diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst index c305332..b57271c 100644 --- a/README.rst +++ b/README.rst @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ poems ----- -All of the poems in here are good, or interesting. There are currently 8,421 poems by 549 poets. \ No newline at end of file +All of the poems in here are good, or interesting. There are currently 8,424 poems by 550 poets. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/poems/data/poems.json b/poems/data/poems.json index 38ecc15..e8579c0 100644 --- a/poems/data/poems.json +++ b/poems/data/poems.json @@ -2915,7 +2915,7 @@ "poems": { "creatures-in-the-dawn": { "title": "“Creatures in the Dawn”", - "body": "You knew the rich full light of innocence.\nEach morning from the flowers of the woods you plucked \nthe last, the pallid echo of a fading star.\nYou drank the limpid radiance that like a most pure hand\nsays farewell to men from beyond the fabled presence of the mountains.\nUnderneath the nascent blue,\namong the new stars, among the first pure breezes \nthat by their very candor vanquished night, \nyou dawned each day, because each day the barely \nmoist tunic rended itself like a virgin, \nunclad, pure, inviolate, to love you.\n\nBetween the sloping hillsides you appeared,\nthere where the tender grass has felt since time began the moon’s instantaneous kiss.\nGentle eye, a sudden glance toward a trembling world \nthat stretches out ineffably beyond its own appearance.\n\nThe melody of rivers, the quietness of wings,\nthose feathers that, still remembering the day, folded back for love, as though for sleep, \nintoned their wholly silent ecstasy \nbeneath the magic gust of light,\nthe fervent moon that once it has appeared up in the sky \nseems to ignore its ephemeral transparent destiny.", + "body": "You knew the rich full light of innocence.\nEach morning from the flowers of the woods you plucked\nthe last, the pallid echo of a fading star.\nYou drank the limpid radiance that like a most pure hand\nsays farewell to men from beyond the fabled presence of the mountains.\nUnderneath the nascent blue,\namong the new stars, among the first pure breezes\nthat by their very candor vanquished night,\nyou dawned each day, because each day the barely\nmoist tunic rended itself like a virgin,\nunclad, pure, inviolate, to love you.\n\nBetween the sloping hillsides you appeared,\nthere where the tender grass has felt since time began the moon’s instantaneous kiss.\nGentle eye, a sudden glance toward a trembling world\nthat stretches out ineffably beyond its own appearance.\n\nThe melody of rivers, the quietness of wings,\nthose feathers that, still remembering the day, folded back for love, as though for sleep,\nintoned their wholly silent ecstasy\nbeneath the magic gust of light,\nthe fervent moon that once it has appeared up in the sky\nseems to ignore its ephemeral transparent destiny.", "metadata": { "translator": "Hugh A. Harter", "source": { @@ -10979,6 +10979,48 @@ } } }, + "leon-bloy": { + "metadata": { + "name": "Léon Bloy", + "birth": { + "year": 1846, + "month": "july", + "day": 11 + }, + "death": { + "year": 1917, + "month": "november", + "day": 3 + }, + "gender": "male", + "religion": "catholic", + "nationality": "french", + "language": "french", + "flag": "🇫🇷", + "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Bloy", + "favorite": false, + "tags": [ + "french" + ], + "n_poems": 1 + }, + "poems": { + "the-sword": { + "title": "“The Sword”", + "body": "The lament of the sword. The first time the Spirit of Sabaoth spoke about me, it was to keep men from forgetting that I had been seen all aflame on the threshold of the lost Eden.\n\nAt once I became War, and my fearful Name everywhere became the sign of Majesty.\nI appeared as the sublime instrument of Providential blood-letting and, in my wonderful unawareness as the Elect of Fate, I espoused through the centuries every human feeling capable of speeding Fate on.\nAnger, Love, Enthusiasm, Greed, Fanaticism and Insanity I served in so perfect a fashion that the history books have been afraid to tell the whole story.\nDuring six thousand years I have made myself drunk, at all points of the globe, on massacre and throat-slitting.\n\nI have killed old men who were like palaces of Suffering. I have cut off the breasts of women who were like light, and I have run little children through who looked at me with eyes of moribund lions.\nDaily have I galloped on the pale Horse along the avenue of cypresses “from the womb to the grave,” and I have made a fountain of blood out of every son of man within my reach.\n\nThe world then was in ecstasy over my beauty. Christian lads dreamt of me. I was given the last kiss of dying monarchs, conquerors latticed in steel knelt with their eyes on me and whole continents were made to run with blood at the prayer I inspired.\nWhen enthusiasm for the Cross had died away, I condescended to become the badge of what men called _Honor_, and, in this lowered state, I still appeared sufficiently magnificent for the whole of Europe one day to throw itself at the feet of a single Master who had placed me in the monstrance of his heart.\nMost certainly he did not pray, this Emperor of Death, but all the same I strewed about him the ecumenical prayer of Sacrifice and Devotion--the dreadful red prayer that bellows forth in the slaughterhouses of nations.\nAh! it was not so splendid as the past! but who will say how beautiful it was? I know something about it, I, the Sword, of whom it is written that I shall devour everything at the end of ends!", + "metadata": { + "translator": "John Coleman", + "source": { + "title": "Devant les Cochons", + "published": { + "year": 1894 + } + }, + "language": "french" + } + } + } + }, "hugh-f-blunt": { "metadata": { "name": "Hugh F. Blunt", @@ -20589,7 +20631,7 @@ "poems": { "the-despairing-man-draws-a-serpent": { "title": "“The Despairing Man Draws a Serpent”", - "body": "I went up the hill \nAt moonrise.\n\nShe swore that she would come \nBy the south way.\n\nA dusky hawk \nCaught up the path \nIn his talons.", + "body": "I went up the hill\nAt moonrise.\n\nShe swore that she would come\nBy the south way.\n\nA dusky hawk\nCaught up the path\nIn his talons.", "metadata": { "translator": "Thomas Merton", "language": "spanish" @@ -35397,10 +35439,13 @@ "metadata": { "name": "Arno Holz", "birth": { - "year": 1863 + "year": 1863, + "month": "april", + "day": 26 }, "death": { - "year": 1929 + "year": 1929, + "month": "october" }, "gender": "male", "religion": null, @@ -35412,13 +35457,34 @@ "tags": [ "german" ], - "n_poems": 4 + "n_poems": 5 }, "poems": { "childhood-paradise": { "title": "“Childhood Paradise”", "body": "_Birth and Baptism_\n\n# 1.\n\nI was … born\non\na first\nfull, luminous streaming\nwonderful,\nwonderblue, wonderwarm\nspring day,\nin\na royal Prussian\npharmacy--\n“To the Black Eagle,”--\nwith a narrow facade and a deep perspective;\nspacious,\nglassdoor klingeling, protected by shutters\nand quaint;\nbuilt\n“anno domini,” in “days of yore,” already there\nunder\nthe Great Elector;\ndignified, cosy,\nwith four stories and so many front steps, with sharp gables and\na double roof,\ntowering high above it all\nand beautiful;\nshelf on shelf, drawer on drawer,\ncontainer near container, small box by small box,\nbottle by bottle,\nalways\nmost carefully neat, always most prudently exact,\nalways\nmost pitilessly orderly,\nmost well\nsorted.\nA pharmacy frequently\ninspected,\nrevised, so as not to say molested,\nsuddenly,\ncompletely\nunexpecte d, unawaited, unsuspected;\ninspected by\ntopmast spygalss commissioners--\naustere, officious, majestically bespectacled,\nsnooping,\nsnuffling, sniffing, sniffling,\nrummaging through\nall boxes, all vessels, all\nprovision rooms,\nwith suspicion, curiosity, mistrust,\nfor\nhours,\nhours and hours--\nuseless,\nfruitless, ineffectual,\nfully\nunnecessary and superfluous.\nA pharmacy\nnot yet new-fashioned,\nso atrociously moulded, so gruesomely\nschematicized,\nshrewdly like a factory, cleverly commercial, slyly\ncold and business-like;\nlacking the divine,\nthe fairy-tale magic, the romance;\namericanized;\nas if\npredestined for me\nby “God,”\nas if\nby a special “destiny,” as if by a higher “power”.\nA pharmacy,\njust\nopposite\nthe precinct station:\nhonestly upright, peaceably lowly,\ncomfortably one-storied,\nstretched\nout, yellow/pink piebald,\npatched up,\ngingerbreadbrown, bright red,\ntile-roofed,\ncaring for citizens,\nrustling,\nrushing, rumbling, whooshing, scarily swooshing,\ncellar-deep\nteeming with rats;\nthe precinct station\nwith the\nbig, heavy, monstrous,\nold-fashioned,\nold-frankish, outmoded fire alarm;\na fire bell\nof black iron,\ndusty with cobwebs, a polished clapper,\ndangling, now and then swaying\nunder a gray, leaking, under a decaying, splintered, under a\nslanted shingle roof\npenetrable by\nrain,\nhail, and blizzard;\na fire bell\nbegging and whining\nfor\nrescue,\nhelp in need and resistance.\nThere\nI was … born!\n\n\n# 2.\n\nNo one shouted\n“Rätin, he lives!”\nThe\naspects:\nMars in opposition to Venus, Mercury in opposition to Saturn,\nJupiter in opposition to Uranus,\nNeptune\nin dispute\nwith all:\nAries, Aquarius\nand\nLibra … you don’t see them that way … every day,\nLeo, Capricorn\nand\nScorpio,--oh, it was pure mockery,--\nstood\nthreateningly … fiercely armed, signalled in a terrible manner,\n# I.protested, I rebelled, I revolted,\n\n# I.opposed.\n\n\nBut!\n\nThe\ngood,\nold, honest,\ndiligent, industrious, eager\nFrau\nPommerŠhnke,\nusually\nloaded and armed\nwith an\nalmost\nsuitcase-sized, mysterious, black-leather\npurse\ncontaining\na syringe;\nwith a\nflesh-colored, self-knitted,\ncrumpled, wrinkled, rumpled\ncardigan;\nFrau\nPommerähnke,\nwho\nhad already helped\ninto the world\nthe whole city and half of the country\nwho\nhelped\nso many already\nto\nthe light, to the air;\nFrau PommerŠhnke assisted,\nand the\nrefined, venerable, bachelor\nDoctor Piehdong,\n“clean as a whistle”\nalways\nlooking lie the death from Warsaw, always moving like Magnificence itself,\nwhite\ngloved, with a gray top-hat, blue bespectacled;\nDoctor Piehdong\ncongratulated, Father inspected, Mother triumphed,\neverything\nfunctioned.\n\nChubby\nand\nround! Red-cheeked and sound! Fully nine pound!\n\nAnd\nthen as the christening procession\nslowly turned\naround the corner--\nmost joyful of\nthrongs, Mother in lace with three prongs,\nFather\nin\nfestive\ntuxedo with tails, very tight pants and with ivory cane,\nbehind him\nin a\nstately and pressing\nblock, Godparents and guests total two score,\nthe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie,\namidst the resounding\njoyous swekks of pious, honest trusty bels,\nand\nmost golden blue\nsunshine, mob and public right behind,\npace\nby pace, trace on\ntrace,\ndown the\npine-strewn church street,\nfrom the marketplace\ntowards Saint George’s\n(there’s\nmore at stake here than\nfun and games, “the manly heart pounds wildly in its cage,”\na\nbrimstone butterfly\nthat\nflew and flutter-tumbled, beat its wings to\nhover overhead,\nand\nswung and tottered, shivered and\nquivered,\npicturesquely\nbrightening up the scene):\nas\nthe procession\nslowly turned\nthe corner,\nsuddenly:\nan idea\noccurred to … Mother!\n\nStop\nit all! It must be so!\n\nMen and women\nfreeze,\nstand, wonderingly\nstaring, not to say as if they were “carved of stone”:\nThe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie!\nMother\nhanded me over,\nin my resplendent\ndisplay,\neyes wide open, delighted, making goo-goo-ga-ga noises,\ngave me\nher\nlittle one,\nto the old PommerŠhnke, the\nloyal soul, the kindly valiant one,\nthe\ntrusty doting mother,\ninto\nthe arms,\nat once\nrescuing, open, obligingly reaching out\nand,\nclick, clack\n“Hold on to the kid for a moment, I’ll be right back,”\nthrough the crowd, through the people, through the ones\nwho\nwere surprised;\ncourageous, energized,\ndetermined, vigorous, resolute,\nback\ninto the pharmacy,\nit\nwas something!\n\nWhereto?! Wherefore?! What for?!\nIdiot!\n\nMotherlove! Motherknowledge!\nMotherconcern!\n\nA\nboy who, at his baptism,\nhad a\npen, or a pencil, or a goose-quill\nstuck into\nhis jacket, or into his swaddling clothes, or into his bunting,\nsecretly,\ncraftily, inconspicuously,\nwill become\nsomething\n“famous”!\n\nAnd\nbarely five minutes later\nin\nthe church,\nwith the blessing of Pastor Dreschhoff,\nwhile\nI was crowned with\nnames,\nall around me, the little\nwiseguy,\nin\ndensely\ncircling, snircling,\nclosing\norbit, yes so be it,\nthe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie,\nI suddenly cried\nout\nand\nmoaned, and consequently groaned,\nnot because\nI was feeling my oats\nbut rather being stuck\nby a very sharp Faber pencil\nwith the … imprint\n\nNumber\nOne!", "metadata": { + "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", + "source": { + "title": "Phantastus", + "published": { + "year": 1898 + } + }, + "language": "german" + } + }, + "on-a-mountain-of-sugar-candy": { + "title": "“On a mountain of sugar-candy …”", + "body": "On a mountain of sugar-candy,\nunder a blossoming almond-tree,\ntwinkles my gingerbread house.\nIts little windows are of gold-foil, out of its chimney steams wadding.\n\nIn the green heaven, above me, beams the Christmas tree.\n\nIn my round sea of tinfoil\nare mirrored all her angels, all her lights!\n\nThe little children stand about\nand stare at me.\n\nI am the dwarf Turlitipu.\n\nMy fat belly is made of gumdragon,\nmy thin pin-legs are matches,\nmy clever little eyes\nraisins!", + "metadata": { + "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", + "source": { + "title": "Phantastus", + "published": { + "year": 1898 + } + }, "language": "german" } }, @@ -35426,6 +35492,13 @@ "title": "“Pain”", "body": "Forgive? I? To you\nA long time ago.\nI did it before I knew it.\nBut forget? Forget? … Ah, if I could!\nOften,\nin the brightest sunshine,\nwhen I’m happy and “don’t think about anything,”\nsuddenly,\nthere,\ngray it crouches in front of me\n… like a toad!\nAnd everything, everything seems stale to me again. shawl and desolate.\nThe whole life.\nAnd I am sad. sorry about you … and me.", "metadata": { + "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", + "source": { + "title": "Phantastus", + "published": { + "year": 1898 + } + }, "language": "german" } }, @@ -35433,6 +35506,13 @@ "title": "“Purzmalunder”", "body": "At\nthe age of five\nI was … certain about\neverything.\n\nIn\nChina\nFrench was\nspoken,\nin\nAfrica\nthere was a bird, called a kangaroo,\nand\nthe Virgin Mary\nwas\nCatholic and had a\nskyblue\nrobe on.\n\nShe was made of wax and was the dear\nLord’s mother.\n\nWhen I grew up,\nI wanted\nto become\nSchiller and Goethe\nand\nlive\nin Berlin behind the palace.\n\nWhen I had children,\nI wanted\nto have them all\npainted.\n\nThat\nwouldn’t be so expensive,\nand\nthey wouldn’t tear\ntheir\npants.\n\nAt\nPollakowski’s book bindery\nhung a\nlarge colorful\nflyspeckbespeckled\nposter\nwith a white stallion, rearing on his hind legs.\n\nThe fat Turk with the shining saber on the post\nwas\nAli Pascha.\n\nIf I ever\ngot a dime,\nI wanted\nto buy … it for myself.\n\nBut\nmostly\nI did so want … to discover\nthe source of the Nile.\n# I.knew exactly\n\nhow\nyou would do it.\n\nWhere\nit flowed out,\nyou simply go into a\nboat,\npaddled, piddled and puddled\nto where\neverything stops.\n\nThen you were there.\n\nThere,\nthere were apes,\nthrowing oranges and coconuts at each other,\ngold dust,\nand\ngrape-raisin trees with bushels of almonds\non them.\n\nAnd\nso I wouldn’t starve,\nI would\ntake\nlots of barley-sugar bars along and a mess of carob bread.\n\nBut\nI wouldn’t tell\nanyone.\n\nThat\nI kept for myself\nalone.\n\nOnly\nI wondered\nto myself,\nwhy the others were\nall\nso dumb!", "metadata": { + "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", + "source": { + "title": "Phantastus", + "published": { + "year": 1898 + } + }, "language": "german" } }, @@ -35440,6 +35520,13 @@ "title": "“Self-Assured Upbeat”", "body": "In\nthe last, deep,\nspellbound, weaving, weighty\nnight sleep,\nthrough the\npurple … convex\npoem,\nfrom light of spheres beyond those worlds, a free-from-earthly-body\nglowing face\nwhispered to me, occurred to me, formed\nin me\nthe\ncertainty:\nSeven trillion … years … before my birth\nI was\na sword lily.\nMy searching roots\nsucked\nthemselves\naround a star.\nOut of\nhis vaulting\nwaters,\nscarry like flower-leaves, dusty like golden arrow threads,\ndreamblue,\ngrew,\nsoared, shoved,\ngrew steeper, parted, skewered,\nburned out, streamed out, sprayed out\ninto\nnew,\nflowing, waxing, waving,\nbrewing, bubbling,\ncircling\nworld rings,\nmost pregnant with secret, most majestic with secret,\nmost exalted with secret,\nself-procreating, self-begetting, self-shadowing, self-\ndividing\nmeteoric ball of flames,\ncascades of comets, colored crown of planets,\nextravagantly\nshowering about herself, benevolently blessing about herself,\nwastefully\ncatapulting\nabout herself,\nmy\ndark-metallic, halcyon-phallic, ringing crystallic\ngiantflower-sceptercrown!\nStill\nin my\nheavy early-up sleep-shaking, in my becoming a person again, in my once again full waking,\nher\npower-proud joy,\nher creator fired-up courage, her\nconfidence\nlaughed, glistened, jubilated\nin crashing cascades!", "metadata": { + "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", + "source": { + "title": "Phantastus", + "published": { + "year": 1898 + } + }, "language": "german" } } @@ -48190,7 +48277,7 @@ }, "the-end": { "title": "“The End”", - "body": "Some of life’s sad ones are too strong to die,\nGrief doesn’t kill them as it kills the weak,\nSorrow is not for those who sit and cry\nLapped in the love of turning t’other cheek,\nBut for the noble souls austere and bleak\nWho have had the bitter dose and drained the cup\nAnd wait for Death face fronted, standing up.\n\nAs the last man upon the sinking ship,\nSeeing the brine creep brightly on the deck,\nHearing aloft the slatting topsails rip,\nRipping to rags among the topmast’s wreck,\nYet hoists the new red ensign without speck,\nThat she, so fair, may sink with colours flying,\nSo the old widowed mother kept from dying.\n\nShe tottered home, back to the little room\nIt was all over for her, but for life;\nShe drew the blinds, and trembled in the gloom;\n“I sat here thus when I was wedded wife;\nSorrow sometimes, and joy; but always strife.\nStruggle to live except just at the last,\nO God, I thank Thee for the mercies past.\nHarry, my man, when we were courting; eh ...\nThe April morning up the Cony-gree.\nHow grand he looked upon our wedding day.\n‘I wish we’d had the bells,’ he said to me;\nAnd we’d the moon that evening, I and he,\nAnd dew come wet, oh, I remember how,\nAnd we come home to where I’m sitting now.\nAnd he lay dead here, and his son was born here;\nHe never saw his son, his little Jim.\nAnd now I’m all alone here, left to mourn here,\nAnd there are all his clothes, but never him.\nHe’s down under the prison in the dim,\nWith quicklime working on him to the bone,\nThe flesh I made with many and many a groan.\n\nAnd then he ran so, he was strong at running,\nAlways a strong one, like his dad at that.\nIn summertimes I done my sewing sunning,\nAnd he’d be sprawling, playing with the cat.\nAnd neighbours brought their knitting out to chat\nTill five o’clock; he had his tea at five;\nHow sweet life was when Jimmy was alive.”\n\nAnd sometimes she will walk the cindery mile,\nSinging, as she and Jimmy used to do,\nSinging “The parson’s dog lep over a stile,”\nAlong the path where water lilies grew.\nThe stars are placid on the evening’s blue,\nBurning like eyes so calm, so unafraid.\nOn all that God has given and man has made.\n\nBurning they watch, and mothlike owls come out,\nThe redbreast warbles shrilly once and stops;\nThe homing cowman gives his dog a shout,\nThe lamps are lighted in the village shops.\nSilence; the last bird passes; in the copse\nThe hazels cross the moon, a nightjar spins,\nDew wets the grass, the nightingale begins.\n\nSinging her crazy song the mother goes,\nSinging as though her heart were full of peace,\nMoths knock the petals from the dropping rose,\nStars make the glimmering pool a golden fleece,\nThe moon droops west, but still she does not cease,\nThe little mice peep out to hear her sing,\nUntil the inn-man’s cockerel shakes his wing.\n\nAnd in the sunny dawns of hot Julys,\nThe labourers going to meadow see her there.\nRubbing the sleep out of their heavy eyes,\nThey lean upon the parapet to stare;\nThey see her plaiting basil in her hair,\nBasil, the dark red wound-wort, cops of clover,\nThe blue self-heal and golden Jacks of Dover.\nDully they watch her, then they turn to go\nTo that high Shropshire upland of late hay;\nHer singing lingers with them as they mow,\nAnd many times they try it, now grave, now gay,\nTill, with full throat, over the hills away,\nThey lift it clear; oh, very clear it towers\nMixed with the swish of many falling flowers.", + "body": "Some of life’s sad ones are too strong to die,\nGrief doesn’t kill them as it kills the weak,\nSorrow is not for those who sit and cry\nLapped in the love of turning t’other cheek,\nBut for the noble souls austere and bleak\nWho have had the bitter dose and drained the cup\nAnd wait for Death face fronted, standing up.\n\nAs the last man upon the sinking ship,\nSeeing the brine creep brightly on the deck,\nHearing aloft the slatting topsails rip,\nRipping to rags among the topmast’s wreck,\nYet hoists the new red ensign without speck,\nThat she, so fair, may sink with colours flying,\nSo the old widowed mother kept from dying.\n\nShe tottered home, back to the little room\nIt was all over for her, but for life;\nShe drew the blinds, and trembled in the gloom;\n“I sat here thus when I was wedded wife;\nSorrow sometimes, and joy; but always strife.\nStruggle to live except just at the last,\nO God, I thank Thee for the mercies past.\nHarry, my man, when we were courting; eh …\nThe April morning up the Cony-gree.\nHow grand he looked upon our wedding day.\n‘I wish we’d had the bells,’ he said to me;\nAnd we’d the moon that evening, I and he,\nAnd dew come wet, oh, I remember how,\nAnd we come home to where I’m sitting now.\nAnd he lay dead here, and his son was born here;\nHe never saw his son, his little Jim.\nAnd now I’m all alone here, left to mourn here,\nAnd there are all his clothes, but never him.\nHe’s down under the prison in the dim,\nWith quicklime working on him to the bone,\nThe flesh I made with many and many a groan.\n\nAnd then he ran so, he was strong at running,\nAlways a strong one, like his dad at that.\nIn summertimes I done my sewing sunning,\nAnd he’d be sprawling, playing with the cat.\nAnd neighbours brought their knitting out to chat\nTill five o’clock; he had his tea at five;\nHow sweet life was when Jimmy was alive.”\n\nAnd sometimes she will walk the cindery mile,\nSinging, as she and Jimmy used to do,\nSinging “The parson’s dog lep over a stile,”\nAlong the path where water lilies grew.\nThe stars are placid on the evening’s blue,\nBurning like eyes so calm, so unafraid.\nOn all that God has given and man has made.\n\nBurning they watch, and mothlike owls come out,\nThe redbreast warbles shrilly once and stops;\nThe homing cowman gives his dog a shout,\nThe lamps are lighted in the village shops.\nSilence; the last bird passes; in the copse\nThe hazels cross the moon, a nightjar spins,\nDew wets the grass, the nightingale begins.\n\nSinging her crazy song the mother goes,\nSinging as though her heart were full of peace,\nMoths knock the petals from the dropping rose,\nStars make the glimmering pool a golden fleece,\nThe moon droops west, but still she does not cease,\nThe little mice peep out to hear her sing,\nUntil the inn-man’s cockerel shakes his wing.\n\nAnd in the sunny dawns of hot Julys,\nThe labourers going to meadow see her there.\nRubbing the sleep out of their heavy eyes,\nThey lean upon the parapet to stare;\nThey see her plaiting basil in her hair,\nBasil, the dark red wound-wort, cops of clover,\nThe blue self-heal and golden Jacks of Dover.\nDully they watch her, then they turn to go\nTo that high Shropshire upland of late hay;\nHer singing lingers with them as they mow,\nAnd many times they try it, now grave, now gay,\nTill, with full throat, over the hills away,\nThey lift it clear; oh, very clear it towers\nMixed with the swish of many falling flowers.", "metadata": { "source": { "title": "From The Widow in the Bye Street", @@ -48575,7 +48662,7 @@ }, "we-therefore-commit-our-brother": { "title": "“We Therefore Commit our Brother”", - "body": "Night fell, and all night long the Dauber lay\nCovered upon the table; all night long\nThe pitiless storm exulted at her prey,\nHuddling the waters with her icy thong.\nBut to the covered shape she did no wrong.\nHe lay beneath the sailcloth. Bell by bell\nThe night wore through; the stars rose, the stars fell.\n\nBlowing most pitiless cold out of clear sky\nThe wind roared all night long; and all night through\nThe green seas on the deck went washing by,\nFlooding the half-deck; bitter hard it blew.\nBut little of it all the Dauber knew;\nThe sopping bunks, the floating chests, the wet,\nThe darkness, and the misery, and the sweat.\n\nHe was off duty. So it blew all night,\nAnd when the watches changed the men would come\nDripping within the door to strike a light\nAnd stare upon the Dauber lying dumb,\nAnd say, “He come a cruel thump, poor chum.”\nOr, “He’d a-been a fine big man”; or, “He ...\nA smart young seaman he was getting to be.”\n\nOr, “Damn it all, it’s what we’ve all to face!...\nI knew another fellow one time ...” then\nCame a strange tale of death in a strange place\nOut on the sea, in ships, with wandering men.\nIn many ways Death puts us into pen.\nThe reefers came down tired and looked and slept.\nBelow the skylight little dribbles crept.\n\nAlong the painted woodwork, glistening, slow,\nFollowing the roll and dripping, never fast,\nBut dripping on the quiet form below,\nLike passing time talking to time long past.\nAnd all night long “Ai, ai!” went the wind’s blast,\nAnd creaming water swished below the pale,\nUnheeding body stretched beneath the sail.\n\nAt dawn they sewed him up, and at eight bells\nThey bore him to the gangway, wading deep,\nThrough the green-clutching, white-toothed water-hells\nThat flung his carriers over in their sweep.\nThey laid an old red ensign on the heap,\nAnd all hands stood bare-headed, stooping, swaying,\nWashed by the sea while the old man was praying\n\nOut of a borrowed prayer-book. At a sign\nThey twitched the ensign back and tipped the grating.\nA creamier bubbling broke the bubbling brine.\nThe muffled figure tilted to the weighting;\nIt dwindled slowly down, slowly gyrating.\nSome craned to see; it dimmed, it disappeared;\nThe last green milky bubble blinked and cleared.\n\n“Mister, shake out your reefs,” the Captain called.\n“Out topsail reefs!” the Mate cried; then all hands\nHurried, the great sails shook, and all hands hauled,\nSinging that desolate song of lonely lands,\nOf how a lover came in dripping bands,\nGreen with the wet and cold, to tell his lover\nThat Death was in the sea, and all was over.\n\nFair came the falling wind; a seaman said\nThe Dauber was a Jonah; once again\nThe clipper held her course, showing red lead,\nShattering the sea-tops into golden rain.\nThe waves bowed down before her like blown grain;\nOnwards she thundered, on; her voyage was short,\nBefore the tier’s bells rang her into port.\n\nCheerly they rang her in, those beating bells,\nThe new-come beauty stately from the sea,\nWhitening the blue heave of the drowsy swells,\nTreading the bubbles down. With three times three\nThey cheered her moving beauty in, and she\nCame to her berth so noble, so superb;\nSwayed like a queen, and answered to the curb.\n\nThen in the sunset’s flush they went aloft,\nAnd unbent sails in that most lovely hour,\nWhen the light gentles and the wind is soft,\nAnd beauty in the heart breaks like a flower.\nWorking aloft they saw the mountain tower,\nSnow to the peak; they heard the launchmen shout;\nAnd bright along the bay the lights came out.\n\nAnd then the night fell dark, and all night long\nThe pointed mountain pointed at the stars,\nFrozen, alert, austere; the eagle’s song\nScreamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.\nOn her intense crags where the air is sparse\nThe stars looked down; their many golden eyes\nWatched her and burned, burned out, and came to rise.\n\nSilent the finger of the summit stood,\nIcy in pure, thin air, glittering with snows.\nThen the sun’s coming turned the peak to blood,\nAnd in the rest-house the muleteers arose.\nAnd all day long, where only the eagle goes,\nStones, loosened by the sun, fall; the stones falling\nFill empty gorge on gorge with echoes calling.", + "body": "Night fell, and all night long the Dauber lay\nCovered upon the table; all night long\nThe pitiless storm exulted at her prey,\nHuddling the waters with her icy thong.\nBut to the covered shape she did no wrong.\nHe lay beneath the sailcloth. Bell by bell\nThe night wore through; the stars rose, the stars fell.\n\nBlowing most pitiless cold out of clear sky\nThe wind roared all night long; and all night through\nThe green seas on the deck went washing by,\nFlooding the half-deck; bitter hard it blew.\nBut little of it all the Dauber knew;\nThe sopping bunks, the floating chests, the wet,\nThe darkness, and the misery, and the sweat.\n\nHe was off duty. So it blew all night,\nAnd when the watches changed the men would come\nDripping within the door to strike a light\nAnd stare upon the Dauber lying dumb,\nAnd say, “He come a cruel thump, poor chum.”\nOr, “He’d a-been a fine big man”; or, “He …\nA smart young seaman he was getting to be.”\n\nOr, “Damn it all, it’s what we’ve all to face!…\nI knew another fellow one time …” then\nCame a strange tale of death in a strange place\nOut on the sea, in ships, with wandering men.\nIn many ways Death puts us into pen.\nThe reefers came down tired and looked and slept.\nBelow the skylight little dribbles crept.\n\nAlong the painted woodwork, glistening, slow,\nFollowing the roll and dripping, never fast,\nBut dripping on the quiet form below,\nLike passing time talking to time long past.\nAnd all night long “Ai, ai!” went the wind’s blast,\nAnd creaming water swished below the pale,\nUnheeding body stretched beneath the sail.\n\nAt dawn they sewed him up, and at eight bells\nThey bore him to the gangway, wading deep,\nThrough the green-clutching, white-toothed water-hells\nThat flung his carriers over in their sweep.\nThey laid an old red ensign on the heap,\nAnd all hands stood bare-headed, stooping, swaying,\nWashed by the sea while the old man was praying\n\nOut of a borrowed prayer-book. At a sign\nThey twitched the ensign back and tipped the grating.\nA creamier bubbling broke the bubbling brine.\nThe muffled figure tilted to the weighting;\nIt dwindled slowly down, slowly gyrating.\nSome craned to see; it dimmed, it disappeared;\nThe last green milky bubble blinked and cleared.\n\n“Mister, shake out your reefs,” the Captain called.\n“Out topsail reefs!” the Mate cried; then all hands\nHurried, the great sails shook, and all hands hauled,\nSinging that desolate song of lonely lands,\nOf how a lover came in dripping bands,\nGreen with the wet and cold, to tell his lover\nThat Death was in the sea, and all was over.\n\nFair came the falling wind; a seaman said\nThe Dauber was a Jonah; once again\nThe clipper held her course, showing red lead,\nShattering the sea-tops into golden rain.\nThe waves bowed down before her like blown grain;\nOnwards she thundered, on; her voyage was short,\nBefore the tier’s bells rang her into port.\n\nCheerly they rang her in, those beating bells,\nThe new-come beauty stately from the sea,\nWhitening the blue heave of the drowsy swells,\nTreading the bubbles down. With three times three\nThey cheered her moving beauty in, and she\nCame to her berth so noble, so superb;\nSwayed like a queen, and answered to the curb.\n\nThen in the sunset’s flush they went aloft,\nAnd unbent sails in that most lovely hour,\nWhen the light gentles and the wind is soft,\nAnd beauty in the heart breaks like a flower.\nWorking aloft they saw the mountain tower,\nSnow to the peak; they heard the launchmen shout;\nAnd bright along the bay the lights came out.\n\nAnd then the night fell dark, and all night long\nThe pointed mountain pointed at the stars,\nFrozen, alert, austere; the eagle’s song\nScreamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.\nOn her intense crags where the air is sparse\nThe stars looked down; their many golden eyes\nWatched her and burned, burned out, and came to rise.\n\nSilent the finger of the summit stood,\nIcy in pure, thin air, glittering with snows.\nThen the sun’s coming turned the peak to blood,\nAnd in the rest-house the muleteers arose.\nAnd all day long, where only the eagle goes,\nStones, loosened by the sun, fall; the stones falling\nFill empty gorge on gorge with echoes calling.", "metadata": { "source": { "title": "Dauber", @@ -49206,7 +49293,7 @@ }, "the-hope-of-my-heart": { "title": "“The Hope of My Heart”", - "body": "_“Delicta juventutis et ignorantius ejus, \nquoesumus ne memineris, Domine.”_\n\nI left, to earth, a little maiden fair,\nWith locks of gold, and eyes that shamed the light;\nI prayed that God might have her in His care\n And sight.\n\nEarth’s love was false; her voice, a siren’s song;\n(Sweet mother-earth was but a lying name)\nThe path she showed was but the path of wrong\n And shame.\n\n“Cast her not out!” I cry. God’s kind words come--\n“Her future is with Me, as was her past;\nIt shall be My good will to bring her home\n At last.”", + "body": "_“Delicta juventutis et ignorantius ejus,\nquoesumus ne memineris, Domine.”_\n\nI left, to earth, a little maiden fair,\nWith locks of gold, and eyes that shamed the light;\nI prayed that God might have her in His care\n And sight.\n\nEarth’s love was false; her voice, a siren’s song;\n(Sweet mother-earth was but a lying name)\nThe path she showed was but the path of wrong\n And shame.\n\n“Cast her not out!” I cry. God’s kind words come--\n“Her future is with Me, as was her past;\nIt shall be My good will to bring her home\n At last.”", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1894 @@ -60408,7 +60495,7 @@ "poems": { "al-aaraaf": { "title": "“Al Aaraaf”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO! nothing earthly save the ray\n(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty’s eye,\nAs in those gardens where the day\nSprings from the gems of Circassy--\nO! nothing earthly save the thrill\nOf melody in woodland rill--\nOr (music of the passion-hearted)\nJoy’s voice so peacefully departed\nThat like the murmur in the shell,\nIts echo dwelleth and will dwell--\nO! nothing of the dross of ours--\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our Love, and deck our bowers--\nAdorn yon world afar, afar--\nThe wandering star.\n\n’Twas a sweet time for Nesace--for there\nHer world lay lolling on the golden air,\nNear four bright suns--a temporary rest--\nAn oasis in desert of the blest.\nAway away--’mid seas of rays that roll\nEmpyrean splendor o’er th’ unchained soul--\nThe soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)\nCan struggle to its destin’d eminence--\nTo distant spheres, from time to time, she rode,\nAnd late to ours, the favour’d one of God--\nBut, now, the ruler of an anchor’d realm,\nShe throws aside the sceptre--leaves the helm,\nAnd, amid incense and high spiritual hymns,\nLaves in quadruple light her angel limbs.\n\nNow happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,\nWhence sprang the “Idea of Beauty” into birth,\n(Falling in wreaths thro’ many a startled star,\nLike woman’s hair ’mid pearls, until, afar,\nIt lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),\nShe look’d into Infinity--and knelt.\nRich clouds, for canopies, about her curled--\nFit emblems of the model of her world--\nSeen but in beauty--not impeding sight--\nOf other beauty glittering thro’ the light--\nA wreath that twined each starry form around,\nAnd all the opal’d air in color bound.\n\nAll hurriedly she knelt upon a bed\nOf flowers: of lilies such as rear’d the head\nOn the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang\nSo eagerly around about to hang\nUpon the flying footsteps of--deep pride--\nOf her who lov’d a mortal--and so died.\nThe Sephalica, budding with young bees,\nUprear’d its purple stem around her knees:\nAnd gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam’d--\nInmate of highest stars, where erst it sham’d\nAll other loveliness: its honied dew\n(The fabled nectar that the heathen knew)\nDeliriously sweet, was dropp’d from Heaven,\nAnd fell on gardens of the unforgiven \nIn Trebizond--and on a sunny flower\nSo like its own above that, to this hour,\nIt still remaineth, torturing the bee\nWith madness, and unwonted reverie:\nIn Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf\nAnd blossom of the fairy plant, in grief\nDisconsolate linger--grief that hangs her head,\nRepenting follies that full long have fled,\nHeaving her white breast to the balmy air,\nLike guilty beauty, chasten’d, and more fair:\nNyctanthes too, as sacred as the light\nShe fears to perfume, perfuming the night:\nAnd Clytia pondering between many a sun,\nWhile pettish tears adown her petals run:\nAnd that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth--\nAnd died, ere scarce exalted into birth,\nBursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing \nIts way to Heaven, from garden of a king:\nAnd Valisnerian lotus thither flown\nFrom struggling with the waters of the Rhone:\nAnd thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante!\nIsola d’oro!--Fior di Levante!\nAnd the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever\nWith Indian Cupid down the holy river--\nFair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given\nTo bear the Goddess’ song, in odors, up to Heaven:\n\n“Spirit! that dwellest where,\nIn the deep sky,\nThe terrible and fair,\nIn beauty vie!\nBeyond the line of blue--\nThe boundary of the star\nWhich turneth at the view\nOf thy barrier and thy bar--\nOf the barrier overgone\nBy the comets who were cast\nFrom their pride, and from their throne\nTo be drudges till the last--\nTo be carriers of fire\n(The red fire of their heart)\nWith speed that may not tire\nAnd with pain that shall not part--\nWho livest--_that_ we know--\nIn Eternity--we feel--\nBut the shadow of whose brow\nWhat spirit shall reveal?\nTho’ the beings whom thy Nesace,\nThy messenger hath known\nHave dream’d for thy Infinity\nA model of their own--\nThy will is done, O God!\nThe star hath ridden high\nThro’ many a tempest, but she rode\nBeneath thy burning eye;\nAnd here, in thought, to thee--\nIn thought that can alone\nAscend thy empire and so be\nA partner of thy throne--\nBy winged Fantasy,\n My embassy is given,\nTill secrecy shall knowledge be\nIn the environs of Heaven.”\n\nShe ceas’d--and buried then her burning cheek\nAbash’d, amid the lilies there, to seek\nA shelter from the fervor of His eye;\nFor the stars trembled at the Deity.\nShe stirr’d not--breath’d not--for a voice was there\nHow solemnly pervading the calm air!\nA sound of silence on the startled ear\nWhich dreamy poets name “the music of the sphere.”\nOurs is a world of words: Quiet we call\n“Silence”--which is the merest word of all.\n\nAll Nature speaks, and ev’n ideal things\nFlap shadowy sounds from the visionary wings--\nBut ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high\nThe eternal voice of God is passing by,\nAnd the red winds are withering in the sky!\n“What tho’ in worlds which sightless cycles run,\nLink’d to a little system, and one sun--\nWhere all my love is folly, and the crowd\nStill think my terrors but the thunder cloud,\nThe storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath\n(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)\nWhat tho’ in worlds which own a single sun\nThe sands of time grow dimmer as they run,\nYet thine is my resplendency, so given\nTo bear my secrets thro’ the upper Heaven.\nLeave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,\nWith all thy train, athwart the moony sky--\nApart--like fire-flies in Sicilian night,\nAnd wing to other worlds another light!\nDivulge the secrets of thy embassy\nTo the proud orbs that twinkle--and so be\nTo ev’ry heart a barrier and a ban\nLest the stars totter in the guilt of man!”\n\nUp rose the maiden in the yellow night,\nThe single-mooned eve!--on earth we plight\nOur faith to one love--and one moon adore--\nThe birth-place of young Beauty had no more.\nAs sprang that yellow star from downy hours,\nUp rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,\nAnd bent o’er sheeny mountain and dim plain\nHer way--but left not yet her Therasaean reign.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHigh on a mountain of enamell’d head--\nSuch as the drowsy shepherd on his bed\nOf giant pasturage lying at his ease,\nRaising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees\nWith many a mutter’d “hope to be forgiven”\nWhat time the moon is quadrated in Heaven--\nOf rosy head, that towering far away \nInto the sunlit ether, caught the ray\nOf sunken suns at eve--at noon of night,\nWhile the moon danc’d with the fair stranger light--\nUprear’d upon such height arose a pile\nOf gorgeous columns on th’ uuburthen’d air,\nFlashing from Parian marble that twin smile\nFar down upon the wave that sparkled there,\nAnd nursled the young mountain in its lair.\nOf molten stars their pavement, such as fall\nThro’ the ebon air, besilvering the pall\nOf their own dissolution, while they die--\nAdorning then the dwellings of the sky.\nA dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,\nSat gently on these columns as a crown--\nA window of one circular diamond, there,\nLook’d out above into the purple air\nAnd rays from God shot down that meteor chain\nAnd hallow’d all the beauty twice again,\nSave when, between th’ Empyrean and that ring,\nSome eager spirit flapp’d his dusky wing.\nBut on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen\nThe dimness of this world: that grayish green\nThat Nature loves the best for Beauty’s grave\nLurk’d in each cornice, round each architrave--\nAnd every sculptured cherub thereabout\nThat from his marble dwelling peered out,\nSeem’d earthly in the shadow of his niche--\nAchaian statues in a world so rich?\nFriezes from Tadmor and Persepolis--\nFrom Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss\nOf beautiful Gomorrah! Oh, the wave \nIs now upon thee--but too late to save!\nSound loves to revel in a summer night:\nWitness the murmur of the gray twilight\nThat stole upon the ear, in Eyraco,\nOf many a wild star-gazer long ago--\nThat stealeth ever on the ear of him\nWho, musing, gazeth on the distance dim,\nAnd sees the darkness coming as a cloud--\nIs not its form--its voice--most palpable and loud?\nBut what is this?--it cometh--and it brings\nA music with it--’tis the rush of wings--\nA pause--and then a sweeping, falling strain,\nAnd Nesace is in her halls again.\nFrom the wild energy of wanton haste\nHer cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart;\nThe zone that clung around her gentle waist\nHad burst beneath the heaving of her heart.\nWithin the centre of that hall to breathe\nShe paus’d and panted, Zanthe! all beneath,\nThe fairy light that kiss’d her golden hair\nAnd long’d to rest, yet could but sparkle there!\n\nYoung flowers were whispering in melody\nTo happy flowers that night--and tree to tree;\nFountains were gushing music as they fell \nIn many a star-lit grove, or moon-light dell;\nYet silence came upon material things--\nFair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wings--\nAnd sound alone that from the spirit sprang\nBore burthen to the charm the maiden sang:\n\n“Neath blue-bell or streamer--\nOr tufted wild spray\nThat keeps, from the dreamer,\nThe moonbeam away--\nBright beings! that ponder,\nWith half-closing eyes,\nOn the stars which your wonder\nHath drawn from the skies,\nTill they glance thro’ the shade, and\nCome down to your brow\nLike--eyes of the maiden\nWho calls on you now--\nArise! from your dreaming\nIn violet bowers,\nTo duty beseeming\nThese star-litten hours--\nAnd shake from your tresses\nEncumber’d with dew\n\nThe breath of those kisses\nThat cumber them too--\n(O! how, without you, Love!\nCould angels be blest?)\nThose kisses of true love\nThat lull’d ye to rest!\nUp! shake from your wing\nEach hindering thing:\nThe dew of the night--\nIt would weigh down your flight;\nAnd true love caresses--\nO! leave them apart!\nThey are light on the tresses,\nBut lead on the heart.\n\nLigeia! Ligeia!\nMy beautiful one!\nWhose harshest idea\nWill to melody run,\nO! is it thy will\nOn the breezes to toss?\nOr, capriciously still,\nLike the lone Albatross,\nIncumbent on night\n(As she on the air)\nTo keep watch with delight\nOn the harmony there?\n\nLigeia! wherever\nThy image may be,\nNo magic shall sever\nThy music from thee.\nThou hast bound many eyes\nIn a dreamy sleep--\nBut the strains still arise\nWhich _thy_ vigilance keep--\n\nThe sound of the rain\nWhich leaps down to the flower,\nAnd dances again\nIn the rhythm of the shower--\nThe murmur that springs\nFrom the growing of grass\nAre the music of things--\nBut are modell’d, alas!\nAway, then, my dearest,\nO! hie thee away\nTo springs that lie clearest\nBeneath the moon-ray--\nTo lone lake that smiles,\nIn its dream of deep rest,\nAt the many star-isles\nThat enjewel its breast--\nWhere wild flowers, creeping,\nHave mingled their shade,\nOn its margin is sleeping\nFull many a maid--\nSome have left the cool glade, and\nHave slept with the bee--\nArouse them, my maiden,\nOn moorland and lea--\n\nGo! breathe on their slumber,\nAll softly in ear,\nThe musical number\nThey slumber’d to hear--\nFor what can awaken\nAn angel so soon\nWhose sleep hath been taken\nBeneath the cold moon,\nAs the spell which no slumber\nOf witchery may test,\nThe rhythmical number\nWhich lull’d him to rest?”\n\nSpirits in wing, and angels to the view,\nA thousand seraphs burst th’ Empyrean thro’,\nYoung dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight--\nSeraphs in all but “Knowledge,” the keen light\nThat fell, refracted, thro’ thy bounds afar,\nO death! from eye of God upon that star;\nSweet was that error--sweeter still that death--\nSweet was that error--ev’n with _us_ the breath\nOf Science dims the mirror of our joy--\nTo them ’twere the Simoom, and would destroy--\nFor what (to them) availeth it to know\nThat Truth is Falsehood--or that Bliss is Woe?\nSweet was their death--with them to die was rife\nWith the last ecstasy of satiate life--\nBeyond that death no immortality--\nBut sleep that pondereth and is not “to be”--\nAnd there--oh! may my weary spirit dwell--\nApart from Heaven’s Eternity--and yet how far from Hell!\n\nWhat guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim\nHeard not the stirring summons of that hymn?\nBut two: they fell: for heaven no grace imparts\nTo those who hear not for their beating hearts.\nA maiden-angel and her seraph-lover--\nO! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)\nWas Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?\nUnguided Love hath fallen--’mid “tears of perfect moan.”\n\nHe was a goodly spirit--he who fell:\nA wanderer by mossy-mantled well--\nA gazer on the lights that shine above--\nA dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:\nWhat wonder? for each star is eye-like there,\nAnd looks so sweetly down on Beauty’s hair--\nAnd they, and ev’ry mossy spring were holy\nTo his love-haunted heart and melancholy.\nThe night had found (to him a night of wo)\nUpon a mountain crag, young Angelo--\nBeetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,\nAnd scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.\nHere sate he with his love--his dark eye bent\nWith eagle gaze along the firmament:\nNow turn’d it upon her--but ever then \nIt trembled to the orb of EARTH again.\n\n“Ianthe, dearest, see! how dim that ray!\nHow lovely ’tis to look so far away!\nShe seemed not thus upon that autumn eve \nI left her gorgeous halls--nor mourned to leave,\nThat eve--that eve--I should remember well--\nThe sun-ray dropped, in Lemnos with a spell\nOn th’ Arabesque carving of a gilded hall\nWherein I sate, and on the draperied wall--\nAnd on my eyelids--O, the heavy light!\nHow drowsily it weighed them into night!\nOn flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran\nWith Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:\nBut O, that light!--I slumbered--Death, the while,\nStole o’er my senses in that lovely isle\nSo softly that no single silken hair\nAwoke that slept--or knew that he was there.”\n\n“The last spot of Earth’s orb I trod upon\nWas a proud temple called the Parthenon;\nMore beauty clung around her columned wall\nThen even thy glowing bosom beats withal,\nAnd when old Time my wing did disenthral\nThence sprang I--as the eagle from his tower,\nAnd years I left behind me in an hour.\nWhat time upon her airy bounds I hung,\nOne half the garden of her globe was flung\nUnrolling as a chart unto my view--\nTenantless cities of the desert too!\nIanthe, beauty crowded on me then,\nAnd half I wished to be again of men.”\n\n“My Angelo! and why of them to be?\nA brighter dwelling-place is here for thee--\nAnd greener fields than in yon world above,\nAnd woman’s loveliness--and passionate love.”\n“But list, Ianthe! when the air so soft\nFailed, as my pennoned spirit leapt aloft,\nPerhaps my brain grew dizzy--but the world \nI left so late was into chaos hurled,\nSprang from her station, on the winds apart,\nAnd rolled a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.\nMethought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar,\nAnd fell--not swiftly as I rose before,\nBut with a downward, tremulous motion thro’\nLight, brazen rays, this golden star unto!\nNor long the measure of my falling hours,\nFor nearest of all stars was thine to ours--\nDread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,\nA red Daedalion on the timid Earth.”\n\n“We came--and to thy Earth--but not to us\nBe given our lady’s bidding to discuss:\nWe came, my love; around, above, below,\nGay fire-fly of the night we come and go,\nNor ask a reason save the angel-nod\n_She_ grants to us as granted by her God--\nBut, Angelo, than thine gray Time unfurled\nNever his fairy wing o’er fairer world!\nDim was its little disk, and angel eyes\nAlone could see the phantom in the skies,\nWhen first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be\nHeadlong thitherward o’er the starry sea--\nBut when its glory swelled upon the sky,\nAs glowing Beauty’s bust beneath man’s eye,\nWe paused before the heritage of men,\nAnd thy star trembled--as doth Beauty then!”\n\nThus in discourse, the lovers whiled away\nThe night that waned and waned and brought no day.\nThey fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts\nWho hear not for the beating of their hearts.", + "body": "# I.\n\nO! nothing earthly save the ray\n(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty’s eye,\nAs in those gardens where the day\nSprings from the gems of Circassy--\nO! nothing earthly save the thrill\nOf melody in woodland rill--\nOr (music of the passion-hearted)\nJoy’s voice so peacefully departed\nThat like the murmur in the shell,\nIts echo dwelleth and will dwell--\nO! nothing of the dross of ours--\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our Love, and deck our bowers--\nAdorn yon world afar, afar--\nThe wandering star.\n\n’Twas a sweet time for Nesace--for there\nHer world lay lolling on the golden air,\nNear four bright suns--a temporary rest--\nAn oasis in desert of the blest.\nAway away--’mid seas of rays that roll\nEmpyrean splendor o’er th’ unchained soul--\nThe soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)\nCan struggle to its destin’d eminence--\nTo distant spheres, from time to time, she rode,\nAnd late to ours, the favour’d one of God--\nBut, now, the ruler of an anchor’d realm,\nShe throws aside the sceptre--leaves the helm,\nAnd, amid incense and high spiritual hymns,\nLaves in quadruple light her angel limbs.\n\nNow happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,\nWhence sprang the “Idea of Beauty” into birth,\n(Falling in wreaths thro’ many a startled star,\nLike woman’s hair ’mid pearls, until, afar,\nIt lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),\nShe look’d into Infinity--and knelt.\nRich clouds, for canopies, about her curled--\nFit emblems of the model of her world--\nSeen but in beauty--not impeding sight--\nOf other beauty glittering thro’ the light--\nA wreath that twined each starry form around,\nAnd all the opal’d air in color bound.\n\nAll hurriedly she knelt upon a bed\nOf flowers: of lilies such as rear’d the head\nOn the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang\nSo eagerly around about to hang\nUpon the flying footsteps of--deep pride--\nOf her who lov’d a mortal--and so died.\nThe Sephalica, budding with young bees,\nUprear’d its purple stem around her knees:\nAnd gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam’d--\nInmate of highest stars, where erst it sham’d\nAll other loveliness: its honied dew\n(The fabled nectar that the heathen knew)\nDeliriously sweet, was dropp’d from Heaven,\nAnd fell on gardens of the unforgiven\nIn Trebizond--and on a sunny flower\nSo like its own above that, to this hour,\nIt still remaineth, torturing the bee\nWith madness, and unwonted reverie:\nIn Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf\nAnd blossom of the fairy plant, in grief\nDisconsolate linger--grief that hangs her head,\nRepenting follies that full long have fled,\nHeaving her white breast to the balmy air,\nLike guilty beauty, chasten’d, and more fair:\nNyctanthes too, as sacred as the light\nShe fears to perfume, perfuming the night:\nAnd Clytia pondering between many a sun,\nWhile pettish tears adown her petals run:\nAnd that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth--\nAnd died, ere scarce exalted into birth,\nBursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing\nIts way to Heaven, from garden of a king:\nAnd Valisnerian lotus thither flown\nFrom struggling with the waters of the Rhone:\nAnd thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante!\nIsola d’oro!--Fior di Levante!\nAnd the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever\nWith Indian Cupid down the holy river--\nFair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given\nTo bear the Goddess’ song, in odors, up to Heaven:\n\n“Spirit! that dwellest where,\nIn the deep sky,\nThe terrible and fair,\nIn beauty vie!\nBeyond the line of blue--\nThe boundary of the star\nWhich turneth at the view\nOf thy barrier and thy bar--\nOf the barrier overgone\nBy the comets who were cast\nFrom their pride, and from their throne\nTo be drudges till the last--\nTo be carriers of fire\n(The red fire of their heart)\nWith speed that may not tire\nAnd with pain that shall not part--\nWho livest--_that_ we know--\nIn Eternity--we feel--\nBut the shadow of whose brow\nWhat spirit shall reveal?\nTho’ the beings whom thy Nesace,\nThy messenger hath known\nHave dream’d for thy Infinity\nA model of their own--\nThy will is done, O God!\nThe star hath ridden high\nThro’ many a tempest, but she rode\nBeneath thy burning eye;\nAnd here, in thought, to thee--\nIn thought that can alone\nAscend thy empire and so be\nA partner of thy throne--\nBy winged Fantasy,\n My embassy is given,\nTill secrecy shall knowledge be\nIn the environs of Heaven.”\n\nShe ceas’d--and buried then her burning cheek\nAbash’d, amid the lilies there, to seek\nA shelter from the fervor of His eye;\nFor the stars trembled at the Deity.\nShe stirr’d not--breath’d not--for a voice was there\nHow solemnly pervading the calm air!\nA sound of silence on the startled ear\nWhich dreamy poets name “the music of the sphere.”\nOurs is a world of words: Quiet we call\n“Silence”--which is the merest word of all.\n\nAll Nature speaks, and ev’n ideal things\nFlap shadowy sounds from the visionary wings--\nBut ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high\nThe eternal voice of God is passing by,\nAnd the red winds are withering in the sky!\n“What tho’ in worlds which sightless cycles run,\nLink’d to a little system, and one sun--\nWhere all my love is folly, and the crowd\nStill think my terrors but the thunder cloud,\nThe storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath\n(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)\nWhat tho’ in worlds which own a single sun\nThe sands of time grow dimmer as they run,\nYet thine is my resplendency, so given\nTo bear my secrets thro’ the upper Heaven.\nLeave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,\nWith all thy train, athwart the moony sky--\nApart--like fire-flies in Sicilian night,\nAnd wing to other worlds another light!\nDivulge the secrets of thy embassy\nTo the proud orbs that twinkle--and so be\nTo ev’ry heart a barrier and a ban\nLest the stars totter in the guilt of man!”\n\nUp rose the maiden in the yellow night,\nThe single-mooned eve!--on earth we plight\nOur faith to one love--and one moon adore--\nThe birth-place of young Beauty had no more.\nAs sprang that yellow star from downy hours,\nUp rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,\nAnd bent o’er sheeny mountain and dim plain\nHer way--but left not yet her Therasaean reign.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHigh on a mountain of enamell’d head--\nSuch as the drowsy shepherd on his bed\nOf giant pasturage lying at his ease,\nRaising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees\nWith many a mutter’d “hope to be forgiven”\nWhat time the moon is quadrated in Heaven--\nOf rosy head, that towering far away\nInto the sunlit ether, caught the ray\nOf sunken suns at eve--at noon of night,\nWhile the moon danc’d with the fair stranger light--\nUprear’d upon such height arose a pile\nOf gorgeous columns on th’ uuburthen’d air,\nFlashing from Parian marble that twin smile\nFar down upon the wave that sparkled there,\nAnd nursled the young mountain in its lair.\nOf molten stars their pavement, such as fall\nThro’ the ebon air, besilvering the pall\nOf their own dissolution, while they die--\nAdorning then the dwellings of the sky.\nA dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,\nSat gently on these columns as a crown--\nA window of one circular diamond, there,\nLook’d out above into the purple air\nAnd rays from God shot down that meteor chain\nAnd hallow’d all the beauty twice again,\nSave when, between th’ Empyrean and that ring,\nSome eager spirit flapp’d his dusky wing.\nBut on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen\nThe dimness of this world: that grayish green\nThat Nature loves the best for Beauty’s grave\nLurk’d in each cornice, round each architrave--\nAnd every sculptured cherub thereabout\nThat from his marble dwelling peered out,\nSeem’d earthly in the shadow of his niche--\nAchaian statues in a world so rich?\nFriezes from Tadmor and Persepolis--\nFrom Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss\nOf beautiful Gomorrah! Oh, the wave\nIs now upon thee--but too late to save!\nSound loves to revel in a summer night:\nWitness the murmur of the gray twilight\nThat stole upon the ear, in Eyraco,\nOf many a wild star-gazer long ago--\nThat stealeth ever on the ear of him\nWho, musing, gazeth on the distance dim,\nAnd sees the darkness coming as a cloud--\nIs not its form--its voice--most palpable and loud?\nBut what is this?--it cometh--and it brings\nA music with it--’tis the rush of wings--\nA pause--and then a sweeping, falling strain,\nAnd Nesace is in her halls again.\nFrom the wild energy of wanton haste\nHer cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart;\nThe zone that clung around her gentle waist\nHad burst beneath the heaving of her heart.\nWithin the centre of that hall to breathe\nShe paus’d and panted, Zanthe! all beneath,\nThe fairy light that kiss’d her golden hair\nAnd long’d to rest, yet could but sparkle there!\n\nYoung flowers were whispering in melody\nTo happy flowers that night--and tree to tree;\nFountains were gushing music as they fell\nIn many a star-lit grove, or moon-light dell;\nYet silence came upon material things--\nFair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wings--\nAnd sound alone that from the spirit sprang\nBore burthen to the charm the maiden sang:\n\n“Neath blue-bell or streamer--\nOr tufted wild spray\nThat keeps, from the dreamer,\nThe moonbeam away--\nBright beings! that ponder,\nWith half-closing eyes,\nOn the stars which your wonder\nHath drawn from the skies,\nTill they glance thro’ the shade, and\nCome down to your brow\nLike--eyes of the maiden\nWho calls on you now--\nArise! from your dreaming\nIn violet bowers,\nTo duty beseeming\nThese star-litten hours--\nAnd shake from your tresses\nEncumber’d with dew\n\nThe breath of those kisses\nThat cumber them too--\n(O! how, without you, Love!\nCould angels be blest?)\nThose kisses of true love\nThat lull’d ye to rest!\nUp! shake from your wing\nEach hindering thing:\nThe dew of the night--\nIt would weigh down your flight;\nAnd true love caresses--\nO! leave them apart!\nThey are light on the tresses,\nBut lead on the heart.\n\nLigeia! Ligeia!\nMy beautiful one!\nWhose harshest idea\nWill to melody run,\nO! is it thy will\nOn the breezes to toss?\nOr, capriciously still,\nLike the lone Albatross,\nIncumbent on night\n(As she on the air)\nTo keep watch with delight\nOn the harmony there?\n\nLigeia! wherever\nThy image may be,\nNo magic shall sever\nThy music from thee.\nThou hast bound many eyes\nIn a dreamy sleep--\nBut the strains still arise\nWhich _thy_ vigilance keep--\n\nThe sound of the rain\nWhich leaps down to the flower,\nAnd dances again\nIn the rhythm of the shower--\nThe murmur that springs\nFrom the growing of grass\nAre the music of things--\nBut are modell’d, alas!\nAway, then, my dearest,\nO! hie thee away\nTo springs that lie clearest\nBeneath the moon-ray--\nTo lone lake that smiles,\nIn its dream of deep rest,\nAt the many star-isles\nThat enjewel its breast--\nWhere wild flowers, creeping,\nHave mingled their shade,\nOn its margin is sleeping\nFull many a maid--\nSome have left the cool glade, and\nHave slept with the bee--\nArouse them, my maiden,\nOn moorland and lea--\n\nGo! breathe on their slumber,\nAll softly in ear,\nThe musical number\nThey slumber’d to hear--\nFor what can awaken\nAn angel so soon\nWhose sleep hath been taken\nBeneath the cold moon,\nAs the spell which no slumber\nOf witchery may test,\nThe rhythmical number\nWhich lull’d him to rest?”\n\nSpirits in wing, and angels to the view,\nA thousand seraphs burst th’ Empyrean thro’,\nYoung dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight--\nSeraphs in all but “Knowledge,” the keen light\nThat fell, refracted, thro’ thy bounds afar,\nO death! from eye of God upon that star;\nSweet was that error--sweeter still that death--\nSweet was that error--ev’n with _us_ the breath\nOf Science dims the mirror of our joy--\nTo them ’twere the Simoom, and would destroy--\nFor what (to them) availeth it to know\nThat Truth is Falsehood--or that Bliss is Woe?\nSweet was their death--with them to die was rife\nWith the last ecstasy of satiate life--\nBeyond that death no immortality--\nBut sleep that pondereth and is not “to be”--\nAnd there--oh! may my weary spirit dwell--\nApart from Heaven’s Eternity--and yet how far from Hell!\n\nWhat guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim\nHeard not the stirring summons of that hymn?\nBut two: they fell: for heaven no grace imparts\nTo those who hear not for their beating hearts.\nA maiden-angel and her seraph-lover--\nO! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)\nWas Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?\nUnguided Love hath fallen--’mid “tears of perfect moan.”\n\nHe was a goodly spirit--he who fell:\nA wanderer by mossy-mantled well--\nA gazer on the lights that shine above--\nA dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:\nWhat wonder? for each star is eye-like there,\nAnd looks so sweetly down on Beauty’s hair--\nAnd they, and ev’ry mossy spring were holy\nTo his love-haunted heart and melancholy.\nThe night had found (to him a night of wo)\nUpon a mountain crag, young Angelo--\nBeetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,\nAnd scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.\nHere sate he with his love--his dark eye bent\nWith eagle gaze along the firmament:\nNow turn’d it upon her--but ever then\nIt trembled to the orb of EARTH again.\n\n“Ianthe, dearest, see! how dim that ray!\nHow lovely ’tis to look so far away!\nShe seemed not thus upon that autumn eve\nI left her gorgeous halls--nor mourned to leave,\nThat eve--that eve--I should remember well--\nThe sun-ray dropped, in Lemnos with a spell\nOn th’ Arabesque carving of a gilded hall\nWherein I sate, and on the draperied wall--\nAnd on my eyelids--O, the heavy light!\nHow drowsily it weighed them into night!\nOn flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran\nWith Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:\nBut O, that light!--I slumbered--Death, the while,\nStole o’er my senses in that lovely isle\nSo softly that no single silken hair\nAwoke that slept--or knew that he was there.”\n\n“The last spot of Earth’s orb I trod upon\nWas a proud temple called the Parthenon;\nMore beauty clung around her columned wall\nThen even thy glowing bosom beats withal,\nAnd when old Time my wing did disenthral\nThence sprang I--as the eagle from his tower,\nAnd years I left behind me in an hour.\nWhat time upon her airy bounds I hung,\nOne half the garden of her globe was flung\nUnrolling as a chart unto my view--\nTenantless cities of the desert too!\nIanthe, beauty crowded on me then,\nAnd half I wished to be again of men.”\n\n“My Angelo! and why of them to be?\nA brighter dwelling-place is here for thee--\nAnd greener fields than in yon world above,\nAnd woman’s loveliness--and passionate love.”\n“But list, Ianthe! when the air so soft\nFailed, as my pennoned spirit leapt aloft,\nPerhaps my brain grew dizzy--but the world\nI left so late was into chaos hurled,\nSprang from her station, on the winds apart,\nAnd rolled a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.\nMethought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar,\nAnd fell--not swiftly as I rose before,\nBut with a downward, tremulous motion thro’\nLight, brazen rays, this golden star unto!\nNor long the measure of my falling hours,\nFor nearest of all stars was thine to ours--\nDread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,\nA red Daedalion on the timid Earth.”\n\n“We came--and to thy Earth--but not to us\nBe given our lady’s bidding to discuss:\nWe came, my love; around, above, below,\nGay fire-fly of the night we come and go,\nNor ask a reason save the angel-nod\n_She_ grants to us as granted by her God--\nBut, Angelo, than thine gray Time unfurled\nNever his fairy wing o’er fairer world!\nDim was its little disk, and angel eyes\nAlone could see the phantom in the skies,\nWhen first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be\nHeadlong thitherward o’er the starry sea--\nBut when its glory swelled upon the sky,\nAs glowing Beauty’s bust beneath man’s eye,\nWe paused before the heritage of men,\nAnd thy star trembled--as doth Beauty then!”\n\nThus in discourse, the lovers whiled away\nThe night that waned and waned and brought no day.\nThey fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts\nWho hear not for the beating of their hearts.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1829 @@ -60471,7 +60558,7 @@ }, "the-city-in-the-sea": { "title": "“The City in the Sea”", - "body": "Lo! Death has reared himself a throne \nIn a strange city lying alone\nFar down within the dim West,\nWhere the good and the bad and the worst and the best\nHave gone to their eternal rest.\nThere shrines and palaces and towers\n(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)\nResemble nothing that is ours.\nAround, by lifting winds forgot,\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\n\nNo rays from the holy Heaven come down\nOn the long night-time of that town;\nBut light from out the lurid sea\nStreams up the turrets silently--\nGleams up the pinnacles far and free--\nUp domes--up spires--up kingly halls--\nUp fanes--up Babylon-like walls--\nUp shadowy long-forgotten bowers\nOf sculptured ivy and stone flowers--\nUp many and many a marvellous shrine\nWhose wreathed friezes intertwine\nThe viol, the violet, and the vine.\n\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\nSo blend the turrets and shadows there\nThat all seem pendulous in air,\nWhile from a proud tower in the town\nDeath looks gigantically down.\n\nThere open fanes and gaping graves\nYawn level with the luminous waves;\nBut not the riches there that lie \nIn each idol’s diamond eye--\nNot the gaily-jewelled dead\nTempt the waters from their bed;\nFor no ripples curl, alas!\nAlong that wilderness of glass--\nNo swellings tell that winds may be\nUpon some far-off happier sea--\nNo heavings hint that winds have been\nOn seas less hideously serene.\n\nBut lo, a stir is in the air!\nThe wave--there is a movement there!\nAs if the towers had thrust aside,\nIn slightly sinking, the dull tide--\nAs if their tops had feebly given\nA void within the filmy Heaven.\nThe waves have now a redder glow--\nThe hours are breathing faint and low--\nAnd when, amid no earthly moans,\nDown, down that town shall settle hence,\nHell, rising from a thousand thrones,\nShall do it reverence.", + "body": "Lo! Death has reared himself a throne\nIn a strange city lying alone\nFar down within the dim West,\nWhere the good and the bad and the worst and the best\nHave gone to their eternal rest.\nThere shrines and palaces and towers\n(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)\nResemble nothing that is ours.\nAround, by lifting winds forgot,\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\n\nNo rays from the holy Heaven come down\nOn the long night-time of that town;\nBut light from out the lurid sea\nStreams up the turrets silently--\nGleams up the pinnacles far and free--\nUp domes--up spires--up kingly halls--\nUp fanes--up Babylon-like walls--\nUp shadowy long-forgotten bowers\nOf sculptured ivy and stone flowers--\nUp many and many a marvellous shrine\nWhose wreathed friezes intertwine\nThe viol, the violet, and the vine.\n\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\nSo blend the turrets and shadows there\nThat all seem pendulous in air,\nWhile from a proud tower in the town\nDeath looks gigantically down.\n\nThere open fanes and gaping graves\nYawn level with the luminous waves;\nBut not the riches there that lie\nIn each idol’s diamond eye--\nNot the gaily-jewelled dead\nTempt the waters from their bed;\nFor no ripples curl, alas!\nAlong that wilderness of glass--\nNo swellings tell that winds may be\nUpon some far-off happier sea--\nNo heavings hint that winds have been\nOn seas less hideously serene.\n\nBut lo, a stir is in the air!\nThe wave--there is a movement there!\nAs if the towers had thrust aside,\nIn slightly sinking, the dull tide--\nAs if their tops had feebly given\nA void within the filmy Heaven.\nThe waves have now a redder glow--\nThe hours are breathing faint and low--\nAnd when, amid no earthly moans,\nDown, down that town shall settle hence,\nHell, rising from a thousand thrones,\nShall do it reverence.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1831 @@ -60529,7 +60616,7 @@ }, "a-dream-within-a-dream": { "title": "“A Dream within a Dream”", - "body": "Take this kiss upon the brow!\nAnd, in parting from you now,\nThus much let me avow--\nYou are not wrong, who deem\nThat my days have been a dream:\nYet if hope has flown away \nIn a night, or in a day,\nIn a vision or in none,\nIs it therefore the less _gone_?\n_All_ that we see or seem \nIs but a dream within a dream.\n\nI stand amid the roar\nOf a surf-tormented shore,\nAnd I hold within my hand\nGrains of the golden sand--\nHow few! yet how they creep\nThrough my fingers to the deep\nWhile I weep--while I weep!\nO God! can I not grasp\nThem with a tighter clasp?\nO God! can I not save\n_One_ from the pitiless wave?\nIs _all_ that we see or seem\nBut a dream within a dream?", + "body": "Take this kiss upon the brow!\nAnd, in parting from you now,\nThus much let me avow--\nYou are not wrong, who deem\nThat my days have been a dream:\nYet if hope has flown away\nIn a night, or in a day,\nIn a vision or in none,\nIs it therefore the less _gone_?\n_All_ that we see or seem\nIs but a dream within a dream.\n\nI stand amid the roar\nOf a surf-tormented shore,\nAnd I hold within my hand\nGrains of the golden sand--\nHow few! yet how they creep\nThrough my fingers to the deep\nWhile I weep--while I weep!\nO God! can I not grasp\nThem with a tighter clasp?\nO God! can I not save\n_One_ from the pitiless wave?\nIs _all_ that we see or seem\nBut a dream within a dream?", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1849, @@ -60545,7 +60632,7 @@ }, "dream-land": { "title": "“Dream-land”", - "body": "By a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only,\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have reached these lands but newly\nFrom an ultimate dim Thule--\nFrom a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,\nOut of SPACE--out of TIME.\n\nBottomless vales and boundless floods,\nAnd chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,\nWith forms that no man can discover\nFor the dews that drip all over;\nMountains toppling evermore \nInto seas without a shore;\nSeas that restlessly aspire,\nSurging, unto skies of fire;\nLakes that endlessly outspread\nTheir lone waters--lone and dead,\nTheir still waters--still and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily.\n\nBy the lakes that thus outspread\nTheir lone waters, lone and dead,--\nTheir sad waters, sad and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily,--\n\nBy the mountains--near the river\nMurmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--\nBy the gray woods,--by the swamp\nWhere the toad and the newt encamp,--\nBy the dismal tarns and pools\nWhere dwell the Ghouls,--\nBy each spot the most unholy--\nIn each nook most melancholy,--\n\nThere the traveller meets aghast\nSheeted Memories of the past--\nShrouded forms that start and sigh\nAs they pass the wanderer by--\nWhite-robed forms of friends long given,\nIn agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.\n\nFor the heart whose woes are legion\n’Tis a peaceful, soothing region--\nFor the spirit that walks in shadow\n’Tis--oh, ’tis an Eldorado!\nBut the traveller, travelling through it,\nMay not--dare not openly view it;\nNever its mysteries are exposed\nTo the weak human eye unclosed;\nSo wills its King, who hath forbid\nThe uplifting of the fringed lid;\nAnd thus the sad Soul that here passes\nBeholds it but through darkened glasses.\n\nBy a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only.\n\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have wandered home but newly\nFrom this ultimate dim Thule.", + "body": "By a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only,\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have reached these lands but newly\nFrom an ultimate dim Thule--\nFrom a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,\nOut of SPACE--out of TIME.\n\nBottomless vales and boundless floods,\nAnd chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,\nWith forms that no man can discover\nFor the dews that drip all over;\nMountains toppling evermore\nInto seas without a shore;\nSeas that restlessly aspire,\nSurging, unto skies of fire;\nLakes that endlessly outspread\nTheir lone waters--lone and dead,\nTheir still waters--still and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily.\n\nBy the lakes that thus outspread\nTheir lone waters, lone and dead,--\nTheir sad waters, sad and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily,--\n\nBy the mountains--near the river\nMurmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--\nBy the gray woods,--by the swamp\nWhere the toad and the newt encamp,--\nBy the dismal tarns and pools\nWhere dwell the Ghouls,--\nBy each spot the most unholy--\nIn each nook most melancholy,--\n\nThere the traveller meets aghast\nSheeted Memories of the past--\nShrouded forms that start and sigh\nAs they pass the wanderer by--\nWhite-robed forms of friends long given,\nIn agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.\n\nFor the heart whose woes are legion\n’Tis a peaceful, soothing region--\nFor the spirit that walks in shadow\n’Tis--oh, ’tis an Eldorado!\nBut the traveller, travelling through it,\nMay not--dare not openly view it;\nNever its mysteries are exposed\nTo the weak human eye unclosed;\nSo wills its King, who hath forbid\nThe uplifting of the fringed lid;\nAnd thus the sad Soul that here passes\nBeholds it but through darkened glasses.\n\nBy a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only.\n\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have wandered home but newly\nFrom this ultimate dim Thule.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1844 @@ -60555,7 +60642,7 @@ }, "dreams": { "title": "“Dreams”", - "body": "Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!\nMy spirit not awakening, till the beam\nOf an Eternity should bring the morrow.\nYes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,\n’Twere better than the cold reality\nOf waking life, to him whose heart must be,\nAnd hath been still, upon the lovely earth,\nA chaos of deep passion, from his birth.\nBut should it be--that dream eternally\nContinuing--as dreams have been to me \nIn my young boyhood--should it thus be given,\n’Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.\nFor I have revelled when the sun was bright \nI’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light\nAnd loveliness,--have left my very heart \nInclines of my imaginary apart\nFrom mine own home, with beings that have been\nOf mine own thought--what more could I have seen?\n’Twas once--and only once--and the wild hour\nFrom my remembrance shall not pass--some power\nOr spell had bound me--’twas the chilly wind\nCame o’er me in the night, and left behind \nIts image on my spirit--or the moon\nShone on my slumbers in her lofty noon\nToo coldly--or the stars--howe’er it was\nThat dream was that that night-wind--let it pass.\n_I have been_ happy, though in a dream.\nI have been happy--and I love the theme:\nDreams! in their vivid coloring of life\nAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife\nOf semblance with reality which brings\nTo the delirious eye, more lovely things\nOf Paradise and Love--and all my own!--\nThan young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.", + "body": "Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!\nMy spirit not awakening, till the beam\nOf an Eternity should bring the morrow.\nYes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,\n’Twere better than the cold reality\nOf waking life, to him whose heart must be,\nAnd hath been still, upon the lovely earth,\nA chaos of deep passion, from his birth.\nBut should it be--that dream eternally\nContinuing--as dreams have been to me\nIn my young boyhood--should it thus be given,\n’Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.\nFor I have revelled when the sun was bright\nI’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light\nAnd loveliness,--have left my very heart\nInclines of my imaginary apart\nFrom mine own home, with beings that have been\nOf mine own thought--what more could I have seen?\n’Twas once--and only once--and the wild hour\nFrom my remembrance shall not pass--some power\nOr spell had bound me--’twas the chilly wind\nCame o’er me in the night, and left behind\nIts image on my spirit--or the moon\nShone on my slumbers in her lofty noon\nToo coldly--or the stars--howe’er it was\nThat dream was that that night-wind--let it pass.\n_I have been_ happy, though in a dream.\nI have been happy--and I love the theme:\nDreams! in their vivid coloring of life\nAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife\nOf semblance with reality which brings\nTo the delirious eye, more lovely things\nOf Paradise and Love--and all my own!--\nThan young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.", "metadata": { "context": { "season": "summer" @@ -60622,7 +60709,7 @@ }, "fairy-land": { "title": "“Fairy-land”", - "body": "Dim vales--and shadowy floods--\nAnd cloudy-looking woods,\nWhose forms we can’t discover\nFor the tears that drip all over\nHuge moons there wax and wane--\nAgain--again--again--\nEvery moment of the night--\nForever changing places--\nAnd they put out the star-light\nWith the breath from their pale faces.\nAbout twelve by the moon-dial\nOne more filmy than the rest\n(A kind which, upon trial,\nThey have found to be the best)\nComes down--still down--and down\nWith its centre on the crown\nOf a mountain’s eminence,\nWhile its wide circumference \nIn easy drapery falls\nOver hamlets, over halls,\nWherever they may be--\nO’er the strange woods--o’er the sea--\nOver spirits on the wing--\nOver every drowsy thing--\nAnd buries them up quite \nIn a labyrinth of light--\nAnd then, how deep!--O, deep!\nIs the passion of their sleep.\nIn the morning they arise,\nAnd their moony covering \nIs soaring in the skies,\nWith the tempests as they toss,\nLike--almost any thing--\nOr a yellow Albatross.\nThey use that moon no more\nFor the same end as before--\nVidelicet a tent--\nWhich I think extravagant:\nIts atomies, however,\nInto a shower dissever,\nOf which those butterflies,\nOf Earth, who seek the skies,\nAnd so come down again\n(Never-contented thing!)\nHave brought a specimen\nUpon their quivering wings.", + "body": "Dim vales--and shadowy floods--\nAnd cloudy-looking woods,\nWhose forms we can’t discover\nFor the tears that drip all over\nHuge moons there wax and wane--\nAgain--again--again--\nEvery moment of the night--\nForever changing places--\nAnd they put out the star-light\nWith the breath from their pale faces.\nAbout twelve by the moon-dial\nOne more filmy than the rest\n(A kind which, upon trial,\nThey have found to be the best)\nComes down--still down--and down\nWith its centre on the crown\nOf a mountain’s eminence,\nWhile its wide circumference\nIn easy drapery falls\nOver hamlets, over halls,\nWherever they may be--\nO’er the strange woods--o’er the sea--\nOver spirits on the wing--\nOver every drowsy thing--\nAnd buries them up quite\nIn a labyrinth of light--\nAnd then, how deep!--O, deep!\nIs the passion of their sleep.\nIn the morning they arise,\nAnd their moony covering\nIs soaring in the skies,\nWith the tempests as they toss,\nLike--almost any thing--\nOr a yellow Albatross.\nThey use that moon no more\nFor the same end as before--\nVidelicet a tent--\nWhich I think extravagant:\nIts atomies, however,\nInto a shower dissever,\nOf which those butterflies,\nOf Earth, who seek the skies,\nAnd so come down again\n(Never-contented thing!)\nHave brought a specimen\nUpon their quivering wings.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1831 @@ -60754,7 +60841,7 @@ }, "israfel": { "title": "“Israfel”", - "body": "_“And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”_\n --Koran\n\nIn Heaven a spirit doth dwell\n“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”\nNone sing so wildly well\nAs the angel Israfel,\nAnd the giddy Stars (so legends tell),\nCeasing their hymns, attend the spell\nOf his voice, all mute.\n\nTottering above\nIn her highest noon,\nThe enamoured Moon\nBlushes with love,\nWhile, to listen, the red levin\n(With the rapid Pleiads, even,\nWhich were seven),\nPauses in Heaven.\n\nAnd they say (the starry choir\nAnd the other listening things)\nThat Israfeli’s fire \nIs owing to that lyre\nBy which he sits and sings--\nThe trembling living wire\nOf those unusual strings.\n\nBut the skies that angel trod,\nWhere deep thoughts are a duty--\nWhere Love’s a grow-up God--\nWhere the Houri glances are \nImbued with all the beauty\nWhich we worship in a star.\n\nTherefore, thou art not wrong,\nIsrafeli, who despisest\nAn unimpassioned song;\nTo thee the laurels belong,\nBest bard, because the wisest!\nMerrily live and long!\n\nThe ecstasies above\nWith thy burning measures suit--\nThy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,\nWith the fervor of thy lute--\nWell may the stars be mute!\n\nYes, Heaven is thine; but this\nIs a world of sweets and sours;\nOur flowers are merely--flowers,\nAnd the shadow of thy perfect bliss\nIs the sunshine of ours.\n\nIf I could dwell\nWhere Israfel\nHath dwelt, and he where I,\nHe might not sing so wildly well\nA mortal melody,\nWhile a bolder note than this might swell\nFrom my lyre within the sky.", + "body": "_“And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”_\n --Koran\n\nIn Heaven a spirit doth dwell\n“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”\nNone sing so wildly well\nAs the angel Israfel,\nAnd the giddy Stars (so legends tell),\nCeasing their hymns, attend the spell\nOf his voice, all mute.\n\nTottering above\nIn her highest noon,\nThe enamoured Moon\nBlushes with love,\nWhile, to listen, the red levin\n(With the rapid Pleiads, even,\nWhich were seven),\nPauses in Heaven.\n\nAnd they say (the starry choir\nAnd the other listening things)\nThat Israfeli’s fire\nIs owing to that lyre\nBy which he sits and sings--\nThe trembling living wire\nOf those unusual strings.\n\nBut the skies that angel trod,\nWhere deep thoughts are a duty--\nWhere Love’s a grow-up God--\nWhere the Houri glances are\nImbued with all the beauty\nWhich we worship in a star.\n\nTherefore, thou art not wrong,\nIsrafeli, who despisest\nAn unimpassioned song;\nTo thee the laurels belong,\nBest bard, because the wisest!\nMerrily live and long!\n\nThe ecstasies above\nWith thy burning measures suit--\nThy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,\nWith the fervor of thy lute--\nWell may the stars be mute!\n\nYes, Heaven is thine; but this\nIs a world of sweets and sours;\nOur flowers are merely--flowers,\nAnd the shadow of thy perfect bliss\nIs the sunshine of ours.\n\nIf I could dwell\nWhere Israfel\nHath dwelt, and he where I,\nHe might not sing so wildly well\nA mortal melody,\nWhile a bolder note than this might swell\nFrom my lyre within the sky.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1836 @@ -60787,7 +60874,7 @@ }, "mysterious-star": { "title": "“Mysterious Star”", - "body": "Mysterious star!\nThou wert my dream\nAll a long summer night--\nBe now my theme!\nBy this clear stream,\nOf thee will I write;\nMeantime from afar\nBathe me in light!\n\nThy world has not the dross of ours,\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our love or deck our bowers \nIn dreamy gardens, where do lie\nDreamy maidens all the day;\nWhile the silver winds of Circassy\nOn violet couches faint away.\nLittle--oh! little dwells in thee\nLike unto what on earth we see:\nBeauty’s eye is here the bluest \nIn the falsest and untruest--\nOn the sweetest air doth float\nThe most sad and solemn note--\nIf with thee be broken hearts,\nJoy so peacefully departs,\nThat its echo still doth dwell,\nLike the murmur in the shell.\nThou! thy truest type of grief \nIs the gently falling leaf--\nThou! thy framing is so holy\nSorrow is not melancholy.", + "body": "Mysterious star!\nThou wert my dream\nAll a long summer night--\nBe now my theme!\nBy this clear stream,\nOf thee will I write;\nMeantime from afar\nBathe me in light!\n\nThy world has not the dross of ours,\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our love or deck our bowers\nIn dreamy gardens, where do lie\nDreamy maidens all the day;\nWhile the silver winds of Circassy\nOn violet couches faint away.\nLittle--oh! little dwells in thee\nLike unto what on earth we see:\nBeauty’s eye is here the bluest\nIn the falsest and untruest--\nOn the sweetest air doth float\nThe most sad and solemn note--\nIf with thee be broken hearts,\nJoy so peacefully departs,\nThat its echo still doth dwell,\nLike the murmur in the shell.\nThou! thy truest type of grief\nIs the gently falling leaf--\nThou! thy framing is so holy\nSorrow is not melancholy.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1831 @@ -60834,7 +60921,7 @@ }, "romance": { "title": "“Romance”", - "body": "Romance, who loves to nod and sing,\nWith drowsy head and folded wing,\nAmong the green leaves as they shake\nFar down within some shadowy lake,\nTo me a painted paroquet\nHath been--a most familiar bird--\nTaught me my alphabet to say--\nTo lisp my very earliest word\nWhile in the wild wood I did lie,\nA child--with a most knowing eye.\n\nOf late, eternal Condor years\nSo shake the very Heaven on high\nWith tumult as they thunder by,\nI have no time for idle cares\nThough gazing on the unquiet sky.\nAnd when an hour with calmer wings \nIts down upon my spirit flings--\nThat little time with lyre and rhyme\nTo while away--forbidden things!\nMy heart would feel to be a crime\nUnless it trembled with the strings.\n\nSucceeding years, too wild for song,\nThen rolled like tropic storms along,\nWhere, though the garish lights that fly\nDying along the troubled sky,\nLay bare, through vistas thunder-riven,\nThe blackness of the general Heaven,\nThat very blackness yet doth fling\nLight on the lightning’s silver wing.\n\nFor being an idle boy lang syne,\nWho read Anacreon and drank wine,\nI early found Anacreon rhymes\nWere almost passionate sometimes--\nAnd by strange alchemy of brain\nHis pleasures always turned to pain--\nHis naïveté to wild desire--\nHis wit to love--his wine to fire--\nAnd so, being young and dipt in folly,\nI fell in love with melancholy.\n\nAnd used to throw my earthly rest\nAnd quiet all away in jest--\nI could not love except where Death\nWas mingling his with Beauty’s breath--\nOr Hymen, Time, and Destiny,\nWere stalking between her and me.\n\nBut _now_ my soul hath too much room--\nGone are the glory and the gloom--\nThe black hath mellow’d into gray,\nAnd all the fires are fading away.\n\nMy draught of passion hath been deep--\nI revell’d, and I now would sleep--\nAnd after drunkenness of soul\nSucceeds the glories of the bowl--\nAn idle longing night and day\nTo dream my very life away.\n\nBut dreams--of those who dream as I,\nAspiringly, are damned, and die:\nYet should I swear I mean alone,\nBy notes so very shrilly blown,\nTo break upon Time’s monotone,\nWhile yet my vapid joy and grief\nAre tintless of the yellow leaf--\nWhy not an imp the greybeard hath,\nWill shake his shadow in my path--\nAnd e’en the greybeard will o’erlook\nConnivingly my dreaming-book.", + "body": "Romance, who loves to nod and sing,\nWith drowsy head and folded wing,\nAmong the green leaves as they shake\nFar down within some shadowy lake,\nTo me a painted paroquet\nHath been--a most familiar bird--\nTaught me my alphabet to say--\nTo lisp my very earliest word\nWhile in the wild wood I did lie,\nA child--with a most knowing eye.\n\nOf late, eternal Condor years\nSo shake the very Heaven on high\nWith tumult as they thunder by,\nI have no time for idle cares\nThough gazing on the unquiet sky.\nAnd when an hour with calmer wings\nIts down upon my spirit flings--\nThat little time with lyre and rhyme\nTo while away--forbidden things!\nMy heart would feel to be a crime\nUnless it trembled with the strings.\n\nSucceeding years, too wild for song,\nThen rolled like tropic storms along,\nWhere, though the garish lights that fly\nDying along the troubled sky,\nLay bare, through vistas thunder-riven,\nThe blackness of the general Heaven,\nThat very blackness yet doth fling\nLight on the lightning’s silver wing.\n\nFor being an idle boy lang syne,\nWho read Anacreon and drank wine,\nI early found Anacreon rhymes\nWere almost passionate sometimes--\nAnd by strange alchemy of brain\nHis pleasures always turned to pain--\nHis naïveté to wild desire--\nHis wit to love--his wine to fire--\nAnd so, being young and dipt in folly,\nI fell in love with melancholy.\n\nAnd used to throw my earthly rest\nAnd quiet all away in jest--\nI could not love except where Death\nWas mingling his with Beauty’s breath--\nOr Hymen, Time, and Destiny,\nWere stalking between her and me.\n\nBut _now_ my soul hath too much room--\nGone are the glory and the gloom--\nThe black hath mellow’d into gray,\nAnd all the fires are fading away.\n\nMy draught of passion hath been deep--\nI revell’d, and I now would sleep--\nAnd after drunkenness of soul\nSucceeds the glories of the bowl--\nAn idle longing night and day\nTo dream my very life away.\n\nBut dreams--of those who dream as I,\nAspiringly, are damned, and die:\nYet should I swear I mean alone,\nBy notes so very shrilly blown,\nTo break upon Time’s monotone,\nWhile yet my vapid joy and grief\nAre tintless of the yellow leaf--\nWhy not an imp the greybeard hath,\nWill shake his shadow in my path--\nAnd e’en the greybeard will o’erlook\nConnivingly my dreaming-book.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1831 @@ -60891,7 +60978,7 @@ }, "the-sleeper": { "title": "“The Sleeper”", - "body": "At midnight, in the month of June,\nI stand beneath the mystic moon.\nAn opiate vapor, dewy, dim,\nExhales from out her golden rim,\nAnd, softly dripping, drop by drop,\nUpon the quiet mountain top,\nSteals drowsily and musically \nInto the universal valley.\nThe rosemary nods upon the grave;\nThe lily lolls upon the wave;\nWrapping the fog about its breast,\nThe ruin moulders into rest;\nLooking like Lethe, see! the lake\nA conscious slumber seems to take,\nAnd would not, for the world, awake.\nAll Beauty sleeps!--and lo! where lies\n(Her casement open to the skies)\nIrene, with her Destinies!\n\nOh, lady bright! can it be right--\nThis window open to the night!\nThe wanton airs, from the tree-top,\nLaughingly through the lattice-drop--\nThe bodiless airs, a wizard rout,\nFlit through thy chamber in and out,\nAnd wave the curtain canopy\nSo fitfully--so fearfully--\nAbove the closed and fringed lid\n’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,\nThat, o’er the floor and down the wall,\nLike ghosts the shadows rise and fall!\nOh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?\nWhy and what art thou dreaming here?\nSure thou art come o’er far-off seas,\nA wonder to these garden trees!\nStrange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!\nStrange, above all, thy length of tress,\nAnd this all-solemn silentness!\n\nThe lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep\nWhich is enduring, so be deep!\nHeaven have her in its sacred keep!\nThis chamber changed for one more holy,\nThis bed for one more melancholy,\nI pray to God that she may lie\nFor ever with unopened eye,\nWhile the dim sheeted ghosts go by!\n\nMy love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,\nAs it is lasting, so be deep;\nSoft may the worms about her creep!\nFar in the forest, dim and old,\nFor her may some tall vault unfold--\nSome vault that oft hath flung its black\nAnd winged panels fluttering back,\nTriumphant, o’er the crested palls,\nOf her grand family funerals--\nSome sepulchre, remote, alone,\nAgainst whose portal she hath thrown,\nIn childhood many an idle stone--\nSome tomb from out whose sounding door\nShe ne’er shall force an echo more,\nThrilling to think, poor child of sin!\nIt was the dead who groaned within.", + "body": "At midnight, in the month of June,\nI stand beneath the mystic moon.\nAn opiate vapor, dewy, dim,\nExhales from out her golden rim,\nAnd, softly dripping, drop by drop,\nUpon the quiet mountain top,\nSteals drowsily and musically\nInto the universal valley.\nThe rosemary nods upon the grave;\nThe lily lolls upon the wave;\nWrapping the fog about its breast,\nThe ruin moulders into rest;\nLooking like Lethe, see! the lake\nA conscious slumber seems to take,\nAnd would not, for the world, awake.\nAll Beauty sleeps!--and lo! where lies\n(Her casement open to the skies)\nIrene, with her Destinies!\n\nOh, lady bright! can it be right--\nThis window open to the night!\nThe wanton airs, from the tree-top,\nLaughingly through the lattice-drop--\nThe bodiless airs, a wizard rout,\nFlit through thy chamber in and out,\nAnd wave the curtain canopy\nSo fitfully--so fearfully--\nAbove the closed and fringed lid\n’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,\nThat, o’er the floor and down the wall,\nLike ghosts the shadows rise and fall!\nOh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?\nWhy and what art thou dreaming here?\nSure thou art come o’er far-off seas,\nA wonder to these garden trees!\nStrange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!\nStrange, above all, thy length of tress,\nAnd this all-solemn silentness!\n\nThe lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep\nWhich is enduring, so be deep!\nHeaven have her in its sacred keep!\nThis chamber changed for one more holy,\nThis bed for one more melancholy,\nI pray to God that she may lie\nFor ever with unopened eye,\nWhile the dim sheeted ghosts go by!\n\nMy love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,\nAs it is lasting, so be deep;\nSoft may the worms about her creep!\nFar in the forest, dim and old,\nFor her may some tall vault unfold--\nSome vault that oft hath flung its black\nAnd winged panels fluttering back,\nTriumphant, o’er the crested palls,\nOf her grand family funerals--\nSome sepulchre, remote, alone,\nAgainst whose portal she hath thrown,\nIn childhood many an idle stone--\nSome tomb from out whose sounding door\nShe ne’er shall force an echo more,\nThrilling to think, poor child of sin!\nIt was the dead who groaned within.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1846 @@ -60904,7 +60991,7 @@ }, "spirits-of-the-dead": { "title": "“Spirits of the Dead”", - "body": "Thy soul shall find itself alone\n’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone\nNot one, of all the crowd, to pry \nInto thine hour of secrecy.\nBe silent in that solitude\nWhich is not loneliness--for then\nThe spirits of the dead who stood\nIn life before thee are again \nIn death around thee--and their will\nShall overshadow thee: be still.\nThe night--tho’ clear--shall frown--\nAnd the stars shall not look down\nFrom their high thrones in the Heaven,\nWith light like Hope to mortals given--\nBut their red orbs, without beam,\nTo thy weariness shall seem\nAs a burning and a fever\nWhich would cling to thee forever.\nNow are thoughts thou shalt not banish--\nNow are visions ne’er to vanish--\nFrom thy spirit shall they pass\nNo more--like dew-drops from the grass.\nThe breeze--the breath of God--is still--\nAnd the mist upon the hill\nShadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,\nIs a symbol and a token--\nHow it hangs upon the trees,\nA mystery of mysteries!", + "body": "Thy soul shall find itself alone\n’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone\nNot one, of all the crowd, to pry\nInto thine hour of secrecy.\nBe silent in that solitude\nWhich is not loneliness--for then\nThe spirits of the dead who stood\nIn life before thee are again\nIn death around thee--and their will\nShall overshadow thee: be still.\nThe night--tho’ clear--shall frown--\nAnd the stars shall not look down\nFrom their high thrones in the Heaven,\nWith light like Hope to mortals given--\nBut their red orbs, without beam,\nTo thy weariness shall seem\nAs a burning and a fever\nWhich would cling to thee forever.\nNow are thoughts thou shalt not banish--\nNow are visions ne’er to vanish--\nFrom thy spirit shall they pass\nNo more--like dew-drops from the grass.\nThe breeze--the breath of God--is still--\nAnd the mist upon the hill\nShadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,\nIs a symbol and a token--\nHow it hangs upon the trees,\nA mystery of mysteries!", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1829 @@ -60914,7 +61001,7 @@ }, "tamerlane": { "title": "“Tamerlane”", - "body": "Kind solace in a dying hour!\nSuch, father, is not (now) my theme--\nI will not madly deem that power\nOf Earth may shrive me of the sin\nUnearthly pride hath revelled in--\nI have no time to dote or dream:\nYou call it hope--that fire of fire!\nIt is but agony of desire:\nIf I _can_ hope--O God! I can--\nIts fount is holier--more divine--\nI would not call thee fool, old man,\nBut such is not a gift of thine.\n\nKnow thou the secret of a spirit\nBowed from its wild pride into shame\nO yearning heart! I did inherit\nThy withering portion with the fame,\nThe searing glory which hath shone\nAmid the Jewels of my throne,\nHalo of Hell! and with a pain\nNot Hell shall make me fear again--\nO craving heart, for the lost flowers\nAnd sunshine of my summer hours!\nThe undying voice of that dead time,\nWith its interminable chime,\nRings, in the spirit of a spell,\nUpon thy emptiness--a knell.\n\nI have not always been as now:\nThe fevered diadem on my brow I claimed and won usurpingly--\nHath not the same fierce heirdom given\nRome to the Caesar--this to me?\nThe heritage of a kingly mind,\nAnd a proud spirit which hath striven\nTriumphantly with human kind.\nOn mountain soil I first drew life:\nThe mists of the Taglay have shed\nNightly their dews upon my head,\nAnd, I believe, the winged strife\nAnd tumult of the headlong air\nHave nestled in my very hair.\n\nSo late from Heaven--that dew--it fell\n(’Mid dreams of an unholy night)\nUpon me with the touch of Hell,\nWhile the red flashing of the light\nFrom clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,\nAppeared to my half-closing eye\nThe pageantry of monarchy;\nAnd the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar\nCame hurriedly upon me, telling\nOf human battle, where my voice,\nMy own voice, silly child!--was swelling\n(O! how my spirit would rejoice,\nAnd leap within me at the cry)\nThe battle-cry of Victory!\n\nThe rain came down upon my head\nUnsheltered--and the heavy wind\nRendered me mad and deaf and blind.\nIt was but man, I thought, who shed\nLaurels upon me: and the rush--\nThe torrent of the chilly air\nGurgled within my ear the crush\nOf empires--with the captive’s prayer--\nThe hum of suitors--and the tone\nOf flattery ’round a sovereign’s throne.\n\nMy passions, from that hapless hour,\nUsurped a tyranny which men\nHave deemed since I have reached to power,\nMy innate nature--be it so:\nBut, father, there lived one who, then,\nThen--in my boyhood--when their fire\nBurned with a still intenser glow\n(For passion must, with youth, expire)\nE’en _then_ who knew this iron heart \nIn woman’s weakness had a part.\n\nI have no words--alas!--to tell\nThe loveliness of loving well!\nNor would I now attempt to trace\nThe more than beauty of a face\nWhose lineaments, upon my mind,\nAre--shadows on th’ unstable wind:\nThus I remember having dwelt\nSome page of early lore upon,\nWith loitering eye, till I have felt\nThe letters--with their meaning--melt\nTo fantasies--with none.\n\nO, she was worthy of all love!\nLove as in infancy was mine--\n’Twas such as angel minds above\nMight envy; her young heart the shrine\nOn which my every hope and thought\nWere incense--then a goodly gift,\nFor they were childish and upright--\nPure--as her young example taught:\nWhy did I leave it, and, adrift,\nTrust to the fire within, for light?\n\nWe grew in age--and love--together--\nRoaming the forest, and the wild;\nMy breast her shield in wintry weather--\nAnd, when the friendly sunshine smiled.\nAnd she would mark the opening skies,\n_I_ saw no Heaven--but in her eyes.\nYoung Love’s first lesson is the heart:\nFor ’mid that sunshine, and those smiles,\nWhen, from our little cares apart,\nAnd laughing at her girlish wiles,\nI’d throw me on her throbbing breast,\nAnd pour my spirit out in tears--\nThere was no need to speak the rest--\nNo need to quiet any fears\nOf her--who asked no reason why,\nBut turned on me her quiet eye!\n\nYet _more_ than worthy of the love\nMy spirit struggled with, and strove\nWhen, on the mountain peak, alone,\nAmbition lent it a new tone--\nI had no being--but in thee:\nThe world, and all it did contain \nIn the earth--the air--the sea--\nIts joy--its little lot of pain\nThat was new pleasure--the ideal,\nDim, vanities of dreams by night--\nAnd dimmer nothings which were real--\n(Shadows--and a more shadowy light!)\nParted upon their misty wings,\nAnd, so, confusedly, became\nThine image and--a name--a name!\nTwo separate--yet most intimate things.\n\nI was ambitious--have you known\nThe passion, father? You have not:\nA cottager, I marked a throne\nOf half the world as all my own,\nAnd murmured at such lowly lot--\nBut, just like any other dream,\nUpon the vapor of the dew\nMy own had past, did not the beam\nOf beauty which did while it thro’\nThe minute--the hour--the day--oppress\nMy mind with double loveliness.\n\nWe walked together on the crown\nOf a high mountain which looked down\nAfar from its proud natural towers\nOf rock and forest, on the hills--\nThe dwindled hills! begirt with bowers\nAnd shouting with a thousand rills.\n\nI spoke to her of power and pride,\nBut mystically--in such guise\nThat she might deem it nought beside\nThe moment’s converse; in her eyes \nI read, perhaps too carelessly--\nA mingled feeling with my own--\nThe flush on her bright cheek, to me\nSeemed to become a queenly throne\nToo well that I should let it be\nLight in the wilderness alone.\n\nI wrapped myself in grandeur then,\nAnd donned a visionary crown--\nYet it was not that Fantasy\nHad thrown her mantle over me--\nBut that, among the rabble--men,\nLion ambition is chained down--\nAnd crouches to a keeper’s hand--\nNot so in deserts where the grand--\nThe wild--the terrible conspire\nWith their own breath to fan his fire.\n\nLook ’round thee now on Samarcand!--\nIs she not queen of Earth? her pride\nAbove all cities? in her hand\nTheir destinies? in all beside\nOf glory which the world hath known\nStands she not nobly and alone?\nFalling--her veriest stepping-stone\nShall form the pedestal of a throne--\nAnd who her sovereign? Timour--he\nWhom the astonished people saw\nStriding o’er empires haughtily\nA diademed outlaw!\n\nO, human love! thou spirit given,\nOn Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!\nWhich fall’st into the soul like rain\nUpon the Siroc-withered plain,\nAnd, failing in thy power to bless,\nBut leav’st the heart a wilderness!\nIdea! which bindest life around\nWith music of so strange a sound\nAnd beauty of so wild a birth--\nFarewell! for I have won the Earth.\n\nWhen Hope, the eagle that towered, could see\nNo cliff beyond him in the sky,\nHis pinions were bent droopingly--\nAnd homeward turned his softened eye.\n’Twas sunset: When the sun will part\nThere comes a sullenness of heart\nTo him who still would look upon\nThe glory of the summer sun.\nThat soul will hate the ev’ning mist\nSo often lovely, and will list\nTo the sound of the coming darkness (known\nTo those whose spirits hearken) as one\nWho, in a dream of night, _would_ fly,\nBut _cannot_, from a danger nigh.\n\nWhat tho’ the moon--tho’ the white moon\nShed all the splendor of her noon,\n_Her_ smile is chilly--and _her_ beam,\nIn that time of dreariness, will seem\n(So like you gather in your breath)\nA portrait taken after death.\nAnd boyhood is a summer sun\nWhose waning is the dreariest one--\nFor all we live to know is known,\nAnd all we seek to keep hath flown--\nLet life, then, as the day-flower, fall\nWith the noon-day beauty--which is all.\nI reached my home--my home no more--\nFor all had flown who made it so.\nI passed from out its mossy door,\nAnd, tho’ my tread was soft and low,\nA voice came from the threshold stone\nOf one whom I had earlier known--\nO, I defy thee, Hell, to show\nOn beds of fire that burn below,\nAn humbler heart--a deeper woe.\n\nFather, I firmly do believe--\nI _know_--for Death who comes for me\nFrom regions of the blest afar,\nWhere there is nothing to deceive,\nHath left his iron gate ajar.\nAnd rays of truth you cannot see\nAre flashing thro’ Eternity--\nI do believe that Eblis hath\nA snare in every human path--\nElse how, when in the holy grove \nI wandered of the idol, Love,--\nWho daily scents his snowy wings\nWith incense of burnt-offerings\nFrom the most unpolluted things,\nWhose pleasant bowers are yet so riven\nAbove with trellised rays from Heaven\nNo mote may shun--no tiniest fly--\nThe light’ning of his eagle eye--\nHow was it that Ambition crept,\nUnseen, amid the revels there,\nTill growing bold, he laughed and leapt \nIn the tangles of Love’s very hair!", + "body": "Kind solace in a dying hour!\nSuch, father, is not (now) my theme--\nI will not madly deem that power\nOf Earth may shrive me of the sin\nUnearthly pride hath revelled in--\nI have no time to dote or dream:\nYou call it hope--that fire of fire!\nIt is but agony of desire:\nIf I _can_ hope--O God! I can--\nIts fount is holier--more divine--\nI would not call thee fool, old man,\nBut such is not a gift of thine.\n\nKnow thou the secret of a spirit\nBowed from its wild pride into shame\nO yearning heart! I did inherit\nThy withering portion with the fame,\nThe searing glory which hath shone\nAmid the Jewels of my throne,\nHalo of Hell! and with a pain\nNot Hell shall make me fear again--\nO craving heart, for the lost flowers\nAnd sunshine of my summer hours!\nThe undying voice of that dead time,\nWith its interminable chime,\nRings, in the spirit of a spell,\nUpon thy emptiness--a knell.\n\nI have not always been as now:\nThe fevered diadem on my brow I claimed and won usurpingly--\nHath not the same fierce heirdom given\nRome to the Caesar--this to me?\nThe heritage of a kingly mind,\nAnd a proud spirit which hath striven\nTriumphantly with human kind.\nOn mountain soil I first drew life:\nThe mists of the Taglay have shed\nNightly their dews upon my head,\nAnd, I believe, the winged strife\nAnd tumult of the headlong air\nHave nestled in my very hair.\n\nSo late from Heaven--that dew--it fell\n(’Mid dreams of an unholy night)\nUpon me with the touch of Hell,\nWhile the red flashing of the light\nFrom clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,\nAppeared to my half-closing eye\nThe pageantry of monarchy;\nAnd the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar\nCame hurriedly upon me, telling\nOf human battle, where my voice,\nMy own voice, silly child!--was swelling\n(O! how my spirit would rejoice,\nAnd leap within me at the cry)\nThe battle-cry of Victory!\n\nThe rain came down upon my head\nUnsheltered--and the heavy wind\nRendered me mad and deaf and blind.\nIt was but man, I thought, who shed\nLaurels upon me: and the rush--\nThe torrent of the chilly air\nGurgled within my ear the crush\nOf empires--with the captive’s prayer--\nThe hum of suitors--and the tone\nOf flattery ’round a sovereign’s throne.\n\nMy passions, from that hapless hour,\nUsurped a tyranny which men\nHave deemed since I have reached to power,\nMy innate nature--be it so:\nBut, father, there lived one who, then,\nThen--in my boyhood--when their fire\nBurned with a still intenser glow\n(For passion must, with youth, expire)\nE’en _then_ who knew this iron heart\nIn woman’s weakness had a part.\n\nI have no words--alas!--to tell\nThe loveliness of loving well!\nNor would I now attempt to trace\nThe more than beauty of a face\nWhose lineaments, upon my mind,\nAre--shadows on th’ unstable wind:\nThus I remember having dwelt\nSome page of early lore upon,\nWith loitering eye, till I have felt\nThe letters--with their meaning--melt\nTo fantasies--with none.\n\nO, she was worthy of all love!\nLove as in infancy was mine--\n’Twas such as angel minds above\nMight envy; her young heart the shrine\nOn which my every hope and thought\nWere incense--then a goodly gift,\nFor they were childish and upright--\nPure--as her young example taught:\nWhy did I leave it, and, adrift,\nTrust to the fire within, for light?\n\nWe grew in age--and love--together--\nRoaming the forest, and the wild;\nMy breast her shield in wintry weather--\nAnd, when the friendly sunshine smiled.\nAnd she would mark the opening skies,\n_I_ saw no Heaven--but in her eyes.\nYoung Love’s first lesson is the heart:\nFor ’mid that sunshine, and those smiles,\nWhen, from our little cares apart,\nAnd laughing at her girlish wiles,\nI’d throw me on her throbbing breast,\nAnd pour my spirit out in tears--\nThere was no need to speak the rest--\nNo need to quiet any fears\nOf her--who asked no reason why,\nBut turned on me her quiet eye!\n\nYet _more_ than worthy of the love\nMy spirit struggled with, and strove\nWhen, on the mountain peak, alone,\nAmbition lent it a new tone--\nI had no being--but in thee:\nThe world, and all it did contain\nIn the earth--the air--the sea--\nIts joy--its little lot of pain\nThat was new pleasure--the ideal,\nDim, vanities of dreams by night--\nAnd dimmer nothings which were real--\n(Shadows--and a more shadowy light!)\nParted upon their misty wings,\nAnd, so, confusedly, became\nThine image and--a name--a name!\nTwo separate--yet most intimate things.\n\nI was ambitious--have you known\nThe passion, father? You have not:\nA cottager, I marked a throne\nOf half the world as all my own,\nAnd murmured at such lowly lot--\nBut, just like any other dream,\nUpon the vapor of the dew\nMy own had past, did not the beam\nOf beauty which did while it thro’\nThe minute--the hour--the day--oppress\nMy mind with double loveliness.\n\nWe walked together on the crown\nOf a high mountain which looked down\nAfar from its proud natural towers\nOf rock and forest, on the hills--\nThe dwindled hills! begirt with bowers\nAnd shouting with a thousand rills.\n\nI spoke to her of power and pride,\nBut mystically--in such guise\nThat she might deem it nought beside\nThe moment’s converse; in her eyes\nI read, perhaps too carelessly--\nA mingled feeling with my own--\nThe flush on her bright cheek, to me\nSeemed to become a queenly throne\nToo well that I should let it be\nLight in the wilderness alone.\n\nI wrapped myself in grandeur then,\nAnd donned a visionary crown--\nYet it was not that Fantasy\nHad thrown her mantle over me--\nBut that, among the rabble--men,\nLion ambition is chained down--\nAnd crouches to a keeper’s hand--\nNot so in deserts where the grand--\nThe wild--the terrible conspire\nWith their own breath to fan his fire.\n\nLook ’round thee now on Samarcand!--\nIs she not queen of Earth? her pride\nAbove all cities? in her hand\nTheir destinies? in all beside\nOf glory which the world hath known\nStands she not nobly and alone?\nFalling--her veriest stepping-stone\nShall form the pedestal of a throne--\nAnd who her sovereign? Timour--he\nWhom the astonished people saw\nStriding o’er empires haughtily\nA diademed outlaw!\n\nO, human love! thou spirit given,\nOn Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!\nWhich fall’st into the soul like rain\nUpon the Siroc-withered plain,\nAnd, failing in thy power to bless,\nBut leav’st the heart a wilderness!\nIdea! which bindest life around\nWith music of so strange a sound\nAnd beauty of so wild a birth--\nFarewell! for I have won the Earth.\n\nWhen Hope, the eagle that towered, could see\nNo cliff beyond him in the sky,\nHis pinions were bent droopingly--\nAnd homeward turned his softened eye.\n’Twas sunset: When the sun will part\nThere comes a sullenness of heart\nTo him who still would look upon\nThe glory of the summer sun.\nThat soul will hate the ev’ning mist\nSo often lovely, and will list\nTo the sound of the coming darkness (known\nTo those whose spirits hearken) as one\nWho, in a dream of night, _would_ fly,\nBut _cannot_, from a danger nigh.\n\nWhat tho’ the moon--tho’ the white moon\nShed all the splendor of her noon,\n_Her_ smile is chilly--and _her_ beam,\nIn that time of dreariness, will seem\n(So like you gather in your breath)\nA portrait taken after death.\nAnd boyhood is a summer sun\nWhose waning is the dreariest one--\nFor all we live to know is known,\nAnd all we seek to keep hath flown--\nLet life, then, as the day-flower, fall\nWith the noon-day beauty--which is all.\nI reached my home--my home no more--\nFor all had flown who made it so.\nI passed from out its mossy door,\nAnd, tho’ my tread was soft and low,\nA voice came from the threshold stone\nOf one whom I had earlier known--\nO, I defy thee, Hell, to show\nOn beds of fire that burn below,\nAn humbler heart--a deeper woe.\n\nFather, I firmly do believe--\nI _know_--for Death who comes for me\nFrom regions of the blest afar,\nWhere there is nothing to deceive,\nHath left his iron gate ajar.\nAnd rays of truth you cannot see\nAre flashing thro’ Eternity--\nI do believe that Eblis hath\nA snare in every human path--\nElse how, when in the holy grove\nI wandered of the idol, Love,--\nWho daily scents his snowy wings\nWith incense of burnt-offerings\nFrom the most unpolluted things,\nWhose pleasant bowers are yet so riven\nAbove with trellised rays from Heaven\nNo mote may shun--no tiniest fly--\nThe light’ning of his eagle eye--\nHow was it that Ambition crept,\nUnseen, amid the revels there,\nTill growing bold, he laughed and leapt\nIn the tangles of Love’s very hair!", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1827 @@ -60927,7 +61014,7 @@ }, "to-helen": { "title": "“To Helen”", - "body": "I saw thee once--once only--years ago:\nI must not say _how_ many--but _not_ many.\nIt was a July midnight; and from out\nA full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,\nSought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,\nThere fell a silvery-silken veil of light,\nWith quietude, and sultriness and slumber,\nUpon the upturn’d faces of a thousand\nRoses that grew in an enchanted garden,\nWhere no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat gave out, in return for the love-light,\nTheir odorous souls in an ecstatic death--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted\nBy thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.\n\nClad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half-reclining; while the moon\nFell on the upturn’d faces of the roses,\nAnd on thine own, upturn’d--alas, in sorrow!\n\nWas it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--\nWas it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow),\nThat bade me pause before that garden-gate,\nTo breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?\nNo footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,\nSave only thee and me--(O Heaven!--O God!\nHow my heart beats in coupling those two words!)--\nSave only thee and me. I paused--I looked--\nAnd in an instant all things disappeared.\n(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)\nThe pearly lustre of the moon went out:\nThe mossy banks and the meandering paths,\nThe happy flowers and the repining trees,\nWere seen no more: the very roses’ odors\nDied in the arms of the adoring airs.\nAll--all expired save thee--save less than thou:\nSave only the divine light in thine eyes--\nSave but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.\nI saw but them--they were the world to me.\nI saw but them--saw only them for hours--\nSaw only them until the moon went down.\nWhat wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten\nUpon those crystalline, celestial spheres!\nHow dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope!\nHow silently serene a sea of pride!\nHow daring an ambition! yet how deep--\nHow fathomless a capacity for love!\n\nBut now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,\nInto a western couch of thunder-cloud;\nAnd thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees\nDidst glide away. _Only thine eyes remained._\nThey _would not_ go--they never yet have gone.\nLighting my lonely pathway home that night,\n_They_ have not left me (as my hopes have) since.\nThey follow me--they lead me through the years.\n\nThey are my ministers--yet I their slave.\nTheir office is to illumine and enkindle--\nMy duty, _to be saved_ by their bright light,\nAnd purified in their electric fire,\nAnd sanctified in their elysian fire.\nThey fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope),\nAnd are far up in Heaven--the stars I kneel to \nIn the sad, silent watches of my night;\nWhile even in the meridian glare of day \nI see them still--two sweetly scintillant\nVenuses, unextinguished by the sun!", + "body": "I saw thee once--once only--years ago:\nI must not say _how_ many--but _not_ many.\nIt was a July midnight; and from out\nA full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,\nSought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,\nThere fell a silvery-silken veil of light,\nWith quietude, and sultriness and slumber,\nUpon the upturn’d faces of a thousand\nRoses that grew in an enchanted garden,\nWhere no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat gave out, in return for the love-light,\nTheir odorous souls in an ecstatic death--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted\nBy thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.\n\nClad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half-reclining; while the moon\nFell on the upturn’d faces of the roses,\nAnd on thine own, upturn’d--alas, in sorrow!\n\nWas it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--\nWas it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow),\nThat bade me pause before that garden-gate,\nTo breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?\nNo footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,\nSave only thee and me--(O Heaven!--O God!\nHow my heart beats in coupling those two words!)--\nSave only thee and me. I paused--I looked--\nAnd in an instant all things disappeared.\n(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)\nThe pearly lustre of the moon went out:\nThe mossy banks and the meandering paths,\nThe happy flowers and the repining trees,\nWere seen no more: the very roses’ odors\nDied in the arms of the adoring airs.\nAll--all expired save thee--save less than thou:\nSave only the divine light in thine eyes--\nSave but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.\nI saw but them--they were the world to me.\nI saw but them--saw only them for hours--\nSaw only them until the moon went down.\nWhat wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten\nUpon those crystalline, celestial spheres!\nHow dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope!\nHow silently serene a sea of pride!\nHow daring an ambition! yet how deep--\nHow fathomless a capacity for love!\n\nBut now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,\nInto a western couch of thunder-cloud;\nAnd thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees\nDidst glide away. _Only thine eyes remained._\nThey _would not_ go--they never yet have gone.\nLighting my lonely pathway home that night,\n_They_ have not left me (as my hopes have) since.\nThey follow me--they lead me through the years.\n\nThey are my ministers--yet I their slave.\nTheir office is to illumine and enkindle--\nMy duty, _to be saved_ by their bright light,\nAnd purified in their electric fire,\nAnd sanctified in their elysian fire.\nThey fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope),\nAnd are far up in Heaven--the stars I kneel to\nIn the sad, silent watches of my night;\nWhile even in the meridian glare of day\nI see them still--two sweetly scintillant\nVenuses, unextinguished by the sun!", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1848 @@ -61006,7 +61093,7 @@ }, "the-valley-of-unrest": { "title": "“The Valley of Unrest”", - "body": "_Once_ it smiled a silent dell\nWhere the people did not dwell;\nThey had gone unto the wars,\nTrusting to the mild-eyed stars,\nNightly, from their azure towers,\nTo keep watch above the flowers,\nIn the midst of which all day\nThe red sun-light lazily lay,\n_Now_ each visitor shall confess\nThe sad valley’s restlessness.\nNothing there is motionless--\nNothing save the airs that brood\nOver the magic solitude.\nAh, by no wind are stirred those trees\nThat palpitate like the chill seas\nAround the misty Hebrides!\nAh, by no wind those clouds are driven\nThat rustle through the unquiet Heaven\nUnceasingly, from morn till even,\nOver the violets there that lie \nIn myriad types of the human eye--\nOver the lilies that wave\nAnd weep above a nameless grave!\nThey wave:--from out their fragrant tops\nEternal dews come down in drops.\nThey weep:--from off their delicate stems\nPerennial tears descend in gems.", + "body": "_Once_ it smiled a silent dell\nWhere the people did not dwell;\nThey had gone unto the wars,\nTrusting to the mild-eyed stars,\nNightly, from their azure towers,\nTo keep watch above the flowers,\nIn the midst of which all day\nThe red sun-light lazily lay,\n_Now_ each visitor shall confess\nThe sad valley’s restlessness.\nNothing there is motionless--\nNothing save the airs that brood\nOver the magic solitude.\nAh, by no wind are stirred those trees\nThat palpitate like the chill seas\nAround the misty Hebrides!\nAh, by no wind those clouds are driven\nThat rustle through the unquiet Heaven\nUnceasingly, from morn till even,\nOver the violets there that lie\nIn myriad types of the human eye--\nOver the lilies that wave\nAnd weep above a nameless grave!\nThey wave:--from out their fragrant tops\nEternal dews come down in drops.\nThey weep:--from off their delicate stems\nPerennial tears descend in gems.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1831 @@ -64412,7 +64499,7 @@ }, "translator": "Lydia Davis", "source": { - "title": "Painted Stars " + "title": "Painted Stars" }, "context": { "season": "summer" @@ -68554,7 +68641,7 @@ }, "lost": { "title": "“Lost”", - "body": "Desolate and lone\nAll night long on the lake \nWhere fog trails and mist creeps, \nThe whistle of a boat \nCalls and cries unendingly, \nLike some lost child \nIn tears and trouble \nHunting the harbor’s breast \nAnd the harbor’s eyes.", + "body": "Desolate and lone\nAll night long on the lake\nWhere fog trails and mist creeps,\nThe whistle of a boat\nCalls and cries unendingly,\nLike some lost child\nIn tears and trouble\nHunting the harbor’s breast\nAnd the harbor’s eyes.", "metadata": { "source": { "title": "Chicago Poems", @@ -68593,7 +68680,7 @@ }, "mill-doors": { "title": "“Mill-Doors”", - "body": "You never come back. \nI say good--by when I see you going in the doors, \nThe hopeless open doors that call and wait \nAnd take you then for--how many cents a day? \nHow many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers? \n\nI say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,\nIn the dark, in the silence, day by day,\nAnd all the blood of you drop by drop,\nAnd you are old before you are young.\nYou never come back.", + "body": "You never come back.\nI say good--by when I see you going in the doors,\nThe hopeless open doors that call and wait\nAnd take you then for--how many cents a day?\nHow many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?\n\nI say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,\nIn the dark, in the silence, day by day,\nAnd all the blood of you drop by drop,\nAnd you are old before you are young.\nYou never come back.", "metadata": { "source": { "title": "Chicago Poems", @@ -69016,7 +69103,7 @@ }, "trafficker": { "title": "“Trafficker”", - "body": "Among the shadows where two streets cross, \nA woman lurks in the dark and waits \nTo move on when a policeman heaves in view. \nSmiling a broken smile from a face \nPainted over haggard bones and desperate eyes, \nAll night she offers passers-by what they will \nOf her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone, \nAnd no takers.", + "body": "Among the shadows where two streets cross,\nA woman lurks in the dark and waits\nTo move on when a policeman heaves in view.\nSmiling a broken smile from a face\nPainted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,\nAll night she offers passers-by what they will\nOf her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone,\nAnd no takers.", "metadata": { "source": { "title": "Chicago Poems", @@ -86098,13 +86185,17 @@ "metadata": { "name": "Émile Verhaeren", "birth": { - "year": 1855 + "year": 1855, + "month": "may", + "day": 21 }, "death": { - "year": 1916 + "year": 1916, + "month": "november", + "day": 27 }, "gender": "male", - "religion": null, + "religion": "catholic", "nationality": "belgian", "language": "french", "flag": "🇧🇪", @@ -86118,8 +86209,12 @@ "poems": { "the-cathedral-of-rheims": { "title": "“The Cathedral of Rheims”", - "body": "He who walks through the meadows of Champagne\nAt noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,\nSees it draw near\nLike some great mountain set upon the plain,\nFrom radiant dawn until the close of day,\nNearer it grows\nTo him who goes\nAcross the country. When tall towers lay\nTheir shadowy pall\nUpon his way,\nHe enters, where\nThe solid stone is hollowed deep by all\nIts centuries of beauty and of prayer.\n\nAncient French temple! thou whose hundred kings\nWatch over thee, emblazoned on thy walls,\nTell me, within thy memory-hallowed halls\nWhat chant of triumph, or what war-song rings?\nThou hast known Clovis and his Frankish train,\nWhose mighty hand Saint Remy’s hand did keep\nAnd in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep\nAn echo of the voice of Charlemagne.\nFor God thou has known fear, when from His side\nMen wandered, seeking alien shrines and new,\nBut still the sky was bountiful and blue\nAnd thou wast crowned with France’s love and pride.\nSacred thou art, from pinnacle to base;\nAnd in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass\nThe setting sun sees thousandfold his face;\nSorrow and joy, in stately silence pass\nAcross thy walls, the shadow and the light;\nAround thy lofty pillars, tapers white\nIlluminate, with delicate sharp flames,\nThe brows of saints with venerable names,\nAnd in the night erect a fiery wall.\nA great but silent fervour burns in all\nThose simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb,\nAnd know that down below, beside the Rhine--\nCannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line--\nWith blare of trumpets, mighty armies come.\n\nSuddenly, each knows fear;\nSwift rumours pass, that every one must hear,\nThe hostile banners blaze against the sky\nAnd by the embassies mobs rage and cry.\nNow war has come, and peace is at an end.\nOn Paris town the German troops descend.\nThey are turned back, and driven to Champagne.\nAnd now, as to so many weary men,\nThe glorious temple gives them welcome, when\nIt meets them at the bottom of the plain.\n\nAt once, they set their cannon in its way.\nThere is no gable now, nor wall\nThat does not suffer, night and day,\nAs shot and shell in crushing torrents fall.\nThe stricken tocsin quivers through the tower;\nThe triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir\nAre circled, hour by hour,\nWith thundering bands of fire\nAnd Death is scattered broadcast among men.\n\nAnd then\nThat which was splendid with baptismal grace;\nThe stately arches soaring into space,\nThe transepts, columns, windows gray and gold,\nThe organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled,\nThe crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places,\nThe Virgin’s gentle hands, the Saints’ pure faces,\nAll, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord\nWere struck and broken by the wanton sword\nOf sacrilegious lust.\n\nO beauty slain, O glory in the dust!\nStrong walls of faith, most basely overthrown!\nThe crawling flames, like adders glistening\nAte the white fabric of this lovely thing.\nNow from its soul arose a piteous moan,\nThe soul that always loved the just and fair.\nGranite and marble loud their woe confessed,\nThe silver monstrances that Popes had blessed,\nThe chalices and lamps and crosiers rare\nWere seared and twisted by a flaming breath;\nThe horror everywhere did range and swell,\nThe guardian Saints into this furnace fell,\nTheir bitter tears and screams were stilled in death.\n\nAround the flames armed hosts are skirmishing,\nThe burning sun reflects the lurid scene;\nThe German army, fighting for its life,\nRallies its torn and terrified left wing;\nAnd, as they near this place\nThe imperial eagles see\nBefore them in their flight,\nHere, in the solemn night,\nThe old cathedral, to the years to be\nShowing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace.", + "body": "He who walks through the meadows of Champagne\n At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,\n Sees it draw near\nLike some great mountain set upon the plain,\nFrom radiant dawn until the close of day,\n Nearer it grows\n To him who goes\nAcross the country. When tall towers lay\n Their shadowy pall\n Upon his way,\n He enters, where\nThe solid stone is hollowed deep by all\nIts centuries of beauty and of prayer.\n\nAncient French temple! thou whose hundred kings\nWatch over thee, emblazoned on thy walls,\nTell me, within thy memory-hallowed halls\nWhat chant of triumph, or what war-song rings?\nThou hast known Clovis and his Frankish train,\nWhose mighty hand Saint Remy’s hand did keep\nAnd in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep\nAn echo of the voice of Charlemagne.\nFor God thou has known fear, when from His side\nMen wandered, seeking alien shrines and new,\nBut still the sky was bountiful and blue\nAnd thou wast crowned with France’s love and pride.\nSacred thou art, from pinnacle to base;\nAnd in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass\nThe setting sun sees thousandfold his face;\nSorrow and joy, in stately silence pass\nAcross thy walls, the shadow and the light;\nAround thy lofty pillars, tapers white\nIlluminate, with delicate sharp flames,\nThe brows of saints with venerable names,\nAnd in the night erect a fiery wall.\nA great but silent fervour burns in all\nThose simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb,\nAnd know that down below, beside the Rhine --\nCannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line --\nWith blare of trumpets, mighty armies come.\n\nSuddenly, each knows fear;\nSwift rumours pass, that every one must hear,\nThe hostile banners blaze against the sky\nAnd by the embassies mobs rage and cry.\nNow war has come, and peace is at an end.\nOn Paris town the German troops descend.\nThey are turned back, and driven to Champagne.\nAnd now, as to so many weary men,\nThe glorious temple gives them welcome, when\nIt meets them at the bottom of the plain.\n\nAt once, they set their cannon in its way.\n There is no gable now, nor wall\nThat does not suffer, night and day,\n As shot and shell in crushing torrents fall.\nThe stricken tocsin quivers through the tower;\n The triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir\nAre circled, hour by hour,\n With thundering bands of fire\nAnd Death is scattered broadcast among men.\n\nAnd then\nThat which was splendid with baptismal grace;\nThe stately arches soaring into space,\nThe transepts, columns, windows gray and gold,\nThe organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled,\nThe crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places,\nThe Virgin’s gentle hands, the Saints’ pure faces,\nAll, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord\nWere struck and broken by the wanton sword\nOf sacrilegious lust.\n\nO beauty slain, O glory in the dust!\nStrong walls of faith, most basely overthrown!\nThe crawling flames, like adders glistening\nAte the white fabric of this lovely thing.\nNow from its soul arose a piteous moan,\nThe soul that always loved the just and fair.\nGranite and marble loud their woe confessed,\nThe silver monstrances that Popes had blessed,\nThe chalices and lamps and crosiers rare\nWere seared and twisted by a flaming breath;\nThe horror everywhere did range and swell,\nThe guardian Saints into this furnace fell,\nTheir bitter tears and screams were stilled in death.\n\nAround the flames armed hosts are skirmishing,\nThe burning sun reflects the lurid scene;\nThe German army, fighting for its life,\nRallies its torn and terrified left wing;\n And, as they near this place\n The imperial eagles see\n Before them in their flight,\nHere, in the solemn night,\nThe old cathedral, to the years to be\n Showing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1915 + }, + "translator": "Joyce Kilmer", "context": { "month": "october" }, @@ -86130,8 +86225,9 @@ "title": "“Infinitely”", "body": "The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,\nGnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.\nThe darkness, immensely, gropes in the emptiness\nFor the moon, seen by the light of water.\n\nFrom point to point, over there, the distant lights,\nAnd in the sky, above, dreadful voices\nComing and going from the infinity of the marshes and planes\nTo the infinity of the valleys and the woods.\n\nAnd roadways that stretch out like sails\nAnd pass each other, coming unfolded in the distance, soundlessly,\nWhile lengthening beneath the stars,\nThrough the shadows and the terror of the night.", "metadata": { + "translator": "Joyce Kilmer", "context": { - "month": "november" + "liturgy": "advent" }, "language": "french" } @@ -86140,6 +86236,7 @@ "title": "“Tenebrae”", "body": "A moon, with vacant, chilling eye, stares\nAt the winter, enthroned vast and white upon the hard ground;\nThe night is an entire and translucent azure;\nThe wind, a blade of sudden presence, stabs.\n\nFar away, on the skylines, the long pathways of frost,\nSeen, in the distance, to pierce the expanses,\nAnd stars of gold, suspended to the zenith,\nAlways higher, amid the ether, to rend the blue of the sky.\n\nThe villages crouched in the plains of Flanders,\nNear the rivers, the heather, and the great forests,\nBetween two pale infinities, shiver with cold,\nHuddled near old hearthsides, where they stir the ashes.", "metadata": { + "translator": "Joyce Kilmer", "context": { "month": "january" }, @@ -87634,7 +87731,7 @@ "tags": [ "american" ], - "n_poems": 41 + "n_poems": 42 }, "poems": { "barbara-frietchie": { @@ -87678,6 +87775,9 @@ "title": "“The Call of the Christian”", "body": "Not always as the whirlwind’s rush\nOn Horeb’s mount of fear,\nNot always as the burning bush\nTo Midian’s shepherd seer,\nNor as the awful voice which came\nTo Israel’s prophet bards,\nNor as the tongues of cloven flame,\nNor gift of fearful words,--\n\nNot always thus, with outward sign\nOf fire or voice from Heaven,\nThe message of a truth divine,\nThe call of God is given!\nAwaking in the human heart\nLove for the true and right,--\nZeal for the Christian’s better part,\nStrength for the Christian’s fight.\n\nNor unto manhood’s heart alone\nThe holy influence steals\nWarm with a rapture not its own,\nThe heart of woman feels!\nAs she who by Samaria’s wall\nThe Saviour’s errand sought,--\nAs those who with the fervent Paul\nAnd meek Aquila wrought:\n\nOr those meek ones whose martyrdom\nRome’s gathered grandeur saw\nOr those who in their Alpine home\nBraved the Crusader’s war,\nWhen the green Vaudois, trembling, heard,\nThrough all its vales of death,\nThe martyr’s song of triumph poured\nFrom woman’s failing breath.\n\nAnd gently, by a thousand things\nWhich o’er our spirits pass,\nLike breezes o’er the harp’s fine strings,\nOr vapors o’er a glass,\nLeaving their token strange and new\nOf music or of shade,\nThe summons to the right and true\nAnd merciful is made.\n\nOh, then, if gleams of truth and light\nFlash o’er thy waiting mind,\nUnfolding to thy mental sight\nThe wants of human-kind;\nIf, brooding over human grief,\nThe earnest wish is known\nTo soothe and gladden with relief\nAn anguish not thine own;\n\nThough heralded with naught of fear,\nOr outward sign or show;\nThough only to the inward ear\nIt whispers soft and low;\nThough dropping, as the manna fell,\nUnseen, yet from above,\nNoiseless as dew-fall, heed it well,--\nThy Father’s call of love!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1880 + }, "language": "english" } }, @@ -87691,16 +87791,33 @@ "language": "english" } }, - "the-common-question": { - "title": "“The Common Question”", - "body": "Behind us at our evening meal\nThe gray bird ate his fill,\nSwung downward by a single claw,\nAnd wiped his hooked bill.\n\nHe shook his wings and crimson tail,\nAnd set his head aslant,\nAnd, in his sharp, impatient way,\nAsked, “What does Charlie want?”\n\n“Fie, silly bird!” I answered, “tuck\nYour head beneath your wing,\nAnd go to sleep;”--but o’er and o’er\nHe asked the self-same thing.\n\nThen, smiling, to myself I said\nHow like are men and birds!\nWe all are saying what he says,\nIn action or in words.\n\nThe boy with whip and top and drum,\nThe girl with hoop and doll,\nAnd men with lands and houses, ask\nThe question of Poor Poll.\n\nHowever full, with something more\nWe fain the bag would cram;\nWe sigh above our crowded nets\nFor fish that never swam.\n\nNo bounty of indulgent Heaven\nThe vague desire can stay;\nSelf-love is still a Tartar mill\nFor grinding prayers alway.\n\nThe dear God hears and pities all;\nHe knoweth all our wants;\nAnd what we blindly ask of Him\nHis love withholds or grants.\n\nAnd so I sometimes think our prayers\nMight well be merged in one;\nAnd nest and perch and hearth and church\nRepeat, “Thy will be done.”", + "the-cities-of-the-plain": { + "title": "“The Cities of the Plain”", + "body": "“Get ye up from the wrath of God’s terrible day!\nUngirded, unsandalled, arise and away!\n’T is the vintage of blood, ’t is the fulness of time,\nAnd vengeance shall gather the harvest of crime!”\n\nThe warning was spoken--the righteous had gone,\nAnd the proud ones of Sodom were feasting alone;\nAll gay was the banquet--the revel was long,\nWith the pouring of wine and the breathing of song.\n\n’T was an evening of beauty; the air was perfume,\nThe earth was all greenness, the trees were all bloom;\nAnd softly the delicate viol was heard,\nLike the murmur of love or the notes of a bird.\n\nAnd beautiful maidens moved down in the dance,\nWith the magic of motion and sunshine of glance\nAnd white arms wreathed lightly, and tresses fell free\nAs the plumage of birds in some tropical tree.\n\nWhere the shrines of foul idols were lighted on high,\nAnd wantonness tempted the lust of the eye;\nMidst rites of obsceneness, strange, loathsome, abhorred,\nThe blasphemer scoffed at the name of the Lord.\n\nHark! the growl of the thunder,--the quaking of earth!\nWoe, woe to the worship, and woe to the mirth!\nThe black sky has opened; there’s flame in the air;\nThe red arm of vengeance is lifted and bare!\n\nThen the shriek of the dying rose wild where the song\nAnd the low tone of love had been whispered along;\nFor the fierce flames went lightly o’er palace and bower,\nLike the red tongues of demons, to blast and devour!\n\nDown, down on the fallen the red ruin rained,\nAnd the reveller sank with his wine-cup undrained;\nThe foot of the dancer, the music’s loved thrill,\nAnd the shout and the laughter grew suddenly still.\n\nThe last throb of anguish was fearfully given;\nThe last eye glared forth in its madness on Heaven!\nThe last groan of horror rose wildly and vain,\nAnd death brooded over the pride of the Plain!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1831 + }, "language": "english" } }, - "disarmament": { - "title": "“Disarmament”", - "body": "“Put up the sword!” The voice of Christ once more\nSpeaks, in the pauses of the cannon’s roar,\nO’er fields of corn by fiery sickles reaped\nAnd left dry ashes; over trenches heaped\nWith nameless dead; o’er cities starving slow\nUnder a rain of fire; through wards of woe\nDown which a groaning diapason runs\nFrom tortured brothers, husbands, lovers, sons\nOf desolate women in their far-off homes\nWaiting to hear the step that never comes!\nO men and brothers! let that voice be heard.\nWar fails, try peace; put up the useless sword!\n\nFear not the end. There is a story told\nIn Eastern tents, when autumn nights grow cold,\nAnd round the fire the Mongol shepherds sit\nWith grave responses listening unto it:\nOnce, on the errands of his mercy bent,\nBuddha, the holy and benevolent,\nMet a fell monster, huge and fierce of look,\nWhose awful voice the hills and forests shook,\n“O son of peace!” the giant cried, “thy fate\nIs sealed at last, and love shall yield to hate.”\nThe unarmed Buddha looking, with no trace\nOf fear and anger, in the monster’s face,\nIn pity said, “Poor fiend, even thee I love.”\nLo! as he spake the sky-tall terror sank\nTo hand-breadth size; the huge abhorrence shrank\nInto the form and fashion of a dove\nAnd where the thunder of its rage was heard,\nCircling above him sweetly sang the bird:\n“Hate hath no harm for love,” so ran the song,\n“And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong!”", + "the-clear-vision": { + "title": "“The Clear Vision”", + "body": "I did but dream. I never knew\nWhat charms our sternest season wore.\nWas never yet the sky so blue,\nWas never earth so white before.\nTill now I never saw the glow\nOf sunset on yon hills of snow,\nAnd never learned the bough’s designs\nOf beauty in its leafless lines.\n\nDid ever such a morning break\nAs that my eastern windows see?\nDid ever such a moonlight take\nWeird photographs of shrub and tree?\nRang ever bells so wild and fleet\nThe music of the winter street?\nWas ever yet a sound by half\nSo merry as you school-boy’s laugh?\n\nO Earth! with gladness overfraught,\nNo added charm thy face hath found;\nWithin my heart the change is wrought,\nMy footsteps make enchanted ground.\nFrom couch of pain and curtained room\nForth to thy light and air I come,\nTo find in all that meets my eyes\nThe freshness of a glad surprise.\n\nFair seem these winter days, and soon\nShall blow the warm west-winds of spring,\nTo set the unbound rills in tune\nAnd hither urge the bluebird’s wing.\nThe vales shall laugh in flowers, the woods\nGrow misty green with leafing buds,\nAnd violets and wind-flowers sway\nAgainst the throbbing heart of May.\n\nBreak forth, my lips, in praise, and own\nThe wiser love severely kind;\nSince, richer for its chastening grown,\nI see, whereas I once was blind.\nThe world, O Father! hath not wronged\nWith loss the life by Thee prolonged;\nBut still, with every added year,\nMore beautiful Thy works appear!\n\nAs Thou hast made thy world without,\nMake Thou more fair my world within;\nShine through its lingering clouds of doubt;\nRebuke its haunting shapes of sin;\nFill, brief or long, my granted span\nOf life with love to thee and man;\nStrike when thou wilt the hour of rest,\nBut let my last days be my best!", + "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1868, + "month": "february" + }, + "context": { + "month": "february" + }, + "language": "english" + } + }, + "the-common-question": { + "title": "“The Common Question”", + "body": "Behind us at our evening meal\nThe gray bird ate his fill,\nSwung downward by a single claw,\nAnd wiped his hooked bill.\n\nHe shook his wings and crimson tail,\nAnd set his head aslant,\nAnd, in his sharp, impatient way,\nAsked, “What does Charlie want?”\n\n“Fie, silly bird!” I answered, “tuck\nYour head beneath your wing,\nAnd go to sleep;”--but o’er and o’er\nHe asked the self-same thing.\n\nThen, smiling, to myself I said\nHow like are men and birds!\nWe all are saying what he says,\nIn action or in words.\n\nThe boy with whip and top and drum,\nThe girl with hoop and doll,\nAnd men with lands and houses, ask\nThe question of Poor Poll.\n\nHowever full, with something more\nWe fain the bag would cram;\nWe sigh above our crowded nets\nFor fish that never swam.\n\nNo bounty of indulgent Heaven\nThe vague desire can stay;\nSelf-love is still a Tartar mill\nFor grinding prayers alway.\n\nThe dear God hears and pities all;\nHe knoweth all our wants;\nAnd what we blindly ask of Him\nHis love withholds or grants.\n\nAnd so I sometimes think our prayers\nMight well be merged in one;\nAnd nest and perch and hearth and church\nRepeat, “Thy will be done.”", "metadata": { "language": "english" } @@ -87709,6 +87826,9 @@ "title": "“Divine Compassion”", "body": "Long since, a dream of heaven I had,\nAnd still the vision haunts me oft;\nI see the saints in white robes clad,\nThe martyrs with their palms aloft;\nBut hearing still, in middle song,\nThe ceaseless dissonance of wrong;\nAnd shrinking, with hid faces, from the strain\nOf sad, beseeching eyes, full of remorse and pain.\n\nThe glad song falters to a wail,\nThe harping sinks to low lament;\nBefore the still unlifted veil\nI see the crowned foreheads bent,\nMaking more sweet the heavenly air,\nWith breathings of unselfish prayer;\nAnd a Voice saith: “O Pity which is pain,\nO Love that weeps, fill up my sufferings which remain!”\n\n“Shall souls redeemed by me refuse\nTo share my sorrow in their turn?\nOr, sin-forgiven, my gift abuse\nOf peace with selfish unconcern?\nHas saintly ease no pitying care?\nHas faith no work, and love no prayer?\nWhile sin remains, and souls in darkness dwell,\nCan heaven itself be heaven, and look unmoved on hell?”\n\nThen through the Gates of Pain, I dream,\nA wind of heaven blows coolly in;\nFainter the awful discords seem,\nThe smoke of torment grows more thin,\nTears quench the burning soil, and thence\nSpring sweet, pale flowers of penitence\nAnd through the dreary realm of man’s despair,\nStar-crowned an angel walks, and to! God’s hope is there!\n\nIs it a dream? Is heaven so high\nThat pity cannot breathe its air?\nIts happy eyes forever dry,\nIts holy lips without a prayer!\nMy God! my God! if thither led\nBy Thy free grace unmerited,\nNo crown nor palm be mine, but let me keep\nA heart that still can feel, and eyes that still can weep.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1868 + }, "context": { "holiday": "palm_sunday" }, @@ -87720,7 +87840,7 @@ "body": "Bland as the morning breath of June\nThe southwest breezes play;\nAnd, through its haze, the winter noon\nSeems warm as summer’s day.\nThe snow-plumed Angel of the North\nHas dropped his icy spear;\nAgain the mossy earth looks forth,\nAgain the streams gush clear.\n\nThe fox his hillside cell forsakes,\nThe muskrat leaves his nook,\nThe bluebird in the meadow brakes\nIs singing with the brook.\n“Bear up, O Mother Nature!” cry\nBird, breeze, and streamlet free;\n“Our winter voices prophesy\nOf summer days to thee!”\n\nSo, in those winters of the soul,\nBy bitter blasts and drear\nO’erswept from Memory’s frozen pole,\nWill sunny days appear.\nReviving Hope and Faith, they show\nThe soul its living powers,\nAnd how beneath the winter’s snow\nLie germs of summer flowers!\n\nThe Night is mother of the Day,\nThe Winter of the Spring,\nAnd ever upon old Decay\nThe greenest mosses cling.\nBehind the cloud the starlight lurks,\nThrough showers the sunbeams fall;\nFor God, who loveth all His works,\nHas left His hope with all!", "metadata": { "context": { - "season": "winter" + "holiday": "ash_wednesday" }, "language": "english" } @@ -87729,6 +87849,9 @@ "title": "“An Easter Flower Gift”", "body": "O dearest bloom the seasons know,\nFlowers of the Resurrection blow,\nOur hope and faith restore;\nAnd through the bitterness of death\nAnd loss and sorrow, breathe a breath\nOf life forevermore!\n\nThe thought of Love Immortal blends\nWith fond remembrances of friends;\nIn you, O sacred flowers,\nBy human love made doubly sweet,\nThe heavenly and the earthly meet,\nThe heart of Christ and ours!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1882 + }, "context": { "holiday": "easter_sunday" }, @@ -87739,6 +87862,9 @@ "title": "“The Eternal Goodness”", "body": "O Friends! with whom my feet have trod\nThe quiet aisles of prayer,\nGlad witness to your zeal for God\nAnd love of man I bear.\n\nI trace your lines of argument;\nYour logic linked and strong\nI weigh as one who dreads dissent,\nAnd fears a doubt as wrong.\n\nBut still my human hands are weak\nTo hold your iron creeds:\nAgainst the words ye bid me speak\nMy heart within me pleads.\n\nWho fathoms the Eternal Thought?\nWho talks of scheme and plan?\nThe Lord is God! He needeth not\nThe poor device of man.\n\nI walk with bare, hushed feet the ground\nYe tread with boldness shod;\nI dare not fix with mete and bound\nThe love and power of God.\n\nYe praise His justice; even such\nHis pitying love I deem:\nYe seek a king; I fain would touch\nThe robe that hath no seam.\n\nYe see the curse which overbroods\nA world of pain and loss;\nI hear our Lord’s beatitudes\nAnd prayer upon the cross.\n\nMore than your schoolmen teach, within\nMyself, alas! I know:\nToo dark ye cannot paint the sin,\nToo small the merit show.\n\nI bow my forehead to the dust,\nI veil mine eyes for shame,\nAnd urge, in trembling self-distrust,\nA prayer without a claim.\n\nI see the wrong that round me lies,\nI feel the guilt within;\nI hear, with groan and travail-cries,\nThe world confess its sin.\nYet, in the maddening maze of things,\nAnd tossed by storm and flood,\nTo one fixed trust my spirit clings;\nI know that God is good!\n\nNot mine to look where cherubim\nAnd seraphs may not see,\nBut nothing can be good in Him\nWhich evil is in me.\n\nThe wrong that pains my soul below\nI dare not throne above,\nI know not of His hate,--I know\nHis goodness and His love.\n\nI dimly guess from blessings known\nOf greater out of sight,\nAnd, with the chastened Psalmist, own\nHis judgments too are right.\n\nI long for household voices gone.\nFor vanished smiles I long,\nBut God hath led my dear ones on,\nAnd He can do no wrong.\n\nI know not what the future hath\nOf marvel or surprise,\nAssured alone that life and death\nHis mercy underlies.\n\nAnd if my heart and flesh are weak\nTo bear an untried pain,\nThe bruised reed He will not break,\nBut strengthen and sustain.\n\nNo offering of my own I have,\nNor works my faith to prove;\nI can but give the gifts He gave,\nAnd plead His love for love.\n\nAnd so beside the Silent Sea\nI wait the muffled oar;\nNo harm from Him can come to me\nOn ocean or on shore.\n\nI know not where His islands lift\nTheir fronded palms in air;\nI only know I cannot drift\nBeyond His love and care.\n\nO brothers! if my faith is vain,\nIf hopes like these betray,\nPray for me that my feet may gain\nThe sure and safer way.\n\nAnd Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen\nThy creatures as they be,\nForgive me if too close I lean\nMy human heart on Thee!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1865 + }, "language": "english" } }, @@ -87753,6 +87879,9 @@ "title": "“Flowers in Winter”", "body": "How strange to greet, this frosty morn,\nIn graceful counterfeit of flower,\nThese children of the meadows, born\nOf sunshine and of showers!\n\nHow well the conscious wood retains\nThe pictures of its flower-sown home,\nThe lights and shades, the purple stains,\nAnd golden hues of bloom!\n\nIt was a happy thought to bring\nTo the dark season’s frost and rime\nThis painted memory of spring,\nThis dream of summertime.\n\nOur hearts are lighter for its sake,\nOur fancy’s age renews its youth,\nAnd dim-remembered fictions take\nThe guise of present truth.\n\nA wizard of the Merrimac,--\nSo old ancestral legends say,--\nCould call green leaf and blossom back\nTo frosted stem and spray.\n\nThe dry logs of the cottage wall,\nBeneath his touch, put out their leaves;\nThe clay-bound swallow, at his call,\nPlayed round the icy eaves.\n\nThe settler saw his oaken flail\nTake bud, and bloom before his eyes;\nFrom frozen pools he saw the pale\nSweet summer lilies rise.\n\nTo their old homes, by man profaned\nCame the sad dryads, exiled long,\nAnd through their leafy tongues complained\nOf household use and wrong.\n\nThe beechen platter sprouted wild,\nThe pipkin wore its old-time green,\nThe cradle o’er the sleeping child\nBecame a leafy screen.\n\nHaply our gentle friend hath met,\nWhile wandering in her sylvan quest,\nHaunting his native woodlands yet,\nThat Druid of the West;\n\nAnd while the dew on leaf and flower\nGlistened in the moonlight clear and still,\nLearned the dusk wizard’s spell of power,\nAnd caught his trick of skill.\n\nBut welcome, be it new or old,\nThe gift which makes the day more bright,\nAnd paints, upon the ground of cold\nAnd darkness, warmth and light!\n\nWithout is neither gold nor green;\nWithin, for birds, the birch-logs sing;\nYet, summer-like, we sit between\nThe autumn and the spring.\n\nThe one, with bridal blush of rose,\nAnd sweetest breath of woodland balm,\nAnd one whose matron lips unclose\nIn smiles of saintly calm.\n\nFill soft and deep, O winter snow!\nThe sweet azalea’s oaken dells,\nAnd hide the banks where roses blow\nAnd swing the azure bells!\n\nO’erlay the amber violet’s leaves,\nThe purple aster’s brookside home,\nGuard all the flowers her pencil gives\nA live beyond their bloom.\n\nAnd she, when spring comes round again,\nBy greening slope and singing flood\nShall wander, seeking, not in vain\nHer darlings of the wood.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1855 + }, "context": { "season": "winter" }, @@ -87763,6 +87892,9 @@ "title": "“Forgiveness”", "body": "My heart was heavy, for its trust had been\nAbused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;\nSo, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,\nOne summer Sabbath day I strolled among\nThe green mounds of the village burial-place;\nWhere, pondering how all human love and hate\nFind one sad level; and how, soon or late,\nWronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face,\nAnd cold hands folded over a still heart,\nPass the green threshold of our common grave,\nWhither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,\nAwed for myself, and pitying my race,\nOur common sorrow, like a nighty wave,\nSwept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1846 + }, "context": { "season": "summer", "weekday": "sunday" @@ -87774,6 +87906,9 @@ "title": "“The Frost Spirit”", "body": "He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nYou may trace his footsteps now\nOn the naked woods and the blasted fields\nAnd the brown hill’s withered brow.\nHe has smitten the leaves of the gray old trees\nWhere their pleasant green came forth,\nAnd the winds, which follow wherever he goes,\nHave shaken them down to earth.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nFrom the frozen Labrador,\nFrom the icy bridge of the northern seas,\nWhich the white bear wanders o’er,\nWhere the fisherman’s sail is stiff with ice,\nAnd the luckless forms below\nIn the sunless cold of the lingering night\nInto marble statues grow!\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nOn the rushing Northern blast,\nAnd the dark Norwegian pines have bowed\nAs his fearful breath went past.\nWith an unscorched wing he has hurried on,\nWhere the fires of Hecla glow\nOn the darkly beautiful sky above\nAnd the ancient ice below.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nAnd the quiet lake shall feel\nThe torpid touch of his glazing breath,\nAnd ring to the skater’s heel;\nAnd the streams which danced on the broken rocks,\nOr sang to the leaning grass,\nShall bow again to their winter chain,\nAnd in mournful silence pass.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nLet us meet him as we may,\nAnd turn with the light of the parlor-fire\nHis evil power away;\nAnd gather closer the circle ’round,\nWhen the firelight dances high,\nAnd laugh at the shriek of the baffled Fiend\nAs his sounding wing goes by!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1830 + }, "context": { "month": "december" }, @@ -87794,6 +87929,9 @@ "title": "“Hampton Beach”", "body": "The sunlight glitters keen and bright,\nWhere, miles away,\nLies stretching to my dazzled sight\nA luminous belt, a misty light,\nBeyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes of sandy gray.\n\nThe tremulous shadow of the Sea!\nAgainst its ground\nOf silvery light, rock, hill, and tree,\nStill as a picture, clear and free,\nWith varying outline mark the coast for miles around.\n\nOn--on--we tread with loose-flung rein\nOur seaward way,\nThrough dark-green fields and blossoming grain,\nWhere the wild brier-rose skirts the lane,\nAnd bends above our heads the flowering locust spray.\n\nHa! like a kind hand on my brow\nComes this fresh breeze,\nCooling its dull and feverish glow,\nWhile through my being seems to flow\nThe breath of a new life, the healing of the seas!\n\nNow rest we, where this grassy mound\nHis feet hath set\nIn the great waters, which have bound\nHis granite ankles greenly round\nWith long and tangled moss, and weeds with cool spray wet.\n\nGood-by to Pain and Care! I take\nMine ease to-day\nHere where these sunny waters break,\nAnd ripples this keen breeze, I shake\nAll burdens from the heart, all weary thoughts away.\n\nI draw a freer breath, I seem\nLike all I see--\nWaves in the sun, the white-winged gleam\nOf sea-birds in the slanting beam,\nAnd far-off sails which flit before the south-wind free.\n\nSo when Time’s veil shall fall asunder,\nThe soul may know\nNo fearful change, nor sudden wonder,\nNor sink the weight of mystery under,\nBut with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.\n\nAnd all we shrink from now may seem\nNo new revealing;\nFamiliar as our childhood’s stream,\nOr pleasant memory of a dream\nThe loved and cherished Past upon the new life stealing.\n\nSerene and mild the untried light\nMay have its dawning;\nAnd, as in summer’s northern night\nThe evening and the dawn unite,\nThe sunset hues of Time blend with the soul’s new morning.\n\nI sit alone; in foam and spray\nWave after wave\nBreaks on the rocks which, stern and gray,\nShoulder the broken tide away,\nOr murmurs hoarse and strong through mossy cleft and cave.\n\nWhat heed I of the dusty land\nAnd noisy town?\nI see the mighty deep expand\nFrom its white line of glimmering sand\nTo where the blue of heaven on bluer waves shuts down!\n\nIn listless quietude of mind,\nI yield to all\nThe change of cloud and wave and wind\nAnd passive on the flood reclined,\nI wander with the waves, and with them rise and fall.\n\nBut look, thou dreamer! wave and shore\nIn shadow lie;\nThe night-wind warns me back once more\nTo where, my native hill-tops o’er,\nBends like an arch of fire the glowing sunset sky.\n\nSo then, beach, bluff, and wave, farewell!\nI bear with me\nNo token stone nor glittering shell,\nBut long and oft shall Memory tell\nOf this brief thoughtful hour of musing by the Sea.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1843 + }, "context": { "season": "summer" }, @@ -87855,6 +87993,9 @@ "title": "“A Memory”", "body": "Here, while the loom of Winter weaves\nThe shroud of flowers and fountains,\nI think of thee and summer eves\nAmong the Northern mountains.\n\nWhen thunder tolled the twilight’s close,\nAnd winds the lake were rude on,\nAnd thou wert singing, _Ca’ the Yowes_,\nThe bonny yowes of Cluden!\n\nWhen, close and closer, hushing breath,\nOur circle narrowed round thee,\nAnd smiles and tears made up the wreath\nWherewith our silence crowned thee;\n\nAnd, strangers all, we felt the ties\nOf sisters and of brothers;\nAh! whose of all those kindly eyes\nNow smile upon another’s?\n\nThe sport of Time, who still apart\nThe waifs of life is flinging;\nOh, nevermore shall heart to heart\nDraw nearer for that singing!\n\nYet when the panes are frosty-starred,\nAnd twilight’s fire is gleaming,\nI hear the songs of Scotland’s bard\nSound softly through my dreaming!\n\nA song that lends to winter snows\nThe glow of summer weather,--\nAgain I hear thee ca’ the yowes\nTo Cluden’s hills of heather.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1854 + }, "context": { "season": "winter" }, @@ -87899,6 +88040,9 @@ "title": "“The Prayer-Seeker”", "body": "Along the aisle where prayer was made,\nA woman, all in black arrayed,\nClose-veiled, between the kneeling host,\nWith gliding motion of a ghost,\nPassed to the desk, and laid thereon\nA scroll which bore these words alone,\n_Pray for me_!\n\nBack from the place of worshipping\nShe glided like a guilty thing\nThe rustle of her draperies, stirred\nBy hurrying feet, alone was heard;\nWhile, full of awe, the preacher read,\nAs out into the dark she sped:\n“_Pray for me_!”\n\nBack to the night from whence she came,\nTo unimagined grief or shame!\nAcross the threshold of that door\nNone knew the burden that she bore;\nAlone she left the written scroll,\nThe legend of a troubled soul,--\n_Pray for me_!\n\nGlide on, poor ghost of woe or sin!\nThou leav’st a common need within;\nEach bears, like thee, some nameless weight,\nSome misery inarticulate,\nSome secret sin, some shrouded dread,\nSome household sorrow all unsaid.\n_Pray for us_!\n\nPass on! The type of all thou art,\nSad witness to the common heart!\nWith face in veil and seal on lip,\nIn mute and strange companionship,\nLike thee we wander to and fro,\nDumbly imploring as we go\n_Pray for us_!\n\nAh, who shall pray, since he who pleads\nOur want perchance hath greater needs?\nYet they who make their loss the gain\nOf others shall not ask in vain,\nAnd Heaven bends low to hear the prayer\nOf love from lips of self-despair\n_Pray for us_!\n\nIn vain remorse and fear and hate\nBeat with bruised bands against a fate\nWhose walls of iron only move\nAnd open to the touch of love.\nHe only feels his burdens fall\nWho, taught by suffering, pities all.\n_Pray for us_!\n\nHe prayeth best who leaves unguessed\nThe mystery of another’s breast.\nWhy cheeks grow pale, why eyes o’erflow,\nOr heads are white, thou need’st not know.\nEnough to note by many a sign\nThat every heart hath needs like thine.\n_Pray for us_!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1870 + }, "language": "english" } }, @@ -87906,6 +88050,9 @@ "title": "“The Pumpkin”", "body": "Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,\nThe vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,\nAnd the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,\nWith broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,\nLike that which o’er Nineveh’s prophet once grew,\nWhile he waited to know that his warning was true,\nAnd longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain\nFor the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain.\n\nOn the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden\nComes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden;\nAnd the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold\nThrough orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold;\nYet with dearer delight from his home in the North,\nOn the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth,\nWhere crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines,\nAnd the sun of September melts down on his vines.\n\nAh! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,\nFrom North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest;\nWhen the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board\nThe old broken links of affection restored;\nWhen the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,\nAnd the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before;\nWhat moistens the lip and what brightens the eye,\nWhat calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?\n\nOh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,\nWhen wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!\nWhen wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,\nGlaring out through the dark with a candle within!\nWhen we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,\nOur chair a broad pumpkin,--our lantern the moon,\nTelling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam\nIn a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!\n\nThen thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better\nE’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!\nFairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,\nBrighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!\nAnd the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,\nSwells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,\nThat the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,\nAnd the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,\nAnd thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky\nGolden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1844 + }, "context": { "holiday": "thanksgiving" }, @@ -87916,6 +88063,9 @@ "title": "“The Reward”", "body": "Who, looking backward from his manhood’s prime,\nSees not the spectre of his misspent time?\nAnd, through the shade\nOf funeral cypress planted thick behind,\nHears no reproachful whisper on the wind\nFrom his loved dead?\n\nWho bears no trace of passion’s evil force?\nWho shuns thy sting, O terrible Remorse?\nWho does not cast\nOn the thronged pages of his memory’s book,\nAt times, a sad and half-reluctant look,\nRegretful of the past?\n\nAlas! the evil which we fain would shun\nWe do, and leave the wished-for good undone\nOur strength to-day\nIs but to-morrow’s weakness, prone to fall;\nPoor, blind, unprofitable servants all\nAre we alway.\n\nYet who, thus looking backward o’er his years,\nFeels not his eyelids wet with grateful tears,\nIf he hath been\nPermitted, weak and sinful as he was,\nTo cheer and aid, in some ennobling cause,\nHis fellow-men?\n\nIf he hath hidden the outcast, or let in\nA ray of sunshine to the cell of sin;\nIf he hath lent\nStrength to the weak, and, in an hour of need,\nOver the suffering, mindless of his creed\nOr home, hath bent;\n\nHe has not lived in vain, and while he gives\nThe praise to Him, in whom he moves and lives,\nWith thankful heart;\nHe gazes backward, and with hope before,\nKnowing that from his works he nevermore\nCan henceforth part.", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1848 + }, "language": "english" } }, @@ -87933,6 +88083,9 @@ "title": "“Stanzas for the Times”", "body": "Is this the land our fathers loved,\nThe freedom which they toiled to win?\nIs this the soil whereon they moved?\nAre these the graves they slumber in?\nAre we the sons by whom are borne\nThe mantles which the dead have worn?\n\nAnd shall we crouch above these graves,\nWith craven soul and fettered lip?\nYoke in with marked and branded slaves,\nAnd tremble at the driver’s whip?\nBend to the earth our pliant knees,\nAnd speak but as our masters please?\n\nShall outraged Nature cease to feel?\nShall Mercy’s tears no longer flow?\nShall ruffian threats of cord and steel,\nThe dungeon’s gloom, the assassin’s blow,\nTurn back the spirit roused to save\nThe Truth, our Country, and the slave?\n\nOf human skulls that shrine was made,\nRound which the priests of Mexico\nBefore their loathsome idol prayed;\nIs Freedom’s altar fashioned so?\nAnd must we yield to Freedom’s God,\nAs offering meet, the negro’s blood?\n\nShall tongue be mute, when deeds are wrought\nWhich well might shame extremest hell?\nShall freemem lock the indignant thought?\nShall Pity’s bosom cease to swell?\nShall Honor bleed?--shall Truth succumb?\nShall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?\n\nNo; by each spot of haunted ground,\nWhere Freedom weeps her children’s fall;\nBy Plymouth’s rock, and Bunker’s mound;\nBy Griswold’s stained and shattered wall;\nBy Warren’s ghost, by Langdon’s shade;\nBy all the memories of our dead!\n\nBy their enlarging souls, which burst\nThe bands and fetters round them set;\nBy the free Pilgrim spirit nursed\nWithin our inmost bosoms, yet,\nBy all above, around, below,\nBe ours the indignant answer,--No!\n\nNo; guided by our country’s laws,\nFor truth, and right, and suffering man,\nBe ours to strive in Freedom’s cause,\nAs Christians may, as freemen can!\nStill pouring on unwilling ears\nThat truth oppression only fears.\n\nWhat! shall we guard our neighbor still,\nWhile woman shrieks beneath his rod,\nAnd while he trampels down at will\nThe image of a common God?\nShall watch and ward be round him set,\nOf Northern nerve and bayonet?\n\nAnd shall we know and share with him\nThe danger and the growing shame?\nAnd see our Freedom’s light grow dim,\nWhich should have filled the world with flame?\nAnd, writhing, feel, where’er we turn,\nA world’s reproach around us burn?\n\nIs’t not enough that this is borne?\nAnd asks our haughty neighbor more?\nMust fetters which his slaves have worn\nClank round the Yankee farmer’s door?\nMust he be told, beside his plough,\nWhat he must speak, and when, and how?\n\nMust he be told his freedom stands\nOn Slavery’s dark foundations strong;\nOn breaking hearts and fettered hands,\nOn robbery, and crime, and wrong?\nThat all his fathers taught is vain,--\nThat Freedom’s emblem is the chain?\n\nIts life, its soul, from slavery drawn!\nFalse, foul, profane! Go, teach as well\nOf holy Truth from Falsehood born!\nOf Heaven refreshed by airs from Hell!\nOf Virtue in the arms of Vice!\nOf Demons planting Paradise!\n\nRail on, then, brethren of the South,\nYe shall not hear the truth the less;\nNo seal is on the Yankee’s mouth,\nNo fetter on the Yankee’s press!\nFrom our Green Mountains to the sea,\nOne voice shall thunder, We are free!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1844 + }, "language": "english" } }, @@ -87940,6 +88093,9 @@ "title": "“The Star of Bethlehem”", "body": "Where Time the measure of his hours\nBy changeful bud and blossom keeps,\nAnd, like a young bride crowned with flowers,\nFair Shiraz in her garden sleeps;\n\nWhere, to her poet’s turban stone,\nThe Spring her gift of flowers imparts,\nLess sweet than those his thoughts have sown\nIn the warm soil of Persian hearts:\n\nThere sat the stranger, where the shade\nOf scattered date-trees thinly lay,\nWhile in the hot clear heaven delayed\nThe long and still and weary day.\n\nStrange trees and fruits above him hung,\nStrange odors filled the sultry air,\nStrange birds upon the branches swung,\nStrange insect voices murmured there.\n\nAnd strange bright blossoms shone around,\nTurned sunward from the shadowy bowers,\nAs if the Gheber’s soul had found\nA fitting home in Iran’s flowers.\n\nWhate’er he saw, whate’er he heard,\nAwakened feelings new and sad,--\nNo Christian garb, nor Christian word,\nNor church with Sabbath-bell chimes glad,\n\nBut Moslem graves, with turban stones,\nAnd mosque-spires gleaming white, in view,\nAnd graybeard Mollahs in low tones\nChanting their Koran service through.\n\nThe flowers which smiled on either hand,\nLike tempting fiends, were such as they\nWhich once, o’er all that Eastern land,\nAs gifts on demon altars lay.\n\nAs if the burning eye of Baal\nThe servant of his Conqueror knew,\nFrom skies which knew no cloudy veil,\nThe Sun’s hot glances smote him through.\n\n“Ah me!” the lonely stranger said,\n“The hope which led my footsteps on,\nAnd light from heaven around them shed,\nO’er weary wave and waste, is gone!”\n\n“Where are the harvest fields all white,\nFor Truth to thrust her sickle in?\nWhere flock the souls, like doves in flight,\nFrom the dark hiding-place of sin?”\n\n“A silent-horror broods o’er all,--\nThe burden of a hateful spell,--\nThe very flowers around recall\nThe hoary magi’s rites of hell!”\n\n“And what am I, o’er such a land\nThe banner of the Cross to bear?\nDear Lord, uphold me with Thy hand,\nThy strength with human weakness share!”\n\nHe ceased; for at his very feet\nIn mild rebuke a floweret smiled;\nHow thrilled his sinking heart to greet\nThe Star-flower of the Virgin’s child!\n\nSown by some wandering Frank, it drew\nIts life from alien air and earth,\nAnd told to Paynim sun and dew\nThe story of the Saviour’s birth.\n\nFrom scorching beams, in kindly mood,\nThe Persian plants its beauty screened,\nAnd on its pagan sisterhood,\nIn love, the Christian floweret leaned.\n\nWith tears of joy the wanderer felt\nThe darkness of his long despair\nBefore that hallowed symbol melt,\nWhich God’s dear love had nurtured there.\n\nFrom Nature’s face, that simple flower\nThe lines of sin and sadness swept;\nAnd Magian pile and Paynim bower\nIn peace like that of Eden slept.\n\nEach Moslem tomb, and cypress old,\nLooked holy through the sunset air;\nAnd, angel-like, the Muezzin told\nFrom tower and mosque the hour of prayer.\n\nWith cheerful steps, the morrow’s dawn\nFrom Shiraz saw the stranger part;\nThe Star-flower of the Virgin-Born\nStill blooming in his hopeful heart!", "metadata": { + "time": { + "year": 1830 + }, "context": { "liturgy": "advent" }, @@ -89990,7 +90146,7 @@ }, "the-reverie-of-poor-susan": { "title": "“The Reverie of Poor Susan”", - "body": "At the corner of Wood-Street, when day-light appears,\nThere’s a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.\nPoor Susan has pass’d by the spot and has heard\nIn the silence of morning the song of the bird.\n\n’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees\nA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;\nBright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,\nAnd a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.\n\nGreen pastures she views in the midst of the dale,\nDown which she so often has tripp’d with her pail,\nAnd a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,\nThe only one dwelling on earth that she loves.\n\nShe looks, and her heart is in Heaven, but they fade,\nThe mist and the river, the hill and the shade;\nThe stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,\nAnd the colours have all pass’d away from her eyes.\n\nPoor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more\nThe house of thy Father will open its door,\nAnd thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,\nMayst hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. ", + "body": "At the corner of Wood-Street, when day-light appears,\nThere’s a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.\nPoor Susan has pass’d by the spot and has heard\nIn the silence of morning the song of the bird.\n\n’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees\nA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;\nBright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,\nAnd a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.\n\nGreen pastures she views in the midst of the dale,\nDown which she so often has tripp’d with her pail,\nAnd a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,\nThe only one dwelling on earth that she loves.\n\nShe looks, and her heart is in Heaven, but they fade,\nThe mist and the river, the hill and the shade;\nThe stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,\nAnd the colours have all pass’d away from her eyes.\n\nPoor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more\nThe house of thy Father will open its door,\nAnd thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,\nMayst hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own.", "metadata": { "time": { "year": 1797 diff --git a/poems/poem.py b/poems/poem.py index 7a6b66e..4d642c4 100644 --- a/poems/poem.py +++ b/poems/poem.py @@ -34,9 +34,9 @@ def title_by_author(self): @property def pretty_date(self): - if "date" not in self.metadata: + if "time" not in self.metadata: return "" - year, m, day = [self.metadata["date"].get(attr) for attr in ["year", "month", "day"]] + year, m, day = [self.metadata["time"].get(attr) for attr in ["year", "month", "day"]] x = "" if m: month = m.capitalize() @@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ def pretty_date(self): if year: x += f"{year}" - if "approximate" in self.metadata["date"]: + if "approximate" in self.metadata["time"]: x = f"circa {x}" return x.strip() diff --git a/poems/poems.json b/poems/poems.json deleted file mode 100644 index 1aa0c42..0000000 --- a/poems/poems.json +++ /dev/null @@ -1,91294 +0,0 @@ -{ - "anonymous": { - "metadata": { - "name": "", - "birth": null, - "death": null, - "gender": "", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "", - "language": "", - "flag": "", - "link": "", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-a-lover": { - "title": "“Advice to a Lover”", - "body": "The sea hath many thousand sands,\nThe sun hath motes as many;\nThe sky is full of stars, and Love\nAs full of woes as any:\nBelieve me, that do know the elf,\nAnd make no trial by thyself!\n\nIt is in truth a pretty toy\nFor babes to play withal:\nBut O, the honies of our youth\nAre oft our age’s gall:\nSelf-proof in time will make thee know\nHe was a prophet told thee so:\n\nA prophet that, Cassandra-like,\nTells truth without belief;\nFor headstrong Youth will run his race,\nAlthough his goal be grief:--\nLove’s Martyr, when his heat is past,\nProves Care’s Confessor at the last.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "the-creation-of-the-moon": { - "title": "“The Creation of the Moon”", - "body": "The man cut his throat and left his head there.\nThe others went to get it.\nWhen they got there they put the head in a sack.\nFarther on the head fell out onto the ground.\nThey put the head back in the sack.\nFarther on the head fell out again.\nAround the first sack they put a second one that was thicker.\nBut the head fell out just the same.\nIt should be explained that they were taking the head to show to the others.\nThey did not put the head back in the sack.\nThey left it in the middle of the road.\nThey went away.\n\nThey crossed the river.\nBut the head followed them.\nThey climbed up a tree full of fruit\nto see whether it would go past.\n\nThe head stopped at the foot of the tree\nand asked them for some fruit.\nSo the men shook the tree.\nThe head went to get the fruit.\nThen it asked for some more.\n\nSo the men shook the tree\nso that the fruit fell into the water.\nThe head said it couldn’t get the fruit from there.\nSo the men threw the fruit a long way\nto make the head go a long way to get it so they could go.\nWhile the head was getting the fruit\nthe men got down from the tree and went on.\n\nThe head came back and looked at the tree\nand didn’t see anybody\nso went on rolling down the road.\n\nThe men had stopped to wait\nto see whether the head would follow them.\nThey saw the head come rolling.\n\nThey ran.\nThey got to their hut they told the others that the head\nwas rolling after them and to shut the door.\n\nAll the huts were closed tight.\nWhen it got there the head commanded them to open the doors.\nThe owners would not open them because they were afraid.\n\nSo the head started to think what it would turn into.\nIf it turned into water they would drink it.\nIf it turned into earth they would walk on it.\nIf it turned into a house they would live in it.\nIf it turned into a steer they would kill it and eat it.\nIf it turned into a cow they would milk it.\nIf it turned into a bean they would cook it.\nIf it turned into the sun\nWhen men were cold it would heat them.\nIf it turned into rain the grass would grow and the animals would crop it.\n\nSo it thought, and it said, “I will turn into the moon.”\nIt called, “Open the doors, I want to get my things.”\nThey would not open them.\n\nThe head cried. It called out, “At least give me\nmy two balls of twine.”\nThey threw out the two balls of twine through a hole.\nIt took them and threw them into the sky.\n\nIt asked them to throw it a little stick too\nto roll the thread around so it could climb up.\n\nThen it said, “I can climb, I am going to the sky.”\nIt started to climb.\n\nThe men opened the doors right away.\nThe head went on climbing.\nThe men shouted, “You going to the sky, head?”\nIt didn’t answer.\n\nAs soon as it got to the Sun\nit turned into the Moon.\nToward evening the Moon was white, it was beautiful.\nAnd the men were surprised\nto see that the head had turned into the Moon.", - "metadata": { - "translator": "W. S. Merwin" - } - }, - "eadwacer": { - "title": "“Eadwacer”", - "body": "To my people it’s as though he gave them a sacrifice:\nThey will destroy him if he comes among them.\nIt is otherwise with us.\n\nWulf is on one island, I on another.\nA fastness is that island, rung round with fens.\nFierce men are there on the island.\nThey will destroy him if he comes among them.\nIt is otherwise with us.\n\nI thought of my Wulf’s far wanderings\nwhen it was rainy weather and I sat weeping\nwhen the war-chief caught me in his arms--\nit was joy then, yet it was also hateful.\n\nWulf, my Wulf! Waiting for you\nhas made me ill, your seldom coming,\nthis sorrowing mood--not lack of meat.\n\nDo you hear, Eadwacer? Our poor whelp\na wolf bears off to the wood.\n\nHow easy for man to break what never was bound--\nour song together.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "funeral-ikos": { - "title": "“Funeral Ikos”", - "body": "_From the Orthodox service for the burial of priests._\n\nThou only art immortal, who hast created and fashioned man. For out of the earth were we mortals made, and unto the earth shall we return again, as thou didst command when thou madest me, saying unto me: For earth thou art, and unto the earth shalt thou return. Whither, also, we mortals wend our way, making of our funeral dirge the song: Alleluia.\n\nIn thought I implore ye, hearken unto me: For with difficulty do I announce these things. For your sakes have I made moan; perchance it may profit one of you. But when ye shall sing these things make mention, now and then, of me whom ye have known. For often have we walked together, and together in the house of God have sung: Alleluia.\n\nRise now, all ye, and make ready, and when ye are set, hearken ye unto the word. Terrible, my brethren, is the judgment Seat before which all we must appear. There is neither bondman nor freeman there; there is neither small nor great; but we shall all stand naked there. Wherefore, it is good to sing together the psalm: Alleluia.\n\nLet us all be consumed with tears, when we behold the earthly remains lying low; and when we shall all draw near to kiss, and peradventure to utter such things as these: Lo l thou hast abandoned us who love thee. Why speakest thou no more with us, o friend? Why speakest thou not, as thou wert wont to speak, but holdest thus thy peace who before with us didst say: Alleluia.\n\nWhy these bitter words of the dying, O brethren, which they utter as they go hence? I am banished, brethren. All my friends do I abandon, and go hence. But whither I go, that understand I not, neither what shall become of me yonder; but only God, who hath summoned me knoweth. But make commemoration of me with the song: Alleluia.\n\nBut whither now go the souls? How dwell they now together there? This mystery have I desired to learn, but none can impart aright. Do they call to mind their own people, as we do them? Or have they already forgotten those who mourn them and make the song: Alleluia?\n\nAccompany ye the dead, o friends, and come ye to the grave with heed, and there gaze ye steadfastly, with understanding; and make ready your feet. All youth is fallen to dissolution there; there all the flower of life is faded; there are dust, and ashes, and worms; there all is silent; and there no man saith: Alleluia.\n\nLo! now behold we him who lieth here, but ne’er shall lie before us more. Lo! already is his tongue stilled, and lo! his mouth hath ceased to speak. Fare ye well, o my friends, my children. Fare ye well, o brethren! Fare ye well, o my comrades; for I go forth upon my way. But make commemoration of me with the song: Alleluia.\n\nNone of the dwellers yonder have returned to life to tell us howthere they fare, our erstwhile brethren and our offspring gone before us to the Lord. Wherefore, again and oft we say: Shall we see each other there? Shall we see our brethren there? Shall we there again together say the psalm: Alleluia?\n\nWe go forth on the path eternal, and as condemned, with downcast faces, present ourselves before the only God. Where then is comeliness? Where then is wealth? Where then is the glory of this world? There shall none of these things aid us, but only to say oft the psalm: Alleluia.\n\nWhy dost thou untimely vex thyself, O man! Yet one hour, and all things shall pass away. For in Hell there is no repentance, nor further remission there. There is the worm that sleepeth not; there is the land, all dark and gloomy, where I must be judged. For I made not haste to say the psalm: Alleluia.\n\nNaught is so easily forgot as mortal from his brother mortal parted. If for a brief space we call to mind, yet straightway forget we Death, as we had not ourselves to die. Parents, also, are utterly forgotten of their children, whom from their own bodies they have borne and reared; and they have dropped tears with the song: Alleluia.\n\nI remind ye, O my brethren, my children, and my friends: Forget me not, when unto the Lord ye pray. I entreat, I beseech, I implore, that ye learn by heart this thing, and mourn for me night and day. As said job unto his friends, so sayI also unto you: Sit ye again and say: Alleluia.\n\nLeaving all things behind us, forth we go, and naked and grieving must present ourselves to God. For like the grass doth beauty fade, and man is but allured therewith. Naked wast thou born, O wretched one, and naked there must every man appear. Dream not, O mortal, of sweetness in this life, but only groan ever with the moan: Alleluia.\n\nIf thou hast shown mercy unto man, O man, that same mercy shall be shown thee there; and if on an orphan thou hast shown compassion, the same shall there deliver thee from want. If in this life the naked thou hast clothed, the same shall give thee shelter there, and sing the psalm: Alleluia.\n\nToilsome the way in which I must go hence, the which, in truth, I never yet have trod; and unknown is that land, and thereof knoweth no one anywhere. Awesome is it to behold my guides; most terrible he who hath called me. the Ruler of life and death, who also calleth us, when he willeth, thither: Alleluia.\n\nIf journeying from a homeland we stand in need of guides, what shall we do when forth we fare to a land to us still all unknown? Many leaders wilt thou then require, many prayers to accompany thee, to save the wretched sinner’s soul; until thou come to Christ and say to him: Alleluia.\n\nThey who are in thrall to the material passions shall find no pardon whatsoever there. For there are the dread accusers; there, also, the books are opened. Where, then, around about thee wilt thou gaze, O man? And who then shall succour thee? Unless thou hast led an upright life, and hast done good to the needy, singing: Alleluia.\n\nYouth and the beauty of the body fade at the hour of death, and the tongue then burneth fiercely, and the parched throat is inflamed. The beauty of the eyes is quenched then, the comeliness of the face all altered, the shapeliness of the neck destroyed; and the other parts have become numb, nor often say: Alleluia.\n\nHush, then; be dumb. Henceforward keep ye silence before him who lieth there, and gaze upon the mighty mystery; for terrible is this hour. Be silent, that the soul may issue forth in peace. For it to a great ordeal is constrained, and in fear doth oft petition make to God: Alleluia.\n\nI have beheld a dying child, and I have mourned my life. He was all agitated, and trembled greatly when the hour was come, and cried, O father, help me! O mother, save me! And no one then could succour him, but only pined away as they gazed on him, and wept for him in the grave: Alleluia.\n\nHow many suddenly are snatched even from the plighting of their troth, and united by a bond eternal; and without avail have made their moan unending, and have not risen from that bridal chamber! But there was both marriage and the grave, both union and disunion, both laughter and weeping, and the psalm: Alleluia.\n\nWith ecstasy are we inflamed if we but hear that there is light eternal yonder; that there is the fountain of our life, and there delight eternal; that there is Paradise, wherein every soul of Righteous Ones rejoiceth. Let us all, also, enter into Christ, that all we may cry aloud thus unto God: Alleluia.", - "metadata": { - "translator": "Isabel Hapgood" - } - }, - "i-syng-of-a-maiden": { - "title": "“I syng of a maiden”", - "body": "I sing of a maiden\nThat is matchless,\nKing of all kings\nFor her son she chose.\n\nHe came as still\nWhere his mother was\nAs dew in April\nThat falls on the grass.\n\nHe came as still\nTo his mother’s bower\nAs dew in April\nThat falls on the flower.\n\nHe came as still\nWhere his mother lay\nAs dew in April\nThat falls on the spray.\n\nMother and maiden\nThere was never, ever one but she;\nWell may such a lady\nGod’s mother be.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "the-unquiet-grave": { - "title": "“The Unquiet Grave”", - "body": "“The wind doth blow today, my love,\nAnd a few small drops of rain;\nI never had but one true-love;\nIn cold grave she was lain.”\n\n“I’ll do as much for my true-love\nAs any young man may;\nI’ll sit and mourn all at her grave\nFor a twelvemonth and a day.”\n\nThe twelvemonth and a day being up,\nThe dead began to speak:\n“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,\nAnd will not let me sleep?”--\n\n“’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,\nAnd will not let you sleep;\nFor I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,\nAnd that is all I seek.”--\n\n“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;\nBut my breath smells earthy strong;\nIf you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,\nYour time will not be long.”\n\n“’Tis down in yonder garden green,\nLove, where we used to walk,\nThe finest flower that ere was seen\nIs wither’d to a stalk.”\n\n“The stalk is wither’d dry, my love,\nSo will our hearts decay;\nSo make yourself content, my love,\nTill God calls you away.”", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "scripture": { - "metadata": { - "name": "", - "birth": null, - "death": null, - "gender": "", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "", - "language": "", - "flag": "", - "link": "", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "anonymous" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "ecclesiastes-31-8": { - "title": "Ecclesiastes 3:1-8", - "body": "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:\na time to be born, and a time to die;\na time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;\na time to kill, and a time to heal;\na time to break down, and a time to build up;\na time to weep, and a time to laugh;\na time to mourn, and a time to dance;\na time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;\na time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;\na time to seek, and a time to lose;\na time to keep, and a time to throw away;\na time to tear, and a time to sew;\na time to keep silence, and a time to speak;\na time to love, and a time to hate;\na time for war, and a time for peace.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "isaiah-586-9": { - "title": "“Isaiah 58:6-9”", - "body": "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:\nto loose the chains of injustice\n and untie the cords of the yoke,\nto set the oppressed free\n and break every yoke?\nIs it not to share your food with the hungry\n and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter--\nwhen you see the naked, to clothe him,\n and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?\nThen your light will break forth like the dawn,\n and your healing will quickly appear;\nthen your righteousness will go before you,\n and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.\nThen you will call, and the Lord will answer;\n you will cry for help, and he will say: Here I am.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "parce-mihi-domine": { - "title": "“Parce mihi, Domine …”", - "body": "_Job 7:16-21_\n\nSpare me, Lord,\nfor my days are nothing.\nWhat is man, that you make much of him?\nor set your heart against him?\nYou take a look at him at dawn,\nAnd at once you test him.\nHow long do you neither spare me\nnor send me away\nto swallow my spittle?\n\nI have sinned;\nwhat do I do to you, O keeper of mankind?\nWhy have you set me against you,\nand made me a burden to yourself?\nWhy do you not pardon my sin,\nand why not take away my iniquity?\nBehold now, I shall sleep in the dust;\nand if in the morning you seek me,\nI shall not be.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "song-of-songs-book-1": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 1”", - "body": "_The song of songs, which is Solomon’s._\n\nLet him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.\nBecause of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.\nDraw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.\nI am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.\nLook not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.\nTell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?\nIf thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents.\nI have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.\nThy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.\nWe will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.\nWhile the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.\nA bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.\nMy beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi.\nBehold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.\nBehold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.\nThe beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-2": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 2”", - "body": "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.\nAs the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.\nAs the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.\nHe brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.\nStay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.\nHis left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.\nI charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.\nThe voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.\nMy beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.\nMy beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.\nFor, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;\nThe flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;\nThe fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.\nO my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.\nTake us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.\nMy beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.\nUntil the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-3": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 3”", - "body": "By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.\nI will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.\nThe watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?\nIt was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.\nI charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.\nWho is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?\nBehold his bed, which is Solomon’s; threescore valiant men are about it, of the valiant of Israel.\nThey all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.\nKing Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon.\nHe made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with love, for the daughters of Jerusalem.\nGo forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-4": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 4”", - "body": "Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.\nThy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.\nThy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.\nThy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.\nThy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.\nUntil the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.\nThou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.\nCome with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards.\nThou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.\nHow fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!\nThy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.\nA garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.\nThy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,\nSpikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:\nA fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.\nAwake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-5": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 5”", - "body": "I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.\nI sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.\nI have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?\nMy beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.\nI rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.\nI opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.\nThe watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.\nI charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.\nWhat is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou dost so charge us?\nMy beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.\nHis head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven.\nHis eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.\nHis cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.\nHis hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.\nHis legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.\nHis mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-6": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 6”", - "body": "Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.\nMy beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.\nI am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.\nThou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.\nTurn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.\nThy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them.\nAs a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks.\nThere are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number.\nMy dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.\nWho is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?\nI went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded.\nOr ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib.\nReturn, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-7": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 7”", - "body": "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.\nThy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.\nThy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.\nThy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.\nThine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.\nHow fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!\nThis thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.\nI said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples;\nAnd the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.\nI am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.\nCome, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.\nLet us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.\nThe mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "song-of-songs-book-8": { - "title": "“Song of Songs, Book 8”", - "body": "O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother! when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.\nI would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house, who would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.\nHis left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should embrace me.\nI charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, until he please.\nWho is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.\nSet me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.\nMany waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.\nWe have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?\nIf she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.\nI am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes as one that found favour.\nSolomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon; he let out the vineyard unto keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand pieces of silver.\nMy vineyard, which is mine, is before me: thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.\nThou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy voice: cause me to hear it.\nMake haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices.", - "metadata": { - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - } - } - }, - "georgy-adamovich": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Georgy Adamovich", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Adamovich", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "dawn-and-rain": { - "title": "“Dawn and rain …”", - "body": "Dawn and rain. A dense fog in the park,\nAnd in the window--an unneeded candle,\nAn open and forgotten trunk,\nHer shoulders that barely tremble.\n\nNo word about us, no word about the past.\nIt’s such a trifle--what happened at the end!\nWhen solitude for two--it is so sad …\n--The sun, with a slanting ray, at last,\nTurned into gold the silver tress.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elena Dubrovina", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "for-the-word-you-remembered-once": { - "title": "“For the word you remembered once …”", - "body": "For the word you remembered once\nAnd then forgot forever,\nFor all that in the burning sunset\nYou looked for and you never found,\n\nAnd for despair of your dreams,\nAnd for the cold that grew inside your chest,\nAnd for a slow-growing death\nWithout any hope of moving on,\n\nAnd for the “rescue,” dressed in white,\nAnd for the somber name of love\nAll sins will be forgiven,\nAnd all your crimes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elena Dubrovina", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "life-what-do-i-need-from-you": { - "title": "“Life! What do I need from you …”", - "body": "Life! What do I need from you--I do not know.\nMy grief cooled down, a lot of infancy.\nBut longing, as much as I’m longing now,\nThe merciful God will not allow.\n\nAnd if somewhere he exists and breathes,\nThe one, who finally was brought to me by fate,\nWhy doesn’t he come to me and doesn’t hear\nThe voice of mine that didn’t fade as yet?\n\nAnd only my eyes, dark, misty, big,\nThe two enormous and mournful wings\nThrew shadows from the Caucasian hills\nOn life of mine and on my all ordeals.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elena Dubrovina", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "o-you-my-life-enough-of-fuss": { - "title": "“O, you, my life, enough of fuss …”", - "body": "O, you, my life, enough of fuss,\nEnough complaints,--it’s all just void.\nAnd peace descends into the world--\nYou, too, search for your rest.\n\nI want the heavy snow to fall,\nThe sky, transparent blue, to stretch,\nAnd that I could forever sense\nIce in my heart and on the trees--some frost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elena Dubrovina", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "speak-to-no-one": { - "title": "“Speak to no one …”", - "body": "Speak to no one. Do not drink wine.\nLeave home behind. Leave brother, wife.\nFrom people depart. Your soul must come\nTo feel--the past is forever gone.\n\nWhat’s past one must unlove. Then time\nWill come to lose love for the wild,\nIndifferent ever more: the day after,\nFrom week to week, year in and year out.\n\nAnd gradually your hopes expire.\nDarkness swallows all. A new life\nYou will find then, clear and reborn:\nThe wooden cross, the crown of thorns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "thank-you-for-everything": { - "title": "“Thank you for everything …”", - "body": "Thank you for everything. For the war,\nFor the revolution and exile.\nFor the indifferent bright country\nWhere we now “drag out our existence”.\nThere is no sweeter destiny than to lose everything.\nThere is no happier fate than to become a vagabond.\nAnd you’ve never been closer to heaven\nThan here, tired of boredom\nTired of breathing,\n Without strength, without money,\n Without love,\n In Paris …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maria Rubins", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-agee": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Agee", - "birth": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Agee", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "description-of-elysium": { - "title": "“Description of Elysium”", - "body": "_There: far, friends our dear dominion:_\n\nWhole health resides with peace,\nGladness and never harm,\nThere not time turning,\nNor fear of flower of snow\n\nWhere marbling water slides\nNo charm may halt of chill,\nAir aisling the open acres,\nAnd all the gracious trees\n\nSpout up their standing fountains\nOf wind-beloved green\nAnd the blue conclaved mountains\nAre grave guards\n\nStone and springing field\nWide one tenderness,\nThe unalterable hour\nSmiles deathlessness:\n\nNo thing is there thinks:\nMind the witherer\nWithers on the outward air:\nWe can not come there.\n\nSure on this shining night\nOf starmade shadows round,\nKindness must watch for me\nThis side the ground.\n\nThe late year lies down the north.\nAll is healed, all is health.\nHigh summer holds the earth.\nHearts all whole.\n\nSure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone\nOf shadows on the stars.\n\nNow thorn bone bare\nSilenced with iron the branch’s gullet:\nRattling merely on the air\nOf hornleaved holly:\n\nThe stony mark where sand was by\nThe water of a nailed foot:\nThe berry harder than the beak:\nThe hole beneath the dead oak root:\n\nAll now brought quiet\nThrough the latest throe\nQuieted and ready and quiet:\nStill not snow:\n\nStill thorn bone hare\nIron in the silenced gully\nRattling only of the air\nThrough hornleaved holly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-happy-hen": { - "title": "“The Happy Hen”", - "body": "_(To Dr. Marie Stopes et al., and to all scientific lovers)_\n\nHis hottest love and most delight\nThe rooster knows for speed of fear\nAnd winds her down and treads her right\nAnd leaves her stuffed with dazzled cheer,\n\nRumpled allwhichways in her lint,\nWho swears, shrugs, redeems her face,\nAnd serves to mind us how a sprint\nHeads swiftliest for the state of grace.\n\nI loitered weeping with my bride for gladness\nHer walking side against and both embracing\nThrough the brash brightening rain that now the season changes\nWhite on the fallen air that now my fallen the fallen girl her grave effaces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "knoxville-summer-of-1915": { - "title": "“Knoxville, Summer of 1915”", - "body": "It has become that time of evening\nWhen people sit on their porches\nRocking gently and talking gently\nAnd watching the street\nAnd the standing up into their sphere\nOf possession of the trees,\nOf birds’ hung havens, hangars.\nPeople go by; things go by.\nA horse, drawing a buggy,\nBreaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt:\nA loud auto: a quiet auto:\nPeople in pairs, not in a hurry,\nScuffling, switching their weight of aestival body,\nTalking casually,\nThe taste hovering over them of vanilla,\nStrawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk,\nThe image upon them of lovers and horsement,\nSquared with clowns in hueless amber.\n\nA streetcar raising into iron moan;\nStopping;\nBelling and starting; stertorous;\nRousing and raising again\nIts iron increasing moan\nAnd swimming its gold windows and straw seats\nOn past and past and past\nThe bleak spark crackling and cursing above it\nLike a small malignant spirit\nSet to dog its tracks;\nThe iron whine rises on rising speed;\nStill risen, faints; halts;\nThe faint stinging bell;\nRises again, still fainter;\nFainting, lifting lifts,\nFaints foregone;\nForgotten.\nNow is the night one blue dew;\nMy father has drained,\nHe has coiled the hose.\nLow on the length of lawns,\nA frailing of fire who breathes.\nParents on porches:\nRock and rock.\nFrom damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.\nThe dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air\nAt once enchants my eardrums.\nOn the rough wet grass\nOf the backyard\nMy father and mother have spread quilts\nWe all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt,\nAnd I too am lying there.\nThey are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,\nOf nothing in particular,\nOf nothing at all.\nThe stars are wide and alive,\nThey all seem like a smile\nOf great sweetness,\nAnd they seem very near.\nAll my people are larger bodies than mine,\nWith voices gentle and meaningless\nLike the voices of sleeping birds.\nOne is an artist, he is living at home.\nOne is a musician, she is living at home.\nOne is my mother who is good to me.\nOne is my father who is good to me.\nBy some chance, here they are,\nAll on this earth;\nAnd who shall ever tell the sorrow\nOf being on this earth, lying, on quilts,\nOn the grass,\nIn a summer evening,\nAmong the sounds of the night.\nMay God bless my people,\nMy uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,\nOh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;\nAnd in the hour of their taking away.\nAfter a little\nI am taken in\nAnd put to bed.\nSleep, soft smiling,\nDraws me unto her;\nAnd those receive me,\nWho quietly treat me,\nAs one familiar and well-beloved in that home:\nBut will not, oh, will not,\nNot now, not ever;\nBut will not ever tell me who I am.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-the-word-asleep": { - "title": "“On the Word Asleep”", - "body": "Asleep, perfected, you would never believe\nHarm of a one of them. That stirring hand,\nThat leg, might clasp, endear, be brought across\nAn enemy, as gently as a wife.\nHow God must grieve,\nWatching in all this shadow land\nThe flinching vigil candles of this countless loss\nIn night’s nave each a life:\nWho groans, smiles, murmurs, quiets; then on the horn\nTranspierced, assembles upward, and reborn,\nBy all that skill and bravery crowns him with\nWorks, while he wakes, to put himself to death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "on-the-word-kingdom": { - "title": "“On the Word Kingdom”", - "body": "In that kingdom no one cries.\nNo one doubts, for no one lies.\nNo son ever dreads his mother,\nNor no brother envies brother.\n\nFamilies, there like nearby trees\nSpring and shelter, and the bees\nGroan among the cloudy flowers;\nAngels, each a soul devours.\n\nThere continually the smile\nOf the heart that knows no guile.\nThere, untroubled, people greet,\nDeath like an old friend in the street.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "our-doom-is-in-our-being": { - "title": "“Our Doom is in Our Being”", - "body": "Our doom is in our being. We began\nIn hunger eager more than ache of hell:\nAnd in that hunger became each a man\nRavened with hunger death alone may spell:\nAnd in that hunger live, as lived the dead,\nWho sought, as now we seek, in the same ways,\nNobly, and hatefully, what angel’s-bread\nMight ever stand us out those short few days.\nSo is the race in this wild hour confounded:\nAnd though you rectify the big distress,\nAnd kill all outward wrong where wrong abounded,\nYour hunger cannot make this hunger less\nWhich breeds all wrath and right, and shall not die\nIn earth, and finds some hope upon the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "outskirts-of-knoxville-tennessee": { - "title": "“Outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee”", - "body": "There, in the earliest and chary spring, the dogwood flowers.\n\nUnharnessed in the friendly Sunday air\nBy the red brambles, on the river bluffs,\nClerks and their choices pair.\n\nThrive by, not near, masked all away by shrub and juniper,\nThe Ford V8, racing the Chevrolet.\n\nThey can not trouble her:\n\nHer breasts, helped open from the afforded lace,\nlie like a peaceful lake;\nAnd on his mouth she breaks her gentleness:\n\nOh, wave them awake!\n\nThey are not of the birds. Such innocence\nBrings us whole to break us only:\nTheirs are not happy words.\n\nWe that are human cannot hope.\nOur tenderest joys oblige us most.\nNo chain so cuts the bone; and sweetest silk most\nshrewdly strangles.\n\nHow this must end, that now please love were ended,\nIn kitchens, bedfights, silences, women’s-pages,\nSickness of heart before goldlettered doors,\nStale flesh, hard collars, agony in antiseptic corridors,\nSpankings, remonstrances, fishing trips, orange juice,\nPolicies, incapacities, a chevrolet,\nScorn of their children, kind contempt exchanged,\nRecalls, tears, second honeymoons, pity,\nShouted corrections of missed syllables,\nHot water bags, gallstones, falls down stairs,\nStammerings, soft foods, confusion of personalities,\nOldfashioned christmases, suspicions of theft,\nArrangements with morticians taken care of by sons in law,\nSmall rooms beneath the gables of brick bungalows,\nThe tumbler smashed, the glance between daughter and husband,\nThe empty body in the lonely bed\nAnd, in the empty concrete porch, blown ash\nGrandchildren wandering the betraying sun\n\nNow, on the winsome crumbling shelves of the horror\nGod show, God blind these children!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-parable-of-doors": { - "title": "“A Parable of Doors”", - "body": "All things of life I term as many doors:\nEntrance to each or all, that man may win\nWho neither questions, nor no more implores\nBut that with mindless ease he be let in.\n\nSuch men are myriad and the door swings wide\nAnd smoothly they swarm through, who care not why,\nInitiate to those mysteries most denied\nThose who most seek them: such a man am I.\n\nI would expound those truths unalterably\nFlayed to strict harmonies no mind has sung.\nMindful that truths are founded axially,\nBy too much mind all hinges I have sprung:\n\nFor it was thus: I lunged the brutal mind\nShoulder to hinge post, since the truth stood there;\nWhich neither yielded nor have I repined,\nBut lunge and batter and am in despair.\n\nI cramped all gates of love forever shut,\nAll beauty is for ever wrecked for me,\nAnd God all spiked with brain, and here is but\nOne door, whose certitude the others flee.\n\nThat door is death: and though my chief assault\nAnd shrewdest labor I’ve assemble there,\nDark hinges no conjecture may default\nSoon shall devolve me on a doorless air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "permit-me-voyage": { - "title": "“Permit Me Voyage”", - "body": "Take these who will as may be: I\nAm careless now of what they fail:\nMy heart and mind discharted lie\nAnd surely as the nerved nail\n\nAppoints all quarters on the north\nSo now it designates him forth\nMy sovereign God my princely soul\nWhereon my flesh is priestly stole:\n\nWhence forth shall my heart and mind\nTo God through soul entirely bow,\nTherein such strong increase to find\nIn truth as is my fate to know:\n\nSmall though that be great God I know\nI know in this gigantic day\nWhat God is ruined and I know\nHow labors with Godhead this day:\n\nHow from the porches of our sky\nThe crested glory is declined:\nAnd hear with what translated cry\nThe stridden soul is overshined:\n\nAnd how this world of wildness through\nTrue poets shall walk who herald you:\nOf whom God grant me of your grace\nTo be, that shall preserve this race.\n\nPermit me voyage, Love, into your hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "the-rendezvous": { - "title": "“The Rendezvous”", - "body": "The horn of resurrection\nGlobes world and skull with jubilance of sound:\nPerfect, my soul and flesh\nResolve from living sky and deathly ground.\n\nAh, true to our appointment\nYou join me, that together we may rise\nTo love’s eternity …\nBut tell me: what has saddened, so, your eyes?\n\n“Only that you, who loved me\nHave waited long in vain new love to share:\nBefore the blazing God\nThat cloudy love has burned to clearest air.”\n\n“Be sad no more; forget me\nAs now I can you: lost in God your soul:\nMe, love’s thin fever\nCould not beguile from death’s white ruinous coal!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "season-of-change": { - "title": "“Season of Change”", - "body": "Season of change the sun for distaff bearing\nIn your right hand and in the left large rains\nAnd writhen winds and noiselessly forth faring\nThe earth abroad, and streaming wide your skeins,\nWhen in unfathomed fairness you have clothed\nThe sea with quiet, the land with painless wealth,\nTurn you to those who changelessly have loathed\nAll and their kind, and grant them peace and health:\nThe proud stone-parting ardor of the tree,\nThe glee of ice relaxed against new earth,\nJoy of the lamb and lust of bloom-struck bee\nGrant to the sick, stiff, spiteful, like fresh birth.\nLet this new time no natural wheel derange:\nBe ever changeless, thus: season of change.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "so-it-begins": { - "title": "“So It Begins”", - "body": "So it begins. Adam is in his earth.\nTempted, and fallen, and his doom made sure\nOh, in the very instant of his birth:\nWhose deathly nature must all things endure.\nThe hungers of his flesh, and mind, and heart,\nThat governed him when he was in the womb,\nThose ravenings multiply in every part:\nAnd shall release him only to the tomb.\nMeantime he works the earth, and builds up nations,\nAnd trades, and wars, and learns, and worships chance,\nAnd looks to God, and weaves the generations\nWhich shall his many hungerings advance\nWhen he is sunken dead among the sins.\nAdam is in the earth. So it begins.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "a-song": { - "title": "“A Song”", - "body": "I had a little child was born in the month of May.\nHe croaked and he crowed from early in the day.\nHe sang like a bird and he delighted to play\nAnd before the night time he was gone away.\n\nLittle child, take no fright,\nIn that shadow where you are\nThe toothless glowworm grants you light.\nSure your mother’s not afar.\n\nBrave, brave, little boy,\nAngels wave you round with joy.\nSoon through the dark she runs to you,\nSoon, soon your mother comforts you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "I have been fashioned on a chain of flesh\nWhose ancient lengths are immolate to dust:\nFrail though that dust be as the dew’s mesh\nThe morning mars, it holds me to a trust:\nMy flesh that was, long as this flesh knew life,\nStrove, and was valiant, still strove, and was naught:\nNow it is mine to wage their valiant strife\nAnd failing seek still what they ever sought.\nI have been given wings they never wore.\nI have been given hope they never knew.\nAnd they were brave, who can be brave no more.\nAnd they that live are kind as they are few.\n’Tis mine to touch with deathlessness their clay:\nAnd I shall fail, and join those I betray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "strengthless-they-stand": { - "title": "“Strengthless They Stand”", - "body": "Strengthless they stand assembled in the shadow,\nBlind to all strife and all to sorrow blind\nWho reared the tower, who scored the April meadow:\nSheltered, they overshade my strengthless mind.\nThose hands that gave their kind ungentle power\nTo summer’s travail, autumn did not spare:\nThat mind which knew the clear, the intact hour,\nNow is disparted on a changeful air.\n\nThe hands that ached to help are pithless bone\n(Mind, mind, the harsh pain and the unalloyed:\nWhat fruit you bear, that must you bear alone!)\nThe broken helmet nods around its void:\nSo I disclothe me of this shadow’s blight;\nAnd stand the axis of swift noon, sure night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "summer-evening": { - "title": "“Summer Evening”", - "body": "Bandstands every Tuesday evening\nBring us to the drawling square:\nBraid, glad horn, blunt drum, commend us\nEach another, shed of care.\n\nLocusts with enthusiasm\nCelebrate the spended day:\nIn the dappling shadowed porchswing\nLove finds out the usual way.\n\nChildren are composed this season.\nThere is hope among us yet.\nHope can cut the roots of reason:\nAnd the sorrowful man forget.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "tuesday" - } - } - }, - "sun-our-father": { - "title": "“Sun Our Father”", - "body": "Sun our father while I slept\nYou lifted like a field of corn\nThe smiling and the peaceful strength\nOf those that are the race new born:\n\nThe infant future waked in you\nOnce more, and the world’s rich breast\nDrank the day’s courage and lay down\nIn fearless and refreshing rest:\n\nAnd while the russian field you raised\nDreams in the starflung shadow’s keep\nYou wake these backward lands to work:\nGood work to do before we sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sure-on-this-shining-night": { - "title": "“Sure on This Shining Night”", - "body": "Sure on this shining night\nOf star made shadows round,\nKindness must watch for me\nThis side the ground.\nThe late year lies down the north.\nAll is healed, all is health.\nHigh summer holds the earth.\nHearts all whole.\nSure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand’ring far alone\nOf shadows on the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-wide-earths-orchard": { - "title": "“The Wide Earth’s Orchard”", - "body": "The wide earth’s orchard of your time of knowing,\nShine of the springtime pleasures into bloom\nAnd branched throes of health: but soon the snowing\nAnd tender foretaste of your afterdoom,\nOf fallen blossoming air persuades the air\nIn hardier practices: and soon dilate\nFruits and the air together that shall bear\nEarthward the heavied boughs and to their fate:\nWrung of the wealth and wonder they unfurled\nBy that same air: which air the sun deranges\nTo slope the living season from the world\nAnd charge the world with snow that all estranges.\nWatch well this sun, and air, and orchard green:\nNone stay these changes every man has seen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "conrad-aiken": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Conrad Aiken", - "birth": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Aiken", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 37 - }, - "poems": { - "all-lovely-things": { - "title": "“All Lovely Things”", - "body": "All lovely things will have an ending,\nAll lovely things will fade and die,\nAnd youth, that’s now so bravely spending,\nWill beg a penny by and by.\n\nFine ladies soon are all forgotten,\nAnd goldenrod is dust when dead,\nThe sweetest flesh and flowers are rotten\nAnd cobwebs tent the brightest head.\n\nCome back, true love! Sweet youth, return!--\nBut time goes on, and will, unheeding,\nThough hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,\nAnd the wild days set true hearts bleeding.\n\nCome back, true love! Sweet youth, remain!--\nBut goldenrod and daisies wither,\nAnd over them blows autumn rain,\nThey pass, they pass, and know not whither.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "annihilation": { - "title": "“Annihilation”", - "body": "While the blue noon above us arches,\nAnd the poplar sheds disconsolate leaves,\nTell me again why love bewitches,\nAnd what love gives.\n\nIt is the trembling finger that traces\nThe eyebrow’s curve, the curve of the cheek?\nThe mouth that quivers, when the hand caresses,\nBut cannot speak?\n\nNo, not these, not in these is hidden\nThe secret, more than in other things:\nNot only the touch of a hand can gladden\nTill the blood sings.\n\nIt is the leaf that falls between us,\nThe bells that murmur, the shadows that move,\nThe autumnal sunlight that fades upon us:\nThese things are love.\n\nIt is the ‘No, let us sit here longer,’\nThe ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ the ‘Once I knew--’\nThese trifles, said as I touch your finger,\nAnd the clock strikes two.\n\nThe world is intricate, and we are nothing.\nIt is the complex world of grass,\nA twig on the path, a look of loathing,\nFeelings that pass--\n\nThese are the secret! And I could hate you,\nWhen, as I lean for another kiss,\nI see in your eyes that I do not meet you,\nAnd that love is this.\n\nRock meeting rock can know love better\nThan eyes that stare or lips that touch.\nAll that we know in love is bitter,\nAnd it is not much.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "ballad": { - "title": "“Ballad”", - "body": "Into the wood the old king went\nAnd greeted an ash and touched an oak.\nOut of his sore soul’s discontent\nHe sighed and spoke:\n\n“Children I had, and they are dead.\nA wife I had, and she is lost.\nWhat do you do, good trees,” he said,\n“At the hour of frost?”\n\nThe oak-trees soughed, the ash-tree sighed,\nBut never a word they gave that king.\nThe crow in the ash-tree cawed and cried,\nBut did not sing.\n\nThe old king shut his two eyes fast,\nAnd leant his forehead against the tree,\nAnd thought of all the dead leaves past--\nA marvellous company.\n\nThey came, they came, like waves of the sea,\nThese ghosts of leaves came round that king.\nThey hushed, they whispered, ceaselessly;\nAnd he heard them sing:\n\n_Children and bright-eyed wives we were,\nBut Time forgot us, and no one grieves.\nWho remembers us? Who will stir\nThe ghosts of leaves?_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "beloved-let-us-once-more-praise-the-rain": { - "title": "“Beloved, Let Us once More Praise the Rain”", - "body": "Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.\nLet us discover some new alphabet,\nFor this, the often praised; and be ourselves,\nThe rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,\nThe green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,\nAnd all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,--\nWho watches with a hard eye from seclusion,\nBeneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.\nThere is an oriole who, upside down,\nHangs at his nest, and flicks an orange wing,--\nUnder a tree as dead and still as lead;\nThere is a single leaf, in all this heaven\nOf leaves, which rain has loosened from its twig:\nThe stem breaks, and it falls, but it is caught\nUpon a sister leaf, and thus she hangs;\nThere is an acorn cup, beside a mushroom\nWhich catches three drops from the stooping cloud.\nThe timid bee goes back to the hive; the fly\nUnder the broad leaf of the hollyhock\nPerpends stupid with cold; the raindark snail\nSurveys the wet world from a watery stone …\nAnd still the syllables of water whisper:\nThe wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait\nIn the dark room; and in your heart I find\nOne silver raindrop,--on a hawthorn leaf,--\nOrion in a cobweb, and the World.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "blues-for-ruby-matrix": { - "title": "“Blues for Ruby Matrix”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhere’s Ruby, where has she gone this evening?\nwhat has her heart done, is it enlarged,\nis she so flown with sombre magnificence,\nis the web wrapped round her and she mad?\nWhy, she should have been here hours ago\nand this a snowy night too and the soul starving--\n\nWhere’s Ruby where has she gone today?\nis she so glorious, is she so beautiful,\nhas she wings that thus abruptly she has gone?\ncome back Ruby, you are my light-of-love\n(and her with a carbuncle too and no money)\nwhere has she gone where has she gone?\n\nI saw her once at a soda fountain,\nyou don’t believe it you don’t believe it do you?\nI saw her once at a soda fountain\nstrangling sarsaparilla through a paper straw.\nWhere’s Ruby gone where is she gone this evening--\nincandescence has stopped, the night is dark.\n\nI was a driver once and knew a thing or two,\nthe rails were right but everything else was wrong,\ncome back Ruby I will unwrap the web around you,\nOh I will blow the snow off your brain tonight\nand polish your conscience for you and give you a tip\nand show you the stairs to the bright door of hell.\n\nCome Ruby, I will undo your rubber goloshes,\ncome Ruby, I will undo the clasps,\nlet us walk along the track of ice a little way\nand talk a little way of ice and icicles\nfor you too knew the way the hoarfrost grew\non God’s terrific wings\n\nhow in the heart’s horn comes the prince of pauses,\nthe peace between the agonies--O you\nwho found the stepping stone and brought it back,\ngave it to me because I stood and loved you,\nyou who stood, when others stood no more,\non the abandoned and unprosperous shore.\n\nWhy it was you I loved and knew, and\nit was, the speechless and inalterable you\nthe one of the Aprils and the one of June,\nO undiscoverable and unpursuable one\nand one that was not one but two and three\nor three that was not three but you and me.\n\nThus it comes, thus it comes Ruby,\nwoman who art not woman but a wound,\nwound who art not wound but indeed a word,\nword that art not word but truly a world\nsprung spoken speaking spoiled and spent\nin the brief darkness that the darkness meant.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut I was not convinced and said so too,\nthere among marigolds with Easter coming,\nno I was not convinced had no convictions\nand she was not convincing in the spring,\nit was the wrong time, it was spring.\n\nWhat I said was nobody’s business, no,\nnobody’s business, I said the words straight out\nand made no mention of the nightingale\nnor of the willow buds or pines or palms\nnor of the pleasure parks on Coney Isle\nwhich Ikey Cohn decreed,\n\nbut I was blue and made no bones about it,\nI was blue and said so to her face\nthere by the hot-dog stand beneath the lamp\nand not so far from the filling-station\nI held her hand and told her face to face--\n\nWhat did I tell her? Oh ask me something easy\nwhy should I say the primrose has an eye,\nwhy should I say the goldenrod is dusty\nor the railroad long as hell from here to there,\nwhy should I make remarks about her hair?\n\nTell me, brother, the little word to whisper,\ntell me, brother, the little word to say,\ntell me, sisters, the grand technique of love\nor how to speak of beauty when you see it,\nfor what I said was angry that was all,\nI told her to go to hell and well-damned stay there.\n\nShe made no mention of the nightingale,\nwhy should she with no nightingales about,\nnor of that other bird that burns to death.\nThe sidewalk was red brick beneath our feet,\nthe hot dog stand bright as the mouth of hell\n\nbut she was part and parcel of the brightness\nthat hell is said to have,\nswallowed the night and smiled it back again,\nlaughed like a million lights, spoke like a cannon\nshe was a scenic railway crashing downward,\nmy straw hat blew awav.\n\nPennies dimes nickels and quarters gone\nand midnight come and the last boat so bright\nso bright so light so cheap and full of people\nall with their mouths and hands--Oh come and see\nthe world that lies behind the primrose eye\nunder the gilded teeth of Ikey Cohn--\n\ncome and see the water beside the ship,\nsee the white lines of foam that cross the brain\nand break against the skulltop and are bitter,\ncome and join us in the convincing spring\nand learn how sad it is to stay out late.\n\nGood-bye, Ruby, I am fed up with you,\ngood-bye Ruby, your nose needs powder,\nI’ve got that midnight feeling in my heart.\nI’ll hate you till breakfast-time, till the poached eggs\nmake peace between us,\n\nbut you were behind the primrose eye and saw\nthe sunrise world and all the wings--and you\nhad known the ultimate and called it nothing\nand you have sightseen God with tired eyes\nand now come back to toast our daily bread.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhat she had was something with no name,\nif she were dead I’d carve it on a stone,\nit was as right as rain as true as time,\nnecessary as rhythm in a tune,\nwhat she had was only a word or two\nspoken under the clock.\n\nDelay was precious and we both delayed,\ncome on, Ruby, and hold on clock,\nbut there were springs unsprung or half-sprung, still\ncompelling mechanism to its stillness\nand in the reading-room we read the word,\nthe silent word that silent spoke of meaning.\n\nit was the now, it was the then, it was the when,\nit was the snow, the rain, the wind,\nthe name and then the where, the name, the street,\nthe hearse, the cradle, the all-knowing judge--\nand I unerring knew the pressing word\nand she receptive knew it--\n\nthe midnight took my meaning, and the noon\nengulfed it in broad sunlight, the swift cloud\ncarried it northward like a handkerchief\nto lose it in the eventualness of time\nwhile I with equal steps climbed up the stairs\naway from the remembered, to descend--\n\nand she ascending too, with equal steps,\nand she descending too, before and after,\nbearing the blossom, her angelic heart,\nthe thurible, the incense, her quick eyes\nknowing the known and guessing the unknown\nsearching the shadow which my mind betrayed.\n\nWhy, we were here before, but now remember\nyou at your time and I at mine,\nboth of us here to know this selfsame thing--\nand now together know it, now together,\nand in this pause together of the wings\n\ntouch the feathers, let the snow touch snow,\nwhisper recoil from whisper, frost shun frost,\nthat we may know what we have known already\nbut never with each other in this place,\nor at this time, or even in this world,\nand never with remembrance of before.\n\nWhat she had was an evening paper, a purse,\na hat, a cape, and what I had was purpose,\nbut now, the purpose gone, I have--what have I Ruby,\nif not a phrase of ice to carve on stone,\nambiguous skeleton of a whisper, gone\nas soon as spoken, and myself alone?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBoy, if I told you half of what I know--\nthe gulfs we cross by day to meet at night,\nthe Lincoln Highway and the Big Rock Candy mountains,\nthe deserts of the Gulf of Mexico,\n\nboy, if I told you how I spend my time\nat night-school learning all the stars of love\n\npropound the constellations of her heart,\nthe North Star and the Southern Cross\nvoyage to regions of the albatross\nand come back spangled with bright frost of death--\nboy, if you carved with me the curves I carve\nagainst the dark undaunted ice of time\n\nand knew those curves of hers that curve beyond\ngeometry of hand or eye or mind\ninto the bloodstream and above again,\nwestward under the sea with setting suns\noblique dishonest and profound as hell,\ncorrupt unchanging changing choice as steel--\n\nBoy, if you went with me along her streets\nunder the windows of her lighted eyes,\nsaw the foul doors the purlieus and the cats,\nthe filth put out the food received the money\nthe evil music grinning all its teeth,\ncachinnations above the sauerkraut!\n\nThis is where she lives and loves, that Ruby,\nthis is where she lives and pays her way\namong the unborn and the dead and dying,\nthe dirty and the sweating, pays her way\nwith sweat and guile and triumph and deceit\nburning the empty paper bags and scraps.\n\nBoy, if I told you where the money comes from\nout of a silver mine in Colorado,\nthe unrefined refined and the bright goddess\nbrought all the way from chaos to Mike’s Alley\nand on her hand at noon to pay the rent\nroof to prevent the rage of heaven’s tent--\n\nbut if I told you half of what I know\nI’d have to be the gulf of Mexico\nthe Big Rock Candy Mountains in the spring\nand every other big or little thing.\nI’d wear the Milky Way out with my walking,\nwear out my shoes with the walking blues.\n\nHush Ruby, I meant these words for someone else,\nhush Ruby, it’s all right now,\nonly a little student of geometry\nwho wanted to know the why and where of curves\nwent out and came back frozen by the stars\nwith geometric frostbite in his brain.\n\nTake him in with you and warm him Ruby,\ntake him in with you put him to sleep,\ntell him the difference between truth and lying,\ntell him where you’ve been and what you mean,\nthe clock, the closet, horror’s cloaca too\nand wake him, when his heart is fed and dead.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBut this was nothing boy, and I said nothing,\nno leaf or love was born but it took time.\nCome on and shake the cosmic dice, come seven,\ncome on and shake the bones for odd or even\nbut this was nothing and no one said a word.\n\nI saw the palm leaf and I took it down, Ruby,\nI saw the gold leaf and I took it down.\nI saw the heaven leaf and I took it down, honey,\nI saw the dead leaf and I took it down.\n\nI saw the word that shaped the lips of water,\nI saw the idea that shaped the mind of water,\nI saw the thought of time that shaped the face,\nI saw the face that brought disgrace to space\n\nbut this was nothing, girl, and I said nothing,\nnothing I thought, what could I think but nothing?\nwho nothing knew and was the seed of nothing,\nthe conscious No One watching Naught from Nowhere.\n\nTake the palm leaf for what it is no other,\ntake the gold-leaf and put it down,\ntake the heaven-leaf and put it down, Ruby,\ntake the dead leaf and put it down\n\nfor what is wisdom, wisdom is only this--\nhistory of the world in a deathbed kiss,\npast and to be in agony brought home,\nand kingdom of darkness come.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nNo use hanging round we must be going,\nno use waiting before the evening altar\ngreen screen of evening sky between paired stars\nwhere the cloud worships and the wind is bowed,\nthere’s no use waiting Ruby we must be moving.\n\nYou are a rock like that blue mountain too\njagged and scarred like that where the snow lingers\nand I have seen the sunrise on white shoulders,\nthe orchid among the boulders,\nthe edelweiss and ewigkeit\nand the retreating armies of the night.\n\nNo use waiting, Ruby, we will not hear,\nthe proud hosanna of the stars is not for us,\nwe will not hear them sing the silver word\nnor see the angelic wings ascend between\nthe silver trumpets against a sky of icy green.\n\nThis we abandon, and though this have seen\nsee it no more, but take our evening down\nalong dark streets that you have made your own,\nthe wretched streets that in-and-out are you,\nthere where the cry of pain is in the bone\n\nand where your darkness prowls around us nightlong,\napproaches and retreats, confronts us snarling,\ndevours the hours--is this your house Ruby,\nare these your stairs, is that your window open,\nis there a bed a ceiling above the bed?\n\ndo voices come and go and slam of doors?\nSmells of fecundity, the human spawn,\nfar off the cries of trains, the taxi’s ticking\nis all coincidence that thus together\neverything meets upon this tip of time--\n\nyour hand that murdered men or drew the morning\nout of the seventh vial, or rolled the mountains\nagainst the tombs of all the gods, or poured\nthe zeros one on other and destroyed\nthe indestructible to create the new--\n\ncame like a flame from sand, reentered water,\nwas braided like the ice, became a wall\nsang through the trumpet of eternity\nand now, descended, holds a greasy key\nand presses it against a greasy lock--\n\nFarewell Ruby, for this is where I leave you\nyour hand releases me its filth is on me,\nthe holy filth of long corruption comes\ncoldly upon me as an absolution,\nsharply we flower in this foul farewell.\n\nBut God’s terrific wing that day came down,\nloud on the world as loud and white as snow\nout of the blue the white and then the silence.\nO Ruby, come again and turn the time.\n\nRuby, your name is matrix rock of ages\ncloven by lightning, smitten by thunder,\nthe surged upon deep shore interminable,\nthe long the nebulous waves, the foam of time\n\nbeating upon you breaking upon you foaming,\nthe worldlong fruitfulness of assuaging sea,\nhammers of foam, O Ruby come again\nbe broken for our simple coming forth--\n\nlet the rocks fall upon us with fearful sound,\nthe long bright glacier of the stars be broken,\nthe beginning and the final word be spoken,\ncome again come again and turn the world.\n\nThis world that is your turning and returning,\nmatrix mother mistress menstrual moon,\nwafer of scarlet in the virgin void,\nOh come again and turn the world to thought.\n\nBut God’s terrific wing that day came down\nsnow on the world and Ruby you were snow,\ndeceitful whiteness and the blood concealed\nso that the world might know how worlds will end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "broad-on-the-sunburnt-hill": { - "title": "“Broad on the Sunburnt Hill”", - "body": "Broad on the sunburnt hill the bright moon comes,\nAnd cuts with silver horn the hurrying cloud;\nAnd the cold Pole Star, in the dusk, resumes\nHis last night’s light, which light alone could shroud.\nAnd legion other stars, that torch pursuing,\nTake each their stations in the deepening night,\nLifting pale tapers for the Watch, renewing\nTheir glorious foreheads in the Infinite.\nNever before had night so many eyes!\nNever was darkness so divinely thronged,\nAs now--my love! bright star!--that you arise,\nGiving me back that night which I had wronged.\nNow with your voice sings all that immortal host,\nThat god of myriad stars whom I thought lost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "chance-meeting": { - "title": "“Chance Meeting”", - "body": "In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive,\nThe shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves,\nIn the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices,\nI suddenly face you,\n\nYour dark eyes return for a space from her who is with you,\nThey shine into mine with a sunlit desire,\nThey say an ‘I love you, what star do you live on?’\nThey smile and then darken,\n\nAnd silent, I answer ‘You too--I have known you,--I love you!--’\nAnd the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves\nInterlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight\nTo divide us forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "counterpoint-two-rooms": { - "title": "“Counterpoint: Two Rooms”", - "body": "He, in the room above, grown old and tired;\nShe, in the room below, his floor her ceiling,\nPursue their separate dreams. He turns his light,\nAnd throws himself on the bed, face down, in laughter.\nShe, by the window, smiles at a starlight night.\n\nHis watch--the same he has heard these cycles of ages\nWearily chimes at seconds beneath his pillow.\nThe clock upon her mantelpiece strikes nine.\nThe night wears on. She hears dull steps above her.\nThe world whirs on. New stars come up to shine.\n\nHis youth--far off--he sees it brightly walking\nIn a golden cloud … wings flashing about it … Darkness\nWalls it around with dripping enormous walls.\nOld age, far off--or death--what do thev matter?\nDown the smooth purple night a streaked star falls.\n\nShe hears slow steps in the street; they chime like music,\nThey climb to her heart, they break and flower in beauty,\nAlong her veins they glisten and ring and burn.\nHe hears his own slow steps tread down to silence.\nFar off they pass. He knows they will never return.\n\nFar off, on a smooth dark road, he hears them faintly.\nThe road, like a sombre river, quietly flowing,\nMoves among murmurous walls. A deeper breath\nSwells them to sound: he hears his steps more clearly.\nAnd death seems nearer to him; or he to death.\n\nWhat’s death?--she smiles.\nThe cool stone hurts her elbow,\nThe last few raindrops gather and fall from elm-boughs,\nShe sees them glisten and break. The arc-lamp sings,\nThe new leaves dip in the warm wet air and fragrance,\nA sparrow whirs to the eaves and shakes its wings.\n\nWhat’s death--what’s death? The spring returns like music;\nThe trees are like dark lovers who dream in starlight;\nThe soft grey clouds go over the stars like dreams.\nThe cool stone wounds her arms to pain, to pleasure.\nUnder the lamp a circle of wet street gleams.\nAnd death seems far away--a thing of roses,\nA golden portal where golden music closes,\nDeath seems far away;\nAnd spring returns, the countless singing of lovers,\nAnd spring returns to stay.\n\nHe, in the room above, grown old and tired,\nFlings himself on the bed, face down, in laughter,\nAnd clenches his hands, and remembers, and desires to die.\nAnd she, by the window, smiles at a night of starlight …\nThe soft grey clouds go slowly across the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-cyclads": { - "title": "“The Cyclads”", - "body": "They have been no longer than usual, in coming to this place.\nTerror of time, they murmur, equals the terror of space.\nAll cancels out, in the end, they say, and the end is nothing.\nAnd all between, a nothing in borrowed clothing.\nHere we have stars, even of the first magnitude,\n(how flattering our human terms) doomed to decrepitude:\nall things, even the little atom, in its slow dying, arrive here,\nand then slip silently--ward to a predestined year.\nWho would plant trees, here? Is it an honest man?\nWould he shade coming chaos in his wistful plan?\nGod knows, not we. At least, we plant no tree.\nWe only wait in the Absolute, and see.\n\nYes, Old Repetition, they have been no longer than usual.\nOnly to itself, perhaps, does time’s cycle seem casual.\nAnd space, this horrid cloaca which we must share,\nfinds no mirror in which to face its face in when or where.\nNot in us, surely? But perhaps in these, who seem\nthe endless repetition of our dream:\ncold algebra brought round again in a concentric hell,\nconvolute whirlwind in an invisible shell.\nHow vast, how still, how slow! We sleep, and wake, and then,\ncloud-walking, see our dream flow past again.\n\nThey have been no longer than usual, this time, in coming.\nHere are the shadows of spokes, the wheels are humming.\nStreet-lights, and neon monsters, glare on the cloud.\nFrom violet dynamos, an endless belt, pours out the crowd.\nAnd all at once: dim past, faint future, all at once:\nthe moral histories, the cracked applause, the festered battle-fronts:\nthe corner drug-store, where the lyric cash-tray sings,\nand the amateur astronomer, peeping at Saturn’s rings.\nBut this is not all. By no means, nol This is not all.\nNo, choose your own show, midway or sideshow: from Adam’s Fall\nto ill-starred Lucifer, or the blind poet’s dictated dream.\nO purblind, blind, panhandler of the siltage in time’s stream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "discordants": { - "title": "“Discordants”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMusic I heard with you was more than music,\nAnd bread I broke with you was more than bread;\nNow that I am without you, all is desolate;\nAll that was once so beautiful is dead.\n\nYour hands once touched this table and this silver,\nAnd I have seen your fingers hold this glass.\nThese things do not remember you, belovèd,\nAnd yet your touch upon them will not pass.\n\nFor it was in my heart you moved among them,\nAnd blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;\nAnd in my heart they will remember always,--\nThey knew you once, O beautiful and wise.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMy heart has become as hard as a city street,\nThe horses trample upon it, it sings like iron,\nAll day long and all night long they beat,\nThey ring like the hooves of time.\n\nMy heart has become as drab as a city park,\nThe grass is worn with the feet of shameless lovers,\nA match is struck, there is kissing in the dark,\nThe moon comes, pale with sleep.\n\nMy heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices,\nThey shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places,\nAnd tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices\nShoot arrows into my heart.\n\n\n# III.\n\nDead Cleopatra lies in a crystal casket,\nWrapped and spiced by the cunningest of hands.\nAround her neck they have put a golden necklace,\nHer tatbebs, it is said, are worn with sands.\n\nDead Cleopatra was once revered in Egypt,\nWarm-eyed she was, this princess of the South.\nNow she is old and dry and faded,\nWith black bitumen they have sealed up her mouth.\n\nO sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!\nWhen we are dead, my best belovèd and I,\nClose well above us, that we may rest forever,\nSending up grass and blossoms to the sky.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIn the noisy street,\nWhere the sifted sunlight yellows the pallid faces,\nSudden I close my eyes, and on my eyelids\nFeel from the far-off sea a cool faint spray,--\n\nA breath on my cheek,\nFrom the tumbling breakers and foam, the hard sand shattered,\nGulls in the high wind whistling, flashing waters,\nSmoke from the flashing waters blown on rocks;\n\n--And I know once more,\nO dearly belovèd! that all these seas are between us,\nTumult and madness, desolate save for the sea-gulls,\nYou on the farther shore, and I in this street.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "evensong": { - "title": "“Evensong”", - "body": "# I.\n\nIn the pale mauve twilight, streaked with orange,\nExquisitely sweet,--\nShe leaned upon her balcony and looked across the street;\nAnd across the huddled roofs of the misty city,\nAcross the hills of tenements, so gray,\nShe looked into the west with a young and infinite pity,\nWith a young and wistful pity, as if to say\nThe dark was coming, and irresistible night,\nWhich man would attempt to meet\nWith here and there a little flickering light …\nThe orange faded, the housetops all were black,\nAnd a strange and beautiful quiet\nCame unexpected, came exquisitely sweet,\nOn market-place and street;\nAnd where were lately crowds and sounds and riot\nWas a gentle blowing of wind, a murmur of leaves,\nA single step, or voice, and under the eaves\nThe scrambling of sparrows; and then the hush swept back.\n\n\n# II.\n\nShe leaned upon her balcony, in the darkness,\nFolding her hands beneath her chin;\nAnd watched the lamps begin\nHere and there to pierce like eyes the darkness,--\nFrom windows, luminous rooms,\nAnd from the damp dark street\nBetween the moving branches, and the leaves with rain still sweet.\nIt was strange: the leaves thus seen,\nWith the lamplight’s cold bright glare thrown up among them,--\nThe restless maple leaves,\nTwinkling their myriad shadows beneath the eaves,--\nWere lovelier, almost, than with sunlight on them,\nSo bright they were with young translucent green;\nWere lovelier, almost, than with moonlight on them …\nAnd looking so wistfully across the city,\nWith such a young, and wise, and infinite pity\nFor the girl who had no lover\nTo walk with her along a street like this,\nWith slow steps in the rain, both aching for a kiss,--\nIt seemed as if all evenings were the same,\nAs if all evenings came\nWith just such tragic peacefulness as this;\nWith just such hint of loneliness or pain,\nThe quiet after rain.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWould her lover, then, grow old sooner than she,\nAnd find a night like this too damp to walk?\nWould he prefer to stay indoors and talk,\nOr read the evening paper, while she sewed, or darned a sock,\nAnd listened to the ticking of the clock:\nWould he prefer it to lamplight on a tree?\nWould he be old and tired,\nAnd, having all the comforts he desired,\nTake no interest in the twilight coming down\nSo beautifully and quietly on the town?\nWould her lover, then, grow old sooner than she?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nA neighbor started singing, singing a child to sleep.\nIt was strange: a song thus heard,--\nIn the misty evening, after an afternoon of rain,--\nSeemed more beautiful than happiness, more beautiful than pain,\nSeemed to escape the music and the word,\nOnly, somehow, to keep\nA warmth that was lovelier than the song of any bird.\nWas it because it came up through this tree,\nThrough the lucent leaves that twinkled on this tree,\nWith the bright lamp there beneath them in the street?\nIt was exquisitely sweet:\nSo unaffected, so unconscious that it was heard.\nOr was it because she looked across the city,\nAcross the hills of tenements, so black,\nAnd thought of all the mothers with a young and infinite pity? …\nThe child had fallen asleep, the hush swept back,\nThe leaves hung lifeless on the tree.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIt was too bad the sky was dark.\nA cat came slinking close along the wall.\nFor the moon was full just now, and in the park,\nIf the sky were clear at all,\nThe lovers upon the moonlight grass would sprawl,\nAnd whisper in the shadows, and laugh, and there\nShe would be going, maybe, with a white rose in her hair …\nBut would youth at last grow weary of these things,\nOf the ribbons and the laces,\nAnd the latest way of putting up one’s hair?\nWould she no longer care,\nIn that undiscovered future of recurring springs,\nIf, growing old and plain, she no longer turned the faces\nAnd saw the people stare?\nWould she hear music and not yearn\nTo take her lover’s arm for one more turn? …\nThe leaves hung breathless on the dripping maple tree,\nThe man across the street was going out.\nIt was the evening made her think such things, no doubt.\nBut would her lover grow old sooner than she? …\nOnly the evening made her think such things, no doubt …\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAnd yet, and yet,--\nSeeing the tired city, and the trees so still and wet,--\nIt seemed as if all evenings were the same;\nAs if all evenings came,\nDespite her smile at thinking of a kiss,\nWith just such tragic peacefulness as this;\nWith just such hint of loneliness or pain;\nThe perfect quiet that comes after rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "exile": { - "title": "“Exile”", - "body": "These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows\nCaw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,\nComplain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak\nLights on the long brown slopes a frost--like dew,\nDew as heavy as rain; the rabbit tracks\nShow sharply in it, as they might in snow.\nBut it’s soon gone in the sun--what good does it do?\nThe houses, on the slope, or among brown trees,\nAre grey and shrivelled. And the men who live here\nAre small and withered, spider-like, with large eyes.\n\nBring water with you if you come to live here--\nCold tinkling cisterns, or else wells so deep\nThat one looks down to Ganges or Himalayas.\nYes, and bring mountains with you, white, moon-bearing,\nMountains of ice. You will have need of these\nProfundities and peaks of wet and cold.\n\nBring also, in a cage of wire or osier,\nBirds of a golden colour, who will sing\nOf leaves that do not wither, watery fruits\nThat heavily hang on long melodious boughs\nIn the blue-silver forests of deep valleys.\n\nI have now been here--how many years? Years unnumbered.\nMy hands grow clawlike. My eyes are large and starved.\nI brought no bird with me, I have no cistern\nWhere I might find the moon, or river, or snow.\nSome day, for lack of these, I’ll spin a web\nBetween two dusty pine-tree tops, and hang there\nFace downward, like a spider, blown as lightly\nAs ghost of leaf. Crows will caw about me.\nMorning and evening I shall drink the dew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "goya": { - "title": "“Goya”", - "body": "Goya drew a pig on a wall.\nThe five-year-old hairdresser’s son\nSaw, graved on a silver tray,\nThe lion; and sunsets were begun.\n\nGoya smelt the bull-fight blood.\nThe pupil of the Carmelite\nGave his hands to a goldsmith, learned\nTo gild an aureole aright.\n\nGoya saw the Puzzel’s eyes:\nSang in the street (with a guitar)\nAnd climbed the balcony; but Keats\n(Under the halyards) wrote ‘Bright star.’\n\nGoya saw the Great Slut pick\nThe chirping human puppets up,\nAnd laugh, with pendulous mountain lip,\nAnd drown them in a coffee cup;\n\nOr squeeze their little juices out\nIn arid hands, insensitive,\nTo make them gibber … Goya went\nAmong the catacombs to live.\n\nHe saw gross Ronyons of the air,\nHarelipped and goitered, raped in flight\nBy hairless pimps, umbrella-winged:\nTumult above Madrid at night.\n\nHe heard the seconds in his clock\nCrack like seeds, divulge, and pour\nAbysmal filth of Nothingness\nBetween the pendulum and the floor:\n\nTorrents of dead veins, rotted cells,\nTonsils decayed, and fingernails:\nDead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin:\nNostrils and lids; and cauls and veils;\n\nAnd eyes that still, in death, remained\n(Unlidded and unlashed) aware\nOf the foul core, and, fouler yet,\nThe region worm that ravins there.\n\nStench flowed out of the second’s tick.\nAnd Goya swam with it through Space,\nSweating the fetor from his limbs,\nAnd stared upon the unfeatured face\n\nThat did not see, and sheltered naught,\nBut was, and is. The second gone,\nGoya returned, and drew the face;\nAnd scrawled beneath it, ‘This I have known’ …\n\nAnd drew four slatterns, in an attic,\nHeavy, with heads on arms, asleep:\nAnd underscribed it, ‘Let them slumber,\nWho, if they woke, could only weep’ …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "haunted-chambers": { - "title": "“Haunted Chambers”", - "body": "The lamp-lit page is turned, the dream forgotten;\nThe music changes tone, you wake, remember\nDeep worlds you lived before, deep worlds hereafter\nOf leaf on falling leaf, music on music,\nRain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter.\n\nHelen was late, and Miriam came too soon;\nJoseph was dead, his wife and children starving;\nElaine was married and soon to have a child.\nYou dreamed last night of fiddler crabs with fiddles.\nThey played a buzzing melody, and you smiled.\n\nTomorrow--what? And what of vesterday?\nThrough soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,\nThrough many doors to the one door of all.\nSoon as it’s opened we shall hear a music:\nOr see a skeleton fall.\n\nWe walk with you. Where is it that you lead us?\nWe climbed the muffled stairs beneath high lanterns.\nWe descend again. We grope through darkened cells.\nYou say: “This darkness, here, will slowly kill me--\nIt creeps and weighs upon me … is full of bells.”\n\n“This is the thing remembered I would forget:\nNo matter where I go, how soft I tread,\nThis windy gesture menaces me with death.\n‘Fatigue!’ it says--and points its finger at me:\nTouches my throat and stops my breath.”\n\n“My fans, my jewels, the portrait of my husband,\nThe torn certificate for my daughter’s grave--\nThese are but mortal seconds in immortal time.\nThey brush me, fade away--like drops of water.\nThey signify no crime.”\n\n“Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you!\nNothing is here I could not frankly tell you--\nNo hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.\nDreams--they are madness; staring eyes--illusion.\nLet us return, hear music, and forget.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "how-many-times-have-we-been-interrupted": { - "title": "“How Many Times Have We Been Interrupted”", - "body": "How many times have we been interrupted\nJust as I was about to make up a story for you!\nOne time it was because we suddenly saw a firefly\nLighting his green lantern among the boughs of a fir-tree.\nMarvellous! Marvellous! He is making for himself\nA little tent of light in the darkness!\nAnd one time it was because we saw a lilac lightning flash\nRun wrinkling into the blue top of the mountain,--\nWe heard boulders of thunder rolling down upon us\nAnd the plat-plat of drops on the window,\nAnd we ran to watch the rain\nCharging in wavering clouds across the long grass of the field!\nOr at other times it was because we saw a star\nSlipping easily out of the sky and falling, far off,\nAmong pine-dark hills;\nOr because we found a crimson eft\nDarting in the cold grass!\nThese things interrupted us and left us wondering;\nAnd the stories, whatever they might have been,\nWere never told.\nA fairy, binding a daisy down and laughing?\nA golden-haired princess caught in a cobweb?\nA love-story of long ago?\nSome day, just as we are beginning again,\nJust as we blow the first sweet note,\nDeath itself will interrupt us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "how-is-it-that-i-am-now-so-softly-awakened": { - "title": "“How is It that I Am now so Softly Awakened”", - "body": "How is it that I am now so softly awakened,\nMy leaves shaken down with music?--\nDarling, I love you.\nIt is not your mouth, for I have known mouths before,--\nThough your mouth is more alive than roses,\nRoses singing softly\nTo green leaves after rain.\nIt is not your eyes, for I have dived often in eyes,--\nThough your eyes, even in the yellow glare of footlights,\nAre windows into eternal dusk.\nNor is it the live white flashing of your feet,\nNor your gay hands, catching at motes in the spotlight;\nNor the abrupt thick music of your laughter,\nWhen, against the hideous backdrop,\nWith all its crudities brilliantly lighted,\nSuddenly you catch sight of your alarming shadow,\nWhirling and contracting.\nHow is it, then, that I am so keenly aware,\nSo sensitive to the surges of the wind, or the light,\nHeaving silently under blue seas of air?--\nDarling, I love you, I am immersed in you.\nIt is not the unraveled night-time of your hair,--\nThough I grow drunk when you press it upon my face:\nAnd though when you gloss its length with a golden brush\nI am strings that tremble under a bow.\nIt was that night I saw you dancing,\nThe whirl and impalpable float of your garment,\nYour throat lifted, your face aglow\n(Like waterlilies in moonlight were your knees).\nIt was that night I heard you singing\nIn the green-room after your dance was over,\nFaint and uneven through the thickness of walls.\n(How shall I come to you through the dullness of walls,\nThrusting aside the hands of bitter opinion?)\nIt was that afternoon, early in June,\nWhen, tired with a sleepless night, and my act performed,\nFeeling as stale as streets,\nWe met under dropping boughs, and you smiled to me:\nAnd we sat by a watery surface of clouds and sky.\nI hear only the susurration of intimate leaves;\nThe stealthy gliding of branches upon slow air.\nI see only the point of your chin in sunlight;\nAnd the sinister blue of sunlight on your hair.\nThe sunlight settles downward upon us in silence.\nNow we thrust up through grass blades and encounter,\nPushing white hands amid the green.\nYour face flowers whitely among cold leaves.\nSoil clings to you, bark falls from you,\nYou rouse and stretch upward, exhaling earth, inhaling sky,\nI touch you, and we drift off together like moons.\nEarth dips from under.\nWe are alone in an immensity of sunlight,\nSpecks in an infinite golden radiance,\nWhirled and tossed upon silent cataracts and torrents.\nGive me your hand darling! We float downward.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-is-now-two-hours-since-i-left-you": { - "title": "“It is now two hours since I left you …”", - "body": "It is now two hours since I left you,\nAnd the perfume of your hands is still on my hands.\nAnd though since then\nI have looked at the stars, walked in the cold blue streets,\nAnd heard the dead leaves blowing over the ground\nUnder the trees,\nI still remember the sound of your laughter.\nHow will it be, lady, when there is none left to remember you\nEven as long as this?\nWill the dust braid your hair?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-letter-from-li-po": { - "title": "“A Letter from Li Po”", - "body": "# I.\n\nFanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind\nannounces autumn, and the equinox\nrolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.\nSomewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,\nlooking for friendship or an old love’s sleeve\nor writing letters to his children, lost,\nand to his children’s children, and to us.\nWhat was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?\nSay that it changed, for better or for worse,\nsifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk\na slant of witch-light; on the pure text\na slant of genius; emptying mind and heart\nfor winecups and more winecups and more words.\nWhat was his time? Say that it was a change,\nbut constant as a changing thing may be,\nfrom chicory’s moon-dark blue down the taut scale\nto chicory’s tenderest pink, in a pink field\nsuch as imagination dreams of thought.\nBut of the heart beneath the winecup moon\nthe tears that fell beneath the winecup moon\nfor children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,\nwhat can we say but that it never ends?\nEven for us it never ends, only begins.\nYet to spell down the poem on her page,\nmargining her phrases, parsing forth\nthe sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale\nfrom chicory pink to blue, is to assume\nLi Po himself: as he before assumed\nthe poets and the sages who were his.\nLike him, we too have eaten of the word:\nwith him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:\nand write, in rain, a letter to lost children,\na letter long as time and brief as love.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd yet not love, not only love. Not caritas\nor only that. Nor the pink chicory love,\ndeep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,\nin which the dragon of his meaning flew\nfor friends or children lost, or even\nfor the beloved horse, for Li Po’s horse:\nnot these, in the self’s circle so embraced:\ntoo near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,\na letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,\nstoried and stored as the ripe honeycomb\nwith other faith than this. As of sole pride\nand holy loneliness, the intrinsic face\nworn by the always changing shape between\nend and beginning, birth and death.\nHow moves that line of daring on the map?\nWhere was it yesterday, or where this morning\nwhen thunder struck at seven, and in the bay\nthe meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,\nand with them one more Icarus? Where struck\nthat lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw\nwrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else?\nBut somewhere else is always here and now.\nEach moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:\neach moment you must die. It was a tree\nthat this time died for you: it was a rock\nand with it all its local web of love:\na chimney, spilling down historic bricks:\nperhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin’s kites.\nAnd with them, us. For we must hear and bear\nthe news from everywhere: the hourly news,\ninfinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.\n\n\n# III.\n\nSole pride and loneliness: it is the state\nthe kingdom rather of all things: we hear\nnews of the heart in weather of the Bear,\nslide down the rungs of Cassiopeia’s Chair,\nstill on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;\nand, if we question one, must question all.\nWhat is this ‘man’? How far from him is ‘me’?\nWho, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?\nWe are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,\namong the leaves we are the hidden bird,\nwe are the singer and are what is heard.\nWhat is this ‘world’? Not Li Po’s Gorge alone,\nand yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was high\nnorth of the White King City, by the fields\nof whistling barley under cuckoo sky,’\nwhere, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po\nspun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk’\n(he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,’\nand, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.’\nHere is the divine loneliness in which\nwe greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,\nthe smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face\ntouched, and loved, but still unknown, and then\na body, still mysterious in embrace.\nTaste lost as touch is lost, only to leave\ndust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve:\nand yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve.\nOf leaf and love, at last, only to doubt:\nfrom world within or world without, kept out.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nCaucus of robins on an alien shore\nas of the Ho-Ho birds at Jewel Gate\nsouthward bound and who knows where and never late\nor lost in a roar at sea. Rovers of chaos\neach one the ‘Rover of Chao,’ whose slight bones\nshall put to shame the swords. We fly with these,\nhave always flown, and they\nstay with us here, stand still and stay,\nwhile, exiled in the Land of Pa, Li Po\nstill at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon.\nAnd northward now, for fall gives way to spring,\nfrom Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing,\nand he remembers, with the pipes and flutes,\ndrunk with joy, bewildered by the chance\nthat brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain,\nhe strove to speak, ‘and in long sentences,’ his pain.\nExiled are we. Were exiles born. The ‘far away,’\nlanguage of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,\nas of the unfathomable worlds that lie\nbetween the apple and the eye,\nthese are the only words we learn to say.\nEach morning we devour the unknown. Each day\nwe find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,\na sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.\nThis cornucopia of air! This very heaven\nof simple day! We do not know, can never know,\nthe alphabet to find us entrance there.\nSo, in the street, we stand and stare,\nto greet a friend, and shake his hand,\nyet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves;\nocean unknowable by unknowable sand.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe locust tree spills sequins of pale gold\nin spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible\nearthward and deathward, but in change to find\nthe cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po\nallowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,\nand, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang’s dream.\nDid Chouang dream he was a butterfly?\nOr did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so,\nwhy then all things can change, and change again,\nthe sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we\nfrom man to butterfly; and back to man.\nThis ‘I,’ this moving ‘I,’ this focal ‘I,’\nwhich changes, when it dreams the butterfly,\ninto the thing it dreams of; liquid eye\nin which the thing takes shape, but from within\nas well as from without: this liquid ‘I’:\nhow many guises, and disguises, this\nnimblest of actors takes, how many names\nputs on and off, the costumes worn but once,\nthe player queen, the lover, or the dunce,\nhero or poet, father or friend,\nsuiting the eloquence to the moment’s end;\nchildlike, or bestial; the language of the kiss\nsensual or simple; and the gestures, too,\nas slight as that with which an empire falls,\nor a great love’s abjured; these feignings, sleights,\nsavants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,\nthe novice in her cell, or wearing tights\non the high wire above a hell of lights:\nwhat’s true in these, or false? which is the ‘I’\nof ‘I’s’? Is it the master of the cadence, who\ntransforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through\ntigers of meaning leap? And are these true,\nthe language never old and never new,\nsuch as the world wears on its wedding day,\nthe something borrowed with something chicory blue?\nIn every part we play, we play ourselves;\neven the secret doubt to which we come\nbeneath the changing shapes of self and thing,\nyes, even this, at last, if we should call\nand dare to name it, we would find\nthe only voice that answers is our own.\nWe are once more defrauded by the mind.\n\nDefrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow.\nIt is the self becoming word, the word\nbecoming world. And with each part we play\nwe add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.\nWho knows but one day we shall find,\nhidden in the prism at the rainbow’s foot,\nthe square root of the eccentric absolute,\nand the concentric absolute to come.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThe thousand eyes, the Argus ‘I’s’ of love,\nof these it was, in verse, that Li Po wove\nthe magic cloak for his last going forth,\ninto the Gorge for his adventure north.\nWhat is not seen or said? The cloak of words\nloves all, says all, sends back the word\nwhether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird\n“that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,”\nor “from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds,\nnine turns for every hundred steps it winds,\nup the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.”\n‘Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff.\nThe cataract roars downward. Boulders fall\nSplitting the echoes from the mountain wall.\nNo voice, save when the nameless birds complain,\nin stunted trees, female echoing male;\nor, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo’s cry,\npiercing the traveller’s heart. Wayfarer from afar,\nwhy are you here? what brings you here? why here?’\n\n\n# VII.\n\nWhy here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough\nscrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind\nsculptures the wall of fog that slides\nseaward, over the Gulf Stream.\n\n The rat\ncomes through the wainscot, brings to his larder\nthe twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep\nlights for a moment into dream, the eyes\nturn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,\no and the music, too, of landscape lost.\nAnd yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave\ncressets of pampas, and the kingfisher\nbinds all that gold with blue.\n\n Why here? why here?\nWhy does the dream keep only this, just this C?\nYes, as the poem or the music do?\n\nThe timelessness of time takes form in rhyme:\nthe lotus and the locust tree rehearse\na four-form song, the quatrain of the year:\nnot in the clock’s chime only do we hear\nthe passing of the Now into the past,\nthe passing into future of the Now:\nhut in the alteration of the bough\ntime becomes visible, becomes audible,\nbecomes the poem and the music too:\ntime becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme.\nThus, in the Court of Aloes, Lady Yang\ncalled the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden,\ncalled for Li Po, in order that the spring,\ntree-peony spring, might so be made immortal.\nLi Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush,\nbut washed his face among the lilies first,\nthen wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow:\nwhich Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played,\nmoving quick fingers on a flute of jade.\nWho will forget that afternoon? Still, still,\nthe singer holds his phrase, the rising moon\nremains unrisen. Even the fountain’s falling blade\nhangs in the air unbroken, and says: Wait!\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nText into text, text out of text. Pretext\nfor scholars or for scholiasts. The living word\nsprings from the dying, as leaves in spring\nspring from dead leaves, our birth from death.\nAnd all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill\nbecomes its name for us, and yet is still\nunnamed, unnamable, a book of trees\nbefore it was a book for men or sheep,\nbefore it was a book for words. Words, words,\nfor it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,\nand yellow where the birches have not shed,\nwhere, in another week, the rocks will show.\nAnd in this marriage of text and thing how can we know\nwhere most the meaning lies? We climb the hill\nthrough bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb\npast poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay\nscaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say\nthat it is only these, through these, we climb,\nor through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme?\nChang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown,\nneeded to put but his three cupfuls down\nto tip his brush with lightning. On the scroll,\nwreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the sky\nopened upon Forever. Which is which?\nThe poem? Or the peachtree in the ditch?\nOr is all one? Yes, all is text, the immortal text,\nSheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill,\nand we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,\ntransposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.\nThe man who sings. What is this man who sings?\nAnd finds this dedicated use for breath\nfor phrase and periphrase of praise between\nthe twin indignities of birth and death?\nLi Yung, the master of the epitaph,\nforgetting about meaning, who himself\nhad added “meaning” to the book of things,\nlies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,\nhis text, too, lost, forever lost …\n\n And yet, no,\ntext lost and poet lost, these only flow\ninto that other text that knows no year.\nThe peachtree in the poem is still here.\nThe song is in the peachtree and the ear.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nThe winds of doctrine blow both ways at once.\nThe wetted finger feels the wind each way,\npresaging plums from north, and snow from south.\nThe dust-wind whistles from the eastern sea\nto dry the nectarine and parch the mouth.\nThe west wind from the desert wreathes the rain\ntoo late to fill our wells, but soon enough,\nthe four-day rain that bears the leaves away.\nSong with the wind will change, but is still song\nand pierces to the rightness in the wrong\nor makes the wrong a rightness, a delight.\nWhere are the eager guests that yesterday\nthronged at the gate? Like leaves, they could not stay,\nthe winds of doctrine blew their minds away,\nand we shall have no loving-cup tonight.\nNo loving-cup: for not ourselves are here\nto entertain us in that outer year,\nwhere, so they say, we see the Greater Earth.\nThe winds of doctrine blow our minds away,\nand we are absent till another birth.\n\n\n# X.\n\nBeyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood,\nunder the four-day rain, gunshot is heard\nand with the falling leaf the falling bird\nflutters her crimson at the huntsman’s foot.\nLife looks down at death, death looks up at life,\nthe eyes exchange the secret under rain,\nrain all the way from heaven: and all three\nknow and are known, share and are shared, a silent\nmoment of union and communion.\nHave we come\nthis way before, and at some other time?\nIs it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come?\nWe know the eye of death, and in it too\nthe eye of god, that closes as in sleep,\ngiving its light, giving its life, away:\nclouding itself as consciousness from pain,\nclouding itself, and then, the shutter shut.\nAnd will this eye of god awake again?\nOr is this what he loses, loses once,\nbut always loses, and forever lost?\nIt is the always and unredeemable cost\nof his invention, his fatigue. The eye\ncloses, and no other takes its place.\nIt is the end of god, each time, each time.\n\nYet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies\nrattle, detach, and fall, each to his own\nperplexed and individual death, Lady Yang\ngone with the inkberry’s vermilion stalk,\nthe peony face behind a fan of frost,\nthe blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,\nbeyond recall by any alchemist\nor incantation from the Book of Change:\nunresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,\nthe fir cone of a thousand years ago:\nstill, in the loving, and the saying so,\nas when we name the hill, and, with the name,\nbestow an essence, and a meaning, too:\ndo we endow them with our lives?\nThey move\ninto another orbit: into a time\nnot theirs: and we become the bell to speak\nthis time: as we become new eyes\nwith which they see, the voice\nin which they find duration, short or long,\nthe chthonic and hermetic song.\nBeyond Sheepfold Hill,\ngunshot again, the bird flies forth to meet\npredestined death, to look with conscious sight\ninto the eye of light\nthe light unflinching that understands and loves.\nAnd Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nThe landscape and the language are the same.\nAnd we ourselves are language and are land,\ntogether grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand,\nand mind, all taking substance in a thought\nwrought out of mystery: birdflight and air\npredestined from the first to be a pair:\nas, in the atom, the living rhyme\ninvented her divisions, which in time,\nand in the terms of time, would make and break\nthe text, the texture, and then all remake.\nThis powerful mind that can by thinking take\nthe order of the world and all remake,\nwill it, for joy in breaking, break instead\nits own deep thought that thought itself be dead?\nAlready in our coil of rock and hand,\nhidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading,\nunder the waters, in the eyes of sand,\nwas that which in its time would understand.\nAlready in the Kingdom of the Dead\nthe scrolls were waiting for the names and dates\nand what would there irrevocably be said.\nThe brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love,\nthe praise was in the word. The ‘Book of Lives’\nlisted the name, Li Po, as an Immortal;\nand it was time to travel. Not, this year,\nnorth to the Damask City, or the Gorge,\nbut, by the phoenix borne, swift as the wind,\nto the Jade Palace Portal. There\nlook through the clouded to the clear\nand there watch evil like a brush-stroke disappear\nin the last perfect rhyme\nof the begin-all-end-all poem, time.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nNorthwest by north. The grasshopper weathervane\nbares to the moon his golden breastplate, swings\nin his predicted circle, gilded legs and wings\nbright with frost, predicting frost. The tide\nscales with moon-silver, floods the marsh, fulfils\nPayne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to lift\nthe fishing-boats against a jetty wall;\nand past them floods the plankton and the weed\nand limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crab\nwho sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed.\nThe hour is open as the mind is open.\nClosed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens\nto receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes\nto feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm\nour human inheritance of touch. The air tonight\nbrings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,\nborne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.\nOn that invisible wave we lift, we too,\nand drag at secret moorings,\nstirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.\nAnd they are here, Li Po and all the others,\nour fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf’s footstep\ntouches the grass: those who were lost at sea\nand those the innocents the too-soon dead:\n\n all mankind\nand all it ever knew is here in-gathered,\nheld in our hands, and in the wind\nbreathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.\nHow still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House\nhow still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,\nnow long since dead, but then how young,\nhow young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost\nlooked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard\nborne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:\nthe father within him, the mother within him, the self\ncoming to self through love of each for each.\nIn this small mute democracy of stones\nis it Abiel or Li Po who lies\nand lends us against death our speech?\nThey are the same, and it is both who teach.\nThe poets and the prophecies are ours:\nand these are with us as we turn, in turn,\nthe leaves of love that fill the Book of Change.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "like-an-old-tree-uprooted-by-the-wind": { - "title": "“Like an old tree uprooted by the wind …”", - "body": "Like an old tree uprooted by the wind\nAnd flung down cruelly\nWith roots bared to the sun and stars\nAnd limp leaves brought to earth--\nTorn from its house--\nSo do I seem to myself\nWhen you have left me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "many-things-perplex-me": { - "title": "“Many things perplex me …”", - "body": "Many things perplex me and leave me troubled,\nMany things are locked away in the white book of stars\nNever to be opened by me.\nThe starr’d leaves are silently turned,\nAnd the mooned leaves;\nAnd as they are turned, fall the shadows of life and death.\nPerplexed and troubled,\nI light a small light in a small room,\nThe lighted walls come closer to me,\nThe familiar pictures are clear.\nI sit in my favourite chair and turn in my mind\nThe tiny pages of my own life, whereon so little is written,\nAnd hear at the eastern window the pressure of a long wind, coming\nFrom I know not where.\nHow many times have I sat here,\nHow many times will I sit here again,\nThinking these same things over and over in solitude\nAs a child says over and over\nThe first word he has learned to say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "melody-in-a-restaurant": { - "title": "“Melody in a Restaurant”", - "body": "The cigarette smoke loops and slides above us,\nDipping and swirling as the waiter passes.\nYou strike a match and stare upon the flame.\nThe tiny firelight leaps in your eyes a moment\nAnd dies away as silently as it came.\n\nThis melody, you say, has certain voices--\nThey rise like nereids from a river, singing,\nLift white faces, and dive to darkness again.\nWherever you go you bear this river with you:\nA leaf falls, and it flows, and you have pain.\n\nSo says the tune to you--but what to me?\nWhat to the waiter, as he pours your coffee?\nThe violinist who suavely draws his bow?\nThat man, who folds his paper, overhears it.\nA thousand dreams revolve and fall and flow.\n\nSomeone there is who sees a virgin stepping\nDown marble stairs to a deep tomb of roses:\nAt the last moment she lifts remembering eyes.\nGreen leaves blow down; the place is checked with shadows;\nA long-drawn murmur of rain goes down the skies.\nAnd oaks are stripped and bare, and smoke with lightning;\nAnd clouds are blown and torn upon high forests;\nAnd the great sea shakes its walls.\nAnd then falls silence … And through long silence falls\nThis melody once more:\nDown endless stairs she goes, as once before.\n\nSo says the tune to him--but what to me?\nWhat are the worlds I see?\nWhat shapes fantastic, terrible dreams?\nI go my secret way, down secret alleys.\nMy errand is not so simple as it seems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "multitudes-turn-in-darkness": { - "title": "“Multitudes Turn in Darkness”", - "body": "The half-shut doors through which we heard that music\nAre softly closed. Horns mutter down to silence,\nThe stars wheel out, the night grows deep.\nDarkness settles upon us; a vague refrain\nDrowsily teases at the drowsy brain.\nIn numberless rooms we stretch ourselves and sleep.\n\nWhere have we been? What savage chaos of music\nWhirls in our dreams? We suddenly rise in darkness,\nOpen our eyes, cry out, and sleep once more.\nWe dream we are numberless sea-waves, languidly foaming\nA warm white moonlit shore;\n\nOr clouds blown windily over a sky at midnight,\nOr chords of music scattered in hurrying darkness,\nOr a singing sound of rain …\nWe open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness,\nAnd enter our dreams again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-love-i-have-betrayed-you": { - "title": "“My love, I have betrayed you …”", - "body": "My love, I have betrayed you seventy times\nIn this brief period since our hearts were met;\nAgainst your ghost contrived unnumbered crimes,\nAnd many times your image overset;\nForgot you, worshipped elsewhere, flung a flower\nTo meaner beauty, proved an infidel;\nShowing my heart not loyal beyond an hour,\nForswearing Paradise, and invoking Hell.\nAlas! What chains of thought can thinking bind?\nIt is in thought alone that I have faltered;\nIt is my faithless, vain, quicksilver mind,\nBy every chance and change too lightly altered.\nCan we absolve, from this all-staining sin,\nThe angelic love who sits, ashamed, within?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "nocturne-of-remembered-spring": { - "title": "“Nocturne of Remembered Spring”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMoonlight silvers the tops of trees,\nMoonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall\nAnd through the evening fall,\nClearly, as if through enchanted seas,\nFootsteps passing, an infinite distance away,\nIn another world and another day.\nMoonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,\nMoonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,\nAnd the boughs of elms grow green and cold,\nOur footsteps echo on gleaming stones,\nThe leaves are stirred to a jargon of muted tones.\nThis is the night we have kept, you say:\nThis is the moonlit night that will never die.\nThrough the grey streets our memories retain\nLet us go back again.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMist goes up from the river to dim the stars,\nThe river is black and cold; so let us dance\nTo flare of horns, and clang of cymbals and drums;\nAnd strew the glimmering floor with roses,\nAnd remember, while the rich music yawns and closes,\nWith a luxury of pain, how silence comes.\nYes, we loved each other, long ago;\nWe moved like wind to a music’s ebb and flow.\nAt a phrase from violins you closed your eyes,\nAnd smiled, and let me lead you how young we were!\nYour hair, upon that music, seemed to stir.\nLet us return there, let us return, you and I;\nThrough changeless streets our memories retain\nLet us go back again.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMist goes up from the rain steeped earth, and clings\nGhostly with lamplight among drenched maple trees.\nWe walk in silence and see how the lamplight flings\nFans of shadow upon it the music’s mournful pleas\nDie out behind us, the door is closed at last,\nA net of silver silence is softly cast\nOver our thought slowly we walk,\nQuietly with delicious pause, we talk,\nOf foolish trivial things; of life and death,\nTime, and forgetfulness, and dust and truth;\nLilacs and youth.\nYou laugh, I hear the after taken breath,\nYou darken your eyes and turn away your head\nAt something I have said\nSome intuition that flew too deep,\nAnd struck a plageant chord.\nTonight, tonight you will remember it as you fall asleep,\nYour dream will suddenly blossom with sharp delight,\nGoodnight! You say.\nThe leaves of the lilac dip and sway;\nThe purple spikes of bloom\nNod their sweetness upon us, lift again,\nYour white face turns, I am caught with pain\nAnd silence descends, and dripping of dew from eaves,\nAnd jeweled points of leaves.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI walk in a pleasure of sorrow along the street\nAnd try to remember you; slow drops patter;\nWater upon the lilacs has made them sweet;\nI brush them with my sleeve, the cool drops scatter;\nAnd suddenly I laugh and stand and listen\nAs if another had laughed a gust\nRustles the leaves, the wet spikes glisten;\nAnd it seems as though it were you who had shaken the bough,\nAnd spilled the fragrance I pursue your face again,\nIt grows more vague and lovely, it eludes me now.\nI remember that you are gone, and drown in pain.\nSomething there was I said to you I recall,\nSomething just as the music seemed to fall\nThat made you laugh, and burns me still with pleasure.\nWhat were those words the words like dripping fire?\nI remember them now, and in sweet leisure\nRehearse the scene, more exquisite than before,\nAnd you more beautiful, and I more wise.\nLilacs and spring, and night, and your clear eyes,\nAnd you, in white, by the darkness of a door:\nThese things, like voices weaving to richest music,\nFlow and fall in the cool night of my mind,\nI pursue your ghost among green leaves that are ghostly,\nI pursue you, but cannot find.\nAnd suddenly, with a pang that is sweetest of all,\nI become aware that I cannot remember you;\nThe ghost I knew\nHas silently plunged in shadows, shadows that stream and fall.\n\n\n# V.\n\nLet us go in and dance once more\nOn the dream’s glimmering floor,\nBeneath the balcony festooned with roses.\nLet us go in and dance once more.\nThe door behind us closes\nAgainst an evening purple with stars and mist.\nLet us go in and keep our tryst\nWith music and white roses, and spin around\nIn swirls of sound.\nDo you foresee me, married and grown old?\nAnd you, who smile about you at this room,\nIs it foretold\nThat you must step from tumult into gloom,\nForget me, love another?\nNo, you are Cleopatra, fiercely young,\nLaughing upon the topmost stair of night;\nRoses upon the desert must be flung;\nAbove us, light by light,\nWeaves the delirious darkness, petal fall,\nAnd music breaks in waves on the pillared wall;\nAnd you are Cleopatra, and do not care.\nAnd so, in memory, you will always be\nYoung and foolish, a thing of dream and mist;\nAnd so, perhaps when all is disillusioned,\nAnd eternal spring returns once more,\nBringing a ghost of lovelier springs remembered,\nYou will remember me.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nYet when we meet we seem in silence to say,\nPretending serene forgetfulness of our youth,\n“Do you remember but then why should you remember!\nDo you remember a certain day,\nOr evening rather, spring evening long ago,\nWe talked of death, and love, and time, and truth,\nAnd said such wise things, things that amused us so\nHow foolish we were, who thought ourselves so wise!”\nAnd then we laugh, with shadows in our eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "prelude": { - "title": "“Prelude”", - "body": "As evening falls,\nAnd the yellow lights leap one by one\nAlong high walls\nAnd along black streets that glisten as if with rain,\nThe muted city seems\nLike one in a restless sleep who lies and dreams\nOf vague desires, vague memories, and half-forgotten pain …\nAlong dark veins like lights the quick dreams run,\nFlash, are extinguished, flash again,\nTo mingle and glow at last in the enormous brain\nAnd die away …\nAs evening falls,\nA dream dissolves these insubstantial walls,\nA myriad secretly gliding lights lie bare.\nThe lover rises, the harlot combs her hair,\nThe dead man’s face grows blue in the dizzy lamplight,\nThe watchman climbs the stair …\nThe bank-defaulter leers at a chaos of figures\nAnd runs among them and is beaten down;\nThe sick man coughs, and hears the chisels ringing;\nThe tired clown\nSees the enormous crowd--a million faces\nMotionless in their places,\nReady to laugh, and seize, and crush, and tear …\nThe dancer smooths her hair,\nLaces her golden slippers and runs through the door\nTo dance once more,\nHearing swift music like an enchantment rise,\nFeeling the praise of a thousand eyes.\n\nAs darkness falls,\nThe walls grow luminous and warm, the walls\nTremble and glow with the lives within them moving,\nMoving like music, secret and rich and warm.\nHow shall we live tonight, where shall we turn?\nTo what new light or darkness yearn?\nA thousand winding stairs lead down before us;\nAnd one by one in myriads we descend\nBy lamp-lit flowered walls, long balustrades,\nThrough half-lit halls which reach no end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "red-is-the-color-of-blood": { - "title": "“Red is the Color of Blood”", - "body": "Red is the color of blood, and I will seek it:\nI have sought it in the grass.\nIt is the color of steep sun seen through eyelids.\n\nIt is hidden under the suave flesh of women--\nFlows there, quietly flows.\nIt mounts from the heart to the temples, the singing mouth--\nAs cold sap climbs to the rose.\nI am confused in webs and knots of scarlet\nSpun from the darkness;\nOr shuttled from the mouths of thirsty spiders.\n\nMadness for red! I devour the leaves of autumn.\nI tire of the green of the world.\nI am myself a mouth for blood …\n\nHere, in the golden haze of the late slant sun,\nLet us walk, with the light in our eyes,\nTo a single bench from the outset predetermined.\nLook: there are seagulls in these city skies,\nKindled against the blue.\nBut I do not think of the seagulls, I think of you.\n\nYour eyes, with the late sun in them,\nAre like blue pools dazzled with yellow petals.\nThis pale green suits them well.\n\nHere is your finger, with an emerald on it:\nThe one I gave you. I say these things politely--\nBut what I think beneath them, who can tell?\n\nFor I think of you, crumpled against a whiteness;\nFlayed and torn, with a dulled face.\nI think of you, writing, a thing of scarlet,\nAnd myself, rising red from that embrace.\n\nNovember sun is sunlight poured through honey:\nOld things, in such a light, grow subtle and fine.\nBare oaks are like still fire.\nTalk to me: now we drink the evening’s wine.\nLook, how our shadows creep along the grave!--\nAnd this way, how the gravel begins to shine!\n\nThis is the time of day for recollections,\nFor sentimental regrets, oblique allusions,\nRose-leaves, shrivelled in a musty jar.\nScatter them to the wind! There are tempests coming.\nIt is dark, with a windy star.\n\nIf human mouths were really roses, my dear,--\n(Why must we link things so?--)\nI would tear yours petal by petal with slow murder.\nI would pluck the stamens, the pistils,\nThe gold and the green,--\nSpreading the subtle sweetness that was your breath\nOn a cold wave of death …\n\nNow let us walk back, slowly, as we came.\nWe will light the room with candles; they may shine\nLike rows of yellow eyes.\nYour hair is like spun fire, by candle-flame.\nYou smile at me--say nothing. You are wise.\n\nFor I think of you, flung down brutal darkness;\nCrushed and red, with pale face.\nI think of you, with your hair disordered and dripping.\nAnd myself, rising red from that embrace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "_Imprimis:_ I forgot all day your face,\nEyes, eyebrows, gentle mouth, and cheek--all faded;\nNor could I in the mind’s deep forest trace\nThe haunted path whereby that dream evaded.\n_Secundus:_ I forgot all night your laughter,\nIn vain evoked it with strong charms of thought;\nGone, like a cry that leaves no image after,\nPhoenix of sound which no hand ever caught.\n_Tertius:_ my wanton mind and heart, together,\nForgetting you, you absent, have delighted\nFor no more cause than bright or stormy weather,\nSinging for joy; in truth, I am benighted.\nYet, when I home once more from breach of faith,\nLove there awaits me with a joy like death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "Absolute zero: the locust sings:\nsummer’s caught in eternity’s rings:\nthe rock explodes, the planet dies,\nwe shovel up our verities.\n\nThe razor rasps across the face\nand in the glass our fleeting race\nlit by infinity’s lightning wink\nunder the thunder tries to think.\n\nIn this frail gourd the granite pours\nthe timeless howls like all outdoors\nthe sensuous moment builds a wall\nopen as wind, no wall at all:\n\nwhile still obedient to valves and knobs\nthe vascular jukebox throbs and sobs\nexpounding hope propounding yearning\nproposing love, but never learning\n\nor only learning at zero’s gate\nlike summer’s locust the final hate\nformless ice on a formless plain\nthat was and is and comes again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-things": { - "title": "“The Things”", - "body": "The house in Broad Street, red brick, with nine rooms\nthe weedgrown graveyard with its rows of tombs\nthe jail from which imprisoned faces grinned\nat stiff palmettos flashing in the wind\n\nthe engine-house, with engines, and a tank\nin which young alligators swam and stank,\nthe bell-tower, of red iron, where the bell\ngonged of the fires in a tone from hell\n\nmagnolia trees with whitehot torch of bud\nthe yellow river between banks of mud\nthe tall striped lighthouse like a barber’s pole\nsnake in the bog and locust in the hole\n\nworn cigarette cards, of white battleships,\nor flags, or chorus girls with scarlet lips,\njackstones of copper, peach tree in the yard\nsplashing ripe peaches on an earth baked hard\n\nchildren beneath the arc-light in a romp\nwith Run sheep Run, and rice-birds in the swamp,\nthe organ-grinder’s monkey, dancing bears,\nokras in baskets, Psyche on the stairs--\n\nand then the north star nearer, and the snow\nsilent between the now and long ago\ntime like a train that roared from place to place\nnew crowds, new faces, for a single face\n\nno longer then the chinaberry tree\nnor the dark mockingbird to sing his glee\nnor prawns nor catfish; icicles instead\nand Indian-pipes, and cider in the shed\n\narbutus under pinewoods in the spring\nand death remembered as a tropic thing\nwith picture postcard angels to upraise it\nand trumpet vines and hummingbirds to phrase it\n\nthen wisdom come, and Shakspere’s voice far off,\nto be or not, upon the teacher’s cough,\nthe latent heat of melting ice, the brief\nhypotenuse from ecstasy to grief\n\namo amas, and then the cras amet,\nthe new-found eyes no slumber could forget,\nVivien, the affliction of the senses,\nand conjugation of historic tenses\n\nand Shakspere nearer come, and louder heard,\nand the disparateness of flesh and word,\ntime growing swifter, and the pendulums\nin shorter savage arcs that beat like drums--\n\nhands held, relinquished, faces come and gone,\nkissed and forgotten, and become but one,\nold shoes worn out, and new ones bought, the gloves\nsoiled, and so lost in limbo, like the loves--\n\nthen Shakspere in the heart, the instant speech\nparting the conscious terrors each from each--\nwisdom’s dishevelment, the purpose lamed,\nand purposeless the footsteps eastward aimed\n\nthe bloodstream always slower, while the clock\nfollowed the tired heart with louder knock,\nfatigue upon the eye, the tardy springs\ninviting to no longer longed-for things--\n\nthe birdsong nearer now than Shakspere’s voice,\nwhispers of comfort--Death is near, rejoice!--\nremember now the red house with nine rooms\nthe graveyard with its trumpetvines and tombs--\n\nplay jackstones now and let your jackstones be\nthe stars that make Orion’s galaxy\nso to deceive yourself until you move\ninto that house whose tenants do not love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "think-love": { - "title": "“Think, Love”", - "body": "Think, love, how when a starry night of frost\nIs ended, and the small pale winter sun\nShines on the garden trellis, ice-embossed,\nAnd the stiff frozen flower-stalks, every one;\nAnd turns their fine embroideries of ice\nInto a loosening silver, skein by skein,\nWarming cold leaves and stones, till, in a trice,\nThe garden smiles, and breathes, and lives again;\nAnd further think, how the poor frozen snail\nCreeps out with trembling horn to feel that heat,\nAnd thaws the snowy mildew from his mail,\nAnd stretches with all his length from his retreat:\nWill he not praise, with his whole heart, the sun?\nThen think, at last, I too am such an one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "this-girl-gave-her-heart-to-me": { - "title": "“This girl gave her heart to me …”", - "body": "This girl gave her heart to me,\nAnd this, and this.\nThis one looked at me as if she loved me,\nAnd silently walked away.\nThis one I saw once and loved, and never saw her again.\nShall I count them for you upon my fingers?\nOr like a priest solemnly sliding beads?\nOr pretend they are roses, pale pink, yellow, and white,\nAnd arrange them for you in a wide bowl\nTo be set in sunlight?\nSee how nicely it sounds as I count them for you--\n“This girl gave her heart to me\nAnd this, and this …!”\nAnd nevertheless, my heart breaks when I think of them,\nWhen I think their names,\nAnd how, like leaves, they have changed and blown\nAnd will lie, at last, forgotten,\nUnder the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "what-musics-devious-voice-can-say": { - "title": "“What Music’s Devious Voice Can Say”", - "body": "What music’s devious voice can say, beguiling\nThe flattered spirit, your voice can richlier say,\nMoving the happy creature to such smiling\nAs the young sun brings flowers at break of day.\nNor can the southwest wind, who turns green boughs,\nAnd sings in watery reeds, outvie your voice--\nNo, though the whole wide world of birds he rouse,\nAnd boughs and birds, together, all rejoice.\nNot water’s self, shy singer among stones,\nVowelling softly of his secret love,\nCan murmur to green roots such undertones,\nNor with low laughter have such power to move.\nNo rival--none. There is no help for us.\nBe it confessed--I am idolatrous.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "what-lunacy-is-this": { - "title": "“What lunacy is this …”", - "body": "What lunacy is this, that night-long tries,\nWith seven or seventy or ten thousand words,\nTo compass God in heaven, the loved one’s eyes?\nAlas! were the whole language changed to birds,\nAnd I Prince Prospero to set them free,\nThough I should hide all heaven with beating wings,\nStill the essential would escape, still be\nUnspoken, dumb, like all essential things.\nLove, let me be the beginning world, and grow\nTo Time from Timelessness, and out of Time\nCreate magnificent Chaos, and there sow\nThe immortal stars, and teach those stars to rhyme--\nEven so, alas, I could in no sense move\nFrom the begin-all-end-all phrase, “I love.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-i-was-a-boy": { - "title": "“When I was a boy …”", - "body": "When I was a boy, and saw bright rows of icicles\nIn many lengths along a wall\nI was dissappointed to find\nThat I could not play music upon them:\nI ran my hand lightly across them\nAnd they fell, tinkling.\nI tell you this, young man, so that your expectations of life\nWill not be too great.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "when-you-are-not-surprised": { - "title": "“When You Are Not Surprised”", - "body": "When you are not surprised, not surprised,\nnor leap in imagination from sunlight into shadow\nor from shadow into sunlight\nsuiting the color of fright or delight\nto the bewildering circumstance\nwhen you are no longer surprised\nby the quiet or fury of daybreak\nthe stormy uprush of the sun’s rage\nover the edges of torn trees\ntorrents of living and dying flung\nupward and outward inward and downward to space\nor else\npeace peace peace peace\nthe wood-thrush speaking his holy holy\nfar hidden in the forest of the mind\nwhile slowly\nthe limbs of light unwind\nand the world’s surface dreams again of night\nas the center dreams of light\nwhen you are not surprised\nby breath and breath and breath\nthe first unconscious morning breath\nthe tap of the bird’s beak on the pane\nand do not cry out come again\nblest blest that you are come again\no light o sound o voice of bird o light\nand memory too o memory blest\nand curst with the debts of yesterday\nthat would not stay, or stay\n\nwhen you are not surprised\nby death and death and death\ndeath of the bee in the daffodil\ndeath of color in the child’s cheek\non the young mother’s breast\ndeath of sense of touch of sight\ndeath of delight\nand the inward death the inward turning night\nwhen the heart hardens itself with hate and indifference\nfor hated self and beloved not-self\nwhen you are not surprised\nby wheel’s turn or turn of season\nthe winged and orbed chariot tilt of time\nthe halcyon pause, the blue caesura of spring\nand solar rhyme\nwoven into the divinely remembered nest\nby the dark-eyed love in the oriole’s breast\nand the tides of space that ring the heart\nwhile still, while still, the wave of the invisible world\nbreaks into consciousness in the mind of god\nthen welcome death and be by death benignly welcomed\nand join again in the ceaseless know-nothing\nfrom which you awoke to the first surprise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-day-opens-with-the-brown-light-of-snowfall": { - "title": "“The day opens with the brown light of snowfall …”", - "body": "The day opens with the brown light of snowfall\nAnd past the window snowflakes fall and fall.\nI sit in my chair all day and work and work\nMeasuring words against each other.\nI open the piano and play a tune\nBut find it does not say what I feel,\nI grow tired of measuring words against each other,\nI grow tired of these four walls,\nAnd I think of you, who write me that you have just had a daughter\nAnd named her after your first sweetheart,\nAnd you, who break your heart, far away,\nIn the confusion and savagery of a long war,\nAnd you who, worn by the bitterness of winter,\nWill soon go south.\nThe snowflakes fall almost straight in the brown light\nPast my window,\nAnd a sparrow finds refuge on my window-ledge.\nThis alone comes to me out of the world outside\nAs I measure word with word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-girl-in-the-room-beneath": { - "title": "“The girl in the room beneath …”", - "body": "The girl in the room beneath\nBefore going to bed\nStrums on a mandolin\nThe three simple tunes she knows.\nHow inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels!\nWhen she has finished them several times\nShe thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails\nAnd smiles, and thinks happily of many things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "bella-akhmadulina": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Bella Akhmadulina", - "birth": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2010 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Akhmadulina", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "along-the-hard-crust-of-the-deep-snows": { - "title": "“Along the Hard Crust of the Deep Snows”", - "body": "Just because the girl Nastas’ya\nran out barefoot in the rain\nto provide another’s pleasure\nvodka for the aged man\n\nshe deserved a lovely god\nin a palace drenched with sun\nelegant and just and good\nin a robe of old gold spun.\n\nBut to him where drunkards snore\nwhere all round is poverty\nthe two blackened icons bore\nlittle similarity.\n\nJust for this the chicory flowered\nsuddenly the pearls were splendid:\nlike a church choir then was heard\nthe plain name of the intended.\n\nHe appeared above the fencing\noffered her a yellow medal:\nthis way he was quite convincing\nas a god in youthful fettle.\n\nAnd her heart sang holy holy\nfor the dulcet light divine\nfor the blue shirt, for the jolly\nconcertina, for the wine.\n\nAnd he lifted off her muslin\nkerchief and (deceitful beast)\nsetting all the hayloft rustling\ncrumpled up her feeble breast …\n\nAnd Nastas’ya combed her hair\ntook the kerchief by its corners\nand Nastas’ya in despair\nsang with gestures like a mourner’s:\n\n“Oh, alas, you have undone me\nyou have wrought me many woes\nWhy oh why did you last Monday\noffer me a white white rose!\n\nWillow, willow, do not wither\nwait, oh make me not bereft.\nAll my faith has gone--ah, whither?\nOnly this small cross is left.”\n\nThrough the sunlight laughed the rain\nand the god laughed at the girl.\nNothing happened. All was vain.\nAnd the god was not at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Keith Bosley, Dimitry Pospielovsky & Janis Sapiets", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "Here’re the girls--they wish to love,\nHere’re the boys--they wish to wander,\nAll changes in that April just unite,\nConsolidate the people with each other.\n\nO, the new month, the new such Lord,\nYou seek in such a way new favour,\nYou may be generous in your words,\nLetting amnesty to calendar.\n\nYes, you’ll free rivers from the shackles,\nWill set the distant quiet close,\nA crazy will get blooming, an oldman\nWill get the healing one time, certainly.\n\nMe only won’t have your mercy either,\nAnd I’m not greedy of that luck.\nYou ask, but I’m late with answer,\nI switch off light, my room turns dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "fifteen-boys": { - "title": "“Fifteen Boys”", - "body": "Fifteen boys--maybe more\nmaybe less than fifteen\nwith frightened voices\nsaid to me:\n“Let’s go to the cinema or the museum of Fine arts.”\nI answered them more or less as follows:\n“I haven’t got the time.”\nFifteen boys gave me snowdrops\nFifteen boys with broken voices said to me:\n“I’ll never stop loving you.”\nI answered them more or less as follows:\n“We’ll see.”\n\nFifteen boys live quietly now.\nThey’ve done their hard duty\nof snowdrops, despair and letters.\nThey’ve got girls--\nsome prettier than me\nsome less pretty.\nFifteen boys brashly, sometimes smugly\ngreet me when they meet me\ngreet in me when they meet me\ntheir deliverance, normal sleep and food …\n\nYou’re wasting your time, latest boy.\nI’ll put your snowdrops in a tumbler\nand their sturdy stems will grow\nsilver bubbles …\nBut never mind, you’ll stop loving me too\nand after conquering yourself you’ll talk down to me\nas if you’d conquered me\nand I’ll walk on down the street, on down the street.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Keith Bosley, Dimitry Pospielovsky & Janis Sapiets", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-hospital-christmas-tree": { - "title": "“The Hospital Christmas Tree”", - "body": "They have set a Christmas tree up in a hospital ward.\nIt clearly feels out of place in a cloister of suffering.\nThe moon over Leningrad comes to my window ledge\nbut does not stay long--many windows, much waiting.\n\nThe moon moves on to a spry, independent old woman;\noutside you can hear the sussurous sound of her trying\nto hide from her neighbors and from her own shallow sleep\nher breaking the norm--the blunder of illegal crying.\n\nAll the patients are worse; still, it is a Christmas Eve.\nTomorrow will some get news; some gifts; some, calls.\nLife and death remain neighbors: the stretcher is always loaded;\nthrough the long night the elevator squeaks as it falls.\n\nRejoice eternally, Virgin! You bore the Child at night.\nThere is no other reason for hope, but that matters so much,\nis so huge, so eternally endless, that it\nconsoles the unknown, underground anchorite.\n\nEven here in the ward where the tree makes some people cry\n(did not want it; a nurse, in fact, ordered it brought)\nthe listening heart beats, and you hear people say,\n“Hey, look! The Star of Bethlehem’s in the sky!”\n\nThe only sure facts are the cattle’s lament in the shred,\nthe Wise Men’s haste, the inexperienced mother’s elbow\nmarking The Child with a miraculous spot on His brow.\nAll the rest is absurd, an age-old but fugitive lie.\n\nWhat matters more or brings more joy to sick flesh\nwasted by work and by war than so simple a scene?\nBut they reproach you for drinking or some other fault\nand stuff your brain with the bones of a system picked clean.\n\nI watched the day begin breaking some time past nine;\nit was a drop, a black light shining absurdly\nonto the window. People dream that they heard\na little toy bell-ringer ringing the bell on the tree.\n\nThe day as it downed was week, not much of a sight.\nThe light was paler than pink, pastel, not harsh,\nthe way an amethyst shimmers on a young girl’s neck.\nAll looked down, once they had seen the sad, humble cross.\n\nAnd when they arose, reluctantly opening their eyes,\na trolley flew by through the snowstorm, gold trim inside it.\nThey crowded the window like children: “Hey, look at that car!\nLike a perch that’s gotten away, all speckled with fire!”\n\nThey sat down for breakfast; they argued, got tired, lay down.\nThe view from the window was such that Leningrad’s secrets\nand splendors brought tears to my eyes, filled me with love.\n“Isn’t there something you want?” “No, there’s nothing.”\n\nI have long been accused of making frivolous things.\nFrivolity maker, I look at those here around me:\nO Mother of God, have mercy! And beg your Son, too.\nOn the day of His birth, pray and weep for us each.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elaine Feinstein", - "date": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "incantation": { - "title": "“Incantation”", - "body": "Don’t weep for me--I’ll live on\nas a happy beggar, a convict with goodwill,\nas a southerner frozen in the north,\nas a consumptive and ill-tempered Petershurger\nin the malarial south I’ll live on.\n\nDon’t weep for me--I’ll live on\nas that lame girl who came out on the church porch,\nas that drunkard slumped on the tablecloth,\nas that one who paints the Mother of God,\nas a wretched icon dauber I’ll live on.\n\nDon’t weep for me--I’ll live on\nas that young girl taught to read and write,\nwho in the blurred future light\n(her bangs red as mine) like a fool\nwill know my poems. I’ll live on.\n\nDon’t weep for me--I’ll live on\nmore merciful than a sister of mercy\nin the preslaughter recklessness of war,\nand tinder the Most Blessed Marina’s star\nsomehow, nonetheless, I’ll live on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Albert C. Todd", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "anna-akhmatova": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anna Akhmatova", - "birth": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Akhmatova", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 115 - }, - "poems": { - "all-is-despoiled-abandoned-sold": { - "title": "“All is despoiled, abandoned, sold …”", - "body": "All is despoiled, abandoned, sold;\nDeath’s wing has swept the sky of color;\nAll’s eaten by a hungry dolor.\nWhat is this light which we behold?\n\nOdors of cherry blossom sigh\nFrom the rumored forest beyond the town.\nAt night, new constellations crown\nThe high, clear heavens of July.\n\nCloser it comes, and closer still,\nTo houses ruinous and blind:\nSome marvelous thing still undivined.\nSome fiat of the century’s will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard Wilbur", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "and-once-more-the-autumn-blasts-like-tamerlane": { - "title": "“And once more the autumn blasts like Tamerlane …”", - "body": "And once more the autumn blasts like Tamerlane,\nThere is silence in the streets of Arbat.\nBeyond the little station or beyond the haze\nThe impassable road is dark.\n\nSo here it is, the latest one! And the rage\nSubsides. It’s as if the world had gone deaf …\nA mighty, evangelical old age\nAnd that most bitter Gethsemane sigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "and-the-whole-town-is-encased-in-ice": { - "title": "“And the whole town is encased in ice …”", - "body": "And the whole town is encased in ice.\nTrees, walls, snow, as if under glass.\nTimidly, I walk on crystals.\nGaily painted sleds skid.\nAnd over the Peter of Voronezh--crows,\nPoplar trees, and the dome, light green,\nFaded, dulled, in sunny haze,\nAnd the battle of Kulikovo blows from the slopes\nOf the mighty, victorious land.\nAnd the poplars, like cups clashed together,\nRoar over us, stronger and stronger,\nAs if our joy were toasted by\n\nA thousand guests at a wedding feast.\nBut in the room of the poet in disgrace,\nFear and the Muse keep watch by turns.\nAnd the night comes on\nThat knows no dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1936, - "month": "march", - "day": 4 - }, - "location": "Voronezh", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 4 - } - } - }, - "as-a-white-stone-in-the-wells-cool-deepness": { - "title": "“As a white stone in the well’s cool deepness …”", - "body": "As a white stone in the well’s cool deepness,\nThere lays in me one wonderful remembrance.\nI am not able and don’t want to miss this:\nIt is my torture and my utter gladness.\n\nI think, that he whose look will be directed\nInto my eyes, at once will see it whole.\nHe will become more thoughtful and dejected\nThan someone, hearing a story of a dole.\n\nI knew: the gods turned once, in their madness,\nMen into things, not killing humane senses.\nYou’ve been turned in to my reminiscences\nTo make eternal the unearthly sadness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1916, - "month": "june", - "day": 5 - }, - "location": "Slepnevo", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 5 - } - } - }, - "as-if-on-the-rim-of-a-cloud": { - "title": "“As if on the rim of a cloud …”", - "body": "As if on the rim of a cloud,\nI remember your words,\n\nAnd because of my words to you,\nNight became brighter than day.\n\nThus, torn from the earth,\nWe rose up, like stars.\n\nThere was neither despair nor shame,\nNot now, not afterward, not at the time.\n\nBut in real life, right now,\nYou hear how I am calling you.\n\nAnd that door that you half opened,\nI don’t have the strength to slam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1945, - "month": "november", - "day": 26 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 26 - } - } - }, - "behind-the-lake-the-moons-not-stirred": { - "title": "“Behind the lake the moon’s not stirred …”", - "body": "Behind the lake the moon’s not stirred\nAnd seems to be a window through\nInto a silent, well-lit house,\nWhere something unpleasant has occurred.\n\nHas the master been brought home dead,\nThe mistress run off with a lover,\nOr has a little girl gone missing,\nAnd her shoes found by the creek-bed…\n\nWe can’t see. But feel some awful thing,\nAnd we don’t want to talk.\nDoleful, the cry of eagle-owls, and hot\nIn the garden the wind is blustering.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "bitter-woman-you-speak-of-things-to-come": { - "title": "“Bitter woman, you speak of things to come …”", - "body": "Bitter woman,\nyou speak of things to come;\nyour arms hang limp,\na lock of hair sticks to your bloodless brow.\nYou smile, and--o, those rosy lips\nenticed many a bee for honeyed sips\nand dazzled many a butterfly!\n\nYour moon-eyes shine,\nyour gaze is bent on things afar.\nAnd is your gentle chiding\nfor a man now dead?\nOr do you grant pardon to the living for\nyour weariness\nand for the shame upon your head?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Graham J. Harrison", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "august", - "day": 27 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "bury-me-bury-me-wind": { - "title": "“Bury me, bury me, wind! …”", - "body": "Bury me, bury me, wind!\nNone of my kin had arrived,\nAbove me, the evening dimmed\nAnd the earth indistinctly sighed.\n\nLike you, I was free and of course,\nI couldn’t resist life’s charms\nAnd now, wind, you see my corpse,\nWith no one to fold my arms.\n\nLet this black wound recede\nAs the shroud of darkness spreads,\nAnd command azure mist to read\nPsalms up above my head.\n\nTo ease me, alone, on the brink\nOf sleep for the final time,\nMake the sedges rustle of spring,\nOf the spring that used to be mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1909, - "month": "december" - }, - "location": "Kiev", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "but-i-warn-you-i-am-living-for-the-last-time": { - "title": "“But I warn you, I am living for the last time …”", - "body": "But I warn you,\nI am living for the last time.\nNot as a swallow, not as a maple,\nNot as a reed nor as a star,\nNot as water from a spring,\nNot as bells in a tower--\nShall I return to trouble you\nNor visit other people’s dreams\nWith lamentation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1940, - "month": "november", - "day": 7 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 7 - } - } - }, - "cleopatra": { - "title": "“Cleopatra”", - "body": "She had already kissed Antony’s dead lips,\nAnd on her knees before Augustus had poured out her tears …\nAnd the servants betrayed her. Victorious trumpets blare\nUnder the Roman eagle, and the mist of evening drifts.\n\nThen enters the last captive of her beauty,\nTall and grave, and he whispers in embarrassment:\n“You--like a slave … will be led before him in the triumph …”\nBut the swan’s neck remains peacefully inclined.\n\nAnd tomorrow they’ll put the children in chains. Oh, how little remains\nFor her to do on earth--joke a little with this boy\nAnd, as if in a valedictory gesture of compassion,\nPlace the black viper on her dusky breast with an indifferent hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1940 - } - } - }, - "crucifix": { - "title": "“Crucifix”", - "body": "_Do not cry about me, Mother, seeing me in the grave._\n\nThis greatist hour was hallowed and thandered\nBy angel’s choirs; fire melted sky.\nHe asked his Father: “Why am I abandoned …?”\nAnd told his Mother: “Mother, do not cry …”\n\nMagdalena struggled, cried and moaned.\nPiter sank into the stone trance …\nOnly there, where Mother stood alone,\nNone has dared cast a single glance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Tanya Karshtedt", - "date": { - "year": 1940, - "circa": true - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "delightful-after-all-the-wind-and-frost": { - "title": "“Delightful, after all the wind and frost …”", - "body": "Delightful, after all the wind and frost\nto warm myself beside the fire;\nbut there I failed to guard my heart\nand someone stole it in desire.\n\nThe New Year celebrations linger,\nthe roses’ stems are soft and moist;\nbut in my breast no longer sings\nthe whirring of dragonflies’ wings.\n\nO, it’s not hard to guess the thief:\nI knew him straightway by his eyes.\nMy fear is that he’ll come back soon\nand return his purloined prize.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Graham J. Harrison", - "date": { - "year": 1914, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "do-not-speak-of-the-north-and-its-sadness": { - "title": "“Do not speak of the north and its sadness …”", - "body": "Do not speak of the north and its sadness\nAnd a dread and malevolent fate.\nSurely this is a festive occasion:\nYou and I, we are parting today.\nNever mind that the moon will not haunt us,\nAnd the dawn you and I will not meet.\nI will shower you with gifts, my beloved,\nOf a kind that have never been seen.\nTake my wavering, dancing reflection\nIn the shimmery glass of a stream;\nTake my gaze that the great, swooning stars\nAs they fall from the heavens arrests;\nTake my voice, take its spent, broken echo,\nOnce so summery, youthful and fresh …\nTake my gifts: they will help you to listen\nWithout pain to the gossiping birds\nIn the wet of a Moscow October,\nAnd will turn autumn’s gloom to the languor\nAnd the sweetness of May … O, my angel,\nThink of me, think of me till the first\nFlakes of snow start to waltz in the air …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1959, - "month": "october", - "day": 15 - }, - "location": "Yaroslavskoe Shosse", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "dont-be-afraid--i-can-still-portray": { - "title": "“Don’t be afraid--I can still portray …”", - "body": "_I abandoned your shores, Empress, against my will._\n --Aeneid, Book 6\n\nDon’t be afraid--I can still portray\nWhat we resemble now.\nYou are a ghost--or a man passing through,\nAnd for some reason I cherish your shade.\n\nFor a while you were my Aeneas--\nIt was then I escaped by fire.\nWe know how to keep quiet about one another.\nAnd you forgot my cursed house.\n\nYou forgot those hands stretched out to you\nIn horror and torment, through flame,\nAnd the report of blasted dreams.\n\nYou don’t know for what you were forgiven …\nRome was created, flocks of flotillas sail on the sea,\nAnd adulation sings the praises of victory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - } - } - }, - "dont-pine-your-heart-with-fleeting-worldly-bliss": { - "title": "“Don’t pine your heart with fleeting worldly bliss …”", - "body": "Don’t pine your heart with fleeting worldly bliss,\nNever be used to your sweet wife and house,\nTake a last piece from your child’s dear mouth\nTo give to somebody, who needs.\n\nAnd be a slave, submissive to a word\nOf him, who was your foe--the sworn, rather,\nAnd call a beast of wilderness your brother,\nAnd wait for nothing from the Lord.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "december" - }, - "location": "Saint Petersburg", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "dream": { - "title": "“Dream”", - "body": "I knew you were dreaming of me,\nthat’s why I couldn’t get to sleep.\nThe murky lamp hazed blue\nand showed me the road.\n\nYou saw the Tsaritsa’s garden,\nthe intricate white palace,\nthe black tracery of the fences\nby the echoing stone steps.\n\nYou walked, not knowing the way,\nand thought, “Quicker, quicker.\nIf only I could find her.\nI must not wake before I meet her.”\n\nThe sentry by the great gates\ncalled out: “Where are you going?”\nThe ice crackled and broke,\nwater blackened under foot.\n\nThis lake--you thought--\nthere is a little island in the lake…\nSuddenly a blue flame\ngleamed out of the darkness.\n\nIn the harsh light of naked day\nyou woke up and groaned,\nand for the first time\nloudly called me by my name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "drink-my-soul-as-if-with-a-straw": { - "title": "“Drink my soul, as if with a straw …”", - "body": "Drink my soul, as if with a straw\nI know it’s bitter, intoxicating taste.\nI won’t disturb the torment with pleading,\nOh, for weeks now I’ve been at peace.\n\nTell me, when you’re done. No sadness,\nThat my soul’s no more of this world.\nI’ll walk down that road nearby\nAnd see how children play.\n\nThe gooseberries are in flower,\nAnd they’re carting bricks by the fence,\nWho are you, my brother, my lover,\nI don’t know now, or need to know.\n\nHow bright it is here, and bare,\nMy body, tired, rests …\nThe passers-by thinking vaguely:\nYes, she was widowed yesterday.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "february", - "day": 11 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 11 - } - } - }, - "echo": { - "title": "“Echo”", - "body": "All the ways to past are now closed,\nWhat the past for me today, what for?\nWhat do you see there?--The bloody stones,\nOr the bricked up surely so heavy door?\nOr the echo, which is still repeating\nWords, and never could this action stop,\nI am asking it to end, but really\nIt is carrying weight, as in my heart, for long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "eulogy-of-the-springs-eve": { - "title": "“Eulogy Of the Spring’s Eve”", - "body": "_… toi qui m’as consolé_\n --Gerard de Nerval\n\nThe blizzard had calmed in pine groves,\nBut, tipsy without any wines,\n--Ophelia over her waters--\nWhite silence all night sang to us.\n\nAnd he, who’d been seemed not still clear,\nWas then with this silence engaged,\nAnd, gone, he stayed graciously here\nWith me till the end of my Age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1963, - "month": "march", - "day": 10 - }, - "location": "Komarovo", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 10 - } - } - }, - "evening-and-slanting": { - "title": "“Evening and slanting …”", - "body": "Evening and slanting,\nDownward goes my way.\nYesterday in love still,\n“Don’t forget” you prayed.\nNow there’s only shepherds’\nCry, and glancing winds,\nAnd the worried cedars\nStand by clear springs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ilya Shambat", - "date": { - "season": "Spring", - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "every-evening-i-receive": { - "title": "“Every evening I receive …”", - "body": "Every evening I receive\nLetter like a bride\nTo my dear friend I give\nResponse late at night.\n\n“I’ll be guest of the white death\nOn my journey down.\nYou, my tender one, don’t do\nHarm to anyone.”\n\nAnd there stands a giant star\nBetween two wood beams,\nWith such calmness promising\nTo fulfil your dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ilya Shambat", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "location": "Hyvinkää" - } - }, - "everything-promised-him-to-me": { - "title": "“Everything promised him to me …”", - "body": "Everything promised him to me:\nthe fading amber edge of the sky,\nand the sweet dreams of Christmas,\nand the wind at Easter, loud with bells,\n\nand the red shoots of the grapevine,\nand waterfalls in the park,\nand the two large dragonflies\non the rusty iron fencepost.\n\nAnd I could only believe\nthat he would be mine\nas I walked along the high slopes,\nthe path of burning stones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "forbidden-rose": { - "title": "“Forbidden Rose”", - "body": "You will think about her as about your first bride,\nTo the point of tears in your dreams.\nWe did not inhale her fragrance together,\nAnd you did not bring her to me.\n\nShe was brought to me\nBy that winged ruler of gods and muses,\nWhen the peals of the first thunder\nGlorified our terrible union.\n\nThat union that is called separation\nAnd is torment to the hundredth power,\nThat is the purest and blackest of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1964, - "month": "october", - "day": 10 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 10 - } - } - }, - "fragment": { - "title": "“Fragment”", - "body": "And it seemed to me those fires\nWere about me till dawn.\nAnd I never learnt--\nThe colour of those eyes.\nEverything was trembling, singing;\nWere you my friend or enemy,\nAnd winter was it, or summer?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - } - } - }, - "the-gray-eyed-king": { - "title": "“The Gray-Eyed King”", - "body": "Hail to thee, everlasting pain!\nThe gray-eyed king died yesterday.\n\nScarlet and close was the autumn eve,\nMy husband, returning, said calmly to me:\n\n“They brought him back from the hunt, you know,\nThey found his body near the old oak.\n\nPity the queen. So young!..\nOvernight her hair has turned gray.”\n\nThen he found his pipe on the hearth\nAnd left, as he did every night, for work.\n\nI will wake my little daughter now,\nAnd look into her eyes of gray.\n\nAnd outside the window the poplars whisper:\n“Your king is no more on this earth …”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1910, - "month": "december", - "day": 10 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 10 - } - } - }, - "the-guest": { - "title": "“The Guest”", - "body": "Nothing is changed: against the dining-room windows\nhard grains of whirling snow still beat.\nI am what I was,\nbut a man came to me.\n\n“What do you want?” I asked.\n“To be with you in hell,” he said.\nI laughed. “It’s plain you mean\nto have us both destroyed.”\n\nHe lifted his thin hand\nand lightly stroked the flowers:\n“Tell me how men kiss you,\ntell me how you kiss.”\n\nHis torpid eyes were fixed\nunblinking on my ring.\nNot a single muscle stirred\nin his clear, sardonic face.\n\nOh, I see: his game is that he knows\nintimately, ardently,\nthere’s nothing from me he wants,\nI have nothing to refuse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Hayward & Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1914, - "month": "january", - "day": 1 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "he-whispers-im-not-sorry": { - "title": "“He whispers, I’m not sorry”", - "body": "He whispers, “I’m not sorry\nFor loving you this way--\nEither be mine alone\nOr I will kill you.”\nIt buzzes around me like a gadfly,\nIncessantly, day after day,\nThis same boring argument,\nYour black jealousy.\nGrief smothers--but not fatally,\nThe wide wind dries my tears\nAnd cheerfulness begins to soothe,\nTo smooth out this troubled heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "hearts-memory-of-sun-grows-fainter": { - "title": "“Heart’s memory of sun grows fainter …”", - "body": "Heart’s memory of sun grows fainter.\nSallow is the grass,\nA few flakes toss in the wind\nScarcely, scarcely.\n\nThe narrow canals no longer flow,\nThey are frozen over.\nNothing will ever happen here.\nOh, never!\n\nIn the bleak sky the willow spreads\nIts bare-boned fan.\nMaybe I’m better off as I am,\nNot as your wife.\n\nHeart’s memory of sun grows fainter.\nWhat’s this? Darkness?\nPerhaps! This very night will bring\nThe winter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "january", - "day": 30 - }, - "location": "Kiev", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "here-the-loveliest-of-young-women-fight": { - "title": "“Here the loveliest of young women fight …”", - "body": "Here the loveliest of young women fight\nfor the honour of marrying the hangmen;\nhere the righteous are tortured at night\nand the resolute worn down by hunger.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1924 - } - } - }, - "here-were-all-drunkards-and-whores": { - "title": "“Here we’re all drunkards and whores …”", - "body": "Here we’re all drunkards and whores,\nJoylessly stuck together!\nOn the walls, birds and flowers\nPine for the clouds and air.\n\nThe smoke from your black pipe\nMakes strange vapours rise.\nThe skirt I wear is tight,\nRevealing my slim thighs.\n\nWindows tightly closed:\nWho’s there, frost or thunder?\nYour eyes, are they those\nOf some cautious cat, I wonder?\n\nO, my heart how you yearn!\nIs it for death you wait?\nOr that girl, dancing there,\nFor hell to be her sure fate?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1913, - "month": "january", - "day": 1 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "how-many-demands-the-beloved-can-make": { - "title": "“How many demands the beloved can make …”", - "body": "How many demands the beloved can make!\nThe woman discarded, none.\nHow glad I am that today the water\nUnder the colorless ice is motionless.\nAnd I stand--Christ help me!--\nOn this shroud that is brittle and bright,\nBut save my letters\nSo that our descendants can decide,\nSo that you, courageous and wise,\nWill be seen by them with greater clarity.\nPerhaps we may leave some gaps\nIn your glorious biography?\nToo sweet is earthly drink,\nToo tight the nets of love.\nSometime let the children read\nMy name in their lesson book,\nAnd on learning the sad story,\nLet them smile shyly …\nSince you’ve given me neither love nor peace\nGrant me bitter glory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "i-am-listening-to-the-orioles-ever-mournful-voice": { - "title": "“I am listening to the orioles’ ever mournful voice …”", - "body": "I am listening to the orioles’ ever mournful voice\nAnd saluting the splendid summer’s decline.\nAnd through grain pressed tightly, ear to ear,\nThe sickle, with its snake’s hiss, slices.\n\nAnd the short skirts of the slender reapers\nfly in the wind, like flags on a holiday.\nThe jingling of bells would be jolly now,\nAnd through dusty lashes, a long, slow gaze.\n\nIt’s not caresses I await, nor lover’s adulation,\nThe premonition of inevitable darkness,\nBut come with me to gaze at paradise, where together\nWe were innocent and blessed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "i-am-not-one-those-who-left-the-land": { - "title": "“I am not one those who left the land …”", - "body": "I am not one those who left the land\nto the mercy of its enemies.\nTheir flattery leaves me cold,\nmy songs are not for them to praise.\n\nBut I pity the exile’s lot\nLike a felon, like a man half-dead,\ndark is your path, wanderer;\nwormwood infects your foreign bread.\n\nBut here, in the murk of conflagration,\nwhere scarcely a friend is left to know,\nwe, the survivors, do not flinch\nfrom anything, not from a single blow.\n\nSurely the reckoning will be made\nafter the passing of this cloud.\nWe are the people without tears,\nstraighter than you … more proud …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Hayward & Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "i-came-here-in-idleness": { - "title": "“I came here, in idleness …”", - "body": "I came here, in idleness.\nWhere I’m bored: all the same to me!\nA sleepy hilltop mill, yes,\nHere years pass silently.\n\nOver convolvulus gone dry\nThe bee swims past, ahead,\nI call to that mermaid by\nThe pond: the mermaid’s dead.\n\nThick with mud, and rusted,\nThe wide pond’s shallows:\nOver the trembling aspen\nA weightless moon glows.\n\nI see everything freshly.\nThe poplars smell moist.\nI’m silent. Silent, ready\nTo be yours again, earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "february", - "day": 23 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "i-dont-know-if-youre-living-or-dead": { - "title": "“I don’t know if you’re living or dead …”", - "body": "I don’t know if you’re living or dead--\nWhether to look for you here on earth\nOr only in evening meditation,\nWhen we grieve serenely for the dead.\n\nEverything is for you: my daily prayer,\nAnd the thrilling fever of the insomniac,\nAnd the blue fire of my eyes,\nAnd my poems, that white flock.\n\nNo one was more intimate with me,\nNo one made me suffer so,\nNot even the one who consigned me to torment,\nNot even the one who caressed and forgot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "i-dream-of-him-less-often-now-thank-god": { - "title": "“I dream of him less often now, thank God …”", - "body": "I dream of him less often now, thank God,\nHe doesn’t appear everywhere anymore.\nFog lies on the white road,\nShadows start to run along the water.\n\nAnd the ringing goes on all day.\nOver the endless expanse of ploughed fields,\nEver louder sound the bells\nFrom Jonah’s Monastery far away.\n\nI am clipping today’s wilted branches\nFrom the lilac bushes;\nOn the ramparts of the ancient fortress,\nTwo monks stroll.\n\nRevive for me, who cannot see,\nThe familiar, comprehensible, corporeal world.\nThe heavenly king has already healed my soul\nWith the peace of unlove, icy cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "location": "Kiev" - } - }, - "i-drink-to-our-ruined-house": { - "title": "“I drink to our ruined house …”", - "body": "I drink to our ruined house,\nto the dolor of my life,\nto our loneliness together;\nand to you I raise my glass,\nto lying lips that have betrayed us,\nto dead-cold, pitiless eyes,\nand to the hard realities:\nthat the world is brutal and coarse,\nthat God in fact has not saved us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward", - "date": { - "year": 1934, - "month": "june", - "day": 27 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "i-have-come-to-take-your-place-sister": { - "title": "“I have come to take your place, sister …”", - "body": "--“I have come to take your place, sister,\nAt the high fire in the forest’s heart.\n\nYour eyes have grown dull, your tears cloudy,\nYour hair is grey.\n\nYou don’t understand the songs birds sing\nAnymore, nor stars, nor summer lighting.\n\nDon’t hear it when the women strike\nThe tamborine; yet you fear the silence.\n\nI have come to take your place, sister,\nAt the high fire in the forest’s heart”…\n\n--“You’ve come to put me in the grave.\nWhere is your shovel and your spade?\nYou’re carrying just a flute.\nI’m not going to blame you,\nSadly a long time ago\nMy voice fell mute.\n\nHave my clothes to wear,\nAnswer my fears with silence,\nLet the wind blow\nThrough your hair, smell of the lilac.\nYou have come by a hard road\nTo be lit up by this fire.”\n\nAnd one went away, ceding\nThe place to another, wandering\nLike a blind woman reading\nAn unfamiliar narrow path,\n\nAnd still it seemed to her a flame\nWas close… In her hand a tamborine…\nAnd she was like a white flag,\nAnd like the light of a beacon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "i-hid-my-heart-from-you": { - "title": "“I hid my heart from you …”", - "body": "I hid my heart from you\nAs if I had hurled it into the Neva …\nWingless and domesticated,\nI live here in your home.\nOnly … at night I hear creaking.\nWhat’s there--in the strange gloom?\nThe Sheremetev lindens …\nThe roll call of the spirits of the house …\nApproaching cautiously,\nLike gurgling water,\nMisfortune’s black whisper\nNestles warmly to my ear--\nAnd murmurs, as if this were\nIts business for the night:\n“You wanted comfort,\nDo you know where it is--your comfort?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1936, - "month": "october", - "day": 30 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "i-pray-to-the-ray-from-the-window-pane": { - "title": "“I pray to the ray from the window-pane …”", - "body": "I pray to the ray from the window-pane--\nIt’s pale, thin, and straight.\nAll morning I was silent,\nMy heart--split in two.\nThe copper of my wash-basin\nIs green with verdigris,\nBut sunlight plays there,\nHow joyously.\nSo simple it is, so innocent,\nIn evening quiet,\nYet in this bare shrine,\nIt’s a gold celebration,\nA consolation, I find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - } - } - }, - "i-rarely-think-of-you-now": { - "title": "“I rarely think of you now …”", - "body": "I rarely think of you now,\nNot captured by your fate,\nBut our insignificant meeting’s trace\nHas not vanished from my soul.\n\nI purposely avoid your red house,\nThat red house on its muddy river,\nBut I know I bitterly disturb\nYour sunlit heart at rest.\n\nThough you never bent to my lips,\nImploring love,\nNever immortalised my longing\nIn verse of gold--\n\nI secretly conjure the future,\nWhen evening shines clear and blue,\nAnd foresee the inevitable meeting,\nA second meeting, with you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "i-stood-for-long-before-the-hells-gates-heavy": { - "title": "“I stood for long before the hell’s gates, heavy …”", - "body": "I stood for long before the hell’s gates, heavy,\nBut in the hell all was just dark and calm …\nOh, even Devil does not need my levy.\nWherever shall I come?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "i-was-born-in-the-right-time-in-whole": { - "title": "“I was born in the right time, in whole …”", - "body": "I was born in the right time, in whole,\nOnly this time is one that is blessed,\nBut great God did not let my poor soul\nLive without deceit on this earth.\n\nAnd therefore, it’s dark in my house,\nAnd therefore, all of my friends,\nLike sad birds, in the evening aroused,\nSing of love, that was never on land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "i-wont-beg-for-you-love-its-laid": { - "title": "“I won’t beg for you love: it’s laid …”", - "body": "I won’t beg for you love: it’s laid\nSafely to rest, let the earth settle…\nDon’t expect my jealous letters\nPouring in to plague your bride.\nBut let me, nevertheless, advise you:\nGive her my poems to read in bed,\nGive her my portraits to keep--it’s wise to\nBe kind like that when newly-wed.\nFor it’s more needful to such geese\nTo know that they have won completely\nThan to have converse light and sweet or\nHoneymoons of remembered bliss…\nWhen you have spent your kopeck’s worth\nOf happiness with your new friend,\nAnd like a taste that sates the mouth\nYour soul has recognized the end--\nDon’t come crawling like a whelp\nInto my bed of lonliness.\nI don’t know you. Nor could I help.\nI’m not yet cured of happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "i-wrung-my-hands-under-my-dark-veil": { - "title": "“I wrung my hands under my dark veil …”", - "body": "I wrung my hands under my dark veil…\n“Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?”\n--Because I have made my loved one drunk\nwith an astringent sadness.\n\nI’ll never forget. He went out, reeling;\nhis mouth was twisted, desolate …\nI ran downstairs, not touching the banisters,\nand followed him as far as the gate.\n\nAnd shouted, choking: “I meant it all\nin fun. Don’t leave me, or I’ll die of pain.”\nHe smiled at me--oh so calmly, terribly--\nand said: “Why don’t you get out of the rain?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "january", - "day": 8 - }, - "location": "Kiev", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "imitation-from-the-armenian": { - "title": "“Imitation from the Armenian”", - "body": "I shall come into your dream\nAs a black ewe, approach the throne\nOn withered and infirm\nLegs, bleating: “Padishah,\n\nHave you dined well? You who hold\nThe world like a bead, beloved\nof Allah, was my little son\nTo your taste, was he fat enough?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "an-inscription-on-a-book": { - "title": "“An Inscription on a Book”", - "body": "_What I have given is yours._\n --Shota Rustaveli\n\nI speak from underneath the ruins here,\nFrom underneath the landslide I am shrieking,\nAs if in quicklime now I disappear\nBeneath a cellar’s arches, where it’s reeking.\n\nAnd in the winter, silence I will feign,\nFor good I’ll slam the everlasting portals,\nAnd still they’ll recognise my tongue’s refrain,\nAgain they will believe, those foolish mortals.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1959, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Leningrad", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "it-drags-on-forever-this-heavy-amber-day": { - "title": "“It drags on forever this heavy, amber day …”", - "body": "It drags on forever--this heavy, amber day!\nHow unsufferable is grief, how futile the wait!\nAnd once more comes the silver voice of the deer\nFrom the menagerie, telling of the northern lights.\n\nAnd I, too, believed that somewhere there was cold snow,\nAnd a bright blue font for the poor and the ill,\nAnd the unsteady dash of little sleighs\nUnder the ancient droning of distant bells.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "it-is-simple-it-is-easy": { - "title": "“It is simple, it is easy …”", - "body": "It is simple, it is easy.\nEveryone can understand it;\nNot the smallest love you bear me,\nYou will never long for me.\nWhy should I be full of longing\nFor a man who is a stranger?\nWhy should I kneel every evening\nTo put up a prayer for you?\nWhy should I forsake mv comrade\nAnd my curly-headed baby,\nThrow away my native country\nAnd the town that I love best,\nAnd just like a dirty beggar\nWander through a foreign city?\nOh, how glad I am to think that\nI shall soon be seeing you!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1917 - }, - "location": "Slepnevo" - } - }, - "ive-learned-to-live-simply-wisel": { - "title": "“I’ve learned to live simply, wisel …”", - "body": "I’ve learned to live simply, wisely,\nTo look at the sky and pray to God,\nAnd to take long walks before evening\nTo wear out this useless anxiety.\n\nWhen the burdocks rustle in the ravine\nAnd the yellow-red clusters of rowan nod,\nI compose happy verses\nAbout mortal life, mortal and beautiful life.\n\nI return. The fluffy cat\nLicks my palm and sweetly purrs.\nAnd on the turret of the sawmill by the lake\nA bright flame flares.\n\nThe quiet is cut, occasionally,\nBy the cry of a stork landing on the roof.\nAnd if you were to knock at my door,\nIt seems to me I wouldn’t even hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "ive-written-down-the-words": { - "title": "“I’ve written down the words …”", - "body": "I’ve written down the words\nThat I’ve not dared to speak.\nMy body’s strangely dumb.\nDully my head beats.\n\nThe horn cries have died.\nThe heart’s still confused.\nOn the croquet lawn, light\nAutumn snowflakes fused.\n\nLet the last leaves rustle!\nLet last thoughts torment!\nI don’t wish to trouble\nThose used to happiness.\n\nI forgive those lips, eyes\nOf yours, their cruel jest …\nOh, tomorrow we’ll ride\nThat first wintry sledge.\n\nDrawing-room candles will glow\nMore tenderly in the day.\nOf conservatory roses,\nI’ll bring a whole bouquet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1910, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "july-1914": { - "title": "“July 1914”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nIt smells of burning. For four weeks\nThe dry peat bog has been burning.\nThe birds have not even sung today,\nAnd the aspen has stopped quaking.\n\nThe sun has become God’s displeasure,\nRain has not sprinkled the fields since Easter.\nA one-legged stranger came along\nAnd all alone in the courtyard he said:\n\n“Fearful times are drawing near. Soon\nFresh graves will be everywhere.\nThere will be famine, earthquakes, widespread death,\nAnd the eclipse of the sun and the moon.\n\nBut the enemy will not divide\nOur land at will, for himself:\nThe Mother of God will spread her white mantle\nOver this enormous grief.”\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe sweet smell of juniper\nflies from the burning woods.\nSoldiers’ wives are wailing for the boys,\nThe widow’s lament keens over the countryside.\n\nThe public prayers were not in vain,\nThe earth was yearning for rain!\nWarm red liquid sprinkled\nThe trampled fields.\n\nLow, low hangs the empty sky\nAnd a praying voice quietly intones:\n“They are wounding your sacred body,\nThey are casting lots for your robes.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1914, - "month": "july", - "day": 20 - }, - "location": "Slepnevo", - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "let-any-who-will-still-bask-in-the-south": { - "title": "“Let any, who will, still bask in the south …”", - "body": "Let any, who will, still bask in the south\nOn the paradisal sand,\nIt’s northerly here--and this year of the north\nAutumn will be my friend.\n\nI’ll live, in a dream, in a stranger’s house\nWhere perhaps I have died,\nWhere the mirrors keep something mysterious\nTo themselves in the evening light.\n\nI shall walk between black fir-trees,\nWhere the wind is at one with the heath,\nAnd a dull splinter of the moon will glint\nLike an old knife with jagged teeth.\n\nOur last, blissful unmeeting I shall bring\nTo sustain me here--\nThe cold, pure, light flame of conquering\nWhat I was destined for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "location": "Komarovo", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "like-someone-deaf-blind-and-mute": { - "title": "“Like someone deaf, blind and mute …”", - "body": "Like someone deaf, blind and mute,\nFor whom, the only thing left\nIs the sense of smell, I breathe in\nDampness, mold, inclement weather\nAnd fleeting, transient smoke …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - } - } - }, - "lots-wife": { - "title": "“Lot’s Wife”", - "body": "The just man followed then his angel guide\nWhere he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;\nBut a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,\n_Look back. it is not too late for a last sight_\n\n_Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square\nWhere once you sang, the gardens you shall mourn,\nAnd the tall house with empty windows where\nYou loved your husband and your babes were born._\n\nShe turned, and looking on the bitter view\nHer eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;\nInto transparent salt her body grew.\nAnd her quick feet were rooted in the plain.\n\nWho would waste tears upon her? Is she not\nThe least of our losses, this unhappy wife?\nYet in my heart she will not be forgot\nWho, for a single glance, gave up her life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard Wilbur", - "date": { - "year": 1924 - } - } - }, - "march-elegy": { - "title": "“March Elegy”", - "body": "I have enough treasures from the past\nto last me longer than I need, or want.\nYou know as well as I … malevolent memory\nwon’t let go of half of them:\na modest church, with its gold cupola\nslightly askew; a harsh chorus\nof crows; the whistle of a train;\na birch-tree haggard in a field\nas if it had just been sprung from jail;\na secret midnight conclave\nof monumental Bible-oaks;\nand a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out\nof somebody’s dreams, slowly foundering.\nWinter has already loitered here,\nlightly powdering these fields,\ncasting an impenetrable haze\nthat fills the world as far as the horizon.\nI used to think that after we are gone\nthere’s nothing, simply nothing at all.\nThen who’s that wandering by the porch\nagain and calling us by name?\nWhose face is pressed against the frosted pane?\nWhat hand out there is waving like a branch?\nBy way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner\na sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1964, - "month": "march", - "day": 11 - }, - "location": "Leningrad", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 11 - } - } - }, - "michal": { - "title": "“Michal”", - "body": "_But David was loved … by the daughter of Saul, Michal. Saul thought: I will give her to him, and she will be a snare for him._\n --First Book of Kings\n\nAnd the youth plays for the mad king,\nAnd annihilates the merciless night,\nAnd loudly summons triumphant dawn\nAnd smothers the specters of fright.\nAnd the king speaks kindly to him:\n“In you, young man, burns a marvelous flame,\nAnd for such a medicine\nI will give you my daughter and my kingdom.”\nAnd the king’s daughter stares at the singer,\nShe needs neither songs nor the marriage crown;\nHer soul is full of grief and resentment,\nNevertheless, Michal wants David.\nShe is paler than death; her mouth is compressed,\nIn her green eyes, frenzy;\nHer garments gleam and with each motion\nHer bracelets ring harmoniously.\nLike a mystery, like a dream, like the first mother, Lilith …\nShe speaks without volition:\n“Surely they have given me drink with poison\nAnd my spirit is clouded.\nMy shamelessness! My humiliation!\nA vagabond! A brigand! A shepherd!\nWhy do none of the king’s courtiers,\nAlas, resemble him?\nBut the sun’s rays … and the stars at night …\nAnd this cold trembling …”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1960, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "muse": { - "title": "“Muse”", - "body": "When at night I’m waiting her arrival,\nLife, it seems, is hanging by a thread.\nGlory, youth and freedom cannot rival\nThe joy she brings me, with a flute in hand.\n\nShe enters, and before I can discern her,\nShe stares at me with an attentive eye.\n“Were you”, I ask, “the cause of the Inferno\nFor Dante?”--And she answers: “I!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1924 - } - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "Something of heavens ever burns in it,\nI like to watch its wondrous facets’ growth.\nIt speaks with me in fate’s non-seldom fits,\nWhen others fear to approach close.\n\nWhen the last of friends had looked away\nFrom me in grave, it lay to me in silence,\nAnd sang as sing a thunderstorm in May,\nAs if all flowers began to talk in gardens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "my-night--i-think-of-you-obsessively": { - "title": "“My night--I think of you obsessively …”", - "body": "My night--I think of you obsessively,\nMy day--indifferent: let it be!\nI turned and smiled at my destiny\nThat brought me only misery.\n\nThe fumes of yesterday are dire,\nThe flames that burn me will not die,\nIt seems to me, this blazing fire\nWill not become a sunlit sky.\n\nShall I endure without conceding,\nAnd curse you for not being there?..\nYou’re far away. You’ll never see me\nImprisoned in my awful snare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "location": "Kiev" - } - }, - "my-youth-was-hard-to-endure": { - "title": "“My youth was hard to endure …”", - "body": "My youth was hard to endure.\nWith so much sorrow to bear.\nHow can a soul this poor\nBe returned to You rich and fair?\nA song of praise, long and elegant,\nThe flattering fate sings fervent.\nLord, Almighty! I’m negligent,\nAlways Your miserly servant.\nNot a rose, not a blade of grass\nWill I be Your garden, Father.\nI tremble at every speck of dust,\nAt each word that a fool may utter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1912, - "month": "december", - "day": 19 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 19 - } - } - }, - "the-new-years-ballad": { - "title": "“The New Year’s Ballad”", - "body": "In cloudy darkness, the bored crescent-sable\nHad sent to our room its grim shine.\nSix sets are installed on the white of the table,\nAnd empty of them--only one.\n\nWe wait--I, my husband and few friends of mine--\nFor time the New Year to be met.\nBut, just like a poison, burns me a red wine,\nMy fingers--like sunk in blood red.\n\nThe host was all solemn, immovable, strained,\nWhile raising his filled to rims glass:\n“I drink to the soil of our native land,\nIn which every one of us lies!”\n\nMy friend then exclaimed in a loud, gay voice,\nWhile thinking of something naïve,\n“I drink to her songs, to her beautiful songs,\nIn which we eternally live!”\n\nBut the third, which till now hadn’t known, I think,\nWhen He had closed his eyes,\nAnswered my thoughts at once,\n“I’m sure that we all have right now to drink\nTo him, who isn’t still with us.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "no-no-i-did-not-love-you": { - "title": "“No, no, I did not love you …”", - "body": "No, no, I did not love you,--gladly\nScorched though I was by such a flame;\nAnd yet explain the strength that sadly\nStill lingers for me in your name.\n\nIn front of me I saw you kneeling,\nLike one who waited for a crown;\nAnd round your youthful head was wheeling\nDeath’s silent shade to strike you down.\n\nYou went,--but not to triumph going;\nYou went to death. Oh empty night l\nMy Angel, may you stay not knowing,\nNot seeing my despairing plight.\n\nBut if white suns from Paradises\nShine on the pathway in the spring,\nBut if the meadow bird arises\nAmong the spiked sheaves, on the wing.\n\nOh this is you, I know it, trying\nTo converse with me from the grave;\nI see the shot-scarred hillock lying\nAbove the Dniester’s bloody wave.\n\nDays of renown and love forgetting.\nForgetting days of youth gone by.\nAnd crafty ways, and soul’s dark fretting.\nYet still your face, your fame unsetting\nI shall remember till I die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "not-thus-from-cursed-lightness-having-disembarked": { - "title": "“Not thus, from cursed lightness having disembarked …”", - "body": "Not thus, from cursed lightness having disembarked,\nI look with worry on the chambers dark?\nAlready used to ringing high and raw,\nAlready judged not by the earthly law,\nI, like a criminal, am being drawn along\nTo place of shame and execution.\nI see the glorious city, and the voice most dear,\nAs though there is no secret grave to fear,\nWhere day and night, in heat and in cold bent,\nI must await the Final Judgment.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ilya Shambat", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "o-let-the-organ-many-voiced-sing-boldly": { - "title": "“O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly …”", - "body": "O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly,\nO let it roar like spring’s first thunderstorm:\nMy half-closed eyes over your young bride’s shoulder\nWill meet your own just once and then no more.\n\nGoodbye, be very happy, I relieve you\nOf all your vows-but, dearest heart, take care\nLest my most sacred words, my ravings fevered\nYou breathe in your enamoured partner’s ear.\n\nKnow this: they’ll poison and corrode your ardent\nAnd blessed union … I go forth to seek--\nTo seek and claim the lovely magic garden\nWhere grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "one-goes-in-straightforward-ways": { - "title": "“One goes in straightforward ways …”", - "body": "One goes in straightforward ways,\nOne in a circle roams:\nWaits for a girl of his gone days,\nOr for returning home.\n\nBut I do go--and woe is there--\nBy a way nor straight, nor broad,\nBut into never and nowhere,\nLike trains--off the railroad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1940 - } - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "Grant me years of sickness and fever;\nmake me sleepless for months at a time.\nTake away my child and my lover\nand the mysterious gift of rhyme.\nAs the air grows ever more sultry,\nthis is the prayer I recite:\nand may the storm cloud over my country\nbe shot through with rays of light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1915, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "rachel": { - "title": "“Rachel”", - "body": "A man met Rachel, in a valley. Jacob\nBowed courteously, this wanderer far from home.\nFlocks, raising the hot dust, could not slake their\nThirst. The well was blocked with a huge stone.\nJacob wrenched the stone from the well\nOf pure water, and the flocks drank their fill.\n\nBut the heart in his breast began to grieve,\nIt ached like an open wound.\nHe agreed that in Laban’s fields he should serve\nSeven years to win the maiden’s hand.\nFor you, Rachel! Seven years in his eyes\nNo more than seven dazzling days.\n\nBut silver-loving Laban lives\nIn a web of cunning, and is unknown to grace.\nHe thinks: every deceit forgives\nItself to the glory of Laban’s house.\nAnd he led Leah firmly to the tent\nWhere Jacob took her, blind and innocent.\n\nNight drops from on high over the plains,\nThe cool dews pour,\nAnd the youngest daughter of Laban groans,\nTearing the thick braids of her hair.\nShe curses her sister and reviles God, and\nBegs the Angel of Death to descend.\n\nAnd Jacob dreams the hour of paradise:\nIn the valley the clear spring,\nThe joyful look in Rachel’s eyes,\nAnd her voice like a bird’s song.\nJacob, was it you who kissed me, loved\nMe, and called me your black dove?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "reading-hamlet": { - "title": "“Reading Hamlet”", - "body": "A barren patch to the right of the cemetery.\nBehind it a river flashing blue.\nYou said: “All right then, get thee to a nunnery,\nOr go get married to a fool …”\n\nIt was the sort of thing that princes always say,\nBut these are words that one remembers.\nMay they flow a hundred centuries in a row\nLike an ermine mantle from his shoulders.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - } - } - }, - "requiem": { - "title": "“Requiem”", - "body": "Not under foreign skies\nNor under foreign wings protected--\nI shared all this with my own people\nThere, where misfortune had abandoned us.\n\n\n# _Instead of a Preface_\n\nDuring the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I\nspent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in\nLeningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.\nOn that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,\nher lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in\nher life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor\ncharacteristic of all of us, she said into my ear\n(everyone whispered there)--“Could one ever describe\nthis?” And I answered--“I can.” It was then that\nsomething like a smile slid across what had previously\nbeen just a face.\n\n\n# _Dedication_\n\nMountains fall before this grief,\nA mighty river stops its flow,\nBut prison doors stay firmly bolted\nShutting off the convict burrows\nAnd an anguish close to death.\nFresh winds softly blow for someone,\nGentle sunsets warm them through; we don’t know this,\nWe are everywhere the same, listening\nTo the scrape and turn of hateful keys\nAnd the heavy tread of marching soldiers.\nWaking early, as if for early mass,\nWalking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,\nWe’d meet--the dead, lifeless; the sun,\nLower every day; the Neva, mistier:\nBut hope still sings forever in the distance.\nThe verdict. Immediately a flood of tears,\nFollowed by a total isolation,\nAs if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or,\nThumped, she lies there brutally laid out,\nBut she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone.\nWhere are you, my unwilling friends,\nCaptives of my two satanic years?\nWhat miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?\nWhat shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?\nI send each one of you my salutation, and farewell.\n\n\n# _Introduction_\n\nIt happened like this when only the dead\nWere smiling, glad of their release,\nThat Leningrad hung around its prisons\nLike a worthless emblem, flapping its piece.\nShrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang\nShort songs of farewell\nTo the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering,\nAs they, in regiments, walked along--\nStars of death stood over us\nAs innocent Russia squirmed\nUnder the blood-spattered boots and tyres\nOf the black marias.\n\n\n# i.\n\nYou were taken away at dawn. I followed you\nAs one does when a corpse is being removed.\nChildren were crying in the darkened house.\nA candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God …\nThe cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat\nOn your brow--I will never forget this; I will gather\n\nTo wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy\nInconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.\n\n\n# ii.\n\nSilent flows the river Don\nA yellow moon looks quietly on\nSwanking about, with cap askew\nIt sees through the window a shadow of you\nGravely ill, all alone\nThe moon sees a woman lying at home\nHer son is in jail, her husband is dead\nSay a prayer for her instead.\n\n\n# iii.\n\nIt isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.\nNot like this. Everything that has happened,\nCover it with a black cloth,\nThen let the torches be removed …\nNight.\n\n\n# iv.\n\nGiggling, poking fun, everyone’s darling,\nThe carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo\nIf only you could have foreseen\nWhat life would do with you--\nThat you would stand, parcel in hand,\nBeneath the Crosses, three hundredth in\nline,\nBurning the new year’s ice\nWith your hot tears.\nBack and forth the prison poplar sways\nWith not a sound--how many innocent\nBlameless lives are being taken away …\n\n\n# v.\n\nFor seventeen months I have been screaming,\nCalling you home.\nI’ve thrown myself at the feet of butchers\nFor you, my son and my horror.\nEverything has become muddled forever--\nI can no longer distinguish\nWho is an animal, who a person, and how long\nThe wait can be for an execution.\nThere are now only dusty flowers,\nThe chinking of the thurible,\nTracks from somewhere into nowhere\nAnd, staring me in the face\nAnd threatening me with swift annihilation,\nAn enormous star.\n\n\n# vi.\n\nWeeks fly lightly by. Even so,\nI cannot understand what has arisen,\nHow, my son, into your prison\nWhite nights stare so brilliantly.\nNow once more they burn,\nEyes that focus like a hawk,\nAnd, upon your cross, the talk\nIs again of death.\n\n\n# vii. _The Verdict_\n\nThe word landed with a stony thud\nOnto my still-beating breast.\nNevermind, I was prepared,\nI will manage with the rest.\n\nI have a lot of work to do today;\nI need to slaughter memory,\nTurn my living soul to stone\nThen teach myself to live again …\n\nBut how. The hot summer rustles\nLike a carnival outside my window;\nI have long had this premonition\nOf a bright day and a deserted house.\n\n\n# viii. _To Death_\n\nYou will come anyway--so why not now?\nI wait for you; things have become too hard.\nI have turned out the lights and opened the door\nFor you, so simple and so wonderful.\nAssume whatever shape you wish. Burst in\nLike a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me\nLike a practised bandit with a heavy weapon.\nPoison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,\nOr, with a simple tale prepared by you\n(And known by all to the point of nausea), take me\nBefore the commander of the blue caps and let me glimpse\nThe house administrator’s terrified white face.\nI don’t care anymore. The river Yenisey\nSwirls on. The Pole star blazes.\nThe blue sparks of those much-loved eyes\nClose over and cover the final horror.\n\n\n# ix.\n\nMadness with its wings\nHas covered half my soul\nIt feeds me fiery wine\nAnd lures me into the abyss.\n\nThat’s when I understood\nWhile listening to my alien delirium\nThat I must hand the victory\nTo it.\n\nHowever much I nag\nHowever much I beg\nIt will not let me take\nOne single thing away:\n\nNot my son’s frightening eyes--\nA suffering set in stone,\nOr prison visiting hours\nOr days that end in storms\n\nNor the sweet coolness of a hand\nThe anxious shade of lime trees\nNor the light distant sound\nOf final comforting words.\n\n\n# x. _Crucifixion_\n\nWeep not for me, mother.\nI am alive in my grave.\n\nA choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,\nThe heavens melted into flames.\nTo his father he said, “Why hast thou forsaken me!”\nBut to his mother, “Weep not for me …”\n\nMagdalena smote herself and wept,\nThe favourite disciple turned to stone,\nBut there, where the mother stood silent,\nNot one person dared to look.\n\n\n# _Epilogue_\n\n# i.\n\nI have learned how faces fall,\nHow terror can escape from lowered eyes,\nHow suffering can etch cruel pages\nOf cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.\nI know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair\nCan suddenly turn white. I’ve learned to recognise\nThe fading smiles upon submissive lips,\nThe trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.\nThat’s why I pray not for myself\nBut all of you who stood there with me\nThrough fiercest cold and scorching July heat\nUnder a towering, completely blind red wall.\n\n\n# ii.\n\nThe hour has come to remember the dead.\nI see you, I hear you, I feel you:\nThe one who resisted the long drag to the open window;\nThe one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar\nsoil beneath her feet;\nThe one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,\n\n“I arrive here as if I’ve come home!”\nI’d like to name you all by name, but the list\nHas been removed and there is nowhere else to look. So,\nI have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble words\nI overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,\nI will never forget one single thing. Even in new grief.\nEven if they clamp shut my tormented mouth\nThrough which one hundred million people scream;\nThat’s how I wish them to remember me when I am dead\nOn the eve of my remembrance day.\nIf someone someday in this country\nDecides to raise a memorial to me,\nI give my consent to this festivity\nBut only on this condition--do not build it\nBy the sea where I was born,\nI have severed my last ties with the sea;\nNor in the Tsar’s Park by the hallowed stump\nWhere an inconsolable shadow looks for me;\nBuild it here where I stood for three hundred hours\nAnd no-one slid open the bolt.\nListen, even in blissful death I fear\nThat I will forget the Black Marias,\nForget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman\nHowled like a wounded beast.\nLet the thawing ice flow like tears\nFrom my immovable bronze eyelids\nAnd let the prison dove coo in the distance\nWhile ships sail quietly along the river.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "slander": { - "title": "“Slander”", - "body": "And everywhere with me the foul slander was.\nHer almost-crawling step I felt in my dreams’ worst,\nAnd in the town, dead under the merciless heaven,\nWhile seeking, by a chance, some bread and place to live in.\nReflections of her flames are seen in all men eyes--\nSometimes as treachery, as simple fear, sometimes.\nI am not feared by it. To every challenge here\nI always have my word, the descent and severe.\nThe day, I can’t avoid, I now foresee:\nIn light of early dawn, my friends will come to me\nTo steer my pleasant dream with their lamenting, endless,\nTo put an icon on my breast, that’s now breathless.\nThen, known by none, it’ll enter my room, sad:\nIn my cooled blood, its mouth will be set\nTo count ceaselessly the offences, imagined,\nTo plait its low voice into laments, emerging.\nAnd all will understand its shameful, crazy lies,\nWhich will forbid each one to look in others’ eyes,\nAnd draw in emptiness my whole body, dying,\nAnd, in the last time, fill my soul, now flying\nIn the dawn’s haze, with burning helplessness\nAnd with great pity for abandoned Earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "some-gaze-into-tender-faces": { - "title": "“Some gaze into tender faces …”", - "body": "Some gaze into tender faces,\nOthers drink until morning light,\nBut all night I hold conversations\nWith my conscience who is always right.\n\nI say to her: “You know how tired I am,\nBearing your heavy burden, many years.”\nBut for her, there is no such thing as time,\nAnd for her, space also disappears.\n\nAnd again, a black Shrove Tuesday,\nThe sinister park, the unhurried ring\nOf hooves, and, flying down the heavenly\nSlopes, full of happiness and joy, the wind.\n\nAnd above me, double-horned and calm\nIs the witness … O I shall go there,\nAlong the ancient well-worn track,\nTo the deathly waters, where the swans are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1935, - "month": "november", - "day": 3 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 3 - } - } - }, - "somewhere-there-is-a-simple-life-and-a-world": { - "title": "“Somewhere there is a simple life and a world …”", - "body": "Somewhere there is a simple life and a world,\nTransparent, warm and joyful …\nThere at evening a neighbor talks with a girl\nAcross the fence, and only the bees can hear\nThis most tender murmuring of all.\nBut we live ceremoniously and with difficulty\nAnd we observe the rites of our bitter meetings,\nWhen suddenly the reckless wind\nBreaks off a sentence just begun--\nBut not for anything would we exchange this splendid\nGranite city of fame and calamity,\nThe wide rivers of glistening ice,\nThe sunless, gloomy gardens,\nAnd, barely audible, the Muse’s voice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1915, - "month": "june", - "day": 23 - }, - "location": "Slepnevo", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-last-meeting": { - "title": "“The Song of the Last Meeting”", - "body": "Then helplessly my breast grew cold,\nBut my steps were light.\nI pulled the glove for my left hand\nOnto my right.\n\nThere seemed to be many steps,\nBut I knew--there were only three!\nThe whisper of autumn in the maples\nWas pleading: “die with me!\n\nI am betrayed by my doleful,\nFickle, evil fate.”\nI answered: “Darling, darling!\nI too. I will die with you …”\n\nThis is the song of the last meeting.\nI glanced at the dark house.\nCandles were burning only in the bedroom,\nWith an indifferent-yellow flame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "september", - "day": 29 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 29 - } - } - }, - "sounds-die-away-in-the-ether": { - "title": "“Sounds die away in the ether …”", - "body": "Sounds die away in the ether,\nAnd darkness overtakes the dusk.\nIn a world become mute for all time,\nThere are only two voices: yours and mine.\nAnd to the almost bell-like sound\nOf the wind from invisible Lake Ladoga,\nThat late-night dialogue turned into\nThe delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows.\n\nFor so long I hated\nTo be pitied,\nBut one drop of your pity\nAnd I go around as if the sun were in my body.\nThat’s why there is dawn all around me.\nI go around creating miracles,\nThat’s why!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1945, - "month": "december", - "day": 20 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "such-days-may-meet-you-just-before-the-springtime": { - "title": "“Such days may meet you just before the springtime …”", - "body": "Such days may meet you just before the springtime:\nBeneath the snow the meadow lies in peace;\nThe treetops wobble with a dainty rhythm;\nBenevolent and balmy is the breeze.\nAnd you can feel the lightness in your body,\nAnd you do not quite recognize your home,\nAnd eagerly you find yourself intoning\nThat song you thought you’d tired of long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robin Kallsen", - "date": { - "season": "Spring", - "year": 1915 - }, - "location": "Slepnevo" - } - }, - "terror-lingering-things-in-the-dark": { - "title": "“Terror, lingering things in the dark …”", - "body": "Terror, lingering things in the dark,\nLeads the moonbeam to an ax.\nBehind the wall there’s an ominous knock--\nWhat’s there, a ghost, a thief, rats?\n\nIn the sweltering kitchen, water drips,\nCounting the rickety floorboards.\nSomeone with a glossy black beard\nflashes by the attic window--\n\nAnd becomes still. How cunning he is and evil,\nHe hid the matches and blew out the candle.\nHow much better would be the gleam of the barrels\nOf rifles leveled at my breast.\n\nBetter, in the grassy square,\nTo be flattened on the raw wood scaffold\nAnd, amid cries of joy and moans,\nPour out my life’s blood there.\n\nI press the smooth cross to my heart:\nGod, restore peace to my soul.\nThe odor of decay, sickeningly sweet,\nRises from the clammy sheets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "there-are-the-words-that-couldnt-be-twice-said": { - "title": "“There are the words that couldn’t be twice said …”", - "body": "There are the words that couldn’t be twice said,\nHe, who said once, spent out all his senses.\nOnly two things have never their end--\nThe heavens’ blue and the Creator’s mercy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "there-is-a-sacred-boundary-between-those-who-are-close": { - "title": "“There is a sacred boundary between those who are close …”", - "body": "There is a sacred boundary between those who are close\nAnd it cannot be crossed by passion or love--\nThough lips fuse in dreadful silence\nAnd the heart shatters to pieces with love.\n\nFriendship is helpless here, and years\nOf exalted and ardent happiness,\nWhen the soul is free and a stranger\nTo the slow languor of voluptuousness.\n\nThose who strive to reach it are mad, and those\nWho reach it--stricken by grief …\nNow you understand why my heart\nDoes not beat faster under your hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "there-was-such-inexpressible-sorrow": { - "title": "“There was such inexpressible sorrow …”", - "body": "There was such inexpressible sorrow\nin the music in the garden.\nThe dish of oysters on ice\nsmelt fresh and sharp of the sea.\n\nHe said to me ‘I am a true friend!’\nHe touched my dress.\nThere is no passion\nin the touch of his hands.\n\nThis is how one strokes a cat or a bird,\nthis is how one looks at a shapely horsewoman.\nThere is only laughter in his eyes\nunder the light gold of his eyelashes.\n\nThe violins’ mourning voices\nsing above the spreading smoke:\n‘Give thanks to heaven:\nyou are alone with your love for the first time.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "theres-none-equal-to-me-he-used-to-cite": { - "title": "“There’s none equal to me he used to cite …”", - "body": "There’s none equal to me--he used to cite.\nFor him, I’m not a woman of the real,\nBut winter sun’s always relieving light,\nAnd a wild song of his land, so dear.\nWhen I am dead, he would not feel a grief,\nThe crazy, would not cry, “Return, my sole!”\nBut understand: a body cannot live\nWithout a sun, without a song--a soul …\nAnd what is now?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "they-didnt-bring-me-a-letter-today": { - "title": "“They didn’t bring me a letter today …”", - "body": "They didn’t bring me a letter today:\nHe forgot to write, or he went away;\nSpring is like a trill of silver laughter,\nBoats are rocking in the bay.\nThey didn’t bring me a letter today…\n\nHe was still with me just recently,\nSo much in love, affectionate and mine,\nBut that was white wintertime.\nNow it is spring, and spring’s sadness is poisonous.\nHe was still with me just recently …\n\nI listen: the light, trembling bow of a violin,\nLike the pain before death, beats, beats,\nHow terrible that my heart will break\nBefore these tender lines are complete…", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "three-autumns": { - "title": "“Three Autumns”", - "body": "The smiles of summer are lost on me,\nI find no secrets in winter\nBut I have observed almost without fail\nThree autumns in every year.\n\nThe first--a holiday madness\nThumbing its nose at summer\nLeaves fly, like pages from notebooks\nthe smell of smoke is incense-sweet\nand everything’s moist, dappled, bright\n\nFirst to dance are the birches\nThrowing on threadbare garments\nShaking off momentary tears\nOnto their neighbours over the fence\n\nBut this is just the beginning\nA second passes, a minute, and then\nComes another, aloof as conscience\nAs ominous as an air raid\n\nEverything now seems paler, and older,\nthe comfort of summer cast out\ndistant marches of golden trumpets\ndrift in on the fragrant mist\n\nand the cold waves of its incense\ncover the high vault of heaven;\nbut the wind rushes in, the sky gapes wide,\nit’s suddenly clear the drama is ending:\nthis is no third autumn, this is death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Mary Besemeres", - "date": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "to-death": { - "title": "“To Death”", - "body": "You’ll surely come. So why wait anymore?\nI’m waiting for you. I am through.\nMy light is out. My doors are open for\nThe simple wonder that is you.\nSo take whatever guise might strike your fancy:\nBlast chemical weapons through my room,\nCome quiet as the nightstick of a gangster,\nDisease my throat with typhus fume,\nOr be the bedtime story you once told\n(The one we’re sick of every night)\nThat I may see the law’s blue cap, the cold\nHouse-porter’s face in livid fright.\nI could care less. The Yenisey swirls by,\nThe North Star glimmers overhead,\nAnd the blue glint in a beloved eye\nGoes dark against the final dread.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. Z. Foreman" - } - }, - "to-awake-when-dawn-is-breaking": { - "title": "“To awake when dawn is breaking …”", - "body": "To awake when dawn is breaking,\nJust because joy stops me sleeping,\nAnd to look out through the port-hole\nWhere the green waves beat outside,\nOr on deck with the rain falling\nTo sit wrapped with furs around me,\nListen to the engine throbbing,\nAnd to have thoughts at all,\nBut expecting soon to meet him.\nHim who is the star that guides me,\nWith the wind and salt spray blowing\nTo grow younger every hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "to-fall-ill-as-one-should-deliriously": { - "title": "“To fall ill as one should, deliriously …”", - "body": "To fall ill as one should, deliriously\nHot, meet everyone again,\nTo stroll broad avenues in the seashore garden\nFull of the wind and the sun.\n\nEven the dead, today, have agreed to come,\nAnd the exiles, into my house.\nLead the child to me by the hand.\nLong I have missed him.\n\nI shall eat blue grapes with those who are dead,\nDrink the iced\nWine, and watch the grey waterfall pour\nOn to the damp flint bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "season": "Spring", - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "to-the-many": { - "title": "“To the Many”", - "body": "I--am your voice, the warmth of your breath,\nI--am the reflection of your face,\nThe futile trembling of futile wings,\nI am with you to the end, in any case.\n\nThat’s why you so fervently love\nMe in my weakness and in my sin;\nThat’s why you impulsively gave\nMe the best of your sons;\n\nThat’s why you never even asked\nMe for any word of him\nAnd blackened my forever-deserted home\nWith fumes of praise.\n\nAnd they say--it’s impossible to fuse more closely,\nImpossible to love more abandonedly…\nAs the shadow from the body wants to part,\nAs the flesh from the soul wants to separate,\nSo I want now--to be forgotten.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "turmoil": { - "title": "“Turmoil”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nIt was sultry from blazing light\nAnd his every glance--like a flame.\nI only started: that is right.\nMe--only this one can tame.\nHe bent,--in a casual, low tone …\nThe blood sharply left my hot face.\nLet love stop--like a tombstone--\nMy life’s even, measured pace.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nYou do not love me? Will not even see?\nO cursed be your looks--so charming.\nAnd I cannot soar up, free.\nI, who was born for flying.\nI bite my quivering lip,\nThings and faces grow misty and roll,\nAnd only one thing--the tulip,\nThe tulip in your buttonhole.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nAs the rules of decorum do say\nYou came up to me, eyebrow arched,\nHalf-caressingly, in your lazy way\nWith a kiss my hand lightly touched--\nThe mysterious, deep ancient eyes\nOf an icon looked right into mine …\nTen years of the heart’s dyings and cries,\nOf my long, sleepless nights and all sighs\nI put in a short quiet word,\nAnd I said it in vain.\nOff you went as if you had not heard,\nAnd the soul got empty and clear again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyubov Fedotova", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "upon-the-hard-crest-of-a-snow-drift": { - "title": "“Upon the hard crest of a snow-drift …”", - "body": "Upon the hard crest of a snow-drift\nWe tread, and grown quiet, we walk\nOn towards my house, white, enchanted;\nOur mood is too tender for talk.\n\nAnd sweeter than music, this dream now\nCome true, the low boughs of the firs\nThat sway as we brush them in passing,\nThe slight silver clink of your spurs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-verdict": { - "title": "“The Verdict”", - "body": "And the stone word has fallen down\nOn my breast, being alive, awhile …\nNo matter, I was ready, almost …\nI’ll cope, overcome this time.\n\nI’m today completly borrowed, rather,\nIt is need to kill the memory to end.\nIt is need for my soul--to harden,\nIt is need--again to live, as well.\n\nOr … The hot rumble of near summer\nIs outside my window as a feast …\nI’ve fore-feeled this long ago: coming\nOf this bright day and my house--left.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1939, - "month": "june", - "day": 22 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "we-had-thought-we-were-beggars": { - "title": "“We had thought we were beggars …”", - "body": "We had thought we were beggars,\nwith nothing at all,\nbut as loss followed loss\nand each day\nbecame a day of memorial,\nwe began to make songs\nabout the Lord’s generosity\nand our bygone wealth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "we-hadnt-breathed-the-poppies-somnolence": { - "title": "“We hadn’t breathed the poppies’ somnolence …”", - "body": "We hadn’t breathed the poppies’ somnolence,\nAnd we ourselves don’t know our sin.\nWhat was in our stars\nThat destined us for sorrow?\n\nAnd what kind of hellish brew\nDid the January darkness bring us?\nAnd what kind of invisible glow\nDrove us out of our minds before dawn?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1946, - "month": "january", - "day": 11 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 11 - } - } - }, - "we-noiselessly-walked-through-the-house": { - "title": "“We noiselessly walked through the house …”", - "body": "We noiselessly walked through the house,\nNot waiting for anything.\nThey showed me way to the sick man,\nAnd I did not recognize him.\n\nHe said, “Now let God have the glory”\nAnd became more thoughtful and blue.\n“It’s long time that I hit the road,\nI’ve only been waiting for you.\n\nSo you bother me in my fever,\nI keep those words from you.\nTell me: can you not forgive me?”\nAnd I said, “I can do.”\n\nIt seemed, that the walls were shining\nFrom floor to the ceiling that day.\nUpon the silken blanket\nA withered arm lay.\n\nAnd the thrown-over predatory profile\nBecame horribly heavy and stark,\nAnd one could not hear the breathing\nThrough the bitten-up lips turned dark.\n\nBut suddenly the last bit of strength\nCame alive in the eyes of blue:\n“It is good that you released me,\nNot always kind were you.”\n\nAnd then the face became younger,\nAnd I recognized him once more.\nAnd then I said, “Holy Father,\nAccept a slave of yours.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ilya Shambat", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "we-shall-not-sip-from-the-same-glass": { - "title": "“We shall not sip from the same glass …”", - "body": "We shall not sip from the same glass,\nNo water for us, or sweet wine;\nWe’ll not embrace at morning,\nNot gaze from the same sill at night;\nYou breathe the sun, I the moon,\nYet the one love keeps us alive.\n\nAlways with me, tender, true friend,\nAnd your smiling friend’s with you.\nBut I know the pain in your grey eyes,\nAnd my sickness is down to you, too.\nIn short, we mustn’t meet often,\nTo be certain of peace of mind.\n\nYet it’s your voice sings in my poems,\nAnd in your poems my breath sighs,\nO, beyond the reach of distance or fear,\nThere is a fire …\nAnd if you knew how dear to me\nAre those dry, pale lips of yours now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "season": "Autumn", - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "when-the-moon-lies-like-a-piece-of-chardush-melon": { - "title": "“When the moon lies like a piece of Chardush melon …”", - "body": "When the moon lies like a piece of Chardush melon\nOn the windowsill and it’s hard to breathe,\nWhen the door is shut and the house bewitched\nBy an airy branch of blue wisteria,\nAnd there is cool water in the clay cup,\nAnd a snow-white towel, and the wax candle\nIs burning, as in my childhood, attracting moths,\nThe silence roars, not hearing my words\nThen from comers black as Rembrandt’s\nSomething rears and hides itself again,\nBut I won’t rouse myself, won’t even take fright …\nHere loneliness has caught me in its net.\nThe landlady’s black cat stares like the eye of centuries,\nAnd the double in the mirror doesn’t want to help me.\nI will sleep sweetly. Good night, night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1944, - "month": "march", - "day": 28 - }, - "location": "Tashkent", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 28 - } - } - }, - "white-night": { - "title": "“White Night”", - "body": "Oh, I’ve not locked the door,\nI’ve not lit the candles,\nYou know I’m too tired\nTo think of sleep.\n\nSee, how the fields die down,\nIn the sunset gloom of firs,\nAnd I’m drunk on the sound\nOf your voice, echoing here.\n\nIt’s fine, that all’s black,\nThat life’s--a cursed hell.\nO, that you’d come back--\nI was so certain, as well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "february", - "day": 6 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 6 - } - } - }, - "wild-honey-the-scent-of-freedom-has": { - "title": "“Wild honey the scent of freedom has …”", - "body": "Wild honey the scent of freedom has,\nDust--the sunshine beam,\nViolet--the mouth of a girl,\nAnd gold--has nothing.\n\nMinionette, the scent of water\nAnd love--the apple.\nBut forever we learnt,\nThat blood has but the scent of blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ljubov V. Kuchkina", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "willow": { - "title": "“Willow”", - "body": "And I grew up in patterned tranquillity,\nIn the cool nursery of the young century.\nAnd the voice of man was not dear to me,\nBut the voice of the wind I could understand.\nBut best of all the silver willow.\nAnd obligingly, it lived\nWith me all my life; it’s weeping branches\nFanned my insomnia with dreams.\nAnd strange!--I outlived it.\nThere the stump stands; with strange voices\nOther willows are conversing\nUnder our, under those skies.\nAnd I am silent …As if a brother had died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1940, - "month": "january", - "day": 18 - }, - "location": "Leningrad", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 18 - } - } - }, - "with-pride-your-spirit-is-darkened": { - "title": "“With pride your spirit is darkened …”", - "body": "With pride your spirit is darkened\nFor this you won’t know world at all.\nYou say that this faith is a dream\nAnd mirage is this capital.\n\nYou say that my country is sinful,\nYour country is godless, I scream.\nMay the guilt still lie upon us--\nWe can correct and redeem.\n\nAround you are water and flowers\nWhy seek a beggar and sinner, my dear?\nI know that you’re sick very badly:\nYou seek death and the end you fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ilya Shambat", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "january", - "day": 1 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "you-know-yourself-that-im-not-going-to-celebrate": { - "title": "“You know yourself that I’m not going to celebrate …”", - "body": "You know yourself that I’m not going to celebrate\nThe most bitter day of our meeting.\nWhat to leave you in remembrance?\nMy shade? What good is a ghost to you?\nThe dedication to a burnt drama\nOf which not an ash remains,\nOr the terrible New Year’s portrait\nSuddenly hurled from its frame.\nOr the barely audible\nSound of birch embers.\nOr that they didn’t have time to tell me of\nAnother’s love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1946, - "month": "january", - "day": 6 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 6 - } - } - }, - "you-thought-i-was-that-type": { - "title": "“You thought I was that type …”", - "body": "You thought I was that type:\nThat you could forget me,\nAnd that I’d plead and weep\nAnd throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare,\n\nOr that I’d ask the sorcerers\nFor some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift:\nMy precious perfumed handkerchief.\n\nDamn you! I will not grant your cursed soul\nVicarious tears or a single glance.\n\nAnd I swear to you by the garden of the angels,\nI swear by the miracle-working icon,\nAnd by the fire and smoke of our nights:\nI will never come back to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "your-palms-are-fiery": { - "title": "“Your palms are fiery …”", - "body": "“Your palms are fiery,\nThe Easter bells ring loud,\nYou’re tempted, like St. Anthony,\nBy visions all around.”\n\n“How was such day’s affair\nMixed with the holy days,\nLike thick and tangled hair\nOf Magdalenes half-crazed.”\n\n“Thus only children love,\nJust once, and then it dies.”\n“No light is strong enough--\nTo match those tranquil eyes.”\n\n“This is the devil’s bluff,\nSuch longing--an offense.”\n“No white is white enough--\nTo match that of her hands.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "youll-live-but-ill-not-perhaps": { - "title": "“You’ll live, but I’ll not; perhaps …”", - "body": "You’ll live, but I’ll not; perhaps,\nThe final turn is that.\nOh, how strongly grabs us\nThe secret plot of fate.\n\nThey differently shot us:\nEach creature has its lot,\nEach has its order, robust,--\nA wolf is always shot.\n\nIn freedom, wolves are grown,\nBut deal with them is short:\nIn grass, in ice, in snow,--\nA wolf is always shot.\n\nDon’t cry, oh, friend my dear,\nIf, in the hot or cold,\nFrom tracks of wolves, you’ll hear\nMy desperate recall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - } - } - }, - "the-boy-said-me-how-painful-it-is": { - "title": "“The boy said me: ‘how painful it is!’”", - "body": "The boy said me: “how painful it is!”\nAnd I feel guilty somehow.\nNot long ago, he was living in bliss\nAnd knew no sadness till now.\n\nBut at this moment he surely knows sorrow\nNo less than the wise and the old.\nIt seems that his eyes have begun to grow narrow,\nAnd their once blinding light is now cold.\n\nI know: that his pain will soon be too much,\nThe pain of first love is intense.\nSo helpless and feverish was his touch\nAs he was stroking my hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1913, - "month": "october" - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-cuckoo-i-asked": { - "title": "“The cuckoo I asked …”", - "body": "The cuckoo I asked\nHow many years I would live… The\nPine tops shivered,\nA yellow shaft fell to the grass.\nIn the fresh forest depths, no sound…\nI am going\nHome, and the cool wind\nCaresses my hot brow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "june", - "day": 1 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 1 - } - } - }, - "the-door-is-half-open": { - "title": "“The door is half open …”", - "body": "The door is half open,\nthe lime trees wave sweetly …\nOn. the table, forgotten -\na whip and a glove.\n\nThe lamp casts a yellow circle …\nI listen to the rustling.\nWhy did you go?\nI don’t understand …\n\nTomorrow the morning\nwill be clear and happy.\nThis life is beautiful,\nheart, be wise;\n\nYou are utterly tired,\nyou beat calmer, duller …\nYou know, I read\nthat souls are immortal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "february", - "day": 17 - }, - "location": "Tsarskoe Selo", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 17 - } - } - }, - "the-earthly-glory-is-like-smoke": { - "title": "“The earthly glory is like smoke …”", - "body": "The earthly glory is like smoke,\nI wanted much more than this.\nIn all my lovers I evoked\nThe feelings of joy and bliss.\nOne is still in love somewhere\nWith a friend from long ago,\nThe other stands in the city square,--\nA statue of bronze in the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-fifth-act-of-the-drama": { - "title": "“The fifth act of the drama …”", - "body": "The fifth act of the drama\nBlows in the wind of autumn,\nEach flower-bed in the park seems\nA fresh grave, we have finished\nThe funeral-feast, and there’s nothing\nTo do. Why then do I linger\nAs if I am expecting\nA miracle? It’s the way a feeble\nHand can hold fast to a heavy\nBoat for a long time by the pier\nAs one is saying goodbye\nTo the person who’s left standing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-first-lighthouse-flashed-over-the-jetty": { - "title": "“The first lighthouse flashed over the jetty …”", - "body": "The first lighthouse flashed over the jetty,\nThe precursor of many--\nAnd the sailor who had sailed seas packed with death,\nAlongside death and on the way to death,\nTook off his cap and wept.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "the-land-though-not-mine": { - "title": "“The land though not mine …”", - "body": "The land though not mine,\nBut forever in my memory,\nAnd in the sea,\nTender icy and unsalted water.\n\nOn the bottom the sand is whiter than chalk,\nAnd the air is drunk, like wine,\nAnd the rosy body of the pine trees\nIs naked at the sunset hour.\n\nAnd the sunset itself in the waves of ether\nIs such that cannot say\nIf it’s the day’s end, the world’s end,\nIf it’s mysteries mystery within me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ljubov V. Kuchkina", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-mysterious-spring-was-still-enjoying-itself": { - "title": "“The mysterious spring was still enjoying itself …”", - "body": "The mysterious spring was still enjoying itself,\nAbout the mountains the revealing wind was wandering,\nAnd the deep blue lake was being blue--\nThe temple of the Baptist not by hands made.\n\nYou were frightened by our first meeting,\nBut I was praying for a second one,\nAnd again tonight there is a hot evening …\nAnd the sunset so low above the mountain.\n\nYou are not with me, but it is not farewell:\nAnd every moment is triumphant news for me.\nI know that there is such anguish in you,\nThat you cannot utter a word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ljubov V. Kuchkina", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "the-one-people-once-called": { - "title": "“The one people once called …”", - "body": "The one people once called\nKing in jest, God in fact,\nWho was killed, and whose implement of torture\nWas heated by the warmth of my breast …\nThe disciples of Christ tasted death,\nAnd the old gossips, and the soldiers,\nAnd the procurator from Rome--all gone.\nThere, where once the arch rose,\nWhere the sea splashed, where the cliff turned black,\nThey were imbibed with the wine, inhaled with the stifling dust\nAnd the fragrance of immortal roses.\nGold rusts and steel decays,\nMarble crumbles away. Everything is on the verge of death.\nThe most reliable thing on earth is sorrow,\nAnd the most enduring--the almighty Word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "the-park-was-filled-with-light-mist": { - "title": "“The park was filled with light mist …”", - "body": "The park was filled with light mist,\nAnd the gaslight flared at the gate.\nI remember only a certain gaze\nFrom ingenuous, tranquil eyes.\n\nYour sorrow, unperceived by all the rest,\nImmediately drew me close,\nAnd you understood that yearning\nWas poisoning and stifling me.\n\nI love this day and I’m celebrating,\nI will come as soon as you invite me.\nAnd sinful and idle, I know\nThat you alone will not indict me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-road-is-black-by-the-beach": { - "title": "“The road is black by the beach …”", - "body": "The road is black by the beach--\nGarden. Lamps yellow and fresh.\nI’m very calm.\nI’d rather not talk about him.\n\nI’ve a lot of feelings for you. You’re kind.\nWe’ll kiss, grow old, walk around.\nLight months will fly over us.\nLike snowy stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Donald Michael Thomas", - "date": { - "year": 1914, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-twenty-first-night-monday": { - "title": "“The twenty-first. Night. Monday …”", - "body": "The twenty-first. Night. Monday.\nThe outlines of the capital are in mist.\nSome idler invented the idea\nThat there’s something in the world called love.\n\nAnd from laziness or boredom,\nEveryone believed it and here is how they live:\nThey anticipate meetings, they fear partings\nAnd they sing the songs of love.\n\nBut the secret will be revealed to the others,\nAnd a hush will fall on them all …\nI stumbled on it by accident\nAnd since then have been somehow unwell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Judith Hemschemeyer", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "monday", - "day": 21, - "month": "january" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-alabaster": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Alabaster", - "birth": { - "year": 1567 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1640 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alabaster", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "a-divine-sonnet": { - "title": "“A Divine Sonnet”", - "body": "Jesu, thy love within me is so main,\nAnd my poor heart so narrow of content,\nThat with thy love my heart wellnigh is rent,\nAnd yet I love to bear such loving pain.\nO take thy Cross and nails and therewith strain\nMy heart’s desire unto his full extent,\nThat thy dear love may not therein be pent,\nBut thoughts may have free scope thy love to explain.\nO now my heart more paineth than before,\nBecause it can receive and hath no more.\nO fill this emptiness or else I die.\nNow stretch my heart again and now supply;\nNow I want space, now grace. To end this smart,\nSince my heart holds not thee, hold thou my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "eternity-the-womb-of-things-created": { - "title": "“Eternity, the Womb of Things Created”", - "body": "Eternity, the womb of things created,\nThe endless bottom of duration,\nWhose half was always past, yet unbegun,\nAnd half behind still coming unabated;\nWhose thread conjoinèd, both unseparated,\nIs time, which dated is by motion;\nEternity, whose real thoughts are one\nWith God, that is everness actuated:\nO tie my soul unto this endless clew,\nThat I may overfathom fate and time\nIn all my actions which I do pursue,\nAnd bound my thoughts in that unbounded clime:\nFor soul and thoughts, designs and acts, are evil,\nThat under compass of this life do level.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-first-beginning-of-creation": { - "title": "“The First Beginning of Creation”", - "body": "The first beginning of creation\nWas God; the end thereof in man was set;\nEnd and beginning were together met;\nSo God and man became one person.\nThus nature’s circle as a ring doth run,\nChrist is the pale within whose circulet\nThe seal of the divinity is knit,\nWhich seal doth stand the Godhead’s ring upon.\nSo stand two rings upon one diamond;\nThe knot of both and either, where are met\nFinite and infinite, more and one\nAlpha and Omega in that fair tablet\nWherein is drawn the angels’ alphabet,\nJesus. If he were learnt, need more be known?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "jesus-is-risen-from-the-infernal-mire": { - "title": "“Jesus is Risen from the Infernal Mire”", - "body": "Jesus is risen from the infernal mire:\nBut who art thou that say’st Jesus arose?\nSuch holy words are only fit for those\nWhose souls with Christ above the heavens aspire.\nBut if thou hast not raisèd thy desire\nFrom earth to heaven, but in the world dost close\nThy love which unto heaven thou shouldst dispose,\nSay not that Christ is yet ascended higher,\nBut yet within thy heart he lieth dead,\nAnd by the devil is impoisonèd.\nRejoice not then in vain of his ascent;\nFor as his glorious rise doth much augment\nAll good men’s hopes, so unto those that tread\nFalse paths, it is a dreadful argument.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "lord-i-have-left-all-myself-behind": { - "title": "“Lord, I Have Left All Myself Behind”", - "body": "Lord, I have left all and myself behind:\nMy state, my hopes, my strength, and present ease,\nMy unprovokèd studies’ sweet disease,\nAnd touch of nature and engrafted kind,\nWhose cleaving twist doth distant tempers bind;\nAnd gentle sense of kindness that doth praise\nThe earnest judgments, others’ wills to please;\nAll and myself I leave, thy love to find.\nO strike my heart with lightning from above,\nThat from one wound both fire and blood may spring;\nFire to transelement my soul to love,\nAnd blood as oil to keep the fire burning;\nThat fire may draw forth blood, blood extend fire,\nDesire possession, possession desire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-friends-whose-kindness-doth-their-judgments-blind": { - "title": "“My Friends Whose Kindness Doth Their Judgments Blind”", - "body": "My friends, whose kindness doth their judgments blind,\nKnow you, say they, the dangers where you run,\nWhich zeal hides from you, but compassion\nTells us? You feel the blow, the smart we find.\nI know it well, and as I call to mind,\nThis is the bill: dearness, affection,\nFriends, fortune, pleasure, fame, hope, life undone,\nWant, prison, torment, death, shame--what behind?\nIs then my sense transel’mented to steel,\nThat neither this, nor that, nor all, can feel,\nNor can it bend my mind, which theirs doth break?\nNot so, nor so; for I am not insensate,\nBut feel a double grief that for Christ’s sake\nI have no more to spend, nor have spent that.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-wretched-man-the-knot-of-contraries": { - "title": "“O Wretched Man, the Knot of Contraries”", - "body": "O wretched man, the knot of contraries,\nIn whom both heaven and earth doth move and rest,\nHeaven of my mind, which with Christ’s love is blest,\nDeath of my heart, which in dull languor lies!\nYet doth my moving will still circulize\nMy heaven about my earth with thoughts’ unrest,\nWhere reason as a sun from east to west\nDarteth his shining beams to melt this ice.\nAnd now with fear it southward doth descend,\nNow between both is equinoctial,\nAnd now to joys it higher doth ascend,\nAnd yet continues my sea glacial.\nWhat shall I do, but pray to Christ the Son?\nIn earth as heaven, Lord, let thy will be done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "over-the-brook-of-cedron-christ-is-gone": { - "title": "“Over the Brook of Cedron Christ is Gone”", - "body": "Over the brook of Cedron Christ is gone,\nTo entertain the combat with his death,\nWhere David fled beforetime void of breath\nTo scape the treacheries of Absalon.\nGo, let us follow him in passion,\nOver this brook, this world that walloweth,\nA stream of cares that drown our thoughts beneath,\nAnd wash away all resolution.\nBeyond the world he must be passèd clear,\nThat in the world for Christ will troubles bear:\nLeave we, O leave we then this miry flood,\nFriends, pleasures, and unfaithful good.\nNow we are up, now down, but cannot stand;\nWe sink, we reel; Jesu, stretch forth thy hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-earth-which-in-delicious-paradise": { - "title": "“This Earth, Which in Delicious Paradise”", - "body": "The earth, which in delicious paradise\nDid bud forth man like cedars stately tall,\nFrom barren womb accursèd by the fall\nDoth thrust forth man as thorns in arm engravèd wise,\nDarting the points of sin against the skies.\nWith those thorns plaited was Christ’s coronal,\nWhich crowned him then with grief, but after all\nIn heaven shall crown him, crown themselves with glory.\nFor with the purple tincture of his blood,\nWhich out the furrows of his brows did rain,\nHe hath transformed us thorns from baser wood\nTo raise our nature and odórant strain,\nThat we, who with our thorny sins did wound him,\nHereafter should with roseal virtues crown him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "though-all-forsake-thee-lord-yet-i-will-die": { - "title": "“Though All Forsake Thee, Lord, yet I Will Die”", - "body": "Though all forsake thee, Lord, yet I will die;\nFor I have chainèd so my will to thine\nThat I have no will left my will to untwine,\nBut will abide with thee most willingly.\nThough all forsake thee, Lord, yet cannot I;\nFor love hath wrought in me thy form divine\nThat thou art more my heart than heart is mine:\nHow can I then from myself, thyself, fly?\nThus thought Saint Peter, and thus thinking, fell;\nAnd by his fall did warn us not to swell.\nYet still in love I say I would not fall,\nAnd say in hope, I trust I never shall;\nBut cannot say in faith what might I do\nTo learn to say it, by hearing Christ say so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "up-to-mount-olivet-my-soul-ascend": { - "title": "“Up to Mount Olivet My Soul Ascend”", - "body": "Up to Mount Olivet my soul ascend\nThe mount spiritual, and there supply\nThy fainting lamp with oil of charity\nTo make the light of faith the more extend.\nGo by this tract which thither right doth tend,\nWhich Christ did first beat forth to walk thereby,\nAnd sixteen ages of posterity\nHave gone it over since from end to end.\nBut strike not down to any new-found balk,\nWhich hunters have begun of late to chalk:\nFor whether ’twere the glow-worm faith went out,\nOr want of love did pine them in the way,\nOr else the cruel devils rob or slay,\nNo news comes back of one of all that rout.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "upon-the-motions-of-the-fiend": { - "title": "“Upon the Motions of the Fiend”", - "body": "With heat and cold I feel the spiteful fiend\nTo work one mischief by two contraries,\nWith lust he doth me scorch, with languor freeze,\nBut lust and languor both one Christ offend.\nLet contraries with contraries contend,\nLet fear of blame and love of Christ arise,\nHot love of Christ to melt in tears mine eyes,\nCold fear of just reproach my shame to extend,\nThat shame with heat may cool my looser thought,\nAnd tears with cold heat my heart’s sluggish deep.\nO happy I if that such grace were wrought!\nTill then, shame blush because tears cannot weep,\nAnd tears weep you because shame cannot blush,\nTill shame from tears, and tears from shame do flush.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "louisa-may-alcott": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louisa May Alcott", - "birth": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_May_Alcott", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "dont-drive-me-away": { - "title": "“Don’t Drive Me Away”", - "body": "Don’t drive me away,\nBut hear what I say:\nBad men want the gold;\nThey will steal it to-night,\nAnd you must take flight;\nSo be quiet and busy and bold.\n\nSlip away with me,\nAnd you will see\nWhat a wise little thing am I;\nFor the road I show\nNo man can know,\nSince it’s up in the pathless sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-kingdom": { - "title": "“My Kingdom”", - "body": "A little kingdom I possess\nwhere thoughts and feelings dwell,\nAnd very hard I find the task\nof governing it well;\nFor passion tempts and troubles me,\nA wayward will misleads,\nAnd selfishness its shadow casts\nOn all my words and deeds.\n\nHow can I learn to rule myself,\nto be the child I should,\nHonest and brave, nor ever tire\nOf trying to be good?\nHow can I keep a sunny soul\nTo shine along life’s way?\nHow can I tune my little heart\nTo sweetly sing all day?\n\nDear Father, help me with the love\nthat casteth out my fear;\nTeach me to lean on thee, and feel\nThat thou art very near,\nThat no temptation is unseen\nNo childish grief too small,\nSince thou, with patience infinite,\nDoth soothe and comfort all.\n\nI do not ask for any crown\nBut that which all may win\nNor seek to conquer any world\nExcept the one within.\nBe thou my guide until I find,\nLed by a tender hand,\nThy happy kingdom in myself\nAnd dare to take command.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - } - } - }, - "richard-aldington": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Aldington", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Aldington", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "beauty-unpraised": { - "title": "“Beauty Unpraised”", - "body": "There is only you.\nThe rest are palterers, slovens, parasites.\nYou only are strong, clear-cut, austere;\nOnly about you the light curls\nLike a gold laurel bough.\n\n_Your words are cold faked stone,\nScentless white violets?_\n\nLaugh!\nLet them blunder.\nThe sea is ever the sea\nAnd none can change it,\nNone possess it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dilemma": { - "title": "“Dilemma”", - "body": "You asked me if you should still go adventuring\nFor more beauty, new lands, strange faces,\nFor other moons and suns over other cities\nAnd seas and forests you have never beheld;\nOr whether you should sit down quietly\nAnd con over all you have gathered,\nFingering your memories, counting your spoils,\nLetting each day pass without comment\nIndistinguishably--a day only, a passage of hours,\nWithout one blood-beat of discovery or pain.\n\nHow could I answer in words!\nIn any case I am sick of words and talk.\nSo I drew you silently to the window\nOpening upon the spring twilight.\nThere was a deep orange overglow from the sun,\nAnd a young moon with a star in her hand;\nThe last swifts dashed screaming over the roofs,\nWhile the first bats swerved noiselessly across the square;\nThere was a murmur of talk and of moving feet\nAs people strolled and met after work;\nA peasant’s cart went by with a man driving\nAnd a girl holding a candle in a paper shade,\nAnd someone played a mandoline.\n\nWere you answered? I do not know,\nFor after a long silence you spoke of other things.\nBut I do not know any other silence to give you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "glaucopis": { - "title": "“Glaucopis”", - "body": "O maidens, whom I loved\nAnd now love not at all,\nNor even the memory of your shadowy faces,\nWho loved me also,\nStriving with delicate and sensuous days\nTo thrall my soul,\nBehold!\nFrom the hush and the dusk\nCome, like the whisper of dawn,\nHer frail, her magical feet.\nFrom the desert she blossoms,\nA flower of the winds,\nTremulous, shaken by love.\n\nAh Gods!\nAnd I may not hearken\nNor stoop to the flower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-have-drifted-along-this-river": { - "title": "“I Have Drifted along This River”", - "body": "I have drifted along this river\nUntil I moored my boat\nBy these crossed trunks.\nHere the mist moves\nOver fragile leaves and rushes,\nColorless waters and brown, fading hills.\nYou have come from beneath the trees\nAnd move within the mist,\nA floating leaf.\nO blue fower of the evening,\nYou have touched my face\nWith your leaves of silver.\nLove me, for I must depart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "images": { - "title": "“Images”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLike a gondola of green scented fruits\nDrifting along the dank canals at Venice,\nYou, O exquisite one,\nHave entered my desolate city.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe blue smoke leaps\nLike swirling clouds of birds vanishing.\nSo my love leaps forth towards you,\nVanishes and is renewed.\n\n\n# III.\n\nA rose-yellow moon in a pale sky\nWhen the sunset is faint vermilion\nIn the mist among the tree-boughs,\nArt thou to me.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAs a young beech-tree on the edge of a forest\nStands still in the evening,\nYet shudders through all its leaves in the light air\nAnd seems to fear the stars--\nSo are you still and so tremble.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe red deer are high on the mountain,\nThey are beyond the last pine trees.\nAnd my desires have run with them.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThe flower which the wind has shaken\nIs soon filled again with rain;\nSo does my mind fill slowly with misgiving\nUntil you return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "la-rochelle": { - "title": "“La Rochelle”", - "body": "Lightly the land-locked waves slide in the harbor,\nLightly, lightly the wind drifts dust of iron men;\nLightly bare feet pat on sun-warmed flags.\nThe lime-trees rustle, sweetening the salt air.\nLightly the colored boats ride at the quay--\nPatched sails, yellow, brown, red on blue masts,\nPatched sailors’ clothes, blue, brown, madder and rose,\nNets dyed deep blue.\nMen pass with a clatter of wooden shoes …\n\nBut who remembers the iron men,\nStarving, faces and vitals pinched,\nTrusting in a God who betrayed them,\nTrusting in the pledged word of the English lords?\nWho remembers them as they starved and died?--\nAnd what can men do more than starve and die\nFor a dream, for a faith, for a pledged word?\n\nDead men, dead men of iron, let me not forget you!\n“Eight months, unsuccored, they held their town,\nHeld it against a great king’s army.\nOut of ten thousand there remained a remnant,\nOne hundred and thirty-six men able to stand.\nWith rage and tears they surrendered their town.”\n\nDead men of iron, forgive us our cowardice,\nForgive us our treachery,\nForgive us that we broke our word,\nForgive us!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "le-maudit": { - "title": "“Le Maudit”", - "body": "Women’s tears are but water;\nThe tears of men are blood.\n\nHe sits alone in the firelight\nAnd on either side drifts by\nSleep, like a torrent whirling,\nProfound, wrinkled and dumb.\n\nCircuitously, stealthily,\nDawn occupies the city;\nAs if the seasons knew of his grief\nSpring has suddenly changed into snow\n\nDisaster and sorrow\nHave made him their pet;\nHe cannot escape their accursed embraces.\nFor all his dodgings\nMemory will lacerate him.\n\nWhat good does it do to wander\nNights hours through city streets?\nOnly that in poor places\nHe can be with common men\nAnd receive their unspoken\nInstinctive sympathy.\n\nWhat has life done for him?\nHe stands alone in the darkness\nLike a sentry never relieved,\nLooking over a barren space,\nAwaiting the tardy finish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "loss": { - "title": "“Loss”", - "body": "This is not hell--\nAt least, merely a comfortable hell,\nWith warmth and food and some still moments\nEre the true hell comes rushing in again.\nYet this one thought is torture:\n\n_Have I lost her, lost her indeed?--\nLost the calm eyes and eager lips of love,\nThe two-fold amorous breasts and braided hair\nThe white slim body my senses fed upon,\nAnd all the secret shadows shot with fire?_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "madrigal": { - "title": "“Madrigal”", - "body": "Oh, by what rite shall I upbraid\n Beauty that will not let me rest?\nWhat charm shall make to fade\n Those cheeks as fragrantly demure as morn,\nAnd quench the perfume of her flowering breast?\nAll night I waked forlorn,\n I waked forlorn,\nHarkening the lamentation of the rain,\nBut daylight brought no slumber to my pain,\n no slumber to my pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-poplars": { - "title": "“The Poplars”", - "body": "Why do you always stand there shivering\nBetween the white stream and the road?\n\nThe people pass through the dust\nOn bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars;\nThe waggoners go by at dawn;\nThe lovers walk on the grass path at night.\n\nStir from your roots, walk, poplar!\nYou are more beautiful than they are.\n\nI know that the white wind loves you,\nIs always kissing you and turning up\nThe white lining of your green petticoat.\nThe sky darts through you like blue rain,\nAnd the grey rain drips on your flanks\nAnd loves you.\nAnd I have seen the moon\nSlip his silver penny into your pocket\nAs you straightened your hair;\nAnd the white mist curling and hesitating\nLike a bashful lover about your knees.\n\nI know you, poplar;\nI have watched you since I was ten.\nBut if you had a little real love,\nA little strength,\nYou would leave your nonchalant idle lovers\nAnd go walking down the white road\nBehind the waggoners.\n\nThere are beautiful beeches\nDown beyond the hill.\nWill you always stand there shivering?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-a-greek-marble": { - "title": "“To a Greek Marble”", - "body": "Pótuia, pótuia\nWhite grave goddess,\nPity my sadness,\nO silence of Paros.\n\nI am not of these about thy feet,\nThese garments and decorum;\nI am thy brother,\nThy lover of aforetime crying to thee,\nAnd thou hearest me not.\n\nI have whispered thee in thy solitudes\nOf our loves in Phrygia,\nThe far ecstasy of burning noons\nWhen the fragile pipes\nCeased in the cypress shade,\nAnd the brown fingers of the shepherd\nMoved over slim shoulders;\nAnd only the cicada sang.\n\nI have told thee of the hills\nAnd the lisp of reeds\nAnd the sun upon thy breasts,\n\nAnd thou hearest me not,\nPótuia, pótuia\nThou hearest me not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "vicente-aleixandre": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vicente Aleixandre", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1984 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Aleixandre", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "creatures-in-the-dawn": { - "title": "“Creatures in the Dawn”", - "body": "You knew the rich full light of innocence.\nEach morning from the flowers of the woods you plucked \nthe last, the pallid echo of a fading star.\nYou drank the limpid radiance that like a most pure hand\nsays farewell to men from beyond the fabled presence of the mountains.\nUnderneath the nascent blue,\namong the new stars, among the first pure breezes \nthat by their very candor vanquished night, \nyou dawned each day, because each day the barely \nmoist tunic rended itself like a virgin, \nunclad, pure, inviolate, to love you.\n\nBetween the sloping hillsides you appeared,\nthere where the tender grass has felt since time began the moon’s instantaneous kiss.\nGentle eye, a sudden glance toward a trembling world \nthat stretches out ineffably beyond its own appearance.\n\nThe melody of rivers, the quietness of wings,\nthose feathers that, still remembering the day, folded back for love, as though for sleep, \nintoned their wholly silent ecstasy \nbeneath the magic gust of light,\nthe fervent moon that once it has appeared up in the sky \nseems to ignore its ephemeral transparent destiny.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Shadow of Paradise", - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Hugh A. Harter", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "no-star": { - "title": "“No Star”", - "body": "Who said that a body\ncarved from kisses shines\nresplendently, an orb\nof happiness? Oh star of mine,\ndescend! May your light finally\nbe flesh, be body, here upon\nthe grass. May I at last\npossess you, throbbing in the reeds,\nstar fallen to the earth,\nwho for my love would sacrifice\nyour blood or gleam. No, never,\nheavenly one! Here, humble\nand tangible, the earth awaits you.\nHere, a man loves you.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Shadow of Paradise", - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Hugh A. Harter", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "with-all-due-respect": { - "title": "“With All Due Respect”", - "body": "Trees, women and children\nare all the same thing: Background.\nVoices, affections, brightness, joy,\nthis knowledge that finally here we all are.\nIndeed. Me and my ten fingers.\n\nNow the sun isn’t horrendous like a cheek that’s ready:\nit isn’t a piece of clothing or a speechless flashlight.\nNor is it the answer heard by our knees,\nnor the task of touching the frontiers with the whitest part of our eyes.\nThe Sun has already become truth, lucidity, stability.\nYou converse with the mountain,\nyou trade the mountain for a heart:\nthen you can go on, weightless, going away.\nThe fish’s eye, if we come to the river,\nis precisely the image of happiness God sets up for us,\nthe passionate kiss that breaks our bones.\n\nIndeed. Finally, it’s life. Oh, what egg-like beauty\nin this ample gift the Valley spreads before us,\nthis limitation we can lean our heads against\nso as to hear the greatest music, that of the distant planets.\nHurry, let’s all get close around the bonfire.\nYour hands made of petals and mine of bark,\nthese delicious improvisations we show each other,\nare good--for burning, for keeping faith in tomorrow,\nso that our talk can go on ignoring our clothes.\nI don’t notice our clothes. Do you?\nDressed up in three-hundred burlap suits,\nwrapped in my roughest heaviest get-up,\nI maintain a dawn-like dignity and brag of how much I know about nakedness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "without-faith": { - "title": "“Without Faith”", - "body": "You have dark eyes.\nGleams there that promise darkness.\nOh, how certain is your night,\nhow uncertain my doubt.\nI see the light in the depths, and alone, I believe.\nAlone then, you exist.\nTo exist is to live with knowledge blindly.\nFor you approach darkly\nand in my eyes more lights\nare felt without my observing that they are shining in them.\nThey do not shine, for they were aware.\nIs awareness knowledge?\nI do not know you and was aware.\nTo be aware is to breathe with open eyes.\nTo doubt …? One who doubts exists. Only death is knowledge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "J. M. Cohen" - } - } - } - }, - "cecil-frances-alexander": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Cecil Frances Alexander", - "birth": { - "year": 1818 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english+irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Frances_Alexander", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english", - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "all-things-bright-and-beauteous": { - "title": "“All Things Bright And Beauteous”", - "body": "All things bright and beauteous\nAll creatures great and small,\nAll things wise and wondrous,\nThe LORD GOD made them all.\n\nEach little flower that opens,\nEach little bird that sings,\nHe made their glowing colours,\nHe made their tiny wings.\n\nThe rich man in his castle,\nThe poor man at his gate,\nGOD made them, high or lowly,\nAnd ordered their estate.\n\nThe purple-headed mountain,\nThe river running by,\nThe sunset, and the morning,\nThat brightens up the sky,\n\nThe cold wind in the winter,\nThe pleasant summer sun,\nThe ripe fruits in the garden,\nHe made them every one.\n\nThe tall trees in the greenwood,\nThe meadows where we play,\nThe rushes by the water,\nWe gather every day;--\n\nHe gave us eyes to see them,\nAnd lips that we might tell,\nHow great is GOD Almighty,\nWho has made all things well.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Hymns for Little Children", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1848 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "once-in-royal-davids-city": { - "title": "“Once in Royal David’s City”", - "body": "Once in royal David’s city\nStood in a lowly cattle shed,\nWhere a mother laid her baby\nIn a manger for his bed:\nMary was that mother mild,\nJesus Christ her little child.\n\nHe came down to earth from heaven,\nWho is God and Lord of all,\nAnd his shelter was a stable,\nAnd his cradle was a stall;\nWith the poor, and mean, and lowly,\nLived on earth our Saviour holy.\n\nAnd through all his wondrous childhood,\nHe would honour and obey,\nLove, and watch the lowly maiden\nIn whose gentle arms he lay:\nChristian children all must be\nMild, obedient, good as he.\n\nFor he is our childhood’s pattern,\nDay by day like us he grew,\nHe was little, weak, and helpless,\nTears and smiles like us he knew,\nAnd he feeleth for our sadness,\nAnd he shareth in our gladness.\n\nAnd our eyes at last shall see him,\nThrough his own redeeming love,\nFor that child so dear and gentle\nIs our Lord in heaven above;\nAnd he leads his children on\nTo the place where he is gone.\n\nNot in that poor lowly stable,\nWith the oxen standing by,\nWe shall see him; but in heaven,\nSee at God’s right hand on high;\nWhen like stars his children crowned,\nAll in white shall wait around.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Hymns for Little Children", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1848 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "there-is-a-green-hill-far-away": { - "title": "“There is a green hill far away …”", - "body": "There is a green hill far away,\nWithout a city wall,\nWhere the dear Lord was crucified,\nWho died to save us all.\n\nWe may not know, we cannot tell\nWhat pains he had to bear,\nBut we believe it was for us\nHe hung and suffer’d there.\n\nHe died that we might be forgiven,\nHe died to make us good,\nThat we might go at last to heaven,\nSav’d by his precious blood.\n\nThere was no other good enough\nTo pay the price of sin;\nHe only could unlock the gate\nOf heaven, and let us in.\n\nO dearly, dearly has he lov’d,\nAnd we must love him too,\nAnd trust in his redeeming blood,\nAnd try his works to do.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Hymns for Little Children", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1848 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dante-alighieri": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dante Alighieri", - "birth": { - "year": 1265, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1321 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "all-my-thoughts-always-speak-to-me-of-love": { - "title": "“All my thoughts always speak to me of love …”", - "body": "All my thoughts always speak to me of love,\nYet have between themselves such difference\nThat while one bids me bow with mind and sense,\nA second saith, “Go to: look thou above”;\nThe third one, hoping, yields me joy enough;\nAnd with the last come tears, I scarce know whence:\nAll of them craving pity in sore suspense,\nTrembling with fears that the heart knoweth of.\nAnd thus, being all unsure which path to take,\nWishing to speak I know not what to say,\nAnd lose myself in amorous wanderings:\nUntil (my peace with all of them to make),\nUnto mine enemy I needs must pray,\nMy lady Pity, for the help she brings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "D. G. Rossetti" - } - }, - "for-certain-he-hath-seen-all-perfectness": { - "title": "“For certain he hath seen all perfectness …”", - "body": "For certain he hath seen all perfectness\nWho among other ladies hath seen mine:\nThey that go with her humbly should combine\nTo thank their God for such peculiar grace.\nSo perfect is the beauty of her face\nThat it begets in no wise any sigh\nOf envy, but draws round her a clear line\nOf love, and blessed faith, and gentleness.\nMerely the sight of her makes all things bow:\nNot she herself alone is holier\nThan all; but hers, through her, are raised above.\nFrom all her acts such lovely graces flow\nThat truly one may never think of her\nWithout a passion of exceeding love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "D. G. Rossetti" - } - }, - "i-felt-a-spirit-of-love-begin-to-stir": { - "title": "“I felt a spirit of love begin to stir …”", - "body": "I felt a spirit of love begin to stir\nWithin my heart, long time unfelt till then;\nAnd saw Love coming towards me fair and fain\n(That I scarce knew him for his joyful cheer),\nSaying, “Be now indeed my worshipper!”\nAnd in his speech he laughed and laughed again.\nThen, while it was his pleasure to remain,\nI chanced to look the way he had drawn near,\nAnd saw the Ladies Joan and Beatrice\nApproach me, this the other following,\nOne and a second marvel instantly.\nAnd even as now my memory speaketh this,\nLove spake it then: “The first is christened Spring;\nThe second Love, she is so like to me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "D. G. Rossetti", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "sestina-of-the-lady-pietra-degli-scrovigni": { - "title": "“Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni”", - "body": "I have come, alas, to the great circle of shadow,\nto the short day and to the whitening hills,\nwhen the colour is all lost from the grass,\nthough my desire will not lose its green,\nso rooted is it in this hardest stone,\nthat speaks and feels as though it were a woman.\n\nAnd likewise this heaven-born woman\nstays frozen, like the snow in shadow,\nand is unmoved, or moved like a stone,\nby the sweet season that warms all the hills,\nand makes them alter from pure white to green,\nso as to clothe them with the flowers and grass.\n\nWhen her head wears a crown of grass\nshe draws the mind from any other woman,\nbecause she blends her gold hair with the green\nso well that Amor lingers in their shadow,\nhe who fastens me in these low hills,\nmore certainly than lime fastens stone.\n\nHer beauty has more virtue than rare stone.\nThe wound she gives cannot be healed with grass,\nsince I have travelled, through the plains and hills,\nto find my release from such a woman,\nyet from her light had never a shadow\nthrown on me, by hill, wall, or leaves’ green.\n\nI have seen her walk all dressed in green,\nso formed she would have sparked love in a stone,\nthat love I bear for her very shadow,\nso that I wished her, in those fields of grass,\nas much in love as ever yet was woman,\nclosed around by all the highest hills.\n\nThe rivers will flow upwards to the hills\nbefore this wood, that is so soft and green,\ntakes fire, as might ever lovely woman,\nfor me, who would choose to sleep on stone,\nall my life, and go eating grass,\nonly to gaze at where her clothes cast shadow.\n\nWhenever the hills cast blackest shadow,\nwith her sweet green, the lovely woman\nhides it, as a man hides stone in grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "D. G. Rossetti", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "there-is-a-gentle-thought-that-often-springs": { - "title": "“There is a gentle thought that often springs …”", - "body": "There is a gentle thought that often springs\nto life in me, because it speaks of you.\nIts reasoning about love’s so sweet and true,\nthe heart is conquered, and accepts these things.\n“Who is this” the mind enquires of the heart,\n“who comes here to seduce our intellect?\nIs his power so great we must reject\nevery other intellectual art?”\nThe heart replies “O, meditative mind\nthis is love’s messenger and newly sent\nto bring me all Love’s words and desires.\nHis life, and all the strength that he can find,\nfrom her sweet eyes are mercifully lent,\nwho feels compassion for our inner fires.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "D. G. Rossetti" - } - }, - "upon-a-day-came-sorrow-in-to-me": { - "title": "“Upon a day, came Sorrow in to me …”", - "body": "Upon a day, came Sorrow in to me,\n Saying, “I’ve come to stay with thee a while”;\n And I perceived that she had ushered Bile\nAnd Pain into my house for company.\nWherefore I said, “Go forth--away with thee!”\n But like a Greek she answered, full of guile,\n And went on arguing in an easy style.\nThen, looking, I saw Love come silently,\nHabited in black raiment, smooth and new,\n Having a black hat set upon his hair;\nAnd certainly the tears he shed were true.\n So that I asked, “What ails thee, trifler?”\nAnswering, he said: “A grief to be gone through;\n For our own lady’s dying, brother dear.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - } - } - }, - "leonardo-alishan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Leonardo Alishan", - "birth": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2005 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "armenian+iranian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇲 🇮🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Alishan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "armenian", - "iranian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-virgins-tears": { - "title": "“The Virgin’s Tears”", - "body": "Forth welling from the breast of sapphire lakes,\nOh, tell my jocund heart why from their shore\nOf emerald do those pairs of wandering pearls\nLike rain upon the rosy plains downpour?\n\nLess pure, less tender, are the twilight dews,\nAt eve descending on the crimson rose\nAnd on the lily’s petals, fine and frail,\nThan those twin drops in which thy sorrow flows.\n\nSpeak, why do founts of shining tears descend,\nMary, from thy love-dropping virgin eyes\nTo thy cheek’s edge, and there hang tremulous,\nAs the stars twinkle in the evening skies?\n\nAs the heart-piercing pupil of the eye,\nSo sensitive each tear-drop seems to be;\nLike the unwinking pupil of the eye,\nCharming my soul, the bright drops look at me.\n\nThe heart throbs hard, the gazer holds his breath.--\nAh, now I know the truth! Oh, woe is me!\nFor me those tears have risen to thine eyes,\nTo heal my spirit’s wounds eternally.\n\nBut still of my unconsecrated heart\nDistrustful, they half-fallen linger there,\nAnd do not dare to drop and moisten me.\nNo, Mary! No, O Virgin Mother fair!\n\nI am a land uncultured, rough and wild;\nBut, underneath those tender tears of thine,\nLet rose and saffron bloom there! With thy love\nWater and cheer this sorrowing heart of mine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_sorrows" - } - } - }, - "weep-not": { - "title": "“Weep Not”", - "body": "Why art thou troubled, wandering heart?\nWhy dost thou sigh with pain?\nFrom whom do all thy sufferings come?\nOf whom dost thou complain?\n\nIs there no cure for wounds, no friend\nTo lend a pitying ear?\nWhy art thou troubled, wandering heart?\nWeep not! See Jesus near!\n\nSorrow and hardship are for all,\nThough differing forms they wear.\nThe path he gave us teems with thorns.\nThe feet must suffer there.\n\nWhat life, though but a day’s brief span,\nIs free from pain and woe?\n’T is not for mortals born in grief\nTo live at ease below.\n\nNot for the transient joys of earth\nThy heart to thee was given,\nBut for an instrument of grief,\nTo raise thy life toward heaven.\n\nIf joys be few, if pains abound,\nIf balms bring slow relief,\nIf wounds be sore and nature weak,\nThy earthly life is brief.\n\nThis is the vale of death and pain,\nOrdained for ancient sin;\nExcept through anguish, Eden’s gate\nNo soul shall enter in.\n\nJustice ordained it; mercy then\nMade it more light to bear.\nUnasked by thee, Christ sweetened it,\nHis love infusing there.\n\nFrom heaven’s height he hastened down,\nPitying thy trouble sore;\nWith thee a servant he became,\nHimself thy wounds he bore.\n\nHe filled his cup celestial\nFull of thy tears and pain,\nAnd tremblingly, yet freely,\nHe dared the dregs to drain.\n\nRemembering this, wilt thou not drink\nThy cup of tears and care?\n’T is proffered by thy Saviour’s hand,\nHis love is mingled there.\n\nHe feels and pities all thy woes,\nHe wipes away each tear;\nLove he distils into thy griefs;\nWeep not, for he is near!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "saint-ambrose": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Ambrose of Milan", - "birth": { - "year": 339, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 397 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "roman", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "roman", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "o-come-redeemer-of-the-earth": { - "title": "“O come, Redeemer of the earth …”", - "body": "O come, Redeemer of the earth, and manifest thy virgin-birth.\nLet every age in wonder fall: such birth befits the God of all.\nBegotten of no human will but of the Spirit, Thou art still the Word of God in flesh arrayed, the promised fruit to man displayed.\nThe Virgin’s womb that burden gained, its virgin honor still unstained.\nThe banners there of virtue glow; God in his temple dwells below.\nProceeding from His chamber free that royal home of purity a giant in twofold substance one, rejoicing now His course to run.\nO equal to the Father, Thou! gird on Thy fleshly mantle now; the weakness of our mortal state with deathless might invigorate.\nThy cradle here shall glitter bright, and darkness breathe a newer light where endless faith shall shine serene and twilight never intervene.\nAll praise, eternal Son, to Thee, whose advent sets Thy people free, whom, with the Father, we adore, and Holy Ghost, for evermore. Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_ambrose" - } - } - }, - "o-splendour-of-gods-glory-bright": { - "title": "“O splendour of God’s glory bright …”", - "body": "O splendour of God’s glory bright,\nO thou that bringest light from light,\nO Light of light, light’s living spring,\nO Day, all days illumining,\n\nO thou true Sun, on us thy glance\nLet fall in royal radiance,\nThe Spirit’s sanctifying beam\nUpon our earthly senses stream.\n\nThe Father, too, our prayers implore,\nFather of glory evermore;\nThe Father of all grace and might,\nTo banish sin from our delight:\n\nTo guide whate’er we nobly do,\nWith love all envy to subdue,\nTo make ill-fortune turn to fair,\nAnd give us grace our wrongs to bear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_ambrose" - } - } - } - } - }, - "yehuda-amichai": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Yehuda Amichai", - "birth": { - "year": 1924 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2000 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "israeli", - "language": "hebrew", - "flag": "🇮🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Amichai", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "israeli" - ], - "n_poems": 20 - }, - "poems": { - "and-we-shall-not-get-excited": { - "title": "“And We Shall Not Get Excited”", - "body": "And we shall not get excited. Because a translator\nMay not get excited. Calmly, we shall pass on\nWords from man to son, from one tongue\nTo others’ lips, un-\nKnowingly, like a father who passes on\nThe features of his dead father’s face\nTo his son, and he himself is like neither of them. Merely a mediator.\n\nWe shall remember the things we held in our hands\nThat slipped out.\nWhat I have in my possesion and what I do not have in my possession.\n\nWe must not get excited.\nCalls and their callers drowned. Or, my beloved\nGave me a few words before she left,\nTo bring up for her.\n\nAnd no more shall we tell what we were told\nTo other tellers. Silence as admission. We must not\nGet excited.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "before": { - "title": "“Before”", - "body": "Before the gate has been closed,\nbefore the last question is posed,\nbefore I am transposed.\n\nBefore the weeds fill the gardens,\nbefore there are no pardons,\nbefore the concrete hardens.\n\nBefore all the flute-holes are covered,\nbefore things are locked in the cupboard,\nbefore the rules are discovered.\n\nBefore the conclusion is planned,\nbefore God closes his hand,\nbefore we have nowhere to stand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "a-dog-after-love": { - "title": "“A Dog after Love”", - "body": "After you left me\nI let a dog smell at\nMy chest and my belly. It will fill its nose\nAnd set out to find you.\n\nI hope it will tear the\nTesticles of your lover and bite off his penis\nOr at least\nWill bring me your stockings between his teeth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "the-first-rain": { - "title": "“The First Rain”", - "body": "The first rain reminds me\nOf the rising summer dust.\nThe rain doesn’t remember the rain of yesteryear.\nA year is a trained beast with no memories.\nSoon you will again wear your harnesses,\nBeautiful and embroidered, to hold\nSheer stockings: you\nMare and harnesser in one body.\n\nThe white panic of soft flesh\nIn the panic of a sudden vision\nOf ancient saints.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "god-full-of-mercy": { - "title": "“God Full of Mercy”", - "body": "God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.\nIf God was not full of mercy,\nMercy would have been in the world,\nNot just in Him.\nI, who plucked flowers in the hills\nAnd looked down into all the valleys,\nI, who brought corpses down from the hills,\nCan tell you that the world is empty of mercy.\nI, who was King of Salt at the seashore,\nWho stood without a decision at my window,\nWho counted the steps of angels,\nWhose heart lifted weights of anguish\nIn the horrible contests.\n\nI, who use only a small part\nOf the words in the dictionary.\n\nI, who must decipher riddles\nI don’t want to decipher,\nKnow that if not for the God-full-of-mercy\nThere would be mercy in the world,\nNot just in Him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "half-the-people-in-the-world": { - "title": "“Half the People in the World”", - "body": "Half the people in the world love the other half,\nhalf the people hate the other half.\nMust I because of this half and that half go wandering\nand changing ceaselessly like rain in its cycle,\nmust I sleep among rocks, and grow rugged like\nthe trunks of olive trees,\nand hear the moon barking at me,\nand camouflage my love with worries,\nand sprout like frightened grass between the railroad tracks,\nand live underground like a mole,\nand remain with roots and not with branches, and not\nfeel my cheek against the cheek of angels, and\nlove in the first cave, and marry my wife\nbeneath a canopy of beams that support the earth,\nand act out my death, always till the last breath and\nthe last words and without ever understandig,\nand put flagpoles on top of my house and a bob shelter\nunderneath. And go out on rads made only for\nreturning and go through all the apalling\nstations--cat, stick, fire, water, butcher,\nbetween the kid and the angel of death?\nHalf the people love,\nhalf the people hate.\nAnd where is my place between such well-matched halves,\nand through what crack will I see the white housing\nprojects of my dreams and the bare foot runners\non the sands or, at least, the waving of a girl’s\nkerchief, beside the mound?", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "i-have-become-very-hairy": { - "title": "“I Have Become Very Hairy”", - "body": "I have become very hairy all over my body.\nI’m afraid they’ll start hunting me because of my fur.\n\nMy multicolored shirt has no meaning of love--\nit looks like an air photo of a railway station.\n\nAt night my body is open and awake under the blanket,\nlike eyes under the blindfold of someone to be shot.\n\nRestless I shall wander about;\nhungry for life I’ll die.\n\nYet I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed,\nand tranquil, like a full cemetery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "i-want-to-die-in-my-own-bed": { - "title": "“I Want to Die in My Own Bed”", - "body": "All night the army came up from Gilgal\nTo get to the killing field, and that’s all.\nIn the ground, warf and woof, lay the dead.\nI want to die in My own bed.\nLike slits in a tank, their eyes were uncanny,\nI’m always the few and they are the many.\nI must answer. They can interrogate My head.\nBut I want to die in My own bed.\n\nThe sun stood still in Gibeon. Forever so, it’s willing\nto illuminate those waging battle and killing.\nI may not see My wife when her blood is shed,\nBut I want to die in My own bed.\n\nSamson, his strength in his long black hair,\nMy hair they sheared when they made me a hero\nPerforce, and taught me to charge ahead.\nI want to die in My own bed.\n\nI saw you could live and furnish with grace\nEven a lion’s den, if you’ve no other place.\nI don’t even mind to die alone, to be dead,\nBut I want to die in My own bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "a-jewish-cemetery-in-germany": { - "title": "“A Jewish Cemetery in Germany”", - "body": "On a little hill amid fertile fields lies a small cemetery,\na Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs,\nabandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer\nnor the voice of lamentation is heard there\nfor the dead praise not the Lord.\nOnly the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves and cheering\neach time they find one--like mushrooms in the forest, like wild strawberries.\nHere’s another grave! There’s the name of my mother’s\nmothers, and a name from the last century. And here’s a name,\nand there! And as I was about to brush the moss from the name--\nLook! an open hand engraved on the tombstone, the grave of a kohen,\nhis fingers splayed in a spasm of holiness and blessing,\nand here’s a grave concealed by a thicket of berries\nthat has to be brushed aside like a shock of hair\nfrom the face of a beautiful beloved woman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "love-of-jerusalem": { - "title": "“Love of Jerusalem”", - "body": "There is a street where they sell only red meat\nAnd there is a street where they sell only clothes and perfumes. And there\nis a day when I see only cripples and the blind\nAnd those covered with leprosy, and spastics and those with twisted lips.\n\nHere they build a house and there they destroy\nHere they dig into the earth\nAnd there they dig into the sky,\nHere they sit and there they walk\nHere they hate and there they love.\n\nBut he who loves Jerusalem\nBy the tourist book or the prayer book\nis like one who loves a women\nBy a manual of sex positions.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "a-man-doesnt-have-time-in-his-life": { - "title": "“A Man Doesn’t Have Time in His Life”", - "body": "A man doesn’t have time in his life\nto have time for everything.\nHe doesn’t have seasons enough to have\na season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes\nWas wrong about that.\n\nA man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,\nto laugh and cry with the same eyes,\nwith the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,\nto make love in war and war in love.\nAnd to hate and forgive and remember and forget,\nto arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest\nwhat history\ntakes years and years to do.\n\nA man doesn’t have time.\nWhen he loses he seeks, when he finds\nhe forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves\nhe begins to forget.\n\nAnd his soul is seasoned, his soul\nis very professional.\nOnly his body remains forever\nan amateur. It tries and it misses,\ngets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,\ndrunk and blind in its pleasures\nand its pains.\n\nHe will die as figs die in autumn,\nShriveled and full of himself and sweet,\nthe leaves growing dry on the ground,\nthe bare branches pointing to the place\nwhere there’s time for everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "memorial-day-for-the-war-dead": { - "title": "“Memorial Day for the War Dead”", - "body": "Memorial day for the war dead. Add now\nthe grief of all your losses to their grief,\neven of a woman that has left you. Mix\nsorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,\nwhich stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning\non one day for easy, convenient memory.\n\nOh, sweet world soaked, like bread,\nin sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.\n“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”\nNo use to weep inside and to scream outside.\nBehind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.\n\nMemorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up\nas a little girl with flowers.\nThe streets are cordoned off with ropes,\nfor the marching together of the living and the dead.\nChildren with a grief not their own march slowly,\nlike stepping over broken glass.\n\nThe flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.\nA dead soldier swims above little heads\nwith the swimming movements of the dead,\nwith the ancient error the dead have\nabout the place of the living water.\n\nA flag loses contact with reality and flies off.\nA shopwindow is decorated with\ndresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.\nAnd everything in three languages:\nHebrew, Arabic, and Death.\n\nA great and royal animal is dying\nall through the night under the jasmine\ntree with a constant stare at the world.\n\nA man whose son died in the war walks in the street\nlike a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.\n“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "near-the-wall-of-a-house": { - "title": "“Near the Wall of a House”", - "body": "Near the wall of a house painted\nto look like stone,\nI saw visions of God.\n\nA sleepless night that gives others a headache\ngave me flowers\nopening beautifully inside my brain.\n\nAnd he who was lost like a dog\nwill be found like a human being\nand brought back home again.\n\nLove is not the last room: there are others\nafter it, the whole length of the corridor\nthat has no end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "of-three-or-four-in-the-room": { - "title": "“Of Three or Four in the Room”", - "body": "Out of three or four in the room\nOne is always standing at the window.\nForced to see the injustice amongst the thorns,\nThe fires on the hills.\n\nAnd people who left whole\nAre brought home in the evening, like small change.\n\nOut of three or four in the room\nOne is always standing at the window.\nHair dark above his thoughts.\nBehind him, the words, wandering, without luggage,\nHearts without provision, prophecies without water\nBig stones put there\nStanding, closed like letters\nWith no addresses; and no one to receive them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "a-pity": { - "title": "“A Pity”", - "body": "They amputated\nYour thighs off my hips.\nAs far as I’m concerned\nThey are all surgeons. All of them.\n\nThey dismantled us\nEach from the other.\nAs far as I’m concerned\nThey are all engineers. All of them.\n\nA pity. We were such a good\nAnd loving invention.\nAn aeroplane made from a man and wife.\nWings and everything.\nWe hovered above the earth.\n\nWe even flew a little.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "the-place-where-we-are-right": { - "title": "“The Place Where We Are Right”", - "body": "From the place where we are right\nFlowers will never grow\nIn the spring.\n\nThe place where we are right\nIs hard and trampled\nLike a yard.\n\nBut doubts and loves\nDig up the world\nLike a mole, a plow.\nAnd a whisper will be heard in the place\nWhere the ruined\nHouse once stood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "quick-and-bitter": { - "title": "“Quick and Bitter”", - "body": "The end was quick and bitter.\nSlow and sweet was the time between us,\nslow and sweet were the nights\nwhen my hands did not touch one another in despair but in the love\nof your body which came\nbetween them.\n\nAnd when I entered into you\nit seemed then that great happiness\ncould be measured with precision\nof sharp pain. Quick and bitter.\n\nSlow and sweet were the nights.\nNow is bitter and grinding as sand--\n“Let’s be sensible” and similiar curses.\n\nAnd as we stray further from love\nwe multiply the words,\nwords and sentences so long and orderly.\nHad we remained together\nwe could have become a silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "try-to-remember-some-details": { - "title": "“Try to Remember Some Details”", - "body": "Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing\nof the one you love\nso that on the day of loss you’ll be able to say: last seen\nwearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.\nTry to remember some details. For they have no face\nand their soul is hidden and their crying\nis the same as their laughter,\nand their silence and their shouting rise to one height\nand their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees\nand they have no life outside this narrow space\nand they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory\nand they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing\nand paper cups that are used once only.\n\nTry to remember some details. For the world\nis filled with people who were torn from their sleep\nwith no one to mend the tear,\nand unlike wild beasts they live\neach in his lonely hiding place and they die\ntogether on battlefields\nand in hospitals.\nAnd the earth will swallow all of them,\ngood and evil together, like the followers of Korah,\nall of them in thir rebellion against death,\ntheir mouths open till the last moment,\npraising and cursing in a single\nhowl. Try, try\nto remember some details.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "what-kind-of-a-person": { - "title": "“What Kind of a Person”", - "body": "“What kind of a person are you,” I heard them say to me.\nI’m a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,\nSophisticated instruments of feeling and a system\nOf controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,\nBut with an old body from ancient times\nAnd with a God even older than my body.\nI’m a person for the surface of the earth.\nLow places, caves and wells\nFrighten me. Mountain peaks\nAnd tall buildings scare me.\nI’m not like an inserted fork,\nNot a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.\n\nI’m not flat and sly\nLike a spatula creeping up from below.\nAt most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle\nMashing good and bad together\nFor a little taste\nAnd a little fragrance.\n\nArrows do not direct me. I conduct\nMy business carefully and quietly\nLike a long will that began to be written\nThe moment I was born.\n\nNow I stand at the side of the street\nWeary, leaning on a parking meter.\nI can stand here for nothing, free.\n\nI’m not a car, I’m a person,\nA man-god, a god-man\nWhose days are numbered. Hallelujah.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - }, - "you-mustnt-show-weakness": { - "title": "“You Mustn’t Show Weakness”", - "body": "You mustn’t show weakness\nand you’ve got to have a tan.\nBut sometimes I feel like the thin veils\nof Jewish women who faint\nat weddings and on Yom Kippur.\n\nYou mustn’t show weakness\nand you’ve got to make a list\nof all the things you can load\nin a baby carriage without a baby.\n\nThis is the way things stand now:\nif I pull out the stopper\nafter pampering myself in the bath,\nI’m afraid that all of Jerusalem, and with it the whole world,\nwill drain out into the huge darkness.\n\nIn the daytime I lay traps for my memories\nand at night I work in the Balaam Mills,\nturning curse into blessing and blessing into curse.\n\nAnd don’t ever show weakness.\nSometimes I come crashing down inside myself\nwithout anyone noticing. I’m like an ambulance\non two legs, hauling the patient\ninside me to Last Aid\nwith the wailing of cry of a siren,\nand people think it’s ordinary speech.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hebrew" - } - } - } - }, - "kingsley-amis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kingsley Amis", - "birth": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1995 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "something-nasty-in-the-bookshop": { - "title": "“Something Nasty in the Bookshop”", - "body": "Between the Gardening and the Cookery\nComes the brief Poetry shelf;\nBy the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology\nOffers itself.\n\nCritical, and with nothing else to do,\nI scan the Contents page,\nRelieved to find the names are mostly new;\nNo one my age.\n\nLike all strangers, they divide by sex:\nLandscape Near Parma\nInterests a man, so does The Double Vortex,\nSo does Rilke and Buddha.\n\n“I travel, you see,” “I think” and “I can read”\nThese titles seem to say;\nBut I Remember You, Love is my Creed,\nPoem for J.,\n\nThe ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter\nFor several seconds;\nFrom somewhere in this (as in any) matter\nA moral beckons.\n\nShould poets bicycle-pump the human heart\nOr squash it flat?\nMan’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;\nGirls aren’t like that.\n\nWe men have got love well weighed up; our stuff\nCan get by without it.\nWomen don’t seem to think that’s good enough;\nThey write about it.\n\nAnd the awful way their poems lay them open\nJust doesn’t strike them.\nWomen are really much nicer than men:\nNo wonder we like them.\n\nDeciding this, we can forget those times\nWe stayed up half the night\nChock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,\nAnd couldn’t write.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "things-tell-less-and-less": { - "title": "“Things Tell Less and Less”", - "body": "Things tell less and less:\nThe news impersonal\nAnd from afar; no book\nWorth wrenching off the shelf.\nLiquor brings dizziness\nAnd food discomfort; all\nMusic sounds thin and tired,\nAnd what picture could earn a look?\nThe self drowses in the self\nBeyond hope of a visitor.\nDesire and those desired\nFade, and no matter:\nMemories in decay\nAnnihilate the day.\nThere once was an answer:\nUp at the stroke of seven,\nA turn round the garden\n(Breathing deep and slow),\nThen work, never mind what,\nHow small, provided that\nIt serves another’s good\nBut once is long ago\nAnd, tell me, how could\nSuch an answer be less than wrong,\nBe right all along?\nVain echoes, desist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wasted": { - "title": "“Wasted”", - "body": "That cold winter evening\nThe fire would not draw,\nAnd the whole family hung\nOver the dismal grate\nWhere rain-soaked logs\nBubbled, hissed and steamed.\nThen, when the others had gone\nUp to their chilly beds,\nAnd I was ready to go,\nThe wood began to flame\nIn clear rose and violet,\nHeating the small hearth.\n\nWhy should that memory cling\nNow the children are all grown up,\nAnd the house--a different house--\nIs warm at any season?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "tom-andrews": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Tom Andrews", - "birth": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2001 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Andrews_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "hymning-the-kanawha": { - "title": "“Hymning the Kanawha”", - "body": "1.\n\n Day brings a steady\nhand, a sure breath every other day …\n\nMy brother again on the edge of his bed,\nsitting up with his eyes closed,\nhis palms pressed, a brief prayer.\n\n _You see we’re in trouble_\n\nSpring, 1972. The last flare\nof an April dusk. Sure breaths and relief\nafter a run on dialysis. He’s telling\nan old story, his slim translations\nof Psalms, to whoever is listening.\n\n _Give us strength enough_\n\nThe passionate calm after a run his\npulse grows as the fresh blood thins,\nhis drugged face opens like a fist.\n\n…\n\nRunnels of spring rain. Branches\nlike floating ribs from the camphor trees.\nSomeone is asking you to make a fist.\nSomeone is taking your pulse\nand saying nothing, and starting to weep\nover the jonquils and the yellow grass,\nover the cold surge of the Kanawha River.\n\n\n2.\n\nSlurs on the Psalms he calls these prayers.\nAnd writes them out\nin a notebook he keeps under his pillow,\nand shows no one.\n\n _Death has fallen on me\n like a stone I can’t budge\n\n Once death was my companion\n We walked together in your house_\n\n It’s an odd-numbered day,\nthe machine, like another child, bathed and asleep.\n\nBefore he sleeps tonight, my brother will forgive\nhis body anything--night sores, bad numbers,\npain like a word …\n\nBefore sleep, my brother will bless himself, and lie down.\n\n…\n\nThe blood in a black widow falls asleep.\nNear an almond branch,\nwork ants gather their meals in the noon sun.\n\nAt the far edge of a field, a hospital\nis erected and torn down\non the same day, the healers now\n\nworking double time, now obsolete,\nyour failed kidneys swelling from pinholes\n\nto buttonholes, buttonholes to large red sacks.\n\n\n3.\n\nWhat’s in the doctor’s pause and the heart’s,\nthe needle placed like a root\nin the red vein …\n\nThe machine drones through the afternoon.\nMy parents shuffle about him, keeping the lines clean,\nsmoothing the blood’s slow run from the body\n\n _But I am no one\n I am poured out like water_\n\nScissor-clamps, the pump, coils: the hours\nare counted out. Like coins, like yesterday’s\ngood news, they pile up\njust out of reach.\n\n _Lord, be near_\n\n…\n\nX rays of the hip joint, fat negatives,\nmilk-light your wronged bones.\nFor once you can hear yourself:\n\nSyringe of sleep,\nSyringe of another life,\nclose my eyes,\nlift these white walls.\n\nYour shadow ascends like a soul\nfrom the stretcher but holds still.\nIn time, in good time, your own blood\nmutters and wakes.\n\n\n4.\n\n“Just to imagine\nthere is something larger than me, and purer.”\n\nThus my brother, in a notebook, 1972.\nA reason to rise in the long mornings.\nThus sun, moon, ghost-of-a-chance; what\nthe Psalms say.\n\n _How long will sorrow flow\n through my heart like bad blood\n How long will you be a stranger_\n\n _Like anyone\n I’m dying_\n\nHe writes at his desk, sure breath after\nsure breath. Outside, the poplars; and I’m\nspinning a ball through a netted hoop\n\nover and over, getting better.\n\n…\n\nReedstem, cattail, eyelash, a leaf …\nA fine rain peppers the Kanawha, a cold\nwind hustles the yew bushes and hollyhocks\nin Tuendiewei Park. The log cabin there\nrests on your fingertip, twilit; inside,\nyour grandparents parade in your white gowns,\ntheir eyes the color of your eyes, their wake\nthe dust prints you’ll leave behind.\n\n\n5.\n\nThere’s a photograph, a boy on a beach, 1961.\nMy father took it. My brother\ndidn’t know it. He sat on the hot sands,\ntracing his noon shadow with a Lego stick.\n\nHeat came in with the waves. He was five.\nMorning opened up\nlike a torn. fingernail, and began to bleed.\nEleven years. He sits under himself now, the flush\nand pull of dialysis; writing sentences.\n\n _The river of God is full\n of water_\n\nThe edge of his straw hat casts a shadow\nlike gray fingers, water reeds. Gulls\ntattooed the beach. At five, my brother saw\n\nhis shadow as a circle. Widening, opening.\n\n…\n\nThe hallway goes out like a blown\ncandle, and you’re back at your first house--\n\nflies in the screen’s light, white wings\nfluttering through the grilled blackness.\n\nYou walk toward the coal cars by the riverbank:\ndamp smell of the cornfield at night;\n\nover your head, the same stars\nin their ordered slide …\n\nOnly this time it’s wrong,\nthe face of the night nurse among the reeds\n\nand birch branches, the whole landscape\ncaught like a moth in the renal room’s dark.\n\n\n6.\n\nTonight, asleep, my brother walks\nout into a mild rain on the driveway.\nThe pulse, he’ll say, of drops collecting\ninto puddles is his pulse, the soft tick\nagainst the windows his tick …\n\nAnd tomorrow’s an odd-numbered day,\nnothing but sleep and a book.\n\n _a little sleep, a little folding\n of the hands_\n\nMy father goes out to bring him back\ninside. He knows that he will keep this:\nhis son asleep in his pale flesh,\n\npart of this rain and the black sky,\npart of these black puddles filling the potholes\nin the driveway.\n (The hands ghostly, so steady …)\n\nMy brother is led to a dry bed, and lies down\nwhispering after a rain, the quiet\nbefore a sleepwalker’s footsteps …\nYour family, gathering themselves forever.\n\nThey play cards, or read, and wait for your step\nand your suit of scars.\nThey stare past one another into\n\nthe river, and go on\nwaiting until your voice fills\nthe breezes again, until\n\nthe shine of the Kanawha\nbecomes their shine.\n\n\n7.\n\nThe machine drones like an old complaint.\nMy brother’s shunt--a tubed sleeve, blood-vines\nscaling the entire room, a red trellis of veins.\nI’m eleven and looking on\nfor hours, as though over a roof’s edge.\n\n _The peace of a good family\n like rare oil\n like your name_\n\nWe try to talk. Already, I know\nthe wrong words to say. I’ve rehearsed\nthe gestures of my hands, how fear\nenters a child’s voice. He’s telling me\nthat it’s al right, that if the mind\nis lucid it can shine\nlike blown glass in a brilliant light …\n\nHis hands shake. His drugged face\nblurs like a moon.\n\nYou sit in a silence of rivers, the last\nApril driftings of the Kanawha, and watch\nyour own ashes being raised in wind\nand scattered on the bank. Your family\nlooks on without a word. In a dry cove,\nthey’ve waited for your body to float by\n\nlike driftwood, for your one call\nfrom the nettles, from the crickets’ chirrs,\nfrom the flash of fireflies low in the grass …\n\n\n8.\n\nWhen God died my brother learned to sing.\nWhen God died my brother slipped through the house\nlike wind, rustling his papers and spread sheets\nbefore leaving under a door without a sound.\n\n _Lord, I look at the night sky\n and see your fingerprints\n\n What are we, almost you\n There’s sheep oxen birds\n There’s the sea there’s the field\n\n through which we see your vital hands_\n\nScissor-clamps, the pump, coils. The hours\nare counted out. But a sure breath fills\nthe planet, and another--what the Psalms say--\n\na sure breath, a steady hand, every other day.\n\n…\n\nAlong the east bank of the Kanawha River,\nyour shadow swells to its own poise\n\nand walks into the chigger bush, burrs\nclinging like tiny scabs to the silhouette.\n\nIt finds the warm grass in Tuendiewei Park\nand lies down. It considers your guilt\n\nand lies down. It turns back to the Kanawha\nand rises, and slides into the black water,\n\nyour body drifting across the white\nbedsheets, a slow erasure of your name …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "maya-angelou": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Maya Angelou", - "birth": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2014 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "Lying, thinking\nLast night\nHow to find my soul a home\nWhere water is not thirsty\nAnd bread loaf is not stone\nI came up with one thing\nAnd I don’t believe I’m wrong\nThat nobody,\nBut nobody\nCan make it out here alone.\n\nAlone, all alone\nNobody, but nobody\nCan make it out here alone.\n\nThere are some millionaires\nWith money they can’t use\nTheir wives run round like banshees\nTheir children sing the blues\nThey’ve got expensive doctors\nTo cure their hearts of stone.\nBut nobody\nNo, nobody\nCan make it out here alone.\n\nAlone, all alone\nNobody, but nobody\nCan make it out here alone.\n\nNow if you listen closely\nI’ll tell you what I know\nStorm clouds are gathering\nThe wind is gonna blow\nThe race of man is suffering\nAnd I can hear the moan,\n’Cause nobody,\nBut nobody\nCan make it out here alone.\n\nAlone, all alone\nNobody, but nobody\nCan make it out here alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-know-why-the-caged-bird-sings": { - "title": "“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”", - "body": "A free bird leaps on the back\nOf the wind and floats downstream\nTill the current ends and dips his wing\nIn the orange suns rays\nAnd dares to claim the sky.\n\nBut a bird that stalks down his narrow cage\nCan seldom see through his bars of rage\nHis wings are clipped and his feet are tied\nSo he opens his throat to sing.\n\nThe caged bird sings with a fearful trill\nOf things unknown but longed for still\nAnd his tune is heard on the distant hill for\nThe caged bird sings of freedom.\n\nThe free bird thinks of another breeze\nAnd the trade winds soft through\nThe sighing trees\nAnd the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright\nLawn and he names the sky his own.\n\nBut a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams\nHis shadow shouts on a nightmare scream\nHis wings are clipped and his feet are tied\nSo he opens his throat to sing.\n\nThe caged bird sings with\nA fearful trill of things unknown\nBut longed for still and his\nTune is heard on the distant hill\nFor the caged bird sings of freedom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "refusal": { - "title": "“Refusal”", - "body": "Beloved,\nIn what other lives or lands\nHave I known your lips\nYour Hands\nYour Laughter brave\nIrreverent.\nThose sweet excesses that\nI do adore.\nWhat surety is there\nThat we will meet again,\nOn other worlds some\nFuture time undated.\nI defy my body’s haste.\nWithout the promise\nOf one more sweet encounter\nI will not deign to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "touched-by-an-angel": { - "title": "“Touched by an Angel”", - "body": "We, unaccustomed to courage\nexiles from delight\nlive coiled in shells of loneliness\nuntil love leaves its high holy temple\nand comes into our sight\nto liberate us into life.\n\nLove arrives\nand in its train come ecstasies\nold memories of pleasure\nancient histories of pain.\nYet if we are bold,\nlove strikes away the chains of fear\nfrom our souls.\n\nWe are weaned from our timidity\nIn the flush of love’s light\nwe dare be brave\nAnd suddenly we see\nthat love costs all we are\nand will ever be.\nYet it is only love\nwhich sets us free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "innokenty-annensky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Innokenty Annensky", - "birth": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innokenty_Annensky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "the-anguish-of-a-mirage": { - "title": "“The Anguish of a Mirage”", - "body": "They faded, the last bands of reddish,\nLike whispers of prayers in night,\nO tale, such seductive and maddish,\nWhat else do you want of this heart?\n\nAre not, beyond measure and count,\nSo hard in the snows my ways?\nAren’t gray empty spaces around?\nIsn’t husky the ring of the bells?\n\nAnd why, every minute and instant,\nMy heart is divided in two?\nI know that she is in distance,\nBut feel her right near me, too.\n\nHere they are, the snowy clouds,\nI can’t take my eyes from all that:\nRight now, shall merge our routs\nIn snows, so white and so dead.\n\nRight now will be silently bound\nAnd newly unbound our sleighs.\nWe’ll hear the bell’s common sound\nIn an instant of sadness and pains …\n\nWe’d heard … But we’ll not any more\nHave meeting in this hazy night …\nIn the circle of anguish and woe\nI wander on my path of blight …\n\nThey faded, the last bands of reddish,\nLike whispers of prayers in night,\nO tale, such seductive and maddish,\nWhat else do you want of this heart?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "autumnal-romance": { - "title": "“Autumnal Romance”", - "body": "I watch you as coldly as ever,\nBut can’t keep this pine in my breast,\nToday sun’s in smoke of havens,\nAnd sadness makes heavy a breath.\n\nI know, I breed just a fable--\nAt least, trust to fables,--but you? …\nLike needless oblations, in alleys,\nLeaves fall in the mournful hue.\n\nWe’re joined by the fate that was blinded:\nWould God join us ‘there’--behind sky? …\nDon’t laugh, if in spring days, delighted,\nYou’ll step on the lives that here die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "black-spring": { - "title": "“Black Spring”", - "body": "A half-holiday for the burial. Of course, they punish\nthe provincial copper bells for hours;\nterribly the nose tilts up like a tallow candle\nfrom the coffin. Does it wish to draw breath\nfrom its torso in a mourning suit? The last snow\nfell sombrely--white, then the roads were bread-crumbed with pebbles.\nPoor winter, honeycombed with debts,\npoured to corruption. Now the dumb, black springtime\nmust look into the chilly eye … from under the mould\non the roof-shingles, the liquid oatmeal\nof the roads, the green stubble of life\non our faces! High in the splinter elm,\nshrill the annual fledglings with their spiky necks.\nThey say to man that his road is mud,\nhis luck is rutted--there is nothing\nsorrier than the marriage of two deaths.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Lowell", - "date": { - "year": 1906, - "month": "march", - "day": 19 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "childs-insomnia": { - "title": "“Child’s Insomnia”", - "body": "From the smothering soot of the earth\nThe fiery speck got out,\nAnd the shadows began to flow gently,\nMerging strange contours.\n\nI knew that I couldn’t sleep:\nWhile my lips prayed,\nThose importunate words began\nShifting in the brain.\n\nI lay, and the shadows drifted,\nProbably knowing and hiding,\nHow a mushroom emerges from the earth\nAnd how the hour-hand ticks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Linda Southby", - "date": { - "year": 1904 - } - } - }, - "ennui": { - "title": "“Ennui”", - "body": "There are the delicate pink ovals\nOn which the mists of morning flood,\nAnd in unique bouquets unwinding\nSteel-colored flowers bloom and bud.\n\nFor nomad flies they are temptation;\nTheir gloss hides poisons’ virulence …\nIntrusive, variegated, idle,\nThe bare facets of existence.\n\nBut when exhausted from a fever\nAnd bed-ridden, as weeks progress,\nYou understand the pleasant hashish\nConcealed within their dull sameness.\n\nYou understand--frugally counting\nThe strokes upon each rose you see …\nAs you build diamonds, willy-nilly,\nBetween the stations of ennui.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov", - "date": { - "year": 1904 - } - } - }, - "for-what-purpose-when-dreams-betray": { - "title": "“For what purpose, when dreams betray …”", - "body": "For what purpose, when dreams betray,\nThat words brim over with delusions?\nFor what purpose, on a forgotten grave,\nGrass grows greener and emits a noise?\n\nFor what purpose these lunar heights,\nIf my garden is silent and dark?\nAnd the tails of her plaits are untied,\nAnd I hear their breath … for what?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "july": { - "title": "“July”", - "body": "Scorched by the fire of the sky’s unmoving body,\nThe pick-ax stops clanging out its accursed lesson.\nAnd nailed onto the earth, the piled autumnal haystacks\nOf sleeping working-men are black as any downpour.\n\nThe last decision of some dark and savage forces,\nA vertical ray’s call, inaudible to people,\nAnd those lines of lean legs amidst smoky confusion.\nOf the disheveled beards, of torn and tattered headgear.\n\nIs not this whirling world many times terrifying\nDoes not one want to run away and hide so quickly?\nJust think: In the arms of their mothers\nAll these were once lovely pink children.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov", - "date": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "nocturne": { - "title": "“Nocturne”", - "body": "Select a dark night and in a field,\nunpeopled, naked, dip into gray twilight …\nMay the air, having fanned, becalm,\nMay the stars, winking, in the cold sky slumber on\nTell the heart not to count its thumps …\nStop in mid-step and listen! You’re not alone …\nThe wings of a bird, heavy, sodden, drift through the fog.\nListen … it’s the flight of a predator, a sovereign avian,\nThey call that bird Time, and on its wings is your will,\nA passing dream of happiness, hopes’ golden rags …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1890, - "month": "february", - "day": 26 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "oh-no-not-your-waist": { - "title": "“Oh, no, not your waist …”", - "body": "Oh, no, not your waist, though it be so\nTender and lively, will I save from your\nTemptations, not the moist shine of crimson\nSmiles, the cold serpent of suffering.\n\nThus at times in the banal, motley hall, where\nThe waltz rings out, disturbing and beseeching,\nI summon up in reverie the sounds of Parsifal\nAnd the shadow, and Death over the king’s mask …\n\nLeave me … Boredom makes my bed. What do I\nNeed that paradise for, of which all dream? And\nIf dirt and baseness are only tormented longing\nFor the beauty that is shining somewhere there …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "R. H. Morrison", - "date": { - "year": 1906, - "month": "may", - "day": 19 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 19 - } - } - }, - "pace": { - "title": "“Pace”", - "body": "Among the gilded bath-houses and obelisks of glory\nIs a white maiden, with thick grass all around.\n\nNo thyrsus pleases her, she strikes no cymbals.\nAnd the white marble Pan does not love her.\n\nOnly the cold fogs have caressed her,\nLeaving black wounds from their moist lips.\n\nBut the maid is as proud of her beauty as\nEver, and they never cut the grass round her.\n\nI do not know why the sculpture of the goddess\nHolds a sweet enchantment for my heart …\n\nI love the hurt in her, her dreadful nose, and\nThe compressed feet, and the braids’ rough knot.\n\nEspecially when cold rain is drizzling\nAnd her nakedness shows helplessly white …\n\nO grant me eternity, and I will give back eternity\nFor unconcern towards hurts and the years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "R. H. Morrison", - "date": { - "year": 1905, - "month": "august", - "day": 2 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "september": { - "title": "“September”", - "body": "The gardens full of gold and decay,\nWith lure of purple of the swelling ailments,\nAnd tardy heat of sun in curves of sunbeam’s remnants,\nUnable to distil into the fragrant spray.\n\nThe carpets’ yellow silk and traces, roughly laid,\nAnd the avowed false of the preceding meeting,\nAnd ponds of parks, extinguished, deep and sad,\nAnd ready long ago for suffering and missing …\n\nBut ones’ hearts only seek past beauty in decays,\nJust the allurement of enchanted forces,\nAnd they, who’ve tested the unearthly lotus,\nAre thrilled by fragrance of autumnal days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - } - } - }, - "guillaume-apollinaire": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Guillaume Apollinaire", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "ailing-autumn": { - "title": "“Ailing Autumn”", - "body": "Autumn ailing and adored\nYou will die when the wind storm blows in rose gardens\nWhen it snows\nIn orchards\n\nPoor autumn\nDies in the whiteness and richness\nOf snow and ripe fruit\nDeep in the sky\nThe sparrow hawks glide\nAbove the tiny gentle green-haired water nymphs\nWho have never loved\n\nAt the distant forest edges\nStags have been bellowing\n\nAnd how I love O season how I love your murmurs\nThe fruits falling without being picked\nThe wind and the forest that weep\nAll their tears in autumn leaf by leaf\n Leaves\n That are trampled\n A train\n That passes\n Life\n That slips away", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "John Cobley", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "Into the fog go a knock-kneed peasant\nAnd his ox slowly into the autumn fog\nThat hides the poor and miserable villages\n\nAnd as he moves away the peasant intones\nA song of love and infidelity\nWhich tells of a ring and a broken heart\n\nOh! autumn autumn has made summer die\nInto the fog go two grey silhouettes", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "John Cobley", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "clotilde": { - "title": "“Clotilde”", - "body": "Anemone and columbine\nWhere gloom has lain\nOpened in gardens\nBetween love and disdain\n\nMade somber by the sun\nOur shadows meet\nUntil the sun\nIs squandered by night\n\nGods of living water\nLet down their hair\nAnd now you must follow\nA craving for shadows", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Donald Revell", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-lady": { - "title": "“The Lady”", - "body": "Knock knock He has closed his door\nThe garden’s lilies have started to rot\nSo who is the corpse being carried from the house\n\nYou just knocked on his door\n And trot trot\n\nTrot goes little lady mouse", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Ron Padgett", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "le-pont-mirabeau": { - "title": "“Le Pont Mirabeau”", - "body": "Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine\nMust I recall\nOur loves recall how then\nAfter each sorrow joy came back again\nLet night come on bells end the day\nThe days go by me still I stay\n\nHands joined and face to face let’s stay just so\nwhile underneath\nThe bridge of our arms shall go\nWeary of endless looks the river’s flow\nLet night come on bells end the day\nThe days go by me still I stay\n\nAll love goes by as water to the sea\nAll love goes by\nHow slow life seems to me\nHow violent the hope of love can be\nLet night come on bells end the day\nThe days go by me still I stay\n\nThe days the weeks pass by beyond our ken\nNeither time past\nNor love comes back again\nUnder the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine\nLet night come on bells end the day\nThe days go by me still I stay", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Richard Wilbur" - } - }, - "les-cloches": { - "title": "“Les Cloches”", - "body": "My handsome gypsy my love\nListen to the bells that ring\nWe loved each other unbridled\nThinking no one could see us\n\nBut we were poorly hidden\nAll the bells everywhere\nHave seen us from steeples\nAnd they’re telling everyone\n\nTomorrow Cyprien and Henri\nMarie Ursule and Catherine\nThe baker’s wife and her husband\nAnd then my cousin Gertrude\n\nWill smile when I walk by\nI won’t know where to put myself\nYou’ll be far away I’ll cry\nI’ll die of it maybe", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Andrea Cohen" - } - }, - "ocean-of-earth": { - "title": "“Ocean of Earth”", - "body": "I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean\nIts windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes\nOctopi are crawling all over where the walls are\nHear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes\n House of dampness\n House of burning\n Season’s fastness\n Season singing\n The airplanes are laying eggs\n Watch out for the dropping of the anchor\n\nWatch out for the shooting black ichor\nIt would be good if you were to come from the sky\nThe sky’s honeysuckle is climbing\nThe earthly octopi are throbbing\nAnd so very many of us have become our own gravediggers\nPale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks\nAround the house is this ocean that you know well\n And is never still", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "palace": { - "title": "“Palace”", - "body": "In deepest dream towards Rosemonde’s palace\nMy barefoot brain inclined for the evening\nLike a naked king the walls are waking\nBeaten flesh and fresh-cut roses\n\nYou can see my thoughts immersed in roses\nSmiling at the concert of the toads\nThey are in the mood for cypress bedposts\nThe sun is a broken mirror of the rose\n\nWhat badly wounded bowman opened\nStigmata of palms on the windowpane\nAt the white lamb’s love-feast I have tasted\nResins that bitter the Cyprian wine\n\nOn the jagged lap of the lascivious king\nIn the May-time of her age and finest frock\nMysterious Madame Rosemonde rolls\nHer little round eyes like a Hun\n\nLady of my thoughts your pearly asshole\nIs unrivalled by anything Oriental\nFor whom are you waiting\nDeepest dreams en route to the Orient\nAre my loveliest neighbors\n\nKnock knock Come into the forecourt night is coming\nIn shadow the night-light is toasted tinsel\nHang your heads by the hair on the hat-rack\nThe evening sky is aglimmer with pins\n\nWe entered the dining room our noses\nCaught a whiff of grease and mucus\nOf twenty soup bowls three were urine\nThe king ate two poached eggs in bouillon\n\nAnd then the scullions brought in the meat dishes\nA standing roast of thoughts deceased in my brain\nMy lovely still-born dreams in slices still bloody\nAnd gamy little meatballs of memory\n\nDead for millennia now these thoughts\nHad a flavorless taste of frozen mammoth\nBones or visionaries danced out of ossuaries\nThe dance of death in the folds of my brain\n\nAnd all those meats pronounced revelations\nBut Holy Christ!\nA famished belly has no hearing\nThe guests continued their best mastications\n\nAh Holy Christ! cried out the rib-eyes\nThe huge pâtés the marrow and hot-pots\nTongues of fire o where is the pentecost\nOf my thoughts for all places nations and times", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Donald Revell", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "poem-for-lou": { - "title": "“Poem for Lou”", - "body": "If I should die out there on the battle-front,\nYou’d weep, O Lou my darling, a single day,\nAnd then my memory would die away\nAs a shell dies bursting over the battle-front,\nA beautiful shell like a flowered mimosa spray.\n\nAnd then this memory exploded in space\nWould flood the whole wide world beneath my blood:\nThe mountains, valleys, seas and the stars that race,\nThe wondrous suns that ripen far in space,\nAs golden fruits round General Baratier would.\n\nForgotten memory, living in all things,\nI’d redden the nipples of your sweet pink breasts,\nI’d blush your mouth, your hair’s now blood-like rings.\nYou wouldn’t grow old at all; these lovely things\nWould ever make you young for their brave behests.\n\nThe fatal spurting of my blood on the world\nWould give more lively brightness to the sun,\nMore color to flowers, to waves more speedy run.\nA marvelous love would descend upon the world,\nWould be, in your lonely flesh, more strongly grown.\n\nAnd if I die there, memory you’ll forget--\nSometimes remember, Lou, the moments of madness,\nOf youth and love and dazzling passion’s heat--\nMy blood will be the burning fountain of gladness!\nAnd be the happiest being the prettiest yet,\n\n_O_ my only love and my great madness!\n\n_L_ ong night is falling,\n_O_ n us foreboding\n_U_ shers a long, long fate of blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Hubert Creekmore" - } - }, - "the-pretty-redhead": { - "title": "“The Pretty Redhead”", - "body": "Here I am first of all a man full of sense\nKnowing life and of death what one living can know\nHaving proved the joys and the sorrows of love\nHaving sometimes known how to impose his ideas\nKnowing several tongues\nBeing pretty well traveled\nHaving looked at the war from the infantry and the artillery\nShot in the head trepanned under ether\nHaving lost his best friends in the frightful fight\nI know as much of the old and the new as one man alone could learn\nAnd today without getting upset at this war\nJust between ourselves for ourselves my friends\nI judge that long wrangle to be of tradition and change\nOf Adventure and Order\n\nYou whose mouth is made in the image of God’s\nMouth that’s the order itself\nBe indulgent when you compare\nTo those who have been the perfection of order\nUs who everywhere seek for adventure\n\nWe aren’t your enemies\nWe want to give you dominions vast and strange\nWhere the flowers’ enigma yields to whoever will pick it\nThere there are brand-new fires and colors unseen\nA thousand phantasms imponderable\n\nThat have to be given reality\nWe want to explore the enormous bounteous country where all is unspoken\nThere’s a time to go forth as well as a time to return\nWhat pity for us who fight all the time on frontiers\nOf limitlessness and the future\nWhat pity our errors what pity our sins\nHere comes the summer the violent season\nAnd my youth is as dead as the spring\nO Sun it’s the time of passionate Reason\n And I’m waiting\n\nTo follow it always the noble and gentle form\nTo be taken at last by the only one that I love\nWhose coming attracts me as magnet attracts a sword\n With the charming aspect of\n An adorable redhead\nHer hair is of gold you might say\nA lovely lightning that stays\nOr the flaunting flame that arrays\nTea-roses fading away\n\nBut laugh at me laugh\nMen of all places especially people here\nBecause there’s so much I’m afraid to tell you\nSo much that you wouldn’t allow me to tell you\nHave pity on me", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-seasons": { - "title": "“The Seasons”", - "body": "It was a blessèd time we were at the beach\nGo out early in the morning no shoes no hats no ties\nAnd quick as a toad’s tongue can reach\nLove wounded the hearts of the mad and the wise\n\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was a military man\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was an artiman\n In the war\n\nIt was a blessèd time At mail call\nWe are squeezed in tighter than on a bus\nAnd the stars passing by were mimicked by the shells\nIn the night when the cannons came rolling up\n\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was a military man\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was an artiman\n In the war\n\nIt was a blessèd time Days and nights blending\nThe stew-pot shells gave our trench dugout\nAluminum shrapnel that you set about\nSmoothing all day into an unlikely ring\n\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was a military man\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was an artiman\n In the war\n\nIt was a blessèd time The war goes on\nThe Gunners have filed for part of a year\nSafe in the woods the Driver can hear\nAn unknown star repeating a song\n\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was a military man\n Did you know Guy when he galloped along\n When he was an artiman\n In the war", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "toward-the-south": { - "title": "“Toward the South”", - "body": "Zenith\n These griefs\n These gardens on and on\nWhere the toad croons a tender cry skyblue\nThe hind of silence startled races by\nThe nightingale that love has bruised sings in\nYour body’s bush on which I’ve picked each rose\nOur hearts hang from the same pomegranate bough\nAnd in our gaze pomegranate blossoms blow\nThat falling one by one have strewn the road", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "zone": { - "title": "“Zone”", - "body": "At last you’re tired of this elderly world\n\nShepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating\n\nYou’re fed up living with antiquity\n\nEven the automobiles are antiques\nReligion alone remains entirely new religion\nRemains as simple as an airport hangar\n\nIn all Europe only you O Christianism are not old\nThe most modern European Pope Pius X it’s you\nThe windows watch and shame has sealed\nThe confessionals against you this morning\nFlyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud\nHere’s poetry this morning and for prose you’re reading the tabloids\nDisposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police\nBiographies of great men a thousand various titles\n\nI saw a pretty street this morning I forgot the name\nNew and cleanly it was the sun’s clarion\nExecutives laborers exquisite stenographers\nCriss-cross Monday through Saturday four times daily\nThree times every morning sirens groan\nAt the lunch hour a rabid bell barks\nThe lettering on the walls and billboards\nthe doorplates and posters twitters parakeet-style\nI love the swank of that street\nSituated in Paris between the rue Aumont-Thieville and the avenue des Ternes\n\nHere’s the young street and you’re still a baby\nDressed by your mother in blue and white only\nYou’re very pious and with your oldest friend Rene Dalize\nNothing is more fun than Masses and Litanies\n\nIt’s nine o’clock the gaslight is low you leave your bed\nYou pray all night in the school chapel\nMeanwhile an eternal adorable amethyst depth\nChrist’s flamboyant halo spins forever\nBehold the beautiful lily of worship\nBehold the red-haired torch inextinguishable\nBehold the pale son and scarlet of the dolorous Mother\nBehold the tree forever tufted with prayer\nBehold the double gallows honor and eternity\nBehold the six-pointed star\nBehold the God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday\nBehold the Christ who flies higher than aviators\nHe holds the world’s record for altitude\n\nChrist pupil of the eye\nTwentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff\nAnd bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky\nDevils in the abyss look up to watch\nThey say this century mimics Simon Magus in Judea\nIt takes a thief to catch a thief they cry\nAngels flutter around the pretty trapeze act\nIcarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana\nHover as close to the airplane as they can\nSometimes they give way to other men hauling the Eucharist\nPriests eternally climbing the elevating Host\nThe plane descends at last its wings unfolded\nbursts into a million swallows\nFull speed come the crows the owls and falcons\nFrom Africa ibis storks flamingoes\nThe Roc-bird famous with writers and poets\nGlides Adam’s skull the original head in its talons\nThe horizon screams an eagle pouncing\nAnd from America there comes a hummingbird\nFrom China sinuous peehees\nWho have only one wing and who fly in couples\nAnd here’s a dove immaculate spirit\nEscorted by lyre-bird and shimmery peacock\n\nPhoenix the pyre the self-resurrected\nObscures everything ardently briefly with ash\nThe sirens abandon their perilous channels\nEach one singing more beautifully arrives\nEveryone eagle Phoenix Chinese peehees\nEager to befriend a machine that flies\n\nYou are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd\nHerds of buses bellow and come too close\nLove-anguish clutches your throat\nYou must never again be loved\nIn the Dark Ages you would have entered a monastery\nYou are ashamed to overhear yourself praying\nYou laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire\nThe sparks gild the ground and background of your life\nYour life is a painting in a dark museum\nAnd sometimes you examine it closely\n\nYou are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked\nIt was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty\n\nIn Chartres from her entourage of flames Our Lady beamed at me\nThe blood of your Sacred Heart drenched me in Montmartre\nI’m sick of hearing blissful promises\nThe love I feel is a venereal disease\nAnd the image possessing you in your pain your insomnia\nVanishes and it is always near you\n\nAnd now you are on the Riviera\nUnder lemon trees that never stop blooming\nYou are boating with friends\nOne is from Nice one is from Menton two from La Turbie\nWe are staring terrified at giant squid\nAt fish the symbols of Jesus swimming through seaweed\n\nYou are in the garden at an inn outside of Prague\nYou are completely happy a rose is on the table\nAnd instead of getting on with your short-story\nYou watch the rosebug sleeping in the rose’s heart\n\nAppalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus\nYou were sad near to death to see yourself there\nYou looked as bewildered as Lazarus\nIn the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards\nAnd you go backwards also through a slow life\nClimbing the Hradchen listening at nightfall\nTo Bohemian songs in the singing taverns\n\nYou in Marseilles among the watermelons\n\nYou in Coblenz at the Hotel Gigantic\n\nYou in Rome beneath a Japanese tree\n\nYou in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly\nShe’s engaged to marry a student from Leyden\nWhere you can rent rooms in Latin Cubicula locanda\nI remember spending three days there and three in Gouda\n\nYou are in Paris hauled before the magistrate\nYou are under arrest you are a criminal now\n\nYou went on sorrowful and giddy travels\nIgnorant still of dishonesty and old age\nLove afflicted you at twenty and again at thirty\nI’ve lived like a fool and I’ve wasted my time\nYou dare not look at your hands I want to weep all the time\nOn you on the one I love on everything that frightened you\n\nAnd now you are crying at the sight of refugees\nWho believe in God who pray whose women nurse babies\nThe hall of the train station is filled with the refugee-smell\nLike the Magi refugees believe in their star\nThey expect to find silver mines in the Argentine\nAnd to return like kings to their abandoned countries\nOne family carries a red eiderdown you carry your heart\nEiderdown and dreams are equally fantastic\n\nSome of the refugees stay on in Paris settling\nInto slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Ecouffes\nI have seen them often at dusk they breathe at their doorways\nThey budge from home as reluctantly as chessmen\nThey are chiefly Jewish the women wear wigs\nAnd haunt backrooms of little shops in little chairs\n\nYou’re standing at the metal counter of some dive\nDrinking wretched coffee where the wretched live\n\nYou are in a cavernous restaurant at night\n\nThese women are not evil they are used-up regretful\nEach has tormented someone even the ugliest\n\nShe is the daughter of a police sergeant from Jersey\n\nHer hands I’d never noticed are hard and cracked\n\nMy pity aches along the seams of her belly\n\nI humble my mouth to her grotesque laughter\n\nYou’re alone when morning comes\nThe milkmen jingle bottles in the street\n\nNight beautiful courtesan the night withdraws\nFraudulent Ferdine or careful Leah\n\nAnd you drink an alcohol as caustic as your life\nYour life you drink as alcohol\n\nYou walk to Auteuil you want to go on foot to sleep\nAt home among your South Sea and Guinean fetishes\nChrists of another shape another faith\nSubordinate Christs of uncertain hopes\n\nGoodbye Goodbye\n\nSun cut throated", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-aquinas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Thomas Aquinas", - "birth": { - "year": 1225 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1274 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "lauda-sion-salvatorem": { - "title": "“Lauda Sion Salvatorem”", - "body": "Sion, lift thy voice and sing:\nPraise thy Savior and thy King;\nPraise with hymns thy Shepherd true:\nDare thy most to praise Him well;\nFor He doth all praise excel;\nNone can ever reach His due.\n\nSpecial theme of praise is Thine,\nThat true living Bread divine,\nThat life-giving flesh adored,\nWhich the brethren twelve received,\nAs most faithfully believed,\nAt the Supper of the Lord.\n\nLet the chant be loud and high;\nSweet and tranquil be the joy\nFelt to-day in every breast;\nOn this festival divine\nWhich recounts the origin\nOf the glorious Eucharist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "pange-lingua": { - "title": "“Pange Lingua”", - "body": "Sing, my tongue, the Saviour’s glory,\nOf His cross the mystery sing;\nLift on high the wondrous trophy,\nTell the triumph of the King:\nHe, the world’s Redeemer, conquers\nDeath, through death now vanquishing.\n\nBorn for us, and for us given;\nSon of man, like us below,\nHe, as Man with men, abiding\nDwells, the seed of life to sow:\nHe, our heavy griefs partaking,\nThus fulfils His life of woe.\n\nWord made flesh! His word life-giving,\nGives His flesh our meat to be,\nBids us drink His blood, believing,\nThrough His death, we life shall see:\nBlessed they who thus receiving\nAre from death and sin set free.\n\nLow in adoration bending,\nNow our hearts our God revere;\nFaith, her aid to sight is lending,\nThough unseen the Lord is near;\nAncient types and shadows ending,\nChrist our paschal Lamb is here.\n\nPraise for ever, thanks and blessing,\nThine, O gracious Father, be:\nPraise be Thine, O Christ, who bringeth\nLife and immortality.\nPraise be Thine, Thou quickening Spirit,\nPraise through all eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "thee-we-adore": { - "title": "“Thee We Adore”", - "body": "Thee we adore, O hidden Savior, Thee,\nWho in Thy sacrament dost deign to be;\nBoth flesh and spirit at Thy presence fail,\nYet here Thy presence we devoutly hail.\n\nO blest memorial of our dying Lord,\nWho living Bread to men doth here afford!\nO may our souls forever feed on Thee,\nAnd Thou, O Christ, forever precious be.\n\nFountain of gladness, Jesu, Lord and God,\nCleanse us, unclean, with Thy most cleansing blood;\nIncrease our faith and love, that we may know\nThe hope and peace which from Thy presence flow.\n\nO Christ, Whom now beneath a veil we see,\nMay what we thirst for soon our portion be,\nTo gaze on Thee unveiled, and see Thy face,\nThe vision of Thy glory and Thy grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - } - } - }, - "louis-aragon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louis Aragon", - "birth": { - "year": 1897 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Aragon", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "elsas-eyes": { - "title": "“Elsa’s Eyes”", - "body": "Your eyes are so deep that leaning down to drink\nTo them I saw all mirrored suns repair\nAll desperate souls hurled deathward from their brink\nYour eyes are so deep my memory is lost there\n\nIn the shadow of birds now the ocean roars\nThen suddenly the day clears and your eyes change\nSummer carves the cloud on the angels’ pinafore\nThe sky’s never blue as it is above grain\n\nIn vain the winds pursue the azure’s griefs\nWhen they sparkle with tears your limpid eyes make\nEnvious the heavens less bright after showers\nGlass is never so blue as it is when it breaks\n\nMother of seven sorrows O watery light\nSeven blades have pierced the color prism\nLight is the more poignant which pricks between tears\nThe iris bored black is bluer by its grief\n\nYour eyes in misfortune form a double breach\nWhere the miracle of the Kings is again revealed\nWhen with beating hearts they all three saw\nMary’s mantle caught in the crib of the child\n\nA mouth may well suffice in the merry May\nOf words for all the songs and for all the sighs\nThere’s too little firmament for all the stars\nWith their secret Twins they had need of your eyes\n\nThe child who holds pictures before him for hours\nWill strain his eyes less immoderately\nWhen you stare from yours I know not if you lie\nOne would think the rain were opening wild flowers\n\nDo they hide lightning in that lavender where\nInsects give deliverance to their lusts\nI am caught in the net of the falling stars\nLike a sailor near death at sea in August\n\nThis radium from pitchblende I have obtained\nMy fingers I have burned on this forbidden fire\nO paradise regained relost and regained\nMy Peru My Golconda My Indies your eyes\n\nOne beautiful evening the universe broke\nOn the reefs where the signal fires did arise\nI looked and saw glittering above the sea\nElsa’s eyes Elsa’s eyes Elsa’s eyes", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Jay Smith", - "date": { - "year": 1945, - "month": "october" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "i-wait-for-her-letter-in-the-twilight": { - "title": "“I Wait for Her Letter in the Twilight”", - "body": "Under a satin sky\nPompadour, and how,\nA little car steers by\nAnd Echo tells its lie.\nAnd what is this song arising\nIn the sleeping wood at evening\nIn the monotonous park\nWhere the regiment is dreaming\nIn the bivouac of the shade\nIn the heart of the lovely fall\n\nHow the wounded hours\nWar at Crouy-sur-Ourcq\nGo to their lingering death\nYou are my core and pith\nYou are my bird of prey\nO steaming camion\nO melancholy love\nAlong the great highway\nLeave for the mist and cloud\nThe agitated ground:\nAnd do you see my love\nIn the sadness in the dream?\n\nAnd is this golden tint\nThis treasure turned to rust\nThe way she wore her hair?\nWhat does she tell me, wind?\nWhat does she tell me say:\nStay, as in other days;\nStay, as it was before\nThe battles in the East.\n\nNothing, the mailman says.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Rolfe Humphries", - "date": { - "year": 1944, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "speak-to-me-of-love-waves": { - "title": "“Speak to me of love waves …”", - "body": "Speak to me of love waves little waves\nThe heart in shadow still has its song and its cry\nAh, speak to me of love. These are the days\nOf doubt and dread where one is alone in writing\nAh, speak to me of love Letters How far it is\nFrom Paris to this outpost in the desert.\n\nYou will speak of love. The novel and the waltz\nWill mock at space and absence. A formal dance\nWith neither of us present is beginning\nThe violins will make the poets jealous\nNight and the sky unfold to the two-cent songs.\n\nDo not speak of love I hear the beating heart\nConceal the meaningless confusing themes\nSpeak no more of love What is she doing there\nSo near, so far, O Time of martyrdom,\nSpeak no more of love Fire hums on the hearth\nAnd the flames set the fragrance of kisses there\n\nBut speak of love again and let love rhyme\nWith old familiar words or nothing at all\nSpeak of love for all the rest is crime\nAnd men gone mad frighten the birds among\nThe bare black boughs that pallid winter leaves\nWhere the nests resemble pleasures stolen away\n\nTo speak of love is to speak of her and she\nIs all the music and the forbidden garden\nWhere Renaud fell in love with Armide and\nSaid nothing about his love O foolish knight\nJust as we used to be in days before\nWe warred upon the prince of infidels\n\nWe will speak of love as long as day returns\nAnd spring comes back and the sparrows make their song\nI will speak of love in bed with a pillow of dreams\nWhere the two of us will be like the gold of a ring\n\nAnd you will tell me Put the paper down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Rolfe Humphries", - "date": { - "year": 1945, - "month": "october" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - } - } - }, - "matthew-arnold": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Matthew Arnold", - "birth": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 22 - }, - "poems": { - "bacchanalia": { - "title": "“Bacchanalia”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe evening comes, the fields are still.\nThe tinkle of the thirsty rill,\nUnheard all day, ascends again;\nDeserted is the half-mown plain,\nSilent the swaths; the ringing wain,\nThe mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms,\nAll housed within the sleeping farms.\nThe business of the day is done,\nThe last-left haymaker is gone.\nAnd from the thyme upon the height,\nAnd from the elder-blossom white\nAnd pale dog-roses in the hedge,\nAnd from the mint-plant in the sedge,\nIn puffs of balm the night-air blows\nThe perfume which the day foregoes.\nAnd on the pure horizon far,\nSee, pulsing with the first-born star,\nThe liquid sky above the hill!\nThe evening comes, the fields are still.\n\nLoitering and leaping,\nWith saunter, with bounds,\nFlickering and circling\nIn files and in rounds,\nGayly their pine-staff green\nTossing in air,\nLoose o’er their shoulders white\nShowering their hair,\nSee! the wild Maenads\nBreak from the wood,\nYouth and Iacchus\nMaddening their blood.\nSee! through the quiet land\nRioting they pass,\nFling the fresh heaps about,\nTrample the grass,\nTear from the rifled hedge\nGarlands, their prize;\nFill with their sports the field,\nFill with their cries.\n\nShepherd, what ails thee, then?\nShepherd, why mute?\nForth with thy joyous song!\nForth with thy flute!\nTempts not the revel blithe?\nLure not their cries?\nGlow not their shoulders smooth?\nMelt not their eyes?\nIs not, on cheeks like those,\nLovely the flush?\n--_Ah! so the quiet was!\nSo was the hush!_\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe epoch ends, the world is still.\nThe age has talked and worked its fill.\nThe famous orators have shone,\nThe famous poets sung and gone,\nThe famous men of war have fought,\nThe famous speculators thought,\nThe famous players, sculptors, wrought,\nThe famous painters filled their wall,\nThe famous critics judged it all.\nThe combatants are parted now;\nUphung the spear, unbent the bow,\nThe puissant crowned, the weak laid low.\nAnd in the after-silence sweet,\nNow strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet,\nAscending pure, the bell-like fame\nOf this or that down-trodden name,\nDelicate spirits, pushed away\nIn the hot press of the noonday.\nAnd o’er the plain, where the dead age\nDid its now-silent warfare wage,--\nO’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom,\nWhere many a splendor finds its tomb,\nMany spent fames and fallen nights nights--\nThe one or two immortal lights\nRise slowly up into the sky,\nTo shine there everlastingly,\nLike stars over the bounding hill.\nThe epoch ends, the world is still.\n\nThundering and bursting\nIn torrents, in waves,\nCarolling and shouting\nOver tombs, amid graves,\nSee! on the cumbered plain\nClearing a stage,\nScattering the past about,\nComes the new age.\nBards make new poems,\nThinkers new schools,\nStatesmen new systems,\nCritics new rules.\nAll things begin again;\nLife is their prize;\nEarth with their deeds they fill,\nFill with their cries.\n\nPoet, what ails thee, then?\nSay, why so mute?\nForth with thy praising voice!\nForth with thy flute!\nLoiterer! why sittest thou\nSunk in thy dream?\nTempts not the bright new age?\nShines not its stream?\nLook, ah! what genius,\nArt, science, wit!\nSoldiers like Caesar,\nStatesmen like Pitt!\nSculptors like Phidias,\nRaphaels in shoals,\nPoets like Shakspeare,--\nBeautiful souls!\nSee, on their glowing cheeks\nHeavenly the flush!\n--_Ah! so the silence was!\nSo was the hush!_\n\nThe world but feels the present’s spell:\nThe poet feels the past as well;\nWhatever men have done, might do,\nWhatever thought, might think it too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-better-part": { - "title": "“The Better Part”", - "body": "Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,\nHow angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!\n“Christ,” some one says, “was human as we are;\nNo judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;”\n\n“We live no more, when we have done our span.”\n“Well, then, for Christ,” thou answerest, “who can care?\nFrom sin which Heaven records not, why forbear?\nLive we like brutes our life without a plan!”\n\nSo answerest thou; but why not rather say,--\n“Hath man no second life? _Pitch this one high!_\nSits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see?\n\n_More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!_\nWas Christ a man like us? _Ah! let us try_\n_If we then, too, can be such men as he!_”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-buried-life": { - "title": "“The Buried Life”", - "body": "Light flows our war of mocking words; and yet,\nBehold, with tears mine eyes are wet!\nI feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.\nYes, yes, we know that we can jest,\nWe know, we know that we can smile!\nBut there’s a something in this breast,\nTo which thy light words bring no rest,\nAnd thy gay smiles no anodyne;\nGive me thy hand, and hush awhile,\nAnd turn those limpid eyes on mine,\nAnd let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.\n\nAlas! is even love too weak\nTo unlock the heart, and let it speak?\nAre even lovers powerless to reveal\nTo one another what indeed they feel?\n\nI knew the mass of men concealed\nTheir thoughts, for fear that if revealed\nThey would by other men be met\nWith blank indifference, or with blame reproved;\nI knew they lived and moved\nTricked in disguises, alien to the rest\nOf men, and alien to themselves--and yet\nThe same heart beats in every human breast!\n\nBut we, my love! doth a like spell benumb\nOur hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?\n\nAh! well for us, if even we,\nEven for a moment, can get free\nOur heart, and have our lips unchained;\nFor that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!\n\nFate, which foresaw\nHow frivolous a baby man would be,--\nBy what distractions he would be possessed,\nHow he would pour himself in every strife,\nAnd well-nigh change his own identity,--\nThat it might keep from his capricious play\nHis genuine self, and force him to obey\nEven in his own despite his being’s law,\nBade through the deep recesses of our breast\nThe unregarded river of our life\nPursue with indiscernible flow its way;\nAnd that we should not see\nThe buried stream, and seem to be\nEddying at large in blind uncertainty,\nThough driving on with it eternally.\n\nBut often, in the world’s most crowded streets,\nBut often, in the din of strife,\nThere rises an unspeakable desire\nAfter the knowledge of our buried life;\nA thirst to spend our fire and restless force\nIn tracking out our true, original course;\nA longing to inquire\nInto the mystery of this heart which beats\nSo wild, so deep in us,--to know\nWhence our lives come, and where they go.\nAnd many a man in his own breast then delves,\nBut deep enough, alas! none ever mines.\nAnd we have been on many thousand lines,\nAnd we have shown, on each, spirit and power;\nBut hardly have we, for one little hour,\nBeen on our own line, have we been ourselves,--\nHardly had skill to utter one of all\nThe nameless feelings that course through our breast,\nBut they course on forever unexpressed.\nAnd long we try in vain to speak and act\nOur hidden self, and what we say and do\nIs eloquent, is well--but ’tis not true!\nAnd then we will no more be racked\nWith inward striving, and demand\nOf all the thousand nothings of the hour\nTheir stupefying power;\nAh, yes, and they benumb us at our call!\nYet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,\nFrom the soul’s subterranean depth upborne\nAs from an infinitely distant land,\nCome airs, and floating echoes, and convey\nA melancholy into all our day.\n\nOnly--but this is rare--\nWhen a beloved hand is laid in ours,\nWhen, jaded with the rush and glare\nOf the interminable hours,\nOur eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,\nWhen our world-deafened ear\nIs by the tones of a loved voice caressed,--\nA bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,\nAnd a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.\nThe eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,\nAnd what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.\n\nA man becomes aware of his life’s flow,\nAnd hears its winding murmur, and he sees\nThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.\n\nAnd there arrives a lull in the hot race\nWherein he doth forever chase\nThe flying and elusive shadow, rest.\nAn air of coolness plays upon his face,\nAnd an unwonted calm pervades his breast;\nAnd then he thinks he knows\nThe hills where his life rose,\nAnd the sea where it goes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-church-of-brou": { - "title": "“The Church of Brou”", - "body": "# I. _The Castle_\n\nDown the Savoy valleys sounding,\nEchoing round this castle old,\n’Mid the distant mountain-chalets\nHark! what bell for church is tolled?\n\nIn the bright October morning\nSavoy’s Duke had left his bride.\nFrom the castle, past the drawbridge,\nFlowed the hunters’ merry tide.\n\nSteeds are neighing, gallants glittering.\nGay, her smiling lord to greet,\nFrom her mullioned chamber-casement\nSmiles the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nFrom Vienna, by the Danube,\nHere she came, a bride, in spring.\nNow the autumn crisps the forest;\nHunters gather, bugles ring.\n\nHounds are pulling, prickers swearing,\nHorses fret, and boar-spears glance.\nOff!--They sweep the marshy forests,\nWestward on the side of France.\n\nHark! the game’s on foot; they scatter!\nDown the forest-ridings lone,\nFurious, single horsemen gallop.\nHark! a shout--a crash--a groan!\n\nPale and breathless, came the hunters--\nOn the turf dead lies the boar.\nGod! the duke lies stretched beside him,\nSenseless, weltering in his gore.\n\nIn the dull October evening,\nDown the leaf-strewn forest-road,\nTo the castle, past the drawbridge,\nCame the hunters with their load.\n\nIn the hall, with sconces blazing,\nLadies waiting round her seat,\nClothed in smiles, beneath the dais\nSate the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nHark! below the gates unbarring!\nTramp of men, and quick commands!\n“’Tis my lord come back from hunting;”\nAnd the duchess claps her hands.\n\nSlow and tired, came the hunters;\nStopped in darkness in the court.\n“Ho, this way, ye laggard hunters!\nTo the hall! What sport, what sport?”\n\nSlow they entered with their master;\nIn the hall they laid him down.\nOn his coat were leaves and blood-stains,\nOn his brow an angry frown.\n\nDead her princely youthful husband\nLay before his youthful wife,\nBloody ’neath the flaring sconces--\nAnd the sight froze all her life.\n\nIn Vienna, by the Danube,\nKings hold revel, gallants meet.\nGay of old amid the gayest\nWas the Duchess Marguerite.\n\nIn Vienna, by the Danube,\nFeast and dance her youth beguiled.\nTill that hour she never sorrowed;\nBut from then she never smiled.\n\n’Mid the Savoy mountain-valleys,\nFar from town or haunt of man,\nStands a lonely church, unfinished,\nWhich the Duchess Maud began.\n\nOld, that duchess stern began it,\nIn gray age, with palsied hands;\nBut she died while it was building,\nAnd the church unfinished stands,--\n\nStands as erst the builders left it,\nWhen she sank into her grave;\nMountain greensward paves the chancel,\nHarebells flower in the nave.\n\n“In my castle all is sorrow,”\nSaid the Duchess Marguerite then:\n“Guide me, some one, to the mountain;\nWe will build the church again.”\n\nSandalled palmers, faring homeward,\nAustrian knights from Syria came.\n“Austrian wanderers bring, O warders!\nHomage to your Austrian dame.”\n\nFrom the gate the warders answered,--\n“Gone, O knights, is she you knew!\nDead our duke, and gone his duchess;\nSeek her at the church of Brou.”\n\nAustrian knights and march-worn palmers\nClimb the winding mountain-way;\nReach the valley, where the fabric\nRises higher day by day.\n\nStones are sawing, hammers ringing;\nOn the work the bright sun shines;\nIn the Savoy mountain-meadows,\nBy the stream, below the pines.\n\nOn her palfrey white the duchess\nSate, and watched her working train,--\nFlemish carvers, Lombard gilders,\nGerman masons, smiths from Spain.\n\nClad in black, on her white palfrey,\nHer old architect beside,--\nThere they found her in the mountains,\nMorn and noon and eventide.\n\nThere she sate, and watched the builders,\nTill the church was roofed and done;\nLast of all, the builders reared her\nIn the nave a tomb of stone.\n\nOn the tomb two forms they sculptured,\nLifelike in the marble pale,--\nOne, the duke in helm and armor;\nOne, the duchess in her veil.\n\nRound the tomb the carved stone fret-work\nWas at Easter-tide put on.\nThen the duchess closed her labors;\nAnd she died at the St. John.\n\n\n# II. _The Church_\n\nUpon the glistening leaden roof\nOf the new pile, the sunlight shines;\nThe stream goes leaping by.\nThe hills are clothed with pines sun-proof;\n’Mid bright green fields, below the pines,\nStands the church on high.\nWhat church is this, from men aloof?\n’Tis the Church of Brou.\n\nAt sunrise, from their dewy lair\nCrossing the stream, the kine are seen\nRound the wall to stray,--\nThe churchyard wall that clips the square\nOf open hill-sward fresh and green\nWhere last year they lay.\nBut all things now are ordered fair\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nOn Sundays, at the matin-chime,\nThe Alpine peasants, two and three,\nClimb up here to pray;\nBurghers and dames, at summer’s prime,\nRide out to church from Chambery,\nDight with mantles gay.\nBut else it is a lonely time\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nOn Sundays, too, a priest doth come\nFrom the walled town beyond the pass,\nDown the mountain-way;\nAnd then you hear the organ’s hum,\nYou hear the white-robed priest say mass,\nAnd the people pray.\nBut else the woods and fields are dumb\nRound the Church of Brou.\n\nAnd after church, when mass is done,\nThe people to the nave repair\nRound the tomb to stray;\nAnd marvel at the forms of stone,\nAnd praise the chiselled broideries rare--\nThen they drop away.\nThe princely pair are left alone\nIn the Church of Brou.\n\n\n# III. _The Tomb_\n\nSo rest, forever rest, O princely pair!\nIn your high church, ’mid the still mountain-air,\nWhere horn, and hound, and vassals, never come.\nOnly the blessed saints are smiling dumb\nFrom the rich painted windows of the nave\nOn aisle, and transept, and your marble grave;\nWhere thou, young prince, shalt never more arise\nFrom the fringed mattress where thy duchess lies,\nOn autumn-mornings, when the bugle sounds,\nAnd ride across the drawbridge with thy hounds\nTo hunt the boar in the crisp woods till eve;\nAnd thou, O princess, shalt no more receive,\nThou and thy ladies, in the hall of state,\nThe jaded hunters with their bloody freight,\nComing benighted to the castle-gate.\nSo sleep, forever sleep, O marble pair!\nOr, if ye wake, let it be then, when fair\nOn the carved western front a flood of light\nStreams from the setting sun, and colors bright\nProphets, transfigured saints, and martyrs brave,\nIn the vast western window of the nave;\nAnd on the pavement round the tomb there glints\nA checker-work of glowing sapphire-tints,\nAnd amethyst, and ruby,--then unclose\nYour eyelids on the stone where ye repose,\nAnd from your broidered pillows lift your heads,\nAnd rise upon your cold white marble beds;\nAnd looking down on the warm rosy tints\nWhich checker, at your feet, the illumined flints,\nSay, _What is this? we are in bliss--forgiven--\nBehold the pavement of the courts of heaven!_\nOr let it be on autumn-nights, when rain\nDoth rustlingly above your heads complain\nOn the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls\nShedding her pensive light at intervals\nThe moon through the clere-story windows shines,\nAnd the wind washes through the mountain-pines,--\nThen, gazing up ’mid the dim pillars high,\nThe foliaged marble forest where ye lie,\n_Hush_, ye will say, _it is eternity!\nThis is the glimmering verge of heaven, and these\nThe columns of the heavenly palaces._\nAnd in the sweeping of the wind your ear\nThe passage of the angels’ wings will hear,\nAnd on the lichen-crusted leads above\nThe rustle of the eternal rain of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "consolation": { - "title": "“Consolation”", - "body": "Mist clogs the sunshine.\nSmoky dwarf houses\nHem me round everywhere;\nA vague dejection\nWeighs down my soul.\n\nYet, while I languish,\nEverywhere countless\nProspects unroll themselves,\nAnd countless beings\nPass countless moods.\n\nFar hence, in Asia,\nOn the smooth convent-roofs,\nOn the gold terraces,\nOf holy Lassa,\nBright shines the sun.\n\nGray time-worn marbles\nHold the pure Muses;\nIn their cool gallery,\nBy yellow Tiber,\nThey still look fair.\n\nStrange unloved uproar\nShrills round their portal;\nYet not on Helicon\nKept they more cloudless\nTheir noble calm.\n\nThrough sun-proof alleys\nIn a lone, sand-hemmed\nCity of Africa,\nA blind, led beggar,\nAge-bowed, asks alms.\n\nNo bolder robber\nErst abode ambushed\nDeep in the sandy waste;\nNo clearer eyesight\nSpied prey afar.\n\nSaharan sand-winds\nSeared his keen eyeballs;\nSpent is the spoil he won.\nFor him the present\nHolds only pain.\n\nTwo young, fair lovers,\nWhere the warm June-wind,\nFresh from the summer fields\nPlays fondly round them,\nStand, tranced in joy.\n\nWith sweet, joined voices,\nAnd with eyes brimming,\n“Ah!” they cry, “Destiny,\nProlong the present!\nTime, stand still here!”\n\nThe prompt stern goddess\nShakes her head, frowning:\nTime gives his hour-glass\nIts due reversal;\nTheir hour is gone.\n\nWith weak indulgence\nDid the just goddess\nLengthen their happiness,\nShe lengthened also\nDistress elsewhere.\n\nThe hour whose happy\nUnalloyed moments\nI would eternalize,\nTen thousand mourners\nWell pleased see end.\n\nThe bleak, stern hour,\nWhose severe moments\nI would annihilate,\nIs passed by others\nIn warmth, light, joy.\n\nTime, so complained of,\nWho to no one man\nShows partiality,\nBrings round to all men\nSome undimmed hours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "dover-beach": { - "title": "“Dover Beach”", - "body": "The sea is calm to-night.\nThe tide is full, the moon lies fair\nUpon the straits; on the French coast, the light\nGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,\nGlimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.\n\nCome to the window, sweet is the night-air!\nOnly, from the long line of spray\nWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched sand,\nListen! you hear the grating roar\nOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,\nAt their return, up the high strand,\nBegin and cease, and then again begin,\nWith tremulous cadence slow, and bring\nThe eternal note of sadness in.\n\nSophocles long ago\nHeard it on the Aegean, and it brought\nInto his mind the turbid ebb and flow\nOf human misery: we\nFind also in the sound a thought,\nHearing it by this distant northern sea.\n\nThe sea of faith\nWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore\nLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.\nBut now I only hear\nIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,\nRetreating, to the breath\nOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drear\nAnd naked shingles of the world.\n\nAh, love, let us be true\nTo one another! for the world, which seems\nTo lie before us like a land of dreams,\nSo various, so beautiful, so new,\nHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,\nNor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;\nAnd we are here as on a darkling plain\nSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,\nWhere ignorant armies clash by night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-future": { - "title": "“The Future”", - "body": "A wanderer is man from his birth.\nHe was born in a ship\nOn the breast of the river of Time;\nBrimming with wonder and joy,\nHe spreads out his arms to the light,\nRivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.\n\nAs what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.\nWhether he wakes\nWhere the snowy mountainous pass,\nEchoing the screams of the eagles,\nHems in its gorges the bed\nOf the new-born, clear-flowing stream;\nWhether he first sees light\nWhere the river in gleaming rings\nSluggishly winds through the plain;\nWhether in sound of the swallowing sea,--\nAs is the world on the banks,\nSo is the mind of the man.\n\nVainly does each, as he glides,\nFable and dream\nOf the lands which the river of Time\nHad left ere he woke on its breast,\nOr shall reach when his eyes have been closed.\nOnly the tract where he sails\nHe wots of; only the thoughts,\nRaised by the objects he passes, are his.\n\nWho can see the green earth any more\nAs she was by the sources of Time?\nWho imagines her fields as they lay\nIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?\nWho thinks as they thought,\nThe tribes who then roamed on her breast,\nHer vigorous, primitive sons?\n\nWhat girl\nNow reads in her bosom as clear\nAs Rebekah read, when she sate\nAt eve by the palm-shaded well?\nWho guards in her breast\nAs deep, as pellucid a spring\nOf feeling, as tranquil, as sure?\n\nWhat bard,\nAt the height of his vision, can deem\nOf God, of the world, of the soul,\nWith a plainness as near,\nAs flashing, as Moses felt,\nWhen he lay in the night by his flock\nOn the starlit Arabian waste?\nCan rise and obey\nThe beck of the Spirit like him?\n\nThis tract which the river of Time\nNow flows through with us, is the plain.\nGone is the calm of its earlier shore.\nBordered by cities, and hoarse\nWith a thousand cries is its stream.\nAnd we on its breast, our minds\nAre confused as the cries which we hear,\nChanging and short as the sights which we see.\n\nAnd we say that repose has fled\nForever the course of the river of Time.\nThat cities will crowd to its edge\nIn a blacker, incessanter line;\nThat the din will be more on its banks,\nDenser the trade on its stream,\nFlatter the plain where it flows,\nFiercer the sun overhead;\nThat never will those on its breast\nSee an ennobling sight,\nDrink of the feeling of quiet again.\n\nBut what was before us we know not,\nAnd we know not what shall succeed.\n\nHaply, the river of Time--\nAs it grows, as the towns on its marge\nFling their wavering lights\nOn a wider, statelier stream--\nMay acquire, if not the calm\nOf its early mountainous shore,\nYet a solemn peace of its own.\n\nAnd the width of the waters, the hush\nOf the gray expanse where he floats,\nFreshening its current, and spotted with foam\nAs it draws to the ocean, may strike\nPeace to the soul of the man on its breast,--\nAs the pale waste widens around him,\nAs the banks fade dimmer away,\nAs the stars come out, and the night-wind\nBrings up the stream\nMurmurs and scents of the infinite sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "growing-old": { - "title": "“Growing Old”", - "body": "What is it to grow old?\nIs it to lose the glory of the form,\nThe lustre of the eye?\nIs it for beauty to forego her wreath?\n--Yes, but not this alone.\n\nIs it to feel our strength--\nNot our bloom only, but our strength--decay?\nIs it to feel each limb\nGrow stiffer, every function less exact,\nEach nerve more loosely strung?\n\nYes, this, and more; but not,\nAh! ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be.\n’Tis not to have our life\nMellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,--\nA golden day’s decline.\n\n’Tis not to see the world\nAs from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,\nAnd heart profoundly stirred;\nAnd weep, and feel the fulness of the past,\nThe years that are no more.\n\nIt is to spend long days,\nAnd not once feel that we were ever young;\nIt is to add, immured\nIn the hot prison of the present, month\nTo month with weary pain.\n\nIt is to suffer this,\nAnd feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.\nDeep in our hidden heart\nFesters the dull remembrance of a change,\nBut no emotion,--none.\n\nIt is--last stage of all--\nWhen we are frozen up within, and quite\nThe phantom of ourselves,\nTo hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,\nWhich blamed the living man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-hymn-of-empedocles": { - "title": "From “The Hymn of Empedocles”", - "body": "Is it so small a thing\nTo have enjoy’d the sun,\nTo have lived light in the spring,\nTo have loved, to have thought, to have done;\nTo have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes;\n\nThat we must feign a bliss\nOf doubtful future date,\nAnd while we dream on this\nLose all our present state,\nAnd relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?\n\nNot much, I know, you prize\nWhat pleasures may be had,\nWho look on life with eyes\nEstranged, like mine, and sad:\nAnd yet the village churl feels the truth more than you;\n\nWho ‘s loth to leave this life\nWhich to him little yields:\nHis hard-task’d sunburnt wife,\nHis often-labour’d fields;\nThe boors with whom he talk’d, the country spots he knew.\n\nBut thou, because thou hear’st\nMen scoff at Heaven and Fate;\nBecause the gods thou fear’st\nFail to make blest thy state,\nTremblest, and wilt not dare to trust the joys there are.\n\nI say, Fear not! life still\nLeaves human effort scope.\nBut, since life teems with ill,\nNurse no extravagant hope.\nBecause thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "isolation": { - "title": "“Isolation”", - "body": "We were apart: yet, day by day,\nI bade my heart more constant be.\nI bade it keep the world away,\nAnd grow a home for only thee;\nNor feared but thy love likewise grew,\nLike mine, each day, more tried, more true.\n\nThe fault was grave! I might have known,\nWhat far too soon, alas! I learned,--\nThe heart can bind itself alone,\nAnd faith may oft be unreturned.\nSelf-swayed our feelings ebb and swell.\nThou lov’st no more. Farewell! Farewell!\n\nFarewell!--And thou, thou lonely heart,\nWhich never yet without remorse\nEven for a moment didst depart\nFrom thy remote and spherèd course\nTo haunt the place where passions reign,--\nBack to thy solitude again!\n\nBack! with the conscious thrill of shame\nWhich Luna felt, that summer-night,\nFlash through her pure immortal frame,\nWhen she forsook the starry height\nTo hang o’er Endymion’s sleep\nUpon the pine-grown Latmian steep.\n\nYet she, chaste queen, had never proved\nHow vain a thing is mortal love,\nWandering in heaven, far removed;\nBut thou hast long had place to prove\nThis truth,--to prove, and make thine own:\n“Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.”\n\nOr, if not quite alone, yet they\nWhich touch thee are unmating things,--\nOcean and clouds and night and day;\nLorn autumns and triumphant springs;\nAnd life, and others’ joy and pain,\nAnd love, if love, of happier men.\n\nOf happier men; for they, at least,\nHave _dreamed_ two human hearts might blend\nIn one, and were through faith released\nFrom isolation without end\nProlonged; nor knew, although not less\nAlone than thou, their loneliness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "morality": { - "title": "“Morality”", - "body": "We cannot kindle when we will\nThe fire which in the heart resides;\nThe spirit bloweth and is still,\nIn mystery our soul abides.\nBut tasks in hours of insight willed\nCan be through hours of gloom fulfilled.\n\nWith aching hands and bleeding feet\nWe dig and heap, lay stone on stone;\nWe bear the burden and the heat\nOf the long day, and wish ’twere done.\nNot till the hours of light return,\nAll we have built do we discern.\n\nThen, when the clouds are off the soul,\nWhen thou dost bask in Nature’s eye,\nAsk how _she_ viewed thy self-control,\nThy struggling, tasked morality,--\nNature, whose free, light, cheerful air,\nOft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.\n\nAnd she, whose censure thou dost dread,\nWhose eye thou wast afraid to seek,\nSee, on her face a glow is spread,\nA strong emotion on her cheek!\n“Ah, child!” she cries, “that strife divine,\nWhence was it, for it is not mine?”\n\n“There is no effort on _my_ brow;\nI do not strive, I do not weep:\nI rush with the swift spheres, and glow\nIn joy, and when I will, I sleep.\nYet that severe, that earnest air,\nI saw, I felt it once--but where?”\n\n“I knew not yet the gauge of time,\nNor wore the manacles of space;\nI felt it in some other clime,\nI saw it in some other place.\n’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,\nAnd lay upon the breast of God.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mycerinus": { - "title": "“Mycerinus”", - "body": "“Not by the justice that my father spurned,\nNot for the thousands whom my father slew,\nAltars unfed and temples overturned,\nCold hearts and thankless tongues, where thanks are due;\nFell this dread voice from lips that cannot lie,\nStern sentence of the Powers of Destiny.”\n\n“I will unfold my sentence and my crime.\nMy crime,--that, rapt in reverential awe,\nI sat obedient, in the fiery prime\nOf youth, self-governed, at the feet of Law;\nEnnobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,\nBy contemplation of diviner things.”\n\n“My father loved injustice, and lived long;\nCrowned with gray hairs he died, and full of sway.\nI loved the good he scorned, and hated wrong--\nThe gods declare my recompense to-day.\nI looked for life more lasting, rule more high;\nAnd when six years are measured, lo, I die!”\n\n“Yet surely, O my people, did I deem\nMan’s justice from the all-just gods was given;\nA light that from some upper fount did beam,\nSome better archetype, whose seat was heaven;\nA light that, shining from the blest abodes,\nDid shadow somewhat of the life of gods.”\n\n“Mere phantoms of man’s self-tormenting heart,\nWhich on the sweets that woo it dares not feed!\nVain dreams, which quench our pleasures, then depart,\nWhen the duped soul, self-mastered, claims its meed;\nWhen, on the strenuous just man, Heaven bestows,\nCrown of his struggling life, an unjust close!”\n\n“Seems it so light a thing, then, austere powers,\nTo spurn man’s common lure, life’s pleasant things?\nSeems there no joy in dances crowned with flowers,\nLove free to range, and regal banquetings?\nBend ye on these indeed an unmoved eye,\nNot gods, but ghosts, in frozen apathy?”\n\n“Or is it that some force, too stern, too strong,\nEven for yourselves to conquer or beguile,\nBears earth and heaven and men and gods along,\nLike the broad volume of the insurgent Nile?\nAnd the great powers we serve, themselves may be\nSlaves of a tyrannous necessity?”\n\n“Or in mid-heaven, perhaps, your golden cars,\nWhere earthly voice climbs never, wing their flight,\nAnd in wild hunt, through mazy tracts of stars,\nSweep in the sounding stillness of the night?\nOr in deaf ease, on thrones of dazzling sheen,\nDrinking deep draughts of joy, ye dwell serene?”\n\n“Oh, wherefore cheat our youth, if thus it be,\nOf one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream?\nStringing vain words of powers we cannot see,\nBlind divinations of a will supreme;\nLost labor! when the circumambient gloom\nBut hides, if gods, gods careless of our doom?”\n\n“The rest I give to joy. Even while I speak,\nMy sand runs short; and as yon star-shot ray,\nHemmed by two banks of cloud, peers pale and weak,\nNow, as the barrier closes, dies away,--\nEven so do past and future intertwine,\nBlotting this six years’ space, which yet is mine.”\n\n“Six years,--six little years,--six drops of time!\nYet suns shall rise, and many moons shall wane,\nAnd old men die, and young men pass their prime,\nAnd languid pleasure fade and flower again,\nAnd the dull gods behold, ere these are flown,\nRevels more deep, joy keener than their own.”\n\n“Into the silence of the groves and woods\nI will go forth; though something would I say,--\nSomething,--yet what, I know not: for the gods\nThe doom they pass revoke not nor delay;\nAnd prayers and gifts and tears are fruitless all,\nAnd the night waxes, and the shadows fall.”\n\n“Ye men of Egypt, ye have heard your king!\nI go, and I return not. But the will\nOf the great gods is plain; and ye must bring\nIll deeds, ill passions, zealous to fulfil\nTheir pleasure, to their feet; and reap their praise,--\nThe praise of gods, rich boon! and length of days.”\n\n--So spake he, half in anger, half in scorn;\nAnd one loud cry of grief and of amaze\nBroke from his sorrowing people; so he spake,\nAnd turning, left them there: and with brief pause,\nGirt with a throng of revellers, bent his way\nTo the cool region of the groves he loved.\nThere by the river-banks he wandered on,\nFrom palm-grove on to palm-grove, happy trees,\nTheir smooth tops shining sunward, and beneath\nBurying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers;\nWhere in one dream the feverish time of youth\nMight fade in slumber, and the feet of joy\nMight wander all day long and never tire.\nHere came the king, holding high feast, at morn,\nRose-crowned; and ever, when the sun went down,\nA hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,\nFrom tree to tree all through the twinkling grove,\nRevealing all the tumult of the feast,--\nFlushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine;\nWhile the deep-burnished foliage overhead\nSplintered the silver arrows of the moon.\n\nIt may be that sometimes his wondering soul\nFrom the loud joyful laughter of his lips\nMight shrink half startled, like a guilty man\nWho wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape,\nGliding half hidden through the dusky stems,\nWould thrust a hand before the lifted bowl,\nWhispering, _A little space, and thou art mine!_\nIt may be, on that joyless feast his eye\nDwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within,\nTook measure of his soul, and knew its strength,\nAnd by that silent knowledge, day by day,\nWas calmed, ennobled, comforted, sustained.\nIt may be; but not less his brow was smooth,\nAnd his clear laugh fled ringing through the gloom,\nAnd his mirth quailed not at the mild reproof\nSighed out by winter’s sad tranquillity;\nNor, palled with its own fulness, ebbed and died\nIn the rich languor of long summer-days;\nNor withered when the palm-tree plumes, that roofed\nWith their mild dark his grassy banquet-hall,\nBent to the cold winds of the showerless spring;\nNo, nor grew dark when autumn brought the clouds.\n\nSo six long years he revelled, night and day.\nAnd when the mirth waxed loudest, with dull sound\nSometimes from the grove’s centre echoes came,\nTo tell his wondering people of their king;\nIn the still night, across the steaming flats,\nMixed with the murmur of the moving Nile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-neckan": { - "title": "“The Neckan”", - "body": "In summer, on the headlands,\nThe Baltic Sea along,\nSits Neckan with his harp of gold,\nAnd sings his plaintive song.\n\nGreen rolls, beneath the headlands,\nGreen rolls the Baltic Sea;\nAnd there, below the Neckan’s feet,\nHis wife and children be.\n\nHe sings not of the ocean,\nIts shells and roses pale:\nOf earth, of earth, the Neckan sings,\nHe hath no other tale.\n\nHe sits upon the headlands,\nAnd sings a mournful stave\nOf all he saw and felt on earth,\nFar from the kind sea-wave.\n\nSings how, a knight, he wandered\nBy castle, field, and town;\nBut earthly knights have harder hearts\nThan the sea-children own.\n\nSings of his earthly bridal,\nPriest, knights, and ladies gay.\n“And who art thou,” the priest began,\n“Sir Knight, who wedd’st to-day?”\n\n“I am no knight,” he answered;\n“From the sea-waves I come.”\nThe knights drew sword, the ladies screamed,\nThe surpliced priest stood dumb.\n\nHe sings how from the chapel\nHe vanished with his bride,\nAnd bore her down to the sea-halls,\nBeneath the salt sea-tide.\n\nHe sings how she sits weeping\n’Mid shells that round her lie.\n“False Neckan shares my bed,” she weeps;\n“No Christian mate have I.”\n\nHe sings how through the billows\nHe rose to earth again,\nAnd sought a priest to sign the cross,\nThat Neckan heaven might gain.\n\nHe sings how, on an evening,\nBeneath the birch-trees cool,\nHe sate and played his harp of gold,\nBeside the river-pool.\n\nBeside the pool sate Neckan,\nTears filled his mild blue eye.\nOn his white mule, across the bridge,\nA cassocked priest rode by.\n\n“Why sitt’st thou there, O Neckan,\nAnd play’st thy harp of gold?\nSooner shall this my staff bear leaves,\nThan thou shalt heaven behold.”\n\nBut, lo! the staff, it budded;\nIt greened, it branched, it waved.\n“O ruth of God!” the priest cried out,\n“This lost sea-creature saved!”\n\nThe cassocked priest rode onwards,\nAnd vanished with his mule;\nAnd Neckan in the twilight gray\nWept by the river-pool.\n\nHe wept, “The earth hath kindness,\nThe sea, the starry poles;\nEarth, sea, and sky, and God above,--\nBut, ah! not human souls!”\n\nIn summer, on the headlands,\nThe Baltic Sea along,\nSits Neckan with his harp of gold,\nAnd sings this plaintive song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "philomela": { - "title": "“Philomela”", - "body": "Hark! ah, the nightingale--\nThe tawny-throated!\nHark! from that moonlit cedar what a burst!\nWhat triumph! hark! what pain!\n\nO wanderer from a Grecian shore,\nStill, after many years, in distant lands,\nStill nourishing in thy bewildered brain\nThat wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain,\nSay, will it never heal?\nAnd can this fragrant lawn\nWith its cool trees, and night,\nAnd the sweet, tranquil Thames,\nAnd moonshine, and the dew,\nTo thy racked heart and brain\nAfford no balm?\n\nDost thou to-night behold,\nHere, through the moonlight on this English grass,\nThe unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?\nDost thou again peruse\nWith hot cheeks and seared eyes\nThe too clear web, and thy dumb sister’s shame?\nDost thou once more assay\nThy flight, and feel come over thee,\nPoor fugitive, the feathery change.\nOnce more, and once more seem to make resound\nWith love and hate, triumph and agony,\nLone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?\nListen, Eugenia,--\nHow thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!\nAgain--thou hearest?\nEternal passion!\nEternal pain!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "progress": { - "title": "“Progress”", - "body": "The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.\nHe saw a fire in his disciples’ eyes;\n“The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to naught:\nBehold the new world rise!”\n\n“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw\nThe old law observed by scribes and Pharisees?\nI say unto you, see ye keep that law\nMore faithfully than these!”\n\n“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!\nThink not that I to annul the law have willed:\nNo jot, no tittle, from the law shall pass\nTill all have been fulfilled.”\n\nSo Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.\nAnd what, then, shall be said to those to-day,\nWho cry aloud to lay the old world low\nTo clear the new world’s way?\n\n“Religious fervors! ardor misapplied!\nHence, hence!” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!\nBut keep him self-immersed, pre-occupied,\nAnd lame the active mind.”\n\nAh! from the old world let some one answer give:\n“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?\nI say unto you, see that _your_ souls live\nA deeper life than theirs!”\n\n“Say ye, ‘The spirit of man has found new roads,\nAnd we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein’?\nLeave, then, the cross as ye have left carved gods,\nBut guard the fire within!”\n\n“Bright, else, and fast the stream of life may roll,\nAnd no man may the other’s hurt behold;\nYet each will have one anguish,--his own soul\nWhich perishes of cold.”\n\nHere let that voice make end; then let a strain\nFrom a far lonelier distance, like the wind\nBe heard, floating through heaven, and fill again\nThese men’s profoundest mind:--\n\n“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye\nForever doth accompany mankind,\nHath looked on no religion scornfully\nThat men did ever find.”\n\n“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?\nWhich has not fallen on the dry heart like rain?\nWhich has not cried to sunk, self-weary man,--\n_Thou must be born again!_”\n\n“Children of men! not that your age excel\nIn pride of life the ages of your sires,\nBut that _ye_ think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,\nThe Friend of man desires.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rugby-chapel": { - "title": "“Rugby Chapel”", - "body": "Coldly, sadly descends\nThe autumn evening. The field\nStrewn with its dank yellow drifts\nOf withered leaves, and the elms,\nFade into dimness apace,\nSilent; hardly a shout\nFrom a few boys late at their play!\nThe lights come out in the street,\nIn the schoolroom windows; but cold,\nSolemn, unlighted, austere,\nThrough the gathering darkness, arise\nThe chapel-walls, in whose bound\nThou, my father! art laid.\n\nThere thou dost lie, in the gloom\nOf the autumn evening. But ah!\nThat word _gloom_ to my mind\nBrings thee back in the light\nOf thy radiant vigor again.\nIn the gloom of November we passed\nDays not dark at thy side;\nSeasons impaired not the ray\nOf thy buoyant cheerfulness clear.\nSuch thou wast! and I stand\nIn the autumn evening, and think\nOf bygone autumns with thee.\n\nFifteen years have gone round\nSince thou arosest to tread,\nIn the summer-morning, the road\nOf death, at a call unforeseen,\nSudden. For fifteen years,\nWe who till then in thy shade\nRested as under the boughs\nOf a mighty oak, have endured\nSunshine and rain as we might,\nBare, unshaded, alone,\nLacking the shelter of thee.\n\nO strong soul, by what shore\nTarriest thou now? For that force,\nSurely, has not been left vain!\nSomewhere, surely, afar,\nIn the sounding labor-house vast\nOf being, is practised that strength,\nZealous, beneficent, firm!\n\nYes, in some far-shining sphere,\nConscious or not of the past,\nStill thou performest the word\nOf the Spirit in whom thou dost live,\nPrompt, unwearied, as here.\nStill thou upraisest with zeal\nThe humble good from the ground,\nSternly repressest the bad;\nStill, like a trumpet, dost rouse\nThose who with half-open eyes\nTread the border-land dim\n’Twixt vice and virtue; reviv’st,\nSuccorest. This was thy work,\nThis was thy life upon earth.\n\nWhat is the course of the life\nOf mortal men on the earth?\nMost men eddy about\nHere and there, eat and drink,\nChatter and love and hate,\nGather and squander, are raised\nAloft, are hurled in the dust,\nStriving blindly, achieving\nNothing; and then they die,--\nPerish; and no one asks\nWho or what they have been,\nMore than he asks what waves,\nIn the moonlit solitudes mild\nOf the midmost ocean, have swelled,\nFoamed for a moment, and gone.\n\nAnd there are some whom a thirst\nArdent, unquenchable, fires,\nNot with the crowd to be spent,\nNot without aim to go round\nIn an eddy of purposeless dust,\nEffort unmeaning and vain.\nAh yes! some of us strive\nNot without action to die\nFruitless, but something to snatch\nFrom dull oblivion, nor all\nGlut the devouring grave.\nWe, we have chosen our path,--\nPath to a clear-purposed goal,\nPath of advance; but it leads\nA long, steep journey, through sunk\nGorges, o’er mountains in snow.\nCheerful, with friends, we set forth:\nThen, on the height, comes the storm.\nThunder crashes from rock\nTo rock; the cataracts reply;\nLightnings dazzle our eyes;\nRoaring torrents have breached\nThe track; the stream-bed descends\nIn the place where the wayfarer once\nPlanted his footstep; the spray\nBoils o’er its borders; aloft,\nThe unseen snow-beds dislodge\nTheir hanging ruin. Alas!\nHavoc is made in our train!\nFriends who set forth at our side\nFalter, are lost in the storm.\n\nWe, we only are left!\nWith frowning foreheads, with lips\nSternly compressed, we strain on,\nOn; and at nightfall at last\nCome to the end of our way,\nTo the lonely inn ’mid the rocks;\nWhere the gaunt and taciturn host\nStands on the threshold, the wind\nShaking his thin white hairs,\nHolds his lantern to scan\nOur storm-beat figures, and asks,--\nWhom in our party we bring?\nWhom we have left in the snow?\n\nSadly we answer, We bring\nOnly ourselves! we lost\nSight of the rest in the storm.\nHardly ourselves we fought through,\nStripped, without friends, as we are.\nFriends, companions, and train,\nThe avalanche swept from our side.\n\nBut thou wouldst not _alone_\nBe saved, my father! _alone_\nConquer and come to thy goal,\nLeaving the rest in the wild.\nWe were weary, and we\nFearful, and we in our march\nFain to drop down and to die.\nStill thou turnedst, and still\nBeckonedst the trembler, and still\nGavest the weary thy hand.\nIf, in the paths of the world,\nStones might have wounded thy feet,\nToil or dejection have tried\nThy spirit, of that we saw\nNothing: to us thou wast still\nCheerful, and helpful, and firm!\nTherefore to thee it was given\nMany to save with thyself;\nAnd, at the end of thy day,\nO faithful shepherd! to come,\nBringing thy sheep in thy hand.\n\nAnd through thee I believe\nIn the noble and great who are gone;\nPure souls honored and blest\nBy former ages, who else else--\nSuch, so soulless, so poor,\nIs the race of men whom I see--\nSeemed but a dream of the heart,\nSeemed but a cry of desire.\nYes! I believe that there lived\nOthers like thee in the past,\nNot like the men of the crowd\nWho all round me to-day\nBluster or cringe, and make life\nHideous and arid and vile;\nBut souls tempered with fire,\nFervent, heroic, and good,\nHelpers and friends of mankind.\n\nServants of God!--or sons\nShall I not call you? because\nNot as servants ye knew\nYour Father’s innermost mind,\nHis who unwillingly sees\nOne of his little ones lost,--\nYours is the praise, if mankind\nHath not as yet in its march\nFainted and fallen and died.\n\nSee! In the rocks of the world\nMarches the host of mankind,\nA feeble, wavering line.\nWhere are they tending? A God\nMarshalled them, gave them their goal.\nAh, but the way is so long!\n\nYears they have been in the wild:\nSore thirst plagues them; the rocks,\nRising all round, overawe;\nFactions divide them; their host\nThreatens to break, to dissolve.\nAh! keep, keep them combined!\nElse, of the myriads who fill\nThat army, not one shall arrive;\nSole they shall stray; on the rocks\nBatter forever in vain,\nDie one by one in the waste.\n\nThen, in such hour of need\nOf your fainting, dispirited race,\nYe like angels appear,\nRadiant with ardor divine.\nBeacons of hope, ye appear!\nLanguor is not in your heart,\nWeakness is not in your word,\nWeariness not on your brow.\nYe alight in our van! at your voice,\nPanic, despair, flee away.\nYe move through the ranks, recall\nThe stragglers, refresh the outworn,\nPraise, re-inspire the brave.\nOrder, courage, return;\nEyes rekindling, and prayers,\nFollow your steps as ye go.\nYe fill up the gaps in our files,\nStrengthen the wavering line,\nStablish, continue our march,\nOn, to the bound of the waste,\nOn, to the City of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "saint-brandan": { - "title": "“Saint Brandan”", - "body": "Saint Brandan sails the northern main;\nThe brotherhoods of saints are glad.\nHe greets them once, he sails again;\nSo late! such storms! The saint is mad!\n\nHe heard, across the howling seas,\nChime convent-bells on wintry nights;\nHe saw, on spray-swept Hebrides,\nTwinkle the monastery-lights;\n\nBut north, still north, Saint Brandan steered;\nAnd now no bells, no convents more!\nThe hurtling Polar lights are neared,\nThe sea without a human shore.\n\nAt last (it was the Christmas-night;\nStars shone after a day of storm)\nHe sees float past an iceberg white,\nAnd on it--Christ!--a living form.\n\nThat furtive mien, that scowling eye,\nOf hair that red and tufted fell,\nIt is--oh, where shall Brandan fly?--\nThe traitor Judas, out of hell!\n\nPalsied with terror, Brandan sate;\nThe moon was bright, the iceberg near.\nHe hears a voice sigh humbly, “Wait!\nBy high permission I am here.”\n\n“One moment wait, thou holy man!\nOn earth my crime, my death, they knew;\nMy name is under all men’s ban:\nAh! tell them of my respite too.”\n\n“Tell them, one blessed Christmas-night\n(It was the first after I came,\nBreathing self-murder, frenzy, spite,\nTo rue my guilt in endless flame),--”\n\n“I felt, as I in torment lay\n’Mid the souls plagued by heavenly power,\nAn angel touch mine arm, and say,--\n_Go hence, and cool thyself an hour!_”\n\n“‘Ah! whence this mercy, Lord?’ I said.\n_The leper recollect_, said he,\n_Who asked the passers-by for aid,_\n_In Joppa, and thy charity_.”\n\n“Then I remembered how I went,\nIn Joppa, through the public street,\nOne morn when the sirocco spent\nIts storms of dust with burning heat;”\n\n“And in the street a leper sate,\nShivering with fever, naked, old;\nSand raked his sores from heel to pate,\nThe hot wind fevered him fivefold.”\n\n“He gazed upon me as I passed,\nAnd murmured, _Help me, or I die!_\nTo the poor wretch my cloak I cast,\nSaw him look eased, and hurried by.”\n\n“O Brandan! think what grace divine,\nWhat blessing must full goodness shower,\nWhen fragment of it small, like mine,\nHath such inestimable power!”\n\n“Well-fed, well-clothed, well-friended, I\nDid that chance act of good, that one!\nThen went my way to kill and lie,\nForgot my good as soon as done.”\n\n“That germ of kindness, in the womb\nOf mercy caught, did not expire;\nOutlives my guilt, outlives my doom,\nAnd friends me in the pit of fire.”\n\n“Once every year, when carols wake,\nOn earth, the Christmas-night’s repose,\nArising from the sinner’s lake,\nI journey to these healing snows.”\n\n“I stanch with ice my burning breast,\nWith silence balm my whirling brain.\nO Brandan! to this hour of rest,\nThat Joppan leper’s ease was pain.”\n\nTears started to Saint Brandan’s eyes;\nHe bowed his head, he breathed a prayer,\nThen looked--and lo, the frosty skies!\nThe iceberg, and no Judas there!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-scholar-gypsy": { - "title": "“The Scholar-Gypsy”", - "body": "Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill;\nGo, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes!\nNo longer leave thy wistful flock unfed,\nNor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats,\nNor the cropped grasses shoot another head;\nBut when the fields are still,\nAnd the tired men and dogs all gone to rest,\nAnd only the white sheep are sometimes seen\nCross and recross the strips of moon-blanched green,\nCome, shepherd, and again renew the quest!\n\nHere, where the reaper was at work of late,--\nIn this high field’s dark corner, where he leaves\nHis coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse,\nAnd in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,\nThen here at noon comes back his stores to use,--\nHere will I sit and wait,\nWhile to my ear from uplands far away\nThe bleating of the folded flocks is borne,\nWith distant cries of reapers in the corn,--\nAll the live murmur of a summer’s day.\n\nScreened is this nook o’er the high, half-reaped field,\nAnd here till sundown, shepherd! will I be.\nThrough the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,\nAnd round green roots and yellowing stalks I see\nPale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep;\nAnd air-swept lindens yield\nTheir scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers\nOf bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,\nAnd bower me from the August-sun with shade;\nAnd the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers.\n\nAnd near me on the grass lies Glanvil’s book.\nCome, let me read the oft-read tale again!\nThe story of that Oxford scholar poor,\nOf shining parts and quick inventive brain,\nWho, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,\nOne summer-morn forsook\nHis friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore,\nAnd roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,\nAnd came, as most men deemed, to little good,\nBut came to Oxford and his friends no more.\n\nBut once, years after, in the country-lanes,\nTwo scholars, whom at college erst he knew,\nMet him, and of his way of life inquired;\nWhereat he answered, that the gypsy-crew,\nHis mates, had arts to rule as they desired\nThe workings of men’s brains,\nAnd they can bind them to what thoughts they will.\n“And I,” he said, “the secret of their art,\nWhen fully learned, will to the world impart;\nBut it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill.”\n\nThis said, he left them, and returned no more.\nBut rumors hung about the country-side,\nThat the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,\nSeen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,\nIn hat of antique shape, and cloak of gray,\nThe same the gypsies wore.\nShepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;\nAt some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,\nOn the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frocked boors\nHad found him seated at their entering;\n\nBut, ’mid their drink and clatter, he would fly.\nAnd I myself seem half to know thy looks,\nAnd put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace;\nAnd boys who in lone wheat-fields scare the rooks\nI ask if thou hast passed their quiet place;\nOr in my boat I lie\nMoored to the cool bank in the summer-heats,\nMid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,\nAnd watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,\nAnd wonder if thou haunt’st their shy retreats.\n\nFor most, I know, thou lov’st retired ground!\nThee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,\nReturning home on summer-nights, have met\nCrossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,\nTrailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,\nAs the punt’s rope chops round;\nAnd leaning backward in a pensive dream,\nAnd fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers\nPlucked in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,\nAnd thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.\n\nAnd then they land, and thou art seen no more!\nMaidens, who from the distant hamlets come\nTo dance around the Fyfield elm in May,\nOft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,\nOr cross a stile into the public way;\nOft thou hast given them store\nOf flowers,--the frail-leafed, white anemone,\nDark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,\nAnd purple orchises with spotted leaves,--\nBut none hath words she can report of thee!\n\nAnd, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time’s here\nIn June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,\nMen who through those wide fields of breezy grass,\nWhere black-winged swallows haunt the glittering Thames,\nTo bathe in the abandoned lasher pass,\nHave often passed thee near\nSitting upon the river-bank o’ergrown;\nMarked thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,\nThy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air:\nBut, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!\n\nAt some lone homestead in the Cumner hills,\nWhere at her open door the housewife darns,\nThou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate\nTo watch the threshers in the mossy barns.\nChildren, who early range these slopes and late\nFor cresses from the rills,\nHave known thee eying, all an April-day,\nThe springing pastures and the feeding kine;\nAnd marked thee, when the stars come out and shine,\nThrough the long dewy grass move slow away.\n\nIn autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood,--\nWhere most the gypsies by the turf-edged way\nPitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see\nWith scarlet patches tagged and shreds of gray,\nAbove the forest ground called Thessaly,--\nThe blackbird picking food\nSees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all;\nSo often has he known thee past him stray,\nRapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray,\nAnd waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.\n\nAnd once, in winter, on the causeway chill\nWhere home through flooded fields foot-travellers go,\nHave I not passed thee on the wooden bridge\nWrapped in thy cloak and battling with the snow,\nThy face toward Hinksey and its wintry ridge?\nAnd thou hast climbed the hill,\nAnd gained the white brow of the Cumner range;\nTurned once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall,\nThe line of festal light in Christ-church hall:\nThen sought thy straw in some sequestered grange.\n\nBut what--I dream! Two hundred years are flown\nSince first thy story ran through Oxford halls,\nAnd the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe\nThat thou wert wandered from the studious walls\nTo learn strange arts, and join a gypsy-tribe.\nAnd thou from earth art gone\nLong since, and in some quiet churchyard laid,--\nSome country-nook, where o’er thy unknown grave\nTall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,\nUnder a dark, red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.\n\n--No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!\nFor what wears out the life of mortal men?\n’Tis that from change to change their being rolls;\n’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,\nExhaust the energy of strongest souls,\nAnd numb the elastic powers,\nTill having used our nerves with bliss and teen,\nAnd tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,\nTo the just-pausing Genius we remit\nOur well-worn life, and are--what we have been.\n\nThou hast not lived, why shouldst thou perish, so?\nThou hadst _one_ aim, _one_ business, _one_ desire;\nElse wert thou long since numbered with thedead!\nElse hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!\nThe generations of thy peers are fled,\nAnd we ourselves shall go;\nBut thou possessest an immortal lot,\nAnd we imagine thee exempt from age,\nAnd living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,\nBecause thou hadst--what we, alas! have not.\n\nFor early didst thou leave the world, with powers\nFresh, undiverted to the world without,\nFirm to their mark, not spent on other things;\nFree from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,\nWhich much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.\nO life unlike to ours!\nWho fluctuate idly without term or scope,\nOf whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,\nAnd each half lives a hundred different lives;\nWho wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.\n\nThou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,\nLight half-believers of our casual creeds,\nWho never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,\nWhose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,\nWhose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;\nFor whom each year we see\nBreeds new beginnings, disappointments new;\nWho hesitate and falter life away,\nAnd lose to-morrow the ground won to-day--\nAh! do not we, wanderer! await it too?\n\nYes, we await it! but it still delays,\nAnd then we suffer! and amongst us one,\nWho most has suffered, takes dejectedly\nHis seat upon the intellectual throne;\nAnd all his store of sad experience he\nLays bare of wretched days;\nTells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,\nAnd how the dying spark of hope was fed,\nAnd how the breast was soothed, and how the head,\nAnd all his hourly varied anodynes.\n\nThis for our wisest! and we others pine,\nAnd wish the long unhappy dream would end,\nAnd waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;\nWith close-lipped patience for our only friend,--\nSad patience, too near neighbor to despair,--\nBut none has hope like thine!\nThou through the fields and through the woods dost stray,\nRoaming the country-side, a truant boy,\nNursing thy project in unclouded joy,\nAnd every doubt long blown by time away.\n\nOh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,\nAnd life ran gayly as the sparkling Thames;\nBefore this strange disease of modern life,\nWith its sick hurry, its divided aims,\nIts heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife,--\nFly hence, our contact fear!\nStill fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!\nAverse, as Dido did with gesture stern\nFrom her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,\nWave us away, and keep thy solitude!\n\nStill nursing the unconquerable hope,\nStill clutching the inviolable shade,\nWith a free, onward impulse brushing through,\nBy night, the silvered branches of the glade,--\nFar on the forest-skirts, where none pursue,\nOn some mild pastoral slope\nEmerge, and resting on the moonlit pales\nFreshen thy flowers as in former years\nWith dew, or listen with enchanted ears,\nFrom the dark dingles, to the nightingales!\n\nBut fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!\nFor strong the infection of our mental strife,\nWhich, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;\nAnd we should win thee from thy own fair life,\nLike us distracted, and like us unblest.\nSoon, soon thy cheer would die,\nThy hopes grow timorous, and unfixed thy powers,\nAnd thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;\nAnd then thy glad perennial youth would fade,\nFade, and grow old at last, and die like ours.\n\nThen fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles!\n--As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea,\nDescried at sunrise an emerging prow\nLifting the cool-haired creepers stealthily,\nThe fringes of a southward-facing brow\nAmong the Aegeaen isles;\nAnd saw the merry Grecian coaster come,\nFreighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,\nGreen bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine,\nAnd knew the intruders on his ancient home,--\n\nThe young light-hearted masters of the waves,--\nAnd snatched his rudder, and shook out more sail,\nAnd day and night held on indignantly\nO’er the blue Midland waters with the gale,\nBetwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily,\nTo where the Atlantic raves\nOutside the western straits, and unbent sails\nThere where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,\nShy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;\nAnd on the beach undid his corded bales.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "self-dependence": { - "title": "“Self-Dependence”", - "body": "Weary of myself, and sick of asking\nWhat I am, and what I ought to be,\nAt this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me\nForwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.\n\nAnd a look of passionate desire\nO’er the sea and to the stars I send:\n“Ye who from my childhood up have calmed me,\nCalm me, ah, compose me to the end!\n\nAh, once more,” I cried, “ye stars, ye waters,\nOn my heart your mighty charm renew;\nStill, still let me, as I gaze upon you,\nFeel my soul becoming vast like you!”\n\nFrom the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,\nOver the lit sea’s unquiet way,\nIn the rustling night-air came the answer,--\n“Wouldst thou _be_ as these are? _Live_ as they.”\n\n“Unaffrighted by the silence round them,\nUndistracted by the sights they see,\nThese demand not that the things without them\nYield them love, amusement, sympathy.”\n\n“And with joy the stars perform their shining,\nAnd the sea its long moon-silvered roll;\nFor self-poised they live, nor pine with noting\nAll the fever of some differing soul.”\n\n“Bounded by themselves, and unregardful\nIn what state God’s other works may be,\nIn their own tasks all their powers pouring,\nThese attain the mighty life you see.”\n\nO air-born voice! long since, severely clear,\nA cry like thine in mine own heart I hear,--\n“Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he\nWho finds himself loses his misery!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-night": { - "title": "“Summer Night”", - "body": "In the deserted, moon-blanched street,\nHow lonely rings the echo of my feet!\nThose windows, which I gaze at, frown,\nSilent and white, unopening down,\nRepellent as the world; but see,\nA break between the housetops shows\nThe moon! and lost behind her, fading dim\nInto the dewy dark obscurity\nDown at the far horizon’s rim,\nDoth a whole tract of heaven disclose!\n\nAnd to my mind the thought\nIs on a sudden brought\nOf a past night, and a far different scene.\nHeadlands stood out into the moonlit deep\nAs clearly as at noon;\nThe spring-tide’s brimming flow\nHeaved dazzlingly between;\nHouses, with long white sweep,\nGirdled the glistening bay;\nBehind, through the soft air,\nThe blue haze-cradled mountains spread away.\nThat night was far more fair--\nBut the same restless pacings to and fro,\nAnd the same vainly throbbing heart was there,\nAnd the same bright, calm moon.\n\nAnd the calm moonlight seems to say,--\n_Hast thou, then, still the old unquiet breast,\nWhich neither deadens into rest,\nNor ever feels the fiery glow\nThat whirls the spirit from itself away,\nBut fluctuates to and fro,\nNever by passion quite possessed,\nAnd never quite benumbed by the world’s sway?_\nAnd I, I know not if to pray\nStill to be what I am, or yield, and be\nLike all the other men I see.\n\nFor most men in a brazen prison live,\nWhere, in the sun’s hot eye,\nWith heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly\nTheir lives to some unmeaning task-work give,\nDreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.\nAnd as, year after year,\nFresh products of their barren labor fall\nFrom their tired hands, and rest\nNever yet comes more near,\nGloom settles slowly down over their breast.\nAnd while they try to stem\nThe waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,\nDeath in their prison reaches them,\nUnfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.\n\nAnd the rest, a few,\nEscape their prison, and depart\nOn the wide ocean of life anew.\nThere the freed prisoner, where’er his heart\nListeth, will sail;\nNor doth he know how there prevail,\nDespotic on that sea,\nTrade-winds which cross it from eternity.\nAwhile he holds some false way, undebarred\nBy thwarting signs, and braves\nThe freshening wind and blackening waves.\nAnd then the tempest strikes him; and between\nThe lightning-bursts is seen\nOnly a driving wreck,\nAnd the pale master on his spar-strewn deck\nWith anguished face and flying hair,\nGrasping the rudder hard,\nStill bent to make some port, he knows not where,\nStill standing for some false, impossible shore.\nAnd sterner comes the roar\nOf sea and wind; and through the deepening gloom\nFainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,\nAnd he too disappears, and comes no more.\n\nIs there no life, but these alone?\nMadman or slave, must man be one?\n\nPlainness and clearness without shadow of stain!\nClearness divine!\nYe heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign\nOf languor, though so calm, and though so great\nAre yet untroubled and unpassionate;\nWho, though so noble, share in the world’s toil,\nAnd, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil!\nI will not say that your mild deeps retain\nA tinge, it may be, of their silent pain\nWho have longed deeply once, and longed in vain;\nBut I will rather say that you remain\nA world above man’s head, to let him see\nHow boundless might his soul’s horizons be,\nHow vast, yet of what clear transparency!\nHow it were good to live there, and breathe free;\nHow fair a lot to fill\nIs left to each man still!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "worldly-place": { - "title": "“Worldly Place”", - "body": "_Even in a palace, life may be led well!_\nSo spake the imperial sage, purest of men,\nMarcus Aurelius. But the stifling den\nOf common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,\n\nOur freedom for a little bread we sell,\nAnd drudge under some foolish master’s ken\nWho rates us if we peer outside our pen,--\nMatched with a palace, is not this a hell?\n\n_Even in a palace!_ On his truth sincere,\nWho spoke these words, no shadow ever came;\nAnd when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame\n\nSome nobler, ampler stage of life to win,\nI’ll stop, and say, “There were no succor here!\nThe aids to noble life are all within.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "youth-and-calm": { - "title": "“Youth and Calm”", - "body": "’Tis death! and peace indeed is here,\nAnd ease from shame, and rest from fear.\nThere’s nothing can dismarble now\nThe smoothness of that limpid brow.\nBut is a calm like this, in truth,\nThe crowning end of life and youth?\nAnd when this boon rewards the dead,\nAre all debts paid, has all been said?\nAnd is the heart of youth so light,\nIts step so firm, its eye so bright,\nBecause on its hot brow there blows\nA wind of promise and repose\nFrom the far grave, to which it goes;\nBecause it has the hope to come,\nOne day, to harbor in the tomb?\nAh, no! the bliss youth dreams is one\nFor daylight, for the cheerful sun,\nFor feeling nerves and living breath;\nYouth dreams a bliss on this side death.\nIt dreams a rest, if not more deep,\nMore grateful than this marble sleep;\nIt hears a voice within it tell,--\n_Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well._\n’Tis all, perhaps, which man acquires,\nBut ’tis not what our youth desires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-ashbery": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Ashbery", - "birth": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2017 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 96 - }, - "poems": { - "by-an-earthquake": { - "title": "“ … by an Earthquake”", - "body": "A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.\nB, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.\nB, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.\nA, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.\nA is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.\nA solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.\nA-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”\nA, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.\nA sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.\nA sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.\nAngela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.\nPhilip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.\nA discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.\nA, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.\nA, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.\n\nA, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.\nA dies of psychic shock.\nAlbert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”\n\nSilver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.\nThree musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.\nArdis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.\nKent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.\nA and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.\nElvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.\nAlphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.\nA has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.\nJenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.\nPetronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.\nThirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.\nBuster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.\nLassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.\nIn the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.\nMore people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.\nToo many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.\nMaddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.\n\nFog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.\nA violent wind blows the fog around.\nTwo miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.\nPerhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.\nJarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.\nJarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.\nA ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.\nJarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend.\nLodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.\n“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.\nAmbrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.\nArthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.\nCathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.\nCathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.\nArthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.\n\nSauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.\nRunning up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.\nIn a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.\nBeatrice loved Alvin before he married.\nB, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.\nB, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.\nA discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.\nAmbrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.\nDonnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.\nNo one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.\nPellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.\nIldebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "abstentions": { - "title": "“Abstentions”", - "body": "Not the shy tourist, hopping up the salty steps of Rome--\nThe Piazza Venezia from a bus, the transparent emotions go by.\nThe old mines. Not\nJust something resembling a part of it\nBut all of it as it is not. The voice\n“Please tell me that you love me” said,\nThe iron monuments drift by,\nThe arches nailed to wood,\nThe caves, blind fists,\nGreen seaweed on the black and blue water\nAnd the friends’ precision with excitement,\n“The man who sees a cloud in Schenectady\nAffects someone he does not know on the other side of the globe, who wants him\nAnd we shall have that rose, Dutch work apart.”\nBlue towers, squeals, the blind roses go by.\n\nTherefore we have these few things.\nIt was a summer afternoon or night, glory was in the gondola\nOn the percussive honeymoon.\nBut he thought of the nights the ruined homes\nThe gold tears shed for him.\nTherefore we have these white bricks.\nThe bride wore white …\n\nHe wears a white suit, carries a white newspaper and apple, his hands and face are white;\nThe clouds sneer but go sailing into the white sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "adam-snow": { - "title": "“Adam Snow”", - "body": "Let’s try the ingenuous mode, if for no better\nReason than its staying power: locked into a continuum\nThat rises and falls with the contours of this earth,\nInhabiting a Tom Tiddler’s ground of special pleading\nAnd cash and carry. Long lines at the checkout counter\nAre a reason to behave, sad and dramatic, silhouetted\nAgainst the tidal wave. For what must be, must be,\nThe old priest said, his face a maze\nOf claw-prints in the snow\nWhich always arrives in time to antagonize\nOr humor, before bedtime, it’s your choice.\nAnd suddenly outlines unlock\nThe forms they were sequestering, just to make it simple\nAnd equal.\n\nAh, but all fakes aren’t alike.\nI think we must settle for the big thing\nSince quality, though a matter of survival,\nIs such a personal call. Sometimes it’s nowhere at all\nOr a faint girl will make light of it, saying\nIn the sprockets in the backwoods there are no noticeable\nStandards, nothing to judge one or be judged by.\nIt’s true the refreshing absence of color\nProduces an effect like that of time;\nThat you may be running through thistles one moment\nAnd across a sheet of thin ice the next and not be aware\nOf any difference, only that you have been granted an extension.\nMake sure you clean up this mess. Other than that\nListening to widely spaced catcalls is OK\nThe livelong day, and sleep isn’t rationed.\nYet one can only question how the system arose,\nCreating itself, I suppose,\nSince nothing else has yet taken that responsibility.\nIf it makes you happier to feel, to see the horror\nOf living one’s life alone for something, what the heck,\nBe my guest, it takes two to tango\nAfter all, or something, doesn’t it?\nAnd you get right back on that conveyor belt\nOf dreams to tip the scale modestly\nInto your own enterprise, nest-egg, portfolio\nOf standard greetings and uncommon manners.\nThe ending can’t take the blame.\n\nIt read like the cubist diary of a brook\nThat sidled past the house one day\nOn its way to a rendezvous with some river\nWe can never cross twice. And the gradual\nEscalation lay near by: we cannot call it back\nYet may meet it again, in other times, under different auspices.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "alcove": { - "title": "“Alcove”", - "body": "Is it possible that spring could be\nonce more approaching? We forget each time\nwhat a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,\nadrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump\nof the final hour,” lest an agenda--horrors!--be imputed to it,\nand the whole point of its being spring collapse\nlike a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,\nyou have to say that for it.\nAnd should further seasons coagulate\ninto years, like spilled, dried paint, why,\nwho’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed\nlooked out for others as though they mattered, and they,\ncatching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night\nin an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.\nBut it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen\ndaily. That’s how we get around obstacles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "alms-for-the-beekeeper": { - "title": "“Alms for the Beekeeper”", - "body": "He makes better errors that way.\nPass it around at breakfast:\nthe family and all, down there with a proximate sense of power,\nlawyering up. Less log-heavy, your text-strategy\nbeat out other options, is languid.\nDuets in the dust start up,\nbegin. Again.\n\nHe entered the firm at night.\nThe 26th is a Monday.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "monday", - "day": 26 - } - } - }, - "amid-mounting-evidence": { - "title": "“Amid Mounting Evidence”", - "body": "I was reading about dinosaurs:\nOnce the scratching phase is over, and the mirage\nOr menage has begun, and the world lies open\nTo the radiation theory (tons of radiation, think of it,\nReversing all normal procedures\nSo that the pessimistic ball of wax begins\nTo slide down the inclined plane again\nBringing further concepts to their doom while encouraging\nThe infinity of loose ends that\nIs taking over our government and threatening to become life as we know it!)\nIt is time to slink off to one’s post in some cold desert\n(Not the Sahara, more like the Gobi actually)\nAnd wait amid that sadness known as banishment\nFor the point to reappear, though it may never do so,\nAnd what was that strange uniform?\n\nOnly that we lived happily in ever-after land\nAnd the fire of my mind was still with us then\nPrevented the object of these negotiations from becoming a toy\nFarther down the keyboard (and of course this did happen\nLater on, every potential is realized if one waits long enough,\nOnly by that time the context may have faded, fragile\nAs summersweet or the light on a windowsill, and then,\nAnd then, why the text will be seen as regular\nOnly no one wants to play anymore; games\nHave their fashions much as truth does) and our lives from\nBeing turned into a shambles too large to deal with, unreasonable;\nAnd as masonry weathers, as moths are silently at work in blankets\nEven as you read this, I saw no reason for complaint\nOr murmur and the entourage liked me, agreeing\nWith me that this wasn’t the right time nor place,\nThat arguments would be foreshortened if initiated now.\nYet this toothache that never seems to go away,\nBurning mildly through the night, heartbeat\nOf something, augurs no calamity unless leagues\nAnd leagues of silent forest canopied by matte-gray\nSky are to be construed as such, but I think our peace\nShould be given the benefit of a doubt and allowances\nSurely made for all our thoughts and daily activities\nIf peace is what we really want, Roman\nCandles ripping open the evening notwithstanding.\nIt’s so easy to trudge and pretend to be a boy\nWhen deep down what you want is asking,\nNot rich assurances that are autumnal\nIn the way they finally work out and become a sad\nThough voluminous and vital commentary on our standing\nImpatiently, waiting for the weather to make the first move,\nAnd when this happens, be the first to scurry away\nComplaining inaudibly and in general installing\nOneself as a capital nuisance, never to be given the time of day again.\n\nAnd if this should happen there are always windows\nWith flower-boxes and dreamy young girls just behind them.\nThere are birds who stop by for one last agitated farewell\nBefore the long flight to the south, and so much more\nTo prevent the ultimatum from being drawn up that really\nIn the first falling flakes a job does get done:\nEnergy left over from some previous and saucy commitment\nTurns out not to have been such a bad option. The drilling\nOf noon insects in high summer had to precede this or something\nElse, the dream be given texture and further substance\nBecause of something. It seems\nShipshape now. Everything seems to be all right.\nThe storm, you see, told none of its secrets,\nGave nothing away. There would have been no one to repeat it to\nIn any case. And the signs of stress that follow\nIn the wake of confusion are there to be read\nIf that is what one wants, but the electricity\nBakes them into shapes of its own cognizance, its wanting\nTo give us something a little better to spend\nThe rest of our lives looking for, wondering whether it got misplaced.\nIn the old days this would have been on the house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "and-you-know": { - "title": "“And You Know”", - "body": "The girls, protected by gold wire from the gaze\nOf the onrushing students, live in an atmosphere of vacuum\nIn the old schoolhouse covered with nasturtiums.\nAt night, comets, shooting stars, twirling planets,\nSuns, bits of illuminated pumice, and spooks hang over the old place;\nThe atmosphere is breathless. Some find the summer light\nNauseous and damp, but there are those\nWho are charmed by it, going out in the morning.\nWe must rest here, for this is where the teacher comes.\nOn his desk stands a vase of tears.\nA quiet feeling pervades the playroom. His voice clears\nThrough the interminable afternoon: “I was a child once\nUnder the spangled sun. Now I do what must be done.\nI teach reading and writing and flaming arithmetic. Those\nIn my home come to me anxiously at night, asking how it goes.\nMy door is always open. I never lie, and the great heat warms me.”\n\nHis door is always open, the fond schoolmaster!\nWe ought to imitate him in our lives,\nFor as a man lives, he dies. To pass away\nIn the afternoon, on the vast vapid bank\nYou think is coming to crown you with hollyhocks and lilacs, or in gold at the opera,\nRequires that one shall have lived so much! And not\nAnswering questions and giving answers, but grandly sitting,\nLike a great rock, through many years.\nIt is the erratic path of time we trace\nOn the globe, with moist fingertip, and surely, the globe stops;\nWe are pointing to England, to Africa, to Nigeria;\nAnd we shall visit these places, you and I, and other places,\nIncluding heavenly Naples, queen of the sea, where shall be king and you will be queen,\nAnd all the places around Naples.\nSo the good old teacher is right, to stop with his finger on Naples, gazing out into the mild December afternoon\nAs his star pupil enters the classroom in that elaborate black and yellow creation.\nHe is thinking of her flounces, and is caught in them\nas if they were made of iron, they will crush him to death!\nGoodbye, old teacher, we must travel on, not to a better land, perhaps,\nBut to the England of the sonnets, Paris, Colombia and Switzerland\nAnd all the places with names, that we wish to visit--\n\nStrasbourg, Albania,\nThe coast of Holland, Madrid, Singapore, Naples, Salonika, Liberia, and Turkey.\nSo we leave you behind with her of the black and yellow flounces,\nYou were always a good friend, but a special one.\nNow as we brush through the clinging leaves we seem to hear you crying;\nYou want us to come back, but it is too late to come back, isn’t it?\nIt is too late to go to the places with the names (what were they, anyway? just names).\nIt is too late to go anywhere but to the nearest star, that one, that hangs just over the hill, beckoning\nLike a hand of which the arm is not visible. Goodbye, Father! Goodbye, pupils. Goodbye, my master and my dame.\nWe fly to the nearest star, whether it be red like a furnace, or yellow,\nAnd we carry your lessons in our hearts (the lessons and our hearts are the same)\nOut of the humid classroom, into the forever. Goodbye, Old Dog Tray.\nAnd so they have left us feeling cross and tired.\nThey never cared for school anyway.\nAnd they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board,\nAnd the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "and-ut-pictura-poesis-is-her-name": { - "title": "“And ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ is Her Name”", - "body": "You can’t say it that way any more.\nBothered about beauty you have to\nCome out into the open, into a clearing,\nAnd rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you\nIs OK. To demand more than this would be strange\nOf you, you who have so many lovers,\nPeople who look up to you and are willing\nTo do things for you, but you think\nIt’s not right, that if they really knew you …\nSo much for self-analysis. Now,\nAbout what to put in your poem-painting:\nFlowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.\nNames of boys you once knew and their sleds,\nSkyrockets are good--do they still exist?\nThere are a lot of other things of the same quality\nAs those I’ve mentioned. Now one must\nFind a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,\nDull-sounding ones. She approached me\nAbout buying her desk. Suddenly the street was\nBananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.\nHumdrum testaments were scattered around. His head\nLocked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something\nOught to be written about how this affects\nYou when you write poetry:\nThe extreme austerity of an almost empty mind\nColliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate\nSomething between breaths, if only for the sake\nOf others and their desire to understand you and desert you\nFor other centers of communication, so that understanding\nMay begin, and in doing so be undone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "anticipated-stranger": { - "title": "“Anticipated Stranger”", - "body": "the bruise will stop by later.\nFor now, the pain pauses in its round,\nnotes the time of day, the patient’s temperature,\nleaves a memo for the surrogate: What the _hell_\ndid you think you were doing? I mean …\nOh well, less said the better, they all say.\nI’ll post this at the desk.\n\nGod will find the pattern and break it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "as-you-came-from-the-holy-land": { - "title": "“As You Came from the Holy Land”", - "body": "of western New York state\nwere the graves all right in their bushings\nwas there a note of panic in the late August air\nbecause the old man had peed in his pants again\nwas there turning away from the late afternoon glare\nas though it too could be wished away\nwas any of this presentc\nand how could this be\nthe magic solution to what you are in now\nwhatever has held you motionless\nlike this so long through the dark season\nuntil now the women come out in navy blue\nand the worms come out of the compost to die\nit is the end of any season\n\nyou reading there so accurately\nsitting not wanting to be disturbed\nas you came from that holy land\nwhat other signs of earth’s dependency were upon you\nwhat fixed sign at the crossroads\nwhat lethargy in the avenues\nwhere all is said in a whisper\nwhat tone of voice among the hedges\nwhat tone under the apple trees\nthe numbered land stretches away\nand your house is built in tomorrow\nbut surely not before the examination\nof what is right and will befall\nnot before the census\nand the writing down of names\n\nremember you are free to wander away\nas from other times other scenes that were taking place\nthe history of someone who came too late\nthe time is ripe now and the adage\nis hatching as the seasons change and tremble\nit is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest\nwere happening in the sky\nbut the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it\n\nout of night the token emerges\nits leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree\ntaken up and shaken again\nput down in weak rage\nknowing as the brain does it can never come about\nnot here not yesterday in the past\nonly in the gap of today filling itself\nas emptiness is distributed\nin the idea of what time it is\nwhen that time is already past", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "a-blessing-in-disguise": { - "title": "“A Blessing in Disguise”", - "body": "Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,\nBut I, in my soul, am alive too.\nI feel I must sing and dance, to tell\nOf this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.\n\nAnd I sing amid despair and isolation\nOf the chance to know you, to sing of me\nWhich are you. You see,\nYou hold me up to the light in a way\n\nI should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps\nBecause you always tell me I am you,\nAnd right. The great spruces loom.\nI am yours to die with, to desire.\n\nI cannot ever think of me, I desire you\nFor a room in which the chairs ever\nHave their backs turned to the light\nInflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees\n\nThat seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.\nIf the wild light of this January day is true\nI pledge me to be truthful unto you\nWhom I cannot ever stop remembering.\n\nRemembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day\nOn the wings of the secret you will never know.\nTaking me from myself, in the path\nWhich the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.\n\nI prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you,”\nYou must come to me, all golden and pale\nLike the dew and the air.\nAnd then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "blue-sonata": { - "title": "“Blue Sonata”", - "body": "Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now\nAs now is but the setting out on a new but still\nUndefined way. _That_ now, the one once\nSeen from far away, is our destiny\nNo matter what else may happen to us. It is\nThe present past of which our features,\nOur opinions are made. We are half it and we\nCare nothing about the rest of it. We\nCan see far enough ahead for the rest of us to be\nImplicit in the surroundings that twilight is.\nWe know that this part of the day comes every day\nAnd we feel that, as it has its rights, so\nWe have our right to be ourselves in the measure\nThat we are in it and not some other day, or in\nSome other place. The time suits us\nTust as it fancies itself, but just so far\nAs we not give up that inch, breath\nOf becoming before becoming may be seen,\nOr come to seem all that it seems to mean now.\n\nThe things that were coming to be talked about\nHave come and gone and are still remembered\nAs being recent. There is a grain of curiosity\nAt the base of some new thing, that unrolls\nIts question mark like a new wave on the shore.\nIn coming to give, to give up what we had,\nWe have, we understand, gained or been gained\nBy what was passing through, bright with the sheen\nOf things recently forgotten and revived.\nEach image fits into place, with the calm\nOf not having too many, of having just enough.\nWe live in the sigh of our present.\nIf that was all there was to have\nWe could re-imagine the other half, deducing it\nFrom the shape of what is seen, thus\nBeing inserted into its idea of how we\nOught to proceed. It would be tragic to fit\nInto the space created by our not having arrived yet,\nTo utter the speech that belongs there,\nFor progress occurs through reinventing\nThese words from a dim recollection of them,\nIn violating that space in such a way as\nTo leave it intact. Yet we do after all\nBelong here, and have moved a considerable\nDistance; our passing is a facade.\nBut our understanding of it is justified.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blueprints-and-others": { - "title": "“Blueprints and Others”", - "body": "The man across the street seems happy,\nor pleased. Sometimes a porter evades the grounds.\nAfter you play a lot with the military\nyou are my own best customer.\n\nI’ve done five of that.\nMake my halloween. Ask me not to say it.\nThe old man wants to see you--_now_.\nThat’s all right, but find your own.\nDo you want to stop using these?\n\nLast winning people told me to sit on the urinal.\nDo not put on others what you can put on yourself.\n_How to be in the city my loved one._\nMen in underwear … A biography field\nlike where we live in the mountains,\n\na falling. Yes I know you have.\nTroves of merchandise, you know, “boomer buzz.”\nHillbilly sculptures of the outside.\n(They won’t see anybody.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "boundary-issues": { - "title": "“Boundary Issues”", - "body": "Here in life, they would understand.\nHow could it be otherwise? We had groped too,\nunwise, till the margin began to give way,\nat which point all was sullen, or lost, or both.\n\nNow it was time, and there was nothing for it.\n\nWe had a good meal, I and my friend,\nslurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables.\nYet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith.\nYou can still decide to. But it wanted warmth.\nOtherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible\nin the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but …”\nThe iconic beggars shuffled off too. I told you,\nonce a breach emerges it will become a chasm\nbefore anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute\non the far side of town erupts into a war\nin no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal\nsweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft,\ninto whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost\nmake up for it. It’s always us that has to pay.\n\nI have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out\nas probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over\nwith wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas,\nits elixirs. Banish truth-telling.\nThat’s the whole point, as I understand it.\nEach new investigation rebuilds the urgency,\nlike a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it,\ncausing its eventual collapse. We could see all that\nfrom a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode\nfrom day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered.\nIt was camaraderie, or something like it, that did,\nporing over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one\ncorrect attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bunch-of-stuff": { - "title": "“Bunch of Stuff”", - "body": "To all events I squirted you\nknowing this not to be this came to pass\nwhen we were out and it looked good.\nWhy wouldn’t you want a fresh piece\nof outlook to stand in down the years?\nSee, your house, a former human energy construction,\ncrashed with us for a few days in May\nand sure enough, the polar inscape\nbrought about some easier poems,\nwhich I guessed was a good thing. At least\nsome of us were relaxed, Steamboat Bill included.\n\nHe didn’t drink nothing.\nIt was one thing\nto be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it.\nAnd if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it:\nPoke fun at balm, then suffer lethargy\nto irradiate its shallow flood in the new packaging\nour enemies processed. They should know.\n\nThe Gold Dust Twins never stopped supplicating Hoosiers\nto limn the trail. There’s no Shakespeare.\nThrough the window, Casanova.\nCouldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incident\nof those days, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bungalows": { - "title": "“The Bungalows”", - "body": "Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,\nThe land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away\nSo that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth\nThan to stay in immediate relation to these other things--boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them--\nWhose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.\nAnd still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.\n\nThey are the same aren’t they,\nThe presumed landscape and the dream of home\nBecause the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,\nTrying to remember how those rectangular shapes\nBecame so extraneous and so near\nTo create a foreground of quiet knowledge\nIn which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that\nWill sign for old age\nAnd so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.\n\nThe warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;\nThe problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:\nComplexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.\nDuring Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent\nOf noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that\nThe great wave of the past, compounded in derision,\nSubmerged idea and non-dreamer alike\nIn falsetto starlight like “purity”\nOf design that had been the first danger sign\nTo wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain--pfui!\n\nHow does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,\nThe delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting\nThe interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written\nBearing to a final point of folly and doom\nThe wisdom of these generations.\nLook at what you’ve done to the landscape--\nThe ice cube, the olive--\nThere is a perfect tri-city mesh of things\nExtending all the way along the river on both sides\nWith the end left for thoughts on construction\nThat are always turning to alps and thresholds\nAbove the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.\n\nWe shall very soon have the pleasure of recording\nA period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect\nAnd to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while\nAt the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:\nRather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to\nAn impossible “calque” of reality, than\n“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,\nSomething of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life\nGoes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,\nAll in one direction.\n\nYou who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,\nWhat do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal\nIs that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.\nBut you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning\nThere can be no further discussion.\nAnd the river pursues its lonely course\nWith the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape\nFor green brings unhappiness--_le vert Porte malheur_.\n“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain\nMakes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”\n\nAll this came to pass eons ago.\nYour program worked out perfectly. You even avoided\nThe monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:\nA backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,\nAn absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.\nEach detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,\nOr would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself--\nFor only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar\nThe way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,\nSometimes disappearing into valleys, _but always on the way_,\nFor it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful\nAs architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,\nTo live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.\nWho cares about what was there before? There is no going back,\nFor standing still means death, and life is moving on,\nMoving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-guess-and-by-gosh": { - "title": "“By Guess and by Gosh”", - "body": "O awaken with me\nthe inquiring goodbyes.\nOoh what a messy business\na tangle and a muddle\n(and made it seem quite interesting).\n\nHe ticks them off:\nleisure top,\na different ride home,\nwhispering, in a way,\nwhispered whiskers,\nso many of the things you have to share.\n\nBut I was getting on,\nand that’s what you don’t need.\nI’m certainly sorry about scaring your king,\nif indeed that’s what happened to him.\nYou get Peanuts and War and Peace,\nsome in rags, some in jags, some in\nvelvet gown. They want\nthe other side of the printing plant.\n\nThere were concerns.\nSay hi to jock itch, leadership principles,\nurinary incompetence.\nTake that, perfect pitch.\nAnd say a word for the president,\nfor the scholar magazines, papers, a streaming.\nThen you are interested in poetry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "chinese-whispers": { - "title": "“Chinese Whispers”", - "body": "And in a little while we broke under the strain:\nsuppurations _ad nauseam_, the wanting to be taller,\nthough it’s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,\nlike any tree in any forest. Mute, the pancake describes you.\n\nIt had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim.\nIt was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,\nalways getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.\nIt was a hundred years before anyone noticed. The governor general\n\ncalled it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,\nknew it was going to be around for a long time,\neven though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees\nonto frozen doorsteps, it came round again\nwhen all memory of it had been expunged from the common brain.\n\nEverybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.\nA boyfriend in the next town had one\nbut conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.\nFinally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:\nI hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose, so dense\n\nnot even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.\nWhat’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,\nyet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides\nand in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,\nblue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them. Camera obscuras,\n\ntoo, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people\nwho want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?\nAll too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,\npasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,\nless noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time.\nHow to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,\ncareless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out,\nput each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out\nbefore anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro of collapsing clouds.\n\nHow I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,\nor dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past\nthe reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs. More\n\nkeeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace\nfrom an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.\nThere is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,\nbut prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried\nin bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations. I yell to the ship’s front door,\n\nwanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.\nI was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.\n\nIt always turns out that much is salvageable. Chicken coops\n\nhaven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business\nwith a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night.\nIt happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,\nthe air was digestible, the fish tied in love-knots\non their gurneys. Yes, and journeys\n\nwere palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances\nand the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.\nWas there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you,\nbruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:\nthe knowledge that this isn’t history, no matter how many\n\ntimes we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines\ntrumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle\nwarehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overrided:\nYours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes,\nstuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales,\ndispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter\nto us, these tunes carried by the wind\n\nfrom a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time\nto reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age\nhave softened us up a little more. Then we’ll see how extinct\n\nthe various races have become, how the years stand up\nto their descriptions, no matter how misleading,\nand how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you\non your detective work, for I am a connoisseur\nof close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it.\n\nThe trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.\nAlways they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them\nwithout noticing. We, too, are taller,\nour ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured\nwith telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,\naccording as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,\na secret thread.\nPeace is a full stop.\nAnd though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,\nnow only time will consent to have anything to do with us,\nfor what purposes we do not know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "civilization-and-its-discontents": { - "title": "“Civilization and Its Discontents”", - "body": "A people chained to aurora\nI alone disarming you\n\nMillions of facts of distributed light\n\nHelping myself with some big boxes\nUp the steps, then turning to no neighborhood;\nThe child’s psalm, slightly sung\nIn the hall rushing into the small room.\nSuch fire! leading away from destruction.\nSomewhere in outer ether I glimpsed you\nComing at me, the solo barrier did it this time,\nGuessing us staying, true to be at the blue mark\nOf threshold. Tired of planning it again and again\nThe cool boy distant, and the soaked-up\nAfterthought, like so much rain, or roof.\n\nThe miracle took you in beside him.\nLeaves rushed the window, there was clear water and the sound of a lock.\nNow I never see you much any more.\nThe summers are much colder than they used to be\nIn that other time, when you and I were young.\nI miss the human truth of your smile,\nThe half-hearted gaze of your palms,\nAnd all things together, but there is no comic reign\nOnly the facts you put to me. You must not, then,\nBe very surprised if I am alone: it is all for you,\nThe night, and the stars, and the way we used to be.\n\nThere is no longer any use in harping on\nThe incredible principle of daylong silence, the dark sunlight\nAs only the grass is beginning to know it,\nThe wreath of the north pole,\nFestoons for the late return, the shy pensioners\nAgasp on the lamplit air. What is agreeable\nIs to hold your hand. The gravel\nUnderfoot. The time for coming near is close. Useless\nVerbs shooting the other words far away.\n\nSince I had already swallowed the poison\nI could only gaze into the distance at my life\nLike a saint’s, with each day distinct.\nNo heaviness in the upland pastures. Nothing\nIn the forest. Only life under the huge trees\nLike a coat that has grown too big, moving far away,\nCutting swamps for men like lapdogs, holding its own,\nPerforming once again, for you and for me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "crossroads-in-the-past": { - "title": "“Crossroads in the Past”", - "body": "That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,\nbut it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.\n“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?\n‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do\nwhen we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”\n\nI tell you, something went wrong there a while back.\nJust don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.\nNo, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know\nexactly what seems wrong to you, how something could\n\nseem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?\nI’m sitting here dialing my cellphone\nwith one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel\nwith the other. And then something like braids will stand out,\n\non horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.\nWe’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,\ntalk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know\nthat’s probably what’s wrong--the beginnings concept, I mean.\nI aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some\nsometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater\n\nhad placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards\ndrew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves\nsitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly\ncrowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully\nknow our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly\namid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "day-bump": { - "title": "“Day Bump”", - "body": "Whether the harborline or the east shoreline\nconsummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there,\neyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation\nfrom blue above. And just like we were saying,\nthe people began to show some interest\nin the mud-choked harbor. It could be summer again\nfor all anyone in our class knew.\nYeah, that’s right. Bumped from our dog-perch,\nwe’d had to roil with the last of them.\n\nIt’s taken a while since I’ve been here,\nbut I’m resolved. What, didn’t I print,\nlittle piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian?\nHere is my friend:\nSocks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come?\nThe inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away.\nSpeaking to him of intricate family affairs.\nI’m not what you think. Stay preconscious.\nIt’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dramedy": { - "title": "“Dramedy”", - "body": "Things I left on your paper:\none of the craziest episodes that ever overtook me.\nDo you like espionage? A watered charm?\nMy pod cast aside, I’ll walk in the human street,\nprotect the old jib from new miniseries.\n\nI could swear it moved\nin incomplete back yards\nto endorse the conversation, request to be strapped in.\nThen it will be time to take the step\ngiving fragile responses,\nand finally he wrote the day.\n\nIt happened in the water\nso that was nice.\n\nIt comes ready conflated:\nvanilla for get lost, flavor of the time\nof his sponsor’s destiny. Be on that sofa.\n\nI was crossing the state line as they were reburying the stuff.\nYou break the time lock, the bride’s canister …\nbut we did say that we’d be back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "el-dorado": { - "title": "“El Dorado”", - "body": "We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore.\nHis concern: that I shall get it like that,\nin the right and righter of a green bush\nchomping on future considerations. In the ghostly\ndreams of others it appears I am all right,\nand even going on tomorrow there is much\nto be said on all these matters, “issues,” like\n“No rest for the weary.” (And yet--why not?)\nFeeling under orders is a way of showing up,\nbut stepping on Earth--she’s not going to.\nTen shades of pleasing himself brings us to tomorrow\nevening and will be back for more. I disagree\nwith you completely but couldn’t be prouder\nand fonder of you. So drink up. Feel good for two.\n\nI do it in a lot of places. Subfusc El Dorado\nis only one that I know something about.\nOthers are recently lost cities\nwhere we used to live--they keep the names\nwe knew, sometimes. I do it in a lot of places.\nBrash brats offer laughing advice,\nas though anything I cared about could be difficult\nor complicated now. That’s the rub. Gusts of up\nto forty-five miles an hour will be dropping in later\non tonight. No reason not to. So point at the luck\nwe know about. Living is a meatloaf sandwich.\nI had a good time up there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elective-infinities": { - "title": "“Elective Infinities”", - "body": "Thirsty? They race across ampersands,\nscrolling. He isn’t sure it’s his head.\nThere’s a delay right now. Smoke backed up.\nLadies please remove hats.\n\nIt was all over by morning. The village idiot\nwas surprised to see us. “… thought you were in Normandy.”\nLike all pendulums we were surprised,\nthen slightly miffed at what seemed to be happening\nback in the bushes. Keep your ornaments,\nif that’s what they are. Return to sender, arse.\n\nAt the intersection a statue of a policeman\nwas directing traffic. It seemed likale a vacation,\nhalloween or something. Process\nwas the only real thing that happened.\nWe wove closer to the abyss, a maze of sunflowers.\nThe dauphin said to take our time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "farm-implements-and-rutabagas-in-a-landscape": { - "title": "“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”", - "body": "The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,\nUnthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,\nFrom livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”\nMeanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant\nTo spend one’s vacation _en la casa de Popeye_,” she scratched\nHer cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach\n\nAnd was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.\n“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder\nToday, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched\nThe part of his head under his hat. The apartment\nSeemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant\nInspiration plunge us now to the stars? _For this is my country_.”\n\nSuddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.\nWimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach\nWhen the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”\nBut Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder\nAnd tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment\nBe but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”\n\nOlive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched\nHer long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country\nOne musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment\nAnd all that it contains, myself and spinach\nIn particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder\nAt his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant\n\nArpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant\nRays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched\nTree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”\nShe grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”\n“But you can’t do that--he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”\nUrged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.\n\nBut Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment\nSuccumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant\nHere,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach\nThen I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”--she scratched\nOne dug pensively--“but Wimpy is such a country\nBumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder\n\nSoon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,\nThe color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched\nHis balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "five-pedantic-pieces": { - "title": "“Five Pedantic Pieces”", - "body": "An idea I had and talked about\nBecame the things I do.\n\nThe poem of these things takes them apart,\nAnd I tremble. Sparse winter, less vulnerable\nThan deflated summer, the nests of words.\n\nSome of the tribes believe the spirit\nIs immanent in a person’s nail-parings.\nThey gather up their dead swiftly,\nAt sundown. And this will be\nSome forgotten day three years ago:\nStartling evidence of light after death\n\nAnother person. The yellow-brick and masonry\nWall, deeper, duller all afternoon\nAnd a voice waltzing, fabricating works\nOf sentimental gadgetry--messes he’d cook up.\n\nAnd the little hotel looked all right\nAnd well-lit, in the dark, on the flat\nBeach behind the breakers, stiff, harmless.\nAnd you are amazed that so much flimsy stuff\nStays erect, trapped in our mummery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flowering-death": { - "title": "“Flowering Death”", - "body": "Ahead, starting from the far north, it wanders.\nIts radish-strong gasoline fumes have probably been\nLocked into your sinuses while you were away.\nYou will have to deliver it.\nThe flowers exist on the edge of breath, loose,\nHaving been laid there.\nOne gives pause to the other,\nOr there will be a symmetry about their movements\nThrough which each is also an individual.\n\nIt is their collective blankness, however,\nThat betrays the notion of a thing not to be destroyed\nIn this, how many facts we have fallen through\nAnd still the old facade glimmers there,\nA mirage, but permanent. We must first trick the idea\nInto being, then dismantle it,\nScattering the pieces on the wind,\nSo that the old joy, modest as cake, as wine and friendship\nWill stay with us at the last, backed by the night\nWhose ruse gave it our final meaning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-john-clare": { - "title": "“For John Clare”", - "body": "Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling--so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.\nThere ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope--letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them half-way would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside--costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.\nIt is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fuxed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it’s their time too--nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: “No comment.” Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "glazunovia": { - "title": "“Glazunovia”", - "body": "The man with the red hat\nAnd the polar bear, is he here too?\nThe window giving on shade,\nIs that here too?\nAnd all the little helps,\nMy initials in the sky,\nThe hay of an arctic summer night?\n\nThe bear\nDrops dead in sight of the window.\nLovely tribes have just moved to the north.\nIn the flickering evening the martins grow denser.\nRivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "grand-abacus": { - "title": "“Grand Abacus”", - "body": "Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days.\nWhat, if not its commercial and etiolated visage, could break through the meadow wires?\nIt placed a chair in the meadow and then went far away.\nPeople come to visit in summer, they do not think about the head.\nSoldiers come down to see the head. The stick hides from them.\nThe heavens say, “Here I am, boys and girls!”\nThe stick tries to hide in the noise. The leaves, happy, drift over the dusty meadow.\n“I’d like to see it,” someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be a town.\nLook! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off--they are laughing people.\nThe skin is perhaps children, they say, “We children,” and are vague near the sea. The eyes--\nWait! What large raindrops! The eyes--\nWait, can’t you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog?\nThe eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us.\nWho knew it, at the beginning of the day?\nIt is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them.\nHow far that bridle flashed! “Hurry up, children!”\nThe birds fly back, they say, “We were lying,\nWe do not want to fly away.” But it is already too late. The children have vanished.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "grand-galop": { - "title": "“Grand Galop”", - "body": "All things seem mention of themselves\nAnd the names which stem from them branch out to other referents.\nHugely, spring exists again. The weigila does its dusty thing\nIn fire-hammered air. And garbage cans are heaved against\nThe railing as the tulips yawn and crack open and fall apart.\nAnd today is Monday. Today’s lunch is: Spanish omelet, lettuce and tomato salad,\nJello, milk and cookies. Tomorrow’s: sloppy joe on bun,\nScalloped corn, stewed tomatoes, rice pudding and milk.\nThe names we stole don’t remove us:\nWe have moved on a little ahead of them\nAnd now it is time to wait again.\nOnly waiting, the waiting: what fills up the time between?\nIt is another kind of wait, waiting for the wait to be ended.\nNothing takes up its fair share of time,\nThe wait is built into the things just coming into their own.\nNothing is partially incomplete, but the wait\nInvests everything like a climate.\nWhat time of day is it?\nDoes anything matter?\nYes, for you must wait to see what it is really like,\nThis event rounding the corner\nWhich will be unlike anything else and really\nCause no surprise: it’s too ample.\n\nWater\nDrops from an air conditioner\nOn those who pass underneath. It’s one of the sights of our town.\nPuaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit. One who comes\nWalking dog on leash is distant to say how all this\nChanges the minute to an hour, the hour\nTo the times of day, days to months, those easy-to-grasp entities,\nAnd the months to seasons, which are far other, foreign\nTo our concept of time. Better the months\nThey are almost persons--than these abstractions\nThat sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio\nAging everything into a characterization of itself.\nBetter the cleanup committee concern itself with\nSome item that is now little more than a feature\nOf some obsolete style--cornice or spandrel\nOut of the dimly remembered whole\nWhich probably lacks true distinction. But if one may pick it up,\nCarry it over there, set it down,\nThen the work is redeemed at the end\nUnder the smiling expanse of the sky\nThat plays no favorites but in the same way\nIs honor only to those who have sought it.\n\nThe dog barks, the caravan passes on.\nThe words had a sort of bloom on them\nBut were weightless, carrying past what was being said.\n“A nice time,” you think, “to go out:\nThe early night is cool, but not\nToo anything. People parading with their pets\nPast lawns and vacant lots, as though these too were somehow imponderables\nBefore going home to the decency of one’s private life\nShut up behind doors, which is nobody’s business.\nIt does matter a little to the others\nBut only because it makes them realize how far their respect\nHas brought them. No one would dare to intrude.\nIt is a night like many another\nWith the sky now a bit impatient for today to be over\nLike a bored salesgirl shifting from foot to stockinged foot.”\nThese khaki undershorts hung out on lines,\nThe wind billowing among them, are we never to make a statement?\nAnd certain buildings we always pass which are never mentioned--\nIt’s getting out of hand.\nAs long as one has some sense that each thing knows its place\nAll is well, but with the arrival and departure\nOf each new one overlapping so intensely in the semi-darkness\nIt’s a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know\neach just for a fleeting second\nMust be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole,\nLike some pocket history of the world, so general\nAs to constitute a sob or wail unrelated\nTo any attempt at definition. And the minor eras\nTake on an importance out of all proportion to the story\nFor it can no longer unwind, but must be kept on hand\nIndefinitely, like a first-aid kit no one ever uses\nOr a word in the dictionary that no one will ever look up.\nThe custard is setting; meanwhile\nI not only have my own history to worry about\nBut am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large\nUnfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point\nOf being, with or without my help, if any were forth-coming.\n\nIt is just the movement of the caravan away\nInto an abstract night, with no\nPrecise goal in view, and indeed not caring,\nThat distributes this pause. Why be in a hurry\nTo speed away in the opposite direction, toward the other end of infinity?\nFor things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.\nI cannot decide in which direction to walk\nBut this doesn’t matter to me, and I might as well\nDecide to climb a mountain (it looks almost flat)\nAs decide to go home\nOr to a bar or restaurant or to the home\nOf some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am\nBecause these pauses are supposed to be life\nAnd they sink steel needles deep into the pores, as though to say\nThere is no use trying to escape\nAnd it is all here anyway. And their steep, slippery sides defy\nAny notion of continuity. It is this\nThat takes us back into what really is, it seems, history\nThe lackluster, disorganized kind without dates\nThat speaks out of the hollow trunk of a tree\nTo warn away the merely polite, or those whose destiny\nLeaves them no time to quibble about the means,\nWhich are not ends, and yet … What precisely is it\nAbout the time of day it is, the weather, that causes\npeople to note it painstakingly in their diaries\nFor them to read who shall come after?\nSurely it is because the ray of light\nOr gloom striking you this moment is hope\nIn all its mature, matronly form, taking all things into account\nAnd reapportioning them according to size\nSo that if one can’t say that this is the natural way\nIt should have happened, at least one can have no cause for complaint\nWhich is the same as having reached the end, wise\nIn that expectation and enhanced by its fulfillment, or the absence of it.\nBut we say, it cannot come to any such end\nAs long as we are left around with no place to go.\nAnd yet it has ended, and the thing we have fulfilled we have become.\n\nNow it is the impulse of morning that makes\nMy watch tick. As one who pokes his head\nOut from under a pile of blankets, the good and bad together,\nSo this tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions:\nThe desire to have fun, to make noise, and so to\nAdd to the already all-but-illegible scrub-forest of\ngraffiti on the shithouse wall.\nSomeone is coming to get you:\nThe mailman, or a butler enters with a letter on a tray\nWhose message is to change everything, but in the meantime\nOne is to worry about one’s smell or dandruff or lost glasses--\nIf only the curtain-raiser would end, but it is interminable.\nBut there is this consolation:\nIf it turns out to be not worth doing, I haven’t done it;\nIf the sight appalls me, I have seen nothing;\nIf the victory is pyrrhic, I haven’t won it.\nAnd so from a day replete with rumors\nOf things being done on the other side of the mountains\nA nucleus remains, a still-perfect possibility\nThat can be kept indefinitely. And yet\nThe groans of labor pains are deafening; one must\nGet up, get out and be on with it. Morning is for sissies like you\nBut the real trials, the ones that separate the men from\nthe boys, come later.\n\nOregon was kinder to us. The streets\nOffered a variety of directions to the foot\nAnd bookstores where pornography is sold. But then\nOne whiffs just a slight odor of madness in the air.\nThey all got into their cars and drove away\nAs in the end of a movie. So that it finally made no difference\nWhether this were the end or it was somewhere else:\nIf it had to be somewhere it might as well be\nHere, on top of one. Here, as elsewhere,\nApril advances new suggestions, and one may as well\nMove along with them, especially in view of\nThe midnight-blue light that in turning itself inside out\nOffers something strange to the attention, a thing\nThat is not itself, gnat whirling before my eyes\nAt an incredible, tame velocity. Too pronounced after all\nTo be that meaningless. And so on to afternoon\nOn the desert, with oneself cleaned up, and the location\nAlmost brand new what with the removal of gum wrappers, etc.\nBut I was trying to tell you about a strange thing\nThat happened to me, but this is no way to tell about it,\nBy making it truly happen. It drifts away in fragments.\nAnd one is left sitting in the yard\nTo try to write poetry\nUsing what Wyatt and Surrey left around,\nTook up and put down again\nLike so much gorgeous raw material,\nAs though it would always happen in some way\nAnd meanwhile since we are all advancing\nIt is sure to come about in spite of everything\nOn a Sunday, where you are left sitting\nIn the shade that, as always, is just a little too cool.\n\nSo there is whirling out at you from the not deep\nEmptiness the word “cock” or some other, brother and sister words\nWith not much to be expected from them, though these\nAre the ones that waited so long for you and finally left, having given up hope.\nThere is a note of desperation in one’s voice, pleading for them,\nAnd meanwhile the intensity thins and sharpens\nIts point, that is the thing it was going to ask.\nOne has been waiting around all evening for it\nBefore sleep had stopped definitively the eyes and ears\nOf all those who came as an audience.\nStill, that poetry does sometimes occur\nIf only in creases in forgotten letters\nPacked away in trunks in the attic--things you forgot you had\nAnd what would it matter anyway,\nThat recompense so precisely dosed\nAs to seem the falling true of a perverse judgment.\nYou forget how there could be a gasp of a new air\nHidden in that jumble. And of course your forgetting\nIs a sign of just how much it matters to you:\n“It must have been important.”\nThe lies fall like flaxen threads from the skies\nAll over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course\nDoesn’t so much not matter as serve to justify\nThe whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.\nSurrey, your lute is getting an attack of nervous paralysis\nBut there are, again, things to be sung of\nAnd this is one of them, only I would not dream of intruding on\nThe frantic completeness, the all-purpose benevolence\nOf that still-moist garden where the tooting originates:\nBetween intervals of clenched teeth, your venomous rondelay.\n\nAsk a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.\nThe road just seems to vanish\nAnd not that far in the distance, either. The horizon must have been moved up.\nSo it is that by limping carefully\nFrom one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round stone tower\nCrouching low in the hollow of a gulley\nWith no door or window but a lot of old license plates\nTacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through\nAnd a sign:\n“Van Camp’s Pork and Beans,”\nFrom then on in: _angst_-colored skies, emotional withdrawals\nAs the whole business starts to frighten even you,\nIts originator and promoter. The horizon returns\nAs a smile of recognition this time, polite, unquestioning.\nHow long ago high school graduation seems\nYet it cannot have been so very long:\nOne has traveled such a short distance.\nThe styles haven’t changed much,\nAnd I still have a sweater and one or two other things I had then.\nIt seems only yesterday that we saw\nThe movie with the cows in it\nAnd turned to one at your side, who burped\nAs morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose\nItself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.\nImpossible not to be moved by the tiny number\nThose people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or that power.\nBut now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail\nIs impassible, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "weekday": "monday" - } - } - }, - "honestly": { - "title": "“Honestly,”", - "body": "we could send you out there\nto join the cackle squad,\nbut hey, that highly accomplished,\nthinly regarded equestrian--well there was no way\nhe was going to join the others’ field trip.\nWouldn’t put his head on the table.\nBut here’s the thing:\n\nThey had owned great dread,\nknew of a way to get away from here\nthrough ice and smoke\nalways clutching her fingers, like it says\nto do.\n\nOnce we were passionate about the police,\nyawned in the teeth of pixels,\nbut a far rumor blanked us out.\nWe bathed in moonshine.\nNow, experts disagree.\nWere we unhappy or sublime?\nWe’ll have to wait until the next time\nan angel comes rapping at the door\nto rejoice docently.\n\n(I know there’s a way to do this.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hotel-lautreamont": { - "title": "“Hotel Lautréamont”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nResearch has shown that ballads were produced by all of society\nworking as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.\nThe people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.\nWe see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”\n\nWorking as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.\nThe horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds\nwe see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”\nor, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.\n\nThe horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds\nthe world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,\nor in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.\nNot to worry, many hands are making work light again.\n\nThe world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.\nIn any case the ruling was long overdue.\nNot to worry, many hands are making work light again,\nso we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nIn any case, the ruling was long overdue.\nThe people are beside themselves with rapture\nso we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure\nand the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.\n\nThe people are beside themselves with rapture\nyet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,\nand the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.\nThe saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.\n\nYet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.\nIn troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.\nThe saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,\nand night like black swansdown settles on the city.\n\nIn troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.\nNow, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,\nand night like black swansdown settles on the city.\nIf we tried to leave, would being naked help us?\n\n\n# 3.\n\nNow, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.\nChildren twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.\nIf we tried to leave, would being naked help us?\nAnd what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?\n\nChildren twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,\nwhen all we think of is how much we can carry with us.\nAnd what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?\nAll the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.\n\nWhen all we think of is how much we can carry with us\nsmall wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.\nAll the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.\nIt remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.\n\nSmall wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.\nIt was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.\nIt remains for us to come to terms with our commonality\nand in so doing deprive time of further hostages.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIt was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.\nNow, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open\nand in so doing deprive time of further hostages,\nto end the standoff that history long ago began.\n\nNow, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open\nbut it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.\nTo end the standoff that history long ago began\nmust we thrust ever onward, into perversity?\n\nBut it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.\nYou mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.\nMust we thrust ever onward, into perversity?\nOnly night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.\n\nYou mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.\nResearch has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;\nonly night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:\nThe people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-to-continue": { - "title": "“How to Continue”", - "body": "Oh there once was a woman\nand she kept a shop\nselling trinkets to tourists\nnot far from a dock\nwho came to see what life could be\nfar back on the island.\n\nAnd it was always a party there\nalways different but very nice\nNew friends to give you advice\nor fall in love with you which is nice\nand each grew so perfectly from the other\nit was a marvel of poetry\nand irony\n\nAnd in this unsafe quarter\nmuch was scary and dirty\nbut no one seemed to mind\nvery much\nthe parties went on from house to house\nThere were friends and lovers galore\nall around the store\nThere was moonshine in winter\nand starshine in summer\nand everybody was happy to have discovered\nwhat they discovered\n\nAnd then one day the ship sailed away\nThere were no more dreamers just sleepers\nin heavy attitudes on the dock\nmoving as if they knew how\namong the trinkets and the souvenirs\nthe random shops of modern furniture\nand a gale came and said\nit is time to take all of you away\nfrom the tops of the trees to the little houses\non little paths so startled\n\nAnd when it became time to go\nthey none of them would leave without the other\nfor they said we are all one here\nand if one of us goes the other will not go\nand the wind whispered it to the stars\nthe people all got up to go\nand looked back on love", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ice-cream-wars": { - "title": "“The Ice-Cream Wars”", - "body": "Although I mean it, and project the meaning\nAs hard as I can into its brushed-metal surface,\nIt cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick up\nWhere I leave off. It sees the Japanese text\n(About two men making love on a foam-rubber bed)\nAs among the most massive secretions of the human spirit.\nIts part is in the shade, beyond the iron spikes of the fence,\nMixing red with blue. As the day wears on\nThose who come to seem reasonable are shouted down\n(_Why you old goat!_ Look who’s talkin’. Let’s see you\nClimb off that tower--the waterworks architecture, both stupid and\nGrandly humorous at the same time, is a kind of mask for him,\nLike a seal’s face. Time and the weather\nDon’t always go hand in hand, as here: sometimes\nOne is slanted sideways, disappears for awhile.\nThen later it’s forget-me-not time, and rapturous\nClouds appear above the lawn, and the rose tells\nThe old old story, the pearl of the orient, occluded\nAnd still apt to rise at times).\n\nA few black smudges\nOn the outer boulevards, like squashed midges\nAnd the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known,\nA heaviness in the trees, and no one can say\nWhere it comes from, or how long it will stay--\n\nA randomness, a darkness of one’s own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-idiot": { - "title": "“The Idiot”", - "body": "Oh how this sullen, careless world\nIgnorant of me is! Those rocks, those homes\nKnow not the touch of my flesh, nor is there one tree\nWhose shade has known me for a friend.\nI’ve wandered the wide world over.\nNo man I’ve known, no friendly beast\nHas come and put its nose into my hands.\nNo maid has welcomed my face with a kiss.\n\nYet once, as I took passage\nFrom Gibraltar to Cape Horn\nI met some friendly mariners on the boat\nAnd as we struggled to keep the ship from sinking\nIn a storm, the very waves seemed friendly, and the sound\nThe spray made as it hit the front of the boat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-you-said-you-would-come-with-me": { - "title": "“If You Said You Would Come with Me”", - "body": "In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. “It’s the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you,” Anna explained. “They always do, you know.”\nIndeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, then rearranging them in apple-pie order. “Two crows,” the voice seemed to say, “were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away.”\n“Yes … _and then_?” I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up several flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. “This is my friend Hans,” Anna said by way of introduction. No one paid much attention and several guests moved away to the balustrade to admire the view of orchards and vineyards, approaching their autumn glory. One of the women however came to greet us in a friendly manner. I was wondering if this was a “harvest home,” a phrase I had often heard but never understood.\n“Welcome to my home … well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr. …”\n“Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.\n“That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.\n“Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”\n“I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are all strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "if-the-birds-knew": { - "title": "“If the Birds Knew”", - "body": "It is better this year.\nAnd the clothes they wear\nIn the gray unweeded sky of our earth\nThere is no possibility of change\nBecause all of the true fragments are here.\nSo I was glad of the fog’s\nTaking me to you\nUndetermined summer thing eaten\nOf grief and passage--where you stay,\nThe wheel is ready to turn again.\nWhen you have gone it will light up,\nThe shadow of the spokes to drown\nYour departure where the summer knells\nSpeak to grown dawn.\nThere is after all a kind of promise\nTo the affair of the waiting weather.\nWe have learned not to be tired\nAmong the lanterns of this year of sleep\nBut someone pays--no transparency\nHas ever hardened us before\nTo long piers of silence, and hedges\nOf understanding, difficult passing\nFrom one lesson to the next and the coldness\nOf the consistency of our lives\nDevotion to immaculate danger.\nA leaf would have settled the disturbance\nOf the atmosphere, but at that high\nValley’s point disbanded\nClouds that rocks smote newly\nThe person or persons involved\nParading slowly through the sunlit fields\nNot only as though the danger did not exist\nBut as though the birds were in on the secret.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "instead-of-losing": { - "title": "“Instead of Losing”", - "body": "Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn’t used yet\nwould’ve done the same: bother the family’s bickering\nto head straight into the channel. My, those times\ncrackled near about us, from sickly melodrama\ninstead of losing, and the odd confusion … confusion.\n\nI thought of it then, and in the mountains.\nDuring the day we perforated the eponymous city limits\nand then some. No one knew all about us\nbut some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town\nfor an empty drawer\ninto which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand\nvirgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!\nNo can do. Here come the bald arbiters\nwith their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.\nHeck, it’s only a muskrat\nthat’s seen better years, when things were medieval\nand gold …\n\nSo you people in the front,\nleave. You see them. And you understand it all.\nIt doesn’t end, night’s sorcery notwithstanding.\nWould you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times\nthan the child can contain or imagine?\nOr is right now the answer--you know, the radio\nwe heard news on late at night,\nour checkered fortunes so pretty.\nHere’s your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Records.\nThe whole embrace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-instruction-manual": { - "title": "“The Instruction Manual”", - "body": "As I sit looking out of a window of the building\nI wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.\nI look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,\nAnd envy them--they are so far away from me!\nNot one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.\nAnd, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out of the window a little,\nOf dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!\nCity I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!\nBut I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,\nYour public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!\nThe band is playing _Scheherazade_ by Rimsky-Korsakov.\nAround stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers,\nEach attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),\nAnd nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit.\nThe couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.\nFirst, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow\nClothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat\nAnd he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.\nHis dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.\nHer slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,\nAnd she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face too often.\nBut everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one\nI doubt they would notice the mustachioed man’s wife.\nHere come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk\nWhich is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth.\nHe is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white.\nBut his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.\nYet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years,\nAnd love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.\nBut I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.\nWait--there he is--on the other side of the bandstand,\nSecluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl\nOf fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying\nBut it seems they are just mumbling something--shy words of love, probably.\nShe is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.\nShe is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek.\nObviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too;\nHis eyes show it. Turning from this couple,\nI see there is an intermission in the concert.\nThe paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws\n(The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),\nAnd the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk\nAbout the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.\n\nLet us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.\nHere you may see one of those white houses with green trim\nThat are so popular here. Look--I told you!\nIt is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.\nAn old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.\nShe welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.\n“My son is in Mexico City,” she says. “He would welcome you too\nIf he were here. But his job is with a bank there.\nLook, here is a photograph of him.”\nAnd a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame.\nWe thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late\nAnd we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.\nThat church tower will do--the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky. Slowly we enter.\nThe caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in the city, and how we like it here.\nHis daughter is scrubbing the steps--she nods to us as we pass into the tower.\nSoon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us.\nThere is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces.\nThere is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.\nThere is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies\nAnd there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige.\nLook! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.\nThere are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,\nBut the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.\nAnd there is the home of the little old lady--\nShe is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.\nHow limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!\nWe have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.\nWe have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.\nWhat more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.\nAnd as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze\nBack to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-was-raining-in-the-capital": { - "title": "“It Was Raining in the Capital”", - "body": "It was raining in the capital\nAnd for many days and nights\nThe one they called the Aquarian\nHad stayed alone with her delight.\n\nWhat with the winter and its business\nIt had fallen to one side\nAnd she had only recently picked it up\nWhere the other had died.\n\nBetween the pages of the newspaper\nIt smiled like a face.\nNext to the drugstore on the corner\nIt looked to another place.\n\nOr it would just hang around\nLike sullen clouds over the sun.\nBut--this was the point--it was real\nTo her and to everyone.\n\nFor spring had entered the capital\nWalking on gigantic feet.\nThe smell of witch hazel indoors\nChanged to narcissus in the street.\n\nShe thought she had seen all this before:\nBundles of new, fresh flowers,\nAll changing, pressing upward\nTo the distant office towers.\n\nUntil now nothing had been easy,\nHemmed in by all that shit--\nHorseshit, dogshit, birdshit, manshit--\nYes, she remembered having said it,\n\nHaving spoken in that way, thinking\nThere could be no road ahead,\nSobbing into the intractable presence of it\nAs one weeps alone in bed.\n\nIts chamber was narrower than a seed\nYet when the doorbell rang\nIt reduced all that living to air\nAs “kyrie eleison” it sang.\n\nHearing that music he had once known\nBut now forgotten, the man,\nThe one who had waited casually in the dark\nTurned to smile at the door’s span.\n\nHe smiled and shrugged--a lesson\nIn the newspaper no longer\nBut fed by the ink and paper\nInto a sign of something stronger\n\nWho reads the news and takes the bus\nGoing to work each day\nBut who was never born of woman\nNor formed of the earth’s clay.\n\nThen what unholy bridegroom\nDid the Aquarian foretell?\nOr was such lively intelligence\nOnly the breath of hell?\n\nIt scarcely mattered at the moment\nAnd it shall never matter at all\nSince the moment will not be replaced\nBut stand, poised for its fall,\n\nForever. “This is what my learning\nTeaches,” the Aquarian said,\n“To absorb life through the pores\nFor the life around you is dead.”\n\nThe sun came out in the capital\nJust before it set.\nThe lovely death’s head shone in the sky\nAs though these two had never met.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "last-month": { - "title": "“Last Month”", - "body": "No changes of support--only\nPatches of gray, here where sunlight fell.\nThe house seems heavier\nNow that they have gone away.\nIn fact it emptied in record time.\nWhen the flat table used to result\nA match recedes, slowly, into the night.\nThe academy of the future is\nOpening its doors and willing\nThe fruitless sunlight streams into domes,\nThe chairs piled high with books and papers.\n\nThe sedate one is this month’s skittish one\nConfirming the property that,\nA timeless value, has changed hands.\nAnd you could have a new automobile\nPing pong set and garage, but the thief\nStole everything like a miracle.\nIn his book there was a picture of treason only\nAnd in the garden, cries and colors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "late-echo": { - "title": "“Late Echo”", - "body": "Alone with our madness and favorite flower\nWe see that there really is nothing left to write about.\nOr rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things\nIn the same way, repeating the same things over and over\nFor love to continue and be gradually different.\n\nBeehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally\nAnd the color of the day put in\nHundreds of times and varied from summer to winter\nFor it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic\nSaraband and huddle there, alive and resting.\n\nOnly then can the chronic inattention\nOf our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory\nAnd with one eye on those long tan plush shadows\nThat speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge\nOf ourselves, the talking engines of our day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "late-ish": { - "title": "“Late-Ish”", - "body": "The girl in the green ski chasuble\nhasn’t yet graduated from radio school.\nLet’s pay attention.\n\nLooking ahead, why, he waved his mouth along.\nDoesn’t life get difficult in the summer?\nThe divine medicine for it collapsed\nin front of the shortstop,\nwho took off like a battalion.\n\nCrowds of older people who would read this\nhappily, willingly, then walking into night’s embrace,\nthen kiss. _“To turn you out, to turn you out!”_\nSometimes an arm is accused:\nYou could have felt it, the blue shirts,\nphlegm central, four times a night.\nBut what does that get me?\nLight refreshments.\n\nWhen the suburban demonstration kind of shrunk\nyou put your foot out,\nleave it or kiss it\nor even two years ago,\nCharmaine here tells us.\nI think I should stay …\n\nCross-eyed sonofabitch …\nHe liked him, he could tell. A de-happening.\nThe gangster no longer wanted to sleep with him,\nbut what the heck. With time off\nfor actual fuzz collected … All right, boys.\nCheap murders, peach driven … I seen enough of those\nsamples along the way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leave-the-hand-in": { - "title": "“Leave the Hand In”", - "body": "Furthermore, Mr. Tuttle used to have to run in the streets.\nNow, each time friendship happens, they’re fully booked.\nSporting with amaryllis in the shade is all fine and good,\nbut when your sparring partner gets there first\nyou wonder if it was all worth it. “Yes, why do it?”\nI’m on hold. It will take quite a lot for this music\nto grow on me. I meant no harm. I’ve helped him\nfrom getting stuck before. Dumb thing. All my appetites are friendly.\nChildren too are free to go and come as they please.\nI ask you only to choose between us, then shut down this election.\nBut don’t reveal too much of your hand at any given time.\nThen up and pipes the major, leave the hand in,\nor change the vows. The bold, enduring menace of courtship is upon us\nlike the plague, and none of us can say what trouble\nwill be precipitated once it has had its way with us.\nOur home is marshland. After dinner was wraparound.\nYou got a tender little look at it.\n\nOutside, it never did turn golden.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leeward": { - "title": "“Leeward”", - "body": "Up, up it rises,\nthe penumbra,\nfor all to see.\n\nHeaven is open--\nmake no mistake.\nThat row of books\njust slid over by itself,\nand a guy, a tubby guy,\ncame to look at it, sneer,\nsnicker, be off again-only,\nouch! There are other strands\nin that equation, he sees now, not\ntoo late. The green spoilage,\nall other things being equal,\nmay be contained.\n\nOnly wear your shirt right.\nWash it again\nand yet again.\nThe bear is still around\nwhose hide you sold,\nwondering why children fear him.\nIs it too much to ask\nsafe conduct, yes, for him too\nthe travesty of night\nwe all must wear\nfor awhile?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "like-a-sentence": { - "title": "“Like a Sentence”", - "body": "How little we know,\nand when we know it!\n\nIt was prettily said that “No man\nhath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards\nin his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was …\n\nNever mind, dears, the afternoon\nwill fold you up, along with preoccupations\nthat now seem so important, until only a child\nrunning around on a unicycle occupies center stage.\nThen what will you make of walls? And I fear you\nwill have to come up with something,\n\nbe it a terraced gambit above the sea\nor gossip overheard in the marketplace.\nFor you see, it becomes you to be chastened:\nfor the old to envy the young,\nand for youth to fear not getting older,\nwhere the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.\n\nAnd it was said of Gyges that his ring\nattracted those who saw him not,\njust as those who wandered through him were aware\nonly of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,\nwhile lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,\nwhether it was something they could be part of\n_sans_ affront to self-esteem.\nAnd those temple hyenas who had seen enough,\nnostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,\nwere no place you could count on,\nhaving taken a proverbial powder\nas rifle butts received another notch.\nI, meanwhile … I was going to say I had squandered spring\nwhen summer came along and took it from me\nlike a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment\nwhile she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.\nBut here it is winter, and wrong\nto speak of other seasons as though they exist.\nTime has only an agenda\nin the wallet at his back, while we\nwho think we know where we are going unfazed\nend up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know\nby the unexpectedness of ice and stars\nand crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,\na run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease\none or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down\ninto this wagonload of prisoners.\n\nThe meter will be screamingly clear then,\nthe rhythms unbounced, for though we came\nto life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating\neven as an ominous wind puffs out the sails\nof proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,\nonly that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "a-man-of-words": { - "title": "“A Man of Words”", - "body": "His case inspires interest\nBut little sympathy; it is smaller\nThan at first appeared. Does the furst nettle\nMake any difference as what grows\nBecomes a skit? Three sides enclosed,\nThe fourth open to a wash of the weather,\nExits and entrances, gestures theatrically meant\nTo punctuate like doubled-over weeds as\nThe garden fills up with snow?\nAh, but this would have been another, quite other\nEntertainment, not the metallic taste\nIn my mouth as I look away, density black as gunpowder\nIn the angles where the grass writing goes on,\nRose-red in unexpected places like the pressure\nOf fingers on a book suddenly snapped shut.\n\nThose tangled versions of the truth are\nCombed out, the snarls ripped out\nAnd spread around. Behind the mask\nIs still a continental appreciation\nOf what is fine, rarely appears and when it does is already\nDying on the breeze that brought it to the threshold\nOf speech. The story worn out from telling.\nAll diaries are alike, clear and cold, with\nThe outlook for continued cold. They are placed\nHorizontal, parallel to the earth,\nLike the unencumbering dead. Just time to reread this\nAnd the past slips through your fingers, wishing you were there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "many-wagons-ago": { - "title": "“Many Wagons Ago”", - "body": "At furst it was as though you had passed,\nBut then no, I said, he is still here.\nForehead refreshed. A light is kindled. And\nAnother. But no I said\n\nNothing in this wide berth of lights like weeds\nStays to listen. Doubled up, fun is inside,\nThe lair a surface compact with the night.\nIt needs only one intervention,\n\nA stitch, two, three, and then you see\nHow it is all false equation planted with\nEnchanting blue shrubbery on each terrace\nThat night produces, and they are backing up.\n\nHow easily we could spell if we could follow,\nLike thread looped through the eye of a needle,\nThe grooves of light. It resists. But we stay behind, among them,\nThe injured, the adored.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mauve-notebook": { - "title": "“The Mauve Notebook”", - "body": "_“Say it enough times and it’s August.”_\n --Geoffrey G. O’Brien, _Three Years_\n\nOn a set you need bush rebels,\nthat numbing little chair while passing.\nIf we knock ’em out\nseven precincts are going to show up.\nIt looks like you don’t need oil.\nI think it’ll be fine.\nDid she think that might be good,\nor for the man who listens to it,\nnothing to be done or thought,\n(section pending)?\n\nOr for the man who listens to it,\nan abrupt yawn, history or the other.\nHome economics. Dr. Singalong\ncan’t find his way back.\nI don’t know about that, but\nat her lamps do you still see\nthe awkward ceremony, too serious?\nLeave it that way, imperfect start beyond\nwhere I was going.\nPrison outside the perpetual sonata,\nthe only anxiety,\nsince you wonder what they don’t do,\nfrom your red zero heart page\nwaiting to touch your face.\n\nAlthough they know about it and\nit literally doesn’t exist,\nno, stay up and go to sleep,\nunless it falls on the right side of the brain\npositioned for so many forgeries,\nmoon nugget …\n\nI don’t cut ’em any slack.\nAssault on a clean front,\nthat’s a lot to be turning into.\n\nThese residents, they start throwing ’em early.\nContinue to open your door to mud!\n\nTake the noon balloon to Rangoon,\ngutta percha academy,\nto the place of ice cream,\n\nbecause, really, what difference does it make?\nWhen it was time you went home.\nTears and flowers,\n\nsee how dirty your hands are.\nWe had a lovely dime.\nSoon it will be seven I ask you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "mean-particles": { - "title": "“Mean Particles”", - "body": "Sometimes something like a second\nwashes the base of this street.\nThe father and his two assistants\nare given permission to go.\nOne of them, a woman, asks, “Why\ndid we come here in the first place,\nto this citadel of dampness?”\n\nSome days are worse than others,\neven if we can’t believe in them.\nBut that was never a concern of mine,\nreasoned the patient.\n\nSing, scroll, or never be blasted by us\ninto marmoreal meaning, or the fist for it.\nKudos to the prince who journeyed here\nto negotiate our release, if you can believe it.\n\nYou’re right. The ballads are retreating\nback into the atmosphere.\nThey won’t be coming round again.\nMake your peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meaningful-love": { - "title": "“Meaningful Love”", - "body": "What the bad news was\nbecame apparent too late\nfor us to do anything good about it.\n\nI was offered no urgent dreaming,\ndidn’t need a name or anything.\nEverything was taken care of.\n\nIn the medium-size city of my awareness\nvoles are building colossi.\nThe blue room is over there.\n\nHe put out no feelers.\nThe day was all as one to him.\nSome days he never leaves his room\nand those are the best days,\nby far.\n\nThere were morose gardens farther down the slope,\nanthills that looked like they belonged there.\nThe sausages were undercooked,\nthe wine too cold, the bread molten.\nWho said to bring sweaters?\nThe climate’s not that dependable.\n\nThe Atlantic crawled slowly to the left\npinning a message on the unbound golden hair of sleeping maidens,\na ruse for next time,\n\nwhere fire and water are rampant in the streets,\nthe gate closed--no visitors today\nor any evident heartbeat.\n\nI got rid of the book of fairy tales,\npawned my old car, bought a ticket to the funhouse,\nfound myself back here at six o’clock,\npondering “possible side effects.”\n\nThere was no harm in loving then,\nno certain good either. But love was loving servants\nor bosses. No straight road issuing from it.\nLeaves around the door are penciled losses.\nTwenty years to fix it.\nAsters bloom one way or another.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "morning-jitters": { - "title": "“Morning Jitters”", - "body": "And the storm re-established itself\nAs a hole in the sheet of time\nAnd of the weariness of the world,\nAnd all the old work that remains to be done on its surface.\nCame morning and the husband was back on the shore\nTo ask another favor of the fish,\nLeviathan now, patience wearing thin. Whose answer\nBubbled out of the waves’ crenellations:\n\n_“Too late! Yet if you analyze\nThe abstract good fortune that has brought you\nTo this floor, you must also unpluck the bees\nImmured in the hive of your mind and bring the nuisance\nAnd the glory into sharper focus. Why,\nOthers too will have implored before forgetting\nTo remove a stick of night from the scrub-forest\nThat keeps us wondering about ourselves\nUntil luck or nepotism has run its course! Only I say,\nYour uniqueness isn’t that unique\nAnd doors must close in the shaved head\nBefore they can spring ajar. Take this.\nIts promise equals power.”_ To be shaken thus\nVehemently back into one’s trance doesn’t promise\nAny petitioner much, even the servile ones. But night in its singleness\nOf motive rewards all equally for what cannot\nAppear disinterested survival tactics from the vantage\nPoint of some rival planet. Things go on being the same,\nAs darkness and ships ruffle the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mottled-tuesday": { - "title": "“Mottled Tuesday”", - "body": "Something was about to go laughably wrong,\nwhether directly at home or here,\non this random shoal pleading with its eyes\ntill it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.\nI’ll add one more scoop\nto the pile of retail.\n\nHey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you\nto, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,\nmy white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.\nWe’re leaving again of our own volition\nfor bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,\nmaybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us\nfor a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and\nforget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this\nfertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.\nHere’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.\nChime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.\nKeep your units pliable and folded,\nthe recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,\nawash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,\nOK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "tuesday" - } - } - }, - "my-erotic-double": { - "title": "“My Erotic Double”", - "body": "He says he doesn’t feel like working today.\nIt’s just as well. Here in the shade\nBehind the house, protected from street noises,\nOne can go over all kinds of old feeling,\nThrow some away, keep others.\n The wordplay\nBetween us gets very intense when there are\nFewer feelings around to confuse things.\nAnother go-round? No, but the last things\nYou always find to say are charming, and rescue me\nBefore the night does. We are afloat\nOn our dreams as on a barge made of ice,\nShot through with questions and fissures of starlight\nThat keep us awake, thinking about the dreams\nAs they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.\n\nI said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.\nThank you. You are a very pleasant person.\nThank you. You are too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-higher": { - "title": "“The New Higher”", - "body": "You meant more than life to me. I lived through\nyou not knowing, not knowing I was living.\nI learned that you called for me. I came to where\nyou were living, up a stair. There was no one there.\nNo one to appreciate me. The legality of it\nupset a chair. Many times to celebrate\nwe were called together and where\nwe had been there was nothing there,\nnothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,\nleaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,\nin an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.\n\nBlithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly\nat the tag on the overcoat near the window where\nthe outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.\nNow it was time to stumble anew,\nblacking out when time came in the window.\nThere was not much of it left.\nI laughed and put my hands shyly\nacross your eyes. Can you see now?\nYes I can see I am only in the where\nwhere the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.\nGo presently you said. Go from my window.\nI am in love with your window I cannot undermine\nit, I said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-only-but-also": { - "title": "“Not only / but Also”", - "body": "Having transferred the one to the other\nAnd living on the plain of insistent self-knowledge\nJust outside the great city, I see many\nWho come and go, and being myself involved in distant places\n\nAsk how they adjust to\nThe light that rains on the traveller’s back\nAnd pushes out before him. It is always ‘the journey’;\nAnd we are never sure if these are preparations\nOr a welcome back to the old circle of stone posts\n\nThat was there before the first invention\nAnd now seems a place of vines and muted shimmers\nAnd sighing at noon\nAs opposed to\n\nThe terrain of stars, the robe\nOf only that journey. You adjusted to all that\nOver a long period of years. When we next set out\nI had spent years in your company\nAnd was now turning back, half amused, half afraid,\nHaving in any case left something important back home\nWhich I could not continue without,\nAn invention so simple I could never figure out\nHow they spent so many ages without discovering it.\nI would have found it, altered it\nTo be my shape, probably in my own lifetime,\nIn a decade, in just a few years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-one-thing-that-can-save-america": { - "title": "“The One Thing that Can Save America”", - "body": "Is anything central?\nOrchards flung out on the land,\nUrban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?\nAre place names central?\nElm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?\nAs they concur with a rush at eye level\nBeating themselves into eyes which have had enough\nThank you, no more thank you.\nAnd they come on like scenery mingled with darkness\nThe damp plains, overgrown suburbs,\nPlaces of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.\n\nThese are connected to my version of America\nBut the juice is elsewhere.\nThis morning as I walked out of your room\nAfter breakfast crosshatched with\nBackward and forward glances, backward into light,\nForward into unfamiliar light,\nWas it our doing, and was it\nThe material, the lumber of life, or of lives\nWe were measuring, counting?\nA mood soon to be forgotten\nIn crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow\nIn this morning that has seized us again?\n\nI know that I braid too much on my own\nSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.\nThey are private and always will be.\nWhere then are the private turns of event\nDestined to bloom later like golden chimes\nReleased over a city from a highest tower?\nThe quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,\nAnd you know instantly what I mean?\nWhat remote orchard reached by winding roads\nHides them? Where are these roots?\n\nIt is the lumps and trials\nThat tell us whether we shall be known\nAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.\nAll the rest is waiting\nFor a letter that never arrives,\nDay after day, the exasperation\nUntil finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,\nThe two envelope halves lying on a plate.\nThe message was wise, and seemingly\nDictated a long time ago.\nIts truth is timeless, but its time has still\nNot arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited\nSteps that can be taken against danger\nNow and in the future, in cool yards,\nIn quiet small houses in the country,\nOur country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ostensibly": { - "title": "“Ostensibly”", - "body": "One might like to rest or read.\nTake walks, celebrate the kitchen table,\nPat the dog absent-mindedly, meanwhile\nThinking gloomy thoughts--so many separate\nWays of doing, one is uncertain\nWhat the future is going to do\nAbout this. Will it reveal itself again,\nOr only in the artificial calm\nOf one person’s resolve to do better\nYet strike a harder bargain,\nNext time?\n\nGardeners cannot make the world\nNor witches undo it, yet\nThe mad doctor is secure\nIn his thick-walled laboratory,\nBehind evergreen borders black now\nAgainst the snow, precise as stocking seams\nPulled straight again. There is never\nAny news from that side.\n\nA rigidity that may well be permanent\nSeems to have taken over. The pendulum\nIs stilled; the rush\nOf season into season ostensibly incomplete.\nA perverse order has been laid\nThere at the joint where the year branches\nInto artifice one way, into a votive\nLassitude the other way, but that is stalled:\nAn old discolored snapshot\nThat soon fades away.\n\nAnd so there is no spectator\nAnd no agent to cry Enough,\nThat the battle chime is stilled,\nThe defeated memory gracious as flowers\nAnd therefore also permanent in its way--\nI mean they endure, are always around,\nAnd even when they are not, their names are,\nA fortified dose of the solid,\nLivable adventure.\n\nAnd from growing dim, the coals\nFall alight. There are two ways to be.\nYou must try getting up from the table\nAnd sitting down relaxed in another country\nWearing red suspenders\nToward one’s own space and time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "our-youth": { - "title": "“Our Youth”", - "body": "of bricks … Who built it? Like some crazy balloon\nWhen love leans on us\nIts nights … The velvety pavement sticks to our feet.\nThe dead puppies turn us back on love.\n\nWhere we are. Sometimes\nThe brick arches led to a room like a bubble, that broke when you entered it\nAnd sometimes to a fallen leaf.\nWe got crazy with emotion, showing how much we knew.\n\nThe Arabs took us. We knew\nThe dead horses. We were discovering coffee,\nHow it is to be drunk hot, with bare feet\nIn Canada. And the immortal music of Chopin\n\nWhich we had been discovering for several months\nSince we were fourteen years old. And coffee grounds,\nAnd the wonder of hands, and the wonder of the day\nWhen the child discovers her first dead hand.\n\nDo you know it? Hasn’t she\nObserved you too? Haven’t you been observed to her?\nMy, haven’t the fowers been? Is the evil\nIn’t? What window? What did you say there?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-outing": { - "title": "“An Outing”", - "body": "“These things … that you are going to have--\nAre you paid specially for them?”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“And when it is over, do you insist,\nDo you insist that the visitor leave the room?”\n“My activity is as random as the wind.\nWhy should I insist? The visitor is free to go,\nOr to stay, as he chooses.”\n\nAre you folks just going out for a walk\nAnd if you are would you check the time\nOn your way back? It’s too late to do anything today.\nI would just take a pratfall if I stepped outside that door.\n\n“I don’t know whether I should apply or nothing.\nI think you shd make yr decision.”\n\nSo it was by chance we found ourselves\nGumshod on the pebbled path, Denmark O Denmark\nFlat, rounded eyes, Denmark Denmark\nGray parchment landscape Denmark O Denmark\nUnmanageable sky, Denmark that cannot shift\nThe faucet drips, the minutes apply, Denmark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-painter": { - "title": "“The Painter”", - "body": "Sitting between the sea and the buildings\nHe enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.\nBut just as children imagine a prayer\nIs merely silence, he expected his subject\nTo rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,\nPlaster its own portrait on the canvas.\n\nSo there was never any paint on his canvas\nUntil the people who lived in the buildings\nPut him to work: “Try using the brush\nAs a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,\nSomething less angry and large, and more subject\nTo a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”\n\nHow could he explain to them his prayer\nThat nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?\nHe chose his wife for a new subject,\nMaking her vast, like ruined buildings,\nAs if, forgetting itself, the portrait\nHad expressed itself without a brush.\n\nSlightly encouraged, he dipped his brush\nIn the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:\n“My soul, when I paint this next portrait\nLet it be you who wrecks the canvas.”\nThe news spread like wildfire through the buildings:\nHe had gone back to the sea for his subject.\n\nImagine a painter crucified by his subject!\nToo exhausted even to lift his brush,\nHe provoked some artists leaning from the buildings\nTo malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer\nNow, of putting ourselves on canvas,\nOr getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”\n\nOthers declared it a self-portrait.\nFinally all indications of a subject\nBegan to fade, leaving the canvas\nPerfectly white. He put down the brush.\nAt once a howl, that was also a prayer,\nArose from the overcrowded buildings.\n\nThey tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;\nAnd the sea devoured the canvas and the brush\nAs though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "paradoxes-and-oxymorons": { - "title": "“Paradoxes and Oxymorons”", - "body": "This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.\nLook at it talking to you. You look out a window\nOr pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.\nYou miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.\n\nThe poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.\nWhat’s a plain level? It is that and other things,\nBringing a system of them into play. Play?\nWell, actually, yes, but I consider play to be\n\nA deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,\nAs in the division of grace these long August days\nWithout proof. Open-ended. And before you know\nIt gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.\n\nIt has been played once more. I think you exist only\nTo tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there\nOr have adopted a different attitude. And the poem\nHas set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "people-behaving-badly-a-concern": { - "title": "“People Behaving Badly a Concern”", - "body": "Aggressive panhandling, public urination, verbal threats,\npublic nudity and violation of the open container law\nfollowed us down the days, for why\nare we here much longer,\nor even this long? I ask you\nto be civil and not interrupt night’s business.\n\nIt was fun getting used to you,\nwho couldn’t have been more nicer.\nThis was as modern as it had ever been.\nThey were influenced by him: some dirty magazine\non the air tonight. (Amid the chaos, reports of survivors.)\n\nDidn’t the flowers’ restoration cat fugue keep spilling,\nand like that? It wouldn’t be the first time, either.\nThe pro-taffeta get up and laugh,\ninvestigate or communicate. The night you were\ngoing to stay up late, others will kiss,\nand he talks about you, and I don’t know what.\nCome in, anyway,\nand don’t lack for tales of the Assertion.\n\nWe’re talking civilian unrest.\nYes, well, maybe you should take one.\n\n(Do not bite or chew.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pied-piper": { - "title": "“The Pied Piper”", - "body": "Under the day’s crust a half-eaten child\nAnd further sores which eyesight shall reveal\nAnd they live. But what of dark elders\nWhose touch at nightfall must now be\nTo keep their promise? Misery\nStarches the host’s one bed, his hand\nFalls like an axe on her curls:\n“Come in, come in! Better that the winter\nBlaze unseen, than we two sleep apart!”\n\nWho in their old age will often part\nFrom single sleep at the murmur\nOf acerb revels under the hill;\nWhose children couple as the earth crumbles,\nIn vanity forever going down\nA sunlit road, for his love was strongest\nWho never loved them at all, and his stiff tune\nMost civil, laughing not to return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-poem-of-unrest": { - "title": "“A Poem of Unrest”", - "body": "Men duly understand the river of life,\nmisconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow\ndark and denser, always farther away.\n\nAnd of course that remote denseness suits\nus, as lambs and clover might have\nif things had been built to order differently.\n\nBut since I don’t understand myself, only segments\nof myself that misunderstand each other, there’s no\nreason for you to want to, no way you could\n\neven if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?\nWe must look at it that way, along those lines\nso the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "proximity": { - "title": "“Proximity”", - "body": "It was great to see you the other day\nat the carnival. My enchiladas were delicious,\n\nand I hope that yours were too.\nI wanted to fulfill your dream of me\n\nin some suitable way. Giving away my new gloves,\nfor instance, or putting a box around all that’s wrong with us.\n\nBut these gutta percha lamps do not whisper on our behalf.\nNow sometimes in the evenings, I am lonely\n\nwith dread. A rambunctious wind fills the pine\nat my doorstep, the woodbine is enchanted,\n\nand I must be off before the clock strikes\nwhatever hour it is intent on.\n\nDo not leave me in this wilderness!\nOr, if you do, pay me to stay behind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pyrography": { - "title": "“Pyrography”", - "body": "Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping\nWind balks at its shadow. The carriages\nAre drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak.\nThis is America calling:\nThe mirroring of state to state,\nOf voice to voice on the wires,\nThe force of colloquial greetings like golden\nPollen sinking on the afternoon breeze.\nIn service stairs the sweet corruption thrives;\nThe page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio.\n\nIf this is the way it is let’s leave,\nThey agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins,\nGradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs\nEnfolding the darkness of cities are remembered\nOnly as a recurring tic. And midway\nWe meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its\nBeing able to stop us in the headlong night\nToward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas\nThe houses doze and seem to wonder why through the\nPacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull.\nWhy be hanging on here? Like kites, circling,\nSlipping on a ramp of air, but always circling?\n\nBut the variable cloudiness is pouring it on,\nFlooding back to you like the meaning of a joke.\nThe land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it\nPartly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves:\nAn arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier\nFor laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed\nAnd only partially designed. How are we to inhabit\nThis space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,\nAs in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are,\nIn lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet\nUnrealized projects, and a strict sense\nOf time running out, of evening presenting\nThe tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit\nRather too easily into it, become transparent,\nAlmost ghosts. One day\nThe birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed\nThe color, the density of the surroundings,\nThe leaves are alive, and too heavy with life.\n\nA long period of adjustment followed.\nIn the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it\nBut were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman\nDisappeared down the block and the postman shouted\nHis daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it\nBut all the fathers returning home\nOn streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:\nThe climate was still floral and all the wallpaper\nIn a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.\nOne day we thought of painted furniture, of how\nIt just slightly changes everything in the room\nAnd in the yard outside, and how, if we were going\nTo be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,\nIt would be necessary to model all these unimportant details\nSo as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative\nWould have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets\nOut in the middle west toward the end of summer,\nThe look of wanting to back out before the argument\nHas been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances\nSo that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business\nIn spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?\nThat way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps\nOf the back country will get plugged into the circuit\nAnd not just the major events but the whole incredible\nMass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,\nChanneling itself into history, will unroll\nAs carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,\nAnd the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,\nOnly be hard, spare, ironical: something one can\nTip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.\n\nThe parade is turning into our street.\nMy stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic\nFeatures of this instant belong here. The land\nIs pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns\nTo an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.\nThe hunch is it will always be this way,\nThe look, the way things first scared you\nIn the night light, and later turned out to be,\nYet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity\nTo what you and they wanted to become:\nNo sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling\nOut toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond\nTo these bare fields, built at today’s expense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-recent-past": { - "title": "“The Recent Past”", - "body": "Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.\nAs today the sky 0 degrees above zero with lines falling\nThe way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear\nThe oddest device can’t be usual. And that is where\nThe pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars\nThere is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee\nBetween the blinding rain that interviews.\n\nYou were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you\nOpening a picture book the pictures were all of grass\nSlowly the book was on fire, you the reader\nSitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed\nHow it was a rhyme for “brick” or “redder.”\nThe next chapter told all about a brook.\nYou were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave\nArrived with sinking ships that spelled out “Aladdin”.\nI thought about the Arab boy in his cave\nBut the thoughts came faster than advice\nIf you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space\nThe print could rhyme with “fallen star.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "riddle-me": { - "title": "“Riddle Me”", - "body": "Rainy days are best,\nThere is some permanence in the angle\nThat things make with the ground;\nIn not taking off after apologies.\nThe speedometer’s at sundown.\n\nEven as they spoke the sun was beginning to disappear behind a cloud.\nAll right so it’s better to have vague outlines\nBut wrapped, tightly, around one’s mood\nOf something like vengeful joy. And in the wood\nIt’s all the same too.\n\nI think I liked you better when I seldom knew you.\nBut lovers are like hermits or cats: they\nDon’t know when to come in, to stop\nBreaking off twigs for dinner.\nIn the little station I waited for you\n\nAnd shall, what with all the interest\nI bear toward plans of yours and the future\nOf stars it makes me thirsty\nJust to go down on my knees looking\nIn the sawdust for joy.\n\nJune and the nippers will scarcely look our way.\nAnd be bold then it’s then\nThis cloud imagines us and all that our story\nWas ever going to be, and we catch up\nTo ourselves, but they are the selves of others.\n\nAnd with it all the city starts to live\nAs a place where one can believe in moving\nTo a particular name and be there, and then\nIt’s more action falling back refreshed into death.\nWe can survive the storms, wearing us\n\nLike rainbow hats, afraid to retrace steps\nTo the past that was only recently ours,\nAfraid of finding a party there.\nO in all your life were you ever teased\nLike this, and it became your mind?\n\nWhere still some saunter on the bank in mixed\nPlum shade and weary sun, resigned\nTo the installations on the opposite bank, we mix\nBreathless greetings and tears and lately taste\nThe precious supplies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "ritual-ii": { - "title": "“Ritual Ii”", - "body": "When the maids returned with the oil they’d bought\nfrom some place that was officially closed, it was too late.\nthe door was locked, the bridegroom wouldn’t let them in.\nHe said he didn’t know them. And it was true: He didn’t.\nIt wasn’t just their falling asleep and forgetting about the oil.\nThey had officially changed. They were different persons,\nexcluded just for wanting to be part of the crisis.\n\nNot having you desire the house\nthe days of these last weeks\nhas swept into disruptive cinema.\nThey came from all over to view, some stayed\nin droves. Envy, of course.\nMy fingers never had to deal with this puzzle\nbefore. It was like taking off too many rings.\nIn the thoroughly rinsed sky a zeppelin passed, smiling,\nknowing it would all be on the evening news.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rivers-and-mountains": { - "title": "“Rivers and Mountains”", - "body": "On the secret map the assassins\nCloistered, the Moon River was marked\nNear the eighteen peaks and the city\nOf humiliation and defeat--wan ending\nOf the trail among dry, papery leaves\nGray-brown quills like thoughts\nIn the melodious but vast mass of today’s\nWriting through fields and swamps\nMarked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds.\nCertainly squirrels lived in the woods\nBut devastation and dull sleep still\nHung over the land, quelled\nThe rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons\nSinging on marble factory walls\nDeaf consolation of minor tunes that pack\nThe air with heavy invisible rods\nPent in some sand valley from\nWhich only quiet walking ever instructs.\nThe bird flew over and\nSat--there was nothing else to do.\nDo not mistake its silence for pride or strength\nOr the waterfall for a harbor\nFull of light boats that is there\nPerforming for thousands of people\nIn clothes some with places to go\nOr games. Sometimes over the pillar\nOf square stones its impact\nMakes a light print.\nSo going around cities\nTo get to other places you found\nIt all on paper but the land\nWas made of paper processed\nTo look like ferns, mud or other\nWhose sea unrolled its magic\nDistances and then rolled them up\nIts secret was only a pocket\nAfter all but some corners are darker\nThan these moonless nights spent as on a raft\nIn the seclusion of a melody heard\nAs though through trees\nAnd you can never ignite their touch\nLong but there were homes\nFlung far out near the asperities\nOf a sharp, rocky pinnacle\nAnd other collective places\nShadows of vineyards whose wine\nTasted of the forest floor\nFisheries and oyster beds\nTides under the pole\nSeminaries of instruction, public\nPlaces for electric light\nAnd the major tax assessment area\nWrinkled on the plan\nOf election to public office\nSixty-two years old bath and breakfast\nThe formal traffic, shadows\nTo make it not worth joining\nAfter the ox had pulled away the cart.\n\nYour plan was to separate the enemy into two groups\nWith the razor-edged mountains between.\nIt worked well on paper\nBut their camp had grown\nTo be the mountains and the map\nCarefully peeled away and not torn\nWas the light, a tender but tough bark\nOn everything. Fortunately the war was solved\nIn another way by isolating the two sections\nOf the enemy’s navy so that the mainland\nWarded away the big floating ships.\nLight bounced off the ends\nOf the small gray waves to tell\nThem in the observatory\nAbout the great drama that was being won\nTo turn off the machinery\nAnd quietly move among the rustic landscape\nScooping snow off the mountains rinsing\nThe coarser ones that love had\nSlowly risen in the night to overflow\nWetting pillow and petal\nDetermined to place the letter\nOn the unassassinated president’s desk\nSo that a stamp could reproduce all this\nIn detail, down to the last autumn leaf\nAnd the affliction of June ride\nSlowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "roof-artist": { - "title": "“Roof Artist”", - "body": "Crash baby, the new recruits have arrived.\nAlong one road traipses the always stubborn and solitary\nman; he has seen the truth and turned away.\nOtherwise, many more would have seen it and crowed.\nThis is the fashion: frugal and far-off.\n\nI am always this diurnal.\nI forget what I was going to say.\nNothing is best in times as sad as these.\n\nI stick to the motivation that begot us\nand thus am willing to talk.\nBright beaches looped away\ninto playgrounds and the dark.\nComfort me with excess hilarity.\nMoss grows in the lamplight,\nan aphorism hems me in.\n\nI would be glad to die for the old folks\nbut they don’t seem to want it.\nFine, this will be for our later days\nno sorehead will sully. Going back a bit\n\nit looks as though fish inhabit that aquarium.\nThe afternoon density has closed again.\nChildren in patches return from school;\nthe candy striped school bus stops at the intersection.\nPeople are tactful and talkative.\nThe car sees what is coming,\n\nwhat a great burden has been lifted from its head.\nSome wish it. Many are calm.\nWe feed the birds against an office rainy afternoon.\nAll the phones are tapped.\nThe chord desires resolution.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "scheherazade": { - "title": "“Scheherazade”", - "body": "Unsupported by reason’s enigma\nWater collects in squared stone catch basins.\nThe land is dry. Under it moves\nThe water. Fish live in the wells. The leaves,\nA concerned green, are scrawled on the light. Bad\nBindweed and rank ragweed somehow forget to flourish here.\nAn inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal\nOf each new occurrence. It can be itself now.\nDay is almost reluctant to decline\nAnd slowing down opens out new avenues\nThat don’t infringe on space but are living here with us.\nOther dreams came and left while the bank\nOf colored verbs and adjectives was shrinking from the light\nTo nurse in shade their want of a method\nBut most of all she loved the particles\nThat transform objects of the same category\nInto particular ones, each distinct\nWithin and apart from its own class.\nIn all this springing up was no hint\nOf a tide, only a pleasant wavering of the air\nIn which all things seemed present, whether\nJust past or soon to come. It was all invitation.\nSo much the flowers outlined along the night\nAlleys when few were visible, yet\nTheir story sounded louder than the hum\nOf bug and stick noises that brought up the rear\nTrundling it along into a new fact of day.\nThese were meant to be read as any\nSalutation before getting down to business,\nBut they stuck to their guns, and so much\nWas their obstinacy in keeping with the rest\n(Like long flashes of white birds that refuse to die\nWhen day does) that none knew the warp\nWhich presented this major movement as a firm\nDigression, a plain that slowly becomes a mountain.\n\nSo each found himself caught in a net\nAs a fashion, and all efforts to wriggle free\nInvolved him further, inexorably, since all\nExisted there to be told, shot through\nFrom border to border. Here were stones\nThat read as patches of sunlight: there was the story\nOf the grandparents, of the vigorous young champion\n(The lines once given to another, now\nRestored to the new speaker), dinners and assemblies,\nThe light in the old home, the secret way\nThe rooms fed into each other, but all\nWas wariness of time watching itself\nFor nothing in the complex story grew outside;\nThe greatness in the moment of telling stayed unresolved\nUntil its wealth of incident, pain mixed with pleasure,\nFaded in the precise moment of bursting\nInto bloom, its growth a static lament.\n\nSome stories survived the dynasty of the builders\nBut their echo was itself locked in, became\nAnticipation that was only memory after all,\nFor the possibilities are limited. It is seen\nAt the end that the kind and good are rewarded,\nThat the unjust one is doomed to burn forever\nAround his error, sadder and wiser anyway.\nBetween these extremes the other muddle through\nLike us, uncertain but wearing artlessly\nTheir function of minor characters who must\nBe kept in mind. It is we who make this\nJungle and call it space, naming each root,\nEach serpent, for the sound of the name\nAs it clinks dully against our pleasure,\nIndifference that is pleasure. And what would they be\nWithout an audience to restrict the innumerable\nPasses and swipes, restored to good humor at it issues\nInto the impervious evening air? So in some way\nAlthough the arithmetic is incorrect\nThe balance is restored because it\nBalances, knowing it prevails,\nAnd the man who made the same mistake twice is exonerated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-short-answer": { - "title": "“The Short Answer”", - "body": "I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time.\nWe hold on to these old ways, are troubled\nsometimes and then the geyser goes away,\ntime gutted. In and of itself there is\nno great roar, force pitted against force that\nmakes up in time what it loses in speed.\nThe waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so\ncomes back to greet us at the beginning.\nHow was your trip? Oh I didn’t last\nyou see, folded over like the margin\nof a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and\nwhat have we come to? A paper-thin past,\njust so, and ’tis pity. We regurgitate\nold anthems and what has come to pass, and why\ndwell on these. Why make things more difficult\nthan they already are? Because if it’s boring\nin a different way, that’ll be interesting too.\nThat’s what I say.\n\nThat rascal, he jumped over the fence.\nI’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from\nthe one who said he’d be back once it was over,\nwho eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly\npromising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out\nand it’s raining again. Just like a day from\nthe compendium. I’ll vouch for you,\nand we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen,\nthe horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher\nshook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools\nat the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far.\nWe’d have to come back in a day or so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sleepers-awake": { - "title": "“Sleepers Awake”", - "body": "Cervantes was asleep when he wrote _Don Quixote_.\nJoyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of _Ulysses_.\nHomer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the _Iliad_; he was awake however when he wrote the _Odyssey_.\nProust snored his way through _The Captive_, as have legions of his readers after him.\nMelville was asleep at the wheel for much of _Moby-Dick_.\nFitzgerald slept through _Tender Is the Night_, which is perhaps not so surprising,\nbut the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of _The Magic Mountain_ is quite extraordinary--that he wrote it, even more so.\nKafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.\nNo one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits--my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.\nLew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in _Ben-Hur_.\nEmily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.\nWhen she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.\nGood old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.\nMaugham snored on the Riviera.\nAgatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches--artistic, for the most part.\nI sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.\n\nI have other things to say, but shall not detain you much.\nNever go out in a boat with an author--they cannot tell when they are over water.\nBirds make poor role models.\nA philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it.\nSlaves make good servants.\nBrushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance.\nStore clean rags in old pillow cases.\nFeed a dog only when he barks.\nFlush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink.\nBeware of anonymous letters--you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "snow-fence": { - "title": "“Snow Fence”", - "body": "Dieting aids posture,\nas reading helps thought.\nThey may be forced\ninto another shape, and the world\naround us becomes black\nwith notions of the ground.\n\nA snow fence imposes that sleep\nAll along it snow has chosen different shapes\nof busyness. It has been prevented\nfrom staying where it wanted to.\nBlue sky will pay for this\nmusic from an old Victrola\nsinging about a lover and his henchman\nand the woman hiding in a barrel\nunder the bridge.\n\nIn the west it all turns to meat.\nA few are grateful, more are bored.\nWe could have lunch by that lake,\ndrink beer from a nearby farm.\nAnd the actors walked with me\nto those calms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "soonest-mended": { - "title": "“Soonest Mended”", - "body": "Barely tolerated, living on the margin\nIn our technological society, we were always having to be rescued\nOn the brink of destruction, like heroines in _Orlando Furioso_\nBefore it was time to start all over again.\nThere would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,\nAnd Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering\nThe colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting\nThe whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.\nAnd then there always came a time when\nHappy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile\nCame plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,\nOnly by that time we were in another chapter and confused\nAbout how to receive this latest piece of information.\n_Was_ it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out\nFor someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind\nWith room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),\nOur daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?\nTo reduce all this to a small variant,\nTo step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau--\nThis was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.\nAlas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,\nA moment and it is gone. And no longer\nMay we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.\nOur star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.\nNow there is no question even of that, but only\nOf holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,\nWith an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across\nThe upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away\nAnd cannot quite see, or a wound will flash\nAgainst the sweet faces of the others, something like:\nThis is what you wanted to hear, so why\nDid you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers\nIt is true, but underneath the talk lies\nThe moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose\nMeaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.\n\nThese then were some hazards of the course,\nYet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else\nIt was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,\nThe clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.\n_They_ were the players, and we who had struggled at the game\nWere merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes\nAnd moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.\nNight after night this message returns, repeated\nIn the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,\nYet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,\nThe being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,\nNot ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes\nTo be without, alone and desperate.\nBut the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting\nRaised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,\nSolid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,\nBut like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression\nNot too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day\nWhen it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering\nLike this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning\nIs a delusion, and I agreed, adding that\nTomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,\nThat the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint\nNone of us ever graduates from college,\nFor time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up\nIs the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.\nAnd you see, both of us were right, though nothing\nHas somehow come to nothing; the avatars\nOf our conforming to the rules and living\nAround the home have made--well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,\nBrushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept\nThe charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,\nFor this is action, this not being sure, this careless\nPreparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,\nMaking ready to forget, and always coming back\nTo the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sortes-vergilianae": { - "title": "“Sortes Vergilianae”", - "body": "You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know.\nPerhaps something you read in the newspaper influenced you and that was very frequently.\nThey have left you to think along these lines and you have gone your own way because you guessed that\nUnder their hiding was the secret, casual as breath, betrayed for the asking.\nThen the sky opened up, revealing much more than any of you were intended to know.\nIt is a strange thing how fast the growth is, almost as fast as the light from polar regions\nReflected off the arctic ice-cap in summer. When you know where it is heading\nYou have to follow it, though at a sadly reduced rate of speed,\nHence folly and idleness, raging at the confines of some miserable sunlit alley or court.\nIt is the nature of these people to embrace each other, they know no other kind but themselves.\nThings pass quickly out of sight and the best is to be forgotten quickly\nFor it is wretchedness that endures, shedding its cancerous light on all it approaches:\nWords spoken in the heat of passion, that might have been retracted in good time,\nAll good intentions, all that was arguable. These are stilled now, as the embrace in the hollow of its Aux\nAnd can never be revived except as perverse notations on an indisputable state of things,\nAs conduct in the past, vanished from the reckoning long before it was time.\nLately you’ve found the dull fevers still inflict their round, only they are unassimilable\nNow that newness or importance has worn away. It is with us like day and night,\nThe surge upward through the grade school positioning and bursting into soft gray blooms\nLike vacuum-cleaner sweepings, the opulent fuzz of our cage, or like an excited insect\nIn nervous scrimmage for the head, etching its none-too-complex ordinances into the matter of the day.\nPresently all will go off satisfied, leaving the millpond bare, a site for new picnics,\nAs they came, naked, to explore all the possible grounds on which exchanges could be set up.\nIt is “No Fishing” in modest capital letters, and getting out from under the major weight of the thing\nAs it was being indoctrinated and dropped, heavy as a branch with apples,\nAnd as it started to sigh, just before tumbling into your lap, chagrined and satisfied at the same time,\nKnowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,\nSatisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts\nWhich is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.\nStrange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving\nThat you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,\nBeing one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.\nThere was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice\nOf all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature\nWho looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile\nSupported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later\nAnd by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting\nFor the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,\nSuch dramas sleeping below the surface of the every-day machinery; besides\nQuality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?\nSo the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar\nBut meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,\nYou know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.\nBest perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.\nSome days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:\nThe music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.\nThis is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve\nOf the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew\nFrom planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,\nAnd one who marched along with, “made common cause,”\nyet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,\nOnly long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "strange-things-happen-at-night": { - "title": "“Strange Things Happen at Night”", - "body": "Without thinking too much about it,\nprepare to go out into the city of your dreams.\nNow, look up. At first they cannot see you.\nLater, the adjustment will be made.\nYour boyfriend sips bark tea.\n\nThe number should’ve turned up by now.\nPerhaps the driving rain impedes it,\nthe recession. In any case there are two too many of us here.\nWe must double up, or die.\n\nAnd that might be a practical if remote solution.\nIt’s not every day you get to bicycle past the ribbons\nof people, watch the grand hotels\nfor some event thought imminent--not lost.\n\nIf ever I was going to turn up your volume--\nbut this isn’t about living, is it?\nOr is it? I mean, many suppers in the seven modes\nor grades, as many as can be made to last\nonce the bosses and their beagles have passed through.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "street-musicians": { - "title": "“Street Musicians”", - "body": "One died, and the soul was wrenched out\nOf the other in life, who, walking the streets\nWrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on\nThe same corners, volumetrics, shadows\nUnder trees. Farther than anyone was ever\nCalled, through increasingly suburban airs\nAnd ways, with autumn falling over everything:\nThe plush leaves the chattels in barrels\nOf an obscure family being evicted\nInto the way it was, and is. The other beached\nGlimpses of what the other was up to:\nRevelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.\n\nSo I cradle this average violin that knows\nOnly forgotten showtunes, but argues\nThe possibility of free declamation anchored\nTo a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself\nIn November, with the spaces among the days\nMore literal, the meat more visible on the bone.\nOur question of a place of origin hangs\nLike smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,\nIn coves with the water always seeping up, and left\nOur trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared\nOn the landscape, to make of us what we could.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-sun": { - "title": "“The Sun”", - "body": "The watermark said it was alone with us,\n“To do your keeping and comparing.” But there were bushes\nOn the horizon shaped like hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds.\nThey were considered\nTo belong to a second class, to which lower standards\nWere applied, as called for in the original rule,\nAnd these standards were now bent inward to become\nThe invariable law, to which exceptions\nWere sometimes apposite, and they liked the new clime,\n\nSo bracing here on the indigo slopes\nTo which families of fathers and daughters have come\nSummer after summer, decade after decade, and it never stops\nBeing refreshing. It is a sign of maturity,\nThis stationary innocence, and a proof\nOf our slow, millennial growth, ring after ring\nJust inside the bark. Yet we get along well without it.\nWater boils more slowly, and then faster\nAt these altitudes, and slowness need never be something\nTo criticize, for it has an investment in its own weight,\nRare bird. We know we can never be anything but parallel\nAnd proximate in our relations, but we are linked up\nAnyway in the sun’s equation, the house from which\nIt steals forth on occasion, pretending, isn’t\nIt funny, to pass unnoticed, until the deeply shelving\nDarker pastures project their own reflection\nAnd are caught in history,\n\nTransfixed, like caves against the sky\nOr rotting spars sketched in phosphorus, for what we did.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "syringa": { - "title": "“Syringa”", - "body": "Orpheus liked the glad personal quality\nOf the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part\nOf this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends\nRocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks\nCan’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon\nTo the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.\nThen Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.\nYour lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to\nFollow, except a few birds of dusty feather,\nNot vivid performances of the past.” But why not?\nAll other things must change too.\nThe seasons are no longer what they once were,\nBut it is the nature of things to be seen only once,\nAs they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along\nSomehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.\nOf course Eurydice vanished into the shade;\nShe would have even if he hadn’t turned around.\nNo use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel\nOf recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent\nComment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.\nOnly love stays on the brain, and something these people,\nThese other ones, call life. Singing accurately\nSo that the notes mount straight up out of the well of\nDim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers\nGrowing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates\nThe different weights of the things.\n\nBut it isn’t enough\nTo just go on singing. Orpheus realized this\nAnd didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven\nAfter the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven\nHalf out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.\nSome say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.\nBut probably the music had more to do with it, and\nThe way music passes, emblematic\nOf life and how you cannot isolate a note of it\nAnd say it is good or bad. You must\nWait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”\nMeaning also that the “tableau”\nIs wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,\nMelt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure\nThat stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;\nIt is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,\nOver which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,\nHarsh strokes. And to ask more than this\nIs to become the tossing reeds of that slow,\nPowerful stream, the trailing grasses\nPlayfully tugged at, but to participate in the action\nNo more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky\nElectric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth\nInto a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses\nHave each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,\n“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,\nThough I can understand the language of birds, and\nThe itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.\nTheir jousting ends in music much\nAs trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm\nAnd is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”\n\nBut how late to be regretting all this, even\nBearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!\nTo which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,\nReplies that these are of course not regrets at all,\nMerely a careful, scholarly setting down of\nUnquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.\nAnd no matter how all this disappeared,\nOr got where it was going, it is no longer\nMaterial for a poem. Its subject\nMatters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly\nWhile the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad\nComet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward\nThat the meaning, good or other, can never\nBecome known. The singer thinks\nConstructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages\nLike a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.\nThe song is engulfed in an instant in blackness\nWhich must in turn flood the whole continent\nWith blackness, for it cannot see. The singer\nMust then pass out of sight, not even relieved\nOf the evil burthen of the words. Stellification\nIs for the few, and comes about much later\nWhen all record of these people and their lives\nHas disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.\nA few are still interested in them. “But what about\nSo-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie\nFrozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus\nSpeaks of a totally different incident with a similar name\nIn whose tale are hidden syllables\n\nOf what happened so long before that\nIn some small town, one indifferent summer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "tahiti-trot": { - "title": "“Tahiti Trot”", - "body": "We close in on ourselves,\nthen yelp that the world is awry.\nIf one person could see his (or her)\nreflection outlined in the mirror\n\nthe last knot would come untied,\nthe great ship slip into the depths\nof the Atlantic Ocean. Who told you\nto say that? Why have you come here?\n\nWe need more people like you\nto tell us what we’re not like. True,\naging would get lost in the process.\nWe’d be sitting on the grass like young\n\nidiots, involved in some personal spell\nwhen the boiler exploded. You’d say,\n“I can’t get over that hat,” and I.\npretending not to understand, would say,\n“Can I get you anything?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tennis-court-oath": { - "title": "“The Tennis Court Oath”", - "body": "What had you been thinking about\nthe face studiously bloodied\nheaven blotted region\nI go on loving you like water but\nthere is a terrible breath in the way all of this\nYou were not elected president, yet won the race\nAll the way through fog and drizzle\nWhen you read it was sincere the coasts\nstammered with unintentional villages the\nhorse strains fatigued I guess … the calls …\nI worry\n\nthe water beetle head\nwhy of course reflecting all\nthen you redid you were breathing\nI thought going down to mail this\nof the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard\nyou come through but\nare incomparable the lovely tent\nmystery you don’t want surrounded the real\nyou dance\nin the spring there was clouds\n\nThe mulatress approached in the hall--the\nlettering easily visible along the edge of the _Times_\nin a moment the bell would ring but there was time\nfor the carnation laughed here are a couple of “other”\n\nto one in yon house\nThe doctor and Philip had come over the road\nTurning in toward the corner of the wall his hat on\nreading it carelessly as if to tell you your fears were justified\nthe blood shifted you know those walls\nwind off the earth had made him shrink\nundeniably an oboe now the young\nwere there there was candy\nto decide the sharp edge of the garment\nlike a particular cry not intervening called the dog “he’s coming! he’s coming” with an emotion felt it sink into peace\nthere was no turning back but the end was in sight\nhe chose this moment to ask her in detail about her family and the others\nThe person. pleaded--“have more of these\nnot stripes on the tunic--or the porch chairs\nwill teach you about men--what it means”\nto be one in a million pink stripe\nand now could go away the three approached the doghouse\nthe reef. Your daughter’s\ndream of my son understand prejudice\ndarkness in the hole\nthe patient finished\nThey could all go home now the hole was dark\nlilacs blowing across his face glad he brought you", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "theme": { - "title": "“Theme”", - "body": "If I were a piano shawl\na porch on someone’s house\nflooding the suave timbre.\n\nThen forty, he,\na unique monsieur\nand yet he never wanted to look into it.\n\n“Have you forgotten your little Kiki?”\nSmoke from the horses’ nostrils\nwreathed the pump by the well.\n\nThe stink of snow\nwas everywhere. Too bad it looks\nso good.\n\nO beautiful and true\nthou that glitterest\n, in storms,\n\nstarting to discuss gardening. I don’t\nwant to throw cold water\non this.\n\nThat music has changed my life\na lot, since I made the\nmistake of learning it.\n\nAnother passionless day. The peach\nforms a stain\nat the end of the line.\n\nLearn to lock love enjoy:\n“The dream I dreamed\nwas not denied me;\n\nhence my love is mad--\na castle’s satin walls\nfolded in blood.”\n\nThe deputy returned\nthe pea shooter. I have learned\nto plait wasps\n\ninto a bronze necropolis.\nThe ticket and the water\nonly endure, as one can\n\nin the right circumstances,\nmon cher Tommy. I think the theme\ncreated itself somewhere\n\naround here and cannot find itself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "these-lacustrine-cities": { - "title": "“These Lacustrine Cities”", - "body": "These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing\nInto something forgetful, although angry with history.\nThey are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,\nThough this is only one example.\n\nThey emerged until a tower\nControlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back\nInto the past for swans and tapering branches,\nBurning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.\n\nThen you are left with an idea of yourself\nAnd the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon\nWhich must be charged to the embarrassment of others\nWho fly by you like beacons.\n\nThe night is a sentinel.\nMuch of your time has been occupied by creative games\nUntil now, but we have all-inclusive plans for you.\nWe had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,\n\nTo a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air\nTo you, pressing you back into a startled dream\nAs sea-breezes greet a child’s face.\nBut the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.\n\nThe worst is not over, yet I know\nYou will be happy here. Because of the logic\nOf your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.\nTender and insouciant by turns, you see\n\nYou have built a mountain of something,\nThoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,\nWhose wind is desire starching a petal,\nWhose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-room": { - "title": "“This Room”", - "body": "The room I entered was a dream of this room.\nSurely all those feet on the sofa were mine.\nThe oval portrait\nof a dog was me at an early age.\nSomething shimmers, something is hushed up.\n\nWe had macaroni for lunch every day\nexcept Sunday, when a small quail was induced\nto be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?\nYou are not even here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "to-redoute": { - "title": "“To Redouté”", - "body": "To true roses uplifted on the bilious tide of evening\nTo morning-glories dotting the crescent day\nThe oval shape responds:\nMy first is a haunting face\nIn the hanging-down hair.\nMy second is wine:\nI am a sieve.\n\nMy only new thing:\nThe penalty of light forever\nOver the heads of those who were there\nAnd back into the night, the cough of the finishing petal.\n\nOnce approved the magentas must continue,\nBut the bark island sees\nInto the light.\nIt grieves for what it gives:\nTears that streak the dusty firmament.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "too-much-sleep-is-bad": { - "title": "“Too Much Sleep is Bad”", - "body": "I don’t have a chronic cough.\nCats don’t drool over me.\nYou can’t listen to the change that’s being monitored.\nYou can only participate in your life\n\n_mutatis mutandis--_\n\nand they finally get it wrong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tower-of-darkness": { - "title": "“Tower of Darkness”", - "body": "I cannot remain outside any longer\nin the cold and pervasive rain.\nI grab my crotch wishing for a ball of light\nin the shaggy interior other people have.\nI shall go away without fetching a grain\nfrom the earth, compact,\nwith the climbing design\nwe knew and hated so well, and when it was our turn\nto die we just gave up, mumbling some excuse.\n\nDo you often go to see them?\nThey can’t have much cause\nto journey here, yet their footprints,\nforeclosed by snow …\n\nIt was the barker whose patter started it\nwell before we were awake, into the dawn\nthat grizzles, now, a fright\nto be wished, to be read.\nunlike the old healing that will come again in time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "train-rising-out-of-the-sea": { - "title": "“Train Rising out of the Sea”", - "body": "It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes\nThat all things have their center in their dying,\nThat each is discrete and diaphanous and\nHas pointed its prow away from the sand for the next trillion years.\n\nAfter that, we may be friends,\nRecognizing in each other the precedents that make us truly social.\nDo you hear the wind? It’s not dying,\nIt’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust.\n\nThe past in each of us, until so much memory becomes an institution,\nThrough sheer weight, the persistence of it, no,\nNot the persistence, that makes it seem a deliberate act\nOf duration, much too deliberate for this ingenuous being\n\nLike an era that refuses to come to an end or be born again.\nWe need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight\nThat inundates our remarks before we can make them\nTaking away a little bit of us each time\n\nTo be deposited elsewhere\nIn the place of our involvement\nWith the core that brought excessive flowering this year\nOf enormous sunsets and big breezes\n\nThat left you feeling too simple\nLike an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one\nNotices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one\nBuilt to prevent you from being towed to shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "unreleased-movie": { - "title": "“Unreleased Movie”", - "body": "Let’s start in the middle, as usual. Ever since I burnt my mouth\nI talk two ways, first as reluctant explainer, then as someone offstage\nIn a dream, hushing those who might wake you from this dream,\nImperfectly got up as a lutanist. Then sighs, whirrs, screeches\nBecome so much its fabric that one listens to see what words materialize\nOn the windowpane this time. I don’t want to make an uneasy habit\nOf this though, because when the universe does turn into a horror movie\nIt will mean Japanese undershirts for the kiddies and unusual, invisible\nDemerits for those of us caught talking back at the screen, unless, of course.\nThe unnatural peace God predicted for us has settled like a giant shell\nOver the ocean floor, in which case we shall all be forgiven and forgotten,\nLike students in a correspondence school. And I mean what shall be saved\nOf us as we live aimed at some near but unattainable mark on the wall?\nNot, one fears, a thing of hitherto unheard-of compacted density\nThat might relieve all the years with spaces in them, years of leggy growth,\nToo much foliage, the wrong light, the wrong taste to things.\n\nThere is so much we know, too much, cruelly, to be expressed in any medium,\nIncluding silence. And to harbor it means having it eventually leach under\nThe spiritual retaining wall that so commends itself to us we can never\nBe other, and become a different habitat altogether in which these transactions\nAre the brittle sounds of insect wings, robbed of the solid clink of something\nLike the reality that now accosts one. It is all, we see too late, a question\nOf having the knack, but the knack is as universal as the wind that now protects,\nNow buffets, and is not ours. Thus, we are more formal this year, can escape\nCertain confrontations, obtain the release of certain compromised acquaintances\nWithout looking at what they may have become, foil the plans of a few\nMiddle-echelon apparatchiks until the day that finally does come to rest, busily,\nAt your doorstep. Put it into a clean jar. Save it from the time which\nHas been, without promoting it too far beyond the venetian blind of that\nFuture’s early demise, in which we saw ourselves pre-figured dimly and what would\nHappen to us scattered all over the ground like bruised rinds. Only say what\nCannot be done to us, for now, and keep us ever straying over the border into\nInsanity and back, and by then, becalmed, we shall know the superior discipline\nAs something lived within us, something that magnetizes everything toward us.\nBut beware the merely frivolous gesture, token of its own smile, which clamps\nOne supremely to one’s own past, in which one is lost. Better the negative\nVolumes of the lives of strangers carried out to a certain point just this side of\nEmptiness, so as to be done with it. And those who may be hungry, or thirsty,\nOr tired; those who lived in a landscape without fully understanding it, may,\nBy their ignorance and needing help blossom again in the same season into a new\nAngle or knot, without feeling unwanted again. So, at any rate, it is written\nAnd believed by some few, a hundred or maybe a thousand of the summarily instructed.\n\nDoors will forever bang in that wind, night moths assault the screens until\nWe know what we are thinking about once more. And that day may guide us.\nSo the dream curved back into something natural (it always does!), beached us\nWhere we started, furious at being safe and sound again. The old oar-locks\nEncased in moss, the same tire marks in the gravel. And we come together\nTo quarrel or make love without any memory of the crabbed ambitions that were there\nBefore us, and may outlive us but we shan’t know this, it won’t make any difference\nEven tonight as I lie here placing a finger now on one page of the book, now\nOn another, as though by planting it there I might outgrow the busy destiny\nPredicted in those teeming lines. Really, it makes no difference:\nIf we are all going to be one, or together, in the space between the moment\nI had this imperfect vision and tomorrow. Yet, as marble\nDust is gradually brushed away one does come upon it, that split-second\nInterval as formal as a jewel, that an army of well-meaning enemies couldn’t\nPossibly displace. I hear it calling to me. I must turn over a new leaf.\nIt is the extreme last chance for doing so. I want it so much. And then the world is\nShredded as a blanket waiting for this to happen, returns to it like a kiss,\nTo that agreeable triangle in a sea of asphalt where one so rarely has difficulty\nGetting a taxi, and all magic works, the wicked and the only misguided.\nI am recreated in the short-sleeved pajamas of my youth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "uptick": { - "title": "“Uptick”", - "body": "We were sitting there, and\nI made a joke about how\nit doesn’t dovetail: time,\none minute running out\nfaster than the one in front\nit catches up to.\nThat way, I said,\nthere can be no waste.\nWaste is virtually eliminated.\n\nTo come back for a few hours to\nthe present subject, a painting,\nlooking like it was seen,\nhalf turning around, slightly apprehensive,\nbut it has to pay attention\nto what’s up ahead: a vision.\nTherefore poetry dissolves in\nbrilliant moisture and reads us\nto us.\nA faint notion. Too many words,\nbut precious.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vetiver": { - "title": "“Vetiver”", - "body": "Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay,\nAs the flowers recited their lines\nAnd pike stirred at the bottom of the pond.\nThe pen was cool to the touch.\nThe staircase swept upward\nThrough fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy\nAlready distilled in letters of the alphabet.\n\nIt would be time for winter now, its spun-sugar\nPalaces and also lines of care\nAt the mouth, pink smudges on the forehead and cheeks,\nThe color once known as “ashes of roses.”\nHow many snakes and lizards shed their skins\nFor time to be passing on like this,\nSinking deeper in the sand as it wound toward\nThe conclusion. It had all been working so well and now,\nWell, it just kind of came apart in the hand\nAs a change is voiced, sharp\nAs a fishhook in the throat, and decorative tears flowed\nPast us into a basin called infinity.\n\nThere was no charge for anything, the gates\nHad been left open intentionally.\nDon’t follow, you can have whatever it is.\nAnd in some room someone examines his youth,\nFinds it dry and hollow, porous to the touch.\nO keep me with you, unless the outdoors\nEmbraces both of us, unites us, unless\nThe birdcatchers put away their twigs,\nThe fishermen haul in their sleek empty nets\nAnd others become part of the immense crowd\nAround this bonfire, a situation\nThat has come to mean us to us, and the crying\nIn the leaves is saved, the last silver drops.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-worldly-country": { - "title": "“A Worldly Country”", - "body": "Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,\nthe scent of manure in the municipal parterre,\nnot the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,\nnot the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred\nin real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel\nthat was OK too. From palace and hovel\nthe great parade flooded avenue and byway\nand turnip fields became just another highway.\nLeftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens\nand geese, who squawked like the very dickens.\nThere was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet\nor the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.\nIn short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.\nBy evening all was calm again. A crescent moon\nhung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.\nDeparting guests smiled and called, “See you in church!”\nFor night, as usual, knew what it was doing,\nproviding sleep to offset the great ungluing\nthat tomorrow again would surely bring.\nAs I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing\npuzzled me: What had happened, and why?\nOne minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,\nand the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.\n\nSo often it happens that the time we turn around in\nsoon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.\nAnd just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea\nwe must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "miguel-angel-asturias": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Miguel Ángel Asturias", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1974 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "guatemalan", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇬🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Ángel_Asturias", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "guatemalan" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "caudal": { - "title": "“Caudal”", - "body": "To give is to love,\nTo give prodigiously:\nFor every drop of water\nTo return a torrent.\n\nWe were made that way,\nMade to scatter\nSeeds in the furrow\nAnd stars in the ocean.\n\nWoe to him, Lord,\nwho doesn’t exhaust his supply,\nAnd, on returning, tells you:\n“Like an empty satchel\nIs my heart.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - } - } - }, - "w-h-auden": { - "metadata": { - "name": "W. H. Auden", - "birth": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 33 - }, - "poems": { - "after-reading-a-childs-guide-to-modern-physics": { - "title": "“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”", - "body": "If all a top physicist knows\nAbout the Truth be true,\nThen, for all the so-and-so’s,\nFutility and grime,\nOur common world contains,\nWe have a better time\nThan the Greater Nebulae do,\nOr the atoms in our brains.\n\nMarriage is rarely bliss\nBut, surely it would be worse\nAs particles to pelt\nAt thousands of miles per sec\nAbout a universe\nWherein a lover’s kiss\nWould either not be felt\nOr break the loved one’s neck.\n\nThough the face at which I stare\nWhile shaving it be cruel\nFor, year after year, it repels\nAn ageing suitor, it has,\nThank God, sufficient mass\nTo be altogether there,\nNot an indeterminate gruel\nWhich is partly somewhere else.\n\nOur eyes prefer to suppose\nThat a habitable place\nHas a geocentric view,\nThat architects enclose\nA quiet Euclidian space:\nExploded myths--but who\nCould feel at home astraddle\nAn ever expanding saddle?\n\nThis passion of our kind\nFor the process of finding out\nIs a fact one can hardly doubt,\nBut I would rejoice in it more\nIf I knew more clearly what\nWe wanted the knowledge for,\nFelt certain still that the mind\nIs free to know or not.\n\nIt has chosen once, it seems,\nAnd whether our concern\nFor magnitude’s extremes\nReally become a creature\nWho comes in a median size,\nOr politicizing Nature\nBe altogether wise,\nIs something we shall learn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-time": { - "title": "“Another Time”", - "body": "For us like any other fugitive,\nLike the numberless flowers that cannot number\nAnd all the beasts that need not remember,\nIt is today in which we live.\n\nSo many try to say Not Now,\nSo many have forgotten how\nTo say I Am, and would be\nLost, if they could, in history.\n\nBowing, for instance, with such old-world grace\nTo a proper flag in a proper place,\nMuttering like ancients as they stump upstairs\nOf Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.\n\nJust as if time were what they used to will\nWhen it was gifted with possession still,\nJust as if they were wrong\nIn no more wishing to belong.\n\nNo wonder then so many die of grief,\nSo many are so lonely as they die;\nNo one has yet believed or liked a lie,\nAnother time has other lives to live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "are-you-there": { - "title": "“Are You There?”", - "body": "Each lover has some theory of his own\nAbout the difference between the ache\nOf being with his love, and being alone:\n\nWhy what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone\nThat really stirs the senses, when awake,\nAppears a simulacrum of his own.\n\nNarcissus disbelieves in the unknown;\nHe cannot join his image in the lake\nSo long as he assumes he is alone.\n\nThe child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,\nAre always up to mischief, though, and take\nThe universe for granted as their own.\n\nThe elderly, like Proust, are always prone\nTo think of love as a subjective fake;\nThe more they love, the more they feel alone.\n\nWhatever view we hold, it must be shown\nWhy every lover has a wish to make\nSome kind of otherness his own:\nPerhaps, in fact, we never are alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "as-i-walked-out-one-evening": { - "title": "“As I Walked out One Evening”", - "body": "As I walked out one evening,\nWalking down Bristol Street,\nThe crowds upon the pavement\nWere fields of harvest wheat.\n\nAnd down by the brimming river\nI heard a lover sing\nUnder an arch of the railway:\n“Love has no ending.”\n\n“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you\nTill China and Africa meet,\nAnd the river jumps over the mountain\nAnd the salmon sing in the street,”\n\n“I’ll love you till the ocean\nIs folded and hung up to dry\nAnd the seven stars go squawking\nLike geese about the sky.”\n\n“The years shall run like rabbits,\nFor in my arms I hold\nThe Flower of the Ages,\nAnd the first love of the world.”\n\nBut all the clocks in the city\nBegan to whirr and chime:\n“O let not Time deceive you,\nYou cannot conquer Time.”\n\n“In the burrows of the Nightmare\nWhere Justice naked is,\nTime watches from the shadow\nAnd coughs when you would kiss.”\n\n“In headaches and in worry\nVaguely life leaks away,\nAnd Time will have his fancy\nTo-morrow or to-day.”\n\n“Into many a green valley\nDrifts the appalling snow;\nTime breaks the threaded dances\nAnd the diver’s brilliant bow.”\n\n“O plunge your hands in water,\nPlunge them in up to the wrist;\nStare, stare in the basin\nAnd wonder what you’ve missed.”\n\n“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,\nThe desert sighs in the bed,\nAnd the crack in the tea-cup opens\nA lane to the land of the dead.”\n\n“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes\nAnd the Giant is enchanting to Jack,\nAnd the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,\nAnd Jill goes down on her back.”\n\n“O look, look in the mirror,\nO look in your distress:\nLife remains a blessing\nAlthough you cannot bless.”\n\n“O stand, stand at the window\nAs the tears scald and start;\nYou shall love your crooked neighbour\nWith your crooked heart.”\n\nIt was late, late in the evening,\nThe lovers they were gone;\nThe clocks had ceased their chiming,\nAnd the deep river ran on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "at-last-the-secret-is-out": { - "title": "“At Last the Secret is Out”", - "body": "At last the secret is out,\nas it always must come in the end,\nthe delicious story is ripe to tell\nto tell to the intimate friend;\nover the tea-cups and into the square\nthe tongues has its desire;\nstill waters run deep, my dear,\nthere’s never smoke without fire.\n\nBehind the corpse in the reservoir,\nbehind the ghost on the links,\nbehind the lady who dances\nand the man who madly drinks,\nunder the look of fatigue\nthe attack of migraine and the sigh\nthere is always another story,\nthere is more than meets the eye.\n\nFor the clear voice suddenly singing,\nhigh up in the convent wall,\nthe scent of the elder bushes,\nthe sporting prints in the hall,\nthe croquet matches in summer,\nthe handshake, the cough, the kiss,\nthere is always a wicked secret,\na private reason for this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "cocaine-lil-and-morphine-sue": { - "title": "“Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue”", - "body": "Did you ever hear about Cocaine Lil?\nShe lived in Cocaine town on Cocaine hill,\nShe had a cocaine dog and a cocaine cat,\nThey fought all night with a cocaine rat.\n\nShe had cocaine hair on her cocaine head.\nShe had a cocaine dress that was poppy red:\nShe wore a snowbird hat and sleigh-riding clothes,\nOn her coat she wore a crimson, cocaine rose.\n\nBig gold chariots on the Milky Way,\nSnakes and elephants silver and gray.\nOh the cocaine blues they make me sad,\nOh the cocaine blues make me feel bad.\n\nLil went to a snow party one cold night,\nAnd the way she sniffed was sure a fright.\nThere was Hophead Mag with Dopey Slim,\nKankakee Liz and Yen Shee Jim.\n\nThere was Morphine Sue and the Poppy Face Kid,\nClimbed up snow ladders and down they skid;\nThere was the Stepladder Kit, a good six feet,\nAnd the Sleigh-riding Sister who were hard to beat.\n\nAlong in the morning about half past three\nThey were all lit up like a Christmas tree;\nLil got home and started for bed,\nTook another sniff and it knocked her dead.\n\nThey laid her out in her cocaine clothes:\nShe wore a snowbird hat with a crimson rose;\nOn her headstone you’ll find this refrain:\nShe died as she lived, sniffing cocaine", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "epitaph-on-a-tyrant": { - "title": "“Epitaph on a Tyrant”", - "body": "Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,\nAnd the poetry he invented was easy to understand;\nHe knew human folly like the back of his hand,\nAnd was greatly interested in armies and fleets;\nWhen he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,\nAnd when he cried the little children died in the streets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fall-of-rome": { - "title": "“The Fall of Rome”", - "body": "The piers are pummelled by the waves;\nIn a lonely field the rain\nLashes an abandoned train;\nOutlaws fill the mountain caves.\n\nFantastic grow the evening gowns;\nAgents of the Fisc pursue\nAbsconding tax-defaulters through\nThe sewers of provincial towns.\n\nPrivate rites of magic send\nThe temple prostitutes to sleep;\nAll the literati keep\nAn imaginary friend.\n\nCerebrotonic Cato may\nExtol the Ancient Disciplines,\nBut the muscle-bound Marines\nMutiny for food and pay.\n\nCaesar’s double-bed is warm\nAs an unimportant clerk\nWrites I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK\nOn a pink official form.\n\nUnendowed with wealth or pity,\nLittle birds with scarlet legs,\nSitting on their speckled eggs,\nEye each flu-infected city.\n\nAltogether elsewhere, vast\nHerds of reindeer move across\nMiles and miles of golden moss,\nSilently and very fast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-time-being": { - "title": "“For The Time Being”", - "body": "Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,\nPutting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes--\nSome have got broken--and carrying them up to the attic.\nThe holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,\nAnd the children got ready for school. There are enough\nLeft-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week--\nNot that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,\nStayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--\nTo love all of our relatives, and in general\nGrossly overestimated our powers. Once again\nAs in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed\nTo do more than entertain it as an agreeable\nPossibility, once again we have sent Him away,\nBegging though to remain His disobedient servant,\nThe promising child who cannot keep His word for long.\nThe Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,\nAnd already the mind begins to be vaguely aware\nOf an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought\nOf Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now\nBe very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,\nBack in the moderate Aristotelian city\nOf darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry\nAnd Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,\nAnd the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.\nIt seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets\nAre much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten\nThe office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen\nThe Child, however dimly, however incredulously,\nThe Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.\nFor the innocent children who whispered so excitedly\nOutside the locked door where they knew the presents to be\nGrew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment\nWe can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;\nRemembering the stable where for once in our lives\nEverything became a You and nothing was an It.\nAnd craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,\nWe look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit\nOur self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose\nWould be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,\nWe are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;\n“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”\nThey will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form\nThat we do not expect, and certainly with a force\nMore dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime\nThere are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,\nIrregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem\nFrom insignificance. The happy morning is over,\nThe night of agony still to come; the time is noon:\nWhen the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing\nWithout even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure\nA silence that is neither for nor against her faith\nThat God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,\nGod will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "for-what-as-easy": { - "title": "“For What as Easy”", - "body": "For what as easy\nFor what thought small,\nFor what is well\nBecause between,\nTo you simply\nFrom me I mean.\n\nWho goes with who\nThe bedclothes say,\nAs I and you\nGo kissed away,\nThe data given,\nThe senses even.\n\nFate is not late,\nNor the speech rewritten,\nNor one word forgotten,\nSaid at the start\nAbout heart,\nBy heart, for heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "give-me-a-doctor": { - "title": "“Give Me a Doctor”", - "body": "Give me a doctor partridge-plump,\nShort in the leg and broad in the rump,\nAn endomorph with gentle hands\nWho’ll never make absurd demands\nThat I abandon all my vices\nNor pull a long face in a crisis,\nBut with a twinkle in his eye\nWill tell me that I have to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-i-could-tell-you": { - "title": "“If I Could Tell You”", - "body": "Time will say nothing but I told you so,\nTime only knows the price we have to pay;\nIf I could tell you I would let you know.\n\nIf we should weep when clowns put on their show,\nIf we should stumble when musicians play,\nTime will say nothing but I told you so.\n\nThere are no fortunes to be told, although,\nBecause I love you more than I can say,\nIf I could tell you I would let you know.\n\nThe winds must come from somewhere when they blow,\nThere must be reasons why the leaves decay;\nTime will say nothing but I told you so.\n\nPerhaps the roses really want to grow,\nThe vision seriously intends to stay;\nIf I could tell you I would let you know.\n\nSuppose all the lions get up and go,\nAnd all the brooks and soldiers run away;\nWill Time say nothing but I told you so?\nIf I could tell you I would let you know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "lady-weeping-at-the-crossroads": { - "title": "“Lady Weeping at the Crossroads”", - "body": "Lady, weeping at the crossroads,\nWould you meet your love\nIn the twilight with his greyhounds,\nAnd the hawk on his glove?\n\nBribe the birds then on the branches,\nBribe them to be dumb,\nStare the hot sun out of heaven\nThat the night may come.\n\nStarless are the nights of travel,\nBleak the winter wind;\nRun with terror all before you\nAnd regret behind.\n\nRun until you hear the ocean’s\nEverlasting cry;\nDeep though it may be and bitter\nYou must drink it dry,\n\nWear out patience in the lowest\nDungeons of the sea,\nSearching through the stranded shipwrecks\nFor the golden key,\n\nPush on to the world’s end, pay the\nDread guard with a kiss,\nCross the rotten bridge that totters\nOver the abyss.\n\nThere stands the deserted castle\nReady to explore;\nEnter, climb the marble staircase,\nOpen the locked door.\n\nCross the silent ballroom,\nDoubt and danger past;\nBlow the cobwebs from the mirror\nSee yourself at last.\n\nPut your hand behind the wainscot,\nYou have done your part;\nFind the penknife there and plunge it\nInto your false heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "lullaby": { - "title": "“Lullaby”", - "body": "Lay your sleeping head, my love,\nHuman on my faithless arm;\nTime and fevers burn away\nIndividual beauty from\nThoughtful children, and the grave\nProves the child ephemeral:\nBut in my arms till break of day\nLet the living creature lie,\nMortal, guilty, but to me\nThe entirely beautiful.\n\nSoul and body have no bounds:\nTo lovers as they lie upon\nHer tolerant enchanted slope\nIn their ordinary swoon,\nGrave the vision Venus sends\nOf supernatural sympathy,\nUniversal love and hope;\nWhile an abstract insight wakes\nAmong the glaciers and the rocks\nThe hermit’s carnal ecstasy.\n\nCertainty, fidelity\nOn the stroke of midnight pass\nLike vibrations of a bell,\nAnd fashionable madmen raise\nTheir pedantic boring cry:\nEvery farthing of the cost,\nAll the dreaded cards foretell,\nShall be paid, but from this night\nNot a whisper, not a thought,\nNot a kiss nor look be lost.\n\nBeauty, midnight, vision dies:\nLet the winds of dawn that blow\nSoftly round your dreaming head\nSuch a day of welcome show\nEye and knocking heart may bless,\nFind the mortal world enough;\nNoons of dryness find you fed\nBy the involuntary powers,\nNights of insult let you pass\nWatched by every human love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "miranda": { - "title": "“Miranda”", - "body": "My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,\nAs the poor and sad are real to the good king,\nAnd the high green hill sits always by the sea.\n\nUp jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree,\nTurned a somersault and ran away waving;\nMy dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.\n\nThe Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body\nMelted into light as water leaves a spring,\nAnd the high green hill sits always by the sea.\n\nAt his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me,\nDown his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running:\nMy dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.\n\nHe kissed me awake, and no one was sorry;\nThe sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,\nAnd the high green hill sits always by the sea.\n\nSo to remember our changing garden, we\nAre linked as children in a circle dancing:\nMy dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely,\nAnd the high, green hill sits always by the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-more-loving-one": { - "title": "“The More Loving One”", - "body": "Looking up at the stars, I know quite well\nThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,\nBut on earth indifference is the least\nWe have to dread from man or beast.\n\nHow should we like it were stars to burn\nWith a passion for us we could not return?\nIf equal affection cannot be,\nLet the more loving one be me.\n\nAdmirer as I think I am\nOf stars that do not give a damn,\nI cannot, now I see them, say\nI missed one terribly all day.\n\nWere all stars to disappear or die,\nI should learn to look at an empty sky\nAnd feel its total dark sublime,\nThough this might take me a little time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "musee-des-beaux-arts": { - "title": "“Musée Des Beaux Arts”", - "body": "About suffering they were never wrong,\nThe old Masters: how well they understood\nIts human position: how it takes place\nWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;\nHow, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting\nFor the miraculous birth, there always must be\nChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skating\nOn a pond at the edge of the wood:\nThey never forgot\nThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course\nAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spot\nWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse\nScratches its innocent behind on a tree.\n\nIn Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away\nQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may\nHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,\nBut for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone\nAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green\nWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen\nSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,\nHad somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-new-age": { - "title": "“A New Age”", - "body": "So an age ended, and its last deliverer died\nIn bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:\nThe sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf\nWould fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.\n\nThey slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt\nA sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,\nBut in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath:\nA kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.\n\nOnly the sculptors and the poets were half sad,\nAnd the pert retinue from the magician’s house\nGrumbled and went elsewhere. The vanished powers were glad\n\nTo be invisible and free; without remorse\nStruck down the sons who strayed in their course,\nAnd ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-new-year-greeting": { - "title": "“A New Year Greeting”", - "body": "On this day tradition allots\nto taking stock of our lives,\nmy greetings to all of you, Yeasts,\nBacteria, Viruses,\nAerobics and Anaerobics:\nA Very Happy New Year\nto all for whom my ectoderm\nis as Middle-Earth to me.\n\nFor creatures your size I offer\na free choice of habitat,\nso settle yourselves in the zone\nthat suits you best, in the pools\nof my pores or the tropical\nforests of arm-pit and crotch,\nin the deserts of my fore-arms,\nor the cool woods of my scalp.\n\nBuild colonies: I will supply\nadequate warmth and moisture,\nthe sebum and lipids you need,\non condition you never\ndo me annoy with your presence,\nbut behave as good guests should,\nnot rioting into acne\nor athlete’s-foot or a boil.\n\nDoes my inner weather affect\nthe surfaces where you live?\nDo unpredictable changes\nrecord my rocketing plunge\nfrom fairs when the mind is in tift\nand relevant thoughts occur\nto fouls when nothing will happen\nand no one calls and it rains.\n\nI should like to think that I make\na not impossible world,\nbut an Eden it cannot be:\nmy games, my purposive acts,\nmay turn to catastrophes there.\nIf you were religious folk,\nhow would your dramas justify\nunmerited suffering?\n\nBy what myths would your priests account\nfor the hurricanes that come\ntwice every twenty-four hours,\neach time I dress or undress,\nwhen, clinging to keratin rafts,\nwhole cities are swept away\nto perish in space, or the Flood\nthat scalds to death when I bathe?\n\nThen, sooner or later, will dawn\na Day of Apocalypse,\nwhen my mantle suddenly turns\ntoo cold, too rancid, for you,\nappetising to predators\nof a fiercer sort, and I\nam stripped of excuse and nimbus,\na Past, subject to Judgement.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "o-tell-me-the-truth-about-love": { - "title": "“O Tell Me the Truth about Love”", - "body": "Some say love’s a little boy,\nAnd some say it’s a bird,\nSome say it makes the world go around,\nSome say that’s absurd,\nAnd when I asked the man next-door,\nWho looked as if he knew,\nHis wife got very cross indeed,\nAnd said it wouldn’t do.\n\nDoes it look like a pair of pyjamas,\nOr the ham in a temperance hotel?\nDoes its odour remind one of llamas,\nOr has it a comforting smell?\nIs it prickly to touch as a hedge is,\nOr soft as eiderdown fluff?\nIs it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?\nO tell me the truth about love.\n\nOur history books refer to it\nIn cryptic little notes,\nIt’s quite a common topic on\nThe Transatlantic boats;\nI’ve found the subject mentioned in\nAccounts of suicides,\nAnd even seen it scribbled on\nThe backs of railway guides.\n\nDoes it howl like a hungry Alsatian,\nOr boom like a military band?\nCould one give a first-rate imitation\nOn a saw or a Steinway Grand?\nIs its singing at parties a riot?\nDoes it only like Classical stuff?\nWill it stop when one wants to be quiet?\nO tell me the truth about love.\n\nI looked inside the summer-house;\nIt wasn’t over there;\nI tried the Thames at Maidenhead,\nAnd Brighton’s bracing air.\nI don’t know what the blackbird sang,\nOr what the tulip said;\nBut it wasn’t in the chicken-run,\nOr underneath the bed.\n\nCan it pull extraordinary faces?\nIs it usually sick on a swing?\nDoes it spend all its time at the races,\nor fiddling with pieces of string?\nHas it views of its own about money?\nDoes it think Patriotism enough?\nAre its stories vulgar but funny?\nO tell me the truth about love.\n\nWhen it comes, will it come without warning\nJust as I’m picking my nose?\nWill it knock on my door in the morning,\nOr tread in the bus on my toes?\nWill it come like a change in the weather?\nWill its greeting be courteous or rough?\nWill it alter my life altogether?\nO tell me the truth about love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-what-is-that-sound": { - "title": "“O What is that Sound”", - "body": "O what is that sound which so thrills the ear\nDown in the valley drumming, drumming?\nOnly the scarlet soldiers, dear,\nThe soldiers coming.\n\nO what is that light I see flashing so clear\nOver the distance brightly, brightly?\nOnly the sun on their weapons, dear,\nAs they step lightly.\n\nO what are they doing with all that gear,\nWhat are they doing this morning, morning?\nOnly their usual manoeuvres, dear,\nOr perhaps a warning.\n\nO why have they left the road down there,\nWhy are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?\nPerhaps a change in their orders, dear,\nWhy are you kneeling?\n\nO haven’t they stopped for the doctor’s care,\nHaven’t they reined their horses, horses?\nWhy, they are none of them wounded, dear,\nNone of these forces.\n\nO is it the parson they want, with white hair,\nIs it the parson, is it, is it?\nNo, they are passing his gateway, dear,\nWithout a visit.\n\nO it must be the farmer that lives so near.\nIt must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?\nThey have passed the farmyard already, dear,\nAnd now they are running.\n\nO where are you going? Stay with me here!\nWere the vows you swore deceiving, deceiving?\nNo, I promised to love you, dear,\nBut I must be leaving.\n\nO it’s broken the lock and splintered the door,\nO it’s the gate where they’re turning, turning;\nTheir boots are heavy on the floor\nAnd their eyes are burning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-where-are-you-going": { - "title": "“O Where Are You Going?”", - "body": "“O where are you going?” said reader to rider,\n“That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,\nYonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,\nThat gap is the grave where the tall return.”\n\n“O do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,\n“That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,\nYour diligent looking discover the lacking,\nYour footsteps feel from granite to grass?”\n\n“O what was that bird,” said horror to hearer,\n“Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?\nBehind you swiftly the figure comes softly,\nThe spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”\n\n“Out of this house”--said rider to reader,\n“Yours never will”--said farer to fearer\n“They’re looking for you”--said hearer to horror,\nAs he left them there, as he left them there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-peoples-home": { - "title": "“Old People’s Home”", - "body": "All are limitory, but each has her own\nnuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves,\n are ambulant with a single stick, adroit\nto read a book all through, or play the slow movements of\n easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very\ncarnal freedom is their spirit’s bane: intelligent\n of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious\nto a glum beyond tears.) Then come those on wheels, the average\n majority, who endure T.V. and, led by\nlenient therapists, do community-singing, then\n the loners, muttering in Limbo, and last\nthe terminally incompetent, as improvident,\n unspeakable, impeccable as the plants\nthey parody. (Plants may sweat profusely but never\n sully themselves.) One tie, though, unites them: all\nappeared when the world, though much was awry there, was more\n spacious, more comely to look at, it’s Old Ones\nwith an audience and secular station. Then a child,\n in dismay with Mamma, could refuge with Gran\nto be revalued and told a story. As of now,\n we all know what to expect, but their generation\nis the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned\n to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience\nas unpopular luggage. As I ride the subway\n to spend half-an-hour with one, I revisage\nwho she was in the pomp and sumpture of her hey-day,\n when week-end visits were a presumptive joy,\nnot a good work. Am I cold to wish for a speedy\n painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays,\nthat God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "refugee-blues": { - "title": "“Refugee Blues”", - "body": "Say this city has ten million souls,\nSome are living in mansions, some are living in holes:\nYet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.\n\nOnce we had a country and we thought it fair,\nLook in the atlas and you’ll find it there:\nWe cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.\n\nIn the village churchyard there grows an old yew,\nEvery spring it blossoms anew:\nOld passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.\n\nThe consul banged the table and said,\n“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:\nBut we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.\n\nWent to a committee; they offered me a chair;\nAsked me politely to return next year:\nBut where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?\n\nCame to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;\n“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:\nHe was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.\n\nThought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;\nIt was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:\nO we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.\n\nSaw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,\nSaw a door opened and a cat let in:\nBut they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.\n\nWent down the harbour and stood upon the quay,\nSaw the fish swimming as if they were free:\nOnly ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.\n\nWalked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;\nThey had no politicians and sang at their ease:\nThey weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.\n\nDreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,\nA thousand windows and a thousand doors:\nNot one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.\n\nStood on a great plain in the falling snow;\nTen thousand soldiers marched to and fro:\nLooking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "roman-wall-blues": { - "title": "“Roman Wall Blues”", - "body": "Over the heather the wet wind blows,\nI’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.\n\nThe rain comes pattering out of the sky,\nI’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why.\n\nThe mist creeps over the hard grey stone,\nMy girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.\n\nAulus goes hanging around her place,\nI don’t like his manners, I don’t like his face.\n\nPiso’s a Christian, he worships a fish;\nThere’d be no kissing if he had his wish.\n\nShe gave me a ring but I diced it away;\nI want my girl and I want my pay.\n\nWhen I’m a veteran with only one eye\nI shall do nothing but look at the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-shield-of-achilles": { - "title": "“The Shield of Achilles”", - "body": " She looked over his shoulder\n For vines and olive trees,\n Marble well-governed cities\n And ships upon untamed seas,\n But there on the shining metal\n His hands had put instead\n An artificial wilderness\n And a sky like lead.\n\nA plain without a feature, bare and brown,\n No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,\nNothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,\n Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood\n An unintelligible multitude,\nA million eyes, a million boots in line,\nWithout expression, waiting for a sign.\n\nOut of the air a voice without a face\n Proved by statistics that some cause was just\nIn tones as dry and level as the place:\n No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;\n Column by column in a cloud of dust\nThey marched away enduring a belief\nWhose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.\n\n She looked over his shoulder\n For ritual pieties,\n White flower-garlanded heifers,\n Libation and sacrifice,\n But there on the shining metal\n Where the altar should have been,\n She saw by his flickering forge-light\n Quite another scene.\n\nBarbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot\n Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)\nAnd sentries sweated for the day was hot:\n A crowd of ordinary decent folk\n Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke\nAs three pale figures were led forth and bound\nTo three posts driven upright in the ground.\n\nThe mass and majesty of this world, all\n That carries weight and always weighs the same\nLay in the hands of others; they were small\n And could not hope for help and no help came:\n What their foes like to do was done, their shame\nWas all the worst could wish; they lost their pride\nAnd died as men before their bodies died.\n\n She looked over his shoulder\n For athletes at their games,\n Men and women in a dance\n Moving their sweet limbs\n Quick, quick, to music,\n But there on the shining shield\n His hands had set no dancing-floor\n But a weed-choked field.\n\nA ragged urchin, aimless and alone,\n Loitered about that vacancy; a bird\nFlew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:\n That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,\n Were axioms to him, who’d never heard\nOf any world where promises were kept,\nOr one could weep because another wept.\n\n The thin-lipped armorer,\n Hephaestos, hobbled away,\n Thetis of the shining breasts\n Cried out in dismay\n At what the god had wrought\n To please her son, the strong\n Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles\n Who would not live long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "stop-all-the-clocks": { - "title": "“Stop All the Clocks”", - "body": "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,\nPrevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,\nSilence the pianos and with muffled drum\nBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.\n\nLet aeroplanes circle moaning overhead\nScribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,\nPut crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,\nLet the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.\n\nHe was my North, my South, my East and West,\nMy working week and my Sunday rest,\nMy noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;\nI thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.\n\nThe stars are not wanted now: put out every one;\nPack up the moon and dismantle the sun;\nPour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;\nFor nothing now can ever come to any good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "taller-to-day": { - "title": "“Taller To-Day”", - "body": "Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,\nWalking together in a windless orchard\nWhere the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier.\n\nNights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl\nUnder headlands in their windy dwelling\nBecause the Adversary put too easy questions\nOn lonely roads.\n\nBut happy now, though no nearer each other,\nWe see farms lighted all along the valley;\nDown at the mill-shed hammering stops\nAnd men go home.\n\nNoises at dawn will bring\nFreedom for some, but not this peace\nNo bird can contradict: passing but here, sufficient now\nFor something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "though-the-night-is-gone": { - "title": "“Though the Night is Gone”", - "body": "Dear, though the night is gone,\nIts dream still haunts today,\nThat brought us to a room\nCavernous, lofty as\nA railway terminus,\nAnd crowded in that gloom\nWere beds, and we in one\nIn a far corner lay.\n\nOur whisper woke no clocks,\nWe kissed and I was glad\nAt everything you did,\nIndifferent to those\nWho sat with hostile eyes\nIn pairs on every bed,\nArms round each other’s neck,\nInert and vaguely sad.\n\nO but what worm of guilt\nOr what malignant doubt\nAm I the victim of,\nThat you then, unabashed,\nDid what I never wished,\nConfessed another love;\nAnd I, submissive, felt\nUnwanted and went out?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-unknown-citizen": { - "title": "“The Unknown Citizen”", - "body": "He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be\nOne against whom there was no official complaint,\nAnd all the reports on his conduct agree\nThat, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,\nFor in everything he did he served the Greater Community.\nExcept for the War till the day he retired\nHe worked in a factory and never got fired,\nBut satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.\nYet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,\nFor his Union reports that he paid his dues,\n(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)\nAnd our Social Psychology workers found\nThat he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.\nThe Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day\nAnd that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.\nPolicies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,\nAnd his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.\nBoth Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare\nHe was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan\nAnd had everything necessary to the Modern Man,\nA phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.\nOur researchers into Public Opinion are content\nThat he held the proper opinions for the time of year;\nWhen there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.\nHe was married and added five children to the population,\nWhich our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.\nAnd our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.\nWas he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:\nHad anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-walk-after-dark": { - "title": "“A Walk after Dark”", - "body": "A cloudless night like this\nCan set the spirit soaring:\nAfter a tiring day\nThe clockwork spectacle is\nImpressive in a slightly boring\nEighteenth-century way.\n\nIt soothed adolescence a lot\nTo meet so shameless a stare;\nThe things I did could not\nBe so shocking as they said\nIf that would still be there\nAfter the shocked were dead\n\nNow, unready to die\nBur already at the stage\nWhen one starts to resent the young,\nI am glad those points in the sky\nMay also be counted among\nThe creatures of middle-age.\n\nIt’s cosier thinking of night\nAs more an Old People’s Home\nThan a shed for a faultless machine,\nThat the red pre-Cambrian light\nIs gone like Imperial Rome\nOr myself at seventeen.\n\nYet however much we may like\nThe stoic manner in which\nThe classical authors wrote,\nOnly the young and rich\nHave the nerve or the figure to strike\nThe lacrimae rerum note.\n\nFor the present stalks abroad\nLike the past and its wronged again\nWhimper and are ignored,\nAnd the truth cannot be hid;\nSomebody chose their pain,\nWhat needn’t have happened did.\n\nOccurring this very night\nBy no established rule,\nSome event may already have hurled\nIts first little No at the right\nOf the laws we accept to school\nOur post-diluvian world:\n\nBut the stars burn on overhead,\nUnconscious of final ends,\nAs I walk home to bed,\nAsking what judgment waits\nMy person, all my friends,\nAnd these United States.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "we-too-had-known-golden-hours": { - "title": "“We too Had Known Golden Hours”", - "body": "We, too, had known golden hours\nWhen body and soul were in tune,\nHad danced with our true loves\nBy the light of a full moon,\nAnd sat with the wise and good\nAs tongues grew witty and gay\nOver some noble dish\nOut of Escoffier;\nHad felt the intrusive glory\nWhich tears reserve apart,\nAnd would in the old grand manner\nHave sung from a resonant heart.\nBut, pawed-at and gossiped-over\nBy the promiscuous crowd,\nConcocted by editors\nInto spells to befuddle the crowd,\nAll words like Peace and Love,\nAll sane affirmative speech,\nHad been soiled, profaned, debased\nTo a horrid mechanical screech.\nNo civil style survived\nThat pandaemonioum\nBut the wry, the sotto-voce,\nIronic and monochrome:\nAnd where should we find shelter\nFor joy or mere content\nWhen little was left standing\n\nBut the suburb of dissent?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "woods": { - "title": "“Woods”", - "body": "A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady’s grace;\nSomeone is not disgusted, or at least\nIs laying bets upon the human race\nRetaining enough decency to last;\nThe trees encountered on a country stroll\nReveal a lot about a country’s soul.\n\nA small grove massacred to the last ash,\nAn oak with heart-rot, give away the show:\nThis great society is going to smash;\nThey cannot fool us with how fast they go,\nHow much they cost each other and the gods.\nA culture is no better than its woods.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "augustine-of-hippo": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Augustine of Hippo", - "birth": { - "year": 354 - }, - "death": { - "year": 430 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "roman", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "roman", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "and-what-is-this": { - "title": "“And What is This?”", - "body": "“And what is this?” I asked the earth, and it answered me, “I am not He”; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same.\n\nI asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, “We are not thy God, seek above us.”\n\nI asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, “Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.”\n\nI asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, “Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.”\n\nAnd I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: “Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.”\n\nAnd they cried out with a loud voice, “He made us.” My questioning them, was my thoughts on them: and their form of beauty gave the answer.\n\nAnd I turned myself unto myself, and said to myself, “Who art thou?” And I answered, “A man.” And behold, in me there present themselves to me soul, and body, one without, the other within. By which of these ought I to seek my God?\n\nI had sought Him in the body from earth to heaven, so far as I could send messengers, the beams of mine eyes. But the better is the inner, for to it as presiding and judging, all the bodily messengers reported the answers of heaven and earth, and all things therein, who said, “We are not God, but He made us.”\n\nThese things did my inner man know by the ministry of the outer: I the inner knew them; I, the mind, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and it answered me, “I am not He, but He made me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "the-beauty-of-creation-bears-witness-to-god": { - "title": "“The Beauty of Creation Bears Witness to God”", - "body": "Question the beauty of the earth,\nthe beauty of the sea,\nthe beauty of the wide air around you,\nthe beauty of the sky;\nquestion the order of the stars,\nthe sun whose brightness lights the day,\nthe moon whose splendor softens\nthe gloom of night;\nquestion the living creatures\nthat move in the waters,\nthat roam upon the earth,\nthat fly through the air;\nthe spirit that lies hidden,\nthe matter that is manifest;\nthe visible things that are ruled,\nthe invisible that rule them;\nquestion all these.\nThey will answer you:\n“Behold and see, we are beautiful.”\nTheir beauty is their confession of God.\nWho made these beautiful changing things,\nif not one who is beautiful and changeth not?", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "late-have-i-loved-you": { - "title": "“Late Have I Loved You”", - "body": "Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!\nLo, you were within,\nbut I outside, seeking there for you,\nand upon the shapely things you have made\nI rushed headlong--I, misshapen.\nYou were with me, but I was not with you.\nThey held me back far from you,\nthose things which would have no being,\nwere they not in you.\nYou called, shouted, broke through my deafness;\nyou flared, blazed, banished my blindness;\nyou lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you;\nI tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst;\nyou touched me, and I burned for your peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "light-of-the-minds-that-know-him": { - "title": "“Light of the Minds that Know Him”", - "body": "Light of the minds that know him,\nmay Christ be light to mine!\nmy sun in risen splendour,\nmy light of truth divine;\nmy guide in doubt and darkness,\nmy true and living way,\nmy clear light ever shining,\nmy dawn of heaven’s day.\n\nLife of the souls that love him,\nmay Christ be ours indeed!\nthe living bread from heaven\non whom our spirits feed;\nwho died for love of sinners\nto bear our guilty load,\nand make of life’s brief journey\na new Emmaus road.\n\nStrength of the wills that serve him,\nmay Christ be strength to me,\nwho stilled the storm and tempest,\nwho calmed the tossing sea;\nhis Spirit’s power to move me,\nhis will to master mine,\nhis cross to carry daily\nand conquer in his sign.\n\nMay it be ours to know him\nthat we may truly love,\nand loving, fully serve him\nas serve the saints above;\ntill in that home of glory\nwith fadeless splendour bright,\nwe serve in perfect freedom\nour strength, our life, our light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Timothy Dudley-Smith", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "love-never-disappears": { - "title": "“Love Never Disappears”", - "body": "Love never disappears for death is a non-event.\nI have merely retired to the room next door.\nYou and I are the same; what we were for each other, we still are.\nSpeak to me as you always have, do not use a different tone, do not be sad.\nContinue to laugh at what made us laugh.\nSmile and think of me.\nLife means what it has always meant.\nThe link is not severed.\nWhy should I be out of your soul if I am out of your sight?\nI will wait for you; I am not here, but just on the other side of this path.\nYou see, all is well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "te-deum": { - "title": "“Te Deum”", - "body": "O God, we praise you; O Lord, we acclaim you.\nEternal Father, all the earth reveres you.\nAll the angels, the heavens and the Pow’rs of heaven,\nCherubim and Seraphim cry out to you in endless praise:\nHoly, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts,\nheaven and earth are filled with the majesty of your glory.\nThe glorious choir of Apostles sings to you,\nthe noble company of prophets praises you,\nthe white-robed army of martyrs glorifies you,\nHoly Church throughout the earth proclaims you,\nFather of boundless majesty,\nwith your true and only Son, worthy of adoration,\nand the Holy Spirit, Paraclete.\nYou, O Christ, are the King of glory,\nyou are the Father’s everlasting Son;\nwhen you resolved to save the human race,\nyou did not spurn the Virgin’s womb;\nyou overcame the sting of death\nand opened wide the Kingdom of Heaven\nto those who put their faith in you.\nYou are seated at the right hand of God\nin the glory of the Father.\nWe believe you are the Judge who is to come.\nAnd so we beg you, help your servants,\nredeemed by your most precious blood.\nNumber them among your saints in eternal glory.\n\nSave your people, Lord, and bless your inheritance.\nShepherd them and raise them to eternal life.\nDay by day, we bless you\nand praise your name for endless ages evermore.\nBe gracious, Lord, on this day,\nand keep us from all sin.\nHave mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy.\nMay your mercy be upon us, Lord,\nas we place our trust in you.\nIn you, O Lord, I rest my hope:\nlet me never be put to shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-baer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Baer", - "birth": { - "year": 1948 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Baer_(writer)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "snowflake": { - "title": "“Snowflake”", - "body": "Timing’s everything. The vapor rises\nhigh in the sky, tossing to and fro,\nthen freezes, suddenly, and crystalizes\ninto a perfect flake of miraculous snow.\nFor countless miles, drifting east above\nthe world, whirling about in a swirling free-\nfor-all, appearing aimless, just like love,\nbut sensing, seeking out, its destiny.\nFalling to where the two young skaters stand,\nhand in hand, then flips and dips and whips\nitself about to ever-so-gently land,\na miracle, across her unkissed lips:\nas he blocks the wind raging from the south,\nleaning forward to kiss her lovely mouth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "when-she-is-silent": { - "title": "“When She is Silent”", - "body": "Her lips\nmove lightly\nas she reads\n\nbut mostly\nshe is silent\nstaring off--\n\nAnd sometimes\nI grow fearful\nshe might hold\nme to my failings\n\nsick of the\nself-control\nand frigidity,\nbored with the books\nand all the little poems\nabout God, and history,\nand the shocks\nof her silence\n\nbut, somehow, our failings\nseem to coincide,\nand when she speaks at all\nshe leaves me be,\nand wonders,\nHow can Magdalene be in heaven\nif Saul is in hell?\n\nor talks lightly of\nthese stupendous nightmares\nthat rack her nights,\nabout Alaric\nand the sack of Rome\n\nAnd holds my hands", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "francisco-balagtas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Francisco Balagtas", - "birth": { - "year": 1788 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1862 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "filipino", - "language": "tagalog", - "flag": "🇵🇭", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Balagtas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "filipino" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "florantes-lament": { - "title": "“Florante’s Lament”", - "body": "Vengeful Heaven, where is your wrath?\nnow my land is overcome, prostrate,\nand in beloved Albania’s infinite skies,\nlately the flag of evil flies.\n\n“Within and without my country of grief,\nbetrayal reigns, is enshrined, esteemed;\ndegraded everywhere, the heart’s goodness\nis consigned to the lowly pauper’s grave.”\n\n“All manner of good and deed are cast\ninto the sea of mockery and perturbation,\neach good man is treated without respect,\nwithout burial rite entombed.”\n\n“But, oh, the cheat, the traitor, the black\nof heart, are enthroned in praise,\nand for each scoundrel incense is burned,\nand offered up in fragrant smoke.”\n\n“Betrayal, dishonesty hold high\ntheir heads, and the righteous is timid, bowed,\ndismayed, reason itself is on its knees,\nfatigued, and to weep is all that’s left for it.”\n\n“And each mouth that opens\nto speak the truth and right\nis quickly stopped and cut\nby the arrogant blade of death.”\n\n“O traitorous ambition for honor and riches!\nO hunger for airy and fleeting praise!\nYou are the reason for all this sinfulness,\nthis misfortune that has befallen me.”\n\n“By the crown of King Linceaeus\nand the riches of my father, the duke,\nCount Adolfo was so bold to pour evil\nupon Albania’s sovereign land.”\n\n“All these, O merciful Heaven\nyou witness, why suffer them persist?\nO Source of sense and righteousness,\nwhy permit them drown in ruthlessness?”\n\n“Lift your right and righteous hand,\nswing the shining blade of your rage,\nupon all evil in Albania’s kingdom pour\nthe full vengeance of your justice.”\n\n“Why, O Heaven, do you turn\na deaf ear to my suit and honest plea?\nWhy from this poor and luckless being\navert your face and shut your ears?”\n\n“And who could ever fathom,\nO Great God, your sacred mystery?\nThe good will not happen on earth\nif it is not Your Will.”\n\n“Alas, where now turn\nfor handhold, bring my heart’s lament,\nIf Heaven refuses to listen\nto my plaintive cry, my faint complaint?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "tagalog" - } - } - } - }, - "maurice-baring": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Maurice Baring", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Baring", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "diffugere-nives": { - "title": "“Diffugere Nives”", - "body": "The snows have fled, the hail, the lashing rain,\n Before the Spring.\nThe grass is starred with buttercups again,\n The blackbirds sing.\n\nNow spreads the month that feast of lovely things\n We loved of old.\nOnce more the swallow glides with darkling wings\n Against the gold.\n\nNow the brown bees about the peach trees boom\n Upon the walls;\nAnd far away beyond the orchard’s bloom\n The cuckoo calls.\n\nThe season holds a festival of light,\n For you, for me,\nThe shadows are abroad, there falls a blight\n On each green tree.\n\nAnd every leaf unfolding, every flower\n Brings bitter meed;\nBeauty of the morning and the evening hour\n Quickens our need.\n\nAll is reborn, but never any Spring\n Can bring back this;\nNor any fullness of midsummer bring\n The voice we miss.\n\nThe smiling eyes shall smile on us no more;\n The laughter clear,\nToo far away on the forbidden shore,\n We shall not hear.\n\nBereft of these until the day we die,\n We both must dwell;\nAlone, alone, and haunted by the cry:\n “Hail and farewell!”\n\nYet when the scythe of Death shall near us hiss\nThrough the cold air,\nThen on the shuddering marge of the abyss\n They will be there.\n\nThey will be there to lift us from sheer space\n And empty night;\nAnd we shall turn and see them face to face\n In the new light.\n\nSo shall we pay the unabated price\n Of their release,\nAnd found on our consenting sacrifice\n Their lasting peace.\n\nThe hopes that fall like leaves before the wind,\n The baffling waste,\nAnd every earthly joy that leaves behind\n A mortal taste.\n\nThe uncompleted end of all things dear,\n The clanging door\nOf Death, forever loud with the last fear,\n Haunt them no more.\n\nWithout them the awakening world is dark\n With dust and mire;\nYet as they went they flung to us a spark,\n A thread of fire.\n\nTo guide us while beneath the sombre skies\n Faltering we tread,\nUntil for us like morning stars shall rise\n The deathless dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "dostoyevsky": { - "title": "“Dostoyevsky”", - "body": "You healed the sore, you made the fearful brave,\nThey bless you for your lasting legacy;\nThe balm, the tears, the fragrant charity\nYou sought and treasured in your living grave.\nThe gifts you humbly took you greatly gave,\nFor solace of the soul in agony,\nWhen through the bars the brutal passions pry,\nAnd mock the bonds of the celestial slave.\n\nYou wandered in the uttermost abyss;\nAnd there, amidst the ashes and the dust,\nYou spoke no word of anger or of pride;\nYou found the prints of steps divine to kiss;\nYou looked right upwards to the stars, you cried:\n_“Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just.”_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "greece": { - "title": "“Greece”", - "body": "The Spring had scattered poppies on the land,\nThe Spring was saying her secret to the breeze;\nIn the translucent shallows of green seas,\nA fisherman, a trident in his hand,\nWas casting shining fishes to the sand,\nAnd wading in the water to his knees;\nAnd still I hear the crickets and the bees,\nThe hidden hoofs, the ringing saraband.\n\nI see the temples above the breaking foam,\nThe pillars pink as dawn in the silver dust;\nThe Parthenon at sunset large and dim,\nSmouldering against the purple mountain’s crust;\nAnd far away on the ocean’s blazing rim,\nThe phantom ship that brought Ulysses home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "a-june-night-in-russia": { - "title": "“A June Night in Russia”", - "body": "A concert. Hark to the prelude’s opening bar!\nPlayed by the sheep bells tinkling on the hill;\nDogs bark and frogs are croaking near the mill,\nThe watchman’s rattle beats the time afar.\nLike water bubbling in a magic jar,\nThe nightingale begins a liquid trill,\nAnother answers; and the world’s so still,\nYou’d think that you could hear that falling star.\n\nI scarcely see for light the stars that swim\nAloof in skies not dark but only dim.\nThe women’s voices echo far away.\nAnd on the road two lovers sing a song:\nThey sing the joy of love that lasts a day:\nThe sorrow of love that lasts a whole life long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "vita-nuova": { - "title": "“Vita Nuova”", - "body": "I watched you in the distance tall and pale,\nLike a swift swallow in a pearly sky;\nYour eyelids drooped like petals wearily,\nYour face was like a lily of the vale.\nYou had the softness of all Summer days,\nThe silver radiance of the twilight hour,\nThe mystery of bluebell-haunted ways,\nThe passion of the white syringa’s flower.\n\nI watched you, and I knew that I had found\nThe long-delaying, long-expected Spring;\nI knew my heart had found a tune to sing;\nThat strength to soar was in my spirit’s wing;\nThat life was full of a triumphant sound,\nThat death could only be a little thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "you-were-blessed": { - "title": "“You Were Blessed”", - "body": "I saw you by the Summer candlelight:--\nYou put to shame the sparkle of the gems,\nThe lights, the flashing of the diadems,\nThe moon and all the stars of Summer night.\nI saw you in the radiant morning hour:--\nYou put to shame the white rose and the red;\nYour chiselled lips, your little lovely head,\nWere fairer than the petals of a flower.\n\nAnd on the shaven surface of the lawn,\nYou moved like music, and you smiled like dawn,--\nThe leaves, the flowers, the dragon-flies, the dew,\nBeside you seemed the stuff of coarser clay;\nAnd all the glory of the Summer day\nA background for the wonder that was you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "guillaume-du-bartas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas", - "birth": { - "year": 1544 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1590 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "gascon", - "language": "gascon", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_de_Salluste_Du_Bartas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "gascon" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-night": { - "title": "“The Night”", - "body": "… The architect of the world ordered that in turn\nDay followed night, night followed day.\nThe night can temper the drought from the day,\nHumidifies our sky and encroaches our guerets;\nNight is the one that with its dark wings\nOn the mute world made with only shadows\nTaste the silence, and sink into the bones\nAnimal recreus a slumbering rest.\nO sweet Night, without toy, without toy the human life\nWould only be a hell, where sorrow, envy,\nPain, greed and a hundred ways of death\nEndlessly torment both our walls and our bodies.\nO Night, you go omitting the mask and the nonsense\nOf which on the human theater in vain we disguise ourselves,\nWhile the day shines: O Night alm, by you\nThe herdsman and the king are made equal at all,\nThe poor and the opulent, the Greek and the Barbarian,\nThe judge and the accused, the learned and the ignorant,\nThe master and the valet, the deformed and the beautiful:\nBecause, Night, you cover everything with your dark coat …", - "metadata": { - "language": "gascon" - } - } - } - }, - "matsuo-basho": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Matsuo Bashō", - "birth": { - "year": 1644 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1694 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "japanese", - "language": "japanese", - "flag": "🇯🇵", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bashō", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "japanese" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "at-a-hermitage": { - "title": "“At a hermitage …”", - "body": "At a hermitage:\n A cool fall night;\ngetting dinner, we peeled\n eggplants, cucumbers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "japanese", - "translator": "Robert Hass", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "awake-at-night": { - "title": "“Awake at night …”", - "body": "awake at night--\nthe sound of a water jar\n cracking in the cold", - "metadata": { - "language": "japanese", - "translator": "Robert Hass", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "four-haiku": { - "title": "“Four haiku”", - "body": "spring:\na hill without a name\nveiled in morning mist\n\nthe beginning of autumn:\nsea and emerald paddy\nboth the same green\n\nthe winds of autumn\nblow: yet still green\nthe chestnut husks\n\na flash of lightning:\ninto the gloom\ngoes the heron’s cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "japanese", - "translator": "Geoffrey Bownas & Anthony Thwaite", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "snowy-morning": { - "title": "“Snowy morning …”", - "body": "snowy morning--\nby myself,\n chewing on dried salmon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "japanese", - "translator": "Robert Hass", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-bee": { - "title": "“A bee”", - "body": "a bee staggers out\nof the peony --\nenough", - "metadata": { - "language": "japanese", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-baudelaire": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Baudelaire", - "birth": { - "year": 1821 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1867 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 45 - }, - "poems": { - "albatross": { - "title": "“Albatross”", - "body": "Often, to amuse themselves, sailors\nsnare that great seabird, the albatross,\nthat flies with these indolent companions as their ship\nglides over the depths of boredom and despair.\n\nOnce they have set their captive on the deck,\nthe king of the sky, awkward and in shame,\npiteously drags along his great white wings,\nlike idle oars bouncing useless on the foam.\n\nThe winged voyager looks foolish now and weak--\nyesterday he was beautiful; today, ugly and ridiculous.\nOne tries to force a burning pipe into his beak.\nAnother mimes the limp of one that used to fly.\n\nThe Poet resembles this prince from the clouds:\nEach hangs in the tempest and laughs at the archer,\nand finds his exile in a circle of hooting humans\nwhere his wide wings are impediments.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Eli Siegel", - "date": { - "year": 1859 - } - } - }, - "all-of-her": { - "title": "“All of Her”", - "body": "The Devil into my high room\nThis morning came to pay a call,\nAnd trying to find me in fault\nSaid: “I should like to know,\n\nAmong all the beautiful things\nWhich make her an enchantress,\nAmong the objects black or rose\nThat compose her charming body,\n\nWhich is the sweetest.”--O my soul!\nYou answered the loathsome Creature:\n“Since in Her all is dittany,\nNo single thing can be preferred.\n\nWhen all delights me, I don’t know\nIf some one thing entrances me.\nShe dazzles like the Dawn\nAnd consoles like the Night;\n\nAnd the harmony that governs\nHer whole body is too lovely\nFor impotent analysis\nTo note its numerous accords.\n\nO mystic metamorphosis\nOf all my senses joined in one!\nHer breath makes music,\nAnd her voice makes perfume!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-bad-monk": { - "title": "“The Bad Monk”", - "body": "Cloisters in former times portrayed on their high walls\nThe truths of Holy Writ with fitting pictures\nWhich gladdened pious hearts and lessened the coldness,\nThe austere appearance, of those monasteries.\n\nIn those days the sowing of Christ’s Gospel flourished,\nAnd more than one famed monk, seldom quoted today,\nTaking his inspiration from the graveyard,\nGlorified Death with naive simplicity.\n\n--My soul is a tomb where, bad cenobite,\nI wander and dwell eternally;\nNothing adorns the walls of that loathsome cloister.\n\nO lazy monk! When shall I learn to make\nOf the living spectacle of my bleak misery\nThe labor of my hands and the love of my eyes?", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "be-drunk": { - "title": "“Be Drunk”", - "body": "You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it--it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.\n\nBut on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.\n\nAnd if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking … ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Louis Simpson", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "beatrice": { - "title": "“Beatrice”", - "body": "One day as I was making complaint to nature\nIn a burnt, ash-gray land without vegetation,\nAnd as I wandered aimlessly, slowly whetting\nUpon my heart the dagger of my thought,\nI saw in broad daylight descending on my head\nA leaden cloud, pregnant with a tempest,\nThat carried a herd of vicious demons\nWho resembled curious, cruel dwarfs.\nThey began to look at me coldly,\nAnd I heard them laugh and whisper to each other,\nExchanging many a sign and many a wink\nLike passers-by who discuss a fool they admire:\n\n--“Let us look leisurely at this caricature,\nThis shade of Hamlet who imitates his posture\nWith indecisive look, hair streaming in the wind.\nIs it not a pity to see this bon vivant,\nThis tramp, this queer fish, this actor without a job,\nBecause he knows how to play skillfully his role,\nWish to interest in the song of his woes\nThe eagles, the crickets, the brooks, and the flowers,\nAnd even to us, authors of that hackneyed drivel,\nBellow the recital of his public tirades?”\n\nI could have (my pride as high as mountains\nDominates the clouds and the cries of the demons)\nSimply turned away my sovereign head\nIf I had not seen in that obscene troop\nA crime which did not make the sun reel in its course!\nThe queen of my heart with the peerless gaze\nLaughing with them at my somber distress\nAnd giving them at times a lewd caress.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "beyond-redemption": { - "title": "“Beyond Redemption”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAn Idea, a Form, a Being\nWhich left the azure sky and fell\nInto a leaden, miry Styx\nThat no eye in Heaven can pierce;\n\nAn Angel, imprudent voyager\nTempted by love of the deformed,\nIn the depths of a vast nightmare\nFlailing his arms like a swimmer,\n\nAnd struggling, mortal agony!\nAgainst a gigantic whirlpool\nThat sings constantly like madmen\nAnd pirouettes in the darkness;\n\nAn unfortunate, enchanted,\nOutstretched hands groping futilely,\nLooking for the light and the key,\nTo flee a place filled with reptiles;\n\nA damned soul descending endless stairs\nWithout banisters, without light,\nOn the edge of a gulf of which\nThe odor reveals the humid depth,\n\nWhere slimy monsters are watching,\nWhose eyes, wide and phosphorescent,\nMake the darkness darker still\nAnd make visible naught but themselves;\n\nA ship caught in the polar sea\nAs though in a snare of crystal,\nSeeking the fatal strait through which\nIt came into that prison;\n\n--Patent symbols, perfect picture\nOf an irremediable fate\nWhich makes one think that the Devil\nAlways does well whatever he does!\n\n\n# II.\n\nSomber and limpid tête-à-tête--\nA heart become its own mirror!\nWell of Truth, clear and black,\nWhere a pale star flickers,\n\nA hellish, ironic beacon,\nTorch of satanical blessings,\nSole glory and only solace\n--The consciousness of doing evil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "benediction": { - "title": "“Bénédiction”", - "body": "When, after a decree of the supreme powers,\nThe Poet is brought forth in this wearisome world,\nHis mother terrified and full of blasphemies\nRaises her clenched fist to God, who pities her:\n\n--“Ah! would that I had spawned a whole knot of vipers\nRather than to have fed this derisive object!\nAccursed be the night of ephemeral joy\nWhen my belly conceived this, my expiation!\n\nSince of all women You have chosen me\nTo be repugnant to my sorry spouse,\nAnd since I cannot cast this misshapen monster\nInto the flames, like an old love letter,\n\nI shall spew the hatred with which you crush me down\nOn the cursed instrument of your malevolence,\nAnd twist so hard this wretched tree\nThat it cannot put forth its pestilential buds!”\n\nThus she gulps down the froth of her hatred,\nAnd not understanding the eternal designs,\nHerself prepares deep down in Gehenna\nThe pyre reserved for a mother’s crimes.\n\nHowever, protected by an unseen Angel,\nThe outcast child is enrapt by the sun,\nAnd in all that he eats, in everything he drinks,\nHe finds sweet ambrosia and rubiate nectar.\n\nHe cavorts with the wind, converses with the clouds,\nAnd singing, transported, goes the way of the cross;\nAnd the Angel who follows him on pilgrimage\nWeeps to see him as carefree as a bird.\n\nAll those whom he would love watch him with fear,\nOr, emboldened by his tranquility,\nEmulously attempt to wring a groan from him\nAnd test on him their inhumanity.\n\nWith the bread and the wine intended for his mouth\nThey mix ashes and foul spittle,\nAnd, hypocrites, cast away what he touches\nAnd feel guilty if they have trod in his footprints.\n\nHis wife goes about the market-places\nCrying: “Since he finds me fair enough to adore,\nI shall imitate the idols of old,\nAnd like them I want to be regilded;\n\nI shall get drunk with spikenard, incense, myrrh,\nAnd with genuflections, viands and wine,\nTo see if laughingly I can usurp\nIn an admiring heart the homage due to God!\n\nAnd when I tire of these impious jokes,\nI shall lay upon him my strong, my dainty hand;\nAnd my nails, like harpies’ talons,\nWill cut a path straight to his heart.\n\nThat heart which flutters like a fledgling bird\nI’ll tear, all bloody, from his breast,\nAnd scornfully I’ll throw it in the dust\nTo sate the hunger of my favorite hound!”\n\nTo Heav’n, where his eye sees a radiant throne,\nPiously, the Poet, serene, raises his arms,\nAnd the dazzling brightness of his illumined mind\nHides from his sight the raging mob:\n\n--“Praise be to You, O God, who send us suffering\nAs a divine remedy for our impurities\nAnd as the best and the purest essence\nTo prepare the strong for holy ecstasies!\n\nI know that you reserve a place for the Poet\nWithin the blessed ranks of the holy Legions,\nAnd that you invite him to the eternal feast\nOf the Thrones, the Virtues, and the Dominations.\n\nI know that suffering is the sole nobility\nWhich earth and hell shall never mar,\nAnd that to weave my mystic crown,\nYou must tax every age and every universe.\n\nBut the lost jewels of ancient Palmyra,\nThe unfound metals, the pearls of the sea,\nSet by Your own hand, would not be adequate\nFor that diadem of dazzling splendor,\n\nFor that crown will be made of nothing but pure light\nDrawn from the holy source of primal rays,\nWhereof our mortal eyes, in their fullest brightness,\nAre no more than tarnished, mournful mirrors!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "a-carcass": { - "title": "“A Carcass”", - "body": "My love, do you recall the object which we saw,\nThat fair, sweet, summer morn!\nAt a turn in the path a foul carcass\nOn a gravel strewn bed,\n\nIts legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,\nBurning and dripping with poisons,\nDisplayed in a shameless, nonchalant way\nIts belly, swollen with gases.\n\nThe sun shone down upon that putrescence,\nAs if to roast it to a turn,\nAnd to give back a hundredfold to great Nature\nThe elements she had combined;\n\nAnd the sky was watching that superb cadaver\nBlossom like a flower.\nSo frightful was the stench that you believed\nYou’d faint away upon the grass.\n\nThe blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,\nFrom which came forth black battalions\nOf maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid\nAll along those living tatters.\n\nAll this was descending and rising like a wave,\nOr poured out with a crackling sound;\nOne would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,\nLived by multiplication.\n\nAnd this world gave forth singular music,\nLike running water or the wind,\nOr the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion\nShake in their winnowing baskets.\n\nThe forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,\nA sketch that slowly falls\nUpon the forgotten canvas, that the artist\nCompletes from memory alone.\n\nCrouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog\nWatched us with angry eye,\nWaiting for the moment to take back from the carcass\nThe morsel he had left.\n\n--And yet you will be like this corruption,\nLike this horrible infection,\nStar of my eyes, sunlight of my being,\nYou, my angel and my passion!\n\nYes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,\nAfter the last sacraments,\nWhen you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,\nTo molder among the bones of the dead.\n\nThen, O my beauty! say to the worms who will\nDevour you with kisses,\nThat I have kept the form and the divine essence\nOf my decomposed love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "confession": { - "title": "“Confession”", - "body": "One time, once only, sweet, amiable woman,\nOn my arm your smooth arm\nRested (on the tenebrous background of my soul\nThat memory is not faded);\n\nIt was late; like a newly struck medal\nThe full moon spread its rays,\nAnd the solemnity of the night streamed\nLike a river over sleeping Paris.\n\nAnd along the houses, under the porte-cocheres,\nCats passed by furtively,\nWith ears pricked up, or else, like beloved shades,\nSlowly escorted us.\n\nSuddenly, in the midst of that frank intimacy\nBorn in the pale moonlight,\nFrom you, sonorous, rich instrument which vibrates\nOnly with radiant gaiety,\n\nFrom you, clear and joyful as a fanfare\nIn the glistening morning light,\nA plaintive note, a bizarre note\nEscaped, faltering\n\nLike a puny, filthy, sullen, horrible child,\nWho would make his family blush,\nAnd whom they have hidden for a long time\nIn a secret cellar.\n\nPoor angel, it sang, your discordant note:\n“That naught is certain here below,\nThat always, though it paint its face with utmost care\nMan’s selfishness reveals itself,\n\nThat it’s a hard calling to be a lovely woman,\nAnd that it is the banal task\nOf the cold and silly danseuse who faints away\nWith a mechanical smile,\n\nThat to build on hearts is a foolish thing,\nThat all things break, love, and beauty,\nTill Oblivion tosses them into his dosser\nTo give them back to Eternity!”\n\nI’ve often evoked that enchanted moon,\nThe silence and the languidness,\nAnd that horrible confidence whispered\nIn the heart’s confessional.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "conversation": { - "title": "“Conversation”", - "body": "You are a lovely autumn sky, clear and rosy!\nBut sadness rises in me like the sea,\nAnd as it ebbs, leaves on my sullen lips\nThe burning memory of its bitter slime.\n\n--In vain does your hand slip over my swooning breast;\nWhat it seeks, darling, is a place plundered\nBy the claws and the ferocious teeth of woman.\nSeek my heart no longer; the beasts have eaten it.\n\nMy heart is a palace polluted by the mob;\nThey get drunk there, kill, tear each other’s hair!\n--A perfume floats about your naked breast! …\n\nO Beauty, ruthless scourge of souls, you desire it!\nWith the fire of your eyes, brilliant as festivals,\nBum these tatters which the beasts spared!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-dancing-serpent": { - "title": "“The Dancing Serpent”", - "body": "Indolent darling, how I love\nTo see the skin\nOf your body so beautiful\nShimmer like silk!\n\nUpon your heavy head of hair\nWith its acrid scents,\nAdventurous, odorant sea\nWith blue and brown waves,\n\nLike a vessel that awakens\nTo the morning wind,\nMy dreamy soul sets sail\nFor a distant sky.\n\nYour eyes where nothing is revealed\nOf bitter or sweet,\nAre two cold jewels where are mingled\nIron and gold.\n\nTo see you walking in cadence\nWith fine abandon,\nOne would say a snake which dances\nOn the end of a staff.\n\nUnder the weight of indolence\nYour child-like head sways\nGently to and fro like the head\nOf a young elephant,\n\nAnd your body stretches and leans\nLike a slender ship\nThat rolls from side to side and dips\nIts yards in the sea.\n\nLike a stream swollen by the thaw\nOf rumbling glaciers,\nWhen the water of your mouth rises\nTo the edge of your teeth,\n\nIt seems I drink Bohemian wine,\nBitter and conquering,\nA liquid sky that scatters\nStars in my heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "dawn-of-the-spirit": { - "title": "“Dawn of the Spirit”", - "body": "When with revelers the white crimson dawn\nComes to join the persistent Ideal,\nThrough the operation of an avenging mystery\nAn angel is awakened in the sated brute.\n\nThe inaccessible blue of Spiritual Skies,\nFor the crushed man who still dreams and suffers,\nOpens and sinks down with the attraction of the abyss.\nThus, dear Goddess, lucid pure Being,\n\nOver the smoky wrecks of stupid orgies\nYour memory more clear, roseate, and charming,\nCeaselessly hovers before my wide-opened eyes.\n\nThe sun has darkened the flame of the candles;\nThus, always conquering, your phantom is like\nThe immortal sun, O soul of splendor!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "dawn": { - "title": "“Dawn”", - "body": "They were sounding reveille in the barracks’ yards,\nAnd the morning wind was blowing on the lanterns.\n\nIt was the hour when swarms of harmful dreams\nMake the sun-tanned adolescents toss in their beds;\nWhen, like a bloody eye that twitches and rolls,\nThe lamp makes a red splash against the light of day;\nWhen the soul within the heavy, fretful body\nImitates the struggle of the lamp and the sun.\nLike a tear-stained face being dried by the breeze,\nThe air is full of the shudders of things that flee,\nAnd man is tired of writing and woman of making love.\n\nHere and there the houses were beginning to smoke.\nThe ladies of pleasure, with eyelids yellow-green\nAnd mouths open, were sleeping their stupefied sleep;\nThe beggar-women, their breasts hanging thin and cold,\nWere blowing on their fires, blowing on their fingers.\nIt was the hour when amid poverty and cold\nThe pains of women in labor grow more cruel;\nThe cock’s crow in the distance tore the foggy air\nLike a sob stifled by a bloody froth;\n\nThe buildings were enveloped in a sea of mist,\nAnd in the charity-wards, the dying\nHiccupped their death-sobs at uneven intervals.\nThe rakes were going home, exhausted by their work.\n\nThe dawn, shivering in her green and rose garment,\nWas moving slowly along the deserted Seine,\nAnd somber Paris, the industrious old man,\nWas rubbing his eyes and gathering up his tools.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-lovers": { - "title": "“The Death of the Lovers”", - "body": "We shall have beds full of subtle perfumes,\nDivans as deep as graves, and on the shelves\nWill be strange flowers that blossomed for us\nUnder more beautiful heavens.\n\nUsing their dying flames emulously,\nOur two hearts will be two immense torches\nWhich will reflect their double light\nIn our two souls, those twin mirrors.\n\nSome evening made of rose and of mystical blue\nA single flash will pass between us\nLike a long sob, charged with farewells;\n\nAnd later an Angel, setting the doors ajar,\nFaithful and joyous, will come to revive\nThe tarnished mirrors, the extinguished flames.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-poor": { - "title": "“The Death of the Poor”", - "body": "It’s Death that comforts us, alas! and makes us live;\nIt is the goal of life; it is the only hope\nWhich, like an elixir, makes us inebriate\nAnd gives us the courage to march until evening;\n\nThrough the storm and the snow and the hoar-frost\nIt is the vibrant light on our black horizon;\nIt is the famous inn inscribed upon the book,\nWhere one can eat, and sleep, and take his rest;\n\nIt’s an Angel who holds in his magnetic hands\nSleep and the gift of ecstatic dreams\nAnd who makes the beds for the poor, naked people;\n\nIt’s the glory of the gods, the mystic granary,\nIt is the poor man’s purse, his ancient fatherland,\nIt is the portal opening on unknown Skies!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "destruction": { - "title": "“Destruction”", - "body": "The Demon is always moving about at my side;\nHe floats about me like an impalpable air;\nI swallow him, I feel him burn my lungs\nAnd fill them with an eternal, sinful desire.\n\nSometimes, knowing my deep love for Art, he assumes\nThe form of a most seductive woman,\nAnd, with pretexts specious and hypocritical,\nAccustoms my lips to infamous philtres.\n\nHe leads me thus, far from the sight of God,\nPanting and broken with fatigue, into the midst\nOf the plains of Ennui, endless and deserted,\n\nAnd thrusts before my eyes full of bewilderment,\nDirty filthy garments and open, gaping wounds,\nAnd all the bloody instruments of Destruction!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "don-juan-in-hell": { - "title": "“Don Juan in Hell”", - "body": "When Don Juan descended to the underground sea,\nAnd when he had given his obolus to Charon,\nThat gloomy mendicant, with Antisthenes’ proud look,\nSeized the two oars with strong, revengeful hands.\n\nShowing their pendent breasts and their unfastened gowns\nWomen writhed and twisted under the black heavens,\nAnd like a great flock of sacrificial victims,\nA continuous groan trailed along in the wake.\n\nSganarelle with a laugh was demanding his wage,\nWhile Don Luis with a trembling finger\nWas showing to the dead, wandering along the shores,\nThe impudent son who had mocked his white brow.\n\nShuddering in her grief, Elvira, chaste and thin,\nNear her treacherous spouse who was once her lover,\nSeemed to implore of him a final, parting smile\nThat would shine with the sweetness of his first promises.\n\nErect in his armor, a tall man carved from stone\nWas standing at the helm and cutting the black flood;\nBut the hero unmoved, leaning on his rapier,\nKept gazing at the wake and deigned not look aside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-enemy": { - "title": "“The Enemy”", - "body": "My youth was a dark storm,\nCrossed here and there by brilliant suns;\nThunder and rain have caused such quick ravage\nThat there remain in my garden very few red fruits.\n\nNow I have touched the autumn of my mind,\nAnd I must use the spade and rakes\nTo assemble again the drenched lands,\nWhere the water digs holes as large as graves.\n\nAnd who knows whether the new flowers I dream of\nWill find in this soil washed like a shore\nThe mystic food which would create their strength?\n\n--О grief! О grief! Time eats away life,\nAnd the dark Enemy who gnaws the heart\nGrows and thrives on the blood we lose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-flawed-bell": { - "title": "“The Flawed Bell”", - "body": "It is bitter and sweet on winter nights\nTo listen by the fire that smokes and palpitates,\nTo distant souvenirs that rise up slowly\nAt the sound of the chimes that sing in the fog.\n\nHappy is the bell which in spite of age\nIs vigilant and healthy, and with lusty throat\nFaithfully sounds its religious call,\nLike an old soldier watching from his tent!\n\nI, my soul is flawed, and when, a prey to ennui,\nShe wishes to fill the cold night air with her songs,\nIt often happens that her weakened voice\n\nResembles the death rattle of a wounded man,\nForgotten beneath a heap of dead, by a lake of blood,\nWho dies without moving, striving desperately.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "gambling": { - "title": "“Gambling”", - "body": "In faded armchairs aged courtesans,\nPale, eyebrows penciled, with alluring fatal eyes,\nSmirking and sending forth from wizened ears\nA jingling sound of metal and of gems;\n\nAround the gaming tables faces without lips,\nLips without color and jaws without teeth,\nFingers convulsed with a hellborn fever\nSearching empty pockets and fluttering bosoms;\n\nUnder dirty ceilings a row of bright lusters\nAnd enormous oil-lamps casting their rays\nOn the tenebrous brows of distinguished poets\nWho come there to squander the blood they have sweated;\n\nThat is the black picture that in a dream one night\nI saw unfold before my penetrating eyes.\nI saw myself at the back of that quiet den,\nLeaning on my elbows, cold, silent, envying,\n\nEnvying the stubborn passion of those people,\nThe dismal merriment of those old prostitutes,\nAll blithely selling right before my eyes,\nOne his ancient honor, another her beauty!\n\nMy heart took fright at its envy of so many\nWretches running fiercely to the yawning chasm,\nWho, drunk with their own blood, would prefer, in a word,\nSuffering to death and hell to nothingness!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-giantess": { - "title": "“The Giantess”", - "body": "At the time when Nature with a lusty spirit\nWas conceiving monstrous children each day,\nI should have liked to live near a young giantess,\nLike a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen.\n\nI should have liked to see her soul and body thrive\nAnd grow without restraint in her terrible games;\nTo divine by the mist swimming within her eyes\nIf her heart harbored a smoldering flame;\n\nTo explore leisurely her magnificent form;\nTo crawl upon the slopes of her enormous knees,\nAnd sometimes in summer, when the unhealthy sun\n\nMakes her stretch out, weary, across the countryside,\nTo sleep nonchalantly in the shade of her breasts,\nLike a peaceful hamlet below a mountainside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "grieving-and-wandering": { - "title": "“Grieving and Wandering”", - "body": "Tell me, does your heart sometimes fly away, Agatha,\nFar from the black ocean of the filthy city,\nToward another ocean where splendor glitters,\nBlue, clear, profound, as is virginity?\nTell me, does your heart sometimes fly away, Agatha?\n\nThe sea, the boundless sea, consoles us for our toil!\nWhat demon endowed the sea, that raucous singer,\nWhose accompanist is the roaring wind,\nWith the sublime function of cradle-rocker?\nThe sea, the boundless sea, consoles us for our toil!\n\nTake me away, carriage! Carry me off, frigate!\nFar, far away! Here the mud is made with our tears!\n--Is it true that sometimes the sad heart of Agatha\nSays: Far from crimes, from remorse, from sorrow,\nTake me away, carriage, carry me off, frigate?\n\nHow far away you are, O perfumed Paradise,\nWhere under clear blue sky there’s only love and joy,\nWhere all that one loves is worthy of love,\nWhere the heart is drowned in sheer enjoyment!\nHow far away you are, O perfumed Paradise!\n\nBut the green Paradise of childhood loves\nThe outings, the singing, the kisses, the bouquets,\nThe violins vibrating behind the hills,\nAnd the evenings in the woods, with jugs of wine\n--But the green Paradise of childhood loves,\n\nThat sinless Paradise, full of furtive pleasures,\nIs it farther off now than India and China?\nCan one call it back with plaintive cries,\nAnd animate it still with a silvery voice,\nThat sinless Paradise full of furtive pleasures?", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "i-am-like-the-king-of-a-rainy-land": { - "title": "“I am like the king of a rainy land …”", - "body": "I am like the king of a rainy land,\nWealthy but powerless, both young and very old,\nWho contemns the fawning manners of his tutors\nAnd is bored with his dogs and other animals.\nNothing can cheer him, neither the chase nor falcons,\nNor his people dying before his balcony.\nThe ludicrous ballads of his favorite clown\nNo longer smooth the brow of this cruel invalid;\nHis bed, adorned with fleurs-de-lis, becomes a grave;\nThe lady’s maids, to whom every prince is handsome,\nNo longer can find gowns shameless enough\nTo wring a smile from this young skeleton.\nThe alchemist who makes his gold was never able\nTo extract from him the tainted element,\nAnd in those baths of blood come down from Roman times,\nAnd which in their old age the powerful recall,\nHe failed to warm this dazed cadaver in whose veins\nFlows the green water of Lethe in place of blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "i-have-more-memories-than-if-id-lived-a-thousand-years": { - "title": "“I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years …”", - "body": "I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.\n\nA heavy chest of drawers cluttered with balance-sheets,\nProcesses, love-letters, verses, ballads,\nAnd heavy locks of hair enveloped in receipts,\nHides fewer secrets than my gloomy brain.\nIt is a pyramid, a vast burial vault\nWhich contains more corpses than potter’s field.\n--I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon,\nIn which long worms crawl like remorse\nAnd constantly harass my dearest dead.\nI am an old boudoir full of withered roses,\nWhere lies a whole litter of old-fashioned dresses,\nWhere the plaintive pastels and the pale Bouchers,\nAlone, breathe in the fragrance from an opened phial.\n\nNothing is so long as those limping days,\nWhen under the heavy flakes of snowy years\nEnnui, the fruit of dismal apathy,\nBecomes as large as immortality.\n--Henceforth you are no more, O living matter!\nThan a block of granite surrounded by vague terrors,\nDozing in the depths of a hazy Sahara\nAn old sphinx ignored by a heedless world,\nOmitted from the map, whose savage nature\nSings only in the rays of a setting sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "i-love-the-naked-ages-long-ago": { - "title": "“I love the naked ages long ago …”", - "body": "I love the thought of those old naked days\nWhen Phoebus gilded torsos with his rays,\nWhen men and women sported, strong and fleet,\nWithout anxiety or base deceit,\nAnd heaven caressed them, amorously keen\nTo prove the health of each superb machine.\nCybele then was lavish of her guerdon\nAnd did not find her sons too gross a burden:\nBut, like a she-wolf, in her love great-hearted,\nHer full brown teats to all the world imparted.\nBold, handsome, strong, Man, rightly, might evince\nPride in the glories that proclaimed him prince--\nFruits pure of outrage, by the blight unsmitten,\nWith firm, smooth flesh that cried out to be bitten.\n\nToday the Poet, when he would assess\nThose native splendours in the nakedness\nOf man or woman, feels a sombre chill\nEnveloping his spirit and his will.\nHe meets a gloomy picture, which be loathes,\nWherein deformity cries out for clothes.\nOh comic runts! Oh horror of burlesque!\nLank, flabby, skewed, pot-bellied, and grotesque!\nWhom their smug god, Utility (poor brats!)\nHas swaddled in his brazen clouts ‘ersatz’\nAs with cheap tinsel. Women tallow-pale,\nBoth gnawed and nourished by debauch, who trail\nThe heavy burden of maternal vice,\nOr of fecundity the hideous price.\n\nWe have (corrupted nations) it is true\nBeauties the ancient people never knew--\nSad faces gnawed by cancers of the heart\nAnd charms which morbid lassitudes impart.\nBut these inventions of our tardy muse\nCan’t force our ailing peoples to refuse\nJust tribute to the holiness of youth\nWith its straightforward mien, its forehead couth,\nThe limpid gaze, like running water bright,\nDiffusing, careless, through all things, like the light\nOf azure skies, the birds, the winds, the flowers,\nThe songs, and perfumes, and heart-warming powers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Roy Campbell", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-worship-you-as-i-worship-the-firmament-of-night": { - "title": "“I worship you as I worship the firmament of night …”", - "body": "I worship you as I worship the firmament of night,\nO urn of sadness, great silent woman,\nAnd love you, beautiful one, the more you flee from me,\nAnd seem to me, ornament of my nights,\nTo accumulate ironically the leagues\nWhich separate my arms from the expanse of blue.\nI advance to the attack, and I climb to the assault,\nAs a chorus of worms climb over a corpse,\nAnd I cherish, O implacable cruel beast,\nEven that coldness by which you are for me more beautiful!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "lethe": { - "title": "“Lethe”", - "body": "Come, lie upon my breast, cruel, insensitive soul,\nAdored tigress, monster with the indolent air;\nI want to plunge trembling fingers for a long time\nIn the thickness of your heavy mane,\n\nTo bury my head, full of pain\nIn your skirts redolent of your perfume,\nTo inhale, as from a withered flower,\nThe moldy sweetness of my defunct love.\n\nI wish to sleep! to sleep rather than live!\nIn a slumber doubtful as death,\nI shall remorselessly cover with my kisses\nYour lovely body polished like copper.\n\nTo bury my subdued sobbing\nNothing equals the abyss of your bed,\nPotent oblivion dwells upon your lips\nAnd Lethe flows in your kisses.\n\nMy fate, hereafter my delight,\nI’ll obey like one predestined;\nDocile martyr, innocent man condemned,\nWhose fervor aggravates the punishment.\n\nI shall suck, to drown my rancor,\nNepenthe and the good hemlock\nFrom the charming tips of those pointed breasts\nThat have never guarded a heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "meditation": { - "title": "“Meditation”", - "body": "Be quiet and more discreet, O my Grief.\nYou cried out for the Evening; even now it falls:\nA gloomy atmosphere envelops the city,\nBringing peace to some, anxiety to others.\n\nWhile the vulgar herd of mortals, under the scourge\nOf Pleasure, that merciless torturer,\nGoes to gather remorse in the servile festival,\nMy Grief, give me your hand; come this way\n\nFar from them. See the dead years in old-fashioned gowns\nLean over the balconies of heaven;\nSmiling Regret rise from the depths of the waters;\n\nThe dying Sun fall asleep beneath an arch, and\nListen, darling, to the soft footfalls of the Night\nThat trails off to the East like a long winding-sheet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "my-former-life": { - "title": "“My Former Life”", - "body": "For a long time I dwelt under vast porticos\nWhich the ocean suns lit with a thousand colors,\nThe pillars of which, tall, straight, and majestic,\nMade them, in the evening, like basaltic grottos.\n\nThe billows which cradled the image of the sky\nMingled, in a solemn, mystical way,\nThe omnipotent chords of their rich harmonies\nWith the sunsets’ colors reflected in my eyes;\n\nIt was there that I lived in voluptuous calm,\nIn splendor, between the azure and the sea,\nAnd I was attended by slaves, naked, perfumed,\n\nWho fanned my brow with fronds of palms\nAnd whose sole task it was to fathom\nThe dolorous secret that made me pine away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "out-of-the-depths-have-i-cried": { - "title": "“Out of the Depths Have I Cried”", - "body": "I beg pity of Thee, the only one I love,\nFrom the depths of the dark pit where my heart has fallen,\nIt’s a gloomy world with a leaden horizon,\nWhere through the night swim horror and blasphemy;\n\nA frigid sun floats overhead six months,\nAnd the other six months darkness covers the land;\nIt’s a land more bleak than the polar wastes\n--Neither beasts, nor streams, nor verdure, nor woods!\n\nBut no horror in the world can surpass\nThe cold cruelty of that glacial sun\nAnd this vast night which is like old Chaos;\n\nI envy the lot of the lowest animals\nWho are able to sink into a stupid sleep,\nSo slowly does the skein of time unwind!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "owls": { - "title": "“Owls”", - "body": "Under the dark yews which shade them,\nThe owls are perched in rows,\nLike so many strange gods,\nDarting their red eyes. They meditate.\n\nWithout budging they will remain\nTill that melancholy hour\nWhen, pushing back the slanting sun,\nDarkness will take up its abode.\n\nTheir attitude teaches the wise\nThat in this world one must fear\nMovement and commotion;\n\nMan, enraptured by a passing shadow,\nForever bears the punishment\nOf having tried to change his place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "poison": { - "title": "“Poison”", - "body": "Wine knows how to adorn the most sordid hovel\nWith marvelous luxury\nAnd make more than one fabulous portal appear\nIn the gold of its red mist\nLike a sun setting in a cloudy sky.\n\nOpium magnifies that which is limitless,\nLengthens the unlimited,\nMakes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness,\nAnd with dark, gloomy pleasures\nFills the soul beyond its capacity.\n\nAll that is not equal to the poison which flows\nFrom your eyes, from your green eyes,\nLakes where my soul trembles and sees its evil side …\nMy dreams come in multitude\nTo slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs.\n\nAll that is not equal to the awful wonder\nOf your biting saliva,\nCharged with madness, that plunges my remorseless soul\nInto oblivion\nAnd rolls it in a swoon to the shores of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "punishment-for-pride": { - "title": "“Punishment for Pride”", - "body": "In that marvelous time in which Theology\nFlourished with the greatest energy and vigor,\nIt is said that one day a most learned doctor\n--After winning by force the indifferent hearts,\nHaving stirred them in the dark depths of their being;\nAfter crossing on the way to celestial glory,\nSingular and strange roads, even to him unknown,\nWhich only pure Spirits, perhaps, had reached,--\nPanic-stricken, like one who has clambered too high,\nHe cried, carried away by a satanic pride:\n“Jesus, little jesus! I raised you very high!\nBut had I wished to attack you through the defect\nIn your armor, your shame would equal your glory,\nAnd you would be no more than a despised fetus!”\n\nAt that very moment his reason departed.\nA crape of mourning veiled the brilliance of that sun;\nComplete chaos rolled in and filled that intellect,\nA temple once alive, ordered and opulent,\nWithin whose walls so much pomp had glittered.\nSilence and darkness took possession of it\nLike a cellar to which the key is lost.\n\nHenceforth he was like the beasts in the street,\nAnd when he went along, seeing nothing, across\nThe fields, distinguishing nor summer nor winter,\nDirty, useless, ugly, like a discarded thing,\nHe was the laughing-stock, the joke, of the children.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "reversibility": { - "title": "“Reversibility”", - "body": "Angel full of gaiety, do you know anguish,\nShame, remorse, sobs, vexations,\nAnd the vague terrors of those frightful nights\nThat compress the heart like a paper one crumples?\nAngel full of gaiety, do you know anguish?\n\nAngel full of kindness, do you know hatred,\nThe clenched fists in the darkness and the tears of gall,\nWhen Vengeance beats out his hellish call to arms,\nAnd makes himself the captain of our faculties?\nAngel full of kindness, do you know hatred?\n\nAngel full of health, do you know Fever,\nWalking like an exile, moving with dragging steps,\nAlong the high, wan walls of the charity ward,\nAnd with muttering lips seeking the rare sunlight?\nAngel full of health, do you know Fever?\n\nAngel full of beauty, do you know wrinkles,\nThe fear of growing old, and the hideous torment\nOf reading in the eyes of her he once adored\nHorror at seeing love turning to devotion?\nAngel full of beauty, do you know wrinkles?\n\nAngel full of happiness, of joy and of light,\nDavid on his death-bed would have appealed for health\nTo the emanations of your enchanted flesh;\nBut of you, angel, I beg only prayers,\nAngel full of happiness, of joy and of light!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "sepulcher": { - "title": "“Sepulcher”", - "body": "If on a dismal, sultry night\nSome good Christian, through charity,\nWill bury your vaunted body\nBehind the ruins of a building\n\nAt the hour when the chaste stars\nClose their eyes, heavy with sleep,\nThe spider will make his webs there,\nAnd the viper his progeny;\n\nYou will hear all year long\nAbove your damned head\nThe mournful cries of wolves\n\nAnd of the half-starved witches,\nThe frolics of lustful old men\nAnd the plots of vicious robbers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "song-of-autumn": { - "title": "“Song of Autumn”", - "body": "# I.\n\nSoon we shall plunge into cold darkness;\nFarewell, strong light of our too brief summers!\nI already hear falling, with funereal thuds,\nThe wood resounding on the pavement of the courtyards.\n\nAll of winter will gather in my being: anger,\nHate, chills, horror, hard and forced labor,\nAnd, like the sun in its polar hell,\nMy heart will be only a red icy block.\n\nI listen shuddering to each log that falls;\nThe scaffold which is being built has not a hollower echo.\nMy mind is like the tower which falls\nUnder the blows of the indefatigable heavy battering ram.\n\nIt seems to me, lulled by the monotonous thuds,\nThat somewhere a casket is being nailed in great haste.\nFor whom? Yesterday it was summer; here is autumn!\nThis mysterious noise sounds like a departure.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI love the green light of your long eyes,\nSweet beauty, but everything today is bitter for me,\nAnd nothing, neither your love, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth,\nIs worth as much to me as the sun shining over the sea.\n\nBut despite all that, love me, tender heart! be maternal,\nEven for an ingrate, even for a wicked man;\nLover or sister, be the passing tenderness\nOf a glorious autumn or of a setting sun.\n\nA brief task! The grave is waiting; it is avid!\nMy head resting on your knees, let me\nEnjoy, as I grieve for the white torrid summer,\nThe yellow gentle ray of the earlier season!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "to-an-auburn-haired-beggar-maid": { - "title": "“To an Auburn-Haired Beggar-Maid”", - "body": "Pale girl with the auburn hair,\nWhose dress through its tears and holes\nReveals your poverty\nAnd your beauty,\n\nFor me, an ailing poet,\nYour body, young and sickly,\nSpotted with countless freckles,\nHas its sweetness.\n\nYou wear with more elegance\nYour wooden clogs than the queen\nIn a romance her sandals\nTrimmed with velvet.\n\nInstead of a scanty rag,\nLet a glittering court dress\nTrail with its long, rustling folds\nOver your heels;\n\nIn place of stockings with holes,\nLet, for the eyes of roués,\nA golden poniard glisten\nIn your garter;\n\nLet ill-tied ribbons give way\nAnd unveil, so we may sin,\nYour two lovely breasts, radiant\nAs shining eyes;\n\nLet your arms demand entreating\nTo uncover your body\nAnd repel with saucy blows\nRoguish fingers,\n\nPearls of the finest water,\nSonnets by Master Belleau\nConstantly offered by swains\nHeld in love’s chains,\n\nPlebeian versifiers\nOffering first books to you\nAnd ogling your slippered foot\nFrom under the stair;\n\nMany a page fond of love’s chance,\nMany a Ronsard and lord\nFor amusement would spy on\nYour chilly hut!\n\nYou could count in your beds\nMore kisses than fleurs-de-lis\nAnd subject to your power\nMany Valois!\n\n--However, you go begging\nSome moldy refuse lying\nOn the steps of some Véfour\nAt the crossroads;\n\nYou go furtively eyeing\nBaubles at twenty-nine sous,\nOf which I can’t, oh! pardon!\nMake you a gift.\n\nGo, with no more adornment,\nPerfume or pearl or diamond,\nThan your slender nudity,\nO my beauty!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "twilight": { - "title": "“Twilight”", - "body": "Behold the sweet evening, friend of the criminal;\nIt comes like an accomplice, stealthily; the sky\nCloses slowly like an immense alcove,\nAnd impatient man turns into a beast of prey.\nO evening, kind evening, desired by him\nWhose arms can say, without lying: “Today\nWe labored!”--It is the evening that comforts\nThose minds that are consumed by a savage sorrow,\nThe obstinate scholar whose head bends with fatigue\nAnd the bowed laborer who returns to his bed.\n\nMeanwhile in the atmosphere malefic demons\nAwaken sluggishly, like businessmen,\nAnd take flight, bumping against porch roofs and shutters.\nAmong the gas flames worried by the wind\nProstitution catches alight in the streets;\nLike an ant-hill she lets her workers out;\nEverywhere she blazes a secret path,\nLike an enemy who plans a surprise attack;\nShe moves in the heart of the city of mire\nLike a worm that steals from Man what he eats.\nHere and there one hears food sizzle in the kitchens,\nThe theaters yell, the orchestras moan;\n\nThe gambling dens, where games of chance delight,\nFill up with whores and cardsharps, their accomplices;\nThe burglars, who know neither respite nor mercy,\nAre soon going to begin their work, they also,\nAnd quietly force open cash-boxes and doors\nTo enjoy life awhile and dress their mistresses.\n\nMeditate, O my soul, in this solemn moment,\nAnd close your ears to this uproar;\nIt is now that the pains of the sick grow sharper!\nSomber Night grabs them by the throat; they reach the end\nOf their destinies and go to the common pit;\nThe hospitals are filled with their sighs.--More than one\nWill come no more to get his fragrant soup\nBy the fireside, in the evening, with a loved one.\n\nHowever, most of them have never known\nThe sweetness of a home, have never lived!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "unslakeable-lust": { - "title": "“Unslakeable Lust”", - "body": "Singular deity, brown as the nights,\nScented with the perfume of Havana and musk,\nWork of some obeah, Faust of the savanna,\nWitch with ebony flanks, child of the black midnight,\n\nI prefer to constance, to opium, to nuits,\nThe nectar of your mouth upon which love parades;\nWhen toward you my desires set out in caravan,\nYour eyes are the cistern that gives drink to my cares.\n\nThrough those two great black eyes, the outlets of your soul,\nO pitiless demon! pour upon me less flame;\nI’m not the River Styx to embrace you nine times,\n\nAlas! and I cannot, licentious Megaera,\nTo break your spirit and bring you to bay\nIn the hell of your bed turn into Proserpine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-vampire": { - "title": "“The Vampire”", - "body": "You who, like the stab of a knife,\nEntered my plaintive heart;\nYou who, strong as a herd\nOf demons, came, ardent and adorned,\n\nTo make your bed and your domain\nOf my humiliated mind\n--Infamous bitch to whom I’m bound\nLike the convict to his chain,\n\nLike the stubborn gambler to the game,\nLike the drunkard to his wine,\nLike the maggots to the corpse,\n--Accurst, accurst be you!\n\nI begged the swift poniard\nTo gain for me my liberty,\nI asked perfidious poison\nTo give aid to my cowardice.\n\nAlas! both poison and the knife\nContemptuously said to me:\n“You do not deserve to be freed\nFrom your accursed slavery,\n\nFool!--if from her domination\nOur efforts could deliver you,\nYour kisses would resuscitate\nThe cadaver of your vampire!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "a-voyage-to-cythera": { - "title": "“A Voyage to Cythera”", - "body": "My heart like a bird was fluttering joyously\nAnd soaring freely around the rigging;\nBeneath a cloudless sky the ship was rolling\nLike an angel drunken with the radiant sun.\n\nWhat is this black, gloomy island?--It’s Cythera,\nThey tell us, a country celebrated in song,\nThe banal Eldorado of old bachelors.\nLook at it; after all, it is a wretched land.\n\n--Island of sweet secrets, of the heart’s festivals!\nThe beautiful shade of ancient Venus\nHovers above your seas like a perfume\nAnd fills all minds with love and languidness.\n\nFair isle of green myrtle filled with full-blown flowers\nEver venerated by all nations,\nWhere the sighs of hearts in adoration\nRoll like incense over a garden of roses\n\nOr like the eternal cooing of wood-pigeons!\n--Cythera was now no more than the barrenest land,\nA rocky desert disturbed by shrill cries.\nBut I caught a glimpse of a singular object!\n\nIt was not a temple in the shade of a grove\nWhere the youthful priestess, amorous of flowers,\nWas walking, her body hot with hidden passion,\nHalf-opening her robe to the passing breezes;\n\nBut behold! as we passed, hugging the shore\nSo that we disturbed the sea-birds with our white sails,\nWe saw it was a gallows with three arms\nOutlined in black like a cypress against the sky.\n\nFerocious birds perched on their feast were savagely\nDestroying the ripe corpse of a hanged man;\nEach plunged his filthy beak as though it were a tool\nInto every corner of that bloody putrescence;\n\nThe eyes were two holes and from the gutted belly\nThe heavy intestines hung down along his thighs\nAnd his torturers, gorged with hideous delights,\nHad completely castrated him with their sharp beaks.\n\nBelow his feet a pack of jealous quadrupeds\nProwled with upraised muzzles and circled round and round;\nOne beast, larger than the others, moved in their midst\nLike a hangman surrounded by his aides.\n\nCytherean, child of a sky so beautiful,\nYou endured those insults in silence\nTo expiate your infamous adorations\nAnd the sins which denied to you a grave.\n\nRidiculous hanged man, your sufferings are mine!\nI felt at the sight of your dangling limbs\nThe long, bitter river of my ancient sorrows\nRise up once more like vomit to my teeth;\n\nBefore you, poor devil of such dear memory\nI felt all the stabbing beaks of the crows\nAnd the jaws of the black panthers who loved so much\nIn other days to tear my flesh to shreds.\n\n--The sky was charming and the sea was smooth;\nFor me thenceforth all was black and bloody,\nAlas! and I had in that allegory\nWrapped up my heart as in a heavy shroud.\n\nOn your isle, O Venus! I found upright only\nA symbolic gallows from which hung my image …\nO! Lord! give me the strength and the courage\nTo contemplate my body and soul without loathing!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "what-will-you-say-tonight-poor-solitary-soul": { - "title": "“What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul …”", - "body": "What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul,\nWhat will you say, my heart, heart once so withered,\nTo the kindest, dearest, the fairest of women,\nWhose divine glance suddenly revived you?\n\n--We shall try our pride in singing her praises:\nThere is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding;\nHer spiritual flesh has the fragrance of Angels,\nAnd when she looks upon us we are clothed with light.\n\nBe it in the darkness of night, in solitude,\nOr in the city street among the multitude,\nHer image in the air dances like a torch flame.\n\nSometimes it speaks and says: “I am fair, I command\nThat for your love of me you love only Beauty;\nI am your guardian Angel, your Muse and Madonna.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "when-a-heavy-lid-of-low-sky": { - "title": "“When a heavy lid of low sky …”", - "body": "# I.\n\nFebruary, peeved at Paris, pours\na gloomy torrent on the pale lessees\nof the graveyard next door and a mortal chill\non tenants of the foggy suburbs too.\n\nThe tiles afford no comfort to my cat\nthat cannot keep its mangy body still;\nthe soul of some old poet haunts the drains\nand howls as if a ghost could hate the cold.\n\nA churchbell grieves, a log in the fireplace smokes\nand hums falsetto to the clock’s catarrh,\nwhile in a filthy reeking deck of cards\n\ninherited from a dropsical old maid,\nthe dapper Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades\ngrimly disinter their love affairs.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSouvenirs?\nMore than if I had lived a thousand years!\n\nNo chest of drawers crammed with documents,\nlove-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,\na lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed,\nhides so many secrets as my brain.\nThis branching catacombs, this pyramid\ncontains more corpses than the potter’s field:\nI am a graveyard that the moon abhors,\nwhere long worms like regrets come out to feed\nmost ravenously on my dearest dead.\nI am an old boudoir where a rack of gowns,\nperfumed by withered roses, rots to dust;\nwhere only faint pastels and pale Bouchers\ninhale the scent of long-unstoppered flasks.\n\nNothing is slower than the limping days\nwhen under the heavy weather of the years\nBoredom, the fruit of glum indifference,\ngains the dimension of eternity …\nHereafter, mortal clay, you are no more\nthan a rock encircled by a nameless dread,\nan ancient sphinx omitted from the map,\nforgotten by the world, and whose fierce moods\nsing only to the rays of setting suns.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI’m like the king of a rainy country, rich\nbut helpless, decrepit though still a young man\nwho scorns his fawning tutors, wastes his time\non dogs and other animals, and has no fun;\nnothing distracts him, neither hawk nor hound\nnor subjects starving at the palace gate.\nHis favorite fool’s obscenities fall flat\n--the royal invalid is not amused--\nand ladies in waiting for a princely nod\nno longer dress indecently enough\nto win a smile from this young skeleton.\nThe bed of state becomes a stately tomb.\nThe alchemist who brews him gold has failed\nto purge the impure substance from his soul,\nand baths of blood, Rome’s legacy recalled\nby certain barons in their failing days,\nare useless to revive this sickly flesh\nthrough which no blood but brackish Lethe seeps.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhen skies are low and heavy as a lid\nover the mind tormented by disgust,\nand hidden in the gloom the sun pours down\non us a daylight dingier than the dark;\n\nwhen earth becomes a trickling dungeon where\nTrust like a bat keeps lunging through the air,\nbeating tentative wings along the walls\nand bumping its head against the rotten beams;\n\nwhen rain falls straight from unrelenting clouds,\nforging the bars of some enormous jail,\nand silent hordes of obscene spiders spin\ntheir webs across the basements of our brains;\n\nthen all at once the raging bells break loose,\nhurling to heaven their awful caterwaul,\nlike homeless ghosts with no one left to haunt\nwhimpering their endless grievances.\n\n--And giant hearses, without dirge or drums,\nparade at half-step in my soul, where Hope,\ndefeated, weeps, and the oppressor Dread\nplants his black flag on my assenting skull.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Richard Howard", - "date": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "you-would-take-the-whole-world-to-bed-with-you": { - "title": "“You would take the whole world to bed with you …”", - "body": "You would take the whole world to bed with you,\nImpure woman! Ennui makes your soul cruel;\nTo exercise your teeth at this singular game,\nYou need a new heart in the rack each day.\nYour eyes, brilliant as shop windows\nOr as blazing lamp-stands at public festivals,\nInsolently use a borrowed power\nWithout ever knowing the law of their beauty.\n\nBlind, deaf machine, fecund in cruelties!\nRemedial instrument, drinker of the world’s blood,\nWhy are you not ashamed and why have you not seen\nIn every looking-glass how your charms are fading?\nWhy have you never shrunk at the enormity\nOf this evil at which you think you are expert,\nWhen Nature, resourceful in her hidden designs,\nMakes use of you, woman, O queen of sin,\nOf you, vile animal,--to fashion a genius?\n\nO foul magnificence! Sublime ignominy!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - } - } - }, - "the-kind-hearted-servant-of-whom-you-were-jealous": { - "title": "“The kind-hearted servant of whom you were jealous …”", - "body": "The kind-hearted servant of whom you were jealous,\nWho sleeps her sleep beneath a humble plot of grass,\nWe must by all means take her some flowers.\nThe dead, ah! the poor dead suffer great pains,\nAnd when October, the pruner of old trees, blows\nHis melancholy breath about their marble tombs,\nSurely they must think the living most ungrateful,\nTo sleep, as they do, between warm, white sheets,\nWhile, devoured by gloomy reveries,\nWithout bedfellows, without pleasant causeries,\nOld, frozen skeletons, belabored by the worm,\nThey feel the drip of winter’s snow,\nThe passing of the years; nor friends, nor family\nReplace the dead flowers that hang on their tombs.\n\nIf, some evening, when the fire-log whistles and sings\nI saw her sit down calmly in the great armchair,\nIf, on a cold, blue night in December,\nI found her ensconced in a corner of my room,\nGrave, having come from her eternal bed\nMaternally to watch over her grown-up child,\nWhat could I reply to that pious soul,\nSeeing tears fall from her hollow eyelids?", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "William Aggeler", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "samuel-beckett": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Samuel Beckett", - "birth": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1989 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "mort-de-a-d": { - "title": "“Mort de A. D.”", - "body": "and there to be there still there\npressed against my old plank scabbed with black\ndays and nights blindly ground\nto being there and to not fleeing and fleeing and being there\nbent toward the avowal of time dying\nof having been what was does what it did\nto me to my friend dead yesterday gleaming eye\nlong teeth panting in his beard devouring\nthe life of saints a life by day of life\nreliving in the night its black sins\ndead yesterday while I lived\nand to be there drinking above the storm\nthe guilt of time irremissible\ngripping the old wood witness to departures\nwitness to returns", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "all-right-all-right-theres-a-land": { - "title": "“all right all right there’s a land …”", - "body": "all right all right there’s a land\nwhere forgetting where forgetting weighs\ngently upon worlds unnamed\nthere the head we shush it the head is mute\nand one knows no but one knows nothing\nthe song of dead mouths dies\non the shore it has made its voyage\nthere is nothing to mourn\n\nmy loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly\nI have the time is what I tell myself I have time\nbut what time famished bone the time of the dog\nof a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky\nof the climbing ray ocellate trembling\nof microns of years of darkness\n\nyou want me to go from A to B I cannot\nI cannot come out I’m in a traceless land\nyes yes it’s a fine thing you’ve got there a mighty fine thing\nwhat is that ask me no more questions\nspiral dust of instants what is this the same\nthe calm the love the hate the calm the calm", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Philip Nikolayev" - } - }, - "to-her-the-calm-act": { - "title": "“to her the calm act …”", - "body": "to her the calm act\nthe savant pores the sex easygoing\nwaiting not too slow regretting not too long the absence\nin the service of presence\na few tatters of azure in the head the points finally dead of the heart\nall the tardy grace of a rain ceasing\nat the fall of a night\nof August\n\nto her empty\nhim pure\nof love", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gustavo-adolfo-becquer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer", - "birth": { - "year": 1836 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1870 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Adolfo_Bécquer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "they-closed-her-eyes": { - "title": "“They Closed Her Eyes”", - "body": "They closed her eyes,\nThey were still open;\nThey hid her face\nWith a white linen,\nAnd some sobbing,\nOthers in silence,\nFrom the sad bedroom\nAll came away.\n\nThe nightlight in a dish\nBurned on the floor;\nIt threw on the wall\nThe bed’s shadow,\nAnd in that shadow\nOne saw some times\nDrawn in sharp line\nThe body’s shape.\n\nThe dawn appeared.\nAt its first whiteness,\nWith its thousand noises,\nThe town awoke.\nBefore that contrast\nOf light and darkness,\nOf life and strangeness,\nI thought a moment.\n _My God, how lonely\n The dead are!_\n\nOn the shoulders of men\nTo church they bore her,\nAnd in a chapel\nThey left her bier.\nThere they surrounded\nHer pale body\nWith yellow candles\nAnd black stuffs.\n\nAt the last stroke\nOf the ringing for the souls\nAn old crone finished\nHer last prayers.\nShe crossed the narrow nave,\nThe doors moaned,\nAnd the holy place\nRemained deserted.\n\nFrom a clock one heard\nThe measured ticking,\nAnd from a candle\nThe guttering.\nAll things there\nWere so dark and mournful,\nSo cold and rigid,\nThat I thought a moment--\n _My God, how lonely\n The dead are!_\n\nFrom the high belfry\nThe tongue of iron\nClanged, giving out\nA last farewell.\nCrape on their clothes,\nHer friends and kindred\nPassed by in line\nIn homage to her.\n\nIn the last vault,\nDark and narrow,\nThe pickaxe opened\nA niche at one end;\nThey laid her away there.\nSoon they bricked the place up,\nAnd with a gesture\nBade grief farewell.\n\nPickaxe on shoulder,\nThe gravedigger,\nSinging between his teeth,\nPassed out of sight.\nThe night came down\nIt was all silent.\nAlone in darkness,\nI thought a moment--\n _My God, how lonely\n The dead are!_\n\nIn the dark nights\nOf bitter winter,\nWhen the wind makes\nThe rafters creak,\nWhen the violent rain\nLashes the windows,\nLonely I remember\nThat poor girl.\n\nThere falls the rain\nWith its noise eternal\nThere the north wind\nFights with the rain.\nStretched in the hollow\nOf the damp bricks,\nPerhaps her bones\nFreeze with the cold.\n\nDoes the dust return to dust?\nDoes the soul fly to heaven?\nOr is all vile matter,\nRottenness, filthiness?\nI know not, but\nThere is something--something--\nSomething which gives me\nLoathing, terror,\nTo leave the dead\nSo alone, so wretched.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "John Masefield", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "joachim-du-bellay": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Joachim du Bellay", - "birth": { - "year": 1522, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1560 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_du_Bellay", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "heavenly-beauty": { - "title": "“Heavenly Beauty”", - "body": "If this our little life is but a day\nIn the Eternal,--if the years in vain\nToil after hours that never come again,--\nIf everything that hath been must decay,\nWhy dreamest thou of joys that pass away,\nMy soul, that my sad body doth restrain?\nWhy of the moment’s pleasure art thou fain?\nNay, thou hast wings,--nay, seek another stay.\n\nThere is the joy whereto each soul aspires,\nAnd there the rest that all the world desires,\nAnd there is love, and peace, and gracious mirth;\nAnd there in the most highest heavens shalt thou\nBehold the Very Beauty, whereof now\nThou worshippest the shadow upon earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "to-a-friend-in-elysium": { - "title": "“To a Friend in Elysium”", - "body": "So long you wandered on the dusky plain,\nWhere flit the shadows with their endless cry,\nYou reach the shore where all the world goes by,\nYou leave the strife, the slavery, the pain;\nBut we, but we, the mortals that remain\nIn vain stretch hands; for Charon sullenly\nDrives us afar, we may not come anigh\nTill that last mystic obolus we gain.\n\nBut you are happy in the quiet place,\nAnd with the learned lovers of old days,\nAnd with your love, you wander ever-more\nIn the dim woods, and drink forgetfulness\nOf us your friends, a weary crowd that press\nAbout the gate, or labour at the oar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "hilaire-belloc": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Hilaire Belloc", - "birth": { - "year": 1870 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french+english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇫🇷 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilaire_Belloc", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english", - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 30 - }, - "poems": { - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "The stranger warmth of the young sun obeying,\nLook! little heads of green begin to grow,\nAnd hidden flowers have dared their tops to show\nWhere late such droughty dusts were rudely playing.\nIt’s not the month, but all the world’s a-maying!\nCome then with me, I’ll take you, for I know\nWhere the first hedgethorns and white windflowers blow:\nWe two alone, that goes without the saying.\n\nThe month has treacherous clouds and moves in fears.\nThis April shames the month itself with smiles:\nIn whose new eyes I know no heaven of tears,\nBut still serene desire and between whiles,\nSo great a look that even April’s grace\nMakes only marvel at her only face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-birds": { - "title": "“The Birds”", - "body": "When Jesus Christ was four years old\nThe angels brought Him toys of gold,\nWhich no man ever had bought or sold.\n\nAnd yet with these He would not play.\nHe made Him small fowl out of clay,\nAnd blessed them till they flew away:\nTu creasti Domine\n\nJesus Christ, Thou child so wise,\nBless mine hands and fill mine eyes,\nAnd bring my soul to Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-check": { - "title": "“The Check”", - "body": "Shall any man for whose dear love another\nHas thrown away his wealth and name in one,\nShall he turn scoffer of a more than brother,\nTo mock his needs when his desires are done?\nOr shall a low-born boy whose mother won him\nIn great men great concerns his little place,\nTurn, when his farthing honours come upon him,\nTo note her yeoman air and conscious grace?\n\nThen mock me as you do my narrow scope,\nFor you it was put out this light of mine,\nTraitrously wrecked my new adventured hope,\nWasted my wordy wealth, spilt my rich wine,\nMade my square ship within a league of shore,\nAlas! to be entombed in seas and seen no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cuckoo": { - "title": "“Cuckoo!”", - "body": "In woods so long time bare.\nCuckoo!\n(Up in Mortain woods, I know not where)\nTwo notes fall.\nYet I do not envy him at all\nHis phantasy.\nCuckoo!\nI too,\nSomewhere,\nI have sang as merrily as he\nWho can dare,\nSmall and careless lover, so to laugh at care,\nAnd who\nCan call\nCuckoo!\nIn woods of winter weary,\nIn scented woods, of winter weary, call\nCuckoo!\nIn woods so long time bare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-death-and-last-confession-of-wandering-peter": { - "title": "“The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter”", - "body": "When Peter Wanderwide was young\nHe wandered everywhere he would:\nAll that he approved was sung,\nAnd most of what he saw was good.\n\nWhen Peter Wanderwide was thrown\nBy Death himself beyond Auxerre,\nHe chanted in heroic tone\nTo priests and people gathered there:\n\n“If all that I have loved and seen\nBe with me on the Judgment Day,\nI shall be saved the crowd between\nFrom Satan and his foul array.”\n\n“Almighty God will surely cry,\n‘St. Michael! Who is this that stands\nWith Ireland in his dubious eye,\nAnd Perigord between his hands,’”\n\n“‘And on his arm the stirrup-thongs,\nAnd in his gait the narrow seas,\nAnd in his mouth Burgundian songs,\nBut in his heart the Pyrenees?’”\n\n“St. Michael then will answer right\n(And not without angelic shame),\n‘I seem to know his face by sight:\nI cannot recollect his name …?’”\n\n“St. Peter will befriend me then,\nBecause my name is Peter too:\n‘I know him for the best of men\nThat ever walloped barley brew.’”\n\n“‘And though I did not know him well\nAnd though his soul were clogged with sin,\nI hold the keys of Heaven and Hell.\nBe welcome, noble Peterkin.’”\n\n“Then shall I spread my native wings\nAnd tread secure the heavenly floor,\nAnd tell the blessed doubtful things\nOf Val d’Aran and Perigord.”\n\nThis was the last and solemn jest\nOf weary Peter Wanderwide.\nHe spoke it with a failing zest,\nAnd having spoken it, he died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "december": { - "title": "“December”", - "body": "Hoar Time about the house betakes him slow,\nSeeking an entry for his weariness;\nAnd in that dreadful company, Distress\nAnd the sad Night with silent footsteps go.\nOn my poor hearth the brands are scarce aglow,\nAnd in the woods without pale wanderers press;\nWhere, waning in the pines from less to less,\nMysterious hangs the hornéd moon, and low.\n\nFor now December, full of aged care,\nComes in upon the year and weakly grieves,\nMumbling his lost desires and his despair;\nAnd with mad, trembling hand still interweaves\nThe dank sear flower-stalks tangled in his hair,\nWhile round about him whirl the rotten leaves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "february": { - "title": "“February”", - "body": "The winter moon has such a quiet car\nThat all the winter nights are dumb with rest;\nShe drives the gradual dark with drooping crest,\nAnd dreams go wandering from her drowsy star.\nBecause her star is silent do not wake:\nBut there shall tremble on the general earth,\nAnd over you, a quickening and a birth,\nThe sun is near the hill-tops for your sake.\n\nThe latest born of all the days shall creep,\nTo kiss the tender eyelids of the year,\nAnd you shall wake, grown young with perfect sleep,\nAnd smile at the new world, and make it dear\nWith living murmurs more than dreams are deep.\nSilence is dead, my Dawn; the morning’s here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "fille-la-haine": { - "title": "“Fille-La-Haine”", - "body": "Death went into the steeple to ring,\nAnd he pulled the rope and he tolled a knell.\nFille-la-Haine, how well you sing!\nWhy are they ringing the Passing Bell?\n_Death went into the steeple to ring;\nFille-la-Haine, how well you sing!_\n\nDeath went down the stream in a boat,\nDown the river of Seine went he;\nFille-la-Haine had a pain in her throat,\nFille-la-Haine was nothing to me.\n_Death went down the stream in a boat;\nFille-la-Haine had a pain in her throat._\n\nDeath went up the hill in a cart\n(I have forgotten her lips and her laughter).\nFille-la-Haine was my sweetheart\n(And all the village was following after).\n_Death went up the hill in a cart;\nFille-la-Haine was my sweetheart._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-harbour": { - "title": "“The Harbour”", - "body": "I was like one who grips the deck by night,\nBearing the tiller up against his breast;\nI was like one who makes with all his might\nFor keeping course although so hardly prest;\nWho veers with veering shock, now east, now west,\nAnd strains his foothold still, and still makes play,\nOf bending beams until the sacred light\nShows him high lands and heralds up the day.\n\nBut now such busy work of battle past,\nI am like one whose barque at bar at last\nComes hardly heeling down the adventurous breeze,\nAnd entering calmer seas,\nI am like one that brings his merchandise\nTo Californian skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-faith": { - "title": "“Her Faith”", - "body": "Because my faltering feet will fail to dare\nThe downward of the endless steps of Hell,\nGive me the word in time that triumphs there.\n\nI too must go into the dreadful hollow,\nWhere all our human laughter stops--and hark!\nThe tiny stuffless voices of the dark\nHave called me, called me till I needs must follow.\n\nGive me the word, and I’ll attempt it well.\n\nSay it’s the little winking of an eye,\nWhich in that issue is uncurtained quite.\nA little sleep that helps a moment by\nBetween the thin dawn and the large daylight.\nOh! tell me more than yet was hoped of men,\nSwear that’s true now, and I’ll believe it then.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-gift-in-a-garden": { - "title": "“Her Gift in a Garden”", - "body": "Not for the luckless buds our roots may bear,\nNow quite in bloom, now seared and cankered lying,\nWill I entreat you, lest they should compare\nMy sad mortality with the fall of flowers;\nBut hold with me your chaste communion rare,\nAnd touch with life this mortal case of ours.\nFor you were born beyond the power of dying:\nI die as bounded things die everywhere.\n\nYou’re full companionship, I’m silence lonely;\nYou’re stuff, I’m void; you’re living, I’m decay.\nI fall, I think, to twilight ending only,\nYou lift, I know, to never-ending day.\nAnd knowing living gift was life for me,\nIn narrow room of rhyme, I fixed it certainly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "her-music": { - "title": "“Her Music”", - "body": "Oh! do not play me music any more,\nLest in us mortal, some not mortal spell\nShould stir strange hopes, and leave a tale to tell\nOf two belovéd whom holy music bore,\nThrough whispering night and doubt’s uncertain seas,\nTo drift at length along a dawnless shore,\nThe last sad goal of human harmonies.\nLook! do not play me music any more.\n\nYou are my music and my mistress both,\nWhy, then, let music play the master here?\nMake silent melody, Melodie. I am loath\nTo find that music, large in my soul’s ear,\nShould stop my fancy, hold my heart in prize,\nAnd make me dreamer more than dreams are wise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-youth": { - "title": "“Her Youth”", - "body": "Youth gave you to me, but I’ll not believe\nThat youth will, taking his quick self, take you.\nYouth’s all our truth; he cannot so deceive;\nHe has our graces--not our own selves too.\nHe still compares with time when he’ll be spent,\nBy human fate enhancing what we are;\nEnriches us with dear experiment,\nLends arms to leaguered age in Time’s rough war.\n\nLook, this youth in us is an old man taking\nA boy to make him wiser than his days.\nSo is our old youth our young ages making,\nSo rich in time his final debt he pays.\nSo with your quite young arms do you me hold,\nAnd I will still be young when all the world’s grown old.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hippopotamus": { - "title": "“The Hippopotamus”", - "body": "I shoot the Hippopotamus\nWith bullets made of platinum,\nBecause if I use leaden ones\nHis hide is sure to flatten ’em.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "homage": { - "title": "“Homage”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThere is a light around your head\nWhich only Saints of God may wear,\nAnd all the flowers on which you tread\nIn pleasaunce more than ours have fed,\nAnd supped the essential air\nWhose summer is a-pulse with music everywhere.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor you are younger than the mornings are\nThat in the mountains break;\nWhen upland shepherds see their only star\nPale on the dawn, and make\nIn his surcease the hours,\nThe early hours of all their happy circuit take.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "january": { - "title": "“January”", - "body": "It freezes. All across a soundless sky\n The birds go home. The horrible dark’s begun:\n The frozen dark that hopes not for a sun;\nThe ultimate dark wherein our race shall die.\n\n Death, with his evil finger to his lip,\nLeers in at human windows, turning spy\nTo learn the country where his rule shall lie\n When he achieves perpetual generalship.\n\n The undefeated enemy--the chill--\nWhich shall benumb the voiceful earth at last,\n Is master of our moment, and has bound\n The viewless wind itself. There is no sound.\nIt freezes. Every friendly stream is fast.\n It freezes; and the graven twigs are still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "june": { - "title": "“June”", - "body": "Rise up, and do begin the day’s adorning;\nThe Summer dark is but the dawn of day.\nThe last of sunset grows into the morning,\nThe morning calls you from the dark away.\nThe holy mist, the white mist of the morning,\nWas wreathing upward on my lonely way.\nMy way was waiting for your own adorning,\nThat should complete the broad adornéd day.\n\nRise up, and do begin the day’s adorning;\nThe little eastern clouds are dapple-gray,\nThere will be wind among the leaves to-day;\nIt is the very promise of the morning.\n_Lux tua via mea._ Your light’s my way:\nOh, do rise up and make it perfect day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-justice-of-the-peace": { - "title": "“The Justice of the Peace”", - "body": "Distinguish carefully between these two,\nThis thing is yours, that other thing is mine.\nYou have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe\nAnd half a coat. I am the Lord benign\nOf fifty hundred acres of fat land\nTo which I have a right. You understand?\n\nI have a right because I have, because,\nBecause I have--because I have a right.\nNow be quite calm and good, obey the laws,\nRemember your low station, do not fight\nAgainst the goad, because, you know, it pricks\nWhenever the uncleanly demos kicks.\n\nI do not envy you your hat, your shoe.\nWhy should you envy me my small estate?\nIt’s fearfully illogical in you\nTo fight with economic force and fate.\nMoreover, I have got the upper hand,\nAnd mean to keep it. Do you understand?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-and-honour": { - "title": "“Love and Honour”", - "body": "Love wooing Honour, Honour’s love did win,\nAnd had his pleasure all a summer’s day.\nNot understanding how the dooms begin,\nLove wooing Honour, wooed her life away.\nThen wandered he for full five years’ unrest,\nUntil, one night, this Honour that had died\nCame as he woke, in youth grown glorified,\nAnd smiling like the saints whom God has blest.\n\nBut when he saw her in the dear night shine\nSerene, with more than mortal light upon her,\nThe boy that careless was of things divine,\nSmall Love, turned penitent to worship Honour.\nSo Love can conquer Honour; when that’s past,\nDead Honour risen outdoes Love at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "may": { - "title": "“May”", - "body": "This is the laughing-eyed amongst them all:\nMy lady’s month. A season of young things.\nShe rules the light with harmony, and brings\nThe year’s first green upon the beeches tall.\nHow often, where long creepers wind and fall\nThrough the deep woods in noonday wanderings,\nI’ve heard the month, when she to echo sings,\nI’ve heard the month make merry madrigal.\n\nHow often, bosomed in the breathing strong\nOf mosses and young flowerets, have I lain\nAnd watched the clouds, and caught the sheltered song--\nWhich it were more than life to hear again--\nOf those small birds that pipe it all day long\nNot far from Marly by the memoried Seine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "November is some historied Emperor,\nConquered in age, but foot to foot with fate,\nWho from his refuge high has caught the roar\nOf squadrons in pursuit, and now, too late,\nStirrups the storm and calls the winds to war,\nAnd arms the garrison of his last heir-loom,\nAnd shakes the sky to its extremest shore\nWith battle against irrevocable doom.\n\nTill, driven and hurled from his strong citadels,\nHe flies in hurrying cloud; and spurs him on\nEmpty of lingerings, empty of farewells\nAnd final benedictions, and is gone.\nBut in my garden all the trees have shed\nTheir legacies of the light, and all the flowers are dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "noel": { - "title": "“Noël”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOn a winter’s night long time ago\n(_The bells ring loud and the bells ring low_),\nWhen high howled wind, and down fell snow\n (Carillon, Carilla).\nSaint Joseph he and Nostre Dame,\nRiding on an ass, full weary came\nFrom Nazareth into Bethlehem.\n And the small child Jesus smile on you.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd Bethlehem inn they stood before\n(_The bells ring less and the bells ring more_),\nThe landlord bade them begone from his door\n (Carillon, Carilla).\n“Poor folk” (says he) “must lie where they may,\nFor the Duke of Jewry comes this way,\nWith all his train on a Christmas Day.”\n And the small child Jesus smile on you.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPoor folk that may my carol hear\n(_The bells ring single and the bells ring clear_),\nSee! God’s one Child had hardest cheer!\n (Carillon, Carilla).\nMen grown hard on a Christmas morn;\nThe dumb beast by and a babe forlorn.\nIt was very, very cold when our Lord was born.\n And the small child Jesus smile on you.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNow these were Jews as Jews must be\n(_The bells ring wild and the bells ring free!_),\nBut Christian men in a band are we\n (Carillon, Carilla).\nEmpty we go and ill bedight,\nSinging Noël on a winter’s night;\nGive us to sup by the warm firelight.\n And the small child Jesus smile on you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "october": { - "title": "“October”", - "body": "Look, how those steep woods on the mountain’s face\nBurn, burn against the sunset; now the cold\nInvades our very noon: the year’s grown old,\nMornings are dark, and evenings come apace.\nThe vines below have lost their purple grace,\nAnd in Forrèze the white wrack backward rolled,\nHangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,\nAnd moaning gusts make desolate all the place.\n\nMine host the month, at thy good hostelry,\nTired limbs I’ll stretch and steaming beast I’ll tether;\nPile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,\nAnd pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;\nSwell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,\nSinging old songs and drinking wine together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "on-the-gift-of-a-book-to-a-child": { - "title": "“On the Gift of a Book to a Child”", - "body": "Child! do not throw this book about!\nRefrain from the unholy pleasure\nOf cutting all the pictures out!\nPreserve it as your chiefest treasure.\n\nChild, have you never heard it said\nThat you are heir to all the ages?\nWhy, then, your hands were never made\nTo tear these beautiful thick pages!\n\nYour little hands were made to take\nThe better things and leave the worse ones:\nThey also may be used to shake\nThe Massive Paws of Elder Persons.\n\nAnd when your prayers complete the day,\nDarling, your little tiny hands\nWere also made, I think, to pray\nFor men that lose their fairylands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-poor-of-london": { - "title": "“The Poor of London”", - "body": "Almighty God, whose Justice, like a sun\nShall coruscate along the floors of heaven:\nRaising what’s low, perfecting what’s undone,\nBreaking the proud, and making odd things even.\nThe Poor of Jesus Christ along the street\nIn your rain sodden, in your snows unshod,\nThey have nor hearth, nor roof, nor daily meat,\nNor even the bread of men; Almighty God.\n\nThe Poor of Jesus Christ whom no man hears\nHave called upon your vengeance much too long.\nWipe out not tears but blood: our eyes bleed tears:\nCome, smite our damnéd sophistries so strong,\nThat thy rude hammer battering this rude wrong\nRing down the abyss of twice ten thousand years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-rebel": { - "title": "“The Rebel”", - "body": "There is a wall of which the stones\nAre lies and bribes and dead men’s bones.\nAnd wrongfully this evil wall\nDenies what all men made for all,\nAnd shamelessly this wall surrounds\nOur homesteads and our native grounds.\n\nBut I will gather and I will ride,\nAnd I will summon a countryside,\nAnd many a man shall hear my halloa\nWho never had thought the horn to follow;\nAnd many a man shall ride with me\nWho never had thought on earth to see\nHigh Justice in her armoury.\n\nWhen we find them where they stand,\nA mile of men on either hand,\nI mean to charge from right away\nAnd force the flanks of their array,\nAnd press them inward from the plains,\nAnd drive them clamouring down the lanes,\nAnd gallop and harry and have them down,\nAnd carry the gates and hold the town.\nThen shall I rest me from my ride\nWith my great anger satisfied.\n\nOnly, before I eat and drink,\nWhen I have killed them all, I think\nThat I will batter their carven names,\nAnd slit the pictures in their frames,\nAnd burn for scent their cedar door,\nAnd melt the gold their women wore,\nAnd hack their horses at the knees,\nAnd hew to death their timber trees,\nAnd plough their gardens deep and through--\nAnd all these things I mean to do\nFor fear perhaps my little son\nShould break his hands, as I have done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-statue": { - "title": "“The Statue”", - "body": "When we are dead, some Hunting-boy will pass\nAnd find a stone half-hidden in tall grass\nAnd grey with age: but having seen that stone\n(Which was your image), ride more slowly on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tarantella": { - "title": "“Tarantella”", - "body": "Do you remember an Inn,\nMiranda?\nDo you remember an Inn?\nAnd the tedding and the spreading\nOf the straw for a bedding,\nAnd the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,\nAnd the wine that tasted of tar?\nAnd the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers\n(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?\nDo you remember an Inn, Miranda,\nDo you remember an Inn?\nAnd the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers\nWho hadn’t got a penny,\nAnd who weren’t paying any,\nAnd the hammer at the doors and the din?\nAnd the hip! hop! hap!\nOf the clap\nOf the hands to the swirl and the twirl\nOf the girl gone chancing,\nGlancing,\nDancing,\nBacking and advancing,\nSnapping of the clapper to the spin\nOut and in--\nAnd the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!\nDo you remember an Inn,\nMiranda?\nDo you remember an Inn?\n\nNever more;\nMiranda,\nNever more.\nOnly the high peaks hoar;\nAnd Aragon a torrent at the door.\nNo sound\nIn the walls of the halls where falls\nThe tread\nOf the feet of the dead to the ground,\nNo sound:\nBut the boom\nOf the far waterfall like doom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-whale": { - "title": "“The Whale”", - "body": "The Whale that wanders round the Pole\nIs not a table fish.\nYou cannot bake or boil him whole,\nNor serve him in a dish;\n\nBut you may cut his blubber up\nAnd melt it down for oil,\nAnd so replace the colza bean\n(A product of the soil).\n\nThese facts should all be noted down\nAnd ruminated on,\nBy every boy in Oxford town\nWho wants to be a Don.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-worlds-end": { - "title": "“The World’s End”", - "body": "The clouds are high and the skies are wide\n(_It’s a weary way to the world’s end_).\nI hear the wind upon a hillside\n(_Over the hills, away_).\n\nOver the hills and over the sea\n(_It’s a weary way to the world’s end_).\nThe woman alone is a-calling me\n(_Over the hills, away_).\n\nBeyond the rim of the rising moon\n(_It’s a weary way to the world’s end_).\nHe’s back too late who starts too soon\n(_Over the hills, away_).\n\nHe’s wise, and he laughs who loves to roam\n(_It’s a weary way to the world’s end_);\nHe’s wise and he cries the when he comes home\n(_Over the hills, away_).\n\nWoman alone, and all alone\n(_It’s a weary way to the world’s end_).\nI’ll just be sitting at home, my own,\nThe world’s a weary way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "andrei-bely": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Andrei Bely", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Bely", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "The windows steamed up.\nIn the yard the moon hangs.\nAnd you stand aimlessly\nbefore the window.\n\nThe wind dies down arguing\nwith the row of gray birches.\nThere has been much sorrow …\nThere have been many tears …\n\nBefore you arises involuntarily\nthe row of abandoned years.\nThe heart is pained; it hurts.\nI am all alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1900, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "My fingers slipped out of your hands.\nYou’re walking away with a frown.\nLook how the birch trees have strewn\nred leaves with the rain of their blood.\n\nPale autumn, cold autumn has spread\nitself over us, reaching up high.\nA barren plain stretching around us\nbreathes a cloud into clear sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Thompson", - "date": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-convict": { - "title": "“The Convict”", - "body": "He ran. Bid farewell to the guards,\nThe earth purpled in the forest.\nHe skulked above the eternal calm,\nSlaking ruthless vengeance.\n\nHe skulked, lifeless staff\nIn cold clenching hand.\nHe stood on the Volga slopes\nAnd dropped to the dear river.\n\nFell on a rock, white-incandescent,\nBundled up in a grey robe.\nLooked at the disheveled clouds.\nLooked at the crimson sunset.\n\nIn spaces, lashed by a flame,\nHung the orphaned smoke,\nCaressing both earth and stone,\nAnd the rusty annuli around feet.\n\nThe iron annuli rang\nAs they fell on the river slope.\nAs they sang on the green slope,\nRattling with dear familiar weeping.\n\nHe was parting for good with Siberia:\nForgive me, my dear gaol,\nWhere years over watery vastness\nI spent exhausted by iron chains.\n\nYears on a stony, naked floor\nWhere he lay as if by habit.\nDown, behind the blind stockade,\nSwayed the gleaming spit;\n\nWhere for years he met with dread\nThe barely trudging days,\nWhere for years with a heavy swing\nHe flung his mallet on flint;\n\nWhere for years so strangely agape\nWas the grin of dying mouths,\nAnd storms splashed and tossed\nThe trembling leafless shrub;\n\nThey cast the clangoring logs,\nBerating, on top of a barge\nAnd close to the shore, evenly,\nThey hauled them, falling to ropes.\n\nWhere he cast life, cursing,\nTo the daring, seething blizzard,\nAnd the biting frost moaned,\nScathing the Taiga with winds,\n\nTearing clothes to tatters,\nCrackling and beating in shrubs;\nShrieking and twisting, entwining,\nSmacking shaved cheeks.\n\nWhere blood showed in foggy cold,\nTo cries and calls of lament,\nFrom the air fell, whistling\nAnd biting, the furious whip,\n\nCleaving to the back, and tearing\nRaw pieces of skin …\nAnd the clouds scowled more gravely\nAnd more gravely sang the sands.\n\nThe crushed shoulders till now\nYou ate away, scar of lead.\nMake way, ye lowery fir trees!\nGo dark, evening scarlet!\n\nThere, nests, like black eyes,\nStaring from a scarp,\nInto the fog of hanging night\nScreechingly shot out swallows.\n\nFitfully with the sign of the cross\nHe blessed his wide forehead.\nDashed through precipitous steeps,\nChurning the leaden waters.\n\nAnd the icy stream clung\nTo the body as prickling glass.\nA lump of muddy earth\nCrumbled above with yellow sand.\n\nLights appeared. And for long\nGlowed from the distant rafts;\nSternly the tenebrous Volga\nCrushed them in foaming surges.\n\nThere, sparks, breezing wearily,\nAscended to drown in the night;\nAnd a wailful song was heard\nThere, in the deep blue mud.\n\nThere, the dark disappeared in a gallop,\nAnd the wind played with wavelets.\nAnd someone shooting a glance\nFrom the clouds winked to the east.\n\nAnd now, quietly over a wave\nHe swayed with a yellow face.\nThe whining gulls languidly\nBrushed against him with their wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrew Stempton", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-hooligans-little-song": { - "title": "“A Hooligan’s Little Song”", - "body": "Once there lived both he and I;\nTo be friends we had to die.\n\nSkeleton, he’d visit me …\nWinters, summers … frequently.\n\nSimple heart and solid bone;\nWe strolled this graveyard alone.\n\nAnd with laughter he’d recall\nThat gay day: our funeral.\n\nHow they bore box behind box …\nHow the priest tagged … over rocks …\n\nCenser smoke filled up the nose.\nFat coachmen made coffin rows.\n\n“Rest with all saints and the Lord”\nThey pressed us down with a board.\n\nOnce there lived he and I … long …\nTil-ly, til-ly, til-ly dong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov", - "date": { - "year": 1906, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "messengers": { - "title": "“Messengers”", - "body": "In fields hopeless and dumb\nDroops the pale-bladed grain;\nIt is dozing and numb\nAmid dreams that are vain …\nWith a high sudden hum\nThe field tosses its mane:\n“Unto us Christ is come!”\nThe wild news shakes the plain.\nLike a wind-beaten drum\nShouts the quivering grain.\n\nThe bells ring soft and slow,\nThere is clamor and pain\nIn the church, and a low\nVoice is lifted again\nThat reiterates: “Woe!”\nTo the poor folk and plain\nAre brought candles aglow:\n“Christ is coming again!”\nBut with voices of woe\nThey file doorward, in pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "on-the-mountains": { - "title": "“On the Mountains”", - "body": "Wedding wreaths crown the mountains.\nI’m ecstatic … I’m young.\nAnd all over my mountains\nSuch a pure chill is hung.\n\nAnd behold--to my rock\nCame a gray-haired hunchback, shuffling-stumbling.\nAnd the gift that he brought\nWas pineapples from an underground dungeon.\n\nO he danced--wearing bright crimson-red.\nPraised the sky’s azure glow.\nHe swept up with his beard\nWhirlwinds of silver-blizzarding snow.\n\nWith a cry\nDeep as gravel\nHe threw into the sky\nThe pineapple.\n\nAnd then arching a line.\nLighting up its environs,\nThe pineapple fell--brilliant with shine\nThrough the unknown,\n\nRadiating a glow\nAs if dew of gold ducats were falling …\nThey agreed down below:\n“It’s a disk of pure flame--a sun shining.”\n\nGolden fountains of fire,\nOr else heavenly dew,\nDew like crystal and red as a pyre,\nBrightly Hew\nDown and bathed the rocks too.\n\nThen I poured out some wine in a glass,\nSneaked aside for a moment,\nAnd I drenched the hunchback\nWith a light, foamy torrent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1906, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "stephen-vincent-benet": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Stephen Vincent Benét", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Vincent_Benét", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "the-city-revisited": { - "title": "“The City Revisited”", - "body": "The grey gulls drift across the bay\nSoftly and still as flakes of snow\nAgainst the thinning fog. All day\nI sat and watched them come and go;\nAnd now at last the sun was set,\nFilling the waves with colored fire\nTill each seemed like a jewelled spire\nThrust up from some drowned city. Soon\nFrom peak and cliff and minaret\nThe city’s lights began to wink,\nEach like a friendly word. The moon\nBegan to broaden out her shield,\nSpurting with silver. Straight before\nThe brown hills lay like quiet beasts\nStretched out beside a well-loved door,\nAnd filling earth and sky and field\nWith the calm heaving of their breasts.\n\nNothing was gone, nothing was changed,\nThe smallest wave was unestranged\nBy all the long ache of the years\nSince last I saw them, blind with tears.\nTheir welcome like the hills stood fast:\nAnd I, I had come home at last.\n\nSo I laughed out with them aloud\nTo think that now the sun was broad,\nAnd climbing up the iron sky,\nWhere the raw streets stretched sullenly\nAbout another room I knew,\nIn a mean house--and soon there, too,\nThe smith would burst the flimsy door\nAnd find me lying on the floor.\nJust where I fell the other night,\nAfter that breaking wave of pain.--\nHow they will storm and rage and fight,\nServants and mistress, one and all,\n“No money for the funeral!”\n\nI broke my life there. Let it stand\nAt that.\nThe waters are a plain,\nHeaving and bright on either hand,\nA tremulous and lustral peace\nWhich shall endure though all things cease,\nFilling my heart as water fills\nA cup. There stand the quiet hills.\nSo, waiting for my wings to grow,\nI watch the gulls sail to and fro,\nRising and falling, soft and swift,\nDrifting along as bubbles drift.\nAnd, though I see the face of God\nHereafter--this day have I trod\nNearer to Him than I shall tread\nEver again. The night is dead.\nAnd there’s the dawn, poured out like wine\nAlong the dim horizon-line.\nAnd from the city comes the chimes--\n\nWe have our heaven on earth--sometimes!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "difference": { - "title": "“Difference”", - "body": "My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it\nUnder a flowing moon until he knew it;\nWinds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,\nAnd states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.\n“Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”\nHere is the strait where eyeless fishes swim\nAbout their buried idol, drowned so cold\nHe weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.\nA country like the dark side of the moon,\nA cider-apple country, harsh and boon,\nA country savage as a chestnut-rind,\nA land of hungry sorcerers.\n Your mind?\n\n--Your mind is water through an April night,\nA cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,\nA lavender as fragrant as your words,\nA room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,\nSewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth\nOf heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,\nFlutters and beats about those lovely things.\nYou are the soul, enchanted with its wings,\nThe single voice that raises up the dead\nTo shake the pride of angels.\n I have said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "lonely-burial": { - "title": "“Lonely Burial”", - "body": "There were not many at that lonely place,\nWhere two scourged hills met in a little plain.\nThe wind cried loud in gusts, then low again.\nThree pines strained darkly, runners in a race\nUnseen by any. Toward the further woods\nA dim harsh noise of voices rose and ceased.\n--We were most silent in those solitudes--\nThen, sudden as a flame, the black-robed priest,\n\nThe clotted earth piled roughly up about\nThe hacked red oblong of the new-made thing,\nShort words in swordlike Latin--and a rout\nOf dreams most impotent, unwearying.\nThen, like a blind door shut on a carouse,\nThe terrible bareness of the soul’s last house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-in-twilight": { - "title": "“Love in Twilight”", - "body": "There is darkness behind the light--and the pale light drips\nCold on vague shapes and figures, that, half-seen loom\nLike the carven prows of proud, far-triumphing ships--\nAnd the firelight wavers and changes about the room,\n\nAs the three logs crackle and burn with a small still sound;\nHalf-blotting with dark the deeper dark of her hair,\nWhere she lies, head pillowed on arm, and one hand curved round\nTo shield the white face and neck from the faint thin glare.\n\nGently she breathes--and the long limbs lie at ease,\nAnd the rise and fall of the young, slim, virginal breast\nIs as certain-sweet as the march of slow wind through trees,\nOr the great soft passage of clouds in a sky at rest.\n\nI kneel, and our arms enlace, and we kiss long, long.\nI am drowned in her as in sleep. There is no more pain.\nOnly the rustle of flames like a broken song\nThat rings half-heard through the dusty halls of the brain.\n\nOne shaking and fragile moment of ecstasy,\nWhile the grey gloom flutters and beats like an owl above.\nAnd I would not move or speak for the sea or the sky\nOr the flame-bright wings of the miraculous Dove!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "may-morning": { - "title": "“May Morning”", - "body": "I lie stretched out upon the window-seat\nAnd doze, and read a page or two, and doze,\nAnd feel the air like water on me close,\nGreat waves of sunny air that lip and beat\nWith a small noise, monotonous and sweet,\nAgainst the window--and the scent of cool,\nFrail flowers by some brown and dew-drenched pool\nPossesses me from drowsy head to feet.\n\nThis is the time of all-sufficing laughter\nAt idiotic things some one has done,\nAnd there is neither past nor vague hereafter.\nAnd all your body stretches in the sun\nAnd drinks the light in like a liquid thing;\nFilled with the divine languor of late spring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "poor-devil": { - "title": "“Poor Devil!”", - "body": "Well, I was tired of life; the silly folk,\nThe tiresome noises, all the common things\nI loved once, crushed me with an iron yoke.\nI longed for the cool quiet and the dark,\nUnder the common sod where louts and kings\nLie down, serene, unheeding, careless, stark,\nNever to rise or move or feel again,\nFilled with the ecstasy of being dead …\n\nI put the shining pistol to my head\nAnd pulled the trigger hard--I felt no pain,\nNo pain at all; the pistol had missed fire\nI thought; then, looking at the floor, I saw\nMy huddled body lying there--and awe\nSwept over me. I trembled--and looked up.\nAbout me was--not that, my heart’s desire,\nThat small and dark abode of death and peace--\nBut all from which I sought a vain release!\nThe sky, the people and the staring sun\nGlared at me as before. I was undone.\nMy last state ten times worse than was my first.\nHelpless I stood, befooled, betrayed, accursed,\nFettered to Life forever, horribly;\nCaught in the meshes of Eternity,\nNo further doors to break or bars to burst!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quality-of-courage": { - "title": "“The Quality of Courage”", - "body": "Black trees against an orange sky,\nTrees that the wind shook terribly,\nLike a harsh spume along the road,\nQuavering up like withered arms,\nWrithing like streams, like twisted charms\nOf hot lead flung in snow. Below\nThe iron ice stung like a goad,\nSlashing the torn shoes from my feet,\nAnd all the air was bitter sleet.\n\nAnd all the land was cramped with snow,\nSteel-strong and fierce and glimmering wan,\nLike pale plains of obsidian.\n--And yet I strove--and I was fire\nAnd ice--and fire and ice were one\nIn one vast hunger of desire.\nA dim desire, of pleasant places,\nAnd lush fields in the summer sun,\nAnd logs aflame, and walls, and faces,\n--And wine, and old ambrosial talk,\nA golden ball in fountains dancing,\nAnd unforgotten hands. (Ah, God,\nI trod them down where I have trod,\nAnd they remain, and they remain,\nEtched in unutterable pain,\nLoved lips and faces now apart,\nThat once were closer than my heart--\nIn agony, in agony,\nAnd horribly a part of me …\nFor Lethe is for no man set,\nAnd in Hell may no man forget.)\n\nAnd there were flowers, and jugs, bright-glancing,\nAnd old Italian swords--and looks,\nA moment’s glance of fire, of fire,\nSpiring, leaping, flaming higher,\nInto the intense, the cloudless blue,\nUntil two souls were one, and flame,\nAnd very flesh, and yet the same!\nAs if all springs were crushed anew\nInto one globed drop of dew!\nBut for the most I thought of heat,\nDesiring greatly … Hot white sand\nThe lazy body lies at rest in,\nOr sun-dried, scented grass to nest in,\nAnd fires, innumerable fires,\nGreat fagots hurling golden gyres\nOf sparks far up, and the red heart\nIn sea-coals, crashing as they part\nTo tiny flares, and kindling snapping,\nBunched sticks that burst their string and wrapping\nAnd fall like jackstraws; green and blue\nThe evil flames of driftwood too,\nAnd heavy, sullen lumps of coke\nWith still, fierce heat and ugly smoke …\n… And then the vision of his face,\nAnd theirs, all theirs, came like a sword,\nThrice, to the heart--and as I fell\nI thought I saw a light before.\n\nI woke. My hands were blue and sore,\nTorn on the ice. I scarcely felt\nThe frozen sleet begin to melt\nUpon my face as I breathed deeper,\nBut lay there warmly, like a sleeper\nWho shifts his arm once, and moans low,\nAnd then sinks back to night. Slow, slow,\nAnd still as Death, came Sleep and Death\nAnd looked at me with quiet breath.\nUnbending figures, black and stark\nAgainst the intense deeps of the dark.\nTall and like trees. Like sweet and fire\nRest crept and crept along my veins,\nGently. And there were no more pains …\n\nWas it not better so to lie?\nThe fight was done. Even gods tire\nOf fighting … My way was the wrong.\nNow I should drift and drift along\nTo endless quiet, golden peace …\nAnd let the tortured body cease.\n\nAnd then a light winked like an eye.\n… And very many miles away\nA girl stood at a warm, lit door,\nHolding a lamp. Ray upon ray\nIt cloaked the snow with perfect light.\nAnd where she was there was no night\nNor could be, ever. God is sure,\nAnd in his hands are things secure.\nIt is not given me to trace\nThe lovely laughter of that face,\nLike a clear brook most full of light,\nOr olives swaying on a height,\nSo silver they have wings, almost;\nLike a great word once known and lost\nAnd meaning all things. Nor her voice\nA happy sound where larks rejoice,\nHer body, that great loveliness,\nThe tender fashion of her dress,\nI may not paint them.\nThese I see,\nBlazing through all eternity,\nA fire-winged sign, a glorious tree!\n\nShe stood there, and at once I knew\nThe bitter thing that I must do.\nThere could be no surrender now;\nThough Sleep and Death were whispering low.\nMy way was wrong. So. Would it mend\nIf I shrank back before the end?\nAnd sank to death and cowardice?\nNo, the last lees must be drained up,\nBase wine from an ignoble cup;\n(Yet not so base as sleek content\nWhen I had shrunk from punishment)\nThe wretched body strain anew!\nLife was a storm to wander through.\nI took the wrong way. Good and well,\nAt least my feet sought out not Hell!\nThough night were one consuming flame\nI must go on for my base aim,\nAnd so, perhaps, make evil grow\nTo something clean by agony …\nAnd reach that light upon the snow …\nAnd touch her dress at last …\nSo, so,\nI crawled. I could not speak or see\nSave dimly. The ice glared like fire,\nA long bright Hell of choking cold,\nAnd each vein was a tautened wire,\nThrobbing with torture--and I crawled.\nMy hands were wounds.\nSo I attained\nThe second Hell. The snow was stained\nI thought, and shook my head at it\nHow red it was! Black tree-roots clutched\nAnd tore--and soon the snow was smutched\nAnew; and I lurched babbling on,\nAnd then fell down to rest a bit,\nAnd came upon another Hell …\nLoose stones that ice made terrible,\nThat rolled and gashed men as they fell.\nI stumbled, slipped … and all was gone\nThat I had gained. Once more I lay\nBefore the long bright Hell of ice.\nAnd still the light was far away.\nThere was red mist before my eyes\nOr I could tell you how I went\nAcross the swaying firmament,\nA glittering torture of cold stars,\nAnd how I fought in Titan wars …\nAnd died … and lived again upon\nThe rack … and how the horses strain\nWhen their red task is nearly done …\n\nI only know that there was Pain,\nInfinite and eternal Pain.\nAnd that I fell--and rose again.\n\nSo she was walking in the road.\nAnd I stood upright like a man,\nOnce, and fell blind, and heard her cry …\nAnd then there came long agony.\nThere was no pain when I awoke,\nNo pain at all. Rest, like a goad,\nSpurred my eyes open--and light broke\nUpon them like a million swords:\nAnd she was there. There are no words.\n\nHeaven is for a moment’s span.\nAnd ever.\nSo I spoke and said,\n“My honor stands up unbetrayed,\nAnd I have seen you. Dear …”\nSharp pain\nClosed like a cloak …\nI moaned and died.\n\nHere, even here, these things remain.\nI shall draw nearer to her side.\n\nOh dear and laughing, lost to me,\nHidden in grey Eternity,\nI shall attain, with burning feet,\nTo you and to the mercy-seat!\nThe ages crumble down like dust,\nDark roses, deviously thrust\nAnd scattered in sweet wine--but I,\nI shall lift up to you my cry,\nAnd kiss your wet lips presently\nBeneath the ever-living Tree.\n\nThis in my heart I keep for goad!\nSomewhere, in Heaven she walks that road.\nSomewhere … in Heaven … she walks … that … road …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-rose-benet": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Rose Benét", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rose_Benét", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-red-country": { - "title": "“The Red Country”", - "body": "In the red country\nThe sky flowers\nAll day.\nStrange mechanical birds\nWith struts of wire and glazed wings\nCross the impassive sky\nWhich burgeons ever and again\nWith ephemeral unfolding flowers,\nWhite and yellow and brown,\nThat spread and dissolve.\nAnd smaller rapid droning birds go by,\nAnd bright metallic bees whose sting is death.\n\nBehind the hills,\nBehind the whispering woods whose leaves are falling\nYellow and red to cover the red clay,\nMisshapen monsters squat with wide black maws\nGulping smoke and belching flame.\nFrom the mirk reed beds of the age of coal,\nWallowing out of their sleep in the earlier slime,\nThey are resurrected and stagger forth to slay--\nThe prehistoric Beasts we thought were dead.\n\nThey are blinded with long sleep,\nBut men with clever weapons\nGoad them to fresh pastures.\nBeside still waters\nThey drink of blood and neigh a horrible laughter,\nAnd their ponderous tread shakes happy cities down,\nAnd the thresh of their flail-like tails\nMakes acres smoulder and smoke\nBlackened of golden harvest.\n\nThe Beasts are back,\nAnd men, in their spreading shadow,\nInhale the odor of their nauseous breath.\nInebriate with it they fashion other gods\nThan the gods of day-dream.\nOf iron and steel are little images\nMade of the Beasts.\nAnd men rush forth and fling themselves for ritual\nBefore these gods, before the lumbering Beasts,--\nAnd some make long obeisance.\n\nUmber and violet flowers of the sky,\nThe sun, like a blazing Mars, clanks across the blue\nAnd plucks you, to fashion into a nosegay\nTo offer Venus, his old-time paramour.\nBut now she shrinks\nAnd pales\nLike Cynthia, her more ascetic sister …\nVulcan came to her arms in the grimy garb\nOf toil, he smelt of the forge and the racketing workshop,\nBut not of blood.\nAnd, if she smells these flowers, they bubble ruby blood\nThat trickles between her fingers.\n\nYet is a dream flowing over the red country,\nYet is a light growing, for all the black furrows of the red country …\nThe machines are foe or friend\nAs the world desires.\nThe Beasts shall sleep again.\nAnd in that sleep, when the land is twilight-still\nAnd men take thought among the frozen waves of the dead,\nThe Sowers go forth once more,\nSowers of vision, sowers of the seed\nOf peace or war.\nShall it be peace indeed?\nGreat shadowy figures moving from hill to hill\nOf tangled bodies, with rhythmic stride and cowled averted head,\nWhat do you sow with hands funereal--\nNew savageries imperial,\nUnthinking pomps for arrogant, witless men?\nOr seed for the people in strong democracy?\nWhat do you see\nWith your secret eyes, and sow for us, that we must reap again?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gottfried-benn": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gottfried Benn", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Benn", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "asters": { - "title": "“Asters”", - "body": "Asters--sweltering days\nold adjuration/curse,\nthe gods hold the balance\nfor an uncertain hour.\n\nOnce more the golden flocks\nof heaven, the light, the trim--\nwhat is the ancient process\nhatching under its dying wings?\n\nOnce more the yearned-for,\nthe intoxication, the rose of you--\nsummer leaned in the doorway\nwatching the swallows--\n\none more presentiment\nwhere certainty is not hard to come by:\nwing tips brush the face of the waters,\nswallows sip speed and night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "cycle": { - "title": "“Cycle”", - "body": "The solitary molar of a whore\nwho had died incognito\nwore a gold filling,\n(The rest had decamped\nas if by silent agreement.)\nThat filling was swiped by the mortician’s mate\nand pawned, so he could go to a dive\nand dance, for, as he put it:\n“Earth alone should return to earth.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Francis Golffing" - } - }, - "divergences": { - "title": "“Divergences”", - "body": "One says: please no inner life,\nmanners by all means, but nothing affective,\nthat’s no compensation\nfor the insufferable\ndifficulties of outward-directed expression--\nthose cerebralized\ncity-Styxes\n\nwhen my little prince\npokes his chubby little legs through the bars of his cot\nit melts my heart, it was like that with Otto Ernst,\nand it’s no different now\n\nthe contraries are not easy to reconcile\nbut when you survey the provinces\nthe inner life\nhas it by a neck.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann" - } - }, - "express-train": { - "title": "“Express Train”", - "body": "Brown. Brandy-brown. Leaf-brown. Russet.\nMalayan yellow.\nExpress train Berlin-Trelleborg and the Baltic resorts.\n\nFlesh that went naked.\nTanned unto the mouth by the sea.\nDeeply ripened for Grecian joys.\nHow far along the summer, in sickle-submissiveness!\nPenultimate day of the ninth month!\n\nParched with stubble and the last corn-shocks.\nUnfurlings, blood, fatigue,\nderanged by dahlia-nearness.\n\nMan-brown jumps on woman-brown.\n\nA woman is something for a night.\nAnd if you enjoyed it, then the next one too!\nO! And then the return to one’s own care.\nThe not-speaking! The urges!\n\nA woman is something with a smell.\nIneffable! To die for! Mignonette.\nShepherd, sea, and South.\nOn every declivity a bliss.\n\nWoman-brown drapes itself on man-brown:\n\nHold me! I’m falling!\nMy neck is so weary.\nOh, the sweet last\nfevered scent from the gardens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 29 - } - } - }, - "fragments": { - "title": "“Fragments”", - "body": "A day without tears is a rare occurrence\nculpable absent-mindedness\npractically an episode\n\nwhen men still wore starched collars,\nand stuffed cotton wool between their toes\nhobbled about in pain, pedicure hadn’t been invented,\nbut you would see faces that were worth a second look\nthose were years when something whispered", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "from-late": { - "title": "From “Late”", - "body": "Feel it--but remember, millennia have felt it--\nthe sea and the beasts and the mindless stars\nwrestle it down today as ever--\n\nthink it--but remember, the most exalted\nare wallowing in their own bow-wave,\nare no more than the yellow of the buttercup,\nwhile other colors too play their game--\n\nremember and endure the hour,\nthere was never one like it, all are like it,\npeople and angels and cherubim,\nblack-winged, bright-eyed,\nnone was yours--\nwas ever yours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "left-the-house": { - "title": "“Left the House”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLeft the house shattered, it hurt so bad,\nso many years as a man, compromise,\nin spite of partial success in intellectual tussle\nhe was never anyone of Olympian allure.\n\nHe walked slowly through the dreamscape\nof the late autumn day, barely distinguishable\nfrom early spring, with young willows\nand a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed.\n\nDreamy exposure to phenomena\nthat to nature in its administration\nof various cycles--young and old alike--\nare inseparably part of a single order--:\n\nso he drank his gin and accepted a dish\nof sausage soup, free on Thursdays\nwith a beverage and so found the Olympian balance\nof sorrow and pleasure.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHe had been reading on the park bench\nand stared into the gray of the last roses,\nthere were no titans, just shrubs\nthinned out by fall.\n\nHe put down his book. It was a day like any other\nand the people were like all people everywhere,\nthat was how it would always be, at least\nthis mixture of death and laughter would persist.\n\nA scent is enough to change things,\neven small flowers stand in some relation to a cedar of Lebanon,\nthen he walked on and saw the windows of the furriers\nwere full of warm things for the winter ahead.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAll very well, a gin and a few minutes\nin the park at noon, with the sun shining,\nbut what when the landlord comes by, there are problems\nwith your tax return, and the girlfriend’s in tears?\n\nShattered: how far are you allowed to push your I,\nand see peculiar things as somehow symptomatic?\nShattered: to what extent are you obliged to play by the rules--\nas far as a Ludwig Richter canvas?\n\nShattered: no one knows. Shattered and you turn\nequally pained to singular and universal--\nyour little experiment with destiny will end\ngloriously and forever, but quite alone.\n\nDamned evergreens! Vinyl whines!\nGin, sun, cedars--what use are they\nto help the self reconcile landlord, God, and dream--\nvoices warble and words mock--\nleft the house and closed his reverie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early", - "weekday": "thursday" - } - } - }, - "no-tears": { - "title": "“No Tears”", - "body": "Roses, Christ knows how they got to be so lovely,\ngreen skies over the city\nin the evening\nin the ephemerality of the years!\n\nThe yearning I have for that time\nwhen one mark thirty was all I had,\nyes, I counted them this way and that,\nI trimmed my days to fit them,\ndays, what am I saying days: weeks on bread and plum mush\nout of earthenware pots\nbrought from my village,\nstill under the rushlight of native poverty,\nhow raw everything felt, how tremblingly beautiful!\n\nWhat good is the luster conferred by European pundits,\nthe great name,\nthe _pour le merite_,\npeople who shoot their cuffs and tool on,\n\nit’s only the ephemeral that’s beautiful,\nlooking back, the poverty,\nthe frowstiness that didn’t know what it was,\nsobs, and stands in line for its dole,\nwhat a wonderful Hades\nthat takes away the frowst,\nand the pundits both--\nplease, no tears,\nno one say: oh, I was so lonesome.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "restaurant": { - "title": "“Restaurant”", - "body": "The gentleman over there orders another pint,\nwell, that’s nice, then I don’t need to worry\nif I have another myself in due course.\nTrouble is, one straightaway thinks one is addicted,\nI even read in an American magazine\nthat every cigarette you smoke takes thirty-six minutes off your life,\nI don’t believe that, presumably it’s the chewing gum industry\nthat’s behind that, or Coca-Cola.\n\nA normal life and a normal death--\nI don’t know what they’re good for. Even a normal life\nends in an unhealthy death. Altogether death\ndoesn’t have a lot to do with health and sickness,\nit merely uses them for its own purposes.\n\nWhat do you mean: death doesn’t have a lot to do with sickness?\nI mean this: a lot of people get sick without dying,\nso what we have before us is something different,\nthe introduction of a variable,\na source of uncertainty,\nnot an open and shut case,\nnot the grim reaper mounted on a bag of bones,\nbut something that observes, sees round corners, exercises restraint,\nand musically plays a different tune.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-shadow-on-the-wall": { - "title": "“A Shadow on the Wall”", - "body": "A shadow on the wall\nboughs stirred by the noonday wind\nthat’s enough earth\nand for the eye\nenough celestial participation.\n\nHow much further do you want to go? Refuse\nthe bossy insistence\nof new impressions--\n\nlie there still,\nbehold your own fields,\nyour estate,\ndwelling especially\non the poppies,\nunforgettable\nbecause they transported the summer--\n\nwhere did it go?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "static-poems": { - "title": "“Static Poems”", - "body": "Deafness to imperatives\nis profundity in the wise man,\nchildren and grandchildren\ndon’t bother him,\ndon’t alarm him.\n\nTo represent a particular outlook,\nto act,\nto travel hither and yon\nare all signs of a world\nthat doesn’t see clearly.\nIn front of my window\n--wise man says--\nis a valley\nwhere shadows pool,\ntwo poplars mark a path,\nleading you will know where to.\n\nPerspective\nis another word for stasis:\nyou draw lines,\nthey ramify\nlike a creeper--\ntendrils explode--\nand they disburse crows in swarms\nin the winter red of early dawns\n\nthen let them settle--\n\nyou will know--for whom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "they-are-human-after-all": { - "title": "“They Are Human After All”", - "body": "They are human after all, you think,\nas the waiter steps up to a table\nout of sight of you,\nreserved, corner table--\nthey too are thin-skinned and pleasure-seeking,\nwith their own feelings and their own sufferings.\n\nYou’re not so all alone\nin your mess, your restlessness, your shakes,\nthey too will be full of doubt, dither, shilly-shallying,\neven if it’s all about making deals,\nthe universal-human\nalbeit in its commercial manifestations,\nbut present there too.\n\nTruly, the grief of hearts is ubiquitous\nand unending,\nbut whether they were ever in love\n(outwith the awful wedded bed)\nburning, athirst, desert-parched\nfor the nectar of a faraway\nmouth,\nsinking, drowning\nin the impossibility of a union of souls--\n\nyou won’t know, nor can you\nask the waiter,\nwho’s just ringing up\nanother bock,\nalways avid for coupons\nto quench a thirst of another nature,\nthough also deep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann" - } - }, - "think-of-the-unsatisfied-ones": { - "title": "“Think of the Unsatisfied Ones”", - "body": "When despair--\nyou who enjoyed great triumphs\nand walked with confidence and the memory\nof many gifts of delirium and dawns\nand unexpected\nturns--\nwhen despair wants you in its grip,\nand threatens you from some unfathomable depth\nwith destruction\nand the guttering out of your flame:\n\nthen think of the unsatisfied ones,\nwith their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions,\nloyal to a few memories\nthat held out little hope,\nwho still bought flowers,\nand with a smile of not much luminosity\nconfided secret desires\nto their small-scale heavens\nthat were soon to be extinguished.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann" - } - }, - "tracing": { - "title": "“Tracing”", - "body": "# i.\n\nO those years! The green light of morning\nand the still unswept pavements of pleasure--\nsummer yelled from every surface of the city\nand supped at a horn\nrefilled from above.\n\nSilent hour. Watery colors\nof a pale green eye’s diluted stream\npictures in that magic green, glass dances,\nshepherds and streams, a dome, pigeons--\nwoven, dispatched, shining, faded--\nmutable clouds of happiness!\n\nSo you faced the day: the font\nwithout bubbles, dawdling\nbuildings and staircases; the houses\nlocked up, it was for you to create\nthe morning, early jasmine,\nits yelps, its incipient aboriginal\nstream--still without end--O those years!\n\nSomething unquenchable in the heart,\ncomplement to heaven and earth;\nplaying to you from reeds and gardens,\nevening storms\ndrenched the brassy umbels,\ndarkly they burst, taut with seeds,\nand sea and strands,\nwimpled with tents,\nfull of burning sand,\nweeks bronzing, tanning everything\nto pelts for kisses landing\nindiscriminately like cloudbursts\nand soon over!\n\nEven then\na weight overhead\ngrapes bunching\nyou pulled down the boughs and let them bounce up,\nonly a few berries\nif you wanted\nfirst--\n\nnot yet so bulging and overhung with\nplate-sized fruit,\nold heavy grape flesh--\n\nO those years!\n\n\n# ii.\n\nDark days of spring,\nunyielding murk in the leaves;\ndrooping lilacs, barely looking up\nnarcissus color, and smelling strongly of death,\nloss of content,\nuntriumphant sadness of the unfulfilled.\n\nAnd in the rain\nfalling on the leaves,\nI hear an old forest song,\nfrom forests I crossed\nand saw again, but I didn’t return\nto the hall where they were singing,\nthe keys were silent,\nthe hands were resting somewhere\napart from the arms that held me,\nmoved me to tears,\nhands from the eastern steppes,\nlong since trampled and bloody--\nonly the forest song\nin the rain\ndark days of spring\nthe everlasting steppes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "whats-bad": { - "title": "“What’s Bad”", - "body": "Not reading English,\nand hearing about a new English thriller\nthat hasn’t been translated.\n\nSeeing a cold beer when it’s hot out,\nand not being able to afford it.\n\nHaving an idea\nthat you can’t encapsulate in a line of Hölderlin,\nthe way the professors do.\n\nHearing the waves beat against the shore on holiday at night,\nand telling yourself it’s what they always do.\n\nVery bad: being invited out,\nwhen your own room at home is quieter,\nthe coffee is better,\nand you don’t have to make small talk.\n\nAnd worst of all:\nnot to die in summer,\nwhen the days are long\nand the earth yields easily to the spade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hofmann", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "zeh-was-a-pharmacist": { - "title": "“Zeh was a pharmacist …”", - "body": "Zeh was a pharmacist,\nor claimed to be,\ntimes were tranquil, people didn’t ask too many questions,\nbut when a new broom came along, it was duly “established that” etc.\nand it all contributed to his downfall.\n\nZeh was an incomparable magician\nshelves full of powders and tinctures\nnot that he had to sell them to you\nyou were persuaded of their efficacy\nin advance.\n\nZeh had mixed up a slimming-cure\ncalled Zeean that you hardly even needed to take\nit worked in your pocket\nyou straightaway started to reduce.\nHe had stuck that preparation in one of the pharmacy windows.\n\nAmong other things you could see there\nherbal teas, pestles and mortars, chatty tips\nfor di- and nocturnal events of an untoward nature\nall of it defying description--\nunrivaled in their suggestiveness\nfrom a psychosomatic point of view\n\nhis like would never be found again\nchildren (not likely!) desunt,\nlong since turfed out of his grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-hugh-benson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Hugh Benson", - "birth": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hugh_Benson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "ave-verum-corpus-natum": { - "title": "“Ave Verum Corpus Natum”", - "body": "Hail, true Body born of Mary,\nWhich for man was crucified;\nLo, the mingled blood and water,\nFlowing from the pierced Side!\n\nLord of Life Who once did’st suffer,\nWhen we draw our latest breath,\nBe to us our Food and succour\nIn the awful hour of death!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "christian-evidences": { - "title": "“Christian Evidences”", - "body": "Now God forbid that Faith be blind assent,\nGrasping what others know; else Faith were nought\nBut learning, as of some far continent\n Which others sought,\nAnd carried thence, better the tale to teach,\nPebbles and shells, poor fragments of the beach.\n\nNow God forbid that Faith be built on dates,\nCursive or uncial letters, scribe or gloss,\nWhat one conjectures, proves, or demonstrates:\n This were the loss\nOf all to which God bids that man aspire,\nThis were the death of life, quenching of fire.\n\nNay, but with Faith I see. Not even Hope,\nHer glorious sister, stands so high as she.\nFor this but stands expectant on the slope\n That leads where He\nHer source and consummation sets His seat,\nWhere Faith dwells always to caress His Feet.\n\nNay, but with Faith I saw my Lord and God\nWalk in the fragrant garden yesterday.\nAh! how the thrushes sang; and, where He trod\n Like spikenard lay\nJewels of dew, fresh-fallen from the sky,\nWhile all the lawn rang round with melody.\n\nNay, but with Faith I marked my Saviour go,\nOne August noonday, down the stifling street\nThat reeked with filth and man; marked from Him flow\n Radiance so sweet,\nThe man ceased cursing, laughter lit the child,\nThe woman hoped again, as Jesus smiled.\n\nNay, but with Faith I sought my Lord last night,\nAnd found Him shining where the lamp was dim;\nThe shadowy altar glimmered, height on height,\n A throne for Him:\nSeen as through lattice work His gracious Face\nLooked forth on me and filled the dark with grace.\n\nNay then, if proof and tortured argument\nContent thee--teach thee that the Lord is there,\nOr risen again; I pray thee be content,\n But leave me here\nWith eye unsealed by any proof of thine,\nWith eye unsealed to know the Lord is mine.\n\nProve if thou wilt, my friend, that Paul is Paul\nAnd Peter Peter: talk till crack of doom;\nMarshal thy facts; yes, yes, l know them all;\n And, spite of gloom,\nOf all the dust and science raised by thee,\nI saw my Lord was there Who smiled on me.\n\nThou dost believe that, ah, so long ago\nHe lived, wrought marvels, and was crucified,\nBecause that Holy Matthew tells thee so?\n I, on my side,\nKnow Him as Love; and Love could not pass by\nAnd leave men sinning--therefore Love must die.\n\nThou dost believe, because He rose again,\nThat Christ is very God? Yet I believe\nHe rose because I see Him walk with men,\n Sinners receive,\nLoose stammering tongues, open the blindest eyes.\nAnd none but God doth so; and God must rise.\n\n“Nay, but I serve Him,” is thy claim, “for yet\nThe faith of some rests all on evidence.\nMen will remember me, while they forget\n Thine eloquence,\nAnd set it by for solid argument;\nLet me serve such, and I am well content.”\n\nEach to his own: yet surely I have read\nHow of two sisters (each to Him was dear),\nOne listened but to what the Saviour said,--\n Thought to be near\nThe Lord Himself were best:--the other ran\nLaid plates, clashed dishes, filled and set the can;\n\nAnd all to serve Him. Yet the Lord preferred\nA quiet face, and that turned up to read\nThe reason of His silence or His word;\n And said indeed\nSomewhat, I fancy, of a better part\nNear to His Feet, but nearer to His Heart.\n\nChoose thou, then, Martha, if thou wilt; perchance\nThe joy of serving is enough for thee.\nLet me choose Mary; yea, love’s arrogance\n Is all for me:\nNay, more than Mary--let me seek His side\nAnd sit by Him in penitential pride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "fulfilment": { - "title": "“Fulfilment”", - "body": "_Fecisti nos ad Te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te_\n\nThe City wakes to fever once again,\nBreathes up her smoke, and restless lies below,\nThirsty for life and eager of her pain;\n See, as the sun goes down\n How all the slumbrous town\nTosses her craving fingers to and fro!\n\nThe sobbing child that breaks her heart at sin,\nThe fool self-centred at his solemn play,\nThe saint that dies without, the knave within,\n Each adds a note, and dies;\n While all about them rise\nThe crashing discords of a world’s dismay.\n\nCome, lift thine eyes from out this dark unrest\nBeyond the bitter mist of tears and blood!\nAbove the vivid fury of the west,\n With radiance softly keen,\n Incredibly serene,\nA star swims high above the phantom flood,\n\nTill in an ordered glory, star by star,\nLeaps into life the wonder of the sky\nAnd in dark vaults, immeasurably far,\n The splendour spreads and breaks,\n And all wide heaven awakes\nAnd earth’s disorders and her tumults die.\n\nCome, lift thine eyes from that disordered heart--\nPities and passions, half-born treacheries,\nFollies and sudden prudence--come apart\n And watch the dark unfold\n Her myriad gates of gold\nTill all thy wailing into wonder dies\n\nSo to the soul that, weary of her pain,\nLooks for her Lord in uttermost despair,\nHe spreads a vision of Himself again;--\n Kindles her ancient creed,\n Lightens the dark indeed,\nAnd writes Himself in glory everywhere.\n\nHere throbs a heart that only lives for love,\nFor warmth and colour, passion and desire,\nCries out for these alone:--and, lo above,\n Opens a vision dim--\n Wide Arms that yearn for him,\nEyes full of longing and a Heart of fire.\n\nHere dwells a subtle mind that seeks to trace\nIn line on line a symmetry and plan,\nTo mark degrees of glory and of grace\n And, lo, all wisdom lies\n Within the tranquil Eyes\nOf that Incarnate Word that dwelt with man.\n\nHere lives a soul that kindles at a tale\nOf noble deeds and daring, fair to see,\nFor very love of fighting glad to fail;--\n And, lo, the hard-won throne\n Of Him that went alone\nTo win it, and a crown, on Calvary.\n\nLo, to the soul that looked for peace on earth,\nAnd lost her yearning with the barren years,\nThere dawns the Star that lit the Saviour’s Birth--\n Broadens, until four-square,\n Gem-built and jewelled fair,\nAs once to John, the Peace of God appears.\n\nNay, but the veriest sinner in his sin\nSeeks but to clasp the life he knows is there,\nDriv’n reckless by the power of God within\n Yet he may rise and gain\n Some harvest of his pain,\nAs Peter rose to pardon through despair.\n\nAh, God is good, Who writes His glory plain\nAbove thee, and about thee at thy side,--\nBids thee look upward from that blinding pain,\n And, ere thy longing tires,\n Kindles His sudden fires.\nLook, and let all thy soul be satisfied!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "a-halt": { - "title": "“A Halt”", - "body": "Lie still, my soul, the Sun of Grace\nIs warm within this garden space\nBeneath tall kindly trees.\nThe quiet light is green and fair;\nA fragrance fills the swooning air;\nLie still, and take thine ease.\n\nThis silent noon of Jesu’s love\nIs warm about thee and above--\nA tender Lord is He.\nLie still an hour--this place is His.\nHe has a thousand pleasaunces,\nAnd each all fair and fragrant is,\nAnd each is all for thee.\n\nThen, Jesu, for a little space\nI rest me in this garden place,\nAll sweet to scent and sight.\nHere, from this high-road scarce withdrawn,\nI thrust my hot hands in the lawn\nCool yet with dew of far-off dawn\nAnd saturate with light.\n\nBut ah, dear Saviour, human-wise,\nI yearn to pierce all mysteries,\nTo catch Thine Hands, and see Thine Eyes\nWhen evening sounds begin.\nThere, in Thy white Robe, Thou wilt wait\nAt dusk beside some orchard gate,\nAnd smile to see me come so late,\nAnd, smiling, call me in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "an-invitation": { - "title": "“An Invitation”", - "body": "Lord take Thine ease within my heart,\nRest here and count Thyself at home\nDo as Thou wilt; rise, set, depart;\nMy Master, not my guest, Thou art\nCome as Thou wilt, but come, Lord, come.\n\nDo Thine own pleasure. Surely, Lord,\nThou art full free to come and go,\nTo lift my sorrow by a word,\nOr pierce me with a sudden sword,\nAnd leave me sobbing in my woe.\n\nCome in broad day, for good or ill,\nIn time of business or of prayer;\nCome in disguise, if so Thy Will\nBe better served, that I may still\nWait on my Lord, though unaware.\n\nCome with the dawn, shine in on me\nAnd wake my soul with welcome light;\nOr let the twilight herald Thee,\nAnd falling dusk Thy shelter be\nTo shroud Thy coming from my sight.\n\nCome by the way beneath the trees\nWhere whispering heath and bracken stir\nThere, where my spirit takes her ease,\nLet that pure scented evening breeze\nWaft me the aloes and the myrrh.\n\nCome, tender Lover, still and bright;\nRose crowned and framed in gracious form\nOr come with terror, and by night,\nThundrous and girt with vivid light,\nA giant striding with the storm.\n\nCome through the Cloister, past the lawn\nAnd laurels where the thin jet plays\nWhere, from the wrangling world withdrawn,\nWaking to silence dawn by dawn,\nMy soul comes forth to studious days.\n\nCome through the carven door, and bring\nA burst of Music through to me;\nOne chord of organ-thundering\nAnd measured song of those that sing,\nDear Saviour, to the praise of Thee.\n\nOr come by some forgotten way\nUntrodden long and overgrown;\nAnd on a sudden on a day\nBurst in; snap web and ivy spray\nThat claim the entrance for their own.\n\nSo many doors, and all divine,\nAnd every latch is loose to Thee;\nSo many paths, and all are Thine\nThat bring Thee to this heart of mine,\nAnd all are therefore dear to me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lauda-sion-salvatorem": { - "title": "“Lauda Sion Salvatorem”", - "body": "Laud, O Sion, thy Salvation,\nLaud in songs of exultation\nThis thy Shepherd and thy King:\nAll thy might in triumph raising\nPraise Him who surpasses praising,\nFar beyond thine honouring.\n\nBe our theme of high thanksgiving\nLiving Bread and source of living\nSet to-day before us here\nBroken at that Supper blessed,\nAs by every mouth confessed,\nFor the brethren gathered there.\n\nLaud be lifted, sweet and sounding,\nRinging from an heart abounding,\nRising into jubilee\nLaud in duteous celebration\nOf this Table’s consecration\nFor such high solemnity.\n\nLo, the King His Law revises;\nNewer truth from elder rises,\nNewer Law and Paschal rite.\nAncient truths their room surrender,\nGlows the twilight into splendour,\nDarkness vanishes in light.\n\nThat He wrought at supper lying\nIn remembrance of His dying\nChrist hath bid His Church renew;\nWe the ordinance obeying,\nEarthly bread and wine displaying,\nConsecrate the Victim due.\n\nNow the sacred truth receiving\nWe, the Bread His Flesh believing\nAnd the Wine His Blood to be,\nWhat tho’ eye and mind be failing,\nNature’s order countervailing\nGrasp by faith the mystery.\n\nUnder diverse kinds concealed\nWhile to sense yet unrevealed\nLies a wonder all-divine\nFlesh and Blood hath each its token\nYet abides their Christ unbroken\nHidden under either sign.\n\nPerfect to the priest who breaks it,\nPerfect in the hand that takes it,\nChrist is undivided there,\nOne or thousands may receive Him\nYet true hearts in truth believe Him\nUnconsumed everywhere.\n\nGood and bad alike partaking\nEach, by diverse lot, is making\nOne to woe and one to weal,\nEach from each is set asunder:\nMark the word of grace and wonder--\nOne to hurt and one to heal.\n\nThus the Lord His Presence hiding\nDwells in many parts abiding,--\nEvery soul in Him confiding\nDoubts not that the Whole is there.\nHe the One remaineth ever\nUnder every part: for never\nAught can Christ from Christ dissever,\nStill abiding everywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "patience": { - "title": "“Patience”", - "body": "I waited for the Lord a little space.\nSo little! in whose sight as yesterday\nPasses a thousand years:--I cried for grace,\nImpatient of delay.\n\nHe waited for me--ah so long! For He\nSees in one single day a loss or gain\nThat bears a fruit through all eternity:--\nMy soul, did He complain?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "plead-thou-my-cause": { - "title": "“Plead Thou My Cause”", - "body": "# I.\n\nPlead Thou my cause, else who will plead for me,\nMy Kingly Advocate before the Throne?\nTrembling I stand; guilty, ashamed, alone,\nGirt only by my own iniquity,\nCried down by sins that fain would silence Thee,\nSome coming after, some to judgment gone.\nWhat I have done, what I have left undone,\nBeckon me out to deathless misery.\n\nThe Court is set, and will not let me go;\nThe heavy books are black with blotted shame.\nI cannot answer; none can plead but Thou.\nI knew not what I did in sinning so;\nHell hungers for me; see, the worm, the flame\nNought but Love’s eloquence can save me now.\n\n\n# II.\n\nPlead Thou my cause; yet let me bear the pain,\nLord, Who hast done so much to ransom me,\nNow that I know how I have wounded Thee,\nAnd crucified Thee, Prince of Life, again.\nYea, let me suffer; Thou wilt not disdain\nTo let me hang beside Thee on the Tree\nAnd taste Thy bitter Cup of agony.\nLet it not be that Thou hast died in vain.\n\nAh, awful Face of Love, bruised by my hand,\nTurn to me, pierce me with Thine eyes of flame,\nAnd give, me deeper knowledge of my sin.\nSo let me grieve and, when I understand\nHow great my guilt, my ruin, and my shame,\nOpen Thy Sacred Heart and let me in!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - }, - "savonarola-moriturus": { - "title": "“Savonarola Moriturus”", - "body": "Death! It is death, dear death, whom I sought so long\nOn the rack, on the stairs, in the cell,\nDeath that I feared, half-feared, when my brain was strong,\n And my heart was well.\nNow I am sickened of life, if life be this,\nDeath comes as dear as a bride\nDying is rest from the flesh, and dying is bliss\n With Thee at my side.\n\n“Faint heart, poor soul,” do they say, “to recant at a pain,\nTo repent at the turn of a screw!”\nAh, I ask pardon of God again and again,\n And pardon from you!\nCan the brain balance and weigh when the sinews are rent,\nIs there room but for agony there?\nWhat if the lips have lied, did the heart consent\n In that night of despair?\nSlow rocked the rafters above as I blinked in my pain\nWith the tears and the sweat in my eyes\nTorn was my heart on the rack, and entangled my brain;\n Is there cause for surprise?\n\nVisions! What visions? I know not, but leave them to Him\nWho allowed me to dream of a day\nWhen a world that is weary with sorrow, whose longings are dim\n And dumb with delay,\nShall look to this city and cry for that secret of hers\nThat should shine in her eyes, on her lips.\nNay, but I dreamed of too much! the wisest man errs,\n The surest foot slips.\nYet is it wonder I dreamed that the King of the sky\nShould be King of the earth that He trod?\nNay, He was King for a moment in Florence, and I\n Gave glory to God.\n\nYea, is it wonder I dreamed that the Saviour could save,\nAs I saw in the twilight below\nGod’s light a-glimmer on faces in transept and nave?\n Who could know, who could know\nSoon--ah so soon--that the glimmer would change to a glare\nAnd the stillness to noisy contempt--\nNave where they listened would yield to the bellowing square,\n And the dream that I dreamt\nFade in this bitter awakening? Bitter the ban\nOf the Church that I love. Yet I cry\nMercy of God: for the mercies or curses of man\n Shall be nought by and by.\nNaked I came from Him, naked return I again\nTo my God through a fiery door;\nBack, earth to earth, go I through a portal of pain.\n Can friar do more?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-teresian-contemplative": { - "title": "“The Teresian Contemplative”", - "body": "She moves in tumult; round her lies\nThe silence of the world of grace;\nThe twilight of our mysteries\nShines like high noonday on her face\nOur piteous guesses, dim with fears,\nShe touches, handles, sees, and hears.\n\nIn her all longings mix and meet;\nDumb souls through her are eloquent;\nShe feels the world beneath her feet\nThrill in a passionate intent\nThrough her our tides of feeling roll\nAnd find their God within her soul.\n\nHer faith the awful Face of God\nBrightens and blinds with utter light;\nHer footsteps fall where late He trod\nShe sinks in roaring voids of night\nCries to her Lord in black despair,\nAnd knows, yet knows not, He is there.\n\nA willing sacrifice she takes\nThe burden of our fall within;\nHoly she stands; while on her breaks\nThe lightning of the wrath of sin\nShe drinks her Saviour’s cup of pain,\nAnd, one with Jesus, thirsts again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "visions-of-the-night": { - "title": "“Visions of the Night”", - "body": "_Libera me a terrore nocturno a negotio\nPerambulante in tenebris … custodi\nanimam meam O Domine visitans me\nvisitatione sanctorum revela mihi animum\nin visionibus noctis_\n\nEre yet I slept, the summer night\nLay vague and mellow in the gloom\nBeyond the steady candlelight.\nThe moth came tapping on the pane,\n Intent on doom.\nThen sank into the night again.\n\nThen, as I lie, the darkened walls\nGrow dim; the sheets are turned to air,\nAs fold on fold the slumber falls.\nThe ticking clock grows dumb with sleep\n And everywhere\nAbout the soul slow pauses creep.\n\nThe sense contracts from form and space--\nShrinks to a speck within the brain--\nThen opens on a wider place\nThat knows no law, no harmony;\n Till once again\nA newer world is born for me.\n\nMy spirit moves in dark dismay\nAbout a house of misty halls:\nI hear the shuddering branches sway\nAt gable-corners; on the floor\n And on the walls\nThe firelight glimmers through the door.\n\nI sit and talk beside the bed,\nGrasp hands, and meet the living eyes,\nOf one whom I had fancied dead\nSome ten years back “How strange,” I say\n In glad surprise,\n“That we should meet again to-day!”\n\nHe smiles for answer sudden then\nI understand the mystery\nOf dying, for the sons of men\nAnd wonder where the sadness lay\n To see him die\nLast year--or was it yesterday?\n\nAll passes;--down long corridors,\nThat lead about this wilderness,\nFall footsteps tramping on the floors,\nThat come from nowhere and are gone\n Yet none the less\nI run in panting terror on.\n\nHere is a lawn with beds and grass;\nThe birds sing shrilly in the air,\nWhile multitudes pass and re-pass,\nWho fill me with unknown distress,\n That holds me there\nTo mark their swift unweariedness.\n\nAnd so with eyes that ache to close,\nAnd feet that fly and flag in turn,\nAbout, about, my spirit goes.\nIn wondrous wise from deep to deep,\n Before me burn\nThe crumbling pageantries of sleep.\n\nO Lord of Light, who gav’st me breath,\nAnd set’st my spirit ill at ease\nWithin the body of this death,\nWhat means this dreaming rush and rout--\n These phantasies\nBorn from within and seen without?\n\nSince ghost and devil, foe and friend\nThrong--shadows on this shadow-stage--\nMove from no source and seek no end--\nSince all the passions born of fear\n Terror and rage,\nAs in a looking-glass appear;\n\nWhy com’st Thou not Thyself, O Lord,\nTo still the tossing of the brain,\nAnd calm with one imperious word\nThis storm of fancy under Thee,\n And yet again\nBid peace, as once in Galilee?\n\nCome, Lord; and if through toilsome days\nI pray in dumb perplexity,\nAnd strive to lift my wearied praise,--\nYet let me rest when night is deep,\n And look on Thee\nThe Lord of waking and of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bernard-of-clairvaux": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux", - "birth": { - "year": 1090 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1153 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Clairvaux", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-loving-souls-jubilation": { - "title": "“The Loving Soul’s Jubilation”", - "body": "Jesus, the very thought of Thee,\nwith sweetness fills my breast,\nbut sweeter far Thy face to see,\nand in Thy presence rest.\n\nNor voice can sing, nor heart can frame,\nnor can the memory find\na sweeter sound than Thy blest name,\no Savior of mankind.\n\nO hope of every contrite heart\no joy of all the meek,\nto those who fall, how kind Thou art!\nhow good to those who seek!\n\nBut what to those who find? Ah this\nnor tongue nor pen can show:\nthe love of Jesus, what it is\nnone but His loved ones know.\n\nJesu, our only joy be Thou,\nAs Thou our prize wilt be:\nJesu, be Thou our glory now,\nAnd through eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_bernard_of_clairvaux" - } - } - } - } - }, - "daniel-berrigan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Daniel Berrigan", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2016 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "consolation": { - "title": "“Consolation”", - "body": "Listen\nif now and then\nyou hear the dead\nmuttering like ashes\ncreaking like empty\nrockers on porches\n\nfilling you in filling you in\n\nlike winds in empty\nbranches like a star\nin wintry trees\nso far\nso good\n\nyou’ve mastered finally\none foreign tongue", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "credentials": { - "title": "“Credentials”", - "body": "I would it were possible to state in so\nfew words my errand in the world: quite simply\nforestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves\nlargehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order\ndecrees, says solemnly who he is\nin the great thrusting limbs that are all finally\none: a return, a permanent riverandsea.\n\nSo the rose is its own credential, a certain\nunattainable effortless form: wearing its heart\nvisibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fullness and fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "prayer-on-the-6-pm-subway": { - "title": "“Prayer on the 6 P.M. Subway”", - "body": "unsteady\nmy prayer mounts or falls why do I\nwaste so want so\nO make room\nin the kingdom of light for lack lusters\namong the austere and severe\nfor malfunctioning men\nonly this to their credit NO GREAT HARM DONE\nonly passage writes\nMAYBE on water\n\nnevertheless\nmight make it yet\nwho knows who knows\nwhether some hour\nturns us on\nunbelievable\nas Christ’s new somersaulting\nstart his words his heart", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "saint-john-baptist": { - "title": "“Saint John Baptist”", - "body": "In the mirror a sword made descending\nbriefer than image a stream carries\nbeyond, I saw John old: eyes cold, hair silver.\n_Look how I save you,_ sang the blade strongly:\n_freedman: do not upbear on shoulder\ndwarfing honors, prophecies by rote,\na stalemate heart._ I caught in two hands\nthis unripe storm-shaken fruit, by hate\n(by love) tossed down. Held it for thanksgiving\nto taste at soul’s mouth its salt vigor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_baptist" - } - } - }, - "suburban-prayer": { - "title": "“Suburban Prayer”", - "body": "Grant us for grace\noppositions, stimyings\nsand in our pet gears\na bubble in the cozy blood\n\nCrowd our real estate\nwith the rag tag real, the world.\nMarry us off, lonely girls\nto Harlem and Asia. This Lent\ncelebrate in the haunted house, the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "wendell-berry": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wendell Berry", - "birth": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 33 - }, - "poems": { - "before-dark": { - "title": "“Before Dark”", - "body": "From the porch at dusk I watched\na kingfisher wild in flight\nhe could only have made for joy.\n\nHe came down the river, splashing\nagainst the water’s dimming face\nlike a skipped rock, passing\n\non down out of sight. And still\nI could hear the splashes\nfarther and farther away\n\nas it grew darker. He came back\nthe same way, dusky as his shadow,\nsudden beyond the willows.\n\nThe splashes went on out of hearing.\nIt was dark then. Somewhere\nthe night had accommodated him\n\n--at the place he was headed for\nor where, led by his delight,\nhe came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-burial-of-the-old": { - "title": "“The Burial of the Old”", - "body": "The old, whose bodies encrust their lives,\ndie, and that is well.\nThey unhinder what has struggled in them.\n\nThe light, painfully loved, that narrowed\nand darkened in their minds\nbecomes again the sky.\n\nThe young, who have looked on dying,\nturn back to the world, grown strangely\nalert to each other’s bodies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-country-town-in-early-summer-morning": { - "title": "“The Country Town in Early Summer Morning”", - "body": "The town has grown here, angular\nand white on its hill pelted\nwith thickets, in the passage\nof a darkness; the houses, two-ranked,\nperistyle of morning’s long shade\na thing of nature, made\ndeviously in all the black\nfilled hollows of its time, its\nhistory of acts and briars.\nIt rose up with the first\nsinging and light to surprise\nits dreamers. Among declivities\nand groves of the inert hill,\nchanneled and splined by the\nseasonal escapade of streams,\nwhere its graves and garbage\nchoke the ravines, old shoes\nin a milling of stones commemorate\nthe town laid waste. By morning’s\ninstantaneous contrivance, mottled\nshade and light, the day upholds\ncarved orange lilies in a calm\ndreamers no longer dream but know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-country-of-marriage": { - "title": "“The Country of Marriage”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI dream of you walking at night along the streams\nof the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs\nof birds opening around you as you walk.\nYou are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThis comes after silence. Was it something I said\nthat bound me to you, some mere promise\nor, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?\nA man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood\nstill and said nothing. And then there rose in me,\nlike the earth’s empowering brew rising\nin root and branch, the words of a dream of you\nI did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer\nwho feels the solace of his native land\nunder his feet again and moving in his blood.\nI went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped\nmy track was there to steady me. It was no abyss\nthat lay before me, but only the level ground.\n\n\n# III.\n\nSometimes our life reminds me\nof a forest in which there is a graceful clearing\nand in that opening a house,\nan orchard and garden,\ncomfortable shades, and flowers\nred and yellow in the sun, a pattern\nmade in the light for the light to return to.\nThe forest is mostly dark, its ways\nto be made anew day after day, the dark\nricher than the light and more blessed,\nprovided we stay brave\nenough to keep on going in.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHow many times have I come to you out of my head\nwith joy, if ever a man was,\nfor to approach you I have given up the light\nand all directions. I come to you\nlost, wholly trusting as a man who goes\ninto the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend\nslowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace\nin you, when I arrive at last.\n\n\n# V.\n\nOur bond is no little economy based on the exchange\nof my love and work for yours, so much for so much\nof an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are--\nthat puts us in the dark. We are more together\nthan we know, how else could we keep on discovering\nwe are more together than we thought?\nYou are the known way leading always to the unknown,\nand you are the known place to which the unknown is always\nleading me back. More blessed in you than I know,\nI possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing\nnot belittled by my saying that I possess it.\nEven an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing\na man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only\naccept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light\nenough to live, and then accepts the dark,\npassing unencumbered back to the earth, as I\nhave fallen tine and again from the great strength\nof my desire, helpless, into your arms.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nWhat I am learning to give you is my death\nto set you free of me, and me from myself\ninto the dark and the new light. Like the water\nof a deep stream, love is always too much. We\ndid not make it. Though we drink till we burst\nwe cannot have it all, or want it all.\nIn its abundance it survives our thirst.\nIn the evening we come down to the shore\nto drink our fill, and sleep, while it\nflows through the regions of the dark.\nIt does not hold us, except we keep returning\nto its rich waters thirsty. We enter,\nwilling to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nI give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,\ncontaining darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.\nI give you the life I have let live for the love of you:\na clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,\nthe young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life\nthat we have planted in the ground, as I\nhave planted mine in you. I give you my love for all\nbeautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself\nagain and again, and satisfy--and this poem,\nno more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dead-calf": { - "title": "“The Dead Calf”", - "body": "Dead at the pasture edge,\nhis head is without eyes, becalmed\non the grass. There was no escaping\nthe heaviness that came on him,\nthe darkness that rose\nunder his belly as though he stood\nin a black sucking pool.\nEarth’s weight grew in him,\nand he lay down. As he died\na great bird took his eyes.\n\nWhere is the horror in it?\nNot in him, for he came to it\nas a shadow into the night.\nIt was nameless and familiar.\nHe was fitted to it. In me\nis where the horror is. In my mind\nhe does not yield. I cannot believe\nthe deep peace that has come to him.\nI am afraid that where the light\nis torn there is a wound.\nThere is a darkness in the soul\nthat loves the eyes. There is a light\nin the mind that sees only light\nand will not enter the darkness.\n\nBut I would have a darkness\nin my mind like the dark\nthe dead calf makes for a time\non the grass where he lies, and will make\nin the earth as he is carried down.\nMay all dead things lie down in me\nand be at peace, as in the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "do-not-be-ashamed": { - "title": "“Do Not Be Ashamed”", - "body": "You will be walking some night\nin the comfortable dark of your yard\nand suddenly a great light will shine\nround about you, and behind you\nwill be a wall you never saw before.\nIt will be clear to you suddenly\nthat you were about to escape,\nand that you are guilty: you misread\nthe complex instructions, you are not\na member, you lost your card\nor never had one. And you will know\nthat they have been there all along,\ntheir eyes on your letters and books,\ntheir hands in your pockets,\ntheir ears wired to your bed.\nThough you have done nothing shameful,\nthey will want you to be ashamed.\nThey will want you to kneel and weep\nand say you should have been like them.\nAnd once you say you are ashamed,\nreading the page they hold out to you,\nthen such light as you have made\nin your history will leave you.\nThey will no longer need to pursue you.\nYou will pursue them, begging forgiveness.\nThey will not forgive you.\nThere is no power against them.\nIt is only candor that is aloof from them,\nonly an inward clarity, unashamed,\nthat they cannot reach. Be ready.\nWhen their light has picked you out\nand their questions are asked, say to them:\n“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon\nwill come around you. The heron will begin\nhis evening flight from the hilltop.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAll day our eyes could find no resting place.\nOver a flood of snow sight came back\nEmpty to the mind. The sun\nIn a shutter of clouds, light\nStaggered down the fall of snow.\nAll circling surfaces of earth were white.\nNo shape or shadow moved the flight\nOf winter birds. Snow held earth its silence.\nWe could pick no birdsong from the wind.\nAt nightfall our father turned his eyes away.\nIt was this storm of silence shook out his ghost.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWe sleep; he only wakes\nWho is unshapen in a night of snow.\nHis shadow in the shadow of the earth,\nMoves the dark to wholeness.\nWe watch beside his body here, his image\nShape of silence in the room.\n\n\n# III.\n\n Sifting\nDown the wind the winter rain\nSpirals about the town\nAnd the church hill’s jut of stones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "enemies": { - "title": "“Enemies”", - "body": "If you are not to become a monster,\nyou must care what they think.\nIf you care what they think,\n\nhow will you not hate them,\nand so become a monster\nof the opposite kind? From where then\n\nis love to come--love for your enemy\nthat is the way of liberty?\nFrom forgiveness. Forgiven, they go\n\nfree of you, and you of them;\nthey are to you as sunlight\non a green branch. You must not\n\nthink of them again, except\nas monsters like yourself,\npitiable because unforgiving.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-future": { - "title": "“For the Future”", - "body": "Planting trees early in spring,\nwe make a place for birds to sing\nin time to come. How do we know?\nThey are singing here now.\nThere is no other guarantee\nthat singing will ever be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "grace": { - "title": "“Grace”", - "body": "The woods is shining this morning.\nRed, gold and green, the leaves\nlie on the ground, or fall,\nor hang full of light in the air still.\nPerfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes\nthe place it has been coming to forever.\nIt has not hastened here, or lagged.\nSee how surely it has sought itself,\nits roots passing lordly through the earth\nSee how without confusion it is\nall that it is, and how flawless\nits grace is. Running or walking, the way\nis the same. Be still. Be still.\n“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-habit-of-waking": { - "title": "“The Habit of Waking”", - "body": "_Do you not know, O speech, how\nthe buds beneath you are folded?_\n\n# I.\n\nSnow, melting, leaves the landscape pied;\nwaking, in vacancy like a dream, withdraws\nthe cloth of sleep; the false earth of winter\nrecedes, is dried, on the dead grass, the merging green;\n\nwhite, unthawed, along the drains, marks\nthe conjectural forking, down-gathering\nof a river. Bulked at troughs, cattle feed\nin the provisional enclosure of the farmer’s mind.\n\nFlocks birth in the female barns. Green\nfevers in the black woods. The wind, now,\nmakes purpose of its accidents, becoming mild;\nthe weather’s dispassionate benevolence,\n\nreturning, stirs the mind again\nto the ancient perilous advancement. Stripped\nof the old cumulus of growths, cessations,\ndreams, the house completes its seasonal closure,\n\nhaving forestalled the winter, sheltering\nas needful, its divisive entrances armed\nagainst cold; having held a compacted light\ntokening, in excess of necessity, joy:\n\nat the window’s interior the scarlet bloom\nof tulips has burned and glowed in the reflected\nlight of snow. The inward and outward house,\ncontainment of that gentleness, and its defense,\nis continent of the intellect, venturing\n\nwith its dreams into the weather’s judgment.\nThe young spring, returning, turns\nthe transparency of windows outward;\nforked cherry branches figure the barren glass,\n\nunleaved. We prepare this vacancy a little\nfor the coming of spring; the tree is cut back\nfor a fuller blooming, heavier fruit.\nThis waking wakes, advances to a new\n\nenvisionment, the old renewal of desire.\nThe mind lays claim to its summer,\ndreams a perfect ripening, weighted harvest,\nin the sun’s cruel beneficence, foreshadowing\n\nharsher culminations, sterner quittances.\nWaking is a leaf, a hand, a light--envisioning\nwhite hands among foliage, red fruit, gathering.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIt’s a weather of engines,\nalso, into which spring comes\n--among the sounds of traffic\nat the roadside, where bloom\nthe yellow first jonquils;\na drift of snow melted there\na week ago--now it’s\njust the memory of snow\ndraws back from the yellow\ncup-lips. The traffic goes by,\nthe engines unwearying\nas weather, gathering places,\ntires pelting the asphalt,\nmoving to destinations\neach way; the jonquils\nbloom in their silence\nand yellow. It’s the wind\nthat stirs them, the wind at large\nover the hill now becoming\ngreen under the heavy weather\nof March and the weather of engines;\nthe hill leans back to the root\nof the wind, the flowerheads\nlean away; having come a long\njourney, unbroken, the wind\nis voluble and strong, taking\nits hurdles, surrounding the\nstolid fenceposts along the roadway,\ncrossing the stream of traffic\nwhich crosses the wind.\n\nThe color of the jonquils\nhas to do with the weather\nof March--a cool yellow,\nreceptive of the smallest\nlight, the frailest warmth;\nand has to do, by its silence,\npurely, with the sounds\nof engines--acceptive; the plant\ndares its bloom above ground\nto be lovely, or trampled.\nThe life in it is its motive.\n\nWakened and touched\nby the thin yellow of jonquils,\nthe house stands in the cross-grain\nof wind and the roadway, in transversed\ndistances comprehending cities\n--approached, approaching.\nThe house stands in a vision\nof journeys bearing recognitions\ntoward it; and in all degrees\nrecognizes and is recognized\nby who comes to it, and who passes.\nThe house and the city, though\nthe bulk of a continent balks\nbetween them, have to do\nwith one another; the knowledge\nof one is a knowledge of the other,\nacknowledges the other.\n\nIn the same dark wherein\nthe periled jonquils remain\n--and the traffic beats on\nbetween cities, continuing\ninto the tunnel of headlights\nparting the embankments, entering\ndistance as by the force of light\nblooming, entering the violable\nblossoming of the desire\nof the place of arrival or the place\nof sleep--a dark craft, vaulting\nits possible crash, arches\nits mathematic trajectory\nover the house, its lights\nlighted, a tentative constellation\nmarking one height of the sky.\nBut it measures\none depth of darkness also,\nand circumscribes the paltry known;\nits course is a severance\nabove which lights are meaningless.\nAnd outward from that fight hunt\nthe made moons of our darkness\nand desire, their circuits\nticking and aware, leaning\nto the void; our listening strains\ninto the galaxial silence\nbeyond expectancy, unmeaning,\nwishing to hear.\n\nAnd in the selfsame dark\nthe creeks, in the aftermath\nof the first heavy rains,\nare audible to the hilltop\n--the wash of sound entering\nthe consciousness of walls.\nAmong the soaked grasses\nalong the down-meaning streams\nin the weather of engines\nthe old singing of the frogs\nbegins. The dark breeds\ndawn, a deeper melting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-handing-down": { - "title": "“The Handing Down”", - "body": "# I. _The Conversation_\n\nSpeaker and hearer, words\nmaking a passage between them,\nbegin a community. Two minds\n\nin succession, grandfather\nand grandson, they sit and talk\non the enclosed porch,\n\nlooking out at the town, which\ntakes its origin in their talk\nand is carried forward.\n\n\nTheir conversation has\nno pattern of its own,\nbut alludes casually\n\nto a shaped knowledge\nin the minds of the two men\nwho love each other.\n\nThe quietness of knowing in common\nis half of it. Silences come into it\neasily, and break it\n\nwhile the old man thinks\nor concentrates on his pipe\nand the strong smoke\n\nclimbs over the brim of his hat.\nHe has lived a long time.\nHe has seen the changes of times\n\nand grown used to the world\nagain. Having been wakeful so long,\nthe loser of so many years,\n\nhis mind moves back and forth,\nsorting and counting,\namong all he knows.\n\nHis memory has become huge,\nand surrounds him,\nand fills his silences.\n\nHe lifts his head\nand speaks of an old day\nthat amuses him or grieves him\n\nor both …\nUnder the windows opposite them\nthere’s a long table, loaded\n\nwith potted plants, the foliage\nstaining and shadowing the daylight\nas it comes in.\n\n\n# II. _The New House_\n\nAt the foot of his long shadow\nhe walked across the town\nearly in the morning\n\nto watch the carpenters at work\non a new house. Their saws released\nthe warm pine-smell into the air\n\n--the scent of time to come, freshly\nopened. He was comforted by that,\nand by the new unblemished wood\n\nThat times goes, making\nthe jointures of households, for better\nor worse, is no comfort.\n\nThat, for the men and women\nstill to be born, time is coming\nis a comfort of sorts.\n\nThat there’s a little of the good\nleft over from a few lives\nis a comfort of sorts.\n\nHe has grown eager\nin his love for the good dead\nand all the unborn.\n\nThat failed hope\ndoesn’t prove the failure of hope\nis a comfort of sorts.\n\nGrown old and wise, he takes\nwhat comfort he can get, as gladly as once\nhe’d have taken the comfort he wished for.\n\nFor a man knowing evil--how surely\nit grows up in any ground and makes seed--\nthe building of a house is a craft indeed.\n\n\n# III. _The Heaviness of His Wisdom_\n\nThe incredible happens, he knows.\nThe worst possibilities are real.\nThe terrible justifies\n\nhis dread of it. He knows winter\ndespondences, the mind inundated\nby its excrement, hope gone\n\nand not remembered.\nAnd he knows vernal transfigurations,\nthe sentence in the stems of trees\n\nnoisy with old memory made new,\ntroubled with the seed\nof the being of what has not been.\n\nHe trusts the changes of the sun and air:\ndung and carrion made dirt,\nrichness that forgets what it was.\n\nHe knows, if he can hold out\nlong enough, the good\nis given its chance.\n\nhe has dreamed of a town\nfit for the abiding of souls\nand bodies that might live forever.\n\nHe has seen it as in a far off\nwhite and gold evening\nof summer, the black flight\n\nof swifts turning above it\nin the air. There’s a clarity\nin which he hasn’t become clear,\n\nhis body dragging a shadow,\nhalf hidden in it.\n\n\n# IV. _The Freedom of Loving_\n\nAfter his long wakeful life,\nhe has come to love the world\nas though it’s not to be lost.\n\nThough he faces darkness, his hands\nhave no weight or harshness\non his small granddaughters’ heads.\n\nHis love doesn’t ask that they understand\nit includes them. It includes, as freely,\nthe green plant leaves in the window,\n\nclusters of white ripe peaches weighting\nthe branch among the weightless leaves.\nThere was an agony in ripening.\n\nwhich becomes irrelevant at last\nto ripeness. His love\nturned away from death, freely,\n\nis equal to it.\n\n\n# V. _The Fern_\n\nHis intimate the green fern\nlives in his eye, its profusion\nveiling the earthen pot,\n\nthe leaves lighted and shadowed\namong the actions of the morning.\nBetween the fern and the old man\n\nthere has been conversation\nall their lives. The leaves\nhave spoken to his eyes.\n\nHe has replied with his hands.\nIn his handing it has come down\nuntil now--a living\n\nwhich has survived\nall successions and sheddings.\nEven when he was a boy\n\nplants were his talent. His mother\nwould give him the weak ones\nuntil he made them grow,\n\nthen buy them, healed, for dimes.\nAnd from her he inherits\nthe fern, the life of it\n\non which the new leaves crest.\nIt feeds on the sun and the dirt\nand does not hasten.\n\nIt has forgotten all deaths.\n\n\n# VI. _He’s in the Habit of the World_\n\nThe world has finally worn him\nuntil he’s no longer strange to it.\nHis face has grown comfortable on him.\n\nHis hat is shaped to his way\nof putting it on and taking it off,\nthe crown bordered\n\nwith the dark graph of his sweat.\nHe has become a scholar of plants\nand gardens, the student\n\nof his memory, attentive to pipesmoke\nand the movements of shadows. His days\ncome to him as if they know him.\n\nHe has become one of the familiars\nof the place, like a landmark\nthe birds no longer fear.\n\nAmong the greens of full summer,\namong shadows like monuments,\nhe makes his way down,\n\nloving the earth he will become.\n\n\n# VII. _The Young Man, Thinking of the Old_\n\nWhile we talk we hear across the town\ntwo hammers galloping on a roof, and the high\ncurving squeal of an electric saw.\n\nThat’s happening deep in the town’s being.\nIt’s as weighted and clumsy with its hope\nas a pregnant woman or a loaded barge.\n\nAnd the old man sitting beside me knows\nthe tools and vision of a builder\nof houses, and the uses of those.\n\nHis strong marriage has made\nthe accuracy of his dwelling.\nAs though always speaking openly\n\nin a clear room, he has made\nthe ways of neighborhood\nbetween his house and the town.\n\nHis life has been a monument to the place.\nHis garden rows go back through all\nhis summers, bearing their fading\n\nscript of vine and bloom,\nwhat he has written on the ground,\nits kind abundance, taken kindly from it.\n\nNow, resting from his walk,\nhe’s comforted by the sounds\nof hammering, half listened to,\n\nas his eyes rest in the greenness\nof the fern, with attention\ndeeper than consciousness.\n\nThe strength of the living town\nforces into the design of a house\n--blindly, he knows,\n\nas the life of a tree is forced\ninto a shell holding the seed\nfor a use or disaster not known.\n\nHe’s comforted, not because he hopes\nfor much, but because he knows\nof hope, its losses and uses.\n\nHe has gone in the world, visioning\na house worthy of the child\nnewborn in it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-this-world": { - "title": "“In This World”", - "body": "The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,\ntilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses\nare in bloom. Along the foot of the hill\ndark floodwater moves down the river.\nThe sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.\nI have climbed up to water the horses\nand now sit and rest, high on the hillside,\nletting the day gather and pass. Below me\ncattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,\nslow and preoccupied as stars. In this world\nmen are making plans, wearing themselves out,\nspending their lives, in order to kill each other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "like-the-water": { - "title": "“Like the Water”", - "body": "Like the water\nof a deep stream,\nlove is always too much.\nWe did not make it.\nThough we drink till we burst,\nwe cannot have it all,\nor want it all.\nIn its abundance\nit survives our thirst.\n\nIn the evening we come down to the shore\nto drink our fill,\nand sleep,\nwhile it flows\nthrough the regions of the dark.\nIt does not hold us,\nexcept we keep returning to its rich waters\nthirsty.\n\nWe enter,\nwilling to die,\ninto the commonwealth of its joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lilies": { - "title": "“The Lilies”", - "body": "Amid the gray trunks of ancient trees we found\nthe gay woodland lilies nodding on their stems,\nfrail and fair, so delicately balanced the air\nheld or moved them as it stood or moved.\nThe ground that slept beneath us woke in them\nand made a music of the light, as it had waked\nand sung in fragile things unnumbered years,\nand left their kind no less symmetrical and fair\nfor all that time. Does my land have the health\nof this, where nothing falls but into life?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-man-born-to-farming": { - "title": "“The Man Born to Farming”", - "body": "The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,\nwhose hands reach into the ground and sprout\nto him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death\nyearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down\nin the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.\nHis thought passes along the row ends like a mole.\nWhat miraculous seed has he swallowed\nThat the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth\nLike a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water\nDescending in the dark?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "manifesto-the-mad-farmer-liberation-front": { - "title": "“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”", - "body": "Love the quick profit, the annual raise,\nvacation with pay. Want more\nof everything ready-made. Be afraid\nto know your neighbors and to die.\n\nAnd you will have a window in your head.\nNot even your future will be a mystery\nany more. Your mind will be punched in a card\nand shut away in a little drawer.\n\nWhen they want you to buy something\nthey will call you. When they want you\nto die for profit they will let you know.\nSo, friends, every day do something\nthat won’t compute. Love the Lord.\nLove the world. Work for nothing.\nTake all that you have and be poor.\nLove someone who does not deserve it.\n\nDenounce the government and embrace\nthe flag. Hope to live in that free\nrepublic for which it stands.\nGive your approval to all you cannot\nunderstand. Praise ignorance, for what man\nhas not encountered he has not destroyed.\n\nAsk the questions that have no answers.\nInvest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.\nSay that your main crop is the forest\nthat you did not plant,\nthat you will not live to harvest.\n\nSay that the leaves are harvested\nwhen they have rotted into the mold.\nCall that profit. Prophesy such returns.\nPut your faith in the two inches of humus\nthat will build under the trees\nevery thousand years.\n\nListen to carrion--put your ear\nclose, and hear the faint chattering\nof the songs that are to come.\nExpect the end of the world. Laugh.\nLaughter is immeasurable. Be joyful\nthough you have considered all the facts.\nSo long as women do not go cheap\nfor power, please women more than men.\n\nAsk yourself: Will this satisfy\na woman satisfied to bear a child?\nWill this disturb the sleep\nof a woman near to giving birth?\n\nGo with your love to the fields.\nLie down in the shade. Rest your head\nin her lap. Swear allegiance\nto what is nighest your thoughts.\n\nAs soon as the generals and the politicos\ncan predict the motions of your mind,\nlose it. Leave it as a sign\nto mark the false trail, the way\nyou didn’t go.\n\nBe like the fox\nwho makes more tracks than necessary,\nsome in the wrong direction.\nPractice resurrection.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-meeting": { - "title": "“A Meeting”", - "body": "In a dream I meet\nmy dead friend. He has,\nI know, gone long and far,\nand yet he is the same\nfor the dead are changeless.\nThey grow no older.\nIt is I who have changed,\ngrown strange to what I was.\nYet I, the changed one,\nask: “How you been?”\nHe grins and looks at me.\n“I been eating peaches\noff some mighty fine trees.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nine-verses-of-the-same-song": { - "title": "“Nine Verses of the Same Song”", - "body": "# I.\n\nthe ear finely attuned\nto the extravagant music\nof yellow pears ripening\nin the scrolled light\nof orchards as if the world\nwere perfect\nhears the cicada burst its shell\n\n\n# II.\n\nthe quiet man sits\ntouching his cheek\nin a room delicately walled\nwith the sound of rain\ntrumpets on the phonograph\nhold the globed gold light\nbelling in the mirror’s corridor\ntime out of time\nwithout duration\nmeasure moving to no distance\na dance of instant light\nin the mirror’s silent hallway\n\ncounter-measure\nto clock tick\nthe morning-red cockerel’s\nburnished crowing\nheard mute in the sun-tattered\ndarkness of gravestones\nand loud\nin the quick of his wrist\n\n\n# III. _State Fair_\n\nthe perfect green\nand red and yellow gold\nof this prized and pampered fruit\nsheaves of millet\nsheaves of wheat\narranged in perfect ripeness\nbeyond our touch\nto music out the light\nas if all possibilities of seed\nbecame visible and orderly here\nand ripeness final\nbut as the sign cautions\ndo not touch\n\nperfection is the myth of effort\n\nfrom here we endlessly return\n\n\n# IV.\n\nhear also the resounding actual\nmusic of wood if played alone\n\nsounds the beloved flesh might make\nisolate and without a soul\n\nlike the austere and strained-for\nmusic of pure soul\n\nmusic the unplayed strings contain\n\nhear these imagining\nimaged in the mind’s ear\n\nit is more mingled and various music\nheard in the human actual ear\n\na speech breaking categories\nto confront its objects\n\nhere the most distant burble\nof water becomes vocal\n\nthe blinding noon lick of the sun\na voice\n\nrapt cicadas thrumming\nthe ear’s meat\n\nbeyond this light\nand darkness are the same\n\n\n# V.\n\nin starlight\nslow as a ship\nthe whitened carcass founders\nand goes down\nearth like water\ncaving the ribs\n\nbees in the hollow skull\nmake honey\nas gold in the dark\nas light\n\n\n# VI.\n\nthe picnic done with\nwe became aware\nof the black bull at his mating\n\nimaged in us the music\nmore gay than madrigals\nthat strummed his veins\nparading\nto his perfect lust\n\ndeep-bodied\nslow\n\nhe stood a moment attentive\nto the drumming of his blood\n\nthen mounted\nbrought the period\nto its close\n\nand descended\nto the immediacy of darkness\nand grass\nunwintered and green\nto his quieted flesh\nas if only the hour\nawaited him\n\nto our ears the evening cicadas\nwhirred like violins\ntheir dry atmospheric sound\n\n\n# VII. _Two Definitive Movements_\n\nmy child stood in the doorway\nwatching night approach the house\nasking to be allowed outside\n\nand admission granted to the dark\nshe chose the light instead\n\nthat\n\nand the word _gone_\nshe learned to say\nat the summer’s end\ncommitted\n\nshe has touched knowing’s edge\nand will own it\nclosely as her flesh\n\nthe morning-glory’s opening\nthe white tenuous muscle\nflexing to light\nas though no darkness had ever been\nis not profounder music\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nand my love has come to me\nto ask my comfort\nfor the hurt I give her\n--having no other\n\ntime and again\n\ntor that trammel me\nmy heart\n\nmy hearing suffers\nno more sorrowing music\n\n\n# IX.\n\nthe child born dead\ngoes free of light\n\nbears all time with him\nrounded to his grave", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-peace-of-wild-things": { - "title": "“The Peace of Wild Things”", - "body": "When despair grows in me\nand I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound\nin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,\nI go and lie down where the wood drake\nrests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.\nI come into the peace of wild things\nwho do not tax their lives with forethought\nof grief. I come into the presence of still water.\nAnd I feel above me the day-blind stars\nwaiting for their light. For a time\nI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-real-work": { - "title": "“The Real Work”", - "body": "It may be that when we no longer know what to do\nwe have come our real work,\n\nand that when we no longer know which way to go\nwe have come to our real journey.\n\nThe mind that is not baffled is not employed.\n\nThe impeded stream is the one that sings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ripening": { - "title": "“Ripening”", - "body": "The longer we are together\nthe larger death grows around us.\nHow many we know by now\nwho are dead! We, who were young,\nnow count the cost of having been.\nAnd yet as we know the dead\nwe grow familiar with the world.\nWe, who were young and loved each other\nignorantly, now come to know\neach other in love, married\nby what we have done, as much\nas by what we intend. Our hair\nturns white with our ripening\nas though to fly away in some\ncoming wind, bearing the seed\nof what we know. It was bitter to learn\nthat we come to death as we come\nto love, bitter to face\nthe just and solving welcome\nthat death prepares. But that is bitter\nonly to the ignorant, who pray\nit will not happen. Having come\nthe bitter way to better prayer, we have\nthe sweetness of ripening. How sweet\nto know you by the signs of this world!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-river-voyagers": { - "title": "“The River Voyagers”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhere the light’s bells ring\nMorning on the river,\nWaking the town to its round of spires\nAnd burials, is only half\nThe world; this very light shapes a country\nGreen of leaf and river\nIn the sleep of the dead voyagers;\nOr their death also\nIs a river where morning returns\nAnd is welcome.\nThe scarlet bird chanting\nIts renewal in a tree of shade\nAs constantly sings\nTo their earthen unhearing ears.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe ghosts of the voyagers are gay\nIn the total sleep of their bones.\nFrom the green noon shade of the river\nTheir vision slowly loves the sky,\nAccepting bird flight, dawn and dark;\nRage for flesh and possession over,\nThey are gentle now; their boats, swamped\nWith voyages and drowned, release the stream.\nThrough the broad country of their sleep,\nBurnished towers and belfries of the sun,\nThe river runs to noon forever;\nThe clear light rings with bees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sabbaths": { - "title": "“Sabbaths”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe wakes in darkness. All around\nare sounds of stones shifting, locks\nunlocking. As if some one had lifted\naway a great weight, light\nfalls on him. He has been asleep or simply\ngone. He has known a long suffering\nof himself, himself sharpen by the pain\nof his wound of separation he now\nno longer minds, for the pain is only himself\nnow, grown small, become a little growing\nlonging joy. Something teaches him\nto rise, to stand and move out through\nthe opening the light has made.\nHe stands on the green hilltop amid\nthe cedars, the skewed stones, the earth all\nopened doors. Half blind with light, he\ntraces with a forefinger the moss-grown\nfurrows of his name, hearing among the others\none woman’s cry. She is crying and laughing,\nher voice a stream of silver he seems to see:\n“Oh William, honey, is it you? Oh!”\n\n\n# II.\n\nSurely it will be for this: the redbud\npink, the wild plum white, yellow\ntrout lilies in the morning light,\nthe trees, the pastures turning green.\nOn the river, quiet at daybreak,\nthe reflections of the trees, as in\nanother world, lie across\nfrom shore to shore. Yes, here\nis where they will come, the dead,\nwhen they rise from the grave.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhite\ndogwood flowers\nafloat\nin leafing woods\nuntrouble\nmy mind.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAsk the world to reveal its quietude--\nnot the silence of machines when they are still,\nbut the true quiet by which birdsongs,\ntrees, bellows, snails, clouds, storms\nbecome what they are, and are nothing else.\n\n\n# V.\n\nA mind that has confronted ruin for years\nIs half or more a ruined mind. Nightmares\nInhabit it, and daily evidence\nOf the clean country smeared for want of sense,\nOf freedom slack and dull among the free,\nOf faith subsumed in idiot luxury,\nAnd beauty beggared in the marketplace\nAnd clear-eyed wisdom bleary with dispraise.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nSit and be still\nuntil in the time\nof no rain you hear\nbeneath the dry wind’s\ncommotion in the trees\nthe sound of flowing\nwater among the rocks,\na stream unheard before,\nand you are where\nbreathing is prayer.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThe wind of the fall is here.\nIt is everywhere. It moves\nevery leaf of every\ntree. It is the only motion\nof the river. Green leaves\ngrow weary of their color.\nNow evening too is in the air.\nThe bright hawks of the day\nsubside. The owls waken.\nSmall creatures die because\nlarger creatures are hungry.\nHow superior to this\nhuman confusion of greed\nand creed, blood and fire.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe question before me, now that I\nam old, is not how to be dead,\nwhich I know from enough practice,\nbut how to be alive, as these worn\nhills still tell, and some paintings\nof Paul Cezanne, and this mere\nsinging wren, who thinks he’s alive\nforever, this instant, and may be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "september-2nd": { - "title": "“September 2nd”", - "body": "In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks\npassing southward over the valley. The tall\nsunflowers stood, burning on their stalks\nto cold seed, by the still river. And high\nup the birds rose into sight against the darkening\nclouds. They tossed themselves among the fading\nlandscapes of the sky like rags, as in\nabandonment to the summons their blood knew.\nAnd in my mind, where had stood a garden\nstraining to the light, there grew\nan acceptance of decline. Having worked,\nI would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "the-silence": { - "title": "“The Silence”", - "body": "Though the air is full of singing\nmy head is loud\nwith the labor of words.\n\nThough the season is rich\nwith fruit, my tongue\nhungers for the sweet of speech.\n\nThough the beech is golden\nI cannot stand beside it\nmute, but must say\n\n‘It is golden,’ while the leaves\nstir and fall with a sound\nthat is not a name.\n\nIt is in the silence\nthat my hope is, and my aim.\nA song whose lines\n\nI cannot make or sing\nsounds men’s silence\nlike a root. Let me say\n\nand not mourn: the world\nlives in the death of speech\nand sings there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "testament": { - "title": "“Testament”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nDear relatives and friends, when my last breath\nGrows large and free in air, don’t call it death--\nA word to enrich the undertaker and inspire\nHis surly art of imitating life; conspire\nAgainst him. Say that my body cannot now\nBe improved upon; it has no fault to show\nTo the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh\nHas a perfect compliance with the grass\nTruer than any it could have striven for.\nYou will recognize the earth in me, as before\nI wished to know it in myself: my earth\nThat has been my care and faithful charge from birth,\nAnd toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,\nAnd all my hopes. Say that I have found\nA good solution, and am on my way\nTo the roots. And say I have left my native clay\nAt last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.\nTraveler to where? Say you don’t know.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nBut do not let your ignorance\nOf my spirit’s whereabouts dismay\nYou, or overwhelm your thoughts.\nBe careful not to say\n\nAnything too final. Whatever\nIs unsure is possible, and life is bigger\nThan flesh. Beyond reach of thought\nLet imagination figure\n\nYour hope. That will be generous\nTo me and to yourselves. Why settle\nFor some know-it-all’s despair\nWhen the dead may dance to the fiddle\n\nHereafter, for all anybody knows?\nAnd remember that the Heavenly soil\nNeed not be too rich to please\nOne who was happy in Port Royal.\n\nI may be already heading back,\nA new and better man, toward\nThat town. The thought’s unreasonable,\nBut so is life, thank the Lord!\n\n\n# 3.\n\nSo treat me, even dead,\nAs a man who has a place\nTo go, and something to do.\nDon’t muck up my face\n\nWith wax and powder and rouge\nAs one would prettify\nAn unalterable fact\nTo give bitterness the lie.\n\nAdmit the native earth\nMy body is and will be,\nAdmit its freedom and\nIts changeability.\n\nDress me in the clothes\nI wore in the day’s round.\nLay me in a wooden box.\nPut the box in the ground.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nBeneath this stone a Berry is planted\nIn his home land, as he wanted.\n\nHe has come to the gathering of his kin,\nAmong whom some were worthy men,\n\nFarmers mostly, who lived by hand,\nBut one was a cobbler from Ireland,\n\nAnother played the eternal fool\nBy riding on a circus mule\n\nTo be remembered in grateful laughter\nLonger than the rest. After\n\nDoing that they had to do\nThey are at ease here. Let all of you\n\nWho yet for pain find force and voice\nLook on their peace, and rejoice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "they-sit-together-on-the-porch": { - "title": "“They Sit Together on the Porch”", - "body": "They sit together on the porch, the dark\nAlmost fallen, the house behind them dark.\nTheir supper done with, they have washed and dried\nThe dishes--only two plates now, two glasses,\nTwo knives, two forks, two spoons--small work for two.\nShe sits with her hands folded in her lap,\nAt rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,\nAnd when they speak at last it is to say\nWhat each one knows the other knows. They have\nOne mind between them, now, that finally\nFor all its knowing will not exactly know\nWhich one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding\nGoodnight, and which sits on a while alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-timbered-choir": { - "title": "“A Timbered Choir”", - "body": "Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,\nfor I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake\nof the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.\nThose who had wanted to go home would never get there now.\n\nI visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned\nat blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories\nwhere the machines were made that would drive ever forward\ntoward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw\nthe poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;\nI came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.\nI saw the passages worn by the unnumbered\nfootfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.\n\nTheir passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments\nof those who had died in pursuit of the objective\nand who had long ago forever been forgotten, according\nto the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget\nthat they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective\nas if nobody ever had pursued it before.\n\nThe races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.\nthe once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free\nto sell themselves to the highest bidder\nand to enter the best paying prisons\nin pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,\nwhich was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,\nwhich was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,\nto the completed sale, to the signature\non the contract, which was to clear the way\nto self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home\nwould ever get there now, for every remembered place\nhad been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.\n\nEvery place had been displaced, every love\nunloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant\nto make way for the passage of the crowd\nof the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless\nwith their many eyes opened toward the objective\nwhich they did not yet perceive in the far distance,\nhaving never known where they were going,\nhaving never known where they came from.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-think-of-the-life-of-a-man": { - "title": "“To Think of the Life of a Man”", - "body": "In a time that breaks\nin cutting pieces all around,\nwhen men, voiceless\nagainst thing-ridden men,\nset themselves on fire, it seems\ntoo difficult and rare\nto think of the life of a man\ngrown whole in the world,\nat peace and in place.\nBut having thought of it\nI am beyond the time\nI might have sold my hands\nor sold my voice and mind\nto the arguments of power\nthat go blind against\nwhat they would destroy.\nI leave all that behind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "water": { - "title": "“Water”", - "body": "I was born in a drouth year. That summer\nmy mother waited in the house, enclosed\nin the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,\nfor the men to come back in the evenings,\nbringing water from a distant spring.\nveins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank.\nAnd all my life I have dreaded the return\nof that year, sure that it still is\nsomewhere, like a dead enemys soul.\nFear of dust in my mouth is always with me,\nand I am the faithful husband of the rain,\nI love the water of wells and springs\nand the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns.\nI am a dry man whose thirst is praise\nof clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.\nMy sweetness is to wake in the night\nafter days of dry heat, hearing the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "what-we-need-is-here": { - "title": "“What We Need is Here”", - "body": "Geese appear high over us,\npass, and the sky closes. Abandon,\nas in love or sleep, holds\nthem to their way, clear\nin the ancient faith: what we need\nis here. And we pray, not\nfor new earth or heaven, but to be\nquiet in heart, and in eye,\nclear. What we need is here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wish-to-be-generous": { - "title": "“The Wish to Be Generous”", - "body": "All that I serve will die, all my delights,\nthe flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,\nthe silent lilies standing in the woods,\nthe woods, the hill, the whole earth, all\nwill burn in man’s evil, or dwindle\nin its own age. Let the world bring on me\nthe sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know\nmy little light taken from me into the seed\nof the beginning and the end, so I may bow\nto mystery, and take my stand on the earth\nlike a tree in a field, passing without haste\nor regret toward what will be, my life\na patient willing descent into the grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-berryman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Berryman", - "birth": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 158 - }, - "poems": { - "the-ball-poem": { - "title": "“The Ball Poem”", - "body": "What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,\nWhat, what is he to do? I saw it go\nMerrily bouncing, down the street, and then\nMerrily over--there it is in the water!\nNo use to say ‘O there are other balls’:\nAn ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy\nAs he stands rigid, trembling, staring down\nAll his young days into the harbour where\nHis ball went. I would not intrude on him,\nA dime, another ball, is worthless. Now\nHe senses first responsibility\nIn a world of possessions. People will take balls,\nBalls will be lost always, little boy,\nAnd no one buys a ball back. Money is external.\nHe is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,\nThe epistemology of loss, how to stand up\nKnowing what every man must one day know\nAnd most know many days, how to stand up\nAnd gradually light returns to the street\nA whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,\nSoon part of me will explore the deep and dark\nFloor of the harbour … I am everywhere,\nI suffer and move, my mind and my heart move\nWith all that move me, under the water\nOr whistling, I am not a little boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-black-book": { - "title": "From “The Black Book”", - "body": "# _not him_\n\nGrandfather, sleepless in a room upstairs,\nSeldom came down; so when they tript him down\nWe wept. The blind light sang about his ears,\nLater we heard. Brother had pull. In pairs\nHe, some, slept upon stone.\nLater they stamped him down in mud.\nThe windlass drew him silly & odd-eyed, blood\nBroke from his ears before they quit.\nBefore they trucked him home they cleaned him up somewhat.\n\nOnly the loose eyes’ glaze they could not clean\nAnd soon he died. He howled a night and shook\nOur teeth before the end; we breathed again\nWhen he stopt. Abraham, what we have seen\nWrite, I beg, in your Book.\nNo more the solemn and high bells\nCall to our pall; we crawl or gibber; Hell’s\nIrritable & treacherous\nDespairs here here (not him) reach now to shatter us.\n\n\n# 2.\n\n_Luftmenschen_ dream, the men who live on air,\nOf other values, in the blackness watching\nPeaceful for gangs or a quick raid,\nThe ghetto nods a mortal head\nSoundless but for a scurry, a sigh, retching,--\nNo moan of generation fear.\nHands hold each other limper\nWhile the moon lengthens on the sliding river.\n\nProlong the woolen night--Solomon sang--\nAnd never the soul with its own revenge encumber\nBut like a cry of cranes dies out,\nEcstatic, faint, a moment float--\ning, fying soul, or flares like August timber\nIn wild woe vanishing.\nBlue grows from grey, towards slaughter.\n(An Ashkenazi genius stoned Ivan; a sculptor.)\n\n“Boleslaus brought us here, surnamed the Good,\nWhose dust rolls nearly seven hundred years\nTowards Sirius: we thank that King\nAs for the ledge whereto we cling,\nNight in the caves under the ruins; stars,\nArmbands come off, for which we could\nBe glad but the black troops gather.”\nSo those who kneel in the paling sky and shiver.\n\nDawn like a rose unfolds--flower of parks--\nAlleys of limetrees, villas, ponds, a palace\nDown a deserted riverbed,\nThe Lazienki Gardens’ pride,\nMonument to a king able and callous\nWho far Vienna from the Turks\nBloodily did deliver.\nFor foreigners, now, a sort of theatre.\n\nOne officer in black demarches here\nCupshot, torn collar by a bitch unwilling\nNative & blonde through the debauch\nThat kept him all night from his couch,\nHurts his head and from the others’ howling\nDrove him out for morning air.\nBrooding over the water\nHe reddens suddenly. He went back & shot her.\n\n\n# _the will_\n\nA frail vague man, in whom our senses ached\nWith nothing, began to whisper with himself\nAt line-up, from the rear,--\nWe trembled for him,--shook the scald that caked\nHis skull, totting up phantoms none could solve,\nFag-end of a career.\n\n(Shadowless in a cairn, four lights. Farewell,\nThe legacy trots off,\nA swimming moment of the stiff’s desire\nSuch decades since. Or nothing trots to tell\nIntestate once with love\nPain brain stood up a bit out of time’s mire.)\nHe scrambled one night out\nAnd dodged between their lights far to the wire,\nWhere he lodged. I suppose he crisped, dying in fire;\nA shot or so, a shout;\nBut certainly, lifting our scalps, well beyond fear,\nHe suddenly sang, sang, hanging on the wire.\n\n\n# _the waiting_\n\nNearer, my heart, to me … My cigarette\nEndures an apotheosis; I feel\nMore for the grey twirl than I mull or whet\nGod’s promise … probably the butt is real.\nNow I seem less so. Than tissue & ash\nI am more indistinct, than fire and weed\nYielding to fire, as fire to the weed’s trash:\nDo pins & feathers kill? Can a root bleed?\nMaster my heart will nothing to my side?\nOtherwhere, neither broods nor aches for me\nRegitive by the iron door unterrified\nFoully it leans. That hole, my mystery,\n\nWhich once its bolt, the muscle of their State,\nOpened to drop me in, cannot keep shut!\nLancet intensities I anticipate!\nFeathery movement twires about my thought!\n\nThe frontier posts, disfigured sphincters, spill\nInvaders home; heart through the ribs returns;\nHow corn & wine return, transfigured, fill\nSleepy lands, our land. Ice on my brow burns,\n\nEbbing, blackfellow-dull, when the bolt shoots\nOver the tigerish flood may I soar steady\nWhither the latched starless & heartless roots\nO need blindly night. I am almost ready--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-dispossessed": { - "title": "“The Dispossessed”", - "body": "‘and something that … that is theirs--no longer ours’\nstammered to me the Italian page. A wood\nseeded & towered suddenly. I understood.--\n\nThe Leading Man’s especially, and the Juvenile Lead’s,\nand the Leading Lady’s thigh that switches and warms,\nand their grimaces, and their flying arms:\n\n_our_ arms, our story. Every seat was sold.\nA crone met in a clearing sprouts a beard\nand has a tirade. Not a word we heard.\n\nMovement of stone within a woman’s heart,\nabrupt and dominant. They gesture how\nfings really are. Rarely a child sings now.\n\nMy harpsichord weird as a koto drums\n_adagio_ for twilight, for the storm-worn dove\nno more de-iced, and the spidery business of love.\n\nThe Juvenile Lead’s the Leader’s arm, one arm\nrunning the whole bole, branches, roots, (O watch)\nand the faceless fellow waving from her crotch,\n\nStalin-unanimous! who procured a vote\nand care not use it, who have kept an eye\nand care not use it, percussive vote, clear eye.\n\nThat which a captain and a weaponeer\none day and one more day did, we did, _ach_\nwe did not, _They_ did … cam slid, the great lock\n\nlodged, and no soul of us all was near was near,--\nan evil sky (where the umbrella bloomed)\ntwirled its mustaches, hissed, the ingenue fumed,\n\npoor virgin, and no hero rides. The race\nis done. Drifts through, between the cold black trunks,\nthe peachblow glory of the perishing sun\n\nin empty houses where old things take place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-1": { - "title": "“Dream Song 1”", - "body": "Huffy Henry hid the day,\nunappeasable Henry sulked.\nI see his point,--a trying to put things over.\nIt was the thought that they thought\nthey could do it made Henry wicked & away.\nBut he should have come out and talked.\n\nAll the world like a woolen lover\nonce did seem on Henry’s side.\nThen came a departure.\nThereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.\nI don’t see how Henry, pried\nopen for all the world to see, survived.\n\nWhat he has now to say is a long\nwonder the world can bear & be.\nOnce in a sycamore I was glad\nall at the top, and I sang.\nHard on the land wears the strong sea\nand empty grows every bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-2": { - "title": "“Dream Song 2”", - "body": "The jane is zoned! no nightspot here, no bar\nthere, no sweet freeway, and no premises\nfor business purposes,\nno loiterers or needers. Henry are\nbaffled. Have ev’ybody head for Maine,\nutility-man take a train?\n\nArrive a time when all coons lose dere grip,\nbut is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal,\none blue, one shuffle,\nif them is all you seem to réquire. Strip,\nol benger, skip us we, sugar; so hang on\none chaste evenin.\n\n--Sir Bones, or Galahad: astonishin\nyo legal & yo good. Is you feel well?\nHoney dusk do sprawl.\n--Hit’s hard. Kinged or thinged, though, fling & wing.\nPoll-cats are coming, hurrah, hurray.\nI votes in my hole.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-3": { - "title": "“Dream Song 3”", - "body": "Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.\n--I’m not so young but not so very old,\nsaid screwed-up lovely 23.\nA final sense of being right out in the cold,\nunkissed.\n(--My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under things.\n\nAll these old criminals sooner or later\nhave had it. I’ve been reading old journals.\nGottwald & Co., out of business now.\nThick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.\nShe holds her breath like a seal\nand is whiter & smoother.\n\nRilke was a jerk.\nI admit his griefs & music\n& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.\nA threshold worse than the circles\nwhere the vile settle & lurk,\nRilke’s. As I said,--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-4": { - "title": "“Dream Song 4”", - "body": "Filling her compact & delicious body\nwith chicken páprika, she glanced at me\ntwice.\nFainting with interest, I hungered back\nand only the fact of her husband & four other people\nkept me from springing on her\n\nor falling at her little feet and crying\n‘You are the hottest one for years of night\nHenry’s dazed eyes\nhave enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon\n(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,\nde world, wif feeding girls.\n\n--Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes\ndowncast … The slob beside her feasts … What wonders is\nshe sitting on, over there?\nThe restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.\nWhere did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.\n--Mr. Bones: there is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-5": { - "title": "“Dream Song 5”", - "body": "Henry sats in de bar & was odd,\noff in the glass from the glass,\nat odds wif de world & its god,\nhis wife is a complete nothing,\nSt Stephen\ngetting even.\n\nHenry sats in de plane & was gay.\nCareful Henry nothing said aloud\nbut where a Virgin out of cloud\nto her Mountain dropt in light,\nhis thought made pockets & the plane buckt.\n‘Parm me, lady.’ ‘Orright.’\n\nHenry lay in de netting, wild,\nwhile the brainfever bird did scales;\nMr Heartbreak, the New Man,\ncome to farm a crazy land;\nan image of the dead on the fingernail\nof a newborn child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-6": { - "title": "“Dream Song 6”", - "body": "During the father’s walking--how he look\ndown by now in soft boards, Henry, pass\nand what he feel or no, who know?--\nas during hís broad father’s, all the breaks\n& ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer\nback to the flying boy in mountain air,\n\nVermont’s child to go out, and while Keats sweat’\nfor hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate,\nand Ethan Allen was a calling man,\nall through the blind one’s dream of the start,\nwhen Day was killing Porter and had to part\nlovers for ever, fancy if you can,\n\nwhile the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out\nwas failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt\ninscrutably was growing, toward its end,\nand a starved lion by a water-hole\nclouded with gall, while Abelard was whole,\nthese grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-7": { - "title": "“Dream Song 7”", - "body": "Henry is old, old; for Henry remembers\nMr Deeds’ tuba, & the Cameo,\n& the race in Ben Hur,--The Lost World, with sound,\n& The Man from Blankey’s, which he did not dig,\nnor did he understand one caption of,\nbewildered Henry, while the Big Ones laughed.\n\nNow Henry is unmistakably a Big One.\nFúnnee; he don’t féel so.\nHe just stuck around.\nThe German & the Russian films into\nItalian & Japanese films turned, while many\nwere prevented from making it.\n\nHe wishing he could squirm again where Hoot\nis just ahead of rustlers, where William S\nforgoes some deep advantage, & moves on,\nwhere Hashknife Hartley having the matter taped\nthe rats are flying. For the rats\nhave moved in, mostly, and this is for real.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-8": { - "title": "“Dream Song 8”", - "body": "The weather was fine. They took away his teeth,\nwhite & helpful; bothered his backhand;\nhalved his green hair.\nThey blew out his loves, his interests. ‘Underneath,’\n(they called in iron voices) ‘understand,\nis nothing. So there.’\n\nThe weather was very fine. They lifted off\nhis covers till he showed, and cringed & pled\nto see himself less.\nThey instaleld mirrors till he flowed. ‘Enough’\n(murmmered they) ‘if you will watch Us instead,\nyet you may saved be. Yes.’\n\nThe weather fleured. They weakened all his eyes,\nand burning thumbs into his ears, and shook\nhis hand like a notch.\nThey flung long silent speeches. (Off the hook!)\nThey sandpapered his plumpest hope. (So capsize.)\nThey took away his crotch.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-9": { - "title": "“Dream Song 9”", - "body": "Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill\nhorrible Henry, foaming. Fan their way\ntoward him who will\nin the high wood: the officers, their rest,\nwith p. a. echoing: his girl comes, say,\nconned in to test\n\nif he’s still human, see,\ntherefore she get on the Sheriff’s mike & howl\n‘Come down, come down’.\nTherefore he un-budge, furious. He’d flee\nbut only Heaven hangs over him foul.\nAt the crossways, downtown,\n\nhe dreams the folks are buying parsnips & suds\nand paying rent to foes. He slipt & fell.\nIt’s golden here in the snow.\nA mild crack: a far rifle. Bogart’s duds\ntruck back to Wardrobe. Fancy the brain from hell\nheld out so long. Let go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-10": { - "title": "“Dream Song 10”", - "body": "There were strange gatherings. A vote would come\nthat would be no vote. There would come a rope.\nYes. There would come a rope.\nMen have their hats down. “Dancing in the Dark”\nwill see him up, car-radio-wise. So many, some\nwon’t find a rut to park.\n\nIt is in the occasions, that--not the fathomless heart--\nthe thinky death consists;\nhis chest is pinched. The enemy are sick,\nand so is us of. Often, to rising trysts,\nlike this one, drove he out\n\nand gasps of love, after all, had got him ready.\nHowever things hurt, men hurt worse. He’s stark\nto be jerked onward?\nYes. In the headlights he got’ keep him steady,\nleak not, look out over. This’ hard work,\nboss, wait’ for The Word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-11": { - "title": "“Dream Song 11”", - "body": "His mother goes. The mother comes & goes.\nChen Lung’s too came, came and crampt & then\nthat dragoner’s mother was gone.\nIt seem we don’t have no good bed to lie on,\nforever. While he drawing his first breath,\nwhile skinning his knees,\n\nwhile he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet\nhe skated up & down in front of her house\nwishing he could, sir, die,\nwhile being bullied & he dreamt he could fly--\nduring irregular verbs--them world-sought bodies\nsafe in the Arctic lay:\n\nStrindberg rocked in his niche, the great Andrée\nby muscled Fraenkel under what’s of the tent,\ntorn like then limbs, by bears\nover fierce decades, harmless. Up in pairs\ngo we not, but we have a good bed.\nI have said what I had to say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-12": { - "title": "“Dream Song 12”", - "body": "There is an eye, there was a slit.\nNights walk, and confer on him fear.\nThe strangler tree, the dancing mouse\nconfound his vision; then they loosen it.\nHenry widens. How did Henry House\nhimself ever come here?\n\nNights run. Tes yeux bizarres me suivent\nwhen loth at landfall soft I leave.\nThe soldiers, Coleridge Rilke Poe,\nshout commands I never heard.\nThey march about, dying & absurd.\nToddlers are taking over. O\n\nver! Sabbath belling. Snoods converge\non a weary-daring man.\nWhat now can be cleard up? from the Yard the visitors urge.\nBelle thro’ the graves in a blast of sun\nto the kirk moves the youngest witch.\nWatch.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-13": { - "title": "“Dream Song 13”", - "body": "God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,\nwith a thatch of hair on his head\nin the beginning.\nHenry was not a coward. Much.\nHe never deserted anything; instead\nhe stuck, when things like pity were thinning.\n\nSo may be Henry was a human being.\nLet’s investigate that.\n… We did; okay.\nHe is a human American man.\nThat’s true. My lass is braking.\nMy brass is aching. Come & diminish me, & map my way.\n\nGod’s Henry’s enemy. We’re in business … Why,\nwhat business must be clear.\nA cornering.\nI couldn’t feel more like it. --Mr. Bones,\nas I look on the saffron sky,\nyou strikes me as ornery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-14": { - "title": "“Dream Song 14”", - "body": "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.\nAfter all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,\nwe ourselves flash and yearn,\nand moreover my mother told me as a boy\n(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored\nmeans you have no\n\nInner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no\ninner resources, because I am heavy bored.\nPeoples bore me,\nliterature bores me, especially great literature,\nHenry bores me, with his plights & gripes\nas bad as achilles,\n\nWho loves people and valiant art, which bores me.\nAnd the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag\nand somehow a dog\nhas taken itself & its tail considerably away\ninto mountains or sea or sky, leaving\nbehind: me, wag.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-15": { - "title": "“Dream Song 15”", - "body": "Let us suppose, valleys & such ago,\none pal unwinding from his labours in\none bar of Chicago\nand this did actually happen. This was so.\nAnd many graces are slipped, & many a sin\neven that laid man low\n\nbut this will be remembered & told over,\nthat she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy,\nto brawl in that low bar:\n‘You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you’ll never.\nI may be only a Polack broad but I don’t lay easy.\nKiss my ass, that’s what you are.’\n\nWomen is better, braver. In a foehn of loss\nentire, which too they hotter understand,\nhaving had it,\nwe struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce,\nsome invest in the past, one hides in the land.\nHenry was not his favourite.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-16": { - "title": "“Dream Song 16”", - "body": "Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls\nwhere it did much resemble Henry and\nthem persons was delighted.\nEspecially his long & glowing tail\nby all them was admired, and visitors.\nThey whistled: This is it!\n\nGolden, whilst your frozen daiquiris\nwhir at midnight, gleams on you his fur\n& silky & black.\nMission accomplished, pal.\nMy molten yellow & moonless bag,\ndrained, hangs at rest.\n\nCollect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,\nin Sealdah Station some possessionless\nchildren survive to die.\nThe Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris\nwithdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room\nand one told the other a lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-17": { - "title": "“Dream Song 17”", - "body": "Muttered Henry:--Lord of matter, thus:\nupon some more unquiet spirit knock,\nmy madnesses have cease.\nAll the quarter astonishes a lonely out & back.\nThey set their clocks by Henry House,\nthe steadiest man on the block.\n\nAnd Lucifer:--I smell you for my own,\nby smug.--What have I tossed you but the least\n(tho’ hard); fit for your ears.\nYour servant, bored with horror, sat alone\nwith busy teeth while his dislike increased\nunto himself, in tears.\n\nAnd he:--O promising despair,\nin solitude-- --End there.\nYour avenues are dying: leave me: I dove\nunder the oaken arms of Brother Martin,\nSt Simeon the Lesser Theologian,\nBodhidharma, and Baal Shem Tov.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-18": { - "title": "“Dream Song 18”", - "body": "Westward, hit a low note, for a roarer lost\nacross the Sound but north from Bremerton,\nhit a way down note.\nAnd never cadenza again of flowers, or cost.\nHim who could really do that cleared his throat\n& staggered on.\n\nThe bluebells, pool-shallows, saluted his over-needs,\nwhile the clouds growled, heh-heh, & snapped, & crashed.\n\nNo stunt he’ll ever unflinch once more will fail\n(O lucky fellow, eh Bones?)--drifted off upstairs,\ndownstairs, somewheres.\nNo more daily, trying to hit the head on the nail:\nthirstless: without a think in his head:\nback from wherever, with it said.\n\nHit a high long note, for a lover found\nneeding a lower into friendlier ground\nto bug among worms no more\naround um jungles where ah blurt ‘What for?’\nWeeds, too, he favoured as most men don’t favour men.\nThe Garden Master’s gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-19": { - "title": "“Dream Song 19”", - "body": "Here, whence\nall have departed orwill do, here airless, where\nthat witchy ball\nwanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living\ndrops limply into one’s hands\nwithout pleasure or interest\n\nFigurez-vous, a time swarms when the word\n‘happy’ sheds its whole meaning, like to come and\nlike for memory too\nThat morning arrived to Henry as well a great cheque\neaten out already by the Government & State &\nother strange matters\n\nGentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat\nsmiled into his mirror, a murderer’s\n(at Stillwater), at himself alone\nand said across a plink to that desolate fellow\nsaid a little hail & buck-you-up\nupon his triumph", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-20": { - "title": "“Dream Song 20”", - "body": "When worst got things, how was you? Steady on?\nWheedling, or shockt her &\nyou have been bad to your friend,\nwhom not you writing to. You have not listened.\nA pelican of lies\nyou loosed: where are you?\n\nDown weeks of evenings of longing\nby hours, NOW, a stoned bell,\nyou did somebody: others you hurt short:\nanyone ever did you do good?\nYou licking your own old hurt,\nwhat?\n\nAn evil kneel & adore.\nThis is human. Hurl, God who found\nus in this, down\nsomething … We hear the more\nsin has increast, the more\ngrace has been caused to abound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-21": { - "title": "“Dream Song 21”", - "body": "Some good people, daring & subtle voices\nand their tense faces, as I think of it\nI see sank underground.\nI see. My radar digs. I do not dig.\nCool their flushing blood, them eyes is shut--\neyes?\n\nAppalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded.\nWithout exception! All.\nALL.\nThe senior population waits. Come down! come down!\nA ghastly & flashing pause, clothed,\nlife called; us do.\n\nIn a madhouse heard I an ancient man\ntube-fed who had not said for fifteen years\n(they said) one canny word,\nsenile forever, who a heart might pierce,\nmutter ‘O come on down. O come on down.’\nClear whom he meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-22": { - "title": "“Dream Song 22”", - "body": "I am the little man who smokes & smokes.\nI am the girl who does know better but.\nI am the king of the pool.\nI am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.\nI am a government official & a goddamned fool.\nI am a lady who takes jokes.\n\nI am the enemy of the mind.\nI am the auto salesman and lóve you.\nI am a teenage cancer, with a plan.\nI am the blackt-out man.\nI am the woman powerful as a zoo.\nI am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind--\n\nIt is the Fourth of July.\nCollect: while the dying man,\nforgone by you creator, who forgives,\nis gasping ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives’\nin vain, in vain, in vain.\nI am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-23": { - "title": "“Dream Song 23”", - "body": "This is the lay of Ike.\nHere’s to the glory of the Grewt White--awk--\nwho has been running--er--er--things in recent--ech--\nin the United--If your screen is black,\nladies & gentlemen, we--I like--\nat the Point he was already terrific--sick\n\nto a second term, having done no wrong--\nno right--no · right--having let the Army--bang--\ndefend itself from Joe, let venom’ Strauss\nbile Oppenheimer out of use--use Robb,\nwho’ll later fend for Goldfine--Breaking no laws,\nhe lay in the White House--sob!!--\n\nwho never understood his own strategy--whee--\nso Monty’s memoirs--nor any strategy,\nwanting the ball bulled thro’ all parts of the line\nat once--proving, by his refusal to take Berlin,\nhe misread even Clauswitz--wide empty grin\nthat never lost a vote (O Adlai mine).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-24": { - "title": "“Dream Song 24”", - "body": "Oh servant Henry lectured till\nthe crows commenced and then\nhe bulbed his voice & lectured on some more.\nThis happened again & again, like war,--\nthe Indian p.a.’s, such as they were,\na weapon on his side, for the birds.\n\nVexations held a field-monsoon.\nHe was Introduced, and then he was Summed-up.\nHe was put questions on race bigotry;\nhe put no questions on race bigotry\nconstantly.\nThe mad sun rose though on the ghats\n & the saddhu in maha mudra, the great River,\n\nand Henry was happy & beside him with excitement.\nBeside himself, his possibilities;\nsalaaming hours of half-blind morning\nwhile the rainy lepers salaamed back,\nsmiles & a passion of their & his eyes flew\nin feelings not ever accorded solely to oneself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-25": { - "title": "“Dream Song 25”", - "body": "Henry, edged, decidedly, made up stories\nlighting the past of Henry, of his glorious\npresent, and his hoaries,\nall the bight heals he tamped-- --Euphoria,\nMr Bones, euphoria. Fate clobber all.\n--Hand me back my crawl,\n\ncondign Heaven. Tighten into a ball\nelongate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace.\nRender him sightless,\nor ruin at high rate his crampon focus,\nwipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us.\n--But, Bones, you is that.\n\n--I cannot remember. I am going away.\nThere was something in my dream about a Cat,\nwhich fought and sang.\nSomething about a lyre, an island. Unstrung.\nLinked to the land at low tide. Cables fray.\nThank you for everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-26": { - "title": "“Dream Song 26”", - "body": "The glories of the world struck me, made me aria, once.\n--What happen then, Mr Bones?\nif be you cares to say.\n--Henry. Henry became interested in women’s bodies,\nhis loins were & were the scene of stupendous achievement.\nStupor. Knees, dear. Pray.\n\nAll the knobs & softnesses of, my God,\nthe ducking & trouble it swarm on Henry,\nat one time.\n--What happen then, Mr Bones?\nyou seems excited-like.\n--Fell Henry back into the original crime: art, rime\n\nbesides a sense of others, my God, my God,\nand a jealousy for the honour (alive) of his country,\nwhat can get more odd?\nand discontent with the thriving gangs & pride.\n--What happen then, Mr Bones?\n--I had a most marvellous piece of luck. I died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-27": { - "title": "“Dream Song 27”", - "body": "The greens of the Ganges delta foliate.\nOf heartless youth made late aware he pled:\nBrownies, please come.\nTo Henry in his sparest times sometimes\nthe little people spread, & did friendly things;\nthen he was glad.\n\nPleased, at the worst, except with the man, he shook\nthe brightest winter sun.\nAll the green lives\nof the great delta, hours, hurt his migrant heart\nin a safety of the steady ’plane. Please, please come.\n\nMy friends,--he has been known to mourn,--I’ll die;\nlive you, in the most wild, kindly, green\npartly forgiving wood,\nsort of forever and all those human sings\nclose not your better ears to, while good Spring\nreturns with a dance and a sigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-28": { - "title": "“Dream Song 28”", - "body": "It was wet & white & swift and where I am\nwe don’t know. It was dark and then\nit isn’t.\nI wish the barker would come. There seems to be eat\nnothing. I am usually tired.\nI’m alone too.\n\nIf only the strange one with so few legs would come,\nI’d say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual.\nWhere are his note I loved?\nThere may be horribles; it’s hard to tell.\nThe barker nips me but somehow I feel\nhe too is on my side.\n\nI’m too alone. I see no end. If we could all\nrun, even that would be better. I am hungry.\nThe sun is not hot.\nIt’s not a good position I am in.\nIf I had to do the whole thing over again\nI wouldn’t.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-29": { - "title": "“Dream Song 29”", - "body": "There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart\nsó heavy, if he had a hundred years\n& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time\nHenry could not make good.\nStarts again always in Henry’s ears\nthe little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.\n\nAnd there is another thing he has in mind\nlike a grave Sienese face a thousand years\nwould fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,\nwith open eyes, he attends, blind.\nAll the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;\nthinking.\n\nBut never did Henry, as he thought he did,\nend anyone and hacks her body up\nand hide the pieces, where they may be found.\nHe knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.\nOften he reckons, in the dawn, them up.\nNobody is ever missing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-30": { - "title": "“Dream Song 30”", - "body": "Collating bones: I would have liked to do.\nHenry would have been hot at that.\nI missed his profession.\nAs a little boy I always thought\n‘I’m an archeologist’; who\ncould be more respected peaceful serious than that?\n\nHell talkt my brain awake.\nBluffed to the ends of me pain\n& I took up a pencil;\nlike this I’m longing with. One sign\nwould snow me back, back.\nis there anyone in the audience who has lived in vain?\n\nA Chinese tooth! African jaw!\nDrool, says a nervous system,\nfor a joyous replacing. Heat burns off dew.\nBetween the Ices (Mindel-Würm)\nin a world I ever saw\nsome of my drying people indexed: “Warm.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-31": { - "title": "“Dream Song 31”", - "body": "Henry Hankovitch, con guítar,\ndid a short Zen pray,\non his tatami in a relaxed lotos\nfixin his mind on nuffin, rose-blue breasts,\nand gave his parnel one French kiss;\nenslaving himself he withdrew from his blue\n\nFlorentine leather case an Egyptian black\n& flickt a zippo.\nHenry & Phoebe happy as cockroaches\nin the world-kitchen woofed, with all away.\nThe International flame, like despair, rose\nor like the foolish Paks or Sudanese\n\nHenry Hankovitch, con guítar,\ndid a praying mantis pray\nwho even more obviously than the increasingly fanatical Americans\ncannot govern themselves. Swedes don’t exist,\nScandanavians in general do not exist,\ntake it from there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-32": { - "title": "“Dream Song 32”", - "body": "And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding\nacross malignant half my years or so?\nOne evil faery\nit was workt night, with amoroso pleasing\nmenace, the panes shake\nwhere Lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream.\n\nA tiger by a torrent in rain, wind,\nnarrows fiend’s eyes for grief\nin an old ink-on-silk,\nreminding me of Delphi, and,\nfriend Quo, once was safe\nimagination as sweet milk.\n\nLet all the flowers wither like a party.\nAnd now you have abandoned\nown your young & old, the oldest, people\nto a solitudinem of mournful communes,\nmournful communes.\nStatus, Status, come home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-33": { - "title": "“Dream Song 33”", - "body": "An apple arc’d toward Kleitos; whose great King\nwroth & of wine did study where his sword,\nsneaked away, might be …\nwith swollen lids staggered up and clung\ndim to the cloth of gold. An un-Greek word\nblister, to him guard,\n\nand the trumpeter would not sound, fisted. Ha,\nthey hustle Clitus out; by another door,\nloaded, crowds he back in\nwho now must, chopped, fall to the spear-ax ah\ngrabbed from an extra by the boy-god, sore\nfor weapons. For the sin:\n\nlittle it is gross Henry has to say.\nThe King heaved. Pluckt out, the ax-end would\nhe jab in his sole throat.\nAs if an end. A baby, the guard may\nsquire him to his apartments. Weeping & blood\nwound round his one friend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-34": { - "title": "“Dream Song 34”", - "body": "My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide\nin the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried\nto his trigger-digit, pal.\nHe should not have done that, but, I guess,\nhe didn’t feel the best, Sister,--felt less\nand more about less than us …?\n\nNow--tell me, my love, if you recall\nthe dove light after dawn at the island and all--\nhere is the story, Jack:\nhe verbed for forty years, very enough,\n& shot & buckt--and, baby, there was of\nschist but small there (some).\n\nWhy should I tell a truth? when in the crack\nof the dooming & emptying news I did hold back--\nin the taxi too, sick--\nsilent--it’s so I broke down here, in his mind\nwhose sire as mine one same way--I refuse,\nhoping the guy go home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-35": { - "title": "“Dream Song 35”", - "body": "Hey, out there!--assistant professors, full,\nassociates,--instructors--others--any--\nI have a sing to shay.\nWe are assembled here in the capital\ncity for Dull--and one professor’s wife is Mary--\nat Christmastide, hey!\n\nand all of you did theses or are doing\nand the moral history of what we were up to\nthrives in Sir Wilson’s hands--\nwho I don’t see here--only deals go screwing\nsome of you out, some up--the chairmen too\nare nervous, little friends--\n\na chairman’s not a chairman, son, forever,\nand hurts with his appointments; ha, but circle--\ntake my word for it--\nthough maybe Frost is dying--around Mary;\nforget your footnotes on the old gentleman;\ndance around Mary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-36": { - "title": "“Dream Song 36”", - "body": "The high ones die, die. They die. You look up and who’s there?\n--Easy, easy, Mr Bones. I is on your side.\nI smell your grief.\n--I sent my grief away. I cannot care\nforever. With them all align & again I died\nand cried, and I have to live.\n\n--Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.\nThat is our ’pointed task. Love & die.\n--Yes; that makes sense.\nBut what makes sense between, then? What if I\nroiling & babbling & braining, brood on why and\njust sat on the fence?\n\n--I doubts you did or do. De choice is lost.\n--It’s fool’s gold. But I go in for that.\nThe boy & the bear\nlooked at each other. Man all is tossed\n& lost with groin-wounds by the grand bulls, cat.\nWilliam Falukner’s where?\n\n(Frost being still around.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-37": { - "title": "“Dream Song 37”", - "body": "His malice was a pimple down his good\nbig face, with its sly eyes. I must be sorry\nMr Frost has left:\nI like it so less I don’t understood--\nhe couldn’t hear or see well--all we sift--\nbut this is a bad story.\n\nHe had fine stories and was another man\nin private; difficult, always. Courteous,\non the whole, in private.\nHe apologize to Henry, off & on,\nfor two blue slanders; which was good of him.\nI don’t know how he made it.\n\nQuickly, off stage with all but kindness, now.\nI can’t say what I have in mind. Bless Frost,\nany odd god around.\nGentle his shift, I decussate & command,\nstoic deity. For a while here we possessed\nan unusual man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-38": { - "title": "“Dream Song 38”", - "body": "The Russian grin bellows his condolence\ntó the family: ah but it’s Kay,\n& Ted, & Chris & Anne,\nHenry thinks of: who eased his fearful way\nfrom here, in here, to there. This wants thought.\nI won’t make it out.\n\nMaybe the source of noble such may come\nclearer to dazzled Henry. It may come.\nI’d say it will come with pain,\nin mystery. I’d rather leave it alone.\nI do leave it alone.\nAnd down with the listener.\n\nNow he has become, abrupt, an industry.\nProfessional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over\ngap wide their mouths\nwhile the quirky medium of so many truths\nis quiet. Let’s be quiet. Let us listen:\n--What for, Mr Bones?\n --while he begins to have it out with Horace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-39": { - "title": "“Dream Song 39”", - "body": "Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.\n‘Nobody (Mark says you said) ‘is ever found out.’\nI figure you were right,\nhaving as Henry got away with murder\nfor long. Some jarred clock tell me it’s late,\nnot for you who went straight\n\nbut for the lorn. Our roof is lefted off\nlately: the shooter, and the bourbon man,\nand then you got tired.\nI’m afraid that’s it. I figure you with love,\nlifey, deathy, but I have a little sense\nthe rest of us are fired\n\nor fired: be with us: we will blow our best,\nour sad wil riffs come easy in that case,\nthinking you over,\nknowing you resting, who was reborn to rest,\nyour gorgeous sentence is done. Nothing’s the same,\nsir,--taking cover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-40": { - "title": "“Dream Song 40”", - "body": "I’m scared a lonely. Never see my son,\neasy be not to see anyone,\ncombers out to sea\nknow they’re goin somewhere but not me.\nGot a little poison, got a little gun,\nI’m scared a lonely.\n\nI’m scared a only one thing, which is me,\nfrom othering I don’t take nothin, see,\nfor any hound dog’s sake.\nBut this is where I livin, where I rake\nmy leaves and cop my promise, this’ where we\ncry oursel’s awake.\n\nWishin was dyin but I gotta make\nit all this way to that bed on these feet\nwhere peoples said to meet.\nMaybe but even if I see my son\nforever never, get back on the take,\nfree, black & forty-one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-41": { - "title": "“Dream Song 41”", - "body": "If we sang in the wood (and Death is a German expert)\nwhile snows flies, chill, after so frequent knew\nso many all nothing,\nfor lead & fire, it’s not we would assert\nparticulars, but animal; cats mew,\nhorses scream, man sing.\n\nOr: men pslam. Man palms his ears and moans.\nDeath is a German expert. Scrambling, sitting,\nspattering, we hurry.\nI try to. Odd & trivial, atones\nsomehow for my escape a bullet splitting\nmy trod-on instep, fiery.\n\nThe cantor bubbled, rattled. The Temple burned.\nLurch with me! phantoms of Varshava. Slop!\nWhen I used to be,\nwho haunted, stumbling, sewers, my sacked shop,\nroofs, a dis-world ai! Death was a German\nhome-country.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-42": { - "title": "“Dream Song 42”", - "body": "O journeyer, deaf in the mould, insane\nwith violent travel & death: consider me\nin my cast, your first son.\nWould you were I by now another one,\nwitted, legged? I see you before me plain\n(I am skilled: I hear, I see)--\n\nyour honour was troubled: when you wondered--‘No’.\nI hear. I think I hear. Now full craze down\nacross our continent\nall storms since you gave in, on my pup-tent.\nI have of blast & counter to remercy you\nfor hurling me downtown.\n\nWe dream of honour, and we get along.\nFate winged me, in the person of a cab\nand your stance on the sand.\nThink it across, in freezing wind: withstand\nmy blistered wish: flop, there, to his blind song\nwho pick up the tab.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-43": { - "title": "“Dream Song 43”", - "body": "‘Oyez, oyez!’ The Man Who Did Not Deliver\nis before you for his deliverance, my lords.\nHe stands, as charged\nfor This by banks, That cops, by lawyers, by\npublishingers for Them. I doubt he’ll make\nold bones.\n\nBe.\nI warned him, of a summer night: consist,\nconsist. Ex-wives roar.\nFurther, the Crown holds that they split himself,\nsplitting his manward chances, to his shame,\nmy lords, & our horror.\n\nBehind, oh worst lean backward them who bring\nun-charges: hundreds & one, children,\nthe pillars & the sot.\nHenry thought. It is so. I must sting.\nListen! the grave ground-rhythm of a gone\n… makar? So what.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-44": { - "title": "“Dream Song 44”", - "body": "Tell it to the forest fire, tell it to the moon,\nmention it in general to the moon\non the way down,\nhe’s about to have his lady, permanent;\nand this is the worst of all came ever sent\nwrithing Henry’s way.\n\nHa ha, fifth column, quisling, genocide,\nhe held his hands & laught from side to side\na loverly time.\nThe berries & the rods left him alone less.\nThro’ a race of water once I went: happiness.\nI’ll walk into the sky.\n\nThere the great flare & stench, O flying creatures,\nsurely will dim-dim? Bars will be closed.\nNo girl will again\nconceive above your throes. A fine thunder peals\nwill with its friends and soon, from agony\nput the fire out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-45": { - "title": "“Dream Song 45”", - "body": "He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.\nHe thought they was old friends. He felt on the stair\nwhere her papa found them bare\nthey became familiar. When the papers were lost\nrich with pals’ secrets, he thought he had the knack\nof ruin. Their paths crossed\n\nand once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;\nand over an unsigned letter their eyes met,\nand in an Asian city\ndirectionless & lurchy at two & three,\nor trembling to a telephone’s fresh threat,\nand when some wired his head\n\nto reach a wrong opinion, ‘Epileptic’.\nBut he noted now that: they were not old friends.\nHe did not know this one.\nThis one was a stranger, come to make amends\nfor all the imposters, and to make it stick.\nHenry nodded, un-.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-46": { - "title": "“Dream Song 46”", - "body": "I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.\nPeople are blowing and beating each other without mercy.\nDrinks are boiling. Iced\ndrinks are boiling. The worse anyone feels, the worse\ntreated he is. Fools elect fools.\nA harmless man at an intersection said, under his breath, “Christ!”\n\nThat word, so spoken, affected the vision\nof, when they trod to work next day, shopkeepers\nwho went and were fitted for glasses.\nEnjoyed they then an appearance of love & law.\nMillenia whift & waft--one, one--er, er …\nTheir glasses were taken from them, & they saw.\n\nMan has undertaken the top job of all,\nson fin. Good luck.\nI myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.\nFollowed other deaths. Among the last,\nlike the memory of a lovely fuck,\nwas: Do, ut des.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-47": { - "title": "“Dream Song 47”", - "body": "--Thass a funny title, Mr Bones.\n--When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold,\nshe considered her fair shoulders\nand all them hundreds who have them, all\nthe more who to her mime thickened & maled\nfrom the supple stage,\n\nand seeing her feet, in a visit, side by side\npaused on the sill of The Tomb, she shrank: ‘No.\nThey are not worthy,\nfondled by many’ and rushed from The Crucified\nback through her followers out of the city ho\nacross the suburbs, plucky\n\nto dare my desert in her late daylight\nof animals and sands. She fall prone.\nOnly wind whistled.\nAnd forty-seven years with our caps on,\nwhom God has not visited.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-48": { - "title": "“Dream Song 48”", - "body": "He yelled at me in Greek,\nmy God!--It’s not his language\nand I’m no good at--his Aramaic,\nwas--I am a monoglot of English\n(American version) and, say pieces from\na baker’s dozen others: where’s the bread?\n\nbut rising in the Second Gospel, pal:\nThe seed goes down, god dies,\na rising happens,\nsome crust, and then occurs an eating. He said so,\na Greek idea,\ntroublesome to imaginary Jews,\n\nlike a bitter Henry, full of the death of love,\nCawdor-uneasy, disambitious, mourning\nthe whole implausible necessary thing.\nHe dropped his voice & sybilled of\nthe death of the death of love.\nI óught to get going.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-49": { - "title": "“Dream Song 49”", - "body": "Old Pussy-cat if he won’t eat, he don’t\nfeel good into his tum’, old Pussy-cat.\nHe wants to have eaten.\nTremor, heaves, he sweaterings. He can’t.\nA dizzy swims of where is Henry at;\n… somewhere streng verboten.\n\nHow come he sleeps & sleeps and sleeps, waking like death:\nlocate the restorations of which we hear\nas of profound sleep.\nFrom daylight he got maintrackt, from friends’ breath,\nwishes, his hopings. Dreams make crawl with fear\nHenry but not get up.\n\nThe course his mind his body steer, poor Pussy-cat,\nin weakness & disorder, will see him down\nwhiskers & tail.\n‘Wastethrift’: Oh one of cunning wives know that\nhe hoardy-squander, where is nor downtown\nneither suburba. Braille.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-50": { - "title": "“Dream Song 50”", - "body": "In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.\nI hummed a short blues. When the stars went out\nI studied my weapons system.\nGrenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout\nof the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes, and most\nof my pencils were sharp.\n\nThis edge of the galaxy has often seen\na defence so stiff, but it could only go\none way.\n--Mr Bones, your troubles give me vertigo,\n& backache. Somehow, when I make your scene,\nI cave to feel as if\n\nde roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, made up\nby some ol’ writer-man, got right forgot\n& the greennesses of ours.\nSpringwater grow so thick it gonna clot\nand the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup,\nyou is bad powers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-51": { - "title": "“Dream Song 51”", - "body": "Our wounds to time, from all the other times,\nsea-times slow, the times of galaxies\nfleeing, the dwarfs’ dead times,\nlessen so little that if here in his crude rimes\nHenry them mentions, do not hold it, please,\nfor a putting of man down.\n\nOl’ Marster, being bound you do your best\nversus we coons, spare now a cagey John\na whilom bits that whip:\nwho’ll tell your fortune, when you have confessed\nwhose & whose woundings--against the innocent stars\n& remorseless seas--\n\n--Are you radioactive, pal? --Pal, radioactive.\n--Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal?\n--Pal, I do.\n--Did your gal leave you? --What do you think, pal?\n--Is that thing on the front of your head what it seems to be, pal?\n--Yes, pal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-52": { - "title": "“Dream Song 52”", - "body": "Bright-eyed & bushy tailed woke not Henry up.\nBright though upon his workshop shone a vise\ncentral, moved in\nwhile he was doing time down hospital\nand growing wise.\nHe gave it the worst look he had left.\n\nAlone. They all abandoned Henry--wonder! all,\nwhen most he--under the sun.\nThat was all right.\nHe can’t work well with it here, or think.\nA bilocation, yellow like catastrophe.\nThe name of this was freedom.\n\nWill Henry again ever be on the lookout for women & milk,\nhonour & love again,\nhave a buck or three?\nHe felt like shrieking but he shuddered as\n(spring mist, warm, rain) an handful with quietness\nvanisht & the thing took hold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-53": { - "title": "“Dream Song 53”", - "body": "He lay in the middle of the world, and twicht.\nMore Sparine for Pelides,\nhuman (half) & down here as he is,\nwith probably insulting mail to open\nand certainly unworthy words to hear\nand his unforgiving memory.\n\n--I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,\nsaid the Honourable Possum.\n--It takes me so long to read the ‘paper,\nsaid to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,\nbecause I have to identify myself with everyone in it,\nincluding the corpses, pal.’\n\nKierkegaard wanted a society, to refuse to read ’papers,\nand that was not, friends, his worst idea.\nTiny Hardy, toward the end, refused to say anything,\na programme adopted early on by long Housman,\nand Gottfried Benn\nsaid:--We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-54": { - "title": "“Dream Song 54”", - "body": "‘NO VISITORS’ I thumb the roller to\nand leans against the door.\nComfortable in my horseblanket\nI prop on the costly bed & dream of my wife,\nmy first wife,\nand my second wife & my son.\n\nInsulting, they put guardrails up,\nas if it were a crib!\nI growl at the head nurse; we compose on one.\nI have been operating from nothing,\nlike a dog after its tail\nmore slowly, losing altitude.\n\nNitid. They are shooting me full of sings.\nI give no rules. Write as short as you can,\nin order, of what matters.\nI think of my beloved poet\nIssa & his father who\nsat down on the grass and took leave of each other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-55": { - "title": "“Dream Song 55”", - "body": "Peter’s not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.\nThe architecture is far from reassuring.\nI feel uneasy.\nA pity,--the interview began so well:\nI mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away\nand sloshed out a martini\n\nstrangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters--\nGod’s health, the vague hell of the Congo,\nJohn’s energy,\nanti-matter matter. I felt fine.\nThen a change came backward. A chill fell.\nTalk slackened,\n\ndied, and began to give me sideways looks.\n‘Chirst,’ I thought ‘what now?’ and would have askt for another\nbut didn’t dare.\nI feel my application failing. It’s growing dark,\nsome other sound is overcoming. His last words are:\n‘We betrayed me.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-56": { - "title": "“Dream Song 56”", - "body": "Hell is empty. O that has come to pass\nwhich the cut Alexandrian foresaw,\nand Hell is empty.\nLightning fell silent where the Devil knelt\nand over the whole grave space hath settled awe\nin a full death of guilt.\n\nThe tinchel closes. Terror, & plunging, swipes.\nI lay my ears back. I am about to die.\nMy cleft feet drum.\nFierce, the two-footers club. My green world pipes\na finish--for us all, my love, not some.\nCrumpling, I--why,--\n\nSo in his crystal ball them two he weighs,\nsolidly, dreaming of his sleepy son,\nah him, and his new wife.\nWhat roar solved once the dilemma of the Ancient of Days,\nwhat sigh borrowed His mercy?--Who may, if\nwe are all the same, make one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-57": { - "title": "“Dream Song 57”", - "body": "In a state of chortle sin--once he reflected,\nswilling tomato juice--live I, and did\nmore than my thirstier years.\nTo Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,\nand gripe of retail loss? I dare say not.\nI don’t thínk there’s that place\n\nsave sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight\nretrieving her whole body, which I need.\nI recall a ’coon treed,\nflashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,\nand something can (has) been said for sobriety\nbut very little.\n\nThe guns. Ah, darling, it was late for me,\nmidnight, at seven. How in famished youth\ncould I forsee Henry’s sweet seed\nunspent across so flying barren ground,\nwhere would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?\nI fell out of the tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-58": { - "title": "“Dream Song 58”", - "body": "Industrious, affable, having brain on fire,\nHenry perplexed himself; others gave up;\ngood girls gave in;\ngeography was hard on friendship, Sire;\nmarriages lashed & languished, anguished; dearth of group\nand what else had been;\n\nthe splendour & the lose grew all the same,\nSire. His heart stiffened, and he failed to smile,\ncatching (enfit) on.\nThe law: we must, owing to chiefly shame\nlacing our pride, down what we did. A mile,\na mile to Avalon.\n\nStuffy & lazy, shaky, making roar\noverseas presses, he quit wondering:\nthe mystery is full.\nSire, damp me down. Me feudal O, me yore\n(male Muse) serf, if anyfing;\nwhich rank I pull.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-59": { - "title": "“Dream Song 59”", - "body": "Down on the cathedrals, as from the Giralda\nin a land no crueller, and over the walls\nto domes & river look\nfrom Great John’s belfry, Ivan-Veliky,\nwhose thirty-one are still\nto hail who storms no father’s throne. Bell, book\n\n& cradle rule, in silence. Hour by hour\nfrom time to time with holy oil\ntouch yet the forehead eyelids nose\nlips ears breast fists of Kruschev, for Christ knows\npoor evil Kadar, cut, is back in power.\nBoils his throne. The moujik kneels & votes.\n\nSouth & east of the others’ tombs--where? why,\nin Arkhanghelsky, on the Baptist’s side,\nlies Brother Jonas (fomrerly Ivan the Terrible),\nwhere Brother Josef came with his friend’s heart\nout of such guilt it proved all bearable,\nand Brother Nikita will come and lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-60": { - "title": "“Dream Song 60”", - "body": "Afters eight years, be less dan eight percent,\ndistinguish’ friend, of coloured wif de whites\nin de School, in de Souf.\n--Is coloured gobs, is coloured officers,\nMr Bones. Dat’s nuffin?--Uncle Tom,\nsweep shut yo mouf,\n\nis million blocking from de proper job,\nde fairest houses & de churches eben.\n--You may be right, Friend Bones.\nIndeed you is. Defy flyin ober de world,\nde pilots, ober ofays. Bit by bit\nour immemorial moans\n\nbrown down to all dere moans. I flees that, sah.\nThey brownin up to ourn. Who gonna win?\n--I wouldn’t predict.\nBut I do guess mos peoples gonna lose.\nI never saw no pickle wifout no hand.\nO my, without no hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-61": { - "title": "“Dream Song 61”", - "body": "Full moon. Our Narragansett gales subside\nand the land is celebrating men of war\nmore or less, less or more.\nIn valleys, thin on headlands, narrow & wide\nour targets rest. In us we trust. Far, near,\nthe bivouacs of fear\n\nare solemn in the moon somewhere tonight,\nin turning time. It’s late for gratitude,\nan annual, rude\nroar of a moment’s turkey’s ‘Thanks’. Bright & white\ntheir ordered markers undulate away\nawaiting no day.\n\nAway from us, from Henry’s feel or fail,\ncampaigners lie with mouldered toes, disarmed,\nout of order,\nwith whom we will one. The war is real,\nand a sullen glory pauses over them harmed,\nincident to murder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-62": { - "title": "“Dream Song 62”", - "body": "That dark brown rabbit, lightness in his ears\n& underneath, gladdened our afternoon\nmunching a crab-’.\nThat rabbit was a fraud, like a black bull\nprudent I admired in Zaragoza, who\ncertainly was brave as a demon\n\nbut would not charge, being willing not to die.\nThe rabbit’s case, a little different,\nconsisted in alert\n& wily looks down the lawn, where nobody was,\nwith prickt ears, while rapt but chatting on the porch\nwe sat in view nearby.\n\nThen went he mildly by, and around behind\n\nmy cabin, and when I followed, there he just sat.\nOnly at last\nhe turned down around, passing my wife at four feet\nand hopped the whole lawn and made thro’ the hedge for the big\n house.\n--Mr Bones, we all brutes & fools.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-63": { - "title": "“Dream Song 63”", - "body": "Bats have no bankers and they do not drink\nand cannot be arrested and pay no tax\nand, in general, bats have it made.\nHenry for joining the human race is bats,\nknown to be so, by few them who think,\nout of the cave.\n\nInstead of the cave! ah lovely-chilly, dark,\nur-moist his cousins hang in hundreds or swerve\nwith personal radar,\ncrisisless, kid. Instead of the cave? I serve,\ninside, my blind term. Filthy four-foot lights\nreflect on the whites of our eyes.\n\nHe then salutes for sixty years of it\njust now a one of valor and insights,\na theatrical man,\nO scholar & Legionnaire who as quickly might\nhave killed as cast you. Olé. Stormed with years\nhe tranquil commands and appears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-64": { - "title": "“Dream Song 64”", - "body": "Supreme my holdings, greater yet my need,\nthoughtless I go out. Dawn. Have I my cig’s,\nmy flaskie O,\nO crystal cock,--my kneel has gone to seed,--\nand anybody’s blessing? (Blast the MIGs\nfor making funble so\n\nmy tardy readying.) Yes, utter’ that.\nAnybody’s blessing? --Mr Bones,\nyou makes too much\ndémand. I might be ’fording you a hat:\nit gonna rain. --I knew a one of groans\n& greed & spite, of a crutch,\n\nwho thought he had, a vile night, been-well-blest.\nHe see someone run off. Why not Henry,\nwith his grasp of desire?\n--Hear matters hard to manage at de best,\nMr Bones. Tween what we see, what be,\nis blinds. Them blinds’ on fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-65": { - "title": "“Dream Song 65”", - "body": "A freaking ankle crabbed his blissful trips,\nthis whiskey tastes like California\nbut is Kentucky,\nlike Berkeley where he truly worked at it\nbut nothing broke all night--no fires--one dawn,\ncrowding his luck,\n\nflowed down along the cliffs to the Big Sur\nwhere Henry Miller’s box is vomit-green\nand Henry bathed in sulphur\nlovely, hot, over the sea, like Senator\nCat, relaxed & sober, watery\nas Tivoli, sir.\n\nNo Christmas jaunts for fractured cats. Hot dog,\nthe world is places where he will not go\nthis wintertide or again.\nDoes Striding Edge block wild the sky as then\nwhen Henry with his mystery was two\n& twenty, high on the hog?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-66": { - "title": "“Dream Song 66”", - "body": "‘All virtues enter into this world:’)\nA Buddhist, doused in the street, serenely burned.\nThe Secretary of State for War,\nwinking it over, screwed a redhaired whore.\nMonsignor Capovilla mourned. What a week.\nA journalism doggy took a leak\n\nagainst absconding coon (‘but take one virtue,\nwithout which a man can hardly hold his own’)\nthe sun in the willow\nshivers itself & shakes itself green-yellow\n(Abba Pimen groaned, over the telephone,\nwhen asked what that was:)\n\nHow feel a fellow then when he arrive\nin fame but lost? but affable, top-shelf.\nQuelle sad semaine.\nHe hardly know his selving. (‘that a man’)\nHenry grew hot, got laid, felt bad, survived\n(‘should always reproach himself’).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-67": { - "title": "“Dream Song 67”", - "body": "I don’t operate often. When I do,\npersons take note.\nNurses look amazed. They pale.\nThe patient is brought back to life, or so.\nThe reason I don’t do this more (I quote)\nis: I have a living to fail--\n\nbecause of my wife & son--to keep from earning.\n--Mr Bones, I sees that.\nThey for these operations thanks you, what?\nnot pays you. --Right.\nYou have seldom been so understanding.\nNow there is further a difficulty with the light:\n\nI am obliged to perform in complete darkness\noperations of great delicacy\non my self.\n--Mr Bones, you terrifies me.\nNo wonder they didn’t pay you. Will you die?\n--My\n friend, I succeeded. Later.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-68": { - "title": "“Dream Song 68”", - "body": "I heard, could be, a Hey there from the wing,\nand I went on: Miss Bessie soundin good\nthat one, that night of all,\nI feelin fari myself, taxes & things\nseem to be back in line, like everybody should\nand nobody in the snow on call\n\nso, as I say, the house is given hell\nto Yellow Dog, I blowin like it too\nand Bessie always do\nwhen she make a very big sound--after, well,\nno sound--I see she totterin--I cross which stage\neven at Henry’s age\n\nin 2-3 seconds: then we wait and see.\nI hear strange horns, Pinetop he hit some chords,\nCharlie start Empty Bed,\nthey all come hangin Christmas on some tree\nafter trees thrown out--sick-house’s white birds’,\nblack to the birds instead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-69": { - "title": "“Dream Song 69”", - "body": "Love her he doesn’t but the thought he puts\ninto that young woman\nwould launch a national product\ncomplete with TV spots & skywriting\noutlets in Bonn & Tokyo\nI mean it\n\nLet it be known that nine words have not passed\nbetween herself and Henry;\nlooks, smiles.\nGod help Henry, who deserves it all\nevery least part of that infernal & unconscious\nwoman, and the pain.\n\nI feel as if, unique, she … Biddable?\nFates, conspire.\n--Mr Bones, please.\n--Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One,\na personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry\nbefore I pass from lust!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-70": { - "title": "“Dream Song 70”", - "body": "Disengaged, bloody, Henry rose from the shell\nwhere in theior racing start his seat got wedged\nunder his knifing knees,\nhe did it on the runners, feathering,\nbeing bow, catching no crab. The ridges were sore\n& tore chamois. It was not done with ease.\n\nSo Henry was a hero, malgré lui,\nthat day, for blundering; until & after the coach\nsaid this & which to him.\nThat happy day, whenas the pregnant back\nof Number Two returned, and he’d no choice\nbut to make for it room.\n\nTherefore he rowed rowed rowed. They did not win.\nForever in the winning & losing since\nof his own crew, or rather\nin the weird regattas of this afterworld,\ncheer for the foe. He sat himself to time\nthe blue father.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-71": { - "title": "“Dream Song 71”", - "body": "Spellbound held subtle Henry all his four\nhearers in the racket of the market\nwith ancient signs, infamous characters,\nnew rythms. On the steps he was beloved,\nhours a day, by all his four, or more,\ndepending. And they paid him.\n\nIt was not, so, like no one listening\nbut critics famed & Henry’s pals or other\ntellers at all\nchiefly in another country. No.\nHe by the heart & brains & tail, because\nof their love for it, had them.\n\nJunk he said to all them open-mouthed.\nWeather wóuld govern. When the monsoon spread\nits floods, few came, two.\nCame a day when none, though he began\nin his accustomed way on the filthy steps\nin a crash of waters, came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-72": { - "title": "“Dream Song 72”", - "body": "Shh! on a twine hung from disastered trees\nHenry is swinging his daughter. They seem drunk.\nOver across them look out,\ntranquil, the high statues of the wise.\nHer feet peep, like a lady’s in sleep sunk.\nThat which this scene’s about--\n\nhe pushes violent, his calves distend,\nhis mouth is open with effort, so is hers,\nin the Supreme Court garden,\nthe justices lean, negro, out, the trees bend,\nman’s try began too long ago, with chirrs\n& leapings, begging pardon--\n\nI will deny the gods of the garden say.\nHenry’s perhaps to break his burnt-cork luck.\nI further will deny\ngood got us up that broad shoreline. Greed may\nlike a fuse, but with the high shore we is stuck,\nwhom they overlook. Why,--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-73": { - "title": "“Dream Song 73”", - "body": "The taxi makes the vegetables fly.\n‘Dozo kudasai,’ I have him wait.\nPast the bright lake up into the temple,\nshoes off, and\nmy right leg swings me left.\nI do survive beside the garden I\n\ncame seven thousand mile the other way\nsupplied of energies all to see, to see.\nDiffer them photographs, plans lie:\nhow big it is!\naustere a sea rectangular of sand by the oiled mud wall,\nand the sand is not quite white: granite sand, grey,\n\n--from nowhere can one see all the stones--\nbut helicopters or a Brooklyn reproduction\nwill fix that--\n\nand the fifteen changeless stones in their five worlds\nwith a shelving of moving moss\nstand me the thought of the ancient maker priest.\nElsewhere occurs--I remember--loss.\nThrough awes & weathers neither it increased\nnor did one blow of all his stone & sand thought die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-74": { - "title": "“Dream Song 74”", - "body": "Henry hates the world. What the world to Henry\ndid will not bear thought.\nFeeling no pain,\nHenry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter\nexplaining how bad it had been\nin this world.\n\nOld yellow, in a gown\nmight have made a difference, ‘these lower beauties’,\nand chartreuse could have mattered\n\n“Kyoto, Toledo,\nBenares--the holy cities--\nand Cambridge shimmering do not make up\nfor, well, the horror of unlove,\nnor south from Paris driving in the Spring\nto Siena and on …”\n\nPulling together Henry, somber Henry\nwoofed at things.\nSpry disappointments of men\nand vicing adorable children\nmiserable women, Henry mastered, Henry\ntasting all the secret bits of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-75": { - "title": "“Dream Song 75”", - "body": "Turning it over, considering, like a madman\nHenry put forth a book.\nNo harm resulted from this.\nNeither the menstruating stars (nor man) was moved\nat once.\nBare dogs drew closer for a second look\n\nand performed their friendly operations there.\nRefreshed, the bark rejoiced.\nSeasons went and came.\nLeaves fell, but only a few.\nSomething remarkable about this\nunshedding bulky bole-proud blue-green moist\n\nthing made by savage & thoughtful\nsurviving Henry\nbegan to strike the passers from despair\nso that sore on their shoulders old men hoisted\nsix-foot sons and polished women called\nsmall girls to dream awhile toward the flashing & bursting\n tree!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-76": { - "title": "“Dream Song 76”", - "body": "Nothin very bad happen to me lately.\nHow you explain that?--I explain that, Mr Bones,\nterms o’ your bafflin odd sobriety.\nSober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,\nwhat could happen bad to Mr Bones?\n--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,\n\nin a modesty of death I join my father\nwho dared so long agone leave me.\nA bullet on a concrete stoop\nclose by a smothering southern sea\nspreadeagled on an island, by my knee.\n--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,\n\nI offers you this handkerchief, now set\nyour left foot by my right foot,\nshoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,\narm in arm, by the beautiful sea,\nhum a little, Mr Bones.\n--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-77": { - "title": "“Dream Song 77”", - "body": "Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world\n& shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up\nand p.a.’d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand\nmoment to Henry, ah to those less & none.\nWif a book of his in either hand\nhe is stript down to move on.\n\n--Come away, Mr. Bones.\n\n--Henry is tired of the winter,\n& haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national\n mind, & Spring (in the city so called).\nHenry likes Fall.\nHé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll\nfor ever, impenitent Henry.\nBut the snows and summers grieve & dream;\n\nthése fierce & airy occupations, and love,\nraved away so many of Henry’s years\nit is a wonder that, with in each hand\none of his own mad books and all,\nancient fires for eyes, his head full\n& his heart full, he’s making ready to move on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-78": { - "title": "“Dream Song 78”", - "body": "Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared,\ninapprehensible his studies grew,\nnourished he less & less\nhis subject body with good food & rest,\nsomething bizarre about Henry, slowly sheared\noff, unlike you & you,\n\nsmaller & smaller, till in question stood\nhis eyeteeth and one block of memories\nThese were enough for him\nimplying commands from upstairs & from down,\nWalt’s ‘orbic flex,’ triads of Hegel would\nincorporate, if you please,\n\ninto the know-how of the American bard\nembarrassed Henry heard himself a-being,\nand the younger Stephen Crane\nof a powerful memory, of pain,\nthese stood the ancestors, relaxed & hard,\nwhilst Henry’s parts were fleeing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-79": { - "title": "“Dream Song 79”", - "body": "Whence flew the litter whereon he was laid?\nOf what heroic stuff was warlock Henry made?\nand questions of that sort\nperplexed the bulging cosmos, O in short\nwas sandalwood in good supply when he\nflared out of history\n\n& the obituary in The New York Times\ninto the world of generosity\ncreating the air where are\n& can be, only, heroes? Statues & rhymes\nsignal his fiery Passage, a mountainous sea,\nthe occlusion of a star:\n\nanything afterward, of a high lament,\nlet too his giant faults appear, as sent\ntogether with his virtues down\nand let this day be his, throughout the town,\nregion & cosmos, lest he freeze our blood\nwith terrible returns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-80": { - "title": "“Dream Song 80”", - "body": "It’s buried at a distance, on my insistence, buried.\nWeather’s severe there, which it will not mind.\nI miss it.\nO happies before & during & between the times it got married.\nI hate the love of leaving it behind,\ndeteriorating & hopeless that.\n\nThe great Uh climbed above me, far above me,\ndoing the north face, or behind it. Does He love me?\nover, & flout.\nGoodness is bits of outer God. The house-guest\n(slimmed-down) with one eye open & one breast\nout.\n\nSlimmed-down from by-blow; adoptive-up; was white.\nA daughter of a friend. His soul is a sight.\n--Mr Bones, what’s all about?\nGirl have a little: what be wrong with that?\nYóu free? --Down some many did descend\nfrom the abominable & semi-mortal Cat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-81": { - "title": "“Dream Song 81”", - "body": "He loom’ so cagey he say ‘Leema beans’\nand measured his intake to the atmosphere\nof that fairly stable country.\nHis ear hurt. Left. The rock-cliffs, a mite sheer\nat his age, in these places.\nScrubbing out his fear,--\n\nthe knowledge that they will take off your hands,\nboth hands; as well as your both feet, & likewise\nboth eyes,\nmight be discouraging to a bloddy hero\nAlso you stifle, like you can’t draw breath.\nBut this is death--\n\nwhich in some vain strive many to avoid,\nmany. It’s on its way, where you drop at\nwho stood up, scrunch down small.\nIt wasn’t so much after all to lose, was, Boyd?\nA body.--But, Mr Bones, you needed that.\nNow I put on my tall hat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-82": { - "title": "“Dream Song 82”", - "body": "Maskt as honours, insult like behaving\nmissiles homes. I bow, & grunt ‘Thank you.\nI’m glad you could come\nso late.’ All loves are gratified. I’m having\nto screw a little thing I have to screw.\nGood nature is over.\n\nHerewith ill-wishes. From a cozy grave\nrainbow I scornful laughings. Do not do,\nFather, me down.\nLet’s shuck an obligation. O I have\ndone. Is the inner-coffin burning blue\nor did Jehovah frown?\n\nJehovah. Period. Yahweh. Period. God.\nIt is marvellous that views so differay\n(Father is a Jesuit)\ncan love so well each other. We was had.\nO visit in my last tomb me.--Perché?\n--Is a nice pit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-83": { - "title": "“Dream Song 83”", - "body": "I recall a boil, whereupon as I had to sit,\njust where, and when I had to, for deadlines.\nO I could learn to type standing,\nbut isn’t it slim to be slumped off from that,\nproblems undignified, fiery dig salt mines?--\nContent on one’s black flat:\n\nsoming no deadline--is all ancient nonsense--\nno typewriters--ha! ha!--no typewriters--\nalas!\nFor I have much to open, I know immense\ntroubles & wonders to their secret curse.\nYet when erect on my ass,\n\npissed off, I sat two-square, I kept shut my mouth\nand stilled my nimble fingers across keys.\nThat is I stood up.\nNow since down I lay, void of love & ruth,\nI’d howl my knowings, only there’s the earth\noverhead. Plop!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-84": { - "title": "“Dream Song 84”", - "body": "Plop, plop. The lobster toppled in the pot,\nfulfilling, dislike man, his destiny,\nglowing fire-red,\nsucculent, and on the whole becoming what\nman wants. I crack my final claw singly,\nwind up the grave, & to bed.\n\n--Sound good, Mr Bones. I wish I had me some.\n(I spose you got a lessen up your slave.)\n--O no no no.\nSole I remember; where no lobster swine,--\npots hot or cold is none. With you I grieve\nlightly, and I have no lesson.\n\nBodies are relishy, they say. Here’s mine,\nwas. What ever happened to Political Economy,\nleaving me here?\nIs a rare--in my opinion--responsibility.\nThe military establishments perpetuate themselves forever.\nHave a bite, for a sign.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-85": { - "title": "“Dream Song 85”", - "body": "Flak. An eventful thought came to me,\nwho squirm in my hole. How will the matter end?\nWho’s king these nights?\nWhat happened to … day? Are ships abroad?\nI would like to but may not entertain a friend.\nSave me from ghastly frights,\n\nTriune! My wood or word seems to be rotting.\nI daresay I’m collapsing. Worms are at hand.\nNo, all that froze,\nI mean the blood. ‘O get up & go in’\nsomewhere once I heard. Nowadays I doze.\nIt’s cold here.\n\nThe cold is ultimating. The cold is cold.\nI am--I should be held together by--\nbut I am breaking up\nand Henry now has come to a full stop--\nvanisht his vision, if there was, & fold\nhim over himself quietly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-86": { - "title": "“Dream Song 86”", - "body": "The conclusion is growing … I feel sure, my lord,\nthis august court will entertain the plea\nNot Guilty by reason of death.\nI can say no more except that for the record\nI add that all the crimes since all the times he\ndied will be due to the breath\n\nof unknown others, sweating in theri guilt\nwhile my client Henry’s brow of stainless steel\nrests free, as well it may,\nof all such turbulence, whereof not built\nHenry lies clear as any onion-peel\nin any sandwich, say.\n\nHe spiced us: there, my lord, the wicked fault\nlodges: we judged him when we did not know\nand we did judge him wrong,\nlying incapable of crime save salt\npreservative in cases here below\nadduced. Not to prolong", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-87": { - "title": "“Dream Song 87”", - "body": "these hearings endlessly, friends, word is had\nHenry may be returning to our life\nadult & difficult.\nThere exist rumors that remote and sad\nand quite beyond the knowledge of his wife\nto the foothills of the cult\n\nwill come in silence this distinguished one\nessaying once again the lower slopes\nin triumph, keeping up our hopes,\nand heading not for the highest we have done\nbut enigmatic faces, unsurveyed,\ncalm as a forest glade\n\nfor him. I only speak of what I hear\nand I have said too much. He may be there\nor he may groan in hospital\nresuming, as the fates decree, our lot.\nI would not interrupt him in whatever, in what\nhe’s bracing him to at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-88": { - "title": "“Dream Song 88”", - "body": "In slack times visit I the violent dead\nand pick their awful brains. Most seem to feel\nnothing is secret more\nto my disdain I find, when we who fled\ncherish the knowings of both worlds, conceal\nmore, beat on the floor,\n\nwhere Bhain is stagnant, dear of Henry’s friends,\nyellow with cancer, paper-thin, & bent\neven in the hospital bed\nracked with high hope, on whom death lay hands\nin weeks, or Yeats in the London spring half-spent,\nonly the grand gift in his head\n\ngoing for him, a seated ruin of a man\ncourteous to a junior, like one of the boarders,\nor Dylan, with more to say\nnow there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.\nYou’d think off here one would be free from orders.\nI didn’t hear a single word. I obeyed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-89": { - "title": "“Dream Song 89”", - "body": "In a blue series towards his sleepy eyes\nthey slid like wonder, women tall & small,\nof every shape & size,\nin many languages to lisp ‘We do’\nto Henry almost waking. What is the night at all,\nhis closed eyes beckon you.\n\nIn the Marriage of the Dead, a new routine,\nhe gasped his crowded vows past lids shut tight\nand a-many rings fumbled on.\nHis coffin like Grand Central to the brim\nfilled up & emptied with the lapse of light.\nWhich one will waken him?\n\nO she must startle like a fallen gown,\ncontent with speech like an old sacrament\nin deaf ears lying down,\nblazing through darkness till he feels the cold\n& blindness of his hopeless tenement\nwhile his black arms unfold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-90": { - "title": "“Dream Song 90”", - "body": "In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,\nof liberations, and beloved faces,\nsuch as now ere dawn he sings.\nIt would not be easy, accustomed to these things,\nto give up the old world, but he could try;\nlet it all rest, have a good cry.\n\nLet Randall rest, whom your self-torturing\ncannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:\nhe’s left us now.\nThe panic died and in the panic’s dying\nso did my old friend. I am headed west\nalso, also, somehow.\n\nIn the chambers of the end we’ll meet again\nI will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat\nand all will be as before\nwhenas we sought, among the beloved faces,\neminence and were dissatisfied with that\nand needed more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-91": { - "title": "“Dream Song 91”", - "body": "Noises from underground made gibber some\nothers collected & dug henry up\nsaying ‘You are a sight.’\nChilly, he muttered for a double rum\nwaving the mikes away, putting a stop\nto rumors, pushing his fright\n\noff with the now accumulated taxes\naccustomed in his way to solitude\nand no bills.\nWives came forward, claiming a new Axis,\nfearful for their insurance, though, now, glued\nto disencumbered Henry’s many ills.\n\nA fortnight, sense a single man\nupon the trampled scene at 2 a.m.\ninsomnia-plagued, with a shovel\ndigging like mad, Lazarus with a plan\nto get his own back, a plan, a stratagem\nno newsman will unravel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-92": { - "title": "“Dream Song 92”", - "body": "Something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart.\n\nTulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood\nto be a tulip and desire no more\nbut water, but light, but air.\nYet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,\n& suffocation called, dream-whiskey’d pour\nsirening. Rosy there\n\ntoo fly my Phil & Ellen roses, pal.\nFlesh-coloured men & women come & punt\nunder my windows. I rave\nor grunt against it, from a flowerless land.\nFor timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind\nmy clock before I shave.\n\nSoon it will fall dark. Soon you’ll see stars\nyou fevered after, child, man, & did nothing,--\ncompass live to the pencil-torch!\nAs still as his cadaver, Henry mars\nthis surface of an earth or other, feet south\neyes bleared west, waking to march.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-93": { - "title": "“Dream Song 93”", - "body": "General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,\nCaptain Fatigue, and at the base of all\npale Corporal Fatigue,\nand curious microbes came, came viruses:\nand the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry\nthe rare Order of Weak.\n\n--How come dims one these wholesome elsers oh?\nOld polymaths, old trackers, far from home,\nsay how thro’ auburn hairtidbits of youth’s grey climb.\nMy beauty id off duty!--\n\nHenry relives a lady, how down vain,\nspruce in her succinct parts, spruce everywhere.\nThey fed like muscles and lunched\nafter, between, before. He tracks her, hunched\n(propped on red table elbows) at her telephone,\nwhite rear bare in the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-94": { - "title": "“Dream Song 94”", - "body": "Ill lay he long, upon this last return,\nunvisited. The doctors put everything in the hospital\ninto reluctant Henry\nand the nurses took it out & put it back,\nsmiling like fiends, with their eternal ‘we.’\nHenry did a slow burn,\n\ncollapsing his dialogue to their white ears\n& shiny on the flanges. Sanka he drank\nuntil his memories blurred\n& Valerie was coming, lower he sank\nand lovely. Teddy on his handlebars\nperched, her. One word he heard\n\ninsistent his broad shortcomings, then lay still.\nThat middle-sized wild man was ill.\nA hospital is where it all has a use,\nso is a makar … So is substantial God,\ntuning in from abroad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-95": { - "title": "“Dream Song 95”", - "body": "The surly cop looked out at me in sleep\ninsect-like. Guess, who was the insect.\nI’d asked him in my robe\n& hospital gown in the elevator politely\nwhy someone saw so many police around,\nand without speaking he looked.\n\nA meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep\nacross my nervous system some time ago wrecked.\nI saw the point of Loeb\nat last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,\nbaffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound\nattend while he is cooked\n\nuntil with trembling hands hoist I my true\n& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains--\nit’s the texture & the thought--\nbut I will like them now, spooning at you,\nmy guardian, slowly, until at lenght the rains\nlose heart and the sun flames out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-96": { - "title": "“Dream Song 96”", - "body": "Under the table, no. That last was stunning,\nthat flagon had breasts. Some men grow down cursed.\nWhy drink so, two days running?\ntwo months, O seasons, years, two decades running?\nI answer (smiles) my question on the cuff:\nMan, I been thirsty.\n\nThe brake is incomplete but white costumes\nthreaten his rum, his cointreau, gin-&-sherry,\nhis bourbon, bugs um all.\nHis go-out privilege led to odd red times,\nsince even or especially in hospital things get hairy.\nHe makes it back without falling.\n\nHe sleep up a short storm.\nHe wolf his meals, lamb-warm.\n\nTheir packs bump on their’ -blades, tan canteens swing,\nfor them this day my dawn’s old, Saturday’s IT,\nthrough town toward a Scout hike.\nFor him too, up since two, out for a sit\nnow in the emptiest freshest park, one sober fling\nbefore correspondence & breakfast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-97": { - "title": "“Dream Song 97”", - "body": "Henry of Donnybrook bred like a pig,\nbred when he was brittle, bred when big,\nhow he’s sweating to support them.\nWhich birthday of the brighter darker man,\nthe Goya of the Globe & Blackfriars, whom--\nour full earth smiled on him\n\nsqueezing his old heart with a daughter loose\n(hostages they áre)--the world’s produced,\nso far, alarms, alarms.\nFancy the chill & fatigue four hundred years\naward a warm one. All we know is ears.\nMy slab lifts up its arms\n\nin a solicitude entire, too late.\nOf brutal revelry gap your mouth to state:\nFront back & backside go bare!\nCats’ blackness, booze, blows, grunts, grand groans.\nYo-bad yōm i-oowaled bo v’ha’l lail awmer h’re gawber!\n--Now, now, poor Bones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-98": { - "title": "“Dream Song 98”", - "body": "I met a junior--not so junior--and\na-many others, who knew ‘him’ or ‘them’\nlong ago, slightly,\nwhom I know. It was the usual\ncocktail party, only (my schedule being strict)\nbeforehand.\n\nI worked. Well. Then they kept the kids away\nwith their own questions, over briefest coffee.\nThen kids drove me to my city.\nI think of the junior: once my advanced élève,\nsweetnatured, slack a little, never perhaps to make,\nin my opinion then, it.\n\nIn my opinion, after a decade, now.\nHe publishes. The place was second-rate\nand is throwing up new buildings.\nHe’ll be, with luck, there always.--Mr Bones,\nstop that damn dismal.--Why can’t we all the same\nbe? --Dr Bones, how?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-99": { - "title": "“Dream Song 99”", - "body": "He does not live here but it is the god.\nA priest tools in a top his motorbike.\nYou do not enter.\nUs the landscape circles hard abroad,\nsunned, stone. Like calls, too low, to like.\n\nOne submachine-gun cleared the Durga Temple.\n\nIt is very dark here in this groping forth\n\n Gulp rhubarb for a guilty heart,\nrhubarb for a free, if the world’s sway\nwaives customs anywhere that far\n\nLook on, without pure dismay.\nUnable to account for itself.\n\nThe slave-girl folded her fan & turned on my air-condtioner.\nThe lemonade-machine made lemonade.\nI made love, lolled,\nmy roundel lowered. I ache less. I purr.\n--Mr Bones, you too advancer with your song,\nmuching of which are wrong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-100": { - "title": "“Dream Song 100”", - "body": "How this woman came by the courage, how she got\nthe courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot\nnight of the eight of July,\nwhere it came from, did once the Lord frown down\nupon her ancient cradle thinking ‘This one\nwill do before she die\n\nfor two and seventy years of chipped indignities\nat least,’ and with his thunder clapped a promise?\nIn that far away town\nwho looky upon my mother with shame & rage\nthat any should endure such pilgrimage,\ngrowled Henry sweating, grown\n\nbut not grown used to the goodness of this woman\nin her great strength, in her hope superhuman,\nno, no, not used at all.\nI declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself,\nof love, and took the bourbon from the shelf\nand drank her a tall one, tall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-101": { - "title": "“Dream Song 101”", - "body": "A shallow lake, with many waterbirds,\nespecially egrets: I was showing Mother around,\nAn extraordinary vivid dream\nof Betty & Douglass, and Don--his mother’s estate\nwas on the grounds of a lunatic asylum.\nHe showed me around.\n\nA policeman trundled a siren up the walk.\nIt was 6:05 p.m., Don was late home.\nI askt if he ever saw\nthe inmates--‘No, they never leave their cells.’\nBetty was downstairs, Don called down ‘A drink’\nwhile showering.\n\nI can’t go into the meaning of the dream\nexcept to say a sense of total Loss\nafflicted me therof:\nan absolute disappearance of continuity & love\nand children away at school, the weight of the cross,\nand everything is what it seems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-102": { - "title": "“Dream Song 102”", - "body": "The sunburnt terraces which swans make home\nwith water purling, Macchu Pichu died\nlike Delphi long ago--\na message to Justinian closing it out,\nthe thousand years’ authority, although\ntho’ never found exactly wrong\n\npolitical patterns did indeed emerge;\nthe Oracle was conservative, like Lippmann,\nroared the winds on the height,\nThe Shining Ones behind the shrine, whose verge\nsaw the impious plunged, 6000 statures\nabove the Temple shone\n\nplundered, centuries plundered, first the gold\nthen bronze & marble, then the plinths,\nthen the dead nerve--\nroot-canal-work, ugh. I--I still hold\nfor the saviour of teeth, & I embrace\nonly he threw me a vicious", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-103": { - "title": "“Dream Song 103”", - "body": "I consider a song will be as humming-bird\nswift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange\nas the world of anti-matter\nwhere they are wondering: does time run backward--\nwhich the poet thought was true; Scarlatti-supple;\nbut can Henry write it?\n\nWreckt, in deep danger, he shook once his head,\nreturning to meditation. And word had sped\nall from the farthest West\nthat Henry was desired: can he get free\nof the hanging menace, & this all, and go?\nHe doesn’t think so.\n\nTherefore he shakes and he will sing no more,\nmuch less a song as fast as said, as light,\nso deep, so flexing. He broods.\nHe may, rehearsing, here of his bad year\nat the very end, in squalor, ill, outside.\n--Happy New Year, Mr Bones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-104": { - "title": "“Dream Song 104”", - "body": "Welcome, grinned Henry, welcome, fifty-one!\nI never cared for fifty, when nothing got done.\nThe hospitals were fun\nin certain ways, and an honour or so,\nbut on the whole fifty was a mess as though\nheavy clubs from below\n\nand from--God save the bloody mark--above\nwere loosed upon his skull & soles. O love,\nwhat was you loafing of\nthat fifty put you off, out & away,\nleaving the pounding, horrid sleep by day,\nnights naught but fits. I pray\n\nthe opening decade contravene its promise\nto be as bad as all the others. Is\nthere something Henry miss\nin the jungle of the gods whom Henry’s prayer to?\nEmpty temples--a decade of dark-blue\nsins, son, worse than you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-105": { - "title": "“Dream Song 105”", - "body": "As a kid I believed in democracy: I\n‘saw no alternative’--teaching at The Big Place I ah\nput it in practice:\nwe’d time for one long novel: to a vote--\nGone with the Wind they voted: I crunched ‘No’\nand we sat down with War & Peace.\n\nAs a man I believed in democracy (nobody\never learns anything): only one lazy day\nmy assistant, called James Dow,\n& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,\nand I said curious ‘What are your real politics?’\n‘Oh, I’m a monarchist.’\n\nFinishing his dissertation, in Political Science.\nI resign. The universal contempt for Mr Nixon,\nwhom never I liked but who\nalert & gutsy served us years under a dope,\nsince dynasty K swarmed in. Let’s have a King\nmaybe, before a few mindless votes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-106": { - "title": "“Dream Song 106”", - "body": "28 July\n\nCalmly, while sat up friendlies & made noise\ndelight fuller than he can ready sing\nor studiously say,\non hearing that the year had swung to pause\nand culminated in an abundant thing,\ncame his Lady’s birthday.\n\nDogs fill daylight, doing each other ill:\nmy own in love was lugged so many blocks\nwe had to have a vet.\nComes unrepentant round the lustful mongrel\nagain today, glaring at her bandages & locks:\nhis bark has grit.\n\nThis screen-porch where my puppy suffers and\nI swarm I hope with heartless love is now\ntowards the close of day\nthe scene of a vision of friendlies who withstand\nanimal nature so far as to allow\ngrace awhile to stay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 28 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-107": { - "title": "“Dream Song 107”", - "body": "Three ’coons come at his garbage. He be cross,\nI figuring porcupine & took Sir poker\nunbarring Mr door,\n& then screen door. Ah, but the little ’coon,\nhardly a foot (not counting tail) got in with\ntwo more at the porch-edge\n\nand they swirled, before some two swerve off\nthis side of crab tree, and my dear friend held\nwith the torch in his tiny eyes\ntwo feet off, banded, but then he gave &\nshot away too. They were all the same size,\nmaybe they were brothers,\n\nit seems, and is, clear to me we are brothers.\nI wish the rabbit & the ’coons could be friends,\nI’m sorry about the poker\nbut I’m too busy now for nipping or quills\nI’ve given up literature & taken down pills,\nand that rabbit doesn’t trust me", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-108": { - "title": "“Dream Song 108”", - "body": "Sixteen below. Our care like stranded hulls\nlitter all day our little Avenues.\nIt was 28 below.\nNo one goes anywhere. Fabulous calls\nto duty clank. Icy dungeons, though,\nhave much to mention to you.\n\nAt Harvard & Yale must Pussy-cat be heard\nin the dead of winter when we must be sad\nand feel by the weather had.\nChrysanthemums crest, far way, in the Emperor’s garden\nand, whenever we are, we must beg always pardon\nPardon was the word.\n\nPardon was the only word, in ferocious cold\nlike Asiatic prisons, where we live\nand strive and strive to forgive.\nMelted my honey, summers ago. I told\nher true & summer things. She leaned an ear\nin my direction, here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-109": { - "title": "“Dream Song 109”", - "body": "She mentioned ‘worthless’ & he took it in,\ndegraded Henry, at the ebb of love--\nO at the end of love--\nin undershorts, with visitors, whereof\nwe can say their childlessness is ending. Love\nfinally took over,\n\nafter their two adopted: she has a month to go\nand Henry has (perhaps) many months to go\nuntil another Spring\nwakens another Henry, with far to go;\nfar to go, pal.\nMy pussy-willow ceased. The tiger-lily dreamed.\n\nAll we dream, uncertain, in Syracuse & here\n& there: dread we our loves, whereas the National Geographic\nis on its way somewhere.\nWe’re not. We’re on our way to the little fair\nand the cops & the flicks & the single flick\nwho’ll solve our intolerable problem.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-110": { - "title": "“Dream Song 110”", - "body": "It was the blue & plain ones. I forget all that.\nMy own clouds darkening hung.\nBesides, it wasn’t serious.\nThey took them in different rooms & fed them lies.\n‘She admitted you wanted to get rid of it.’\n‘He told us he told you to.’\n\nThe Force, with its rapists con-men murderers,\nhas been our Pride (trust Henry) eighty years;--\nnow Teddy was hard on.\nStill the tradition persists, beat up, beat on,\ntake, take. Frame. Get set; cover up.\nThe Saturday confessions are really something.\n\nHere was there less or nothing in question but horror.\nShe left his brother’s son two minutes but--\nas I say I forget that--\nduring the time he drowned. The laundry lived\nand they lived, uncharged, and went their ways apart\nwith the blessing of the N.Y. Police Force.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-111": { - "title": "“Dream Song 111”", - "body": "I miss him. When I get back to camp\nI’ll dig him up. Well, he can prop & watch,\ncan’t he, pink or blue,\nand I will talk to him. I miss him. Slams,\ngrand or any, aren’t for the tundra much.\nOne face-card will do.\n\nIt’s marvellous how four sit down--beyond\nmy thought how many tables sometimes are\nin forgotten clubs\nacross & down the world. Your fever conned\nus, pal. Will it work out, my solitaire?\nThe blubber’s safe in the tubs,\n\nthe dogs are still, & all’s well … nine long times\nI loosed & buried. Then I shot him dead.\nI don’t remember why.\nThe Captain of the supply ship, playing for dimes,\nthinks I killed him. The black cards are red\nand where’s the others? I--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-112": { - "title": "“Dream Song 112”", - "body": "My framework is broken, I am coming to an end,\nGod send it soon. When I had most to say\nmy tongue clung to the roof\nI mean of my mouth. It is my Lady’s birthday\nwhich must be honoured, and has been. God send\nit soon.\n\nI now must speak to my disciples, west\nand east. I say to you, Do not delay\nI say, expectation is vain.\nI say again, It is my Lady’s birthday\nwhich must be honoured. Bring her to the test\nat once.\n\nI say again, It is my Lady’s birthday\nwhich must be honoured, for her high black hair\nbut not for that alone:\nfor every word she utters everywhere\nshows her good soul, as true as a healed bone,--\nbeing part of what I meant to say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-113": { - "title": "“Dream Song 113”", - "body": "or Amy Vladeck or Riva Freifeld\n\nThat isna Henry limping. That’s a hobble\nclapped on mere Henry by the most high GOD\nfor the freedom of Henry’s soul.\n--The body’s foul, cried god, once, twice, & bound it--\nFor many years I hid it from him successfully--\nI’m not clear how he found it\n\nBut now he has it--much good may it do him\nin the vacant spiritual of space--\nonly Russians & Americans\nto as it were converse with--weel, one Frenchman\nto liven up the airless with one nose\n& opinions clever & grim.\n\nGod declared war on Valerie Trueblood,\nagainst Miss Kaplan he had much to say\nO much to say too.\nMy memory of his kindness comes like a flood\nfor which I flush with gratitude; yet away\nhe shouldna have put down Miss Trueblood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-114": { - "title": "“Dream Song 114”", - "body": "Henry in trouble whirped out lonely whines.\nWhen ich when was ever not in trouble?\nBut did he whip out whines\nafore? And when check in wif ales & lifelines\nanyone earlier O?--Some, now, Mr Bones,\nmany.--I am fleeing double:\n\nMr Past being no friends of mine,\nall them around: Sir Future Dubious,\ncalamitous & grand:\nI can no foothold here; wherefore I pines\nfor Dr Present, who won’t thrive to us\nhand over neither hand\n\nfrom them blue depths nor choppering down skies\ndoes Dr Present vault unto his task.\nHenry is weft on his own.\nPluck Dr Present. Let his grievous wives\nthrall lie to livey toads. May his chains bask.\nlower him, Capt Owen, into the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-115": { - "title": "“Dream Song 115”", - "body": "Her properties, like her of course & frisky & new:\na stale cake sold to kids, a 7-foot weed\ninside in the Great Neck night,\na record (‘great’), her work all over as u-\nsual rejected. She odd in a bakery.\nThe owner stand beside her\n\nand she have to sell to the brother & sister jumping\nwithout say ‘One week old.’ Her indifference\nto the fate of her manuscripts\n(which flash) to a old hand is truly somefing.\nI guess: she’ll take the National Book Award\npresently, with like flare & indifference.\n\nA massive, unpremeditated, instantaneous\ntransfer of solicitude from the thing to the creature\nHenry sometimes felt.\nA state of chancy mind when facts stick out\nfrequent was his, while that this shrugging girl,\nkeen, do not quit, he knelt.\n\n(Having so swiftly, and been by, let down.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-116": { - "title": "“Dream Song 116”", - "body": "Through the forest, followed, Henry made his silky way,\nNo chickadee was troubled, small moss smiled\non his swift passage.\nBut there were those ahead when at midday\nthey met in a clearing and lookt at each other awhile.\nTo kill was not the message.\n\nHe only could go with them--odds? 20 to one-and-a-half;\npointless. Besides, palaver with the High Chief\nmight advance THE CAUSE.\nUndoubtedly down they sat and they did talk\nand one did balk & stuck but one did stalk\na creation of new laws.\n\nHe smoked the pipe of peace--the sceen? tepees,\nwigwams, papooses, buffalo hides, a high fire--\nwith everyone,\neven that abnormally scrubbed & powerful one,\nshivering with power, held together with wires,\nhis worst enemy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-117": { - "title": "“Dream Song 117”", - "body": "Disturbed, when Henry’s love returned with a hubby,--\nI see that, Henry, I don’t put that down,--\nhe thought he had to think\nor with a razor like a skating-rink\nhave more to say or more to them downtown\nin the Christmas season, like a hobby.\n\nTheir letters will, released, shake the mapped world\nat some point, in the National Geographic.\n(Friend, that hurt.)\nIt’s horrible how near she was my hurt\nin the old days--now she’s a lawyer twirled\nhalfway around her finger\n\nand I am elated & vague for love of her\nand she is chilly & lost for love of me\nand we are for each other\nthat which needs which, corresponding to Henry’s mother\nbut which can not have, like the lifting sea\nover each other’s fur.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-118": { - "title": "“Dream Song 118”", - "body": "He wondered: Do I love? all this applause,\nyoung beauties sitting at my feet & all,\nand all.\nIt tires me out, he pondered: I’m tempted to break laws\nand love myself, or the stupid questions asked me\nmove me to homicide--\n\nso many beauties, one on either side,\nthe wall’s behind me, into which I crawl\nout of my repeating voice--\nthe mike folds down, the foolish askers fall\nover theirselves in an audience of ashes\nand Henry returns to rejoice\n\nin dark & and still, and one sole beauty only\nwho never walked near Henry while the mob\nwas at him like a club:\nshe saw through things, she saw that he was lonely\nand waited while he hid behind the wall\nand all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-119": { - "title": "“Dream Song 119”", - "body": "Fresh-shaven, past months & a picture in New York\nof Beard Two, I did have Three took off. Well …\nShadow & act, shadow & act,\nBetter get white or you’ get whacked,\nor keep so-called black\n& raise new hell.\n\nI’ve had enough of this dying.\nYou’ve done me a dozen goodnesses; get well.\nFight again for our own.\nHenry felt baffled, in the middle of the thing.\nHe spent his whole time in Ireland on the Book of Kells,\nthe jackass, made of bone.\n\nNo tremor, no perspire: Heaven is here\nnow, in Minneapolis.\nIt’s easier to vomit than it was,\nbeardless.\nThere’s always the cruelty of scholarship.\nI once was a slip.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-120": { - "title": "“Dream Song 120”", - "body": "Foes I sniff, when I have less to shout\nor murmur. Pals alone enormous sounds\ndownward & up bring real.\nLoss, deaths, terror. Over & out,\nbeloved: thanks for cabbage on my wounds:\nI’ll feed you how I feel:--\n\nof avocado moist with lemon, yea\nformaldehyde & rotting sardines O\nin our appointed time\nI would I could a touch more fully say\nmy consentless mind. The senses are below,\nwhich in this air sublime\n\ndo I repudiate. But foes I sniff!\nMy nose in all directions! I be so brave\nI creep into an Arctic cave\nfor the rectal temperature of the biggest bear,\nhibernating--in my left hand sugar.\nI totter to the lip of the cliff.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-121": { - "title": "“Dream Song 121”", - "body": "Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it,\nthe whole humiliating Human round,\nout of this & that.\nHe made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat\nwho now need never mind his nostril-hair\nnor a critical error laid bare.\n\nHe endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell\nand wrote a-many books & he wrote well.\nPeace to the bearded corpse.\nHis last book was his best. His wives loved him.\nHe saw in the forest something coming, grim,\nbut did not change his purpose.\n\nHonest & cruel, peace now to his soul.\nHe never loved his body, being full of dents.\nA wrinkled peace to this good man.\nHenry is half in love with one of his students\nand the sad process continues to the whole\nas it swarmed & began.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-122": { - "title": "“Dream Song 122”", - "body": "He published his girl’s bottom in staid pages\nof an old weekly. Where will next his rages\nridiculous Henry land?\nTranquil & chaste, de-hammocked, he descended--\nupon which note the fable should have ended--\ntowards the ground, and\n\nwhile fable wound itself upon him thick\nand coats upon his tongue formed, white, terrific:\nhe stretched out still.\nAssembled bands to do obsequious music\nat hopeless noon. He bayed before he obeyed,\ndoing at last their will.\n\nThis seemed perhaps one of the best of dogs\nduring his barking. Many thronged & lapped\nat his delicious stone.\nCats to a distance kept--one of their own--\nhaving in mind that down he lay & napped\nin the realm of whiskers & fogs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-123": { - "title": "“Dream Song 123”", - "body": "Dapples my floor the eastern sun, my house faces north,\nI have nothing to say except that it dapples my floor\nand it would dapple me\nif I lay on that floor, as-well-forthwith\nI have done, trying well to mount a thought\nnot carelessly\n\nin times forgotten, except by the New York Times\nwhich can’t forget. There is always the morgue.\nThere are men in the morgue.\nThese men have access. Sleepless, in position,\nthey dream the past forever\nColossal in the dawn comes the second light\n\nwe do all die, in the floor, in the morgue\nand we must die forever, c’est la mort\na heady brilliance\nthe ultimate gloire\npost-mach, probably in underwear\nas we met each other once.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-124": { - "title": "“Dream Song 124”", - "body": "Behold I bring you tidings of great joy--\nespecially now that the snow & gale are still--\nfor Henry is delivered.\nNot only is he delivered from the gale\nbut he has a little one. He’s out of jail\nalso. It is a boy.\n\nHenry’s pleasure in this unusual event\nreminds me of the extra told at Hollywood & Vine\nthat TV cameras\nwere focussed on him personally then & there\nand ‘Just a few words … Is it what you meant?\nWas there a genuine sign?’\n\nCouvade was always Henry’s favourite custom,\nbetter than the bride biting off the penises, pal,\nremember? All the brothers\nmarrying her in turn & dying mutilated\nuntil the youngest put in instead a crowbar, pal,\nand pulled out not only her teeth but also his brothers’ dongs & no doubt others’.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-125": { - "title": "“Dream Song 125”", - "body": "Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water,\nwholly in dark, time limited, different from\ninitiations now:\nthe class in writing, clothed & dry & light,\nunlimited time, till Poetry takes some,\nnobody reads them though,\n\nno trumpets, no solemn instauration, no change;\nno commissions, ladies high in soulful praise\n(pal) none,\ncostumes as usual, turtleneck sweaters, loafers,\nin & among the busy Many who brays\nart is if anything fun.\n\nI say the subject was given as of old,\nprescribed the technical treatment, tests really tests\nwere set by the masters & graded.\nI say the paralyzed fear lest one’s not one\nis back with us forever, worsts & bests\nspring for the public, faded.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-126": { - "title": "“Dream Song 126”", - "body": "A Thurn\n\nAmong them marble where the man may lie\nlie chieftains grand in final phase, or pause,\n‘O rare Ben Jonson’,\ndictator too, & the thinky other Johnson,\ndictator too, backhanders down of laws,\nmen of fears, weird & sly.\n\nNot of these least is borne to rest.\nIf grandeur & mettle prompted his lone journey\nneither oh crowded shelved\nnor this slab I celebrates attest\nhis complex slow fame forever (more or less).\nI imagine the Abbey\n\namong their wonders will be glad of him\nwhom some are sorry for his griefs across the world\ngrievously understated\nand grateful for that bounty, for bright whims\nof heavy mind across the tiresome world\nwhich the tiresome world debated, complicated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-127": { - "title": "“Dream Song 127”", - "body": "Again, his friend’s death made the man sit still\nand freeze inside--his daughter won first price--\nhis wife scowled over at him--\nIt seemed to be Hallowe’en.\nHis friend’s death had been adjudged suicide,\nwhich dangles a trail\n\nlonger than Henry’s chill, longer than his loss\nand longer than the letter that he wrote\nthat day to the widow\nto find out what the hell had happened thus.\nAll souls converge upon a hopeless mote\ntonight, as though\n\nthe throngs of souls in hopeless pain rise up\nto say they cannot care, to say they abide\nwhatever is to come.\nMy air is flung with souls which will not stop\nand among them hangs a soul that has not died\nand refuses to come home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "dream-song-128": { - "title": "“Dream Song 128”", - "body": "A hemorrhage of his left ear of Good Friday--\nso help me Jesus--then made funny too\nthe other, further one.\nThere must have been a bit. Sheets scrubbed away\nsoon all but three nails. Doctors in this city O\nwill not (his wife cried) come.\n\nPerhaps he’s for it. IF that Filipino doc\nhad diagnosed ah here in Washington\nthat ear-infection ha\nhe’d have been grounded, so in a hall for the ill\nin Southern California, they opined.\nThe cabins at eight thou’\n\nare pressurized, they swore, my love, bad for--\nten days ago--a dim & bloody ear,\nor ears.\nThey say are sympathetic, ears, & hears\nmore than they should or\ndid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-129": { - "title": "“Dream Song 129”", - "body": "Thin as a sheet his mother came to him\nduring the screaming evenings after he did it,\ntouched F.J.’s dead hand.\nThe parlour was dark, he was the first pall-bearer in,\nhe gave himself a dare & then did it,\nthe thing was quite unplanned,\n\nriots for Henry the unstructured dead,\nhis older playmate fouled, reaching for him\nand never will he be free\nfrom the older boy who died by the cottonwood\n& now is to be planted, wise & slim,\nas part of Henry’s history.\n\nChrist waits. That boy was good beyond his years,\nhe served at Mass like Henry, he never did\none extreme thing wrong\nbut tender his cold hand, latent with Henry’s fears\nto Henry’s shocking touch, whereat he fled\nand woke screaming, young & strong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-130": { - "title": "“Dream Song 130”", - "body": "When I saw my friend covered with blood, I thought\nThis is the end of the dream, now I’ll wake up.\nThat was more years ago\nthan I care to reckon, and my friend is not\ndying but adhering to an élite group\nin California O.\n\nWhy did I never wake, when covered with blood\nI saw my fearful friend, his nerves are bad\nwith the large strain of moving,\nI see his motions, stretcht on his own rack,\nour book is coming out in paperback,\nHenry has not ceased loving\n\nbut wishes all that blood would flow away\nleaving his friend crisp, ready for all\nin the new world O.\nI see him brace, and on that note I pray\nthe blood recede like an old folderol\nand he spring up & go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-131": { - "title": "“Dream Song 131”", - "body": "Come touch me baby in his waking dream\ndisordered Henry murmured. I’ll read you Hegel\nand that will hurt your mind\nI can’t remember when you were unkind\nbut I will clear that block, I’ll set you on fire\nalong with our babies\n\nto save them up the high & ruined stairs,\nmy growing daughters. I am insane, I think,\nthey say & act so.\nBut then they let me out, and I must save them,\nHigh fires will help, at this time, in my affairs.\nI am insane, I know\n\nand many of my close friends were half-sane\nI see the rorschach for the dead on its way\nProp them up!\nTrade us a lesson, pour me down a sink\nI swear I’ll love her always, like a drink\nLet pass from me this cup", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-132": { - "title": "“Dream Song 132”", - "body": "A Small Dream\n\nIt was only a small dream of the Golden World,\nnow you trot off to bed. I’ll turn the machine off,\nyou’ve danced & trickt us enough.\nUnintelligible whines & imprecations, hurled\nfrom the second floor, fail to impress your mother\nand I am the only other\n\nand I say go to bed! We’ll meet tomorrow,\nacres of threats dissolve into a smile,\nyou’ll be the Little Baby\nagain, while I pursue my path of sorrow\n& bodies, bodies, to be carried a mile\n& dropt. Maybe\n\nif frozen slush will represent the soul\nwhich is to represented in the hereafter\nI ask for a decree\ndooming my bitter enemies to laughter\nadvanced against them. If the dream was small\nit was my dream also, Henry’s.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-133": { - "title": "“Dream Song 133”", - "body": "As he grew famous--ah, but what is fame?--\nhe lost his old obsession with his name,\nthings seemed to matter less,\nincluding the fame--a television team came\nfrom another country to make a film of him\nwhich did not him distress:\n\nhe enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,\nso they all said--the charming Englishman\namong the camera & the lights\nmathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom\ndoing their duty, as too he did it,\nbut where are the delights\n\nof long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?\nI am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,\nyet I must do my best.\nIt doesn’t matter, truly. It doesn’t matter truly.\nIt seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry\nvoicing & obsessed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-134": { - "title": "“Dream Song 134”", - "body": "Sick at 6 & sick again at 9\nwas Henry’s gloomy Monday morning oh.\nStill he had to lecture.\nThey waited, his little children, for stricken Henry\nto rise up yet once more again and come oh.\nThey figured he was a fixture,\n\nnuts to their bolds, keys to their bloody locks.\nOne day the whole affair will fall apart\nwith a rustle of fire,\na wrestle of undoing, as of tossed clocks,\nand somewhere not far off a broken heart\nfor hire.\n\nHe had smoked a pack of cigarettes by 10\n& was ready to go. Peace to his ashes then,\npoor Henry,\nwith all this gas & shit blowing through it\nfour times in 2 hours, his tail ached.\nHe arose, benign, & performed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-135": { - "title": "“Dream Song 135”", - "body": "I heard said ‘Cats that walk by their wild lone’\nbut Henry had need of friends. They disappeared\nShall I follow my dream?\nClothes disappeared in a backward sliding, zones\nshot into view, pocked, exact & weird:\nwho is what he seem?\n\nI will tell you now a story about Speck:\nafter other cuts, he put the knife in her eye,\none of the eight:\nhe was troubled, missionary: and Whitman\nof the tower murdered his wife & mother\nbefore (mercy-killings) he set out.\n\nNot every shot went in. But most went in:\nin just over an hour\nwith the tumor thudding in his brain\nhe killed 13, hit 33:\nhis empty father said he taught him to respect guns\n(not persons).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-136": { - "title": "“Dream Song 136”", - "body": "While his wife earned the living, Rabbi Henry\nstudied the Torah, writing commentaries\nmore likely to be burnt than printed.\nIt was rumoured that they needed revision.\nSmiling, kissing, he bent his head not with ‘Please’\nbut with austere requests barely hinted,\n\nlike a dog with a bone he worried the Sacred Book\nand often taught its fringes.\nImperishable enthusiasms.\nI have only one request to make of the Lord,\nthat I may no longer have to earn my living as a rabbi\n‘Thou shalt make unto thee any graven image’\n\nThe sage said ‘I merit long life if only because\nI have never left bread-crumbs lying on the ground.\nWe were tested yesterday & are sound,\nHenry’s lady & Henry.\nIt all centered in the end on the suicide\nin which I am an expert, deep & wide.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-171": { - "title": "“Dream Song 171”", - "body": "Go, ill-sped book, and whisper to her or\nstorm out the message for her only ear\nthat she is beautiful.\nMention sunsets, be not silent of her eyes\nand mouth and other prospects, praise her size,\nsay her figure is full.\n\nSay her small figure is heavenly & full,\nso as stunned Henry yatters like a fool\n& maketh little sense.\nSay she is soft in speech, stately in walking,\nmodest at gatherings, and in every thing\ndeclare her excellence.\n\nAnd forget not, when the rest is wholly done\nand all of her splendors opened, one by one,\nto add that she likes Henry,\nfor reasons unknown, and fate has bound them fast\none to another in linkages that last\nand that are fair to see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-172": { - "title": "“Dream Song 172”", - "body": "Your face broods from my table, Suicide.\nYour force came on like a torrent toward the end\nof agony and wrath.\nYou were christened in the beginning Sylvia Plath\nand changed that name for Mrs Hughes and bred\nand went on round the bend\n\ntill the oven seemed the proper place for you.\nI brood upon your face, the geography of grief,\nhooded, till I allow\nagain your resignation from us now\nthough the screams of orphaned children fix me anew.\nYour torment here was brief,\n\nlong falls your exit all repeatingly,\na poor exemplum, one more suicide,\nto stack upon the others\ntill stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers\nsuddenly gone pauses to wonder why he\nalone breasts the wronging tide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-176": { - "title": "“Dream Song 176”", - "body": "All that hair flashing over the Atlantic,\nHenry’s girl’s gone. She’ll find Paris a sweet place\nas many times he did.\nShe’s there now, having left yesterday. I held\nher cousin’s hand, all innocence, on the climb to the tower.\nHer cousin is if possible more beautiful than she is.\n\nAll over the world grades are being turned in,\nand isn’t that a truly gloomy thought.\nIt’s June, God help us, when the sight we fought\nclears. One day when I take my sock\noff the skin will come with it\n\nand I’ll run blood, horrible on the floor\nthe streaming blood reminds me of my love.\nWolves run in & out\ntake wolves, but terrible enough\nI am dreaming of my love’s hair & all her front teeth are false\nas were my anti-hopes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-224": { - "title": "“Dream Song 224”", - "body": "Eighty\n\nLonely in his great age, Henry’s old friend\nleaned on his burning cane while hís old friend\nwas hymnéd out of living.\nThe Abbey rang with sound. Pound white as snow\nbowed to them with his thoughts--it’s hard to know them though\nfor the old man sang no word.\n\nDry, ripe with pain, busy with loss, let’s guess.\nGone. Gone them wine-meetings, gone green grasses\nof the picnics of rising youth.\nGone all slowly. Stately, not as the tongue\nworries the loose tooth, wits as strong as young,\nonly the albino body failing.\n\nWhere the smother clusters pinpoint insights clear.\nThe tennis is over. The last words are here?\nWhat, in the world, will they be?\nWhite is the hue of death & victory,\nall the old generosities dismissed,\nwhile the white years insist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-265": { - "title": "“Dream Song 265”", - "body": "I don’t know one damned butterfly from another\nmy ignorance of the stars is formidable,\nalso of dogs & ferns\nexcept that around my house one destroys the other\nWhen I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,\nI mumble “many returns”--\n\nnext time it will be nature & Thoreau\nthis time is Baudelaire if one had the skill\nand even those problems O\nAt the mysterious urging of the body or Poe\nreeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer\nO formal & elaborate I choose you\n\nbut I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,\nthe mad, I sometimes can’t always tell them apart\nAs we fall apart, will you let me hear?\nThat would be good, that would be halfway to bliss\nYou said will you answer back? I cross my heart\n& hope to die but not this year.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "dream-song-324": { - "title": "“Dream Song 324”", - "body": "Henry in Ireland to Bill underground:\nRest well, who worked so hard, who made a good sound\nconstantly, for so many years:\nyour high-jinks delighted the continents & our ears:\nyou had so many girls your life was a triumph\nand you loved your one wife.\n\nAt dawn you rose & wrote--the books poured forth--\nyou delivered infinite babies, in one great birth--\nand your generosity\nto juniors made you deeply loved, deeply:\nif envy was a Henry trademark, he would envy you,\nespecially the being through.\n\nToo many journeys lie for him ahead,\ntoo many galleys & page-proofs to be read,\nhe would like to lie down\nin your sweet silence, to whom was not denied\nthe mysterious late excellence which is the crown\nof our trials & our last bride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "eleven-addresses-to-the-lord": { - "title": "“Eleven Addresses to the Lord”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nMaster of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake,\ninimitable contriver,\nendower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon,\nthank you for such as it is my gift.\n\nI have made up a morning prayer to you\ncontaining with precision everything that most matters.\n‘According to Thy will’ the thing begins.\nIt took me off & on two days. It does not aim at eloquence.\n\nYou have come to my rescue again & again\nin my impassable, sometimes despairing years.\nYou have allowed my brilliant friends to destroy themselves\nand I am still here, severely damaged, but functioning.\n\nUnknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs:\nhow can I ‘love’ you?\nI only as far as gratitude & awe\nconfidently & absolutely go.\n\nI have no idea whether we live again.\nIt doesn’t seem likely\nfrom either the scientific or the philosophical point of view\nbut certainly all things are possible to you,\n\nand I believe as fixedly in the Resurrection-appearances to Peter & to Paul\nas I believe I sit in this blue chair.\nOnly that may have been a special case\nto establish their initiatory faith.\n\nWhatever your end may be, accept my amazement.\nMay I stand until death forever at attention\nfor any your least instruction or enlightenment.\nI even feel sure you will assist me again, Master of insight & beauty.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nHoly, as I suppose I dare to call you\nwithout pretending to know anything about you\nbut infinite capacity everywhere & always\n& in particular certain goodness to me.\n\nYours is the crumpling, to my sister-in-law terrifying thunder,\nyours the candelabra buds sticky in Spring,\nChrist’s mercy,\nthe gloomy wisdom of godless Freud:\n\nyours the lost souls in ill-attended wards,\nthose agonized thro’ the world\nIt this instant of time, all evil men,\nBelsen, Omaha Beach,--\n\nincomprehensible to man your ways.\nMay be the Devil after all exists.\n‘I don’t try to reconcile anything’ said the poet at eighty,\n‘This is a damned strange world.’\n\nMan is ruining the pleasant earth & man.\nWhat at last, my Lord, will you allow?\nPostpone till after my children’s deaths your doom\nif it be thy ineffable, inevitable will.\n\nI say ‘Thy kingdom come’, it means nothing to me.\nHast Thou prepared astonishments for man?\nOne sudden Coming? Many so believe.\nSo not, without knowing anything, do I.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nSole watchman of the flying stars, guard me\nagainst my flicker of impulse lust: teach me\nto see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain\nmy grand endeavours: husbandship & crafting.\n\nForsake me not when my wild hours come;\ngrant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;\nachieve in me patience till the thing be done,\na careful view of my achievement come.\n\nMake me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.\nWhen all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.\nEmpty my heart toward Thee.\nLet me pace without fear the common path of death.\n\nCross am I sometimes with my little daughter:\nfill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.\nUnite my various soul,\nsole watchman of the wide & single stars.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIf I say Thy name, art Thou there? It may be so.\nThou art not absent-minded, as I am.\nI am so much so I had to give up driving.\nYou attend, I feel, to the matters of man.\n\nAcross the ages certain blessings swarm,\nhorrors accumulate, the best men fail:\nSocrates, Lincoln, Christ mysterious.\nWho can search Thee out?\n\nexcept Isaiah & Pascal, who saw.\nI dare not ask that vision, though a piece of it\nat last in crisis was vouchsafèd me.\nI altered then for good, to become yours.\n\nCaretaker! take care, for we run in straits.\nDaily, by night, we walk naked to storm,\nsome threat of wholesale loss, to ruinous fear.\nGift us with long cloaks & adrenalin.\n\nWho haunt the avenues of Angkor Wat\nrecalling all that prayer, that glory dispersed,\nhaunt me at the corner of Fifth & Hennepin.\nShield & fresh fountain! Manifester! Even mine.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nHoly, & holy. The damned are said to say\n‘We never thought we would come into this place.’\nI’m fairly clear, my Friend, there’s no such place\nordained for inappropriate & evil man.\n\nSurely they fall dull, & forget. We too,\nthe more or less just, I feel fall asleep\ndreamless forever while the worlds hurl out.\nRest may be your ultimate gift.\n\nRest or transfiguration! come & come\nwhenever Thou wilt. My daughter & my son\nfend will without me, when my work is done\nin Your opinion.\n\nStrengthen my widow, let her dream on me\nthro’ tranquil hours less & down to less.\nAbrupt elsewhere her heart, I sharply hope.\nI leave her in wise Hands.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nUnder new management, Your Majesty:\nThine. I have solo’d mine since childhood, since\nmy father’s suicide when I was twelve\nblew out my most bright candle faith, and look at me.\n\nI served at Mass six dawns a week from five,\nadoring Father Boniface & you,\nmemorizing the Latin he explained.\nMostly we worked alone. One or two women.\n\nThen my poor father frantic. Confusions & afflictions\nfollowed my days. Wives left me.\nBankrupt I closed my doors. You pierced the roof\ntwice & again. Finally you opened my eyes.\n\nMy double nature fused in that point of time\nthree weeks ago day before yesterday.\nNow, brooding thro’ a history of the early Church,\nI identify with everybody, even the heresiarchs.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nAfter a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean,\nJustin Martyr studied the words of the Saviour,\nfinding them short, precise, terrible, & full of refreshment.\nI am tickled to learn this.\n\nLet one day desolate Sherry, fair, thin, tall,\nat 29 today her life the Sahara Desert,\nwho has never once enjoyed a significant relation,\nso find His lightning words.\n\n\n# _A Prayer for the Self_\n\nWho am I worthless that You spent such pains\nand take may pains again?\nI do not understand; but I believe.\nJonquils respond with wit to the teasing breeze.\n\nInduct me down my secrets. Stiffen this heart\nto stand their horrifying cries, O cushion\nthe first the second shocks, will to a halt\nin mid-air there demons who would be at me.\n\nMay fade before, sweet morning on sweet morning,\nI wake my dreams, my fan-mail go astray,\nand do me little goods I have not thought of,\ningenious & beneficial Father.\n\nEase in their passing my beloved friends,\nall others too I have cared for in a travelling life,\nanyone anywhere indeed. Lift up\nsober toward truth a scared self-estimate.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nSurprise me on some ordinary day\nwith a blessing gratuitous. Even I’ve done good\nbeyond their expectations. What count we then\nupon Your bounty?\n\nInterminable: an old theologian\nasserts that even to say You exist is misleading.\nUh-huh. I buy that Second-century fellow.\nI press his withered glorifying hand.\n\nYou certainly do not as I exist,\nimpersonating as well the meteorite\n& flaring in your sun your waterfall\nor blind in caves pallid fishes.\n\nBear in mind me, Who have forgotten nothing,\n& Who continues. I may not foreknow\n& fail much to remember. You sustain\nimperial desuetudes, at the kerb a widow.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nFearful I peer upon the mountain path\nwhere once Your shadow passed, Limner of the clouds\nup their phantastic guesses. I am afraid,\nI never until now confessed.\n\nI fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons:\nYou were good to me, & a delicious author,\nrational & passionate. Come on me again,\nas twice you came to Azarias & Misael.\n\nPresident of the brethren, our mild assemblies\ninspire, & bother the priest not to be dull;\nkeep us week-long in order; love my children,\nmy mother far & ill, far brother, my spouse.\n\nOil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation\nI sweat out my wayward works.\nFather Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ.\nLet me lie down exhausted, content with that.\n\n\n# 11.\n\nGermanicus leapt upon the wild lion in Smyrna,\nwishing to pass quickly from a lawless life.\nThe crowd shook the stadium.\nThe proconsul marvelled.\n\n‘Eighty & six years have I been his servant,\nand he has done me no harm.\nHow can I blaspheme my King who saved me?’\nPolycarp, John’s pupil, facing the fire.\n\nMake too me acceptable at the end of time\nin my degree, which then Thou wilt award.\nCancer, senility, mania,\nI pray I may be ready with my witness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fare-well": { - "title": "“Fare Well”", - "body": "Motions of waking trouble winter air,\nI wonder, and his face as it were forms\nSolemn, canorous, under the howled alarms,--\nThe eyes shadowed and shut.\nCertainly for this sort of thing it is very late,\nI shudder, while my love longs and I pour\nMy bright eyes towards the moving shadow … where?\nOut, like a plucked gut\n\nWhat has been taken away will not return,\nI take it, whether upon the crouch of night\nOr for my mountain need to share a morning’s light,--\nNo! I am alone.\nWhat has been taken away should not have been shown,\nI complain, torturing, and then withdrawn.\nAfter so long, can I still long so and burn,\nImperishable son?\n\nO easy the phoenix in the tree of the heart,\nEach in its time, his twigs and spices fixes\nTo make a last nest, and marvellously relaxes,--\nOut of the fire, weak peep! …\nFather I fought for Mother, sleep where you sleep!\nI slip into a snowbed with no hurt\nWhere warm will warm be warm enough to part\nUs. As I sink, I weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "innocent": { - "title": "“Innocent”", - "body": "Cats’ eyes could see a flub of blood.\nHm. Not her eyes whose pain\nArched in the dark by the roadside.\nNo cats, nothing. She tried, & tried,\nTroubling not Christ’s night in vain.\n\nScum of the moon caught on her chin,\nHarmless & sickle moon, a slack\nDrink-dull passer noticed her,\nTo gather the beggar out of the blur\nInto his wagon, sick, and track.\n\nThe soft flesh melted from the bones\nOf the child born dead, for days & days\nIn the wood’s edge. Birds, nothing came.\nBones go. All is the same, the same,--\nExcept our envy O wintry praise!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-25": { - "title": "“Sonnet 25”", - "body": "Sometimes the night echoes to prideless wailing\nLow as I hunch home late and fever-tired,\nNear you not, nearing the sharer I desired,\nToward whom till now I sailed back … but that sailing\nYaws, from the cabin orders like a failing\nDribble, the stores disordered and then fired\nSkid wild, the men are glaring, the mate has wired\n_Hopeless:_ Locked in, and humming, the Captain’s nailing\nA false log to the lurching table. Lies\nAnd passion sing in the cabin on the voyage home,\nThe burgee should fly Jolly Roger: wind\nMadness like the tackle of a crane (outcries\nAscend) around to heave him from the foam\nIrresponsible, since all the stars rain blind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-96": { - "title": "“Sonnet 96”", - "body": "It will seem strange, no more this range on range\nOf opening hopes and happenings. Strange to be\nOne’s name no longer. Not caught up, not free.\nStrange, not to wish one’s wishes onward. Strange,\nThe looseness, slopping, time and space estrange.\nStrangest, and sad as a blind child, not to see\nEver you, never to hear you, endlessly\nNeither you there, nor coming … Heavy change!--\n\nAn instant there is, Sophoclean, true,\nWhen Oedipus must understand: his head--\nWhen Oedipus believes--tilts like a wave,\nAnd will not break, only iov iov\nWells from his dreadful mouth, the love he led:\nProlong to Procyon this. This begins my grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-104": { - "title": "“Sonnet 104”", - "body": "A spot of poontang on a five-foot piece,\nDiminutive, but room enough … like clay\nTo finger eager on some torrid day …\nWho’d throw her black hair back, and hang, and tease.\nNever, not once in all one’s horny lease\nTo’have had a demi-lay, a pretty, gay,\nSnug, slim and supple-breasted girl for play …\nShe bats her big, warm eyes, and slides like grease.\n\nAnd cuff her silly-hot again, mouth hot\nAnd wet her small round writhing--but this screams\nSuddenly awake, unreal as alkahest,\nMy god, this isn’t what I want!--You tot\nThe harrow-days you hold me to, black dreams,\nThe dirty water to get off my chest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-115": { - "title": "“Sonnet 115”", - "body": "All we were going strong last night this time,\nthe mosts were flying & the frozen daiquiris\nwere downing, supine on the floor lay Lise\nlistening to Schubert grievous & sublime,\nmy head was frantic with a following rime:\nit was a good evening, and evening to please,\nI kissed her in the kitchen--ecstasies--\namong so much good we tamped down the crime.\n\nThe weather’s changing. This morning was cold,\nas I made for the grove, without expectation,\nsome hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,\nto read her if she came. Presently the sun\nyellowed the pines & my lady came not\nin blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-117": { - "title": "“Sonnet 117”", - "body": "All we were going strong last night this time,\nthe mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris\nwere downing, supine on the floor lay Lise\nlistening to Schubert grievous & sublime,\nmy head was frantic with a following rime:\nit was a good evening, an evening to please,\nI kissed her in the kitchen--ecstasies--\namong so much good we tamped down the crime.\n\nThe weather’s changing. This morning was cold,\nas I made for the grove, without expectation,\nsome hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,\nto read her if she came. Presently the sun\nyellowed the pines & my lady came not\nin blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.\n\nJudges xvi.22", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "surviving-love": { - "title": "“Surviving Love”", - "body": "The clapper hovers, but why run so hard?\nWhat he wants, has,--more than will make him ease;\nNo god calls down,--he’s not been on his knees\nThis man, for years, and he is off his guard.\nWhat then does he dream of\nSweating through day?--Surviving love.\n\nCold he knows he comes, once to the dark,\nAll that waste of cold, leaving all cold\nBehind him hearts, forgotten when he’s tolled,\nHis books are split and sold, the pencil mark\nHe made erased, his wife\nGone brave and quick to her new life.\n\nAnd so he spins to find out something warm\nTo think on when the glaze fastens his eyes\nAnd he begins to freeze. He slows and tries\nTo hear a promise: ‘After, after your storm\nI will grieve and remember,\nMiss you and be warm and remember.’\n\nBut really nothing replies to the poor man,\nHe never hears this, or the voice he hears\n(He thinks) he loses ah when next appears\nThe hood of the bell, seeing which he began.\nHis skull rings with his end,\nHe runs on, love for love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-traveller": { - "title": "“The Traveller”", - "body": "They pointed me out on the highway, and they said\n‘That man has a curious way of holding his head.’\n\nThey pointed me out on the beach; they said ‘That man\nWill never become as we are, try as he can.’\n\nThey pointed me out at the station, and the guard\nLooked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.\n\nI took the same train that the others took,\nTo the same place. Were it not for that look\nAnd those words, we were all of us the same.\nI studied merely maps. I tried to name\nThe effects of motion on the travellers,\nI watched the couple I could see, the curse\nAnd blessings of that couple, their destination,\nThe deception practised on them at the station,\nTheir courage. When the train stopped and they knew\nThe end of their journey, I descended too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wholly-fail": { - "title": "“Wholly Fail”", - "body": "Sir Partofall, our Best, O the Physicist is\n(Wizards of Oak Ridge and Los Alamos)\nYour questrist foxing up a drug that may\nOr may not, who knows … so (but not a word)\nA livens wife’s and mother’s and son’s coffee\nHis own, therewith one holy night; next day\nNone descends, if the silence in the house\nIs unusual and complete, like a curtain,\nHe will know (or will not, will he) he has failed.\nSuch a good Doctor nominate a beast\nOr madman: if he reached the Chair alive,\nO lucky Doctor. Let us hang our faith\n--To master the power of the grave, much; more,\nThe power to unwit; most, curst and clouded shore,\nThe power of despair.--\nInstead on him on to the Grail, throw the State there\nTo see what he can find\nUseful for mankind,\nUseful although uncertain:\nWhere Partsusall, transfigured, white with joy,\nSmiles thro’ the blast and fiery wind spreading out from zero--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-landscape": { - "title": "“Winter Landscape”", - "body": "The three men coming down the winter hill\nIn brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds\nAt heel, through the arrangement of the trees,\nPast the five figures at the burning straw,\nReturning cold and silent to their town,\n\nReturning to the drifted snow, the rink\nLively with children, to the older men,\nThe long companions they can never reach,\nThe blue light, men with ladders, by the church\nThe sledge and shadow in the twilit street,\n\nAre not aware that in the sandy time\nTo come, the evil waste of history\nOutstretched, they will be seen upon the brow\nOf that same hill: when all their company\nWill have been irrecoverably lost,\n\nThese men, this particular three in brown\nWitnessed by birds will keep the scene and say\nBy their configuration with the trees,\nThe small bridge, the red houses and the fire,\nWhat place, what time, what morning occasion\n\nSent them into the wood, a pack of hounds\nAt heel and the tall poles upon their shoulders,\nThence to return as now we see them and\nAnkle-deep in snow down the winter hill\nDescend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "from-the-book-of-job": { - "title": "From the Book of Job", - "body": "> _Job:_\n\nPerish the day’s fire in where I was born, and that night’s joy crying ‘A boy!’\nThat day let God enquire not down for, no brightness burn there,\nBut a dark of midnight claim, a black cloud seize it wholly,\nLet all that stains & shrouds terrify that day.\nDisjoin from its fellow days it, exiled from the toil of the months.\nStony that night turn, joyless, empty of all song;\nEnchanters mark it curst, whose baleful power calls up Leviathan;\nIts twilight stars be darkt, unseen the eyelids of its dawn;\nFor it shut not the hole of my womb, but let me out to trouble.\n\nWhy died not I from the womb, incht-out still-born,\nOr fail aborted, carelessly buried, like children who never saw light?\nWhy my father’s knee accepting, breasts giving me suck,--\nWhen now I should have lain still, and slept, and slept at rest,\nWith kings and the world’s counsellors, who built up ruins to their glory,\nWith princes heavy with gold, who houses filled with silver;\nWhere the wicked cease from raging, where the exhausted rest,\nWhere prisoners glad together hear not the voice of the guard,\nWhere small & great are the same, and the slave free from a master.\nWherefore is light to the miserable, wherefore living to the bitter\nWho long for a death unforthcoming, and dig for it like treasure,\nWhose hearts leap at a mound, a small mound, strain toward a grave,\nWhose way is lockt off, who are hedged in by God himself?\nTo me moans came for food, my roars poured forth like drink.\nI fear a fear: it comes. That which I dread comes to me.\nNo ease was mine, no quiet, no rest; yet trouble came.\n\n\n> _Eliphass:_\n\nWill it do if we speak to you? for who can here be still?\nLo, you admonisht many, and to the frail sprang support,\nYour speech arrested those falling, you stiffened the folding knees.\nNow it comes on, and you faint; touches you, fear.\nIs not good fear your boldness, this your integrity hope?\nWho perished ever,--remember?--pure? Where were the good destroyed?\nEvil ones I have seen pluckt up, reaping an empty house,\nTheir children cast away justiceless in the gates courts;\nI have seen a sowing of evil, until the wind-blast of God.\nThe old hoarse lions roar, assailed, and the young lions teeth are broken,\nAnd starve do old & young, and the lady’s cubs are crusht forth.\n\nNow secretly a word came, and I gathered a little of it,\nIn piecemeal visions of the night, when deep sleep takes men;\nEntered me fear, and trembling, and all my bones shook,\nBefore my face a spirit passed, my head’s hair shuddered,\nIt stood still, no part of that appearance clear to me,\nA form was before my eyes, in silence, and I heard a voice:\n(_word unclear_) men can be just before God? Can a man be pure as his maker?\nWho can place trust in His servants? His angels fail to you;\nThen what in those whose houses are mud, whose foundations are mud.\n\nWho crunch like a moth, between the dawn and evening,\nWho are shattered, so, and unseen perish for ever.\nRage is the foolish man’s enemy, resentment doubles his woe;\nI have seen him taking root, and curst his house suddenly,\nFor his children are unsafe, and suffer in the gate, unaided.\nTheir harvest any hungry eat--even from thorns, and the snare gapes.\nFrom the dust woe comes not, nor shoots from the ground.\nBut man is born to trouble, as the angels fly off.\nWere it mine, I would seek Shaddai and put the case there,\nWho ancient enigmatic great deeds does, marvellous at, numberless,\nRain-donor here, prolific of waters elsewhere, anywhere,\nPlace-alterer, lifting up the low, restoring the mourning,\nWho moves on the crafty’s schemes, emptying their hands,\nWho takes the wise in their own devices, the wily’s counsels blows away;\nDarkness at noon abruptly they meet, and grope, and grope:\nThe Good from their mouths he snatches, the poor from their power,\nSo that the poor have hope, and evil shuts its mouth.\n\nLo, happy a man whom God corrects, who Shaddai’s training takes;\nFor first He hurts, then heals; wounds, and His hands make whole;\nOut from six woes He saves you,--seven, and He saves;\nIn famine keeps you from dying, in war from the sword’s power.\nFrom spells you sheltered, scathless when demons come:\nAt them and hunger laugh, look upon beasts without fear,\nFor you be in league with the satyrs of the fields, at peace with the wild beasts.\nAnd your tent shall be at peace, your home-place whole.\nMany your seed, in your confidence, your offspring like the grass.\nYou shall die unimpaired, & old, as a shock of corn in its season.\nSo: here is our knowing, & truth, & proven: hear it in your heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-betjeman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Betjeman", - "birth": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1984 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Betjeman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "five-oclock-shadow": { - "title": "“Five O’Clock Shadow”", - "body": "This is the time of day when we in the Men’s ward\nThink “one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight.”\nWhen he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly:\nThis is the time of day which is worse than night.\n\nA haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds,\nA doctors’ foursome out on the links is played,\nSafe in her sitting-room Sister is putting her feet up:\nThis is the time of day when we feel betrayed.\n\nBelow the windows, loads of loving relations\nRev in the car park, changing gear at the bend,\nMaking for home and a nice big tea and the telly:\n“Well, we’ve done what we can. It can’t be long till the end.”\n\nThis is the time of day when the weight of bedclothes\nIs harder to bear than a sharp incision of steel.\nThe endless anonymous croak of a cheap transistor\nIntensifies the lonely terror I feel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-licorice-fields-at-pontefract": { - "title": "“The Licorice Fields At Pontefract”", - "body": "In the licorice fields at Pontefract\nMy love and I did meet\nAnd many a burdened licorice bush\nWas blooming round our feet;\nRed hair she had and golden skin,\nHer sulky lips were shaped for sin,\nHer sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d\nThe strongest legs in Pontefract.\n\nThe light and dangling licorice flowers\nGave off the sweetest smells;\nFrom various black Victorian towers\nThe Sunday evening bells\nCame pealing over dales and hills\nAnd tanneries and silent mills\nAnd lowly streets where country stops\nAnd little shuttered corner shops.\n\nShe cast her blazing eyes on me\nAnd plucked a licorice leaf;\nI was her captive slave and she\nMy red-haired robber chief.\nOh love! for love I could not speak,\nIt left me winded, wilting, weak,\nAnd held in brown arms strong and bare\nAnd wound with flaming ropes of hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "laurence-binyon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Laurence Binyon", - "birth": { - "year": 1869 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Binyon", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "as-in-the-dusty-lane-to-fern-or-flower": { - "title": "“As in the Dusty Lane to Fern or Flower”", - "body": "As in the dusty lane to fern or flower,\nWhose freshness in hot noon is dried and dead,\nSweet comes the dark with a full--falling shower,\nAnd again breathes the new--washed, happy head:\n\nSo when the thronged world round my spirit hums,\nAnd soils my purer sense, and dims my eyes,\nSo grateful to my heart the evening comes,\nUnburdening its still rain of memories.\n\nThen in the deep and solitary night\nI feel the freshness of your absent grace,\nSweetening the air, and know again the light\nOf your loved presence, musing on your face,\n\nUntil I see its image, clear and whole,\nShining above me, and sleep takes my soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-burning-of-the-leaves": { - "title": "“The Burning of the Leaves”", - "body": "# I.\n\nNow is the time for the burning of the leaves.\nThey go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke\nWandering slowly into a weeping mist.\nBrittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!\nA flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites\nOn stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.\n\nThe last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;\nAll the spices of June are a bitter reek,\nAll the extravagant riches spent and mean.\nAll burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;\nSparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild\nFingers of fire are making corruption clean.\n\nNow is the time for stripping the spirit bare,\nTime for the burning of days ended and done,\nIdle solace of things that have gone before:\nRootless hope and fruitless desire are there;\nLet them go to the fire, with never a look behind.\nThe world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.\n\nThey will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise\nFrom squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,\nAnd magical scents to a wondering memory bring;\nThe same glory, to shine upon different eyes.\nEarth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.\nNothing is certain, only the certain spring.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNever was anything so deserted\nAs this dim theatre\nNow, when in passive grayness the remote\nMorning is here,\nDaunting the wintry glitter of the pale,\nHalf--lit chandelier.\n\nNever was anything disenchanted\nAs this silence!\nGleams of soiled gilding on curved balconies\nEmpty; immense\nDead crimson curtain, tasselled with its old\nAnd staled pretence.\n\nNothing is heard but a shuffling and knocking\nOf mop and mat,\nWhere dustily two charwomen exchange\nLeisurely chat.\nStretching and settling to voluptuous sleep\nCurls a cat.\n\nThe voices are gone, the voices\nThat laughed and cried.\nIt is as if the whole marvel of the world\nHad blankly died,\nExposed, inert as a drowned body left\nBy the ebb of the tide.\n\nBeautiful as water, beautiful as fire,\nThe voices came,\nMade the eyes to open and the ears to hear,\nThe hand to lie intent and motionless,\nThe heart to flame,\nThe radiance of reality was there,\nSplendour and shame.\n\nSlowly an arm dropped, and an empire fell.\nWe saw, we knew.\nA head was lifted, and a soul was freed.\nAbysses opened into heaven and hell.\nWe heard, we drew\nInto our thrilled veins courage of the truth\nThat searched us through.\n\nBut the voices are all departed,\nThe vision dull.\nDaylight disconsolately enters\nOnly to annul.\nThe vast space is hollow and empty\nAs a skull.\n\n\n# III.\n\nCold springs among black ruins? Who shall say\nWhither or whence they stream?\nIf it could be that such translated light\nAs comes about a dreamer when he dreams--\nAnd he believes with a belief intense\nWhat morning will deride--if such a light\nOf neither night nor day\nNor moon nor sun\nShone here, it would accord with what it broods upon,--\nDisjected fragments of magnificence!\nA loneliness of light, without a sound,\nIs shattered on wrecked tower and purpled wall\n(Fire has been here!)\nOn arch and pillar and entablature,\nAs if arrested in the act to fall.\nWhere a home was, is a misshapen mound\nBeneath nude rafters. Still,\nFluent and fresh and pure,\nAt their own will\nAmid this lunar desolation glide\nThose living springs, with interrupted gleam,\nAs if nothing had died:\nBut who will drink of them?\n\nStooping and feeble, leaning on a stick,\nAn old man with his vague feet stirs the dust,\nSearching a strange world for he knows not what\nAmong haphazard stone and crumbled brick.\nHe cannot adjust\nWhat his eyes see to memory’s golden land,\nShut off by the iron curtain of to--day:\nThe past is all the present he has got.\nNow, as he bends to peer\nInto the rubble, he picks up in his hand\n(Death has been here!)\nSomething defaced, naked and bruised: a doll,\nA child’s doll, blankly smiling with wide eyes\nAnd oh, how human in its helplessness!\nPondered in weak fingers\nHe holds it puzzled: wondering, where is she\nThe small mother\nWhose pleasure was to clothe it and caress,\nWho hugged it with a motherhood foreknown,\nWho ran to comfort its imagined cries\nAnd gave it pretty sorrows for its own?\nNo one replies.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBeautiful, wearied head\nLeant back against the arm upthrown behind,\nWhy are your eyes closed? Is it that they fear\nSight of these vast horizons shuddering red\nAnd drawing near and near?\nGod--like shape, would you be blind\nRather than see the young leaves dropping dead\nAll round you in foul blasts of scorching wind,\nAs if the world, O disinherited,\nThat your own spirit willed\nSince upon earth laughter and grief began\nShould only in final mockery rebuild\nA palace for the proudest ruin, Man?\n\nOr are those eyes closed for the inward eye\nTo see, beyond the tortures of to--day,\nThe hills of hope, serene in liquid light\nOf reappearing sky--\nThis black fume and miasma rolled away?\nYet oh how far thought speeds the onward sight!\nThe unforeshortened vision opens vast.\nHill beyond hill, year upon year amassed,\nAge beyond age and still the hills ascend,\nHeight superseding height,\nThough each had seemed (but only seemed) the last,\nAnd still appears no end,\nNo end, but all an upward path to climb,\nTo conquer--at what cost!\nLabouring on, to be lost\nOn the mountains of Time.\n\nWhat are they burning, what are they burning,\nHeaping and burning in a thunder--gloom?\nRubbish of the old world, dead things, merely names,\nTruth, justice, love, beauty, the human smile,\nAll flung to the flames!\nThey are raging to destroy, but first defile;\nMaddened, because no furnace will consume\nWhat lives, still lives, impassioned to create.\nAh, your eyes open: open, and dilate.\nTransfigured, you behold\nThe python that was coiled about your feet,\nMuscle on muscle, in slow malignant fold,\nTauten and tower, impending opposite,--\nA fury of greed, an ecstasy of hate,\nConcentred in the small and angry eye.\nYour hand leaps out in the action to defy,\nAnd grips the unclean throat, to strangle it.\n\n\n# V.\n\nFrom shadow to shadow the waters are gliding, are gone,\nThey mirror the ruins a moment, the wounds and the void;\nBut theirs is the sweetness of silence in places apart:\nThey retain not a stain, in a moment they shine as they shone,\nThey stay not for bound or for bar, they have found out a way\nFar from the gnawing of greed and the envious heart.\n\nThe freshness of leaves is from them, and the springing of grass,\nThe juice of the apple, the rustle of ripening corn;\nThey know not the lust of destruction, the frenzy of spite;\nThey give and pervade, and possess not, but silently pass;\nThey perish not, though they be broken; continuing streams,\nThe same in the cloud and the glory, the night and the light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "do-kings-put-faith-in-fortressed-walls": { - "title": "“Do Kings Put Faith in Fortressed Walls”", - "body": "Do kings put faith in fortressed walls, and bar\nTheir cities’ gates, as strong to keep out war?\nThe constancy of friends is stronger far.\nAre lilies pure, that in some vale unknown\nUnplucked have blossomed and unpraised have blown?\nThe constancy of friends is purer.\nThe constancy of friends is lovelier\nThan fame or fortune; past all riches dear;\nImpossible to soil by foulest breath;\nTheir crown is rarer than the conqueror’s wreath,\nAnd all their joy securer.\n\nThen let our love be simple, steadfast, true,\nAnd we will Fate and all her arms defy.\nWith that blind conflict what have we to do,\nHowever stabbed at by Adversity?\nThe mortal foe is slain, mistrust; the dread\nLest our love lean upon uncertainty;\nMistrust, that poisons the mind’s daily bread,\nAnd kills its needful faith.\nFor us, since our joined hands have made us brave,\nNot ev’n Love’s boastful foes,\nEstranging Time nor separating Death,\nShall call us slave,\nSo that we keep perfect the name of those\nWho did not buy each other’s hearts, but gave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-fallen": { - "title": "“For the Fallen”", - "body": "With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,\nEngland mourns for her dead across the sea.\nFlesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,\nFallen in the cause of the free.\n\nSolemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal\nSings sorrow up into immortal spheres,\nThere is music in the midst of desolation\nAnd a glory that shines upon our tears.\n\nThey went with songs to the battle, they were young,\nStraight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.\nThey were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;\nThey fell with their faces to the foe.\n\nThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:\nAge shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.\nAt the going down of the sun and in the morning\nWe will remember them.\n\nThey mingle not with their laughing comrades again;\nThey sit no more at familiar tables of home;\nThey have no lot in our labour of the day-time;\nThey sleep beyond England’s foam.\n\nBut where our desires are and our hopes profound,\nFelt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,\nTo the innermost heart of their own land they are known\nAs the stars are known to the Night;\n\nAs the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,\nMoving in marches upon the heavenly plain;\nAs the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,\nTo the end, to the end, they remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-healers": { - "title": "“The Healers”", - "body": "In a vision of the night I saw them,\n In the battles of the night.\n’Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood\n They were moving like light,\n\nLight of the reason, guarded\n Tense within the will,\nAs a lantern under a tossing of boughs\n Burns steady and still.\n\nWith scrutiny calm, and with fingers\n Patient as swift\nThey bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen\n Bodies uplift,\n\nUntired and defenceless; around them\n With shrieks in its breath\nBursts stark from the terrible horizon\n Impersonal death;\n\nBut they take not their courage from anger\n That blinds the hot being;\nThey take not their pity from weakness;\n Tender, yet seeing;\n\nFeeling, yet nerved to the uttermost;\n Keen, like steel;\nYet the wounds of the mind they are stricken with,\n Who shall heal?\n\nThey endure to have eyes of the watcher\n In hell, and not swerve\nFor an hour from the faith that they follow,\n The light that they serve.\n\nMan true to man, to his kindness\n That overflows all,\nTo his spirit erect in the thunder\n When all his forts fall,--\n\nThis light, in the tiger-mad welter,\n They serve and they save.\nWhat song shall be worthy to sing of them--\n Braver than the brave?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-high-leaves-of-the-walnut": { - "title": "“In the High Leaves of the Walnut”", - "body": "In the high leaves of a walnut,\nOn the very topmost boughs,\nA boy that climbed the branching bole\nHis cradled limbs would house.\n\nOn the airy bed that rocked him\nLong, idle hours he’d lie\nAlone with white clouds sailing\nThe warm blue of the sky.\n\nI remember not what his dreams were;\nBut the scent of a leaf’s enough\nTo house me higher than those high boughs\nIn a youth he knew not of,\n\nIn a light that no day brings now\nBut none can spoil or smutch,\nA magic that I felt not then\nAnd only now I touch.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "in-the-shadow-of-a-broken-house": { - "title": "“In the Shadow of a Broken House”", - "body": "In the shadow of a broken house,\nDown a deserted street,\nPropt walls, cold hearths, and phantom stairs,\nAnd the silence of dead feet--\nLocked wildly in one another’s arms\nI saw two lovers meet.\n\nAnd over that hearthless house aghast\nRose from the mind’s abyss\nLost stars and ruined, peering moons,\nWorlds overshadowing this,--\nTime’s stony palace crumbled down\nBefore that instant kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "no-more-now-with-jealous-complaining": { - "title": "“No More now with Jealous Complaining”", - "body": "No more now with jealous complaining\nShall you be vext; nor I with fears\nTorture my heart: my heart is secure now,\nAnd laughs at follies of former tears.\nNo more now with the endless paining\nOf idle desires shall Day distress;\nNor Night, from passionate envy pure now,\nWith insupportable loneliness.\nTruth and Trust so sweetly possess\nMy fortress of peace, no more to be shaken;\nFrom dreams of joy to joy I awaken\nAnd wander in fields of happiness.\nFoolish once, now I’ll be wise,\nAnd live in the light of your trusting eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nothing-is-enough": { - "title": "“Nothing is Enough!”", - "body": "No, though our all be spent--\nHeart’s extremest love,\nSpirit’s whole intent,\nAll that nerve can feel,\nAll that brain invent,--\nStill beyond appeal\nWill Divine Desire\nYet more excellent\nPrecious cost require\nOf this mortal stuff,--\nNever be content\nTill ourselves be fire.\nNothing is enough!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rain-was-ending": { - "title": "“The Rain Was Ending”", - "body": "The rain was ending, and light\nLifting the leaden skies.\nIt shone upon ceiling and floor\nAnd dazzled a child’s eyes.\n\nPale after fever, a captive\nApart from his schoolfellows,\nHe stood at the high room’s window\nWith face to the pane pressed close,\n\nAnd beheld an immense glory\nFlooding with fire the drops\nSpilled on miraculous leaves\nOf the fresh green lime-tree tops.\n\nWashed gravel glittered red\nTo a wall, and beyond it nine\nTall limes in the old inn yard\nRose over the tall inn sign.\n\nAnd voices arose from beneath\nOf boys from school set free,\nRacing and chasing each other\nWith laughter and games and glee.\n\nTo the boy at the high room-window,\nGazing alone and apart,\nThere came a wish without reason,\nA thought that shone through his heart.\n\nI’ll choose this moment and keep it,\nHe said to himself, for a vow,\nTo remember for ever and ever\nAs if it were always now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "elizabeth-bishop": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Elizabeth Bishop", - "birth": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 69 - }, - "poems": { - "anaphora": { - "title": "“Anaphora”", - "body": "Each day with so much ceremony\nbegins, with birds, with bells,\nwith whistles from a factory;\nsuch white-gold skies our eyes\nfirst open on, such brilliant walls\nthat for a moment we wonder\n“Where is the music coming from, the energy?\nThe day was meant for what ineffable creature\nwe must have missed?” Oh promptly he\nappears and takes his earthly nature\n instantly, instantly falls\n victim of long intrigue,\n assuming memory and mortal\n mortal fatigue.\n\nMore slowly falling into sight\nand showering into stippled faces,\ndarkening, condensing all his light;\nin spite of all the dreaming\nsquandered upon him with that look,\nsuffers our uses and abuses,\nsinks through the drift of bodies,\nsinks through the drift of vlasses\nto evening to the beggar in the park\nwho, weary, without lamp or book\n prepares stupendous studies:\n the fiery event\n of every day in endless\n endless assent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "argument": { - "title": "“Argument”", - "body": "Days that cannot bring you near\nor will not,\nDistance trying to appear\nsomething more obstinate,\nargue argue argue with me\nendlessly\nneither proving you less wanted nor less dear.\n\nDistance: Remember all that land\nbeneath the plane;\nthat coastline\nof dim beaches deep in sand\nstretching indistinguishably\nall the way,\nall the way to where my reasons end?\n\nDays: And think\nof all those cluttered instruments,\none to a fact,\ncanceling each other’s experience;\nhow they were\nlike some hideous calendar\n“Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc.”\n\nThe intimidating sound\nof these voices\nwe must separately find\ncan and shall be vanquished:\nDays and Distance disarrayed again\nand gone\nboth for good and from the gentle battleground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-armadillo": { - "title": "“The Armadillo”", - "body": "This is the time of year\nwhen almost every night\nthe frail, illegal fire balloons appear.\nClimbing the mountain height,\n\nrising toward a saint\nstill honored in these parts,\nthe paper chambers flush and fill with light\nthat comes and goes, like hearts.\n\nOnce up against the sky it’s hard\nto tell them from the stars--\nplanets, that is--the tinted ones:\nVenus going down, or Mars,\n\nor the pale green one. With a wind,\nthey flare and falter, wobble and toss;\nbut if it’s still they steer between\nthe kite sticks of the Southern Cross,\n\nreceding, dwindling, solemnly\nand steadily forsaking us,\nor, in the downdraft from a peak,\nsuddenly turning dangerous.\n\nLast night another big one fell.\nIt splattered like an egg of fire\nagainst the cliff behind the house.\nThe flame ran down. We saw the pair\n\nof owls who nest there flying up\nand up, their whirling black-and-white\nstained bright pink underneath, until\nthey shrieked up out of sight.\n\nThe ancient owls’ nest must have burned.\nHastily, all alone,\na glistening armadillo left the scene,\nrose-flecked, head down, tail down,\n\nand then a baby rabbit jumped out,\n_short_-eared, to our surprise.\nSo soft!--a handful of intangible ash\nwith fixed, ignited eyes.\n\n_Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!\nO falling fire and piercing cry\nand panic, and a weak mailed fist\nclenched ignorant against the sky!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "arrival-at-santos": { - "title": "“Arrival at Santos”", - "body": "Here is a coast; here is a harbor;\nhere, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery;\nimpractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,\nsad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,\n\nwith a little church on top of one. And warehouses,\nsome of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,\nand some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,\nis this how this country is going to answer you\n\nand your immodest demands for a different world,\nand a better life, and complete comprehension\nof both at last, and immediately,\nafter eighteen days of suspension?\n\nFinish your breakfast. The tender is coming,\na strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.\nSo that’s the flag. I never saw it before.\nI somehow never thought of there being a flag,\n\nbut of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,\nand paper money; they remain to be seen.\nAnd gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,\nmyself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,\n\ndescending into the midst of twenty-six freighters\nwaiting to be loaded with green coffee beans.\nPlease, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!\nWatch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen’s\n\nskirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,\na retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,\nwith beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.\nHer home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall\n\ns, New York. There. We are settled.\nThe customs officials will speak English, we hope,\nand leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.\nPorts are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,\n\nbut they seldom seem to care what impression they make,\nor, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,\nthe unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps--\nwasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter\n\ndo when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat,\neither because the glue here is very inferior\nor because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;\nwe are driving to the interior.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "at-the-fishhouses": { - "title": "“At the Fishhouses”", - "body": "Although it is a cold evening,\ndown by one of the fishhouses\nan old man sits netting,\nhis net, in the gloaming almost invisible,\na dark purple-brown,\nand his shuttle worn and polished.\nThe air smells so strong of codfish\nit makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.\nThe five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs\nand narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up\nto storerooms in the gables\nfor the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.\nAll is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,\nswelling slowly as if considering spilling over,\nis opaque, but the silver of the benches,\nthe lobster pots, and masts, scattered\namong the wild jagged rocks,\nis of an apparent translucence\nlike the small old buildings with an emerald moss\ngrowing on their shoreward walls.\nThe big fish tubs are completely lined\nwith layers of beautiful herring scales\nand the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered\nwith creamy iridescent coats of mail,\nwith small iridescent flies crawling on them.\nUp on the little slope behind the houses,\nset in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,\nis an ancient wooden capstan,\ncracked, with two long bleached handles\nand some melancholy stains, like dried blood,\nwhere the ironwork has rusted.\nThe old man accepts a Lucky Strike.\nHe was a friend of my grandfather.\nWe talk of the decline in the population\nand of codfish and herring\nwhile he waits for a herring boat to come in.\nThere are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.\nHe has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,\nfrom unnumbered fish with that black old knife,\nthe blade of which is almost worn away.\n\nDown at the water’s edge, at the place\nwhere they haul up the boats, up the long ramp\ndescending into the water, thin silver\ntree trunks are laid horizontally\nacross the gray stones, down and down\nat intervals of four or five feet.\n\nCold dark deep and absolutely clear,\nelement bearable to no mortal,\nto fish and to seals … One seal particularly\nI have seen here evening after evening.\nHe was curious about me. He was interested in music;\nlike me a believer in total immersion,\nso I used to sing him Baptist hymns.\nI also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”\nHe stood up in the water and regarded me\nsteadily, moving his head a little.\nThen he would disappear, then suddenly emerge\nalmost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug\nas if it were against his better judgment.\nCold dark deep and absolutely clear,\nthe clear gray icy water … Back, behind us,\nthe dignified tall firs begin.\nBluish, associating with their shadows,\na million Christmas trees stand\nwaiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended\nabove the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.\nI have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,\nslightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,\nicily free above the stones,\nabove the stones and then the world.\nIf you should dip your hand in,\nyour wrist would ache immediately,\nyour bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn\nas if the water were a transmutation of fire\nthat feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.\nIf you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,\nthen briny, then surely burn your tongue.\nIt is like what we imagine knowledge to be:\ndark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,\ndrawn from the cold hard mouth\nof the world, derived from the rocky breasts\nforever, flowing and drawn, and since\nour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "behind-stowe": { - "title": "“Behind Stowe”", - "body": "I heard an elf go whistling by,\nA whistle sleek as moonlit grass,\nThat drew me like a silver string\nTo where the dusty, pale moths fly,\nAnd make a magic as they pass;\nAnd there I heard a cricket sing.\n\nHis singing echoed through and through\nThe dark under a windy tree\nWhere glinted little insects’ wings.\nHis singing split the sky in two.\nThe halves fell either side of me,\nAnd I stood straight, bright with moon-rings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-bight": { - "title": "“The Bight”", - "body": "At low tide like this how sheer the water is.\nWhite, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare\nand the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.\nAbsorbing, rather than being absorbed,\nthe water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,\nthe color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.\nOne can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire\none could probably hear it turning to marimba music.\nThe little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock\nalready plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.\nThe birds are outsize. Pelicans crash\ninto this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,\nit seems to me, like pickaxes,\nrarely coming up with anything to show for it,\nand going off with humorous elbowings.\nBlack-and-white man-of-war birds soar\non impalpable drafts\nand open their tails like scissors on the curves\nor tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.\nThe frowsy sponge boats keep coming in\nwith the obliging air of retrievers,\nbristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks\nand decorated with bobbles of sponges.\nThere is a fence of chicken wire along the dock\nwhere, glinting like little plowshares,\nthe blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry\nfor the Chinese-restaurant trade.\nSome of the little white boats are still piled up\nagainst each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,\nand not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,\nlike torn-open, unanswered letters.\nThe bight is littered with old correspondences.\nClick. Click. Goes the dredge,\nand brings up a dripping jawful of marl.\nAll the untidy activity continues,\nawful but cheerful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-burglar-of-babylon": { - "title": "“The Burglar of Babylon”", - "body": "On the fair green hills of Rio\n There grows a fearful stain:\nThe poor who come to Rio\n And can’t go home again.\n\nOn the hills a million people,\n A million sparrows, nest,\nLike a confused migration\n That’s had to light and rest,\n\nBuilding its nests, or houses,\n Out of nothing at all, or air.\nYou’d think a breath would end them,\n They perch so lightly there.\n\nBut they cling and spread like lichen,\n And people come and come.\nThere’s one hill called the Chicken,\n And one called Catacomb;\n\nThere’s the hill of Kerosene,\n And the hill of Skeleton,\nThe hill of Astonishment,\n And the hill of Babylon.\n\nMicuçú was a burglar and killer,\n An enemy of society.\nHe had escaped three times\n From the worst penitentiary.\n\nThey don’t know how many he murdered\n (Though they say he never raped),\nAnd he wounded two policemen\n This last time he escaped.\n\nThey said, “He’ll go to his auntie,\n Who raised him like a son.\nShe has a little drink shop\n On the hill of Babylon.”\n\nHe did go straight to his auntie,\n And he drank a final beer.\nHe told her, “The soldiers are coming,\n And I’ve got to disappear.”\n\n“Ninety years they gave me.\n Who wants to live that long?\nI’ll settle for ninety hours,\n On the hill of Babylon.”\n\n“Don’t tell anyone you saw me.\n I’ll run as long as I can.\nYou were good to me, and I love you,\n But I’m a doomed man.”\n\nGoing out, he met a mulata\n Carrying water on her head.\n“If you say you saw me, daughter,\n You’re as good as dead.”\n\nThere are caves up there, and hideouts,\n And an old fort, falling down.\nThey used to watch for Frenchmen\n From the hill of Babylon.\n\nBelow him was the ocean.\n It reached far up the sky,\nFlat as a wall, and on it\n Were freighters passing by,\n\nOr climbing the wall, and climbing\n Till each looked like a fly,\nAnd then fell over and vanished;\n And he knew he was going to die.\n\nHe could hear the goats baa-baa-ing.\n He could hear the babies cry;\nFluttering kites strained upward;\n And he knew he was going to die.\n\nA buzzard flapped so near him\n He could see its naked neck.\nHe waved his arms and shouted,\n “Not yet, my son, not yet!”\n\nAn Army helicopter\n Came nosing around and in.\nHe could see two men inside it,\n but they never spotted him.\n\nThe soldiers were all over,\n On all sides of the hill,\nAnd right against the skyline\n A row of them, small and still.\n\nChildren peeked out of windows,\n And men in the drink shop swore,\nAnd spat a little cachaça\n At the light cracks in the floor.\n\nBut the soldiers were nervous, even\n with tommy guns in hand,\nAnd one of them, in a panic,\n Shot the officer in command.\n\nHe hit him in three places;\n The other shots went wild.\nThe soldier had hysterics\n And sobbed like a little child.\n\nThe dying man said, “Finish\n The job we came here for.”\nhe committed his soul to God\n And his sons to the Governor.\n\nThey ran and got a priest,\n And he died in hope of Heaven\n--A man from Pernambuco,\n The youngest of eleven.\n\nThey wanted to stop the search,\n but the Army said, “No, go on,”\nSo the soldiers swarmed again\n Up the hill of Babylon.\n\nRich people in apartments\n Watched through binoculars\nAs long as the daylight lasted.\n And all night, under the stars,\n\nMicuçú hid in the grasses\n Or sat in a little tree,\nListening for sounds, and staring\n At the lighthouse out at sea.\n\nAnd the lighthouse stared back at him,\n til finally it was dawn.\nHe was soaked with dew, and hungry,\n On the hill of Babylon.\n\nThe yellow sun was ugly,\n Like a raw egg on a plate--\nSlick from the sea. He cursed it,\n For he knew it sealed his fate.\n\nHe saw the long white beaches\n And people going to swim,\nWith towels and beach umbrellas,\n But the soldiers were after him.\n\nFar, far below, the people\n Were little colored spots,\nAnd the heads of those in swimming\n Were floating coconuts.\n\nHe heard the peanut vendor\n Go peep-peep on his whistle,\nAnd the man that sells umbrellas\n Swinging his watchman’s rattle.\n\nWomen with market baskets\n Stood on the corners and talked,\nThen went on their way to market,\n Gazing up as they walked.\n\nThe rich with their binoculars\n Were back again, and many\nWere standing on the rooftops,\n Among TV antennae.\n\nIt was early, eight or eight-thirty.\n He saw a soldier climb,\nLooking right at him. He fired,\n And missed for the last time.\n\nHe could hear the soldier panting,\n Though he never got very near.\nMicuçú dashed for shelter.\n But he got it, behind the ear.\n\nHe heard the babies crying\n Far, far away in his head,\nAnd the mongrels barking and barking.\n Then Micuçú was dead.\n\nHe had a Taurus revolver,\n And just the clothes he had on,\nWith two contos in the pockets,\n On the hill of Babylon.\n\nThe police and the populace\n Heaved a sigh of relief,\nBut behind the counter his auntie\n Wiped her eyes in grief.\n\n“We have always been respected.\n My shop is honest and clean.\nI loved him, but from a baby\n Micuçú was mean.”\n\n“We have always been respected.\n His sister has a job.\nBoth of us gave him money.\n Why did he have to rob?”\n\n“I raised him to be honest,\n Even here, in Babylon slum.”\nThe customers had another,\n Looking serious and glum.\n\nBut one of them said to another,\n When he got outside the door,\n“He wasn’t much of a burglar,\n He got caught six times--or more.”\n\nThis morning the little soldiers\n are on Babylon hill again;\nTheir gun barrels and helmets\n Shine in a gentle rain.\n\nMicuçú is buried already.\n They’re after another two,\nBut they say they aren’t as dangerous\n As the poor Micuçú.\n\n\nOn the green hills of Rio\n There grows a fearful stain:\nThe poor who come to Rio\n And can’t go home again.\n\nThere’s the hill of Kerosene,\n And the hill of the Skeleton,\nThe hill of Astonishment,\n And the hill of Babylon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cape-breton": { - "title": "“Cape Breton”", - "body": "Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,\nthe razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand\nwith their backs to the mainland\nin solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,\nwhile the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”\n(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede\nand fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)\nThe silken water is weaving and weaving,\ndisappearing under the mist equally in all directions,\nlifted and penetrated now and then\nby one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,\nand somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,\nrapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.\n\nThe same mist hangs in thin layers\namong the valleys and gorges of the mainland\nlike rotting snow-ice sucked away\nalmost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift\namong those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack--\ndull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,\neach riser distinguished from the next\nby an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,\nalike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.\n\nThe wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.\nOn it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,\nbut without their drivers, because today is Sunday.\nThe little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills\nlike lost quartz arrowheads.\nThe road appears to have been abandoned.\nWhatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,\nunless the road is holding it back, in the interior,\nwhere we cannot see,\nwhere deep lakes are reputed to be,\nand disused trails and mountains of rock\nand miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches\nlike the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones--\nand these regions now have little to say for themselves\nexcept in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward\nfreely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing\nin brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.\n\nA small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,\npacked with people, even to its step.\n(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,\nbut today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a\n hanger.)\nIt passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,\nwhere today no flag is flying\nfrom the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.\nIt stops, and a man carrying a bay gets off,\nclimbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,\nwhich establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,\nto his invisible house beside the water.\n\nThe birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.\nThe thin mist follows\nthe white mutations of its dream;\nan ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "casabianca": { - "title": "“Casabianca”", - "body": "Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck\ntrying to recite “The boy stood on\nthe burning deck.” Love’s the son\nstood stammering elocution\nwhile the poor ship in flames went down.\n\nLove’s the obstinate boy, the ship,\neven the swimming sailors, who\nwould like a schoolroom platform, too,\nor an excuse to stay\non deck. And love’s the burning boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "chemin-de-fer": { - "title": "“Chemin de Fer”", - "body": "Alone on the railroad track\n I walked with pounding heart.\nThe ties were too close together\n or maybe too far apart.\n\nThe scenery was impoverished:\n scrub-pine and oak; beyond\nits mingled gray-green foliage\n I saw the little pond\n\nwhere the dirty old hermit lives,\n lie like an old tear\nholding onto its injuries\n lucidly year after year.\n\nThe hermit shot off his shot-gun\n and the tree by his cabin shook.\nOver the pond went a ripple\n The pet hen went chook-chook.\n\n“Love should be put into action!”\n screamed the old hermit.\nAcross the pond an echo\n tried and tried to confirm it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cirque-dhiver": { - "title": "“Cirque D’hiver”", - "body": "Across the floor flits the mechanical toy,\nfit for a king of several centuries back.\nA little circus horse with real white hair.\nHis eyes are glossy black.\nHe bears a little dancer on his back.\n\nShe stands upon her toes and turns and turns.\nA slanting spray of artificial roses\nis stitched across her skirt and tinsel bodice.\nAbove her head she poses\nanother spray of artificial roses.\n\nHis mane and tail are straight from Chirico.\nHe has a formal, melancholy soul.\nHe feels her pink toes dangle toward his back\nalong the little pole\nthat pierces both her body and her soul\n\nand goes through his, and reappears below,\nunder his belly, as a big tin key.\nHe canters three steps, then he makes a bow,\ncanters again, bows on one knee,\ncanters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.\n\nThe dancer, by this time, has turned her back.\nHe is the more intelligent by far.\nFacing each other rather desperately--\nhis eye is like a star--\nwe stare and say, “Well, we have come this far.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-cold-spring": { - "title": "“A Cold Spring”", - "body": "_Nothing is so beautiful as spring._ --Hopkins\n\nA cold spring:\nthe violet was flawed on the lawn.\nFor two weeks or more the trees hesitated;\nthe little leaves waited,\ncarefully indicating their characteristics.\nFinally a grave green dust\nsettled over your big and aimless hills.\nOne day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,\non the side of one a calf was born.\nThe mother stopped lowing\nand took a long time eating the after-birth,\na wretched flag,\nbut the calf got up promptly\nand seemed inclined to feel gay.\n\nThe next day\nwas much warmer.\nGreenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,\neach petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;\nand the blurred redbud stood\nbeside it, motionless, but almost more\nlike movement than any placeable color.\nFour deer practiced leaping over your fences.\nThe infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.\nSong-sparrows were wound up for the summer,\nand in the maple the complementary cardinal\ncracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,\nstretching miles of green limbs from the south.\n\nIn his cap the lilacs whitened,\nthen one day they fell like snow.\nNow, in the evening,\na new moon comes.\nThe hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show\nwhere each cow-flop lies.\nThe bull-frogs are sounding,\nslack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.\nBeneath the light, against your white front door,\nthe smallest moths, like Chinese fans,\nflatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt\nover pale yellow, orange, or gray.\nNow, from the thick grass, the fireflies\nbegin to rise:\nup, then down, then up again:\nlit on the ascending flight,\ndrifting simultaneously to the same height,\n--exactly like the bubbles in champagne.\n--Later on they rise much higher.\nAnd your shadowy pastures will be able to offer\nthese particular glowing tributes\nevery evening now throughout the summer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "conversation": { - "title": "“Conversation”", - "body": "The tumult in the heart\nkeeps asking questions.\nAnd then it stops and undertakes to answer\nin the same tone of voice.\nNo one could tell the difference.\n\nUninnocent, these conversations start,\nand then engage the senses,\nonly half-meaning to.\nAnd then there is no choice,\nand then there is no sense;\n\nuntil a name\nand all its connotation are the same.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crusoe-in-england": { - "title": "“Crusoe in England”", - "body": "A new volcano has erupted,\nthe papers say, and last week I was reading\nwhere some ship saw an island being born:\nat first a breath of steam, ten miles away;\nand then a black fleck--basalt, probably--\nrose in the mate’s binoculars\nand caught on the horizon like a fly.\nThey named it. But my poor old island’s still\nun-rediscovered, un-renamable.\nNone of the books has ever got it right.\n\nWell, I had fifty-two\nmiserable, small volcanoes I could climb\nwith a few slithery strides--\nvolcanoes dead as ash heaps.\nI used to sit on the edge of the highest one\nand count the others standing up,\nnaked and leaden, with their heads blown off.\nI’d think that if they were the size\nI thought volcanoes should be, then I had\nbecome a giant;\nand if I had become a giant,\nI couldn’t bear to think what size\nthe goats and turtles were,\nor the gulls, or the overlapping rollers\n--a glittering hexagon of rollers\nclosing and closing in, but never quite,\nglittering and glittering, though the sky\nwas mostly overcast.\n\nMy island seemed to be\na sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s\nleft-over clouds arrived and hung\nabove the craters--their parched throats\nwere hot to touch.\nWas that why it rained so much?\nAnd why sometimes the whole place hissed?\nThe turtles lumbered by, high-domed,\nhissing like teakettles.\n(And I’d have given years, or taken a few,\nfor any sort of kettle, of course.)\nThe folds of lava, running out to sea,\nwould hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove\nto be more turtles.\nThe beaches were all lava, variegated,\nblack, red, and white, and gray;\nthe marbled colors made a fine display.\nAnd I had waterspouts. Oh,\nhalf a dozen at a time, far out,\nthey’d come and go, advancing and retreating,\ntheir heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches\nof scuffed-up white.\nGlass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,\nsacerdotal beings of glass … I watched\nthe water spiral up in them like smoke.\nBeautiful, yes, but not much company.\n\nI often gave way to self-pity.\n“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.\nI wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there\na moment when I actually chose this?\nI don’t remember, but there could have been.”\nWhat’s wrong about self-pity, anyway?\nWith my legs dangling down familiarly\nover a crater’s edge, I told myself\n“Pity should begin at home.” So the more\npity I felt, the more I felt at home.\n\nThe sun set in the sea; the same odd sun\nrose from the sea,\nand there was one of it and one of me.\nThe island had one kind of everything:\none tree snail, a bright violet-blue\nwith a thin shell, crept over everything,\nover the one variety of tree,\na sooty, scrub affair.\nSnail shells lay under these in drifts\nand, at a distance,\nyou’d swear that they were beds of irises.\nThere was one kind of berry, a dark red.\nI tried it, one by one, and hours apart.\nSub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;\nand so I made home-brew. I’d drink\nthe awful, fizzy, stinging stuff\nthat went straight to my head\nand play my home-made flute\n(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)\nand, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.\nHome-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?\nI felt a deep affection for\nthe smallest of my island industries.\nNo, not exactly, since the smallest was\na miserable philosophy.\n\nBecause I didn’t know enough.\nWhy didn’t I know enough of something?\nGreek drama or astronomy? The books\nI’d read were full of blanks;\nthe poems--well, I tried\nreciting to my iris-beds,\n“They flash upon that inward eye,\nwhich is the bliss …” The bliss of what?\nOne of the first things that I did\nwhen I got back was look it up.\n\nThe island smelled of goat and guano.\nThe goats were white, so were the gulls,\nand both too tame, or else they thought\nI was a goat, too, or a gull.\nBaa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,\nbaa … shriek … baa … I still can’t shake\nthem from my ears; they’re hurting now.\nThe questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies\nover a ground of hissing rain\nand hissing, ambulating turtles\ngot on my nerves.\nWhen all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded\nlike a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.\nI’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,\nan oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.\nI’d heard of cattle getting island-sick.\nI thought the goats were.\nOne billy-goat would stand on the volcano\nI’d christened Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair\n(I’d time enough to play with names),\nand bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.\nI’d grab his beard and look at him.\nHis pupils, horizontal, narrowed up\nand expressed nothing, or a little malice.\nI got so tired of the very colors!\nOne day I dyed a baby goat bright red\nwith my red berries, just to see\nsomething a little different.\nAnd then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.\n\nDreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food\nand love, but they were pleasant rather\nthan otherwise. But then I’d dream of things\nlike slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it\nfor a baby goat. I’d have\nnightmares of other islands\nstretching away from mine, infinities\nof islands, islands spawning islands,\nlike frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs\nof islands, knowing that I had to live\non each and every one, eventually,\nfor ages, registering their flora,\ntheir fauna, their geography.\n\nJust when I thought I couldn’t stand it\nanother minute longer, Friday came.\n(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)\nFriday was nice.\nFriday was nice, and we were friends.\nIf only he had been a woman!\nI wanted to propagate my kind,\nand so did he, I think, poor boy.\nHe’d pet the baby goats sometimes,\nand race with them, or carry one around.\n--Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.\n\nAnd then one day they came and took us off.\n\nNow I live here, another island,\nthat doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?\nMy blood was full of them; my brain\nbred islands. But that archipelago\nhas petered out. I’m old.\nI’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,\nsurrounded by uninteresting lumber.\nThe knife there on the shelf--\nit reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.\nIt lived. How many years did I\nbeg it, implore it, not to break?\nI knew each nick and scratch by heart,\nthe bluish blade, the broken tip,\nthe lines of wood-grain on the handle …\nNow it won’t look at me at all.\nThe living soul has dribbled away.\nMy eyes rest on it and pass on.\n\nThe local museum’s asked me to\nleave everything to them:\nthe flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,\nmy shedding goatskin trousers\n(moths have got in the fur),\nthe parasol that took me such a time\nremembering the way the ribs should go.\nIt still will work but, folded up,\nlooks like a plucked and skinny fowl.\nHow can anyone want such things?\n--And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles\nseventeen years ago come March.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-march": { - "title": "“The End of March”", - "body": "It was cold and windy, scarcely the day\nto take a walk on that long beach\nEverything was withdrawn as far as possible,\nindrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,\nseabirds in ones or twos.\nThe rackety, icy, offshore wind\nnumbed our faces on one side;\ndisrupted the formation\nof a lone flight of Canada geese;\nand blew back the low, inaudible rollers\nin upright, steely mist.\n\nThe sky was darker than the water\n--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.\nAlong the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed\na track of big dog-prints (so big\nthey were more like lion-prints). Then we came on\nlengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,\nlooping up to the tide-line, down to the water,\nover and over. Finally, they did end:\na thick white snarl, man-size, awash,\nrising on every wave, a sodden ghost,\nfalling back, sodden, giving up the ghost …\nA kite string?--But no kite.\n\nI wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,\nmy crypto-dream-house, that crooked box\nset up on pilings, shingled green,\na sort of artichoke of a house, but greener\n(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),\nprotected from spring tides by a palisade\nof--are they railroad ties?\n(Many things about this place are dubious.)\nI’d like to retire there and do nothing,\nor nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:\nlook through binoculars, read boring books,\nold, long, long books, and write down useless notes,\ntalk to myself, and, foggy days,\nwatch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.\nAt night, a grog a l’américaine.\nI’d blaze it with a kitchen match\nand lovely diaphanous blue flame\nwould waver, doubled in the window.\nThere must be a stove; there is a chimney,\naskew, but braced with wires,\nand electricity, possibly\n--at least, at the back another wire\nlimply leashes the whole affair\nto something off behind the dunes.\nA light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.\nAnd that day the wind was much too cold\neven to get that far,\nand of course the house was boarded up.\n\nOn the way back our faces froze on the other side.\nThe sun came out for just a minute.\nFor just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,\nthe drab, damp, scattered stones\nwere multi-colored,\nand all those high enough threw out long shadows,\nindividual shadows, then pulled them in again.\nThey could have been teasing the lion sun,\nexcept that now he was behind them\n--a sun who’d walked the beach the last low tide,\nmaking those big, majestic paw-prints,\nwho perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "exchanging-hats": { - "title": "“Exchanging Hats”", - "body": "Unfunny uncles who insist\nin trying on a lady’s hat,\n--oh, even if the joke falls flat,\nwe share your slight transvestite twist\n\nin spite of our embarrassment.\nCostume and custom are complex.\nThe headgear of the other sex\ninspires us to experiment.\n\nAnandrous aunts, who, at the beach\nwith paper plates upon your laps,\nkeep putting on the yachtsmen’s caps\nwith exhibitionistic screech,\n\nthe visors hanging o’er the ear\nso that the golden anchors drag,\n--the tides of fashion never lag.\nSuch caps may not be worn next year.\n\nOr you who don the paper plate\nitself, and put some grapes upon it,\nor sport the Indian’s feather bonnet,\n--perversities may aggravate\n\nthe natural madness of the hatter.\nAnd if the opera hats collapse\nand crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,\nhe thinks what might a miter matter?\n\nUnfunny uncle, you who wore a\nhat too big, or one too many,\ntell us, can’t you, are there any\nstars inside your black fedora?\n\nAunt exemplary and slim,\nwith avernal eyes, we wonder\nwhat slow changes they see under\ntheir vast, shady, turned-down brim.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "filling-station": { - "title": "“Filling Station”", - "body": "Oh, but it is dirty!\n--this little filling station,\noil-soaked, oil-permeated\nto a disturbing, over-all\nblack translucency.\nBe careful with that match!\n\nFather wears a dirty,\noil-soaked monkey suit\nthat cuts him under the arms,\nand several quick and saucy\nand greasy sons assist him\n(it’s a family filling station),\nall quite thoroughly dirty.\n\nDo they live in the station?\nIt has a cement porch\nbehind the pumps, and on it\na set of crushed and grease-\nimpregnated wickerwork;\non the wicker sofa\na dirty dog, quite comfy.\n\nSome comic books provide\nthe only note of color-\nof certain color. They lie\nupon a big dim doily\ndraping a taboret\n(part of the set), beside\na big hirsute begonia.\n\nWhy the extraneous plant?\nWhy the taboret?\nWhy, oh why, the doily?\n(Embroidered in daisy stitch\nwith marguerites, I think,\nand heavy with gray crochet.)\n\nSomebody embroidered the doily.\nSomebody waters the plant,\nor oils it, maybe. Somebody\narranges the rows of cans\nso that they softly say:\nESSO--SO--SO--SO\nto high-strung automobiles.\nSomebody loves us all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - } - } - }, - "first-death-in-nova-scotia": { - "title": "“First Death in Nova Scotia”", - "body": "In the cold, cold parlor\nmy mother laid out Arthur\nbeneath the chromographs:\nEdward, Prince of Wales,\nwith Princess Alexandra,\nand King George with Queen Mary.\nBelow them on the table\nstood a stuffed loon\nshot and stuffed by Uncle\nArthur, Arthur’s father.\n\nSince Uncle Arthur fired\na bullet into him,\nhe hadn’t said a word.\nHe kept his own counsel\non his white, frozen lake,\nthe marble-topped table.\nHis breast was deep and white,\ncold and caressable;\nhis eyes were red glass,\nmuch to be desired.\n\n“Come,” said my mother,\n“Come and say good-bye\nto your little cousin Arthur.”\nI was lifted up and given\none lily of the valley\nto put in Arthur’s hand.\nArthur’s coffin was\na little frosted cake,\nand the red-eyed loon eyed it\nfrom his white, frozen lake.\n\nArthur was very small.\nHe was all white, like a doll\nthat hadn’t been painted yet.\nJack Frost had started to paint him\nthe way he always painted\nthe Maple Leaf (Forever).\nHe had just begun on his hair,\na few red strokes, and then\nJack Frost had dropped the brush\nand left him white, forever.\n\nThe gracious royal couples\nwere warm in red and ermine;\ntheir feet were well wrapped up\nin the ladies’ ermine trains.\nThey invited Arthur to be\nthe smallest page at court.\nBut how could Arthur go,\nclutching his tiny lily,\nwith his eyes shut up so tight\nand the roads deep in snow?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-fish": { - "title": "“The Fish”", - "body": "I caught a tremendous fish\nand held him beside the boat\nhalf out of water, with my hook\nfast in a corner of his mouth.\nHe didn’t fight.\nHe hadn’t fought at all.\nHe hung a grunting weight,\nbattered and venerable\nand homely. Here and there\nhis brown skin hung in strips\nlike ancient wallpaper,\nand its pattern of darker brown\nwas like wallpaper:\nshapes like full-blown roses\nstained and lost through age.\nHe was speckled with barnacles,\nfine rosettes of lime,\nand infested\nwith tiny white sea-lice,\nand underneath two or three\nrags of green weed hung down.\nWhile his gills were breathing in\nthe terrible oxygen\n--the frightening gills,\nfresh and crisp with blood,\nthat can cut so badly--\nI thought of the coarse white flesh\npacked in like feathers,\nthe big bones and the little bones,\nthe dramatic reds and blacks\nof his shiny entrails,\nand the pink swim-bladder\nlike a big peony.\nI looked into his eyes\nwhich were far larger than mine\nbut shallower, and yellowed,\nthe irises backed and packed\nwith tarnished tinfoil\nseen through the lenses\nof old scratched isinglass.\nThey shifted a little, but not\nto return my stare.\n--It was more like the tipping\nof an object toward the light.\nI admired his sullen face,\nthe mechanism of his jaw,\nand then I saw\nthat from his lower lip\n--if you could call it a lip\ngrim, wet, and weaponlike,\nhung five old pieces of fish-line,\nor four and a wire leader\nwith the swivel still attached,\nwith all their five big hooks\ngrown firmly in his mouth.\nA green line, frayed at the end\nwhere he broke it, two heavier lines,\nand a fine black thread\nstill crimped from the strain and snap\nwhen it broke and he got away.\nLike medals with their ribbons\nfrayed and wavering,\na five-haired beard of wisdom\ntrailing from his aching jaw.\nI stared and stared\nand victory filled up\nthe little rented boat,\nfrom the pool of bilge\nwhere oil had spread a rainbow\naround the rusted engine\nto the bailer rusted orange,\nthe sun-cracked thwarts,\nthe oarlocks on their strings,\nthe gunnels--until everything\nwas rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!\nAnd I let the fish go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "five-flights-up": { - "title": "“Five Flights Up”", - "body": "Still dark.\nThe unknown bird sits on his usual branch.\nThe little dog next door barks in his sleep\ninquiringly, just once.\nPerhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires\nonce or twice, quavering.\nQuestions--if that is what they are--\nanswered directly, simply,\nby day itself.\n\nEnormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;\ngray light streaking each bare branch,\neach single twig, along one side,\nmaking another tree, of glassy veins …\nThe bird still sits there. Now he seems to yawn.\n\nThe little black dog runs in his yard.\nHis owner’s voice arises, stern,\n“You ought to be ashamed!”\nWhat has he done?\nHe bounces cheerfully up and down;\nhe rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.\n\nObviously, he has no sense of shame.\nHe and the bird know everything is answered,\nall taken care of,\nno need to ask again.\n--Yesterday brought to today so lightly!\n(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1974 - } - } - }, - "florida": { - "title": "“Florida”", - "body": "The state with the prettiest name,\nthe state that floats in brackish water,\nheld together by mangrave roots\nthat bear while living oysters in clusters,\nand when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,\ndotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks\nlike ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.\nThe state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,\nand unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale\nevery time in a tantrum.\nTanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,\nand pelicans whose delight it is to clown;\nwho coast for fun on the strong tidal currents\nin and out among the mangrove islands\nand stand on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings\non sun-lit evenings.\nEnormous turtles, helpless and mild,\ndie and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,\nand their large white skulls with round eye-sockets\ntwice the size of a man’s.\nThe palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze\nlike the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down\nto freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:\nJob’s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,\nparti-colored pectins and Ladies’ Ears,\narranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,\nthe buried Indian Princess’s skirt;\nwith these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line\nis delicately ornamented.\n\nThirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,\nover something they have spotted in the swamp,\nin circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment\nsinking through water.\nSmoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.\nOn stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.\nThe mosquitoes\ngo hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos.\nAfter dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh\nuntil the moon rises.\nCold white, not bright, the moonlight is coarse-meshed,\nand the careless, corrupt state is all black specks\ntoo far apart, and ugly whites; the poorest\npost-card of itself.\nAfter dark, the pools seem to have slipped away.\nThe alligator, who has five distinct calls:\nfriendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning--\nwhimpers and speaks in the throat\nof the Indian Princess.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-country-to-the-city": { - "title": "“From the Country to the City”", - "body": " The long, long legs,\nLeague-boots of land, that carry the city nowhere,\n Nowhere; the lines\nThat we drive on (the satin-stripes on harlequin’s\n Trousers, tights);\nHis tough trunk dressed in tatters, scribbled over with\n Nonsensical signs;\nHis shadowy, tall dunce-cap; and best of all his\n Shows and sights,\nHis brain appears, throned in “fantastic triumph.”\n And shines through his hat\nWith jewelled works at work at intermeshing crowns,\n Lamé with lights.\nAs we approach, wickedest clown, your heart and head\n We can see that\nGlittering arrangement of your brain consists, now,\n Of mermaid-like,\nSeated, ravishing sirens, each waving her hand-mirror;\n And we start at\nSeries of slight disturbances up in the telephone wires\n On the turnpike.\nFlocks of short, shining wires seem to be flying sidewise.\n Are they birds?\nThey flash again. No. They are vibrations of the tuning-fork\n You hold and strike\nAgainst the mirror-frames, then draw for miles, your dreams,\n Out country-wards.\nWe bring a message from the long black length of body:\n “Subside,” it begs and begs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "giant-snail": { - "title": "“Giant Snail”", - "body": "The rain has stopped. The waterfall will roar like that all\nnight. I have come out to take a walk and feed. My body--foot,\nthat is--is wet and cold and covered with sharp gravel. It is\nwhite, the size of a dinner plate. I have set myself a goal, a\ncertain rock, but it may well be dawn before I get there.\nAlthough I move ghostlike and my floating edges barely graze\nthe ground, I am heavy, heavy, heavy. My white muscles are\nalready tired. I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is\nonly with the greatest effort of my will that I can rise above the\nsmallest stones and sticks. And I must not let myself be dis-\ntracted by those rough spears of grass. Don’t touch them. Draw\nback. Withdrawal is always best.\n The rain has stopped. The waterfall makes such a noise! (And\nwhat if I fall over it?) The mountains of black rock give off such\nclouds of steam! Shiny streamers are hanging down their sides.\nWhen this occurs, we have a saying that the Snail Gods have\ncome down in haste. I could never descend such steep escarp-\nments, much less dream of climbing them.\n That toad was too big, too, like me. His eyes beseeched my\nlove. Our proportions horrify our neighbors.\n Rest a minute; relax. Flattened to the ground, my body is like\na pallid, decomposing leaf. What’s that tapping on my shell?\nNothing. Let’s go on.\n My sides move in rhythmic waves, just off the ground, from\nfront to back, the wake of a ship, wax-white water, or a slowly\nmelting floe. I am cold, cold, cold as ice. My blind, white bull’s\nhead was a Cretan scare-head; degenerate, my four horns that\ncan’t attack. The sides of my mouth are now my hands. They\npress the earth and suck it hard. Ah, but I know my shell is\nbeautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well,\nalthough I have not seen it. Its curled white lip is of the finest\nenamel. Inside, it is as smooth as silk, and I, I fill it to perfection.\n My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark. I leave a lovely\nopalescent ribbon: I know this.\n But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me.\n If and when I reach the rock, I shall go into a certain crack\nthere for the night. The waterfall below will vibrate through\nmy shell and body all night long. In that steady pulsing I can\nrest. All night I shall be like a sleeping ear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "giant-toad": { - "title": "“Giant Toad”", - "body": "I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me.\nMy eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin in drops. The drops run down my back, run from the corners of my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneathmy belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pigments gradually shudder and shift over.\nNow I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I’m standing up. The lichen’s gray, and rough to my front feet. Get down. Turn facing out, it’s safer. Don’t breathe until the snail gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.\nSwallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang!\nI live, I breathe, by swallowing. Once, some naughty children picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes. We could not help but smoke them, to the end. I thought it was the death of me, but when I was entirely filled with smoke, when my slack mouth was burning, and all my tripes were hot and dry, they let us go. But I was sick for days.\nI have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their color is dark. They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air.\nBeware, you frivolous crab.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-in-need-of-music-that-would-flow": { - "title": "“I Am in Need of Music that Would Flow”", - "body": "I am in need of music that would flow\nOver my fretful, feeling finger-tips,\nOver my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,\nWith melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.\nOh, for the healing swaying, old and low,\nOf some song sung to rest the tired dead,\nA song to fall like water on my head,\nAnd over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!\n\nThere is a magic made by melody:\nA spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool\nHeart, that sinks through fading colors deep\nTo the subaqueous stillness of the sea,\nAnd floats forever in a moon-green pool,\nHeld in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-imaginary-iceberg": { - "title": "“The Imaginary Iceberg”", - "body": "We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,\nalthough it meant the end of travel.\nAlthough it stood stock-still like cloudy rock\nand all the sea were moving marble.\nWe’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;\nwe’d rather own this breathing plain of snow\nthough the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea\nas the snow lies undissolved upon the water.\nO solemn, floating field,\nare you aware an iceberg takes repose\nwith you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?\n\nThis is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.\nThe ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises\nand sinks again; its glassy pinnacles\ncorrect elliptics in the sky.\nThis is a scene where he who treads the boards\nis artlessly rhetorical. The curtain\nis light enough to rise on finest ropes\nthat airy twists of snow provide.\nThe wits of these white peaks\nspar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares\nupon a shifting stage and stands and stares.\n\nThe iceberg cuts its facets from within.\nLike jewelry from a grave\nit saves itself perpetually and adorns\nonly itself, perhaps the snows\nwhich so surprise us lying on the sea.\nGood-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off\nwhere waves give in to one another’s waves\nand clouds run in a warmer sky.\nIcebergs behoove the soul\n(both being self-made from elements least visible)\nto see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-the-waiting-room": { - "title": "“In the Waiting Room”", - "body": "In Worcester, Massachusetts,\nI went with Aunt Consuelo\nto keep her dentist’s appointment\nand sat and waited for her\nin the dentist’s waiting room.\nIt was winter. It got dark\nearly. The waiting room\nwas full of grown-up people,\narctics and overcoats,\nlamps and magazines.\nMy aunt was inside\nwhat seemed like a long time\nand while I waited I read\nthe National Geographic\n(I could read) and carefully\nstudied the photographs:\nthe inside of a volcano,\nblack, and full of ashes;\nthen it was spilling over\nin rivulets of fire.\nOsa and Martin Johnson\ndressed in riding breeches,\nlaced boots, and pith helmets.\nA dead man slung on a pole\n--“Long Pig,” the caption said.\nBabies with pointed heads\nwound round and round with string;\nblack, naked women with necks\nwound round and round with wire\nlike the necks of light bulbs.\nTheir breasts were horrifying.\nI read it right straight through.\nI was too shy to stop.\nAnd then I looked at the cover:\nthe yellow margins, the date.\nSuddenly, from inside,\ncame an oh! of pain\n--Aunt Consuelo’s voice--\nnot very loud or long.\nI wasn’t at all surprised;\neven then I knew she was\na foolish, timid woman.\nI might have been embarrassed,\nbut wasn’t. What took me\ncompletely by surprise\nwas that it was me:\nmy voice, in my mouth.\nWithout thinking at all\nI was my foolish aunt,\nI--we--were falling, falling,\nour eyes glued to the cover\nof the National Geographic,\nFebruary, 1918.\n\nI said to myself: three days\nand you’ll be seven years old.\nI was saying it to stop\nthe sensation of falling off\nthe round, turning world.\ninto cold, blue-black space.\nBut I felt: you are an I,\nyou are an Elizabeth,\nyou are one of them.\nWhy should you be one, too?\nI scarcely dared to look\nto see what it was I was.\nI gave a sidelong glance\n--I couldn’t look any higher--\nat shadowy gray knees,\ntrousers and skirts and boots\nand different pairs of hands\nlying under the lamps.\nI knew that nothing stranger\nhad ever happened, that nothing\nstranger could ever happen.\n\nWhy should I be my aunt,\nor me, or anyone?\nWhat similarities--\nboots, hands, the family voice\nI felt in my throat, or even\nthe National Geographic\nand those awful hanging breasts--\nheld us all together\nor made us all just one?\nHow--I didn’t know any\nword for it--how “unlikely” …\nHow had I come to be here,\nlike them, and overhear\na cry of pain that could have\ngot loud and worse but hadn’t?\n\nThe waiting room was bright\nand too hot. It was sliding\nbeneath a big black wave,\nanother, and another.\n\nThen I was back in it.\nThe War was on. Outside,\nin Worcester, Massachusetts,\nwere night and slush and cold,\nand it was still the fifth\nof February, 1918.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 5 - } - } - }, - "insomnia": { - "title": "“Insomnia”", - "body": "The moon in the bureau mirror\nlooks out a million miles\n(and perhaps with pride, at herself,\nbut she never, never smiles)\nfar and away beyond sleep, or\nperhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.\n\nBy the Universe deserted,\nshe’d tell it to go to hell,\nand she’d find a body of water,\nor a mirror, on which to dwell.\nSo wrap up care in a cobweb\nand drop it down the well\n\ninto that world inverted\nwhere left is always right,\nwhere the shadows are really the body,\nwhere we stay awake all night,\nwhere the heavens are shallow as the sea\nis now deep, and you love me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "large-bad-picture": { - "title": "“Large Bad Picture”", - "body": "Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or\nsome northerly harbor of Labrador,\nbefore he became a schoolteacher\na great-uncle painted a big picture.\n\nReceding for miles on either side\ninto a flushed, still sky\nare overhanging pale blue cliffs\nhundreds of feet high,\n\ntheir bases fretted by little arches,\nthe entrances to caves\nrunning in along the level of a bay\nmasked by perfect waves.\n\nOn the middle of that quiet floor\nsits a fleet of small black ships,\nsquare-rigged, sails furled, motionless,\ntheir spars like burnt match-sticks.\n\nAnd high above them, over the tall cliffs’\nsemi-translucent ranks,\nare scribbled hundreds of fine black birds\nhanging in n’s in banks.\n\nOne can hear their crying, crying,\nthe only sound there is\nexcept for occasional sizhine\nas a large aquatic animal breathes.\n\nIn the pink light\nthe small red sun goes rolling, rolling,\nround and round and round at the same height\nin perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling,\n\nwhile the ships consider it.\nApparently they have reached their destination.\nIt would be hard to say what brought them there,\ncommerce or contemplation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "letter-to-n-y": { - "title": "“Letter to N. Y.”", - "body": "In your next letter I wish you’d say\nwhere you are going and what you are doing;\nhow are the plays and after the plays\nwhat other pleasures you’re pursuing:\n\ntaking cabs in the middle of the night,\ndriving as if to save your soul\nwhere the road gose round and round the park\nand the meter glares like a moral owl,\n\nand the trees look so queer and green\nstanding alone in big black caves\nand suddenly you’re in a different place\nwhere everything seems to happen in waves,\n\nand most of the jokes you just can’t catch,\nlike dirty words rubbed off a slate,\nand the songs are loud but somehow dim\nand it gets so teribly late,\n\nand coming out of the brownstone house\nto the gray sidewalk, the watered street,\none side of the buildings rises with the sun\nlike a glistening field of wheat.\n\n--Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid\nif it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,\nnevertheless I’d like to know\nwhat you are doing and where you are going.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "little-exercise": { - "title": "“Little Exercise”", - "body": "Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily\nlike a dog looking for a place to sleep in,\nlisten to it growling.\n\nThink how they must look now, the mangrove keys\nlying out there unresponsive to the lightning\nin dark, coarse-fibred families,\n\nwhere occasionally a heron may undo his head,\nshake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment\nwhen the surrounding water shines.\n\nThink of the boulevard and the little palm trees\nall stuck in rows, suddenly revealed\nas fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.\n\nIt is raining there. The boulevard\nand its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack\nare relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.\n\nNow the storm goes away again in a series\nof small, badly lit battle-scenes,\neach in “Another part of the field.”\n\nThink of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat\ntied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;\nthink of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-lies-sleeping": { - "title": "“Love Lies Sleeping”", - "body": "Earliest morning, switching all the tracks\nthat cross the sky from cinder star to star,\n coupling the ends of streets\n to trains of light.\n\nnow draw us into daylight in our beds;\nand clear away what presses on the brain:\n put out the neon shapes\n that float and swell and glare\n\ndown the gray avenue between the eyes\nin pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs.\n Hang-over moons, wane, wane!\n From the window I see\n\nan immense city, carefully revealed,\nmade delicate by over-workmanship,\n detail upon detail,\n cornice upon facade,\n\nreaching up so languidly up into\na weak white sky, it seems to waver there.\n (Where it has slowly grown\n in skies of water-glass\n\nfrom fused beads of iron and copper crystals,\nthe little chemical “garden” in a jar\n trembles and stands again,\n pale blue, blue-green, and brick.)\n\nThe sparrows hurriedly begin their play.\nThen, in the West, “Boom!” and a cloud of smoke.\n “Boom!” and the exploding ball\n of blossom blooms again.\n\n(And all the employees who work in a plants\nwhere such a sound says “Danger,” or once said “Death,”\n turn in their sleep and feel\n the short hairs bristling\n\non backs of necks.) The cloud of smoke moves off.\nA shirt is taken of a threadlike clothes-line.\n Along the street below\n the water-wagon comes\n\nthrowing its hissing, snowy fan across\npeelings and newspapers. The water dries\n light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern\n of the cool watermelon.\n\nI hear the day-springs of the morning strike\nfrom stony walls and halls and iron beds,\n scattered or grouped cascades,\n alarms for the expected:\n\nqueer cupids of all persons getting up,\nwhose evening meal they will prepare all day,\n you will dine well\n on his heart, on his, and his,\n\nso send them about your business affectionately,\ndragging in the streets their unique loves.\n Scourge them with roses only,\n be light as helium,\n\nfor always to one, or several, morning comes\nwhose head has fallen over the edge of his bed,\n whose face is turned\n so that the image of\n\nthe city grows down into his open eyes\ninverted and distorted. No. I mean\n distorted and revealed,\n if he sees it at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lullaby-for-the-cat": { - "title": "“Lullaby for the Cat”", - "body": "Minnow, go to sleep and dream,\n Close your great big eyes;\nRound your bed Events prepare\n The pleasantest surprise.\n\nDarling Minnow, drop that frown,\n Just cooperate,\nNot a kitten shall be drowned\n In the Marxist State.\n\nJoy and Love will both be yours,\n Minnow, don’t be glum.\nHappy days are coming soon--\n Sleep, and let them come …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-man-moth": { - "title": "“The Man-Moth”", - "body": " _Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”_\n\nHere, above,\ncracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.\nThe whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.\nIt lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,\nand he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.\nHe does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,\nfeeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,\nof a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.\n\n But when the Man-Moth\npays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,\nthe moon looks rather different to him. He emerges\nfrom an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks\nand nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.\nHe thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,\nproving the sky quite useless for protection.\nHe trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.\n\n Up the façades,\nhis shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him\nhe climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage\nto push his small head through that round clean opening\nand be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.\n(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)\nBut what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although\nhe fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.\n\n Then he returns\nto the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,\nhe flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains\nfast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.\nThe Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way\nand the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,\nwithout a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.\nHe cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.\n\n Each night he must\nbe carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.\nJust as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie\nhis rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,\nfor the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,\nruns there beside him. He regards it as a disease\nhe has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep\nhis hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.\n\n If you catch him,\nhold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,\nan entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens\nas he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids\none tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.\nSlyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention\nhe’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,\ncool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "manners": { - "title": "“Manners”", - "body": "For a Child of 1918\n\nMy grandfather said to me\nas we sat on the wagon seat,\n“Be sure to remember to always\nspeak to everyone you meet.”\n\nWe met a stranger on foot.\nMy grandfather’s whip tapped his hat.\n“Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day.”\nAnd I said it and bowed where I sat.\n\nThen we overtook a boy we knew\nwith his big pet crow on his shoulder.\n“Always offer everyone a ride;\ndon’t forget that when you get older,”\n\nmy grandfather said. So Willy\nclimbed up with us, but the crow\ngave a “Caw!” and flew off. I was worried.\nHow would he know where to go?\n\nBut he flew a little way at a time\nfrom fence post to fence post, ahead;\nand when Willy whistled he answered.\n“A fine bird,” my grandfather said,\n\n“and he’s well brought up. See, he answers\nnicely when he’s spoken to.\nMan or beast, that’s good manners.\nBe sure that you both always do.”\n\nWhen automobiles went by,\nthe dust hid the people’s faces,\nbut we shouted “Good day! Good day!\nFine day!” at the top of our voices.\n\nWhen we came to Hustler Hill,\nhe said that the mare was tired,\nso we all got down and walked,\nas our good manners required.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "manuelzinho": { - "title": "“Manuelzinho”", - "body": "Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)--\na sort of inheritance; white,\nin your thirties now, and supposed\nto supply me with vegetables,\nbut you don’t; or you won’t; or you can’t\nget the idea through your brain--\nthe world’s worst gardener since Cain.\nTitled above me, your gardens\nravish my eyes. You edge\nthe beds of silver cabbages\nwith red carnations, and lettuces\nmix with alyssum. And then\numbrella ants arrive,\nor it rains for a solid week\nand the whole thing’s ruined again\nand I buy you more pounds of seeds,\nimported, guaranteed,\nand eventually you bring me\na mystic thee-legged carrot,\nor a pumpkin “bigger than the baby.”\n\nI watch you through the rain,\ntrotting, light, on bare feet,\nup the steep paths you have made--\nor your father and grandfather made--\nall over my property,\nwith your head and back inside\na sodden burlap bag,\nand feel I can’t endure it\nanother minute; then,\nindoors, beside the stove,\nkeep on reading a book.\n\nYou steal my telephone wires,\nor someone does. You starve\nyour horse and yourself\nand your dogs and family.\namong endless variety,\nyou eat boiled cabbage stalks.\nAnd once I yelled at you\nso loud to hurry up\nand fetch me those potatoes\nyour holey hat flew off,\nyou jumped out of your clogs,\nleaving three objects arranged\nin a triangle at my feet,\nas if you’d been a gardener\nin a fairy tale all this time\nand at the word “potatoes”\nhad vanished to take up your work\nof fairy prince somewhere.\n\nThe strangest things happen to you.\nYour cows eats a “poison grass”\nand drops dead on the spot.\nNobody else’s does.\nAnd then your father dies,\na superior old man\nwith a black plush hat, and a moustache\nlike a white spread-eagled sea gull.\nThe family gathers, but you,\nno, you “don’t think he’s dead!\nI look at him. He’s cold.\nThey’re burying him today.\nBut you know, I don’t think he’s dead.”\nI give you money for the funeral\nand you go and hire a bus\nfor the delighted mourners,\nso I have to hand over some more\nand then have to hear you tell me\nyou pray for me every night!\n\nAnd then you come again,\nsniffing and shivering,\nhat in hand, with that wistful\nface, like a child’s fistful\nof bluets or white violets,\nimprovident as the dawn,\nand once more I provide\nfor a shot of penicillin\ndown at the pharmacy, or\none more bottle of\nElectrical Baby Syrup.\nOr, briskly, you come to settle\nwhat we call our “accounts,”\nwith two old copybooks,\none with flowers on the cover,\nthe other with a camel.\nimmediate confusion.\nYou’ve left out decimal points.\nYour columns stagger,\nhoneycombed with zeros.\nYou whisper conspiratorially;\nthe numbers mount to millions.\nAccount books? They are Dream Books.\nin the kitchen we dream together\nhow the meek shall inherit the earth--\nor several acres of mine.\n\nWith blue sugar bags on their heads,\ncarrying your lunch,\nyour children scuttle by me\nlike little moles aboveground,\nor even crouch behind bushes\nas if I were out to shoot them!\n--Impossible to make friends,\nthough each will grab at once\nfor an orange or a piece of candy.\n\nTwined in wisps of fog,\nI see you all up there\nalong with Formoso, the donkey,\nwho brays like a pump gone dry,\nthen suddenly stops.\n--All just standing, staring\noff into fog and space.\nOr coming down at night,\nin silence, except for hoofs,\nin dim moonlight, the horse\nor Formoso stumbling after.\nBetween us float a few\nbig, soft, pale-blue,\nsluggish fireflies,\nthe jellyfish of the air …\n\nPatch upon patch upon patch,\nyour wife keeps all of you covered.\nShe has gone over and over\n(forearmed is forewarned)\nyour pair of bright-blue pants\nwith white thread, and these days\nyour limbs are draped in blueprints.\nYou paint--heaven knows why--\nthe outside of the crown\nand brim of your straw hat.\nPerhaps to reflect the sun?\nOr perhaps when you were small,\nyour mother said, “Manuelzinho,\none thing; be sure you always\npaint your straw hat.”\nOne was gold for a while,\nbut the gold wore off, like plate.\nOne was bright green. Unkindly,\nI called you Klorophyll Kid.\nMy visitors thought it was funny.\nI apologize here and now.\nYou helpless, foolish man,\nI love you all I can,\nI think. Or I do?\nI take off my hat, unpainted\nand figurative, to you.\nAgain I promise to try.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-map": { - "title": "“The Map”", - "body": "Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.\nShadows, or are they shallows, at its edges\nshowing the line of long sea-weeded ledges\nwhere weeds hang to the simple blue from green.\nOr does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,\ndrawing it unperturbed around itself?\nAlong the fine tan sandy shelf\nis the land tugging at the sea from under?\n\nThe shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.\nLabrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo\nhas oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,\nunder a glass as if they were expected to blossom,\nor as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.\nThe names of seashore towns run out to sea,\nthe names of cities cross the neighboring mountains\n--the printer here experiencing the same excitement\nas when emotion too far exceeds its cause.\nThese peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger\nlike women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.\n\nMapped waters are more quiet than the land is,\nlending the land their waves’ own conformation:\nand Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,\nprofiles investigate the sea, where land is.\nAre they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?\n--What suits the character or the native waters best.\nTopography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.\nMore delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-miracle-for-breakfast": { - "title": "“A Miracle for Breakfast”", - "body": "_“Miracles enable us to judge of doctrine, and doctrine enables us to judge of miracles.”_\n\nAt six o’clock we were waiting for coffee,\nWaiting for coffee and the charitable crumb\nThat was going to be served from a certain balcony,\n--Like kings of old, or like a miracle.\nIt was still dark. One foot of the sun\nSteadied itself on a long ripple in the river.\n\nThe first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.\nIt was so cold we hoped the coffee\nWould be very hot, seeing that the sun\nWas not going to warm us; and that the crumb\nWould be a loaf each buttered, by a miracle.\nAt seven a man stepped out on the balcony.\n\nHe stood for a minute alone on the balcony\nLooking over our heads towards the river.\nA servant handed him the makings of the miracle,\nConsisting of one lone cup of coffee\nAnd one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,\nHis head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.\n\nWas the man crazy? What under the sun\nWas he trying to do, up there on his balcony!\nEach man received one rather hard crumb,\nWhich some flicked scornfully into the river,\nAnd, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.\nSome of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.\n\nI can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.\nA beautiful villa stood in the sun\nAnd from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.\nIn front, a baroque white plaster balcony\nAdded by birds, who nest along the river,\n--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb--\n\nAnd galleries and marble chambers. My crumb\nMy mansion, made for me by a miracle,\nThrough ages, by insects, birds, and the river\nWorking the stone. Every day, in the sun,\nAt breakfast time I sit on my balcony\nWith my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.\n\nWe licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.\nA window across the river caught the sun\nAs if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-monument": { - "title": "“The Monument”", - "body": "Now can you see the monument? It is of wood\nbuilt somewhat like a box. No. Built\nlike several boxes in descending sizes\none above the other.\nEach is turned half-way round so that\nits corners point toward the sides\nof the one below and the angles alternate.\nThen on the topmost cube is set\na sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood,\nlong petals of board, pierced with odd holes,\nfour-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical.\nFrom it four thin, warped poles spring out,\n(slanted like fishing-poles or flag-poles)\nand from them jig-saw work hangs down,\nfour lines of vaguely whittled ornament\nover the edges of the boxes\nto the ground.\nThe monument is one-third set against\na sea; two-thirds against a sky.\nThe view is geared\n(that is, the view’s perspective)\nso low there is no “far away,”\nand we are far away within the view.\nA sea of narrow, horizontal boards\nlies out behind our lonely monument,\nits long grains alternating right and left\nlike floor-boards--spotted, swarming-still,\nand motionless. A sky runs parallel,\nand it is palings, coarser than the sea’s:\nsplintery sunlight and long-fibred clouds.\n“Why does the strange sea make no sound?\nIs it because we’re far away?\nWhere are we? Are we in Asia Minor,\nor in Mongolia?”\n\nAn ancient promontory,\nan ancient principality whose artist-prince\nmight have wanted to build a monument\nto mark a tomb or boundary, or make\na melancholy or romantic scene of it …\n“But that queer sea looks made of wood,\nhalf-shining, like a driftwood, sea.\nAnd the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud.\nIt’s like a stage-set; it is all so flat!\nThose clouds are full of glistening splinters!\nWhat is that?”\n\nIt is the monument.\n“It’s piled-up boxes,\noutlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off,\ncracked and unpainted. It looks old.”\n--The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,\nall the conditions of its existence,\nmay have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted,\nand made it homelier than it was.\n“Why did you bring me here to see it?\nA temple of crates in cramped and crated scenery,\nwhat can it prove?\nI am tired of breathing this eroded air,\nthis dryness in which the monument is cracking.”\n\nIt is an artifact\nof wood. Wood holds together better\nthan sea or cloud or and could by itself,\nmuch better than real sea or sand or cloud.\nIt chose that way to grow and not to move.\nThe monument’s an object, yet those decorations,\ncarelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all,\ngive it away as having life, and wishing;\nwanting to be a monument, to cherish something.\nThe crudest scroll-work says “commemorate,”\nwhile once each day the light goes around it\nlike a prowling animal,\nor the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it.\nIt may be solid, may be hollow.\nThe bones of the artist-prince may be inside\nor far away on even drier soil.\nBut roughly but adequately it can shelter\nwhat is within (which after all\ncannot have been intended to be seen).\nIt is the beginning of a painting,\na piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,\nand all of wood. Watch it closely.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-moose": { - "title": "“The Moose”", - "body": "From narrow provinces\nof fish and bread and tea,\nhome of the long tides\nwhere the bay leaves the sea\ntwice a day and takes\nthe herrings long rides,\n\nwhere if the river\nenters or retreats\nin a wall of brown foam\ndepends on if it meets\nthe bay coming in,\nthe bay not at home;\n\nwhere, silted red,\nsometimes the sun sets\nfacing a red sea,\nand others, veins the flats’\nlavender, rich mud\nin burning rivulets;\n\non red, gravelly roads,\ndown rows of sugar maples,\npast clapboard farmhouses\nand neat, clapboard churches,\nbleached, ridged as clamshells,\npast twin silver birches,\n\nthrough late afternoon\na bus journeys west,\nthe windshield flashing pink,\npink glancing off of metal,\nbrushing the dented flank\nof blue, beat-up enamel;\n\ndown hollows, up rises,\nand waits, patient, while\na lone traveller gives\nkisses and embraces\nto seven relatives\nand a collie supervises.\n\nGoodbye to the elms,\nto the farm, to the dog.\nThe bus starts. The light\ngrows richer; the fog,\nshifting, salty, thin,\ncomes closing in.\n\nIts cold, round crystals\nform and slide and settle\nin the white hens’ feathers,\nin gray glazed cabbages,\non the cabbage roses\nand lupins like apostles;\n\nthe sweet peas cling\nto their wet white string\non the whitewashed fences;\nbumblebees creep\ninside the foxgloves,\nand evening commences.\n\nOne stop at Bass River.\nThen the Economies--\nLower, Middle, Upper;\nFive Islands, Five Houses,\nwhere a woman shakes a tablecloth\nout after supper.\n\nA pale flickering. Gone.\nThe Tantramar marshes\nand the smell of salt hay.\nAn iron bridge trembles\nand a loose plank rattles\nbut doesn’t give way.\n\nOn the left, a red light\nswims through the dark:\na ship’s port lantern.\nTwo rubber boots show,\nilluminated, solemn.\nA dog gives one bark.\n\nA woman climbs in\nwith two market bags,\nbrisk, freckled, elderly.\n“A grand night. Yes, sir,\nall the way to Boston.”\nShe regards us amicably.\n\nMoonlight as we enter\nthe New Brunswick woods,\nhairy, scratchy, splintery;\nmoonlight and mist\ncaught in them like lamb’s wool\non bushes in a pasture.\n\nThe passengers lie back.\nSnores. Some long sighs.\nA dreamy divagation\nbegins in the night,\na gentle, auditory,\nslow hallucination …\n\nIn the creakings and noises,\nan old conversation\n--not concerning us,\nbut recognizable, somewhere,\nback in the bus:\nGrandparents’ voices\n\nuninterruptedly\ntalking, in Eternity:\nnames being mentioned,\nthings cleared up finally;\nwhat he said, what she said,\nwho got pensioned;\n\ndeaths, deaths and sicknesses;\nthe year he remarried;\nthe year (something) happened.\nShe died in childbirth.\nThat was the son lost\nwhen the schooner foundered.\n\nHe took to drink. Yes.\nShe went to the bad.\nWhen Amos began to pray\neven in the store and\nfinally the family had\nto put him away.\n\n“Yes …” that peculiar\naffirmative. “Yes …”\nA sharp, indrawn breath,\nhalf groan, half acceptance,\nthat means “Life’s like that.\nWe know it (also death).”\n\nTalking the way they talked\nin the old featherbed,\npeacefully, on and on,\ndim lamplight in the hall,\ndown in the kitchen, the dog\ntucked in her shawl.\n\nNow, it’s all right now\neven to fall asleep\njust as on all those nights.\n--Suddenly the bus driver\nstops with a jolt,\nturns off his lights.\n\nA moose has come out of\nthe impenetrable wood\nand stands there, looms, rather,\nin the middle of the road.\nIt approaches; it sniffs at\nthe bus’s hot hood.\n\nTowering, antlerless,\nhigh as a church,\nhomely as a house\n(or, safe as houses).\nA man’s voice assures us\n“Perfectly harmless …”\n\nSome of the passengers\nexclaim in whispers,\nchildishly, softly,\n“Sure are big creatures.”\n“It’s awful plain.”\n“Look! It’s a she!”\n\nTaking her time,\nshe looks the bus over,\ngrand, otherworldly.\nWhy, why do we feel\n(we all feel) this sweet\nsensation of joy?\n\n“Curious creatures,”\nsays our quiet driver,\nrolling his r’s.\n“Look at that, would you.”\nThen he shifts gears.\nFor a moment longer,\n\nby craning backward,\nthe moose can be seen\non the moonlit macadam;\nthen there’s a dim\nsmell of moose, an acrid\nsmell of gasoline.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - } - } - }, - "the-mountain": { - "title": "“The Mountain”", - "body": "At evening, something behind me.\nI start for a second, I blench,\nor staggeringly halt and burn.\nI do not know my age.\n\nIn the morning it is different.\nAn open book confronts me,\ntoo close to read in comfort.\nTell me how old I am.\n\nAnd then the valleys stuff\nimpenetrable mists\nlike cotton in my ears.\nI do not know my age.\n\nI do not mean to complain.\nThey say it is my fault.\nNobody tells me anything.\nTell me how old I am.\n\nThe deepest demarcation\ncan slowly spread and sink\nlike any blurred tattoo.\nI do not know my age.\n\nShadows fall down; lights climb.\nClambering lights, oh children!\nyou never stay long enough.\nTell me how old I am.\n\nStone wings have sifted here\nwith feathers hardening feathers.\nThe claws are lost somewhere.\nI do not know my age.\n\nI am growing deaf. Bird-calls\ndribble and the waterfalls\ngo unwiped. What is my age?\nTell me how old I am.\n\nLet the moon go hang,\nthe stars go fly their kites.\nI want to know my age.\nTell me how old I am.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "north-haven": { - "title": "“North Haven”", - "body": "I can make out the rigging of a schooner\na mile off; I can count\nthe new cones on the spruce. It is so still\nthe pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky\nno clouds except for one long, carded horse’s tail.\n\nThe islands haven’t shifted since last summer,\neven if I like to pretend they have\n--drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,\na little north, a little south, or sidewise,\nand that they’re free within the blue frontiers of bay.\n\nThis month, our favorite one is full of flowers:\nButtercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,\nHackweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,\nthe Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,\nand more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.\n\nThe Goldfinches are back, or others like them,\nand the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song,\npleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.\nNature repeats herself, or almost does:\nrepeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.\n\nYears ago, you told me it was here\n(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”\nand learned to sail, and learned to kiss.\nYou had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.\n(“Fun”--it always seemed to leave you at a loss …)\n\nYou left North Haven, anchored in its rock,\nafloat in mystic blue … And now--you’ve left\nfor good. You can’t derange, or re-arrange,\nyour poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.)\nThe words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "o-breath": { - "title": "“O Breath”", - "body": "Beneath that loved and celebrated breast,\nsilent, bored really blindly veined,\ngrieves, maybe lives and lets\nlive, passes bets,\nsomething moving but invisibly,\nand with what clamor why restrained\nI cannot fathom even a ripple.\n(See the thin flying of nine black hairs\nfour around one five the other nipple,\nflying almost intolerably on your own breath.)\nEquivocal, but what we have in common’s bound to be there,\nwhatever we must own equivalents for,\nsomething that maybe I could bargain with\nand make a separate peace beneath\nwithin if never with.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-art": { - "title": "“One Art”", - "body": "The art of losing isn’t hard to master;\nso many things seem filled with the intent\nto be lost that their loss is no disaster.\n\nLose something every day. Accept the fluster\nof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.\nThe art of losing isn’t hard to master.\n\nThen practice losing farther, losing faster:\nplaces, and names, and where it was you meant\nto travel. None of these will bring disaster.\n\nI lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or\nnext-to-last, of three loved houses went.\nThe art of losing isn’t hard to master.\n\nI lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,\nsome realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.\nI miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.\n\n--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture\nI love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident\nthe art of losing’s not too hard to master\nthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - } - } - }, - "paris-7-am": { - "title": "“Paris, 7 A.M.”", - "body": "I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:\nSome hands point histrionically one way\nAnd some point others, from the ignorant faces.\nTime is an Etoile; the hours diverge\nSo much that days are journeys round the suburbs,\nCircles surrounding stars, overlapping circles.\nThe short, half-tone scale of winter weathers\nIs a spread pigeon’s wing.\nWinter lives under a pigeon’s wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.\n\nLook down into the courtyard. All the houses\nAre built that way, with ornamental urns\nSet on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons\nTake their walks. It is like introspection\nTo stare inside, or retrospection,\nA star inside a rectangle, a recollection:\nThis hollow square could easily have been there.\n--The childish snow-forts, built in flashier winters,\nCould have reached these proportions and been houses;\nThe mighty snow-forts, four, five, stories high,\nWithstanding spring as sand-forts do the tide,\nTheir walls, their shape, could not dissolve and die,\nOnly be overlapping in a strong chain, turned to stone,\nAnd grayed and yellowed now like these.\n\nWhere is the ammunition, the piled-up balls\nWith the star-splintered hearts of ice?\nThis sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon\nEscaping endless intersecting circles.\nIt is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell.\nThe urns have caught his ashes or his feathers.\nWhen did the star dissolve, or was it captured\nBy the sequence of squares and squares and circles, circles?\nCan the clocks say; is it there below,\nAbout to tumble in snow?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "poem": { - "title": "“Poem”", - "body": "About the size of an old-style dollar bill,\nAmerican or Canadian,\nmostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays\n--this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)\nhas never earned any money in its life.\nUseless and free, it has spent seventy years\nas a minor family relic\nhanded along collaterally to owners\nwho looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to.\n\nIt must be Nova Scotia; only there\ndoes one see abled wooden houses\npainted that awful shade of brown.\nThe other houses, the bits that show, are white.\nElm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple\n--that gray-blue wisp--or is it? In the foreground\na water meadow with some tiny cows,\ntwo brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;\ntwo minuscule white geese in the blue water,\nback-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick.\nUp closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,\nfresh-squiggled from the tube.\nThe air is fresh and cold; cold early spring\nclear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky\nbelow the steel-gray storm clouds.\n(They were the artist’s specialty.)\nA specklike bird is flying to the left.\nOr is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?\n\nHeavens, I recognize the place, I know it!\nIt’s behind--I can almost remember the farmer’s name.\nHis barn backed on that meadow. There it is,\ntitanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,\nfilaments of brush-hairs, barely there,\nmust be the Presbyterian church.\nWould that be Miss Gillespie’s house?\nThose particular geese and cows\nare naturally before my time.\n\nA sketch done in an hour, “in one breath,”\nonce taken from a trunk and handed over.\nWould you like this? I’ll Probably never\nhave room to hang these things again.\nYour Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,\nhe’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother\nwhen he went back to England.\nYou know, he was quite famous, an R.A. …\n\nI never knew him. We both knew this place,\napparently, this literal small backwater,\nlooked at it long enough to memorize it,\nour years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,\nor its memory is (it must have changed a lot).\nOur visions coincided--“visions” is\ntoo serious a word--our looks, two looks:\nart “copying from life” and life itself,\nlife and the memory of it so compressed\nthey’ve turned into each other. Which is which?\nLife and the memory of it cramped,\ndim, on a piece of Bristol board,\ndim, but how live, how touching in detail\n--the little that we get for free,\nthe little of our earthly trust. Not much.\nAbout the size of our abidance\nalong with theirs: the munching cows,\nthe iris, crisp and shivering, the water\nstill standing from spring freshets,\nthe yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prodigal": { - "title": "“A Prodigal”", - "body": "The brown enormous odor he lived by\nwas too close, with its breathing and thick hair,\nfor him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty\nwas plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.\nLight-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,\nthe pigs’ eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--\neven to the sow that always ate her young--\ntill, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.\nBut sometimes mornings after drinking bouts\n(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),\nthe sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red\nthe burning puddles seemed to reassure.\nAnd then he thought he almost might endure\nhis exile yet another year or more.\n\nBut evenings the first star came to warn.\nThe farmer whom he worked for came at dark\nto shut the cows and horses in the barn\nbeneath their overhanging clouds of hay,\nwith pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,\nsafe and companionable as in the Ark.\nThe pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.\nThe lantern--like the sun, going away--\nlaid on the mud a pacing aureole.\nCarrying a bucket along a slimy board,\nhe felt the bats’ uncertain staggering flight,\nhis shuddering insights, beyond his control,\ntouching him. But it took him a long time\nfinally to make up his mind to go home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "questions-of-travel": { - "title": "“Questions of Travel”", - "body": "There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams\nhurry too rapidly down to the sea,\nand the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops\nmakes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,\nturning to waterfalls under our very eyes.\n--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,\naren’t waterfalls yet,\nin a quick age or so, as ages go here,\nthey probably will be.\nBut if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,\nthe mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,\nslime-hung and barnacled.\n\nThink of the long trip home.\nShould we have stayed at home and thought of here?\nWhere should we be today?\nIs it right to be watching strangers in a play\nin this strangest of theatres?\nWhat childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life\nin our bodies, we are determined to rush\nto see the sun the other way around?\nThe tiniest green hummingbird in the world?\nTo stare at some inexplicable old stonework,\ninexplicable and impenetrable,\nat any view,\ninstantly seen and always, always delightful?\nOh, must we dream our dreams\nand have them, too?\nAnd have we room\nfor one more folded sunset, still quite warm?\n\nBut surely it would have been a pity\nnot to have seen the trees along this road,\nreally exaggerated in their beauty,\nnot to have seen them gesturing\nlike noble pantomimists, robed in pink.\n--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard\nthe sad, two-noted, wooden tune\nof disparate wooden clogs\ncarelessly clacking over\na grease-stained filling-station floor.\n(In another country the clogs would all be tested.\nEach pair there would have identical pitch.)\n--A pity not to have heard\nthe other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird\nwho sings above the broken gasoline pump\nin a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:\nthree towers, five silver crosses.\n--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,\nblurr’dly and inconclusively,\non what connection can exist for centuries\nbetween the crudest wooden footwear\nand, careful and finicky,\nthe whittled fantasies of wooden footwear\nand, careful and finicky,\nthe whittled fantasies of wooden cages.\n--Never to have studied history in\nthe weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.\n--And never to have had to listen to rain\nso much like politicians’ speeches:\ntwo hours of unrelenting oratory\nand then a sudden golden silence\nin which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:\n\n“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come\nto imagined places, not just stay at home?\nOr could Pascal have been not entirely right\nabout just sitting quietly in one’s room?\n\nContinent, city, country, society:\nthe choice is never wide and never free.\nAnd here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,\nwherever that may be?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rain-towards-morning": { - "title": "“Rain Towards Morning”", - "body": "The great light cage has broken up in the air,\nfreeing, I think, about a million birds\nwhose wild ascending shadows will not be back,\nand all the wires come falling down.\nNo cage, no frightening birds; the rain\nis brightening now. The face is pale\nthat tried the puzzle of their prison\nand solved it with an unexpected kiss,\nwhose freckled unsuspected hands alit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "roosters": { - "title": "“Roosters”", - "body": "At four o’clock\nin the gun-metal blue dark\nwe hear the first crow of the first cock\n\njust below\nthe gun-metal blue window\nand immediately there is an echo\n\noff in the distance,\nthen one from the backyard fence,\nthen one, with horrible insistence,\n\ngrates like a wet match\nfrom the broccoli patch,\nflares, and all over town begins to catch.\n\nCries galore\ncome from the water-closet door,\nfrom the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,\n\nwhere in the blue blur\ntheir rusting wives admire,\nthe roosters brace their cruel feet and glare\n\nwith stupid eyes\nwhile from their beaks there rise\nthe uncontrolled, traditional cries.\n\nDeep from protruding chests\nin green-gold medals dressed,\nplanned to command and terrorize the rest,\n\nthe many wives\nwho lead hens’ lives\nof being courted and despised;\n\ndeep from raw throats\na senseless order floats\nall over town. A rooster gloats\n\nover our beds\nfrom rusty irons sheds\nand fences made from old bedsteads,\n\nover our churches\nwhere the tin rooster perches,\nover our little wooden northern houses,\n\nmaking sallies\nfrom all the muddy alleys,\nmarking out maps like Rand McNally’s:\n\nglass-headed pins,\noil-golds and copper greens,\nanthracite blues, alizarins,\n\neach one an active\ndisplacement in perspective;\neach screaming, “This is where I live!”\n\nEach screaming\n“Get up! Stop dreaming!”\nRoosters, what are you projecting?\n\nYou, whom the Greeks elected\nto shoot at on a post, who struggled\nwhen sacrificed, you whom they labeled\n\n“Very combative …”\nwhat right have you to give\ncommands and tell us how to live,\n\ncry “Here!” and “Here!”\nand wake us here where are\nunwanted love, conceit and war?\n\nThe crown of red\nset on your little head\nis charged with all your fighting blood\n\nYes, that excrescence\nmakes a most virile presence,\nplus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence\n\nNow in mid-air\nby two they fight each other.\nDown comes a first flame-feather,\n\nand one is flying,\nwith raging heroism defying\neven the sensation of dying.\n\nAnd one has fallen\nbut still above the town\nhis torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;\n\nand what he sung\nno matter. He is flung\non the gray ash-heap, lies in dung\n\nwith his dead wives\nwith open, bloody eyes,\nwhile those metallic feathers oxidize.\n\n\nSt. Peter’s sin\nwas worse than that of Magdalen\nwhose sin was of the flesh alone;\n\nof spirit, Peter’s,\nfalling, beneath the flares,\namong the “servants and officers.”\n\nOld holy sculpture\ncould set it all together\nin one small scene, past and future:\n\nChrist stands amazed,\nPeter, two fingers raised\nto surprised lips, both as if dazed.\n\nBut in between\na little cock is seen\ncarved on a dim column in the travertine,\n\nexplained by gallus canit;\nflet Petrus underneath it,\nThere is inescapable hope, the pivot;\n\nyes, and there Peter’s tears\nrun down our chanticleer’s\nsides and gem his spurs.\n\nTear-encrusted thick\nas a medieval relic\nhe waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick,\n\nstill cannot guess\nthose cock-a-doodles yet might bless,\nhis dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,\n\na new weathervane\non basilica and barn,\nand that outside the Lateran\n\nthere would always be\na bronze cock on a porphyry\npillar so the people and the Pope might see\n\nthat event the Prince\nof the Apostles long since\nhad been forgiven, and to convince\n\nall the assembly\nthat “Deny deny deny”\nis not all the roosters cry.\n\nIn the morning\na low light is floating\nin the backyard, and gilding\n\nfrom underneath\nthe broccoli, leaf by leaf;\nhow could the night have come to grief?\n\ngilding the tiny\nfloating swallow’s belly\nand lines of pink cloud in the sky,\n\nthe day’s preamble\nlike wandering lines in marble,\nThe cocks are now almost inaudible.\n\nThe sun climbs in,\nfollowing “to see the end,”\nfaithful as enemy, or friend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sandpiper": { - "title": "“Sandpiper”", - "body": "The roaring alongside he takes for granted,\nand that every so often the world is bound to shake.\nHe runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,\nin a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.\n\nThe beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet\nof interrupting water comes and goes\nand glazes over his dark and brittle feet.\nHe runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.\n\n--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them\nwhere (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains\nrapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,\nhe stares at the dragging grains.\n\nThe world is a mist. And then the world is\nminute and vast and clear. The tide\nis higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.\nHis beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,\n\nlooking for something, something, something.\nPoor bird, he is obsessed!\nThe millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray\nmixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seascape": { - "title": "“Seascape”", - "body": "This celestial seascape, with white herons got up as angels,\nflying high as they want and as far as they want sidewise\nin tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections;\nthe whole region, from the highest heron\ndown to the weightless mangrove island\nwith bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings\nlike illumination in silver,\nand down to the suggestively Gothic arches of the mangrove roots\nand the beautiful pea-green back-pasture\nwhere occasionally a fish jumps, like a wildflower\nin an ornamental spray of spray;\nthis cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope:\nit does look like heaven.\nBut a skeletal lighthouse standing there\nin black and white clerical dress,\nwho lives on his nerves, thinks he knows better.\nHe thinks that hell rages below his iron feet,\nthat that is why the shallow water is so warm,\nand he knows that heaven is not like this.\nHeaven is not like flying or swimming,\nbut has something to do with blackness and a strong glare\nand when it gets dark he will remember something\nstrongly worded to say on the subject.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sestina": { - "title": "“Sestina”", - "body": "September rain falls on the house.\nIn the failing light, the old grandmother\nsits in the kitchen with the child\nbeside the Little Marvel Stove,\nreading the jokes from the almanac,\nlaughing and talking to hide her tears.\n\nShe thinks that her equinoctial tears\nand the rain that beats on the roof of the house\nwere both foretold by the almanac,\nbut only known to a grandmother.\nThe iron kettle sings on the stove.\nShe cuts some bread and says to the child,\n\nIt’s time for tea now; but the child\nis watching the teakettle’s small hard tears\ndance like mad on the hot black stove,\nthe way the rain must dance on the house.\nTidying up, the old grandmother\nhangs up the clever almanac\n\non its string. Birdlike, the almanac\nhovers half open above the child,\nhovers above the old grandmother\nand her teacup full of dark brown tears.\nShe shivers and says she thinks the house\nfeels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.\n\nIt was to be, says the Marvel Stove.\nI know what I know, says the almanac.\nWith crayons the child draws a rigid house\nand a winding pathway. Then the child\nputs in a man with buttons like tears\nand shows it proudly to the grandmother.\n\nBut secretly, while the grandmother\nbusies herself about the stove,\nthe little moons fall down like tears\nfrom between the pages of the almanac\ninto the flower bed the child\nhas carefully placed in the front of the house.\n\nTime to plant tears, says the almanac.\nThe grandmother sings to the marvelous stove\nand the child draws another inscrutable house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "the-shampoo": { - "title": "“The Shampoo”", - "body": "The still explosions on the rocks,\nthe lichens, grow\nby spreading, gray, concentric shocks.\nThey have arranged\nto meet the rings around the moon, although\nwithin our memories they have not changed.\n\nAnd since the heavens will attend\nas long on us,\nyou’ve been, dear friend,\nprecipitate and pragmatical;\nand look what happens. For Time is\nnothing if not amenable.\n\nThe shooting stars in your black hair\nin bright formation\nare flocking where,\nso straight, so soon?\n--Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,\nbattered and shiny like the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sleeping-on-the-ceiling": { - "title": "“Sleeping on the Ceiling”", - "body": "It is so peaceful on the ceiling!\nIt is the Place de la Concorde.\nThe little crystal chandelier\nis off, the fountain is in the dark.\nNot a soul is in the park.\n\nBelow, where the wallpaper is peeling,\nthe Jardin des Plantes has locked its gates.\nThose photographs are animals.\nThe mighty flowers and foliage rustle;\nunder the leaves the insects tunnel.\n\nWe must go under the wallpaper\nto meet the insect-gladiator,\nto battle with a net and trident,\nand leave the fountain and the square\nBut oh, that we could sleep up there …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-for-the-rainy-season": { - "title": "“Song for the Rainy Season”", - "body": "Hidden, oh hidden\nin the high fog\nthe house we live in,\nbeneath the magnetic rock,\nrain-, rainbow-ridden,\nwhere blood-black\nbromelias, lichens,\nowls, and the lint\nof the waterfalls cling,\nfamiliar, unbidden.\n\nIn a dim age\nof water\nthe brook sings loud\nfrom a rib cage\nof giant fern; vapor\nclimbs up the thick growth\neffortlessly, turns back,\nholding them both,\nhouse and rock,\nin a private cloud.\n\nAt night, on the roof,\nblind drops crawl\nand the ordinary brown\nowl gives us proof\nhe can count:\nfive times--always five--\nhe stamps and takes off\nafter the fat frogs that,\nshrilling for love,\nclamber and mount.\n\nHouse, open house\nto the white dew\nand the milk-white sunrise\nkind to the eyes,\nto membership\nof silver fish, mouse,\nbookworms,\nbig moths; with a wall\nfor the mildew’s\nignorant map;\n\ndarkened and tarnished\nby the warm touch\nof the warm breath,\nmaculate, cherished;\nrejoice! For a later\nera will differ.\n(O difference that kills\nor intimidates, much\nof all our small shadowy\nlife!) Without water\n\nthe great rock will stare\nunmagnetized, bare,\nno longer wearing\nrainbows or rain,\nthe forgiving air\nand the high fog gone;\nthe owls will move on\nand the several\nwaterfalls shrivel\nin the steady sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "songs-for-a-colored-singer": { - "title": "“Songs for a Colored Singer”", - "body": "# I.\n\nA washing hangs upon the line,\n but it’s not mine.\nNone of the things that I can see\n belong to me.\nThe neighbors got a radio with an aerial;\n we got a little portable.\nThey got a lot of closet space;\n we got a suitcase.\n\nI say, “Le Roy, just how much are we owing?\nSomething I can’t comprehend,\nthe more we got the more we spend …”\nHe only answers, “Let’s get going.”\nLe Roy, you’re earning too much money now.\n\nI sit and look at our backyard\n and find it very hard.\nWhat have we got for all his dollars and cents?\n --A pile of bottles by the fence.\nHe’s faithful and he’s kind\n but he sure has an inquiring mind.\nHe’s seen a lot; he’s bound to see the rest,\n and if I protest\n\nLe Roy answers with a frown,\n“Darling, when I earns I spends.\nThe world is wide; it still extends …\nI’m going to get a job in the next town.”\nLe Roy, you’re earning too much money now.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe time has come to call a halt;\n and so it ends.\n He’s gone off with his other friends.\n He needn’t try to make amends,\nthis occasion’s all his fault.\n Through rain and dark I see his face\n across the street at Flossie’s place.\n He’s drinking in the warm pink glow\n to th’ accompaniment of the piccolo.\n\nThe time has come to call a halt.\nI met him walking with Varella\nand hit him twice with my umbrella.\nPerhaps that occasion was my fault,\nbut the time has come to call a halt.\n\nGo drink your wine and go get tight.\n Let the piccolo play.\n I’m sick of all your fussing anyway.\n Now I’m pursuing my own way.\nI’m leaving on the bus tonight.\n Far down the highway wet and black\n I’ll ride and ride and not come back.\n I’m going to go and take the bus\n and find someone monogamous.\n\nThe time has come to call a halt.\nI’ve borrowed fifteen dollars fare\nand it will take me anywhere.\nFor this occasion’s all his fault.\nThe time has come to call a halt.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLullaby.\nAdult and child\nsink to their rest.\nAt sea the big ship sinks and dies,\nlead in its breast.\n\nLullaby.\nLet mations rage,\nlet nations fall.\nThe shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage\nupon the wall.\n\nLullaby.\nSleep on and on,\nwar’s over soon.\nDrop the silly, harmless toy,\npick up the moon.\n\nLullaby.\nIf they should say\nyou have no sense,\ndon’t you mind them; it won’t make\nmuch difference.\n\nLullaby.\nAdult and child\nsink to their rest.\nAt sea the big ship sinks and dies,\nlead in its breast.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhat’s that shining in the leaves,\nthe shadowy leaves,\nlike tears when somebody grieves,\nshining, shining in the leaves?\n\nIs it dew or is it tears,\ndew or tears,\nhanging there for years and years\nlike a heavy dew of tears?\n\nThen that dew begins to fall,\nroll down and fall,\nMaybe it’s not tears at all.\nSee it, see it roll and fall.\n\nHear it falling on the ground,\nhear, all around.\nThat is not a tearful sound,\nbeating, beating on the ground.\n\nSee it lying there like seeds,\nlike black seeds.\nsee it taking root like weeds,\nfaster, faster than the weeds,\n\nall the shining seeds take root,\nconspiring root,\nand what curious flower or fruit\nwill grow from that conspiring root?\n\nfruit or flower? It is a face.\nYes, a face.\nIn that dark and dreary place\neach seed grows into a face.\n\nLike an army in a dream\nthe faces seem,\ndarker, darker, like a dream.\nThey’re too real to be a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Summer is over upon the sea.\nThe pleasure yacht, the social being,\nThat danced on the endless polished floor,\nStepped and side-stepped like Fred Astaire,\nIs gone, is gone, docked somewhere ashore.\n\nThe friends have left, the sea is bare\nThat was strewn with floating, fresh green weeds.\nOnly the rusty-sided freighter\nGoes past the moon’s marketless craters\nAnd the stars are the only ships of pleasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "Caught--the bubble\nin the spirit level,\na creature divided;\nand the compass needle\nwobbling and wavering,\nundecided.\nFreed--the broken\nthermometer’s mercury\nrunning away;\nand the rainbow-bird\nfrom the narrow bevel\nof the empty mirror,\nflying wherever\nit feels like, gay!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "squatters-children": { - "title": "“Squatter’s Children”", - "body": "On the unbreathing sides of hills\nthey play, a specklike girl and boy,\nalone, but near a specklike house.\nThe Sun’s suspended eye\nblinks casually, and then they wade\ngigantic waves of light and shade.\nA dancing yellow spot, a pup,\nattends them. Clouds are piling up;\n\na storm piles up behind the house.\nThe children play at digging holes.\nThe ground is hard; they try to use\none of their father’s tools,\na mattock with a broken haft\nthe two of them can scarcely lift.\nIt drops and clangs. Their laughter spreads\neffulgence in the thunderheads,\n\nWeak flashes of inquiry\ndirect as is the puppy’s bark.\nBut to their little, soluble,\nunwarrantable ark,\napparently the rain’s reply\nconsists of echolalia,\nand Mother’s voice, ugly as sin,\nkeeps calling to them to come in.\n\nChildren, the threshold of the storm\nhas slid beneath your muddy shoes;\nwet and beguiled, you stand among\nthe mansions you may choose\nout of a bigger house than yours,\nwhose lawfulness endures.\nIt’s soggy documents retain\nyour rights in rooms of falling rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "strayed-crab": { - "title": "“Strayed Crab”", - "body": "This is not my home. How did I get so far from water? It must\nbe over that way somewhere.\n I am the color of wine, of tinta. The inside of my powerful\nright claw is saffron-yellow. See, I see it now; I wave it like a\nflag. I am dapper and elegant; I move with great precision,\ncleverly managing all my smaller yellow claws. I believe in the\noblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself.\n But on this strange, smooth surface I am making too much\nnoise. I wasn’t meant for this. If I maneuver a bit and keep a\nsharp lookout, I shall find my pool again. Watch out for my right\nclaw, all passersby! This place is too hard. The rain has stopped,\nand it is damp, but still not wet enough to please me.\n My eyes are good, though small; my shell is tough and tight.\nIn my own pool are many small gray fish. I see right through\nthem. Only their large eyes are opaque, and twitch at me. They\nare hard to catch but I, I catch them quickly in my arms and\neat them up.\n What is that big soft monster, like a yellow cloud, stifling\nand warm? What is it doing? It pats my back. Out, claw. There,\nI have frightened it away. It’s sitting down, pretending nothing’s\nhappened. I’ll skirt it. It’s still pretending not to see me. Out of\nmy way, O monster. I own a pool, all the little fish that swim in it,\nand all the skittering waterbugs that smell like rotten apples.\n Cheer up, O grievous snail. I tap your shell, encouragingly,\nnot that you will ever know about it.\n And I want nothing to do with you, either, sulking toad.\nImagine, at least four times my size and yet so vulnerable … I\ncould open your belly with my claw. You glare and bulge, a\nwatchdog near my pool; you make a loud and hollow noise. I\ndo not care for such stupidity. I admire compression, lightness,\nand agility, all rare in this loose world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "suicide-of-a-moderate-dictator": { - "title": "“Suicide of a Moderate Dictator”", - "body": "This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;\nleak from the dangling telephone earphones\nsapping the festooned switchboards’ strength;\nfall from the windows, blow from off the sills,\n--the vague, slight unremarkable contents\nof emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers\nlike ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,\ncrocking the way the unfocused photographs\nof crooked faces do that soil our coats,\nour tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths.\n\nToday’s a day when those who work\nare idling. Those who played must work\nand hurry, too, to get it done,\nwith little dignity or none.\nThe newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters\ncrash down. But anyway, in the night\nthe headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets\nand sidewalks everywhere; a sediment’s splashed\neven to the first floors of apartment houses.\n\nThis is a day that’s beautiful as well,\nand warm and clear. At seven o’clock I saw\nthe dogs being walked along the famous beach\nas usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,\nleaving their paw prints draining in the wet.\nThe line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,\nsegmented rainbow steadily hung above it.\nAt eight two little boys were flying kites.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "trouvee": { - "title": "“Trouvée”", - "body": "Oh, why should a hen\nhave been run over\non West 4th Street\nin the middle of summer?\n\nShe was a white hen\n--red-and-white now, of course.\nHow did she get there?\nWhere was she going?\n\nHer wing feathers spread\nflat, flat in the tar,\nall dirtied, and thin\nas tissue paper.\n\nA pigeon, yes,\nor an English sparrow,\nmight meet such a fate,\nbut not that poor fowl.\n\nJust now I went back\nto look again.\nI hadn’t dreamed it:\nthere is a hen\n\nturned into a quaint\nold country saying\nscribbled in chalk\n(except for the beak).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-unbeliever": { - "title": "“The Unbeliever”", - "body": "_He sleeps on the top of a mast._ --Bunyan\n\nHe sleeps on the top of a mast\nwith his eyes fast closed.\nThe sails fall away below him\nlike the sheets of his bed,\nleaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head.\n\nAsleep he was transported there,\nasleep he curled\nin a gilded ball on the mast’s top,\nor climbed inside\na gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride.\n\n“I am founded on marble pillars,”\nsaid a cloud. “I never move.\nSee the pillars there in the sea?”\nSecure in introspection\nhe peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.\n\nA gull had wings under his\nand remarked that the air\nwas “like marble.” He said: “Up here\nI tower through the sky\nfor the marble wings on my tower-top fly.”\n\nBut he sleeps on the top of his mast\nwith his eyes closed tight.\nThe gull inquired into his dream,\nwhich was, “I must not fall.\nThe spangled sea below wants me to fall.\nIt is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "view-of-the-capitol-from-the-library-of-congress": { - "title": "“View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress”", - "body": "Moving from left to left, the light\nis heavy on the Dome, and coarse.\nOne small lunette turns it aside\nand blankly stares off to the side\nlike a big white old wall-eyed horse.\n\nOn the east steps the Air Force Band\nin uniforms of Air Force blue\nis playing hard and loud, but--queer--\nthe music doesn’t quite come through.\n\nIt comes in snatches, dim then keen,\nthen mute, and yet there is no breeze.\nThe giant trees stand in between.\nI think the trees must intervene,\n\ncatching the music in their leaves\nlike gold-dust, till each big leaf sags.\nUnceasingly the little flags\nfeed their limp stripes into the air,\nand the band’s efforts vanish there.\n\nGreat shades, edge over,\ngive the music room.\nThe gathered brasses want to go\nboom--boom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "visits-to-st-elizabeths": { - "title": "“Visits to St. Elizabeths”", - "body": "This is the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is the man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is the time\nof the tragic man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is a wristwatch\ntelling the time\nof the talkative man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is a sailor\nwearing the watch\nthat tells the time\nof the honored man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is the roadstead all of board\nreached by the sailor\nwearing the watch\nthat tells the time\nof the old, brave man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThese are the years and the walls of the ward,\nthe winds and clouds of the sea of board\nsailed by the sailor\nwearing the watch\nthat tells the time\nof the cranky man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is a Jew in a newspaper hat\nthat dances weeping down the ward\nover the creaking sea of board\nbeyond the sailor\nwinding his watch\nthat tells the time\nof the cruel man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is a world of books gone flat.\nThis is a Jew in a newspaper hat\nthat dances weeping down the ward\nover the creaking sea of board\nof the batty sailor\nthat winds his watch\nthat tells the time\nof the busy man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is a boy that pats the floor\nto see if the world is there, is flat,\nfor the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat\nthat dances weeping down the ward\nwaltzing the length of a weaving board\nby the silent sailor\nthat hears his watch\nthat ticks the time\nof the tedious man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThese are the years and the walls and the door\nthat shut on a boy that pats the floor\nto feel if the world is there and flat.\nThis is a Jew in a newspaper hat\nthat dances joyfully down the ward\ninto the parting seas of board\npast the staring sailor\nthat shakes his watch\nthat tells the time\nof the poet, the man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.\n\nThis is the soldier home from the war.\nThese are the years and the walls and the door\nthat shut on a boy that pats the floor\nto see if the world is round or flat.\nThis is a Jew in a newspaper hat\nthat dances carefully down the ward,\nwalking the plank of a coffin board\nwith the crazy sailor\nthat shows his watch\nthat tells the time\nof the wretched man\nthat lies in the house of Bedlam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1979 - } - } - }, - "the-weed": { - "title": "“The Weed”", - "body": "I dreamed that dead, and meditating,\nI lay upon a grave, or bed,\n(at least, some cold and close-built bower).\nIn the cold heart, its final thought\nstood frozen, drawn immense and clear,\nstiff and idle as I was there;\nand we remained unchanged together\nfor a year, a minute, an hour.\nSuddenly there was a motion,\nas startling, there, to every sense\nas an explosion. Then it dropped\nto insistent, cautious creeping\nin the region of the heart,\nprodding me from desperate sleep.\nI raised my head. A slight young weed\nhad pushed up through the heart and its\ngreen head was nodding on the breast.\n(All this was in the dark.)\nIt grew an inch like a blade of grass;\nnext, one leaf shot out of its side\na twisting, waving flag, and then\ntwo leaves moved like a semaphore.\nThe stem grew thick. The nervous roots\nreached to each side; the graceful head\nchanged its position mysteriously,\nsince there was neither sun nor moon\nto catch its young attention.\nThe rooted heart began to change\n(not beat) and then it split apart\nand from it broke a flood of water.\nTwo rivers glanced off from the sides,\none to the right, one to the left,\ntwo rushing, half-clear streams,\n(the ribs made of them two cascades)\nwhich assuredly, smooth as glass,\nwent off through the fine black grains of earth.\nThe weed was almost swept away;\nit struggled with its leaves,\nlifting them fringed with heavy drops.\nA few drops fell upon my face\nand in my eyes, so I could see\n(or, in that black place, thought I saw)\nthat each drop contained a light,\na small, illuminated scene;\nthe weed-deflected stream was made\nitself of racing images.\n(As if a river should carry all\nthe scenes that it had once reflected\nshut in its waters, and not floating\non momentary surfaces.)\nThe weed stood in the severed heart.\n“What are you doing there?” I asked.\nIt lifted its head all dripping wet\n(with my own thoughts?)\nand answered then: “I grow,” it said,\n“but to divide your heart again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "while-someone-telephones": { - "title": "“While Someone Telephones”", - "body": "Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn’t be worse,\nminutes of a barbaric condescension.\n--Stare out the bathroom window at the fir-trees,\nat their dark needles, accretions to no purpose\nwoodenly crystallized, and where two fireflies\nare only lost.\nHear nothing but a train that goes by, must go by, like tension;\nnothing. And wait:\nmaybe even now these minutes’ host\nemerges, some relaxed uncondescending stranger,\nthe heart’s release.\nAnd while the fireflies\nare failing to illuminate these nightmare trees\nmight they not be his green gay eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bjornstjerne-bjornson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson", - "birth": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "norwegian", - "language": "norwegian", - "flag": "🇳🇴", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjørnstjerne_Bjørnson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "norwegian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "alone-and-repentant": { - "title": "“Alone and Repentant”", - "body": "A friend I possess, whose whispers just said,\n“God’s peace!” to my night-watching mind.\nWhen daylight is gone and darkness brings dread,\nHe ever the way can find.\n\nHe utters no word to smite and to score;\nHe, too, has known sin and its grief.\nHe heals with his look the place that is sore,\nAnd stays till I have relief.\n\nHe takes for his own the deed that is such\nThat sorrows of heart increase.\nHe cleanses the wound with so gentle a touch,\nThe pain must give way to peace.\n\nHe followed each hope the heights that would scale\nReproached not a hapless descent.\nHe stands here just now, so mild, but so pale;--\nIn time he shall know what it meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "norwegian" - } - }, - "in-the-forest": { - "title": "“In the Forest”", - "body": "List to the forest-voice murmuring low:\nAll that it saw when alone with its laughter,\nAll that it suffered in times that came after,\nMournful it tells, that the wind may know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "norwegian" - } - }, - "master-or-slave": { - "title": "“Master or Slave”", - "body": "Lo, this land that lifts around it\nThreatening peaks, while stern seas bound it,\nWith cold winters, summers bleak,\nCurtly smiling, never meek,\n’Tis the giant we must master,\nTill he work our will the faster.\nHe shall carry, though he clamor,\nHe shall haul and saw and hammer,\nTurn to light the tumbling torrent,--\nAll his din and rage abhorrent\nShall, if we but do our duty,\nWin for us a realm of beauty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "norwegian" - } - }, - "the-ocean": { - "title": "“The Ocean”", - "body": "Oceanward I am ever yearning,\nWhere far it rolls in its calm and grandeur,\nThe weight of mountain-like fogbanks bearing,\nForever wandering and returning.\nThe skies may lower, the land may call it,\nIt knows no resting and knows no yielding.\nIn nights of summer, in storms of winter,\nIts surges murmur the self-same longing.\n\nYes, oceanward I am ever yearning,\nWhere far is lifted its broad, cold forehead!\nThereon the world throws its deepest shadow\nAnd mirrors whispering all its anguish.\nThough warm and blithesome the bright sun stroke it\nWith joyous message, that life is gladness,\nYet ice-cold, changelessly melancholy,\nIt drowns the sorrow and drowns the solace.\n\nThe full moon pulling, the tempest lifting,\nMust loose their hold on the flowing water.\nDown whirling lowlands and crumbling mountains\nIt to eternity tireless washes.\nWhat forth it draws must the one way wander.\nWhat once is sunken arises never.\nNo message comes thence, no cry is heard thence;\nIts voice, its silence, can none interpret.\n\nYes, toward the ocean, far out toward ocean,\nThat knows no hour of self-atonement!\nFor all that suffer release it offers,\nBut trails forever its own enigma.\nA strange alliance with Death unites it,\nThat all it give Him,--itself excepting!\n\nI feel, vast Ocean, thy solemn sadness,\nTo thee abandon my weak devices,\nTo thee let fly all my anxious longings:\nMay thy cool breath to my heart bring healing!\nLet Death now follow, his booty seeking:\nThe moves are many before the checkmate!\nAwhile I’ll harass thy love of plunder,\nAs on I scud ’neath thy angry eyebrows;\nThou only fillest my swelling mainsail,\nThough Death ride fast on thy howling tempest;\nThy billows raging shall bear the faster\nMy little vessel to quiet waters.\n\nAh! Thus alone at the helm in darkness,\nBy all forsaken, by Death forgotten,\nWhen sails unknown far away are wafted\nAnd some swift-coursing by night are passing,\nTo note the ground-swell’s resistless current,\nThe sighing heart of the breathing ocean--\nOr small waves plashing along the planking,\nIts quiet pastime amid its sadness.\nThen glide my lingering longings over\nInto the ocean-deep grief of nature,\nThe night’s, the water’s united coldness\nPrepares my spirit for death’s dark dwelling.\n\nThen comes day’s dawning! My soul bounds upward\nOn beams of light to the vault of heaven;\nMy ship-steed sniffing its flank is laving\nWith buoyant zest in the cooling billow.\nWith song the sailor to masthead clambers\nTo clear the sail that shall swell more freely,\nAnd thoughts are flying like birds aweary\nRound mast and yard-arm, but find no refuge …\nYes, toward the ocean! To follow Vikar!\nTo sail like him and to sink as he did,\nFor great King Olaf the prow defending!\nWith keel unswerving the cold thought cleaving,\nBut hope deriving from lightest breezes!\nDeath’s eager fingers so near the rudder,\nWhile heaven’s clearness the way illumines!\n\nAnd then at last in the final hour\nTo feel the bolts and the nails are yielding\nAnd Death is pressing the seams asunder,\nThat in may stream the absolving water!\nWet winding-sheets shall be folded round me,\nAnd I descend to eternal silence,\nWhile rolling billows my name bear shoreward\nIn spacious nights ’neath the cloudless moonlight!", - "metadata": { - "language": "norwegian" - } - } - } - }, - "william-blake": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Blake", - "birth": { - "year": 1757 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1827 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 80 - }, - "poems": { - "ah-sun-flower": { - "title": "“Ah! Sun-Flower”", - "body": "Ah Sun-flower! weary of time.\nWho countest the steps of the Sun;\nSeeking after that sweet golden clime\nWhere the travellers journey is done.\n\nWhere the Youth pined away with desire,\nAnd the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:\nArise from their graves and aspire.\nWhere my Sun-flower wishes to go.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "an-angel-came-to-me": { - "title": "“An Angel Came to Me”", - "body": "An Angel came to me and said O pitiable foolish young man! O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career.\nI said, perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable.\nSo he took me thro’ a stable & thro’ a church & down into the church vault at the end of which was a mill: thro’ the mill we went, and came to a cave, down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way till a void boundless as a nether sky appear’d beneath us, & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity, but I said, if you please we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also, if you will not, I will? but he answer’d, do not presume O young-man but as we here remain behold thy lot which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.\nSo I remain’d with him sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus, which hung with the head downward into the deep.\nBy degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption, & the air was full of them, & seem’d composed of them; these are Devils, and arc called Powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? he said, between the black & white spiders.\nBut now, from between the black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro’ the deep, blackning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea & rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones throw from us appear’d and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent; at last to the east, distant about three degrees appear’d a fiery crest above the waves; slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks till we discover’d two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw, it was the head of Leviathan; his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tygers forehead: soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the raging foam tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.\nMy friend the Angel climb’d up from his station into the mill; I remain’d alone, & then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp, & his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.\nBut I arose, and sought for the mill & there I found my Angel, who surprised asked me how I escaped?\nI answer’d, All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I shew you yours? he laugh’d at my proposal; but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, & flew westerly thro’ the night, till we were elevated above the earths shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun; here I clothed myself in white, & taking in my hand Swedenborgs volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to saturn; here I staid to rest, & then leap’d into the void, between saturn & the fixed stars.\nHere, said I! is your lot, in this space, if space it may be call’d. Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me; soon we saw seven houses of brick; one we enter’d; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chain’d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains; however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devour’d, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour’d too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoy’d us both we went into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.\nSo the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.\nI answer’d: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.\nOpposition is true Friendship.\nI have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning:\nThus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books.\nA man carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conciev’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, & himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.\nNow hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth:\nNow hear another: he has written all the old falshoods.\nAnd now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.\nThus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial, opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.\nHave now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.\nBut when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-angel": { - "title": "“The Angel”", - "body": "I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?\nAnd that I was a maiden Queen:\nGuarded by an Angel mild;\nWitless woe, was neer beguil’d!\n\nAnd I wept both night and day\nAnd he wip’d my tears away\nAnd I wept both day and night\nAnd hid from him my hearts delight\n\nSo he took his wings and fled:\nThen the morn blush’d rosy red:\nI dried my tears & armd my fears,\nWith ten thousand shields and spears.\n\nSoon my Angel came again;\nI was arm’d, he came in vain:\nFor the time of youth was fled\nAnd grey hairs were on my head", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "the-argument": { - "title": "“The Argument”", - "body": "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,\nHungry clouds swag on the deep.\n\nOnce meek, and in a perilous path\nThe just man kept his course along\nThe Vale of Death.\nRoses are planted where thorns grow,\nAnd on the barren heath\nSing the honey bees.\n\nThen the perilous path was planted,\nAnd a river and a spring\nOn every cliff and tomb;\nAnd on the bleached bones\nRed clay brought forth:\nTill the villain left the paths of ease\nTo walk in perilous paths, and drive\nThe just man into barren climes.\n\nNow the sneaking serpent walks\nIn mild humility;\nAnd the just man rages in the wilds\nWhere lions roam.\n\nRintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,\nHungry clouds swag on the deep.\n\n_As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise: see Isaiah xxxiv & xxxv Chap: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell._", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1790 - } - } - }, - "auguries-of-innocence": { - "title": "“Auguries of Innocence”", - "body": "To see a world in a grain of sand\nAnd a heaven in a wild flower,\nHold infinity in the palm of your hand\nAnd eternity in an hour.\nA robin redbreast in a cage\nPuts all heaven in a rage.\nA dove-house filled with doves and pigeons\nShudders hell through all its regions.\nA dog starved at his master’s gate\nPredicts the ruin of the state.\nA horse misused upon the road\nCalls to heaven for human blood.\nEach outcry of the hunted hare\nA fibre from the brain does tear.\nA skylark wounded in the wing,\nA cherubim does cease to sing.\nThe game-cock clipped and armed for fight\nDoes the rising sun affright.\nEvery wolf’s and lion’s howl\nRaises from hell a human soul.\nThe wild deer wandering here and there\nKeeps the human soul from care.\nThe lamb misused breeds public strife,\nAnd yet forgives the butcher’s knife.\nThe bat that flits at close of eve\nHas left the brain that won’t believe.\nThe owl that calls upon the night\nSpeaks the unbeliever’s fright.\nHe who shall hurt the little wren\nShall never be beloved by men.\nHe who the ox to wrath has moved\nShall never be by woman loved.\nThe wanton boy that kills the fly\nShall feel the spider’s enmity.\nHe who torments the chafer’s sprite\nWeaves a bower in endless night.\nThe caterpillar on the leaf\nRepeats to thee thy mother’s grief.\nKill not the moth nor butterfly,\nFor the Last Judgment draweth nigh.\nHe who shall train the horse to war\nShall never pass the polar bar.\nThe beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,\nFeed them, and thou wilt grow fat.\nThe gnat that sings his summer’s song\nPoison gets from Slander’s tongue.\nThe poison of the snake and newt\nIs the sweat of Envy’s foot.\nThe poison of the honey-bee\nIs the artist’s jealousy.\nThe prince’s robes and beggar’s rags\nAre toadstools on the miser’s bags.\nA truth that’s told with bad intent\nBeats all the lies you can invent.\nIt is right it should be so:\nMan was made for joy and woe;\nAnd when this we rightly know\nThrough the world we safely go.\nJoy and woe are woven fine,\nA clothing for the soul divine.\nUnder every grief and pine\nRuns a joy with silken twine.\nThe babe is more than swaddling bands,\nThroughout all these human lands;\nTools were made and born were hands,\nEvery farmer understands.\nEvery tear from every eye\nBecomes a babe in eternity;\nThis is caught by females bright\nAnd returned to its own delight.\nThe bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar\nAre waves that beat on heaven’s shore.\nThe babe that weeps the rod beneath\nWrites Revenge! in realms of death.\nThe beggar’s rags fluttering in air\nDoes to rags the heavens tear.\nThe soldier armed with sword and gun\nPalsied strikes the summer’s sun.\nThe poor man’s farthing is worth more\nThan all the gold on Afric’s shore.\nOne mite wrung from the labourer’s hands\nShall buy and sell the miser’s lands,\nOr if protected from on high\nDoes that whole nation sell and buy.\nHe who mocks the infant’s faith\nShall be mocked in age and death.\nHe who shall teach the child to doubt\nThe rotting grave shall ne’er get out.\nHe who respects the infant’s faith\nTriumphs over hell and death.\nThe child’s toys and the old man’s reasons\nAre the fruits of the two seasons.\nThe questioner who sits so sly\nShall never know how to reply.\nHe who replies to words of doubt\nDoth put the light of knowledge out.\nThe strongest poison ever known\nCame from Caesar’s laurel crown.\nNought can deform the human race\nLike to the armour’s iron brace.\nWhen gold and gems adorn the plough\nTo peaceful arts shall Envy bow.\nA riddle or the cricket’s cry\nIs to doubt a fit reply.\nThe emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile\nMake lame philosophy to smile.\nHe who doubts from what he sees\nWill ne’er believe, do what you please.\nIf the sun and moon should doubt,\nThey’d immediately go out.\nTo be in a passion you good may do,\nBut no good if a passion is in you.\nThe whore and gambler, by the state\nLicensed, build that nation’s fate.\nThe harlot’s cry from street to street\nShall weave old England’s winding sheet.\nThe winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,\nDance before dead England’s hearse.\nEvery night and every morn\nSome to misery are born.\nEvery morn and every night\nSome are born to sweet delight.\nSome are born to sweet delight,\nSome are born to endless night.\nWe are led to believe a lie\nWhen we see not through the eye\nWhich was born in a night to perish in a night,\nWhen the soul slept in beams of light.\nGod appears, and God is light\nTo those poor souls who dwell in night,\nBut does a human form display\nTo those who dwell in realms of day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1803 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-birds": { - "title": "“The Birds”", - "body": "He. Where thou dwellest, in what grove,\nTell me Fair One, tell me Love;\nWhere thou thy charming nest dost build,\nO thou pride of every field!\n\nShe. Yonder stands a lonely tree,\nThere I live and mourn for thee;\nMorning drinks my silent tear,\nAnd evening winds my sorrow bear.\n\nHe. O thou summer’s harmony,\nI have liv’d and mourn’d for thee;\nEach day I mourn along the wood,\nAnd night hath heard my sorrows loud.\n\nShe. Dost thou truly long for me?\nAnd am I thus sweet to thee?\nSorrow now is at an end,\nO my Lover and my Friend!\n\nHe. Come, on wings of joy we’ll fly\nTo where my bower hangs on high;\nCome, and make thy calm retreat\nAmong green leaves and blossoms sweet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "blind-mans-buff": { - "title": "“Blind Man’s Buff”", - "body": "When silver snow decks Susan’s clothes,\nAnd jewel hangs at th’ shepherd’s nose,\nThe blushing bank is all my care,\nWith hearth so red, and walls so fair;\n“Heap the sea-coal, come, heap it higher,\nThe oaken log lay on the fire.”\nThe well-wash’d stools, a circling row,\nWith lad and lass, how fair the show!\nThe merry can of nut-brown ale,\nThe laughing jest, the love-sick tale,\nTill, tir’d of chat, the game begins.\nThe lasses prick the lads with pins;\nRoger from Dolly twitch’d the stool,\nShe, falling, kiss’d the ground, poor fool!\nShe blush’d so red, with sidelong glance\nAt hob-nail Dick, who griev’d the chance.\nBut now for Blind man’s Buff they call;\nOf each encumbrance clear the hall--\nJenny her silken ’kerchief folds,\nAnd blear-eyed Will the black lot holds.\nNow laughing stops, with “Silence! hush!”\nAnd Peggy Pout gives Sam a push.\nThe Blind man’s arms, extended wide,\nSam slips between:--“O woe betide\nThee, clumsy Will!”--but titt’ring Kate\nIs penn’d up in the corner straight!\nAnd now Will’s eyes beheld the play;\nHe thought his face was t’other way.\n“Now, Kitty, now! what chance hast thou,\nRoger so near thee!--Trips, I vow!”\nShe catches him--then Roger ties\nHis own head up--but not his eyes;\nFor thro’ the slender cloth he sees,\nAnd runs at Sam, who slips with ease\nHis clumsy hold; and, dodging round,\nSukey is tumbled on the ground!--\n“See what it is to play unfair!\nWhere cheating is, there’s mischief there.”\nBut Roger still pursues the chase,--\n“He sees! he sees!” cries, softly, Grace;\n“O Roger, thou, unskill’d in art,\nMust, surer bound, go thro’ thy part!”\nNow Kitty, pert, repeats the rimes,\nAnd Roger turns him round three times,\nThen pauses ere he starts--but Dick\nWas mischief bent upon a trick;\nDown on his hands and knees he lay\nDirectly in the Blind man’s way,\nThen cries out “Hem!” Hodge heard, and ran\nWith hood-wink’d chance--sure of his man;\nBut down he came.--Alas, how frail\nOur best of hopes, how soon they fail!\nWith crimson drops he stains the ground;\nConfusion startles all around.\nPoor piteous Dick supports his head,\nAnd fain would cure the hurt he made.\nBut Kitty hasted with a key,\nAnd down his back they straight convey\nThe cold relief; the blood is stay’d,\nAnd Hodge again holds up his head.\nSuch are the fortunes of the game,\nAnd those who play should stop the same\nBy wholesome laws; such as all those\nWho on the blinded man impose\nStand in his stead; as, long a-gone,\nWhen men were first a nation grown,\nLawless they liv’d, till wantonness\nAnd liberty began t’ increase,\nAnd one man lay in another’s way;\nThen laws were made to keep fair play.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-blossom": { - "title": "“The Blossom”", - "body": "Merry Merry Sparrow\nUnder leaves so green\nA happy Blossom\nSees you swift as arrow\nSeek your cradle narrow\nNear my Bosom.\n\nPretty Pretty Robin\nUnder leaves so green\nA happy Blossom\nHears you sobbing sobbing\nPretty Pretty Robin\nNear my Bosom.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-book-of-thel": { - "title": "“The Book of Thel”", - "body": "_Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?\nOr wilt thou go ask the Mole?\nCan Wisdom be put in a silver rod?\nOr Love in a golden bowl?_\n\n# I.\n\nThe daughters of the Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,\nAll but the youngest: she in paleness sought the secret air,\nTo fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day:\nDown by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,\nAnd thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew:\n\n“O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water,\nWhy fade these children of the spring, born but to smile and fall?\nAh! Thel is like a wat’ry bow, and like a parting cloud;\nLike a reflection in a glass; like shadows in the water;\nLike dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant’s face;\nLike the dove’s voice; like transient day; like music in the air.\nAh! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,\nAnd gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice\nOf him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.”\nThe Lily of the valley, breathing in the humble grass,\nAnswer’d the lovely maid and said: “I am a wat’ry weed,\nAnd I am very small and love to dwell in lowly vales;\nSo weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head.\nYet I am visited from heaven, and he that smiles on all\nWalks in the valley and each morn over me spreads his hand,\nSaying, ‘Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lily-flower,\nThou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks;\nFor thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna,\nTill summer’s heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs\nTo flourish in eternal vales.’ Then why should Thel complain?\nWhy should the mistress of the vales of Har utter a sigh?”\n\nShe ceas’d and smil’d in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine.\n\nThel answer’d: “O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley,\nGiving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o’ertired;\nThy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments,\nHe crops thy flowers while thou sittest smiling in his face,\nWiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.\nThy wine doth purify the golden honey; thy perfume,\nWhich thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs,\nRevives the milked cow, and tames the fire-breathing steed.\nBut Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:\nI vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?”\n\n“Queen of the vales,” the Lily answer’d, “ask the tender cloud,\nAnd it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky,\nAnd why it scatters its bright beauty thro’ the humid air.\nDescend, O little Cloud, and hover before the eyes of Thel.”\n\nThe Cloud descended, and the Lily bow’d her modest head\nAnd went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass.\n\n\n# II.\n\n“O little Cloud,” the virgin said, “I charge thee tell to me\nWhy thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away:\nThen we shall seek thee, but not find. Ah! Thel is like to thee:\nI pass away: yet I complain, and no one hears my voice.”\n\nThe Cloud then shew’d his golden head and his bright form emerg’d,\nHovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel.\n\n“O virgin, know’st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs\nWhere Luvah doth renew his horses? Look’st thou on my youth,\nAnd fearest thou, because I vanish and am seen no more,\nNothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away\nIt is to tenfold life, to love, to peace and raptures holy:\nUnseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers,\nAnd court the fair-eyed dew to take me to her shining tent:\nThe weeping virgin trembling kneels before the risen sun,\nTill we arise link’d in a golden band and never part,\nBut walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers.”\n\n“Dost thou, O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee,\nFor I walk thro’ the vales of Har, and smell the sweetest flowers,\nBut I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds,\nBut I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food:\nBut Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away;\nAnd all shall say, ‘Without a use this shining woman liv’d,\nOr did she only live to be at death the food of worms?’”\n\nThe Cloud reclin’d upon his airy throne and answer’d thus:\n\n“Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,\nHow great thy use, how great thy blessing! Every thing that lives\nLives not alone nor for itself. Fear not, and I will call\nThe weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice,\nCome forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.”\n\nThe helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily’s leaf,\nAnd the bright Cloud sail’d on, to find his partner in the vale.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThen Thel astonish’d view’d the Worm upon its dewy bed.\n\n“Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?\nI see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf\nAh! weep not, little voice, thou canst not speak, but thou canst weep.\nIs this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless and naked, weeping,\nAnd none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother’s smiles.”\nThe Clod of Clay heard the Worm’s voice and rais’d her pitying head:\nShe bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d\nIn milky fondness: then on Thel she fix’d her humble eyes.\n\n“O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves.\nThou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed.\nMy bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark;\nBut he, that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head,\nAnd kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,\nAnd says: ‘Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee\nAnd I have given thee a crown that none can take away.’\nBut how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;\nI ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.”\n\nThe daughter of beauty wip’d her pitying tears with her white veil,\nAnd said: “Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.\nThat God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil foot\nThat wilful bruis’d its helpless form; but that he cherish’d it\nWith milk and oil I never knew, and therefore did I weep;\nAnd I complain’d in the mild air, because I fade away,\nAnd lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.”\n\n“Queen of the vales,” the matron Clay answer’d, “I heard thy sighs,\nAnd all thy moans flew o’er my roof, but I have call’d them down.\nWilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? ’Tis given thee to enter\nAnd to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet.”\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:\nThel enter’d in and saw the secrets of the land unknown.\nShe saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous roots\nOf every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:\nA land of sorrows and of tears where never smile was seen.\n\nShe wander’d in the land of clouds thro’ valleys dark, list’ning\nDolours and lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave\nShe stood in silence, list’ning to the voices of the ground,\nTill to her own grave plot she came, and there she sat down,\nAnd heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit.\n\n“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?\nOr the glist’ning Eye to the poison of a smile?\nWhy are Eyelids stor’d with arrows ready drawn,\nWhere a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?\nOr an Eye of gifts and graces show’ring fruits and coined gold?\nWhy a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?\nWhy an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?\nWhy a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, and affright?\nWhy a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?\nWhy a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?”\n\nThe Virgin started from her seat, and with a shriek\nFled back unhinder’d till she came into the vales of Har.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1780 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-the-book-of-urizen": { - "title": "From “The Book of Urizen”", - "body": "Lo, a shadow of horror is risen\nIn Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!\nSelf-closd, all-repelling: what Demon\nHath form’d this abominable void\nThis soul-shudd’ring vacuum?--Some said\n“It is Urizen,” But unknown, abstracted\nBrooding secret, the dark power hid.\n\nTimes on times he divided, & measur’d\nSpace by space in his ninefold darkness\nUnseen, unknown! changes appeard\nIn his desolate mountains rifted furious\nBy the black winds of perturbation.\n\nFor he strove in battles dire\nIn unseen conflictions with shapes\nBred from his forsaken wilderness,\nOf beast, bird, fish, serpent & element\nCombustion, blast, vapour and cloud.\n\nDark revolving in silent activity:\nUnseen in tormenting passions;\nAn activity unknown and horrible;\nA self-contemplating shadow,\nIn enormous labours occupied.\n\nBut Eternals beheld his vast forests\nAge on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown\nBrooding shut in the deep; all avoid\nThe petrific abominable chaos.\n\nHis cold horrors silent, dark Urizen\nPrepar’d: his ten thousands of thunders\nRang’d in gloom’d array stretch out across\nThe dread world, & the rolling of wheels\nAs of swelling seas, sound in his clouds\nIn his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains\nOf hail & ice; voices of terror,\nAre heard, like thunders of autumn,\nWhen the cloud blazes over the harvests.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "broken-love": { - "title": "“Broken Love”", - "body": "My Spectre around me night and day\nLike a wild beast guards my way;\nMy Emanation far within\nWeeps incessantly for my sin.\n\nA fathomless and boundless deep,\nThere we wander, there we weep;\nOn the hungry craving wind\nMy Spectre follows thee behind.\n\nHe scents thy footsteps in the snow\nWheresoever thou dost go,\nThro’ the wintry hail and rain.\nWhen wilt thou return again?\n\nDost thou not in pride and scorn\nFill with tempests all my morn,\nAnd with jealousies and fears\nFill my pleasant nights with tears?\n\nSeven of my sweet loves thy knife\nHas bereavéd of their life.\nTheir marble tombs I built with tears,\nAnd with cold and shuddering fears.\n\nSeven more loves weep night and day\nRound the tombs where my loves lay,\nAnd seven more loves attend each night\nAround my couch with torches bright.\n\nAnd seven more loves in my bed\nCrown with wine my mournful head,\nPitying and forgiving all\nThy transgressions great and small.\n\nWhen wilt thou return and view\nMy loves, and them to life renew?\nWhen wilt thou return and live?\nWhen wilt thou pity as I forgive?\n\nO’er my sins thou sit and moan:\nHast thou no sins of thy own?\nO’er my sins thou sit and weep,\nAnd lull thy own sins fast asleep.\n\n“What transgressions I commit\nAre for thy transgressions fit.\nThey thy harlots, thou their slave;\nAnd my bed becomes their grave.”\n\nNever, never, I return:\nStill for victory I burn.\nLiving, thee alone I’ll have;\nAnd when dead I’ll be thy grave.\n\nThro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell\nThou shalt never, quell:\nI will fly and thou pursue:\nNight and morn the flight renew.\n\nPoor, pale, pitiable form\nThat I follow in a storm;\nIron tears and groans of lead\nBind around my aching head.\n\nTill I turn from Female love\nAnd root up the Infernal Grove,\nI shall never worthy be\nTo step into Eternity.\n\nAnd, to end thy cruel mocks,\nAnnihilate thee on the rocks,\nAnd another form create\nTo be subservient to my fate.\n\nLet us agree to give up love,\nAnd root up the Infernal Grove;\nThen shall we return and see\nThe worlds of happy Eternity.\n\nAnd throughout all Eternity\nI forgive you, you forgive me.\nAs our dear Redeemer said:\n“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "but-in-the-wine-presses-the-human-grapes-sing-not-nor-dance": { - "title": "“But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance …”", - "body": "But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:\nThey howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,\nIn chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,\nIn pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe:\nThe plates and screws and racks and saws and cords and fires and cisterns\nThe cruel joys of Luvah’s Daughters, lacerating with knives\nAnd whips their victims, and the deadly sport of Luvah’s Sons.\n\nThey dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan,\nThey catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them to one another:\nThese are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play,\nTears of the grape, the death sweat of the cluster, the last sigh\nOf the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-clod-and-the-pebble": { - "title": "“The Clod and the Pebble”", - "body": "“Love seeketh not itself to please,\nNor for itself hath any care,\nBut for another gives it ease,\nAnd builds a heaven in hell’s despair.”\n\nSo sang a little clod of clay,\nTrodden with the cattle’s feet,\nBut a pebble of the brook\nWarbled out these metres meet:\n\n“Love seeketh only Self to please,\nTo bind another to its delight,\nJoys in another’s loss of ease,\nAnd builds a hell in heaven’s despite.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "a-cradle-song": { - "title": "“A Cradle Song”", - "body": "Sweet dreams form a shade,\nO’er my lovely infants head.\nSweet dreams of pleasant streams,\nBy happy silent moony beams\n\nSweet sleep with soft down.\nWeave thy brows an infant crown.\nSweet sleep Angel mild,\nHover o’er my happy child.\n\nSweet smiles in the night,\nHover over my delight.\nSweet smiles Mothers smiles,\nAll the livelong night beguiles.\n\nSweet moans, dovelike sighs,\nChase not slumber from thy eyes,\nSweet moans, sweeter smiles,\nAll the dovelike moans beguiles.\n\nSleep sleep happy child,\nAll creation slept and smil’d.\nSleep sleep, happy sleep.\nWhile o’er thee thy mother weep\n\nSweet babe in thy face,\nHoly image I can trace.\nSweet babe once like thee.\nThy maker lay and wept for me\n\nWept for me for thee for all,\nWhen he was an infant small.\nThou his image ever see.\nHeavenly face that smiles on thee,\n\nSmiles on thee on me on all,\nWho became an infant small,\nInfant smiles are His own smiles,\nHeaven & earth to peace beguiles.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "a-divine-image": { - "title": "“A Divine Image”", - "body": "Cruelty has a human heart,\nAnd Jealousy a human face;\nTerror the human form divine,\nAnd Secresy the human dress.\n\nThe human dress is forged iron,\nThe human form a fiery forge,\nThe human face a furnace sealed,\nThe human heart its hungry gorge.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "divine-image": { - "title": "“Divine Image”", - "body": "To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,\nAll pray in their distress,\nAnd to these virtues of delight\nReturn their thankfulness.\n\nFor Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,\nIs God our Father dear;\nAnd Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,\nIs man, his child and care.\n\nFor Mercy has a human heart\nPity, a human face;\nAnd Love, the human form divine;\nAnd Peace, the human dress.\n\nThen every man, of every clime,\nThat prays in his distress,\nPrays to the human form divine:\nLove, Mercy, Pity, Peace.\n\nAnd all must love the human form,\nIn heathen, Turk, or Jew.\nWhere Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,\nThere God is dwelling too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "earths-answer": { - "title": "“Earth’s Answer”", - "body": "Earth raised up her head.\nFrom the darkness dread & drear,\nHer light fled:\nStony dread!\nAnd her locks cover’d with grey despair.\n\nPrison’d on watery shore\nStarry Jealousy does keep my den\nCold and hoar\nWeeping o’er\nI hear the father of the ancient men\n\nSelfish father of men\nCruel jealous selfish fear\nCan delight\nChain’d in night\nThe virgins of youth and morning bear.\n\nDoes spring hide its joy\nWhen buds and blossoms grow?\nDoes the sower?\nSow by night?\nOr the ploughman in darkness plough?\n\nBreak this heavy chain.\nThat does freeze my bones around\nSelfish! vain!\nEternal bane!\nThat free Love with bondage bound.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-echoing-green": { - "title": "“The Echoing Green”", - "body": "The sun does arise,\nAnd make happy the skies;\nThe merry bells ring\nTo welcome the Spring;\nThe skylark and thrush,\nThe birds of the bush,\nSing louder around\nTo the bells’ cheerful sound;\nWhile our sports shall be seen\nOn the echoing Green.\n\nOld John, with white hair,\nDoes laugh away care,\nSitting under the oak,\nAmong the old folk.\nThey laugh at our play,\nAnd soon they all say,\n“Such, such were the joys\nWhen we all--girls and boys--\nIn our youth-time were seen\nOn the echoing Green.”\n\nTill the little ones, weary,\nNo more can be merry:\nThe sun does descend,\nAnd our sports have an end.\nRound the laps of their mothers\nMany sisters and brothers,\nLike birds in their nest,\nAre ready for rest,\nAnd sport no more seen\nOn the darkening green.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "evening-star": { - "title": "“Evening Star”", - "body": "Thou fair hair’d angel of the evening,\nNow, while the sun rests on the mountains light,\nThy bright torch of love; Thy radiant crown\nPut on, and smile upon our evening bed!\nSmile on our loves; and when thou drawest the\nBlue curtains, scatter thy silver dew\nOn every flower that shuts its sweet eyes\nIn timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on\nThe lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes\nAnd wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full, soon,\nDost thou withdraw; Then, the wolf rages wide,\nAnd the lion glares thro’ the dun forest.\nThe fleece of our flocks are covered with\nThy sacred dew; Protect them with thine influence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-everlasting-gospel": { - "title": "“The Everlasting Gospel”", - "body": "The vision of Christ that thou dost see\nIs my vision’s greatest enemy.\nThine has a great hook nose like thine;\nMine has a snub nose like to mine.\nThine is the Friend of all Mankind;\nMine speaks in parables to the blind.\nThine loves the same world that mine hates;\nThy heaven doors are my hell gates.\nSocrates taught what Meletus\nLoath’d as a nation’s bitterest curse,\nAnd Caiaphas was in his own mind\nA benefactor to mankind.\nBoth read the Bible day and night,\nBut thou read’st black where I read white.\n\nWas Jesus gentle, or did He\nGive any marks of gentility?\nWhen twelve years old He ran away,\nAnd left His parents in dismay.\nWhen after three days’ sorrow found,\nLoud as Sinai’s trumpet-sound:\n“No earthly parents I confess--\nMy Heavenly Father’s business!\nYe understand not what I say,\nAnd, angry, force Me to obey.\nObedience is a duty then,\nAnd favour gains with God and men.”\nJohn from the wilderness loud cried;\nSatan gloried in his pride.\n“Come,” said Satan, “come away,\nI’ll soon see if you’ll obey!\nJohn for disobedience bled,\nBut you can turn the stones to bread.\nGod’s high king and God’s high priest\nShall plant their glories in your breast,\nIf Caiaphas you will obey,\nIf Herod you with bloody prey\nFeed with the sacrifice, and be\nObedient, fall down, worship me.”\nThunders and lightnings broke around,\nAnd Jesus’ voice in thunders’ sound:\n“Thus I seize the spiritual prey.\nYe smiters with disease, make way.\nI come your King and God to seize,\nIs God a smiter with disease?”\nThe God of this world rag’d in vain:\nHe bound old Satan in His chain,\nAnd, bursting forth, His furious ire\nBecame a chariot of fire.\nThroughout the land He took His course,\nAnd trac’d diseases to their source.\nHe curs’d the Scribe and Pharisee,\nTrampling down hypocrisy.\nWhere’er His chariot took its way,\nThere Gates of Death let in the Day,\nBroke down from every chain and bar;\nAnd Satan in His spiritual war\nDragg’d at His chariot-wheels: loud howl’d\nThe God of this world: louder roll’d\nThe chariot-wheels, and louder still\nHis voice was heard from Zion’s Hill,\nAnd in His hand the scourge shone bright;\nHe scourg’d the merchant Canaanite\nFrom out the Temple of His Mind,\nAnd in his body tight does bind\nSatan and all his hellish crew;\nAnd thus with wrath He did subdue\nThe serpent bulk of Nature’s dross,\nTill He had nail’d it to the Cross.\nHe took on sin in the Virgin’s womb\nAnd put it off on the Cross and tomb\nTo be worshipp’d by the Church of Rome.\n\nWas Jesus humble? or did He\nGive any proofs of humility?\nBoast of high things with humble tone,\nAnd give with charity a stone?\nWhen but a child He ran away,\nAnd left His parents in dismay.\nWhen they had wander’d three days long\nThese were the words upon His tongue:\n“No earthly parents I confess:\nI am doing My Father’s business.”\nWhen the rich learnéd Pharisee\nCame to consult Him secretly,\nUpon his heart with iron pen\nHe wrote “Ye must be born again.”\nHe was too proud to take a bribe;\nHe spoke with authority, not like a Scribe.\nHe says with most consummate art\n“Follow Me, I am meek and lowly of heart,\nAs that is the only way to escape\nThe miser’s net and the glutton’s trap.”\nWhat can be done with such desperate fools\nWho follow after the heathen schools?\nI was standing by when Jesus died;\nWhat I call’d humility, they call’d pride.\nHe who loves his enemies betrays his friends.\nThis surely is not what Jesus intends;\nBut the sneaking pride of heroic schools,\nAnd the Scribes’ and Pharisees’ virtuous rules;\nFor He acts with honest, triumphant pride,\nAnd this is the cause that Jesus dies.\nHe did not die with Christian ease,\nAsking pardon of His enemies:\nIf He had, Caiaphas would forgive;\nSneaking submission can always live.\nHe had only to say that God was the Devil,\nAnd the Devil was God, like a Christian civil;\nMild Christian regrets to the Devil confess\nFor affronting him thrice in the wilderness;\nHe had soon been bloody Caesar’s elf,\nAnd at last he would have been Caesar himself,\nLike Dr. Priestly and Bacon and Newton--\nPoor spiritual knowledge is not worth a button\nFor thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes:\n“God can only be known by His attributes;\nAnd as for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost,\nOr of Christ and His Father, it’s all a boast\nAnd pride, and vanity of the imagination,\nThat disdains to follow this world’s fashion.”\nTo teach doubt and experiment\nCertainly was not what Christ meant.\nWhat was He doing all that time,\nFrom twelve years old to manly prime?\nWas He then idle, or the less\nAbout His Father’s business?\nOr was His wisdom held in scorn\nBefore His wrath began to burn\nIn miracles throughout the land,\nThat quite unnerv’d the Seraph band?\nIf He had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,\nHe’d have done anything to please us;\nGone sneaking into synagogues,\nAnd not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;\nBut humble as a lamb or ass\nObey’d Himself to Caiaphas.\nGod wants not man to humble himself:\nThat is the trick of the Ancient Elf.\nThis is the race that Jesus ran:\nHumble to God, haughty to man,\nCursing the Rulers before the people\nEven to the Temple’s highest steeple,\nAnd when He humbled Himself to God\nThen descended the cruel rod.\n“If Thou Humblest Thyself, Thou humblest Me.\nThou also dwell’st in Eternity.\nThou art a Man: God is no more:\nThy own Humanity learn to adore,\nFor that is My spirit of life.\nAwake, arise to spiritual strife,\nAnd Thy revenge abroad display\nIn terrors at the last Judgement Day.\nGod’s mercy and long suffering\nIs but the sinner to judgement to bring.\nThou on the Cross for them shalt pray--\nAnd take revenge at the Last Day.”\nJesus replied, and thunders hurl’d:\n“I never will pray for the world.\nOnce I did so when I pray’d in the Garden;\nI wish’d to take with Me a bodily pardon.”\nCan that which was of woman born,\nIn the absence of the morn,\nWhen the Soul fell into sleep,\nAnd Archangels round it weep,\nShooting out against the light\nFibres of a deadly night,\nReasoning upon its own dark fiction,\nIn doubt which is self-contradiction?\nHumility is only doubt,\nAnd does the sun and moon blot out,\nRooting over with thorns and stems\nThe buried soul and all its gems.\nThis life’s five windows of the soul\nDistorts the Heavens from pole to pole,\nAnd leads you to believe a lie\nWhen you see with, not thro’, the eye\nThat was born in a night, to perish in a night,\nWhen the soul slept in the beams of light.\n\nDid Jesus teach doubt? or did He\nGive any lessons of philosophy,\nCharge Visionaries with deceiving,\nOr call men wise for not believing? …\n\nWas Jesus born of a Virgin pure\nWith narrow soul and looks demure?\nIf He intended to take on sin\nThe Mother should an harlot been,\nJust such a one as Magdalen,\nWith seven devils in her pen.\nOr were Jew virgins still more curs’d,\nAnd more sucking devils nurs’d?\nOr what was it which He took on\nThat He might bring salvation?\nA body subject to be tempted,\nFrom neither pain nor grief exempted;\nOr such a body as might not feel\nThe passions that with sinners deal?\nYes, but they say He never fell.\nAsk Caiaphas; for he can tell.--\nHe mock’d the Sabbath, and He mock’d\nThe Sabbath’s God, and He unlock’d\nThe evil spirits from their shrines,\nAnd turn’d fishermen to divines;\nO’erturn’d the tent of secret sins,\nAnd its golden cords and pins,\nIn the bloody shrine of war\nPour’d around from star to star,--\nHalls of justice, hating vice,\nWhere the Devil combs his lice.\nHe turn’d the devils into swine\nThat He might tempt the Jews to dine;\nSince which, a pig has got a look\nThat for a Jew may be mistook.\n“Obey your parents.”--What says He?\n“Woman, what have I to do with thee?\nNo earthly parents I confess:\nI am doing my Father’s business.”\nHe scorn’d Earth’s parents, scorn’d Earth’s God,\nAnd mock’d the one and the other’s rod;\nHis seventy Disciples sent\nAgainst Religion and Government--\nThey by the sword of Justice fell,\nAnd Him their cruel murderer tell.\nHe left His father’s trade to roam,\nA wand’ring vagrant without home;\nAnd thus He others’ labour stole,\nThat He might live above control.\nThe publicans and harlots He\nSelected for His company,\nAnd from the adulteress turn’d away\nGod’s righteous law, that lost its prey.\nWas Jesus chaste? or did He\nGive any lessons of chastity?\nThe Morning blushéd fiery red:\nMary was found in adulterous bed;\nEarth groan’d beneath, and Heaven above\nTrembled at discovery of Love.\nJesus was sitting in Moses’ chair.\nThey brought the trembling woman there.\nMoses commands she be ston’d to death.\nWhat was the sound of Jesus’ breath?\nHe laid His hand on Moses’ law;\nThe ancient Heavens, in silent awe,\nWrit with curses from pole to pole,\nAll away began to roll.\nThe Earth trembling and naked lay\nIn secret bed of mortal clay;\nOn Sinai felt the Hand Divine\nPulling back the bloody shrine;\nAnd she heard the breath of God,\nAs she heard by Eden’s flood:\n“Good and Evil are no more!\nSinai’s trumpets cease to roar!\nCease, finger of God, to write!\nThe Heavens are not clean in Thy sight.\nThou art good, and Thou alone;\nNor may the sinner cast one stone.\nTo be good only, is to be\nA God or else a Pharisee.\nThou Angel of the Presence Divine,\nThat didst create this Body of Mine,\nWherefore hast thou writ these laws\nAnd created Hell’s dark jaws?\nMy Presence I will take from thee:\nA cold leper thou shalt be.\nTho’ thou wast so pure and bright\nThat Heaven was impure in thy sight,\nTho’ thy oath turn’d Heaven pale,\nTho’ thy covenant built Hell’s jail,\nTho’ thou didst all to chaos roll\nWith the Serpent for its soul,\nStill the breath Divine does move,\nAnd the breath Divine is Love.\nMary, fear not! Let me see\nThe seven devils that torment thee.\nHide not from My sight thy sin,\nThat forgiveness thou may’st win.\nHas no man condemnéd thee?”\n“No man, Lord.” “Then what is he\nWho shall accuse thee? Come ye forth,\nFallen fiends of heavenly birth,\nThat have forgot your ancient love,\nAnd driven away my trembling Dove.\nYou shall bow before her feet;\nYou shall lick the dust for meat;\nAnd tho’ you cannot love, but hate,\nShall be beggars at Love’s gate.\nWhat was thy love? Let Me see it;\nWas it love or dark deceit?”\n“Love too long from me has fled;\n’Twas dark deceit, to earn my bread;\n’Twas covet, or ’twas custom, or\nSome trifle not worth caring for;\nThat they may call a shame and sin\nLove’s temple that God dwelleth in,\nAnd hide in secret hidden shrine\nThe naked Human Form Divine,\nAnd render that a lawless thing\nOn which the Soul expands its wing.\nBut this, O Lord, this was my sin,\nWhen first I let these devils in,\nIn dark pretence to chastity\nBlaspheming Love, blaspheming Thee,\nThence rose secret adulteries,\nAnd thence did covet also rise.\nMy sin Thou hast forgiven me;\nCanst Thou forgive my blasphemy?\nCanst Thou return to this dark hell,\nAnd in my burning bosom dwell?\nAnd canst Thou die that I may live?\nAnd canst Thou pity and forgive?”\nThen roll’d the shadowy Man away\nFrom the limbs of Jesus, to make them His prey,\nAn ever devouring appetite,\nGlittering with festering venoms bright;\nCrying “Crucify this cause of distress,\nWho don’t keep the secrets of holiness!\nThe mental powers by diseases we bind;\nBut He heals the deaf, the dumb, and the blind.\nWhom God has afflicted for secret ends,\nHe comforts and heals and calls them friends.”\nBut, when Jesus was crucified,\nThen was perfected His galling pride.\nIn three nights He devour’d His prey,\nAnd still He devours the body of clay;\nFor dust and clay is the Serpent’s meat,\nWhich never was made for Man to eat.\n\nSeeing this False Christ, in fury and passion\nI made my voice heard all over the nation.\nWhat are those …\n\nI am sure this Jesus will not do,\nEither for Englishman or Jew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "fair-elanor": { - "title": "“Fair Elanor”", - "body": "The bell struck one, and shook the silent tower;\nThe graves give up their dead: fair Elenor\nWalk’d by the castle gate, and lookéd in.\nA hollow groan ran thro’ the dreary vaults.\n\nShe shriek’d aloud, and sunk upon the steps,\nOn the cold stone her pale cheeks. Sickly smells\nOf death issue as from a sepulchre,\nAnd all is silent but the sighing vaults.\n\nChill Death withdraws his hand, and she revives;\nAmaz’d, she finds herself upon her feet,\nAnd, like a ghost, thro’ narrow passages\nWalking, feeling the cold walls with her hands.\n\nFancy returns, and now she thinks of bones\nAnd grinning skulls, and corruptible death\nWrapp’d in his shroud; and now fancies she hears\nDeep sighs, and sees pale sickly ghosts gliding.\n\nAt length, no fancy but reality\nDistracts her. A rushing sound, and the feet\nOf one that fled, approaches--Ellen stood\nLike a dumb statue, froze to stone with fear.\n\nThe wretch approaches, crying: “The deed is done;\nTake this, and send it by whom thou wilt send;\nIt is my life--send it to Elenor:--\nHe’s dead, and howling after me for blood!”\n\n“Take this,” he cried; and thrust into her arms\nA wet napkin, wrapp’d about; then rush’d\nPast, howling: she receiv’d into her arms\nPale death, and follow’d on the wings of fear.\n\nThey pass’d swift thro’ the outer gate; the wretch,\nHowling, leap’d o’er the wall into the moat,\nStifling in mud. Fair Ellen pass’d the bridge,\nAnd heard a gloomy voice cry, “Is it done?”\n\nAs the deer wounded, Ellen flew over\nThe pathless plain; as the arrows that fly\nBy night, destruction flies, and strikes in darkness.\nShe fled from fear, till at her house arriv’d.\n\nHer maids await her; on her bed she falls,\nThat bed of joy, where erst her lord hath press’d:\n“Ah, woman’s fear!” she cried; “ah, curséd duke!\nAh, my dear lord! ah, wretched Elenor!”\n\n“My lord was like a flower upon the brows\nOf lusty May! Ah, life as frail as flower!\nO ghastly death! withdraw thy cruel hand,\nSeek’st thou that flow’r to deck thy horrid temples?”\n\n“My lord was like a star in highest heav’n\nDrawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;\nMy lord was like the opening eyes of day\nWhen western winds creep softly o’er the flowers;”\n\n“But he is darken’d; like the summer’s noon\nClouded; fall’n like the stately tree, cut down;\nThe breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.\nO Elenor, weak woman, fill’d with woe!”\n\nThus having spoke, she raiséd up her head,\nAnd saw the bloody napkin by her side,\nWhich in her arms she brought; and now, tenfold\nMore terrifiéd, saw it unfold itself.\n\nHer eyes were fix’d; the bloody cloth unfolds,\nDisclosing to her sight the murder’d head\nOf her dear lord, all ghastly pale, clotted\nWith gory blood; it groan’d, and thus it spake:\n\n“O Elenor, I am thy husband’s head,\nWho, sleeping on the stones of yonder tower,\nWas ’reft of life by the accurséd duke!\nA hiréd villain turn’d my sleep to death!”\n\n“O Elenor, beware the curséd duke;\nO give not him thy hand, now I am dead;\nHe seeks thy love; who, coward, in the night,\nHiréd a villain to bereave my life.”\n\nShe sat with dead cold limbs, stiffen’d to stone;\nShe took the gory head up in her arms;\nShe kiss’d the pale lips; she had no tears to shed;\nShe hugg’d it to her breast, and groan’d her last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-fly": { - "title": "“The Fly”", - "body": "Little Fly,\nThy summer’s play\nMy thoughtless hand\nHas brushed away.\n\nAm not I\nA fly like thee?\nOr art not thou\nA man like me?\n\nFor I dance\nAnd drink, and sing,\nTill some blind hand\nShall brush my wing.\n\nIf thought is life\nAnd strength and breath\nAnd the want\nOf thought is death;\n\nThen am I\nA happy fly,\nIf I live,\nOr if I die.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-four-zoas": { - "title": "“The Four Zoas”", - "body": "“What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?\nOr wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price\nOf all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.\nWisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,\nAnd in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.\n\nIt is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun\nAnd in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.\nIt is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,\nTo speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,\nTo listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season\nWhen the red blood is fill’d with wine and with the marrow of lambs.\n\nIt is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,\nTo hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter house moan;\nTo see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast;\nTo hear sounds of love in the thunder storm that destroys our enemies’ house;\nTo rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,\nWhile our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.\n\nThen the groan and the dolor are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,\nAnd the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field\nWhen the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.\n\nIt is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:\nThus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.”\n\n“Compel the poor to live upon a crust of bread, by soft mild arts.\nSmile when they frown, frown when they smile; and when a man looks pale\nWith labour and abstinence, say he looks healthy and happy;\nAnd when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough\nBorn, even too many, and our earth will be overrun\nWithout these arts. If you would make the poor live with temper,\nWith pomp give every crust of bread you give; with gracious cunning\nMagnify small gifts; reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.\nSay he smiles if you hear him sigh. If pale, say he is ruddy.\nPreach temperance: say he is overgorg’d and drowns his wit\nIn strong drink, though you know that bread and water are all\nHe can afford. Flatter his wife, pity his children, till we can\nReduce all to our will, as spaniels are taught with art.”\n\nThe sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning,\nAnd the mild moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night,\nAnd Man walks forth from midst of the fires: the evil is all consum’d.\nHis eyes behold the Angelic spheres arising night and day;\nThe stars consum’d like a lamp blown out, and in their stead, behold\nThe expanding eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds!\nOne Earth, one sea beneath; nor erring globes wander, but stars\nOf fire rise up nightly from the ocean; and one sun\nEach morning, like a new born man, issues with songs and joy\nCalling the Plowman to his labour and the Shepherd to his rest.\nHe walks upon the Eternal Mountains, raising his heavenly voice,\nConversing with the animal forms of wisdom night and day,\nThat, risen from the sea of fire, renew’d walk o’er the Earth;\nFor Tharmas brought his flocks upon the hills, and in the vales\nAround the Eternal Man’s bright tent, the little children play\nAmong the woolly flocks. The hammer of Urthona sounds\nIn the deep caves beneath; his limbs renew’d, his Lions roar\nAround the Furnaces and in evening sport upon the plains.\nThey raise their faces from the earth, conversing with the Man:\n\n“How is it we have walk’d through fires and yet are not consum’d?\nHow is it that all things are chang’d, even as in ancient times?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-garden-of-love": { - "title": "“The Garden of Love”", - "body": "I laid me down upon a bank,\nWhere Love lay sleeping;\nI heard among the rushes dank\nWeeping, weeping.\n\nThen I went to the heath and the wild,\nTo the thistles and thorns of the waste;\nAnd they told me how they were beguiled,\nDriven out, and compelled to the chaste.\n\nI went to the Garden of Love,\nAnd saw what I never had seen;\nA Chapel was built in the midst,\nWhere I used to play on the green.\n\nAnd the gates of this Chapel were shut\nAnd “Thou shalt not,” writ over the door;\nSo I turned to the Garden of Love\nThat so many sweet flowers bore.\n\nAnd I saw it was filled with graves,\nAnd tombstones where flowers should be;\nAnd priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,\nAnd binding with briars my joys and desires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "from-the-grey-monk": { - "title": "From “The Grey Monk”", - "body": "“I die, I die!” the Mother said,\n“My children die for lack of bread.\nWhat more has the merciless Tyrant said?”\nThe Monk sat down on the stony bed.\n\nThe blood red ran from the Grey Monk’s side,\nHis hands and feet were wounded wide,\nHis body bent, his arms and knees\nLike to the roots of ancient trees.\n\nHis eye was dry; no tear could flow:\nA hollow groan first spoke his woe.\nHe trembled and shudder’d upon the bed;\nAt length with a feeble cry he said:\n\n“When God commanded this hand to write\nIn the studious hours of deep midnight,\nHe told me the writing I wrote should prove\nThe bane of all that on Earth I lov’d.\n\nMy Brother starv’d between two walls,\nHis Children’s cry my soul appalls;\nI mock’d at the rack and griding chain,\nMy bent body mocks their torturing pain.\n\nThy father drew his sword in the North,\nWith his thousands strong he marched forth;\nThy Brother has arm’d himself in steel\nTo avenge the wrongs thy Children feel.\n\nBut vain the Sword and vain the Bow,\nThey never can work War’s overthrow.\nThe Hermit’s prayer and the Widow’s tear\nAlone can free the World from fear.\n\nFor a Tear is an intellectual thing,\nAnd a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,\nAnd the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe\nIs an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.\n\nThe hand of Vengeance found the bed\nTo which the Purple Tyrant fled;\nThe iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head\nAnd became a Tyrant in his stead.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gwin-king-of-norway": { - "title": "“Gwin King of Norway”", - "body": "Come, kings, and listen to my song:\nWhen Gwin, the son of Nore,\nOver the nations of the North\nHis cruel sceptre bore;\nThe nobles of the land did feed\nUpon the hungry poor;\nThey tear the poor man’s lamb, and drive\nThe needy from their door.\n\n“The land is desolate; our wives\nAnd children cry for bread;\nArise, and pull the tyrant down!\nLet Gwin be humbléd!”\n\nGordred the giant rous’d himself\nFrom sleeping in his cave;\nHe shook the hills, and in the clouds\nThe troubl’d banners wave.\n\nBeneath them roll’d, like tempests black,\nThe num’rous sons of blood;\nLike lions’ whelps, roaring abroad,\nSeeking their nightly food.\n\nDown Bleron’s hills they dreadful rush,\nTheir cry ascends the clouds;\nThe trampling horse and clanging arms\nLike rushing mighty floods!\n\nTheir wives and children, weeping loud,\nFollow in wild array,\nHowling like ghosts, furious as wolves\nIn the bleak wintry day.\n\n“Pull down the tyrant to the dust,\nLet Gwin be humbléd,”\nThey cry, “and let ten thousand lives\nPay for the tyrant’s head.”\n\nFrom tow’r to tow’r the watchmen cry,\n“O Gwin, the son of Nore,\nArouse thyself! the nations, black\nLike clouds, come rolling o’er!”\n\nGwin rear’d his shield, his palace shakes,\nHis chiefs come rushing round;\nEach, like an awful thunder cloud,\nWith voice of solemn sound:\n\nLike rearéd stones around a grave\nThey stand around the King;\nThen suddenly each seiz’d his spear,\nAnd clashing steel does ring.\n\nThe husbandman does leave his plough\nTo wade thro’ fields of gore;\nThe merchant binds his brows in steel,\nAnd leaves the trading shore;\n\nThe shepherd leaves his mellow pipe,\nAnd sounds the trumpet shrill;\nThe workman throws his hammer down\nTo heave the bloody bill.\n\nLike the tall ghost of Barraton\nWho sports in stormy sky,\nGwin leads his host, as black as night\nWhen pestilence does fly,\n\nWith horses and with chariots--\nAnd all his spearmen bold\nMarch to the sound of mournful song,\nLike clouds around him roll’d.\n\nGwin lifts his hand--the nations halt;\n“Prepare for war!” he cries--\nGordred appears!--his frowning brow\nTroubles our northern skies.\n\nThe armies stand, like balances\nHeld in th’ Almighty’s hand;--\n“Gwin, thou hast fill’d thy measure up:\nThou’rt swept from out the land.”\n\nAnd now the raging armies rush’d\nLike warring mighty seas;\nThe heav’ns are shook with roaring war,\nThe dust ascends the skies!\n\nEarth smokes with blood, and groans and shakes\nTo drink her children’s gore,\nA sea of blood; nor can the eye\nSee to the trembling shore!\n\nAnd on the verge of this wild sea\nFamine and death doth cry;\nThe cries of women and of babes\nOver the field doth fly.\n\nThe King is seen raging afar,\nWith all his men of might;\nLike blazing comets scattering death\nThro’ the red fev’rous night.\n\nBeneath his arm like sheep they die,\nAnd groan upon the plain;\nThe battle faints, and bloody men\nFight upon hills of slain.\n\nNow death is sick, and riven men\nLabour and toil for life;\nSteed rolls on steed, and shield on shield,\nSunk in this sea of strife!\n\nThe god of war is drunk with blood;\nThe earth doth faint and fail;\nThe stench of blood makes sick the heav’ns;\nGhosts glut the throat of hell!\n\nO what have kings to answer for\nBefore that awful throne;\nWhen thousand deaths for vengeance cry,\nAnd ghosts accusing groan!\n\nLike blazing comets in the sky\nThat shake the stars of light,\nWhich drop like fruit unto the earth\nThro’ the fierce burning night;\n\nLike these did Gwin and Gordred meet,\nAnd the first blow decides;\nDown from the brow unto the breast\nGordred his head divides!\n\nGwin fell: the sons of Norway fled,\nAll that remain’d alive;\nThe rest did fill the vale of death,\nFor them the eagles strive.\n\nThe river Dorman roll’d their blood\nInto the northern sea;\nWho mourn’d his sons, and overwhelm’d\nThe pleasant south country.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hear-the-voice-of-the-bard": { - "title": "“Hear the Voice of the Bard”", - "body": "Hear the voice of the Bard,\nWho present, past, and future, sees;\nWhose ears have heard\nThe Holy Word\nThat walked among the ancient tree;\n\nCalling the lapsed soul,\nAnd weeping in the evening dew;\nThat might control\nThe starry pole,\nAnd fallen, fallen light renew!\n\n“O Earth, O Earth, return!\nArise from out the dewy grass!\nNight is worn,\nAnd the morn\nRises from the slumbrous mass.”\n\n“Turn away no more;\nWhy wilt thou turn away?\nThe starry floor,\nThe watery shore,\nAre given thee till the break of day.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "holy-thursday": { - "title": "“Holy Thursday”", - "body": "Is this a holy thing to see\nIn a rich and fruitful land,--\nBabes reduced to misery,\nFed with cold and usurous hand?\n\nIs that trembling cry a song?\nCan it be a song of joy?\nAnd so many children poor?\nIt is a land of poverty!\n\nAnd their son does never shine,\nAnd their fields are bleak and bare,\nAnd their ways are filled with thorns:\nIt is eternal winter there.\n\nFor where’er the sun does shine,\nAnd where’er the rain does fall,\nBabes should never hunger there,\nNor poverty the mind appall.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "how-sweet-i-roamd": { - "title": "“How Sweet I Roam’d”", - "body": "How sweet I roam’d from field to field,\nAnd tasted all the summer’s pride\n’Til the prince of love beheld\nWho in the sunny beams did glide!\n\nHe shew’d me lilies for my hair\nAnd blushing roses for my brow;\nHe led me through his garden fair,\nWhere all his golden pleasures grow.\n\nWith sweet May dews my wings were wet,\nAnd Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage\nHe caught me in his silken net,\nAnd shut me in his golden cage.\n\nHe loves to sit and hear me sing,\nThen, laughing, sports and plays with me;\nThen stretches out my golden wing,\nAnd mocks my loss of liberty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-human-abstract": { - "title": "“The Human Abstract”", - "body": "Pity would be no more,\nIf we did not make somebody Poor;\nAnd Mercy no more could be.\nIf all were as happy as we;\n\nAnd mutual fear brings peace;\nTill the selfish loves increase.\nThen Cruelty knits a snare,\nAnd spreads his baits with care.\n\nHe sits down with holy fears.\nAnd waters the ground with tears:\nThen Humility takes its root\nUnderneath his foot.\n\nSoon spreads the dismal shade\nOf Mystery over his head;\nAnd the Caterpillar and Fly\nFeed on the Mystery.\n\nAnd it bears the fruit of Deceit.\nRuddy and sweet to eat:\nAnd the Raven his nest has made\nIn its thickest shade.\n\nThe Gods of the earth and sea,\nSought thro’ Nature to find this Tree\nBut their search was all in vain:\nThere grows one in the Human Brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-rose-up-at-the-dawn-of-day": { - "title": "“I Rose up at the Dawn of Day”", - "body": "I rose up at the dawn of day--\n“Get thee away! get thee away!\nPray’st thou for riches? Away! away!\nThis is the Throne of Mammon grey.”\n\nSaid I: This, sure, is very odd;\nI took it to be the Throne of God.\nFor everything besides I have:\nIt is only for riches that I can crave.\n\nI have mental joy, and mental health,\nAnd mental friends, and mental wealth;\nI’ve a wife I love, and that loves me;\nI’ve all but riches bodily.\n\nI am in God’s presence night and day,\nAnd He never turns His face away;\nThe accuser of sins by my side doth stand,\nAnd he holds my money-bag in his hand.\n\nFor my worldly things God makes him pay,\nAnd he’d pay for more if to him I would pray;\nAnd so you may do the worst you can do;\nBe assur’d, Mr. Devil, I won’t pray to you.\n\nThen if for riches I must not pray,\nGod knows, I little of prayers need say;\nSo, as a church is known by its steeple,\nIf I pray it must be for other people.\n\nHe says, if I do not worship him for a God,\nI shall eat coarser food, and go worse shod;\nSo, as I don’t value such things as these,\nYou must do, Mr. Devil, just as God please.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-saw-a-chapel": { - "title": "“I Saw a Chapel”", - "body": "I saw a chapel all of gold\nThat none did dare to enter in,\nAnd many weeping stood without,\nWeeping, mourning, worshipping.\n\nI saw a serpent rise between\nThe white pillars of the door,\nAnd he forc’d and forc’d and forc’d,\nDown the golden hinges tore.\n\nAnd along the pavement sweet,\nSet with pearls and rubies bright,\nAll his slimy length he drew\nTill upon the altar white\n\nVomiting his poison out\nOn the bread and on the wine.\nSo I turn’d into a sty\nAnd laid me down among the swine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-was-in-a-printing-house-in-hell": { - "title": "“I Was in a Printing House in Hell”", - "body": "I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.\nIn the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a caves moth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.\nIn the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold, silver and precious stones.\nIn the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air; he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite; around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.\nIn the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids.\nIn the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.\nThere they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries.\nThe Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of all activity; but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.\nThus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.\nBut the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved the excess of his delights.\nSome will say, Is not God alone the Prolific? I answer, God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.\nThese two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.\nReligion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.\nNote: Jesus Christ did not wish to unit but to seperate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.\nMessiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the Antediluvians who are our Energies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-see-the-four-fold-man": { - "title": "“I see the Four-fold Man …”", - "body": "I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep\nAnd its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow.\nI see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once\nBefore me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,\nThat I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose;\nFor Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang\nLike iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents\nInfold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.\n\nI turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe\nAnd there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,\nWash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth\nIn heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works\nOf many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic\nMoving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,\nWheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jerusalem", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1820 - } - } - }, - "if-it-is-true-what-the-prophets-write": { - "title": "“If It is True What the Prophets Write”", - "body": "If it is true, what the Prophets write,\nThat the heathen gods are all stocks and stones,\nShall we, for the sake of being polite,\nFeed them with the juice of our marrow-bones?\n\nAnd if Bezaleel and Aholiab drew\nWhat the finger of God pointed to their view,\nShall we suffer the Roman and Grecian rods\nTo compel us to worship them as gods?\n\nThey stole them from the temple of the Lord\nAnd worshipp’d them that they might make inspiréd art abhorr’d;\n\nThe wood and stone were call’d the holy things,\nAnd their sublime intent given to their kings.\nAll the atonements of Jehovah spurn’d,\nAnd criminals to sacrifices turn’d.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1810, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "the-lamb": { - "title": "“The Lamb”", - "body": "Little Lamb, who made thee\nDost thou know who made thee,\nGave thee life, and bid thee feed\nBy the stream and o’er the mead;\nGave thee clothing of delight,\nSoftest clothing, woolly, bright;\nGave thee such a tender voice,\nMaking all the vales rejoice?\nLittle Lamb, who made thee?\nDost thou know who made thee?\n\nLittle Lamb, I’ll tell thee;\nLittle Lamb, I’ll tell thee:\nHe is called by thy name,\nFor He calls Himself a Lamb\nHe is meek, and He is mild,\nHe became a little child.\nI a child, and thou a lamb,\nWe are called by His name.\nLittle Lamb, God bless thee!\nLittle Lamb, God bless thee!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-land-of-dreams": { - "title": "“The Land of Dreams”", - "body": "Awake, awake my little Boy!\nThou wast thy Mother’s only joy:\nWhy dost thou weep in thy gentle sleep?\nAwake! thy Father does thee keep.\n\n“O, what land is the Land of Dreams?\nWhat are its mountains, and what are its streams?\nO Father, I saw my Mother there,\nAmong the lillies by waters fair.\n\nAmong the lambs clothed in white\nShe walked with her Thomas in sweet delight.\nI wept for joy, like a dove I mourn--\nO when shall I return again?”\n\nDear child, I also by pleasant streams\nHave wandered all night in the Land of Dreams;\nBut though calm and warm the waters wide,\nI could not get to the other side.\n\n“Father, O Father, what do we here,\nIn this land of unbelief and fear?\nThe Land of Dreams is better far\nAbove the light of the Morning Star.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "laughing-song": { - "title": "“Laughing Song”", - "body": "When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,\nAnd the dimpling stream runs laughing by;\nWhen the air does laugh with our merry wit,\nAnd the green hill laughs with the noise of it;\n\nwhen the meadows laugh with lively green,\nAnd the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,\nWhen Mary and Susan and Emily\nWith their sweet round mouths sing “Ha, ha he!”\n\nWhen the painted birds laugh in the shade,\nWhere our table with cherries and nuts is spread:\nCome live, and be merry, and join with me,\nTo sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, ha, he!”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-little-boy-found": { - "title": "“The Little Boy Found”", - "body": "“Father, father, where are you going?\nOh do not walk so fast!\nSpeak, father, speak to your little boy,\nOr else I shall be lost.”\n\nThe night was dark, no father was there,\nThe child was wet with dew;\nThe mire was deep, and the child did weep,\nAnd away the vapour flew.\n\nThe little boy lost in the lonely fen,\nLed by the wandering light,\nBegan to cry, but God, ever nigh,\nAppeared like his father, in white.\n\nHe kissed the child, and by the hand led,\nAnd to his mother brought,\nWho in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale,\nThe little boy weeping sought.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - } - } - }, - "a-little-boy-lost": { - "title": "“A Little Boy Lost”", - "body": "“Nought loves another as itself,\nNor venerates another so,\nNor is it possible to thought\nA greater than itself to know.”\n\n“And, father, how can I love you\nOr any of my brothers more?\nI love you like the little bird\nThat picks up crumbs around the door.”\n\nThe Priest sat by and heard the child;\nIn trembling zeal he seized his hair,\nHe led him by his little coat,\nAnd all admired the priestly care.\n\nAnd standing on the altar high,\n“Lo, what a fiend is here!” said he:\n“One who sets reason up for judge\nOf our most holy mystery.”\n\nThe weeping child could not be heard,\nThe weeping parents wept in vain:\nThey stripped him to his little shirt,\nAnd bound him in an iron chain,\n\nAnd burned him in a holy place\nWhere many had been burned before;\nThe weeping parents wept in vain.\nAre such thing done on Albion’s shore?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "the-little-girl-found": { - "title": "“The Little Girl Found”", - "body": "All the night in woe,\nLyca’s parents go:\nOver vallies deep.\nWhile the desarts weep.\n\nTired and woe-begone.\nHoarse with making moan:\nArm in arm seven days.\nThey trac’d the desert ways.\n\nSeven nights they sleep.\nAmong shadows deep:\nAnd dream they see their child\nStarvdd in desart wild.\n\nPale thro’ pathless ways\nThe fancied image strays.\nFamish’d, weeping, weak\nWith hollow piteous shriek\n\nRising from unrest,\nThe trembling woman prest,\nWith feet of weary woe;\nShe could no further go.\n\nIn his arms he bore.\nHer arm’d with sorrow sore:\nTill before their way\nA couching lion lay.\n\nTurning back was vain,\nSoon his heavy mane.\nBore them to the ground;\nThen he stalk’d around.\n\nSmelling to his prey,\nBut their fears allay,\nWhen he licks their hands:\nAnd silent by them stands.\n\nThey look upon his eyes\nFill’d with deep surprise:\nAnd wondering behold.\nA spirit arm’d in gold.\n\nOn his head a crown\nOn his shoulders down,\nFlow’d his golden hair.\nGone was all their care.\n\nFollow me he said,\nWeep not for the maid;\nIn my palace deep.\nLyca lies asleep.\n\nThen they followed,\nWhere the vision led;\nAnd saw their sleeping child,\nAmong tygers wild.\n\nTo this day they dwell\nIn a lonely dell\nNor fear the wolvish howl,\nNor the lion’s growl.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - } - } - }, - "a-little-girl-lost": { - "title": "“A Little Girl Lost”", - "body": "In futurity\nI prophesy see.\nThat the earth from sleep.\n(Grave the sentence deep)\n\nShall arise and seek\nFor her maker meek:\nAnd the desart wild\nBecome a garden mild.\n\nIn the southern clime,\nWhere the summers prime\nNever fades away;\nLovely Lyca lay.\n\nSeven summers old\nLovely Lyca told,\nShe had wandered long.\nHearing wild birds song.\n\nSweet sleep come to me\nUnderneath this tree;\nDo father, mother weep.--\n“Where can Lyca sleep”.\n\nLost in desert wild\nIs your little child.\nHow can Lyca sleep.\nIf her mother weep.\n\nIf her heart does ake.\nThen let Lyca wake;\nIf my mother sleep,\nLyca shall not weep.\n\nFrowning, frowning night,\nO’er this desert bright.\nLet thy moon arise.\nWhile I close my eyes.\n\nSleeping Lyca lay:\nWhile the beasts of prey,\nCome from caverns deep,\nView’d the maid asleep\n\nThe kingly lion stood\nAnd the virgin view’d:\nThen he gambolled round\nO’er the hallowed ground:\n\nLeopards, tygers play,\nRound her as she lay;\nWhile the lion old,\nBow’d his mane of gold,\n\nAnd her bosom lick,\nAnd upon her neck,\nFrom his eyes of flame,\nRuby tears there came;\n\nWhile the lioness\nLoos’d her slender dress,\nAnd naked they convey’d\nTo caves the sleeping maid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-little-vagabond": { - "title": "“The Little Vagabond”", - "body": "Dear mother, dear mother, the Church is cold;\nBut the Alehouse is healthy, and pleasant, and warm.\nBesides, I can tell where I am used well;\nThe poor parsons with wind like a blown bladder swell.\n\nBut, if at the Church they would give us some ale,\nAnd a pleasant fire our souls to regale,\nWe’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day,\nNor ever once wish from the Church to stray.\n\nThen the Parson might preach, and drink, and sing,\nAnd we’d be as happy as birds in the spring;\nAnd modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,\nWould not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.\n\nAnd God, like a father, rejoicing to see\nHis children as pleasant and happy as he,\nWould have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,\nBut kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "mad-song": { - "title": "“Mad Song”", - "body": "The wild winds weep\nAnd the night is a-cold;\nCome hither, Sleep,\nAnd my griefs infold:\nBut lo! the morning peeps\nOver the eastern steeps,\nAnd the rustling birds of dawn\nThe earth do scorn.\n\nLo! to the vault\nOf paved heaven,\nWith sorrow fraught\nMy notes are driven:\nThey strike the ear of night,\nMake weep the eyes of day;\nThey make mad the roaring winds,\nAnd with tempests play.\n\nLike a fiend in a cloud,\nWith howling woe,\nAfter night I do crowd,\nAnd with night will go;\nI turn my back to the east,\nFrom whence comforts have increas’d;\nFor light doth seize my brain\nWith frantic pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "from-a-memorable-fancy": { - "title": "From “A Memorable Fancy”", - "body": "As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their proverbs, thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the proverbs of Hell show the nature of infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.\n\nWhen I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rock; with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, and read by them on earth:--\n\n _“How do you know but every bird\n that cuts the airy way\n Is an immense world of delight,\n closed by your senses five?”_", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1790 - } - } - }, - "a-memorable-fancy": { - "title": "“A Memorable Fancy”", - "body": "The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.\nIsaiah answer’d, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.\nThen I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?\nHe replied, All poets that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.\nThen Ezekiel said, The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all other others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods\nwould at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so patheticly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled; from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.\nThis said he, like all firm perswasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can be? I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction. After dinner I ask’d Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works, he said none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel said the same of his.\nI also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer’d, the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian.\nI then asked Ezekiel, why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer’d, the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?\nThe ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.\nFor the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.\nThis will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.\nBut first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged: this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.\nIf the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.\nFor man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1790 - } - } - }, - "memory-hither-come": { - "title": "“Memory, Hither Come”", - "body": "Memory, hither come,\nAnd tune your merry notes;\nAnd, while upon the wind\nYour music floats,\n\nI’ll pore upon the stream\nWhere sighing lovers dream,\nAnd fish for fancies as they pass\nWithin the watery glass.\n\nI’ll drink of the clear stream,\nAnd hear the linnet’s song;\nAnd there I’ll lie and dream\nThe day along:\n\nAnd, when night comes, I’ll go\nTo places fit for woe,\nWalking along the darken’d valley\nWith silent Melancholy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-pretty-rose-tree": { - "title": "“My Pretty Rose Tree”", - "body": "A flower was offered to me,\nSuch a flower as May never bore;\nBut I said “I’ve a pretty rose tree,”\nAnd I passed the sweet flower o’er.\n\nThen I went to my pretty rose tree,\nTo tend her by day and by night;\nBut my rose turned away with jealousy,\nAnd her thorns were my only delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "my-spectre-around-me": { - "title": "“My Spectre around Me”", - "body": "My spectre around me night and day\nLike a wild beast guards my way.\nMy emanation far within\nWeeps incessantly for my sin.\n\nA fathomless and boundless deep,\nThere we wander, there we weep;\nOn the hungry craving wind\nMy spectre follows thee behind.\n\nHe scents thy footsteps in the snow,\nWheresoever thou dost go\nThrough the wintry hail and rain.\nWhen wilt thou return again?\n\nDost thou not in pride and scorn\nFill with tempests all my morn,\nAnd with jealousies and fears\nFill my pleasant nights with tears?\n\nSeven of my sweet loves thy knife\nHas bereaved of their life.\nTheir marble tombs I built with tears\nAnd with cold and shuddering fears.\n\nSeven more loves weep night and day\nRound the tombs where my loves lay,\nAnd seven more loves attend each night\nAround my couch with torches bright.\n\nAnd seven more loves in my bed\nCrown with wine my mournful head,\nPitying and forgiving all\nThy transgressions, great and small.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "never-seek-to-tell-thy-love": { - "title": "“Never seek to tell thy love …”", - "body": "Never seek to tell thy love\nLove that never told can be;\nFor the gentle wind does move\nSilently, invisibly.\n\nI told my love, I told my love,\nI told her all my heart,\nTrembling, cold, in ghastly fears--\nAh, she doth depart.\n\nSoon as she was gone from me\nA traveller came by\nSilently, invisibly--\nO, was no deny.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-jerusalem": { - "title": "“The New Jerusalem”", - "body": "And did those feet in ancient time\nWalk upon England’s mountains green?\nAnd was the holy Lamb of God\nOn England’s pleasant pastures seen?\n\nAnd did the Countenance Divine\nShine forth upon our clouded hills?\nAnd was Jerusalem builded here\nAmong these dark Satanic Mills?\n\nBring me my bow of burning gold!\nBring me my arrows of desire!\nBring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!\nBring me my charriot of fire!\n\nI will not cease from mental fight,\nNor shall my sword sleep in my hand\nTill we have built Jerusalem\nIn England’s green and pleasant land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "The sun descending in the west,\nThe evening star does shine;\nThe birds are silent in their nest,\nAnd I must seek for mine.\n The moon, like a flower\n In heaven’s high bower,\n With silent delight,\n Sits and smiles on the night.\n\nFarewell, green fields and happy grove,\nWhere flocks have ta’en delight.\nWhere lambs have nibbled, silent move\nThe feet of angels bright;\n Unseen they pour blessing,\n And joy without ceasing,\n On each bud and blossom,\n And each sleeping bosom.\n\nThey look in every thoughtless nest\nWhere birds are covered warm;\nThey visit caves of every beast,\nTo keep them all from harm:\n If they see any weeping\n That should have been sleeping,\n They pour sleep on their head,\n And sit down by their bed.\n\nWhen wolves and tigers howl for prey,\nThey pitying stand and weep;\nSeeking to drive their thirst away,\nAnd keep them from the sheep.\n But, if they rush dreadful,\n The angels, most heedful,\n Receive each mild spirit,\n New worlds to inherit.\n\nAnd there the lion’s ruddy eyes\nShall flow with tears of gold:\nAnd pitying the tender cries,\nAnd walking round the fold:\n Saying: “Wrath by His meekness,\n And, by His health, sickness,\n Are driven away\n From our immortal day.”\n\n“And now beside thee, bleating lamb,\nI can lie down and sleep,\nOr think on Him who bore thy name,\nGraze after thee, and weep.\n For, washed in life’s river,\n My bright mane for ever\n Shall shine like the gold,\n As I guard o’er the fold.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-anothers-sorrow": { - "title": "“On Another’s Sorrow”", - "body": "Can I see another’s woe,\nAnd not be in sorrow too?\nCan I see another’s grief,\nAnd not seek for kind relief?\n\nCan I see a falling tear,\nAnd not feel my sorrow’s share?\nCan a father see his child\nWeep, nor be with sorrow filled?\n\nCan a mother sit and hear\nAn infant groan, an infant fear?\nNo, no! never can it be!\nNever, never can it be!\n\nAnd can He who smiles on all\nHear the wren with sorrows small,\nHear the small bird’s grief and care,\nHear the woes that infants bear--\n\nAnd not sit beside the next,\nPouring pity in their breast,\nAnd not sit the cradle near,\nWeeping tear on infant’s tear?\n\nAnd not sit both night and day,\nWiping all our tears away?\nOh no! never can it be!\nNever, never can it be!\n\nHe doth give his joy to all:\nHe becomes an infant small,\nHe becomes a man of woe,\nHe doth feel the sorrow too.\n\nThink not thou canst sigh a sigh,\nAnd thy Maker is not by:\nThink not thou canst weep a tear,\nAnd thy Maker is not near.\n\nOh He gives to us his joy,\nThat our grief He may destroy:\nTill our grief is fled an gone\nHe doth sit by us and moan.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "once-i-saw-a-devil-in-a-flame-of-fire": { - "title": "“Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire …”", - "body": "Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil utter’d these words.\nThe worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest\nmen best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.\nThe Angel hearing this became almost blue, but mastering himself he grew yellow, & at last white pink & smiling, and then replied,\nThou Idolater, is not God One? & is not he visible in Jesus Christ? and has not Jesus Christ given his sanction to the law often commandments, and are not all other men fools, sinners, & nothings?\nThe Devil answer’d: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.\nWhen he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.\nNote: This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well.\nI have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no.\nOne Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "piping-down-the-valleys-wild": { - "title": "“Piping down the Valleys Wild”", - "body": "Piping down the valleys wild,\nPiping songs of pleasant glee,\nOn a cloud I saw a child,\nAnd he laughing said to me:\n\n“Pipe a song about a lamb!”\nSo I piped with merry cheer.\n“Piper, pipe that song again.”\nSo I piped: he wept to hear.\n\n“Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;\nSing thy songs of happy cheer.”\nSo I sung the same again,\nWhile he wept with joy to hear.\n\n“Piper, sit thee down and write\nIn a book, that all may read.”\nSo he vanished from my sight,\nAnd I plucked a hollow reed,\n\nAnd I made a rural pen,\nAnd I stained the water clear,\nAnd I wrote my happy songs\nEvery child may joy to hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-poison-tree": { - "title": "“A Poison Tree”", - "body": "I was angry with my friend:\nI told my wrath, my wrath did end.\nI was angry with my foe:\nI told it not, my wrath did grow.\n\nAnd I watered it in fears\nNight and morning with my tears,\nAnd I sunned it with smiles\nAnd with soft deceitful wiles.\n\nAnd it grew both day and night,\nTill it bore an apple bright,\nAnd my foe beheld it shine,\nand he knew that it was mine,--\n\nAnd into my garden stole\nWhen the night had veiled the pole;\nIn the morning, glad, I see\nMy foe outstretched beneath the tree.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "preludium-to-america": { - "title": "“Preludium to America”", - "body": "The shadowy Daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc,\nWhen fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode:\nHis food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in cups of iron:\nCrown’d with a helmet and dark hair the nameless female stood;\nA quiver with its burning stores, a bow like that of night,\nWhen pestilence is shot from heaven: no other arms she need!\nInvulnerable though naked, save where clouds roll round her loins\nTheir awful folds in the dark air: silent she stood as night;\nFor never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise,\nBut dumb till that dread day when Orc assay’d his fierce embrace.\n“Dark Virgin,” said the hairy youth, “thy father stern, abhorr’d,\nRivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars;\nSometimes an Eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a Lion\nStalking upon the mountains, and sometimes a Whale, I lash\nThe raging fathomless abyss; anon a Serpent folding\nAround the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs\nOn the Canadian wilds I fold; feeble my spirit folds,\nFor chain’d beneath I rend these caverns: when thou bringest food\nI howl my joy, and my red eyes seek to behold thy face--\nIn vain! these clouds roll to and fro, and hide thee from my sight.”\n\nSilent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,\nThe hairy shoulders rend the links; free are the wrists of fire;\nRound the terrific loins he seiz’d the panting, struggling womb;\nIt joy’d: she put aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile,\nAs when a black cloud shews its lightnings to the silent deep.\n\nSoon as she saw the terrible boy, then burst the virgin cry:\n\n“I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go:\nThou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa,\nAnd thou art fall’n to give me life in regions of dark death.\nOn my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions\nEndur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep.\nI see a Serpent in Canada who courts me to his love,\nIn Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;\nI see a Whale in the south-sea, drinking my soul away.\nO what limb-rending pains I feel! thy fire and my frost\nMingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent.\nThis is eternal death, and this the torment long foretold.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "preludium-to-europe": { - "title": "“Preludium to Europe”", - "body": "The nameless shadowy female rose from out the breast of Orc,\nHer snaky hair brandishing in the winds of Enitharmon;\nAnd thus her voice arose:\n\n“O mother Enitharmon, wilt thou bring forth other sons?\nTo cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found,\nFor I am faint with travail,\nLike the dark cloud disburden’d in the day of dismal thunder.\n\nMy roots are brandish’d in the heavens, my fruits in earth beneath\nSurge, foam and labour into life, first born and first consum’d!\nConsumed and consuming!\nThen why shouldst thou, accursed mother, bring me into life?\n\nI wrap my turban of thick clouds around my lab’ring head,\nAnd fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs;\nYet the red sun and moon\nAnd all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains.\n\nUnwilling I look up to heaven, unwilling count the stars:\nSitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine\nI seize their burning power\nAnd bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings,\n\nDevouring and devoured, roaming on dark and desolate mountains,\nIn forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.\nAh mother Enitharmon!\nStamp not with solid form this vig’rous progeny of fires.\n\nI bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames,\nAnd thou dost stamp them with a signet; then they roam abroad\nAnd leave me void as death.\nAh! I am drown’d in shady woe and visionary joy.\n\nAnd who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?\nTo compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it\nWith milk and honey?\nI see it smile, and I roll inward, and my voice is past.”\n\nShe ceased, and roll’d her shady clouds\nInto the secret place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "proverbs-of-hell": { - "title": "“Proverbs of Hell”", - "body": "In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.\nDrive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.\nThe road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.\nPrudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.\nHe who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.\nThe cut worm forgives the plow.\nDip him in the river who loves water.\nA fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.\nHe whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.\nEternity is in love with the productions of time.\nThe busy bee has no time for sorrow.\nThe hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.\nAll wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.\nBring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.\nNo bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.\nA dead body revenges not injuries.\nThe most sublime act is to set another before you.\nIf the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.\nFolly is the cloak of knavery.\nShame is Pride’s cloke.\nPrisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.\nThe pride of the peacock is the glory of God.\nThe lust of the goat is the bounty of God.\nThe wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.\nThe nakedness of woman is the work of God.\nExcess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.\nThe roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.\nThe fox condemns the trap, not himself.\nJoys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.\nLet man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.\nThe bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.\nThe selfish, smiling fool, and the sullen, frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.\nWhat is now proved was once only imagin’d.\nThe rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits.\nThe cistern contains: the fountain overflows.\nOne thought fills immensity.\nAlways be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.\nEvery thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.\nThe eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.\nThe fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.\nThink in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.\nHe who has suffer’d you to impose on him, knows you.\nAs the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.\nThe tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.\nExpect poison from the standing water.\nYou never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.\nListen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!\nThe eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.\nThe weak in courage is strong in cunning.\nThe apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow; nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.\nThe thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.\nIf others had not been foolish, we should be so.\nThe soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.\nWhen thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!\nAs the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.\nTo create a little flower is the labour of ages.\nDamn braces. Bless relaxes.\nThe best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.\nPrayers plow not! Praises reap not!\nJoys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!\nThe head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands and feet Proportion.\nAs the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.\nThe crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white.\nExuberance is Beauty.\nIf the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.\nImprovement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.\nSooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.\nWhere man is not, nature is barren.\nTruth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.\nEnough! or too much.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1790 - } - } - }, - "the-school-boy": { - "title": "“The School Boy”", - "body": "I love to rise on a summer morn,\nWhen birds are singing on every tree;\nThe distant huntsman winds his horn,\nAnd the skylark sings with me:\nOh what sweet company!\n\nBut to go to school in a summer morn,--\nOh it drives all joy away!\nUnder a cruel eye outworn,\nThe little ones spend the day\nIn sighing and dismay.\n\nAh then at times I drooping sit,\nAnd spend many an anxious hour;\nNor in my book can I take delight,\nNor sit in learning’s bower,\nWorn through with the dreary shower.\n\nHow can the bird that is born for joy\nSit in a cage and sing?\nHow can a child, when fears annoy,\nBut droop his tender wing,\nAnd forget his youthful spring?\n\nOh father and mother, if buds are nipped,\nAnd blossoms blown away;\nAnd if the tender plants are stripped\nOf their joy in the springing day,\nBy sorrow and care’s dismay,--\n\nHow shall the summer arise in joy,\nOr the summer fruits appear?\nOr how shall we gather what griefs destroy,\nOr bless the mellowing year,\nWhen the blasts of winter appear?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "several-questions-answered": { - "title": "“Several Questions Answered”", - "body": "What is it men in women do require?\nThe lineaments of Gratified Desire.\nWhat is it women do in men require?\nThe lineaments of Gratified Desire.\n\nThe look of love alarms\nBecause ’tis fill’d with fire;\nBut the look of soft deceit\nShall Win the lover’s hire.\n\nSoft Deceit & Idleness,\nThese are Beauty’s sweetest dress.\n\nHe who binds to himself a joy\nDot the winged life destroy;\nBut he who kisses the joy as it flies\nLives in Eternity’s sunrise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-shepherd": { - "title": "“The Shepherd”", - "body": "How sweet is the Shepherd’s sweet lot,\nFrom the morn to the evening he strays:\nHe shall follow his sheep all the day\nAnd his tongue shall be filled with praise.\n\nFor he hears the lambs innocent call,\nAnd he hears the ewes tender reply,\nHe is watchful while they are in peace,\nFor they know when their Shepherd is nigh.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-liberty": { - "title": "“A Song of Liberty”", - "body": "The Eternal Female groan’d! it was heard over all the Earth:\nAlbions coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!\nShadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean. France rend down thy dungeon;\nGolden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome;\nCast thy keys O Rome into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling, and weep.\nIn her trembling hands she took the new born terror howling;\nOn those infinite mountains of light, now barr’d out by the atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king!\nFlag’d with grey brow’d snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings wav’d over the deep.\nThe speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl’d the new born wonder thro’ the starry night.\nThe fire, the fire, is falling!\nLook up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine; O African! black African! (go, winged thought, widen his forehead.)\nThe fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.\nWak’d from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away;\nDown rush’d beating his wings in vain the jealous king; his grey brow’d councellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings, and rocks,\nFalling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens;\nAll night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy King.\nWith thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing: his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,\nWhere the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her Golden breast,\nSpurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing: the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying,\nEmpire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.\n\n> _Chorus_\n\nLet the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!\nFor every thing that lives is Holy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-song-of-los": { - "title": "“The Song of Los”", - "body": "# _Africa_\n\nI will sing you a song of Los, the Eternal Prophet:\nHe sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity.\nIn heart-formed Africa.\nUrizen faded! Ariston shudderd!\nAnd thus the Song began\n\nAdam stood in the garden of Eden:\nAnd Noah on the mountains of Ararat;\nThey saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations\nBy the hands of the children of Los.\n\nAdam shudderd! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African\nWhen Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East:\n(Night spoke to the Cloud!\nLo these Human form’d spirits in smiling hipocrisy. War\nAgainst one another; so let them War on; slaves to the eternal Elements)\nNoah shrunk, beneath the waters;\nAbram fled in fires from Chaldea;\nMoses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion:\n\nTo Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law:\nTo Pythagoras Socrates & Plato.\n\nTimes rolled on o’er all the sons of Har, time after time\nOrc on Mount Atlas howld, chain’d down with the Chain of Jealousy\nThen Oothoon hoverd over Judah & Jerusalem\nAnd Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he recievd\nA Gospel from wretched Theotormon.\n\nThe human race began to wither, for the healthy built\nSecluded places, fearing the joys of Love\nAnd the disease’d only propagated:\nSo Antamon call’d up Leutha from her valleys of delight:\nAnd to Mahomet a loose Bible gave.\nBut in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War,\nBecause of Diralada thinking to reclaim his joy.\n\nThese were the Churches: Hospitals: Castles: Palaces:\nLike nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity\nAnd all the rest a desart;\nTill like a dream Eternity was obliterated & erased.\n\nSince that dread day when Har and Heva fled.\nBecause their brethren & sisters liv’d in War & Lust;\nAnd as they fled they shrunk\nInto two narrow doleful forms:\nCreeping in reptile flesh upon\nThe bosom of the ground:\nAnd all the vast of Nature shrunk\nBefore their shrunken eyes.\n\nThus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave\nLaws & Religions to the sons of Har binding them more\nAnd more to Earth: closing and restraining:\nTill a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete\nUrizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke\n\nClouds roll heavy upon the Alps round Rousseau & Voltaire:\nAnd on the mountains of Lebanon round the deceased Gods\nOf Asia; & on the deserts of Africa round the Fallen Angels\nThe Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent\n\n\n# _Asia_\n\nThe Kings of Asia heard\nThe howl rise up from Europe!\nAnd each ran out from his Web;\nFrom his ancient woven Den;\nFor the darkness of Asia was startled\nAt the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc.\n\nAnd the Kings of Asia stood\nAnd cried in bitterness of soul.\n\nShall not the King call for Famine from the heath?\nNor the Priest, for Pestilence from the fen?\nTo restrain! to dismay! to thin!\nThe inhabitants of mountain and plain;\nIn the day, of full-feeding prosperity;\nAnd the night of delicious songs.\n\nShall not the Councellor throw his curb\nOf Poverty on the laborious?\nTo fix the price of labour;\nTo invent allegoric riches:\n\nAnd the privy admonishers of men\nCall for fires in the City\nFor heaps of smoking ruins,\nIn the night of prosperity & wantonness\n\nTo turn man from his path,\nTo restrain the child from the womb,\n\nTo cut off the bread from the city,\nThat the remnant may learn to obey.\nThat the pride of the heart may fail;\nThat the lust of the eyes may be quench’d:\nThat the delicate ear in its infancy\n\nMay be dull’d; and the nostrils clos’d up;\nTo teach mortal worms the path\nThat leads from the gates of the Grave.\n\nUrizen heard them cry!\nAnd his shudd’ring waving wings\nWent enormous above the red flames\nDrawing clouds of despair thro’ the heavens\nOf Europe as he went:\nAnd his Books of brass iron & gold\nMelted over the land as he flew,\n\nHeavy-waving, howling, weeping.\n\nAnd he stood over Judea:\nAnd stay’d in his ancient place:\nAnd stretch’d his clouds over Jerusalem;\n\nFor Adam, a mouldering skeleton\nLay bleach’d on the garden of Eden;\nAnd Noah as white as snow\nOn the mountains of Ararat.\n\nThen the thunders of Urizen bellow’d aloud\nFrom his woven darkness above.\n\nOrc raging in European darkness\nArose like a pillar of fire above the Alps\nLike a serpent of fiery flame!\nThe sullen Earth\nShrunk!\n\nForth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones\nJoin: shaking convuls’d the shivring clay breathes\nAnd all flesh naked stands: Fathers and Friends;\nMothers & Infants; Kings & Warriors:\n\nThe Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes\nHer hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:\nHer bosom swells with wild desire:\nAnd milk & blood & glandous wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "My silks and fine array,\nMy smiles and languish’d air,\nBy love are driv’n away;\nAnd mournful lean Despair\nBrings me yew to deck my grave;\nSuch end true lovers have.\n\nHis face is fair as heav’n\nWhen springing buds unfold;\nO why to him was’t giv’n\nWhose heart is wintry cold?\nHis breast is love’s all-worshipp’d tomb,\nWhere all love’s pilgrims come.\n\nBring me an axe and spade,\nBring me a winding sheet;\nWhen I my grave have made\nLet winds and tempests beat:\nThen down I’ll lie as cold as clay.\nTrue love doth pass away!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Sound the flute!\nNow it’s mute!\nBird’s delight,\nDay and night,\nNightingale,\nIn the dale,\nLark in sky,--\nMerrily,\nMerrily merrily, to welcome in the year.\n\nLittle boy,\nFull of joy;\nLittle girl,\nSweet and small;\nCock does crow,\nSo do you;\nMerry voice,\nInfant noise;\nMerrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.\n\nLittle lamb,\nHere I am;\nCome and lick\nMy white neck;\nLet me pull\nYour soft wool;\nLet me kiss\nYour soft face;\nMerrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Innocence", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1789 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "those-who-restrain-desire": { - "title": "“Those Who Restrain Desire”", - "body": "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer of reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.\nAnd being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.\nThe history of this written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor of Reason is call’d Messiah.\nAnd the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death.\nBut in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.\nFor this history has been adopted by both parties.\nIt indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils account is that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.\nThis is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire.\nKnow that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.\nBut in Milton’ the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Raio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!\nNote. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-autumn": { - "title": "“To Autumn”", - "body": "O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain’d\nWith the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit\nBeneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,\nAnd tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,\nAnd all the daughters of the year shall dance!\nSing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.\n\nThe narrow bud opens her beauties to\nThe sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;\nBlossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and\nFlourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,\nTill clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,\nAnd feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.\n\nThe spirits of the air live in the smells\nOf fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round\nThe gardens, or sits singing in the trees.\nThus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,\nThen rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak\nHills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1783 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "to-spring": { - "title": "“To Spring”", - "body": "O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down\nThro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn\nThine angel eyes upon our western isle,\nWhich in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!\n\nThe hills tell each other, and the listening\nValleys hear; all our longing eyes are turned\nUp to thy bright pavilions: issue forth,\nAnd let thy holy feet visit our clime.\n\nCome o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds\nKiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste\nThy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls\nUpon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.\n\nO deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour\nThy soft kisses on her bosom; and put\nThy golden crown upon her languished head,\nWhose modest tresses were bound up for thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "to-summer": { - "title": "“To Summer”", - "body": "O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in\nThy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat\nThat flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,\nOft pitched’st here thy goldent tent, and oft\nBeneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld\nWith joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.\n\nBeneath our thickest shades we oft have heard\nThy voice, when noon upon his fervid car\nRode o’er the deep of heaven; beside our springs\nSit down, and in our mossy valleys, on\nSome bank beside a river clear, throw thy\nSilk draperies off, and rush into the stream:\nOur valleys love the Summer in his pride.\n\nOur bards are fam’d who strike the silver wire:\nOur youth are bolder than the southern swains:\nOur maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:\nWe lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,\nNor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,\nNor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-winter": { - "title": "“To Winter”", - "body": "“O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:\nThe north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark\nDeep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,\nNor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.”\n\nHe hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep\nRides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathéd\nIn ribbéd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,\nFor he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world.\n\nLo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings\nTo his strong bones, strides o’er the groaning rocks:\nHe withers all in silence, and in his hand\nUnclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.\n\nHe takes his seat upon the cliffs,--the mariner\nCries in vain. Poor little wretch, that deal’st\nWith storms!--till heaven smiles, and the monster\nIs driv’n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-the-accuser-who-is-the-god-of-this-world": { - "title": "“To the Accuser Who is the God of This World”", - "body": "Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,\nAnd dost not know the Garment from the Man.\nEvery Harlot was a Virgin once,\nNor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.\n\nTho’ thou art Worship’d by the Names Divine\nOf Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still\nThe Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline,\nThe lost Traveller’s Dream under the Hill.", - "metadata": { - "source": "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1818 - } - } - }, - "to-the-evening-star": { - "title": "“To the Evening Star”", - "body": "Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,\nNow, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light\nThy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown\nPut on, and smile upon our evening bed!\nSmile on our loves, and while thou drawest the\nBlue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew\nOn every flower that shuts its sweet eyes\nIn timely sleep. Let thy west wing sleep on\nThe lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,\nAnd wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,\nDost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,\nAnd the lion glares through the dun forest.\nThe fleeces of our flocks are covered with\nThy sacred dew; protect with them with thine influence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-muses": { - "title": "“To the Muses”", - "body": "Whether on Ida’s shady brow,\nOr in the chambers of the East,\nThe chambers of the sun, that now\nFrom ancient melody have ceas’d;\n\nWhether in Heav’n ye wander fair,\nOr the green corners of the earth,\nOr the blue regions of the air,\nWhere the melodious winds have birth;\n\nWhether on crystal rocks ye rove,\nBeneath the bosom of the sea\nWand’ring in many a coral grove,\nFair Nine, forsaking Poetry!\n\nHow have you left the ancient love\nThat bards of old enjoy’d in you!\nThe languid strings do scarcely move!\nThe sound is forc’d, the notes are few!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-two-songs": { - "title": "“The Two Songs”", - "body": "I heard an Angel Singing\nWhen the day was springing:\n“Mercy, pity, and peace,\nAre the world’s release.”\n\nSo he sang all day\nOver the new-mown hay,\nTill the sun went down,\nAnd the haycocks looked brown.\n\nI heard a devil curse\nOver the heath and the furse:\n“Mercy vould be no more\nIf there were nobody poor,\nAnd pity no more could be\nIf all were happy as ye:\nAnd mutual fear brings peace,\nMisery’s increase\nAre mercy, pity, and peace.”\n\nAt his curse the sun went down,\nAnd the heavens gave a frown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tyger": { - "title": "“The Tyger”", - "body": "Tyger Tyger, burning bright,\nIn the forests of the night;\nWhat immortal hand or eye,\nCould frame thy fearful symmetry?\n\nIn what distant deeps or skies.\nBurnt the fire of thine eyes?\nOn what wings dare he aspire?\nWhat the hand, dare seize the fire?\n\nAnd what shoulder, & what art,\nCould twist the sinews of thy heart?\nAnd when thy heart began to beat.\nWhat dread hand? & what dread feet?\n\nWhat the hammer? what the chain,\nIn what furnace was thy brain?\nWhat the anvil? what dread grasp.\nDare its deadly terrors clasp?\n\nWhen the stars threw down their spears\nAnd water’d heaven with their tears:\nDid he smile his work to see?\nDid he who made the Lamb make thee?\n\nTyger Tyger burning bright,\nIn the forests of the night:\nWhat immortal hand or eye,\nDare frame thy fearful symmetry?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Songs of Experience", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1794 - } - } - }, - "the-voice-of-the-devil": { - "title": "“The Voice of the Devil”", - "body": "All Bibles or sacred codes, have been the causes of the following Errors:\n\n1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.\n2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.\n3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.\n\n\nBut the following Contraries to these are True:\n\n1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.\n2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.\n3. Energy is Eternal Delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-my-mother-died": { - "title": "“When My Mother Died”", - "body": "When my mother died I was very young,\nAnd my father sold me while yet my tongue\nCould scarcely cry “Weep! weep! weep! weep!”\nSo your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.\n\nThere’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,\nThat curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,\n“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,\nYou know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”\n\nAnd so he was quiet, and that very night,\nAs Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!--\nThat thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,\nWere all of them locked up in coffins of black.\n\nAnd by came an angel, who had a bright key,\nAnd he opened the coffins, and let them all free;\nThen down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,\nAnd wash in a river, and shine in the sun.\n\nThen naked and white, all their bags left behind,\nThey rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;\nAnd the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,\nHe’d have God for his father, and never want joy.\n\nAnd so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,\nAnd got with our bags and our brushes to work.\nThough the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:\nSo, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-should-i-care-for-the-men-of-thames": { - "title": "“Why Should I Care for the Men of Thames”", - "body": "Why should I care for the men of Thames\nOr the cheating waves of charter’d streams\nOr shrink at the little blasts of fear\nThat the hireling blows into my ear\n\nTho born on the cheating banks of Thames\nTho his waters bathed my infant limbs\nThe Ohio shall wash his stains from me\nI was born a slave but I go to be free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wild-flowers-song": { - "title": "“The Wild Flower’s Song”", - "body": "As I wandered the forest,\nThe green leaves among,\nI heard a Wild Flower\nSinging a song.\n\n“I slept in the earth\nIn the silent night,\nI murmured my fears\nAnd I felt delight.”\n\n“In the morning I went\nAs rosy as morn,\nTo seek for new joy;\nBut oh! met with scorn.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "veniamin-blazhenny": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Veniamin Blazhenny", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1999 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "belarusian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇧🇾", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veniamin_Blazhenny", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "belarusian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-soul-waking-up": { - "title": "“The Soul Waking Up”", - "body": "The soul, waking up, will not recognize her house,\nThe darling earthly shelter.\nShe will wonder, forced by her destiny …\nWhy would she need a home when she is a soul?\n\nAnd moving through the path of no return,\nThrough the vast expanses of the heavenly track,\nThe soul will take with her my earthly name\nAnd my immense sorrows.\n\nNo, she will not take my every trouble,\nBut only the unbearable path,\nWhere step by step I prayed to God,\nAnd step by step I struggled with my earthly limits.\n\nA mysterious light will be spilled\nAt the turning point of time,\nBut the timeless chain of spirit will not be broken\nNeither in this pitiful world, nor in the other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - } - } - }, - "alexander-blok": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexander Blok", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Blok", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-stranger": { - "title": "“The Stranger”", - "body": "The restaurants on hot spring evenings\nLie under a dense and savage air.\nFoul drafts and hoots from dunken revelers\nContaminate the thoroughfare.\nAbove the dusty lanes of suburbia\nAbove the tedium of bungalows\nA pretzel sign begilds a bakery\nAnd children screech fortissimo.\n\nAnd every evening beyond the barriers\nGentlemen of practiced wit and charm\nGo strolling beside the drainage ditches--\nA tilted derby and a lady at the arm.\n\nThe squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water\nA woman’s shriek assaults the ear\nWhile above, in the sky, inured to everything,\nThe moon looks on with a mindless leer.\n\nAnd every evening my one companion\nSits here, reflected in my glass.\nLike me, he has drunk of bitter mysteries.\nLike me, he is broken, dulled, downcast.\n\nThe sleepy lackeys stand beside tables\nWaiting for the night to pass\nAnd tipplers with the eyes of rabbits\nCry out: “In vino veritas!”\n\nAnd every evening (or am I imagining?)\nExactly at the appointed time\nA girl’s slim figure, silk raimented,\nGlides past the window’s mist and grime.\n\nAnd slowly passing throught the revelers,\nUnaccompanied, always alone,\nExuding mists and secret fragrances,\nShe sits at the table that is her own.\n\nSomething ancient, something legendary\nSurrounds her presence in the room,\nHer narrow hand, her silk, her bracelets,\nHer hat, the rings, the ostrich plume.\n\nEntranced by her presence, near and enigmatic,\nI gaze through the dark of her lowered veil\nAnd I behold an enchanted shoreline\nAnd enchanted distances, far and pale.\n\nI am made a guardian of the higher mysteries,\nSomeone’s sun is entrusted to my control.\nTart wine has pierced the last convolution\nof my labyrinthine soul.\n\nAnd now the drooping plumes of ostriches\nAsway in my brain droop slowly lower\nAnd two eyes, limpid, blue, and fathomless\nAre blooming on a distant shore.\n\nInside my soul a treasure is buried.\nThe key is mine and only mine.\nHow right you are, you drunken monster!\nI know: the truth is in the wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "to-the-muse": { - "title": "“To the Muse”", - "body": "In your hidden memories\nThere are fatal tidings of doom …\nA curse on sacred traditions,\nA desecration of happiness;\n\nAnd a power so alluring\nThat I am ready to repeat the rumour\nThat you have brought angels down from heaven,\nEnticing them with your beauty …\n\nAnd when you mock at faith,\nThat pale, greyish-purple halo\nWhich I once saw before\nSuddenly begins to shine above you.\n\nAre you evil or good? You are altogether from another world\nThey say strange things about you\nFor some you are the Muse and a miracle.\nFor me you are torment and hell.\n\nI do not know why in the hour of dawn,\nWhen no strength was left to me,\nI did not perish, but caught sight of your face\nAnd begged you to comfort me.\n\nI wanted us to be enemies;\nWhy then did you make me a present\nOf a flowery meadow and of the starry firmament--\nThe whole curse of your beauty?\n\nYour fearful caresses were more treacherous\nThan the northern night,\nMore intoxicating than the golden champagne of Aï,\nBriefer than a gypsy woman’s love …\n\nAnd there was a fatal pleasure\nIn trampling on cherished and holy things;\nAnd this passion, bitter as wormwood,\nWas a frenzied delight for the heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "hugh-f-blunt": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Hugh F. Blunt", - "birth": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_F._Blunt", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "blindness": { - "title": "“Blindness”", - "body": "He drew the veil that we might see and prize,\nThe way that leadeth to His mansions bright;\nBut proud and stubborn Reason closed her eyes,\nAnd sullenly cried out: “There is no light!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "immaculate": { - "title": "“Immaculate”", - "body": "I as a cinder black,\nI as a quenched fire;\nThou as a glowing coal,\nFanned by a God’s desire.\n\nI as a wilted leaf,\nI as a twig all dried;\nThou as a fruitful sheaf,\nThou as a forest wide.\n\nI as a cloud of gray,\nI as a starless night;\nThou as the sky of May,\nThou as the noonday bright.\n\nI as a ranksome weed,\nI as a poison vine;\nThou as the dewy mead,\nThou as the eglantine.\n\nI am the soul all stained,\nFit to be Satan’s mate;\nThou art the soul unchained,\nThou art immaculate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "my-offerings": { - "title": "“My Offerings”", - "body": "_“Son, give me thy heart”_\n\nI brought to my God, with a thought to please,\nMy arms upheaped with the blue hearts-ease,\nWith fragrant lily and mossy rose,\nAll gathered for Him in my garden-close.\n“These blossoms for Thee, God,” I said;\nBut the Lord smiled not,--and my flowers are dead.\n\nI brought to my God a haunting strain--\nThe mystical dream of a poet’s brain;\nI linked each word to a solemn tone,\nAnd I sang it unto His ear alone.\n“I sing of Thy love, God,” said I;\nBut the Lord seemed deaf to my throat’s full cry.\n\nI stood me then at His barred door,\nMy hands upfilled with my meagre store\nOf alms for His poor, and I said, “Dear Lord,\nBut bless me once as my good reward.”\nI knocked till my hands were numbed in pain;\nBut alas, and my gold was all in vain.\n\n“O God,” I sobbed in my bitterness,\n“Will none of my gifts move Thee to bless?\nWilt Thou of my love-gifts have no part;\nWhat then can I offer to please Thy heart?”\nBut the Lord, still sorrowing, answered so:\n_“If thou didst love Me, thou wouldst know.”_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-bly": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Bly", - "birth": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2021 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bly", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 69 - }, - "poems": { - "abraham": { - "title": "“Abraham”", - "body": "Do you remember the night Abraham first saw\nThe stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”\nHow happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,\n\nHe cried, “You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was\nWhen he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:\nWe take as our Lord the stars that go down.\n\nWe are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.\nWe are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel\nThe dirt flying out from behind our back claws.\n\nAnd no one can convince us that mud is not\nBeautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.\nWe are ready to spend the rest of our life\n\nWalking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.\nWe resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.\nWe stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.\n\nMy heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping\nAbandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,\nSince I am a man in love with the setting stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "after-long-busyness": { - "title": "“After Long Busyness”", - "body": "I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.\nMoon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars, not a trace of light!\nSuppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?\nEvery day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "after-working": { - "title": "“After Working”", - "body": "After many strange thoughts,\nThoughts of distant harbors, and new life,\nI came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.\n\nOutside it covers the trees like pure sound,\nThe sound of tower bells, or of water moving under the ice,\nThe sound the deaf hear through the bones of their heads.\n\nWe know the road; as the moonlight\nLifts everything, so in a night like this,\nThe road goes on ahead, it is all clear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-american-dream": { - "title": "“An American Dream”", - "body": "Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters,\nDropping small bones engraved with Hegel’s name.\nA badger carries the bones in his fur\nTo his den, where the entire family dies that night.\n\nA chorus girl stands for hours behind curtains\nLooking out at the street.\nThere are dead branches painted white\nIn the windows of trucking services;\nA tiny alligator grips those branches tightly\nTo keep away from the dry leaves on the floor.\n\nThe honeycomb at night has strange dreams:\nSmall black trains going round and round--\nOld warships drowning in the raindrop.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "awakening": { - "title": "“Awakening”", - "body": "We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind\nMingle with thoughts of pain\nAnd the long roots of barley, bitterness\nAs of the oak roots staining the waters dark\nIn Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain\nAnd sodden blossoms; out of this\nWe have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.\n\nThe storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota\nIs hardly strong enough for the wind.\nDarkness, darkness in grass, darkness in trees.\nEven the water in wells trembles.\nBodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums\nAre dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay\nTo the deep barns where the dark air is moving from corners.\n\nLincoln’s statue, and the traffic. From the long past\nInto the long present\nA bird, forgotten in these troubles, warbling,\nAs the great wheel turns around, grinding\nThe living in water.\nWashing, continual washing, in water now stained\nWith blossoms and rotting logs,\nCries, half-muffled, from beneath the earth, the living awakened\nat last like the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "bachs-b-minor-mass": { - "title": "“Bach’s B Minor Mass”", - "body": "The Walgravian ancestors step inside Trinity Church.\nThe tenors, the horns, the sopranos, the altos\nSay: “Do not be troubled. Death will come.”\n\nThe basses as they sing reach into their long coats\nAnd give bits of dark bread to the poor, saying,\n“Eat, eat, in the shadow of Jethro’s garden.”\n\nThe clarinets remind us of the old promise\nThat the orphans will be fed. The oboes reply,\n“Oh, that promise is too wonderful for us!”\n\nDon’t worry, my dears. The tidal wave that\nWipes out whole cities is merely the wood thrush\nLifting her wings to catch the morning sun.\n\nWe know that God gobbles up the Faithful.\nThe Harvesters on the sea floor are feeding\nAll of those ruined by the depth of the sea.\n\nWe know that people live and die. Even after\nTheir tree has splintered and fallen in the night, once\nDawn has come, the birds can do nothing but sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bear-and-the-man": { - "title": "“The Bear and the Man”", - "body": "Suppose there were a bear and a man. The bear\nKnows his kin--old pebbles, fifty-five--\nGallon barrels, big pine trees in the moonlight,\nAbandoned down jackets; and the man approaches warily--\n\nHe’s read Tolstoy, knows a few symphonies.\nThat’s about it. Each has lost a son. The bear’s\nKilled by a trap, the man’s killed by a bear.\nThat boy was partly drunk, alone in the woods.\n\nThe bear puts out black claws firmly on earth.\nHe’s not dumb. Skinned, he’s like a man. People\nSay that both bears and men receive a signal\nComing from far up there, near the North Pole.\n\nThe old grandmother of both bear and man\nSits netted among the stars, looking down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-beauty-of-women": { - "title": "“The Beauty of Women”", - "body": "Delicate women, with eyes open,\nArms hung lightly as they ride,\nNaked feet covered with jewels,\nSome small scarf trailing from their wrists,\nShoulders of the spirit:\nThis is the secret of Nonnus and Pelagia,\nA chorus of old men shouting Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "boards-on-the-ground": { - "title": "“Boards on the Ground”", - "body": "I love to see boards lying on the ground in early spring;\nThe ground beneath them is wet, and muddy.\nPerhaps covered with chicken tracks\nAnd they are dry and eternal.\n\nThis is the wood one sees on the decks of ocean ships,\nWand dis ravis, wininfinenla-for simple taste,\nLike a horse’s tail.\n\nThis wood is like a man who has a simple life,\nLiving through the spring and winter on the ship of his own desire.\nHe sits on dry wood surrounded by half-melted snow\nAs the rooster walks away springily over the dampened hay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "a-boy-on-the-farm": { - "title": "“A Boy on the Farm”", - "body": "I was one of the saved.\nThe chickens were, too.\nMorning came; only\nThe hired girl was ready.\n\nThe rest of us dozed,\nAnd got up, and fed chickens.\nThe guinea hens rose\nFrom unimaginable places.\n\nWe couldn’t understand\nHow strange they were.\nThey slept in trees\nAnd had better nights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "brahms": { - "title": "“Brahms”", - "body": "It must be that my early friendship with defeat\nHas given me affection for the month of August.\nThe potato fields belong to early night.\n\nSo many times as a boy I sat in the dirt\nAmong dry cornstalks that gave assurances\nEvery hour that Francis had his ear to the night.\n\nColumbus’s letters tell us that we will receive\nThe gifts that mariners all receive at the end\nMemories of gold and a grave in the sand.\n\nThe shadow of a friend’s hand gives us\nPromises similar to those we received from\nThe light under the door as our mother came near.\n\nI am the father who wept for Joseph.\nI am the sparrow that flies through the warrior’s\nHall and back out into the falling snow.\n\nI don’t know why these images should please me\nSo much; an angel said: “In the last moment before night\nBrahms will show you how loyal the notes are.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-bridegroom": { - "title": "“The Bridegroom”", - "body": "The bridegroom wanted to reach the Norwegian Church.\nBut the roads were made impassable by huge snows.\nWe are each the bridegroom longing for existence.\n\nMarriage brings the moth close to the candle flame.\nWith their frail wings, men and women\nAre constantly flying into the fire of existence.\n\nSome say that each drop of ground water in Kansas\nKnows about the ocean. How can this be?\nEvery drop of water longs like us for existence.\n\nAbu Said fasted in the desert for twenty years.\nLater when he came back, his dragon friend\nWept. “Your suffering gave me a hint of existence.”\n\nWhen the pianist’s fingers strike all the notes\nIn the Tenth Prelude, it’s clear Bach’s soul has been\nLeaping about like a hare in the field of existence.\n\nRobert, you’re close to joy but not quite there.\nYou are a hunchback standing in an Italian\nSquare, looking in at the festival of existence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-caterpillar-on-the-desk": { - "title": "“A Caterpillar on the Desk”", - "body": "Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy’s hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around in the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily--or perhaps summer’s insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 1 - } - } - }, - "clear-air-of-october": { - "title": "“Clear Air of October”", - "body": "I can see outdoors the gold wings without birds\nFlying around, and the wells of cold water\nWithout walls standing eighty feet up in the air,\nI can feel the crickets’ singing carrying them into the sky.\n\nI know these shadows are falling for hundreds of miles,\nCrossing lawns in tiny towns, and the doors of Catholic churches;\nI know the horse of darkness is riding fast to the east,\nCarrying a thin man with no coat.\n\nAnd I know the sun is sinking down great stairs,\nLike an executioner with a great blade walking into a cellar,\nAnd the gold animals, the lions, and the zebras, and the pheasants,\nAre waiting at the head of the stairs with robbers’ eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "come-with-me": { - "title": "“Come with Me”", - "body": "Come with me into those things that have felt this despair for so long--\nThose removed Chevrolet wheels that howl with a terrible loneliness,\nLying on their backs in the cindery dirt, like men drunk and naked,\nStaggering off down a hill to drown at last in a pond;\nShredded inner tubes abandoned on the shoulders of thruways,\nBlack and collapsed souls, who tried and burst\nAnd were left behind,\nAnd those curled steel shavings scattered about on oily benches,\nSometimes still warm, gritty when we hold them,\nWho have given up, and blame everything on the government,\nAnd those roads in South Dakota that feel around in the darkness …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-confusion-of-america": { - "title": "“The Confusion of America”", - "body": "The lace that lay around the bones of Danish kings\nRises at dawn in the grass of North Dakota;\nThe torture rack is the steering wheel of a Dodge,\nAnd the Assyrian lions blaze above the soybean fields;\nThe last haven of Jehovah, down from the old heavens,\nHugs a sooty corner of the murdered pine;\nPhoenician priests carrying Arabic numerals\nWalk the earth dressed as bankers and hunters of bear,\nAnd at night our sleep is invaded by stealthy diamonds.\n\nThe old jewels of Charlemagne fall in the flakes of snow\nAnd lie drifted in the door of a pig-house,\nLeft abandoned all winter in a barnyard in Montana;\nOur bodies are mingled among bills and relics\nLike Bibles and carbines in the Sears Roebuck catalog;\nSaxophones and gears fly together in the nightmares\nRising, like feathers, from the grave of Hannibal,\nAnd tiny beetles, bright as Cadillacs, toil down\nThe long dusty roads into the mountains of South Dakota.\n\nWe meet men who travelled in Canada for Astor,\nAnd also strange animals, men with wings of fur,\nCars that fly through the air with the faces of women,\nSheep come in hotels wearing crow feathers painted red,\nRocks climb up stairs balancing on the feet of birds,\nGlasses of water swallow tiny cities with gypsy fairs,\nPoor accountants awake one day with the paws of bears;\nHigh in the beanplant that has grown from Carnegie’s dime,\nTiny loaves of bread with ears lie on the President’s table.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-dream-on-the-night-of-first-snow": { - "title": "“A Dream on the Night of First Snow”", - "body": "I woke from a furst-day-of-snow dream\nI dreamt I met a girl in an attic,\nwho talked of operas, intensely.\nSnow has bent the poplar over nearly to the ground,\nnew snowfall widens the plowing.\nOutside maple leaves floated on rainwater,\nyellow, matted, luminous.\nI found a salamander! and held him.\nWhen I put him down again,\nhe strode over a log\nwith such confidence, like a chessmaster,\nthe front leg first, then the hind\nleg, he rose up like a tractor climbing\nover a hump in the field\nand disappeared toward winter, a caravan going deeper into mountains,\ndogs pulling travois,\nfeathers fluttering on the lances of the arrogant men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "driving-north-from-san-francisco": { - "title": "“Driving North from San Francisco”", - "body": "We cross the sleeping water on the San Rafael Bridge.\nRed rocks lie in it, like sleepers who will not awake.\nThe water is deep blue,\nWashing quietly about the rocks, as if watching.\n\nWe drive north through brown hills in the California winter,\nHills with green trees, sloping quickly down to the road\nOr to a barn fence, with twenty skinny cows,\nAnd two men spreading some straw in a field.\n\nAhead of us on the shoulder I see Santa Clauses for sale,\nStanding with outstretched arms in the warm sun,\nReaching toward us, wrapped in clear cellophane.\nA sign: Meadowbrook Ranch. Horses for Sale.\n\nHow strange to think of horses being sold!\nHiding behind their great eyes\nOther hills, and sides of barns,\nOwners they have loved, now gone,\nPassed into the dark trees on the hill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "driving-west-in-1970": { - "title": "“Driving West in 1970”", - "body": "My dear children, do you remember the morning\nWhen we climbed into the old Plymouth\nAnd drove west straight toward the Pacific?\n\nWe were all the people there were.\nWe followed Dylan’s songs all the way west.\nIt was Seventy; the war was over, almost;\n\nAnd we were driving to the sea.\nWe had closed the farm, tucked in\nThe flap, and were eating the honey\n\nOf distance and the word “there.”\n_Oh whee, we’re gonna fly\nDown into the easy chair._ We sang that\n\nOver and over. That’s what the early\nSeventies were like. We weren’t afraid.\nAnd a hole had opened in the world.\n\nWe laughed at Las Vegas.\nThere was enough gaiety\nFor all of us, and ahead of us was\n\nThe ocean. _Tomorrow’s\nThe day my bride’s gonna come._\nAnd the war was over, almost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "driving-through-ohio": { - "title": "“Driving through Ohio”", - "body": "We slept that night in Delaware, Ohio:\nA magnificent and sleepy country,\nOak country, sheep country, sod country\nWe slept in a huge white tourist home\nWith National Geographics on the table.\n\nNorth of Columbus there is a kind of torpid joy,\nThe slow and muddy river,\nThe white barns leaning into the ground,\nCottonwoods with their trunks painted white,\nAnd houses with small observatories on top,\nAs if Ohio were the widow’s coast, looking over\nThe dangerous Atlantic.\n\nNow we drive North past the white cemeteries\nSo rich in the morning air!\nAll morning I have felt the sense of death!\nI am full of love, and love this torpid land.\nSome day I will go back, and inhabit again\nThe sleepy ground where Harding was born.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "driving-toward-the-lac-qui-parle-river": { - "title": "“Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River”", - "body": "I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.\nThe stubble field catches the last growth of sun.\nThe soybeans are breathing on all sides.\nOld men are sitting before their houses on car seats\nIn the small towns. I am happy,\nThe moon rising above the turkey sheds.\n\nThe small world of the car\nPlunges through the deep fields of the night,\nOn the road from Willmar to Milan.\nThis solitude covered with iron\nMoves through the fields of night\nPenetrated by the noise of crickets.\n\nNearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,\nAnd water kneeling in the moonlight.\nIn small towns the houses are built right on the ground;\nThe lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.\nWhen I reach the river, the full moon covers it.\nA few people are talking, low, in a boat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "fall-rain": { - "title": "“Fall Rain”", - "body": "In the rain the sodden leaffoor shudders faintly as if ruffling its feathers; it is the time when bark hangs from old birch and poplar trees, like rags, and the moss gains new foothold on the sodden cedar trunk leaning out over the water. The husband, in the damp bed covered with blankets, dreams of aunts he has never heard of, dead grandfathers still alive, and strange earthquakes as they walk the street. Now on the roof the delicate rain whispers of wet sails falling over abandoned junks in ancient harbors of China, and of young women wandering in the rain to die, and it whispers of drowned bodies floating on the stairs of the lake floor, ascending to the eternal balconies of death, and of the souls of those of the furst World War beneath the tangled metal, the buckles and the ghosts of leather, ghosts of wooden wagon wheels, of shell casings and bandages. Now the sound of geese is heard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "fall": { - "title": "“Fall”", - "body": "From far out in the center of the naked lake\nA loon’s cry came--\nIt was the cry of someone who owned very little.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-fat-old-couple-whirling-around": { - "title": "“The Fat Old Couple Whirling Around”", - "body": "The drum says that the night we die will be a long night.\nIt says the children have time to play. Tell the grownups\nThey can pull the curtains around the bed tonight.\n\nThe old man wants to know how the war ended.\nThe young girl wants her breasts to cause the sun to rise.\nThe thinker wants to keep misunderstanding alive.\n\nIt’s all right if the earthly monk is buried near the altar.\nIt’s all right if the singer fails to turn up for her concert.\nIt’s good if the fat old couple keeps whirling around.\n\nLet the parents sing over the cradle every night.\nLet the pelicans go on living in their stickly nests.\nLet the duck go on loving the mud around her feet.\n\nIt’s all right if the ant always remembers his way home.\nIt’s all right if Bach keeps reaching for the same note.\nIt’s all right if we knock the ladder away from the house.\n\nEven if you are a puritan it would be all right\nIf you join the lovers in their ruined house tonight.\nIt’s good if you become a soul and then disappear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-old-gnostics": { - "title": "“For the Old Gnostics”", - "body": "The Fathers put their trust in the end of the world\nAnd they were wrong. The Gnostics were right and not\nRight. Dragons copulate with their knobby tails.\nSome somnolent wealth rises unconcerned,\nOver there! In the world! Ponderous stubborn\nSorrow weighs down the flying Gospels.\nSome enormous obstacle blocks our way.\nThe untempered soul grumbles in empty light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-greek-ships": { - "title": "“The Greek Ships”", - "body": "When the water holes go, and the fish flop about\nIn the mud, they can moisten each other faintly,\nBut it’s best if they lose themselves in the river.\n\nYou know how many Greek ships went down\nWith their cargoes of wine. If we can’t get\nTo port, perhaps it’s best to head for the bottom.\n\nI’ve heard that the mourning dove never says\nWhat she means. Those of us who make up poems\nHave agreed not to say what the pain is.\n\nFor years Eliot wrote poems standing under\nA bare light-bulb. He knew he was a murderer,\nAnd he accepted his punishment at birth.\n\nThe sitar player is searching: now in the backyard,\nNow in the old dishes left behind on the table,\nNow for the suffering on the underside of a leaf.\n\nGo ahead, throw your good name into the water.\nAll those who have ruined their lives for love\nAre calling to us from a hundred sunken ships.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-wanted-to-live-his-life-over": { - "title": "“He Wanted to Live His Life Over”", - "body": "_What? You want to live your life over again?_\n“Well, I suppose, yes … That time in Grand Rapids …\nMy life--as I lived it--was a series of shynesses.”\n\n_Being bolder--what good would that do?_\n“I’d open my door again. I’ve felt abashed\nYou see. Now I’d go out and say, ‘All right,\n\nI’ll go with you to Alaska.’ Just opening the door\nFrom inside would have altered me--a little.\nI’m too shy.” _And so, a bolder life\n\nIs what you want?_ “We could begin now.\nJust walk with me--down to the river.\nI’ll pretend this boat is my life … I’ll climb in.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hermit": { - "title": "“The Hermit”", - "body": "Darkness is falling through darkness,\nFalling from ledge\nTo ledge.\nThere is a man whose body is perfectly whole.\nHe stands, the storm behind him,\nAnd the grass blades are leaping in the wind.\nDarkness is gathered in folds\nAbout his feet.\nHe is no one.\nWhen we see\nHim, we grow calm,\nAnd sail on into the tunnels of joyful death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "herons": { - "title": "“Herons”", - "body": "After trailing their bony legs the herons dance\nin their crystal house far up near the clouds.\nI need you in sand, touching your hand I weep.\nIn another world I am clear and transparent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hunting-pheasants-in-a-cornfield": { - "title": "“Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield”", - "body": "What is so strange about a tree alone in an open field?\nIt is a willow tree. I walk around and around it.\nMy body is strangely torn, and cannot leave it.\nAt last I sit down beneath it.\n\nIt is a willow tree alone in acres of dry corn.\nIts leaves are scattered around its trunk, and around me,\nBrown now, and speckled with delicate black.\nOnly the cornstalks now can make a noise.\n\nThe sun is cold, burning through the frosty distances of space.\nThe weeds are frozen to death long ago.\nWhen then do I love to watch\nThe sun moving on the chill skin of the branches?\n\nThe mind has shed leaves alone for years.\nIt stands apart with small creatures near its roots.\nI am happy in this ancient place,\nA spot easily caught sight of above the corn,\nIf I were a young animal ready to turn home at dusk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "hurrying-away-from-the-earth": { - "title": "“Hurrying Away from the Earth”", - "body": "The poor, and the dazed, and the idiots\nAre with us, they live in the casket of the sun\nAnd the moon’s coffin, as I walk out tonight\nSeeing the night wheeling their dark wheelbarrow\nAll about the plains of heaven,\nAnd the stars inexorable rising.\nDark moon! Sinister tears!\nShadow of slums and of the conquering dead!\n\nSome men have pierced the chest with a long needle\nTo stop their heart from beating any more;\nAnother put blocks of ice in his bed\nSo he would die, women\nHave washed their hair, and hung themselves\nIn the long braids, one climbed\nA high tree above her house\nAnd lawn and swallowed poisonous spiders--\n\nThe time for exhortation is past. I have heard\nThe iron chairs scraping in asylums,\nAs the cold bird hunches into the winter\nIn the windy nights of November.\nThe coal miners rise from their pits\nLike a flash flood,\nLike a rice field disintegrating.\nNow men cry when they hear stories of someone rising from the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "images-suggested-by-medieval-music": { - "title": "“Images Suggested by Medieval Music”", - "body": "_A thousand singing herons I saw passing\nFlying overhead, sounding a thousand voices\nExulting: Glory be in the heaven, etc._\n\nOnce more\nA child is born, and it has no father,\nAnd it is right to rejoice: our past life appears\nAs a wake behind us, and we plunge on into the sea of pain.\n\nI have felt this joy before, it is like the harsh grasses\nOn lonely beaches, this strange sweetness\nOf medieval music, a hoarse joy,\nLike birds’, or the joy of trackless seas,\nColumbus’ ships covered with ice,\nPalace children dancing among finely-worked gold:\n\nAs I listen, I am a ship, skirting\nA thousand harbors, as once, sailing off the coast of Crete,\nAnd turning in, we will find the steep climb from the harbor;\nThe voyage goes on. The joy of sailing and the open sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "in-bowling-green-kentucky": { - "title": "“In Bowling Green, Kentucky”", - "body": "The mourning dove’s call woke me\nIn the still night, when it was still night\nTo me. Those sounds came from a time\nBefore the box radio, even, and they said,\nA man is walking alone down the canyon.\nThere’s a baby lost. I saw my dead father\nLast night near the cottonwood grove.\n\nThe mourning dove’s story, so lonely\nIn the morning, is a tale of water. It says:\nRemember that the cool egg is waiting\nStill on the floor of the swift river,\nAnd my calls will bring it forth.\nThen this world of taxes will disappear\nAnd you’ll be with your mother again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "iseult-and-the-badger": { - "title": "“Iseult and the Badger”", - "body": "The ink we use to write seeps in through our fingers.\nWhat we call reason is the way the parasite\nLearns to live in the saint’s intestinal tract.\n\nEven the finest reason still contains the darkness\nFrom feathers packed together; General Patton\nWas a salmon who grew large in the Etruscan pool.\n\nPoetry, being language, is woven from animal hair.\nThe badgers and the thrushes soak up the stain of separation,\nJust as lanolin makes the shearer’s hands soft.\n\nThe old thinkers of quiddity remind us\nOf the fear the hogs feel hanging by their hind legs;\nFor we know our throats are open to the unfaithful.\n\nIseult said, “I was climbing on the sounds of my lover’s\nName toward God! Then a badger ran past.\nWhen I said, ‘Oh badger,’ I fell to earth.”\n\nPerhaps if we used no words at all in poems\nWe could continue to climb, but things seep in.\nWe are porous to the piled leaves on the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-journey-with-women": { - "title": "“A Journey with Women”", - "body": "Floating in turtle blood, going backward and forward,\nWe wake up like a mad sea-urchin\nOn the bloody fields near the secret pass--\nThere the dead sleep in jars …\n\nOr we go at night slowly into the tunnels of the tortoise’s claws,\nCarrying chunks of the moon\nTo light the tunnels,\nListening for the sound of falling rocks.\n\nWaking, we find ourselves in the tortoise’s beak,\nAs he carries us high over New Jersey!\nGoing swiftly through the darkness between the constellations …\n\nThe body becomes transparent as it flies!\nWe sail through space, falling, like a tear\nMade of crystal that gathers in the moonlight …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-late-spring-day-in-my-life": { - "title": "“A Late Spring Day in My Life”", - "body": "A silence hovers over the earth:\nThe grass lifts lightly in the heat\nLike the ancient wing of a bird.\nA horse gazes steadily at me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "late-at-night-during-a-visit-of-friends": { - "title": "“Late at Night during a Visit of Friends”", - "body": "We spent all day fishing and talking.\nAt last, late at night, I sit at my desk alone.\nAnd rise and walk out in the summery night.\nA dark thing hopped near me in the grass.\n\nThe trees were breathing, the windmill slowly pumped.\nOver head the rain clouds that rained on Ortonville\nCovered half the stars.\nThe air was still cool from their rain.\n\nIt is very late.\nI am the only one awake.\nMen and women I love are sleeping nearby.\n\nThe human face shines as it speaks of things\nNear itself, thoughts full of dreams.\nThe human face shines like a dark sky\nAs it speaks of those things that oppress the living.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-life-of-weeds": { - "title": "“The Life of Weeds”", - "body": "The cry of those being eaten by America,\nOthers pale and soft being stored for later eating\n\nAnd Jefferson\nWho saw hope in new oats\n\nThe wild houses go on\nWith long hair growing from between their toes\nThe feet at night get up\nAnd run down the long white roads by themselves\n\nDams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert\n\nMinisters who dive headfirst into the earth\nThe pale flesh\nSpreading guiltily into new literatures\n\nThis is why these poems are so sad\nThe long dead running over the fields\n\nThe mass sinking down\nThe light in children’s faces fading at six or seven\nThe world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "living-at-the-end-of-time": { - "title": "“Living at the End of Time”", - "body": "There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,\nAnd so much discontent at the end of day,\nAnd so much satisfaction when a train goes by.\n\nI don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,\nNor why elephants keep raising their trunks,\nNor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.\n\nA handsome child is a gift from God,\nAnd a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,\nAnd a wound is an inheritance from the wind.\n\nSome say we are living at the end of time,\nBut I believe a thousand pagan ministers\nWill arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.\n\nThere’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist\nHas been laying his hands on earth for so long\nThat the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.\n\nIt’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster\nIs saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel\nSo much satisfaction when a train goes by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "looking-at-some-flowers": { - "title": "“Looking at Some Flowers”", - "body": "Light is around the petals, and behind them:\nSome petals are living on the other side of the light.\nLike sunlight drifting onto the carpet\nWhere the casket stands, not knowing which world it is in.\nAnd fuzzy leaves, hair growing from some animal\nBuried in the green trenches of the plant.\nOr the ground this house is on,\nOnly free of the sea for five or six thousand years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-moose": { - "title": "“The Moose”", - "body": "The Arctic moose drinks at the tundra’s edge,\nswirling the watercress with his mouth.\nHow fresh the water is, the coolness of the far North.\nA light wind moves through the deep firs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "morning-in-marrakesh": { - "title": "“Morning in Marrakesh”", - "body": "Even in Marrakesh we still have to decide\nWhat morning is. During the night people\nWe hadn’t even met whispered in our ears\nThoughts that would have changed our lives,\nMight have, if we had heard them earlier.\nSo the dreamer never gives up. He’s come\nAcross the desert, ignoring the sun.\nHe’s waited for night. Down in the patio\nDawn has drawn the hotel cats away\nFrom their place under the folding chairs.\nA cat drinks from the pool--its long\nBlack tail points toward the desert.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poem-in-praise-of-solitude": { - "title": "“Poem in Praise of Solitude”", - "body": "In the deep fall, the body awakes,\nAnd we find lions on the sea-shore--\nNothing to fear.\nThe wind rises, the water is born,\nSpreading white tomb clothes on a rocky shore,\nDrawing us up\nFrom the bed of the land.\n\nWe did not come to remain whole.\nWe came to lose our leaves like the trees,\nThe trees that are broken\nAnd start again, drawing up from the great roots;\nLike mad poets captured by the Moors,\nMen who live out\nA second life.\n\nThat we should know of poverty and rags,\nThat we should taste the weed of Dillinger,\nAnd swim in the sea,\nNot always walking on dry land,\nAnd, dancing, fund in the trees a savior,\nA home in dark grass,\nAnd nourishment in death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "poem": { - "title": "“Poem”", - "body": "There is dust that is near us,\nWaves breaking on shores just over the hill,\nTrees full of birds that we have never seen,\nNets drawn down with dark fish.\n\nThe evening arrives; we look up and it is there;\nIt has come through the nets of the stars,\nThrough the tissues of the grass,\nWalking quietly over the asylums of the water.\n\nThe day shall never end, we think;\nWe have hair that seems born for the daylight;\nBut at last the quiet water of the night shall rise,\nAnd our skin shall see far away, as it does under water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "prayer-for-my-father": { - "title": "“Prayer for My Father”", - "body": "Your head is still\nrestless, rolling\neast and west.\nThat body in you\ninsisting on living\nis the old hawk\nfor whom the world\ndarkens.\nIf I am not\nwith you when you die,\nthat is just.\n\nIt is all right.\nThat part of you cleaned\nmy bones more\nthan once. But I\nwill meet you\nin the young hawk\nwhom I see\ninside both\nyou and me; he\nwill guide\nyou to the Lord of Night,\nwho will give you\nthe tenderness\nyou wanted here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-ramage-for-awakening-sorrow": { - "title": "“A Ramage for Awakening Sorrow”", - "body": "The grackles stroll about on the black floor of sorrow.\nRabbis robed in saffron feed them\nminnow bread … They come to meet you.\nFicino and Moses and his black wife\nwalk like birds and dance. Among the stalks of wild grass\nthe saddled horses drink from sorrow tanks.\nBut the grackles’ toes are springy--they walk\nover the human footprints the dreamer made last night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-ramage-for-the-star-man-mourning": { - "title": "“A Ramage for the Star Man, Mourning”", - "body": "The star man, mourning, floats among the stars\nfirmly, the farms beneath his feet.\nHow long it takes for me to climb into grief!\nFifty years old, and still held in the dark,\nin the unfinished, the hopeful, what longs for solution.\nAs that girl there, who explains things, combing\nher hair … the face seems alert, the body\nstill drifting through the ponderous farms of ocean.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "riderless-horses": { - "title": "“Riderless Horses”", - "body": "An owl on the dark waters\nAnd so many torches smoking\nBy mossy stone\nAnd horses that are seen riderless on moonlit nights\nA candle that flutters as a black hand\nReaches out\nAll of these mean\nA man with coins on his eyes\n\nThe vast waters\nThe cry of seagulls", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seeing-the-eclipse-in-maine": { - "title": "“Seeing the Eclipse in Maine”", - "body": "It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,\nWe were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard\nAnd a pin, and we all cried out when the sun\nAppeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.\n\nIt was hard to believe. The high school teacher\nWe’d met called it a pinhole camera,\nPeople in the Renaissance loved to do that.\nAnd when the moon had passed partly through\n\nWe saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,\nDozens of crescents--made the same way--\nThousands! Even our straw hats produced\nA few as we moved them over the bare granite.\n\nWe shared chocolate, and one man from Maine\nTold a joke. Suns were everywhere--at our feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shabistari-and-the-secret-garden": { - "title": "“Shabistari and the Secret Garden”", - "body": "I can’t stop praising Shabistari for bringing\nThe gnat’s and the elephant’s legs close to each other.\nNext I want Sunday to be brought closer to Monday.\n\nSuppose a bit of straw were able to marry the wind.\nHaven’t you noticed those good marriages when\nThe wind and the chaff go down the road together?\n\nWhen a poem takes me to that place where\nNo story ever happens twice, all I want\nIs a warm room, and a thousand years of thought.\n\nConrad said the dark swimmer did reach his ship.\nIf we sink into the suffering that’s right for us,\nOur dreams will have all that Adam and Eve wept for.\n\nAmazing things do happen. One morning Kierkegaard\nExplains exactly what ressentiment is\nAnd the mouse agrees to marry everyone in the room.\n\nRobert, those high spirits don’t prove you are\nA close friend of truth; but you have learned to drive\nYour buggy over the prairies of human sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "snowfall-in-the-november-afternoon": { - "title": "“Snowfall in the November Afternoon”", - "body": "The grass is half-covered with snow.\nIt was the kind of snowfall that starts in late afternoon,\nAnd now the little houses of the grass are growing dark.\n\nIf I reached my hands down, near the earth,\nI could take handfulls of darkness!\nThat darkness was always there, which we never noticed.\n\nAs the snow grows heavier, the cornstalks fade farther away,\nAnd the barn moves nearer to the house.\nThe barn moves all alone in the growing storm.\n\nThe barn is full of corn, and moving toward us now\nLike a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea;\nAll the sailors on deck have been blind for many years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "suddenly-turning-away": { - "title": "“Suddenly Turning Away”", - "body": "Some words come near,\nBullheads that bite\nThe snow, moments of intimacy that are waved away,\nLost antennas of the seasnail.\nBrought to the ground.\nIt is the sun\nThat glints on us! But the shadows\nOf not-love come,\nIt cannot be stood against.\nAnd we suffer. The gold discs\nFall from our ears.\nThe sea grows cloudy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-testament": { - "title": "“The Testament”", - "body": "Chrysanthemums crying out on the borders of death,\nLone teeth walking in the icy water.\nThe heavy body mourns!\nIt howls outside the hedges of death,\nPushed out of the enclosure.\nNow it must meet the death outside the death.\n\nHaven’t you seen the cold faces outside the gate,\nThe bag of bones warming itself in a tree,\nThe rags constantly trailing those lumpish feet?\nThere is a desolation that only the Egyptian knows,\nFreezing at dawn in the desert,\nAnd the water jar turned over by a falling Testament--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "thinking-of-high-school-girls": { - "title": "“Thinking of High School Girls”", - "body": "Smoke rising over the full moon,\nLike a cloud forming inside a transparent stone,\nSmouldering fires,\nLeaves raked together still not having met the fire,\nBut all the other girls nearby going up in heavy smoke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "unanswered-letters": { - "title": "“Unanswered Letters”", - "body": "Strips of August sun come in through shutters.\nBaskets of unanswered letters lie on chairs.\nSome foolish man must live here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "waking-from-sleep": { - "title": "“Waking from Sleep”", - "body": "Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,\nTiny explosions at the waterlines,\nAnd seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.\n\nIt is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.\nWindow seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full\nOf stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.\n\nNow we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!\nShouts rise from the harbor of the blood,\nMist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.\n\nNow we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.\nOur whole body is like a harbor at dawn;\nWe know that our master has left us for the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "waking-in-the-middle-of-the-night": { - "title": "“Waking in the Middle of the Night”", - "body": "I want to be true to what I have heard. It was\nSweet to hear music last night. There is so\nMuch joy in being afraid of the world together.\n\nThe snow in the branches, the sadness in your hands,\nThe foot tracks in the mud, the old Inca faces,\nThe trout who wait all year for the acorns to descend.\n\nThe sitar player is so much like the crow, who rises\nEach morning in the sky above the black branches\nAnd cries six cries with no memory of the light.\n\nEvery musician wants his fingers to play faster\nSo that he can go deeper into the kingdom of pain.\nEach note on the string calls for one note more.\n\nThe hand that has written all these sounds down\nIs like a bird who wakes in the middle of the night\nAnd starts out toward its old nest on the mountain.\n\nRobert, I don’t know why you would have such\nGood luck these days. Those few lines about the crows\nCrying are better than a whole night of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "waking-on-the-farm": { - "title": "“Waking on the Farm”", - "body": "I can remember the early mornings--how the stubble,\na little proud with frost, snapped as we walked.\n\nHow the John Deere tractor hood pulled heat\nAway from our hands when we put in gas.\n\nAnd the way the sun brought light right out of the ground\nIt turned on a whole hill of stubble as easily as a single stone.\n\nBreathing seemed frail and daring in the morning.\nTo pull in air was like reading a whole novel\n\nThe angleworms, turned up by the plow, were uneasy\nLike shy people trying to get away from praise.\n\nFor a while we had goats. They were like turkeys,\nOnly more reckless. One butted a Chevrolet car door.\n\nWhen we washed up at noon, we were more ordinary.\nBut the water kept something of the early morning in it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "wanting-sumptuous-heavens": { - "title": "“Wanting Sumptuous Heavens”", - "body": "No one grumbles among the oyster clans,\nAnd lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.\nOnly we, with our opposable thumbs, want\nHeaven to be, and God to come, again.\nThere is no end to our grumbling; we want\nComfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.\nBut the heron standing on one leg in the bog\nDrinks his dark rum all day, and is content.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "watering-the-horse": { - "title": "“Watering the Horse”", - "body": "How strange to think of giving up all ambition!\nSuddenly I see with such clear eyes\nThe white flake of snow\nThat has just fallen in the horse’s mane!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "what-jesus-said": { - "title": "“What Jesus Said”", - "body": "The wind blows where it likes: that is what\nEveryone is like who is born from the wind.\nOh now it’s getting serious. We are the ones\nBorn from the wind that blows along the plains\nAnd over the sea where no one has a home.\nAnd that Upsetting Rabbi, didn’t he say:\n“Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.\nWhen evening comes, sleep wherever you are.\nAnd if the owners say no, shake out the dust\nFrom your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep.”\nDon’t hope for what will never come. Give up hope,\nDear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "what-kept-horace-alive": { - "title": "“What Kept Horace Alive”", - "body": "Men and women spend only a moment in Paradise.\nThe two lovers watch Charlie Chaplin eat his shoe,\nAnd a moment later find themselves barefooted in the grave.\n\nI know that I wanted more than two years with you.\nIf my wife had been able to absorb more cruelty,\nPerhaps I could have paid the fiery angels to go away.\n\nThe dead man lies in bed with his great toe\nSticking up; it is because of his toe\nThat he could carry the burden of marriage so long.\n\nSometimes I frighten that boy who sleeps on the ground.\nHe keeps his head in his arms; all he smells is the hair\nThat is left behind when the groundhog is eaten.\n\nThere are as many groundhogs as there are stars,\nWherever there is a lot of anything, we are in trouble.\nIt is the generosity of snowflakes that leads us to suicide.\n\nThe bats’ wings are the Saviours of the mosquitoes;\nAnd the cod long for the net. It was only the certainty\nOf death that kept Horace alive so long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-i-am-with-you": { - "title": "“When I Am with You”", - "body": "When I am with you, two notes of the sarod\nCarry me into a place where I am not.\nAll the farms have disappeared into air.\n\nThose wooden fence posts I loved as a boy\nI can see my father’s face through their wood,\nAnd through his face the sky as threshing ends.\n\nIt is such a blessing to hear that we will die.\nTen thousand barks become a hundred thousand;\nI knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.\n\nTouch the sarod’s string again, so that the finger\nThat touched my skin a moment ago\nCan become a lightning bolt that closes the door.\n\nNow I know why I keep hinting at the word you--\nThe sound of you carries me over the border.\nWe disappear the same way a baby is born.\n\nSome fool with my name has been trying\nTo peer all afternoon between the thick boards\nOf the fence. Tell that boy it isn’t time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "when-i-was-twenty-six": { - "title": "“When I Was Twenty-Six”", - "body": "Why God allowed Montserrat to fall\nIs not explained, nor why the Queen of Cattle\nDrove my one calf into the slaughterhouse.\n\nOf course my poems are sad. How else could they be?\nThe judge and the criminal live in my own house.\nI am constantly coming upon secret court proceedings.\n\nWhy can we achieve organization only in wartime?\nI want to know why so many plays of Sophocles were lost,\nAnd why God becomes an ox and eats the grass each night.\n\nWhen I was twenty-six, the words that fed me were killed\nAlong with the vowels that joined me to others;\nAnd the calf of language was cut up and thrown into the ditch.\n\nMy small talent was trapped under the water,\nAnd the lungs I breathed with were filled with lies.\nIf I had been human, it would have been worse.\n\nThat is what Separation is like: I know it now.\nI had only will to keep my lungs from filling with water.\nI was unfaithful even to Infidelity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-the-dumb-speak": { - "title": "“When the Dumb Speak”", - "body": "There is a joyful night in which we lose\nEverything, and drift\nLike a radish\nRising and falling, and the ocean\nAt last throws us into the ocean,\nAnd on the water we are sinking\nAs if floating on darkness.\nThe body raging\nAnd driving itself, disappearing in smoke,\nWalks in large cities late at night,\nOr reading the Bible in Christian Science windows,\nOr reading a history of Bougainville.\nThen the images appear:\nImages of death,\nImages of the body shaken in the grave,\nAnd the graves filled with sea-water;\nFires in the sea,\nThe ships smouldering like bodies,\nImages of wasted life,\nLife lost, imagination ruined,\nThe house fallen,\nThe gold sticks broken,\nThen shall the talkative be silent,\nAnd the dumb shall speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-the-master-is-united": { - "title": "“When the Master is United”", - "body": "“As soon as the master is untied, the bird soars.”\nThat is what a great teacher once said.\n“In the sad heat of noon the pheasant chicks\nSpread their new wings in the moon dust.\nOh my darling, we have experienced this.\nDoes it matter whether we are sad or happy?\nOur laughter goes back to the roots of trees\nAn old sadness returns in the sorrowing dust.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-we-dont-die": { - "title": "“Why We Don’t Die”", - "body": "In late September many voices\nTell you you will die.\nThat leaf says it, that coolness.\nAll of them are right.\n\nOur many souls--what\nCan they do about it?\nNothing. They’re already\nPart of the invisible.\n\nOur souls have been\nLonging to go home\nAnyway. “It’s late,” they say,\n“Lock the door, let’s go.”\n\nThe body doesn’t agree. It says\n“We buried a little iron\nBall under that tree.\nLet’s go get it.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "the-world-is-a-confusion-of-three-worlds": { - "title": "“The World is a Confusion of Three Worlds”", - "body": "The dark figures of politics hover in the air\nLike dark birds,\nThe new trees flutter in the backyards of New York\nAnd the boy stretches to his mother.\n\nI hear a chirping of birds on Twelfth Street,\nIn the backyard, and soon I shall dive\nInto the waterfalls of concrete,\nWhere the tiny bells of China are heard in the sunlight.\n\nThe tiny bells of China ring to call to solitude\nAnd contemplation, in a tiny mountain house\nBy green leaves, and through the bells I hear the traffic\nWhich at furst seems the noise of the Hundred Years’ War.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "written-near-rome": { - "title": "“Written near Rome”", - "body": "What if these long races go on repeating themselves\ncentury after century, living in houses painted light colors\non the beach,\nblack spiders\nhaving turned pale and fat,\nmen walking thoughtfully with their families,\nvibrations\nof exhausted violin-bodies,\nhorrible eternities of sea-pines!\nSome men will leave their houses\nTo live on rafts tied together on the ocean,\nthose left on shore will go inside tree trunks,\nsurrounded by bankers\nwhose fingers have grown long and slender,\npiercing through rotting bark for their food.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "giovanni-boccaccio": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Giovanni Boccaccio", - "birth": { - "year": 1313 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1375 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Boccaccio", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "ballatta": { - "title": "“Ballatta”", - "body": "I am young and fain to sing\nIn this happy tide of spring\nOf love and many a gentle thing,\n\nI wander through green meadows dight\nWith blossoms gold and red and white;\nRose by the thorn and lily fair,\nBoth one and all I do compare\nWith him who, worshipping my charms,\nFor aye would fold me in his arms\nAs one unto his service sworn.\n\nThen, when I find a flower that seems\nLike to the object of my dreams,\nI gather it and kiss it there,\nI flatter it in accents fair,\nMy heart outpour, my soul stoop down,\nThen weave it in a fragrant crown\nAmong my flaxen locks to wear.\n\nThe rapture nature’s floweret gay\nAwakes in me doth last alway,\nAs if I tarried face to face\nWith him whose true love is my grace;\nThoughts which its fragrancy inspires\nI cannot frame to my desires,\nMy sighs their pilgrimage do trace.\n\nMy sights are neither harsh nor sad\nAs other women’s are, but glad\nAnd tender; in so fond a wise\nThey seek my love that he replies\nBy coming hither, and so gives\nDelight to her who in him lives\nYet almost wept: “Come, for hope dies.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "sonetto": { - "title": "“Sonetto”", - "body": "Beside a fountain in a little grove\nThat fresh green fronds and pretty flowers did grace,\nThree maidens sat and talked methinks of love.\nMid golden locks, o’ershadowing each sweet face,\nFor coolness was entwined a leaf-green spray,\nAnd all the while a gentle zephyr played\nThrough green and golden in a tender way,\nWeaving a web of sunshine and of shade.\n\nAfter a while, unto the other two\nOne spoke, and I could hear her words: “Think you\nThat if our lovers were to happen by\nWe would all run away for very fright?”\nThe others answered her: “From such delight\nShe were a little fool who’d wish to fly!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "louise-bogan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louise Bogan", - "birth": { - "year": 1897 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1970 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bogan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "betrothed": { - "title": "“Betrothed”", - "body": "You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,\nYou have said my name as a prayer.\nHere where trees are planted by the water\nI have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,\nAnd your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,\n\nMy mother remembers the agony of her womb\nAnd long years that seemed to promise more than this.\nShe says, “You do not love me,\nYou do not want me,\nYou will go away.”\n\nIn the country whereto I go\nI shall not see the face of my friend\nNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;\nTogether we shall not find\nThe land on whose hills bends the new moon\nIn air traversed of birds.\n\nWhat have I thought of love?\nI have said, “It is beauty and sorrow.”\nI have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor\nAs a wind out of old time …\n\nBut there is only the evening here,\nAnd the sound of willows\nNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "medusa": { - "title": "“Medusa”", - "body": "I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,\nFacing a sheer sky.\nEverything moved,--a bell hung ready to strike,\nSun and reflection wheeled by.\n\nWhen the bare eyes were before me\nAnd the hissing hair,\nHeld up at a window, seen through a door.\nThe stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead\nFormed in the air.\n\nThis is a dead scene forever now.\nNothing will ever stir.\nThe end will never brighten it more than this,\nNor the rain blur.\n\nThe water will always fall, and will not fall,\nAnd the tipped bell make no sound.\nThe grass will always be growing for hay\nDeep on the ground.\n\nAnd I shall stand here like a shadow\nUnder the great balanced day,\nMy eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,\nAnd does not drift away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "words-for-departure": { - "title": "“Words for Departure”", - "body": "# I.\n\nNothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.\nWhen we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,\nThe window-sills were wet from rain in the night,\nBirds scattered and settled over chimneypots\nAs among grotesque trees.\n\nNothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.\nSlight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,\nThe afternoon sifted coolness\nAnd people drew together in streets becoming deserted.\nThere was a moon, and light in a shop-front,\nAnd dusk falling like precipitous water.\n\nHand clasped hand\nForehead still bowed to forehead--\nNothing was lost, nothing possessed\nThere was no gift nor denial.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI have remembered you.\nYou were not the town visited once,\nNor the road falling behind running feet.\n\nYou were as awkward as flesh\nAnd lighter than frost or ashes.\n\nYou were the rind,\nAnd the white-juiced apple,\nThe song, and the words waiting for music.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou have learned the beginning;\nGo from mine to the other.\n\nBe together; eat, dance, despair,\nSleep, be threatened, endure.\nYou will know the way of that.\n\nBut at the end, be insolent;\nBe absurd--strike the thing short off;\nBe mad--only do not let talk\nWear the bloom from silence.\n\nAnd go away without fire or lantern\nLet there be some uncertainty about your departure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bonaventure": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Bonaventure", - "birth": { - "year": 1221 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1274 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonaventure", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "in-praise-of-the-sacred-cross": { - "title": "“In Praise of the Sacred Cross”", - "body": "Sacred Cross, O pray remember,\nYou who walk the way that’s holy;\n In it ceaselessly delight.\nCross so sacred, yea remember;\nOn it gazing, ever raising\n Eyes unto its holy light.\n\nIn the Cross, the Master guiding,\nStand secure and never waver\n For as long as you shall live.\nWeary not, but grow in fervor,\nHeart e’er yearning, zeal e’er burning,\n Giving all you have to give.\n\nLove the Cross, the world’s sure beacon,\n’Queathing you both way and leader\n Now and for eternity.\nWith this Cross so gird your body,\nThat so binding, you’ll be finding\n This your constant strength will be.\n\nLet the Cross the heart encompass;\nLet each heart be set within it,\n Satisfied and soiled no more.\nSacred Cross, O tongue proclaim it,\nOf it singing, ever ringing\n Praises forth forevermore.\n\nHeart encompassed, tongue proclaiming,\nO the joy, the Cross e’er reigning;\n What a sweetness doth impart.\nLet the Cross have all dominion;\nIn man dwelling, all compelling,\n Ruling passion of the heart.\n\nWith the Cross be saturated,\nHeart in Cross your earnest seeking\n With a love that is afire.\nWith the needs of life forgotten,\nMay mind’s dying, crucifying,\n Be your joy and your desire.\n\nBring each one great love and honor\nTo that source of man’s salvation\n With the ardour of the heart.\nTo this Cross bring with all striving,\nYour aspiring and desiring,\n All your love to it impart.\n\nIn the Cross be ever zealous,\nFinding refuge in it only,\n That your life with gladness rings.\nNailed with Christ, together suff’ring,\nWhat sweet union, What communion\n Leading you to heavenly things.\n\nSeek the Cross and seek the keys, the\nHands they pierced, the feet they hollowed,\n And that riven, bleeding side.\nFor as long as you are able,\nStand there gazing, ever praising;\n With all honor, there abide.\n\nMay this pledge be never broken,\nThat the Cross direct each action,\n Blessing you each hour and day.\nWhen the devil would defeat you,\nHim repelling, by your dwelling\n In the Cross, the healing way.\n\nDwell with body, soul, and spirit\nIn this Cross with jubilation,\n With a will you consecrate.\nIt reveals and marks the pathway,\nBoth protecting and perfecting\n Those who’d walk the way that’s straight.\n\nWhen you’re tempted, when afflicted,\nOvercome, by all forsaken;\n Troubled, weary, at a loss;\nBe not stagnant, be not sluggish,\nBe not lonely, find strength only,\n Waiting, trusting, at the Cross.\n\nIn your going, in your coming,\nWhen you’re laughing, when you’re crying,\n In your grief or joy untold;\nIn your resting, in your working,\nJubilation, tribulation,\n Grasp the Cross and firmly hold.\n\nFor each care and anxious moment,\nFor each trial, if you but seek it,\n In the Cross there is a cure.\nWhen you’re torn and plagued with torment,\nO the sweetness and completeness\n Finding there a place secure.\n\nBy the Cross the earth found healing,\nAnd the way that heavenly goodness\n All its wonders has unfurled.\nO the Cross, the gate of Heaven,\nThrough whose portals pass all mortals\n Who have overcome the world.\n\nTo the earnest soul that’s seeking\nFor the way to his salvation,\n In the Cross is the true light.\nAnd the Cross is to the perfect\nSuch a treasure, beyond measure,\n Full of beauty, grace, delight.\n\nHow the Cross reflects all virtue,\nImparts hope unto the faithful,\n To salvation is the guide.\nHow it is to the believer,\nThere retreating, him entreating;\n And his glory, grace, and pride.\n\nTo the brave the Cross is mighty;\nAs their armour and protector,\n It the enemy destroys.\nBoat and harbor, yea, a garden,\nBy it nourished, all things flourish,\n By this Cross, true place of joys.\n\nAs a tree arrayed in splendor,\nBy Christ’s blood is consecrated;\n Full of fruits to fill each need;\nFrom the Cross the soul is nourished,\nFor true living, to it giving\n Food on which the angels feed.\n\nO how happy is that person\nDwelling there with constant fervor;\n At the Cross for all his days.\nO how happy is the seeker,\nJoy unending, will ne’er bending,\n At the Cross forever stays.\n\nIn the Cross great faith discover,\nLanguish there in love and longing,\n Lifting hearts in endless praise.\nSeek the Cross, the Cross so holy,\nThere desiring, there aspiring,\n Trusting always as you gaze.\n\nOn the Cross let thoughts be dwelling,\nLet it swell the heart to fullness;\n In your mind be so agreed.\n’Round this Cross, be as you worship,\nEver working, never shirking\n In each yearning, word, and deed.\n\nOft remember, devout Brother,\nSeven times each day be mindful\n Of the passion of our Lord.\nFor by it all men find freedom;\nThose who’ve striven will be given\n Mortal man’s supreme reward.\n\nSeven times, from early morning,\nPrime, Matins, Terce, Sext, and vespers,\n Ninth, and last, when you retire;\nIf the Cross you love and honor,\nBe it seeking, to it speaking\n At these hours with great desire.\n\nSeek this Christ in whom you’re trusting,\nIn your heart bear him who suffered,\n Where’er you are, pray, so will.\nWhen you’re standing, sitting, resting,\nWhen you’re weary, all is dreary,\n When you speak and when you’re still.\n\nFix your mind on Christ in earnest.\nFor the One who for you suffered,\n Suffer such in this same way.\nOf the death of Christ, O Christian,\nBe rejoicing in the voicing\n Of your grief, both night and day.\n\nHow despised and how forsaken\nHas been made this King of Heaven;\n For man’s soul he so became.\nHungry, thirsty, poor and wanting,\nHow rejected, how subjected,\n Led away to suffer shame.\n\nHis great poverty remember,\nThe sad worthlessness and torment,\n And the punishment severe.\nBe e’er mindful of his passion,\nFor your blessing, you possessing\n Eyes to see and ears to hear.\n\nWhen they brought and crucified Him\nOn that Cross above the watchers,\n His disciples fled away.\nAs He hung there pierced and bleeding,\nOne a scoffer, drink did offer\n To this King, O dreadful day.\n\nSee the eyes of Christ so blessed,\nDarkened now from hours of suff’ring,\n And his countenance grown dim.\nHanging there, his body naked,\nBeauty draining, naught remaining\n Of the loveliness of Him.\n\nFor the sake of all man’s sinning\nOn the Cross was He so punished,\n Scourged, tormented, flesh all torn;\nLimbs ripped loose by their rough torture,\nHim defiling and reviling,\n O what violent wounds were borne.\n\nOn the Cross amidst great suff’ring,\nGod’s own Son gave forth his spirit,\n Weeping from a heart of love.\nLet us grieve with all our being,\nHeart outpouring, spirit mourning\n God’s begotten from above.\n\nYou who hear, torment your body,\nShatter self with that death’s fierceness\n Suffered at the hands of men.\nJoin with all in your lamenting\nHis rejection and dejection,\n That you feel, as He did then.\n\nGaze upon the man of sorrows,\nIn the face of death courageous;\n Yea, the last of men was He.\nSuffer, too, reproach so violent,\nYour self dying, crucifying,\n Dear to you may this Man be.\n\nWhen you see yourself afflicted,\nOvercome, by all forsaken,\n Weak, disheartened, at a loss;\nThink of Christ’s humiliation,\nHis rejection, his dejection,\n His sad grief upon that Cross.\n\nO good brother, with him suffer,\nOn his wounds forever gazing\n In whatever you may do.\nMay these wounds so fill your spirit,\nBy so seeing, ever being\n For all time as food to you.\n\nMake me strong, O crucified one,\nThat with pleasure, my heart willing,\n I your death may ever mourn.\nTo be wounded and embrace you,\nSo aspiring, so desiring\n There with you forever borne.\n\nLet thy sorrow fall as dewdrops,\nThat for you I may be grieving,\n Christ who doth rekindle me.\nNow may I your wounds e’er suffer,\nFire my yearning, soul set burning;\n O Redeemer, let it be.\n\nLet it be that all here spoken\nGlorify the One who suffered,\n To Him praise and honor bring.\nMay to me, if He so will it,\nLife be giving, sins forgiving,\n Glorious, eternal King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_cross" - } - } - }, - "in-the-lords-atoning-grief": { - "title": "“In the Lord’s Atoning Grief”", - "body": "In the Lord’s atoning grief\nBe our rest and sweet relief;\nStore we deep in heart’s recess\nAll the shame and bitterness.\n\nThorns, and cross, and nails, and lance,\nWounds, our treasure that enhance,\nVinegar, and gall, and reed,\nAnd the pang His soul that freed.\n\nMay these all our spirits sate,\nAnd with love inebriate;\nIn our souls plant virtue’s root,\nAnd mature its glorious fruit.\n\nCrucified! we Thee adore,\nThee with all our hearts implore;\nUs with saintly hands unite\nIn the realms of heavenly light.\n\nChrist, by coward hands betrayed,\nChrist, for us a Captive made,\nChrist, upon the bitter tree\nSlain for man, be praise to Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jorge-luis-borges": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jorge Luis Borges", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1986 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "argentinian", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇦🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "argentinian" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "adam-cast-forth": { - "title": "“Adam Cast Forth”", - "body": "Was there a garden or was the garden a dream?\nI ask myself, slowly in the evening light,\nAlmost for consolation, without delight,\nIf that past was real or if it only seems\nReal to me now in misery, an illusion?\n No more than a magical show\n Of a god I do not know\nBut dreamed, and that Paradise, vague now, delusion?\n But I know that Paradise will be\n Even if it does not exist for me.\nThe warring incest of Cains and Abels is the tough earth’s way\nOf punishing me. Yet it is a good thing to have known of\nHappiness and to have touched love,\nThe living garden, even if only for a day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Richard Eberhart" - } - }, - "a-compass": { - "title": "“A Compass”", - "body": "All things are words belonging to that language\nIn which Someone or Something, night and day,\nWrites down the infinite babble that is, per se,\nThe history of the world. And in that hodgepodge\n\nBoth Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,\nMy life that I don’t grasp, this painful load\nOf being riddle, randomness, or code,\nAnd all of Babel’s gibberish stream by.\n\nBehind the name is that which has no name;\nToday I have felt its shadow gravitate\nIn this blue needle, in its trembling sweep\n\nCasting its influence toward the farthest strait,\nWith something of a clock glimpsed in a dream\nAnd something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Mezey" - } - }, - "fragments-from-an-apocryphal-evangelist": { - "title": "“Fragments from an Apocryphal Evangelist”", - "body": "3. Cursed are the poor in spirit, for when they are under the ground, they will be about as they are now, above it.\n\n5. Blessed are those who know that suffering is not a crown of glory.\n\n6. It is not enough to be last, in the hope of someday being first.\n\n10. Blessed are they that do not hunger after righteousness, for they know that our fate, implacable or merciful, is the work of chance, and chance is unfathomable.\n\n14. There is no one who is the salt of the earth, and no one who, at some moment of his life, is not.\n\n24. Do not overdo the worship of truth; there is no man but who, at day’s end, has lied several times for good reason.\n\n27. I am not talking about vengeance or forgiveness; oblivion is the only forgiveness, the only vengeance.\n\n28. Doing good to one’s enemy can be a work of justice, and it isn’t hard; loving one’s enemy, ah, that is a job for angels, not for men.\n\n39. The door does the choosing, not the man.\n\n47. Blessed are the poor without bitterness and the rich without pride.\n\n50. Happy are the beloved, happy the lovers, and happy those who can do without love.\n\n51. Happy are the happy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Mezey" - } - }, - "history-of-the-night": { - "title": "“History of the Night”", - "body": "Throughout the course of the generations\nmen constructed the night.\nAt first she was blindness;\nthorns raking bare feet,\nfear of wolves.\nWe shall never know who forged the word\nfor the interval of shadow\ndividing the two twilights;\nwe shall never know in what age it came to mean\nthe starry hours.\nOthers created the myth.\nThey made her the mother of the unruffled Fates\nthat spin our destiny,\nthey sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock\nwho crows his own death.\nThe Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;\nto Zeno, infinite words.\nShe took shape from Latin hexameters\nand the terror of Pascal.\nLuis de Leon saw in her the homeland\nof his stricken soul.\nNow we feel her to be inexhaustible\nlike an ancient wine\nand no one can gaze on her without vertigo\nand time has charged her with eternity.\n\nAnd to think that she wouldn’t exist\nexcept for those fragile instruments, the eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-instant": { - "title": "“The Instant”", - "body": "Where will be the centuries, where the dream\nof swords that the Tartars dreamed of,\nwhere the strong walls that they leveled,\nwhere the Tree of Adam and the other Log?\nThe present is alone. The memory\nset the time succession and deceit\nIt’s the clock routine. Year\nis no less vain than vain history.\nBetween dawn and night there is an abyss\nof agonies, of lights, of care;\nthe face that is seen in the worn\nnight mirrors is not the same.\nThe fleeting today is dim and is eternal;\nDon’t expect another Heaven, nor another Hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "limits": { - "title": "“Limits”", - "body": "Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,\nThere must be one (which, I am not sure)\nThat I by now have walked for the last time\nWithout guessing it, the pawn of that Someone\n\nWho fixes in advance omnipotent laws,\nSets up a secret and unwavering scale\nfor all the shadows, dreams, and forms\nWoven into the texture of this life.\n\nIf there is a limit to all things and a measure\nAnd a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,\nWho will tell us to whom in this house\nWe without knowing it have said farewell?\n\nThrough the dawning window night withdraws\nAnd among the stacked books which throw\nIrregular shadows on the dim table,\nThere must be one which I will never read.\n\nThere is in the South more than one worn gate,\nWith its cement urns and planted cactus,\nWhich is already forbidden to my entry,\nInaccessible, as in a lithograph.\n\nThere is a door you have closed forever\nAnd some mirror is expecting you in vain;\nTo you the crossroads seem wide open,\nYet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.\n\nThere is among all your memories one\nWhich has now been lost beyond recall.\nYou will not be seen going down to that fountain\nNeither by white sun nor by yellow moon.\n\nYou will never recapture what the Persian\nSaid in his language woven with birds and roses,\nWhen, in the sunset, before the light disperses,\nYou wish to give words to unforgettable things.\n\nAnd the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,\nAll that vast yesterday over which today I bend?\nThey will be as lost as Carthage,\nScourged by the Romans with fire and salt.\n\nAt dawn I seem to hear the turbulent\nMurmur of crowds milling and fading away;\nThey are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;\nSpace, time, and Borges now are leaving me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "may-20-1928": { - "title": "“May 20, 1928”", - "body": "Now he is invulnerable like the gods.\nNothing on earth can hurt him, not the coldness of a woman, nor tuberculosis, nor the troubles of verse, nor that white thing the moon, which he is no longer obliged to capture in words.\nHe strolls beneath the lindens; he looks at balustrades and doorways, but not to remember them.\nNow he knows how many nights and how many mornings he has left.\nHis will has imposed on him a precise discipline. He will perform specific acts, he will cross foreseen streetcorners, he will touch a tree or a grille, that the future might be as irrevocable as the past.\nHe behaves in that way so that the event which he desires and which he fears may be nothing else than the conclusive end of a series.\nHe walks down 49th Street; it strikes him that he will never go through this or that side door.\nWithout their suspecting it, he has taken leave now of many friends.\nHe thinks of what he will never know, whether the next day will be rainy.\nHe meets an acquaintance and cracks a joke. He knows that this incident will be, on some occasion, an anecdote.\nNow he is invulnerable like the dead.\nAt a set time, he will climb some marble stairs. (This will survive in the memories of others.)\nHe will go down to the men’s room; on the checkered floor the water will soon wash away the blood. The mirror is waiting for him.\nHe will slick back his hair, he will adjust the knot of his tie (he was always a bit of a dandy, as befits a young poet), and he will try to imagine that the other man, the one in the glass, is doing these things and that he, the double, is repeating them. His hand will not tremble when the end comes. Passively, magically, the pistol will by now have rested against the temple.\nThat, I believe, is how it happened.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Mezey", - "date": { - "year": 1928, - "month": "may", - "day": 28 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "remorse-for-any-death": { - "title": "“Remorse for Any Death”", - "body": "Free of memory and of hope,\nlimitless, abstract, almost future,\nthe dead man is not a dead man: he is death.\nLike the God of the mystics,\nof Whom anything that could be said must be denied,\nthe dead one, alien everywhere,\nis but the ruin and absence of the world.\nWe rob him of everything,\nwe leave him not so much as a color or syllable:\nhere, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see,\nthere, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait.\nEven what we are thinking,\nhe could be thinking;\n\nwe have divvied up like thieves\nthe booty of nights and days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "sleep": { - "title": "“Sleep”", - "body": "If sleep is truce, as it is sometimes said,\nA pure time for the mind to rest and heal,\nWhy, when they suddenly wake you, do you feel\nThat they have stolen everything you had?\nWhy is it so sad to be awake at dawn?\nIt strips us of a gift so strange, so deep,\nIt can be remembered only in half-sleep,\nMoments of drowsiness that gild and adorn\nThe waking mind with dreams, which may well be\nBut broken images of the night’s treasure,\nA timeless world that has no name or measure\nAnd breaks up in the mirrors of the day.\nWho will you be tonight, in the dark thrall\nOf sleep, when you have slipped across its wall?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Mezey" - } - }, - "a-wolf": { - "title": "“A Wolf”", - "body": "Grey and furtive in the final twilight,\nhe lopes by, leaving his spoor along the bank\nof this nameless river that has quenched the thirst\nof his throat, these waters that repeat no stars.\nTonight, the wolf is a shade who runs alone\nand searches for his mate and feels cold.\nHe is the last wolf in all of Angle-land.\nOdin and Thor know him. In a commanding\nhouse of stone a king has made up his mind\nto put an end to wolves. The powerful\nblade of your death has already been forged\nSaxon wolf, your seed has come to nothing.\nTo be cruel isn’t enough. You are the last.\nA thousand years will pass and an old man\nwill dream of you in America. What use\ncan that future dream possibly be to you?\nTonight the men who followed through the woods\nthe spoor you left are closing in on you,\ngrey and furtive in the final twilight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Mezey" - } - } - } - }, - "anne-bradstreet": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anne Bradstreet", - "birth": { - "year": 1612 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1672 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bradstreet", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "before-the-birth-of-one-of-her-children": { - "title": "“Before the Birth of One of Her Children”", - "body": "All things within this fading world hath end,\nAdversity doth still our joyes attend;\nNo ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,\nBut with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.\nThe sentence past is most irrevocable,\nA common thing, yet oh inevitable.\nHow soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,\nHow soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,\nWe are both ignorant, yet love bids me\nThese farewell lines to recommend to thee,\nThat when that knot’s untied that made us one,\nI may seem thine, who in effect am none.\nAnd if I see not half my dayes that’s due,\nWhat nature would, God grant to yours and you;\nThe many faults that well you know I have\nLet be interr’d in my oblivious grave;\nIf any worth or virtue were in me,\nLet that live freshly in thy memory\nAnd when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,\nYet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.\nAnd when thy loss shall be repaid with gains\nLook to my little babes, my dear remains.\nAnd if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,\nThese o protect from step Dames injury.\nAnd if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,\nWith some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;\nAnd kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,\nWho with salt tears this last Farewel did take.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-night-when-others-soundly-slept": { - "title": "“By Night when Others Soundly Slept”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nBy night when others soundly slept\nAnd hath at once both ease and Rest,\nMy waking eyes were open kept\nAnd so to lie I found it best.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI sought him whom my Soul did Love,\nWith tears I sought him earnestly.\nHe bow’d his ear down from Above.\nIn vain I did not seek or cry.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nMy hungry Soul he fill’d with Good;\nHe in his Bottle put my tears,\nMy smarting wounds washt in his blood,\nAnd banisht thence my Doubts and fears.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nWhat to my Saviour shall I give\nWho freely hath done this for me?\nI’ll serve him here whilst I shall live\nAnd Loue him to Eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "contemplations": { - "title": "“Contemplations”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nSometime now past in the Autumnal Tide,\nWhen _Phoebus_ wanted but one hour to bed,\nThe trees all richly clad, yet void of pride,\nWere gilded o’re by his rich golden head.\nTheir leaves and fruits seem’d painted but was true\nOf green, of red, of yellow, mixed hew,\nRapt were my senses at this delectable view.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI wist not what to wish, yet sure thought I,\nIf so much excellence abide below,\nHow excellent is he that dwells on high?\nWhose power and beauty by his works we know.\nSure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light,\nThat hath this under world so richly dight.\nMore Heaven than Earth was here, no winter and no night.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThen on a stately Oak I cast mine Eye,\nWhose ruffling top the Clouds seem’d to aspire;\nHow long since thou wast in thine Infancy?\nThy strength and stature, more thy years admire,\nHath hundred winters past since thou wast born?\nOr thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn,\nIf so, all these as nought, Eternity doth scorn.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThen higher on the glistering Sun I gaz’d,\nWhose beams was shaded by the leafy Tree.\nThe more I look’d, the more I grew amaz’d\nAnd softly said, what glory’s like to thee?\nSoul of this world, this Universe’s Eye,\nNo wonder some made thee a Deity:\nHad I not better known (alas) the same had I.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThou as a Bridegroom from thy Chamber rushes\nAnd as a strong man joys to run a race.\nThe morn doth usher thee with smiles and blushes.\nThe Earth reflects her glances in thy face.\nBirds, insects, Animals with Vegative,\nThy heat from death and dullness doth revive:\nAnd in the darksome womb of fruitful nature dive.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThy swift Annual and diurnal Course,\nThy daily straight and yearly oblique path,\nThy pleasing fervour, and thy scorching force,\nAll mortals here the feeling knowledge hath.\nThy presence makes it day, thy absence night,\nQuaternal seasons caused by thy might:\nHail Creature, full of sweetness, beauty, and delight.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nArt thou so full of glory that no Eye\nHath strength thy shining Rays once to behold?\nAnd is thy splendid Throne erect so high?\nAs, to approach it, can no earthly mould.\nHow full of glory then must thy Creator be?\nWho gave this bright light luster unto thee:\nAdmir’d, ador’d for ever be that Majesty.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nSilent alone where none or saw, or heard,\nIn pathless paths I lead my wand’ring feet.\nMy humble Eyes to lofty Skies I rear’d\nTo sing some Song my mazed Muse thought meet.\nMy great Creator I would magnifie,\nThat nature had thus decked liberally:\nBut Ah and Ah again, my imbecility!\n\n\n# 9.\n\nI heard the merry grasshopper then sing,\nThe black clad Cricket bear a second part.\nThey kept one tune and played on the same string,\nSeeming to glory in their little Art.\nShall creatures abject thus their voices raise?\nAnd in their kind resound their maker’s praise:\nWhilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher layes.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nWhen present times look back to Ages past\nAnd men in being fancy those are dead,\nIt makes things gone perpetually to last\nAnd calls back months and years that long since fled\nIt makes a man more aged in conceit,\nThan was _Methuselah_ or’s grand-sire great:\nWhile of their persons and their acts his mind doth treat.\n\n\n# 11.\n\nSometimes in _Eden_ fair he seems to be,\nSee glorious _Adam_ there made Lord of all,\nFancies the Apple, dangle on the Tree,\nThat turn’d his Sovereign to a naked thrall,\nWho like a miscreant’s driven from that place\nTo get his bread with pain and sweat of face:\nA penalty impos’d on his backsliding Race.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nHere sits our Grandame in retired place,\nAnd in her lap her bloody _Cain_ new born,\nThe weeping Imp oft looks her in the face,\nBewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn;\nHis Mother sighs to think of Paradise,\nAnd how she lost her bliss, to be more wise,\nBelieving him that was, and is, Father of lyes.\n\n\n# 13.\n\nHere _Cain_ and _Abel_ come to sacrifice,\nFruits of the Earth and Fatlings each do bring,\nOn _Abel_s gift the fire descends from Skies,\nBut no such sign on false _Cain_’s offering;\nWith sullen hateful looks he goes his wayes.\nHath thousand thoughts to end his brothers dayes,\nUpon whose blood his future good he hopes to raise.\n\n\n# 14.\n\nThere _Abel_ keeps his sheep, no ill he thinks,\nHis brother comes, then acts his fratricide.\nThe Virgin Earth of blood her first draught drinks,\nBut since that time she often hath been cloy’d;\nThe wretch with ghastly face and dreadful mind,\nThinks each he sees will serve him in his kind,\nThough none on Earth but kindred near then could he find.\n\n\n# 15.\n\nWho fancies not his looks now at the Barr,\nHis face like death, his heart with horror fraught,\nNor Male-factor ever felt like warr,\nWhen deep despair with wish of life hath fought,\nBranded with guilt, and crusht with treble woes,\nA Vagabond to Land of _Nod_ he goes.\nA City builds, that wals might him secure from foes.\n\n\n# 16.\n\nWho thinks not oft upon the Fathers ages.\nTheir long descent, how nephews sons they saw,\nThe starry observations of those Sages,\nAnd how their precepts to their sons were law,\nHow _Adam_ sigh’d to see his Progeny,\nCloath’d all in his black, sinful Livery,\nWho neither guilt not yet the punishment could fly.\n\n\n# 17.\n\nOur Life compare we with their length of dayes\nWho to the tenth of theirs doth now arrive?\nAnd though thus short, we shorten many wayes,\nLiving so little while we are alive;\nIn eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight\nSo unawares comes on perpetual night,\nAnd puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.\n\n\n# 18.\n\nWhen I behold the heavens as in their prime,\nAnd then the earth (though old) still clad in green,\nThe stones and trees, insensible of time,\nNor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen;\nIf winter come, and greenness then do fade,\nA Spring returns, and they more youthfull made;\nBut Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid.\n\n\n# 19.\n\nBy birth more noble than those creatures all,\nYet seems by nature and by custom curs’d,\nNo sooner born, but grief and care makes fall\nThat state obliterate he had at first:\nNor youth, nor strength, nor wisdom spring again\nNor habitations long their names retain,\nBut in oblivion to the final day remain.\n\n\n# 20.\n\nShall I then praise the heavens, the trees, the earth\nBecause their beauty and their strength last longer\nShall I wish there, or never to had birth,\nBecause they’re bigger and their bodyes stronger?\nNay, they shall darken, perish, fade and dye,\nAnd when unmade, so ever shall they lye,\nBut man was made for endless immortality.\n\n\n# 21.\n\nUnder the cooling shadow of a stately Elm\nClose sate I by a goodly Rivers side,\nWhere gliding streams the Rocks did overwhelm;\nA lonely place, with pleasures dignifi’d.\nI once that lov’d the shady woods so well,\nNow thought the rivers did the trees excel,\nAnd if the sun would ever shine, there would I dwell.\n\n\n# 22.\n\nWhile on the stealing stream I fixt mine eye,\nWhich to the long’d-for Ocean held its course,\nI markt, nor crooks, nor rubs that there did lye\nCould hinder ought but still augment its force:\nO happy Flood, quoth I, that holds thy race\nTill thou arrive at thy beloved place,\nNor is it rocks or shoals that can obstruct thy pace.\n\n\n# 23.\n\nNor is’t enough that thou alone may’st slide,\nBut hundred brooks in thy cleer waves do meet,\nSo hand in hand along with thee they glide\nTo _Thetis_ house, where all imbrace and greet:\nThou Emblem true of what I count the best,\nO could I lead my Rivolets to rest,\nSo may we press to that vast mansion, ever blest.\n\n\n# 24.\n\nYe Fish which in this liquid Region ’bide\nThat for each season have your habitation,\nNow salt, now fresh where you think best to glide\nTo unknown coasts to give a visitation,\nIn Lakes and ponds, you leave your numerous fry,\nSo Nature taught, and yet you know not why,\nYou watry folk that know not your felicity.\n\n\n# 25.\n\nLook how the wantons frisk to tast the air,\nThen to the colder bottome streight they dive,\nEftsoon to _Neptun’s_ glassy Hall repair\nTo see what trade they, great ones, there do drive,\nWho forrage o’re the spacious sea-green field,\nAnd take the trembling prey before it yield,\nWhose armour is their scales, their spreading fins their shield.\n\n\n# 26.\n\nWhile musing thus with contemplation fed,\nAnd thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,\nThe sweet-tongu’d Philomel percht ore my head,\nAnd chanted forth a most melodious strain\nWhich rapt me so with wonder and delight,\nI judg’d my hearing better than my sight,\nAnd wisht me wings with her a while to take my flight.\n\n\n# 27.\n\nO merry Bird (said I) that fears no snares,\nThat neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn,\nFeels no sad thoughts, nor cruciating cares\nTo gain more good, or shun what might thee harm\nThy clothes ne’re wear, thy meat is every where,\nThy bed a bough, thy drink the water cleer,\nReminds not what is past, nor whats to come dost fear.\n\n\n# 28.\n\nThe dawning morn with songs thou dost prevent,\nSets hundred notes unto thy feathered crew,\nSo each one tunes his pretty instrument,\nAnd warbling out the old, begin anew,\nAnd thus they pass their youth in summer season,\nThen follow thee into a better Region,\nWhere winter’s never felt by that sweet airy legion.\n\n\n# 29.\n\nMan at the best a creature frail and vain,\nIn knowledge ignorant, in strength but weak,\nSubject to sorrows, losses, sickness, pain,\nEach storm his state, his mind, his body break,\nFrom some of these he never finds cessation,\nBut day or night, within, without, vexation,\nTroubles from foes, from friends, from dearest, near’st Relation.\n\n\n# 30.\n\nAnd yet this sinfull creature, frail and vain,\nThis lump of wretchedness, of sin and sorrow,\nThis weather-beaten vessel wrackt with pain,\nJoys not in hope of an eternal morrow;\nNor all his losses, crosses and vexation,\nIn weight, in frequency and long duration\nCan make him deeply groan for that divine Translation.\n\n\n# 31.\n\nThe Mariner that on smooth waves doth glide,\nSings merrily and steers his Barque with ease,\nAs if he had command of wind and tide,\nAnd now becomes great Master of the seas;\nBut suddenly a storm spoils all the sport,\nAnd makes him long for a more quiet port,\nWhich ’gainst all adverse winds may serve for fort.\n\n\n# 32.\n\nSo he that faileth in this world of pleasure,\nFeeding on sweets, that never bit of th’ sowre,\nThat’s full of friends, of honour and of treasure,\nFond fool, he takes this earth ev’n for heav’ns bower,\nBut sad affliction comes and makes him see\nHere’s neither honour, wealth, nor safety;\nOnly above is found all with security.\n\n\n# 33.\n\nO Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,\nThat draws oblivions curtains over kings,\nTheir sumptuous monuments, men know them not,\nTheir names without a Record are forgot,\nTheir parts, their ports, their pomp’s all laid in th’ dust.\nNor wit, nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust;\nBut he whose name is grav’d in the white stone\nShall last and shine when all of these are gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-four-ages-of-man": { - "title": "“The Four Ages of Man”", - "body": "# _Introduction_\n\nLo now! four other acts upon the stage,\nChildhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.\nThe first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water,\nUnstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature.\nThe second: frolic claims his pedigree;\nFrom blood and air, for hot and moist is he.\nThe third of fire and choler is compos’d,\nVindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d.\nThe last, of earth and heavy melancholy,\nSolid, hating all lightness, and all folly.\nChildhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show,\nHis spring was intermixed with some snow.\nUpon his head a Garland Nature set:\nOf Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet.\nSuch cold mean flowers (as these) blossom betime,\nBefore the Sun hath throughly warm’d the clime.\nHis hobby striding, did not ride, but run,\nAnd in his hand an hour-glass new begun,\nIn dangers every moment of a fall,\nAnd when ’tis broke, then ends his life and all.\nBut if he held till it have run its last,\nThen may he live till threescore years or past.\nNext, youth came up in gorgeous attire\n(As that fond age, doth most of all desire),\nHis Suit of Crimson, and his Scarf of Green.\nIn’s countenance, his pride quickly was seen.\nGarland of Roses, Pinks, and Gillyflowers\nSeemed to grow on’s head (bedew’d with showers).\nHis face as fresh, as is Aurora fair,\nWhen blushing first, she ’gins to red the Air.\nNo wooden horse, but one of metal try’d:\nHe seems to fly, or swim, and not to ride.\nThen prancing on the Stage, about he wheels;\nBut as he went, death waited at his heels.\nThe next came up, in a more graver sort,\nAs one that cared for a good report.\nHis Sword by’s side, and choler in his eyes,\nBut neither us’d (as yet) for he was wise,\nOf Autumn fruits a basket on his arm,\nHis golden rod in’s purse, which was his charm.\nAnd last of all, to act upon this Stage,\nLeaning upon his staff, comes up old age.\nUnder his arm a Sheaf of wheat he bore,\nA Harvest of the best: what needs he more?\nIn’s other hand a glass, ev’n almost run,\nThis writ about: This out, then I am done.\nHis hoary hairs and grave aspect made way,\nAnd all gave ear to what he had to say.\nThese being met, each in his equipage\nIntend to speak, according to their age,\nBut wise Old-age did with all gravity\nTo childish childhood give precedency,\nAnd to the rest, his reason mildly told:\nThat he was young, before he grew so old.\nTo do as he, the rest full soon assents,\nTheir method was that of the Elements,\nThat each should tell what of himself he knew,\nBoth good and bad, but yet no more then’s true.\nWith heed now stood, three ages of frail man,\nTo hear the child, who crying, thus began.\n\n\n# _Childhood_\n\nAh me! conceiv’d in sin, and born in sorrow,\nA nothing, here to day, but gone to morrow,\nWhose mean beginning, blushing can’t reveal,\nBut night and darkness must with shame conceal.\nMy mother’s breeding sickness, I will spare,\nHer nine months’ weary burden not declare.\nTo shew her bearing pangs, I should do wrong,\nTo tell that pain, which can’t be told by tongue.\nWith tears into this world I did arrive;\nMy mother still did waste, as I did thrive,\nWho yet with love and all alacity,\nSpending was willing to be spent for me.\nWith wayward cries, I did disturb her rest,\nWho sought still to appease me with her breast;\nWith weary arms, she danc’d, and By, By, sung,\nWhen wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong.\nWhen Infancy was past, my Childishness\nDid act all folly that it could express.\nMy silliness did only take delight,\nIn that which riper age did scorn and slight,\nIn Rattles, Bables, and such toyish stuff.\nMy then ambitious thoughts were low enough.\nMy high-born soul so straitly was confin’d\nThat its own worth it did not know nor mind.\nThis little house of flesh did spacious count,\nThrough ignorance, all troubles did surmount,\nYet this advantage had mine ignorance,\nFreedom from Envy and from Arrogance.\nHow to be rich, or great, I did not cark,\nA Baron or a Duke ne’r made my mark,\nNor studious was, Kings favours how to buy,\nWith costly presents, or base flattery;\nNo office coveted, wherein I might\nMake strong my self and turn aside weak right.\nNo malice bare to this or that great Peer,\nNor unto buzzing whisperers gave ear.\nI gave no hand, nor vote, for death, of life.\nI’d nought to do, ’twixt Prince, and peoples’ strife.\nNo Statist I: nor Marti’list i’ th’ field.\nWhere e’re I went, mine innocence was shield.\nMy quarrels, not for Diadems, did rise,\nBut for an Apple, Plumb, or some such prize.\nMy strokes did cause no death, nor wounds, nor scars.\nMy little wrath did cease soon as my wars.\nMy duel was no challenge, nor did seek.\nMy foe should weltering, with his bowels reek.\nI had no Suits at law, neighbours to vex,\nNor evidence for land did me perplex.\nI fear’d no storms, nor all the winds that blows.\nI had no ships at Sea, no fraughts to loose.\nI fear’d no drought, nor wet; I had no crop,\nNor yet on future things did place my hope.\nThis was mine innocence, but oh the seeds\nLay raked up of all the cursed weeds,\nWhich sprouted forth in my insuing age,\nAs he can tell, that next comes on the stage.\nBut yet me let me relate, before I go,\nThe sins and dangers I am subject to:\nFrom birth stained, with Adam’s sinful fact,\nFrom thence I ’gan to sin, as soon as act;\nA perverse will, a love to what’s forbid;\nA serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid;\nA lying tongue as soon as it could speak\nAnd fifth Commandment do daily break;\nOft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry;\nThen nought can please, and yet I know not why.\nAs many was my sins, so dangers too,\nFor sin brings sorrow, sickness, death, and woe,\nAnd though I miss the tossings of the mind,\nYet griefs in my frail flesh I still do find.\nWhat gripes of wind, mine infancy did pain?\nWhat tortures I, in breeding teeth sustain?\nWhat crudities my cold stomach hath bred?\nWhence vomits, worms, and flux have issued?\nWhat breaches, knocks, and falls I daily have?\nAnd some perhaps, I carry to my grave.\nSometimes in fire, sometimes in water fall:\nStrangely preserv’d, yet mind it not at all.\nAt home, abroad, my danger’s manifold\nThat wonder ’tis, my glass till now doth hold.\nI’ve done: unto my elders I give way,\nFor ’tis but little that a child can say.\n\n\n# _Youth_\n\nMy goodly clothing and beauteous skin\nDeclare some greater riches are within,\nBut what is best I’ll first present to view,\nAnd then the worst, in a more ugly hue,\nFor thus to do we on this Stage assemble,\nThen let not him, which hath most craft dissemble.\nMine education, and my learning’s such,\nAs might my self, and others, profit much:\nWith nurture trained up in virtue’s Schools;\nOf Science, Arts, and Tongues, I know the rules;\nThe manners of the Court, I likewise know,\nNor ignorant what they in Country do.\nThe brave attempts of valiant Knights I prize\nThat dare climb Battlements, rear’d to the skies.\nThe snorting Horse, the Trumpet, Drum I like,\nThe glist’ring Sword, and well advanced Pike.\nI cannot lie in trench before a Town,\nNor wait til good advice our hopes do crown.\nI scorn the heavy Corslet, Musket-proof;\nI fly to catch the Bullet that’s aloof.\nThough thus in field, at home, to all most kind,\nSo affable that I do suit each mind,\nI can insinuate into the breast\nAnd by my mirth can raise the heart deprest.\nSweet Music rapteth my harmonious Soul,\nAnd elevates my thoughts above the Pole.\nMy wit, my bounty, and my courtesy\nMakes all to place their future hopes on me.\nThis is my best, but youth (is known) alas,\nTo be as wild as is the snuffing Ass,\nAs vain as froth, as vanity can be,\nThat who would see vain man may look on me:\nMy gifts abus’d, my education lost,\nMy woful Parents’ longing hopes all crost;\nMy wit evaporates in merriment;\nMy valour in some beastly quarrel’s spent;\nMartial deeds I love not, ’cause they’re virtuous,\nBut doing so, might seem magnanimous.\nMy Lust doth hurry me to all that’s ill,\nI know no Law, nor reason, but my will;\nSometimes lay wait to take a wealthy purse\nOr stab the man in’s own defence, that’s worse.\nSometimes I cheat (unkind) a female Heir\nOf all at once, who not so wise, as fair,\nTrusteth my loving looks and glozing tongue\nUntil her friends, treasure, and honour’s gone.\nSometimes I sit carousing others’ health\nUntil mine own be gone, my wit, and wealth.\nFrom pipe to pot, from pot to words and blows,\nFor he that loveth Wine wanteth no woes.\nDays, nights, with Ruffins, Roarers, Fiddlers spend,\nTo all obscenity my ears I bend,\nAll counsel hate which tends to make me wise,\nAnd dearest friends count for mine enemies.\nIf any care I take, ’tis to be fine,\nFor sure my suit more than my virtues shine.\nIf any time from company I spare,\n’Tis spent in curling, frisling up my hair,\nSome young Adonais I do strive to be.\nSardana Pallas now survives in me.\nCards, Dice, and Oaths, concomitant, I love;\nTo Masques, to Plays, to Taverns still I move;\nAnd in a word, if what I am you’d hear,\nSeek out a British, bruitish Cavalier.\nSuch wretch, such monster am I; but yet more\nI want a heart all this for to deplore.\nThus, thus alas! I have mispent my time,\nMy youth, my best, my strength, my bud, and prime,\nRemembring not the dreadful day of Doom,\nNor yet the heavy reckoning for to come,\nThough dangers do attend me every hour\nAnd ghastly death oft threats me with her power:\nSometimes by wounds in idle combats taken,\nSometimes by Agues all my body shaken;\nSometimes by Fevers, all my moisture drinking,\nMy heart lies frying, and my eyes are sinking.\nSometimes the Cough, Stitch, painful Pleurisy,\nWith sad affrights of death, do menace me.\nSometimes the loathsome Pox my face be-mars\nWith ugly marks of his eternal scars.\nSometimes the Frenzy strangely mads my Brain\nThat oft for it in Bedlam I remain.\nToo many’s my Diseases to recite,\nThat wonder ’tis I yet behold the light,\nThat yet my bed in darkness is not made,\nAnd I in black oblivion’s den long laid.\nOf Marrow full my bones, of Milk my breasts,\nCeas’d by the gripes of Serjeant Death’s Arrests:\nThus I have said, and what I’ve said you see,\nChildhood and youth is vain, yea vanity.\n\n\n# _Middle Age_\n\nChildhood and youth forgot, sometimes I’ve seen,\nAnd now am grown more staid that have been green,\nWhat they have done, the same was done by me:\nAs was their praise, or shame, so mine must be.\nNow age is more, more good ye do expect;\nBut more my age, the more is my defect.\nBut what’s of worth, your eyes shall first behold,\nAnd then a world of dross among my gold.\nWhen my Wild Oats were sown, and ripe, and mown,\nI then receiv’d a harvest of mine own.\nMy reason, then bad judge, how little hope\nSuch empty seed should yield a better crop.\nI then with both hands graspt the world together,\nThus out of one extreme into another,\nBut yet laid hold on virtue seemingly:\nWho climbs without hold, climbs dangerously.\nBe my condition mean, I then take pains\nMy family to keep, but not for gains.\nIf rich, I’m urged then to gather more\nTo bear me out i’ th’ world and feed the poor;\nIf a father, then for children must provide,\nBut if none, then for kindred near ally’d;\nIf Noble, then mine honour to maintain;\nIf not, yet wealth, Nobility can gain.\nFor time, for place, likewise for each relation,\nI wanted not my ready allegation.\nYet all my powers for self-ends are not spent,\nFor hundreds bless me for my bounty sent,\nWhose loins I’ve cloth’d, and bellies I have fed,\nWith mine own fleece, and with my household bread.\nYea, justice I have done, was I in place,\nTo cheer the good and wicked to deface.\nThe proud I crush’d, th’oppressed I set free,\nThe liars curb’d but nourisht verity.\nWas I a pastor, I my flock did feed\nAnd gently lead the lambs, as they had need.\nA Captain I, with skill I train’d my band\nAnd shew’d them how in face of foes to stand.\nIf a Soldier, with speed I did obey\nAs readily as could my Leader say.\nWas I a laborer, I wrought all day\nAs cheerfully as ere I took my pay.\nThus hath mine age (in all) sometimes done well;\nSometimes mine age (in all) been worse than hell.\nIn meanness, greatness, riches, poverty\nDid toil, did broil; oppress’d, did steal and lie.\nWas I as poor as poverty could be,\nThen baseness was companion unto me.\nSuch scum as Hedges and High-ways do yield,\nAs neither sow, nor reap, nor plant, nor build.\nIf to Agriculture I was ordain’d,\nGreat labours, sorrows, crosses I sustain’d.\nThe early Cock did summon, but in vain,\nMy wakeful thoughts up to my painful gain.\nFor restless day and night, I’m robb’d of sleep\nBy cankered care, who sentinel doth keep.\nMy weary breast rest from his toil can find,\nBut if I rest, the more distrest my mind.\nIf happiness my sordidness hath found,\n’Twas in the crop of my manured ground:\nMy fatted Ox, and my exuberous Cow,\nMy fleeced Ewe, and ever farrowing Sow.\nTo greater things I never did aspire,\nMy dunghill thoughts or hopes could reach no higher.\nIf to be rich, or great, it was my fate.\nHow was I broil’d with envy, and with hate?\nGreater than was the great’st was my desire,\nAnd greater still, did set my heart on fire.\nIf honour was the point to which I steer’d,\nTo run my hull upon disgrace I fear’d,\nBut by ambitious sails I was so carried\nThat over flats, and sands, and rocks I hurried,\nOpprest, and sunk, and sack’d, all in my way\nThat did oppose me to my longed bay.\nMy thirst was higher than Nobility\nAnd oft long’d sore to taste on Royalty,\nWhence poison, Pistols, and dread instruments\nHave been curst furtherers of mine intents.\nNor Brothers, Nephews, Sons, nor Sires I’ve spar’d.\nWhen to a Monarchy my way they barr’d,\nThere set, I rid my self straight out of hand\nOf such as might my son, or his withstand,\nThen heapt up gold and riches as the clay,\nWhich others scatter like the dew in May.\nSometimes vain-glory is the only bait\nWhereby my empty school is lur’d and caught.\nBe I of worth, of learning, or of parts,\nI judge I should have room in all men’s hearts;\nAnd envy gnaws if any do surmount.\nI hate for to be had in small account.\nIf Bias like, I’m stript unto my skin;\nI glory in my wealth I have within.\nThus good, and bad, and what I am, you see,\nNow in a word, what my diseases be:\nThe vexing Stone, in bladder and in reins,\nTorments me with intolerable pains;\nThe windy cholic oft my bowels rend,\nTo break the darksome prison, where it’s penn’d;\nThe knotty Gout doth sadly torture me,\nAnd the restraining lame Sciatica;\nThe Quinsy and the Fevers often distaste me,\nAnd the Consumption to the bones doth waste me,\nSubject to all Diseases, that’s the truth,\nThough some more incident to age, or youth;\nAnd to conclude, I may not tedious be,\nMan at his best estate is vanity.\n\n\n# _Old Age_\n\nWhat you have been, ev’n such have I before,\nAnd all you say, say I, and something more.\nBabe’s innocence, Youth’s wildness I have seen,\nAnd in perplexed Middle-age have been,\nSickness, dangers, and anxieties have past,\nAnd on this Stage am come to act my last.\nI have been young, and strong, and wise as you\nBut now, Bis pueri senes is too true.\nIn every Age I’ve found much vanity.\nAn end of all perfection now I see.\nIt’s not my valour, honour, nor my gold,\nMy ruin’d house, now falling can uphold;\nIt’s not my Learning, Rhetoric, wit so large,\nNow hath the power, Death’s Warfare, to discharge.\nIt’s not my goodly house, nor bed of down,\nThat can refresh, or ease, if Conscience frown;\nNor from alliance now can I have hope,\nBut what I have done well, that is my prop.\nHe that in youth is godly, wise, and sage\nProvides a staff for to support his age.\nGreat mutations, some joyful, and some sad,\nIn this short Pilgrimage I oft have had.\nSometimes the Heavens with plenty smil’d on me,\nSometimes, again, rain’d all adversity;\nSometimes in honour, sometimes in disgrace,\nSometime an abject, then again in place:\nSuch private changes oft mine eyes have seen.\nIn various times of state I’ve also been.\nI’ve seen a Kingdom flourish like a tree\nWhen it was rul’d by that Celestial she,\nAnd like a Cedar others so surmount\nThat but for shrubs they did themselves account.\nThen saw I France, and Holland sav’d, Calais won,\nAnd Philip and Albertus half undone.\nI saw all peace at home, terror to foes,\nBut ah, I saw at last those eyes to close,\nAnd then, me thought, the world at noon grew dark\nWhen it had lost that radiant Sun-like spark.\nIn midst of griefs, I saw some hopes revive\n(For ’twas our hopes then kept our hearts alive);\nI saw hopes dash’t, our forwardness was shent,\nAnd silenc’d we, by Act of Parliament.\nI’ve seen from Rome, an execrable thing,\nA plot to blow up Nobles and their King.\nI’ve seen designs at Ree and Cades cross’t,\nAnd poor Palatinate for every lost.\nI’ve seen a Prince to live on others’ lands,\nA Royal one, by alms from Subjects’ hands.\nI’ve seen base men, advanc’d to great degree,\nAnd worthy ones, put to extremity,\nBut not their Prince’s love, nor state so high,\nCould once reverse, their shameful destiny.\nI’ve seen one stabb’d, another lose his head,\nAnd others fly their Country through their dread.\nI’ve seen, and so have ye, for ’tis but late,\nThe desolation of a goodly State.\nPlotted and acted so that none can tell\nWho gave the counsell, but the Prince of hell.\nI’ve seen a land unmoulded with great pain,\nBut yet may live to see’t made up again.\nI’ve seen it shaken, rent, and soak’d in blood,\nBut out of troubles ye may see much good.\nThese are no old wives’ tales, but this is truth.\nWe old men love to tell, what’s done in youth.\nBut I return from whence I stept awry;\nMy memory is short and brain is dry.\nMy Almond-tree (gray hairs) doth flourish now,\nAnd back, once straight, begins apace to bow.\nMy grinders now are few, my sight doth fail,\nMy skin is wrinkled, and my cheeks are pale.\nNo more rejoice, at music’s pleasant noise,\nBut do awake at the cock’s clanging voice.\nI cannot scent savours of pleasant meat,\nNor sapors find in what I drink or eat.\nMy hands and arms, once strong, have lost their might.\nI cannot labour, nor I cannot fight:\nMy comely legs, as nimble as the Roe,\nNow stiff and numb, can hardly creep or go.\nMy heart sometimes as fierce, as Lion bold,\nNow trembling, and fearful, sad, and cold.\nMy golden Bowl and silver Cord, e’re long,\nShall both be broke, by wracking death so strong.\nI then shall go whence I shall come no more.\nSons, Nephews, leave, my death for to deplore.\nIn pleasures, and in labours, I have found\nThat earth can give no consolation sound\nTo great, to rich, to poor, to young, or old,\nTo mean, to noble, fearful, or to bold.\nFrom King to beggar, all degrees shall find\nBut vanity, vexation of the mind.\nYea, knowing much, the pleasant’st life of all\nHath yet amongst that sweet, some bitter gall.\nThough reading others’ Works doth much refresh,\nYet studying much brings weariness to th’ flesh.\nMy studies, labours, readings all are done,\nAnd my last period can e’en elmost run.\nCorruption, my Father, I do call,\nMother, and sisters both; the worms that crawl\nIn my dark house, such kindred I have store.\nThere I shall rest till heavens shall be no more;\nAnd when this flesh shall rot and be consum’d,\nThis body, by this soul, shall be assum’d;\nAnd I shall see with these same very eyes\nMy strong Redeemer coming in the skies.\nTriumph I shall, o’re Sin, o’re Death, o’re Hell,\nAnd in that hope, I bid you all farewell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-my-dear-and-loving-husband": { - "title": "“To My Dear and Loving Husband”", - "body": "If ever two were one, then surely we.\nIf ever man were loved by wife, then thee.\nIf ever wife was happy in a man,\nCompare with me, ye women, if you can.\nI prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,\nOr all the riches that the East doth hold.\nMy love is such that rivers cannot quench,\nNor ought but love from thee give recompense.\nThy love is such I can no way repay;\nThe heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.\nThen while we live, in love let’s so persever,\nThat when we live no more, we may live ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "joe-brainard": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Joe Brainard", - "birth": { - "year": 1942 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1994 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Brainard", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "30-one-liners": { - "title": "“30 One-Liners”", - "body": "_Winter_\nMore time is spent at the window.\n\n_Summer_\nYou go along from day to day with summer all around you.\n\n_Stores_\nStores tell all about people who live in the area.\n\n_Writing_\nOthers have already written what I would like to write.\n\n_Today_\nToday the sky is so blue it burns.\n\n_In the country_\nIn the country one can almost hear the silence.\n\n_The four seasons_\nThe four seasons of the year permit us to enjoy things.\n\n_Recipe_\nSmear each side of a pork chop with mustard and dredge in flour.\n\n_Book worm_\nHave always had nose stuck in book from little on.\n\n_That feeling_\nWhat defines that feeling one has when gazing at a rock?\n\n_Costa rica_\nIt was in Costa Rica I saw my first coffee plantation.\n\n_Happiness_\nHappiness is nothing more than a state of mind.\n\n_Money_\nMoney will buy a fine dog.\n\n_Our government_\nA new program is being introduced by our government.\n\n_Edward_\nOn the whole he is a beautiful human being.\n\n_Lake_\nA lake attracts a man and wife and members of a family.\n\n_The sky_\nWe see so many different things when we look at the sky.\n\n_A sexy thought_\nMale early in the day.\n\n_Potatoes_\nOne can only go so far without potatoes in the kitchen.\n\n_Mother_\nA mother is something we have all had.\n\n_Modern times_\nEvery four minutes a car comes off the assembly line they say.\n\n_The ocean_\nFoamy waves wash to shore “treasures” as a sacrifice to damp sand.\n\n_Today_\nHigh density housing is going on all around us.\n\n_Real life_\nI could have screamed the day John proposed winterizing the cottage and living there permanently.\n\n_Alaska_\nI am a very cold person here.\n\n_The year of the white man_\nThe year of the white man was a year of many beads.\n\n_Loyalty_\nLoyalty, I feel, is a very big word.\n\n_Something to think about_\nPerhaps in our mad scramble to keep our heads above water we miss the point.\n\n_Human nature_\nWhy must we be so intent on destroying everything we touch?\n\n_Company_\nWinifred was a little relieved when they were gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "richard brautigan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Brautigan", - "birth": { - "year": 1935 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1984 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "at-the-california-institute-of-technology": { - "title": "“At The California Institute Of Technology”", - "body": "I don’t care how God-damn smart\nthese guys are: I’m bored.\n\nIt’s been raining like hell all day long\nand there’s nothing to do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gee-youre-so-beautiful-that-its-starting-to-rain": { - "title": "“Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting To Rain”", - "body": "Oh, Marcia,\nI want your long blonde beauty\nto be taught in high school,\nso kids will learn that God\nlives like music in the skin\nand sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.\nI want high school report cards\nto look like this:\n\n_Playing with Gentle Glass Things_\nA\n\n_Computer Magic_\nA\n\n_Writing Letters to Those You Love_\nA\n\n_Finding out about Fish_\nA\n\n_Marcia’s Long Blonde Beauty_\nA+!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mating-saliva": { - "title": "“Mating Saliva”", - "body": "A girl in a green mini-\nskirt, not very pretty, walks\ndown the street.\n\nA businessman stops, turns\nto stare at her ass\nthat looks like a moldy\nrefrigerator.\n\nThere are now 200,000,000 people\nin America.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-nose-is-growing-old": { - "title": "“My Nose Is Growing Old”", - "body": "Yup.\nA long lazy September look\nin the mirror\nsay it’s true.\n\nI’m 31\nand my nose is growing\nold.\n\nIt starts about 1/2\nan inch\nbelow the bridge\nand strolls geriatrically\ndown\nfor another inch or so:\nstopping.\n\nFortunately, the rest\nof the nose is comparatively\nyoung.\n\nI wonder if girls\nwill want me with an\nold nose.\n\nI can hear them now\nthe heartless bitches!\n\n“He’s cute\nbut his nose\nis old.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bertolt-brecht": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Bertolt Brecht", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "alabama-song": { - "title": "“Alabama Song”", - "body": "Show me the way to the next whisky bar\nOh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nShow me the way to the next whisky bar\nOh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nFor if we don’t find the next whisky bar\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you\nI tell you\nI tell you we must die\n\nOh, moon of Alabama\nWe now must say say good-bye\nWe’ve lost our good old mamma\nAnd must have whisky\nOh, you know why.\n\nShow me the way to the next pretty girl\nOh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nShow me the way to the next pretty girl\nOh don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nFor if we don’t find the next pretty girl\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you\nI tell you\nI tell you we must die\n\nOh, moon of Alabama\nWe now must say good-bye\nWe’ve lost our good old mamma\nAnd must have a girl\nOh, you know why.\n\nShow me the way to the next little dollar\nOh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nShow me the way to the next little dollar\nOh, don’t ask why, oh, don’t ask why\nFor if we don’t find the next little dollar\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you we must die\nI tell you\nI tell you\nI tell you we must die\n\nOh, moon of Alabama\nWe now must say good-bye\nWe’ve lost our good old mamma\nAnd must have dollars\nOh, you know why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "all-of-us-or-none": { - "title": "“All of Us or None”", - "body": "Slave, who is it who shall free you?\nThose in deepest darkness lying,\nComrade, these alone shall see you,\nThey alone can hear you crying.\nComrade, only slaves can free you.\n\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\nOne alone his lot can’t better,\nChoose the gun or fetter.\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\n\nYou who hunger, who shall feed you?\nIf it’s bread you would be carving,\nCome to us, we, too, are starving.\nCome to us and let us lead you.\nOnly hungry men can feed you.\n\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\nOne alone his lot can’t better,\nChoose the gun or fetter.\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\n\nBeaten man, who shall avenge you?\nYou, on whom the blows are falling,\nHear your wounded brothers calling:\nWeakness gives us strength to lend you,\nComrade, come, we shall avenge you.\n\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\nOne alone his lot can’t better,\nChoose the gun or fetter.\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\n\nWho, O ruined man, shall dare it?\nHe, who can no longer bear it,\nCounts the blows that arm his spirit,\nTaught the time by need and sorrow,\nStrikes today and not tomorrow.\n\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.\nOne alone his lot can’t better,\nChoose the gun or fetter.\nEverything or nothing. All of us or none.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-burning-of-the-books": { - "title": "“The Burning of the Books”", - "body": "When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings\nShould be publicly burnt and everywhere\nOxen were forced to draw carts full of books\nTo the funeral pyre, an old poet, one of the best,\nDiscovered with fury when he studied the list\nOf the burned, that his own books\nHad been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table\nOn wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.\nBurn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!\nDo not treat me in this fashion.\nDon’t leave me out. Have I not\nAlways taught truth in my books? And now\nYou treat me like a liar! I order you:\nBurn me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "contemplating-hell": { - "title": "“Contemplating Hell”", - "body": "Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,\nMy brother Shelley found it to be a place\nMuch like the city of London. I,\nWho do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,\nFind, contemplating Hell, that it\nMust be even more like Los Angeles.\n\nAlso in Hell,\nI do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens\nWith flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,\nVery quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets\nWith great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless\n\nPossess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,\nLighter than their own shadows, swifter than\nFoolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which\nRosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.\nAnd houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,\nEven when inhabited.\n\nEven the houses in Hell are not all ugly.\nBut concern about being thrown into the street\nConsumes the inhabitants of the villas no less\nThan the inhabitants of the barracks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "hollywood-elegies": { - "title": "“Hollywood Elegies”", - "body": "1.\n\nUnder the long green hair of pepper trees,\nThe writers and composers work the street.\nBach’s new score is crumpled in his pocket,\nDante sways his ass-cheeks to the beat.\n\n\n2.\n\nThe city is named for the angels,\nAnd its angels are easy to find.\nThey give off a lubricant odor,\nTheir eyes are mascara-lined;\nAt night you can see them inserting\nGold-plated diaphragms;\nFor breakfast they gather at poolside\nWhere screenwriters feed and swim.\n\n\n3.\n\nEvery day, I go to earn my bread\nIn the exchange where lies are marketed,\nHoping my own lies will attract a bid.\n\n\n4.\n\nIt’s Hell, it’s Heaven: the amount you earn\nDetermines if you play the harp or burn.\n\n\n5.\n\nGold in their mountains,\nOil on their coast;\nDreaming in celluloid\nProfits them most.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "how-fortunate-the-man-with-none": { - "title": "“How Fortunate the Man with None”", - "body": "You saw sagacious Solomon\nYou know what came of him,\nTo him complexities seemed plain.\nHe cursed the hour that gave birth to him\nAnd saw that everything was vain.\nHow great and wise was Solomon.\nThe world however did not wait\nBut soon observed what followed on.\nIt’s wisdom that had brought him to this state.\nHow fortunate the man with none.\n\nYou saw courageous Caesar next\nYou know what he became.\nThey deified him in his life\nThen had him murdered just the same.\nAnd as they raised the fatal knife\nHow loud he cried: you too my son!\nThe world however did not wait\nBut soon observed what followed on.\nIt’s courage that had brought him to that state.\nHow fortunate the man with none.\n\nYou heard of honest Socrates\nThe man who never lied:\nThey weren’t so grateful as you’d think\nInstead the rulers fixed to have him tried\nAnd handed him the poisoned drink.\nHow honest was the people’s noble son.\nThe world however did not wait\nBut soon observed what followed on.\nIt’s honesty that brought him to that state.\nHow fortunate the man with none.\n\nHere you can see respectable folk\nKeeping to God’s own laws.\nSo far he hasn’t taken heed.\nYou who sit safe and warm indoors\nHelp to relieve our bitter need.\nHow virtuously we had begun.\nThe world however did not wait\nBut soon observed what followed on.\nIt’s fear of god that brought us to that state.\nHow fortunate the man with none.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "i-never-loved-you-more": { - "title": "“I Never Loved You More”", - "body": "I never loved you more, ma soeur\nThan as I walked away from you that evening.\nThe forest swallowed me, the blue forest, ma soeur\nThe blue forest and above it pale stars in the west.\n\nI did not laugh, not one little bit, ma soeur\nAs I playfully walked towards a dark fate--\nWhile the faces behind me\nSlowly paled in the evening of the blue forest.\n\nEverything was grand that one night, ma soeur\nNever thereafter and never before--\nI admit it: I was left with nothing but the big birds\nAnd their hungry cries in the dark evening sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-want-to-go-with-the-one-i-love": { - "title": "“I Want to Go with the One I Love”", - "body": "I want to go with the one I love.\nI do not want to calculate the cost.\nI do not want to think about whether it’s good.\nI do not want to know whether he loves me.\nI want to go with whom I love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "im-not-saying-anything-against-alexander": { - "title": "“I’m Not Saying Anything against Alexander”", - "body": "Timur, I hear, took the trouble to conquer the earth.\nI don’t understand him.\nWith a bit of hard liquor you can forget the earth.\n\nI’m not saying anything against Alexander,\nOnly I have seen people who were remarkable,\nHighly deserving of your admiration\nFor the fact that they were alive at all.\n\nGreat men generate too much sweat.\nIn all of this I see just a proof that\nThey couldn’t stand being on their own\nAnd smoking and drinking and the like.\nAnd they must be too mean-spirited to get\nContentment from sitting by a woman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "not-what-was-meant": { - "title": "“Not What Was Meant”", - "body": "When the Academy of Arts demanded freedom\nOf artistic expression from narrow-minded bureaucrats\nThere was a howl and a clamour in its immediate vicinity\nBut roaring above everything\nCame a deafening thunder of applause\nFrom beyond the Sector boundary.\nFreedom! it roared. Freedom for the artists!\nFreedom all round! Freedom for all!\nFreedom for the exploiters! Freedom for the warmongers!\nFreedom for the Ruhr cartels! Freedom for Hitler’s generals!\nSoftly, my dear fellows …\nThe Judas kiss for the artists follows\nHard on the Judas kiss for the workers.\nThe arsonist with his bottle of petrol\nSneaks up grinning to\nThe Academy of Arts.\nBut it was not to embrace him, just\nTo knock the bottle out of his dirty hand that\nWe asked for elbow room.\nEven the narrowest minds\nIn which peace is harboured\nAre more welcome to the arts than the art lover\n\nWho is also a lover of the art of war.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "on-the-term-exile": { - "title": "“On the Term Exile”", - "body": "No need to drive a nail into the wall\nTo hang your hat on;\nWhen you come in, just drop it on the chair\nNo guest has sat on.\n\nDon’t worry about watering the flowers--\nIn fact, don’t plant them.\nYou will have gone back home before they bloom,\nAnd who will want them?\n\nIf mastering the language is too hard,\nOnly be patient;\nThe telegram imploring your return\nWon’t need translation.\n\nRemember, when the ceiling sheds itself\nIn flakes of plaster,\nThe wall that keeps you out is crumbling too,\nAs fast or faster.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "parting": { - "title": "“Parting”", - "body": "We embrace.\nRich cloth under my fingers\nWhile yours touch poor fabric.\nA quick embrace\nYou were invited for dinner\nWhile the minions of law are after me.\nWe talk about the weather and our\nLasting friendship. Anything else\nWould be too bitter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-plum-tree": { - "title": "“The Plum Tree”", - "body": "In the courtyard stands a plum tree,\nIt’s so small, no one believes it.\nIt has a fence around it,\nSo no one can stomp on it.\nThe little tree can’t grow,\nYes--it wants to grow!\nNo one talks about it;\nIt gets too little sun.\n\nNo one believes it’s a plum tree\nBecause it doesn’t have a single plum.\nBut it is a plum tree;\nYou can tell by its leaf.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "poor-b-b": { - "title": "“Poor B. B.”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nI, Bertolt Brecht, come from the black forests.\nMy mother carried me into the cities\nWhen I was in her belly. And the chill of the forests\nWill be in me till my dying day.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe asphalt city is my home. Furnished\nFrom the outset with every sacramental perquisite:\nWith newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.\nDistrustful and idle and contented to the end.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nI am friendly to people. I put on\nA top hat because that’s what they do.\nI tell myself: They are animals with a particular smell.\nAnd I tell myself: What of it, so am I.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIn the morning I like to set a woman or two\nIn my empty rocking chairs\nAnd I look at them insouciantly and I say to them:\nIn me you have someone on whom there is no relying.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nTowards evening it’s men I gather round about me\nAnd we address our company as gentlemen.\nThey park their feet on my table\nAnd say: Things are looking up. And I don’t ask: When?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "questions": { - "title": "“Questions”", - "body": "Write me what you’re wearing! Is it warm?\nWrite me how you lie! Do you lie there softly?\nWrite me how you look! Is it still the same?\nWrite me what you’re missing! Is it my arm?\n\nWrite me how you are! Have you been spared?\nWrite me what they’re doing! Do you have enough courage?\nWrite me what you’re doing! Is it good?\nWrite me, who are you thinking of? Is it me?\n\nFreely, I’ve given you only my questions.\nAnd I hear the answers, how they fall.\nWhen you’re tired, I can’t carry it for you.\n\nIf you’re hungry, I have nothing for you to eat.\nAnd so now I leave the world\nNo longer there, as if I’ve forgotten you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "send-me-a-leaf": { - "title": "“Send Me a Leaf”", - "body": "Send me a leaf, but from a bush\nThat grows at least one half hour\nAway from your house, then\nYou must go and will be strong, and I\nThank you for the pretty leaf.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "song-of-the-storm-trooper": { - "title": "“Song of the Storm Trooper”", - "body": "From hunger I grew drowsy,\nDulled by my belly’s ache.\nThen someone shouted in my ear,\nGermany awake.\n\nThen I saw many marching\nToward the Third Reich, they said.\nSince 1 had naught to lose\nI followed where they led.\n\nAnd as I marched, there marched\nBig Belly by my side.\nWhen I shouted “Bread and jobs,”\n“Bread and jobs,” he cried.\n\nThe leader wore high boots,\nI stumbled with wet feet\nYet all of us were marching\nTo the selfsame beat.\n\nI wanted to march leftward,\nSquads right, the order was.\nI blindly followed orders\nFor better or for worse.\n\nAnd toward some new Third Reich,\nBut scarcely knowing whither,\nPale and hungry men\nAnd well-fed marched together.\n\nThey gave me a revolver\nAnd said: now shoot our foe.\nBut as I fired on his ranks\nI laid my brother low.\n\nIt was my brother, hunger\nMade us one, I know,\nAnd I am marching, marching\nWith my own and my brother’s foe.\n\nSo I have lost my brother,\nI wove his winding sheet.\nI know now by this victory\nI wrought my own defeat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-swamp": { - "title": "“The Swamp”", - "body": "I beheld many friends, and the friend I loved the most,\nhelplessly sink into the swamp\nI pass by daily.\n\nAnd a drowning was not over in a single morning.\nOften it took\nmany weeks; this made it more terrible.\nAnd the memory of our long\nagreeing talks about the swamp, which already\nheld so many.\nPowerless now I saw him leaning back\ncovered with leeches\nin the shimmering\nsoftly moving slime. Upon the sinking\nface the ghastly\nblissful smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "to-posterity": { - "title": "“To Posterity”", - "body": "# I.\n\nIndeed I live in the dark ages!\nA guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens\nA hard heart. He who laughs\nHas not yet heard\nThe terrible tidings.\n\nAh, what an age it is\nWhen to speak of trees is almost a crime\nFor it is a kind of silence about injustice!\nAnd he who walks calmly across the street,\nIs he not out of reach of his friends\nIn trouble?\n\nIt is true: I earn my living\nBut, believe me, it is only an accident.\nNothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.\nBy chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me\nI am lost.)\n\nThey tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!\nBut how can I eat and drink\nWhen my food is snatched from the hungry\nAnd my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?\nAnd yet I eat and drink.\n\nI would gladly be wise.\nThe old books tell us what wisdom is:\nAvoid the strife of the world\nLive out your little time\nFearing no one\nUsing no violence\nReturning good for evil--\nNot fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness\nPasses for wisdom.\nI can do none of this:\nIndeed I live in the dark ages!\n\n\n# II.\n\nI came to the cities in a time of disorder\nWhen hunger ruled.\nI came among men in a time of uprising\nAnd I revolted with them.\nSo the time passed away\nWhich on earth was given me.\n\nI ate my food between massacres.\nThe shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.\nAnd when I loved, I loved with indifference.\nI looked upon nature with impatience.\nSo the time passed away\nWhich on earth was given me.\n\nIn my time streets led to the quicksand.\nSpeech betrayed me to the slaughterer.\nThere was little I could do. But without me\nThe rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.\nSo the time passed away\nWhich on earth was given me.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou, who shall emerge from the flood\nIn which we are sinking,\nThink--\nWhen you speak of our weaknesses,\nAlso of the dark time\nThat brought them forth.\n\nFor we went, changing our country more often than our shoes.\nIn the class war, despairing\nWhen there was only injustice and no resistance.\n\nFor we knew only too well:\nEven the hatred of squalor\nMakes the brow grow stern.\nEven anger against injustice\nMakes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we\nWho wished to lay the foundations of kindness\nCould not ourselves be kind.\n\nBut you, when at last it comes to pass\nThat man can help his fellow man,\nDo no judge us\nToo harshly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "to-those-born-after": { - "title": "“To Those Born After”", - "body": "# I.\n\nTo the cities I came in a time of disorder\nThat was ruled by hunger.\nI sheltered with the people in a time of uproar\nAnd then I joined in their rebellion.\nThat’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.\n\nI ate my dinners between the battles,\nI lay down to sleep among the murderers,\nI didn’t care for much for love\nAnd for nature’s beauties I had little patience.\nThat’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.\n\nThe city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,\nMy speech betrayed me to the butchers.\nI could do only little\nBut without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:\nThat’s what I hoped.\nThat’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.\n\nOur forces were slight and small,\nOur goal lay in the far distance\nClearly in our sights,\nIf for me myself beyond my reaching.\nThat’s how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou who will come to the surface\nFrom the flood that’s overwhelmed us and drowned us all\nMust think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness\nThat you’ve not had to face:\n\nDays when we were used to changing countries\nMore often than shoes,\nThrough the war of the classes despairing\nThat there was only injustice and no outrage.\n\nEven so we realised\nHatred of oppression still distorts the features,\nAnger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.\nOh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,\nCould never be friendly ourselves.\n\nAnd in the future when no longer\nDo human beings still treat themselves as animals,\nLook back on us with indulgence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "what-has-happened": { - "title": "“What Has Happened?”", - "body": "The industrialist is having his aeroplane serviced.\nThe priest is wondering what he said in his sermon eight weeks ago\nabout tithes.\nThe generals are putting on civvies and looking like bank clerks.\nPublic officials are getting friendly.\nThe policeman points out the way to the man in the cloth cap.\nThe landlord comes to see whether the water supply is working.\nThe journalists write the word People with capital letters.\nThe singers sing at the opera for nothing.\nShips’ captains check the food in the crew’s galley,\nCar owners get in beside their chauffeurs.\nDoctors sue the insurance companies.\nScholars show their discoveries and hide their decorations.\nFarmers deliver potatoes to the barracks.\nThe revolution has won its first battle:\nThat’s what has happened.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "when-id-reported-to-the-couple-thus": { - "title": "“When I’d Reported to the Couple Thus”", - "body": "_The Augsburger walks with Dante through the hell of the departed. He addresses the inconsolable and reports to them that on earth some things have changed._\n\nWhen I’d reported to the couple, thus\nThat up there no one murders now for gain\nSince no one owns a thing, the faithless spouse\n\nWho’d beguiled that woman so improperly\nLifted his hand, now tied to hers by chains\nAnd looked at her and turned perplexed to me\n\nSo no one steals, if there’s no property?\nI shook my head. And as their hands just touched\nI saw a blush suffuse the woman’s cheeks.\n\nHe saw it too and cried, She hasn’t once\nShown so much since the day she was seduced!\nAnd murmuring, Then there’s no abstinence?\n\nThey moved off swiftly. And the ties that fused\nThem tight were of no weight or consequence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "a-worker-reads-history": { - "title": "“A Worker Reads History”", - "body": "Who built the seven gates of Thebes?\nThe books are filled with names of kings.\nWas it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?\nAnd Babylon, so many times destroyed.\nWho built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,\nThat city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?\nIn the evening when the Chinese wall was finished\nWhere did the masons go? Imperial Rome\nIs full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom\nDid the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.\nWere all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend\nThe night the seas rushed in,\nThe drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.\n\nYoung Alexander conquered India.\nHe alone?\nCaesar beat the Gauls.\nWas there not even a cook in his army?\nPhillip of Spain wept as his fleet\nwas sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?\nFrederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.\nWho triumphed with him?\n\nEach page a victory\nAt whose expense the victory ball?\nEvery ten years a great man,\nWho paid the piper?\n\nSo many particulars.\nSo many questions.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-bridges": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Bridges", - "birth": { - "year": 1844 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bridges", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 59 - }, - "poems": { - "the-affliction-of-richard": { - "title": "“The Affliction of Richard”", - "body": "Love not too much. But how,\nWhen thou hast made me such,\nAnd dost thy gifts bestow,\nHow can I love too much?\nThough I must fear to lose,\nAnd drown my joy in care,\nWith all its thorns I choose\nThe path of love and prayer.\n\nThough thou, I know not why,\nDidst kill my childish trust,\nThat breach with toil did I\nRepair, because I must:\nAnd spite of frighting schemes,\nWith which the fiends of Hell\nBlaspheme thee in my dreams,\nSo far I have hoped well.\n\nBut what the heavenly key,\nWhat marvel in me wrought\nShall quite exculpate thee,\nI have no shadow of thought.\nWhat am I that complain?\nThe love, from which began\nMy question sad and vain,\nJustifies thee to man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "amiel": { - "title": "“Amiel”", - "body": "Why, O Maker of all, madest thou man with affections\nTender above thyself, scrupulous and passionate?\nNay, if compassionate thou art, why, thou lover of men,\nHidest thou thy face so pitilessly from us?\nIf thou in priesthoods and altar-glory delitest,\nIn torment and tears of trouble and suffering,\nThen wert thou displeas’d looking on soft human emotion,\nThou must scorn the devout love of a sire to a son.\n’Twas but vainly of old, Man, making Faith to approach thee,\nHeld an imagin’d scheme of providence in honour;\nAnd, to redeem thy praise, judg’d himself cause, took upon him\nHumbly the impossible burden of all misery.\nNow casteth he away his books and logical idols\nLeaveth again his cell of terrified penitence;\nAnd that stony goddess, his first-born fancy, dethroning,\nHath made after his own homelier art another;\nMade sweet Hope, the modest unportion’d daughter of anguish,\nWhose brimming eye sees but dimly what it looketh on;\nDreaming a day when fully, without curse or horrible cross,\nThou wilt deign to reveal her vision of happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "among-the-tombs": { - "title": "“Among the Tombs”", - "body": "Sad, sombre place, beneath whose antique yews\nI come, unquiet sorrows to control;\nAmid thy silent mossgrown graves to muse\nWith my neglected solitary soul;\nAnd to poetic sadness care confide,\nTrusting sweet Melancholy for my guide:\n\nThey will not ask why in thy shades I stray,\nAmong the tombs finding my rare delight,\nBeneath the sun at indolent noonday,\nOr in the windy moon-enchanted night,\nWho have once reined in their steeds at any shrine,\nAnd given them water from the well divine.--\n\nThe orchards are all ripened, and the sun\nSpots the deserted gleanings with decay;\nThe seeds are perfected: his work is done,\nAnd Autumn lingers but to outsmile the May;\nBidding his tinted leaves glide, bidding clear\nUnto clear skies the birds applaud the year.\n\nLo, here I sit, and to the world I call,\nThe world my solemn fancy leaves behind,\nCome! pass within the inviolable wall,\nCome pride, come pleasure, come distracted mind;\nWithin the fated refuge, hither, turn,\nAnd learn your wisdom ere ’tis late to learn.\n\nCome with me now, and taste the fount of tears;\nFor many eyes have sanctified this spot,\nWhere grief’s unbroken lineage endears\nThe charm untimely Folly injures not,\nAnd slays the intruding thoughts, that overleap\nThe simple fence its holiness doth keep.\n\nRead the worn names of the forgotten dead,\nTheir pompous legends will no smile awake;\nEven the vainglorious title o’er the head\nWins its pride pardon for its sorrow’s sake;\nAnd carven Loves scorn not their dusty prize,\nThough fallen so far from tender sympathies.\n\nHere where a mother laid her only son,\nHere where a lover left his bride, below\nThe treasured names their own are added on\nTo those whom they have followed long ago:\nSealing the record of the tears they shed,\nThat ‘where their treasure there their hearts are fled.’\n\nGrandfather, father, son, and then again\nChild, grandchild, and great-grandchild laid beneath\nNumbered in turn among the sons of men,\nAnd gathered each one in his turn to death:\nWhile he that occupies their house and name\nTo-day,--to-morrow too their grave shall claim.\n\nAnd where are all the spirits? Ah! could we tell\nThe manner of our being when we die,\nAnd see beyond the scene we know so well,\nThe country that so much obscured doth lie!\nWith brightest visions our fond hopes repair,\nOr crown our melancholy with despair;\n\nFrom death, still death, still would a comfort come:\nSince of this world the essential joy must fall\nIn all distributed, in each thing some,\nIn nothing all, and all complete in all;\nTill pleasure, ageing to her full increase,\nPuts on perfection, and is throned in peace.\n\nYea, sweetest peace, unsought-for, undesired,\nLoathed and misnamed, ’tis thee I worship here:\nThough in most black habiliments attired,\nThou art sweet peace, and thee I cannot fear.\nNay, were my last hope quenched, I here would sit\nAnd praise the annihilation of the pit.\n\nNor quickly disenchanted will my feet\nBack to the busy town return, but yet\nLinger, ere I my loving friends would greet,\nOr touch their hands, or share without regret\nThe warmth of that kind hearth, whose sacred ties\nOnly shall dim with tears my dying eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "Wanton with long delay the gay spring leaping cometh;\nThe blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:\nAll day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:\nThe cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.\n\nNow dewy nights again and rain in gentle shower\nAt root of tree and flower have quenched the winter’s drouth:\nOn high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower\nIn bulging heads that crowd for miles the dazzling south.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "awake-my-heart": { - "title": "“Awake, My Heart”", - "body": "Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!\n\nThe darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,\nIt leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slake\nThe o’ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake!\n\nShe too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee:\nHer eyes already have sped the shades that flee,\nAlready they watch the path thy feet shall take:\nAwake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!\n\nAnd if thou tarry from her,--if this could be,--\nShe cometh herself, O heart, to be loved, to thee;\nFor thee would unashamed herself forsake:\nAwake, to be loved, my heart, awake, awake!\n\nAwake! The land is scattered with light, and see,\nUncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree;\nAnd blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake:\nAwake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!\n\nLo, all things wake and tarry and look for thee:\nShe looketh and saith, “O sun, now bring him to me.\nCome, more adored, O adored, for his coming’s sake,\nAnd awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-birds-that-sing-on-autumn-eves": { - "title": "“The Birds that Sing on Autumn Eves”", - "body": "The birds that sing on autumn eves\nAmong the golden-tinted leaves,\nAre but the few that true remain\nOf budding May’s rejoicing train.\n\nLike autumn flowers that brave the frost,\nAnd make their show when hope is lost,\nThese ’mong the fruits and mellow scent\nMourn not the high-sunned summer spent.\n\nTheir notes thro’ all the jocund spring\nWere mixed in merry musicking:\nThey sang for love the whole day long,\nBut now their love is all for song.\n\nNow each hath perfected his lay\nTo praise the year that hastes away:\nThey sit on boughs apart, and vie\nIn single songs and rich reply:\n\nAnd oft as in the copse I hear\nThese anthems of the dying year,\nThe passions, once her peace that stole,\nWith flattering love my heart console.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "christmas-eve": { - "title": "“Christmas Eve”", - "body": "_Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis_\n\nA frosty Christmas Eve\nwhen the stars were shining\nFared I forth alone\nwhere westward falls the hill,\nAnd from many a village\nin the water’d valley\nDistant music reach’d me\npeals of bells aringing:\nThe constellated sounds\nran sprinkling on earth’s floor\nAs the dark vault above\nwith stars was spangled o’er.\nThen sped my thoughts to keep\nthat first Christmas of all\nWhen the shepherds watching\nby their folds ere the dawn\nHeard music in the fields\nand marveling could not tell\nWhether it were angels\nor the bright stars singing.\n\nNow blessed be the tow’rs\nthat crown England so fair\nThat stand up strong in prayer\nunto God for our souls\nBlessed be their founders\n(said I) an’ our country folk\nWho are ringing for Christ\nin the belfries to-night\nWith arms lifted to clutch\nthe rattling ropes that race\nInto the dark above\nand the mad romping din.\n\nBut to me heard afar\nit was starry music\nAngels’ song, comforting\nas the comfort of Christ\nWhen he spake tenderly\nto his sorrowful flock:\nThe old words came to me\nby the riches of time\nMellow’d and transfigured\nas I stood on the hill\nHeark’ning in the aspect\nof th’ eternal silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "crown-winter-with-green": { - "title": "“Crown Winter with Green”", - "body": "Crown Winter with green,\nAnd give him good drink\nTo physic his spleen\nOr ever he think.\n\nHis mouth to the bowl,\nHis feet to the fire;\nAnd let him, good soul,\nNo comfort desire.\n\nSo merry he be,\nI bid him abide:\nAnd merry be we\nThis good Yuletide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "dejection": { - "title": "“Dejection”", - "body": "Wherefore to-night so full of care,\nMy soul, revolving hopeless strife,\nPointing at hindrance, and the bare\nPainful escapes of fitful life?\n\nShaping the doom that may befall\nBy precedent of terror past:\nBy love dishonoured, and the call\nOf friendship slighted at the last?\n\nBy treasured names, the little store\nThat memory out of wreck could save\nOf loving hearts, that gone before\nCall their old comrade to the grave?\n\nO soul, be patient: thou shall find\nA little matter mend all this;\nSome strain of music to thy mind,\nSome praise for skill not spent amiss.\n\nAgain shall pleasure overflow\nThy cup with sweetness, thou shalt taste\nNothing but sweetness, and shalt grow\nHalf sad for sweetness run to waste.\n\nO happy life! I hear thee sing,\nO rare delight of mortal stuff!\nI praise my days for all they bring,\nYet are they only not enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "dunstone-hill": { - "title": "“Dunstone Hill”", - "body": "A cottage built of native stone\nStands on the mountain-moor alone,\nHigh from man’s dwelling on the wide\nAnd solitary mountain-side,\n\nThe purple mountain-side, where all\nThe dewy night the meteors fall,\nAnd the pale stars musically set\nTo the watery bells of the rivulet,\n\nAnd all day long, purple and dun,\nThe vast moors stretch beneath the sun,\nThe wide wind passeth fresh and hale,\nAnd whirring grouse and blackcock sail.\n\nAh, heavenly Peace, where dost thou dwell?\nSurely ’twas here thou hadst a cell,\nTill flaming Love, wandering astray\nWith fury and blood, drove thee away.--\n\nFar down across the valley deep\nThe town is hid in smoky sleep,\nAt moonless nightfall wakening slow\nUpon the dark with lurid glow:\n\nBeyond, afar the widening view\nMerges into the soften’d blue,\nCornfield and forest, hill and stream,\nFair England in her pastoral dream.\n\nTo one who looketh from this hill\nLife seems asleep, all is so still:\nNought passeth save the travelling shade\nOf clouds on high that float and fade:\n\nNor since this landscape saw the sun\nMight other motion o’er it run,\nTill to man’s scheming heart it came\nTo make a steed of steel and flame.\n\nHim may you mark in every vale\nMoving beneath his fleecy trail,\nAnd tell whene’er the motions die\nWhere every town and hamlet lie.\n\nHe gives the distance life to-day,\nRushing upon his level’d way\nFrom man’s abode to man’s abode,\nAnd mocks the Roman’s vaunted road,\n\nWhich o’er the moor purple and dun\nStill wanders white beneath the sun,\nDeserted now of men and lone\nSave for this cot of native stone.\n\nThere ever by the whiten’d wall\nStandeth a maiden fair and tall,\nAnd all day long in vacant dream\nWatcheth afar the flying steam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-duteous-heart": { - "title": "“The Duteous Heart”", - "body": "Spirit of grace and beauty,\nWhom men so much miscall:\nMaidenly, modest duty,\nI cry thee fair befall!\n\nPity for them that shun thee,\nSorrow for them that hate,\nGlory, hath any won thee\nTo dwell in high estate!\n\nBut rather thou delightest\nTo walk in humble ways,\nKeeping thy favour brightest\nUncrown’d by foolish praise;\nIn such retirement dwelling,\nWhere, hath the worldling been,\nHe straight returneth telling\nOf sights that he hath seen,\n\nOf simple men and truest\nFaces of girl and boy;\nThe souls whom thou enduest\nWith gentle peace and joy.\n\nFair from my song befall thee,\nSpirit of beauty and grace!\nMen that so much miscall thee\nHave never seen thy face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "Clear and gentle stream,\nKnown and loved so long,\nThat hast heard the song\nAnd the idle dream\nOf my boyish day;\nWhile I once again\nDown thy margin stray,\nIn the selfsame strain\nStill my voice is spent,\nWith my old lament,\nAnd my idle dream,\nClear and gentle stream!\n\nWhere my old seat was\nHere again I sit,\nWhere the long boughs knit\nOver stream and graís\nThick translucent eaves:\nWhere back eddies play\nShipwreck with the leaves,\nAnd the proud swans stray,\nSailing one by one\nOut of stream and sun,\nAnd the fish lie cool\nIn their chosen pool.\n\nMany an afternoon\nOf the summer day\nDreaming here I lay;\nAnd I know how soon\nIdly at its hour\nFirst the deep bell hums\nFrom the minster tower,\nAnd then evening comes,\nCreeping up the glade,\nWith her lengthening shade,\nAnd the tardy boon\nOf her brightening moon.\n\nClear and gentle stream,\nEre again I go\nWhere thou dost not flow,\nWell does it beseem\nThee to hear again\nOnce my youthful song,\nThat familiar strain\nSilent now so long:\nBe as I content\nWith my old lament,\nAnd my idle dream,\nClear and gentle stream!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "eros": { - "title": "“Eros”", - "body": "Why hast thou nothing in thy face?\nThou idol of the human race,\nThou tyrant of the human heart,\nThe flower of lovely youth that art;\nYea, and that standest in thy youth\nAn image of eternal Truth,\nWith thy exuberant flesh so fair,\nThat only Pheidias might compare,\nEre from his chaste marmoreal form\nTime had decayed the colours warm;\nLike to his gods in thy proud dress,\nThy starry sheen of nakedness.\n\nSurely thy body is thy mind,\nFor in thy face is nought to find,\nOnly thy soft unchristen’d smile,\nThat shadows neither love nor guile,\nBut shameless will and power immense,\nIn secret sensuous innocence.\n\nO king of joy, what is thy thought?\nI dream thou knowest it is nought,\nAnd wouldst in darkness come, but thou\nMakest the light where’er thou go.\nAh yet no victim of thy grace,\nNone who e’er long’d for thy embrace,\nHath cared to look upon thy face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-evening-darkens-over": { - "title": "“The Evening Darkens Over”", - "body": "The evening darkens over\nAfter a day so bright\nThe windcapt waves discover\nThat wild will be the night.\nThere’s sound of distant thunder.\n\nThe latest sea-birds hover\nAlong the cliff’s sheer height;\nAs in the memory wander\nLast flutterings of delight,\nWhite wings lost on the white.\n\nThere’s not a ship in sight;\nAnd as the sun goes under\nThick clouds conspire to cover\nThe moon that should rise yonder.\nThou art alone, fond lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "first-spring-morning": { - "title": "“First Spring Morning”", - "body": "Look! Look! the spring is come:\nO feel the gentle air,\nThat wanders thro’ the boughs to burst\nThe thick buds everywhere!\nThe birds are glad to see\nThe high unclouded sun:\nWinter is fled away, they sing,\nThe gay time is begun.\n\nAdown the meadows green\nLet us go dance and play,\nAnd look for violets in the lane,\nAnd ramble far away\nTo gather primroses,\nThat in the woodland grow,\nAnd hunt for oxlips, or if yet\nThe blades of bluebells show:\n\nThere the old woodman gruff\nHath half the coppice cut,\nAnd weaves the hurdles all day long\nBeside his willow hut.\nWe’ll steal on him, and then\nStartle him, all with glee\nSinging our song of winter fled\nAnd summer soon to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-garden-in-september": { - "title": "“The Garden in September”", - "body": "Now thin mists temper the slow-ripening beams\nOf the September sun: his golden gleams\nOn gaudy flowers shine, that prank the rows\nOf high-grown hollyhocks, and all tall shows\nThat Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers;\nWhere tomtits, hanging from the drooping heads\nOf giant sunflowers, peck the nutty seeds;\nAnd in the feathery aster bees on wing\nSeize and set free the honied flowers,\nTill thousand stars leap with their visiting:\nWhile ever across the path mazily flit,\nUnpiloted in the sun,\nThe dreamy butterflies\nWith dazzling colours powdered and soft glooms,\nWhite, black and crimson stripes, and peacock eyes,\nOr on chance flowers sit,\nWith idle effort plundering one by one\nThe nectaries of deepest-throated blooms.\n\nWith gentle flaws the western breeze\nInto the garden saileth,\nScarce here and there stirring the single trees,\nFor his sharpness he vaileth:\nSo long a comrade of the bearded corn,\nNow from the stubbles whence the shocks are borne,\nO’er dewy lawns he turns to stray,\nAs mindful of the kisses and soft play\nWherewith he enamoured the light-hearted May,\nEre he deserted her;\nLover of fragrance, and too late repents;\nNor more of heavy hyacinth now may drink,\nNor spicy pink,\nNor summer’s rose, nor garnered lavender,\nBut the few lingering scents\nOf streakèd pea, and gillyflower, and stocks\nOf courtly purple, and aromatic phlox.\n\nAnd at all times to hear are drowsy tones\nOf dizzy flies, and humming drones,\nWith sudden flap of pigeon wings in the sky,\nOr the wild cry\nOf thirsty rooks, that scour ascare\nThe distant blue, to watering as they fare\nWith creaking pinions, or--on business bent,\nIf aught their ancient polity displease,--\nCome gathering to their colony, and there\nSettling in ragged parliament,\nSome stormy council hold in the high trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "a-hymn-of-nature": { - "title": "“A Hymn of Nature”", - "body": "# I.\n\nPower eternal, power unknown, uncreate:\nForce of force, fate of fate.\n\nBeauty and light are thy seeing,\nWisdom and right thy decreeing,\nLife of life is thy being.\nIn the smile of thine infinite starry gleam,\nWithout beginning or end,\nMeasure or number,\nBeyond time and space,\nWithout foe or friend,\nIn the void of thy formless embrace,\nAll things pass as a dream\nOf thine unbroken slumber.\n\n\n# II.\n\nGloom and the night are thine:\nOn the face of thy mirror darkness and terror,\nThe smoke of thy blood, the frost of thy breath.\n\nIn silence and woful awe\nThy harrying angels of death\nDestroy whate’er thou makest--\nMakest, destroyest, destroyest and makest.\nThy gems of life thou dost squander,\nTheir virginal beauty givest to plunder,\nDoomest to uttermost regions of age-long ice\nTo starve and expire:\nConsumest with glance of fire,\nOr back to confusion shakest\nWith earthquake, elemental storm and thunder.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn ways of beauty and peace\nFair desire, companion of man,\nLeadeth the children of earth.\n\nAs when the storm doth cease,\nThe loving sun the clouds dispelleth,\nAnd woodland walks are sweet in spring;\nThe birds they merrily sing\nAnd every flower-bud swelleth.\nOr where the heav’ns o’erspan\nThe lonely downs\nWhen summer is high:\nBelow their breezy crowns\nAnd grassy steep\nSpreadeth the infinite smile of the sunlit sea;\nWhereon the white ships swim,\nAnd steal to havens far\nAcross the horizon dim,\nOr lie becalm’d upon the windless deep,\nLike thoughts of beauty and peace,\nWhen the storm doth cease,\nAnd fair desire, companion of man,\nLeadeth the children of earth.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMan, born to toil, in his labour rejoiceth;\nHis voice is heard in the morn:\nHe armeth his hand and sallieth forth\nTo engage with the generous teeming earth,\nAnd drinks from the rocky rills\nThe laughter of life.\n\nOr else, in crowded cities gathering close,\nHe traffics morn and eve\nIn thronging market-halls;\nOr within echoing walls\nOf busy arsenals\nWeldeth the stubborn iron to engines vast;\nOr tends the thousand looms\nWhere, with black smoke o’ercast,\nThe land mourns in deep glooms.\n\nLife is toil, and life is good:\nThere in loving brotherhood\nBeateth the nation’s heart of fire.\nStrife! Strife! The strife is strong!\nThere battle thought and voice, and spirits conspire\nIn joyous dance around the tree of life,\nAnd from the ringing choir\nRiseth the praise of God from hearts in tuneful song.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHark! What spirit doth entreat\nThe love-obedient air?\nAll the pomp of his delight\nRevels on the ravisht night,\nWandering wilful, soaring fair:\nThere! ’Tis there, ’tis there.\nLike a flower of primal fire\nLate redeem’d by man’s desire.\n\nAway, on wings away\nMy spirit far hath flown,\nTo a land of love and peace,\nOf beauty unknown.\nThe world that earth-born man,\nBy evil undismay’d,\nOut of the breath of God\nHath for his heaven made.\n\nWhere all his dreams soe’er\nOf holy things and fair\nIn splendour are upgrown,\nWhich thro’ the toilsome years\nMartyrs and faithful seers\nAnd poets with holy tears\nOf hope have sown.\n\nThere, beyond power of ill,\nIn joy and blessing crown’d,\nChrist with His lamp of truth\nSitteth upon the hill\nOf everlasting youth,\nAnd calls His saints around.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nSweet compassionate tears\nHave dimm’d my earthly sight,\nTears of love, the showers wherewith\nThe eternal morn is bright:\nDews of the heav’nly spheres.\nWith tears my eyes are wet,\nTears not of vain regret,\nTears of no lost delight,\nDews of the heav’nly spheres\nHave dimm’d my earthly sight,\nSweet compassionate tears.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nGird on thy sword, O man, thy strength endue,\nIn fair desire thine earth-born joy renew.\nLive thou thy life beneath the making sun\nTill Beauty, Truth, and Love in thee are one.\n\nThro’ thousand ages hath thy childhood run:\nOn timeless ruin hath thy glory been:\nFrom the forgotten night of loves fordone\nThou risest in the dawn of hopes unseen.\n\nHigher and higher shall thy thoughts aspire,\nUnto the stars of heaven, and pass away,\nAnd earth renew the buds of thy desire\nIn fleeting blooms of everlasting day.\n\nThy work with beauty crown, thy life with love;\nThy mind with truth uplift to God above:\nFor whom all is, from whom was all begun,\nIn whom all Beauty, Truth, and Love are one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-climb-the-mossy-bank": { - "title": "“I Climb the Mossy Bank”", - "body": "I climb the mossy bank of the glade:\nMy love awaiteth me in the shade.\n\nShe holdeth a book that she never heedeth:\nIn Goddës work her spirit readeth.\n\nShe is all to me, and I to her:\nWhen we embrace, the stars confer.\n\nO my love, from beyond the sky\nI am calling thy heart, and who but I?\n\nFresh as love is the breeze of June,\nIn the dappled shade of the summer noon.\n\nCatullus, throwing his heart away,\nGave fewer kisses every day.\n\nHeracleitus, spending his youth\nIn search of wisdom, had less of truth.\n\nFlame of fire was the poet’s desire:\nThe thinker found that life was fire.\n\nO my love! my song is done:\nMy kiss hath both their fires in one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "i-love-all-beauteous-things": { - "title": "“I Love All Beauteous Things”", - "body": "I love all beauteous things,\nI seek and adore them;\nGod hath no better praise,\nAnd man in his hasty days\nIs honoured for them.\n\nI too will something make\nAnd joy in the making;\nAltho’ to-morrow it seem\nLike the empty words of a dream\nRemembered on waking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "i-praise-the-tender-flower": { - "title": "“I Praise the Tender Flower”", - "body": "I praise the tender flower,\nThat on a mournful day\nBloomed in my garden bower\nAnd made the winter gay.\nIts loveliness contented\nMy heart tormented.\n\nI praise the gentle maid\nWhose happy voice and smile\nTo confidence betrayed\nMy doleful heart awhile:\nAnd gave my spirit deploring\nFresh wings for soaring.\n\nThe maid for very fear\nOf love I durst not tell:\nThe rose could never hear,\nThough I bespake her well:\nSo in my song I bind them\nFor all to find them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "i-will-not-let-thee-go": { - "title": "“I Will Not Let Thee Go”", - "body": "I will not let thee go.\nEnds all our month-long love in this?\nCan it be summed up so,\nQuit in a single kiss?\nI will not let thee go.\n\nI will not let thee go.\nIf thy words’ breath could scare thy deeds,\nAs the soft south can blow\nAnd toss the feathered seeds,\nThen might I let thee go.\n\nI will not let thee go.\nHad not the great sun seen, I might;\nOr were he reckoned slow\nTo bring the false to light,\nThen might I let thee go.\n\nI will not let thee go.\nThe stars that crowd the summer skies\nHave watched us so below\nWith all their million eyes,\nI dare not let thee go.\n\nI will not let thee go.\nHave we chid the changeful moon,\nNow rising late, and now\nBecause she set too soon,\nAnd shall I let thee go?\n\nI will not let thee go.\nHave not the young flowers been content,\nPlucked ere their buds could blow,\nTo seal our sacrament?\nI cannot let thee go.\n\nI will not let thee go.\nI hold thee by too many bands:\nThou sayest farewell, and lo!\nI have thee by the hands,\nAnd will not let thee go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-never-shall-love-the-snow-again": { - "title": "“I never shall love the snow again …”", - "body": "I never shall love the snow again\nSince Maurice died:\nWith corniced drift it blocked the lane\nAnd sheeted in a desolate plain\nThe country side.\n\nThe trees with silvery rime bedight\nTheir branches bare.\nBy day no sun appeared; by night\nThe hidden moon shed thievish light\nIn the misty air.\n\nWe fed the birds that flew around\nIn flocks to be fed:\nNo shelter in holly or brake they found.\nThe speckled thrush on the frozen ground\nLay frozen and dead.\n\nWe skated on stream and pond; we cut\nThe crinching snow\nTo Doric temple or Arctic hut;\nWe laughed and sang at nightfall, shut\nBy the fireside glow.\n\nYet grudged we our keen delights before\nMaurice should come.\nWe said, In-door or out-of-door\nWe shall love life for a month or more,\nWhen he is home.\n\nThey brought him home; ’twas two days late\nFor Christmas day:\nWrapped in white, in solemn state,\nA flower in his hand, all still and straight\nOur Maurice lay.\n\nAnd two days ere the year outgave\nWe laid him low.\nThe best of us truly were not brave,\nWhen we laid Maurice down in his grave\nUnder the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "in-still-midsummer-night": { - "title": "“In Still Midsummer Night”", - "body": "In still midsummer night\nWhen the moon is late\nAnd the stars all watery and white\nFor her coming wait,\n\nA spirit, whose eyes are possest\nBy wonder new,\nPasseth--her arms upon her breast\nEnwrapt from the dew\nIn a raiment of azure fold\nWith diaper\nOf flower’d embroidery of gold\nBestarr’d with silver.\n\n\nThe daisy folk are awake\nTheir carpet to spread,\nAnd the thron’d stars gazing on her make\nFresh crowns for her head,\n\nNetted in her floating hair\nAs she drifteth free\nBetween the starriness of the air\nAnd the starry lea,\n\nFrom the silent-shadow’d vale\nBy the west wind drawn\nAloft to melt into the pale\nMoonrise of dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "indolence": { - "title": "“Indolence”", - "body": "We left the city when the summer day\nHad verged already on its hot decline,\nAnd charmèd Indolence in languor lay\nIn her gay gardens, ’neath her towers divine:\n“Farewell,” we said, “dear city of youth and dream!”\nAnd in our boat we stepped and took the stream.\n\nAll through that idle afternoon we strayed\nUpon our proposed travel well begun,\nAs loitering by the woodland’s dreamy shade,\nPast shallow islets floating in the sun,\nOr searching down the banks for rarer flowers\nWe lingered out the pleasurable hours.\n\nTill when that loveliest came, which mowers home\nTurns from their longest labour, as we steered\nAlong a straitened channel flecked with foam,\nWe lost our landscape wide, and slowly neared\nAn ancient bridge, that like a blind wall lay\nLow on its buried vaults to block the way.\n\nThen soon the narrow tunnels broader showed,\nWhere with its arches three it sucked the mass\nOf water, that in swirl thereunder flowed,\nOr stood piled at the piers waiting to pass;\nAnd pulling for the middle span, we drew\nThe tender blades aboard and floated through.\n\nBut past the bridge what change we found below!\nThe stream, that all day long had laughed and played\nBetwixt the happy shires, ran dark and slow,\nAnd with its easy flood no murmur made:\nAnd weeds spread on its surface, and about\nThe stagnant margin reared their stout heads out.\n\nUpon the left high elms, with giant wood\nSkirting the water-meadows, interwove\nTheir slumbrous crowns, o’ershadowing where they stood\nThe floor and heavy pillars of the grove:\nAnd in the shade, through reeds and sedges dank,\nA footpath led along the moated bank.\n\nAcross, all down the right, an old brick wall,\nAbove and o’er the channel, red did lean;\nHere buttressed up, and bulging there to fall,\nTufted with grass and plants and lichen green;\nAnd crumbling to the flood, which at its base\nSlid gently nor disturbed its mirrored face.\n\nSheer on the wall the houses rose, their backs\nAll windowless, neglected and awry,\nWith tottering coigns, and crooked chimney stacks;\nAnd here and there an unused door, set high\nAbove the fragments of its mouldering stair,\nWith rail and broken step led out on air.\n\nBeyond, deserted wharfs and vacant sheds,\nWith empty boats and barges moored along,\nAnd rafts half-sunken, fringed with weedy shreds,\nAnd sodden beams, once soaked to season strong.\nNo sight of man, nor sight of life, no stroke,\nNo voice the somnolence and silence broke.\n\nThen I who rowed leant on my oar, whose drip\nFell without sparkle, and I rowed no more;\nAnd he that steered moved neither hand nor lip,\nBut turned his wondering eye from shore to shore;\nAnd our trim boat let her swift motion die,\nBetween the dim reflections floating by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "invitation-to-the-country": { - "title": "“Invitation to the Country”", - "body": "Again with pleasant green\nHas Spring renewed the wood,\nAnd where the bare trunks stood\nAre leafy arbours seen;\nAnd back on budding boughs\nCome birds, to court and pair,\nWhose rival amorous vows\nAmaze the scented air.\n\nThe streams unbound anew\nRefill their mossy banks,\nThe forward season pranks\nWith flowers of varied hue:\nAnd scattered down the meads\nFrom hour to hour unfold\nA thousand buds and beads\nIn stars and cups of gold.\n\nNow hear, and see, and note,\nThe farms are all astir,\nAnd every labourer\nHas doffed his winter coat;\nAnd how with specks of white\nThey dot the brown hillside,\nOr jaunt and sing outright\nAs by their teams they stride.\n\nThey sing to feel the Sun\nRegain his wanton strength;\nTo know the year at length\nRewards their labour done;\nTo see the rootless stake\nThey set bare in the ground,\nBurst into leaf, and shake\nIts grateful scent around.\n\nAh now an evil lot\nIs his who toils for gain,\nWhere crowded chimneys stain\nThe heavens his choice forgot;\n’Tis on the blighted trees\nThat deck his garden dim,\nAnd in the tainted breeze\nThat sweet spring comes to him.\n\nFar rather would I choose\nThe grace of brutes that bask,\nThan in an eager task,\nMy inborn honour lose:\nWould rather far enjoy\nThe body, than invent\nA duty, to destroy\nThe ease which nature sent;\n\nAnd country life I praise\nAnd lead, because I find\nThe philosophic mind\nCan take no middle ways;\nShe will not leave her love\nTo mix with men, her art\nIs all to strive above\nThe crowd, or stand apart.\n\nThrice happy he, the rare\nPrometheus, who can play\nWith hidden things, and lay\nNew realms of nature bare:\nWhose venturous step has trod\nHell underfoot, and won\nA crown from man and God\nFor all that he has done.--\n\nThat highest gift of all,\nSince crabbèd fate did flood\nMy heart with sluggish blood,\nI look not mine to call;\nBut, like a truant freed,\nFly to the woods, and claim\nA pleasure for the deed\nOf my inglorious name.\n\nAnd am content, denied\nThe best, in choosing right;\nFor Nature can delight\nFancies unoccupied\nWith ecstasies so sweet\nAs none can even guess,\nWho walk not with the feet\nOf joy in idleness.\n\nThen leave your joyless ways,\nMy friend, my joys to see.\nThe day you come shall be\nThe choice of chosen days:\nYou shall be lost, and learn\nNew being, and forget\nThe world, till your return\nShall bring your first regret.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "january": { - "title": "“January”", - "body": "Cold is the winter day, misty and dark:\nThe sunless sky with faded gleams is rent:\nAnd patches of thin snow outlying, mark\nThe landscape with a drear disfigurement.\n\nThe trees their mournful branches lift aloft:\nThe oak with knotty twigs is full of trust,\nWith bud-thronged bough the cherry in the croft;\nThe chestnut holds her gluey knops upthrust.\n\nNo birds sing, but the starling chaps his bill\nAnd chatters mockingly; the newborn lambs\nWithin their strawbuilt fold beneath the hill\nAnswer with plaintive cry their bleating dams.\n\nTheir voices melt in welcome dreams of spring,\nGreen grass and leafy trees and sunny skies:\nMy fancy decks the woods, the thrushes sing,\nMeadows are gay, bees hum and scents arise.\n\nAnd God the Maker doth my heart grow bold\nTo praise for wintry works not understood,\nWho all the worlds and ages doth behold,\nEvil and good as one, and all as good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "joy": { - "title": "“Joy”", - "body": "Joy, sweetest lifeborn joy, where dost thou dwell?\nUpon the formless moments of our being\nFlitting, to mock the ear that heareth well,\nTo escape the trainèd eye that strains in seeing,\nDost thou fly with us whither we are fleeing;\nOr home in our creations, to withstand\nBlack-wingèd death, that slays the making hand?\n\nThe making mind, that must untimely perish\nAmidst its work which time may not destroy,\nThe beauteous forms which man shall love to cherish,\nThe glorious songs that combat earth’s annoy?\nThou dost dwell here, I know, divinest Joy:\nBut they who build thy towers fair and strong,\nOf all that toil, feel most of care and wrong.\n\nSense is so tender, O and hope so high,\nThat common pleasures mock their hope and sense;\nAnd swifter than doth lightning from the sky\nThe ecstasy they pine for flashes hence,\nLeaving the darkness and the woe immense,\nWherewith it seems no thread of life was woven,\nNor doth the track remain where once ’twas cloven.\n\nAnd heaven and all the stable elements\nThat guard God’s purpose mock us, though the mind\nBe spent in searching: for his old intents\nWe see were never for our joy designed:\nThey shine as doth the bright sun on the blind,\nOr like his pensioned stars, that hymn above\nHis praise, but not toward us, that God is Love.\n\nFor who so well hath wooed the maiden hours\nAs quite to have won the worth of their rich show,\nTo rob the night of mystery, or the flowers\nOf their sweet delicacy ere they go?\nNay, even the dear occasion when we know,\nWe miss the joy, and on the gliding day\nThe special glories float and pass away.\n\nOnly life’s common plod: still to repair\nThe body and the thing which perisheth:\nThe soil, the smutch, the toil and ache and wear,\nThe grinding enginry of blood and breath,\nPain’s random darts, the heartless spade of death;\nAll is but grief, and heavily we call\nOn the last terror for the end of all.\n\nThen comes the happy moment: not a stir\nIn any tree, no portent in the sky:\nThe morn doth neither hasten nor defer,\nThe morrow hath no name to call it by,\nBut life and joy are one,--we know not why,--\nAs though our very blood long breathless lain\nHad tasted of the breath of God again.\n\nAnd having tasted it I speak of it,\nAnd praise him thinking how I trembled then\nWhen his touch strengthened me, as now I sit\nIn wonder, reaching out beyond my ken,\nReaching to turn the day back, and my pen\nUrging to tell a tale which told would seem\nThe witless phantasy of them that dream.\n\nBut O most blessèd truth, for truth thou art,\nAbide thou with me till my life shall end.\nDivinity hath surely touched my heart;\nI have possessed more joy than earth can lend:\nI may attain what time shall never spend.\nOnly let not my duller days destroy\nThe memory of thy witness and my joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "june-is-come": { - "title": "“June is Come”", - "body": "When June is come, then all the day\nI’ll sit with my love in the scented hay:\nAnd watch the sunshot palaces high,\nThat the white clouds build in the breezy sky.\n\nShe singeth, and I do make her a song,\nAnd read sweet poems the whole day long:\nUnseen as we lie in our haybuilt home.\nO life is delight when June is come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-last-week-of-february": { - "title": "“The Last Week of February”", - "body": "Hark to the merry birds, hark how they sing!\nAlthough ’tis not yet spring\nAnd keen the air;\nHale Winter, half resigning ere he go,\nDoth to his heiress shew\nHis kingdom fair.\n\nIn patient russet is his forest spread,\nAll bright with bramble red,\nWith beechen moss\nAnd holly sheen: the oak silver and stark\nSunneth his aged bark\nAnd wrinkled boss.\n\nBut neath the ruin of the withered brake\nPrimroses now awake\nFrom nursing shades:\nThe crumpled carpet of the dry leaves brown\nAvails not to keep down\nThe hyacinth blades.\n\nThe hazel hath put forth his tassels ruffed;\nThe willow’s flossy tuft\nHath slipped him free:\nThe rose amid her ransacked orange hips\nBraggeth the tender tips\nOf bowers to be.\n\nA black rook stirs the branches here and there,\nForaging to repair\nHis broken home:\nAnd hark, on the ash-boughs! Never thrush did sing\nLouder in praise of spring,\nWhen spring is come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "late-spring-evening": { - "title": "“Late Spring Evening”", - "body": "I saw the Virgin-mother clad in green,\nWalking the sprinkled meadows at sundown;\nWhile yet the moon’s cold flame was hung between\nThe day and night, above the dusky town:\nI saw her brighter than the Western gold,\nWhereto she faced in splendour to behold.\n\nHer dress was greener than the tenderest leaf\nThat trembled in the sunset glare aglow:\nHerself more delicate than is the brief,\nPink apple-blossom, that May showers lay low,\nAnd more delicious than’s the earliest streak\nThe blushing rose shows of her crimson cheek.\n\nWith jealous grace her idle ears to please,\nA music entered, making passion fain:\nThree nightingales sat singing in the trees,\nAnd praised the Goddess for the fallen rain;\nWhich yet their unseen motions did arouse,\nOr parting Zephyrs shook out from the boughs.\n\nAnd o’er the treetops, scattered in mid air,\nThe exhausted clouds, laden with crimson light,\nFloated, or seemed to sleep; and, highest there,\nOne planet broke the lingering ranks of night;\nDaring day’s company, so he might spy\nThe Virgin-queen once with his watchful eye.\n\nAnd when I saw her, then I worshipped her,\nAnd said,--O bounteous Spring, O beauteous Spring,\nMother of all my years, thou who dost stir\nMy heart to adore thee and my tongue to sing,\nFlower of my fruit, of my heart’s blood the fire,\nOf all my satisfaction the desire!\n\nHow art thou every year more beautiful,\nYounger for all the winters thou hast cast:\nAnd I, for all my love grows, grow more dull,\nDecaying with each season overpast!\nIn vain to teach him love must man employ thee,\nThe more he learns the less he can enjoy thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "laus-deo": { - "title": "“Laus Deo”", - "body": "Let praise devote thy work, and skill employ\nThy whole mind, and thy heart be lost in joy.\nWell-doing bringeth pride, this constant thought\nHumility, that thy best done is nought.\n\nMan doeth nothing well, be it great or small,\nSave to praise God; but that hath savèd all:\nFor God requires no more than thou hast done,\nAnd takes thy work to bless it for his own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "london-snow": { - "title": "“London Snow”", - "body": "When men were all asleep the snow came flying,\nIn large white flakes falling on the city brown,\nStealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,\nHushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;\nDeadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;\nLazily and incessantly floating down and down:\nSilently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;\nHiding difference, making unevenness even,\nInto angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.\nAll night it fell, and when full inches seven\nIt lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,\nThe clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;\nAnd all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness\nOf the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:\nThe eye marvelled--marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;\nThe ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;\nNo sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,\nAnd the busy morning cries came thin and spare.\nThen boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,\nThey gathered up the crystal manna to freeze\nTheir tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;\nOr rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;\nOr peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,\n“O look at the trees!” they cried, “O look at the trees!”\nWith lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,\nFollowing along the white deserted way,\nA country company long dispersed asunder:\nWhen now already the sun, in pale display\nStanding by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below\nHis sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.\nFor now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;\nAnd trains of sombre men, past tale of number,\nTread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:\nBut even for them awhile no cares encumber\nTheir minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,\nThe daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber\nAt the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "low-barometer": { - "title": "“Low Barometer”", - "body": "The south-wind strengthens to a gale,\nAcross the moon the clouds fly fast,\nThe house is smitten as with a flail,\nThe chimney shudders to the blast.\n\nOn such a night, when Air has loosed\nIts guardian grasp on blood and brain,\nOld terrors then of god or ghost\nCreep from their caves to life again;\n\nAnd Reason kens he herits in\nA haunted house. Tenants unknown\nAssert their squalid lease of sin\nWith earlier title than his own.\n\nUnbodied presences, the pack’d\nPollution and remorse of Time,\nSlipp’d from oblivion reënact\nThe horrors of unhouseld crime.\n\nSome men would quell the thing with prayer\nWhose sightless footsteps pad the floor,\nWhose fearful trespass mounts the stair\nOr burts the lock’d forbidden door.\n\nSome have seen corpses long interr’d\nEscape from hallowing control,\nPale charnel forms--nay ev’n have heard\nThe shrilling of a troubled soul,\n\nThat wanders till the dawn hath cross’d\nThe dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound\nCloser her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust\nThe baleful phantoms underground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1880 - } - } - }, - "may": { - "title": "“May”", - "body": "The hill pines were sighing,\nO’ercast and chill was the day:\nA mist in the valley lying\nBlotted the pleasant May.\n\nBut deep in the glen’s bosom\nSummer slept in the fire\nOf the odorous gorse-blossom\nAnd the hot scent of the brier.\n\nA ribald cuckoo clamoured,\nAnd out of the copse the stroke\nOf the iron axe that hammered\nThe iron heart of the oak.\n\nAnon a sound appalling,\nAs a hundred years of pride\nCrashed, in the silence falling:\nAnd the shadowy pine-trees sighed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "morning-hymn": { - "title": "“Morning Hymn”", - "body": "O golden Sun, whose ray\nMy path illumineth:\nLight of the circling day,\nWhose night is birth and death:\n\nThat dost not stint the prime\nOf wise and strong, nor stay\nThe changeful ordering time,\nThat brings their sure decay:\n\nThough thou, the central sphere,\nDost seem to turn around\nThy creature world, and near\nAs father fond art found;\n\nThereon, as from above\nTo shine, and make rejoice\nWith beauty, life, and love,\nThe garden of thy choice,\nTo dress the jocund Spring\nWith bounteous promise gay\nOf hotter months, that bring\nThe full perfected day;\n\nTo touch with richest gold\nThe ripe fruit, ere it fall;\nAnd smile through cloud and cold\nOn Winter’s funeral.\n\nNow with resplendent flood\nGladden my waking eyes,\nAnd stir my slothful blood\nTo joyous enterprise.\n\nArise, arise, as when\nAt first God said LIGHT BE!\nThat He might make us men\nWith eyes His light to see.\n\nScatter the clouds that hide\nThe face of heaven, and show\nWhere sweet Peace doth abide,\nWhere Truth and Beauty grow.\n\nAwaken, cheer, adorn,\nInvite, inspire, assure\nThe joys that praise thy morn,\nThe toil thy noons mature:\n\nAnd soothe the eve of day,\nThat darkens back to death;\nO golden Sun, whose ray\nOur path illumineth!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "north-wind-in-october": { - "title": "“North Wind in October”", - "body": "In the golden glade the chestnuts are fallen all;\nFrom the sered boughs of the oak the acorns fall:\nThe beech scatters her ruddy fire;\nThe lime hath stripped to the cold,\nAnd standeth naked above her yellow attire:\nThe larch thinneth her spire\nTo lay the ways of the wood with cloth of gold.\n\nOut of the golden-green and white\nOf the brake the fir-trees stand upright\nIn the forest of flame, and wave aloft\nTo the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft.\n\nBut swiftly in shuddering gloom the splendours fail,\nAs the harrying North-wind beareth\nA cloud of skirmishing hail\nThe grievèd woodland to smite:\nIn a hurricane through the trees he teareth,\nRaking the boughs and the leaves rending,\nAnd whistleth to the descending\nBlows of his icy flail.\nGold and snow he mixeth in spite,\nAnd whirleth afar; as away on his winnowing flight\nHe passeth, and all again for awhile is bright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-north-wind": { - "title": "“The North Wind”", - "body": "The north wind came up yesternight\nWith the new year’s full moon,\nAnd rising as she gained her height,\nGrew to a tempest soon.\nYet found he not on heaven’s face\nA task of cloud to clear;\nThere was no speck that he might chase\nOff the blue hemisphere,\nNor vapour from the land to drive:\nThe frost-bound country held\nNought motionable or alive,\nThat ’gainst his wrath rebelled.\nThere scarce was hanging in the wood\nA shrivelled leaf to reave;\nNo bud had burst its swathing hood\nThat he could rend or grieve:\nOnly the tall tree-skeletons,\nWhere they were shadowed all,\nWavered a little on the stones,\nAnd on the white church-wall.\n\n--Like as an artist in his mood,\nWho reckons all as nought,\nSo he may quickly paint his nude,\nUnutterable thought:\nSo Nature in a frenzied hour\nBy day or night will show\nDim indications of the power\nThat doometh man to woe.\nAh, many have my visions been,\nAnd some I know full well:\nI would that all that I have seen\nWere fit for speech to tell.--\n\nAnd by the churchyard as I came,\nIt seemed my spirit passed\nInto a land that hath no name,\nGrey, melancholy and vast;\nWhere nothing comes: but Memory,\nThe widowed queen of Death,\nReigns, and with fixed, sepulchral eye\nAll slumber banisheth.\nEach grain of writhen dust, that drapes\nThat sickly, staring shore,\nIts old chaotic change of shapes\nRemembers evermore.\nAnd ghosts of cities long decayed\nAnd ruined shrines of Fate\nGather the paths, that Time hath made\nFoolish and desolate.\n\nNor winter there hath hope of spring,\nNor the pale night of day,\nSince the old king with scorpion sting\nHath done himself away.\n\nThe morn was calm; the wind’s last breath\nHad fal’n: in solemn hush\nThe golden moon went down beneath\nThe dawning’s crimson flush.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "The lonely season in lonely lands, when fled\nAre half the birds, and mists lie low, and the sun\nIs rarely seen, nor strayeth far from his bed;\nThe short days pass unwelcomed one by one.\n\nOut by the ricks the mantled engine stands\nCrestfallen, deserted,--for now all hands\nAre told to the plough,--and ere it is dawn appear\nThe teams following and crossing far and near,\nAs hour by hour they broaden the brown bands\nOf the striped fields; and behind them firk and prance\nThe heavy rooks, and daws grey-pated dance:\nAs awhile, surmounting a crest, in sharp outline\n(A miniature of toil, a gem’s design,)\nThey are pictured, horses and men, or now near by\nAbove the lane they shout lifting the share,\nBy the trim hedgerow bloom’d with purple air;\nWhere, under the thorns, dead leaves in huddle lie\nPacked by the gales of Autumn, and in and out\nThe small wrens glide\nWith a happy note of cheer,\nAnd yellow amorets flutter above and about,\nGay, familiar in fear.\n\nAnd now, if the night shall be cold, across the sky\nLinnets and twites, in small flocks helter-skelter,\nAll the afternoon to the gardens fly,\nFrom thistle-pastures hurrying to gain the shelter\nOf American rhododendron or cherry-laurel:\nAnd here and there, near chilly setting of sun,\nIn an isolated tree a congregation\nOf starlings chatter and chide,\nThickset as summer leaves, in garrulous quarrel:\nSuddenly they hush as one,--\nThe tree top springs,--\nAnd off, with a whirr of wings,\nThey fly by the score\nTo the holly-thicket, and there with myriads more\nDispute for the roosts; and from the unseen nation\nA babel of tongues, like running water unceasing,\nMakes live the wood, the flocking cries increasing,\nWrangling discordantly, incessantly,\nWhile falls the night on them self-occupied;\nThe long dark night, that lengthens slow,\nDeepening with Winter to starve grass and tree,\nAnd soon to bury in snow\nThe Earth, that, sleeping ’neath her frozen stole,\nShall dream a dream crept from the sunless pole\nOf how her end shall be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "on-a-dead-child": { - "title": "“On a Dead Child”", - "body": "Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,\nWith promise of strength and manhood full and fair!\nThough cold and stark and bare,\nThe bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee.\n\nThy mother’s treasure wert thou;--alas! no longer\nTo visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be\nThy father’s pride;--ah, he\nMust gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger.\n\nTo me, as I move thee now in the last duty,\nDost thou with a turn or gesture anon respond;\nStartling my fancy fond\nWith a chance attitude of the head, a freak of beauty.\n\nThy hand clasps, as ’twas wont, my finger, and holds it:\nBut the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff;\nYet feels to my hand as if\n’Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that enfolds it.\n\nSo I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing,--\nGo lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed!--\nPropping thy wise, sad head,\nThy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.\n\nSo quiet! doth the change content thee?--Death, whither hath he taken thee?\nTo a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?\nThe vision of which I miss,\nWho weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?\n\nAh! little at best can all our hopes avail us\nTo lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,\nUnwilling, alone we embark,\nAnd the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-palm-willow": { - "title": "“The Palm Willow”", - "body": "See, whirling snow sprinkles the starvèd fields,\nThe birds have stayed to sing;\nNo covert yet their fairy harbour yields.\nWhen cometh Spring?\nAh! in their tiny throats what songs unborn\nAre quenched each morn.\n\nThe lenten lilies, through the frost that push,\nTheir yellow heads withhold:\nThe woodland willow stands a lonely bush\nOf nebulous gold;\nThere the Spring-goddess cowers in faint attire\nOf frightened fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "pater-filio": { - "title": "“Pater Filio”", - "body": "Sense with keenest edge unusèd,\nYet unsteel’d by scathing fire;\nLovely feet as yet unbruisèd\nOn the ways of dark desire;\nSweetest hope that lookest smiling\nO’er the wilderness defiling!\n\nWhy such beauty, to be blighted\nBy the swarm of foul destruction?\nWhy such innocence delighted,\nWhen sin stalks to thy seduction?\nAll the litanies e’er chaunted\nShall not keep thy faith undaunted.\n\nI have pray’d the sainted Morning\nTo unclasp her hands to hold thee;\nFrom resignful Eve’s adorning\nStol’n a robe of peace to enfold thee;\nWith all charms of man’s contriving\nArm’d thee for thy lonely striving.\n\nMe too once unthinking Nature,\n--Whence Love’s timeless mockery took me,--\nFashion’d so divine a creature,\nYea, and like a beast forsook me.\nI forgave, but tell the measure\nOf her crime in thee, my treasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-portrait-of-a-grandfather": { - "title": "“The Portrait of a Grandfather”", - "body": "With mild eyes agaze, and lips ready to speak,\nWhereon the yearning of love, the warning of wisdom plays,\nOne portrait ever charms me and teaches me when I seek:\nIt is of him whom I, remembering my young days,\nImagine fathering my father; when he, in sonship afore,\nLiv’d honouring and obeying the eyes now pictur’d agaze,\nThe lips ready to speak, that promise but speak no more.\n\nO high parental claim, that were not but for the knowing,\nO fateful bond of duty, O more than body that bore,\nThe smile that guides me to right, the gaze that follows my going,\nHow had I stray’d without thee! and yet how few will seek\nThe spirit-hands, that heaven, in tender-free bestowing,\nHolds to her children, to guide the wandering and aid the weak.\n\nAnd Thee! ah what of thee, thou lover of men? if truly\nA painter had stell’d thee there, with thy lips ready to speak,\nIn all-fathering passion to souls enchanted newly,\n--Tenderer call than of sire to son, or of lover to maiden,--\nEver ready to speak to us, if we will hearken duly,\n‘Come, O come unto me, ye weary and heavy-laden!’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "a-robin": { - "title": "“A Robin”", - "body": "Flame-throated robin on the topmost bough\nOf the leafless oak, what singest thou?\nHark! he telleth how--\nSpring is coming now; Spring is coming now.\n\nNow ruddy are the elm-tops against the blue sky,\nThe pale larch donneth her jewelry;\nRed fir and black fir sigh,\nAnd I am lamenting the year gone by.\n\nThe bushes where I nested are all cut down,\nThey are felling the tall trees one by one,\nAnd my mate is dead and gone,\nIn the winter she died and left me lone.\n\nShe lay in the thicket where I fear to go;\nFor when the March-winds after the snow\nThe leaves away did blow,\nShe was not there, and my heart is woe:\n\nAnd sad is my song, when I begin to sing,\nAs I sit in the sunshine this merry spring:\nLike a withered leaf I cling\nTo the white oak-bough, while the wood doth ring.\n\nSpring is coming now, the sun again is gay;\nEach day like a last spring’s happy day.’--\nThus sang he; then from his spray\nHe saw me listening and flew away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-screaming-tarn": { - "title": "“The Screaming Tarn”", - "body": "The saddest place that e’er I saw\nIs the deep tarn above the inn\nThat crowns the mountain-road, whereby\nOne southward bound his way must win.\n\nSunk on the table of the ridge\nFrom its deep shores is nought to see:\nThe unresting wind lashes and chills\nIts shivering ripples ceaselessly.\n\nThree sides ’tis banked with stones aslant,\nAnd down the fourth the rushes grow,\nAnd yellow sedge fringing the edge\nWith lengthen’d image all arow.\n\n’Tis square and black, and on its face\nWhen noon is still, the mirror’d sky\nLooks dark and further from the earth\nThan when you gaze at it on high.\n\nAt mid of night, if one be there,\n--So say the people of the hill--\nA fearful shriek of death is heard,\nOne sudden scream both loud and shrill.\n\nAnd some have seen on stilly nights,\nAnd when the moon was clear and round,\nBubbles which to the surface swam\nAnd burst as if they held the sound.--\n\n’Twas in the days ere hapless Charles\nLosing his crown had lost his head,\nThis tale is told of him who kept\nThe inn upon the watershed:\n\nHe was a lowbred ruin’d man\nWhom lawless times set free from fear:\nOne evening to his house there rode\nA young and gentle cavalier.\n\nWith curling hair and linen fair\nAnd jewel-hilted sword he went;\nThe horse he rode he had ridden far,\nAnd he was with his journey spent.\n\nHe asked a lodging for the night,\nHis valise from his steed unbound,\nHe let none bear it but himself\nAnd set it by him on the ground.\n\n“Here’s gold or jewels,” thought the host,\n“That’s carrying south to find the king.”\nHe chattered many a loyal word,\nAnd scraps of royal airs gan sing.\n\nHis guest thereat grew more at ease\nAnd o’er his wine he gave a toast,\nBut little ate, and to his room\nCarried his sack behind the host.\n\n“Now rest you well,” the host he said,\nBut of his wish the word fell wide;\nNor did he now forget his son\nWho fell in fight by Cromwell’s side.\n\nRevenge and poverty have brought\nFull gentler heart than his to crime;\nAnd he was one by nature rude,\nBorn to foul deeds at any time.\n\nWith unshod feet at dead of night\nIn stealth he to the guest-room crept,\nLantern and dagger in his hand,\nAnd stabbed his victim while he slept.\n\nBut as he struck a scream there came,\nA fearful scream so loud and shrill:\nHe whelm’d the face with pillows o’er,\nAnd lean’d till all had long been still.\n\nThen to the face the flame he held\nTo see there should no life remain:--\nWhen lo! his brutal heart was quell’d:\n’Twas a fair woman he had slain.\n\nThe tan upon her face was paint,\nThe manly hair was torn away,\nSoft was the breast that he had pierced;\nBeautiful in her death she lay.\n\nHis was no heart to faint at crime,\nTho’ half he wished the deed undone.\nHe pulled the valise from the bed\nTo find what booty he had won.\n\nHe cut the straps, and pushed within\nHis murderous fingers to their theft.\nA deathly sweat came o’er his brow,\nHe had no sense nor meaning left.\n\nHe touched not gold, it was not cold,\nIt was not hard, it felt like flesh.\nHe drew out by the curling hair\nA young man’s head, and murder’d fresh;\n\nA young man’s head, cut by the neck.\nBut what was dreader still to see,\nHer whom he had slain he saw again,\nThe twain were like as like can be.\n\nBrother and sister if they were,\nBoth in one shroud they now were wound,--\nAcross his back and down the stair,\nOut of the house without a sound.\n\nHe made his way unto the tarn,\nThe night was dark and still and dank;\nThe ripple chuckling neath the boat\nLaughed as he drew it to the bank.\n\nUpon the bottom of the boat\nHe laid his burden flat and low,\nAnd on them laid the square sandstones\nThat round about the margin go.\n\nStone upon stone he weighed them down,\nUntil the boat would hold no more;\nThe freeboard now was scarce an inch:\nHe stripp’d his clothes and push’d from shore.\n\nAll naked to the middle pool\nHe swam behind in the dark night;\nAnd there he let the water in\nAnd sank his terror out of sight.\n\nHe swam ashore, and donn’d his dress,\nAnd scraped his bloody fingers clean;\nRan home and on his victim’s steed\nMounted, and never more was seen.\n\nBut to a comrade ere he died\nHe told his story guess’d of none:\nSo from his lips the crime returned\nTo haunt the spot where it was done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "since-we-loved": { - "title": "“Since We Loved”", - "body": "Since we loved,--(the earth that shook\nAs we kissed, fresh beauty took)--\nLove hath been as poets paint,\nLife as heaven is to a saint;\n\nAll my joys my hope excel,\nAll my work hath prosper’d well,\nAll my songs have happy been,\nO my love, my life, my queen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "so-sweet-love-seemed-that-april-morn": { - "title": "“So Sweet Love Seemed that April Morn”", - "body": "So sweet love seemed that April morn,\nWhen first we kissed beside the thorn,\nSo strangely sweet, it was not strange\nWe thought that love could never change.\n\nBut I can tell--let truth be told--\nThat love will change in growing old;\nThough day by day is naught to see,\nSo delicate his motions be.\n\nAnd in the end ’twill come to pass\nQuite to forget what once he was,\nNor even in fancy to recall\nThe pleasure that was all in all.\n\nHis little spring, that sweet we found,\nSo deep in summer floods is drowned,\nI wonder, bathed in joy complete,\nHow love so young could be so sweet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-south-wind": { - "title": "“The South Wind”", - "body": "The south wind rose at dusk of the winter day,\nThe warm breath of the western sea\nCircling wrapp’d the isle with his cloke of cloud,\nAnd it now reach’d even to me, at dusk of the day,\nAnd moan’d in the branches aloud:\nWhile here and there, in patches of dark space,\nA star shone forth from its heavenly place,\nAs a spark that is borne in the smoky chase;\nAnd, looking up, there fell on my face--\nCould it be drops of rain\nSoft as the wind, that fell on my face?\nGossamers light as threads of the summer dawn,\nSuck’d by the sun from midmost calms of the main,\nFrom groves of coral islands secretly drawn,\nO’er half the round of earth to be driven,\nNow to fall on my face\nIn silky skeins spun from the mists of heaven.\n\nWho art thou, in wind and darkness and soft rain\nThyself that robest, that bendest in sighing pines\nTo whisper thy truth? that usest for signs\nA hurried glimpse of the moon, the glance of a star\nIn the rifted sky?\nWho art thou, that with thee I\nWoo and am wooed?\nThat robing thyself in darkness and soft rain\nChoosest my chosen solitude,\nComing so far\nTo tell thy secret again,\nAs a mother her child, in her folding arm\nOf a winter night by a flickering fire,\nTelleth the same tale o’er and o’er\nWith gentle voice, and I never tire,\nSo imperceptibly changeth the charm,\nAs Love on buried ecstasy buildeth his tower,\n--Like as the stem that beareth the flower\nBy trembling is knit to power;--\nAh! long ago\nIn thy first rapture I renounced my lot,\nThe vanity, the despondency and the woe,\nAnd seeking thee to know\nWell was ’t for me, and evermore\nI am thine, I know not what.\n\nFor me thou seekest ever, me wondering a day\nIn the eternal alternations, me\nFree for a stolen moment of chance\nTo dream a beautiful dream\nIn the everlasting dance\nOf speechless worlds, the unsearchable scheme,\nTo me thou findest the way,\nMe and whomsoe’er\nI have found my dream to share\nStill with thy charm encircling; even to-night\nTo me and my love in darkness and soft rain\nUnder the sighing pines thou comest again,\nAnd staying our speech with mystery of delight,\nOf the kiss that I give a wonder thou makest,\nAnd the kiss that I take thou takest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-storm-is-over": { - "title": "“The Storm is Over”", - "body": "The storm is over, the land hushes to rest:\nThe tyrannous wind, its strength fordone,\nIs fallen back in the west\nTo couch with the sinking sun.\nThe last clouds fare\nWith fainting speed, and their thin streamers fly\nIn melting drifts of the sky.\nAlready the birds in the air\nAppear again; the rooks return to their haunt,\nAnd one by one,\nProclaiming aloud their care,\nRenew their peaceful chant.\n\nTorn and shattered the trees their branches again reset,\nThey trim afresh the fair\nFew green and golden leaves withheld from the storm,\nAnd awhile will be handsome yet.\nTo-morrow’s sun shall caress\nTheir remnant of loveliness:\nIn quiet days for a time\nSad Autumn lingering warm\nShall humour their faded prime.\n\nBut ah! the leaves of summer that lie on the ground!\nWhat havoc! The laughing timbrels of June,\nThat curtained the birds’ cradles, and screened their song,\nThat sheltered the cooing doves at noon,\nOf airy fans the delicate throng,--\nTorn and scattered around:\nFar out afield they lie,\nIn the watery furrows die,\nIn grassy pools of the flood they sink and drown,\nGreen-golden, orange, vermilion, golden and brown,\nThe high year’s flaunting crown\nShattered and trampled down.\n\nThe day is done: the tired land looks for night:\nShe prays to the night to keep\nIn peace her nerves of delight:\nWhile silver mist upstealeth silently,\nAnd the broad cloud driving moon in the clear sky\nLifts o’er the firs her shining shield,\nAnd in her tranquil light\nSleep falls on forest and field.\nSée! sléep hath fallen: the trees are asleep:\nThe night is come. The land is wrapt in sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-summer-trees": { - "title": "“The Summer Trees”", - "body": "The summer trees are tempest-torn,\nThe hills are wrapped in a mantle wide\nOf folding rain by the mad wind borne\nAcross the country side.\n\nHis scourge of fury is lashing down\nThe delicate-rankèd golden corn,\nThat never more shall rear its crown\nAnd curtsey to the morn.\n\nThere shews no care in heaven to save\nMan’s pitiful patience, or provide\nA season for the season’s slave,\nWhose trust hath toiled and died.\n\nSo my proud spirit in me is sad,\nA wreck of fairer fields to mourn,\nThe ruin of golden hopes she had,\nMy delicate-rankèd corn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-testament-of-beauty": { - "title": "“The Testament of Beauty”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMan’s Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,\nthat tho’ she guide his highest flight heav’nward, and teach him\ndignity morals manners and human comfort,\nshe can delicatly and dangerously bedizen\nthe rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.\nNot without alliance of the animal senses\nhath she any miracle: Lov’st thou in the blithe hour\nof April dawns--nay marvelest thou not--to hear\nthe ravishing music that the small birdës make\nin garden or woodland, rapturously heralding\nthe break of day; when the first lark on high hath warn’d\nthe vigilant robin already of the sun’s approach,\nand he on slender pipe calleth the nesting tribes\nto awake and fill and thrill their myriad-warbling throats\npraising life’s God, untill the blisful revel grow\nin wild profusion unfeign’d to such a hymn as man\nhath never in temple or grove pour’d to the Lord of heav’n?\nHast thou then thought that all this ravishing music,\nthat stirreth so thy heart, making thee dream of things\nillimitable unsearchable and of heavenly import,\nis but a light disturbance of the atoms of air,\nwhose jostling ripples, gather’d within the ear, are tuned\nto resonant scale, and thence by the enthron’d mind received\non the spiral stairway of her audience chamber\nas heralds of high spiritual significance?\nand that without thine ear, sound would hav no report.\nNature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee\nany better melody in the April woods at dawn\nthan what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake\no’night in his comfortless attic, might perchance\nbe aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?\nNow since the thoughtless birds not only act and enjoy\nthis music, but to their offspring teach it with care,\nhanding on those small folk-songs from father to son\nin such faithful tradition that they are familiar\nunchanging to the changeful generations of men--\nand year by year, listening to himself the nightingale\nas amorous of his art as of his brooding mate\npractiseth every phrase of his espousal lay,\nand still provoketh envy of the lesser songsters\nwith the same notes that woke poetic eloquence\nalike in Sophocles and the sick heart of Keats--\nsee then how deeply seated is the urgence whereto\nBach and Mozart obey’d, or those other minstrels\nwho pioneer’d for us on the marches of heav’n\nand paid no heed to wars that swept the world around,\nnor in their homes wer more troubled by cannon-roar\nthan late the small birds wer, that nested and carol’d\nupon the devastated battlefields of France.\nBirds are of all animals the nearest to men\nfor that they take delight in both music and dance,\nand gracefully schooling leisure to enliven life\nwer the earlier artists: moreover in their airy flight\n(which in its swiftness symboleth man’s soaring thought)\nthey hav no rival but man, and easily surpass\nin their free voyaging his most desperate daring,\naltho’ he hath fed and sped his ocean-ships with fire;\nand now, disturbing me as I write, I hear on high\nhis roaring airplanes, and idly raising my head\nsee them there; like a migratory flock of birds\nthat rustle southward from the cold fall of the year\nin order’d phalanx--so the thin-rankt squadrons ply,\ntil sound and sight failing me they are lost in the clouds.\n\nTime eateth away at many an old delusion,\nyet with civilization delusions make head;\nthe thicket of the people wil take furtiv fire\nfrom irresponsible catchwords of live ideas,\nsudden as a gorse-bush from the smouldering end\nof any loiterer’s match-splint, which, unless trodden out\nafore it spredd, or quell’d with wieldy threshing-rods\nwil burn ten years of planting with all last year’s ricks\nand blacken a countryside. ’Tis like enough that men\nignorant of fire and poison should be precondemn’d\nto sudden deaths and burnings, but ’tis mightily\nto the reproach of Reason that she cannot save\nnor guide the herd; that minds who else wer fit to rule\nmust win to power by flattery and pretence, and so\nby spiritual dishonesty in their flurried reign\nconfirm the disrepute of all authority--\nbut only in sackcloth can the Muse speak of such things.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe Spartan General Brasidas, the strenuous man,\nwho earn’d historic favour from his conquer’d foe,\nonce caught a mouse foraging in his messbasket\namong the figs, but when it bit him let it go,\npraising its show of fight in words that Plutarch judged\nworth treasuring; and since I redd the story at school\nunto this hour I hav never thought of Brasidas\nand cannot hear his name, but that I straightway see\na table and an arm’d man smiling with hand outstretch’d\nabove a little mouse that is scampering away.\nWhy should this thing so hold me? and why do I welcome now\nthe tiny beast, that hath come running up to me\nas if here in my cantos he had spied a crevice,\nand counting on my friendship would make it his home?\n’Tis such a pictur as must by mere beauty of fitness\nconvince natural feeling with added comfort.\nThe soldier seeth the instinct of Selfhood in the mouse\nto be the same impulse that maketh virtue in him.\nFor Brasidas held that courage ennobleth man,\nand from unworth redeemeth, and that folk who shrink\nfrom ventur of battle in self-defence are thereby doom’d\nto slavery and extinction: and so this mouse, albeit\nits little teeth had done him a petty hurt, deserved\nliberty for its courage, and found grace in man.\n\n\nWhat is Beauty? saith my sufferings then.--I answer\nthe lover and poet in my loose alexandrines:\nBeauty is the highest of all these occult influences,\nthe quality of appearances that thru’ the sense\nwakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man:\nAnd Art, as it createth new forms of beauty,\nawakeneth new ideas that advance the spirit\nin the life of Reason to the wisdom of God.\nBut highest Art must be as rare as nativ faculty is\nand her surprise of magic winneth favor of men\nmore than her inspiration: most are led away\nby fairseeming pretences, which being wrought for gain\npursue the ephemeral fashion that assureth it;\nand their thin influences are of the same low grade\nas the unaccomplish’d forms; their poverty is exposed\nwhen they would stake their charm on ethic excellence;\nfor then weak simulations of virtues appear,\nsuch as convention approveth, but not Virtue itself,\ntho’ not void of all good: and (as I read) ’twas this\nthat Benvenuto intended, saying that not only\nVirtue was memorable but things so truly done\nthat they wer like to Virtue; and thus prefaced his book,\nthinking to justify both himself and his works.\nThe authority of Reason therefor relieth at last\nhereon--that her discernment of spiritual things,\nthe ideas of Beauty, is her conscience of instinct\nupgrown in her (as she unto conscience of all\nupgrew from lower to higher) to conscience of Beauty\njudging itself by its own beauteous judgment.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHow was November’s melancholy endear’d to me\nin the effigy of plowteams following and recrossing\npatiently the desolat landscape from dawn to dusk,\nas the slow-creeping ripple of their single furrow\nsubmerged the sodden litter of summer’s festival!\nThey are fled, those gracious teams; high on the headland now\nsquatted, a roaring engin toweth to itself\na beam of bolted shares, that glideth to and fro\ncombing the stubbled glebe: and agriculture here,\nblotting out with such daub so rich a pictur of grace,\nhath lost as much of beauty as it hath saved in toil.\nAgain where reapers, bending to the ripen’d corn,\nwere wont to scythe in rank and step with measured stroke,\na shark-tooth’d chariot rampeth biting a broad way,\nand, jerking its high swindging arms around in the air,\nswoopeth the swath. Yet this queer Pterodactyl is well,\nthat in the sinister torpor of the blazing day\nclicketeth in heartless mockery of swoon and sweat,\nas ’twer the salamandrine voice of all parch’d things:\nand the dry grasshopper wondering knoweth his God.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBeauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God\nand Angel of his Presence thru’ all creation,\nfashioning her new love-realm in the mind of man,\nattempteth every mortal child with influences\nof her divine supremacy … ev’n as in a plant\nwhen the sap mounteth secretly and its wintry stalk\nbreaketh out in the prolific miracle of Spring,\nor as the red blood floodeth into a beating heart\nto build the animal body comely and strong; so she\nin her transcendant rivalry would flush his spirit\nwith pleasurable ichor of heaven: and where she hath found\nresponsiv faculty in some richly favour’d soul--\nL’anima vaga delle cose belle, as saith\nthe Florentine,--she wil inaugurate her feast\nof dedication, and even in thatt earliest onset,\nwhen yet infant Desire hath neither goal nor clue\nto fix the dream, ev’n then, altho’ it graspeth nought\nand passeth in its airy vision away, and dieth\nout of remembrance, ’tis in its earnest of life\nand dawn of bliss purer and hath less of earthly tinge\nthan any other after-attainment of the understanding:\nfor all man’s knowledge kenneth also of toil and flaw\nand even his noblest works, tho’ they illume the dark\nwith individual consummation, are cast upon\nby the irrelevant black shadows of time and fate.\n\nRepudiation of pleasur is a reason’d folly\nof imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate\nor decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life,\nwhereon all function whatsoever in man is based.\nConsider how this mortal sensibility\nhath a wide jurisdiction of range in all degrees,\nfrom mountainous gravity to imperceptible\nfaintest tenuities:--The imponderable fragrance\nof my window-jasmin, that from her starry cup\nof red-stemm’d ivory invadeth my being,\nas she floateth it forth, and wantoning unabash’d\nasserteth her idea in the omnipotent blaze\nof the tormented sun-ball, checquering the grey wall\nwith shadow-tracery of her shapely fronds; this frail\nunique spice of perfumery, in which she holdeth\nmonopoly by royal licence of Nature,\nis but one of a thousand angelic species,\noriginal beauties that win conscience in man:\na like marvel hangeth o’er the rosebed, and where\nthe honeysuckle escapeth in serpentine sprays\nfrom its dark-cloister’d clamber thru’ the old holly-bush,\nspreading its joybunches to finger at the sky\nin revel above rivalry. Legion is their name;\nLily-of-the-vale, Violet, Verbena, Mignonette,\nHyacinth, Heliotrope, Sweet-briar, Pinks and Peas,\nLilac and Wallflower, or such white and purple blooms\nthat sleep i’ the sun, and their heavy perfumes withhold\nto mingle their heart’s incense with the wonder-dreams,\nlove-laden prayers and reveries that steal forth from earth,\nunder the dome of night: and tho’ these blossomy breaths,\nthat hav presumed the title of their gay genitors,\nenter but singly into our neighboring sense, that hath\nno panorama, yet the mind’s eye is not blind\nunto their multitudinous presences:--I know\nthat if odour wer visible as color is, I’d see\nthe summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds,\nwith such warfare of hues as a painter might choose\nto show his sunset sky or a forest aflame;\nwhile o’er the country-side the wide clover-pastures\nand the beanfields of June would wear a mantle, thick\nas when in late October, at the drooping of day\nthe dark grey mist arising blotteth out the land\nwith ghostly shroud. Now these and such-like influences\nof tender specialty must not--so fine they be--\nfall in neglect and all their loveliness be lost,\nbeing to the soul deep springs of happiness, and full\nof lovingkindness to the natural man, who is apt\nkindly to judge of good by comfortable effect.\nThus all men ever hav judged the wholesomness of food\nfrom the comfort of body ensuing thereupon,\nwhereby all animals retrieve their proper diet;\nbut if when in discomfort ’tis for pleasant hope\nof health restored we swallow nauseous medicines,\nso mystics use asceticism, yea, and no man\nreadier than they to assert eventual happiness\nto justify their conduct. Whence it is not strange\n(for so scientific minds in search of truth digest\nassimilable hypotheses) they should extend\ntheir pragmatism, and from their happiness deduce\nthe very existence and the natur of God, and take\nreligious consolation for the ground of faith:\nas if the pleasur of life wer the sign-manual\nof Nature when she set her hand to her covenant.\nBut man, vain of his Reason and thinking more to assure\nits independence, wil disclaim complicity\nwith human emotion; and regarding his Mother\ndeemeth it dutiful and nobler in honesty\ncoldly to criticize than purblindly to love;\nand in pride of this quarrel he hath been led in the end\nto make distinction of kind ’twixt Pleasur and Happiness;\nobserving truly enough how one may hav pleasure\nand yet miss happiness; but this warpeth the sense\nand common use of speech, since all tongues in the world\ncall children and silly folk happy and sometimes ev’n brutes.\nThe name of happiness is but a wider term\nfor the unalloy’d conditions of the Pleasur of Life,\nattendant on all function, and not to be deny’d\nto th’ soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature\nspiritual is by definition unnatural.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "thou-didst-delight-my-eyes": { - "title": "“Thou Didst Delight My Eyes”", - "body": "Thou didst delight my eyes:\nYet who am I? nor first\nNor last nor best, that durst\nOnce dream of thee for prize;\nNor this the only time\nThou shalt set love to rhyme.\n\nThou didst delight my ear:\nAh! little praise; thy voice\nMakes other hearts rejoice,\nMakes all ears glad that hear;\nAnd short my joy: but yet,\nO song, do not forget.\n\nFor what wert thou to me?\nHow shall I say? The moon,\nThat poured her midnight noon\nUpon his wrecking sea;--\nA sail, that for a day\nHas cheered the castaway.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-upper-skies": { - "title": "“The Upper Skies”", - "body": "The upper skies are palest blue\nMottled with pearl and fretted snow:\nWith tattered fleece of inky hue\nClose overhead the storm-clouds go.\n\nTheir shadows fly along the hill\nAnd o’er the crest mount one by one:\nThe whitened planking of the mill\nIs now in shade and now in sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-vignette": { - "title": "“A Vignette”", - "body": "Among the meadows\nlightly going,\nWith worship and joy\nmy heart o’erflowing,\n\nFar from town\nand toil of living,\nTo a holy day\nmy spirit giving, …\n\nThou tender flower,\nI kneel beside thee\nWondering why God\nso beautified thee.--\n\nAn answering thought\nwithin me springeth,\nA bloom of the mind\nher vision bringeth.\n\nBetween the dim hill’s\ndistant azure\nAnd flowery foreground\nof sparkling pleasure\n\nI see the company\nof figures sainted,\nFor whom the picture\nof earth was painted.\n\nThose robèd seers\nwho made man’s story\nThe crown of Nature,\nHer cause his glory.\n\nThey walk in the city\nwhich they have builded,\nThe city of God\nfrom evil shielded:\n\nTo them for canopy\nthe vault of heaven,\nThe flowery earth\nfor carpet is given;\n\nWhereon I wander\nnot unknowing,\nWith worship and joy\nmy heart o’erflowing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "a-villager": { - "title": "“A Villager”", - "body": "There was no lad handsomer than Willie was\nThe day that he came to father’s house:\nThere was none had an eye as soft an’ blue\nAs Willie’s was, when he came to woo.\n\nTo a labouring life though bound thee be,\nAn’ I on my father’s ground live free,\nI’ll take thee, I said, for thy manly grace,\nThy gentle voice an’ thy loving face.\n\n’Tis forty years now since we were wed:\nWe are ailing an’ grey needs not to be said:\nBut Willie’s eye is as blue an’ soft\nAs the day when he wooed me in father’s croft.\n\nYet changed am I in body an’ mind,\nFor Willie to me has ne’er been kind:\nMerrily drinking an’ singing with the men\nHe ’ud come home late six nights o’ the se’n.\n\nAn’ since the children be grown an’ gone\nHe ’as shunned the house an’ left me lone:\nAn’ less an’ less he brings me in\nOf the little he now has strength to win.\n\nThe roof lets through the wind an’ the wet,\nAn’ master won’t mend it with us in ’s debt:\nAn’ all looks every day more worn,\nAn’ the best of my gowns be shabby an’ torn.\n\nNo wonder if words hav’ a-grown to blows;\nThat matters not while nobody knows:\nFor love him I shall to the end of life,\nAn’ be, as I swore, his own true wife.\n\nAn’ when I am gone, he’ll turn, an’ see\nHis folly an’ wrong, an’ be sorry for me:\nAn’ come to me there in the land o’ bliss\nTo give me the love I looked for in this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "the-voice-of-nature": { - "title": "“The Voice of Nature”", - "body": "I stand on the cliff and watch the veiled sun paling\nA silver field afar in the mournful sea,\nThe scourge of the surf, and plaintive gulls sailing\nAt ease on the gale that smites the shuddering lea:\n Whose smile severe and chaste\nJune never hath stirred to vanity, nor age defaced.\nIn lofty thought strive, O spirit, for ever:\nIn courage and strength pursue thine own endeavour.\n\nAh! if it were only for thee, thou restless ocean\nOf waves that follow and roar, the sweep of the tides;\nWer’t only for thee, impetuous wind, whose motion\nPrecipitate all o’errides, and turns, nor abides:\n For you sad birds and fair,\nOr only for thee, bleak cliff, erect in the air;\nThen well could I read wisdom in every feature,\nO well should I understand the voice of Nature.\n\nBut far away, I think, in the Thames valley,\nThe silent river glides by flowery banks:\nAnd birds sing sweetly in branches that arch an alley\nOf cloistered trees, moss-grown in their ancient ranks:\n Where if a light air stray,\n’Tis laden with hum of bees and scent of may.\nLove and peace be thine, O spirit, for ever:\nServe thy sweet desire: despise endeavour.\n\nAnd if it were only for thee, entrancèd river,\nThat scarce dost rock the lily on her airy stem,\nOr stir a wave to murmur, or a rush to quiver;\nWer’t but for the woods, and summer asleep in them:\n For you my bowers green,\nMy hedges of rose and woodbine, with walks between,\nThen well could I read wisdom in every feature,\nO well should I understand the voice of Nature.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-windmill": { - "title": "“The Windmill”", - "body": "The green corn waving in the dale,\nThe ripe grass waving on the hill:\nI lean across the paddock pale\nAnd gaze upon the giddy mill.\n\nIts hurtling sails a mighty sweep\nCut thro’ the air: with rushing sound\nEach strikes in fury down the steep,\nRattles, and whirls in chase around.\n\nBeside his sacks the miller stands\nOn high within the open door:\nA book and pencil in his hands,\nHis grist and meal he reckoneth o’er.\n\nHis tireless merry slave the wind\nIs busy with his work to-day:\nFrom whencesoe’er, he comes to grind;\nHe hath a will and knows the way.\n\nHe gives the creaking sails a spin,\nThe circling millstones faster flee,\nThe shuddering timbers groan within,\nAnd down the shoot the meal runs free.\n\nThe miller giveth him no thanks,\nAnd doth not much his work o’erlook:\nHe stands beside the sacks, and ranks\nThe figures in his dusty book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-winnowers": { - "title": "“The Winnowers”", - "body": "Betwixt two billows of the downs\nThe little hamlet lies,\nAnd nothing sees but the bald crowns\nOf the hills, and the blue skies.\n\nClustering beneath the long descent\nAnd grey slopes of the wold,\nThe red roofs nestle, oversprent\nWith lichen yellow as gold.\n\nWe found it in the mid-day sun\nBasking, what time of year\nThe thrush his singing has begun,\nEre the first leaves appear.\n\nHigh from his load a woodman pitched\nHis faggots on the stack:\nKnee-deep in straw the cattle twitched\nSweet hay from crib and rack:\n\nAnd from the barn hard by was borne\nA steady muffled din,\nBy which we knew that threshèd corn\nWas winnowing, and went in.\n\nThe sunbeams on the motey air\nStreamed through the open door,\nAnd on the brown arms moving bare,\nAnd the grain upon the floor.\n\nOne turns the crank, one stoops to feed\nThe hopper, lest it lack,\nOne in the bushel scoops the seed,\nOne stands to hold the sack.\n\nWe watched the good grain rattle down,\nAnd the awns fly in the draught;\nTo see us both so pensive grown\nThe honest labourers laughed:\n\nMerry they were, because the wheat\nWas clean and plump and good,\nPleasant to hand and eye, and meet\nFor market and for food.\n\nIt chanced we from the city were,\nAnd had not gat us free\nIn spirit from the store and stir\nOf its immensity:\n\nBut here we found ourselves again.\nWhere humble harvests bring\nAfter much toil but little grain,\n’Tis merry winnowing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "winter-nightfall": { - "title": "“Winter Nightfall”", - "body": "The day begins to droop,--\nIts course is done:\nBut nothing tells the place\nOf the setting sun.\n\nThe hazy darkness deepens,\nAnd up the lane\nYou may hear, but cannot see,\nThe homing wain.\n\nAn engine pants and hums\nIn the farm hard by:\nIts lowering smoke is lost\nIn the lowering sky.\n\nThe soaking branches drip,\nAnd all night through\nThe dropping will not cease\nIn the avenue.\n\nA tall man there in the house\nMust keep his chair:\nHe knows he will never again\nBreathe the spring air:\n\nHis heart is worn with work;\nHe is giddy and sick\nIf he rise to go as far\nAs the nearest rick:\n\nHe thinks of his morn of life,\nHis hale, strong years;\nAnd braves as he may the night\nOf darkness and tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-winters-night": { - "title": "“A Winter’s Night”", - "body": "A winter’s night with the snow about:\n’Twas silent within and cold without:\nBoth father and mother to bed were gone:\nThe son sat yet by the fire alone.\n\nHe gazed on the fire, and dreamed again\nOf one that was now no more among men:\nAs still he sat and never aware\nHow close was the spirit beside his chair.\n\nNay, sad were his thoughts, for he wept and said\nAh, woe for the dead! ah, woe for the dead!\nHow heavy the earth lies now on her breast,\nThe lips that I kissed, and the hand I pressed.\n\nThe spirit he saw not, he could not hear\nThe comforting word she spake in his ear:\nHis heart in the grave with her mouldering clay\nNo welcome gave--and she fled away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "joseph-brodsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Joseph Brodsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1996 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇷🇺 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Brodsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 27 - }, - "poems": { - "at-a-lecture": { - "title": "“At a Lecture”", - "body": "Since mistakes are inevitable, I can easily be taken\nfor a man standing before you in this room filled\nwith yourselves. Yet in about an hour\nthis will be corrected, at your and at my expense,\nand the place will be reclaimed by elemental particles\nfree from the rigidity of a particular human shape\nor type of assembly. Some particles are still free. It’s not all dust.\n\nSo my unwillingness to admit it’s I\nfacing you now, or the other way around,\nhas less to do with my modesty or solipsism\nthan with my respect for the premises’ instant future,\nfor those afore-mentioned free-floating particles\nsettling upon the shining surface\nof my brain. Inaccessible to a wet cloth eager to wipe them off.\n\nThe most interesting thing about emptiness\nis that it is preceded by fullness.\nThe first to understand this were, I believe, the Greek\ngods, whose forte indeed was absence.\nRegard, then, yourselves as rehearsing perhaps for the divine encore,\nwith me playing obviously to the gallery.\nWe all act out of vanity. But I am in a hurry.\n\nOnce you know the future, you can make it come\nearlier. The way it’s done by statues or by one’s furniture.\nSelf-effacement is not a virtue\nbut a necessity, recognised most often\ntoward evening. Though numerically it is easier\nnot to be me than not to be you. As the swan confessed\nto the lake: I don’t like myself. But you are welcome to my reflection.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "belfast-tune": { - "title": "“Belfast Tune”", - "body": "Here’s a girl from a dangerous town\n She crops her dark hair short\nso that less of her has to frown\n when someone gets hurt.\n\nShe folds her memories like a parachute.\n Dropped, she collects the peat\nand cooks her veggies at home: they shoot\n here where they eat.\n\nAh, there’s more sky in these parts than, say,\n ground. Hence her voice’s pitch,\nand her stare stains your retina like a gray\n bulb when you switch\n\nhemispheres, and her knee-length quilt\n skirt’s cut to catch the squall,\nI dream of her either loved or killed\n because the town’s too small.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "christmas-1963": { - "title": "“Christmas 1963”", - "body": "The magi had come. The infant soundly slept.\nThe star shone brightly from the vaulted sky.\nA cold wind swept the snow up into drifts.\nThe sand rustled. A bonfire crackled nearby.\nSmoke plumed skyward. Flames hooked and writhed.\nThe shadows cast by the fire grew now shorter,\nnow suddenly longer. No one there yet realized\nthat on that very night life’s count had started.\nThe magi had come. The infant soundly slept.\nSteep arches loomed above the manger.\nSnow swirled about. White steam rose in wisps.\nWith gifts piled near him, the child slept like an angel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Jamie Olson", - "date": { - "year": 1964, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "constancy": { - "title": "“Constancy”", - "body": "Constancy is an evolution of one’s living quarters into\na thought: a continuation of a parallelogram or a rectangle\nby means--as Clausewitz would have put it--\nof the voice and, ultimately, the gray matter.\nAh, shrunken to the size of a brain-cell parlor\nwith a lampshade, an armoire in the “Slavic\nGlory” fashion, four studded chairs, a sofa,\na bed, a bedside table with\nlittle medicine bottles left there standing like\na kremlin or, better yet, manhattan.\nTo die, to abandon a family, to go away for good,\nto change hemispheres, to let new ovals\nbe painted into the square--the more\nvolubly will the gray cell insist\non its actual measurements, demanding\ndaily sacrifice from the new locale,\nfrom the furniture, from the silhouette in a yellow\ndress; in the end--from your very self.\nA spider revels in shading especially the fifth corner.\nEvolution is not a species’\nadjustment to a new environment but one’s memories’\ntriumph over reality, the ichthyosaurus pining\nfor the amoeba, the slack vertebrae of a train\nthundering in the darkness, past\nthe mussel shells, tightly shut for the night, with their\nspineless, soggy, pearl-shrouding contents.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "december-24": { - "title": "“December 24”", - "body": "When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.\nAt the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.\nWhere a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,\nis the cause of a human assault-wave\nby a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:\neach one his own king, his own camel.\n\nNylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,\ncaps and neckties all twisted up sideways.\nReek of vodka and resin and cod,\norange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.\nFloods of faces, no sign of a pathway\ntoward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.\n\nAnd the bearers of moderate gifts\nleap on buses and jam all the doorways,\ndisappear into courtyards that gape,\nthough they know that there’s nothing inside there:\nnot a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,\nround whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.\n\nEmptiness. But the mere thought of that\nbrings forth lights as if out of nowhere.\nHerod reigns but the stronger he is,\nthe more sure, the more certain the wonder.\nIn the constancy of this relation\nis the basic mechanics of Christmas.\n\nThat’s what they celebrate everywhere,\nfor its coming push tables together.\nNo demand for a star for a while,\nbut a sort of good will touched with grace\ncan be seen in all men from afar,\nand the shepherds have kindled their fires.\n\nSnow is falling: not smoking but sounding\nchimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.\nHerod drinks. Every wife hides her child.\nHe who comes is a mystery: features\nare not known beforehand, men’s hearts may\nnot be quick to distinguish the stranger.\n\nBut when drafts through the doorway disperse\nthe thick mist of the hours of darkness\nand a shape in a shawl stands revealed,\nboth a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy\nin your self you discover; you stare\nskyward, and it’s right there: a star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-a-beautiful-era": { - "title": "“The End of a Beautiful Era”", - "body": "Since the stern art of poetry calls for words, I, morose,\ndeaf, and balding ambassador of a more or less\ninsignificant nation that’s stuck in this super\npower, wishing to spare my old brain,\nhand myself my own topcoat and head for the main\nstreet: to purchase the evening paper.\n\nWind disperses the foliage. The dimness of old bulbs in these\nsorry quarters, whose motto’s “The mirror will please,”\ngives a sense of abundance supported by puddles.\nEven thieves here steal apples by scratching the amalgam first.\nYet the feeling one gets, from one’s own sweet reflection--this feeling I’ve lost.\n That’s what really puzzles.\n\nEverything in these parts is geared for winter: long dreams,\nprison walls, overcoats, bridal dresses of whiteness that seems\nsnowlike. Drinks. Kinds of soap matching dirt in dark corners.\nSparrow vests, second hand of the watch round your wrist,\npuritanical mores, underwear. And, tucked in the violinists’\npalms, old redwood hand warmers.\n\nThis whole realm is just static. Imagining the output of lead\nand cast iron, and shaking your stupefied head,\nyou recall bayonets, Cossack whips of old power.\nYet the eagles land like good lodestones on the scraps.\nEven wicker chairs here are built mostly with bolts and with nuts,\none is bound to discover.\n\nOnly fish in the sea seem to know freedom’s price.\nStill, their muteness compels us to sit and devise\ncashier booths of our own. And space rises like some bill of fare.\nTime’s invented by death. In its search for the objects, it deals\nwith raw vegetables first That’s why cocks are so keen on the bells\nchiming deafly somewhere.\n\nTo exist in the Era of Deeds and to stay elevated, alert\nain’t so easy, alas. Having raised a long skirt,\nyou will find not new wonders but what you expected.\nAnd it’s not that they play Lobachevsky’s ideas by ear,\nbut the widened horizons should narrow somewhere, and here--\nhere’s the end of perspective.\n\nEither old Europe’s map has been swiped by the gents in plain clothes,\nor the famous five-sixths of remaining landmass has just lost\nits poor infamous colleague, or a fairy casts spells over shabby\nme, who knows--but I cannot escape from this place;\nI pour wine for myself (service here’s a disgrace),\nsip, and rub my old tabby.\n\nThus the brain earned a slug, as a spot where an error occurred\nearns a good pointing finger. Or should I hit waterways, sort\n of like Christ? Anyway, in these laudable quarters,\neyes dumbfounded by ice and by booze\nwill reproach you alike for whatever you choose:\n traceless rails, traceless waters.\n\nNow let’s see what they say in the papers about lawsuits.\n“The condemned has been dealt with.” Having read this, a denizen puts\non his metal-rimmed glasses that help to relate it\nto a man lying flat, his face down, by the wall;\nthough he isn’t asleep. Since dreams spurn a skull\n that has been perforated.\n\nThe keen-sightedness of our era takes root in the times\nwhich were short, in their blindness, of drawing clear lines\ntwixt those fallen from cradles and fallen from saddles.\nThough there are plenty of saucers, there is no one to turn tables with\nto subject you, poor Rurik, to a sensible quiz;\nthat’s what really saddens.\n\nThe keen-sightedness of our days is the sort that befits the dead end\nwhose concrete begs for spittle and not for a witty comment.\nWake up a dinosaur, not a prince, to recite you the moral!\nBirds have feathers for penning last words, though it’s better to ask.\nAll the innocent head has in store for itself is an ax\nplus the evergreen laurel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-funeral-of-bobo": { - "title": "“The Funeral of Bobó”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nBobó is dead, but don’t take off your hat.\nYou can’t explain why there’s no consolation.\nWe cannot pin a butterfly upon\nthe Admiralty spire--we’d only crush it.\nThe squares of windows no matter where\none looks on every side. And as reply\nto “what happened?” you open up\nan empty can: “Apparently, this did.”\nBobó is dead. Wednesday ends.\nOn streets devoid of spots to spend the night\nit’s white, so white. Only the black water\nin the night river does not retain the snow.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nBobó is dead--a line containing grief.\nThe squares of windows, archways’ semicircle.\nSuch freezing frost that if one’s to be killed,\nthen let it be from firearms.\nFarewell, Bobó, my beautiful Bobó.\nMy tear would suit sliced cheese.\nWe are too frail to follow after you,\nnor are we strong enough to stay in place.\nIn heat-waves and in devastating cold\nI know beforehand, your image will\nnot diminish--but quite to the contrary--\nin Rossi’s inimitable prospect.\n\n# 3.\n\n\nBobó is dead. This is a feeling which can\nbe shared, but slippery like soap.\nToday I dreamed that I was lying\nupon my bed. And so it was in fact.\nTear off a page, correct the date:\nthe list of losses opens with a zero.\nDreams without Bobó suggest reality.\nA square of air comes in the window vent.\nBobó is dead. And, one’s lips somewhat\napart, one wants to say “it shouldn’t be”.\nNo doubt it’s emptiness that follows death.\nBoth far more probable, and worse than Hell.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nYou were everything. But because you are\ndead now, my Bobó, you have become\nnothing--more precisely, a glob of emptiness.\nWhich, if one considers it, is quite a lot.\nBobó is dead. On rounded eyes\nthe sight of the horizon is like a knife,\nbut neither Kiki nor Zaza, Bobó,\nwill take your place. That is impossible.\nThursday is coming. I believe in emptiness.\nIt’s quite like Hell there, only shittier.\nAnd the new Dante bends toward the page,\nand on an empty spot he sets a word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "wednesday" - } - } - }, - "galatea-encore": { - "title": "“Galatea Encore”", - "body": "As though the mercury’s under its tongue, it won’t\ntalk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,\nimmobile, by a leaf-coated pond\na statue stands white like a blight of winter.\nAfter such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins\nand outs of centuries, pestered heather.\nThat’s what coming full circle means--\nwhen your countenance starts to resemble weather,\nwhen Pygmalion’s vanished. And you are free\nto cloud your folds, to bare the navel.\nFuture at last! That is, bleached debris\nof a glacier amid the five-lettered “never.”\nHence the routine of a goddess, nee\nalabaster, that lets roving pupils gorge on\nthe heart of color and the temperature of the knee.\nThat’s what it looks like inside a virgin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-hawks-cry-in-autumn": { - "title": "“The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn”", - "body": "Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above\nthe dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown\nConnecticut Valley. Far beneath,\nchickens daintily pause and move\nunseen in the yard of the tumbledown\nfarmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath.\n\nNow adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone,\nall that he glimpses--the hills’ lofty, ragged\nridges, the silver stream that threads\nquivering like a living bone\nof steel, badly notched with rapids,\nthe townships like strings of beads\n\nstrewn across New England. Having slid down to nil\nthermometers--those household gods in niches--\nfreeze, inhibiting thus the fire\nof leaves and churches’ spires. Still,\nno churches for him. In the windy reaches,\nundreamt of by the most righteous choir,\n\nhe soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut,\nhis talons clutched tight into his belly\n--claws balled up like a sunken fist--\nsensing in each wisp of down the thrust\nfrom below, glinting back the berry\nof his eyeball, heading south-southeast\n\nto the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still:\nto a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell\nof grass whose edges no fingers trust,\nsunk amid forest’s odors, filled\nwith splinters of red-speckled eggshell,\nwith a brother or a sister’s ghost.\n\nThe heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing,\npulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping,\npropelled by internal heat and sense,\nthe bird goes slashing and scissoring\nthe autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token,\nenlarging it at the expense\n\nof its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye,\na dot, sliding far above the lofty\npine tree; at the expense of the empty look\nof that child, arching up at the sky,\nthat couple that left the car and lifted\ntheir heads, that woman on the stoop.\n\nBut the uprush of air is still lifting him\nhigher and higher. His belly feathers\nfeel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze,\nhe sees the horizon growing dim,\nhe sees, as it were, the features\nof the first thirteen colonies whose\n\nchimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight\nthat tells the bird of his elevation,\nof what altitude he’s reached this trip.\nWhat am I doing at such a height?\nHe senses a mixture of trepidation\nand pride. Heeling over a tip\n\nof wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air\nbounces him back, winging up to glory,\nto the colorless icy plane.\nHis yellow pupil darts a sudden glare\nof rage, that is, a mix of fury\nand terror. So once again\n\nhe turns and plunges down. But as walls return\nrubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near,\nhe’s driven upward this time as well!\nHe! whose innards are still so warm!\nStill higher! Into some blasted ionosphere!\nThat astronomically objective hell\n\nof birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars\nplay millet served from a plate or a crescent.\nWhat, for the bipeds, has always meant\nheight, for the feathered is the reverse.\nNot with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs\nhe guesses the truth of it: it’s the end.\n\nAnd at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak\nthere tears free of him and flies ad luminem\nthe sound Erinyes make to rend\nsouls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek,\nthe shriek of steel that devours aluminum;\n“mechanical,” for it’s meant\n\nfor nobody, for no living ears:\nnot man’s, not yelping foxes’,\nnot squirrels’ hurrying to the ground\nfrom branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears\ncan’t be avenged this way, which forces\nthem into their burrows. And only hounds\n\nlift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal,\nmore nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding\nof the diamond cutting glass,\nslashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel\nfor an instant, shuddering from this rending.\nFor the warmth burns space in the highest as\n\nbadly as some iron fence down here\nbrands incautious gloveless fingers.\nWe, standing where we are, exclaim\n“There!” and see far above the tear\nthat is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers\nin wavelets, a spider skein\n\nswelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space\nwhose lack of echo spells, especially in October,\nan apotheosis of pure sound.\nAnd caught in this heavenly patterned lace,\nstarlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder,\nsilver-clad, crystal-bound,\n\nthe bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high\nof azure. Through binoculars we foretoken\nhim, a glittering dot, a pearl.\nWe hear something ring out in the sky,\nlike some family crockery being broken,\nslowly falling aswirl,\n\nyet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt\nbut melt when handled. And in a twinkling\nonce more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings,\nrainbowlike, multicolored, blurred\ncommas, ellipses, spirals, linking\nheads of barley, concentric rings--\n\nthe bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed,\na map, now a mere heap of flying\npale flakes that make a green slope appear\nwhite. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed,\nswarm out of doors to catch them, crying\nwith a loud shout in English, “Winter’s here!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "history-of-the-twentieth-century": { - "title": "“History of the Twentieth Century”", - "body": "_The Sun’s in its orbit,\nyet I feel morbid._\n\n# Act 1\n\n# _Prologue_\n\nLadies and gentlemen and the day!\nAll ye made of sweet human clay!\nLet me tell you: you are o’kay.\n\nOur show is to start without much delay.\nSo let me inform you right away:\nthis is not a play but the end of the play\n\nthat has been on for some eighty years.\nIt received its boos and received its cheers.\nIt won’t last for long, one fears.\n\nMen and machines lie to rest or rust.\nNothing arrives as quick as the Past.\nWhat we’ll show you presently is the cast\n\nof characters who have ceased to act.\nEach of these lives has become a fact\nfrom which you presumably can subtract\n\nbut to which you blissfully cannot add.\nThe consequences of that could be bad\nfor your looks or your blood.\n\nFor they are the cause, you are the effect.\nbecause they lie flat, you are still erect.\nCitizens! Don’t neglect\n\nhistory! History holds the clue\nto your taxes and to your flu,\nto what comes out of the blue.\n\nWe’ll show you battlefields, bedrooms, labs,\nsinking ships and escaping subs,\ncradles, weddings, divorces, slabs.\n\nFolks! The curtain’s about to rise!\nWhat you’ll see won’t look like a Paradise.\nStill, the Past may moisten a pair of eyes,\n\nfor its prices were lower than our sales,\nfor it was ruining cities: not blood cells;\nfor on the horizon it’s not taut sails\n\nbut the wind that fails.\n\n\n1900. A quiet year, you bet.\nTrue: none of you is alive as yet.\nThe ‘00’ stands for the lack of you.\nStill, things are happening, quite a few.\nIn China, the Boxers are smashing whites.\nIn Russia, A. P. Chekhov writes.\nIn Italy, Floria Tosca screams.\nFreud, in Vienna, interprets dreams.\nThe Impressionists paint, Rodin still sculpts.\nIn Africa, Boers grab the British scalps\nor vice versa (who cares, my dear?).\nAnd McKinley is re-elected here.\nThere are four great empires, three good democracies.\nThe rest of the world sports loin-cloths and moccasins,\nspeaking both figuratively and literally.\nUpstaging “Umberto’s” in Little Italy,\nin the big one Umberto the Ist’s shot dead.\n(Not all that’s written on walls is read).\nAnd marking the century’s real turn,\nFriedrich Nietzsche dies, Louis Armstrong’s born\nto refute the great Kraut’s unholy\n“God is dead” with “Hello, Dolly.”\n\nThe man of the year, though, is an engineer.\nJohn Browning is his name.\nHe’s patented something. So let us hear\nabout John’s claim to fame.\n\n\n> _John Moses Browning:_\n“I looked at the calendar, and I saw\nthat there are a hundred years to go.\nThat made me a little nervous\nfor I thought of my neighbors.\nI’ve multiplied them one hundred times:\nit came to them being all over!\nSo I went to my study that looks out on limes\nand invented this cute revolver!”\n\n\n1901. A swell, modest time.\nA T-bone steak is about a dime.\nQueen Victoria dies; but then Australia\nrepeats her silhouette and, inter alia,\njoins the Commonwealth. In the humid woods\nof Tahiti, Gauguin paints his swarthy nudes.\nIn China, the Boxers take the rap.\nMax Planck in his lab (not on his lap\nyet) in studying radiation.\nVerdi dies too. But our proud nation,\nrepresented by Mrs.Disney, awards the world\nwith a kid by the name of Walt\nwho’ll animate the screen. Off screen,\nthe British launch their first submarine.\nBut it’s a cake-walk or a Strindberg play\nor Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday\nLife” that really are not to be missed!\nAnd McKinley’s shot dead by an anarchist.\n\nThe man of the year is Signore Marconi.\nHe is an Italian, a Roman.\nHis name prophetically rhymes with “Sony”:\nthey have a few things in common.\n\n\n> _Guglieimo Marconi:_\n“In a Catholic country where the sky is blue\nand clouds look like cherubs’ vestiges,\none daily receives through the air a few\nwordless but clear messages.\nRegular speech has its boring spoils:\nit leads to more speech, to violence,\nit looks like spaghetti, it also coils.\nThat’s why I’ve built the wireless!”\n\n\n1902. Just another bland\npeaceful year. They dissect a gland\nand discover hormones. And a hormone\nonce discovered is never gone.\nThe Boer War (ten thousand dead) is over.\nElsewhere, kind Europeans offer\nrailroad chains to a noble savage.\nA stork leaves a bundle in a Persian cabbage\npatch, and the tag reads “Khomeini”. Greeks, Serbs, Croats,\nand Bulgars are at each others’ throats.\nClaude Monet paints bridges nevertheless.\nThe population of the U.S.\nis approximately 76\nmillion: all of them having sex\nto affect our present rent.\nPlus Teddy Roosevelt’s the President.\n\nThe man of the year is Arthur Conan Doyle,\na writer. The subjects of his great toil\nare a private dick and a paunchy doc;\noccasionally, a dog.\n\n\n> _Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:_\n“Imagine the worst: your subconscious is\nas dull as your conscience. And you, a noble\nsoul, grab a Luger and make Swiss cheese\nout of your skull. Better take my novel\nabout the Hound of the Baskervilles!\nIt’ll save a handful of your brain cells\nand beef up your dreams. For it simply kills\ntime and somebody else!”\n\n1903. You may start to spy\non the future. Old Europe’s sky\nis a little dim. To increase its dimness,\nThe Krupp Works in Essen erect their chimneys.\n(Thus the sense of Geld breeds the sense of guilt.)\nStill, more smoke comes from London, from a smoke-filled\nroom where with guile and passion\nBolsheviks curse Mensheviks in Russian.\nSpeaking of Slavs: The Serbian King and Queen\nare done by local well-wishers in.\nPainters Whistler, Gauguin, Pissarro are gone.\nPanama rents us its Canal Zone.\nWhile bidding their maidens bye-bye and cheerio,\nthe tommies sail off to grab Nigeria\nand turn it into a British colony:\nto date, a nation’s greatest felony\nis if it’s neither friend nor foe.\nMy father is born. So is Evelyn Waugh.\n\nMan of the year, I am proud to say\nis two men. They are brothers. Together, they\nsport two heads, four legs and four hands-which brings\nus to their bird’s four wings.\n\n\n> _The Wright Brothers:_\n“We are Orville and Wilbur Wright.\nOur name simply rhymes with ‘flight’!\nThis may partially explain\nwhy we decided to build a plane.\nOh there are no men in the skies, just wind!\nCities look like newspaper print.\nMountains glitter and rivers bend.\nBut the ultimate plane’d rather bomb than land!”\n\n\n1904. Things which were in store\nhit the counter. There is a war.\nJapan, ever so smiling, gnashes\nteeth and bites off what, in fact, in Russia’s.\nOther than that, in Milan police\ncrack local skulls. But more common is\nthe touch of the new safety razor blade.\nThe nuances of the White Slave Trade,\nMount St.Victoire by Monsieur Cezanne\nand other trifles under the sun\nincluding popular French disgust\nwith the Vatican, are discussed\nin every Partisan cafeteria.\nRadioactivity--still a theory--\nis stated by Rutherford (when a particle\nbrings you a lordship we call it practical).\nAnd as the first Rolls Royce engines churn,\nChekhov dies but Graham Greene is born,\nso is George Balanchine, to upgrade the stage,\nso too--though it’s sin to disclose her age--\nis Miss Dietrich, to daunt the screen.\nAnd New York hears its subway’s first horrid scream!\n\nThe man of the year is a Hottentot.\nSouth-West Africa’s where he dwells.\nIn a German colony. And is being taught\nGerman. So he rebels.\n\n\n> _A Hottentot:_\n“Germans to me are extremely white.\nThey are white in broad daylight and what’s more, at night.\nPlus if you try to win minds and hearts\nof locals, you don’t call a black guy ‘schwarz’--\n‘Schwarz’ sounds shoddy and worse than ‘black’.\nChange your language and then come back!\nFly, my arrow, and hit a Hans\nto cure a Hans of his arrogance!”\n\n\n1905. In the news: Japan.\nWhich means that the century is upon\nus. Diminishing the lifespan\nof Russian dreadnoughts to naught, Japan\ntells urbi et orbi it’s loathe to lurk\nin the wings of geography. In Petersburg\nthose whose empty stomachs churn\ntake to the streets. Yet they won’t return\nhome, for the Cossacks adore long streets.\nA salesman of the Singer sewing devices greets\nin Latvia the arrival of yet another\ndaughter, who is to become my mother.\nIn Spain, unaware of this clever ploy,\nPablo Picasso depicts his “Boy\nWith Pipe” in blue. While the shades of blonde,\nSwedes and Norwegians, dissolve their bond.\nAnd Norway goes independent; yet\nthat’s not enough to turn brunette.\nSpeaking of things that sound rather queer,\nE is equated to MC square\nby Albert Einstein, and the Fauvists\n(Les Fauves is the French for unruly beasts)\nunleash Henri Matisse in Paris.\n“The Merry Widow” by Franz Lehar is\nthe toast of the town. Plus Transvaal gets its\nconstitution called by the natives “the pits”.\nAnd Greta Garbo, La belle dame sans\nmerci, is born. So are neon signs.\n\nThe man of the year, our record tells,\nis neither Strindberg nor H.G.Wells,\nhe is not Albert Schweitzer, not Oscar Wilde:\nhis name is obscured by his own brain-child.\n\n\n> _Camouflage:_\n“I am what gentleman wear in the field\nwhen they are afraid that they may be killed.\nI am called camouflage. Sporting me, each creature\nfeels both safer and close to Nature.\nThe green makes your simper’s pupil sore.\nThat’s what forests and swamps are for.\nThe planet itself wears me: the design\nis as French as it is divine.”\n\n\n1906. Time stands at ease.\nHaving one letter in common with\nhis subject, Freud adds to our bookshelf\npreparing the century for itself.\nOn the whole, Europeans become much nicer\nto each other: in Africa. Still, the Kaiser\nwhen asked of the growth of his navy, lies.\nThe Japs, for some reason, nationalize\ntheir railroads of whose existence none,\nsave several spices, had known.\nAlong the same, so to speak cast-iron\nlines, aping the rod of Aaron,\nthe Simplon Tunnel opens to hit your sight\nwith a smoking non-stop Vis-a-vis. Aside\nfrom that the civilized world condemns\nnight shifts (in factories though) for dames.\nPrime ministers are leapfrogging in\nRussia, as though they’ve seen\nin a crystal ball that the future keeps\nno room for these kinds of leaps.\nThe French Government warily says “pardon”\nto Captain Dreyfus, a Jew who’s done\nten years in the slimmer on the charge of treason.\nStill, this distinction between a prison\nand a Jew has no prophetic air.\nThe U.S. troops have a brief affair\nwith the Island of Cuba: their first tete-a-tete.\nSamuel Beckett is born. Paul Cezanne is dead.\n\nThe man of the year is Herr von Pirquet.\nHe stings like honey-bee.\nThe sting screams like Prince Hamlet’s sick parakeet:\nTB or not TB.\n\n\n> _Dr. Clement von Pirquet:_\n“What I call allergy, you call rash.\nI’ll give you an analogy: each time you blush,\nit shows you’re too susceptible to something lurid,\nobscene and antiseptical to hope to cure it.\nThis, roughly, is the principle that guides my needle.\nTo prove you are invincible it hurts a little;\nit plucks from your pale cheeks the blooming roses\nand checks their petals for tuberculosis!”\n\n\nAs for 1907, it’s neither here\nnot there. But Auden is born this year!\nThis birth is the greatest of all prologues!\nStill, Pavlov gets interested in dogs.\nNext door Mendeleev, his bearded neighbor\nwho gave the universe the table\nof its elements, slips into a coma.\nThe Cubists’ first show, while Oklahoma\nbecomes the Union’s 46th\nstate. Elsewhere New Zeland seeks\nto fly the Union Jack. Lumiere\ndevelops the colored pictures ere\nanyone else (we all owe it to him!)\nThe Roman Pope takes a rather dim\nview of modernism: jealous Iago!\nHaving squashed (4-0) Detroit, Chicago\nforever thirsting for Gloria Mundi\nwins the World Series. In Swinemunde\nNicholas the IInd meets the German Kaiser\nfor a cup of tea. That, again, is neither\nhere not there, like Kalamazoo.\nAnd Carl Hagenbeck opens his careless zoo\nwhere walruses swim, lions pace, birds fly\nproving: animals also can live a lie.\n\nThe man of the year, you won’t believe,\nis Joseph Stalin, then just a tried.\nHe is young; he is twenty-eight;\nbut History’s there, and he cannot wait.\n\n\n> _Joseph Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin:_\n“My childhood was rotten, I lived in mud.\nI hold up banks ’cause I miss my dad.\nSo to help the party, for all my troubles\none day I took four hundred grand in roubles.\nThus far, it was the greatest heist\nin the Russian history after Christ.\nSome call me eager, some call me zealous;\nI just like big figures with their crowd of zeroes.”\n\n\n1908 is a real bore\nthough it provides a new high in gore\nby means of an earthquake in the Southern part\nof Calabria, Italy. Still, the world of art\ntries to replace those one hundred fifty\nthousand victims with things as nifty\nas Monet’s depiction of the Ducal Palace\nin Venice, or with Isadora’s galas,\nor with the birth of Ian Fleming: to fill the crater.\nIn the World Series Chicago’s again a winner.\nIn the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina\nare taken by Austria (for what it took\nit will pay somewhat later with its Archduke).\nAnd the fountain pen is in vogue worldwide.\nThe gas of helium’s liquefied\nin Holland which means the rising of\nthat flat country a bit above\nsea level, which means thoughts vertical.\nThe king and the crown prince are killed in Portugal,\nfor horizontality’s sake no doubt.\nAlso, the first Model T is out\nin Dearborn to roam our blissful quarters\ntrailed by the news that General Motors\nis incorporated. The English Edward\nand Russia’s Nicholas make an effort\nto know each other aboard a yacht.\nThe Germans watch it but don’t react--\nor do, but that cannot be photographed.\nAnd the Republic calls on William Taft.\n\nThe man of the year is German scientist\nPaul Ehrlich. He digs bacterias\nand sires immunology. All the sapiens\nowe a lot to his theories.\n\n\n> _Paul Ehrlich:_\n“The world is essentially a community\nand to syphilis, nobody has immunity.\nSo what I’ve invented beefs up your arsenal\nfor living a life that’s a bit more personal.\nI’ve made Salvarsan. Oh my Salvarsan!\nIt may cure your wife, it may cure your son,\nit may cure yourself and your mistress fast.\nThink of Paul Ehrlich as you pull or thrust!”\n\n\n1909 trots a fine straight line.\nThree Lives are published by Gertrude Stein.\n(On the strength of this book, if its author vies\nfor the man of the year, she sure qualifies.)\nOther than that, there is something murky\nabout the political life in Turkey:\nin those parts, every man has a younger brother,\nand as Sultans they love to depose each other.\nThe same goes apparently in Iran:\nAhmed Shah tells Mohammed Ali: “I run\nthe show,” though he’s 12 years old.\nIn Paris, Sergei Diaghilev strikes gold\nwith his “Ballets Russes”. While in Honduras,\nscreaming the usual “God, endure us!”\npeasants slaughter each other: it’s a civil war.\nSigmund Freud crosses the waters for\nto tell our Wonderland’s cats and Alices\na few things about psychoanalysis.\nBut David Griffith of Motion Pictures,\nboggling one’s dreams, casts Mary Pickford.\nThe Brits, aping the Royal Dutch\nShell Company, too, legalize their touch\non the Persian oil. The Rockefeller\nFoundation is launched to stall a failure\nand to boost a genus. Leaving all the blight,\nglitter and stuff made of Bake light\n(that heralds the Plastic Age) far below, the weary\nbearded and valiant Captain Robert Peary\nreaches the North Pole, and thus subscribes\nvirginal white to the Stars and Stripes.\nAh those days when one’s thoughts were glued\nto this version of the Absolute!\n\nThe man of the year is the unknown\nnameless hairdresser in London Town.\nStirred either by its cumulous firmament\nor by the British anthem, he invents the permanent.\n\n\n> _A London hairdresser:_\n“The Sun never sets over this Empire.\nStill, all empires one day expire.\nThey go to pieces, they get undone.\nThe wind of history is no fun.\nLet England be England and rule the waves!\nAnd let those waves be real raves.\nLet them be dark, red, chestnut, blonde\nunruffled by great events beyond!”\n\n\n1910 marks the end of the first decade.\nAs such, it can definitely be okayed.\nFor there is clearly a democratic\ntrend. Though at times things take an erratic\nturn. Like when Egypt’s Prime Minister, through no fault\nof his, gets murdered. But the revolt\nin Albania is the work of masses\n(although how they tell their oppressed from their ruling class is\nanyone’s guess). Plus Portugal bravely rids\nitself of its king, and as he’s hugged by the Brits,\nbecomes a republic. As for the Brits themselves,\none more generation of them learns God saves\nno king, and mourning the sad demise\nof Edward the Seventh, they fix their eyes\non George the Fifth. Mark Twain and Tolstoy die too.\nBut Karl May has just published his Winnetou\nin German. In Paris, they’ve seen and heard\nStravinsky-cum-Diaghilev’s “Firebird”.\nThat causes some riot, albeit a tiny one.\nWhereas the twangs of the Argentinean\nTango do to the world what the feared and hailed\nHalley’s comet, thank heavens, failed\nto do. And our watchful Congress\nfinds it illegal if not incongruous\nto take ladies across state lines\nfor purposes it declines\nto spell out, while Japan moves nearer\nto Korea: a face that invades a mirror.\n\nThe man of the year is an architect.\nHis name is Frank Lloyd Wright.\nThings that he’s built still stand erect,\nnay! hug what they stand on tight.\n\n> _Frank Lloyd Wright:_\n“Nature and space have no walls or doors,\nand roaming at will is what man adores.\nSo, a builder of houses, I decide\nto bring the outside inside.\nYou don’t build them tall: you build them flat.\nThat’s what Nature is so good at.\nYou go easy on bricks and big on glass\nso that space may sashay your parquets like grass.”\n\n\n1911 is wholly given\nto looking balanced albeit uneven.\nIn Hamburg, stirring his nation’s helm\nthe German Kaiser (for you, Wilhelm\nthe Second) demands what sounds weird for some:\n“A Place for Germany in the Sun”.\nIt you were French, you would say C’est tout.\nYet Hitler is barely twenty-two\nand things in the sun aren’t so hot besides.\nThe activity of the sun excites\nthe Chinese to abolish pigtails and then\nproclaim a republic with Sun Yat-Sen\ntheir first President. (Although how three hundred\ntwenty-five millions can be handled\nby a Parliament, frankly, beats\nme. That is, how many seats\nwould they have had in that grand pavilion?\nAnd even if it’s just one guy per million\nwhat would a minority of, say, ten percent\nadd up to? This is like counting sand!\nFor this democracy has no lexicon!)\nAlong the same latitude, the Mexican\nCivil War is over, and saintly, hesitant\nFrancisco Madero becomes the President.\nItaly finding the Turks too coarse\nto deal with, resorts to the air force\nfor the first time in history, while da Vinci’s\nMona Lisa gets stolen from the Louver--which is\nwhy the cops in Paris grab Monsieur Guillaume\nApollinaire who though born in Rome,\nwrites in French, and has other energies.\nRilke prints his Duinese Elegies\nand in London, suffragettes poke their black\numbrellas at Whitehall and cry Alack!\n\nMan of the year is a great Norwegian.\nThe crucial word in their tongue is “Skol”.\nThey are born wearing turtlenecks in that region.\nWhen they go South, they hit the Pole.\n\n\n> _Roald Amundsen:_\n“I am Roald Amundsen. I like ice.\nThe world is my oyster for it’s capped twice\nwith ice: first, Arctical, then Antarctical.\nHuman life in those parts is a missing article.\nO! when the temperature falls subzero\nthe eyes grow blue, the heart sincere.\nThere are neither doubts nor a question mark:\nit’s the tails of your huskies which pull and bark”.\n\n\n1912. Captain Robert Scott\nreaches the South Pole also. Except he got\nthere later than Amundsen. He stares at ice,\nthinks of his family, prays, and dies.\nIce, however, is not through yet.\nS.S. Titanic hits an iceberg at\nfull speed and goes down. The bell grimly tolls\nat Lloyd’s in London. Fifteen hundred souls\nare lost, if not more. Therefore, let’s turn\nto Romania where Eugene Ionesco’s born\nor to Turkey and her Balkan neighbors: each\none of them feels an itch to reach\nfor the gun; on reflection, though, they abandon\nthe idea. It’s peace everywhere. In London\nby now there are five hundred movie theaters\nwhich makes an issue of baby-sitters.\nAt home, after having less done than said;\nWoodrow Wilson becomes the Prez. Dead-set\nto pocket the dizzy with flipping coin\nNew Mexico and Arizona join\nthe Union. For all its steel mills and farms\nthe Union keeps currently under arms\nonly one hundred thousand men. That’s barmy\nconsidering five million in the Russian Army,\nor four million in Germany, or the French\nwho, too, have as many to fill a trench.\nThis sounds to some like a lack of caution.\nBut then there is the Atlantic Ocean\nbetween the Continent and the U.S.,\nand it’s only 1912, God bless,\nand the hemispheres luckily seem unable\nto play the now popular Cain and Abel.\n\nThe man of the year is both short and tall.\nHe’s nameless, and well he should\nstay nameless: for spoiling for us free fall\nby using a parachute.\n\n> _Captain Albert Berry:_\n“Leaving home with umbrella? Take a parachute!\nWhen it rains from below, that is when they shoot\ndown a plane and its pilot objects to die,\nwhen you wand to grab Holland or drop a spy\nbehind enemy lines, you need parachutes.\nO, they’ll be more popular than a pair of shoes.\nIn their soft descent they suggest a dove.\nAye! it’s not only love that comes from above!”\n\n\n1913. Peace is wearing thin\nin the Balkans. Great powers try their pristine\nroutine of talks, but only soil white gloves:\nTurkey and the whole bunch of Slavs\nslash one another as if there is no tomorrow.\nThe States think there is; and being thorough\nintroduce the federal income tax.\nStill, what really spells the Pax\nAmericana is the assembly line\nFord installs in Michigan. Some decline\nof capitalism! No libertine or Marxist\ncould foresee this development in the darkest\npossible dream. Speaking of such a dream,\nCalifornia hears the first natal scream\nof Richard Nixon. However, the most\nloaded sounds are those uttered by Robert Frost\nwhose A Boy’s Will and North of Boston\nare printed in England and nearly lost on\nhis compatriots eyeing in sentimental\nrapture the newly-built Grand Central\nStation where they later would\nact as though hired by Hollywood.\nIn the meantime, M.Proust lets his stylus saunter\nthe Swann’s Way, H.Geyger designs his counter;\nprobing nothing perilous or perdu,\nStravinsky produces Le Sacre du\nPrintemps, a ballet, in Paris, France.\nBut the fox-trot is what people really dance.\nAnd as Schweitzer cures lepers and subs dive deeper,\nthe hottest news is the modest zipper.\nThink of the preliminaries it skips\ntiming your lips with you fingertips!\n\nThe man of the year is, I fear, Niels Bohr.\nHe comes from the same place as danishes.\nHe builds what one feels like when one can’t score\nor what one looks like when one vanishes.\n\n> _Niels Bohr:_\nAtoms are small. Atoms are nice. Until you split one, of course.\nThen they get large enough to play dice with your whole universe.\nA model of an atom is what I’ve built! Something both small and big!\nInside, it resembles the sense of guilt. Outside, the lunar dig.\n\n\n1914.\n\nNineteen-fourteen! Oh, nineteen-fourteen!\nAh, some years shouldn’t be let out of quarantine!\nWell, this is one of them. Things get raw:\nIn Paris, the editor of Figaro\nis shot dead by the wife of the French finance\nminister, for printing this lady’s--sans\nmerci, should we add?--steamy letters to\n--ah, who cares! … And apparently it’s c’est tout\nalso for a socialist and pacifist\nof all times, Jean Jaures. He who shook his fist\nat the Parliament urging hot heads to cool it,\ndies, as he dines, by some bigot’s bullet\nin a cafe. Ah, those early, single\nshots of Nineteen-fourteen! ah, the index finger\nof an assassin! ah, white puffs in the blue acrylic! …\nThere is something pastoral, nay! idyllic\nabout these murders. About that Irish enema\nthe Brits suffer in Dublin again. And about Panama\nCanal’s grand opening. Or about that doc\nand his open heart surgery on his dog …\nWell, to make these things disappear forever,\nthe Archduke is arriving at Sarajevo;\nand there is in the crowd that unshaven, timid\nyouth, with his handgun … (To be continued).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-sit-by-the-window": { - "title": "“I Sit by the Window”", - "body": "I said fate plays a game without a score,\nand who needs fish if you’ve got caviar?\nThe triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass\nand turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.\nI sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.\nWhen I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn’t often.\n\nI said the forest’s only part of a tree.\nWho needs the whole girl if you’ve got her knee?\nSick of the dust raised by the modern era,\nthe Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.\nI sit by the window. The dishes are done.\nI was happy here. But I won’t be again.\n\nI wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,\nand love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-\no Euclid thought the vanishing point became\nwasn’t math--it was the nothingness of Time.\nI sit by the window. And while I sit\nmy youth comes back. Sometimes I’d smile. Or spit.\n\nI said that the leaf may destory the bud;\nwhat’s fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;\nthat on the flat field, the unshadowed plain\nnature spills the seeds of trees in vain.\nI sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.\nMy heavy shadow’s my squat company.\n\nMy song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,\nbut at least no chorus can ever sing it back.\nThat talk like this reaps no reward bewilders\nno one--no one’s legs rest on my sholders.\nI sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,\nthe waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.\n\nA loyal subject of these second-rate years,\nI proudly admit that my finest ideas\nare second-rate, and may the future take them\nas trophies of my struggle against suffocation.\nI sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out\nwhich is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-villages-god-does-not-live-only": { - "title": "“In villages God does not live only …”", - "body": "In villages God does not live only\nin icon corners, as the scoffers claim,\nbut plainly, everywhere. He sanctifies\neach roof and pan, divides each double door.\nIn villages God acts abundantly--\ncooks lentils in iron pots on Saturdays,\ndances a lazy jig in flickering flames,\nand winks at me, witness to all of this.\nHe plants a hedge, and gives away a bride\n(the groom’s a forester), and, for a joke,\nhe makes it certain that the game warden\nwill never hit the duck he’s shooting at.\nThe chance to know and witness all of this,\namidst the whistling of the autumn mist,\nis, I would say, the only touch of bliss\nthat’s open to the village atheist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "George L. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "january-1-1965": { - "title": "“January 1, 1965”", - "body": "The Wise Men will unlearn your name.\nAbove your head no star will flame.\nOne weary sound will be the same--\nthe hoarse roar of the gale.\nThe shadows fall from your tired eyes\nas your lone bedside candle dies,\nfor here the calendar breeds nights\ntill stores of candles fail.\n\nWhat prompts this melancholy key?\nA long familiar melody.\nIt sounds again. So let it be.\nLet it sound from this night.\nLet it sound in my hour of death--\nas gratefulness of eyes and lips\nfor that which sometimes makes us lift\nour gaze to the far sky.\n\nYou glare in silence at the wall.\nYour stocking gapes: no gifts at all.\nIt’s clear that you are now too old\nto trust in good Saint Nick;\nthat it’s too late for miracles.\n--But suddenly, lifting your eyes\nto heaven’s light, you realize:\nyour life is a sheer gift.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "letter-to-an-archaeologist": { - "title": "“Letter to an Archaeologist”", - "body": "Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter\ngarbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;\na scalp so often scalded with boiling water\nthat the puny brain feels completely cooked.\nYes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden\nrubble which you now arrive to sift.\nAll our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.\nAlso: we didn’t love our women, but they conceived.\nSharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;\nstill, it’s gentler than what we’ve been told or have said ourselves.\nStranger! move carefully through our carrion:\nwhat seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.\nLeave our names alone. Don’t reconstruct those vowels,\nconsonants, and so forth: they won’t resemble larks\nbut a demented bloodhound whose maw devours\nits own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "letters-to-the-roman-friend": { - "title": "“Letters to the Roman Friend”", - "body": "_From Martial_\n\nNow is windy and the waves are cresting over\nFall is soon to come to change the place entirely.\nChange of colors moves me, Postum, even stronger\nThan a girlfriend while she’s changing her attire.\n\nMaidens comfort you but to a certain limit--\nCan’t go further than an elbow or a kneeline.\nWhile apart from body, beauty is more splendid--\nAn embrace is as impossible as treason.\n\nI’m sending to you, Postum-friend, some reading.\nHow’s the capital? Soft bed and rude awakening?\nHow’s Caesar? What’s he doing? Still intriguing?\nStill intriguing, I imagine, and engorging.\n\nIn my garden, I am sitting with a night-light\nNo maid nor mate, not even a companion\nBut instead of weak and mighty of this planet,\nBuzzing pests in their unanimous dominion.\n\nHere, was laid away an Asian merchant. Clever\nMerchant was he--very diligent yet decent.\nHe died suddenly--malaria. To barter\nBusiness did he come, and surely not for this one.\n\nNext to him--a legionnaire under a quartz grave.\nIn the battles, he brought fame to the Empire.\nMany times could have been killed! Yet died an old brave.\nEven here, there is no ordinance, my dear.\n\nMaybe, chicken really aren’t birds, my Postum,\nYet a chicken brain should rather take precautions.\nAn empire, if you happened to be born to,\nbetter live in distant province, by the ocean.\n\nFar away from Caesar, and away from tempests\nNo need to cringe, to rush or to be fearful,\nYou are saying procurators are all looters,\nBut I’d rather choose a looter than a slayer.\n\nUnder thunderstorm, to stay with you, hetaera,--\nI agree but let us deal without haggling:\nTo demand sesterces from a flesh that covers\nis the same as stripping roofs of their own shingle.\nAre you saying that I leak? Well, where’s a puddle?\nLeaving puddles hasn’t been among my habits.\nOnce you find yourself some-body for a husband,\nThen you’ll see him take a leak under your blankets.\n\nHere, we’ve covered more than half of our life span\nAs an old slave, by the tavern, has just said it,\n“Turning back, we look but only see old ruins”.\nSurely, his view is barbaric, but yet candid.\n\nI’ve been to hills and now busy with some flowers.\nHave to find a pitcher, so to pour them water.\nHow’s in Libya, my Postum, or wherever?\nIs it possible that we are still at war there?\n\nYou remember, friend, the procurator’s sister?\nOn the skinny side, however with those plump legs.\nYou have slept with her then … she became a priestess.\nPriestess, Postum, and confers with the creators.\n\nDo come here, we’ll have a drink with bread and olives--\nOr with plums. You’ll tell me news about the nation.\nIn the garden you will sleep under clear heavens,\nAnd I’ll tell you how they name the constellations.\n\nPostum, friend of yours once tendered to addition,\nSoon shall reimburse deduction, his old duty …\nTake the savings, which you’ll find under my cushion.\nHaven’t got much but for funeral--it’s plenty.\n\nOn your skewbald, take a ride to the hetaeras,\nTheir house is right by the town limit,\nBid the price we used to pay--for them to love us--\nThey should now get the same--for their lament.\n\nLaurel’s leaves so green--it makes your body shudder.\nWide ajar the door--a tiny window’s dusty--\nLong deserted bed--an armchair is abandoned--\nNoontime sun has been absorbed by the upholstery.\n\nWith the wind, by sea point cape, a boat, is wrestling.\nRoars the gulf behind the black fence of the pine trees.\nOn the old and wind-cracked bench--Pliny the Elder.\nAnd a thrush is chirping in the mane of cypress.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "lines-on-the-winter-campaign": { - "title": "“Lines on the Winter Campaign”", - "body": "_The scorching noon, the vale in Dagestan …_\n--Mikhail Lermontov\n\n# I.\n\nA bullet’s velocity in low temperatures\ngreatly depends on its target’s virtues,\non its urge to warm up in the plaited muscles\nof the torso, in the neck’s webbed sinews.\nStones lie flat like a second army.\nThe shade hugs the loam to itself willy-nilly.\nThe sky resembles peeling stucco.\nAn aircraft dissolves in it like a clothes moth,\nand like a spring from a ripped-up mattress\nan explosion sprouts up. Outside the crater,\nthe blood, like boiled milk, powerless to seep into\nthe ground, is seized by a film’s hard ripples.\n\n\n# II.\n\nShepherd and sower, the North is driving\nherds to the sea, spreading cold to the South.\nA bright, frosty noon in a Wogistan valley.\nA mechanical elephant, trunk wildly waving\nat the horrid sight of the small black rodent\nof a snow-covered mine, spews out throat-clogging\nlumps, possessed of that old desire\nof Mahomet’s, to move a mountain.\nSummits loom white; the celestial warehouse\nlends them at noontime its flaking surplus.\nThe mountains lack any motion, passing\ntheir immobility to the scattered bodies.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe doleful, echoing Slavic singing\nat evening in Asia. Dank and freezing,\nsprawling piles of human pig meat\ncover the caravansary’s mud bottom.\nThe fuel dung smolders, legs stiffen in numbness.\nIt smells of old socks, of forgotten bath days.\nThe dreams are identical, as are the greatcoats.\nPlenty of cartridges, few recollections,\nand the tang in the mouth of too many “hurrahs.”\nGlory to those who, their glances lowered,\nmarched in the sixties to abortion tables,\nsparing the homeland its present stigma.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhat is contained in the drone’s dull buzzing?\nAnd what in the sound of the aero-engine?\nLiving is getting as complicated\nas building a house with grapes’ green marbles\nor little lean-tos with spades and diamonds.\nNothing is stable (one puff and it’s over):\nfamilies, private thoughts, clay shanties.\nNight over ruins of a mountain village.\nArmor, wetting its metal sheets with oil slick,\nfreezes in thorn scrub. Afraid of drowning\nin a discarded jackboot, the moon\nhides in a cloud as in Allah’s turban.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIdle, inhaled now by no one, air.\nImported, carelessly piled-up silence.\nRising like dough that’s leavened,\nemptiness. If the stars had life-forms,\nspace would erupt with a brisk ovation;\na gunner, blinking, runs to the footlights.\nMurder’s a blatant way of dying,\na tautology, the art form of parrots,\na manual matter, the knack for catching\nlife’s fly in the hairs of the gunsight\nby youngsters acquainted with blood through either\nhearsay or violating virgins.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nPull up the blanket, dig a hole in the palliasse.\nFlop down and give ear to the _oo_ of the siren.\nThe Ice Age is coming--slavery’s ice age is coming,\noozing over the atlas. Its moraines force under\nnations, fond memories, muslin blouses.\nMuttering, rolling our eyeballs upward,\nwe are becoming a new kind of bivalve,\nour voice goes unheard, as though we were trilobites.\nThere’s a draft from the corridor, draft from the square windows.\nTurn off the light, wrap up in a bundle.\nThe vertebra craves eternity. Unlike a ringlet.\nIn the morning the limbs are past all uncoiling.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nUp in the stratosphere, thought of by no one,\nthe little bitch barks as she peers through the porthole:\n“Beach Ball! Beach Ball! Over. It’s Rover.”\nThe beach ball’s below. With the equator on it\nlike a dog collar. Slopes, fields, and gullies\nrepeat in their whiteness cheekbones\n(the color of shame has all gone to the banners).\nAnd the hens in their snowed-in hen coops,\nalso a-shake from the shock of reveille,\nlay their eggs of immaculate color.\nIf anything blackens, it’s just the letters,\nlike the tracks of some rabbit, preserved by a wonder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "may-24-1980": { - "title": "“May 24, 1980”", - "body": "I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,\ncarved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,\nlived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,\ndined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.\nFrom the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly\nwidth. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.\nQuit the country the bore and nursed me.\nThose who forgot me would make a city.\nI have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,\nworn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,\nplanted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,\nguzzled everything save dry water.\nI’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul\ndreams. Munched the bread of exile; it’s stale and warty.\nGranted my lungs all sounds except the howl;\nswitched to a whisper. Now I am forty.\nWhat should I say about my life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.\nBroken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.\nYet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,\nonly gratitude will be gushing from it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 24 - } - } - }, - "odysseus-to-telemachus": { - "title": "“Odysseus to Telemachus”", - "body": "My dear Telemachus,\nThe Trojan War\nis over now; I don’t recall who won it.\nThe Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave\nso many dead so far from their own homeland.\nBut still, my homeward way has proved too long.\nWhile we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,\nit almost seems, stretched and extended space.\n\nI don’t know where I am or what this place\ncan be. It would appear some filthy island,\nwith bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.\nA garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.\nGrass and huge stones … Telemachus, my son!\nTo a wanderer the faces of all islands\nresemble one another. And the mind\ntrips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,\nrun; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.\nI can’t remember how the war came out;\neven how old you are--I can’t remember.\n\nGrow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.\nOnly the gods know if we’ll see each other\nagain. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe\nbefore whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.\nHad it not been for Palamedes’ trick\nwe two would still be living in one household.\nBut maybe he was right; away from me\nyou are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,\nand your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-love": { - "title": "“On Love”", - "body": "Twice I woke up tonight and wandered to\nthe window. And the lights down on the street,\nlike pale omission points, tried to complete\nthe fragment of a sentence spoken through\nsleep, but diminished darkness, too.\n\nI’d dreamt that you were pregnant, and in spite\nof having lived so many years apart\nI still felt guilty and my heartened palm\ncaressed your belly as, by the bedside,\nit fumbled for my trousers and the light-\n\nswitch on the wall. And with the bulb turned on\nI knew that I was leaving you alone\nthere, in the darkness, in the dream, where calmly\nyou waited till I might return,\nnot trying to reproach or scold me\n\nfor the unnatural hiatus. For\ndarkness restores what light cannot repair.\nThere we are married, blest, we make once more\nthe two-backed beast and children are the fair\nexcuse of what we’re naked for.\n\nSome future night you will appear again.\nYou’ll come to me, worn out and thin now, after\nthings in between, and I’ll see son or daughter\nnot named as yet. This time I will restrain\nmy hand from groping for the switch, afraid\n\nand feeling that I have no right\nto leave you both like shadows by that sever-\ning fence of days that bar your sight,\nvoiceless, negated by the real light\nthat keeps me unattainable forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Jamie Olson", - "date": { - "year": 1964, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "a-part-of-speech": { - "title": "“A Part of Speech”", - "body": "I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland\nby zinc-gray breakers that always marched on\nin twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice\nthat ripples between them like hair still moist,\nif it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow,\nthe helix picks out of them no sea rumble\nbut a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle\non the burner, boiling--lastly, the seagull’s metal\ncry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region\nis that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision.\nOnly sound needs echo and dreads its lack.\nA glance is accustomed to no glance back\n\nA list of some observations. In a corner, it’s warm.\nA glance leaves an imprint on anything it’s dwelt on.\nWater is glass’s most public form.\nMan is more frightening than his skeleton.\nA nowhere winter evening with wine. A black\nporch resists an osier’s stiff assaults.\nFixed on an elbow, the body bulks\nlike a glacier’s debris, a moraine of sorts.\nA millenium hence, they’ll no doubt expose\na fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze\ncloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe,\nmumbling “Good night” to a window hinge.\n\nI recognize this wind battering the limp grass\nthat submits to it as they did to the Tartar mass.\nI recognize this leaf splayed in the roadside mud\nlike a prince empurpled in his own blood.\nFanning wet arrows that blow aslant\nthe cheek of a wooden hut in another land,\nautumn tells, like geese by their flying call,\na tear by its face. And as I roll\nmy eyes to the ceiling, I chant herein\nnot the lay of that eager man’s campaign\nbut utter your Kazakh name which till now was stored\nin my throat as a password into the Horde.\n\nA navy-blue dawn in a frosted pane\nrecalls yellow streetlamps in the snow-piled lane,\nicy pathways, crossroads, drifts on either hand,\na jostling cloakroom in Europe’s eastern end.\n“Hannibal …” drones on there, a worn-out motor,\nparallel bars in the gym reek with armpit odor;\nas for that scary blackboard you failed to see through,\nit has stayed just as black. And its reverse side, too.\nSilvery hoarfrost has transformed the rattling bell\ninto crystal. As regards all that parallel-\nline stuff, it’s turned out true and bone-clad, indeed.\nDon’t want to get up now. And never did.\n\nYou’ve forgotten that village lost in the rows and rows\nof swamp in a pine-wooded territory where no scarecrows\never stand in orchards: the crops aren’t worth it,\nand the roads are also just ditches and brushwood surface.\nOld Nastasia is dead, I take it, and Pesterev, too, for sure,\nand if not, he’s sitting drunk in the cellar or\nis making something out of the headboard of our bed:\na wicket gate, say, or some kind of shed.\nAnd in winter they’re chopping wood, and turnips is all they live on,\nand a star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven,\nand no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft,\nplus the emptiness where once we loved.\n\nIn the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map\nthe cobblestones shine like scales that coat a carp,\non the secular chestnut tree melting candles hang,\nand a cast-iron lion pines for a good harangue.\nThrough the much laundered, pale window gauze\nwoundlike carnations and kirchen needles ooze;\na tram rattles far off, as in days of yore,\nbut no one gets off at the stadium anymore.\nThe real end of the war is a sweet blonde’s frock\nacross a Viennese armchair’s fragile back\nwhile the humming winged silver bullets fly,\ntaking lives southward, in mid-July.\n\nAs for the stars, they are always on.\nThat is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike\nsphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon\nhere: well after hours, blinking.\nThe sky looks better when they are off.\nThough, with them, the conquest of space is quicker.\nProvided you haven’t got to move\nfrom the bare veranda and squeaking rocker.\nAs one spacecraft pilot has said, his face\nhalf sunk in the shadow, it seems there is\nno life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze\ncan be rested on none of these.\n\nNear the ocean, by candlelight. Scattered farms,\nfields overrun with sorrel, lucerne, and clover.\nToward nightfall, the body, like Shiva, grows extra arms\nreaching out yearningly to a lover.\nA mouse rustles through grass. An owl drops down.\nSuddenly creaking rafters expand a second.\nOne sleeps more soundly in a wooden town,\nsince you dream these days only of things that happened.\nThere’s a smell of fresh fish. An armchair’s profile\nis glued to the wall. The gauze is too limp to bulk at\nthe slightest breeze … And a ray of the moon, meanwhile,\ndraws up the tide like a slipping blanket.\n\nThe Laocoön of a tree, casting the mountain weight\noff his shoulders, wraps them in an immense\ncloud. From a promontory, wind gushes in. A voice\npitches high, keeping words on a string of sense.\nRain surges down; its ropes twisted into lumps,\nlash, like the bather’s shoulders, the naked backs of these\nhills. The Medhibernian Sea stirs round colonnaded stumps\nlike a salt tongue behind broken teeth.\nThe heart, however grown savage, still beats for two.\nEvery good boy deserves fingers to indicate\nthat beyond today there is always a static to-\nmorrow, like a subject’s shadowy predicate.\n\nIf anything’s to be praised, it’s most likely how\nthe west wind becomes the east wind, when a frozen bough\nsways leftward, voicing its creaking protests,\nand your cough flies across the Great Plains to Dakota’s forests.\nAt noon, shouldering a shotgun, fire at what may well\nbe a rabbit in snowfields, so that a shell\nwidens the breach between the pen that puts up these limping\nawkward lines and the creature leaving\nreal tracks in the white. On occasion the head combines\nits existence with that of a hand, not to fetch more lines\nbut to cup an ear under the pouring slur\nof their common voice. Like a new centaur.\n\nThere is always a possibility left--to let\nyourself out to the street whose brown length\nwill soothe the eye with doorways, the slender forking\nof willows, the patchwork puddles, with simply walking.\nThe hair on my gourd is stirred by a breeze\nand the street, in distance, tapering to a V, is\nlike a face to a chin; and a barking puppy\nflies out of a gateway like crumpled paper.\nA street. Some houses, let’s say,\nare better than others. To take one item,\nsome have richer windows. What’s more, if you go insane,\nit won’t happen, at least, inside them.\n\n… and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice\nrush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece\nof ripened memory which is twice\nas hole-ridden as real cheese.\nAfter all these years it hardly matters who\nor what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,\nand your mind resounds not with a seraphic “do,”\nonly their rustle. Life, that no one dares\nto appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth,\nbares its teeth in a grin at each\nencounter. What gets left of a man amounts\nto a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.\n\nNot that I am losing my grip; I am just tired of summer.\nYou reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted.\nIf only winter were here for snow to smother\nall these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted\ngreen. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed\nbook, while what’s left of the year’s slack rhythm,\nlike a dog abandoning its blind owner,\ncrosses the road at the usual zebra. Freedom\nis when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name\nand your mouth’s saliva is sweeter than Persian pie,\nand though your brain is wrung tight as the horn of a ram\nnothing drops from your pale-blue eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "seaward": { - "title": "“Seaward”", - "body": "Darling, you think it’s love, it’s just a midnight journey.\nBest are the dales and rivers removed by force,\nas from the next compartment throttles “Oh, stop it, Bernie,”\nyet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.\nHook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,\nalias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!\nHere the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,\nand the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.\nBark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.\nDogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.\nStill, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,\nslamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.\nOnly the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.\nMan shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.\nLook: what’s been left behind is about as meager\nas what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-song": { - "title": "“A Song”", - "body": "I wish you were here, dear,\nI wish you were here.\nI wish you sat on the sofa\nand I sat near.\nThe handkerchief could be yours,\nthe tear could be mine, chin-bound.\nThough it could be, of course,\nthe other way around.\n\nI wish you were here, dear,\nI wish you were here.\nI wish we were in my car\nand you’d shift the gear.\nWe’d find ourselves elsewhere,\non an unknown shore.\nOr else we’d repair\nto where we’ve been before.\n\nI wish you were here, dear,\nI wish you were here.\nI wish I knew no astronomy\nwhen stars appear,\nwhen the moon skims the water\nthat sighs and shifts in its slumber.\nI wish it were still a quarter\nto dial your number.\n\nI wish you were here, dear,\nin this hemisphere,\nas I sit on the porch\nsipping a beer.\nIt’s evening, the sun is setting;\nboys shout and gulls are crying.\nWhat’s the point of forgetting\nif it’s followed by dying?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "star-of-the-nativity": { - "title": "“Star of the Nativity”", - "body": "In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than\nto cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,\na child was born in a cave in order to save the world;\nit blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.\n\nTo Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam\nout of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior--the team\nof Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.\nHe was but a dot, and a dot was the star.\n\nKeenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray\nclouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away--\nfrom the depth of the universe, from its opposite end--the star\nwas looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "tornfallet": { - "title": "“Tornfallet”", - "body": "There is a meadow in Sweden\nwhere I lie smitten,\neyes stained with clouds’\nwhite ins and outs.\n\nAnd about that meadow\nroams my widow\nplaiting a clover\nwreath for her lover.\n\nI took her in marriage\nin a granite parish.\nThe snow lent her whiteness,\na pine was a witness.\n\nShe’d swim in the oval\nlake whose opal\nmirror, framed by bracken,\nfelt happy, broken.\n\nAnd at night the stubborn\nsun of her auburn\nhair shone from my pillow\nat post and pillar.\n\nNow in the distance\nI hear her descant.\nShe sings “Blue Swallow,”\nbut I can’t follow.\n\nThe evening shadow\nrobs the meadow\nof width and color.\nIt’s getting colder.\n\nAs I lie dying\nhere, I’m eyeing\nstars. Here’s Venus;\nno one between us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "transatlantic": { - "title": "“Transatlantic”", - "body": "The last twenty years were good for practically everybody\nsave the dead. But maybe for them as well.\nMaybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois\nand uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage\nmakes no sense. Hence memories, recollections,\nvalues, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t\nspent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely\nas they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams,\nunlike the city, become less populous\nthe older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest\ncancels analysis. The last twenty years were good\nfor practically everybody and constituted\nthe afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned\nbut not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not\nmind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways\nor watch pregnant submarines returning\nto their native pen after a worldwide journey\nwithout destroying life on earth, without\neven a proper flag to hoist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tsushima-screen": { - "title": "“Tsushima Screen”", - "body": "The perilous yellow sun follows with its slant eyes\nmasts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize\nin the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer\ndays than the other months; therefore, it’s more cruel\nthan the rest. Dearest, it’s more sound\nto wrap up our sailing round\nthe globe with habitual naval grace,\nmoving your cot to the fireplace\nwhere our dreadnought is going under\nin great smoke. Only fire can grasp a winter!\nGolder unharnessed stallions in the chimney\ndye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,\nand the dark room fills with the plaintive, incessant chirring\nof a naked, lounging grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "two-hours-in-reservoir": { - "title": "“Two Hours in Reservoir”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nI am an anti-fascist … anti-Faust\nIch liebe life and I admire chaos\nIch bin to wish, Genosse Offizieren,\nDem Zeit zum Faust for a while spazieren.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nWithout embracing Polish propaganda,\nIn Krakow he had missed his Vaterland, and\nHe dreamt of the philosopher’s true diamond\nAnd sometimes doubted his own talent.\nHe gently picked, off ground, ladies’ tissues,\nHe got excited with the gender issues,\nAlong, in school he played the polo’s virtues.\n\nHe studied deeply gambling catechismus,\nAnd learned to taste the sweetness of Cartesian.\nThen crawled deep down into the Artesian\nwell of ego-centrism. The military slyness\nFor which was famous Mr. Clausewitz,\nFor him remained apparently unknown,\nWhereas to Vater was a wood artisan.\n\nZum beispiel, in outbreak of glaucoma,\nThe plague, cholera und Tuberculosen,\nHe saved himself by schwarze Papierossen.\nAttracted by the Gypsies and the Moors.\nHe then became a bachelor alumnus.\nWas granted then a licentiate laurus\nAnd sang to students, “Cambrian … dinosaurs …”\n\nA German man--a German cerebrum.\nWithout mentioning, Cogito ergo sum.\nUndoubtedly--Deutschland uber alles.\n(One’s ears can catch a famous Vienna’s waltz).\nHe parted with Krakow with some heart cheer,\nAnd took a carriage in a rush to sheer\nTo chair the school with honest glass of beer.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nA splendid C-moon shines out of the clouds.\nTremendous foliant. A man above it.\nA wrinkle darkens right ’twixt the eyebrows,\nHis eyes--the lacework devilry of Arabs.\nWith a Cordovan black chalk in his right hand\nAnd from the corner, he’s watched at profile length\nBy Meph-ibn-Stopheles: an Arab agent.\n\nThe candles burning. Screeches under clothes-bin.\n“Herr Doktor, midnight”. “Jawohl, schlafen, schlafen …”\nTwo dark black muzzles open utter “meow,”\nFrom kitchen quietly comes a Yiddish Frau.\nShe holds a sizzling omelet with fried bacon.\nHerr doctor jots the address on the letter:\n“Gott Strafe. England. London. Francis Bacon”.\n\nConcerns and demons come and go further,\nThe years and guests do come and go further …\nOne can’t recall then dresses, words, or weather.\nThat’s how all the years have passed and gone swift.\nHe knew the Arabic, but didn’t know Sanskrit.\nAnd yet quite late, hey, Faust had discovered\nBefore him, eine kleine Fraulein Margaret.\n\nAnd then to Cairo he had sent epistle\nBy which he voted back his soul from devil.\nMeph had arrived while he had changed his clothes.\nHe gazed into the mirrow and saw close\nThat he forever is metamorphosed.\nTo maiden’s boudoir, with flowers, kitschy\nHe then set off. Und veni, vidi, vici.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIch liebe clearness. Ja. Ich liebe promptness.\nIch bin to ask to see here no vileness.\nYou’re hinting that he loved the flower lasses.\nIch understanden, das ist ganze swiftness.\nBut this transaction macht der grosse Minus.\nDie righte Sprache, macht der grosse Sinus:\nThe heart and spirit nein gehabt in surplus.\n\nIn vain you alles would expect from creatures:\n“Behold--said to the moment--you’re so gorgeous”\nThe devil all the time among us wanders\nAnd by the minute he awaits this phrase.\nNevertheless, a man, mein liebe Herren,\nIs so uncertain in his greatest darings,\nThat each time lies as if he sells the air\nAnd yet like Goethe could not goof by chance.\n\nUnd grosser Dichter Goethe made a blooper\nWith which subjected to a ganze risk that matter.\nAnd Thomas Mann had ruined his best seller\nAnd cher Gounod confused his lady actor.\nThe fine art is the fine art is the fine art …\nI’d rather sing in skies than fib in concert.\nDie Kunst gehabt the need in truthful kind heart.\n\nBy all fair means, of death, he could be scared.\nFrom where the demons come, he was aware.\nHe fed der dog on all Galens, Ibn-Sinas.\nHe could das Wasser drain in knees and fingers.\nHe could define the tree age by the log rings,\nHe knew where to the stars’ ways lead us rightly.\n\nBut Doctor Faust nichts knew of Almighty.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThere’s mystique. There’s faith. And there is God.\nThere’s difference between them. And there’s oneness.\nSome men are itched by flesh, while some are saved.\nUnfaith is sightlessness, or rather swine-ness.\n\nThe Lord looks down. Up above look men.\nYet everybody seeks his own profit …\nGod’s infinite. Indeed. And what is man?\nAnd man, most probably, is very finite.\n\nA man has got his ceiling, which in fact\nCould always be up there, a little mobile.\nA flatterer will find his way to heart.\nAnd life no more is seen beyond the devil.\n\nThat’s how Doctor Faust was. Likewise\nMarlowe, and Goethe, Thomas Mann and masses\nof singers, intellectuals und, alas,\nThe readers in milieu of other classes.\n\nSame flow sweeps away their foot steps too,\nTheir retorts,--Donnerwetter!,--vibes and musings …\nSo grant them, God, the time to scream “Where to?”\nAnd listen to the answers of their Muses.\n\nAn honest German for der Weg zuruck\nWon’t wait until he’s summoned by the others.\nHe takes his Walter out of his warm slacks\nAnd then forever leaves to a Walter-Closet.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nFraulein, please tell me was ist das “incubus”?\nIncubus das ist eine kleine globus.\nNoch grosser Dichter Goethe gave us rebus\nAnd Ibycus’s evil bearing cranes,\nWhen having fled off Weimar’s foggy cloud,\nThey, of the pocket, snatched a key right out,\nBy Eckermann’s insight, not being rescued.\nAnd now we got, Matrosen, in a fix.\n\nThere are spiritually thuthful queries.\nMystique is indication of a failure\nIn an attempt to handle them. However,\nIch bin--unworthy topic to debate--.\nZum beispiel: Ceiling starts the roofing layers;\nOne poem lavisher … one human--nietzsche-r.\nI can recall Godmother in a niche there.\nAbundant Fruhstuck served right into bed.\n\nAgain September, Boredom. Full moon’s blown.\nGray witch does “meow” at my feet below.\nI put a hatchet right beneath my pillow …\nSome schnapps will do! Well this is apgemacht!\nJawohl, September. Character gets rotten\nAnd spinning, in a field a roaring tractor.\n\nIch liebe life and “Volkisch Beobachter”.\nGut Nacht, mein liebe Herren. Ja, gut Nacht.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - } - } - }, - "emily-bronte": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Emily Brontë", - "birth": { - "year": 1818 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1848 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Brontë", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "fall-leaves-fall": { - "title": "“Fall, Leaves, Fall”", - "body": "Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;\nLengthen night and shorten day;\nEvery leaf speaks bliss to me\nFluttering from the autumn tree.\nI shall smile when wreaths of snow\nBlossom where the rose should grow;\nI shall sing when night’s decay\nUshers in a drearier day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "no-coward-soul-is-mine": { - "title": "“No Coward Soul is Mine”", - "body": "No coward soul is mine\nNo trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere\nI see Heaven’s glories shine\nAnd Faith shines equal arming me from Fear\n\nO God within my breast\nAlmighty ever-present Deity\nLife, that in me hast rest,\nAs I Undying Life, have power in Thee\n\nVain are the thousand creeds\nThat move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,\nWorthless as withered weeds\nOr idlest froth amid the boundless main\n\nTo waken doubt in one\nHolding so fast by thy infinity,\nSo surely anchored on\nThe steadfast rock of Immortality.\n\nWith wide-embracing love\nThy spirit animates eternal years\nPervades and broods above,\nChanges, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears\n\nThough earth and moon were gone\nAnd suns and universes ceased to be\nAnd Thou wert left alone\nEvery Existence would exist in thee\n\nThere is not room for Death\nNor atom that his might could render void\nSince thou art Being and Breath\nAnd what thou art may never be destroyed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "remembrance": { - "title": "“Remembrance”", - "body": "Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee,\nFar, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!\nHave I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,\nSevered at last by Time’s all-severing wave?\n\nNow, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover\nOver the mountains, on that northern shore,\nResting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover\nThy noble heart forever, ever more?\n\nCold in the earth--and fifteen wild Decembers,\nFrom those brown hills, have melted into spring:\nFaithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers\nAfter such years of change and suffering!\n\nSweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,\nWhile the world’s tide is bearing me along;\nOther desires and other hopes beset me,\nHopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!\n\nNo later light has lightened up my heaven,\nNo second morn has ever shone for me;\nAll my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,\nAll my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.\n\nBut, when the days of golden dreams had perished,\nAnd even Despair was powerless to destroy,\nThen did I learn how existence could be cherished,\nStrengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.\n\nThen did I check the tears of useless passion--\nWeaned my young soul from yearning after thine;\nSternly denied its burning wish to hasten\nDown to that tomb already more than mine.\n\nAnd, even yet, I dare not let it languish,\nDare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;\nOnce drinking deep of that divinest anguish,\nHow could I seek the empty world again?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "shall-earth-no-more-inspire-thee": { - "title": "“Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee”", - "body": "Shall earth no more inspire thee,\nThou lonely dreamer now?\nSince passion may not fire thee\nShall Nature cease to bow?\n\nThy mind is ever moving\nIn regions dark to thee;\nRecall its useless roving--\nCome back and dwell with me.\n\nI know my mountain breezes\nEnchant and soothe thee still--\nI know my sunshine pleases\nDespite thy wayward will.\n\nWhen day with evening blending\nSinks from the summer sky,\nI’ve seen thy spirit bending\nIn fond idolatry.\n\nI’ve watched thee every hour;\nI know my mighty sway,\nI know my magic power\nTo drive thy griefs away.\n\nFew hearts to mortals given\nOn earth so wildly pine;\nYet none would ask a heaven\nMore like this earth than thine.\n\nThen let my winds caress thee;\nThy comrade let me be--\nSince nought beside can bless thee,\nReturn and dwell with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-two-children": { - "title": "“The Two Children”", - "body": "Heavy hangs the raindrop\nFrom the burdened spray;\nHeavy broods the damp mist\nOn uplands far away;\n\nHeavy looms the dull sky,\nHeavy rolls the sea--\nAnd heavy beats the young heart\nBeneath that lonely tree.\n\nNever has a blue streak\nCleft the clouds since morn--\nNever has his grim Fate\nSmiled since he was born.\n\nFrowning on the infant,\nShadowing childhood’s joy,\nGuardian angel knows not\nThat melancholy boy.\n\nDay is passing swiftly\nIts sad and sombre prime;\nYouth is fast invading\nSterner manhood’s time.\n\nAll the flowers are praying\nFor sun before they close,\nAnd he prays too, unknowing,\nThat sunless human rose!\n\nBlossoms, that the west wind\nHas never wooed to blow,\nScentless are your petals,\nYour dew as cold as snow.\n\nSoul, where kindred kindness\nNo early promise woke,\nBarren is your beauty\nAs weed upon the rock.\n\nWither, Brothers, wither,\nYou were vainly given--\nEarth reserves no blessing\nFor the unblessed of Heaven!\n\nChild of Delight! with sunbright hair,\nAnd seablue, seadeep eyes;\nSpirit of Bliss, what brings thee here,\nBeneath these sullen skies?\n\nThou shouldst live in eternal spring,\nWhere endless day is never dim;\nWhy, seraph, has thy erring wing\nBorne thee down to weep with him?\n\n“Ah, not from heaven am I descended,\nAnd I do not come to mingle tears;\nBut sweet is day, though with shadows blended;\nAnd, though clouded, sweet are youthful years.”\n\n“I, the image of light and gladness,\nSaw and pitied that mournful boy,\nAnd I swore to take his gloomy sadness,\nAnd give to him my beamy joy.”\n\n“Heavy and dark the night is closing;\nHeavy and dark may its biding be:\nBetter for all from grief reposing,\nAnd better for all who watch like me.”\n\n“Guardian angel, he lacks no longer;\nEvil fortune he need not fear:\nFate is strong, but Love is stronger;\nAnd more unsleeping than angel’s care.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - } - } - }, - "rupert-brooke": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rupert Brooke", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Brooke", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dead": { - "title": "“The Dead”", - "body": "These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,\nWashed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.\nThe years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,\nAnd sunset, and the colours of the earth.\nThese had seen movement, and heard music; known\nSlumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;\nFelt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;\nTouched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.\n\nThere are waters blown by changing winds to laughter\nAnd lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,\nFrost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance\nAnd wandering loveliness. He leaves a white\nUnbroken glory, a gathered radiance,\nA width, a shining peace, under the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "dust": { - "title": "“Dust”", - "body": "When the white flame in us is gone,\nAnd we that lost the world’s delight\nStiffen in darkness, left alone\nTo crumble in our separate night;\n\nWhen your swift hair is quiet in death,\nAnd through the lips corruption thrust\nHas stilled the labour of my breath--\nWhen we are dust, when we are dust!--\n\nNot dead, not undesirous yet,\nStill sentient, still unsatisfied,\nWe’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,\nAround the places where we died,\n\nAnd dance as dust before the sun,\nAnd light of foot, and unconfined,\nHurry from road to road, and run\nAbout the errands of the wind.\n\nAnd every mote, on earth or air,\nWill speed and gleam, down later days,\nAnd like a secret pilgrim fare\nBy eager and invisible ways,\n\nNor ever rest, nor ever lie,\nTill, beyond thinking, out of view,\nOne mote of all the dust that’s I\nShall meet one atom that was you.\n\nThen in some garden hushed from wind,\nWarm in a sunset’s afterglow,\nThe lovers in the flowers will find\nA sweet and strange unquiet grow\n\nUpon the peace; and, past desiring,\nSo high a beauty in the air,\nAnd such a light, and such a quiring,\nAnd such a radiant ecstasy there,\n\nThey’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,\nOr out of earth, or in the height,\nSinging, or flame, or scent, or hue,\nOr two that pass, in light, to light,\n\nOut of the garden, higher, higher …\nBut in that instant they shall learn\nThe shattering ecstasy of our fire,\nAnd the weak passionless hearts will burn\n\nAnd faint in that amazing glow,\nUntil the darkness close above;\nAnd they will know--poor fools, they’ll know!--\nOne moment, what it is to love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-vicarage-grantchester": { - "title": "“The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”", - "body": "Just now the lilac is in bloom,\nAll before my little room;\nAnd in my flower-beds, I think,\nSmile the carnation and the pink;\nAnd down the borders, well I know,\nThe poppy and the pansy blow …\nOh! there the chestnuts, summer through,\nBeside the river make for you\nA tunnel of green gloom, and sleep\nDeeply above; and green and deep\nThe stream mysterious glides beneath,\nGreen as a dream and deep as death.\n--Oh, damn! I know it! and I know\nHow the May fields all golden show,\nAnd when the day is young and sweet,\nGild gloriously the bare feet\nThat run to bathe …\n“Du lieber Gott!”\n\nHere am I, sweating, sick, and hot,\nAnd there the shadowed waters fresh\nLean up to embrace the naked flesh.\nTemperamentvoll German Jews\nDrink beer around;--and THERE the dews\nAre soft beneath a morn of gold.\nHere tulips bloom as they are told;\nUnkempt about those hedges blows\nAn English unofficial rose;\nAnd there the unregulated sun\nSlopes down to rest when day is done,\nAnd wakes a vague unpunctual star,\nA slippered Hesper; and there are\nMeads towards Haslingfield and Coton\nWhere das Betreten’s not verboten.\n\nεἴθε γενοίμην … would I were\nIn Grantchester, in Grantchester!--\nSome, it may be, can get in touch\nWith Nature there, or Earth, or such.\nAnd clever modern men have seen\nA Faun a-peeping through the green,\nAnd felt the Classics were not dead,\nTo glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,\nOr hear the Goat-foot piping low: …\nBut these are things I do not know.\nI only know that you may lie\nDay long and watch the Cambridge sky,\nAnd, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,\nHear the cool lapse of hours pass,\nUntil the centuries blend and blur\nIn Grantchester, in Grantchester …\nStill in the dawnlit waters cool\nHis ghostly Lordship swims his pool,\nAnd tries the strokes, essays the tricks,\nLong learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.\nDan Chaucer hears his river still\nChatter beneath a phantom mill.\nTennyson notes, with studious eye,\nHow Cambridge waters hurry by …\nAnd in that garden, black and white,\nCreep whispers through the grass all night;\nAnd spectral dance, before the dawn,\nA hundred Vicars down the lawn;\nCurates, long dust, will come and go\nOn lissom, clerical, printless toe;\nAnd oft between the boughs is seen\nThe sly shade of a Rural Dean …\nTill, at a shiver in the skies,\nVanishing with Satanic cries,\nThe prim ecclesiastic rout\nLeaves but a startled sleeper-out,\nGrey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,\nThe falling house that never falls.\n\nGod! I will pack, and take a train,\nAnd get me to England once again!\nFor England’s the one land, I know,\nWhere men with Splendid Hearts may go;\nAnd Cambridgeshire, of all England,\nThe shire for Men who Understand;\nAnd of THAT district I prefer\nThe lovely hamlet Grantchester.\nFor Cambridge people rarely smile,\nBeing urban, squat, and packed with guile;\nAnd Royston men in the far South\nAre black and fierce and strange of mouth;\nAt Over they fling oaths at one,\nAnd worse than oaths at Trumpington,\nAnd Ditton girls are mean and dirty,\nAnd there’s none in Harston under thirty,\nAnd folks in Shelford and those parts\nHave twisted lips and twisted hearts,\nAnd Barton men make Cockney rhymes,\nAnd Coton’s full of nameless crimes,\nAnd things are done you’d not believe\nAt Madingley on Christmas Eve.\nStrong men have run for miles and miles,\nWhen one from Cherry Hinton smiles;\nStrong men have blanched, and shot their wives,\nRather than send them to St. Ives;\nStrong men have cried like babes, bydam,\nTo hear what happened at Babraham.\nBut Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!\nThere’s peace and holy quiet there,\nGreat clouds along pacific skies,\nAnd men and women with straight eyes,\nLithe children lovelier than a dream,\nA bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,\nAnd little kindly winds that creep\nRound twilight corners, half asleep.\nIn Grantchester their skins are white;\nThey bathe by day, they bathe by night;\nThe women there do all they ought;\nThe men observe the Rules of Thought.\nThey love the Good; they worship Truth;\nThey laugh uproariously in youth;\n(And when they get to feeling old,\nThey up and shoot themselves, I’m told) …\n\nAh God! to see the branches stir\nAcross the moon at Grantchester!\nTo smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten\nUnforgettable, unforgotten\nRiver-smell, and hear the breeze\nSobbing in the little trees.\nSay, do the elm-clumps greatly stand\nStill guardians of that holy land?\nThe chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,\nThe yet unacademic stream?\nIs dawn a secret shy and cold\nAnadyomene, silver-gold?\nAnd sunset still a golden sea\nFrom Haslingfield to Madingley?\nAnd after, ere the night is born,\nDo hares come out about the corn?\nOh, is the water sweet and cool,\nGentle and brown, above the pool?\nAnd laughs the immortal river still\nUnder the mill, under the mill?\nSay, is there Beauty yet to find?\nAnd Certainty? and Quiet kind?\nDeep meadows yet, for to forget\nThe lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet\nStands the Church clock at ten to three?\nAnd is there honey still for tea?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-soldier": { - "title": "“The Soldier”", - "body": "If I should die, think only this of me:\nThat there’s some corner of a foreign field\nThat is for ever England. There shall be\nIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;\nA dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,\nGave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;\nA body of England’s, breathing English air,\nWashed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.\n\nAnd think, this heart, all evil shed away,\nA pulse in the eternal mind, no less\nGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;\nHer sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;\nAnd laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,\nIn hearts at peace, under an English heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "gwendolyn-brooks": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gwendolyn Brooks", - "birth": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2000 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bean-eaters": { - "title": "“The Bean Eaters”", - "body": "They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.\nDinner is a casual affair.\nPlain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,\nTin flatware.\n\nTwo who are Mostly Good.\nTwo who have lived their day,\nBut keep on putting on their clothes\nAnd putting things away.\n\nAnd remembering …\nRemembering, with twinklings and twinges,\nAs they lean over the beans in their rented back room that\nis full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,\ntobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "the-children-of-the-poor": { - "title": "“The Children of the Poor”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nPeople who have no children can be hard:\nAttain a mail of ice and insolence:\nNeed not pause in the fire, and in no sense\nHesitate in the hurricane to guard.\nAnd when wide world is bitten and bewarred\nThey perish purely, waving their spirits hence\nWithout a trace of grace or of offense\nTo laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.\nWhile through a throttling dark we others hear\nThe little lifting helplessness, the queer\nWhimper-whine; whose unridiculous\nLost softness softly makes a trap for us.\nAnd makes a curse. And makes a sugar of\nThe malocclusions, the inconditions of love.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nWhat shall I give my children? who are poor,\nWho are adjudged the leastwise of the land,\nWho are my sweetest lepers, who demand\nNo velvet and no velvety velour;\nBut who have begged me for a brisk contour,\nCrying that they are quasi, contraband\nBecause unfinished, graven by a hand\nLess than angelic, admirable or sure.\nMy hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.\nBut I lack access to my proper stone.\nAnd plenitude of plan shall not suffice\nNor grief nor love shall be enough alone\nTo ratify my little halves who bear\nAcross an autumn freezing everywhere.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nAnd shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?\nMites, come invade most frugal vestibules\nSpectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals\nAnd all hysterics arrogant for a day.\nInstruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.\nChildren, confine your lights in jellied rules;\nResemble graves; be metaphysical mules.\nLearn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.\nBehind the scurryings of your neat motif\nI shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm\nIf that should frighten you: sew up belief\nIf that should tear: turn, singularly calm\nAt forehead and at fingers rather wise,\nHolding the bandage ready for your eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - } - } - }, - "the-life-of-lincoln-west": { - "title": "“The Life of Lincoln West”", - "body": "Ugliest little boy\nthat everyone ever saw.\nThat is what everyone said.\n\nEven to his mother it was apparent--\nwhen the blue-aproned nurse came into the\nnortheast end of the maternity ward\nbearing his squeals and plump bottom\nlooped up in a scant receiving blanket,\nbending, to pass the bundle carefully\ninto the waiting mother-hands--that this\nwas no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness\nthat was going to inch away\nas would baby fat, baby curl, and\nbaby spot-rash. The pendulous lip, the\nbranching ears, the eyes so wide and wild,\nthe vague unvibrant brown of the skin,\nand, most disturbing, the great head.\nThese components of That Look bespoke\nthe sure fibre. The deep grain.\n\nHis father could not bear the sight of him.\nHis mother high-piled her pretty dyed hair and\nput him among her hairpins and sweethearts,\ndance slippers, torn paper roses.\nHe was not less than these,\nhe was not more.\n\nAs the little Lincoln grew,\nuglily upward and out, he began\nto understand that something was\nwrong. His little ways of trying\nto please his father, the bringing\nof matches, the jumping aside at\nwarning sound of oh-so-large and\nrushing stride, the smile that gave\nand gave and gave--Unsuccessful!\n\nEven Christmases and Easters were spoiled.\nHe would be sitting at the\nfamily feasting table, really\ndelighting in the displays of mashed potatoes\nand the rich golden\nfat-crust of the ham or the festive\nfowl, when he would look up and find\nsomebody feeling indignant about him.\n\nWhat a pity what a pity. No love\nfor one so loving. The little Lincoln\nloved Everybody. Ants. The changing\ncaterpillar. His much-missing mother.\nHis kindergarten teacher.\n\nHis kindergarten teacher--whose\nconcern for him was composed of one\npart sympathy and two parts repulsion.\nThe others ran up with their little drawings.\nHe ran up with his.\nShe\ntried to be as pleasant with him as\nwith others, but it was difficult.\nFor she was all pretty! all daintiness,\nall tiny vanilla, with blue eyes and fluffy\nsun-hair. One afternoon she\nsaw him in the hall looking bleak against\nthe wall. It was strange because the\nbell had long since rung and no other\nchild was in sight. Pity flooded her.\nShe buttoned her gloves and suggested\ncheerfully that she walk him home. She\nstarted out bravely, holding him by the\nhand. But she had not walked far before\nshe regretted it. The little monkey.\nMust everyone look? And clutching her\nhand like that … Literally pinching\nit …\n\nAt seven, the little Lincoln loved\nthe brother and sister who\nmoved next door. Handsome. Well-\ndressed. Charitable, often, to him. They\nenjoyed him because he was\nresourceful, made up\ngames, told stories. But when\ntheir More Acceptable friends came they turned\ntheir handsome backs on him. He\nhated himself for his feeling\nof well-being when with them despite--\nEverything.\n\nHe spent much time looking at himself\nin mirrors. What could be done?\nBut there was no\nshrinking his head. There was no\nbinding his ears.\n\n“Don’t touch me!” cried the little\nfairy-like being in the playground.\n\nHer name was Nerissa. The many\nchildren were playing tag, but when\nhe caught her, she recoiled, jerked free\nand ran. It was like all the\nrainbow that ever was, going off\nforever, all, all the sparklings in\nthe sunset west.\n\nOne day, while he was yet seven,\na thing happened. In the down-town movies\nwith his mother a white\nman in the seat beside him whispered\nloudly to a companion, and pointed at\nthe little Linc.\n“THERE! That’s the kind I’ve been wanting\nto show you! One of the best\nexamples of the specie. Not like\nthose diluted Negroes you see so much of on\nthe streets these days, but the\nreal thing.\n\nBlack, ugly, and odd. You\ncan see the savagery. The blunt\nblankness. That is the real\nthing.”\n\nHis mother--her hair had never looked so\nred around the dark brown\nvelvet of her face--jumped up,\nshrieked “Go to--” She did not finish.\nShe yanked to his feet the little\nLincoln, who was sitting there\nstaring in fascination at his assessor. At the author of his\nnew idea.\n\nAll the way home he was happy. Of course,\nhe had not liked the word\n“ugly.”\nBut, after all, should he not\nbe used to that by now? What had\nstruck him, among words and meanings\nhe could little understand, was the phrase\n“the real thing.”\nHe didn’t know quite why,\nbut he liked that.\nHe liked that very much.\n\nWhen he was hurt, too much\nstared at--\ntoo much\nleft alone--he\nthought about that. He told himself\n“After all, I’m\nthe real thing.”\n\nIt comforted him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1987 - } - } - }, - "the-lovers-of-the-poor": { - "title": "“The Lovers of the Poor”", - "body": "arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League\nArrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting\nIn diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag\nOf proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting\nHere, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,\nThe pink paint on the innocence of fear;\nWalk in a gingerly manner up the hall.\nCutting with knives served by their softest care,\nServed by their love, so barbarously fair.\nWhose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!\nYou had better not throw stones upon the wrens!\nHerein they kiss and coddle and assault\nAnew and dearly in the innocence\nWith which they baffle nature. Who are full,\nSleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all\nSweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,\nJudge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt\nBeneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.\nTo resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.\nTo be a random hitching-post or plush.\nTo be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.\n\nTheir guild is giving money to the poor.\nThe worthy poor. The very very worthy\nAnd beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?\nperhaps just not too dirty nor too dim\nNor--passionate. In truth, what they could wish\nIs--something less than derelict or dull.\nNot staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!\nGod shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!\nThe noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald\nNonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.\n\nBut it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.\nThe stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,\nDead porridges of assorted dusty grains,\nThe old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,\nSomething called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn\nDarkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.\nThe soil that looks the soil of centuries.\nAnd for that matter the general oldness. Old\nWood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.\nNot homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.\nNothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,\nThere is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no\nUnkillable infirmity of such\nA tasteful turn as lately they have left,\nGlencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars\nMust presently restore them. When they’re done\nWith dullards and distortions of this fistic\nPatience of the poor and put-upon.\n\nThey’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as\nNewspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”\nTheir hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich\nRugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered …)\nReadies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.\nHere is a scene for you. The Ladies look,\nIn horror, behind a substantial citizeness\nWhose trains clank out across her swollen heart.\nWho, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.\nAll tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor\nAnd tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-\nEyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.\n\nTheir League is allotting largesse to the Lost.\nBut to put their clean, their pretty money, to put\nTheir money collected from delicate rose-fingers\nTipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems …\n\nThey own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,\nMantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,\nTurtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”\nAubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter\nIn Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,\nWhen suitable, the nice Art Institute;\nBuy the right books in the best bindings; saunter\nOn Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.\nOh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre\nWith fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings\nOf loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers\nSo old old, what shall flatter the desolate?\nTin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling\nAnd swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage\nOf the middle passage, and urine and stale shames\nAnd, again, the porridges of the underslung\nAnd children children children. Heavens! That\nWas a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long\nAnd long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’\nBetterment League agree it will be better\nTo achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,\nTo hie to a house that does not holler, to ring\nBells elsetime, better presently to cater\nTo no more Possibilities, to get\nAway. Perhaps the money can be posted.\nPerhaps they two may choose another Slum!\nSome serious sooty half-unhappy home!--\nWhere loathe-love likelier may be invested.\n\nKeeping their scented bodies in the center\nOf the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,\nThey allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,\nAre off at what they manage of a canter,\nAnd, resuming all the clues of what they were,\nTry to avoid inhaling the laden air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "my-dreams-my-works-must-wait-till-after-hell": { - "title": "“My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait till after Hell”", - "body": "I hold my honey and I store my bread\nIn little jars and cabinets of my will.\nI label clearly, and each latch and lid\nI bid, Be firm till I return from hell.\nI am very hungry. I am incomplete.\nAnd none can tell when I may dine again.\nNo man can give me any word but Wait,\nThe puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;\nHoping that, when the devil days of my hurt\nDrag out to their last dregs and I resume\nOn such legs as are left me, in such heart\nAs I can manage, remember to go home,\nMy taste will not have turned insensitive\nTo honey and bread old purity could love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "a-penitent-considers-another-coming-of-mary": { - "title": "“A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary”", - "body": "If Mary came would Mary\nForgive, as Mothers may,\nAnd sad and second Saviour\nFurnish us today?\n\nShe would not shake her head and leave\nThis military air,\nBut ratify a modern hay,\nAnd put her Baby there.\n\nMary would not punish men--\nIf Mary came again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "a-sunset-of-the-city": { - "title": "“A Sunset of the City”", - "body": "Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.\nMy daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,\nAre gone from the house.\nMy husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite\nAnd night is night.\nIt is a real chill out,\nThe genuine thing.\nI am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer\nBecause sun stays and birds continue to sing.\nIt is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.\nThe sweet flowers indrying and dying down,\nThe grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.\nIt is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.\nI am aware there is winter to heed.\nThere is no warm house\nThat is fitted with my need.\nI am cold in this cold house this house\nWhose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.\nI am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.\nI am a woman who hurries through her prayers.\nTin intimations of a quiet core to be my\nDesert and my dear relief\nCome: there shall be such islanding from grief,\nAnd small communion with the master shore.\nTwang they. And I incline this ear to tin,\nConsult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry\nIn humming pallor or to leap and die.\nSomebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "truth": { - "title": "“Truth”", - "body": "And if sun comes\nHow shall we greet him?\nShall we not dread him,\nShall we not fear him\nAfter so lengthy a\nSession with shade?\n\nThough we have wept for him,\nThough we have prayed\nAll through the night-years--\nWhat if we wake one shimmering morning to\nHear the fierce hammering\nOf his firm knuckles\nHard on the door?\n\nShall we not shudder?--\nShall we not flee\nInto the shelter, the dear thick shelter\nOf the familiar\nPropitious haze?\n\nSweet is it, sweet is it\nTo sleep in the coolness\nOf snug unawareness.\n\nThe dark hangs heavily\nOver the eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - } - } - }, - "when-you-have-forgotten-sunday": { - "title": "“When you have forgotten Sunday”", - "body": "--And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,\nAnd most especially when you have forgotten Sunday--\nWhen you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,\nOr me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon\nLooking off down the long street\nTo nowhere,\nHugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation\nAnd nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?\nAnd if-Monday-never-had-to-come--\nWhen you have forgotten that, I say,\nAnd how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,\nAnd how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;\nAnd how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,\nThat is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner\nTo Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles\nOr chicken and rice\nAnd salad and rye bread and tea\nAnd chocolate chip cookies--\nI say, when you have forgotten that,\nWhen you have forgotten my little presentiment\nThat the war would be over before they got to you;\nAnd how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,\nAnd lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end\nBright bedclothes,\nThen gently folded into each other--\nWhen you have, I say, forgotten all that,\nThen you may tell,\nThen I may believe\nYou have forgotten me well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "george-mackay-brown": { - "metadata": { - "name": "George Mackay Brown", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1996 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mackay_Brown", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "epiphany-poem": { - "title": "“Epiphany Poem”", - "body": "The red king\nCame to a great water. He said,\nHere the journey ends.\nNo keel or skipper on this shore.\n\nThe yellow king\nHalted under a hill. He said,\nTurn the camels round.\nBeyond, ice summits only.\n\nThe black king\nKnocked on a city gate. He said,\nAll roads stop here.\nThese are gravestones, no inn.\n\nThe three kings\nMet under a dry star.\nThere, at midnight,\nThe star began its singing.\n\nThe three kings\nSuffered salt, snow, skulls.\nThey suffered the silence\nBefore the first word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "hamnavoe-market": { - "title": "“Hamnavoe Market”", - "body": "They drove to the Market with ringing pockets.\n\nFolster found a girl\nWho put wounds on his face and throat,\nSmall and diagonal, like red doves.\n\nJohnston stood beside the barrel.\nAll day he stood there.\nHe woke in a ditch, his mouth full of ashes.\n\nGrieve bought a balloon and a goldfish.\nHe swung through the air.\nHe fired shotguns, rolled pennies, ate sweet fog from a stick.\n\nHeddle was at the Market also.\nI know nothing of his activities.\nHe is and always was a quiet man.\n\nGarson fought three rounds with a negro boxer,\nAnd received thirty shillings,\nMuch applause, and an eye loaded with thunder.\n\nWhere did they find Flett?\nThey found him in a brazen circle,\nAll flame and blood, a new Salvationist.\n\nA gypsy saw in the hand of Halcro\nGreat strolling herds, harvests, a proud woman.\nHe wintered in the poorhouse.\n\nThey drove home from the Market under the stars\nExcept for Johnston\nWho lay in a ditch, his mouth full of dying fires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-year-of-the-whale": { - "title": "“The Year of the Whale”", - "body": "The old go, one by one, like guttered flames.\nThis past winter\nTammag the bee-man has taken his cold blank mask\nTo the honeycomb under the hill,\nCorston who ploughed out the moor\nUnyoked and gone; and I ask,\nIs Heddle lame, that in youth could dance and saunter\nA way to the chastest bed?\nThe kirkyard is full of their names\nChiselled in stone. Only myself and Yule\nIn the ale-house now, speak of the great whale year.\n\nThis one and that provoked the taurine waves\nWith an arrogant pass,\nOr probing deep through the snow-burdened hill\nResurrected his flock,\nOr passed from fiddles to ditch\nBy way of the quart and the gill,\nAll night lay tranced with corn, but stirred to face\nThe brutal stations of bread;\nWhile those who tended their lives\nLike sacred lamps, chary of oil and wick,\nDied in the fury of one careless match.\n\nOff Scabra Head the lookout sighted a school\nAt the first light.\nA meagre year it was, limpets and crows\nAnd brief mottled grain.\nEverything that could float\nCircled the school. Ploughs\nWounded those wallowing lumps of thunder and night.\nThe women crouched and prayed.\nThen whale by whale by whale\nBlundering on the rock with its red stain\nCrammed our winter cupboards with oil and meat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "sterling-allen-brown": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sterling Allen Brown", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1989 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Allen_Brown", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "riverbank-blues": { - "title": "“Riverbank Blues”", - "body": "A man git his feet set in a sticky mudbank,\nA man git dis yellow water in his blood,\nNo need for hopin’, no need for doin’,\nMuddy streams keep him fixed for good.\n\nLittle Muddy, Big Muddy, Moreau and Osage,\nLittle Mary’s, Big Mary’s, Cedar Creek,\nFlood deir muddy water roundabout a man’s roots,\nKeep him soaked and stranded and git him weak.\n\nLazy sun shinin’ on a little cabin,\nLazy moon glistenin’ over river trees;\nOle river whisperin’, lappin’ ’gainst de long roots:\n“Plenty of rest and peace in these …”\n\nBig mules, black loam, apple and peach trees,\nBut seems lak de river washes us down\nPast de rich farms, away from de fat lands,\nDumps us in some ornery riverbank town.\n\nWent down to the river, sot me down an’ listened,\nHeard de water talkin’ quiet, quiet lak an’ slow:\n“Ain’ no need fo’ hurry, take yo’ time, take yo’\ntime …” Heard it sayin’--“Baby, hyeahs de way life go …”\n\nDat is what it tole me as I watched it slowly rollin’,\nBut somp’n way inside me rared up an’ say,\n“Better be movin’ … better be travelin’ …\nRiverbank’ll git you ef you stay …”\n\nTowns are sinkin’ deeper, deeper in de riverbank,\nTakin’ on de ways of deir sulky Ole Man--\nTakin’ on his creepy ways, takin’ on his evil ways,\n“Bes’ git way, a long way … whiles you can. Man got his\nsea too lak de Mississippi Ain’t got so long for a whole lot longer way,\nMan better move some, better not git rooted Muddy water fool you, ef you stay …”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "elizabeth-barrett-browning": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Elizabeth Barrett Browning", - "birth": { - "year": 1806 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "the-cry-of-the-children": { - "title": "“The Cry of the Children”", - "body": "_“Pheu pheu, ti prosderkesthe m ommasin, tekna?”_\n_“Alas, alas, why do you gaze at me with your eyes, my children?”_\n --Medea.\n\nDo ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,\nEre the sorrow comes with years?\nThey are leaning their young heads against their mothers,--\nAnd that cannot stop their tears.\nThe young lambs are bleating in the meadows;\nThe young birds are chirping in the nest;\nThe young fawns are playing with the shadows;\nThe young flowers are blowing toward the west--\nBut the young, young children, O my brothers,\nThey are weeping bitterly!\nThey are weeping in the playtime of the others,\nIn the country of the free.\n\nDo you question the young children in the sorrow,\nWhy their tears are falling so?\nThe old man may weep for his to-morrow\nWhich is lost in Long Ago--\nThe old tree is leafless in the forest--\nThe old year is ending in the frost--\nThe old wound, if stricken, is the sorest--\nThe old hope is hardest to be lost:\nBut the young, young children, O my brothers,\nDo you ask them why they stand\nWeeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,\nIn our happy Fatherland?\n\nThey look up with their pale and sunken faces,\nAnd their looks are sad to see,\nFor the man’s grief abhorrent, draws and presses\nDown the cheeks of infancy--\n“Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary;”\n“Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak!”\n“Few paces have we taken, yet are weary--\nOur grave-rest is very far to seek!\nAsk the old why they weep, and not the children,\nFor the outside earth is cold--\nAnd we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,\nAnd the graves are for the old!”\n\n“True,” say the children, “it may happen\nThat we die before our time!\nLittle Alice died last year her grave is shapen\nLike a snowball, in the rime.\nWe looked into the pit prepared to take her--\nWas no room for any work in the close clay:\nFrom the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,\nCrying, ‘Get up, little Alice! it is day.’\nIf you listen by that grave, in sun and shower,\nWith your ear down, little Alice never cries;\nCould we see her face, be sure we should not know her,\nFor the smile has time for growing in her eyes ,--\nAnd merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in\nThe shroud, by the kirk-chime!\nIt is good when it happens,” say the children,\n“That we die before our time!”\n\nAlas, the wretched children! they are seeking\nDeath in life, as best to have!\nThey are binding up their hearts away from breaking,\nWith a cerement from the grave.\nGo out, children, from the mine and from the city--\nSing out, children, as the little thrushes do--\nPluck you handfuls of the meadow-cowslips pretty\nLaugh aloud, to feel your fingers let them through!\nBut they answer, “Are your cowslips of the meadows\nLike our weeds anear the mine?\nLeave us quiet in the dark of the coal-shadows,\nFrom your pleasures fair and fine!”\n\n“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,\nAnd we cannot run or leap--\nIf we cared for any meadows, it were merely\nTo drop down in them and sleep.\nOur knees tremble sorely in the stooping--\nWe fall upon our faces, trying to go;\nAnd, underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,\nThe reddest flower would look as pale as snow.\nFor, all day, we drag our burden tiring,\nThrough the coal-dark, underground--\nOr, all day, we drive the wheels of iron\nIn the factories, round and round.”\n\n“For all day, the wheels are droning, turning,--\nTheir wind comes in our faces,--\nTill our hearts turn,--our heads, with pulses burning,\nAnd the walls turn in their places\nTurns the sky in the high window blank and reeling--\nTurns the long light that droppeth down the wall,--\nTurn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling--\nAll are turning, all the day, and we with all!--\nAnd all day, the iron wheels are droning;\nAnd sometimes we could pray,\n‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning)\n‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”\n\nAy! be silent! Let them hear each other breathing\nFor a moment, mouth to mouth--\nLet them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing\nOf their tender human youth!\nLet them feel that this cold metallic motion\nIs not all the life God fashions or reveals--\nLet them prove their inward souls against the notion\nThat they live in you, or under you, O wheels!--\nStill, all day, the iron wheels go onward,\nAs if Fate in each were stark;\nAnd the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,\nSpin on blindly in the dark.\n\nNow tell the poor young children, O my brothers,\nTo look up to Him and pray--\nSo the blessed One, who blesseth all the others,\nWill bless them another day.\nThey answer, “Who is God that He should hear us,\nWhile the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?\nWhen we sob aloud, the human creatures near us\nPass by, hearing not, or answer not a word!\nAnd we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)\nStrangers speaking at the door:\nIs it likely God, with angels singing round Him,\nHears our weeping any more?”\n\n“Two words, indeed, of praying we remember;\nAnd at midnight’s hour of harm,--\n‘Our Father,’ looking upward in the chamber,\nWe say softly for a charm.\nWe know no other words, except ‘Our Father,’\nAnd we think that, in some pause of angels’ song,\nGod may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,\nAnd hold both within His right hand which is strong.\n‘Our Father!’ If He heard us, He would surely\n(For they call Him good and mild)\nAnswer, smiling down the steep world very purely,\n‘Come and rest with me, my child.’”\n\n“But, no!” say the children, weeping faster,\n“He is speechless as a stone;\nAnd they tell us, of His image is the master\nWho commands us to work on.\nGo to!” say the children,--“up in Heaven,\nDark, wheel-like, turning clouds are all we find!\nDo not mock us; grief has made us unbelieving--\nWe look up for God, but tears have made us blind.”\nDo ye hear the children weeping and disproving,\nO my brothers, what ye preach?\nFor God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving--\nAnd the children doubt of each.\n\nAnd well may the children weep before you;\nThey are weary ere they run;\nThey have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory\nWhich is brighter than the sun:\nThey know the grief of man, without its wisdom;\nThey sink in the despair, without its calm--\nAre slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,--\nAre martyrs, by the pang without the palm,--\nAre worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly\nNo dear remembrance keep,--\nAre orphans of the earthly love and heavenly:\nLet them weep! let them weep!\n\nThey look up, with their pale and sunken faces,\nAnd their look is dread to see,\nFor they think you see their angels in their places,\nWith eyes meant for Deity;--\n“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,\nWill you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,--\nStifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,\nAnd tread onward to your throne amid the mart?\nOur blood splashes upward, O our tyrants,\nAnd your purple shews your path;\nBut the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence\nThan the strong man in his wrath!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "grief": { - "title": "“Grief”", - "body": "I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;\nThat only men incredulous of despair,\nHalf-taught in anguish, through the midnight air\nBeat upward to God’s throne in loud access\nOf shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,\nIn souls as countries, lieth silent-bare\nUnder the blanching, vertical eye-glare\nOf the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express\nGrief for thy dead in silence like to death--\nMost like a monumental statue set\nIn everlasting watch and moveless woe\nTill itself crumble to the dust beneath.\nTouch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:\nIf it could weep, it could arise and go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-do-i-love-thee": { - "title": "“How Do I Love Thee?”", - "body": "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.\nI love thee to the depth and breadth and height\nMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sight\nFor the ends of being and ideal grace.\nI love thee to the level of every day’s\nMost quiet need, by sun and candle-light.\nI love thee freely, as men strive for right.\nI love thee purely, as they turn from praise.\nI love thee with the passion put to use\nIn my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.\nI love thee with a love I seemed to lose\nWith my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,\nSmiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,\nI shall but love thee better after death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "We cannot live, except thus mutually\nWe alternate, aware or unaware,\nThe reflex act of life: and when we bear\nOur virtue onward most impulsively,\nMost full of invocation, and to be\nMost instantly compellant, certes, there\nWe live most life, whoever breathes most air\nAnd counts his dying years by sun and sea.\nBut when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth\nThrow out her full force on another soul,\nThe conscience and the concentration both\nMake mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole\nAnd aim consummated, is Love in sooth,\nAs nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-musical-instrument": { - "title": "“A Musical Instrument”", - "body": "What was he doing, the great god Pan,\nDown in the reeds by the river?\nSpreading ruin and scattering ban,\nSplashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,\nAnd breaking the golden lilies afloat\nWith the dragon-fly on the river.\n\nHe tore out a reed, the great god Pan,\nFrom the deep cool bed of the river:\nThe limpid water turbidly ran,\nAnd the broken lilies a-dying lay,\nAnd the dragon-fly had fled away,\nEre he brought it out of the river.\n\nHigh on the shore sate the great god Pan,\nWhile turbidly flowed the river;\nAnd hacked and hewed as a great god can,\nWith his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,\nTill there was not a sign of a leaf indeed\nTo prove it fresh from the river.\n\nHe cut it short, did the great god Pan,\n(How tall it stood in the river!)\nThen drew the pith, like the heart of a man,\nSteadily from the outside ring,\nAnd notched the poor dry empty thing\nIn holes, as he sate by the river.\n\n“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,\nLaughed while he sate by the river,\n“The only way, since gods began\nTo make sweet music, they could succeed.”\nThen, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,\nHe blew in power by the river.\n\nSweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!\nPiercing sweet by the river!\nBlinding sweet, O great god Pan!\nThe sun on the hill forgot to die,\nAnd the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly\nCame back to dream on the river.\n\nYet half a beast is the great god Pan,\nTo laugh as he sits by the river,\nMaking a poet out of a man:\nThe true gods sigh for the cost and pain,--\nFor the reed which grows nevermore again\nAs a reed with the reeds in the river.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "my-heart-and-i": { - "title": "“My Heart and I”", - "body": "Enough! we’re tired, my heart and I.\nWe sit beside the headstone thus,\nAnd wish that name were carved for us.\nThe moss reprints more tenderly\nThe hard types of the mason’s knife,\nAs heaven’s sweet life renews earth’s life\nWith which we’re tired, my heart and I.\n\nYou see we’re tired, my heart and I.\nWe dealt with books, we trusted men,\nAnd in our own blood drenched the pen,\nAs if such colours could not fly.\nWe walked too straight for fortune’s end,\nWe loved too true to keep a friend;\nAt last we’re tired, my heart and I.\n\nHow tired we feel, my heart and I!\nWe seem of no use in the world;\nOur fancies hang grey and uncurled\nAbout men’s eyes indifferently;\nOur voice which thrilled you so, will let\nYou sleep; our tears are only wet:\nWhat do we here, my heart and I?\n\nSo tired, so tired, my heart and I!\nIt was not thus in that old time\nWhen Ralph sat with me ’neath the lime\nTo watch the sunset from the sky.\nDear love, you’re looking tired,’ he said;\nI, smiling at him, shook my head:\n’Tis now we’re tired, my heart and I.\n\nSo tired, so tired, my heart and I!\nThough now none takes me on his arm\nTo fold me close and kiss me warm\nTill each quick breath end in a sigh\nOf happy languor. Now, alone,\nWe lean upon this graveyard stone,\nUncheered, unkissed, my heart and I.\n\nTired out we are, my heart and I.\nSuppose the world brought diadems\nTo tempt us, crusted with loose gems\nOf powers and pleasures? Let it try.\nWe scarcely care to look at even\nA pretty child, or God’s blue heaven,\nWe feel so tired, my heart and I.\n\nYet who complains? My heart and I?\nIn this abundant earth no doubt\nIs little room for things worn out:\nDisdain them, break them, throw them by\nAnd if before the days grew rough\nWe once were loved, used,--well enough,\nI think, we’ve fared, my heart and I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-browning": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Browning", - "birth": { - "year": 1812 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "among-the-rocks": { - "title": "“Among the Rocks”", - "body": "Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,\nThis autumn morning! How he sets his bones\nTo bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet\nFor the ripple to run over in its mirth;\nListening the while, where on the heap of stones\nThe white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.\n\nThat is the doctrine, simple, ancient, true;\nSuch is life’s trial, as old earth smiles and knows.\nIf you loved only what were worth your love,\nLove were clear gain, and wholly well for you:\nMake the low nature better by your throes!\nGive earth yourself, go up for gain above!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "confessions": { - "title": "“Confessions”", - "body": "What is he buzzing in my ears?\n“Now that I come to die,\nDo I view the world as a vale of tears?”\nAh, reverend sir, not I!\n\nWhat I viewed there once, what I view again\nWhere the physic bottles stand\nOn the table’s edge,--is a suburb lane,\nWith a wall to my bedside hand.\n\nThat lane sloped, much as the bottles do,\nFrom a house you could descry\nO’er the garden-wall; is the curtain blue\nOr green to a healthy eye?\n\nTo mine, it serves for the old June weather\nBlue above lane and wall;\nAnd that farthest bottle labelled “Ether”\nIs the house o’ertopping all.\n\nAt a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,\nThere watched for me, one June,\nA girl: I know, sir, it’s improper,\nMy poor mind’s out of tune.\n\nOnly, there was a way … you crept\nClose by the side, to dodge\nEyes in the house, two eyes except:\nThey styled their house “The Lodge.”\n\nWhat right had a lounger up their lane?\nBut, by creeping very close,\nWith the good wall’s help,--their eyes might strain\nAnd stretch themselves to Oes,\n\nYet never catch her and me together,\nAs she left the attic, there,\nBy the rim of the bottle labelled “Ether,”\nAnd stole from stair to stair,\n\nAnd stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,\nWe loved, sir--used to meet:\nHow sad and bad and mad it was--\nBut then, how it was sweet!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "epilogue": { - "title": "“Epilogue”", - "body": "At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,\n When you set your fancies free,\nWill they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned--\nLow he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,\n --Pity me?\n\nOh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!\n What had I on earth to do\nWith the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?\nLike the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel\n --Being--who?\n\nOne who never turned his back but marched breast forward,\n Never doubted clouds would break,\nNever dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,\nHeld we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,\n Sleep to wake.\n\nNo, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time\n Greet the unseen with a cheer!\nBid him forward, breast and back as either should be,\n“Strive and thrive!” cry “Speed,--fight on, fare ever\n There as here!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lost-mistress": { - "title": "“The Lost Mistress”", - "body": "All’s over, then: does truth sound bitter\nAs one at first believes?\nHark, ’tis the sparrows’ good-night twitter\nAbout your cottage eaves!\n\nAnd the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,\nI noticed that, to-day;\nOne day more bursts them open fully\n--You know the red turns grey.\n\nTo-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?\nMay I take your hand in mine?\nMere friends are we,--well, friends the merest\nKeep much that I resign:\n\nFor each glance of the eye so bright and black,\nThough I keep with heart’s endeavour,--\nYour voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,\nThough it stay in my soul for ever!--\n\nYet I will but say what mere friends say,\nOr only a thought stronger;\nI will hold your hand but as long as all may,\nOr so very little longer!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "now": { - "title": "“Now”", - "body": "Out of your whole life give but one moment!\nAll of your life that has gone before,\nAll to come after it,--so you ignore,\nSo you make perfect the present,--condense,\nIn a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,\nThought and feeling and soul and sense--\nMerged in a moment which gives me at last\nYou around me for once, you beneath me, above me--\nMe--sure that despite of time future, time past,--\nThis tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me!\nHow long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--\nThe moment eternal--just that and no more--\nWhen ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core\nWhile cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-real-and-true-and-sure": { - "title": "“The Real and True and Sure”", - "body": "Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,\nMere imitation of the inimitable:\nIn heaven we have the real and true and sure.\n’Tis there they neither marry nor are given\nIn marriage but are as the angels: right,\nOh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ\nTo say that! Marriage-making for the earth,\nWith gold so much,--birth, power, repute so much,\nOr beauty, youth so much, in lack of these!\nBe as the angels rather, who, apart,\nKnow themselves into one, are found at length\nMarried, but marry never, no, nor give\nIn marriage; they are man and wife at once\nWhen the true time is: here we have to wait\nNot so long neither! Could we by a wish\nHave what we will and get the future now,\nWould we wish aught done undone in the past?\nSo, let him wait God’s instant men call years;\nMeantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,\nDo out the duty! Through such souls alone\nGod stooping shows sufficient of His light\nFor us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-cullen-bryant": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Cullen Bryant", - "birth": { - "year": 1794 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cullen_Bryant", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 24 - }, - "poems": { - "after-a-tempest": { - "title": "“After a Tempest”", - "body": "The day had been a day of wind and storm;--\nThe wind was laid, the storm was overpast,--\nAnd stooping from the zenith bright and warm\nShone the great sun on the wide earth at last.\nI stood upon the upland slope, and cast\nMy eye upon a broad and beauteous scene,\nWhere the vast plain lay girt by mountains vast,\nAnd hills o’er hills lifted their heads of green,\nWith pleasant vales scooped out and villages between.\n\nThe rain-drops glistened on the trees around,\nWhose shadows on the tall grass were not stirred,\nSave when a shower of diamonds, to the ground,\nWas shaken by the flight of startled bird;\nFor birds were warbling round, and bees were heard\nAbout the flowers; the cheerful rivulet sung\nAnd gossiped, as he hastened ocean-ward;\nTo the gray oak the squirrel, chiding, clung,\nAnd chirping from the ground the grasshopper upsprung.\n\nAnd from beneath the leaves that kept them dry\nFlew many a glittering insect here and there,\nAnd darted up and down the butterfly,\nThat seemed a living blossom of the air.\nThe flocks came scattering from the thicket, where\nThe violent rain had pent them; in the way\nStrolled groups of damsels frolicksome and fair;\nThe farmer swung the scythe or turned the hay,\nAnd ’twixt the heavy swaths his children were at play.\n\nIt was a scene of peace--and, like a spell,\nDid that serene and golden sunlight fall\nUpon the motionless wood that clothed the fell,\nAnd precipice upspringing like a wall,\nAnd glassy river and white waterfall,\nAnd happy living things that trod the bright\nAnd beauteous scene; while far beyond them all,\nOn many a lovely valley, out of sight,\nWas poured from the blue heavens the same soft golden light.\n\nI looked, and thought the quiet of the scene\nAn emblem of the peace that yet shall be,\nWhen o’er earth’s continents, and isles between,\nThe noise of war shall cease from sea to sea,\nAnd married nations dwell in harmony;\nWhen millions, crouching in the dust to one,\nNo more shall beg their lives on bended knee,\nNor the black stake be dressed, nor in the sun\nThe o’erlaboured captive toil, and wish his life were done.\n\nToo long, at clash of arms amid her bowers\nAnd pools of blood, the earth has stood aghast,\nThe fair earth, that should only blush with flowers\nAnd ruddy fruits; but not for aye can last\nThe storm, and sweet the sunshine when ’tis past.\nLo, the clouds roll away--they break--they fly,\nAnd, like the glorious light of summer, cast\nO’er the wide landscape from the embracing sky,\nOn all the peaceful world the smile of heaven shall lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "autumn-woods": { - "title": "“Autumn Woods”", - "body": "Ere, in the northern gale,\nThe summer tresses of the trees are gone,\nThe woods of Autumn, all around our vale,\nHave put their glory on.\n\nThe mountains that infold,\nIn their wide sweep, the coloured landscape round,\nSeem groups of giant kings, in purple and gold,\nThat guard the enchanted ground.\n\nI roam the woods that crown\nThe upland, where the mingled splendours glow,\nWhere the gay company of trees look down\nOn the green fields below.\n\nMy steps are not alone\nIn these bright walks; the sweet south-west, at play,\nFlies, rustling, where the painted leaves are strown\nAlong the winding way.\n\nAnd far in heaven, the while,\nThe sun, that sends that gale to wander here,\nPours out on the fair earth his quiet smile,--\nThe sweetest of the year.\n\nWhere now the solemn shade,\nVerdure and gloom where many branches meet;\nSo grateful, when the noon of summer made\nThe valleys sick with heat?\n\nLet in through all the trees\nCome the strange rays; the forest depths are bright?\nTheir sunny-coloured foliage, in the breeze,\nTwinkles, like beams of light.\n\nThe rivulet, late unseen,\nWhere bickering through the shrubs its waters run,\nShines with the image of its golden screen,\nAnd glimmerings of the sun.\n\nBut ’neath yon crimson tree,\nLover to listening maid might breathe his flame,\nNor mark, within its roseate canopy,\nHer blush of maiden shame.\n\nOh, Autumn! why so soon\nDepart the hues that make thy forests glad;\nThy gentle wind and thy fair sunny noon,\nAnd leave thee wild and sad!\n\nAh! ’twere a lot too blessed\nFor ever in thy coloured shades to stray;\nAmid the kisses of the soft south-west\nTo rove and dream for aye;\n\nAnd leave the vain low strife\nThat makes men mad--the tug for wealth and power,\nThe passions and the cares that wither life,\nAnd waste its little hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-damsel-of-peru": { - "title": "“The Damsel of Peru”", - "body": "Where olive leaves were twinkling in every wind that blew,\nThere sat beneath the pleasant shade a damsel of Peru.\nBetwixt the slender boughs, as they opened to the air,\nCame glimpses of her ivory neck and of her glossy hair;\nAnd sweetly rang her silver voice, within that shady nook,\nAs from the shrubby glen is heard the sound of hidden brook.\n\n’Tis a song of love and valour, in the noble Spanish tongue,\nThat once upon the sunny plains of old Castile was sung;\nWhen, from their mountain holds, on the Moorish rout below,\nHad rushed the Christians like a flood, and swept away the foe.\nA while that melody is still, and then breaks forth anew\nA wilder rhyme, a livelier note, of freedom and Peru.\n\nFor she has bound the sword to a youthful lover’s side,\nAnd sent him to the war the day she should have been his bride,\nAnd bade him bear a faithful heart to battle for the right,\nAnd held the fountains of her eyes till he was out of sight.\nSince the parting kiss was given, six weary months are fled,\nAnd yet the foe is in the land, and blood must yet be shed.\n\nA white hand parts the branches, a lovely face looks forth,\nAnd bright dark eyes gaze steadfastly and sadly toward the north\nThou look’st in vain, sweet maiden, the sharpest sight would fail.\nTo spy a sign of human life abroad in all the vale;\nFor the noon is coming on, and the sunbeams fiercely beat,\nAnd the silent hills and forest-tops seem reeling in the heat.\n\nThat white hand is withdrawn, that fair sad face is gone,\nBut the music of that silver voice is flowing sweetly on,\nNot as of late, in cheerful tones, but mournfully and low,--\nA ballad of a tender maid heart-broken long ago,\nOf him who died in battle, the youthful and the brave,\nAnd her who died of sorrow, upon his early grave.\n\nBut see, along that mountain’s slope, a fiery horseman ride;\nMark his torn plume, his tarnished belt, the sabre at his side.\nHis spurs are buried rowel-deep, he rides with loosened rein,\nThere’s blood upon his charger’s flank and foam upon the mane;\nHe speeds him toward the olive-grove, along that shaded hill:\nGod shield the helpless maiden there, if he should mean her ill!\n\nAnd suddenly that song has ceased, and suddenly I hear\nA shriek sent up amid the shade, a shriek--but not of fear.\nFor tender accents follow, and tenderer pauses speak\nThe overflow of gladness, when words are all too weak:\n“I lay my good sword at thy feet, for now Peru is free,\nAnd I am come to dwell beside the olive-grove with thee.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-flowers": { - "title": "“The Death of the Flowers”", - "body": "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,\nOf wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.\nHeaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;\nThey rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.\nThe robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,\nAnd from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.\n\nWhere are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood\nIn brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?\nAlas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers\nAre lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.\nThe rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain\nCalls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.\n\nThe wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,\nAnd the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;\nBut on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,\nAnd the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,\nTill fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,\nAnd the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.\n\nAnd now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,\nTo call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;\nWhen the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,\nAnd twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,\nThe south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,\nAnd sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.\n\nAnd then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,\nThe fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:\nIn the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,\nAnd we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:\nYet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,\nSo gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "an-evening-revery": { - "title": "“An Evening Revery”", - "body": "The summer day is closed--the sun is set:\nWell they have done their office, those bright hours,\nThe latest of whose train goes softly out\nIn the red West. The green blade of the ground\nHas risen, and herds have cropped it; the young twig\nHas spread its plaited tissues to the sun;\nFlowers of the garden and the waste have blown\nAnd withered; seeds have fallen upon the soil,\nFrom bursting cells, and in their graves await\nTheir resurrection. Insects from the pools\nHave filled the air awhile with humming wings,\nThat now are still for ever; painted moths\nHave wandered the blue sky, and died again;\nThe mother-bird hath broken for her brood\nTheir prison shell, or shoved them from the nest,\nPlumed for their earliest flight. In bright alcoves,\nIn woodland cottages with barky walls,\nIn noisome cells of the tumultuous town,\nMothers have clasped with joy the new-born babe.\nGraves by the lonely forest, by the shore\nOf rivers and of ocean, by the ways\nOf the thronged city, have been hollowed out\nAnd filled, and closed. This day hath parted friends\nThat ne’er before were parted; it hath knit\nNew friendships; it hath seen the maiden plight\nHer faith, and trust her peace to him who long\nHad wooed; and it hath heard, from lips which late\nWere eloquent of love, the first harsh word,\nThat told the wedded one her peace was flown.\nFarewell to the sweet sunshine! One glad day\nIs added now to Childhood’s merry days,\nAnd one calm day to those of quiet Age.\nStill the fleet hours run on; and as I lean,\nAmid the thickening darkness, lamps are lit,\nBy those who watch the dead, and those who twine\nFlowers for the bride. The mother from the eyes\nOf her sick infant shades the painful light,\nAnd sadly listens to his quick-drawn breath.\n\nOh thou great Movement of the Universe,\nOr Change, or Flight of Time--for ye are one!\nThat bearest, silently, this visible scene\nInto night’s shadow and the streaming rays\nOf starlight, whither art thou bearing me?\nI feel the mighty current sweep me on,\nYet know not whither. Man foretells afar\nThe courses of the stars; the very hour\nHe knows when they shall darken or grow bright;\nYet doth the eclipse of Sorrow and of Death\nCome unforewarned. Who next, of those I love,\nShall pass from life, or, sadder yet, shall fall\nFrom virtue? Strife with foes, or bitterer strife\nWith friends, or shame and general scorn of men--\nWhich who can bear?--or the fierce rack of pain,\nLie they within my path? Or shall the years\nPush me, with soft and inoffensive pace,\nInto the stilly twilight of my age?\nOr do the portals of another life\nEven now, while I am glorying in my strength,\nImpend around me? Oh! beyond that bourne,\nIn the vast cycle of being which begins\nAt that broad threshold, with what fairer forms\nShall the great law of change and progress clothe\nIts workings? Gently--so have good men taught--\nGently, and without grief, the old shall glide\nInto the new; the eternal flow of things,\nLike a bright river of the fields of heaven,\nShall journey onward in perpetual peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-fountain": { - "title": "“The Fountain”", - "body": "Fountain, that springest on this grassy slope,\nThy quick cool murmur mingles pleasantly,\nWith the cool sound of breezes in the beach,\nAbove me in the noontide. Thou dost wear\nNo stain of thy dark birthplace; gushing up\nFrom the red mould and slimy roots of earth,\nThou flashest in the sun. The mountain air,\nIn winter, is not clearer, nor the dew\nThat shines on mountain blossom. Thus doth God\nBring, from the dark and foul, the pure and bright.\n\nThis tangled thicket on the bank above\nThy basin, how thy waters keep it green!\nFor thou dost feed the roots of the wild vine\nThat trails all over it, and to the twigs\nTies fast her clusters. There the spice-bush lifts\nHer leafy lances; the viburnum there,\nPaler of foliage, to the sun holds up\nHer circlet of green berries. In and out\nThe chipping sparrow, in her coat of brown,\nSteals silently, lest I should mark her nest.\n\nNot such thou wert of yore, ere yet the axe\nHad smitten the old woods. Then hoary trunks\nOf oak, and plane, and hickory, o’er thee held\nA mighty canopy. When April winds\nGrew soft, the maple burst into a flush\nOf scarlet flowers. The tulip-tree, high up,\nOpened, in airs of June, her multitude\nOf golden chalices to humming-birds\nAnd silken-winged insects of the sky.\n\nFrail wood-plants clustered round thy edge in Spring.\nThe liverleaf put forth her sister blooms\nOf faintest blue. Here the quick-footed wolf,\nPassing to lap thy waters, crushed the flower\nOf sanguinaria, from whose brittle stem\nThe red drops fell like blood. The deer, too, left\nHer delicate foot-print in the soft moist mould,\nAnd on the fallen leaves. The slow-paced bear,\nIn such a sultry summer noon as this,\nStopped at thy stream, and drank, and leaped across.\n\nBut thou hast histories that stir the heart\nWith deeper feeling; while I look on thee\nThey rise before me. I behold the scene\nHoary again with forests; I behold\nThe Indian warrior, whom a hand unseen\nHas smitten with his death-wound in the woods,\nCreep slowly to thy well-known rivulet,\nAnd slake his death-thirst. Hark, that quick fierce cry\nThat rends the utter silence; ’tis the whoop\nOf battle, and a throng of savage men\nWith naked arms and faces stained like blood,\nFill the green wilderness; the long bare arms\nAre heaved aloft, bows twang and arrows stream;\nEach makes a tree his shield, and every tree\nSends forth its arrow. Fierce the fight and short,\nAs is the whirlwind. Soon the conquerors\nAnd conquered vanish, and the dead remain\nMangled by tomahawks. The mighty woods\nAre still again, the frighted bird comes back\nAnd plumes her wings; but thy sweet waters run\nCrimson with blood. Then, as the sun goes down,\nAmid the deepening twilight I descry\nFigures of men that crouch and creep unheard,\nAnd bear away the dead. The next day’s shower\nShall wash the tokens of the fight away.\n\nI look again--a hunter’s lodge is built,\nWith poles and boughs, beside thy crystal well,\nWhile the meek autumn stains the woods with gold,\nAnd sheds his golden sunshine. To the door\nThe red man slowly drags the enormous bear\nSlain in the chestnut thicket, or flings down\nThe deer from his strong shoulders. Shaggy fells\nOf wolf and cougar hang upon the walls,\nAnd loud the black-eyed Indian maidens laugh,\nThat gather, from the rustling heaps of leaves,\nThe hickory’s white nuts, and the dark fruit\nThat falls from the gray butternut’s long boughs.\n\nSo centuries passed by, and still the woods\nBlossomed in spring, and reddened when the year\nGrew chill, and glistened in the frozen rains\nOf winter, till the white man swung the axe\nBeside thee--signal of a mighty change.\nThen all around was heard the crash of trees,\nTrembling awhile and rushing to the ground,\nThe low of ox, and shouts of men who fired\nThe brushwood, or who tore the earth with ploughs.\nThe grain sprang thick and tall, and hid in green\nThe blackened hill-side; ranks of spiky maize\nRose like a host embattled; the buckwheat\nWhitened broad acres, sweetening with its flowers\nThe August wind. White cottages were seen\nWith rose-trees at the windows; barns from which\nCame loud and shrill the crowing of the cock;\nPastures where rolled and neighed the lordly horse,\nAnd white flocks browsed and bleated. A rich turf\nOf grasses brought from far o’ercrept thy bank,\nSpotted with the white clover. Blue-eyed girls\nBrought pails, and dipped them in thy crystal pool;\nAnd children, ruddy-cheeked and flaxen-haired,\nGathered the glistening cowslip from thy edge.\n\nSince then, what steps have trod thy border! Here\nOn thy green bank, the woodmann of the swamp\nHas laid his axe, the reaper of the hill\nHis sickle, as they stooped to taste thy stream.\nThe sportsman, tired with wandering in the still\nSeptember noon, has bathed his heated brow\nIn thy cool current. Shouting boys, let loose\nFor a wild holiday, have quaintly shaped\nInto a cup the folded linden leaf,\nAnd dipped thy sliding crystal. From the wars\nReturning, the plumed soldier by thy side\nHas sat, and mused how pleasant ’twere to dwell\nIn such a spot, and be as free as thou,\nAnd move for no man’s bidding more. At eve,\nWhen thou wert crimson with the crimson sky,\nLovers have gazed upon thee, and have thought\nTheir mingled lives should flow as peacefully\nAnd brightly as thy waters. Here the sage,\nGazing into thy self-replenished depth,\nHas seen eternal order circumscribe\nAnd bind the motions of eternal change,\nAnd from the gushing of thy simple fount\nHas reasoned to the mighty universe.\n\nIs there no other change for thee, that lurks\nAmong the future ages? Will not man\nSeek out strange arts to wither and deform\nThe pleasant landscape which thou makest green?\nOr shall the veins that feed thy constant stream\nBe choked in middle earth, and flow no more\nFor ever, that the water-plants along\nThy channel perish, and the bird in vain\nAlight to drink? Haply shall these green hills\nSink, with the lapse of years, into the gulf\nOf ocean waters, and thy source be lost\nAmidst the bitter brine? Or shall they rise,\nUpheaved in broken cliffs and airy peaks,\nHaunts of the eagle and the snake, and thou\nGush midway from the bare and barren steep?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "green-river": { - "title": "“Green River”", - "body": "When breezes are soft and skies are fair,\nI steal an hour from study and care,\nAnd hie me away to the woodland scene,\nWhere wanders the stream with waters of green,\nAs if the bright fringe of herbs on its brink\nHad given their stain to the wave they drink;\nAnd they, whose meadows it murmurs through,\nHave named the stream from its own fair hue.\n\nYet pure its waters--its shallows are bright\nWith coloured pebbles and sparkles of light,\nAnd clear the depths where its eddies play,\nAnd dimples deepen and whirl away,\nAnd the plane-tree’s speckled arms o’ershoot\nThe swifter current that mines its root,\nThrough whose shifting leaves, as you walk the hill,\nThe quivering glimmer of sun and rill\nWith a sudden flash on the eye is thrown,\nLike the ray that streams from the diamond stone.\nOh, loveliest there the spring days come,\nWith blossoms, and birds, and wild bees’ hum;\nThe flowers of summer are fairest there,\nAnd freshest the breath of the summer air;\nAnd sweetest the golden autumn day\nIn silence and sunshine glides away.\n\nYet fair as thou art, thou shunnest to glide,\nBeautiful stream! by the village side;\nBut windest away from haunts of men,\nTo quiet valley and shaded glen;\nAnd forest, and meadow, and slope of hill,\nAround thee, are lonely, lovely, and still.\nLonely--save when, by thy rippling tides,\nFrom thicket to thicket the angler glides;\nOr the simpler comes with basket and book,\nFor herbs of power on thy banks to look;\nOr haply, some idle dreamer, like me,\nTo wander, and muse, and gaze on thee.\nStill--save the chirp of birds that feed\nOn the river cherry and seedy reed,\nAnd thy own wild music gushing out\nWith mellow murmur and fairy shout,\nFrom dawn to the blush of another day,\nLike traveller singing along his way.\n\nThat fairy music I never hear,\nNor gaze on those waters so green and clear,\nAnd mark them winding away from sight,\nDarkened with shade or flashing with light,\nWhile o’er them the vine to its thicket clings,\nAnd the zephyr stoops to freshen his wings,\nBut I wish that fate had left me free\nTo wander these quiet haunts with thee,\nTill the eating cares of earth should depart,\nAnd the peace of the scene pass into my heart;\nAnd I envy thy stream, as it glides along,\nThrough its beautiful banks in a trance of song.\n\nThough forced to drudge for the dregs of men,\nAnd scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,\nAnd mingle among the jostling crowd,\nWhere the sons of strife are subtle and loud--\nI often come to this quiet place,\nTo breathe the airs that ruffle thy face,\nAnd gaze upon thee in silent dream,\nFor in thy lonely and lovely stream\nAn image of that calm life appears\nThat won my heart in my greener years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "june": { - "title": "“June”", - "body": "I gazed upon the glorious sky\nAnd the green mountains round,\nAnd thought that when I came to lie\nWithin the silent ground,\n’Twere pleasant, that in flowery June,\nWhen brooks send up a cheerful tune,\nAnd groves a joyous sound,\nThe sexton’s hand, my grave to make,\nThe rich, green mountain turf should break.\n\nA cell within the frozen mould,\nA coffin borne through sleet,\nAnd icy clods above it rolled,\nWhile fierce the tempests beat--\nAway!--I will not think of these--\nBlue be the sky and soft the breeze,\nEarth green beneath the feet,\nAnd be the damp mould gently pressed\nInto my narrow place of rest.\n\nThere through the long, long summer hours,\nThe golden light should lie,\nAnd thick young herbs and groups of flowers\nStand in their beauty by.\nThe oriole should build and tell\nHis love-tale close beside my cell;\nThe idle butterfly\nShould rest him there, and there be heard\nThe housewife bee and humming-bird.\n\nAnd what if cheerful shouts at noon\nCome, from the village sent,\nOr songs of maids, beneath the moon\nWith fairy laughter blent?\nAnd what if, in the evening light,\nBetrothed lovers walk in sight\nOf my low monument?\nI would the lovely scene around\nMight know no sadder sight nor sound.\n\nI know, I know I should not see\nThe season’s glorious show,\nNor would its brightness shine for me,\nNor its wild music flow;\nBut if, around my place of sleep,\nThe friends I love should come to weep,\nThey might not haste to go.\nSoft airs, and song, and light, and bloom,\nShould keep them lingering by my tomb.\n\nThese to their softened hearts should bear\nThe thought of what has been,\nAnd speak of one who cannot share\nThe gladness of the scene;\nWhose part, in all the pomp that fills\nThe circuit of the summer hills,\nIs--that his grave is green;\nAnd deeply would their hearts rejoice\nTo hear again his living voice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-maidens-sorrow": { - "title": "“The Maiden’s Sorrow”", - "body": "Seven long years has the desert rain\nDropped on the clods that hide thy face;\nSeven long years of sorrow and pain\nI have thought of thy burial-place.\n\nThought of thy fate in the distant west,\nDying with none that loved thee near;\nThey who flung the earth on thy breast\nTurned from the spot williout a tear.\n\nThere, I think, on that lonely grave,\nViolets spring in the soft May shower;\nThere, in the summer breezes, wave\nCrimson phlox and moccasin flower.\n\nThere the turtles alight, and there\nFeeds with her fawn the timid doe;\nThere, when the winter woods are bare,\nWalks the wolf on the crackling snow.\n\nSoon wilt thou wipe my tears away;\nAll my task upon earth is done;\nMy poor father, old and gray,\nSlumbers beneath the churchyard stone.\n\nIn the dreams of my lonely bed,\nEver thy form before me seems;\nAll night long I talk with the dead,\nAll day long I think of my dreams.\n\nThis deep wound that bleeds and aches,\nThis long pain, a sleepless pain--\nWhen the Father my spirit takes,\nI shall feel it no more again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "midsummer": { - "title": "“Midsummer”", - "body": "A power is on the earth and in the air,\nFrom which the vital spirit shrinks afraid,\nAnd shelters him, in nooks of deepest shade,\nFrom the hot steam and from the fiery glare.\nLook forth upon the earth--her thousand plants\nAre smitten; even the dark sun-loving maize\nFaints in the field beneath the torrid blaze;\nThe herd beside the shaded fountain pants;\nFor life is driven from all the landscape brown;\nThe bird has sought his tree, the snake his den,\nThe trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men\nDrop by the sun-stroke in the populous town:\nAs if the Day of Fire had dawned, and sent\nIts deadly breath into the firmament.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "monument-mountain": { - "title": "“Monument Mountain”", - "body": "Thou who wouldst see the lovely and the wild\nMingled in harmony on Nature’s face,\nAscend our rocky mountains. Let thy foot\nFail not with weariness, for on their tops\nThe beauty and the majesty of earth,\nSpread wide beneath, shall make thee to forget\nThe steep and toilsome way. There, as thou stand’st,\nThe haunts of men below thee, and around\nThe mountain summits, thy expanding heart\nShall feel a kindred with that loftier world\nTo which thou art translated, and partake\nThe enlargement of thy vision. Thou shalt look\nUpon the green and rolling forest tops,\nAnd down into the secrets of the glens,\nAnd streams, that with their bordering thickets strive\nTo hide their windings. Thou shalt gaze, at once,\nHere on white villages, and tilth, and herds,\nAnd swarming roads, and there on solitudes\nThat only hear the torrent, and the wind,\nAnd eagle’s shriek. There is a precipice\nThat seems a fragment of some mighty wall,\nBuilt by the hand that fashioned the old world,\nTo separate its nations, and thrown down\nWhen the flood drowned them. To the north, a path\nConducts you up the narrow battlement.\nSteep is the western side, shaggy and wild\nWith mossy trees, and pinnacles of flint,\nAnd many a hanging crag. But, to the east,\nSheer to the vale go down the bare old cliffs,--\nHuge pillars, that in middle heaven upbear\nTheir weather-beaten capitals, here dark\nWith the thick moss of centuries, and there\nOf chalky whiteness where the thunderbolt\nHas splintered them. It is a fearful thing\nTo stand upon the beetling verge, and see\nWhere storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall,\nHave tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base\nDashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear\nOver the dizzy depth, and hear the sound\nOf winds, that struggle with the woods below,\nCome up like ocean murmurs. But the scene\nIs lovely round; a beautiful river there\nWanders amid the fresh and fertile meads,\nThe paradise he made unto himself,\nMining the soil for ages. On each side\nThe fields swell upward to the hills; beyond,\nAbove the hills, in the blue distance, rise\nThe mighty columns with which earth props heaven.\n\nThere is a tale about these reverend rocks,\nA sad tradition of unhappy love,\nAnd sorrows borne and ended, long ago,\nWhen over these fair vales the savage sought\nHis game in the thick woods. There was a maid,\nThe fairest of the Indian maids, bright-eyed,\nWith wealth of raven tresses, a light form,\nAnd a gay heart. About her cabin-door\nThe wide old woods resounded with her song\nAnd fairy laughter all the summer day.\nShe loved her cousin; such a love was deemed,\nBy the morality of those stern tribes,\nIncestuous, and she struggled hard and long\nAgainst her love, and reasoned with her heart,\nAs simple Indian maiden might. In vain.\nThen her eye lost its lustre, and her step\nIts lightness, and the gray-haired men that passed\nHer dwelling, wondered that they heard no more\nThe accustomed song and laugh of her, whose looks\nWere like the cheerful smile of Spring, they said,\nUpon the Winter of their age. She went\nTo weep where no eye saw, and was not found\nWhen all the merry girls were met to dance,\nAnd all the hunters of the tribe were out;\nNor when they gathered from the rustling husk\nThe shining ear; nor when, by the river’s side,\nThay pulled the grape and startled the wild shades\nWith sounds of mirth. The keen-eyed Indian dames\nWould whisper to each other, as they saw\nHer wasting form, and say _the girl will die_.\n\nOne day into the bosom of a friend,\nA playmate of her young and innocent years,\nShe poured her griefs. “Thou know’st, and thou alone,”\nShe said, “for I have told thee, all my love,\nAnd guilt, and sorrow. I am sick of life.\nAll night I weep in darkness, and the morn\nGlares on me, as upon a thing accursed,\nThat has no business on the earth. I hate\nThe pastimes and the pleasant toils that once\nI loved; the cheerful voices of my friends\nHave an unnatural horror in mine ear.\nIn dreams my mother, from the land of souls,\nCalls me and chides me. All that look on me\nDo seem to know my shame; I cannot bear\nTheir eyes; I cannot from my heart root out\nThe love that wrings it so, and I must die.”\n\nIt was a summer morning, and they went\nTo this old precipice. About the cliffs\nLay garlands, ears of maize, and shaggy skins\nOf wolf and bear, the offerings of the tribe\nHere made to the Great Spirit, for they deemed,\nLike worshippers of the elder time, that God\nDoth walk on the high places and affect\nThe earth-o’erlooking mountains. She had on\nThe ornaments with which her father loved\nTo deck the beauty of his bright-eyed girl,\nAnd bade her wear when stranger warriors came\nTo be his guests. Here the friends sat them down,\nAnd sang, all day, old songs of love and death,\nAnd decked the poor wan victim’s hair with flowers,\nAnd prayed that safe and swift might be her way\nTo the calm world of sunshine, where no grief\nMakes the heart heavy and the eyelids red.\nBeautiful lay the region of her tribe\nBelow her--waters resting in the embrace\nOf the wide forest, and maize-planted glades\nOpening amid the leafy wilderness.\nShe gazed upon it long, and at the sight\nOf her own village peeping through the trees,\nAnd her own dwelling, and the cabin roof\nOf him she loved with an unlawful love,\nAnd came to die for, a warm gush of tears\nRan from her eyes. But when the sun grew low\nAnd the hill shadows long, she threw herself\nFrom the steep rock and perished. There was scooped\nUpon the mountain’s southern slope, a grave;\nAnd there they laid her, in the very garb\nWith which the maiden decked herself for death,\nWith the same withering wild flowers in her hair.\nAnd o’er the mould that covered her, the tribe\nBuilt up a simple monument, a cone\nOf small loose stones. Thenceforward all who passed,\nHunter, and dame, and virgin, laid a stone\nIn silence on the pile. It stands there yet.\nAnd Indians from the distant West, who come\nTo visit where their fathers’ bones are laid,\nYet tell the sorrowful tale, and to this day\nThe mountain where the hapless maiden died\nIs called the Mountain of the Monument.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "noon": { - "title": "“Noon”", - "body": "’Tis noon. At noon the Hebrew bowed the knee\nAnd worshipped, while the husbandmen withdrew\nFrom the scorched field, and the wayfaring man\nGrew faint, and turned aside by bubbling fount,\nOr rested in the shadow of the palm.\n\nI, too, amid the overflow of day,\nBehold the power which wields and cherishes\nThe frame of Nature. From this brow of rock\nThat overlooks the Hudson’s western marge,\nI gaze upon the long array of groves,\nThe piles and gulfs of verdure drinking in\nThe grateful heats. They love the fiery sun;\nTheir broadening leaves grow glossier, and their sprays\nClimb as he looks upon them. In the midst,\nThe swelling river, into his green gulfs,\nUnshadowed save by passing sails above,\nTakes the redundant glory, and enjoys\nThe summer in his chilly bed. Coy flowers,\nThat would not open in the early light,\nPush back their plaited sheaths. The rivulet’s pool,\nThat darkly quivered all the morning long\nIn the cool shade, now glimmers in the sun;\nAnd o’er its surface shoots, and shoots again,\nThe glittering dragon-fly, and deep within\nRun the brown water-beetles to and fro.\n\nA silence, the brief sabbath of an hour,\nReigns o’er the fields; the laborer sits within\nHis dwelling; he has left his steers awhile,\nUnyoked, to bite the herbage, and his dog\nSleeps stretched beside the door-stone in the shade.\nNow the grey marmot, with uplifted paws,\nNo more sits listening by his den, but steals\nAbroad, in safety, to the clover field,\nAnd crops its juicy blossoms. All the while\nA ceaseless murmur from the populous town\nSwells o’er these solitudes: a mingled sound\nOf jarring wheels, and iron hoofs that clash\nUpon the stony ways, and hammer-clang,\nAnd creak of engines lifting ponderous bulks,\nAnd calls and cries, and tread of eager feet,\nInnumerable, hurrying to and fro.\nNoon, in that mighty mart of nations, brings\nNo pause to toil and care. With early day\nBegan the tumult, and shall only cease\nWhen midnight, hushing one by one the sounds\nOf bustle, gathers the tired brood to rest.\n\nThus, in this feverish time, when love of gain\nAnd luxury possess the hearts of men,\nThus is it with the noon of human life.\nWe, in our fervid manhood, in our strength\nOf reason, we, with hurry, noise, and care,\nPlan, toil, and strife, and pause not to refresh\nOur spirits with the calm and beautiful\nOf God’s harmonious universe, that won\nOur youthful wonder; pause not to inquire\nWhy we are here; and what the reverence\nMan owes to man, and what the mystery\nThat links us to the greater world, beside\nWhose borders we but hover for a space.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!\nOne mellow smile through the soft vapoury air,\nEre, o’er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,\nOr snows are sifted o’er the meadows bare.\nOne smile on the brown hills and naked trees,\nAnd the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,\nAnd the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,\nNods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.\nYet a few sunny days, in which the bee\nShall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,\nThe cricket chirp upon the russet lea,\nAnd man delight to linger in thy ray.\nYet one rich smile, and we will try to bear\nThe piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "october": { - "title": "“October”", - "body": "Ay, thou art welcome, heaven’s delicious breath,\nWhen woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,\nAnd suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,\nAnd the year smiles as it draws near its death.\nWind of the sunny south! oh still delay\nIn the gay woods and in the golden air,\nLike to a good old age released from care,\nJourneying, in long serenity, away.\nIn such a bright, late quiet, would that I\nMight wear out life like thee, mid bowers and brooks,\nAnd, dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,\nAnd music of kind voices ever nigh;\nAnd when my last sand twinkled in the glass,\nPass silently from men, as thou dost pass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-old-mans-counsel": { - "title": "“The Old Man’s Counsel”", - "body": "Among our hills and valleys, I have known\nWise and grave men, who, while their diligent hands\nTended or gathered in the fruits of earth,\nWere reverent learners in the solemn school\nOf nature. Not in vain to them were sent\nSeed-time and harvest, or the vernal shower\nThat darkened the brown tilth, or snow that beat\nOn the white winter hills. Each brought, in turn,\nSome truth, some lesson on the life of man,\nOr recognition of the Eternal mind\nWho veils his glory with the elements.\n\nOne such I knew long since, a white-haired man,\nPithy of speech, and merry when he would;\nA genial optimist, who daily drew\nFrom what he saw his quaint moralities.\nKindly he held communion, though so old,\nWith me a dreaming boy, and taught me much\nThat books tell not, and I shall ne’er forget.\n\nThe sun of May was bright in middle heaven,\nAnd steeped the sprouting forests, the green hills\nAnd emerald wheat-fields, in his yellow light.\nUpon the apple-tree, where rosy buds\nStood clustered, ready to burst forth in bloom,\nThe robin warbled forth his full clear note\nFor hours, and wearied not. Within the woods,\nWhose young and half transparent leaves scarce cast\nA shade, gay circles of anemones\nDanced on their stalks; the shadbush, white with flowers,\nBrightened the glens; the new-leaved butternut\nAnd quivering poplar to the roving breeze\nGave a balsamic fragrance. In the fields\nI saw the pulses of the gentle wind\nOn the young grass. My heart was touched with joy\nAt so much beauty, flushing every hour\nInto a fuller beauty; but my friend,\nThe thoughtful ancient, standing at my side,\nGazed on it mildly sad. I asked him why.\n\n“Well mayst thou join in gladness,” he replied,\n“With the glad earth, her springing plants and flowers,\nAnd this soft wind, the herald of the green\nLuxuriant summer. Thou art young like them,\nAnd well mayst thou rejoice. But while the flight\nOf seasons fills and knits thy spreading frame,\nIt withers mine, and thins my hair, and dims\nThese eyes, whose fading light shall soon be quenched\nIn utter darkness. Hearest thou that bird?”\n\nI listened, and from midst the depth of woods\nHeard the love-signal of the grouse, that wears\nA sable ruff around his mottled neck;\nPartridge they call him by our northern streams,\nAnd pheasant by the Delaware. He beat\n’Gainst his barred sides his speckled wings, and made\nA sound like distant thunder; slow the strokes\nAt first, then fast and faster, till at length\nThey passed into a murmur and were still.\n\n“There hast thou,” said my friend, “a fitting type\nOf human life. ’Tis an old truth, I know,\nBut images like these revive the power\nOf long familiar truths. Slow pass our days\nIn childhood, and the hours of light are long\nBetwixt the morn and eve; with swifter lapse\nThey glide in manhood, and in age they fly;\nTill days and seasons flit before the mind\nAs flit the snow-flakes in a winter storm,\nSeen rather than distinguished. Ah! I seem\nAs if I sat within a helpless bark\nBy swiftly running waters hurried on\nTo shoot some mighty cliff. Along the banks\nGrove after grove, rock after frowning rock,\nBare sands and pleasant homes, and flowery nooks,\nAnd isles and whirlpools in the stream, appear\nEach after each, but the devoted skiff\nDarts by so swiftly that their images\nDwell not upon the mind, or only dwell\nIn dim confusion; faster yet I sweep\nBy other banks, and the great gulf is near.”\n\n“Wisely, my son, while yet thy days are long,\nAnd this fair change of seasons passes slow,\nGather and treasure up the good they yield--\nAll that they teach of virtue, of pure thoughts\nAnd kind affections, reverence for thy God\nAnd for thy brethren; so when thou shalt come\nInto these barren years, thou mayst not bring\nA mind unfurnished and a withered heart.”\n\nLong since that white-haired ancient slept--but still,\nWhen the red flower-buds crowd the orchard bough,\nAnd the ruffed grouse is drumming far within\nThe woods, his venerable form again\nIs at my side, his voice is in my ear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "a-scene-on-the-banks-of-the-hudson": { - "title": "“A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson”", - "body": "Cool shades and dews are round my way,\nAnd silence of the early day;\nMid the dark rocks that watch his bed,\nGlitters the mighty Hudson spread,\nUnrippled, save by drops that fall\nFrom shrubs that fringe his mountain wall;\nAnd o’er the clear still water swells\nThe music of the Sabbath bells.\n\nAll, save this little nook of land\nCircled with trees, on which I stand;\nAll, save that line of hills which lie\nSuspended in the mimic sky--\nSeems a blue void, above, below,\nThrough which the white clouds come and go,\nAnd from the green world’s farthest steep\nI gaze into the airy deep.\n\nLoveliest of lovely things are they,\nOn earth, that soonest pass away.\nThe rose that lives its little hour\nIs prized beyond the sculptured flower.\nEven love, long tried and cherished long,\nBecomes more tender and more strong,\nAt thought of that insatiate grave\nFrom which its yearnings cannot save.\n\nRiver! in this still hour thou hast\nToo much of heaven on earth to last;\nNor long may thy still waters lie,\nAn image of the glorious sky.\nThy fate and mine are not repose,\nAnd ere another evening close,\nThou to thy tides shalt turn again,\nAnd I to seek the crowd of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday", - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-stars": { - "title": "“Song of the Stars”", - "body": "When the radiant morn of creation broke,\nAnd the world in the smile of God awoke,\nAnd the empty realms of darkness and death\nWere moved through their depths by his mighty breath,\nAnd orbs of beauty and spheres of flame\nFrom the void abyss by myriads came,--\nIn the joy of youth as they darted away,\nThrough the widening wastes of space to play,\nTheir silver voices in chorus rang,\nAnd this was the song the bright ones sang:\n\n“Away, away, through the wide, wide sky,\nThe fair blue fields that before us lie,--\nEach sun with the worlds that round him roll,\nEach planet, poised on her turning pole;\nWith her isles of green, and her clouds of white,\nAnd her waters that lie like fluid light.”\n\n“For the source of glory uncovers his face,\nAnd the brightness o’erflows unbounded space;\nAnd we drink as we go the luminous tides\nIn our ruddy air and our blooming sides:\nLo, yonder the living splendours play;\nAway, on our joyous path, away!”\n\n“Look, look, through our glittering ranks afar,\nIn the infinite azure, star after star,\nHow they brighten and bloom as they swiftly pass!\nHow the verdure runs o’er each rolling mass!\nAnd the path of the gentle winds is seen,\nWhere the small waves dance, and the young woods lean.”\n\n“And see where the brighter day-beams pour,\nHow the rainbows hang in the sunny shower;\nAnd the morn and eve, with their pomp of hues,\nShift o’er the bright planets and shed their dews;\nAnd ’twixt them both, o’er the teeming ground,\nWith her shadowy cone the night goes round!”\n\n“Away, away! in our blossoming bowers,\nIn the soft air wrapping these spheres of ours,\nIn the seas and fountains that shine with morn,\nSee, Love is brooding, and Life is born,\nAnd breathing myriads are breaking from night,\nTo rejoice, like us, in motion and light.”\n\n“Glide on in your beauty, ye youthful spheres,\nTo weave the dance that measures the years;\nGlide on, in the glory and gladness sent,\nTo the farthest wall of the firmament,--\nThe boundless visible smile of Him,\nTo the veil of whose brow your lamps are dim.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-strange-lady": { - "title": "“The Strange Lady”", - "body": "The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,\nAs if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky;\nYoung Albert, in the forest’s edge, has heard a rustling sound,\nAn arrow slightly strikes his hand and falls upon the ground.\n\nA dark-haired woman from the wood comes suddenly in sight;\nHer merry eye is full and black, her cheek is brown and bright;\nHer gown is of the mid-sea blue, her belt with beads is strung,\nAnd yet she speaks in gentle tones, and in the English tongue.\n\n“It was an idle bolt I sent, against the villain crow;\nFair sir, I fear it harmed thy hand; beshrew my erring bow!”\n“Ah! would that bolt had not been spent! then, lady, might I wear\nA lasting token on my hand of one so passing fair!”\n\n“Thou art a flatterer like the rest, but wouldst thou take with me\nA day of hunting in the wilds, beneath the greenwood tree,\nI know where most the pheasants feed, and where the red-deer herd,\nAnd thou shouldst chase the nobler game, and I bring down the bird.”\n\nNow Albert in her quiver lays the arrow in its place,\nAnd wonders as he gazes on the beauty of her face:\n“Those hunting-grounds are far away, and, lady, ’twere not meet\nThat night, amid the wilderness, should overtake thy feet.”\n\n“Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine,--\n’Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, ’tis mantled by the vine;\nThe wild plum sheds its yellow fruit from fragrant thickets nigh,\nAnd flowery prairies from the door stretch till they meet the sky.”\n\n“There in the boughs that hide the roof the mock-bird sits and sings,\nAnd there the hang-bird’s brood within its little hammock swings;\nA pebbly brook, where rustling winds among the hopples sweep,\nShall lull thee till the morning sun looks in upon thy sleep.”\n\nAway, into the forest depths by pleasant paths they go,\nHe with his rifle on his arm, the lady with her bow,\nWhere cornels arch their cool dark boughs o’er beds of winter-green,\nAnd never at his father’s door again was Albert seen.\n\nThat night upon the woods came down a furious hurricane,\nWith howl of winds and roar of streams, and beating of the rain;\nThe mighty thunder broke and drowned the noises in its crash;\nThe old trees seemed to fight like fiends beneath the lightning-flash.\n\nNext day, within a mossy glen, ’mid mouldering trunks were found\nThe fragments of a human form upon the bloody ground;\nWhite bones from which the flesh was torn, and locks of glossy hair;\nThey laid them in the place of graves, yet wist not whose they were.\n\nAnd whether famished evening wolves had mangled Albert so,\nOr that strange dame so gay and fair were some mysterious foe,\nOr whether to that forest lodge, beyond the mountains blue,\nHe went to dwell with her, the friends who mourned him never knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-summer-ramble": { - "title": "“A Summer Ramble”", - "body": "The quiet August noon has come,\nA slumberous silence fills the sky,\nThe fields are still, the woods are dumb,\nIn glassy sleep the waters lie.\n\nAnd mark yon soft white clouds that rest\nAbove our vale, a moveless throng;\nThe cattle on the mountain’s breast\nEnjoy the grateful shadow long.\n\nOh, how unlike those merry hours\nIn early June when Earth laughs out,\nWhen the fresh winds make love to flowers,\nAnd woodlands sing and waters shout.\n\nWhen in the grass sweet voices talk,\nAnd strains of tiny music swell\nFrom every moss-cup of the rock,\nFrom every nameless blossom’s bell.\n\nBut now a joy too deep for sound,\nA peace no other season knows,\nHushes the heavens and wraps the ground,\nThe blessing of supreme repose.\n\nAway! I will not be, to-day,\nThe only slave of toil and care.\nAway from desk and dust! away!\nI’ll be as idle as the air.\n\nBeneath the open sky abroad,\nAmong the plants and breathing things,\nThe sinless, peaceful works of God,\nI’ll share the calm the season brings.\n\nCome, thou, in whose soft eyes I see\nThe gentle meanings of thy heart,\nOne day amid the woods with me,\nFrom men and all their cares apart.\n\nAnd where, upon the meadow’s breast,\nThe shadow of the thicket lies,\nThe blue wild flowers thou gatherest\nShall glow yet deeper near thine eyes.\n\nCome, and when mid the calm profound,\nI turn, those gentle eyes to seek,\nThey, like the lovely landscape round,\nOf innocence and peace shall speak.\n\nRest here, beneath the unmoving shade,\nAnd on the silent valleys gaze,\nWinding and widening, till they fade\nIn yon soft ring of summer haze.\n\nThe village trees their summits rear\nStill as its spire, and yonder flock\nAt rest in those calm fields appear\nAs chiselled from the lifeless rock.\n\nOne tranquil mount the scene o’erlooks--\nThere the hushed winds their sabbath keep\nWhile a near hum from bees and brooks\nComes faintly like the breath of sleep.\n\nWell may the gazer deem that when,\nWorn with the struggle and the strife,\nAnd heart-sick at the wrongs of men,\nThe good forsakes the scene of life;\n\nLike this deep quiet that, awhile,\nLingers the lovely landscape o’er,\nShall be the peace whose holy smile\nWelcomes him to a happier shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "to-a-cloud": { - "title": "“To a Cloud”", - "body": "Beautiful cloud! with folds so soft and fair,\nSwimming in the pure quiet air!\nThy fleeces bathed in sunlight, while below\nThy shadow o’er the vale moves slow;\nWhere, midst their labour, pause the reaper train\nAs cool it comes along the grain.\nBeautiful cloud! I would I were with thee\nIn thy calm way o’er land and sea:\nTo rest on thy unrolling skirts, and look\nOn Earth as on an open book;\nOn streams that tie her realms with silver bands,\nAnd the long ways that seem her lands;\nAnd hear her humming cities, and the sound\nOf the great ocean breaking round.\nAy--I would sail upon thy air-borne car\nTo blooming regions distant far,\nTo where the sun of Andalusia shines\nOn his own olive-groves and vines,\nOr the soft lights of Italy’s bright sky\nIn smiles upon her ruins lie.\nBut I would woo the winds to let us rest\nO’er Greece long fettered and oppressed,\nWhose sons at length have heard the call that comes\nFrom the old battle-fields and tombs,\nAnd risen, and drawn the sword, and on the foe\nHave dealt the swift and desperate blow,\nAnd the Othman power is cloven, and the stroke\nHas touched its chains, and they are broke.\nAy, we would linger till the sunset there\nShould come, to purple all the air,\nAnd thou reflect upon the sacred ground\nThe ruddy radiance streaming round.\n\nBright meteor! for the summer noontide made!\nThy peerless beauty yet shall fade.\nThe sun, that fills with light each glistening fold,\nShall set, and leave thee dark and cold:\nThe blast shall rend thy skirts, or thou mayst frown\nIn the dark heaven when storms come down;\nAnd weep in rain, till man’s inquiring eye\nMiss thee, for ever, from the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-a-mosquito": { - "title": "“To a Mosquito”", - "body": "Fair insect! that, with threadlike legs spread out,\nAnd blood-extracting bill and filmy wing,\nDoes murmur, as thou slowly sail’st about,\nIn pitiless ears full many a plaintive thing,\nAnd tell how little our large veins should bleed,\nWould we but yield them to thy bitter need.\n\nUnwillingly, I own, and, what is worse,\nFull angrily men hearken to thy plaint;\nThou gettest many a brush, and many a curse,\nFor saying thou art gaunt, and starved, and faint:\nEven the old beggar, while he asks for food,\nWould kill thee, hapless stranger, if he could.\n\nI call thee stranger, for the town, I ween,\nHas not the honour of so proud a birth,--\nThou com’st from Jersey meadows, fresh and green,\nThe offspring of the gods, though born on earth;\nFor Titan was thy sire, and fair was she,\nThe ocean nymph that nursed thy infancy.\n\nBeneath the rushes was thy cradle swung,\nAnd when, at length, thy gauzy wings grew strong,\nAbroad to gentle airs their folds were flung,\nRose in the sky and bore thee soft along;\nThe south wind breathed to waft thee on thy way,\nAnd danced and shone beneath the billowy bay.\n\nCalm rose afar the city spires, and thence\nCame the deep murmur of its throng of men,\nAnd as its grateful odours met thy sense,\nThey seemed the perfumes of thy native fen.\nFair lay its crowded streets, and at the sight\nThy tiny song grew shriller with delight.\n\nAt length thy pinions fluttered in Broadway--\nAh, there were fairy steps, and white necks kissed\nBy wanton airs, and eyes whose killing ray\nShone through the snowy veils like stars through mist;\nAnd fresh as morn, on many a cheek and chin,\nBloomed the bright blood through the transparent skin.\n\nSure these were sights to touch an anchorite!\nWhat! do I hear thy slender voice complain?\nThou wailest, when I talk of beauty’s light,\nAs if it brought the memory of pain:\nThou art a wayward being--well--come near,\nAnd pour thy tale of sorrow in my ear.\n\nWhat sayst thou--slanderer!--rouge makes thee sick?\nAnd China bloom at best is sorry food?\nAnd Rowland’s Kalydor, if laid on thick,\nPoisons the thirsty wretch that bores for blood?\nGo! ’twas a just reward that met thy crime--\nBut shun the sacrilege another time.\n\nThat bloom was made to look at, not to touch;\nTo worship, not approach, that radiant white;\nAnd well might sudden vengeance light on such\nAs dared, like thee, most impiously to bite.\nThou shouldst have gazed at distance and admired,\nMurmured thy adoration and retired.\n\nThou’rt welcome to the town--but why come here\nTo bleed a brother poet, gaunt like thee?\nAlas! the little blood I have is dear,\nAnd thin will be the banquet drawn from me.\nLook round--the pale-eyed sisters in my cell,\nThy old acquaintance, Song and Famine, dwell.\n\nTry some plump alderman, and suck the blood\nEnriched by generous wine and costly meat;\nOn well-filled skins, sleek as thy native mud,\nFix thy light pump and press thy freckled feet:\nGo to the men for whom, in ocean’s hall,\nThe oyster breeds, and the green turtle sprawls.\n\nThere corks are drawn, and the red vintage flows\nTo fill the swelling veins for thee, and now\nThe ruddy cheek and now the ruddier nose\nShall tempt thee, as thou flittest round the brow;\nAnd when the hour of sleep its quiet brings,\nNo angry hand shall rise to brush thy wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-twenty-second-of-december": { - "title": "“The Twenty-Second of December”", - "body": "Wild was the day; the wintry sea\nMoaned sadly on New-England’s strand,\nWhen first the thoughtful and the free,\nOur fathers, trod the desert land.\n\nThey little thought how pure a light,\nWith years, should gather round that day;\nHow love should keep their memories bright,\nHow wide a realm their sons should sway.\n\nGreen are their bays; but greener still\nShall round their spreading fame be wreathed,\nAnd regions, now untrod, shall thrill\nWith reverence when their names are breathed.\n\nTill where the sun, with softer fires,\nLooks on the vast Pacific’s sleep,\nThe children of the pilgrim sires\nThis hallowed day like us shall keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "the-white-footed-deer": { - "title": "“The White-Footed Deer”", - "body": "It was a hundred years ago,\nWhen, by the woodland ways,\nThe traveller saw the wild deer drink,\nOr crop the birchen sprays.\n\nBeneath a hill, whose rocky side\nO’erbrowed a grassy mead,\nAnd fenced a cottage from the wind,\nA deer was wont to feed.\n\nShe only came when on the cliffs\nThe evening moonlight lay,\nAnd no man knew the secret haunts\nIn which she walked by day.\n\nWhite were her feet, her forehead showed\nA spot of silvery white,\nThat seemed to glimmer like a star\nIn autumn’s hazy night.\n\nAnd here, when sang the whippoorwill,\nShe cropped the sprouting leaves,\nAnd here her rustling steps were heard\nOn still October eves.\n\nBut when the broad midsummer moon\nRose o’er that grassy lawn,\nBeside the silver-footed deer\nThere grazed a spotted fawn.\n\nThe cottage dame forbade her son\nTo aim the rifle here;\n“It were a sin,” she said, “to harm\nOr fright that friendly deer.”\n\n“This spot has been my pleasant home\nTen peaceful years and more;\nAnd ever, when the moonlight shines,\nShe feeds before our door.”\n\n“The red men say that here she walked\nA thousand moons ago;\nThey never raise the war-whoop here,\nAnd never twang the bow.”\n\n“I love to watch her as she feeds,\nAnd think that all is well\nWhile such a gentle creature haunts\nThe place in which we dwell.”\n\nThe youth obeyed, and sought for game\nIn forests far away,\nWhere, deep in silence and in moss,\nThe ancient woodland lay.\n\nBut once, in autumn’s golden time,\nHe ranged the wild in vain,\nNor roused the pheasant nor the deer,\nAnd wandered home again.\n\nThe crescent moon and crimson eve\nShone with a mingling light;\nThe deer, upon the grassy mead,\nWas feeding full in sight.\n\nHe raised the rifle to his eye,\nAnd from the cliffs around\nA sudden echo, shrill and sharp,\nGave back its deadly sound.\n\nAway into the neighbouring wood\nThe startled creature flew,\nAnd crimson drops at morning lay\nAmid the glimmering dew.\n\nNext evening shone the waxing moon\nAs sweetly as before;\nThe deer upon the grassy mead\nWas seen again no more.\n\nBut ere that crescent moon was old,\nBy night the red men came,\nAnd burnt the cottage to the ground,\nAnd slew the youth and dame.\n\nNow woods have overgrown the mead,\nAnd hid the cliffs from sight;\nThere shrieks the hovering hawk at noon,\nAnd prowls the fox at night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-winter-piece": { - "title": "“A Winter Piece”", - "body": "The time has been that these wild solitudes,\nYet beautiful as wild, were trod by me\nOftener than now; and when the ills of life\nHad chafed my spirit--when the unsteady pulse\nBeat with strange flutterings--I would wander forth\nAnd seek the woods. The sunshine on my path\nWas to me as a friend. The swelling hills,\nThe quiet dells retiring far between,\nWith gentle invitation to explore\nTheir windings, were a calm society\nThat talked with me and soothed me. Then the chant\nOf birds, and chime of brooks, and soft caress\nOf the fresh sylvan air, made me forget\nThe thoughts that broke my peace, and I began\nTo gather simples by the fountain’s brink,\nAnd lose myself in day-dreams. While I stood\nIn nature’s loneliness, I was with one\nWith whom I early grew familiar, one\nWho never had a frown for me, whose voice\nNever rebuked me for the hours I stole\nFrom cares I loved not, but of which the world\nDeems highest, to converse with her. When shrieked\nThe bleak November winds, and smote the woods,\nAnd the brown fields were herbless, and the shades,\nThat met above the merry rivulet,\nWere spoiled, I sought, I loved them still,--they seemed\nLike old companions in adversity.\nStill there was beauty in my walks; the brook,\nBordered with sparkling frost-work, was as gay\nAs with its fringe of summer flowers. Afar,\nThe village with its spires, the path of streams,\nAnd dim receding valleys, hid before\nBy interposing trees, lay visible\nThrough the bare grove, and my familiar haunts\nSeemed new to me. Nor was I slow to come\nAmong them, when the clouds, from their still skirts,\nHad shaken down on earth the feathery snow,\nAnd all was white. The pure keen air abroad,\nAlbeit it breathed no scent of herb, nor heard\nLove-call of bird, nor merry hum of bee,\nWas not the air of death. Bright mosses crept\nOver the spotted trunks, and the close buds,\nThat lay along the boughs, instinct with life,\nPatient, and waiting the soft breath of Spring,\nFeared not the piercing spirit of the North.\nThe snow-bird twittered on the beechen bough,\nAnd ’neath the hemlock, whose thick branches bent\nBeneath its bright cold burden, and kept dry\nA circle, on the earth, of withered leaves,\nThe partridge found a shelter. Through the snow\nThe rabbit sprang away. The lighter track\nOf fox, and the racoon’s broad path, were there,\nCrossing each other. From his hollow tree,\nThe squirrel was abroad, gathering the nuts\nJust fallen, that asked the winter cold and sway\nOf winter blast, to shake them from their hold.\n\nBut Winter has yet brighter scenes,--he boasts\nSplendours beyond what gorgeous Summer knows;\nOr Autumn with his many fruits, and woods\nAll flushed with many hues. Come when the rains\nHave glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice;\nWhile the slant sun of February pours\nInto the bowers a flood of light. Approach!\nThe incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps,\nAnd the broad arching portals of the grove\nWelcome thy entering. Look! the massy trunks\nAre cased in the pure crystal; each light spray,\nNodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven,\nIs studded with its trembling water-drops,\nThat stream with rainbow radiance as they move.\nBut round the parent stem the long low boughs\nBend, in a glittering ring, and arbours hide\nThe glassy floor. Oh! you might deem the spot\nThe spacious cavern of some virgin mine,\nDeep in the womb of earth--where the gems grow,\nAnd diamonds put forth radiant rods and bud\nWith amethyst and topaz--and the place\nLit up, most royally, with the pure beam\nThat dwells in them. Or haply the vast hall\nOf fairy palace, that outlasts the night,\nAnd fades not in the glory of the sun;--\nWhere crystal columns send forth slender shafts\nAnd crossing arches; and fantastic aisles\nWind from the sight in brightness, and are lost\nAmong the crowded pillars. Raise thine eye,--\nThou seest no cavern roof, no palace vault;\nThere the blue sky and the white drifting cloud\nLook in. Again the wildered fancy dreams\nOf spouting fountains, frozen as they rose,\nAnd fixed, with all their branching jets, in air,\nAnd all their sluices sealed. All, all is light;\nLight without shade. But all shall pass away\nWith the next sun. From numberless vast trunks,\nLoosened, the crashing ice shall make a sound\nLike the far roar of rivers, and the eve\nShall close o’er the brown woods as it was wont.\n\nAnd it is pleasant, when the noisy streams\nAre just set free, and milder suns melt off\nThe plashy snow, save only the firm drift\nIn the deep glen or the close shade of pines,--\n’Tis pleasant to behold the wreaths of smoke\nRoll up among the maples of the hill,\nWhere the shrill sound of youthful voices wakes\nThe shriller echo, as the clear pure lymph,\nThat from the wounded trees, in twinkling drops,\nFalls, mid the golden brightness of the morn,\nIs gathered in with brimming pails, and oft,\nWielded by sturdy hands, the stroke of axe\nMakes the woods ring. Along the quiet air,\nCome and float calmly off the soft light clouds,\nSuch as you see in summer, and the winds\nScarce stir the branches. Lodged in sunny cleft,\nWhere the cold breezes come not, blooms alone\nThe little wind-flower, whose just opened eye\nIs blue as the spring heaven it gazes at--\nStartling the loiterer in the naked groves\nWith unexpected beauty, for the time\nOf blossoms and green leaves is yet afar.\nAnd ere it comes, the encountering winds shall oft\nMuster their wrath again, and rapid clouds\nShade heaven, and bounding on the frozen earth\nShall fall their volleyed stores rounded like hail,\nAnd white like snow, and the loud North again\nShall buffet the vexed forest in his rage.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-bukowski": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Bukowski", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1994 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇩🇪 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "bluebird": { - "title": "“Bluebird”", - "body": "there’s a bluebird in my heart that\nwants to get out\nbut I’m too tough for him,\nI say, stay in there, I’m not going\nto let anybody seeyou.\nthere’s a bluebird in my heart that\nwants to get out\nbut I pour whiskey on him and inhale\ncigarette smoke\nand the whores and the bartenders\nand the grocery clerks\nnever know that\nhe’s\nin there.\n\nthere’s a bluebird in my heart that\nwants to get out\nbut I’m too tough for him,\nI say,\nstay down, do you want to mess\nme up?\nyou want to screw up the\nworks?\nyou want to blow my book sales in\nEurope?\nthere’s a bluebird in my heart that\nwants to get out\nbut I’m too clever, I only let him out\nat night sometimes\nwhen everybody’s asleep.\nI say, I know that you’re there,\nso don’t be\nsad.\nthen I put him back,\nbut he’s singing a little\nin there, I haven’t quite let him\ndie\nand we sleep together like\nthat\nwith our\nsecret pact\nand it’s nice enough to\nmake a man\nweep, but I don’t\nweep, do\nyou?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-met-a-genius": { - "title": "“I Met a Genius”", - "body": "I met a genius on the train\ntoday\nabout 6 years old,\nhe sat beside me\nand as the train\nran down along the coast\nwe came to the ocean\nand then he looked at me\nand said,\nit’s not pretty.\n\nit was the first time I’d\nrealized\nthat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "im-in-love": { - "title": "“I’m in Love”", - "body": "she’s young, she said,\nbut look at me,\nI have pretty ankles,\nand look at my wrists, I have pretty\nwrists\no my god,\nI thought it was all working,\nand now it’s her again,\nevery time she phones you go crazy,\nyou told me it was over\nyou told me it was finished,\nlisten, I’ve lived long enough to become a\ngood woman,\nwhy do you need a bad woman?\nyou need to be tortured, don’t you?\nyou think life is rotten if somebody treats you\nrotten it all fits,\ndoesn’t it?\ntell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a\npiece of shit?\nand my son, my son was going to meet you.\nI told my son\nand I dropped all my lovers.\nI stood up in a cafe and screamed\nI’M IN LOVE,\nand now you’ve made a fool of me …\nI’m sorry, I said, I’m really sorry.\nhold me, she said, will you please hold me?\nI’ve never been in one of these things before, I said,\nthese triangles …\nshe got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all\nover.she paced up and down, wild and crazy.she had\na small body.her arms were thin, very thin and when\nshe screamed and started beating me I held her\nwrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,\ncenturies deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and\nsick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.\nthere was no creature living as foul as I\nand all my poems were\nfalse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "let-it-enfold-you": { - "title": "“Let It Enfold You”", - "body": "either peace or happiness,\nlet it enfold you\n\nwhen I was a young man\nI felt these things were\ndumb, unsophisticated.\nI had bad blood, a twisted\nmind, a pecarious\nupbringing.\n\nI was hard as granite, I\nleered at the\nsun.\nI trusted no man and\nespecially no\nwoman.\n\nI was living a hell in\nsmall rooms, I broke\nthings, smashed things,\nwalked through glass,\ncursed.\nI challenged everything,\nwas continually being\nevicted, jailed, in and\nout of fights, in and aout\nof my mind.\nwomen were something\nto screw and rail\nat, i had no male\nfreinds,\n\nI changed jobs and\ncities, I hated holidays,\nbabies, history,\nnewspapers, museums,\ngrandmothers,\nmarriage, movies,\nspiders, garbagemen,\nenglish accents, spain,\nfrance, italy, walnuts and\nthe color\norange.\nalgebra angred me,\nopera sickened me,\ncharlie chaplin was a\nfake\nand flowers were for\npansies.\n\npeace an happiness to me\nwere signs of\ninferiority,\ntenants of the weak\nan\naddled\nmind.\n\nbut as I went on with\nmy alley fights,\nmy suicidal years,\nmy passage through\nany number of\nwomen--it gradually\nbegan to occur to\nme\nthat I wasn’t diffrent\n\nfrom the\nothers, I was the same,\n\nthey were all fulsome\nwith hatred,\nglossed over with petty\ngreivances,\nthe men I fought in\nalleys had hearts of stone.\neverybody was nudging,\ninching, cheating for\nsome insignificant\nadvantage,\nthe lie was the\nweapon and the\nplot was\nemptey,\ndarkness was the\ndictator.\n\ncautiously, I allowed\nmyself to feel good\nat times.\nI found moments of\npeace in cheap\nrooms\njust staring at the\nknobs of some\ndresser\nor listening to the\nrain in the\ndark.\nthe less I needed\nthe better i\nfelt.\n\nmaybe the other life had worn me\ndown.\nI no longer found\nglamour\nin topping somebody\nin conversation.\nor in mounting the\nbody of some poor\ndrunken female\nwhose life had\nslipped away into\nsorrow.\n\nI could never accept\nlife as it was,\ni could never gobble\ndown all its\npoisons\nbut there were parts,\ntenous magic parts\nopen for the\nasking.\n\nI re formulated\nI don’t know when,\ndate, time, all\nthat\nbut the change\noccured.\nsomething in me\nrelaxed, smoothed\nout.\ni no longer had to\nprove that I was a\nman,\n\nI did’nt have to prove\nanything.\n\nI began to see things:\ncoffe cups lined up\nbehind a counter in a\ncafe.\nor a dog walking along\na sidewalk.\nor the way the mouse\non my dresser top\nstopped there\nwith its body,\nits ears,\nits nose,\nit was fixed,\na bit of life\ncaught within itself\nand its eyes looked\nat me\nand they were\nbeautiful.\nthen--it was\ngone.\n\nI began to feel good,\nI began to feel good\nin the worst situations\nand there were plenty\nof those.\nlike say, the boss\nbehind his desk,\nhe is going to have\nto fire me.\n\nI’ve missed too many\ndays.\nhe is dressed in a\nsuit, necktie, glasses,\nhe says, “i am going\nto have to let you go”\n\n“it’s all right” I tell\nhim.\n\nHe must do what he\nmust do, he has a\nwife, a house, children.\nexpenses, most probably\na girlfreind.\n\nI am sorry for him\nhe is caught.\n\nI walk onto the blazing\nsunshine.\nthe whole day is\nmine\ntemporailiy,\nanyhow.\n\n(the whole world is at the\nthroat of the world,\neverybody feels angry,\nshort-changed, cheated,\neverybody is despondent,\ndissillusioned)\n\nI welcomed shots of\npeace, tattered shards of\nhappiness.\n\nI embraced that stuff\nlike the hottest number,\nlike high heels, breasts,\nsinging, the\nworks.\n\n(dont get me wrong,\nthere is such a thing as cockeyed optimism\nthat overlooks all\nbasic problems justr for\nthe sake of\nitself--\nthis is a sheild and a\nsickness.)\n\nThe knife got near my\nthroat again,\nI almost turned on the\ngas\nagain\nbut when the good\nmoments arrived\nagain\nI did’nt fight them off\nlike an alley\nadversary.\nI let them take me,\ni luxuriated in them,\nI bade them welcome\nhome.\nI even looked into\nthe mirror\nonce having thought\nmyself to be\nugly,\nI now liked what\nI saw, almost\nhandsome, yes,\na bit ripped and\nragged,\nscares, lumps,\nodd turns,\nbut all in all,\nnot too bad,\nalmost handsome,\nbetter at least than\nsome of those movie\nstar faces\nlike the cheeks of\na babys\nbutt.\n\nand finally I discovered\nreal feelings fo\nothers,\nunhearleded,\nlike latley,\nlike this morning,\nas I was leaving,\nfor the track,\ni saw my wif in bed,\njust the\nshape of\nher head there\n(not forgetting\ncenturies of the living\nand the dead and\nthe dying,\nthe pyarimids,\nMozart dead\nbut his music still\nthere in the\nroom, weeds growing,\nthe earth turning,\nthe toteboard waiting for\nme)\nI saw the shape of my\nwife’s head,\nshe so still,\ni ached for her life,\njust being there\nunder the\ncovers.\n\ni kissed her in the,\nforehead,\ngot down the stairway,\ngot outside,\ngot into my marvelous\ncar,\nfixed the seatbelt,\nbacked out the\ndrive.\nfeeling warm to\nthe fingertips,\ndown to my\nfoot on the gas\npedal,\nI entered the world\nonce\nmore,\ndrove down the\nhill\npast the houses\nfull and emptey\nof\npeople,\ni saw the mailman,\nhonked,\nhe waved\nback\nat me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-most": { - "title": "“The Most”", - "body": "here comes the fishhead singing\nhere comes the baked potato in drag\nhere comes nothing to do all day long\nhere comes another night of no sleep\nhere comes the phone wringing the wrong tone\nhere comes a termite with a banjo\nhere comes a flagpole with blank eyes\nhere comes a a cat and a dog wearing nylons\nhere comes a machine gun saying\nhere comes bacon burning in the pan\nhere comes a voice saying something dull\nhere comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds\nwith flat brown beaks\nhere comes a cunt carrying a torch\na grenade\na deathly love\nhere comes a victory carrying\none bucket of blood\nand stumbling over the berry bush\nand the sheets hang out the windows\nand the bombers head east west north south\nget lost\nget tossed like salad\nas all the fish in the sea line up and form\none line\none long line\none very long thin line\nthe longest line you could ever imagine\nand we get lost\nwalking past purple mountains\nwe walk lost\nbare at last like the knife\nhaving given\nhaving spit it out like an unexpected olive seed\nas the girl at the call service\nscreams over the phone:\n“don’t call back! you sound like a jerk!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poetry-readings": { - "title": "“Poetry Readings”", - "body": "poetry readings have to be some of the saddest\ndamned things ever,\nthe gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,\nweek after week, month after month, year\nafter year,\ngetting old together,\nreading on to tiny gatherings,\nstill hoping their genius will be\ndiscovered,\nmaking tapes together, discs together,\nsweating for applause\nthey read basically to and for\neach other,\nthey can’t find a New York publisher\nor one\nwithin miles,\nbut they read on and on\nin the poetry holes of America,\nnever daunted,\nnever considering the possibility that\ntheir talent might be\nthin, almost invisible,\nthey read on and on\nbefore their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,\ntheir wives, their friends, the other poets\nand the handful of idiots who have wandered\nin\nfrom nowhere.\n\nI am ashamed for them,\nI am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,\nI am ashamed for their lisping egos,\ntheir lack of guts.\n\nif these are our creators,\nplease, please give me something else:\n\na drunken plumber at a bowling alley,\na prelim boy in a four rounder,\na jock guiding his horse through along the\nrail,\na bartender on last call,\na waitress pouring me a coffee,\na drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,\na dog munching a dry bone,\nan elephant’s fart in a circus tent,\na 6 p.m. freeway crush,\nthe mailman telling a dirty joke\n\nanything\nanything\nbut\nthese.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-radio-with-guts": { - "title": "“A Radio with Guts”", - "body": "it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street\nI used to get drunk\nand throw the radio through the window\nwhile it was playing, and, of course,\nit would break the glass in the window\nand the radio would sit there on the roof\nstill playing\nand I’d tell my woman,\n“Ah, what a marvelous radio!”\nthe next morning I’d take the window\noff the hinges\nand carry it down the street\nto the glass man\nwho would put in another pane.\nI kept throwing that radio through the window\neach time I got drunk\nand it would sit there on the roof\nstill playing--\na magic radio\na radio with guts,\nand each morning I’d take the window\nback to the glass man.\nI don’t remember how it ended exactly\nthough I do remember\nwe finally moved out.\nthere was a woman downstairs who worked in\nthe garden in her bathing suit,\nshe really dug with that trowel\nand she put her behind up in the air\nand I used to sit in the window\nand watch the sun shine all over that thing\nwhile the music played.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "so-now": { - "title": "“So Now?”", - "body": "the words have come and gone,\nI sit ill.\nthe phone rings, the cats sleep.\nLinda vacuums.\nI am waiting to live,\nwaiting to die.\nI wish I could ring in some bravery.\nit’s a lousy fix\nbut the tree outside doesn’t know:\nI watch it moving with the wind\nin the late afternoon sun.\nthere’s nothing to declare here,\njust a waiting.\neach faces it alone.\nOh, I was once young,\nOh, I was once unbelievably\nyoung!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-whore-who-took-my-poems": { - "title": "“To the Whore Who Took My Poems”", - "body": "some say we should keep personal remorse from the poem,\nstay abstract, and there is some reason in this, but jezus;\ntwelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have my\npaintings too, my best ones; its stifling:\nare you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?\nwhy didn’t you take my money? they usually do\nfrom the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.\nnext time take my left arm or a fifty\nbut not my poems:\nI’m not Shakespeare\nbut sometime simply\nthere won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;\nthere’ll always be money and whores and drunkards\ndown to the last bomb,\nbut as God said,\ncrossing his legs,\nI see where I have made plenty of poets\nbut not so very much\npoetry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "working-out": { - "title": "“Working Out”", - "body": "Van Gogh cut off his ear\ngave it to a\nprostitute\nwho flung it away in\nextreme\ndisgust.\nVan, whores don’t want\nears\nthey want\nmoney.\nI guess that’s why you were\nsuch a great\npainter: you\ndidn’t understand\nmuch\nelse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ivan-bunin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ivan Bunin", - "birth": { - "year": 1870 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Bunin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 27 - }, - "poems": { - "and-here-again-as-dusk-now-spreads": { - "title": "“And Here Again, as Dusk Now Spreads …”", - "body": "And here again, as dusk now spreads,\nAloft and free in sky’s expanses\nThe birds’ formation sea-bound threads,\nAn arrow’s shade, its chain advances.\n\nThe dusk is limpid, steppe is hushed,\nThe reddening sunset now is blazing …\nThe sky by mute formation’s brushed,\nBirds’ gentle wings its crimson grazing.\n\nHow far away and high they fly!\nYou gaze--the blueness escalating\nAs deepness of the autumn sky\nAbove you is evaporating.\n\nThis distance now extends embrace--\nThe soul to give herself is willing,\nShe looses from the earth a trace\nOf anguished new bright thinking’s spilling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "as-in-a-boundless-sea": { - "title": "“As in a Boundless Sea”", - "body": "As in a boundless sea in darkening fields and meadows\nThe sunset’s tristful rays fade and then sink from sight,\nAnd in mute twilights wake, over the steppe the shadows\n Creep swiftly, bringing night.\n\nSoft sound the gophers’ calls, and, ne’er the stillness waking,\nJerboas now appear--two or perhaps just one.\nThey ghost-like haunt the plain, great leaps across it taking,\n And all at once are gone …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "at-the-gates-of-zion": { - "title": "“At the gates of Zion …”", - "body": "At the gates of Zion, over Kedron,\nThere is a windswept hillock;\nAnd where the wall gives temporary shade,\nI happened to sit down beside a leper,\nWho was eating toxic seeds.\n\nHis stench was indescribable.\nThe fool was poisoning himself.\nBut he would smile, for all that,\nLooking blissfully around\nAnd muttering: “Praise be to Allah!”\n\nMerciful God, wherefore did you give us\nFeelings, thoughts, and cares,\nA thirst for action and amusement?\nHappy are the cripples and the idiots,\nAnd happiest of all--the leper!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Simon Franklin", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "september", - "day": 16 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 16 - } - } - }, - "the-camel-snorts": { - "title": "“The Camel Snorts”", - "body": "The camel snorts. He won’t get up.\nHis grumbling flanks are heaving. Give him\nA kick? … The criers’ calls atop\nThe mosques dawn’s sleepy streets enliven.\n\nPearl-grey, Stambul shows from afar.\nMist clothes the strait, its blue waves veiling.\nInto the Sea of Marmora,\nThrough haze and smoke the ships are sailing.\n\nThe smoke, white orchards, drifts from you,\nAnd, though it has imbibed the chill of\nSea water, smells of summer dew,\nOf dung, of honey and vanilla.\n\nA Greek a great red samovar\nBears from his teahouse; sheep are taken\nAcross the square to the bazaar;\nTwo beggars, stretched nearby, awaken.\n\nTime to move off, go east, toward\nA land where morning burns and blazes\nAnd where across the sun-parched sward\nA bird’s small, slanting shadow races.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "endless-downpour": { - "title": "“Endless Downpour”", - "body": "Endless downpour; misty wood;\nFir trees swaying:\n“Oh, dear Lord!”--as if the wood were drunk,\nRain-sodden.\n\nAt the window of the dark lodge\nA child sits drumming with a spoon.\nMother sleeping soundly on the stove;\nA calf lowing in the damp passage.\nGloomy lodge; buzzing of flies …\n\nWhy does the wood ring with birdsong,\nSprout with mushrooms, blossom with flowers\nAnd vegetation bright as grass snakes?\n\nWhy does a round-eyed child,\nWeary of the world and of his lodge,\nDrum his spoon on the windowsill\nTo the even patter of the rain?\nCalf lowing; dumb calf.\n\nAnd the mournful fir trees bow their green branches:\n“Oh, dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Simon Franklin", - "date": { - "year": 1923, - "month": "march", - "day": 10 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "an-even-hazy-hum-runs-through-the-glade": { - "title": "“An Even, Hazy Hum Runs through the Glade …”", - "body": "An even, hazy hum runs through the glade,\nThe rustling leaves to laze and drowse incline …\nThe roosters faraway in sun-specked shade,\nTheir vernal tidings sing, in crows benign.\n\nA quiet, hazy hum runs through the glade …\nTo succor me and send my soul repose,\nI lie midst birch grove green, my worries fade,\nIn this enchanted realm where stillness flows.\n\nSo used I’ve come to live with grief and dole\nThat this clear lustrous day seems strange to me,\nAs if I needs must chide my self, my soul\nFor feeling joyful, light at heart and free.\n\nBut censure and rebuke on my smile fades …\nThe woods hum on, the lacy shadows laze,\nThe leaves’ bright hum dissolves, in flight abrades\nThe quiet rustle of bright childhood days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "evening": { - "title": "“Evening”", - "body": "We always only dream about happiness, however,\nIt’s everywhere. And perhaps it is\nThese trees behind the barn wrapped into autumn weather,\nAnd through my window a softly flowing breeze.\n\nIn the endless sky there rises white and wispy\nEdge of a shining cloud. Quite for long\nI’ve followed it. We see and know so little,\nBut to the knowledgeable happiness belongs.\n\nMy window’s open. With a squeaky cheer\nA bird perched on the sill. And for a bit\nI take away my tired eyes from the read.\n\nThe day’s declining now. The sky has cleared.\nThe thresher’s buzz is coming from the barn …\nI see, I hear, happy. All is mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Liliya Garipova", - "date": { - "year": 1909, - "month": "august", - "day": 14 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "a-farewell": { - "title": "“A Farewell”", - "body": "Blasting the malachites beneath the rudder,\nThe seething sea spews pearly blobs of foam.\nThe shore sails nearer as we move from under\nThe ship’s smooth, towering shape and make for home.\n\nThe pier is empty. Pigeons coo and chatter\nAnd peck at corn and scraps of food … At sea,\nThe ship’s stern sways, the bowsprit draws a pattern\nUpon the dimming sky’s dark canopy.\n\nWhere now? March. Dusk. In port, the church bells ringing.\nOf spring and sadness full this soul of mine.\nLights at the inn … No, home I’ll go, I’m thinking!\nFor I am drunk--drunk though I’ve touched no wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-fisherwoman": { - "title": "“The Fisherwoman”", - "body": "“Who knocks? I won’t get up. I will not open\nThe spray-soaked door of this old hut. How chill\nAnd how uneasy are the nights of autumn!\nAnd yet its dawns are more uneasy still.”\n\n“Is it the wind’s moan as it louder grows\nThat scares you or, perhaps, the rasping sound\nOf pebbles by the waves rolled round and round?”\n“No, I’m unwell, and there’s a draft, it blows.”\n\n“I’ll wait until the storm-drunk waves are sober,\nTill they are quelled, and through the window pane\nAnd down on to the bench there streams again\nThe pallid, tarnished gold of mid-October.”\n\n“Begone! Another spent the night with me.\nHe’s bold and does not fear the wind and sea.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "flax": { - "title": "“Flax”", - "body": "She sits on tumulus Savoor, and stares,\nOld woman Death, upon the crowded road.\nLike a blue flame the small flax-flower flares\nThick through the meadows sowed.\n\nAnd says old woman Death: “Hey, traveler!\nDoes any one want linen, linen fit\nFor funeral wear? A shroud, madam or sir,\nI’ll take cheap coin for it!”\n\nAnd says serene Savoor: “Don’t crow so loud!\nEven the winding-sheet is dust, and cracks\nAnd crumbles into earth, that from the shroud\nMay spring the sky-blue flax.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-god-of-noon": { - "title": "“The God of Noon”", - "body": "Black goats I herded with my sister; they\nGrazed by red rocks; the grass rose stiff and stinging.\nWarming their backs, stones to the foot-hills clinging\nSlept dumbly on. And sheer blue shone the bay.\nBy the gnarled silver of an olive flinging\nMy drowsy limbs, in its dry shade I lay,--\nHe came--like a hot cobweb net, asway,\nOr like a cloud of flies about me singing.\n\nHe bared my knees. Kindled my quiet feet.\nThe silver on my shirt his white fire burned.\nHis hot embrace is heavy, ah, and sweet.\nHe laid me on my back. The whole sky turned.\nHe tanned my naked bosom to the teat.\nFrom him the cammomile’s kind use I learned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1912, - "month": "august", - "day": 18 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "istanbul": { - "title": "“Istanbul”", - "body": "Starved, mangy dogs with mournful, pleading eyes,\nDescendants of the ones that in a bygone\nAge from the steppeland came, and, stung by flies,\nDragged in the wake of dusty, creaking wagons.\n\nThe conqueror was rich and powerful,\nAnd with his hordes, proud city, he invaded\nYour palaces, and named you Istanbul,\nAnd then sought rest, a lion gorged and sated.\n\nBut faster move the days than birds in flight!\nBlack loom the trees in Scutari; unnumbered\nThe tombs they shade, their marble shapes as white\nAs bones bleached by the rays of many summers.\n\nUpon the dust of shrines and temples falls\nThe dust of ages, and the plaintive howling\nOf dogs the gloom of desert sands recalls\nBeneath Byzantium’s walls and arches crumbling.\n\nBare the Serail, its glory spent and past,\nIts trees, now dry, bent low in desolation …\nO Istanbul! Dead nomad camp, the last\nGreat relic of a last and great migration!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "im-a-plain-girl-whose-hands-are-stained-with-earth": { - "title": "“I’m a plain girl, whose hands are stained with earth …”", - "body": "I’m a plain girl, whose hands are stained with earth.\nHe is a fisherman he’s gay and keen.\nThe far white sail is drowning in the firth.\nMany the seas and rivers he has seen.\n\nThe women of the Bosphorus, they say,\nAre good-looking … and I--I’m lean and black.\nThe white sail drowns far out beyond the bay.\nIt may be that he never will come back.\n\nI shall wait on in good and evil weather.\nIf vainly, take my wage, go to the sea\nAnd cast the ring and hope away together.\nAnd my black braid will serve to strangle me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1905 - } - } - }, - "loneliness": { - "title": "“Loneliness”", - "body": "The rain and the wind and the murk\nReign over cold desert of fall,\nHere, life’s interrupted till spring;\nTill the spring, gardens barren and tall.\nI’m alone in my house, it’s dim\nAt the easel, and drafts through the rims.\n\nThe other day, you came to me,\nBut I feel you are bored with me now.\nThe somber day’s over, it seemed\nYou were there for me as my spouse.\nWell, so long, I will somehow strive\nTo survive till the spring with no wife.\n\nThe clouds, again, have today\nReturned, passing, patch after patch.\nYour footprints got smudged by the rain,\nAnd are filling with water by the porch.\nAs I sink into lonesome despair\nFrom the vanishing late autumn’s glare.\n\nI gasped to call after you fast:\nPlease come back, you’re a part of me, dear;\nTo a woman, there is no past:\nOnce love ends, you’re a stranger to her;\nI’ll get drunk, I will watch burning logs,\nWould be splendid to get me a dog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maya Jouravel", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "no-birds-in-sight": { - "title": "“No Birds in Sight”", - "body": "No birds in sight. The forest withers slowly,\nResigned to utter emptiness and chill.\nNo mushrooms, but there comes from out a gully\nOf mushroom damp the strong and tangy smell.\n\nThe scrub is lighter and less tall, the greying\nGrass near the bushes droops, seems trampled down;\nBeneath the autumn rain the leaves, decaying,\nIn mouldy heaps lie of a darkish brown.\n\nBut in the fields the wind is fresh and biting.\nI lead my stallion out and ride from home,\nAnd, in the freedom of the steppe delighting,\nFar from the villages till nightfall roam.\n\nLulled by my mount’s slow, easy pace, I listen\nWith joy-tinged, quiet sadness to the hum\nOf wind as it invades with singsong whistle\nAnd drawn-out moan the barrels of my gun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-pleiades": { - "title": "“The Pleiades”", - "body": "It’s dark. Not caring where I go, which path I follow,\n Past sleepy ponds I stroll.\nOf autumn freshness, leaves and fruit the fragrance mellow\n Drifts over all.\n\nThe garden’s almost bare, and through the branches whitely\n The stars of evening show.\nDead silence reigns. Murk clothes the paths. It’s nighttime.\n My steps are slow.\n\nThey’re slow, but wake the hush … High in the sky’s cool darkness,\n A princely diadem,\nThe icy Pleiades blaze diamond-like and sparkle,\n Each one a gem.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "rakhils-tomb": { - "title": "“Rakhil’s Tomb”", - "body": "“She passed away, and was interred by Jacob\nBeside the road …” And on the tomb, no sight\nOf any name, inscription and no mark up.\n\nAt nighttime, there’s a gleaming feeble light,\nAnd whitewashed with chalk, the grave’s cupola\nWith enigmatic paleness is attired.\n\nI’m timidly approaching as the night falls\nAnd kiss the dust and chalk in awe and thrill\nOf this tombstone, artless, white, and cold\n\nThe sweetest of the earthly words! Rakhil!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maya Jouravel", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-sail": { - "title": "“The Sail”", - "body": "Embroidered all in stars, my sail\nStands tall and white, both taut and frail;\nBetween the stars there glows the Face\nOf Mother Mary, full of grace.\n\nWhat do I care if shores and sphere\nAre fading, soon to disappear!\nMy soul’s replete, my soul’s austere,\nAnd horns of fresh moon in the skies\nIllume my path as sun’s glow dies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1915, - "month": "september", - "day": 14 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "temdzhid": { - "title": "“Temdzhid”", - "body": "_“He sleeps not, drowses not.”_\n --_The Koran_\n\nIn the placid ancient city of Skutari,\nAs evening wends its way into the night,\nFrom minarets that loom o’er Dede Efendi,\nResounds the pensive music of Temdzhid.\n\nAt witching time midway twixt gloaming hour\nAnd morning’s dawn the dervishes perform;\nThey stand and whirl on high Efendi’s tower,\nAnd sing their ageless hymn, revered Temdzhid.\n\nThe sepulchres at midnight, the lovely gardens sleep,\nSkutari sleeps in silence, its daylight cares dismissed,\nBut under starry skies floats down from minaret\nThat hymn designed for those who turn and twist.\n\nTheir anxious eyes are fixed, intent on midnight murk,\nThey gaze in secret torment as the shadows slowly creep,\nTheir lips voice desperate cries, but all in vain,\nThey plead and whisper prayers for blessed sleep.\n\nDark and filled with pitfalls is this earthly road of life,\nBut every human sigh below is reckoned up on high,\nSleep on, O mortal, sleep! God sleeps not, drowses not,\nHe thinks of you, his mercy’s rife, He watches from the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1905 - } - } - }, - "wakened-by-the-shadows-probing": { - "title": "“Wakened by the shadows’ probing …”", - "body": "Wakened by the shadows’ probing\nSnowy windows with their arc--\nIsaac’s swarthy gold dome’s robing\nGlimmers, beautiful and dark.\n\nDoleful, snowy morning settles,\nIsaac’s cross wears misty shroud.\nAt the window pigeons nestle,\nSnug against the glass they crowd.\n\nAll is joy to me and novel:\nChandelier and coffee’s spice,\nRug on floor of cosy hovel,\nPapers’ soggy frosted ice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "warmth-and-light": { - "title": "“Warmth and Light”", - "body": "Warmth and light, buzzing bumblebees, wheat ears and grasses,\nAzure skies--of high summer the birth …\nTo his prodigal son will the Lord say: “Confess, pray--\nHave you known true contentment on earth?”\n\nAnd forgetting all else save the golden and endless\nFields of wheat, the sereneness and peace,\nI will weep, and, my words choked by sweet tears of gladness,\nThankful fall at those merciful knees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "warmth-and-light-buzzing-bumblebees-wheat-ears-and-grasses": { - "title": "“Warmth and light, buzzing bumblebees, wheat ears and grasses …”", - "body": "Warmth and light, buzzing bumblebees, wheat ears and grasses,\nAzure skies--of high summer the birth …\nTo his prodigal son will the Lord say: “Confess, pray--\nHave you known true contentment on earth?”\n\nAnd forgetting all else save the golden and endless\nFields of wheat, the sereneness and peace,\nI will weep, and, my words choked by sweet tears of gladness,\nThankful fall at those merciful knees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "why-does-the-ancient-grave-in-captivation": { - "title": "“Why does the ancient grave in captivation …”", - "body": "Why does the ancient grave in captivation,\nhold all those dreams of what may once have been?\nWhy does the willow bend its frowning green\nTo cast its shadow as in veneration,\nSo mournful and so tender and so bright,\nAs if all things that now are ended might\nAlready know the joy of resurrection\nAnd in redemption’s bosom, dark perfection\nIn tangle of celestial blooms’ delight?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "youth": { - "title": "“Youth”", - "body": "A whip cracks in the wood, and cattle low\nAnd through the underbrush are heard to\nCrash heavily. Leaves rustle. Snowdrops show\nTheir blue heads here and there. A sudden, furtive\n\nWind starts to blow, and ashen clouds are swept\nAcross the skies, a cool, fresh rain presaging …\nThe heart grieves and is glad that life is, strangely,\nVast like the steppe and empty like the steppe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "youd-be-always-out": { - "title": "“You’d be always out …”", - "body": "You’d be always out\nIn villages around\nHaving fun at feasts\nI’d be on my own,\nIn the wood or home,\nWatching plants and trees.\n\nGirls were, sewing, spinning\nGrannies played with children\nI was all alone,\nGentle as a berry\nStill as captive birdie\nIn a flax-blue tone.\n\nDidn’t I love him dearly?\nDidn’t I pray sincerely,\nBegging God for hope?\nYears were flying over\nI was getting older …\nAnd your bugle stopped.\n\nNow the sunset rambles\nRound the rooms and parlours\nBy the oaken pale.\nBut it’s cold and dumpy\nAnd my soul, held captive,\nCan’t escape the jail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-day-will-come-ill-disappear": { - "title": "“The day will come; I’ll disappear …”", - "body": "The day will come; I’ll disappear,\nWhile in this selfsame empty room,\nThat table, bench, icon austere\nThe same contours of space consume.\n\nAnd just as now will flutter in\nThat silken butterfly serene,\nTo rustle, palpitate and ding\nAgainst the ceiling’s bluish-green.\n\nAnd the sky’s horizon, cerulean glow\nWill peer in, gaze through this window,\nWhile the steady unruffled blue of the sea\nBeckons toward emptiness: “Come. Follow me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1916, - "month": "august", - "day": 10 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 10 - } - } - }, - "the-tranquil-gaze-your-eyes-so-like-a-does": { - "title": "“The tranquil gaze, your eyes so like a doe’s …”", - "body": "The tranquil gaze, your eyes so like a doe’s,\nAll in that gaze once loved so tenderly\nOn grievous days I cherish, keep, but slenderly,\nFor haze and mist your visage now enclose.\n\nThe day will come when even sadness fades,\nWhen reminiscence glitters, azure-blue,\nIn dreams with grief and happiness askew,\nWhere nothing’s left but all-absolving shades.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1901 - } - } - } - } - }, - "basil-bunting": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Basil Bunting", - "birth": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Bunting", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "from-briggflatts": { - "title": "From “Briggflatts”", - "body": "Brag, sweet tenor bull,\ndescant on Rawthey’s madrigal,\neach pebble its part\nfor the fells’ late spring.\nDance tiptoe, bull,\nblack against may.\nRidiculous and lovely\nchase hurdling shadows\nmorning into noon.\nMay on the bull’s hide\nand through the dale\nfurrows fill with may,\npaving the slowworm’s way.\n\nA mason times his mallet\nto a lark’s twitter,\nlistening while the marble rests,\nlays his rule\nat a letter’s edge,\nfingertips checking,\ntill the stone spells a name\nnaming none,\na man abolished.\nPainful lark, labouring to rise!\nThe solemn mallet says:\nIn the grave’s slot\nhe lies. We rot.\n\nDecay thrusts the blade,\nwheat stands in excrement\ntrembling. Rawthey trembles.\nTongue stumbles, ears err\nfor fear of spring.\nRub the stone with sand,\nwet sandstone rending\nroughness away. Fingers\nache on the rubbing stone.\nThe mason says: Rocks\nhappen by chance.\nNo one here bolts the door,\nlove is so sore.\n\nStone smooth as skin,\ncold as the dead they load\non a low lorry by night.\nThe moon sits on the fell\nbut it will rain.\nUnder sacks on the stone\ntwo children lie,\nhear the horse stale,\nthe mason whistle,\nharness mutter to shaft,\nfelloe to axle squeak,\nrut thud the rim,\ncrushed grit.\n\nStocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,\nhead to a hard arm,\nthey kiss under the rain,\nbruised by their marble bed.\nIn Garsdale, dawn;\nat Hawes, tea from the can.\nRain stops, sacks\nsteam in the sun, they sit up.\nCopper-wire moustache,\nsea-reflecting eyes\nand Baltic plainsong speech\ndeclare: By such rocks\nmen killed Bloodaxe.\n\nFierce blood throbs in his tongue,\nlean words.\nSkulls cropped for steel caps\nhuddle round Stainmore.\nTheir becks ring on limestone,\nwhisper to peat.\nThe clogged cart pushes the horse downhill.\nIn such soft air\nthey trudge and sing,\nlaying the tune frankly on the air.\nAll sounds fall still,\nfeilside bleat,\nhide-and-seek peewit.\n\nHer pulse their pace,\npalm countering palm,\ntill a trench is filled,\nstone white as cheese\njeers at the dale.\nKnotty wood, hard to rive,\nsmoulders to ash;\nsmell of October apples.\nThe road again,\nat a trot.\nWetter, warmed, they watch\nthe mason meditate\non name and date.\n\nRain rinses the road,\nthe bull streams and laments.\nSour rye porridge from the hob\nwith cream and black tea,\nmeat, crust and crumb.\nHer parents in bed\nthe children dry their clothes.\nHe has untied the tape\nof her striped flannel drawers\nbefore the range. Naked\non the pricked rag mat\nhis fingers comb\nthatch of his manhood’s home.\n\nGentle generous voices weave\nover bare night\nwords to confirm and delight\ntill bird dawn.\nRainwater from the butt\nshe fetches and flannel\nto wash him inch by inch,\nkissing the pebbles.\nShining slowworm part of the marvel.\nThe mason stirs:\nWords!\nPens are too light.\nTake a chisel to write.\n\nEvery birth a crime,\nevery sentence life.\nWiped of mould and mites\nwould the ball run true?\nNo hope of going back.\nHounds falter and stray,\nshame deflects the pen.\nLove murdered neither bleeds nor stifles\nbut jogs the draftsman’s elbow.\nWhat can he, changed, tell\nher, changed, perhaps dead?\nDelight dwindles. Blame\nstays the same.\n\nBrief words are hard to find,\nshapes to carve and discard:\nBloodaxe, king of York,\nking of Dublin, king of Orkney.\nTake no notice of tears;\nletter the stone to stand\nover love laid aside lest\ninsufferable happiness impede\nflight to Stainmore,\nto trace\nlark, mallet,\nbecks, flocks\nand axe knocks.\n\nDung will not soil the slowworm’s\nmosaic. Breathless lark\ndrops to nest in sodden trash;\nRawthey truculent, dingy.\nDrudge at the mallet, the may is down,\nfog on fells. Guilty of spring\nand spring’s ending\namputated years ache after\nthe bull is beef, love a convenience.\nIt is easier to die than to remember.\nName and date\nsplit in soft slate\na few months obliterate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "chomei-at-toyama": { - "title": "“Chomei at Toyama”", - "body": "Swirl sleeping in the waterfall!\nOn motionless pools scum appearing\n disappearing!\n\nEaves formal on the zenith,\nlofty city Kyoto,\nwealthy, without antiquities!\n\nHousebreakers clamber about,\nbuilders raising floor upon floor\nat the corner sites, replacing\ngardens by bungalows.\n\nIn the town where I was known\nthe young men stare at me.\nA few faces I know remain.\n\nWhence comes man at his birth? or where\ndoes death lead him? Whom do you mourn?\nWhose steps wake your delight?\nDewy hibiscus dries: though dew\noutlast the petals.\n\nI have been noting events forty years.\n\nOn the twentyseventh May eleven hundred\nand seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out\nat the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets.\nIn a night\npalace, ministries, university, parliament\nwere destroyed. As the wind veered\nflames spread out in the shape of an open fan.\nTongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt.\nIn the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze.\nSome choked, some burned, some barely escaped.\nSixteen great officials lost houses and\nvery many poor. A third of the city burned;\nseveral thousands died; and of beasts,\nlimitless numbers.\n\nMen are fools to invest in real estate.\n\nThree years less three days later a wind\nstarting near the outer boulevard\nbroke a path a quarter mile across\nto Sixth Avenue.\nNot a house stood. Some were felled whole,\nsome in splinters; some had left\ngreat beams upright in the ground\nand round about\nlay rooves scattered where the wind flung them.\nFlocks of furniture in the air,\neverything flat fluttered like dead leaves.\nA dust like fog or smoke,\nyou could hear nothing for the roar,\n bufera infernal!\nLamed some, wounded some.\nThis cyclone turned southwest.\n\nMassacre without cause.\n\nPortent?\n\nThe same year thunderbolted change of capital,\nfixed here, Kyoto, for ages.\nNothing compelled the change nor was it an easy matter\nbut the grumbling was disproportionate.\nWe moved, those with jobs\nor wanting jobs or hangers on of the rest,\nin haste haste fretting to be the first.\nRooftrees overhanging empty rooms;\ndismounted: floating down the river.\nThe soil returned to heath.\n\nI visited the new site narrow and too uneven,\ncliffs and marshes, deafening shores, perpetual strong winds;\nthe palace a logcabin dumped amongst the hills\n(yet not altogether inelegant).\nThere was no flat place for houses, many vacant lots,\nthe former capital wrecked, the new a camp,\nand thoughts like clouds changing, frayed by a breath:\npeasants bewailing lost land, newcomers aghast at prices.\nNo one in uniform: the crowds\nresembled demobilized conscripts.\n\nThere were murmurs. Time defined them.\nIn the winter the decree was rescinded,\nwe returned to Kyoto;\nbut the houses were gone and none\ncould afford to rebuild them.\n\nI have heard of a time when kings beneath bark rooves\nwatched chimneys.\nWhen smoke was scarce, taxes were remitted.\n\nTo appreciate present conditions\ncollate them with those of antiquity.\n\nDrought, floods, and a dearth. Two fruitless autumns.\nEmpty markets, swarms of beggars. Jewels\nsold for a handful of rice. Dead stank\non the curb, lay so thick on\nRiverside Drive a car couldnt pass.\nThe pest bred.\nThat winter my fuel was the walls of my own house.\n\nFathers fed their children and died,\nbabies died sucking the dead.\nThe priest Hoshi went about marking their foreheads\nA, Amida, their requiem;\nhe counted them in the East End in the last two months,\nfortythree thousand A’s.\n\nCrack, rush, ye mountains, bury your rills!\nSpread your green glass, ocean, over the meadows!\nScream, avalanche, boulders amok, strangle the dale!\nO ships in the sea’s power, O horses\nOn shifting roads, in the earth’s power, without hoofhold!\nThis is the earthquake, this was\nthe great earthquake of Genryaku!\n\nThe chapel fell, the abbey, the minster and the small shrines\nfell, their dust rose and a thunder of houses falling.\nO to be birds and fly or dragons and ride on a cloud!\nThe earthquake, the great earthquake of Genryaku!\n\nA child building a mud house against a high wall:\nI saw him crushed suddenly, his eyes hung\nfrom their orbits like two tassels.\nHis father howled shamelessly--an officer.\nI was not abashed at his crying.\n\nSuch shocks continued three weeks; then lessening,\nbut still a score daily as big as an average earthquake;\nthen fewer, alternate days, a tertian ague of tremors.\nThere is no record of any greater.\nIt caused a religious revival.\nMonths …\nYears …\n…\nNobody mentions it now.\n\nThis is the unstable world and\nwe in it unstable and our houses.\n\nA poor man living amongst the rich\ngives no rowdy parties, doesnt sing.\nDare he keep his child at home, keep a dog?\nHe dare not pity himself above a whimper.\n\nBut he visits, he flatters, he is put in his place,\nhe remembers the patch on his trousers.\nHis wife and sons despise him for being poor.\nHe has no peace.\n\nIf he lives in an alley of rotting frame houses\nhe dreads a fire.\nIf he commutes he loses his time\nand leaves his house daily to be plundered by gunmen.\nThe bureaucrats are avaricious.\nHe who has no relatives in the Inland Revenue,\npoor devil!\n\nWhoever helps him enslaves him\nand follows him crying out: Gratitude!\nIf he wants success he is wretched.\nIf he doesnt he passes for mad.\n\nWhere shall I settle, what trade choose\nthat the mind may practise, the body rest?\n\nMy grandmother left me a house\nbut I was always away\nfor my health and because I was alone there.\nWhen I was thirty I couldnt stand it any longer,\nI built a house to suit myself:\none bamboo room, you would have thought it a cartshed,\npoor shelter from snow or wind.\nIt stood on the flood plain. And that quarter\nis also flooded with gangsters.\n\nOne generation\nI saddened myself with idealistic philosophies,\nbut before I was fifty\nI perceived there was no time to lose,\nleft home and conversation.\nAmong the cloudy mountains of Ohara\nspring and autumn, spring and autumn, spring and autumn,\nemptier than ever.\n\nThe dew evaporates from my sixty years,\nI have built my last house, or hovel,\na hunter’s bivouac, an old\nsilkworm’s cocoon:\nten feet by ten, seven high: and I,\nreckoning it a lodging not a dwelling,\nomitted the usual foundation ceremony.\n\nI have filled the frames with clay,\nset hinges at the corners;\neasy to take it down and carry it away\nwhen I get bored with this place.\nTwo barrowloads of junk\nand the cost of a man to shove the barrow,\nno trouble at all.\n\nSince I have trodden Hino mountain\nnoon has beaten through the awning\nover my bamboo balcony, evening\nshone on Amida.\nI have shelved my books above the window,\nlute and mandolin near at hand,\npiled bracken and a little straw for bedding,\na smooth desk where the light falls, stove for bramblewood.\nI have gathered stones, fitted\nstones for a cistern, laid bamboo\npipes. No woodstack,\nwood enough in the thicket.\n\nToyama, snug in the creepers!\nToyama, deep in the dense gully, open\nwestward whence the dead ride out of Eden\nsquatting on blue clouds of wistaria.\n(Its scent drifts west to Amida.)\n\nSummer? Cuckoo’s Follow, follow--to\nharvest Purgatory hill!\nFall? The nightgrasshopper will\nshrill Fickle life!\nSnow will thicken on the doorstep,\nmelt like a drift of sins.\nNo friend to break silence,\nno one will be shocked if I neglect the rite.\nThere’s a Lent of commandments kept\nwhere there’s no way to break them.\n\nA ripple of white water after a boat,\nshining water after the boats Mansami saw\nrowing at daybreak\nat Okinoya.\nBetween the maple leaf and the caneflower\nmurmurs the afternoon--Po Lo-tien\nsaying goodbye on the verge of Jinyo river.\n(I am playing scales on my mandolin.)\nBe limber, my fingers, I am going to play Autumn Wind\nto the pines, I am going to play Hastening Brook\nto the water. I am no player\nbut there’s nobody listening,\nI do it for my own amusement.\n\nSixteen and sixty, I and the gamekeeper’s boy,\none zest and equal, chewing tsubana buds,\none zest and equal, persimmon, pricklypear,\nears of sweetcorn pilfered from Valley Farm.\n\nThe view from the summit: sky bent over Kyoto,\npicnic villages, Fushimi and Toba:\na very economical way of enjoying yourself.\nThought runs along the crest, climbs Sumiyama;\nbeyond Kasatori it visits the great church,\ngoes on pilgrimage to Ishiyama (no need to foot it!)\nor the graves of poets, of Semimaru who said:\n Somehow or other\n we scuttle through a lifetime.\n Somehow or other\n neither palace nor straw-hut\n is quite satisfactory.\n\nNot emptyhanded, with cherryblossom, with red maple\nas the season gives it to decorate my Buddha\nor offer a sprig at a time to chancecomers, home!\n\nA fine moonlit night,\nI sit at the window with a headful of old verses.\n\nWhenever a monkey howls there are tears on my cuff.\n\nThose are fireflies that seem\nthe fishermen’s lights\noff Maki island.\n\nA shower at dawn\nsings\nlike the hillbreeze in the leaves.\n\nAt the pheasant’s chirr I recall\nmy father and mother uncertainly.\n\nI rake my ashes.\n Chattering fire,\nsoon kindled, soon burned out,\nfit wife for an old man!\n\nNeither closed in one landscape\nnor in one season\nthe mind moving in illimitable\nrecollection.\n\nI came here for a month\nfive years ago.\nThere’s moss on the roof.\n\nAnd I hear Soanso’s dead\nback in Kyoto.\nI have as much room as I need.\n\nI know myself and mankind.\n…\nI dont want to be bothered.\n\n(You will make me editor\nof the Imperial Anthology?\nI dont want to be bothered.)\n\nYou build for your wife, children,\ncousins and cousins’ cousins.\nYou want a house to entertain in.\n\nA man like me can have neither servants nor friends\nin the present state of society.\nIf I did not build for myself\nfor whom should I build?\n\nFriends fancy a rich man’s riches,\nfriends suck up to a man in high office.\nIf you keep straight you will have no friends\nbut catgut and blossom in season.\n\nServants weigh out their devotion\nin proportion to their perquisites\nWhat do they care for peace and quiet?\nThere are more pickings in town.\n\nI sweep my own floor\n--less fuss.\nI walk; I get tired\nbut do not have to worry about a horse.\n\nMy hands and feet will not loiter\nwhen I am not looking.\nI will not overwork them.\nBesides, it’s good for my health.\n\nMy jacket’s wistaria flax,\nmy blanket hemp,\nberries and young greens\nmy food.\n\n(Let it be quite understood,\nall this is merely personal.\nI am not preaching the simple life\nto those who enjoy being rich.)\n\nI am shifting rivermist, not to be trusted.\nI do not ask anything extraordinary of myself.\nI like a nap after dinner\nand to see the seasons come round in good order.\n\nHankering, vexation and apathy,\nthat’s the run of the world.\nHankering, vexation and apathy,\nkeeping a carriage wont cure it.\n\nKeeping a man in livery\nwont cure it. Keeping a private fortress\nwont cure it. These things satisfy no craving,\nHankering, vexation and apathy …\n\nI am out of place in the capital,\npeople take me for a beggar,\nas you would be out of place in this sort of life,\nyou are so I regret it so welded to your vulgarity.\n\nThe moonshadow merges with darkness\non the cliffpath,\na tricky turn near ahead.\n\nOh! There’s nothing to complain about.\nBuddha says: ‘None of the world is good.’\nI am fond of my hut …\n\nI have renounced the world;\nhave a saintly\nappearance.\n\nI do not enjoy being poor,\nI’ve a passionate nature.\nMy tongue\nclacked a few prayers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "chorus-of-furies": { - "title": "“Chorus of Furies”", - "body": "_Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine_\n\nLet us come upon him first as if in a dream,\nanonymous triple presence,\nmemory made substance and tally of heart’s rot:\nthen in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem\nsole aspect of being’s essence,\ncoffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot.\nThen he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress\nwithout hope of divorce,\nenvying idiocy’s apathy or the stress\nof definite remorse.\nHe will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force\nof the mind’s eagerness\nrecall those fiends or new apparitions endorse\nhis excessive distress.\nHe will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware\nthe last skin of the flayed: despair.\nHe will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain\neven of death’s solace,\nimpotent to outpace\ndispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "coda": { - "title": "“Coda”", - "body": "A strong song tows\nus, long earsick.\nBlind, we follow\nrain slant, spray flick\nto fields we do not know.\n\nNight, float us.\nOffshore wind, shout,\nask the sea\nwhat’s lost, what’s left,\nwhat horn sunk,\nwhat crown adrift.\n\nWhere we are who knows\nof kings who sup\nwhile day fails? Who,\nswinging his axe\nto fell kings, guesses\nwhere we go?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-earthy-shields": { - "title": "“The Earthy Shields”", - "body": "Lavender and contorted\nOnly and lavender\nOutrageous and very\n\nThis flipper may back and\nbeckon, but it\nis absurdly hidden\nInto a streamed fly a short man\nhas seemed contorted\nFormless as a\nhay, more formless than shield\n\nThe rain saying our\nface, its own calling skin\nAppeal has rotted in our curved\nbank\nGloom is so homeward-bound\nit has mourned it\nHearing an earthy gross year from under\nold decent water\nOur hand thickening, motionless\nand farcical, our arm rotting", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "from-fearful-symmetry": { - "title": "From “Fearful Symmetry”", - "body": "Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow,\nbilious glaring eyes, tufted ears,\nrecidivous criminality in the slouch,\n--This is not the latest absconding bankrupt\nbut a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from\nKuala Lumpur.\n\n7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A.\nare taking his profitable likeness;\n28 reporters and an essayist\nare writing him up.\nSundry ladies think he is a darling\nespecially at mealtimes, observing\nthat a firm near the docks advertises replicas\nfullgrown on approval for easy cash payments.\n\n♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise\nup and down his cage before feeding\nin a stench of excrements of great cats\nindifferent to beauty or brutality.\nHe is said to have eaten several persons\nbut of course you can never be quite sure of these things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fishermen": { - "title": "“Fishermen”", - "body": "Mesh cast for mackerel\nby guess and the sheen’s tremor--\nimperceptible if you haven’t the knack--\na difficult job,\n\nhazardous and seasonal:\nmany shoals all of a sudden,\nit would tax the Apostles to take the lot;\nthen drowse for months,\n\nnets on the shingle,\na pint in the tap.\nLikewise the pilchards come unexpectedly,\nstartle the man on the cliff.\n\n“Remember us to the teashop girls.\nSay we have seen no legs better than theirs,\nwe have the sea to stare at--\nIts treason, copiousness, tedium.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gin-the-goodwife-stint": { - "title": "“Gin the Goodwife Stint”", - "body": "The ploughland has gone to bent\nand the pasture to heather;\ngin the goodwife stint,\nshe’ll keep the house together.\n\nGin the goodwife stint\nand the bairns hunger\nthe Duke can get his rent\none year longer.\n\nThe Duke can get his rent\nand we can get our ticket\ntwa pund emigrant\non a C.P.R. packet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "see-their-verses-are-laid": { - "title": "“See! Their Verses Are Laid”", - "body": "See! Their verses are laid\nas mosaic gold to gold\ngold to lapis lazuli\nwhite marble to porphyry\nstone shouldering stone, the dice\npolished alike, there is\nno cement seen and no gap\nbetween stones as the frieze strides\nto the impending apse:\nthe rays of many glories\nforced to its focus forming\na glory neither of stone\nnor metal, neither of words\nnor verses, but of the light\nshining upon no substance;\na glory not made\nfor which all else was made.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-violet": { - "title": "“To Violet”", - "body": "These tracings from a world that’s dead\nTake for my dust-smothered Pyramid.\nCount the sharp study and long toil\nAs pavements laid for worms to soil.\nYou, without knowing it, might tread\nThe grass where my foundation’s laid;\nYour, or another’s, house be built\nWhere my mossed, weathered stones lie spilt;\nAnd this unread memento be\nThe only lasting part of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "villon": { - "title": "“Villon”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe whom we anatomized\n‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers\nand thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’\nspeaks\nto us, hatching marrow,\nbroody all night over the bones of a deadman.\n\nMy tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.\nWe saw is so and it was not so,\nthe Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.\n(--A blazing parchment,\nMatthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.)\n\nIt was not so,\nscratched on black by God knows who,\nby God, by God knows who.\n\nIn the dark in fetters\non bended elbows I supported my weak back\nhulloing to muffled walls blank again\nunresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent.\nMy soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible\nI stammer to my ear:\nNaked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold!\nWrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric,\nwrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair.\n\nWhat trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor\nwith magic in darkness, I unforewained.\nThe golden hands are not in Averrhoes,\neyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water\nmakes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me!\n\nTo the right was darkness and to the left hardness\nbelow hardness darkness above\nat the feet darkness at the head partial hardness\nwith equal intervals without\nto the left moaning and beyond a scurry.\nIn those days rode the good Lorraine\nwhom English burned at Rouen,\nthe day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust.\n\nThen he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands,\nthe Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb\nalongside Charles. These things are not obliterate.\nWhite gobs spitten for mockery;\nand I too shall have CY GIST, written over me.\n\nRemember, imbeciles and wits,\nsots and ascetics, fair and foul,\nyoung girls with little tender tits,\nthat DEATH is written over all.\n\nWorn hides that scarcely clothe the soul\nthey are so rotten, old and thin,\nor firm and soft and warm and full--\nfellmonger Death gets every skin.\n\nAll that is piteous, all that’s fair,\nall that is fat and scant of breath,\nElisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,\nis Death’s collateral:\n\nThree score and ten years after sight\nof this pay me your pulse and breath\nvalue received. And who dare cite,\nas we forgive our debtors, Death?\n\nAbelard and Eloise,\nHenry the Fowler, Charlemagne,\nGenée, Lopokova, all these\ndie, die in pain.\n\nAnd General Grant and General Lee,\nPatti and Florence Nightingale,\nlike Tyro and Antiope\ndrift among ghosts in Hell,\n\nknow nothing, are nothing, save a fume\ndriving across a mind\npreoccupied with this: our doom\nis, to be sifted by the wind,\n\nheaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.\nWe are less permanent than thought.\nThe Emperor with the Golden Hands\n\nis still a word, a tint, a tone,\ninsubstantial-glorious,\nwhen we ourselves are dead and gone\nand the green grass growing over us.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLet his days be few and let\nhis bishoprick pass to another,\nfor he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust,\nmouldy bread that his dogs had vomited,\nI lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave,\nfettered to a post in the damp cellarage.\n Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor,\nthere are no dancers, no somersaulters now,\nonly bricks and bleak black cement and bricks,\nonly the military tread and the snap of the locks.\n Mine was a threeplank bed whereon\nI lay and cursed the weary sun.\nThey took away the prison clothes\nand on the frosty nights I froze.\nI had a Bible where I read\nthat Jesus came to raise the dead--\nI kept myself from going mad\nby singing an old bawdy ballad\nand birds sang on my windowsill\nand tortured me till I was ill,\nbut Archipiada came to me\nand comforted my cold body\nand Circe excellent utterer of her mind\nlay with me in that dungeon for a year\nmaking a silk purse from an old sow’s ear\ntill Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue.\n Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars,\ntrodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule,\nJoshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad.\nThey have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds,\nhunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo,\nthey have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada:\nWhat is your name? Your maiden name?\nGo in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name.\nDistinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!)\nNow the thumbprints for filing.\nColour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon!\nHow many golden prints on the smudgy page?\nHomer? Adest. Dante? Adest.\nAdsunt omnes, omnes et\nVillon.\nVillon?\nBlacked by the sun, washed by the rain,\nhither and thither scurrying as the wind varies.\n\n\n# III.\n\nUnder the olive trees\nwalking alone\non the green terraces\nvery seldom\nover the sea seldom\nwhere it ravelled and spun\nblue tapestries white and green\ngravecloths of men\nRomans and modern men\nand the men of the sea\nwho have neither nation nor time\non the mountains seldom\nthe white mountains beyond\nor the brown mountains between\nand their drifting echoes\nin the clouds and over the sea\nin shrines on their ridges\nthe goddess of the country\nsilverplated in silk and embroidery\nwith offerings of pictures\nlittle ships and arms\nbelow me the ports\nwith naked breasts\nshipless spoiled sacked\nbecause of the beauty of Helen\n\nprecision clarifying vagueness;\nboundary to a wilderness\nof detail; chisel voice\nsmoothing the flanks of noise;\ncatalytic making whisper and whisper\nrun together like two drops of quicksilver;\nfactor that resolves\n unnoted harmonies;\nname of the nameless;\n stuff that clings\nto frigid limbs\n more marble hard\nthan girls imagined by Mantegna …\n\nThe sea has no renewal, no forgetting,\nno variety of death,\nis silent with the silence of a single note.\n\nHow can I sing with my love in my bosom?\nUnclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-word": { - "title": "“The Word”", - "body": "Nothing\nsubstance utters or time\nstills or restrains\njoins the design and the\n\nsupple measure deftly\nas thought’s intricate polyphonic\nscore dovetails with the tread\nsensuous things\nkeep in our consciousness.\n\nCelebrate man’s craft\nand the word spoken in shapeless night, the\nsharp tool paring away\nwaste and the forms\ncut out of mystery!\n\nWhen the tight string’s note\npasses ear’s reach, or red rays or violet\nfade, strong over unseen\nforces the word\nranks and enumerates …\n\nMimes the clouds condensed\nand the hewn hills and the bristling forests,\nsteadfast corn in its season\nand the seasons\nin their due array,\n\nlife of man’s own body\nand death …\nThe sound thins into melody,\ndiscourse narrowing, craft\nfailing, design\npetering out;\n\nears heavy to breeze of speech and\nthud of the ictus.\n\n\n_Appendix: Iron_\n\nMolten pool, incandescent spilth of\ndeep cauldrons--and brighter nothing is--\ncast and cold, your blazes extinct and\nno turmoil nor peril left you,\nrusty ingot, bleak paralyzed blob!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-bunyan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Bunyan", - "birth": { - "year": 1628 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1688 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-shepherd-boy-sings-in-the-valley-of-humiliation": { - "title": "“The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation”", - "body": "He that is down needs fear no fall,\nHe that is low, no pride;\nHe that is humble ever shall\nHave God to be his guide.\n\nI am content with what I have,\nLittle be it or much:\nAnd, Lord, contentment still I crave,\nBecause Thou savest such.\n\nFullness to such a burden is\nThat go on pilgrimage:\nHere little, and hereafter bliss,\nIs best from age to age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "david-burliuk": { - "metadata": { - "name": "David Burliuk", - "birth": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "ukrainian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇺🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Burliuk", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "ukrainian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "each-is-young-young-younger": { - "title": "“Each is young young younger …”", - "body": "Each is young young younger\nBellies full of devilish hunger\nSo fall in behind me …\nOver my shoulder\nI toss a proud screech\nThis laconic speech!\nLet us feed on stones and grasses\nSweetness bitterness and asps\nLet us gobble up the empty\nThe deep and the lofty\nBeasts, monsters, fish, birds\nWind, clay, salt and surge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-burns": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Burns", - "birth": { - "year": 1759 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1796 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "ae-fond-kiss": { - "title": "“Ae Fond Kiss”", - "body": "Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;\nAe fareweel, and then forever!\nDeep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,\nWarring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.\nWho shall say that Fortune grieves him,\nWhile the star of hope she leaves him?\nMe, nae cheerfu’ twinkle lights me;\nDark despair around benights me.\n\nI’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy,\nNaething could resist my Nancy;\nBut to see her was to love her;\nLove but her, and love forever.\nHad we never lov’d sae kindly,\nHad we never lov’d sae blindly,\nNever met--or never parted--\nWe had ne’er been broken-hearted.\n\nFare thee weel, thou first and fairest!\nFare thee weel, thou best and dearest!\nThine be ilka joy and treasure,\nPeace. enjoyment, love, and pleasure!\nAe fond kiss, and then we sever;\nAe fareweel, alas, forever!\nDeep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,\nWarring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "afton-water": { - "title": "“Afton Water”", - "body": "Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,\nFlow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;\nMy Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,\nFlow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.\n\nThou stock-dove, whose echo resounds thro’ the glen,\nYe wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,\nThou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,\nI charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.\n\nHow lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,\nFar mark’d with the courses of clear winding rills;\nThere daily I wander as noon rises high,\nMy flocks and my Mary’s sweet cot in my eye.\n\nHow pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,\nWhere wild in the woodlands the primroses blow;\nThere oft, as mild Ev’ning sweeps over the lea,\nThe sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.\n\nThy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,\nAnd winds by the cot where my Mary resides,\nHow wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,\nAs gathering sweet flowrets she stems thy clear wave.\n\nFlow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,\nFlow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;\nMy Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,\nFlow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-dirge": { - "title": "“A Dirge”", - "body": "The wintry west extends his blast,\nAnd hail and rain does blaw;\nOr, the stormy north sends driving forth\nThe blinding sleet and snaw:\nWhile tumbling brown, the burn comes down,\nAnd roars frae bank to brae;\nAnd bird and beast in covert rest,\nAnd pass the heartless day.\n\nThe sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,\nThe joyless winter-day,\nLet others fear, to me more dear\nThan all the pride of May:\nThe tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,\nMy griefs it seems to join;\nThe leafless trees my fancy please,\nTheir fate resembles mine!\n\nThou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty scheme\nThese woes of mine fulfil,\nHere, firm, I rest, they must be best,\nBecause they are Thy will!\nThen all I want (O, do Thou grant\nThis one request of mine!)\nSince to enjoy Thou dost deny,\nAssist me to resign.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "for-a-that-an-a-that": { - "title": "“For A’ that An’ A’ That”", - "body": "Is there, for honest poverty,\nThat hings his head, an’ a’ that?\nThe coward slave, we pass him by,\nWe dare be poor for a’ that!\nFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,\nOur toils obscure, an’ a’ that;\nThe rank is but the guinea’s stamp;\nThe man’s the gowd for a’ that,\n\nWhat tho’ on hamely fare we dine,\nWear hoddin-gray, an’ a’ that;\nGie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,\nA man’s a man for a’ that.\nFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,\nTheir tinsel show an’ a’ that;\nThe honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,\nIs king o’ men for a’ that.\n\nYe see yon birkie, ca’d a lord\nWha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;\nTho’ hundreds worship at his word,\nHe’s but a coof for a’ that:\nFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,\nHis riband, star, an’ a’ that,\nThe man o’ independent mind,\nHe looks and laughs at a’ that.\n\nA prince can mak a belted knight,\nA marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;\nBut an honest man’s aboon his might,\nGuid faith he mauna fa’ that!\nFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,\nTheir dignities, an’ a’ that,\nThe pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,\nAre higher rank than a’ that.\n\nThen let us pray that come it may,\nAs come it will for a’ that,\nThat sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,\nMay bear the gree, an’ a’ that.\nFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,\nIt’s coming yet, for a’ that,\nThat man to man, the warld o’er,\nShall brothers be for a’ that.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "halloween": { - "title": "“Halloween”", - "body": "Upon that night, when fairies light\nOn Cassilis Downans dance,\nOr owre the lays, in splendid blaze,\nOn sprightly coursers prance;\nOr for Colean the route is ta’en,\nBeneath the moon’s pale beams;\nThere, up the cove, to stray and rove,\nAmong the rocks and streams\nTo sport that night.\n\nAmong the bonny winding banks,\nWhere Doon rins, wimplin’ clear,\nWhere Bruce ance ruled the martial ranks,\nAnd shook his Carrick spear,\nSome merry, friendly, country-folks,\nTogether did convene,\nTo burn their nits, and pou their stocks,\nAnd haud their Halloween\nFu’ blithe that night.\n\nThe lasses feat, and cleanly neat,\nMair braw than when they’re fine;\nTheir faces blithe, fu’ sweetly kythe,\nHearts leal, and warm, and kin’;\nThe lads sae trig, wi’ wooer-babs,\nWeel knotted on their garten,\nSome unco blate, and some wi’ gabs,\nGar lasses’ hearts gang startin’\nWhiles fast at night.\n\nThen, first and foremost, through the kail,\nTheir stocks maun a’ be sought ance;\nThey steek their een, and graip and wale,\nFor muckle anes and straught anes.\nPoor hav’rel Will fell aff the drift,\nAnd wander’d through the bow-kail,\nAnd pou’t, for want o’ better shift,\nA runt was like a sow-tail,\nSae bow’t that night.\n\nThen, staught or crooked, yird or nane,\nThey roar and cry a’ throu’ther;\nThe very wee things, todlin’, rin,\nWi’ stocks out owre their shouther;\nAnd gif the custoc’s sweet or sour.\nWi’ joctelegs they taste them;\nSyne cozily, aboon the door,\nWi cannie care, they’ve placed them\nTo lie that night.\n\nThe lasses staw frae ’mang them a’\nTo pou their stalks of corn:\nBut Rab slips out, and jinks about,\nBehint the muckle thorn:\nHe grippet Nelly hard and fast;\nLoud skirl’d a’ the lasses;\nBut her tap-pickle maist was lost,\nWhen kitlin’ in the fause-house\nWi’ him that night.\n\nThe auld guidwife’s well-hoordit nits,\nAre round and round divided,\nAnd monie lads’ and lasses’ fates\nAre there that night decided:\nSome kindle coothie, side by side,\nAnd burn thegither trimly;\nSome start awa, wi’ saucy pride,\nAnd jump out-owre the chimlie\nFu’ high that night.\n\nJean slips in twa wi’ tentie ee;\nWha ’twas she wadna tell;\nBut this is Jock, and this is me,\nShe says in to hersel:\nHe bleezed owre her, and she owre him,\nAs they wad never mair part;\nTill, fuff! he started up the lum,\nAnd Jean had e’en a sair heart\nTo see’t that night.\n\nPoor Willie, wi’ his bow-kail runt,\nWas brunt wi’ primsie Mallie;\nAnd Mallie, nae doubt, took the drunt,\nTo be compared to Willie;\nMall’s nit lap out wi’ pridefu’ fling,\nAnd her ain fit it brunt it;\nWhile Willie lap, and swore by jing,\n’Twas just the way he wanted\nTo be that night.\n\nNell had the fause-house in her min’,\nShe pits hersel and Rob in;\nIn loving bleeze they sweetly join,\nTill white in ase they’re sobbin’;\nNell’s heart was dancin’ at the view,\nShe whisper’d Rob to leuk for’t:\nRob, stowlins, prie’d her bonny mou’,\nFu’ cozie in the neuk for’t,\nUnseen that night.\n\nBut Merran sat behint their backs,\nHer thoughts on Andrew Bell;\nShe lea’es them gashin’ at their cracks,\nAnd slips out by hersel:\nShe through the yard the nearest taks,\nAnd to the kiln goes then,\nAnd darklins graipit for the bauks,\nAnd in the blue-clue throws then,\nRight fear’t that night.\n\nAnd aye she win’t, and aye she swat,\nI wat she made nae jaukin’,\nTill something held within the pat,\nGuid Lord! but she was quakin’!\nBut whether ’twas the deil himsel,\nOr whether ’twas a bauk-en’,\nOr whether it was Andrew Bell,\nShe didna wait on talkin’\nTo spier that night.\n\nWee Jennie to her grannie says,\n“Will ye go wi’ me, grannie?\nI’ll eat the apple at the glass\nI gat frae Uncle Johnnie:”\nShe fuff’t her pipe wi’ sic a lunt,\nIn wrath she was sae vap’rin’,\nShe notice’t na, an aizle brunt\nHer braw new worset apron\nOut through that night.\n\n“Ye little skelpie-limmer’s face!\nI daur you try sic sportin’,\nAs seek the foul thief ony place,\nFor him to spae your fortune.\nNae doubt but ye may get a sight!\nGreat cause ye hae to fear it;\nFor mony a ane has gotten a fright,\nAnd lived and died deleeret\nOn sic a night.”\n\n“Ae hairst afore the Sherramoor,--\nI mind’t as weel’s yestreen,\nI was a gilpey then, I’m sure\nI wasna past fifteen;\nThe simmer had been cauld and wat,\nAnd stuff was unco green;\nAnd aye a rantin’ kirn we gat,\nAnd just on Halloween\nIt fell that night.”\n\n“Our stibble-rig was Rab M’Graen,\nA clever sturdy fallow:\nHis son gat Eppie Sim wi’ wean,\nThat lived in Achmacalla:\nHe gat hemp-seed, I mind it weel,\nAnd he made unco light o’t;\nBut mony a day was by himsel,\nHe was sae sairly frighted\nThat very night.”\n\nThen up gat fechtin’ Jamie Fleck,\nAnd he swore by his conscience,\nThat he could saw hemp-seed a peck;\nFor it was a’ but nonsense.\nThe auld guidman raught down the pock,\nAnd out a hanfu’ gied him;\nSyne bade him slip frae ’mang the folk,\nSome time when nae ane see’d him,\nAnd try’t that night.\n\nHe marches through amang the stacks,\nThough he was something sturtin;\nThe graip he for a harrow taks.\nAnd haurls it at his curpin;\nAnd every now and then he says,\n“Hemp-seed, I saw thee,\nAnd her that is to be my lass,\nCome after me, and draw thee\nAs fast this night.”\n\nHe whistled up Lord Lennox’ march\nTo keep his courage cheery;\nAlthough his hair began to arch,\nHe was say fley’d and eerie:\nTill presently he hears a squeak,\nAnd then a grane and gruntle;\nHe by his shouther gae a keek,\nAnd tumbled wi’ a wintle\nOut-owre that night.\n\nHe roar’d a horrid murder-shout,\nIn dreadfu’ desperation!\nAnd young and auld came runnin’ out\nTo hear the sad narration;\nHe swore ’twas hilchin Jean M’Craw,\nOr crouchie Merran Humphie,\nTill, stop! she trotted through them\nAnd wha was it but grumphie\nAsteer that night!\n\nMeg fain wad to the barn hae gaen,\nTo win three wechts o’ naething;\nBut for to meet the deil her lane,\nShe pat but little faith in:\nShe gies the herd a pickle nits,\nAnd two red-cheekit apples,\nTo watch, while for the barn she sets,\nIn hopes to see Tam Kipples\nThat very nicht.\n\nShe turns the key wi cannie thraw,\nAnd owre the threshold ventures;\nBut first on Sawnie gies a ca’\nSyne bauldly in she enters:\nA ratton rattled up the wa’,\nAnd she cried, Lord, preserve her!\nAnd ran through midden-hole and a’,\nAnd pray’d wi’ zeal and fervour,\nFu’ fast that night;\n\nThey hoy’t out Will wi’ sair advice;\nThey hecht him some fine braw ane;\nIt chanced the stack he faddom’d thrice\nWas timmer-propt for thrawin’;\nHe taks a swirlie, auld moss-oak,\nFor some black grousome carlin;\nAnd loot a winze, and drew a stroke,\nTill skin in blypes cam haurlin’\nAff’s nieves that night.\n\nA wanton widow Leezie was,\nAs canty as a kittlin;\nBut, och! that night amang the shaws,\nShe got a fearfu’ settlin’!\nShe through the whins, and by the cairn,\nAnd owre the hill gaed scrievin,\nWhare three lairds’ lands met at a burn\nTo dip her left sark-sleeve in,\nWas bent that night.\n\nWhyles owre a linn the burnie plays,\nAs through the glen it wimpl’t;\nWhyles round a rocky scaur it strays;\nWhyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;\nWhyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,\nWi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;\nWhyles cookit underneath the braes,\nBelow the spreading hazel,\nUnseen that night.\n\nAmong the brackens, on the brae,\nBetween her and the moon,\nThe deil, or else an outler quey,\nGat up and gae a croon:\nPoor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool!\nNear lav’rock-height she jumpit;\nbut mist a fit, and in the pool\nOut-owre the lugs she plumpit,\nWi’ a plunge that night.\n\nIn order, on the clean hearth-stane,\nThe luggies three are ranged,\nAnd every time great care is ta’en’,\nTo see them duly changed:\nAuld Uncle John, wha wedlock joys\nSin’ Mar’s year did desire,\nBecause he gat the toom dish thrice,\nHe heaved them on the fire\nIn wrath that night.\n\nWi’ merry sangs, and friendly cracks,\nI wat they didna weary;\nAnd unco tales, and funny jokes,\nTheir sports were cheap and cheery;\nTill butter’d so’ns, wi’ fragrant lunt,\nSet a’ their gabs a-steerin’;\nSyne, wi’ a social glass o’ strunt,\nThey parted aff careerin’\nFu’ blythe that night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "highland-mary": { - "title": "“Highland Mary”", - "body": "Ye banks, and braes, and streams around\nThe castle o’ Montgomery,\nGreen be your woods, and fair your flowers,\nYour waters never drumlie!\nThere Simmer first unfald her robes,\nAnd there the langest tarry:\nFor there I took the last Fareweel\nO’ my sweet Highland Mary.\n\nHow sweetly bloom’d the gay, green birk,\nHow rich the hawthorn’s blossom;\nAs underneath their fragrant shade,\nI clasp’d her to my bosom!\nThe golden Hours, on angel wings,\nFlew o’er me and my Dearie;\nFor dear to me as light and life\nWas my sweet Highland Mary.\n\nWi’ mony a vow, and lock’d embrace,\nOur parting was fu’ tender;\nAnd pledging aft to meet again,\nWe tore oursels asunder:\nBut Oh! fell Death’s untimely frost,\nThat nipt my Flower sae early!\nNow green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay,\nThat wraps my Highland Mary!\n\nO pale, pale now, those rosy lips,\nI aft hae kiss’d sae fondly!\nAnd clos’d for ay the sparkling glance,\nThat dwalt on me sae kindly!\nAnd mouldering now in silent dust,\nThat heart that lo’ed me dearly!\nBut still within my bosom’s core\nShall live my Highland Mary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-red-red-rose": { - "title": "“A Red, Red Rose”", - "body": "O my Luve is like a red, red rose\n That’s newly sprung in June;\nO my Luve is like the melody\n That’s sweetly played in tune.\n\nSo fair art thou, my bonnie lass,\n So deep in luve am I;\nAnd I will luve thee still, my dear,\n Till a’ the seas gang dry.\n\nTill a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,\n And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;\nI will love thee still, my dear,\n While the sands o’ life shall run.\n\nAnd fare thee weel, my only luve!\n And fare thee weel awhile!\nAnd I will come again, my luve,\n Though it were ten thousand mile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-silver-tassie": { - "title": "“The Silver Tassie”", - "body": "Go, fetch to me a pint o’ wine,\nAnd fill it in a silver tassie,\nThat I may drink before I go\nA service to my bonie lassie!\nThe boat rocks at the pier o’ Leith,\nFu’ loud the wind blaws frae the Ferry,\nThe ship rides by the Berwick-Law,\nAnd I maun leave my bonie Mary.\n\nThe trumpets sound, the banners fly,\nThe glittering spears are rankèd ready,\nThe shouts o’ war are heard afar,\nThe battle closes deep and bloody.\nIt’s not the roar o’ sea or shore\nWad mak me langer wish to tarry,\nNor shouts o’ war that’s heard afar:\nIt’s leaving thee, my bonie Mary!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-winter-night": { - "title": "“A Winter Night”", - "body": "When biting Boreas, fell and doure,\nSharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r;\nWhen Phoebus gies a short-liv’d glow’r,\n Far south the lift,\nDim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r,\n Or whirling drift:\n\nAe night the storm the steeples rocked,\nPoor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,\nWhile burns, wi’ snawy wreeths upchoked,\n Wild-eddying swirl,\nOr thro’ the mining outlet bocked,\n Down headlong hurl.\n\nList’ning, the doors an’ winnocks rattle,\nI thought me on the ourie cattle,\nOr silly sheep, wha bide this brattle\n O’ winter war,\nAnd thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,\n Beneath a scar.\n\nIlk happing bird, wee, helpless thing!\nThat, in the merry months o’ spring,\nDelighted me to hear thee sing,\n What comes o’ thee?\nWhare wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing\n An’ close thy e’e?\n\nEv’n you on murd’ring errands toil’d,\nLone from your savage homes exil’d,\nThe blood-stain’d roost, and sheep-cote spoil’d\n My heart forgets,\nWhile pityless the tempest wild\n Sore on you beats.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "witter-bynner": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Witter Bynner", - "birth": { - "year": 1881 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witter_Bynner", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "a-farmer-remembers-lincoln": { - "title": "“A Farmer Remembers Lincoln”", - "body": "“Lincoln--\nWell, I was in the old Second Maine,\nThe first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree State.\nOf course I didn’t get the butt of the clip;\nWe was there for guardin’ Washington--\nWe was all green.”\n\n“I ain’t never ben to the theayter in my life--\nI didn’t know how to behave.\nI ain’t never ben since.\nI can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in\nWhen he was shot.\nI can tell you, sir, there was a panic\nWhen we found our President was in the shape he was in!\nNever saw a soldier in the world but what liked him.”\n\n“Yes, sir. His looks was kind o’ hard to forget.\nHe was a spare man,\nAn old farmer.\nEverything was all right, you know,\nBut he wasn’t a smooth-appearin’ man at all--\nNot in no ways;\nThin-faced, long-necked,\nAnd a swellin’ kind of a thick lip like.”\n\n“And he was a jolly old fellow--always cheerful;\nHe wasn’t so high but the boys could talk to him their own ways.\nWhile I was servin’ at the Hospital\nHe’d come in and say, ‘You look nice in here,’\nPraise us up, you know.\nAnd he’d bend over and talk to the boys--\nAnd he’d talk so good to ’em--so close--\nThat’s why I call him a farmer.\nI don’t mean that everything about him wasn’t all right, you understand,\nIt’s just--well, I was a farmer--\nAnd he was my neighbor, anybody’s neighbor.\nI guess even you young folks would ‘a’ liked him.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "presidents_day" - } - } - }, - "grieve-not-for-beauty": { - "title": "“Grieve Not for Beauty”", - "body": "Grieve not for the invisible, transported brow\nOn which like leaves the dark hair grew,\nNor for the lips of laughter that are now\nLaughing inaudibly in sun and dew,\nNor for those limbs that, fallen low\nAnd seeming faint and slow,\nShall yet pursue\nMore ways of swiftness than the swallow dips\nAmong … and find more winds than ever blew\nThe straining sails of unimpeded ships!\nMourn not!--yield only happy tears\nTo deeper beauty than appears!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mystic": { - "title": "“The Mystic”", - "body": "By seven vineyards on one hill\nWe walked. The native wine\nIn clusters grew beside us two,\nFor your lips and for mine,\n\nWhen, “Hark!” you said,--“Was that a bell\nOr a bubbling spring we heard?”\nBut I was wise and closed my eyes\nAnd listened to a bird;\n\nFor as summer leaves are bent and shake\nWith singers passing through,\nSo moves in me continually\nThe winged breath of you.\n\nYou tasted from a single vine\nAnd took from that your fill--\nBut I inclined to every kind,\nAll seven on one hill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sante-fe": { - "title": "“Sante Fe”", - "body": "Among the automobiles and in a region\nNow Democratic, now Republican,\nWith a department-store, a branch of the Legion,\nA Chamber of Commerce and a moving-van,\nIn spite of cities crowding on the Trail,\nHere is a mountain-town that prays and dances\nWith something left, though much besides may fail,\nOf the ancient faith and wisdom of St. Francis.\n\nHis annual feast has come. His image moves\nAlong these streets of people. And the trees\nAnd kneeling women, just as they did before,\nWelcome and worship him because he proves\nThat natural sinners put him at his ease,\nAnd so he enters the cathedral-door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lord-byron": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lord Byron", - "birth": { - "year": 1788 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1824 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "and-thou-art-dead-as-young-and-fair": { - "title": "“And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair”", - "body": "And thou art dead, as young and fair\nAs aught of mortal birth;\nAnd form so soft, and charms so rare,\nToo soon return’d to Earth!\nThough Earth receiv’d them in her bed,\nAnd o’er the spot the crowd may tread\nIn carelessness or mirth,\nThere is an eye which could not brook\nA moment on that grave to look.\n\nI will not ask where thou liest low,\nNor gaze upon the spot;\nThere flowers or weeds at will may grow,\nSo I behold them not:\nIt is enough for me to prove\nThat what I lov’d, and long must love,\nLike common earth can rot;\nTo me there needs no stone to tell,\n’T is Nothing that I lov’d so well.\n\nYet did I love thee to the last\nAs fervently as thou,\nWho didst not change through all the past,\nAnd canst not alter now.\nThe love where Death has set his seal,\nNor age can chill, nor rival steal,\nNor falsehood disavow:\nAnd, what were worse, thou canst not see\nOr wrong, or change, or fault in me.\n\nThe better days of life were ours;\nThe worst can be but mine:\nThe sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,\nShall never more be thine.\nThe silence of that dreamless sleep\nI envy now too much to weep;\nNor need I to repine\nThat all those charms have pass’d away,\nI might have watch’d through long decay.\n\nThe flower in ripen’d bloom unmatch’d\nMust fall the earliest prey;\nThough by no hand untimely snatch’d,\nThe leaves must drop away:\nAnd yet it were a greater grief\nTo watch it withering, leaf by leaf,\nThan see it pluck’d to-day;\nSince earthly eye but ill can bear\nTo trace the change to foul from fair.\n\nI know not if I could have borne\nTo see thy beauties fade;\nThe night that follow’d such a morn\nHad worn a deeper shade:\nThy day without a cloud hath pass’d,\nAnd thou wert lovely to the last,\nExtinguish’d, not decay’d;\nAs stars that shoot along the sky\nShine brightest as they fall from high.\n\nAs once I wept, if I could weep,\nMy tears might well be shed,\nTo think I was not near to keep\nOne vigil o’er thy bed;\nTo gaze, how fondly! on thy face,\nTo fold thee in a faint embrace,\nUphold thy drooping head;\nAnd show that love, however vain,\nNor thou nor I can feel again.\n\nYet how much less it were to gain,\nThough thou hast left me free,\nThe loveliest things that still remain,\nThan thus remember thee!\nThe all of thine that cannot die\nThrough dark and dread Eternity\nReturns again to me,\nAnd more thy buried love endears\nThan aught except its living years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1812 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "darkness": { - "title": "“Darkness”", - "body": "I had a dream, which was not all a dream.\nThe bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars\nDid wander darkling in the eternal space,\nRayless, and pathless, and the icy earth\nSwung blind and blackening in the moonless air;\nMorn came and went--and came, and brought no day,\nAnd men forgot their passions in the dread\nOf this their desolation; and all hearts\nWere chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:\nAnd they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,\nThe palaces of crowned kings--the huts,\nThe habitations of all things which dwell,\nWere burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,\nAnd men were gather’d round their blazing homes\nTo look once more into each other’s face;\nHappy were those who dwelt within the eye\nOf the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:\nA fearful hope was all the world contain’d;\nForests were set on fire--but hour by hour\nThey fell and faded--and the crackling trunks\nExtinguish’d with a crash--and all was black.\nThe brows of men by the despairing light\nWore an unearthly aspect, as by fits\nThe flashes fell upon them; some lay down\nAnd hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest\nTheir chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;\nAnd others hurried to and fro, and fed\nTheir funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up\nWith mad disquietude on the dull sky,\nThe pall of a past world; and then again\nWith curses cast them down upon the dust,\nAnd gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d\nAnd, terrified, did flutter on the ground,\nAnd flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes\nCame tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d\nAnd twin’d themselves among the multitude,\nHissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.\nAnd War, which for a moment was no more,\nDid glut himself again: a meal was bought\nWith blood, and each sate sullenly apart\nGorging himself in gloom: no love was left;\nAll earth was but one thought--and that was death\nImmediate and inglorious; and the pang\nOf famine fed upon all entrails--men\nDied, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;\nThe meagre by the meagre were devour’d,\nEven dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,\nAnd he was faithful to a corse, and kept\nThe birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,\nTill hunger clung them, or the dropping dead\nLur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,\nBut with a piteous and perpetual moan,\nAnd a quick desolate cry, licking the hand\nWhich answer’d not with a caress--he died.\nThe crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two\nOf an enormous city did survive,\nAnd they were enemies: they met beside\nThe dying embers of an altar-place\nWhere had been heap’d a mass of holy things\nFor an unholy usage; they rak’d up,\nAnd shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands\nThe feeble ashes, and their feeble breath\nBlew for a little life, and made a flame\nWhich was a mockery; then they lifted up\nTheir eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld\nEach other’s aspects--saw, and shriek’d, and died--\nEven of their mutual hideousness they died,\nUnknowing who he was upon whose brow\nFamine had written Fiend. The world was void,\nThe populous and the powerful was a lump,\nSeasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--\nA lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.\nThe rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,\nAnd nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;\nShips sailorless lay rotting on the sea,\nAnd their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d\nThey slept on the abyss without a surge--\nThe waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,\nThe moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;\nThe winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,\nAnd the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need\nOf aid from them--She was the Universe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1816 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-destruction-of-sennacherib": { - "title": "“The Destruction of Sennacherib”", - "body": "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,\nAnd his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;\nAnd the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,\nWhen the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.\n\n Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,\nThat host with their banners at sunset were seen:\nLike the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,\nThat host on the morrow lay withered and strown.\n\n For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,\nAnd breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;\nAnd the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,\nAnd their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!\n\n And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,\nBut through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;\nAnd the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,\nAnd cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.\n\n And there lay the rider distorted and pale,\nWith the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:\nAnd the tents were all silent, the banners alone,\nThe lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.\n\n And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,\nAnd the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;\nAnd the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,\nHath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1815 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-giaour": { - "title": "“The Giaour”", - "body": "… Unquenched, unquenchable,\nAround, within, thy heart shall dwell;\nNor ear can hear nor tongue can tell\nThe tortures of that inward hell!\nBut first, on earth as vampire sent,\nThy corse shall from its tomb be rent:\nThen ghastly haunt thy native place,\nAnd suck the blood of all thy race;\nThere from thy daughter, sister, wife,\nAt midnight drain the stream of life;\nYet loathe the banquet which perforce\nMust feed thy livid living corse:\nThy victims ere they yet expire\nShall know the demon for their sire,\nAs cursing thee, thou cursing them,\nThy flowers are withered on the stem.\nBut one that for thy crime must fall,\nThe youngest, most beloved of all,\nShall bless thee with a father’s name--\nThat word shall wrap thy heart in flame!\nYet must thou end thy task, and mark\nHer cheek’s last tinge, her eye’s last spark,\nAnd the last glassy glance must view\nWhich freezes o’er its lifeless blue;\nThen with unhallowed hand shalt tear\nThe tresses of her yellow hair,\nOf which in life a lock when shorn\nAffection’s fondest pledge was worn,\nBut now is borne away by thee,\nMemorial of thine agony!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1813 - } - } - }, - "i-speak-not-i-trace-not-i-breathe-not-thy-name": { - "title": "“I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name …”", - "body": "I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name;\nThere is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame;\nBut the tear that now burns on my cheek may impart\nThe deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.\nToo brief for our passion, too long for our peace,\nWere those hours--can their joy or their bitterness cease?\nWe repent, we abjure, we will break from our chain,--\nWe will part, we will fly to--unite it again!\nOh! thine be the gladness, and mine be the guilt!\nForgive me, adored one!--forsake if thou wilt;\nBut the heart which is thine shall expire undebased,\nAnd man shall not break it--whatever thou may’st.\nAnd stern to the haughty, but humble to thee,\nThis soul in its bitterest blackness shall be;\nAnd our days seem as swift, and our moments more sweet,\nWith thee at my side, than with worlds at our feet.\nOne sigh of thy sorrow, one look of thy love,\nShall turn me or fix, shall reward or reprove.\nAnd the heartless may wonder at all I resign--\nThy lips shall reply, not to them, but to mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1814, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "maid-of-athens-ere-we-part": { - "title": "“Maid of Athens, ere we part …”", - "body": "Maid of Athens, ere we part,\nGive, oh give me back my heart!\nOr, since that has left my breast,\nKeep it now, and take the rest!\nHear my vow before I go,\n_Ζώη μου, σας αγαπώ._\n\nBy those tresses unconfined,\nWood by each Aegean wind;\nBy those lids whose jetty fringe\nKiss thy soft cheeks’ blooming tinge;\nBy those wild eyes like the roe,\n_Ζώη μου, σας αγαπώ._\n\nBy that lip I long to taste;\nBy that zone encircled waist;\nBy all the token-flowers that tell\nWhat words can never speak so well;\nBy love’s alternate joy and woe.\n_Ζώη μου, σας αγαπώ._\n\nMaid of Athens! I am gone:\nThink of me, sweet! when alone.\nThough I fly to Istambol,\nAthens holds my heart and soul:\nCan I cease to love thee? No!\n_Ζώη μου, σας αγαπώ._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1810 - }, - "location": "Athens" - } - }, - "prometheus": { - "title": "“Prometheus”", - "body": "# I.\n\nTitan! to whose immortal eyes\n The sufferings of mortality,\n Seen in their sad reality,\nWere not as things that gods despise;\nWhat was thy pity’s recompense?\nA silent suffering, and intense;\nThe rock, the vulture, and the chain,\nAll that the proud can feel of pain,\nThe agony they do not show,\nThe suffocating sense of woe,\n Which speaks but in its loneliness,\nAnd then is jealous lest the sky\nShould have a listener nor will sigh\n Until its voice is echoless.\n\n\n# II.\n\nTitan! to thee the strife was given\n Between the suffering and the will,\nWhich torture where they cannot kill;\nAnd the inexorable Heaven,\nAnd the deaf tyranny of Fate,\nThe ruling principle of Hate,\nWhich for its pleasure doth create\nThe things it may annihilate,\nRefused thee even the boon o die:\nThe wretched gift eternity\nWas thine--and thou hast borne it well.\nAll that the Thunderer wrung from thee\nWas but the menace which flung back\nOn him the torments of thy rack;\nThe fate thou didst so well foresee,\nBut would not to appease him tell;\nAnd in thy Silence was his Sentence,\nAnd in his Soul a vain repentance,\nAnd evil dread so ill dissembled,\nThat in his hand the lightnings trembled.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThy Godlike crime was to be kind,\n To render with thy precepts less\n The sum of human wretchedness,\nAnd strengthen Man with his own mind;\nBut baffled as thou wert from high,\nStill in thy patient energy,\nIn the endurance, and repulse\n Of thine impenetrable Spirit,\nWhich Earth and Heaven could not convulse,\n A mighty lesson we inherit:\nThou art a symbol and a sign\n To Mortals of their fate and force;\nLike thee, Man is in part divine,\n A troubled stream from a pure source;\nAnd Man in portions can foresee\nHis own funereal destiny;\nHis wretchedness, and his resistance,\nAnd his sad unallied existence:\nTo which his Spirit may oppose\nItself--and equal to all woes,\n And a firm will, and a deep sense,\nWhich even in torture can descry\n Its own concenter’d recompense,\nTriumphant where it dares defy,\nAnd making Death a Victory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1816, - "month": "july" - }, - "location": "Diodata", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "she-walks-in-beauty": { - "title": "“She Walks in Beauty”", - "body": "She walks in beauty, like the night\nOf cloudless climes and starry skies;\nAnd all that’s best of dark and bright\nMeet in her aspect and her eyes;\nThus mellowed to that tender light\nWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.\n\nOne shade the more, one ray the less,\nHad half impaired the nameless grace\nWhich waves in every raven tress,\nOr softly lightens o’er her face;\nWhere thoughts serenely sweet express,\nHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.\n\nAnd on that cheek, and o’er that brow,\nSo soft, so calm, yet eloquent,\nThe smiles that win, the tints that glow,\nBut tell of days in goodness spent,\nA mind at peace with all below,\nA heart whose love is innocent!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1815 - } - } - }, - "snatched-away-in-beautys-bloom": { - "title": "“Snatched Away in Beauty’s Bloom”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom,\nOn thee shall press no ponderous tomb;\nBut on thy turf shall roses rear\nTheir leaves, the earliest of the year;\nAnd the wild cypress wave in tender gloom:\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd oft by yon blue gushing stream\nShall Sorrow lean her drooping head,\nAnd feed deep thought with many a dream,\nAnd lingering pause and lightly tread;\nFond wretch! as if her step disturbed the dead!\n\n\n# III.\n\nAway! we know that tears are vain,\nThat Death nor heeds nor hears distress:\nWill this unteach us to complain?\nOr make one mourner weep the less?\nAnd thou--who tell’st me to forget,\nThy looks are wan, thine eyes are wet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "so-well-go-no-more-a-roving": { - "title": "“So we’ll go no more a-roving …”", - "body": "So we’ll go no more a-roving\n So late into the night,\nThough the heart still be as loving,\n And the moon still be as bright.\n\nFor the sword outwears its sheath,\n And the soul outwears the breast,\nAnd the heart must pause to breathe,\n And love itself have rest.\n\nThough the night was made for loving,\n And the day returns too soon,\nYet we’ll go no more a-roving\n By the light of the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "there-is-a-pleasure-in-the-pathless-woods": { - "title": "“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods …”", - "body": " There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,\n There is a rapture on the lonely shore,\n There is society where none intrudes,\n By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:\n I love not Man the less, but Nature more,\n From these our interviews, in which I steal\n From all I may be, or have been before,\n To mingle with the Universe, and feel\nWhat I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.\n\n Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!\n Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;\n Man marks the earth with ruin--his control\n Stops with the shore;--upon the watery plain\n The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain\n A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,\n When for a moment, like a drop of rain,\n He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,\nWithout a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.\n\n His steps are not upon thy paths,--thy fields\n Are not a spoil for him,--thou dost arise\n And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields\n For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,\n Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,\n And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray\n And howling, to his gods, where haply lies\n His petty hope in some near port or bay,\nAnd dashest him again to earth:--there let him lay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1818 - } - } - }, - "a-spirit-passed-before-me": { - "title": "“A spirit passed before me …”", - "body": "A spirit passed before me: I beheld\nThe face of immortality unveiled--\nDeep sleep came down on every eye save mine--\nAnd there it stood,--all formless--but divine:\nAlong my bones the creeping flesh did quake;\nAnd as my damp hair stiffened, thus it spake:\n\n“Is man more just than God? Is man more pure\nThan He who deems even Seraphs insecure?\nCreatures of clay--vain dwellers in the dust!\nThe moth survives you, and are ye more just?\nThings of a day! you wither ere the night,\nHeedless and blind to Wisdom’s wasted light!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1810 - }, - "location": "Athens" - } - } - } - }, - "scott-cairns": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Scott Cairns", - "birth": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Cairns", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "early-frost": { - "title": "“Early Frost”", - "body": "This morning the world’s white face reminds us\nthat life intends to become serious again.\nAnd the same loud birds that all summer long\nannoyed us with their high attitudes and chatter\nsilently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned,\nchastened enough.\n\nThey look as if they’re waiting for things\nto grow worse, but are watching the house,\nas if somewhere in their dim memories\nthey recall something about this abandoned garden\nthat could save them.\n\nThe neighbor’s dog has also learned to wake\nwithout exaggeration. And the neighbor himself\nhas made it to his car with less noise, starting\nthe small engine with a kind of reverence. At the window\nhis wife witnesses this bleak tableau, blinking\nher eyes, silent.\n\nI fill the feeders to the top and cart them\nto the tree, hurrying back inside\nto leave the morning to these ridiculous\nbirds, who, reminded, find the rough shelters,\nbow, and then feed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "late-results": { - "title": "“Late Results”", - "body": "And the few willing to listen demanded that we confess on television.\nSo we kept our sins to ourselves, and they became less troubling.\n\nThe halt and the lame arranged to have their hips replaced.\nLepers coated their sores with a neutral foundation, avoided strong light.\n\nThe hungry ate at grand buffets and grew huge, though they remained hungry.\nPrisoners became indistinguishable from the few who visited them.\n\nWidows remarried and became strangers to their kin.\nThe orphans finally grew up and learned to fend for themselves.\n\nEven the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut.\nOnly the poor--who are with us always--only they continued in the hope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prior-despair": { - "title": "“A Prior Despair”", - "body": "When I saw that I had lost her completely, I sought the dulcet\ntaste of her on the lips of each subsequent woman, her fragrant\nflesh in the fold of every lover’s nape thereafter, and her heat\nwelling with my own and drawing out an urgency in each\nambiguous woman met in that tortured interim.\n\nWhen I saw that I had lost her I was lost, and held\nmy eyes shut tight that I might so delude my wits as to trust\nthat it was she receiving me, that it was she returning\nwith delight the urgent drive against the unbearable\ndistance--two bodies, struggling toward agreeable repose.\n\nThen, tasting once a sudden kiss so suddenly presented,\nI saw another prospect rise to view, and knew reprieve\nfrom the familiar ring of hell, from which I rose and marveled\nat the offer of another life whose heat and heady fragrance\nrose, delirious to burn deliciously, and not consume.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "luis-de-camoes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Luís de Camões", - "birth": { - "year": 1525, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1580 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "portuguese", - "language": "portuguese", - "flag": "🇵🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luís_de_Camões", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "portuguese" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "an-adieu-to-tagus": { - "title": "“An Adieu to Tagus”", - "body": "Waters of gentle Tagus, calmly flowing\nThrough these green fields ye freshen as ye flow,\nOn flocks and herds, plants, flowers, all things that grow,\nOn shepherds and on nymphs delight bestowing;\nI know not, ah! sweet streams, despair of knowing\nWhen I shall come again; for as I go,\nAnd ponder why, ye fill me with such woe,\nThat in my heart a deep distrust is growing.\nThe Fates have e’en decreed this sad adieu,\nAiming to change my joys into despair,\nThis sad adieu that weighs upon my years:\nOf them complaining, yearning after you,\nWith sighs I shall invade some distant air,\nAnd trouble other waters with my tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "J. J. Aubertin", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "all-hushed-the-heaven-and-earth-and-wind-the-same": { - "title": "“All hushed the heaven and earth, and wind the same …”", - "body": "_The fisher Ionio calls on the waves to restore to him his drowned love:_\n\nAll hushed the heaven and earth, and wind the same,\nThe waves all spreading o’er the sandy plain,\nWhile sleep doth in the sea the fish enchain,\nNocturnal silence brooding as a dream;--\nProstrate with love, Ionio, fisher, came\nWhere the breeze moved the waters of the main;\nWeeping, the well-loved name he called in vain,\nThat can no more be called but as a name;\nOh! waves, or ere love slay me, thus he cried,\nRestore to me my nymph who, ah! so soon,\nYe taught my soul was subject to the grave.\nNo one replies; from far beats ocean’s tide;\nAll softly moves the grove; and the wind’s moan\nBears off the voice that to the wind he gave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "J. J. Aubertin", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "beholding-her": { - "title": "“Beholding Her”", - "body": "When I behold you, Lady! when my eyes\nDwell on the deep enjoyment of your sight,\nI give my spirit to that one delight,\nAnd earth appears to me a Paradise.\nAnd when I hear you speak, and see you smile,\nFull satisfied, absorb’d, my centr’d mind\nDeems all the world’s vain hopes and joys the while\nAs empty as the unsubstantial wind.\nLady! I feel your charms, yet dare not raise\nTo that high theme the unequal song of praise,--\nA power for that to language was not given;\nNor marvel I, when I those beauties view,\nLady! that He, whose power created you,\nCould form the stars and yonder glorious heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Robert Southey" - } - }, - "blighted-love": { - "title": "“Blighted Love”", - "body": "Flowers are fresh, and bushes green,\n Cheerily the linnets sing;\nWinds are soft, and skies serene;\n Time, however, soon shall throw\n Winter’s snow\nO’er the buxom breast of Spring!\n\nHope, that buds in lover’s heart,\n Lives not through the scorn of years;\nTime makes love itself depart;\n Time and scorn congeal the mind,--\n Looks unkind\nFreeze affection’s warmest tears.\n\nTime shall make the bushes green;\n Time dissolve the winter snow;\nWinds be soft, and skies serene;\n Linnets sing their wonted strain:\n But again\nBlighted love shall never blow!", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Lord Strangford", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "his-insufficiency-of-praise": { - "title": "“His Insufficiency of Praise”", - "body": "So sweet the lyre, so musical the strain,\nBy which my suit, Belovëd! is expressed,\nThat, hearing them, no such indifferent breast\nBut welcomes Love and his delicious pain,\nAnd opes to his innumerable train\nOf sweet persuasions, lovely mysteries,\nBrief angers, gentle reconcilements, sighs\nAnd ardour unabash’d by proud disdain.\nYet, when I strive to sing what beauty dwells\nUpon thy brow, so oft in scorn array’d,\nMy song upon the unworthy lips expires.\nIt must be loftier verse than mine that tells\nOf loveliness like thine. My Muse, dismay’d,\nFolds her weak wing and silently retires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Richard Garnett" - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "Love is a fire that burns unseen,\na wound that aches yet isn’t felt,\nan always discontent contentment,\na pain that rages without hurting,\n\na longing for nothing but to long,\na loneliness in the midst of people,\na never feeling pleased when pleased,\na passion that gains when lost in thought.\n\nIt’s being enslaved of your own free will;\nit’s counting your defeat a victory;\nit’s staying loyal to your killer.\n\nBut if it’s so self-contradictory,\nhow can Love, when Love chooses,\nbring human hearts into sympathy?", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Richard Zenith" - } - }, - "the-shepherdess-nise": { - "title": "“The Shepherdess Nise”", - "body": "Aurora with her new-born crystal ray\nArose the enamelled world again to dress,\nWhen Nise, fair and gentle shepherdess,\nDeparted whence her only true life lay.\nThe light of eyes that darkened those of day\nShe raised, while flowing anxious tears oppress,\nOf self, fate, time, all wearied to distress,\nAnd gazing heavenward thus did pensive say:\nRise, tranquil sun, once more all pure and shining,\nClear purple morn with new-born light be clad,\nAnd see sad souls with you their grief resigning;\nBut my poor soul, while others all are glad,\nYe know ye ne’er shall see but as repining,\nNor any other shepherdess so sad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "J. J. Aubertin" - } - }, - "sibella": { - "title": "“Sibella”", - "body": "Within a wood nymphs were inhabiting,\nSibella, lovely nymph, was wandering free;\nAnd climbing up into a shady tree,\nThe yellow blossoms there was gathering.\nCupid, who thither ever turned his wing,\nCool in his shady mid-day sleep to be,\nWould on a branch, e’er sleeping, pendent see\nThe bows and arrows he was wont to bring.\nThe nymph, who now the moment fitting saw\nFor so great enterprise, in nought delays,\nBut flies the scorner with the arms she ta’en.\nShe bears the arrows in her eyes, to draw.\nOh! shepherds fly, for every one she slays,\nSave me alone, who live by being slain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "J. J. Aubertin", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-eyes-where-love-in-chastest-fire-would-glow": { - "title": "“The eyes where love in chastest fire would glow …”", - "body": "The eyes where love in chastest fire would glow,\nJoying to be consumed amidst their light,\nThe face whereon with wondrous lustre bright\nThe purple rose was blushing o’er the snow;\nThe hair whereof the sun would envious grow,\nIt made his own less golden to the sight;\nThe well-formed body and the hand so white,\nAll to cold earth reduced lies here below!\nIn tender age, a beauty all entire,\nE’en like a blossom gathered ere its time,\nLies withered in the hand of heartless death:\nHow doth not Love for pity’s sake expire?\nAh! not for her who flies to life sublime,\nBut for himself whom night extinguisheth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "J. J. Aubertin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "roy-campbell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Roy Campbell", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "south_african", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇿🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Campbell_(poet)", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "south_african" - ], - "n_poems": 83 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-horse-fair": { - "title": "“After the Horse-fair”", - "body": "A mule, the snowball of a beast!\n(Ring out the duros, test the tune)\nAnd a guitar, the midnight lark,\nThat rises silvering the dark\nAn hour before the rosy-fleeced\nArrival of the Moon.\n\nThe gypsies quarried from the gloom,\nFor their carouse, a silver hall:\nAnd jingled harness filled the lands\nWith gay pesetas changing hands,\nSo silvery, there seemed no room\nFor any moon at all.\n\nTwo figtrees on a whitewashed wall\nWere playing chess; a lamp was queen:\nBeneath the civil guard were seen\nWith tricorned hats--a game of cards:\nOne bottle was between them all,\nGood health, and kind regards.\n\nA stable with an open door\nAnd in the yard a dying hound:\nOut on the dunes a broken spoor\nConverging into twenty more--\nWhen torches had been flashed around\nWas all they could restore.\n\nA wind that blows from other countries\nShook opals from the vernal palms\nBirdshot of the silver huntress\nBy which the nightingale was slain:\nWith stitch of fire the distant farms\nWere threaded by the train.\n\nOne rider, then, and all alone--\nThe long Castilian Veld before:\nTo show the way his shadow straight\nWent on ahead and would not wait,\nBut seemed, so infinitely grown,\nEquator to the moor.\n\nTill with a faint adoring thunder,\nTheir lances raised to Christ the King,\nThrough all the leagues he had to go--\nAn army chanting smooth and low,\nAcross the long mirage of wonder\nHe heard the steeples sing.\n\nAnd as, far off, the breaking morn\nHad hit the high seraphic town,\nHe prayed for lonesome carbineers\nAnd wakeful lovers, rash of years,\nWho’ve harvested the lunar corn\nBefore the crops were brown.\n\nFor thieves: the gate-man late and lonely\nWith his green flag; for tramps that sprawl:\nAnd lastly for a frozen guy\nThat towed six mules along the sky\nAnd felt among them all the only,\nOr most a mule of all!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-altar": { - "title": "“The Altar”", - "body": " Mithraic symbols wreathe the shrine\n whereon, like flower-fed bulls, are slain\n my years, exhaling in their pain\n the lily’s ghost and bleeding wine;\n the trumpets of whose throats of gold\n cry pæan to the victor steel;\n whose souls in airy nimbus rolled\n deride the deaths to which they kneel;\n and from the sacred flames they feast\n in hymns of incense re-aspire\n to praise His throne of silver fire,\n Who all the leas with lilies fleeced\n to feed each great snow-shouldered beast\n in whom these squandered days expire.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "autumn-plane": { - "title": "“Autumn Plane”", - "body": "Peeled white and washed with fallen rain,\nA dancer weighed with jingling pearls,\nThe girl-white body of a plane,\nIn whose red hair the Autumn swirls,\nStands out, soliciting the cruel\nFlame of the wintry sun, and dies,\nIf only to the watcher’s eyes,\nIn red-gold anguish glowing; fuel\nTo that cold fire, as she assumes\n(Brunhilde) her refulgent plumes\nIn leaves that kindle as they die,\nOf all that triumphs and returns\nThe furious aurora burns\nAgainst the winter-boding sky.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "I love to see, when leaves depart,\nThe clear anatomy arrive,\nWinter, the paragon of art,\nThat kills all forms of life and feeling\nSave what is pure and will survive.\n\nAlready now the clanging chains\nOf geese are harnessed to the moon:\nStripped are the great sun-clouding planes:\nAnd the dark pines, their own revealing,\nLet in the needles of the noon.\n\nStrained by the gale the olives whiten\nLike hoary wrestlers bent with toil\nAnd, with the vines, their branches lighten\nTo brim our vats where summer lingers\nIn the red froth and sun-gold oil.\n\nSoon on our hearth’s reviving pyre\nTheir rotted stems will crumble up:\nAnd like a ruby, panting fire,\nThe grape will redden on your fingers\nThrough the lit crystal of the cup.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "canaan": { - "title": "“Canaan”", - "body": "Beneath us stream the golden hours\nThe slower for our hearts, where now,\nTwo ripe grenades on the same bough,\nTheir globes of bronze together swung,\nHave stayed the stream they overhung\nWith fallen heaps of flowers.\n\nFor never was she half so fair\nWhose colours bleed the red rose white\nAnd milk the lilies of their light:\nIn her snowed breasts where sorrow dies,\nAll the white rills of Canaan rise,\nAnd cedars in her hair.\n\nHalf-way across a flowery land\nThrough which our still reluctant feet\nMust pass, for every halt too fleet,\nWe pause upon the topmost hill\nWhence streams of wine and honey spill\nTo some rapacious strand.\n\nThere, sisters of the milky way,\nThe rills of Canaan sing and shine:\nDiluvial in the waves of wine\nWhose gulls are rosy-footed doves\nThe glorious bodies of my loves\nLike dolphins heave the spray--\n\nRed Rhones towards the sounding shore\nThrough castled gorges roaring down\nBy many a tiered and towery town,\nHigh swollen with a spate of hours,\nAnd strewn with all the dying flowers\nThat we shall love no more--\n\nTorrential in the nightingale,\nMy spirit hymns them as they go\nFor wider yet their streams must flow\nWith flowery trophies heaped more high\nBefore they drain their sources dry\nAnd those clear fountains fail.\n\nI cannot think (so blue the day)\nThat those fair castalies of dreams\nOr the cool naiads of their streams,\nOr I, the willow in whose shade\nTheir wandering music was delayed,\nShould pass like ghosts away.\n\nThe azure triumphs on the height:\nLife is sustained with golden arms:\nThe fire-red cock with loud alarms\nArising, drums his golden wings\nAnd in the victory he sings,\nThe Sun insults the night.\n\nO flying hair and limbs of fire\nThrough whose frail forms, that fade and pass,\nTornadoing as flame through grass,\nEternal beauty flares alone\nTo build herself a blazing throne\nOut of the world’s desire--\n\nThe summer leaves are whirled away:\nThe fallen chestnut in the grass\nIs trampled by the feet that pass\nAnd like the young Madonna’s heart\nWith rosy portals gashed apart\nBleeds for the things I say.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "choosing-a-mast": { - "title": "“Choosing a Mast”", - "body": "This mast, new-shaved, through whom I rive the ropes,\nSays she was once an oread of the slopes,\nGraceful and tall upon the rocky highlands,\nA slender tree as vertical as noon,\nAnd her low voice was lovely as the silence\nThrough which a fountain whistles to the moon,\nWho now of the white spray must take the veil\nAnd, for her songs, the thunder of the sail.\n\nI chose her for her fragrance, when the spring\nWith sweetest resins swelled her fourteenth ring\nAnd with live amber welded her young thews:\nI chose her for the glory of the Muse,\nSmoother of forms, that her hard-knotted grain,\nGrazed by the chisel, shaven by the plane,\nMight from the steel as cool a burnish take\nAs from the bladed moon a windless lake.\n\nI chose her for her eagerness of flight\nWhere she stood tiptoe on the rocky height\nLifted by her own perfume to the sun,\nWhile through her rustling plumes with eager sound\nHer eagle spirit, with the gale at one,\nSpreading wide pinions, would have spurned the ground\nAnd her own sleeping shadow, had they not\nWith thymy fragrance charmed her to the spot.\n\nLover of song, I chose this mountain pine\nNot only for the straightness of her spine\nBut for her songs: for there she loved to sing\nThrough a long noon’s repose of wave and wing,\nThe fluvial swirling of her scented hair\nSole rill of song in all that windless air,\nAnd her slim form the naiad of the stream\nAfloat upon the languor of its theme;\n\nAnd for the soldier’s fare on which she fed:\nHer wine the azure, and the snow her bread;\nAnd for her stormy watches on the height,\nFor only out of solitude or strife\nAre born the sons of valour and delight;\nAnd lastly for her rich, exulting life,\nThat with the wind stopped not its singing breath\nBut carolled on, the louder for its death.\n\nUnder a pine, when summer days were deep,\nWe loved the most to lie in love or sleep:\nAnd when in long hexameters the west\nRolled his grey surge, the forest for his lyre,\nIt was the pines that sang us to our rest,\nLoud in the wind and fragrant in the fire,\nWith legioned voices swelling all night long,\nFrom Pelion to Provence, their storm of song.\n\nIt was the pines that fanned us in the heat,\nThe pines, that cheered us in the time of sleet,\nFor which sweet gifts I set one dryad free;\nNo longer to the wind a rooted foe,\nThis nymph shall wander where she longs to be\nAnd with the blue north wind arise and go,\nA silver huntress with the moon to run\nAnd fly through rainbows with the rising sun;\n\nAnd when to pasture in the glittering shoals\nThe guardian mistral drives his thundering foals,\nAnd when like Tartar horsemen racing free\nWe ride the snorting fillies of the sea,\nMy pine shall be the archer of the gale\nWhile on the bending willow curves the sail\nFrom whose great bow the long keel shooting home\nShall fly, the feathered arrow of the foam.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "christ-in-uniform": { - "title": "“Christ in Uniform”", - "body": "Close at my side a girl and boy\nFell firing, in the doorway here,\nCollapsing with a strangled cheer\nAs on the very couch of joy,\nAnd onward through a wall of fire\nA thousand others rolled the surge,\nAnd where a dozen men expire\nA hundred myrmidons emerge--\nAs if the Christ, our Solar Sire,\nMagnificent in their intent,\nReturned the bloody way he went,\nOf so much blood, of such desire,\nAnd so much valour proudly spent,\nTo weld a single heart of fire.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "christ-in-the-hospital": { - "title": "“Christ in the Hospital”", - "body": "_Al Padre Evaristo, Carmelita Descalzo, Toledo_\n\nIxions of the slow wheel of the day\nThey had come down at last, but not to stay,\nAnd at the fall of night, with even sway,\nWere slowly wheeling up the other way.\n\nAnd he who felt the finest in the Ward\nWas scarcely better than a broken stick;\nHis spine ran through him like a rusty sword\nRasping its meagre scabbard to the quick.\n\nThrough the dim pane he saw the stars take flight\nLike pigeons scattered by the crash and groan\nOf the great world, with pendulum of stone\nDingdonging in the steeple of the Night.\n\nHe heard, far off, the people stream their course\nWhipped by their pleasures into frantic tops--\nAs the grey multitude (when twilight drops)\nGoes out to trade its boredom for remorse.\n\nThe Moon, a soldier with a bleeding eye,\nReturning to the war, beheld these things.\nAnd long grey tom-cats crept across the sky\nBetween the chimneys where the wireless sings.\n\nNever seemed anything so steep or tall\n(Sierra, iceberg, or the tower of noon),\nAs what he saw when turning from the moon--\nThe bloody Christ that hung upon the wall!\n\nGreat Albatross, of every storm the Birth!--\nHis bleeding pinions bracketed a Night\nToo small for His embrace; and from his height,\nAs from an Eagle’s, cowered the plaintive Earth!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "creeping-jesus": { - "title": "“Creeping Jesus”", - "body": "Pale crafty eyes beneath his ginger crop,\nA fox’s snout with spectacles on top--\nEye to the keyhole, kneeling on the stair,\nWe often found this latter saint at prayer,\n“For your own sake,” he’d tell you with a sigh\n(He always did his kindness on the sly).\nHe paid mere friendship with his good advice\nAnd swarmed with counsels as a cur with lice:\nFor his friends’ actions, with unerring snout,\nHe’d always fox his own low motives out,\nAnd having found them, trot them out to view,\nSaying it hurt him so much more than you!\nSober, astute, and modest in his mien,\nBetween extremes he always chose the _mean_,\nFor Epsom mounted quickly to his head\nAnd he saw brown where other men see red.\nWalking Locarno between friend and friend\nHe soured the quarrels he so loved to mend.\nIn him the ‘friend’ concealed the jealous ‘tante’\nWho slandered women he could not supplant,\nWhose faults he would invent and then reveal\nOn the pretext of trying to conceal.\nHe’d blurt a secret (none so sure as he)\nBy hiding it so hard that all could see.\nHe’d make men black in everybody’s eye--\nTaking their part, so stoutly to deny\nThings they had never done, nor none suspected …\nUntil his stout defence was interjected!\nNo dun with more reluctance or regret\nEver came knocking to present a debt,\nThan he so mildly, sadly would reproach\nA friend--or any painful subject broach.\nHis martyred look no mortal could resist\nMore than a gossamer to Dempsey’s fist,\nIt had the power to put you in the wrong\nAnd suck excuses from a rawhide thong.\nWhen of apologies your heart was poor\nYou always seemed to owe him more and more,\nThe star of Tartuffe by his own grew dim\nAnd Pecksniff was a nincompoop to him!\nHe was the guy to censure or expunge\nThe folk on whom he’d condescend to sponge,\nAnd when he ate you out of hearth and home,\nOn independence lecture you a tome.\nA counter-jumper born of base degree\nIn all the world no greater snob than he,\nThough he descended from some anglo-parson\nWho had committed (something else than) arson,\nAnd looked it--had you made his collar shunt\nTo tally with its owner, _back-to-front_!\nSo satisfied his smirk, so smug his snigger,\nYou’d take him for a deacon or a vicar;\nHis pale blue smile was full of deany dope\nAnd in his hand a cake of Monkey Soap.\nIf we put up with him--’twas as a bug\nIn his own talent (an expensive rug),\nBut he abused its lovely silken floss,\nOne tiny insect spoiled the whole kaross:\nThe leather’s perished, moulted all the hair,\nBut the old bug is still established there!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-crystal": { - "title": "“The Crystal”", - "body": "To form the idiom of her flesh\nI faceted in clearest thought\nAn arctic crystal in whose mesh\nOf frosty rays the sun is caught\nThat from its central pulse of fire\nVibrates the arrebol it stains,\nAnd forks the azure of her veins\nThrough flushed auroras of desire.\nThough nerves of splendour lace the jewel,\nThough to my rasp its ice be fuel\nAnd bright within it burn the brands:\nI might have breathed upon a glass--\nTo feel my purpose through it pass\nIt runs like water through my hands.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-dawn": { - "title": "“The Dawn”", - "body": "Tug, monsters, at the badgered meat\nout of whose needs yourselves were born;\ninto the east you tug the morn\nwhose victory is your defeat;\ndrink, thirsty swords, the central star--\nyour cup of blood; your kiss of steel\nshall blaze the rising orb afar\nof which you twinkle in the wheel;\nand every drop that thence is wrung\nits parent circle shall repeat;\na gem of humming rays, be hung\nlike dew the rising god to greet,\nto turn the ancient valleys young\nand bathe His westward-wending feet.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-dead-torero": { - "title": "“The Dead Torero”", - "body": "Such work can be the mischief of an hour.\nThis drunken-looking doll without a face\nWas lovely Florentino. This was grace\nAnd virtue smiling on the face of Power.\n\nShattered, that slim Toledo-tempered spine!\nHollow, the chrysalis, his gentle hand,\nFrom which those wide imperial moths were fanned\nEach in its hushed miraculous design!\n\nHe was the bee, with danger for his rose!\nHe died the sudden violence of Kings,\nAnd from the bullring to the Virgin goes\nFloating his cape. He has no need for wings.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "dedication-to-mary-campbell": { - "title": "“Dedication to Mary Campbell”", - "body": "_None will break ranks_\n --WILFRED OWEN\n\n\nFolly in towns, like maggots in a corpse,\nBut wisdom breeds with leisure in the dorps;\nVain is the trek where haste with nature strives\nIf at the journey’s end a fool arrives;\nCool as the Roman, as the tortoise slow,\nI lay my road around me as I go,\nFor there’s less wisdom in a hasty thing\nThan in the daftest butterfly of spring.\nI write no telegrams that cannot wait\nBecause to-morrow they’d be out of date,\nWhat news I have (it’s not a vast amount)\nMyself I carry, and myself recount--\nNo Reuter, but a postman of the sun\nWho loves to loiter when the others run.\nMy pen the spur, my rhyme the jingled rein,\nMy hand the downswung stirrup of my brain,\nAlthough I’ve had to spurt to save my hide\nA canter is my ordinary stride;\nI like to feel the landscape moving by\nGradual and smooth and almost on the sly,\nFor I’m the sort of guy that rides and sings.\nTrain-window, tourist insight into things\nWas never in my line; the way I go\nZigzags too quickly but arrives too slow;\nI call at friendly shelters by the way\nAnd often turn the midnight into day;\nMy horse would bear me slumbering afar,\nAnd I have been arrested by a Star!\nThey never could recruit me for their Scouts\nBecause I had so many ins-and-outs--\nI’d plant my scouting pole to bear me fruit\nAnd in its shade lie pillowed at the root\nAbsent from roll-call, by a dream delayed\nWhen Bugles sound the Bolshevik parade.\nWhen due for duty off to draw my cash,\nTo paint the city and to cut a dash\nWith saddle-bags ding-donging like the bells\nThat ring for dinner in the world’s hotels;\nAnd when the duros cease their happy din\nTo greet my messmate, Hunger, with a grin--\nThat sterling chap sham bolshies do not know,\nWhose hat the moon is, and his coat the snow,\nSo staunch a friend when all the rest depart\nTo sharpen wit and fortify the heart,\nFor fasts revive our pleasures when they cloy\nAnd are the springboards of Eternal Joy:\nYou ask old Ghandi, or my friend the priest--\nFirst in the fast is foremost in the feast!\nAcross the world more lightly we can sail\nThan Attila (whose kitchen was his tail).\nDiogenes to me was an esquire\nWho thought his house insured against the fire,\nWhile you and I with no more luggage pass\nThan springbok bounding over plains of grass--\nFree as the air, responsible to none,\nSoldiers of chance, and troopers of the Sun.\nLuck on our side, we play at pitch and toss\nChrist for our king and Mithras for our boss;\nProcrastination saves me half my time--\nTo live comes first with me--to them a crime:\nThat shadow-chorus to whose chant I act\nIn all their emptiness the only fact,\nFor having twice set foot upon their shore\nAs I have done on half a dozen more.\nCunctator, though no Fabian, I must fight\nAs best befits who travel swift and light.\nI like this sort of warfare: a cadet\nOf Bolivar, Sertorius, and de Wet\nMy forces I collect and then disband\nAnd when the least expected am at hand\nAlthough not there, forever in their mind,\nSix years although I left them all behind.\nI scorn the goose-step of their massed attack\nAnd fight with my guitar slung on my back,\nAgainst a regiment I oppose a brain\nAnd a dark horse against an armoured train:\nI like to trick their marksmen having shown\nMy dummy image from behind a stone,\nTo hear their yell of triumph when they score\nAnd then to snipe off half a dozen more.\nIn their day-dreams they’ve killed me thrice a day\nSwearing I’m dead they daily blaze away\nAnd all their noisy shelling of the kop\nOnly proclaims who’s fighting there on top.\nThey’re the pink Tommies, all in order lined,\nPoking each other onward from behind\nTo face one single muzzle-loading gun,\nBecause it gets its nitre from the sun.\nBut, as it is, the odds are on my side,\nThis age is broken ground on which we ride,\nFatal to heavy troops, this great Waste Land\nWas for the neat guerilla nicely planned,\nWhose only luggage is his light guitar,\nWhose compass is the love-delighting Star,\nWho takes advice from every winding stream\nOr stone (the pillow of a Jacob’s dream),\nMakes of the wilderness his posh hotel,\nAnd drinks his fill where armies dry the well.\nOf phalanxes this era breaks the line\nAnd seems with my own tactics to combine;\nAdded to that, they’re loaded with despair\nThe meanest sin that blackens earth or air!\nWeighed down by conscious guilt themselves they dread\nMore than the fiercest enemy ahead.\nVain is the frosty non-committal sneer,\nAgainst the human laugh, the human tear,\nAnd the sad rictus of each cynic grin\nBetrays the toxins rioting within--\nBut may the Devil all my molars pull\nWhen I grow tired of torrying John Bull!\nFor he was never braver with his gun\nThan when he numbered ninety-nine to one;\nNumber and repetition are his law--\n“None will break ranks,” as Owen long foresaw;\nJock Stot’s the same--but when the bullets whistle\nUp goes the White flag, and down comes the Thistle …\n\n… These are the guys that have no time to wait\nThough wisdom has a trick of coming late,\nA butterfly that stops at every flower\nAnd with a golden leisure hoards the hour,\nWhich these have squandered in their breathless haste\nAnd through their open bilges run to waste.\nSo how to round them up? and where impound\nThis legion of the lost that can’t be found?\nNo need to hurry; with an easy mind\nWe catch them--where they left themselves behind!\nFor without one exception to the rule\nThey just can’t keep from hanging round their school.\nIt holds the sum of all their earthly joys\nAnd they’ll be Masters if they can’t be boys;\nAnd here to prove it running to the minute\nShunts in the train with all the ‘Old Boys’ in it.\nThe chaps all shouted like a single fool\n“Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome home to School!”\nThen the new Master from his study burst\nNot quite so much a Coward as the first\nHe cracked a joke, made everybody laugh--\nJohn Bull, Jock Stot, and little Jacky Calf.\nBack to the fields where Waterloo was won,\nMajuba lost (they blame it on the sun!),\nThey came out hiking in their shorts and specs\nAnd the sun passed his brand around their necks,\nSo well Apollo knows that bovine crew\nHe always ropes them with a red lassoo;\nOne uniform he has for dons or scholars\nRed knee-caps and the ringworm for their collars.\nTo find a red-neck cheap upon this day\nYou do not need to wander far away--\nEach comes with his pink halter to your hand\nAnd noosing one you seem to noose the band:\nRodin outdone, this concourse seems to be\nA thousand Calais burghers on the spree,\nSo many of them and so like as fleas\nYou cannot see the Woodleys for the trees.\n\nTo you I hand them, with this bunch of keys.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Talking Bronco", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "dreaming-spires": { - "title": "“Dreaming Spires”", - "body": "Through villages of yelping tykes\nWith skulls on totem-poles, and wogs\nExclaiming at our motor bikes\nWith more amazement than their dogs:\n\nRespiring fumes of pure phlogiston\nOn hardware broncos, half-machine,\nWith arteries pulsing to the piston\nAnd hearts inducting gasoline:\n\nBuckjumping over ruts and boulders,\nThe Centaurs of an age of steel\nEngrafted all save head and shoulders\nInto the horsepower of the wheel--\n\nWe roared into the open country,\nScattering vultures, kites, and crows;\nAll Nature scolding our effrontery\nIn raucous agitation rose.\n\nZoology went raving stark\nTo meet us on the open track--\nThe whole riff raff of Noah’s Ark\nWith which the wilderness was black.\n\nWith kicks and whinnies, bucks and snorts,\nTheir circuses stamped by:\nA herd of wildebeest cavorts,\nAnd somersaults against the sky:\n\nAcross the stripes of zebras sailing,\nThe eyesight rattles like a cane\nThat’s rattled down an area-railing\nUntil it blurs upon the brain.\n\nThe lions flee with standing hackles,\nLeaving their feast before they’ve dined:\nTheir funeral poultry flaps and cackles\nTo share the breeze they feel behind.\n\nBoth wart- and road-hog vie together,\nAs they and we, petarding smoke,\nBelly to earth and hell for leather,\nIn fumes of dust and petrol choke.\n\nWe catch the madness they have caught,\nStand on the footrests, and guffaw--\nTill shadowed by a looming thought\nAnd visited with sudden awe,\n\nWe close our throttles, clench the curb,\nAnd hush the rumble of our tyres,\nAbashed and fearful to disturb\nThe City of the Dreaming Spires--\n\nThe City of Giraffes!--a People\nWho live between the earth and skies,\nEach in his lone religious steeple,\nKeeping a light-house with his eyes:\n\nEach his own stairway, tower, and stylite,\nAscending on his saintly way\nUp rungs of gold into the twilight\nAnd leafy ladders to the day:\n\nChimneys of silence! at whose summit,\nLike storks, the daydreams love to nest;\nThe Earth, descending like a plummet\nInto the oceans of unrest,\n\nThey can ignore--whose nearer neighbour\nThe sun is, with the stairs and moon\nThat on their hides, with learned labour,\nTattooed the hieroglyphic rune.\n\nMuezzins that from airy pylons\nPeer out above the golden trees\nWhere the mimosas fleece the silence\nOr slumber on the drone of bees:\n\nNought of this earth they see but flowers\nQuilting a carpet to the sky\nTo where some pensive crony towers\nOr Kilimanjaro takes the eye.\n\nTheir baser passions fast on greens\nWhere, never to intrude or push,\nTheir bodies live like submarines,\nFar down beneath them, in the bush.\n\nAround their head the solar glories,\nWith their terrestrial sisters fly--\nRollers, and orioles, and lories,\nAnd trogons of the evening sky.\n\nTheir bloodstream with a yeasty leaven\nExalts them to the stars above,\nAs we are raised, though not to heaven,\nBy drink--or when we fall in love.\n\nBy many a dismal crash and wreck\nOur dreams are weaned of aviation,\nBut these have beaten (by a neck!)\nThe steepest laws of gravitation.\n\nSome animals have all the luck,\nWho hurl their breed in nature’s throat--\nOut of a gumtree by a buck,\nOr escalator--by a goat!\n\nWhen I have worked my ticket, pension,\nAnd whatsoever I can bum,\nTo colonise the fourth dimension,\nWith my Beloved, I may come,\n\nAnd buy a pair of stilts for both,\nAnd hire a periscope for two,\nTo vegetate in towering sloth\nOut here amongst these chosen few …\n\nOr so my fancies seemed to sing\nTo see, across the gulf of years,\nThe soldiers of a reigning King\nConfront those ghostly halberdiers.\n\nBut someone kicks his starter back:\nAnachronism cocks its ears.\nLike Beefeaters who’ve got the sack\nWith their own heads upon their spears;\n\nLike Leftwing Poets at the hint\nOf work, or danger, or the blitz,\nOr when they catch the deadly glint\nOf satire, swordplay of the wits,--\n\nInto the dusk of leafy oceans\nThey fade away with phantom tread;\nAnd changing gears, reversing notions,\nThe road to Moshi roars ahead.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Talking Bronco", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "en-una-noche-oscura": { - "title": "“En Una Noche Oscura”", - "body": " Upon a gloomy night,\n With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,\n (O venture of delight!)\n With nobody in sight\n I went abroad when all the house was hushed.\n\n In safety, in disguise,\n In darkness, up the secret stair I crept,\n (O happy enterprise!)\n Concealed from other eyes\n When all my home at length in silence slept.\n\n Upon that lucky night,\n In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,\n I went without discerning\n And with no other light\n Except for that which in my heart was burning.\n\n It lit and led me through,\n More certain than the light of noonday clear,\n To where One waited near\n Whose presence well I knew,\n There, where no other presence might appear.\n\n O Night that was my guide!\n O Darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,\n O Night that joined the lover\n To the beloved bride,\n Transfiguring them each into the other!\n\n Within my flowering breast,\n Which only for himself entire I save,\n He sank into his rest\n And all my gifts I gave,\n Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.\n\n Over the ramparts fanned,\n While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,\n With his serenest hand\n My neck he wounded, and\n Suspended every sense in its caresses.\n\n Lost to myself I stayed,\n My face upon my lover having laid\n From all endeavour ceasing:\n And, all my cares releasing,\n Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Talking Bronco", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "faith": { - "title": "“Faith”", - "body": "While the land drowses\nAnd through the spacious hours\nThe dark herd browses,\nLow horns with level sweep\nLike sickles, half in sleep,\nThe golden lilies reap\nAnd mow the flowers.\n\nWhite egrets ride\nEach bossy croup and dome\nOf sombre hide,\nLike silver plumes that wave\nBlack hearses to the grave\nOr on the midnight wave\nThe torching foam:--\n\nSome of them bolder\nFlit round my horse: and one\nLights on my shoulder\nPreening his ermine there\nBut with as little care\nAs of the passing air\nOr faded sun.\n\nSignal and sign\nOf snowy truce to men!\nUnfurl the fine\nWhite thistles of your frills,\nFan from my brain its ills,\nAnd from your slender quills\nShed me a pen--\n\nThat I may write\nAll that from here I mark:\nHow, singed with light,\nBlack-bodied though it goes\nThe hornèd crescent shows,\nWhere one hind-quarter glows,\nBranded, the Dark!\n\nThough from a star--\nSo horned, so black with spite,\nMight seem from far\nThe thunder-bearing world\nThrough soot and fury hurled,\nOn its dark hump is furled\nA flame as white.\n\nCyphered with Light\n(Its Master’s brand and name)\nThough dim to sight,\nIts shadow loom to seat\nThe solar paraclete\nFaint-silvered, like a sleet\nOf ghostly flame--\n\nJust as this moon,\nFar straying bull, now lost\nBeyond the dune:\nIt bears an egret white\nTo torch it through the night,\nSave but to Faith, its light\nA wraith of frost.\n\nPatience will keep\nThat phantom torch aglow\nThat seems asleep\nTo all but watchful eyes:\nAnd live to see it rise\nSun-drawn into the skies\nWith swans of snow.\n\nFor they’ll survive\nWho from an offal-leap\nCan feed and thrive,\nThanking their God for life,\nAs for a friend or wife;\nAnd count the pain or strife\nAs over-cheap.\n\nTo be a slave\nContent: or driven, first\nOf the mad wave,\nIn the front rank to fight--\nWhat matter Left or Right,\nSo in our hearts the light\nFor which we thirst?\n\nFor humble herds are we\nAs those with which we ride,\nAnd daily see\nIn our toil, that warns,\nThe boaster with his scorns\nThrown by the very horns\nThat were his pride.\n\nThen--with the worst\nAccepted, best to trust--\nOnly can burst\nThis passion so divine\nAs blackens all the shine\nOf wealth, the lust of wine,\nThe wine of lust--\n\nThe seeded spark\nThat in the few can spring,\nTo whom the dark\nIs room and scope; the Night,\nWhen most a foe to sight,\nThe fiercest appetite\nFor what we bring.\n\nFrom sky to sky that bleeds\nDerided warnings,\nAs hornèd Tagus leads\nHis myriad waves to graze\nWith moonèd brows ablaze,\nTo trample down the days\nAnd toss the mornings!--\n\nOur chosen herds,\nAll torch-lit with the snow\nOf ghostly birds,\nMooned by the droving Light\nAnd surging on with might,\nAre rivers to the Night\nThrough which we go!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "familiar-daemon": { - "title": "“Familiar Dæmon”", - "body": "Measuring out my life in flagons\n(No coffee-spoon to skim the flood)\nYou were the prince of thirsty dragons,\nThe gay carouser of my blood:\nWe could not part, our love was such,\nBut gasconading, shared the fun\nWhile every cripple’s shouldered crutch\nWas sighted at me like a gun.\nWhat sport to-day? to swim or fly?\nOr fish for thunder in the sky?\nWhat laughter out of hell to fetch,\nOr joy from peril, have you planned,\nYou sunward rider, that you stretch\nThe downswung stirrup of my hand?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-festivals-of-flight": { - "title": "“The Festivals of Flight”", - "body": "Too sensitively nerved to bear\nDomestication, O my friends\nOn a perpetual change of air\nWhose sole stability depends,\n\nBy what phenomenal emotion,\nAlas, is each of us obsessed\nThat travel, flight, and ceaseless motion\nMust keep us in a state of rest?\n\nSchooled by the new gymnastic Muse\nIn barbarous academies,\nThe rifle and the running noose\nConferred upon us their degrees,\n\nTo play our more precarious parts\nTrapezed above the rolling decks\nOr in the high equestrian arts\nTo graduate with broken necks.\n\nYet I could wish, before I perish,\nTo make my peace with God above\nOr, like a millionaire, to cherish\nMy purse with soft marsupial love,\n\nOr like a poet woo the moon,\nRiding an arm-chair for my steed,\nAnd with a flashing pen harpoon\nTerrific metaphors of speed--\n\nSpeed, motion, flight!--the last hosanna\nOf routed angels: sword that fights\nThe coward free: unfailing manna\nOf earth’s fastidious Israelites!\n\nValise of invalids on tour:\nRefuge of refugees in flight:\nHome of the homeless: sinecure\nOf hunted thieves at dead of night.\n\nNirvana of the record-breakers,\nHeaven in which our senses swim,\nAviary of aviators\nAnd poultry-run of seraphim!\n\nSafari to the unexplored\nWith rough first-aid for Cupid’s darts,\nPerambulator of the Bored\nAnd ambulance of broken hearts!\n\nDeranger of the intellects\nOf those who flee before a curse,\nFixative of blurred effects,\nAnd laxative of minor verse!\n\nMecca of all mechanic progress:\nDestination, course, and goal\nOf those who’ve none: Circean Ogress\nWhose snouted trophy is my soul!\n\nTourist, who leaves with ten-league boots\nHis spoor of Castles down the Rhine:\nSmoker of immense cheroots--\nThe funnels of the Cunard Line!\n\nOf cranks, the boomerang and waddy:\nOf rogues, the assegai and kerry:\nBlack Maria to the Body,\nTo the Soul a Stygian ferry!\n\nPope of the gypsies: sole religion\nOf those who sail with every breeze:\nThe Son, the Father, and the Pigeon\nTo wandering aborigines!\n\nTo Thee our heathen hymns are hurled\nFrom where we wander in the clouds--\nSonatas on the fog-horn skirled,\nThe pibroch of the creaking shrouds.\n\nLead, kindly ignis fatuus, far\nAmid the world’s encircling gloom:\nIn my last trek be thou the star\nTo whom I hitch my disselboom.\n\nFar from the famed memorial arch\nTowards a lonely grave I come,\nMy heart in its funereal march\nGoes beating like a muffled drum,\n\nYet lest when midnight winds are loud\nI should not see the way to go,\nLet every gross proverbial cloud\nIts shabby silver lining show:\n\nAnd you shall lend me, if you please,\nThat in the mode I may appear,\nYour shirt, tormented Hercules!\nLaocoön! your bandolier.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-fight": { - "title": "“The Fight”", - "body": "One silver-white and one of scarlet hue,\nStorm-hornets humming in the wind of death,\nTwo aeroplanes were fighting in the blue\nAbove our town; and if I held my breath,\nIt was because my youth was in the Red\nWhile in the White an unknown pilot flew--\nAnd that the White had risen overhead.\n\nFrom time to time the crackle of a gun\nFar into flawless ether faintly railed,\nAnd now, mosquito-thin, into the Sun,\nAnd now like mating dragonflies they sailed:\nAnd, when like eagles near the earth they drove,\nThe Red, still losing what the White had won,\nThe harder for each lost advantage strove.\n\nSo lovely lay the land--the towers and trees\nTaking the seaward counsel of the stream:\nThe city seemed, above the far-off seas,\nThe crest and turret of a Jacob’s dream,\nAnd those two gun-birds in their frantic spire\nAt death-grips for its ultimate regime--\nLess to be whirled by anger than desire.\n\nTill (Glory!) from his chrysalis of steel\nThe Red flung wide the fatal fans of fire:\nI saw the long flames, ribboning, unreel,\nAnd slow bitumen trawling from his pyre.\nI knew the ecstasy, the fearful throes,\nAnd the white phœnix from his scarlet sire,\nAs silver in the Solitude he rose.\n\nThe towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,\nThe city was a prayer, the land a nun:\nThe noonday azure strumming all its rays\nSang that a famous battle had been won,\nAs signing his white Cross, the very Sun,\nThe Solar Christ and captain of my days\nZoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-flame": { - "title": "“The Flame”", - "body": "In the blue darkness of your hair,\nSmouldering on from birth to death,\nMy love is like the burnish there\nThat I can kindle with a breath.\nOr like the flame in this black wine\nUpon whose raven wings we rise\nLighter in spirit than the sighs\nWith which the purple roses twine:\nLike a great star with steady beam\nIt runs against a darkened stream,\nAnd from its onrush of despairs\nDraws all the splendours my blood,\nAs I have seen the Rhone in flood\nDrawn starward by the golden hairs.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-flaming-terrapin": { - "title": "“The Flaming Terrapin”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMaternal Earth stirs redly from beneath\nHer blue sea-blanket and her quilt of sky,\nA giant Anadyomene from the sheath\nAnd chrysalis of darkness; till we spy\nHer vast barbaric haunches, furred with trees,\nStretched on the continents, and see her hair\nCombed in a surf of fire along the breeze\nTo curl about the dim sierras, where\nFaint snow-peaks catch the sun’s far-swivelled beams:\nAnd, tinder to his rays, the mountain-streams\nKindle, and volleying with a thunder-stroke\nOut of their roaring gullies, burst in smoke\nTo shred themselves as fine as women’s hair,\nAnd hoop gay rainbows on the sunlit air.\nWinnowed by radiant eagles, in whose quills\nSing the swift gales, and on whose waving plumes\nFlashing sunbeams ignite--the towering hills\nYearn to the sun, rending the misty fumes\nThat clogged their peaks, and from each glistening spire\nFling to the winds their rosy fleece of fire.\nFar out to sea the gales with savage sweep\nChurning the water, waken drowsy fins\nHuge fishes to propel from monstrous sleep,\nThat spout their pride as the red day begins,\n“We are the great volcanoes of the deep!”\nNow up from the intense creative Earth\nSpring her strong sons: the thunder of their mirth\nVibrates upon the shining rocks and spills\nIn floods of rolling music on the hills.\nAction and flesh cohere in one clean fusion\nOf force with form: the very ethers breed\nWild harmonies of song: the frailest reed\nHolds shackled thunder in its heart’s seclusion.\nAnd every stone that lines my lonely way,\nSad tongueless nightingale without a wing,\nSeems on the point of rising up to sing\nAnd donning scarlet for its dusty grey!\nHow often have I lost this fervent mood,\nAnd gone down dingy thoroughfares to brood\nOn evils like my own from day to day;\n“Life is a dusty corridor,” I say,\n“Shut at both ends.” But far across the plain,\nOld Ocean growls and tosses his grey mane,\nPawing the rocks in all his old unrest\nOf lifting lazily on some white crest\nHis pale foam-feathers for the moon to burn--\nThen to my veins I feel new sap return,\nStrength tightens up my sinews long grown dull,\nAnd in the old charred crater of the skull\nLight strikes the slow somnambulistic mind\nAnd sweeps her forth to ride the rushing wind,\nAnd stamping on the hill-tops high in air,\nTo shake the golden bonfire of her hair.\n\nThis sudden strength that catches up men’s souls\nAnd rears them up like giants in the sky,\nGiving them fins where the dark ocean rolls,\nAnd wings of eagles when the whirlwinds fly,\nStands visible to me in its true self\n(No spiritual essence or wing’d elf\nLike Ariel on the empty winds to spin).\nI see him as a mighty Terrapin,\nRafting whole islands on his stormy back,\nBuilt of strong metals molten from the black\nRoots of the inmost earth: a great machine,\nThoughtless and fearless, governing the clean\nSystem of active things: the winds and currents\nAre his primeval thoughts: the raging torrents\nAre moods of his, and men who do great deeds\nAre but the germs his awful fancy breeds.\nFor when the winds have ceased their ghostly speech\nAnd the long waves roll moaning from the beach,\nThe Flaming Terrapin that towed the Ark\nRears up his hump of thunder on the dark,\nAnd like a mountain, seamed with rocky scars,\nTufted with forests, barnacled with stars,\nCrinkles white rings, as from its ancient sleep\nInto a foam of life he wakes the Deep.\nHis was the crest that from the angry sky\nTore down the hail: he made the boulders fly\nLike balls of paper, splintered icebergs, hurled\nLassoes of dismal smoke around the world,\nAnd like a bunch of crisp and crackling straws,\nCoughed the sharp lightning from his craggy jaws.\nHis was the eye that blinked beyond the hill\nAfter the fury of the flood was done,\nAnd breaching from the bottom, cold and still,\nLeviathan reared up to greet the Sun.\nPerched on the stars around him in the air,\nWhite angels rinsed the moonlight from their hair,\nAnd the drowned trees into new flowers unfurled\nAs it sank dreaming down upon the world.\nAs he rolled by, all evil things grew dim.\nThe Devil, who had scoffed, now slunk from him\nAnd sat in Hell, dejected and alone,\nRasping starved teeth against an old dry bone.\n\nBefore the coral reared its sculptured fern\nOr the pale shellfish, swinging in the waves\nWith pointed steeples, had begun to turn\nThe rocks to shadowy cities--from dark caves\nThe deep and drowsy poisons of the sea\nMixed their corrosive strength with horny stones,\nAnd coaxed new substances from them to be\nThe ponderous material of his bones.\nThe waves by slow erosion did their part\nShaping his heavy bonework from the mass,\nAnd in that pillared temple grew a heart\nThat branched with mighty veins, through which to pass\nHis blood, that, filtering the tangled mesh,\nBuilt walls of gristle, clogged each hollow gap\nWith concrete vigour, till through bone and flesh\nFlowed the great currents of electric sap.\nWhile thunder clanging from the cloudy rack\nWith elemental hammers fierce and red,\nTempered the heavy target of his back,\nAnd forged the brazen anvil of his head.\n\nFreed from the age-long agonies of birth\nThis living galleon oars himself along\nAnd roars his triumph over all the earth\nUntil the sullen hills burst into song.\nHis beauty makes a summer through the land,\nAnd where he crawls upon the solid ground,\nGigantic flowers, exploding from the sand,\nSpread fans of blinding colour all around.\nHis voice has roused the amorphous mud to life--\nDust thinks: and tired of spinning in the wind,\nStands up to be a man and feel the strife\nOf brute-thoughts in the jungle of his mind.\nBellerophon, the primal cowboy, first\nHeard that wild summons on the stillness burst,\nAs, from the dusty mesà leaping free,\nHe slewed his white-winged broncho out to sea,\nAnd shaking loose his flaming curls of hair,\nShot whistling up the smooth blue roads of air:\nAs he rose up, the moon with slanted ray\nRuled for those rapid hoofs a shining way,\nAnd streaming from their caves, the sirens came\nRiding on seals to follow him: the flame\nOf their moon-tinselled limbs had flushed the dim\nGreen depths, and as when winds in Autumn skim\nGold acres, rustling plume with fiery plume,\nTheir long hair flickered skyward in the gloom,\nTossed to the savage rhythms of their tune.\nTill, far across the world, the rising moon\nHeard, ghost-like, in the embered evening sky\nTheir singing fade into a husky sigh,\nAnd splashed with stars and dashed with stinging spray,\nThe dandy of the prairies rode away!\nThat voice on Samson’s mighty sinews rang\nAs on a harp’s tense chords: each fibre sang\nIn all his being: rippling their strings of fire,\nHis nerves and muscles, like a wondrous lyre,\nVibrated to that sound; and through his brain\nProud thoughts came surging in a gorgeous train.\nHe rose to action, slew the grumbling bear,\nHauled forth the flustered lion from its lair\nAnd swung him yelping skyward by the tail:\nTigers he mauled, with tooth and ripping nail\nRending their straps of fire, and from his track\nSlithering like quicksilver, pouring their black\nAnd liquid coils before his pounding feet,\nHe drove the livid mambas of deceit.\nOppression, like a starved hyæna, sneaked\nFrom his loud steps: Tyranny, vulture-beaked,\nRose clapping iron wings, and in a cloud\nOf smoke and terror, wove its own dark shroud,\nAs he strode by and in his tossing hair,\nRippled with sunshine, sang the morning air.\n\nLike a great bell clanged in the winds of Time,\nLinking the names of heroes chime by chime\nThat voice rolled on, and as it filled the night\nStrong men rose up, thrilled with the huge delight\nOf their own energy. Upon the snows\nOf Ararat gigantic Noah rose,\nStiffened for fierce exertion, like the thong\nThat strings a bow before its arrow strong\nSings on the wind; and from his great fists hurled\nRed thunderbolts to purify the world.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhen Noah thundered with his monstrous axe\nIn the primeval forest, and his boys,\nShaping the timbers, curved their gristled backs,\nThe ranges rocked and rumbled with the noise.\nAnd as the trees came crashing down lengthwise,\nAnd sprayed their flustered birds into the skies,\nThat plumed confetti, soaring far and frail,\nWith such a feathered glory strewed the gale,\nThat to the firmament they reared a new\nBut brighter galaxy: and as they flew,\nTheir rolling pinions, whistlingly aflare,\nKindled in flame and music on the air.\nThen, like a comet, the pale Phœnix rose\nBlazing above the white star-tusking snows,\nAnd smouldering from her tail, a long white fume\nFollowed that feathered rocket through the gloom.\nTo the scared nations, volleying through the calm,\nHer phantom was a signal of alarm,\nAnd mustering their herds in frenzied haste,\nThey rolled in dusty hordes across the waste.\nFar in the clouds her fatal meteor shone,\nSwelling the turmoil as she hurtled on\nPresaging ruin. In his mane of gold\nThe flaming lion trembled to behold:\nAnd the fierce buffaloes who scorn control\nHushed up the thunder of their hoofs and stole\nLike shadows from the plain. Through brakes and thorns\nCrashed the wild antelopes with slanted horns:\nAnd tigers, scrawled with fierce electric rays,\nWere dimmed to hueless spectres by the blaze.\n\nSkittles to Noah’s axe, the great trunks sprawled,\nAnd with the weight of their own bodies hauled\nTheir screaming roots from earth: their tall green towers\nTilted, and at a sudden crack came down\nWith roaring cataracts of leaves and flowers\nTo crush themselves upon the rocks, and drown\nThe earth for acres in their leafy flood;\nHeaped up and gashed and toppled in the mud,\nTheir coloured fruits poured forth their juicy gore\nTo make sweet shambles of the grassy floor.\nWhen star by star, above the vaulted hill,\nThe sky poured out its hoarded bins of gold,\nNight stooped upon the mountain-tops, and still\nThose low concussions from the forest rolled,\nAnd still more fiercely hounded by their dread\nLost in the wastes the savage tribesmen fled.\n\nOut of its orbit sags the cratered sun\nAnd strews its last red cinders on the land,\nThe hurricanes of chaos have begun\nTo buzz like hornets on the shifting sand.\nAcross the swamp the surly day goes down,\nVoracious insects rise on wings that drone,\nStormed in a fog to where the mountains frown,\nLocked in their tetanous agonies of stone.\nThe cold and plaintive jackals of the wind\nWhine on the great waste levels of the sea,\nAnd like a leper, faint and tatter-skinned,\nThe wan moon makes a ghost of every tree.\n\nThe Ark is launched; cupped by the streaming breeze,\nThe stiff sails tug the long reluctant keel,\nAnd Noah, spattered by the rising seas,\nStands with his great fist fastened to the wheel.\nLike driven clouds, the waves went rustling by,\nFeathered and fanned across their liquid sky,\nAnd, like those waves, the clouds in silver bars\nCreamed on the scattered shingle of the stars.\nAll night he watched black water coil and burn,\nAnd the white wake of phosphorous astern\nLit up the sails and made the lanterns dim,\nUntil it seemed the whole sea burned for him;\nBeside the keel he saw the grey sharks move,\nAnd the long lines of fire their fins would groove,\nSeemed each a ghost that followed in its sleep\nThose long phantasmal coffins of the deep;\nAnd in that death-light, as the long swell rolled,\nThe tarpon was a thunderbolt of gold.\nThen in the long night-watches he would hear\nThe whinnying stallions of the wind career.\nAnd to their lost companions, in their flight,\nWhine like forlorn cicalas through the night.\n\nBy day the sky put on a peacock dress,\nAnd, from its far bewildering recess,\nSnowed its white birds about the rolling hull--\nThe swift sea-swallow and the veering gull\nMixed in a mist of circling wings, whose swoops\nHaloed her with a thousand silver hoops;\nAnd from the blue waves, startled in a swarm,\nOn sunlit wings, butterflies of the storm!\nThe flying-fishes in their silver mail\nRose up like stars, and pattered down like hail,\nWhile the blunt whale, ponderous in his glee,\nChurned his broad flukes and siphoned up the sea,\nAnd through it, as the creamy circles spread,\nHeaved the superb Olympus of his head.\n\nThen far away, all in a curve of gold,\nFlounced round with spray and frilled with curling foam,\nCleaving the ocean’s flatness with its bold\nRidges of glory, rose a towering dome\nAs the great Terrapin, bulking on high,\nSpread forth his huge dimensions on the sky.\nNot even Teneriffe, that awful dyke,\nWhen the sun strikes him silver to the spike,\nSends such a glory through his cloudy spray\nAs did the Flaming Terrapin that day,\nRushing to meet the Ark; with such a sweep\nThe blue Zambezi rumbles to the deep,\nWith such a roar white avalanches slide\nTo strip whole forests from a mountain’s side.\nBut Noah drew his blunt stone anchor in\nAnd heaved it at him; with a thund’rous din\nThe stony fluke impaled the brazen shell\nAnd set it clanging like a surly bell.\nIts impact woke the looped and lazy chain\nAnd rattling swiftly out across the main,\nDrawn by the anchor from its dark abode,\nInto the light that glittering serpent flowed\nChafing the waves: then as a mustang colt,\nFeeling the snaffle, lurches for a bolt--\nWith such a lurch, with such a frantic rear,\nThe Ark lunged forward on her mad career,\nAnd the old Captain, with a grip of steel,\nLaid his brown hands once more upon the wheel,\nBidding his joyous pilot haul him free\nFrom the dead earth to dare the living sea!\nRowelled by that sharp prow to hissing hate,\nThe waves washed round her in a dreary spate,\nAnd, as she passed, with slow vindictive swoop\nSwerved in to gnash their teeth against the poop:\nBut like torn Hectors at the chariot wheel,\nShe dragged their mangled ruins with her keel:\nTill puffed by growing rage to greater height,\nTheir foamy summits towered into the night\nSo steeply, that it seemed by God’s decree\nThe Alps had all gone marching on the sea,\nOr Andes had been liquefied and rolled\nTheir moonlit ridges in a surf of gold!\n\nO, there were demons in the wind, whose feet,\nStriding the foam, were clawed with stinging sleet:\nThey rolled their eyes and lashed their scorpion tails\nAnd ripped long stripes into the shrieking sails.\nHigh on the poop the dim red lantern glowed,\nAnd soaring in the night, the pale ship rode:\nHer shadow smeared the white moon black: her spars\nRound wild horizons buffeted the stars,\nAs through the waves, with icicles for teeth,\nShe gored huge tunnels, through whose gloom to flee,\nAnd down upon the crackling hull beneath\nToppled the white sierras of the sea!\n\nOn fiery Coloradoes she was hurled,\nAnd where gaunt canyons swallowed up the light,\nDown from the blazing daylight of the world,\nShe plunged into the corridors of night\nThrough gorges vast, between whose giant ribs\nOf shadowing rock, the flood so darkly ran\nThat glimpses of the sky were feeble squibs\nAnd faint blue powders flashing in the pan\nOf that grim barrel, through whose craggy bore\nThe stream compelled her with explosive roar,\nUntil once more she burst as from a gun\nInto the setting splendour of the sun:\nDown unimagined Congoes proudly riding,\nBuoyed on whose flow through many a grey lagoon,\nThe husks of sleepy crocodiles went sliding\nLike piles of floating lumber in the moon;\nThen with the giddiness of her speed elate,\nWith sails spread like the gold wings of a moth,\nDown the black Amazon, cresting the spate,\nThe smooth keel slithered on the rustling froth:\nShe moved like moonlight through the awful woods,\nAnd though the thunder hammered on his gong,\nHalf-dreaming, as beneath their frail white hoods\nSail the swift Nautili, she skimmed along--\nTill, raftered by the forest, through whose thatch\nThe moon had struck its faint and ghostly match,\nShe saw the monsters that the jungle breeds--\nTerrific larvæ crawled among the weeds\nAnd from the fetid broth like horrid trees\nWavered their forked antennæ on the breeze,\nAnd panthers’ eyes, with chill and spectral stare,\nFlashed their pale sulphur on the sunless air:\nWhile phosphorescent flowers across the haze,\nLike searchlights darted faint unearthly rays:\nAnd gleaming serpents, shot with gold and pearl,\nPoured out, as softly as a smoke might curl,\nTheir stealthy coils into that spectral light\nThere to lie curved in sleep, or taking flight,\nTrundle their burnished hoops across the leaves,\nTill the stream, casting wide its forest sleeves,\nHeaved out its broad blue chest against the sea,\nAnd from their leafy bondage they were free.\nRound the spiked islands, where the wild clouds scale\nFlamboyant peaks, and fragrant meadows sweep,\nA surf of roses roaring in the gale,\nDown to the tufted shingles of the deep,\nShe passed, and squadrons of huge scarlet crabs\nScampered across the fringes of the land--\nSome were as vast as the gnarled baobabs\nThat hook clawed roots into the desert sand.\nThere, where the Cyclops herds the mastodon\nThe sombre crags with lurid splendour shone,\nAs like a lighthouse towering on the sky,\nHe rolled the fiery cartwheel of his eye.\nOn the far headlands, chaired on heaps of bones,\nCannibal kings sat charcoaled on the light,\nTill the ship passed, and from their reeking thrones,\nThey leapt to their canoes in craven flight,\nAnd their slim keels like horses bounded free\nTo leap the foamy hurdles of the sea;\nLike plunging hoofs their paddles spurned the foam,\nAnd, as they rose to crest each frothing comb,\nAnd swung wave-lifted in the whistling air,\nThe gusty moonlight smouldered on their hair.\n\nRound the stark Horn with buckled masts she clove,\nRound the lean fore-arm of the World she drove,\nRound the stark Horn, the lupanar of Death,\nWhere she and that fierce Lesbian, half-aswoon,\nRoll smoking in the blizzard’s frosty breath,\nWhile, like a skinny cockroach, the faint moon\nCrawls on their tattered blanket, whose dark woof\nOf knitted cloud shrouds their dread dalliance, proof\nTo the white archery of the sun, and those\nThin javelins that cold Orion throws.\nRound the stark Horn, where bleak and stiffly lined,\nHooked ridges form a cauldron for the wind,\nAnd droning endless tunes, that gloomy sprite\nStoops to his dismal cookery all night,\nAnd with his giant ladle skims the froth,\nBoiling up icebergs in the stormy broth,\nBrewing the spirits that in sinking ships\nDrowned sailors tipple with their clammy lips.\n\nThe hurricanes are out!--the whole night long\nHumming the cradle-song that lulls the dead,\nWhere rolling stiffly in a silent throng\nTheir waif-like corpses on a stormy bed\nToss in their deep deliriums, or sleep,\nLifting pale faces from their restless grave.\nOnly to sink into a trance more deep\nAs they loll back upon the pillowing wave.\nSailors, so still?--See where the water pales\nTo milky froth before the whistling gales,\nHear the shrill song, where brawling out of Hell,\nThose savage song-birds come to ring your knell,\nHear the low moan, where thunder bursting free,\nMourns for the great tanned nurslings of the sea!\nPapooses of the storm! The grey tides lead\nYour savage orphaned souls to rest, and thin\nYour voices to the rustling of a reed,\nYour flesh to vapour, and your horny skin\nTo spider-threads--and still you lie and dream!\nThough the mad hurricanes around your scream,\nTwitter and moan, so shrill and piercing-sweet,\nThat in His stormy turret on the Moon\nGod even feels His starry rafters beat\nTime to the rhythms of the dismal rune\nThat those ferocious nightingales repeat.\nIts four sad candles dripping from their wicks,\nThe Southern Cross disconsolately swung,\nAnd canted low its splintered crucifix,\nWhile all around the wolfish winds gave tongue,\nAnd, in the silence of the nether shore,\nWith hateful patience by the hunted ship,\nTheir slitting fangs and feet that leave no spoor\nRaced all night long in drear companionship,\nTill, through the shadows of the Southern floe\nThe awful ghost of Erebus at last\nFlowered in the desolation of the snow,\nCurling his fiery tresses on the blast:\nAnd the red plumes that rustle in his crest\nTinged the pale icebergs as they loomed abreast\nAnd faintly in the Night’s funereal noon\nReared their immense tiaras to the moon:\nAs they drew near, they hit the dazzled sight\nLike ships on fire, and stacked with flaming spears\nOld Ocean shone, as swaying through the Night\nHe rafted up his monstrous chandeliers.\nThe wild Antarctic lights, ablaze on high,\nRippled their feathered glories up the sky;\nAs if a phœnix, moulting plume from plume,\nSprinkled his fading splendours on the gloom,\nZigzags of scarlet, combs of silver flame,\nShivering on the darkness, went and came,\nAnd fifty hues, in fierce collision hurled,\nBlazed on the hushed amazement of the world!\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow low along the skyline, furred and shagged\nAs bears, dense clouds in slow contortions dragged\nPonderous bodies, and with clumsy stoop\nCame shambling skyward in a sombre troop:\nLike quarries shattered out of cliffs, their chaps,\nCrammed with resounding cordite, from deep gaps\nExploded thunder, and with jagged spark\nFlashed fangs of deathly pallor on the dark.\nDrilled by the level sleet, and lashed with spray,\nConfounded in the gloom the sailors lay,\nOr huddled on the deck their watches kept\nUntil they whined for sleep: and if they slept,\nSleep was a long dark tunnel demon-scooped\nOut of the Night’s black rock, in which were grouped\nHuge grizzled bats, so aged and so thin\nThat, as with fruit parched in its wrinkled skin,\nAbout the shrunk pulp of their bodies clung\nA loose grey pouch of fur, and as they swung,\nLike pennies in a beggar’s greasy purse\nTheir dry bones jingled: and their blood-shot eyes,\nThe only light, winked redly to disperse\nLank shadows, which the canted stalagmites\nFlung forward, dull as falling logs, to fade\nTapering on into the gloom, or rise\nUp half-lit walls that lost themselves in shade.\n\nThey mourned dead summers: faint remembered flowers\nWith ghosts of scent and colour filled their hours,\nAs like poor skeletons, whiskered and lean,\nThey crouched and prayed for death to intervene:\nBut life, a scorpion with tenacious hold,\nFastened upon their spirits with the cold\nRelentless threat of its infinitude--\nAnd though in that one thought the world seclude\nIts fairest hopes, the sense of dying men\nInvests it with a nameless horror, when\nWith sight unveiled and sure untingling ear,\nTheir souls reach out beyond the grave to hear\nThe whisper of the sea that has no shore.\nAnd all around them as the grim night wore,\nThe fury of the tempest grew more blind--\nUp in the shrouds the whanging of the wind\nWrung from the soulless metal of the wire\nA shriek of agony: a sighing fire\nFeathered the yards; like devil-rattled dice\nTheir cold bones shivered, and their fearful wails\nMixed with the hollow grinding of the ice\nAbove the slatted thunder of the sails.\n\nThere in the Night against whose stormy womb\nA nameless cape, reared up into the gloom,\nWith cloudy sperm engendered ghastly forms,\nDread embryos of hurricanes and storms--\nCoasting the snows they heard as in a dream\nThe death-cry and the agony supreme\nOf the slow-drowning world. On tongues of flame\nOut of the throat of Erebus it came\nDrawn through the craggy windpipe of the world:\nThere where red lava, in Lofodens swirled,\nHad funnelled to the sky its stormy flue\nThe death-gasp of the world came smoking through,\nAnd on the sky’s cold glass, frostily strewn,\nLay smeared in phthisic pallor round the moon.\nIn that great sigh the voices of the world\nAs in a shroud of ghostly sound were furled.\nThe souls of Nations, tossed like stormy trees,\nWith groans and heavy thunder filled the breeze,\nAnd as each race, in travail with its doom,\nSent forth its hollow voice into the gloom,\nThe flying winds its faint, sad rumour bore\nTill all was heard along that dismal shore.\nAnarchy, jolted in a rattling car,\nCrested the turrets of the storm, and plied\nHis crackling whip with forked lash to scar\nRed weals across the gloom: with frantic stride\nHis gusty stallions clenched their bits and tore\nHis whirling spokes along the pitchy rack:\nTheir gaping nostrils drizzled foam and gore,\nAnd where they passed the gurly sea grew black.\nRevolving up in mighty colonnades,\nThick maelstroms propped the dense and sagging shades\nWith pillared thunder, and with hideous twist,\nCorkscrewed by whirlwinds, writhed athwart the mist.\n\nBut when their stormy pilot, through the spray,\nLike a great ship churning a giant screw,\nRose tilting o’er the waves and thrashed his way\nAcross the grumbling sea, the weary crew\nForgot their pain and through that night of fear\nSang as they followed in his swift career,\nPurged by their agonies of all the dross\nOf fear and sloth, their spirits shed their gross\nRags of despair, and as in spangled pride\nA python ripples from his shrivelled hide\nTo ride propelled on wheels of rolling fire,\nTheir souls emerging from their old attire\nGlittered new-sheathed, as if in shining mail,\nSteadfast through all the terrors of the gale.\nLike moonlight the new splendour of their minds\nFlushed their clean limbs: beauty ran all aflare\nThrough nerve and bone, and whistled in the winds\nThreading the burning fibres of their hair.\nFit men they seemed in vigour, brain, and blood,\nTo mend the swamping havoc of the Flood,\nTo breed great races and in pride to reign\nThroned in the flowering cities of the plain.\n\nBut in their absence from the drowning earth,\nThe sooty Fiend, deep in his mirky firth\nOf smoke, upon his throne of roasted bricks,\nBawled his fell triumph far along the Styx,\nAnd Cerberus, his lean three-headed tyke,\nHowled his response far down the surly dyke.\nAround him then he gathered all his court--\nGoblins and apes and elves of every sort.\nHuge carrion crows came rasping rusty jaws\nHoarse as the friction of a hundred saws;\nToads pranced about him on their nimble shins\nWhile others sawed their creaking violins:\nGaunt poetesses, shrieking of their sins,\nFresh from the world’s asylums, like a rout\nOf cackling turkeys, hedged him round about:\nWhile lousy toucans, clanking hollow bills,\nSounded him on, as he bestrode the hills.\n\nTowering like a steeple through the air\nHe stalks: the cascades of his molten hair\nWith streams of lava wash his ebon limbs:\nHis eyes, like wheels of fire with whirling rims,\nRevolve in his gaunt skull, from which a tusk\nCurves round his ear and glitters in the dusk.\nNow he comes prowling on the ravaged earth,\nHe whores with Nature, and she brings to birth\nMonsters perverse, and fosters feeble minds,\nNourishing them on stenches such as winds\nLift up from rotting whales. On earth again\nFoul Mediocrity begins his reign:\nAll day, all night God stares across the curled\nRim of the vast abyss upon the world:\nAll night, all day the world with eyes as dim\nGazes as fatuously back at him.\nHe does not hear the forests when they roar\nSome second purging deluge to implore,\nWhen cities from his ancient rule revolt,\nHe grasps, but dares not wield, his thunderbolt.\nSodom, rebuilded, scorns the wilting power\nThat once played skittles with her tallest tower.\nEach Nation’s banner, like a stinking clout,\nInfecting Earth’s four winds, flaunts redly out,\nDyed with the bloody issues of a war,\nFor hordes of cheering victims to adore.\nWhile old Plutocracy on gouty feet\nLimps like a great splay camel down the street;\nAnd Patriotism, Satan’s angry son,\nRasps on the trigger of his rusty gun,\nWhile priests and churchmen, heedless of the strife,\nFind remedy in thoughts of after-life;\nHad they nine lives, O muddled and perplexed,\nThey’d waste each one in thinking of the next!\nContentment, like an eating slow disease,\nSettles upon them, fetters hands and knees;\nWhile pale Corruption, round his ghastly form\nFolding the cloudy terrors of the storm,\nHis shapeless spectre smothered in the blending\nOf heavy fumes, o’er mirky towns descending,\nSwims through the reek, with movements as of one\nWho, diving after pearls, down from the sun\nAlong the shaft of his own shadow slides\nWith knife in grinning jaws; and as he glides,\nNearing the twilight of the nether sands,\nUnder him swings his body deft and slow,\nGathers his knees up, reaches down his hands\nAnd settles on his shadow like a crow.\nSo dread Corruption, over human shoals,\nInstead of pearls, comes groping after souls,\nAnd the pure pearl of many a noble life\nFalls to the scraping of his rusty knife.\nTill glutted with his spoil, like some huge squid,\nHe reascends, in smeary vapours hid,\nAnd, like those awful nightmares of the deep\nWhen through the gloom propelled with backward sweep\nOut of their mirky bowels they discharge\nThe dark hydraulic jet that moves their large\nUnwieldy trunks--back to his secret lair\nHe welters through the dense miasmal air\nIn inky vapours cloaking his retreat:\nEver-renewed, his soft and sucking feet\nBreak from his trunk, and wandering alone,\nGrow into forms as ghastly as his own:\nWhich, in their turn, with equal vigour breed\nAnd through the world disseminate his seed,\nTill over every city, grim and vast,\nThe shadow of a brooding death is cast.\n\nAmphion, whose music planted massive towers\nAnd temples propped on cylinders of stone,\nSeems to have risen to this world of ours,\nRenounced his lyre, and now to dotage grown,\nAcross the world in pied pyjamas goes\nFluting a leaky bagpipe with his nose.\nA merry piper! Let his flutings rear\nNew slums and brothels year on dismal year--\nHouses where Sickness, wrapped in clogging mist,\nClenches pale children in his bony fist,\nAnd as he sucks his lean and hairy paws,\nSlamming the huge porticullis of his jaws,\nEnormous lice, like tiger, hog, and bear,\nGo crashing in the jungles of his hair.\nLet him build ships and muzzle them with dread\nTo carry death where they might carry bread,\nAnd forge those iron fish, that from their decks,\nThey launch with thunder bottled in their necks\nTo strew the waves with limbs of mangled crews.\nLet squinting guns command the fairest views,\nAnd giant mills, the temples of despair,\nReared to dull Vulcan and to brutish Mars,\nWolfing huge coals with iron jaws aflare,\nRoll their grim smoke to choke the trembling stars!\n\nYouth of the world! pale lichens crawl apace\nOn Earth’s fair limbs and cloud her shining face:\nWe lie in graves and dungeons and our chains\nAre naught but our own sluggard nerves and veins!\nSee where the Ark, bearded with frost, rolls home,\nHer faded ensign trailing in the foam,\nHer fiery pilot, with his crest aflare,\nRoars out his triumph on the morning air\nRending the gloom: fire-purfled clouds unroll\nTheir crimson banners round the stormy Pole!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThought reared me up to perch upon a crag\nThat, crooked in heaven like an evil snag,\nShipwrecked the soaring stars, and there I saw,\nClenching his tail within his foamy jaw,\nThe Kraken, Time, convolved in scaly fold,\nHug the round Earth and girdle her with gold.\nHuge throes ran through his equatorial coil,\nHis spangles, as when water mixed with oil\nWhorls rainbows, all disintegrating, swirled\nTheir violent colours, as whose flames unfurled,\nRippling his scales, all through him seemed to run\nA thousand fiery serpents writhed in one,\nWhile future ages rolled into my sight\nSpreading prophetic visions on the night.\n\nFar be the bookish Muses! Let them find\nPoets more spruce, and with pale fingers wind\nThe bays in garlands for their northern kind.\nMy task demands a virgin muse to string\nA lyre of savage thunder as I sing.\nYou who sit brooding on the crags alone,\nNourished on sunlight in a world of stone,\nMuse of the Berg, muse of the sounding rocks\nWhere old Zambezi shakes his hoary locks,\nAnd as they tremble to his awful nod,\nThunder proclaims the presence of a god!\nYou who have heard with me, when daylight drops,\nThose gaunt muezzins of the mountain-tops,\nThe grey baboons, salute the rising moon\nAnd watched with me the long horizons swoon\nIn twilight, when the lorn hyæna’s strain\nReared to the clouds its lonely tower of pain.\nNow while across the night with dismal hum\nThe hurricanes, your meistersingers, come,\nChoose me some lonely hill-top in the range\nTo be my Helicon, and let me change\nThis too-frequented Hippocrene for one\nThat thunders flashing to my native sun\nOr in the night hushes his waves to hear\nHow, armed and crested with a sable plume,\nLike a dark cloud, clashing a ghostly spear,\nThe shade of Tchaka strides across the gloom.\nWrite what I sing in red corroding flame,\nLet it be hurled in thunder on the dark,\nAnd as the vast earth trembles through its frame,\nSalute with me the advent of the Ark!\n\nNow from their frosty fetters bursting free,\nTo dare once more the terrors of the sea,\nThe Ark and her grim pilot churned the foam,\nCrested the waves, and hoisted sail for home.\nFierce currents trailed her in their rustling train,\nSwishing their silver skirts along the main,\nAnd the grim night, as like proud queens they swayed,\nRe-echoed with the great frou-frou they made.\nNorthward she seethed before the rising gales,\nAnd with the starlight frosted on her sails,\nForth, like a shivering marshfire, flew to skim\nWith dancing flame the far horizon’s rim.\nTill in the growing light, tufting the grey\nBlank levels with a mead of flowery spray,\nThe sirens like a sheaf of lilies sprang,\nStreaking the depths with faint and snowy limbs,\nAnd in pale constellations, moved and sang\nBuoyed on the cadence of their own shrill hymns:\nAnd as the spheres through level ether, bowled\nBy their own music, chime with tongues of gold--\nSo to their harmonies the sirens moved\nAnd through the tide their shining orbits grooved.\nFrom their red lips forth rippled on the air\nVisible music: shapes with tossing hair\nSkipped on the winds, and with a ringing cry,\nRolled in harmonious battle down the sky.\nTheir tongues like silver hammers beat the air\nTo crystal armour for those shapes to wear:\nOut of each dusty mouthful of the wind\nTheir throats with vibrant shuttles wove and twined\nGlittering robes, by vocal magic wrought\nTo clothe those airy phantoms of their thought.\nAnd the pale squadrons, clashing through the mists\nTilted by starlight in their windy lists,\nTill every one was slain, and the last white\nLingering singer slithered out of sight,\nAnd trailing white foam-roses in her curls,\nSank wavering down to dream among the pearls.\nThe winds died down: but music filled the sails\nWith all the speed and beauty of the gales,\nAnd like a nun with twilight-slippered feet,\nSighed on beside the Ark: sounding more sweet\nAs faintlier it passed, her ghostly tread\nSmoothed the untroubled sea, and carpeted\nThe level mirrors with reflected stars\nThat floated there like huge white nenuphars,\nWhile dying echoes, leaning to the sail,\nShouldered her onward through the twilight pale.\n\nCleaving the deep, that miracle of ships,\nAs smoothly as a psalm divides the lips,\nPassed on her way: and still beneath her drawn\nHer pale reflection moved, as when the Dawn,\nAcross the Ocean’s polished floors of gloom,\nSweeps her faint shadow with a golden broom.\nSmooth as a lover’s hand, ere sleep, may slide\nO’er the gold sunburn of a woman’s side\nTo drain the moonlight smouldering from her hair--\nShe stroked the water with her keel, and where\nShe passed along, it silvered into foam\nAnd burned to take her roving beauty home.\nShe, whose white form had been the splendid theme\nOf chanting hurricanes in their supreme\nAnd wildest inspiration: she, whose white\nVirginity appeased the lust of Night,\nWhen in his star-slung hammock, worked with red\nStitches of lightning as with scarlet thread,\nShe swayed to his embraces as she lay\nDandled in thunder, cosseted in spray!\nNow from his couch of terrors borne apart,\nShe slides alone; the silence on her heart\nWeighs down with all the precious weight of gold,\nWhile through the shades, serene and chaste and cold,\nShe rears aloft her moon-emboldened form,\nWith child of high endeavour by the Storm.\n\nNew signals greeted now the flying ship,\nLike lambs the merry waves were seen to skip,\nAs shepherd winds drove forth their foamy sheep\nTo rustle through the verdure of the deep:\nNo more the cruising shark with whispers thin\nThrough their crisp fleeces sheared his sickle fin\nBeside the keep, portending death and woe:\nBut joyful omens in unceasing flow\nSaluted her, as racing with the gales,\nShe rolled escorted by the rolling whales.\n\nNow far along the skyline, like a white\nSignal of triumph through the muffled light,\nAn Albatross, wheeling in awful rings,\nSpanned the serene horizon with his wings,\nAnd towering upward on his scythes of fire,\nSmote the thick air, that, stung with beams of light,\nClanged to his harpings like a smitten lyre\nTolling the solemn death-knell of the Night.\nTill, rearing higher, he caught the blinding glow\nOf sunlight frozen in his plumes of snow,\nAs his ethereal silver soared to fade\nInto the light its own white wings had made,\nAnd, fusing slowly, Albatross and sun\nMingled their two faint radiances in one.\n\nThe trancèd crew hailed with a thrilling cry\nThat snowy sign: but hardly had the sigh\nOf the last echo died, when on their sight\nDawned a vast Presence, reddening the Night,\nAs the old Dragon, from his native slime,\nLeviathan, the eldest child of Time,\nProjected his gaunt skull upon the gloom,\nIn tones of thunder prophesying doom.\nThe blood-red ridges of his drooping gills\nArched the horizon like a range of hills:\nIn fiery whirlpools, glaring on the skies,\nThrough blood and foam he churned his rolling eyes\nAnd ruled their long blue rays across the dark\nTo fix in pallid focus on the Ark.\nThe sails lit up: the long illumined hull,\nPolished with fire, shone like a naked skull,\nAnd the whole ship, in bridal white arrayed,\nStood chiselled out in flame against the shade.\n\nThen the old Serpent, with a voice that fell\nLoud as the hammer of a groaning bell\nThat rocks a steeple--launched his fatal cry\nHounding the laden echoes through the sky:\n“Yawn, you great gaps: you starred abysses, yawn\nTo swill the fiery vintage of the Dawn:\nNature’s grim forces heavy with their sleep\nRise up in red rebellion from the deep:\nAnd strong, chained thunders, rifting stone from stone,\nSurge underground with subterraneous moan:\nVolcanoes, in eruption loud and dire,\nSprawl on the Night with baobabs of fire\nAnd writhe their horrid branches to the Moon\nWith crackling din. Hark how the shrill Typhoon\nSkirls in the towers of Sodom like a cricket\nFiddling her death-dance: splintered like a wicket,\nTall Babel crumples up! The gaunt abyss\nSucks in the darkness with a mournful hiss\nGaping for hunger: swirling in its throat\nThe shadows of a stormy whirlpool float.\nLet old Corruption on his spangled throne\nTremble to hear! The jagged rifts of stone\nRoar for his mangled carrion: old Earth\nWrithes in the anguish of a second birth,\nAnd now casts off her shrivelled hide, to be\nThe sun’s fair bride, as bright and pure as he!\nFleeced like a god in rosy curls of fire\nWith massive limbs, stiffened by fierce desire,\nHe leaps, and as she yields her golden thigh,\nGigantic copulations shake the sky!\nOld Noah’s sons, in pomp and princely pride,\nThrough all the gardens of the world will ride,\nAnd steepled cities stun the hollow sky\nWith thunderclaps of bells as they go by,\nWhile at their sides, their stately wives shall pass\nLike rays of moonlight on the waving grass,\nWith flowers twined and scarlet plumes aflare\nLike rockets in the midnight of their hair!”\nHe spoke and sank; and as a cauldron boils\nThe sea, drawn downward in his horrid coils,\nFunnelled a gloomy whirlpit, till the world\nOf waters on a single pivot swirled,\nAnd, slowly slackening, once more untwined\nIts foamy rings, and rolled before the wind;\nBut not for long, for the fierce Terrapin,\nWith one sharp wrench, had snapped the linking cable\nAnd sounded downwards: with a rending din\nHalf the flat Ocean, tilting like a table,\nRose in a wave, whose long white foamy lip\nSlobbered the stars with froth, and sucked the ship\nHeavenward on its hoary-whiskered rim.\nDizzy she soared that foaming ridge to skim,\nAnd as a top, whipped into frantic pain,\nScribbles the dust, so on the boiling main\nShe swirled and eddied: till the snowy crest\nRearing her like the star that gilds the west,\nHigh as the clouds, sank with a strident roar\nTo strand her on the far, the promised shore!\nSo a fierce mænad, all her rites performed,\nFrom where among the woods she raved and stormed,\nComes panting, as her frenzy fades away,\nTo lie sleep-towsled on the moonlit hay.\nThe dauntless crew, turbulent in their mirth,\nSprang from the decks to stamp the solid earth,\nCalling their wives: and as those stately girls\nUp from the hatches, wreathed in glimmering curls,\nSet foot upon the shore, a sudden surf\nOf flowers foamed up to canopy the turf:\nThey strayed the fields, among the flowers they rolled\nLike plundering bees, dabbled with dusty gold,\nAnd watched the light, which, trembling as it grew,\nUp through the clouds on silver pinions flew.\n\nBut the old Terrapin, freed from his load,\nOn sterner Errands took his lonely road\nOver far continents. All through the land\nHis breath in cyclones pillared up the sand\nAnd drove it on before him. In his ire\nHe spewed up thunder, and like slots of fire\nThe loopholed sockets of his eyes betrayed\nTheir gun-like pupils, as they smeared the shade\nWith clouds of pitch, and forking through the haze,\nRiddled the gloom with fierce electric rays.\nBefore him floundered havoc, but behind,\nFlowers with their scented tassels beat the wind:\nAfter the winter of his wrath he led\nA soft atoning Spring and from the red\nCinders he spread before him, as she passed,\nPetals and leaves unravelled on the blast,\nAnd tossed their rosy curls like conscious things\nFanned by the glimmering rainbows of her wings.\n\nAs a fierce train, maned like a ramping lion\nWith smoke and fire, thunders on rolling iron\nPounding grim tunes, and grinds with flashing wheel\nRockets of flame from parallels of steel,\nAnd, as the rails curve, shoots from flanks of brass\nTangents of fire to singe the whiskered grass--\nSo the mad Terrapin, with mighty shoulders\nShunting the hills, moved upon rolling boulders\nThat, like huge wheels, propelled with savage might,\nRevolved their molten globes across the night.\n\nTill far upon a mountain’s twinkling spire,\nHe saw the Devil on his throne of fire\nRuling the world: and launched his fatal shock\nOf thunder: as it leapt from rock to rock\nBlackening the gulf beneath, and out behind\nIts tattered fringes reddened on the wind,\nThe old Fiend heard it come, and pale with fear\nFelt his harsh tresses writhe themselves and rear\nLike shocks of wheat. Under his gaudy throne\nAvernus yawned with hollow jaws of stone,\nAs like a skittle to the thunderclap\nHe sprawled far out into the windy gap,\nAnd, on his baffled pinions loosely flung,\nDown through the gloom in huge gyrations swung.\nLike a stone toppled from an endless hill,\nCompelled as by some fierce insensate will,\nColliding and rebounding from the crags,\nSheer through the deep he tore his whistling rags.\nAnd while through those grim vaults and starless gaps\nHe rumbled in his hideous collapse,\nThe damned, each like a grey hook-tailed baboon,\nGrown blind with yearning on the fruitless moon,\nHearing his fall, stole forth in rustling troops,\nCrammed the cold ledges of the cliff that stoops\nBowed o’er the pit, and there with groping sight\nFollowed his sinking phantom through the night.\nFor weary months from cliff to crag he fell,\nUntil at last the grim recess of Hell,\nStunned by his fall, gave forth a horrid groan\nFrom all its jolted battlements of stone.\nAnd as he dragged his body from the flood,\nPocking deep craters in the sucking mud,\nThe Dead, like weary snipe, rising on high,\nWhined through the gusty pallor of the sky,\nAnd left him there, rending the night with moans,\nTo nurse the mangled relics of his bones.\n\nAfter he sank, the clouds from soppy locks\nWrung their last tears the slow descending dew,\nThe dawn put forth upon the eastern rocks\nA milky thigh, and donned a silver shoe,\nAnd through the half-drawn curtains of the mist\nLingered and swayed, a frail somnambulist,\nAs in fair tresses, on the wind unfurled,\nShe trawled the rosy morning through the world.\n\nThe props of stone that carry the whole night\nUpon their shoulders, when her pitchy crows\nPerch with faint-spangled wings upon their white\nHelmets of frost, and cling with gnarly toes\nTo their steep Krantzes--in that sudden blaze\nBecame red beacons, from whose palisade,\nHurled as by some huge fist across the haze,\nThe Sun burst upward like a red grenade!\n\n\n# V.\n\nDown on their airy beds,\n As the thin leaves fade on the willows,\nThe Stars, outwatched, upon cloudy pillows\n Nuzzled their curly heads.\nFeathering heaven with ripples of fire,\n The birds stormed up to the sun’s dominions,\nAnd the tense air hummed like a silver lyre\n To the stroke of their burning pinions.\nWhere Behemoth rolled on a river of gold,\n Far down in the valleys below,\nThe lilies of Africa rustled and beat\nTheir giddy white flames with the whistle of sleet,\n As they quilted the land with snow.\n\nWith the sun on their tansied hair,\n And the wind in their scarlet quills,\nWhite Seraphim rose aflare\n From the tops of the snow-clad hills.\nAs a song on the strings of a lyre\n Rolls and ripples and dances,\nAs, surging through forests, a fire\n Shaking its furious lances\nTill the bare boughs crackle and twire,\n On wheels of revolving smoke\n In ruin advances--\n So from the eastern skies they broke,\n And with fierce tresses ablaze,\n On billows of fire uprose\nTo riddle the gloom with the shafted rays\n That they twanged from their golden bows.\n\nFrom the blue vault, with rosy glow,\n In shimmering descent,\nTen thousand angels fell like snow,\nTen thousand tumbling angels went\nCareering on the winds, and hurled\nTheir rainbow-lazos to pursue\n The wild, unbroken world!\nSaddled on shooting stars they flew\nAnd rode them down with manes aflare,\nStampeding with a wild halloo,\nGymnastic on the rushing air.\nDown on the hills, with a shatter of flame,\nThe topsy-turvy horsemen came,\nThe angel cowboys, flaring white,\nWith lariats twirling, cracking whips,\nAnd long hair foaming in the light,\nVaulting on the saw-backed ridges\nWhere they tear the sky to strips,\nAnd the rack of thunder bridges\nMountain-tops in dense eclipse:\nAnd the raven cloud, in rout,\nFled like redly smoking ships,\nThe raven clouds, that with a shout,\nPelting flowers, they beat about\nAnd hounded through the sky.\nWith ruin sagging from their spars,\nRaked by the shrapnel of the stars,\nCareering madly by\nTo roll, torpedoed by a blood-red moon,\nStark crazy on the blast of the typhoon.\nAnd when the champions of the light\nHad put their tattered sails to flight,\nStar-high they hung above the cliffs suspended,\nOn scarlet plumes so fierce and splendid\nThat the sun’s beams were turned to running springs\nAnd rippled in the glory of their long spread wings.\n\nOut of the Ark’s grim hold\nA torrent of splendour rolled--\nFrom the hollow resounding sides,\nFlashing and glittering, came\nPanthers with sparkled hides,\nAnd tigers scribbled with flame,\nAnd lions in grisly trains\nCascading their golden manes.\nThey ramped in the morning light,\nAnd over their stripes and stars\nThe sun-shot lightnings, quivering bright,\nRippled in zigzag bars.\nThe wildebeest frisked with the gale\nOn the crags of a hunchback mountain,\nWith his heels in the clouds, he flirted his tail\nLike the jet of a silvery fountain.\nFrail oribi sailed with their golden-skinned\nAnd feathery limbs laid light on the wind.\nAnd the springbok bounced, and fluttered, and flew,\nHooping their spines on the gaunt karroo.\nGay zebras pranced and snorted aloud--\nWith the crackle of hail their hard hoofs pelt,\nAnd thunder breaks from the rolling cloud\nThat they raise on the dusty Veld.\nO, hark how the rapids of the Congo\nAre chanting their rolling strains,\nAnd the sun-dappled herds a-skipping to the song, go\nKicking up the dust on the great, grey plains--\nTsessebe, Koodoo, Buffalo, Bongo,\nWith the fierce wind foaming in their manes.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nHigh on the streams of ether, through the void\nThe angel riders of the air deployed\nTheir glittering files, as if in one hooped line\nOf flame, the far horizons to confine,\nAnd spin a running girdle round the earth--\nA belt of fire, in whose expanding girth,\nStruck by the sun with one white melting ray,\nIn all but hue, the ranks dissolved away:\nAnd all their gorgeous dyes, diffusing through\nEach other, slowly mingled and withdrew\nEach draining from the glimmering maze its own\nSoluble flame, in fluid ease alone\nTo glide in its own channel: till between\nThe gold and scarlet ribbons, ran the green,\nAnd in one blaze of watery fire unfurled,\nThe Rainbow looped the mountains of the world.\nNow the Earth meets the Sun: through nerve and limb\nTrembling she feels his fiery manhood swim:\nHuge spasms rend her, as in red desire\nHe leaps and fills her gushing womb with fire:\nAnd as he labours, sounding through the skies,\nThe thunders of their merriment arise!\nNow each small seed, thrilled with their mighty lust,\nBuilds up its leafy palace out of dust\nAnd through its rustling trellises, in springs\nOf crystal light, the swift wind flows and sings:\nVibrant with life, each clod of turf, inspired,\nShoots forth a gorgeous flower as if it fired\nA rocket at the sky. The steepled trees\nRocked with their great bells clanging in the Breeze\nAs she passed by with golden locks aswirl,\nOf all earth’s progeny the fairest girl!\nIn robes of rustling air she ran to play,\nTripping on trembling lilies all the way,\nAnd the hushed Ocean, puckered into smiles,\nFoamed at her feet around its shining isles:\nAnd trees and mountains heard her joyful song\nOn plumes of towering eagles borne along,\nAnd higher yet, where eagles fear to fly,\nBandied by soaring echoes through the sky.\nShe slid with white feet planted in a shell\nThat smoothed the water with its whorlèd prow\nAcross the deep. Lorn as a midnight bell\nIs the remembrance of her beauty now.\nThe sea’s faint marble veined with green and gold\nFramed her white image as she glided by:\nThe clouds, her hoarded fragrances to hold,\nSpread seines of tasselled fire across the sky,\nAnd a gay rainbow, curved to catch the pale\nRays of the morning, served her for a sail.\n\nThe Flaming Terrapin, his labours done,\nHumped like a cloud o’er mountain, crag and field\nRose on the skyline. The far-shooting sun\nSplintered its arrows on his armoured shield,\nFrom whose bright dome in sudden ricochets\nRecoiling flashed the long reflected rays:\nWhile, rolling his red eyes, a double moon\nThat lit the hill-sides with a second noon,\nHe sank to rest. His golden ridges, tiered\nAbove the foam, now slowly disappeared:\nAnd as clouds roll immense and globed and still\nTo burst in thunder round a lonely hill,\nThe slow foam gathered round him: o’er his wild\nMountainous outline, ponderously piled,\nIt hung one moment, poised in grim suspense,\nAnd then swamped crashing down, and from its dense\nVortex of thunder, with a gradual sweep\nRolled forth in groaning circles on the deep:\nHalo on halo, ring on gleaming ring,\nReached out, in long subsiding curves, to fling\nThe rude waves back and with a foamy crown\nProclaim the Monarch as he sounded down!\nBack to the deep he sinks and in a proud\nDisintegration, like a raining cloud,\nReversing the grand process of his birth,\nReturned his borrowed vigour to the Earth.\nThat vital fluid, straining through the pores\nOf the vast ocean, on the wind upsoars\nIn rolling clouds that globe around the Sun,\nWhence, rinsed as from his fiery curls, they run\nIn sparkling showers which, teeming in the Earth,\nRouse up the soil to energies of birth,\nAnd shoot new vigour up through giant stems\nWider to spread their leafy diadems,\nWhile from the glad red turf the eager grain\nSprings dancing to the silver flutes of rain.\nThence into livelier forms his vigour swims\nIn fluid grace to beautify the limbs\nOf swift wild creatures pasturing in herds,\nThrough whose lithe bodies, as they graze the plain,\nIt flows like music--soaping into curds\nOf froth along the Koodoo’s gusty mane,\nAnd slithering in the muscles of the Roan,\nAnd in great Buffaloes, loading with stone\nTheir horny brows, as with resounding stride\nAnd battering force, in one fierce shock that pulls\nThe screaming turf up, their huge forms collide\nAnd thunder clothes the battle-angry bulls!\nFeeding a myriad forms with life and light,\nSpeed for the race, and courage for the fight,\nAnd Man, triumphant, feels their strength and speed\nThrill through his frame as music through a reed.\n\nNow by each silent pool and fringed lagoon\nThe faint flamingoes burn among the weeds:\nAnd the green Evening, tended by the Moon,\nSprays her white egrets on the swinging reeds.\nHer wings are spangled with the fiery grain\nThey winnow from the skies, and through the night,\nShoot their soft rays to gild the glistening main:\nThe swift winds simmer in her ghostly light.\nThe miser, leaning o’er his greasy hoard,\nCannot her brighter alchemy resist:\nThe murderer has wiped his grisly sword,\nThe rusty carbine trembles in his fist;\nThe trigger turns into a golden pin,\nThe barrel swings, a lily tall and frail,\nAnd the dark soul, forgetful of his sin,\nWalks singing through the terrors of the gale.\nUnder the feet of pale somnambulists\nThe thorns are turned to flowers gold and white:\nRoses for those sad haunters of the mists\nFlame in the secret gardens of the night.\nWhere each young Hercules, tired of the chase,\nHas lain, the earth becomes a mass of flowers:\nHis pleated muscles and his burning face\nAre sweeter to the earth than April showers,\nAnd where he slept the flaming corn aspires\nTo harp the wind along on golden wires.\n\nHigh on the top of Ararat alone\nOld Noah stood: beneath him faintly blown,\nGreat aasvogels, like beetles on a pond,\nVeered in slow circles o’er the gulf beyond.\nThe dusk came on: faint shades began to streak\nAcross the dim cathedral of the peak,\nAnd from his craggy pulpit, the baboon\nRose on the skyline, mitred with the moon.\nOver far Edens waved the golden lights\nTrailing their gorgeous fringes o’er the heights.\nUnder the dying splendours of the day,\nRolling around him from his frosty throne,\nRidged with red skies, his mighty kingdom lay\nStretching to heaven. Zone on sweeping zone,\nHuge circles outward swirled without a bound,\nThe world’s immense horizons ringed him round,\nReceding, merging on until the whole\nCreation on the pivot of his soul\nSeemed to be wheeling: star on lonely star\nHaloed him with its orbit from afar.\nHe was the axle of the wheel, the pole\nRound which the galaxies and systems roll,\nAnd from his being, making months and years\nIssued the vase momentum of the spheres.\nThose mighty rings seemed but the ripples flung\nFrom his great soul in lofty triumph swung,\nAn Aphrodite rising from the deep\nOf old despairs. Matter’s forlorn desire,\nThrough souls of men, in mighty deeds to leap,\nRose in his soul and crowned itself with fire.\nAnd as the Night, serene and chaste and cold,\nDown the faint air on starry pinions rolled,\nLoud shouts of triumph through the valleys ran,\nAnd Noah turned to watch, far in the west,\nThe sun’s great phœnix fold her scarlet fan\nAnd sink in ruin from the snowy crest.\nThere as amid the growing shades he stood\nFacing alone the sky’s vast solitude,\nThat space, which gods and demons fear to scan,\nSmiled on the proud irreverence of Man.\n\nNight is a Captain hustling up his stars,\nLoud is the stumping of their boots of gold\nAlong the frosty horns and deep-cut scars\nOf old bull-mountains sulking in the cold\nVacuums whereto they thrust their snouts to feel\nRelease from laden pressures or to hear\nThe humming spokes that twinkle in the wheel\nOf many a roving sun. Set in their sheer\nGrey brows, the caved unasking eyes with dim\nSecrets are slowly filled: wisdom undreamed\nMakes heavier their pine-quilled heads where swim\nPonderous fancies: grooved in quartz and seamed\nIn slate, they pattern their tremendous schemes--\nDead lava scrawled with wrinkled epics: lust\nExpressed in stony groins, where distant streams\nDash into puffs of dust\nOr trail thin fibres down the slopes to break\nAnd crinkle on the star-bright lake.\n\nThough the dark sky has gathered stormy numbers\nOf vultures to be snowed upon my corpse;\nThough the weak arc of Heaven warps\nBeneath the darkness that encumbers\nThe night beyond; though we believe the end\nIs but the end, and that the torn flesh crumbles\nAnd the fierce soul, rent from its temple, tumbles\nInto the gloom where empty winds contend,\nIn gnat-like vortex droning--what is this\nThat makes us stamp upon the mountain-tops,\nSo fearless at the brink of the abyss,\nWhere into space the sharp rock-rampart drops\nAnd bleak winds hiss?\nIt is the silent chanting of the soul:\n“Though times shall change and stormy ages roll,\nI am that ancient hunter of the plains\nThat raked the shaggy flitches of the Bison:\nPass, world: I am the dreamer that remains,\nThe Man, clear-cut against the last horizon!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1824 - } - } - }, - "the-flowering-reed": { - "title": "“The Flowering Reed”", - "body": "When the red brands of day consume\nAnd in the darkening Rhone illume\nThe still reflections of the reed,\nI saw its passing leagues of gloom,\nTorrential in their strength and speed,\nResisted by a rosy plume\nThat burned far down among the weed;\nAs in the dark of Tullia’s tomb\nThe frail wick-tethered phantom set\nTo watch, remember and regret,\nThawing faint tears to feed its fume\nOf incense, spent in one long sigh\nThe centuries that thundered by\nTo battle, scooping huge moraines\nAcross the wreck of fifty reigns;\nIt held a candle to the eye\nTo show how much must pass and die\nTo set such scatheless phantoms free,\nOr feather with one reed of rhyme\nThe boulder-rolling Rhone of time,\nThat rafts our ruin to the sea.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-flower": { - "title": "“The Flower”", - "body": "Let no light word your silence mar:\nThis one red flame be all you say,\nBetween the old and new desire\nA solitary point of fire,\nThe hesitation of a star\nBetween the twilight and the day.\n\nSo rich the pollen of your breath\nIt is sufficient to be dumb,\nForeknowing, as the moment slips,\nThat in the parting of our lips\nThe hour has slain a rose whose death\nWill colour all our days to come.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "Where not a breeze the silence raids\nAnd by the outer noon forgot,\nStrayed sunbeams crack with ruby shot\nThe smooth gold rind of the grenades:\nLit only by the falling stream,\nThe Form familiar to my rest\nWith fluid arm and naked breast\nFlushes the crystal of my theme,\nYet on its clearness sheds no haze\nOf sorrow more than if a glass\nBetween me and the sun should pass\nTo share the unimpeded rays.\nSoft fall the laurel-scented hours\nRinsed with the golden light, and long\nFor those in faith and virtue strong\nShall rain upon their bed of flowers:\nWhile through its fall of silver sheer\nAscends the music of the spring\nWith fluted throat and jewelled wing\nTo sing as ever through the year,\nHow Love was like a Laurel sprung\nWithin whose quiet ring of shade\nBeauty and Wit, like man and maid,\nHave lain as we since earth was young--\nWhile all the crowns that glory weaves\nTo buckle on victorious brows\nWere offered for their tent of boughs,\nAround whose stillness vainly grieves\nThe valour that has daunted time,\nAnd all the deathless flow of rhyme\nIs but a wind among the leaves.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-hat": { - "title": "“The Hat”", - "body": "Beneath our feet we heard the soaring larks;\nThe sunlight had the hum of winnowed chaff,\nAnd the blue wind was sown with tingling sparks,\nThat blew my hat away to make you laugh.\nOver the land it sailed, collecting height,\nFlapped in the face of each offended crow,\nAnd scared the speckled falcon of the Baux,\nAdventurously taunting it to fight.\nLike Saturn’s in its whirling shady brim,\nFar down, its giant shadow coursed the plain--\nNever did autogyre so lively skim\nAs did the flying discus of my brain;\nAnd though my skull, a mile or so behind,\nLeft to the cold phrenologizing wind,\nShone bald and egg-like in the noonday sun--\nThis fantasy was left to hatch alone,\nA sudden brainwave, breaching through the bone,\nThat for a breathless minute made us one\nWith that unsated wish in us, that lives\nOut of this merely positive degree\nIn the wide region of superlatives,\nTranslating every rash hyperbole\nWe utter, into life and action there;\nOut of our foibles founding pyramids;\nAnd friezing dizzy Parthenons of air\nWith deeds that our heredity forbids.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "hialmar": { - "title": "“Hialmar”", - "body": "The firing ceased and like a wounded foe\nThe day bled out in crimson: wild and high\nA far hyena sent his voice of woe\nTingling in faint hysteria through the sky.\n\nThick lay the fatal harvest of the fight\nIn the grey twilight when the newly-dead\nCollect those brindled scavengers of night\nWhose bloodshot eyes must candle them to bed.\n\nThe dead slept on: but one among them rose\nOut of his trance, and turned a patient eye\nTo where like cankers in a burning rose,\nOut of the fading scarlet of the sky,\n\nGreat birds, descending, settled on the stones:\nHe knew their errand and he knew how soon\nThe wolf must make a pulpit of his bones\nTo skirl his shrill hosannas to the moon.\n\nGreat adjutants came wheeling from the hills,\nAnd chaplain crows with smug, self-righteous face,\nAnd vultures bald and red about the gills\nAs any hearty colonel at the base.\n\nAll creatures that grow fat on beauty’s wreck,\nThey ranged themselves expectant round the kill,\nAnd like a shrivelled arm each raw, red neck\nLifted the rusty dagger of its bill.\n\nThen to the largest of that bony tribe\n“O merry bird”, he shouted, “work your will,\nI offer my clean body as a bribe\nThat when upon its flesh you’ve gorged your fill,”\n\n“You’ll take my heart and bear it in your beak\nTo where my sweetheart combs her yellow hair\nBeside the Vaal: and if she bids you speak\nTell her you come to represent me there.”\n\n“Flounce out your feathers in their sleekest trim,\nAffect the brooding softness of the dove--\nYea, smile, thou skeleton so foul and grim,\nAs fits the bland ambassador of love!”\n\n“And tell her, when the nights are wearing late\nAnd the grey moonlight smoulders on her hair,\nTo brood no more upon her ghostly mate\nNor on the phantom children she would bear.”\n\n“Tell her I fought as blindly as the rest,\nThat none of them had wronged me whom I killed,\nAnd she may seek within some other breast\nThe promise that I leave her unfulfilled.”\n\n“I should have been too tired for love or mirth\nStung as I am, and sickened by the truth--\nOld men have hunted beauty from the earth\nOver the broken bodies of our youth!”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "horses-on-the-camargue": { - "title": "“Horses on the Camargue”", - "body": "In the grey wastes of dread,\nThe haunt of shattered gulls where nothing moves\nBut in a shroud of silence like the dead,\nI heard a sudden harmony of hooves,\nAnd, turning, saw afar\nA hundred snowy horses unconfined,\nThe silver runaways of Neptune’s car\nRacing, spray-curled, like waves before the wind.\nSons of the Mistral, fleet\nAs him with whose strong gusts they love to flee,\nWho shod the flying thunders on their feet\nAnd plumed them with the snortings of the sea;\nTheirs is no earthly breed\nWho only haunt the verges of the earth\nAnd only on the sea’s salt herbage feed--\nSurely the great white breakers gave them birth.\nFor when for years a slave,\nA horse of the Camargue, in alien lands,\nShould catch some far-off fragrance of the wave\nCarried far inland from his native sands,\nMany have told the tale\nOf how in fury, foaming at the rein,\nHe hurls his rider; and with lifted tail,\nWith coal-red eyes and cataracting mane,\nHeading his course for home,\nThough sixty foreign leagues before him sweep,\nWill never rest until he breathes the foam\nAnd hears the native thunder of the deep.\nBut when the great gusts rise\nAnd lash their anger on these arid coasts,\nWhen the scared gulls career with mournful cries\nAnd whirl across the waste like driven ghosts:\nWhen hail and fire converge,\nThe only souls to which they strike no pain\nAre the white-crested fillies of the surge\nAnd the white horses of the windy plain.\nThen in their strength and pride\nThe stallions of the wilderness rejoice;\nThey feel their Master’s trident in their side,\nAnd high and shrill they answer to his voice.\nWith white tails smoking free,\nLong streaming manes, and arching necks, they show\nTheir kinship to their sisters of the sea--\nAnd forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow.\nStill out of hardship bred,\nSpirits of power and beauty and delight\nHave ever on such frugal pastures fed\nAnd loved to course with tempests through the night.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "hot-rifles": { - "title": "“Hot Rifles”", - "body": "Our rifles were too hot to hold,\nThe night was made of tearing steel,\nAnd down the street the volleys rolled\nWhere as in prayer the snipers kneel.\nFrom every cranny, rift, or creek,\nI heard the fatal furies scream,\nAnd the moon held the river’s gleam\nLike a long rifle to its cheek.\nOf all that fearful fusillade\nI reckoned not the gain or loss\nTo see (her every forfeit paid)\nAnd grander, though her riches fade,\nToledo, hammered on the Cross,\nAnd in her Master’s wounds arrayed.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "illumination": { - "title": "“Illumination”", - "body": " I halt and tremble at the height\n to which you lift my dreaming gaze\n through curls of fire, upon the white\n abrupt sierras of my days;\n O hyacinthal star! whose shining\n phasm to film, the flesh will glow\n a rose against the dawn, designing\n the skeleton, a frond of snow,\n while on the rosy splendour drawn,\n like webs of frost against the dawn,\n the nerves of joy and pain are spun\n fine as the thistled hair of fays\n and myriad as the coloured rays\n an eyelash fibres from the sun.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "a-jug-of-water": { - "title": "“A Jug of Water”", - "body": "The snow-born sylph, her spools of glory spun,\nForgets the singing journeys that she came\nTo fill this frosty chrysalis of flame\nWhere sleeps a golden echo of the Sun.\n\nThe silver life and swordplay of the noon\nCaught in mid-slash; the wildfire of the scar\nWhose suds of thunder in a crystal jar\nCompose a silent image of the moon.\n\nShut rainbow; hushed appeasement of the spray;\nMeeting of myriad dews, as if to show\nAurora’s hand from out whose cup of snow\nThe solar horses drink the fires of day.\n\nA masquer so anonymously white\nWho smiles without a face: a cloister frail\nIn whose clear precinct music takes the veil\nAnd sings, but to the vision, with its light;--\n\nIt was the psalm and incense of the plain,\nThe sleep-heard music humming on the roofs,\nThe candle lighted by our horses’ hoofs\nWhen we rode home by moonlight after rain.\n\nWhen tinder to a star it lay at night\nHolding it like a glow-worm in its hand;\nOr in a shallow ripple shaved the sand\nFilming a stormy shipwreck of the light--\n\nStill was its only study to acquire\nEmbryon ecstasies, the sperm of power--\nRose of the dawn, or nimbus of the shower\nTo sail, a ship of love, on seas of fire.\n\nIts luck was always to sustain a King,\nThe jingled spur and stirrup of the cloud--\nTo launch a swan by the same art endowed\nOr smooth the pebbles for a David’s sling.\n\nTrue phœnix-fuel whom no burning mars\nBut pain and fire resuscitate afresh,\nIt has put on all forms of flame or flesh\nAnd trawled the lovely bodies of the stars.\n\nAnd once it was a youth before he died\nTo form this lily-calyx for the light,\nWho made a pond his palace of delight\nAnd thought himself beside the sun enskied.\n\nWith stars and flying clouds about him rolled\nHigh in that silver paradise ensphered,\nDown from his gaze his fatal beauty sheered,\nA marble precipice, with ferns of gold.\n\nEcho his dirge, the zephyr is his shroud,\nWhose pride with running water was but one:\nAnd both a brief reflection of the sun\nWhich any sigh suffices for a cloud.\n\nThough every passing yearner for the skies\nOut of his glass construct a secret hell,\nIf with our own reflections we must dwell\nLet them be seen in one another’s eyes.\n\nThis crystal by a different hand is wheeled,\nAnd here the sun its circle seems to dim\nThat we may see undazzled through to Him\nOf whom it is the mirror or the shield.\n\nStagnant in drains where beauty scorns to bathe,\nYet who has seen it unalloyed with Light\nHas seen black snow, has seen unanswered faith,\nAnd courage unrewarded with delight.\n\nPool in the grime by city lanterns scarred,\nStainless it still from every contact came\nAs the light incense, orphan of the flame,\nSurvives the baser fuel it has charred.\n\nSight of the Earth, for every star an eye,\nThe element by which it sees and thinks,\nIt signs upon that stark and rocky Sphinx\nHer smile of resignation to the sky.\n\nHere though in exile from the singing shower,\nIt seems to boast its quiet faith--’To me\nThe world is like a trogon-feathered tree\nThat never sheds its leaves except to flower.’\n\nIt says it is the blossom in our blood\nWith folded petals smiling out the sere,\nBrown, shuffled slippers of the limping year--\nThe leaves that drift and whisper in the mud.\n\nComplain those burned brown leaves? then let them go!\n(Though who should whimper whom the sun has kissed?)\nThat flowers may come, outsilvering the mist,\nTo stain the boasted ermines of the snow.\n\nAnd now the world’s great autumn blows at last,\nThe brown horde yells before it, questing death--\nFolding its cape, this waits with baited breath\nTo flaunt its cool evasion of the blast.\n\nWhite armour of the world’s exultant strife,\nIn it the sunbeam is a lance at rest:\nAnd like a sword the lightning in its breast\nLies hidden, with the miracle of life.\n\nWings, flowers, and flames are folded in its peace--\nThis common water where the sunlight falls;\nShake it, and from your hand you can release\nA flight of coloured pigeons round the walls.\n\nRest, twinkling valour! on my friendly sill\nWhen sheep are rabid, serpents well may rest.\n(Coil, Christian Tagus, round the sacred hill,\nThat wears the steep Alcazar for a crest!)\n\nBut when your great commandos, in the rain\nShall gallop singing on our thirsty lands,\nDown on my knees, my hat between my hands,\nI’ll drink the huge elation of the plain.\n\nYour spirit sings (and to its sister sprite)\nThat love is God, that dying is renewal,\nThat we are flames, and the black world is fuel\nTo hearts that burn and battle for delight.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "junction-of-rails-voice-of-the-steel": { - "title": "“Junction of Rails: Voice of the Steel”", - "body": "Cities of cinemas and lighted bars,\nSmokers of tall bituminous cigars,\nWhose evenings are a smile of golden teeth--\nUpon your cenotaphs I lay this wreath\nAnd so commend you to the moon and stars.\n\nFor I attain your presence in the dark\nDeriding gossip Reuter’s twittered spark\nAnd reach you rails that, swifter in career,\nArrive as due as they depart from here--\nI am a tour on which the hours embark.\n\nThrough me the moon, in ruled meridian steel,\nUnwinding journeys from a burnished reel,\nStitches the world with threads of fire: each clue,\nPulleyed with rolling-stock as webs with dew,\nA nerve for sleeping capitals to feel.\n\nTheir life-blood circulating in my veins,\nWith runnelled iron I irrigate the plains\nAnd spider touring metal through the rock,\nWhile to the same tentacular tick-tock\nMy scarecrow signals semaphore their trains.\n\nUnder this bleak mechanical display\nI screen an inward knowledge, when the day\nX-rays the fingers of my open hand\nOver the chess-board acres of the land\nWhose towns are shifted peons in the play.\n\nProgress, the blue macadam of their dream,\nIts railed and shining hippodrome of steam,\nGlazed by cool horsepower, varnished clean with wheels,\nFilming their destiny in endless reels,\nDefers the formal ending that they scheme.\n\nThey greet each other in these gliding cars,\nRead the same nightly journal of the stars,\nAnd when the rail rings I can hear the bells\nRinging for dinner in the world’s hotels\nAnd after that that the closing of the bars.\n\nThough they have taught the lightning how to lie\nAnd made their wisdom to misread the sky\nI hold their pulses: through my ringing loom\nTheir trains with flying shuttles weave a doom\nI am too sure a prophet to defy.\n\nAnd when they jargon through the wind and rain\nBreathing false hopes upon a frosty pane,\nI hear the sad electrocuted words\nThud from the wires like stiffly-frozen birds\nThat warming hands resuscitate in vain.\n\nThe de Profundis of each canine hell\nVoices their needs in its voluptuous swell:\nWhile from the slums the radio’s hollow strain\nFrom hungry guts ventriloquizing pain\nBelies them, as it sobs that all is well.\n\nThen like a flawless magnet to the fact\nInto my secret knowledge I attract\nTheir needles of dissimulated fear\nWhose trembling fingers indicate me here\nThe focus of their every mood and act.\n\nWhat hopes are theirs, what knowledge they forgo\nFrom day to day procrastinating woe--\nI, balancing each project and desire,\nFunambulize upon my strands of fire\nToo many aspirations not to know.\n\nI am plexus of their myriad schemes,\nAnd were I flesh the ruin would undo me\nOf all the purposes they sinew through me,\nOf thwarted embassies, and beaten teams,\nAnd home-returning honeymoons as gloomy.\n\nHow shrill the long hosannas of despair\nWith which those to-fro scolopendras bear,\nStatesmen to conferences, troops to war--\nAll that concerted effort can restore\nLike rattled cans to porters of despair!\n\nBut in the waiting-room where Time has beckoned\nHis vanguard, every moment must be reckoned\nAnd fierce anticipation push the clock\nThough for each same reiterated second\nThe whole world swing its pendulum of rock.\n\nFar on the plain my waving pennons stream,\nIn the blue light the white horsetailing steam:\nOr where they storm the night with rosy cirrus--\n(Armoured incendiary, plumy Pyrrhus!)\nThrough palaces of ice where eagles scream.\n\nFrom fog-red docks, the sink of rotting drains,\nWhere, tipsy giants, reel the workless cranes:\nWhere in dead liners, that the rust attacks,\nSprung decks think back beyond the saw and axe,\nAnd masts put on the green of country lanes--\n\nI tentacle the news: relay the mails:\nAnd sense the restive anger that prevails\nWherever shafts descend or girders rise:\nAnd day and night their steel-to-steel replies\nHum in my bolts and tingle in my rails.\n\nThese tons of metal rusting in the rain\n(Iron on strike) are singing one refrain:\nLet steel hang idle, burning rust devour,\nTill Beauty smile upon the face of Power\nAnd Love unsheathe me from the rust again …\n\nMy rails that rove me through the whispered corn\nBring me the tidings of a world unborn:\nMy sleepers escalading to the skies\nBeyond the far horizons seem to rise\nAnd form a Jacob’s ladder to the morn.\n\nAnd I often thought by lonely sidings--\nWhat shepherd or what cowboy in his ridings\nForges the Sword so terrible and bright\nThat brings not peace, but fury of delight,\nAnd of whose coming I have had the tidings.\n\nThey are the tidings of a world’s relief:\nMy aching rails run out for their belief\nTo where a halted Star or rising Crescent\nAbove a byre or sheepfold hangs quiescent,\nAnd meditation reaps the golden sheaf--\n\nThe joy that veld and kopje thrice restored\nTo that bleak wilderness the city horde--\nWhen once the living radios of God,\nBy ravens fed, the lonely places trod,\nAnd talked with foxes, and with lions roared.\n\nA sword is singing and a scythe is reaping\nIn those great pylons prostrate in the dust,\nDeath has a sword of valour in his keeping\nTo arm our souls towards the future leaping:\nAnd holy holy holy is the rust\nWherein the blue Excaliburs are sleeping!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "la-clemence": { - "title": "“La Clemence”", - "body": " When with white wings and rhyme of rapid oars\n The sisters of your speed, as fleet as you,\n With silver scythes, the reapers of the blue,\n Turn from their harvest to the sunset shores;\n\n When the pine-heaving mistral rolls afar\n The sounding gust that your stiff pinion loves,\n And rose-lit sails, a thousand homing doves\n With foamy ribbons draw the wave-born Star;\n\n May you be first her rising torch to greet\n And first within the distant port to ride,\n Your triangle of silver for her guide,\n Your pearling prow a sandal to her feet.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-louse-catchers": { - "title": "“The Louse Catchers”", - "body": " When the child’s brow, with torment flushing red,\n Implores white dreams to shed their hazy veils,\n Two sisters, tall and fair, approach his bed\n Whose fingers glint with silver-pointed nails.\n\n They seat him by a window, where the blue\n Air bathes a sheaf of flowers: with rhythms calm,\n Into his heavy hair where falls the dew,\n Prowl their long fingers terrible in charm.\n\n He hears their breathing whistle in long sighs\n Flowering with ghostly pollen; and the hiss\n Of spittle on the lips withdrawn, where dies\n From time to time the fancy of a kiss.\n\n Brushing cool cheeks their feathered lashes flick\n The perfumed silences: through drifting veils\n He hears their soft electric fingers click\n The death of tiny lice with regal nails.\n\n Drowsed in the deep wines of forgetfulness,\n Delirious harmonies his spirit hears\n And to the rhythm of their slow caress\n Wavers and pauses on the verge of tears.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "mass-at-dawn": { - "title": "“Mass at Dawn”", - "body": "I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines\nWhere the white quay is chequered by cool planes\nIn whose great branches, always out of sight,\nThe nightingales are singing day and night.\nThough all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,\nMy boat in her new paint shone like a bride,\nAnd silver in my baskets shone the bream:\nMy arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,\nBut when with food and drink, at morning-light,\nThe children met me at the water-side,\nNever was wine so red or bread so white.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "mazeppa": { - "title": "“Mazeppa”", - "body": "Helpless, condemned, yet still for mercy croaking\nLike a trussed rooster swinging by the claws,\nThey hoisted him: they racked his joints asunder;\nThey lashed his belly to a thing of thunder--\nA tameless brute, with hate and terror smoking,\nThat never felt the bit between its jaws.\n\nSo when his last vain struggle had subsided,\nHis gleeful butchers wearied of the fun:\nLooping the knots about his thighs and back,\nWith lewd guffaws they heard his sinews crack,\nAnd laughed to see his lips with foam divided,\nHis eyes too glazed with blood to know the sun.\n\nA whip cracked, they were gone: alone they followed\nThe endless plain: the long day volleyed past\nWith only the white clouds above them speeding\nAnd the grey steppe into itself receding,\nWhere each horizon, by a vaster swallowed,\nRepeated but the bareness of the last.\n\nOut of his trance he wakened: on they flew:\nThe blood ran thumping down into his brain:\nWith skull a-dangle, facing to the sky\nThat like a great black wind went howling by,\nFoaming, he strove to gnash the tethers through\nThat screwed his flesh into a knot of pain.\n\nTo him the earth and sky were drunken things--\nBucked from his senses, jolted to and fro,\nHe only saw them reeling hugely past,\nAs sees a sailor soaring at the mast,\nWho retches as his sickening orbit swings\nThe sea above him and the sky below.\n\nInto his swelling veins and open scars\nThe python cords bit deeper than before\nAnd the great beast, to feel their sharpened sting,\nLooping his body in a thundrous sling\nAs if to jolt his burden to the stars,\nRecoiled, and reared, and plunged ahead once more.\n\nThree days had passed, yet could not check nor tire\nThat cyclone whirling in its spire of sand:\nCharged with resounding cordite, as they broke\nIn sudden flashes through the flying smoke,\nThe fusillading hoofs in rapid fire\nRumbled a dreary volley through the land.\n\nNow the dark sky with gathering ravens hums:\nAnd vultures, swooping down on his despair,\nStruck at the loose and lolling head whereunder\nThe flying coffin sped, the hearse of thunder,\nWhose hoof-beats with the roll of muffled drums\nLed on the black processions of the air.\n\nThe fourth sun saw the great black wings descending\nWhere crashed in blood and spume the charger lay:\nFrom the snapped cords a shapeless bundle falls--\nScarce human now, like a cut worm he crawls\nStill with a shattered arm his face defending\nAs inch by inch he drags himself away.\n\nWho’d give a penny for that strip of leather?\nGo, set him flapping in a field of wheat,\nOr take him as a pull-through for your gun,\nOr hang him up to kipper in the sun,\nOr leave him here, a strop to hone the weather\nAnd whet the edges of the wind and sleet.\n\nWho on that brow foresees the gems aglow?\nWho, in that shrivelled hand, the sword that swings\nWide as a moonbeam through the farthest regions,\nTo crop the blood-red harvest of the legions,\nMaking amends to every cheated crow\nAnd feasting vultures on the fat of kings.\n\nThis is that Tartar prince, superbly pearled,\nWhose glory soon on every wind shall fly,\nWhose arm shall wheel the nations into battle,\nWhose warcry, rounding up the tribes like cattle,\nShall hurl his cossacks rumbling through the world\nAs thunder hurls the hail-storm through the sky.\n\nAnd so it is whenever some new god,\nBoastful, and young, and avid of renown,\nWould make his presence known upon the earth--\nChoosing some wretch from those of mortal birth,\nHe takes his body like a helpless clod\nAnd on the croup of genius straps it down.\n\nWith unseen hand he knots the cord of pain,\nUnseen the winged courser strains for flight:\nHe leads it forth into some peopled space\nWhere the dull eyes of those who throng the place\nSee not the wings that wave, the thews that strain,\nBut only mark the victim of their might.\n\nLeft for the passing rabble to admire,\nHe fights for breath, he chokes, and rolls his eyes:\nThey mime his agonies with loud guffaws,\nThey pelt him from the place with muddy paws,\nNor do they hear the sudden snort of fire\nTo which the tether snaps, the great wings rise …\n\nVertiginously through the heavens rearing,\nPlunging through chasms of eternal pain,\nSplendours and horrors open on his view,\nAnd wingèd fiends like fiercer kites pursue,\nWith hateful patience at his side careering,\nTo hook their claws of iron on his brain.\n\nWith their green eyes his solitude is starlit,\nThat lamp the dark and lurk in every brier:\nHe sinks obscure into the night of sorrow\nTo rise again, refulgent on the morrow,\nWith eagles for his ensigns, and the scarlet\nHorizon for his Rubicon of fire.\n\nOut of his pain, perhaps, some god-like thing,\nIs born. A god has touched him, though with whips:\nWe only know that, hooted from our walls,\nHe hurtles on his way, he reels, he falls,\nAnd staggers up to find himself a king\nWith truth a silver trumpet at his lips.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "mithras-speaks": { - "title": "“Mithras Speaks”", - "body": "# I.\n\n“A flitting rainbow in your life,\nyour body but a passing cloud,\nremember this when you are proud\nor when you look upon a knife.”\n(He said) “We work for the same Boss\nthough you are earth and I a star,\nand herdsmen both, though my guitar\nis strung to strum the world across!\nas if you’d known me all your life\ngo with good luck as with a wife;\nthough there’s a line you may not cross\nyou will not find it in this land\nand you can sleep on this kaross”\n(He stroked the meadow with his hand).\n\n\n# II.\n\n“The World put down its lovely mane,\nyour fathers strokes it with their ships;\nthey won you, with their guns and whips,\nthe huge hosannah of the plain.\nThrough the lush lilies as you crash\nand rein horizons in your hold,\nwhile, baying fire, the aloes slash\nyour stirrups with their fangs of gold--\nSing, Cowboy! string your strong guitar!\nFor each Vaquero is a star\nand Abel’s sons the line will cross,\nunder the stretched, terrific wings,\nthe outspread arms (our soaring King’s)--\nthe man they made an Albatross!”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-morning": { - "title": "“The Morning”", - "body": "The woods have caught the singing flame\nin live bouquets of loveliest hue--\nthe scarlet fink, the chook, the sprew,\nthat seem to call me by my name.\nSuch friendship, understanding, truth,\nthis morning from its Master took\nas if San Juan de la Cruz\nhad written it in his own book,\nand went on reading it aloud\nuntil his voice was half the awe\nwith which this loneliness is loud,\nand every word were what I saw\nlive, shine, or suffer in that Ray\nwhose only shadow is our day.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-olive-tree-i": { - "title": "“The Olive Tree” I", - "body": "# I.\n\n In bare country shorn of leaf,\n By no remote sierra screened,\n Where pauses in the wind are brief\n As the remorses of a fiend,\n The stark Laocoön this tree\n Forms of its knotted arm and thigh\n In snaky tussle with a sky\n Whose hatred is eternity,\n Through his white fronds that whirl and seethe\n And in the groaning root he screws,\n Makes heard the cry of all who breathe,\n Repulsing and accusing still\n The Enemy who shaped his thews\n And is inherent to his will.\n\n# II.\n\n Curbed athlete hopeless of the palm,\n If in the rising moon he hold,\n Discobolos, a quoit of gold\n Caught in his gusty sweep of arm,\n Or if he loom against the dawn,\n The circle where he takes his run\n To hurl the discus of the sun\n Is by his own dark shadow drawn:\n The strict arena of his game\n Whose endless effort is denied\n More room for victory or pride\n Than what he covers with his shame.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "on-the-top-of-the-caderau": { - "title": "“On the Top of the Caderau”", - "body": "The splintering hail of the night was continued\nBy the shimmering beams of a morning that sinewed\nThe lowlands with silver, and trawled to the plains,\nRill-threaded, the sweep of its glittering seines:\nAs we rode to the summit (high over a cliff\nIt would dizzy the kestrel to plummet) the wind was a stiff\nBee-line to the sun, that it flew like a thundering kite,\nTunny-finned, and humming with gems, in the ocean of light.\nAnd red on the blue-black blinding azure, your coat\nLike a banner of fire in the storming of heaven afloat,\nA flaunted bridle challenge was swung for the sunbeam to gore\nBy the jewelled Aquilon, a glittering toreador;\nAnd under the blue-black buffeted rook of your hair\nYour face was a silvery cry in the solitude there,\nAs you reared your white horse on the summit reminding me this--\nThat the steepest nevadas of rapture rise over the deepest abyss.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "an-open-window": { - "title": "“An Open Window”", - "body": "An open window where the blue\nWind washed the snowy flowers with dew,\nMy lateness to deride,\nAcross my sunken pillow threw\nThe morning’s silver pride\nWhen I from sullen dreams awoke\nAnd to my doubts, before they spoke,\nUnbidden thoughts replied--\n\n“We were not idle though you slept\nBut, secret spiders, we have kept\nThe track of wasted hours:\nIn corners you had left unswept\nThe busy toil was ours\nBy which, before the dawn was red,\nA thousand suns of silk were spread\nTo catch the falling showers.”\n\n“Our webs are lit with stars of dew:\nPulleyed with pearls, each frosty clue\nIts maze of glory runs,\nWhile we, reflecting every hue,\nAs eager as the Sons\nOf Morning to exalt their Sire,\nShoot forth our rays of liquid fire\nTo multiply the sun’s.”\n\n“Before the lark had left the corn,\nYour love had bathed, and to the morn\nWas up to show the way:\nWe saw how with her blood the dawn\nHad fused its silver ray\nTill on your bed’s cool-quilted snows,\nFlushed as the phantom of a rose,\nHer lighted shadow lay.”\n\n“Nor slow to follow in her way\nSee how, in lovely disarray,\nNew hope, with limbs aglow,\nStands at the chilly brink of day\nAnd hesitating so,\nIn that clear current, half in fright\nAt the swift tremor of delight,\nHas dipped a rosy toe.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "overtime": { - "title": "“Overtime”", - "body": " Amongst the ponderous tomes of learning.\n Dull texts of medicine and law,\n With idle thumb the pages turning\n In sudden carnival, I saw,\n Revelling forth into the day\n In scarlet liveries, nine or ten\n Survivors of their own decay--\n The flayed anatomies of men:\n And marked how well the scalpel’s care\n Was aided by the painter’s tones\n To liven with a jaunty air\n Their crazy trellises of bones.\n In regimental stripes and bands\n Each emphasised the cause he serves--\n Here was a grenadier of glands\n And there a gay hussar of nerves:\n And one his skin peeled off, as though\n A workman’s coat, with surly shrug\n The flexion of the thews to show,\n Treading a shovel, grimly dug.\n Dour sexton, working overtime,\n With gristly toes he hooked his spade\n To trench the very marl and slime\n In which he should have long been laid.\n The lucky many of the dead--\n Their suit of darkness fits them tight,\n Buttoned with stars from foot to head\n They wear the uniform of Night;\n But some for extra shift are due\n Who, slaves for any fool to blame,\n With a flayed sole the ages through\n Must push the shovel of their fame.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-palm": { - "title": "“The Palm”", - "body": "Blistered and dry was the desert I trod\nWhen out of the sky with the step of a god,\nVictory-vanned, with her feathers out-fanned,\nThe palm tree alighting my journey delayed\nAnd spread me, inviting, her carpet of shade.\nVain were evasions, though urgent my quest,\nAnd there as the guest of her rustling persuasions\nTo lie in the shade of her branches was best.\nLike a fountain she played, spilling plume over plume in\nA leafy cascade for the winds to illumine,\nAscending in brilliance and falling in shade,\nAnd spurning the ground with a tiptoe resilience,\nDanced to the sound of the music she made.\nHer voice intervened on my shadowed seclusion\nLike a whispered intrusion of seraph or fiend,\nIn its tone was the hiss of the serpent’s wise tongue\nBut soft as the kiss of a lover it stung--\n“Unstrung is your lute? For despair are you silent?\nAm I not an island in oceans as mute?\nAround me the thorns of the desert take root;\nThough I spring from the rock of a region accurst,\nYet fair is the daughter of hunger and thirst\nWho sings like the water the valleys have nursed,\nAnd rings her blue shadow as deep and as cool\nAs the heavens of azure that sleep on a pool.\nAnd you, who so soon by the toil were undone,\nCould you guess through what horrors my beauty had won\nEre I crested the noon as the bride of the sun?\nThe roots are my anchor struck fast in the hill,\nThe higher I hanker, the deeper they drill,\nThrough the red mortar their claws interlock\nTo ferret the water through warrens of rock.\nEach inch of my glory was wrenched with a groan,\nCorroded with fire from the base of my throne\nAnd drawn like a wire from the heart of a stone:\nThough I soar in the height with a shape of delight\nUplifting my stem like the string of a kite,\nYet still must each grade of my climbing be told\nAnd still from the summit my measure I hold,\nSounding the azure with plummet of gold.\nPartaking the strain of the heavenward pride\nThat soars me away from the earth I deride,\nThough my stem be a rein that would tether me down\nAnd fasten a chain on the height of my crown,\nYet through its tense nerve do I measure my might,\nThe strain of its curb is the strength of my flight:\nAnd when, by the hate of the hurricane blown,\nIt doubles its forces with fibres that groan,\nExulting I ride in the tower of my pride\nTo feel that the strength of the blast is my own …\nRest under my branches, breathe deep of my balm\nFrom the hushed avalanches of fragrance and calm,\nFor suave is the silence that poises the palm.\nThe wings of the egrets are silken and fine,\nBut hushed with the secrets of Eden are mine:\nYour spirit that grieves like the wind in my leaves\nShall be robbed of its care by those whispering thieves\nTo study my patience and hear, the day long,\nThe soft foliations of sand into song--\nFor bitter and cold though it rasp to my root,\nEach atom of gold is the chance of a fruit,\nThe sap is the music, the stem is the flute,\nAnd the leaves are the wings of the seraph I shape\nWho dances, who springs in a golden escape,\nOut of the dust and the drought of the plain,\nTo sing with the silver hosannas of rain.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "pomegranates": { - "title": "“Pomegranates”", - "body": "Sung by the nightingale to birth\nWhose ringing pearls were all the dew\nWith which, the long dry summer through,\nThe rainless azure fed their dearth--\n\nPomegranates, colder than the noon,\nIn whom a maiden breast rebels,\nForcing the smooth gold of their shells\nTo split with rubies to the moon.\n\nIn whose half-opened husks we see,\nWhere the rich blood of autumn swells,\nThe membranes and the rosy cells\nTo which the sunbeam was the bee:--\n\nLike musing brows with patience fraught\nUntil their secret gems be shown,\nAnd through their inward toil alone\nMade royal with a crown of thought:--\n\nAs to some poet’s labours wed\nTo dream Golcondas from despair,\nTill some pure act of faith or prayer\nShall freeze the crimson tears they shed:--\n\nLike lovers’ hearts to ripeness grown\nThe rapturous red wine they bleed\nIs chambered in each lustrous seed\nAs light within a carven stone.\n\nWarm-flushing through their films of frost\nWith rosy smiles and crystal teeth\nA yielding beauty seems to breathe\nWhose language on our lips is lost.\n\nTheir speech in coolness dies away,\nThawed by a breath, they change and tremble\nAs the lips they most resemble\nWhen one red kiss is all they say.\n\nToo fain in fragrance to escape,\nTheir form eludes the clearest phrase\nWhen Psyche, in a sister’s praise,\nWould carve her crystals in their shape.\n\nIn vain her vision seeks to prove\nThe secret structure of those grains\nWhose dewy membranes and lit veins\nRemind her most of those I love.\n\nIf new similitudes to try,\nFusing them with her speech, she sips\nThose seeds whose death upon the lips\nIs half a kiss and half a sigh--\n\nMoulding those phrases with her tongue\nThat melt as sweetly, by a spell\nSo transient that she cannot tell\nIf they be tasted, kissed, or sung--\n\nTheir gems so ruddy to the eye\nAre snow upon the mouth that sips:\nBut even when they cheat the lips\nAnd, born of song, on perfume die,--\n\nAre most conspiring with her theme\nThe true resemblance to disclose,\nAnd tell the secrets of the rose\nWhose changing reveries they seem.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "posada": { - "title": "“Posada”", - "body": "Outside, it froze. On rocky arms\nSleeping face-upwards to the sun\nLay Spain. Her golden hair was spun\nFrom sky to sky. Her mighty charms\nBreathed soft beneath her robe of farms\nAnd gardens: while her snowy breasts,\nSierras white, with crimson crests,\nWere stained with sunset. At the Inn,\nA priest, a soldier, and a poet\n(Fate-summoned, though they didn’t know it)\nMet there, a shining hour to win.\nA song, a blessing, and a grin\nWere melted in one cup of mirth,\nThe Eternal Triumvirs of Earth\nForesaw their golden age begin.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-prodigal": { - "title": "“The Prodigal”", - "body": "John Bull, go fatten up your Son\nAgainst my passing by,\nAnd Jackie Calf! be underdone\nWhether you roast or fry;\nI’ll take my time of Day from none--\nGo carefully, say I!\n\nWhen clocks like whirling windmills turn\nAnd scarcely pause to chime\nLike fast propellers at the stern\nOf disappearing Time,\nThen Time’s to squander, Time’s to burn,\nAnd Leisure is no crime.\n\nYou’ve slung the World upon a cord\nYour pendulum of rock;\nIts every beat though you record,\nI care no tick nor tock--\nThe Pen is mightier than the Sword,\nBut slower than the Clock.\n\nAmphitryon may toot his horn\nAnd puff-puff run to date,\nBut leisure was my cash and corn\nWho’ve loitered in my gait,\nNor died of hurry, nor was born\nThrough fear of being late.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-raven": { - "title": "“The Raven”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe flesh-devouring bird of time\nsails overhead; of his dark flight\nthe streamers of immortal rhyme\nillume the Scandinavian Night:\nall joys on which our lives are flown\nin those great wings of darkness flare--\nthe blue flame that my lover’s hair\ntrawls like the moonrise on the Rhône:\nthe red flame that the circling wine\nswivels around these sombre walls\nwhen friendship is the most divine\nand far too soon the morning falls--\nare fuel that his flight consumes\nto burnish those unageing plumes.\n\n\n# II.\n\nUpon the red crag of my heart\nhis gorgeous pinions came to rest\nwhere year by year with curious art\nhe piles the faggots of his nest,\nold forest antlers lichen-hoary\nand driftwood fished from lunar seas\nthat once had blossomed with the lory\nand trumpeted the golden bees:\nand steeper yet he stacks the pyre\nto tempt the forked, cremating fire\nto strike, to kindle, and consume:\ntill answering beacons shall attest\nthat fire is in the Raven’s nest\nand resurrection in the tomb.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHis home of firewood from the skies\nreclaims the fire, a bride to house:\ndumb claws of thunderstricken boughs,\nthat clenched in imprecation rise\ntheir scent and colour to implore\nas first from out the sun it came--\nand all that Burning can restore\nof sweated resins, leafing flame,\nof whistling tongues and scented air,\nto bud with singing hearts, to bear\none crop of nightingales and fruits,\nand foliate in plumes and wings\nuntil the verdure flies and sings\nand birds are flowering from the roots.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "reflection": { - "title": "“Reflection”", - "body": " My thought has learned the lucid art\n By which the willows lave their limbs,\n Whose form upon the water swims\n Though in the air they rise apart.\n For when with my delight I lie,\n By purest reason unreproved,\n Psyche usurps the outward eye\n To trace her inward sculpture grooved\n In one melodious line, whose flow\n With eddying circle now invests\n The rippled silver of her breasts,\n Now shaves a flank of rose-lit snow,\n Or rounds a cheek where sunset dies\n In the black starlight of her eyes.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-rejoneador": { - "title": "“The Rejoneador”", - "body": " While in your lightly veering course\n A seraph seems to take his flight,\n The swervings of your snowy horse,\n Volted with valour and delight,\n In thundering orbit wheel the Ring\n Which Apis pivots with his pain\n And of whose realm, with royal stain,\n His agony anoints you king.\n His horns the moon, his hue the night,\n The dying embers of his sight\n Across their bloody film may view\n The star of morning rise in fire,\n Projectile of the same desire\n Whose pride is animate in you.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "resurrection": { - "title": "“Resurrection”", - "body": "The sun leaves rosy with his breath\nA heaven rinsed with silver rains,\nAnd on the golden verge of death\nThe lingering storm in glory gains:\n\nWhile the red light and rolling thunder\nUnvanquished from their fight withdraw:\nDim to the eyes’ yet vibrant wonder\nWhom such a vision held in awe,\n\nExhaling in the mists of gold\nFrom every pollen-wreathed husk,\nHis triumphs in the stars foretold,\nA shade emerges in the dusk,\n\nA wrestler such as Jacob knew\nWhose strength increases with the hours,\nA Hercules of matchless thew\nWhose body is the breath of flowers--\n\nSo evening with a god grew full\nWhen Jove, amid such blossomed thorns,\nRaised, in the lily-breathing Bull,\nThe silver moonrise of his horns.\n\nAntaeus of the fallen storms,\nThe resurrection of the power\nWhose splendours in the frailest forms\nThe most unconquerably tower,\n\nThe Form whose challenge, high and loud,\nThe whistling fifes of wind had spun,\nWhose rolling muscles to a proud\nRepulse had dared the noonday sun,\n\nWhose heavy torrent-hurling shock\nHad filled the roaring gullies, bowed\nThe groaning tree, and split the rock--\nHad worn no armour but a cloud,\n\nAnd now from the wet earth reborn,\nAll Africa his phoenix pyre,\nOut of a thousand leagues of thorn\nHad softly smouldered into fire.\n\nThe lightning sinews of his limbs\nAre in that soft effulgence furled\nAnd on the breath of incense swims\nThe thunderbolt his anger hurled.\n\nDiffusing on through endless space,\nMajestic peace without a flaw,\nWild is the light that from his face\nThe woods and dreaming waters draw.\n\nThe skies are with his trophies hung--\nThe Bull, the Lion, and the Bear;\nWhat spoil of victories unsung\nRemains to be erected there?\n\nThe gorgeous Ram that horns his lyre\nOf silence: whose great pelt is rolled\nTo quilt a thousand hills with fire\nIn the acacia’s fleece of gold--\n\nRound which, astream through flowering vales,\nDread guardians, pythoning the spoils,\nLit by the moon with glittering scales\nThe great Zambezis wreathe their coils--\n\nShorn from the shoulders of the morning\nBy his strong arm of thunder, yields\nIts shaggy hide, his thews adorning\nIn all the fragrance of the fields.\n\nYet through the wreaths of cloudy fire\nThat crown the hazard of his quest,\nStill to new victories aspire\nThe broodings of his dark unrest.\n\nAnd his long gaze, down some immense\nHorizon of horizons drawn,\nYearns to the fleeced magnificence\nAnd fire of its perennial dawn.\n\nShort is the peace, though hushed and breathless,\nIn which we feel the victor’s will\nAnd its intrinsic hydra, deathless,\nReviving at the self-same rill.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-road-to-arles": { - "title": "“The Road to Arles”", - "body": "From the cold huntress shorn of any veil\nBare trees, the target of her silver spite,\nDown the long avenue in staggy flight\nAre hunted by the hungers of the gale:\nAlong the cold grey torrent of the sky\nWhere branch the fatal trophies of his brows,\nActæon, antlered in the wintry boughs,\nRears to the stars his mastiff-throttled cry.\nPride has avenging arrows for the eyes\nThat strip her beauty silver of disguise,\nAnd she has dogs before whose pace to flee--\nIn front a waste, behind a bended bow,\nAnd a long race across the stony Crau\nTorn in each gust, and slain in every tree.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "rust": { - "title": "“Rust”", - "body": "See there, and there it gnaws, the Rust--\nVoet-ganger of the coming swarm\nWhose winged innumerable storm\nShall grind their pylons into dust.\n\nWhose dropped asphyxiating dung\nShall fall exploding blood and mire;\nWhose cropping teeth of rattled fire\nShall make one cud of old and young;--\n\nTill turning from the carnage then\nThemselves in anger to devour,\nShall die a race of weary men--\n\nAnd all to spring the dainty flower\nThat, herding on that blasted heath,\nA cowboy chews between his teeth.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "san-juan-sings": { - "title": "“San Juan Sings”", - "body": "--As if San Juan sang aloud\nuntil his song became whatever\ndrew my sight: the sailing cloud:\nthe Sea that rushes on forever,\nand the Sun that makes it proud:\nthe blue wind tethered to the tree\ngrazing the poppies by my side--\nthe wind so blue you cannot see,\nso light and swift you cannot ride!\nthe City White, above the air,\n(the City where I long to go)\nand the sunbeams playing there\nas windblown threads of golden hair\nare scattered on a nape of snow.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "the-secret-muse": { - "title": "“The Secret Muse”", - "body": " Between the midnight and the morn,\n To share my watches late and lonely,\n There dawns a presence such as only\n Of perfect silence can be born.\n On the blank parchment falls the glow\n Of more than daybreak: and one regal\n Thought, like the shadow of an eagle,\n Grazes the smoothness of its snow.\n Though veiled to me that face of faces\n And still that form eludes my art,\n Yet all the gifts my faith has brought\n Along the secret stair of thought\n Have come to me on those hushed paces\n Whose footfall is my beating heart.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-serf": { - "title": "“The Serf”", - "body": "His naked skin clothed in the torrid mist\nThat puffs in smoke around the patient hooves,\nThe ploughman drives, a slow somnambulist,\nAnd through the green his crimson furrow grooves.\nHis heart, more deeply than he wounds the plain,\nLong by the rasping share of insult torn,\nRed clod, to which the war-cry once was rain\nAnd tribal spears the fatal sheaves of corn,\nLies fallow now. But as the turf divides\nI see in the slow progress of his strides\nOver the toppled clods and falling flowers,\nThe timeless, surly patience of the serf\nThat moves the nearest to the naked earth\nAnd ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-seven-swords": { - "title": "“The Seven Swords”", - "body": "Of seven hues in white elision,\nthe radii of your silver gyre,\nare the seven swords of vision\nthat spoked the prophets’ flaming tyre;\ntheir sistered stridences ignite\nthe spectrum of the poets’ lyre\nwhose unison becomes a white\nrevolving disc of stainless fire,\nand sights the eye of that sole star\nthat, in the heavy clods we are,\nthe kindred seeds of fire can spy,\nor, in the cold shell of the rock,\nthe red yolk of the phœnix-cock\nwhose feathers in the meteors fly.\n\n\n# _The First Sword._\n\nThe first’s of lunar crystal hewn,\na woman’s beauty, through whose snows\nthe volted ecstasy outglows\na dolphin dying in the noon;\nand fights for love, as that for life,\nand leaps and turns upon its side\nand swirls the anger of its strife\na radiant iris far and wide,\nbronze, azure, and auroral rose\nfaint-flushing through its nacreous snows--\nelectric in a god’s strong hand\nthis sword was tempered in my blood\nwhen all its tides were at the flood\nand heroes fought upon the strand.\n\n\n# _The Second Sword._\n\nClear spirits of the waveless sea\nhave steeped the second in their light,\na low blue flame, the halcyon’s flight\npassing at sunset swift and free\nalong the miles of tunny-floats\nwhen the soft swell in slumber rolls\nand sways the lanterns on their poles\nand idly rocks the drifting boats;\nwhen evening strews the rosy fleece\nand the low conches sound from far,\na lonely bird whose sword of air\nis hilted with the evening star\nhas slain upon the shrine of peace\nthe daily slaving forms I wear.\n\n\n# _The Third Sword._\n\nLike moonbeams on a wintry sea\nthe third is sorrowful and pale\nand from my vision guards the grail\nwhose glory I shall never see;\na boreal streamer burning green,\nit shivers in a land of shade\nas if some wandering Cain had seen\nhis soul reflected in its blade.\nIt glitters in some frozen hold\nthat leaves its icy hilt unthawn;\nits radius is a flame of cold,\nthe skyline of an arctic dawn;\nVulcan in forging it grew old\nand sorrow froze when it was drawn.\n\n\n# _The Fourth Sword._\n\nIn crimson sash and golden vest\na gay dædalion of the day\ntransfixing with a sworded ray\nits black and melancholy breast,\nthe tiger-fly with whirring vans\nrifles a sombre grape, whose heart,\nred-glowing to the hilted dart,\nseems a lit furnace that he fans--\nso to the soured and black despairs\nmy blasted vine in autumn bears,\nso horneted with strident wings,\nto his own trumpet peal and drum\nthe toreadoring sylph will come\nand anger is the sword he brings.\n\n\n# _The Fifth Sword._\n\nSilent and vertical and dim\nthe lunar flambeau of a prayer\nthat rising in the frosty air\nis silvered by the seraphim,\nthawing the night with airy blade,\nlike a funereal candle set\nto burn the fuel of regret\n(though in the noon it casts a shade)\nthe fifth, a lifetime to consume,\nin vigilance is still the same,\na sword of silver in the gloom\nit guards a grief that is my shame;\nby day a cypress on a tomb,\nbut in the night it is a flame.\n\n\n# _The Sixth Sword._\n\nFrom that Toledo of the brain\nwhere none but perfect steel is wrought,\nof all its cities thronged with thought\nthat soars the farthest from the plain,\nclear lightning with a sheath of gold,\na scarlet tassel at the hilt,\na blade the noonday sun to jilt\nand sparkle in a cherub’s hold,\nthe sixth salutes the last Crusade\nand her, by all the world betrayed,\nwho reared its red and golden streamer\nupon the ramparts of Castile--\nof the great West the sole redeemer\nand rainbow of the Storms of Steel.\n\n\n# _The Seventh Sword._\n\nThe seventh arms a god’s desire\nwho lusts, in Psyche, to possess\nhis white reluctant pythoness;\nas in the fugitive of fire,\npale ice, the sworded flame is caught;\nor the red images of ire\nin the pure person of a thought.\nAs arctic crystals that would shun,\nbut each become, the living sun,\nwhere best his image may be sought;\nso to the shining sword he probes,\nher breasts are lighted, and their globes\neach to a vase of crystal wrought.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-shell": { - "title": "“The Shell”", - "body": "The azure films upon her eyes\nAre folded like the wings of terns;\nBut still the wavering tide returns,\nAnd in her hair an ocean sighs:\nStill in her flesh the Anger glows\nAnd in her breathing seems to hiss\nThe phantom of the fiercest kiss\nWith which we slew its crimson rose--\nAs in a flushed barbaric shell\nWhose lips of coral, sharked with pearls,\nOf the remembered surges tell,\nA ghostly siren swells the roar\nAnd sings of some deserted shore\nWithin whose caves the ocean swirls.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "silence": { - "title": "“Silence”", - "body": "I know your footfall hushed and frail,\nFair siren of the snow-born lake\nWhose surface only swans should sail\nAnd only silver hymns should break,\nOr thankful prayers devout as this\nWhite trophy of a night of sighs\nWhere Psyche celebrates the kiss\nWith which a sister closed her eyes.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-sisters": { - "title": "“The Sisters”", - "body": "After hot loveless nights, when cold winds stream\nSprinkling the frost and dew, before the light,\nBored with the foolish things that girls must dream\nBecause their beds are empty of delight,\n\nTwo sisters rise and strip. Out from the night\nTheir horses run to their low-whistled pleas--\nVast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white\nThat sneeze a fiery steam about their knees:\n\nThrough the crisp manes their stealthy prowling hands,\nStronger than curbs, in slow caresses rove,\nThey gallop down across the milk-white sands\nAnd wade far out into the sleeping cove:\n\nThe frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss\nAs intimate as love, as cold as death:\nTheir lips, whereon delicious tremors hiss,\nFume with the ghostly pollen of their breath.\n\nFar out on the grey silence of the flood\nThey watch the dawn in smouldering gyres expand\nBeyond them: and the day burns through their blood\nLike a white candle through a shuttered hand.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-skull-in-the-desert": { - "title": "“The Skull in the Desert”", - "body": "I am not one his bread who peppers\nWith stars of nebulous illusion,\nBut learned, with soldiers, mules, and lepers\nAs comrades of my education,\nThe Economy of desolation\nAnd Architecture of confusion\n\nOn the bare sands, where nothing else is\nSave death, and like a lark in love,\nGyrating through the vault above,\nThe ace of all created things\nFlies singing Gloria in Excelsis\nAnd spreads the daybreak from his wings:\n\nI found a horse’s empty cranium,\nWhich the hyenas had despised,\nWherein the wind ventriloquised\nAnd fluting huskily afar\nSang of the rose and the geranium\nAnd evenings lit with azahar.\n\nFoaled by the Apocalypse, and stranded\nSome wars, or plagues, or famines back,\nTo bleach beside the desert track,\nHe kept his hospitable rule:\nA pillow for the roving bandit,\nA signpost to the stricken mule.\n\nA willing host, adeptly able,\nSmoking a long cheroot of flame,\nTo catalyse the sniper’s aim\nOr entertain the poet’s dream,\nBy turns a gunrest or a table,\nAn inspiration, and a theme--\n\nHe served the desert for a Sphinx\nAnd to the wind for a guitar,\nFor in the harmony he drinks\nTo rinse his whirring casque of bone\nThere hums a rhythm less its own\nThan of the planet and the star.\n\nNo lion with a lady’s face\nCould better have become the spot\nInterrogating time and space\nAnd making light of their replies\nAs he endured the soldier’s lot\nOf dissolution, sand, and flies.\n\nSo white a cenotaph to show\nYou did not have to be a banker\nOr poet of the breed we know:\nSubjected to a sterner law,\nThe luckless laughter of the ranker\nWas sharked upon his lipless jaw.\n\nAll round, the snarled and windrowed sands\nExpressed the scandal of the waves,\nAnd in this orphan of the graves\nAs in a conch, there seemed to roar\nReverberations of the Hand\nThat piles the wrecks along the shore.\n\nTwice I had been the Ocean’s refuse\nAs now the flotsam of the sand,\nFar worse at sea upon the land\nThan ever in the drink before\nFor Triton, with his sons and nephews,\nTo gargle and to puke ashore.\n\nTo look on him, my tongue could taste\nThe bony mandibles of death\nBetween my cheeks: across the waste\nThe drought was glaring like a gorgon\nBut in that quaint outlandish organ\nWith spectral whinny, whirled the breath.\n\nThe wind arrived, the gorgon-slayer,\nDefied the wind that rose to whelm it,\nAnd swirled like water in the helmet\nOf that dead brain, with crystal voices,\nArticulating in a prayer\nThe love with which the rain rejoices--\n\nThe zephyr from the blue Nevadas,\nStirrupped with kestrels, smoothly rinking\nThe level wave where halcyons drowse,\nCame with the whirr of the cicadas,\nWith the green song of orchards drinking\nAnd orioles fluting in the boughs.\n\nAll the green juices of creation,\nAnd those with which our veins are red,\nWere mingled in his jubilation\nAnd sang the swansong of the planet\nAmidst the solitudes of granite\nAnd the grey sands that swathe the dead.\n\nAll I had left of will or mind,\nWhich fire or fever had not charred,\nWas but the shaving, husk, and shard:\nBut that sufficed to catch the air\nAnd from the pentecostal wind\nConceive the whisper of a prayer.\n\nAnd soon that prayer became a hymn\nBy feeding on itself. The skies\nWere tracered by the seraphim\nWith arrows from the dim guitars\nThat on their strings funambulise\nThe tap-dance of the morning stars.\n\nWhen frowsy proverbs lose their force\nAnd tears have dried their queasy springs,\nTo hope and pray for crowns and wings\nIt follows as a thing of course,\nWhen you’ve phrenologised the horse\nThat on the desert laughs and sings.\n\nI leave the Helmet and the Spear\nTo the hyena-bellied muses\nThat farm this carnage from the rear:\nBut of the sacrifice they fear\nAnd of the strain their sloth refuses\nElect me as the engineer.\n\nMake of my bones your fife and organ,\nRed winds of pestilence and fire!\nBut from the rust on the barbed-wire\nAnd scurf upon the pool that stinks\nI fetch a nosegay for the Gorgon\nAnd a conundrum for the Sphinx:\n\nFor all the freight of Stygian ferries,\nRoll on the days of halcyon weather,\nThe oriole fluting in the cherries,\nThe sunlight sleeping on the farms,\nTo say the Rosary together\nAnd sleep in one another’s arms!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Talking Bronco", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "the-sleeper": { - "title": "“The Sleeper”", - "body": "She lies so still, her only motion\nThe waves of hair that round her sweep\nRevolving to their hushed explosion\nOf fragrance on the shores of sleep.\nIs it my spirit or her flesh\nThat takes this breathless, silver swoon?\nSleep has no darkness to enmesh\nThat lonely rival of the moon,\nHer beauty, vigilant and white,\nThat wakeful through the long blue night,\nWatches, with own sleepless eyes,\nThe darkness silver into day,\nAnd through their sockets burns away\nThe sorrows that have made them wise.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "a-sleeping-woman": { - "title": "“A Sleeping Woman”", - "body": " Reddening through the gems of frost\n That twinkle on the milk-white thorn,\n Softly hesitates the morn\n In whom as yet no star is lost.\n From skies the colour of her skin,\n So touched with golden down, so fair,\n Where glittering cypress seems to spin\n The black refulgence of her hair,\n Clear as a glass the day replies\n To every feature save her eyes\n But shows their lashes long and fine\n Across her cheek by slumber drawn,\n As the black needles of the pine\n Are feathered on the flush of dawn.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "the-sling": { - "title": "“The Sling”", - "body": "Guarding the cattle on my native hill\nThis was my talisman. Its charm was known\nHigh in the blue and aquiline ozone,\nAnd by my tireless armourer, the rill,\nSmoothing his pellets to my hand or eye:\nAnd how its meteors sang into the sky\nThe eagles of the Berg remember still.\n\nI wore this herdsman’s bracelet all day long:\nTo me it meant ‘To-morrow’ and ‘Perhaps’,\nThe insults of Goliath, his collapse,\nMuch fighting, and (who knows?) a life of song.\nSo fine a jewel at his wrist to swing\n(For it was Chance) has seldom graced a king--\nAs I have dangled on a rawhide thong.\n\nIt spelt me luck in every polished stone\nThat to its mark, or thereabouts, had won:\nFor it had been to a poor herdsman’s son\nA stirrup once, to vault into a throne\nAnd ride a nation over its despair;\nTo me, it seemed an amulet of prayer,\nRemembering David and the warrior Joan.\n\nI thought of the incendiary hope\nSuch herdsmen brought to cities from the hills.\nTaught by the rash example of the rills,\nLeaping in fire, to rush the headlong slope,\nTo gather impetus for height that’s lost,\nAnd hurtle through, regardless of the cost,\nWhere cunning or precaution have no scope.\n\nWhen I have felt the whiff of madness’ wing,\nAnd rioted in barrios of shame,\nWhere all they gave me was a thirsty flame,\nTo burn my lips, that could no longer sing--\nAround my fevered pulse to cool the flame,\nThere ghosted at my wrist an airy sling\nAnd drew me to a garden, or a spring.\n\nMy link, in its long absence, with delight:\nMy handcuff (if I looked upon a knife)\nThat chained me to the miracle of life\nThrough a long frost and winter of the sprite:\nAnd ready, at most need, to arm my prayer,\nAs once, when cries and feathers filled the air,\nIt saved a silver egret from a kite.\n\nWhen stranded on these unfamiliar feet\nWithout a horse, and in the Stranger’s land,\nLike any tamest Redneck to your hand,\nI shuffled with the Charlies in the street\nForgetting I was born a Centaur’s foal;\nWhen like the rest, I would have sawn my soul\nShort at the waist, where man and mount should meet--\n\nIts tightened thong would jerk me to control,\nAnd never let the solar memory set\nOf those blue highlands which are Eden yet\nFor all the rage of dynamite or coal--\nWhose sunrise is the vision that I see then,\nThat, hurled like Bruce’s heart amongst the heathen,\nLeads on our White Commando to its goal!\n\nWhere none break ranks though down the whole race treks,\nIt taught me how to separate, and choose;\nThe uniform they ordered, to refuse--\nThe hornrimmed eyes, the ringworm round their necks;\nAnd, when the Prince of herdsmen rode on high,\nTo rope those hikers with that bolshie tie,\nTo save my scruff, and see without the specs:--\n\nChoosing my pebbles (to distinguish, free)\nI had dispensed with numbers; finding how,\nSince Space was always Here as Time was Now,\nExtent of either means a Fig to me;\nTo the whole field I can prefer a flower\nAnd know that States are foundered by an hour\nWhile centuries may groan to fell a tree.\n\nBy its cool guidance I unread my books\nAnd learned, in spite of theories and charts,\nThings have a nearer meaning to their looks\nThan to their dead analyses in parts;\nAnd how (for all the outfit be antique)\nOur light is in our heads; and we can seek\nThe clearest information in our hearts.\n\nIt taught me to inflict or suffer pain:\nThat my worst fortune was to serve me right,\nAnd though it be the fashion to complain,\nSelf-pity is the ordure of the sprite,\nBut faith its ichor; and though in my course,\nA rival knot the grass to spill my horse,\nThat trusting all to luck is half the fight.\n\nIt taught me that the world is not for Use;\nBut is, to each, the fruit of his desire,\nFrom whose superb Grenade to swill the juice,\nSome thaw its rosy frost into a fire--\nLeaving the husks they most expect to find\nTo those insisting on the horny rind;\nFor it rewards as we to it aspire.\n\nSo ripe a fruit, so ruddy, and so real!--\nTo-night it bleeds, as when in days gone by\n(Aldebaran a rowel at my heel)\nI rounded up the cattle on the sky\nAgainst the Berg’s Toledo-steepled walls--\nAs now, upon the mesas of Castile\nBeside the city that it most recalls.\n\nFor him whose teeth can crack the bitter rind--\nStill to his past the future will reply,\nAnd build a sacred city in his mind\nWith singing towers to thunder in the wind:\nTo light his life will shine the herdsman King\nWho whirls our great Pomegranate in his sling\nTo herd the other planets through the sky.\n\nSlung at his wrist will hang the phantom stress\nOf David’s stone--to weigh that all is right;\nEven to daunt him should the weak unite\nIn one Goliath, he’ll accept and bless,\nWhose home’s the Earth, and Everywhere his bed\nA sheepskin saddle to his seat or head,\nAnd Here and Now his permanent address.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-snake-the-scorpion-and-the-dog": { - "title": "“The Snake, the Scorpion, and the Dog”", - "body": "Now the slain victim to the sun\nwould rise (his mortal ruin shed);\nhis soul its base alloy to shun\ncasts forth the parasites it fed;\ntheir ancient ruler to deride\nhis earthly emanations spring\nlike courtiers round a fallen king--\nhis guile, a serpent at his side,\nwith venom forks the mortal sting;\nthe forceps fix his dangled stones\nas to the scorpion he atones\nthat envy is a creeping thing;\nwhile at his shoulder tugs the beast\nhe gorged the fattest at his feast.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-snake": { - "title": "“The Snake”", - "body": "Damp clods with corn may thank the showers,\nBut when the desert boulder flowers\nNo common buds unfold--\nA Jove to Danae’s bridal showers\nImmortal fire and gold,\nAnd high above the wastes will tower\nThe hydra stem, the deathless flower.\n\nA glory, such as from scant seed\nThe thirsty rocks suffice to breed\nOut of the rainless glare,\nWas born in me of such a need\nAnd of a like despair,\nBut fairer than the aloe sprang\nAnd hilted with a sharper fang.\n\nThe heart whom shame or anger sears\nBeyond the cheap relief of tears\nIts secret never opes,\nSave to the loveliest of fears,\nThe most divine of hopes,\nAnd only when such seeds may find\nA tough resistance in the rind--\n\nHard husks the self-same truth express\nAs, yielding to the sweet excess\nOf hoarded gems within,\nThey crack to show the rich recess\nOur thirsty lips would win,\nWhen ripe grenades that drink the sun\nResolving into rubies run.\n\nSo from the old Anchises’ tomb\nAll that the fire could not consume,\nThe living ichor, flowed,\nA serpent from the rocky womb\nWhere barren death abode,\nWith lifted crest and radiant gyre\nRevolving into wheels of fire.\n\nNo rock so pure a crystal rears\nBut filed with water, thawed with years,\nOr by its prophet struck,\nIts breast may sparkle into tears\nFor thirsting hordes to suck.\nBut it was to a sorer dint\nAnd flashing from a harder flint\n\nThat, smitten by its angry god,\nMy heart recoiling to the rod\nRilled forth its stream of pride,\nA serpent from the rifted clod\nOn rolling wheels to ride,\nWho reared, as if their birth were one,\nTo gaze, an equal, on the Sun.\n\nHis eyes like slots of jet inlaid\nOn their smooth triangle of jade,\nWere vigilant with fire,\nHis armour stripped the sun for braid\nAnd wore the stars for tire\nAnd slid the glory of its greaves\nA stream of moonlight through the leaves.\n\nImmortal longings hold his sight\nStill sunward to that source of light\nDrained from whose crystal spars\nHis slender current rolls its bright\nAlluvium of stars,\nAnd through its winding channel trails\nThe shingle of his burnished scales.\n\nThe news that such a king was crowned\nHas made a solitude around\nHis vigil hushed and calm,\nWhere, with the fruits of Eden wound,\nHe girds the stripling Palm\nAnd shares her starry shade with none\nSave with the silence and the sun.\n\nHis teeth stained crimson with her flowers,\nThere through the blue enchanted hours\nRocked by the winds to rest,\nHer fragrance lulls his folded powers\nWhen slumber sinks his crest\nThrough his own circles clear and cool\nAs through the ripples of a pool.\n\nA crystal freshet through whose sluice\nThe noonday beams their light reduce\nTo one melodious line,\nAnd flow together like the juice\nThat circles in the vine,\nHis frosty ichor drinks the sun\nAnd fuses fire and ice in one.\n\nWhen by the horror-breathing wraith\nThe soul is scorched of hope and faith,\nThis form survives the fire,\nThe living self no flame can scathe,\nThe spine, the ringing wire\nThat silver through its alloy sings\nAnd fresh in each exertion springs.\n\nBlest is the stony ground, where smite\nNo rains but of the angry light,\nAnd rich beyond all dreams,\nWhose stubborn seed will not ignite\nSave to such deathless beams\nAs first through emeralds fire did ray\nAnd into diamonds shot the day:\n\nAnd blest exchange for vain delight,\nFor dreams, the tyrants of the night,\nAnd passions--of the day,\nIs his whose clear, unchanging sight\nThrough triumph, change, decay,\nIn such a serpent’s coiled repose\nHis secret architecture knows.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-solar-enemy": { - "title": "“The Solar Enemy”", - "body": " Enemy of my inward night\n and victor of its bestial Signs\n whose arm against the Bull designs\n the red veronicas of light:\n your cape a roaring gale of gold\n in furious auroras swirled,\n the scarlet of its outward fold\n is of a dawn beyond the world--\n a sky of intellectual fire\n through which the stricken beast may view\n its final agony aspire\n to sun the broad æolian blue--\n my own lit heart, its rays of fire,\n the seven swords that run it through.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "a-song-for-the-people": { - "title": "“A Song for the People”", - "body": "I sing the people; shall the Muse deny\nThe weak, the blind, the humble and the lame\nWho have no purpose save to multiply,\nWho have no will save all to be the same:\nI sing the people as I watch, untamed,\nIts aimless pomps and generations roll--\nA monster whom the drunken gods have maimed\nAnd set upon a road that has no goal.\n\nHow fiercely callous Nature plies her whips\nWhen that tame hydra on the light uprears\nHuge buttock-faces slashed with flabby lips,\nGouged into eyes, and tortured into ears.\nA shapeless mass to any rhythm worked,\nSee how its legs to raucous music stir\nAs if some string of sausages were jerked,\nAnd tugged, and worried by a snarling cur!\n\nDo they too have their loves, and with these clods\nOf bodies do they dare on their bodes\nTo parody our dalliance, or the gods’,\nBy coupling in the chilly sport of toads?\nDo they too feel and hate--under our wheels\nCould they be crushed the deeper in the slime\nWhen forth we ride elate with bloody heels,\nOr jingle in the silver spurs of rhyme?\n\nFunnelled with roaring mouths that gorp like cod\nAnd spit the bitten ends of thick cigars,\nThis is the beast that dares to praise its god\nUnder the calm derision of the stars!\nWhen from the lonely beacons that we tend\nWe gaze far down across the nameless flats,\nWhere the dark road of progress without end\nIs cobbled with a line of bowler hats,\n\nSearching the lampless horror of that fen,\nWe think of those whose pens or swords have made\nSteep ladders of the broken bones of men\nTo climb above its everlasting shade:\nOf men whose scorn has turned them into gods,\nChrists, tyrants, martyrs, who in blood or fire\nDrove their clean furrows through these broken clods\nYet raised no harvest from such barren mire.\n\nIn the cold hour when poets light their tapers\nAnd the tall Muse glides naked to the door,\nWhen by its love, its drinks, its evening papers,\nAll Babel has been lulled into a snore,\nThe pious poet in that silence hears\nLike some pure hymn uplifting his desires\nHow Nero’s fiddle shrills across the years\nAnd to its music leap the dancing fires--\n\nAnd the great Master of the radiant spheres\nTurns from the sleeping multitudes in scorn\nTo where he sees our lonely flames and hears,\nAs when before him sang the sons of morn,\nDown the far ages ringing lofty chimes,\nAbove the prayers of that huge carrion soul,\nOur sacrifices, miracles, and crimes,\nUp to the Throne their sounding anthems roll.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "songs-between-the-soul-and-the-bridegroom": { - "title": "“Songs between the Soul and the Bridegroom”", - "body": " BRIDE Where can your hiding be,\n Beloved, that you left me thus to moan\n While like the stag you flee\n Leaving the wound with me?\n I followed calling loud, but you had flown.\n\n O shepherds, you that, yonder,\n Go through the sheepfolds of the slope on high,\n If you, as there you wander,\n Should chance my love to spy,\n Then tell him that I suffer, grieve, and die.\n\n To fetch my loves more near,\n Amongst these mountains and ravines I’ll stray,\n Nor pluck flowers, nor for fear\n Of prowling beasts delay,\n But pass through forts and frontiers on my way.\n\n O thickets, densely-trammelled,\n Which my love’s hand has sown along the height:\n O field of green, enamelled\n With blossoms, tell me right\n If he has passed across you in his flight.\n\n Diffusing showers of grace\n In haste among these groves his path he took,\n And only with his face,\n Glancing around the place,\n Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.\n\n O who my grief can mend!\n Come, make the last surrender that I yearn for,\n And let there be an end\n Of messengers you send\n Who bring me other tidings than I burn for.\n\n All those that haunt the spot\n Recount your charm, and wound me worst of all\n Babbling I know not what\n Strange rapture they recall\n Which leaves me stretched and dying where I fall.\n\n How can you thus continue\n To live, my life, where your own life is not?\n With all the arrows in you\n And, like a target, shot\n By that which in your breast he has begot.\n\n Why then did you so pierce\n My heart, nor heal it with your touch sublime?\n Why, like a robber fierce,\n Desert me every time\n And not enjoy the plunder of your crime?\n\n Come, end my sufferings quite\n Since no-one else suffices for physician:\n And let mine eyes have sight\n Of you, who are their light,\n Except for whom I scorn the gift of vision.\n\n Reveal your presence clearly\n And kill me with the beauty you discover,\n For pains acquired so dearly\n From love, cannot recover\n Save only through the presence of the lover.\n\n O brook of crystal sheen,\n Could you but cause, upon your silver fine,\n Suddenly to be seen\n The eyes for which I pine\n Which in my inmost heart my thoughts design!\n\n With-hold their gaze, my Love,\n For I take wing.\n\n BRIDEGROOM Turn, Ringdove, and alight.\n The wounded stag above\n The slope is now in sight\n Fanned by the wind and freshness of your flight.\n\n BRIDE My love’s the mountain range,\n The valleys each with solitary grove,\n The islands that are strange,\n The streams with sounds that change,\n The whistling of the lovesick winds that rove.\n\n Before the dawn comes round\n Here is the night, dead-hushed with all its glamours,\n The music without sound,\n The solitude that clamours,\n he supper that revives us and enamours.\n\n Now flowers the marriage bed\n With dens of lions fortified around it\n With tent of purple spread,\n In peace securely founded,\n And by a thousand shields of gold surmounted.\n\n Tracking your sandal-mark\n The maidens search the roadway for your sign,\n Yearning to catch the spark\n And taste the scented wine\n That emanate a balm that is divine.\n\n Deep-cellared is the cavern\n Of my love’s heart, I drank of him alive:\n Now, stumbling from the tavern,\n No thoughts of mine survive,\n And I have lost the flock I used to drive.\n\n He gave his breast; seraphic\n In savour was the science that he taught;\n And there I made my traffic\n Of all, withholding naught,\n And promised to become the bride he sought.\n\n My spirit I prepare\n To serve him with her riches and her beauty.\n No flocks are now my care,\n No other toil I share,\n And only now in loving is my duty.\n\n So now if from this day\n I am not found among the haunts of men,\n Say that I went astray,\n Love-stricken, from my way,\n That I was lost, but have been found again.\n\n Of flowers and emerald’s sheen\n Collected when the dews of dawning shine,\n A wreath of garlands green\n (That flower for you) we’ll twine\n Together with one golden hair of mine.\n\n One hair (upon my nape\n You loved to watch it flutter, fall, and rise)\n Preventing your escape\n Has snared you for a prize\n And held you to be wounded from my eyes.\n\n When you at first surmised me\n Your gaze was on my eyes imprinted so,\n That it effeminised me,\n And my eyes were not slow\n To worship that which set your own aglow.\n\n Scorn not my humble ways,\n And if my hue is tawny do not loathe me.\n On me you well may gaze\n Since, after that, the rays\n Of every grace and loveliness will clothe me.\n\n Chase all the foxes hence\n Because our vine already flowers apace:\n And while with roses dense\n Our posy we enlace,\n Let no one on the hillside show his face.\n\n Cease, then, you arctic gale,\n And come, recalling love, wind of the South:\n Within my garden-pale\n The scent of flowers exhale\n Which my Beloved browses with his mouth.\n\n BRIDEGROOM Now, as she long aspired,\n Into the garden comes the bride, a guest:\n And in its shade retired\n Has leant her neck to rest\n Against the gentle arm of the Desired.\n\n Beneath the apple-tree,\n You came to swear your troth and to be mated,\n Gave there your hand to me,\n And have been new-created\n There where your mother first was violated.\n\n You birds with airy wings,\n Lions, and stags, and roebucks leaping light,\n Hills, valleys, creeks, and springs,\n Waves, winds, and ardours bright,\n And things that rule the watches of the night:\n\n By the sweet lyre and call\n Of sirens, now I conjure you to cease\n Your tumults one and all,\n Nor echo on the wall\n That she may sleep securely and at peace.\n\n BRIDE Oh daughters of Judea,\n While yet our flowers and roses in their flesh hold\n Ambrosia, come not near,\n But keep the outskirts clear\n And do not dare to pass across our threshold.\n\n Look to the mountain peak,\n My darling, and stay hidden from the view.\n And do not dare to speak\n But watch her retinue\n Who sails away to islands strange and new.\n\n BRIDEGROOM The dove so snowy-white,\n Returning to the Ark, her frond bestows:\n And seeking to unite\n The mate of her delight\n Has found him where the shady river flows.\n\n In solitude she bided,\n And in the solitude her nest she made:\n In solitude he guided\n His loved-one through the shade\n Whose solitude the wound of love has made.\n\n BRIDE Rejoice, my love, with me\n And in your beauty see us both reflected:\n By mountain-slope and lea,\n Where purest rills run free,\n We’ll pass into the forest undetected:\n\n Then climb to lofty places\n Among the caves and boulders of the granite,\n Where every track effaces,\n And, entering, leaves no traces,\n And revel in the wine of the pomegranate.\n\n Up there, to me you’ll show\n What my own soul has longed for all the way:\n And there, my love, bestow\n The secret which you know\n And only spoke about the other day.\n\n The breathing air so keen;\n The song of Philomel: the waving charm\n Of groves in beauty seen:\n The evening so serene,\n With fire that can consume yet do not harm.\n\n With none our peace offending,\n Aminadab had vanished with his slaughters:\n And now the siege had ending,\n The cavalcades descending\n Were seen within the precinct of the waters.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Talking Bronco", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "You ask what far-off singing\nHas mingled with our rest.\nIt is my love that, winging\nThe deep wave of your breast,\nWith white sail homeward turning,\nSings at the golden oar\nOf a white city burning\nOn the battle-tented shore.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "swans": { - "title": "“Swans”", - "body": "The dark trees slept, none to the azure true,\nSave where alone, the glory of the glade,\nThe cone of one tall cypress cut the blue\nAnd azure on the marble dreamed its shade:\nAs long as I could feel it next to mine\nHer body was illumined by my ghost,\nAs through the silver of the lighted host\nMight flush the ruby reflex of the wine.\nThe night ran like a river deep and blue:\nThe reeds of thought, with humming silver wands,\nBrushed by our silence like a fleet of swans,\nSang to the passing wave their faint adieu.\nStars in that current quenched their dying flame\nLike folding flowers: till down the silent streams,\nSwan-drawn among the lilies, slumber came,\nVeiling with rosy hand the lamp of dreams.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "testament-of-a-vaquero": { - "title": "“Testament of a Vaquero”", - "body": "Herding his cattle on the dusty flat,\nA cowboy whose guitar had lost its tone,\nWith the grey moonlight leaking through his hat,\nThus, on his ancient gelding as he sat,\nFrom hungry guts ventriloquized alone--\n“At Oxford if I hadn’t proved a fool\n(What tragedies my happy fate forbids!)\nI’d be a Charlie sitting on a stool\nAnd teaching mathematics to the kids.\nMy old professor in a thousand shifts,\nMy early friend, perhaps the last I’ll know,\nI thank my Poverty for all my gifts\nWho shares with me his coat of wind and snow.\nAll else I can bequeath to who requires--\nTo those who lack the true poetic fires\nI leave the fine nystagmus of my eye\nTo lead them round the world in frantic gyres,\nAnd land them in a garret or a sty;\nThat he for whom the fatted calf was fed,\nSo late returning homeward for the spree,\nShall find a full-grown toro in his stead\nAnd thank his fortune for the nearest tree.\nBut I will hoard away my lack of gear--\nThe world my sun-baked spud, my stove the day!\nAnd if at times its rind be charred and tough\nKeen hunger is the knife that cuts the way--\nThere’s death in surfeit, dullness in ‘Enough.’\nTo the anatomists--my twisted spine--\nDiploma of equestrian despite;\nBut to their patients half my Crusoe sleight\nOf fishing out the cargo from the wreck;\nAnd this light heart--to raft them to the calm\nGreen island with its periscope of palm,\nAnd my Good Luck to Admiral the deck!\nTo those who dream of roses and of lilies--\n(Earnest of faith) these breeches I got rent\nWhen breaking in the pride of English fillies\n(My warhorse still) and punching cows in Kent.\nAnd to my children, all that I would save,\nWhen empires crash and red battalions form,\nThe Celtic blood so buoyant to the storm,\nThat gay joy-riding foam of every wave!”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "the-theology-of-bongwi-the-baboon": { - "title": "“The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon”", - "body": "This is the wisdom of the Ape\n Who yelps beneath the Moon--\n\n“’Tis God who made me in His shape\n He is a Great Baboon.\n’Tis He who tilts the moon askew\n And fans the forest trees,\nThe heavens which are broad and blue\n Provide him his trapeze;\nHe swings with tail divinely bent\n Around those azure bars\nAnd munches to his Soul’s content\n The kernels of the stars;\nAnd when I die, His loving care\n Will raise me from the sod\nTo learn the perfect Mischief there,\n The Nimbleness of God.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "to-the-future": { - "title": "“To the Future”", - "body": "You all-propitious season,\nOlder than Adam’s race--\nWith what foresight and reason\nYou shame to show your face!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "to-the-sun": { - "title": "“To the Sun”", - "body": "Oh let your shining orb grow dim,\nOf Christ the mirror and the shield,\nThat I may gaze through you to Him,\nSee half the miracle revealed,\nAnd in your seven hues behold\nThe Blue Man walking on the Sea;\nThe Green, beneath the summer tree,\nWho called the children; then the Gold,\nWith palms; the Orange, flaring bold\nWith scourges; Purple in the garden\n(As Greco saw): and then the Red\nTorero (Him who took the toss\nAnd rode the black horns of the cross--\nBut rose snow-silver from the dead!)", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "to-the-survivors": { - "title": "“To the Survivors”", - "body": "The rust that paints their cities red\nAnd makes their cast-iron idols reel:\nThe russet locust-swarm that’s spread\nUpon their wilting crops of steel:--\n\nThis gift of our protecting Sire,\nThe Solar Christ, to purge the lands--\nIs like the good Promethean fire\nAt which to warm our scatheless hands.\n\nBy it the human heart relumed,\nShall blaze once more with ruby light--\nThe strong shall seize it unconsumed,\nThe rest will crumble at its sight.\n\nThe brave from out its grudging crust\nWill pull the treasure that it keeps--\nWithin the red sheath of the rust,\nThe white Excalibur that sleeps:--\n\nOne from its ash breathe new desire;\nOne from its embers snatch the Star\nThat glances with a triple fire\nAnd tips the Trident of Cailar:--\n\nOne will blow flames, when nations drowse,\nWith which to burn prophetic lips:\nAnd some find shares, with cruiser-prows\nTo heave the curling turf like ships.\n\nThen, like Niagara set free,\nRide on, you fine Commando: vain\nWere looking back, for all you’d see\nWere ‘Charlies’ running for their train!\n\nFor none save those are worthy birth\nWho neither life nor death will shun:\nAnd we plough deepest in the Earth\nWho ride the nearest to the Sun.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "toril": { - "title": "“Toril”", - "body": "_Crowd._\nAnother Bull! another Bull!\n\n> _Ox._\nYou heard?\nYour number’s up, the people gave the word!\n\n> _Bull._\nFeasted on flowers, the darling of the days,\nTo-day I’ve ghastly asphodels to graze,\nHarsh sand to bite, and my own blood to swill--\nWhose dewlap loved the golden-rolling rill,\nWhen through the rushes, burnished like its tide,\nThe lovely cirrus of my thews would slide,\nMy heart flame-glazing through the silken skin\nJoy of its mighty furnace lit within.\nThese crescent horns that scimitared the moon,\nThese eyes, the flaming emeralds of noon,\nWhose orbs were fuel to the deathless rays\nAnd burned the long horizon with their gaze--\nAll now to be cut down, and soon to trail\nA sledge of carrion at a horse’s tail!\n\n> _Ox._\nFlame in the flaming noon, I’ve seen you run.\nThe Anvil of Toledo’s now your Sun,\nWhose angry dawn beyond these gates has spread\nIts crimson cape, the sunrise of the dead:\nWhose iron clangs for you, whose doom you feel,\nThe target of its burnished ray of steel!\n\n> _Bull._\nOx as you are, what should you know of this\nWho never neared the verge of that abyss?\n\n> _Ox._\nOx as I am, none better knows than I\nWho led your father’s father here to die.\nDeclaiming clown, I am the mute, the wise;\nPoets would read enigmas in my eyes.\nMy being is confederate with pain,\nMine to endure as yours is to complain;\nI am the thinker, satisfied to know,\nAnd bought this wisdom for a life of woe.\nBe brave, be patient, and reserve your breath.\n\n> _Bull._\nBut tell me what is blacker than this Death?\n\n> _Ox._\nMy impotence.\n\n> _Bull._\nIt was your soul that spoke!--\nMore hideous than this martyrdom?\n\n> _Ox._\nThe Yoke!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "tristan-da-cunha": { - "title": "“Tristan da Cunha”", - "body": "Snore in the foam; the night is vast and blind;\nThe blanket of the mist about your shoulders,\nSleep your old sleep of rock, snore in the wind,\nSnore in the spray! the storm your slumber lulls,\nHis wings are folded on your nest of boulders\nAs on their eggs the grey wings of your gulls.\n\nNo more as when, so dark an age ago,\nYou hissed a giant cinder from the ocean,\nAround your rocks you furl the shawling snow\nHalf sunk in your own darkness, vast and grim,\nAnd round you on the deep with surly motion\nPivot your league-long shadow as you swim.\n\nWhy should you haunt me thus but that I know\nMy surly heart is in your own displayed,\nRound whom such leagues in endless circuit flow,\nWhose hours in such a gloomy compass run--\nA dial with its league-long arm of shade\nSlowly revolving to the moon and sun.\n\nMy pride has sunk, like your grey fissured crags,\nBy its own strength o’ertoppled and betrayed:\nI, too, have burned the wind with fiery flags\nWho now am but a roost for empty words,\nAn island of the sea whose only trade\nIs in the voyage of its wandering birds.\n\nDid you not, when your strength became your pyre\nDeposed and tumbled from your flaming tower,\nAwake in gloom from whence you sank in fire,\nTo find, Antaeus-like, more vastly grown,\nA throne in your own darkness, and a power\nSheathed in the very coldness of your stone?\n\nYour strength is that you have no hope or fear,\nYou march before the world without a crown,\nThe nations call you back, you do not hear,\nThe cities of the earth grow grey behind you,\nYou will be there when their great flames go down\nAnd still the morning in the van will find you.\n\nYou march before the continents, you scout\nIn front of all the earth; alone you scale\nThe mast-head of the world, a lorn look-out,\nWaving the snowy flutter of your spray\nAnd gazing back in infinite farewell\nTo suns that sink and shores that fade away.\n\nFrom your grey tower what long regrets you fling\nTo where, along the low horizon burning,\nThe great swan-breasted seraphs soar and sing,\nAnd suns go down, and trailing splendours dwindle,\nAnd sails on lonely errands unreturning\nGlow with a gold no sunrise can rekindle.\n\nTurn to the night; these flames are not for you\nWhose steeple for the thunder swings its bells;\nGrey Memnon, to the tempest only true,\nTurn to the night, turn to the shadowing foam,\nAnd let your voice, the saddest of farewells,\nWith sullen curfew toll the grey wings home.\n\nThe wind, your mournful syren, haunts the gloom;\nThe rocks, spray-clouded, are your signal guns\nWhose stony nitre, puffed with flying spume,\nRolls forth in grim salute your broadside hollow\nOver the gorgeous burials of suns\nTo sound the tocsin of the storms that follow.\n\nPlunge forward like a ship to battle hurled,\nSlip the long cables of the failing light,\nThe level rays that moor you to the world:\nSheathed in your armour of eternal frost,\nPlunge forward, in the thunder of the fight\nTo lose yourself as I would fain be lost.\n\nExiled like you and severed from my race\nBy the cold ocean of my own disdain,\nDo I not freeze in such a wintry space,\nDo I not travel through a storm as vast\nAnd rise at times, victorious from the main,\nTo fly the sunrise at my shattered mast?\n\nYour path is but a desert where you reap\nOnly the bitter knowledge of your soul:\nYou fish with nets of seaweed in the deep\nAs fruitlessly as I with nets of rhyme--\nYet forth you stride, yourself the way, the goal,\nThe surges are your strides, your path is time.\n\nHurled by what aim to what tremendous range!\nA missile from the great sling of the past,\nYour passage leaves its track of death and change\nAnd ruin on the world: you fly beyond\nLeaping the current of the ages vast\nAs lightly as a pebble skims a pond.\n\nThe years are undulations in your flight\nWhose awful motion we can only guess--\nToo swift for sense, too terrible for sight,\nWe only know how fast behind you darken\nOur days like lonely beacons of distress:\nWe know that you stride on and will not harken.\n\nNow in the eastern sky the fairest planet\nPierces the dying wave with dangled spear,\nAnd in the whirring hollows of your granite\nThat vaster sea to which you are a shell\nSighs with a ghostly rumour, like the drear\nMoan of the nightwind in a hollow cell.\n\nWe shall not meet again; over the wave\nOur ways divide, and yours is straight and endless,\nBut mine is short and crooked to the grave:\nYet what of these dark crowds amid whose flow\nI battle like a rock, aloof and friendless,\nAre not their generations vague and endless\nThe waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "vaquero-to-his-wife": { - "title": "“Vaquero to his Wife”", - "body": "Since from his charred mechanic Hells\nNow to his native form restored,\nThe azure soul of Steel rebels\nRefulgent in a single Sword\nWhose edge of Famine, honed with ire,\nFlames forth his threat to all the lands\nWhere wheels and furnaces conspire\nTo rob the skill from human hands,\nFrom human hearts the solar fire;\nAnd since the yellow, spangled Fay\nRifting her dungeons to the day,\nBewitching all, in havoc flies\nTo daunt the great and fool the wise,\nAnd scatter carnage in her play,\nBut soon, her fearful vengeance done,\nWill sparkle only for the eyes\nAnd be a daughter to the Sun--\nBy what laws other should we hold\nThan those they leave without repeal,\nThat breathed your cheeks with down of Gold\nAnd shinned my horse with rods of Steel?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "vaqueros-lament-on-getting-a-cheque": { - "title": "“Vaquero’s Lament on getting a Cheque”", - "body": "With a black streamer fasten our guitar\nFor mourning is the colour we must choose--\nBlack as my horse, the darker for a star,\nWho shoals the glittering mackerel of his thews\nIn one great midnight wave--to match your hair.\n(As he is to the ground, it to the air,\nLiquid and light, a traveller in fire.)\nThen pour the wine; for whose one ruby spark,\nIts gloom is more religious, deep, and dark,\nAnd turn on me the eyes that never tire,\nDarker than wine is, darker than your hair,\nYet burnished by the same eternal morning.\nI am in love with black; and we go mourning\n(Girl, horse, guitar, and wine) for buried care.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "vespers-on-the-nile": { - "title": "“Vespers on the Nile”", - "body": "When to their roost the sacred ibis file,\nMosquito-thin against the fading West,\nAnd palm-trees, fishing in the crimson Nile,\nDangle their windless effigies of rest,\n\nScarce to the moon’s hushed conquest of the blue\nHave waked the wingless warblers of the bogs,\nOr to the lunar sabbath staunchly true\nThe jackals sung their first selenologues,\n\nWhen through the waste, far-flung as from a steeple\nFirst in low rumours, then in sounding choir,\nThe lamentation of an ancient people\nSounds from the waters and the sands of fire.\n\nThe centuries have heard that plaint persist,\nSince Pharaoh’s foreman stood with lifted quirt,\nOr swung the bloody sjambok in his fist\nTo cut the sluggard through his hairy shirt.\n\nThis was the strain, the Amphionic lyre,\nBy which were carted Thebes’ colossal stones,\nWhich though it lifted pyramid and spire\nYet rang their ruin in prophetic tones.\n\nStill theirs the agony, still theirs the bondage,\nStill theirs the toil, their recompense forlorn\nTo crop the thistles, bite the withered frondage\nAnd rasp the bitter stubble of the corn.\n\nStill as if Pharaoh’s sjambok cut their rumps,\nSick for some Zion of the vast inane,\nThe effort of a thousand rusty pumps\nWheezes untiring through their shrill refrain.\n\nWhere royal suns descending left no stains,\nWhere forms of power and beauty change and pass,\nOne epic to eternity remains--\nThe heehawhallelujahs of the Ass.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "whatever-comes": { - "title": "“Whatever Comes”", - "body": "Need, when beset by hunger in the waste,\nFor food or friendship takes whatever comes.\nThe Tartars, scorning kitchens in their haste,\nCould cook their food on horseback with their bums.\nAs beggars pool their botches by the way--\nThe lame upon the eyeless blinkers ride:\nOr drunkards (herding phantom sheep that stray)\nWho help each other on--from side to side!\nOr if as wrecked survivors on a raft\nPecksniff with Bobadil had manned one craft\nTo share provisions--one his good advice,\nAnd one his oaths and last remaining lice …\nInstead of feeling sore you could have laughed\nAt your mistake, and let the truth suffice.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - }, - "wings": { - "title": "“Wings”", - "body": "When gathering vapours climb in storm\nThe steep sierras of delight,\nWings of your hair I love to form\nAnd on its perfume soar from sight.\nFor in those great black plumes unfurled\nThe darkest condor of my thought\nMay stretch his aching sinews taut\nAnd fling his shadow on the world.\nWhen sick of self my moods rebel,\nThe demon from his secret hell,\nThe eagle from his cage of brass,\nThey have been lent such scented wings\nOver the wreck of earthly things\nIn silence with the sun to pass.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Flowering Reeds", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "written-in-the-horse-truck": { - "title": "“Written in the Horse-truck”", - "body": "Full of adieus as this late train\nThe World’s great Autumn blows at last\nAnd far and shrill across the plain\nWhistles the engine of the Past.\nStitching the night with threads of fire,\nA stream of fire-flies lit with pain,\nThough Life should prove a shunting train\nThat rumbles on the wheels of ire,\nWith contraband I’ve lit my pipe\nThe strong tobacco of my Luck,\nThere are few tears for us to wipe\nWho travel in the cheapest truck\nWhose lamp swings like an orange, ripe\nAnd ready for the Muse to pluck.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Mithraic Emblems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-zulu-girl": { - "title": "“The Zulu Girl”", - "body": "When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,\nDown where the sweating gang its labour plies,\nA girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder\nUnslings her child tormented by the flies.\n\nShe takes him to a ring of shadow pooled\nBy thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,\nWhile her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,\nProwl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,\n\nHis sleepy mouth plugged by the heavy nipple,\nTugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:\nThrough his frail nerves her own deep languors ripple\nLike a broad river sighing through its reeds.\n\nYet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes\nAn old unquenched unsmotherable heat--\nThe curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,\nThe sullen dignity of their defeat.\n\nHer body looms above him like a hill\nWithin whose shade a village lies at rest,\nOr the first cloud so terrible and still\nThat bears the coming harvest in its breast.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Adamastor", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-campion": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Campion", - "birth": { - "year": 1567 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1620 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Campion", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "follow-thy-fair-sun": { - "title": "“Follow thy fair sun …”", - "body": "Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,\nThough thou be black as night\nAnd she made all of light,\nYet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow.\n\nFollow her whose light thy light depriveth,\nThough here thou liv’st disgraced,\nAnd she in heaven is placed,\nYet follow her whose light the world reviveth.\n\nFollow those pure beams whose beauty burneth,\nThat so have scorched thee,\nAs thou still black must be,\nTill Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth.\n\nFollow her while yet her glory shineth,\nThere comes a luckless night,\nThat will dim all her light,\nAnd this the black unhappy shade divineth.\n\nFollow still since so thy fates ordained,\nThe Sun must have his shade,\nTill both at once do fade,\nThe Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-care-not-for-these-ladies": { - "title": "“I care not for these ladies …”", - "body": "I care not for these ladies,\nThat must be wooed and prayed:\nGive me kind Amaryllis,\nThe wanton country maid.\nNature art disdaineth,\nHer beauty is her own.\nHer when we court and kiss,\nShe cries, “Forsooth, let go!”\nBut when we come where comfort is,\nShe never will say no.\n\nIf I love Amaryllis,\nShe gives me fruit and flowers:\nBut if we love these ladies,\nWe must give golden showers.\nGive them gold, that sell love,\nGive me the nut-brown lass,\nWho, when we court and kiss,\nShe cries, “Forsooth, let go!”\nBut when we come where comfort is,\nShe never will say no.\n\nThese ladies must have pillows,\nAnd beds by strangers wrought;\nGive me a bower of willows,\nOf moss and leaves unbought,\nAnd fresh Amaryllis,\nWith milk and honey fed;\nWho, when we court and kiss,\nShe cries, “Forsooth, let go!”\nBut when we come where comfort is,\nShe never will say no.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kind-are-her-answers": { - "title": "“Kind are her answers …”", - "body": "Kind are her answers,\nBut her performance keeps no day;\nBreaks time, as dancers\nFrom their own music when they stray:\nAll her free favors\nAnd smooth words wing my hopes in vain.\nO did ever voice so sweet but only feign?\nCan true love yield such delay,\nConverting joy to pain?\n\nLost is our freedom,\nWhen we submit to women so:\nWhy do we need ’em,\nWhen in their best they work our woe?\nThere is no wisdom\nCan alter ends, by Fate prefixed.\nO why is the good of man with evil mixed?\nNever were days yet called two,\nBut one night went betwixt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "never-love-unless-you-can": { - "title": "“Never love unless you can …”", - "body": "Never love unless you can\nBear with all the faults of man:\nMen sometimes will jealous be\nThough but little cause they see;\nAnd hang the head, as discontent,\nAnd speak what straight they will repent.\n\nMen that but one saint adore\nMake a show of love to more.\nBeauty must be scorned in none,\nThough but truly served in one:\nFor what is courtship but disguise?\nTrue hearts may have dissembling eyes.\n\nMen, when their affairs require,\nMust awhile themselves retire;\nSometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk,\nAnd not ever sit and talk.\nIf these and such-like you can bear,\nThen like, and love, and never fear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-thou-must-home-to-shades-of-underground": { - "title": "“When thou must home to shades of underground …”", - "body": "When thou must home to shades of underground,\nAnd there arriv’d, a new admired guest,\nThe beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,\nWhite Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,\nTo hear the stories of thy finish’d love\nFrom that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;\n\nThen wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,\nOf masques and revels which sweet youth did make,\nOf tourneys and great challenges of knights,\nAnd all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake:\nWhen thou hast told these honours done to thee,\nThen tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ernesto-cardenal": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ernesto Cardenal", - "birth": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2020 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "nicaraguan", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇳🇮", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Cardenal", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "nicaraguan" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "drake-in-the-southern-sea": { - "title": "“Drake in the Southern Sea”", - "body": "I set out from the Port of Acapulco on the twenty-third of March\nAnd kept a steady course until Saturday, the fourth of April, when\nA half hour before dawn, we saw by the light of the moon\nThat a ship had come alongside\nWith sails and a bow that seemed to be of silver.\nOur helmsman cried out to them to stand off\nBut no one answered, as though they were all asleep.\nAgain we called out: “WHERE DID THEIR SHIP COME FROM?”\nAnd they said: Peru!\nAfter which we heard trumpets, and muskets firing,\nAnd they ordered me to come down into their longboat\nTo cross over to where their Captain was.\nI found him walking the deck,\nWent up to him, kissed his hands and he asked me:\n“What silver or gold I had aboard that ship?”\nI said, “None at all,\nNone at all, My Lord, only my dishes and cups.”\nSo then he asked me if I knew the Viceroy.\nI said I did. And I asked the Captain,\n“If he were Captain Drake himself and no other?”\nThe Captain replied that\n“He was the very Drake I spoke of.”\nWe spoke together a long time, until the hour of dinner,\nAnd he commanded that I sit by his side.\nHis dishes and cups are of silver, bordered with gold\nWith his crest upon them.\nHe has with him many perfumes and scented waters in crystal vials\nWhich, he said, the Queen had given him.\nHe dines and sups always with music of violins\nAnd also takes with him everywhere painters who keep painting\nAll the coast for him.\nHe is a man of some twenty-four years, small, with a reddish beard.\nHe is a nephew of Juan Aquinas, the pirate.\nAnd is one of the greatest mariners there are upon the sea.\nThe day after, which was Sunday, he clothed himself in splendid garments\nAnd had them hoist all their flags\nWith pennants of divers colors at the mastheads,\nThe bronze rings, and chains, and the railings and\nThe lights on the Alcazar shining like gold.\nHis ship was like a gold dragon among the dolphins.\nAnd we went, with his page, to my ship to look at the coffers.\nAll day long until night he spent looking at what I had.\nWhat he took from me was not much,\nA few trifles of my own,\nAnd he gave me a cutlass and a silver brassart for them,\nAsking me to forgive him\nSince it was for his lady that he was taking them:\nHe would let me go, he said, the next morning, as soon as there was a breeze;\nFor this I thanked him, and kissed his hands.\nHe is carrying, in his galleon, three thousand bars of silver\nThree coffers full of gold\nTwelve great coffers of pieces of eight:\nAnd he says he is heading for China\nFollowing the charts and steered by a Chinese pilot whom he captured …", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Thomas Merton", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 5, - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "like-empty-beer-cans": { - "title": "“Like Empty Beer Cans”", - "body": "My days have been like empty beer cans\nand stubbed-out cigarette ends.\nMy life has passed me by like the figures who appear\nand disappear on a television screen.\nLike cars passing by at speed along the roads\nwith girls laughing and music from the radio …\nAnd beauty was as transient as the models of those cars\nand the fleeting hits that blasted from the radios\nand were forgotten.\n\nAnd nothing is left of those days,\nnothing, besides the empty cans and stubbed-out dog-ends,\nsmiles on washed-out photos, torn coupons,\nand the sawdust with which, at dawn,\nthey swept out the bars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Ricardo Blanco" - } - } - } - }, - "giosue-carducci": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Giosuè Carducci", - "birth": { - "year": 1835 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giosuè_Carducci", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "at-the-station": { - "title": "“At the Station”", - "body": "O the lamps--how they chase\neach other lazily there behind the trees,\nyawning their light through dripping\nbranches onto the mud.\n\nFaint, fine, shrill, a nearby\nsteam engine hisses. A lead sky\nand the autumn morning\nenwrap us like a great chimera.\n\nWhere and to what are they going, these people,\ncloaked and silent, hurrying to dark cars--\nto what unforeseeable sorrows\nor pangs of remote hope?\n\nEven you, rapt Lydia, give\nto the conductor your torn ticket,\nand to pressing time your beautiful years,\nyour memories and moments of joy.\n\nAlong the black train come\nthe trainmen hooded in black\nlike shadows, with dim lanterns\nand iron sledges, and the iron\n\nbrakes when plied make a long\nenervated clang: from the soul’s depths,\nan echo of languor makes its sad\nreply, like a shudder.\n\nAnd the doors slammed shut\nseem like outrages: a quick jibe\nsounds the final farewell:\nthundering on heavy panes, the rain.\n\nAlready the monster, owning its metallic\nsoul, fumes, slouches, pants, opens\nwide its fiery eyes; defies the heavens,\nwhistling through the gloom.\n\nThe unholy monster goes; with a horrible tug,\nbeating its wings, it carries away my love.\nAh, the alabaster face and fine veil,\nhailing me, disappear in darkness.\n\nO sweet face of pale rose,\no starlit placid eyes, o snow-white\nforehead ringed with luxuriant curls\ngently bending in a nod of love.\n\nThe warm air was throbbing with life;\nthe summer throbbed when she looked on me,\nand the youthful June sun\nliked to shower her cheek\n\nwith kisses of light, reflected through\nauburn hair: like a halo\nmore brilliant than the sun, my dreams\nencircle her soft shape …\n\nBeneath the rain, I return through\nthe haze; and I would lose myself in it.\nI stagger like a drunk. I touch myself\nto see if I also have become a ghost.\n\nO how the leaves are falling--cold,\nincessant, mute, heavy--on my soul.\nI know that everywhere in the world,\nsolitary and eternal, it is November.\n\nBetter he who’s lost the sense of life,\nbetter this shadow, this haze:\nI want O how I want to lie myself down\nin doldrums that will last forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "When the precise diva drops down on our houses,\nthe far off roar of her flying is heard,\n\nand the shadow of her icy wing, icily advancing,\nspreads wide a melancholy silence.\n\nWhen she comes, men bow their heads,\nbut the women fall to pining.\n\nThus the treetops, when July winds gather,\ndo not sway on the green hills:\n\nthe trees stand almost utterly still,\nand only the hoarse moan of the creek is heard.\n\nShe enters, passes, touches, and without even turning levels\nthe saplings, delighted by their young branches;\n\nshe shears the golden wheat, and strips even hanging grapes,\nscoops up the good wives and innocent girls\n\nand tiny children: pink between black wings they reach their arms\nto the sun, to their games, and smile.\n\nO sad homes, where before their fathers’ faces,\nsilent, livid diva, you put out young lives.\n\nTherein, rooms no longer sound with laughter and merrymaking\nor with whispers, like birds’ nests in May:\n\ntherein, no more the sound of joyful rearing,\nnor love’s woes, nor wedding dances:\n\nthey grow old therein, the shadowed survivors; to the roar\nof your return their ears incline, O goddess.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "kingfisher": { - "title": "“Kingfisher”", - "body": "Not under a steel nib that scratches in nasty furrows\nits dull thoughts onto dry white paper;\n\nbut under the ripe sun, as breezes gust\nthrough wide-open clearings beside a swift stream,\n\nthe heart’s sighs, dwindling into infinity, are born,\nthe sweet, wistful flower of melody is born.\n\nHere redolent May shines in rose-scented air,\nbrilliant the hollow eyes, hearts asleep in their chests;\n\nthe heart sleeps, but ears are easily roused\nby the chromatic cries of La Gioconda.\n\nO Muses’ altar of green, white-capped\nabove the sea. Alcman leads the chaste choir:\n\n“I want to fly with you, maidens, fly into a dance,\nas the kingfisher flies drawn by halcyons:\n\nhe flies with halcyons over spindrift waves in a gale,\nkingfisher, purple herald of spring.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bliss-carman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Bliss Carman", - "birth": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_Carman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "Now when the time of fruit and grain is come\nWhen apples hang above the orchard wall,\nAnd from the tangle by the roadside stream\nA scent of wild grapes fills the racy air,\nComes Autumn with her sunburnt caravan,\nLike a long gypsy train with trappings gay\nAnd tattered colors of the Orient,\nMoving slow-footed through the dreamy hills.\nThe woods of Wilton at her coming wear\nTints of Bokhara and of Samarcand;\nThe maples glow with their Pompeian red,\nThe hickories with burnt Etruscan gold;\nAnd while the crickets fife along her march,\nBehind her banners burns the crimson sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "a-creature-cathechism": { - "title": "“A Creature Cathechism”", - "body": "# I. _Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the sea?_\n\nLord, said a flying fish,\nBelow the foundations of storm\nWe feel the primal wish\nOf the earth take form.\n\nThrough the dim green water-fire\nWe see the red sun loom,\nAnd the quake of a new desire\nTakes hold on us down in the gloom.\n\nNo more can the filmy drift\nNor draughty currents buoy\nOur whim to its bent, nor lift\nOur heart to the height of its joy.\n\nWhen sheering down to the Line\nCome polar tides from the North,\nThy silver folk of the brine\nMust glimmer and forth.\n\nDown in the crumbling mill\nGrinding eternally,\nWe are the type of thy will\nTo the tribes of the sea.\n\n\n# II. _Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the air?_\n\nLord, said a butterfly,\nOut of a creeping thing,\nFor days in the dust put by,\nThe spread of a wing\n\nEmerges with pulvil of gold\nOn a tissue of green and blue,\nAnd there is thy purpose of old\nUnspoiled and fashioned anew.\n\nEphemera, ravellings of sky\nAnd shreds of the Northern light,\nWe age in a heart-beat and die\nUnder the eaves of night.\n\nWhat if the small breath quail,\nOr cease at a touch of the frost?\nNot a tremor of joy shall fail,\nNor a pulse be lost.\n\nThis fluttering life, never still,\nSurvives to oblivion’s despair.\nWe are the type of thy will\nTo the tribes of the air.\n\n\n# III. _Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the field?_\n\nLord, said a maple seed,\nThough well we are wrapped and bound,\nWe are the first to give heed,\nWhen thy bugles give sound.\n\nWe banner thy House of the Hills\nWith green and vermilion and gold,\nWhen the floor of April thrills\nWith the myriad stir of the mould,\n\nAnd her hosts for migration prepare.\nWe too have the veined twin-wings,\nVans for the journey of air.\nWith the urge of a thousand springs\n\nPent for a germ in our side,\nWe perish of joy, being dumb,\nThat our race may be and abide\nFor aeons to come.\n\nWhen rivulet answers to rill\nIn snow-blue valleys unsealed,\nWe are the type of thy will\nTo the tribes of the field.\n\n\n# IV. _Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the ground?_\n\nLord, when the time is ripe,\nSaid a frog through the quiet rain,\nWe take up the silver pipe\nFor the pageant again.\n\nWhen the melting wind of the South\nIs over meadow and pond,\nWe draw the breath of thy mouth,\nReviving the ancient bond.\n\nThen must we fife and declare\nThe unquenchable joy of earth,--\nTestify hearts still dare,\nSignalize beauty’s worth.\n\nThen must we rouse and blow\nOn the magic reed once more,\nTill the glad earth-children know\nNot a thing to deplore.\n\nWhen rises the marshy trill\nTo the soft spring night’s profound,\nWe are the type of thy will\nTo the tribes of the ground.\n\n\n# V. _Soul, what art thou in the tribes of the earth?_\n\nLord, said an artist born,\nWe leave the city behind\nFor the hills of open morn,\nFor fear of our kind.\n\nOur brother they nailed to a tree\nFor sedition; they bully and curse\nAll those whom love makes free.\nYet the very winds disperse\n\nRapture of birds and brooks,\nColours of sea and cloud,--\nBeauty not learned of books,\nTruth that is never loud.\n\nWe model our joy into clay,\nOr help it with line and hue,\nOr hark for its breath in stray\nWild chords and new.\n\nFor to-morrow can only fulfil\nDreams which to-day have birth;\nWe are the type of thy will\nTo the tribes of the earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "noon": { - "title": "“Noon”", - "body": "Behold, now, where the pageant of high June\nHalts in the glowing noon!\nThe trailing shadows rest on plain and hill;\nThe bannered hosts are still;\nWhile over forest crown and mountain-head\nThe azure tent is spread.\n\nThe song is hushed in every woodland throat;\nMoveless the lilies float;\nEven the ancient ever-murmuring sea\nSighs only fitfully;\nThe cattle drowse in the field-corner’s shade;\nPeace on the world is laid.\n\nIt is the hour when Nature’s caravan,\nThat bears the pilgrim Man\nTo the far region of his hope sublime\nAcross the desert of time,\nRests in the green oasis of the year,\nIts journey’s end drawn near.\n\nAh, traveler, hast thou nought of thanks or praise\nFor these fleet halcyon days?--\nNo courage to uplift thee from despair\nBorn with the breath of prayer?\nThen turn thee to the lilied field once more!\nGod stands in his tent door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-rainbird": { - "title": "“The Rainbird”", - "body": "Far off I hear a rainbird.\nListen! How fine and clear\nHis plaintive voice comes ringing\nWith rapture to the ear!\n\nOver the misty wood-lots,\nAcross the first spring heat,\nComes the enchanted cadence,\nSo clear, so solemn-sweet.\n\nHow often I have hearkened\nTo that high pealing strain,\nAcross the cedar barrens,\nUnder the soft gray rain!\n\nHow often I have wondered,\nAnd longed in vain to know\nThe source of that enchantment--\nThat touch of long ago!\n\nO brother, who first taught thee\nTo haunt the teeming spring\nWith that divine sad wisdom\nWhich only age can bring?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-sending-of-the-magi": { - "title": "“The Sending of the Magi”", - "body": "In a far Eastern country\nIt happened long of yore,\nWhere a lone and level sunrise\nFlushes the desert floor,\nThat three kings sat together\nAnd a spearman kept the door.\n\nGaspar, whose wealth was counted\nBy city and caravan;\nWith Melchior, the seer\nWho read the starry plan;\nAnd Balthasar, the blameless,\nWho loved his fellow man.\n\nThere while they talked, a sudden\nStrange rushing sound arose,\nAnd as with startled faces\nThey thought upon their foes,\nThree figures stood before them\nIn imperial repose.\n\nOne in flame-gold and one in blue\nAnd one is scarlet clear,\nWith the almighty portent\nOf sunrise they drew near!\nAnd the kings made obeisance\nWith hand on breast, in fear.\n\n“Arise,” said they, “we bring you\nGood tidings of great peace!\nTo-day a power is wakened\nWhose working must increase,\nTill fear and greed and malice\nAnd violence shall cease.”\n\nThe messengers were Michael,\nBy whom all things are wrought\nTo shape and hue; and Gabriel\nWho is the lord of thought;\nAnd Rafael without whose love\nAll toil must come to nought.\n\nThen Rafael said to Balthasar,\n“In a country west from here\nA lord is born in lowliness,\nIn love without a peer.\nTake grievances and gifts to him\nAnd prove his kingship clear!”\n\n“By this sign ye shall know him;\nWithin his mother’s arm\nAmong the sweet-breathed cattle\nHe slumbers without harm,\nWhile wicked hearts are troubled\nAnd tyrants take alarm.”\n\nAnd Gabriel said to Melchior,\n“My comrade, I will send\nMy star to go before you,\nThat ye may comprehend\nWhere leads your mystic learning\nIn a humaner trend.”\n\nAnd Michael said to Gaspar,\n“Thou royal builder, go\nWith tribute to thy riches!\nThough time shall overthrow\nThy kingdom, no undoing\nHis gentle might shall know.”\n\nThen while the kings’ hearts greatened\nAnd all the chamber shone,\nAs when the hills at sundown\nTake a new glory on\nAnd the air thrills with purple,\nTheir visitors were gone.\n\nThen straightway up rose Gaspar,\nMelchior and Balthasar,\nAnd passed out through the murmur\nOf palace and bazar,\nTo make without misgiving\nThe journey of the Star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "why": { - "title": "“Why”", - "body": "For a name unknown,\nWhose fame unblown\nSleeps in the hills\nFor ever and aye;\n\nFor her who hears\nThe stir of the years\nGo by on the wind\nBy night and day;\n\nAnd heeds no thing\nOf the needs of spring,\nOf autumn’s wonder\nOr winter’s chill;\n\nFor one who sees\nThe great sun freeze,\nAs he wanders a-cold\nFrom hill to hill;\n\nAnd all her heart\nIs a woven part\nOf the flurry and drift\nOf whirling snow;\n\nFor the sake of two\nSad eyes and true,\nAnd the old, old love\nSo long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lewis-carroll": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lewis Carroll", - "birth": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 25 - }, - "poems": { - "the-aged-aged-man": { - "title": "“The Aged, Aged Man”", - "body": "I’ll tell thee everything I can;\nThere’s little to relate.\nI saw an aged aged man,\nA-sitting on a gate.\n“Who are you, aged man?” I said,\n“And how is it you live?”\nAnd his answer trickled through my head\nLike water through a sieve.\n\nHe said, “I look for butterflies\nThat sleep among the wheat:\nI make them into mutton-pies,\nAnd sell them in the street.\nI sell them unto men,” he said,\n“Who sail on stormy seas;\nAnd that’s the way I get my bread--\nA trifle; if you please.”\n\nBut I was thinking of a plan\nTo dye one’s whiskers green,\nAnd always use so large a fan\nThat they could not be seen.\nSo, having no reply to give\nTo what the old man said,\nI cried, “Come, tell me how you live!”\nAnd thumped him on the head.\n\nHis accents mild took up the tale:\nHe said, “I go my ways,\nAnd when I find a mountain-rill,\nI set it in a blaze;\nAnd thence they make a stuff they call\nRowland’s Macassar-Oil--\nYet twopence-halfpenny is all\nThey give me for my toil.”\n\nBut I was thinking of a way\nTo feed oneself on batter,\nAnd so go on from day to day\nGetting a little fatter.\nI shook him well from side to side,\nUntil his face was blue:\n“Come, tell me how you live,” I cried,\n“And what it is you do!”\n\nHe said, “I hunt for haddocks’ eyes\nAmong the heather bright,\nAnd work them into waistcoat buttons\nIn the silent night.\nAnd these I do not sell for gold\nOr coin of silvery shine,\nBut for a copper halfpenny,\nAnd that will purchase nine.”\n\n“I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,\nOr set limed twigs for crabs;\nI sometimes search the grassy knolls\nFor wheels of hansom-cabs.\nAnd that’s the way” (he gave a wink)\n“By which I get my wealth--\nAnd very gladly will I drink\nYour Honour’s noble health.”\n\nI heard him then, for I had just\nCompleted my design\nTo keep the Menai bridge from rust\nBy boiling it in wine.\nI thanked him much for telling me\nThe way he got his wealth,\nBut chiefly for his wish that he\nMight drink my noble health.\n\nAnd now, if e’er by chance I put\nMy fingers into glue,\nOr madly squeeze a right-hand foot\nInto a left-hand shoe,\nOr if I drop upon my toe\nA very heavy weight,\nI weep, for it reminds me so\nOf that old man I used to know--\nWhose look was mild, whose speech was slow,\nWhose hair was whiter than the snow,\nWhose face was very like a crow,\nWith eyes, like cinders, all aglow,\nWho seemed distracted with his woe,\nWho rocked his body to and fro,\nAnd muttered mumblingly and low,\nAs if his mouth were full of dough,\nWho snorted like a buffalo--\nThat summer evening long ago\nA-sitting on a gate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "atalanta-in-camden-town": { - "title": "“Atalanta in Camden-Town”", - "body": "Ay, ’twas here, on this spot,\nIn that summer of yore,\nAtalanta did not\nVote my presence a bore,\nNor reply to my tenderest talk “She had\nheard all that nonsense before.”\n\nShe’d the brooch I had bought\nAnd the necklace and sash on,\nAnd her heart, as I thought,\nWas alive to my passion;\nAnd she’d done up her hair in the style that\nthe Empress had brought into fashion.\n\nI had been to the play\nWith my pearl of a Peri--\nBut, for all I could say,\nShe declared she was weary,\nThat “the place was so crowded and hot, and\nshe couldn’t abide that Dundreary.”\n\nThen I thought “Lucky boy!\n’Tis for _you_ that she whimpers!”\nAnd I noted with joy\nThose sensational simpers:\nAnd I said “This is scrumptious!”--a\nphrase I had learned from the Devonshire shrimpers.\n\nAnd I vowed “’Twill be said\nI’m a fortunate fellow,\nWhen the breakfast is spread,\nWhen the topers are mellow,\nWhen the foam of the bride-cake is white,\nand the fierce orange-blossoms are yellow!”\n\nO that languishing yawn!\nO those eloquent eyes!\nI was drunk with the dawn\nOf a splendid surmise--\nI was stung by a look, I was slain by a tear,\nby a tempest of sighs.\n\nThen I whispered “I see\nThe sweet secret thou keepest.\nAnd the yearning for _ME_\nThat thou wistfully weepest!\nAnd the question is ‘License or Banns?’,\nthough undoubtedly Banns are the cheapest.”\n\n“Be my Hero,” said I,\n“And let _me_ be Leander!”\nBut I lost her reply--\nSomething ending with “gander”--\nFor the omnibus rattled so loud that no\nmortal could quite understand her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-boat-beneath-a-sunny-sky": { - "title": "“A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky”", - "body": "A boat beneath a sunny sky,\nLingering onward dreamily\nIn an evening of July--\n\nChildren three that nestle near,\nEager eye and willing ear,\nPleased a simple tale to hear--\n\nLong has paled that sunny sky:\nEchoes fade and memories die:\nAutumn frosts have slain July.\n\nStill she haunts me, phantomwise,\nAlice moving under skies\nNever seen by waking eyes.\n\nChildren yet, the tale to hear,\nEager eye and willing ear,\nLovingly shall nestle near.\n\nIn a Wonderland they lie,\nDreaming as the days go by,\nDreaming as the summers die:\n\nEver drifting down the stream--\nLingering in the golden gleam--\nLife, what is it but a dream?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "brother-and-sister": { - "title": "“Brother and Sister”", - "body": "“Sister, sister, go to bed!\nGo and rest your weary head.”\nThus the prudent brother said.\n\n“Do you want a battered hide,\nOr scratches to your face applied?”\nThus his sister calm replied.\n\n“Sister, do not raise my wrath.\nI’d make you into mutton broth\nAs easily as kill a moth”\n\nThe sister raised her beaming eye\nAnd looked on him indignantly\nAnd sternly answered, “Only try!”\n\nOff to the cook he quickly ran.\n“Dear Cook, please lend a frying-pan\nTo me as quickly as you can.”\n\n“And wherefore should I lend it you?”\n“The reason, Cook, is plain to view.\nI wish to make an Irish stew.”\n\n“What meat is in that stew to go?”\n“My sister’ll be the contents!”\n“Oh”\n“You’ll lend the pan to me, Cook?”\n“No!”\n\n_Moral: Never stew your sister._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dedication": { - "title": "“Dedication”", - "body": "Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,\nEager she wields her spade: yet loves as well\nRest on a friendly knee, intent to ask\nThe tale he loves to tell.\nRude spirits of the seething outer strife,\nUnmeet to read her pure and simple spright,\nDeem if you list, such hours a waste of life,\nEmpty of all delight!\n\nChat on, sweet Maid, and rescue from annoy\nHearts that by wiser talk are unbeguiled.\nAh, happy he who owns that tenderest joy,\nThe heart-love of a child!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "echoes": { - "title": "“Echoes”", - "body": "Lady Clara Vere de Vere\nWas eight years old, she said:\nEvery ringlet, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden thread.\n\nShe took her little porringer:\nOf me she shall not win renown:\nFor the baseness of its nature shall have strength to drag her down.\n\n“Sisters and brothers, little Maid?\nThere stands the Inspector at thy door:\nLike a dog, he hunts for boys who know not two and two are four.”\n\n“Kind words are more than coronets,”\nShe said, and wondering looked at me:\n“It is the dead unhappy night, and I must hurry home to tea.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fames-penny-trumpet": { - "title": "“Fame’s Penny-Trumpet”", - "body": "_Affectionately dedicated to all “original researchers” who pant for “endowment.”_\n\nBlow, blow your trumpets till they crack,\nYe little men of little souls!\nAnd bid them huddle at your back--\nGold-sucking leeches, shoals on shoals!\n\nFill all the air with hungry wails--\n“Reward us, ere we think or write!\nWithout your Gold mere Knowledge fails\nTo sate the swinish appetite!”\n\nAnd, where great Plato paced serene,\nOr Newton paused with wistful eye,\nRush to the chace with hoofs unclean\nAnd Babel-clamour of the sty\n\nBe yours the pay: be theirs the praise:\nWe will not rob them of their due,\nNor vex the ghosts of other days\nBy naming them along with you.\n\nThey sought and found undying fame:\nThey toiled not for reward nor thanks:\nTheir cheeks are hot with honest shame\nFor you, the modern mountebanks!\n\nWho preach of Justice--plead with tears\nThat Love and Mercy should abound--\nWhile marking with complacent ears\nThe moaning of some tortured hound:\n\nWho prate of Wisdom--nay, forbear,\nLest Wisdom turn on you in wrath,\nTrampling, with heel that will not spare,\nThe vermin that beset her path!\n\nGo, throng each other’s drawing-rooms,\nYe idols of a petty clique:\nStrut your brief hour in borrowed plumes,\nAnd make your penny-trumpets squeak.\n\nDeck your dull talk with pilfered shreds\nOf learning from a nobler time,\nAnd oil each other’s little heads\nWith mutual Flattery’s golden slime:\n\nAnd when the topmost height ye gain,\nAnd stand in Glory’s ether clear,\nAnd grasp the prize of all your pain--\nSo many hundred pounds a year--\n\nThen let Fame’s banner be unfurled!\nSing Paeans for a victory won!\nYe tapers, that would light the world,\nAnd cast a shadow on the Sun--\n\nWho still shall pour His rays sublime,\nOne crystal flood, from East to West,\nWhen _ye_ have burned your little time\nAnd feebly flickered into rest!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hiawathas-photographing": { - "title": "“Hiawatha’s Photographing”", - "body": "From his shoulder Hiawatha\nTook the camera of rosewood,\nMade of sliding, folding rosewood;\nNeatly put it all together.\nIn its case it lay compactly,\nFolded into nearly nothing;\n\nBut he opened out the hinges,\nPushed and pulled the joints and hinges,\nTill it looked all squares and oblongs,\nLike a complicated figure\nIn the Second Book of Euclid.\n\nThis he perched upon a tripod--\nCrouched beneath its dusky cover--\nStretched his hand, enforcing silence--\nSaid, “Be motionless, I beg you!”\nMystic, awful was the process.\n\nAll the family in order\nSat before him for their pictures:\nEach in turn, as he was taken,\nVolunteered his own suggestions,\nHis ingenious suggestions.\n\nFirst the Governor, the Father:\nHe suggested velvet curtains\nLooped about a massy pillar;\nAnd the corner of a table,\nOf a rosewood dining-table.\nHe would hold a scroll of something,\nHold it firmly in his left-hand;\nHe would keep his right-hand buried\n(Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat;\nHe would contemplate the distance\nWith a look of pensive meaning,\nAs of ducks that die ill tempests.\n\nGrand, heroic was the notion:\nYet the picture failed entirely:\nFailed, because he moved a little,\nMoved, because he couldn’t help it.\n\nNext, his better half took courage;\nSHE would have her picture taken.\nShe came dressed beyond description,\nDressed in jewels and in satin\nFar too gorgeous for an empress.\nGracefully she sat down sideways,\nWith a simper scarcely human,\nHolding in her hand a bouquet\nRather larger than a cabbage.\nAll the while that she was sitting,\nStill the lady chattered, chattered,\nLike a monkey in the forest.\n“Am I sitting still?” she asked him.\n“Is my face enough in profile?\nShall I hold the bouquet higher?\nWill it came into the picture?”\nAnd the picture failed completely.\n\nNext the Son, the Stunning-Cantab:\nHe suggested curves of beauty,\nCurves pervading all his figure,\nWhich the eye might follow onward,\nTill they centered in the breast-pin,\nCentered in the golden breast-pin.\nHe had learnt it all from Ruskin\n(Author of ‘The Stones of Venice,’\n‘Seven Lamps of Architecture,’\n‘Modern Painters,’ and some others);\nAnd perhaps he had not fully\nUnderstood his author’s meaning;\nBut, whatever was the reason,\nAll was fruitless, as the picture\nEnded in an utter failure.\n\nNext to him the eldest daughter:\nShe suggested very little,\nOnly asked if he would take her\nWith her look of ‘passive beauty.’\n\nHer idea of passive beauty\nWas a squinting of the left-eye,\nWas a drooping of the right-eye,\nWas a smile that went up sideways\nTo the corner of the nostrils.\n\nHiawatha, when she asked him,\nTook no notice of the question,\nLooked as if he hadn’t heard it;\nBut, when pointedly appealed to,\nSmiled in his peculiar manner,\nCoughed and said it ‘didn’t matter,’\nBit his lip and changed the subject.\n\nNor in this was he mistaken,\nAs the picture failed completely.\n\nSo in turn the other sisters.\n\nLast, the youngest son was taken:\nVery rough and thick his hair was,\nVery round and red his face was,\nVery dusty was his jacket,\nVery fidgety his manner.\nAnd his overbearing sisters\nCalled him names he disapproved of:\nCalled him Johnny, ‘Daddy’s Darling,’\nCalled him Jacky, ‘Scrubby School-boy.’\nAnd, so awful was the picture,\nIn comparison the others\nSeemed, to one’s bewildered fancy,\nTo have partially succeeded.\n\nFinally my Hiawatha\nTumbled all the tribe together,\n(‘Grouped’ is not the right expression),\nAnd, as happy chance would have it\nDid at last obtain a picture\nWhere the faces all succeeded:\nEach came out a perfect likeness.\n\nThen they joined and all abused it,\nUnrestrainedly abused it,\nAs the worst and ugliest picture\nThey could possibly have dreamed of.\n‘Giving one such strange expressions--\nSullen, stupid, pert expressions.\nReally any one would take us\n(Any one that did not know us)\nFor the most unpleasant people!’\n(Hiawatha seemed to think so,\nSeemed to think it not unlikely).\nAll together rang their voices,\nAngry, loud, discordant voices,\nAs of dogs that howl in concert,\nAs of cats that wail in chorus.\n\nBut my Hiawatha’s patience,\nHis politeness and his patience,\nUnaccountably had vanished,\nAnd he left that happy party.\nNeither did he leave them slowly,\nWith the calm deliberation,\nThe intense deliberation\nOf a photographic artist:\nBut he left them in a hurry,\nLeft them in a mighty hurry,\nStating that he would not stand it,\nStating in emphatic language\nWhat he’d be before he’d stand it.\nHurriedly he packed his boxes:\nHurriedly the porter trundled\nOn a barrow all his boxes:\nHurriedly he took his ticket:\nHurriedly the train received him:\nThus departed Hiawatha.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hunting-of-the-snark": { - "title": "“The Hunting of the Snark”", - "body": "# I. _The Landing_\n\n\n“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,\nAs he landed his crew with care;\nSupporting each man on the top of the tide\nBy a finger entwined in his hair.\n\n“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:\nThat alone should encourage the crew.\nJust the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:\nWhat I tell you three times is true.”\n\nThe crew was complete: it included a Boots--\nA maker of Bonnets and Hoods--\nA Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes--\nAnd a Broker, to value their goods.\n\nA Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense,\nMight perhaps have won more than his share--\nBut a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,\nHad the whole of their cash in his care.\n\nThere was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck,\nOr would sit making lace in the bow:\nAnd had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,\nThough none of the sailors knew how.\n\nThere was one who was famed for the number of things\nHe forgot when he entered the ship:\nHis umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,\nAnd the clothes he had bought for the trip.\n\nHe had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,\nWith his name painted clearly on each:\nBut, since he omitted to mention the fact,\nThey were all left behind on the beach.\n\nThe loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because\nHe had seven coats on when he came,\nWith three pair of boots--but the worst of it was,\nHe had wholly forgotten his name.\n\nHe would answer to “Hi!” or to any loud cry,\nSuch as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”\nTo “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name!”\nBut especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”\n\nWhile, for those who preferred a more forcible word,\nHe had different names from these:\nHis intimate friends called him “Candle-ends,”\nAnd his enemies “Toasted-cheese.”\n\n“His form is ungainly--his intellect small--”\n(So the Bellman would often remark)\n“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,\nIs the thing that one needs with a Snark.”\n\nHe would joke with hyænas, returning their stare\nWith an impudent wag of the head:\nAnd he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,\n“Just to keep up its spirits,” he said.\n\nHe came as a Baker: but owned, when too late--\nAnd it drove the poor Bellman half-mad--\nHe could only bake Bridecake--for which, I may state,\nNo materials were to be had.\n\nThe last of the crew needs especial remark,\nThough he looked an incredible dunce:\nHe had just one idea--but, that one being “Snark,”\nThe good Bellman engaged him at once.\n\nHe came as a Butcher: but gravely declared,\nWhen the ship had been sailing a week,\nHe could only kill Beavers. The Bellman looked scared,\nAnd was almost too frightened to speak:\n\nBut at length he explained, in a tremulous tone,\nThere was only one Beaver on board;\nAnd that was a tame one he had of his own,\nWhose death would be deeply deplored.\n\nThe Beaver, who happened to hear the remark,\nProtested, with tears in its eyes,\nThat not even the rapture of hunting the Snark\nCould atone for that dismal surprise!\n\nIt strongly advised that the Butcher should be\nConveyed in a separate ship:\nBut the Bellman declared that would never agree\nWith the plans he had made for the trip:\n\nNavigation was always a difficult art,\nThough with only one ship and one bell:\nAnd he feared he must really decline, for his part,\nUndertaking another as well.\n\nThe Beaver’s best course was, no doubt, to procure\nA second-hand dagger-proof coat--\nSo the Baker advised it--and next, to insure\nIts life in some Office of note:\n\nThis the Banker suggested, and offered for hire\n(On moderate terms), or for sale,\nTwo excellent Policies, one Against Fire,\nAnd one Against Damage From Hail.\n\nYet still, ever after that sorrowful day,\nWhenever the Butcher was by,\nThe Beaver kept looking the opposite way,\nAnd appeared unaccountably shy.\n\n\n# II. _The Bellman’s Speech_\n\nThe Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--\nSuch a carriage, such ease and such grace!\nSuch solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,\nThe moment one looked in his face!\n\nHe had bought a large map representing the sea,\nWithout the least vestige of land:\nAnd the crew were much pleased when they found it to be\nA map they could all understand.\n\n“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,\nTropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”\nSo the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply\n“They are merely conventional signs!”\n\n“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!\nBut we’ve got our brave Captain to thank”\n(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best--\nA perfect and absolute blank!”\n\nThis was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out\nThat the Captain they trusted so well\nHad only one notion for crossing the ocean,\nAnd that was to tingle his bell.\n\nHe was thoughtful and grave--but the orders he gave\nWere enough to bewilder a crew.\nWhen he cried “Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!”\nWhat on earth was the helmsman to do?\n\nThen the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:\nA thing, as the Bellman remarked,\nThat frequently happens in tropical climes,\nWhen a vessel is, so to speak, “snarked.”\n\nBut the principal failing occurred in the sailing,\nAnd the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,\nSaid he _had_ hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,\nThat the ship would _not_ travel due West!\n\nBut the danger was past--they had landed at last,\nWith their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:\nYet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,\nWhich consisted of chasms and crags.\n\nThe Bellman perceived that their spirits were low,\nAnd repeated in musical tone\nSome jokes he had kept for a season of woe--\nBut the crew would do nothing but groan.\n\nHe served out some grog with a liberal hand,\nAnd bade them sit down on the beach:\nAnd they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,\nAs he stood and delivered his speech.\n\n“Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!”\n(They were all of them fond of quotations:\nSo they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,\nWhile he served out additional rations).\n\n“We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks,\n(Four weeks to the month you may mark),\nBut never as yet (’tis your Captain who speaks)\nHave we caught the least glimpse of a Snark!”\n\n“We have sailed many weeks, we have sailed many days,\n(Seven days to the week I allow),\nBut a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze,\nWe have never beheld till now!”\n\n“Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again\nThe five unmistakable marks\nBy which you may know, wheresoever you go,\nThe warranted genuine Snarks.”\n\n“Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,\nWhich is meagre and hollow, but crisp:\nLike a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,\nWith a flavour of Will-o-the-wisp.”\n\n“Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree\nThat it carries too far, when I say\nThat it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,\nAnd dines on the following day.”\n\n“The third is its slowness in taking a jest.\nShould you happen to venture on one,\nIt will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:\nAnd it always looks grave at a pun.”\n\n“The fourth is its fondness for bathing-machines,\nWhich it constantly carries about,\nAnd believes that they add to the beauty of scenes--\nA sentiment open to doubt.”\n\n“The fifth is ambition. It next will be right\nTo describe each particular batch:\nDistinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,\nFrom those that have whiskers, and scratch.”\n\n“For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,\nYet, I feel it my duty to say,\nSome are Boojums--” The Bellman broke off in alarm,\nFor the Baker had fainted away.\n\n\n# III. _The Baker’s Tale_\n\n\nThey roused him with muffins--they roused him with ice--\nThey roused him with mustard and cress--\nThey roused him with jam and judicious advice--\nThey set him conundrums to guess.\n\nWhen at length he sat up and was able to speak,\nHis sad story he offered to tell;\nAnd the Bellman cried “Silence! Not even a shriek!”\nAnd excitedly tingled his bell.\n\nThere was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream,\nScarcely even a howl or a groan,\nAs the man they called “Ho!” told his story of woe\nIn an antediluvian tone.\n\n“My father and mother were honest, though poor--”\n“Skip all that!” cried the Bellman in haste.\n“If it once becomes dark, there’s no chance of a Snark--\nWe have hardly a minute to waste!”\n\n“I skip forty years,” said the Baker, in tears,\n“And proceed without further remark\nTo the day when you took me aboard of your ship\nTo help you in hunting the Snark.”\n\n“A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named)\nRemarked, when I bade him farewell--”\n“Oh, skip your dear uncle!” the Bellman exclaimed,\nAs he angrily tingled his bell.\n\n“He remarked to me then,” said that mildest of men,\n“’If your Snark be a Snark, that is right:\nFetch it home by all means--you may serve it with greens,\nAnd it’s handy for striking a light.’”\n\n“’You may seek it with thimbles--and seek it with care;\nYou may hunt it with forks and hope;\nYou may threaten its life with a railway-share;\nYou may charm it with smiles and soap--’”\n\n(“That’s exactly the method,” the Bellman bold\nIn a hasty parenthesis cried,\n“That’s exactly the way I have always been told\nThat the capture of Snarks should be tried”)\n\n“‘But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,\nIf your Snark be a Boojum! For then\nYou will softly and suddenly vanish away,\nAnd never be met with again!’”\n\n“It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul,\nWhen I think of my uncle’s last words:\nAnd my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl\nBrimming over with quivering curds!”\n\n“It is this, it is this--” “We have had that before!”\nThe Bellman indignantly said.\nAnd the Baker replied “Let me say it once more.\nIt is this, it is this that I dread!”\n\n“I engage with the Snark--every night after dark--\nIn a dreamy delirious fight:\nI serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,\nAnd I use it for striking a light:”\n\n“But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day,\nIn a moment (of this I am sure),\nI shall softly and suddenly vanish away--\nAnd the notion I cannot endure!”\n\n\n# IV. _The Hunting_\n\nThe Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.\n“If only you’d spoken before!\nIt’s excessively awkward to mention it now,\nWith the Snark, so to speak, at the door!”\n\n“We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,\nIf you never were met with again--\nBut surely, my man, when the voyage began,\nYou might have suggested it then?”\n\n“It’s excessively awkward to mention it now--\nAs I think I’ve already remarked.”\nAnd the man they called “Hi!” replied, with a sigh,\n“I informed you the day we embarked.”\n\n“You may charge me with murder--or want of sense--\n(We are all of us weak at times):\nBut the slightest approach to a false pretence\nWas never among my crimes!”\n\n“I said it in Hebrew--I said it in Dutch--\nI said it in German and Greek:\nBut I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)\nThat English is what you speak!”\n\n“’Tis a pitiful tale,” said the Bellman, whose face\nHad grown longer at every word:\n“But, now that you’ve stated the whole of your case,\nMore debate would be simply absurd.”\n\n“The rest of my speech” (he explained to his men)\n“You shall hear when I’ve leisure to speak it.\nBut the Snark is at hand, let me tell you again!\n’Tis your glorious duty to seek it!”\n\n“To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care;\nTo pursue it with forks and hope;\nTo threaten its life with a railway-share;\nTo charm it with smiles and soap!”\n\n“For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t\nBe caught in a commonplace way.\nDo all that you know, and try all that you don’t:\nNot a chance must be wasted to-day!”\n\n“For England expects--I forbear to proceed:\n’Tis a maxim tremendous, but trite:\nAnd you’d best be unpacking the things that you need\nTo rig yourselves out for the fight.”\n\nThen the Banker endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed),\nAnd changed his loose silver for notes.\nThe Baker with care combed his whiskers and hair,\nAnd shook the dust out of his coats.\n\nThe Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade--\nEach working the grindstone in turn:\nBut the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed\nNo interest in the concern:\n\nThough the Barrister tried to appeal to its pride,\nAnd vainly proceeded to cite\nA number of cases, in which making laces\nHad been proved an infringement of right.\n\nThe maker of Bonnets ferociously planned\nA novel arrangement of bows:\nWhile the Billiard-marker with quivering hand\nWas chalking the tip of his nose.\n\nBut the Butcher turned nervous, and dressed himself fine,\nWith yellow kid gloves and a ruff--\nSaid he felt it exactly like going to dine,\nWhich the Bellman declared was all “stuff.”\n\n“Introduce me, now there’s a good fellow,” he said,\n“If we happen to meet it together!”\nAnd the Bellman, sagaciously nodding his head,\nSaid “That must depend on the weather.”\n\nThe Beaver went simply galumphing about,\nAt seeing the Butcher so shy:\nAnd even the Baker, though stupid and stout,\nMade an effort to wink with one eye.\n\n“Be a man!” said the Bellman in wrath, as he heard\nThe Butcher beginning to sob.\n“Should we meet with a Jubjub, that desperate bird,\nWe shall need all our strength for the job!”\n\n\n# V. _The Beaver’s Lesson_\n\nThey sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;\nThey pursued it with forks and hope;\nThey threatened its life with a railway-share;\nThey charmed it with smiles and soap.\n\nThen the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan\nFor making a separate sally;\nAnd had fixed on a spot unfrequented by man,\nA dismal and desolate valley.\n\nBut the very same plan to the Beaver occurred:\nIt had chosen the very same place:\nYet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word,\nThe disgust that appeared in his face.\n\nEach thought he was thinking of nothing but “Snark”\nAnd the glorious work of the day;\nAnd each tried to pretend that he did not remark\nThat the other was going that way.\n\nBut the valley grew narrow and narrower still,\nAnd the evening got darker and colder,\nTill (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill)\nThey marched along shoulder to shoulder.\n\nThen a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky,\nAnd they knew that some danger was near:\nThe Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail,\nAnd even the Butcher felt queer.\n\nHe thought of his childhood, left far far behind--\nThat blissful and innocent state--\nThe sound so exactly recalled to his mind\nA pencil that squeaks on a slate!\n\n“’Tis the voice of the Jubjub!” he suddenly cried.\n(This man, that they used to call “Dunce.”)\n“As the Bellman would tell you,” he added with pride,\n“I have uttered that sentiment once.”\n\n“’Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;\nYou will find I have told it you twice.\n’Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,\nIf only I’ve stated it thrice.”\n\nThe Beaver had counted with scrupulous care,\nAttending to every word:\nBut it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair,\nWhen the third repetition occurred.\n\nIt felt that, in spite of all possible pains,\nIt had somehow contrived to lose count,\nAnd the only thing now was to rack its poor brains\nBy reckoning up the amount.\n\n“Two added to one--if that could but be done,”\nIt said, “with one’s fingers and thumbs!”\nRecollecting with tears how, in earlier years,\nIt had taken no pains with its sums.\n\n“The thing can be done,” said the Butcher, “I think.\nThe thing must be done, I am sure.\nThe thing shall be done! Bring me paper and ink,\nThe best there is time to procure.”\n\nThe Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,\nAnd ink in unfailing supplies:\nWhile strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,\nAnd watched them with wondering eyes.\n\nSo engrossed was the Butcher, he heeded them not,\nAs he wrote with a pen in each hand,\nAnd explained all the while in a popular style\nWhich the Beaver could well understand.\n\n“Taking Three as the subject to reason about--\nA convenient number to state--\nWe add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out\nBy One Thousand diminished by Eight.”\n\n“The result we proceed to divide, as you see,\nBy Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two:\nThen subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be\nExactly and perfectly true.”\n\n“The method employed I would gladly explain,\nWhile I have it so clear in my head,\nIf I had but the time and you had but the brain--\nBut much yet remains to be said.”\n\n“In one moment I’ve seen what has hitherto been\nEnveloped in absolute mystery,\nAnd without extra charge I will give you at large\nA Lesson in Natural History.”\n\nIn his genial way he proceeded to say\n(Forgetting all laws of propriety,\nAnd that giving instruction, without introduction,\nWould have caused quite a thrill in Society),\n\n“As to temper the Jubjub’s a desperate bird,\nSince it lives in perpetual passion:\nIts taste in costume is entirely absurd--\nIt is ages ahead of the fashion:”\n\n“But it knows any friend it has met once before:\nIt never will look at a bribe:\nAnd in charity-meetings it stands at the door,\nAnd collects--though it does not subscribe.”\n\n“Its flavour when cooked is more exquisite far\nThan mutton, or oysters, or eggs:\n(Some think it keeps best in an ivory jar,\nAnd some, in mahogany kegs:)”\n\n“You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:\nYou condense it with locusts and tape:\nStill keeping one principal object in view--\nTo preserve its symmetrical shape.”\n\nThe Butcher would gladly have talked till next day,\nBut he felt that the Lesson must end,\nAnd he wept with delight in attempting to say\nHe considered the Beaver his friend.\n\nWhile the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks\nMore eloquent even than tears,\nIt had learned in ten minutes far more than all books\nWould have taught it in seventy years.\n\nThey returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned\n(For a moment) with noble emotion,\nSaid “This amply repays all the wearisome days\nWe have spent on the billowy ocean!”\n\nSuch friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became,\nHave seldom if ever been known;\nIn winter or summer, ’twas always the same--\nYou could never meet either alone.\n\nAnd when quarrels arose--as one frequently finds\nQuarrels will, spite of every endeavour--\nThe song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds,\nAnd cemented their friendship for ever!\n\n\n\n6. _The Barrister’s Dream_\n\nThey sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;\nThey pursued it with forks and hope;\nThey threatened its life with a railway-share;\nThey charmed it with smiles and soap.\n\nBut the Barrister, weary of proving in vain\nThat the Beaver’s lace-making was wrong,\nFell asleep, and in dreams saw the creature quite plain\nThat his fancy had dwelt on so long.\n\nHe dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court,\nWhere the Snark, with a glass in its eye,\nDressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig\nOn the charge of deserting its sty.\n\nThe Witnesses proved, without error or flaw,\nThat the sty was deserted when found:\nAnd the Judge kept explaining the state of the law\nIn a soft under-current of sound.\n\nThe indictment had never been clearly expressed,\nAnd it seemed that the Snark had begun,\nAnd had spoken three hours, before any one guessed\nWhat the pig was supposed to have done.\n\nThe Jury had each formed a different view\n(Long before the indictment was read),\nAnd they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew\nOne word that the others had said.\n\n“You must know--” said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed “Fudge!\nThat statute is obsolete quite!\nLet me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends\nOn an ancient manorial right.”\n\n“In the matter of Treason the pig would appear\nTo have aided, but scarcely abetted:\nWhile the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,\nIf you grant the plea ’never indebted.’”\n\n“The fact of Desertion I will not dispute:\nBut its guilt, as I trust, is removed\n(So far as relates to the costs of this suit)\nBy the Alibi which has been proved.”\n\n“My poor client’s fate now depends on your votes.”\nHere the speaker sat down in his place,\nAnd directed the Judge to refer to his notes\nAnd briefly to sum up the case.\n\nBut the Judge said he never had summed up before;\nSo the Snark undertook it instead,\nAnd summed it so well that it came to far more\nThan the Witnesses ever had said!\n\nWhen the verdict was called for, the Jury declined,\nAs the word was so puzzling to spell;\nBut they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn’t mind\nUndertaking that duty as well.\n\nSo the Snark found the verdict, although, as it owned,\nIt was spent with the toils of the day:\nWhen it said the word “GUILTY!” the Jury all groaned,\nAnd some of them fainted away.\n\nThen the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite\nToo nervous to utter a word:\nWhen it rose to its feet, there was silence like night,\nAnd the fall of a pin might be heard.\n\n“Transportation for life” was the sentence it gave,\n“And _then_ to be fined forty pound.”\nThe Jury all cheered, though the Judge said he feared\nThat the phrase was not legally sound.\n\nBut their wild exultation was suddenly checked\nWhen the jailer informed them, with tears,\nSuch a sentence would have not the slightest effect,\nAs the pig had been dead for some years.\n\nThe Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted:\nBut the Snark, though a little aghast,\nAs the lawyer to whom the defence was intrusted,\nWent bellowing on to the last.\n\nThus the Barrister dreamed, while the bellowing seemed\nTo grow every moment more clear:\nTill he woke to the knell of a furious bell,\nWhich the Bellman rang close at his ear.\n\n\n# VII. _The Banker’s Fate_\n\nThey sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;\nThey pursued it with forks and hope;\nThey threatened its life with a railway-share;\nThey charmed it with smiles and soap.\n\nAnd the Banker, inspired with a courage so new\nIt was matter for general remark,\nRushed madly ahead and was lost to their view\nIn his zeal to discover the Snark.\n\nBut while he was seeking with thimbles and care,\nA Bandersnatch swiftly drew nigh\nAnd grabbed at the Banker, who shrieked in despair,\nFor he knew it was useless to fly.\n\nHe offered large discount--he offered a cheque\n(Drawn “to bearer”) for seven-pounds-ten:\nBut the Bandersnatch merely extended its neck\nAnd grabbed at the Banker again.\n\nWithout rest or pause--while those frumious jaws\nWent savagely snapping around--\nHe skipped and he hopped, and he floundered and flopped,\nTill fainting he fell to the ground.\n\nThe Bandersnatch fled as the others appeared\nLed on by that fear-stricken yell:\nAnd the Bellman remarked “It is just as I feared!”\nAnd solemnly tolled on his bell.\n\nHe was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace\nThe least likeness to what he had been:\nWhile so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white--\nA wonderful thing to be seen!\n\nTo the horror of all who were present that day.\nHe uprose in full evening dress,\nAnd with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say\nWhat his tongue could no longer express.\n\nDown he sank in a chair--ran his hands through his hair--\nAnd chanted in mimsiest tones\nWords whose utter inanity proved his insanity,\nWhile he rattled a couple of bones.\n\n“Leave him here to his fate--it is getting so late!”\nThe Bellman exclaimed in a fright.\n“We have lost half the day. Any further delay,\nAnd we sha’n’t catch a Snark before night!”\n\n\n# VIII. _The Vanishing_\n\nThey sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;\nThey pursued it with forks and hope;\nThey threatened its life with a railway-share;\nThey charmed it with smiles and soap.\n\nThey shuddered to think that the chase might fail,\nAnd the Beaver, excited at last,\nWent bounding along on the tip of its tail,\nFor the daylight was nearly past.\n\n“There is Thingumbob shouting!” the Bellman said.\n“He is shouting like mad, only hark!\nHe is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,\nHe has certainly found a Snark!”\n\nThey gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed\n“He was always a desperate wag!”\nThey beheld him--their Baker--their hero unnamed--\nOn the top of a neighbouring crag,\n\nErect and sublime, for one moment of time.\nIn the next, that wild figure they saw\n(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,\nWhile they waited and listened in awe.\n\n“It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,\nAnd seemed almost too good to be true.\nThen followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:\nThen the ominous words “It’s a Boo-”\n\nThen, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air\nA weary and wandering sigh\nThat sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare\nIt was only a breeze that went by.\n\nThey hunted till darkness came on, but they found\nNot a button, or feather, or mark,\nBy which they could tell that they stood on the ground\nWhere the Baker had met with the Snark.\n\nIn the midst of the word he was trying to say,\nIn the midst of his laughter and glee,\nHe had softly and suddenly vanished away--\nFor the Snark _was_ a Boojum, you see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1876 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "april_fools" - } - } - }, - "jabberwocky": { - "title": "“Jabberwocky”", - "body": "’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves\nDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:\nAll mimsy were the borogoves,\nAnd the mome raths outgrabe.\n\n“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!\nThe jaws that bite, the claws that catch!\nBeware the Jubjub bird, and shun\nThe frumious Bandersnatch!”\n\nHe took his vorpal sword in hand;\nLong time the manxome foe he sought--\nSo rested he by the Tumtum tree\nAnd stood awhile in thought.\n\nAnd, as in uffish thought he stood,\nThe Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,\nCame whiffling through the tulgey wood,\nAnd burbled as it came!\n\nOne, two! One, two! And through and through\nThe vorpal blade went snicker-snack!\nHe left it dead, and with its head\nHe went galumphing back.\n\n“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?\nCome to my arms, my beamish boy!\nO frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”\nHe chortled in his joy.\n\n’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves\nDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:\nAll mimsy were the borogoves,\nAnd the mome raths outgrabe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lang-coortin": { - "title": "“The Lang Coortin’”", - "body": "The ladye she stood at her lattice high,\nWi’ her doggie at her feet;\nThorough the lattice she can spy\nThe passers in the street,\n\n“There’s one that standeth at the door,\nAnd tirleth at the pin:\nNow speak and say, my popinjay,\nIf I sall let him in.”\n\nThen up and spake the popinjay\nThat flew abune her head:\n“Gae let him in that tirls the pin:\nHe cometh thee to wed.”\n\nO when he cam’ the parlour in,\nA woeful man was he!\n“And dinna ye ken your lover agen,\nSae well that loveth thee?”\n\n“And how wad I ken ye loved me, Sir,\nThat have been sae lang away?\nAnd how wad I ken ye loved me, Sir?\nYe never telled me sae.”\n\nSaid--“Ladye dear,” and the salt, salt tear\nCam’ rinnin’ doon his cheek,\n“I have sent the tokens of my love\nThis many and many a week.”\n\n“O didna ye get the rings, Ladye,\nThe rings o’ the gowd sae fine?\nI wot that I have sent to thee\nFour score, four score and nine.”\n\n“They cam’ to me,” said that fair ladye.\n“Wow, they were flimsie things!”\nSaid--“that chain o’ gowd, my doggie to howd,\nIt is made o’ thae self-same rings.”\n\n“And didna ye get the locks, the locks,\nThe locks o’ my ain black hair,\nWhilk I sent by post, whilk I sent by box,\nWhilk I sent by the carrier?”\n\n“They cam’ to me,” said that fair ladye;\n“And I prithee send nae mair!”\nSaid--“that cushion sae red, for my doggie’s head,\nIt is stuffed wi’ thae locks o’ hair.”\n\n“And didna ye get the letter, Ladye,\nTied wi’ a silken string,\nWhilk I sent to thee frae the far countrie,\nA message of love to bring?”\n\n“It cam’ to me frae the far countrie\nWi’ its silken string and a’;\nBut it wasna prepaid,” said that high-born maid,\n“Sae I gar’d them tak’ it awa’.”\n\n“O ever alack that ye sent it back,\nIt was written sae clerkly and well!\nNow the message it brought, and the boon that it sought,\nI must even say it mysel’.”\n\nThen up and spake the popinjay,\nSae wisely counselled he.\n“Now say it in the proper way:\nGae doon upon thy knee!”\n\nThe lover he turned baith red and pale,\nWent doon upon his knee:\n“O Ladye, hear the waesome tale\nThat must be told to thee!”\n\n“For five lang years, and five lang years,\nI coorted thee by looks;\nBy nods and winks, by smiles and tears,\nAs I had read in books.”\n\n“For ten lang years, O weary hours!\nI coorted thee by signs;\nBy sending game, by sending flowers,\nBy sending Valentines.”\n\n“For five lang years, and five lang years,\nI have dwelt in the far countrie,\nTill that thy mind should be inclined\nMair tenderly to me.”\n\n“Now thirty years are gane and past,\nI am come frae a foreign land:\nI am come to tell thee my love at last--\nO Ladye, gie me thy hand!”\n\nThe ladye she turned not pale nor red,\nBut she smiled a pitiful smile:\n“Sic’ a coortin’ as yours, my man,” she said\n“Takes a lang and a weary while!”\n\nAnd out and laughed the popinjay,\nA laugh of bitter scorn:\n“A coortin’ done in sic’ a way,\nIt ought not to be borne!”\n\nWi’ that the doggie barked aloud,\nAnd up and doon he ran,\nAnd tugged and strained his chain o’ gowd,\nAll for to bite the man.\n\n“O hush thee, gentle popinjay!\nO hush thee, doggie dear!\nThere is a word I fain wad say,\nIt needeth he should hear!”\n\nAye louder screamed that ladye fair\nTo drown her doggie’s bark:\nEver the lover shouted mair\nTo make that ladye hark:\n\nShrill and more shrill the popinjay\nUpraised his angry squall:\nI trow the doggie’s voice that day\nWas louder than them all!\n\nThe serving-men and serving-maids\nSat by the kitchen fire:\nThey heard sic’ a din the parlour within\nAs made them much admire.\n\nOut spake the boy in buttons\n(I ween he wasna thin),\n“Now wha will tae the parlour gae,\nAnd stay this deadlie din?”\n\nAnd they have taen a kerchief,\nCasted their kevils in,\nFor wha will tae the parlour gae,\nAnd stay that deadlie din.\n\nWhen on that boy the kevil fell\nTo stay the fearsome noise,\n“Gae in,” they cried, “whate’er betide,\nThou prince of button-boys!”\n\nSyne, he has taen a supple cane\nTo swinge that dog sae fat:\nThe doggie yowled, the doggie howled\nThe louder aye for that.\n\nSyne, he has taen a mutton-bane--\nThe doggie ceased his noise,\nAnd followed doon the kitchen stair\nThat prince of button-boys!\n\nThen sadly spake that ladye fair,\nWi’ a frown upon her brow:\n“O dearer to me is my sma’ doggie\nThan a dozen sic’ as thou!”\n\n“Nae use, nae use for sighs and tears:\nNae use at all to fret:\nSin’ ye’ve bided sae well for thirty years,\nYe may bide a wee langer yet!”\n\nSadly, sadly he crossed the floor\nAnd tirled at the pin:\nSadly went he through the door\nWhere sadly he cam’ in.\n\n“O gin I had a popinjay\nTo fly abune my head,\nTo tell me what I ought to say,\nI had by this been wed.”\n\n“O gin I find anither ladye,”\nHe said wi’ sighs and tears,\n“I wot my coortin’ sall not be\nAnither thirty years”\n\n“For gin I find a ladye gay,\nExactly to my taste,\nI’ll pop the question, aye or nay,\nIn twenty years at maist.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lays-of-sorrow": { - "title": "“Lays of Sorrow”", - "body": "The day was wet, the rain fell souse\nLike jars of strawberry jam, a\nsound was heard in the old henhouse,\nA beating of a hammer.\nOf stalwart form, and visage warm,\nTwo youths were seen within it,\nSplitting up an old tree into perches for their poultry\nAt a hundred strokes a minute.\nThe work is done, the hen has taken\nPossession of her nest and eggs,\nWithout a thought of eggs and bacon,\n(Or I am very much mistaken happy)\nShe turns over each shell,\nTo be sure that all’s well,\nLooks into the straw\nTo see there’s no flaw,\nGoes once round the house,\nHalf afraid of a mouse,\nThen sinks calmly to rest\nOn the top of her nest,\nFirst doubling up each of her legs.\nTime rolled away, and so did every shell,\n“Small by degrees and beautifully less,”\nAs the large mother with a powerful spell\nForced each in turn its contents to express,\nBut ah! “imperfect is expression,”\nSome poet said, I don’t care who,\nIf you want to know you must go elsewhere,\nOne fact I can tell, if you’re willing to hear,\nHe never attended a Parliament Session,\nFor I’m certain that if he had ever been there,\nFull quickly would he have changed his ideas,\nWith the hissings, the hootings, the groans and the cheers.\nAnd as to his name it is pretty clear\nThat it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you!\n\nAnd so it fell upon a day,\n(That is, it never rose again)\nA chick was found upon the hay,\nIts little life had ebbed away.\nNo longer frolicsome and gay,\nNo longer could it run or play.\n“And must we, chicken, must we part?”\nIts master cried with bursting heart,\nAnd voice of agony and pain.\nSo one, whose ticket’s marked “Return,”\nWhen to the lonely roadside station\nHe flies in fear and perturbation,\nThinks of his home--the hissing urn--\nThen runs with flying hat and hair,\nAnd, entering, finds to his despair\nHe’s missed the very last train.\n\nToo long it were to tell of each conjecture\nOf chicken suicide, and poultry victim,\nThe deadly frown, the stern and dreary lecture,\nThe timid guess, “perhaps some needle pricked him!”\nThe din of voice, the words both loud and many,\nThe sob, the tear, the sigh that none could smother,\nTill all agreed “a shilling to a penny\nIt killed itself, and we acquit the mother!”\nScarce was the verdict spoken,\nWhen that still calm was broken,\nA childish form hath burst into the throng;\nWith tears and looks of sadness,\nThat bring no news of gladness,\nBut tell too surely something hath gone wrong!\n“The sight I have come upon\nThe stoutest heart would sicken,\nThat nasty hen has been and gone\nAnd killed another chicken!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lobster-quadrille": { - "title": "“The Lobster Quadrille”", - "body": "“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail,\n“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.\nSee how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!\nThey are waiting on the shingle--will you come and join the dance?\nWill you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?\nWill you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”\n\n“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be\nWhen they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”\nBut the snail replied, “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance--\nSaid he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.\nWould not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.\nWould not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.\n\n“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.\n“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.\nThe further off from England the nearer is to France--\nThen turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.\nWill you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?\nWill you, won’ t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mad-gardeners-song": { - "title": "“The Mad Gardener’s Song”", - "body": "He thought he saw an Elephant,\nThat practised on a fife:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA letter from his wife.\n“At length I realise,” he said,\nThe bitterness of Life!’\n\nHe thought he saw a Buffalo\nUpon the chimney-piece:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nHis Sister’s Husband’s Niece.\n“Unless you leave this house,” he said,\n“I’ll send for the Police!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Rattlesnake\nThat questioned him in Greek:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nThe Middle of Next Week.\n“The one thing I regret,” he said,\n“Is that it cannot speak!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk\nDescending from the bus:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Hippopotamus.\n“If this should stay to dine,” he said,\n“There won’t be much for us!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Kangaroo\nThat worked a coffee-mill:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Vegetable-Pill.\n“Were I to swallow this,” he said,\n“I should be very ill!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Coach-and-Four\nThat stood beside his bed:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Bear without a Head.\n“Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!\nIt’s waiting to be fed!”\n\nHe thought he saw an Albatross\nThat fluttered round the lamp:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Penny-Postage Stamp.\n“You’d best be getting home,” he said:\n“The nights are very damp!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Garden-Door\nThat opened with a key:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Double Rule of Three:\n“And all its mystery,” he said,\n“Is clear as day to me!”\n\nHe thought he saw a Argument\nThat proved he was the Pope:\nHe looked again, and found it was\nA Bar of Mottled Soap.\n“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,\n“Extinguishes all hope!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "melancholetta": { - "title": "“Melancholetta”", - "body": "With saddest music all day long\nShe soothed her secret sorrow:\nAt night she sighed “I fear ’twas wrong\nSuch cheerful words to borrow.\nDearest, a sweeter, sadder song\nI’ll sing to thee to-morrow.”\n\nI thanked her, but I could not say\nThat I was glad to hear it:\nI left the house at break of day,\nAnd did not venture near it\nTill time, I hoped, had worn away\nHer grief, for nought could cheer it!\n\nMy dismal sister! Couldst thou know\nThe wretched home thou keepest!\nThy brother, drowned in daily woe,\nIs thankful when thou sleepest;\nFor if I laugh, however low,\nWhen thou’rt awake, thou weepest!\n\nI took my sister t’other day\n(Excuse the slang expression)\nTo Sadler’s Wells to see the play\nIn hopes the new impression\nMight in her thoughts, from grave to gay\nEffect some slight digression.\n\nI asked three gay young dogs from town\nTo join us in our folly,\nWhose mirth, I thought, might serve to drown\nMy sister’s melancholy:\nThe lively Jones, the sportive Brown,\nAnd Robinson the jolly.\n\nThe maid announced the meal in tones\nThat I myself had taught her,\nMeant to allay my sister’s moans\nLike oil on troubled water:\nI rushed to Jones, the lively Jones,\nAnd begged him to escort her.\n\nVainly he strove, with ready wit,\nTo joke about the weather--\nTo ventilate the last ‘_on dit_’--\nTo quote the price of leather--\nShe groaned “Here I and Sorrow sit:\nLet us lament together!”\n\nI urged “You’re wasting time, you know:\nDelay will spoil the venison.”\n“My heart is wasted with my woe!\nThere is no rest--in Venice, on\nThe Bridge of Sighs!” she quoted low\nFrom Byron and from Tennyson.\n\nI need not tell of soup and fish\nIn solemn silence swallowed,\nThe sobs that ushered in each dish,\nAnd its departure followed,\nNor yet my suicidal wish\nTo _be_ the cheese I hollowed.\n\nSome desperate attempts were made\nTo start a conversation;\n“Madam,” the sportive Brown essayed,\n“Which kind of recreation,\nHunting or fishing, have you made\nYour special occupation?”\n\nHer lips curved downwards instantly,\nAs if of india-rubber.\n“Hounds _in full cry_ I like,” said she:\n(Oh how I longed to snub her!)\n“Of fish, a whale’s the one for me,\n_It is so full of blubber_!”\n\nThe night’s performance was “King John.”\n“It’s dull,” she wept, “and so-so!”\nAwhile I let her tears flow on,\nShe said they soothed her woe so!\nAt length the curtain rose upon\n‘Bombastes Furioso.’\n\nIn vain we roared; in vain we tried\nTo rouse her into laughter:\nHer pensive glances wandered wide\nFrom orchestra to rafter--\n“_Tier upon tier_!” she said, and sighed;\nAnd silence followed after.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-fancy": { - "title": "“My Fancy”", - "body": "I painted her a gushing thing,\nWith years about a score;\nI little thought to find they were\nA least a dozen more;\nMy fancy gave her eyes of blue,\nA curly auburn head:\nI came to find the blue a green,\nThe auburn turned to red.\n\nShe boxed my ears this morning,\nThey tingled very much;\nI own that I could wish her\nA somewhat lighter touch;\nAnd if you ask me how\nHer charms might be improved,\nI would not have them added to,\nBut just a few removed!\n\nShe has the bear’s ethereal grace,\nThe bland hyaena’s laugh,\nThe footstep of the elephant,\nThe neck of a giraffe;\nI love her still, believe me,\nThough my heart its passion hides;\n“She’s all my fancy painted her,”\nBut oh! how much besides!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-palace-of-humbug": { - "title": "“The Palace of Humbug”", - "body": "I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,\nAnd each damp thing that creeps and crawls\nWent wobble-wobble on the walls.\n\nFaint odours of departed cheese,\nBlown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,\nAwoke the never ending sneeze.\n\nStrange pictures decked the arras drear,\nStrange characters of woe and fear,\nThe humbugs of the social sphere.\n\nOne showed a vain and noisy prig,\nThat shouted empty words and big\nAt him that nodded in a wig.\n\nAnd one, a dotard grim and gray,\nWho wasteth childhood’s happy day\nIn work more profitless than play.\n\nWhose icy breast no pity warms,\nWhose little victims sit in swarms,\nAnd slowly sob on lower forms.\n\nAnd one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,\nWhere flowers are growing wild and rank,\nLike weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.\n\nAll birds of evil omen there\nFlood with rich Notes the tainted air,\nThe witless wanderer to snare.\n\nThe fatal Notes neglected fall,\nNo creature heeds the treacherous call,\nFor all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.\n\nThe wandering phantom broke and fled,\nStraightway I saw within my head\nA vision of a ghostly bed,\n\nWhere lay two worn decrepit men,\nThe fictions of a lawyer’s pen,\nWho never more might breathe again.\n\nThe serving-man of Richard Roe\nWept, inarticulate with woe:\nShe wept, that waiting on John Doe.\n\n“Oh rouse,” I urged, “the waning sense\nWith tales of tangled evidence,\nOf suit, demurrer, and defence.”\n\n“Vain,” she replied, “such mockeries:\nFor morbid fancies, such as these,\nNo suits can suit, no plea can please.”\n\nAnd bending o’er that man of straw,\nShe cried in grief and sudden awe,\nNot inappropriately, “Law!”\n\nThe well-remembered voice he knew,\nHe smiled, he faintly muttered “Sue!”\n(Her very name was legal too.)\n\nThe night was fled, the dawn was nigh:\nA hurricane went raving by,\nAnd swept the Vision from mine eye.\n\nVanished that dim and ghostly bed,\nThe hangings, tape; the tape was red happy\n’Tis o’er, and Doe and Roe are dead!\n\nOh, yet my spirit inly crawls,\nWhat time it shudderingly recalls\nThat horrid dream of marble halls!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "phantasmagoria": { - "title": "“Phantasmagoria”", - "body": "# I. _The Trystyng_\n\nOne winter night, at half-past nine,\n Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy,\nI had come home, too late to dine,\nAnd supper, with cigars and wine,\n Was waiting in the study.\n\nThere was a strangeness in the room,\n And Something white and wavy\nWas standing near me in the gloom--\nI took it for the carpet-broom\n Left by that careless slavey.\n\nBut presently the Thing began\n To shiver and to sneeze:\nOn which I said “Come, come, my man!\nThat’s a most inconsiderate plan.\n Less noise there, if you please!”\n\n“I’ve caught a cold,” the Thing replies,\n “Out there upon the landing.”\nI turned to look in some surprise,\nAnd there, before my very eyes,\n A little Ghost was standing!\n\nHe trembled when he caught my eye,\n And got behind a chair.\n“How came you here,” I said, “and why?\nI never saw a thing so shy.\n Come out! Don’t shiver there!”\n\nHe said “I’d gladly tell you how,\n And also tell you why;\nBut” (here he gave a little bow)\n“You’re in so bad a temper now,\n You’d think it all a lie.”\n\n“And as to being in a fright,\n Allow me to remark\nThat Ghosts have just as good a right\nIn every way, to fear the light,\n As Men to fear the dark.”\n\n“No plea,” said I, “can well excuse\n Such cowardice in you:\nFor Ghosts can visit when they choose,\nWhereas we Humans ca’n’t refuse\n To grant the interview.”\n\nHe said “A flutter of alarm\n Is not unnatural, is it?\nI really feared you meant some harm:\nBut, now I see that you are calm,\n Let me explain my visit.”\n\n“Houses are classed, I beg to state,\n According to the number\nOf Ghosts that they accommodate:\n(The Tenant merely counts as weight,\n With Coals and other lumber).”\n\n“This is a ‘one-ghost’ house, and you\n When you arrived last summer,\nMay have remarked a Spectre who\nWas doing all that Ghosts can do\n To welcome the new-comer.”\n\n“In Villas this is always done--\n However cheaply rented:\nFor, though of course there’s less of fun\nWhen there is only room for one,\n Ghosts have to be contented.”\n\n“That Spectre left you on the Third--\n Since then you’ve not been haunted:\nFor, as he never sent us word,\n’Twas quite by accident we heard\n That any one was wanted.”\n\n“A Spectre has first choice, by right,\n In filling up a vacancy;\nThen Phantom, Goblin, Elf, and Sprite--\nIf all these fail them, they invite\n The nicest Ghoul that they can see.”\n\n“The Spectres said the place was low,\n And that you kept bad wine:\nSo, as a Phantom had to go,\nAnd I was first, of course, you know,\n I couldn’t well decline.”\n\n“No doubt,” said I, “they settled who\n Was fittest to be sent\nYet still to choose a brat like you,\nTo haunt a man of forty-two,\n Was no great compliment!”\n\n“I’m not so young, Sir,” he replied,\n “As you might think. The fact is,\nIn caverns by the water-side,\nAnd other places that I’ve tried,\n I’ve had a lot of practice:”\n\n“But I have never taken yet\n A strict domestic part,\nAnd in my flurry I forget\nThe Five Good Rules of Etiquette\n We have to know by heart.”\n\nMy sympathies were warming fast\n Towards the little fellow:\nHe was so utterly aghast\nAt having found a Man at last,\n And looked so scared and yellow.\n\n“At least,” I said, “I’m glad to find\n A Ghost is not a dumb thing!\nBut pray sit down: you’ll feel inclined\n(If, like myself, you have not dined)\n To take a snack of something:”\n\n“Though, certainly, you don’t appear\n A thing to offer food to!\nAnd then I shall be glad to hear--\nIf you will say them loud and clear--\n The Rules that you allude to.”\n\n“Thanks! You shall hear them by and by.\n This is a piece of luck!”\n“What may I offer you?” said I.\n“Well, since you are so kind, I’ll try\n A little bit of duck.”\n\n“One slice! And may I ask you for\n Another drop of gravy?”\nI sat and looked at him in awe,\nFor certainly I never saw\n A thing so white and wavy.\n\nAnd still he seemed to grow more white,\n More vapoury, and wavier--\nSeen in the dim and flickering light,\nAs he proceeded to recite\n His “Maxims of Behaviour.”\n\n\n# II. _Hys Fyve Rules_\n\n“My First--but don’t suppose,” he said,\n “I’m setting you a riddle--\nIs--if your Victim be in bed,\nDon’t touch the curtains at his head,\n But take them in the middle,”\n\n“And wave them slowly in and out,\n While drawing them asunder;\nAnd in a minute’s time, no doubt,\nHe’ll raise his head and look about\n With eyes of wrath and wonder.”\n\n“And here you must on no pretence\n Make the first observation.\nWait for the Victim to commence:\nNo Ghost of any common sense\n Begins a conversation.”\n\n“If he should say ‘How came you here?’\n (The way that you began, Sir,)\nIn such a case your course is clear--\n‘On the bat’s back, my little dear!’\n Is the appropriate answer.”\n\n“If after this he says no more,\n You’d best perhaps curtail your\nExertions--go and shake the door,\nAnd then, if he begins to snore,\n You’ll know the thing’s a failure.”\n\n“By day, if he should be alone--\n At home or on a walk--\nYou merely give a hollow groan,\nTo indicate the kind of tone\n In which you mean to talk.”\n\n“But if you find him with his friends,\n The thing is rather harder.\nIn such a case success depends\nOn picking up some candle-ends,\n Or butter, in the larder.”\n\n“With this you make a kind of slide\n (It answers best with suet),\nOn which you must contrive to glide,\nAnd swing yourself from side to side--\n One soon learns how to do it.”\n\n“The Second tells us what is right\n In ceremonious calls:--\n‘First burn a blue or crimson light’\n(A thing I quite forgot to-night),\n ‘Then scratch the door or walls.’”\n\nI said “You’ll visit here no more,\n If you attempt the Guy.\nI’ll have no bonfires on my floor--\nAnd, as for scratching at the door,\n I’d like to see you try!”\n\n“The Third was written to protect\n The interests of the Victim,\nAnd tells us, as I recollect,\nTo treat him with a grave respect,\n And not to contradict him.”\n\n“That’s plain,” said I, “as Tare and Tret,\n To any comprehension:\nI only wish some Ghosts I’ve met\nWould not so constantly forget\n The maxim that you mention!”\n\n“Perhaps,” he said, “you first transgressed\n The laws of hospitality:\nAll Ghosts instinctively detest\nThe Man that fails to treat his guest\n With proper cordiality.”\n\n“If you address a Ghost as ‘Thing!’\n Or strike him with a hatchet,\nHe is permitted by the King\nTo drop all formal parleying--\n And then you’re sure to catch it!”\n\n“The Fourth prohibits trespassing\n Where other Ghosts are quartered:\nAnd those convicted of the thing\n(Unless when pardoned by the King)\n Must instantly be slaughtered.”\n\n“That simply means ‘be cut up small’:\n Ghosts soon unite anew.\nThe process scarcely hurts at all--\nNot more than when you ’re what you call\n ‘Cut up’ by a Review.”\n\n“The Fifth is one you may prefer\n That I should quote entire:--\nThe King must be addressed as ‘Sir.’\nThis, from a simple courtier,\n Is all the Laws require:”\n\n“But, should you wish to do the thing\n With out-and-out politeness,\nAccost him as ‘My Goblin King!\nAnd always use, in answering,\n The phrase ‘Your Royal Whiteness!’”\n\n“I’m getting rather hoarse, I fear,\n After so much reciting:\nSo, if you don’t object, my dear,\nWe’ll try a glass of bitter beer--\n I think it looks inviting.”\n\n\n# III. _Scarmoges_\n\n“And did you really walk,” said I,\n “On such a wretched night?\nI always fancied Ghosts could fly--\nIf not exactly in the sky,\n Yet at a fairish height.”\n\n“It’s very well,” said he, “for Kings\n To soar above the earth:\nBut Phantoms often find that wings--\nLike many other pleasant things--\n Cost more than they are worth.”\n\n“Spectres of course are rich, and so\n Can buy them from the Elves:\nBut we prefer to keep below--\nThey’re stupid company, you know,\n For any but themselves:”\n\n“For, though they claim to be exempt\n From pride, they treat a Phantom\nAs something quite beneath contempt--\nJust as no Turkey ever dreamt\n Of noticing a Bantam.”\n\n“They seem too proud,” said I, “to go\n To houses such as mine.\nPray, how did they contrive to know\nSo quickly that ‘the place was low,’\n And that I ‘kept bad wine’?”\n\n“Inspector Kobold came to you--”\n The little Ghost began.\nHere I broke in--“Inspector who?\nInspecting Ghosts is something new!\n Explain yourself, my man!”\n\n“His name is Kobold,” said my guest:\n “One of the Spectre order:\nYou’ll very often see him dressed\nIn a yellow gown, a crimson vest,\n And a night-cap with a border.”\n\n“He tried the Brocken business first,\n But caught a sort of chill;\nSo came to England to be nursed,\nAnd here it took the form of thirst,\n Which he complains of still.”\n\n“Port-wine, he says, when rich and sound,\n Warms his old bones like nectar:\nAnd as the inns, where it is found,\nAre his especial hunting-ground,\n We call him the Inn-Spectre.”\n\nI bore it--bore it like a man--\n This agonizing witticism!\nAnd nothing could be sweeter than\nMy temper, till the Ghost began\n Some most provoking criticism.\n\n“Cooks need not be indulged in waste;\n Yet still you’d better teach them\nDishes should have some sort of taste.\nPray, why are all the cruets placed\n Where nobody can reach them?”\n\n“That man of yours will never earn\n His living as a waiter!\nIs that queer thing supposed to burn?\n(It’s far too dismal a concern\n To call a Moderator).”\n\n“The duck was tender, but the peas\n Were very much too old:\nAnd just remember, if you please,\nThe next time you have toasted cheese,\n Don’t let them send it cold.”\n\n“You’d find the bread improved, I think,\n By getting better flour:\nAnd have you anything to drink\nThat looks a little less like ink,\n And isn’t quite so sour?”\n\nThen, peering round with curious eyes,\n He muttered “Goodness gracious!”\nAnd so went on to criticise--\n“Your room’s an inconvenient size:\n It’s neither snug nor spacious.”\n\n“That narrow window, I expect,\n Serves but to let the dusk in--”\n“But please,” said I, “to recollect\n’Twas fashioned by an architect\n Who pinned his faith on Ruskin!”\n\n“I don’t care who he was, Sir, or\n On whom he pinned his faith!\nConstructed by whatever law,\nSo poor a job I never saw,\n As I’m a living Wraith!”\n\n“What a re-markable cigar!\n How much are they a dozen?”\nI growled “No matter what they are!\nYou’re getting as familiar\n As if you were my cousin!”\n\n“Now that’s a thing I will not stand,\n And so I tell you flat.”\n“Aha,” said he, “we’re getting grand!”\n(Taking a bottle in his hand)\n “I’ll soon arrange for that!”\n\nAnd here he took a careful aim,\n And gaily cried “Here goes!”\nI tried to dodge it as it came,\nBut somehow caught it, all the same,\n Exactly on my nose.\n\nAnd I remember nothing more\n That I can clearly fix,\nTill I was sitting on the floor,\nRepeating “Two and five are four,\n But five and two are six.”\n\nWhat really passed I never learned,\n Nor guessed: I only know\nThat, when at last my sense returned,\nThe lamp, neglected, dimly burned--\n The fire was getting low--\n\nThrough driving mists I seemed to see\n A Thing that smirked and smiled:\nAnd found that he was giving me\nA lesson in Biography,\n As if I were a child.\n\n\n# IV. _Hys Nouryture_\n\n“Oh, when I was a little Ghost,\n A merry time had we!\nEach seated on his favourite post,\nWe chumped and chawed the buttered toast\n They gave us for our tea.”\n\n“That story is in print!” I cried.\n “Don’t say it’s not, because\nIt’s known as well as Bradshaw’s Guide!”\n(The Ghost uneasily replied\n He hardly thought it was).\n\n“It’s not in Nursery Rhymes? And yet\n I almost think it is--\n‘Three little Ghosteses’ were set\n‘On posteses,’ you know, and ate\n Their ‘buttered toasteses.’”\n\n“I have the book; so if you doubt it--”\n I turned to search the shelf.\n“Don’t stir!” he cried. “We’ll do without it:\nI now remember all about it;\n I wrote the thing myself.”\n\n“It came out in a ‘Monthly,’ or\n At least my agent said it did:\nSome literary swell, who saw\nIt, thought it seemed adapted for\n The Magazine he edited.”\n\n“My father was a Brownie, Sir;\n My mother was a Fairy.\nThe notion had occurred to her,\nThe children would be happier,\n If they were taught to vary.”\n\n“The notion soon became a craze;\n And, when it once began, she\nBrought us all out in different ways--\nOne was a Pixy, two were Fays,\n Another was a Banshee;”\n\n“The Fetch and Kelpie went to school\n And gave a lot of trouble;\nNext came a Poltergeist and Ghoul,\nAnd then two Trolls (which broke the rule),\n A Goblin, and a Double--”\n\n“(If that’s a snuff-box on the shelf,”\n He added with a yawn,\n“I’ll take a pinch)--next came an Elf,\nAnd then a Phantom (that’s myself),\n And last, a Leprechaun.”\n\n“One day, some Spectres chanced to call,\n Dressed in the usual white:\nI stood and watched them in the hall,\nAnd couldn’t make them out at all,\n They seemed so strange a sight.”\n\n“I wondered what on earth they were,\n That looked all head and sack;\nBut Mother told me not to stare,\nAnd then she twitched me by the hair,\n And punched me in the back.”\n\n“Since then I’ve often wished that I\n Had been a Spectre born.\nBut what’s the use?” (He heaved a sigh.)\n“They are the ghost-nobility,\n And look on us with scorn.”\n\n“My phantom-life was soon begun:\n When I was barely six,\nI went out with an older one--\nAnd just at first I thought it fun,\n And learned a lot of tricks.”\n\n“I’ve haunted dungeons, castles, towers--\n Wherever I was sent:\nI’ve often sat and howled for hours,\nDrenched to the skin with driving showers,\n Upon a battlement.”\n\n“It’s quite old-fashioned now to groan\n When you begin to speak:\nThis is the newest thing in tone--”\nAnd here (it chilled me to the bone)\n He gave an awful squeak.\n\n“Perhaps,” he added, “to your ear\n That sounds an easy thing?\nTry it yourself, my little dear!\nIt took me something like a year,\n With constant practising.”\n\n“And when you’ve learned to squeak, my man,\n And caught the double sob,\nYou’re pretty much where you began:\nJust try and gibber if you can!\n That’s something like a job!”\n\n“I’ve tried it, and can only say\n I’m sure you couldn’t do it, e-\nven if you practised night and day,\nUnless you have a turn that way,\n And natural ingenuity.”\n\n“Shakspeare I think it is who treats\n Of Ghosts, in days of old,\nWho ‘gibbered in the Roman streets,’\nDressed, if you recollect, in sheets--\n They must have found it cold.”\n\n“I’ve often spent ten pounds on stuff,\n In dressing as a Double;\nBut, though it answers as a puff,\nIt never has effect enough\n To make it worth the trouble.”\n\n“Long bills soon quenched the little thirst\n I had for being funny.\nThe setting-up is always worst:\nSuch heaps of things you want at first,\n One must be made of money!”\n\n“For instance, take a Haunted Tower,\n With skull, cross-bones, and sheet;\nBlue lights to burn (say) two an hour,\nCondensing lens of extra power,\n And set of chains complete:”\n\n“What with the things you have to hire--\n The fitting on the robe--\nAnd testing all the coloured fire--\nThe outfit of itself would tire\n The patience of a Job!”\n\n“And then they’re so fastidious,\n The Haunted-House Committee:\nI’ve often known them make a fuss\nBecause a Ghost was French, or Russ,\n Or even from the City!”\n\n“Some dialects are objected to--\n For one, the Irish brogue is:\nAnd then, for all you have to do,\nOne pound a week they offer you,\n And find yourself in Bogies!”\n\n\n# V. _Byckerment_\n\n“Don’t they consult the ‘Victims,’ though?”\n I said. “They should, by rights,\nGive them a chance--because, you know,\nThe tastes of people differ so,\n Especially in Sprites.”\n\nThe Phantom shook his head and smiled.\n “Consult them? Not a bit!\n’Twould be a job to drive one wild,\nTo satisfy one single child--\n There’d be no end to it!”\n\n“Of course you can’t leave children free,”\n Said I, “to pick and choose:\nBut, in the case of men like me,\nI think ‘Mine Host’ might fairly be\n Allowed to state his views.”\n\nHe said “It really wouldn’t pay--\n Folk are so full of fancies.\nWe visit for a single day,\nAnd whether then we go, or stay,\n Depends on circumstances.”\n\n“And, though we don’t consult ‘Mine Host’\n Before the thing’s arranged,\nStill, if he often quits his post,\nOr is not a well-mannered Ghost,\n Then you can have him changed.”\n\n“But if the host’s a man like you--\n I mean a man of sense;\nAnd if the house is not too new--”\n“Why, what has that,” said I, “to do\n With Ghost’s convenience?”\n\n“A new house does not suit, you know--\n It’s such a job to trim it:\nBut, after twenty years or so,\nThe wainscotings begin to go,\n So twenty is the limit.”\n\n“To trim” was not a phrase I could\n Remember having heard:\n“Perhaps,” I said, “you’ll be so good\nAs tell me what is understood\n Exactly by that word?”\n\n“It means the loosening all the doors,”\n The Ghost replied, and laughed:\n“It means the drilling holes by scores\nIn all the skirting-boards and floors,\n To make a thorough draught.”\n\n“You’ll sometimes find that one or two\n Are all you really need\nTo let the wind come whistling through--\nBut here there’ll be a lot to do!”\n I faintly gasped “Indeed!”\n\n“If I’d been rather later, I’ll\n Be bound,” I added, trying\n(Most unsuccessfully) to smile,\n“You’d have been busy all this while,\n Trimming and beautifying?”\n\n“Why, no,” said he; “perhaps I should\n Have stayed another minute--\nBut still no Ghost, that’s any good,\nWithout an introduction would\n Have ventured to begin it.”\n\n“The proper thing, as you were late,\n Was certainly to go:\nBut, with the roads in such a state,\nI got the Knight-Mayor’s leave to wait\n For half an hour or so.”\n\n“Who’s the Knight-Mayor?” I cried. Instead\n Of answering my question,\n“Well, if you don’t know that,” he said,\n“Either you never go to bed,\n Or you’ve a grand digestion!”\n\n“He goes about and sits on folk\n That eat too much at night:\nHis duties are to pinch, and poke,\nAnd squeeze them till they nearly choke.”\n (I said “It serves them right!”)\n\n“And folk who sup on things like these--”\n He muttered, “eggs and bacon--\nLobster--and duck--and toasted cheese--\nIf they don’t get an awful squeeze,\n I’m very much mistaken!”\n\n“He is immensely fat, and so\n Well suits the occupation:\nIn point of fact, if you must know,\nWe used to call him years ago,\n The Mayor and Corporation!”\n\n“The day he was elected Mayor\n I know that every Sprite meant\nTo vote for me, but did not dare--\nHe was so frantic with despair\n And furious with excitement.”\n\n“When it was over, for a whim,\n He ran to tell the King;\nAnd being the reverse of slim,\nA two-mile trot was not for him\n A very easy thing.”\n\n“So, to reward him for his run\n (As it was baking hot,\nAnd he was over twenty stone),\nThe King proceeded, half in fun,\n To knight him on the spot.”\n\n“’Twas a great liberty to take!”\n (I fired up like a rocket).\n“He did it just for punning’s sake:\n‘The man,’ says Johnson, ‘that would make\n A pun, would pick a pocket!’”\n\n“A man,” said he, “is not a King.”\n I argued for a while,\nAnd did my best to prove the thing--\nThe Phantom merely listening\n With a contemptuous smile.\n\nAt last, when, breath and patience spent,\n I had recourse to smoking--\n“Your aim,” he said, “is excellent:\nBut--when you call it argument--\n Of course you’re only joking?”\n\nStung by his cold and snaky eye,\n I roused myself at length\nTo say “At least I do defy\nThe veriest sceptic to deny\n That union is strength!”\n\n“That’s true enough,” said he, “yet stay--”\n I listened in all meekness--\n“Union is strength, I’m bound to say;\nIn fact, the thing’s as clear as day;\n But onions are a weakness.”\n\n\n# VI. _Dyscomfyture_\n\nAs one who strives a hill to climb,\n Who never climbed before:\nWho finds it, in a little time,\nGrow every moment less sublime,\n And votes the thing a bore:\n\nYet, having once begun to try,\n Dares not desert his quest,\nBut, climbing, ever keeps his eye\nOn one small hut against the sky\n Wherein he hopes to rest:\n\nWho climbs till nerve and force are spent,\n With many a puff and pant:\nWho still, as rises the ascent,\nIn language grows more violent,\n Although in breath more scant:\n\nWho, climbing, gains at length the place\n That crowns the upward track.\nAnd, entering with unsteady pace,\nReceives a buffet in the face\n That lands him on his back:\n\nAnd feels himself, like one in sleep,\n Glide swiftly down again,\nA helpless weight, from steep to steep,\nTill, with a headlong giddy sweep,\n He drops upon the plain--\n\nSo I, that had resolved to bring\n Conviction to a ghost,\nAnd found it quite a different thing\nFrom any human arguing,\n Yet dared not quit my post\n\nBut, keeping still the end in view\n To which I hoped to come,\nI strove to prove the matter true\nBy putting everything I knew\n Into an axiom:\n\nCommencing every single phrase\n With ‘therefore’ or ‘because,’\nI blindly reeled, a hundred ways,\nAbout the syllogistic maze,\n Unconscious where I was.\n\nQuoth he “That’s regular clap-trap:\n Don’t bluster any more.\nNow do be cool and take a nap!\nSuch a ridiculous old chap\n Was never seen before!”\n\n“You’re like a man I used to meet,\n Who got one day so furious\nIn arguing, the simple heat\nScorched both his slippers off his feet!”\n I said “That’s very curious!”\n\n“Well, it is curious, I agree,\n And sounds perhaps like fibs:\nBut still it’s true as true can be--\nAs sure as your name’s Tibbs,” said he.\n I said “My name’s not Tibbs.”\n\n“Not Tibbs!” he cried--his tone became\n A shade or two less hearty--\n“Why, no,” said I. “My proper name\nIs Tibbets--” “Tibbets?” “Aye, the same.”\n “Why, then YOU’RE NOT THE PARTY!”\n\nWith that he struck the board a blow\n That shivered half the glasses.\n“Why couldn’t you have told me so\nThree quarters of an hour ago,\n You prince of all the asses?”\n\n“To walk four miles through mud and rain,\n To spend the night in smoking,\nAnd then to find that it’s in vain--\nAnd I’ve to do it all again--\n It’s really too provoking!”\n\n“Don’t talk!” he cried, as I began\n To mutter some excuse.\n“Who can have patience with a man\nThat’s got no more discretion than\n An idiotic goose?”\n\n“To keep me waiting here, instead\n Of telling me at once\nThat this was not the house!” he said.\n“There, that’ll do--be off to bed!\n Don’t gape like that, you dunce!”\n\n“It’s very fine to throw the blame\n On me in such a fashion!\nWhy didn’t you enquire my name\nThe very minute that you came?”\n I answered in a passion.\n\n“Of course it worries you a bit\n To come so far on foot--\nBut how was I to blame for it?”\n“Well, well!” said he. “I must admit\n That isn’t badly put.”\n\n“And certainly you’ve given me\n The best of wine and victual--\nExcuse my violence,” said he,\n“But accidents like this, you see,\n They put one out a little.”\n\n“’Twas my fault after all, I find--\n Shake hands, old Turnip-top!”\nThe name was hardly to my mind,\nBut, as no doubt he meant it kind,\n I let the matter drop.\n\n“Good-night, old Turnip-top, good-night!\n When I am gone, perhaps\nThey’ll send you some inferior Sprite,\nWho’ll keep you in a constant fright\n And spoil your soundest naps.”\n\n“Tell him you’ll stand no sort of trick;\n Then, if he leers and chuckles,\nYou just be handy with a stick\n(Mind that it’s pretty hard and thick)\n And rap him on the knuckles!”\n\n“Then carelessly remark ‘Old coon!\n Perhaps you’re not aware\nThat, if you don’t behave, you’ll soon\nBe chuckling to another tune--\n And so you’d best take care!’”\n\n“That’s the right way to cure a Sprite\n Of such like goings-on--\nBut gracious me! It’s getting light!\nGood-night, old Turnip-top, good-night!”\n A nod, and he was gone.\n\n\n# VII. _Sad Souvenaunce_\n\n“What’s this?” I pondered. “Have I slept?\n Or can I have been drinking?”\nBut soon a gentler feeling crept\nUpon me, and I sat and wept\n An hour or so, like winking.\n\n“No need for Bones to hurry so!”\n I sobbed. “In fact, I doubt\nIf it was worth his while to go--\nAnd who is Tibbs, I’d like to know,\n To make such work about?”\n\n“If Tibbs is anything like me,\n It’s possible,” I said,\n“He won’t be over-pleased to be\nDropped in upon at half-past three,\n After he’s snug in bed.”\n\n“And if Bones plagues him anyhow--\n Squeaking and all the rest of it,\nAs he was doing here just now--\nI prophesy there’ll be a row,\n And Tibbs will have the best of it!”\n\nThen, as my tears could never bring\n The friendly Phantom back,\nIt seemed to me the proper thing\nTo mix another glass, and sing\n The following Coronach.\n\n‘And art thou gone, beloved Ghost?\n Best of Familiars!\nNay then, farewell, my duckling roast,\nFarewell, farewell, my tea and toast,\n My meerschaum and cigars!\n\nThe hues of life are dull and gray,\n The sweets of life insipid,\nWhen thou, my charmer, art away--\nOld Brick, or rather, let me say,\n Old Parallelepiped!’\n\nInstead of singing Verse the Third,\n I ceased--abruptly, rather:\nBut, after such a splendid word\nI felt that it would be absurd\n To try it any farther.\n\nSo with a yawn I went my way\n To seek the welcome downy,\nAnd slept, and dreamed till break of day\nOf Poltergeist and Fetch and Fay\n And Leprechaun and Brownie!\n\nFor years I’ve not been visited\n By any kind of Sprite;\nYet still they echo in my head,\nThose parting words, so kindly said,\n “Old Turnip-top, good-night!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "a-sea-dirge": { - "title": "“A Sea Dirge”", - "body": "There are certain things--as, a spider, a ghost,\nThe income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three--\nThat I hate, but the thing that I hate the most\nIs a thing they call the Sea.\n\nPour some salt water over the floor--\nUgly I’m sure you’ll allow it to be:\nSuppose it extended a mile or more,\n_That’s_ very like the Sea.\n\nBeat a dog till it howls outright--\nCruel, but all very well for a spree:\nSuppose that he did so day and night,\n_That_ would be like the Sea.\n\nI had a vision of nursery-maids;\nTens of thousands passed by me--\nAll leading children with wooden spades,\nAnd this was by the Sea.\n\nWho invented those spades of wood?\nWho was it cut them out of the tree?\nNone, I think, but an idiot could--\nOr one that loved the Sea.\n\nIt is pleasant and dreamy, no doubt, to float\nWith ‘thoughts as boundless, and souls as free’:\nBut, suppose you are very unwell in the boat,\nHow do you like the Sea?\n\nThere is an insect that people avoid\n(Whence is derived the verb ‘to flee’).\nWhere have you been by it most annoyed?\nIn lodgings by the Sea.\n\nIf you like your coffee with sand for dregs,\nA decided hint of salt in your tea,\nAnd a fishy taste in the very eggs--\nBy all means choose the Sea.\n\nAnd if, with these dainties to drink and eat,\nYou prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,\nAnd a chronic state of wet in your feet,\nThen--I recommend the Sea.\n\nFor _I_ have friends who dwell by the coast--\nPleasant friends they are to me!\nIt is when I am with them I wonder most\nThat anyone likes the Sea.\n\nThey take me a walk: though tired and stiff,\nTo climb the heights I madly agree;\nAnd, after a tumble or so from the cliff,\nThey kindly suggest the Sea.\n\nI try the rocks, and I think it cool\nThat they laugh with such an excess of glee,\nAs I heavily slip into every pool\nThat skirts the cold cold Sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "size-and-tears": { - "title": "“Size and Tears”", - "body": "When on the sandy shore I sit,\nBeside the salt sea-wave,\nAnd fall into a weeping fit\nBecause I dare not shave--\nA little whisper at my ear\nEnquires the reason of my fear.\n\nI answer “If that ruffian Jones\nShould recognise me here,\nHe’d bellow out my name in tones\nOffensive to the ear:\nHe chaffs me so on being stout\n(A thing that always puts me out).”\n\nAh me! I see him on the cliff!\nFarewell, farewell to hope,\nIf he should look this way, and if\nHe’s got his telescope!\nTo whatsoever place I flee,\nMy odious rival follows me!\n\nFor every night, and everywhere,\nI meet him out at dinner;\nAnd when I’ve found some charming fair,\nAnd vowed to die or win her,\nThe wretch (he’s thin and I am stout)\nIs sure to come and cut me out!\n\nThe girls (just like them!) all agree\nTo praise J. Jones, Esquire:\nI ask them what on earth they see\nAbout him to admire?\nThey cry “He is so sleek and slim,\nIt’s quite a treat to look at him!”\n\nThey vanish in tobacco smoke,\nThose visionary maids--\nI feel a sharp and sudden poke\nBetween the shoulder-blades--\n“Why, Brown, my boy! Your growing stout!”\n(I told you he would find me out!)\n\n“My growth is not YOUR business, Sir!”\n“No more it is, my boy!\nBut if it’s YOURS, as I infer,\nWhy, Brown, I give you joy!\nA man, whose business prospers so,\nIs just the sort of man to know!”\n\n“It’s hardly safe, though, talking here--\nI’d best get out of reach:\nFor such a weight as yours, I fear,\nMust shortly sink the beach!”--\nInsult me thus because I’m stout!\nI vow I’ll go and call him out!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-sunsets": { - "title": "“Three Sunsets”", - "body": "He saw her once, and in the glance,\nA moment’s glance of meeting eyes,\nHis heart stood still in sudden trance:\nHe trembled with a sweet surprise--\nAll in the waning light she stood,\nThe star of perfect womanhood.\n\nThat summer-eve his heart was light:\nWith lighter step he trod the ground:\nAnd life was fairer in his sight,\nAnd music was in every sound:\nHe blessed the world where there could be\nSo beautiful a thing as she.\n\nThere once again, as evening fell\nAnd stars were peering overhead,\nTwo lovers met to bid farewell:\nThe western sun gleamed faint and red,\nLost in a drift of purple cloud\nThat wrapped him like a funeral-shroud.\n\nLong time the memory of that night--\nThe hand that clasped, the lips that kissed,\nThe form that faded from his sight\nSlow sinking through the tearful mist--\nIn dreamy music seemed to roll\nThrough the dark chambers of his soul.\n\nSo after many years he came\nA wanderer from a distant shore:\nThe street, the house, were still the same,\nBut those he sought were there no more:\nHis burning words, his hopes and fears,\nUnheeded fell on alien ears.\n\nOnly the children from their play\nWould pause the mournful tale to hear,\nShrinking in half-alarm away,\nOr, step by step, would venture near\nTo touch with timid curious hands\nThat strange wild man from other lands.\n\nHe sat beside the busy street,\nThere, where he last had seen her face:\nAnd thronging memories, bitter-sweet,\nSeemed yet to haunt the ancient place:\nHer footfall ever floated near:\nHer voice was ever in his ear.\n\nHe sometimes, as the daylight waned\nAnd evening mists began to roll,\nIn half-soliloquy complained\nOf that black shadow on his soul,\nAnd blindly fanned, with cruel care,\nThe ashes of a vain despair.\n\nThe summer fled: the lonely man\nStill lingered out the lessening days;\nStill, as the night drew on, would scan\nEach passing face with closer gaze--\nTill, sick at heart, he turned away,\nAnd sighed “she will not come to-day.”\n\nSo by degrees his spirit bent\nTo mock its own despairing cry,\nIn stern self-torture to invent\nNew luxuries of agony,\nAnd people all the vacant space\nWith visions of her perfect face.\n\nThen for a moment she was nigh,\nHe heard no step, but she was there;\nAs if an angel suddenly\nWere bodied from the viewless air,\nAnd all her fine ethereal frame\nShould fade as swiftly as it came.\n\nSo, half in fancy’s sunny trance,\nAnd half in misery’s aching void\nWith set and stony countenance\nHis bitter being he enjoyed,\nAnd thrust for ever from his mind\nThe happiness he could not find.\n\nAs when the wretch, in lonely room,\nTo selfish death is madly hurled,\nThe glamour of that fatal fume\nShuts out the wholesome living world--\nSo all his manhood’s strength and pride\nOne sickly dream had swept aside.\n\nYea, brother, and we passed him there,\nBut yesterday, in merry mood,\nAnd marveled at the lordly air\nThat shamed his beggar’s attitude,\nNor heeded that ourselves might be\nWretches as desperate as he;\n\nWho let the thought of bliss denied\nMake havoc of our life and powers,\nAnd pine, in solitary pride,\nFor peace that never shall be ours,\nBecause we will not work and wait\nIn trustful patience for our fate.\n\nAnd so it chanced once more that she\nCame by the old familiar spot:\nThe face he would have died to see\nBent o’er him, and he knew it not;\nToo rapt in selfish grief to hear,\nEven when happiness was near.\n\nAnd pity filled her gentle breast\nFor him that would not stir nor speak\nThe dying crimson of the west,\nThat faintly tinged his haggard cheek,\nFell on her as she stood, and shed\nA glory round the patient head.\n\nAh, let him wake! The moments fly:\nThis awful tryst may be the last.\nAnd see, the tear, that dimmed her eye,\nHad fallen on him ere she passed--\nShe passed: the crimson paled to gray:\nAnd hope departed with the day.\n\nThe heavy hours of night went by,\nAnd silence quickened into sound,\nAnd light slid up the eastern sky,\nAnd life began its daily round--\nBut light and life for him were fled:\nHis name was numbered with the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-three-voices": { - "title": "“The Three Voices”", - "body": "> _The First Voice_\n\nHe trilled a carol fresh and free,\nHe laughed aloud for very glee:\nThere came a breeze from off the sea:\n\nIt passed athwart the glooming flat--\nIt fanned his forehead as he sat--\nIt lightly bore away his hat,\n\nAll to the feet of one who stood\nLike maid enchanted in a wood,\nFrowning as darkly as she could.\n\nWith huge umbrella, lank and brown,\nUnerringly she pinned it down,\nRight through the centre of the crown.\n\nThen, with an aspect cold and grim,\nRegardless of its battered rim,\nShe took it up and gave it him.\n\nA while like one in dreams he stood,\nThen faltered forth his gratitude\nIn words just short of being rude:\n\nFor it had lost its shape and shine,\nAnd it had cost him four-and-nine,\nAnd he was going out to dine.\n\n“To dine!” she sneered in acid tone.\n“To bend thy being to a bone\nClothed in a radiance not its own!”\n\nThe tear-drop trickled to his chin:\nThere was a meaning in her grin\nThat made him feel on fire within.\n\n“Term it not ‘radiance,’” said he:\n“’Tis solid nutriment to me.\nDinner is Dinner: Tea is Tea.”\n\nAnd she “Yea so? Yet wherefore cease?\nLet thy scant knowledge find increase.\nSay ‘Men are Men, and Geese are Geese.’”\n\nHe moaned: he knew not what to say.\nThe thought “That I could get away!”\nStrove with the thought “But I must stay.”\n\n“To dine!” she shrieked in dragon-wrath.\n“To swallow wines all foam and froth!\nTo simper at a table-cloth!”\n\n“Say, can thy noble spirit stoop\nTo join the gormandising troup\nWho find a solace in the soup?”\n\n“Canst thou desire or pie or puff?\nThy well-bred manners were enough,\nWithout such gross material stuff.”\n\n“Yet well-bred men,” he faintly said,\n“Are not willing to be fed:\nNor are they well without the bread.”\n\nHer visage scorched him ere she spoke:\n“There are,” she said, “a kind of folk\nWho have no horror of a joke.”\n\n“Such wretches live: they take their share\nOf common earth and common air:\nWe come across them here and there:”\n\n“We grant them--there is no escape--\nA sort of semi-human shape\nSuggestive of the man-like Ape.”\n\n“In all such theories,” said he,\n“One fixed exception there must be.\nThat is, the Present Company.”\n\nBaffled, she gave a wolfish bark:\nHe, aiming blindly in the dark,\nWith random shaft had pierced the mark.\n\nShe felt that her defeat was plain,\nYet madly strove with might and main\nTo get the upper hand again.\n\nFixing her eyes upon the beach,\nAs though unconscious of his speech,\nShe said “Each gives to more than each.”\n\nHe could not answer yea or nay:\nHe faltered “Gifts may pass away.”\nYet knew not what he meant to say.\n\n“If that be so,” she straight replied,\n“Each heart with each doth coincide.\nWhat boots it? For the world is wide.”\n\n“The world is but a Thought,” said he:\n“The vast unfathomable sea\nIs but a Notion--unto me.”\n\nAnd darkly fell her answer dread\nUpon his unresisting head,\nLike half a hundredweight of lead.\n\n“The Good and Great must ever shun\nThat reckless and abandoned one\nWho stoops to perpetrate a pun.”\n\n“The man that smokes--that reads the TIMES--\nThat goes to Christmas Pantomimes--\nIs capable of ANY crimes!”\n\nHe felt it was his turn to speak,\nAnd, with a shamed and crimson cheek,\nMoaned “This is harder than Bezique!”\n\nBut when she asked him “Wherefore so?”\nHe felt his very whiskers glow,\nAnd frankly owned “I do not know.”\n\nWhile, like broad waves of golden grain,\nOr sunlit hues on cloistered pane,\nHis colour came and went again.\n\nPitying his obvious distress,\nYet with a tinge of bitterness,\nShe said “The More exceeds the Less.”\n\n“A truth of such undoubted weight,”\nHe urged, “and so extreme in date,\nIt were superfluous to state.”\n\nRoused into sudden passion, she\nIn tone of cold malignity:\n“To others, yea: but not to thee.”\n\nBut when she saw him quail and quake,\nAnd when he urged “For pity’s sake!”\nOnce more in gentle tones she spake.\n\n“Thought in the mind doth still abide\nThat is by Intellect supplied,\nAnd within that Idea doth hide:”\n\n“And he, that yearns the truth to know,\nStill further inwardly may go,\nAnd find Idea from Notion flow:”\n\n“And thus the chain, that sages sought,\nIs to a glorious circle wrought,\nFor Notion hath its source in Thought.”\n\nSo passed they on with even pace:\nYet gradually one might trace\nA shadow growing on his face.\n\n\n> _The Second Voice_\n\nThey walked beside the wave-worn beach;\nHer tongue was very apt to teach,\nAnd now and then he did beseech\n\nShe would abate her dulcet tone,\nBecause the talk was all her own,\nAnd he was dull as any drone.\n\nShe urged “No cheese is made of chalk”:\nAnd ceaseless flowed her dreary talk,\nTuned to the footfall of a walk.\n\nHer voice was very full and rich,\nAnd, when at length she asked him “Which?”\nIt mounted to its highest pitch.\n\nHe a bewildered answer gave,\nDrowned in the sullen moaning wave,\nLost in the echoes of the cave.\n\nHe answered her he knew not what:\nLike shaft from bow at random shot,\nHe spoke, but she regarded not.\n\nShe waited not for his reply,\nBut with a downward leaden eye\nWent on as if he were not by\n\nSound argument and grave defence,\nStrange questions raised on “Why?” and “Whence?”\nAnd wildly tangled evidence.\n\nWhen he, with racked and whirling brain,\nFeebly implored her to explain,\nShe simply said it all again.\n\nWrenched with an agony intense,\nHe spake, neglecting Sound and Sense,\nAnd careless of all consequence:\n\n“Mind--I believe--is Essence--Ent--\nAbstract--that is--an Accident--\nWhich we--that is to say--I meant--”\n\nWhen, with quick breath and cheeks all flushed,\nAt length his speech was somewhat hushed,\nShe looked at him, and he was crushed.\n\nIt needed not her calm reply:\nShe fixed him with a stony eye,\nAnd he could neither fight nor fly.\n\nWhile she dissected, word by word,\nHis speech, half guessed at and half heard,\nAs might a cat a little bird.\n\nThen, having wholly overthrown\nHis views, and stripped them to the bone,\nProceeded to unfold her own.\n\n“Shall Man be Man? And shall he miss\nOf other thoughts no thought but this,\nHarmonious dews of sober bliss?”\n\n“What boots it? Shall his fevered eye\nThrough towering nothingness descry\nThe grisly phantom hurry by?”\n\n“And hear dumb shrieks that fill the air;\nSee mouths that gape, and eyes that stare\nAnd redden in the dusky glare?”\n\n“The meadows breathing amber light,\nThe darkness toppling from the height,\nThe feathery train of granite Night?”\n\n“Shall he, grown gray among his peers,\nThrough the thick curtain of his tears\nCatch glimpses of his earlier years,”\n\n“And hear the sounds he knew of yore,\nOld shufflings on the sanded floor,\nOld knuckles tapping at the door?”\n\n“Yet still before him as he flies\nOne pallid form shall ever rise,\nAnd, bodying forth in glassy eyes”\n\n“The vision of a vanished good,\nLow peering through the tangled wood,\nShall freeze the current of his blood.”\n\nStill from each fact, with skill uncouth\nAnd savage rapture, like a tooth\nShe wrenched some slow reluctant truth.\n\nTill, like a silent water-mill,\nWhen summer suns have dried the rill,\nShe reached a full stop, and was still.\n\nDead calm succeeded to the fuss,\nAs when the loaded omnibus\nHas reached the railway terminus:\n\nWhen, for the tumult of the street,\nIs heard the engine’s stifled beat,\nThe velvet tread of porters’ feet.\n\nWith glance that ever sought the ground,\nShe moved her lips without a sound,\nAnd every now and then she frowned.\n\nHe gazed upon the sleeping sea,\nAnd joyed in its tranquillity,\nAnd in that silence dead, but she\n\nTo muse a little space did seem,\nThen, like the echo of a dream,\nHarked back upon her threadbare theme.\n\nStill an attentive ear he lent\nBut could not fathom what she meant:\nShe was not deep, nor eloquent.\n\nHe marked the ripple on the sand:\nThe even swaying of her hand\nWas all that he could understand.\n\nHe saw in dreams a drawing-room,\nWhere thirteen wretches sat in gloom,\nWaiting--he thought he knew for whom:\n\nHe saw them drooping here and there,\nEach feebly huddled on a chair,\nIn attitudes of blank despair:\n\nOysters were not more mute than they,\nFor all their brains were pumped away,\nAnd they had nothing more to say--\n\nSave one, who groaned “Three hours are gone!”\nWho shrieked “We’ll wait no longer, John!\nTell them to set the dinner on!”\n\nThe vision passed: the ghosts were fled:\nHe saw once more that woman dread:\nHe heard once more the words she said.\n\nHe left her, and he turned aside:\nHe sat and watched the coming tide\nAcross the shores so newly dried.\n\nHe wondered at the waters clear,\nThe breeze that whispered in his ear,\nThe billows heaving far and near,\n\nAnd why he had so long preferred\nTo hang upon her every word:\n“In truth,” he said, “it was absurd.”\n\n\n> _The Third Voice_\n\nNot long this transport held its place:\nWithin a little moment’s space\nQuick tears were raining down his face\n\nHis heart stood still, aghast with fear;\nA wordless voice, nor far nor near,\nHe seemed to hear and not to hear.\n\n“Tears kindle not the doubtful spark.\nIf so, why not? Of this remark\nThe bearings are profoundly dark.”\n\n“Her speech,” he said, “hath caused this pain.\nEasier I count it to explain\nThe jargon of the howling main,”\n\n“Or, stretched beside some babbling brook,\nTo con, with inexpressive look,\nAn unintelligible book.”\n\nLow spake the voice within his head,\nIn words imagined more than said,\nSoundless as ghost’s intended tread:\n\n“If thou art duller than before,\nWhy quittedst thou the voice of lore?\nWhy not endure, expecting more?”\n\n“Rather than that,” he groaned aghast,\n“I’d writhe in depths of cavern vast,\nSome loathly vampire’s rich repast.”\n\n“’Twere hard,” it answered, “themes immense\nTo coop within the narrow fence\nThat rings THY scant intelligence.”\n\n“Not so,” he urged, “nor once alone:\nBut there was something in her tone\nThat chilled me to the very bone.”\n\n“Her style was anything but clear,\nAnd most unpleasantly severe;\nHer epithets were very queer.”\n\n“And yet, so grand were her replies,\nI could not choose but deem her wise;\nI did not dare to criticise;”\n\n“Nor did I leave her, till she went\nSo deep in tangled argument\nThat all my powers of thought were spent.”\n\nA little whisper inly slid,\n“Yet truth is truth: you know you did.”\nA little wink beneath the lid.\n\nAnd, sickened with excess of dread,\nProne to the dust he bent his head,\nAnd lay like one three-quarters dead\n\nThe whisper left him--like a breeze\nLost in the depths of leafy trees--\nLeft him by no means at his ease.\n\nOnce more he weltered in despair,\nWith hands, through denser-matted hair,\nMore tightly clenched than then they were.\n\nWhen, bathed in Dawn of living red,\nMajestic frowned the mountain head,\n“Tell me my fault,” was all he said.\n\nWhen, at high Noon, the blazing sky\nScorched in his head each haggard eye,\nThen keenest rose his weary cry.\n\nAnd when at Eve the unpitying sun\nSmiled grimly on the solemn fun,\n“Alack,” he sighed, “what HAVE I done?”\n\nBut saddest, darkest was the sight,\nWhen the cold grasp of leaden Night\nDashed him to earth, and held him tight.\n\nTortured, unaided, and alone,\nThunders were silence to his groan,\nBagpipes sweet music to its tone:\n\n“What? Ever thus, in dismal round,\nShall Pain and Mystery profound\nPursue me like a sleepless hound,”\n\n“With crimson-dashed and eager jaws,\nMe, still in ignorance of the cause,\nUnknowing what I broke of laws?”\n\nThe whisper to his ear did seem\nLike echoed flow of silent stream,\nOr shadow of forgotten dream,\n\nThe whisper trembling in the wind:\n“Her fate with thine was intertwined,”\nSo spake it in his inner mind:\n\n“Each orbed on each a baleful star:\nEach proved the other’s blight and bar:\nEach unto each were best, most far:”\n\n“Yea, each to each was worse than foe:\nThou, a scared dullard, gibbering low,\nAND SHE, AN AVALANCHE OF WOE!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-valentine": { - "title": "“A Valentine”", - "body": "_Sent to a friend who had complained that I was glad enough to see him when he came, but didn’t seem to miss him if he stayed away._\n\nAnd cannot pleasures, while they last,\nBe actual unless, when past,\nThey leave us shuddering and aghast,\nWith anguish smarting?\nAnd cannot friends be firm and fast,\nAnd yet bear parting?\n\nAnd must I then, at Friendship’s call,\nCalmly resign the little all\n(Trifling, I grant, it is and small)\nI have of gladness,\nAnd lend my being to the thrall\nOf gloom and sadness?\n\nAnd think you that I should be dumb,\nAnd full _dolorum omnium_,\nExcepting when _you_ choose to come\nAnd share my dinner?\nAt other times be sour and glum\nAnd daily thinner?\n\nMust he then only live to weep,\nWho’d prove his friendship true and deep\nBy day a lonely shadow creep,\nAt night-time languish,\nOft raising in his broken sleep\nThe moan of anguish?\n\nThe lover, if for certain days\nHis fair one be denied his gaze,\nSinks not in grief and wild amaze,\nBut, wiser wooer,\nHe spends the time in writing lays,\nAnd posts them to her.\n\nAnd if the verse flow free and fast,\nTill even the poet is aghast,\nA touching Valentine at last\nThe post shall carry,\nWhen thirteen days are gone and past\nOf February.\n\nFarewell, dear friend, and when we meet,\nIn desert waste or crowded street,\nPerhaps before this week shall fleet,\nPerhaps to-morrow.\nI trust to find _your_ heart the seat\nOf wasting sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "the-voice-of-the-lobster": { - "title": "“The Voice of the Lobster”", - "body": "“’Tis the voice of the Lobster”: I heard him declare\n“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”\nAs a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose\nTrims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.\nWhen the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,\nAnd will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:\nBut, when the tide rises and sharks are around,\nHis voice has a timid and tremulous sound.\n\nI passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,\nHow the Owl and the Panter were sharing a pie:\nThe Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,\nWhile the Old had the dish as its share of the treat.\nWhen the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,\nWas kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:\nWhile the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,\nAnd concluded the banquet by eating the owl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-walrus-and-the-carpenter": { - "title": "“The Walrus and the Carpenter”", - "body": "The sun was shining on the sea,\nShining with all his might:\nHe did his very best to make\nThe billows smooth and bright--\nAnd this was odd, because it was\nThe middle of the night.\n\nThe moon was shining sulkily,\nBecause she thought the sun\nHad got no business to be there\nAfter the day was done--\n“It’s very rude of him,” she said,\n“To come and spoil the fun.”\n\nThe sea was wet as wet could be,\nThe sands were dry as dry.\nYou could not see a cloud, because\nNo cloud was in the sky:\nNo birds were flying overhead--\nThere were no birds to fly.\n\nThe Walrus and the Carpenter\nWere walking close at hand;\nThey wept like anything to see\nSuch quantities of sand:\n“If this were only cleared away,”\nThey said, “it would be grand!”\n\n“If seven maids with seven mops\nSwept it for half a year,\nDo you suppose,” the Walrus said,\n“That they could get it clear?”\n“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,\nAnd shed a bitter tear.\n\n“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”\nThe Walrus did beseech.\n“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,\nAlong the briny beach:\nWe cannot do with more than four,\nTo give a hand to each.”\n\nThe eldest Oyster looked at him,\nBut never a word he said:\nThe eldest Oyster winked his eye,\nAnd shook his heavy head--\nMeaning to say he did not choose\nTo leave the oyster-bed.\n\nBut four young Oysters hurried up,\nAll eager for the treat:\nTheir coats were brushed, their faces washed,\nTheir shoes were clean and neat--\nAnd this was odd, because, you know,\nThey hadn’t any feet.\n\nFour other Oysters followed them,\nAnd yet another four;\nAnd thick and fast they came at last,\nAnd more, and more, and more--\nAll hopping through the frothy waves,\nAnd scrambling to the shore.\n\nThe Walrus and the Carpenter\nWalked on a mile or so,\nAnd then they rested on a rock\nConveniently low:\nAnd all the little Oysters stood\nAnd waited in a row.\n\n“The time has come,” the Walrus said,\n“To talk of many things:\nOf shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--\nOf cabbages--and kings--\nAnd why the sea is boiling hot--\nAnd whether pigs have wings.”\n\n“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,\n“Before we have our chat;\nFor some of us are out of breath,\nAnd all of us are fat!”\n“No hurry!” said the Carpenter.\nThey thanked him much for that.\n\n“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,\n“Is what we chiefly need:\nPepper and vinegar besides\nAre very good indeed--\nNow if you’re ready, Oysters dear,\nWe can begin to feed.”\n\n“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,\nTurning a little blue.\n“After such kindness, that would be\nA dismal thing to do!”\n“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.\n“Do you admire the view?”\n\n“It was so kind of you to come!\nAnd you are very nice!”\nThe Carpenter said nothing but\n“Cut us another slice:\nI wish you were not quite so deaf--\nI’ve had to ask you twice!”\n\n“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,\n“To play them such a trick,\nAfter we’ve brought them out so far,\nAnd made them trot so quick!”\nThe Carpenter said nothing but\n“The butter’s spread too thick!”\n\n“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:\n“I deeply sympathize.”\nWith sobs and tears he sorted out\nThose of the largest size,\nHolding his pocket-handkerchief\nBefore his streaming eyes.\n\n“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,\n“You’ve had a pleasant run!\nShall we be trotting home again?”\nBut answer came there none--\nAnd this was scarcely odd, because\nThey’d eaten every one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "raymond-carver": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Raymond Carver", - "birth": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1988 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "the-best-time-of-the-day": { - "title": "“The Best Time of the Day”", - "body": "Cool summer nights.\nWindows open.\nLamps burning.\nFruit in the bowl.\nAnd your head on my shoulder.\nThese the happiest moments in the day.\n\nNext to the early morning hours,\nof course. And the time\njust before lunch.\nAnd the afternoon, and\nearly evening hours.\nBut I do love\n\nthese summer nights.\nEven more, I think,\nthan those other times.\nThe work finished for the day.\nAnd no one who can reach us now.\nOr ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "drinking-while-driving": { - "title": "“Drinking While Driving”", - "body": "It’s August and I have not\nRead a book in six months\nexcept something called The Retreat from Moscow\nby Caulaincourt\nNevertheless, I am happy\nRiding in a car with my brother\nand drinking from a pint of Old Crow.\nWe do not have any place in mind to go,\nwe are just driving.\nIf I closed my eyes for a minute\nI would be lost, yet\nI could gladly lie down and sleep forever\nbeside this road\nMy brother nudges me.\nAny minute now, something will happen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "fear": { - "title": "“Fear”", - "body": "Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive.\nFear of falling asleep at night.\nFear of not falling asleep.\nFear of the past rising up.\nFear of the present taking flight.\nFear of the telephone that rings in the dead of night.\nFear of electrical storms.\nFear of the cleaning woman who has a spot on her cheek!\nFear of dogs I’ve been told won’t bite.\nFear of anxiety!\nFear of having to identify the body of a dead friend.\nFear of running out of money.\nFear of having too much, though people will not believe this.\nFear of psychological profiles.\nFear of being late and fear of arriving before anyone else.\nFear of my children’s handwriting on envelopes.\nFear they’ll die before I do, and I’ll feel guilty.\nFear of having to live with my mother in her old age, and mine.\nFear of confusion.\nFear this day will end on an unhappy note.\nFear of waking up to find you gone.\nFear of not loving and fear of not loving enough.\nFear that what I love will prove lethal to those I love.\nFear of death.\nFear of living too long.\nFear of death.\n\nI’ve said that.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gravy": { - "title": "“Gravy”", - "body": "No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.\nGravy, these past ten years.\nAlive, sober, working, loving and\nbeing loved by a good woman. Eleven years\nago he was told he had six months to live\nat the rate he was going. And he was going\nnowhere but down. So he changed his ways\nsomehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?\nAfter that it was all gravy, every minute\nof it, up to and including when he was told about,\nwell, some things that were breaking down and\nbuilding up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”\nhe said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.\nI’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone\nexpected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "late-night-with-fog-and-horses": { - "title": "“Late Night with Fog and Horses”", - "body": "They were in the living room. Saying their\ngoodbyes. Loss ringing in their ears.\nThey’d been through a lot together, but now\nthey couldn’t go another step. Besides, for him\nthere was someone else. Tears were falling\nwhen a horse stepped out of the fog\ninto the front yard. Then another, and\nanother. She went outside and said,\n“Where did you come from, you sweet horses?”\nand moved in amongst them, weeping,\ntouching their flanks. The horses began\nto graze in the front yard.\nHe made two calls: one call went straight\nto the sheriff--“someone’s horses are out.”\nBut there was that other call, too.\nThen he joined his wife in the front\nyard, where they talked and murmured\nto the horses together. (Whatever was\nhappening now was happening in another time.)\nHorses cropped the grass in the yard\nthat night. A red emergency light\nflashed as a sedan crept in out of fog.\nVoices carried out of the fog.\nAt the end of that long night,\nwhen they finally put their arms around\neach other, their embrace was full of\npassion and memory. Each recalled\nthe other’s youth. Now something had ended,\nsomething else rushing in to take its place.\nCame the moment of leave-taking itself.\n“Goodbye, go on,” she said.\nAnd then pulling away.\nMuch later,\nhe remembered making a disastrous phone call.\nOne that had hung on and hung on,\na malediction. It’s boiled down\nto that. The rest of his life.\nMalediction.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "photograph-of-my-father-in-his-twenty-second-year": { - "title": "“Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year”", - "body": "October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen\nI study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face.\nSheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string\nof spiny yellow perch, in the other\na bottle of Carlsbad Beer.\n\nIn jeans and denim shirt, he leans\nagainst the front fender of a 1934 Ford.\nHe would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,\nWear his old hat cocked over his ear.\nAll his life my father wanted to be bold.\n\nBut the eyes give him away, and the hands\nthat limply offer the string of dead perch\nand the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,\nyet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either,\nand don’t even know the places to fish?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "stupid": { - "title": "“Stupid”", - "body": "It’s what the kids nowadays call weed. And it drifts\nlike clouds from his lips. He hopes no one\ncomes along tonight, or calls to ask for help.\nHelp is what he’s most short on tonight.\nA storm thrashes outside. Heavy seas\nwith gale winds from the west. The table he sits at\nis, say, two cubits long and one wide.\nThe darkness in the room teems with insight.\nCould be he’ll write an adventure novel. Or else\na children’s story. A play for two female characters,\none of whom is blind. Cutthroat should be coming\ninto the river. One thing he’ll do is learn\nto tie his own flies. Maybe he should give\nmore money to each of his surviving\nfamily members. The ones who already expect a little\nsomething in the mail first of each month.\nEvery time they write they tell him\nthey’re coming up short. He counts heads on his fingers\nand finds they’re all survivng. So what\nif he’d rather be remembered in the dreams of strangers?\nHe raises his eyes to the skylights where rain\nhammers on. After a while--\nwho knows how long?--his eyes ask\nthat they be closed. And he closes them.\nBut the rain keeps hammering. Is this a cloudburst?\nShould he do something? Secure the house\nin some way? Uncle Bo stayed married to Aunt Ruby for 47 years. Then hanged himself.\nHe opens his eyes again. Nothing adds up.\nIt all adds up. How long will this storm go on?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-the-doctor-said": { - "title": "“What the Doctor Said”", - "body": "He said it doesn’t look good\nhe said it looks bad in fact real bad\nhe said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before\nI quit counting them\nI said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know\nabout any more being there than that\nhe said are you a religious man do you kneel down\nin forest groves and let yourself ask for help\nwhen you come to a waterfall\nmist blowing against your face and arms\ndo you stop and ask for understanding at those moments\nI said not yet but I intend to start today\nhe said I’m real sorry he said\nI wish I had some other kind of news to give you\nI said Amen and he said something else\nI didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do\nand not wanting him to have to repeat it\nand me to have to fully digest it\nI just looked at him\nfor a minute and he looked back it was then\nI jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me\nsomething no one else on earth had ever given me\nI may have even thanked him habit being so strong", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "turner-cassity": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Turner Cassity", - "birth": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2009 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_Cassity", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-autoscopic-experience": { - "title": "“The Autoscopic Experience”", - "body": "The soul at death looks on the corpse it leaves\nAnd after that dies or is put on hold.\nIt is a process easy to reduce\nTo painted birds on stucco walls, or breath\nThis side a mirror. As abstraction, view\nAnd viewer one to one and poised to part,\nAutoscopy is more the mask of gold:\nThe mummy’s backward eye. Or is the gold\nMore narrowly-need, cost, implied exchange.\nMust the eye cover for the heart gone out?\nEmotion is investment capital\nLike any other; it will be withdrawn.\nFree, idle, high potential hovers, soon\nTo pick its site: another flesh astute\nIn ways to estimate another flesh,\nAnd by and by a disembodied drive\nEternally in search of search; until,\nOutworn by scrutiny, the body counters,\nAnd the soul, the poor hardworking soul,\nHaving paid through the nose, must leave by it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "favors": { - "title": "“Favors”", - "body": "Comus who end the carnival,\nLargesse who on your float of treasures\nBear the gifts we seek, let fall\nSuch trinkets as will be our futures.\n\nGive, but give without distinction.\nTo the luckless fling the dice,\nAnd to the cured of fever, unction\nIn its waxen phial. Toss,\n\nTo all the young and warm of flesh,\nThe china skull to chain their keys;\nTo all who cough the tray for ash.\nTo who are old a sand that flees;\n\nUnto each cripple canes of candy.\nIt is we who take the toss\nWho sort the lots that we shall end,\nIn time, without or with. The loss?\n\nWho has the limp must time the egg.\nDip, therefore, to who bargain,\nComus, Yours the cup: libation quick\nTo slow the timer, spare, unmaim us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "catullus": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Catullus", - "birth": { - "year": -84 - }, - "death": { - "year": -54 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "roman", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "roman" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "he-to-me-like-unto-the-gods-appeareth": { - "title": "“He to me like unto the Gods appeareth …”", - "body": "He to me like unto the Gods appeareth,\nHe, if I dare speak it, ascends above them,\nFace to face who toward thee attently sitting\n Gazes or hears thee\n\nLovely in sweet laughter; alas within me\nEvery lost sense falleth away for anguish;\nWhen as I look’d on thee, upon my lips no\n Whisper abideth,\n\nStraight my tongue froze, Lesbia; soon a subtle\nFire thro’ each limb streameth adown; with inward\nSound the full ears tinkle, on either eye night’s\n Canopy darkens.\n\nEase alone, Catullus, alone afflicts thee;\nEase alone breeds error of heady riot;\nEase hath entomb’d princes of old renown and\n Cities of honour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Robinson Ellis" - } - }, - "learn-to-play-the-fool-no-more": { - "title": "“Learn to Play the Fool No More”", - "body": "Ah poor Catullus, learn to play the fool no more.\nLost is the lost, thou know’st it, and the past is past.\n\nBright once the days and sunny shone the light on thee,\nStill ever hasting where she led, the maid so fair,\nBy me belov’d as maiden is belov’d no more.\n\nWas then enacting all the merry mirth wherein\nThyself delighted, and the maid she said not nay.\nAh truly bright and sunny shone the days on thee.\n\nNow she resigns thee; child, do thou resign no less,\nNor follow her that flies thee, or to bide in woe\nConsent, but harden all thy heart, resolve, endure.\n\nFarewell, my love. Catullus is resolv’d, endures,\nHe will not ask for pity, will not importune.\n\nBut thou’lt be mourning thus to pine unask’d alway.\nO past retrieval faithless! Ah what hours are thine!\nWhen comes a likely wooer? who protests thou’rt fair?\n\nWho brooks to love thee? who decrees to live thine own?\nWhose kiss delights thee? whose the lips that own thy bite?\nYet, yet, Catullus, learn to bear, resolve, endure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Robinson Ellis" - } - }, - "living-lesbia-we-should-een-be-loving": { - "title": "“Living, Lesbia, we should e’en be loving …”", - "body": "Living, Lesbia, we should e’en be loving.\nSour severity, tongue of eld maligning,\nAll be to us a penny’s estimation.\n\nSuns set only to rise again to-morrow.\nWe, when sets in a little hour the brief light,\nSleep one infinite age, a night for ever.\n\nThousand kisses, anon to these an hundred,\nThousand kisses again, another hundred,\nThousand give me again, another hundred.\n\nThen once heedfully counted all the thousands,\nWe’ll uncount them as idly; so we shall not\nKnow, nor traitorous eye shall envy, knowing\nAll those myriad happy many kisses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Robinson Ellis" - } - }, - "though-outworn-with-sorrow": { - "title": "“Though, outworn with sorrow …”", - "body": "Though, outworn with sorrow, with hours of torturous anguish,\nOrtalus, I no more tarry the Muses among;\nThough from a fancy deprest fair blooms of poesy budding\nRise not at all; such grief rocks me, uneasily stirr’d:\n\nColdly but even now mine own dear brother in ebbing\nLethe his ice-wan feet laveth, a shadowy ghost.\nHe whom Troy’s deep bosom, a shore Rhoetean above him,\nRudely denies these eyes, heavily crushes in earth.\n\nAh! no more to address thee, or hear thy kindly replying,\nBrother! O e’en than life round me delightfuller yet,\nNe’er to behold thee again! Still love shall fail not alone in\nFancy to muse death’s dark elegy, closely to weep.\nClosely as under boughs of dimmest shadow the pensive\nDaulian ever moans Itys in agony slain.\n\nYet mid such desolation a verse I tender of ancient\nBattiades, new-drest, Ortalus, wholly for you.\nLest to the roving winds these words all idly deliver’d,\nSeem too soon from a frail memory fallen away.\n\nE’en as a furtive gift, sent, some love-apple, a-wooing,\nLeaps from breast of a coy maiden, a canopy pure;\nThere forgotten alas, mid vestments silky reposing,--\nSoon as a mother’s step starts her, it hurleth adown:\nStraight to the ground, dash’d forth ungently, the gift shoots headlong;\nShe in tell-tale cheeks glows a disorderly shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Robinson Ellis" - } - }, - "weep-each-heavenly-venus": { - "title": "“Weep each heavenly Venus”", - "body": "Weep each heavenly Venus, all the Cupids,\nWeep all men that have any grace about ye.\nDead the sparrow, in whom my love delighted,\nThe dear sparrow, in whom my love delighted.\n\nYea, most precious, above her eyes, she held him,\nSweet, all honey: a bird that ever hail’d her\nLady mistress, as hails the maid a mother.\n\nNor would move from her arms away: but only\nHopping round her, about her, hence or hither,\nPiped his colloquy, piped to none beside her.\n\nNow he wendeth along the mirky pathway,\nWhence, they tell us, is hopeless all returning.\n\nEvil on ye, the shades of evil Orcus,\nShades all beauteous happy things devouring,\nSuch a beauteous happy bird ye took him.\n\nAh! for pity; but ah! for him the sparrow,\nOur poor sparrow, on whom to think my lady’s\nEyes do angrily redden all a-weeping.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Robinson Ellis" - } - } - } - }, - "willa-cather": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Willa Cather", - "birth": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1947 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willa_Cather", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 35 - }, - "poems": { - "antinous": { - "title": "“Antinous”", - "body": "With attributes of gods they sculptured him,\n Hermes, Osiris, but were never wise\nTo lift the level, frowning brow of him\n Or dull the mortal misery in his eyes,\nThe scornful weariness of every limb,\n The dust-begotten doubt that never dies,\nAntinous, beneath thy lids, though dim,\nThe curling smoke of altars rose to thee,\nConjuring thee to comfort and content.\n An emperor sent his galleys wide and far\nTo seek thy healing for thee. Yea, and spent\n Honour and treasure and red fruits of war\n To lift thy heaviness, lest thou should’st mar\nThe head that was an empire’s glory, bent\nA little, as the heavy poppies are.\n Did the perfection of thy beauty pain\nThy limbs to bear it? Did it ache to be,\n As song hath ached in men, or passion vain?\nOr lay it like some heavy robe on thee?\n Was thy sick soul drawn from thee like the rain,\nOr drunk up as the dead are drunk each hour\nTo feed the colour of some tulip flower?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "arcadian-winter": { - "title": "“Arcadian Winter”", - "body": "Woe is me to tell it thee,\nWinter winds in Arcady!\nScattered is thy flock and fled\nFrom the glades where once it fed,\nAnd the snow lies drifted white\nIn the bower of our delight,\nWhere the beech threw gracious shade\nOn the cheek of boy and maid:\nAnd the bitter blasts make roar\nThrough the fleshless sycamore.\n\nWhite enchantment holds the spring,\nWhere thou once wert wont to sing,\nAnd the cold hath cut to death\nReeds melodious of thy breath.\nHe, the rival of thy lyre,\nNightingale with note of fire,\nSings no more; but far away,\nFrom the windy hill-side gray,\nCalls the broken note forlorn\nOf an aged shepherd’s horn.\n\nStill about the fire they tell\nHow it long ago befell\nThat a shepherd maid and lad\nMet and trembled and were glad;\nWhen the swift spring waters ran,\nAnd the wind to boy or man\nBrought the aching of his sires--\nSong and love and all desires.\nEre the starry dogwoods fell\nThey were lovers, so they tell.\n\nWoe is me to tell it thee,\nWinter winds in Arcady!\nBroken pipes and vows forgot,\nScattered flocks returning not,\nFrozen brook and drifted hill,\nAshen sun and song-birds still;\nSongs of summer and desire\nCrooned about the winter fire;\nShepherd lads with silver hair,\nShepherd maids no longer fair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "autumn-melody": { - "title": "“Autumn Melody”", - "body": "In the autumn days, the days of parting,\n Days that in a golden silence fall,\nWhen the air is quick with bird-wings starting,\n And the asters darken by the wall;\n\nStrong and sweet the wine of heaven is flowing,\n Bees and sun and sleep and golden dyes;\nLong forgot is budding-time and blowing,\n Sunk in honeyed sleep the garden lies.\n\nSpring and storm and summer midnight madness\n Dream within the grape but never wake;\nBees and sun and sweetness,--oh, and sadness!\n Sun and sweet that reach the heart--and break.\n\nAh, the pain at heart forever starting,\n Ah, the cup untasted that we spilled\nIn the autumn days, the days of parting!\n Would our shades could drink it, and be stilled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-encore": { - "title": "“The Encore”", - "body": "No garlands in the winter-time,\n No trumpets in the night!\nThe song ye praise was done lang syne,\n And was its own delight.\nO’ God’s name take the wreath away,\n Since now the music’s sped;\nYe never cry, “Long live the king!”\n Until the king is dead.\n\nWhen I came piping through the land,\n One morning in the spring,\nWith cockle-burrs upon my coat,\n ’Twas then I was a king:\nA mullein sceptre in my hand,\n My order daisies three,\nWith song’s first freshness on my lips--\n And then ye pitied me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "evening-song": { - "title": "“Evening Song”", - "body": "Dear love, what thing of all the things that be\nIs ever worth one thought from you or me,\n Save only Love,\n Save only Love?\n\nThe days so short, the nights so quick to flee,\nThe world so wide, so deep and dark the sea,\n So dark the sea;\n\nSo far the suns and every listless star,\nBeyond their light--Ah! dear, who knows how far,\n Who knows how far?\n\nOne thing of all dim things I know is true,\nThe heart within me knows, and tells it you,\n And tells it you.\n\nSo blind is life, so long at last is sleep,\nAnd none but Love to bid us laugh or weep,\n And none but Love,\n And none but Love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - } - } - }, - "fides-spes": { - "title": "“Fides, Spes”", - "body": "Joy is come to the little\n Everywhere;\nPink to the peach and pink to the apple,\n White to the pear.\nStars are come to the dogwood,\n Astral, pale;\nMists are pink on the red-bud,\n Veil after veil.\nFlutes for the feathery locusts,\n Soft as spray;\nTongues of lovers for chestnuts, poplars,\n Babbling May.\nYellow plumes for the willows’\n Wind-blown hair;\nOak trees and sycamores only\n Comfortless, bare.\nSore from steel and the watching,\n Somber and old,\n(Wooing robes for the beeches, larches,\n Splashed with gold,\nBreath of love from the lilacs,\n Warm with noon,)\nGreat hearts cold when the little\n Beat mad so soon.\nWhat is their faith to bear it\n Till it come,\nWaiting with rain-cloud and swallow,\n Frozen, dumb?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-gaul-in-the-capitol": { - "title": "“The Gaul in the Capitol”", - "body": "The murmur of old, old water,\nThe yellow of old, old stone,\nThe fountain that sings through the silence,\nThe river-god, dreaming alone;\nThe Antonine booted and mounted\nIn his sun-lit, hill-top place,\nThe Julians, gigantic in armour,\nThe low-browed Claudian race.\n\nThe wolf and the twin boys she suckled,\nAnd the powerful breed they bred;\nCaesars of duplicate empires,\nAll under one roof-stead.\nFronting these fronts triumphant,\nConquest on conquest pressed\nBy these marching, arrogant masters,\nWho could have hoped for the West?\n\nAt the feet of his multiple victors,\nBeaten and dazed and dumb,\nOne, from the wild new races,\nClay of the kings to come.\nHail, in the halls of the Caesars!\nHail, from the thrones oversea!\nSheath of the sword-like vigour,\nSap of the kings to be!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "going-home": { - "title": "“Going Home”", - "body": "How smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;\nEven in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.\nThe wheels turn as if they were glad to go;\nThe sharp curves and windings left behind,\nThe roadway wide open,\n(_The crooked straight\nAnd the rough places plain._)\n\nThey run smoothly, they run softly, too.\nThere is not noise enough to trouble the lightest sleeper.\nNor jolting to wake the weary-hearted.\nI open my window and let the air blow in,\nThe air of morning,\nThat smells of grass and earth--\nEarth, the grain-giver.\n\nHow smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;\nEven in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.\nThe wheels turn as if they were glad to go;\nThey run like running water,\nLike Youth, running away …\nThey spin bright along the bright rails,\nSinging and humming,\nSinging and humming.\nThey run remembering,\nThey run rejoicing,\nAs if they, too, were going home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "grandmither-think-not-i-forget": { - "title": "“Grandmither, Think Not I Forget”", - "body": "Grandmither, think not I forget, when I come back to town,\nAn’ wander the old ways again an’ tread them up an’ down.\nI never smell the clover bloom, nor see the swallows pass,\nWithout I mind how good ye were unto a little lass.\nI never hear the winter rain a-pelting all night through,\nWithout I think and mind me of how cold it falls on you.\nAnd if I come not often to your bed beneath the thyme,\nMayhap ’t is that I’d change wi’ ye, and gie my bed for thine,\n Would like to sleep in thine.\n\nI never hear the summer winds among the roses blow,\nWithout I wonder why it was ye loved the lassie so.\nYe gave me cakes and lollipops and pretty toys a score,--\nI never thought I should come back and ask ye now for more.\nGrandmither, gie me your still, white hands, that lie upon your breast,\nFor mine do beat the dark all night and never find me rest;\nThey grope among the shadows an’ they beat the cold black air,\nThey go seekin’ in the darkness, an’ they never find him there,\n An’ they never find him there.\n\nGrandmither, gie me your sightless eyes, that I may never see\nHis own a-burnin’ full o’ love that must not shine for me.\nGrandmither, gie me your peaceful lips, white as the kirkyard snow,\nFor mine be red wi’ burnin’ thirst, an’ he must never know.\nGrandmither, gie me your clay-stopped ears, that I may never hear\nMy lad a-singin’ in the night when I am sick wi’ fear;\nA-singin’ when the moonlight over a’ the land is white--\nAw God! I’ll up an’ go to him a-singin’ in the night,\n A-callin’ in the night.\n\nGrandmither, gie me your clay-cold heart that has forgot to ache,\nFor mine be fire within my breast and yet it cannot break.\nIt beats an’ throbs forever for the things that must not be,--\nAn’ can ye not let me creep in an’ rest awhile by ye?\nA little lass afeard o’ dark slept by ye years agone--\nAh, she has found what night can hold ’twixt sunset an’ the dawn!\nSo when I plant the rose an’ rue above your grave for ye,\nYe’ll know it’s under rue an’ rose that I would like to be,\n That I would like to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-hawthorn-tree": { - "title": "“The Hawthorn Tree”", - "body": "Across the shimmering meadows--\nAh, when he came to me!\nIn the spring-time,\nIn the night-time,\nIn the starlight,\nBeneath the hawthorn tree.\n\nUp from the misty marsh-land--\nAh, when he climbed to me!\nTo my white bower,\nTo my sweet rest,\nTo my warm breast,\nBeneath the hawthorn tree.\n\nAsk of me what the birds sang,\nHigh in the hawthorn tree;\nWhat the breeze tells,\nWhat the rose smells,\nWhat the stars shine--\nNot what he said to me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-sought-the-wood-in-winter": { - "title": "“I Sought the Wood in Winter”", - "body": "I sought the wood in summer\n When every twig was green;\nThe rudest boughs were tender,\n And buds were pink between.\nLight-fingered aspens trembled\n In fitful sun and shade,\nAnd daffodils were golden\n In every starry glade.\nThe brook sang like a robin--\n My hand could check him where\nThe lissome maiden willows\n Shook out their yellow hair.\n\n“How frail a thing is Beauty,”\n I said, “when every breath\nShe gives the vagrant summer\n But swifter woos her death.\nFor this the star dust troubles,\n For this have ages rolled:\nTo deck the wood for bridal\n And slay her with the cold.”\n\nI sought the wood in winter\n When every leaf was dead;\nBehind the wind-whipped branches\n The winter sun set red.\nThe coldest star was rising\n To greet that bitter air,\nThe oaks were writhen giants;\n Nor bud nor bloom was there.\nThe birches, white and slender,\n In deathless marble stood,\nThe brook, a white immortal,\n Slept silent in the wood.\n\n“How sure a thing is Beauty,”\n I cried. “No bolt can slay,\nNo wave nor shock despoil her,\n No ravishers dismay.\nHer warriors are the angels\n That cherish from afar,\nHer warders people Heaven\n And watch from every star.\nThe granite hills are slighter,\n The sea more like to fail;\nBehind the rose the planet,\n The Law behind the veil.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-media-vita": { - "title": "“In Media Vita”", - "body": "Streams of the spring a-singing,\n Winds of the May that blow,\nBirds from the Southland winging,\n Buds in the grasses below.\nClouds that speed hurrying over,\n And the climbing rose by the wall,\nSinging of bees in the clover,\n And the dead, under all!\n\nLads and their sweethearts lying\n In the cleft of the windy hill;\nHearts that are hushed of their sighing,\n Lips that are tender and still.\nStars in the purple gloaming,\n Flowers that suffuse and fall,\nTwitter of bird-mates homing,\n And the dead, under all!\n\nHerdsman abroad with his collie,\n Girls on their way to the fair,\nYoung lads a-chasing their folly,\n Parsons a-praying their prayer.\nChildren their kites a-flying,\n Grandsires that nod by the wall,\nMothers soft lullabies sighing,\n And the dead, under all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "in-rose-time": { - "title": "“In Rose Time”", - "body": "_Oh, this is the joy of the rose:\n That it blows,\n And goes._\n\nWinter lasts a five-month,\nSpring-time stays but one;\nYellow blow the rye-fields\nWhen the rose is done.\nPines are clad at Yuletide\nWhen the birch is bare,\nAnd the holly’s greenest\nIn the frosty air.\n\nSorrow keeps a stone house\nBuilded grim and gray;\nPleasure hath a straw thatch\nHung with lanterns gay.\nOn her petty savings\nNiggard Prudence thrives,\nPassion, ere the moonset,\nBleeds a thousand lives.\n\nVirtue hath a warm hearth--\nFolly’s dead and drowned;\nFriendship hath her own when\nLove is underground.\nAh! for me the madness\nOf the spendthrift flower,\nBurning myriad sunsets\nIn a single hour.\n\n_Oh, this is the joy of the rose:\n That it blows,\n And goes._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "lament-for-marsyas": { - "title": "“Lament for Marsyas”", - "body": "Marsyas sleeps. Oh, never wait,\nMaidens, by the city gate,\nTill he come to plunder gold\nOf the daffodils you hold,\nOr your branches white with may;\nHe is whiter gone than they.\nHe will startle you no more\nWhen along the river shore\nDamsels beat the linen clean.\nNor when maidens play at ball\nWill he catch it where it fall:\nThough ye wait for him and call,\nHe will answer not, I ween.\n\nHappy Earth to hold him so,\nStill and satisfied and low,\nGiving him his will--ah, more\nThan a woman could before!\nStill forever holding up\nTo his parted lips the cup\nWhich hath eased him, when to bless\nAll who loved were powerless.\nAh! for that too-lovely head,\nLow among the laureled dead,\nMany a rose earth oweth yet;\nMany a yellow jonquil brim,\nMany a hyacinth dewy-dim,\nFor the singing breath of him--\nSweeter than the violet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "a-likeness": { - "title": "“A Likeness”", - "body": "In every line a supple beauty--\n The restless head a little bent--\nDisgust of pleasure, scorn of duty,\n The unseeing eyes of discontent.\nI often come to sit beside him,\n This youth who passed and left no trace\nOf good or ill that did betide him,\n Save the disdain upon his face.\n\nThe hope of all his House, the brother\n Adored, the golden-hearted son,\nWhom Fortune pampered like a mother;\n And then--a shadow on the sun.\nWhether he followed Caesar’s trumpet,\n Or chanced the riskier game at home\nTo find how favour played the strumpet\n In fickle politics at Rome;\n\nWhether he dreamed a dream in Asia\n He never could forget by day,\nOr gave his youth to some Aspasia,\n Or gamed his heritage away--\nOnce lost, across the Empire’s border\n This man would seek his peace in vain;\nHis look arraigns a social order\n Somehow entrammelled with his pain.\n\n“The dice of gods are always loaded”;\n One gambler, arrogant as they,\nFierce, and by fierce injustice goaded,\n Left both his hazard and the play.\nIncapable of compromises,\n Unable to forgive or spare,\nThe strange awarding of the prizes\n He had no fortitude to bear.\n\nTricked by the forms of things material,--\n The solid-seeming arch and stone,\nThe noise of war, the pomp Imperial,\n The heights and depths about a throne--\nHe missed, among the shapes diurnal,\n The old, deep-travelled road from pain,\nThe thoughts of men, which are eternal,\n In which, eternal, men remain.\n\n_Ritratto D’ignoto_; defying\n Things unsubstantial as a dream--\nAn empire, long in ashes lying--\n His face still set against the stream--\nYes, so he looked, that gifted brother\n I loved, who passed and left no trace,\nNot even--luckier than this other--\n His sorrow in a marble face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "lenvoi": { - "title": "“L’Envoi”", - "body": "Where are the loves that we have loved before\nWhen once we are alone, and shut the door?\nNo matter whose the arms that held me fast,\nThe arms of Darkness hold me at the last.\nNo matter down what primrose path I tend,\nI kiss the lips of Silence in the end.\nNo matter on what heart I found delight,\nI come again unto the breast of Night.\nNo matter when or how love did befall,\n’Tis Loneliness that loves me best of all,\nAnd in the end she claims me, and I know\nThat she will stay, though all the rest may go.\nNo matter whose the eyes that I would keep\nNear in the dark, ’tis in the eyes of Sleep\nThat I must look and look forever more,\nWhen once I am alone, and shut the door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - } - } - }, - "macon-prairie": { - "title": "“Macon Prairie”", - "body": "She held me for a night against her bosom,\nThe aunt who died when I was yet a baby,\nThe girl who scarcely lived to be a woman.\nStricken, she left familiar earth behind her,\nMortally ill, she braved the boisterous ocean,\nDying, she crossed irrevocable rivers,\nHailed the blue Lakes, and saw them fade forever,\nHungry for distances;--her heart exulting\nThat God had made so many seas and countries\nTo break upon the eye and sweep behind her.\nFrom one whose love was tempered by discretion,\nFrom all the net of caution and convenience\nShe snatched her high heart for the great adventure,\nBroke her bright bubble under far horizons,--\nAmong the skirmishers that teased the future,\nPrecursors of the grave slow-moving millions\nAlready destined to the Westward-faring.\n\nThey came, at last, to where the railway ended,\nThe strange troop captained by a dying woman;\nThe father, the old man of perfect silence,\nThe mother, unresisting, broken-hearted,\nThe gentle brother and his wife, both timid,\nNot knowing why they left their native hamlet;\nGoing as in a dream, but ever going.\n\nIn all the glory of an Indian summer,\nThe lambent transmutations of October,\nThey started with the great ox-teams from Hastings\nAnd trekked in a southwesterly direction,\nBoring directly toward the fiery sunset.\nOver the red grass prairies, shaggy-coated,\nWithout a goal the caravan proceeded;\nAcross the tablelands and rugged ridges,\nThrough the coarse grasses which the oxen breasted,\nBlue-stem and bunch-grass, red as sea-marsh samphire.\nAlways the similar, soft undulations\nOf the free-breathing earth in golden sunshine,\nThe hardy wind, and dun hawks flying over\nAgainst the unstained firmament of heaven.\n\nIn the front wagon, under the white cover,\nStretched on her feather-bed and propped with pillows,\nNever dismayed by the rude oxen’s scrambling,\nThe jolt of the tied wheel or brake or hold-back,\nShe lay, the leader of the expedition;\nAnd with her burning eyes she took possession\nOf the red waste,--for hers, and theirs, forever.\n\nA wagon-top, rocking in seas of grasses,\nA camp-fire on a prairie chartless, trackless,\nA red spark under the dark tent of heaven.\nSurely, they said, by day she saw a vision,\nThough her exhausted strength could not impart it,--\nHer breathing hoarser than the tired cattle.\n\nWhen cold, bright stars the sunburnt days succeeded,\nShe took me in her bed to sleep beside her,--\nA sturdy bunch of life, born on the ocean.\nAlways she had the wagon cover lifted\nBefore her face. The sleepless hours till daybreak\nShe read the stars.\n\n“Plenty of time for sleep,” she said, “hereafter.”\n\nShe pointed out the spot on Macon prairie,\nTelling my father that she wished to lie there.\n“And plant, one day, an apple orchard round me,\nIn memory of woman’s first temptation,\nAnd man’s first cowardice.”\nThat night, within her bosom,\nI slept.\n Before the morning\nI cried because the breast was cold behind me.\n\nNow, when the sky blazes like blue enamel,\nBrilliant and hard over the blond cornfields,\nAnd through the autumn days our wind is blowing\nLike the creative breath of God Almighty--\nThen I rejoice that offended love demanded\nSuch wide retreat, and such self-restitution;\nForged an explorer’s will in a frail woman,\nAsked of her perfect faith and renunciation,\nHardships and perils, prophecy and vision,\nThe leadership of kin, and happy ending\nOn the red rolling land of Macon prairie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "mills-of-montmartre": { - "title": "“Mills of Montmartre”", - "body": "Upon the hill above the town--\nThe old town pale and gray--\nIn other days went up and down\nThe country lasses gay.\nBelow the humming mills it shone,\nAcross the fields of flowers,\nThe city, dreamlike, far away,--\nThe island, stream and towers.\n\nThe merry mills were going,\nThe country winds were blowing,\nAnd brave the miller sings;\n_“Bring in, bring in your yellow grain,\nMy weight is never light;\n(Oh tall my mill and swift her wings!)\nBring in, bring in your yellow grain\nAnd I will give you white.\nWhite is my hopper for your grist,\nMy mill-stones you may trust:\nBring in your harvest when you list\nAnd I will give you dust.”_\n\nUpon the hill above the town\nThey grind the corn no more;\nThe girls go tripping up and down\nFrom idle door to door.\nThe nights are terrible with mirth.\nThe days ashamed for song;\nAgainst the sky the crimson sails\nTurn all the night-time long.\n\nThe merry mills are going,\nThe country winds are blowing\nAnd brave the miller sings:\n_“Bring in, bring in your yellow grain,\nMy weight is never light;\n(Oh tall my mill and swift her wings!)\nBring in, bring in your yellow grain,\nAnd I will give you white.\nWide is my hopper for your grist,\nMy mill-stones you may trust:\nBring in your harvest when you list,\nAnd I will give you dust.”_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-palatine": { - "title": "“The Palatine”", - "body": "“Have you been with the King to Rome,\n Brother, big brother?”\n“I’ve been there and I’ve come home.\n Back to your play, little brother.”\n\n“Oh, how high is Caesar’s house,\n Brother, big brother?”\n“Goats about the doorways browse:\nNight hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree,\nHome of the wild bird and home of the bee.\nA thousand chambers of marble lie\nWide to the sun and the wind and the sky.\nPoppies we find amongst our wheat\nGrow on Caesar’s banquet seat.\nCattle crop and neatherds drowse\nOn the floors of Caesar’s house.”\n\n“But what has become of Caesar’s gold,\n Brother, big brother?”\n“The times are bad and the world is old--\nWho knows the where of the Caesars’ gold?\nNight comes black on the Caesars’ hill;\nThe wells are deep and the tales are ill.\nFire-flies gleam in the damp and mould,--\nAll that is left of the Caesars’ gold.\n Back to your play, little brother.”\n\n“What has become of the Caesars’ men,\n Brother, big brother?”\n“Dogs in the kennel and wolf in the den\nHowl for the fate of the Caesars’ men.\nSlain in Asia, slain in Gaul,\nBy Dacian border and Persian wall;\nRhineland orchard and Danube fen\nFatten their roots on Caesar’s men.”\n\n“Why is the world so sad and wide,\n Brother, big brother?”\n“Saxon boys by their fields that bide\nNeed not know if the world is wide.\nClimb no mountain but Shire-end Hill,\nCross no water but goes to mill;\nOx in the stable and cow in the byre,\nSmell of the wood smoke and sleep by the fire;\nSun-up in seed-time--a likely lad\nHurts not his head that the world is sad.\n Back to your play, little brother.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "paradox": { - "title": "“Paradox”", - "body": "I knew them both upon Miranda’s isle,\n Which is of youth a sea-bound seigniory:\nMisshapen Caliban, so seeming vile,\n And Ariel, proud prince of minstrelsy,\nWho did forsake the sunset for my tower\n And like a star above my slumber burned.\nThe night was held in silver chains by power\n Of melody, in which all longings yearned--\nStar-grasping youth in one wild strain expressed,\n Tender as dawn, insistent as the tide;\nThe heart of night and summer stood confessed.\n I rose aglow and flung the lattice wide--\nAh, jest of art, what mockery and pang!\n Alack, it was poor Caliban who sang.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-poor-minstrel": { - "title": "“The Poor Minstrel”", - "body": "_Does the darkness cradle thee\nThan mine arms more tenderly?_\nDo the angels God hath put\nThere to guard thy lonely sleep--\nOne at head and one at foot--\nWatch more fond and constant keep?\nWhen the black-bird sings in May,\nAnd the spring is in the wood,\nWould you never trudge the way\nOver hill-tops, if you could?\nWas my harp so hard a load\nEven on the sunny morns\nWhen the plumèd huntsmen rode\nTo the music of their horns?\nHath the love that lit the stars,\nFills the sea and moulds the flowers,\nWhose completeness nothing mars,\nMade forgot what once was ours?\nChrist hath perfect rest to give--\nStillness and perpetual peace;\nYou, who found it hard to live,\nSleep and sleep, without surcease.\n\nChrist hath stars to light thy porch,\nSilence after fevered song;--\nI had but a minstrel’s torch\nAnd the way was wet and long.\nSleep. No more on winter nights,\nHarping at some castle gate,\nThou must see the revel lights\nStream upon our cold estate.\nBitter was the bread of song\nWhile you tarried in my tent,\nAnd the jeering of the throng\nHurt you, as it came and went.\nWhen you slept upon my breast\nGrief had wed me long ago:\nChrist hath his perpetual rest\nFor thy weariness. But oh!\nWhen I sleep beside the road,\nThanking God thou liest not so,\nBrother to the owl and toad,\nCould’st thou, Dear, but let me know,\n_Does the darkness cradle thee\nThan mine arms more tenderly?_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "poppies-on-ludlow-castle": { - "title": "“Poppies on Ludlow Castle”", - "body": "Through halls of vanished pleasure,\n And hold of vanished power,\nAnd crypt of faith forgotten,\n I came to Ludlow tower.\n\nA-top of arch and stairway,\n Of crypt, and donjon cell,\nOf council hall, and chamber,\n Of wall, and ditch, and well,\n\nHigh over grated turrets\n Where clinging ivies run,\nA thousand scarlet poppies\n Enticed the rising sun,\n\nUpon the topmost turret,\n With death and damp below,--\nThree hundred years of spoilage,--\n The crimson poppies grow.\n\nThis hall it was that bred him,\n These hills that knew him brave,\nThe gentlest English singer\n That fills an English grave.\n\nHow have they heart to blossom\n So cruel gay and red,\nWhen beauty so hath perished\n And valour so hath sped?\n\nWhen knights so fair are rotten,\n And captains true asleep,\nAnd singing lips are dust-stopped\n Six English earth-feet deep?\n\nWhen ages old remind me\n How much hath gone for naught,\nWhat wretched ghost remaineth\n Of all that flesh hath wrought;\n\nOf love and song and warring,\n Of adventure and play,\nOf art and comely building,\n Of faith and form and fray--\n\nI’ll mind the flowers of pleasure,\n Of short-lived youth and sleep,\nThat drank the sunny weather\n A-top of Ludlow keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "prairie-dawn": { - "title": "“Prairie Dawn”", - "body": "A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;\nA pungent odor from the dusty sage;\nA sudden stirring of the huddled herds;\nA breaking of the distant table-lands\nThrough purple mists ascending, and the flare\nOf water-ditches silver in the light;\nA swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;\nA sudden sickness for the hills of home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - } - } - }, - "prairie-spring": { - "title": "“Prairie Spring”", - "body": "Evening and the flat land,\nRich and somber and always silent;\nThe miles of fresh-plowed soil,\nHeavy and black, full of strength and harshness;\nThe growing wheat, the growing weeds,\nThe toiling horses, the tired men;\nThe long, empty roads,\nSullen fires of sunset, fading,\nThe eternal, unresponsive sky.\nAgainst all this, Youth,\nFlaming like the wild roses,\nSinging like the larks over the plowed fields,\nFlashing like a star out of the twilight;\nYouth with its insupportable sweetness,\nIts fierce necessity,\nIts sharp desire;\nSinging and singing,\nOut of the lips of silence,\nOut of the earthy dusk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "provencal-legend": { - "title": "“Provençal Legend”", - "body": "On his little grave and wild,\nFaustinus, the martyr child,\nCandytuft and mustards grow.\nAh, how many a June has smiled\nOn the turf he lies below.\n\nAges gone they laid him there,\nQuit of sun and wholesome air,\nBroken flesh and tortured limb;\nLeaving all his faith the heir\nOf his gentle hope and him.\n\nYonder, under pagan skies,\nBleached by rains, the circus lies,\nWhere they brought him from his play.\nComeliest his of sacrifice,\nYouth and tender April day.\n\n“Art thou not the shepherd’s son?--\nThere the hills thy lambkins run?--\nThese the fields thy brethren keep?”\n“On a higher hill than yon\nDoth my Father lead His sheep.”\n\n“Bring thy ransom, then,” they say,\n“Gold enough to pave the way\nFrom the temple to the Rhone.”\nWhen he came, upon his day,\nSlender, tremulous, alone,\n\nMustard flowers like these he pressed,\nGolden, flame-like, to his breast,\nBlooms the early weanlings eat.\nWhen his Triumph brought him rest,\nYellow bloom lay at his feet.\n\nGolden play-days came: the air\nCalled him, weanlings bleated there,\nRoman boys ran fleet with spring;\nShorn of youth and usage fair,\nHope nor hill-top days they bring.\n\nBut the shepherd children still\nCome at Easter, warm or chill,\nCome with violets gathered wild\nFrom his sloping pasture hill,\nPlay-fellows who would fulfill\nPlay-time to that martyr child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide", - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "a-silver-cup": { - "title": "“A Silver Cup”", - "body": "In Venice,\nUnder the Rialto bridge, one summer morning,\nIn a mean shop I bought a silver goblet.\nIt was a place of poor and sordid barter,\nA damp hole filled with rags and rusty kettles,\nFire-tongs and broken grates and mended bellows,\nAnd common crockery, coarse in use and fashion.\nEverything spoke the desperate needs of body,\nThe breaking up and sale of wretched shelters,\nThe frail continuance even of hunger.\nMisery under all--and that so fleeting!\nThe fight to fill the pots and pans soon over,\nAnd then this wretched litter left from living.\n\nThe goblet\nStood in a dusty window full of charcoal,\nThe only bright, the only gracious object.\nBecause my heart was full to overflowing,\nBecause my day to weep had not come near me,\nBecause the world was full of love, I bought it.\nFrom all the wreckage there I took no warning;--\nThose ugly things outlasting hearts and houses,\nAnd all the life that men build into houses.\nOut of the jaws of hunger toothed with iron,\nInto the sun exultantly I bore it.\nThen, in the brightness of the summer sunshine,\nI saw the loops and flourishes of letters,\nThe scattered trace of some outworn inscription,--\nSix lines or more, rubbed flat into the silver,\nDashes and strokes, like rain-marks in a snowdrift.\nWas it a prize, perhaps, or gift of friendship?\nWas its inscription hope, or recognition?\nNot heeding still, I bade my oarsman quicken,\nAnd once ashore, across the Square I hastened,\nPrecipitate through the idlers and the pigeons,\nBehind the Clock Tower, to a cunning craftsman,\nThere to exhort and urge the deft engraver,\nAnd crowd upon my cup another story;\nA name and promise in my memory singing.\n\nIn Venice,\nUnder the Rialto bridge, I bought you.\nNow you come back to me, such long years after,\nYour promise never kept, your hope defeated,\nYour legend now a thing for tears and laughter;--\nThough both your names are names of living people,\nCut by the steady hand of that engraver\nWhile I stood over him and urged his deftness.\nHe played the part; nor stopped to smile and tell me\nThat for such words his art was too enduring.\nHis living was to cut such stuff in silver!\nAnd now I have you, what to do, I wonder?\nThe names, another smith can soon efface them,--\nBut leave, so beautifully cut, the legend.\nNot from a poet’s book, but from the living\nSad mouth of a young peasant boy, I took it;\nFour words, which mean that life is sweet together.\n\nIn some dark junk-shop window I shall leave you,\nSome place of poor effects from broken houses,\nWhere desperate women go to sell a saucepan\nAnd frightened men to buy a baby’s cradle.\nHere, in New York, a city full of exiles,\nShort marriages and early deaths and heart-breaks:\nIn some such window, with the blue glass vases,\nThe busts of Presidents in plaster, gilded,\nPawned watches, and the rings and chains and bracelets\nGiven for love and sold for utter anguish,\nThere I shall leave you, a sole gracious object.\n\nAnd hope some blind, bright eye will one day spy you--\nSome boy with too much love and empty pockets\nMay read with quickening pulse your brief inscription,\nCut in his mother-language, half forgotten,\nFour words which mean that life is sweet together;\nRush in and count his coins upon the table,\n(A cup his own as if his heart had made it!)\nAnd bear you off to one who hopes as he does.\nSo, one day, may the wish, for you, be granted.\nThey will not know, these two, the names you cover;\nMine and another, razed by violence from you,\nNor his, worn down by time, the first possessor’s--\nWho had his story, which you never told me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "sleep-minstrel-sleep": { - "title": "“Sleep, Minstrel, Sleep”", - "body": "Sleep, minstrel, sleep; the winter wind’s awake,\n And yellow April’s buried deep and cold.\nThe wood is black, and songful things forsake\n The haunted forest when the year is old.\nAbove the drifted snow the aspens quake,\n The scourging clouds a shrunken moon enfold,\nDenying all that nights of summer spake\n And swearing false the summer’s globe of gold.\n\nSleep, minstrel, sleep; in such a bitter night\n Thine azure song would seek the stars in vain;\nThy rose and roundelay the winter’s spite\n Would scarcely spare--O never wake again!\nThese leaden skies do not thy masques invite,\n Thy sunny breath would warm not their disdain;\nHow should’st thou sing to boughs with winter dight,\n Or gather marigolds in winter rain?\n\nSleep, minstrel, sleep; we do not grow more kind;\n Your cloak was thin, your wound was wet and deep;\nMore bitter breath there was than winter wind,\n And hotter tears than now thy lovers weep.\nUpon the world-old breast of comfort find\n How gentle Darkness thee will gently keep.\nThou wert the summer’s, and thy joy declined\n When winter winds awoke. Sleep, minstrel, sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Troubadour, when you were gay,\nYou wooed with rose and roundelay,\nSinging harp-strings, sweet as May.\nFrom beneath the crown of bay\nFell the wild, abundant hair.\nScent of cherry bloom and pear\nWith you from the south did fare,\nBuds of myrtle for your wear.\nSoft as summer stars thine eyes,\nPlanets pale in violet skies;\nSummer wind that sings and dies\nWas the music of thy sighs.\n\nTroubadour, one winter’s night,\nWhen the pasture-lands were white\nAnd the cruel stars were bright,\nFortune held thee in despite.\nThen beneath my tower you bore\nRose nor rondel as of yore,\nBut a heavy grief and sore\nLaid in silence at my door.\nApril yearneth, April goes;\nNot for me her violet blows,\nI have done for long with those.\nAt my breast thy sorrow grows,\nNearer to my heart, God knows,\nThan ever roundelay or rose!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "Alas, that June should come when thou didst go;\nI think you passed each other on the way;\nAnd seeing thee, the Summer loved thee so\nThat all her loveliness she gave away;\nHer rare perfumes, in hawthorn boughs distilled,\nBlushing, she in thy sweeter bosom left,\nThine arms with all her virgin roses filled,\nYet felt herself the richer for thy theft;\nBeggared herself of morning for thine eyes,\nHung on the lips of every bird the tune,\nBreathed on thy cheek her soft vermilion dyes,\nAnd in thee set the singing heart of June.\nAnd so, not only do I mourn thy flight,\nBut Summer comes despoiled of her delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "spanish-johnny": { - "title": "“Spanish Johnny”", - "body": "The old West, the old time,\n The old wind singing through\nThe red, red grass a thousand miles,\n And, Spanish Johnny, you!\nHe’d sit beside the water-ditch\n When all his herd was in,\nAnd never mind a child, but sing\n To his mandolin.\n\nThe big stars, the blue night,\n The moon-enchanted plain:\nThe olive man who never spoke,\n But sang the songs of Spain.\nHis speech with men was wicked talk--\n To hear it was a sin;\nBut those were golden things he said\n To his mandolin.\n\nThe gold songs, the gold stars,\n The world so golden then:\nAnd the hand so tender to a child\n Had killed so many men.\nHe died a hard death long ago\n Before the Road came in;\nThe night before he swung, he sang\n To his mandolin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "street-in-packingtown": { - "title": "“Street in Packingtown”", - "body": "In the gray dust before a frail gray shed,\nBy a board fence obscenely chalked in red,\nA gray creek willow, left from country days,\nFlickers pallid in the haze.\n\nBeside the gutter of the unpaved street,\nTin cans and broken glass about his feet,\nAnd a brown whisky bottle, singled out\nFor play from prosier crockery strewn about,\nTwisting a shoestring noose, a Polack’s brat\nJoylessly torments a cat.\n\nHis dress, some sister’s cast-off wear,\nIs rolled to leave his stomach bare.\nHis arms and legs with scratches bleed;\nHe twists the cat and pays no heed.\nHe mauls her neither less nor more\nBecause her claws have raked him sore.\nHis eyes, faint-blue and moody, stare\nFrom under a pale shock of hair.\nNeither resentment nor surprise\nLights the desert of those eyes--\nTo hurt and to be hurt; he knows\nAll he will know on earth, or need to know.\n\nBut there, beneath his willow tree,\nHis tribal, tutelary tree,\nThe tortured cat across his knee,\nWith hate, perhaps, a threat, maybe,\nLithuania looks at me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-swedish-mother": { - "title": "“The Swedish Mother”", - "body": "_“You shall hear the tale again--\n Hush, my red-haired daughter.”\nBrightly burned the sunset gold\n On the black pond water._\n\nRed the pasture ridges gleamed\n Where the sun was sinking.\nSlow the windmill rasped and wheezed\n Where the herd was drinking._\n\nOn the kitchen doorstep low\n Sat a Swedish mother;\nIn her arms one baby slept,\n By her sat another._\n\n“All time, ’way back in old countree,\nYour grandpa, he been good to me.\nYour grandpa, he been young man, too,\nAnd I been yust li’l’ girl, like you.\nAll time in spring, when evening come,\nWe go bring sheep an’ li’l’ lambs home.\nWe go big field, ’way up on hill,\nTen times high like our windmill.\nOne time your grandpa leave me wait\nWhile he call sheep down. By de gate\nI sit still till night come dark;\nRabbits run an’ strange dogs bark,\nOld owl hoot, an’ your modder cry,\nShe been so ’fraid big bear come by.\nLast, ’way off, she hear de sheep,\nLi’l’ bells ring and li’l’ lambs bleat.\nThen all sheep come over de hills,\nBig white dust, an’ old dog Nils.\nThen come grandpa, in his arm\nLi’l’ sick lamb dat somet’ing harm.\nHe so young then, big and strong,\nPick li’l’ girl up, take her ’long,--\nPoor li’l’ tired girl, yust like you,--\nLift her up an’ take her too.\nHold her tight an’ carry her far,--\n’Ain’t no light but yust one star.\nSheep go ‘bah-h,’ an’ road so steep;\nLi’l’ girl she go fast asleep.”\n\n_Every night the red-haired child\n Begs to hear the story,\nWhen the pasture ridges burn\n With the sunset glory._\n\n_She can never understand,\n Since the tale ends gladly,\nWhy her mother, telling it,\n Always smiles so sadly._\n\n_Wonderingly she looks away\n Where her mother’s gazing;\nOnly sees the drifting herd,\n In the sunset grazing._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-tavern": { - "title": "“The Tavern”", - "body": "In the tavern of my heart\n Many a one has sat before,\nDrunk red wine and sung a stave,\n And, departing, come no more.\nWhen the night was cold without,\n And the ravens croaked of storm,\nThey have sat them at my hearth,\n Telling me my house was warm.\n\nAs the lute and cup went round,\n They have rhymed me well in lay;--\nWhen the hunt was on at morn,\n Each, departing, went his way.\nOn the walls, in compliment,\n Some would scrawl a verse or two,\nSome have hung a willow branch,\n Or a wreath of corn-flowers blue.\n\nAh! my friend, when thou dost go,\n Leave no wreath of flowers for me;\nNot pale daffodils nor rue,\n Violets nor rosemary.\nSpill the wine upon the lamps,\n Tread the fire, and bar the door;\nSo despoil the wretched place,\n None will come forevermore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "thou-art-the-pearl": { - "title": "“Thou Art the Pearl”", - "body": "I read of knights who laid their armour down,\n And left the tourney’s prize for other hands,\nAnd clad them in a pilgrim’s sober gown,\n To seek a holy cup in desert lands.\nFor them no more the torch of victory;\n For them lone vigils and the starlight pale,\nSo they in dreams the Blessed Cup may see--\n Thou art the Grail!\n\nAn Eastern king once smelled a rose in sleep,\n And on the morrow laid his scepter down.\nHis heir his titles and his lands might keep,--\n The rose was sweeter wearing than the crown.\nNor cared he that its life was but an hour,\n A breath that from the crimson summer blows,\nWho gladly paid a kingdom for a flower--\n Thou art the Rose!\n\nA merchant man, who knew the worth of things,\n Beheld a pearl more priceless than a star;\nAnd straight returning, all he hath he brings\n And goes upon his way, ah, richer far!\nLaughter of merchants in the market-place,\n Nor taunting gibe nor scornful lips that curl,\nCan ever cloud the rapture on his face--\n Thou art the Pearl!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - } - } - }, - "winter-at-delphi": { - "title": "“Winter at Delphi”", - "body": "Cold are the stars of the night,\nWild is the tempest crying,\nFast through the velvet dark\nLittle white flakes are flying.\nStill is the House of Song.\nBut the fire on the hearth is burning;\nAnd the lamps are trimmed, and the cup\nIs full for his day of returning.\nHis watchers are fallen asleep,\nThey wait but his call to follow,\nAy, to the ends of the earth--\nBut Apollo, the god, Apollo?\n\nSick is the heart in my breast,\nMine eyes are blinded with weeping;\nThe god who never comes back,\nThe watch that forever is keeping.\nService of gods is hard;\nDeep lies the snow on my pillow.\nFor him the laurel and song,\nWeeping for me and the willow:\nEmpty my arms and cold\nAs the nest forgot of the swallow;\nBirds will come back with the spring,--\nBut Apollo, the god, Apollo?\n\nHope will come back with the spring,\nJoy with the lark’s returning;\nLove must awake betimes,\nWhen crocus buds are a-burning.\nHawthorns will follow the snow,\nThe robin his tryst be keeping;\nWinds will blow in the May,\nWaking the pulses a-sleeping.\nSnowdrops will whiten the hills,\nViolets hide in the hollow:\nPan will be drunken and rage--\nBut Apollo, the god, Apollo?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "catherine-of-siena": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Catherine of Siena", - "birth": { - "year": 1347 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1380 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_of_Siena", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "consumed-in-grace": { - "title": "“Consumed in Grace”", - "body": "I first saw God when I was a child, six years of age.\nThe cheeks of the sun were pale before Him,\nand the earth acted as a shy\ngirl, like me.\n\nDivine light entered my heart from His love\nthat did never fully wane,\n\nthough indeed, dear, I can understand how a person’s\nfaith can at times flicker,\n\nfor what is the mind to do\nwith something that becomes the mind’s ruin:\na God that consumes us\nin His grace.\n\nI have seen what you want;\nit is there,\n\na Beloved of infinite\ntenderness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_catherine_of_siena" - } - } - }, - "eternal-trinity": { - "title": "“Eternal Trinity”", - "body": "Eternal Trinity, Godhead, mystery deep as the sea, you could give me no greater gift than the gift of yourself.\nFor you are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being.\nYes, you are a fire that takes away the coldness, illuminates the mind with its light, and causes me to know your truth.\nAnd I know that you are beauty and wisdom itself. The food of angels, you gave yourself to man in the fire of your love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-hymns-of-the-earth": { - "title": "“The Hymns of the Earth”", - "body": "I wanted to be a hermit and only hear the hymns of the earth, and the laughter of the sky,\nand the sweet gossip of the creatures on my limbs, the forests.\nI wanted to be a hermit and not see another face look upon mine and tell me I was not all the beauty in this world.\nFor so many faces do that--cage us.\nThe wings we have are so fragile they can break from just one word, or a glance void of love.\nI wanted to live in that cloister of light’s silence because, is it not true, the heart is so fragile and shy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_catherine_of_siena" - } - } - }, - "prayer-of-saint-catherine": { - "title": "“Prayer of Saint Catherine”", - "body": "I see that you have endowed your vicar\nby nature\nwith a fearless heart;\nso I humbly, imploringly beg you\nto pour the light beyond nature\ninto the eye of his understanding.\nFor unless this light,\nacquired through pure affection for virtue,\nis joined with it,\na heart such as his tends to be proud.\n\nToday again let every selfish love be cut away\nfrom those enemies of yours\nand from the vicar\nand from us all,\nso that we may be able to forgive those enemies\nwhen you bend their hardness.\n\nFor them, that they may humble themselves\nand obey this lord of ours,\nI offer you my life\nfrom this moment\nand for whenever you wish me to lay it down\nfor your glory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_catherine_of_siena" - } - } - }, - "until-your-own-dawn": { - "title": "“Until Your Own Dawn”", - "body": "Daybreak: everything in this world is a luminous divine dream I have spun.\nI did not know life was a fabric woven by my soul.\nAny form that can appear to you--should I confess this?--\nit is something I made.\nAll roots nurse from me.\nGod’s art is mine.\nI did not want His divine talent.\nIt simply grew in my heart from the way I loved.\nExistence is as a young child moving through a lane at night;\nit wanted to hold my hand.\nHere, dear earth, hold me,\nuntil your own dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_catherine_of_siena" - } - } - }, - "we-were-enclosed": { - "title": "“We Were Enclosed”", - "body": "We were enclosed,\nO eternal Father,\nwithin the garden of your breast.\nYou drew us out of your holy mind\nlike a flower\npetaled with our soul’s three powers,\nand into each power\nyou put the whole plant,\nso that they might bear fruit in your garden,\nmight come back to you\nwith the fruit you gave them.\nAnd you would come back to the soul,\nto fill her with your blessedness.\nThere the soul dwells--\nlike the fish in the sea\nand the sea in the fish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_catherine_of_siena" - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-causley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Causley", - "birth": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2003 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Causley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "ballad-of-the-breadman": { - "title": "“Ballad of the Breadman”", - "body": "Mary stood in the kitchen\nBaking a loaf of bread.\nAn angel flew in the window\n“We’ve a job for you,” he said.\n\n“God in his big gold heaven\nSitting in his big blue chair,\nWanted a mother for his little son.\nSuddenly saw you there.”\n\nMary shook and trembled,\n“It isn’t true what you say.”\n“Don’t say that,” said the angel.\n“The baby’s on its way.”\n\nJoseph was in the workshop\nPlaning a piece of wood.\n“The old man’s past it,” the neighbours said.\n“That girls been up to no good.”\n\n“And who was that elegant fellow,”\nThey said. “in the shiny gear?”\nThe things they said about Gabriel\nWere hardly fit to hear.\n\nMary never answered,\nMary never replied.\nShe kept the information,\nLike the baby, safe inside.\n\nIt was the election winter.\nThey went to vote in the town.\nWhen Mary found her time had come\nThe hotels let her down.\n\nThe baby was born in an annexe\nNext to the local pub.\nAt midnight, a delegation\nTurned up from the Farmers’ club.\n\nThey talked about an explosion\nThat made a hole on the sky,\nSaid they’d been sent to the Lamb and Flag\nTo see God come down from on high.\n\nA few days later a bishop\nAnd a five-star general were seen\nWith the head of an African country\nIn a bullet-proof limousine.\n\n“We’ve come,” they said “with tokens\nFor the little boy to choose.”\nTold the tale about war and peace\nIn the television news.\n\nAfter them came the soldiers\nWith rifle and bombs and gun,\nLooking for enemies of the state.\nThe family had packed up and gone.\n\nWhen they got back to the village\nThe neighbours said, to a man,\n“That boy will never be one of us,\nThough he does what he blessed well can.”\n\nHe went round to all the people\nA paper crown on his head.\nHere is some bread from my father.\nTake, eat, he said.\n\nNobody seemed very hungry.\nNobody seemed to care.\nNobody saw the God in himself\nQuietly standing there.\n\nHe finished up in the papers.\nHe came to a very bad end.\nHe was charged with bringing the living to life.\nNo man was that prisoner’s friend.\n\nThere’s only one kind of punishment\nTo fit that kind of crime.\nThey rigged a trial and shot him dead.\nThey were only just in time.\n\nThey lifted the young man by the leg,\nThy lifted him by the arm,\nThey locked him in a cathedral\nIn case he came to harm.\n\nThey stored him safe as water\nUnder seven rocks.\nOne Sunday morning he burst out\nLike a jack-in-the-box.\n\nThrough the town he went walking.\nHe showed them the holes in his head.\nNow do you want any loaves? He cried.\n“Not today” they said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "i-am-the-great-sun": { - "title": "“I am the Great Sun”", - "body": "I am the great sun, but you do not see me,\nI am your husband, but you turn away.\nI am the captive, but you do not free me,\nI am the captain but you will not obey.\nI am the truth, but you will not believe me,\nI am the city where you will not stay.\nI am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,\nI am that God to whom you will not pray.\nI am your counsel, but you will not hear me,\nI am your lover whom you will betray.\nI am the victor, but you do not cheer me,\nI am the holy dove whom you will slay.\nI am your life, but if you will not name me,\nSeal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ten-types-of-hospital-visitor": { - "title": "“Ten Types of Hospital Visitor”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nThe first enters wearing the neon armour\nOf virtue.\nCeaselessly firing all-purpose smiles\nAt everyone present\nShe destroys hope\nIn the breasts of the sick,\nWho realize instantly\nThat they are incapable of surmounting\nHer ferocious goodwill.\n\nSuch courage she displays\nIn the face of human disaster!\n\nFortunately, she does not stay long.\nAfter a speedy trip round the ward\nIn the manner of a nineteen-thirties destroyer\nShowing the flag in the Mediterranean,\nShe returns home for a week\n--With luck, longer--\nScorched by the heat of her own worthiness.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe second appears, a melancholy splurge\nOf theological colours;\nTaps heavily about like a healthy vulture\nDistributing deep-frozen hope.\n\nThe patients gaze at him cautiously.\nMost of them, as yet uncertain of the realities\nOf heaven, hell-fire, or eternal emptiness,\nPlay for safety\nBy accepting his attentions\nWith just-concealed apathy,\nExcept one old man, who cries\nWith newly sharpened hatred,\n“Shove off! Shove off!”\n“Shove … shove … shove … shove\nOff!\nJust you\nShove!”\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThe third skilfully deflates his weakly smiling victim\nBy telling him\nHow the lobelias are doing,\nHow many kittens the cat had,\nHow the slate came off the scullery roof,\nAnd how no one has visited the patient for a fortnight\nBecause everybody\nHad colds and feared to bring the jumpy germ\nInto hospital.\nThe patient’s eyes\nIce over. He is uninterested\nIn lobelias, the cat, the slate, the germ.\nFlat on his back, drip-fed, his face\nThe shade of a newly dug-up Pharaoh,\nWearing his skeleton outside his skin,\nYet his wits as bright as a lighted candle,\nHe is concerned only with the here, the now,\nAnd requires to speak\nOf nothing but his present predicament.\n\nIt is not permitted.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThe fourth attempts to cheer\nHis aged mother with light jokes\nMenacing as shell-splinters.\n“They’ll soon have you jumping round\nLike a gazelle,” he says.\n“Playing in the football team.”\nQuite undeterred by the sight of kilos\nOf plaster, chains, lifting-gear,\nA pair of lethally designed crutches,\n“You’ll be leap-frogging soon,” he says.\n“Swimming ten lengths of the baths.”\nAt these unlikely prophecies\nThe old lady stares fearfully\nAt her sick, sick offspring\nThinking he has lost his reason--\n\nWhich, alas, seems to be the case.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThe fifth, a giant from the fields\nWith suit smelling of milk and hay,\nShifts uneasily from one bullock foot\nTo the other, as though to avoid\nSettling permanently in the antiseptic landscape.\nOccasionally he looses a scared glance\nSideways, as though fearful of what intimacy\nHe may blunder on, or that the walls\nMight suddenly close in on him.\n\nHe carries flowers, held lightly in fingers\nThe size and shape of plantains,\nTenderly kisses his wife’s cheek\n--The brush of a child’s lips--\nThen balances, motionless, for thirty minutes\nOn the thin chair.\n\nAt the end of visiting time\nHe emerges breathless,\nBlinking with relief, into the safe light.\n\nHe does not appear to notice\nThe dusk.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThe sixth visitor says little,\nBreathes reassurance,\nSmiles securely.\nCarries no black passport of grapes\nAnd visa of chocolate. Has a clutch\nOf clean washing.\nUnobtrusively stows it\nIn the locker; searches out more.\nTalks quietly to the Sister\nOut of sight, out of earshot, of the patient.\nArrives punctually as a tide.\nDoes not stay the whole hour.\n\nEven when she has gone\nThe patient seems to sense her there:\nAn upholding\nPresence.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nThe seventh visitor\nSmells of bar-room after-shave.\nOften finds his friend\nSound asleep: whether real or feigned\nIs never determined.\n\nHe does not mind; prowls the ward\nIn search of second-class, lost-face patients\nWith no visitors\nAnd who are pretending to doze\nOr read paperbacks.\n\nHe probes relentlessly the nature\nOf each complaint, and is swift with such\nDilutions of confidence as,\n“Ah! You’ll be worse\nBefore you’re better.”\n\nFive minutes before the bell punctuates\nVisiting time, his friend opens an alarm-clock eye.\nThe visitor checks his watch.\nMarket day. The Duck and Pheasant will be still open.\n\nCourage must be refuelled.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nThe eight visitor looks infinitely\nMore decayed, ill and infirm than any patient.\nHis face is an expensive grey.\n\nHe peers about with antediluvian eyes\nAs though from the other end\nOf time.\nHe appears to have risen from the grave\nTo make this appearance.\nThere is a whiff of white flowers about him;\nThe crumpled look of a slightly used shroud.\nSlowly he passes the patient\nA bag of bullet-proof\nHome-made biscuits,\nA strong, death-dealing cake--\n“To have with your tea,”\nOr a bowl of fruit so weighty\nIt threatens to break\nHis glass fingers.\n\nThe patient, encouraged beyond measure,\nThanks him with enthusiasm, not for\nThe oranges, the biscuits, the cake,\nBut for the healing sight\nOf someone patently worse\nThan himself. He rounds the crisis-corner;\nBegins a recovery.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nThe ninth visitor is life.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nThe tenth visitor\nIs not usually named.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "timothy-winters": { - "title": "“Timothy Winters”", - "body": "Timothy Winters comes to school\nWith eyes as wide as a football pool,\nEars like bombs and teeth like splinters:\nA blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.\n\nHis belly is white, his neck is dark,\nAnd his hair is an exclamation mark.\nHis clothes are enough to scare a crow\nAnd through his britches the blue winds blow.\n\nWhen teacher talks he won’t hear a word\nAnd he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,\nHe licks the patterns off his plate\nAnd he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.\n\nTimothy Winters has bloody feet\nAnd he lives in a house on Suez Street,\nHe sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor\nAnd they say there aren’t boys like him any more.\n\nOld man Winters likes his beer\nAnd his missus ran off with a bombardier.\nGrandma sits in the grate with a gin\nAnd Timothy’s dosed with an aspirin.\n\nThe Welfare Worker lies awake\nBut the law’s as tricky as a ten-foot snake,\nSo Timothy Winters drinks his cup\nAnd slowly goes on growing up.\n\nAt Morning Prayers the Master helves\nFor children less fortunate than ourselves,\nAnd the loudest response in the room is when\nTimothy Winters roars “Amen!”\n\nSo come one angel, come on ten:\nTimothy Winters says “Amen\nAmen amen amen amen.”\nTimothy Winters, Lord. Amen!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "constantine-p-cavafy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Constantine P. Cavafy", - "birth": { - "year": 1863 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 52 - }, - "poems": { - "according-to-the-formulas-of-ancient-grecosyrian-magi": { - "title": "“According to the Formulas of Ancient Grecosyrian Magi”", - "body": "“What distillate can be discovered from herbs\nof a witching brew,” said an aesthete,\n“what distillate prepared according\nto the formulas of ancient Grecosyrian magi\nwhich for a day (if no longer\nits potency can last), or even for a short time\ncan bring my twenty three years to me\nagain; can bring my friend of twenty two\nto me again--his beauty, his love.”\n\n“What distillate prepared according\nto the formulas of ancient Grecosyrian magi\nwhich, in bringing back these things,\ncan also bring back our little room.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "aemilianus-monae-alexandrian": { - "title": "“Aemilianus Monae, Alexandrian”", - "body": "With words, with countenance, and with manners\nI shall build an excellent panoply;\nand in this way I shall face evil men\nwithout having any fear or weakness.\n\nThey will want to harm me. But of those\nwho approach me none will know\nwhere my wounds are, my vulnerable parts,\nunder all the lies that will cover me.--\n\nBoastful words of Aemilianus Monae.\nDid he ever build this panoply?\nIn any case, he did not wear it much.\nHe died in Sicily, at the age of twenty-seven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "alexandrian-kings": { - "title": "“Alexandrian Kings”", - "body": "The Alexandrians were gathered\nto see Cleopatra’s children,\nCaesarion, and his little brothers,\nAlexander and Ptolemy, whom for the first\ntime they lead out to the Gymnasium,\nthere to proclaim kings,\nin front of the grand assembly of the soldiers.\n\nAlexander--they named him king\nof Armenia, Media, and the Parthians.\nPtolemy--they named him king\nof Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia.\nCaesarion stood more to the front,\ndressed in rose-colored silk,\non his breast a bouquet of hyacinths,\nhis belt a double row of sapphires and amethysts,\nhis shoes fastened with white\nribbons embroidered with rose pearls.\nHim they named more than the younger ones,\nhim they named King of Kings.\n\nThe Alexandrians of course understood\nthat those were theatrical words.\n\nBut the day was warm and poetic,\nthe sky was a light azure,\nthe Alexandrian Gymnasium was\na triumphant achievement of art,\nthe opulence of the courtiers was extraordinary,\nCaesarion was full of grace and beauty\n(son of Cleopatra, blood of the Lagidae);\nand the Alexandrians rushed to the ceremony,\nand got enthusiastic, and cheered\nin greek, and egyptian, and some in hebrew,\nenchanted by the beautiful spectacle--\nalthough they full well knew what all these were worth,\nwhat hollow words these kingships were.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "anna-comnena": { - "title": "“Anna Comnena”", - "body": "In the prologue to her Alexiad,\nAnna Comnena laments her widowhood.\n\nHer soul is dizzy. “And with rivers\nof tears,” she tells us “I wet\nmy eyes … alas for the waves” in her life,\n“alas for the revolts.” Pain burns her\n“to the the bones and the marrow and the cleaving of the soul.”\n\nBut it seems the truth is, that this ambitious woman\nknew only one great sorrow;\nshe only had one deep longing\n(though she does not admit it) this haughty Greek woman,\nthat she was never able, despite all her dexterity,\nto acquire the Kingship; but it was taken\nalmost out of her hands by the insolent John.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "anna-dalassene": { - "title": "“Anna Dalassené”", - "body": "In the golden bull that Alexios Comnenos issued\nto prominently honor his mother,\nthe very sagacious Lady Anna Dalassené--\ndistinguished in her works, in her ways--\nthere are many words of praise:\nhere let us convey of them\na beautiful, noble phrase\n“Those cold words ‘mine’ or ‘yours’ were never spoken.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "as-much-as-you-can": { - "title": "“As Much as You Can”", - "body": "Even if you cannot shape your life as you want it,\nat least try this\nas much as you can; do not debase it\nin excessive contact with the world,\nin the excessive movements and talk.\n\nDo not debase it by taking it,\ndragging it often and exposing it\nto the daily folly\nof relationships and associations,\nuntil it becomes burdensome as an alien life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-bandaged-shoulder": { - "title": "“The Bandaged Shoulder”", - "body": "He said that he had hurt himself on a wall or that he had fallen.\nBut there was probably another reason\nfor the wounded and bandaged shoulder.\n\nWith a somewhat abrupt movement,\nto bring down from a shelf some\nphotographs that he wanted to see closely,\nthe bandage was untied and a little blood ran.\n\nI bandaged the shoulder again, and while bandaging it\nI was somewhat slow; because it did not hurt,\nand I liked to look at the blood. That\nblood was a part of my love.\n\nWhen he had left, I found in front of the chair,\na bloody rag, from the bandages,\na rag that looked in belonged in garbage;\nwhich I brought up to my lips,\nand which I held there for a long time--\nthe blood of love on my lips.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "caesarion": { - "title": "“Caesarion”", - "body": "Partly to verify an era,\npartly also to pass the time,\nlast night I picked up a collection\nof Ptolemaic epigrams to read.\nThe plentiful praises and flatteries\nfor everyone are similar. They are all brilliant,\nglorious, mighty, beneficent;\neach of their enterprises the wisest.\nIf you talk of the women of that breed, they too,\nall the Berenices and Cleopatras are admirable.\n\nWhen I had managed to verify the era\nI would have put the book away, had not a small\nand insignificant mention of king Caesarion\nimmediately attracted my attention …\n\nBehold, you came with your vague\ncharm. In history only a few\nlines are found about you,\nand so I molded you more freely in my mind.\nI molded you handsome and sentimental.\nMy art gives to your face\na dreamy compassionate beauty.\nAnd so fully did I envision you,\nthat late last night, as my lamp\nwas going out--I let go out on purpose--\nI fancied that you entered my room,\nit seemed that you stood before me; as you might have been\nin vanquished Alexandria,\npale and tired, idealistic in your sorrow,\nstill hoping that they would pity you,\nthe wicked--who whispered “Too many Caesars.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "candles": { - "title": "“Candles”", - "body": "The days of our future stand in front of us\nlike a row of little lit candles--\ngolden, warm, and lively little candles.\n\nThe days past remain behind us,\na mournful line of extinguished candles;\nthe ones nearest are still smoking,\ncold candles, melted, and bent.\n\nI do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,\nand it saddens me to recall their first light.\nI look ahead at my lit candles.\n\nI do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder\nat how fast the dark line lengthens,\nat how fast the extinguished candles multiply.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-city": { - "title": "“The City”", - "body": "You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,\nfind another city better than this one.\nWhatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong\nand my heart lies buried like something dead.\n\nHow long can I let my mind moulder in this place?\nWherever I turn, wherever I look,\nI see the black ruins of my life, here,\nwhere I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”\nYou won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.\nThis city will always pursue you.\nYou’ll walk the same streets, grow old\nin the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.\nYou’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:\nthere’s no ship for you, there’s no road.\nNow that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,\nyou’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "dangerous-things": { - "title": "“Dangerous Things”", - "body": "Said Myrtias (a Syrian student\nin Alexandria; in the reign of\nAugustus Constans and Augustus Constantius;\nin part a pagan, and in part a christian);\n“Fortified by theory and study,\nI shall not fear my passions like a coward.\nI shall give my body to sensual delights,\nto enjoyments dreamt-of,\nto the most daring amorous desires,\nto the lustful impulses of my blood, without\nany fear, for whenever I want--\nand I shall have the will, fortified\nas I shall be by theory and study--\nat moments of crisis I shall find again\nmy spirit, as before, ascetic.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "days": { - "title": "“Days”", - "body": "I never found them again--the things so quickly lost …\nthe poetic eyes, the pale\nface … in the dusk of the street …\n\nI never found them again--the things acquired quite by chance,\nthat I gave up so lightly;\nand that later in agony I wanted.\nThe poetic eyes, the pale face,\nthose lips, I never found again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "desires": { - "title": "“Desires”", - "body": "Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old\nand they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,\nwith roses at the head and jasmine at the feet--\nthis is what desires resemble that have passed\nwithout fulfillment; with none of them having achieved\na night of sensual delight, or a bright morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "envoys-from-alexandria": { - "title": "“Envoys from Alexandria”", - "body": "They had not seen, for ages, such beautiful gifts in Delphi\nas these that had been sent by the two brothers,\nthe rival Ptolemaic kings. After they had received them\nhowever, the priests were uneasy about the oracle. They will need\nall their experience to compose it with astuteness,\nwhich of the two, which of such two will be displeased.\nAnd they hold secret councils at night\nand discuss the family affairs of the Lagidae.\n\nBut see, the envoys have returned. They are bidding farewell.\nThey are returning to Alexandria, they say. And they do not ask\nfor any oracle. And the priests hear this with joy\n(of course they will keep the marvellous gifts),\nbut they also are utterly perplexed,\nnot understanding what this sudden indifference means.\nFor they are unaware that yesterday the envoys received grave news.\nThe oracle was given in Rome; the division took place there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "exiles": { - "title": "“Exiles”", - "body": "It goes on being Alexandria still. Just walk a bit\nalong the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome\nand you’ll see palaces and monuments that will amaze you.\nWhatever war-damage it’s suffered,\nhowever much smaller it’s become,\nit’s still a wonderful city.\nAnd then, what with excursions and books\nand various kinds of study, time does go by.\nIn the evenings we meet on the sea front,\nthe five of us (all, naturally, under fictitious names)\nand some of the few other Greeks\nstill left in the city.\nSometimes we discuss church affairs\n(the people here seem to lean toward Rome)\nand sometimes literature.\nThe other day we read some lines by Nonnos:\nwhat imagery, what rhythm, what diction and harmony!\nAll enthusiasm, how we admired the Panopolitan.\nSo the days go by, and our stay here\nisn’t unpleasant because, naturally,\nit’s not going to last forever.\nWe’ve had good news: if something doesn’t come\nof what’s now afoot in Smyrna,\nthen in April our friends are sure to move from Epiros,\nso one way or another, our plans are definitely working out,\nand we’ll easily overthrow Basil.\nAnd when we do, at last our turn will come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-first-step": { - "title": "“The First Step”", - "body": "The young poet Evmenis\ncomplained one day to Theocritus:\n“I’ve been writing for two years now\nand I’ve composed only one idyll.\nIt’s my single completed work.\nI see, sadly, that the ladder\nof Poetry is tall, extremely tall;\nand from this first step I’m standing on now\nI’ll never climb any higher.”\nTheocritus retorted: “Words like that\nare improper, blasphemous.\nJust to be on the first step\nshould make you happy and proud.\nTo have reached this point is no small achievement:\nwhat you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.\nEven this first step\nis a long way above the ordinary world.\nTo stand on this step\nyou must be in your own right\na member of the city of ideas.\nAnd it’s a hard, unusual thing\nto be enrolled as a citizen of that city.\nIts councils are full of Legislators\nno charlatan can fool.\nTo have reached this point is no small achievement:\nwhat you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "footsteps": { - "title": "“Footsteps”", - "body": "On an ebony bed decorated\nwith coral eagles, sound asleep lies\nNero--unconscious, quiet, and blissful;\nthriving in the vigor of flesh,\nand in the splendid power of youth.\n\nBut in the alabaster hall that encloses\nthe ancient shrine of the Aenobarbi\nhow restive are his Lares.\nThe little household gods tremble,\nand try to hide their insignificant bodies.\nFor they heard a horrible clamor,\na deathly clamor ascending the stairs,\niron footsteps rattling the stairs.\nAnd now in a faint the miserable Lares,\nburrow in the depth of the shrine,\none tumbles and stumbles upon the other,\none little god falls over the other\nfor they understand what sort of clamor this is,\nthey are already feeling the footsteps of the Furies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "for-some-people-the-day-comes": { - "title": "“For some people the day comes …”", - "body": "For some people the day comes\nwhen they have to declare the great Yes\nor the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes\nready within him; and saying it,\nhe goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.\nHe who refuses does not repent. Asked again,\nhe’d still say no. Yet that no--the right no--\ndrags him down all his life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-god-abandons-antony": { - "title": "“The God Abandons Antony”", - "body": "When suddenly, at midnight, you hear\nan invisible procession going by\nwith exquisite music, voices,\ndon’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,\nwork gone wrong, your plans\nall proving deceptive--don’t mourn them uselessly.\nAs one long prepared, and graced with courage,\nsay goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.\nAbove all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say\nit was a dream, your ears deceived you:\ndon’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.\nAs one long prepared, and graced with courage,\nas is right for you who were given this kind of city,\ngo firmly to the window\nAnd listen with deep emotion, but not\nwith whining, the pleas of a coward;\nlisten--your final delectation--to the voices,\nto the exquisite music of that strange procession,\nand say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "half-an-hour": { - "title": "“Half an Hour”", - "body": "I never had you, nor will I ever have you\nI suppose. A few words, an approach\nas in the bar yesterday, and nothing more.\nIt is, undeniably, a pity. But we who serve Art\nsometimes with intensity of mind, and of course only\nfor a short while, we create pleasure\nwhich almost seems real.\nSo in the bar the day before yesterday--the merciful alcohol\nwas also helping much--\nI had a perfectly erotic half-hour.\nAnd it seems to me that you understood,\nand stayed somewhat longer on purpose.\nThis was very necessary. Because\nfor all the imagination and the wizard alcohol,\nI needed to see your lips as well,\nI needed to have your body close.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "he-came-to-read": { - "title": "“He Came to Read”", - "body": "He came to read. Two or three books\nare open; historians and poets.\nBut he only read for ten minutes,\nand gave them up. He is dozing\non the sofa. He is fully devoted to books--\nbut he is twenty-three years old, and he’s very handsome;\nand this afternoon love passed\nthrough his ideal flesh, his lips.\nThrough his flesh which is full of beauty\nthe heat of love passed;\nwithout any silly shame for the form of the enjoyment …", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "he-vows": { - "title": "“He Vows”", - "body": "Every so often he vows to start a better life.\nBut when night comes with her own counsels,\nwith her compromises, and with her promises;\nbut when night comes with her own power\nof the body that wants and demands, he returns,\nforlorn, to the same fatal joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "hidden-things": { - "title": "“Hidden Things”", - "body": "Let them not seek to discover who I was\nfrom all that I have done and said.\nAn obstacle was there that transformed\nthe deeds and the manner of my life.\nAn obstacle was there that stopped me\nmany times when I was about to speak.\nOnly from my most imperceptible deeds\nand my most covert writings--\nfrom these alone will they understand me.\nBut perhaps it isn’t worth exerting\nsuch care and such effort for them to know me.\nLater, in the more perfect society,\nsurely some other person created like me\nwill appear and act freely.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "hidden": { - "title": "“Hidden”", - "body": "From all I’ve done and all I’ve said\nlet them not seek to find who I’ve been.\nAn obstacle stood and transformed\nmy acts and way of my life.\nAn obstacle stood and stopped me\nmany a time as I was going to speak.\nMy most unobserved acts,\nand my writitings the most covered--\nthence only they will feel me.\nBut mayhaps it is not worth to spend\nthis much care and this much effort to know me.\nFor--in the more perfect society--\nsomeone else like me created\nwill certainly appear and freely act.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "i-went": { - "title": "“I Went”", - "body": "I did not restrain myself. I let go entirely and went.\nTo the pleasures that were half real\nand half wheeling in my brain,\nI went into the lit night.\nAnd I drank of potent wines, such as\nthe valiant of voluptuousness drink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "in-200-bc": { - "title": "“In 200 B.C.”", - "body": "“Alexander son of Philip, and the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians--”\n\nWe can very well imagine\nthat they were utterly indifferent in Sparta\nto this inscription. “Except the Lacedaemonians,”\nbut naturally. The Spartans were not\nto be led and ordered about\nas precious servants. Besides\na panhellenic campaign without\na Spartan king as a leader\nwould not have appeared very important.\nO, of course “except the Lacedaemonians.”\n\nThis too is a stand. Understandable.\n\nThus, except the Lacedaemonians at Granicus;\nand then at Issus; and in the final\nbattle, where the formidable army was swept away\nthat the Persians had massed at Arbela:\nwhich had set out from Arbela for victory, and was swept away.\n\nAnd out of the remarkable panhellenic campaign,\nvictorious, brilliant,\ncelebrated, glorious\nas no other had ever been glorified,\nthe incomparable: we emerged;\na great new Greek world.\n\nWe; the Alexandrians, the Antiocheans,\nthe Seleucians, and the numerous\nrest of the Greeks of Egypt and Syria,\nand of Media, and Persia, and the many others.\nWith our extensive territories,\nwith the varied action of thoughtful adaptations.\nAnd the Common Greek Language\nwe carried to the heart of Bactria, to the Indians.\n\nAs if we were to talk of Lacedaemonians now!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "in-harbor": { - "title": "“In Harbor”", - "body": "A young man, twenty eight years old, on a vessel from Tenos,\nEmes arrived at this Syrian harbor\nwith the intention of learning the perfume trade.\nBut during the voyage he was taken ill. And as soon\nas he disembarked, he died. His burial, the poorest,\ntook place here. A few hours before he died,\nhe whispered something about “home,” about “very old parents.”\nBut who these were nobody knew,\nnor which his homeland in the vast panhellenic world.\nBetter so. For thus, although\nhe lies dead in this harbor,\nhis parents will always hope he is alive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "in-the-same-space": { - "title": "“In the Same Space”", - "body": "The surroundings of home, centers, neighorhood\nwhich I see and where I walk; for years and years.\n\nI have created you in joy and in sorrows:\nwith so many circumstances, with so many things.\n\nAnd you have become all feeling, for me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "interruption": { - "title": "“Interruption”", - "body": "We interrupt the work of the gods,\nhasty and inexperienced beings of the moment.\nIn the palaces of Eleusis and Phthia\nDemeter and Thetis start good works\namid high flames and dense smoke. But\nalways Metaneira rushes from the king’s\nchambers, disheveled and scared,\nand always Peleus is fearful and interferes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "ionian": { - "title": "“Ionian”", - "body": "Just because we’ve torn their statues down,\nand cast them from their temples,\ndoesn’t for a moment mean the gods are dead.\nLand of Ionia, they love you yet,\ntheir spirits still remember you.\n\nWhen an August morning breaks upon you\na vigour from their lives stabs through your air;\nand sometimes an ethereal and youthful form\nin swiftest passage, indistinct,\npasses up above your hills.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "ithaka": { - "title": "“Ithaka”", - "body": "As you set out for Ithaka\nhope your road is a long one,\nfull of adventure, full of discovery.\nLaistrygonians, Cyclops,\nangry Poseidon--don’t be afraid of them:\nyou’ll never find things like that on your way\nas long as you keep your thoughts raised high,\nas long as a rare excitement\nstirs your spirit and your body.\nLaistrygonians, Cyclops,\nwild Poseidon--you won’t encounter them\nunless you bring them along inside your soul,\nunless your soul sets them up in front of you.\n\nHope your road is a long one.\nMay there be many summer mornings when,\nwith what pleasure, what joy,\nyou enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;\nmay you stop at Phoenician trading stations\nto buy fine things,\nmother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,\nsensual perfume of every kind--\nas many sensual perfumes as you can;\nand may you visit many Egyptian cities\nto learn and go on learning from their scholars.\n\nKeep Ithaka always in your mind.\nArriving there is what you’re destined for.\nBut don’t hurry the journey at all.\nBetter if it lasts for years,\nso you’re old by the time you reach the island,\nwealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,\nnot expecting Ithaka to make you rich.\nIthaka gave you the marvelous journey.\nWithout her you wouldn’t have set out.\nShe has nothing left to give you now.\n\nAnd if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.\nWise as you will have become, so full of experience,\nyou’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "manuel-komninos": { - "title": "“Manuel Komninos”", - "body": "One dreary September day\nEmperor Manuel Komninos\nfelt his death was near.\nThe court astrologers--bribed, of course--went on babbling\nabout how many years he still had to live.\nBut while they were having their say,\nhe remembered an old religious custom\nand ordered ecclesiastical vestments\nto be brought from a monastery,\nand he put them on, glad to assume\nthe modest image of a priest or monk.\n\nHappy all those who believe,\nand like Emperor Manuel end their lives\ndressed modestly in their faith.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "monotony": { - "title": "“Monotony”", - "body": "One monotonous day is followed\nby another monotonous, identical day. The same\nthings will happen, they will happen again--\nthe same moments find us and leave us.\n\nA month passes and ushers in another month.\nOne easily guesses the coming events;\nthey are the boring ones of yesterday.\nAnd the morrow ends up not resembling a morrow anymore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "morning-sea": { - "title": "“Morning Sea”", - "body": "Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile.\nThe brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,\nthe yellow shore; all lovely,\nall bathed in light.\n\nLet me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this\n(I really did see it for a minute when I first stopped)\nand not my usual day-dreams here too,\nmy memories, those images of sensual pleasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "neros-term": { - "title": "“Nero’s Term”", - "body": "Nero was not worried when he heard\nthe prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.\n“Let him fear the seventy three years.”\nHe still had ample time to enjoy himself.\nHe is thirty. More than sufficient\nis the term the god allots him\nto prepare for future perils.\n\nNow he will return to Rome slightly tired,\nbut delightfully tired from this journey,\nfull of days of enjoyment--\nat the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia …\nevenings at cities of Achaia …\nAh the delight of nude bodies, above all …\n\nThus fared Nero. And in Spain Galba\nsecretly assembles and drills his army,\nthe old man of seventy three.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "an-old-man": { - "title": "“An Old Man”", - "body": "At the back of the noisy café\nbent over a table sits an old man;\na newspaper in front of him, without company.\n\nAnd in the scorn of his miserable old age\nhe ponders how little he enjoyed the years\nwhen he had strength, and the power of the word, and good looks.\n\nHe knows he has aged much; he feels it, he sees it.\nAnd yet the time he was young seems\nlike yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.\n\nAnd he ponders how Prudence deceived him;\nand how he always trusted her--what a folly!--\nthat liar who said: “Tomorrow. There is ample time.”\n\nHe remembers the impulses he curbed; and how much\njoy he sacrificed. Every lost chance\nnow mocks his senseless wisdom.\n\n… But from so much thinking and remembering\nthe old man gets dizzy. And falls asleep\nbent over the café table.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "on-an-italian-shore": { - "title": "“On an Italian Shore”", - "body": "Kimos, son of Menedoros, a young Greek-Italian,\ndevotes his life to amusing himself,\nlike most young men in Greater Greece\nbrought up in the lap of luxury.\n\nBut today, in spite of his nature,\nhe is preoccupied, dejected. Near the shore\nhe watched, deeply distressed, as they unload\nships with booty taken from the Peloponnese.\n\n_Greek loot: booty from Corinth_\nToday certainly it is not right,\nit is not possible for the young Greek-Italian\nto want to amuse himself in any way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "one-of-their-gods": { - "title": "“One of Their Gods”", - "body": "When one of them passed through the market place\nof Seleucia, toward the hour that night falls\nas a tall and perfectly handsome youth,\nwith the joy of immortality in his eyes,\nwith his scented black hair,\nthe passers-by would stare at him\nand one would ask the other if he knew him,\nand if he were a Greek of Syria, or a stranger. But some,\nwho watched with greater attention,\nwould understand and stand aside;\nand as he vanished under the arcades,\ninto the shadows and into the lights of the evening,\nheading toward the district that lives\nonly at night, with orgies and debauchery,\nand every sort of drunkenness and lust,\nthey would ponder which of Them he might be,\nand for what suspect enjoyment\nhe had descended to the streets of Seleucia\nfrom the Venerable, Most Hallowed Halls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "pictured": { - "title": "“Pictured”", - "body": "My work, I’m very careful about it, and I love it.\nBut today I’m discouraged by how slowly it’s going.\nThe day has affected my mood.\nIt gets darker and darker. Endless wind and rain.\nI’m more in the mood for looking than for writing.\nIn this picture, I’m now gazing at a handsome boy\nwho is lying down close to a spring,\nexhausted from running.\nWhat a handsome boy; what a heavenly noon\nhas caught him up in sleep.\nI sit and gaze like this for a long time,\nrecovering through art from the effort of creating it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "poseidonians": { - "title": "“Poseidonians”", - "body": "The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language\nafter so many centuries of mingling\nwith Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.\nThe only thing surviving from their ancestors\nwas a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,\nwith lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.\nAnd it was their habit toward the festival’s end\nto tell each other about their ancient customs\nand once again to speak Greek names\nthat only few of them still recognized.\nAnd so their festival always had a melancholy ending\nbecause they remebered that they too were Greeks,\nthey too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;\nand how low they’d fallen now, what they’d become,\nliving and speaking like barbarians,\ncut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "remember-body": { - "title": "“Remember, Body …”", - "body": "Body, remember not only how much you were loved,\nnot only the beds on which you lay,\nbut also those desires which for you\nplainly glowed in the eyes,\nand trembled in the voice--and some\nchance obstacle made them futile.\nNow that all belongs to the past,\nit is almost as if you had yielded\nto those desires too--remember,\nhow they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;\nhow they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "return": { - "title": "“Return”", - "body": "Return often and take me,\nbeloved sensation, return and take me--\nwhen the memory of the body awakens,\nand an old desire runs again through the blood;\nwhen the lips and the skin remember,\nand the hands feel as if they touch again.\n\nReturn often and take me at night,\nwhen the lips and the skin remember …", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-satrapy": { - "title": "“The Satrapy”", - "body": "What a misfortune, although you are made\nfor fine and great works\nthis unjust fate of yours always\ndenies you encouragement and success;\nthat base customs should block you;\nand pettiness and indifference.\nAnd how terrible the day when you yield\n(the day when you give up and yield),\nand you leave on foot for Susa,\nand you go to the monarch Artaxerxes\nwho favorably places you in his court,\nand offers you satrapies and the like.\nAnd you accept them with despair\nthese things that you do not want.\nYour soul seeks other things, weeps for other things;\nthe praise of the public and the Sophists,\nthe hard-won and inestimable Well Done;\nthe Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.\nHow can Artaxerxes give you these,\nwhere will you find these in a satrapy;\nand what life can you live without these.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "since-nine-oclock": { - "title": "“Since Nine O’Clock”", - "body": "Half past twelve. Time has gone by quickly\nsince nine o’clock when I lit the lamp\nand sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,\nwithout speaking. Completely alone in the house,\nwhom could I talk to?\n\nSince nine o’clock when I lit the lamp\nthe shade of my young body\nhas come to haunt me, to remind me\nof shut scented rooms,\nof past sensual pleasure--what daring pleasure.\nAnd it’s also brought back to me\nstreets now unrecognizable,\nbustling night clubs now closed,\ntheatres and cafes no longer here.\n\nThe shade of my young body\nalso brought back the things that make us sad:\nfamily grief, separations,\nthe feelings of my own people, feelings\nof the dead so little acknowledged.\n\nHalf past twelve. How the time has gone by.\nHalf past twelve. How the years have gone by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "so-much-i-gazed": { - "title": "“So Much I Gazed”", - "body": "So much I gazed on beauty,\nthat my vision is replete with it.\n\nContours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.\nHair as if taken from greek statues;\nalways beautiful, even when uncombed,\nand it falls, slightly, over white foreheads.\nFaces of love, as my poetry\nwanted them … in the nights of my youth,\nin my nights, secretly, met …", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "supplication": { - "title": "“Supplication”", - "body": "The sea took a sailor to its depths.--\nHis mother, unsuspecting, goes and lights\n\na tall candle before the Virgin Mary\nfor his speedy return and for fine weather--\n\nand always she turns her ear to the wind.\nBut while she prays and implores,\n\nthe icon listens, solemn and sad,\nknowing that the son she expects will no longer return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "they-should-have-provided": { - "title": "“They Should Have Provided”", - "body": "I have almost been reduced to a homeless pauper.\nThis fatal city, Antioch,\nhas consumed all my money;\nthis fatal city with its expensive life.\n\nBut I am young and in excellent health.\nMy command of Greek is superb\n(I know all there is about Aristotle, Plato;\norators, poets, you name it.)\nI have an idea of military affairs,\nand have friends among the mercenary chiefs.\nI am on the inside of administration as well.\nLast year I spent six months in Alexandria;\nI have some knowledge (and this is useful) of affairs there:\nintentions of the Malefactor, and villainies, et cetera.\n\nTherefore I believe that I am fully\nqualified to serve this country,\nmy beloved homeland Syria.\n\nIn whatever capacity they place me I shall strive\nto be useful to the country. This is my intent.\nThen again, if they thwart me with their methods--\nwe know those able people: need we talk about it now?\nif they thwart me, I am not to blame.\n\nFirst, I shall apply to Zabinas,\nand if this moron does not appreciate me,\nI shall go to his rival Grypos.\nAnd if this idiot does not hire me,\nI shall go straight to Hyrcanos.\n\nOne of the three will want me however.\n\nAnd my conscience is not troubled\nabout not worrying about my choice.\nAll three harm Syria equally.\n\nBut, a ruined man, why is it my fault.\nWretched man, I am trying to make ends meet.\nThe almighty gods should have provided\nand created a fourth, good man.\nGladly would I have joined him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "understanding": { - "title": "“Understanding”", - "body": "The years of my youth, my sensual life--\nhow clearly I see their meaning now.\n\nWhat needless repentances, how futile …\n\nBut I did not understand the meaning then.\n\nIn the dissolute life of my youth\nthe desires of my poetry were being formed,\nthe scope of my art was being plotted.\n\nThis is why my repentances were never stable.\nAnd my resolutions to control myself, to change\nlasted for two weeks at the very most.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "very-seldom": { - "title": "“Very Seldom”", - "body": "He’s an old man. Used up and bent,\ncrippled by time and indulgence,\nhe slowly walks along the narrow street.\nBut when he goes inside his house to hide\nthe shambles of his old age, his mind turns\nto the share in youth that still belongs to him.\n\nHis verse is now recited by young men.\nHis visions come before their lively eyes.\nTheir healthy sensual minds,\ntheir shapely taut bodies\nstir to his perception of the beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "waiting-for-the-barbarians": { - "title": "“Waiting for the Barbarians”", - "body": "What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?\n\n_The barbarians are due here today._\n\nWhy isn’t anything happening in the senate?\nWhy do the senators sit there without legislating?\n\n_Because the barbarians are coming today.\nWhat laws can the senators make now?\nOnce the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating._\n\nWhy did our emperor get up so early,\nand why is he sitting at the city’s main gate\non his throne, in state, wearing the crown?\n\n_Because the barbarians are coming today\nand the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.\nHe has even prepared a scroll to give him,\nreplete with titles, with imposing names._\n\nWhy have our two consuls and praetors come out today\nwearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?\nWhy have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,\nand rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?\nWhy are they carrying elegant canes\nbeautifully worked in silver and gold?\n\n_Because the barbarians are coming today\nand things like that dazzle the barbarians._\n\nWhy don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual\nto make their speeches, say what they have to say?\n\n_Because the barbarians are coming today\nand they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking._\n\nWhy this sudden restlessness, this confusion?\n(How serious people’s faces have become.)\nWhy are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,\neveryone going home so lost in thought?\n\n_Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.\nAnd some who have just returned from the border say\nthere are no barbarians any longer._\n\nAnd now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?\nThey were, those people, a kind of solution.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "walls": { - "title": "“Walls”", - "body": "Without consideration, without pity, without shame\nthey have built great and high walls around me.\n\nAnd now I sit here and despair.\nI think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;\n\nfor I had many things to do outside.\nAh why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.\n\nBut I never heard any noise or sound of builders.\nImperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "the-windows": { - "title": "“The Windows”", - "body": "In these darkened rooms, where I spend\noppresive days, I pace to and fro\nto find the windows.--When a window\nopens, it will be a consolation.--\nBut the windows cannot be found, or I cannot\nfind them. And maybe it is best that I do not find them.\nMaybe the light will be a new tyranny.\nWho knows what new things it will reveal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - } - } - }, - "guido-cavalcanti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Guido Cavalcanti", - "birth": { - "year": 1250, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1300 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Cavalcanti", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "as-ive-no-hope-of-returning-ever": { - "title": "“As I’ve No Hope of Returning Ever”", - "body": "As I’ve no hope of returning ever,\nLittle ballad, lightly, softly,\nGo yourself, to Tuscany,\nGo straight to my lady,\nWho of her great courtesy\nWill show you highest honour.\n\nYou will bring her news of sighs,\nFilled with pain, and great with fear:\nBut take care to meet no eyes\nHostile to a gentle nature:\nMy disadvantage then for sure\nYou’d work, like one opposed,\nAnd be by her reproved,\nAnd so prove pain for me:\nSo that after my death there’d be,\nWeeping and fresh dolour.\n\nLittle ballad, you know that death\nGrips me so that life deserts me,\nKnow how my heart with every breath\nBeats hard, as the spirits speak inside me.\nSo much of my Being’s now undone,\nI can scarcely suffer longer:\nSo if you would serve me further,\nTake my soul along with you,\nFervently I beg of you,\nAs it leaps from out my heart, here.\n\nO, little ballad, now I yield\nThis trembling soul to your friendship,\nIn its sorrow, take it with you,\nTo the sweet one to whom I send it.\nOh, little ballad, sighing say\nTo her, when you’re presented:\n“Your servant comes\nTo be with you,\nHe leaves one,\nWho was Love’s servant.”\n\nYou, little weak and fearful voice\nIssuing from the sad heart weeping,\nGo with my soul, and this little song,\nAnd tell her of my mind that’s ruined.\nYou’ll find a tender woman there,\nOf an intellect so sweet,\nThat it will be delight complete\nFor you to leave her never.\nAnd then, my soul, adore her,\nWorthy as she is, for ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "deep-in-thoughts-of-love-i-came": { - "title": "“Deep in Thoughts of Love, I Came”", - "body": "Deep in thoughts of love, I came\nOn two young maids,\nOne sang: “It rains\nOn us, the joy of love.”\n\nTheir faces were so calm and sweet,\nWith modesty and courtesy,\nI said to them: “You hold the key\nOf all virtue and nobility.\nAh, young maids, do not scorn me\nBecause of the wound that I carry,\nMy heart has been dead inside me\nSince I left Toulouse.”\n\nThey turned their gaze towards me so\nThey might see how I was wounded\nAnd how a spirit born of sorrow\nFrom my wound’s deep centre issued.\nWhen they saw me so destroyed,\nOne of them smiled and said:\n“See how this man is conquered\nBy the power of love.”\n\nThe other filled with mercy, pity,\nMade for joy, in Love’s likeness,\nSaid: “Your heart’s wound I see\nCame from eyes of such excess,\nSuch power, they left within, a brightness\nI cannot endure:\nTell me if you recall\nThose eyes in you.”\n\nTo this harsh and fearful question\nThat the young maid asked of me,\nI said: “In Toulouse I remember\nThere appeared an elegant lady,\nWhom Love called la Mandetta: she\nStruck me so fiercely, suddenly\nTo death, with her eyes, inwardly,\nThrough and through.”\n\nShe who had laughed at me before\nNow replied most courteously:\n“She, who set herself with Love’s power\nIn your heart, gazed so fixedly\nInto and through your eyes, that she\nMade Love, himself, appear there.\nIf it’s deeply that you suffer\nTurn to Love.”\n\nGo to Toulouse, my little ballad,\nEnter the Gilded Church there quietly,\nAsk of some lovely lady, clearly,\nTo take you, out of courtesy,\nTo her of whom I told you fully:\nAnd if you are received,\nSay to her softly: “See,\nFor mercy I come to you.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "o-my-lady-have-you-not-seen-one": { - "title": "“O, My Lady, Have You Not Seen One”", - "body": "O, my lady, have you not seen One\nWho laid his hand on my heart, when\nI answered you so softly, tamely,\nBecause I feared his blows?\nHe was Love, that one who found us,\nCome from far, but standing by me,\nIn a Syrian bowman’s likeness,\nSolely set to conquer others.\n\nDrawing sighs from out your eyes,\nHe fired them deep into my heart,\nSo I was forced to flee in terror,\nTill swiftly Death revealed himself\nSurrounded by those sufferings\nWhich drown all men with sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "who-is-this-that-comes-and-all-admire-her": { - "title": "“Who is This that Comes and All Admire Her”", - "body": "Who is this that comes and all admire her,\nAnd makes the air tremble with her brightness,\nBrings Love with her, so that none who sees her\nHas the power to speak, but each man sighs?\nOh, how she seems as she looks all about her,\nLet Love himself tell. How can I describe her?\nShe seems a lady of such gentle aspect,\nThat all compared to her seem full of pride.\n\nFor her sweetness there is no description,\nEvery gentle virtue bows towards her,\nAnd Beauty makes her its divinity.\nOur minds could never soar so high,\nNor have we grace enough inside,\nFor us to ever know her perfectly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - } - } - }, - "camilo-jose-cela": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Camilo José Cela", - "birth": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2002 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilo_José_Cela", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "inventory-of-the-dark": { - "title": "“Inventory of the Dark”", - "body": "There are young girls wetting with the stupor of frogs\nAnd humid cadavers rotting alone\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThere are men born with a hole in their chest\nAnd bitter wax tapers to debilitate virgins\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThere are magnanimous torrents of tears that burn\nAnd wearying weepings like an eye on the floor\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThere are treacherous mattresses resembling purest crystal\nAnd poisonous friends like lizards at ease\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThere are women who gnaw the most tender violins\nAnd rusting irons as happy as wastrels\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThrough the hopes and through the hurricanes\nWith eyelids that sound and wrists that tremble\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThere is the heavy atmosphere of worn chemises\nClinging to our thighs like a frightened child\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThere are very deep wells with cries inside them\nLike the salt that imprisons the roots of dreams\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThere are bodies, radios, bottles, mares\nTo spurt in a welter like working manure\n_On moonless nights_\n\nAnd there is a hole in the ground, without measure or owner\nWith bridges of lichen and the sound of fright\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThere are bulls like fountains, flighty as horses\nWho enlace our legs in sudden lunges\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThere are telegraph forms with the news of births\nAnd missives of hoarfrost to kill the expectant\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nSoft autumnal firewood, and these hands useless\nTo break the seals stamped on my hearing\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThere are atrocious cowbells and dyes that mire\nOur misty sleep like a young girl’s dying\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nThe trees, the clovers, the vegetal oxen\nThe corners, the blows, the watery maidens\n_On moonless nights_\n\nThey come leaping along the ineffable lids\nAlong the hands frozen by death’s proximity\n_In the dark of the moon_\n\nAlong the rooftops and over the schoolbooks\nThrough the highest branches wounded with swallows\n_On moonless nights_\n\nFerocious winds blow from hated provinces\nAnd sustain the shadows we maraud alone\n_In the dark of the moon_", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Anthony Kerrigan", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "paul-celan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Paul Celan", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1970 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "romanian", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇷🇴", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Celan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "romanian" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "all-souls": { - "title": "“All Souls”", - "body": "What did I\ndo?\nSeminated the night, as though\nthere could be others, more nocturnal than\nthis one.\n\nBird flight, stone flight, a thousand\ndescribed routes. Glances,\npurloined and plucked. The sea,\ntasted, drunk away, dreamed away. An hour\nsoul-eclipsed. The next, an autumn light,\noffered up to a blind\nfeeling which came that way. Others, many,\nwith no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and avoided.\nFoundlings, stars,\nblack, full of language: named\nafter an oath which silence annulled.\n\nAnd once (when? that too is forgotten):\nfelt the barb\nwhere my pulse dared the counter-beat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "ars-poetica-62": { - "title": "“Ars Poetica 62”", - "body": "The Big Secret--there it stood, next to the club moss,\nin the meadows.\nI could have plucked it, easily, with two toes.\n\nBut I was busy; I was teaching\nHyperion the language\nwe hymn-makers have come to expect.\n\nHe liked to learn, was so agreeable. At the word\nwhore\nbrown laurel grew quickly\naround his baton and his talon; he had\nwhat it took to rhyme, thanks to\nPindar and a few\nHungarians, Prussians and Finns.\n\nIn his verse\nTime stood in the light of its Swabian hours,\nmustachioed, young, and utterly mute.\n\nIngenious,\nI heard myself say,\ningenious--: my\nother neighbor, the one\ncut in half yesterday in the Black Forest, the man\nwith the jackdaw (and the stitched-up caesura!)\nwas lacking this gem of a word.\n(Or else the second half\nwould also have died\nand been\n laid\n bare.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "ashglory": { - "title": "“Ashglory”", - "body": "Ashglory behind\nyour shaken-knotted\nhands at the threeway.\n\nPontic erstwhile: here,\na drop,\non\n\nthe drowned rudder blade,\ndeep\nin the petrified oath,\nit roars up.\n\n(On the vertical\nbreathrope, in those days,\nhigher than above,\nbetween two painknots, while\nthe glossy\nTatarmoon climbed up to us,\nI dug myself into you and into you.)\n\nAsh-\nglory behind\nyou threeway\nhands.\n\nThe cast-in-front-of-you, from\nthe East, terrible.\n\nNo one\nbears witness for the\nwitness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "below": { - "title": "“Below”", - "body": "Led home into oblivion\nthe sociable talk of\nour slow eyes.\n\nLed home, syllable after syllable, shared\nout among the dayblind dice, for which\nthe playing hand reaches out, large,\nawakening.\n\nAnd the too much of my speaking:\nheaped up round the little\ncrystal dressed in the style of your silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "flower": { - "title": "“Flower”", - "body": "The stone.\nThe stone in the air, which I followed.\nYour eye, as blind as the stone.\n\nWe were\nhands,\nwe baled the darkness empty, we found\nthe word that ascended summer:\nflower.\n\nFlower--a blindman’s word.\nYour eye and mine:\nthey see\nto water.\n\nGrowth.\nHeart wall upon heart wall\nadds petals to it.\n\nOne more word like this word, and the hammers\nwill swing over open ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "homecoming": { - "title": "“Homecoming”", - "body": "Snowfall, denser and denser,\ndove-coloured as yesterday,\nsnowfall, as if even now you were sleeping.\n\nWhite, stacked into distance.\nAbove it, endless,\nthe sleigh track of the lost.\n\nBelow, hidden,\npresses up\nwhat so hurts the eyes,\nhill upon hill,\ninvisible.\n\nOn each,\nfetched home into its today,\nand I slipped away into dumbness:\nwooden, a post.\n\nThere: a feeling,\nblown across by the ice wind\nattaching its dove- its snow-\ncoloured cloth as a flag.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "psalm": { - "title": "“Psalm”", - "body": "No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,\nno one incants our dust.\nNo one.\n\nBlessèd art thou, No One.\nIn thy sight would\nwe bloom.\nIn thy\nspite.\n\nA Nothing\nwe were, are now, and ever\nshall be, blooming:\nthe Nothing-, the\nNo-One’s-Rose.\n\nWith\nour pistil soul-bright,\nour stamen heaven-waste,\nour corona red\nfrom the purpleword we sang\nover, O over\nthe thorn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "John Felstiner" - } - }, - "radix-matrix": { - "title": "“Radix, Matrix”", - "body": "As one speaks to stone, like\nyou,\nfrom the chasm, from\na home become a\nsister to me, hurled\ntowards me, you,\nyou that long ago\nyou in the nothingness of a night,\nyou in the multi-night en-\ncountered, you\nmulti-you:\n\nAt that time, when I was not there,\nat that time when you\npaced the ploughed field, alone:\n\nWho,\nwho was it, that\nlineage, the murdered, that looms\nblack into the sky:\nrod and bulb?\n\n(Root.\nAbraham’s root. Jesse’s root. No one’s\nroot-O\nours.)\n\nYes,\nas one speaks to stone, as\nyou\nwith your hands grope into there,\nand into nothing, such\nis what is here:\n\nthis fertile\nsoil too gapes,\nthis\ngoing down\nis one of the\ncrests growing wild.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "think-of-it": { - "title": "“Think of It”", - "body": "Think of it:\nthe bog soldier of Massada\nteaches himself home, most\ninextinguishably,\nagainst\nevery barb in the wire.\n\nThink of it:\nthe eyeless with no shape\nlead you free through the tumult, you\ngrow stronger and\nstronger.\n\nThink of it: your\nown hand\nhas held\nthis bit of\nhabitable\nearth, suffered up\nagain\ninto life.\n\nThink of it:\nthis came towards me,\nname-awake, hand-awake,\nfor ever,\nfrom the unburiable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "todesfuge": { - "title": "“Todesfuge”", - "body": "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk\nwe drink it at noon in mornings we drink it at night\nwe drink and we drink\nwe dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room\nA man lives in the house he plays with his snakes he writes\nhe writes when it darkens in Deutschland your golden hair Margarete\nhe writes it and steps outside of the house and the strike of the stars he whistles his hounds\nhe whistles his Jews dig a grave in the ground\nhe commands us strike up for the dance\n\nBlack milk of daybreak we drink you at night\nwe drink you in mornings and midday we drink you at dusk\nwe drink and we drink\nA man lives in the house he plays with his snakes he writes\nhe writes when it darkens in Deutschland your golden hair Margarete\nyour ashen hair Sulamith we dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room\n\nHe shouts you there dig deeper the rest of you sing you others play on\nhe raises the rod from his belt his eyes are blue\ndrive the spade deeper the rest of you sing you others play on for the dance\n\nBlack milk of daybreak we drink you at night\nwe drink you at midday and mornings we drink you at dusk\nwe drink and we drink\na man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete\nyour ashen hair Sulamith he plays with his snakes\n\nHe shouts make death sound sweeter death is a Master from Deutschland\nhe shouts strike the violin darker then rise as smoke in the air\nthen a grave in the clouds there is so much more room\n\nBlack milk of mornings we drink you at night\nwe drink you at midday death is a Master from Deutschland\nwe drink you at dusk in mornings we drink and drink\ndeath is a Master from Deutschland his eye is blue\nhis lead bullets strike you his aim is true\na man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete\nhe whistles his hounds he grants us graves in the sky\nhe plays with his snakes and he dreams death is a Master aus Deutschland\n\nyour golden hair Magarete\nyour ashen hair Sulamith", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Dean Rader", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "vinegrowers": { - "title": "“Vinegrowers”", - "body": "Vinegrowers dig up dig\nunder the darkhoured watch,\ndepth for depth,\n\nyou read,\nthe invisible\none commands the wind\nto stay in bounds,\n\nyou read,\n\nthe Open Ones carry\nthe stone behind the eye,\nit recognizes you,\non a Sabbath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Pierre Joris", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "where-am-i": { - "title": "“Where Am I”", - "body": "Where am I\ntoday?\n\nThe dangers, all,\nwith their appliance,\nhickishly gamey,\n\npitchfork-high\nthe heavensfallow hoisted,\n\nthe losses, chalkmouthed--you\nupright mouths, you tables!--\nin the disangled town,\nharnessed to glimmerhackneys,\n\n--goldtrace, counterheaved\ngoldtrace!--,\n\nthe bridges, overjoyed by the stream,\n\nlove, up there in the branch,\nniggling at the coming-escaping\n\nthe Great Light\nelevated to a spark,\non the right of the rings\nand all gain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Pierre Joris" - } - }, - "why-this-sudden-at-homeness": { - "title": "“Why This Sudden At-Homeness”", - "body": "Why this sudden at-homeness, all-out, all-in?\nI can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike,\nyou yourself slay your brothers:\nearlier than they\nI was with you, Snowed One.\n\nThrow your tropes\nin with the rest:\nSomeone wants to know,\nwhy with God I\nwas no different than with you,\n\nsomeone\nwants to drown in that,\ntwo books instead of lungs,\n\nsomeone who stabbed himself into\nyou, bebreathes the cut,\n\nsomeone, he was the one closest to you,\ngets lost to himself,\n\nsomeone adorns your sex\nwith your and his betrayal,\n\nmaybe\nI was both", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Pierre Joris", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jean-de-la-ceppede": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jean de La Ceppède", - "birth": { - "year": 1550 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1623 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_La_Ceppède", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "ecce-homo": { - "title": "“Ecce Homo”", - "body": "Behold the Man, o my eyes, what a deplorable sight!\nShame, sleeplessness, lack of food,\nSorrows, and blood lost in great quantity\nHave left him so deformed that he is no longer desirable.\nThat hair (the ornament of his venerable head)\nBloodied, stood on end by this coronation,\nTangled in these reeds, serve unworthily\nTo his injured head as an execrable fence.\nThose eyes (once so lovely) beaten, retreated,\nSunken in, are, alas, two eclipsed Suns.\nThe coral of his mouth is now pale yellow.\nThe roses and lilies of his skin are faded.\nThe rest of his Body is the color of Opal,\nSo bruised are his members from head to feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "theorems-on-the-sacred-mystery-of-our-redemption": { - "title": "“Theorems on the Sacred Mystery of Our Redemption”", - "body": "Love is what made him from Olympus descend:\nLove made him shoulder the sins of men:\nLove has had him already spill all his blood:\nLove made him suffer to be spitted upon:\nLove attached these spines to his head:\nLove made his Mother see him hang from this wood:\nLove fixed these rude nails in his hands:\nLove will soon see him laid out in the grave.\nHis love is so great, his love is so strong\nThat he attacks Hell, that he strikes down death,\nThat he rips from Pluto his faithful Eurydice.\nMy dear, for whom this hero dies loving you:\nSee if there has ever been so cruel a torment,\nSee if there has ever been so perfect a lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "miguel-de-cervantes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Miguel de Cervantes", - "birth": { - "year": 1547, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1616 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "cancion": { - "title": "“Canción”", - "body": "What makes me languish and complain?--Oh, ’tis disdain!\nWhat yet more fiercely tortures me?--’Tis jealousy.\nHow have I patience lost?--By absence crossed.\nThen hopes farewell, there’s no relief;\nI sink beneath oppressing grief;\nNor can a wretch, without despair,\nScorn, jealousy, and absence bear.\n\nWhat in my breast, this anguish drove?--Intruding love.\nWhat could such mighty ills create?--Blind fortune’s hate.\nWhat cruel powers my fate approve?--The powers above.\nThen let me bear and cease to moan;\n’Tis glorious thus to be undone;\nWhen these invade, who dares oppose?\nHeaven, love, and fortune are my foes. What shall I find a speedy cure?--Death is sure.\nNo milder means to set me free?--Inconstancy.\nCan nothing else my pains assuage?--Distracting age.\n\nWhat! die or change?--Lucinda lose?--\nOh, let me rather madness choose!\nBut judge, ye gods, what we endure\nWhen death or madness is the cure!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Peter Anthony Motteux" - } - } - } - }, - "geoffrey-chaucer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Geoffrey Chaucer", - "birth": { - "year": 1343, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1400 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-complaint-unto-pity": { - "title": "“The Complaint Unto Pity”", - "body": "Pite, that I have sought so yore agoo\nWith herte soore and ful of besy peyne,\nThat in this world was never wight so woo\nWithoute deth--and yf I shal not feyne,\nMy purpos was to Pite to compleyne\nUpon the crueltee and tirannye\nOf Love, that for my trouthe doth me dye.\n\nAnd when that I, be lengthe of certeyne yeres,\nHad evere in oon a tyme sought to speke,\nTo Pitee ran I al bespreynt with teres\nTo prayen hir on Cruelte me awreke.\nBut er I myghte with any word outbreke\nOr tellen any of my peynes smerte,\nI fond hir ded, and buried in an herte.\n\nAdoun I fel when that I saugh the herse,\nDed as a ston while that the swogh me laste;\nBut up I roos with colour ful dyverse\nAnd pitously on hir myn eyen I caste,\nAnd ner the corps I gan to presen faste,\nAnd for the soule I shop me for to preye.\nI was but lorn, ther was no more to seye.\n\nThus am I slayn sith that Pite is ded.\nAllas, that day, that ever hyt shulde falle.\nWhat maner man dar now hold up his hed?\nTo whom shal any sorwful herte calle?\nNow Cruelte hath cast to slee us alle,\nIn ydel hope, folk redeless of peyne,\nSyth she is ded, to whom shul we compleyne?\n\nBut yet encreseth me this wonder newe,\nThat no wight woot that she is ded, but I--\nSo many men as in her tyme hir knewe--\nAnd yet she dyed not so sodeynly,\nFor I have sought hir ever ful besely\nSith first I hadde wit or mannes mynde,\nBut she was ded er that I koude hir fynde.\n\nAboute hir herse there stoden lustely,\nWithouten any woo as thoughte me,\nBounte parfyt, wel armed and richely,\nAnd fresshe Beaute, Lust, and Jolyte,\nAssured Maner, Youthe, and Honeste,\nWisdom, Estaat, Drede, and Governaunce,\nConfedred both by honde and alliaunce.\n\nA compleynt had I, writen in myn hond,\nFor to have put to Pite as a bille;\nBut when I al this companye ther fond,\nThat rather wolden al my cause spille\nThen do me help, I held my pleynte stille,\nFor to that folk, withouten any fayle,\nWithoute Pitee ther may no bille availe.\n\nThen leve I al these vertues, sauf Pite,\nKepynge the corps as ye have herd me seyn,\nConfedered alle by bond of Cruelte\nAnd ben assented when I shal be sleyn.\nAnd I have put my complaynt up ageyn,\nFor to my foes my bille I dar not shewe,\nTh’effect of which seith thus, in wordes fewe:\n\n\n_(The Bill of Complaint)_\n\nHumblest of herte, highest of reverence,\nBenygne flour, coroune of vertues alle,\nSheweth unto youre rial excellence\nYoure servaunt, yf I durste me so calle,\nHys mortal harm in which he is yfalle,\nAnd noght al oonly for his evel fare,\nBut for your renoun, as he shal declare.\n\nHit stondeth thus: your contraire, Crueltee,\nAllyed is ayenst your regalye\nUnder colour of womanly Beaute--\nFor men shulde not, lo, knowe hir tirannye--\nWith Bounte, Gentilesse, and Curtesye,\nAnd hath depryved yow now of your place\nThat hyghte “Beaute apertenant to Grace.”\n\nFor kyndely by youre herytage ryght\nYe ben annexed ever unto Bounte;\nAnd verrayly ye oughte do youre myght\nTo helpe Trouthe in his adversyte.\nYe be also the corowne of Beaute,\nAnd certes yf ye wanten in these tweyne,\nThe world is lore; ther is no more to seyne.\n\nEke what availeth Maner and Gentilesse\nWithoute yow, benygne creature?\nShal Cruelte be your governeresse?\nAllas, what herte may hyt longe endure?\nWherfore, but ye the rather take cure\nTo breke that perilouse alliaunce,\nYe sleen hem that ben in your obeisaunce.\n\nAnd further over yf ye suffre this,\nYoure renoun ys fordoo than in a throwe;\nTher shal no man wite well what Pite is.\nAllas, that your renoun is falle so lowe!\nYe be than fro youre heritage ythrowe\nBy Cruelte that occupieth youre place,\nAnd we despeyred that seken to your grace.\n\nHave mercy on me, thow Herenus quene,\nThat yow have sought so tendirly and yore;\nLet som strem of youre lyght on me be sene\nThat love and drede yow ever lenger the more;\nFor sothly for to seyne I bere the soore,\nAnd though I be not konnynge for to pleyne,\nFor Goddis love have mercy on my peyne.\n\nMy peyne is this, that what so I desire\nThat have I not, ne nothing lyk therto;\nAnd ever setteth Desir myn hert on fire.\nEke on that other syde where so I goo,\nWhat maner thing that may encrese my woo,\nThat have I redy, unsoght, everywhere;\nMe lakketh but my deth and than my here.\n\nWhat nedeth to shewe parcel of my peyne?\nSyth every woo that herte may bethynke\nI suffre and yet I dar not to yow pleyne;\nFor wel I wot although I wake or wynke,\nYe rekke not whether I flete or synke.\nBut natheles yet my trouthe I shal sustene\nUnto my deth, and that shal wel be sene.\n\nThis is to seyne I wol be youres evere,\nThough ye me slee by Crueltee your foo,\nAlgate my spirit shal never dissevere\nFro youre servise for any peyne or woo.\nSith ye be ded--allas that hyt is soo--\nThus for your deth I may wel wepe and pleyne\nWith herte sore and ful of besy peyne.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fortune": { - "title": "“Fortune”", - "body": "_Pleintif_\n\nThis wrecched worldes transmutacioun,\nAs wele or wo, now povre and now honour,\nWithouten ordre or wys discrecioun\nGoverned is by Fortunes errour.\nBut natheles, the lak of hir favour\nNe may nat don me singen though I dye,\nJay tout perdu mon temps et mon labour;\nFor fynally, Fortune, I thee defye.\n\nYit is me left the light of my resoun\nTo knowen frend fro fo in thy mirour.\nSo muchel hath yit thy whirling up and doun\nYtaught me for to knowen in an hour.\nBut trewely, no force of thy reddour\nTo him that over himself hath the maystrye.\nMy suffisaunce shal be my socour,\nFor fynally Fortune, I thee defye.\n\nO Socrates, thou stidfast champioun,\nShe never mighte be thy tormentour;\nThou never dreddest hir oppressioun,\nNe in hir chere founde thou no savour.\nThou knewe wel the deceit of hir colour,\nAnd that hir moste worshipe is to lye.\nI knowe hir eek a fals dissimulour,\nFor fynally, Fortune, I thee defye!\n\n\n_La respounse de Fortune au Pleintif_\n\nNo man is wrecched but himself it wene,\nAnd he that hath himself hath suffisaunce.\nWhy seystow thanne I am to thee so kene,\nThat hast thyself out of my governaunce?\nSey thus: “Graunt mercy of thyn haboundaunce\nThat thou hast lent or this.” Why wolt thou stryve?\nWhat wostow yit how I thee wol avaunce?\nAnd eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve.\n\nI have thee taught divisioun bitwene\nFrend of effect and frend of countenaunce;\nThee nedeth nat the galle of noon hyene,\nThat cureth eyen derked for penaunce;\nNow seestow cleer that were in ignoraunce.\nYit halt thyn ancre and yit thou mayst arryve\nTher bountee berth the keye of my substaunce,\nAnd eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve.\n\nHow many have I refused to sustene\nSin I thee fostred have in thy plesaunce.\nWoltow than make a statut on thy quene\nThat I shal been ay at thyn ordinaunce?\nThou born art in my regne of variaunce,\nAboute the wheel with other most thou dryve.\nMy lore is bet than wikke is thy grevaunce,\nAnd eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve.\n\n\n_La respounse du Pleintif countre Fortune_\n\nThy lore I dampne; it is adversitee.\nMy frend maystow nat reven, blind goddesse;\nThat I thy frendes knowe, I thanke it thee.\nTak hem agayn, lat hem go lye on presse.\nThe negardye in keping hir richesse\nPrenostik is thou wolt hir tour assayle;\nWikke appetyt comth ay before syknesse.\nIn general, this reule may nat fayle.\n\n\n_La respounse de Fortune countre le Pleintif_\n\nThou pinchest at my mutabilitee\nFor I thee lente a drope of my richesse,\nAnd now me lyketh to withdrawe me.\nWhy sholdestow my realtee oppresse?\nThe see may ebbe and flowen more or lesse;\nThe welkne hath might to shyne, reyne, or hayle;\nRight so mot I kythen my brotelnesse.\nIn general, this reule may nat fayle.\n\nLo, th’execucion of the majestee\nThat al purveyeth of his rightwysnesse,\nThat same thing “Fortune’” clepen ye,\nYe blinde bestes ful of lewdednesse.\nThe hevene hath propretee of sikernesse.\nThis world hath ever resteles travayle;\nThy laste day is ende of myn intresse.\nIn general, this reule may nat fayle.\n\n\n_L’envoy de Fortune_\n\nPrinces, I prey you of your gentilesse\nLat nat this man on me thus crye and pleyne,\nAnd I shal quyte you your bisinesse\nAt my requeste, as three of you or tweyne,\nAnd but you list releve him of his peyne,\nPreyeth his beste frend of his noblesse\nThat to som beter estat he may atteyne.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lak-of-stedfastnesse": { - "title": "“Lak of Stedfastnesse”", - "body": "Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable\nThat mannes word was obligacioun,\nAnd now it is so fals and deceivable\nThat word and deed, as in conclusioun,\nBen nothing lyk, for turned up-so-doun\nIs al this world for mede and wilfulnesse,\nThat al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse.\n\nWhat maketh this world to be so variable\nBut lust that folk have in dissensioun?\nFor among us now a man is holde unable,\nBut if he can by som collusioun\nDon his neighbour wrong or oppressioun.\nWhat causeth this but wilful wrecchednesse,\nThat al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse?\n\nTrouthe is put doun, resoun is holden fable,\nVertu hath now no dominacioun;\nPitee exyled, no man is merciable.\nThrough covetyse is blent discrecioun.\nThe world hath mad a permutacioun\nFro right to wrong, fro trouthe to fikelnesse,\nThat al is lost for lak of stedfastnesse.\n\nO prince, desyre to be honourable,\nCherish thy folk and hate extorcioun.\nSuffre nothing that may be reprevable\nTo thyn estat don in thy regioun.\nShew forth thy swerd of castigacioun,\nDred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse,\nAnd wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "proverbs": { - "title": "“Proverbs”", - "body": "What should these clothes thus manifold,\nLo! this hot summer’s day?\nAfter great heate cometh cold;\nNo man cast his pilche away.\nOf all this world the large compass\nWill not in mine arms twain;\nWho so muche will embrace,\nLittle thereof he shall distrain.\n\nThe world so wide, the air so remuable,\nThe silly man so little of stature;\nThe green of ground and clothing so mutable,\nThe fire so hot and subtile of nature;\nThe water never in one--what creature\nThat made is of these foure thus flitting,\nMay steadfast be, as here, in his living?\n\nThe more I go, the farther I am behind;\nThe farther behind, the nearer my war’s end;\nThe more I seek, the worse can I find;\nThe lighter leave, the lother for to wend;\nThe better I live, the more out of mind;\nIs this fortune, n’ot I, or infortune;\nThough I go loose, tied am I with a loigne.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "truth": { - "title": "“Truth”", - "body": "Fle fro the pres, and dwelle with sothefastnesse,\nSuffise thin owen thing, thei it be smal;\nFor hord hath hate, and clymbyng tykelnesse,\nPrees hath envye, and wele blent overal.\nSavour no more thanne the byhove schal;\nReule weel thiself, that other folk canst reede;\nAnd trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.\n\n Tempest the nought al croked to redresse,\nIn trust of hire that tourneth as a bal.\nMyche wele stant in litel besynesse;\nBywar therfore to spurne ayeyns an al;\nStryve not as doth the crokke with the wal.\nDaunte thiself, that dauntest otheres dede;\nAnd trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede.\n\n That the is sent, receyve in buxumnesse;\nThe wrestlyng for the worlde axeth a fal.\nHere is non home, here nys but wyldernesse.\nForth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal!\nKnow thi contré! loke up! thonk God of al!\nHold the heye weye, and lat thi gost the lede;\nAnd trouthe shal delyvere, it is no drede.\n\n Therfore, thou Vache, leve thine olde wrechednesse;\nUnto the world leve now to be thral.\nCrie hym mercy, that of hys hie godnesse\nMade the of nought, and in especial\nDraw unto hym, and pray in general\nFor the, and eke for other, hevenelyche mede;\nAnd trouthe schal delyvere, it is no drede.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "elizabeth-cheney": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Elizabeth Cheney", - "birth": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "/", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "overheard-in-an-orchard": { - "title": "“Overheard in an Orchard”", - "body": "Said the Robin to the Sparrow,\n“I should really like to know\nWhy these anxious human beings\nRush about and worry so!”\n\nSaid the Sparrow to the Robin,\n“Friend, I think that it must be\nThat they have no heavenly Father\nSuch as cares for you and me!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "there-is-a-man-on-the-cross": { - "title": "“There is a Man on the Cross”", - "body": "Whenever there is silence around me\nBy day or by night--\nI am startled by a cry.\nIt came down from the cross--\nThe first time I heard it.\nI went out and searched--\nAnd found a man in the throes of crucifixion,\nAnd I said, “I will take you down,”\nAnd I tried to take the nails out of his feet.\n\nBut he said, “Let them be,\nFor I cannot be taken down\nUntil every man, every woman, and every child\nCome together to take me down.”\nAnd I said, “But I cannot bear your cry.\nWhat can I do?”\nAnd he said, “Go about the world--\nTell every one that you meet--\nThere is a man on the cross.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "g-k-chesterton": { - "metadata": { - "name": "G. K. Chesterton", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 71 - }, - "poems": { - "all-the-leaves-are-gold": { - "title": "“All the Leaves Are Gold”", - "body": "Lo! I am come to autumn,\n When all the leaves are gold;\nGrey hairs and golden leaves cry out\n The year and I are old.\n\nIn youth I sought the prince of men,\n Captain in cosmic wars,\nOur Titan, even the weeds would show\n Defiant, to the stars.\n\nBut now a great thing in the street\n Seems any human nod,\nWhere shift in strange democracy\n The million masks of God.\n\nIn youth I sought the golden flower\n Hidden in wood or wold,\nBut I am come to autumn,\n When all the leaves are gold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-god-makers": { - "title": "“The Ballad of God-Makers”", - "body": "A bird flew out at the break of day\nFrom the nest where it had curled,\nAnd ere the eve the bird had set\nFear on the kings of the world.\n\nThe first tree it lit upon\nWas green with leaves unshed;\nThe second tree it lit upon\nWas red with apples red;\n\nThe third tree it lit upon\nWas barren and was brown,\nSave for a dead man nailed thereon\nOn a hill above a town.\n\nThat night the kings of the earth were gay\nAnd filled the cup and can;\nLast night the kings of the earth were chill\nFor dread of a naked man.\n\n“If he speak two more words,” they said,\n“The slave is more than the free;\nIf he speak three more words,” they said,\n“The stars are under the sea.”\n\nSaid the King of the East to the King of the West,\nI wot his frown was set,\n“Lo, let us slay him and make him as dung,\nIt is well that the world forget.”\n\nSaid the King of the West to the King of the East,\nI wot his smile was dread,\n“Nay, let us slay him and make him a god,\nIt is well that our god be dead.”\n\nThey set the young man on a hill,\nThey nailed him to a rod;\nAnd there in darkness and in blood\nThey made themselves a god.\n\nAnd the mightiest word was left unsaid,\nAnd the world had never a mark,\nAnd the strongest man of the sons of men\nWent dumb into the dark.\n\nThen hymns and harps of praise they brought,\nIncense and gold and myrrh,\nAnd they thronged above the seraphim,\nThe poor dead carpenter.\n\n“Thou art the prince of all,” they sang,\n“Ocean and earth and air.”\nThen the bird flew on to the cruel cross,\nAnd hid in the dead man’s hair.\n\n“Thou art the son of the world.” they cried,\n“Speak if our prayers be heard.”\nAnd the brown bird stirred in the dead man’s hair\nAnd it seemed that the dead man stirred.\n\nThen a shriek went up like the world’s last cry\nFrom all nations under heaven,\nAnd a master fell before a slave\nAnd begged to be forgiven.\n\nThey cowered, for dread in his wakened eyes\nThe ancient wrath to see;\nAnd a bird flew out of the dead Christ’s hair,\nAnd lit on a lemon tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ballad-of-saint-barbara": { - "title": "“Ballad of Saint Barbara”", - "body": "_(St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery and of those in danger of sudden death.)_\n\nWhen the long grey lines came flooding upon Paris in the plain,\nWe stood and drank of the last free air we never could taste again:\nThey had led us back from the lost battle, to halt we knew not where\nAnd stilled us; and our gaping guns were dumb with our despair.\nThe grey tribes flowed for ever from the infinite lifeless lands\nAnd a Norman to a Breton spoke, his chin upon his hands.\n\n“There was an end to Ilium; and an end came to Rome;\nAnd a man plays on a painted stage in the land that he calls home;\nArch after arch of triumph, but floor beyond falling floor,\nThat lead to a low door at last; and beyond there is no door.”\n\nAnd the Breton to the Norman spoke, like a small child spoke he,\nAnd his sea-blue eyes were empty as his home beside the sea:\n“There are more windows in one house than there are eyes to see,\nThere are more doors in a man’s house, but God has hid the key:\nRuin is a builder of windows; her legend witnesseth\nBarbara, the saint of gunners, and a stay in sudden death.”\n\nIt seemed the wheel of the world stood still an instant in its turning,\nMore than the kings of the earth that turned with the turning of Valmy mill:\nWhile trickled the idle tale and the sea-blue eyes were burning,\nStill as the heart of a whirlwind the heart of the world stood still.\n\n _“Barbara the beautiful\n Had praise of lute and pen:\n Her hair was like a summer night\n Dark and desired of men.\n\n Her feet like birds from far away\n That linger and light in doubt;\n And her face was like a window\n Where a man’s first love looked out.\n\n Her sire was master of many slaves\n A hard man of his hands;\n They built a tower about her\n In the desolate golden lands,\n\n Sealed as the tyrants sealed their tombs,\n Planned with an ancient plan,\n And set two windows in the tower\n Like the two eyes of a man.”_\n\nOur guns were set toward the foe; we had no word, for firing.\nGrey in the gateway of St. Gond the Guard of the tyrant shone;\nDark with the fate of a falling star, retiring and retiring,\nThe Breton line went backward and the Breton tale went on.\n\n _“Her father had sailed across the sea\n From the harbour of Africa\n When all the slaves took up their tools\n For the bidding of Barbara.\n\n She smote the bare wall with her hand\n And bad them smite again;\n She poured them wealth of wine and meat\n To stay them in their pain.\n\n And cried through the lifted thunder\n Of thronging hammer and hod\n ‘Throw open the third window\n In the third name of God.’\n\n Then the hearts failed and the tools fell,\n And far towards the foam,\n Men saw a shadow on the sands\n And her father coming home.”_\n\nSpeak low and low, along the line the whispered word is flying\nBefore the touch, before the time, we may not loose a breath:\nTheir guns must mash us to the mire and there be no replying,\nTill the hand is raised to fling us for the final dice to death.\n\n _“There were two windows in your tower,\n Barbara, Barbara,\n For all between the sun and moon\n In the lands of Africa.\n\n Hath a man three eyes, Barbara,\n A bird three wings,\n That you have riven roof and wall\n To look upon vain things?”\n\n Her voice was like a wandering thing\n That falters yet is free,\n Whose soul has drunk in a distant land\n Of the rivers of liberty.\n\n “There are more wings than the wind knows\n Or eyes than see the sun\n In the light of the lost window\n And the wind of the doors undone.\n\n For out of the first lattice\n Are the red lands that break\n And out of the second lattice\n Sea like a green snake,\n\n But out of the third lattice\n Under low eaves like wings\n Is a new corner of the sky\n And the other side of things.”_\n\nIt opened in the inmost place an instant beyond uttering,\nA casement and a chasm and a thunder of doors undone,\nA seraph’s strong wing shaken out the shock of its unshuttering,\nThat split the shattered sunlight from a light behind the sun.\n\n _“Then he drew sword and drave her\n Where the judges sat and said\n ‘Caesar sits above the gods,\n Barbara the maid.\n\n Caesar hath made a treaty\n With the moon and with the sun,\n All the gods that men can praise\n Praise him every one.\n\n There is peace with the anointed\n Of the scarlet oils of Bel,\n With the Fish God, where the whirlpool\n Is a winding stair to hell,\n\n With the pathless pyramids of slime,\n Where the mitred negro lifts\n To his black cherub in the cloud\n Abominable gifts,\n\n With the leprous silver cities\n Where the dumb priests dance and nod,\n But not with the three windows\n And the last name of God.’”_\n\nThey are firing, we are falling, and the red skies rend and shiver us,\nBarbara, Barbara, we may not loose a breath--\nBe at the bursting doors of doom, and in the dark deliver us,\nWho loosen the last window on the sun of sudden death.\n\n _“Barbara the beautiful\n Stood up as queen set free,\n Whose mouth is set to a terrible cup\n And the trumpet of liberty.\n\n ‘I have looked forth from a window\n That no man now shall bar,\n Caesar’s toppling battle-towers\n Shall never stretch so far.\n\n The slaves are dancing in their chains,\n The child laughs at the rod,\n Because of the bird of the three wings,\n And the third face of God.’\n\n The sword upon his shoulder\n Shifted and shone and fell,\n And Barbara lay very small\n And crumpled like a shell.”_\n\nWhat wall upon what hinges turned stands open like a door?\nToo simple for the sight of faith, too huge for human eyes,\nWhat light upon what ancient way shines to a far-off floor,\nThe line of the lost land of France or the plains of Paradise?\n\n _“Caesar smiled above the gods,\n His lip of stone was curled,\n His iron armies wound like chains\n Round and round the world,\n\n And the strong slayer of his own\n That cut down flesh for grass,\n Smiled too, and went to his own tower\n Like a walking tower of brass,\n\n And the songs ceased and the slaves were dumb;\n And far towards the foam\n Men saw a shadow on the sands;\n And her father coming home …\n\n Blood of his blood upon the sword\n Stood red but never dry.\n He wiped it slowly, till the blade\n Was blue as the blue sky.\n\n But the blue sky split with a thunder-crack,\n Spat down a blinding brand,\n And all of him lay back and flat\n As his shadow on the sand.”_\n\nThe touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together\nSt. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right,\nThey are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather.\nBuilding window upon window to our lady of the light.\nFor the light is come on Liberty, her foes are falling, falling,\nThey are reeling, they are running, as the shameful years have run,\nShe is risen for all the humble, she has heard the conquered calling,\nSt. Barbara of the Gunners, with her hand upon the gun.\nThey are burst asunder in the midst that eat of their own flatteries,\nWhose lip is curled to order as its barbered hair is curled …\nBlast of the beauty of sudden death, St. Barbara of the batteries!\nThat blow the new white window in the wall of all the world.\n\nFor the hand is raised behind us, and the bolt smites hard\nThrough the rending of the doorways, through the death-gap of the Guard,\nFor the cry of the Three Colours is in Condé and beyond\nAnd the Guard is flung for carrion in the graveyard of St. Gond,\nThrough Mondemont and out of it, through Morin marsh and on\nWith earthquake of salutation the impossible thing is gone,\nGaul, charioted and charging, great Gaul upon a gun,\nTip-toe on all her thousand years and trumpeting to the sun:\nAs day returns, as death returns, swung backwards and swung home,\nBack on the barbarous reign returns the battering-ram of Rome.\nWhile that that the east held hard and hot like pincers in a forge,\nCame like the west wind roaring up the cannon of St. George,\nWhere the hunt is up and racing over stream and swamp and tarn\nAnd their batteries, black with battle, hold the bridgeheads of the Marne\nAnd across the carnage of the Guard, by Paris in the plain,\nThe Normans to the Bretons cried and the Bretons cheered again …\nBut he that told the tale went home to his house beside the sea\nAnd burned before St. Barbara, the light of the windows three,\nThree candles for an unknown thing, never to come again,\nThat opened like the eye of God on Paris in the plain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "ballad-of-the-sun": { - "title": "“Ballad of the Sun”", - "body": "O well for him that loves the sun\nThat sees the heaven-race ridden or run\nThe splashing seas of sunset won\nAnd shouts for victory.\n\nGod made the sun to crown his head\nAnd when death’s dart at last is sped\nAt least it will not find him dead\nAnd pass the carrion by.\n\nO ill for him that loves the sun;\nShall the sun stoop for anyone?\nShall the sun weep for hearts undone\nOr heavy souls that pray?\n\nNot less for us and everyone\nWas that white web of splendour spun;\nO well for him who loves the sun\nAlthough the sun should slay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "ballade-dune-grande-dame": { - "title": "“Ballade D’une Grande Dame”", - "body": "Heaven shall forgive you Bridge at dawn\nThe clothes you wear--or do not wear--\nAnd Ladies’ Leap-frog on the lawn\nAnd dyes and drugs and _petits verres._\nYour vicious things shall melt in air …\n… But for the Virtuous Things you do\nThe Righteous Work the Public Care\nIt shall not be forgiven you.\n\nBecause you could not even yawn\nWhen your Committees would prepare\nTo have the teeth of paupers drawn\nOr strip the slums of Human Hair;\nBecause a Doctor Otto Maehr\nSpoke of “a segregated few”--\nAnd you sat smiling in your chair--\nIt shall not be forgiven you.\n\nThough your sins cried to Father Vaughan\nThese desperate you could not spare\nWho steal with nothing left to pawn;\nYou caged a man up like a bear\nFor ever in a jailor’s care\nBecause his sins were more than _two_ …\n… I know a house in Hoxton where\nIt shall not be forgiven you.\n\n\n# _Envoi:_\n\nPrincess you trapped a guileless Mayor\nTo meet some people that you knew …\nWhen the Last Trumpet rends the air\nIt shall not be forgiven you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-ballade-of-suicide": { - "title": "“A Ballade of Suicide”", - "body": "The gallows in my garden people say\nIs new and neat and adequately tall.\nI tie the noose on in a knowing way\nAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;\nBut just as all the neighbours--on the wall--\nAre drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”\nThe strangest whim has seized me … After all\nI think I will not hang myself to-day.\n\nTo-morrow is the time I get my pay--My\nuncle’s sword is hanging in the hall--\nI see a little cloud all pink and grey--\nPerhaps the rector’s mother will _not_ call--\nI fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall\nThat mushrooms could be cooked another way--\nI never read the works of Juvenal--\nI think I will not hang myself to-day.\n\nThe world will have another washing day;\nThe decadents decay; the pedants pall;\nAnd H.G. Wells has found that children play.\nAnd Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;\nRationalists are growing rational--\nAnd through thick woods one finds a stream astray\nSo secret that the very sky seems small--\nI think I will not hang myself to-day.\n\n\n# _Envoi:_\n\nPrince I can hear the trumpet of Germinal\nThe tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;\nEven to-day your royal head may fall--\nI think I will not hang myself to-day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-ballade-of-a-book-reviewer": { - "title": "“A Ballade of a Book-Reviewer”", - "body": "I have not read a rotten page\nOf “Sex-Hate” or “The Social Test”\nAnd here comes “Husks” and “Heritage” …\nO Moses give us all a rest!\n“Ethics of Empire”! … I protest\nI will not even cut the strings\nI’ll read “Jack Redskin on the Quest”\nAnd feed my brain with better things.\n\nSomebody wants a Wiser Age\n(He also wants me to invest);\nSomebody likes the Finnish Stage\nBecause the Jesters do not jest;\nAnd grey with dust is Dante’s crest\nThe bell of Rabelais soundless swings;\nAnd the winds come out of the west\nAnd feed my brain with better things.\n\nLord of our laughter and our rage.\nLook on us with our sins oppressed!\nI too have trodden mine heritage\nWickedly wearying of the best.\nBurn from my brain and from my breast\nSloth and the cowardice that clings\nAnd stiffness and the soul’s arrest:\nAnd feed my brain with better things.\n\n\n# _Envoi:_\n\nPrince you are host and I am guest\nTherefore I shrink from cavillings …\nBut I should have that fizz suppressed\nAnd feed my brain with better things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-ballade-of-an-anti-puritan": { - "title": "“A Ballade of an Anti-Puritan”", - "body": "They spoke of Progress spiring round\nOf Light and Mrs. Humphry Ward--\nIt is not true to say I frowned\nOr ran about the room and roared;\nI might have simply sat and snored--\nI rose politely in the club\nAnd said “I feel a little bored;\nWill someone take me to a pub?”\n\nThe new world’s wisest did surround\nMe; and it pains me to record\nI did not think their views profound\nOr their conclusions well assured;\nThe simple life I can’t afford\nBesides I do not like the grub--\nI wait a mash and sausage “scored”--\nWill someone take me to a pub?\n\nI know where Men can still be found\nAnger and clamorous accord\nAnd virtues growing from the ground\nAnd fellowship of beer and board\nAnd song that is a sturdy cord.\nAnd hope that is a hardy shrub\nAnd goodness that is God’s last word--\nWill someone take me to a pub?\n\n\n# _Envoi:_\n\nPrince Bayard would have smashed his sword\nTo see the sort of knights you dub--Is\nthat the last of them--O Lord!\nWill someone take me to a pub?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-ballade-of-the-first-rain": { - "title": "“A Ballade of the First Rain”", - "body": "The sky is blue with summer and the sun\nThe woods are brown as autumn with the tan\nIt might as well be Tropics and be done\nI might as well be born a copper Khan;\nI fashion me an oriental fan\nMade of the wholly unreceipted bills\nBrought by the ice-man sleeping in his van\n(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).\n\nI read the Young Philosophers for fun\n--Fresh as our sorrow for the late Queen Anne--\nThe Dionysians whom a pint would stun\nThe Pantheists who never heard of Pan.\n--But through my hair electric needles ran\nAnd on my book a gout of water spills\nAnd on the skirts of heaven the guns began\n(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).\n\nO fields of England cracked and dry and dun\nO soul of England sick of words and wan!--\nThe clouds grow dark;--the down-rush has begun.\n--It comes it comes as holy darkness can\nBlack as with banners ban and arriere-ban;\nA falling laughter all the valley fills\nDeep as God’s thunder and the thirst of man:\n(A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills).\n\n\n# _Envoi:_\n\nPrince Prince-Elective on the modern plan\nFulfilling such a lot of People’s Wills\nYou take the Chiltern Hundreds while you can--\nA storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "bay-combe": { - "title": "“Bay Combe”", - "body": "With leaves below and leaves above\nAnd groping under tree and tree\nI found the home of my true love\nWho is a wandering home for me.\n\nWho lost in ruined worlds aloof\nBore the dread dove wings like a roof;\nWho past the last lost stars of space\nCarried the fire-light on her face.\n\nWho passing as in idle hours\nTamed the wild weeds to garden flowers;\nStroked the strange whirlwind’s whirring wings\nAnd made the comets homely things.\n\nWhere she went by upon her way\nThe dark was dearer than the day;\nWhere she paused in heaven or hell\nThe whole world’s tale had ended well.\n\n_With leaves below and leaves above.\nAnd groping under tree and tree\nI found the home of my true love\nWho is a wandering home for me_.\n\nWhere she was flung above beneath\nBy the rude dance of life and death\nGrow she at Gotham--die at Rome\nBetween the pine trees is her home.\n\nIn some strange town some silver morn\nShe may have wandered to be born;\nStopped at some motley crowd impressed\nAnd called them kinsfolk for a jest.\n\nIf we again En goodness thrive\nAnd the dead saints become alive\nThen pedants bald and parchments brown\nMay claim her blood for London town.\n\n_But leaves below and leaves above.\nAnd groping under tree and tree\nI found the home of my true love\nWho is a wandering home for me_.\n\nThe great gravestone she may pass by\nAnd without noticing may die;\nThe streets of silver Heaven may tread\nWith her grey awful eyes unfed.\n\nThe city of great peace in pain\nMay pass until she find again\nThis little house of holm and fir\nGod built before the stars for her.\n\nHere in the fallen leaves is furled\nHer secret centre of the world.\nWe sit and feel in dusk and dun\nThe stars swing round us like a sun.\n\n_For leaves below and leaves above.\nAnd groping under tree and tree\nI found the home of my true love.\nWho is a wandering home for me_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-beatific-vision": { - "title": "“The Beatific Vision”", - "body": "Then Bernard smiled at me that I should gaze\nBut I had gazed already; caught the view\nFaced the unfathomable ray of rays\nWhich to itself and by itself is true.\n\nThen was my vision mightier than man’s speech;\nSpeech snapt before it like a flying spell;\nAnd memory and all that time can teach\nBefore that splendid outrage failed and fell.\n\nAs when one dreameth and remembereth not\nWaking what were his pleasures or his pains\nWith every feature of the dream forgot\nThe printed passion of the dream remains:--\n\nEven such am I; within whose thoughts resides\nNo picture of that sight nor any part\nNor any memory: in whom abides\nOnly a happiness within the heart\n\nA secret happiness that soaks the heart\nAs hills are soaked by slow unsealing snow\nOr secret as that wind without a chart\nWhereon did the wild leaves of Sibyl go.\n\nO light uplifted from all mortal knowing\nSend back a little of that glimpse of thee.\nThat of its glory I may kindle glowing\nOne tiny spark for all men yet to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "blessed-are-the-peacemakers": { - "title": "“Blessed Are the Peacemakers”", - "body": "Of old with a divided heart\nI saw my people’s pride expand\nSince a man’s soul is torn apart\nBy mother earth and fatherland.\n\nI knew through many a tangled tale\nGlory and truth not one but two:\nKing Constable and Amirail\nTook me like trumpets: but I knew\n\nA blacker thing than blood’s own dye\nWeighed down great Hawkins on the sea;\nAnd Nelson turned his blindest eye\nOn Naples and on liberty.\n\nTherefore to you my thanks O throne\nO thousandfold and frozen folk\nFor whose cold frenzies all your own\nThe Battle of the Rivers broke;\n\nWho have no faith a man could mourn.\nNor freedom any man desires;\nBut in a new clean light of scorn\nClose up my quarrel with my sires;\n\nWho bring my English heart to me\nWho mend me like a broken toy;\nTill I can see you fight and flee\nAnd laugh as if I were a boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-child-of-the-snows": { - "title": "“A Child of the Snows”", - "body": "There is heard a hymn when the panes dim\nAnd never before or again\nWhen the nights are strong with a darkness long\nAnd the dark is alive with rain.\n\nNever we know but in sleet and in snow\nThe place where the great fires are\nThat the midst of the earth is a raging mirth\nAnd the heart of the earth a star.\n\nAnd at night we win to the ancient inn\nWhere the child in the frost is furled\nWe follow the feet where all souls meet\nAt the inn at the end of the world.\n\nThe gods lie dead where the leaves lie red\nFor the flame of the sun is flown.\nThe gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold.\nAnd a Child comes forth alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-christmas-carol": { - "title": "“A Christmas Carol”", - "body": "The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,\nHis hair was like a light.\n(O weary, weary were the world,\nBut here is all aright.)\n\nThe Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,\nHis hair was like a star.\n(O stern and cunning are the kings,\nBut here the true hearts are.)\n\nThe Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,\nHis hair was like a fire.\n(O weary, weary is the world,\nBut here the world’s desire.)\n\nThe Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,\nHis hair was like a crown.\nAnd all the flowers looked up at Him,\nAnd all the stars looked down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "a-christmas-song-for-three-guilds": { - "title": "“A Christmas Song for Three Guilds”", - "body": "To be sung a long time ago--or hence.\n\n# _The Carpenters_\n\nSt. Joseph to the Carpenters said on a Christmas Day:\n“The master shall have patience and the prentice shall obey;\nAnd your word unto your women shall be nowise hard or wild:\nFor the sake of me your master who have worshipped Wife and Child.\nBut softly you shall frame the fence and softly carve the door\nAnd softly plane the table--as to spread it for the poor\nAnd all your thoughts be soft and white as the wood of the white tree.\nBut if they tear the Charter Jet the tocsin speak for me!\nLet the wooden sign above your shop be prouder to be scarred\nThan the lion-shield of Lancelot that hung at Joyous Garde.”\n\n\n# _The Shoemakers_\n\nSt. Crispin to the shoemakers said on a Christmastide:\n“Who fashions at another’s feet will get no good of pride.\nThey were bleeding on the Mountain the feet that brought good news\nThe latchet of whose shoes we were not worthy to unloose.\nSee that your feet offend not nor lightly lift your head\nTread softly on the sunlit roads the bright dust of the dead.\nLet your own feet be shod with peace; be lowly all your lives.\nBut if they touch the Charter ye shall nail it with your knives.\nAnd the bill-blades of the commons drive in all as dense array\nAs once a crash of arrows came upon St. Crispin’s Day.”\n\n\n# _The Painters_\n\nSt. Luke unto the painters on Christmas Day he said:\n“See that the robes are white you dare to dip in gold and red;\nFor only gold the kings can give and only blood the saints;\nAnd his high task grows perilous that mixes them in paints.\nKeep you the ancient order; follow the men that knew\nThe labyrinth of black and whits the maze of green and blue;\nPaint mighty things paint paltry things paint silly things or sweet.\nBut if men break the Charter you may slay them in the street.\nAnd if you paint one post for them then … but you know it well\nYou paint a harlot’s face to drag all heroes down to hell.”\n\n\n# _All Together_\n\nAlmighty God to all mankind on Christmas Day said He:\n“I rent you from the old red hills and rending made you free.\nThere was charter there was challenge; in a blast of breath I gave;\nYou can be all things other; you cannot be a slave.\nYou shall be tired and tolerant of fancies as they fade\nBut if men doubt the Charter ye shall call on the Crusade--\nTrumpet and torch and catapult cannon and bow and blade\nBecause it was My challenge to all the things I made.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "a-cider-song": { - "title": "“A Cider Song”", - "body": "The wine they drink in Paradise\nThey make in Haute Lorraine;\nGod brought it burning from the sod\nTo be a sign and signal rod\nThat they that drink the blood of God\nShall never thirst again.\n\nThe wine they praise in Paradise\nThey make in Ponterey\nThe purple wine of Paradise\nBut we have better at the price;\nIt’s wine they praise in Paradise\nIt’s cider that they pray.\n\nThe wine they want in Paradise\nThey find in Plodder’s End\nThe apple wine of Hereford\nOf Hafod Hill and Hereford\nWhere woods went down to Hereford\nAnd there I had a friend.\n\nThe soft feet of the blessed go\nIn the soft western vales\nThe road the silent saints accord\nThe road from Heaven to Hereford\nWhere the apple wood of Hereford\nGoes all the way to Wales.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "confessional": { - "title": "“Confessional”", - "body": "Now that I kneel at the throne O Queen\nPity and pardon me.\nMuch have I striven to sing the same\nBrother of beast and tree;\nYet when the stars catch me alone\nNever a linnet sings--\nAnd the blood of a man is a bitter voice\nAnd cries for foolish things.\n\nNot for me be the vaunt of woe;\nWas not I from a boy\nVowed with the helmet and spear and spur\nTo the blood-red banner of joy?\nA man may sing his psalms to a stone\nPour his blood for a weed\nBut the tears of a man are a sudden thing\nAnd come not of his creed.\n\nNay but the earth is kind to me\nThough I cry for a Star\nLeaves and grasses feather and flower\nCover the foolish scar\nProphets and saints and seraphim\nLighten the load with song\nAnd the heart of a man is a heavy load\nFor a man to bear along.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-convert": { - "title": "“The Convert”", - "body": "After one moment when I bowed my head\nAnd the whole world turned over and came upright\nAnd I came out where the old road shone white.\nI walked the ways and heard what all men said\nForests of tongues like autumn leaves unshed\nBeing not unlovable but strange and light;\nOld riddles and new creeds not in despite\nBut softly as men smile about the dead\n\nThe sages have a hundred maps to give\nThat trace their crawling cosmos like a tree\nThey rattle reason out through many a sieve\nThat stores the sand and lets the gold go free:\nAnd all these things are less than dust to me\nBecause my name is Lazarus and I live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-crusader-returns-from-captivity": { - "title": "“The Crusader Returns from Captivity”", - "body": "I have come forth alive from the land of purple and poison and glamour\nWhere the charm is strong as the torture being chosen to change the mind;\nTorture of wordless dance and wineless feast without clamour\nPalace hidden in palace garden with garden behind;\n\nWomen veiled in the sun or bare as brass in the shadows\nAnd the endless eyeless patterns where each thing seems an eye …\nAnd my stride is on Caesar’s sand where it slides to the English meadows\nTo the last low woods of Sussex and the road that goes to Rye.\n\nIn the cool and careless woods the eyes of the eunuchs burned not\nBut the wild hawk went before me being free to return or roam\nThe hills had broad unconscious backs; and the tree-tops turned not\nAnd the huts were heedless of me: and I knew I was at home.\n\nAnd I saw my lady afar and her holy freedom upon her\nA head without veil averted and not to be turned with charms\nAnd I heard above bannerets blown the intolerant trumpets of honour\nThat usher with iron laughter the coming of Christian arms.\n\nMy shield hangs stainless still; but I shall not go where they praise it\nA sword is still at my side but I shall not ride with the King.\nOnly to walk and to walk and to stun my soul and amaze it\nA day with the stone and the sparrow and every marvellous thing.\n\nI have trod the curves of the Crescent in the maze of them that adore it\nCurved around doorless chambers and unbeholden abodes\nBut I walk in the maze no more; on the sign of the cross I swore it\nThe wild white cross of freedom the sign of the white cross-roads.\n\nAnd the land shall leave me or take and the Woman take me or leave me\nThere shall be no more Night or nightmares seen in a glass;\nBut Life shall hold me alive and Death shall never deceive me\nAs long as I walk in England in the lanes that let me pass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "cyclopean": { - "title": "“Cyclopean”", - "body": "A mountainous and mystic brute\nNo rein can curb, no arrow shoot,\nUpon whose doomed deformed back\nI sweep the planets’ scorching track.\n\nOld is the elf, and wise, men say,\nHis hair grows green as ours grows grey;\nHe mocks the stars with myriad hands,\nHigh as that swinging forest stands.\n\nBut though in pigmy wanderings dull\nI scour the deserts of his skull,\nI never find the face, eyes, teeth,\nLowering or laughing underneath.\n\nI met my foe in an empty dell,\nHis face in the sun was naked hell.\nI thought, “One silent, bloody blow,\nNo priest would curse, no crowd would know.”\n\nThen cowered: a daisy, half concealed,\nWatched for the fame of that poor field;\nAnd in that flower and suddenly\nEarth opened its one eye on me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dead-hero": { - "title": "“The Dead Hero”", - "body": "We never saw you like our sires\nFor whom your face was Freedom’s face\nNor know what office-tapes and wires\nWith such strong cords may interlace;\nWe know not if the statesmen then\nWere fashioned as the sort we see\nWe know that not under your ken\nDid England laugh at Liberty.\n\nYea this one thing is known of you\nWe know that not till you were dumb\nNot till your course was thundered through\nDid Mammon see his kingdom come.\nThe songs of theft the swords of hire\nThe clerks that raved the troops that ran\nThe empire of the world’s desire\nThe dance of all the dirt began.\n\nThe happy jewelled alien men\nWorked then but as a little leaven;\nFrom some more modest palace then\nThe Soul of Dives stank to Heaven.\nBut when they planned with lisp and leer\nTheir careful war upon the weak\nThey smote your body on its bier\nFor surety that you could not speak.\n\nA hero in the desert died;\nMen cried that saints should bury him.\nAnd round the grave should guard and ride\nA chivalry of Cherubim.\nGod said: “There is a better place\nA nobler trophy and more tall;\nThe beasts that fled before his face\nShall come to make his funeral.”\n\n“The mighty vermin of the void\nThat hid them from his bended bow\nShall crawl from caverns overjoyed\nJackal and snake and carrion crow.\nAnd perched above the vulture’s eggs\nReversed upon its hideous head\nA blue-faced ape shall wave its legs\nTo tell the world that he is dead.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-dedication-of-the-man-who-was-thursday": { - "title": "“The Dedication of the Man Who Was Thursday”", - "body": "A cloud was on the mind of men and wailing went the weather\nYea a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.\nScience announced nonentity and art admired decay;\nThe world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.\nRound us in antic order their crippled vices came--\nLust that had lost its laughter fear that had lost its shame.\nLike the white lock of Whistler that lit our aimless gloom\nMen showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.\nLife was a fly that faded and death a drone that stung;\nThe world was very old indeed when you and I were young.\nThey twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:\nMen were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.\nWeak if we were and foolish not thus we failed not thus;\nWhen that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us.\nChildren we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we\nHigh as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.\nFools as we were in motley all jangling and absurd\nWhen all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.\n\nNot all unhelped we held the fort our tiny flags unfurled;\nSome giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.\nI find again the book we found I feel the hour that flings\nFar out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;\nAnd the Green Carnation withered as in forest fires that pass\nRoared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;\nOr sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain\nTruth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.\nYea cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey\nDunedin to Samoa spoke and darkness unto day\nBut we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms\nGod and the good Republic come riding back in arms:\nWe have seen the city of Mansoul even as it rocked relieved--Blessed\nare they who did not see but being blind believed.\n\nThis is a tale of those old fears even of those emptied hells\nAnd none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells--\nOf what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash\nOf what huge devils hid the stars yet fell at a pistol flash.\nThe doubts that were so plain to chase so dreadful to withstand--\nOh who shall understand but you; yea who shall understand?\nThe doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain\nAnd day had broken on the streets e’er it broke upon the brain.\nBetween us by the peace of God such truth can now be told;\nYea there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.\nWe have found common things at last and marriage and a creed.\nAnd I may safely write it now and you may safely read.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-deluge": { - "title": "“The Deluge”", - "body": "Though giant rains put out the sun\nHere stand I for a sign.\nThough Earth be filled with waters dark\nMy cup is filled with wine.\nTell to the trembling priests that here\nUnder the deluge rod\nOne nameless tattered broken man\nStood up and drank to God.\n\nSun has been where the rain is now\nBees in the heat to hum\nHaply a humming maiden came\nNow let the Deluge come:\nBrown of aureole green of garb\nStraight as a golden rod\nDrink to the throne of thunder now!\nDrink to the wrath of God.\n\nHigh in the wreck I held the cup\nI clutched my rusty sword\nI cocked my tattered feather\nTo the glory of the Lord.\nNot undone were the heaven and earth\nThis hollow world thrown up\nBefore one man had stood up straight!\nAnd drained it like a cup.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-donkey": { - "title": "“The Donkey”", - "body": "When fishes flew and forests walked\nAnd figs grew upon thorn\nSome moment when the moon was blood\nThen surely I was born.\n\nWith monstrous head and sickening cry\nAnd ears like errant wings\nThe devil’s walking parody\nOn all four-footed things.\n\nThe tattered outlaw of the earth\nOf ancient crooked will;\nStarve scourge deride me: I am dumb\nI keep my secret still.\n\nFools! For I also had my hour;\nOne far fierce hour and sweet:\nThere was a shout about my ears\nAnd palms before my feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-earths-vigil": { - "title": "“The Earth’s Vigil”", - "body": "The old earth keepeth her watch the same.\nAlone in a voiceless void doth stand\nHer orange flowers in her bosom flame\nHer gold ring in her hand.\nThe surfs of the long gold-crested morns\nBreak ever more at her great robe’s hem\nAnd evermore come the bleak moon-horns.\nBut she keepeth not watch for them.\n\n _She keepeth her watch through the awns\n But the heart of her groweth not old\n For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeans\n And the tale she once was told._\n\nThe nations shock and the cities reel\nThe empires travail and rive and rend\nAnd she looks on havoc and smoke and steel\nAnd knoweth it is not the end.\nThe faiths may choke and the powers despair\nThe powers re-arise and the faiths renew\nShe is only a maiden waiting there\nFor the love whose word is true.\n\n _She keepeth her watch through the aeons\n But the heart of her groweth not old\n For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeans\n And the tale she once was told._\n\nThrough the cornfield’s gleam and the cottage shade\nThey wait unwearied the young and old\nMother for child and man for maid.\nFor a love that once was told.\nThe hair grows grey under thatch or slates\nThe eyes grow dim behind lattice panes\nThe earth-race wait as the old earth waits\nAnd the hope in the heart remains.\n\n _She keepeth her watch through the aeons\n But the heart of her groweth not old\n For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeans\n And the tale she once was told._\n\nGod’s gold ring on her hand is bound\nShe fires with blossom the grey hill-sides\nHer fields are quickened her forests crowned\nWhile the love of her heart abides\nAnd we from the fears that fret and mar\nLook up in hours and behold awhile\nHer face colossal mid star on star\nStill looking forth with a smile.\n\n _She keepeth her watch through the sons\n But the heart of her groweth not old\n For the peal of the bridegroom’s paeans\n And the tale she once was told._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-fairy-tale": { - "title": "“A Fairy Tale”", - "body": "All things grew upwards, foul and fair:\nThe great trees fought and beat the air\nWith monstrous wings that would have flown;\nBut the old earth clung to her own,\nHolding them back from heavenly wars,\nThough every flower sprang at the stars.\n\nBut he broke free: while all things ceased,\nSome hour increasing, he increased.\nThe town beneath him seemed a map,\nAbove the church he cocked his cap,\nAbove the cross his feather flew\nAbove the birds and still he grew.\n\nThe trees turned grass; the clouds were riven;\nHis feet were mountains lost in heaven;\nThrough strange new skies he rose alone,\nThe earth fell from him like a stone,\nAnd his own limbs beneath him far\nSeemed tapering down to touch a star.\n\nHe reared his head, shaggy and grim,\nStaring among the cherubim;\nThe seven celestial floors he rent,\nOne crystal dome still o’er him bent:\nAbove his head, more clear than hope,\nAll heaven was a microscope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "fantasia": { - "title": "“Fantasia”", - "body": "The happy men that lose their heads\nThey find their heads in heaven,\nAs cherub heads with cherub wings,\nAnd cherub haloes even:\nOut of the infinite evening lands\nAlong the sunset sea,\nLeaving the purple fields behind,\nThe cherub wings beat down the wind\nBack to the groping body and blind\nAs the bird back to the tree.\n\nWhether the plumes be passion-red\nFor him that truly dies\nBy headsmen’s blade or battle-axe,\nOr blue like butterflies,\nFor him that lost it in a lane\nIn April’s fits and starts,\nHis folly is forgiven then:\nBut higher, and far beyond our ken,\nIs the healing of the unhappy men,\nThe men that lost their hearts.\n\nIs there not pardon for the brave\nAnd broad release above,\nWho lost their heads for liberty\nOr lost their hearts for love?\nOr is the wise man wise indeed\nWhom larger thoughts keep whole?\nWho sees life equal like a chart,\nMade strong to play the saner part,\nAnd keep his head and keep his heart,\nAnd only lose his soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "femina-contra-mundum": { - "title": "“Femina Contra Mundum”", - "body": "The sun was black with judgment, and the moon\nBlood: but between\nI saw a man stand, saying: “To me at least\nThe grass is green.”\n\n“There was no star that I forgot to fear\nWith love and wonder.\nThe birds have loved me”; but no answer came--\nOnly the thunder.\n\nOnce more the man stood, saying: “A cottage door,\nWherethrough I gazed\nThat instant as I turned--yea, I am vile;\nYet my eyes blazed.”\n\n“For I had weighed the mountains in a balance,\nAnd the skies in a scale,\nI come to sell the stars--old lamps for new--\nOld stars for sale.”\n\nThen a calm voice fell all the thunder through,\nA tone less rough:\n“Thou hast begun to love one of my works\nAlmost enough.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "for-a-war-memorial": { - "title": "“For a War Memorial”", - "body": "The hucksters haggle in the mart\nThe cars and carts go by;\nSenates and schools go droning on;\nFor dead things cannot die.\n\nA storm stooped on the place of tombs\nWith bolts to blast and rive;\nBut these be names of many men\nThe lightning found alive.\n\nIf usurers rule and rights decay\nAnd visions view once more\nGreat Carthage like a golden shell\nGape hollow on the shore,\n\nStill to the last of crumbling time\nUpon this stone be read\nHow many men of England died\nTo prove they were not dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "glencoe": { - "title": "“Glencoe”", - "body": "The star-crowned cliffs seem hinged upon the sky\nThe clouds are floating rags across them curled\nThey open to us like the gates of God\nCloven in the last great wall of all the world.\n\nI looked and saw the valley of my soul\nWhere naked crests fight to achieve the skies\nWhere no grain grows nor wine no fruitful thing\nOnly big words and starry blasphemies.\n\nBut you have clothed with mercy like a moss\nThe barren violence of its primal wars\nSterile although they be and void of rule\nYou know my shapeless crags have Wed the stars.\n\nHow shall I thank you O courageous heart.\nThat of this wasteful world you had no fear;\nBut bade it blossom in clear faith and sent\nYour fair flower-feeding rivers: even as here\n\nThe peat burns brimming from their cups of stone\nGlow brown and blood-red down the vast decline\nAs if Christ stood on yonder clouded peak\nAnd turned its thousand waters into wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "gloria-in-profundis": { - "title": "“Gloria in Profundis”", - "body": "There has fallen on earth for a token\nA god too great for the sky.\nHe has burst out of all things and broken\nThe bounds of eternity:\nInto time and the terminal land\nHe has strayed like a thief or a lover,\nFor the wine of the world brims over,\nIts splendour is spilt on the sand.\n\nWho is proud when the heavens are humble,\nWho mounts if the mountains fall,\nIf the fixed stars topple and tumble\nAnd a deluge of love drowns all-\nWho rears up his head for a crown,\nWho holds up his will for a warrant,\nWho strives with the starry torrent,\nWhen all that is good goes down?\n\nFor in dread of such falling and failing\nThe fallen angels fell\nInverted in insolence, scaling\nThe hanging mountain of hell:\nBut unmeasured of plummet and rod\nToo deep for their sight to scan,\nOutrushing the fall of man\nIs the height of the fall of God.\n\nGlory to God in the Lowest\nThe spout of the stars in spate-\nWhere thunderbolt thinks to be slowest\nAnd the lightning fears to be late:\nAs men dive for sunken gem\nPursuing, we hunt and hound it,\nThe fallen star has found it\nIn the cavern of Bethlehem.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-horrible-history-of-jones": { - "title": "“The Horrible History of Jones”", - "body": "Jones had a dog; it had a chain;\nNot often worn not causing pain;\nBut as the I.K.L. had passed\nTheir “Unleashed Cousins Act” at last\nInspectors took the chain away;\nWhereat the canine barked “hurray”!\nAt which of course the S.P.U.\n(Whose Nervous Motorists’ Bill was through)\nWere forced to give the dog in charge\nFor being Audibly at Large.\nNone you will say were now annoyed\nSave haply Jones--the yard was void.\nBut something being in the lease\nAbout “alarms to aid police”\nThe U.S.U. annexed the yard\nFor having no sufficient guards\nNow if there’s one condition\nThe C.C.P. are strong upon\nIt is that every house one buys\nMust have a yard for exercise;\nSo Jones as tenant was unfit.\nHis state of health was proof of it.\nTwo doctors of the T.T.U.‘s\nTold him his legs from long disuse\nWere atrophied; and saying “So\nFrom step to higher step we go\nTill everything is New and True”\nThey cut his legs off and withdrew.\nYou know the E.T.S.T.‘s views\nAre stronger than the T.T.U.‘s:\nAnd soon (as one may say) took wing\nThe Arms though not the Man I sing.\nTo see him sitting limbless there\nWas more than the K.K. could bear\n“In mercy silence with all speed\nThat mouth there are no hands to feed;\nWhat cruel sentimentalist\nO Jones would doom thee to exist--\nClinging to selfish Selfhood yet?\nWeak one! Such reasoning might upset\nThe Pump Act and the accumulation\nOf all constructive legislation;\nLet us construct you up a bit--”\nThe head fell off when it was hit:\nThen words did rise and honest doubt\nAnd four Commissions sat about\nWhether the slash that left him dead\nCut off his body or his head.\n\nAn author in the Isle of Wight\nObserved with unconcealed delight\nA land of old and just renown\nWhere Freedom slowly broadened down\nFrom Precedent to Precedent …\nAnd this I think was what he meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-house-of-christmas": { - "title": "“The House of Christmas”", - "body": "There fared a mother driven forth\nOut of an inn to roam;\nIn the place where she was homeless\nAll men are at home.\nThe crazy stable close at hand\nWith shaking timber and shifting sand\nGrew a stronger thing to abide and stand\nThan the square stones of Rome.\n\nFor men are homesick in their homes\nAnd strangers under the sun\nAnd they lay their heads in a foreign land\nWhenever the day is done.\nHere we have battle and blazing eyes\nAnd chance and honour and high surprise\nWhere the yule tale was begun.\n\nA Child in a foul stable\nWhere the beasts feed and foam;\nOnly where He was homeless\nAre you and I at home;\nWe have hands that fashion and heads that\nBut our hearts we lost--how long ago!\nIn a place no chart nor ship can show\nUnder the sky’s dome.\n\nThis world is wild as an old wives’ tale\nAnd strange the plain things are\nThe earth is enough and the air is enough\nFor our wonder and our war;\nBut our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings\nAnd our peace is put in impossible things\nWhere clashed and thundered unthinkable wings\nRound an incredible star.\n\nTo an open house in the evening\nHome shall men come\nTo an older place than Eden\nAnd a taller town than Rome.\nTo the end of the way of the wandering star\nTo the things that cannot be and that are\nTo the place where God was homeless\nAnd all men are at home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-hunting-of-the-dragon": { - "title": "“The Hunting of the Dragon”", - "body": "When we went hunting the Dragon\nIn the days when we were young,\nWe tossed the bright world over our shoulder\nAs bugle and baldrick slung;\nNever was world so wild and fair\nAs what went by on the wind,\nNever such fields of paradise\nAs the fields we left behind:\n\n _For this is the best of a rest for men\n That men should rise and ride\n Making a flying fairyland\n Of market and country-side,\n Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,\n Wings upon pot and pan,\n For the hunting of the Dragon\n That is the life of a man._\n\nFor men grow weary of fairyland\nWhen the Dragon is a dream,\nAnd tire of the talking bird in the tree,\nThe singing fish in the stream;\nAnd the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,\nAnd the wonder is stiff with scorn;\nFor this is the honour of fairyland\nAnd the following of the horn;\n\n _Beauty on beauty called us back\n When we could rise and ride,\n And a woman looked out of every window\n As wonderful as a bride:\n And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,\n And the children cheered and ran,\n For the love of the hate of the Dragon\n That is the pride of a man._\n\nThe sages called him a shadow\nAnd the light went out of the sun:\nAnd the wise men told us that all was well\nAnd all was weary and one:\nAnd then, and then, in the quiet garden,\nWith never a weed to kill,\nWe knew that his shining tail had shone\nIn the white road over the hill:\nWe knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,\nWe knew that the sunset fire\nWas red with the blood of the Dragon\nWhose death is the world’s desire.\n\n _For the horn was blown in the heart of the night\n That men should rise and ride,\n Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest\n Never for long untried;\n Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,\n Never in cup or can,\n The death of a deathless Dragon,\n That is the life of a man._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-hymn-for-the-church-militant": { - "title": "“A Hymn for the Church Militant”", - "body": "Great God that bowest sky and star\nBow down our towering thoughts to thee\nAnd grant us in a faltering war\nThe firm feet of humility.\n\nLord we that snatch the swords of flame\nLord we that cry about Thy car.\nWe too are weak with pride and shame\nWe too are as our foemen are.\n\nYea we are mad as they are mad\nYea we are blind as they are blind\nYea we are very sick and sad\nWho bring good news to all mankind.\n\nThe dreadful joy Thy Son has sent\nIs heavier than any care;\nWe find as Cain his punishment\nOur pardon more than we can bear.\n\nLord when we cry Thee far and near\nAnd thunder through all lands unknown\nThe gospel into every ear\nLord let us not forget our own.\n\nCleanse us from ire of creed or class\nThe anger of the idle tings;\nSow in our souls like living grass\nThe laughter of all lowly things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-hymn": { - "title": "“A Hymn”", - "body": "O God of earth and altar\nBow down and hear our cry\nOur earthly rulers falter\nOur people drift and die;\nThe walls of gold entomb us\nThe swords of scorn divide\nTake not thy thunder from us\nBut take away our pride.\n\nFrom all that terror teaches\nFrom lies of tongue and pen\nFrom all the easy speeches\nThat comfort cruel men\nFrom sale and profanation\nOf honour and the sword\nFrom sleep and from damnation\nDeliver us good Lord!\n\nTie in a living tether\nThe prince and priest and thrall\nBind all our lives together\nSmite us and save us all;\nIn ire and exultation\nAflame with faith and free\nLift up a living nation\nA single sword to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-kingdom-of-heaven": { - "title": "“The Kingdom of Heaven”", - "body": "Said the Lord God “Build a house\nBuild it in the gorge of death\nFound it in the throats of hell.\nWhere the lost sea muttereth\nFires and whirlwinds build it well.”\n\nLaboured sternly flame and wind\nBut a little and they cry\n“Lord we doubt of this Thy will\nWe are blind and murmur why”\nAnd the winds are murmuring still.\n\nSaid the Lord God “Build a house\nCleave its treasure from the earth\nWith the jarring powers of hell\nStrive with formless might and mirth\nTribes and war-men build it well.”\n\nThen the raw red sons of men\nBrake the soil and lopped the wood\nBut a little and they shrill\n“Lord we cannot view Thy good”\nAnd the wild men clamour still.\n\nSaid the Lord God “Build a house\nSmoke and iron spark and steam\nSpeak and vote and buy and sell;\nLet a new world throb and stream\nSeers and makers build it well.”\n\nStrove the cunning men and strong\nBut a little and they cry\n“Lord mayhap we are but clay\nAnd we cannot know the why”\nAnd the wise men doubt to-day.\n\nYet though worn and deaf and blind\nForce and savage king and seer\nLabour still they know not why;\nAt the dim foundation here\nKnead and plough and think and ply.\n\nTill at last mayhap hereon\nFused of passion and accord\nLove its crown and peace its stay\nRise the city of the Lord\nThat we darkly build to-day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-last-hero": { - "title": "“The Last Hero”", - "body": "The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day\nThere was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away\nAnd drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide\nSpewed out of house and stable beggared of flag and bride.\nThe heavens are bowed about my head shouting like seraph wars.\nWith rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars\nRains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above\nThe roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.\nFeast in my hall O foemen and eat and drink and drain\nYou never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.\n\nThe chance of battle changes--so may all battle be;\nI stole my lady bride from them they stole her back from me.\nI rent her from her red-roofed hall I rode and saw arise\nMore lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.\nShe never loved me never bent never was less divine;\nThe sunset never loved me; the wind was never mine.\nWas it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?\nSilence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.\nO you who drain the cup of life O you who wear the crown\nYou never loved a woman’s smile as I have loved her frown.\n\nThe wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day\nThey ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way\nI shall not die alone alone but kin to all the powers.\nAs merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.\nHow white their steel how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave.\nCry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.\nYea I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie\nWhen on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.\nThe hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose--\nYou never loved your friends my friends as I shall love my foes.\n\nKnow you what earth shall lose to-night what rich uncounted loans\nWhat heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?\nMy loves in deep dim meadows my ships that rode at ease\nRuffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.\nTo see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given\nThe blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.\nThe skies I saw the trees I saw after no eyes shall see.\nTo-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me:\nOne sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet’s breath:\nYou never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "lepanto": { - "title": "“Lepanto”", - "body": "White founts falling in the Courts of the sun\nAnd the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;\nThere is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared\nIt stirs the forest darkness the darkness of his beard\nIt curls the blood-red crescent the crescent of his lips\nFor the inmost sea of all the earth is shake with his ships.\nThey have dared the white republics up the cape of Italy\nThey have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea\nAnd the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss\nAnd called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.\nThe cold queen of England is looking in the glass;\nThe shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;\nFrom evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun\nAnd the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.\n\nDim drums throbbing in the hills half heard\nWhere only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred\nWhere risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall\nThe last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall\nThe last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung\nThat once went singing southward when all the world was young.\nIn that enormous silence tiny and unafraid\nComes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.\n\nStrong gongs groaning as the guns boom far\n_Don John of Austria is going to the war_\nStiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold\nIn the gloom black-purple in the glint old-gold\nTorchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums\nThen the tuckets then the trumpets then the cannon and he comes.\nDon John laughing in the brave beard curled.\nSpuming of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world\nHolding his head up for a flag of all the free.\nLove-light of Spain--hurrah!\nDeath-light of Africa!\nDon John of Austria\nIs riding to the sea.\n\nMahound is in his paradise above the evening star\n_(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)_\nHe moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees\nHis turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.\nHe shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease\nAnd he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees\nAnd his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring\nBlack Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.\nGiants and the Genii\nMultiplex of wing and eye\nWhose strong obedience broke the sky\nWhen Solomon was king.\n\nThey rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn\nFrom temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;\nThey rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea\nWhere fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;\nOn them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl\nSplashed with a splendid sickness the sickness of the pearl;\nThey swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground--\nThey gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.\nAnd he saith “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide\nAnd sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide\nAnd chase the Giaours flying night and day not giving rest\nFor that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.\nWe have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun\nOf knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done\nBut a noise is in ‘the mountains in the mountains and I know\nThe voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:\nIt is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;\nIt is Richard it is Raymond it is Godfrey in the gate!\nIt is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth\nPut down your feet upon him that our peace be on the earth.”\nFor he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar\n_(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)_\nSudden and still--hurrah!\nBolt from Iberia!\nDon John of Austria\nIs gone by Alcalar.\n\nSt. Michael’s on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north\n_(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)_\nWhere the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift\nAnd the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.\nHe shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;\nThe noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;\nThe North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes\nAnd dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise\nAnd Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty\nAnd Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom\nAnd Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee\nBut Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.\nDon John calling through the blast and the eclipse\nCrying with the trumpet with the trumpet of his lips\nTrumpet that sayeth ha!\n_Domino gloria!_\nDon John of Austria\nIs shouting to the ships.\n\nKing Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck\n_(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)_\nThe walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin\nAnd little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.\nHe holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon\nHe touches and it tingles and he trembles very\nAnd his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey\nLike plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day.\nAnd death is in the phial and the end of noble work\nBut Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.\nDon John’s hunting and his hounds have bayed--Booms\naway past Italy the rumour of his raid.\nGun upon gun ha! ha!\nGun upon gun hurrah!\nDon John of Austria\nHas loosed the cannonade.\n\nThe Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke\n_(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)_\nThe hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year\nThe secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.\nHe sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea\nThe crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;\nThey fling great shadows foe-wards making Cross and Castle dark\nThey veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;\nAnd above the ships are palaces of brown black-bearded chiefs\nAnd below the ships are prisons where with multitudinous griefs\nChristian captives sick and sunless all a labouring race repines\nLike a race in sunken cities like a nation in the mines.\nThey are lost like slaves that swat and in the skies of morning hung\nThe stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.\nThey are countless voiceless hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on\nBefore the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.\nAnd many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell\nWhere a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell\nAnd he finds his God forgotten and he seeks no more a sign_(But\nDon John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)_\nDon John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop\nPurpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop\nScarlet running over on the silvers and the golds\nBreaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds\nThronging of the thousands up that labour under sex\nWhite for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.\n_Vivat Hispania!_\n_Domino Gloria!_\nDon John of Austria\nHas set his people free!\n\nCervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath\n_(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)_\nAnd he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain\nUp which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain\nAnd he smiles but not as Sultans smile and settles back the blade …\n_(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade_.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "lost": { - "title": "“Lost”", - "body": "So you have gained the golden crowns so you have piled together\nThe laurels and the jewels the pearls out of the blue\nBut I will beat the bounding drum and I will fly the feather\nFor all the glory I have lost the good I never knew.\n\nI saw the light of morning pale on princely human faces\nIn tales irrevocably gone in final night enfurled\nI saw the tail of flying fights a glimpse of burning blisses\nAnd laughed to think what I had lost--the wealth of all the world.\n\nYea ruined in a royal game I was before my cradle;\nWas ever gambler hurling gold who lost such things as I?\nThe purple moth that died an hour ere I was born of\nThat great green sunset God shall make three days after I die.\n\nWhen all the lights are lost and done when all the skies are broken\nAbove the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state\nWith a brain made rich with the irrevocable sunsets\nAnd a closed heart happy in the fullness of a fate.\n\nSo you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather\nThe kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell\nBut I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather\nFor the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "loves-trappist": { - "title": "“Love’s Trappist”", - "body": "There is a place where lute and lyre are broken.\nWhere scrolls are torn and on a wild wind go\nWhere tablets stand wiped naked for a token\nWhere laurels wither and the daisies grow.\n\nLo: I too join the brotherhood of silence\nI am Love’s Trappist and you ask in vain\nFor man through Love’s gate even as through Death’s gate\nGoeth alone and comes not back again.\n\nYet here I pause look back across the threshold.\nCry to my brethren though the world be old\nProphets and sages questioners and doubters\nO world old world the best hath ne’er been told!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-march-of-the-black-mountain": { - "title": "“The March of the Black Mountain”", - "body": "What will there be to remember\nOf us in the days to be?\nWhose faith was a trodden ember\nAnd even our doubt not free;\nParliaments built of paper\nAnd the soft swords of gold\nThat twist like a waxen taper\nIn the weak aggressor’s hold;\nA hush around Hunger slaying\nA city of serfs unfed;\nWhat shall we leave for a saying\nTo praise us when we are dead?\nBut men shall remember the Mountain\nThat broke its forest chains\nAnd men shall remember the Mountain\nWhen it arches against the plains:\nAnd christen their children from it\nAnd season and ship and street\nWhen the Mountain came to Mahomet\nAnd looked small before his feet.\n\nHis head was as high as the crescent\nOf the moon that seemed his crown\nAnd on glory of past and present\nThe light of his eyes looked down;\nOne hand went out to the morning\nOver Brahmin and Buddhist slain\nAnd one to the West in scorning\nTo point at the scars of Spain;\nOne foot on the hills for warden\nBy the little Mountain trod;\nAnd one was in a garden\nAnd stood on the grave of God.\nBut men shall remember the Mountain\nThough it fall down like a tree\nThey shall see the sign of the Mountain\nFaith cast into the sea;\nThough the crooked swords overcome it\nAnd the Crooked Moon ride free\nWhen the Mountain comes to Mahomet\nIt has more life than he.\n\nBut what will there be to remember\nOr what will there be to see--\nThough our towns through a long November\nAbide to the end and be?\nStrength of slave and mechanic\nWhose iron is ruled by gold\nPeace of immortal panic\nLove that is hate grown cold--\nAre these a bribe or a warning\nThat we turn not to the sun\nNor look on the lands of morning\nWhere deeds at last are done?\nWhere men shall remember the Mountain\nWhen truth forgets the plain--\nAnd walk in the way of the Mountain\nThat did not fail in vain;\nDeath and eclipse and comet\nThunder and seals that rend:\nWhen the Mountain came to Mahomet;\nBecause it was the end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-marriage-song": { - "title": "“A Marriage Song”", - "body": "Why should we reck of hours that rend\n While we two ride together?\nThe heavens rent from end to end\n Would be but windy weather,\nThe strong stars shaken down in spate\n Would be a shower of spring,\nAnd we should list the trump of fate\n And hear a linnet sing.\n\nWe break the line with stroke and luck,\n The arrows run like rain,\nIf you be struck, or I be struck,\n There’s one to strike again.\nIf you befriend, or I befriend,\n The strength is in us twain,\nAnd good things end and bad things end,\n And you and I remain.\n\nWhy should we reck of ill or well\n While we two ride together?\nThe fires that over Sodom fell\n Would be but sultry weather.\nBeyond all ends to all men given\n Our race is far and fell,\nWe shall but wash our feet in heaven,\n And warm our hands in hell.\n\nBattles unborn and vast shall view\n Our faltered standards stream,\nNew friends shall come and frenzies new.\n New troubles toil and teem;\nNew friends shall pass and still renew\n One truth that does not seem,\nThat I am I, and you are you,\n And Death a morning dream.\n\nWhy should we reck of scorn or praise\n While we two ride together?\nThe icy air of godless days\n Shall be but wintry weather.\nIf hell were highest, if the heaven\n Were blue with devils blue,\nI should have guessed that all was even,\n If I had dreamed of you.\n\nLittle I reck of empty prides,\n Of creeds more cold than clay;\nTo nobler ends and longer rides,\n My lady rides to-day.\nTo swing our swords and take our sides\n In that all-ending fray\nWhen stars fall down and darkness hides,\n When God shall turn to bay.\n\nWhy should we reck of grin and groan\n While we two ride together?\nThe triple thunders of the throne\n Would be but stormy weather.\nFor us the last great fight shall roar,\n Upon the ultimate plains,\nAnd we shall turn and tell once more\n Our love in English lanes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "modern-elfland": { - "title": "“Modern Elfland”", - "body": "I cut a staff in a churchyard copse,\nI clad myself in ragged things,\nI set a feather in my cap\nThat fell out of an angel’s wings.\n\nI filled my wallet with white stones,\nI took three foxgloves in my hand,\nI slung my shoes across my back,\nAnd so I went to fairyland.\n\nBut lo, within that ancient place\nScience had reared her iron crown,\nAnd the great cloud of steam went up\nThat telleth where she takes a town.\n\nBut cowled with smoke and starred with lamps,\nThat strange land’s light was still its own;\nThe word that witched the woods and hills\nSpoke in the iron and the stone.\n\nNot Nature’s hand had ever curved\nThat mute unearthly porter’s spine.\nLike sleeping dragon’s sudden eyes\nThe signals leered along the line.\n\nThe chimneys thronging crooked or straight\nWere fingers signalling the sky;\nThe dog that strayed across the street\nSeemed four-legged by monstrosity.\n\n‘In vain,’ I cried, ‘though you too touch\nThe new time’s desecrating hand,\nThrough all the noises of a town\nI hear the heart of fairyland.’\n\nI read the name above a door,\nThen through my spirit pealed and passed:\n‘This is the town of thine own home,\nAnd thou hast looked on it at last.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1927 - } - } - }, - "the-mortal-answers": { - "title": "“The Mortal Answers”", - "body": "_“… come away--\nwith the fairies, hand in hand,\nfor the world is more full of weeping\nthan you can understand.”_\n --W. B. Yeats\n\nFrom the Wood of the Old Wives’ Fables\n They glittered out of the grey,\nAnd with all the Armies of Elf-land\n I strove like a beast at bay;\n\nWith only a right arm wearied,\n Only a red sword worn,\nAnd the pride of the House of Adam\n That holdeth the stars in scorn.\n\nFor they came with chains of flowers\n And lilies lances free,\nThere in the quiet greenwood\n To take my grief from me.\n\nAnd I said, “Now all is shaken\n When heavily hangs the brow,\nWhen the hope of the years is taken\n The last star sunken. Now--\n\nHear, you chattering cricket,\n Hear, you spawn of the sod,\nThe strange strong cry in the darkness\n Of one man praising God,\n\nThat out of the night and nothing\n With travail of birth he came\nTo stand one hour in the sunlight\n Only to say her name.\n\nFalls through her hair the sunshine\n In showers; it touches, see,\nHer high bright cheeks in turning;\n Ah, Elfin Company,\n\nThe world is hot and cruel,\n We are weary of heart and hand.\nBut the world is more full of glory\n Than you can understand.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "Sounding brass and tinkling cymbal\nHe that made me sealed my ears\nAnd the pomp of gorgeous noises\nWaves of triumph waves of tears\n\nThundered empty round and past me\nShattered lost for ever more\nAncient gold of pride and passion\nWrecked like treasure on a shore.\n\nBut I saw her cheek and forehead\nChange as at a spoken word\nAnd I saw her head uplifted\nLike a lily to the Lord.\n\nNought is lost but all transmuted\nEars are sealed yet eyes have seen;\nSaw her smiles (O soul be worthy!)\nSaw her tears (O heart be clean!).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-mystery": { - "title": "“The Mystery”", - "body": "If sunset clouds could grow on trees\nIt would but match the may in flower;\nAnd skies be underneath the seas\nNo topsyturvier than a shower.\n\nIf mountains rose on wings to wander\nThey were no wilder than a cloud;\nYet all my praise is mean as slander,\nMean as these mean words spoken aloud.\n\nAnd never more than now I know\nThat man’s first heaven is far behind;\nUnless the blazing seraph’s blow\nHas left him in the garden blind.\n\nWitness, O Sun that blinds our eyes,\nUnthinkable and unthankable King,\nThat though all other wonder dies\nI wonder at not wondering.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-nativity": { - "title": "“The Nativity”", - "body": "The thatch on the roof was as golden\nThough dusty the straw was and old\nThe wind had a peal as of trumpets\nThough blowing and barren and cold\nThe mother’s hair was a glory\nThough loosened and torn\nFor under the eaves in the gloaming\n A child was born.\n\nHave a myriad children been quickened.\nHave a myriad children grown old\nGrown gross and unloved and embittered\nGrown cunning and savage and cold?\nGod abides In a terrible patience\nUnangered unworn\nAnd again for the child that was squandered\n A child is born.\n\nWhat know we of aeons behind us\nDim dynasties lost long ago\nHuge empires like dreams unremembered\nHuge cities for ages laid low?\nThis at least--that with blight and with blessing\nWith flower and with thorn\nLove was there and his cry was among them\n “A child is born.”\n\nThough the darkness be noisy with systems\nDark fancies that fret and disprove\nStill the plumes stir around us above us\nThe wings of the shadow of love:\nOh! princes and priests have ye seen it\nGrow pale through your scorn.\nHuge dawns sleep before us deep changes\n A child is born.\n\nAnd the rafters of toil still are gilded\nWith the dawn of the star of the heart\nAnd the wise men draw near in the twilight\nWho are weary of learning and art\nAnd the face of the tyrant is darkened.\nHis spirit is torn\nFor a new King is enthroned; yea the sternest\n A child is born.\n\nAnd the mother still joys for the whispered\nFirst stir of unspeakable things\nStill feels that high moment unfurling\nRed glory of Gabriel’s wings.\nStill the babe of an hour is a master\nWhom angels adorn\nEmmanuel prophet anointed\n A child is born.\n\nAnd thou that art still in thy cradle\nThe sun being crown for thy brow.\nMake answer our flesh make an answer\nSay whence art thou come--who art thou?\nArt thou come back on earth for our teaching\nTo train or to warn--?\nHush--how may we know?--knowing only\n A child is born.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "the-new-freethinker": { - "title": "“The New Freethinker”", - "body": "John Grubby who was short and stout\nAnd troubled with religious doubt\nRefused about the age of three\nTo sit upon the curate’s knee;\n(For so the eternal strife must rage\nBetween the spirit of the age\nAnd Dogma which as is well known.\nDoes simply hate to be outgrown).\nGrubby the young idea that shoots\nOutgrew the ages like old boots;\nWhile still to all appearance small\nWould have no Miracles at all;\nAnd just before the age of ten\nFirmly refused Free Will to men.\nThe altars reeled the hen-ens shook\nJust as he read of in the book;\nFlung from his house went forth the youth\nAlone with tempests and the Truth\nUp to the distant city and dim\nWhere his papa had bought for him\nA partnership in Chepe and Deer\nWorth say twelve hundred pounds a year.\nBut he was resolute. Lord Brute\nHad found him useful; and Lord Loot\nWith whom few other men would act\nValued his promptitude and tact;\nNever did even philanthropy\nEnrich a man more rapidly:\nTwas he that stopped the Strike in Coal\nFor hungry children racked his soul;\nTo end their misery there and then\nHe filled the mines with Chinamen--\nSat in that House that broke the Kings\nAnd voted for all sores of things--\nAnd rose from Under-Sec. to Sec.\nSome grumbled. Growlers who gave less\nThan generous worship to success\nThe little printers in Dundee\nWho got ten years for blasphemy\n(Although he let them off with seven)\nRespect him rather less than heaven.\nNo matter. This can still be said:\nNever to supernatural dread\nNever to unseen deity\nDid Sir John Grubby bend the knee;\nNever did dream of hell or wrath\nTurn Viscount Grubby from his path;\nNor was he bribed by fabled bliss\nTo kneel to any world but this.\nThe curate lives in Camden Town\nHis lap still empty of renown\nAnd still across the waste of years\nJohn Grubby in the House of Peers\nFaces that curate proud and free\nAnd never sits upon his knee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "nightmare": { - "title": "“Nightmare”", - "body": "The silver and violet leopard of the night\nSpotted with stars and smooth with silence sprang;\nAnd though three doors stood open, the end of light\nClosed like a trap; and stillness was a clang.\n\nUnder the leopard sky of lurid stars\nI strove with evil sleep the hot night long,\nDreams dumb and swollen of triumphs without wars,\nOf tongueless trumpet and unanswering gong.\n\nI saw a pale imperial pomp go by,\nHelmet and hornèd mitre and heavy wreath;\nTheir high strange ensigns hung upon the sky\nAnd their great shields were like the doors of death.\n\nTheir mitres were as moving pyramids\nAnd all their crowns as marching towers were tall;\nTheir eyes were cold under their carven lids\nAnd the same carven smile was on them all.\n\nOver a paven plain that seemed unending\nThey passed unfaltering till it found an end\nIn one long shallow step; and these descending\nFared forth anew as long away to wend.\n\nI thought they travelled for a thousand years;\nAnd at the end was nothing for them all,\nFor all that splendour of sceptres and of spears,\nBut a new step, another easy fall.\n\nThe smile of stone seemed but a little less,\nThe load of silver but a little more:\nAnd ever was that terraced wilderness\nAnd falling plain paved like a palace floor.\n\nRust red as gore crawled on their arms of might\nAnd on their faces wrinkles and not scars:\nTill the dream suddenly ended; noise and light\nLoosened the tyranny of the tropic stars.\n\nBut over them like a subterranean sun\nI saw the sign of all the fiends that fell;\nAnd a wild voice cried “Hasten and be done,\nIs there no steepness in the stairs of hell?”\n\nHe that returns, He that remains the same,\nTurned the round real world, His iron vice;\nDown the grey garden paths a bird called twice,\nAnd through three doors mysterious daylight came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-old-song": { - "title": "“The Old Song”", - "body": "A livid sky on London\nAnd like the iron steeds that rear\nA shock of engines halted\nAnd I knew the end was near:\nAnd something said that far away, over the hills and far away\nThere came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here.\nFor London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down,\nAs digging lets the daylight on the sunken streets of yore,\nThe lightning looked on London town, the broken bridge of London town.\nThe ending of a broken road where men shall go no more.\n\nI saw the kings of London town,\nThe kings that buy and sell,\nThat built it up with penny loaves\nAnd penny lies as well:\n\nAnd where the streets were paved with gold the shrivelled paper shone for gold,\nThe scorching light of promises that pave the streets of hell.\nFor penny loaves will melt away, melt away, melt away,\nMock the men that haggled in the grain they did not grow;\nWith hungry faces in the gate, a hundred thousand in the gate,\nA thunder-flash on London and the finding of the foe.\n\nI heard the hundred pin-makers\nSlow down their racking din,\nTill in the stillness men could hear\nThe dropping of the pin:\nAnd somewhere men without the wall, beneath the wood, without the wall,\nHad found the place where London ends and England can begin.\nFor pins and needles bend and break, bend and break, bend and break,\nFaster than the breaking spears or the bending of the bow,\nOf pagents pale in thunder-light, ’twixt thunderload and thunderlight,\nThe Hundreds marching on the hills in the wars of long ago.\n\nI saw great Cobbett riding,\nThe horseman of the shires;\nAnd his face was red with judgement\nAnd a light of Luddite fires:\nAnd south to Sussex and the sea the lights leapt up for liberty,\nThe trumpet of the yeomanry, the hammer of the squires;\nFor bars of iron rust away, rust away, rust away,\nRend before the hammer and the horseman riding in,\nCrying that all men at the last, and at the worst and at the last,\nHave found the place where England ends and England can begin.\n\nHis horse-hoofs go before you\nFar beyond your bursting tyres;\nAnd time is bridged behind him\nAnd our sons are with our sires.\n\nA trailing meteor on the Downs he rides above the rotting towns,\nThe Horseman of Apocalypse, the Rider of the Shires.\nFor London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down;\nBlow the horn of Huntington from Scotland to the sea--\n… Only flash of thunder-light, a flying dream of thunder-light,\nHad shown under the shattered sky a people that were free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "on-righteous-indignation": { - "title": "“On Righteous Indignation”", - "body": "When Adam went from Paradise\nHe saw the Sword and ran;\nThe dreadful shape the new device\nThe pointed end of Paradise\nAnd saw what Peril is and Price\nAnd knew he was a man.\n\nWhen Adam went from Paradise\nHe turned him back and cried\nFor a little flower from Paradise;\nThere came no flower from Paradise;\nThe woods were dark in Paradise\nAnd not a bird replied.\n\nFor only comfort or contempt\nFor jest or great reward\nOver the walls of Paradise\nThe flameless gates of Paradise\nThe dumb shut doors of Paradise\nGod flung the flaming sword.\n\nIt burns the hand that holds it\nMore than the skull it scores;\nIt doubles like a snake and stings\nYet he in whose hand it swings\nHe is the most masterful of things\nA scorner of the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "on-the-downs": { - "title": "“On the Downs”", - "body": "When you came over the top of the world\nIn the great day on the Downs,\nThe air was crisp and the clouds were curled,\nWhen you came over the top of the world,\nAnd under your feet were spire and street\nAnd seven English towns.\n\nAnd I could not think that the pride was perished\nAs you came over the down;\nLiberty, chivalry, all we cherished,\nLost in a rattle of pelf and perished;\nOr the land we love that you walked above\nWithering town by town.\n\nFor you came out on the dome of the earth\nLike a vision of victory,\nOut on the great green dome of the earth\nAs the great blue dome of the sky for girth,\nAnd under your feet the shires could meet\nAnd your eyes went out to sea.\n\nUnder your feet the towns were seven,\nAlive and alone on high,\nYour back to the broad white wall of heaven;\nYou were one and the towns were seven,\nSingle and one as the soaring sun\nAnd your head upheld the sky.\n\nAnd I thought of a thundering flag unfurled\nAnd the roar of the burghers’ bell:\nBeacons crackled and bolts were hurled\nAs you came over the top of the world;\nAnd under your feet were chance and cheat\nAnd the slime of the slopes of hell.\n\nIt has not been as the great wind spoke\nOn the great green down that day:\nWe have seen, wherever the wide wind spoke,\nSlavery slaying the English folk:\nThe robbers of land we have seen command\nThe rulers of land obey.\n\nWe have seen the gigantic golden worms\nIn the garden of paradise:\nWe have seen the great and the wise make terms\nWith the peace of snakes and the pride of worms,\nand them that plant make covenant\nWith the locust and the lice.\n\nAnd the wind blows and the world goes on\nAnd the world can say that we,\nWho stood on the cliffs where the quarries shone,\nStood upon clouds that the sun shone on:\nAnd the clouds dissunder and drown in thunder\nThe news that will never be.\n\nLady of all that have loved the people,\nLight over roads astray,\nMaze of steading and street and steeple,\nGreat as a heart that has loved the people:\nStand on the crown of the soaring down,\nLift up your arms and pray.\n\nOnly you I have not forgotten\nFor wreck of the world’s renown,\nRending and ending of things gone rotten,\nOnly the face of you unforgotten:\nAnd your head upthrown in the skies alone\nAs you came over the down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-prayer-in-darkness": { - "title": "“A Prayer in Darkness”", - "body": "This much, O heaven--if I should brood or rave,\nPity me not; but let the world be fed,\nYea, in my madness if I strike me dead,\nHeed you the grass that grows upon my grave.\n\nIf I dare snarl between this sun and sod,\nWhimper and clamour, give me grace to own,\nIn sun and rain and fruit in season shown,\nThe shining silence of the scorn of God.\n\nThank God the stars are set beyond my power,\nIf I must travail in a night of wrath,\nThank God my tears will never vex a moth,\nNor any curse of mine cut down a flower.\n\nMen say the sun was darkened: yet I had\nThought it beat brightly, even on Calvary:\nAnd He that hung upon the Torturing Tree\nHeard all the crickets singing, and was glad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-red-sea": { - "title": "“The Red Sea”", - "body": "Our souls shall be Leviathans\nIn purple seas of wine\nWhen drunkenness is dead with death,\nAnd drink is all divine;\nLearning in those immortal vats\nWhat mortal vineyards mean;\nFor only in heaven we shall know\nHow happy we have been.\n\nLike clouds that wallow in the wind\nBe free to drift and drink;\nTower without insolence when we rise,\nWithout surrender sink:\nDreams dizzy and crazy we shall know\nAnd have no need to write\nOur blameless blasphemies of praise,\nOur nightmares of delight.\n\nFor so in such misshapen shape\nThe vision came to me,\nWhere such titanian dolphins dark\nRoll in a sunset sea:\nDark with dense colours, strange and strong\nAs terrible true love,\nHaloed like fish in phospher light\nThe holy monsters move.\n\nMeasure is here and law, to learn,\nWhen honour rules it so,\nTo lift the glass and lay it down\nOr break the glass and go.\nBut when the world’s New Deluge boils\nFrom the New Noah’s vine,\nOur souls shall be Leviathans\nIn sanguine seas of wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-second-childhood": { - "title": "“A Second Childhood”", - "body": "When all my days are ending\nAnd I have no song to sing,\nI think I shall not be too old\nTo stare at everything;\nAs I stared once at a nursery door\nOr a tall tree and a swing.\n\nWherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs\nOn all my sins and me,\nBecause He does not take away\nThe terror from the tree\nAnd stones still shine along the road\nThat are and cannot be.\n\nMen grow too old for love, my love,\nMen grow too old for wine,\nBut I shall not grow too old to see\nUnearthly daylight shine,\nChanging my chamber’s dust to snow\nTill I doubt if it be mine.\n\nBehold, the crowning mercies melt,\nThe first surprises stay;\nAnd in my dross is dropped a gift\nFor which I dare not pray:\nThat a man grow used to grief and joy\nBut not to night and day.\n\nMen grow too old for love, my love,\nMen grow too old for lies;\nBut I shall not grow too old to see\nEnormous night arise,\nA cloud that is larger than the world\nAnd a monster made of eyes.\n\nNor am I worthy to unloose\nThe latchet of my shoe;\nOr shake the dust from off my feet\nOr the staff that bears me through\nOn ground that is too good to last,\nToo solid to be true.\n\nMen grow too old to woo, my love,\nMen grow too old to wed:\nBut I shall not grow too old to see\nHung crazily overhead\nIncredible rafters when I wake\nAnd find I am not dead.\n\nA thrill of thunder in my hair:\nThough blackening clouds be plain,\nStill I am stung and startled\nBy the first drop of the rain:\nRomance and pride and passion pass\nAnd these are what remain.\n\nStrange crawling carpets of the grass,\nWide windows of the sky:\nSo in this perilous grace of God\nWith all my sins go I:\nAnd things grow new though I grow old,\nThough I grow old and die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-secret-people": { - "title": "“The Secret People”", - "body": "Smile at us pay us pass us; but do not quite forget.\nFor we are the people of England that never has spoken yet.\nThere is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully\nThere is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.\nThere are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.\nThere is hunger in our bellies there is laughter in our eyes;\nYou laugh at us and love us both mugs and eyes are wet:\nOnly you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.\n\nThe fine French kings came over in a flutter of flags and dames.\nWe liked their smiles and battles but we never could say their names.\nThe blood ran red to Bosworth and the High French lords went down;\nThere was naught but a naked people under a naked crown.\n\nAnd the eyes of the King’s Servants turned terribly every way\nAnd the gold of the King’s Servants rose higher every day.\nThey burnt the homes of the shaven men that had been quaint and kind\nTill there was no bed in a monk’s house nor food that man could find.\nThe inns of God where no man paid that were the wall of the weak\nThe King’s Servants ate them all. And Still we did not speak.\n\nAnd the face of the King’s Servants grew greater than the King:\nHe tricked them and they trapped him and stood round him in a ring.\nThe new grave lords closed round him that had eaten the abbey’s fruits.\nAnd the men of the new religion with their bibles in their boots.\nWe saw their shoulders moving to menace or discuss\nAnd some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.\nWe saw the King as they killed him and his face was proud and pale;\nAnd a few men talked of freedom while England talked of ale.\n\nA war that we understood not came over the world and woke\nAmericans Frenchmen Irish; but we knew not the things they spoke.\nThey talked about rights and nature and peace and the people’s reign:\nAnd the squires our masters bade us fight; and never scorned us again.\nWeak if we be for ever could none condemn us then;\nMen called us serfs and drudges; men knew that we were men.\nIn foam and flame at Trafalgar on Albuera plains\nWe did and died like lions to keep ourselves in chains\nWe lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not\nThe strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought\nAnd the man who seemed to be more than man we strained against and broke;\nAnd we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.\n\nOur patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.\nBut the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish as if in pain\nHe leaned on a staggering lawyer he clutched a cringing Jew\nHe was stricken; it may be after all he was stricken at Waterloo.\nOr perhaps the shades of the shaven men whose spoil is in his house\nCome back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:\nWe only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea.\nAnd a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.\n\nThey have given us into the hand of the new unhappy lords\nLords without anger and honour who dare not carry their swords.\nThey fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;\nThey look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.\nAnd the load 01 their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs\nTheir doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.\n\nWe hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet\nYet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.\nIt may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first\nOur wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.\nIt may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest\nGod’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.\nBut we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.\nSmile at us pay us pass us. But do not quite forget.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-defeat": { - "title": "“A Song of Defeat”", - "body": "The line breaks and the guns go under\nThe lords and the lackeys ride the plain;\nI draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder\nAnd the whole of my heart grows young again.\nFor our Chiefs said “Done” and I did not deem it;\nOur Seers said “Peace” and it was not peace;\nEarth will grow worse till men redeem it\nAnd wars more evil ere all wars cease.\nBut the old flags reel and the old drums rattle.\nAs once in my life they throbbed and reeled;\nI have found ray youth in the lost battle\nI have found my heart on the battlefield.\n For we that fight till the world is free\n We are not easy in victory:\n We have known each other too long my brother\n And fought each other the world and we.\n\nAnd I dream of the days when work was scrappy\nAnd rare in our pockets the mark of the mint\nWhen we were angry and poor and happy\nAnd proud of seeing our names in print.\nFor so they conquered and so we scattered\nWhen the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold\nAnd the peace of a harmless folk was shattered;\nWhen I was twenty and odd years old.\nWhen the mongrel men that the market classes\nHad slimy hands upon England’s rod\nAnd sword in hand upon Afric’s passes\nHer last Republic cried to God.\n For the men no lords can buy or sell\n They sit not easy when all goes well.\n They have said to each other what naught can smother\n They have seen each other our souls and hell.\n\nIt is all as of old; the empty clangour.\nThe Nothing scrawled on a five-foot page\nThe huckster who mocking holy anger\nPainfully paints his face with rage.\nAnd the faith of the poor is faint and partial\nAnd the pride of the rich is all for sale\nAnd the chosen heralds of England’s Marshal\nAre the sandwich-men of the “Daily Mail.”\nAnd the niggards that dare not give are glutted\nAnd the feeble that dare not fail are strong\nSo while the City of Toil is gutted\nI sit in the saddle and sing my song.\n For we that fight till the world is free\n We have no comfort in victory;\n We have read each other as Cain his brother\n We know each other these slaves and we.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-gifts-to-god": { - "title": "“A Song of Gifts to God”", - "body": "When the first Christmas presents came the straw where Christ was rolled\nSmelt sweeter than their frankincense burnt brighter than their gold\nAnd a wise man said “We will not give; the thanks would be but cold.”\n\n“Nay” said the next “To all new gifts to this gift or another\nBends the high gratitude of God; even as He now my brother\nWho had a Father for all time yet thanks Him for a Mother.”\n\n“Yet scarce for Him this yellow stone or prickly-smells and sparse.\nWho holds the gold heart of the sun that fed these timber bars\nNor any scentless lily lives for One that smells the stars.”\n\nThen spake the third of the Wise Men; the wisest of the three:\n“We may not with the widest lives enlarge His liberty\nWhose wings are wider than the world. It is not He but we.”\n\n“We say not He has more to gain but we have more to lose.\nLess gold shall go astray we say less gold if thus we choose\nGo to make harlots of the Greeks and hucksters of the Jews.”\n\n“Less clouds before colossal feet redden in the under-light\nTo the blind gods from Babylon less incense burn to-night\nTo the high beasts of Babylon whose mouths make mock of right.”\n\nBabe of the thousand birthdays we that are young yet grey\nWhite with the centuries still can find no better thing to say\nWe that with sects and whims and wars have wasted Christmas Day.\n\nLight Thou Thy censer to Thyself for all our fires are dim\nStamp Thou Thine image on our coin for Caesar’s face grows dim\nAnd a dumb devil of pride and greed has taken hold of him.\n\nWe bring Thee back great Christendom churches and towns and towers.\nAnd if our hands are glad O God to cast them down like flowers\n’Tis not that they enrich Thine hands but they are saved from ours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-quoodle": { - "title": "“The Song of Quoodle”", - "body": "They haven’t got no noses,\nThe fallen sons of Eve;\nEven the smell of roses\nIs not what they supposes;\nBut more than mind discloses\nAnd more than men believe.\n\nThey haven’t got no noses,\nThey cannot even tell\nWhen door and darkness closes\nThe park a Jew encloses,\nWhere even the law of Moses\nWill let you steal a smell.\n\nThe brilliant smell of water,\nThe brave smell of a stone,\nThe smell of dew and thunder,\nThe old bones buried under,\nAre things in which they blunder\nAnd err, if left alone.\n\nThe wind from winter forests,\nThe scent of scentless flowers,\nThe breath of brides’ adorning,\nThe smell of snare and warning,\nThe smell of Sunday morning,\nGod gave to us for ours.\n\nAnd Quoodle here discloses\nAll things that Quoodle can,\nThey haven’t got no noses,\nThey haven’t got no noses,\nAnd goodness only knowses\nThe Noselessness of Man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-strange-ascetic": { - "title": "“The Song of the Strange Ascetic”", - "body": "If I had been a Heathen,\nI’d have praised the purple vine,\nMy slaves should dig the vineyards,\nAnd I would drink the wine.\nBut Higgins is a Heathen,\nAnd his slaves grow lean and grey,\nThat he may drink some tepid milk\nExactly twice a day.\n\nIf I had been a Heathen,\nI’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,\nAnd filled my life with love affairs,\nMy house with dancing girls;\nBut Higgins is a Heathen,\nAnd to lecture rooms is forced,\nWhere his aunts, who are not married,\nDemand to be divorced.\n\nIf I had been a Heathen,\nI’d have sent my armies forth,\nAnd dragged behind my chariots\nThe Chieftains of the North.\nBut Higgins is a Heathen,\nAnd he drives the dreary quill,\nTo lend the poor that funny cash\nThat makes them poorer still.\n\nIf I had been a Heathen,\nI’d have piled my pyre on high,\nAnd in a great red whirlwind\nGone roaring to the sky;\nBut Higgins is a Heathen,\nAnd a richer man than I:\nAnd they put him in an oven,\nJust as if he were a pie.\n\nNow who that runs can read it,\nThe riddle that I write,\nOf why this poor old sinner,\nShould sin without delight-\nBut I, I cannot read it\n(Although I run and run),\nOf them that do not have the faith,\nAnd will not have the fun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-wheels": { - "title": "“The Song of the Wheels”", - "body": "King Dives he was waiting in his garden all alone\nWhere his flowers are made of iron and his trees are made of stone\nAnd his hives are full of thunder and the lightning leaps and kills\nFor the mills of God grind slowly; and he works with other mills.\nDives found a mighty silence; and he missed the throb and leap\nThe noise of all the sleepless creatures singing him to sleep.\nAnd he said: “A screw has fallen--or a bolt has slipped aside--\nSome little thing has shifted”: and the little things replied:\n\n“Call upon the wheels master call upon the wheels;\nWe are taking rest master finding how it feels\nStrict the law of thine and mine: theft we ever shun--\nAll the wheels are thine master--tell the wheels to run!\nYea the Wheels are mighty gods--set them going then!\nWe are only men master have you heard of men?”\n\n“O they live on earth like fishes and a gasp is all their breath.\nGod for empty honours only gave them death and scorn of death\nAnd you walk the worms for carpet and you tread a stone that squeals--\nOnly God that made them worms did not make them wheels.\nMan shall shut his heart against you and you shall not find the spring.\nMan who wills the thing he wants not the intolerable thing--\nOnce he likes his empty belly better than your empty head\nEarth and heaven are dumb before him: he is stronger than the dead.”\n\n“Call upon the wheels master call upon the wheels\nSteel is beneath your hand stone beneath your heels\nSteel will never laugh aloud hearing what we heard\nStone will never break its heart mad with hope deferred--\nMen of tact that arbitrate slow reform that heals--\nSave the stinking grease master save it for the wheels.”\n\n“King Dives in the garden we have naught to give or hold--\n(Even while the baby came alive the rotten sticks were sold.)\nThe savage knows a cavern and the peasants keep a plot\nOf all the things that men have had--lo! we have them not.\nNot a scrap of earth where ants could lay their eggs--\nOnly this poor lump of earth that walks about on legs--\nOnly this poor wandering mansion only these two walking trees.\nOnly hands and hearts and stomachs--what have you to do with these?\nYou have engines big and burnished tall beyond our fathers’ ken\nWhy should you make peace and traffic with such feeble folk as men?”\n\n“Call upon the wheels master call upon the wheels\nThey are deaf to demagogues deaf to crude appeals;\nAre our hands our own master?--how the doctors doubt!\nAre our legs our own master? wheels can run without--\nProve the points are delicate--they will understand.\nAll the wheels are loyal; see how still they stand!”\n\nKing Dives he was walking in his garden in the sun\nHe shook his hand at heaven and he called the wheels to run\nAnd the eyes of him were hateful eyes the lips of him were curled\nAnd he called upon his father that is lord below the world\nSitting in the Gate of Treason in the gate of broken seals\n“Bend and bind them bend and bind them bend and bind them into wheels\nThen once more in all my garden there may swing and sound and sweep--\nThe noise of all the sleepless things that sing the soul to sleep.”\n\n_Call upon the wheels master call upon the wheels.\nWeary grow the holidays when you miss the meals\nThrough the Gate of Treason through the gate within\nCometh fear and greed of fame cometh deadly sin;\nIf a man grow faint master take him ere he kneels.\nTake him break him rend him end him roll him crush him with the wheels._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-strange-music": { - "title": "“The Strange Music”", - "body": "Other loves may sink and settle other loves may loose and slack\nBut I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back\nThough the harp be on my bosom though I finger and I fret\nStill my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.\n\nIn your strings is hid a music that no hand hath ere let fall\nIn your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;\nPleasure subtle as your spirit strange and slender as your frame\nFiercer than the pain that folds you softer than your sorrow’s name.\n\nNot as mine my soul’s anointed not as mine the rude and light\nEasy mirth of many faces swaggering pride of song and fight;\nSomething stranger something sweeter something waiting you afar\nSecret as your stricken senses magic as your sorrows are.\n\nBut on this God’s harp supernal stretched but to be stricken once.\nHoary Time is a beginner Life a bungler Death a dunce.\nBut I will not fear to match them--no by God I will not fear\nI will learn you I will play you and the stars stand still to hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-sword-of-surprise": { - "title": "“The Sword of Surprise”", - "body": "Sunder me from my bones, O sword of God,\nTill they stand stark and strange as do the trees;\nThat I whose heart goes up with the soaring woods\nMay marvel as much at these.\n\nSunder me from my blood that in the dark\nI hear that red ancestral river run,\nLike branching buried floods that find the sea\nBut never see the sun.\n\nGive me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,\nThose rolling mirrors made alive in me,\nTerrible crystal more incredible\nThan all the things they see.\n\nSunder me from my soul, that I may see\nThe sins like streaming wounds, the life’s brave beat;\nTill I shall save myself, as I would save\nA stranger in the street.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-trinkets": { - "title": "“The Trinkets”", - "body": "A wandering world of rivers,\nA wavering world of trees,\nIf the world grow dim and dizzy\nWith all changes and degrees,\nIt is but Our Lady’s mirror\nHung dreaming in its place,\nShining with only shadows\nTill she wakes it with her face.\n\nThe standing whirlpool of the stars,\nThe wheel of all the world,\nIs a ring on Our Lady’s finger\nWith the suns and moons empearled\nWith stars for stones to please her\nWho sits playing with her rings\nWith the great heart that a woman has\nAnd the love of little things.\n\nWings of the whirlwind of the world\nFrom here to Ispahan,\nSpurning the flying forests\nAre light as Our Lady’s fan:\nFor all things violent here and vain\nLie open and all at ease\nWhere God has girded heaven to guard\nHer holy vanities.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "the-truce-of-christmas": { - "title": "“The Truce of Christmas”", - "body": "Passionate peace is in the sky--\nAnd in the snow in silver sealed\nThe beasts are perfect in the field\nAnd men seem men so suddenly--\n(But take ten swords and ten times ten\nAnd blow the bugle in praising men;\nFor we are for all men under the sun\nAnd they are against us every one;\nAnd misers haggle and madmen clutch\nAnd there is peril in praising much.\nAnd we have the terrible tongues uncurled\nThat praise the world to the sons of the world.)\n\nThe idle humble hill and wood\nAre bowed upon the sacred birth\nAnd for one little hour the earth\nIs lazy with the love of good--\n(But ready are you and ready am I\nIf the battle blow and the guns go by;\nFor we are for all men under the sun\nAnd they are against us every one;\nAnd the men that hate herd all together\nTo pride and gold and the great white feather\nAnd the thing is graven in star and stone\nThat the men who love are all alone.)\n\nHunger is hard and time is tough\nBut bless the beggars and kiss the kings\nFor hope has broken the heart of things\nAnd nothing was ever praised enough.\n(But bold the shield for a sudden swing\nAnd point the sword when you praise a thing\nFor we are for all men under the sun\nAnd they are against us every one;\nAnd mime and merchant thane and thrall\nHate us because we love them all;\nOnly till Christmastide go by\nPassionate peace is in the sky.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "a-wedding-in-war-time": { - "title": "“A Wedding in War-Time”", - "body": "Our God who made two lovers in a garden,\nAnd smote them separate and set them free,\nTheir four eyes wild for wonder and wrath and pardon\nAnd their kiss thunder as lips of land and sea:\nEach rapt unendingly beyond the other,\nTwo starry worlds of unknown gods at war,\nWife and not mate, a man and not a brother,\nWe thank thee thou hast made us what we are.\n\nMake not the grey slime of infinity\nTo swamp these flowers thou madest one by one;\nLet not the night that was thine enemy\nMix a mad twilight of the moon and sun;\nWaken again to thunderclap and clamour\nThe wonder of our sundering and the song,\nOr break our hearts with thine hell-shattering hammer\nBut leave a shade between us all day long.\n\nShade of high shame and honourable blindness\nWhen youth, in storm of dizzy and distant things,\nFinds the wild windfall of a little kindness\nAnd shakes to think that all the world has wings.\nWhen the one head that turns the heavens in turning\nMoves yet as lightly as a lingering bird,\nAnd red and random, blown astray but burning,\nLike a lost spark goes by the glorious word.\n\nMake not this sex, this other side of things,\nA thing less distant than the world’s desire;\nWhat colour to the end of evening clings\nAnd what far cry of frontiers and what fire\nFallen too far beyond the sun for seeking,\nLet it divide us though our kingdom come;\nWith a far signal in our secret speaking\nTo hang the proud horizon in our home.\n\nOnce we were one, a shapeless cloud that lingers\nLoading the seas and shutting out the skies,\nOne with the woods, a monster of myriad fingers,\nYou laid on me no finger of surprise.\nOne with the stars, a god with myriad eyes,\nI saw you nowhere and was blind for scorn:\nOne till the world was riven and the rise\nOf the white days when you and I were born.\n\nDarkens the world: the world-old fetters rattle;\nAnd these that have no hope behind the sun\nMay feed like bondmen and may breed like cattle,\nOne in the darkness as the dead are one;\nUs if the rended grave give up its glory\nTrumpets shall summon asunder and face to face:\nWe will be strangers in so strange a story\nAnd wonder, meeting in so wild a place.\n\nAh, not in vain or utterly for loss\nCome even the black flag and the battle-hordes,\nIf these grey devils flee the sign of the cross\nEven in the symbol of the crossing swords.\nNor shall death doubt Who made our souls alive\nSwords meeting and not stakes set side by side,\nBade us in the sunburst and the thunder thrive\nEarthquake and Dawn; the bridegroom and the bride.\n\nDeath and not dreams or doubt of things undying,\nOf whose the holy hearth or whose the sword;\nThough sacred spirits dissever in strong crying\nInto Thy hands, but Thy two hands, O Lord,\nThough not in Earth as once in Eden standing\nSo plain again we see Thee what thou art,\nAs in this blaze, the blasting and the branding\nOf this wild wedding where we meet and part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-wife-of-flanders": { - "title": "“The Wife of Flanders”", - "body": "Low and brown barns thatched and repatched and tattered\nWhere I had seven sons until to-day\nA little hill of hay your spur has scattered …\nThis is not Paris. You have lost the way.\n\nYou staring at your sword to find it brittle\nSurprised at the surprise that was your plan\nWho shaking and breaking barriers not a little\nFind never more the death-door of Sedan.\n\nMust I for more than carnage call you claimant\nPaying you a penny for each son you slay?\nMan the whole globe in gold were no repayment\nFor what _you_ have lost. And how shall I repay?\n\nWhat is the price of that red spark that caught me\nFrom a kind farm that never had a name?\nWhat is the price of that dead man they brought me?\nFor other dead men do not look the same.\n\nHow should I pay for one poor graven steeple\nWhereon you shattered what you shall not know\nHow should I pay you miserable people?\nHow should I pay you everything you owe?34\n\nUnhappy can I give you back your honour?\nThough I forgave would any man forget?\nWhile all the great green land has trampled on her\nThe treason and terror of the night we met.\n\nNot any more in vengeance or in pardon\nAn old wife bargains for a bean that’s hers.\nYou have no word to break: no heart to harden.\nRide on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "wine-and-water": { - "title": "“Wine and Water”", - "body": "Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,\nHe ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail,\nAnd the soup he took was Elephant Soup and fish he took was Whale,\nBut they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,\nAnd Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,\n“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”\n\nThe cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink\nAs if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,\nThe seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,\nAnd Noah he cocked his eye and said, “It looks like rain, I think,\nThe water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,\nBut I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”\n\nBut Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod,\nTill a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,\nAnd you can’t get wine at a P.S.A., or chapel, or Eisteddfod,\nFor the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God,\nAnd water is on the Bishop’s board and the Higher Thinker’s shrine,\nBut I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-wise-men": { - "title": "“The Wise Men”", - "body": "Step softly under snow or rain\nTo find the place where men can pray;\nThe way is all so very plain\nThat we may lose the way.\n\nOh we have learnt to peer and pore\nOn tortured puzzles from our youth\nWe know all labyrinthine lore\nWe are the three wise mert of yore\nAnd we know all things but the truth.\n\nWe have gone round and round the hill\nAnd lost the wood among the trees\nAnd learnt long names for every ill\nAnd served the mad gods naming still\nThe Furies the Eumenides.\n\nThe gods of violence took the veil\nOf vision and philosophy\nThe Serpent that brought all men bale\nHe bites his own accursed tail\nAnd calls himself Eternity.\n\nGo humbly … it has hailed and snowed …\nWith voices low and lanterns lit;\nSo very simple is the road\nThat we may stray from it.\n\nThe world grows terrible and white\nAnd blinding white the breaking day;\nWe walk bewildered in the light\nFor something is too large for sight\nAnd something much too plain to say.\n\nThe Child that was ere worlds begun\n( … We need but walk a little way\nWe need but see a latch undone …)\nThe Child that played with moon and sun\nIs playing with a little hay.\n\nThe house from which the heavens are fed\nThe old strange house that is our own\nWhere tricks of words are never said.\nAnd Mercy is as plain as bread\nAnd Honour is as hard as stone.\n\nGo humbly; humble are the skies\nAnd low and large and fierce the Star;\nSo very near the Manger lies\nThat we may travel far.\n\nHark! Laughter like a lion wakes\nTo roar to the resounding plain\nAnd the whole heaven shouts and shakes\nFor God Himself is born again\nAnd we are little children walking\nThrough the snow and rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "a-word": { - "title": "“A Word”", - "body": "A word came forth in Galilee a word like to a star;\nIt climbed and rang and blessed and burnt wherever brave hearts are;\nA word of sudden secret hope of trial and increase\nOf wrath and pity fused in fire and passion kissing peace.\nA star that o’er the citied world beckoned a sword of flame;\nA star with myriad thunders tongued: a mighty word there came.\n\nThe wedge’s dart passed into it the groan of timberwains\nThe ringing of the rivet nails the shrieking of the planes;\nThe hammering on the roofs at morn the busy workshop roar;\nThe hiss of shavings drifted deep along the windy floor;\nThe heat-browned toiler’s crooning song the hum of human worth--\nMingled of all the noise of crafts the ringing word went forth.\n\nThe splash of nets passed into it the grind of sand and shell\nThe boat-hook’s clash the boat-oars’ jar the cries to buy and sell\nThe flapping of the landed shoals the canvas crackling free\nAnd through all varied notes and cries the roaring of the sea\nThe noise of little lives and brave of needy lives and high;\nIn gathering all the throes of earth the living word went by.\n\nEarth’s giant sins bowed down to it in Empire’s huge eclipse\nWhen darkness sat above the thrones seven thunders on her lips\nThe woe of cities entered it the clang of idols’ falls\nThe scream of filthy Caesars stabbed high in their brazen halls\nThe dim hoarse Hoods of naked men the worldrealms snapping girth\nThe trumpets of Apocalypse the darkness of the earth:\n\nThe wrath that brake the eternal lamp and hid the eternal hill\nA world’s destruction loading the word went onward still--\nThe blaze of creeds passed into it the hiss of horrid fires\nThe headlong spear the scarlet cross the hair-shirt and the briars\nThe cloistered brethren’s thunderous chaunt the errant champion’s song\nThe shifting of the crowns and thrones the tangle of the strong.\n\nThe shattering fall of crest and crown and shield and cross and cope\nThe tearing of the gauds of time the blight of prince and pope\nThe reign of ragged millions leagued to wrench a loaded debt\nLoud with the many throated roar the word went forward yet.\nThe song of wheels passed into it the roaring and the smoke\n\nThe riddle of the want and wage the fogs that burn and choke.\nThe breaking of the girths of gold the needs that creep and swell.\nThe strengthening hope the dazing light the deafening evangel\nThrough kingdoms dead and empires damned through changes without cease\nWith earthquake chaos born and fed rose--and the word was “Peace.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - } - } - }, - "sasha-chorny": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sasha Chorny", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasha_Chorny", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "green-verses": { - "title": "“Green Verses”", - "body": "The woods have turned green,\nThe pond has turned green.\nAnd green frogs\nCroak their songs.\n\nA fir-tree--a sheaf of green candles,\nMoss--a green carpet.\nAnd a green grasshopper\nConducts the song …\n\nAbove a house’s green roof\nA green oak sleeps,\nAnd two green gnomes\nSit between its chimneys.\n\nAfter breaking a green leaf,\nThe younger gnome whispers:\n“You see, that red-haired student\nIn the window?\n\nWhy isn’t he green?\nIt’s May already … May!”\nThe older gnome yawns drowsily:\n“Why don’t you just shut up?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Kevin Kinsella", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-chrysostom": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Chrysostom", - "birth": { - "year": 347 - }, - "death": { - "year": 407 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "", - "language": "ancient_greek", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chrysostom", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "from-a-paschal-sermon": { - "title": "From a Paschal Sermon", - "body": "Let no one bewail his poverty,\nFor the universal Kingdom has been revealed.\nLet no one weep for his iniquities,\nFor pardon has shown forth from the grave.\nLet no one fear death,\nFor the Saviour’s death has set us free.\nHe that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it.\n\nBy descending into Hell, He made Hell captive.\nHe embittered it when it tasted of His flesh.\nAnd Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry:\nHell, said he, was embittered\nWhen it encountered Thee in the lower regions.\n\nIt was embittered, for it was abolished.\nIt was embittered, for it was mocked.\nIt was embittered, for it was slain.\nIt was embittered, for it was overthrown.\nIt was embittered, for it was fettered in chains.\nIt took a body, and met God face to face.\nIt took earth, and encountered Heaven.\nIt took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.\n\nO Death, where is thy sting?\nO Hell, where is thy victory?", - "metadata": { - "language": "ancient_greek", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-clare": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Clare", - "birth": { - "year": 1793 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,\nOn the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,\nThe spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;\nThrough stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.\n\nThe ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,\nThe greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.\nThe fallow fields glitter like water indeed,\nAnd gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.\n\nHill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,\nAnd the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run;\nBurning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;\nWhoever looks round sees Eternity there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-dying-child": { - "title": "“The Dying Child”", - "body": "He could not die when trees were green,\n For he loved the time too well.\nHis little hands, when flowers were seen,\n Were held for the bluebell,\n As he was carried o’er the green.\n\nHis eye glanced at the white-nosed bee;\n He knew those children of the spring:\nWhen he was well and on the lea\n He held one in his hands to sing,\n Which filled his heart with glee.\n\nInfants, the children of the spring!\n How can an infant die\nWhen butterflies are on the wing,\n Green grass, and such a sky?\n How can they die at spring?\n\nHe held his hands for daisies white,\n And then for violets blue,\nAnd took them all to bed at night\n That in the green fields grew,\n As childhood’s sweet delight.\n\nAnd then he shut his little eyes,\n And flowers would notice not;\nBirds’ nests and eggs caused no surprise,\n He now no blossoms got;\n They met with plaintive sighs.\n\nWhen winter came and blasts did sigh,\n And bare were plain and tree,\nAs he for ease in bed did lie\n His soul seemed with the free,\n He died so quietly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-am": { - "title": "“I Am!”", - "body": "I am--yet what I am none cares or knows;\nMy friends forsake me like a memory lost:\nI am the self-consumer of my woes--\nThey rise and vanish in oblivious host,\nLike shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes\nAnd yet I am, and live--like vapours tossed\n\nInto the nothingness of scorn and noise,\nInto the living sea of waking dreams,\nWhere there is neither sense of life or joys,\nBut the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;\nEven the dearest that I loved the best\nAre strange--nay, rather, stranger than the rest.\n\nI long for scenes where man hath never trod\nA place where woman never smiled or wept\nThere to abide with my Creator, God,\nAnd sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,\nUntroubling and untroubled where I lie\nThe grass below--above the vaulted sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-hid-my-love": { - "title": "“I Hid My Love”", - "body": "I hid my love when young till I\nCouldn’t bear the buzzing of a fly;\nI hid my love to my despite\nTill I could not bear to look at light:\nI dare not gaze upon her face\nBut left her memory in each place;\nWhere’er I saw a wild flower lie\nI kissed and bade my love good-bye.\n\nI met her in the greenest dells,\nWhere dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;\nThe lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,\nThe bee kissed and went singing by,\nA sunbeam found a passage there,\nA gold chain round her neck so fair;\nAs secret as the wild bee’s song\nShe lay there all the summer long.\n\nI hid my love in field and town\nTill e’en the breeze would knock me down;\nThe bees seemed singing ballads o’er,\nThe fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar;\nAnd even silence found a tongue,\nTo haunt me all the summer long;\nThe riddle nature could not prove\nWas nothing else but secret love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-love-to-see-the-summer-beaming-forth": { - "title": "“I Love to See the Summer Beaming Forth”", - "body": "I love to see the summer beaming forth\nAnd white wool sack clouds sailing to the north\nI love to see the wild flowers come again\nAnd mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain\nAnd water lilies whiten on the floods\nWhere reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood\nWhere from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes\nAnd seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes\nI like the willow leaning half way o’er\nThe clear deep lake to stand upon its shore\nI love the hay grass when the flower head swings\nTo summer winds and insects happy wings\nThat sport about the meadow the bright day\nAnd see bright beetles in the clear lake play", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "love-lives-beyond-the-tomb": { - "title": "“Love Lives beyond the Tomb”", - "body": "Love lives beyond\nThe tomb, the earth, which fades like dew--\nI love the fond,\nThe faithful, and the true\n\nLove lives in sleep,\n’Tis happiness of healthy dreams\nEve’s dews may weep,\nBut love delightful seems.\n\n’Tis seen in flowers,\nAnd in the even’s pearly dew\nOn earth’s green hours,\nAnd in the heaven’s eternal blue.\n\n’Tis heard in spring\nWhen light and sunbeams, warm and kind,\nOn angels’ wing\nBring love and music to the wind.\n\nAnd where is voice,\nSo young, so beautiful and sweet\nAs nature’s choice,\nWhere Spring and lovers meet?\n\nLove lives beyond\nThe tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.\nI love the fond,\nThe faithful, young and true.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "meet-me-in-the-green-glen": { - "title": "“Meet Me in the Green Glen”", - "body": "Love, meet me in the green glen,\nBeside the tall elm-tree,\nWhere the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen;\nThere come with me.\nMeet me in the green glen.\n\nMeet me at the sunset\nDown in the green glen,\nWhere we’ve often met\nBy hawthorn-tree and foxes’ den,\nMeet me in the green glen.\n\nMeet me in the green glen,\nBy sweetbriar bushes there;\nMeet me by your own sen,\nWhere the wild thyme blossoms fair.\nMeet me in the green glen.\n\nMeet me by the sweetbriar,\nBy the mole-hill swelling there;\nWhen the west glows like a fire\nGod’s crimson bed is there.\nMeet me in the green glen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-stranger": { - "title": "“The Stranger”", - "body": "When trouble haunts me, need I sigh?\nNo, rather smile away despair;\nFor those have been more sad than I,\nWith burthens more than I could bear;\nAye, gone rejoicing under care\nWhere I had sunk in black despair.\n\nWhen pain disturbs my peace and rest,\nAm I a hopeless grief to keep,\nWhen some have slept on torture’s breast\nAnd smiled as in the sweetest sleep,\nAye, peace on thorns, in faith forgiven,\nAnd pillowed on the hope of heaven?\n\nThough low and poor and broken down,\nAm I to think myself distrest?\nNo, rather laugh where others frown\nAnd think my being truly blest;\nFor others I can daily see\nMore worthy riches worse than me.\n\nAye, once a stranger blest the earth\nWho never caused a heart to mourn,\nWhose very voice gave sorrow mirth--\nAnd how did earth his worth return?\nIt spurned him from its lowliest lot,\nThe meanest station owned him not;\n\nAn outcast thrown in sorrow’s way,\nA fugitive that knew no sin,\nYet in lone places forced to stray--\nMen would not take the stranger in.\nYet peace, though much himself he mourned,\nWas all to others he returned.\n\n* * * * *\n\nHis presence was a peace to all,\nHe bade the sorrowful rejoice.\nPain turned to pleasure at his call,\nHealth lived and issued from his voice.\nHe healed the sick and sent abroad\nThe dumb rejoicing in the Lord.\n\nThe blind met daylight in his eye,\nThe joys of everlasting day;\nThe sick found health in his reply;\nThe cripple threw his crutch away.\nYet he with troubles did remain\nAnd suffered poverty and pain.\n\nYet none could say of wrong he did,\nAnd scorn was ever standing bye;\nAccusers by their conscience chid,\nWhen proof was sought, made no reply.\nYet without sin he suffered more\nThan ever sinners did before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-images": { - "title": "“Summer Images”", - "body": "Now swarthy Summer, by rude health embrowned,\nPrecedence takes of rosy fingered Spring;\nAnd laughing Joy, with wild flowers prank’d, and crown’d,\nA wild and giddy thing,\nAnd Health robust, from every care unbound,\nCome on the zephyr’s wing,\nAnd cheer the toiling clown.\n\nHappy as holiday-enjoying face,\nLoud tongued, and “merry as a marriage bell,”\nThy lightsome step sheds joy in every place;\nAnd where the troubled dwell,\nThy witching charms wean them of half their cares;\nAnd from thy sunny spell,\nThey greet joy unawares.\n\nThen with thy sultry locks all loose and rude,\nAnd mantle laced with gems of garish light,\nCome as of wont; for I would fain intrude,\nAnd in the world’s despite,\nShare the rude wealth that thy own heart beguiles;\nIf haply so I might\nWin pleasure from thy smiles.\n\nMe not the noise of brawling pleasure cheers,\nIn nightly revels or in city streets;\nBut joys which soothe, and not distract the ears,\nThat one at leisure meets\nIn the green woods, and meadows summer-shorn,\nOr fields, where bee-fly greets\nThe ear with mellow horn.\n\nThe green-swathed grasshopper, on treble pipe,\nSings there, and dances, in mad-hearted pranks;\nThere bees go courting every flower that’s ripe,\nOn baulks and sunny banks;\nAnd droning dragon-fly, on rude bassoon,\nAttempts to give God thanks\nIn no discordant tune.\n\nThe speckled thrush, by self-delight embued,\nThere sings unto himself for joy’s amends,\nAnd drinks the honey dew of solitude.\nThere Happiness attends\nWith inbred Joy until the heart o’erflow,\nOf which the world’s rude friends,\nNought heeding, nothing know.\n\nThere the gay river, laughing as it goes,\nPlashes with easy wave its flaggy sides,\nAnd to the calm of heart, in calmness shows\nWhat pleasure there abides,\nTo trace its sedgy banks, from trouble free:\nSpots Solitude provides\nTo muse, and happy be.\n\nThere ruminating ‘neath some pleasant bush,\nOn sweet silk grass I stretch me at mine ease,\nWhere I can pillow on the yielding rush;\nAnd, acting as I please,\nDrop into pleasant dreams; or musing lie,\nMark the wind-shaken trees,\nAnd cloud-betravelled sky.\n\nThere think me how some barter joy for care,\nAnd waste life’s summer-health in riot rude,\nOf nature, nor of nature’s sweets aware.\nWhen passions vain intrude,\nThese, by calm musings, softened are and still;\nAnd the heart’s better mood\nFeels sick of doing ill.\n\nThere I can live, and at my leisure seek\nJoys far from cold restraints--not fearing pride--\nFree as the winds, that breathe upon my cheek\nRude health, so long denied.\nHere poor Integrity can sit at ease,\nAnd list self-satisfied\nThe song of honey-bees.\n\nThe green lane now I traverse, where it goes\nNought guessing, till some sudden turn espies\nRude batter’d finger post, that stooping shows\nWhere the snug mystery lies;\nAnd then a mossy spire, with ivy crown,\nCheers up the short surprise,\nAnd shows a peeping town.\n\nI see the wild flowers, in their summer morn\nOf beauty, feeding on joy’s luscious hours;\nThe gay convolvulus, wreathing round the thorn,\nAgape for honey showers;\nAnd slender kingcup, burnished with the dew\nOf morning’s early hours,\nLike gold yminted new.\n\nAnd mark by rustic bridge, o’er shallow stream,\nCow-tending boy, to toil unreconciled,\nAbsorbed as in some vagrant summer dream;\nWho now, in gestures wild,\nStarts dancing to his shadow on the wall,\nFeeling self-gratified,\nNor fearing human thrall.\n\nOr thread the sunny valley laced with streams,\nOr forests rude, and the o’ershadow’d brims\nOf simple ponds, where idle shepherd dreams,\nStretching his listless limbs;\nOr trace hay-scented meadows, smooth and long,\nWhere joy’s wild impulse swims\nIn one continued song.\n\nI love at early morn, from new mown swath,\nTo see the startled frog his route pursue;\nTo mark while, leaping o’er the dripping path,\nHis bright sides scatter dew,\nThe early lark that from its bustle flies,\nTo hail his matin new;\nAnd watch him to the skies.\n\nTo note on hedgerow baulks, in moisture sprent,\nThe jetty snail creep from the mossy thorn,\nWith earnest heed, and tremulous intent,\nFrail brother of the morn,\nThat from the tiny bent’s dew-misted leaves\nWithdraws his timid horn,\nAnd fearful vision weaves.\n\nOr swallow heed on smoke-tanned chimney top,\nWont to be first unsealing Morning’s eye,\nEre yet the bee hath gleaned one wayward drop\nOf honey on his thigh;\nTo see him seek morn’s airy couch to sing,\nUntil the golden sky\nBepaint his russet wing.\n\nOr sauntering boy by tanning corn to spy,\nWith clapping noise to startle birds away,\nAnd hear him bawl to every passer by\nTo know the hour of day;\nWhile the uncradled breezes, fresh and strong,\nWith waking blossoms play,\nAnd breathe Aeolian song.\n\nI love the south-west wind, or low or loud,\nAnd not the less when sudden drops of rain\nMoisten my glowing cheek from ebon cloud,\nThreatening soft showers again,\nThat over lands new ploughed and meadow grounds,\nSummer’s sweet breath unchain,\nAnd wake harmonious sounds.\n\nRich music breathes in Summer’s every sound;\nAnd in her harmony of varied greens,\nWoods, meadows, hedge-rows, corn-fields, all around\nMuch beauty intervenes,\nFilling with harmony the ear and eye;\nWhile o’er the mingling scenes\nFar spreads the laughing sky.\n\nSee, how the wind-enamoured aspen leaves\nTurn up their silver lining to the sun!\nAnd hark! the rustling noise, that oft deceives,\nAnd makes the sheep-boy run:\nThe sound so mimics fast-approaching showers,\nHe thinks the rain’s begun,\nAnd hastes to sheltering bowers.\n\nBut now the evening curdles dank and grey,\nChanging her watchet hue for sombre weed;\nAnd moping owls, to close the lids of day,\nOn drowsy wing proceed;\nWhile chickering crickets, tremulous and long,\nLight’s farewell inly heed,\nAnd give it parting song.\n\nThe pranking bat its flighty circlet makes;\nThe glow-worm burnishes its lamp anew;\nO’er meadows dew-besprent, the beetle wakes\nInquiries ever new,\nTeazing each passing ear with murmurs vain,\nAs wanting to pursue\nHis homeward path again.\n\nHark! ’tis the melody of distant bells\nThat on the wind with pleasing hum rebounds\nBy fitful starts, then musically swells\nO’er the dim stilly grounds;\nWhile on the meadow-bridge the pausing boy\nListens the mellow sounds,\nAnd hums in vacant joy.\n\nNow homeward-bound, the hedger bundles round\nHis evening faggot, and with every stride\nHis leathern doublet leaves a rustling sound,\nTill silly sheep beside\nHis path start tremulous, and once again\nLook back dissatisfied,\nAnd scour the dewy plain.\n\nHow sweet the soothing calmness that distills\nO’er the heart’s every sense its opiate dews,\nIn meek-eyed moods and ever balmy trills!\nThat softens and subdues,\nWith gentle Quiet’s bland and sober train,\nWhich dreamy eve renews\nIn many a mellow strain!\n\nI love to walk the fields, they are to me\nA legacy no evil can destroy;\nThey, like a spell, set every rapture free\nThat cheer’d me when a boy.\nPlay--pastime--all Time’s blotting pen conceal’d,\nComes like a new-born joy,\nTo greet me in the field.\n\nFor Nature’s objects ever harmonize\nWith emulous Taste, that vulgar deed annoys;\nWhich loves in pensive moods to sympathize,\nAnd meet vibrating joys\nO’er Nature’s pleasing things; nor slighting, deems\nPastimes, the Muse employs,\nVain and obtrusive themes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,\nFor the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,\nAnd the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,\nAnd love is burning diamonds in my true lover’s breast;\nShe sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,\nAnd I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;\nI will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,\nAnd lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.\n\nThe clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,\nThe merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,\nAnd the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest\nIn the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover’s breast;\nI’ll lean upon her breast and I’ll whisper in her ear\nThat I cannot get a wink o’sleep for thinking of my dear;\nI hunger at my meat and I daily fade away\nLike the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "what-is-life": { - "title": "“What is Life?”", - "body": "And what is Life?--An hour-glass on the run,\nA Mist retreating from the morning sun,\nA busy, bustling, still repeated dream;\nIts length?--A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;\nAnd happiness?--A bubble on the stream,\nThat in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.\n\nWhat are vain Hopes?--The puffing gale of morn,\nThat of its charms divests the dewy lawn,\nAnd robs each flow’ret of its gem,--and dies;\nA cobweb hiding disappointment’s thorn,\nWhich stings more keenly through the thin disguise.\n\nAnd thou, O Trouble?--nothing can suppose,\n(And sure the power of wisdom only knows,)\nWhat need requireth thee:\nSo free and liberal as thy bounty flows,\nSome necessary cause must surely be:\nBut disappointments, pains, and every woe\nDevoted wretches feel,\nThe universal plagues of life below,\nAre mysteries still ‘neath Fate’s unbroken seal.\n\nAnd what is Death? is still the cause unfound?\nThat dark, mysterious name of horrid sound?--\nA long and lingering sleep, the weary crave.\nAnd Peace? where can its happiness abound?--\nNo where at all, save heaven, and the grave.\n\nThen what is Life?--When stripp’d of its disguise,\nA thing to be desir’d it cannot be;\nSince every thing that meets our foolish eyes\nGives proof sufficient of its vanity.\n’Tis but a trial all must undergo;\nTo teach unthankful mortals how to prize\nThat happiness vain man’s denied to know,\nUntil he’s call’d to claim it in the skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "paul-claudel": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Paul Claudel", - "birth": { - "year": 1868 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Claudel", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "ballade": { - "title": "“Ballade”", - "body": "We went many times before, but this time is good.\nFarewell, all of you that we are expensive, the train must we do not expect.\nWe repeated this scene many times, but this time is good.\nDid you think that I can not be separated from you for good? then you see that this is not the case.\nFarewell, mother. Why weep as those who have hope?\nThings that can not be otherwise not worth a tear us.\nDo not you know that I am a passing shadow, shade yourself and appearance?\nWe shall return to you.\nAnd we let all the women behind us, the real wives, and others, and brides.\nIt’s over the embarrassment of women and kids, we are all alone and light.\nYet even at this last moment, in this solemn hour and shaded,\nLet me see your face again, until I’m dead and abroad,\nBefore in a little while I am no longer, let me see your face again! before it is to another.\nAt least take good care when you will be the child, the child who was born from us,\nThe child who is my flesh and soul and give the name of father to another.\nWe shall return to you.\nFarewell, friends! We came too far to deserve your belief.\nJust a bit of fun and fright. But here the country never left the familiar and reassuring.\nWe must keep our knowledge to us, including, as a particular thing we have suddenly enjoyment\nThe futility of man and death in one who feels alive.\nYou remain with us some knowledge, possession consuming and useless!\n“The art, science, free life”--… O brothers, what is there between us?\nLet me just go away, why do not you leave me alone?\nWe shall return to you.\nYou all stay, and we are on board, and the board is removed from us.\nThere are more than a little smoke in the sky, you will not see us more with you.\nThere are more than the eternal sunshine of God He created the waters.\nWe shall return to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Anonymous" - } - }, - "the-blessed-lady-who-listens": { - "title": "“The Blessed Lady Who Listens”", - "body": "In the church of my village of Brangues there is a chapel in the chateau:\nBecause it’s too warm outside, into its nave each day at five o’clock I go.\nA man can’t keep on walking all the time, so he might as well visit the Good Lord’s House:\nOutside the sun is blazing away, and the road screams across the square as if it wanted the whole world to arouse.\nBut inside, the Holy Mother before me, for me, she is like a glacier, so fresh and pure,\nAll white with her son in her lovely gown, all white, it’s so long I can see only the tips of her feet for sure.\nMary! Here is that fellow again, all overflowing with desire and worrying:\nAh, I’ll never have time enough to tell you everything.\nBut she, lowering her eyes, with a face tender and bland,\nLooks at the words on my mouth like someone who listens and gets ready to understand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Eugene Jolas", - "date": { - "year": 1940, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "the-day-of-gifts": { - "title": "“The Day of Gifts”", - "body": "It’s not true that Your saints have won everything: they left me with sins enough.\nSomeday I’ll lie on my deathbed, Lord, ill-shaven and yellow as a lifelong drunk.\nAnd I’ll make a general examination of myself, looking back over all my days,\nAnd I’ll see that I’m rich after all, ripe and rich with evil in its unnumbered paths and ways.\nI haven’t lost one single chance, Lord, to make matter for You to pardon.\nNow I hearten myself with vice, having long ago sloughed off virtue’s burden.\nEach day has its own kind of crime, plain to see, and I count them like some paranoid miser.\n\nIf what you need, Lord, are virgins, if what you need are brave men beneath your standard;\nIf there are people for whom to be Christian words alone would not suffice,\nBut who know rather that only in stirring themselves to chase after You is there any life,\nWell then there’s Dominic and Francis, Saint Lawrence and Saint Cecilia and plenty more!\nBut if by chance You should have need of a lazy and imbecilic bore,\nIf a prideful coward could prove useful to You, or perhaps a soiled ingrate,\nOr the sort of man whose hard heart shows up in a hard face--\nWell, anyway, You didn’t come to save the just but that other type that abounds,\nAnd if, miraculously, You run out of them elsewhere … Lord, I’m still around.\n\nAnd what kind of a man is so crude that he hasn’t held a little something back from You,\nHasn’t in his free time fashioned something special for You,\nHoping that one day the idea will come to You to ask it of him,\nAnd maybe this little that he’s made himself, kept back until then, though horrid and tortuous, will please Your whim.\nIt would be something that he’d put his whole heart into, something useless and malformed.\nJust like that my little daughter once, on my birthday, teetered forward with encumbered arms\nAnd offered me, her heart at once full of timidity and pride,\nA magnificent little duck she had made with her own two hands, a pincushion, made of red wool and gold thread.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Jonathan Monroe Geltner", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - }, - "december-25-1886": { - "title": "“December 25, 1886”", - "body": "After all, you, my Lady, made the first move.\nFor I was only one of those “standing around” in the sullen inattentive crowd,\nOne element, “standing around,” lost in the center of the trampling crowded mob,\nThat mass of bodies of the people under their clothes and of flaccid hearts which held me pinned against that pillar.\nIt was the darkest day of winter, and the blackest rainy afternoon in Paris, vespers in the semi-night of Christmas,\nAnd the sanctuary in the middle lighted up with gold and linen, and the great carpet with the arrangement of celebrants gold and lace up to the altar,\nThe ceremony sideways from my position and the lighting up of that group of people in white singing and accomplishing something during the hour of time.\nThey sing, but it would be more accurate to say they recite and release something with animation and fervor,\nThe vociferation of a long powerful sentence which begins and grows and rolls and unfurls in a gigantic curve!\nAnd there is a moment just for the organ which meditates, and then again it’s the big sentence and the wave, the long irresistible sentence upright which rises and begins all over! The roar of Israel toward its God from the beginning of time to the end! in the smoke rising up and spreading,\nOur Lady, the Woman-Church, with cries, large with God, erecting Her own Magnificat!\nAnd that wretched child I was!--Yes, myself, I repeat!--what did I do to be so carried away?\nAnd whence comes the reservoir of powerful tears which collapses? the wild cry and the heart which suddenly is outside of me?\nAll that I was is over! and all I learned in school is over!\nWretch that you are, someone looked at in the crowds, all is over! and there is nothing to do to ward off the wild overflow of hope!\nNothing to do to ward off that eruption of Faith, like the world in the depths of my being!\nNothing to do to stop that voice before the world was which says to me: you are mine!\nNothing to do to fight the impulsiveness, like someone who splits himself open, of the beast who says: I believe!\nSo, my Lady, everything that has happened since, can’t help it, you are responsible!\nAll the groping search I have tried to carry out from one end of the world to the other through a terrible disorder and relentlessness and filth!\nThe groping search all alone through the glory of God’s justice!\nThe questioning with the Mother of the Father we have in heaven,\nThe questioning with the world, and with all that is and with sin,\nAnd with this end of deciphered and broken ground to the end of the horizon,\nOf this Someone who when you push Him to the wall is not embarrassed by an alibi,\nAnd it’s suddenly a smile for an answer in our arms that child who leaves us defenceless and speechless!\nAnd so, if I have not done better, it is not my fault!\nAnd let me tell you that probably you would have done just as well to go to someone else!\nAll this paper I have piled up behind me is good for tears and laughs!\nIf I had to reread it, you would see the face I would make!\nOh if it could come about that there might be between us an agreement,\nMy Lady, that all I have done and all I have written, you might be willing to consider it as nothing at all!\nAnd that I might come before you, blessedly intact and empty,\nBasically stripped of all my insipid literature!\nLet me pause and collect my thoughts in the expectation of what will not fail to happen in a short time,\nLike someone to whom something terrible is going to happen--for example, raising his eyes and seeing you! and pretending not to be afraid!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Visages Radieux", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1955, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "dialogue-from-la-ville": { - "title": "Dialogue from “La Ville”", - "body": "> _Besme:_\nYou are like the tongue hidden in a dark place!\nIf it is true, as water gushes out of the earth,\nThat nature likewise from between the lips of the poet has opened up to us an abundance of words,\nTell me whence comes that breath made into words by your mouth.\nFor, when you speak, like a tree which with all its leaves\nTrembles in the silence of noon, peace gradually takes the place of thought in us.\nBy means of that song without music and that word without voice, we are fused with the melody of the world.\nYou explain nothing, O poet, but all things through you become understandable.\n\n> _Coeuvre:_\nO Besme, I do not speak as I wish, but I conceive in sleep.\nAnd I could not explain whence I draw that breath, for it is the breath drawn from me.\nDilating the hollow I have in me, I open my mouth,\nAnd, breathing the air, into that legacy of himself by which man each second breathes out the image of his death,\nI restore an intelligible word.\nAnd, having said it, I know what I said.\nThus I slowly succeed in making plain your suffering.\n\n> _Besme:_\nIs it not true, O Coeuvre, that every word is an answer or calls up an answer?\nAnd that is why every verse other than yours,\nMeter or rhyme, requires or contains\nAn element exterior to itself.\n\n> _Coeuvre:_\nThat is true.\n\n> _Besme:_\nBut who questions you or whom do you answer?\nWhere is that exchange, that mysterious respiration you speak of?\n\n> _Coeuvre:_\nIt is true, Besme, and you have appropriately discovered my suffering.\nI am surrounded by doubt and terrorized I feel the echo.\nEvery word is an explanation of love, but, although my heart is full,\nWho loves me, or who can say that I love?\nSuch is the wine of the grape which some drink sweet,\nAnd which one man puts in reserve in his cellar, and which another\nDistills into a burning brandy, by the transformation of sugar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1955, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "heat-of-the-sun": { - "title": "“Heat of the Sun”", - "body": "The day is harsher than the hellish regions.\nOutside, a sun strikes you down and a blinding splendor, so steady that it seems solid, devours every shadow. I perceive in what surrounds me less immobility than stupor, the arrest in the blow. For the Earth in her four moons has achieved her generation; it is time for the Bridegroom to kill her, and, uncovering the fires which consume him, to condemn her with a fatal kiss.\nWhat can I say for myself? If these flames are terrifying to my weakness, if my eyes turn away, if my body perspires, if I bend on the triple joints of my legs, I shall be accusing inert matter, but the mind of a man emerges from himself in heroic ecstasy! I feel it! My soul hesitates, but only something supreme can satisfy this enticing and horrible jealousy. Let others flee underground and carefully obstruct the cleft in their dwelling. But a noble heart, caught on the hard point of love, embraces fire and torture. Sun, redouble your flames. Burning is not enough, consume. My grief would be not to suffer enough. Let nothing impure be taken out of the furnace and nothing blind from the agony of light!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Connaissance de l’Est", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-infant-jesus-of-prague": { - "title": "“The Infant Jesus of Prague”", - "body": "It is snowing. The huge world is perhaps dead. This is December.\nBut how warm it is in the small room!\nThe fireplace filled with burning coals\nColors the ceiling with a drowsy reflection,\nAnd all you can hear is some water softly boiling.\nUp above, on the shelf, over the two beds,\nUnder his glass globe, a crown on his head,\nOne of his hands holding the world, the other ready\nTo protect those children who trust in it,\nKindly in his long solemn dress\nAnd magnificent under that large yellow hat,\nThe Infant Jesus of Prague reigns and rules.\nHe is all alone in front of the hearthside shining on him\nLike the host hidden within the sanctuary,\nThe Child-God watches over his small brothers until the day comes.\nUnheard like breath which is exhaled,\nEternal existence fills the room, equal\nTo all those innocent naive poor tots!\nWhen he is with us, no harm can come.\nWe can sleep, Jesus our brother, is here.\nHe is ours, and all these good things as well:\nThe marvellous doll, and the wooden horse,\nAnd the sheep, are there, all three of them in that corner.\nAnd we sleep, but all those good things are ours!\nThe curtains are pulled … Outside, somewhere\nIn the snow and the night a kind of hour rings.\nThe child in his warm bed contentedly understands\nThat he is sleeping and that someone who loves him is there,\nMoves a bit, murmurs indistinctly, puts his arm out,\nTries to wake up and cannot.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Corona Benignitatis Anni Dei", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "parable-of-animus-and-anima": { - "title": "“Parable of Animus and Anima”", - "body": "All is not well with the couple Animus and Anima, the mind and the soul. The time is distant, the honeymoon was soon over, during which Anima had the right to speak as she wished and Animus listened to her with delight. After all, isn’t it Anima who brought the dowry and who supports the household? But Animus did not let himself be subjected for long to this subordinate position and soon he showed his real nature, vain, pedantic, tyrannical. Anima is an ignoramus and a fool, she never went to school, whereas Animus knows heaps of things, he has read heaps of things in books, he learned to speak with a small pebble in his mouth, and now, when he speaks, he speaks so well that all his friends say one can’t speak better than he does. You want to listen to him forever. But now Anima hasn’t the right to say a word. He takes, as you say, the words right out of her mouth. He knows better than she does whät she means, and with his theories and stories he turns it out and fixes it up so that the poor simple minded girl can’t make head or tail of it. Animus is not faithful, but that does not keep him from being jealous, for deep down he knows that Anima has all the money, and he is a tramp living only on what she gives him. So he doesn’t stop exploiting her and tormenting her to get a few francs. He pinches her to make her yell, he plays tricks, invents stories to hurt her and to see what she will say, and at night in the café he tells it all to his friends. During this time, she stays at home, without a word, and cooks and cleans up as best she can after those literary gatherings which smell of vomit and tobacco. But that is exceptional. In reality Animus is a bourgeois, he has regular habits, he loves to be served always the same dishes. But something curious has just happened. One day when Animus came home unexpectedly, or perhaps he was taking a nap after dinner, or perhaps he was absorbed in his work, he heard Anima singing all alone, behind the closed door. An unusual song, something he didn’t know, and there was no way to find the music or the words or the key. A strange marvellous song. Since then he has tried slyly to make her repeat it, but Anima pretends not to understand. She shuts up as soon as he looks at her. The soul keeps silence as soon as the mind looks at it. Then, Animus hit on an idea. He is going to see to it that she thinks he isn’t there. He goes outside, speaks in a loud voice with his friends, whistles, plucks the lute, saws some wood, sings some foolish songs. Gradually Anima relaxes, looks about, listens, breathes, believes she is alone, and noiselessly goes to open the door to her divine lover. But the eyes of Animus, as they say, are in the back of his head.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Positions and Propositions", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1934, - "month": "april", - "day": 23 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "resurrection": { - "title": "“Resurrection”", - "body": "This silence of all the centuries before me: there was no way,\n it had to be given up.\nNo way to say anymore of interrogated Earth:\n she shut herself up.\nThe stars set themselves to tell what they’ve seen,\n in tumult, each to each.\nThe ground’s broken silence and whatever it knows\n it sets itself to teach.\n\nThe sun’s not yet risen; before that immense solitude\n there’s an hour yet.\nFrom Pole to Pole, there’s nothing to guard the tomb\n but the vigil of the firmament.\nWhen suddenly by moonlight the bells--fat cluster of grapes\n hanging in the tower--\nthose benighted bells set themselves to sounding\n as if by their own power.\n\nIt’s no human word. It’s the outsize sidereal\n vintage swaying\nin triumph; and the Earth, delivered Godward blow by blow,\n urges this solemn baying.\nThe soul, already half-undressed, cries out\n craving delirium.\nAnd the dead, already half-living, mix with those bells’\n mumbled magisterium.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Jonathan Monroe Geltner", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "saint-joseph": { - "title": "“Saint Joseph”", - "body": "When the tools are put in their places and the day’s work is done,\nWhen between Carmel and the Jordan, Israel falls asleep in the wheatfields and the night,\nAs when he was once a young boy and it began to get too dark for reading,\nJoseph enters with a deep sigh into conversation with God.\nHe preferred Wisdon and she had been brought to him for marriage.\nHe is as silent as the earth when the dew rises,\nHe feels the fullness of night, and he is at ease with joy and with truth.\nMary is in his possession and he surrounds her on all sides.\nIt is not in a single day that he learned how not to be alone any more.\nA woman won over each part of his heart which is now prudent and fatherly.\nAgain he is in Paradise with Eve!\nThe face which all men need turns with love and submission toward Joseph.\nIt is no longer the same prayer and no longer the ancient waiting since he has felt\nLike an arm suddenly without hate the pressure of this profound and innocent being.\nIt is no longer bare Faith in the night, it is love explaining and working.\nJoseph is with Mary and Mary is with the Father.\nAnd for us too, so that God at last may be allowed, whose works surpass our reason,\nSo that this light may not be extinguished by our lamp and His word by the noise we make,\nSo that man cease, and Your Kingdom come and Your Will be done,\nSo that we may find again the beginning with bound. less delight,\nSo that the sea may quiet down and Mary begin,\nShe who has the better part and who consummates the struggle of ancient Israel,\nInner Patriarch, Joseph, obtain silence for us!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Feuilles de Saints", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_joseph" - } - } - }, - "souvenir": { - "title": "“Souvenir”", - "body": "I remember that convent of women once upon a time, I think it was in Rio de Janeiro,\nAnd those fervent voices chanting and reciting the credo almost quite low.\nAnd that made me think of the desert, of the night of Bethlehem, in its enormous black veil,\nWith that cassocked group of shepherds who ask each other and tell each other many a tale;\nOne questions, the other answers, the young one lets the elder speak, he does not tire.\nThere is sometimes a moment of silence, it’s time to put wood in the fire.\nThus the degree of our salvation and that road leading to heaven’s throne\nAre told us humbly in a confidential tone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Eugene Jolas", - "date": { - "year": 1940, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "tenebres": { - "title": "“Tenebres”", - "body": "I’m here, the other is elsewhere, and the silence is terrible:\nWe are unhappy and we Satan valve in its screen.\nI suffer, and the other suffers, and there is no way\nBetween her and me, the other me point voice or hand.\nNothing but the night is common and incommunicable\nThe night when there worketh and impractical terrible love.\nI listen, and I am alone, and terror came over me.\nI hear the resemblance of his voice and the sound of a scream.\nI hear a little wind and my hair stand up on my head.\nSave her from the danger of death and the mouth of the beast!\nHere again the taste of death between my teeth,\nThe trench, the urge to vomit and turning.\nI was alone in the press I have trodden grapes in my delirium,\nThat night when I walked from one wall to the other, laughing.\nWhoever has eyes, eyes did he not see me?\nWhoever has ears, does he not hear me without ears?\nI know that where sin abounds, there Thy mercy abounds.\nWe must pray, because it’s time for Prince of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Anonymous" - } - }, - "the-virgin-at-noon": { - "title": "“The Virgin at Noon”", - "body": "It is noon. The church is open. I must go in.\nMother of our Lord, I have not come to pray,\n\nI have nothing to give and nothing to ask.\nI am here, my Lady, only to look at you\n\nTo look at you, to cry for joy, to know\nThat I am your son and you are there.\n\nOnly for one moment when everything stops. Noon!\nTo be with you, Mary, in this place where you are.\n\nTo say nothing, to look at your face,\nTo let my heart sing in its own language,\n\nTo say nothing, but simply to sing because my heart is too full,\nLike the blackbird which repeats its idea in that species of swift couplets.\n\nBecause you are beautiful, because you are pure,\nWoman at last restored in Grace,\n\nCreature in her first honor and her final glory,\nAs she came from God in the morning of her original splendor.\n\nIntact ineffably because you are the Mother of Our Lord,\nWho is the truth in your arms, and the one hope and the one fruit.\n\nBecause you are woman, the Eden of the ancient forgotten tenderness,\nWhose eyes look suddenly into the heart and cause the pent-up tears to flow,\n\nBecause you saved me, because you saved France,\nBecause France too, like myself, was for you a thing to be considered,\nBecause at that moment when everything collapsed, you intervened,\nBecause you saved France once again,\nBecause it is noon, because we are at this moment of today,\n\nBecause you are there for always, simply because you are Mary, simply because you exist,\nMother of Our Lord, we gives thanks to you!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poèmes de Guerre", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "the-virgin-of-brangues": { - "title": "“The Virgin of Brangues”", - "body": "I am at her feet and I am praying.\nBut she, well … you couldn’t exactly say she sees me or hears me.\nShe is reflecting.\nIn the way one says that calm, pure water reflects.\nThe infant she holds in her left arm is the one who hears me. His ear is turned toward me.\nHis heart beats …\nAnd the proof that it beats is the long thin hand, raised over him, of his mother, who listens to him.\nShe listens to him listening.\nAnd the hand of the child in its turn rests on the mother’s arm.\nUpon the maternal artery.\nThe Virgin of Brangues is a virgin who works.\nAnd here I am, showing up at a job already well under way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Jonathan Monroe Geltner", - "date": { - "year": 1950, - "month": "august", - "day": 6 - }, - "location": "Brangues", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 6 - } - } - }, - "from-the-art-poetique": { - "title": "From the “Art Poétique”", - "body": "Once in Japan, as I was travelling from Nikkô to Chuzenji, I saw, although widely separated, juxta- posed by the line of my vision, the green of a maple crown the pattern proposed by a pine tree. These pages are comments on this forest text, on the arboreal enun- ciation, in June, of a new poetics of the universe, of a new logic. The old logic had the syllogism as an organ, the new has the metaphor, the new word, the operation resulting from the joined simultaneous existence of two different things. The starting point of the first is a general and absolute affirmation, an attribution, for all time, to the subject, of a quality and a character. Without reference to time and place, _the sun shines, the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles._ It creates, by defining them, abstract indi- viduals, it establishes between them invariables. Its procedure is a naming. All the terms, once decided upon, classified by genre and species in the columns of its bookkeeping, by separate analysis, it applies to any subject proposed. I would compare this logic to the first part of grammar which determines the nature and function of different words. The second logic is like syntax which teaches the art of putting the words together, and this is practised before our eyes by na- ture itself. Science deals only with the general, and creation only with the particular. The metaphor, the basic iamb or the combination of a long and a short accent, are not manifested solely on the pages of books : they are part of the autochthonous art used by every- thing which comes into being. And do not speak of chance. The planting of this cluster of flowers, the form of that mountain are no more the effect of chance than the Parthenon or this diamond which ages the lapidary in cutting it, but the result of a treasury of plans certainly far richer and more scientific. I al- lege many proofs of geology and temperature, of na- tural and human history; our works and our means do not differ from nature’s. I understand that each thing does not exist alone in itself, but in an infinite set of relationships with all others …", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1955, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "from-the-magnificat": { - "title": "From the “Magnificat”", - "body": "My soul doth magnify the Lord.\n\nThe long painful streets and the years when I was alone and one!\nThe walk in Paris, that long street which leads down to Notre-Dame!\nThen, like the young athlete moving toward the\nOval in the midst of the eager group of his friends and trainers,\nAnd one whispers to him, and another, taking his arm, tightens the band around his muscles,\nI walked among the hastening feet of my gods! Fewer sounds in the forest at the summer feast of St. John,\nThere is a less audible song in Damascus when to the story of the waters gushing down from the mountains\nIs joined the sigh of the desert and the rustling of the tall plane trees in the free evening air,\nThan there are words in this young heart filled with desire!\nO Lord, a young man and the son of woman is more pleasing to you than a young bull!\nAnd before your sight I was like a wrestler who bends,\nNot because he thinks himself weak, but because the other is stronger.\nYou called me by my name\nLike someone who knows it, you picked me from all those of my age.\nO Lord, you know how the heart of the young is full of affection and how it dislikes its defilement and its vanity!\nAnd behold, suddenly, you are someone!\nYou struck down Moses with your power, but in my heart you are a being without sin.\nO I really am the son of woman! for now reason, and the teachings of my masters, and absurdity, hold not a straw\nTo the violence of my heart and the extended hands of this small child!\nTears! O heart too weak! O mine of tears that explodes!\nCome, all ye faithful, and worship this new born child.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cinq Grandes Odes", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Wallace Fowlie", - "date": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_baptist" - } - } - } - } - }, - "arthur-hugh-clough": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Arthur Hugh Clough", - "birth": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hugh_Clough", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "say-not-the-struggle-nought-availeth": { - "title": "“Say not the struggle nought availeth …”", - "body": "Say not the struggle nought availeth,\n The labour and the wounds are vain,\nThe enemy faints not, nor faileth,\n And as things have been they remain.\n\nIf hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;\n It may be, in yon smoke concealed,\nYour comrades chase e’en now the fliers,\n And, but for you, possess the field.\n\nFor while the tired waves, vainly breaking\n Seem here no painful inch to gain,\nFar back through creeks and inlets making,\n Comes silent, flooding in, the main.\n\nAnd not by eastern windows only,\n When daylight comes, comes in the light,\nIn front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,\n But westward, look, the land is bright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "where-lies-the-land-to-which-the-ship-would-go": { - "title": "“Where lies the land to which the ship would go?”", - "body": "Where lies the land to which the ship would go?\nFar, far ahead, is all her seamen know.\nAnd where the land she travels from? Away,\nFar, far behind, is all that they can say.\n\nOn sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,\nLinked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace!\nOr, o’er the stern reclining, watch below\nThe foaming wake far widening as we go.\n\nOn stormy nights while wild north-westers rave,\nHow proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!\nThe dripping sailor on the reeling mast\nExults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.\n\nWhere lies the land to which the ship would go?\nFar, far ahead, is all her seamen know.\nAnd where the land she travels from? Away,\nFar, far behind, is all that they can say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-p-t-coffin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert P. T. Coffin", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P._T._Coffin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-end-of-light": { - "title": "“The End of Light”", - "body": "A last and lonely thrush is calling,\nA whippoorwill is calling back;\nThe house stands on the edge of day,\nImmense and high and black.\n\nA bee goes home benumbed with honey,\nThe first star hangs above the well,\nThe dew upon the lilac trees\nMakes a burden of their smell.\n\nToo late to light the lamps this evening\nBehind the windows high or low.\nToo late tomorrow. Bricks are gone\nAlong the chimney’s topmost row.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-foot-of-tucksport": { - "title": "“The Foot of Tucksport”", - "body": "Colonel Jonathan Jethro Tuck\nWas a gold-lace man,\nHe had lived in clover all\nHis ruddy threescore span.\n\nHe had a house with porticoes\nAbove Penobscot River,\nEleven tall and handsome sons\nHad fallen from his quiver.\n\nThe forest had been beaten back\nBy his plow and harrow,\nHis cattle made a dozen hills\nGroan with milk and marrow.\n\nHe had a wife whose powdered hair\nStood high as a crown,\nThe tortoise combs upon her head\nCame from London Town.\n\nThe buckles on her slender shoes\nCame from far Peru,\nThe roses of rich France were in\nEvery breath she drew.\n\nThe King’s word was the colonel’s word,\nThe colonel gave the law,\nThe colonel’s name was on the town\nAnd all the fields he saw.\n\nNo ship put out of Tucksport Town\nWithout the colonel’s nod,\nUpon the blue Penobscot hills\nThe colonel lived like God.\n\nThere was only one small cloud\nIn all the wide blue sky--\nA bent old woman with a strange\nBlue fire in her eye.\n\nShe lived where the forest reared\nIts head against man’s coming,\nShe had much to tell herself,\nShe filled her house with humming.\n\nThe pine boughs met above her roof,\nThe partridge raised her brood\nBy her doorstep, and the owl\nOn her ridgepole whooed.\n\nThe Tucksport boys walked miles around\nRather than pass her door,\nAt night, thin tongues of flames stood up\nAlong her roof, they swore.\n\nNo white man drew her latch’s string,\nBut sons of Ishmael\nCame by night with painted cheeks\nRed as flames of hell.\n\nThe woman had a single son,\nHis arms were grown man-size,\nHe trailed his fingers in the dust\nBeside his boy-length thighs.\n\nWhen good people met the waif\nOn a woodland way,\nThey said the Lord’s Prayer to themselves\nAnd rued the ill-starred day.\n\nThe creature’s eyes were like the eyes\nOf moths by candle light,\nHis comrades were the Indians,\nHis daytime was the night.\n\nBut the forehead and the hair\nOn this misshapen man\nWere the forehead and the hair\nOf Colonel Jonathan.\n\nThe aged woman of the woods\nSmiled horrible to see\nWhen the colonel passed her hut\nIn lace and finery.\n\nHer face had had a beauty once,\nThe ruins of it showed\nWhen her blue and blazing eyes\nWere bent upon the road.\n\nNo one knew the woman’s name,\nBut she had sojourned there\nFrom the year the colonel broke\nThe wild sod with his share.\n\nWhen she walked the Tucksport streets,\nMiserable and wan,\nThe children dogged her heels and cried,\n“Red Whore of Babylon!”\n\nOne day when the wind was up\nAnd whitecaps flecked the tide,\nThe woman stopped the colonel’s coach\nAnd spoke to the colonel’s bride.\n\nThey brought the colonel’s Lady home\nWith fingers hid with rings,\nBut her face was whiter than\nThe seagull’s windy wings.\n\nShe lay and never spoke a word\nBut twisted at her lace,\nShe turned her eyes away to sea\nFrom her husband’s face.\n\nThe colonel buckled on his sword\nAnd set his jaw Like stone,\nHe rode into the windy night,\nAnd he rode alone.\n\nWhat passed between the woodland crone\nAnd Colonel Jonathan\nLay with God. ’Twas never known\nTo any mortal man.\n\nBut people living near heard screams\nAbove the wind and weather,\n“I will not go! In life, in death,\nWe will be together!”\n\nSome there were who swore that lights\nFlickered thin and blue,\nAnd there were some who smelled the smell\nOf blazing brimstone, too.\n\nAnd in the morning there were coins\nScattered on the mold\nAnd the King’s face staring up\nWith his eyes of gold.\n\nNext day, the colonel sat in church,\nThe pastor sat beside,\nAnd the woman sat below\nWith her thin hands tied.\n\n“If there be any Christian here\nTo swear this dame is evil,\nLet him speak, that we may judge\nIf she be of the Devil!”\n\nA man with deep-set eyes arose,\n“I, Jotham Merriam,\nSaw this woman ride one night\nOn a shining tam!”\n\nA woman rose. “I have no child.\nWhen I am brought to bed,\nThis scarlet woman taps my door,\nMy children are born dead.”\n\n“I, Jared Snow, have seen a track\nOn this woman’s roof,\nIt was printed on the frost\nLike a deer’s split hoof!”\n\n“I, Ebenezer Scattergood,\nFind my horses’ tails\nFull of knots, and all my joints\nAre full of red-hot nails!”\n\n“I saw this woman’s son go up\nAnd walk upon the trees,”\nAnother swore. “He walked upon\nHis hands and twisted knees!”\n\n“When this woman looks at me,”\nSpoke little Nancy South,\n“I fall down on the road, and snakes\nCome squirming on my mouth!”\n\n“I saw this woman stand one night,”\nCried Noah Waitstill Phipps,\n“A big black-man a-hugging her\nAnd kissing of her lips!”\n\nThe pastor rose, pale as a sheet,\nAnd to the judge he turned,\n“Holy Writ makes plain the brood\nOf Endor should be burned.”\n\nJudge Tuck got upon his feet,\nHe drew deep in his breath,\n“I sentence thee, Ann Harraway,\nTo be burned to death!”\n\n“Thou shalt be bound to thine own house,\nAnd we will burn the whole,\nAnd may the living, gracious God\nHave mercy on thy soul!”\n\nThere was a silence as between\nThe lightning and the thunder,\nThen the mob rose up to lay\nTheir hands upon their plunder.\n\nThe withered woman shrieked and called\nOn God and Holy Writ,\n“If I wear scarlet, there he stands\nWho painted me with it!”\n\n“There stands the father of my son\nWho swore to wed with me!”\n“Out and away!” the pastor cried,\n“On this foul blasphemy!”\n\nHands reached out and stopped her mouth,\nHands reached and tore her gown,\nThe people dragged her from the church\nAnd out of Tucksport Town.\n\nThe afternoon was blue and bright,\nBut thunder reared its crest,\nWhiter than the driven snow,\nHigh up in the west.\n\nThey dragged the crone to her poor hut,\nThey tied her to her door,\nThey brought and heaped the withered boughs\nAgainst the rags she wore.\n\nThe thunderhead touched on the sun,\nAnd a shadow came,\nJust as Colonel Tuck bent down\nAnd touched the boughs with flame.\n\nAs the fire bit the wood,\nThe woman’s voice rang clear,\nAnd every person in the place\nHer dying words could hear:\n\n“I curse thee now, Jonathan Tuck,\nWith my dying breath!\nI curse thee for thy days in life\nAnd thy days in death!”\n\n“Thy life on earth shall be a hell,\nAnd hell shall be thy grave,\nAwake or sleeping, quick or dead,\nNaught thy soul may save!”\n\n“The sweat that trickles from thy brow\nShall bring to thee no peace,\nThy fruit shall wither, and thy dreams\nShall bring thee no release.”\n\n“By sun, by starlight, sick or hale,\nI will be with thee still,\nI will go beside thy way\nTo turn all things to ill.”\n\n“And so long as a monument\nMarks a grave of thine,\nSo long shall my curse inscribe\nThy tombstone with my sign!”\n\nShe finished, and a thunderclap\nRent the heavens after.\nThe flames leapt up and folded her,\nAnd she burst into laughter.\n\nPeal on peal the thunder rolled,\nAnd every spine there tingled\nTo hear the woman laugh at death,\nAnd mirth and thunder mingled.\n\nThe fire took the little things\nThe woman had befriended,\nMice and tiny finches screamed,\nAnd in the red blaze ended.\n\nA little adder, scorched and hurt,\nCrept from out the coal,\n“See!” the people hissed, “there goes\nTo Satan her lost soul!”\n\nThe storm burst blackly overhead,\nThe lightning forked its tongue,\nOne of the woman’s bony legs\nIn the fire swung.\n\nAt that instant from the woods\nThere came a mortal groan,\nThe old crone’s son came running out\nAnd seized the smoking bone.\n\nHe clasped the poor foot to his heart,\nAnd lit by thunder light,\nThe dwarf ran to the woods and plunged\nForever from men’s sight.\n\nThen the rain came and the wind\nAnd washed the earth like new,\nAnd men went home and thanked the Lord\nThe sorry work was through.\n\nColonel Tuck went back to see\nTo oxen and to ships,\nBut jest or smile there never was\nAgain upon his lips.\n\nThe colonel’s lady lingered on\nUntil the Autumn rains,\nThe colonel buried her when leaves\nLay golden in the lanes.\n\nColonel Tuck lived to himself\nIn his empty house,\nPeople said the man was wrong\nNot to take a spouse.\n\nHis cattle covered all the hills,\nHis grandsons spread like grass,\nEvery man in Tucksport touched\nHis forelock as he’d pass.\n\nBut the lord of Tucksport went\nLike a man apart,\nThe memory of his wife, folks said,\nHad closed and sealed his heart.\n\nWhen he was old and full of years,\nThey bore him on their shoulders\nTo his grave, and set above\nOne of his own boulders.\n\nBut on the granite face of it,\nBelow his honored name,\nWithin a week of burial,\nA strange, dark symbol came.\n\nIt was like a bony foot\nNo scrubbing could erase.\nThe family had the mason come\nAnd cut another face.\n\nBut in a day the foot returned,\nAnd memories were stirred,\nPeople put their heads together,\nAnd whisperings were heard.\n\nThe family raised a granite wall\nAround their founder’s tomb,\nBut the whisperings went on\nAnd the word of doom.\n\nTwo hundred Winters have not washed\nThe Tucksport stain away,\nThe foot is on the colonel’s grave\nTill the Judgment Day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "the-hill-place": { - "title": "“The Hill Place”", - "body": "The Tompkins homestead was the sort\nMen used to build when men could be\nAt home in safety with their thoughts,\nTheir God, and their fecundity.\n\nSet high upon a hill, it seemed\nConsecrate to some design,\nA house the older gods would choose\nFor ends malignant yet divine.\n\nThe family here were six removes\nFrom the man who built it strong.\nPerhaps they were unwise to stay\nIn one dwelling-place so long.\n\nFor one son went about the place\nWith footsteps very light and wary\nAnd nothing lit behind his eyes;\nAnd two of the girls would never marry.\n\nThere were too many silences\nIn the rooms above, below;\nThere was an open-chamber room\nWhere only the mother used to go.\n\nOne of the meals was served upstairs.\nThe grandfather with a puzzled face\nSat quiet, but could not recall\nWhat was amiss about the place.\n\nIf one could still believe in hands\nBehind the dark as back of light,\nIt may be that high house would wear\nThin flames about it in the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-secret-heart": { - "title": "“The Secret Heart”", - "body": "Across the years he could recall\nHis father one way best of all.\n\nIn the stillest hour of night\nThe boy awakened to a light.\n\nHalf in dreams, he saw his sire\nWith his great hands full of fire.\n\nThe man had struck a match to see\nIf his son slept peacefully.\n\nHe held his palms each side the spark\nHis love had kindled in the dark.\n\nHis two hands were curved apart\nIn the semblance of a heart.\n\nHe wore, it seemed to his small son,\nA bare heart on his hidden one,\n\nA heart that gave out such a glow\nNo son awake could bear to know.\n\nIt showed a look upon a face\nToo tender for the day to trace.\n\nOne instant, it lit all about,\nAnd then the secret heart went out.\n\nBut it shone long enough for one\nTo know that hands held up the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "fathers_day" - } - } - }, - "the-way-to-know-a-father": { - "title": "“The Way To Know A Father”", - "body": "No man knows his father till he sees\nHis father in the son upon his knees;\nThe best way for a man to understand\nHis father is to hold him by the hand.\n\nWhen he is small enough, a father’s face\nIs full of starriness and looks like space\nAbove the trees upon an August night,\nAnd his dark future is unfathomed light.\n\nWhat his son and his son’s sons will be\nIs there for any man to see;\nThe father sits with wonder in his gaze\nTo see the sure design of his own days.\n\nWhat was behind the sorrow and the lust,\nWhat was behind his father’s work in dust\nWas holy, single life unearthly keen,\nClean as the petals on a star are clean.\n\nA grandson tells what no man dares to tell\nWhen he is deep in living and feels well:\nThat any son is more than one man’s heir\nAnd wears all proud men’s glory on his hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "fathers_day" - } - } - } - } - }, - "leonard-cohen": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Leonard Cohen", - "birth": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2016 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 29 - }, - "poems": { - "anthem": { - "title": "“Anthem”", - "body": "The birds they sang\nat the break of day\nStart again\nI heard them say\nDon’t dwell on what\nhas passed away\nor what is yet to be.\nAh the wars they will\nbe fought again\nThe holy dove\nShe will be caught again\nbought and sold\nand bought again\nthe dove is never free.\nRing the bells that still can ring\nForget your perfect offering\nThere is a crack in everything\nThat’s how the light gets in.\nWe asked for signs\nthe signs were sent:\nthe birth betrayed\nthe marriage spent\nYeah the widowhood\nof every government--\nsigns for all to see.\nI can’t run no more\nwith that lawless crowd\nwhile the killers in high places\nsay their prayers out loud.\nBut they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up\na thundercloud\nand they’re going to hear from me.\nRing the bells that still can ring …\nYou can add up the parts\nbut you won’t have the sum\nYou can strike up the march,\nthere is no drum\nEvery heart, every heart\nto love will come\nbut like a refugee.\nRing the bells that still can ring\nForget your perfect offering\nThere is a crack, a crack in everything\nThat’s how the light gets in.\nRing the bells that still can ring\nForget your perfect offering\nThere is a crack, a crack in everything\nThat’s how the light gets in.\nThat’s how the light gets in.\nThat’s how the light gets in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "beneath-my-hands": { - "title": "“Beneath my hands …”", - "body": "Beneath my hands\nyour small breasts\nare the upturned bellies\nof breathing fallen sparrows.\n\nWherever you move\nI hear the sounds of closing wings\nof falling wings.\n\nI am speechless\nbecause you have fallen beside me\nbecause your eyelashes\nare the spines of tiny fragile animals.\n\nI dread the time\nwhen your mouth\nbegins to call me hunter.\n\nWhen you call me close\nto tell me\nyour body is not beautiful\nI want to summon\nthe eyes and hidden mouths\nof stone and light and water\nto testify against you.\n\nI want them\nto surrender before you\nthe trembling rhyme of your face\nfrom their deep caskets.\n\nWhen you call me close\nto tell me\nyour body is not beautiful\nI want my body and my hands\nto be pools\nfor your looking and laughing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bird-on-the-wire": { - "title": "“Bird on the Wire”", - "body": "Like a bird on the wire,\nlike a drunk in a midnight choir\nI have tried in my way to be free.\n\nLike a worm on a hook,\nlike a knight from some old fashioned book\nI have saved all my ribbons for thee.\n\nIf I, if I have been unkind,\nI hope that you can just let it go by.\nIf I, if I have been untrue\nI hope you know it was never to you.\n\nLike a baby, stillborn,\nlike a beast with his horn\nI have torn everyone who reached out for me.\n\nBut I swear by this song\nand by all that I have done wrong\nI will make it all up to thee.\n\nI saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,\nhe said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”\nAnd a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,\nshe cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”\n\nOh like a bird on the wire,\nlike a drunk in a midnight choir\nI have tried in my way to be free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dance-me-to-the-end-of-love": { - "title": "“Dance Me to the End of Love”", - "body": "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin\nDance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in\nLift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the end of love\nOh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone\nLet me feel you moving like they do in Babylon\nShow me slowly what I only know the limits of\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on\nDance me very tenderly and dance me very long\nWe’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the children who are asking to be born\nDance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn\nRaise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to your beauty with a burning violin\nDance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in\nTouch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the end of love\nDance me to the end of love", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "do-not-forget-old-friends": { - "title": "“Do not forget old friends …”", - "body": "Do not forget old friends\nyou knew long before I met you\nthe times I know nothing about\nbeing someone\nwho lives by himself\nand only visits you on a raid", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-future": { - "title": "“The Future”", - "body": "Give me back my broken night\nmy mirrored room, my secret life\nit’s lonely here,\nthere’s no one left to torture\nGive me absolute control\nover every living soul\nAnd lie beside me, baby,\nthat’s an order!\nGive me crack and anal sex\nTake the only tree that’s left\nand stuff it up the hole\nin your culture\nGive me back the Berlin wall\ngive me Stalin and St Paul\nI’ve seen the future, brother:\nit is murder.\nThings are going to slide, slide in all directions\nWon’t be nothing\nNothing you can measure anymore\nThe blizzard, the blizzard of the world\nhas crossed the threshold\nand it has overturned\nthe order of the soul\nWhen they said REPENT REPENT\nI wonder what they meant\nWhen they said REPENT REPENT\nI wonder what they meant\nWhen they said REPENT REPENT\nI wonder what they meant\nYou don’t know me from the wind\nyou never will, you never did\nI’m the little jew\nwho wrote the Bible\nI’ve seen the nations rise and fall\nI’ve heard their stories, heard them all\nbut love’s the only engine of survival\nYour servant here, he has been told\nto say it clear, to say it cold:\nIt’s over, it ain’t going\nany further\nAnd now the wheels of heaven stop\nyou feel the devil’s riding crop\nGet ready for the future:\nit is murder\nThings are going to slide …\nThere’ll be the breaking of the ancient\nwestern code\nYour private life will suddenly explode\nThere’ll be phantoms\nThere’ll be fires on the road\nand the white man dancing\nYou’ll see a woman\nhanging upside down\nher features covered by her fallen gown\nand all the lousy little poets\ncoming round\ntryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson\nand the white man dancin’\nGive me back the Berlin wall\nGive me Stalin and St Paul\nGive me Christ\nor give me Hiroshima\nDestroy another fetus now\nWe don’t like children anyhow\nI’ve seen the future, baby:\nit is murder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-genius": { - "title": "“The Genius”", - "body": "For you\nI will be a ghetto jew\nand dance\nand put white stockings\non my twisted limbs\nand poison wells\nacross the town\n\nFor you\nI will be an apostate jew\nand tell the Spanish priest\nof the blood vow\nin the Talmud\nand where the bones\nof the child are hid\n\nFor you\nI will be a banker jew\nand bring to ruin\na proud old hunting king\nand end his line\n\nFor you\nI will be a Broadway jew\nand cry in theatres\nfor my mother\nand sell bargain goods\nbeneath the counter\n\nFor you\nI will be a doctor jew\nand search\nin all the garbage cans for foreskins\nto sew back again\n\nFor you\nI will be a Dachau jew\nand lie down in lime\nwith twisted limbs\nand bloated pain\nno mind can understand", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hey-thats-no-way-to-say-goodbye": { - "title": "“Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye”", - "body": "I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,\nyour hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,\nyes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,\nin city and in forest they smiled like me and you,\nbut now it’s come to distances and both of us must try,\nyour eyes are soft with sorrow,\nHey, that’s no way to say goodbye.\nI’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,\nwalk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme\nyou know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,\nit’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,\n\nbut let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie,\nyour eyes are soft with sorrow,\nHey, that’s no way to say goodbye.\nI loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,\nyour hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,\nyes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,\nin city and in forest they smiled like me and you,\nbut let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie,\nyour eyes are soft with sorrow,\nHey, that’s no way to say goodbye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-almost-went-to-bed": { - "title": "“I almost went to bed …”", - "body": " I almost went to bed\nwithout remembering\nthe four white violets\nI put in the button-hole\nof your green sweater\n\nand how I kissed you then\nand you kissed me\nshy as though I’d\nnever been your lover", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-have-not-lingered-in-european-monosteries": { - "title": "“I have not lingered in European monosteries …”", - "body": "I have not lingered in European monosteries\nand discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights\nwho fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;\nI have not parted the grasses\nor purposefully left them thatched.\n\nI have not held my breath\nso that I might hear the breathing of God\nor tamed my heartbeat with an exercise,\nor starved for visions.\nAlthough I have watched him often\nI have not become the heron,\nleaving my body on the shore,\nand I have not become the luminous trout,\nleaving my body in the air.\n\nI have not worshipped wounds and relics,\nor combs of iron,\nor bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.\n\nI have not been unhappy for ten thousands years.\nDuring the day I laugh and during the night I sleep.\nMy favourite cooks prepare my meals,\nmy body cleans and repairs itself,\nand all my work goes well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-heard-of-a-man": { - "title": "“I heard of a man …”", - "body": "I heard of a man\nwho says words so beautifully\nthat if he only speaks their name\nwomen give themselves to him.\n\nIf I am dumb beside your body\nwhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.\nit is because I hear a man climb stairs\nand clear his throat outside the door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-long-to-hold-some-lady": { - "title": "“I long to hold some lady …”", - "body": "I long to hold some lady\nFor my love is far away,\nAnd will not come tomorrow\nAnd was not here today.\n\nThere is no flesh so perfect\nAs on my lady’s bone,\nAnd yet it seems so distant\nWhen I am all alone:\n\nAs though she were a masterpiece\nIn some castled town,\nThat pilgrims come to visit\nAnd priests to copy down.\n\nAlas, I cannot travel\nTo a love I have so deep\nOr sleep too close beside\nA love I want to keep.\n\nBut I long to hold some lady,\nFor flesh is warm and sweet.\nCold skeletons go marching\nEach night beside my feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-lost-my-way-i-forgot-to-call-on-your-name": { - "title": "“I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name …”", - "body": "I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-perceived-the-outline-of-your-breasts": { - "title": "“I perceived the outline of your breasts …”", - "body": "I perceived the outline of your breasts\nthrough your Hallowe’en costume\nI knew you were falling in love with me\nbecause no other man could perceive\nthe advance of your bosom into his imagination\nIt was a rupture of your unusual modesty\nfor me and me alone\nthrough which you impressed upon my shapeless hunger\nthe incomparable and final outline of your breasts\nlike two deep fossil shells\nwhich remained all night long and probably forever", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "i-stopped-to-listen-but-he-did-not-come": { - "title": "“I stopped to listen, but he did not come …”", - "body": "I stopped to listen, but he did not come. I begain again with a sense of loss. As this sense deepened I heard him again. I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance. This was a strategy, and didn’t work at all. Much time, years were wasted in such a minor mode. I bargain now. I offer buttons for his love. I beg for mercy. Slowly he yields. Haltingly he moves toward his throne. Reluctantly the angels grant to one another permission to sing. In a transition so delicate it cannot be marked, the court is established on beams of golden symmetry, and once again I am a singer in the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-wonder-how-many-people-in-this-city": { - "title": "“I wonder how many people in this city …”", - "body": "I wonder how many people in this city\nlive in furnished rooms.\nLate at night when I look out at the buildings\nI swear I see a face in every window\nlooking back at me\nand when I turn away\nI wonder how many go back to their desks\nand write this down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "im-your-man": { - "title": "“I’m Your Man”", - "body": "If you want a lover\nI’ll do anything you ask me to\nAnd if you want another kind of love\nI’ll wear a mask for you\nIf you want a partner\nTake my hand\nOr if you want to strike me down in anger\nHere I stand\nI’m your man\nIf you want a boxer\nI will step into the ring for you\nAnd if you want a doctor\nI’ll examine every inch of you\nIf you want a driver\nClimb inside\nOr if you want to take me for a ride\nYou know you can\nI’m your man\nAh, the moon’s too bright\nThe chain’s too tight\nThe beast won’t go to sleep\nI’ve been running through these promises to you\nThat I made and I could not keep\nAh but a man never got a woman back\nNot by begging on his knees\nOr I’d crawl to you baby\nAnd I’d fall at your feet\nAnd I’d howl at your beauty\nLike a dog in heat\nAnd I’d claw at your heart\nAnd I’d tear at your sheet\nI’d say please, please\nI’m your man\nAnd if you’ve got to sleep\nA moment on the road\nI will steer for you\nAnd if you want to work the street alone\nI’ll disappear for you\nIf you want a father for your child\nOr only want to walk with me a while\nAcross the sand\nI’m your man\nIf you want a lover\nI’ll do anything you ask me to\nAnd if you want another kind of love\nI’ll wear a mask for you", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "millenium": { - "title": "“Millenium”", - "body": "This could be my little\nbook about love\nif I wrote it--\nbut my good demon said:\n“Lay off documents!”\nEverybody was watching me\nburn my books--\nI swung my liberty torch\nhappy as a gestapo brute;\nthe only thing I wanted to save\nwas a scar\na burn or two--\nbut my good demon said:\n“Lay off documents!\nThe fire’s not important!”\nThe pile was safely blazing.\nI went home to take a bath.\nI phoned my grandmother.\nShe is suffering from arthritis.\n“Keep well,” I said, “don’t mind the pain.”\n“You neither,” she said.\nHours later I wondered\ndid she mean\ndon’t mind my pain\nor don’t mind her pain?\nWhereupon my good demon said:\n“Is that all you can do?”\nWell was it?\nWas it all I could do?\nThere was the old lady\neating alone, thinking about\nPrince Albert, Flanders Field,\nKishenev, her fingers too sore\nfor TV knobs;\nbut how could I get there ?\nThe books were gone\nmy address lists--\nMy good demon said again:\n“Lay off documents!\nYou know how to get there!”\nAnd suddenly I did!\nI remembered it from memory!\nI found her\npouring over the royal family tree,\n“Grandma,”\nI almost said,\n“you’ve got it upside down--”\n“Take a look,” she said,\n“it only goes to George V.”\n“That’s far enough\nyou sweet old blood!”\n“You’re right!” she sang\nand burned the\nLondon Illustrated Souvenir\nI did not understand\nthe day it was\ntill I looked outside\nand saw a fire in every\nwindow on the street\nand crowds of humans\ncrazy to talk\nand cats and dogs and birds\nsmiling at each other!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "my-lady-can-sleep": { - "title": "“My lady can sleep …”", - "body": "My lady can sleep\nUpon a handkerchief\nOr if it be Fall\nUpon a fallen leaf.\n\nI have seen the hunters\nkneel before her hem\nEven in her sleep\nShe turns away from them.\n\nThe only gift they offer\nIs their abiding grief\nI pull out my pockets\nFor a handkerchief or leaf.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-next-one": { - "title": "“The Next One”", - "body": "Things are better in Milan.\nThings are a lot better in Milan.\nMy adventure has sweetened.\nI met a girl and a poet.\nOne of them was dead\nand one of them was alive.\nThe poet was from Peru\nand the girl was a doctor.\nShe was taking antibiotics.\nI will never forget her.\nShe took me into a dark church\nconsecrated to Mary.\nLong live the horses and the sandles.\nThe poet gave me back my spirit\nwhich I had lost in prayer.\nHe was a great man out of the civil war.\nHe said his death was in my hands\nbecause I was the next one\nto explain the weakness of love.\nThe poet was Cesar Vallejo\nwho lies at the floor of his forehead.\nBe with me now great warrior\nwhose strength depends solely\non the favours of a woman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "now-of-sleeping": { - "title": "“Now of Sleeping”", - "body": " Under her grandmother’s patchwork quilt\na calico bird’s-eye view\nof crops and boundaries\nnaming dimly the districts of her body\nsleeps my Annie like a perfect lady\n\nLike ages of weightless snow\non tiny oceans filled with light\nher eyelids enclose deeply\na shade tree of birthday candles\none for every morning\nuntil the now of sleeping\n\nThe small banner of blood\nkept and flown by Brother Wind\nlong after the pierced bird fell down\nis like her red mouth\namong the squalls of pillow\n\nBearers of evil fancy\nof dark intention and corrupting fashion\nwho come to rend the quilt\nplough the eye and ground the mouth\nwill contend with mighty Mother Goose\nand Farmer Brown and all good stories\nof invincible belief\nwhich surround her sleep\nlike the golden wheather of a halo\n\nWell-wishers and her true lover\nmay stay to watch my Annie\nsleeping like a perfect lady\nunder her grandmother’s patchwork quilt\nbut they must promise to whisper\nand to vanish by morning -\nall but her one true lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pro": { - "title": "“The Pro”", - "body": "Lost my voice in New York City\nnever heard it again after sixty-seven\nNow I talk like you\nNow I sing like you\nCigarette and coffee to make me sick\nCouple of families to make me think\nGoing to see my lawyer\nGoing to read my mail\nLost my voice in New York City\nGuess you always knew", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sisters-of-mercy": { - "title": "“Sisters of Mercy”", - "body": "Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.\nThey were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.\nAnd they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.\nOh I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so long.\nYes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.\n\nIt begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.\nWell I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:\nWhen you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.\nWell they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them.\nThey touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.\n\nIf your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn\nthey will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.\nWhen I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.\nDon’t turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.\nAnd you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:\nWe weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right,\nWe weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "stories-of-the-street": { - "title": "“Stories of the Street”", - "body": "The stories of the street are mine\nThe Spanish voices laugh\nThe Cadillacs go creeping now\nThrough the night and the poison gas\nAnd I lean from my window sill\nIn this old hotel I chose\nYes, one hand on my suicide\nOne hand on the rose\n\nI know you’ve heard it’s over now\nAnd war must surely come\nThe cities they all broke in half\nAnd the middlemen are gone\nBut let me ask you one more time\nO children of the dusk\nAll these hunters who are shrieking now\nOh, do they speak for us?\nAnd where do all these highways go\nNow that we are free?\nWhy are the armies marching still\nThat were coming home to me?\n\nO lady with your legs so fine\nO stranger at your wheel\nYou are locked into your suffering\nAnd your pleasures are the seal\nThe age of lust is giving birth\nAnd both the parents ask\nThe nurse to tell them fairy tales\nOn both sides of the glass\nAnd now the infant with his cord\nIs hauled in like a kite\nAnd one eye filled with blueprints\nOne eye filled with night\n\nO come with me my little one\nWe will find that farm\nAnd grow us grass and apples there\nAnd keep all the animals warm\nAnd if by chance I wake at night\nAnd I ask you who I am\nO take me to the slaughterhouse\nI will wait there with the lamb\nWith one hand on the hexagram\nAnd one hand on the girl\nI balance on a wishing well\nThat all men call the world\n\nWe are so small between the stars\nSo large against the sky\nAnd lost among the subway crowds\nI try to catch your eye", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-haiku": { - "title": "“Summer Haiku”", - "body": "Silence\n\nand a deeper silence\n\nwhen the crickets\n\nhesitate", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "take-this-waltz": { - "title": "“Take This Waltz”", - "body": "Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.\nThere’s a shoulder where death comes to cry.\nThere’s a lobby with nine hundred windows.\nThere’s a tree where the doves go to die.\nThere’s a piece that was torn from the morning,\nand it hangs in the Gallery of Frost--\nAy, ay ay ay\nTake this waltz, take this waltz,\ntake this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.\n\nI want you, I want you, I want you\non a chair with a dead magazine.\nIn the cave at the tip of the lily,\nin some hallway where love’s never been.\nOn a bed where the moon has been sweating,\nin a cry filled with footsteps and sand--\nAy, ay ay ay\nTake this waltz, take this waltz,\ntake its broken waist in your hand.\n\nThis waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz\nwith its very own breath\nof brandy and death,\ndragging its tail in the sea.\n\nThere’s a concert hall in Vienna\nwhere your mouth had a thousand reviews.\nThere’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking,\nthey’ve been sentenced to death by the blues.\nAh, but who is it climbs to your picture\nwith a garland of freshly cut tears?\nAy, ay ay ay\nTake this waltz, take this waltz,\ntake this waltz, it’s been dying for years.\n\nThere’s an attic where children are playing,\nwhere I’ve got to lie down with you soon,\nin a dream of Hungarian lanterns,\nin the mist of some sweet afternoon.\nAnd I’ll see what you’ve chained to your sorrow,\nall your sheep and your lilies of snow--\nAy, ay ay ay\nTake this waltz, take this waltz\nwith its “I’ll never forget you, you know!”\n\nAnd I’ll dance with you in Vienna,\nI’ll be wearing a river’s disguise.\nThe hyacinth wild on my shoulder\nmy mouth on the dew of your thighs.\nAnd I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,\nwith the photographs there and the moss.\nAnd I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty,\nmy cheap violin and my cross.\nAnd you’ll carry me down on your dancing\nto the pools that you lift on your wrist--\nO my love, O my love\nTake this waltz, take this waltz,\nit’s yours now. It’s all that there is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "waiting-for-marianne": { - "title": "“Waiting for Marianne”", - "body": " I have lost a telephone\nwith your smell in it\n\nI am living beside the radio\nall the stations at once\nbut I pick out a Polish lullaby\nI pick it out of the static\nit fades I wait I keep the beat\nit comes back almost alseep\n\nDid you take the telephone\nknowing I’d sniff it immoderately\nmaybe heat up the plastic\nto get all the crumbs of your breath\n\nand if you won’t come back\nhow will you phone to say\nyou won’t come back\nso that I could at least argue", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-this-american-woman": { - "title": "“When this American woman …”", - "body": "When this American woman,\nwhose thighs are bound in casual red cloth,\ncomes thundering past my sitting place\nlike a forest-burning Mongol tribe,\nthe city is ravished\nand brittle buildings of a hundred years\nsplash into the street;\nand my eyes are burnt\nfor the embroidered Chinese girls,\nalready old,\nand so small between the thin pines\non these enormous landscapes,\nthat if you turn your head\nthey are lost for hours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-only-tourist-in-havana-turns-his-thoughts-homeward": { - "title": "“The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward”", - "body": "Come, my brothers,\nlet us govern Canada,\nlet us find our serious heads,\nlet us dump asbestos on the White House,\nlet us make the French talk English,\n\n not only here but everywhere,\n let us torture the Senate individually\n until they confess,\n let us purge the New Party,\n let us encourage the dark races\n so they’ll be lenient\n when they take over,\n let us make the CBC talk English,\n let us all lean in one direction\n and float down\n to the coast of Florida,\n let us have tourism,\n let us flirt with the enemy,\n let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,\n let us sell snow\n to under-developed nations,\n (It is true one of our national leaders\n was a Roman Catholic?)\n let us terrorize Alaska,\n let us unite\n Church and State,\n let us not take it lying down,\n let us have two Governor Generals\n at the same time,\n let us have another official language,\n let us determine what it will be,\n let us give a Canada Council Fellowship\n to the most original suggestion,\n let us teach sex in the home\n to parents,\n let us threaten to join the U.S.A.\n and pull out at the last moment,\n my brothers, come,\n our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere\n like Gladstone bags abandoned\n after a coup d’état,\n let us put them on very quickly,\n let us maintain a stony silence\n on the St. Lawrence Seaway.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "samuel-taylor-coleridge": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Samuel Taylor Coleridge", - "birth": { - "year": 1772 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1834 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "a-christmas-carol": { - "title": "“A Christmas Carol”", - "body": "The Shepherds went their hasty way,\nAnd found the lowly stable-shed\nWhere the Virgin-Mother lay:\nAnd now they checked their eager tread,\nFor to the Babe, that at her bosom clung,\nA Mother’s song the Virgin-Mother sung.\n\nThey told her how a glorious light,\nStreaming from a heavenly throng,\nAround them shone, suspending night!\nWhile sweeter than a Mother’s song,\nBlest Angels heralded the Saviour’s birth,\nGlory to God on high! and Peace on Earth.\n\nShe listened to the tale divine,\nAnd closer still the Babe she pressed;\nAnd while she cried, the Babe is mine!\nThe milk rushed faster to her breast:\nJoy rose within her, like a summer’s morn;\nPeace, Peace on Earth! the Prince of Peace is born.\n\nThou Mother of the Prince of Peace,\nPoor, simple, and of low estate!\nThat Strife should vanish, Battle cease,\nO why should this thy soul elate?\nSweet Music’s loudest note, the Poet’s story,--\nDid’st thou ne’er love to hear of Fame and Glory?\n\nAnd is not War a youthful King,\nA stately Hero clad in Mail?\nBeneath his footsteps laurels spring;\nHim Earth’s majestic monarchs hail\nTheir Friend, their Playmate! and his bold bright eye\nCompels the maiden’s love-confessing sigh.\n\n“Tell this in some more courtly scene,\nTo maids and youths in robes of state!\nI am a woman poor and mean,\nAnd therefore is my Soul elate.\nWar is a ruffian, all with guilt defiled,\nThat from the aged Father tears his Child!”\n\n“A murderous fiend, by fiends adored,\nHe kills the Sire and starves the Son;\nThe Husband kills, and from her board\nSteals all his Widow’s toil had won;\nPlunders God’s world of beauty; rends away\nAll safety from the Night, all comfort from the Day.”\n\n“Then wisely is my soul elate,\nThat Strife should vanish, Battle cease:\nI’m poor and of a low estate,\nThe Mother of the Prince of Peace.\nJoy rises in me, like a summer’s morn:\nPeace, Peace on Earth, the Prince of Peace is born.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1799 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "frost-at-midnight": { - "title": "“Frost at Midnight”", - "body": "The Frost performs its secret ministry,\nUnhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry\nCame loud--and hark, again! loud as before.\nThe inmates of my cottage, all at rest,\nHave left me to that solitude, which suits\nAbstruser musings: save that at my side\nMy cradled infant slumbers peacefully.\n’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs\nAnd vexes meditation with its strange\nAnd extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,\nThis populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,\nWith all the numberless goings-on of life,\nInaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame\nLies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;\nOnly that film, which fluttered on the grate,\n\nStill flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.\nMethinks, its motion in this hush of nature\nGives it dim sympathies with me who live,\nMaking it a companionable form,\nWhose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit\nBy its own moods interprets, every where\nEcho or mirror seeking of itself,\nAnd makes a toy of Thought.\n\nBut O! how oft,\nHow oft, at school, with most believing mind,\nPresageful, have I gazed upon the bars,\nTo watch that fluttering _stranger_! and as oft\nWith unclosed lids, already had I dreamt\nOf my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,\nWhose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang\nFrom morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,\nSo sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me\nWith a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear\nMost like articulate sounds of things to come!\nSo gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,\nLulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!\nAnd so I brooded all the following morn,\nAwed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye\nFixed with mock study on my swimming book:\nSave if the door half opened, and I snatched\nA hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,\nFor still I hoped to see the _stranger_’s face,\nTownsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,\nMy play-mate when we both were clothed alike!\n\nDear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,\nWhose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,\nFill up the intersperséd vacancies\nAnd momentary pauses of the thought!\nMy babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart\nWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,\nAnd think that thou shalt learn far other lore,\nAnd in far other scenes! For I was reared\nIn the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,\nAnd saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.\nBut _thou_, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze\nBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags\nOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,\nWhich image in their bulk both lakes and shores\nAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear\nThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible\nOf that eternal language, which thy God\nUtters, who from eternity doth teach\nHimself in all, and all things in himself.\nGreat universal Teacher! he shall mould\nThy spirit, and by giving make it ask.\n\nTherefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,\nWhether the summer clothe the general earth\nWith greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing\nBetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch\nOf mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch\nSmokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall\nHeard only in the trances of the blast,\nOr if the secret ministry of frost\nShall hang them up in silent icicles,\nQuietly shining to the quiet Moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1798 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-good-great-man": { - "title": "“The Good, Great Man”", - "body": "“How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits\nHonour or wealth with all his worth and pains!\nIt sounds like stories from the land of spirits\nIf any man obtain that which he merits\nOr any merit that which he obtains.”\n\n\n_Reply to the above:_\n\nFor shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!\nWhat would’st thou have a good great man obtain?\nPlace? titles? salary? a gilded chain?\nOr throne of corses which his sword had slain?\nGreatness and goodness are not _means_, but _ends_!\nHath he not always treasures, always friends,\nThe good great man? _three_ treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,\nAnd CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant’s breath:\nAnd three firm friends, more sure than day and night,\nHIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kubla-khan": { - "title": "“Kubla Khan”", - "body": "_Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment._\n\nIn Xanadu did Kubla Khan\nA stately pleasure-dome decree:\nWhere Alph, the sacred river, ran\nThrough caverns measureless to man\nDown to a sunless sea.\nSo twice five miles of fertile ground\nWith walls and towers were girdled round;\nAnd there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,\nWhere blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;\nAnd here were forests ancient as the hills,\nEnfolding sunny spots of greenery.\n\nBut oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted\nDown the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!\nA savage place! as holy and enchanted\nAs e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted\nBy woman wailing for her demon-lover!\nAnd from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,\nAs if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,\nA mighty fountain momently was forced:\nAmid whose swift half-intermitted burst\nHuge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,\nOr chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:\nAnd mid these dancing rocks at once and ever\nIt flung up momently the sacred river.\nFive miles meandering with a mazy motion\nThrough wood and dale the sacred river ran,\nThen reached the caverns measureless to man,\nAnd sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;\nAnd ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far\nAncestral voices prophesying war!\nThe shadow of the dome of pleasure\nFloated midway on the waves;\nWhere was heard the mingled measure\nFrom the fountain and the caves.\nIt was a miracle of rare device,\nA sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!\n\nA damsel with a dulcimer\nIn a vision once I saw:\nIt was an Abyssinian maid\nAnd on her dulcimer she played,\nSinging of Mount Abora.\nCould I revive within me\nHer symphony and song,\nTo such a deep delight ’twould win me,\nThat with music loud and long,\nI would build that dome in air,\nThat sunny dome! those caves of ice!\nAnd all who heard should see them there,\nAnd all should cry, Beware! Beware!\nHis flashing eyes, his floating hair!\nWeave a circle round him thrice,\nAnd close your eyes with holy dread\nFor he on honey-dew hath fed,\nAnd drunk the milk of Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1797 - } - } - }, - "the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner": { - "title": "“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”", - "body": "_Argument_\n\n_How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country._\n\n\n# I.\n\nIt is an ancient Mariner,\nAnd he stoppeth one of three.\n“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,\nNow wherefore stopp’st thou me?\n\nThe Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,\nAnd I am next of kin;\nThe guests are met, the feast is set:\nMay’st hear the merry din.”\n\nHe holds him with his skinny hand,\n“There was a ship,” quoth he.\n“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”\nEftsoons his hand dropt he.\n\nHe holds him with his glittering eye--\nThe Wedding-Guest stood still,\nAnd listens like a three years’ child:\nThe Mariner hath his will.\n\nThe Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:\nHe cannot choose but hear;\nAnd thus spake on that ancient man,\nThe bright-eyed Mariner.\n\n“The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,\nMerrily did we drop\nBelow the kirk, below the hill,\nBelow the lighthouse top.\n\nThe Sun came up upon the left,\nOut of the sea came he!\nAnd he shone bright, and on the right\nWent down into the sea.\n\nHigher and higher every day,\nTill over the mast at noon--”\nThe Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,\nFor he heard the loud bassoon.\n\nThe bride hath paced into the hall,\nRed as a rose is she;\nNodding their heads before her goes\nThe merry minstrelsy.\n\nThe Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,\nYet he cannot choose but hear;\nAnd thus spake on that ancient man,\nThe bright-eyed Mariner.\n\nAnd now the STORM-BLAST came, and he\nWas tyrannous and strong:\nHe struck with his o’ertaking wings,\nAnd chased us south along.\n\nWith sloping masts and dipping prow,\nAs who pursued with yell and blow\nStill treads the shadow of his foe,\nAnd forward bends his head,\nThe ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,\nAnd southward aye we fled.\n\nAnd now there came both mist and snow,\nAnd it grew wondrous cold:\nAnd ice, mast-high, came floating by,\nAs green as emerald.\n\nAnd through the drifts the snowy clifts\nDid send a dismal sheen:\nNor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--\nThe ice was all between.\n\nThe ice was here, the ice was there,\nThe ice was all around:\nIt cracked and growled, and roared and howled,\nLike noises in a swound!\n\nAt length did cross an Albatross,\nThorough the fog it came;\nAs if it had been a Christian soul,\nWe hailed it in God’s name.\n\nIt ate the food it ne’er had eat,\nAnd round and round it flew.\nThe ice did split with a thunder-fit;\nThe helmsman steered us through!\n\nAnd a good south wind sprung up behind;\nThe Albatross did follow,\nAnd every day, for food or play,\nCame to the mariner’s hollo!\n\nIn mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,\nIt perched for vespers nine;\nWhiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,\nGlimmered the white Moon-shine.\n\n“God save thee, ancient Mariner!\nFrom the fiends, that plague thee thus!--\nWhy look’st thou so?”--With my cross-bow\nI shot the ALBATROSS.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe Sun now rose upon the right:\nOut of the sea came he,\nStill hid in mist, and on the left\nWent down into the sea.\n\nAnd the good south wind still blew behind,\nBut no sweet bird did follow,\nNor any day for food or play\nCame to the mariner’s hollo!\n\nAnd I had done a hellish thing,\nAnd it would work ’em woe:\nFor all averred, I had killed the bird\nThat made the breeze to blow.\nAh wretch! said they, the bird to slay,\nThat made the breeze to blow!\n\nNor dim nor red, like God’s own head,\nThe glorious Sun uprist:\nThen all averred, I had killed the bird\nThat brought the fog and mist.\n’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,\nThat bring the fog and mist.\n\nThe fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,\nThe furrow followed free;\nWe were the first that ever burst\nInto that silent sea.\n\nDown dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,\n’Twas sad as sad could be;\nAnd we did speak only to break\nThe silence of the sea!\n\nAll in a hot and copper sky,\nThe bloody Sun, at noon,\nRight up above the mast did stand,\nNo bigger than the Moon.\n\nDay after day, day after day,\nWe stuck, nor breath nor motion;\nAs idle as a painted ship\nUpon a painted ocean.\n\nWater, water, every where,\nAnd all the boards did shrink;\nWater, water, every where,\nNor any drop to drink.\n\nThe very deep did rot: O Christ!\nThat ever this should be!\nYea, slimy things did crawl with legs\nUpon the slimy sea.\n\nAbout, about, in reel and rout\nThe death-fires danced at night;\nThe water, like a witch’s oils,\nBurnt green, and blue and white.\n\nAnd some in dreams assurèd were\nOf the Spirit that plagued us so;\nNine fathom deep he had followed us\nFrom the land of mist and snow.\n\nAnd every tongue, through utter drought,\nWas withered at the root;\nWe could not speak, no more than if\nWe had been choked with soot.\n\nAh! well a-day! what evil looks\nHad I from old and young!\nInstead of the cross, the Albatross\nAbout my neck was hung.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThere passed a weary time. Each throat\nWas parched, and glazed each eye.\nA weary time! a weary time!\nHow glazed each weary eye,\n\nWhen looking westward, I beheld\nA something in the sky.\n\nAt first it seemed a little speck,\nAnd then it seemed a mist;\nIt moved and moved, and took at last\nA certain shape, I wist.\n\nA speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!\nAnd still it neared and neared:\nAs if it dodged a water-sprite,\nIt plunged and tacked and veered.\n\nWith throats unslaked, with black lips baked,\nWe could nor laugh nor wail;\nThrough utter drought all dumb we stood!\nI bit my arm, I sucked the blood,\nAnd cried, A sail! a sail!\n\nWith throats unslaked, with black lips baked,\nAgape they heard me call:\nGramercy! they for joy did grin,\nAnd all at once their breath drew in.\nAs they were drinking all.\n\nSee! see! (I cried) she tacks no more!\nHither to work us weal;\nWithout a breeze, without a tide,\nShe steadies with upright keel!\n\nThe western wave was all a-flame.\nThe day was well nigh done!\nAlmost upon the western wave\nRested the broad bright Sun;\nWhen that strange shape drove suddenly\nBetwixt us and the Sun.\n\nAnd straight the Sun was flecked with bars,\n(Heaven’s Mother send us grace!)\nAs if through a dungeon-grate he peered\nWith broad and burning face.\n\nAlas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)\nHow fast she nears and nears!\nAre those her sails that glance in the Sun,\nLike restless gossameres?\n\nAre those her ribs through which the Sun\nDid peer, as through a grate?\nAnd is that Woman all her crew?\nIs that a DEATH? and are there two?\nIs DEATH that woman’s mate?\n\nHer lips were red, her looks were free,\nHer locks were yellow as gold:\nHer skin was as white as leprosy,\nThe Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,\nWho thicks man’s blood with cold.\n\nThe naked hulk alongside came,\nAnd the twain were casting dice;\n“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”\nQuoth she, and whistles thrice.\n\nThe Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;\nAt one stride comes the dark;\nWith far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,\nOff shot the spectre-bark.\n\nWe listened and looked sideways up!\nFear at my heart, as at a cup,\nMy life-blood seemed to sip!\nThe stars were dim, and thick the night,\nThe steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;\nFrom the sails the dew did drip--\nTill clomb above the eastern bar\nThe hornèd Moon, with one bright star\nWithin the nether tip.\n\nOne after one, by the star-dogged Moon,\nToo quick for groan or sigh,\nEach turned his face with a ghastly pang,\nAnd cursed me with his eye.\n\nFour times fifty living men,\n(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)\nWith heavy thump, a lifeless lump,\nThey dropped down one by one.\n\nThe souls did from their bodies fly,--\nThey fled to bliss or woe!\nAnd every soul, it passed me by,\nLike the whizz of my cross-bow!\n\n\n# IV.\n\n“I fear thee, ancient Mariner!\nI fear thy skinny hand!\nAnd thou art long, and lank, and brown,\nAs is the ribbed sea-sand.\n\nI fear thee and thy glittering eye,\nAnd thy skinny hand, so brown.”--\nFear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!\nThis body dropt not down.\n\nAlone, alone, all, all alone,\nAlone on a wide wide sea!\nAnd never a saint took pity on\nMy soul in agony.\n\nThe many men, so beautiful!\nAnd they all dead did lie:\nAnd a thousand thousand slimy things\nLived on; and so did I.\n\nI looked upon the rotting sea,\nAnd drew my eyes away;\nI looked upon the rotting deck,\nAnd there the dead men lay.\n\nI looked to heaven, and tried to pray;\nBut or ever a prayer had gusht,\nA wicked whisper came, and made\nMy heart as dry as dust.\n\nI closed my lids, and kept them close,\nAnd the balls like pulses beat;\nFor the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky\nLay dead like a load on my weary eye,\nAnd the dead were at my feet.\n\nThe cold sweat melted from their limbs,\nNor rot nor reek did they:\nThe look with which they looked on me\nHad never passed away.\n\nAn orphan’s curse would drag to hell\nA spirit from on high;\nBut oh! more horrible than that\nIs the curse in a dead man’s eye!\nSeven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,\nAnd yet I could not die.\n\nThe moving Moon went up the sky,\nAnd no where did abide:\nSoftly she was going up,\nAnd a star or two beside--\n\nHer beams bemocked the sultry main,\nLike April hoar-frost spread;\nBut where the ship’s huge shadow lay,\nThe charmèd water burnt alway\nA still and awful red.\n\nBeyond the shadow of the ship,\nI watched the water-snakes:\nThey moved in tracks of shining white,\nAnd when they reared, the elfish light\nFell off in hoary flakes.\n\nWithin the shadow of the ship\nI watched their rich attire:\nBlue, glossy green, and velvet black,\nThey coiled and swam; and every track\nWas a flash of golden fire.\n\nO happy living things! no tongue\nTheir beauty might declare:\nA spring of love gushed from my heart,\nAnd I blessed them unaware:\nSure my kind saint took pity on me,\nAnd I blessed them unaware.\n\nThe self-same moment I could pray;\nAnd from my neck so free\nThe Albatross fell off, and sank\nLike lead into the sea.\n\n\n# V.\n\nOh sleep! it is a gentle thing,\nBeloved from pole to pole!\nTo Mary Queen the praise be given!\nShe sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,\nThat slid into my soul.\n\nThe silly buckets on the deck,\nThat had so long remained,\nI dreamt that they were filled with dew;\nAnd when I awoke, it rained.\n\nMy lips were wet, my throat was cold,\nMy garments all were dank;\nSure I had drunken in my dreams,\nAnd still my body drank.\n\nI moved, and could not feel my limbs:\nI was so light--almost\nI thought that I had died in sleep,\nAnd was a blessed ghost.\n\nAnd soon I heard a roaring wind:\nIt did not come anear;\nBut with its sound it shook the sails,\nThat were so thin and sere.\n\nThe upper air burst into life!\nAnd a hundred fire-flags sheen,\nTo and fro they were hurried about!\nAnd to and fro, and in and out,\nThe wan stars danced between.\n\nAnd the coming wind did roar more loud,\nAnd the sails did sigh like sedge,\nAnd the rain poured down from one black cloud;\nThe Moon was at its edge.\n\nThe thick black cloud was cleft, and still\nThe Moon was at its side:\nLike waters shot from some high crag,\nThe lightning fell with never a jag,\nA river steep and wide.\n\nThe loud wind never reached the ship,\nYet now the ship moved on!\nBeneath the lightning and the Moon\nThe dead men gave a groan.\n\nThey groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,\nNor spake, nor moved their eyes;\nIt had been strange, even in a dream,\nTo have seen those dead men rise.\n\nThe helmsman steered, the ship moved on;\nYet never a breeze up-blew;\nThe mariners all ’gan work the ropes,\nWhere they were wont to do;\nThey raised their limbs like lifeless tools--\nWe were a ghastly crew.\n\nThe body of my brother’s son\nStood by me, knee to knee:\nThe body and I pulled at one rope,\nBut he said nought to me.\n\n“I fear thee, ancient Mariner!”\nBe calm, thou Wedding-Guest!\n’Twas not those souls that fled in pain,\nWhich to their corses came again,\nBut a troop of spirits blest:\n\nFor when it dawned--they dropped their arms,\nAnd clustered round the mast;\nSweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,\nAnd from their bodies passed.\n\nAround, around, flew each sweet sound,\nThen darted to the Sun;\nSlowly the sounds came back again,\nNow mixed, now one by one.\n\nSometimes a-dropping from the sky\nI heard the sky-lark sing;\nSometimes all little birds that are,\nHow they seemed to fill the sea and air\nWith their sweet jargoning!\n\nAnd now ’twas like all instruments,\nNow like a lonely flute;\nAnd now it is an angel’s song,\nThat makes the heavens be mute.\n\nIt ceased; yet still the sails made on\nA pleasant noise till noon,\nA noise like of a hidden brook\nIn the leafy month of June,\nThat to the sleeping woods all night\nSingeth a quiet tune.\n\nTill noon we quietly sailed on,\nYet never a breeze did breathe:\nSlowly and smoothly went the ship,\nMoved onward from beneath.\n\nUnder the keel nine fathom deep,\nFrom the land of mist and snow,\nThe spirit slid: and it was he\nThat made the ship to go.\nThe sails at noon left off their tune,\nAnd the ship stood still also.\n\nThe Sun, right up above the mast,\nHad fixed her to the ocean:\nBut in a minute she ’gan stir,\nWith a short uneasy motion--\nBackwards and forwards half her length\nWith a short uneasy motion.\n\nThen like a pawing horse let go,\nShe made a sudden bound:\nIt flung the blood into my head,\nAnd I fell down in a swound.\n\nHow long in that same fit I lay,\nI have not to declare;\nBut ere my living life returned,\nI heard and in my soul discerned\nTwo voices in the air.\n\n“Is it he?” quoth one, “Is this the man?\nBy him who died on cross,\nWith his cruel bow he laid full low\nThe harmless Albatross.\n\nThe spirit who bideth by himself\nIn the land of mist and snow,\nHe loved the bird that loved the man\nWho shot him with his bow.”\n\nThe other was a softer voice,\nAs soft as honey-dew:\nQuoth he, “The man hath penance done,\nAnd penance more will do.”\n\n\n# VI.\n\n> _First Voice:_\n“But tell me, tell me! speak again,\nThy soft response renewing--\nWhat makes that ship drive on so fast?\nWhat is the ocean doing?”\n\n> _Second Voice:_\n“Still as a slave before his lord,\nThe ocean hath no blast;\nHis great bright eye most silently\nUp to the Moon is cast--\n\nIf he may know which way to go;\nFor she guides him smooth or grim.\nSee, brother, see! how graciously\nShe looketh down on him.”\n\n> _First Voice:_\n“But why drives on that ship so fast,\nWithout or wave or wind?”\n> _Second Voice:_\n“The air is cut away before,\nAnd closes from behind.\n\nFly, brother, fly! more high, more high!\nOr we shall be belated:\nFor slow and slow that ship will go,\nWhen the Mariner’s trance is abated.”\n\nI woke, and we were sailing on\nAs in a gentle weather:\n’Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;\nThe dead men stood together.\n\nAll stood together on the deck,\nFor a charnel-dungeon fitter:\nAll fixed on me their stony eyes,\nThat in the Moon did glitter.\n\nThe pang, the curse, with which they died,\nHad never passed away:\nI could not draw my eyes from theirs,\nNor turn them up to pray.\n\nAnd now this spell was snapt: once more\nI viewed the ocean green,\nAnd looked far forth, yet little saw\nOf what had else been seen--\n\nLike one, that on a lonesome road\nDoth walk in fear and dread,\nAnd having once turned round walks on,\nAnd turns no more his head;\nBecause he knows, a frightful fiend\nDoth close behind him tread.\n\nBut soon there breathed a wind on me,\nNor sound nor motion made:\nIts path was not upon the sea,\nIn ripple or in shade.\n\nIt raised my hair, it fanned my cheek\nLike a meadow-gale of spring--\nIt mingled strangely with my fears,\nYet it felt like a welcoming.\n\nSwiftly, swiftly flew the ship,\nYet she sailed softly too:\nSweetly, sweetly blew the breeze--\nOn me alone it blew.\n\nOh! dream of joy! is this indeed\nThe light-house top I see?\nIs this the hill? is this the kirk?\nIs this mine own countree?\n\nWe drifted o’er the harbour-bar,\nAnd I with sobs did pray--\nO let me be awake, my God!\nOr let me sleep alway.\n\nThe harbour-bay was clear as glass,\nSo smoothly it was strewn!\nAnd on the bay the moonlight lay,\nAnd the shadow of the Moon.\n\nThe rock shone bright, the kirk no less,\nThat stands above the rock:\nThe moonlight steeped in silentness\nThe steady weathercock.\n\nAnd the bay was white with silent light,\nTill rising from the same,\nFull many shapes, that shadows were,\nIn crimson colours came.\n\nA little distance from the prow\nThose crimson shadows were:\nI turned my eyes upon the deck--\nOh, Christ! what saw I there!\n\nEach corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,\nAnd, by the holy rood!\nA man all light, a seraph-man,\nOn every corse there stood.\n\nThis seraph-band, each waved his hand:\nIt was a heavenly sight!\nThey stood as signals to the land,\nEach one a lovely light;\n\nThis seraph-band, each waved his hand,\nNo voice did they impart--\nNo voice; but oh! the silence sank\nLike music on my heart.\n\nBut soon I heard the dash of oars,\nI heard the Pilot’s cheer;\nMy head was turned perforce away\nAnd I saw a boat appear.\n\nThe Pilot and the Pilot’s boy,\nI heard them coming fast:\nDear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy\nThe dead men could not blast.\n\nI saw a third--I heard his voice:\nIt is the Hermit good!\nHe singeth loud his godly hymns\nThat he makes in the wood.\nHe’ll shrieve my soul, he’ll wash away\nThe Albatross’s blood.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThis Hermit good lives in that wood\nWhich slopes down to the sea.\nHow loudly his sweet voice he rears!\nHe loves to talk with marineres\nThat come from a far countree.\n\nHe kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--\nHe hath a cushion plump:\nIt is the moss that wholly hides\nThe rotted old oak-stump.\n\nThe skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,\n“Why, this is strange, I trow!\nWhere are those lights so many and fair,\nThat signal made but now?”\n\n“Strange, by my faith!” the Hermit said--\n“And they answered not our cheer!\nThe planks looked warped! and see those sails,\nHow thin they are and sere!\nI never saw aught like to them,\nUnless perchance it were\n\nBrown skeletons of leaves that lag\nMy forest-brook along;\nWhen the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,\nAnd the owlet whoops to the wolf below,\nThat eats the she-wolf’s young.”\n\n“Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look--\n(The Pilot made reply)\nI am a-feared”--“Push on, push on!”\nSaid the Hermit cheerily.\n\nThe boat came closer to the ship,\nBut I nor spake nor stirred;\nThe boat came close beneath the ship,\nAnd straight a sound was heard.\n\nUnder the water it rumbled on,\nStill louder and more dread:\nIt reached the ship, it split the bay;\nThe ship went down like lead.\n\nStunned by that loud and dreadful sound,\nWhich sky and ocean smote,\nLike one that hath been seven days drowned\nMy body lay afloat;\nBut swift as dreams, myself I found\nWithin the Pilot’s boat.\n\nUpon the whirl, where sank the ship,\nThe boat spun round and round;\nAnd all was still, save that the hill\nWas telling of the sound.\n\nI moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked\nAnd fell down in a fit;\nThe holy Hermit raised his eyes,\nAnd prayed where he did sit.\n\nI took the oars: the Pilot’s boy,\nWho now doth crazy go,\nLaughed loud and long, and all the while\nHis eyes went to and fro.\n“Ha! ha!” quoth he, “full plain I see,\nThe Devil knows how to row.”\n\nAnd now, all in my own countree,\nI stood on the firm land!\nThe Hermit stepped forth from the boat,\nAnd scarcely he could stand.\n\n“O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!”\nThe Hermit crossed his brow.\n“Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say--\nWhat manner of man art thou?”\n\nForthwith this frame of mine was wrenched\nWith a woful agony,\nWhich forced me to begin my tale;\nAnd then it left me free.\n\nSince then, at an uncertain hour,\nThat agony returns:\nAnd till my ghastly tale is told,\nThis heart within me burns.\n\nI pass, like night, from land to land;\nI have strange power of speech;\nThat moment that his face I see,\nI know the man that must hear me:\nTo him my tale I teach.\n\nWhat loud uproar bursts from that door!\nThe wedding-guests are there:\nBut in the garden-bower the bride\nAnd bride-maids singing are:\nAnd hark the little vesper bell,\nWhich biddeth me to prayer!\n\nO Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been\nAlone on a wide wide sea:\nSo lonely ’twas, that God himself\nScarce seemèd there to be.\n\nO sweeter than the marriage-feast,\n’Tis sweeter far to me,\nTo walk together to the kirk\nWith a goodly company!--\n\nTo walk together to the kirk,\nAnd all together pray,\nWhile each to his great Father bends,\nOld men, and babes, and loving friends\nAnd youths and maidens gay!\n\nFarewell, farewell! but this I tell\nTo thee, thou Wedding-Guest!\nHe prayeth well, who loveth well\nBoth man and bird and beast.\n\nHe prayeth best, who loveth best\nAll things both great and small;\nFor the dear God who loveth us,\nHe made and loveth all.\n\nThe Mariner, whose eye is bright,\nWhose beard with age is hoar,\nIs gone: and now the Wedding-Guest\nTurned from the bridegroom’s door.\n\nHe went like one that hath been stunned,\nAnd is of sense forlorn:\nA sadder and a wiser man,\nHe rose the morrow morn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1798 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "youth-and-age": { - "title": "“Youth and Age”", - "body": "Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,\nWhere Hope clung feeding, like a bee--\nBoth were mine! Life went a-maying\nWith Nature, Hope, and Poesy,\nWhen I was young!\n\nWhen I was young?--Ah, woful When!\nAh! for the change ’twixt Now and Then!\nThis breathing house not built with hands,\nThis body that does me grievous wrong,\nO’er aery cliffs and glittering sands,\nHow lightly then it flashed along:--\nLike those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,\nOn winding lakes and rivers wide,\nThat ask no aid of sail or oar,\nThat fear no spite of wind or tide!\nNought cared this body for wind or weather\nWhen Youth and I lived in’t together.\n\nFlowers are lovely; Love is flower-like;\nFriendship is a sheltering tree;\nO! the joys, that came down shower-like,\nOf Friendship, Love, and Liberty,\nEre I was old!\nEre I was old? Ah woful Ere,\nWhich tells me, Youth’s no longer here!\nO Youth! for years so many and sweet,\n’Tis known, that Thou and I were one,\nI’ll think it but a fond conceit--\nIt cannot be that Thou art gone!\n\nThy vesper-bell hath not yet toll’d:--\nAnd thou wert aye a masker bold!\nWhat strange disguise hast now put on,\nTo make believe, that thou are gone?\nI see these locks in silvery slips,\nThis drooping gait, this altered size:\nBut Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,\nAnd tears take sunshine from thine eyes!\nLife is but thought: so think I will\nThat Youth and I are house-mates still.\n\nDew-drops are the gems of morning,\nBut the tears of mournful eve!\nWhere no hope is, life’s a warning\nThat only serves to make us grieve,\nWhen we are old:\nThat only serves to make us grieve\nWith oft and tedious taking-leave,\nLike some poor nigh-related guest,\nThat may not rudely be dismist;\nYet hath outstay’d his welcome while,\nAnd tells the jest without the smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "billy-collins": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Billy Collins", - "birth": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Collins", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "fishing-on-the-susquehanna-in-july": { - "title": "“Fishing on the Susquehanna in July”", - "body": "I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna\nor on any river for that matter\nto be perfectly honest.\n\nNot in July or any month\nhave I had the pleasure--if it is a pleasure--\nof fishing on the Susquehanna.\n\nI am more likely to be found\nin a quiet room like this one--\na painting of a woman on the wall,\n\na bowl of tangerines on the table--\ntrying to manufacture the sensation\nof fishing on the Susquehanna.\n\nThere is little doubt\nthat others have been fishing\non the Susquehanna,\n\nrowing upstream in a wooden boat,\nsliding the oars under the water\nthen raising them to drip in the light.\n\nBut the nearest I have ever come to\nfishing on the Susquehanna\nwas one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia\n\nwhen I balanced a little egg of time\nin front of a painting\nin which that river curled around a bend\n\nunder a blue cloud-ruffled sky,\ndense trees along the banks,\nand a fellow with a red bandanna\n\nsitting in a small, green\nflat-bottom boat\nholding the thin whip of a pole.\n\nThat is something I am unlikely\never to do, I remember\nsaying to myself and the person next to me.\n\nThen I blinked and moved on\nto other American scenes\nof haystacks, water whitening over rocks,\n\neven one of a brown hare\nwho seemed so wired with alertness\nI imagined him springing right out of the frame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "flames": { - "title": "“Flames”", - "body": "Smokey the Bear heads\ninto the autumn woods\nwith a red can of gasoline\nand a box of wooden matches.\n\nHis ranger’s hat is cocked\nat a disturbing angle.\n\nHis brown fur gleams\nunder the high sun\nas his paws, the size\nof catcher’s mitts,\ncrackle into the distance.\n\nHe is sick of dispensing\nwarnings to the careless,\nthe half-wit camper,\nthe dumbbell hiker.\n\nHe is going to show them\nhow a professional does it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "litany": { - "title": "“Litany”", - "body": "You are the bread and the knife,\nthe crystal goblet and the wine.\nYou are the dew on the morning grass\nand the burning wheel of the sun.\nYou are the white apron of the baker,\nand the marsh birds suddenly in flight.\n\nHowever, you are not the wind in the orchard,\nthe plums on the counter,\nor the house of cards.\nAnd you are certainly not the pine-scented air.\nThere is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.\n\nIt is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,\nmaybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,\nbut you are not even close\nto being the field of cornflowers at dusk.\n\nAnd a quick look in the mirror will show\nthat you are neither the boots in the corner\nnor the boat asleep in its boathouse.\n\nIt might interest you to know,\nspeaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,\nthat I am the sound of rain on the roof.\n\nI also happen to be the shooting star,\nthe evening paper blowing down an alley\nand the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.\n\nI am also the moon in the trees\nand the blind woman’s tea cup.\nBut don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.\nYou are still the bread and the knife.\nYou will always be the bread and the knife,\nnot to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "Why do we bother with the rest of the day,\nthe swale of the afternoon,\nthe sudden dip into evening,\n\nthen night with his notorious perfumes,\nhis many-pointed stars?\n\nThis is the best--\nthrowing off the light covers,\nfeet on the cold floor,\nand buzzing around the house on espresso--\n\nmaybe a splash of water on the face,\na palmful of vitamins--\nbut mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,\n\ndictionary and atlas open on the rug,\nthe typewriter waiting for the key of the head,\na cello on the radio,\n\nand, if necessary, the windows--\ntrees fifty, a hundred years old out there,\nheavy clouds on the way\nand the lawn steaming like a horse\nin the early morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-collins": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Collins", - "birth": { - "year": 1721 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1759 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Collins_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "how-sleep-the-brave": { - "title": "“How Sleep the Brave”", - "body": "How sleep the brave, who sink to rest\nBy all their country’s wishes blest!\nWhen Spring, with dewy fingers cold,\nReturns to deck their hallow’d mould,\nShe there shall dress a sweeter sod\nThan Fancy’s feet have ever trod.\n\nBy fairy hands their knell is rung;\nBy forms unseen their dirge is sung;\nThere Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,\nTo bless the turf that wraps their clay;\nAnd Freedom shall awhile repair\nTo dwell, a weeping hermit, there!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-fear": { - "title": "“Ode to Fear”", - "body": "Thou, to whom the world unknown,\nWith all its shadowy shapes, is shown;\nWho seest, appall’d, the unreal scene,\nWhile Fancy lifts the veil between:\nAh Fear! ah frantic Fear!\nI see, I see thee near.\nI know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye!\nLike thee I start; like thee disorder’d fly.\nFor, lo, what monsters in thy train appear!\nDanger, whose limbs of giant mould\nWhat mortal eye can fix’d behold?\nWho stalks his round, an hideous form,\nHowling amidst the midnight storm;\nOr throws him on the ridgy steep\nOf some loose hanging rock to sleep:\nAnd with him thousand phantoms join’d,\nWho prompt to deeds accursed the mind:\nAnd those, the fiends, who, near allied,\nO’er Nature’s wounds, and wrecks, preside;\nWhilst Vengeance, in the lurid air,\nLifts her red arm, exposed and bare:\nOn whom that ravening brood of Fate,\nWho lap the blood of sorrow, wait:\nWho, Fear, this ghastly train can see,\nAnd look not madly wild, like thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "tristan-corbière": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Tristan Corbière", - "birth": { - "year": 1845 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1875 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Corbière", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "blind-mans-cries": { - "title": "“Blind Man’s Cries”", - "body": "The murdered eye is not dead\nA spike still splits it\nNailed up I am coffinless\nThey drove the nail in my eye\nThe nailed eye is not dead\nAnd the spike still enters it\n\n_Deus misericors_\n_Deus misericors_\nThe hammer pounds my wooden head\nThe hammer that will make the cross\n_Deus misericors_\n_Deus misericors_\n\nThe undertaker birds\nAre thus afraid of my body\nMy Golgotha is not over\n_Lama Lama sabacthani_\nDoves of Death\nBe thirsty for my body\n\nRed as a gun-port\nThe sore is on the edge\nLike the drooling gum\nOf a toothless laughing old woman\nThe sore is on the edge\nRed as a gun-port\n\nI see circles of gold\nThe white sun bites me\nI’ve two holes pierced by an iron bar\nReddened in the forge of hell\nI see a circle of gold\nThe sky’s fire bites me\n\nIn the marrow twists\nA tear which comes out\nI see inside paradise\n_Miserere de profundis_\nIn my skull twists\nA sulfur tear which comes out\n\nBlessed the good dead man\nThe saved dead man who sleeps\nHappy the martyrs the chosen\nWith the Virgin and her Jesus\nOh blessed the dead man\nThe judged dead man who sleeps\n\nA Knight outside\nReposes without remorse\nIn the hallowed cemetery\nIn his granite siesta\nThe man of stone outside\nHas two eyes without remorse\n\nOh I feel you still\nYellow moors of Armor\nI feel my rosary in my fingers\nAnd Christ in bone on the wood\nI gape at you still\nO dead Armor sky\n\nPardon for praying hard\nLord if it is fate\nMy eyes two burning holy-water fonts\nThe devil put his fingers inside\nPardon for crying loud\nLord against fate\n\nI hear the north wind\nWhich bugles like a hom\nIt is the hunting call for the kill of the dead\nI bay enough on my own\nI hear the north wind\nI hear the hom’s knell", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Kenneth Koch & Georges Guy", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "hours": { - "title": "“Hours”", - "body": "Alms to the highwayman in pursuit!\nEvil eye to the luring eye!\nBlade against blade with the avid swordsman!\n--My soul is not in a state of grace!--\n\nI am the fool of Pamplona,\nAfraid of the Moon’s laughter,\nHypocritical, in black crepe …\nHorror! is everything, then, beneath a candle snuffer?\n\nI hear a noise like a rattle …\nIt is the evil hour which calls me.\nIn the pit of nights falls: one knell … two knells.\n\nI have counted more than fourteen hours …\nEach hour a tear. You are weeping,\nMy heart! … Keep singing, go on--Don’t count.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Kenneth Koch & Georges Guy" - } - } - } - }, - "abraham-cowley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Abraham Cowley", - "birth": { - "year": 1618 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1667 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Cowley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "the-change": { - "title": "“The Change”", - "body": "Love in her sunny eyes does basking play;\nLove walks the pleasant mazes of her hair;\nLove does on both her lips for ever stray\nAnd sows and reaps a thousand kisses there.\nIn all her outward parts Love’s always seen;\nBut, oh, He never went within.\n\nWithin Love’s foes, his greatest foes abide,\nMalice, Inconstance, and Pride.\nSo the Earth’s face, trees, herbs, and flowers do dress,\nWith other beauties numberless;\nBut at the center, darkness is, and Hell;\nThere wicked spirits, and there the Damned dwell.\n\nWith me alas, quite contrary it fares;\nDarkness and death lies in my weeping eyes,\nDespair and paleness in my face appears,\nAnd grief, and fear, Love’s greatest enemies;\nBut, like the Persian tyrant, Love within\nKeeps his proud court, and ne’re is seen.\n\nOh take my heart, and by that means you’ll prove\nWithin, too stor’d enough of Love;\nGive me but yours, I’ll by that change so thrive,\nThat Love in all my parts shall live.\nSo powerful is this change, it render can,\nMy outside woman, and your inside man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "drinking": { - "title": "“Drinking”", - "body": "The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,\nAnd drinks, and gapes for drink again.\nThe plants suck in the earth, and are\nWith constant drinking fresh and fair.\nThe sea itself, which one would think\nShould have but little need of drink,\nDrinks ten thousand rivers up,\nSo fill’d that they o’erflow the cup.\nThe busy sun (and one would guess\nBy’s drunken fiery face no less)\nDrinks up the sea, and when h’as done,\nThe moon and stars drink up the sun.\nThey drink and dance by their own light,\nThey drink and revel all the night.\nNothing in Nature’s sober found,\nBut an eternal health goes round.\nFill up the bowl then, fill it high,\nFill all the glasses there, for why\nShould every creature drink but I,\nWhy, man of morals, tell me why?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-given-heart": { - "title": "“The Given Heart”", - "body": "I wonder what those lovers mean, who say\nThey have giv’n their hearts away.\nSome good kind lover tell me how;\nFor mine is but a torment to me now.\n\nIf so it be one place both hearts contain,\nFor what do they complain?\nWhat courtesy can Love do more,\nThan to join hearts that parted were before?\n\nWoe to her stubborn heart, if once mine come\nInto the self-same room;\n’Twill tear and blow up all within,\nLike a granado shot into a magazine.\n\nThen shall Love keep the ashes, and torn parts,\nOf both our broken hearts:\nShall out of both one new one make,\nFrom hers, th’ allay; from mine, the metal take.\n\nFor of her heart he from the flames will find\nBut little left behind:\nMine only will remain entire;\nNo dross was there, to perish in the fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wish": { - "title": "“The Wish”", - "body": "Well then; I now do plainly see\nThis busy world and I shall ne’er agree.\nThe very honey of all earthly joy\nDoes of all meats the soonest cloy;\nAnd they (methinks) deserve my pity\nWho for it can endure the stings,\nThe crowd, and buzz, and murmurings\nOf this great hive, the city.\n\nAh, yet, ere I descend to th’ grave\nMay I a small house and large garden have!\nAnd a few friends, and many books, both true,\nBoth wise, and both delightful too!\nAnd since love ne’er will from me flee,\nA mistress moderately fair,\nAnd good as guardian angels are,\nOnly belov’d, and loving me.\n\nO fountains! when in you shall I\nMyself eas’d of unpeaceful thoughts espy?\nO fields! O woods! when shall I be made\nThe happy tenant of your shade?\nHere’s the spring-head of Pleasure’s flood:\nHere’s wealthy Nature’s treasury,\nWhere all the riches lie that she\nHas coin’d and stamp’d for good.\n\nPride and ambition here\nOnly in far-fetch’d metaphors appear;\nHere nought but winds can hurtful murmurs scatter,\nAnd nought but Echo flatter.\nThe gods, when they descended, hither\nFrom heaven did always choose their way:\nAnd therefore we may boldly say\nThat ’tis the way too thither.\n\nHow happy here should I\nAnd one dear she live, and embracing die!\nShe who is all the world, and can exclude\nIn deserts solitude.\nI should have then this only fear:\nLest men, when they my pleasures see,\nShould hither throng to live like me,\nAnd so make a city here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-cowper": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Cowper", - "birth": { - "year": 1731 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1800 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "abuse-of-the-gospel": { - "title": "“Abuse of the Gospel”", - "body": "Too many, Lord, abuse Thy grace\nIn this licentious day,\nAnd while they boast they see Thy face,\nThey turn their own away.\n\nThy book displays a gracious light\nThat can the blind restore;\nBut these are dazzled by the sight,\nAnd blinded still the more.\n\nThe pardon such presume upon,\nThey do not beg but steal;\nAnd when they plead it at Thy throne,\nOh! where’s the Spirit’s seal?\n\nWas it for this, ye lawless tribe,\nThe dear Redeemer bled?\nIs this the grace the saints imbibe\nFrom Christ the living head?\n\nAh, Lord, we know Thy chosen few\nAre fed with heavenly fare;\nBut these,--the wretched husks they chew,\nProclaim them what they are.\n\nThe liberty our hearts implore\nIs not to live in sin;\nBut still to wait at Wisdom’s door,\nTill Mercy calls us in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-castaway": { - "title": "“The Castaway”", - "body": "Obscurest night involv’d the sky,\n Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,\nWhen such a destin’d wretch as I,\n Wash’d headlong from on board,\nOf friends, of hope, of all bereft,\nHis floating home for ever left.\n\nNo braver chief could Albion boast\n Than he with whom he went,\nNor ever ship left Albion’s coast,\n With warmer wishes sent.\nHe lov’d them both, but both in vain,\nNor him beheld, nor her again.\n\nNot long beneath the whelming brine,\n Expert to swim, he lay;\nNor soon he felt his strength decline,\n Or courage die away;\nBut wag’d with death a lasting strife,\nSupported by despair of life.\n\nHe shouted: nor his friends had fail’d\n To check the vessel’s course,\nBut so the furious blast prevail’d,\n That, pitiless perforce,\nThey left their outcast mate behind,\nAnd scudded still before the wind.\n\nSome succour yet they could afford;\n And, such as storms allow,\nThe cask, the coop, the floated cord,\n Delay’d not to bestow.\nBut he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,\nWhate’er they gave, should visit more.\n\nNor, cruel as it seem’d, could he\n Their haste himself condemn,\nAware that flight, in such a sea,\n Alone could rescue them;\nYet bitter felt it still to die\nDeserted, and his friends so nigh.\n\nHe long survives, who lives an hour\n In ocean, self-upheld;\nAnd so long he, with unspent pow’r,\n His destiny repell’d;\nAnd ever, as the minutes flew,\nEntreated help, or cried--Adieu!\n\nAt length, his transient respite past,\n His comrades, who before\nHad heard his voice in ev’ry blast,\n Could catch the sound no more.\nFor then, by toil subdued, he drank\nThe stifling wave, and then he sank.\n\nNo poet wept him: but the page\n Of narrative sincere;\nThat tells his name, his worth, his age,\n Is wet with Anson’s tear.\nAnd tears by bards or heroes shed\nAlike immortalize the dead.\n\nI therefore purpose not, or dream,\n Descanting on his fate,\nTo give the melancholy theme\n A more enduring date:\nBut misery still delights to trace\n Its semblance in another’s case.\n\nNo voice divine the storm allay’d,\n No light propitious shone;\nWhen, snatch’d from all effectual aid,\n We perish’d, each alone:\nBut I beneath a rougher sea,\nAnd whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-exhortation-to-prayer": { - "title": "“An Exhortation to Prayer”", - "body": "What various hindrances we meet\nIn coming to a mercy seat!\nYet who that knows the worth of prayer,\nBut wishes to be often there?\n\nPrayer makes the darken’d cloud withdraw,\nPrayer climbs the ladder Jacob saw,\nGives exercise to faith and love,\nBrings every blessing from above.\n\nRestraining prayer, we cease to fight;\nPrayer makes the Christian’s armour bright;\nAnd Satan trembles when he sees\nThe weakest saint upon his knees.\n\nWhile Moses stood with arms spread wide,\nSuccess was found on Israel’s side;\nBut when through weariness they fail’d,\nThat moment Amalek prevail’d.\n\nHave you no words? Ah, think again,\nWords flow apace when you complain,\nAnd fill your fellow-creature’s ear\nWith the sad tale of all your care.\n\nWere half the breath thus vainly spent\nTo heaven in supplication sent,\nYour cheerful song would oftener be,\n“Hear what the Lord has done for me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light-shining-out-of-darkness": { - "title": "“Light Shining out of Darkness”", - "body": "God moves in a mysterious way,\nHis wonders to perform;\nHe plants his footsteps in the sea,\nAnd rides upon the storm.\n\nDeep in unfathomable mines\nOf never-failing skill,\nHe treasures up his bright designs,\nAnd works his sov’reign will.\n\nYe fearful saints, fresh courage take,\nThe clouds ye so much dread\nAre big with mercy, and shall break\nIn blessings on your head.\n\nJudge not the Lord by feeble sense,\nBut trust him for his grace;\nBehind a frowning providence\nHe hides a smiling face.\n\nHis purposes will ripen fast,\nUnfolding ev’ry hour;\nThe bud may have a bitter taste,\nBut sweet will be the flow’r.\n\nBlind unbelief is sure to err,\nAnd scan his work in vain;\nGod is his own interpreter,\nAnd he will make it plain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-mary": { - "title": "“To Mary”", - "body": "The twentieth year is well-nigh past\nSince first our sky was overcast;\nAh, would that this might be the last!\nMy Mary!\n\nThy spirits have a fainter flow,\nI see thee daily weaker grow--\n’Twas my distress that brought thee low,\nMy Mary!\n\nThy needles, once a shining store,\nFor my sake restless heretofore,\nNow rust disus’d, and shine no more,\nMy Mary!\n\nFor though thou gladly wouldst fulfil\nThe same kind office for me still,\nThy sight now seconds not thy will,\nMy Mary!\n\nBut well thou play’d’st the housewife’s part,\nAnd all thy threads with magic art\nHave wound themselves about this heart,\nMy Mary!\n\nThy indistinct expressions seem\nLike language utter’d in a dream;\nYet me they charm, whate’er the theme,\nMy Mary!\n\nThy silver locks, once auburn bright,\nAre still more lovely in my sight\nThan golden beams of orient light,\nMy Mary!\n\nFor could I view nor them nor thee,\nWhat sight worth seeing could I see?\nThe sun would rise in vain for me,\nMy Mary!\n\nPartakers of thy sad decline,\nThy hands their little force resign;\nYet, gently prest, press gently mine,\nMy Mary!\n\nAnd then I feel that still I hold\nA richer store ten thousandfold\nThan misers fancy in their gold,\nMy Mary!\n\nSuch feebleness of limbs thou prov’st,\nThat now at every step thou mov’st\nUpheld by two; yet still thou lov’st,\nMy Mary!\n\nAnd still to love, though prest with ill,\nIn wintry age to feel no chill,\nWith me is to be lovely still,\nMy Mary!\n\nBut ah! by constant heed I know,\nHow oft the sadness that I show\nTransforms thy smiles to looks of woe,\nMy Mary!\n\nAnd should my future lot be cast\nWith much resemblance of the past,\nThy worn-out heart will break at last--\nMy Mary!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "hart-crane": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Hart Crane", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Crane", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "forgetfulness": { - "title": "“Forgetfulness”", - "body": "Forgetfulness is like a song\nThat, freed from beat and measure, wanders.\nForgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,\nOutspread and motionless,--\nA bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.\n\nForgetfulness is rain at night,\nOr an old house in a forest,--or a child.\nForgetfulness is white,--white as a blasted tree,\nAnd it may stun the sybil into prophecy,\nOr bury the Gods.\n\nI can remember much forgetfulness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "legend": { - "title": "“Legend”", - "body": "As silent as a mirror is believed\nRealities plunge in silence by …\n\nI am not ready for repentance;\nNor to match regrets. For the moth\nBends no more than the still\nImploring flame. And tremorous\nIn the white falling flakes\nKisses are,--\nThe only worth all granting.\n\nIt is to be learned--\nThis cleaving and this burning,\nBut only by the one who\nSpends out himself again.\n\nTwice and twice\n(Again the smoking souvenir,\nBleeding eidolon!) and yet again.\nUntil the bright logic is won\nUnwhispering as a mirror\nIs believed.\n\nThen, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry\nShall string some constant harmony,--\nRelentless caper for all those who step\nThe legend of their youth into the noon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "my-grandmothers-love-letters": { - "title": "“My Grandmother’s Love Letters”", - "body": "There are no stars to-night\nBut those of memory.\nYet how much room for memory there is\nIn the loose girdle of soft rain.\n\nThere is even room enough\nFor the letters of my mother’s mother,\nElizabeth,\nThat have been pressed so long\nInto a corner of the roof\nThat they are brown and soft,\nAnd liable to melt as snow.\n\nOver the greatness of such space\nSteps must be gentle.\nIt is all hung by an invisible white hair.\nIt trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.\n\nAnd I ask myself:\n\n“Are your fingers long enough to play\nOld keys that are but echoes:\nIs the silence strong enough\nTo carry back the music to its source\nAnd back to you again\nAs though to her?”\n\nYet I would lead my grandmother by the hand\nThrough much of what she would not understand;\nAnd so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof\nWith such a sound of gently pitying laughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "north-labrador": { - "title": "“North Labrador”", - "body": "A land of leaning ice\nHugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,\nFlings itself silently\nInto eternity.\n\n“Has no one come here to win you,\nOr left you with the faintest blush\nUpon your glittering breasts?\nHave you no memories, O Darkly Bright?”\n\nCold-hushed, there is only the shifting moments\nThat journey toward no Spring--\nNo birth, no death, no time nor sun\nIn answer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "passage": { - "title": "“Passage”", - "body": "Where the cedar leaf divides the sky\nI heard the sea.\nIn sapphire arenas of the hills\nI was promised an improved infancy.\n\nSulking, sanctioning the sun,\nMy memory I left in a ravine,--\nCasual louse that tissues the buck-wheat,\nAprons rocks, congregates pears\nIn moonlit bushels\nAnd wakens alleys with a hidden cough.\n\nDangerously the summer burned\n(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).\nThe shadows of boulders lengthened my back:\nIn the bronze gongs of my cheeks\nThe rain dried without odour.\n\n“It is not long, it is not long;\nSee where the red and black\nVine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind\nDied speaking through the ages that you know\nAnd bug, chimney-sooted heart of man!\nSo was I turned about and back, much as your smoke\nCompiles a too well-known biography.\n\nThe evening was a spear in the ravine\nThat throve through very oak. And had I walked\nThe dozen particular decimals of time?\nTouching an opening laurel, I found\nA thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.\n\n“Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?\nTo argue with the laurel,” I replied:\n“Am justified in transience, fleeing\nUnder the constant wonder of your eyes”\n\nHe closed the book. And from the Ptolemies\nSand troughed us in a glittering, abyss.\nA serpent swam a vertex to the sun\n--On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and\ndrummed.\nWhat fountains did I hear? What icy speeches?\nMemory, committed to the page, had broke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "richard-crashaw": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Crashaw", - "birth": { - "year": 1613 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1649 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Crashaw", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-flaming-heart": { - "title": "“The Flaming Heart”", - "body": "O heart, the equal poise of love’s both parts,\nBig alike with wounds and darts,\nLive in these conquering leaves; live all the same,\nAnd walk through all tongues one triumphant flame;\nLive here, great heart, and love and die and kill,\nAnd bleed and wound, and yield and conquer still.\nLet this immortal life, where’er it comes,\nWalk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms;\nLet mystic deaths wait on ’t, and wise souls be\nThe love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.\nO sweet incendiary! show here thy art,\nUpon this carcass of a hard cold heart,\nLet all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play\nAmong the leaves of thy large books of day,\nCombin’d against this breast, at once break in\nAnd take away from me my self and sin;\nThis gracious robbery shall thy bounty be,\nAnd my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.\nO thou undaunted daughter of desires!\nBy all thy dow’r of lights and fires,\nBy all the eagle in thee, all the dove,\nBy all thy lives and deaths of love,\nBy thy large draughts of intellectual day,\nAnd by thy thirsts of love more large than they,\nBy all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire,\nBy thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire,\nBy the full kingdom of that final kiss\nThat seiz’d thy parting soul and seal’d thee his,\nBy all the heav’ns thou hast in him,\nFair sister of the seraphim!\nBy all of him we have in thee,\nLeave nothing of my self in me:\nLet me so read thy life that I\nUnto all life of mine may die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-song": { - "title": "“A Song”", - "body": "Lord, when the sense of thy sweet grace\nSends up my soul to seek thy face.\nThy blessed eyes breed such desire,\nI dy in love’s delicious Fire.\nO love, I am thy Sacrifice.\nBe still triumphant, blessed eyes.\nStill shine on me, fair suns! that I\nStill may behold, though still I dy.\n\nThough still I dy, I live again;\nStill longing so to be still slain,\nSo gainfull is such losse of breath.\nI dy even in desire of death.\nStill live in me this loving strife\nOf living Death and dying Life.\nFor while thou sweetly slayest me\nDead to my selfe, I live in Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "verses-from-the-shepherds-hymn": { - "title": "“Verses from the Shepherd’s Hymn”", - "body": "We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,\nYoung dawn of our eternal day;\nWe saw Thine eyes break from the East,\nAnd chase the trembling shades away:\nWe saw Thee, and we blest the sight,\nWe saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.\n\nPoor world, said I, what wilt thou do\nTo entertain this starry stranger?\nIs this the best thou canst bestow--\nA cold and not too cleanly manger?\nContend, the powers of heaven and earth,\nTo fit a bed for this huge birth.\n\nProud world, said I, cease your contest,\nAnd let the mighty babe alone;\nThe phoenix builds the phoenix’ nest,\nLove’s architecture is His own.\nThe babe, whose birth embraves this morn,\nMade His own bed ere He was born.\n\nI saw the curl’d drops, soft and slow,\nCome hovering o’er the place’s head,\nOff’ring their whitest sheets of snow,\nTo furnish the fair infant’s bed.\nForbear, said I, be not too bold;\nYour fleece is white, but ’tis too cold.\n\nI saw th’ obsequious seraphim\nTheir rosy fleece of fire bestow,\nFor well they now can spare their wings,\nSince Heaven itself lies here below.\nWell done, said I; but are you sure\nYour down, so warm, will pass for pure?\n\nNo, no, your King ’s not yet to seek\nWhere to repose His royal head;\nSee, see how soon His new-bloom’d cheek\n’Twixt mother’s breasts is gone to bed!\nSweet choice, said we; no way but so,\nNot to lie cold, you sleep in snow!\n\nShe sings Thy tears asleep, and dips\nHer kisses in Thy weeping eye;\nShe spreads the red leaves of Thy lips,\nThat in their buds yet blushing lie.\nShe ’gainst those mother diamonds tries\nThe points of her young eagle’s eyes.\n\nWelcome--tho’ not to those gay flies,\nGilded i’ th’ beams of earthly kings,\nSlippery souls in smiling eyes--\nBut to poor shepherds, homespun things,\nWhose wealth ’s their flocks, whose wit ’s to be\nWell read in their simplicity.\n\nYet, when young April’s husband show’rs\nShall bless the fruitful Maia’s bed,\nWe’ll bring the first-born of her flowers,\nTo kiss Thy feet and crown Thy head.\nTo Thee, dread Lamb! whose love must keep\nThe shepherds while they feed their sheep.\n\nTo Thee, meek Majesty, soft King\nOf simple graces and sweet loves!\nEach of us his lamb will bring,\nEach his pair of silver doves!\nAt last, in fire of Thy fair eyes,\nOurselves become our own best sacrifice!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-weeper": { - "title": "“The Weeper”", - "body": "Hail, sister springs,\nParents of silver-footed rills!\nEver bubbling things,\nThawing crystal, snowy hills!\nStill spending, never spent; I mean\nThy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene.\n\nHeavens thy fair eyes be;\nHeavens of ever-falling stars;\n’Tis seed-time still with thee,\nAnd stars thou sow’st whose harvest dares\nPromise the earth to countershine\nWhatever makes Heaven’s forehead fine.\n\nEvery morn from hence\nA brisk cherub something sips\nWhose soft influence\nAdds sweetness to his sweetest lips;\nThen to his music: and his song\nTastes of this breakfast all day long.\n\nWhen some new bright guest\nTakes up among the stars a room,\nAnd Heaven will make a feast,\nAngels with their bottles come,\nAnd draw from these full eyes of thine\nTheir Master’s water, their own wine.\n\nThe dew no more will weep\nThe primrose’s pale cheek to deck;\nThe dew no more will sleep\nNuzzled in the lily’s neck:\nMuch rather would it tremble here,\nAnd leave them both to be thy tear.\n\nWhen sorrow would be seen\nIn her brightest majesty,\n--For she is a Queen--\nThen is she drest by none but thee:\nThen and only then she wears\nHer richest pearls--I mean thy tears.\n\nNot in the evening’s eyes,\nWhen they red with weeping are\nFor the Sun that dies,\nSits Sorrow with a face so fair.\nNowhere but here did ever meet\nSweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.\n\nDoes the night arise?\nStill thy tears do fall and fall.\nDoes night lose her eyes?\nStill the fountain weeps for all.\nLet day and night do what they will,\nThou hast thy task, thou weepest still.\n\nNot So long she lived\nWill thy tomb report of thee;\nBut So long she grieved:\nThus must we date thy memory.\nOthers by days, by months, by years,\nMeasure their ages, thou by tears.\n\nSay, ye bright brothers,\nThe fugitive sons of those fair eyes\nYour fruitful mothers,\nWhat make you here? What hopes can ’tice\nYou to be born? What cause can borrow\nYou from those nests of noble sorrow?\n\nWhither away so fast\nFor sure the sordid earth\nYour sweetness cannot taste,\nNor does the dust deserve your birth.\nSweet, whither haste you then? O say,\nWhy you trip so fast away?\n\nWe go not to seek\nThe darlings of Aurora’s bed,\nThe rose’s modest cheek,\nNor the violet’s humble head.\nNo such thing: we go to meet\nA worthier object--our Lord’s feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "wishes-to-his-supposed-mistress": { - "title": "“Wishes to His (Supposed) Mistress”", - "body": "Whoe’er she be,\nThat not impossible she\nThat shall command my heart and me;\n\nWhere’er she lie,\nLocked up from mortal eye\nIn shady leaves of destiny:\n\nTill that ripe birth\nOf studied fate stand forth,\nAnd teach her fair steps to our earth;\n\nTill that divine\nIdea take a shrine\nOf crystal flesh, through which to shine:\n\nMeet you her, my wishes,\nBespeak her to my blisses,\nAnd be ye called my absent kisses.\n\nI wish her beauty,\nThat owes not all its duty\nTo gaudy tire, or glist’ring shoe-tie;\n\nSomething more than\nTaffata or tissue can,\nOr rampant feather, or rich fan;\n\nMore than the spoil\nOf shop, or silkworm’s toil,\nOr a bought blush, or a set smile.\n\nA face that’s best\nBy its own beauty drest,\nAnd can alone commend the rest:\n\nA face made up\nOut of no other shop\nThan what nature’s white hand sets ope.\n\nA cheek where youth\nAnd blood with pen of truth\nWrite what the reader sweetly ru’th.\n\nA cheek where grows\nMore than a morning rose,\nWhich to no box his being owes.\n\nLips, where all day\nA lovers kiss may play,\nYet carry nothing thence away.\n\nLooks that oppress\nTheir richest tires, but dress\nAnd clothe their simplest nakedness.\n\nEyes, that displaces\nThe neighbour diamond, and outfaces\nThat sunshine by their own sweet graces.\n\nTresses, that wear\nJewels, but to declare\nHow much themselves more precious are;\n\nWhose native ray\nCan tame the wanton day\nOf gems that in their bright shades play.\n\nEach ruby there,\nOr pearl that dare appear,\nBe its own blush, be its own tear.\n\nA well-tamed heart,\nFor whose more noble smart\nLove may be long choosing a dart.\n\nEyes, that bestow\nFull quivers on Love’s bow,\nYet pay less arrows than they owe.\n\nSmiles, that can warm\nThe blood, yet teach a charm,\nThat chastity shall take no harm.\n\nBlushes, that bin\nThe burnish of no sin,\nNor flames of aught too hot within.\n\nJoyes, that confess\nVirtue their mistress,\nAnd have no other head to dress.\n\nFears, fond and flight\nAs the coy bride’s when night\nFirst does the longing lover right.\n\nTears, quickly fled\nAnd vain as those are shed\nFor a dying maidenhead.\n\nDays, that need borrow\nNo part of their good morrow\nFrom a forspent night of sorrow.\n\nDays, that, in spite\nOf darkness, by the light\nOf a clear mind are day all night.\n\nNights, sweet as they,\nMade short by lovers’ play,\nYet long by th’ absence of the day.\n\nLife, that dares send\nA challenge to its end,\nAnd when it comes say Welcome Friend.\n\nSydneian showers\nOf sweet discourse, whose powers\nCan crown old winter’s head with flowers.\n\nSoft silken hours,\nOpen suns, shady bowers\n’Bove all; nothing within that lours.\n\nWhate’er delight\nCan make day’s forehead bright,\nOr give down to the wings of night.\n\nIn her whole frame\nHave nature all the name,\nArt and ornament the shame.\n\nHer flattery\nPicture and poesy,\nHer counsel her own virtue be.\n\nI wish her store\nOf worth may leave her poor\nOf wishes; and I wish--no more.\n\nNow, if Time knows\nThat Her, whose radiant brows\nWeave them a garland of my vows;\n\nHer, whose just bays\nMy future hopes can raise,\nA trophy to her present praise;\n\nHer, that dares be\nWhat these lines wish to see:\nI seek no further, it is she.\n\n’Tis she, and here\nLo! I unclothe and clear\nMy wishes’ cloudy character.\n\nMay she enjoy it,\nWhose merit dare apply it,\nBut modesty dares still deny it!\n\nSuch worth as this is\nShall fix my flying wishes,\nAnd determine them to kisses.\n\nLet her full glory,\nMy fancies, fly before ye;\nBe ye my fictions, but her story.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-creeley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Creeley", - "birth": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2005 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Creeley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "chicago": { - "title": "“Chicago”", - "body": "Say that you’re\nlonely--and want\nsomething to\nplace you--\n\ngoing around groping\neither by mind\nor hand--but behind\nthe pun is a\n\ndoor you keep open,\none way,\nso they won’t touch you\nand still let you stay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-door": { - "title": "“The Door”", - "body": "It is hard going to the door\ncut so small in the wall where\nthe vision which echoes loneliness\nbrings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.\n\nWhat I understood, I understand.\nMy mind is sometime torment,\nsometimes good and filled with livelihood,\nand feels the ground.\n\nBut I see the door,\nand knew the wall, and wanted the wood,\nand would get there if I could\nwith my feet and hands and mind.\n\nLady, do not banish me\nfor digressions. My nature\nis a quagmire of unresolved\nconfessions. Lady, I follow.\n\nI walked away from myself,\nI left the room, I found the garden,\nI knew the woman\nin it, together we lay down.\n\nDead night remembers. In December\nwe change, not multiplied but dispersed,\nsneaked out of childhood,\nthe ritual of dismemberment.\n\nMighty magic is a mother,\nin her there is another issue\nof fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,\nthe charge of the command.\n\nThe garden echoes across the room.\nIt is fixed in the wall like a mirror\nthat faces a window behind you\nand reflects the shadows.\n\nMay I go now?\nAm I allowed to bow myself down\nin the ridiculous posture of renewal,\nof the insistence of which I am the virtue?\n\nNothing for You is untoward.\nInside You would also be tall,\nmore tall, more beautiful.\nCome toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.\n\nSo I screamed to You,\nwho hears as the wind, and changes\nmultiply, invariably,\nchanges in the mind.\n\nRunning to the door, I ran down\nas a clock runs down. Walked backwards,\nstumbled, sat down\nhard on the floor near the wall.\n\nWhere were You.\nHow absurd, how vicious.\nThere is nothing to do but get up.\nMy knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.\n\nFor that one sings, one\nwrites the spring poem, one goes on walking.\nThe Lady has always moved to the next town\nand you stumble on after Her.\n\nThe door in the wall leads to the garden\nwhere in the sunlight sit\nthe Graces in long Victorian dresses,\nof which my grandmother had spoken.\n\nHistory sings in their faces.\nThey are young, they are obtainable,\nand you follow after them also\nin the service of God and Truth.\n\nBut the Lady is indefinable,\nshe will be the door in the wall\nto the garden in sunlight.\nI will go on talking forever.\n\nI will never get there.\nOh Lady, remember me\nwho in Your service grows older\nnot wiser, no more than before.\n\nHow can I die alone.\nWhere will I be then who am now alone,\nwhat groans so pathetically\nin this room where I am alone?\n\nI will go to the garden.\nI will be a romantic. I will sell\nmyself in hell,\nin heaven also I will be.\n\nIn my mind I see the door,\nI see the sunlight before me across the floor\nbeckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt\nmoves small beyond it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "for-no-clear-reason": { - "title": "“For No Clear Reason”", - "body": "I dreamt last night\nthe fright was over, that\nthe dust came, and then water,\nand women and men, together\nagain, and all was quiet\nin the dim moon’s light.\n\nA paean of such patience--\nlaughing, laughing at me,\nand the days extend over\nthe earth’s great cover,\ngrass, trees, and flower-\ning season, for no clear reason.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-know-a-man": { - "title": "“I Know a man”", - "body": "As I sd to my\nfriend, because I am\nalways talking,--John, I\n\nsd, which was not his\nname, the darkness sur-\nrounds us, what\n\ncan we do against\nit, or else, shall we &\nwhy not, buy a goddamn big car,\n\ndrive, he sd, for\nchrist’s sake, look\nout where yr going.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ill-be-here": { - "title": "“I’ll Be Here”", - "body": "There is a lake of clear water.\nThere are forms of things despite us.\n\nPope said, “A little learning,”\n_and, and, and, and_--the same.\n\nWhy don’t you go home and sleep\nand come back and talk some more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rose": { - "title": "“The Rose”", - "body": "Up and down\nshe walks, listless\nform, a movement\nquietly misled.\n\nNow, speak to her.\n“Did you want\nto go, then why\ndon’t you.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-wicker-basket": { - "title": "“A Wicker Basket”", - "body": "Comes the time when it’s later\nand onto your table the headwaiter\nputs the bill, and very soon after\nrings out the sound of lively laughter--\n\nPicking up change, hands like a walrus,\nand a face like a barndoor’s,\nand a head without any apparent size,\nnothing but two eyes--\n\nSo that’s you, man,\nor me. I make it as I can,\nI pick up, I go\nfaster than they know--\n\nOut the door, the street like a night,\nany night, and no one in sight,\nbut then, well, there she is,\nold friend Liz--\n\nAnd she opens the door of her cadillac,\nI step in back,\nand we’re gone.\nShe turns me on--\n\nThere are very huge stars, man, in the sky,\nand from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie,\nwith a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,\nand I eat it--\n\nSlowly. And while certainly\nthey are laughing at me, and all around me is racket\nof these cats not making it, I make it\n\nin my wicker basket.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-world": { - "title": "“The World”", - "body": "I wanted so ably\nto reassure you, I wanted\nthe man you took to be me,\n\nto comfort you, and got\nup, and went to the window,\npushed back, as you asked me to,\n\nthe curtain, to see\nthe outline of the trees\nin the night outside.\n\nThe light, love,\nthe light we felt then,\ngreyly, was it, that\n\ncame in, on us, not\nmerely my hands or yours,\nor a wetness so comfortable,\n\nbut in the dark then\nas you slept, the grey\nfigure came so close\n\nand leaned over,\nbetween us, as you\nslept, restless, and\n\nmy own face had to\nsee it, and be seen by it,\nthe man it was, your\n\ngrey lost tired bewildered\nbrother, unused, untaken--\nhated by love, and dead,\n\nbut not dead, for an\ninstant, saw me, myself\nthe intruder, as he was not.\n\nI tried to say, it is\nall right, she is\nhappy, you are no longer\n\nneeded. I said,\nhe is dead, and he\nwent as you shifted\n\nand woke, at first afraid,\nthen knew by my own knowing\nwhat had happened--\n\nand the light then\nof the sun coming\nfor another morning\nin the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "alice-guerin-crist": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alice Guerin Crist", - "birth": { - "year": 1876 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish+australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪 🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Guerin_Crist", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian", - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "the-banshee": { - "title": "“The Banshee”", - "body": "As we came down the old boreen,\nRose and I--Rose and I,\nAt vesper time on Sunday e’en,\nWe heard a banshee cry!\nBeyond the churchyard dim and dark,\n’Neath whispering elms, and yew-trees stark,\nWhere our star shone--a corpse-like spark--\nAgainst the wintry sky.\n\nWe heard and shuddered sick with dread,\nRose and I--Rose and I,\nAs the shrill keening rang o’erhead\nWhere cloud-wrack floated high.\nOur two young hearts long, sorely tried,\nBy poverty and love denied\nStill waiting for some favouring tide,\nAnd now! Death come so nigh.\n\n“Which of us two is called away\nYou or I--You or I?”\nI heard my patient poor love say,\nWith bitter plaintive sigh.\n“Neither, dear girl,” I bravely said,\n“To Mary Mother bow your head,\nAnd cry for help to Her instead,\nNor heed the Banshee’s cry.”\n\nWe raised our hearts in fervent prayer,\nRose and I--Rose and I,\nNor knew our troubles ended there,\nOur happiness came nigh.\nFor ’twas the grim old farmer, he--\nMy only kin, rich, miserly,\nWho, dying left his wealth to me--\nFor whom the banshee cried.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "brother-wind": { - "title": "“Brother Wind”", - "body": "“I thank my god for brother wind,”\nSo prayed St. Francis long ago\nIn words of simple, joyous praise,\nThat fill my heart with sudden glow\nAs--braced by winter’s icy draught--\nWith singing soul, and strengthened mind,\nI humbly join the good Saint’s prayer\nThank my God for “Brother Wind.”\n\nFor Brother Wind, who, whispering soft\nBrings subtlest perfume on his wings,\nThe violet scent of childhood days,\nThe lost delight in simple things;\nFor Brother wind, who whistling keen\nO’er open plain and storm-scarred hill,\nCleanses from mind, and heart, and brain,\nAll thoughts of wrong, and ancient ill.\n\nWho wafts from scarce-stirred lily beds\nIncense of early purity,\nOr wakes to life our laggard souls\nWith stinging fragrance of the sea.\n\nEchoes of Heaven, far-off and faint\nFor weary heart and tired mind,\nSweet long-lost memories, old and quaint--\nThese are the gifts of Brother Wind.\n\nAh! Dear St. Francis, let me kneel\nBefore thy shrine with joyous mind\nJoining my humble, grateful prayer,\nThanking our God for Brother Wind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "christmas-welcome": { - "title": "“Christmas Welcome”", - "body": "Under the wintry skies,\nSundered from home and kin,\nWith patience and love in her eyes,\nMary is journeying.\nThe angels keep watch and ward,\nAnd Joseph is there to guard,\nBut--“there is no room at the inn.”\n\nNo room in the inns of Life,\nNo place for Christ the King,\nThrough the Heavens with joy are rife,\nWhere worshipping angels sing,\nIn palace, and street and mart,\nIn the worlds great pagan heart\nThere is no welcoming.\n\nBut in far cathedrals dim,\nWhere Christmas lilies bloom\n’Mid incense and holy hymn,\nAnd tapers lighting the gloom,\nWhere the Christmas crib is laid,\nAnd children come, unafraid\nHis own are finding Him room.\n\nHere the humble ones of the earth,\nThe poor, and the sorely tried\nAre waiting the dear Lord’s birth,\nAnd their arms are open wide,\nAnd Mary will find them grace\nWho makes for Her child a place\nIn their hearts, this Christmas-tide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "himself": { - "title": "“Himself”", - "body": "Last night, when I was listenin’\nAlone, to wind and rain,\nHe took the chair beside me,\nHimself--come home again.\n\nHis kind blue eyes were smilin’\nBeneath his thatch of grey,\nHe laid his hand on my hand,\nThe ould sweetheartin’ way.\n\nI pressed my cheek upon it,\nRemembering bitterly\nThe times he faced his daily toil\nWithout one smile from me.\n\nAnd yet, his meals were always good,\nHis clothes well kept and clean,\nThe neighbours, sure, will tell you,\nThe splendid wife I’ve been.\n\nBut in Life’s stress and struggle,\nWe somehow, grew apart,\nYou know these Irish mothers,\n’Tis “the childer” has their heart.\n\nAnd he grew grim, and close-lipped,\nAnd harder, day by day,\nPoor man--too tired for laughter,\nToo worried to be gay.\n\nBut--how his care enclosed us,\nFor all he was so grim,\nThe very rafters of our home\nWere cut and laid by him.\n\nAnd I, that might have cheered him,\nThe bitter words I said,\nOh! God, that we remember,\nOnly when they are dead.\n\nBut now--my arms were round him,\nThe room seemed full of flowers,\nAnd Youth came back and sunshine,\nThat glorious time was ours.\n\nThe firelight flamed and flickered,\nThe embers fell apart,\nI woke to empty silence,\nWith sorrow at my heart.\n\nThe wild winds brought the morning,\nThe dawn was red and chill,\nAnd Himself was lyin’ sleepin’\nIn the graveyard on the hill!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "homesick": { - "title": "“Homesick”", - "body": "I’ve lit the Christmas candle,\nAs we used to long ago\nWhen it shone through cabin windows\nOn Holly-hedge and snow.\nIn this fine new house they’ve built me\nThat is furnished rich and fair--\nBut I’m hearing now the breakers rolling round the cliffs of Moher,\nAnd my heart is aching, aching for a breath of Irish air.\n\nThe wren boys on St. Stephen’s Day\nWent singin’ up and down.\nWith their poor dead wren and thorn bush,\nI heard them through the town.\nBut to-night down lighted city streets,\nI hear the distant band,\nAnd when’er they play “our own” hymns or tune of dear old Ireland,\nThe poor old foolish heart of me is in another land.\n\n’Twas a lonely hillside chapel,\nWhere we tramped to midnight Mass,\nWith the flaring lights we carried\nThrowing shadows on the grass.\nBut to-night my boy will drive me\nIn his grand new limousine,\nAnd he’ll wrap my furs around me, proudly caring for his Mother,\nAnd I’ll ride to the Cathedral just as grand as any queen.\n\nAh! No, I’m not repinin’,\nAnd I love this wide new land,\nAnd I’m proud to see the childer\nGrowin’ prosperous and grand,\nBut roots strike deep in Irish soil,\nOld memories are sweet,\nAnd to-night my heart is yearnin’ for the cabin I was born in,\nAnd I smell the reek of turf-smoke driftin’ up the city streets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_stephen" - } - } - }, - "the-voyage": { - "title": "“The Voyage”", - "body": "We planned a glorious voyage, my Captain bold and I,\nTo sail in bliss on summer seas while halcyon days went by;\nAnd underneath a speckless sky in a little dancing breeze,\nWe decked our craft with roses, and launched it on the seas.\n\nYes--we would sail together, my Captain gay and I.\nPast miles and miles of blossomed shore, with sheltering harbours nigh;\nWe would not tempt the trackless seas, nor roam the waters dark,\nLes Love, the tricksy pilot, should e’er desert our bark.\n\nAlas! For all our planning, my Captain brave and I,\nWe drove before a whistling gale beneath a lowering sky;\nFor the fierce storms came up on us scarce half a league from home,\nAnd flung our crimson roses in the bitter blinding foam.\n\nSilent our lilting love songs, untouched our gay guitar,\nAs side by side we toil and strive where raging tempests are;\nBut though in ceaseless labour our earnest days are spent,\nA voiceless song is in our souls--a song of glad content.\n\nFor Love, the tricksy pilot, still at our helm he sings,\nOur darkest night is luminous with torchlight from his wings;\nLoudly he sings and sweetly above the whistling gale,\nAnd with Love’s music in our hearts, how could we turn or quail?\n\nContent we sail together, my Captain true and I,\nUnheeding of the raging waves, or of the threatening sky;\nWith His strong hand to guard us, and Love to guide the boat,\nThe happiest pair of mariners that God has set afloat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "pablo-antonio-cuadra": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Pablo Antonio Cuadra", - "birth": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2002 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "nicaraguan", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇳🇮", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Antonio_Cuadra", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "nicaraguan" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-despairing-man-draws-a-serpent": { - "title": "“The Despairing Man Draws a Serpent”", - "body": "I went up the hill \nAt moonrise.\n\nShe swore that she would come \nBy the south way.\n\nA dusky hawk \nCaught up the path \nIn his talons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Thomas Merton" - } - }, - "manuscript-in-a-bottle": { - "title": "“Manuscript in a Bottle”", - "body": "I had seen coconut trees and tamarinds\nand mangos\nthe white sails drying in the sun\nthe smoke of breakfast across the sky\nat dawn\nand fish jumping in the net\nand a girl in red\nwho would go down to the shore and come up with a jug\nand pass behind a grove\nand appear and disappear\nand for a long time\nI could not sail without that image\nof the girl in red\nand the coconut trees and tamarinds and mangos\nthat seemed to live only\nbecause she lived\nand the white sails were white only\nwhen she lay down\nin her red dress and the smoke was blue\nand the fish and the reflection of the fish\nwere happy\nand for a long time I wanted to write a poem\nabout that girl in red\nand couldn’t find the way to describe\nthe strange things that fascinated me\nand when I told my friends they laughed\nbut when I sailed away and returned\nI always passed the island of the girl in red\nuntil one day I entered the bay of her island\nand cast anchor and leaped to land\nand now I write these lines and throw them into the waves in a bottle\nbecause this is my story\nbecause I am gazing at coconut trees and tamarinds\nand mangos\nthe white sails drying in the sun\nand the smoke of breakfast across the sky\nand time passes\nand we wait and wait\nand we grunt\nand she does not come with ears of corn\nthe girl in red.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Grace Schulman & Ann McCarthy de Zavala" - } - } - } - }, - "e-e-cummings": { - "metadata": { - "name": "E. E. Cummings", - "birth": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 42 - }, - "poems": { - "blac": { - "title": "“!blac”", - "body": "!blac\nk\nagains\nt\n\n(whi)\n\nte sky\n?t\nrees whic\nh fr\n\nom droppe\n\nd\n,\nle\naf\n\na:;go\n\ne\ns wh\nIrlI\nn\n\n.g", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "2-little-whos": { - "title": "“2 Little Whos”", - "body": "2 little whos\n(he and she)\nunder are this\nwonderful tree\n\nsmiling stand\n(all realms of where\nand when beyond)\nnow and here\n\n(far from a grown\n-up i&you-\nful world of known)\nwho and who\n\n(2 little ams\nand over them this\naflame with dreams\nincredible is)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "all-in-green-my-love-went-riding": { - "title": "“All in Green My Love Went Riding”", - "body": "All in green went my love riding\non a great horse of gold\ninto the silver dawn.\n\nfour lean hounds crouched low and smiling\nthe merry deer ran before.\n\nFleeter be they than dappled dreams\nthe swift sweet deer\nthe red rare deer.\n\nFour red roebuck at a white water\nthe cruel bugle sang before.\n\nHorn at hip went my love riding\nriding the echo down\ninto the silver dawn.\n\nfour lean hounds crouched low and smiling\nthe level meadows ran before.\n\nSofter be they than slippered sleep\nthe lean lithe deer\nthe fleet flown deer.\n\nFour fleet does at a gold valley\nthe famished arrow sang before.\n\nBow at belt went my love riding\nriding the mountain down\ninto the silver dawn.\n\nfour lean hounds crouched low and smiling\nthe sheer peaks ran before.\n\nPaler be they than daunting death\nthe sleek slim deer\nthe tall tense deer.\n\nFour tall stags at a green mountain\nthe lucky hunter sang before.\n\nAll in green went my love riding\non a great horse of gold\ninto the silver dawn.\n\nfour lean hounds crouched low and smiling\nmy heart fell dead before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "anyone-lived-in-a-pretty-how-town": { - "title": "“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”", - "body": "anyone lived in a pretty how town\n(with up so floating many bells down)\nspring summer autumn winter\nhe sang his didn’t he danced his did.\n\nWomen and men(both little and small)\ncared for anyone not at all\nthey sowed their isn’t they reaped their same\nsun moon stars rain\n\nchildren guessed(but only a few\nand down they forgot as up they grew\nautumn winter spring summer)\nthat noone loved him more by more\n\nwhen by now and tree by leaf\nshe laughed his joy she cried his grief\nbird by snow and stir by still\nanyone’s any was all to her\n\nsomeones married their everyones\nlaughed their cryings and did their dance\n(sleep wake hope and then)they\nsaid their nevers they slept their dream\n\nstars rain sun moon\n(and only the snow can begin to explain\nhow children are apt to forget to remember\nwith up so floating many bells down)\n\none day anyone died i guess\n(and noone stooped to kiss his face)\nbusy folk buried them side by side\nlittle by little and was by was\n\nall by all and deep by deep\nand more by more they dream their sleep\nnoone and anyone earth by april\nwish by spirit and if by yes.\n\nWomen and men(both dong and ding)\nsummer autumn winter spring\nreaped their sowing and went their came\nsun moon stars rain", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "because-i-love-you": { - "title": "“Because I Love You”", - "body": "because i love you)last night\n\nclothed in sealace\nappeared to me\nyour mind drifting\nwith chuckling rubbish\nof pearl weed coral and stones;\n\nlifted,and(before my\neyes sinking)inward,fled;softly\nyour face smile breasts gargled\nby death rowned only\n\nagain carefully through deepness to rise\nthese your wrists\nthighs feet hands\n\npoising\n to again utterly disappear;\nrushing gently swiftly creeping\nthrough my dreams last\nnight,all of your\nbody with its spirit floated\n(clothed only in\n\nthe tide’s acute weaving murmur", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-boys-i-meet-are-not-refined": { - "title": "“The Boys I Meet Are Not Refined”", - "body": "the boys i mean are not refined\nthey go with girls who buck and bite\nthey do not give a fuck for luck\nthey hump them thirteen times a night\n\none hangs a hat upon her tit\none carves a cross on her behind\nthey do not give a shit for wit\nthe boys i mean are not refined\n\nthey come with girls who bite and buck\nwho cannot read and cannot write\nwho laugh like they would fall apart\nand masturbate with dynamite\n\nthe boys i mean are not refined\nthey cannot chat of that and this\nthey do not give a fart for art\nthey kill like you would take a piss\n\nthey speak whatever’s on their mind\nthey do whatever’s in their pants\nthe boys i mean are not refined\nthey shake the mountains when they dance", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "buffalo-bills": { - "title": "“Buffalo Bill’s”", - "body": "Buffalo Bill’s\ndefunct\n who used to\n ride a watersmooth-silver\n stallion\nand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat\n Jesus\nhe was a handsome man\n and what I want to know is\nhow do you like your blue-eyed boy\nMister Death", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cambridge-ladies-who-live-in-furnished-souls": { - "title": "“The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls”", - "body": "the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls\nare unbeautiful and have comfortable minds\n(also, with the church’s protestant blessings\ndaughters,unscented shapeless spirited)\nthey believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,\nare invariably interested in so many things--\nat the present writing one still finds\ndelighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?\nperhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy\nscandal of Mrs. N and Professor D\n… the Cambridge ladies do not care, above\nCambridge if sometimes in its box of\nsky lavender and cornerless, the\nmoon rattles like a fragment of angry candy", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dying-is-fine-but-death": { - "title": "“Dying is Fine but Death”", - "body": "dying is fine)but Death\n\n?o\nbaby\ni\n\nwouldn’t like\n\nDeath if Death\nwere\ngood:for\n\nwhen(instead of stopping to think)you\n\nbegin to feel of it,dying\n’s miraculous\nwhy?be\n\ncause dying is\n\nperfectly natural;perfectly\nputting\nit mildly lively(but\n\nDeath\n\nis strictly\nscientific\n& artificial &\n\nevil & legal)\n\nwe thank thee\ngod\nalmighty for dying\n(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fl": { - "title": "“Fl”", - "body": "fl\n\na\ntt\nene\n\nd d\n\nreaml\nessn\nesse\n\ns wa\n\nit\nsp\ni\n\nt)(t\n\nhe\ns\ne\n\nf\n\nooli\nsh sh\napes\n\nccocoucougcoughcoughi\n\nng with me\nn more o\nn than in the\n\nm", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-carry-your-heart-with-me": { - "title": "“I Carry Your Heart with Me”", - "body": "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in\nmy heart)i am never without it(anywhere\ni go you go,my dear;and whatever is done\nby only me is your doing,my darling)\n i fear\nno fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want\nno world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)\nand it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant\nand whatever a sun will always sing is you\n\nhere is the deepest secret nobody knows\n(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud\nand the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows\nhigher than soul can hope or mind can hide)\nand this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart\n\ni carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-have-found-what-you-are-like": { - "title": "“I Have Found What You Are Like”", - "body": "i have found what you are like\nthe rain\n\n (Who feathers frightened fields\nwith the superior dust-of-sleep. wields\n\neasily the pale club of the wind\nand swirled justly souls of flower strike\n\nthe air in utterable coolness\n\ndeeds of gren thrilling light\n with thinned\nnewfragile yellows\n\n lurch and press\n--in the woods\n which\n stutter\n and\n sing\nAnd the coolness of your smile is\nstirringofbirds between my arms;but\ni should rather than anything\nhave(almost when hugeness will shut\nquietly)almost,\n your kiss", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-love-you-much": { - "title": "“I Love You Much”", - "body": "i love you much(most beautiful darling)\n\nmore than anyone on the earth and i\nlike you better than everything in the sky\n\n--sunlight and singing welcome your coming\n\nalthough winter may be everywhere\nwith such a silence and such a darkness\nnoone can quite begin to guess\n\n(except my life)the true time of year--\n\nand if what calls itself a world should have\nthe luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such\nsunlight as will leap higher than high\nthrough gayer than gayest someone’s heart at your each\n\nnearness)everyone certainly would(my\nmost beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-sing-of-olad-glad-and-big": { - "title": "“I Sing of Olad Glad and Big”", - "body": "i sing of Olaf glad and big\nwhose warmest heart recoiled at war:\na conscientious object--or\n\nhis wellbelovéd colonel(trig\nwestpointer most succinctly bred)\ntook erring Olaf soon in hand;\nbut--though an host of overjoyed\nnoncoms(first knocking on the head\nhim)do through icy waters roll\nthat helplessness which others stroke\nwith brushes recently employed\nanent this muddy toiletbowl,\nwhile kindred intellects evoke\nallegiance per blunt instruments--\nOlaf(being to all intents\na corpse and wanting any rag\nupon what God unto him gave)\nresponds,without getting annoyed\n“I will not kiss your fucking flag”\n\nstraightway the silver bird looked grave\n(departing hurriedly to shave)\n\nbut--though all kinds of officers\n(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)\ntheir passive prey did kick and curse\nuntil for wear their clarion\nvoices and boots were much the worse,\nand egged the firstclassprivates on\nhis rectum wickedly to tease\nby means of skilfully applied\nbayonets roasted hot with heat--\nOlaf(upon what were once knees)\ndoes almost ceaselessly repeat\n“there is some shit I will not eat”\n\nour president,being of which\nassertions duly notified\nthrew the yellowsonofabitch\ninto a dungeon,where he died\n\nChrist(of His mercy infinite)\ni pray to see;and Olaf,too\n\npreponderatingly because\nunless statistics lie he was\nmore brave than me:more blond than you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-thank-you-god-for-most-this-amazing": { - "title": "“I Thank You God for Most This Amazing”", - "body": "i thank You God for most this amazing\nday:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees\nand a blue true dream of sky;and for everything\nwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes\n\n(i who have died am alive again today,\nand this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth\nday of life and love and wings:and of the gay\ngreat happening illimitably earth)\n\nhow should tasting touching hearing seeing\nbreathing any--lifted from the no\nof all nothing--human merely being\ndoubt unimaginable You?\n\n(now the ears of my ears awake and\nnow the eyes of my eyes are opened)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "if-everything-happens-that-cant-be-done": { - "title": "“If Everything Happens that Can’t Be Done”", - "body": "if everything happens that can’t be done\n(and anything’s righter\nthan books\ncould plan)\nthe stupidest teacher will almost guess\n(with a run\nskip\naround we go yes)\nthere’s nothing as something as one\n\none hasn’t a why or because or although\n(and buds know better\nthan books\ndon’t grow)\none’s anything old being everything new\n(with a what\nwhich\naround we come who)\none’s everyanything so\n\nso world is a leaf so tree is a bough\n(and birds sing sweeter\nthan books\ntell how)\nso here is away and so your is a my\n(with a down\nup\naround again fly)\nforever was never till now\n\nnow i love you and you love me\n(and books are shutter\nthan books\ncan be)\nand deep in the high that does nothing but fall\n(with a shout\neach\naround we go all)\nthere’s somebody calling who’s we\n\nwe’re anything brighter than even the sun\n(we’re everything greater\nthan books\nmight mean)\nwe’re everanything more than believe\n(with a spin\nleap\nalive we’re alive)\nwe’re wonderful one times one", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-i-should-sleep-with-a-lady-called-death": { - "title": "“If I Should Sleep with a Lady Called Death”", - "body": "if I should sleep with a lady called death\nget another man with firmer lips\nto take your new mouth in his teeth\n(hips pumping pleasure into hips).\n\nSeeing how the limp huddling string\nof your smile over his body squirms\nkissingly, I will bring you every spring\nhandfuls of little normal worms.\n\nDress deftly your flesh in stupid stuffs,\nphrase the immense weapon of your hair.\nUnderstanding why his eye laughs,\nI will bring you every year\n\nsomething which is worth the whole,\nan inch of nothing for your soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-i": { - "title": "“If I”", - "body": "if i\n\nor anybody don’t\nknow where it her his\n\nmy next meal’s coming from\ni say to hell with that\nthat doesn’t matter (and if\n\nhe she it or everybody gets a\nbellyful without\nlifting my finger i say to hell\nwith that i\n\nsay that doesn’t matter) but\nif somebody\nor you are beautiful or\ndeep or generous what\ni say is\n\nwhistle that\nsing that yell that spell\nthat out big (bigger than cosmic\nrays war earthquakes famine or the ex\n\nprince of whoses diving into\na whatses to rescue miss nobody’s\nprobably handbag) because i say that’s not\n\nswell (get me) babe not (understand me) lousy\nkid that’s something else my sweet (i feel that’s\n\ntrue)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if": { - "title": "“If”", - "body": "If freckles were lovely, and day was night,\nAnd measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,\n Life would be delight,--\n But things couldn’t go right\n For in such a sad plight\nI wouldn’t be I.\n\nIf earth was heaven, and now was hence,\nAnd past was present, and false was true,\n There might be some sense\n But I’d be in suspense\n For on such a pretense\nYou wouldn’t be you.\n\nIf fear was plucky, and globes were square,\nAnd dirt was cleanly and tears were glee\n Things would seem fair,--\n Yet they’d all despair,\n For if here was there\nWe wouldn’t be we.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-just": { - "title": "“In Just”", - "body": "in Just-\nspring when the world is mud-\nluscious the little\nlame balloonman\nwhistles far and wee\n\nand eddieandbill come\nrunning from marbles and\npiracies and it’s spring\n\nwhen the world is puddle-wonderful\n\nthe queer\nold balloonman whistles\nfar and wee\nand bettyandisbel come dancing\nfrom hop-scotch and jump-rope and\n\nit’s spring\nand the goat-footed\nballoonMan whistles\nfar\nand\nwee", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-spite-of-everything": { - "title": "“In Spite of Everything”", - "body": "in spite of everything\nwhich breathes and moves,since Doom\n(with white longest hands\nneatening each crease)\nwill smooth entirely our minds\n--before leaving my room\ni turn,and(stooping\nthrough the morning)kiss\nthis pillow,dear\nwhere our heads lived and were.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-time-of-daffodils": { - "title": "“In Time of Daffodils”", - "body": "in time of daffodils(who know\nthe goal of living is to grow)\nforgetting why,remember how\n\nin time of lilacs who proclaim\nthe aim of waking is to dream,\nremember so(forgetting seem)\n\nin time of roses(who amaze\nour now and here with paradise)\nforgetting if,remember yes\n\nin time of all sweet things beyond\nwhatever mind may comprehend,\nremember seek(forgetting find)\n\nand in a mystery to be\n(when time from time shall set us free)\nforgetting me,remember me", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "it-may-not-always-be-so": { - "title": "“It May Not Always Be So”", - "body": "it may not always be so; and i say\nthat if your lips, which i have loved, should touch\nanother’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch\nhis heart, as mine in time not far away;\nif on another’s face your sweet hair lay\nin such a silence as i know, or such\ngreat writhing words as, uttering overmuch,\nstand helplessly before the spirit at bay;\n\nif this should be, i say if this should be--\nyou of my heart, send me a little word;\nthat i may go unto him, and take his hands,\nsaying, Accept all happiness from me.\nThen shall i turn my face, and hear one bird\nsing terribly afar in the lost lands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-is-at-moments-after-i-have-dreamed": { - "title": "“It is at Moments after I Have Dreamed”", - "body": "it is at moments after i have dreamed\nof the rare entertainment of your eyes,\nwhen(being fool to fancy)i have deemed\n\nwith your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;\nat moments when the glassy darkness holds\n\nthe genuine apparition of your smile\n(it was through tears always)and silence moulds\nsuch strangeness as was mine a little while;\n\nmoments when my once more illustrious arms\nare filled with fascination,when my breast\nwears the intolerant brightness of your charms:\n\none pierced moment whiter than the rest\n\n--turning from the tremendous lie of sleep\ni watch the roses of the day grow deep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "jehovah-buried-satan-dead": { - "title": "“Jehovah Buried, Satan Dead”", - "body": "Jehovah buried,Satan dead,\ndo fearers worship Much and Quick;\nbadness not being felt as bad,\nitself thinks goodness what is meek;\nobey says toc,submit says tic,\nEternity’s a Five Year Plan:\nif Joy with Pain shall hand in hock\nwho dares to call himself a man?\n\ngo dreamless knaves on Shadows fed,\nyour Harry’s Tom,your Tom is Dick;\nwhile Gadgets murder squack and add,\nthe cult of Same is all the chic;\nby instruments,both span and spic,\nare justly measured Spic and Span:\nto kiss the mike if Jew turn kike\nwho dares to call himself a man?\n\nloudly for Truth have liars pled,click;\nwhere Boobs are holy,poets mad,\nillustrious punks of Progress shriek;\nwhen Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,\nHearts being sick,Minds nothing can:\nif Hate’s a game and Love’s a fuck\nwho dares to call himself a man?\n\nKing Christ,this world is all aleak;\nand lifepreservers there are none:\nand waves which only He may walk\nWho dares to call Himself a man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "little-tree": { - "title": "“Little Tree”", - "body": "little tree\nlittle silent Christmas tree\nyou are so little\nyou are more like a flower\n\nwho found you in the green forest\nand were you very sorry to come away?\nsee i will comfort you\nbecause you smell so sweetly\n\ni will kiss your cool bark\nand hug you safe and tight\njust as your mother would,\nonly don’t be afraid\n\nlook the spangles\nthat sleep all the year in a dark box\ndreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,\nthe balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,\n\nput up your little arms\nand i’ll give them all to you to hold\nevery finger shall have its ring\nand there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy\n\nthen when you’re quite dressed\nyou’ll stand in the window for everyone to see\nand how they’ll stare!\noh but you’ll be very proud\n\nand my little sister and i will take hands\nand looking up at our beautiful tree\nwe’ll dance and sing\n”Noel Noel”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "a-man-who-had-fallen-among-thieves": { - "title": "“A Man Who Had Fallen among Thieves”", - "body": "a man who had fallen among thieves\nlay by the roadside on his back\ndressed in fifteenthrate ideas\nwearing a round jeer for a hat\n\nfate per a somewhat more than less\nemancipated evening\nhad in return for consciousness\nendowed him with a changeless grin\n\nwhereon a dozen staunch and leal\ncitizens did graze at pause\nthen fired by hypercivic zeal\nsought newer pastures or because\n\nswaddled with a frozen brook\nof pinkest vomit out of eyes\nwhich noticed nobody he looked\nas if he did not care to rise\n\none hand did nothing on the vest\nits wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt\nwhile the mute trouserfly confessed\na button solemnly inert.\n\nBrushing from whom the stiffened puke\ni put him all into my arms\nand staggered banged with terror through\na million billion trillion stars", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-love": { - "title": "“My Love”", - "body": "my love\nthy hair is one kingdom\nthe king whereof is darkness\nthy forehead is a flight of flowers\nthy head is a quick forest\nfilled with sleeping birds\nthy breasts are swarms of white bees\nupon the bough of thy body\nthy body to me is April\nin those armpits is the approach of spring\nthy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot\nof kings\nthey are the striking of a good minstrel\nbetween them is always a pleasant song\nmy love\nthy head is a casket\nof the cool jewel of thy mind\nthe hair of thy head is one warrior\ninnocent of defeat\nthy hair upon thy shoulders is an army\nwith victory and with trumpets\nthy legs are the trees of dreaming\nwhose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness\nthy lips are satraps in scarlet\nin whose kiss is the combinings of kings\nthy wrists\nare holy\nwhich are the keepers of the keys of thy blood\nthy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases\nof silver\nin thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes\nthy eyes are the betrayal\nof bells comprehended through incense", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-sweet-old-etcetera": { - "title": "“My Sweet Old Etcetera”", - "body": "my sweet old etcetera\naunt lucy during the recent\n\nwar could and what\nis more did tell you just\nwhat everybody was fighting\n\nfor,\nmy sister\n\nIsabel created hundreds\n(and\nhundreds)of socks not to\nmention fleaproof earwarmers\netcetera wristers etcetera, my\nmother hoped that\n\ni would die etcetera\nbravely of course my father used\nto become hoarse talking about how it was\na privilege and if only he\ncould meanwhile my\n\nself etcetera lay quietly\nin the deep mud et\n\ncetera\n(dreaming,\net\ncetera, of\nYour smile\neyes knees and of your Etcetera)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-sweet-spontaneous": { - "title": "“O Sweet Spontaneous”", - "body": "o sweet spontaneous\nearth how often have\nthe\ndoting\n\n fingers of\nprurient philosophers pinched\nand\npoked\n\nthee\n, has the naughty thumb\nof science prodded\nthy\n\n beauty . how\noften have religions taken\nthee upon their scraggy knees\nsqueezing and\n\nbuffeting thee that thou mightest conceive\ngods\n (but\ntrue\n\nto the incomparable\ncouch of death thy\nrhythmic\nlover\n\n thou answerest\n\n\nthem only with\n\n spring)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "of-ever-ever-land-i-speak": { - "title": "“Of Ever-Ever Land I Speak”", - "body": "(of Ever-Ever Land i speak\nsweet morons gather roun’\nwho does not dare to stand or sit\nmay take it lying down)\n\ndown with the human soul\nand anything else uncanned\nfor everyone carries canopeners\nin Ever-Ever Land\n\n(for Ever-Ever Land is a place\nthat’s as simple as simple can be\nand was built that way on purpose\nby simple people like we)\n\ndown with hell and heaven\nand all the religious fuss\ninfinity pleased our parents\none inch looks good to us\n\n(and Ever-Ever Land is a place\nthat’s measured and safe and known\nwhere it’s lucky to be unlucky\nand the hitler lies down with the cohn)\n\ndown above all with love\nand everything perverse\nor which makes some feel more better\nwhen all ought to feel less worse\n\n(but only sameness is normal\nin Ever-Ever Land\nfor a bad cigar is a woman\nbut a gland is only a gland)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pity-this-busy-monster-manunkind": { - "title": "“Pity This Busy Monster, Manunkind”", - "body": "pity this busy monster, manunkind,\n\nnot. Progress is a comfortable disease:\nyour victim (death and life safely beyond)\n\nplays with the bigness of his littleness\n--electrons deify one razorblade\ninto a mountainrange; lenses extend\nunwish through curving wherewhen till unwish\nreturns on its unself.\n A world of made\nis not a world of born--pity poor flesh\n\nand trees, poor stars and stones, but never this\nfine specimen of hypermagical\n\nultraomnipotence. We doctors know\n\na hopeless case if--listen: there’s a hell\nof a good universe next door; let’s go", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "she-being-brand": { - "title": "“She Being Brand”", - "body": "she being Brand\n\n-new;and you\nknow consequently a\nlittle stiff i was\ncareful of her and(having\n\nthoroughly oiled the universal\njoint tested my gas felt of\nher radiator made sure her springs were O.\n\nK.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her\n\nup,slipped the\nclutch(and then somehow got into reverse she\nkicked what\nthe hell)next\nminute i was back in neutral tried and\n\nagain slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my\n\nlev-er Right-\noh and her gears being in\nA 1 shape passed\nfrom low through\nsecond-in-to-high like\ngreasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity\n\navenue i touched the accelerator and give\n\nher the juice,good\n\n (it\n\nwas the first ride and believe i we was\nhappy to see how nice she acted right up to\nthe last minute coming back down by the Public\nGardens i slammed on\n\nthe\ninternalexpanding\n&\nexternalcontracting\nbrakes Bothatonce and\n\nbrought allofher tremB\n-ling\nto a dead.\n\nstand-\n;Still)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "since-feeling-is-first": { - "title": "“Since Feeling is First”", - "body": "since feeling is first\nwho pays any attention\nto the syntax of things\nwill never wholly kiss you;\n\nwholly to be a fool\nwhile Spring is in the world\n\nmy blood approves,\nand kisses are a better fate\nthan wisdom\nlady i swear by all the flowers. Don’t cry\n--the best gesture of my brain is less than\nyour eyelids’ flutter which says\n\nwe are for each other: then\nlaugh, leaning back in my arms\nfor life’s not a paragraph\n\nand death i think is no parenthesis", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "somewhere-i-have-never-travelled": { - "title": "“Somewhere I Have Never Travelled”", - "body": "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond\nany experience,your eyes have their silence:\nin your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,\nor which i cannot touch because they are too near\n\nyour slightest look easily will unclose me\nthough i have closed myself as fingers,\nyou open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens\n(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose\n\nor if your wish be to close me,i and\nmy life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,\nas when the heart of this flower imagines\nthe snow carefully everywhere descending;\n\nnothing which we are to perceive in this world equals\nthe power of your intense fragility:whose texture\ncompels me with the color of its countries,\nrendering death and forever with each breathing\n\n(i do not know what it is about you that closes\nand opens;only something in me understands\nthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)\nnobody,not even the rain,has such small hands", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-omnipotent-goddess": { - "title": "“Spring Omnipotent Goddess”", - "body": "Spring omnipotent goddess Thou\ndost stuff parks\nwith overgrown pimply\nchevaliers and gumchewing giggly\n\ndamosels Thou dost\npersuade to serenade\nhis lady the musical tom-cat\nThou dost inveigle\n\ninto crossing sidewalks the\nunwary june-bug and the frivolous\nangleworm\nThou dost hang canary birds in parlour windows\n\nSpring slattern of seasons\nyou have soggy legs\nand a muddy petticoat\ndrowsy\n\nis your hair your\neyes are sticky with\ndream and you have a sloppy body from\n\nbeing brought to bed of crocuses\nwhen you sing in your whisky voice\nthe grass rises on the head of the earth\nand all the trees are put on edge\n\nspring\nof the excellent jostle of\nthy hips\nand the superior\n\nslobber of your breasts i\nam so very fond that my\nsoul inside of me hollers\nfor thou comest\n\nand your hands are the snow and thy\nfingers are the rain\nand your\nfeet O your feet\n\nfreakish\nfeet feet incorrigible\n\nragging the world", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "spring-is-like-a-perhaps-hand": { - "title": "“Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand”", - "body": "Spring is like a perhaps hand\n(which comes carefully\nout of Nowhere)arranging\na window,into which people look(while\npeople stare\narranging and changing placing\ncarefully there a strange\nthing and a known thing here)and\n\nchanging everything carefully\n\nspring is like a perhaps\nHand in a window\n(carefully to\nand fro moving New and\nOld things,while\npeople stare carefully\nmoving a perhaps\nfraction of flower here placing\nan inch of air there)and\n\nwithout breaking anything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "what-if-much-of-a-which-of-a-wind": { - "title": "“What if Much of a Which of a Wind”", - "body": "what if a much of a which of a wind\ngives the truth to summer’s lie;\nbloodies with dizzying leaves the sun\nand yanks immortal stars awry?\nBlow king to beggar and queen to seem\n(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)\n--when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,\nthe single secret will still be man\n\nwhat if a keen of a lean wind flays\nscreaming hills with sleet and snow:\nstrangles valleys by ropes of thing\nand stifles forests in white ago?\nBlow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind\n(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)\n--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,\nit’s they shall cry hello to the spring\n\nwhat if a dawn of a doom of a dream\nbites this universe in two,\npeels forever out of his grave\nand sprinkles nowhere with me and you?\nBlow soon to never and never to twice\n(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)\n--all nothing’s only our hugest home;\nthe most who die, the more we live", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "when-serpents-bargain": { - "title": "“When Serpents Bargain”", - "body": "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm\nand the sun strikes to gain a living wage--\nwhen thorns regard their roses with alarm\nand rainbows are insured against old age\n\nwhen every thrush may sing no new moon in\nif all screech-owls have not okayed his voice\n--and any wave signs on the dotted line\nor else an ocean is compelled to close\n\nwhen the oak begs permission of the birch\nto make an acorn--valleys accuse their\nmountains of having altitude--and march\ndenounces april as a saboteur\n\nthen we’ll believe in that incredible\nunanimal mankind (and not until)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "yguduh": { - "title": "“Yguduh”", - "body": "ygUDuh\n\nydoan\nyunnuhstan\n\nydoan o\nyunnuhstand dem\nyguduh ged\n\nyunnuhstan dem doidee\nyguduh ged riduh\nydoan o nudn\n\nLISN bud LISN\n\ndem\ngud\na.m\n\nlidl yelluh bas\ntuds weer goin\n\nduhSIVILEYEzum", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "you-shall-above-all-things-be-glad-and-young": { - "title": "“You Shall above All Things Be Glad and Young”", - "body": "you shall above all things be glad and young\nFor if you’re young,whatever life you wear\n\nit will become you;and if you are glad\nwhatever’s living will yourself become.\nGirlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:\ni can entirely her only love\n\nwhose any mystery makes every man’s\nflesh put space on;and his mind take off time\n\nthat you should ever think,may god forbid\nand (in his mercy) your true lover spare:\nfor that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave\ncalled progress,and negation’s dead undoom.\n\nI’d rather learn from one bird how to sing\nthan teach ten thousand stars how not to dance", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "young-women-of-cambridge": { - "title": "“Young Women of Cambridge,”", - "body": "“Gay” is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge, mass.\nto whom nobody seems to have mentioned ye olde freudian wish;\nwhen i contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass\nyou try if we are a gentleman not to think of(sh)\n\nthe world renowned investigator of paper sailors--argonauta argo\nharmoniously being with his probably most brilliant pupil mated,\nlet us not deem it miraculous if their(so to speak)offspring has that largo\nappearance of somebody who was hectocotyliferously propagated\n\nwhen Miss G touched n.y. our skeleton stepped from his cupboard\ngallantly offering to demonstrate the biggest best busiest city\nand presently found himself rattling for that well known suburb\nthe bronx(enlivening an otherwise dead silence with harmless quips, out of Briggs by Kitty)\n\narriving in an exhausted condition, i purchased two bags of lukewarm peanuts\nwith the dime which her mama had generously provided(despite courteous protestations)\nand offering Miss Gay one(which she politely refused)set out gaily for the hyenas\nsuppressing my frank qualms in deference to her not inobvious perturbations\n\nunhappily, the denizens of the zoo were that day inclined to be uncouthly erotic\nmore particularly the primates--from which with dignity square feet turned abruptly Miss Gay away:\n“on the whole”(if you will permit a metaphor savouring slightly of the demotic)\nMiss Gay had nothing to say to the animals and the animals had nothing to say to Miss Gay\n\nduring our return voyage, my pensive companion dimly remarlted something about “stuffed\nfauna” being “very interesting” … we also discussed the possibility of rain …\nE distant proximity to a Y.W.c.a. she suddenly luffed\n--thanking me; and(stating that she hoped we might “meet again\nsometime”)vanished, gunwale awash. I thereupon loosened my collar\nand dove for the nearest l; surreptitiously cogitating\nthe dictum of a new england sculptor(well on in life)re the helen moller\ndancers, whom he considered “elevating--that is, if dancing CAN be elevating”\n\nMiss(believe it or)Gay is a certain Young Woman unacquainted with the libido\nand pursuing a course of instruction at radcliffe college, cambridge, mass.\ni try if you are a gentleman not to sense something un poco putrido\nwhen we contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "olive-custance": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Olive Custance", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1944 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Custance", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-parting-hour": { - "title": "“The Parting Hour”", - "body": "Not yet, dear love, not yet: the sun is high;\nYou said last night, “At sunset I will go.”\nCome to the garden, where when blossoms die\nNo word is spoken; it is better so:\nAh! bitter word “Farewell.”\n\nHark! how the birds sing sunny songs of spring!\nSoon they will build, and work will silence them;\nSo we grow less light-hearted as years bring\nLife’s grave responsibilities--and then\nThe bitter word “Farewell.”\n\nThe violets fret to fragrance ’neath your feet,\nHeaven’s gold sunlight dreams aslant your hair:\nNo flower for me! your mouth is far more sweet.\nO, let my lips forget, while lingering there,\nLove’s bitter word “Farewell.”\n\nSunset already! have we sat so long?\nThe parting hour, and so much left unsaid!\nThe garden has grown silent--void of song,\nOur sorrow shakes us with a sudden dread!\nAh! bitter word “Farewell.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "roald-dahl": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Roald Dahl", - "birth": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "i-had-a-little-nut-tree": { - "title": "“I Had a Little Nut-Tree”", - "body": "I had a little nut-tree,\nNothing would it bear.\nI searched in all its branches,\nBut not a nut was there.\n\n“Oh, little tree,” I begged,\n“Give me just a few.”\nThe little tree looked down at me\nAnd whispered, “Nuts to you.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ruben-dario": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rubén Darío", - "birth": { - "year": 1867 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "nicaraguan", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇳🇮", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubén_Darío", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "nicaraguan" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "nocturne": { - "title": "“Nocturne”", - "body": "Silence of the night, a sad, nocturnal\nsilence--Why does my soul tremble so?\nI hear the humming of my blood,\nand a soft storm passes through my brain.\nInsomnia! Not to be able to sleep, and yet\nto dream. I am the autospecimen\nof spiritual dissection, the auto-Hamlet!\nTo dilute my sadness\nin the wine of the night\nin the marvelous crystal of the dark--\nAnd I ask myself: When will the dawn come?\nSomeone has closed a door--\nSomeone has walked past--\nThe clock has rung three--If only it were She!--", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "song-of-hope": { - "title": "“Song of Hope”", - "body": "A great flight of crows stains the celestial blue.\nA thousand-year-old breath brings threats of plague.\nMen are murdered in the East End.\n\nHas the apocalyptic Antichrist been born?\nOmens have been known and wonders have been seen\nand the return of Christ seems imminent.\n\nThe earth is pregnant with pain so deep\nthat the imperial dreamer, brooding,\nsuffer with the anguish of the heart of the world.\n\nExecutioners of ideals afflicted the earth:\nin a well of shadow humanity locks itself\nwith the rude molossians of hatred and war.\n\nO Lord Jesus Christ! Why are you late, what are you waiting for\nto extend your hand of light over the beasts\nand make your divine flags shine in the sun?\n\nSuddenly arises and pours the essence of life\nabout so many crazy, sad or hardened souls\nthat, lover of darkness, your sweet dawn forgets.\nCome, Lord, to make glory of yourself.\nCome with tremor of stars and horror of cataclysm,\ncome to bring love and peace over the abyss.\n\nAnd your white horse, which the visionary looked at,\nhappens. And sound the divine extraordinary bugle.\nMy heart will be the ember of your censer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - } - } - }, - "william-davenant": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Davenant", - "birth": { - "year": 1606 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1668 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Davenant", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "aubade": { - "title": "“Aubade”", - "body": "The lark now leaves his wat’ry nest,\nAnd climbing shakes his dewy wings.\nHe takes this window for the East,\nAnd to implore your light he sings--\nAwake, awake! the morn will never rise\nTill she can dress her beauty at your eyes.\n\nThe merchant bows unto the seaman’s star,\nThe ploughman from the sun his season takes;\nBut still the lover wonders what they are\nWho look for day before his mistress wakes.\nAwake, awake! break thro’ your veils of lawn!\nThen draw your curtains, and begin the dawn!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-mistress-dying": { - "title": "“To a Mistress Dying”", - "body": "> _Lover:_\n Your beauty, ripe and calm and fresh\n As eastern summers are,\nMust now, forsaking time and flesh,\n Add light to some small star.\n\n> _Philosopher:_\n Whilst she yet lives, were stars decay’d,\n Their light by hers relief might find;\nBut Death will lead her to a shade\n Where Love is cold and Beauty blind.\n\n> _Lover:_\n Lovers, whose priests all poets are,\n Think every mistress, when she dies,\nIs changed at least into a star:\n And who dares doubt the poets wise?\n\n> _Philosopher:_\n But ask not bodies doom’d to die\n To what abode they go;\nSince Knowledge is but Sorrow’s spy,\n It is not safe to know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "donald-davidson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Donald Davidson", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "apple-and-mole": { - "title": "“Apple and Mole”", - "body": "For a high heavy time on the long green bough\nHangs the apple of a summer that is shaken\nFrom its flat hot road to its apple-topped hill\nWith the scraping of a mole that would awaken.\n\nHe is under the turf of the long green meadow,\nSnuffling under grass and lusty clover\nWith a sure blunt snout and capable paws\nUp the long green slope past the beeches and the haws\nFor the summer must be shaken and over.\n\nIt’s a ripe heavy time for an apple to hang.\nHe is butting out a path, he is shoveling a furrow,\nTill the tree will be aquiver feeling mole at the root.\nIt is tall, it is green, but he will burrow\n\nTill the root will be sapless and the twig will be dry\nAnd the long green bough it will be shaken.\nThe apple is too old, it has worms at the core,\nAnd the long green summer will be green no more.\nThe apple will fall and not awaken.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "aunt-maria-and-the-gourds": { - "title": "“Aunt Maria and the Gourds”", - "body": "Aunt Maria, to whom all doors are open,\nKnocks at none. Who is there left to see\nBehind old doors where once her carriage stopped?\nThe devil looks out for his own. The devil has taken\nCherry and Spruce streets into the kingdom of Hell,\nLopped the trees, put in his plate-glass windows,\nSmartened the ruins with optimism and paint,\nAs was foretold in ’Sixty-five. For her\nThe old home place is good enough to live in,\nEspecially good to die in. She will die\nAt the proper time, but meanwhile is at home\nThursdays at four o’clock on the Charlotte Pike.\nThe yellow hair--you know how Colonel Bob,\nHer father, shook his yellow hair\nBefore the charging ranks on Shiloh field--\nThat hair is graying. It becomes the hands\nWhich pass the cups and silver; and the voice\nMatches the shoulders, gracious and unbowed\nBy all the kingdoms of Hell.\n\nIt is too late\nTo cultivate the rising generations,\nBut in the name of youth and spring\nBorn to fulfil the obscure prophecies\nWritten in blood and readable to the wise,\nAt every sowing-time she plants her gourds\nBeside the porch where the dark shadow of doom\nSpeaks, when the ominous winds of March are near.\nThere have I visited, not yet too young\nAnd not too strange to hear the song of the gourds,\nAnd wandered homeward haunted by a face\nUncompromised by time, a ringing look,\nA withered finger lifted, gesturing hush.\n\nBeneath the window-sill the dry gourds clung\nUngathered, scraping the dry bricks,\nKnocking together when the wind blew\nClammy and fierce, out of the wilderness.\nNot knowing spring, the gourds clicked and rasped\nAn innocent fatality of song.\nLeaning at twilight over the window-sill,\nLooking toward Nashville, neglecting the candles and voices,\nI heard the gourds’ foretelling, I felt the hollow\nRattle of voices singing of Babylon;\nOf Babylon, to whom the years have whispered\nPredictions that the builders cannot now\nConfound with any charm or reassurance.\nVibrations deep, imperative as death,\nWrench and shiver. These are not a dream.\n\nYou who walk in callous innocence,\nPacing, as once I paced, the long street,\nPause, look down, remember how this stone\nSlid and avoided, even as you set your foot.\nHear the rattle of gourds over Babylon.\nLearn what the years have whispered secretly,\nLearn how the stone refused your heel and may\nAgain miss and waver, and hurl you on\nStumbling to what awaits beyond the corner.\n\nThe wind blows, and Cumberland waters run\nTo carry us home. And there beneath the bluffs\nSomething stirs that once had life. It drops\nInto the stream, a last act of faith.\nSeedballs of sycamore, incautious leaves of willow,\nThese have outstayed their autumn, teasing death\nOnly so far, not yet beyond all patience.\nNow they let go. The tawny wind-rocked billow\nReceives them all, no questions, no complaints.\nBut here there are no leaves for the wind to stir,\nAnd no faith, even to die. Only a smoulder,\nOnly an evil burning and a smoke\nThat hardly lifts, even for winds of spring.\n\nThus sang the gourds, but Aunt Maria stood\nWatching us out of sight, and in the dark\nHer voice still flashed like a creature of the air\nAbout our heads, pleading, Do not forget!\nCome back! Remember! For the spring is here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "february", - "month_epoch": "late", - "liturgy": "lent", - "weekday": "thursday" - } - } - }, - "a-barren-look": { - "title": "“A Barren Look”", - "body": "“Here is the bridge where a trout pool used to be.\nStep softly, look, and tell me what you see.”\n\n“Bright water coursing through an unreaped meadow\nAnd my own face mirrored in a boulder’s shadow.”\n\n“So there is water still, and water is good!\nBut look hard where that boulder stems the flood\nAnd, whispering, say if any living shape\nFloats in its lee or, darting, seeks escape.”\n\n“Only the empty water moves and the deep-tufted slender grasses\nDowse their tips and sway where the eddying ripple passes;\nWhite birch and jewel-weed tremble along the strand;\nNo track of man or beast or bird on the gray sand.”\n\n“Once all were here, but now you read their fate,\nAnd that is why I feared a barren look.”\n\n“I read only a bridge and a mountain brook\nThat could be much more desolate\nBeside this good road entered on our map\nAs fully paved through Middlebury Gap.”\n\n“No fish in the stream, no light in the head,\nAnd what if, next, the land be dead!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "censored": { - "title": "“Censored”", - "body": "Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds,\nBehold swart devils in the sunniest weather;\nHe would lump the saint and the courtesan together,\nMost miserably jangling all the creeds.\n\nThe prurient multitude heard he was mad,\nYet nosed his books for some pornography.\nThe censors doubted his virginity,\nAnd secretly conned the works that they forbade.\n\nReporters found this dangerous oddity\nIn rusty pantaloons, mowing the green,\nAnd wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen\nA naked Venus disturbing an alien sea.\n\nHe watched their backs receding down the street,\nRaked up the grass, and suddenly had a vision\nOf how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derision\nBehind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "crabbed-youth-and-merry-age": { - "title": "“Crabbed Youth and Merry Age”", - "body": "These are the young men whispering through the darkness,\nTongues of disaster muted with sleep and scorn.\nBefore the time resting they are tired;\nBefore the time of losing they are forlorn.\n\nAnd these are the old men, risen at morning light,\nUnlatching country gates before the sun,\nTo catch a horse and call with Stentor’s voice\nThe lazy boy whose ploughing’s not begun.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "the-demon-brother": { - "title": "“The Demon Brother”", - "body": "I heard strange pipes when I was young,\nPiping songs of an outland tongue.\nI heard, and was agape to see\nHow like that piper was to me,\nHis brow, his gesture, even his dress\nPerfections of my awkwardness,\nAnd wandering forms of early wonder\nShaped into him, no more asunder.\n\nPlaying a tune to the rabble’s whim\nHe marched away; I followed him.\nFor something in his rolling eye\nPlucked at my senses mightily,\nAnd something in that outland tongue\nDrew me away, for I was young.\nThen over the town he piping went;\nStreets tipped, I thought, in ravishment;\nRoofs clapped, and windows blazed to see\nThat alien piper, so like me.\n\nI followed till the pipes trilled sweet\nAt the winding end of a nameless street,\nAnd none of all the mob was nigh,\nNor door nor window cracked an eye.\nThen, “Follow me no more,” he said,\n“Though I be of thy father bred,\nAnd though I speak from thine own blood,\nYet I am not of mortal brood;\n\nAnd follow not my piping sweet\nTo find the walking world a cheat;\nAnd cherish not my outland grace,\nNor pride in likeness to my face,\nFor children of an earthly mother\nCry out against their demon brother.”\nHis smile flashed out a sudden dawn\nIn the dark street--then he was gone;\nAnd through the town where he had sung\nThe futile raveled silence hung.\n\nI heard, but I could not forget,\nAnd through the world I follow yet,\nAnd many a time I pause and sigh,\nThinking I hear his melody;\nAnd peer at all men’s charactery\nTo find that image so like me;\nAnd marvel that his piping sweet\nLeft me to know a world’s deceit,\nLeft me to seek an unknown kin\nThrough all the streets I travel in.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "gradual-of-the-northern-summer": { - "title": "“Gradual of the Northern Summer”", - "body": "# I.\n\nNow let us leave the gate unshut\nOn hayfields grown too ripe to cut.\nThat Adirondack will not change its pose,\nAnd this northern light looks back before it goes\nTill Kirby Peak turns rose.\nWhoever asks the day of the week\nCan hold the wind on his western cheek,\nWalk, and find an unblazed road where Monday\nMeasures as good a blueberry mile as Sunday.\nLest we should sin by being fanatic\nWe let the red squirrel all the attic.\nKnowing God is, we say our vows\nWhen vesper deer come forth to browse,\nTelling the beads of many a yesterday.\nNine shadows lined against the wood;\nThe tenth you cannot see,\nBut count that other shadow where the gray\nBoulder remembers the glacial flood,\nAnd that will make our rosary.\nAve Maria while the evening star leans low\nBrings dew upon the head.\nOur Paternoster’s said.\nThe lamp is lit within, and we must go.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWe ask God for no better proof\nThan that moss likes our shingle roof.\nLocusts give shade; the sun will set;\nAsters proclaim it will rise again.\nThe red ants know we will have rain\nThough the merry cricket says, “Not yet!”\n\nIn the pavilion where the shade\nCools the sweat his labor made\nOur gardener, loving God’s command,\nAdores the apple in his hand.\nHis Eve, to make the man complete,\nPut an apple in for him to eat.\nHis mower, silent in the swathe,\nCan count no time, can dream no scathe.\nIt waits on Charley’s hand and faith;\n\nWhile, derelict near the new-cut grass,\nEyes watch to see Nausicaa pass.\nIn shorts, because the day is warm,\nShe brings the washing on her arm.\n\nSlim-legged, tiptoe, unaware\nWhat wanderer’s in the goldenrod,\nShe tightens rope and trusts in God.\nShe hangs out all the line will bear--\nSea-purple, white--and then is gone.\nSo the red fox invades the lawn.\nBony and lean, he has a brush\nWould serve Odysseus for a bush.\nThe little, naked red fox peers\nWith prayerful face and upright ears,\nThen genuflects, with sweep of paw,\nTo mark the rigor of God’s law\nAnd catch, of grasshoppers in riot,\nHis portion of a hermit’s diet,\nWhich, if it is not sacrament,\nOwes naught to secular government.\n\n\n# III.\n\nOnce and again a tantara\nHails like a distant Gloria.\nOthers beyond our unshut gate\nFollow a highway broad and straight;\nWhoso would turn to our abode\nMust take the narrow, rain-scraped road\nAnd learn by one-way steeps and grooves\nGod loves best where he unimproves.\nA horn in time is all the stitch\nOur welfare takes to mind the ditch\nAnd signal home friend and machine.\n\nLet eyes now say what ears have seen:\nThe mistress of our high demesne\nWho daily, though our sins be black,\nBrings God’s grace in a grocery sack.\nHow could she learn, without research,\nThe Gradual of our mountain church\nIf not from logs of pine and birch\nThat lift from every morning fire\nThe plainsong of our primitive choir?\nWe cannot stop to remember\nThat snow comes here in September.\nOur calendar keeps its face to the wall;\nWe do not enter time till Labor Day\nAnd that is far away.\nWe must not think of that at all.\n\nNow, translating all to light,\nAn artist’s eye confirms the rite\nAnd seizes from time’s spatial flame\nReflections we could never frame.\nImages we would leave to burn,\nLines for which we lack an urn,\nShe gathers into perspective.\nThe shadows that our eyes refused\nAre light she will not leave unused.\nBy dark as much as sun we live,\nAnd pity knows, before we ask,\nThe trespass that the senses mask.\n\nThe foe that tears our parts piecemeal\nMeans to enslave, not to reveal.\nTo sever parts was our mistake;\nThe brush restores them for God’s sake.\nAnd so companioning the fox,\nOur own Madonna of the Rocks\nBetween the steeple-bush and thistle,\nBoulder for seat and lap for easel,\nRedeems us from the evening shade\nWith light too absolute to fade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-house-of-the-sun": { - "title": "“The House of the Sun”", - "body": "_“The chambers of the sun, that now\nFrom ancient melody have ceased.”_\n\nThe doorways of the Sun were closed;\nIts muted bells gave forth no sound.\nBut while the windy prophets dozed\nA child a little crevice found.\n\nHe pulled with one small straining hand;\nThe massy door moved willingly.\nAnd he has wakened all the band\nOf singers--they rise eagerly.\n\nLet now again the hinges move\nIn sweetly clanging melody;\nUnseat the dark blind from the groove;\nUnleash the struggling harmony.\n\nThe golden doors are opening\nTo ancient sounds of loveliness;\nThe Sons of Light are issuing,\nWinged with their antique mightiness.\n\nWho can sing the House of the Sun?\nWho shall frame its dreadful art?\nHis childhood never must be done!\nAnd he must have a wondering heart!\n\nBurn all the manuscripts of shame!\nBreak every lute of brazen string!\nUtter, O living tongues, the flame!\nUp, Dust, into the Sun, and sing!", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "martha-and-shadow": { - "title": "“Martha and Shadow”", - "body": "Martha said, Shadow is little, Shadow is not\nAble as I when world is gold in the sun.\nShe walked in the dew of the clover, and Martha forgot\nThat the day had only begun.\n\nMartha said, Shadow is weak, Shadow will fly\nWherever I come in the dew and clover of morning.\nShadow was smaller at noon but would not die;\nShadow not Martha had a long time for growing.\n\nShadow said, Martha is little, Martha is not\nAble as I in evening, and evening is last.\nMartha said, Shadow is all, I know thee, O Shadow!\nI will come into Shadow and rest.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "on-culleoka-road": { - "title": "“On Culleoka Road”", - "body": "Girl in the blue sports-car that floats across the bridge,\nYou toss your yellow hair and will not look below\nWhere deep in shadow we claim the shadows’ privilege\nAnd wait at a dry ford to watch you come and go.\n\nBut who can see us now if apples are gone from the hill\nAnd if wild thickets of plum are stricken and chopped away?\nAnd if new strange weather keeps all water from the mill\nWho, then, can believe we too crossed here, one day?\n\nBefore there was ever a bridge, there was Culleoka Road\nAnd driving down to bright water I checked my sleek bay mare;\nWhere she turned and drank a wagoner rested his load,\nAn old man with merry eyes and sunset on his hair.\n\n“My girl,” he said, “was a phoenix, dawn rosy on her breast;\nFive nights I rode courting till the heavens overflowed\nAnd I swam my horse to win her, for what young man can rest\nWho comes to find his phoenix on Culleoka Road?”\n\n“Old man,” I said, “I know one whose eyes are blue as day\nAnd hair bright as morning on a sycamore in spring.\nBefore the whippoorwills begin I know I’ll hear her say\nThat she will be my phoenix through all my journeying.”\n\nWhen I rode from my phoenix the whippoorwills were calling;\nMidnight a meadow the stars had overflowed;\nOn my lips her kisses and summer dew falling\nTill we should be shadows on Culleoka Road.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "pot-macabre": { - "title": "“Pot Macabre”", - "body": "“Press out an opiate juice\nFrom berries culled in prick of June-time heat;\nPound nettles in a cruse\nOf crimson sard till mixing is complete;\nAnd strain the brew through bags of sarcenet,\nMumbling the runes that crazed Sir Dagonet.”\n\nSo spoke the slobbering witch,\nWagging her shaky head incessantly;\nThen, with an agile twitch\nStove oddly crackling through the briery.\nI caught the swish of her broomstick up to the moon,\nAnd her tattered skirt afloat like a black balloon.\n\nOld Witch, whither art gone?\nHopped off to the well like Chick-o’-my-Craney-Crow?\nHere’s work for thy dudgeon,\nA brew and a bake for a devilish calico!\nWhat’s but a kettle ready for mad ferment,\nBlack mouth a-grin at me, the innocent!\n\nI pressed and pounded duly,\nAnd sat to watch the slop at bubble slow;\nFed coals with knots unruly\nOf thornbush boles till pot-legs stood aglow.\nAnd thrice the pot gave forth a piggish grunt,\nAnd thrice a bellowing as of hounds on hunt.\n\nA great red swine sprang out,\nWith bristling gleams as bright as Freyr’s boar;\nThen, at his grubbing snout,\nTwo black dogs leaped, two white-fanged lusts for gore.\nThey three made hideous noise through brush and dew--\nTrembling I stooped and strained the mulling brew.\n\nAnd there was born a girl\nWithin a sudden mist wizardry,\nAnd came some faint pipes’ thirl,\nWhile she danced, with lips turned sly, and beckoned me,\nAnd we danced mad till night’s low-burning wick\nSnuffed out, hearing like us the Old Hag’s stick.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "prie-dieu": { - "title": "“Prie-Dieu”", - "body": "Of what sins have you made confession here,\nArdent Cecile? Not passion’s intimacy,\nOr tangles of desire that mutineer\nA bold way through your maiden ecstasy.\nThose are not blamed … the penance not severe!\n\nPray rather, with cool-lidded conscious eyes\nFor warm juvescence of those ichored limbs,\nFor laughter checked by no repentant cries,\nFor lips unstained by pattering of hymns.\nMen’s glances have embraced you. They are wise.\n\nThey have seen you, cumbent by the ruddy fire,\nLending your curves to cushioned wantonness,\nOr leaping to the stroke of an earthy lyre\nTwanged in the joy of throbbing noon’s excess\nAnd cried no pause for love. You, they require.\n\nOf what sins have you made confession here,\nArdent Cecile? The wood receives your knees;\nThe organ stirs your prayer. Now you revere\nThe God that made you beautiful among these,\nThe gnarled and ugly. Your book receives no tear.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "randall-my-son": { - "title": "“Randall, My Son”", - "body": "Randall, my son, before you me just now\nI saw the lean vine fingering at the latch,\nAnd through the rain I heard the poplar bough\nThresh at the blinds it never used to touch,\nAnd I was old and troubled overmuch,\nAnd called in the deep night, but there was none\nTo comfort me or answer, Randall, my son.\n\nBut mount the stair and lay you down till morn.\nThe bed is made--the lamp is burning low.\nWithin the changeless room where you were born\nI wait the changing day when you must go.\nI am unreconciled to what I know,\nAnd I am old with questions never done\nThat will not let me slumber, Randall, my son.\n\nRandall, my son, I cannot hear the cries\nThat lure beyond familiar fields, or see\nThe glitter of the world that draws your eyes.\nCold is the mistress that beckons you from me.\nI wish her sleek; hunting might never come to be--\nFor in our woods where deer and fox still run\nAn old horn blows at daybreak, Randall, my son.\n\nAnd tell me then, will you some day bequeath\nTo your own son not born or yet begotten,\nThe lustre of a sword that sticks in sheath,\nA house that crumbles and a fence that’s rotten?\nTake, what I leave, your own land unforgotten;\nHear, what I hear, in a far chase new begun\nAn old horn’s husky music, Randall, my son.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "redivivus": { - "title": "“Redivivus”", - "body": "Thin lips can make a music;\nHateful eyes can see;\nCrooked limbs go dancing\nTo a swift melody.\n\nThe probing knife of madness\nCan start a dullard brain;\nCold cheeks feel kisses\nAnd warm with tears again;\n\nThe surly heart of clowns\nCan crack with ecstasy;\nRootbound oaks toss limbs\nIf winds come fervently;\n\nThen let my skeleton soul\nWrithe upward from its loam,\nDrink red morning again,\nAnd look gently home.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "sanctuary": { - "title": "“Sanctuary”", - "body": "You must remember this when I am gone,\nAnd tell your sons--for you will have tall sons,\nAnd times will come when answers will not wait.\nRemember this: if ever defeat is black\nUpon your eyelids, go to the wilderness\nIn the dread last of trouble, for your foe\nTangles there, more than you, and paths are strange\nTo him, that are your paths, in the wilderness,\nAnd were your fathers’ paths, and once were mine.\n\nYou must remember this, and mark it well\nAs I have told it--what my eyes have seen\nAnd where my feet have walked beyond forgetting\nBut tell it not often, tell it only at last\nWhen your sons know what blood runs in their veins\nAnd when the danger comes, as come it will,\nGo as your fathers went with woodsman’s eyes\nUncursed, unflinching, studying only the path.\n\nFirst, what you cannot carry, burn or hide.\nLeave nothing here for him to take or eat.\nBury, perhaps, what you can surely find\nIf good chance ever bring you back again.\nLevel the crops. Take only what you need:\nA little corn for an ash-cake, a little\nSide-meat for your three days’ wilderness ride.\nHorses for your women and your children,\nAnd one to lead, if you should have that many.\nThen go. At once. Do not wait until\nYou see his great dust rising in the valley.\nThen it will be too late.\nGo when you hear that he has crossed Will’s Ford.\nOthers will know and pass the word to you--\nA tap on the blinds, a hoot-owl’s cry at dusk.\nDo not look back. You can see your roof afire\nWhen you reach high ground. Yet do not look.\nDo not turn. Do not look back.\n\nGo further on. Go high. Go deep.\nThe line of this rail-fence east across the old-fields\nLeads to the cane-bottoms. Back of that,\nA white-oak tree beside a spring, the one\nChopped with three blazes on the hillward side.\nThere pick up the trail. I think it was\nA buffalo path once or an Indian road.\nYou follow it three days along the ridge\nUntil you reach the spruce woods. Then a cliff\nBreaks, where the trees are thickest, and you look\nInto a cove, and right across, Chilhowee\nIs suddenly there, and you are home at last.\nSweet springs of mountain water in that cove\nRun always. Deer and wild turkey range.\nYour kin, knowing the way, long there before you\nWill have good fires and kettles on to boil,\nBough-shelters reared and thick beds of balsam.\nThere in tall timber you will be as free\nAs were your fathers once when Tryon raged\nIn Carolina hunting Regulators,\nOr Tarleton rode to hang the old-time Whigs.\nSome tell how in that valley young Sam Houston\nLived long ago with his brother, Oo-loo-te-ka,\nReading Homer among the Cherokee;\nAnd others say a Spaniard may have found it\nFar from De Soto’s wandering turned aside,\nAnd left his legend on a boulder there.\nAnd some that this was a sacred place to all\nOld Indian tribes before the Cherokee\nCame to our eastern mountains. Men have found\nImages carved in bird-shapes there and faces\nMoulded into the great kind look of gods.\nThese old tales are like prayers. I only know\nThis is the secret refuge of our race\nTold only from a father to his son,\nA trust laid on your lips, as though a vow\nTo generations past and yet to come.\nThere, from the bluffs above, you may at last\nLook back to all you left, and trace\nHis dust and flame, and plan your harrying\nIf you would gnaw his ravaging flank, or smite\nHim in his glut among the smouldering ricks.\nOr else, forgetting ruin, you may lie\nOn sweet grass by a mountain stream, to watch\nThe last wild eagle soar or the last raven\nCherish his brood within their rocky nest,\nOr see, when mountain shadows first grow long,\nThe last enchanted white deer come to drink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "second-harvest": { - "title": "“Second Harvest”", - "body": "At midnight, crowding the autumn paths, I hear those voices\nThat cannot sleep, as I cannot, for a restless horn\nWhetting the dogs and whetting me while answering noises\nMuster from all the hills and harry the too-long born.\n\nThey cry “Rise up, Joe Clisby, for the hunter’s moon\nSickles the frosty lanes where green corn once was growing.\nQuail and wild turkey know what play comes on so soon;\nBeyond the ravished field, what cover’s ripe for mowing.”\n\nOnce I could ride as a man ought to a hill where horses\nNeighed and my old companions called--that starry place\nWhere always the Ploughman drives the bear on her changeless courses\nAnd no man hangs his head to dream of a woman’s face.\n\nThen no soft arms could hold me from my wilderness yearning\nTo reap at daylight’s fallow edge, with bullet or knife,\nThat flicker of hoof and pelt, that flash of wings returning--\nThe dogs trace it--harvest of life that gives me life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "spoken-at-a-castle-gate": { - "title": "“Spoken at a Castle Gate”", - "body": "Before you touch the bolt that locks this gate\nBe warned. There’s no return where you are going.\nA sword is tinder at the touch of fate\nAnd crumbles in a way beyond your knowing.\n\nSomething I’ve heard, but something less I tell.\nAn old man knows, advises--young men smile,\nBlow slug-horns, chink a latch, or clank a bell.\nI’ve watched a many a one this weary while.\n\nYou can hear the nightingales, I won’t deny.\nThey always sing for eager souls like you,\nPerched on their boughs of possibility,\nMost vaguely heard and only vaguely true.\n\nAnd they are more, perhaps, than mere tradition.\nThey must exist, though none come back to say\nHow they are feathered, or what rare nutrition\nKeeps them, piping their sad peculiar lay.\n\nGardens there are and Queens, no doubt, a-walking,\nWhite blooms adrift on gold and marvelous hair.\nYoung men in murmurous dreams have heard them talking,\nLeaped up, like you, and entered … vanished … where?\n\nFor all I know, the castle’s just a dream,\nA shadow piled to mask a dangerous ledge,\nA fantasy blown from devils’ lungs in steam,\nMade permanent here, just on a chasm’s edge\n\nWhere you will tremble in a swoon of falling\nAnd yet plunge upward through the unearthly mist\nTo hear once more the voice that you heard calling\nAnd win at last those lips you would have kissed,\n\nEven as you touch the bolt that locks this gate,\nSmiling, with patience such as fits old men\nWho prophesy. Ah yes, what you create\nYou’ll surely find--but never come back again.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "spring-voices": { - "title": "“Spring Voices”", - "body": "Lovely in spring again flows Harpeth River\nWhile bough to bough I hear the gray doves calling,\nBut the voices that answered me by Harpeth River\nAre gone with the flowing stream and the blooms falling.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "the-swinging-bride": { - "title": "“The Swinging Bride”", - "body": "Not arching up as good stone bridges do,\nNor glum and straight like common iron things,\nBut marvelously adroop between two trees\nTrembling at even the softest step, it swings\nTo span the summer’s long, long wish and a lazy\ncreek’s vagaries.\n\nA boy (I know him well) has crept up there\nThrough the smooth willow’s crotch and footed the wire,\nTiptoe where ancient planks have rotted through\nAnd gone, like folks who have followed old desire\nInto some heaven and long, long fallen asleep where\nthey wanted to.\n\nIn the close leaves the rustle tells him to dream.\nHe knows the sunny rock and the leaping-in;\nHow the pool will jostle its lusters into flight\nAt the swimmer’s stroke; and hears the laughter begin\nAnd the voices calling Ezell! and Joe! till comes the\nlong, long night.\n\nBut the bridge stirs under his feet, the wizard bridge.\n“Cross me,” it says, “and taste my sweet unrest.”\nBeyond the whispering leaves, beyond the stream\nOne dark hawk mounts the clouds to the sky’s crest--\nLong, long have I remembered that sky, those wings,\nthat climber’s dream.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "teach-me": { - "title": "“Teach Me”", - "body": "Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change,\nYour calm of stars, watching the turn of earth,\nPatient of man, and never thinking strange\nThe mad red crash of each new system’s birth.\n\nTeach me, for I would know your beauty’s way\nThat waits and changes with each changing sun,\nNo dawn so fair but promises a day\nOf other perfectness than men have won.\n\nTeach me, old World, not as vain men have taught,\n--Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass,\nNor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought\nIs woe that they and worlds alike must pass.\n\nNothing I learn by any mortal rule;\nTeach me, old World, I would not be man’s fool.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "the-tiger-woman": { - "title": "“The Tiger-Woman”", - "body": "The Tiger-Woman came to me\nWhen dusk was close and men were dull.\nShe beckoned from the jungle-path;\nI followed, dreaming, fanciful.\n\nThe Tiger-Woman’s face is pale,\nBut oh, her speaking eyes are dark.\nNo beast can move so lithe as she\nBeside the matted river’s mark.\n\nThe jungle is a fearsome place\nFor men who hunt, and men who slay,\nBut I was not afraid to go\nWhere Tiger-Woman led the way.\n\nThe Tiger-Woman’s lips are thin;\nHer teeth are like the Tiger’s teeth.\nYet her soft hands are woman’s hands,\nAnd oh, the blood beats warm beneath.\n\nShe led me to a little glade,--\nThe creepers with the moon inwove,--\nAnd two great striped beasts leaped up\nAnd fawned upon her breast in love.\n\nThe Tiger-Woman’s voice was sweet;\nI hearkened and was not afraid.\nShe stroked the Tigers’ fearful jaws;\nUpon their heads my hands I laid.\n\nAnd all the jungle things drew near,\nAnd all the leaves a music made\nLike spirits chanting in a choir\nAlong the bamboo colonnade.\n\nToo sweet for human harps to sound,\nIt touched my blood, it fired my heart\nThe Tiger-Woman sang, and I\nSang too, and understood her art.\n\nShe kissed the Tiger’s snarling mouth.\nShe kissed--I marveled that she could--\nBut now her lips were warm on mine;\nI cared not they were dabbed with blood.\n\nWhat if the traveller shuns my hut,\nWhat if the world forgets to be,\nWhat if I have the Tiger’s heart,--\nThe Tiger-Woman loveth me!", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Fugitive", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "a-touch-of-snow": { - "title": "“A Touch of Snow”", - "body": "Cold showers, drumming fit to wake the dead,\nFrom morning darkness rout us out of bed.\nAs yet there’s no last trumpet we can hear,\nBut fog on the mountain, rain, the turn of the year,\nAnd on our brows that sudden breath, too soon, too near,\nProclaim summer must go.\n\nTwo wise men on our porch with ladder and brush\nTurn broad backs to the north and the wind’s rush.\nThey had counted on our porch to paint inside\nWhen it should rain, if God should so decide.\nAnd do they feel no other gust, of time, of tide?\nThey must know what I know.\n\nThey must know what comes next when a season shifts.\n“Won’t there be snow, high up, when the fog lifts?”\nThey shake their heads. Not theirs the risk to say\nUnlucky weather’s somewhere on the way.\n“Oh, never mind the ridge,” one holds, “long as we may\nKeep summer here below.”\n\nFrom where that summer stays we still can watch\nFor any higher warnings man should catch:\nStars old or new that course the telltale night;\nTree-shapes that blaze too fair for mortal sight;\nOr mist-flurries writing ‘MENE’ there on our mountain height\nWith just a touch of snow.\n\nNow that the fog-veils lift, we see it clear--\nA stretch of white that marks the turn of the year.\nSummer may dally here with autumn-tide,\nBut we believe what the mountain testified.\nBefore God’s frosty breath leaves snow too deep, too wide,\nWe’ll make our turn, and go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "wild-game": { - "title": "“Wild Game”", - "body": "Whether it is only a thought\nOr some wild thing, harried severely,\nIt is trapped for but never caught;\nIt visits us rarely\n\nIn the likeness of a deer\nPerhaps, or sometimes a wild\nWolf that will slaver fear,\nOr a dove; never beguiled\n\nTo drink or touch or taste\nOur flat and homely waters;\nObeying no charm or the chaste\nPrayers of our virgin daughters;\n\nYet is seen of certain men\nAlone, who walk with eyes\nGlazed to all else but it\nAnd are long afterwards called wise.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fugitive Days", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - } - } - }, - "donald-davie": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Donald Davie", - "birth": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1995 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davie", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "across-the-bay": { - "title": "“Across the Bay”", - "body": "A queer thing about those waters: there are no Birds there, or hardly any.\nI did not miss them, I do not remember\nMissing them, or thinking it uncanny.\n\nThe beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,\nA quarry outraged by hulls.\nWe took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness\nOf the light, the silence, and the water’s stillness.\n\nBut this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes.\nThis hurt, and goes on hurting:\nThe venomous soft jelly, the undersides.\nWe could stand the world if it were hard all over.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "derbyshire-turf": { - "title": "“Derbyshire Turf”", - "body": "That, true to the contours which round it\nOut and lie close,\nThe best beauty is barbarous, grounded\nOn foreign bodies,\nFlush to their angles, ungainly,\nPawkily true--\nDerbyshire turf, you tried vainly\nTo point such a moral\nWhen we, in our warmly remembered\nYouth, from the old\nArmstrong Siddeley tourer descended\nShouting upon you.\n\nThen as now it was just where the boulder\nLay scantily buried,\nOr the gritstone poked up a shoulder,\nYou sported your streaks\nOf a specially sumptuous darkened\nLush olive green\nYet in those days none of us hearkened\nTo this intimation\nThat where most intriguingly mounded\nAbrupt in its curves,\nBeauty is richest and rounded\nHome on the truth.\n\nVery well. Still we should wonder\nAt farmers who loaded\nWagons with stones to lay under\nThe grass of their pastures.\nMuch the same is the poet who prizing\nThe shape of the truth\nStudies to find some surprising\nEccentric perception\nTo validate memory. Boys\nAre willing to guess\nAt the rock which lies under their joy’s\nElusiveness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "in-california": { - "title": "“In California”", - "body": "Chemicals ripen the citrus;\nThere are rattlesnakes in the mountains,\nAnd on the shoreline\nHygiene, inhuman caution.\n\nBeef in cellophane\nTall as giraffes,\nThe orange-rancher’s daughters\nCrop their own groves, mistrustful.\n\nPerpetual summer seems\nPrecarious on the littoral. We drive\nInland to prove\nThe risk we sense. At once\n\nWinter claps-to like a shutter\nHigh over the Ojai valley, and discloses\nA double crisis,\nWinter and Drought.\n\nRanges on mountain-ranges,\nEmpty, unwatered, crumbling,\nHot colours come at the eye.\nIt is too cold.\n\nFor picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit\nYellow burns on the distance.\nThe phantom walks\nEverywhere, of intolerable heat.\n\nAt Ventucopa, elevation\nTwo-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen,\nDeserted or broken settlements,\nGasoline stations closed and boarded.\n\nBy nightfall, to the snows;\nAnd over the mile on tilted\nMile of the mountain park\nThe bright cars hazarded.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "july": { - "title": "“July”", - "body": "For work like mine, fine weather is inclement.\n“Know when to stop,” breathes hoarse July,\nA stalk in his blistered mouth. “Whatever end\nYou seem to reach this month is fraudulent.”\n\nHe would be cool: I see his bushy tufts\nToss in their hanging ranks, or inky single\nIn steeps of corn promise a stone-cold shade;\nAnd all such ovens, funnels of hot draughts!\n\nFrigidity can every day outwit\nAnd stone-cold stone outstrip him. But to freeze\nDistress and torpor in a finished gesture,\nHard as it is, is not the half of it.\n\nWhatever would be natural is begun\nWith a more troubled feeling: we’ve a duty,\nIf nothing natural bears with finishing,\nTo leave our work dishevelled and half-done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-nonconformist": { - "title": "“The Nonconformist”", - "body": "X, whom society’s most mild command,\nFor instance evening dress, infuriates,\nIn art is seen confusingly to stand\nFor disciplined conformity, with Yeats.\n\nTaxed to explain what this resentment is\nHe feels for small proprieties, it comes,\nHe likes to think, from old enormities\nAnd keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms.\n\nYet it is likely, if indeed the crimes\nHis fathers suffered rankle in his blood,\nThat he find least excusable the times\nWhen they acceded, not when they withstood.\n\nHow else explain this bloody-minded bent\nTo kick against the prickings of the norm;\nWhen to conform is easy, to dissent;\nAnd when it is most difficult, conform?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-red-mills": { - "title": "“The Red Mills”", - "body": "Each of us has the time,\nAnd both the times are wrong.\nOur needs and likings chime\nSometimes, but not for long.\n\nYour watch is often fast,\nMine usually slow.\nAnd yet you cling to the past,\nI laxly let it go.\n\nYou are like a ferryman’s daughter,\nAnd I the stream that blurred\nCalls sent across that water\nWhich loyally you have heard.\n\nMy lapsings I acknowledge.\nAnd yet, on either hand\nCombed green, the river’s sedge\nSweetens the fishwives’ island.\n\nBut loyalty strings the reaches\nA river only spills.\nNecklace of bluffs and beaches,\nAnd the rubies under the mills!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-spring-song": { - "title": "“A Spring Song”", - "body": "_“stooped to truth and moralized his song”_\n\nSpring pricks a little. I get out the maps.\nTime to demoralize my song, high time.\nVernal a little. _Primavera._ First\nGreen, first truth and last.\nHigh time, high time.\n\nA high old time we had of it last summer?\nI overstate. But getting out the maps …\nLook! Up the valley of the Brenne,\nLouise de la Vallière … Syntax collapses.\nHigh time for that, high time.\n\nTo Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis\nRooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay\nOr so the song says, an amoral song\nLike Ronsard’s where we go today\nPerhaps, perhaps tomorrow.\n\nTomorrow and tomorrow and … Get well!\nPhilip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt\nOr some word as ridiculous, the whole\nDiction kit begins to fall apart.\nHigh time it did, high time.\n\nHigh time and a long time yet, my love!\nGet out that blessed map.\nAgeing, you take your glasses off to read it.\nStooping to truth, we potter to Montoire.\nHigh time, my love. High time and a long time yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "thyestes": { - "title": "“Thyestes”", - "body": "Brush of a raven’s, not an eagle’s wing!\nNo wonder older classicists could wish\nFor something more cathartic than this King\nWho spooned his baked-meat children from a dish.\n\nWith Jung and Frazer, Tylor, Graves and Lang,\nThe scholiast can wash the blood away.\nBut what’s the use? The savage poets sang\nEnormities that happen every day.\n\nNo talons raven in a titan’s gut\nWhen dreadful fathers of a fortnight’s date\nAre drowning kittens in a water-butt.\nBut see, a baby’s finger in the plate!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "time-passing-beloved": { - "title": "“Time Passing, Beloved”", - "body": "Time passing, and the memories of love\nComing back to me, carissima, no more mockingly\nThan ever before; time passing, unslackening,\nUnhastening, steadily; and no more\nBitterly, beloved, the memories of love\nComing into the shore.\n\nHow will it end? Time passing and our passages of love\nAs ever, beloved, blind\nAs ever before; time binding, unbinding\nAbout us; and yet to remember\nNever less chastening, nor the flame of love\nLess like an amber.\n\nWhat will become of us? Time\nPassing, beloved, and we in a sealed\nAssurance unassailed\nBy memory. How can it end,\nThis siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,\nNo doubts defend?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "w-h-davies": { - "metadata": { - "name": "W. H. Davies", - "birth": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Davies", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "come-let-us-find-a-cottage": { - "title": "“Come, let us find a cottage …”", - "body": "Come, let us find a cottage, love,\nThat’s green for half a mile around;\nTo laugh at every grumbling bee,\nWhose sweetest blossom’s not yet found.\nWhere many a bird shall sing for you,\nAnd in your garden build its nest:\nThey’ll sing for you as though their eggs\nWere lying in your breast,\n My love--\nWere lying warm in your soft breast.\n\n’Tis strange how men find time to hate,\nWhen life is all too short for love;\nBut we, away from our own kind,\nA different life can live and prove.\nAnd early on a summer’s morn,\nAs I go walking out with you,\nWe’ll help the sun with our warm breath\nTo clear away the dew,\n My love,\nTo clear away the morning dew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-fog": { - "title": "“The Fog”", - "body": "I saw the fog grow thick,\nWhich soon made blind my ken;\nIt made tall men of boys,\nAnd giants of tall men.\n\nIt clutched my throat, I coughed;\nNothing was in my head\nExcept two heavy eyes\nLike balls of burning lead.\n\nAnd when it grew so black\nThat I could know no place,\nI lost all judgment then,\nOf distance and of space.\n\nThe street lamps, and the lights\nUpon the halted cars,\nCould either be on earth\nOr be the heavenly stars.\n\nA man passed by me close,\nI asked my way, he said,\n“Come, follow me, my friend”--\nI followed where he led.\n\nHe rapped the stones in front,\n“Trust me,” he said, “and come”;\nI followed like a child--\nA blind man led me home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "cecil-day-lewis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Cecil Day-Lewis", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish+english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Day-Lewis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english", - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 15 - }, - "poems": { - "address-to-the-mother": { - "title": "“Address to the Mother”", - "body": "This was your world and this I owe you--\nRoom for growing, a site for building,\nThe braced sinew, the hands agreeing,\nMind foreseeing and nerve for facing.\nYou were my world, my breath, my seasons,\nWhere blood ran easy and springs failed not;\nKind was clover to feet exploring\nA broad earth and all to discover.\nSimple that world, of two dimensions,\nOf stone mansions and good examples;\nEach image actual, nearness was no\nFear, and distance without a mirage.\nDawn like a greyhound leapt the hilltops,\nA million leaves held up the noonday,\nEvening was slow with bells pealing,\nAnd night compelling to breast and pillow.\nThis was my world--oh, this you gave me--\nSafety for seed, petal uncurled there;\nLove asked no proving or price, a country\nSunny for play, for spring manoeuvres.\n\nWoman, ask no more of me,\nChill not the blood with jealous feud;\nThis is a separate country now,\nWill pay respects but no tribute.\nDemand no atavistic rites,\nPreference in trade or tithe of grain;\nBound by the limiting matrix I\nIncreased you once, will not again.\nMy vision’s patented, my plant\nSet up, my constitution whole;\nNew fears, old tunes cannot induce\nNostalgia of the sickly soul.\nWould you prolong your day, transfuse\nYoung blood into your veins? Beware\nLest one oppressed by autumn’s weight\nMay thrill to feel death in the air.\nLet love be like a natural day\nThat folds her work and takes to bed;\nPloughland and tree stand out in black,\nEnough memorial for the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "come-live-with-me-and-be-my-love": { - "title": "“Come, Live with Me and Be My Love”", - "body": "Come, live with me and be my love,\nAnd we will all the pleasures prove\nOf peace and plenty, bed and board,\nThat chance employment may afford.\n\nI’ll handle dainties on the docks\nAnd thou shalt read of summer frocks:\nAt evening by the sour canals\nWe’ll hope to hear some madrigals.\n\nCare on thy maiden brow shall put\nA wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot\nBe shod with pain: not silken dress\nBut toil shall tire thy loveliness.\n\nHunger shall make thy modest zone\nAnd cheat fond death of all but bone--\nIf these delight thy mind may move,\nThen live with me and be my love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "condemned": { - "title": "“Condemned”", - "body": "Tempt me no more; for I\nHave known the lightning’s hour,\nThe poet’s inward pride,\nThe certainty of power.\n\nBayonets are closing round.\nI shrink; yet I must wring\nA living from despair\nAnd out of steel a song.\n\nThough song, though breath be short,\nI’ll share not the disgrace\nOf those that ran away\nOr never left the base.\n\nComrades, my tongue can speak\nNo comfortable words,\nCalls to a for lorn hope,\nGives work and not rewards.\n\nOh keep the sickle sharp\nAnd follow still the plough:\nOthers may reap, though some\nSee not the winter through.\n\nFather, who endest all,\nPity our broken sleep;\nFor we lie down with tears\nAnd waken but to weep.\n\nAnd if our blood alone\nWill melt this iron earth,\nTake it. It is well spent\nEasing a saviour’s birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-conflict": { - "title": "“The Conflict”", - "body": "I sang as one\nWho on a tilting deck sings\nTo keep their courage up, thought the wave hangs\nThat shall cut off their sun.\n\nAs storm-cocks sing,\nFlinging their natural answer in the wind’s teeth,\nAnd care not if it is waste of breath\nOr birth-control of spring.\n\nAs ocean-flyer clings\nTo height, to the last drop of spirit driving on\nWhile yet ahead is land to be won\nAnd work for wings.\n\nSinging I was at peace,\nAbove the clouds, outside the ring:\nFor sorrow finds a swift release in song\nAnd pride in poise.\n\nYet living here,\nAs one between two massive powers I live\nWhom neutrality cannot save\nNor occupation cheer.\n\nNone such shall be left alive:\nThe innocent wing is soon shot down,\nAnd private stars fade in the blood-red dawn\nWhere two worlds strive.\n\nThe red advance of life\nContracts pride, calls out the common blood,\nBeats song into a single-blade,\nMakes a depth-charge of grief.\n\nMove then with new desires,\nFor where we used to build and love\nIs no man’s land, and only ghosts can live\nBetween two fires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ecstatic": { - "title": "“The Ecstatic”", - "body": "Lark, skylark, spilling your rubbed and round\nPebbles of sounds in air’s still lake,\nWhose widening circles fill the noon; yet none\nIs known so small beside the sun:\n\nBe strong your fervent soaring, your skyward air!\nTremble there, a nerve of song!\nFloat up there where voice and wing are one,\nA singing star, a note of light!\n\nBuoyed, embayed in heaven’s noon-wide reaches--\nFor soon Light’s tide will turn--Oh Stay!\nCease not till day streams to the west, then down\nThat estuary drop down to peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegy-before-death": { - "title": "“Elegy before Death”", - "body": "Come to the orangery. Sit down awhile.\nThe sun is setting: the verandah frames\nAn illuminated leaf of Italy.\nGold and green and blue, stroke upon stroke,\nSeem to tell what nature and man could make of it\nIf only their marriage were made in heaven. But see,\nEven as we hold the picture,\nThe colors are fading already, the lines collapsing\nFainting into the dream they will soon be.\n\nAgain? Again we are balled who have sought\nSo long in a melting Now the formula\nOf Always. There is no fast dye. Always?--\nThat is the word the sirens sing\nOn bone island. Oh stop your ears, and stop\nAll this vain peering through the haze,\nThe fortunate haze wherein we change and ripen,\nAnd never mind for what. Let us even embrace\nThe shadows wheeling away our windfall days.\n\nAgain again again, the frogs are screeling\nDown by the lilypond. Listen! I’ll echo them--\nGain gain gain … Could we compel\nOne grain of one vanishing moment to deliver\nIts golden ghost, loss would be gain\nAnd Love step naked from illusion’s shell.\nDid we but dare to see it,\nAll things to us, you and I to each other,\nStand in this naked potency of farewell.\n\nThe villa was built for permanence. Man laid down\nLike wine his heart, planted young trees, young pictures,\nYoung thoughts to ripen for an heir.\nLook how these avenues take the long view\nOf things ephemerall With what aplomb\nThe statues greet us at the grassy stair!\nTime on the sundial was a snail’s migration\nOver a world of warmth, and each day passing\nLeft on the fertile heart another layer.\n\nThe continuity they took for granted\nWe wistfully glamorize. So life’s devalued:\nWorth not a rhyme\nThese statues, groves, books, bibelots, masterpieces,\nIf we have used them only to grout a shaken\nConfidence or stop up the gaps of time.\nWe must ride the flood, or go under\nWith all our works, to emerge, when it recedes,\nDerelicts sluggish from the dishonoring slime.\n\nOur sun is setting. Terrestrial planes shift\nAnd slide towards dissolution, the terraced gardens\nQuaver like waves, and in the garden urn\nGeraniums go ashen. Now are we tempted, each\nTo yearn that his struggling counterpoint, carried away\nDrowned by the flood’s finale, shall return\nTo silence. Why do we trouble\nA master theme with cadenzas\nThat ring out, fade out over its fathomless unconcern?\n\nLove, more than our holidays are numbered.\nNot one day but a whole life is drained off\nThrough this pinprick of doubt into the dark.\nRhadamanthine moment! Shall we be judged\nSelf-traitors? Now is a chance to make our Aux\nStand and deliver its holy spark,\nNow, when the tears rise and the levees crumble,\nTo tap the potency of farewell.\nWhat ark is there but love? Let us embark.\n\nA weeping firmament, a sac of waters,\nA passive chaos--time without wind or tide,\nWhere on brief motiveless eddy seethe\nLost faces, furniture, animals, oblivion’s litter--\nEnvelope me, just as the incipient poem\nIs globed in nescience, and beneath\nA heart purged of all but memory, grows.\nNo landfall yet? No rift in the film? … I send you\nMy dove into the future, to your death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "epitaph-for-an-enemy": { - "title": "“Epitaph for an Enemy”", - "body": "You ask, “What sort of man\nWas this?”--No worthier than\nA pendulum which makes\nBetween its left and right\nInvoluntary arcs,\nProving from morn to night\nNo contact anywhere\nWith human or sublime--\nA punctual tick, a mere\nAccessory of Time.\n\nHis leaden act was done,\nHe stopt, and Time went on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-hard-frost": { - "title": "“A Hard Frost”", - "body": "A frost came in the night and stole my world\nAnd left this changeling for it--a precocious\nImage of spring, too brilliant to be true:\nWhite lilac on the window-pane, each grass-blade\nFurred like a catkin, maydrift loading the hedge.\nThe elms behind the house are elms no longer\nBut blossomers in crystal, stems of the mist\nThat hangs yet in the valley below, amorphous\nAs the blind tissue whence creation formed.\n\nThe sun looks out and the fields blaze with diamonds\nMockery spring, to lend this bridal gear\nFor a few hours to a raw country maid,\nThen leave her all disconsolate with old fairings\nOf aconite and snowdrop! No, not here\nAmid this flounce and filigree of death\nIs the real transformation scene in progress,\nBut deep below where frost\nWorrying the stiff clods unclenches their\nGrip on the seed and lets\nthe future breathe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "is-it-far-to-go": { - "title": "“Is It Far to Go?”", - "body": "_Is it far to go?_\nA step--no further.\n_Is it hard to go?_\nAsk the melting snow,\nThe eddying feather.\n\n_What can I take there?_\nNot a hank, not a hair.\n_What shall I leave behind?_\nAsk the hastening wind,\nThe fainting star.\n\n_Shall I be gone long?_\nFor ever and a day.\n_To whom there belong?_\nAsk the stone to say,\nAsk my song.\n\n_Who will say farewell?_\nThe beating bell.\n_Will anyone miss me?_\nThat I dare not tell--\nQuick, Rose, and kiss me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "newsreel": { - "title": "“Newsreel”", - "body": "Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving\nYour debts asleep, your history at the door:\nThis is the home for heroes, and this loving\nDarkness a fur you can afford.\n\nFish in their tank electrically heated\nNose without envy the glass wall: for them\nClerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,\nMove in a mute day-dream.\n\nBathed in this common source, you gape incurious\nAt what your active hours have willed--\nSleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious\nSick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.\n\nThere is the mayor opening the oyster season:\nA society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:\nAn old crocks’ race, and a politician\nIn fishing-waders to prove that all is well.\n\nOh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble\nIn the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.\nBut what are they to trouble--\nThese silver shadows--to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?\n\nSee the big guns, rising, groping, erected\nTo plant death in your world’s soft womb.\nFire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected--\nAre these exotics? They will grow nearer home!\n\nGrow nearer home--and out of the dream-house stumbling\nOne night into a strangling air and the flung\nRags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,\nYou’ll know you slept too long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "two-travellers": { - "title": "“Two Travellers”", - "body": "One of us in the compartment stares\nOut of his window the whole day long\nWith attentive mein, as if he knows,\nThere is hid in the journeying scene a song\nTo recall or compose\nFrom snatches of vision, hints of vanishing airs.\n\nHe’ll mark the couched hares\nIn grass whereover the lapwing reel and twist:\nHe notes how the shockheaded sunflowers climb\nLike boys on the wire by the railway line;\nAnd for him those morning rivers are love-in-a-mist,\nAnd the chimneystacks prayers.\n\nThe other is plainly a man of affairs,\nA seasoned commuter. His looks assert,\nAs he opens a briefcase intent on perusing\nFacts and figures, he’d never divert\nWith profitless musing\nThe longest journey, or notice the dress it wears.\n\nLittle he cares\nFor the coloured drift of his passage: no, not a thing\nValues in all that is hurrying past,\nThough dimly he senses from first to last\nHow flaps and waves the smoke of his travelling\nAt the window-squares.\n\nOne is preoccupied, one just stares,\nWhile the whale-ribbed terminus nears apace\nWhere passengers all must change, and under\nIts arch triumphal quickly disperse\nSo you may wonder\nWatching these two whom the train indifferently bears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-volunteer": { - "title": "“The Volunteer”", - "body": "Tell them in England, if they ask\nWhat brought us to these wars,\nTo this plateau beneath the night’s\nGrave manifold of stars--\n\nIt was not fraud or foolishness,\nGlory, revenge, or pay:\nWe came because our open eyes\nCould see no other way.\n\nThere was no other way to keep\nMan’s flickering truth alight:\nThese stars will witness that our course\nBurned briefer, not less bright.\n\nBeyond the wasted olive-groves,\nThe furthest lift of land,\nThere calls a country that was ours\nAnd here shall be regained.\n\nShine on us, memoried and real,\nGreen-water-silken meads:\nRivers of home, refresh our path\nWhom here your influence leads.\n\nHere in a parched and stranger place\nWe fight for England free,\nThe good our fathers won for her,\nThe land they hoped to see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "walking-away": { - "title": "“Walking Away”", - "body": "It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day--\nA sunny day with leaves just turning,\nThe touch-lines new-ruled--since I watched you play\nYour first game of football, then, like a satellite\nWrenched from its orbit, go drifting away\n\nBehind a scatter of boys. I can see\nYou walking away from me towards the school\nWith the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free\nInto a wilderness, the gait of one\nWho finds no path where the path should be.\n\nThat hesitant figure, eddying away\nLike a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,\nHas something I never quite grasp to convey\nAbout nature’s give-and-take--the small, the scorching\nOrdeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.\n\nI have had worse partings, but none that so\nGnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly\nSaying what God alone could perfectly show--\nHow selfhood begins with a walking away,\nAnd love is proved in the letting go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "where-are-the-war-poets": { - "title": "“Where Are the War Poets?”", - "body": "They who in folly or mere greed\nEnslaved religion, markets, laws,\nBorrow our language now and bid\nUs to speak up in freedom’s cause.\n\nIt is the logic of our times,\nNo subject for immortal verse--\nThat we who lived by honest dreams\nDefend the bad against the worse", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-night": { - "title": "“Winter Night”", - "body": "This evening holds her breath\nAnd makes a crystal pause;\nThe streams of light are frozen,\nShining above their source.\n\nNow if ever might one\nBreak through the sensual gate;\nSeraph’s wing glimpse far-glinting.\nIs it, is it too late?\n\nWe look up at the sky.\nYes, it is mirror clear;\nToo well we recognise\nThe physiognomy there.\n\nFriend, let us look to earth,\nBe stubborn, act and sleep.\nHere at our feet the skull\nKeeps a stiff upper lip;\n\nFeeling the weight of winter,\nGrimaces underground;\nBut does not need to know\nWhy spirit was flesh-bound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "c-j-dennis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "C. J. Dennis", - "birth": { - "year": 1876 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Dennis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "growing-up": { - "title": "“Growing Up”", - "body": "Little Tommy Tadpole began to weep and wail,\nFor little Tommy Tadpole had lost his little tail;\nAnd his mother didn’t know him as he wept upon a log,\nFor he wasn’t Tommy Tadpole, but Mr. Thomas Frog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "gavrila-derzhavin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gavrila Derzhavin", - "birth": { - "year": 1743 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1816 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrila_Derzhavin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "a-declaration-of-love": { - "title": "“A Declaration of Love”", - "body": "Although all nature now is dormant,\nMy love alone it restless lies;\nIt heeds your breath and every movement\nAnd only you can hold its eyes.\n\nSo suffer then my conversation,\nTo me alone your dreams devote;\nReserve for me your adoration\nAnd, as you answer, on me dote.\n\nOh, answer that we’re in agreement\nAnd tell me what you think of this:\nWhat can compare with this contentment\nWhen two as single soul find bliss?\n\nImagine then this bliss before us\nAnd hasten to embrace its taste:\nWith love that’s sung by heav’nly chorus\nOur mortal journey will be graced.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1770 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-river-time-in-its-fast-currents": { - "title": "“The river-time, in its fast currents …”", - "body": "The river-time, in its fast currents,\nBears away all people’s deals,\nAnd drowns kingdoms, kings, and countries,\nIn the forgetfulness’ abyss.\n\nAnd if, due pipes’ or lyres’ greatness,\nShall anything remain of that,\nIt shall be gobbled by the endless,\nAnd shall not dodge the common fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1816, - "month": "july", - "day": 6 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 6 - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-dickey": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Dickey", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dickey", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "bums-on-waking": { - "title": "“Bums, on Waking”", - "body": "Bums, on waking,\nDo not always find themselves\nIn gutters with water running over their legs\nAnd the pillow of the curbstone\nTurning hard as sleep drains from it.\nMostly, they do not know\n\nBut hope for where they shall come to.\nThe opening of the eye is precious,\n\nAnd the shape of the body also,\nLying as it has fallen,\nDisdainfully crumpling earthward\nOut of alcohol.\nDrunken under their eyelids\nLike children sleeping toward Christmas,\n\nThey wait for the light to shine\nWherever it may decide.\n\nOften it brings them staring\nThrough glass in the rich part of town,\nWhere the forms of humanized wax\nAre arrested in midstride\nWith their heads turned, and dressed\nBy force. This is ordinary, and has come\n\nTo be disappointing.\nThey expect and hope for\n\nSomething totally other:\nThat while they staggered last night\nFor hours, they got clear,\nSomehow, of the city; that they\nBurst through a hedge, and are lying\nIn a trampled rose garden,\nPillowed on a bulldog’s side,\nA watchdog’s, whose breathing\n\nIs like the earth’s, unforced--\nOr that they may, once a year\n(Any dawn now), awaken\nIn church, not on the coffin boards\nOf a back pew, or on furnace-room rags,\nBut on the steps of the altar\n\nWhere candles are opening their eyes\nWith all-seeing light\n\nAnd the green stained-glass of the windows\nFalls on them like sanctified leaves.\nWho else has quite the same\nCommitment to not being sure\nWhat he shall behold, come from sleep--\nA child, a policeman, an effigy?\n\nWho else has died and thus risen?\nNever knowing how they have got there,\n\nThey might just as well have walked\nOn water, through walls, out of graves,\nThrough potter’s fields and through barns,\nThrough slums where their stony pillows\nRefused to harden, because of\nTheir hope for this morning’s first light,\n\nWith water moving over their legs\nMore like living cover than it is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "cherrylog-road": { - "title": "“Cherrylog Road”", - "body": "Off Highway 106\nAt Cherrylog Road I entered\nThe ’34 Ford without wheels,\nSmothered in kudzu,\nWith a seat pulled out to run\nCorn whiskey down from the hills,\n\nAnd then from the other side\nCrept into an Essex\nWith a rumble seat of red leather\nAnd then out again, aboard\nA blue Chevrolet, releasing\nThe rust from its other color,\n\nReared up on three building blocks.\nNone had the same body heat;\nI changed with them inward, toward\nThe weedy heart of the junkyard,\nFor I knew that Doris Holbrook\nWould escape from her father at noon\n\nAnd would come from the farm\nTo seek parts owned by the sun\nAmong the abandoned chassis,\nSitting in each in turn\nAs I did, leaning forward\nAs in a wild stock-car race\n\nIn the parking lot of the dead.\nTime after time, I climbed in\nAnd out the other side, like\nAn envoy or movie star\nMet at the station by crickets.\nA radiator cap raised its head,\n\nBecome a real toad or a kingsnake\nAs I neared the hub of the yard,\nPassing through many states,\nMany lives, to reach\nSome grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow\nSending platters of blindness forth\n\nFrom its nickel hubcaps\nAnd spilling its tender upholstery\nOn sleepy roaches,\nThe glass panel in between\nLady and colored driver\nNot all the way broken out,\n\nThe back-seat phone\nStill on its hook.\nI got in as though to exclaim,\n“Let us go to the orphan asylum,\nJohn; I have some old toys\nFor children who say their prayers.”\n\nI popped with sweat as I thought\nI heard Doris Holbrook scrape\nLike a mouse in the southern-state sun\nThat was eating the paint in blisters\nFrom a hundred car tops and hoods.\nShe was tapping like code,\n\nLoosening the screws,\nCarrying off headlights,\nSparkplugs, bumpers,\nCracked mirrors and gear-knobs,\nGetting ready, already,\nTo go back with something to show\n\nOther than her lips’ new trembling\nI would hold to me soon, soon,\nWhere I sat in the ripped back seat\nTalking over the interphone,\nPraying for Doris Holbrook\nTo come from her father’s farm\n\nAnd to get back there\nWith no trace of me on her face\nTo be seen by her red-haired father\nWho would change, in the squalling barn,\nHer back’s pale skin with a strop,\nThen lay for me\n\nIn a bootlegger’s roasting car\nWith a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun\nTo blast the breath from the air.\nNot cut by the jagged windshields,\nThrough the acres of wrecks she came\nWith a wrench in her hand,\n\nThrough dust where the blacksnake dies\nOf boredom, and the beetle knows\nThe compost has no more life.\nSomeone outside would have seen\nThe oldest car’s door inexplicably\nClose from within:\n\nI held her and held her and held her,\nConvoyed at terrific speed\nBy the stalled, dreaming traffic around us,\nSo the blacksnake, stiff\nWith inaction, curved back\nInto life, and hunted the mouse\n\nWith deadly overexcitement,\nThe beetles reclaimed their field\nAs we clung, glued together,\nWith the hooks of the seat springs\nWorking through to catch us red-handed\nAmidst the gray breathless batting\n\nThat burst from the seat at our backs.\nWe left by separate doors\nInto the changed, other bodies\nOf cars, she down Cherrylog Road\nAnd I to my motorcycle\nParked like the soul of the junkyard\n\nRestored, a bicycle fleshed\nWith power, and tore off\nUp Highway 106, continually\nDrunk on the wind in my mouth,\nWringing the handlebar for speed,\nWild to be wreckage forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "falling": { - "title": "“Falling”", - "body": "_“A 29-year-old stewardess fell … to her death tonight when she was swept through an emergency door that suddenly sprang open … The body … was found … three hours after the accident.”_\n --New York Times\n\nThe states when they black out and lie there rolling when they turn\nTo something transcontinental move by drawing moonlight out of the great\nOne-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to\nAn engine is groaning for coffee and there is faintly coming in\nSomewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks\nOf trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored\nUniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew\n\nThe door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black\nOut finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taken by the throat\nThe undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something\nThat no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air\nStill neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat\nStill on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely\nWith utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it\nIn many places and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems\nTo slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body\n\nTo watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her\nSelf in low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight\nComing down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease\nOf a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil\nOf a central state of one’s country with a great gradual warmth coming\nOver her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using\nFor breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly\nBelow her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all\nTo her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and\nHer eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck\nAll the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling\nOf stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone\nIn bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide\nOff tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread\nOr whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth\nOf wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon. There is time to live\nIn superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing\nAn ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving\nIn a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches\nThe moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good\nAnd evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love\nMaking dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no\nRaincoat no matter all small towns brokenly brighter from inside\nCloud she walks over them like rain bursts out to behold a Greyhound\nBus shooting light through its sides it is the signal to go straight\nDown like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped beautifully\nUp her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deliriously bare then\nArms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great\nTo take control of her trembles near feathers planes head-down\nThe quick movements of bird-necks turning her head gold eyes the insight-\neyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops a taste for chicken overwhelming\nHer the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars\nFreight trains looped bridges enlarging the moon racing slowly\nThrough all the curves of a river all the darks of the midwest blazing\nFrom above. A rabbit in a bush turns white the smothering chickens\nHuddle for over them there is still time for something to live\nWith the streaming half-idea of a long stoop a hurtling a fall\nThat is controlled that plummets as it wills turns gravity\nInto a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining\nNew Powers there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing\nBut the whole night time for her to remember to arrange her skirt\nLike a diagram of a bat tightly it guides her she has this flying-skin\nMade of garments and there are also those sky-divers on tv sailing\nIn sunlight smiling under their goggles swapping batons back and forth\nAnd He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving\nBuddy. She looks for her grinning companion white teeth nowhere\nShe is screaming singing hymns her thin human wings spread out\nFrom her neat shoulders the air beast-crooning to her warbling\nAnd she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world now\nShe is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose\nAnd gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up\nIts local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs if she fell\nInto water she might live like a diver cleaving perfect plunge\n\nInto another heavy silver unbreathable slowing saving\nElement: there is water there is time to perfect all the fine\nPoints of diving feet together toes pointed hands shaped right\nTo insert her into water like a needle to come out healthily dripping\nAnd be handed a Coca-Cola there they are there are the waters\nOf life the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir so let me begin\nTo plane across the night air of Kansas opening my eyes superhumanly\nBright to the damned moon opening the natural wings of my jacket\nBy Don Loper moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water\nOne cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time one must use\nIt she is now through with all through all clouds damp hair\nStraightened the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing\nNew darks new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos\n\nAnd night a gradual warming a new-made, inevitable world of one’s own\nCountry a great stone of light in its waiting waters hold hold out\nFor water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body\nAnd fly and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned\nWater stored up for her for years the arms of her jacket slipping\nAir up her sleeves to go all over her? What final things can be said\nOf one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night\nAir to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself\nOff to the right in Kansas? She goes toward the blazing-bare lake\nHer skirts neat her hands and face warmed more and more by the air\nRising from pastures of beans and under her under chenille bedspreads\nThe farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding\nOn the scratch-shining posts of the bed dreaming of female signs\nOf the moon male blood like iron of what is really said by the moan\nOf airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight passing\nOver brush fires burning out in silence on little hills and will wake\nTo see the woman they should be struggling on the rooftree to become\nStars: for her the ground is closer water is nearer she passes\nIt then banks turns her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls\nOut to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must\nDo something with water fly to it fall in it drink it rise\nFrom it but there is none left upon earth the clouds have drunk it back\nThe plants have sucked it down there are standing toward her only\nThe common fields of death she comes back from flying to falling\nReturns to a powerful cry the silent scream with which she blew down\nThe coupled door of the airliner nearly nearly losing hold\nOf what she has done remembers remembers the shape at the heart\nOf cloud fashionably swirling remembers she still has time to die\nBeyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour\nOf cornfields and have enough time to kick off her one remaining\nShoe with the toes of the other foot to unhook her stockings\nWith calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair\nNear death when the body will assume without effort any position\nExcept the one that will sustain it enable it to rise live\nNot die nine farms hover close widen eight of them separate, leaving\nOne in the middle then the fields of that farm do the same there is no\nWay to back off from her chosen ground but she sheds the jacket\nWith its silver sad impotent wings sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece\nOf her skirt the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse the intimate\nInner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost\nOf a virgin sheds the long windsocks of her stockings absurd\nBrassiere then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming\nOff her: no longer monobuttocked she feels the girdle flutter shake\nIn her hand and float upward her clothes rising off her ascending\nInto cloud and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe\nLike a dumb bird and now will drop in soon now will drop\n\nIn like this the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas down from all\nHeights all levels of American breath layered in the lungs from the frail\nChill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly\nAnd breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after\nHer last superhuman act the last slow careful passing of her hands\nAll over her unharmed body desired by every sleeper in his dream:\nBoys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s blood\nWidowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves\nArisen at sunrise the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn\nToward clouds all feel something pass over them as she passes\nHer palms over her long legs her small breasts and deeply between\nHer thighs her hair shot loose from all pins streaming in the wind\nOf her body let her come openly trying at the last second to land\nOn her back This is it this\n All those who find her impressed\nIn the soft loam gone down driven well into the image of her body\nThe furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep\nIn her mortal outline in the earth as it is in cloud can tell nothing\nBut that she is there inexplicable unquestionable and remember\nThat something broke in them as well and began to live and die more\nWhen they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth\nCaught her interrupted her maiden flight told her how to lie she cannot\nTurn go away cannot move cannot slide off it and assume another\nPosition no sky-diver with any grin could save her hold her in his arms\nPlummet with her unfold above her his wedding silks she can no longer\nMark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife\nOr the goddess in Norwegian farm girls or all the back-breaking whores\nOf Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one\nBreath it is all gone and yet not dead not anywhere else\nQuite lying still in the field on her back sensing the smells\nOf incessant growth try to lift her a little sight left in the corner\nOf one eye fading seeing something wave lies believing\nThat she could have made it at the best part of her brief goddess\nState to water gone in headfirst come out smiling invulnerable\nGirl in a bathing-suit ad but she is lying like a sunbather at the last\nOf moonlight half-buried in her impact on the earth not far\nFrom a railroad trestle a water tank she could see if she could\nRaise her head from her modest hole with her clothes beginning\nTo come down all over Kansas into bushes on the dewy sixth green\nOf a golf course one shoe her girdle coming down fantastically\nOn a clothesline, where it belongs her blouse on a lightning rod:\n\nLies in the fields in this field on her broken back as though on\nA cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without\nTheir women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters\nOf life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms\nToward the flowering of the harvest in their hands that tragic cost\nFeels herself go go toward go outward breathes at last fully\nNot and tries less once tries tries ah, god--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-firebombing": { - "title": "“The Firebombing”", - "body": "_“Deke daran, dass nach den grossen Zerstörungen Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unschuldig war.”_\n --Günter Bich\n\n_“Or hast thou an arm like God?”_\n --The Book of Job\n\nHome-owners unite.\n\nAll families lie together, though some are burned alive.\nThe others try to feel\nFor them. Some can, it is often said.\n\nStarve and take off\n\nTwenty years in the suburbs, and the palm trees willingly leap\nInto the flashlights,\nAnd there is beneath them also\nA booted crackling of snailshells and coral-sticks.\nThere are cowl-flaps and the tilt’ cross of propellers,\nThe shovel-marked clouds’ far sides against the moon,\nThe enemy filling up the hills\nWith ceremonial graves. At my somewhere among these,\n\nSnap, a bulb is tricked on in the cockpit\n\nAnd some technical-minded stranger with my hands\nIs sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,\nHaving potential fire under the undeodorized arms\nOf his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,\nThe “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks\nFilled with napalm and gasoline.\n\nThinking forward ten minutes\nFrom that, there is also the burst straight out\nOf the overcast into the moon; there is now\nThe moon-metal-shine of propellers, the quarter-\nmoonstone, aimed at the waves,\nStopped on the cumulus.\n\nThere is then this re-entry\nInto cloud, for the engines to ponder their sound.\nIn white dark the aircraft shrinks; Japan\n\nDilates around it like a thought.\nComing out, the one who is here is over\nLand, passing over the all-night grainfields,\nIn dark paint over\nThe woods with one silver side,\nRice-water calm at all levels\nOf the terraced hill.\n\n Enemy rivers and trees\nSliding off me like snakeskin,\nStrips of vapor spooled from the wingtips\n\nGoing invisible passing over on\nOver bridges roads for night-walkers\nSunday night in the enemy’s country absolute\nCalm the moon’s face coming slowly\nAbout\n the inland sea\nSlants is woven with wire thread\nLevels out holds together like a quilt\nOf the starboard wing cloud flickers\nAt my glassed-off forehead the moon’s now and again\nUninterrupted face going forward\nOver the waves in a glide-path\nLost into land.\n\nGoing: going with it\n\nCombat booze by my side in a cratered canteen,\nBourbon frighteningly mixed\nWith GI pineapple juice,\nDogs trembling under me for hundreds of miles, on many\nIslands, sleep-smelling that ungodly mixture\nOf napalm and high-octane fuel,\nGood bourbon and GI juice.\n\nRivers circling behind me around\nCome to the fore, and bring\nA town with everyone darkened.\nFive thousand people are sleeping off\nAn all-day American drone.\nTwenty years in the suburbs have not shown me\nWhich ones were hit and which not.\n\nHaul on the wheel racking slowly\nThe aircraft blackly around\nIn a dark dream that that is\nThat is like flying inside someone’s head\n\nThink of this think of this\nI did not think of my house\n\nBut think of my house now\nWhere the lawn-mower rests on its laurels\nWhere the diet exists\nFor my own good where I try to drop\nTwenty years, eating figs in the pantry\nBlinded by each and all\nOf the eye-catching cans that gladly have caught my wife’s eye\nUntil I cannot say\nWhere the screwdriver is where the children\nGet off the bus where the new\nScoutmaster lives where the fly\nHones his front legs where the hammock folds\nIts erotic daydreams where the Sunday\nSchool text for the day has been put\nwhere the fire\nWood is where the payments\nFor everything under the sun\nPile peacefully up,\n\nBut in this half-paid-for pantry\nAmong the red lids that screw off\nWith an easy half-twist to the left\nAnd the long drawers crammed with dim spoons,\nI still have charge--secret charge--\nOf the fire developed to cling\nTo everything: to golf carts and fingernail\nScissors as yet unborn tennis shoes\nGrocery baskets toy fire engines\nNew Buicks stalled by the half-moon\n\nShining at midnight on crossroads green paint\nOf jolly garden tools red Christmas ribbons:\n\nNot atoms, these, but glue inspired\nBy love of country to burn,\nThe apotheosis of gelatin.\n\nBehind me having risen the Southern Cross\nSet up by chaplains in the Ryukyus--\nOrion, Scorpio, the immortal silver\nLike the myths of king-\ninsects at swarming-time--\nOne mosquito, dead drunk\nOn altitude, drones on, far under the engines,\nAnd bites between\nThe oxygen mask and the eye.\nThe enemy-colored skin of families\nDetermines to hold its color\nIn sleep, as my hand turns whiter\nThan ever, clutching the toggle--\nThe ship shakes bucks\nFire hangs not yet fire\nIn the air above Beppu\nFor I am fulfilling\nAn “anti-morale” raid upon it.\nAll leashes of dogs\nBreak under the first bomb, around those\nIn bed, or late in the public baths: around those\nWho inch forward on their hands\nInto medicinal waters.\nTheir heads come up with a roar\nOf Chicago fire:\nCome up with the carp pond showing\nThe bath-house upside down,\nStanding stiller to show it more\nAs I sail artistically over\nThe resort town followed by farms,\nSinging and twisting\nAll the handles in heaven kicking\nThe small cattle off their feet\nIn a red costly blast\nFlinging jelly over the walls\nAs in a chemical war-\nfare field demonstration.\nWith fire of mine like a cat\n\nHolding onto another man’s walls,\nMy hat should crawl on my head\nIn streetcars, thinking of it,\nThe fat on my body should pale.\n\nGun down\nThe engine, the eight blades sighing\nFor the moment when the roofs will connect\nTheir flames, and make a town burning with all\nAmerican fire.\n Reflections of houses catch;\nFire shuttles from pond to pond\nIn every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.\nWith this in the dark of the mind,\nDeath will not be what it should:\nWill not, even now, even when\nMy exhaled face in the mirror\nOf bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.\nThe death of children is ponds\nShutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs\nThe terraces of hills\nSmaller and smaller, a mote of red dust\nAt a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out\nThat is what should have got in\nTo my eye\n\nAnd shown the insides of houses, the low tables\nCatch fire from the floor mats,\nBlaze up in gas around their heads\nLike a dream of suddenly growing\nToo intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms\nSomething strange-scented falls--when those on earth\nDie, there is not even sound;\nOne is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,\nTurned blue by the power of beauty,\nIn a pale treasure-hole of soft light\nDeep in aesthetic contemplation,\nSeeing the ponds catch fire\nAnd cast it through ring after ring\nOf land: O death in the middle\nOf acres of inch-deep water! Useless\n\nFiring small arms\nSpeckles from the river\nBank one ninety millimeter\nMisses far down wrong petals gone\n\nIt is this detachment,\nThe honored aesthetic evil,\nThe greatest sense of power in one’s life,\nThat must be shed in bars, or by whatever\nMeans, by starvation\nVisions in well-stocked pantries:\nThe moment when the moon sails in between\nThe tail-booms the rudders nod I swing\nOver directly over the heart\n\nThe _heart_ of the fire. A mosquito burns out on my cheek\nWith the cold of my face\nthere are the eyes\nIn blue light bar-light\nAll masked but them the moon\nCrossing from left to right in the streams below\nOriental fish form quickly\nIn the chemical shine,\nIn their eyes one tiny seed\nOf deranged, Old Testament light.\n\nLetting go letting go\nThe plane rises gently dark forms\nGlide off me long water pales\nIn safe zones a new cry enters\nThe voice-box of chained family dogs\n\nWe buck leap over something\nNot there settle back\nLeave it leave it clinging and crying\nIt consumes them in a hot\nBody-flash, old age or menopause\nOf children, clings and burns\n eating through\nAnd when a reed mat catches fire\nFrom me, it explodes through field after field\nBearing its sleeper another\n\nBomb finds a home\nAnd clings to it like a child. And so\n\nGoodbye to the grassy mountains\nTo cloud streaming from the night engines\nFlags pennons curved silks\nOf air myself streaming also\n\nMy body covered\nWith flags, the air of flags\nBetween the engines.\nForever I do sleep in that position,\nForever in a turn\nFor home that breaks out streaming banners\nFrom my wingtips,\nWholly in position to admire.\n\nO then I knock it off\nAnd turn for home over the black complex thread worked\n through\nThe silver night-sea,\nFollowing the huge, moon-washed stepping-stones\nOf the Ryukyus south,\nThe nightgrass of mountains billowing softly\nIn my rising heat.\n Turn and tread down\nThe yellow stones of the islands\nTo where Okinawa burns,\nPure gold, on the radar screen,\nBeholding beneath me the actual island form\nIn the vast water-silver poured just above solid ground,\nAn inch of water extending for thousands of miles\nAbove flat ploughland. Say “down,” and it is done.\n\nAll this, and I am still hungry,\nStill twenty years overweight, still unable\nTo get down there or see\nWhat really happened.\n But it may be that I could not,\nIf I tried, say to any\nWho lived there, deep in my flames: say, in cold\nGrinning sweat, as to another\n\nOf these home-owners who are always curving\nNear me down the different-grassed street: say\nAs though to the neighbor\nI borrowed the hedge-clippers from\nOn the darker-grassed side of the two,\nCome in, my house is yours, come in\nIf you can, if you\nCan pass this unfured door. It is that I can imagine\nAt the threshold nothing\nWith its ears crackling off\nLike powdery leaves,\nNothing with children of ashes, nothing not\nAmiable, gentle, well-meaning,\nA little nervous for no\nReason a little worried a little too loud\nOr too easy-going nothing I haven’t lived with\nFor twenty years, still nothing not as\nAmerican as I am, and proud of it.\n\nAbsolution? Sentence? No matter;\nThe thing itself is in that.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-last-wolverine": { - "title": "“For the Last Wolverine”", - "body": "They will soon be down\n\nTo one, but he still will be\nFor a little while still will be stopping\n\nThe flakes in the air with a look,\nSurrounding himself with the silence\nOf whitening snarls. Let him eat\nThe last red meal of the condemned\n\nTo extinction, tearing the guts\n\nFrom an elk. Yet that is not enough\nFor me. I would have him eat\n\nThe heart, and from it, have an idea\nStream into his gnarling head\nThat he no longer has a thing\nTo lose, and so can walk\n\nOut into the open, in the full\n\nPale of the sub-Arctic sun\nWhere a single spruce tree is dying\n\nHigher and higher. Let him climb it\nWith all his meanness and strength.\nLord, we have come to the end\nOf this kind of vision of heaven,\n\nAs the sky breaks open\n\nIts fans around him and shimmers\nAnd into its northern gates he rises\n\nSnarling complete in the joy of a weasel\nWith an elk’s horned heart in his stomach\nLooking straight into the eternal\nBlue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all\n\nMy way: at the top of that tree I place\n\nThe New World’s last eagle\nHunched in mangy feathers giving\n\nUp on the theory of flight.\nDear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate\nTo the death in the rotten branches,\nLet the tree sway and burst into flame\n\nAnd mingle them, crackling with feathers,\n\nIn crownfire. Let something come\nOf it something gigantic legendary\n\nRise beyond reason over hills\nOf ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,\nThat it has come back, this time\nOn wings, and will spare no earthly thing:\n\nThat it will hover, made purely of northern\n\nLights, at dusk and fall\nOn men building roads: will perch\n\nOn the moose’s horn like a falcon\nRiding into battle into holy war against\nScreaming railroad crews: will pull\nWhole traplines like fibres from the snow\n\nIn the long-jawed night of fur trappers.\n\nBut, small, filthy, unwinged,\nYou will soon be crouching\n\nAlone, with maybe some dim racial notion\nOf being the last, but none of how much\nYour unnoticed going will mean:\nHow much the timid poem needs\n\nThe mindless explosion of your rage,\n\nThe glutton’s internal fire the elk’s\nHeart in the belly, sprouting wings,\n\nThe pact of the “blind swallowing\nThing,” with himself, to eat\nThe world, and not to be driven off it\nUntil it is gone, even if it takes\n\nForever. I take you as you are\n\nAnd make of you what I will,\nSkunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty\n\nNon-survivor.\n _Lord, let me die but not die\nOut._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-the-marble-quarry": { - "title": "“In the Marble Quarry”", - "body": "Beginning to dangle beneath\nThe wind that blows from the undermined wood,\nI feel the great pulley grind,\n\nThe thread I cling to lengthen\nAnd let me soaring and spinning down into marble,\nHooked and weightlessly happy\n\nWhere the squared sun shines\nBack equally from all four sides, out of stone\nAnd years of dazzling labor,\n\nTo land at last among men\nWho cut with power saws a Parian whiteness\nAnd, chewing slow tobacco,\n\nTheir eyebrows like frost,\nShunt house-sized blocks and lash them to cables\nAnd send them heavenward\n\nInto small-town banks,\nInto the columns and statues of government buildings,\nBut mostly graves.\n\nI mount my monument and rise\nSlowly and spinningly from the white-gloved men\nToward the hewn sky\n\nOut of the basement of light,\nSadly, lifted through time’s blinding layers\nOn perhaps my tombstone\n\nIn which the original shape\nMichelangelo believed was in every rock upon earth\nIs heavily stirring,\n\nSurprised to be an angel,\nTo be waked in North Georgia by the ponderous play\nOf men with ten-ton blocks\n\nBut no more surprised than I\nTo feel sadness fall off as though I myself\nWere rising from stone\n\nHeld by a thread in midair,\nBadly cut, local-looking, and totally uninspired,\nNot a masterwork\n\nOr even worth seeing at all\nBut the spirit of this place just the same,\nFelt here as joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-tree-house-at-night": { - "title": "“In the Tree House at Night”", - "body": "And now the green household is dark.\nThe half-moon completely is shining\nOn the earth-lighted tops of the trees.\nTo be dead, a house must be still.\nThe floor and the walls wave me slowly;\nI am deep in them over my head.\nThe needles and pine cones about me\n\nAre full of small birds at their roundest,\nTheir fist without mercy gripping\nHard down through the tree to the roots\nTo sing back at light when they feel it.\nWe lie here like angels in bodies,\nMy brothers and I, one dead,\nThe other asleep from much living,\n\nIn mid-air huddled beside me.\nDark climbed to us here as we climbed\nUp the nails I have hammered all day\nThrough the sprained, comic rungs of the ladder\nOf broom handles, crate slats, and laths\nFoot by foot up the trunk to the branches\nWhere we came out at last over lakes\n\nOf leaves, of fields disencumbered of earth\nThat move with the moves of the spirit.\nEach nail that sustains us I set here;\nEach nail in the house is now steadied\nBy my dead brother’s huge, freckled hand.\nThrough the years, he has pointed his hammer\nUp into these limbs, and told us\n\nThat we must ascend, and all lie here.\nStep after step he has brought me,\nEmbracing the trunk as his body,\nShaking its limbs with my heartbeat,\nTill the pine cones danced without wind\nAnd fell from the branches like apples.\nIn the arm-slender forks of our dwelling\n\nI breathe my live brother’s light hair.\nThe blanket around us becomes\nAs solid as stone, and it sways.\nWith all my heart, I close\nThe blue, timeless eye of my mind.\nWind springs, as my dead brother smiles\nAnd touches the tree at the root;\n\nA shudder of joy runs up\nThe trunk; the needles tingle;\nOne bird uncontrollably cries.\nThe wind changes round, and I stir\nWithin another’s life. Whose life?\nWho is dead? Whose presence is living?\nWhen may I fall strangely to earth,\n\nWho am nailed to this branch by a spirit?\nCan two bodies make up a third?\nTo sing, must I feel the world’s light?\nMy green, graceful bones fill the air\nWith sleeping birds. Alone, alone\nAnd with them I move gently.\nI move at the heart of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-lifeguard": { - "title": "“The Lifeguard”", - "body": "In a stable of boats I lie still,\nFrom all sleeping children hidden.\nThe leap of a fish from its shadow\nMakes the whole lake instantly tremble.\nWith my foot on the water, I feel\nThe moon outside\n\nTake on the utmost of its power.\nI rise and go our through the boats.\nI set my broad sole upon silver,\nOn the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,\nStepping outward from earth onto water\nIn quest of the miracle\n\nThis village of children believed\nThat I could perform as I dived\nFor one who had sunk from my sight.\nI saw his cropped haircut go under.\nI leapt, and my steep body flashed\nOnce, in the sun.\n\nDark drew all the light from my eyes.\nLike a man who explores his death\nBy the pull of his slow-moving shoulders,\nI hung head down in the cold,\nWide-eyed, contained, and alone\nAmong the weeds,\n\nAnd my fingertips turned into stone\nFrom clutching immovable blackness.\nTime after time I leapt upward\nExploding in breath, and fell back\nFrom the change in the children’s faces\nAt my defeat.\n\nBeneath them I swam to the boathouse\nWith only my life in my arms\nTo wait for the lake to shine back\nAt the risen moon with such power\nThat my steps on the light of the ripples\nMight be sustained.\n\nBeneath me is nothing but brightness\nLike the ghost of a snowfield in summer.\nAs I move toward the center of the lake,\nWhich is also the center of the moon,\nI am thinking of how I may be\nThe savior of one\n\nWho has already died in my care.\nThe dark trees fade from around me.\nThe moon’s dust hovers together.\nI call softly out, and the child’s\nVoice answers through blinding water.\nPatiently, slowly,\n\nHe rises, dilating to break\nThe surface of stone with his forehead.\nHe is one I do not remember\nHaving ever seen in his life.\nThe ground I stand on is trembling\nUpon his smile.\n\nI wash the black mud from my hands.\nOn a light given off by the grave\nI kneel in the quick of the moon\nAt the heart of a distant forest\nAnd hold in my arms a child\nOf water, water, water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "may-day-sermon": { - "title": "“May Day Sermon”", - "body": "Each year at this time I shall be telling you of the Lord\n--Fog, gamecock, snake, and neighbor--giving men all the help they need\nTo drag their daughters into barns. Children, I shall be showing you\nThe fox-hide stretched on the door like a flying-squirrel fly\nOpen to show you the dark where the one pole of light is paid out\nIn spring by the loft, and in it the croker sacks sprawling and shuttling\nThemselves into place as it comes comes through spiders dead\nDrunk on their threads the hogs’ fat bristling the milk\nSnake in the rafters unbending through gnats to touch the last place\nAlive on the sun with his tongue I shall be flickering from my mouth\nOil grease-cans lard-cans nubbins cobs night\nComing floating each May with night coming I cannot help\nTelling you how he hauls her to the centerpole how the tractor moves\nOver as he sets his feet and hauls hauls ravels her arms and hair\nIn stump-chains: Telling: telling of Jehovah come and gone\nDown on His belly descending creek-curving blowing His legs\n\nLike candles, out putting North Georgia copper on His head\nTo crawl in under the door in dust red enough to breathe\nThe breath of Adam into: Children, be brought where she screams and begs\nTo the sacks of corn and coal to nails to the swelling ticks\nOn the near side of mules, for the Lord’s own man has found the limp\nRubber that lies in the gulley the penis-skin like a serpent\nUnder the weaving willow.\n Listen: often a girl in the country,\nMostly sweating mostly in spring, deep enough in the holy Bible\nBelt, will feel her hair rise up arms rise, and this not any wish\n\nOf hers, and clothes like lint shredding off her abominations\nIn the sight of the Lord: will hear the Book speak like a father\nGone mad: each year at this time will hear the utmost sound\nOf herself, as her lungs cut, one after one, every long track\nSpiders have coaxed from their guts stunned spiders fall\nInto Pandemonium fall fall and begin to dance like a girl\nOn the red clay floor of Hell she screaming her father screaming\nScripture CHAPter and verse beating it into her with a weeping\nWillow branch the animals stomping she prancing and climbing\nHer hair beasts shifting from foot to foot about the stormed\nSteel of the anvil the tractor gaslessly straining believing\nIt must pull up a stump pull pull down the walls of the barn\nLike Dagon’s temple set the Ark of the Lord in its place change all\nThings for good, by pain. Each year at this time you will be looking up\nGnats in the air they boil recombine go mad with striving\nTo form the face of her lover, as when he lay at Nickajack Creek\nWith her by his motorcycle looming face trembling with exhaust\nFumes humming insanely--each May you hear her father scream like God\nAnd King James as he flails cuds richen bulls chew themselves white-faced\nDeeper into their feed bags, and he cries something the Lord cries\nWords! Words! Ah, when they leap when they are let out of the Bible’s\nBlack box they whistle they grab the nearest girl and do her hair up\nFor her lover in root-breaking chains and she knows she was born to hang\nIn the middle of Gilmer County to dance, on May Day, with holy\nWords all around her with beasts with insects O children NOW\nIn five bags of chicken-feed the torsos of prophets form writhe\nDie out as her freckled flesh as flesh and the Devil twist and turn\nHer body to love cram her mouth with defiance give her words\nTo battle with the Bible’s in the air: she shrieks sweet Jesus and God\n\nI’m glad O my God-darling O lover O angel-stud dear heart\nOf life put it in me give you’re killing KILLING: each\nNight each year at this time I shall be telling you of the snake-\ndoctor drifting from the loft, a dragonfly, where she is wringing\nOut the tractor’s muddy chains where her cotton socks prance,\nWhere her shoes as though one ankle were broken, stand with night\nComing and creatures drawn by the stars, out of their high holes\nBy moon-hunger driven part the leaves crawl out of Grimes Nose\nAnd Brasstown Bald: on this night only I can tell how the weasel pauses\nEach year in the middle of the road looks up at the evening blue\nStar to hear her say again O again YOU CAN BEAT ME TO DEATH\nAnd I’ll still be glad:\n Sisters, it is time to show you rust\nSmashing the lard-cans more in spring after spring bullbats\nSwifts barn swallows mule-bits clashing on walls mist turning\nUp white out of warm creeks: all over, fog taking the soul from the body\nOf water gaining rising up trees sifting up through smoking green\nFrenzied levels of gamecocks sleeping from the roots stream-curves\nOf mist: wherever on God’s land is water, roads rise up the shape of rivers\nOf no return: O sisters, it is time you cannot sleep with Jehovah\n\nSearching for what to be, on ground that has called Him from His Book:\nShall He be the pain in the willow, or the copperhead’s kingly riding\nIn kudzu, growing with vines toward the cows or the wild face working over\nA virgin, swarming like gnats or the grass of the west field, bending\nEast, to sweep into bags and turn brown or shall He rise, white on white,\nFrom Nickajack Creek as a road? The barn creaks like an Ark beasts\nSmell everywhere the streams drawn out by their souls the flood-\nsigh of grass in the spring they shall be saved they know as she screams\nOf sin as the weasel stares the hog strains toward the woods\nThat hold its primeval powers:\n Often a girl in the country will find herself\nDancing with God in a mule’s eye, twilight drifting in straws from the dark\nOverhead of hay cows working their sprained jaws sideways at the hour\nOf night all things are called: when gnats in their own midst and fury\nOf swarming-time, crowd into the barn their sixty-year day consumed\nIn this sunset die in a great face of light that swarms and screams\nOf love.\n Each May you will crouch like a sawhorse to make yourself\nMore here you will be cow-chips chickens croaking for her hands\nThat shook the corn over the ground bouncing kicked this way\nAnd that, by the many beaks and every last one of you will groan\nLike nails barely holding and your hair be full of the gray\nGlints of stump-chains. Children, each year at this time you will have\nBack-pain, but also heaven but also also this lovely other life-\npain between the thighs: woman-child or woman in bed in Gilmer\nCounty smiling in sleep like blood-beast and Venus together\nDancing the road as I speak, get up up in your socks and take\nThe pain you were born for: that rose through her body straight\nUp from the earth like a plant, like the process that raised overhead\nThe limbs of the uninjured willow.\n Children, it is true\nThat the kudzu advances, its copperheads drunk and tremendous\nWith hiding, toward the cows and wild fences cannot hold the string\nBeans as they overshoot their fields: that in May the weasel loves love\nAs much as blood that in the dusk bottoms young deer stand half\nIn existence, munching cornshucks true that when the wind blows\nRight Nickajack releases its mist the willow leaves stiffen once\nMore altogether you can hear each year at this time you can hear\nNo Now, no Now Yes Again More O O my God\nI love it love you don’t leave don’t don’t stop O GLORY\nBe:\n More dark more coming fox-fire crawls over the okra-\npatch as through it a real fox creeps to claim his father’s fur\nFlying on doornails the quartermoon on the outhouse begins to shine\nWith the quartermoonlight of this night as she falls and rises,\nChained to a sapling like a tractor WHIPPED for the wind in the willow\nTree WHIPPED for Bathsheba and David WHIPPED for the woman taken\nAnywhere anytime WHIPPED for the virgin sighing bleeding\nFrom her body for the sap and green of the year for her own good\nAnd evil:\n Sisters, who is your lover? Has he done nothing but come\nAnd go? Has your father nailed his cast skin to the wall as evidence\nOf sin? Is it flying like a fox in the darkness dripping pure radiant venom\nOf manhood?\n Yes, but heis unreeling in hills between his long legs\nThe concrete of the highway his face in the moon beginning\nTo burn twitch dance like an overhead swarm he feels a nail\nBeat through his loins far away he rises in pain and delight, as spirit\nEnters his sex sways forms rises with the forced, choked red\nBlood of her red-headed image, in the red-dust, Adam-colored clay\nWhirling and leaping creating calling: O on the dim, gray man-\ntrack of cement flowing into his mouth each year he turns the moon back\nAround on his handlebars her image going all over him like the wind\nBlasting up his sleeves. He turns off the highway, and\n Ah, children,\nThere is now something else to hear: there is now this madness of engine\nNoise in the bushes past reason ungodly squealing reverting\nLike a hog turned loose in the woods Yes, as he passes the first\nTrees of God’s land game-hens overhead and the farm is ON\nHim everything is more more MORE as he enters the black\nBible’s white swirling ground O daughters his heartbeat great\nWith trees some blue leaves coming NOW and right away fire\nIn the right eye Lord more MORE O Glory land\nOf Glory: ground-branches hard to get through coops where fryers huddle\nTo death, as the star-beast dances and scratches at their home-boards,\nHis rubber stiffens on its nails: Sisters, understand about men and sheaths:\n\nAbout nakedness: understand how butterflies, amazed, pass out\nOf their natal silks how the tight snake takes a great breath bursts\nThrough himself and leaves himself behind how a man casts finally\nOff everything that shields him from another beholds his loins\nShine with his children forever burn with the very juice\nOf resurrection: such shining is how the spring creek comes\nForth from its sunken rocks it is how the trout foams and turns on\nHimself heads upstream, breathing mist like water, for the cold\nMountain of his birth flowing sliding in and through the ego-\nmaniacal sleep of gamecocks shooting past a man with one new blind\nSide who feels his skinned penis rise like a fish through the dark\nWoods, in a strange lifted-loving form a snake about to burst\nThrough itself on May Day and leave behind on the ground still\nStill the shape of a fooled thing’s body:\n he comes on comes\nThrough the laurel, wiped out on his right by an eye-twig now he\nIs crossing the cow track his hat in his hand going on before\nHis face then up slowly over over like the Carolina moon\nComing into Georgia feels the farm close its Bible and ground-\nfog over him his dark side blazing something whipping\nBy, beyond sight: each year at this time I shall be letting you\n\nKnow when she cannot stand when the chains fall back on\nTo the tractor when you should get up when neither she nor the pole\nHas any more sap and her striped arms and red hair must keep her\nFrom falling when she feels God’s willow laid on her, at last,\nWith no more pressure than hay, and she has finished crying to her lover’s\nShifting face and his hand when he gave it placed it, unconsumed,\nIn her young burning bush. Each year by dark she has learned\n\nThat home is to hang in home is where your father cuts the baby\nFat from your flanks for the Lord, as you scream for the viny foreskin\nOf the motorcycle rider. Children, by dark by now, when he drops\nThe dying branch and lets her down when the red clay flats\nOf her feet hit the earth all things have heard--fog, gamecock\nSnake, and lover--and we listen: Listen children, for the fog to lift\nThe form of sluggish creeks into the air: each spring, each creek\nOn the Lord’s land flows in two O sisters, lovers, flows in two\nPlaces: where it was, and in the low branches of pines where chickens\nSleep in mist and that is where you will find roads floating free\nOf the earth winding leading unbrokenly out of the farm of God\nThe father:\n Each year at this time she is coming from the barn she\nFalls once, hair hurting her back stumbles walking naked\nWith dignity walks with no help to the house lies face-down\nIn her room, burning tuning in hearing in the spun rust-\ngroan of bedsprings, his engine root and thunder like a pig,\nKnowing who it is must be knowing that the face of gnats will wake,\nIn the woods, as a man: there is nothing else this time of night\nBut her dream of having wheels between her legs: tires, man,\nEverything she can hold, pulsing together her father walking\nReading intoning calling his legs blown out by the ground-\nfogging creeks of his land: Listen listen like females each year\nIn May O glory to the sound the sound of your man gone wild\nWith love in the woods let your nipples rise and leave your feet\nTo hear: This is when moths flutter in from the open, and Hell\nFire of the oil lamp shrivels them and it is said\nTo her: said like the Lord’s voice trying to find a way\nOutside the Bible O sisters O women and children who will be\nWomen of Gilmer County you farm girls and Ellijay cotton mill\nGirls, get up each May Day up in your socks it is the father\nSound going on about God making, a hundred feet down,\nThe well beat its bucket like a gong: she goes to the kitchen,\nStands with the inside grain of pinewood whirling on her like a cloud\nOf wire picks up a useful object two they are not themselves\nTonight each hones itself as the moon does new by phases\nOf fog floating unchanged into the house coming atom\nBy atom sheepswool different smokes breathed like the Word\nOf nothing, round her seated father. Often a girl in the country,\nMostly in spring mostly bleeding deep enough in the holy Bible\nBelt will feel her arms rise up up and this not any wish\nOf hers will stand, waiting for word. O daughters, he is rambling\nIn Obadiah the pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou\nThat dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high\nThat saith in his heart O daughters who shall bring me down\nTo the ground? And she comes down putting her back into\nThe hatchet often often he is brought down laid out\nLashing smoking sucking wind: Children, each year at this time\nA girl will tend to take an ice pick in both hands a lone pine\nNeedle will hover hover: Children, each year at this time\nThings happen quickly and it is easy for a needle to pass\nThrough the eye of a man bound for Heaven she leaves it naked goes\nWithout further sin through the house floating in and out of all\nFour rooms comes onto the porch on cloud-feet steps down and out\nAnd around to the barn pain changing her old screams hanging\nBy the hair around her: Children, in May, often a girl in the country\nWill find herself lifting wood her arms like hair rising up\nTo undo locks raise latches set gates aside turn all things\nLoose shoo them out shove pull O hogs are leaping ten\nMillion years back through fog cows walking worriedly passing out\nOf the Ark from stalls where God’s voice cursed and mumbled\nAt milking-time moving moving disappearing drifting\nIn cloud cows in the alders already lowing far off no one\nCan find them each year: she comes back to the house and grabs double\nHandfuls of clothes\n and her lover, with his one eye of amazing grace\nOf sight, sees her coming as she was born swirling developing\nToward him she hears him grunt she hears him creaking\nHis saddle dead-engined she conjures one foot whole from the ground-\nfog to climb him behind he stands up stomps catches roars\nBlasts the leaves from a blinding twig wheels they blaze up\nTogether she breathing to match him her hands on his warm belly\nHis hard blood renewing like a snake O now now as he twists\nHis wrist, and takes off with their bodies:\n each May you will hear it\nSaid that the sun came as always the sun of next day burned\nThem off with the mist: that when the river fell back on its bed\nOf water they fell from life from limbs they went with it\nTo Hell three-eyed in love, their legs around an engine, her arms\nAround him. But now, except for each year at this time, their sound\nHas died: except when the creek-bed thicks its mist gives up\nThe white of its flow to the air comes off lifts into the pine-poles\nOf May Day comes back as you come awake in your socks and crotch-hair\nOn new-mooned nights of spring I speak you listen and the pines fill\nWith motorcycle sound as they rise, stoned out of their minds on the white\nLightning of fog singing the saddle bags full of her clothes\nFlying snagging shoes hurling away stockings grabbed-off\nUnwinding and furling on twigs: all we know all we could follow\nThem by was her underwear was stocking after stocking where it tore\nAway, and a long slip stretched on a thorn all these few gave\nOut. Children, you know it: that place was where they took\nOff into the air died disappeared entered my mouth your mind\nEach year each pale, curved breath each year as she holds him\nCloser wherever he hurtles taking her taking her she going forever\nWhere he goes with the highways of rivers through one-eyed\nTwigs through clouds of chickens and grass with them bends\nDouble the animals lift their heads peanuts and beans exchange\nShells in joy joy like the speed of the body and rock-bottom\nJoy: joy by which the creek-bed appeared to bear them out of the Bible\n‘s farm through pine-clouds of gamecocks where no earthly track\nIs, but those risen out of warm currents streams born to hang\nIn the pines of Nickajack Creek: tonight her hands are under\nHis crackling jacket the pain in her back enough to go through\nThem both her buttocks blazing in the sheepskin saddle: tell those\n\nWho look for them who follow by rayon stockings who look on human\nHighways on tracks of cement and gravel black weeping roads\nOf tar: tell them that she and her rider have taken no dirt\nNor any paved road no path for cattle no county trunk or trail\nOr any track upon earth, but have roared like a hog on May Day\nThrough pines and willows: that when he met the insane vine\nOf the scuppernong he tilted his handlebars back and took\nThe road that rises in the cold mountain spring from warm creeks:\nO women in your rayon from Lindale, I shall be telling you to go\nTo Hell by cloud down where the chicken-walk is running\nTo weeds and anyone can show you where the tire-marks gave out\nAnd her last stocking was cast and you stand as still as a weasel\nUnder Venus before you dance dance yourself blue with blood-\njoy looking into the limbs looking up into where they rode\nThrough cocks tightening roots with their sleep-claws. Children,\nThey are gone: gone as the owl rises, when God takes the stone\nBlind sun off its eyes, and it sees sees hurtle in the utter dark\nGold of its sight, a boy and a girl buried deep in the cloud\nOf their speed drunk, children drunk with pain and the throttle\nWide open, in love with a mindless sound with her red hair\nIn the wind streaming gladly for them both more than gladly\nAs the barn settles under the weight of its pain the stalls fill once\nMore with trampling like Exodus the snake-doctor gone the rats beginning\nOn the last beans and all the chicks she fed, each year at this time\nBurst from their eggs as she passes:\n Children, it is true that mice\nNo longer bunch on the rafters, but wade the fields like the moon,\nShifting in patches ravenous the horse floats, smoking with flies,\nTo the water-trough coming back less often learning to make\nDo with the flowing drink of deer the mountain standing cold\nFlowing into his mouth grass underfoot dew horse or what\never he is now moves back into trees where the bull walks\nWith a male light spread between his horns some say screams like a girl\nAnd her father yelling together:\n Ah, this night in the dark laurel\nGreen of the quartermoon I shall be telling you that the creek’s last\nAscension is the same is made of water and air heat and cold\nThis year as before: telling you not to believe every scream you hear\nIs the Bible’s: it may be you or me it may be her sinful barn-\nhowling for the serpent, as her father whips her, using the tried\nAnd true rhythms of the Lord. Sisters, an old man at times like this\nMoon, is always being found yes found with an ice pick on his mind,\nA willow limb in his hand. By now, the night-moths have come\nHave taken his Bible and read it have flown, dissolved, having found\nNothing in it for them. I shall be telling you each moon each\nYear at this time, Venus rises the weasel goes mad at the death\nIn the egg, of the chicks she fed for him by hand: mad in the middle\nOf human space he dances blue-eyed dances with Venus rising\nLike blood-lust over the road O tell your daughters tell them\nThat the creek’s ghost can still O still can carry double\nWeight of true lovers any time any night as the wild turkeys claw\nInto the old pines of gamecocks, and with a cow’s tongue, the Bible calls\nFor its own, and is not heard and even God’s unsettled great white father\nhead with its ear to the ground, cannot hear know cannot pick\nUp where they are where her red hair is streaming through the white\nHairs of His centerless breast: with the moon He cries with the cow all\nIts life penned up with Noah in the barn talk of original\nSin as the milk spurts talk of women talk of judgment and flood\nAnd the promised land:\n Telling on May Day, children: telling\nThat the animals are saved without rain that they are long gone\nFrom here gone with the sun gone with the woman taken\nIn speed gone with the one-eyed mechanic that the barn falls in\nLike Jericho at the bull’s voice at the weasel’s dance at the hog’s\nPrimeval squeal the uncut hay walks when the wind prophesies in the west\nPasture the animals move roam, with kudzu creating all the earth\nEast of the hayfield: Listen: each year at this time the county speaks\nWith its beasts and sinners with its blood the county speaks of nothing\nElse each year at this time: speaks as beasts speak to themselves\nOf holiness learned in the barn: Listen O daughters turn turn\nIn your sleep rise with your backs on fire in spring in your socks\nInto the arms of your lovers: every last one of you, listen one-eyed\nWith your man in hiding in fog where the animals walk through\nThe white breast of the Lord muttering walk with nothing\nTo do but be in the spring laurel in the mist and self-sharpened\nMoon walk through the resurrected creeks through the Lord\nAt their own pace the cow shuts its mouth and the Bible is still\nStill open at anything we are gone the barn wanders over the earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "may_day" - } - } - }, - "the-performance": { - "title": "“The Performance”", - "body": "The last time I saw Donald Armstrong\nHe was staggering oddly off into the sun,\nGoing down, off the Philippine Islands.\nI let my shovel fall, and put that hand\nAbove my eyes, and moved some way to one side\nThat his body might pass through the sun,\n\nAnd I saw how well he was not\nStanding there on his hands,\nOn his spindle-shanked forearms balanced,\nUnbalanced, with his big feet looming and waving\nIn the great, untrustworthy air\nHe flew in each night, when it darkened.\n\nDust fanned in scraped puffs from the earth\nBetween his arms, and blood turned his face inside out,\nTo demonstrate its suppleness\nOf veins, as he perfected his role.\nNext day, he toppled his head off\nOn an island beach to the south,\n\nAnd the enemy’s two-handed sword\nDid not fall from anyone’s hands\nAt that miraculous sight,\nAs the head rolled over upon\nIts wide-eyed face, and fell\nInto the inadequate grave\n\nHe had dug for himself, under pressure.\nYet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows\nMonths later, to see him again\nIn the sun, when I learned how he died,\nAnd imagined him, there,\nCome, judged, before his small captors,\n\nDoing all his lean tricks to amaze them--\nThe back somersault, the kip-up--\nAnd at last, the stand on his hands,\nPerfect, with his feet together,\nHis head down, evenly breathing,\nAs the sun poured from the sea\n\nAnd the headsman broke down\nIn a blaze of tears, in that light\nOf the thin, long human frame\nUpside down in its own strange joy,\nAnd, if some other one had not told him,\nWould have cut off the feet\n\nInstead of the head,\nAnd if Armstrong had not presently risen\nIn kingly, round-shouldered attendance,\nAnd then knelt down in himself\nBeside his hacked, glittering grave, having done\nAll things in this life that he could.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pursuit-from-under": { - "title": "“Pursuit from Under”", - "body": "Often, in these blue meadows,\nI hear what passes for the bark of seals\n\nAnd on August weekends the cold of a personal ice age\nComes up through my bare feet\nWhich are trying to walk like a boy’s again\nSo that nothing on earth can have changed\nOn the ground where I was raised.\n\nThe dark grass here is like\nThe pads of mukluks going on and on\n\nBecause I once burned kerosene to read\nMyself near the North Pole\nIn the journal of Arctic explorers\nFound, years after death, preserved\nIn a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten\n\nBefore the last entry.\nAll over my father’s land\n\nThe seal holes sigh like an organ,\nAnd one entry carries more terror\nThan the blank page that signified death\nIn 1912, on the icecap.\nIt says that, under the ice,\n\nThe killer whale darts and distorts,\nCut down by the flawing glass\n\nTo a weasel’s shadow,\nAnd when, through his ceiling, he sees\nAnything darker than snow\nHe falls away\nTo gather more and more force\n\nFrom the iron depths of cold water,\nHis shadow dwindling\n\nAlmost to nothing at all, then charges\nStraight up, looms up at the ice and smashes\nInto it with his forehead\nTo splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man\nOn a drifting piece of the floe\n\nWhich he can overturn.\nIf you run, he will follow you\n\nUnder the frozen pane,\nTurning as you do, zigzagging,\nAnd at the most uncertain of your ground\nWill shatter through, and lean,\nAnd breathe frankly in your face\n\nAn enormous breath smelling of fish.\nWith the lungs staining your air\n\nYou know the unsaid recognition\nOf which the explorers died:\nThey had been given an image\nOf how the downed dead pursue us.\nThey knew, as they starved to death,\n\nThat not only in the snow\nBut in the family field\n\nThe small shadow moves,\nAnd under the bare feet in the summer:\nThat somewhere the turf will heave,\nAnd the outraged breath of the dead,\nSo long held, will form\n\nUnbreathably around the living.\nThe cows low oddly here\n\nAs I pass, a small bidden shape\nGoing with me, trembling like foxfire\nUnder my heels and their hooves.\nI shall write this by kerosene,\nPitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-sheep-child": { - "title": "“The Sheep Child”", - "body": "Farm boys wild to couple\nWith anything with soft-wooded trees\nWith mounds of earth mounds\nOf pinestraw will keep themselves off\nAnimals by legends of their own:\nIn the hay-tunnel dark\nAnd dung of barns, they will\nSay I have heard tell\n\nThat in a museum in Atlanta\nWay back in a corner somewhere\nThere’s this thing that’s only half\nSheep like a woolly baby\nPickled in alcohol because\nThose things can’t live. his eyes\nAre open but you can’t stand to look\nI heard from somebody who …\n\nBut this is now almost all\nGone. The boys have taken\nTheir own true wives in the city,\nThe sheep are safe in the west hill\nPasture but we who were born there\nStill are not sure. Are we,\nBecause we remember, remembered\nIn the terrible dust of museums?\n\nMerely with his eyes, the sheep-child may\n\nBe saying saying\n\n _I am here, in my father’s house.\n I who am half of your world, came deeply\n To my mother in the long grass\n Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight\n Listening for foxes. It was something like love\n From another world that seized her\n From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head\n Out of dew, without ever looking, her best\n Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face\n Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound\n Of sobbing of something stumbling\n Away, began, as she must do,\n To carry me. I woke, dying,\n\n In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes\n Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment\n The great grassy world from both sides,\n Man and beast in the round of their need,\n And the hill wind stirred in my wood,\n My hoof and my hand clasped each other,\n I ate my one meal\n Of milk, and died\n Staring. From dark grass I came straight\n\n To my father’s house, whose dust\n Whirls up in the halls for no reason\n When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,\n And, through my immortal waters,\n I meet the sun’s grains eye\n To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.\n Dead, I am most surely living\n In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives\n Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf\n And from the chaste ewe in the wind.\n They go into woods into bean fields they go\n Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,\n They groan they wait they suffer\n Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "emily-dickinson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Emily Dickinson", - "birth": { - "year": 1830 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "the-blue-jay": { - "title": "“The Blue Jay”", - "body": "No brigadier throughout the year\nSo civic as the jay.\nA neighbor and a warrior too\nWith shrill felicity\n\nPursuing winds that censure us\nA February day\nThe brother of the universe\nWas never blown away.\n\nThe snow and he are intimate;\nI’ve often seen them play\nWhen heaven looked upon us all\nWith such severity\n\nI felt apology were due\nTo an insulted sky\nWhose pompous frown was nutriment\nTo their temerity.\n\nThe pillow of this daring head\nIs pungent evergreens;\nHis larder--terse and militant--\nUnknown refreshing things;\n\nHis character a tonic\nHis future a dispute;\nUnfair an immortality\nThat leaves this neighbor out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Because I could not stop for Death--\nHe kindly stopped for me--\nThe Carriage held but just Ourselves--\nAnd Immortality.\n\nWe slowly drove--He knew no haste\nAnd I had put away\nMy labor and my leisure too,\nFor His Civility--\n\nWe passed the School, where Children strove\nAt Recess--in the Ring--\nWe passed the Fields of Gazing Grain--\nWe passed the Setting Sun--\n\nOr rather--He passed Us--\nThe Dews drew quivering and Chill--\nFor only Gossamer, my Gown--\nMy Tippet--only Tulle--\n\nWe paused before a House that seemed\nA Swelling of the Ground--\nThe Roof was scarcely visible--\nThe Cornice--in the Ground--\n\nSince then--’tis Centuries--and yet\nFeels shorter than the Day\nI first surmised the Horses’ Heads\nWere toward Eternity--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "exclusion": { - "title": "“Exclusion”", - "body": "The soul selects her own society\nThen shuts the door;\nOn her divine majority\nObtrude no more.\n\nUnmoved she notes the chariot’s pausing\nAt her low gate;\nUnmoved an emperor is kneeling\nUpon her mat.\n\nI’ve known her from an ample nation\nChoose one;\nThen close the valves of her attention\nLike stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "funeral": { - "title": "“Funeral”", - "body": "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,\nAnd Mourners to and fro\nKept treading--treading--till it seemed\nThat Sense was breaking through--\n\nAnd when they all were seated,\nA Service, like a Drum--\nKept beating--beating--till I thought\nMy mind was going numb--\n\nAnd then I heard them lift a Box\nAnd creak across my Soul\nWith those same Boots of Lead, again,\nThen Space--began to toll,\n\nAs all the Heavens were a Bell,\nAnd Being, but an Ear,\nAnd I, and Silence, some strange Race,\nWrecked, solitary, here--\n\nAnd then a Plank in Reason, broke,\nAnd I dropped down, and down--\nAnd hit a World, at every plunge,\nAnd Finished knowing--then--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hope": { - "title": "“Hope”", - "body": "Hope is the thing with feathers\nThat perches in the soul\nAnd sings the tune without the words\nAnd never stops at all\n\nAnd sweetest in the gale is heard;\nAnd sore must be the storm\nThat could abash the little bird\nThat kept so many warm.\n\nI’ve heard it in the chillest land\nAnd on the strangest sea;\nYet never in extremity\nIt asked a crumb of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hunger": { - "title": "“Hunger”", - "body": "I had been hungry all the years;\nMy noon had come to dine;\nI trembling drew the table near\nAnd touched the curious wine.\n\n’T was this on tables I had seen\nWhen turning hungry lone\nI looked in windows for the wealth\nI could not hope to own.\n\nI did not know the ample bread\n’T was so unlike the crumb\nThe birds and I had often shared\nIn Nature’s dining-room.\n\nThe plenty hurt me ’t was so new--\nMyself felt ill and odd\nAs berry of a mountain bush\nTransplanted to the road.\n\nNor was I hungry; so I found\nThat hunger was a way\nOf persons outside windows\nThe entering takes away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-shall-know-why": { - "title": "“I Shall Know Why”", - "body": "I shall know why, when time is over,\nAnd I have ceased to wonder why;\nChrist will explain each separate anguish\nIn the fair schoolroom of the sky.\n\nHe will tell me what Peter promised,\nAnd I, for wonder at his woe,\nI shall forget the drop of anguish\nThat scalds me now, that scalds me now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nobody": { - "title": "“Nobody”", - "body": "I’m Nobody! Who are you?\nAre you--Nobody--too?\nThen there’s a pair of us!\nDon’t tell! they’d advertise--you know!\n\nHow dreary--to be--Somebody!\nHow public--like a Frog--\nTo tell one’s name--the livelong June--\nTo an admiring Bog!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-sea": { - "title": "“The Sea”", - "body": "An everywhere of silver\nWith ropes of sand\nTo keep it from effacing\nThe track called land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "success": { - "title": "“Success”", - "body": "Success is counted sweetest\nBy those who ne’er succeed.\nTo comprehend a nectar\nRequires sorest need.\n\nNot one of all the purple Host\nWho took the Flag today\nCan tell the definition\nSo clear of victory\n\nAs he defeated--dying--\nOn whose forbidden ear\nThe distant strains of triumph\nBurst agonized and clear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "truth": { - "title": "“Truth”", - "body": "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--\nSuccess in Circuit lies\nToo bright for our infirm Delight\nThe Truth’s superb surprise\nAs Lightning to the Children eased\nWith explanation kind\nThe Truth must dazzle gradually\nOr every man be blind--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wild-nights": { - "title": "“Wild Nights”", - "body": "Wild nights--Wild nights!\nWere I with thee\nWild nights should be\nOur luxury!\n\nFutile--the winds--\nTo a Heart in port--\nDone with the Compass--\nDone with the Chart!\n\nRowing in Eden--\nAh--the Sea!\nMight I but moor--tonight--\nIn thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "annie-dillard": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Annie Dillard", - "birth": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dillard", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "feast-days-thanksgiving-christmas": { - "title": "“Feast Days: Thanksgiving-Christmas”", - "body": "_Three things are too wonderful for me;\nfour I do not understand:\nthe way of an eagle in the sky,\nthe way of a serpent on a rock,\nthe way of a ship on the high seas,\nand the way of a man with a maiden._\n --Proverbs\n\nToday I saw a wood duck\nin Tinker Creek.\nIn the fall flood, look\nwhat the creek floats down:\nonce I glimpsed\nround the edge of a bank\na troupe of actors\nrained in from Kansas,\ndressed for comedy.\nThe ffood left a candelabrum\non the lawn.\nWith a ten-foot hook\nwe fished from the creek\na bunch of bananas, a zither,\na casket of antique coins.\n\nOr,\nin the creek I found a log,\na tree trunk rotted halfway open.\nLord, lover, listen:\nremember kissing on the stair\ndancing in the kitchen--\nI crumbled the wet wood away.\nInside the tree a row of cells had grown,\nsealed chambers, smooth, elongate.\nI slit one open, found a book\nhand-bound in yellow thread:\na child’s book of wildfowers\nsketched in ink\nand washed with watercolors.\nCome take a walk, you said.\nAnd if I reached out\nmy hand could feel your shoulders move,\nthin, under your shirt.\nWhat newness, what surprises!\nOnce I dug a hole to plant a pine\nand founda ruby growing on a stone.\nOne thing we’ve got plenty of\nhere on the continents\nis soil. Out of the soil\nthe plants are taking substance, edges,\nlike a tomato moving on its stake,\nten pounds of tomatoes, and the ground\nblowing them up like balloons.\nWe walk on the soil\nhere on the continents\namong the plants, and eat.\n\nThanksgiving: the men\nare watching the game.\nI wash, and dry, and dream.\nI dream of a firelit room,\na tipi of eighteen buffalo hides,\nof skins on the floor\nand smoke curling up\nthe bark of the trunk of the lightwood lodgepole pine.\n\nThe Mandans in North Dakota\nalong the Missouri, prayed,\nCo, flying birds, to the southern horizon,\nto the old woman who never dies.\nReturn at the end of winter.\nCarry sunshine, carry water\non your broad backs.\n\nAnd in your beaks,\nand in your beaks,\nbring her blessing like a berry\nto the crops you symbolize--\n“The wild goose to the maize,\nthe wild duck to the beans,\nthe wild swan to the gourds”\n\nThanksgiving, creation:\noutside the great American forest\nis heaving up leaves and wood from the ground.\nInside I stand at the window, god,\nwith your name wrapped round my throat like a scarf.\n\nToday I’ve been naming\nthe plants of the southem forest:\narrowwood, witherod,\nhobblebush, nannyberry,\nand the loblolly, longleaf\nand shortleaf pine.\n\nToday I’ve been naming\nthe plants of the southem forest:\narrowwood, witherod,\nhobblebush, nannyberry,\nand the loblolly, longleaf\nand shortleaf pine.\n\nLean through the willow, look\nupstream, and see wha?’s floating down!\nI see camels swimming\nwith long-lash, golden eyes.\nI see trunks and telescopes floating,\na canopied barge with silk scarves ffying,\na peacock on each post,\nand three crowned kings inside.\nCaspar, Melchior, Balthazar,\nI suspect you’re on to something.\n\nYou tell me your dream\nand I’ll tell you mine.\n\nI dreamed I woke in a garden.\nEverywhere trees were growing;\neverywhere fowers were growing,\nand otters played in the stream, and grew.\nFruit hung down.\n\nAn egg at my feet\ncracked, opened up,\nand you stepped out,\nperfect, intricate lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "the-heart": { - "title": "“The Heart”", - "body": "It’s the lobby of the Plaza,\nthe systole and diastole\nof hard women in soft coats, soft\nmen in hard coats, palming\nquarters, fungers, keys.\nDrop in any mailbox.\nI’ll answer. Please.\n\nIt’s the murmur, the scarring fever,\nof a page, always the same,\nurgent, muted: calling\nMr. Name. Calling Mr. Name\n\nYou exsanguinate.\nFor the carpets of indolence,\nfor the cut-throat chandelier,\nfor the forced forsythia\non the table--you pay, dear.\n\nBut some of it’s free. A knock\nand rise in the ribs, gardenia\npectoris, and at four a muffled din:\nthe revolving door is bearing balloons;\nlook out--someone’s checking in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-we-spend-our-days": { - "title": "“How We Spend Our Days”", - "body": "How we spend our days\nis, of course,\nhow we spend our lives.\n\nWhat we do with this hour,\nand that one,\nis what we are doing.\n\nA schedule\ndefends from chaos\nand whim.\n\nIt is a net\nfor catching days.\nIt is a scaffolding\n\non which a worker\ncan stand\nand labor with both hands\n\nat sections of time.\nA schedule is a mock-up\nof reason and order--\n\nwilled, faked,\nand so brought into being;\nit is a peace and a haven\n\nset into the wreck of time;\nit is a lifeboat\non which you find yourself,\n\ndecades later,\nstill living.\nEach day is the same,\n\nso you remember\nthe series afterward\nas a blurred and powerful pattern.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mayakovsky-in-new-york": { - "title": "“Mayakovsky in New York”", - "body": "New York: You take a train that rips through versts.\nIt feels as if the trains were running over your ears.\n\nFor many hours the train flies along the banks\nof the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops,\npassengers run out, buy up bunches of celery,\nand run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.\n\nBridges leap over the train with increasing frequency.\n\nAt each stop an additional story grows\nonto the roofs. Finally houses with squares\nand dots of windows rise up. No matter how far\nyou throw back your head, there are no tops.\n\nTime and again, the telegraph poles are made\nof wood. Maybe it only seems that way.\n\nIn the narrow canyons between the buildings, a sort\nof adventurer-wind howls and runs away\nalong the versts of the ten avenues. Below\nflows a solid human mass. Only their yellow\nwaterproof slickers hiss like samovars and blaze.\nThe construction rises and with it the crane, as if\nthe building were being lifted up off the ground\nby its pigtail. It is hard to take it seriously.\n\nThe buildings are glowing with electricity; their evenly\ncut-out windows are like a stencil. Under awnings\nthe papers lie in heaps, delivered by trucks.\nIt is impossible to tear oneself away from this spectacle.\n\nAt midnight those leaving the theaters drink a last soda.\nPuddles of rain stand cooling. Poor people scavenge\nbones. In all directions is a labyrinth of trains\nsuffocated by vaults. There is no hope, your eyes\nare not accustomed to seeing such things.\n\nThey are starting to evolve an American gait out\nof the cautious steps of the Indians on the paths of empty\nManhattan. Maybe it only seems that way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mornings-like-this": { - "title": "“Mornings Like This”", - "body": "Sunday. What still sunny days\nWe have now. And I alone in them.\nSo brief--our best!\n\nSo much is wrong, but not my hills.\nI have been thinking of writing\nA letter to the President of China.\n\nDo it, do it, do it, do it.\nI beseech you, I beseech you,\nI beseech you, I beseech you.\n\nMornings like this: I look\nAbout the earth and the heavens:\nThere is not enough to believe--\n\nMornings like this. How heady\nThe morning air! How sharp\nAnd sweet and clear the morning air!\n\nAuthentic winter! The odor of campfires!\nBeans eighteen inches long!\nA billion chances--and I am here!\n\nAnd here I lie in the quiet room\nAnd read and read and read.\nSo easy--so easy--so easy.\n\nPools in old woods, full of leaves.\nGive me time enough in this place\nAnd I will surely make a beautiful thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-natural-history-of-getting-through-the-year": { - "title": "“A Natural History of Getting through the Year”", - "body": "# _November 1, 1895_\n\nThe mountains are on fire\nand everything is dry; insects gone.\nMy private work this year will be:\nBiology, Bible, Art, Geology, Body,\nLiterature. This term will be devoted\nto Art, Zoology, Bibles, Epics, Dramas,\netc. I find the Entomostraca interesting.\n\n\n# _January 25, 1896_\n\nI spent most of the day\nmounting butterflies from India.\nThis finishes all the flies for this year\nuntil more are caught.\nPoisoned plants at night.\nVery warm. The brightest,\nwarmest January I remember.\n\n\n# _Plan of Nature Study for April_\n\nBirds and flowers will keep one busy.\nMake collections of both, and observe\nthe battles and songs of birds. Watch\nfor the eggs of Phoebe about the middle\nof the month. Study the circulation\nof the blood in a frog’s foot.\nTake up mental hygiene;\nbecause it is much needed now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "quatrain-of-the-bodys-sleep": { - "title": "“Quatrain of the Body’s Sleep”", - "body": "I lure sleep. I bait sleep in with my white throat.\nI pretend to be asleep. Then everything happens at once.\nSleep wraps me round in his dim coat;\nI weep; you leap from your corner and dance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tan-from-the-sun": { - "title": "“Tan from the Sun”", - "body": "_Q. Are you tan from the sun?\nA. No, I’m Annie from earth._\n --children’s joke\n\nTan from the sun\nis slick as a drop;\nlollipop man, serene.\n\nHalloo! he calls\ndown the hairless wind;\nhe has a little brain\n\nlike a ping pong ball;\nhis fingernail\nis lucid as the moon.\n\nAnnie from earth\nhas grit for teeth\nand grasses on her chin.\n\nHalloo! she calls;\nher shoulder smells\nof salt and fuid, stone.\n\nAnnie from carth\nhas twigs in her mouth;\nshe sleeps in a whitened gown\n\nof bones like lace;\nwhile Baby-face,\nold Tan from the sun wakes on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-vision-thing": { - "title": "“The Vision Thing”", - "body": "Here is how it happens.\n\nThe vision is, sub specie aeternitatis, a set of mental relationships,\na coherent series of formal possibilities.\nIn the actual rooms of time, however,\nit is a page or two of legal paper\nfilled with words and questions;\nit is a terrible diagram,\na few books’ names in a margin,\nan ambiguous doodle,\na corner folded down in a library book.\nThese are memos from the thinking brain\nto witless hope.\n\nNevertheless, ignoring the provisional and pathetic nature\nof these scraps, and bearing the vision\nitself in mind--\nhaving it before your sights like the very Grail--\nyou begin to scratch\nout the first faint marks on the canvas,\non the page. You begin\nthe work proper.\nNow you have gone and done it.\nNow the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.\n\nWords lead to other words\nand down the garden path.\nYou adjust the paints’ values and hues not to the world,\nnot to the vision,\nbut to the rest of the paint.\nThe materials are stubborn and rigid;\npush is always\ncoming to shove.\nYou can fly--\nyou can fly\nhigher than you thought possible--\nbut you can never get off the page.\nAfter every passage another passage follows,\nmore sentences,\nmore everything\non drearily down. Time\nand materials hound the work;\nthe vision recedes\neven farther into the dim realms.\n\nAnd so you continue the work, and finish it.\nProbably by now you have been forced\nto toss the most essential part of the vision.\n\nBut this is a concern for mere nostalgia now:\nfor before your eyes,\nand stealing your heart,\nis this fighting and frail finished product,\nentirely opaque.\n\nYou can see nothing\nthrough it.\n\nIt is only itself, a series of well-known passages,\nsome coloured paint.\nIts relationship to the vision that impelled it\nis the relationship between any energy\nand any work,\nanything unchanging\nto anything temporal.\n\nThe work is not the vision itself, certainly.\nIt is not the vision filled in,\nas if it had been a coloring book.\nIt is not the vision reproduced in time;\nthat were impossible.\n\nIt is rather a simulacrum\nand a replacement.\nIt is a golem.\nYou try--\nyou try\nevery time--\nto reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men.\nBut you can only come along with your bushel\nand hide it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-write-till-you-drop": { - "title": "From “Write till You Drop”", - "body": "Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all,\nright away, every time.\n\nDo not hoard what seems good\nfor a later place in the book, or\nfor another book;\ngive it, give it all, give it now.\n\nThe impulse to save something good\nfor a better place later is the signal to\nspend it now.\n\nSomething more will arise\nfor later, something better.\n\nThese things fill from behind,\nfrom beneath,\nlike well water.\n\nSimilarly, the impulse to keep to yourself\nwhat you have learned is not only\nshameful, it is\ndestructive.\n\nAnything you do not give freely and\nabundantly becomes lost to you.\n\nYou open your safe and find ashes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-donne": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Donne", - "birth": { - "year": 1572 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1631 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 42 - }, - "poems": { - "air-and-angels": { - "title": "“Air and Angels”", - "body": "Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,\nBefore I knew thy face or name;\nSo in a voice, so in a shapeless flame\nAngels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be;\nStill when, to where thou wert, I came,\nSome lovely glorious nothing I did see.\nBut since my soul, whose child love is,\nTakes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,\nMore subtle than the parent is\nLove must not be, but take a body too;\nAnd therefore what thou wert, and who,\nI bid Love ask, and now\nThat it assume thy body, I allow,\nAnd fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.\n\nWhilst thus to ballast love I thought,\nAnd so more steadily to have gone,\nWith wares which would sink admiration,\nI saw I had love’s pinnace overfraught;\nEv’ry thy hair for love to work upon\nIs much too much, some fitter must be sought;\nFor, nor in nothing, nor in things\nExtreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere;\nThen, as an angel, face, and wings\nOf air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,\nSo thy love may be my love’s sphere;\nJust such disparity\nAs is ’twixt air and angels’ purity,\n’Twixt women’s love, and men’s, will ever be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "the-anniversary": { - "title": "“The Anniversary”", - "body": "All Kings, and all their favourites,\nAll glory of honours, beauties, wits,\nThe sun itself, which makes times, as they pass,\nIs elder by a year now than it was\nWhen thou and I first one another saw:\nAll other things to their destruction draw,\nOnly our love hath no decay;\nThis no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,\nRunning it never runs from us away,\nBut truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.\n\nTwo graves must hide thine and my corse;\nIf one might, death were no divorce.\nAlas, as well as other Princes, we\n(Who Prince enough in one another be)\nMust leave at last in death these eyes and ears,\nOft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;\nBut souls where nothing dwells but love\n(All other thoughts being inmates) then shall prove\nThis, or a love increasèd there above,\nWhen bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.\n\nAnd then we shall be throughly blessed;\nBut we no more than all the rest.\nHere upon earth we’re Kings, and none but we\nCan be such Kings, nor of such subjects be;\nWho is so safe as we? where none can do\nTreason to us, except one of us two.\nTrue and false fears let us refrain,\nLet us love nobly, and live, and add again\nYears and years unto years, till we attain\nTo write threescore: this is the second of our reign.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "the-apparition": { - "title": "“The Apparition”", - "body": "When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead\n And that thou think’st thee free\nFrom all solicitation from me,\nThen shall my ghost come to thy bed,\nAnd thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see;\nThen thy sick taper will begin to wink,\nAnd he, whose thou art then, being tir’d before,\nWill, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think\n Thou call’st for more,\nAnd in false sleep will from thee shrink;\nAnd then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou\nBath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie\n A verier ghost than I.\nWhat I will say, I will not tell thee now,\nLest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,\nI’had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,\nThan by my threat’nings rest still innocent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "ascension": { - "title": "“Ascension”", - "body": "Salute the last, and everlasting day,\nJoy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,\nYe whose true tears, or tribulation\nHave purely wash’d, or burnt your drossy clay.\nBehold, the Highest, parting hence away,\nLightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon;\nNor doth he by ascending show alone,\nBut first He, and He first enters the way.\nO strong Ram, which hast batter’d heaven for me!\nMild lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark’d the path!\nBright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see!\nO, with Thy own Blood quench Thy own just wrath;\nAnd if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise,\nDeign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1610 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "the-baite": { - "title": "“The Baite”", - "body": "Come live with mee, and bee my love,\nAnd wee will some new pleasures prove\nOf golden sands, and christall brookes,\nWith silken lines, and silver hookes.\n\nThere will the river whispering runne\nWarm’d by thy eyes, more than the Sunne.\nAnd there the’inamor’d fish will stay,\nBegging themselves they may betray.\n\nWhen thou wilt swimme in that live bath,\nEach fish, which every channell hath,\nWill amorously to thee swimme,\nGladder to catch thee, than thou him.\n\nIf thou, to be so seene, beest loath,\nBy Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,\nAnd if my selfe have leave to see,\nI need not their light, having thee.\n\nLet others freeze with angling reeds,\nAnd cut their legges, with shells and weeds,\nOr treacherously poore fish beset,\nWith strangling snare, or windowie net:\n\nLet coarse bold hands, from slimy nest\nThe bedded fish in banks out-wrest,\nOr curious traitors, sleavesilke flies\nBewitch poore fishes wandring eyes.\n\nFor thee, thou needst no such deceit,\nFor thou thy selfe art thine owne bait;\nThat fish, that is not catch’d thereby,\nAlas, is wiser farre than I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-burnt-ship": { - "title": "“The Burnt Ship”", - "body": "Out of a fired ship, which by no way\nBut drowning could be rescued from the flame,\nSome men leap’d forth, and ever as they came\nNear the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;\nSo all were lost, which in the ship were found,\nThey in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown’d.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-calm": { - "title": "“The Calm”", - "body": "Our storm is past, and that storm’s tyrannous rage,\nA stupid calm, but nothing it, doth ’suage.\nThe fable is inverted, and far more\nA block afflicts, now, than a stork before.\nStorms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us;\nIn calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus.\nAs steady’as I can wish that my thoughts were,\nSmooth as thy mistress’ glass, or what shines there,\nThe sea is now; and, as the isles which we\nSeek, when we can move, our ships rooted be.\nAs water did in storms, now pitch runs out;\nAs lead, when a fir’d church becomes one spout.\nAnd all our beauty, and our trim, decays,\nLike courts removing, or like ended plays.\nThe fighting-place now seamen’s rags supply;\nAnd all the tackling is a frippery.\nNo use of lanthorns; and in one place lay\nFeathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.\nEarth’s hollownesses, which the world’s lungs are,\nHave no more wind than the upper vault of air.\nWe can nor lost friends nor sought foes recover,\nBut meteor-like, save that we move not, hover.\nOnly the calenture together draws\nDear friends, which meet dead in great fishes’ jaws;\nAnd on the hatches, as on altars, lies\nEach one, his own priest, and own sacrifice.\nWho live, that miracle do multiply,\nWhere walkers in hot ovens do not die.\nIf in despite of these we swim, that hath\nNo more refreshing than our brimstone bath;\nBut from the sea into the ship we turn,\nLike parboil’d wretches, on the coals to burn.\nLike Bajazet encag’d, the shepherds’ scoff,\nOr like slack-sinew’d Samson, his hair off,\nLanguish our ships. Now as a myriad\nOf ants durst th’ emperor’s lov’d snake invade,\nThe crawling gallies, sea-gaols, finny chips,\nMight brave our pinnaces, now bed-rid ships.\nWhether a rotten state, and hope of gain,\nOr to disuse me from the queasy pain\nOf being belov’d and loving, or the thirst\nOf honour, or fair death, out-push’d me first,\nI lose my end; for here, as well as I,\nA desperate may live, and a coward die.\nStag, dog, and all which from or towards flies,\nIs paid with life or prey, or doing dies.\nFate grudges us all, and doth subtly lay\nA scourge, ’gainst which we all forget to pray.\nHe that at sea prays for more wind, as well\nUnder the poles may beg cold, heat in hell.\nWhat are we then? How little more, alas,\nIs man now, than before he was? He was\nNothing; for us, we are for nothing fit;\nChance, or ourselves, still disproportion it.\nWe have no power, no will, no sense; I lie,\nI should not then thus feel this misery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-canonization": { - "title": "“The Canonization”", - "body": "For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,\nOr chide my palsy, or my gout,\nMy five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,\nWith wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,\nTake you a course, get you a place,\nObserve his honor, or his grace,\nOr the king’s real, or his stampèd face\nContemplate; what you will, approve,\nSo you will let me love.\n\nAlas, alas, who’s injured by my love?\nWhat merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?\nWho says my tears have overflowed his ground?\nWhen did my colds a forward spring remove?\nWhen did the heats which my veins fill\nAdd one more to the plaguy bill?\nSoldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still\nLitigious men, which quarrels move,\nThough she and I do love.\n\nCall us what you will, we are made such by love;\nCall her one, me another fly,\nWe’re tapers too, and at our own cost die,\nAnd we in us find the eagle and the dove.\nThe phoenix riddle hath more wit\nBy us; we two being one, are it.\nSo, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.\nWe die and rise the same, and prove\nMysterious by this love.\n\nWe can die by it, if not live by love,\nAnd if unfit for tombs and hearse\nOur legend be, it will be fit for verse;\nAnd if no piece of chronicle we prove,\nWe’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;\nAs well a well-wrought urn becomes\nThe greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,\nAnd by these hymns, all shall approve\nUs canonized for Love.\n\nAnd thus invoke us: “You, whom reverend love\nMade one another’s hermitage;\nYou, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;\nWho did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove\nInto the glasses of your eyes\n(So made such mirrors, and such spies,\nThat they did all to you epitomize)\nCountries, towns, courts: beg from above\nA pattern of your love!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "death-be-not-proud-though-some-have-called-thee": { - "title": "“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee …”", - "body": "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee\nMighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;\nFor those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow\nDie not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.\nFrom rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,\nMuch pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,\nAnd soonest our best men with thee do go,\nRest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.\nThou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,\nAnd dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,\nAnd poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well\nAnd better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?\nOne short sleep past, we wake eternally,\nAnd death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-expiration": { - "title": "“The Expiration”", - "body": "So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,\nWhich sucks two souls, and vapours both away;\nTurn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this,\nAnd let ourselves benight our happiest day.\nWe ask none leave to love; nor will we owe\nAny so cheap a death as saying, “Go.”\n\nGo; and if that word have not quite killed thee,\nEase me with death, by bidding me go too.\nOr, if it have, let my word work on me,\nAnd a just office on a murderer do.\nExcept it be too late, to kill me so,\nBeing double dead, going, and bidding, “Go.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "the-flea": { - "title": "“The Flea”", - "body": "Mark but this flea, and mark in this,\nHow little that which thou deniest me is;\nIt sucked me first, and now sucks thee,\nAnd in this flea our two bloods mingled be;\nThou know’st that this cannot be said\nA sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,\nYet this enjoys before it woo,\nAnd pampered swells with one blood made of two,\nAnd this, alas, is more than we would do.\n\nOh stay, three lives in one flea spare,\nWhere we almost, nay more than married are.\nThis flea is you and I, and this\nOur marriage bed, and marriage temple is;\nThough parents grudge, and you, w’are met,\nAnd cloistered in these living walls of jet.\nThough use make you apt to kill me,\nLet not to that, self-murder added be,\nAnd sacrilege, three sins in killing three.\n\nCruel and sudden, hast thou since\nPurpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?\nWherein could this flea guilty be,\nExcept in that drop which it sucked from thee?\nYet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou\nFind’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;\n’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:\nJust so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,\nWill waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1590, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "go-and-catch-a-falling-star": { - "title": "“Go and Catch a Falling Star”", - "body": "Go and catch a falling star,\nGet with child a mandrake root,\nTell me where all past years are,\nOr who cleft the devil’s foot,\nTeach me to hear mermaids singing,\nOr to keep off envy’s stinging,\n And find\n What wind\nServes to advance an honest mind.\n\nIf thou be’st born to strange sights,\nThings invisible to see,\nRide ten thousand days and nights,\nTill age snow white hairs on thee,\nThou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,\nAll strange wonders that befell thee,\n And swear,\n No where\nLives a woman true, and fair.\n\nIf thou find’st one, let me know,\nSuch a pilgrimage were sweet;\nYet do not, I would not go,\nThough at next door we might meet;\nThough she were true, when you met her,\nAnd last, till you write your letter,\n Yet she\n Will be\nFalse, ere I come, to two, or three.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "the-good-morrow": { - "title": "“The Good-Morrow”", - "body": "I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I\nDid, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then,\nBut sucked on country pleasures, childishly?\nOr snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?\n’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.\nIf ever any beauty I did see,\nWhich I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.\n\nAnd now good morrow to our waking souls,\nWhich watch not one another out of fear;\nFor love, all love of other sights controls,\nAnd makes one little room an everywhere.\nLet sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,\nLet maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,\nLet us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.\n\nMy face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,\nAnd true plain hearts do in the faces rest;\nWhere can we find two better hemispheres,\nWithout sharp North, without declining West?\nWhatever dies was not mixed equally;\nIf our two loves be one; or thou and I\nLove so alike that none do slacken, none can die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-1": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 1”", - "body": "Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?\nRepair me now, for now mine end doth haste,\nI run to death, and death meets me as fast,\nAnd all my pleasures are like yesterday;\nI dare not move my dim eyes any way,\nDespair behind, and death before doth cast\nSuch terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste\nBy sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.\nOnly thou art above, and when towards thee\nBy thy leave I can look, I rise again;\nBut our old subtle foe so tempteth me,\nThat not one hour I can myself sustain;\nThy grace may wing me to prevent his art,\nAnd thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-2": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 2”", - "body": "As due by many titles I resign\nMyself to thee, O God. First I was made\nBy Thee; and for Thee, and when I was decay’d\nThy blood bought that, the which before was Thine.\nI am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine,\nThy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid,\nThy sheep, Thine image, and--till I betray’d\nMyself--a temple of Thy Spirit divine.\nWhy doth the devil then usurp on me?\nWhy doth he steal, nay ravish, that’s Thy right?\nExcept Thou rise and for Thine own work fight,\nO! I shall soon despair, when I shall see\nThat Thou lovest mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,\nAnd Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-3": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 3”", - "body": "O might those sighes and teares returne againe\nInto my breast and eyes, which I have spent,\nThat I might in this holy discontent\nMourne with some fruit, as I have mourn’d in vaine;\nIn mine Idolatry what showres of raine\nMine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?\nThat sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;\n’Cause I did suffer I must suffer paine.\nTh’hydroptique drunkard, and night-scouting thiefe,\nThe itchy Lecher, and selfe tickling proud\nHave the remembrance of past joyes, for reliefe\nOf comming ills. To (poore) me is allow’d\nNo ease; for, long, yet vehement griefe hath beene\nTh’effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-4": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 4”", - "body": "Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art summoned\nBy sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;\nThou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done\nTreason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,\nOr like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,\nWisheth himselfe delivered from prison;\nBut damn’d and hal’d to execution,\nWisheth that still he might be imprisoned.\nYet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;\nBut who shall give thee that grace to beginne?\nOh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke,\nAnd red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;\nOr wash thee in Christs blood, which hath this might\nThat being red, it dyes red soules to white.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-5": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 5”", - "body": "I am a little world made cunningly\nOf elements, and an angelic spright,\nBut black sin hath betrayed to endless night\nMy worlds both parts, and oh! both parts must die.\nYou, which beyond that heaven which was most high\nHave found new spheres and of new lands can write,\nPour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might\nDrown my world with my weeping earnestly,\nOr wash it, if it must be drowned no more:\nBut oh! it must be burnt; alas the fire\nOf lust and envy burnt it heretofore,\nAnd made it fouler; Let their flames retire,\nAnd burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal\nOf thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-7": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 7”", - "body": "At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow\nYour trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise\nFrom death, you numberlesse infinities\nOf soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,\nAll whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,\nAll whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,\nDespaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,\nShall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.\nBut let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,\nFor, if above all these, my sinnes abound,\n’Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,\nWhen wee are there; here on this lowly ground,\nTeach mee how to repent; for that’s as good\nAs if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-12": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 12”", - "body": "Why are wee by all creatures waited on?\nWhy doe the prodigall elements supply\nLife and food to mee, being more pure than I,\nSimple, and further from corruption?\nWhy brook’st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?\nWhy dost thou bull, and bore so seelily\nDissemble weaknesses and by’one mans stroke die,\nWhose whole kinde, you might swallow and feed upon?\n\nWeaker I am, woe is mee, and worse than you,\nYou have not sinn’d, nor need be timorous.\nBut wonder at a greater wonder, for to us\nCreated nature doth these things subdue,\nBut their Creator, whom sin, nor nature tyed,\nFor us, his Creatures, and his foes, hath dyed.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-13": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 13”", - "body": "What if this present were the worlds last night?\nMarke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwelly\nThe picture of Christ crucified, and tell\nWhether that countenance can thee affright,\nTeares in his eyes quench the amazing light,\nBlood fills his frownes, which from his pierc’d head fell.\nAnd can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,\nWhich pray’d forgivenesse for his foes fierce spight?\n\nNo, no; but as in my idolatrie\nI said to all my profane mistresses,\nBeauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is\nA signe of rigour: so I say to thee,\nTo wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d,\nThis beauteous forme assures a pitious minde.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-14": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 14”", - "body": "Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you\nAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;\nThat I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend\nYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.\nI, like an usurped town, to another due,\nLabour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.\nReason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,\nBut is captived, and proves weak or untrue.\n\nYet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,\nBut am betrothed unto your enemy:\nDivorce me, untie or break that knot again,\nTake me to you, imprison me, for I,\nExcept you enthrall me, never shall be free,\nNor ever chaste, except you ravish me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-15": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 15”", - "body": "Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,\nMy Soule, this wholsome meditation,\nHow God the Spirit, by Angels waited on\nIn heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.\nThe Father having begot a Sonne most blest,\nAnd still begetting, (for he ne’r begonne)\nHath deign’d to chuse thee by adoption,\nCoheire to’his glory, and Sabbaths endlesse rest;\n\nAnd as a robb’d man, which by search doth finde\nHis stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy’it againe:\nThe Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,\nUs whom he’had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.\n’Twas much, that man was made like God before,\nBut, that God should be made like man, much more.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-16": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 16”", - "body": "Father, part of his double interest\nUnto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to mee,\nHis joynture in the knottie Trinitie\nHee keepes, and gives to me his deaths conquest.\nThis Lambe, whose death, with life the world hath blest,\nWas from the worlds beginning slaine, and he\nHath made two Wills, which with the Legacie\nOf his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes invest.\n\nYet such are thy laws, that men argue yet\nWhether a man those statutes can fulfill;\nNone doth; but all-healing grace and spirit\nRevive againe what law and letter kill.\nThy lawes abridgement, and thy last command\nIs all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-17": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 17”", - "body": "Since she whom I lov’d hath payd her last debt\nTo Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,\nAnd her Soule early into heaven ravished,\nWholly on heavenly things my mind is sett.\nHere the admyring her my mind did whett\nTo seeke thee God; so streames do shew their head;\nBut though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,\nA holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett.\n\nBut why should I begg more Love, when as thou\nDost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine:\nAnd dost not only feare least I allow\nMy Love to Saints and Angels things divine,\nBut in thy tender jealousy dost doubt\nLeast the World. Fleshe, yea Devill putt thee out.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-18": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 18”", - "body": "Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse, so bright and clear.\nWhat! is it She, which on the other shore\nGoes richly painted? or which rob’d and tore\nLaments and mournes in Germany and here?\nSleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare?\nIs she selfe truth and errs? now new, now outwore?\nDoth she, and did she, and shall she evermore\nOn one, on seaven, or on no hill appeare?\n\nDwells she with us, or like adventuring knights\nFirst travaile we to seeke and then make Love?\nBetray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,\nAnd let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,\nWho is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then\nWhen she’is embrac’d and open to most men.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "holy-sonnet-19": { - "title": "“Holy Sonnet 19”", - "body": "Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:\nInconstancy unnaturally hath begott\nA constant habit; that when I would not\nI change in vowes, and in devotions.\nAs humorous is my contritione\nAs my prophane Love, and as soone forgott:\nAs ridlingly distemper’d, cold and hott,\nAs praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.\n\nI durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day\nIn prayers, and flattering speaches I court God:\nTo morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.\nSo my devout fitts come and go away\nLike a fantastique Ague: save that here\nThose are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Holy Sonnets", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "a-hymn-to-christ": { - "title": "“A Hymn To Christ”", - "body": "In what torn ship soever I embark,\nThat ship shall be my emblem of thy Ark;\nWhat sea soever swallow me, that flood\nShall be to me an emblem of thy blood;\nThough thou with clouds of anger do disguise\nThy face, yet through that mask I know those eyes,\nWhich, though they turn away sometimes,\nThey never will despise.\n\nI sacrifice this Island unto thee,\nAnd all whom I loved there, and who loved me;\nWhen I have put our seas ‘twixt them and me,\nPut thou thy sea betwixt my sins and thee.\nAs the tree’s sap doth seek the root below\nIn winter, in my winter now I go,\nWhere none but thee, th’ Eternal root\nOf true Love, I may know.\n\nNor thou nor thy religion dost control\nThe amorousness of an harmonious Soul,\nBut thou wouldst have that love thyself: as thou\nArt jealous, Lord, so I am jealous now,\nThou lov’st not, till from loving more, Thou free\nMy soul: who ever gives, takes liberty:\nO, if thou car’st not whom I love\nAlas, thou lov’st not me.\n\nSeal then this bill of my Divorce to All,\nOn whom those fainter beams of love did fall;\nMarry those loves, which in youth scattered be\nOn Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.\nChurches are best for Prayer, that have least light:\nTo see God only, I go out of sight:\nAnd to ‘scape stormy days, I choose\nAn Everlasting night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-hymn-to-god-the-father": { - "title": "“A Hymn to God the Father”", - "body": "Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,\nWhich was my sin, though it were done before?\nWilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,\nAnd do run still, though still I do deplore?\nWhen thou hast done, thou hast not done,\n For I have more.\n\nWilt thou forgive that sin which I have won\nOthers to sin, and made my sin their door?\nWilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun\nA year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?\nWhen thou hast done, thou hast not done,\n For I have more.\n\nI have a sin of fear, that when I have spun\nMy last thread, I shall perish on the shore;\nBut swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son\nShall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;\nAnd, having done that, thou hast done;\n I fear no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "hymn-to-god-my-god-in-my-sickness": { - "title": "“Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness”", - "body": "Since I am coming to that holy room,\nWhere, with thy choir of saints for evermore,\nI shall be made thy music; as I come\nI tune the instrument here at the door,\nAnd what I must do then, think here before.\n\nWhilst my physicians by their love are grown\nCosmographers, and I their map, who lie\nFlat on this bed, that by them may be shown\nThat this is my south-west discovery,\nPer fretum febris, by these straits to die,\n\nI joy, that in these straits I see my west;\nFor, though their currents yield return to none,\nWhat shall my west hurt me? As west and east\nIn all flat maps (and I am one) are one,\nSo death doth touch the resurrection.\n\nIs the Pacific Sea my home? Or are\nThe eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?\nAnyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,\nAll straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,\nWhether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.\n\nWe think that Paradise and Calvary,\nChrist’s cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place;\nLook, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;\nAs the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,\nMay the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.\n\nSo, in his purple wrapp’d, receive me, Lord;\nBy these his thorns, give me his other crown;\nAnd as to others’ souls I preach’d thy word,\nBe this my text, my sermon to mine own:\n“Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1620 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-indifferent": { - "title": "“The Indifferent”", - "body": "I can love both fair and brown,\nHer whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays,\nHer who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays,\nHer whom the country formed, and whom the town,\nHer who believes, and her who tries,\nHer who still weeps with spongy eyes,\nAnd her who is dry cork, and never cries;\nI can love her, and her, and you, and you,\nI can love any, so she be not true.\n\nWill no other vice content you?\nWill it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?\nOr have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others?\nOr doth a fear that men are true torment you?\nO we are not, be not you so;\nLet me, and do you, twenty know.\nRob me, but bind me not, and let me go.\nMust I, who came to travail thorough you,\nGrow your fixed subject, because you are true?\n\nVenus heard me sigh this song,\nAnd by love’s sweetest part, variety, she swore,\nShe heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more.\nShe went, examined, and returned ere long,\nAnd said, Alas! some two or three\nPoor heretics in love there be,\nWhich think to ’stablish dangerous constancy.\nBut I have told them, Since you will be true,\nYou shall be true to them who are false to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "a-lecture-upon-the-shadow": { - "title": "“A Lecture upon the Shadow”", - "body": "Stand still, and I will read to thee\nA lecture, love, in love’s philosophy.\nThese three hours that we have spent,\nWalking here, two shadows went\nAlong with us, which we ourselves produc’d.\nBut, now the sun is just above our head,\nWe do those shadows tread,\nAnd to brave clearness all things are reduc’d.\nSo whilst our infant loves did grow,\nDisguises did, and shadows, flow\nFrom us, and our cares; but now ’tis not so.\nThat love has not attain’d the high’st degree,\nWhich is still diligent lest others see.\n\nExcept our loves at this noon stay,\nWe shall new shadows make the other way.\nAs the first were made to blind\nOthers, these which come behind\nWill work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.\nIf our loves faint, and westwardly decline,\nTo me thou, falsely, thine,\nAnd I to thee mine actions shall disguise.\nThe morning shadows wear away,\nBut these grow longer all the day;\nBut oh, love’s day is short, if love decay.\nLove is a growing, or full constant light,\nAnd his first minute, after noon, is night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "loves-deity": { - "title": "“Love’s Deity”", - "body": "I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,\nWho died before the god of love was born.\nI cannot think that he, who then lov’d most,\nSunk so low as to love one which did scorn.\nBut since this god produc’d a destiny,\nAnd that vice-nature, custom, lets it be,\nI must love her, that loves not me.\n\nSure, they which made him god, meant not so much,\nNor he in his young godhead practis’d it.\nBut when an even flame two hearts did touch,\nHis office was indulgently to fit\nActives to passives. Correspondency\nOnly his subject was; it cannot be\nLove, till I love her, that loves me.\n\nBut every modern god will now extend\nHis vast prerogative as far as Jove.\nTo rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,\nAll is the purlieu of the god of love.\nO! were we waken’d by this tyranny\nTo ungod this child again, it could not be\nI should love her, who loves not me.\n\nRebel and atheist too, why murmur I,\nAs though I felt the worst that love could do?\nLove might make me leave loving, or might try\nA deeper plague, to make her love me too;\nWhich, since she loves before, I’am loth to see.\nFalsehood is worse than hate; and that must be,\nIf she whom I love, should love me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "loves-growth": { - "title": "“Love’s Growth”", - "body": "I scarce believe my love to be so pure\nAs I had thought it was,\nBecause it doth endure\nVicissitude, and season, as the grass;\nMethinks I lied all winter, when I swore\nMy love was infinite, if spring make it more.\n\nBut if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow\nWith more, not only be no quintessence,\nBut mix’d of all stuffs, vexing soul, or sense,\nAnd of the sun his active vigour borrow,\nLove’s not so pure, and abstract as they use\nTo say, which have no mistress but their Muse;\nBut as all else, being elemented too,\nLove sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.\n\nAnd yet no greater, but more eminent,\nLove by the spring is grown;\nAs in the firmament\nStars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,\nGentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,\nFrom love’s awakened root do bud out now.\n\nIf, as in water stirr’d more circles be\nProduced by one, love such additions take,\nThose like so many spheres but one heaven make,\nFor they are all concentric unto thee;\nAnd though each spring do add to love new heat,\nAs princes do in times of action get\nNew taxes, and remit them not in peace,\nNo winter shall abate this spring’s increase.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "loves-infiniteness": { - "title": "“Love’s Infiniteness”", - "body": "If yet I have not all the love,\nDear, I shall never have it all,\nI cannot breathe one other sigh, to move,\nNor can entreat one other tear to fall.\nAll my treasure, which should purchase thee,\nSighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent,\nYet no more can be due to me,\nThan at the bargain made was meant.\nIf then thy gift of love were partial,\nThat some to me, some should to others fall,\n Dear, I shall never have thee all.\n\nOr if then thou gavest me all,\nAll was but all, which thou hadst then;\nBut if in thy heart, since, there be or shall\nNew love created be, by other men,\nWhich have their stocks entire, and can in tears,\nIn sighs, in oaths, and letters outbid me,\nThis new love may beget new fears,\nFor, this love was not vowed by thee.\nAnd yet it was, thy gift being general,\nThe ground, thy heart is mine; whatever shall\n Grow there, dear, I should have it all.\n\nYet I would not have all yet,\nHe that hath all can have no more,\nAnd since my love doth every day admit\nNew growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store;\nThou canst not every day give me thy heart,\nIf thou canst give it, then thou never gav’st it;\nLove’s riddles are, that though thy heart depart,\nIt stays at home, and thou with losing sav’st it:\nBut we will have a way more liberal,\nThan changing hearts, to join them, so we shall\n Be one, and another’s all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "a-nocturnal-upon-st-lucys-day": { - "title": "“A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”", - "body": "’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,\nLucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;\n The sun is spent, and now his flasks\n Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;\n The world’s whole sap is sunk;\nThe general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,\nWhither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,\nDead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,\nCompar’d with me, who am their epitaph.\n\nStudy me then, you who shall lovers be\nAt the next world, that is, at the next spring;\n For I am every dead thing,\n In whom Love wrought new alchemy.\n For his art did express\nA quintessence even from nothingness,\nFrom dull privations, and lean emptiness;\nHe ruin’d me, and I am re-begot\nOf absence, darkness, death: things which are not.\n\nAll others, from all things, draw all that’s good,\nLife, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;\n I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave\n Of all that’s nothing. Oft a flood\n Have we two wept, and so\nDrown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow\nTo be two chaoses, when we did show\nCare to aught else; and often absences\nWithdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.\n\nBut I am by her death (which word wrongs her)\nOf the first nothing the elixir grown;\n Were I a man, that I were one\n I needs must know; I should prefer,\n If I were any beast,\nSome ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,\nAnd love; all, all some properties invest;\nIf I an ordinary nothing were,\nAs shadow, a light and body must be here.\n\nBut I am none; nor will my sun renew.\nYou lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun\n At this time to the Goat is run\n To fetch new lust, and give it you,\n Enjoy your summer all;\nSince she enjoys her long night’s festival,\nLet me prepare towards her, and let me call\nThis hour her vigil, and her eve, since this\nBoth the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_lucia" - } - } - }, - "the-sun-rising": { - "title": "“The Sun Rising”", - "body": "Busy old fool, unruly Sun,\nWhy dost thou thus,\nThrough windows, and through curtains, call on us?\nMust to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?\nSaucy pedantic wretch, go chide\nLate schoolboys, and sour prentices,\nGo tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,\nCall country ants to harvest offices,\nLove, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,\nNor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.\n\nThy beams, so reverend and strong\nWhy shouldst thou think?\nI could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,\nBut that I would not lose her sight so long:\nIf her eyes have not blinded thine,\nLook, and tomorrow late, tell me\nWhether both the’Indias of spice and mine\nBe where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.\nAsk for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,\nAnd thou shalt hear: “All here in one bed lay.”\n\nShe’is all states, and all princes I,\nNothing else is.\nPrinces do but play us; compar’d to this,\nAll honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.\nThou, sun, art half as happy’as we,\nIn that the world’s contracted thus;\nThine age asks ease, and since thy duties be\nTo warm the world, that’s done in warming us.\nShine here to us, and thou art everywhere;\nThis bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "sweetest-love-i-do-not-go": { - "title": "“Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go”", - "body": "Sweetest love, I do not go,\nFor weariness of thee,\nNor in hope the world can show\nA fitter love for me;\nBut since that I\nMust die at last, ’tis best\nTo use myself in jest\nThus by feign’d deaths to die.\n\nYesternight the sun went hence,\nAnd yet is here today;\nHe hath no desire nor sense,\nNor half so short a way:\nThen fear not me,\nBut believe that I shall make\nSpeedier journeys, since I take\nMore wings and spurs than he.\n\nO how feeble is man’s power,\nThat if good fortune fall,\nCannot add another hour,\nNor a lost hour recall!\nBut come bad chance,\nAnd we join to’it our strength,\nAnd we teach it art and length,\nItself o’er us to’advance.\n\nWhen thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind,\nBut sigh’st my soul away;\nWhen thou weep’st, unkindly kind,\nMy life’s blood doth decay.\nIt cannot be\nThat thou lov’st me, as thou say’st,\nIf in thine my life thou waste,\nThat art the best of me.\n\nLet not thy divining heart\nForethink me any ill;\nDestiny may take thy part,\nAnd may thy fears fulfil;\nBut think that we\nAre but turn’d aside to sleep;\nThey who one another keep\nAlive, ne’er parted be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-is-my-plays-last-scene": { - "title": "“This is My Play’s Last Scene”", - "body": "This is my play’s last scene; here heavens appoint\nMy pilgrimage’s last mile; and my race,\nIdly, yet quickly run, hath this last pace,\nMy span’s last inch, my minute’s latest point;\nAnd gluttonous death will instantly unjoint\nMy body and my soul, and I shall sleep a space;\nBut my’ever-waking part shall see that face\nWhose fear already shakes my every joint.\nThen, as my soul to’heaven, her first seat, takes flight,\nAnd earth-born body in the earth shall dwell,\nSo fall my sins, that all may have their right,\nTo where they’are bred, and would press me, to hell.\nImpute me righteous, thus purg’d of evil,\nFor thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "to-his-mistress-going-to-bed": { - "title": "“To His Mistress Going to Bed”", - "body": "Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy,\nUntil I labour, I in labour lie.\nThe foe oft-times having the foe in sight,\nIs tired with standing though he never fight.\nOff with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,\nBut a far fairer world encompassing.\nUnpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,\nThat th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.\nUnlace yourself, for that harmonious chime\nTells me from you that now it is bed time.\nOff with that happy busk, which I envy,\nThat still can be, and still can stand so nigh.\nYour gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,\nAs when from flowery meads th’hills shadow steals.\nOff with your wiry coronet and show\nThe hairy diadem which on you doth grow:\nNow off with those shoes: and then safely tread\nIn this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.\nIn such white robes heaven’s angels used to be\nReceived by men; thou, Angel, bring’st with thee\nA heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though\nIll spirits walk in white, we easily know\nBy this these Angels from an evil sprite:\nThose set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.\n License my roving hands, and let them go\nBefore, behind, between, above, below.\nO my America! my new-found-land,\nMy kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,\nMy mine of precious stones, my empery,\nHow blest am I in this discovering thee!\nTo enter in these bonds is to be free;\nThen where my hand is set, my seal shall be.\n Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,\nAs souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,\nTo taste whole joys. Gems which you women use\nAre as Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,\nThat when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,\nHis earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:\nLike pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made\nFor lay-men, are all women thus arrayed.\nThemselves are mystic books, which only we\n(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)\nMust see revealed. Then, since that I may know,\nAs liberally as to a midwife, show\nThyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,\nThere is no penance due to innocence:\nTo teach thee, I am naked first; why than,\nWhat need’st thou have more covering than a man?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1654 - } - } - }, - "the-triple-fool": { - "title": "“The Triple Fool”", - "body": "I am two fools, I know,\nFor loving, and for saying so\nIn whining poetry;\nBut where’s that wiseman, that would not be I,\nIf she would not deny?\nThen as th’ earth’s inward narrow crooked lanes\nDo purge sea water’s fretful salt away,\nI thought, if I could draw my pains\nThrough rhyme’s vexation, I should them allay.\nGrief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,\nFor he tames it, that fetters it in verse.\n\nBut when I have done so,\nSome man, his art and voice to show,\nDoth set and sing my pain;\nAnd, by delighting many, frees again\nGrief, which verse did restrain.\nTo love and grief tribute of verse belongs,\nBut not of such as pleases when ’tis read.\nBoth are increased by such songs,\nFor both their triumphs so are published,\nAnd I, which was two fools, do so grow three;\nWho are a little wise, the best fools be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1633 - } - } - }, - "a-valediction-forbidding-mourning": { - "title": "“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”", - "body": "As virtuous men pass mildly away,\nAnd whisper to their souls, to go,\nWhilst some of their sad friends do say,\n“The breath goes now,” and some say, “No”:\n\nSo let us melt, and make no noise,\nNo tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;\n’Twere profanation of our joys\nTo tell the laity our love.\n\nMoving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;\nMen reckon what it did, and meant;\nBut trepidation of the spheres,\nThough greater far, is innocent.\n\nDull sublunary lovers’ love\n(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit\nAbsence, because it doth remove\nThose things which elemented it.\n\nBut we by a love so much refin’d,\nThat ourselves know not what it is,\nInter-assured of the mind,\nCare less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.\n\nOur two souls therefore, which are one,\nThough I must go, endure not yet\nA breach, but an expansion,\nLike gold to airy thinness beat.\n\nIf they be two, they are two so\nAs stiff twin compasses are two;\nThy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show\nTo move, but doth, if the’ other do.\n\nAnd though it in the centre sit,\nYet when the other far doth roam,\nIt leans, and hearkens after it,\nAnd grows erect, as that comes home.\n\nSuch wilt thou be to me, who must\nLike th’ other foot, obliquely run;\nThy firmness makes my circle just,\nAnd makes me end, where I begun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1611 - } - } - } - } - }, - "h-d": { - "metadata": { - "name": "H. D.", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.D.", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "at-baia": { - "title": "“At Baia”", - "body": "I should have thought\nin a dream you would have brought\nsome lovely, perilous thing,\norchids piled in a great sheath,\nas who would say (in a dream),\n“I send you this,\nwho left the blue veins\nof your throat unkissed.”\n\nWhy was it that your hands\n(that never took mine),\nyour hands that I could see\ndrift over the orchid-heads\nso carefully,\nyour hands, so fragile, sure to lift\nso gently, the fragile flower-stuff--\nah, ah, how was it\n\nYou never sent (in a dream)\nthe very form, the very scent,\nnot heavy, not sensuous,\nbut perilous--perilous--\nof orchids, piled in a great sheath,\nand folded underneath on a bright scroll,\nsome word:\n\n“Flower sent to flower;\nfor white hands, the lesser white,\nless lovely of flower-leaf,”\n\nor\n\n“Lover to lover, no kiss,\nno touch, but forever and ever this.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "evadne": { - "title": "“Evadne”", - "body": "I first tasted under Apollo’s lips,\nlove and love sweetness,\nI, Evadne;\nmy hair is made of crisp violets\nor hyacinth which the wind combs back\nacross some rock shelf;\nI, Evadne,\nwas made of the god of light.\n\nHis hair was crisp to my mouth,\nas the flower of the crocus,\nacross my cheek,\ncool as the silver-cress\non Erotos bank;\nbetween my chin and throat,\nhis mouth slipped over and over.\n\nStill between my arm and shoulder,\nI feel the brush of his hair,\nand my hands keep the gold they took,\nas they wandered over and over,\nthat great arm-full of yellow flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "heat": { - "title": "“Heat”", - "body": "O wind, rend open the heat,\ncut apart the heat,\nrend it to tatters.\n\nFruit cannot drop\nthrough this thick air--\nfruit cannot fall into heat\nthat presses up and blunts\nthe points of pears\nand rounds the grapes.\n\nCut the heat--\nplough through it,\nturning it on either side\nof your path.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "oread": { - "title": "“Oread”", - "body": "Whirl up, sea--\nWhirl your pointed pines.\nSplash your great pines\nOn our rocks.\nHurl your green over us--\nCover us with your pools of fir.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sheltered-garden": { - "title": "“Sheltered Garden”", - "body": "I have had enough.\nI gasp for breath.\n\nEvery way ends, every road,\nevery foot-path leads at last\nto the hill-crest--\nthen you retrace your steps,\nor find the same slope on the other side,\nprecipitate.\n\nI have had enough--\nborder-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,\nherbs, sweet-cress.\n\nO for some sharp swish of a branch--\nthere is no scent of resin\nin this place,\nno taste of bark, of coarse weeds,\naromatic, astringent--\nonly border on border of scented pinks.\n\nHave you seen fruit under cover\nthat wanted light--\npears wadded in cloth,\nprotected from the frost,\nmelons, almost ripe,\nsmothered in straw?\n\nWhy not let the pears cling\nto the empty branch?\nAll your coaxing will only make\na bitter fruit--\nlet them cling, ripen of themselves,\ntest their own worth,\nnipped, shrivelled by the frost,\nto fall at last but fair\nwith a russet coat.\n\nOr the melon--\nlet it bleach yellow\nin the winter light,\neven tart to the taste--\nit is better to taste of frost--\nthe exquisite frost--\nthan of wadding and of dead grass.\n\nFor this beauty,\nbeauty without strength,\nchokes out life.\nI want wind to break,\nscatter these pink-stalks,\nsnap off their spiced heads,\nfling them about with dead leaves--\nspread the paths with twigs,\nlimbs broken off,\ntrail great pine branches,\nhurled from some far wood\nright across the melon-patch,\nbreak pear and quince--\nleave half-trees, torn, twisted\nbut showing the fight was valiant.\n\nO to blot out this garden\nto forget, to find a new beauty\nin some terrible\nwind-tortured place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "ernest-dowson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ernest Dowson", - "birth": { - "year": 1867 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Dowson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "amor-profanus": { - "title": "“Amor Profanus”", - "body": "Beyond the pale of memory,\nIn some mysterious dusky grove;\nA place of shadows utterly,\nWhere never coos the turtle-dove,\nA world forgotten of the sun:\nI dreamed we met when day was done,\nAnd marvelled at our ancient love.\n\nMet there by chance, long kept apart,\nWe wandered through the darkling glades;\nAnd that old language of the heart\nWe sought to speak: alas! poor shades!\nOver our pallid lips had run\nThe waters of oblivion,\nWhich crown all loves of men or maids.\n\nIn vain we stammered: from afar\nOur old desire shone cold and dead:\nThat time was distant as a star,\nWhen eyes were bright and lips were red.\nAnd still we went with downcast eye\nAnd no delight in being nigh,\nPoor shadows most uncomforted.\n\nAh, Lalage! while life is ours,\nHoard not thy beauty rose and white,\nBut pluck the pretty fleeing flowers\nThat deck our little path of light:\nFor all too soon we twain shall tread\nThe bitter pastures of the dead:\nEstranged, sad spectres of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "april-love": { - "title": "“April Love”", - "body": "We have walked in Love’s land a little way,\nWe have learnt his lesson a little while,\nAnd shall we not part at the end of day,\nWith a sigh, a smile?\n\nA little while in the shine of the sun,\nWe were twined together, joined lips forgot\nHow the shadows fall when day is done,\nAnd when Love is not.\n\nWe have made no vows--there will none be broke,\nOur love was free as the wind on the hill,\nThere was no word said we need wish unspoke,\nWe have wrought no ill.\n\nSo shall we not part at the end of day,\nWho have loved and lingered a little while,\nJoin lips for the last time, go our way,\nWith a sigh, a smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "autumnal": { - "title": "“Autumnal”", - "body": "Pale amber sunlight falls across\nThe reddening October trees,\nThat hardly sway before a breeze\nAs soft as summer: summer’s loss\nSeems little, dear! on days like these.\n\nLet misty autumn be our part!\nThe twilight of the year is sweet:\nWhere shadow and the darkness meet\nOur love, a twilight of the heart\nEludes a little time’s deceit.\n\nAre we not better and at home\nIn dreamful Autumn, we who deem\nNo harvest joy is worth a dream?\nA little while and night shall come,\nA little while, then, let us dream.\n\nBeyond the pearled horizons lie\nWinter and night: awaiting these\nWe garner this poor hour of ease,\nUntil love turn from us and die\nBeneath the drear November trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "cynara": { - "title": "“Cynara”", - "body": "Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine\nThere fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed\nUpon my soul between the kisses and the wine;\nAnd I was desolate and sick of an old passion,\nYea, I was desolate and bowed my head:\nI have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.\n\nAll night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,\nNight-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;\nSurely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;\nBut I was desolate and sick of an old passion,\nWhen I awoke and found the dawn was gray:\nI have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.\n\nI have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,\nFlung roses, roses riotously with the throng,\nDancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;\nBut I was desolate and sick of an old passion,\nYea, all the time, because the dance was long:\nI have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.\n\nI cried for madder music and for stronger wine,\nBut when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,\nThen falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;\nAnd I am desolate and sick of an old passion,\nYea, hungry for the lips of my desire:\nI have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dregs": { - "title": "“Dregs”", - "body": "The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,\n(This is the end of every song man sings!)\nThe golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,\nBitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;\nAnd health and hope have gone the way of love\nInto the drear oblivion of lost things.\nGhosts go along with us until the end;\nThis was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.\nWith pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait\nFor the dropped curtain and the closing gate:\nThis is the end of all the songs man sings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "grey-nights": { - "title": "“Grey Nights”", - "body": "A while we wandered (thus it is I dream!)\nThrough a long, sandy track of No Man’s Land,\nWhere only poppies grew among the sand,\nThe which we, plucking, cast with scant esteem,\nAnd ever sadlier, into the sad stream,\nWhich followed us, as we went, hand in hand,\nUnder the estranged stars, a road unplanned,\nSeeing all things in the shadow of a dream.\n\nAnd ever sadlier, as the stars expired,\nWe found the poppies rarer, till thine eyes\nGrown all my light, to light me were too tired,\nAnd at their darkening, that no surmise\nMight haunt me of the lost days we desired,\nAfter them all I flung those memories!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-last-word": { - "title": "“A Last Word”", - "body": "Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;\nThe day is overworn, the birds all flown;\nAnd we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;\nDespair and death; deep darkness o’er the land,\nBroods like an owl; we cannot understand\nLaughter or tears, for we have only known\nSurpassing vanity: vain things alone\nHave driven our perverse and aimless band.\n\nLet us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,\nTo Hollow Lands where just men and unjust\nFind end of labour, where’s rest for the old,\nFreedom to all from love and fear and lust.\nTwine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold\nOur life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-valediction": { - "title": "“A Valediction”", - "body": "If we must part,\nThen let it be like this.\nNot heart on heart,\nNor with the useless anguish of a kiss;\nBut touch mine hand and say:\n“Until to-morrow or some other day,\nIf we must part.”\n\nWords are so weak\nWhen love hath been so strong;\nLet silence speak:\n“Life is a little while, and love is long;\nA time to sow and reap,\nAnd after harvest a long time to sleep,\nBut words are weak.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "vitae-summa-brevis": { - "title": "“Vitae Summa Brevis”", - "body": "They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,\nLove and desire and hate:\nI think they have no portion in us after\nWe pass the gate.\n\nThey are not long, the days of wine and roses:\nOut of a misty dream\nOur path emerges for a while, then closes\nWithin a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "you-would-have-understood-me": { - "title": "“You Would Have Understood Me”", - "body": "You would have understood me, had you waited;\nI could have loved you, dear! as well as he:\nHad we not been impatient, dear! and fated\nAlways to disagree.\n\nWhat is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:\nLest we should still be wishing things unsaid.\nThough all the words we ever spake were bitter,\nShall I reproach you dead?\n\nNay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover\nAll the old anger, setting us apart:\nAlways, in all, in truth was I your lover;\nAlways, I held your heart.\n\nI have met other women who were tender,\nAs you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare.\nThink you, I turned to them, or made surrender,\nI who had found you fair?\n\nHad we been patient, dear! ah, had you waited,\nI had fought death for you, better than he:\nBut from the very first, dear! we were fated\nAlways to disagree.\n\nLate, late, I come to you, now death discloses\nLove that in life was not to be our part:\nOn your low lying mound between the roses,\nSadly I cast my heart.\n\nI would not waken you: nay! this is fitter;\nDeath and the darkness give you unto me;\nHere we who loved so, were so cold and bitter,\nHardly can disagree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-dryden": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Dryden", - "birth": { - "year": 1631 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1700 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "can-life-be-a-blessing": { - "title": "“Can life be a blessing …”", - "body": "Can life be a blessing,\nOr worth the possessing,\nCan life be a blessing if love were away?\nAh no! though our love all night keep us waking,\nAnd though he torment us with cares all the day,\nYet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking,\nThere’s an hour at the last, there’s an hour to repay.\n\nIn ev’ry possessing,\nThe ravishing blessing,\nIn ev’ry possessing the fruit of our pain,\nPoor lovers forget long ages of anguish,\nWhate’er they have suffer’d and done to obtain;\n’Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish,\nWhen we hope, when we hope to be happy again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dreams": { - "title": "“Dreams”", - "body": "Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes;\nWhen monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes:\nCompounds a medley of disjointed things,\nA mob of cobblers, and a court of kings:\nLight fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad;\nBoth are the reasonable soul run mad;\nAnd many monstrous forms in sleep we see,\nThat neither were, nor are, nor e’er can be.\nSometimes forgotten things long cast behind\nRush forward in the brain, and come to mind.\nThe nurse’s legends are for truths received,\nAnd the man dreams but what the boy believed.\nSometimes we but rehearse a former play,\nThe night restores our actions done by day;\nAs hounds in sleep will open for their prey.\nIn short, the farce of dreams is of a piece,\nChimeras all; and more absurd, or less.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-song-for-st-cecilias-day": { - "title": "“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”", - "body": "From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony\nThis universal frame began.\nWhen Nature underneath a heap\nOf jarring atoms lay,\nAnd could not heave her head,\nThe tuneful voice was heard from high,\nArise ye more than dead.\nThen cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,\nIn order to their stations leap,\nAnd music’s pow’r obey.\nFrom harmony, from Heav’nly harmony\nThis universal frame began:\nFrom harmony to harmony\nThrough all the compass of the notes it ran,\nThe diapason closing full in man.\n\nWhat passion cannot music raise and quell!\nWhen Jubal struck the corded shell,\nHis list’ning brethren stood around\nAnd wond’ring, on their faces fell\nTo worship that celestial sound:\nLess than a god they thought there could not dwell\nWithin the hollow of that shell\nThat spoke so sweetly and so well.\nWhat passion cannot music raise and quell!\n\nThe trumpet’s loud clangor\nExcites us to arms\nWith shrill notes of anger\nAnd mortal alarms.\nThe double double double beat\nOf the thund’ring drum\nCries, hark the foes come;\nCharge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat.\n\nThe soft complaining flute\nIn dying notes discovers\nThe woes of hopeless lovers,\nWhose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling lute.\n\nSharp violins proclaim\nTheir jealous pangs, and desperation,\nFury, frantic indignation,\nDepth of pains and height of passion,\nFor the fair, disdainful dame.\n\nBut oh! what art can teach\nWhat human voice can reach\nThe sacred organ’s praise?\nNotes inspiring holy love,\nNotes that wing their Heav’nly ways\nTo mend the choirs above.\n\nOrpheus could lead the savage race;\nAnd trees unrooted left their place;\nSequacious of the lyre:\nBut bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r;\nWhen to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n,\nAn angel heard, and straight appear’d\nMistaking earth for Heav’n.\n\nAs from the pow’r of sacred lays\nThe spheres began to move,\nAnd sung the great Creator’s praise\nTo all the bless’d above;\nSo when the last and dreadful hour\nThis crumbling pageant shall devour,\nThe trumpet shall be heard on high,\nThe dead shall live, the living die,\nAnd music shall untune the sky.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Troilus and Cressida", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1679, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "song-from-an-evenings-love": { - "title": "“Song from an Evening’s Love”", - "body": "After the pangs of a desperate lover,\nWhen day and night I have sighed all in vain,\nAh, what a pleasure it is to discover\nIn her eyes pity, who causes my pain!\n\nWhen with unkindness our love at a stand is,\nAnd both have punished ourselves with the pain,\nAh, what a pleasure the touch of her hand is!\nAh, what a pleasure to touch it again!\n\nWhen the denial comes fainter and fainter,\nAnd her eyes give what her tongue does deny,\nAh, what a trembling I feel when I venture!\nAh, what a trembling does usher my joy!\n\nWhen, with a sigh, she accords me the blessing,\nAnd her eyes twinkle ’twixt pleasure and pain,\nAh, what a joy ’tis beyond all expressing!\nAh, what a joy to hear ‘Shall we again!’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "veni-creator-spiritus": { - "title": "“Veni, Creator Spiritus”", - "body": "Creator Spirit, by whose aid\nThe world’s foundations first were laid,\nCome, visit ev’ry pious mind;\nCome, pour thy joys on human kind;\nFrom sin, and sorrow set us free;\nAnd make thy temples worthy Thee.\n\nO, Source of uncreated Light,\nThe Father’s promis’d Paraclete!\nThrice Holy Fount, thrice Holy Fire,\nOur hearts with heav’nly love inspire;\nCome, and thy Sacred Unction bring\nTo sanctify us, while we sing!\n\nPlenteous of grace, descend from high,\nRich in thy sev’n-fold energy!\nThou strength of his Almighty Hand,\nWhose pow’r does heav’n and earth command:\nProceeding Spirit, our Defence,\nWho do’st the gift of tongues dispence,\nAnd crown’st thy gift with eloquence!\n\nRefine and purge our earthly parts;\nBut, oh, inflame and fire our hearts!\nOur frailties help, our vice control;\nSubmit the senses to the soul;\nAnd when rebellious they are grown,\nThen, lay thy hand, and hold ’em down.\n\nChase from our minds th’ Infernal Foe;\nAnd peace, the fruit of love, bestow;\nAnd, lest our feet should step astray,\nProtect, and guide us in the way.\n\nMake us Eternal Truths receive,\nAnd practise, all that we believe:\nGive us thy self, that we may see\nThe Father and the Son, by thee.\n\nImmortal honour, endless fame,\nAttend th’ Almighty Father’s name:\nThe Saviour Son be glorified,\nWho for lost Man’s redemption died:\nAnd equal adoration be,\nEternal Paraclete, to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1690 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alan-dugan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alan Dugan", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2003 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dugan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 31 - }, - "poems": { - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "The old man in shining black, with the immense black umbrella,\nwalked down the street like the younger brother of the shadow of\ndeath. Each house, as he passed, pulled down its shades, and each\ntree, as he passed, withdrew its buds.\nThen on the corner as the rain stopped, he stopped and walked\nback up the street, the shadow of death disappearing as he closed\nhis overpowering umbrella. The buds popped out, the windows\nopened as one bird sang and one child shouted, and all that was\nleft was the black skeleton of the brother of the shadow of\ndeath to laugh at and yes, to stone.\nBe careful, this is April. It might rain again and the shadow\nand its slapstick brother might move up and down the spring-\nbursting, bud-ladened, totally confused street all afternoon singing,\nDanger, Laughter, Danger, Laughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "at-twelve-noon-the-young-typists-come-down-from-offices": { - "title": "“At twelve noon the young typists come down from offices …”", - "body": "At twelve noon the young typists come down from offices\nto lunch briefly and to wander through the railroad station.\nGirdled, on high heels, never alone or solemn, they listen\nto the movie sounds of engines, whistles and announcers,\nand look at the baggage, at the strange, dirty travelers.\nWalking out into the new weather spring has given,\nthey clasp hands and let the warm sun touch their contained bodies.\nand when they crowd to the elevators, still laughing,\n(maybe there are wonderful offices up there) the last girls\ndawdle, spring-ladened, and wolf-whistle at each other\nif no one else will, and then they too are taken.\n\nO they deserve much more than all our whistles and analytic looks.\nMay their dresses be forever stylish, their faces identical,\ntheir laughter real, and their figures more to their liking.\nMay the movie star or the light or dark haired stranger come\nand carry them off to whatever Hollywood or cottage they desire.\nAnd may the jolly executives who carry crises in their luggage\npause on the way to headlines to consider the children of time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "aubade-chant-of-the-innocents": { - "title": "“Aubade: Chant of the Innocents”", - "body": "I shall arise in the morning and make my bed.\nI shall walk to the door and admire things.\n\nI shall remember neither the sick mornings\nwhen eyeballs grated on the lid,\nand the mind clenched, refused to breathe,\nor mumble and cough over small indigestible portions of dreams,\nnor your frayed voice, speaking also in the morning\nto the mirror of its self, saying,\nWhat terrible days we must expect to endure\nas a price for this decay around us;\nfor these contortions we have,\n\nUntil the time that I can say:\nAll in all I remember it (and you)\nwith a good deal of nostalgia,\nI shall mop the floor and stand reveille,\nand when the hangar doors open in a huge yawn\nI shall enter its noisy intestines\nto perform the function for which I am best fitted.\nI shall stand with mechanics, grouped like surgeons\nover the engine. (Whose black blood\nwill camouflage fumbles, delicacy,\nwaving of words and change all hands\ninto ratchets, wrenches and soft, ineffectual mallets.)\nI shall work with pleasure in great intensity.\nI shall say, Good morning. Good morning. What a fine morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-branches-of-water-or-desire": { - "title": "“The Branches of Water or Desire”", - "body": "Imagine that the fast life of a bird\nsang in the branches of the cold,\ncast-off antlers of a stag\nand lit the points of bone\nfiguratively with fire.\nWorn, those antlers were\nan outer counterweight,\nextravagant in air and poised\nagainst a branching need\ndrumming in the red inside\nthe arteries or antlers of the heart.\nThat was the balance that allowed\nthe stag’s head’s limber rise,\nand might have been the gift\nthe temporary, reed-boned bird\nsang air about: abundance,\nrank beyond the need. The horns\nappear before the eye to be\nmore permanent than songs\nthat branch out lightly on the air\nor root into the chest\nas singing’s negative, the breath,\nthat touches at the branching veins\nat depth:\nbut when the leaping rut\nslept growing in the hollow of the hind,\nthe candelabra that the head\ndazzled the wedding with\nguttered to rubbish and was lost.\nThat perch for calls and bird-\nsong was a call itself,\nand fell to grace the wilds\ncorrectly, since an itch,\nunder the rootholds of the horns,\nwhitens with mushroom want\nin cellars of the antlers’ nerve\njust off the brain,\nand wants to make its many points again.\n\nOnce cast, they are the dead and fall\nduly as a sound falls in the cool\nof smoking days, when air\nsags with the damp and song\nswirls in the hollows: this\nis so the works can start again,\nuntrammeled by the done, downed\nwonders, and be upstart news\nto publicize the crocus of next spring.\nThe stag had something on his mind\nbeside his wants, and it\nis more than curious, the way\nthe horns are worn at ease\nby cranial fulcrum, since the likes of them,\nthe lighter songs or battle-cries of birds,\nhum in the chambers of the nose\njust off the brain,\nso that the chambered mute, the brain,\nsilent, in wants and plans,\nvibrates in closest sympathy\nwith what is not its own\nand plays as best it can.\nThose were the works,\nthe prides and hat-trees of the head\nthat climbed out of the brain\nto show its matter: earth, and how a beast\nwho wears a potted plant, all thorns,\nis mostly desert, with a glory\nunsustained. O it\nis useless in a fight\nwon by the head and heels,\nnot nicety, not war-cries worn\nin silence to be seen. The hinds,\ncropping the perimeter of war,\nsooner accept the runnel one\nwho has not fronded his desire\nwith public works. Call and be gone,\nbird: the one who wears the horns\ncan bear the singer too, mindlessly singing all\nthe bird-brained airs of spring,\nbut has to cast the tuning forks\nthat let the eye see song,\nand winter with this loss.\n\nThe bone as singing-post\nis capital enough in arms\nto hold the nation of your sound\nin singing’s fief: the brain’s\nsavage receptionist, the ear,\nbeating a drum outside its closest door,\njoins with the civil eye’s\nelectrical distance from the brain\nin witnessing the poles of prongs and sounds\narcing across their earthworks of desire:\nthe sounds and tines\nmust be some excess of the flesh\nthat wants beyond efficiency\nin time, but cannot find\nmuch permanence outside it: getting or not aside,\nit must branch out in works\nthat cap itself, for some\nimaginary reason out of mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "conspiracy-of-two-against-the-world": { - "title": "“Conspiracy of Two against the World”", - "body": "If I were out of love\nand sequence I would turn\nthe end of love--its death\nknife-like against myself\nto cut off my distinction and\nrejoin the Commons, maimed\nBut love is here!, so by\nthat contact with the one\noh may I contact all\nself-alienated aliens\nin Atom City and apply\nto join the one big union.\nWorkers of this world, unite!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-explorer": { - "title": "“The Explorer”", - "body": "The native girls were dirty; he never mentioned\nthat. The wild beasts were scrawny and less wild,\nand what was indicated on his map as an immense\nmountain was only a rather undistinguished hill.\n\nTwenty-seven days it took him, half starved\nand feverish toward the end, seeing visions,\nto travel the same trail we traveled in a week,\nstopping often to search for the giants he found.\n\nWas the diary a fraud? No, we thought not.\nAt the river-fork where we had a picnic, he wept,\nfor the alternatives seemed death or death.\nWhat did we know of total exasperation in blind\n\nvalleys, night-fear, terror at the awful cries\nof imagined animals we saw were only monkeys?\nWe had none of that. We had modern weapons,\na city to go to, and the safety of a brave precedent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "his-hands-have-five-knives-each": { - "title": "“His Hands Have Five Knives Each”", - "body": "The birth of Seventh Avenue\nfrom Varick Street at night\nis out of surf, all moonshine\nas it breaks along the curb,\ncoming, flooding, and falling away.\nIn it, matter’s savagery\nextrudes a civic fault, a man\nwading in moonlight blocks\naway, hunchbacked in the shape\nof things before my birth,\nbeyond my death, and now,\npanicked by night alive.\nI fear the animal embrace\nof Venus’ negative half-\ncreature of the universe,\nwhose wildness, let in out of love,\nmust be the genius of this place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-we-heard-the-name": { - "title": "“How We Heard the Name”", - "body": "The river brought down\ndead horses, dead men\nand military debris,\nindicative of war\nor official acts upstream,\nbut it went by, it all\ngoes by, that is the thing\nabout the river. Then\na soldier on a log\nwent by. He seemed drunk\nand we asked him Why\nhad he and this junk\ncome down to us so\nfrom the past upstream.\n“Friends,” he said, “the great\nBattle of Granicus\nhas just been won\nby all of the Greeks except\nthe Lacedaemonians and\nmyself: this is a joke\nbetween me and a man\nnamed Alexander, whom\nall of you ba bas\nwill hear of as a god.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "landfall": { - "title": "“Landfall”", - "body": "The curtains belly in the waking room.\nSails are round with holding, horned at top,\nand net a blue bull in the wind: the day.\nThey drag the blunt hulls of my heels awake\nand outrigged by myself through morning seas.\nIf I do land, let breakfast harbor me.\n\nWaking in June, I found a first fruit\nriding out the water on a broken branch.\nSleep was a windfall, and its floating seeds\nsteered me among the Cyclades of noise.\nA coastal woman with a cricket in her hair\ntook soundings as the time chirped in her head:\nI knew that night-time is an Island District;\ncurtains are my sails to shore.\n\nBlock and tackle string a butcher’s dance\nand hoist the sun on home: the bull\nis beached and hung to dry, and through\nhis bloody noon, the island of his flank\nquakes in the silence and disturbs the flies.\n\nFlesh has crawled out on the beach of morning,\nsalt-eyed, with the ocean wild in hair,\nand landed, land-locked, beached on day,\nmust hitch its hand to traces and resist\nthe fierce domestic horses teamed to it.\n\nDrivers and driven both, the plowing heels\nbloody the furrows after plunging beasts:\nthe spring of day is fleshed for winter fruit.\nFallen in salt-sweat, piercing skin, the bones\nessay plantation in their dirt of home\n\nand rest their aching portion in the heat’s\nblood afternoon. O if the sun’s day-laborer\nrecords inheritable yield, the script\nis morning’s alpha to omega after dark:\nthe figured head to scrotum of the bull.\n\nAccountancy at sundown is the wine of night:\nwalking the shore, I am refreshed by it\nand price the windrise and the bellowing surf\nwhile, waiting for its freight of oil and hides,\na first sail starts the wind by snapping whips.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "love-song-i-and-thou": { - "title": "“Love Song: I and Thou”", - "body": "Nothing is plumb, level, or square:\n the studs are bowed, the joists\nare shaky by nature, no piece fits\n any other piece without a gap\nor pinch, and bent nails\n dance all over the surfacing\nlike maggots. By Christ\n I am no carpenter. I built\nthe roof for myself, the walls\n for myself, the floors\nfor myself, and got\n hung up in it myself. I\ndanced with a purple thumb\n at this house-warming, drunk\nwith my prime whiskey: rage.\n Oh I spat rage’s nails\ninto the frame-up of my work:\n it held. It settled plumb,\nlevel, solid, square and true\n for that great moment. Then\nit screamed and went on through,\n skewing as wrong the other way.\nGod damned it. This is hell,\n but I planned it. I sawed it,\nI nailed it, and I\n will live in it until it kills me.\nI can nail my left palm\n to the left-hand crosspiece but\nI can’t do everything myself.\n I need a hand to nail the right,\na help, a love, a you, a wife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "the-martyr": { - "title": "“The Martyr”", - "body": "That he was guilty of those fantastic charges\nagainst him has never been adequately proven.\nGreat jurists have disputed it in huge volumes,\na high court has pardoned his memory, and he,\nin one of his embarrassing letters to his son\nhas said, “O sonny boy, through tears and agony\nyour loving father proclaims his innocence\nof any crime against the hope of man. But we\nare always guilty before Their involved laws\nbecause our alibis always contain new crimes,\nso pervasive are these laws, and so we lie,--\nand that too is a crime. Kiss mother for me.”\n\nHis last speech crystallizes naturally into\nfree verse: “This is your justice, not mine.\nMy purpose is to expose its decay. My fate\nis to take a small trouble like this. the death\nof one man, and enlarge it to a great trouble\ncapable of hurling you from your high benches.\nAll my life I have knowingly approached this\ndisaster, and now I rejoice that it is here.\nBecause of my love for you I offer you myself\nto torture, to kill. My love is my death!\nYou will husband this wife to man in legends!”\n\nHe almost failed, like Jesus, at the last\nmoment, but recovered in time to forgive\nthe electrician before the switch closed.\nAnd people thought of him! He was like a radio\nno one has noticed until it’s broken and quiet.\nFor a month the whole system was endangered.\nThe Administration tried every anodyne it knew;\ncabinet scandal, draft, deportation of aliens,\na Federal Theatre Project. Finally only a war\nwith the neighboring savages could expunge him\n\nHe had known all that. (The uncanny foresight\namazed his secret readers to tears and homage.)\nHe had said, in the awful style so typical\nof his early work, “What is needed is a Society\nof Martyrs, one of whom to Die each month every\nmonth, or each Day if need be, to defeat them.\nThe People are slow to rise, but that they rise,\nin the presence of magnificent enough Examples,\nI wager my entire Life, Future, Hope and Self!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "monologue-of-a-commercial-fisherman": { - "title": "“Monologue of a Commercial Fisherman”", - "body": "“If you work a body of water and a body of woman\nyou can take fish out of one and children out of the other\nfor the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good,\nboth kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield,\nbut the hard work and the miseries are killing;\nit is a good life if life is good. If not, not.\nYou are out in the world and in in the world,\nhaving it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living\ncombined, although you have to think about the weathers\nand the hard work and the miseries are what I said.\nIt runs on like water, quickly, under the boat,\nthen slowly like the sand dunes under the house.\nYou survive by yourself by the one fish for a while\nand then by the other afterward when you run out.\nYou run out a hooky life baited with good times,\nand whether the catch is caught or not is a question\nfor those who go fishing for men or among them for things.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "natural-enemies-of-the-conch": { - "title": "“Natural Enemies of the Conch”", - "body": "1.\n\nThe first point of the shell\nwas moored to zero but\nits mouth kissed one\nand paid in torque.\nA turbine in the conch\nis whirled so fast\nthat it stands still,\nhumming with cold light.\n\n\n2.\n\nThe animal inside\nis out of luck in art.\nTourists gouge him out\nof water’s Gabriel\nand gild the whirling horn\nto make a lamp of home.\nThe death, a minor surf,\nsounds in the living room.\n\n\n3.\n\n(That’s the way it is\nwith the ugly: ugliness\nshould arm their flesh\nagainst the greedy but\nthey grow such wiles\naround the hurt\nthat estheticians come\nwith love, apology\nand knives and cut\nthe beauty from the quick.)\n\n\n4.\n\nThe Maya crack the gem\nwhere muscles glue\nthe palace to the slug\nand eat him out. Again\nthe curio is fleshed\nbut wrecked like Knossos\nwith a window down the maze\ntoward nothing\nwhere a bull at heart\nroars in the start of surf.\n\n\n5.\n\n(To know why slime\nshould build such forts,\nchallenge the tooth\none pod is spurred with.\nHe has a tongue on guard,\nlike authors, out around\nthe works, and can retreat\nin what reveals him,\nclaw last, at a touch.)\n\n\n6.\n\nTurned in his likeness\nlike a foraging son,\nthere is a Natural Drill\nthat bores a vent in him\nand taps his life.\nLike Prince Hippolytus,\nwhen we behave too\nsimply toward some law\nwe have our image,\nfather, from the sea:\nthe sea-bull bellowing\nto foul our traces,\ndragging us to death\nbehind disturbed machines.\n\n\n7.\n\nThe snail retreats to nothing\nwhere the shell is born,\npearl of its phlegm and rock,\nsmall as water can whirl.\nWhorling down the turns\nfrom mouth to point,\nit points in vanishing\nto university,\nwhere thickened water learned\none graph with nebulae\nand turned the living horn\non zero’s variable lathe.\n\n\n8.\n\nIt voids the plum, wrack\nand accidents of space\nand sounds a sea-bull\nfirst ashore. Similar ears,\nlistening mouth to mouth,\nhear it as ocean’s time\nand turn into the brain\nas mirrors of the maze.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "notes-toward-a-spring-offensive": { - "title": "“Notes Toward a Spring Offensive”", - "body": "I will begin again in May, describing weather, how\nthe wind swept up the dust and pigeons suddenly. Then\nthe rain began to fall on this and that, the regular\nablutions. The soldiers marched, the cowards wept,\nand all were wetted down and winded, crushed.\nSoldiers turn the dew to mud. Shivering uncontrollably\nbecause the mild wind blew through wet fatigues,\nthey fell down in the mud, their pieces fouled,\nand groveled in the wilderness, regardless. Some died, and how\nI will not tell, since I should speak of weather. Afterwards\nthe clouds were stripped out of the sky. Palpably fresh,\nsuckingly sweet like bitten peaches, sparkling like oh,\na peeling tangerine, the air was warmed by light again,\nand those who could rise rose like crushed chives from the mud\nand stank and thought to dry. The cowards wept\nand some got well again, profane with flowers, all was well,\nand I have finished now in May. I have described\none circle of a day and those beneath it, but not why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "on-being-a-householder": { - "title": "“On Being a Householder”", - "body": "I live inside of a machine\nor machines. Every time one\ngoes off another starts. Why\ndon’t I go outside and sleep\non the ground. It is because\nI’m scared of the open night\nand stars looking down at me\nas God’s eyes, full of questions;\nand when I do sleep out alone\nI wake up soaking wet\nwith the dew-fall and am\nbeing snuffed at by a female fox\nwho stinks from being skunked.\nAlso there are carrion insects\nclimbing my private parts. Therefore\nI would find shelter in houses,\nrented or owned. Anything that money\ncan build or buy is better than\nthe nothing of the sky at night,\nthe stars being the visible past.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-rape-unattempted": { - "title": "“On Rape Unattempted”", - "body": "“Be alive,” they say, when I\nam so alive I ache with it\nso much I do not look alive\nbut chase that cock-teaser till\nmy balls so ache with her\nthat I fall groaning into speech\nand write the one word, Rape!,\non subway lavatory walls\nwhile she, receptive but to me,\ndances and sings around me:\n“Yes and no and maybe so\nand everywhere all over.” Oh\nmy nonsense: she’s the truth;\nI cry the sentence of the Fool:\n“I don’t know what to do!”\nHer left eye winks Yes,\nher right eye stares No,\nand her smile smiles smiles\nwhile I write copy for\nher disappearance on the air!\nas “Miss Unknowable, 1964.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-zero": { - "title": "“On Zero”", - "body": "The man who first saw nothing\ndrew a line around it\nshaped like a kiss or gasp\nor any of the lips’ expressions during shock,\nand what had been interior\nwelled from its human source\nand pooled, a mirror perilous.\nThat was the mouth of the horn of agony,\nthe womb all matter tumbled out of in the first\nmeaningless avalanche of the concrete,\nand I’m afraid that it will be\nthe sewer of all water and the grave of space\nso as to be complete.\n\nWhen his head, dead tired of its theory,\ndropped to the mark it made,\nhis forehead drank the kiss of nothing.\nThat was not sleep!\nHis students dove through it\ndown oceans of absence and\nare not remembered, but\nbeautiful wet women ran out of the surf, subtly changed\nand laughing over something secret they had learned\nTheir navigating sons\nsailed past horizons of the sensed\nand founded wonderlands!\ndeep in the deserts of flesh away\nfrom heaven’s waters. They have not returned\neither.\n\nI am not interested in mathematics\nas a way of knowing, but\nonce I was the bravest acrobat\never to leap through burning hoops!\nNow I balk when I run at\nmy burning mirror, mouth, and twin,\nafraid that I will not break out again\nthe other side of death,\napplauded, unscorched, and agrin.\nOh I refuse that lovers’ leap\nthrough spit and image\ndown the throat of shock\nand into the opposite day.\nI am afraid that parity is lost\nand nothing wins.\n\nOnce I calmed\nmy self before that chaos caught\nso weakly in the charms of will\nand called it cornucopia, cloaca, or else: nought;\nbut now the charmed\ncircle seems no longer to be charmed:\nits wizards must have lost\nthe mumbo-jumbo that could call up\nuseful salamanders, fiends, and witches from the pit\nand hold them helpless in the will\nand tractable to Liberal errands.\nNow when the fouls appear\nhowling and snorting fire,\nwho is to ride them out\nfairly and full of honor like the knights\nand to what businesses?:\nWhole governments of them\ninduce it at the world’s heart,\nall their citizens are food,\nand it can drink the seas up,\neat the mountains, roots to peaks,\nand bubble to the outer edge of air\nto be a nova. “Istimirant Stella!”\nstrangers might say, and make their own\nunearthly, efficient prophecies.\n\nAfter sleepers first touch zero at the maw\nthey wake up in a permanently different light.\nThey wear its caste-mark as another eye\nincapable of sleep or hurt, and burrowing inside.\nThey’re fed to it: it\nwidens unastonished and they drown: internally.\nIf only I knew a woman’s charm I cannot learn\nin whose clear form and lines\nthe trouble of the problem slept, solved,\nOh they would have a lid against its light,\nrest in the mystery, and a chance\nblindly to venture on in time,\n\nbut no such Cyclops\ncrazed by the price of size\nwould search the bellies of his sheep\nto thank his blinders and their flame-sharp stick:\nHis eye is the condition of his flock\nand his flock is his food and fleece;\nso: sack the world’s\nunfinished business in your balls,\nUlysses, and escape\nto soaking Venus or the red plains\nof Mars: Nothing is here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "passage-over-water": { - "title": "“Passage over Water”", - "body": "We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,\nlost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.\nThe boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last\nunder the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.\n\nLet the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time\nour love like a knife between us\ndefining the boundaries that we can never cross\nnor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,\ncutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths\nand the dark wound closed in behind us.\n\nForget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,\ngardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,\nthe rooms where we had come together bombd.\n\nBut even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel\nyour absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt\nover your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,\nyou pass with ease into the destructive world.\nThere is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,\nfalls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore\nand within the indestructible night I am alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "portrait-from-the-infantry": { - "title": "“Portrait from the Infantry”", - "body": "He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries\nof being scared while sleepless when he said\nthis: “I want a private woman, peace and quiet,\nand some green stuff in my pocket. Fuck\nthe rest.” Pity the underwear and socks,\nlong burnt, of an accomplished murderer,\noh God, of germans and replacements, who\nrefused three stripes to keep his B.A.R.,\nwho fought, fought not to fight some days\nlike any good small businessman of war,\nand dug more holes than an outside dog\nto modify some Freudian’s thesis: “No\nman can stand three hundred days\nof fear of mutilation and death.” What he\ntheorized was a joke: “To keep a tight\nasshole, dry socks and a you-deep hole\nwith you at all times.” Afterwards,\nmet in a sports shirt with a round wife, he was\nthe clean slave of a daughter, a power brake\nand beer. To me, he seemed diminished\nin his dream, or else enlarged, who knows?,\nby its accomplishment: personal life\nwrung from mass issues in a bloody time\nand lived out hiddenly. Aside from sound\nbaseball talk, his only interesting remark\nwas, in pointing to his wife’s belly, “If\nhe comes out left foot first” (the way\nyou Forward March!), “I am going to stuff\nhim back up.” “Isn’t he awful?” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "remembering-an-account-executive": { - "title": "“Remembering an Account Executive”", - "body": "He had a back office in his older brother’s\nadvertising agency and understood the human asshole.\nHe turned his father’s small inheritance over and over\non hemorrhoid ads between three-hour lunches\nat the Plaza every day and cocktails at five-thirty\nwith different dressy women waiting in our front office.\nWe joked that he fucked them up the ass to make more customers\nand were nauseated by him because he picked his ears\nwith the lead end of his lead pencil as he argued and argued\nhemorrhoid copy with us on nauseating Mad. Ave. mornings.\nWhy argue? It must have been for executive power-feelings\nbecause the copy never changed. Every week, the poor\nbleeding assholes bought the shit. When my mind\nbegan to get fucked and go as black as his inner ears\nI quit as broke as I began, remembering his prophecy:\nthat the last working television set in the world\nwould be showing a hemorrhoid ad for ANUSALL\nat Armageddon, that it would have been written\nby him, that he would be watching it at 6:00 P.M.\nin the bomb-cellar lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel\nwith a blonde’s ass in one hand and a scotch in the other,\nand that he would die happy, with his old man’s\nmoney intact and his asshole too, unlike us prat-boys.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "soldier": { - "title": "“Soldier”", - "body": "Having felt and forgotten the wind during the time for wind\nand having burned in the sun to the color and heat of the sun,\nhe can speak with candor of earth, of edible and poisonous fruits\nand of things that remain in the sun and accept night without shelter.\n\nBut during the hours the wind didn’t blow\nand no one moved who didn’t have to move\nhe saw himself and said, I am empty. I am invalid.\nI represent no known abstraction\nwith which to whip the squalid disasters to vanity.\n\nAnd my eyes turn to a place where home is defined\nas sitting at ease at your favorite bar\nwhile verbal doubts and basic reservations are set up\nand shattered like empty bottles at a shooting gallery,\nwhere love will be performed with pin-ups and mannequins\nin lighted store windows, on Times Square at noon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "song-for-a-deformed-prince": { - "title": "“Song for a Deformed Prince”", - "body": "If lovers war\nin a wild bed\nand fall like wounds\non veteran sleep\noh will the child\nbe mild, be mild?\n\nIf lovers wince\non summer silk\nand slide like snakes\nto frozen sleep\noh will the child\nbe wild, be wild?\n\nIf lovers farm\ntheir stubborn sods\nfor stolid crops\nin chores of sleep\noh will the child\nbe child, be child?\n\nChild, child,\nI rub your hump\nfor talking’s luck:\ndo not mistake\nthe King for Fool\nor Fool for King:\n\nexploit will cringe\nbeside the throne,\ngibes will sack\na hearty Rome,\nwhen cause meets luck,\nwhen cause meets luck.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1953, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "speciously-individual": { - "title": "“Speciously individual …”", - "body": "Speciously individual\nlike a solid piece of spit\nfloating in a cuspidor\nI dream of free bravery\nbut am a social being.\nI should do something\nto get out of here\nbut float around in the culture\nwondering what it will grow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-sleep": { - "title": "“To Sleep”", - "body": "Love’s arsenal is dark.\nThe watchman walks his key\nto stations of his round\nand turns off each alarm.\n\nThe flashlight plays on shapes\nof martial night-machines\nand cases of grenades\nstacked up for use awake,\n\nand on the office wall\namong the mountainous charts,\nthe gilt-framed masterpiece:\nLove as Child with Darts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1953, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "tuesday": { - "title": "“Tuesday”", - "body": "There are no lovers in the park tonight. O no.\nCats have been put out but they don’t like it and say so.\nYou can hear the telephone wires weeping like poets\nin a wind that fingers each nerve end with a separate shiver.\n\nThe street lights hang permanently above us like great thinkers.\nO their loneliness appalls me and I turn to your brief self,\nhaving seen their incandescence, the dreary landscape of inquiry,\nand in it our cold nakedness. It’s a bad night, honey, a bad night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1947, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "tuesday" - } - } - }, - "two-quits-and-a-drum-and-elegy-for-drinkers": { - "title": "“Two Quits and a Drum, and Elegy for Drinkers”", - "body": "1. _ON ASPHALT: NO GREENS_\n\nQuarry out the stone\nof land, cobble the beach,\nwall surf, name it “street,”\nallow no ground or green\ncover for animal sins,\nbut let opacity of sand\nbe glass to keep the heat\noutside, the senses in.\nThen, when time’s Drunk,\nreeling to death, provokes\ngod’s favor as a fool,\noh let a lamp post grow\nout of its absence, bend,\nheavy with care, and bloom\nlight. Let a curb extrude\na comfortable fault. Let\n“street” become a living room.\nComfortably seated, lit\nby the solicitude of “lamp,”\nthe Drunk and street are one.\nThey say, “Let’s have no dirt:\nbulldoze the hills into\ntheir valleys: make it plain.\nThen take the mountains down\nand let their decks of slate\nbe dealt out flat grey.\nLet their mating seams\nbe tarred against the weeds\nby asphalt, by the night’s\nelixir of volcanoes hotly poured.”\nThen the soulless port at night\nis made a human, and the Drunk\ngod: no one else is here\nto be so but who cares?\n\n\n2. _PORTRAIT AGAINST WOMEN_\n\nBones, in his falling,\nmust have hit the skin\nbetween themselves and stone,\nbut distances of wine\nwere his upholstery\nagainst the painful crime\nof lying in the street,\nsince “God protects them.”\nHe rolled onto his back,\nhis right hand in his fly,\nand gargled open-mouthed,\nshowing the white of an eye:\nit did not see the sign\nraised on the proper air\nthat read: “Here lies\na god-damned fool. Beware.”\nNo: his hand, his woman, on\nthe dry root of his sex,\ndebates it: deformed by wine\nand fantasy, the wreck\nof infant memory is there,\nof how the garden gate\nslammed at the words, “Get\nout you god-damned bum,”\nand so he was, since she,\ngoddess, mother, and wife,\nspoke and it was the fact.\nHer living hair came out\ngray in his hand, her teeth\nwent false at his kiss,\nand her solid flesh went slack\nlike mother’s. “Now, lady,\nI am sick and out of socks,\nso save me: I am pure although\nmy hand is on my cock.”\nThen he could rise up young\nout of his vagrancy\nin whole unwilled reform\nand shuck the fallen one,\nhis furlough in this street\nredeemed by her grace.\nThere would be the grass\nto lay her on, the quench\nof milk behind the taste of wine,\nand laughter in a dreamed\njungle of love behind\na billboard that could read:\n“This is YOUR Garden:\nPlease keep it clean.”\n\n\n3. _COURAGE. EXCEED._\n\nA beggar with no legs below\nthe middle of his knees\nwalked down Third Avenue\non padded sockets, on\nhis telescoped or\nanti-stilted legs\nrepeating, “Oh beautiful\nfaspacious skies!” upon\na one-man band: a bass\ndrum on roller-skates,\na mouth-high bugle clamped\nto it, and cymbals interlocked\ninside a fate of noise. He\nflew the American flag\nfor children on a stick\nstuck in a veteran’s hat,\nand offered pencils. He\nwas made of drunks’ red eyes.\nHe cried, “Courage! Exceed!”\nHe was collapsed in whole\ndisplay. Drunkards, for this\nand with his pencil I\nput down his words drunk:\n“Stand! Improvise!”\n\n\n4. _ELEGY FOR DRINKERS_\n\nWhat happened to the drunks\nI used to know, the prodigals\nwho tried their parents’ help\ntoo far? Some misers of health\nhave aged out dry; the rest\nare sick and out of socks,\ntheir skin-tight anklebones\nblue as the mussel shells\nthat rolled in Naxos’ surf\nwhen Bacchus danced ashore\nand kicked them all to hell.\n\nOh gutter urinal,\nbe Dirce’s holy stream,\nso lightning out of Zeus\ncan rage on Semele,\ninvited! Permit her son,\nissuant of His thigh,\nto rule her family\nas Bromios, god of wine!\n\nOh Dionisos, good god\nof memory and sleep,\nyou grace the paper bag,\nstuck in the fork of a crutch,\nthat holds the secret sons\nand furniture of bums,\nsince wine is the cure of wine.\nIt’s thanks to you that I,\nin my condition, am\nstill possible and praising: I\nam drunk today, but what\nabout tomorrow? I burnt\nmy liver to you for a drink,\nso pay me for my praises:\nfor thirty-seven cents, for\nthe price of a pint of lees,\nI would praise wine, your name,\nand how your trouble came\nout of the east to Thebes:\nyou taught the women wine\nand tricked King Pentheus\nto mask as one of them:\nbecause his father died\nto all appeals for help,\nthe rending penalty,\ndeath at his mother’s hands!,\nstill fills The Bowery\nwith prodigals of hope:\nthey pray for lightning and\na dance to their god damn,\nsince wine is the cure of wine\nand wine the cure wine cured\nand wine the cure of wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wall-cave-and-pillar-statements-after-asoka": { - "title": "“Wall, Cave, and Pillar Statements, after Asôka”", - "body": "In order to perfect all readers\nthe statements should be carved\non rock walls, on cave walls,\nand on the side of pillars so\nthe charm of their instruction can\naffect the mountain climbers near\nthe cliffs, the plainsmen near\nthe pillars, and the city people near\nthe caves they go to on vacations.\n\nThe statements should, and in a fair\nscript, spell out the right text and gloss\nof the Philosopher’s jocular remark. Text:\n“Honesty is the best policy.” Gloss:\n“He means not ‘best’ but ‘policy,’\n(this is the joke of it) whereas in fact\n Honesty is Honesty, Best\n is Best, and Policy is Policy,\n the three terms being not\n related, but here loosely allied.\nWhat is more important is that ‘is’\nis, but the rocklike truth of the text\nresides in the ‘the’. The ‘the’ is The.\n By this means the amusing sage\n has raised or caused to be raised\n the triple standard in stone:\nthe single is too simple for life,\nthe double is mere degrading hypocrisy,\nbut the third combines the first two\nin a possible way, and contributes\nsomething unsayable of its own:\nthis is the pit, nut, seed, or stone\nof the fruit when the fruit has been\ndigested:\n It is good to do good for the wrong\n reason, better to do good for the good\n reason, and best of all to do good\n good: i.e. when the doer and doee\n and whatever passes between them\n are beyond all words like ‘grace’\n or ‘anagogic insight,’ or definitions like\n ‘particular instance of a hoped-at-law,’\nand which the rocks alone can convey.\nThis is the real reason for the rock walls,\nthe cave walls and pillars, and not the base\ndesires for permanence and display\nthat the teacher’s conceit suggests.”\n\n That is the end of the statements, but,\n in order to go on a way after the end\n so as to make up for having begun\n after the beginning, and thus to come around\n to it in order to include the whole thing,\nadd: “In some places the poignant slogan,\n‘Morality is a bad joke like everything else,’\nmay be written or not, granted that space\nexists for the vulgar remarks, the dates,\ninitials and hearts of lovers, and all\nother graffiti of the prisoners of this world.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-the-hell-rage-give-in-to-natural-graces": { - "title": "“What the Hell, Rage, Give in to Natural Graces”", - "body": "She walks. This never has\nbeen done before. She shows\nhow it is done: her forearms\nraised, waving her hands\non the natural ratchets of her wrists,\nshe takes steps! She balances\non black spike heels so sharp\nthat they would pierce your heart\nif she could walk on you,\nand smiles to show it off:\nthis is a giddy new art\nshe owns squealing because\nshe steps on certain things;--\nspittle and cigarette butts\nlittered from some past,--\nand comes back from the store\nwith the first ice-cream cone\nin the whole world to date,\nher walking being as light\nas my irony is heavy.\nShe blinks rapidly when\nshe tells me all this because\nwild insects of perception get\ninto her eyes and bite them\nThinking of history, oh I\nmust speak of What’s-her-name,\nsweet sixteen and never been\nand never will be, just is;\nbut speak of love and she’s\na sweet one to the senses,\npalpably adequate, e-\nmotionally to be husbanded\nbecause the world is weird\nbecause it’s here while she\nis. Yesterday would surprise\nher if she heard of it,\nas will tomorrow when she does,\nor else not. As of now,\nthings are for the first\nand last time timeless like\nthe Classic Comic strips\nand known to her agreeably\nexcept for stepped-on things\nlittered from some past,\nso what the hell, rage,\ngive in to native graces:\nher brains are in her tits!\nas she knows bouncingly,\nand there for all to love,\nsince the world fights its war\nin her womb and so far wins.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962, - "month": "november" - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "winters-onset-from-an-alienated-point-of-view": { - "title": "“Winter’s Onset from an Alienated Point of View”", - "body": "The first cold front came in\nwhining like a carpenter’s plane\nand curled the warm air\nup the sky: winter is\nfor busy work, summer\nfor construction. As for\nspring and fall, ah, you\nknow what we do then:\nsow and reap. I want\nnever to be idle or by plumb\nor level to fear death,\nso I do none of this\nin offices away from weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-working-worlds-bloody-flux": { - "title": "“The Working World’s Bloody Flux”", - "body": "What do you do if you meet a witch?\nMove! from the scenery of belief in her\nby air, by car, by foot, by back-\nroads if you must, but move! Leave!\nAnd if you can’t or think you can’t,\nOh build a fort of reason in her country,\nand walk the battlements of stone,\nof brick, of mud, of sticks, of thorn-\nbush if you lack, and say the charm:\n2 plus 2 is four, a truth so true\nit laughs, “Tautology!, Tautology!” before\nthe numbers change in speech and come\nin screams, in shouts, in lalling, or\nin curses if you hurt. 2 plus 2\nis Noah’s Ark, with every couple in it\ncoupled into one and crying differently\nto make a third, a fourth, a fifth, a litter.\nDove, find us a land of peace and ease.\nCome back with a bomb or burning bough\nproof in your claws that love or death,\nin giving us the business, gives us all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-captive-flourished-like-mushroom-in-his-oubliette": { - "title": "“The captive flourished like mushroom in his oubliette …”", - "body": "The captive flourished like\nmushroom in his oubliette.\nHe breathed his night’s breath every day,\ntook food and water from the walls\nand ruled his noisy rats and youth.\nHe made a calendar of darkness,\nthought his boredom out, and carved\nHeaven in his dungeon with a broken spoon.\n\nAt last he made his own\nlight like a deep sea fish, and when\nhis captors’ children came for him\nthey found no madman in a filthy beard\nor heap of rat-picked bones:\nthey found a spry, pale old gentleman\nwho had a light around his head.\nOh he could stare as well as ever,\nargue in a passionate voice\nand walk on to the next\ndetention in their stone dismay\nunaided.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "paul-laurence-dunbar": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Paul Laurence Dunbar", - "birth": { - "year": 1872 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Laurence_Dunbar", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "christmas-carol": { - "title": "“Christmas Carol”", - "body": "Ring out, ye bells!\nAll Nature swells\nWith gladness at the wondrous story,--\nThe world was lorn,\nBut Christ is born\nTo change our sadness into glory.\n\nSing, earthlings, sing!\nTo-night a King\nHath come from heaven’s high throne to bless us.\nThe outstretched hand\nO’er all the land\nIs raised in pity to caress us.\n\nCome at his call;\nBe joyful all;\nAway with mourning and with sadness!\nThe heavenly choir\nWith holy fire\nTheir voices raise in songs of gladness.\n\nThe darkness breaks\nAnd Dawn awakes,\nHer cheeks suffused with youthful blushes.\nThe rocks and stones\nIn holy tones\nAre singing sweeter than the thrushes.\n\nThen why should we\nIn silence be,\nWhen Nature lends her voice to praises;\nWhen heaven and earth\nProclaim the truth\nOf Him for whom that lone star blazes?\n\nNo, be not still,\nBut with a will\nStrike all your harps and set them ringing;\nOn hill and heath\nLet every breath\nThrow all its power into singing!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "emancipation": { - "title": "“Emancipation”", - "body": "Fling out your banners, your honors be bringing,\nRaise to the ether your paeans of praise.\nStrike every chord and let music be ringing!\nCelebrate freely this day of all days.\n\nFew are the years since that notable blessing,\nRaised you from slaves to the powers of men.\nEach year has seen you my brothers progressing,\nNever to sink to that level again.\n\nPerched on your shoulders sits Liberty smiling,\nPerched where the eyes of the nations can see.\nKeep from her pinions all contact defiling;\nShow by your deeds what you’re destined to be.\n\nPress boldly forward nor waver, nor falter.\nBlood has been freely poured out in your cause,\nLives sacrificed upon Liberty’s alter.\nPress to the front, it were craven to pause.\n\nLook to the heights that are worth your attaining\nKeep your feet firm in the path to the goal.\nToward noble deeds every effort be straining.\nWorthy ambition is food for the soul!\n\nUp! Men and brothers, be noble, be earnest!\nRipe is the time and success is assured;\nKnow that your fate was the hardest and sternest\nWhen through those lash-ringing days you endured.\n\nNever again shall the manacles gall you\nNever again shall the whip stroke defame!\nNobles and Freemen, your destinies call you\nOnward to honor, to glory and fame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "juneteenth" - } - } - }, - "the-farm-house-by-the-river": { - "title": "“The Farm House by the River”", - "body": "I know a little country place\nWhere still my heart doth linger,\nAnd o’er its fields is every grace\nLined out by memory’s finger.\nBack from the lane where poplar grew\nAnd aspens quake and quiver,\nThere stands all bath’d in summer’s glow\nA farm house by the river.\n\nIts eaves are touched with golden light\nSo sweetly, softly shining,\nAnd morning-glories full and bright\nAbout the doors are twining.\nAnd there endowed with every grace\nThat nature’s hand could give her,\nThere lived the angel of the place\nIn the farm house by the river.\n\nHer eyes were blue, her hair was gold,\nHer face was bright and sunny;\nThe songs that from her bosom rolled\nWere sweet as summer’s honey.\nAnd I loved her well, that maid divine,\nAnd I prayed the Gracious Giver,\nThat I some day might call her mine\nIn the farm house by the river.\n\n’Twas not to be--but God knows best,\nHis will for aye be heed!\nPerhaps amid the angels blest,\nMy little love was needed.\nHer spirit from its thralldom torn\nWent singing o’er the river,\nAnd that sweet life my heart shall mourn\nForever and forever.\n\nShe died one morn at early light\nWhen all the birds are singing,\nAnd heaven itself in pure delight\nIts bells of joy seemed ringing.\nThey laid her dust where soon and late\nThe solemn grasses quiver,\nAnd left alone and disolate\nThe farm house by the river.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-old-apple-tree": { - "title": "“The Old Apple Tree”", - "body": "There’s a memory keeps a-runnin’\nThrough my weary head to-night,\nAn’ I see a picture dancin’\nIn the fire-flames’ ruddy-light;\n’Tis the picture of an orchard\nWrapped in autumn’s purple haze,\nWith the tender light about it\nThat I loved in other days.\nAn’ a-standin’ in a corner\nOnce again I seem to see\nThe verdant leaves an’ branches\nOf an old apple-tree.\nYou perhaps would call it ugly,\nAn’ I don’t know but it’s so,\nWhen you look the tree all over\nUnadorned by memory’s glow;\nFor its boughs are gnarled an’ crooked,\nAn’ its leaves are gettin’ thin,\nAn’ the apples of its bearin’\nWouldn’t fill so large a bin\nAs they used to. But I tell you,\nWhen it comes to pleasin’ me,\nIt’s the dearest in the orchard,--\nIs that old apple-tree.\nI would hide within its shelter,\nSettlin’ in some cosy nook,\nWhere no calls nor threats could stir me\nFrom the pages o’ my book.\nOh, that quiet, sweet seclusion\nIn its fulness passeth words!\nIt was deeper than the deepest\nThat my sanctum now affords.\nWhy, the jaybirds an’ the robins,\nThey was hand in glove with me,\nAs they winked at me ’an warbled\nIn that old apple-tree.\nIt was on its sturdy branches\nThat in summers long ago\nI would tie my swing an’ dangle\nIn contentment to an’ fro,\nIdly dreaming’ childish fancies,\nBuildin’ castles in the air,\nMakin’ o’ myself a hero\nOf romances rich an’ rare.\nI kin shet my eyes an’ see it\nJest as plain as plain kin be,\nThat same old swing a-danglin’\nTo the old apple-tree.\nThere’s a rustic seat beneath it\nThat I never kin forget.\nIt’s the place where me an’ Hallie--\nLittle sweetheart--used to set,\nWhen we’d wander to the orchard\nSo’s no listenin’ ones could hear\nAs I whispered sugared nonsense\nInto her little willin’ ear.\nNow my gray old wife is Hallie,\nAn’ I’m grayer still than she,\nBut I’ll not forget our courtin’\n’Neath the old apple-tree,\nLife for us ain’t all been summer,\nBut I guess we’ve had our share\nOf its flittin’ joys an’ pleasures,\nAn’ a sprinklin’ of its care.\nOft the skies have smiled upon us;\nThen again we’ve seen ’em frown,\nThough our load was ne’er so heavy\nThat we longed to lay it down.\nBut when death does come a-callin’,\nThis my last request shall be,--\nThat they’ll bury me an’ Hallie\n’Neath the old apple-tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sympathy": { - "title": "“Sympathy”", - "body": "I know what the caged bird feels, alas!\nWhen the sun is bright on the upland slopes;\nWhen the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,\nAnd the river flows like a stream of glass;\nWhen the first bird sings and the first bud opes,\nAnd the faint perfume from its chalice steals--\nI know what the caged bird feels!\n\nI know why the caged bird beats his wing\nTill its blood is red on the cruel bars;\nFor he must fly back to his perch and cling\nWhen he fain would be on the bough a-swing;\nAnd a pain still throbs in the old, old scars\nAnd they pulse again with a keener sting--\nI know why he beats his wing!\n\nI know why the caged bird sings, ah me,\nWhen his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--\nWhen he beats his bars and he would be free;\nIt is not a carol of joy or glee,\nBut a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,\nBut a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--\nI know why the caged bird sings!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "we-wear-the-mask-that-grins-and-lies": { - "title": "“We wear the mask that grins and lies …”", - "body": "We wear the mask that grins and lies,\nIt hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--\nThis debt we pay to human guile;\nWith torn and bleeding hearts we smile,\nAnd mouth with myriad subtleties.\n\nWhy should the world be over-wise,\nIn counting all our tears and sighs?\nNay, let them only see us, while\n We wear the mask.\n\nWe smile, but, O great Christ, our cries\nTo thee from tortured souls arise.\nWe sing, but oh the clay is vile\nBeneath our feet, and long the mile;\nBut let the world dream otherwise,\n We wear the mask!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-duncan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Duncan", - "birth": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1988 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Duncan_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "often-i-am-permitted-to-return-to-a-meadow": { - "title": "“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”", - "body": "as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,\nthat is not mine, but is a made place,\n\nthat is mine, it is so near to the heart,\nan eternal pasture folded in all thought\nso that there is a hall therein\n\nthat is a made place, created by light\nwherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.\n\nWherefrom fall all architectures I am\nI say are likenesses of the First Beloved\nwhose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.\n\nShe it is Queen Under The Hill\nwhose hosts are a disturbance of words within words\nthat is a field folded.\n\nIt is only a dream of the grass blowing\neast against the source of the sun\nin an hour before the sun’s going down\n\nwhose secret we see in a children’s game\nof ring a round of roses told.\n\nOften I am permitted to return to a meadow\nas if it were a given property of the mind\nthat certain bounds hold against chaos,\n\nthat is a place of first permission,\neverlasting omen of what is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lawrence-durrell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lawrence Durrell", - "birth": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "acropolis": { - "title": "“Acropolis”", - "body": "The soft quem quam will be Scops the Owl\nconjugation of nouns, a line of enquiry,\npowdery stubble of the socratic prison\nlaurels crack like parchments in the wind.\nwho walks here in the violet dust at night\nby the tower of the winds and water-clocks?\ntapers smoke upon open coffins\nsurely the shattered pitchers must one day\nrevive in the gush of marble breathing up?\ncall again softly, and again.\nthe fresh spring empties like a vein\nno children spit on their reflected faces\nbut from the blazing souk below the passive smells\nbread urine cooking printing-ink\nwill tell you what the sullen races think\nand among the tombs gnawing of mandolines\nconfounding sleep with carnage where\nstrangers arrive like sleepy gods\ndismount at nightfall at desolate inns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-unimportant-morning": { - "title": "“This Unimportant Morning”", - "body": "This unimportant morning\nSomething goes singing where\nThe capes turn over on their sides\nAnd the warm Adriatic rides\nHer blue and sun washing\nAt the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.\n\nDay rings in the higher airs\nPure with cicadas, and slowing\nLike a pulse to smoke from farms,\n\nExtinguished in the exhausted earth,\nUnclenching like a fist and going.\n\nTrees fume, cool, pour--and overflowing\nUnstretch the feathers of birds and shake\nCarpets from windows, brush with dew\nThe up-and-doing: and young lovers now\nTheir little resurrections make.\n\nAnd now lightly to kiss all whom sleep\nStitched up--and wake, my darling, wake.\nThe impatient Boatman has been waiting\nUnder the house, his long oars folded up\nLike wings in waiting on the darkling lake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "mona-van-duyn": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mona Van Duyn", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2004 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Van_Duyn", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-gentle-snorer": { - "title": "“The Gentle Snorer”", - "body": "When summer came, we locked up our lives and fled\nto the woods in Maine, and pulled up over our heads\na comforter filled with batts of piney dark,\ntied with crickets’ chirretings and the bork\nof frogs; we hid in a sleep of strangeness from\nthe human humdrum.\n\nA pleasant noise the unordered world makes wove\naround us. Burrowed, we heard the scud of waves,\nwrack of bending branch, or plop of a fish\non his heavy home; the little beasts rummaged the brush.\nWe dimmed to silence, slipped from the angry pull\nof wishes and will.\n\nAnd then we had a three-week cabin guest\nwho snored; he broke the wilderness of our rest.\nAs all night long he sipped the succulent air,\nthat rhythm we shared made visible to the ear\na rich refreshment of the blood. We fed in\nunison with him.\n\nA sound we dreamed and woke to, over the snuff\nof wind, not loud enough to scare off the roof\nthe early morning chipmunks. Under our skins\nwe heard, as after disease, the bright, thin\ntick of our time. Sleeping, he mentioned death\nand celebrated breath.\n\nHe went back home. The water flapped the shore.\nA thousand bugs drilled at the darkness. Over\nthe lake a loon howled. Nothing spoke up for us,\nsalvagers always of what we have always lost;\nand we thought what the night needed was more of man,\nhe left us so partisan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "letter-from-a-father": { - "title": "“Letter from a Father”", - "body": "# I.\n\nUlcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is\nsuch pain, would have to go to the hospital to have\nit pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners,\nbut can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve\nand her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels\nare so bad, she almost had a stoppage and sometimes\nwhat she passes is green as grass. There are big holes\nin my thigh where my leg brace buckles the size of dimes.\nMy head pounds from the high pressure. It is awful\nnot to be able to get out, and I fell in the bathroom\nand the girl could hardly get me up at all.\nSure thought my back was broken, it will be next time.\nProstate is bad and heart has given out,\nfeel bloated after supper. Have made my peace\nbecause am just plain done for and have no doubt\nthat the Lord will come any day with my release.\nYou say you enjoy your feeder, I don’t see why\nyou want to spend good money on grain for birds\nand you say you have a hundred sparrows, I’d buy\npoison and get rid of their diseases and turds.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWe enjoyed your visit, it was nice of you to bring\nthe feeder but a terrible waste of your money\nfor that big bag of feed since we won’t be living\nmore than a few weeks long. We can see\nthem good from where we sit, big ones and little ones\nbut you know when I farmed I used to like to hunt\nand we had many a good meal from pigeons\nand quail and pheasant but these birds won’t\nbe good for nothing and are dirty to have so near\nthe house. Mother likes the redbirds though.\nMy bad knee is so sore and I can’t hardly hear\nand Mother says she is hoarse form yelling but I know\nit’s too late for a hearing aid. I belch up all the time\nand have a sour mouth and of course with my heart\nit’s no use to go to a doctor. Mother is the same.\nHas a scab she thinks is going to turn to a wart.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe birds are eating and fighting, Ha! Ha! All shapes\nand colors and sizes coming out of our woods\nbut we don’t know what they are. Your Mother hopes\nyou can send us a kind of book that tells about birds.\nThere is one the folks called snowbirds, they eat on the ground,\nwe had the girl sprinkle extra there, but say,\nthey eat something awful. I sent the girl to town\nto buy some more feed, she had to go anyway.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAlmost called you on the telephone\nbut it costs so much to call thought better write.\nSay, the funniest thing is happening, one\nday we had so many birds and they fight\nand get excited at their feed you know\nand it’s really something to watch and two or three\nflew right at us and crashed into our window\nand bang, poor little things knocked themselves silly.\nThey come to after while on the ground and flew away.\nAnd they been doing that. We felt awful\nand didn’t know what to do but the other day\na lady from our Church drove out to call\nand a little bird knocked itself out while she sat\nand she brought it in her hands right into the house,\nit looked like dead. It had a kind of hat\nof feathers sticking up on its head, kind of rose\nor pinky color, don’t know what it was,\nand I petted it and it come to life right there\nin her hands and she took it out and it flew. She says\nthey think the window is the sky on a fair\nday, she feeds birds too but hasn’t got\nso many. She says to hang strips of aluminum foil\nin the window so we’ll do that. She raved about\nour birds. P.S. The book just come in the mail.\n\n\n# V.\n\nSay, that book is sure good, I study\nin it every day and enjoy our birds.\nSome of them I can’t identify\nfor sure, I guess they’re females, the Latin words\nI just skip over. Bet you’d never guess\nthe sparrow I’ve got here, House Sparrow you wrote,\nbut I have Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows,\nPine Woods and Tree and Chipping and White Throat\nand White Crowned Sparrows. I have six Cardinals,\nthree pairs, they come at early morning and night,\nthe males at the feeder and on the ground the females.\nJuncos, maybe 25, they fight\nfor the ground, that’s what they used to call snowbirds. I miss\nthe Bluebirds since the weather warmed. Their breast\nis the color of a good ripe muskmelon. Tufted Titmouse\nis sort of blue with a little tiny crest.\nAnd I have Flicker and Red-Bellied and Red-\nHeaded Woodpeckers, you would die laughing\nto see Red-Bellied, he hangs on with his head\nflat on the board, his tail braced up under,\nwing out. And Dickcissel and Ruby Crowned Kinglet\nand Nuthatch stands on his head and Veery on top\nthe color of a bird dog and Hermit Thrush with spot\non breast, Blue Jay so funny, he will hop\nright on the backs of the other birds to get the grain.\nWe bought some sunflower seeds just for him.\nAnd Purple Finch I bet you never seen,\ncolor of a watermelon, sits on the rim\nof the feeder with his streaky wife, and the squirrels,\nyou know, they are cute too, they sit tall\nand eat with their little hands, they eat bucketfuls.\nI pulled my own tooth, it didn’t bleed at all.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIt’s sure a surprise how well Mother is doing,\nshe forgets her laxative but bowels move fine.\nNow that windows are open she says our birds sing\nall day. The girl took a Book of Knowledge on loan\nfrom the library and I am reading up\non the habits of birds, did you know some males have three\nwives, some migrate some don’t. I am going to keep\nfeeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see\nthey expect it. Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine\nSiskin next winter. Some folks are going to come see us\nfrom Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.\nThey have birds in town but nothing to equal this.\n\nSo the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "henry-van-dyke": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry van Dyke Jr.", - "birth": { - "year": 1852 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_van_Dyke_Jr.", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "arrival": { - "title": "“Arrival”", - "body": "Across a thousand miles of sea, a hundred leagues of land,\nAlong a path I had not traced and could not understand,\nI travelled fast and far for this,--to take thee by the hand.\n\nA pilgrim knowing not the shrine where he would bend his knee,\nA mariner without a dream of what his port would be,\nSo fared I with a seeking heart until I came to thee.\n\nO cooler than a grove of palm in some heat-weary place,\nO fairer than an isle of calm after the wild sea race,\nThe quiet room adorned with flowers where first I saw thy face!\n\nThen furl the sail, let fall the oar, forget the paths of foam!\nThe Power that made me wander far at last has brought me home\nTo thee, dear haven of my heart, and I no more will roam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "god-of-the-open-air": { - "title": "“God of the Open Air”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThou who hast made thy dwelling fair\nWith flowers beneath, above with starry lights,\nAnd set thine altars everywhere,--\nOn mountain heights,\nIn woodlands dim with many a dream,\nIn valleys bright with springs,\nAnd on the curving capes of every stream:\nThou who hast taken to thyself the wings\nOf morning, to abide\nUpon the secret places of the sea,\nAnd on far islands, where the tide\nVisits the beauty of untrodden shores,\nWaiting for worshippers to come to thee\nIn thy great out-of-doors!\nTo thee I turn, to thee I make my prayer,\nGod of the open air.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSeeking for thee, the heart of man\nLonely and longing ran,\nIn that first, solitary hour,\nWhen the mysterious power\nTo know and love the wonder of the morn\nWas breathed within him, and his soul was born;\nAnd thou didst meet thy child,\nNot in some hidden shrine,\nBut in the freedom of the garden wild,\nAnd take his hand in thine,--\nThere all day long in Paradise he walked,\nAnd in the cool of evening with thee talked.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLost, long ago, that garden bright and pure,\nLost, that calm day too perfect to endure,\nAnd lost the childlike love that worshipped and was sure!\nFor men have dulled their eyes with sin,\nAnd dimmed the light of heaven with doubt,\nAnd built their temple walls to shut thee in,\nAnd framed their iron creeds to shut thee out.\nBut not for thee the closing of the door,\nO Spirit unconfined!\nThy ways are free\nAs is the wandering wind,\nAnd thou hast wooed thy children, to restore\nTheir fellowship with thee,\nIn peace of soul and simpleness of mind.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nJoyful the heart that, when the flood rolled by,\nLeaped up to see the rainbow in the sky;\nAnd glad the pilgrim, in the lonely night,\nFor whom the hills of Haran, tier on tier,\nBuilt up a secret stairway to the height\nWhere stars like angel eyes were shining clear.\nFrom mountain-peaks, in many a land and age,\nDisciples of the Persian seer\nHave hailed the rising sun and worshipped thee;\nAnd wayworn followers of the Indian sage\nHave found the peace of God beneath a spreading tree.\n\nBut One, but One,--ah, child most dear,\nAnd perfect image of the Love Unseen,--\nWalked every day in pastures green,\nAnd all his life the quiet waters by,\nReading their beauty with a tranquil eye.\n\nTo him the desert was a place prepared\nFor weary hearts to rest;\nThe hillside was a temple blest;\nThe grassy vale a banquet-room\nWhere he could feed and comfort many a guest.\nWith him the lily shared\nThe vital joy that breathes itself in bloom;\nAnd every bird that sang beside the nest\nTold of the love that broods o’er every living thing.\nHe watched the shepherd bring\nHis flock at sundown to the welcome fold,\nThe fisherman at daybreak fling\nHis net across the waters gray and cold,\nAnd all day long the patient reaper swing\nHis curving sickle through the harvest-gold.\nSo through the world the foot-path way he trod,\nDrawing the air of heaven in every breath;\nAnd in the evening sacrifice of death\nBeneath the open sky he gave his soul to God.\nHim will I trust, and for my Master take;\nHim will I follow; and for his dear sake,\nGod of the open air,\nTo thee I make my prayer.\n\n\n# V.\n\nFrom the prison of anxious thought that greed has builded,\nFrom the fetters that envy has wrought and pride has gilded,\nFrom the noise of the crowded ways and the fierce confusion,\nFrom the folly that wastes its days in a world of illusion,\n(Ah, but the life is lost that frets and languishes there!)\nI would escape and be free in the joy of the open air.\n\nBy the breadth of the blue that shines in silence o’er me,\nBy the length of the mountain-lines that stretch before me,\nBy the height of the cloud that sails, with rest in motion,\nOver the plains and the vales to the measureless ocean,\n(Oh, how the sight of the things that are great enlarges the eyes!)\nLead me out of the narrow life, to the peace of the hills\nand the skies.\n\nWhile the tremulous leafy haze on the woodland is spreading,\nAnd the bloom on the meadow betrays where May has been treading;\nWhile the birds on the branches above, and the brooks flowing under,\nAre singing together of love in a world full of wonder,\n(Lo, in the marvel of Springtime, dreams are changed into truth!)\nQuicken my heart, and restore the beautiful hopes of youth.\n\nBy the faith that the flowers show when they bloom unbidden,\nBy the calm of the river’s flow to a goal that is hidden,\nBy the trust of the tree that clings to its deep foundation,\nBy the courage of wild birds’ wings on the long migration,\n(Wonderful secret of peace that abides in Nature’s breast!)\nTeach me how to confide, and live my life, and rest.\n\nFor the comforting warmth of the sun that my body embraces,\nFor the cool of the waters that run through the shadowy places,\nFor the balm of the breezes that brush my face with their fingers,\nFor the vesper-hymn of the thrush when the twilight lingers,\nFor the long breath, the deep breath, the breath\nof a heart without care,--\nI will give thanks and adore thee, God of the open air!\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThese are the gifts I ask\nOf thee, Spirit serene:\nStrength for the daily task,\nCourage to face the road,\nGood cheer to help me bear the traveller’s load,\nAnd, for the hours of rest that come between,\nAn inward joy in all things heard and seen.\nThese are the sins I fain\nWould have thee take away:\nMalice, and cold disdain,\nHot anger, sullen hate,\nScorn of the lowly, envy of the great,\nAnd discontent that casts a shadow gray\nOn all the brightness of the common day.\n\nThese are the things I prize\nAnd hold of dearest worth:\nLight of the sapphire skies,\nPeace of the silent hills,\nShelter of forests, comfort of the grass,\nMusic of birds, murmur of little rills,\nShadow of clouds that swiftly pass,\nAnd, after showers,\nThe smell of flowers\nAnd of the good brown earth,--\nAnd best of all, along the way, friendship and mirth.\n\nSo let me keep\nThese treasures of the humble heart\nIn true possession, owning them by love;\nAnd when at last I can no longer move\nAmong them freely, but must part\nFrom the green fields and from the waters clear,\nLet me not creep\nInto some darkened room and hide\nFrom all that makes the world so bright and dear;\nBut throw the windows wide\nTo welcome in the light;\nAnd while I clasp a well-beloved hand,\nLet me once more have sight\nOf the deep sky and the far-smiling land,--\nThen gently fall on sleep,\nAnd breathe my body back to Nature’s care,\nMy spirit out to thee, God of the open air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "indian-summer": { - "title": "“Indian Summer”", - "body": "A soft veil dims the tender skies,\nAnd half conceals from pensive eyes\nThe bronzing tokens of the fall;\nA calmness broods upon the hills,\nAnd summer’s parting dream distills\nA charm of silence over all.\n\nThe stacks of corn, in brown array,\nStand waiting through the placid day,\nLike tattered wigwams on the plain;\nThe tribes that find a shelter there\nAre phantom peoples, forms of air,\nAnd ghosts of vanished joy and pain.\n\nAt evening when the crimson crest\nOf sunset passes down the West,\nI hear the whispering host returning;\nOn far-off fields, by elm and oak,\nI see the lights, I smell the smoke,--\nThe Camp-fires of the Past are burning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - } - } - }, - "bob-dylan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Bob Dylan", - "birth": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 39 - }, - "poems": { - "alberta": { - "title": "“Alberta”", - "body": "Alberta let your hair hang low\nAlberta let your hair hang low\nI’ll give you more gold\nThan your apron can hold\nIf you’d only let your hair hang low\n\nAlberta what’s on your mind\nAlberta what’s on your mind\nYou keep me worried and bothered\nAll of the time\nAlberta what’s on your mind\n\nAlberta don’t you treat me unkind\nAlberta don’t you treat me unkind\nOh my heart is so sad\nCause I want you so bad\nAlberta don’t you treat me unkind\n\nAlberta let your hair hang low\nAlberta let your hair hang low\nI’ll give you more gold\nThan your apron can hold\nIf you’ll only let your hair hang low", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "all-along-the-watchtower": { - "title": "“All Along the Watchtower”", - "body": "“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,\n“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.\nBusinessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,\nNone of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”\n\n“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,\n“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.\nBut you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,\nSo let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”\n\nAll along the watchtower, princes kept the view\nWhile all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.\nOutside in the distance a wildcat did growl,\nTwo riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blind-willie-mctell": { - "title": "“Blind Willie McTell”", - "body": "Seen the arrow on the doorpost\nSaying this land is condemned\nAll the way from New Orleans\nTo Jerusalem\n\nI travel through east Texas\nWhere many martyrs fell\nAnd I dont know one can sing the blues\nLike blind Wille McTell\n\nWell, I heard that hoo-dove singing\nAs they were taking down the tent\nThe stars above the barren trees\nWas his only audiance\n\nThem charcoal gypsy maidens\nCan strut their feathers well\nBut nobody can sing the blues\nLike blind Wille McTell\n\nSeen them big plantations burning\nHear the cracking of the whips\nSmell that sweet magnolia blooming\nSee the ghost of slarvery ship\n\nI can hear them tribes moaning\nHear the undertakers bell\nNobody can sing the blues\nLike blind Wille McTell\n\nThere’s a woman by the river\nWith some fine young handsome man\nHe’s dressed up like a squier\nBootlegged whiskey in his hand\n\nThere’s a chain gang on the highway\nI can hear them rebells yell\nAnd I know no one can sing the blues\nLike blind Wille McTell\n\nWell, God is in his heaven\nAnd we are what was his\nBut power and greed and corruptible seed\nSeem to be all that there is\n\nI’m gazing out the window\nOf the St. James Hotel\nAnd I dont know no one that can sing the blues\nLike blind Wille McTell", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "brownsville-girl": { - "title": "“Brownsville Girl”", - "body": "Well, there was this movie I seen one time\nAbout a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck\nHe was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself\nThe townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck\n\nWell, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp\nAs the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath\n“Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square\nI want him to feel what it’s like to every moment face his death”\n\nWell, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in\nAnd you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain\nYou know I can’t believe we’ve lived so long and are still so far apart\nThe memory of you keeps callin’ after me like a rollin’ train\n\nI can still see the day that you came to me on the painted desert\nIn your busted down Ford and your platform heels\nI could never figure out why you chose that particular place to meet\nAh, but you were right. It was perfect as I got in behind the wheel\n\nWell, we drove that car all night into San Anton’\nAnd we slept near the Alamo, your skin was so tender and soft\nWay down in Mexico you went out to find a doctor and you never came back\nI would have gone on after you but I didn’t feel like letting my head get blown off\n\nWell, we’re drivin’ this car and the sun is comin’ up over the Rockies\nNow I know she ain’t you but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul\nBut I’m too over the edge and I ain’t in the mood anymore to remember the times when I was your only man\nAnd she don’t want to remind me. She knows this car would go out of control\n\nBrownsville girl with your Brownsville curls\nTeeth like pearls shining like the moon above\nBrownsville girl, show me all around the world\nBrownsville girl, you’re my honey love\n\nWell, we crossed the panhandle and then we headed towards Amarillo\nWe pulled up where Henry Porter used to live. He owned a wreckin’ lot outside of town about a mile\nRuby was in the backyard hanging clothes, she had her red hair tied back. She saw us come rolling up in a trail of dust\nShe said, “Henry ain’t here but you can come on in, he’ll be back in a little while”\n\nThen she told us how times were tough and about how she was thinkin’ of bummin’ a ride back to from where she started\nBut ya know, she changed the subject every time money came up\nShe said, “Welcome to the land of the living dead.” You could tell she was so broken hearted\nShe said, “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt”\n\n“How far are y’all going?” Ruby asked us with a sigh\n“We’re going all the way ’til the wheels fall off and burn\n’Til the sun peels the paint and the seat covers fade and the water moccasin dies”\nRuby just smiled and said, “Ah, you know some babies never learn”\n\nSomething about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head\nBut I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play\nAll I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved\nAnd a lot of them seemed to be lookin’ my way\n\nBrownsville girl with your Brownsville curls,\nTeeth like pearls shining like the moon above\nBrownsville girl, show me all around the world\nBrownsville girl, you’re my honey love\n\nWell, they were looking for somebody with a pompadour\nI was crossin’ the street when shots rang out\nI didn’t know whether to duck or to run, so I ran\n“We got him cornered in the churchyard,” I heard somebody shout\n\nWell, you saw my picture in the _Corpus Christi Tribune_. Underneath it, it said, “A man with no alibi”\nYou went out on a limb to testify for me, you said I was with you\nThen when I saw you break down in front of the judge and cry real tears\nIt was the best acting I saw anybody do\n\nNow I’ve always been the kind of person that doesn’t like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line\nOh if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now\nYou know, I feel pretty good, but that ain’t sayin’ much. I could feel a whole lot better\nIf you were just here by my side to show me how\n\nWell, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck\nYeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind\nHe’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about\nBut I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line\n\nBrownsville girl with your Brownsville curls\nTeeth like pearls shining like the moon above\nBrownsville girl, show me all around the world\nBrownsville girl, you’re my honey love\n\nYou know, it’s funny how things never turn out the way you had ’em planned\nThe only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter\nAnd you know there was somethin’ about you baby that I liked that was always too good for this world\nJust like you always said there was somethin’ about me you liked that I left behind in the French Quarter\n\nStrange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content\nI don’t have any regrets, they can talk about me plenty when I’m gone\nYou always said people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent\nAnd I always said, “Hang on to me, baby, and let’s hope that the roof stays on”\n\nThere was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice\nI don’t remember who I was or where I was bound\nAll I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back\nSeems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down\n\nBrownsville girl with your Brownsville curls\nTeeth like pearls shining like the moon above\nBrownsville girl, show me all around the world\nBrownsville girl, you’re my honey love", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "changing-of-the-guards": { - "title": "“Changing of the Guards”", - "body": "Sixteen years,\nSixteen banners united over the field\nWhere the good shepherd grieves.\nDesperate men, desperate women divided,\nSpreading their wings ’neath the falling leaves.\n\nFortune calls,\nI step from the shadows, to the marketplace,\nMerchants and thieves hungry for power, my last deal gone down.\nShe’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born,\nOn midsummer’s eve, near the tower.\n\nThe cold-blooded moon,\nThe captain awaiting above the celebration\nSending his thoughts to a beloved maid\nWhose ebony face is beyond communication.\nThe captain is down but still believing that his love will be repaid.\n\nThey shaved her head.\nShe was torn between Jupiter and Apollo.\nA messenger arrived with a black nightingale.\nI seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow,\nFollow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil.\n\nI struggled to my feet.\nI rode past destruction in the ditches\nWith the stitches still mending ’neath a heart-shaped tattoo.\nRenegade priests and treacherous young witches\nWere handing out the flowers that I’d given to you.\n\nThe palace of mirrors\nWhere dog soldiers are reflected,\nThe endless road and the wailing of chimes,\nThe empty rooms where her memory is protected,\nWhere the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times.\n\nShe wakes him up\nForty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking\nNear broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks.\nShe’s begging to know what measures he now will be taking.\nHe’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks.\n\n“Gentlemen,” he said,\n“I don’t need your organization. I’ve shined your shoes,\nI’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards,\nBut Eden is burning: either get ready for elimination\nOr else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.”\n\nPeace will come\nWith tranquility and splendour, on the wheels of fire,\nBut will offer no reward when her false idols fall\nAnd cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating\nBetween the King and the Queen of Swords.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "chimes-of-freedom": { - "title": "“Chimes of Freedom”", - "body": "Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll\nWe ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing\nAs majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds\nSeeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing\nFlashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight\nFlashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight\nAn’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.\n\nIn the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched\nWith faces hidden as the walls were tightening\nAs the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain\nDissolved into the bells of the lightning\nTolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake\nTolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked\nTolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.\n\nThrough the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail\nThe sky cracked its poems in naked wonder\nThat the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze\nLeaving only bells of lightning and its thunder\nStriking for the gentle, striking for the kind\nStriking for the guardians and protectors of the mind\nAn’ the poet an the painter far behind his rightful time\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.\n\nIn the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales\nFor the disrobed faceless forms of no position\nTolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts\nAll down in taken-for granted situations\nTolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute\nFor the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute\nFor the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.\n\nEven though a clouds’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed\nAn’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting\nElectric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones\nCondemned to drift or else be kept from drifting\nTolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail\nFor the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale\nAn’ for each unharmfull, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.\n\nStarry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught\nTrapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended\nAs we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look\nSpellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended\nTolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed\nFor the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse\nAn’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe\nAn’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "day-of-the-locusts": { - "title": "“Day of the Locusts”", - "body": "Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration\nThe birdies were flyin’ from tree to tree\nThere was little to say, there was no conversation\nAs I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree\n\nAnd the locusts sang off in the distance\nYeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody\nOh, the locusts sang off in the distance\nYeah, the locusts sang and they were singin’ for me\n\nI glanced into the chamber where the judges were talkin’\nDarkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb\nI was ready to leave, I was already walkin’\nBut the next time I looked, there was light in the room\n\nAnd the locusts sang, yeah, it give me a chill\nOh, the locusts sang such a sweet melody\nOh, the locusts sang that high whining trill\nYeah, the locusts sang, and they were singin’ for me\n\nOutside of the gates the trucks were unloadin’\nThe weather was hot, a nearly 90 degrees\nThe man standin’ next to me, his head was explodin’\nWhoa, I was prayin’ the pieces wouldn’t fall on me\n\nYeah, and the locusts sang off in the distance\nYeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody\nOh, the locusts sang off in the distance\nNow, the locusts sang and they were singin’ for me\n\nI put down my robe, I picked up my diploma\nTook hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive\nStraight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota\nSure was glad to get out of there alive\n\nAnd the locusts sang, whoa, it give me a chill\nYeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody\nAnd the locusts sang with that high whinin’ trill\nYeah, the locusts sang and they was singin’ for me\nSingin’ for me, whoa, singin’ for me", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "desolation-row": { - "title": "“Desolation Row”", - "body": "They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown,\nThe beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town.\nHere comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance,\nOne hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants.\nAnd the riot squad, they’re restless, they need somewhere to go\nAs Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row.\n\nCinderella, she seems so easy. “It takes one to know one,” she smiles\nAnd puts her hands into her back pocket Bette Davis-style.\nAnd in comes Romeo, he’s moaning, “You belong to me, I believe.”\nAnd someone turns and says to him, “My friend, you’d better leave.”\nAnd the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go\nIs Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.\n\nNow, the moon is almost hidden, the stars, they’re just pretending to hide,\nThe fortune-telling lady has even taken all her things inside.\nAll except for Cain and Abel and the Hunchback of Notre Dame,\nEveryone is either making love or else expecting rain.\nAnd the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing, he’s getting ready for the show.\nHe’s going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.\n\nOphelia, she’s ’neath the window, for her I feel so afraid,\nOn her twenty-second birthday she already is an old maid.\nNow, to her death is quite romantic, she wears an iron vest,\nHer profession is her religion, her sin is her lifelessness.\nAnd, though her eyes are fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow,\nShe spends her time peeking into Desolation Row.\n\nEinstein, disguised as Robin Hood, with his memories in a trunk,\nPassed this way an hour ago with his friend, some jealous monk.\nNow, he looked so immaculately frightful as he bummed a cigarette,\nThen he went off sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet.\nYou would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago\nFor playing the electric violin on Desolation Row.\n\nDr. Filth, he keeps his world locked inside of his leather cup,\nBut all his sexless patients, they’re trying to blow it up.\nNow, his nurse, some local loser, she’s in charge of the cyanide hole,\nShe also keeps the cards that read “Have Mercy on His Soul”.\nThey all play on the penny whistle, you can hear them blow\nIf you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row.\n\nAcross the street they’ve nailed the curtains, they’re getting ready for the feast,\nThe Phantom of the Opera in the perfect image of a priest.\nThey are spoon-feeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured,\nThen they’ll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words.\nAnd the Phantom shouts to skinny girls, “Get outta here if you don’t know\nCasanova, he’s just being punished for going to Desolation Row!”\n\nAt midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew\nCome out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.\nThen they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine\nIs strapped across their shoulders and then the kerosene\nIs brought down from the castles by insurance men who go\nCheck to see that no one is escaping to Desolation Row.\n\nPraise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn,\nEverybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”\nAnd Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower\nWhile Calypso-singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers\nBetween the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow\nAnd nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row.\n\nYes, I received your letter yesterday about the time the door-knob broke.\nWhen you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?\nAll these people that you mention, yes, I know them, they’re quite lame,\nI had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name.\nRight now I cannot read too well, don’t send me no more letters, no!\nNot unless you mail them from Desolation Row.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dont-think-twice-its-all-right": { - "title": "“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”", - "body": "It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe\nIf’n you don’t know by now\nAnd it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe\nIt’ll never do somehow\nWhen your rooster crows at the break of dawn\nLook out your window and I’ll be gone\nYou’re the reason I’m a-traveling on\nBut don’t think twice, it’s all right\n\nAnd it ain’t no use in turning on your light, babe\nThat light I never knowed\nAnd it ain’t no use in turning on your light, babe\nI’m on the dark side of the road\nBut I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say\nTo try and make me change my mind and stay\nBut we never did too much talking anyway\nBut don’t think twice, it’s all right\n\nSo it ain’t no use in calling out my name, gal\nLike you never done before\nAnd it ain’t no use in calling out my name, gal\nI can’t hear you anymore\nI’m a-thinking and a-wonderin’ walking down the road\nI once loved a woman, a child, I’m told\nI give her my heart but she wanted my soul\nBut don’t think twice, it’s all right\n\nSo long honey, babe\nWhere I’m bound, I can’t tell\nGoodbye’s too good a word, babe\nSo I’ll just say, “Fare thee well”\nI ain’t a-saying you treated me unkind\nYou could’ve done better but I don’t mind\nYou just kinda wasted my precious time\nBut don’t think twice, it’s all right", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "every-grain-of-sand": { - "title": "“Every Grain of Sand”", - "body": "In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need\nWhen the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed\nThere’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere\nToiling in the danger and in the morals of despair\n\nDon’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake\nLike Cain, I behold this chain of events that I must break\nIn the fury of the moment, I can see the master’s hand\nIn every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.\n\nOh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear\nLike criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer\nAnd the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way\nTo ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay\n\nI gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame\nAnd every time I pass that way I always hear my name\nThen onward in my journey, I come to understand\nThat every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.\n\nI have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night\nIn the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintery light\nIn the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space\nIn the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face\n\nI hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea\nSometimes I turn, there’s someone there, at times it’s only me\nI’m hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan\nLike every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "girl-from-the-north-country": { - "title": "“Girl from the North Country”", - "body": "Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair\nWhere the winds hit heavy on the borderline\nRemember me to one who lives there\nShe once was a true love of mine\n\nWell, if you go when the snowflakes storm\nWhen the rivers freeze and summer ends\nPlease see if she’s wearing a coat so warm\nTo keep her from the howlin’ winds\n\nPlease see for me if her hair hangs long,\nIf it rolls and flows all down her breast.\nPlease see for me if her hair hangs long,\nThat’s the way I remember her best.\n\nI’m a-wonderin’ if she remembers me at all\nMany times I’ve often prayed\nIn the darkness of my night\nIn the brightness of my day\n\nSo if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair\nWhere the winds hit heavy on the borderline\nRemember me to one who lives there\nShe once was a true love of mine", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "i-shall-be-released": { - "title": "“I Shall Be Released”", - "body": "They say ev’rything can be replaced\nYet ev’ry distance is not near\nSo I remember ev’ry face\nOf ev’ry man who put me here\nI see my light come shining\nFrom the west unto the east\nAny day now, any day now\nI shall be released\n\nThey say ev’ry man needs protection\nThey say ev’ry man must fall\nYet I swear I see my reflection\nSome place so high above this wall\nI see my light come shining\nFrom the west unto the east\nAny day now, any day now\nI shall be released\n\nStanding next to me in this lonely crowd\nIs a man who swears he’s not to blame\nAll day long I hear him shout so loud\nCrying out that he was framed\nI see my light come shining\nFrom the west unto the east\nAny day now, any day now\nI shall be released", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-was-young-when-i-left-home": { - "title": "“I Was Young When I Left Home”", - "body": "I was young when I left home\nBut I been out a-ramblin’ ’round\nAnd I never wrote a letter to my home\nTo my home, Lord, to my home\nAnd I never wrote a letter to my home\n\nIt was just the other day\nI was bringing home my pay\nWhen I met an old friend I used to know\n\nSaid your mother’s dead and gone\nBaby sister’s all gone wrong\nAnd your daddy needs you home right away\n\nNot a shirt on my back\nNot a penny on my name\nWell I can’t go home thisaway\nThisaway, Lord, Lord, Lord\nAnd I can’t go home thisaway\n\nIf you miss the train I’m on\nCount the days I’m gone\nYou will hear that whistle blow a hundred miles\nA hundred miles, honey baby. Lord Lord Lord\nAnd you’ll hear that whistle blow a hundred miles\n\nI’m playing on a track\nMa would come and whoop me back\nOn them trestles down by old Jim McKay’s\n\nWhen I pay the debt I owe\nTo the commissary store\nI will pawn my watch and chain and go home\nGo home, Lord Lord Lord\nI will pawn my watch and chain and go home\n\nUsed to tell Ma sometimes\nWhen I see them riding blinds\nGonna make me a home out in the wind\nIn the wind, Lord in the wind\nMake me a home out in the wind\n\nI don’t like it in the wind\nWanna go back home again\nBut I can’t go home thisaway\nThisaway, Lord Lord Lord\nAnd I can’t go home thisaway\n\nI was young when I left home\nAnd I been out rambling ’round\nAnd I never wrote a letter to my home\nTo my home, Lord Lord Lord\nAnd I never wrote a letter to my home", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "idiot-wind": { - "title": "“Idiot Wind”", - "body": "Someone’s got it in for me\nThey’re planting stories in the press\nWhoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick\nBut when they will I can only guess\nThey say I shot a man named Gray\nAnd took his wife to Italy\nShe inherited a million bucks\nAnd when she died it came to me\nI can’t help it if I’m lucky\n\nPeople see me all the time\nAnd they just can’t remember how to act\nTheir minds are filled with big ideas\nImages and distorted facts\nEven you, yesterday\nYou had to ask me where it was at\nI couldn’t believe after all these years\nYou didn’t know me better than that\nSweet lady\n\nIdiot wind\nBlowing every time you move your mouth\nBlowing down the back roads headin’ south\nIdiot wind\nBlowing every time you move your teeth\nYou’re an idiot, babe\nIt’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe\n\nI ran into the fortune-teller\nWho said, “beware of lightning that might strike”\nI haven’t known peace and quiet\nFor so long I can’t remember what it’s like\nThere’s a lone soldier on the cross\nSmoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door\nYou didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done\nIn the final end he won the wars\nAfter losin’ every battle\n\nI woke up on the roadside\nDaydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are\nVisions of your chestnut mare\nShoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars\nYou hurt the ones that I love best\nAnd cover up the truth with lies\nOne day you’ll be in the ditch\nFlies buzzin’ around your eyes\nBlood on your saddle\n\nIdiot wind\nBlowing through the flowers on your tomb\nBlowing through the curtains in your room\nIdiot wind\nBlowing every time you move your teeth\nYou’re an idiot, babe\nIt’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe\n\nIt was gravity which pulled us down\nAnd destiny which broke us apart\nYou tamed the lion in my cage\nBut it just wasn’t enough to change my heart\nNow everything’s a little upside down\nAs a matter of fact the wheels have stopped\nWhat’s good is bad, what’s bad is good\nYou’ll find out when you reach the top\nYou’re on the bottom\n\nI noticed at the ceremony\nYour corrupt ways had finally made you blind\nI can’t remember your face anymore\nYour mouth has changed\nYour eyes don’t look into mine\nThe priest wore black on the seventh day\nAnd sat stone-faced while the building burned\nI waited for you on the running boards\nNear the cypress trees, while the springtime turned\nSlowly into autumn\n\nIdiot wind\nBlowing like a circle around my skull\nFrom the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol\nIdiot wind\nBlowing every time you move your teeth\nYou’re an idiot, babe\nIt’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe\n\nI can’t feel you anymore\nI can’t even touch the books you’ve read\nEvery time I crawl past your door\nI been wishin’ I was somebody else instead\nDown the highway, down the tracks\nDown the road to ecstasy\nI followed you beneath the stars\nHounded by your memory\nAnd all your ragin’ glory\n\nI been double-crossed now\nFor the very last time and now I’m finally free\nI kissed goodbye the howling beast\nOn the borderline which separated you from me\nYou’ll never know the hurt I suffered\nNor the pain I rise above\nAnd I’ll never know the same about you\nYour holiness or your kind of love\nAnd it makes me feel so sorry\n\nIdiot wind\nBlowing through the buttons of our coats\nBlowing through the letters that we wrote\nIdiot wind\nBlowing through the dust upon our shelves\nWe’re idiots, babe\nIt’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "its-all-over-now-baby-blue": { - "title": "“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”", - "body": "You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.\nBut whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.\nYonder stands your orphan with his gun,\nCrying like a fire in the sun.\nLook out the saints are comin’ through\nAnd it’s all over now, Baby Blue.\n\nThe highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.\nTake what you have gathered from coincidence.\nThe empty-handed painter from your streets\nIs drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.\nThis sky, too, is folding under you\nAnd it’s all over now, Baby Blue.\n\nAll your seasick sailors, they are rowing home.\nAll your reindeer armies, are all going home.\nThe lover who just walked out your door\nHas taken all his blankets from the floor.\nThe carpet, too, is moving under you\nAnd it’s all over now, Baby Blue.\n\nLeave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.\nForget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.\nThe vagabond who’s rapping at your door\nIs standing in the clothes that you once wore.\nStrike another match, go start anew\nAnd it’s all over now, Baby Blue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding": { - "title": "“It’s Alright Ma, I’m only Bleeding”", - "body": "Darkness at the break of noon\nShadows even the silver spoon,\nThe handmade blade, the child’s balloon,\nEclipses both the sun and moon--\nTo understand you know too soon that there is no sense in trying.\n\nPointed threats, they bluff with scorn,\nSuicide remarks are torn\nFrom the fool’s gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn\nPlays wasted words, it proves to warn\nHe not a-busy being born is a-busy dying.\n\nTemptation’s page flies out the door,\nYou follow, find yourself at war,\nWatch a-waterfalls of pity roar,\nFeel to moan, but unlike before\nYou discover that you’d just a-be one more person crying.\n\nSo, don’t fear if you hear\nA foreign sound to your ear,\nIt’s alright, ma, I’m only sighing.\n\nSome warn victory, some downfall,\nPrivate reasons--great or small--\nCan be seen in the eyes of those that call\nTo make all that should be killed to crawl,\nOthers say, “Don’t hate nothing at all except a-hatred.”\n\nDisillusioned words a-like a-bullets bark,\nHuman gods aim for their mark,\nMake everything from toy guns that spark\nTo flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark--\nIt’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.\n\nWhile preachers preach of evil fates,\nTeachers teach that knowledge waits,\nCan lead you to hundred-dollar plates,\nGoodness hides behind its gates,\nEven the president of the United States sometimes a-must have to stand naked.\n\nBut, though the rules of the road have been lodged,\nIt’s people’s games that you got to dodge,\nIt’s alright, ma, I can make it.\n\nAdvertising signs, they con,\nCon you into thinking that you’re the one\nThat can do what’s a-never been done,\nThat can win what’s a-never been won--\nMeantime life outside goes on all around you.\n\nYou lose yourself, but then you reappear,\nYou suddenly find you’ve got nothing to fear,\nAlone you stand with nobody near\nWhen a trembling, distant voice, unclear,\nStartles your ears to hear somebody thinks that they really have found you.\n\nA question in your nerves is lit,\nYet you know that there is no answer fit\nTo satisfy, ensure you not to quit,\nKeep it in your mind and don’t forget\nThat it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.\n\nBut, though the masters make the rules\nFor the wise men and the fools,\nI got nothing, ma, to live up to.\n\nOld-lady judges watch people in pairs,\nLimited in sex they dare\nPush fake morals, insult, and stare\nWhile money doesn’t talk, it swears,\nObscenity--who really cares?--propaganda all is phony.\n\nWhile them that defend what they cannot see\nWith a killer’s pride, security,\nIt blows their minds a-most a-bitterly,\nFor them that think death--death’s honesty\nWon’t fall upon ’em naturally, life sometimes must get lonely.\n\nMy eyes collide head-on with stuffed\nGraveyards and false goals, I scuff\nAt pettiness, which plays so rough,\nWalk upside-down inside handcuffs,\nKick my legs to crash it off,\nSay, “Alright, I’ve had enough, what else can you show me?”\n\nAnd, if my thought-dreams could be seen,\nThey’d probably put my head in a guillotine,\nBut it’s alright, ma, it’s life and life only.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "last-thoughts-on-woody-guthrie": { - "title": "“Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”", - "body": "When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb\nWhen you think you’re too old, too young, too smart or too dumb\nWhen yer laggin’ behind an’ losin’ yer pace\nIn a slow-motion crawl of life’s busy race\nNo matter what yer doing if you start givin’ up\nIf the wine don’t come to the top of yer cup\nIf the wind’s got you sideways with with one hand holdin’ on\nAnd the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone\nAnd yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it\nAnd the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it\nAnd yer sidewalk starts curlin’ and the street gets too long\nAnd you start walkin’ backwards though you know its wrong\nAnd lonesome comes up as down goes the day\nAnd tomorrow’s mornin’ seems so far away\nAnd you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin’\nAnd yer rope is a-slidin’ ’cause yer hands are a-drippin’\nAnd yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys\nTurn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys\nAnd yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe’s a-pourin’\nAnd the lightnin’s a-flashing and the thunder’s a-crashin’\nAnd the windows are rattlin’ and breakin’ and the roof tops a-shakin’\nAnd yer whole world’s a-slammin’ and bangin’\nAnd yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm\nAnd to yourself you sometimes say\n“I never knew it was gonna be this way\nWhy didn’t they tell me the day I was born”\n\nAnd you start gettin’ chills and yer jumping from sweat\nAnd you’re lookin’ for somethin’ you ain’t quite found yet\nAnd yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air\nAnd the whole world’s a-watchin’ with a window peek stare\nAnd yer good gal leaves and she’s long gone a-flying\nAnd yer heart feels sick like fish when they’re fryin’\nAnd yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet\nAnd you need it badly but it lays on the street\nAnd yer bell’s bangin’ loudly but you can’t hear its beat\nAnd you think yer ears might a been hurt\nOr yer eyes’ve turned filthy from the sight-blindin’ dirt\nAnd you figured you failed in yesterdays rush\nWhen you were faked out an’ fooled white facing a four flush\nAnd all the time you were holdin’ three queens\nAnd it’s makin you mad, it’s makin’ you mean\nLike in the middle of Life magazine\nBouncin’ around a pinball machine\n\nAnd there’s something on yer mind you wanna be saying\nThat somebody someplace oughta be hearin’\nBut it’s trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head\nAnd it bothers you badly when your layin’ in bed\nAnd no matter how you try you just can’t say it\nAnd yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it\nAnd yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head\nAnd yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead\nAnd the lion’s mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth\nAnd his jaws start closin with you underneath\nAnd yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind\nAnd you wish you’d never taken that last detour sign\n\nAnd you say to yourself just what am I doin’\nOn this road I’m walkin’, on this trail I’m turnin’\nOn this curve I’m hanging\nOn this pathway I’m strolling, in the space I’m talking\nIn this air I’m inhaling\nAm I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard\nWhy am I walking, where am I running\nWhat am I saying, what am I knowing\nOn this guitar I’m playing, on this banjo I’m frailin’\nOn this mandolin I’m strummin’, in the song I’m singin’\nIn the tune I’m hummin’, in the words I’m writin’\nIn the words that I’m thinkin’\nIn this ocean of hours I’m all the time drinkin’\nWho am I helping, what am I breaking\nWhat am I giving, what am I taking\n\nBut you try with your whole soul best\nNever to think these thoughts and never to let\nThem kind of thoughts gain ground\nOr make yer heart pound\nBut then again you know why they’re around\nJust waiting for a chance to slip and drop down\n’Cause sometimes you hear’em when the night times comes creeping\nAnd you fear that they might catch you a-sleeping\nAnd you jump from yer bed, from yer last chapter of dreamin’\nAnd you can’t remember for the best of yer thinking\nIf that was you in the dream that was screaming\n\nAnd you know that it’s something special you’re needin’\nAnd you know that there’s no drug that’ll do for the healin’\nAnd no liquor in the land to stop yer brain from bleeding\nAnd you need something special\nYeah, you need something special all right\nYou need a fast flyin’ train on a tornado track\nTo shoot you someplace and shoot you back\nYou need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler\nThat’s been banging and booming and blowing forever\nThat knows yer troubles a hundred times over\n\nYou need a Greyhound bus that don’t bar no race\nThat won’t laugh at yer looks\nYour voice or your face\nAnd by any number of bets in the book\nWill be rollin’ long after the bubblegum craze\nYou need something to open up a new door\nTo show you something you seen before\nBut overlooked a hundred times or more\nYou need something to open your eyes\nYou need something to make it known\nThat it’s you and no one else that owns\nThat spot that yer standing, that space that you’re sitting\nThat the world ain’t got you beat\nThat it ain’t got you licked\nIt can’t get you crazy no matter how many\nTimes you might get kicked\n\nYou need something special all right\nYou need something special to give you hope\nBut hope’s just a word\nThat maybe you said or maybe you heard\nOn some windy corner ’round a wide-angled curve\nBut that’s what you need man, and you need it bad\nAnd yer trouble is you know it too good\n’Cause you look an’ you start getting the chills\n’Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill\nAnd it ain’t on Macy’s window sill\nAnd it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map\nAnd it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house\nAnd it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ\nAnd it ain’t on that dimlit stage\nWith that half-wit comedian on it\nRanting and raving and taking yer money\nAnd you thinks it’s funny\nNo you can’t find it in no night club or no yacht club\nAnd it ain’t in the seats of a supper club\nAnd sure as hell you’re bound to tell\nThat no matter how hard you rub\nYou just ain’t a-gonna find it on yer ticket stub\nNo, and it ain’t in the rumors people’re tellin’ you\nAnd it ain’t in the pimple-lotion people are sellin’ you\nAnd it ain’t in no cardboard-box house\nOr down any movie star’s blouse\nAnd you can’t find it on the golf course\nAnd Uncle Remus can’t tell you and neither can Santa Claus\nAnd it ain’t in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes\nAnd it ain’t in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons\nAnd it ain’t in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices\nThat come knockin’ and tappin’ in Christmas wrappin’\nSayin’ ain’t I pretty and ain’t I cute and look at my skin\nLook at my skin shine, look at my skin glow\nLook at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry\nWhen you can’t even sense if they got any insides\nThese people so pretty in their ribbons and bows\n\nNo you’ll not now or no other day\nFind it on the doorsteps made out-a paper mache\nAnd inside it the people made of molasses\nThat every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses\nAnd it ain’t in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies\nWho’d turn yuh in for a tenth of a penny\nWho breathe and burp and bend and crack\nAnd before you can count from one to ten\nDo it all over again but this time behind yer back\nMy friend\nThe ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl\nAnd play games with each other in their sand-box world\nAnd you can’t find it either in the no-talent fools\nThat run around gallant\nAnd make all rules for the ones that got talent\nAnd it ain’t in the ones that ain’t got any talent but think they do\nAnd think they’re foolin’ you\nThe ones who jump on the wagon\nJust for a while ’cause they know it’s in style\nTo get their kicks, get out of it quick\nAnd make all kinds of rnoney and chicks\n\nAnd you yell to yourself and you throw down yer hat\nSayin’, “Christ do I gotta be like that\nAin’t there no one here that knows where I’m at\nAin’t there no one here that knows how I feel\nGood God Almighty\nTHAT STUFF AINT REAL”\n\nNo but that ain’t yer game, it ain’t even yer race\nYou can’t hear yer name, you can’t see yer face\nYou gotta look some other place\nAnd where do you look for this hope that yer seekin’\nWhere do you look for this lamp that’s a-burnin’\nWhere do you look for this oil well gushin’\nWhere do you look for this candle that’s glowin’\nWhere do you look for this hope that you know is there\nAnd out there somewhere\n\nAnd your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads\nYour eyes can only look through two kinds of windows\nYour nose can only smell two kinds of hallways\nYou can touch and twist\nAnd turn two kinds of doorknobs\nYou can either go to the church of your choice\nOr you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital\nAnd though it’s only my opinion\nI may be right or wrong\nYou’ll find them both\nIn the Grand Canyon\nAt sundown", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lay-lady-lay": { - "title": "“Lay, Lady, Lay”", - "body": "Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed\nLay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed\nWhatever colors you have in your mind\nI’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine.\n\nLay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed\nStay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile\nUntil the break of day, let me see you make him smile\nHis clothes are dirty but his hands are clean\nAnd you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen.\n\nStay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile\nWhy wait any longer for the world to begin\nYou can have your cake and eat it too\nWhy wait any longer for the one you love\nWhen he’s standing in front of you.\n\nLay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed\nStay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead\nI long to see you in the morning light\nI long to reach for you in the night\nStay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lonesome-death-of-hattie-carroll": { - "title": "“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”", - "body": "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll\nWith a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger\nAt a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’\nAnd the cops were called in and his weapon took from him\nAs they rode him in custody down to the station\nAnd booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder\nBut you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears\nTake the rag away from your face\nNow ain’t the time for your tears\n\nWilliam Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years\nOwns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres\nWith rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him\nAnd high office relations in the politics of Maryland\nReacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders\nAnd swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling\nIn a matter of minutes on bail was out walking\nBut you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears\nTake the rag away from your face\nNow ain’t the time for your tears\n\nHattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen\nShe was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children\nWho carried the dishes and took out the garbage\nAnd never sat once at the head of the table\nAnd didn’t even talk to the people at the table\nWho just cleaned up all the food from the table\nAnd emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level\nGot killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane\nThat sailed through the air and came down through the room\nDoomed and determined to destroy all the gentle\nAnd she never done nothing to William Zanzinger\nBut you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears\nTake the rag away from your face\nNow ain’t the time for your tears\n\nIn the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel\nTo show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level\nAnd that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded\nAnd that even the nobles get properly handled\nOnce that the cops have chased after and caught ’em\nAnd that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom\nStared at the person who killed for no reason\nWho just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’\nAnd he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished\nAnd handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance\nWilliam Zanzinger with a six-month sentence\nOh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears\nBury the rag deep in your face\nFor now’s the time for your tears", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-minus-zero": { - "title": "“Love Minus Zero”", - "body": "My love she speaks like silence,\nWithout ideals or violence,\nShe doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,\nYet she’s true, like ice, like fire.\nPeople carry roses,\nMake promises by the hours,\nMy love she laughs like the flowers,\nValentines can’t buy her.\n\nIn the dime stores and bus stations,\nPeople talk of situations,\nRead books, repeat quotations,\nDraw conclusions on the wall.\nSome speak of the future,\nMy love she speaks softly,\nShe knows there’s no success like failure\nAnd that failure’s no success at all.\n\nThe cloak and dagger dangles,\nMadams light the candles.\nIn ceremonies of the horsemen,\nEven the pawn must hold a grudge.\nStatues made of match sticks,\nCrumble into one another,\nMy love winks, she does not bother,\nShe knows too much to argue or to judge.\n\nThe bridge at midnight trembles,\nThe country doctor rambles,\nBankers’ nieces seek perfection,\nExpecting all the gifts that wise men bring.\nThe wind howls like a hammer,\nThe night blows cold and rainy,\nMy love she’s like some raven\nAt my window with a broken wing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-is-just-a-four-letter-word": { - "title": "“Love is Just a Four-Letter Word”", - "body": "Seems like only yesterday\nI left my mind behind\nDown in the Gypsy Cafe\nWith a friend of a friend of mine--\nShe sat with a baby heavy on her knee\nYet spoke of life most free from slavery\nWith eyes that showed no trace of misery--\nA phrase in connection first with she I heard\nThat love is just a four-letter word.\n\nOutside a rambling store-front window\nCats meowed to the break of day--\nMe, I kept my mouth shut,\nTo you I had no words to say--\nMy experience was limited and underfed--\nYou were talking, while I hid,\nTo the one who was the father of your kid:\nYou probably didn’t think I did, but I heard\nYou say that love is just a four-letter word.\n\nI said goodbye unnoticed,\nPushed towards things in my own games,\nDrifting in and out of lifetimes\nUnmentionable by name,\nSearching for my double, looking for\nComplete evaporation to the core--\nThough I tried and failed at finding any door,\nI must have thought that there was nothing more absurd\nThan that love is just a four-letter word.\n\nThough I never knew just what you meant\nWhen you were speaking to your man,\nI could only think in terms of me\nAnd now I understand--\nAfter waking enough times to think I see\nThe Holy Kiss that’s s’posed to last eternity\nBlow up in smoke, its destiny\nFalls on strangers, travels free--\nYes, I know now, traps are only set by me\nAnd I do not really need to be assured\nThat love is just a four-letter word.\n\nStrange it is to be beside you\nMany years, the tables turned--\nYou’d probably not believe me\nIf I told you all I’ve learned--\nAnd it is very, very weird indeed\nTo hear words like “forever” plead,\nSo ships run through my mind, I cannot cheat--\nIt’s like looking in a teacher’s face complete:\nI can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard--\nThat love is just a four-letter word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "most-of-the-time": { - "title": "“Most of the Time”", - "body": "Most of the time\nI’m clear focused all around,\nMost of the time\nI can keep both feet on the ground,\nI can follow the path, I can read the signs,\nStay right with it, when the road unwinds,\nI can handle whatever I stumble upon,\nI don’t even notice she’s gone,\nMost of the time.\nMost of the time\nIt’s well understood,\nMost of the time\nI wouldn’t change it if I could,\nI can make it all match up, I can hold my own,\nI can deal with the situation right down to the bone,\nI can survive, I can endure\nAnd I don’t even think about her\nMost of the time.\n\nMost of the time\nMy head is on straight,\nMost of the time\nI’m strong enough not to hate,\nI don’t build up illusion ’till it makes me sick,\nI ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick,\nI can smile in the face of mankind,\nDon’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine\nMost of the time.\n\nMost of the time\nShe ain’t even in my mind,\nI wouldn’t know her if I saw her\nShe’s that far behind.\nMost of the time\nI can’t even be sure\nIf she was ever with me\nOr if I was ever with her.\n\nMost of the time\nI’m halfways content,\nMost of the time\nI’d know exactly whether it all went,\nI don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide,\nHide from the feelings that are buried inside,\nI don’t compromise and I don’t pretend,\nI don’t even care if I ever see her again\nMost of the time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-back-pages": { - "title": "“My Back Pages”", - "body": "Crimson flames tied through my ears, rollin’ high and mighty traps\nPounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my maps\n“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I, proud ’neath heated brow\nAh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now\n\nHalf-wracked prejudice leaped forth, “rip down all hate,” I screamed\nLies that life is black and white spoke from my skull, I dreamed\nRomantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep, somehow\nAh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now\n\nGirls’ faces formed the forward path from phony jealousy\nTo memorizing politics of ancient history\nFlung down by corpse evangelists, unthought of, though somehow\nAh, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now\n\nA self-ordained professor’s tongue too serious to fool\nSpouted out that liberty is just equality in school\n“Equality,” I spoke the word as if a wedding vow\nAh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now\n\nIn a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach\nFearing not that I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach\nMy existence led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow\nAh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now\n\nYes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect\nDeceived me into thinking I had something to protect\nGood and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow\nAh, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-dark-yet": { - "title": "“Not Dark Yet”", - "body": "Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day,\nIt’s too hot to sleep and time is running away.\nFeel like my soul has turned into steel,\nI’ve still got the scars that the sun did not heal.\nThere’s not even room enough to be anywhere,\nIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.\n\nWell, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain,\nBehind every beautiful thing there’s been some kinda pain.\nShe wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind,\nShe put down in writing what was in her mind.\nI just don’t see why I should even care,\nIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.\n\nWell, I’ve been to London and I’ve been to gay Paris,\nI’ve followed the river and I got to the sea.\nI’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies,\nI ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes.\nSometimes my burden is more than I can bear,\nIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.\n\nI was born here and I’ll die here against my will,\nI know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still.\nEvery nerve in my body is so vacant and numb,\nI can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from.\nDon’t even hear a murmur of a prayer,\nIt’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-a-night-like-this": { - "title": "“On a Night Like This”", - "body": "On a night like this\nSo glad you came around\nHold on to me so tight\nAnd heat up some coffee grounds\nWe got much to talk about\nAnd much to reminisce\nIt sure is right\nOn a night like this\n\nOn a night like this\nSo glad you’ve come to stay\nHold on to me, pretty miss\nSay you’ll never go away to stray\nRun your fingers down my spine\nBring me a touch of bliss\nIt sure feels right\nOn a night like this\n\nOn a night like this\nI can’t get any sleep\nThe air is so cold outside\nAnd the snow’s so deep\nBuild a fire, throw on logs\nAnd listen to it hiss\nAnd let it burn, burn, burn, burn\nOn a night like this\n\nPut your body next to mine\nAnd keep me company\nThere is plenty a-room for all\nSo please don’t elbow me\n\nLet the four winds blow\nAround this old cabin door\nIf I’m not too far off\nI think we did this once before\nThere’s more frost on the window glass\nWith each new tender kiss\nBut it sure feels right\nOn a night like this", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "one-too-many-mornings": { - "title": "“One Too Many Mornings”", - "body": "Down the street, the dogs are barkin’\nAnd the day is gettin’ dark\nAs the night comes in a-fallin’\nThe dogs, they’ll lose their bark\nAn’ the silent night will shatter\nFrom the sounds inside my mind\nAs I’m one too many mornings\nAnd a thousand miles behind\n\nFrom the crossroads of my doorstep\nMy eyes begin to fade\nAnd I turn my head back to the room\nWhere my love and I have laid\nAn’ I gaze back to the street\nThe sidewalks and the sign\nNever know I’m one too many mornings\nAn’ a thousand miles behind\n\nIt’s a restless hungry feeling\nAnd it don’t mean no one no good\nWhen ev’rything that I’m sayin’\nYou can say it just as good\nYou’re right from your side\nAnd I’m right from mine\nWe’re both just one too many mornings\nAn’ a thousand miles behind", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sad-eyed-lady-of-the-lowlands": { - "title": "“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”", - "body": "With your mercury mouth in the missionary times\nAnd your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes\nAnd your silver cross and your voice like chimes\nOh, who do they think could bury you?\n\nWith your pockets well-protected at last\nAnd your streetcar visions which you place on the grass\nAnd your flesh like silk and your face like glass\nWho could they get to carry you?\n\nSad-eyed lady of the lowlands\nWhere the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes\nMy warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums\nShould I put them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?\n\nWith your sheets like metal and your belt like lace\nAnd your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace\nAnd your basement clothes and your hollow face\nWho among them did think he could outguess you?\n\nWith your silhouette when the sunlight dims\nInto your eyes where the moonlight swims\nAnd your matchbook songs and your gypsy hymns\nWho among them would try to impress you?\n\nSad-eyed lady of the lowlands\nWhere the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes\nMy warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums\nShould I put them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?\n\nThe kings of Tyrus, with their convict list\nAre waiting in line for their geranium kiss\nAnd you wouldn’t know it would have happened like this\nBut who among them really wants just to kiss you?\n\nWith your childhood flames on your midnight rug\nAnd your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs\nAnd your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs\nWho among them do you think could resist you?\n\nSad-eyed lady of the lowlands\nWhere the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes\nMy warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums\nShould I leave them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?\n\nOh, the farmers and the businessmen, they all did decide\nTo show you where the dead angels are that they used to hide\nBut why did they pick you to sympathize with their side?\nHow could they ever mistake you?\n\nThey wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm\nBut with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm\nAnd with the child of the hoodlum wrapped up in your arms\nHow could they ever have persuaded you?\n\nSad-eyed lady of the lowlands\nWhere the sad-eyed prophet says that no man’s come\nMy warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums\nShould I leave them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?\n\nWith your sheet metal memory of Cannery Row\nAnd your magazine husband who one day just had to go\nAnd your gentleness now, which you just can’t help but show\nWho among them do you think would employ you?\n\nNow you stand with your thief, you’re on his parole\nWith your holy medallion in your fingertips now enfold\nAnd your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul\nWho among them could ever think he could destroy you?\n\nSad-eyed lady of the lowlands\nWhere the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes\nMy warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums\nShould I leave them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seven-curses": { - "title": "“Seven Curses”", - "body": "Old Reilly’s daughter got a message\nThat her father was goin’ to hang.\nShe rode by night and came by morning\nWith gold and silver in her hand\n\nWhen the judge he saw Reilly’s daughter\nHis old eyes deepened in his head,\nSayin’, “Gold will never free your father,\nThe price, my dear, is you instead.”\n\n“Oh I’m as good as dead,” cried Reilly,\n“It’s only you that he does crave\nAnd my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all.\nGet on your horse and ride away.”\n\n“Oh father you will surely die\nIf I don’t take the chance to try\nAnd pay the price and not take your advice.\nFor that reason I will have to stay.”\n\nThe gallows shadows shook the evening,\nIn the night a hound dog bayed,\nIn the night the grounds were groanin’,\nIn the night the price was paid.\n\nThe next mornin’ she had awoken\nTo know that the judge had never spoken.\nShe saw that hangin’ branch a-bendin’,\nShe saw her father’s body broken.\n\nThese be seven curses on a judge so cruel:\nthat one doctor will not save him\nThat two healers will not heal him,\nThat three eyes will not see him.\n\nThat four ears will not hear him,\nThat five walls will not hide him,\nThat six diggers will not bury him\nAnd that seven deaths shall never kill him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spanish-boots-of-spanish-leather": { - "title": "“Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather”", - "body": "Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love\nI’m sailin’ away in the morning\nIs there something I can send you from across the sea\nFrom the place that I’ll be landing?\n\nNo, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love\nThere’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’\nJust carry yourself back to me unspoiled\nFrom across that lonesome ocean\n\nOh, but I just thought you might want something fine\nMade of silver or of golden\nEither from the mountains of Madrid\nOr from the coast of Barcelona\n\nOh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night\nAnd the diamonds from the deepest ocean\nI’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss\nFor that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’\n\nThat I might be gone a long time\nAnd it’s only that I’m askin’\nIs there something I can send you to remember me by\nTo make your time more easy passin’\n\nOh, how can, how can you ask me again\nIt only brings me sorrow\nThe same thing I want from you today\nI would want again tomorrow\n\nI got a letter on a lonesome day\nIt was from her ship a-sailin’\nSaying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again\nIt depends on how I’m a-feelin’\n\nWell, if you, my love, must think that-a-way\nI’m sure your mind is roamin’\nI’m sure your heart is not with me\nBut with the country to where you’re goin’\n\nSo take heed, take heed of the western wind\nTake heed of the stormy weather\nAnd yes, there’s something you can send back to me\nSpanish boots of Spanish leather", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "subterranean-homesick-blues": { - "title": "“Subterranean Homesick Blues”", - "body": "Johnny’s in the basement\nMixing up the medicine\nI’m on the pavement\nThinking about the government\nThe man in the trench coat\nBadge out, laid off\nSays he’s got a bad cough\nWants to get it paid off\nLook out kid\nIt’s somethin’ you did\nGod knows when\nBut you’re doin’ it again\nYou better duck down the alley way\nLookin’ for a new friend\nThe man in the coon-skin cap\nIn the big pen\nWants eleven dollar bills\nYou only got ten\n\nMaggie comes fleet foot\nFace full of black soot\nTalkin’ that the heat put\nPlants in the bed but\nThe phone’s tapped anyway\nMaggie says that many say\nThey must bust in early May\nOrders from the D. A.\nLook out kid\nDon’t matter what you did\nWalk on your tip toes\nDon’t try “No Doz”\nBetter stay away from those\nThat carry around a fire hose\nKeep a clean nose\nWatch the plain clothes\nYou don’t need a weather man\nTo know which way the wind blows\n\nGet sick, get well\nHang around a ink well\nRing bell, hard to tell\nIf anything is goin’ to sell\nTry hard, get barred\nGet back, write braille\nGet jailed, jump bail\nJoin the army, if you fail\nLook out kid\nYou’re gonna get hit\nBy losers, cheaters\nSix-time users\nHangin’ ’round the theaters\nGirl by the whirlpool\nLookin’ for a new fool\nDon’t follow leaders\nWatch the parkin’ meters\n\nAh get born, keep warm\nShort pants, romance, learn to dance\nGet dressed, get blessed\nTry to be a success\nPlease her, please him, buy gifts\nDon’t steal, don’t lift\nTwenty years of schoolin’\nAnd they put you on the day shift\nLook out kid\nThey keep it all hid\nBetter jump down a manhole\nLight yourself a candle\nDon’t wear sandals\nTry to avoid the scandals\nDon’t wanna be a bum\nYou better chew gum\nThe pump don’t work\n’Cause the vandals took the handles", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tangled-up-in-blue": { - "title": "“Tangled up in Blue”", - "body": "Early one morning the sun was shining, she was lying in bed,\nWondering if she’d changed at all, if her hair was still red.\nTheir folks, they said their lives together sure was a-gonna be rough,\nThey never did like mama’s homemade dress, papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough.\nAnd he was standing on the side of the road, rain falling on his shoes,\nHeading out for the East Coast--Lord knows, he’s paid some dues getting through,\nTangled up in blue.\n\nShe was married when they first met, soon to be divorced,\nHe helped her out of a jam, I guess, but he used a little too much force.\nThen they drove that car as far as they could, abandoned it out west,\nSplitting up on a dark, sad night, both agreeing it was best.\nShe turned around to look at him as he was a-walking away,\nSaying over her shoulder, “We’ll meet again someday on the avenue,\nTangled up in blue.”\n\nHe had a job in Santa Fe working in an old hotel,\nBut he never did like it all that much and one day it just a-went to hell,\nSo he drifted down to New Orleans, lucky not to be destroyed,\nWhere he got him a job on a fishing boat docked outside Delacroix,\nBut all the while he was alone, the past was close behind,\nHe seen a lot of women but she never escaped his mind and he just grew\nTangled up in blue.\n\nShe was working in a topless place and I stopped in for a beer,\nI just kept looking at the side of her face in the spotlight so clear,\nAnd later on, when the crowd thinned out, I was just about to do the same,\nShe was standing there right beside my chair, said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess your name,”\nI muttered something underneath my breath, she studied the lines of my face,\nI must admit, felt a little uneasy when she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,\nTangled up in blue.\n\nI lived with them on Montague Street, in a basement down the stairs,\nThere was music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air,\nTill he started into dealing with slaves and something inside of him died,\nShe had to sell everything she owned and froze up inside,\nAnd when it all came crashing down, I became withdrawn,\nThe only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on like a bird that flew,\nTangled up in blue.\n\nSo now I’m going back on again, I got to get to them somehow,\nAll the faces we used to know, they’re an illusion to me now.\nSome are mathematicians, some are truck drivers’ wives,\nDon’t know how it all got started, I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives,\nBut me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint,\nWe always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view,\nTangled up in blue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-times-they-are-a-changin": { - "title": "“The Times They are A-Changin’”", - "body": "Come gather ’round people\nWherever you roam\nAnd admit that the waters\nAround you have grown\nAnd accept it that soon\nYou’ll be drenched to the bone\nIf your time to you is worth savin’\nAnd you better start swimmin’\nOr you’ll sink like a stone\nFor the times they are a-changin’\n\nCome writers and critics\nWho prophesize with your pen\nAnd keep your eyes wide\nThe chance won’t come again\nAnd don’t speak too soon\nFor the wheel’s still in spin\nAnd there’s no tellin’ who\nThat it’s namin’\nFor the loser now\nWill be later to win\nFor the times they are a-changin’\n\nCome senators, congressmen\nPlease heed the call\nDon’t stand in the doorway\nDon’t block up the hall\nFor he that gets hurt\nWill be he who has stalled\nThe battle outside ragin’\nWill soon shake your windows\nAnd rattle your walls\nFor the times they are a-changin’\n\nCome mothers and fathers\nThroughout the land\nAnd don’t criticize\nWhat you can’t understand\nYour sons and your daughters\nAre beyond your command\nYour old road is rapidly agin’\nPlease get out of the new one\nIf you can’t lend your hand\nFor the times they are a-changin’\n\nThe line it is drawn\nThe curse it is cast\nThe slow one now\nWill later be fast\nAs the present now\nWill later be past\nThe order is rapidly fadin’\nAnd the first one now\nWill later be last\nFor the times they are a-changin’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tomorrow-is-a-long-time": { - "title": "“Tomorrow is a Long Time”", - "body": "If today was not a crooked highway\nIf tonight was not a crooked trail\nIf tomorrow wasn’t such a long time\nThen lonesome would mean nothing to you at all\nYes and only if my own true love was waitin’\nAnd if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’\nYes, only if she was lyin’ by me\nThen I’d lie in my bed once again\n\nI can’t see my reflection in the waters\nI can’t speak the sounds that show no pain\nI can’t hear the echo of my footsteps\nOr remember the sound of my own name\nYes, and only if my own true love was waitin’\nAnd if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’\nYes and only if she was lyin’ by me\nThen I’d lie in my bed once again\n\nThere’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river\nThere’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky\nBut none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty\nThat I remember in my true love’s eyes\nYes and only if my own true love was waitin’\nI could hear her heart a softly poundin’\nYes and only if she was lyin’ by me\nThen I’d lie in my bed once again", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "visions-of-johanna": { - "title": "“Visions of Johanna”", - "body": "Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?\nWe sit here stranded though we all do our best to deny it\nAnd Louise holds a handful of rain tempting you to defy it.\nLights flicker from the opposite loft,\nIn this room the heat-pipes just cough,\nThe country music station plays soft,\nBut there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off,\nJust Louise and her lover so entwined\nAnd these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.\n\nIn the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key-chain\nAnd the all-night girls, they whisper of escapades out on the D train,\nWe can hear the night watchman click his flashlight, ask himself if it’s him or them who should be insane.\nBut Louise, she’s alright, she’s just near,\nShe’s delicate, she seems like the mirror,\nBut she just makes it all too concise and too clear\nThat Johanna’s not here.\nThe ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face\nWhere these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.\n\nLittle boy lost, he takes himself so seriously,\nHe brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously,\nAnd, when bringing her name up, he speaks of her farewell kiss to me.\nHe’s sure got a lot of gall\nTo be so useless and all,\nMuttering small talk at the wall\nWhile I’m in the hall.\nOh, how can I explain? It’s so hard to get on\nAnd these visions of Johanna, they’ve kept me up past the dawn.\n\nInside the museums infinity’s going up on trial,\nVoices echo, “This is what salvation must be like after a while,”\nBut Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles.\nSee the primitive wallflower freeze\nWhen the jelly-faced women all sneeze,\nHear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez,\nI can’t find my knees.”\nJewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule,\nBut these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.\n\nThe peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him,\nSaying, “Name me somebody that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.”\nBut, like Louise always says, “You can’t look at much, can you, man?” as she herself prepares for him.\nAnd Madonna, she still has not showed,\nWe see this empty cage now corrode\nWhere her cape of the stage once had flowed,\nThe fiddler, he now steps to the road,\nHe writes, “Everything’s been returned which was owed”\nOn the back of the fish truck that loads\nWhile my conscience explodes.\nThe harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain\nAnd these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "watered-down-love": { - "title": "“Watered-Down Love”", - "body": "Love that’s pure hopes all things,\nBelieves all things, won’t pull no strings,\nWon’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome,\nCapture your soul and hold it for ransom.\n\nYou don’t want a love that’s pure\nYou wanna drown love\nYou want a watered-down love\n\nLove that’s pure, it don’t make no false claims,\nIntercedes for you ’stead of casting the blame,\nWill not deceive you or lead you into transgression,\nWon’t write it up and make you sign a false confession.\n\nYou don’t want a love that’s pure\nYou wanna drown love\nYou want a watered-down love\n\nLove that’s pure won’t lead you astray,\nWon’t hold it back, won’t get in your way,\nWon’t pervert you, corrupt you with foolish wishes,\nIt won’t make you envious, won’t a-make you suspicious.\n\nYou don’t want a love that’s pure\nYou wanna drown love\nYou want a watered-down love\n\nLove that’s pure, no accident,\nIt knows that it knows, and is always content,\nAn eternal flame, quietly burning--\nHeaven needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning!\n\nYou don’t want a love that’s pure\nYou wanna drown love\nYou want a watered-down love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "we-better-talk-this-over": { - "title": "“We Better Talk This Over”", - "body": "I think we better talk this over\nMaybe when we both get sober\nYou’ll understand I’m only a man\nDoin’ the best that I can.\n\nThis situation can only get rougher.\nWhy should we needlessly suffer?\nLet’s call it a day, go our own different ways\nBefore we decay.\n\nYou don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face,\nWe’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase.\n\nI feel displaced, I got a low-down feeling\nYou been two-faced, you been double-dealing.\nI took a chance, got caught in the trance\nOf a downhill dance.\n\nOh, child, why you want to hurt me?\nI’m exiled, you can’t convert me.\nI’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways\nWith both eyes glazed.\n\nYou don’t have to yearn for love, you don’t have to be alone,\nSomewhere’s in this universe there’s a place that you can call home.\n\nI guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow\nIf I have to beg, steal or borrow.\nIt’d be great to cross paths in a day and a half\nLook at each other and laugh.\n\nBut I don’t think it’s liable to happen\nLike the sound of one hand clappin’.\nThe vows that we kept are now broken and swept\n’Neath the bed where we slept.\n\nDon’t think of me and fantasize on what we never had,\nBe grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad.\n\nWhy should we go on watching each other through a telescope?\nEventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope.\n\nOh, babe, time for a new transition\nI wish I was a magician.\nI would wave a wand and tie back the bond\nThat we’ve both gone beyond.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-can-i-do-for-you": { - "title": "“What Can I Do for You?”", - "body": "You have given everything to me\nWhat can I do for you?\nYou have given me eyes to see\nWhat can I do for you?\n\nPulled me out of bondage and you made me renewed inside\nFilled up a hunger that had always been denied\nOpened up a door no man can shut and you opened it up so wide\nAnd you’ve chosen me to be among the few\nWhat can I do for you?\n\nYou have laid down your life for me\nWhat can I do for you?\nYou have explained every mystery\nWhat can I do for you?\n\nSoon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly\nHe gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie\nWho would deliver him from the death he’s bound to die\nWell, you’ve done it all and there’s no more anyone can pretend to do\nWhat can I do for you?\n\nYou have given all there is to give\nWhat can I give to you?\nYou have given me life to live\nHow can I live for you?\n\nI know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts\nI don’t care how rough the road is, show me where it starts\nWhatever pleases you, tell it to my heart\nWell, I don’t deserve it but I sure did make it through\nWhat can I do for you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-was-it-you-wanted": { - "title": "“What Was It You Wanted”", - "body": "What was it you wanted\nTell me again so I’ll know\nWhat’s happening in there\nWhat’s going on in your show\nWhat was it you wanted\nCould you say it again\nI’ll be back in a minute\nYou can get it together by then\n\nWhat was it you wanted\nYou can tell me I’m back\nWe can start it all over\nGet it back on the track\nYou got why attention\nGo ahead speak\nWhat was it you wanted\nWhen you were kissing my cheek\n\nWas there somebody looking\nWhen you gave me that kiss\nSomeone there in the shadows\nSomeone that I might have missed\nIs there something you needed\nSomething I don’t understand\nWhat was it you wanted\nDo I have it in my hand\n\nWhatever you wanted\nSlipped out of my mind\nWould you remind me again\nIf you’d be so kind\nHas the record been breaking\nDid the needle just skip\nIs there somebody waitin’\nWas there a slip of the lip\n\nWhat was it you wanted\nI ain’t keepin’ score\nAre you the same person\nThat was here before\nIs it something important\nMaybe not\nWhat was it you wanted\nTell me again I forgot\n\nWhatever you wanted\nWhat can it be\nDid somebody tell you\nThat you could get it from me\nIs it something that comes natural\nIs it easy to say\nWhy do you want it\nWho are you anyway\n\nIs the scenery changing\nAm I getting it wrong\nIs the whole thing going backwards\nAre they playing our song\nWhere were you when it started\nDo you want it for free\nWhat was it you wanted\nAre you talking to me", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-the-ship-comes-in": { - "title": "“When the Ship Comes In”", - "body": "Oh, the time will come up\nWhen the winds will stop\nAnd the breeze will cease to be breathin’\nLike the stillness in the wind\nBefore the hurricane begins\nThe hour that the ship comes in\nAnd the seas will split\nAnd the ship will hit\nAnd the sands on the shoreline will be shaking\nThen the tide will sound\nAnd the wind will pound\nAnd the morning will be breaking\n\nOh, the fishes will laugh\nAs they swim out of the path\nAnd the seagulls they’ll be smiling\nAnd the rocks on the sand\nWill proudly stand\nThe hour that the ship comes in\nAnd the words that are used\nFor to get the ship confused\nWill not be understood as they’re spoken\nFor the chains of the sea\nWill have busted in the night\nAnd will be buried at the bottom of the ocean\n\nA song will lift\nAs the mainsail shifts\nAnd the boat drifts on to the shoreline\nAnd the sun will respect\nEvery face on the deck\nThe hour that the ship comes in\nThen the sands will roll\nOut a carpet of gold\nFor your weary toes to be a-touchin’\nAnd the ship’s wise men\nWill remind you once again\nThat the whole wide world is watchin’\n\nOh, the foes will rise\nWith the sleep still in their eyes\nAnd they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’\nBut they’ll pinch themselves and squeal\nAnd know that it’s for real\nThe hour when the ship comes in\nThen they’ll raise their hands\nSayin’ we’ll meet all your demands\nBut we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered\nAnd like Pharaoh’s tribe\nThey’ll be drownded in the tide\nAnd like Goliath, they’ll be conquered", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "richard-eberhart": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Eberhart", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2005 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Eberhart", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 67 - }, - "poems": { - "blessed-are-the-angels-in-heaven": { - "title": "“Blessed Are the Angels in Heaven”", - "body": "Blessed are the angels in heaven\nWe are not with them on earth\nAnd blessed is their rationality\nDenied us from our birth\n\nAnd if any can say\nIn our writhen, human condition\nProud, red words to make us gay\nLet him say them and let him be\n\nA man of courage in a broken time\nAnd a great singer in the evening\nThe master of our irrationality\nAnd lover of our scrivening\n\nAnd the angels in heaven who are blessed\nWill not hear him calling, calling\nFor they have nothing to do with us\nAnd bind us to our barking heritage.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-blindness-of-poets": { - "title": "“The Blindness of Poets”", - "body": "The blindness of poets is what puts them to pain.\nThey think they can make the world over again.\nAccepting man\nThey think they can make him a god.\nWho is to blame?\nFor man is lame.\nMan’s life is a game.\n\nSee the musician with his mated score.\nHis blithe machinery tells love more and more.\nYet his flesh’s sleazy\nListings sheer immortality,\nAnd no odium enlarges\nFrom windowy podium\nMusic is a fane.\n\nIt is the sculptor makes a man a man,\nThat marble image neither god nor man\nIs symbol of struggle,\nAnd might of muscle,\nAnd a beautiful marble,\nTrouble of inevitable being,\nFreezes us, and frees us for seeing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-blue-grains": { - "title": "“The Blue Grains”", - "body": "Whether blue grains shall stay, as they are,\nIn the shift of heaven, it is,\nThick and rich, for music to say, as a star\nAsks not permission of bliss.\n\nSo eventualities of love pertain\nTo the majestical eventualities of fate,\nSurely working, which made Helen\nThe master-mistress of a nation’s fate,\n\nAnd whether skin or soul shall win,\nIn chaotic intricacies\nIs music’s medium in couched reaches\nOf year’s birds and humming bees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-dream": { - "title": "“The Dream”", - "body": "In a dream I was in a tunnel struggling\nA chalky tunnel, and torturous place,\nWith at the end a suggestion of light,\nA space of light and gruff old optimistic strokes\nFor though convulsed, frisked, I felt I would reach the light\n\nAnd as in a dream things happen without pain,\nIn a childhood sequence of untractable reality,\nIn this pleasurable though unpredictable predicament\nI struggled, drawn directly by the great light,\nThe tunnel was merely there, exfoliating.\n\nThen as if angels whisked you, an unseen force\nYet seemingly not a force, for all was fervent balance,\nI was in high regions of beautiful world and life,\nI visited the extreme palaces, stroked the glowing air,\nWent up through hitched forests to a gold plateau\n\nAnd all was triumph, magnitude, deep vistas,\nAll was largess of harmonies, freedom of form,\nLuminous periodicities in a static realm,\nThe unimaginable godhead, divine peculiarity,\nThe child’s, the death’s-head’s unconquerable vanity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dublin-afternoon": { - "title": "“Dublin Afternoon”", - "body": "Death was lovable, I thought.\nSeduction, somber, of unnumbered years\nIn the steep tombs of St. Michan’s.\nI touched the corpses, a little hot\n\nAnd then I dropped into the dust,\nO so much so, I thought I waked,\nFeeling serene memories of Autumn:\nThere, behind the spider-curtained air--\n\n(But it was not like being not)\nLove of death is love of love\nYet from that august dream, when I felt\nStir the fesh of him who I had been\n\nI recognized the curse of mind again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "easter-absolutes": { - "title": "“Easter Absolutes”", - "body": "Disaster lurks in Easter absolutes,\nThe sun is straining blood through time,\nHeaven, is innocence so far away?\nHell, are you gaping in your fury?\n\nTo think, to feel, to see, to be\nControl confusion and force dispute\nCringing before the cold, glad Easter\nWhere dwell the ruthless relatives.\n\nHeavens of contemplation, and first\nBelief, that runs lamb-like here,\nGive me the order of the soul’s sway\nAnd harmony that teaches mastery.\n\nChrist now come from out the tomb,\nNone other, and walk upon the ruined meadows,\nDream-like vision, powerful beyond reality,\nWhere the spirit is jocund, where it would go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "forms-of-the-human": { - "title": "“Forms of the Human”", - "body": "I wanted to be more human\nFor I felt I thought too much\nAnd for all the thinking I did--\nMore rabbits in the same hutch.\n\nAnd how to be more human, I said?\nI will tell you the way, I said.\nI know how to do it, I said.\nBut what I said was not what I did.\n\nI took an old garden hoe\nAnd dug the earth, and planted there,\nNot forgetting the compost too,\nThree small beans that one might grow.\n\nThree grew tall, but one was wild\nSo I cut off the other two,\nAnd now I have a wild bean flower\nThe sweetest that ever grew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-forum": { - "title": "“The Forum”", - "body": "Each came to the Forum, exposed his views,\nAnd heated grew, and then eased off.\nNone shook the Greeks down from their pedestals,\nEach tinctured the spirit of our time.\n\nReligion was cursed, bun stood its inner ground,\nRhyme was trounced, but boomeranged about.\nForm was tried and found a repentant wanton,\nArt queried, but strengthened its devotees.\n\nThe eyeball in its smithy socket can\nMake up the whole mind of man.\nWhile that intricate, reflective gem,\nThe poem, gives love back to men.\n\nIn dissonances, quicknesses, in gleams\nEach poet catches a flying spirit\nAnd he would from his blood’s frantic force\nNew light, dazzling, see and fit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fury-of-aerial-bombardment": { - "title": "“The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”", - "body": "You would think the fury of aerial bombardment\nWould rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces\nAre still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.\nHistory, even, does not know what is meant.\n\nYou would feel that after so many centuries\nGod would give man to repent; yet he can kill\nAs Cain could, but with multitudinous will,\nNo farther advanced than in his ancient furies\n\nWas man made stupid to see his own stupidity?\nIs God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?\nIs the eternal truth man’s fighting soul\nWherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?\n\nOf Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,\nNames on a list, whose faces I do not recall\nBut they are gone to early death, who late in school\nDistinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-giantess": { - "title": "“The Giantess”", - "body": "Idleness gilds an encompassing giantess\nWho lies upon the heavy land of torpor.\nHer yellow fesh, empty in indolence,\nPoisons desire; she is mordant and depraved.\n\nI have walked upon the golden stones of time\nAnd fallen on her lurking on the hills.\nMy senses shrink within her slow, brutal languor.\nShe holds a sullen summer smile of lassitude.\n\nShe draws the spirit down upon the stones\nAnd makes it as a gorged and sleeping snake,\nMonster of disuse, elongate in her charms,\nWhere time is working its worn dreamlessness.\n\nShe moves in slowness of a long caress\nAnd mauls the future. Languid and primeval,\nShe sucks evil away in one vast innocence,\nAnd holds her victim mindless like a night.\n\nSuch hours of leaden torpor in her arms\nControl an elemental misery;\nWhile senseless of her flesh, her sensual power\nCorrupts the longing and the love of death.\n\nShe is the mood of land-gone sailors when,\nTheir copra hoisted out at hot Copan,\nThey seek the thatch of love, and hope, but find\nThe girls are gone, never to return again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "grape-vine-shoots": { - "title": "“Grape Vine Shoots”", - "body": "I have watched their caution over months,\nExtending upward and across the air:\nWhat faith is theirs, what patience!\n\nThe green shoots of the new year\nFrom where I trained them to the rusty fence\nBelieve in the wind, in space itself.\n\nThey bend out as if they could not bend so far.\nThey strain upward with a sturdy delicacy.\nIt is their quiet assurance that moves me.\n\nHow could they lean across the air so far\nOr push so almost straight upright\nWithout a strange and surcharged certainty?\n\nThey know the wind will one day on their tendrils\nPush a puissant force, fixing their green fingers\nJust long enough to close and keep.\n\nThey feel that space must give itself away,\nGifted space, presenting some fine object\nKeenly, closely, surely to cling to.\n\nBeyond aesthetic blond sight my blood\nAbounds in love of your intent\nAs in the vine I await the grape.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-groundhog": { - "title": "“The Groundhog”", - "body": "In June, amid the golden fields,\nI saw a groundhog lying dead.\nDead lay he; my senses shook,\nAnd mind outshot our naked frailty.\n\nThere lowly in the vigorous summer\nHis form began its senseless change,\nAnd made my senses waver dim\nSeeing nature ferocious in him.\n\nInspecting close maggots’ might\nAnd seething cauldron of his being,\nHalf with loathing, half with a strange love,\nI poked him with an angry stick.\n\nThe fever arose, became a flame\nAnd Vigour circumscribed the skies,\nImmense energy in the sun,\nAnd through my frame a sunless trembling.\n\nMy stick had done nor good nor harm.\nThen stood I silent in the day\nWatching the object, as before;\nAnd kept my reverence for knowledge\n\nTrying for control, to be still,\nTo quell the passion of the blood;\nUntil I had bent down on my knees\nPraying for joy in the sight of decay.\n\nAnd so I left; and I returned\nIn Autumn strict of eye, to see\nThe sap gone out of the groundhog,\nBut the bony sodden hulk remained\n\nBut the year had lost its meaning,\nAnd in intellectual chains\nI lost both love and loathing,\nMured up in the wall of wisdom.\n\nAnother summer took the fields again\nMassive and burning, full of life,\nBut when I chanced upon the spot\nThere was only a little hair left,\n\nAnd bones bleaching in the sunlight\nBeautiful as architecture;\nI watched them like a geometer,\nAnd cut a walking stick from a birch.\n\nIt has been three years, now.\nThere is no sign of the groundhog.\nI stood there in the whirling summer,\nMy hand capped a withered heart,\n\nAnd thought of China and of Greece,\nOf Alexander in his tent;\nOf Montaigne in his tower,\nOf Saint Theresa in her wild lament.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "hark-back": { - "title": "“Hark Back”", - "body": "To have stepped lightly among European marbles\nDwelling in a pantheon of air;\n\nTo have altered the gods in a fact of being;\n\nTo have envisaged the marriage\nOf everything new with the old,\n\nAnd sprung a free spirit in the world\n\nIs to have caught my own spirit\nOn a bicycle in the morning\n\nRiding out of Paris,\nHeading South.\n\nMy flesh felt so good\nI was my own god.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-i-could-only-live": { - "title": "“If I Could only Live”", - "body": "If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness\nWhen everything is as it was in my childhood\nViolent, vivid, and of infinite possibility\nThat the sun and the moon broke over my head.\n\nThen I cast time out of the trees and fields,\nThen I stood immaculate in the Ego;\nThen I eyed the world with all delight,\nReality was the perfection of my sight.\n\nAnd time has big handles on the hands,\nFields and trees a way of being themselves.\nI saw battalions of the race of mankind\nStanding stolid, demanding a moral answer.\n\nI gave the moral answer, and I died\nAnd into a world of complexity came\nWhere nothing is possible but Necessity\nAnd the truth wailing there like a red babe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "indian-summer": { - "title": "“Indian Summer”", - "body": "I saw my days as passionate integers,\nThey leaped upon the wind as leaves\nLeaping upon the wind; not Spring leaves\nFixed; I see them all as Autumn leaves.\n\nIt is the season of my mellowest appetite,\nAnd germane to my soul; cruel times forgot,\nUnvexing, the joyful. Plain days unspecified.\nThe clear enchantment of dry exhalations!\n\nI would speak a word deep and pure,\nPure and deep, deep, deep and pure.\nAnd these Autumnal days speak for me here--\nRealization--else what is Autumn for?\n\nI think the Indian Summer’s long regard\nFlanks all the days with resonance--\nThat I shall never be more richly blessed\nThan I am breathing in it now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "jealousy": { - "title": "“Jealousy”", - "body": "The leaves fairly burst out; summer’s ability\nWas a fore-shape of a visual utility,\nThe leaves believing in their own fertility.\n\nTo him who in the paradox of inability\nWas able to see the ultimate inutility\nThe leaves, like all, spelled infertility.\n\nAbility to take himself out of the world’s\nUtility, by the gigantic act of suicide’s\nFertility, was what shook the naked nature.\n\nIt was his inability to fore-shape the leaves,\nFelt senseless inutility, the sensuous trees,\nThat dressed infertility in mental loneliness.\n\nThe trees were laughing at his nullity.\nIt may be that error has its own stability.\nThe shaping eye owes fidelity to the senses.\n\nFatality is an instance of the sun.\nMentality is man but not his master.\nThe Creator as fabulist of ineluctability.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-kiss-of-stillness": { - "title": "“The Kiss of Stillness”", - "body": "When stillness steps barefooted in\nAnd like a lover locks the door,\nMy room becomes a shadowy place\nThat I have never known before.\n\nAnd as she weaves her spell around me\nUrgent as the growth of roses,\nSinuously her rhythm falls\nAnd on my naked being closes.\n\nI have forgotten how the wind\nSprings up the air like winging geese;\nAnd how the rain comes down on roofs\nAware of springtime, crooning peace.\n\nI have forgotten how the waves\nRush to the taut rocks, thundering\nThe sea’s heart as they lash the shore,\nBut break with muttered wondering.\n\nI have forgotten skies that moan\nAnd in the stress of wild storms tremble;\nCliffs that slowly cold and sunshine\nTry, and shatter, and dissemble.\n\nTumult clanging through tall towns\nIs hurrying life I cannot keep;\nAnd pain as terrible as fire\nIs like an unremembered sleep.\n\nThen as the stillness, like a lover\nLingering, with full love lingers,\nSuddenly and strange I feel\nAlong my throat her cool white fingers.\n\nI am one with every stone,\nI am one with every seed,\nMingled with the air and earth,\nWoven into man and weed.\n\nI am the rhythms of the ocean,\nI am dawns of aeoned peace.\nI am man before his coming.\nI am Egypt. I am Greece.\n\nThe singing of the starlight, I,\nAnd I am man when he is gone.\nAll living things that breathe and die,\nAll being, lonely and alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "late-summer": { - "title": "“Late Summer”", - "body": "Etched old heads\nOf men of seventy\nI see you bending to a Martini\nTelling your exploits\n\nHow many\nHow many\nHave not achieved\nYour state of grace.\n\nAstute old heads,\nEach feature a statement\nOf nature attentive,\n\nDeath the grotesque\nTook all the others,\n\nOld sovereign heads\nClarified in Salem,\nIn an eighteenth century house,\nCertified in Castine,\n\nNow, going toward a new decade,\nI cherish the incised major\nOf eyebrow and stance,\nSapid old men of the seventies.\n\nYou have been\nIn Africa or in Asia,\nThe winds are blowing,\nCherish the Martini.\n\nI read your skin of sixteen,\nYour bridegroom flush,\nYour further, your father anger.\n\nIt has fled,\nThe times have fled,\nLife like a dream flown,\nTime pipes you abroad.\n\nYour tucked features\nOn an August evening\nSpeak for a grace of nature,\n\nTeak old heads\nOf men of seventy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "from-letter-i": { - "title": "From “Letter I”", - "body": "Art is the product of a driving will,\nIn Western man more evident than in Eastern\nYet the passive Oriental fabricant of a holku\nStill directs it to a delicate repose.\nDestiny is the shaper of the will,\nIts sometime killer, in a long argument in time.\nIt is the fate of circumstances, the texture\nOf the times, multifarious objectifications,\nPressures of families, friends, and state,\nConfrontation of the evil of managerial individuals,\nCallousness and pestiferousness of mankind,\nThe turn of decades turning for the worse,\nPolitical strife leading to stultifying war\nThat shapes the will to forms of art it takes\nOr shapes the art despite the sharpening will.\n\nIt has often been said in extenuation\nThat poetry, if not of lies, is made of pseudo-statements\nIncapable of proof: a web of phantasies\nLeading man into the dangerous lands of Myth.\nBy devious travel he will voyage and will come\nInto far sight of the mountains of illusion;\nBetween Scylla and Charybdis if not overwhelmed\nBy squalls of ancient fury, or by topmast felled,\nOn the rocky shores of fabulous Sicily\nHe will lose his men and wreck his boat.\nOr struggling up the rocky cliff at Taormina\nWhere on the perilous topcrest sits the stamped jewel\nThat is the Greek theater with its slender columns,\nA windowless realm of the late imagination\nLooking across one way the dialectical waters\nWhile to the west the white summit of chaste Aetna\nBurns in the blue dome ethereal, imponderable,\nHe will come to these sights derelict and spent\nFor he cannot tell the past from the present,\nMaimed he will be, he will be thrown in chains\nKilled by the cruel king like those who sought fame\nFar from home by thus adventuring to die\nIn a land of olives under a white sky.\n\nThe counsel of the scientist in his study\nIs not to voyage beyond the rule of measure,\nBy materialistic means to manipulate fact,\nIf, to be sure, he cannot manipulate the weather.\nPoetry with his truth is irreconcilable\nAnd the heart of poetry is unanalyzable.\nThe incapability of proof of poetic statement\nShows ancient courage in the heart of man, not meant\nTo unravel the secrets of the universe\nBut, by His will, to praise the Lord in verse.\nFor it is the unknowable and the unfathomable,\nThe unpredictable and the unreasonable\nThat reveal to man where he is able,\nWho needs not give account to the unaccountable\nNor vaunt himself to say that he has the answer\nTo immortality, evil or good, the dance, the dancer.\nThe poet would always voyage to Cythère.\n\nAcross an infinitude of unstable air\nHis will to praise the realm of the unknown\nIs stubborn and ancient in his marrow bone.\nFor it is by his myths, his dreams, these in his heart\nThat man knows himself man, and the poet makes his art.\nIf any proof be needed that he is wrong,\nThe most ancient wish of man was sung in song.\nPoetry loves where there is fallacy\nAnd lives where there is error and frailty,\nIt mirrors well, and spurns not, humanity,\nA natural element as deep as is the sea.\nHave no fear of it; it will live long\nThough it slumber often in many a tongue,\nAnd though, like man, it never will know God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light-from-above": { - "title": "“Light from Above”", - "body": "The vigor and majesty of the air,\nEmpurpled in October, in an afternoon\n\nOf scudding clouds with sun breaking through\nShowing a militant light on mountain and river,\n\nIs the imperial power\nGreater than man’s works\n\nI praise and sing; my headlong delight\nIn unsymbolic gestures of eternity;\n\nFor here, surely, above the worn farms,\nTheir stoical souls and axe patience,\n\nWhatever man learned from the soil, from\nSociety, and from his time-locked\n\nIs the greater, the grand, the impersonal gesture\nAnd the imperial power; here, the great sky,\n\nFull of profound adventure beyond man’s losses,\nTosses the locks of a strong, abrasive radiance\n\nFrom the beginning, and through the time of man,\nAnd into the future beyond our love and wit,\n\nAnd in the vigor and majesty of the air\nI, empurpled, think on unity\n\nGlimpsed in pure visual belief\nWhen the sky expresses beyond our powers\n\nThe fiat of a great assurance", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "looking-down": { - "title": "“Looking Down”", - "body": "I want to walk upon a tree\nThat is a bridge across a river\n(I’ll hold to branches as I go),\nAnd watch the sleepy water slow\nTo silence underneath, and dream\nA little over sands that gleam\nBeneath the shallow water. I\nHave need of looking down from sky\nAnd clouds to water, and I wish\nTo see below some thin bright fish\nThat take old sunlight from the sand\nAnd have a drowsiness from land\nLooming around them like a night\n(Flaming and stunned in the water’s light).\n\nIf I stand still upon a tree\nFor long, I think that I may be\nAware, by looking straightly down\n(By looking very closely down),\nOf what it is that is so still\nIn water, even though it thrill\nWith roar of mountains whence it came.\nAnd I shall never be the same\nKnowing this stillness looking down,\nBefore I cross and walk to town.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lapres-midi-dun-faune": { - "title": "“L’apres-Midi D’un Faune”", - "body": "Caught in the gossamer veil of tone, the frail\nEcstatic quivering of leaves at dawn,\nUnder the golden fingers of the sun,\n\nHeld for an instant the play of fugitive light\nShimmering along the boughs of trees, falling\nDelicately down, incredibly chiselling the ground,\n\nWon from the massive turn of the earth the flush\nOf the vivid sky when day is near to its ruin,\nVibrant at dusk with glory and desolation,\n\nFixed into rapture utterly the rhythm of life,\nThrobbing and wafting, tremulous with tumult,\nWound on a core of sound in the luminous air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meditation-by-an-old-barn-in-the-heat-of-summertime": { - "title": "“Meditation by an Old Barn in the Heat of Summertime”", - "body": "The spirit fails and fades,\nAnd then you know reality,\nHard reality of words, the bare bones,\nThe bare ideas, which did no good,\nThe life which did no good,\nThe death which did no good,\nThe spirit which did no good.\n\nBut memory, in loveliness and grace of flesh,\nBrings blossom and lightness to the eye,\nAnd the brown thrasher confused among the rose bushes,\nGlimpse of a woman just in the waves,\nStance of the Admiral adjusting his pipe at the Club,\nThrongs of aircraft, hums of bees,\nThe antiaircraft which makes you say: like thunder:\n\nSomething connects them all,\nSomething inescapable,\nThe red cardinal I cannot see in the green tree,\nIn old Virginia.\nThe essential color blindness,\nCentral, controlling ignorance\nAfter many years of awkwardness\nThat is the waywardness of order.\n\nSomething about the fall\nOf man,\nA cradling creature\nWho continuously kills his neighbor,\nUpon whom disgust has no measure\nBut laughter (the ironic is a treasure)\nAgainst his heavy witless foolery,\nAnd there is a tooth in blasphemy,\nThe skirl, why is he not better?\n\nO Evanescence! that takes away\nEven the knowledge of oneself,\nDoes not let you know who you are,\nShifts the winds of circumstance,\nVeils by days, by months, by years,--\nHave I put my mind upon it,\nThe subtle essence that is always evanescent,\nThe substance that is unknown, working against man?\n\nThat not philosophy, its integration,\nNot government, its suppositions,\nArt, its reality,\nNor religion, its mystical consolations\nHave heart before a very breath of air?\nMagnificent! were it not for the human condition, but\nCathedral spire and bombs away,\nJuke box, feathery oratory,\n\nAre man’s witnesses; his action never ceases.\nAgainst the evanescent he seeks protections.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "new-hampshire-february": { - "title": "“New Hampshire, February”", - "body": "Nature had made them hide in crevices,\nTwo wasps so cold they looked like bark.\nWhy I do not know, but I took them\nAnd I put them\nIn a metal pan, both day and dark.\n\nLike God touching his finger to Adam\nI felt, and thought of Michelangelo,\nFor whenever I breathed on them,\nThe slightest breath,\nThey leaped, and preened as if to go.\n\nMy breath controlled them always quite.\nMore sensitive than electric sparks\nThey came into life\nOr they withdrew to ice,\nWhile I watched, suspending remarks.\n\nThen one in a blind career got out,\nAnd fell to the kitchen for. I\nCrushed him with my cold ski boot,\nBy accident. The other\nHad not the wit to try or die.\n\nAnd so the other is still my pet.\nThe moral of this is plain.\nBut I will shirk it.\nYou will not like it. And\nGod does not live to explain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "night-watch-on-the-pacific": { - "title": "“Night Watch on the Pacific”", - "body": "There are no hills that lead the spirit up\nTo watch the colors tip-toe on the air,\nOr hear the sound held in a buttercup.\nThere are no hills to see, yet everywhere\nThe endless ocean holds the color’s heart\nAnd keeps in each cool wave the core of sound.\nI am grown suddenly still, and dwell apart,\nLike one in an amazing kingdom found.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-truth-the-protagonist-speaking": { - "title": "“Of Truth: The Protagonist Speaking”", - "body": "O the wicked, winking incidence of truth!\nThe wicked wink and incidents of truth;\nThe wink, the flicker, the flight, the snicker, the flare,\nThe raging actor fying, baring bodkin.\nWhen I fetch it, it is gone; where leave it,\nFind it. Unruly, leonine, most unruly substance!\nSubstance? It haunts me like all shadows. All shades\nOf meaning whipping in and out are there.\nThis torturer is a great lover of professors,\nPsychiatrists, chaplains, sits on their faces’ skin\nBut when I look at them it’s on my own,\nThen flies to another place, leaves me in arrears.\nKing bat! He leaps out of the ink of the sages;\nOr benched judge plying a black batlet;\nHe is the blood-dressed ghost walking all battlefields,\nI sense his uncanny wing in the air of the age.\nMysterious essence! to be so wary-vaporish,\nThat cannot be found honestly anywhere,\nRefusing with an absolute sublimity\nSatisfaction to the adept at adding up.\nThe learned doctor has got him in his indices?\nThe lecturer has him in his leaves? The leaves\nHave him in their lectures? The lawyers have him\nIn legalism? The President has got him in his speeches?\nHas the astronomer caught him in the starlight?\nThe epileptic, paling, in a jagged flash? The hirsute\nPommeller in a left to the jaw, and a right\nTo the jaw? The pilot seeing the icing wing?\nThe janitors banding together to strike at Yale?\nOr does he reside in beddings of cold terror\nIn the root and remorseless heart of cancer?\nDoes he dwell in the realm of sleety accident\nWhere he rides with death at the automobile wheel?\nDevil or angel, child or seer or both,\nThe absolute in the relative, the relative in\nThe absolute, the Bible or the yelping babe,\nHe comes at me but I cannot come at him.\nAs the spectacular is suspect, but passivity\nIs a means often given undue prominence,\nTruth is I avow a vast middle quality,\nNot voided, although it never will be known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "offering-to-the-body": { - "title": "“Offering to the Body”", - "body": "I give up to my body the gross fact\nThat it is not perfect, as I expected\nWhen in youth I preened myself in my excess,\nBelieving that nothing of it was suspect.\n\nWhat long day-shine of ramifying revery\nI enjoyed in the apple orchard and jungle\nOf extreme vegetation when I was replete\nWith an ardor so powerful it was exact.\n\nThen in those days I loved myself alone,\nWas both male and female, both old and young,\nLiving the long summer days in wholeness, and\nIn harmony with self and all living beings.\n\nNothing was so great as to be alive alone\nAnd stand and walk and sit and dream\nIn the incomparable hours that had no ending,\nIn endless world of delight that would ever seem.\n\nI offer my body the high estate of my esteem,\nI look upon it with joy of its long dream,\nI wonder as I wondered when I was young\nOf the intricacies and mechanisms of its means.\n\nI am as close to it as to the spiritual,\nAlthough this conglomeration of sinews and muscle\nAggravates time to bring it down to nothing,\nMaking of the very complex the very simple.\n\nI write to the paradox of the living flesh\nThat it seems capable but is doomed to end\nAnd while I have a flowing hand may state the truth\nThat truth is beyond the body, lofted to sky,\n\nSo that, seeing the body fail, time take it away,\nI offer it the grace of a passing bow of words,\nSalute its efforts as its efforts rise and fall,\nAll a strange tale, and a strange tale to tell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "only-in-the-dream": { - "title": "“Only in the Dream”", - "body": "Only in the dream that is like sleep\nWhen time has taken the measure of live things\nBy stark origination\nIs mankind redeemed.\n\nOnly in the melancholy of the music\nOf the midnight within the blood\nComes the fulfillment\nAfter faring years.\n\nOnly in the balance of dark tenderness\nWhen everything is seen in its purity\nDo we penetrate\nThe myth of mankind.\n\nOnly in the mastery of love\nIs anything known of the world,\nDeath put aside\nWith pure intent.\n\nOnly in the long wastes of loss\nComes the mystical touch on the brow\nThat triumph grow,\nInsatiable, again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "order-again": { - "title": "“Order Again”", - "body": "I return to order as one ailing.\nI become the thing I long for and desire.\nI am a momentary order\nSpeaking harmony before disaster.\n\nIt is something to have forsaken faiths.\nIt is much to see every eye afresh.\nIt is a kind of resurrection\nTo have outlived each prejudice.\n\nNow the sun is a misty master,\nAnd the air is a moist forgiveness.\nNow I believe I am free\nWho wished to believe himself free.\n\nTo speak for order in a time of chaos\nIs the tough, root rights of man,\nAnd rite of undeniable, tensile strength,\nTo those who have hidden springs.\n\nLet then a symphony begin,\nAnd subtle sweep, and waiting string,\nThat the fine harmonies in-ring\nAnd the soul dwell in immaterial things.\n\nAnd let us be as we were once,\nBefore experience and time compelled us,\nLet us revel in the pure delight\nOf the first kingdoms of our sight.\n\nI return to order where I was\nBefore the necessity of the world\nAnd I dream upon that kingdom\nAs the drowning see the skies above them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "order-and-disorder": { - "title": "“Order and Disorder”", - "body": "A passion came to me in the form of order,\nTo order all things in the mind.\nSeek then frenzy, the foliating blood, then,\nSeek the schisms of the stars, the will.\n\nAnd did the passion come from order’s self?\nI heard in the wind the falling of a leaf.\nAnd as the night’s weak eye bore down on mine,\nWas I its killer, was I its thief?\n\nStrange things go on in the subtle night,\nIn the darkness the ages murmur and tremble.\nPlato conceives, and Aristotle measures,\nBuddha thinks deep, and Christ is burning white.\n\nEach is an order, but each is a blight.\nI feel my blood abounding, massive in darkness.\nEach was an order, but each its order closing\nIn total harmony, save only Christ.\n\nAnd the passion was a wild air of night,\nIt was a violation of the mind in its order,\nA tumult, a transgression, ingression,\nChrist’s blood the strain in truth’s disorder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "plain-song-talk": { - "title": "“Plain Song Talk”", - "body": "I speak of the history of the world,\nSo deep there is no fathoming it,\nAt the depths of which one cannot speak,\nBefore which we whistle in the wind.\n\nOur days and years are a vain attempt\nTo quell the meaning of the universe,\nBut we are worsted as the days go by,\nWe are shuffled into a bin of night.\n\nI speak of the hopes we had in youth,\nThe diminishing powers we had as time went by,\nOf sufferings old or new, and always doubt.\nAnd of death the less said the better.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-poem-in-construction": { - "title": "From “Poem in Construction”", - "body": "I wrote Helen a letter but got no reply\nThey say marriage is equivalent to to die.\nI long for that girl of Park Avenue\nAnd I long for her blue tiny shoe,\nI long, in fact, for the past, the past, the big sky.\n\nFor now all I have is a book crammed with ink,\nNow all I have to do is to sit still and think\nWith nothing but black characters around,\nNothing at all to take at one bound,\nI’m the bookish man who must compendiously shrink\n\nWhen I look to the future I see the big guns\nI feel the maggots eating, those angelic ones,\nMy compound fracture where I lie\nOn a field or in a cast, to die\nOf the evil of a world the delicate heart stuns.\n\nO the folly and wreckage of man I dote on!\nO the mind that ponders folly I gloat on!\nThe ancient contemplation of the navel\nCan still be a spiritual revel,\nWhile the mad world founders on, anon on.\n\nEurope was, after all, like a jewel box\nAnd gem of great price, a magnificent hoax\nSeemingly limitless, magnificent\nFor a red youth to be spent\nAmong her mountains, cathedrals and ancient\n\nShe lay there like a mysterious woman\nWith a myriad invitations and summons\nWanting to be taken, but faking\nWanton, uncommunicative nakedness,\nEnglish head, Parisian heart in common.\n\nShe was a physical, but also a spiritual call,\nShe held my life for years in her thrall,\nWander-love best, in melancholy\nCame to a rest, if not holy\nBy a Greek temple, a mossy dell or a col.\n\nChartres had its charm many a time;\nGrenoble, Tours, Nice, Amiens, Nimes,\nChateaubriand still at St. Malo;\nThe old foods to miss at Mont St. Michel;\nAnd ramparts of Carcassonne in December wintershine.\n\nLondon the male part and Paris the female\nWith offspring of a beryled Taormina tale,\nLife stretching vexed limbs between\nCharybdis-Scylla sea-green\nAnd Aetna’s white grain that the spirit not fail!\n\nAnd Rome the city: the cost, the conquest, the catacombs!\nThe old ghosts, the air’s gold, and the old domes!\nWhere the wear of the worldly\nImperial power turned early a surly\nLight before cut Florence’s high tome and cone.\n\nI discover in memory how it is to be free,\nNot in the event are there many eyes to see;\nBut eternal elation enlivens\nIn meditation time’s environs\nAs equally eternal despair goads the mystery.\n\nAnd still the evil of all centuries, contiguous\nTo every heart that this late roams the world,\nFlares through the bomb-light a fierce flag unfurled\nAnd still the doleful light is in us\nAnd root of war growing, murder-conspicuous.\n\n“They daily torture the poor Christ anew”\nSomebody said, I remember it clearly\nAnd it stays with me daily, yearly,\nIt is a statement that is clean and is true,\nIt goes through the action of me and of you.\n\nBut I think of her there, her hair all golden,\nWherever her blue eyes dart\nIs a world of music at a start\nAnd a roaming, and a ranging, a glory not told in\nMere fugitive replies of a risible pen.\n\nAmerica of the abolished towers to escape\nIn my kind of fighting: what was justice but\nRaging on every ancient city’s jutty\nOf rugged, or time-sequestered beauty,\nDiscoverable sanctity of some lucid cape?\n\nOr lively abolition of such ease,\nThe long galleries of Chinese sights!\nBuddha’s ecstatic calm, the still nights,\nEndless without decrease and without increase\nWill of a world, will-less-a world appeased?\n\nWhere the dull ox turned the dull stone\nOut of time, and the woman there\nSo silent was in the immobile air\nLike a statue she, and a fly had gone\nUp and down her face unturned upon.\n\nAnd the Chinese bells of the temple tolled\nSuch nameless depth in the full heart\nThe full throat uttered no cry,\nThe breath made never a sigh,\nThe peace of the place: green veils of mold.\n\nTrance defined is trance traduced;\nThe leap of the heart is the race produced.\nIncessant surges the summer\nOften the sea invites the swimmer\nAnd on the body the lashing tide of action is loosed.\n\nO the glory of the unresolvable!\nThe might and persistence of our lack of control!\nBuddha benign, Christ afire\nEnd our longing, light our desire.\nBut words are the wicked talent of the soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "politics": { - "title": "“Politics”", - "body": "To be rational about politics\nIs to take a rash step\nFor surely as they change\nYou will find yourself out of step.\n\nAn irrational attitude is better,\nSome bold improbable commitment\nWhich may overlap boundaries\nAnd land you right for 1999.\n\nTo eschew them is the classic mark,\nYet politics assail us inwardly\nAs governments mull our disorder,\nAnd should we wish to be aloof?\n\nA shrewd eye may see a spectacle,\nSavor a style, inject a note,\nBut shrewdness is unpolitical,\nPolitics is the people’s choice.\n\nRush in, unreasonable roysterer,\nDisrupt the game in the grand manner,\nIt is serious to be mistaken,\nIt is pleasant to be two-faced.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-preternatural-wildness-of-the-subliminal-spirit": { - "title": "“The Preternatural Wildness of the Subliminal Spirit”", - "body": "_Touch the quick of the matter,\nWild newness in the world.\nBrotherhood, brotherhood!_\n\nNewness leaps in the lights\nOf the Cathedral Square at Mexico City,\nLights at dusk over the square of revolution,\nHundreds of pricking revolutionary songs,\n\nWhere mingled bloods bespeak democracy,\nWhere Negrita was long since a word of praise,\nWhere Cortes wept by the old tree still living,\nEven though Keats made his boyish mistake.\n\nLook, it is December of Our Lady of Guadalupe,\nThe Indians come by thousands in breakless devotion,\nI mingle with the throngs of the world on their knees,\nWhose poetry is a richness beyond intelligence.\n\nLook, we have come to a Paradise on earth, Purua,\nReverse of wilderness, a Paradise worked from nature\nWhere like Roman emperors in radioactive baths\nBubbles arise around our bodies like endless lightness.\n\nLook, we see the mummies of Guanajuato,\nDescending narrow steps down into the tomb,\nHere are the Christian souls standing up as corpses,\nOne woman, fuxed, holds before her a mummified foetus.\n\nWhen we were coming to this necropolis,\nThe sweet blue coffin of a baby dead in a year\nWe saw carried on the shoulders of the young parents\nTo the cemetery where the mummies dwell.\n\nThey placed this tender baby in a place of bones,\nIn the dignity of the long journey upward,\nGreat Mother! I would cry my heart out hard\nBut for the solace of Our Lady of Guadalupe!\n\nLook, we take a thousand curves of the mountains,\nLovers of the Zapotecs more than of the Aztecs,\nWe come through cacti to hot, pacific Acapulco\nThere we see the passionate, plunging end,\n\nLook, see, the passionate end of the continent,\nYoung boys who pray before they leap,\nWhere we have always leaped before we prayed,\nThey leap toward death, but escape to life\n\nDown a hundred and thirty feet of cliff\nInto the rising of the tide, a great dash\nOf small man from a gaunt height,\nThey dive into danger, they dive to live.\n\nHere is brown Salvadore who has caught the sea bass\nOff Puerto Vallarta, cut and streaked with salt,\nWe sit under primitive shade by the Pacific,\nHe poles us to the hot, lulled waters inland\n\nTo the ancient iguana, which swart Salvadore\nReveals unmoving on a tree from his dugout canoe\nFar up a mangrove bayou in the bird-calling morning,\nArmored. the animal is more armored than man.\n\nWhat more time-defeating than to see an iguana\nWith hands for his feet, and hands for his hands,\nInfinitely older than man, armored and plated,\nLook from his ancient eyes on ancient Mexico,\n\nA prince of endeavor, beyond the brunt of Shakespeare,\nI salute your archaic eye, archaic creature,\nI salute you at the top of the tropical morning,\nSurvivor of Alexander and Hitler, semaphore dictators.\n\nLook, we have seen Popacatapetl\nBeyond the valley of the temple of the moon,\nAnd the Eternal Woman lying in the skies,\nWe have drunk the mystical draft of altitude.\n\nSix on a side on burros play polo\nAs the Pacific strikes the sands with salvos.\nThe red and the yellow, they urge on the burros,\nCrying out in harsh cries, burro, burro,\n\nAnd as a man hits the ball hard on the sand,\nHe falls off the creature; the beasts will not rise\nTo the passion of man for victory,\nIt is a hopeless melee of comic spectacle.\n\nThe soft brutes with their serene faces\nRefuse in their absolute poise of nature\nTo go faster, or turn quicker, or run\nHard on the goal with beatings and proddings,\n\nTheir resistance is splendid and final.\nThey react to the enthusiasm of man,\nWho endlessly thinks he can change them,\nWith a profound superiority of nature\n\nSo that they do not know who is winning or losing,\nWho it is who falls off or stays on,\nWhat is the meaning of this Sunday fracas\nAnd why they are making such a commotion,\n\nBut the burros of Mexico are the victors,\nWho, tireless and put upon by mankind,\nShow their dignity by the side of the Pacific,\nThey do not frolic to lose their integrity.\n\nAnd, I saw a father who had three young daughters,\nWho offered tequila before hot-pepper lunch,\nShow such love to them in unself-conscious caresses\nAs to stun the heart with reverence,\n\nWho taught that the adult is a child,\nThe child is an adult, and in this holy communion\nLove exists as a single reality,\nBeyond poverty and wealth, before tequila.\n\n_Touch the quick of the matter,\nWild newness in the world.\nBrotherhood, brotherhood!_\n\nI saw in Morelia where they let us in the doors\nJust before the great doors closed, in the close\nA thousand children sitting in lines around a square,\nAwait the pageant of an ancient mystery.\n\nAll was order, harmony, and expectation.\nMary sat upon a donkey, dressed in heavenly blue.\nAnd Joseph led the beast around the ancient square\nWhile all the children watched in praise, singing till dusk.\n\nIn St. Miguel de Allende, down from the square,\nWe chanced into a church and sat in the rear\nWhere hundreds of children sang the service,\nExuberant whistles shook the nave and stones,\n\nPassionate cries in the face of Christ Our Lord,\nAs if nothing could be more pagan or child like,\nThen they carried the Virgin on young shoulders\nLong through the throngs of the Mexican solidarity.\n\nAnd all the children rushed out of the doors\nTo receive Christmas presents from loving women,\nIt seemed as if love were a living thing,\nIt seemed as if mystery were bearable.\n\nIn the tombs of ancient Mitla near Oaxaca,\nAnd in the tombs of Monte Alban, and where Quetzalcoatl,\nThe blond god of the powerful Aztecs, where\nThe stone serpents gaze through centuries on man.\n\nWhere the rich, mysterious past suffuses\nThe inexplicable nature of the universe\nAnd makes us wonder on ourselves,\nOn the value of the individual will,\n\nIn these tombs and through these ancient mysteries\nOf being, conquest, endurance, and belief,\nWe who would leap out of the planet,\nElecting new worlds of the universe,\n\nSee in the valley of the Pyramids,\nHear in the bells of Taxco and Oaxaca,\nFeel in the devout at Guadalupe,\nSense in the conflicts of revolution,\n\nThrough lives and deaths of governments,\nIn the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood\nIn Mexico man’s passionate realization,\nThe struggle of mankind for brotherhood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_guadalupe" - } - } - }, - "the-project": { - "title": "“The Project”", - "body": "The mail box, the roadway, and the dump truck\na day in June blue and gold\n\nThe play rock, the high swing, the pine stand\na race of children readying time\n\nA prospect of a legendary Connecticut\nangler flicking his fly in amber evening\n\nTumble of waters at Diana’s pool\nDive, shimmer and roil of bathers, devotees.\n\nIt is the pageant of the American summer\nBlue, gold, and high, an elegance of time.\n\nWhen freefoot lads find a decaying animal\nIn the woods, one yells “Helpl Don’t breathe it!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "riches": { - "title": "“Riches”", - "body": "The riches of my life shall never fail\nIf I can only put these riches down.\nHow, when I was young I aspired to Heaven.\nHow, when to tempestuous manhood grown,\nI locked on irony; only laughter could leaven\n\nThe bitter ring of truth that desolates,\nThe fact we never triumph, but capitulate\nTo relativity, and take our stride in a city\nMore _circus maximus_ than spiritual\nSanctuary, richer in reason than in pity,\n\nRicher in sensuous realities and stratagems\nThan in knowledge of the good, the true, the pure,\nFor we have lived through clamors and decay,\nWe have fought for brightness in the dark,\nWe have claimed what poetry has to say.\n\nThere is a kind of fighting in my soul, too,\nHamlet, and was since first I saw the fate\nOf day, my spirit ever swifter, fiercer\nThan this time’s dubious traits allow,\nAnd I would be truth’s worrier and piercer.\n\nBut that the desire and need of dramatic sense\nCould fund a hero in a time of doubt,\nBut that the soul were fleshed with highest talk,\nBut that a gleam of true belief were seen\nIn brutish thickets where we, flowered, walk\n\nIn sensuous matrices of our own concerns,\nForced by reason to dispersal of passion,\nOrdered by order to disclaim the glory\nOf man’s subtle spirit striving and wavering,\nWhere love is the flame breath of the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "search": { - "title": "“Search”", - "body": "I am torn because I cannot find on earth\nAn answer to the sunset’s aching cry.\nAnd in philosophers I feel the dearth\nOf all philosophy. I long to die.\n\nFor man gropes like a worm along the earth\nAnd cannot see his way, and does not know\nWhat his own death may be, or what his birth,\nOr why the rainbow comes, or why the snow.\n\nI call upon the moon, and then the sun,\nAnd search the moving heavens with my eyes.\nThen it is spring! And flowers leap up and run,\nTorching the earth, exultant to the skies!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seeing-is-deceiving": { - "title": "“Seeing is Deceiving”", - "body": "Having fed impalpably on the ineluctable\nIn yearlong passion of the unfathomed,\nTo realign the mystery of the ineffable,\n\nHaltingly, haltingly, in lofty clashes,\nLongsight glare, in total psychic refusal,\nHe would not allow his eyes to see the rose.\n\nThe rose that is with blood transfused,\nThe rose absolute, rose of all the world,\nFlower of the flesh, flesh of the very flower,\n\nIntruding organ of most rage-potential sense,\nRich rugged rose, the years in their dark make,\nSagest blossoms that can break and bless,\n\nHe would not in a high perfection sit,\nStaring the day away in anarchy\nThat saw a heaven in imperfection’s makeshifts,\n\nAnd told the world in the etcher’s fine escape,\nThe gardens clamant in the blare of June,\nBirds precise, clouds fixed, grasses interlaced\n\nWith grasses as they are, and nature had,\nBut crying against perfection of the sight\nHe broke perfection with the inner eye,\n\nSomber, strange, amorphous, vast, replete,\nAnd all his organs in the dark of time\nCreated the secret of an ultimatum.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "singular-desolate-out-of-it": { - "title": "“Singular, Desolate, out of It”", - "body": "I saw an old man walking along the street\nApparently far beyond my liveliness.\nI shuddered, God let me not be like him.\nAlthough far off, I discovered myself in him.\n\nI forgot the old man for another decade,\nSo singular, so desolate, so out of it.\nNow, without the power to be myself again,\nGod spent time, and made me look like him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-skier-and-the-mountain": { - "title": "“The Skier and the Mountain”", - "body": "The gods are too airy: feathery as the snow\nWhen its consistency is just the imagination’s,\nI recognize, but also in an airy, gauzy way\nThat it will capture me, I will never capture it.\nThe imagination is too elusive, too like me.\nThe gods are the airiness of my spirit.\nI have dreamed upon them tiptop dreams,\nYet they elude me, like the next step on the ski\nI pole along, push upward, I see the summit,\nYet the snow on which I glide is treachery.\nThe gods are too airy. It is their elusive nature\nI in my intellectual pride have wished to know.\nI have thought I knew what I was doing,\nGliding over the cold, resisting element,\nToward some summit all my strength could take.\nThe gods are the fascination of the place, they escape\nThe genius of the place they make. They evade\nThe blood of our question. Imagination is a soaring,\nIt never allows the firm, inevitable step.\nThe gods tantalize me, and the gods’ imaginations.\nI am thus the captured actor, the taken one,\nThe used, I am used up by the will of the gods,\nI am their imagination, lost to self and to will.\nIn this impossibility is my humility.\n\nI saw an old country god of the mountain,\nFar up, leaning out of the summit mist,\nBorn beyond time, and wise beyond our wisdom.\nHe was beside an old, gnarled trunk of a tree\nBlasted by the winds. Stones outcropped the snow,\nThere where the summit was bare, or would be bare.\nI thought him a dream-like creature, a god beyond evil,\nAnd thought to speak of the portent of my time,\nTo broach some ultimate question. No bird\nFlew in this fying mist. As I raised my voice\nTo shape the matters of the intellect\nAnd integrate the spirit, the old, wise god,\nNatural to the place, positive and free,\nVanished as he had been supernatural dream.\nI was astonished by his absence, deprived\nOf the astonishment of his presence, standing\nIn a reverie of the deepest mist, cloud and snow,\nSolitary on the mountain slope: the vision gone,\nEven as the vision came. This was then the gods’ meaning,\nThat they leave us in our true humanity,\nElusive, shadowy gods of our detachment,\nWho lead us to the summits, and keep their secrets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "song-for-the-death-of-my-uncle-in-illinois": { - "title": "“Song for the Death of My Uncle in Illinois”", - "body": "Here is such perfection as the world dreamed of.\nBut earth receives him, and the worms begin to choir\nEven as the boys are singing _Te Deum Laudamus_.\nThere, is the perfection man knows not of.\n\nAnd as the heavy burden of the years\n(I wept no tear) bore Honour, Justice, Fame\nI made a solemn resolution; I would\nDole the dream beyond the earth and sky,\n\nErect an arbitrary word and sign,\nFor sightlessness the seeing word,\nFor thoughtlessness a sacred chamber music,\nMysterious from the womb unto the tomb\n\nIdea’s, Ideas’ flying!\n\nThese things I thought on a humid day\nThese things I felt as the world whirled away\n(The saving elf out of the serving bourse),\nWalking stiff-collared behind the Packard hearse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Cover me over, clover;\nCover me over, grass.\nThe mellow day is over\nAnd there is night to pass.\n\nGreen arms about my head,\nGreen fingers on my hands.\nEarth has no quieter bed\nIn all her quiet lands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "speculative-nature-note": { - "title": "“Speculative Nature Note”", - "body": "And now as the strength and panorama\nUnfolds when evening turns into night,\nWhat should I say of natural splendor,\nSo foreign to this age?\n\nHow could I express the subdued joy\nOf waters silent in the long eventide,\nHow could a poet express\nSo great a calm, so great a joy?\n\nIt is as if all we have suffered,\nAll we know of temporality,\nWere lit with a supernal radiance\nWhich we cannot believe, but see.\n\nWe cannot believe, because of suffering,\nBut here we see ultimate reality\nIn a moment of nature, calm, serene,\nBefore words could speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "speech-of-acceptance": { - "title": "“Speech of Acceptance”", - "body": "About which you can do nothing,\nDo nothing.\n\nIf the wind bangs the shutters\nIn the middle of the night\n\nYou cannot stop\nThe dark or the wind\n\nNo use to toss\nYourself around.\n\nIf you achieve sleep\nThe world will not exist.\n\nAbout which you can do nothing\nDo nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-spider": { - "title": "“The Spider”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe spider expects the cold of winter.\nWhen the shadows fall in long Autumn\nHe congeals in a nest of paper, prepares\nThe least and minimal existence,\nObedient to nature. No other course\nIs his; no other availed him when\nIn high summer he spun and furled\nThe gaudy catches. I am that spider,\nCaught in nature, summer and winter.\nYou are the symbol of the seasons too.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow to expatiate and temporize\nThis artful brag. I never saw so quieting\nA sight as the dawn, dew-clenched foot--\nWide web hung on summer barn-eaves, spangled.\nIt moves to zephyrs that is tough as steel.\nI never saw so finely-legged a creature\nWalk so accurate a stretch as he,\nProud, capable, patient, confident.\nTo the eye he gave close penetration\nInto real myth, the myth of you and me.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYet, by moving eyesight off from this\nThere is another dimension. Near the barn,\nDown meadow to shingle, no place for spiders,\nThe sea in large blue breathes in brainstorm tides,\nPirates itself away to ancient Spain,\nPirouettes past Purgatory to Paradise.\nDo I feed deeper on a spider,\nA close-hauled view upon windless meaning,\nOr deeper a day or dance or doom bestride\nOn ocean’s long reach, on parables of God?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-struggle": { - "title": "“The Struggle”", - "body": "Longing went out from him like a flag\nRun up the mast of heavens. Rains were torn\nFrom tremendous downpours. The careening ships\nStrode in the chaos of the moral seas.\nEverything\nWas what it is not.\n\nIn the blasts of heavenly conjecture,\nMaledictions crashing like tied thunderbolts,\nThe skies opened as in better centuries;\nMercy appeared, white-throated, visionary.\nAll would\nBecome what it is not.\n\nDesire was against imperishable death,\nA seed-bursting openness, an avenging\nUnquenchable archangel, militant, consuming\nThe ether. Heaven defend the earth. All care\nThat love\nBecome what it is not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sumatra-shore-leave": { - "title": "“Sumatra Shore Leave”", - "body": "The bells of a Chinese temple sang\nA monody in sunned Sabang,\nA singing timberless of tone,\nLike water falling on a stone.\nAnd he was glad, glad to be\nA sailor resting from the sea\nWhere Indians and Arabs go,\nMost slowly, slow and slow;\nWhere swart Malayan women walk\nDreamfully along and talk;\nWhere skirted, bearded, dark-skin Turks\nGo hand in hand, and no one works.\nChina women with bound doll feet\nLike marionettes move down the street,\nAnd underneath the arbored trees,\nMild-eyed, squatting in twos or threes,\nChinamen smoke, peaceful and still.\nGazing afar at the palms on the hill,\nPondering Buddha, these Chinamen-\nOr counting in mind their hoarded yen.\nAnd there are girls whose smiles are worth\nSome subtle Asiatic mirth\nUnunderstood and wonderful:\nGirls dark, and shy, and beautiful.\n\nHe had not known harbor or town\nSo free from tumult, fret, or frown,\nOf all the sunny towns that are\nSpun under a southern star\nUpon the oriental South.\nHere Love with amorous mellow mouth\nDrinks from the chalice of delight\nSun-mulled wine from dawn till night.\nHere the ponderer plucks a lute;\nThe drowsed land is ripe with fruit;\nAnd all man’s conquest and man’s glory\nIs but a story-teller’s story,\nIncredible and strangely told\nOf men far off amazed with gold,\nWho bend beneath some heavy plan\nTo trample down a fellow-man,\nThus harvest wealth, and fame, and power.\n\nThis is Sabang; hour on hour\nThe full day ripens in the sun,\nAnd time has always just begun.\nPrimeval silence without stir\nHolds the earth like gossamer.\nFor love is slowly blossoming\nIn quietness too still to sing.\nAnd here he lingers, murmuring\nThe name of some forgotten king,\nWho had a wonder-welling heart:\nRichard Ghormley Eberhart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sunday-in-october": { - "title": "“Sunday in October”", - "body": "The farmer, in the pride of sea-won acres,\nShowed me his honey mill, the honey-gate.\nLate afternoon was hazy on the land,\nThe sun was a warm gauzy providence.\n\nThe honey mill, the honey-gate. And then,\nNear by, the bees. They came in from the fields,\nThe sun behind them, from the fields and trees,\nLike soft banners, waving from the sea.\n\nHe told me of their thousands, their ways,\nOf pounds of honey in the homely apiaries.\nThe stores were almost full, in Autumn air,\nAgainst the coming chill, and the long cold.\n\nHe was about ready to rob them now,\nThe combs. He’d leave them just enough to keep them.\nI thought it a rather subtle point he made,\nWishing Providence would be as sure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "talk-at-dawn": { - "title": "“Talk at Dawn”", - "body": "To be aphrodisiacal would be\nTo be maniacal, pliable,\nUndeniable. It would be to be fictive.\n\nA weather-beaten man would be\nNot, probably, aphrodisiacal.\nHe might be, nevertheless, viable.\n\nBut, the sensory system a cavation\nIn which years drop in lucent dreams\nPrecludes the argument in our favor.\n\nFor, if no whims were allowed to fructify\nDebility would inform ministers of state,\nStatecraft’s espial would not fluctuate.\n\nThen, ministers of the church would extemporize\nFailing to denominize, denominate,\nThey would more than ordinarily penalize.\n\nAnd, professional dignitaries\nWith Henry James would too long tarry,\nYeats unmystify, or Joyce parry.\n\nSo, to be aphrodisiacal would be\nTo be maniacal, and pliable,\nUndeniable, perfervidly enjoyable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-testament": { - "title": "“A Testament”", - "body": "It is what I never quite understood\nAbout my formidable day\nWas the truth, the trust, and the good\nWhere the final values play.\n\nIt was the ungraspable part\nAs events and crises interfered\nWas the bold quest of my art,\nThe blood, the crystal tear.\n\nIt was the lack of direct mating\nWith authority, politics or powers\nGave thrust to loving and hating,\nAllowing the purest hours.\n\nIt is the world’s inability\nTo nourish my senses whole\nBrings on the subtle utility\nOf the total strength of soul.\n\nI arise from the clear, the deep,\nAges will find it clear,\nLove that is a grasp, a leap,\nAnd faith, landfall of fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thrush-song-at-dawn": { - "title": "“Thrush Song at Dawn”", - "body": "Bird song is flute song and a glory\nOf the morning when the sun unascending\nHolds his other glory of mentality\n\nAnd the dawn has not the mental mockery\nBut the birds from sweet subconscious wells\nPierce through all barriers to sense,\n\nThey send and giving sing divinity,\nSo sweetly charged with subterranean meaning\nThey are like angels in the morning\n\nCome from ancient time, a fast enchantment,\nTo bless our mortal songless weakness\nAnd trail a vocal glory all the day.\n\nI would not be a bird, but I would hear\nDeep in some lost purity, beneath the mind,\nThere in the sweet, dark coil of time,\n\nAs in a mother, the thrush as savior,\nAnd a sovereign mediator; or any other\nLung-red singing: Richness propounds confusion,\n\nThat pleasure that will never cease to be\nWhere we are played upon without a fault\nBy magic tones we love but do not have to know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "time-passes": { - "title": "“Time Passes”", - "body": "All is a kind of toys, all is a kind of play\nIn the great stack house of poetry.\nWhether to say it out, or play it fey\nDeposits truth upon society\n\nWhich does not know which way it went\nUntil shuflings of many a fall\nSettle the account of each event\nAnd show at last that style is all.\n\nThe toys of the mind, the toys of the word\nIn high displays, in richest glow\nTell it better than it was\nWhen the shifting heart would come and go,\n\nSo that society knows now\nIn the great stack house of poetry\nThe soul that shone upon the snow\nAnd the eye of every pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-come-closer-unto-thee": { - "title": "“To Come Closer Unto Thee”", - "body": "To come closer unto Thee\nI tried animal lust. But see,\nIt dissolved in a pool of science,\nAnd I lost my clairvoyance.\n\nThen I ate the fruit of the mind\nRushing reach-high into the garden;\nFlavour of intellect would be kind\nWhen the arteries began to harden,\n\nI thought: sure mind fails not,\nHoarder of life’s heart ever.\nBut I forgot what I thought,\nWhile worms were eating Plato’s dialogues.\n\nBy the river of Christ’s blood, I cried,\nLike Thee let me be, like Thee. I tried,\nBut that was further evidence of pride,\nAnd I grew so weak I almost died.\n\nIf action’s bad and contemplation’s worse,\nChrist His Christ and I myself,\nHigh in life as lost in a hearse,\nI might as well go to the movies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-evade-the-whirlwind": { - "title": "“To Evade the Whirlwind”", - "body": "To evade the whirlwind and to espouse the sky\nIs now all my mental imagery.\nThe rocket’s red glare is dense nowhere\nFor mankind’s best ruddied energy.\n\nThe myth of mankind demands the honest heart.\nThe occult seas and occult trees treat\nOf things foreknown but in their farthest art:\nMost male is being hale in this heavenly heat.\n\nSo now I pose the symbol of the sky\nThat’s breathed with the heart and seen with the eye,\nFelt with the cheek, but hurt with the brutal sigh\nThat treats it as offending Adam, as a sigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-h-e-b": { - "title": "“To H. E. B.”", - "body": "When Eve ate the apple\nMy woes began,\nBut I didn’t believe then\nThat I would believe in Original Sin.\nWhen Adam delved\nI began to fail,\nBut I didn’t comprehend\nThe majesty of the Supra Rational.\n\nThat Cain and Abel\nShould be such brothers\nAnd not love each other\nSeemed not in the nature of things.\nThese were old fables\nOf the dimly understood,\nWhen men began to construct\nEvil and Good.\n\nThen the great passion of pied air\nFlew through the days,\nThe days used the years,\nThe years grew to tears--\nLogic made the stories go\nAnd Imagination moved the key.\nSomewhere Love came in,\nQuietly, mysteriously.\n\nThe force as odd as any\nAfter all is said\nHas more sense in it\nThan hounding the dead.\nAnd the bond of the obvious\nBlood in its beauty\nControls more, is not moral,\nSimply is.\n\nWhen nothing can be understood,\nWorld-systems crumble,\nLove is of the essence,\nPoetically speaking.\nAs in music\nThe truth is in between the tones,\nNeither action nor will\nTell what is going on;\nIt is something glancing off\nAllures always,\nThe rich sense\nOf the all, the impossible, the ineffable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "twenty-two": { - "title": "“Twenty-Two”", - "body": "I am going somewhere now--\nYou stay here if you like.\nIt doesn’t matter where--\nWe just are not alike.\nI must be going far\nTo find the burning sun,\nAnd I’ll be starting out\nAgain when I have done.\nYou stay here if you like--\nI’m restless for the noon,\nI must be going far.\nI’ll not be back, not soon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "under-the-hill": { - "title": "“Under the Hill”", - "body": "When darkness crept and grew\nThe hushed wide earth lay still.\nI listened; I thought I knew\nThe vibrance under the hill.\nIf I were now just dead\nI could not make less sound.\nI slowly bent my head\nIntently to the ground.\nI listened again. My feet\nTook root within the soil;\nEarth grew within me, sweet\nIn my limbs. I knew the soil\nHad claimed my body whole.\nI listened. There came no sound\nAcross the darkening knoll\nOr over the matted ground.\n\nI had become a thing\nOf earth. My face felt air\nAs leaves feel winds that bring\nA sudden cool. My hair\nWas grass, my flesh was sand--\nStrange that it happened there\nUpon the solid land!\nMy blood turned water. My bone\nTook on the strength of stone.\n\nMixed with earth and sky,\nI bore all things to die.\nI caused the twig to sprout\nAnd every flower come out.\nFlaming the earth with spring\nI made each robin sing,\nThen sent the long heat down\nTinging green leaves with brown.\nI made the summer old\nWith singing autumn gold,\nAnd stilled all things that grow,\nAnd covered the world with snow.\n\nWhen darkness crept and grew\nThe hushed wide earth lay still.\nBeing earth, at last I knew\nThe vibrance under the hill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "united-555": { - "title": "“United 555”", - "body": "Saint Paul never saw a sight like this.\nSeven miles up, fifty five below outside,\nWide open flat top of cloud vista to the far horizon,\nAs the sun descends reddening the upworld spectacle.\n\nSaint Paul never got off the ground, and, for that matter,\nChrist was nailed to a Cross a few feet above the earth.\nHere I sit seven miles up not feeling anything.\nNo visceral reaction, dollar martini, endless visual vista.\n\nI must say it could not be more beautiful.\nO think of Akhnaton, who never got off the ground either.\nRaciest to think of the baboons in East Africa at Treetops,\nWho could not imagine to come to such a pass as this.\n\nChrist and Paul never knew what height is,\nThey never polluted the atmosphere.\nI am Twentieth Century Man riding high,\nGoing into the sunset, Seven Up, feeling no pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vermont-idyll": { - "title": "“Vermont Idyll”", - "body": "These are the days of yellow and red\nThrown up across a far field,\nOctober’s eyeball-striking glory,\nA day that imitates the summer.\nThe leaves are falling, will come winter.\n\nYou lie upon the grass, the sun is hot,\nYour skin is moist, you think of summer,\nBut when you stand and walk a cool\nCleanliness of the lengthening day\nReaches a white winter in the bones.\n\nAnd then the silence of this time\nIs opened by an engine’s oncome\nComing slowly with growing invasion,\nChanging meditation,\nUntil goes past, across, the manure spreader.\n\nThe red and yellow sentinels stand by.\nThe lurcher machine, immigrant, throws out\nIts rich burden over unplowed grass,\nA secret ritual of rebirth,\nThe hand of man applying the levers.\n\nOnly a moment without man’s agency\nIt seemed a timeless perfection\nWas one with consciousness,\nA stasis like a dreaming mind\nBetween summer and winter.\n\nNearby, a car rotting among thistles\nHad jagged glass, teeth of broken windows.\nIn the back, a ruined cushion with a hole\nIn the center. A discarded plow rusted too,\nAs time was stalking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-village-daily": { - "title": "“The Village Daily”", - "body": "Worn linotype machines are clicking fast,\nAnd there’s a pungent smell of printer’s ink\nAbout this ancient shop--its plates of zinc,\nAnd dingy placards on the wall long cast.\nBelow, the presses grind the paper past,\nAnd feel quick cool metallic slaps, and drink\nThe stone-smooth inks that on bare papers clink\nWith spank, spank, spank, and heavier clouts at last.\n\nThe daily village paper goes to press\nWhile all the people lie asleep in bed.\nThe mechanism trains a finty eye\nTo find new stuff for momentary stress;\nAnd every night it sets in rigid lead\nThose who are born, who marry, and who die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-voyage": { - "title": "“The Voyage”", - "body": "To make a headway against the tide,\nThe tide-rip and the windy afternoon,\nThe skillful sailor, salt consigned,\nImpressed the canvas to new subtlety.\n\nThe engine off, a sporting gesture.\nFound him moving aft, heading fore.\nHeading forward, we go backward\nWhere we were. The day is pure\n\nAnd time seems stopped somewhere.\nThe sounding shore, we passed far back,\nAs ancient as Circean chant\nAnd lure, comes to sound once more.\n\nNow the consternated sailor winces,\nHis skill debased, the wind long gone.\nThe open ocean, a lolling torpid giant,\nOccasions nothing but philosophy.\n\nHe turns the engine on again\nAs a last resort, Man cannot endure\nTo be going backward going forward.\nThe sirens wail in the rocks’ sonority.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wentworth-place": { - "title": "“Wentworth Place”", - "body": "As one who lingers on a sunlit hill\nTo draw the late warm rays of afternoon\nAround him, lest the quiet dusk should still\nWithin his summer brain the sounds of June,\nI dreamed, enchanted in this little room,\nOf larks upblown, of earth grown warm with morning,\nBees in drowsy plunder on a bloom,\nAnd water moving with a kind of scorning\nVoiced against the river stones. But I\nWhen at the pinnacle of triumphing\nRemembered, and I felt the summer die\nAlong my blood, like birds that wheel and wing\nAway. And night fell down upon the fen;\nAnd hollow was the heart I turned to men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-wheel-turns": { - "title": "“The Wheel Turns”", - "body": "The wheel turns, turns the wheel, the wheel turns.\nCeaseless, ceaseless, ceaseless, turns the wheel.\nThe flame burns, burns the flame, the flame burns-\nAlways, always, always, blue as steel.\n\nThere is no end, there is no hope, no hope.\nDesire breeds new desire, there is no end.\nThe waves break, yearn, break, yearn. They grope and grope.\nThey settle back. They yearn again. They spend.\n\nThe inner eternal will is senseless will,\nThe impelling force behind the wheel is blind.\nAll life spins, whizzes, veers, revolves unstill.\nFreedom is but a figment of the mind.\n\nSay No to life, say No, say No to life.\nA momentary respite from the wheel\nIs all that comes. Then strife continues--strife\nThat’s witless, long, indifferent, and real.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wind-as-an-abstract-god": { - "title": "“The Wind as an Abstract God”", - "body": "Every day one looks for the signs of the wind,\nWhich has now become a living thing, obsessive,\nThought of in terms of sail-lifting pleasure,\nA rustle in the holly trees; will it be\nEnough? The flag is always indicating,\nAt the Cavalier. Often in excess of élan\nYou have tromped all your gear down to the beach\nIn the anticipation of eight knots, or\nTaken the smooth seven-footer that will sail in six,\nIts pale blue cover to go slowly and stately,\nBut by this token it is also less maneuverable.\n\nYour knowledge of the wind was faulty, and even\nThough there is wind at the edges of the waves\nYour helper lifts aloft, and you reel in hard,\nBut the kite will not rise, but falls, unbroken.\n\nThe fascination of the thing is in the wind!\n\nSomerimes sailing, the kite well exercising,\nThe wind will drop, and nothing can be done\nNothing, nothing.\nYou go, with all your gear, reluctant, home.\n\nAnd you had learned obedience to nature,\nDesirous man, had learned obedience to nature,\nBefore you sulked home with your sticks and fabrics.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-kill": { - "title": "“Winter Kill”", - "body": "Word traps catch big bears in silence.\nThey hunt the woods for years in freedom,\nKeeping the counsels of the bees and snows.\nThen, once unwary, a foot is caught in a trap.\nThe big black mountain comes atumble down.\n\nHis picture is put in the local paper.\nThe expressionless hunter stands in sullen pride;\nA small son touches the nose of the brute.\nThe gun rests easy by the icy carcass;\nPeople come to stare at the winter kill.\n\nI would have him noble on the mountain side,\nRoaming and treading, untrapped by man.\nMan kills him only half for meaning,\nHalf out of thoughtlessness. The steaks\nAre passed around as tokens to the neighbors.\n\nWord traps catch big bears another way\nWhen the meaning is total. The way a poem prinks\nInto the heart from a forest hill\nIs to have it in words, but never to have it.\nWhich is to say it is elusive still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "worlds-havoc": { - "title": "“World’s Havoc”", - "body": "So far away back, so very far,\nHow can I communicate with you?\n\nThe evanescence of true feeling\nVanishes as it is resurrected.\n\nIs there return through the years?\nI look at my sleeping children with tenderness,\n\nI kiss the brow of the wise, sleeping boy,\nI look at the strong, small, sleeping daughter.\n\nIt is mysteriously, infinitely wordless;\nI think my parents may have touched me so.\n\nThe deepest bonds are invisible, incalculable,\nUnassimilable; what is left of the deepest truth,\n\nThe purest love, the most sacrificial, most human.\nIn the subtle decry of time?\n\nSo far back, so very far, nothing,\nIs there nothing, time, nothing at all?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-young-greek-killed-in-the-wars": { - "title": "“A Young Greek, Killed in the Wars”", - "body": "The lacy towers, the words so tall,\nThe serene hautboys floating the timed\nMemory so like its forgetfulness,\nThese are sigils and tones of belief.\n\nTo treachery give the Cheshire smile,\nA bit sedate, touching a plane tree.\nThe clouds are gathering over the Acropolis,\nNature amorphous to man’s precision.\n\nThey dug a trench, and threw him in a grave\nShallow as youth; and poured the wine out\nSoaking the tunic and the dry Attic air.\nThey covered him lightly, and left him there.\n\nWhen music comes upon the airs of Spring,\nFaith fevers the blood; counter to harmony,\nThe mind makes its rugged testaments.\nMelancholy moves, preservative and predatory.\n\nThe light is a container of treachery,\nThe light is the preserver of the Parthenon.\nThe light is lost from that young eye.\nHearing music, I speak, lest he should die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "meister-eckhart": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Meister Eckhart", - "birth": { - "year": 1260, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1328, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "god-is-always-ready": { - "title": "“God is always ready”", - "body": "God is always ready,\nbut we are very unready;\nGod is near to us,\nbut we are far from Him;\nGod is within, but we are without;\nGod is at home, but we are strangers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "man": { - "title": "“Man”", - "body": "Man never desires anything so earnestly\nas God desires to bring a man to Himself,\nthat he may know Him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "practice": { - "title": "“Practice”", - "body": "Practice is better than precept;\nbut the practice and precept of eternal God is a counsel of perfection.\nIf I wanted a teacher of theology, I should go for one to Paris,\nto its learned university.\n\nHowever, if I came to ask about the perfect life,\nwhy then he could not tell me.\nWhere then am I to turn?\nTo pure and abstract nature, nowhere else:\nthat can solve your anxious questions.\n\nWhy, good people, search among dead bones?\nWhy not seek the living part that is directly connected with creation and that gives eternal life?\nThe dead neither give nor take.\n\nAn angel seeking God as God would not anywhere for him except in a quiet, solitary creature.\nThe essence of perfection lies in bearing poverty, misery, scorn, adversity and every hardship that befalls, willingly, gladly, freely, eagerly, calm and unmoved and persisting until death without a why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-prophet-said": { - "title": "“The prophet said …”", - "body": "The prophet said:\n\nGod guides the redeemed through a narrow way into the broad road,\nso that they come into the wide and broad place;\nthat is to say, into true freedom of the spirit,\nwhen one has become a spirit with God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "max-ehrmann": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Max Ehrmann", - "birth": { - "year": 1872 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ehrmann", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "a-prayer": { - "title": "“A Prayer”", - "body": "Let me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours\nof despair overcome me, may I not forget the strength\nthat comforted me in the desolation of other times.\n\nMay I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over\nthe silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a\nquiet river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised\nmy early God to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years.\n\nSpare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded moments.\nMay I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit.\n\nThough the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions\nbe such as shall keep me friendly with myself.\n\nLift up my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses\nof the stars. Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself.\n\nLet me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path.\n\nGive me a few friends who will love me for what I am;\nand keep ever burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope.\n\nAnd though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within sight\nof the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for life,\nand for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet;\nand may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "reforming-oneself": { - "title": "“Reforming Oneself”", - "body": "It has been raining again.\nI have been indoors, meditating on the shortcomings of life.\nI wish there were more kindly persons in the world.\nOur competitive life develops selfishness and unkindness.\nI am determined to do something about it.\nI cannot hope to convert many persons.\nTo convert one person, I shall do well.\nI will begin with the person I know best--myself.\nWhen it rains and one is much indoors one is\nlikely to meditate on the shortcomings of life.\nLet me think--how shall I make myself kind, gentle considerate?\nI do believe it has stopped raining.\nI can go out now. I’ll go and shoot on the archery range.\nI’ll not bother to reform myself today. Perhaps tomorrow--\nif it is raining, and I must stay indoors,\nand meditate on the shortcomings of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "george-eliot": { - "metadata": { - "name": "George Eliot", - "birth": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "blue-wings": { - "title": "“Blue Wings”", - "body": "Warm whisp’ring through the slender olive leaves\nCame to me a gentle sound,\nWhis’pring of a secret found\nIn the clear sunshine ’mid the golden sheaves:\n\nSaid it was sleeping for me in the morn,\nCalled it gladness, called it joy,\nDrew me on ‘Come hither, boy.’\nTo where the blue wings rested on the corn.\n\nI thought the gentle sound had whispered true\nThought the little heaven mine,\nLeaned to clutch the thing divine,\nAnd saw the blue wings melt within the blue!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-choir-invisible": { - "title": "“The Choir Invisible”", - "body": "Oh, may I join the choir invisible\nOf those immortal dead who live again\nIn minds made better by their presence; live\nIn pulses stirred to generosity,\nIn deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn\nFor miserable aims that end with self,\nIn thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,\nAnd with their mild persistence urge men’s search\nTo vaster issues. So to live is heaven:\nTo make undying music in the world,\nBreathing a beauteous order that controls\nWith growing sway the growing life of man.\nSo we inherit that sweet purity\nFor which we struggled, failed, and agonized\nWith widening retrospect that bred despair.\nRebellious flesh that would not be subdued,\nA vicious parent shaming still its child,\nPoor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved;\nIts discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,\nDie in the large and charitable air,\nAnd all our rarer, better, truer self\nThat sobbed religiously in yearning song,\nThat watched to ease the burden of the world,\nLaboriously tracing what must be,\nAnd what may yet be better,--saw within\nA worthier image for the sanctuary,\nAnd shaped it forth before the multitude,\nDivinely human, raising worship so\nTo higher reverence more mixed with love,--\nThat better self shall live till human Time\nShall fold its eyelids, and the human sky\nBe gathered like a scroll within the tomb\nUnread forever. This is life to come,--\nWhich martyred men have made more glorious\nFor us who strive to follow. May I reach\nThat purest heaven,--be to other souls\nThe cup of strength in some great agony,\nEnkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,\nBeget the smiles that have no cruelty,\nBe the sweet presence of a good diffused,\nAnd in diffusion ever more intense!\nSo shall I join the choir invisible\nWhose music is the gladness of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "count-that-day-lost": { - "title": "“Count that Day Lost”", - "body": "If you sit down at set of sun\nAnd count the acts that you have done,\nAnd, counting, find\nOne self-denying deed, one word\nThat eased the heart of him who heard,\nOne glance most kind\nThat fell like sunshine where it went--\nThen you may count that day well spent.\n\nBut if, through all the livelong day,\nYou’ve cheered no heart, by yea or nay--\nIf, through it all\nYou’ve nothing done that you can trace\nThat brought the sunshine to one face--\nNo act most small\nThat helped some soul and nothing cost--\nThen count that day as worse than lost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-death-of-moses": { - "title": "“The Death of Moses”", - "body": "Moses, who spake with God as with his friend,\nAnd ruled his people with the twofold power\nOf wisdom that can dare and still be meek,\nWas writing his last word, the sacred name\nUnutterable of that Eternal Will\nWhich was and is and evermore shall be.\nYet was his task not finished, for the flock\nNeeded its shepherd and the life-taught sage\nLeaves no successor; but to chosen men,\nThe rescuers and guides of Israel,\nA death was given called the Death of Grace,\nWhich freed them from the burden of the flesh\nBut left them rulers of the multitude\nAnd loved companions of the lonely. This\nWas God’s last gift to Moses, this the hour\nWhen soul must part from self and be but soul.\n\nGod spake to Gabriel, the messenger\nOf mildest death that draws the parting life\nGently, as when a little rosy child\nLifts up its lips from off the bowl of milk\nAnd so draws forth a curl that dipped its gold\nIn the soft white--thus Gabriel draws the soul.\n“Go bring the soul of Moses unto me!”\nAnd the awe-stricken angel answered, “Lord,\nHow shall I dare to take his life who lives\nSole of his kind, not to be likened once\nIn all the generations of the earth?”\n\nThen God called Michaël, him of pensive brow\nSnow-vest and flaming sword, who knows and acts:\n“Go bring the spirit of Moses unto me!”\nBut Michaël with such grief as angels feel,\nLoving the mortals whom they succour, pled:\n“Almighty, spare me; it was I who taught\nThy servant Moses; he is part of me\nAs I of thy deep secrets, knowing them.”\n\nThen God called Zamaël, the terrible,\nThe angel of fierce death, of agony\nThat comes in battle and in pestilence\nRemorseless, sudden or with lingering throes.\nAnd Zamaël, his raiment and broad wings\nBlood-tinctured, the dark lustre of his eyes\nShrouding the red, fell like the gathering night\nBefore the prophet. But that radiance\nWon from the heavenly presence in the mount\nGleamed on the prophet’s brow and dazzling pierced\nIts conscious opposite: the angel turned\nHis murky gaze aloof and inly said:\n“An angel this, deathless to angel’s stroke.”\n\nBut Moses felt the subtly nearing dark:--\n“Who art thou? and what wilt thou?” Zamaël then:\n“I am God’s reaper; through the fields of life\nI gather ripened and unripened souls\nBoth willing and unwilling. And I come\nNow to reap thee.” But Moses cried,\nFirm as a seer who waits the trusted sign:\n“Reap thou the fruitless plant and common herb--\nNot him who from the womb was sanctified\nTo teach the law of purity and love.”\nAnd Zamaël baffled from his errand fled.\n\nBut Moses, pausing, in the air serene\nHeard now that mystic whisper, far yet near,\nThe all-penetrating Voice, that said to him,\n“Moses, the hour is come and thou must die.”\n“Lord, I obey; but thou rememberest\nHow thou, Ineffable, didst take me once\nWithin thy orb of light untouched by death.”\nThen the voice answered, “Be no more afraid:\nWith me shall be thy death and burial.”\nSo Moses waited, ready now to die.\n\nAnd the Lord came, invisible as a thought,\nThree angels gleaming on his secret track,\nPrince Michaël, Zamaël, Gabriel, charged to guard\nThe soul-forsaken body as it fell\nAnd bear it to the hidden sepulchre\nDenied for ever to the search of man.\nAnd the Voice said to Moses: “Close thine eyes.”\nHe closed them. “Lay thine hand upon thine heart,\nAnd draw thy feet together.” He obeyed.\nAnd the Lord said, “O spirit! child of mine!\nA hundred years and twenty thou hast dwelt\nWithin this tabernacle wrought of clay.\nThis is the end: come forth and flee to heaven.”\n\nBut the grieved soul with plaintive pleading cried,\n“I love this body with a clinging love:\nThe courage fails me, Lord, to part from it.”\n\n“O child, come forth! for thou shalt dwell with me\nAbout the immortal throne where seraphs joy\nIn growing vision and in growing love.”\n\nYet hesitating, fluttering, like the bird\nWith young wing weak and dubious, the soul\nStayed. But behold! upon the death-dewed lips\nA kiss descended, pure, unspeakable--\nThe bodiless Love without embracing Love\nThat lingered in the body, drew it forth\nWith heavenly strength and carried it to heaven.\n\nBut now beneath the sky the watchers all,\nAngels that keep the homes of Israel\nOr on high purpose wander o’er the world\nLeading the Gentiles, felt a dark eclipse:\nThe greatest ruler among men was gone.\nAnd from the westward sea was heard a wail,\nA dirge as from the isles of Javanim,\nCrying, “Who now is left upon the earth\nLike him to teach the right and smite the wrong?”\nAnd from the East, far o’er the Syrian waste,\nCame slowlier, sadlier, the answering dirge:\n“No prophet like him lives or shall arise\nIn Israel or the world for evermore.”\n\nBut Israel waited, looking toward the mount,\nTill with the deepening eve the elders came\nSaying, “His burial is hid with God.\nWe stood far off and saw the angels lift\nHis corpse aloft until they seemed a star\nThat burnt itself away within the sky.”\n\nThe people answered with mute orphaned gaze\nLooking for what had vanished evermore.\nThen through the gloom without them and within\nThe spirit’s shaping light, mysterious speech,\nInvisible Will wrought clear in sculptured sound,\nThe thought-begotten daughter of the voice,\nThrilled on their listening sense: “He has no tomb.\nHe dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-lonely": { - "title": "“I Am Lonely”", - "body": "The world is great: the birds all fly from me,\nThe stars are golden fruit upon a tree\nAll out of reach: my little sister went,\nAnd I am lonely.\n\nThe world is great: I tried to mount the hill\nAbove the pines, where the light lies so still,\nBut it rose higher: little Lisa went\nAnd I am lonely.\n\nThe world is great: the wind comes rushing by.\nI wonder where it comes from; sea birds cry\nAnd hurt my heart: my little sister went,\nAnd I am lonely.\n\nThe world is great: the people laugh and talk,\nAnd make loud holiday: how fast they walk!\nI’m lame, they push me: little Lisa went,\nAnd I am lonely.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-grant-you-ample-leave": { - "title": "“I Grant You Ample Leave”", - "body": "“I grant you ample leave\nTo use the hoary formula ‘I am’\nNaming the emptiness where thought is not;\nBut fill the void with definition, ‘I’\nWill be no more a datum than the words\nYou link false inference with, the ‘Since’ & ‘so’\nThat, true or not, make up the atom-whirl.\nResolve your ‘Ego’, it is all one web\nWith vibrant ether clotted into worlds:\nYour subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’\nTurns nought but object, melts to molecules,\nIs stripped from naked Being with the rest\nOf those rag-garments named the Universe.\nOr if, in strife to keep your ‘Ego’ strong\nYou make it weaver of the etherial light,\nSpace, motion, solids & the dream of Time--\nWhy, still ’tis Being looking from the dark,\nThe core, the centre of your consciousness,\nThat notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain,\nWhat are they but a shifting otherness,\nPhantasmal flux of moments?--”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sweet-springtime": { - "title": "“Sweet Springtime”", - "body": "It was in the prime\nOf the sweet springtime\nIn the linnet’s throat\nTrembled the love note,\nAnd the love-stirred air\nThrilled the blossoms there.\nLittle shadows danced,\nEach a tiny elf\nHappy in large light\nAnd the thinnest self.\n\nIt was but a minute\nIn a far-off spring,\nBut each gentle thing,\nSweetly wooing linnet,\nSoft thrilled hawthorn tree,\nHappy shadowy elf,\nWith the thinnest self,\nLive on still in me.\nIt was in the prime\nOf the past springtime!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "t-s-eliot": { - "metadata": { - "name": "T. S. Eliot", - "birth": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1965 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american+english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 47 - }, - "poems": { - "animula": { - "title": "“Animula”", - "body": "‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’\nTo a flat world of changing lights and noise,\nTo light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;\nMoving between the legs of tables and of chairs,\nRising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,\nAdvancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,\nRetreating to the corner of arm and knee,\nEager to be reassured, taking pleasure\nIn the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,\nPleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;\nStudies the sunlit pattern on the floor\nAnd running stags around a silver tray;\nConfounds the actual and the fanciful,\nContent with playing-cards and kings and queens,\nWhat the fairies do and what the servants say.\nThe heavy burden of the growing soul\nPerplexes and offends more, day by day;\nWeek by week, offends and perplexes more\nWith the imperatives of ‘is and seems’\nAnd may and may not, desire and control.\nThe pain of living and the drug of dreams\nCurl up the small soul in the window seat\nBehind the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_.\nIssues from the hand of time the simple soul\nIrresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,\nUnable to fare forward or retreat,\nFearing the warm reality, the offered good,\nDenying the importunity of the blood,\nShadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,\nLeaving disordered papers in a dusty room;\nLiving first in the silence after the viaticum.\n\nPray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,\nFor Boudin, blown to pieces,\nFor this one who made a great fortune,\nAnd that one who went his own way.\nPray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,\nPray for us now and at the hour of our birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "ash-wednesday": { - "title": "“Ash Wednesday”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBecause I do not hope to turn again\nBecause I do not hope\nBecause I do not hope to turn\nDesiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope\nI no longer strive to strive towards such things\n(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)\nWhy should I mourn\nThe vanished power of the usual reign?\n\nBecause I do not hope to know\nThe infirm glory of the positive hour\nBecause I do not think\nBecause I know I shall not know\nThe one veritable transitory power\nBecause I cannot drink\nThere where trees flower and springs flow for there is\nnothing again\n\nBecause I know that time is always time\nAnd place is always and only place\nAnd what is actual is actual only for one time\nAnd only for one place\nI rejoice that things are as they are and\nI renounce the blessèd face\nAnd renounce the voice\nBecause I cannot hope to turn again\nConsequently I rejoice having to construct something\nUpon which to rejoice\n\nAnd pray to God to have mercy upon us\nAnd pray that I may forget\nThese matters that with myself I too much discuss\nToo much explain\nBecause I do not hope to turn again\nLet these words answer\nFor what is done not to be done again\nMay the judgement not be too heavy upon us\n\nBecause these wings are no longer wings to fly\nBut merely vans to beat the air\nThe air which is now thoroughly small and dry\nSmaller and dryer than the will\nTeach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.\n\nPray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death\nPray for us now and at the hour of our death.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLady three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree\nIn the cool of the day having fed to sateity\nOn my legs my heart my liver and that which had been\ncontained\nIn the hollow round of my skull. And God said\nShall these bones live? shall these\nBones live? And that which had been contained\nIn the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:\nBecause of the goodness of this Lady\nAnd because of her loveliness and because\nShe honours the Virgin in meditation\nWe shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled\nProffer my deeds to oblivion and my love\nTo the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.\nIt is this which recovers\nMy guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions\nWhich the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn\nIn a white gown to contemplation in a white gown.\nLet the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.\nThere is no life in them. As I am forgotten\nAnd would be forgotten so I would forget\nThus devoted concentrated in purpose. And God said\nProphesy to the wind to the wind only for only\nThe wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping\nWith the burden of the grasshopper saying\n\n_Lady of silences\nCalm and distressed\nTorn and most whole\nRose of memory\nRose of forgetfulness\nExhausted and life-giving\nWorried reposeful\nThe single Rose\nIs now the Garden\nWhere all loves end\nTerminate torment\nOf love unsatisfied\nThe greater torment\nOf love satisfied\nEnd of the endless\nJourney to no end\nConclusion of all that\nIs inconclusible\nSpeech without word and\nWord of no speech\nGrace to the Mother\nFor the Garden\nWhere all love ends._\n\nUnder a juniper-tree the bones sang scattered and shining\nWe are glad to be scattered we did little good to each\nother\nUnder a tree in the cool of day with the blessing of sand\nForgetting themselves and each other united\nIn the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye\nShall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity\nMatters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAt the first turning of the second stair\nI turned and saw below\nThe same shape twisted on the banister\nUnder the vapour in the fetid air\nStruggling with the devil of the stairs who wears\nThe deceitul face of hope and of despair.\n\nAt the second turning of the second stair\nI left them twisting turning below;\nThere were no more faces and the stair was dark\nDamp jaggèd like an old man’s mouth drivelling beyond\nrepair\nOr the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.\n\nAt the first turning of the third stair\nWas a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit\nAnd beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene\nThe broadbacked figure drest in blue and green\nEnchanted the maytime with an antique flute.\nBlown hair is sweet brown hair over the mouth blown\nLilac and brown hair;\nDistraction music of the flute stops and steps of the mind\nover the third stair\nFading fading; strength beyond hope and despair\nClimbing the third stair.\n\nLord I am not worthy\nLord I am not worthy\n\nbut speak the word only.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWho walked between the violet and the violet\nWhe walked between\nThe various ranks of varied green\nGoing in white and blue in Mary’s colour\nTalking of trivial things\nIn ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour\nWho moved among the others as they walked\nWho then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs\n\nMade cool the dry rock and made firm the sand\nIn blue of larkspur blue of Mary’s colour\nSovegna vos\n\nHere are the years that walk between bearing\nAway the fiddles and the flutes restoring\nOne who moves in the time between sleep and waking wearing\n\nWhite light folded sheathing about her folded.\nThe new years walk restoring\nThrough a bright cloud of tears the years restoring\nWith a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem\nThe time. Redeem\nThe unread vision in the higher dream\nWhile jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.\n\nThe silent sister veiled in white and blue\nBetween the yews behind the garden god\nWhose flute is breathless bent her head and signed but spoke\nno word\n\nBut the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down\nRedeem the time redeem the dream\nThe token of the word unheard unspoken\n\nTill the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew\n\nAnd after this our exile\n\n\n# V.\n\nIf the lost word is lost if the spent word is spent\nIf the unheard unspoken\nWord is unspoken unheard;\nStill is the unspoken word the Word unheard\nThe Word without a word the Word within\nThe world and for the world;\nAnd the light shone in darkness and\nAgainst the Word the unstilled world still whirled\nAbout the centre of the silent Word.\n\nO my people what have I done unto thee.\n\nWhere shall the word be found where will the word\nResound? Not here there is not enough silence\nNot on the sea or on the islands not\nOn the mainland in the desert or the rain land\nFor those who walk in darkness\nBoth in the day time and in the night time\nThe right time and the right place are not here\nNo place of grace for those who avoid the face\nNo time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny\nthe voice\n\nWill the veiled sister pray for\nThose who walk in darkness who chose thee and oppose thee\nThose who are torn on the horn between season and season\ntime and time between\nHour and hour word and word power and power those who wait\nIn darkness? Will the veiled sister pray\nFor children at the gate\nWho will not go away and cannot pray:\nPray for those who chose and oppose\n\nO my people what have I done unto thee.\n\nWill the veiled sister between the slender\nYew trees pray for those who offend her\nAnd are terrified and cannot surrender\nAnd affirm before the world and deny between the rocks\nIn the last desert before the last blue rocks\nThe desert in the garden the garden in the desert\nOf drouth spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.\n\nO my people.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAlthough I do not hope to turn again\nAlthough I do not hope\nAlthough I do not hope to turn\n\nWavering between the profit and the loss\nIn this brief transit where the dreams cross\nThe dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying\n(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things\nFrom the wide window towards the granite shore\nThe white sails still fly seaward seaward flying\nUnbroken wings\n\nAnd the lost heart stiffens and rejoices\nIn the lost lilac and the lost sea voices\nAnd the weak spirit quickens to rebel\nFor the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell\nQuickens to recover\nThe cry of quail and the whirling plover\nAnd the blind eye creates\nThe empty forms between the ivory gates\nAnd smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth\n\nThis is the time of tension between dying and birth\nThe place of solitude where three dreams cross\nBetween blue rocks\nBut when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away\nLet the other yew be shaken and reply.\n\nBlessèd sister holy mother spirit of the fountain spirit\nof the garden\nSuffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood\nTeach us to care and not to care\nTeach us to sit still\nEven among these rocks\nOur peace in His will\nAnd even among these rocks\nSister mother\nAnd spirit of the river spirit of the sea\nSuffer me not to be separated\n\nAnd let my cry come unto Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "aunt-helen": { - "title": "“Aunt Helen”", - "body": "Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,\nAnd lived in a small house near a fashionable square\nCared for by servants to the number of four.\nNow when she died there was silence in heaven\nAnd silence at her end of the street.\nThe shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet--\nHe was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.\nThe dogs were handsomely provided for,\nBut shortly afterwards the parrot died too.\nThe Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,\nAnd the footman sat upon the dining-table\nHolding the second housemaid on his knees--\nWho had always been so careful while her mistress lived.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "before-morning": { - "title": "“Before Morning”", - "body": "While all the East was weaving red with gray,\nThe flowers at the window turned toward dawn,\nPetal on petal, waiting for the day,\nFresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.\n\nThis morning’s flowers and flowers of yesterday\nTheir fragrance drifts across the room at dawn,\nFragrance of bloom and fragrance of decay,\nFresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-boston-evening-transcript": { - "title": "“The Boston Evening Transcript”", - "body": "The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript\nSway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.\nWhen evening quickens faintly in the street,\nWakening the appetites of life in some\nAnd to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,\nI mount the steps and ring the bell, turning\nWearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,\nIf the street were time and he at the end of the street,\nAnd I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "burbank-with-a-baedeker-bleistein-with-a-cigar": { - "title": "“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”", - "body": "_Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire--nil nisi divinum stabile\nest; caetera fumus--the gondola stopped, the old\npalace was there, how charming its grey and pink--\ngoats and monkeys, with such hair too!--so the\ncountess passed on until she came through the\nlittle park, where Niobe presented her with a\ncabinet, and so departed._\n\n\nBurbank crossed a little bridge\nDescending at a small hotel;\nPrincess Volupine arrived,\nThey were together, and he fell.\n\nDefunctive music under sea\nPassed seaward with the passing bell\nSlowly: the God Hercules\nHad left him, that had loved him well.\n\nThe horses, under the axletree\nBeat up the dawn from Istria\nWith even feet. Her shuttered barge\nBurned on the water all the day.\n\nBut this or such was Bleistein’s way:\nA saggy bending of the knees\nAnd elbows, with the palms turned out,\nChicago Semite Viennese.\n\nA lustreless protrusive eye\nStares from the protozoic slime\nAt a perspective of Canaletto.\nThe smoky candle end of time\n\nDeclines. On the Rialto once.\nThe rats are underneath the piles.\nThe jew is underneath the lot.\nMoney in furs. The boatman smiles,\n\nPrincess Volupine extends\nA meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand\nTo climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,\nShe entertains Sir Ferdinand\n\nKlein. Who clipped the lion’s wings\nAnd flea’d his rump and pared his claws?\nThought Burbank, meditating on\nTime’s ruins, and the seven laws.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "burnt-norton": { - "title": "“Burnt Norton”", - "body": "Time present and time past\nAre both perhaps present in time future,\nAnd time future contained in time past.\nIf all time is eternally present\nAll time is unredeemable.\nWhat might have been is an abstraction\nRemaining a perpetual possibility\nOnly in a world of speculation.\nWhat might have been and what has been\nPoint to one end, which is always present.\nFootfalls echo in the memory\nDown the passage which we did not take\nTowards the door we never opened\nInto the rose-garden. My words echo\nThus, in your mind.\nBut to what purpose\nDisturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves\nI do not know.\nOther echoes\nInhabit the garden. Shall we follow?\nQuick, said the bird, find them, find them,\nRound the corner. Through the first gate,\nInto our first world, shall we follow\nThe deception of the thrush? Into our first world.\nThere they were, dignified, invisible,\nMoving without pressure, over the dead leaves,\nIn the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,\nAnd the bird called, in response to\nThe unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,\nAnd the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses\nHad the look of flowers that are looked at.\nThere they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.\nSo we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,\nAlong the empty alley, into the box circle,\nTo look down into the drained pool.\nDry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,\nAnd the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,\nAnd the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,\nThe surface glittered out of heart of light,\nAnd they were behind us, reflected in the pool.\nThen a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.\nGo, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,\nHidden excitedly, containing laughter.\nGo, go, go, said the bird: human kind\nCannot bear very much reality.\nTime past and time future\nWhat might have been and what has been\nPoint to one end, which is always present.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "choruses-from-the-rock": { - "title": "Choruses from “The Rock”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,\nThe Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.\nO perpetual revolution of configured stars,\nO perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,\nO world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!\nThe endless cycle of idea and action,\nEndless invention, endless experiment,\nBrings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;\nKnowledge of speech, but not of silence;\nKnowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.\nAll our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,\nAll our ignorance brings us nearer to death,\nBut nearness to death no nearer to God.\nWhere is the Life we have lost in living?\nWhere is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?\nWhere is the knowledge we have lost in information?\nThe cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries\nBring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.\n\nI journeyed to London, to the timekept City,\nWhere the River flows, with foreign flotations.\nThere I was told: we have too many churches,\nAnd too few chop-houses. There I was told:\nLet the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church\nIn the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays.\nIn the City, we need no bells:\nLet them waken the suburbs.\nI journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:\nWe toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor\nTo Hindhead, or Maidenhead.\nIf the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers.\nIn industrial districts, there I was told\nOf economic laws.\nIn the pleasant countryside, there it seemed\nThat the country now is only fit for picnics.\nAnd the Church does not seem to be wanted\nIn country or in suburb; and in the town\nOnly for important weddings.\n\n> _CHORUS LEADER:_\nSilence! and preserve respectful distance.\nFor I perceive approaching\nThe Rock. Who will perhaps answer our doubtings.\nThe Rock. The Watcher. The Stranger.\nHe who has seen what has happened\nAnd who sees what is to happen.\nThe Witness. The Critic. The Stranger.\nThe God-shaken, in whom is the truth inborn.\n\n> _Enter the ROCK, led by a BOY:_\n\n> _THE ROCK:_\nThe lot of man is ceaseless labour,\nOr ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,\nOr irregular labour, which is not pleasant.\nI have trodden the winepress alone, and I know\nThat it is hard to be really useful, resigning\nThe things that men count for happiness, seeking\nThe good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting\nWith equal face those that bring ignominy,\nThe applause of all or the love of none.\nAll men are ready to invest their money\nBut most expect dividends.\nI say to you: Make perfect your will.\nI say: take no thought of the harvest,\nBut only of proper sowing.\n\nThe world turns and the world changes,\nBut one thing does not change.\nIn all of my years, one thing does not change.\nHowever you disguise it, this thing does not change:\nThe perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.\nForgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;\nThe men you are in these times deride\nWhat has been done of good, you find explanations\nTo satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.\nSecond, you neglect and belittle the desert.\nThe desert is not remote in southern tropics,\nThe desert is not only around the corner,\nThe desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,\nThe desert is in the heart of your brother.\nThe good man is the builder, if he build what is good.\nI will show you the things that are now being done,\nAnd some of the things that were long ago done,\nThat you may take heart. Make perfect your will.\nLet me show you the work of the humble. Listen.\n\n_The lights fade; in the semi-darkness the voices of WORKMEN are heard chanting._\n\nIn the vacant places\nWe will build with new bricks\nThere are hands and machines\nAnd clay for new brick\nAnd lime for new mortar\nWhere the bricks are fallen\nWe will build with new stone\nWhere the beams are rotten\nWe will build with new timbers\nWhere the word is unspoken\nWe will build with new speech\nThere is work together\nA Church for all\nAnd a job for each\nEvery man to his work.\n\n_Now a group of WORKMEN is silhouetted against the dim sky. From farther away, they are answered by voices of the UNEMPLOYED._\n\nNo man has hired us\nWith pocketed hands\nAnd lowered faces\nWe stand about in open places\nAnd shiver in unlit rooms.\nOnly the wind moves\nOver empty fields, untilled\nWhere the plough rests, at an angle\nTo the furrow. In this land\nThere shall be one cigarette to two men,\nTo two women one half pint of bitter\nAle. In this land\nNo man has hired us.\nOur life is unwelcome, our death\nUnmentioned in “The Times”.\n\n_Chant of WORKMEN again._\n\nThe river flows, the seasons turn\nThe sparrow and starling have no time to waste.\nIf men do not build\nHow shall they live?\nWhen the field is tilled\nAnd the wheat is bread\nThey shall not die in a shortened bed\nAnd a narrow sheet. In this street\nThere is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end\nBut noise without speech, food without taste.\nWithout delay, without haste\nWe would build the beginning and the end of this street.\nWe build the meaning:\nA Church for all\nAnd a job for each\nEach man to his work.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThus your fathers were made\nFellow citizens of the saints, of the household of GOD, being built upon the foundation\nOf apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief cornerstone.\nBut you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a ruined house?\nWhere many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and squalid deaths, embittered scorn in honeyless hives,\nAnd those who would build and restore turn out the palms of their hands, or look in vain towards foreign lands for alms to be more or the urn to be filled.\nYour building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and wonder whether and how you may be builded together for a habitation of GOD in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved on the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a tortoise.\nAnd some say: “How can we love our neighbour? For love must be made real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have only our labour to give and our labour is not required.\nWe wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can sing which nobody wants to hear sung;\nWaiting to be flung in the end, on a heap less useful than dung”.\n\nYou, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?\nTalking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men to GOD.\n“Our citizenship is in Heaven”; yes, but that is the model and type for your citizenship upon earth.\nWhen your fathers fixed the place of GOD,\nAnd settled all the inconvenient saints,\nApostles, martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade,\nThen they could set about imperial expansion\nAccompanied by industrial development.\nExporting iron, coal and cotton goods\nAnd intellectual enlightenment\nAnd everything, including capital\nAnd several versions of the Word of GOD:\nThe British race assured of a mission\nPerformed it, but left much at home unsure.\n\nOf all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.\nAnd the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.\nFor every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:\nFor sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the Word of GOD,\nFor pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.\nAnd of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.\nFor good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death,\nBut here upon earth you have the reward of the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.\nAnd all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;\nAnd all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.\nThe Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;\nFor this is the law of life; and you must remember that while there is time of prosperity\nThe people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity they will decry it.\n\nWhat life have you if you have not life together?\nThere is no life that is not in community,\nAnd no community not lived in praise of GOD.\nEven the anchorite who meditates alone,\nFor whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD,\nPrays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.\nAnd now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,\nAnd no man knows or cares who is his neighbour\nUnless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,\nBut all dash to and fro in motor cars,\nFamiliar with the roads and settled nowhere.\nNor does the family even move about together,\nBut every son would have his motor cycle,\nAnd daughters ride away on casual pillions.\n\nMuch to cast down, much to build, much to restore;\nLet the work not delay, time and the arm not waste;\nLet the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone,\nLet the fire not be quenched in the forge.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe Word of the LORD came unto me, saying:\nO miserable cities of designing men,\nO wretched generation of enlightened men,\nBetrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,\nSold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:\nI have given you hands which you turn from worship,\nI have given you speech, for endless palaver,\nI have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,\nI have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,\nI have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust.\nI have given you power of choice, and you only alternate\nBetween futile speculation and unconsidered action.\nMany are engaged in writing books and printing them,\nMany desire to see their names in print,\nMany read nothing but the race reports.\nMuch is your reading, but not the Word of GOD,\nMuch is your building, but not the House of GOD.\nWill you build me a house of plaster, with corrugated roofing,\nTo be filled with a litter of Sunday newspapers?\n\n\n> _1ST MALE VOICE:_\nA Cry from the East:\nWhat shall be done to the shore of smoky ships?\nWill you leave my people forgetful and forgotten\nTo idleness, labour, and delirious stupor?\nThere shall be left the broken chimney,\nThe peeled hull, a pile of rusty iron,\nIn a street of scattered brick where the goat climbs,\nWhere My Word is unspoken.\n\n\n> _2ND MALE VOICE:_\nA Cry from the North, from the West and from the South\nWhence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;\nWhere My Word is unspoken,\nIn the land of lobelias and tennis flannels\nThe rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,\nThe nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,\nAnd the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:\nTheir only monument the asphalt road\nAnd a thousand lost golf balls”.\n\n\n> _CHORUS:_\nWe build in vain unless the LORD build with us.\nCan you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?\nA thousand policemen directing the traffic\nCannot tell you why you come or where you go.\nA colony of cavies or a horde of active marmots\nBuild better than they that build without the LORD.\nShall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?\nI have loved the beauty of Thy House, the peace of Thy sanctuary\nI have swept the floors and garnished the altars.\nWhere there is no temple there shall be no homes,\nThough you have shelters and institutions,\nPrecarious lodgings while the rent is paid,\nSubsiding basements where the rat breeds\nOr sanitary dwellings with numbered doors\nOr a house a little better than your neighbour’s;\nWhen the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?\nDo you huddle close together because you love each other?”\nWhat will you answer? “We all dwell together\nTo make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?\nAnd the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.\nO my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger,\nBe prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.\n\nO weariness of men who turn from GOD\nTo the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,\nTo arts and inventions and daring enterprises,\nTo schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,\nBinding the earth and the water to your service,\nExploiting the seas and developing the mountains,\nDividing the stars into common and preferred,\nEngaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,\nEngaged in working out a rational morality,\nEngaged in printing as many books as possible,\nPlotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,\nTurning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm\nFor nation or race or what you call humanity;\nThough you forget the way to the Temple,\nThere is one who remembers the way to your door:\nLife you may evade, but Death you shall not.\nYou shall not deny the Stranger.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThere are those who would build the Temple,\nAnd those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.\nIn the days of Nehemiah the Prophet\nThere was no exception to the general rule.\nIn Shushan the palace, in the month Nisan,\nHe served the wine to the king Artaxerxes,\nAnd he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;\nAnd the King gave him leave to depart\nThat he might rebuild the city.\nSo he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,\nAnd there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,\nBy the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,\nJerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;\nNo place for a beast to pass.\nThere were enemies without to destroy him,\nAnd spies and self-seekers within,\nWhen he and his men laid their hands to rebuilding the wall\nSo they built as men must build\nWith the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.\n\n\n# V.\n\nO Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.\nSanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem the Arabian: were doubtless men of public spirit and zeal.\nPreserve me from the enemy who has something to gain: and from the friend who has something to lose.\nRemembering the words of Nehemiah the Prophet: “The trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster.”\nThose who sit in a house of which the use is forgotten: are like snakes that lie on mouldering stairs, content in the sun light.\nAnd the others run about like dogs, full of enterprise, sniffing and barking: they say, “This house is a nest of serpents, let us destroy it,\nAnd have done with these abominations, the turpitudes of the Christians.” And these are not justified, nor the others.\nAnd they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.\nIf humility and purity be not in the heart, they are not in the home: and if they are not in the home, they are not in the City.\nThe man who has builded during the day would return to his hearth at nightfall: to be blessed with the gift of silence, and doze before he sleeps.\nBut we are encompassed with snakes and dogs: therefore some must labour, and others must hold the spears.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIt is hard for those who have never known persecution,\nAnd who have never known a Christian,\nTo believe these tales of Christian persecution.\nIt is hard for those who live near a Bank\nTo doubt the security of their money.\nIt is hard for those who live near a Police Station\nTo believe in the triumph of violence.\nDo you think that the Faith has conquered the World\nAnd that lions no longer need keepers?\nDo you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?\nDo you need to be told that even such modest attainments\nAs you can boast in the way of polite society\nWill hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?\nMen! polish your teeth on rising and retiring;\nWomen! polish your fingernails:\nYou polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat.\nWhy should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?\nShe tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.\nShe is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.\nShe tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.\nThey constantly try to escape\nFrom the darkness outside and within\nBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.\nBut the man that is will shadow\nThe man that pretends to be.\nAnd the Son of Man was not crucified once for all,\nThe blood of the martyrs not shed once for all,\nThe lives of the Saints not given once for all:\nBut the Son of Man is crucified always\nAnd there shall be Martyrs and Saints.\nAnd if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps\nWe must first build the steps;\nAnd if the Temple is to be cast down\nWe must first build the Temple.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nIn the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.\nAnd when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards GOD\nBlindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and germination.\nThey followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness,\nWorshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.\nWaste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.\nAnd the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.\nAnd men who turned towards the light and were known of the light\nInvented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were good\nAnd led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil.\nBut their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness\nAs the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic Current;\nAnd they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life,\nAnd they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has died of starvation.\nPrayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites with forgotten meanings\nIn the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind will not let the snow rest.\nWaste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.\n\nThen came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,\nA moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,\nA moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.\nThen it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the Word,\nThrough the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;\nBestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before,\nYet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;\nOften halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.\n\nBut it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.\nMen have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before\nThat men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,\nAnd then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.\nThe Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do\nBut stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards\nIn an age which advances progressively backwards?\n\n> _VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED (afar off):_\nIn this land\nThere shall be one cigarette to two men,\nTo two women one half pint of bitter\nAle …\n\n> _CHORUS:_\nWhat does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way?\n\n> _VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED (more faintly):_\nIn this land\nNo man has hired us …\n\n> _CHORUS:_\nWaste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.\nHas the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?\nWhen the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten\nAll gods except Usury, Lust and Power.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nO Father we welcome your words,\nAnd we will take heart for the future,\nRemembering the past.\n\nThe heathen are come into thine inheritance,\nAnd thy temple have they defiled.\n\nWho is this that cometh from Edom?\n\nHe has trodden the wine-press alone.\n\nThere came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem\nAnd the holy places defiled;\nPeter the Hermit, scourging with words.\nAnd among his hearers were a few good men,\nMany who were evil,\nAnd most who were neither.\nLike all men in all places,\n\nSome went from love of glory,\nSome went who were restless and curious,\nSome were rapacious and lustful.\nMany left their bodies to the kites of Syria\nOr sea-strewn along the routes;\nMany left their souls in Syria,\nLiving on, sunken in moral corruption;\nMany came back well broken,\nDiseased and beggared, finding\nA stranger at the door in possession:\nCame home cracked by the sun of the East\nAnd the seven deadly sins in Syria.\nBut our King did well at Acre.\nAnd in spite of all the dishonour,\nThe broken standards, the broken lives,\nThe broken faith in one place or another,\nThere was something left that was more than the tales\nOf old men on winter evenings.\nOnly the faith could have done what was good of it;\nWhole faith of a few,\nPart faith of many.\nNot avarice, lechery, treachery,\nEnvy, sloth, gluttony, jealousy, pride:\nIt was not these that made the Crusades,\nBut these that unmade them.\n\nRemember the faith that took men from home\nAt the call of a wandering preacher.\nOur age is an age of moderate virtue\nAnd of moderate vice\nWhen men will not lay down the Cross\nBecause they will never assume it.\nYet nothing is impossible, nothing,\nTo men of faith and conviction.\nLet us therefore make perfect our will.\nO GOD, help us.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nSon of Man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears\nAnd set thine heart upon all that I show thee.\nWho is this that has said: the House of GOD is a House of Sorrow;\nWe must walk in black and go sadly, with longdrawn faces,\nWe must go between empty walls, quavering lowly, whispering faintly,\nAmong a few flickering scattered lights?\nThey would put upon GOD their own sorrow, the grief they should feel\nFor their sins and faults as they go about their daily occasions.\nYet they walk in the street proudnecked, like thoroughbreds ready for races,\nAdorning themselves, and busy in the market, the forum,\nAnd all other secular meetings.\nThinking good of themselves, ready for any festivity,\nDoing themselves very well.\nLet us mourn in a private chamber, learning the way of penitence,\nAnd then let us learn the joyful communion of saints.\n\nThe soul of Man must quicken to creation.\nOut of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone,\nSpring always new forms of life, from the soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone;\nOut of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless\nJoined with the artist’s eye, new life, new form, new colour.\nOut of the sea of sound the life of music,\nOut of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,\nApproximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,\nThere spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.\n\nLORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?\nShall we not bring to Your service all our powers\nFor life, for dignity, grace and order,\nAnd intellectual pleasures of the senses?\nThe LORD who created must wish us to create\nAnd employ our creation again in His service\nWhich is already His service in creating.\nFor Man is joined spirit and body,\nAnd therefore must serve as spirit and body.\nVisible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;\nVisible and invisible must meet in His Temple;\nYou must not deny the body.\n\nNow you shall see the Temple completed:\nAfter much striving, after many obstacles;\nFor the work of creation is never without travail;\nThe formed stone, the visible crucifix,\nThe dressed altar, the lifting light,\n\nLight\n\nLight\n\nThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.\n\n\n# X.\n\nYou have seen the house built, you have seen it adorned\nBy one who came in the night, it is now dedicated to GOD.\nIt is now a visible church, one more light set on a hill\nIn a world confused and dark and disturbed by portents of fear.\nAnd what shall we say of the future? Is one church all we can build?\nOr shall the Visible Church go on to conquer the World?\n\nThe great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled\nIn folds of himself until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.\nBut the Mystery of Iniquity is a pit too deep for mortal eyes to plumb. Come\nYe out from among those who prize the serpent’s golden eyes,\nThe worshippers, self-given sacrifice of the snake. Take\nYour way and be ye separate.\nBe not too curious of Good and Evil;\nSeek not to count the future waves of Time;\nBut be ye satisfied that you have light\nEnough to take your step and find your foothold.\n\nO Light Invisible, we praise Thee!\nToo bright for mortal vision.\nO Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;\nThe eastern light our spires touch at morning,\nThe light that slants upon our western doors at evening,\nThe twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,\nMoon light and star light, owl and moth light,\nGlow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.\nO Light Invisible, we worship Thee!\n\nWe thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,\nThe light of altar and of sanctuary;\nSmall lights of those who meditate at midnight\nAnd lights directed through the coloured panes of windows\nAnd light reflected from the polished stone,\nThe gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.\nOur gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward\nAnd see the light that fractures through unquiet water.\nWe see the light but see not whence it comes.\nO Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!\n\nIn our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.\nWe are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.\nWe tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,\nControlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.\nAnd we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;\nForever must quench, forever relight the flame.\nTherefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.\nWe thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.\nAnd when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we may set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision is made.\nAnd we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.\nO Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "circes-palace": { - "title": "“Circe’s Palace”", - "body": "Around her fountain which flows\nWith the voice of men in pain,\nAre flowers that no man knows.\nTheir petals are fanged and red\nWith hideous streak and stain.\nThey sprang from the limbs of the dead.--\nWe shall not come here again.\n\nPanthers rise from their lairs\nIn the forest which thickens below,\nAlong the garden stairs\nThe sluggish python lies;\nThe peacock’s walk, stately and slow\nAnd they look at us with the eyes\nOf men whom we knew long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - } - } - }, - "conversation-galante": { - "title": "“Conversation Galante”", - "body": "I observe: “Our sentimental friend the moon!\nOr possibly (fantastic, I confess)\nIt may be Prester John’s balloon\nOr an old battered lantern hung aloft\nTo light poor travellers to their distress.”\nShe then: “How you digress!”\n\nAnd I then: “Some one frames upon the keys\nThat exquisite nocturne, with which we explain\nThe night and moonshine; music which we seize\nTo body forth our vacuity.”\nShe then: “Does this refer to me?”\n“Oh no, it is I who am inane.”\n\n“You, madam, are the eternal humorist,\nThe eternal enemy of the absolute,\nGiving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!\nWith your air indifferent and imperious\nAt a stroke our mad poetics to confute--”\nAnd--“Are we then so serious?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "a-cooking-egg": { - "title": "“A Cooking Egg”", - "body": "_En l’an trentiesme de mon aage\nQue toutes mes hontes j’ay beues …_\n\n\nPipit sate upright in her chair\n Some distance from where I was sitting;\nViews of the Oxford Colleges\n Lay on the table, with the knitting.\n\nDaguerreotypes and silhouettes,\n Her grandfather and great great aunts,\nSupported on the mantelpiece\n An Invitation to the Dance.\n\n\nI shall not want Honour in Heaven\n For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney\nAnd have talk with Coriolanus\n And other heroes of that kidney.\n\nI shall not want Capital in Heaven\n For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:\nWe two shall lie together, lapt\n In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.\n\nI shall not want Society in Heaven,\n Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;\nHer anecdotes will be more amusing\n Than Pipit’s experience could provide.\n\nI shall not want Pipit in Heaven:\n Madame Blavatsky will instruct me\nIn the Seven Sacred Trances;\n Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.\n\n\nBut where is the penny world I bought\n To eat with Pipit behind the screen?\nThe red-eyed scavengers are creeping\n From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green;\n\nWhere are the eagles and the trumpets?\n\n Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.\nOver buttered scones and crumpets\n Weeping, weeping multitudes\nDroop in a hundred A.B.C.’s", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "cousin-nancy": { - "title": "“Cousin Nancy”", - "body": "Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them,\nRode across the hills and broke them--\nThe barren New England hills--\nRiding to hounds\nOver the cow-pasture.\n\nMiss Nancy Ellicott smoked\nAnd danced all the modern dances;\nAnd her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,\nBut they knew that it was modern.\n\nUpon the glazen shelves kept watch\nMatthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,\nThe army of unalterable law.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-cultivation-of-christmas-trees": { - "title": "“The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”", - "body": "There are several attitudes towards Christmas,\nSome of which we may disregard:\nThe social, the torpid, the patently commercial,\nThe rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),\nAnd the childish--which is not that of the child\nFor whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel\nSpreading its wings at the summit of the tree\nIs not only a decoration, but an angel.\n\nThe child wonders at the Christmas Tree:\nLet him continue in the spirit of wonder\nAt the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;\nSo that the glittering rapture, the amazement\nOf the first-remembered Christmas Tree,\nSo that the surprises, delight in new possessions\n(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),\nThe expectation of the goose or turkey\nAnd the expected awe on its appearance,\n\nSo that the reverence and the gaiety\nMay not be forgotten in later experience,\nIn the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,\nThe awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,\nOr in the piety of the convert\nWhich may be tainted with a self-conceit\nDispleasing to God and disrespectful to children\n(And here I remember also with gratitude\nSt.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):\n\nSo that before the end, the eightieth Christmas\n(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)\nThe accumulated memories of annual emotion\nMay be concentrated into a great joy\nWhich shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion\nWhen fear came upon every soul:\nBecause the beginning shall remind us of the end\nAnd the first coming of the second coming.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-saint-narcissus": { - "title": "“The Death of Saint Narcissus”", - "body": "Come under the shadow of this gray rock--\nCome in under the shadow of this gray rock,\nAnd I will show you something different from either\nYour shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or\nYour shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock:\nI will show you his bloody cloth and limbs\nAnd the gray shadow on his lips.\n\nHe walked once between the sea and the high cliffs\nWhen the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other\nAnd of his arms crossed over his breast.\nWhen he walked over the meadows\nHe was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm.\nBy the river\nHis eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes\nAnd his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.\n\nStruck down by such knowledge\nHe could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God.\nIf he walked in city streets\nHe seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees.\nSo he came out under the rock.\n\nFirst he was sure that he had been a tree,\nTwisting its branches among each other\nAnd tangling its roots among each other.\n\nThen he knew that he had been a fish\nWith slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,\nWrithing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty\nCaught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.\n\nThen he had been a young girl\nCaught in the woods by a drunken old man\nKnowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness,\nThe horror of his own smoothness,\nAnd he felt drunken and old.\n\nSo he became a dancer to God,\nBecause his flesh was in love with the burning arrows\nHe danced on the hot sand\nUntil the arrows came.\nAs he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him.\nNow he is green, dry and stained\nWith the shadow in his mouth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "a-dedication-to-my-wife": { - "title": "“A Dedication to My Wife”", - "body": "To whom I owe the leaping delight\nThat quickens my senses in our wakingtime\nAnd the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,\nthe breathing in unison.\n\nOf lovers whose bodies smell of each other\nWho think the same thoughts without need of speech,\nAnd babble the same speech without need of meaning …\n\nNo peevish winter wind shall chill\nNo sullen tropic sun shall wither\nThe roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only\n\nBut this dedication is for others to read:\nThese are private words addressed to you in public.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-difficulties-of-a-statesman-from-coriolan": { - "title": "“The Difficulties of a Statesman from Coriolan”", - "body": "Cry what shall I cry?\nAll flesh is grass: comprehending\nThe Companions of the Bath, the Knights of the British Empire, the Cavaliers,\nO Cavaliers! of the Legion of Honour,\nThe Order of the Black Eagle (1st and 2nd class),\nAnd the Order of the Rising Sun.\nCry cry what shall I cry?\nThe first thing to do is to form the committees:\nThe consultative councils, the standing committees committees and sub-committees\nOne secretary will do for several committees.\nWhat shall I cry?\n\nArthur Edward Cyril Parker is appointed telephone operator\nAt a salary of one pound ten a week rising by annual increments of fiveshillings\nTo two pounds ten a week; with a bonus of thirty shillings at Christmas\nAnd one week’s leave a year.\nA committee has been appointed to nominate a commission of engineers\nTo consider the Water Supply.\nA commission is appointed\nFor Public Works, chiefly the question of rebuilding the fortifications.\nA commission is appointed\nTo confer with a Volscian commission\nAbout perpetual peace: the fletchers and javelin-makers and smiths\nHave appointed a joint committee to protest against the reduction of orders.\nMeanwhile the guards shake dice on the marches\nAnd the frogs (O Mantuan) croak in the marshes.\nFireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning\nWhat shall I cry?\nMother mother\nHere is the row of family portraits, dingy busts, all looking remarkably Roman,\nRemarkably like each other, lit up successively by the flare\nOf a sweaty torchbearer, yawning.\n\nO hidden under the … Hidden under the … Where the dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment,\nA still moment, repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree\nUnder the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon\nThere the cyclamen spreads its wings, there the clematis droops over the lintel,\nO mother (not among these busts, all correctly inscribed)\nI a tired head among these heads\nNecks strong to bear them\nNoses strong to break the wind\nMother\nMay we not be some time, almost now, together,\nIf the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations,\nAre now observed\nMay we not be\nO hidden\nHidden in the stillness of noon, in the silent croaking night.\nCome with the sweep of the little bat’s wing, with the small flare of thefirefly or lightning bug,\n‘Rising and falling, crowned with dust’, the small creatures,\nThe small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.\nO mother\nWhat shall I cry?\nWe demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation\nRESIGN RESIGN RESIGN", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "the-dry-savages": { - "title": "“The Dry Savages”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI do not know much about gods; but I think that the river\nIs a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable,\nPatient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;\nUseful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;\nThen only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.\nThe problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten\nBy the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable.\nKeeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder\nOf what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated\nBy worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.\nHis rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,\nIn the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,\nIn the smell of grapes on the autumn table,\nAnd the evening circle in the winter gaslight.\n\nThe river is within us, the sea is all about us;\nThe sea is the land’s edge also, the granite\nInto which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses\nIts hints of earlier and other creation:\nThe starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;\nThe pools where it offers to our curiosity\nThe more delicate algae and the sea anemone.\nIt tosses up our losses, the torn seine,\nThe shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar\nAnd the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,\nMany gods and many voices.\n The salt is on the briar rose,\nThe fog is in the fir trees.\n The sea howl\nAnd the sea yelp, are different voices\nOften together heard: the whine in the rigging,\nThe menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,\nThe distant rote in the granite teeth,\nAnd the wailing warning from the approaching headland\nAre all sea voices, and the heaving groaner\nRounded homewards, and the seagull:\nAnd under the oppression of the silent fog\nThe tolling bell\nMeasures time not our time, rung by the unhurried\nGround swell, a time\nOlder than the time of chronometers, older\nThan time counted by anxious worried women\nLying awake, calculating the future,\nTrying to unweave, unwind, unravel\nAnd piece together the past and the future,\nBetween midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,\nThe future futureless, before the morning watch\nWhen time stops and time is never ending;\nAnd the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,\nClangs\nThe bell.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhere is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,\nThe silent withering of autumn flowers\nDropping their petals and remaining motionless;\nWhere is there and end to the drifting wreckage,\nThe prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable\nPrayer at the calamitous annunciation?\n\n There is no end, but addition: the trailing\nConsequence of further days and hours,\nWhile emotion takes to itself the emotionless\nYears of living among the breakage\nOf what was believed in as the most reliable--\nAnd therefore the fittest for renunciation.\n\n There is the final addition, the failing\nPride or resentment at failing powers,\nThe unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,\nIn a drifting boat with a slow leakage,\nThe silent listening to the undeniable\nClamour of the bell of the last annunciation.\n\n Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing\nInto the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?\nWe cannot think of a time that is oceanless\nOr of an ocean not littered with wastage\nOr of a future that is not liable\nLike the past, to have no destination.\n\n We have to think of them as forever bailing,\nSetting and hauling, while the North East lowers\nOver shallow banks unchanging and erosionless\nOr drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;\nNot as making a trip that will be unpayable\nFor a haul that will not bear examination.\n\n There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,\nNo end to the withering of withered flowers,\nTo the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,\nTo the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,\nThe bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable\nPrayer of the one Annunciation.\n\n It seems, as one becomes older,\nThat the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence--\nOr even development: the latter a partial fallacy\nEncouraged by superficial notions of evolution,\nWhich becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.\nThe moments of happiness--not the sense of well--being,\nFruition, fulfilment, security or affection,\nOr even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination--\nWe had the experience but missed the meaning,\nAnd approach to the meaning restores the experience\nIn a different form, beyond any meaning\nWe can assign to happiness. I have said before\nThat the past experience revived in the meaning\nIs not the experience of one life only\nBut of many generations--not forgetting\nSomething that is probably quite ineffable:\nThe backward look behind the assurance\nOf recorded history, the backward half-look\nOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.\nNow, we come to discover that the moments of agony\n(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,\nHaving hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,\nIs not in question) are likewise permanent\nWith such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better\nIn the agony of others, nearly experienced,\nInvolving ourselves, than in our own.\nFor our own past is covered by the currents of action,\nBut the torment of others remains an experience\nUnqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.\nPeople change, and smile: but the agony abides.\nTime the destroyer is time the preserver,\nLike the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,\nThe bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.\nAnd the ragged rock in the restless waters,\nWaves wash over it, fogs conceal it;\nOn a halcyon day it is merely a monument,\nIn navigable weather it is always a seamark\nTo lay a course by: but in the sombre season\nOr the sudden fury, is what it always was.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant--\nAmong other things--or one way of putting the same thing:\nThat the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray\nOf wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,\nPressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.\nAnd the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.\nYou cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,\nThat time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.\nWhen the train starts, and the passengers are settled\nTo fruit, periodicals and business letters\n(And those who saw them off have left the platform)\nTheir faces relax from grief into relief,\nTo the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.\nFare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past\nInto different lives, or into any future;\nYou are not the same people who left that station\nOr who will arrive at any terminus,\nWhile the narrowing rails slide together behind you;\nAnd on the deck of the drumming liner\nWatching the furrow that widens behind you,\nYou shall not think ‘the past is finished’\nOr ‘the future is before us’.\nAt nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,\nIs a voice descanting (though not to the ear,\nThe murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)\n‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;\nYou are not those who saw the harbour\nReceding, or those who will disembark.\nHere between the hither and the farther shore\nWhile time is withdrawn, consider the future\nAnd the past with an equal mind.\nAt the moment which is not of action or inaction\nYou can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being\nThe mind of a man may be intent\nAt the time of death”--that is the one action\n(And the time of death is every moment)\nWhich shall fructify in the lives of others:\nAnd do not think of the fruit of action.\nFare forward.\n O voyagers, O seamen,\nYou who came to port, and you whose bodies\nWill suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,\nOr whatever event, this is your real destination.’\nSo Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna\nOn the field of battle.\n Not fare well,\nBut fare forward, voyagers.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nLady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,\nPray for all those who are in ships, those\nWhose business has to do with fish, and\nThose concerned with every lawful traffic\nAnd those who conduct them.\n\n Repeat a prayer also on behalf of\nWomen who have seen their sons or husbands\nSetting forth, and not returning:\nFiglia del tuo figlio,\nQueen of Heaven.\n\n Also pray for those who were in ships, and\nEnded their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips\nOr in the dark throat which will not reject them\nOr wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s\nPerpetual angelus.\n\n\n# V.\n\nTo communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,\nTo report the behaviour of the sea monster,\nDescribe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,\nObserve disease in signatures, evoke\nBiography from the wrinkles of the palm\nAnd tragedy from fingers; release omens\nBy sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable\nWith playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams\nOr barbituric acids, or dissect\nThe recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors--\nTo explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual\nPastimes and drugs, and features of the press:\nAnd always will be, some of them especially\nWhen there is distress of nations and perplexity\nWhether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.\nMen’s curiosity searches past and future\nAnd clings to that dimension. But to apprehend\nThe point of intersection of the timeless\nWith time, is an occupation for the saint--\nNo occupation either, but something given\nAnd taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,\nArdour and selflessness and self-surrender.\nFor most of us, there is only the unattended\nMoment, the moment in and out of time,\nThe distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,\nThe wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning\nOr the waterfall, or music heard so deeply\nThat it is not heard at all, but you are the music\nWhile the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,\nHints followed by guesses; and the rest\nIs prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.\nThe hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.\nHere the impossible union\nOf spheres of existence is actual,\nHere the past and future\nAre conquered, and reconciled,\nWhere action were otherwise movement\nOf that which is only moved\nAnd has in it no source of movement--\nDriven by daemonic, chthonic\nPowers. And right action is freedom\nFrom past and future also.\nFor most of us, this is the aim\nNever here to be realised;\nWho are only undefeated\nBecause we have gone on trying;\nWe, content at the last\nIf our temporal reversion nourish\n(Not too far from the yew-tree)\nThe life of significant soil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "east-coker": { - "title": "“East Coker”", - "body": "# I.\n\nIn my beginning is my end. In succession\nHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,\nAre removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place\nIs an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.\nOld stone to new building, old timber to new fires,\nOld fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth\nWhich is already flesh, fur and faeces,\nBone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.\nHouses live and die: there is a time for building\nAnd a time for living and for generation\nAnd a time for the wind to break the loosened pane\nAnd to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots\nAnd to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.\n\nIn my beginning is my end. Now the light falls\nAcross the open field, leaving the deep lane\nShuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,\nWhere you lean against a bank while a van passes,\nAnd the deep lane insists on the direction\nInto the village, in the electric heat\nHypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light\nIs absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.\nThe dahlias sleep in the empty silence.\nWait for the early owl.\n\n In that open field\nIf you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,\nOn a summer midnight, you can hear the music\nOf the weak pipe and the little drum\nAnd see them dancing around the bonfire\nThe association of man and woman\nIn daunsinge, signifying matrimonie--\nA dignified and commodiois sacrament.\nTwo and two, necessarye coniunction,\nHolding eche other by the hand or the arm\nWhiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire\nLeaping through the flames, or joined in circles,\nRustically solemn or in rustic laughter\nLifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,\nEarth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth\nMirth of those long since under earth\nNourishing the corn. Keeping time,\nKeeping the rhythm in their dancing\nAs in their living in the living seasons\nThe time of the seasons and the constellations\nThe time of milking and the time of harvest\nThe time of the coupling of man and woman\nAnd that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.\nEating and drinking. Dung and death.\n\nDawn points, and another day\nPrepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind\nWrinkles and slides. I am here\nOr there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhat is the late November doing\nWith the disturbance of the spring\nAnd creatures of the summer heat,\nAnd snowdrops writhing under feet\nAnd hollyhocks that aim too high\nRed into grey and tumble down\nLate roses filled with early snow?\nThunder rolled by the rolling stars\nSimulates triumphal cars\nDeployed in constellated wars\nScorpion fights against the Sun\nUntil the Sun and Moon go down\nComets weep and Leonids fly\nHunt the heavens and the plains\nWhirled in a vortex that shall bring\nThe world to that destructive fire\nWhich burns before the ice-cap reigns.\n\nThat was a way of putting it--not very satisfactory:\nA periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,\nLeaving one still with the intolerable wrestle\nWith words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.\nIt was not (to start again) what one had expected.\nWhat was to be the value of the long looked forward to,\nLong hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity\nAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us\nOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,\nBequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?\nThe serenity only a deliberate hebetude,\nThe wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets\nUseless in the darkness into which they peered\nOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,\nAt best, only a limited value\nIn the knowledge derived from experience.\nThe knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,\nFor the pattern is new in every moment\nAnd every moment is a new and shocking\nValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived\nOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.\nIn the middle, not only in the middle of the way\nBut all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,\nOn the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,\nAnd menaced by monsters, fancy lights,\nRisking enchantment. Do not let me hear\nOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,\nTheir fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,\nOf belonging to another, or to others, or to God.\nThe only wisdom we can hope to acquire\nIs the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.\n\nThe houses are all gone under the sea.\n\nThe dancers are all gone under the hill.\n\n\n# III.\n\nO dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,\nThe vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,\nThe captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,\nThe generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,\nDistinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,\nIndustrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,\nAnd dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha\nAnd the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,\nAnd cold the sense and lost the motive of action.\nAnd we all go with them, into the silent funeral,\nNobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.\nI said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you\nWhich shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,\nThe lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed\nWith a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,\nAnd we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama\nAnd the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away--\nOr as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations\nAnd the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence\nAnd you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen\nLeaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;\nOr when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing--\nI said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope\nFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,\nFor love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith\nBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.\nWait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:\nSo the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.\nWhisper of running streams, and winter lightning.\nThe wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,\nThe laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy\nNot lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony\nOf death and birth.\n\n You say I am repeating\nSomething I have said before. I shall say it again.\nShall I say it again? In order to arrive there,\nTo arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,\n You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.\nIn order to arrive at what you do not know\n You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.\nIn order to possess what you do not possess\n You must go by the way of dispossession.\nIn order to arrive at what you are not\n You must go through the way in which you are not.\nAnd what you do not know is the only thing you know\nAnd what you own is what you do not own\nAnd where you are is where you are not.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe wounded surgeon plies the steel\nThat questions the distempered part;\nBeneath the bleeding hands we feel\nThe sharp compassion of the healer’s art\nResolving the enigma of the fever chart.\n\nOur only health is the disease\nIf we obey the dying nurse\nWhose constant care is not to please\nBut to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,\nAnd that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.\n\nThe whole earth is our hospital\nEndowed by the ruined millionaire,\nWherein, if we do well, we shall\nDie of the absolute paternal care\nThat will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.\n\nThe chill ascends from feet to knees,\nThe fever sings in mental wires.\nIf to be warmed, then I must freeze\nAnd quake in frigid purgatorial fires\nOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.\n\nThe dripping blood our only drink,\nThe bloody flesh our only food:\nIn spite of which we like to think\nThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--\nAgain, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.\n\n\n# V.\n\nSo here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--\nTwenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres\nTrying to use words, and every attempt\nIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure\nBecause one has only learnt to get the better of words\nFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which\nOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture\nIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate\nWith shabby equipment always deteriorating\nIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,\nUndisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer\nBy strength and submission, has already been discovered\nOnce or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope\nTo emulate--but there is no competition--\nThere is only the fight to recover what has been lost\nAnd found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions\nThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.\nFor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.\n\nHome is where one starts from. As we grow older\nThe world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated\nOf dead and living. Not the intense moment\nIsolated, with no before and after,\nBut a lifetime burning in every moment\nAnd not the lifetime of one man only\nBut of old stones that cannot be deciphered.\nThere is a time for the evening under starlight,\nA time for the evening under lamplight\n(The evening with the photograph album).\nLove is most nearly itself\nWhen here and now cease to matter.\nOld men ought to be explorers\nHere or there does not matter\nWe must be still and still moving\nInto another intensity\nFor a further union, a deeper communion\nThrough the dark cold and the empty desolation,\nThe wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters\nOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "empty-silences": { - "title": "“Empty Silences”", - "body": "Along the city streets\nIt is still high tide,\nYet the garrulous waves of life\nShrink and divide\nWith a thousand incidents\nVexed and debated--\nThis is the hour for which we waited--\n\nThis is the ultimate hour\nWhen life is justified.\nThe seas of experience\nThat were so broad and deep,\nSo immediate and steep,\nAre suddenly still.\nYou may say what you will,\nAt such peace I am terrified.\nThere is nothing else beside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eyes-that-i-last-saw-in-tears": { - "title": "“Eyes that I Last Saw in Tears”", - "body": "Eyes that last I saw in tears\nThrough division\nHere in death’s dream kingdom\nThe golden vision reappears\nI see the eyes but not the tears\nThis is my affliction\n\nThis is my affliction\nEyes I shall not see again\nEyes of decision\nEyes I shall not see unless\nAt the door of death’s other kingdom\nWhere, as in this,\nThe eyes outlast a little while\nA little while outlast the tears\nAnd hold us in derision.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gerontion": { - "title": "“Gerontion”", - "body": "_Thou hast nor youth nor age\nBut as it were an after dinner sleep\nDreaming of both._\n\n\nHere I am an old man in a dry month\nBeing read to by a boy waiting for rain.\nI was neither at the hot gates\nNor fought in the warm rain\nNor knee deep in the salt marsh heaving a cutlass\nBitten by flies fought.\nMy house is a decayed house\nAnd the jew squats on the window sill the owner\nSpawned in some estaminet of Antwerp\nBlistered in Brussels patched and peeled in London.\nThe goat coughs at night in the field overhead;\nRocks moss stonecrop iron merds.\nThe woman keeps the kitchen makes tea\nSneezes at evening poking the peevish gutter.\n\n I an old man\nA dull head among windy spaces.\n\nSigns are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign”:\nThe word within a word unable to speak a word\nSwaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year\nCame Christ the tiger\n\nIn depraved May dogwood and chestnut flowering Judas\nTo be eaten to be divided to be drunk\nAmong whispers; by Mr. Silvero\nWith caressing hands at Limoges\nWho walked all night in the next room;\nBy Hakagawa bowing among the Titians;\nBy Madame de Tornquist in the dark room\nShifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp\nWho turned in the hall one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles\nWeave the wind. I have no ghosts\nAn old man in a draughty house\nUnder a windy knob.\n\nAfter such knowledge what forgiveness? Think now\nHistory has many cunning passages contrived corridors\nAnd issues deceives with whispering ambitions\nGuides us by vanities. Think now\nShe gives when our attention is distracted\nAnd what she gives gives with such supple confusions\nThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late\nWhat’s not believed in or if still believed\nIn memory only reconsidered passion. Gives too soon\nInto weak hands what’s thought can be dispensed with\nTill the refusal propagates a fear. Think\nNeither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices\nAre fathered by our heroism. Virtues\nAre forced upon us by our impudent crimes.\nThese tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.\n\nThe tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last\nWe have not reached conclusion when I\nStiffen in a rented house. Think at last\nI have not made this show purposelessly\nAnd it is not by any concitation\nOf the backward devils.\nI would meet you upon this honestly.\nI that was near your heart was removed therefrom\nTo lose beauty in terror terror in inquisition.\nI have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it\nSince what is kept must be adulterated?\nI have lost my sight smell hearing taste and touch:\nHow should I use it for your closer contact?\n\nThese with a thousand small deliberations\nProtract the profit of their chilled delirium\nExcite the membrane when the sense has cooled\nWith pungent sauces multiply variety\nIn a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do\nSuspend its operations will the weevil\nDelay? De Bailhache Fresca Mrs. Cammel whirled\nBeyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear\nIn fractured atoms. Gull against the wind in the windy straits\nOf Belle Isle or running on the Horn\nWhite feathers in the snow the Gulf claims\nAnd an old man driven by the Trades\nTo a sleepy corner.\n\n Tenants of the house\nThoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-hippopotamus": { - "title": "“The Hippopotamus”", - "body": "_Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos ut\nmandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum ut Jesum\nChristum existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros\nautem ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem\nApostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de\nquibus suadeo vos sic habeo.\n\nS. IGNATII AD TRALLIANOS.\n\nAnd when this epistle is read among you cause\nthat it be read also in the church of the\nLaodiceans._\n\n\nThe broad-backed hippopotamus\nRests on his belly in the mud;\nAlthough he seems so firm to us\nHe is merely flesh and blood.\n\nFlesh-and-blood is weak and frail\nSusceptible to nervous shock;\nWhile the True Church can never fail\nFor it is based upon a rock.\n\nThe hippo’s feeble steps may err\nIn compassing material ends\nWhile the True Church need never stir\nTo gather in its dividends.\n\nThe ’potamus can never reach\nThe mango on the mango-tree;\nBut fruits of pomegranate and peach\nRefresh the Church from over sea.\n\nAt mating time the hippo’s voice\nBetrays inflexions hoarse and odd\nBut every week we hear rejoice\nThe Church at being one with God.\n\nThe hippopotamus’s day\nIs passed in sleep; at night he hunts;\nGod works in a mysterious way--\nThe Church can sleep and feed at once.\n\nI saw the ’potamus take wing\nAscending from the damp savannas\nAnd quiring angels round him sing\nThe praise of God in loud hosannas.\n\nBlood of the Lamb shall wash him clean\nAnd him shall heavenly arms enfold\nAmong the saints he shall be seen\nPerforming on a harp of gold.\n\nHe shall be washed as white as snow\nBy all the martyr’d virgins kiss\nWhile the True Church remains below\nWrapt in the old miasmal mist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-hollow-men": { - "title": "“The Hollow Men”", - "body": "# I.\n\n_Mistah Kurtz-he dead\n A penny for the Old Guy_\n\n\nWe are the hollow men\nWe are the stuffed men\nLeaning together\nHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!\nOur dried voices when\nWe whisper together\nAre quiet and meaningless\nAs wind in dry grass\nOr rats’ feet over broken glass\nIn our dry cellar\n\nShape without form shade without colour\nParalysed force gesture without motion;\n\nThose who have crossed\nWith direct eyes to death’s other Kingdom\nRemember us-if at all-not as lost\nViolent souls but only\nAs the hollow men\nThe stuffed men.\n\n\n# II.\n\nEyes I dare not meet in dreams\nIn death’s dream kingdom\nThese do not appear:\nThere the eyes are\nSunlight on a broken column\nThere is a tree swinging\nAnd voices are\nIn the wind’s singing\nMore distant and more solemn\nThan a fading star.\n\nLet me be no nearer\nIn death’s dream kingdom\nLet me also wear\nSuch deliberate disguises\nRat’s coat crowskin crossed staves\nIn a field\nBehaving as the wind behaves\nNo nearer-\n\nNot that final meeting\nIn the twilight kingdom\n\n\n# III.\n\nThis is the dead land\nThis is cactus land\nHere the stone images\nAre raised here they receive\nThe supplication of a dead man’s hand\nUnder the twinkle of a fading star.\n\nIs it like this\nIn death’s other kingdom\nWaking alone\nAt the hour when we are\nTrembling with tenderness\nLips that would kiss\nForm prayers to broken stone.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe eyes are not here\nThere are no eyes here\nIn this valley of dying stars\nIn this hollow valley\nThis broken jaw of our lost kingdoms\n\nIn this last of meeting places\nWe grope together\nAnd avoid speech\nGathered on this beach of the tumid river\n\nSightless unless\nThe eyes reappear\nAs the perpetual star\nMultifoliate rose\nOf death’s twilight kingdom\nThe hope only\nOf empty men.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHere we go round the prickly pear\nPrickly pear prickly pear\nHere we go round the prickly pear\nAt five o’clock in the morning.\n\nBetween the idea\nAnd the reality\nBetween the motion\nAnd the act\nFalls the Shadow\nFor Thine is the Kingdom\n\nBetween the conception\nAnd the creation\nBetween the emotion\nAnd the response\nFalls the Shadow\nLife is very long\n\nBetween the desire\nAnd the spasm\nBetween the potency\nAnd the existence\nBetween the essence\nAnd the descent\nFalls the Shadow\nFor Thine is the Kingdom\n\nFor Thine is\nLife is\nFor Thine is the\n\n_This is the way the world ends\nThis is the way the world ends\nThis is the way the world ends\nNot with a bang but a whimper._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - } - } - }, - "hysteria": { - "title": "“Hysteria”", - "body": "As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her\nlaughter and being part of it, until her teeth were\nonly accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I\nwas drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary\nrecovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her\nthroat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An\nelderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly\nspreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty\ngreen iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman\nwish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and\ngentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …” I\ndecided that if the shaking of her breasts could be\nstopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might\nbe collected, and I concentrated my attention with\ncareful subtlety to this end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "if-time-and-space-as-sages-say": { - "title": "“If Time and Space, as sages say …”", - "body": "If Time and Space, as sages say,\nAre things which cannot be,\nThe sun which does not feel decay\nNo greater is then we.\nSo why, Love, should we ever pray\nto live a century?\nThe butterfly that lives a day\nHas lived eternity.\n\nThe flowers I gave thee when the dew\nWas trembling on the vine,\nWere withered ere the wild bee flew\nTo suck the eglentine.\nSo let us haste to pluck anew\nNor mourn to see them pine,\nAnd though our days of love be few\nYet let them be divine.\n\nIf Space and Time, as sages say,\nAre things which cannot be,\nThe fly that lives a single day\nHas lived as long as we.\nBut let us live while yet we may,\nWhile love and life are free,\nFor time is time, and runs away,\nThough sages disagree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-journey-of-the-magi": { - "title": "“The Journey of the Magi”", - "body": "A cold coming we had of it,\nJust the worst time of the year\nFor a journey, and such a long journey:\nThe ways deep and the weather sharp,\nThe very dead of winter.\nAnd the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,\nLying down in the melting snow.\nThere were times we regretted\nThe summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,\nAnd the silken girls bringing sherbet.\nThen the camel men cursing and grumbling\nand running away, and wanting their liquor and women,\nAnd the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,\nAnd the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly\nAnd the villages dirty and charging high prices:\nA hard time we had of it.\nAt the end we preferred to travel all night,\nSleeping in snatches,\nWith the voices singing in our ears, saying\nThat this was all folly.\n\nThen at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,\nWet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;\nWith a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,\nAnd three trees on the low sky,\nAnd an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.\nThen we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,\nSix hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,\nAnd feet kicking the empty wine-skins.\nBut there was no information, and so we continued\nAnd arriving at evening, not a moment too soon\nFinding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.\n\nAll this was a long time ago, I remember,\nAnd I would do it again, but set down\nThis set down\nThis: were we led all that way for\nBirth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly\nWe had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,\nBut had thought they were different; this Birth was\nHard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.\nWe returned to our places, these Kingdoms,\nBut no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,\nWith an alien people clutching their gods.\nI should be glad of another death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "la-figlia-che-piange": { - "title": "“La Figlia Che Piange”", - "body": "_O quam te memorem Virgo …_\n\nStand on the highest pavement of the stair--\nLean on a garden urn--\nWeave weave the sunlight in your hair--\nClasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise--\nFling them to the ground and turn\nWith a fugitive resentment in your eyes:\nBut weave weave the sunlight in your hair.\n\nSo I would have had him leave\nSo I would have had her stand and grieve\nSo he would have left\nAs the soul leaves the body torn and bruised\nAs the mind deserts the body it has used.\nI should find\nSome way incomparably light and deft\nSome way we both should understand\nSimple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.\n\nShe turned away but with the autumn weather\nCompelled my imagination many days\nMany days and many hours:\nHer hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.\nAnd I wonder how they should have been together!\nI should have lost a gesture and a pose.\nSometimes these cogitations still amaze\nThe troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "little-gidding": { - "title": "“Little Gidding”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMidwinter spring is its own season\nSempiternal though sodden towards sundown,\nSuspended in time, between pole and tropic.\nWhen the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,\nThe brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,\nIn windless cold that is the heart’s heat,\nReflecting in a watery mirror\nA glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.\nAnd glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,\nStirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire\nIn the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing\nThe soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell\nOr smell of living thing. This is the spring time\nBut not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow\nIs blanched for an hour with transitory blossom\nOf snow, a bloom more sudden\nThan that of summer, neither budding nor fading,\nNot in the scheme of generation.\nWhere is the summer, the unimaginable\nZero summer?\n\n If you came this way,\nTaking the route you would be likely to take\nFrom the place you would be likely to come from,\nIf you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges\nWhite again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.\nIt would be the same at the end of the journey,\nIf you came at night like a broken king,\nIf you came by day not knowing what you came for,\nIt would be the same, when you leave the rough road\nAnd turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade\nAnd the tombstone. And what you thought you came for\nIs only a shell, a husk of meaning\nFrom which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled\nIf at all. Either you had no purpose\nOr the purpose is beyond the end you figured\nAnd is altered in fulfilment. There are other places\nWhich also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,\nOr over a dark lake, in a desert or a city--\nBut this is the nearest, in place and time,\nNow and in England.\n\n If you came this way,\nTaking any route, starting from anywhere,\nAt any time or at any season,\nIt would always be the same: you would have to put off\nSense and notion. You are not here to verify,\nInstruct yourself, or inform curiosity\nOr carry report. You are here to kneel\nWhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more\nThan an order of words, the conscious occupation\nOf the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.\nAnd what the dead had no speech for, when living,\nThey can tell you, being dead: the communication\nOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.\nHere, the intersection of the timeless moment\nIs England and nowhere. Never and always.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAsh on and old man’s sleeve\nIs all the ash the burnt roses leave.\nDust in the air suspended\nMarks the place where a story ended.\nDust inbreathed was a house--\nThe walls, the wainscot and the mouse,\nThe death of hope and despair,\n This is the death of air.\n\nThere are flood and drouth\nOver the eyes and in the mouth,\nDead water and dead sand\nContending for the upper hand.\nThe parched eviscerate soil\nGapes at the vanity of toil,\nLaughs without mirth.\n This is the death of earth.\n\nWater and fire succeed\nThe town, the pasture and the weed.\nWater and fire deride\nThe sacrifice that we denied.\nWater and fire shall rot\nThe marred foundations we forgot,\nOf sanctuary and choir.\n This is the death of water and fire.\n\nIn the uncertain hour before the morning\n Near the ending of interminable night\n At the recurrent end of the unending\nAfter the dark dove with the flickering tongue\n Had passed below the horizon of his homing\n While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin\nOver the asphalt where no other sound was\n Between three districts whence the smoke arose\n I met one walking, loitering and hurried\nAs if blown towards me like the metal leaves\n Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.\n And as I fixed upon the down-turned face\nThat pointed scrutiny with which we challenge\n The first-met stranger in the waning dusk\n I caught the sudden look of some dead master\nWhom I had known, forgotten, half recalled\n Both one and many; in the brown baked features\n The eyes of a familiar compound ghost\nBoth intimate and unidentifiable.\n So I assumed a double part, and cried\n And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’\nAlthough we were not. I was still the same,\n Knowing myself yet being someone other--\n And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed\nTo compel the recognition they preceded.\n And so, compliant to the common wind,\n Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,\nIn concord at this intersection time\n Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,\n We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.\nI said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,\n Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:\n I may not comprehend, may not remember.’\nAnd he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse\n My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.\n These things have served their purpose: let them be.\nSo with your own, and pray they be forgiven\n By others, as I pray you to forgive\n Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten\nAnd the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.\n For last year’s words belong to last year’s language\n And next year’s words await another voice.\nBut, as the passage now presents no hindrance\n To the spirit unappeased and peregrine\n Between two worlds become much like each other,\nSo I find words I never thought to speak\n In streets I never thought I should revisit\n When I left my body on a distant shore.\nSince our concern was speech, and speech impelled us\n To purify the dialect of the tribe\n And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,\nLet me disclose the gifts reserved for age\n To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.\n First, the cold friction of expiring sense\nWithout enchantment, offering no promise\n But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit\n As body and soul begin to fall asunder.\nSecond, the conscious impotence of rage\n At human folly, and the laceration\n Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.\nAnd last, the rending pain of re-enactment\n Of all that you have done, and been; the shame\n Of motives late revealed, and the awareness\nOf things ill done and done to others’ harm\n Which once you took for exercise of virtue.\n Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.\nFrom wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit\n Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire\n Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’\nThe day was breaking. In the disfigured street\n He left me, with a kind of valediction,\n And faded on the blowing of the horn.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThere are three conditions which often look alike\nYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:\nAttachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment\nFrom self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference\nWhich resembles the others as death resembles life,\nBeing between two lives--unflowering, between\nThe live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:\nFor liberation--not less of love but expanding\nOf love beyond desire, and so liberation\nFrom the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country\nBegins as attachment to our own field of action\nAnd comes to find that action of little importance\nThough never indifferent. History may be servitude,\nHistory may be freedom. See, now they vanish,\nThe faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,\nTo become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.\n\nSin is Behovely, but\nAll shall be well, and\nAll manner of thing shall be well.\nIf I think, again, of this place,\nAnd of people, not wholly commendable,\nOf no immediate kin or kindness,\nBut of some peculiar genius,\nAll touched by a common genius,\nUnited in the strife which divided them;\nIf I think of a king at nightfall,\nOf three men, and more, on the scaffold\nAnd a few who died forgotten\nIn other places, here and abroad,\nAnd of one who died blind and quiet\nWhy should we celebrate\nThese dead men more than the dying?\nIt is not to ring the bell backward\nNor is it an incantation\nTo summon the spectre of a Rose.\nWe cannot revive old factions\nWe cannot restore old policies\nOr follow an antique drum.\nThese men, and those who opposed them\nAnd those whom they opposed\nAccept the constitution of silence\nAnd are folded in a single party.\nWhatever we inherit from the fortunate\nWe have taken from the defeated\nWhat they had to leave us--a symbol:\nA symbol perfected in death.\nAnd all shall be well and\nAll manner of thing shall be well\nBy the purification of the motive\nIn the ground of our beseeching.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe dove descending breaks the air\nWith flame of incandescent terror\nOf which the tongues declare\nThe one discharge from sin and error.\nThe only hope, or else despair\n Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre--\n To be redeemed from fire by fire.\n\nWho then devised the torment? Love.\nLove is the unfamiliar Name\nBehind the hands that wove\nThe intolerable shirt of flame\nWhich human power cannot remove.\n We only live, only suspire\n Consumed by either fire or fire.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat we call the beginning is often the end\nAnd to make and end is to make a beginning.\nThe end is where we start from. And every phrase\nAnd sentence that is right (where every word is at home,\nTaking its place to support the others,\nThe word neither diffident nor ostentatious,\nAn easy commerce of the old and the new,\nThe common word exact without vulgarity,\nThe formal word precise but not pedantic,\nThe complete consort dancing together)\nEvery phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,\nEvery poem an epitaph. And any action\nIs a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat\nOr to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.\nWe die with the dying:\nSee, they depart, and we go with them.\nWe are born with the dead:\nSee, they return, and bring us with them.\nThe moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree\nAre of equal duration. A people without history\nIs not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern\nOf timeless moments. So, while the light fails\nOn a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel\nHistory is now and England.\n\nWith the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling\n\nWe shall not cease from exploration\nAnd the end of all our exploring\nWill be to arrive where we started\nAnd know the place for the first time.\nThrough the unknown, unremembered gate\nWhen the last of earth left to discover\nIs that which was the beginning;\nAt the source of the longest river\nThe voice of the hidden waterfall\nAnd the children in the apple-tree\nNot known, because not looked for\nBut heard, half-heard, in the stillness\nBetween two waves of the sea.\nQuick now, here, now, always--\nA condition of complete simplicity\n(Costing not less than everything)\nAnd all shall be well and\nAll manner of thing shall be well\nWhen the tongues of flame are in-folded\nInto the crowned knot of fire\nAnd the fire and the rose are one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock": { - "title": "“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”", - "body": "_S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse\nA persona che mai tornasse al mondo\nQuesta fiamma staria senza piu scosse.\nMa perciocche giammai di questo fondo\nNon torno vivo alcun s’i’odo il vero\nSenza tema d’infamia ti rispondo._\n\n\nLet us go then you and I\nWhen the evening is spread out against the sky\nLike a patient etherized upon a table;\nLet us go through certain half-deserted streets\nThe muttering retreats\nOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotels\nAnd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:\nStreets that follow like a tedious argument\nOf insidious intent\nTo lead you to an overwhelming question …\nOh do not ask “What is it?”\nLet us go and make our visit.\n\nIn the room the women come and go\nTalking of Michelangelo.\n\nThe yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes\nThe yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes\nLicked its tongue into the corners of the evening\nLingered upon the pools that stand in drains\nLet fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys\nSlipped by the terrace made a sudden leap\nAnd seeing that it was a soft October night\nCurled once about the house and fell asleep.\n\nAnd indeed there will be time\nFor the yellow smoke that slides along the street\nRubbing its back upon the window panes;\nThere will be time there will be time\nTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet\nThere will be time to murder and create\nAnd time for all the works and days of hands\nThat lift and drop a question on your plate;\nTime for you and time for me\nAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions\nAnd for a hundred visions and revisions\nBefore the taking of a toast and tea.\n\nIn the room the women come and go\nTalking of Michelangelo.\n\nAnd indeed there will be time\nTo wonder “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”\nTime to turn back and descend the stair\nWith a bald spot in the middle of my hair--\n(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)\nMy morning coat my collar mounting firmly to the chin\nMy necktie rich and modest but asserted by a simple pin--\n(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)\nDo I dare\nDisturb the universe?\nIn a minute there is time\nFor decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.\n\nFor I have known them all already known them all:\nHave known the evenings mornings afternoons\nI have measured out my life with coffee spoons;\nI know the voices dying with a dying fall\nBeneath the music from a farther room.\n So how should I presume?\n\nAnd I have known the eyes already known them all--\nThe eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase\nAnd when I am formulated sprawling on a pin\nWhen I am pinned and wriggling on the wall\nThen how should I begin\nTo spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?\n And how should I presume?\n\nAnd I have known the arms already known them all--\nArms that are braceleted and white and bare\n(But in the lamplight downed with light brown hair!)\nIs it perfume from a dress\nThat makes me so digress?\nArms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl.\n And should I then presume?\n And how should I begin?\n\n\nShall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets\nAnd watched the smoke that rises from the pipes\nOf lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows?\n\nI should have been a pair of ragged claws\nScuttling across the floors of silent seas.\n\nAnd the afternoon the evening sleeps so peacefully!\nSmoothed by long fingers\nAsleep … tired … or it malingers.\nStretched on the floor here beside you and me.\nShould I after tea and cakes and ices\nHave the strength to force the moment to its crisis?\nBut though I have wept and fasted wept and prayed\nThough I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter\nI am no prophet--and here’s no great matter;\nI have seen the moment of my greatness flicker\nAnd I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker\nAnd in short I was afraid.\n\nAnd would it have been worth it after all\nAfter the cups the marmalade the tea\nAmong the porcelain among some talk of you and me\nWould it have been worth while\nTo have bitten off the matter with a smile\nTo have squeezed the universe into a ball\nTo roll it toward some overwhelming question\nTo say: “I am Lazarus come from the dead\nCome back to tell you all I shall tell you all”--\nIf one settling a pillow by her head\n Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;\n That is not it at all.”\n\nAnd would it have been worth it after all\nWould it have been worth while\nAfter the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets\nAfter the novels after the teacups after the skirts that trail along the floor--\nAnd this and so much more?--\nIt is impossible to say just what I mean!\nBut as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:\nWould it have been worth while\nIf one settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl\nAnd turning toward the window should say:\n “That is not it at all\n That is not what I meant at all.”\n\n\nNo! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be;\nAm an attendant lord one that will do\nTo swell a progress start a scene or two\nAdvise the prince; no doubt an easy tool\nDeferential glad to be of use\nPolitic cautious and meticulous;\nFull of high sentence but a bit obtuse;\nAt times indeed almost ridiculous--\nAlmost at times the Fool.\n\nI grow old … I grow old …\nI shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.\n\nShall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?\nI shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.\nI have heard the mermaids singing each to each.\n\nI do not think that they will sing to me.\n\nI have seen them riding seaward on the waves\nCombing the white hair of the waves blown back\nWhen the wind blows the water white and black.\n\nWe have lingered in the chambers of the sea\nBy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown\nTill human voices wake us and we drown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "morning-at-the-window": { - "title": "“Morning at the Window”", - "body": "They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,\nAnd along the trampled edges of the street\nI am aware of the damp souls of housemaids\nSprouting despondently at area gates.\nThe brown waves of fog toss up to me\nTwisted faces from the bottom of the street,\nAnd tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts\nAn aimless smile that hovers in the air\nAnd vanishes along the level of the roofs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "mr-apollinax": { - "title": "“Mr. Apollinax”", - "body": "When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States\nHis laughter tinkled among the teacups.\nI thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,\nAnd of Priapus in the shrubbery\nGaping at the lady in the swing.\nIn the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s\nHe laughed like an irresponsible foetus.\nHis laughter was submarine and profound\nLike the old man of the sea’s\nHidden under coral islands\nWhere worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,\nDropping from fingers of surf.\nI looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair\nOr grinning over a screen\nWith seaweed in its hair.\nI heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the hard turf\nAs his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.\n“He is a charming man”--“But after all what did he mean?”--\n“His pointed ears … He must be unbalanced,”--\n“There was something he said that I might have challenged.”\nOf dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah\nI remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mr-eliots-sunday-morning-service": { - "title": "“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”", - "body": "Look look master here comes two religious\ncaterpillars.\n The Jew of Malta.\n\n\nPolyphiloprogenitive\nThe sapient sutlers of the Lord\nDrift across the window-panes.\nIn the beginning was the Word.\n\nIn the beginning was the Word.\nSuperfetation of Greek text inserted here\nAnd at the mensual turn of time\nProduced enervate Origen.\n\nA painter of the Umbrian school\nDesigned upon a gesso ground\nThe nimbus of the Baptized God.\nThe wilderness is cracked and browned\n\nBut through the water pale and thin\nStill shine the unoffending feet\nAnd there above the painter set\nThe Father and the Paraclete.\n\n\nThe sable presbyters approach\nThe avenue of penitence;\nThe young are red and pustular\nClutching piaculative pence.\n\nUnder the penitential gates\nSustained by staring Seraphim\nWhere the souls of the devout\nBurn invisible and dim.\n\nAlong the garden-wall the bees\nWith hairy bellies pass between\nThe staminate and pistilate\nBlest office of the epicene.\n\nSweeney shifts from ham to ham\nStirring the water in his bath.\nThe masters of the subtle schools\nAre controversial polymath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-naming-of-cats": { - "title": "“The Naming of Cats”", - "body": "The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,\n It isn’t just one of your holiday games;\nYou may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter\nWhen I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.\nFirst of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,\n Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,\nSuch as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--\n All of them sensible everyday names.\nThere are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,\n Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:\nSuch as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--\n But all of them sensible everyday names,\nBut I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,\n A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,\nElse how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,\n Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?\nOf names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,\n Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,\nSuch as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum--\n Names that never belong to more than one cat.\nBut above and beyond there’s still one name left over,\n And that is the name that you never will guess;\nThe name that no human research can discover--\n But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.\nWhen you notice a cat in profound meditation,\n The reason, I tell you, is always the same:\nHis mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation\n Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:\n His ineffable effable\n Effanineffable\nDeep and inscrutable singular name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "nocturne": { - "title": "“Nocturne”", - "body": "Romeo, _grand sérieux_, to importune\nGuitar and hat in hand, beside the gate\nWith Juliet, in the usual debate\nOf love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;\nThe conversation failing, strikes some tune\nBanal, and out of pity for their fate\nBehind the wall I have some servant wait,\nStab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.\n\nBlood looks effective on the moonlit ground--\nThe hero smiles; in my best mode oblique\nRolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,\n(No need of “Love forever?”--“Love next week?”)\nWhile female readers all in tears are drowned:--\n“The perfect climax all true lovers seek!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - } - } - }, - "o-light-invisible": { - "title": "“O Light Invisible”", - "body": "Greater Light, we praise Thee for the less;\nThe eastern light our spires touch at morning,\nThe light that slants upon our western doors at evening.\nThe twilight over stagnant pools at batflight,\nMoon light and star light, owl and moth light,\nGlow-worm glowlight on a grassblade.\nLight Invisible, we worship Thee!\n\nWe thank Thee for the lights that we have kindled,\nThe light of altar and of sanctuary;\nSmall lights of those who meditate at midnight\nAnd lights directed through the coloured panes of windows\nAnd light reflected from the polished stone,\nThe gilded carven wood, the coloured fresco.\nOur gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward\nAnd see the light that fractures through unquiet water.\nWe see the light but see not whence it comes.\nLight Invisible, we glorify Thee!\n\nIn our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.\nWe are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play.\nWe tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep,\nControlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons.\nAnd we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it;\nForever must quench, forever relight the flame.\nTherefore we thank Thee for our little light, that is dappled with shadow.\nWe thank Thee who hast moved us to building, to finding, to forming at the ends of our fingers and beams of our eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "portrait-of-a-lady": { - "title": "“Portrait of a Lady”", - "body": "_Thou hast committed--\nFornication: but that was in another country\nAnd besides the wench is dead.\nThe Jew of Malta._\n\n\n# I.\n\nAmong the smoke and fog of a December afternoon\nYou have the scene arrange itself--as it will seem to do--\nWith “I have saved this afternoon for you”;\nAnd four wax candles in the darkened room\nFour rings of light upon the ceiling overhead\nAn atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb\nPrepared for all the things to be said or left unsaid.\nWe have been let us say to hear the latest Pole\nTransmit the Preludes through his hair and finger-tips.\n“So intimate this Chopin that I think his soul\nShould be resurrected only among friends\nSome two or three who will not touch the bloom\nThat is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”\n--And so the conversation slips\nAmong velleities and carefully caught regrets\nThrough attenuated tones of violins\nMingled with remote cornets\nAnd begins.\n\n“You do not know how much they mean to me my friends\nAnd how how rare and strange it is to find\nIn a life composed so much so much of odds and ends\n(For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!\nHow keen you are!)\nTo find a friend who has these qualities\nWho has and gives\nThose qualities upon which friendship lives.\nHow much it means that I say this to you--\nWithout these friendships--life what cauchemar!”\nAmong the windings of the violins\nAnd the ariettes\nOf cracked cornets\nInside my brain a dull tom-tom begins\nAbsurdly hammering a prelude of its own\nCapricious monotone\nThat is at least one definite “false note.”\n--Let us take the air in a tobacco trance\nAdmire the monuments\nDiscuss the late events\nCorrect our watches by the public clocks.\nThen sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow that lilacs are in bloom\nShe has a bowl of lilacs in her room\nAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks.\n“Ah my friend you do not know you do not know\nWhat life is you should hold it in your hands”;\n(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)\n“You let it flow from you you let it flow\nAnd youth is cruel and has no remorse\nAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see.”\nI smile of course\nAnd go on drinking tea.\n“Yet with these April sunsets that somehow recall\nMy buried life and Paris in the Spring\nI feel immeasurably at peace and find the world\nTo be wonderful and youthful after all.”\n\nThe voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune\nOf a broken violin on an August afternoon:\n“I am always sure that you understand\nMy feelings always sure that you feel\nSure that across the gulf you reach your hand.\n\nYou are invulnerable you have no Achilles’ heel.\nYou will go on and when you have prevailed\nYou can say: at this point many a one has failed.\n\nBut what have I but what have I my friend\nTo give you what can you receive from me?\nOnly the friendship and the sympathy\nOf one about to reach her journey’s end.\n\nI shall sit here serving tea to friends …”\n\nI take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends\nFor what she has said to me?\nYou will see me any morning in the park\nReading the comics and the sporting page.\nParticularly I remark An English countess goes upon the stage.\nA Greek was murdered at a Polish dance\nAnother bank defaulter has confessed.\nI keep my countenance I remain self-possessed\nExcept when a street piano mechanical and tired\nReiterates some worn-out common song\nWith the smell of hyacinths across the garden\nRecalling things that other people have desired.\nAre these ideas right or wrong?\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe October night comes down; returning as before\nExcept for a slight sensation of being ill at ease\nI mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door\nAnd feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.\n\n“And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?\nBut that’s a useless question.\nYou hardly know when you are coming back\nYou will find so much to learn.”\nMy smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.\n\n“Perhaps you can write to me.”\nMy self-possession flares up for a second;\nThis is as I had reckoned.\n\n“I have been wondering frequently of late\n(But our beginnings never know our ends!)\nWhy we have not developed into friends.”\nI feel like one who smiles and turning shall remark\nSuddenly his expression in a glass.\nMy self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.\n\n“For everybody said so all our friends\nThey all were sure our feelings would relate\nSo closely! I myself can hardly understand.\nWe must leave it now to fate.\nYou will write at any rate.\nPerhaps it is not too late.\nI shall sit here serving tea to friends.”\n\nAnd I must borrow every changing shape\nTo find expression … dance dance\nLike a dancing bear\nCry like a parrot chatter like an ape.\nLet us take the air in a tobacco trance--\nWell! and what if she should die some afternoon\nAfternoon grey and smoky evening yellow and rose;\nShould die and leave me sitting pen in hand\nWith the smoke coming down above the housetops;\nDoubtful for quite a while\nNot knowing what to feel or if I understand\nOr whether wise or foolish tardy or too soon …\nWould she not have the advantage after all?\nThis music is successful with a “dying fall”\nNow that we talk of dying--\nAnd should I have the right to smile?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "preludes": { - "title": "“Preludes”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe winter evening settles down\nWith smell of steaks in passageways.\nSix o’clock.\nThe burnt-out ends of smoky days.\nAnd now a gusty shower wraps\nThe grimy scraps\nOf withered leaves about your feet\nAnd newspapers from vacant lots;\nThe showers beat\nOn broken blinds and chimney-pots\nAnd at the corner of the street\nA lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.\nAnd then the lighting of the lamps.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe morning comes to consciousness\nOf faint stale smells of beer\nFrom the sawdust-trampled street\nWith all its muddy feet that press\nTo early coffee-stands.\n\nWith the other masquerades\nThat time resumes\nOne thinks of all the hands\nThat are raising dingy shades\nIn a thousand furnished rooms.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou tossed a blanket from the bed\nYou lay upon your back and waited;\nYou dozed and watched the night revealing\nThe thousand sordid images\nOf which your soul was constituted;\nThey flickered against the ceiling.\nAnd when all the world came back\nAnd the light crept up between the shutters\nAnd you heard the sparrows in the gutters\nYou had such a vision of the street\nAs the street hardly understands;\nSitting along the bed’s edge where\nYou curled the papers from your hair\nOr clasped the yellow soles of feet\nIn the palms of both soiled hands.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHis soul stretched tight across the skies\nThat fade behind a city block\nOr trampled by insistent feet\nAt four and five and six o’clock;\nAnd short square fingers stuffing pipes\nAnd evening newspapers and eyes\nAssured of certain certainties\nThe conscience of a blackened street\nImpatient to assume the world.\n\nI am moved by fancies that are curled\nAround these images and cling:\nThe notion of some infinitely gentle\nInfinitely suffering thing.\n\nWipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;\nThe worlds revolve like ancient women\nGathering fuel in vacant lots.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "rhapsody-on-a-windy-night": { - "title": "“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”", - "body": "Twelve o’clock.\nAlong the reaches of the street\nHeld in a lunar synthesis\nWhispering lunar incantations\nDisolve the floors of memory\nAnd all its clear relations\nIts divisions and precisions\nEvery street lamp that I pass\nBeats like a fatalistic drum\nAnd through the spaces of the dark\nMidnight shakes the memory\nAs a madman shakes a dead geranium.\n\nHalf-past one\nThe street lamp sputtered\nThe street lamp muttered\nThe street lamp said\n“Regard that woman\nWho hesitates toward you in the light of the door\nWhich opens on her like a grin.\nYou see the border of her dress\nIs torn and stained with sand\nAnd you see the corner of her eye\nTwists like a crooked pin.”\n\nThe memory throws up high and dry\nA crowd of twisted things;\nA twisted branch upon the beach\nEaten smooth and polished\nAs if the world gave up\nThe secret of its skeleton\nStiff and white.\nA broken spring in a factory yard\nRust that clings to the form that the strength has left\nHard and curled and ready to snap.\n\nHalf-past two\nThe street-lamp said\n“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter\nSlips out its tongue\nAnd devours a morsel of rancid butter.”\nSo the hand of the child automatic\nSlipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along\nthe quay.\nI could see nothing behind that child’s eye.\nI have seen eyes in the street\nTrying to peer through lighted shutters\nAnd a crab one afternoon in a pool\nAn old crab with barnacles on his back\nGripped the end of a stick which I held him.\n\nHalf-past three\nThe lamp sputtered\nThe lamp muttered in the dark.\n\nThe lamp hummed:\n“Regard the moon\nLa lune ne garde aucune rancune\nShe winks a feeble eye\nShe smiles into corners.\nShe smooths the hair of the grass.\nThe moon has lost her memory.\nA washed-out smallpox cracks her face\nHer hand twists a paper rose\nThat smells of dust and old Cologne\nShe is alone With all the old nocturnal smells\nThat cross and cross across her brain.\nThe reminiscence comes\nOf sunless dry geraniums\nAnd dust in crevices\nSmells of chestnuts in the streets\nAnd female smells in shuttered rooms\nAnd cigarettes in corridors\nAnd cocktail smells in bars.”\n\nThe lamp said\n“Four o’clock\nHere is the number on the door.\nMemory!\nYou have the key\nThe little lamp spreads a ring on the stair\nMount.\nThe bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall\nPut your shoes at the door sleep prepare for life.”\n\nThe last twist of the knife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "a-silent-city": { - "title": "“A Silent City”", - "body": "The silence of the city, how awful at midnight!\nMute as the battlements and crags and towers\nThat Fancy makes in the clouds, yea, as mute\nAs the moonlight that sleeps on the steady vanes.\n\nThe cell of a departed anchoret,\nHis skeleton and flitting ghost are there,\nSole tenants--\nAnd all the city silent as the moon\nThat steeps in quiet light the steady vanes\nOf her huge temples.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-song-for-simeon": { - "title": "“A Song for Simeon”", - "body": "Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and\nThe winter sun creeps by the snow hills;\nThe stubborn season has made stand.\nMy life is light, waiting for the death wind,\nLike a feather on the back of my hand.\nDust in sunlight and memory in corners\nWait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.\n\nGrant us they peace.\nI have walked many years in this city,\nKept faith and fast, provided for the poor,\nhave given and taken honour and ease.\nThere went never any rejected from my door.\nWho shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children?\nWhen the time of sorrow is come?\nThey will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,\nFleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.\n\nBefore the time of cords and scourges and lamentation\nGrant us thy peace.\nBefore the stations of the mountain of desolation,\nBefore the certain hour of maternal sorrow,\nNow at this birth season of decease,\nLet the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,\nGrant Israel’s consolation\nTo one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.\n\nAccording to thy word.\nThey shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation\nWith glory and derision,\nLight upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.\nNot for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,\nNot for me the ultimate vision.\nGrant me thy peace.\n(And a sword shall pierce thy heart, Thine also).\nI am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,\nI am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.\nLet they servant depart,\nHaving seen thy salvation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "candlemas" - } - } - }, - "spleen": { - "title": "“Spleen”", - "body": "Sunday: this satisfied procession\nOf definite Sunday faces;\nBonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces\nIn repetition that displaces\nYour mental self-possession\nBy this unwarranted digression.\n\nEvening, lights, and tea!\nChildren and cats in the alley;\nDejection unable to rally\nAgainst this dull conspiracy.\n\nAnd Life, a little bald and gray,\nLanguid, fastidious, and bland,\nWaits, hat and gloves in hand,\nPunctilious of tie and suit\n(Somewhat impatient of delay)\nOn the doorstep of the Absolute.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "sweeney-erect": { - "title": "“Sweeney Erect”", - "body": " _And the trees about me,\nLet them be dry and leafless; let the rocks\nGroan with continual surges; and behind me\nMake all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!_\n\n\nPaint me a cavernous waste shore\nCast in the unstilted Cyclades,\nPaint me the bold anfractuous rocks\nFaced by the snarled and yelping seas.\n\nDisplay me Aeolus above\nReviewing the insurgent gales\nWhich tangle Ariadne’s hair\nAnd swell with haste the perjured sails.\n\nMorning stirs the feet and hands\n(Nausicaa and Polypheme),\nGesture of orang-outang\nRises from the sheets in steam.\n\nThis withered root of knots of hair\nSlitted below and gashed with eyes,\nThis oval O cropped out with teeth:\nThe sickle motion from the thighs\n\nJackknifes upward at the knees\nThen straightens out from heel to hip\nPushing the framework of the bed\nAnd clawing at the pillow slip.\n\nSweeney addressed full length to shave\nBroadbottomed, pink from nape to base,\nKnows the female temperament\nAnd wipes the suds around his face.\n\n(The lengthened shadow of a man\nIs history, said Emerson\nWho had not seen the silhouette\nOf Sweeney straddled in the sun).\n\nTests the razor on his leg\nWaiting until the shriek subsides.\nThe epileptic on the bed\nCurves backward, clutching at her sides.\n\nThe ladies of the corridor\nFind themselves involved, disgraced,\nCall witness to their principles\nAnd deprecate the lack of taste\n\nObserving that hysteria\nMight easily be misunderstood;\nMrs. Turner intimates\nIt does the house no sort of good.\n\nBut Doris, towelled from the bath,\nEnters padding on broad feet,\nBringing sal volatile\nAnd a glass of brandy neat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sweeney-among-the-nightingales": { - "title": "“Sweeney among the Nightingales”", - "body": "Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees\nLetting his arms hang down to laugh,\nThe zebra stripes along his jaw\nSwelling to maculate giraffe.\n\nThe circles of the stormy moon\nSlide westward toward the River Plate,\nDeath and the Raven drift above\nAnd Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.\n\nGloomy Orion and the Dog\nAre veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;\nThe person in the Spanish cape\nTries to sit on Sweeney’s knees\n\nSlips and pulls the table cloth\nOverturns a coffee-cup,\nReorganized upon the floor\nShe yawns and draws a stocking up;\n\nThe silent man in mocha brown\nSprawls at the window-sill and gapes;\nThe waiter brings in oranges\nBananas figs and hothouse grapes;\n\nThe silent vertebrate in brown\nContracts and concentrates, withdraws;\nRachel née Rabinovitch\nTears at the grapes with murderous paws;\n\nShe and the lady in the cape\nAre suspect, thought to be in league;\nTherefore the man with heavy eyes\nDeclines the gambit, shows fatigue,\n\nLeaves the room and reappears\nOutside the window, leaning in,\nBranches of wisteria\nCircumscribe a golden grin;\n\nThe host with someone indistinct\nConverses at the door apart,\nThe nightingales are singing near\nThe Convent of the Sacred Heart,\n\nAnd sang within the bloody wood\nWhen Agamemnon cried aloud,\nAnd let their liquid droppings fall\nTo stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "triumphal-march": { - "title": "“Triumphal March”", - "body": "Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels\nOver the paving.\nAnd the flags. And the trumpets. And so many eagles.\nHow many? Count them. And such a press of people.\nWe hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City.\nThis is the way to the temple, and we so many crowding the way.\nSo many waiting, how many waiting? what did it matter, on such a day?\nAre they coming? No, not yet. You can see some eagles.\nAnd hear the trumpets.\nHere they come. Is he coming?\nThe natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.\nWe can wait with our stools and our sausages.\nWhat comes first? Can you see? Tell us. It is\n\n5,800,000 rifles and carbines,\n102,000 machine guns,\n28,000 trench mortars,\n53,000 field and heavy guns,\nI cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,\n13,000 aeroplanes,\n24,000 aeroplane engines,\n50,000 ammunition waggons,\nnow 55,000 army waggons,\n11,000 field kitchens,\n1,150 field bakeries.\nWhat a time that took. Will it be he now? No,\nThose are the golf club Captains, these the Scouts,\nAnd now the societe gymnastique de Poissy\nAnd now come the Mayor and the Liverymen. Look\nThere he is now, look:\nThere is no interrogation in his eyes\nOr in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck,\nAnd the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.\nO hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast,\nUnder the palmtree at noon, under the running water\nAt the still point of the turning world. O hidden.\n\nNow they go up to the temple. Then the sacrifice.\nNow come the virgins bearing urns, urns containing\nDust\nDust\nDust of dust, and now\nStone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels\nOver the paving.\n\nThat is all we could see. But how many eagles! and how many trumpets!\n(And Easter Day, we didn’t get to the country,\nSo we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell\nAnd he said right out loud, crumpets.)\nDon’t throw away that sausage,\nIt’ll come in handy. He’s artful. Please, will you\nGive us a light?\nLight\nLight\nEt les soldats faisaient la haie? ILS LA FAISAIENT.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "the-waste-land": { - "title": "“The Waste Land”", - "body": "1. _The Burial of the Dead_\n\nApril is the cruellest month breeding\nLilacs out of the dead land mixing\nMemory and desire stirring\nDull roots with spring rain.\nWinter kept us warm covering\nEarth in forgetful snow feeding\nA little life with dried tubers.\nSummer surprised us coming over the Starnbergersee\nWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade\nAnd went on in sunlight into the Hofgarten\nAnd drank coffee and talked for an hour.\nBin gar keine Russin stamm’ aus Litauen echt deutsch.\nAnd when we were children staying at the archduke’s\nMy cousin’s he took me out on a sled\nAnd I was frightened. He said Marie\nMarie hold on tight. And down we went.\nIn the mountains there you feel free.\nI read much of the night and go south in the winter.\n\nWhat are the roots that clutch what branches grow\nOut of this stony rubbish? Son of man\nYou cannot say or guess for you know only\nA heap of broken images where the sun beats\nAnd the dead tree gives no shelter the cricket no relief\nAnd the dry stone no sound of water. Only\nThere is shadow under this red rock\n(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)\nAnd I will show you something different from either\nYour shadow at morning striding behind you\nOr your shadow at evening rising to meet you;\nI will show you fear in a handful of dust.\n _Frisch weht der Wind\n Der Heimat zu\n Mein Irisch Kind\n Wo weilest du?_\n“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;\nThey called me the hyacinth girl.”\n--Yet when we came back late from the Hyacinth garden\nYour arms full and your hair wet I could not\nSpeak and my eyes failed I was neither\nLiving nor dead and I knew nothing\nLooking into the heart of light the silence.\n_Oed’ und leer das Meer_.\n\nMadame Sosostris famous clairvoyante\nHad a bad cold nevertheless\nIs known to be the wisest woman in Europe\nWith a wicked pack of cards. Here said she\nIs your card the drowned Phoenician Sailor\n(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)\nHere is Belladonna the Lady of the Rocks\nThe lady of situations.\nHere is the man with three staves and here the Wheel\nAnd here is the one-eyed merchant and this card\nWhich is blank is something he carries on his back\nWhich I am forbidden to see. I do not find\nThe Hanged Man. Fear death by water.\nI see crowds of people walking round in a ring.\nThank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone\nTell her I bring the horoscope myself:\nOne must be so careful these days.\n\nUnreal City\nUnder the brown fog of a winter dawn\nA crowd flowed over London Bridge so many\nI had not thought death had undone so many.\nSighs short and infrequent were exhaled\nAnd each man fixed his eyes before his feet.\nFlowed up the hill and down King William Street\nTo where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours\nWith a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.\nThere I saw one I knew and stopped him crying “Stetson!\nYou who were with me in the ships at Mylae!\nThat corpse you planted last year in your garden\nHas it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?\nOr has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?\nOh keep the Dog far hence that’s friend to men\nOr with his nails he’ll dig it up again!\nYou! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable--mon frère!”\n\n\n2. _A Game of Chess_\n\nThe Chair she sat in like a burnished throne\nGlowed on the marble where the glass\nHeld up by standards wrought with fruited vines\nFrom which a golden Cupidon peeped out\n(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)\nDoubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra\nReflecting light upon the table as\nThe glitter of her jewels rose to meet it\nFrom satin cases poured in rich profusion.\nIn vials of ivory and coloured glass\nUnstoppered lurked her strange synthetic perfumes\nUnguent powdered or liquid--troubled confused\nAnd drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air\nThat freshened from the window these ascended\nIn fattening the prolonged candle-flames\nFlung their smoke into the laquearia\nStirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.\nHuge sea-wood fed with copper\nBurned green and orange framed by the coloured stone\nIn which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.\nAbove the antique mantel was displayed\nAs though a window gave upon the sylvan scene\nThe change of Philomel by the barbarous king\nSo rudely forced; yet there the nightingale\nFilled all the desert with inviolable voice\nAnd still she cried and still the world pursues\n“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.\nAnd other withered stumps of time\nWere told upon the walls; staring forms\nLeaned out leaning hushing the room enclosed.\nFootsteps shuffled on the stair.\nUnder the firelight under the brush her hair\nSpread out in fiery points\nGlowed into words then would be savagely still.\n\n“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes bad. Stay with me.\nSpeak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.\nWhat are you thinking of? What thinking? What?\nI never know what you are thinking. Think.”\n\nI think we are in rats’ alley\nWhere the dead men lost their bones.\n\n“What is that noise?”\n The wind under the door.\n“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”\n Nothing again nothing.\n“Do\nYou know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember\nNothing?”\n\nI remember\nThose are pearls that were his eyes.\n“Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?”\n But\nO O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--\nIt’s so elegant\nSo intelligent\n“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”\nI shall rush out as I am and walk the street\n“With my hair down so. What shall we do tomorrow?\nWhat shall we ever do?”\n The hot water at ten.\nAnd if it rains a closed car at four.\nAnd we shall play a game of chess\nPressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.\n\nWhen Lil’s husband got demobbed I said--\nI didn’t mince my words I said to her myself\nHURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME\nNow Albert’s coming back make yourself a bit smart.\nHe’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you\nTo get yourself some teeth. He did I was there.\nYou have them all out Lil and get a nice set\nHe said I swear I can’t bear to look at you.\nAnd no more can’t I I said and think of poor Albert\nHe’s been in the army four years he wants a good time\nAnd if you don’t give it him there’s others will I said.\nOh is there she said. Something o’ that I said.\nThen I’ll know who to thank she said and give me a straight look.\nHURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME\nIf you don’t like it you can get on with it I said.\nOthers can pick and choose if you can’t.\nBut if Albert makes off it won’t be for lack of telling.\nYou ought to be ashamed I said to look so antique.\n(And her only thirty-one.)\nI can’t help it she said pulling a long face\nIt’s them pills I took to bring it off she said.\n(She’s had five already and nearly died of young George.)\nThe chemist said it would be all right but I’ve never been the same.\nYou _are_ a proper fool I said.\nWell if Albert won’t leave you alone there it is I said\nWhat you get married for if you don’t want children?\nHURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME\nWell that Sunday Albert was home they had a hot gammon\nAnd they asked me in to dinner to get the beauty of it hot--\nHURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME\nHURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME\nGoonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.\nTa ta. Goonight. Goonight.\nGood night ladies good night sweet ladies good night good night.\n\n\n3. _The Fire Sermon_\n\nThe river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf\nClutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind\nCrosses the brown land unheard. The nymphs are departed.\nSweet Thames run softly till I end my song.\nThe river bears no empty bottles sandwich papers\nSilk handkerchiefs cardboard boxes cigarette ends\nOr other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.\nAnd their friends the loitering heirs of city directors;\nDeparted have left no addresses.\nBy the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …\nSweet Thames run softly till I end my song\nSweet Thames run softly for I speak not loud or long.\nBut at my back in a cold blast I hear\nThe rattle of the bones and chuckle spread from ear to ear.\nA rat crept softly through the vegetation\nDragging its slimy belly on the bank\nWhile I was fishing in the dull canal\nOn a winter evening round behind the gashouse\nMusing upon the king my brother’s wreck\nAnd on the king my father’s death before him.\nWhite bodies naked on the low damp ground\nAnd bones cast in a little low dry garret\nRattled by the rat’s foot only year to year.\nBut at my back from time to time I hear\nThe sound of horns and motors which shall bring\nSweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.\nO the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter\nAnd on her daughter\nThey wash their feet in soda water\n_Et O ces voix d’enfants chantant dans la coupole!_\n\nTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\nTereu\n\nUnreal City\nUnder the brown fog of a winter noon\nMr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant\nUnshaven with a pocket full of currants\nC.i.f. London: documents at sight\nAsked me in demotic French\nTo luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel\nFollowed by a weekend at the Metropole.\n\nAt the violet hour when the eyes and back\nTurn upward from the desk when the human engine waits\nLike a taxi throbbing waiting\nI Tiresias though blind throbbing between two lives\nOld man with wrinkled female breasts can see\nAt the violet hour the evening hour that strives\nHomeward and brings the sailor home from sea\nThe typist home at teatime clears her breakfast lights\nHer stove and lays out food in tins.\nOut of the window perilously spread\nHer drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays\nOn the divan are piled (at night her bed)\nStockings slippers camisoles and stays.\nI Tiresias old man with wrinkled dugs\nPerceived the scene and foretold the rest--\nI too awaited the expected guest.\nHe the young man carbuncular arrives\nA small house agent’s clerk with one bold stare\nOne of the low on whom assurance sits\nAs a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.\nThe time is now propitious as he guesses\nThe meal is ended she is bored and tired\nEndeavours to engage her in caresses\nWhich still are unreproved if undesired.\nFlushed and decided he assaults at once;\nExploring hands encounter no defence;\nHis vanity requires no response\nAnd makes a welcome of indifference.\n(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all\nEnacted on this same divan or bed;\nI who have sat by Thebes below the wall\nAnd walked among the lowest of the dead.)\nBestows one final patronising kiss\nAnd gropes his way finding the stairs unlit …\n\nShe turns and looks a moment in the glass\nHardly aware of her departed lover;\nHer brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:\n“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”\nWhen lovely woman stoops to folly and\nPaces about her room again alone\nShe smooths her hair with automatic hand\nAnd puts a record on the gramophone.\n\n“This music crept by me upon the waters”\nAnd along the Strand up Queen Victoria Street.\nO City city I can sometimes hear\nBeside a public bar in Lower Thames Street\nThe pleasant whining of a mandoline\nAnd a clatter and a chatter from within\nWhere fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls\nOf Magnus Martyr hold\nInexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.\n\n The river sweats\n Oil and tar\n The barges drift\n With the turning tide\n Red sails\n Wide\n To leeward swing on the heavy spar.\n The barges wash\n Drifting logs\n Down Greenwich reach\n Past the Isle of Dogs.\n Weialala leia\n Wallala leialala\n Elizabeth and Leicester\n Beating oars\n The stern was formed\n A gilded shell\n Red and gold\n The brisk swell\n Rippled both shores\n Southwest wind\n Carried down stream\n The peal of bells\n White towers\n Weialala leia\n Wallala leialala\n\n“Trams and dusty trees.\nHighbury bore me. Richmond and Kew\nUndid me. By Richmond I raised my knees\nSupine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”\n\n“My feet are at Moorgate and my heart\nUnder my feet. After the event\nHe wept. He promised ‘a new start’.\nI made no comment. What should I resent?”\n“On Margate Sands.\nI can connect\nNothing with nothing.\nThe broken fingernails of dirty hands.\nMy people humble people who expect\nNothing.”\n la la\n\nTo Carthage then I came\n\nBurning burning burning burning\nO Lord Thou pluckest me out\nO Lord Thou pluckest\n\nburning\n\n\n4. _Death by Water_\n\nPhlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,\nForgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell\nAnd the profit and loss.\n A current under sea\nPicked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell\nHe passed the stages of his age and youth\nEntering the whirlpool.\n Gentile or Jew\nO you who turn the wheel and look to windward,\nConsider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.\n\n\n5. _What the Thunder Said_\n\nAfter the torchlight red on sweaty faces\nAfter the frosty silence in the gardens\nAfter the agony in stony places\nThe shouting and the crying\nPrison and palace and reverberation\nOf thunder of spring over distant mountains\nHe who was living is now dead\nWe who were living are now dying\nWith a little patience\n\nHere is no water but only rock\nRock and no water and the sandy road\nThe road winding above among the mountains\nWhich are mountains of rock without water\nIf there were water we should stop and drink\nAmongst the rock one cannot stop or think\nSweat is dry and feet are in the sand\nIf there were only water amongst the rock\nDead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit\nHere one can neither stand nor lie nor sit\nThere is not even silence in the mountains\nBut dry sterile thunder without rain\nThere is not even solitude in the mountains\nBut red sullen faces sneer and snarl\nFrom doors of mudcracked houses\n\nIf there were water\nAnd no rock\nIf there were rock\nAnd also water\nAnd water\nA spring\nA pool among the rock\nIf there were the sound of water only\nNot the cicada\nAnd dry grass singing\nBut sound of water over a rock\nWhere the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees\nDrip drop drip drop drop drop drop\nBut there is no water\n\nWho is the third who walks always beside you?\nWhen I count there are only you and I together\nBut when I look ahead up the white road\nThere is always another one walking beside you\nGliding wrapt in a brown mantle hooded\nI do not know whether a man or a woman\n--But who is that on the other side of you?\n\nWhat is that sound high in the air\nMurmur of maternal lamentation\nWho are those hooded hordes swarming\nOver endless plains stumbling in cracked earth\nRinged by the flat horizon only\nWhat is the city over the mountains\nCracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air\nFalling towers\nJerusalem Athens Alexandria\nVienna London\nUnreal\n\nA woman drew her long black hair out tight\nAnd fiddled whisper music on those strings\nAnd bats with baby faces in the violet light\nWhistled and beat their wings\nAnd crawled head downward down a blackened wall\nAnd upside down in air were towers\nTolling reminiscent bells that kept the hours\nAnd voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.\n\nIn this decayed hole among the mountains\nIn the faint moonlight the grass is singing\nOver the tumbled graves about the chapel\nThere is the empty chapel only the wind’s home.\nIt has no windows and the door swings\nDry bones can harm no one.\nOnly a cock stood on the rooftree\nCo co rico co co rico\nIn a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust\nBringing rain\n\nGanga was sunken and the limp leaves\nWaited for rain while the black clouds\nGathered far distant over Himavant.\nThe jungle crouched humped in silence.\nThen spoke the thunder\nDA\n_Datta:_ what have we given?\nMy friend blood shaking my heart\nThe awful daring of a moment’s surrender\nWhich an age of prudence can never retract\nBy this and this only we have existed\nWhich is not to be found in our obituaries\nOr in memories draped by the beneficent spider\nOr under seals broken by the lean solicitor\nIn our empty rooms\nDA\n_Dayadhvam:_ I have heard the key\nTurn in the door once and turn once only\nWe think of the key each in his prison\nThinking of the key each confirms a prison\nOnly at nightfall aetherial rumours\nRevive for a moment a broken Coriolanus\nDA\n_Damyata:_ The boat responded\nGaily to the hand expert with sail and oar\nThe sea was calm your heart would have responded\nGaily when invited beating obedient\nTo controlling hands\n\nI sat upon the shore\nFishing with the arid plain behind me\nShall I at least set my lands in order?\nLondon Bridge is falling down falling down falling down\n_Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina\nQuando fiam ceu chelidon_--O swallow swallow\n_Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie_\nThese fragments I have shored against my ruins\nWhy then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.\nDatta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.\nShantih shantih shantih", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "when-we-came-home-across-the-hill": { - "title": "“When we came home across the hill …”", - "body": "When we came home across the hill\nNo leaves were fallen from the trees;\nThe gentle fingers of the breeze\nHad torn no quivering cobweb down.\n\nThe hedgerow bloomed with flowers still,\nNo withered petals lay beneath;\nBut the wild roses in your wreath\nWere faded, and the leaves were brown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "whispers-of-immortality": { - "title": "“Whispers of Immortality”", - "body": "Webster was much possessed by death\nAnd saw the skull beneath the skin;\nAnd breastless creatures under ground\nLeaned backward with a lipless grin.\n\nDaffodil bulbs instead of balls\nStared from the sockets of the eyes!\nHe knew that thought clings round dead limbs\nTightening its lusts and luxuries.\n\nDonne I suppose was such another\nWho found no substitute for sense;\nTo seize and clutch and penetrate\nExpert beyond experience\n\nHe knew the anguish of the marrow\nThe ague of the skeleton;\nNo contact possible to flesh\nAllayed the fever of the bone.\n\n\nGrishkin is nice: her Russian eye\nIs underlined for emphasis;\nUncorseted her friendly bust\nGives promise of pneumatic bliss.\n\nThe couched Brazilian jaguar\nCompels the scampering marmoset\nWith subtle effluence of cat;\nGrishkin has a maisonette;\n\nThe sleek Brazilian jaguar\nDoes not in its arboreal gloom\nDistil so rank a feline smell\nAs Grishkin in a drawing-room.\n\nAnd even the Abstract Entities\nCircumambulate her charm;\nBut our lot crawls between dry ribs\nTo keep our metaphysics warm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - } - } - } - } - }, - "odysseas-elytis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Odysseas Elytis", - "birth": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1996 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseas_Elytis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "beauty-and-the-illiterate": { - "title": "“Beauty and the Illiterate”", - "body": "Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from\nthe mountains across, although the day was harsh and\ntomorrow foreign.\n\nBut, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over\nthe little garden of the dead, She\n\nAlone, Standing, with the few domestics of the night--the blowing\nrosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns--\nat sea’s entry, wakeful\n\nOtherly beauty!\n\nOnly the waves’ words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others\nresembling the dead’s that startle in the cypress, strange\nzodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head.\nAnd one\n\nUnbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real\nlandscape to be seen,\n\nWhere, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel,\nexactly showing how she’s born, Beauty\n\nOr what we otherwise call tear.\n\nAnd long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the\nglowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an\nancient prostitute’s, cheekbones\n\nStretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin.\n\n“Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place\nwhere a tear may have no meaning and the only light be\nfrom the flame that ravishes all that for me exists.”\n\n“Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence\nand the co-ruling of the stars,”\n\n“As if I didn’t know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme\nsilence are the most repellent thuds”\n\n“And that, since it became unbearable inside a man’s chest, solitude\ndispersed and seeded stars!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Olga Broumas", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-know-the-night-no-longer": { - "title": "“I know the night no longer …”", - "body": "I know the night no longer, the terrible anonymity of death\nA fleet of stars moors in the haven of my heart\nO Hesperos, sentinel, that you may shine by the side\nOf a skyblue breeze on an island which dreams\nOf me anouncing the dawn from its rocky heights\nMy twin eyes set you sailing embraced\nWith my true heart’s star: I know the night no longer\nI know the names no longer of a world which disavows me\nI read seashells, leaves, and the stars clearly\nMy hatred is superfluous on the roads of the sky\nUnless it is the dream which watches me again\nAs I walked by the sea of immortality in tears\nO Hesperos, under the arc of your golden fire\nI know the night no longer that is a night only.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Kimon Friar", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-mad-pomegranate-tree": { - "title": "“The Mad Pomegranate Tree”", - "body": "In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows\nWhistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter\nWith windy wilfulness and whispering, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat quivers with foliage newly born at dawn\nRaising high its colours in a shiver of triumph?\n\nOn plains where the naked girls awake,\nWhen they harvest clover with their light brown arms\nRoaming round the borders of their dreams--tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree,\nUnsuspecting, that puts the lights in their verdant baskets\nThat floods their names with the singing of birds--tell me\nIs it the mad pomegranate tree that combats the cloudy skies of the world?\n\nOn the day that it adorns itself in jealousy with seven kinds of feathers,\nGirding the eternal sun with a thousand blinding prisms\nTell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat seizes on the run a horse’s mane of a hundred lashes,\nNever sad and never grumbling--tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat cries out the new hope now dawning?\nTell me, is that the mad pomegranate tree waving in the distance,\nFluttering a handkerchief of leaves of cool flame,\nA sea near birth with a thousand ships and more,\nWith waves that a thousand times and more set out and go\nTo unscented shores--tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat creaks the rigging aloft in the lucid air?\n\nHigh as can be, with the blue bunch of grapes that flares and celebrates\nArrogant, full of danger--tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat shatters with light the demon’s tempests in the middle of the world\nThat spreads far as can be the saffron ruffle of the day\nRichly embroidered with scattered songs--tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree\nThat hastily unfastens the silk apparel of day?\n\nIn petticoats of April first and cicadas of the feast of mid-August\nTell me, that which plays, that which rages, that which can entice\nShaking out of threats their evil black darkness\nSpilling the sun’s embrace intoxicating birds\nTell me, that which opens its wings on the breast of things\nOn the breast of our deepest dreams, is that the mad pomegranate tree?", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-presence": { - "title": "“The Presence”", - "body": "> _Maria Nefele:_\nI walk in thorns in the dark\nof what’s to happen and what has\nwith my only weapon my only defense\nmy nails purple like cyclamens.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nI saw her everywhere. Holding a glass and staring in space. Lying down\nlistening to records. Walking the streets in wide trousers and an old\ngabardine. In front of children’s-store windows. Sadder then. And in\ndiscotheques, more nervous, eating her nails. She smokes innumerable\ncigarettes. She is pale and beautiful. But if you talk to her she doesn’t hear\nat all. As if something is happening--she alone hears it and is frightened.\nShe holds your hand tight, tears, but is not there. I never touched her and I\nnever took from her anything.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nHe understood nothing. He kept asking all the time “Remember?” What’s to\nremember? My dreams alone I remember because I see them at night. Days\nI feel bad--how to say: unprepared. I found myself so suddenly, in life--\nwhere I’d hardly expected. I’d say “Bah, I’ll get used to it.” And everything\naround me ran. Things and people ran, ran--until I set myself to run like\ncrazy. But, it seems, I overdid. Because--I don’t know--something strange\nhappened in the end. First I’d see the corpse and then the murder. First\ncame the blood and then the blow and cry. And now, when I hear rain I don’t\nknow what’s waiting …\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\n“Why don’t they bury people standing up like archbishops?”--that’s what\nshe’d say to me. And once, I remember, summer on the island, all of us\ncoming from a party, dawn, we jumped over the bars of the museum’s\ngarden. She danced on the stones and she saw nothing.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nI saw his eyes. I saw some old olive groves.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nI saw a column on a grave. A girl in relief on the stone. She seemed sad\nand held a small bird in her cupped hand.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nHe was looking at me, I know, he was looking at me. We both were looking\nat the same stone. We looked at each other through the stone.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nShe was calm and in her palm she held a small bird.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nShe was sitting and she was dead.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nShe was sitting and in her palm she held a small bird.\nYou’ll never hold a bird like that--you aren’t able.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nOh if they let me, if they let me.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nIf who let you?\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nThe one who lets nothing.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nHe, he who lets nothing\nis cut by his shadow and walks away.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nHis words are white and unspeakable\nhis eyes deep and without sleep …\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nBut the whole upper part of the stone was taken. And with it her name.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nARIMNA--as if I could still see the letters carved inside the light …\nARIMNA EFE EL …\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nGone. The whole top gone. There were no letters at all.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nARIMNA EFE EL--there, on the EL the stone had cut and broken. I remember\nit well.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nShe must have seen it in a dream since she remembers.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nIn my dreams, yes. In a large sleep that will come sometimes all light and\nheat and small stony steps. The children will walk in the streets arm in arm\nlike in some old Italian movies. Song everywhere and enormous women in\nsmall balconies watering their flowers.\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nA large blue balloon will take us high then, here and there, the wind will beat\nus. The silver domes will stand out first, then the belfries. The streets will\nappear narrower and straighter than we imagined. The terraces with the\nwhite television antennas. And all around the hills, and the kites--so close\nwe’ll just shave past them. Until one moment we’ll see the whole sea. On it\nthe souls will be leaving small white steams.\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nI have lifted my hand against the mountains, the dark and the demonic of\nthis world. I’ve asked love “Why?” and rolled her on the floor. War and war\nand not one rag to hide deep in our things and forget. Who listens? Who\nlistened? Judges, priests, police, which is your country? One body is left me\nand I give it. On it those who know cultivate the holy, as the gardeners in\nHolland, tulips. And in it drown who never learned of sea or swimming … Flux\nof the sea and you stars’ distant influx--stand by me!\n\n> _Antiphonist:_\nI have lifted my hand against the\nunexorcised demons of the world\nand from the place of illness I have exited\nto the sun and to the light self-exiled!\n\n> _Maria Nefele:_\nAnd from too many storms I’ve exited\nself among humans exiled!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Olga Broumas", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "ralph-waldo-emerson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ralph Waldo Emerson", - "birth": { - "year": 1803, - "month": "may", - "day": 25 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1882, - "month": "april", - "day": 27 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "unitarian", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "boston", - "fireside" - ], - "n_poems": 49 - }, - "poems": { - "the-adirondacs": { - "title": "“The Adirondacs”", - "body": " _Wise and polite,--and if I drew\n Their several portraits, you would own\n Chaucer had no such worthy crew,\n Nor Boccace in Decameron._\n\nWe crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,\nThence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks\nOf the Ausable stream, intent to reach\nThe Adirondac lakes. At Martin’s Beach\nWe chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,--\nTen men, ten guides, our company all told.\n\n Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,\nWith skies of benediction, to Round Lake,\nWhere all the sacred mountains drew around us,\nTaháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,\nAnd other Titans without muse or name.\nPleased with these grand companions, we glide on,\nInstead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.\nWe made our distance wider, boat from boat,\nAs each would hear the oracle alone.\nBy the bright morn the gay flotilla slid\nThrough files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,\nThrough gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,\nThrough scented banks of lilies white and gold,\nWhere the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,\nOn through the Upper Saranac, and up\nPère Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass\nWinding through grassy shallows in and out,\nTwo creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,\nTo Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.\n\n Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,\nUnder low mountains, whose unbroken ridge\nPonderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.\nA pause and council: then, where near the head\nDue east a bay makes inward to the land\nBetween two rocky arms, we climb the bank,\nAnd in the twilight of the forest noon\nWield the first axe these echoes ever heard.\nWe cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,\nBarked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,\nThen struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.\n\n The wood was sovran with centennial trees,--\nOak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,\nLinden and spruce. In strict society\nThree conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,\nFive-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,\nOur patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,\nThe maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.\n\n “Welcome!” the wood-god murmured through the leaves,--\n“Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.”\nEvening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,\nWhich o’erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.\nDecayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,\nLit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.\n\n Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft\nIn well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,\nLie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,\nAnd greet unanimous the joyful change.\nSo fast will Nature acclimate her sons,\nThough late returning to her pristine ways.\nOff soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;\nAnd, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,\nSleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.\nUp with the dawn, they fancied the light air\nThat circled freshly in their forest dress\nMade them to boys again. Happier that they\nSlipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,\nAt the first mounting of the giant stairs.\nNo placard on these rocks warned to the polls,\nNo door-bell heralded a visitor,\nNo courier waits, no letter came or went,\nNothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;\nThe frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,\nThe falling rain will spoil no holiday.\nWe were made freemen of the forest laws,\nAll dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,\nEssaying nothing she cannot perform.\n\n In Adirondac lakes\nAt morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:\nShoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make\nHis brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,\nHe dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:\nA paddle in the right hand, or an oar,\nAnd in the left, a gun, his needful arms.\nBy turns we praised the stature of our guides,\nTheir rival strength and suppleness, their skill\nTo row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,\nTo climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs\nFull fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:\nTemper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,\nAnd wit to trap or take him in his lair.\nSound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,\nIn winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;\nTheir sinewy arms pull at the oar untired\nThree times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.\n\n Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!\nNo city airs or arts pass current here.\nYour rank is all reversed; let men or cloth\nBow to the stalwart churls in overalls:\n_They_ are the doctors of the wilderness,\nAnd we the low-prized laymen.\nIn sooth, red flannel is a saucy test\nWhich few can put on with impunity.\nWhat make you, master, fumbling at the oar?\nWill you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.\nThe sallow knows the basket-maker’s thumb;\nThe oar, the guide’s. Dare you accept the tasks\nHe shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,\nTell the sun’s time, determine the true north,\nOr stumbling on through vast self-similar woods\nTo thread by night the nearest way to camp?\n\n Ask you, how went the hours?\nAll day we swept the lake, searched every cove,\nNorth from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,\nWatching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,\nOr whipping its rough surface for a trout;\nOr, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;\nChallenging Echo by our guns and cries;\nOr listening to the laughter of the loon;\nOr, in the evening twilight’s latest red,\nBeholding the procession of the pines;\nOr, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,\nIn the boat’s bows, a silent night-hunter\nStealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds\nOf the red deer, to aim at a square mist.\nHark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods\nIs fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck\nWho stands astonished at the meteor light,\nThen turns to bound away,--is it too late?\n\n Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,\nSix rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;\nSometimes their wits at sally and retort,\nWith laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;\nOr parties scaled the near acclivities\nCompeting seekers of a rumored lake,\nWhose unauthenticated waves we named\nLake Probability,--our carbuncle,\nLong sought, not found.\n\n Two Doctors in the camp\nDissected the slain deer, weighed the trout’s brain,\nCaptured the lizard, salamander, shrew,\nCrab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;\nInsatiate skill in water or in air\nWaved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;\nThe while, one leaden got of alcohol\nGave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.\nNot less the ambitious botanist sought plants,\nOrchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,\nRosy polygonum, lake-margin’s pride,\nHypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,\nOr harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.\nAbove, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,\nThe raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker\nLoud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.\nAs water poured through hollows of the hills\nTo feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,\nSo Nature shed all beauty lavishly\nFrom her redundant horn.\n\n Lords of this realm,\nBounded by dawn and sunset, and the day\nRounded by hours where each outdid the last\nIn miracles of pomp, we must be proud,\nAs if associates of the sylvan gods.\nWe seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,\nSo pure the Alpine element we breathed,\nSo light, so lofty pictures came and went.\nWe trode on air, contemned the distant town,\nIts timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned\nThat we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge\nAnd how we should come hither with our sons,\nHereafter,--willing they, and more adroit.\n\n Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery,--\nThe midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito\nPainted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:\nBut, on the second day, we heed them not,\nNay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,\nWhom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.\nFor who defends our leafy tabernacle\nFrom bold intrusion of the travelling crowd,--\nWho but the midge, mosquito and the fly,\nWhich past endurance sting the tender cit,\nBut which we learn to scatter with a smudge,\nOr baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?\n\n Our foaming ale we drank from hunters’ pans,\nAle, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave\nVenison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;\nAll ate like abbots, and, if any missed\nTheir wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss\nWith hunters’ appetite and peals of mirth.\nAnd Stillman, our guides’ guide, and Commodore,\nCrusoe, Crusader, Pius Aeneas, said aloud,\n‘Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating\nFood indigestible’:--then murmured some,\nOthers applauded him who spoke the truth.\n\n Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought\nChecked in these souls the turbulent heyday\n’Mid all the hints and glories of the home.\nFor who can tell what sudden privacies\nWere sought and found, amid the hue and cry\nOf scholars furloughed from their tasks and let\nInto this Oreads’ fended Paradise,\nAs chapels in the city’s thoroughfares,\nWhither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow\nAnd meditate a moment on Heaven’s rest.\nJudge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke\nTo each apart, lifting her lovely shows\nTo spiritual lessons pointed home,\nAnd as through dreams in watches of the night,\nSo through all creatures in their form and ways\nSome mystic hint accosts the vigilant,\nNot clearly voiced, but waking a new sense\nInviting to new knowledge, one with old.\nHark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?\nMark his capricious ways to draw the eye.\nNow soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,\nSeeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,\nThirsting in that pure for a purer sky?\n\n And presently the sky is changed; O world!\nWhat pictures and what harmonies are thine!\nThe clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,\nSo like the soul of me, what if ’t were me?\nA melancholy better than all mirth.\nComes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,\nOr at the foresight of obscurer years?\nLike yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory\nWhereon the purple iris dwells in beauty\nSuperior to all its gaudy skirts.\nAnd, that no day of life may lack romance,\nThe spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down\nA private beam into each several heart.\nDaily the bending skies solicit man,\nThe seasons chariot him from this exile,\nThe rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,\nThe storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,\nSuns haste to set, that so remoter lights\nBeckon the wanderer to his vaster home.\n\n With a vermilion pencil mark the day\nWhen of our little fleet three cruising skiffs\nEntering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls\nOf loud Bog River, suddenly confront\nTwo of our mates returning with swift oars.\nOne held a printed journal waving high\nCaught from a late-arriving traveller,\nBig with great news, and shouted the report\nFor which the world had waited, now firm fact,\nOf the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,\nAnd landed on our coast, and pulsating\nWith ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries\nFrom boat to boat, and to the echoes round,\nGreet the glad miracle. Thought’s new-found path\nShall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,\nMatch God’s equator with a zone of art,\nAnd lift man’s public action to a height\nWorthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,\nWhen linkèd hemispheres attest his deed.\nWe have few moments in the longest life\nOf such delight and wonder as there grew,--\nNor yet unsuited to that solitude:\nA burst of joy, as if we told the fact\nTo ears intelligent; as if gray rock\nAnd cedar grove and cliff and lake should know\nThis feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;\nAs if we men were talking in a vein\nOf sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,\nAnd a prime end of the most subtle element\nWere fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!\nBend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,\nLet them hear well! ’tis theirs as much as ours.\n\n A spasm throbbing through the pedestals\nOf Alp and Andes, isle and continent,\nUrging astonished Chaos with a thrill\nTo be a brain, or serve the brain of man.\nThe lightning has run masterless too long;\nHe must to school and learn his verb and noun\nAnd teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,\nSpelling with guided tongue man’s messages\nShot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.\nAnd yet I marked, even in the manly joy\nOf our great-hearted Doctor in his boat\n(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;\nOr was it for mankind a generous shame,\nAs of a luck not quite legitimate,\nSince fortune snatched from wit the lion’s part?\nWas it a college pique of town and gown,\nAs one within whose memory it burned\nThat not academicians, but some lout,\nFound ten years since the Californian gold?\nAnd now, again, a hungry company\nOf traders, led by corporate sons of trade,\nPerversely borrowing from the shop the tools\nOf science, not from the philosophers,\nHad won the brightest laurel of all time.\n’Twas always thus, and will be; hand and head\nAre ever rivals: but, though this be swift,\nThe other slow,--this the Prometheus,\nAnd that the Jove,--yet, howsoever hid,\nIt was from Jove the other stole his fire,\nAnd, without Jove, the good had never been.\nIt is not Iroquois or cannibals,\nBut ever the free race with front sublime,\nAnd these instructed by their wisest too,\nWho do the feat, and lift humanity.\nLet not him mourn who best entitled was,\nNay, mourn not one: let him exult,\nYea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,\nAnd water it with wine, nor watch askance\nWhether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:\nEnough that mankind eat and are refreshed.\n\n We flee away from cities, but we bring\nThe best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,\nMen knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.\nWe praise the guide, we praise the forest life:\nBut will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore\nOf books and arts and trained experiment,\nOr count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?\nO no, not we! Witness the shout that shook\nWild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail\nThe joyful traveller gives, when on the verge\nOf craggy Indian wilderness he hears\nFrom a log cabin stream Beethoven’s notes\nOn the piano, played with master’s hand.\n“Well done!” he cries; “the bear is kept at bay,\nThe lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;\nAll the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,\nThis thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,\nThis wild plantation will suffice to chase.\nNow speed the gay celerities of art,\nWhat in the desert was impossible\nWithin four walls is possible again,--\nCulture and libraries, mysteries of skill,\nTraditioned fame of masters, eager strife\nOf keen competing youths, joined or alone\nTo outdo each other and extort applause.\nMind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.\nTwirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,\nOn for a thousand years of genius more.”\n\n The holidays were fruitful, but must end;\nOne August evening had a cooler breath;\nInto each mind intruding duties crept;\nUnder the cinders burned the fires of home;\nNay, letters found us in our paradise:\nSo in the gladness of the new event\nWe struck our camp and left the happy hills.\nThe fortunate star that rose on us sank not;\nThe prodigal sunshine rested on the land,\nThe rivers gambolled onward to the sea,\nAnd Nature, the inscrutable and mute,\nPermitted on her infinite repose\nAlmost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,\nAs if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1858, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "bacchus": { - "title": "“Bacchus”", - "body": "Bring me wine, but wine which never grew\nIn the belly of the grape,\nOr grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through,\nUnder the Andes to the Cape,\nSuffer no savor of the earth to scape.\n\nLet its grapes the morn salute\nFrom a nocturnal root,\nWhich feels the acrid juice\nOf Styx and Erebus;\nAnd turns the woe of Night,\nBy its own craft, to a more rich delight.\n\nWe buy ashes for bread;\nWe buy diluted wine;\nGive me of the true,--\nWhose ample leaves and tendrils curled\nAmong the silver hills of heaven\nDraw everlasting dew;\nWine of wine,\nBlood of the world,\nForm of forms, and mould of statures,\nThat I intoxicated,\nAnd by the draught assimilated,\nMay float at pleasure through all natures;\nThe bird-language rightly spell,\nAnd that which roses say so well.\n\nWine that is shed\nLike the torrents of the sun\nUp the horizon walls,\nOr like the Atlantic streams, which run\nWhen the South Sea calls.\n\nWater and bread,\nFood which needs no transmuting,\nRainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,\nWine which is already man,\nFood which teach and reason can.\n\nWine which Music is,--\nMusic and wine are one,--\nThat I, drinking this,\nShall hear far Chaos talk with me;\nKings unborn shall walk with me;\nAnd the poor grass shall plot and plan\nWhat it will do when it is man.\nQuickened so, will I unlock\nEvery crypt of every rock.\n\nI thank the joyful juice\nFor all I know;--\nWinds of remembering\nOf the ancient being blow,\nAnd seeming-solid walls of use\nOpen and flow.\n\nPour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;\nRetrieve the loss of me and mine!\nVine for vine be antidote,\nAnd the grape requite the lote!\nHaste to cure the old despair,--\nReason in Nature’s lotus drenched,\nThe memory of ages quenched;\nGive them again to shine;\nLet wine repair what this undid;\nAnd where the infection slid,\nA dazzling memory revive;\nRefresh the faded tints,\nRecut the aged prints,\nAnd write my old adventures with the pen\nWhich on the first day drew,\nUpon the tablets blue,\nThe dancing Pleiads and eternal men.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-bell": { - "title": "“The Bell”", - "body": "I love thy music, mellow bell,\n I love thine iron chime,\nTo life or death, to heaven or hell,\n Which calls the sons of Time.\n\nThy voice upon the deep\n The home-bound sea-boy hails,\nIt charms his cares to sleep,\n It cheers him as he sails.\n\nTo house of God and heavenly joys\n Thy summons called our sires,\nAnd good men thought thy sacred voice\n Disarmed the thunder’s fires.\n\nAnd soon thy music, sad death-bell,\n Shall lift its notes once more,\nAnd mix my requiem with the wind\n That sweeps my native shore.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1823 - } - } - }, - "blight": { - "title": "“Blight”", - "body": " Give me truths;\nFor I am weary of the surfaces,\nAnd die of inanition. If I knew\nOnly the herbs and simples of the wood,\nRue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,\nBlue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,\nMilkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,\nAnd rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods\nDraw untold juices from the common earth,\nUntold, unknown, and I could surely spell\nTheir fragrance, and their chemistry apply\nBy sweet affinities to human flesh,\nDriving the foe and stablishing the friend,--\nO, that were much, and I could be a part\nOf the round day, related to the sun\nAnd planted world, and full executor\nOf their imperfect functions.\nBut these young scholars, who invade our hills,\nBold as the engineer who fells the wood,\nAnd travelling often in the cut he makes,\nLove not the flower they pluck, and know it not,\nAnd all their botany is Latin names.\nThe old men studied magic in the flowers,\nAnd human fortunes in astronomy,\nAnd an omnipotence in chemistry,\nPreferring things to names, for these were men,\nWere unitarians of the united world,\nAnd, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,\nThey caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes\nAre armed, but we are strangers to the stars,\nAnd strangers to the mystic beast and bird,\nAnd strangers to the plant and to the mine.\nThe injured elements say, “Not in us;”\nAnd night and day, ocean and continent,\nFire, plant and mineral say, “Not in us;”\nAnd haughtily return us stare for stare.\nFor we invade them impiously for gain;\nWe devastate them unreligiously,\nAnd coldly ask their pottage, not their love.\nTherefore they shove us from them, yield to us\nOnly what to our griping toil is due;\nBut the sweet affluence of love and song,\nThe rich results of the divine consents\nOf man and earth, of world beloved and lover,\nThe nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;\nAnd in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves\nAnd pirates of the universe, shut out\nDaily to a more thin and outward rind,\nTurn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,\nThe stunted trees look sick, the summer short,\nClouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,\nAnd nothing thrives to reach its natural term;\nAnd life, shorn of its venerable length,\nEven at its greatest space is a defeat,\nAnd dies in anger that it was a dupe;\nAnd, in its highest noon and wantonness,\nIs early frugal, like a beggar’s child;\nEven in the hot pursuit of the best aims\nAnd prizes of ambition, checks its hand,\nLike Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,\nChilled with a miserly comparison\nOf the toy’s purchase with the length of life.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "boston-hymn": { - "title": "“Boston Hymn”", - "body": "The word of the Lord by night\nTo the watching Pilgrims came,\nAs they sat by the seaside,\nAnd filled their hearts with flame.\n\nGod said, I am tired of kings,\nI suffer them no more;\nUp to my ear the morning brings\nThe outrage of the poor.\n\nThink ye I made this ball\nA field of havoc and war,\nWhere tyrants great and tyrants small\nMight harry the weak and poor?\n\nMy angel,--his name is Freedom,--\nChoose him to be your king;\nHe shall cut pathways east and west\nAnd fend you with his wing.\n\nLo! I uncover the land\nWhich I hid of old time in the West,\nAs the sculptor uncovers the statue\nWhen he has wrought his best;\n\nI show Columbia, of the rocks\nWhich dip their foot in the seas\nAnd soar to the air-borne flocks\nOf clouds and the boreal fleece.\n\nI will divide my goods;\nCall in the wretch and slave:\nNone shall rule but the humble.\nAnd none but Toil shall have.\n\nI will have never a noble,\nNo lineage counted great;\nFishers and choppers and ploughmen\nShall constitute a state.\n\nGo, cut down trees in the forest\nAnd trim the straightest boughs;\nCut down trees in the forest\nAnd build me a wooden house.\n\nCall the people together,\nThe young men and the sires,\nThe digger in the harvest-field,\nHireling and him that hires;\n\nAnd here in a pine state-house\nThey shall choose men to rule\nIn every needful faculty,\nIn church and state and school.\n\nLo, now! if these poor men\nCan govern the land and sea\nAnd make just laws below the sun,\nAs planets faithful be.\n\nAnd ye shall succor men;\n’Tis nobleness to serve;\nHelp them who cannot help again:\nBeware from right to swerve.\n\nI break your bonds and masterships,\nAnd I unchain the slave:\nFree be his heart and hand henceforth\nAs wind and wandering wave.\n\nI cause from every creature\nHis proper good to flow:\nAs much as he is and doeth,\nSo much he shall bestow.\n\nBut, laying hands on another\nTo coin his labor and sweat,\nHe goes in pawn to his victim\nFor eternal years in debt.\n\nTo-day unbind the captive,\nSo only are ye unbound;\nLift up a people from the dust,\nTrump of their rescue, sound!\n\nPay ransom to the owner\nAnd fill the bag to the brim.\nWho is the owner? The slave is owner,\nAnd ever was. Pay him.\n\nO North! give him beauty for rags,\nAnd honor, O South! for his shame;\nNevada! coin thy golden crags\nWith Freedom’s image and name.\n\nUp! and the dusky race\nThat sat in darkness long,--\nBe swift their feet as antelopes.\nAnd as behemoth strong.\n\nCome, East and West and North,\nBy races, as snow-flakes,\nAnd carry my purpose forth,\nWhich neither halts nor shakes.\n\nMy will fulfilled shall be,\nFor, in daylight or in dark,\nMy thunderbolt has eyes to see\nHis way home to the mark.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1863, - "month": "january", - "day": 1 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "juneteenth" - } - } - }, - "cosmos": { - "title": "“Cosmos”", - "body": "Who saw the hid beginnings\n When Chaos and Order strove,\nOr who can date the morning.\n The purple flaming of love?\n\nI saw the hid beginnings\n When Chaos and Order strove,\nAnd I can date the morning prime\n And purple flame of love.\n\nSong breathed from all the forest,\n The total air was fame;\nIt seemed the world was all torches\n That suddenly caught the flame.\n\n\nIs there never a retroscope mirror\n In the realms and corners of space\nThat can give us a glimpse of the battle\n And the soldiers face to face?\n\nSit here on the basalt courses\n Where twisted hills betray\nThe seat of the world-old Forces\n Who wrestled here on a day.\n\n\nWhen the purple flame shoots up,\n And Love ascends his throne,\nI cannot hear your songs, O birds,\n For the witchery of my own.\n\nAnd every human heart\n Still keeps that golden day\nAnd rings the bells of jubilee\n On its own First of May.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "destiny": { - "title": "“Destiny”", - "body": "That you are fair or wise is vain,\nOr strong, or rich, or generous;\nYou must add the untaught strain\nThat sheds beauty on the rose.\nThere’s a melody born of melody,\nWhich melts the world into a sea.\nToil could never compass it;\nArt its height could never hit;\nIt came never out of wit;\nBut a music music-born\nWell may Jove and Juno scorn.\nThy beauty, if it lack the fire\nWhich drives me mad with sweet desire,\nWhat boots it? What the soldier’s mail,\nUnless he conquer and prevail?\nWhat all the goods thy pride which lift,\nIf thou pine for another’s gift?\nAlas! that one is born in blight,\nVictim of perpetual slight:\nWhen thou lookest on his face,\nThy heart saith, “Brother, go thy ways!\nNone shall ask thee what thou doest,\nOr care a rush for what thou knowest,\nOr listen when thou repliest,\nOr remember where thou liest,\nOr how thy supper is sodden;”\nAnd another is born\nTo make the sun forgotten.\nSurely he carries a talisman\nUnder his tongue;\nBroad his shoulders are and strong;\nAnd his eye is scornful,\nThreatening and young.\nI hold it of little matter\nWhether your jewel be of pure water,\nA rose diamond or a white,\nBut whether it dazzle me with light.\nI care not how you are dressed,\nIn coarsest weeds or in the best;\nNor whether your name is base or brave:\nNor for the fashion of your behavior;\nBut whether you charm me,\nBid my bread feed and my fire warm me\nAnd dress up Nature in your favor.\nOne thing is forever good;\nThat one thing is Success,--\nDear to the Eumenides,\nAnd to all the heavenly brood.\nWho bides at home, nor looks abroad,\nCarries the eagles, and masters the sword.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "dirge": { - "title": "“Dirge”", - "body": "I reached the middle of the mount\n Up which the incarnate soul must climb,\nAnd paused for them, and looked around,\n With me who walked through space and time.\n\nFive rosy boys with morning light\n Had leaped from one fair mother’s arms,\nFronted the sun with hope as bright,\n And greeted God with childhood’s psalms.\n\nKnows he who tills this lonely field\n To reap its scanty corn,\nWhat mystic fruit his acres yield\n At midnight and at morn?\n\nIn the long sunny afternoon\n The plain was full of ghosts;\nI wandered up, I wandered down,\n Beset by pensive hosts.\n\nThe winding Concord gleamed below,\n Pouring as wide a flood\nAs when my brothers, long ago,\n Came with me to the wood.\n\nBut they are gone,--the holy ones\n Who trod with me this lovely vale;\nThe strong, star-bright companions\n Are silent, low and pale.\n\nMy good, my noble, in their prime,\n Who made this world the feast it was\nWho learned with me the lore of time,\n Who loved this dwelling-place!\n\nThey took this valley for their toy,\n They played with it in every mood;\nA cell for prayer, a hall for joy,--\n They treated Nature as they would.\n\nThey colored the horizon round;\n Stars flamed and faded as they bade,\nAll echoes hearkened for their sound,--\n They made the woodlands glad or mad.\n\nI touch this flower of silken leaf,\n Which once our childhood knew;\nIts soft leaves wound me with a grief\n Whose balsam never grew.\n\nHearken to yon pine-warbler\n Singing aloft in the tree!\nHearest thou, O traveller,\n What he singeth to me?\n\nNot unless God made sharp thine ear\n With sorrow such as mine,\nOut of that delicate lay could’st thou\n Its heavy tale divine.\n\n“Go, lonely man,” it saith;\n “They loved thee from their birth;\nTheir hands were pure, and pure their faith,--\n There are no such hearts on earth.”\n\n“Ye drew one mother’s milk,\n One chamber held ye all;\nA very tender history\n Did in your childhood fall.”\n\n“You cannot unlock your heart,\n The key is gone with them;\nThe silent organ loudest chants\n The master’s requiem.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1838 - }, - "location": "Concord", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "each-and-all": { - "title": "“Each and All”", - "body": "Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown\nOf thee from the hill-top looking down;\nThe heifer that lows in the upland farm,\nFar-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;\nThe sexton, tolling his bell at noon,\nDeems not that great Napoleon\nStops his horse, and lists with delight,\nWhilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;\nNor knowest thou what argument\nThy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.\nAll are needed by each one;\nNothing is fair or good alone.\nI thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,\nSinging at dawn on the alder bough;\nI brought him home, in his nest, at even;\nHe sings the song, but it cheers not now,\nFor I did not bring home the river and sky;--\nHe sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye.\nThe delicate shells lay on the shore;\nThe bubbles of the latest wave\nFresh pearls to their enamel gave,\nAnd the bellowing of the savage sea\nGreeted their safe escape to me.\nI wiped away the weeds and foam,\nI fetched my sea-born treasures home;\nBut the poor, unsightly, noisome things\nHad left their beauty on the shore\nWith the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.\nThe lover watched his graceful maid,\nAs ’mid the virgin train she strayed,\nNor knew her beauty’s best attire\nWas woven still by the snow-white choir.\nAt last she came to his hermitage,\nLike the bird from the woodlands to the cage;--\nThe gay enchantment was undone,\nA gentle wife, but fairy none.\nThen I said, “I covet truth;\nBeauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;\nI leave it behind with the games of youth:”--\nAs I spoke, beneath my feet\nThe ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,\nRunning over the club-moss burrs;\nI inhaled the violet’s breath;\nAround me stood the oaks and firs;\nPine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;\nOver me soared the eternal sky.\nFull of light and of deity;\nAgain I saw, again I heard,\nThe rolling river, the morning bird;--\nBeauty through my senses stole;\nI yielded myself to the perfect whole.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "the-enchanter": { - "title": "“The Enchanter”", - "body": "In the deep heart of man a poet dwells\nWho all the day of life his summer story tells;\nScatters on every eye dust of his spells,\nScent, form and color; to the flowers and shells\nWins the believing child with wondrous tales;\nTouches a cheek with colors of romance,\nAnd crowds a history into a glance;\nGives beauty to the lake and fountain,\nSpies oversea the fires of the mountain;\nWhen thrushes ope their throat, ’t is he that sings,\nAnd he that paints the oriole’s fiery wings.\nThe little Shakspeare in the maiden’s heart\nMakes Romeo of a plough-boy on his cart;\nOpens the eye to Virtue’s starlike meed\nAnd gives persuasion to a gentle deed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eros": { - "title": "“Eros”", - "body": "The sense of the world is short,--\nLong and various the report,--\n To love and be beloved;\nMen and gods have not outlearned it;\nAnd, how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,\n Not to be improved.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "experience": { - "title": "“Experience”", - "body": "The lords of life, the lords of life,--\nI saw them pass\nIn their own guise,\nLike and unlike,\nPortly and grim,--\nUse and Surprise,\nSurface and Dream,\nSuccession swift and spectral Wrong,\nTemperament without a tongue,\nAnd the inventor of the game\nOmnipresent without name;--\nSome to see, some to be guessed,\nThey marched from east to west:\nLittle man, least of all,\nAmong the legs of his guardians tall,\nWalked about with puzzled look.\nHim by the hand dear Nature took,\nDearest Nature, strong and kind,\nWhispered, “Darling, never mind!\nTo-morrow they will wear another face,\nThe founder thou; these are thy race!”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Elements and Mottoes", - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fable": { - "title": "“Fable”", - "body": "The mountain and the squirrel\nHad a quarrel,\nAnd the former called the latter ‘Little Prig’;\nBun replied,\n“You are doubtless very big;\nBut all sorts of things and weather\nMust be taken in together,\nTo make up a year\nAnd a sphere.\nAnd I think it no disgrace\nTo occupy my place.\nIf I’m not so large as you,\nYou are not so small as I,\nAnd not half so spry.\nI’ll not deny you make\nA very pretty squirrel track;\nTalents differ; all is well and wisely put;\nIf I cannot carry forests on my back,\nNeither can you crack a nut.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "forerunners": { - "title": "“Forerunners”", - "body": "Long I followed happy guides,\nI could never reach their sides;\nTheir step is forth, and, ere the day\nBreaks up their leaguer, and away.\nKeen my sense, my heart was young,\nRight good-will my sinews strung,\nBut no speed of mine avails\nTo hunt upon their shining trails.\nOn and away, their hasting feet\nMake the morning proud and sweet;\nFlowers they strew,--I catch the scent;\nOr tone of silver instrument\nLeaves on the wind melodious trace;\nYet I could never see their face.\nOn eastern hills I see their smokes,\nMixed with mist by distant lochs.\nI met many travellers\nWho the road had surely kept;\nThey saw not my fine revellers,--\nThese had crossed them while they slept.\nSome had heard their fair report,\nIn the country or the court.\nFleetest couriers alive\nNever yet could once arrive,\nAs they went or they returned,\nAt the house where these sojourned.\nSometimes their strong speed they slacken,\nThough they are not overtaken;\nIn sleep their jubilant troop is near,--\nI tuneful voices overhear;\nIt may be in wood or waste,--\nAt unawares ’t is come and past.\nTheir near camp my spirit knows\nBy signs gracious as rainbows.\nI thenceforward and long after\nListen for their harp-like laughter,\nAnd carry in my heart, for days,\nPeace that hallows rudest ways.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "give-all-to-love": { - "title": "“Give all to love …”", - "body": "Give all to love;\nObey thy heart;\nFriends, kindred, days,\nEstate, good-fame,\nPlans, credit and the Muse,--\nNothing refuse.\n\n’T is a brave master;\nLet it have scope:\nFollow it utterly,\nHope beyond hope:\nHigh and more high\nIt dives into noon,\nWith wing unspent,\nUntold intent;\nBut it is a god,\nKnows its own path\nAnd the outlets of the sky.\n\nIt was never for the mean;\nIt requireth courage stout.\nSouls above doubt,\nValor unbending,\nIt will reward,--\nThey shall return\nMore than they were,\nAnd ever ascending.\n\nLeave all for love;\nYet, hear me, yet,\nOne word more thy heart behoved,\nOne pulse more of firm endeavor,--\nKeep thee to-day,\nTo-morrow, forever,\nFree as an Arab\nOf thy beloved.\n\nCling with life to the maid;\nBut when the surprise,\nFirst vague shadow of surmise\nFlits across her bosom young,\nOf a joy apart from thee,\nFree be she, fancy-free;\nNor thou detain her vesture’s hem,\nNor the palest rose she flung\nFrom her summer diadem.\n\nThough thou loved her as thyself,\nAs a self of purer clay,\nThough her parting dims the day,\nStealing grace from all alive;\nHeartily know,\nWhen half-gods go.\nThe gods arrive.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "good-hope": { - "title": "“Good Hope”", - "body": "The cup of life is not so shallow\nThat we have drained the best,\nThat all the wine at once we swallow\nAnd lees make all the rest.\n\nMaids of as soft a bloom shall marry\nAs Hymen yet hath blessed,\nAnd fairer forms are in the quarry\nThan Phidias released.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - } - } - }, - "good-bye": { - "title": "“Good-bye”", - "body": "Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:\nThou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.\nLong through thy weary crowds I roam;\nA river-ark on the ocean brine,\nLong I’ve been tossed like the driven foam:\nBut now, proud world! I’m going home.\n\nGood-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;\nTo Grandeur with his wise grimace;\nTo upstart Wealth’s averted eye;\nTo supple Office, low and high;\nTo crowded halls, to court and street;\nTo frozen hearts and hasting feet;\nTo those who go, and those who come;\nGood-bye, proud world! I’m going home.\n\nI am going to my own hearth-stone,\nBosomed in yon green hills alone,--\nsecret nook in a pleasant land,\nWhose groves the frolic fairies planned;\nWhere arches green, the livelong day,\nEcho the blackbird’s roundelay,\nAnd vulgar feet have never trod\nA spot that is sacred to thought and God.\n\nO, when I am safe in my sylvan home,\nI tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;\nAnd when I am stretched beneath the pines,\nWhere the evening star so holy shines,\nI laugh at the lore and the pride of man,\nAt the sophist schools and the learned clan;\nFor what are they all, in their high conceit,\nWhen man in the bush with God may meet?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "grace": { - "title": "“Grace”", - "body": "How much, preventing God, how much I owe\nTo the defences thou hast round me set;\nExample, custom, fear, occasion slow,--\nThese scorned bondmen were my parapet.\nI dare not peep over this parapet\nTo gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,\nThe depths of sin to which I had descended,\nHad not these me against myself defended.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hamatreya": { - "title": "“Hamatreya”", - "body": "Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,\nPossessed the land which rendered to their toil\nHay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.\nEach of these landlords walked amidst his farm,\nSaying, “’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s.\nHow sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!\nHow graceful climb those shadows on my hill!\nI fancy these pure waters and the flags\nKnow me, as does my dog: we sympathize;\nAnd, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.”\n\nWhere are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:\nAnd strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.\nEarth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys\nEarth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;\nWho steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet\nClear of the grave.\nThey added ridge to valley, brook to pond,\nAnd sighed for all that bounded their domain;\n“This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park;\nWe must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,\nAnd misty lowland, where to go for peat.\nThe land is well,--lies fairly to the south.\n’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back,\nTo find the sitfast acres where you left them.”\nAh! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds\nHim to his land, a lump of mould the more.\nHear what the Earth says:--\n\n _“Mine and yours;\n Mine, not yours.\n Earth endures;\n Stars abide--\n Shine down in the old sea;\n Old are the shores;\n But where are old men?\n I who have seen much,\n Such have I never seen.\n\n The lawyer’s deed\n Ran sure,\n In tail,\n To them, and to their heirs\n Who shall succeed,\n Without fail,\n Forevermore.\n\n Here is the land,\n Shaggy with wood,\n With its old valley,\n Mound and flood.\n But the heritors?--\n\n Fled like the flood’s foam.\n The lawyer, and the laws,\n And the kingdom,\n Clean swept herefrom.\n\n They called me theirs,\n Who so controlled me;\n Yet every one\n Wished to stay, and is gone,\n How am I theirs,\n If they cannot hold me,\n But I hold them?”_\n\nWhen I heard the Earth-song\nI was no longer brave;\nMy avarice cooled\nLike lust in the chill of the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hymn": { - "title": "“Hymn”", - "body": "There is in all the sons of men\nA love that in the spirit dwells,\nThat panteth after things unseen,\nAnd tidings of the future tells.\n\nAnd God hath built his altar here\nTo keep this fire of faith alive,\nAnd sent his priests in holy fear\nTo speak the truth--for truth to strive.\n\nAnd hither come the pensive train\nOf rich and poor, of young and old,\nOf ardent youth untouched by pain,\nOf thoughtful maids and manhood bold.\n\nThey seek a friend to speak the word\nAlready trembling on their tongue,\nTo touch with prophet’s hand the chord\nWhich God in human hearts hath strung.\n\nTo speak the plain reproof of sin\nThat sounded in the soul before,\nAnd bid you let the angels in\nThat knock at meek contrition’s door.\n\nA friend to lift the curtain up\nThat hides from man the mortal goal,\nAnd with glad thoughts of faith and hope\nSurprise the exulting soul.\n\nSole source of light and hope assured,\nO touch thy servant’s lips with power,\nSo shall he speak to us the word\nThyself dost give forever more.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "illusions": { - "title": "“Illusions”", - "body": "Flow, flow the waves hated,\nAccursed, adored,\nThe waves of mutation;\nNo anchorage is.\nSleep is not, death is not;\nWho seem to die live.\nHouse you were born in,\nFriends of your spring-time,\nOld man and young maid,\nDay’s toil and its guerdon,\nThey are all vanishing,\nFleeing to fables,\nCannot be moored.\nSee the stars through them,\nThrough treacherous marbles.\nKnow the stars yonder,\nThe stars everlasting,\nAre fugitive also,\nAnd emulate, vaulted,\nThe lambent heat lightning\nAnd fire-fly’s flight.\n\nWhen thou dost return\nOn the wave’s circulation,\nBehold the shimmer,\nThe wild dissipation,\nAnd, out of endeavor\nTo change and to flow,\nThe gas become solid,\nAnd phantoms and nothings\nReturn to be things,\nAnd endless imbroglio\nIs law and the world,--\nThen first shalt thou know,\nThat in the wild turmoil,\nHorsed on the Proteus,\nThou ridest to power,\nAnd to endurance.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Elements and Mottoes", - "language": "english" - } - }, - "limits": { - "title": "“Limits”", - "body": "Who knows this or that?\nHark in the wall to the rat:\nSince the world was, he has gnawed;\nOf his wisdom, of his fraud\nWhat dost thou know?\nIn the wretched little beast\nIs life and heart,\nChild and parent,\nNot without relation\nTo fruitful field and sun and moon.\nWhat art thou? His wicked eye\nIs cruel to thy cruelty.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1834 - } - } - }, - "the-miracle": { - "title": "“The Miracle”", - "body": "I have trod this path a hundred times\nWith idle footsteps, crooning rhymes.\nI know each nest and web-worm’s tent,\nThe fox-hole which the woodchucks rent,\nMaple and oak, the old Divan\nSelf-planted twice, like the banian.\nI know not why I came again\nUnless to learn it ten times ten.\nTo read the sense the woods impart\nYou must bring the throbbing heart.\nLove is aye the counterforce,--\nTerror and Hope and wild Remorse,\nNewest knowledge, fiery thought,\nOr Duty to grand purpose wrought.\n Wandering yester morn the brake,\nI reached this heath beside the lake,\nAnd oh, the wonder of the power,\nThe deeper secret of the hour!\nNature, the supplement of man,\nHis hidden sense interpret can;--\nWhat friend to friend cannot convey\nShall the dumb bird instructed say.\nPassing yonder oak, I heard\nSharp accents of my woodland bird;\nI watched the singer with delight,--\nBut mark what changed my joy to fright,--\nWhen that bird sang, I gave the theme;\nThat wood-bird sang my last night’s dream,\nA brown wren was the Daniel\nThat pierced my trance its drift to tell,\nKnew my quarrel, how and why,\nPublished it to lake and sky,\nTold every word and syllable\nIn his flippant chirping babble,\nAll my wrath and all my shames,\nNay, God is witness, gave the names.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mithridates": { - "title": "“Mithridates”", - "body": "I cannot spare water or wine,\n Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;\nFrom the earth-poles to the Line,\n All between that works or grows,\nEvery thing is kin of mine.\n\nGive me agates for my meat;\nGive me cantharids to eat;\nFrom air and ocean bring me foods,\nFrom all zones and altitudes;--\n\nFrom all natures, sharp and slimy,\n Salt and basalt, wild and tame:\nTree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,\n Bird, and reptile, be my game.\n\nIvy for my fillet band;\nBlinding dog-wood in my hand;\nHemlock for my sherbet cull me,\nAnd the prussic juice to lull me;\nSwing me in the upas boughs,\nVampyre-fanned, when I carouse.\n\nToo long shut in strait and few,\nThinly dieted on dew,\nI will use the world, and sift it,\nTo a thousand humors shift it,\nAs you spin a cherry.\nO doleful ghosts, and goblins merry!\nO all you virtues, methods, mights,\nMeans, appliances, delights,\nReputed wrongs and braggart rights,\nSmug routine, and things allowed,\nMinorities, things under cloud!\nHither! take me, use me, fill me,\nVein and artery, though ye kill me!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "monadnoc": { - "title": "“Monadnoc”", - "body": "Thousand minstrels woke within me,\n “Our music’s in the hills;”--\nGayest pictures rose to win me,\n Leopard-colored rills.\n“Up!--If thou knew’st who calls\nTo twilight parks of beech and pine,\nHigh over the river intervals,\nAbove the ploughman’s highest line,\nOver the owner’s farthest walls!\nUp! where the airy citadel\nO’erlooks the surging landscape’s swell!\nLet not unto the stones the Day\nHer lily and rose, her sea and land display.\nRead the celestial sign!\nLo! the south answers to the north;\nBookworm, break this sloth urbane;\nA greater spirit bids thee forth\nThan the gray dreams which thee detain.\nMark how the climbing Oreads\nBeckon thee to their arcades;\nYouth, for a moment free as they,\nTeach thy feet to feel the ground,\nEre yet arrives the wintry day\nWhen Time thy feet has bound.\nTake the bounty of thy birth,\nTaste the lordship of the earth.”\n\n I heard, and I obeyed,--\nAssured that he who made the claim,\nWell known, but loving not a name,\n Was not to be gainsaid.\nEre yet the summoning voice was still,\nI turned to Cheshire’s haughty hill.\nFrom the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed\nLike ample banner flung abroad\nTo all the dwellers in the plains\nRound about, a hundred miles,\nWith salutation to the sea and to the bordering isles.\nIn his own loom’s garment dressed,\nBy his proper bounty blessed,\nFast abides this constant giver,\nPouring many a cheerful river;\nTo far eyes, an aerial isle\nUnploughed, which finer spirits pile,\nWhich morn and crimson evening paint\nFor bard, for lover and for saint;\nAn eyemark and the country’s core,\nInspirer, prophet evermore;\nPillar which God aloft had set\nSo that men might it not forget;\nIt should be their life’s ornament,\nAnd mix itself with each event;\nGauge and calendar and dial,\nWeatherglass and chemic phial,\nGarden of berries, perch of birds,\nPasture of pool-haunting herds,\nGraced by each change of sum untold,\nEarth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.\n\nThe Titan heeds his sky-affairs,\nRich rents and wide alliance shares;\nMysteries of color daily laid\nBy morn and eve in light and shade;\nAnd sweet varieties of chance,\nAnd the mystic seasons’ dance;\nAnd thief-like step of liberal hours\nThawing snow-drift into flowers.\nO, wondrous craft of plant and stone\nBy eldest science wrought and shown!\n\n“Happy,” I said, “whose home is here!\nFair fortunes to the mountaineer!\nBoon Nature to his poorest shed\nHas royal pleasure-grounds outspread.”\nIntent, I searched the region round,\nAnd in low hut the dweller found:\nWoe is me for my hope’s downfall!\nIs yonder squalid peasant all\nThat this proud nursery could breed\nFor God’s vicegerency and stead?\nTime out of mind, this forge of ores;\nQuarry of spars in mountain pores;\nOld cradle, hunting-ground and bier\nOf wolf and otter, bear and deer;\nWell-built abode of many a race;\nTower of observance searching space;\nFactory of river and of rain;\nLink in the Alps’ globe-girding chain;\nBy million changes skilled to tell\nWhat in the Eternal standeth well,\nAnd what obedient Nature can;--\nIs this colossal talisman\nKindly to plant and blood and kind,\nBut speechless to the master’s mind?\nI thought to find the patriots\nIn whom the stock of freedom roots;\nTo myself I oft recount\nTales of many a famous mount,--\nWales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary’s dells:\nBards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells;\nAnd think how Nature in these towers\nUplifted shall condense her powers,\nAnd lifting man to the blue deep\nWhere stars their perfect courses keep,\nLike wise preceptor, lure his eye\nTo sound the science of the sky,\nAnd carry learning to its height\nOf untried power and sane delight:\nThe Indian cheer, the frosty skies,\nRear purer wits, inventive eyes,--\nEyes that frame cities where none be,\nAnd hands that stablish what these see:\nAnd by the moral of his place\nHint summits of heroic grace;\nMan in these crags a fastness find\nTo fight pollution of the mind;\nIn the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,\nAdhere like this foundation strong,\nThe insanity of towns to stem\nWith simpleness for stratagem.\nBut if the brave old mould is broke,\nAnd end in churls the mountain folk\nIn tavern cheer and tavern joke,\nSink, O mountain, in the swamp!\nHide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!\nPerish like leaves, the highland breed\nNo sire survive, no son succeed!\n\nSoft! let not the offended muse\nToil’s hard hap with scorn accuse.\nMany hamlets sought I then,\nMany farms of mountain men.\nRallying round a parish steeple\nNestle warm the highland people,\nCoarse and boisterous, yet mild,\nStrong as giant, slow as child.\nSweat and season are their arts,\nTheir talismans are ploughs and carts;\nAnd well the youngest can command\nHoney from the frozen land;\nWith cloverheads the swamp adorn,\nChange the running sand to corn;\nFor wolf and fox, bring lowing herds,\nAnd for cold mosses, cream and curds:\nWeave wood to canisters and mats;\nDrain sweet maple juice in vats.\nNo bird is safe that cuts the air\nFrom their rifle or their snare;\nNo fish, in river or in lake,\nBut their long hands it thence will take;\nWhilst the country’s flinty face,\nLike wax, their fashioning skill betrays,\nTo fill the hollows, sink the hills,\nBridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,\nAnd fit the bleak and howling waste\nFor homes of virtue, sense and taste.\nThe World-soul knows his own affair,\nForelooking, when he would prepare\nFor the next ages, men of mould\nWell embodied, well ensouled,\nHe cools the present’s fiery glow,\nSets the life-pulse strong but slow:\nBitter winds and fasts austere\nHis quarantines and grottoes, where\nHe slowly cures decrepit flesh,\nAnd brings it infantile and fresh.\nToil and tempest are the toys\nAnd games to breathe his stalwart boys:\nThey bide their time, and well can prove,\nIf need were, their line from Jove;\nOf the same stuff, and so allayed,\nAs that whereof the sun is made,\nAnd of the fibre, quick and strong,\nWhose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.\n\n Now in sordid weeds they sleep,\nIn dulness now their secret keep;\nYet, will you learn our ancient speech,\nThese the masters who can teach.\nFourscore or a hundred words\nAll their vocal muse affords;\nBut they turn them in a fashion\nPast clerks’ or statesmen’s art or passion.\nI can spare the college bell,\nAnd the learned lecture, well;\nSpare the clergy and libraries,\nInstitutes and dictionaries,\nFor that hardy English root\nThrives here, unvalued, underfoot.\nRude poets of the tavern hearth,\nSquandering your unquoted mirth,\nWhich keeps the ground and never soars,\nWhile Jake retorts and Reuben roars;\nScoff of yeoman strong and stark,\nGoes like bullet to its mark;\nWhile the solid curse and jeer\nNever balk the waiting ear.\n\n On the summit as I stood,\nO’er the floor of plain and flood\nSeemed to me, the towering hill\nWas not altogether still,\nBut a quiet sense conveyed:\nIf I err not, thus it said:--\n\n“Many feet in summer seek,\nOft, my far-appearing peak;\nIn the dreaded winter time,\nNone save dappling shadows climb,\nUnder clouds, my lonely head,\nOld as the sun, old almost as the shade;\nAnd comest thou\nTo see strange forests and new snow,\nAnd tread uplifted land?\nAnd leavest thou thy lowland race,\nHere amid clouds to stand?\nAnd wouldst be my companion\nWhere I gaze, and still shall gaze,\nThrough tempering nights and flashing days,\nWhen forests fall, and man is gone,\nOver tribes and over times,\nAt the burning Lyre,\nNearing me,\nWith its stars of northern fire,\nIn many a thousand years?”\n\n“Gentle pilgrim, if thou know\nThe gamut old of Pan,\nAnd how the hills began,\nThe frank blessings of the hill\nFall on thee, as fall they will.”\n\n“Let him heed who can and will;\nEnchantment fixed me here\nTo stand the hurts of time, until\nIn mightier chant I disappear.\n If thou trowest\nHow the chemic eddies play,\nPole to pole, and what they say;\nAnd that these gray crags\nNot on crags are hung,\nBut beads are of a rosary\nOn prayer and music strung;\nAnd, credulous, through the granite seeming,\nSeest the smile of Reason beaming;--\nCan thy style-discerning eye\nThe hidden-working Builder spy,\nWho builds, yet makes no chips, no din,\nWith hammer soft as snowflake’s flight;--\nKnowest thou this?\nO pilgrim, wandering not amiss!\nAlready my rocks lie light,\nAnd soon my cone will spin.”\n\n“For the world was built in order,\nAnd the atoms march in tune;\nRhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,\nThe sun obeys them and the moon.\nOrb and atom forth they prance,\nWhen they hear from far the rune;\nNone so backward in the troop,\nWhen the music and the dance\nReach his place and circumstance,\nBut knows the sun-creating sound,\nAnd, though a pyramid, will bound.”\n\n“Monadnoc is a mountain strong,\nTall and good my kind among;\nBut well I know, no mountain can,\nZion or Meru, measure with man.\nFor it is on zodiacs writ,\nAdamant is soft to wit:\nAnd when the greater comes again\nWith my secret in his brain,\nI shall pass, as glides my shadow\nDaily over hill and meadow.”\n\n“Through all time, in light, in gloom\nWell I hear the approaching feet\nOn the flinty pathway beat\nOf him that cometh, and shall come;\nOf him who shall as lightly bear\nMy daily load of woods and streams,\nAs doth this round sky-cleaving boat\nWhich never strains its rocky beams;\nWhose timbers, as they silent float,\nAlps and Caucasus uprear,\nAnd the long Alleghanies here,\nAnd all town-sprinkled lands that be,\nSailing through stars with all their history.”\n\n“Every morn I lift my head,\nSee New England underspread,\nSouth from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,\nFrom Katskill east to the sea-bound.\nAnchored fast for many an age,\nI await the bard and sage,\nWho, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,\nShall string Monadnoc like a bead.\nComes that cheerful troubadour,\nThis mound shall throb his face before,\nAs when, with inward fires and pain,\nIt rose a bubble from the plain.\nWhen he cometh, I shall shed,\nFrom this wellspring in my head,\nFountain-drop of spicier worth\nThan all vintage of the earth.\nThere’s fruit upon my barren soil\nCostlier far than wine or oil.\nThere’s a berry blue and gold,--\nAutumn-ripe, its juices hold\nSparta’s stoutness, Bethlehem’s heart,\nAsia’s rancor, Athens’ art,\nSlowsure Britain’s secular might,\nAnd the German’s inward sight.\nI will give my son to eat\nBest of Pan’s immortal meat,\nBread to eat, and juice to drain;\nSo the coinage of his brain\nShall not be forms of stars, but stars,\nNor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars,\nHe comes, but not of that race bred\nWho daily climb my specular head.\nOft as morning wreathes my scarf,\nFled the last plumule of the Dark,\nPants up hither the spruce clerk\nFrom South Cove and City Wharf.\nI take him up my rugged sides,\nHalf-repentant, scant of breath,--\nBead-eyes my granite chaos show,\nAnd my midsummer snow:\nOpen the daunting map beneath,--\nAll his county, sea and land,\nDwarfed to measure of his hand;\nHis day’s ride is a furlong space,\nHis city-tops a glimmering haze.\nI plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;\n‘See there the grim gray rounding\nOf the bullet of the earth\nWhereon ye sail,\nTumbling steep\nIn the uncontinented deep.’\nHe looks on that, and he turns pale.\n’T is even so, this treacherous kite,\nFarm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,\nThoughtless of its anxious freight,\nPlunges eyeless on forever;\nAnd he, poor parasite,\nCooped in a ship he cannot steer,--\nWho is the captain he knows not,\nPort or pilot trows not,--\nRisk or ruin he must share.\nI scowl on him with my cloud,\nWith my north wind chill his blood;\nI lame him, clattering down the rocks;\nAnd to live he is in fear.\nThen, at last, I let him down\nOnce more into his dapper town,\nTo chatter, frightened, to his clan\nAnd forget me if he can.”\n\nAs in the old poetic fame\nThe gods are blind and lame,\nAnd the simular despite\nBetrays the more abounding might,\nSo call not waste that barren cone\nAbove the floral zone,\nWhere forests starve:\nIt is pure use;--\nWhat sheaves like those which here we glean and bind\nOf a celestial Ceres and the Muse?\n\nAges are thy days,\nThou grand affirmer of the present tense,\nAnd type of permanence!\nFirm ensign of the fatal Being,\nAmid these coward shapes of joy and grief,\nThat will not bide the seeing!\n\nHither we bring\nOur insect miseries to thy rocks;\nAnd the whole flight, with folded wing,\nVanish, and end their murmuring,--\nVanish beside these dedicated blocks,\nWhich who can tell what mason laid?\nSpoils of a front none need restore,\nReplacing frieze and architrave;--\nWhere flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;\nStill is the haughty pile erect\nOf the old building Intellect.\n\nComplement of human kind,\nHolding us at vantage still,\nOur sumptuous indigence,\nO barren mound, thy plenties fill!\nWe fool and prate;\nThou art silent and sedate.\nTo myriad kinds and times one sense\nThe constant mountain doth dispense;\nShedding on all its snows and leaves,\nOne joy it joys, one grief it grieves.\nThou seest, O watchman tall,\nOur towns and races grow and fall,\nAnd imagest the stable good\nFor which we all our lifetime grope,\nIn shifting form the formless mind,\nAnd though the substance us elude,\nWe in thee the shadow find.\nThou, in our astronomy\nAn opaker star,\nSeen haply from afar,\nAbove the horizon’s hoop,\nA moment, by the railway troop,\nAs o’er some bolder height they speed,--\nBy circumspect ambition,\nBy errant gain,\nBy feasters and the frivolous,--\nRecallest us,\nAnd makest sane.\nMute orator! well skilled to plead,\nAnd send conviction without phrase,\nThou dost succor and remede\nThe shortness of our days,\nAnd promise, on thy Founder’s truth,\nLong morrow to this mortal youth.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-mountain-grave": { - "title": "“A Mountain Grave”", - "body": "Why fear to die\nAnd let thy body lie\nUnder the flowers of June,\n Thy body food\n For the ground-worms’ brood\nAnd thy grave smiled on by the visiting moon.\n\nAmid great Nature’s halls\nGirt in by mountain walls\nAnd washed with waterfalls\nIt would please me to die,\n Where every wind that swept my tomb\n Goes loaded with a free perfume\nDealt out with a God’s charity.\n\nI should like to die in sweets,\nA hill’s leaves for winding-sheets,\nAnd the searching sun to see\nThat I am laid with decency.\nAnd the commissioned wind to sing\nHis mighty psalm from fall to spring\nAnd annual tunes commemorate\nOf Nature’s child the common fate.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831, - "month": "june", - "day": 1 - }, - "location": "Williamstown, Vermont", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 1 - } - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "Let me go where’er I will,\nI hear a sky-born music still:\nIt sounds from all things old,\nIt sounds from all things young,\nFrom all that’s fair, from all that’s foul,\nPeals out a cheerful song.\n\nIt is not only in the rose,\nIt is not only in the bird,\nNot only where the rainbow glows,\nNor in the song of woman heard,\nBut in the darkest, meanest things\nThere alway, alway something sings.\n\n’T is not in the high stars alone,\nNor in the cup of budding flowers,\nNor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,\nNor in the bow that smiles in showers,\nBut in the mud and scum of things\nThere alway, alway something sings.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1832, - "month": "october", - "day": 9 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 9 - } - } - }, - "musketaquid": { - "title": "“Musketaquid”", - "body": "Because I was content with these poor fields,\nLow, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,\nAnd found a home in haunts which others scorned,\nThe partial wood-gods overpaid my love,\nAnd granted me the freedom of their state,\nAnd in their secret senate have prevailed\nWith the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life,\nMade moon and planets parties to their bond,\nAnd through my rock-like, solitary wont\nShot million rays of thought and tenderness.\nFor me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the Spring\nVisits the valley;--break away the clouds,--\nI bathe in the morn’s soft and silvered air,\nAnd loiter willing by yon loitering stream.\nSparrows far off, and nearer, April’s bird,\nBlue-coated,--flying before from tree to tree,\nCourageous sing a delicate overture\nTo lead the tardy concert of the year.\nOnward and nearer rides the sun of May;\nAnd wide around, the marriage of the plants\nIs sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain\nThe surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,\nHollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade,\nAre touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff\nHas thousand faces in a thousand hours.\n\nBeneath low hills, in the broad interval\nThrough which at will our Indian rivulet\nWinds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,\nWhose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,\nHere in pine houses built of new-fallen trees,\nSupplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.\nTraveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,\nOr, it may be, a picture; to these men,\nThe landscape is an armory of powers,\nWhich, one by one, they know to draw and use.\nThey harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;\nThey prove the virtues of each bed of rock,\nAnd, like the chemist ’mid his loaded jars,\nDraw from each stratum its adapted use\nTo drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.\nThey turn the frost upon their chemic heap,\nThey set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,\nThey thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,\nAnd, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,\nSlide with the sledge to inaccessible woods\nO’er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,\nThey fight the elements with elements\n(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,\nTransmuted in these men to rule their like),\nAnd by the order in the field disclose\nThe order regnant in the yeoman’s brain.\n\nWhat these strong masters wrote at large in miles,\nI followed in small copy in my acre;\nFor there’s no rood has not a star above it;\nThe cordial quality of pear or plum\nAscends as gladly in a single tree\nAs in broad orchards resonant with bees;\nAnd every atom poises for itself,\nAnd for the whole. The gentle deities\nShowed me the lore of colors and of sounds,\nThe innumerable tenements of beauty.\nThe miracle of generative force,\nFar-reaching concords of astronomy\nFelt in the plants and in the punctual birds;\nBetter, the linked purpose of the whole,\nAnd, chiefest prize, found I true liberty\nIn the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.\nThe polite found me impolite; the great\nWould mortify me, but in vain; for still\nI am a willow of the wilderness,\nLoving the wind that bent me. All my hurts\nMy garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,\nA quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,\nA wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,\nSalve my worst wounds.\nFor thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:\n“Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?\nCanst thou, thy pride forgot, like Nature pass\nInto the winter night’s extinguished mood?\nCanst thou shine now, then darkle,\nAnd being latent, feel thyself no less?\nAs, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,\nThe river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure,\nYet envies none, none are unenviable.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "nature": { - "title": "“Nature”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWinters know\nEasily to shed the snow,\nAnd the untaught Spring is wise\nIn cowslips and anemonies.\nNature, hating art and pains,\nBaulks and baffles plotting brains;\nCasualty and Surprise\nAre the apples of her eyes;\nBut she dearly loves the poor,\nAnd, by marvel of her own,\nStrikes the loud pretender down.\nFor Nature listens in the rose\nAnd hearkens in the berry’s bell\nTo help her friends, to plague her foes,\nAnd like wise God she judges well.\nYet doth much her love excel\nTo the souls that never fell,\nTo swains that live in happiness\nAnd do well because they please,\nWho walk in ways that are unfamed,\nAnd feats achieve before they’re named.\n\n\n# II.\n\nShe is gamesome and good,\nBut of mutable mood,--\nNo dreary repeater now and again,\nShe will be all things to all men.\nShe who is old, but nowise feeble,\nPours her power into the people,\nMerry and manifold without bar,\nMakes and moulds them what they are,\nAnd what they call their city way\nIs not their way, but hers,\nAnd what they say they made to-day,\nThey learned of the oaks and firs.\nShe spawneth men as mallows fresh,\nHero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;\nShe drugs her water and her wheat\nWith the flavors she finds meet,\nAnd gives them what to drink and eat;\nAnd having thus their bread and growth,\nThey do her bidding, nothing loath.\nWhat’s most theirs is not their own,\nBut borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,\nAnd in their vaunted works of Art\nThe master-stroke is still her part.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1867 - } - } - }, - "nemesis": { - "title": "“Nemesis”", - "body": "Already blushes on thy cheek\nThe bosom thought which thou must speak;\nThe bird, how far it haply roam\nBy cloud or isle, is flying home;\nThe maiden fears, and fearing runs\nInto the charmed snare she shuns;\nAnd every man, in love or pride,\nOf his fate is never wide.\n\nWill a woman’s fan the ocean smooth?\nOr prayers the stony Parcae soothe,\nOr coax the thunder from its mark?\nOr tapers light the chaos dark?\nIn spite of Virtue and the Muse,\nNemesis will have her dues,\nAnd all our struggles and our toils\nTighter wind the giant coils.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1867 - } - } - }, - "night-in-june": { - "title": "“Night in June”", - "body": "I left my dreary page and sallied forth,\nReceived the fair inscriptions of the night;\nThe moon was making amber of the world,\nGlittered with silver every cottage pane,\nThe trees were rich, yet ominous with gloom.\n The meadows broad\nFrom ferns and grapes and from the folded flowers\nSent a nocturnal fragrance; harlot flies\nFlashed their small fires in air, or held their court\nIn fairy groves of herds-grass.\n\nHe lives not who can refuse me;\nAll my force saith, Come and use me:\nA gleam of sun, a summer rain,\nAnd all the zone is green again.\n\nSeems, though the soft sheen all enchants,\nCheers the rough crag and mournful dell,\nAs if on such stern forms and haunts\nA wintry storm more fitly fell.\n\nPut in, drive home the sightless wedges\nAnd split to flakes the crystal ledges.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-beauty": { - "title": "“Ode to Beauty”", - "body": "Who gave thee, O Beauty,\nThe keys of this breast,--\nToo credulous lover\nOf blest and unblest?\nSay, when in lapsed ages\nThee knew I of old?\nOr what was the service\nFor which I was sold?\nWhen first my eyes saw thee,\nI found me thy thrall,\nBy magical drawings,\nSweet tyrant of all!\nI drank at thy fountain\nFalse waters of thirst;\nThou intimate stranger,\nThou latest and first!\nThy dangerous glances\nMake women of men;\nNew-born, we are melting\nInto nature again.\n\nLavish, lavish promiser,\nNigh persuading gods to err!\nGuest of million painted forms,\nWhich in turn thy glory warms!\nThe frailest leaf, the mossy bark,\nThe acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,\nThe swinging spider’s silver line,\nThe ruby of the drop of wine,\nThe shining pebble of the pond,\nThou inscribest with a bond,\nIn thy momentary play,\nWould bankrupt nature to repay.\n\nAh, what avails it\nTo hide or to shun\nWhom the Infinite One\nHath granted his throne?\nThe heaven high over\nIs the deep’s lover;\nThe sun and sea,\nInformed by thee,\nBefore me run\nAnd draw me on,\nYet fly me still,\nAs Fate refuses\nTo me the heart Fate for me chooses.\nIs it that my opulent soul\nWas mingled from the generous whole;\nSea-valleys and the deep of skies\nFurnished several supplies;\nAnd the sands whereof I’m made\nDraw me to them, self-betrayed?\n\nI turn the proud portfolio\nWhich holds the grand designs\nOf Salvator, of Guercino,\nAnd Piranesi’s lines.\nI hear the lofty paeans\nOf the masters of the shell,\nWho heard the starry music\nAnd recount the numbers well;\nOlympian bards who sung\nDivine Ideas below,\nWhich always find us young\nAnd always keep us so.\nOft, in streets or humblest places,\nI detect far-wandered graces,\nWhich, from Eden wide astray,\nIn lowly homes have lost their way.\n\nThee gliding through the sea of form,\nLike the lightning through the storm,\nSomewhat not to be possessed,\nSomewhat not to be caressed,\nNo feet so fleet could ever find,\nNo perfect form could ever bind.\nThou eternal fugitive,\nHovering over all that live,\nQuick and skilful to inspire\nSweet, extravagant desire,\nStarry space and lily-bell\nFilling with thy roseate smell,\nWilt not give the lips to taste\nOf the nectar which thou hast.\n\nAll that’s good and great with thee\nWorks in close conspiracy;\nThou hast bribed the dark and lonely\nTo report thy features only,\nAnd the cold and purple morning\nItself with thoughts of thee adorning;\nThe leafy dell, the city mart,\nEqual trophies of thine art;\nE’en the flowing azure air\nThou hast touched for my despair;\nAnd, if I languish into dreams,\nAgain I meet the ardent beams.\nQueen of things! I dare not die\nIn Being’s deeps past ear and eye;\nLest there I find the same deceiver\nAnd be the sport of Fate forever.\nDread Power, but dear! if God thou be,\nUnmake me quite, or give thyself to me!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "ode": { - "title": "“Ode”", - "body": "O tenderly the haughty day\n Fills his blue urn with fire;\nOne morn is in the mighty heaven,\n And one in our desire.\n\nThe cannon booms from town to town,\n Our pulses beat not less,\nThe joy-bells chime their tidings down,\n Which children’s voices bless.\n\nFor He that flung the broad blue fold\n O’er-mantling land and sea,\nOne third part of the sky unrolled\n For the banner of the free.\n\nThe men are ripe of Saxon kind\n To build an equal state,--\nTo take the statute from the mind\n And make of duty fate.\n\nUnited States! the ages plead,--\n Present and Past in under-song,--\nGo put your creed into your deed,\n Nor speak with double tongue.\n\nFor sea and land don’t understand,\n Nor skies without a frown\nSee rights for which the one hand fights\n By the other cloven down.\n\nBe just at home; then write your scroll\n Of honor o’er the sea,\nAnd bid the broad Atlantic roll,\n A ferry of the free.\n\nAnd henceforth there shall be no chain,\n Save underneath the sea\nThe wires shall murmur through the main\n Sweet songs of liberty.\n\nThe conscious stars accord above,\n The waters wild below,\nAnd under, through the cable wove,\n Her fiery errands go.\n\nFor He that worketh high and wise.\n Nor pauses in his plan,\nWill take the sun out of the skies\n Ere freedom out of man.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1857, - "month": "july", - "day": 4 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "pan": { - "title": "“Pan”", - "body": "O what are heroes, prophets, men,\nBut pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow\nA momentary music. Being’s tide\nSwells hitherward, and myriads of forms\nLive, robed with beauty, painted by the sun;\nTheir dust, pervaded by the nerves of God,\nThrobs with an overmastering energy\nKnowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie\nWhite hollow shells upon the desert shore,\nBut not the less the eternal wave rolls on\nTo animate new millions, and exhale\nRaces and planets, its enchanted foam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-river": { - "title": "“The River”", - "body": "And I behold once more\nMy old familiar haunts; here the blue river,\nThe same blue wonder that my infant eye\nAdmired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--\nWhence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed\nThe fragrant flag-roots in my father’s fields,\nAnd where thereafter in the world he went.\nLook, here he is, unaltered, save that now\nHe hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales\nWith his redundant waves.\nHere is the rock where, yet a simple child,\nI caught with bended pin my earliest fish,\nMuch triumphing,--and these the fields\nOver whose flowers I chased the butterfly\nA blooming hunter of a fairy fine.\nAnd hark! where overhead the ancient crows\nHold their sour conversation in the sky:--\nThese are the same, but I am not the same,\nBut wiser than I was, and wise enough\nNot to regret the changes, tho’ they cost\nMe many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;\nThese trees and stones are audible to me,\nThese idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,\nI understand their faery syllables,\nAnd all their sad significance. The wind,\nThat rustles down the well-known forest road--\nIt hath a sound more eloquent than speech.\nThe stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,\nAll of them utter sounds of ’monishment\nAnd grave parental love.\nThey are not of our race, they seem to say,\nAnd yet have knowledge of our moral race,\nAnd somewhat of majestic sympathy,\nSomething of pity for the puny clay,\nThat holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.\nI feel as I were welcome to these trees\nAfter long months of weary wandering,\nAcknowledged by their hospitable boughs;\nThey know me as their son, for side by side,\nThey were coeval with my ancestors,\nAdorned with them my country’s primitive times,\nAnd soon may give my dust their funeral shade.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827, - "month": "june" - }, - "location": "Concord", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-romany-girl": { - "title": "“The Romany Girl”", - "body": "The sun goes down, and with him takes\nThe coarseness of my poor attire;\nThe fair moon mounts, and aye the flame\nOf Gypsy beauty blazes higher.\n\nPale Northern girls! you scorn our race;\nYou captives of your air-tight halls,\nWear out indoors your sickly days,\nBut leave us the horizon walls.\n\nAnd if I take you, dames, to task,\nAnd say it frankly without guile,\nThen you are Gypsies in a mask,\nAnd I the lady all the while.\n\nIf on the heath, below the moon,\nI court and play with paler blood,\nMe false to mine dare whisper none,--\nOne sallow horseman knows me good.\n\nGo, keep your cheek’s rose from the rain,\nFor teeth and hair with shopmen deal;\nMy swarthy tint is in the grain,\nThe rocks and forest know it real.\n\nThe wild air bloweth in our lungs,\nThe keen stars twinkle in our eyes,\nThe birds gave us our wily tongues,\nThe panther in our dances flies.\n\nYou doubt we read the stars on high,\nNathless we read your fortunes true;\nThe stars may hide in the upper sky,\nBut without glass we fathom you.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1867 - } - } - }, - "self-reliance": { - "title": "“Self-Reliance”", - "body": "Henceforth, please God, forever I forego\nThe yoke of men’s opinions. I will be\nLight-hearted as a bird, and live with God.\nI find him in the bottom of my heart,\nI hear continually his voice therein.\n\nThe little needle always knows the North,\nThe little bird remembereth his note,\nAnd this wise Seer within me never errs.\nI never taught it what it teaches me;\nI only follow, when I act aright.\n\nAnd when I am entombed in my place,\nBe it remembered of a single man,\nHe never, though he dearly loved his race,\nFor fear of human eyes swerved from his plan.\n\nOh what is Heaven but the fellowship\nOf minds that each can stand against the world\nBy its own meek and incorruptible will?\n\nThe days pass over me\nAnd I am still the same;\nThe aroma of my life is gone\nWith the flower with which it came.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1832, - "month": "october", - "day": 9 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 9 - } - } - }, - "september": { - "title": "“September”", - "body": "In the turbulent beauty\n Of a gusty Autumn day,\nPoet on a sunny headland\n Sighed his soul away.\n\nFarms the sunny landscape dappled,\n Swandown clouds dappled the farms,\nCattle lowed in mellow distance\n Where far oaks outstretched their arms.\n\nSudden gusts came full of meaning,\n All too much to him they said,\nOh, south winds have long memories,\n Of that be none afraid.\n\nI cannot tell rude listeners\n Half the tell-tale South-wind said,--\n’T would bring the blushes of yon maples\n To a man and to a maid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-snow-storm": { - "title": "“The Snow-Storm”", - "body": "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,\nArrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,\nSeems nowhere to alight: the whited air\nHides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,\nAnd veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.\nThe sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet\nDelayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit\nAround the radiant fireplace, enclosed\nIn a tumultuous privacy of storm.\n\n Come see the north wind’s masonry.\nOut of an unseen quarry\nFurnished with tile, the fierce artificer\nCurves his white bastions with projected roof\nRound every windward stake, or tree, or door.\nSpeeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work\nSo fanciful, so savage, nought cares he\nFor number or proportion. Mockingly,\nOn coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;\nA swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;\nFills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,\nMaugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate\nA tapering turret overtops the work.\nAnd when his hours are numbered, and the world\nIs all his own, retiring, as he were not,\nLeaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art\nTo mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,\nBuilt in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,\nThe frolic architecture of the snow.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "thine-eyes-still-shined-for-me-though-far": { - "title": "“Thine eyes still shined for me, though far …”", - "body": "Thine eyes still shined for me, though far\n I lonely roved the land or sea:\nAs I behold yon evening star,\n Which yet beholds not me.\n\nThis morn I climbed the misty hill\n And roamed the pastures through;\nHow danced thy form before my path\n Amidst the deep-eyed dew!\n\nWhen the redbird spread his sable wing,\n And showed his side of flame;\nWhen the rosebud ripened to the rose,\n In both I read thy name.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "thought": { - "title": "“Thought”", - "body": "I am not poor, but I am proud,\n Of one inalienable right,\nAbove the envy of the crowd,--\n Thought’s holy light.\n\nBetter it is than gems or gold,\n And oh! it cannot die,\nBut thought will glow when the sun grows cold,\n And mix with Deity.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1823 - }, - "location": "Boston" - } - }, - "threnody": { - "title": "“Threnody”", - "body": "The South-wind brings\nLife, sunshine and desire,\nAnd on every mount and meadow\nBreathes aromatic fire;\nBut over the dead he has no power,\nThe lost, the lost, he cannot restore;\nAnd, looking over the hills, I mourn\nThe darling who shall not return.\n\nI see my empty house,\nI see my trees repair their boughs;\nAnd he, the wondrous child,\nWhose silver warble wild\nOutvalued every pulsing sound\nWithin the air’s cerulean round,--\nThe hyacinthine boy, for whom\nMorn well might break and April bloom,\nThe gracious boy, who did adorn\nThe world whereinto he was born,\nAnd by his countenance repay\nThe favor of the loving Day,--\nHas disappeared from the Day’s eye;\nFar and wide she cannot find him;\nMy hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.\nReturned this day, the South-wind searches,\nAnd finds young pines and budding birches;\nBut finds not the budding man;\nNature, who lost, cannot remake him;\nFate let him fall, Fate can’t retake him;\nNature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.\n\nAnd whither now, my truant wise and sweet,\nO, whither tend thy feet?\nI had the right, few days ago,\nThy steps to watch, thy place to know:\nHow have I forfeited the right?\nHast thou forgot me in a new delight?\nI hearken for thy household cheer,\nO eloquent child!\nWhose voice, an equal messenger,\nConveyed thy meaning mild.\nWhat though the pains and joys\nWhereof it spoke were toys\nFitting his age and ken,\nYet fairest dames and bearded men,\nWho heard the sweet request,\nSo gentle, wise and grave,\nBended with joy to his behest\nAnd let the world’s affairs go by,\nA while to share his cordial game,\nOr mend his wicker wagon-frame,\nStill plotting how their hungry fear\nThat winsome voice again might hear;\nFor his lips could well pronounce\nWords that were persuasions.\n\nGentlest guardians marked serene\nHis early hope, his liberal mien;\nTook counsel from his guiding eyes\nTo make this wisdom earthly wise.\nAh, vainly do these eyes recall\nThe school-march, each day’s festival,\nWhen every morn my bosom glowed\nTo watch the convoy on the road;\nThe babe in willow wagon closed,\nWith rolling eyes and face composed;\nWith children forward and behind,\nLike Cupids studiously inclined;\nAnd he the chieftain paced beside,\nThe centre of the troop allied,\nWith sunny face of sweet repose,\nTo guard the babe from fancied foes.\nThe little captain innocent\nTook the eye with him as he went;\nEach village senior paused to scan\nAnd speak the lovely caravan.\nFrom the window I look out\nTo mark thy beautiful parade,\nStately marching in cap and coat\nTo some tune by fairies played;--\nA music heard by thee alone\nTo works as noble led thee on.\n\nNow Love and Pride, alas! in vain,\nUp and down their glances strain.\nThe painted sled stands where it stood;\nThe kennel by the corded wood;\nHis gathered sticks to stanch the wall\nOf the snow-tower, when snow should fall;\nThe ominous hole he dug in the sand,\nAnd childhood’s castles built or planned;\nHis daily haunts I well discern,--\nThe poultry-yard, the shed, the barn,--\nAnd every inch of garden ground\nPaced by the blessed feet around,\nFrom the roadside to the brook\nWhereinto he loved to look.\nStep the meek fowls where erst they ranged;\nThe wintry garden lies unchanged;\nThe brook into the stream runs on;\nBut the deep-eyed boy is gone.\n\nOn that shaded day,\nDark with more clouds than tempests are,\nWhen thou didst yield thy innocent breath\nIn birdlike heavings unto death,\nNight came, and Nature had not thee;\nI said, “We are mates in misery.”\nThe morrow dawned with needless glow;\nEach snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;\nEach tramper started; but the feet\nOf the most beautiful and sweet\nOf human youth had left the hill\nAnd garden,--they were bound and still.\nThere’s not a sparrow or a wren,\nThere’s not a blade of autumn grain,\nWhich the four seasons do not tend\nAnd tides of life and increase lend;\nAnd every chick of every bird,\nAnd weed and rock-moss is preferred.\nO ostrich-like forgetfulness!\nO loss of larger in the less!\nWas there no star that could be sent,\nNo watcher in the firmament,\nNo angel from the countless host\nThat loiters round the crystal coast,\nCould stoop to heal that only child,\nNature’s sweet marvel undefiled,\nAnd keep the blossom of the earth,\nWhich all her harvests were not worth?\nNot mine,--I never called thee mine,\nBut Nature’s heir,--if I repine,\nAnd seeing rashly torn and moved\nNot what I made, but what I loved,\nGrow early old with grief that thou\nMust to the wastes of Nature go,--\n’T is because a general hope\nWas quenched, and all must doubt and grope.\nFor flattering planets seemed to say\nThis child should ills of ages stay,\nBy wondrous tongue, and guided pen,\nBring the flown Muses back to men.\nPerchance not he but Nature ailed,\nThe world and not the infant failed.\nIt was not ripe yet to sustain\nA genius of so fine a strain,\nWho gazed upon the sun and moon\nAs if he came unto his own,\nAnd, pregnant with his grander thought,\nBrought the old order into doubt.\nHis beauty once their beauty tried;\nThey could not feed him, and he died,\nAnd wandered backward as in scorn,\nTo wait an aeon to be born.\nIll day which made this beauty waste,\nPlight broken, this high face defaced!\nSome went and came about the dead;\nAnd some in books of solace read;\nSome to their friends the tidings say;\nSome went to write, some went to pray;\nOne tarried here, there hurried one;\nBut their heart abode with none.\nCovetous death bereaved us all,\nTo aggrandize one funeral.\nThe eager fate which carried thee\nTook the largest part of me:\nFor this losing is true dying;\nThis is lordly man’s down-lying,\nThis his slow but sure reclining,\nStar by star his world resigning.\n\nO child of paradise,\nBoy who made dear his father’s home,\nIn whose deep eyes\nMen read the welfare of the times to come,\nI am too much bereft.\nThe world dishonored thou hast left.\nO truth’s and nature’s costly lie!\nO trusted broken prophecy!\nO richest fortune sourly crossed!\nBorn for the future, to the future lost!\n\nThe deep Heart answered, “Weepest thou?\nWorthier cause for passion wild\nIf I had not taken the child.\nAnd deemest thou as those who pore,\nWith aged eyes, short way before,--\nThink’st Beauty vanished from the coast\nOf matter, and thy darling lost?\nTaught he not thee--the man of eld,\nWhose eyes within his eyes beheld\nHeaven’s numerous hierarchy span\nThe mystic gulf from God to man?\nTo be alone wilt thou begin\nWhen worlds of lovers hem thee in?\nTo-morrow, when the masks shall fall\nThat dizen Nature’s carnival,\nThe pure shall see by their own will,\nWhich overflowing Love shall fill,\n’T is not within the force of fate\nThe fate-conjoined to separate.\nBut thou, my votary, weepest thou?\nI gave thee sight--where is it now?\nI taught thy heart beyond the reach\nOf ritual, bible, or of speech;\nWrote in thy mind’s transparent table,\nAs far as the incommunicable;\nTaught thee each private sign to raise\nLit by the supersolar blaze.\nPast utterance, and past belief,\nAnd past the blasphemy of grief,\nThe mysteries of Nature’s heart;\nAnd though no Muse can these impart,\nThrob thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,\nAnd all is clear from east to west.”\n\n“I came to thee as to a friend;\nDearest, to thee I did not send\nTutors, but a joyful eye,\nInnocence that matched the sky,\nLovely locks, a form of wonder,\nLaughter rich as woodland thunder,\nThat thou might’st entertain apart\nThe richest flowering of all art:\nAnd, as the great all-loving Day\nThrough smallest chambers takes its way,\nThat thou might’st break thy daily bread\nWith prophet, savior and head;\nThat thou might’st cherish for thine own\nThe riches of sweet Mary’s Son,\nBoy-Rabbi, Israel’s paragon.\nAnd thoughtest thou such guest\nWould in thy hall take up his rest?\nWould rushing life forget her laws,\nFate’s glowing revolution pause?\nHigh omens ask diviner guess;\nNot to be conned to tediousness\nAnd know my higher gifts unbind\nThe zone that girds the incarnate mind.\nWhen the scanty shores are full\nWith Thought’s perilous, whirling pool;\nWhen frail Nature can no more,\nThen the Spirit strikes the hour:\nMy servant Death, with solving rite,\nPours finite into infinite.\nWilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow,\nWhose streams through Nature circling go?\nNail the wild star to its track\nOn the half-climbed zodiac?\nLight is light which radiates,\nBlood is blood which circulates,\nLife is life which generates,\nAnd many-seeming life is one,--\nWilt thou transfix and make it none?\nIts onward force too starkly pent\nIn figure, bone and lineament?\nWilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,\nTalker! the unreplying Fate?\nNor see the genius of the whole\nAscendant in the private soul,\nBeckon it when to go and come,\nSelf-announced its hour of doom?\nFair the soul’s recess and shrine,\nMagic-built to last a season;\nMasterpiece of love benign,\nFairer that expansive reason\nWhose omen ’tis, and sign.\nWilt thou not ope thy heart to know\nWhat rainbows teach, and sunsets show?\nVerdict which accumulates\nFrom lengthening scroll of human fates,\nVoice of earth to earth returned,\nPrayers of saints that inly burned,--\nSaying, _What is excellent,_\n_As God lives, is permanent;_\n_Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;_\n_Heart’s love will meet thee again._\nRevere the Maker; fetch thine eye\nUp to his style, and manners of the sky.\nNot of adamant and gold\nBuilt he heaven stark and cold;\nNo, but a nest of bending reeds,\nFlowering grass and scented weeds;\nOr like a traveller’s fleeing tent,\nOr bow above the tempest bent;\nBuilt of tears and sacred flames,\nAnd virtue reaching to its aims;\nBuilt of furtherance and pursuing,\nNot of spent deeds, but of doing.\nSilent rushes the swift Lord\nThrough ruined systems still restored,\nBroadsowing, bleak and void to bless,\nPlants with worlds the wilderness;\nWaters with tears of ancient sorrow\nApples of Eden ripe to-morrow.\nHouse and tenant go to ground,\nLost in God, in Godhead found.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "uriel": { - "title": "“Uriel”", - "body": "It fell in the ancient periods\n Which the brooding soul surveys,\nOr ever the wild Time coined itself\n Into calendar months and days.\n\nThis was the lapse of Uriel,\nWhich in Paradise befell.\nOnce, among the Pleiads walking,\nSeyd overheard the young gods talking;\nAnd the treason, too long pent,\nTo his ears was evident.\nThe young deities discussed\nLaws of form, and metre just,\nOrb, quintessence, and sunbeams,\nWhat subsisteth, and what seems.\nOne, with low tones that decide,\nAnd doubt and reverend use defied,\nWith a look that solved the sphere,\nAnd stirred the devils everywhere,\nGave his sentiment divine\nAgainst the being of a line.\n“Line in nature is not found;\nUnit and universe are round;\nIn vain produced, all rays return;\nEvil will bless, and ice will burn.”\nAs Uriel spoke with piercing eye,\nA shudder ran around the sky;\nThe stern old war-gods shook their heads,\nThe seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;\nSeemed to the holy festival\nThe rash word boded ill to all;\nThe balance-beam of Fate was bent;\nThe bounds of good and ill were rent;\nStrong Hades could not keep his own,\nBut all slid to confusion.\n\nA sad self-knowledge, withering, fell\nOn the beauty of Uriel;\nIn heaven once eminent, the god\nWithdrew, that hour, into his cloud;\nWhether doomed to long gyration\nIn the sea of generation,\nOr by knowledge grown too bright\nTo hit the nerve of feebler sight.\nStraightway, a forgetting wind\nStole over the celestial kind,\nAnd their lips the secret kept,\nIf in ashes the fire-seed slept.\nBut now and then, truth-speaking things\nShamed the angels’ veiling wings;\nAnd, shrilling from the solar course,\nOr from fruit of chemic force,\nProcession of a soul in matter,\nOr the speeding change of water,\nOr out of the good of evil born,\nCame Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,\nAnd a blush tinged the upper sky,\nAnd the gods shook, they knew not why.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "voluntaries": { - "title": "“Voluntaries”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLow and mournful be the strain,\nHaughty thought be far from me;\nTones of penitence and pain,\nMeanings of the tropic sea;\nLow and tender in the cell\nWhere a captive sits in chains.\nCrooning ditties treasured well\nFrom his Afric’s torrid plains.\nSole estate his sire bequeathed,--\nHapless sire to hapless son,--\nWas the wailing song he breathed,\nAnd his chain when life was done.\n\n What his fault, or what his crime?\nOr what ill planet crossed his prime?\nHeart too soft and will too weak\nTo front the fate that crouches near,--\nDove beneath the vulture’s beak;--\nWill song dissuade the thirsty spear?\nDragged from his mother’s arms and breast,\nDisplaced, disfurnished here,\nHis wistful toil to do his best\nChilled by a ribald jeer.\nGreat men in the Senate sate,\nSage and hero, side by side,\nBuilding for their sons the State,\nWhich they shall rule with pride.\nThey forbore to break the chain\nWhich bound the dusky tribe,\nChecked by the owners’ fierce disdain,\nLured by ‘Union’ as the bribe.\nDestiny sat by, and said,\n“Pang for pang your seed shall pay,\nHide in false peace your coward head,\nI bring round the harvest day.”\n\n\n# II.\n\nFreedom all winged expands,\nNor perches in a narrow place;\nHer broad van seeks unplanted lands;\nShe loves a poor and virtuous race.\nClinging to a colder zone\nWhose dark sky sheds the snowflake down,\nThe snowflake is her banner’s star,\nHer stripes the boreal streamers are.\nLong she loved the Northman well;\nNow the iron age is done,\nShe will not refuse to dwell\nWith the offspring of the Sun;\nFoundling of the desert far,\nWhere palms plume, siroccos blaze,\nHe roves unhurt the burning ways\nIn climates of the summer star.\nHe has avenues to God\nHid from men of Northern brain,\nFar beholding, without cloud,\nWhat these with slowest steps attain.\nIf once the generous chief arrive\nTo lead him willing to be led,\nFor freedom he will strike and strive,\nAnd drain his heart till he be dead.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn an age of fops and toys,\nWanting wisdom, void of right,\nWho shall nerve heroic boys\nTo hazard all in Freedom’s fight,--\nBreak sharply off their jolly games,\nForsake their comrades gay\nAnd quit proud homes and youthful dames\nFor famine, toil and fray?\nYet on the nimble air benign\nSpeed nimbler messages,\nThat waft the breath of grace divine\nTo hearts in sloth and ease.\nSo nigh is grandeur to our dust,\nSo near is God to man,\nWhen Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,\nThe youth replies, _I can_.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nO, well for the fortunate soul\nWhich Music’s wings infold,\nStealing away the memory\nOf sorrows new and old!\nYet happier he whose inward sight,\nStayed on his subtile thought,\nShuts his sense on toys of time,\nTo vacant bosoms brought.\nBut best befriended of the God\nHe who, in evil times,\nWarned by an inward voice,\nHeeds not the darkness and the dread,\nBiding by his rule and choice,\nFeeling only the fiery thread\nLeading over heroic ground,\nWalled with mortal terror round,\nTo the aim which him allures,\nAnd the sweet heaven his deed secures.\nPeril around, all else appalling,\nCannon in front and leaden rain\nHim duty through the clarion calling\nTo the van called not in vain.\n\n Stainless soldier on the walls,\nKnowing this,--and knows no more,--\nWhoever fights, whoever falls,\nJustice conquers evermore,\nJustice after as before,--\nAnd he who battles on her side,\nGod, though he were ten times slain,\nCrowns him victor glorified,\nVictor over death and pain.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBlooms the laurel which belongs\nTo the valiant chief who fights;\nI see the wreath, I hear the songs\nLauding the Eternal Rights,\nVictors over daily wrongs:\nAwful victors, they misguide\nWhom they will destroy,\nAnd their coming triumph hide\nIn our downfall, or our joy:\nThey reach no term, they never sleep,\nIn equal strength through space abide;\nThough, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,\nThe strong they slay, the swift outstride:\nFate’s grass grows rank in valley clods,\nAnd rankly on the castled steep,--\nSpeak it firmly, these are gods,\nAll are ghosts beside.", - "metadata": { - "source": "May-Day and Other Pieces", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1867 - } - } - }, - "walden": { - "title": "“Walden”", - "body": "In my garden three ways meet,\n Thrice the spot is blest;\nHermit-thrush comes there to build,\n Carrier-doves to nest.\n\nThere broad-armed oaks, the copses’ maze,\n The cold sea-wind detain;\nHere sultry Summer overstays\n When Autumn chills the plain.\n\nSelf-sown my stately garden grows;\n The winds and wind-blown seed,\nCold April rain and colder snows\n My hedges plant and feed.\n\nFrom mountains far and valleys near\n The harvests sown to-day\nThrive in all weathers without fear,--\n Wild planters, plant away!\n\nIn cities high the careful crowds\n Of woe-worn mortals darkling go,\nBut in these sunny solitudes\n My quiet roses blow.\n\nMethought the sky looked scornful down\n On all was base in man,\nAnd airy tongues did taunt the town,\n “Achieve our peace who can!”\n\nWhat need I holier dew\n Than Walden’s haunted wave,\nDistilled from heaven’s alembic blue,\n Steeped in each forest cave?\n\n(If Thought unlock her mysteries,\n If Friendship on me smile,\nI walk in marble galleries,\n I talk with kings the while.)\n\nHow drearily in College hall\n The Doctor stretched the hours,\nBut in each pause we heard the call\n Of robins out of doors.\n\nThe air is wise, the wind thinks well,\n And all through which it blows,\nIf plants or brain, if egg or shell,\n Or bird or biped knows;\n\nAnd oft at home ’mid tasks I heed,\n I heed how wears the day;\nWe must not halt while fiercely speed\n The spans of life away.\n\nWhat boots it here of Thebes or Rome\n Or lands of Eastern day?\nIn forests I am still at home\n And there I cannot stray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "we-are-what-we-are-made": { - "title": "“We are what we are made …”", - "body": "We are what we are made; each following day\nIs the Creator of our human mould\nNot less than was the first; the all-wise God\nGilds a few points in every several life,\nAnd as each flower upon the fresh hillside,\nAnd every colored petal of each flower,\nIs sketched and dyed, each with a new design,\nIts spot of purple, and its streak of brown,\nSo each man’s life shall have its proper lights,\nAnd a few joys, a few peculiar charms,\nFor him round in the melancholy hours\nAnd reconcile him to the common days.\nNot many men see beauty in the fogs\nOf close low pine-woods in a river town;\nYet unto me not morn’s magnificence,\nNor the red rainbow of a summer eve,\nNor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls\nOf rich men blazing hospitable light,\nNor wit, nor eloquence,--no, nor even the song\nOf any woman that is now alive,--\nHath such a soul, such divine influence,\nSuch resurrection of the happy past,\nAs is to me when I behold the morn\nOpe in such law moist roadside, and beneath\nPeep the blue violets out of the black loam,\nPathetic silent poets that sing to me\nThine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems of Youth and Early Manhood", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1833, - "month": "march" - }, - "location": "Naples", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "wealth": { - "title": "“Wealth”", - "body": "Who shall tell what did befall,\nFar away in time, when once,\nOver the lifeless ball,\nHung idle stars and suns?\nWhat god the element obeyed?\nWings of what wind the lichen bore,\nWafting the puny seeds of power,\nWhich, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?\nAnd well the primal pioneer\nKnew the strong task to it assigned,\nPatient through Heaven’s enormous year\nTo build in matter home for mind.\nFrom air the creeping centuries drew\nThe matted thicket low and wide,\nThis must the leaves of ages strew\nThe granite slab to clothe and hide,\nEre wheat can wave its golden pride.\nWhat smiths, and in what furnace, rolled\n(In dizzy aeons dim and mute\nThe reeling brain can ill compute)\nCopper and iron, lead and gold?\nWhat oldest star the fame can save\nOf races perishing to pave\nThe planet with a floor of lime?\nDust is their pyramid and mole:\nWho saw what ferns and palms were pressed\nUnder the tumbling mountain’s breast,\nIn the safe herbal of the coal?\nBut when the quarried means were piled,\nAll is waste and worthless, till\nArrives the wise selecting will,\nAnd, out of slime and chaos, Wit\nDraws the threads of fair and fit.\nThen temples rose, and towns, and marts,\nThe shop of toil, the hall of arts;\nThen flew the sail across the seas\nTo feed the North from tropic trees;\nThe storm-wind wove, the torrent span,\nWhere they were bid, the rivers ran;\nNew slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream,\nGalvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.\nThen docks were built, and crops were stored,\nAnd ingots added to the hoard.\nBut though light-headed man forget,\nRemembering Matter pays her debt:\nStill, through her motes and masses, draw\nElectric thrills and ties of law,\nWhich bind the strengths of Nature wild\nTo the conscience of a child.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Elements and Mottoes", - "language": "english" - } - }, - "woodnotes": { - "title": "“Woodnotes”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWhen the pine tosses its cones\nTo the song of its waterfall tones,\nWho speeds to the woodland walks?\nTo birds and trees who talks?\nCaesar of his leafy Rome,\nThere the poet is at home.\nHe goes to the river-side,--\nNot hook nor line hath he;\nHe stands in the meadows wide,--\nNor gun nor scythe to see.\nSure some god his eye enchants:\nWhat he knows nobody wants.\nIn the wood he travels glad,\nWithout better fortune had,\nMelancholy without bad.\nKnowledge this man prizes best\nSeems fantastic to the rest:\nPondering shadows, colors, clouds,\nGrass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,\nBoughs on which the wild bees settle,\nTints that spot the violet’s petal,\nWhy Nature loves the number five,\nAnd why the star-form she repeats:\nLover of all things alive,\nWonderer at all he meets,\nWonderer chiefly at himself,\nWho can tell him what he is?\nOr how meet in human elf\nComing and past eternities?\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAnd such I knew, a forest seer,\nA minstrel of the natural year,\nForeteller of the vernal ides,\nWise harbinger of spheres and tides,\nA lover true, who knew by heart\nEach joy the mountain dales impart;\nIt seemed that Nature could not raise\nA plant in any secret place,\nIn quaking bog, on snowy hill,\nBeneath the grass that shades the rill,\nUnder the snow, between the rocks,\nIn damp fields known to bird and fox.\nBut he would come in the very hour\nIt opened in its virgin bower,\nAs if a sunbeam showed the place,\nAnd tell its long-descended race.\nIt seemed as if the breezes brought him,\nIt seemed as if the sparrows taught him;\nAs if by secret sight he knew\nWhere, in far fields, the orchis grew.\nMany haps fall in the field\nSeldom seen by wishful eyes,\nBut all her shows did Nature yield,\nTo please and win this pilgrim wise.\nHe saw the partridge drum in the woods;\nHe heard the woodcock’s evening hymn;\nHe found the tawny thrushes’ broods;\nAnd the shy hawk did wait for him;\nWhat others did at distance hear,\nAnd guessed within the thicket’s gloom,\nWas shown to this philosopher,\nAnd at his bidding seemed to come.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nIn unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers’ gang\nWhere from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;\nHe trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon\nThe all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;\nWhere feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,\nAnd up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.\nHe saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,\nThe slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,\nAnd blessed the monument of the man of flowers,\nWhich breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.\nHe heard, when in the grove, at intervals,\nWith sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,--\nOne crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,\nDeclares the close of its green century.\nLow lies the plant to whose creation went\nSweet influence from every element;\nWhose living towers the years conspired to build,\nWhose giddy top the morning loved to gild.\nThrough these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,\nHe roamed, content alike with man and beast.\nWhere darkness found him he lay glad at night;\nThere the red morning touched him with its light.\nThree moons his great heart him a hermit made,\nSo long he roved at will the boundless shade.\nThe timid it concerns to ask their way,\nAnd fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,\nTo make no step until the event is known,\nAnd ills to come as evils past bemoan.\nNot so the wise; no coward watch he keeps\nTo spy what danger on his pathway creeps;\nGo where he will, the wise man is at home,\nHis hearth the earth,--his hall the azure dome;\nWhere his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road\nBy God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.\n\n\n# 4.\n\n’T was one of the charmèd days\nWhen the genius of God doth flow;\nThe wind may alter twenty ways,\nA tempest cannot blow;\nIt may blow north, it still is warm;\nOr south, it still is clear;\nOr east, it smells like a clover-farm;\nOr west, no thunder fear.\nThe musing peasant, lowly great,\nBeside the forest water sate;\nThe rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown\nComposed the network of his throne;\nThe wide lake, edged with sand and grass,\nWas burnished to a floor of glass,\nPainted with shadows green and proud\nOf the tree and of the cloud.\nHe was the heart of all the scene;\nOn him the sun looked more serene;\nTo hill and cloud his face was known,--\nIt seemed the likeness of their own;\nThey knew by secret sympathy\nThe public child of earth and sky.\n“You ask,” he said, “what guide\nMe through trackless thickets led,\nThrough thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide.\nI found the water’s bed.\nThe watercourses were my guide;\nI travelled grateful by their side,\nOr through their channel dry;\nThey led me through the thicket damp,\nThrough brake and fern, the beavers’ camp,\nThrough beds of granite cut my road,\nAnd their resistless friendship showed.\nThe falling waters led me,\nThe foodful waters fed me,\nAnd brought me to the lowest land,\nUnerring to the ocean sand.\nThe moss upon the forest bark\nWas pole-star when the night was dark;\nThe purple berries in the wood\nSupplied me necessary food;\nFor Nature ever faithful is\nTo such as trust her faithfulness.\nWhen the forest shall mislead me,\nWhen the night and morning lie,\nWhen sea and land refuse to feed me,\n’T will be time enough to die;\nThen will yet my mother yield\nA pillow in her greenest field,\nNor the June flowers scorn to cover\nThe clay of their departed lover.”\n\n\n# 5.\n\n_As sunbeams stream through liberal space_\n_And nothing jostle or displace,_\n_So waved the pine-tree through my thought_\n_And fanned the dreams it never brought._\n\n“Whether is better, the gift or the donor?\nCome to me,”\nQuoth the pine-tree,\n“I am the giver of honor.\nMy garden is the cloven rock,\nAnd my manure the snow;\nAnd drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,\nIn summer’s scorching glow.\nHe is great who can live by me:\nThe rough and bearded forester\nIs better than the lord;\nGod fills the script and canister,\nSin piles the loaded board.\nThe lord is the peasant that was,\nThe peasant the lord that shall be;\nThe lord is hay, the peasant grass,\nOne dry, and one the living tree.\nWho liveth by the ragged pine\nFoundeth a heroic line;\nWho liveth in the palace hall\nWaneth fast and spendeth all.\nHe goes to my savage haunts,\nWith his chariot and his care;\nMy twilight realm he disenchants,\nAnd finds his prison there.”\n\n“What prizes the town and the tower?\nOnly what the pine-tree yields;\nSinew that subdued the fields;\nThe wild-eyed boy, who in the woods\nChants his hymn to hills and floods,\nWhom the city’s poisoning spleen\nMade not pale, or fat, or lean;\nWhom the rain and the wind purgeth,\nWhom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,\nIn whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,\nIn whose feet the lion rusheth,\nIron arms, and iron mould,\nThat know not fear, fatigue, or cold.\nI give my rafters to his boat,\nMy billets to his boiler’s throat,\nAnd I will swim the ancient sea\nTo float my child to victory,\nAnd grant to dwellers with the pine\nDominion o’er the palm and vine.\nWho leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,\nUnnerves his strength, invites his end.\nCut a bough from my parent stem,\nAnd dip it in thy porcelain vase;\nA little while each russet gem\nWill swell and rise with wonted grace;\nBut when it seeks enlarged supplies,\nThe orphan of the forest dies.\nWhoso walks in solitude\nAnd inhabiteth the wood,\nChoosing light, wave, rock and bird,\nBefore the money-loving herd,\nInto that forester shall pass,\nFrom these companions, power and grace.\nClean shall he be, without, within,\nFrom the old adhering sin,\nAll ill dissolving in the light\nOf his triumphant piercing sight:\nNot vain, sour, nor frivolous;\nNot mad, athirst, nor garrulous;\nGrave, chaste, contented, though retired,\nAnd of all other men desired.\nOn him the light of star and moon\nShall fall with purer radiance down;\nAll constellations of the sky\nShed their virtue through his eye.\nHim Nature giveth for defence\nHis formidable innocence;\nThe mounting sap, the shells, the sea,\nAll spheres, all stones, his helpers be;\nHe shall meet the speeding year,\nWithout wailing, without fear;\nHe shall be happy in his love,\nLike to like shall joyful prove;\nHe shall be happy whilst he wooes,\nMuse-born, a daughter of the Muse.\nBut if with gold she bind her hair,\nAnd deck her breast with diamond,\nTake off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,\nThough thou lie alone on the ground.”\n\n“Heed the old oracles,\nPonder my spells;\nSong wakes in my pinnacles\nWhen the wind swells.\nSoundeth the prophetic wind,\nThe shadows shake on the rock behind,\nAnd the countless leaves of the pine are strings\nTuned to the lay the wood-god sings.\n Hearken! Hearken!\nIf thou wouldst know the mystic song\nChanted when the sphere was young.\nAloft, abroad, the paean swells;\nO wise man! hear’st thou half it tells?\nO wise man! hear’st thou the least part?\n’Tis the chronicle of art.\nTo the open ear it sings\nSweet the genesis of things,\nOf tendency through endless ages,\nOf star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,\nOf rounded worlds, of space and time,\nOf the old flood’s subsiding slime,\nOf chemic matter, force and form,\nOf poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm:\nThe rushing metamorphosis\nDissolving all that fixture is,\nMelts things that be to things that seem,\nAnd solid nature to a dream.\nO, listen to the undersong,\nThe ever old, the ever young;\nAnd, far within those cadent pauses,\nThe chorus of the ancient Causes!\nDelights the dreadful Destiny\nTo fling his voice into the tree,\nAnd shock thy weak ear with a note\nBreathed from the everlasting throat.\nIn music he repeats the pang\nWhence the fair flock of Nature sprang.\nO mortal! thy ears are stones;\nThese echoes are laden with tones\nWhich only the pure can hear;\nThou canst not catch what they recite\nOf Fate and Will, of Want and Right,\nOf man to come, of human life,\nOf Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.”\n\n Once again the pine-tree sung:--\n“Speak not thy speech my boughs among:\nPut off thy years, wash in the breeze;\nMy hours are peaceful centuries.\nTalk no more with feeble tongue;\nNo more the fool of space and time,\nCome weave with mine a nobler rhyme.\nOnly thy Americans\nCan read thy line, can meet thy glance,\nBut the runes that I rehearse\nUnderstands the universe;\nThe least breath my boughs which tossed\nBrings again the Pentecost;\nTo every soul resounding clear\nIn a voice of solemn cheer,--\n‘Am I not thine? Are not these thine?’\nAnd they reply, ‘Forever mine!’\nMy branches speak Italian,\nEnglish, German, Basque, Castilian,\nMountain speech to Highlanders,\nOcean tongues to islanders,\nTo Fin and Lap and swart Malay,\nTo each his bosom-secret say.”\n\n “Come learn with me the fatal song\nWhich knits the world in music strong,\nCome lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,\nOf things with things, of times with times,\nPrimal chimes of sun and shade,\nOf sound and echo, man and maid,\nThe land reflected in the flood,\nBody with shadow still pursued.\nFor Nature beats in perfect tune,\nAnd rounds with rhyme her every rune,\nWhether she work in land or sea,\nOr hide underground her alchemy.\nThou canst not wave thy staff in air,\nOr dip thy paddle in the lake,\nBut it carves the bow of beauty there,\nAnd the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.\nThe wood is wiser far than thou;\nThe wood and wave each other know\nNot unrelated, unaffied,\nBut to each thought and thing allied,\nIs perfect Nature’s every part,\nRooted in the mighty Heart,\nBut thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,\nWhence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed,\nWhence, O thou orphan and defrauded?\nIs thy land peeled, thy realm marauded?\nWho thee divorced, deceived and left?\nThee of thy faith who hath bereft,\nAnd torn the ensigns from thy brow,\nAnd sunk the immortal eye so low?\nThy cheek too white, thy form too slender,\nThy gait too slow, thy habits tender\nFor royal man;--they thee confess\nAn exile from the wilderness,--\nThe hills where health with health agrees,\nAnd the wise soul expels disease.\nHark! in thy ear I will tell the sign\nBy which thy hurt thou may’st divine.\nWhen thou shalt climb the mountain cliff,\nOr see the wide shore from thy skiff,\nTo thee the horizon shall express\nBut emptiness on emptiness;\nThere lives no man of Nature’s worth\nIn the circle of the earth;\nAnd to thine eye the vast skies fall,\nDire and satirical,\nOn clucking hens and prating fools,\nOn thieves, on drudges and on dolls.\nAnd thou shalt say to the Most High,\n‘Godhead! all this astronomy,\nAnd fate and practice and invention,\nStrong art and beautiful pretension,\nThis radiant pomp of sun and star,\nThroes that were, and worlds that are,\nBehold! were in vain and in vain;--\nIt cannot be,--I will look again.\nSurely now will the curtain rise,\nAnd earth’s fit tenant me surprise;--\nBut the curtain doth _not_ rise,\nAnd Nature has miscarried wholly\nInto failure, into folly.”\n\n“Alas! thine is the bankruptcy,\nBlessed Nature so to see.\nCome, lay thee in my soothing shade,\nAnd heal the hurts which sin has made.\nI see thee in the crowd alone;\nI will be thy companion.\nQuit thy friends as the dead in doom,\nAnd build to them a final tomb;\nLet the starred shade that nightly falls\nStill celebrate their funerals,\nAnd the bell of beetle and of bee\nKnell their melodious memory.\nBehind thee leave thy merchandise,\nThy churches and thy charities;\nAnd leave thy peacock wit behind;\nEnough for thee the primal mind\nThat flows in streams, that breathes in wind:\nLeave all thy pedant lore apart;\nGod hid the whole world in thy heart.\nLove shuns the sage, the child it crowns,\nGives all to them who all renounce.\nThe rain comes when the wind calls;\nThe river knows the way to the sea;\nWithout a pilot it runs and falls,\nBlessing all lands with its charity;\nThe sea tosses and foams to find\nIts way up to the cloud and wind;\nThe shadow sits close to the flying ball;\nThe date fails not on the palm-tree tall;\nAnd thou,--go burn thy wormy pages,--\nShalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.\nOft didst thou thread the woods in vain\nTo find what bird had piped the strain:--\nSeek not, and the little eremite\nFlies gayly forth and sings in sight.”\n\n“Hearken once more!\nI will tell thee the mundane lore.\nOlder am I than thy numbers wot,\nChange I may, but I pass not.\nHitherto all things fast abide,\nAnd anchored in the tempest ride.\nTrenchant time behoves to hurry\nAll to yean and all to bury:\nAll the forms are fugitive,\nBut the substances survive.\nEver fresh the broad creation,\nA divine improvisation,\nFrom the heart of God proceeds,\nA single will, a million deeds.\nOnce slept the world an egg of stone,\nAnd pulse, and sound, and light was none;\nAnd God said, ‘Throb!’ and there was motion\nAnd the vast mass became vast ocean.\nOnward and on, the eternal Pan,\nWho layeth the world’s incessant plan,\nHalteth never in one shape,\nBut forever doth escape,\nLike wave or flame, into new forms\nOf gem, and air, of plants, and worms.\nI, that to-day am a pine,\nYesterday was a bundle of grass.\nHe is free and libertine,\nPouring of his power the wine\nTo every age, to every race;\nUnto every race and age\nHe emptieth the beverage;\nUnto each, and unto all,\nMaker and original.\nThe world is the ring of his spells,\nAnd the play of his miracles.\nAs he giveth to all to drink,\nThus or thus they are and think.\nWith one drop sheds form and feature;\nWith the next a special nature;\nThe third adds heat’s indulgent spark;\nThe fourth gives light which eats the dark;\nInto the fifth himself he flings,\nAnd conscious Law is King of kings.\nAs the bee through the garden ranges,\nFrom world to world the godhead changes;\nAs the sheep go feeding in the waste,\nFrom form to form He maketh haste;\nThis vault which glows immense with light\nIs the inn where he lodges for a night.\nWhat recks such Traveller if the bowers\nWhich bloom and fade like meadow flowers\nA bunch of fragrant lilies be,\nOr the stars of eternity?\nAlike to him the better, the worse,--\nThe glowing angel, the outcast corse.\nThou metest him by centuries,\nAnd lo! he passes like the breeze;\nThou seek’st in globe and galaxy,\nHe hides in pure transparency;\nThou askest in fountains and in fires,\nHe is the essence that inquires.\nHe is the axis of the star;\nHe is the sparkle of the spar;\nHe is the heart of every creature;\nHe is the meaning of each feature;\nAnd his mind is the sky.\nThan all it holds more deep, more high.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-world-soul": { - "title": "“The World-Soul”", - "body": "Thanks to the morning light,\n Thanks to the foaming sea,\nTo the uplands of New Hampshire,\n To the green-haired forest free;\nThanks to each man of courage,\n To the maids of holy mind,\nTo the boy with his games undaunted\n Who never looks behind.\n\nCities of proud hotels,\n Houses of rich and great,\nVice nestles in your chambers,\n Beneath your roofs of slate.\nIt cannot conquer folly,--\n Time-and-space-conquering steam,--\nAnd the light-outspeeding telegraph\n Bears nothing on its beam.\n\nThe politics are base;\n The letters do not cheer;\nAnd ’tis far in the deeps of history,\n The voice that speaketh clear.\nTrade and the streets ensnare us,\n Our bodies are weak and worn;\nWe plot and corrupt each other,\n And we despoil the unborn.\n\nYet there in the parlor sits\n Some figure of noble guise,--\nOur angel, in a stranger’s form,\n Or woman’s pleading eyes;\nOr only a flashing sunbeam\n In at the window-pane;\nOr Music pours on mortals\n Its beautiful disdain.\n\nThe inevitable morning\n Finds them who in cellars be;\nAnd be sure the all-loving Nature\n Will smile in a factory.\nYon ridge of purple landscape,\n Yon sky between the walls,\nHold all the hidden wonders\n In scanty intervals.\n\nAlas! the Sprite that haunts us\n Deceives our rash desire;\nIt whispers of the glorious gods,\n And leaves us in the mire.\nWe cannot learn the cipher\n That’s writ upon our cell;\nStars taunt us by a mystery\n Which we could never spell.\n\nIf but one hero knew it,\n The world would blush in flame;\nThe sage, till he hit the secret,\n Would hang his head for shame.\nOur brothers have not read it,\n Not one has found the key;\nAnd henceforth we are comforted,--\n We are but such as they.\n\nStill, still the secret presses;\n The nearing clouds draw down;\nThe crimson morning flames into\n The fopperies of the town.\nWithin, without the idle earth,\n Stars weave eternal rings;\nThe sun himself shines heartily,\n And shares the joy he brings.\n\nAnd what if Trade sow cities\n Like shells along the shore,\nAnd thatch with towns the prairie broad\n With railways ironed o’er?--\nThey are but sailing foam-bells\n Along Thought’s causing stream,\nAnd take their shape and sun-color\n From him that sends the dream.\n\nFor Destiny never swerves\n Nor yields to men the helm;\nHe shoots his thought, by hidden nerves,\n Throughout the solid realm.\nThe patient Daemon sits,\n With roses and a shroud;\nHe has his way, and deals his gifts,--\n But ours is not allowed.\n\nHe is no churl nor trifler,\n And his viceroy is none,--\nLove-without-weakness,--\n Of Genius sire and son.\nAnd his will is not thwarted;\n The seeds of land and sea\nAre the atoms of his body bright,\n And his behest obey.\n\nHe serveth the servant,\n The brave he loves amain;\nHe kills the cripple and the sick,\n And straight begins again;\nFor gods delight in gods,\n And thrust the weak aside;\nTo him who scorns their charities\n Their arms fly open wide.\n\nWhen the old world is sterile\n And the ages are effete,\nHe will from wrecks and sediment\n The fairer world complete.\nHe forbids to despair;\n His cheeks mantle with mirth;\nAnd the unimagined good of men\n Is yeaning at the birth.\n\nSpring still makes spring in the mind\n When sixty years are told;\nLove wakes anew this throbbing heart,\n And we are never old;\nOver the winter glaciers\n I see the summer glow,\nAnd through the wild-piled snow-drift\n The warm rosebuds below.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "d-j-enright": { - "metadata": { - "name": "D. J. Enright", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2002 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._J._Enright", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "seminar-on-contemporary-chinese-writing": { - "title": "“Seminar on Contemporary Chinese Writing”", - "body": "Novels about peasants are generally good\n(In general the peasantry is good)\nThey may sound rather boring\nBut they are not\n\nOne of them is entitled ‘The Well’\nAnd set in a remote village\nWhere are many hardships\n\nAnother is called ‘The Village’\nConcerning a peasant and his wife\nWho have two sons\nAnd each son has a wife\n\n(If the Chinese professor sounds rather boring\nIt is due to the translation\nBut he is not)\n\nWas one of the sons\nThe son who laid himself flat on a frozen river\nTo melt the ice and furnish his parents\nWith fresh fish in the winter?\n\nNo, that is not a contemporary writing\nIt is a very old story\nWe have better ways of melting the ice\nNowadays\n\ndo peasants ever write such novels?\nIf they do they are not peasants\nDo they read them?\nA chuckle, translated as a chuckle\n\n(One has met at most one Chinese peasant\nThe only villager to own a television set\nHe was proudly illiterate)\n\nNo, ‘Golden Lotus’ was long ago\nIt is true that sex was making a comeback\nUntil it suffered a setback\n\n(London is a large urban centre\nThere are beggars but no peasants\nThe lecture room is centrally heated\nSex has suffered a minor setback\nBut our hardships are relatively light\nSoon there will be a break for coffee).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ephrem-the-syrian": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Ephrem the Syrian", - "birth": { - "year": 306, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 373 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "syrian", - "language": "aramaic", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephrem_the_Syrian", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "saint", - "syrian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "from-god-christs-deity-came-forth": { - "title": "“From God Christ’s deity came forth …”", - "body": "From God Christ’s deity came forth,\nhis manhood from humanity;\nhis priesthood from Melchizedek,\nhis royalty from David’s tree:\npraised be his Oneness.\n\nHe joined with guests at wedding feast,\nyet in the wilderness did fast;\nhe taught within the temple’s gates;\nhis people saw him die at last:\npraised be his teaching.\n\nThe dissolute he did not scorn,\nnor turn from those who were in sin;\nhe for the righteous did rejoice\nbut bade the fallen to come in:\npraised be his mercy.\n\nHe did not disregard the sick;\nto simple ones his word was given;\nand he descended to the earth\nand, his work done, went up to heaven:\npraised be his coming.\n\nWho then, my Lord, compares to you?\nThe Watcher slept, the Great was small,\nthe Pure baptized, the Life who died,\nthe King abased to honor all:\npraised be your glory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "aramaic", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "hymn-to-the-light": { - "title": "“Hymn to the Light”", - "body": "The Light of the just and joy of the upright is Christ Jesus our Lord.\nBegotten of the Father, He manifested himself to us.\nHe came to rescue us from darkness and to fill us with the radiance of His light.\nDay is dawning upon us; the power of darkness is fading away.\n\nFrom the true Light there arises for us the light which illumines our darkened eyes.\nHis glory shines upon the world and enlightens the very depths of the abyss.\nDeath is annihilated, night has vanished, and the gates of Sheol are broken.\nCreatures lying in darkness from ancient times are clothed in light.\nThe dead arise from the dust and sing because they have a Savior.\nHe brings salvation and grants us life. He ascends to his Father on high.\nHe will return in glorious splendor and shed His light on those gazing upon Him.\n\nOur King comes in majestic glory.\n\nLet us light our lamps and go forth to meet Him.\nLet us find our joy in Him, for He has found joy in us.\nHe will indeed rejoice us with His marvelous light.\n\nLet us glorify the majesty of the Son and give thanks to the almighty Father\nWho, in an outpouring of love, sent Him to us, to fill us with hope and salvation.\nWhen He manifests Himself, the saints awaiting Him in weariness and sorrow,\nwill go forth to meet Him with lighted lamps.\n\nThe angels and guardians of heaven will rejoice\nin the glory of the just and upright people of earth;\nTogether crowned with victory,\nthey will sing hymns and psalms.\n\nStand up then and be ready!\nGive thanks to our King and Savior,\nWho will come in great glory to gladden us\nwith His marvelous light in His kingdom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "aramaic", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "from-hymns-on-paradise": { - "title": "From “Hymns on Paradise”", - "body": "Whoever has washed the feet of the saints\nwill himself be cleansed in that dew;\nto the hand that has stretched out\nto give to the poor\nwill the fruits of the trees\nthemselves stretch out;\nthe very footsteps of him\nwho visited the sick in their affliction\ndo the flowers make haste\nto crown with blooms,\njostling to see\nwhich can be first to kiss his steps.\n\nI saw that place, my brethren\nand I sat down and wept,\nfor myself and for those like me,\nat how my days have reached their fill,\ndissipated one by one, faded out,\nstolen away without my noticing;\nremorse seizes hold of me\nbecause I have lost\ncrown, name and glory,\nrobe and bridal chamber of light.\nHow blessed is the person\nwho of that heavenly table is held worthy!\n\nMay all the children of light\nmake supplication for me there,\nthat our Lord may grant them\nthe gift of a single soul.\nThus would I have renewed occasion\nto praise Him\nwhose hand is, to be sure,\nstretched out in readiness.\nMay He who gives\nboth in justice and in grace\ngive to me, in His mercy,\nof the treasure store of His mercies.\n\nAnd if none who is defiled\ncan enter that place,\nthen allow me to live by its enclosure,\nresiding in its shade.\nSince Paradise resembles\nthat table,\nlet me, through Your grace\neat of the “crumbs” of its fruit\nwhich fall outside,\nso that I too may join\nthose dogs who had their fill\nfrom the crumbs of their masters’ tables.\n\nMay my sins not be revealed\nto my brethren on that day,\n--yet by this we show\nhow contemptible we are, Lord;\nif our sins are revealed to You,\nfrom whom can we hide them?\nI have made shame\nan idol for myself;\ngrant me, Lord, to fear You,\nfor You are mighty.\nMay I feel shame and self-reproach\nbefore You, for You are gentle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "aramaic", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-everson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Everson", - "birth": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1994 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Everson_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "dust-and-the-glory": { - "title": "“Dust and the Glory”", - "body": "On a low Lorrainian knoll a leaning peasant sinking a pit\nMeets rotted rock and a slab.\nThe slab cracks and is split, the old grave opened,\nHis spade strikes iron and keenly rings.\nOut of the earth he picks an ancient sword,\nHiltless with rust and the blade a long double curve,\nSteel of no Roman nor Teuton king,\nBut metal struck in the sleeping East and lost in the raids.\nHe turns it awhile in the thick hands,\nHis thumb searching the eaten edge, and throws it aside.\nThe brown strip winks in the light and is sunk;\nWinks once in a thousand years, in the sun and the singing air,\nAnd is lost again in the ground.\nAttila, you rode your hordes from the Asian slopes and swept to the west;\nIn the screaming dawns you struck the rich earth and left it smoking;\nStruck and butchered and lived like the crimson arc of a cutting knife,\nRoaring down Rome and the north-born Goths.\nThrough the reeling years you ran like a wolf,\nSide-slashing blindly from border to border the length of that bleeding land\nTill your own lust killed you, and the dark swarm broke.\nIn the nights the moon crawls to the west and is hidden;\nThe dawns bloom in the east; The fogs gather.\nAttila, in your frenzy of life you burned, but for nothing;\nYou roared for an instant, shook the world’s width, broke the fierce tribes.\nYou are outdone: the earth that you raped has been ravaged more foully;\nThe cities you sacked have been burnt and rebuilt a hundred times.\nFrom your day to this the valleys you plundered\nHave known killing and looting, the sharp violence,\nThe running thunder shaking the night,\nA gasping moment of peace and then at it again!\nYet you struck deep: in the fields the earth gives up a curious sword;\nThe bright-haired folk of a German farm\nRegard with doubt a baby born with oval eyes;\nIn a gusty hut an old man hugs the hearth\nAnd tells an ancient story.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "jay-breed": { - "title": "“Jay Breed”", - "body": "All the young summer the jay breed prospered.\nThe new brood, fledged early and growing apace,\nTook over the canyon, a stellar triumph.\nBright, black-crested, sporting the razor-sharp profile,\nThey probed every cranny. Whatever accosted\nMust pass inspection else suffer abuse.\nScolding, truculent, cunning, vindictive,\nThey strutted about the canyon, and we endured them.\nDownstream by the meadow our creekside neighbors\nShot them with guns, then hung the skewed bodies in the apple trees\nTo scare off robbers. Here, under the towering\nCanopy of redwoods, we let them live\nAnd suffer their gall.\n\nAnd indeed their very abrasion\nBespeaks them: after the the gloomy tree-sodden winter\nThat jaybird bravura fills a definite need.\n\nI have, in fact, gone so far in complicity\nAs to scatter crumbs on an old stump to lure them in,\nSwooping, blue iridescent streaks,\nAngling through slant shafts of the sun\nBetween columned redwoods, their raucous bravado\nMy guiltful delight.\n\nBut the cats\nAre not amused. Skulking the yard they endure that umbrage\nNastily. Dive-bombed from behind\nThey crouch flat-eared and bare their fangs.\nOften they scan the sky, the trees, the hedging thickets,\nPossessed of a throttled rage, a passion\nApparently hopeless, given the jays’\nTreetop immunity, but nursed nonetheless,\nCorrosive desire clenched to the heart\nAgainst the long-deferred accounting, the Great Day\nOf feline retribution.\n\nMeantime,\nThe jays cursed back, and streaked in,\nJeering.\n\nThen early afternoon,\nThe hour lazy and bland, a stripling jay\nDropped down from the trees to pick off a cricket.\nAt ease in the grass, confident of his long legs\nFor quick takeoff, he speared his game\nWith nice precision. Foiled in his beak\nThe hapless insect wriggled and strove.\nIntrigued, the jay let it squirm,\nThen flipped it aside, pounced, stabbed it twice,\nArtfully toying.\n\nBut all unnoticed\nIn the wide summer day the black tom\nGot his wits together. Aslink under the hibachi stand\nHe inched stealthily forward, tail twitching.\nSuddenly the jay sensed him: one electric spring of those long legs\nAnd he lit out, the cricket still foiling his beak.\nToo late. Too late. Lightning unleashed, the black tom caught him\nFull stretch in the rush, a foot off the ground and going away.\nOne terrified squawk sent the cricket spinning,\nAnd bird and cat hit the grass together, a feathery tussle:\nThe end, the mad scrambling end and the clutched triumph,\nAbrupt close of the long life-gamble.\n\nNot yet. Not yet.\n\nPressed under the paws the jay’s head struggled out,\nScreeching piteously. The jay breed responded.\nConverging from thicket and scrub,\nFrom the tall stands of redwood and the streamside alders,\nThey closed in. The long flight-angles\nPlaned down, not jockeying now for scattered crumbs\nBut swooping for life, the only life they know:\nThe perdurable breed.\n\nWheeling above the crouched pair\nThey danced like blue devils.\nThe black tom grinned up at them,\nHis neck craned, his white teeth\nGleaming behind stretched lips,\nHis eyes yellow fire. Under his feet\nThe caught prey implored, piteously, the long lament,\nThe life-going.\n\nThat hullabaloo\nBrought the cat tribe in from the listening woods.\nFirst little Squeak, least of the litter,\nWho snatched the prey from her brother’s paws\nDistracted by jaybirds. But she, too, dawdled,\nShe, too, toyed with that pleading life,\nTill her bigger sister, greedy minx,\nSnatched it away, and with one clench of her jaw\nCrushed the black-crested head.\nInstantly all fell still, the fierce clamor hushed,\nThe yard deeply silent. From twig and branch the jays looked down,\nStunned, shaken. Then the parent bird\nGave the sharp tut-tut, abrupt signal of termination,\nAnd they all took off.\n\nThe cats\nIgnored what they caught, left the futile remains,\nSmall wing-flurry of the spent cyclone,\nScattered in the grass. As for me,\nSomething within was held suspended,\nThe extravagant episode suddenly quenched,\nLike a drench of ether splashed on my heart.\nI picked up the disheveled, resplendent wings,\nAnd stretched them to let the light fall through,\nTranslucent blue in the wild feathers. Then the arrogant tail\nThat had flirted with death and not won.\nAnd for final gesture the elegant claw\nCrooked at the sky.\n\nI took the numinous trophies\nInside the house to dry on a ledge. Well-placed,\nTheir iridescent message glows in the room,\nTo reveal from beyond the screen of Nature\nThe life of God.\n\nBut what was the vibration\nThat trailed them through the rooms as I bore them in,\nAnd clings yet to my hands, like mountain misery?\nA speck of blood flecked my fingernail.\nTasting, I imagined it salt.\n\nBut the moment was no more.\n\nOutside, in the languid day, the black tom\nSlunk beneath the hibachi stand and took up his post.\nA touch of swagger, transmitted out of the fetch of the jay,\nInvested his movements with auspicious pomp.\nOh, what animal cunning licked the feline lips,\nAppeasement clean as a wing-bone whistle?\nReality reduced to a feather in the grass,\nA plume in the fern?\n\nWhatever death is\nThe jaybird learned it. But the black tom\nDemurs, coiled in contradiction, the infinite\nSatisfaction of life. Crouched on sheathed paws\nHe watches. His yellow eyes, blank as the sun,\nCeaselessly scan the jayless sky,\nAnd not blink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "kingfisher-flat": { - "title": "“Kingfisher Flat”", - "body": "In the long drought\nImpotence clutched on the veins of passion\nEncircles our bed, a serpent of stone.\n\nI think of the Fisher King,\nAll his domain parched in a sterile fixation of purpose,\nClenched on the core of the burning question\nGone unasked.\n\nOh, wife and companion!\nThe ancient taboo hangs over us,\nA long suspension tightens its grip\nOn the seed of my passion and the flower of your hope.\nMasks of drought deceive us. An inexorable forbearance\nFalsifies the face of things, and makes inflexible\nThe flow of this life, the movement of this love.\n\nI hear quaking grass\nShiver under the windowsill, and out along the road\nThe ripe mallow and the wild oat\nRustle in the wind. Deeper than the strict\nInterdiction of denial or the serpentine coiling of time,\nWoman and earth lie sunk in sleep, unsatisfied.\nEach holds that bruise to her heart like a stone\nAnd aches for rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "out-of-the-ash": { - "title": "“Out of the Ash”", - "body": "Solstice of the dark, the absolute\nZero of the year. Praise God\nWho comes for us again, our lives\nPulled to their fisted knot,\nCinched tight with cold, drawn\nTo the heart’s constriction; our faces\nSeamed like clinkers in the grate,\nHands like tongs--Praise God\nThat Christ, phoenix immortal,\nSprings up again from solstice ash,\nDrives his equatorial ray\nInto our cloud, emblazons\nOur stiff brow, fries\nOur chill tears. Come Christ,\nMost gentle and throat-pulsing Bird!\nO come, sweet Child! Be gladness\nIn our church! Waken with anthems\nOur bare rafters! O phoenix\nForever! Virgin-wombed\nAnd burning in the dark,\nBe born! Be born!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "winter_solstice" - } - } - }, - "the-poet-is-dead": { - "title": "“The Poet is Dead”", - "body": "Snow on the headland,\nThe strangely beautiful\nOblique concurrence,\nThe strangely beautiful\nSetting of death.\n\nThe great tongue\nDries in the mouth. I told you.\nThe voiceless throat\nCools silence. And the sea-granite eyes.\nWashed the sibilant waters\nThat stretched lips kiss peace.\n\nThe poet is dead.\n\nNor will ever again hear the sea lions\nGrunt in the kelp at Point Lobos.\nNor look to the south when the grunion\nRun the Pacific, and the plunging\nShearwaters, insatiable,\nStun themselves in the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "seed": { - "title": "“Seed”", - "body": "Some seed in me,\nSome troublous birth,\nLike an awkward awakening,\nstirs into life.\n\nTerrible and instinctive\nIt touches my guts.\nI fear and resist it,\nCrouch down on my norms, a man’s\nPatent assurances.\n\nI don’t know its nature.\nI have no term for it.\nI cannot see its shape.\nBut, there, inscrutable,\nJust underground,\nIs the long-avoided tatency.\n\nLike the mushrooms in the oak wood,\nWhere the high-sloped mountain\nBenches the sea,\nWhen the faint rains of November\nDamp down the duff,\nWakening their spores--\nLike them,\nGross, thick and compelling,\nWhat I fear and desire\nPokes up its head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "we-in-the-fields": { - "title": "“We in the Fields”", - "body": "Dawn and a high film, the sun burned it,\nBut noon had a thick sheet, and the clouds coming,\nThe low rain-bringers, trooping in from the north,\nFrom the far cold fog-breeding seas, the womb of the storms.\nDusk brought a wind and the sky opened;\nAll down the west the broken strips lay snared in the light,\nBellied and humped and heaped on the hills.\nThe set sun threw the blaze up,\nThe sky lived redly, banner on banner of far-burning flame,\nFrom south to the north, the furnace-door wide and the smoke rolling.\nWe in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope,\nFacing the west, facing the bright sky,\nHopelessly longing to know the red beauty.\nBut the unable eyes, the too-small intelligence,\nThe insufficient organs of reception not a thousandth part enough to take and retain.\nWe stared, and no speaking, and felt the deep loneness of incomprehension.--\nThe flesh must turn cloud, the spirit, air,\nThe transformation to sky and the burning,\nAbsolute oneness with the west and the down sun.\nBut we, being earth-stuck, watched from the fields\nTill the rising rim shut out the light,\nTill the sky changed, the long wounds healed,\nTill the rain fell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-wise": { - "title": "“The Wise”", - "body": "Miles across the turbulent kingdoms\nThey came for it, but that was nothing,\nThat was the least. Drunk with vision,\nRain stringing in the ragged beards,\nWhen a beast lamed, they caught up another\nAnd goaded west.\nFor the time was on them.\nOnce, as it may, in the life of a man,\nOnce, as it was, in the life of mankind,\nAll is corrected. And their years of pursuit,\nRaw-eyed reading the wrong texts,\nCharting the doubtful calculations,\nThose nights knotted with thought,\nWhen dawn held off, and the rooster\nRattled the leaves with his blind assertion---\nAll that, they regarded, under the Sign,\nNo longer as search but as preparation.\nFor when the mark was made, they saw it.\nNor stopped to reckon the fallible years,\nBut rejoiced and followed,\nAnd are called “wise,” who learned that Truth,\nWhen sought and at last seen,\nIs never found. It is given.\nAnd they brought their camels\nBreakneck into that village,\nAnd flung themselves down in the dung and dirt of that place,\nAnd kissed that ground, and the tears\nRan on their faces, where the rain had.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - } - } - }, - "frederick-william-faber": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Frederick William Faber", - "birth": { - "year": 1814 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1863 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_William_Faber", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "first-love": { - "title": "“First Love”", - "body": "I have been long without a home,\nAnd yearned too much for one;\nAnd scanty are the deeds of faith\nMy lonely heart hath done:\nFor many a night my weary bed\nHath felt the weak tears run.\nCold armour of ambitious dreams\nI bade my soul to wear,\nAnd to false friendship’s wildfire sweet\nHave laid my spirit bare;\nAnd some few times pure heavenly thoughts\nAwhile have lighted there.\n\nBut still my sickness grew, and still\nThe fever gained worse power;\nAnd every star that gentlest shone\nAbove my dreary tower\nHath waned long since, or waneth now,\nMore palely every hour.\nBut I have felt thy light low voice,\nThy soft eye’s languid beam,\nAnd light and colour have come back\nUnto my purest dream,\nAnd to my heart the old fresh blood\nHath mounted in a stream.\nHealth, power, deep gladness have come back\nWith shouts and songs of bliss;\nOf all my loves in this bright crowd\nThere is not one I miss--\nOh! never mortal soul hath had\nA wakening like this!\n\nNo tossing now on feverish thoughts,\nNo sick heart’s burning swell,\nNo waiting day by day to bid\nEach new false hope farewell,\nFree, without chains, my spirit starts\nAnd breaks the long dull spell.\nIt is not passion’s lurid light,\nNor friendship’s meteor way,\nFalse gleams that through pale summer nights\nFrom far-off tempests play,\nBut one rich golden orb that shines\nSteady and large all day\nA full, warm, fostering light wherein\nThe heart’s best foliage springs,\nA flame to whose sweet sternness faith\nEach brittle purpose brings,\nAn altar-fire where hope is fed,\nAnd prayer and praise find wings.\n\nThou art too young for me to tell\nMy hidden love to thee;\nAnd, till fit season, it must burn\nIn darkest privacy,\nFor years must pass and fortunes change\nTill such fit season be.\nYoung as thou art, hadst thou but seen\nThis withered heart before,\nAnd poured thy love, as o’er some plant\nThou dost fresh water pour,\nAnd watched the fragrance and the hue\nGrow into it once more--\nThou wouldst, mayhap, have felt within\nThy first and sweetest strife,\nAnd marvelled much at the new taste\nAnd power it gave to life;\nAnd so less like a dream had been\nMy first dream of a Wife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "jesus-gentlest-savior": { - "title": "“Jesus, Gentlest Savior”", - "body": "Jesus, gentlest Savior,\nGod of might and power,\nthou thyself art dwelling\nin us at this hour.\n\nNature cannot hold thee,\nheaven is all too strait\nfor thine endless glory\nand thy royal state.\n\nOut beyond the shining\nof the furthest star\nthou art ever stretching\ninfinitely far.\n\nYet the hearts of children\nhold what worlds cannot,\nand the God of wonders\nloves the lowly spot.\n\nJesus, gentlest Savior,\ndwelling in us now,\nfill us full of goodness\ntill our hearts o’erflow.\n\nMultiply our graces,\nchiefly love and fear,\nand, dear Lord, the chiefest,\ngrace to persevere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rogation-days": { - "title": "“The Rogation Days”", - "body": "_“Despise not thy mother when she is old.”_\n --Prov. xxiii.\n\nHeavy and sad the Church must go:\nFull weary are her latter days,\nAnd she must hush the voice of praise\nWhile tears of penance flow.\nAnd she must fast, though by her side\nThe Bridegroom yet on earth doth move;\nAnd fear must be instead of love\nFor her own children’s pride.\n\nYet, holy Mother! Lent is past:\nAnd long ago the Easter sun\nInto the middle sky hath run;--\nWherefore this second fast?\nMother! with us the Lord doth bide;\nYet but a little while He stays,--\nThen for three dim and lonely days\nWhy keep us from His side?\nHe said we should not fast when He\nCame down to live with us below:\nThen, holy Mother! why forego\nOur ancient liberty?\nWhen thou wert in thy virgin prime,\nThose forty days through all the earth\nThy heart did swell with festal mirth--\nIt was thy bridal time.\n\n“Talk not, my son, of early days:\nMy precious stones were passing fair,\nMy life was Sacrament and prayer,\nMy unity was praise.”\n\n“These glories now are well-nigh past:\nMy son! the world is waxing strong;\nThe day is hot; the fight is long,\nAnd therefore do I fast.”\n\n“And ye are weak, and cannot bear\nFull forty days of Easter mirth:\nAnd nought is left unstained of earth,\nBut penance, fast, and prayer.”\n\n“Oh! weary is my stay below;\nAnd thus with strong and earnest cry,\nAs each Ascension-day glides by,\nI fain with Him would go.”\n\n“Then watch and fast, like saints of yore;\nThese three new days perchance may bring\nThe earlier advent of our King,\nAnd we shall fast no more!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "the-will-of-god": { - "title": "“The Will of God”", - "body": "I worship thee, sweet will of God!\nAnd all thy ways adore;\nAnd every day I live, I seem\nTo love thee more and more.\n\nThou wert the end, the blessed rule\nOf our Saviour’s toils and tears;\nThou wert the passion of his heart\nThose three and thirty years.\n\nAnd he hath breathed into my soul\nA special love of thee,\nA love to lose my will in his,\nAnd by that loss be free.\n\nI love to see thee bring to naught\nThe plans of wily men;\nWhen simple hearts outwit the wise,\nOh, thou art loveliest then.\n\nThe headstrong world it presses hard\nUpon the church full oft,\nAnd then how easily thou turn’st\nThe hard ways into soft.\n\nI love to kiss each print where thou\nHast set thine unseen feet;\nI cannot fear thee, blessed will!\nThine empire is so sweet.\n\nWhen obstacles and trials seem\nLike prison walls to be,\nI do the little I can do,\nAnd leave the rest to thee.\n\nI know not what it is to doubt,\nMy heart is ever gay;\nI run no risk, for, come what will,\nThou always hast thy way.\n\nI have no cares, O blessed will!\nFor all my cares are thine:\nI live in triumph, Lord! for thou\nHast made thy triumphs mine.\n\nAnd when it seems no chance or change\nFrom grief can set me free,\nHope finds its strength in helplessness,\nAnd gayly waits on thee.\n\nMan’s weakness, waiting upon God,\nIts end can never miss,\nFor men on earth no work can do\nMore angel-like than this.\n\nRide on, ride on, triumphantly,\nThou glorious will, ride on!\nFaith’s pilgrim sons behind thee take\nThe road that thou hast gone.\n\nHe always wins who sides with God,\nTo him no chance is lost;\nGod’s will is sweetest to him, when\nIt triumphs at his cost.\n\nIll that he blesses is our good,\nAnd unblessed good is ill;\nAnd all is right that seems most wrong.\nIf it be his sweet will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wren": { - "title": "“The Wren”", - "body": "There is a bay, all still and lone,\nAnd in the shade one broad grey stone\nWhere at the evening hour\nThe sun upon the water weaves\nMotions of light among the leaves\nOf a low-hanging bower:\nAnd one old sycamore that dips\nInto the stream its dark-green tips,\nAnd drinks all day and night:\nAnd opposite, the mountain high\nDoth intercept the deep blue sky\nAnd shuts it out from sight.\n\nLast year it was my haunted seat,\nAnd every evening did I meet\nA grave and solemn Wren:\nHe sate and never spoke a word;\nA holy and religious bird\nHe seemed unto me then.\nI thought, perchance, that sin and strife\nMight in a winged creature’s life\nBe somehow strangely blent:\nSo hermit-like he lived apart,\nAnd might be in his little heart\nA woodland penitent!\nDeceitful thing! into the brook,\nHour after hour, a stedfast look\nFrom off his perch was sent;\nAnd yet I thought his eyes too bright,\nToo happy for an anchorite\nOn lonely penance bent.\n\nAh! yes--for long his nest hath been\nBehind yon alder’s leafy screen\nBy Rothay’s chiming waters:\nTwo rapid years are run, and now\nThis monk hath peopled every bough\nWith little sons and daughters.\nI will not blame thee, Friar Wren,\nBecause among stout-hearted men\nSome truant monks there be;\nAnd, if you could their names collect,\nI rather more than half suspect\nThat I should not be free.\nErewhile I dreamed of cloistered cells,\nOf gloomy courts and matin bells,\nAnd painted windows rare;\nBut common life’s less real gleams\nShone warm on my monastic dreams,\nAnd melted them to air.\n\nMy captive heart is altered now;\nAnd, had I but one little bough\nOf thy green alder-tree,\nI would not live too long alone,\nOr languish there for want of one\nTo share the nest with me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "b-h-fairchild": { - "metadata": { - "name": "B. H. Fairchild", - "birth": { - "year": 1942 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._H._Fairchild", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-men": { - "title": "“The Men”", - "body": "As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl\nbooth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,\nyou watch the late-afternoon drunks\ncoming and going, sunlight breaking\nthrough the smoky dark as the door\nopens and closes, and it’s the future\nflashing ahead like the taillights\nof a semi as you drop over a rise\nin the road on your way to Amarillo,\n_bright lights and blondehaired women_,\nas Billy used to say, slumped over\nhis beer like a snail, _make a real man\nout of you_, the smile bleak as the gaps\nbetween his teeth, stay loose, _son,\ndon’t die before you’re dead_. Always\nthe warnings from men you worked with\nbefore they broke, blue fingernails,\neyes red as fate. _A different life\nfor me_, you think, and outside later,\nfeeling young and strong enough to raise\nthe sun back up, you stare down Highway 54,\npushing everything--stars, sky, moon,\nall but a thin line at the edge\nof the world--behind you. Your headlights\nsweep across the tavern window,\nripping the dark from the small, humped\nshapes of men inside who turn and look,\nlike small animals caught in the glare\nof your lights on the road to Amarillo.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mrs-hill": { - "title": "“Mrs. Hill”", - "body": "I am so young that I am still in love\nwith Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,\nsubmarines powered by baking soda,\nwhistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,\nnot even them. Nobody can hear them.\n\nMrs. Hill from next door is hammering\non our front door shouting, and my father\nin his black and gold gangster robe lets her in\ntrembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow\npleading, _oh I’m so sorry, so sorry,\nso sorry_, and clutching the neck of her gown\nas if she wants to choke herself. _He said\nhe was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun\nand he said he was going to shoot me_.\n\nI have never heard of such a thing. A man\nwanting to shoot his wife. His wife.\nI am standing in the center of a room\nbarefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman\nis crying and being held and soothed\nby my mother. Outside, through the open door\nmy father is holding a shotgun,\nand his shadow envelops Mr. Hill,\nwho bows his head and sobs into his hands.\n\nA line of shadows seems to he moving\nacross our white fence: hunched-over soldiers\non a death march, or kindly old ladies\nin flower hats lugging grocery bags.\n\nAt Roman’s Salvage tire tubes\nare hanging from trees, where we threw them.\nIn the corner window of Beacon Hardware there’s a sign:\nWHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW.\nFor some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.\nClosed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.\nIn the _Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior_\nthe great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,\nthe library of Alexandria is burning.\nSomewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City\nthe Purple Heart my father refused in WWII\nis sitting in a Muriel cigar box,\nand every V-Day someone named Schwartz\nor Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.\n\nIn the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing\ngin rummy with my mother and laughing\nin those long shrieks that women have\nthat make you think they are dying.\n\nI walk into the front yard where moonlight\ndrips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftain.\nI take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves.\nNo one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "faiz-ahmad-faiz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Faiz Ahmad Faiz", - "birth": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "february", - "day": 13 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1984, - "month": "november", - "day": 20 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "pakistani", - "language": "urdu", - "flag": "🇵🇰", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiz_Ahmad_Faiz", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "pakistani" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "before-you-came": { - "title": "“Before You Came”", - "body": "Before you came,\nthings were as they should be:\nthe sky was the dead-end of sight,\nthe road was just a road, wine merely wine.\n\nNow everything is like my heart,\na color at the edge of blood:\nthe grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,\nthe gold when we meet, the season ablaze,\nthe yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,\nand the black when you cover the earth\nwith the coal of dead fires.\n\nAnd the sky, the road, the glass of wine?\nThe sky is a shirt wet with tears,\nthe road a vein about to break,\nand the glass of wine a mirror in which\nthe sky, the road, the world keep changing.\n\nDon’t leave now that you’re here--\nStay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky,\nthe road a road,\nand the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "Arabic", - "translator": "Naomi Lazard" - } - }, - "the-love-i-gave-you-once": { - "title": "“The Love I Gave You Once”", - "body": "My beloved,\nMy own,\nDo not demand the love\nI gave you once.\n\nFor a moment, I really believed\nThat you alone gave meaning\nTo my withered life;\nThat the accelerating pain\nOf my unrequited love,\nWould make me forget\nAll other torments\nOf this troubled world;\nThat your face lent stability\nTo the restless spring;\nThat nothing else mattered\nIn this empty world\nBut your deep, seductive eyes.\n\nFor a moment, I really believed\nThat if I could only possess you,\nI could conquer Fate itself.\n\nBut all that was false,\nA mere illusion.\n\nThis world of ours bleeds\nWith more pains than just the pain of love;\nAnd many more pleasures beckon us all the time\nThan just this fleeting pleasure of a reunion with you.\n\nFor untold centuries,\nThe affluent have always woven many webs of intrigue,\nDark and cruel and mysterious,\nAnd dressed them up in silks and brocades.\nAnd for all those years,\nOn every street and in every bazaar,\nHuman bodies have been brazenly sold,\nDressed in dust and bathed in blood,\nMalnourished, misshapen and baked by disease.\n\nTime and time again,\nMy eyes are diverted\nTo this tragic scene,\nYour beauty is alluring as ever,\nYour arms inviting as always:\nBut how can I ever ignore\nAll this ugliness, all this pain?\n\nYes, my love,\nThis world of ours bleeds\nWith more pains than just the pain of love;\nAnd many more pleasures beckon us all the time\nThan just the fleeting pleasure of a reunion with you.\n\nMy beloved,\nMy own,\nDo not demand the love\nI gave you once.", - "metadata": { - "language": "Urdu", - "translator": "Mahbub-ul-Haq" - } - } - } - }, - "william-faulkner": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Faulkner", - "birth": { - "year": 1897 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "after-fifty-years": { - "title": "“After Fifty Years”", - "body": "Her house is empty and her heart is old,\nAnd filled with shades and echoes that deceive\nNo one save her, for still she tries to weave\nWith blind bent fingers, nets that cannot hold.\nOnce all men’s arms rose up to her, ’tis told,\nAnd hovered like white birds for her caress:\nA crown she could have had to bind each tress\nOf hair, and her sweet arms the Witches’ Gold.\n\nHer mirrors know her witnesses, for there\nShe rose in dreams from other dreams that lent\nHer softness as she stood, crowned with soft hair.\nAnd with his bound heart and his young eyes bent\nAnd blind, he feels her presence like shed scent,\nHolding him body and life within its snare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "gray-the-day": { - "title": "“Gray the Day”", - "body": "Gray the day, all the year is cold,\nAcross the empty land the swallows’ cry\nMarks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled\nSave winter, in the sky.\n\nO sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep\nStirs and turns and time once more is green,\nIn empty path and lane and grass will creep\nWith none to tread it clean.\n\nApril and May and June, and all the dearth\nOf heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;\nWhat good is budding, gray November earth?\nNo need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.\n\nThe hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees\nShivers the grass in path and lane\nAnd Grief and Time are tideless golden seas--\nHush, hush! He’s home again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "love-song": { - "title": "“Love Song”", - "body": "Shall I walk, then, through a corridor of profundities\nCarefully erect ( I am taller that [than?] I look)\nTo a certain door--and shall I dare\nTo open it? I smoothe my mental hair\nWith an oft changed phrase that I revise again\nUntil I have forgotten what it was at first;\nSettle my tie with: I have brought a book,\nThen seat myself with: We have passed the worst.\n\nThen I shall sit among careful cups of tea,\nAware of a slight perspiring as to brow,\n(The smell of scented cigarettes will always trouble me);\nI shall sit, so patently at ease,\nStiffly erect, decorous as to knees\nAmong toy balloons of dignity on threads of talk.\n\nAnd do I dare\n(I once more stroke my hand across my hair )\nBut the window of my mind flies shut, I am in a room\nOf surcharged conversation, and of jewelled hands;\n--Here one slowly strips a flower stalk.\nIt is too close in here, I rise and walk,\nFirmly take my self-possession by the hand.\n\nNow, do I dare,\nWho sees the light gleam on her intricate hair?\nShall I assume a studied pose, or shall I stand--\nOh, Mr. …? You are so kind …\nAgain the door slams inward on my mind.\n\nNot at all!\n\nReplace a cup,\nReturn and pick a napkin up.\n\nMy tongue, a bulwark where a last faint self-possession hides,\nFails me: I withdraw, retreat,\nConscious of the glances on my feet,\nAnd feel as if I trod in sand.\n\nYet I may raise my head a little while.\nThe world revolves behind a painted smile.\nAnd now, while evening lies embalmed upon the west\nAnd a last faint pulse of life fades down the sky,\nWe will go alone, my soul and I,\nTo a hollow cadence down this neutral street;\nTo a rhythm of feet\nNow stilled and fallen. I will walk alone,\nThe uninvited one who dares not go\nWhither the feast is spread to friend and foe,\nWhose courage balks the last indifferent gate,\nWho dares not join the beggars at the arch of stone.\n\nChange and change: the world revolves to worlds,\nTo minute whorls\nAnd particles of soil on careless thumbs.\nNow I shall go alone,\nI shall echo streets of stone, while evening comes\nTreading space and beat, space and beat.\nThe last left seed of beauty in my heart\nThat I so carefully tended, leaf and bloom,\nFalls in darkness.\n\nBut enough. What is all beauty? What, that I\nShould raise my hands palm upward to the sky,\nThat I should weakly tremble and fall dumb\nAt some cryptic promise or pale gleam;--\nA sudden wing, a word, a cry?\nEvening dies, and now that night has come\nWalking still streets, monk-like, grey and dumb;\nThen softly clad in grey, lies down again;\nI also rise and walk, and die in dream,\nFor dream is death, and death but fathomed dream.\n\nAnd shall I walk these streets while passing time\nSoftly ticks my face, my thinning hair?\nI should have been a priest in floorless halls\nWearing his eyes thin on a faded manuscript.\n\nThe world revolves. High heels and scented shawls,\nPainted masks, and kisses mouth and mouth:\nGesture of a senile pantaloon\nTo make us laugh.\n\nI have measured time, I measured time\nWith span of thumb and finger\nAs one who seeks a bargain: sound enough\nI think, but slightly worn;\nThere’s still enough to cover me from cold,\nMomentous indecisions, change\nAnd loneliness. Does not each fold\nRepeat--the while I measure time, I measure time--\nThe word, the thought, the soundless empty gesture\nOf him that it so bravely once arrayed?\n\nSpring … shadowed walls, and kissing in the dark.\nI, too; was young upon a time, I too; have felt\nAll life, at one small word, within me melt;\nAnd strange slow swooning wings I could not see\nStirring the beautiful silence over me.\n\nI grow old, I grow old.\nCould I walk within my garden while the night\nComes gently down,\nAnd see the garden maidens dancing, white\nAnd dim, across the flower beds?\n\nI would take cold: I dare not try,\nNor watch the stars again born in the sky\nEternally young.\n\nI grow old, I grow old.\nSubmerged in the firelight’s solemn gold\nI sit, watching the restless shadows, red and brown\nFloat there till I disturb them, then they drown.\n\nI measure time, I measure time.\nI see my soul, disturbed, awake and climb\nA sudden dream, and fall\nAnd whimpering, crowd near me in the dark.\n\nAnd do I dare, who steadily builds a wall\nOf hour on hour, and day, then lifts a year\nThat heavily falls in place, while time\nTicks my face, my thinning hair, my heart\nIn which a faint last long remembered beauty hides?\n\nI should have been a priest in floorless halls\nWhose hand, worn thin by turning endless pages,\nLifts, and strokes his face, and falls\nAnd stirs a dust of time heaped grain on grain,\nThen gropes the book, and turns it through again;\n\nWho turns the pages through, who turns again,\nWhile darkness lays soft fingers on his eyes\nAnd strokes the lamplight from his brow, to wake him, and he dies.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Vision in Spring", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "night-piece": { - "title": "“Night Piece”", - "body": "Trumpets of sun to silence fall\nOn house and barn and stack and wall.\nWithin the cottage, slowly wheeling,\nThe lamplight’s gold turns on the ceiling.\nBeneath the stake and windless vane\nCattle stamp and munch their grain;\nBelow the starry apple bough\nLeans the warped and clotted plow.\nThe moon rolls up, while far away\nAnd thin with sorrow, the sheepdog’s bay\nFills the valley with lonely sound.\nSlow leaves of darkness steal around.\nThe watch the watchman, Death will keep\nAnd man in amnesty may sleep.\n\nThe world is still, for she is old\nAnd many’s the bead of a life she’s told.\nHer gossip there, the watching moon\nView hill and stream and wave and dune\nAnd many ‘s the fair one she’s seen wither:\nThe pass and pass, she cares not whither--\nLovers’ vows by her made bright,\nThe outcast cursing at her light;\nMazed within her lambence lies\nAll the strife of flesh that dies.\nThen through the darkened room with whispers speaking\nThere comes to man the sleep that all are seeking.\n\nThe lurking thief, in sharp regret\nWatches the far world, waking yet,\nBut which in sleep will soon be still;\nWhile he upon his misty hill\nHears a dark bird briefly cry\nFrom its thicket on the sky,\nAnd curses the moon because her light\nMarks every outcast under night.\n\nStill swings the murderer, bent of knees\nIn a slightly strained repose,\nNor feels the faint hand of the breeze:\nHe now with Solomon all things knows:\nThat, lastly, breath is to a man\nBut to want and fret a span.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "over-the-worlds-rim": { - "title": "“Over the world’s rim …”", - "body": "Over the world’s rim, drawing bland November\nReluctant behind them, drawing the moons of cold:\nWhat do their lonely voices wake to remember\nIn this dust ere ‘twas flesh? what restless old\n\nDream a thousand years was safely sleeping\nWakes my blood to sharp unease? what horn\nRings out to them? Was I free once, sweeping\nTheir Ewild and lonely skies ere I was born?\n\nThe hand that shaped my body, that gave me vision,\nMade me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.\nSweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,\nThen the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.\n\nOver the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,\nSeeking some high desire, and not in vain,\nThey fill and empty the red and dying moon\nAnd, crying, cross the rim of the world again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "a-poplar": { - "title": "“A Poplar”", - "body": "Why do you shiver there\nBetween the white river and the road?\nYou are not cold,\nWith the sun light dreaming about you;\nAnd yet you lift your pliant supplicating arms as though\nTo draw clouds from the sky to hide your slenderness.\n\nYou are a young girl\nTrembling in the throes of ecstatic modesty,\nA white objective girl\nWhose clothing has been forcibly taken away from her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ringed-moon-sits-eerily": { - "title": "“The ringèd moon sits eerily …”", - "body": "The ringèd moon sits eerily\nLike a mad woman in the sky,\nDropping flat hands to caress\nThe far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,\nPlunging white hands in the glade\nElbow deep in leafy shade\nWhere birds sleep in each silent brake\nSilverly, there to wake\nThe quivering loud nightingales\nWhose cries like scattered silver sails\nSpread across the azure sea.\nHer hands also caress me:\nMy keen heart also does she dare;\nWhile turning always through the skies\nHer white feet mirrored in my eyes\nWeave a snare about my brain\nUnbreakable by surge or strain,\nFor the moon is mad, for she is old,\nAnd many’s the bead of a life she’s told;\nAnd many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:\nThey pass, they pass, and know not whither.\n\nThe hushèd earth, so calm, so old,\nDreams beneath its heath and wold--\nAnd heavy scent from thorny hedge\nPaused and snowy on the edge\nOf some dark ravine, from where\nMists as soft and thick as hair\nFloat silver in the moon.\n\nStars sweep down--or are they stars?--\nAgainst the pines’ dark etchèd bars.\nAlong a brooding moon-wet hill\nDogwood shine so cool and still,\nLike hands that, palm up, rigid lie\nIn invocation to the sky\nAs they spread there, frozen white,\nUpon the velvet of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "samuel-ferguson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Samuel Ferguson", - "birth": { - "year": 1810 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Ferguson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-fairy-thorn": { - "title": "“The Fairy Thorn”", - "body": "“GET up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning wheel\nFor your father’s on the hill, and your mother is asleep;\nCome up above the crags, and we’ll dance a highland reel\nAround the fairy thorn on the steep.”\n\nAt Anna Grace’s door’t was thus the maidens cried,\nThree merry maidens fair in kirtles of the green;\nAnd Anna laid the sock and the weary wheel aside,\nThe fairest of the four, I ween.\n\nThey’re glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve,\nAway in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare;\nThe heavy-sliding stream in its sleeply song they leave,\nAnd the crags in the ghostly air;\n\nAnd linking hand in hand, and singing as they go,\nThe maids along the hill-side have ta’en their fearless way,\nTill they come to where the rowan trees in lovely beauty grow\nBeside the Fairy Hawthorn gray.\n\nThe hawthorn stands between the ashes tall and slim,\nLike matron with her twin grand-daughters at her knee;\nThe rowan berries cluster o’er her low head gray and dim\nIn ruddy kisses sweet to see.\n\nThe merry maidens four have ranged them in a row,\nBetween each lovely couple a stately rowan stem,\nAnd away in mazes wavy like skimming birds they go,--\nOh, never caroll’d bird like them!\n\nBut solemn is the silence of the silvery haze\nThat drinks away their voices in echoless repose,\nAnd dreamily the evening has still’d the haunted braes,\nAnd dreamier the gloaming grows.\n\nAnd sinking one by one, like lark-notes from the sky\nWhen the falcon’s shadow saileth across the open shaw,\nAre hush’d the maidens’ voices, as cowering down they lie\nIn the flutter of their sudden awe.\n\nFor, from the air above and the grassy ground beneath,\nAnd from the mountain-ashes and the old white thorn between,\nA power of faint enchantment doth through their beings breathe,\nAnd they sink down together on the green.\n\nThey sink together silent, and, stealing side by side,\nThey fling their lovely arms o’er their drooping necks so fair,\nThen vainly strive again their naked arms to hide,\nFor their shrinking necks again are bare.\n\nThus clasp’d and prostrate all, with their heads together bow’d,\nSoft o’er their bosoms beating--the only human sound--\nThey hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd,\nLike a river in the air, gliding round.\n\nNor scream can any raise, nor prayer can any say,\nBut wild, wild, the terror of the speechless three,\nFor they feel fair Anna Grace drawn silently away,\nBy whom they dare not look to see.\n\nThey feel their tresses twine with her parting locks of gold,\nAnd the curls elastic falling, as her head withdraws;\nThey feel her sliding arms from their tranced arms unfold,\nBut they dare not look to see the cause:\n\nFor heavy on their senses the faint enchantment lies\nThrough all that night of anguish and perilous amaze;\nAnd neither fear nor wonder can ope their quivering eyes,\nOr their limbs from the cold ground raise,\n\nTill out of night the earth has roll’d her dewy side,\nWith every haunted mountain and streamy vale below;\nWhen, as the mist dissolves in the yellow morning-tide,\nThe maidens’ trance dissolveth so.\n\nThen fly the ghastly three as swiftly as they may,\nAnd tell their tale of sorrow to anxious friends in vain:\nThey pin’d away and died within the year and day,\nAnd ne’er was Anna Grace seen again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "lament-for-thomas-davis": { - "title": "“Lament for Thomas Davis”", - "body": "I walked through Ballinderry in the spring-time,\nWhen the bud was on the tree;\nAnd I said, in every fresh-ploughed field beholding\nThe sowers striding free,\nScattering broadside forth the corn in golden plenty\nOn the quick seed-clasping soil,\n“Even such this day, among the fresh-stirred hearts of Erin.\nThomas Davis, is thy toil.”\n\nI Sat by Ballyshannon in the summer,\nAnd saw the salmon leap;\nAnd I said, as I beheld the gallant creatures\nSpring glittering from the deep,\nThrough the spray, and through the prone heaps striving onward\nTo the calm, clear streams above,\n“So seekest thou thy native founts of freedom, Thomas Davis,\nIn thy brightness of strength and love.”\n\nI stood in Derrybawn in the autumn,\nAnd I heard the eagle call,\nWith a clangorous cry of wrath and lamentation\nThat filled the wide mountain hall,\nO’er the bare, deserted place of his plundered eyrie;\nAnd I said, as he screamed and soared,\n“So callest thou, thou wrathful, soaring Thomas Davis,\nFor a nation’s rights restored!”\n\nAnd, alas! to think but now, and thou art lying,\nDear Davis, dead at thy mother’s knee;\nAnd I, no mother near, on my own sick-bed,\nThat face on earth shall never see;\nI may lie and try to feel that I am dreaming,\nI may lie and try to say, “Thy will be done,”\nBut a hundred such as I will never comfort Erin\nFor the loss of the noble son!\n\nYoung husbandman of Erin’s fruitful seed-time,\nIn the fresh track of danger’s plough!\nWho will walk the heavy, toilsome, perilous furrow,\nGirt with freedom’s seed-sheets, now?\nWho will banish with the wholesome crop of knowledge\nThe daunting weed and the bitter thorn,\nNow that thou thyself art but a seed for hopeful planting\nAgainst the Resurrection morn?\n\nYoung salmon of the flood-tide of freedom\nThat swells round Erin’s shore!\nThou wilt leap against their loud oppressive torrent\nOf bigotry and hate no more;\nDrawn downward by their prone material instinct,\nLet them thunder on their rocks and foam--\nThou hast leapt, aspiring soul, to founts beyond their raging,\nWhere troubled waters never come!\n\nBut I grieve not, Eagle of the empty eyrie,\nThat thy wrathful cry is still;\nAnd that the songs alone of peaceful mourners\nAre heard to-day on Earth’s hill;\nBetter far, if brothers’ war be destined for us\n(God avert that horrid day I pray),\nThat ere our hands be stained with slaughter fratricidal,\nThy warm heart should be cold in clay.\n\nBut my trust is strong in God, Who made us brothers,\nThat He will not suffer their right hands,\nWhich thou hast joined in holier rites than wedlock\nTo draw opposing brands.\nOh, many a tuneful tongue that thou madest vocal\nWould lie cold and silent then;\nAnd songless long once more, should often-widowed Erin\nMourn the loss of her brave young men.\n\nOh, brave young men, my love, my pride, my promise,\n’Tis on you my hopes are set,\nIn manliness, in kindliness, in justice,\nTo make Erin a nation yet;\nSelf-respecting, self-relying, self-advancing--\nIn union or in severance, free and strong--\nAnd if God grant this, then, under God, to Thomas Davis\nLet the greater praise belong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lawrence-ferlinghetti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti", - "birth": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2021 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "jewish", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "american", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Ferlinghetti", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "beat" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "autobiography": { - "title": "“Autobiography”", - "body": "I am leading a quiet life\nin Mike’s Place every day\nwatching the champs\nof the Dante Billiard Parlor\nand the French pinball addicts.\nI am leading a quiet life\non lower East Broadway.\nI am an American.\nI was an American boy.\nI read the American Boy Magazine\nand became a boy scout\nin the suburbs.\nI thought I was Tom Sawyer\ncatching crayfish in the Bronx River\nand imagining the Mississippi.\nI had a baseball mit\nand an American Flyer bike.\nI delivered the Woman’s Home Companion\nat five in the afternoon\nor the Herald Trib\nat five in the morning.\nI still can hear the paper thump\non lost porches.\nI had an unhappy childhood.\nI saw Lindbergh land.\nI looked homeward\nand saw no angel.\nI got caught stealing pencils\nfrom the Five and Ten Cent Store\nthe same month I made Eagle Scout.\nI chopped trees for the CCC\nand sat on them.\nI landed in Normandy\nin a rowboat that turned over.\nI have seen the educated armies\non the beach at Dover.\nI have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds\nshopkeepers rolling up their blinds\nat midday\npotato salad and dandelions\nat anarchist picnics.\nI am reading ‘Lorna Doone’\nand a life of John Most\nterror of the industrialist\na bomb on his desk at all times.\nI have seen the garbagemen parade\nin the Columbus Day Parade\nbehind the glib\nfarting trumpeters.\nI have not been out to the Cloisters\nin a long time\nnor to the Tuileries\nbut I still keep thinking\nof going.\nI have seen the garbagemen parade\nwhen it was snowing.\nI have eaten hotdogs in ballparks.\nI have heard the Gettysburg Address\nand the Ginsberg Address.\nI like it here\nand I won’t go back\nwhere I came from.\nI too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars.\nI have travelled among unknown men.\nI have been in Asia\nwith Noah in the Ark.\nI was in India\nwhen Rome was built.\nI have been in the Manger\nwith an Ass.\nI have seen the Eternal Distributor\nfrom a White Hill\nin South San Francisco\nand the Laughing Woman at Loona Park\noutside the Fun House\nin a great rainstorm\nstill laughing.\nI have heard the sound of revelry\nby night.\nI have wandered lonely\nas a crowd.\nI am leading a quiet life\noutside of Mike’s Place every day\nwatching the world walk by\nin its curious shoes.\nI once started out\nto walk around the world\nbut ended up in Brooklyn.\nThat Bridge was too much for me.\nI have engaged in silence\nexile and cunning.\nI flew too near the sun\nand my wax wings fell off.\nI am looking for my Old Man\nwhom I never knew.\nI am looking for the Lost Leader\nwith whom I flew.\nYoung men should be explorers.\nHome is where one starts from.\nBut Mother never told me\nthere’d be scenes like this.\nWomb-weary\nI rest\nI have travelled.\nI have seen goof city.\nI have seen the mass mess.\nI have heard Kid Ory cry.\nI have heard a trombone preach.\nI have heard Debussy\nstrained thru a sheet.\nI have slept in a hundred islands\nwhere books were trees.\nI have heard the birds\nthat sound like bells.\nI have worn grey flannel trousers\nand walked upon the beach of hell.\nI have dwelt in a hundred cities\nwhere trees were books.\nWhat subways what taxis what cafes!\nWhat women with blind breasts\nlimbs lost among skyscrapers!\nI have seen the statues of heroes\nat carrefours.\nDanton weeping at a metro entrance\nColumbus in Barcelona\npointing Westward up the Ramblas\ntoward the American Express\nLincoln in his stony chair\nAnd a great Stone Face\nin North Dakota.\nI know that Columbus\ndid not invent America.\nI have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.\nThey should all be freed.\nIt is long since I was a herdsman.\nI am leading a quiet life\nin Mike’s Place every day\nreading the Classified columns.\nI have read the Reader’s Digest\nfrom cover to cover\nand noted the close identification\nof the United States and the Promised Land\nwhere every coin is marked\nIn God We Trust\nbut the dollar bills do not have it\nbeing gods unto themselves.\nI read the Want Ads daily\nlooking for a stone a leaf\nan unfound door.\nI hear America singing\nin the Yellow Pages.\nOne could never tell\nthe soul has its rages.\nI read the papers every day\nand hear humanity amiss\nin the sad plethora of print.\nI see where Walden Pond has been drained\nto make an amusement park.\nI see they’re making Melville\neat his whale.\nI see another war is coming\nbut I won’t be there to fight it.\nI have read the writing\non the outhouse wall.\nI helped Kilroy write it.\nI marched up Fifth Avenue\nblowing on a bugle in a tight platoon\nbut hurried back to the Casbah\nlooking for my dog.\nI see a similarity\nbetween dogs and me.\nDogs are the true observers\nwalking up and down the world\nthru the Molloy country.\nI have walked down alleys\ntoo narrow for Chryslers.\nI have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons\nin a vacant lot in Astoria.\nBen Shahn never painted them\nbut they’re there\naskew in Astoria.\nI have heard the junkman’s obbligato.\nI have ridden superhighways\nand believed the billboard’s promises\nCrossed the Jersey Flats\nand seen the Cities of the Plain\nAnd wallowed in the wilds of Westchester\nwith its roving bands of natives\nin stationwagons.\nI have seen them.\nI am the man.\nI was there.\nI suffered\nsomewhat.\nI am an American.\nI have a passport.\nI did not suffer in public.\nAnd I’m too young to die.\nI am a selfmade man.\nAnd I have plans for the future.\nI am in line\nfor a top job.\nI may be moving on\nto Detroit.\nI am only temporarily\na tie salesman.\nI am a good Joe.\nI am an open book\nto my boss.\nI am a complete mystery\nto my closest friends.\nI am leading a quiet life\nin Mike’s Place every day\ncontemplating my navel.\nI am a part\nof the body’s long madness.\nI have wandered in various nightwoods.\nI have leaned in drunken doorways.\nI have written wild stories\nwithout punctuation.\nI am the man.\nI was there.\nI suffered\nsomewhat.\nI have sat in an uneasy chair.\nI am a tear of the sun.\nI am a hill\nwhere poets run.\nI invented the alphabet\nafter watching the flight of cranes\nwho made letters with their legs.\nI am a lake upon a plain.\nI am a word\nin a tree.\nI am a hill of poetry.\nI am a raid\non the inarticulate.\nI have dreamt\nthat all my teeth fell out\nbut my tongue lived\nto tell the tale.\nFor I am a still\nof poetry.\nI am a bank of song.\nI am a playerpiano\nin an abandoned casino\non a seaside esplanade\nin a dense fog\nstill playing.\nI see a similarity\nbetween the Laughing Woman\nand myself.\nI have heard the sound of summer\nin the rain.\nI have seen girls on boardwalks\nhave complicated sensations.\nI understand their hesitations.\nI am a gatherer of fruit.\nI have seen how kisses\ncause euphoria.\nI have risked enchantment.\nI have seen the Virgin\nin an appletree at Chartres\nAnd Saint Joan burn\nat the Bella Union.\nI have seen giraffes in junglejims\ntheir necks like love\nwound around the iron circumstances\nof the world.\nI have seen the Venus Aphrodite\narmless in her drafty corridor.\nI have heard a siren sing\nat One Fifth Avenue.\nI have seen the White Goddess dancing\nin the Rue des Beaux Arts\non the Fourteenth of July\nand the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy\npicking her nose in Chumley’s.\nShe did not speak English.\nShe had yellow hair\nand a hoarse voice\nI am leading a quiet life\nin Mike’s Place every day\nwatching the pocket pool players\nmaking the minestrone scene\nwolfing the macaronis\nand I have read somewhere\nthe Meaning of Existence\nyet have forgotten\njust exactly where.\nBut I am the man\nAnd I’ll be there.\nAnd I may cause the lips\nof those who are asleep\nto speak.\nAnd I may make my notebooks\ninto sheaves of grass.\nAnd I may write my own\neponymous epitaph\ninstructing the horsemen\nto pass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "american" - } - }, - "away-above-a-harborful": { - "title": "“Away above a harborful …”", - "body": "Away above a harborful\nof caulkless houses\namong the charley noble chimneypots\nof a rooftop rigged with clotheslines\na woman pastes up sails\nupon the wind\nhanging out her morning sheets\nwith wooden pins\nO lovely mammal\nher nearly naked breasts\nthrow taut shadows\nwhen she stretches up\nto hang at last the last of her\nso white washed sins\nbut it is wetly amorous\nand winds itself about her\nclinging to her skin\nSo caught with arms\nupraised\nshe tosses back her head\nin voiceless laughter\nand in choiceless gesture then\nshakes out gold hair\n\nwhile in the reachless seascape spaces\n\nbetween the blown white shrouds\n\nstand out the bright steamers\n\nto kingdom come", - "metadata": { - "language": "american" - } - }, - "dont-let-that-horse": { - "title": "“Don’t let that horse …”", - "body": "Don’t let that horse\neat that violin\n\ncried Chagall’s mother\n\nBut he\nkept right on\npainting\n\nAnd became famous\n\nAnd kept on painting\nThe Horse With Violin In Mouth\n\nAnd when he finally finished it\nhe jumped up upon the horse\nand rode away\nwaving the violin\n\nAnd then with a low bow gave it\nto the first naked nude he ran across\n\n\nAnd there were no strings\nattached", - "metadata": { - "language": "american" - } - }, - "underwear": { - "title": "“Underwear”", - "body": "I didn’t get much sleep last night\nthinking about underwear\nHave you ever stopped to consider\nunderwear in the abstract\nWhen you really dig into it\nsome shocking problems are raised\nUnderwear is something\nwe all have to deal with\nEveryone wears\nsome kind of underwear\nThe Pope wears underwear I hope\nThe Governor of Louisiana\nwears underwear\nI saw him on TV\nHe must have had tight underwear\nHe squirmed a lot\nUnderwear can really get you in a bind\nYou have seen the underwear ads\nfor men and women\nso alike but so different\nWomen’s underwear holds things up\nMen’s underwear holds things down\nUnderwear is one thing\nmen and women have in common\nUnderwear is all we have between us\nYou have seen the three-color pictures\nwith crotches encircled\nto show the areas of extra strength\nand three-way stretch\npromising full freedom of action\nDon’t be deceived\nIt’s all based on the two-party system\nwhich doesn’t allow much freedom of choice\nthe way things are set up\nAmerica in its Underwear\nstruggles thru the night\nUnderwear controls everything in the end\nTake foundation garments for instance\nThey are really fascist forms\nof underground government\nmaking people believe\nsomething but the truth\ntelling you what you can or can’t do\nDid you ever try to get around a girdle\nPerhaps Non-Violent Action\nis the only answer\nDid Gandhi wear a girdle?\nDid Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?\nWas that why Macbeth murdered sleep?\nAnd that spot she was always rubbing--\nWas it really in her underwear?\nModern anglosaxon ladies\nmust have huge guilt complexes\nalways washing and washing and washing\nOut damned spot\nUnderwear with spots very suspicious\nUnderwear with bulges very shocking\nUnderwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom\nSomeone has escaped his Underwear\nMay be naked somewhere\nHelp!\nBut don’t worry\nEverybody’s still hung up in it\nThere won’t be no real revolution\nAnd poetry still the underwear of the soul\nAnd underwear still covering\na multitude of faults\nin the geological sense--\nstrange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!\nIf I were you I’d keep aside\nan oversize pair of winter underwear\nDo not go naked into that good night\nAnd in the meantime\nkeep calm and warm and dry\nNo use stirring ourselves up prematurely\n‘over Nothing’\nMove forward with dignity\nhand in vest\nDon’t get emotional\nAnd death shall have no dominion\nThere’s plenty of time my darling\nAre we not still young and easy\nDon’t shout", - "metadata": { - "language": "american" - } - } - } - }, - "antonio-ferreira": { - "metadata": { - "name": "António Ferreira", - "birth": { - "year": 1528 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1569 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "portuguese", - "language": "portuguese", - "flag": "🇵🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/António_Ferreira_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "portuguese" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "that-blessed-sunlight-that-once-showed-to-me": { - "title": "“That blessed sunlight, that once showed to me …”", - "body": "That blessed sunlight, that once showed to me\nMy way to heaven more plain, more certainly,\nAnd with her bright beams banished utterly\nAll trace of mortal sorrow far from me,\nHas gone from me, has left her prison sad,\nAnd I am blind and alone and gone astray,\nLike a lost pilgrim on a desert way\nWanting the blessed guide that once he had.\n\nThus with a spirit bowed and mind a blur\nI trace the holy steps where she has gone\nBy valleys and by meadows and by mountains,\nAnd everywhere I catch a glimpse of her,\nShe takes me by the hand and leads me on,\nAnd my eyes follow her, my eyes made fountains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "John Masefield" - } - } - } - }, - "afanasy-fet": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Afanasy Fet", - "birth": { - "year": 1820 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afanasy_Fet", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "at-a-fireplace": { - "title": "“At a fireplace”", - "body": "At dusk a dying out coal\nIs twinkling with transparent blinks,\nThe way a moth on a poppy’s bowl\nFlaps azure with its weightless wings.\n\nSuccessions of mixed apparitions\nAttract the tired out eye,\nSome images as premonitions\nAlong the ash are flying by.\n\nThe bygone happiness, unprompted,\nArises tender with ardours;\nAnd soul lies that all’s not wanted\nFor what it so deeply mourns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1856 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "ave-maria": { - "title": "“Ave Maria”", - "body": "Ave Maria--the lamp is quiet,\nFour lines in my heart are ready all right:\n\nBlessed Holy Virgin, mother of grief,\nYour grace penetrated my soul, I perceive.\nNot in a blaze,--in a quiet dream\nAppear before her, Heavenly Queen,\n\nAve Maria--the lamp is quiet,\nI said all these lines in a whisper all right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_sorrows" - } - } - }, - "do-not-elude": { - "title": "“Do not elude …”", - "body": "Do not elude--I will not sue\nFor your heart pain, nor secret worrying,\nI want to plunge myself in mourning\nAnd to repeat that I love you.\n\nIt is suffice for me to fly\nTo you like waves run by the water--\nTo kiss cold granite I have gotten,\nTo kiss and after that to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1862 - } - } - }, - "forgive-my-hazy-memory": { - "title": "“Forgive! My hazy memory …”", - "body": "Forgive! My hazy memory\nShows me one night time and again:\nYou sitting alone and silently\nIn front of your fireplace’s flame.\n\nWatching it, I was lost in thought,\nMagic around caused heaviness,\nAnd bitter was felt in that lot\nOf my vigour and happiness.\n\nI wavered near my goal, but why?\nWhat did my madness lead me to?\nTo what storms and thickets did I\nTake away your warmth, away from you?\n\nWhere are you? Is that really so,\nThat, seeing not a thing around,\nStunned, frozen and whitened with snow,\nI’m knocking on your heart aloud?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Pavel Efremov", - "date": { - "year": 1888, - "month": "january", - "day": 22 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-come-to-you-with-daybreak-greeting": { - "title": "“I come to you with daybreak greeting …”", - "body": "I come to you with daybreak greeting,\nTo tell you of the risen sun,\nOf how its rays, with shade competing,\nAcross the glints of foliage run;\n\nTo tell you that the woods have woken,\nWith every branch and twig that sing,\nEach feather-flit of bird a token\nOf nature’s yearning thirst for spring;\n\nTo say that, just as yesterday,\nWith fervidness I come to you,\nThat steeped in glee and bliss at play,\nMy soul will palliate your rue;\n\nTo tell you that from God knows where\nContentment wafts through all my veins,\nI know not yet what song I’ll air,\nBut deep inside I nurse refrains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "so-little-and-so-dainty-and-slender": { - "title": "“So little and so dainty and slender …”", - "body": "So little and so dainty and slender,\nAround with me whirling she flies;\nSo warm are her hands and so tender,\nSo warm are the stars in her eyes.\n\nAnd yesterday noon, ah, I saw her,\nWith her red cheeks all ashen and grey;\nAsleep and enshrouded in velvet,\nThey took her and bore her away.\n\nAh! Ah! High above through my window,\nPale like a ghost looks the moon.\nI dream that we two are still dancing,\nAh, how could it happen so soon?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "why-am-i-too-amicable-with-others": { - "title": "“Why am I too amicable with others …”", - "body": "Why am I too amicable with others\nFeeling that of all he is the farthest?\nWhy can’t I though shunning him elsewhere\nStill not run him into, here and there?\nWhy on seeing him do I get angry,\nAt all exasperated, all and sundry?\nWhy when I am left with him in private\nDo I scoff at him offended by it?\nAfterwards the night through I’ll be crying.\nWho can tell the answer, who is prying?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov" - } - } - } - }, - "eugene-field": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Eugene Field", - "birth": { - "year": 1850 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Field", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "at-the-door": { - "title": "“At the Door ”", - "body": "I thought myself indeed secure,\nSo fast the door, so firm the lock;\nBut, lo! he toddling comes to lure\nMy parent ear with timorous knock.\n\nMy heart were stone could it withstand\nThe sweetness of my baby’s plea,--\nThat timorous, baby knocking and\n“Please let me in,--it’s only me.”\n\nI threw aside the unfinished book,\nRegardless of its tempting charms,\nAnd opening wide the door, I took\nMy laughing darling in my arms.\n\nWho knows but in Eternity,\nI, like a truant child, shall wait\nThe glories of a life to be,\nBeyond the Heavenly Father’s gate?\n\nAnd will that Heavenly Father heed\nThe truant’s supplicating cry,\nAs at the outer door I plead,\n“’T is I, O Father! only I!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "norse-lullaby": { - "title": "“Norse Lullaby”", - "body": "The sky is dark and the hills are white\nAs the storm-king speeds from the north to-night,\nAnd this is the song the storm-king sings,\nAs over the world his cloak he flings:\n“Sleep, sleep, little one, sleep;”\nHe rustles his wings and gruffly sings:\n“Sleep, little one, sleep.”\n\nOn yonder mountain-side a vine\nClings at the foot of a mother pine;\nThe tree bends over the trembling thing,\nAnd only the vine can hear her sing:\n“Sleep, sleep, little one, sleep;\nWhat shall you fear when I am here?\nSleep, little one, sleep.”\n\nThe king may sing in his bitter flight,\nThe tree may croon to the vine to-night,\nBut the little snowflake at my breast\nLiketh the song I sing the best,--\nSleep, sleep, little one, sleep;\nWeary thou art, anext my heart\nSleep, little one, sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "wynken-blynken-and-nod": { - "title": "“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”", - "body": "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night\n Sailed off in a wooden shoe,--\nSailed on a river of crystal light\n Into a sea of dew.\n“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”\n The old moon asked the three.\n“We have come to fish for the herring-fish\n That live in this beautiful sea;\n Nets of silver and gold have we,”\n Said Wynken,\n Blynken,\n And Nod.\n\nThe old moon laughed and sang a song,\n As they rocked in the wooden shoe;\nAnd the wind that sped them all night long\n Ruffled the waves of dew;\nThe little stars were the herring-fish\n That lived in the beautiful sea.\n“Now cast your nets wherever you wish,--\n Never afraid are we!”\n So cried the stars to the fishermen three,\n Wynken,\n Blynken,\n And Nod.\n\nAll night long their nets they threw\n To the stars in the twinkling foam,--\nThen down from the skies came the wooden shoe,\n Bringing the fishermen home:\n’Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed\n As if it could not be;\nAnd some folk thought ’twas a dream they’d dreamed\n Of sailing that beautiful sea;\n But I shall name you the fishermen three:\n Wynken,\n Blynken,\n And Nod.\n\nWynken and Blynken are two little eyes,\n And Nod is a little head,\nAnd the wooden shoe that sailed the skies\n Is a wee one’s trundle-bed;\nSo shut your eyes while Mother sings\n Of wonderful sights that be,\nAnd you shall see the beautiful things\n As you rock in the misty sea\n Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:--\n Wynken,\n Blynken,\n And Nod.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "donald-finkel": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Donald Finkel", - "birth": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2008 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Finkel", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bachelor": { - "title": "“The Bachelor”", - "body": "There is a dog barking somewhere down the street,\nsteadily, in snatches of three and four,\nmuffled, irregular, but continual.\nI think of going downstairs, tracking him down,\nmy fury mounting as his barks grow louder,\nand when I have found him, what will I not do?\nBut already the barks trail off, two,\na silence, one, now nothing, nothing\nto stir me out of my chair, into the darkness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-father": { - "title": "“The Father”", - "body": "When I am walking with the children, and a girl\nstill hard in the buttocks bends to them with a laugh,\nmy heart bangs where it hangs in my empty carcase\nBut you knew that. It has already passed\nthe stage of neighbors’ gossip and attained\nthe clarity of an historical fact.\nA myth comes down your street: here on my right\ntoddles my twinkling daughter, who loves me, while\non my left marches my son, who does not.\n\nIt is all true, but it does not matter;\nin twenty years my son and I will have reached\na silent understanding, whereas (poor fool,\nalready growing hollow) some pimply bastard\nwill have made off with my blessings and my daughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-great-wave": { - "title": "“The Great Wave”", - "body": "_“But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation,\nand suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A\ntrained observer, carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a\ndilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt.”_\n --Herbert Read, _The Meaning of Art_\n\nIt is because the sea is blue,\nBecause Fuji is blue, because the bent blue\nMen have white faces, like the snow\nOn Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their\nBoats. It is because the air\nIs full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing\nWill harm these frail strangers,\nThat high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers\nWill not fall; and the blue men\nLean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans\nAgainst the sky.\n\nIn the painter’s sea\nAll fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.\nBut the innocent bystander, he merely\nWalks round a corner, thinking of nothing’: hidden\nBehind a screen we hear his cry.\nHe stands half in and half out of this world; he is the men,\nBut he cannot see below Fuji\nThe shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches\nHis claws against strangers. He is\nNot safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.\nHe fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat\nBlindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-imbecile": { - "title": "“The Imbecile”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe is not the wise man, who comes\nround to it only the long way.\nHe has not yet crept out of his mind,\nwhich he inhabits like a snake\na well. No. Like water the shape\nof the well. Any stone shakes\nhim, is him: then fear like a memory\nof fading ripples to remind\nhim.\n\nHowever, there is a moment they come\nto him real as stones, there is a way\nhe can see, out of the corner of his mind.\nand for a moment they stay. No snake\nis as subtle, then, or as slight a shape,\nshaking only as the wind shakes\nhim, softly, for passers beneath his tree\nare few, and the least breath can confound\nthem.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHis is a balance the wise man comes\nto only by fumes and potions, or the way\nof whirling in circles, until the mind\nis water and the world is a shuddering snake\nthen nothing: then the mind shakes\nand settles, and no ark, though the sea\nfall back from Ararat, can land\nhim.\n\nHe knows a world more like a song than a world,\nnot that it is beautiful, but that it is all\nof a piece, that at the last moment when the whole\nthing is teetering comes one more note and it is cold\n\nperfect again. More like a lady than a song,\nnot that it is inviting, but that it is so\nlike him and unlike him at the same time, that no\nsinging can soften it, that he is at once king\n\nto it and vassal. More like a graven image than\na lady, not, not that he could kneel\nto it, merely that it is work of hands, it will\nnever be less perfect, it will never come down\n\nfrom the altar and shake stone fists at him.\nNow by the image, though his shuffling feet\ndeny his genuflections, though despite\nhis heart his arrant hands each time\ndrive off the lady when she deigns to come,\nsoftly he works at it behind his mute\nmeticulous mouth, until eventually the wet\nsong wells at his lips in a transcendent stream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "negative": { - "title": "“Negative”", - "body": "The lonely sniper from the land with a language all questions,\nto whom it is natural, peering at the curved blade\nof the moon, to say (to himself, rubbing his beardless cheek\non the stock of his weapon), “Moon?” To whom it is not\nstrange in the least, feeling at his cheek the oiled\ncoolness of walnut in the night (in a whisper thin\nas the moon’s kris), to say, “Weapon?” To say (or not\nreally to say, to find said, a thought as faint\nas the old moon, dying on the edge of the new),\n“Death?” And to watch as, hesitantly, then surer and surer,\nbright bullets in the black answer, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-fitzgerald": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Fitzgerald", - "birth": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fitzgerald", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "charles-river-nocturne": { - "title": "“Charles River Nocturne”", - "body": "Reflecting remote swords, chilled in the calm\nAnd liquid darkness, lights on the esplanade\nProlong the night’s edge downward all night long\n\nTo those whose nostrils ache with the strong darkness,\n\nThose who in hunger press against the waters\n\nThose without birth or death, to whom the cold\nOcean long laboring in her regal womb\nWhispers a word of foam.\n\n The lavish cars\nMove westward in an eddy and dance of shadow\nUnder the dazed lamps on the lifeless shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "cobb-would-have-caught-it": { - "title": "“Cobb Would Have Caught It”", - "body": "In sunburnt parks where Sundays lie,\nOr the wide wastes beyond the cities,\nTeams in grey deploy through sunlight.\n\nTalk it up, boys, a little practice.\n\nComing in stubby and fast, the baseman\nGathers a grounder in fat green grass,\nPicks it stinging and clipped as wit\nInto th eleather: a swinging step\nWings it deadeye down to first.\nSmack. Oh, attaboy, attyoldboy.\n\nCatcher reverses his cap, pulls down\nSweaty casque, and squats in the dust:\nPitcher rubs new ball on his pants,\nChewing, puts a jet behind him;\nNods past batter, taking his time.\nBatter settles, tugs at his cap:\nA spinning ball: step and swing to it,\nCaught like a cheek before it ducks\nBy shivery hickory: socko, baby:\nCleats dig into dust. Outfielder,\nOn his way, looking over shoulder,\nMakes it a triple. A long peg home.\n\nInnings and afternoons. Fly lost in sunset.\nThrowing arm gone bad. There’s your old ball game.\nCool reek of the field. Reek of companions.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "counselors": { - "title": "Counselors", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhom should I consult? Philosophers\nAre happy in their homes and seminars.\nSee this one with the mischievous bright childlike\nGaze going out through walls and air,\nA tangent to the bent rays of the star.\nHear the chalk splutter, hear the groping voice:\nConceive the demiurge in his perpetual\nStrife with the chaos of the universe,\nThat humming equilibrium of creation\nPure and enormous, crossed by the constant\nLight of unimaginable combustion:\nTeems, how it teems. An elm tree sighs\nBeyond the dusty windowledge of June.\nAs in the mind the notes of a melody\nVibrate when vibration’s gone, a series\nGenerated by a decimal has no end;\nObserve it closely, though; it stops when it stops.\nThe frail spectacles are bedimmed with spring.\n\nBut whom should I consult? Well-seasoned men,\nRuddy with business or the salty summer,\nAutumnal in their woolens, gaze\nToward the quick plumes above the city.\nA frosty morning sun reddens the river.\nThis one is meditative and well-qualified:\nDecently shined, one heavy saddle-dark\nPerforated brogan swings from the swivel\nChair arm; leaning back, the head\nWell-cropped and grey, the experienced\nEyes quiet, with one highlighted pupil.\nA reader of Herodotus in the evening.\nThe road was in receivership, the mills\nWere in receivership, the bondholders\nSuitably informed would not dissent\nFrom an able plan of reorganization.\nEasy did it.\n And his beautiful daughters\nSink in a circle of white skirts like daisies,\nLaughing for the brash photographer.\nYears ago they sailed to the North Cape,\nMade out that flecked mass in the East\nWith Mother and the broad-shouldered boy from Cook’s\nOn deck in the dim summer on the grey\nSea. Often they saw the fishermen\nOff Cherbourg in the awe of morning hitting\nThe outside spanking seas: red sails in sea-light.\nFar away in the nursery a music box\nPlucks its icy Bavarian tune for them.\n\nThen whom? A thousand flashes from Long Island\nEnter the high room in the office building,\nA heliograph of cars turning toward sunset.\nWill he decipher them? The journalist\nSweats in his shirtsleeves, mutilates\nCigarettes in a smouldering tray, surveys\nMe and the world in a racket of teletypes,\nSick of it and excited, needing a drink.\nPositive copy sprouts from the typewriter,\nEach paragraph a piston stroke. The sun\nGlitters on Hackensack, sorrows on the land,\nGoes out like a pliant egg sucked down a bottle.\nUnder the shadowing azure a violet\nDusk consumes the sharp walls of the world.\nThe melancholy distributor of wit\nSnatches at straws amid the alien darkness,\nA whirl of dusty danger.\n For his retreat\nThe priest lifts up the monstrance, muttering\nAbstracted Latin to the tinkle behind him.\nPresently they will bawl the Stabat Mater.\nAnd all those years at seminary, reading\nSt. Basil and Jerome, girding his cassock\nFor handball in the gritty cement courtyard\nUnder the swooping smoke of the powerhouse;\nAnd ordination when the folks from Chicago\nWept before the bishop. Mortify\nThe flesh. Think on thy last end. Pray\nThe Holy Mother of God in her infinite mercy,\nAnd Him who rests in the dark chapel always,\nWhere the wick burns in wax, a cuddling flame:\nDeduced by Thomas from the tip of heaven.\n\nOr should I tumble to the recumbent\nConfessional, and the scientist of distress?\nFor any child the terror in the night,\nThe hating eyes by day may be\nDeath’s cunning orchestration: they prepare\nThe servant’s cry at last, absolute and lonely.\nSee this easy gentleman in tweeds,\nDeepchested, a swimmer to the farthest light,\nDiagnostician of the subaqueous\nFaces of dreams: with patience like a lover\nHe must all day sustain his authority,\nMust not be bored, merciful or amused.\n\nOr the anatomist and healer of bones?\nTrepanner, skilled in suturing, the masked\nAnd sterile hero in the cone of light;\nThere the sweet ether cone must be inhaled\nWith one, two pulses of the fiery spiral\nSinging into timeless speed or quiet:\nA mound under a sheet, a square of pale\nMortal flesh incised in a seeping line,\nSpreading its lips for pretty butchery.\n\nBlankets, hypodermics and high fever,\nRacing delirium in the ward; the tall screen\nEfficiently deployed at the bedside;\nIntravenous ministrations: charts: starch:\nAnd how is he today. Pretty good, doc.\nOr else the fly sits down on the dead face\nIn the dead sunny room.\n\n Shall I have speech\nWith those undone by the world’s great memory?\nMen translated by music, treasurers\nOf the French phrase, the childhood images,\nUnregarded announcers of prophecy;\nStaring blind at the stained wall paper\nIn their nightly rooms; their dreadful hearts\nBeating the beds where other hearts have slept\nLike birds under the night wind of time.\nSee this one whom the currents under earth\nIntoxicate, and the flosses of the sky:\nWeeping, weeping in vanity and grief\nHe walks toward remote dawn in the empty city,\nFacing the cold draft, fish-smell from the river,\nNecessitous of love. Masters of intricate\nFancy, libertines of intelligence,\nI. Until Jove let it be, no colonist\nMastered the wild earth; no land was marked,\nNone parceled out or shared; but everyone\nLooked for his living in the common wold.\n\nAnd Jove gave poison to the blacksnakes, and\nMade the wolves ravage, made the ocean roll,\nKnocked honey from the leaves, took fire away--\nSo man might beat out various inventions\nBy reasoning and art.\n First he chipped fire\nOut of the veins of flint where it was hidden;\nThen rivers felt his skiffs of the light alder;\nThen sailors counted up the stars and named them:\nPleiades, Hyades, and the Pole Star;\nThen were discovered ways to take wild things.\nIn snares, or hunt them with the circling pack;\nAnd how to whip a stream with casting nets,\nOr draw the deep-sea fisherman’s cordage up;\nAnd then the use of steel and the shrieking saw;\nThen various crafts. All things were overcome\nBy labor and by force of bitter need.\n\n# II.\n\nEven when your threshing floor is leveled\nBy the big roller, smoothed and packed by hand\nWith potter’s clay, so that it will not crack,\nThere are still nuisances. The tiny mouse\nLocates his house and granary underground,\nOr the blind mole tunnels his dark chamber;\nThe toad, too, and all monsters of the earth,\nBesides those plunderers of the grain, the weevil\nAnd frantic ant, scared of a poor old age.\n\nLet me speak then, too, of the farmer’s weapons:\nThe heavy oaken plow and the plowshare,\nThe slowly rolling carts of Demeter,\nThe threshing machine, the sledge, the weighted mattock,\nThe withe baskets, the cheap furniture,\nThe harrow and the magic winnowing fan--\nAll that your foresight makes provision of,\nIf you still favor the divine countryside.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMoreover, like men tempted by the straits\nIn ships borne homeward through the blowing sea,\nWe too must reckon on Arcturus star,\nThe days of luminous Draco and the Kids.\nWhen Libra makes the hours of sleep and daylight\nEqual, dividing the world, half light, half dark,\nThen drive the team, and sow the field with barley,\nEven under intractable winter’s rain.\nBut Spring is the time to sow your beans and clover,\nWhen shining Taurus opens the year with his golden\nHorns, and the Dog’s averted star declines;\nFor greater harvests of your wheat and spelt,\nLet first the Pleiades and Hyades be hid\nAnd Ariadne’s diadem go down.\nThe golden sun rules the great firmament\nThrough the twelve constellations, and the world\nIs measured out in certain parts, and heaven\nBy five great zones is taken up entire:\nOne glowing with sundazzle and fierce heat;\nAnd far away on either side the arctics,\nFrozen with ice and rain, cerulean;\nAnd, in between, two zones for sick mankind:\nThrough each of these a slanting path is cut\nWhere pass in line the zodiacal stars.\n\nNorthward the steep world rises to Scythia\nAnd south of Libya descends, where black\nStyx and the lowest of the dead look on.\nIn the north sky the Snake glides like a river\nWinding about the Great and Little Bear--\nThose stars that fear forever the touch of ocean;\nSouthward they say profound Night, mother of Furies,\nSits tight-lipped among the crowding shades,\nOr thence Aurora draws the daylight back;\nAnd where the East exhales the yellow morning,\nReddening evening lights her stars at last.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAs for the winter, when the freezing rains\nConfine the farmer, he may employ himself\nIn preparations for serener seasons.\nThe plowman beats the plowshare on the forge,\nOr makes his vats of tree-trunks hollowed out,\nBrands his cattle, numbers his piles of grain,\nSharpens fence posts or pitchforks, prepares\nUmbrian trellises for the slow vine.\nThen you may weave the baskets of bramble twigs\nOr dip your bleating flock in the clean stream.\nOften the farmer loads his little mule\nWith olive oil or apples, and brings home\nA grindstone or a block of pitch from market.\n\nAnd some will stay up late beside the fire\nOn winter nights, whittling torches, while\nThe housewife runs the shuttle through the loom\nAnd comforts the long labor with her singing;\nOr at the stove she simmers the new wine,\nSkimming the froth with leaves. Oh idle time!\nIn that hale season, all their worries past,\nFarmers arrange convivialities--\nAs after laden ships have reached home port,\nThe happy sailors load the prow with garlands.\nThen is the time to gather acorns and\nLaurel berries and the bloodred myrtle,\nTo lay your traps for cranes and snares for buck,\nTo hit the fallow deer with twisted slingshots,\nAnd track the long-eared hare--\nWhen snow is deep, and ice is on the rivers.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat of the humors and the ways of Autumn?\n\nJust when the farmer wished to reap his yellow\nFields, and thresh his grain,\nI have often seen all the winds make war,\nFlattening the stout crops from the very roots;\nAnd in the black whirlwind\nCarrying off the ears and the light straw.\nAnd often mighty phalanxes of rain\nMarched out of heaven, as the clouds\nRolled up from the sea the detestable tempest;\nThen the steep aether thundered, and the deluge\nSoaked the crops, filled ditches, made the rivers\nRise and roar and seethe in their spuming beds.\n\nThe Father himself in the mid stormy night\nLets the lightning go, at whose downstroke\nEnormous earth quivers, wild things flee,\nAnd fear abases the prone hearts of men--\nAs Jove splits Athos with his firebolt\nOr Rhodope or the Ceraunian ridge.\nThe southwind wails in sheets of rain,\nAnd under that great wind the groves\nLament, and the long breast of the shore is shaken.\n\nIf you dislike to be so caught, mark well\nThe moon’s phases and the weather signs;\nNotice where Saturn’s frigid star retires,\nMercury’s wanderings over heaven; and revere\nEspecially, the gods. Offer to Ceres\nAnnual sacrifice and annual worship\nIn the first fair weather of the spring,\nSo may your sheep grow fat and your vines fruitful,\nYour sleep sweet and your mountains full of shade.\nLet all the country folk come to adore her,\nAnd offer her libations of milk and wine;\nConduct the sacrificial lamb three times\nAround the ripe field, in processional,\nWith all your chorus singing out to Ceres;\nAnd let no man lay scythe against his grain\nUnless he first bind oakleaves on his head\nAnd make his little dance, and sing to her.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nWhen shall we herd the cattle to the stables?\nThe wind, say, rises without intermission;\nThe sea gets choppy and the swell increases;\nThe dry crash of boughs is heard on hills;\nThe long sound of the surf becomes a tumult;\nThe gusts become more frequent in the grove;\nThe waves begin to fight against the keels;\nFrom far at sea the gulls fly shoreward crying;\nThe heron leaves his favorite marsh and soars\nOver the high cloud. Then you will see\nBeyond thin skimrack, shooting stars\nFalling, the long pale tracks behind them\nWhitening through the darkness of the night;\nAnd you’ll see straw and fallen leaves blowing.\nBut when it thunders in rough Boreas’ quarter,\nWhen east and west it thunders--every sailor\nFurls his dripping sail.\n\nA storm should never catch you unprepared.\nAerial cranes take flight before its rising,\nThe restless heifer with dilated nostrils\nSniffs the air; the squeaking hirondelle\nFlits round and round the lake, and frogs,\nInveterate in their mud, croak a chorale.\nAnd too the ant, more frantic in his gallery,\nTrundles his eggs out from their hiding place;\nThe rainbow, cloud imbiber, may be seen;\nAnd crows go cawing from the pasture\nIn a harsh throng of crepitating wings;\nThe jeering jay gives out his yell for rain\nAnd takes a walk by himself on the dry sand.\nStormwise, the various sea-fowl, and such birds\nAs grub the sweet Swan River in Asia,\nMay be observed dousing themselves and diving\nOr riding on the water, as if they wished--\nWhat odd exhilaration--to bathe themselves.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAfter a storm, clear weather and continuing\nSunny days may likewise be foretold:\nBy the sharp twinkle of the stars, the moon\nRising to face her brother’s rays by day;\nNo tenuous fleeces blowing in the sky,\nNo halcyons, sea favorites, on the shore\nStretching out their wings in tepid sunlight;\nBut mists go lower and lie on the fields,\nThe owl, observing sundown from his perch,\nModulates his meaningless melancholy.\nAloft in crystal air the sparrow hawk\nChases his prey; and as she flits aside\nThe fierce hawk follows screaming on the wind,\nAnd as he swoops, she flits aside again.\nWith funereal contractions of the windpipe\nThe crows produce their caws, three at a time,\nAnd in their high nests, pleased at I know not what,\nNoise it among themselves: no doubt rejoicing\nTo see their little brood after the storm,\nBut not, I think, by reason of divine\nInsight or superior grasp of things.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nBut if you carefully watch the rapid sun\nAnd the moon following, a fair night’s snare\nNever deceives you as to next day’s weather.\nWhen the new moon collects a rim of light,\nIf that bow be obscured with a dark vapor,\nThen a great tempest is in preparation;\nIf it be blushing like a virgin’s cheek,\nThere will be wind; wind makes Diana blush;\nIf on the fourth night (most significant)\nShe goes pure and unclouded through the sky,\nAll that day and the following days will be,\nFor one full month, exempt from rain and wind.\nThe sun, too, rising and setting in the waves,\nWill give you weather signs, trustworthy ones\nWhether at morning or when stars come out.\nA mackerel sky over the east at sunrise\nMeans look out for squalls, a gale is coming,\nUnfavorable to trees and plants and flocks.\nOr when through denser strata the sun’s rays\nBreak out dimly, or Aurora rises\nPale from Tithonus’ crocus-colored chamber,\nAlas, the vine-leaf will not shield the cluster\nIn the hubbub of roof-pattering bitter hail.\nIt will be well to notice sunset, too,\nFor the sun’s visage then has various colors;\nBluish and dark means rain; if it be fiery\nThat means an East wind; if it be dappled\nAnd mixed with red gold light, then you will see\nWind and rain in commotion everywhere.\nNobody can advise me, on that night,\nTo cast off hawsers and put out to sea.\nBut if the next day passes and the sunset\nThen be clear, you need not fear the weather:\nA bright Norther will sway the forest trees.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nLast, what the late dusk brings, and whence the fair\nClouds are blown, and secrets of the Southwind\nYou may learn from the sun, whose prophecies\nNo man denies, seeing black insurrections,\nTreacheries, and wars are told by him.\n\nWhen Caesar died, the great sun pitied Rome,\nSo veiling his bright head, the godless time\nTrembled in fear of everlasting night;\nAnd then were portents given of earth and ocean,\nVile dogs upon the roads, and hideous\nStrange birds, and Aetna quaking, and her fires\nBursting to overflow the Cyclops’ fields\nWith flames whirled in the air and melted stones.\nThunder of war was heard in Germany\nFrom south to north, shaking the granite Alps;\nAnd a voice also through the silent groves\nPiercing; and apparitions wondrous pale\nWere seen in dead of night. Then cattle spoke\n(O horror!), streams stood still, the earth cracked open\nAnd tears sprang even from the temple bronze.\nThe Po, monarch of rivers, on his back\nSpuming whole forests, raced through the lowland plains\nAnd bore off pens and herds; and then continually\nThe viscera of beasts were thick with evil,\nBlood trickled from the springs; tall towns at night\nRe-echoed to the wolf-pack’s shivering howl;\nAnd never from pure heaven have there fallen\nSo many fires, nor baleful comets burned.\nIt seemed that once again the Roman lines,\nAlike in arms, would fight at Philippi;\nAnd heaven permitted those Thessalian fields\nTo be enriched again with blood of ours.\nSome future day, perhaps, in that country,\nA farmer with his plow will turn the ground,\nAnd find the javelins eaten thin with rust,\nOr knock the empty helmets with his mattock\nAnd wonder, digging up those ancient bones.\n\nPaternal gods! Ancestors! Mother Vesta!\nYou that guard Tiber and the Palatine!\nNow that long century is overthrown,\nLet not this young man fail to give us peace!\nLong enough beneath your rule, O Caesar,\nHeaven has hated us and all those triumphs\nWhere justice was thrown down--so many wars,\nSo many kinds of wickedness! No honor\nRendered the plow, but the fields gone to ruin,\nThe country-folk made homeless, and their scythes\nBeaten to straight swords on the blowing forge!\nWar from the Euphrates to Germany;\nRuptured engagements, violence of nations,\nAnd impious Mars raging the whole world over--\nAs when a four horsed chariot rears away\nPlunging from the barrier, and runs wild,\nHeedless of the reins or the charioteer.\nTerrorizers of themselves, laughers in\nLanguage and priests of any mystery--\nNot by authority.\n\n What of the revered\nHistorian, the painstaking public man?\nHis dusty briefcase worn to a splitting bulge,\nThe scholar descending from the library\nSmiles at the doves, and at the glowing grass.\nLetters gone frail and yellow in their strings\nSpill fuzz and dust from the stuck folds:\nIt might be inferred from what the ambassador\nWrote to his daughter in Virginia\nThat others were privy to the situation.\nThese judges are gentle and well-cultivated\nHonorable stylists, penetrating men,\nMirrors of duplicity and bewilderment,\nMirrors of magnificent deep-rooted structural\nPolicy and implacable miscarriage.\nThe documents are all photostated, the files\nArranged. Let humane logic\nGuide them in the wilderness of the State.\nThe pallid husbandman grunts at his fields,\nSells his new lambs in the damp of March,\nThumbs the slick catalogue of the mail order\nHouse for ginghams for the girls of summer;\nChews with the county agent at the gate.\nHe will be ruddy as the sun goes over,\nThe clouds go over, the tractor shudders on\nThrough the high fields. The piling west will grow\nFractious with lightning, the wild branches bend,\nCurtains blow out like goodbye handkerchiefs\nHilarious in the gloomy wind. Autumn\nComes with marriages to the aging house,\nWinter comes with comforts and old death.\nStill the farmer’s dull hand holds the seed;\nThe low star glimmers on the dewy sill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "for-the-others": { - "title": "“For the Others”", - "body": "They will come to my house, to the street’s end\nIn the tedious season,\nNaming the dry leaf, and the wind at morning\nBearing death.\n\nFrom the tastefully cut helms, the craftsmen’s speech,\nI shall turn clearly\nTo grip in daylight time’s still edge\nFinding my body, sight, touch, hearing, strange\nIdentity then with what mind in what place\nOf all that make the story?\n\n Birds\nSing in the dark trees at the world’s end\nIn the evening of time. The bearded men\nStand there among the horses. The lutes play.\nAnd there are valleys in the mountains\nAnd women cutting the hay, and carrying it\nIn under the hot rain.\n\n These we know.\n\nO father, father,\nThese many days and many harvests\nWe have endured, and the grey sea under mists,\nThe agony of our daughters, and\nOld men dying in candlelight\nAt the summer’s passage--\n\n remembering\n\nLandfalls, delay of autumn, grief among dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "himeros": { - "title": "“Himeros”", - "body": "The locust sobs in the leaves. Her dusty hair\nMy love has now let fall upon the sun’s\nStream. Beyond pale trestles\nFlows evening: darkness and earth-drift.\nUnder a shard of moon the locust sings\nMourning holocausts of summer.\n\nCentaurs in warm forests wheel silently\nOver leaf-mould, where the huntress\nWalks with stiff breasts.\nA star at the bedside clinks.\nAt last knee to knee we say: Peace--\nThough in the air of bats a clown listens.\n\nOur present death, dear time, of all purity\nTakes lordly revenue in this twilight,\nThe leaf-veined delta of the spreading year.\nThe field is silted for the richer harvest,\nCrystalline shores regained,\nAnd a slow surf beating our nets forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "lightness-in-autumn": { - "title": "“Lightness in Autumn”", - "body": "The rake is like a wand or fan,\nWith bamboo springing in a span\nTo catch the leaves that I amass\nIn bushels on the evening grass.\n\nI reckon how the wind behaves\nAnd rake them lightly into waves\nAnd rake the waves upon a pile,\nThen stop my raking for a while.\n\nThe sun is down, the air is blue,\nAnd soon the fingers will be, too,\nBut there are children to appease\nWith ducking in those leafy seas.\n\nSo loudly rummaging their bed\nOn the dry billows of the dead,\nThey are not warned at four and three\nOf natural mortality.\n\nBefore their supper they require\nA dragon field of yellow fire\nTo light and toast them in the gloom.\nSo much for old earth’s ashen doom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "metaphysical": { - "title": "“Metaphysical”", - "body": "_In festo Christi Regis_\n\nThe level slope of colored sea\nRises degree upon degree\nTo hide the brazen ball of sun.\nPonderous is the planet side,\nAnd nothing here but heart can slide,\nAnd nothing but the day is done.\n\nGlory the heavens here declare\nHeavens in gloom deny elsewhere.\nThe jackal and the gaping shark\nPossess the shambles of the night.\nAs upward eyries take the light\nThe downward longitudes are dark.\n\nEyes on the telluric rim\nIn tangent angles peering dim\nFind shape and hour dark or down.\nBut centered lordship knows the art\nOf bearing so toward every part\nThe studded sphere becomes his crown.\n\nRays of his mercy are besought\nTo magnetize my speck of thought.\nElated let the evening fall,\nAbysmal be the golden day;\nThe ravaged carcass far away\nBe supple in the life of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957, - "month": "february" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christ_the_king" - } - } - }, - "midsummer": { - "title": "“Midsummer”", - "body": "The adolescent night, breath of the town,\nPorch-swings and whispers, maple leaves unseen\nDeploying moonlight quieter than a man dead\nAfter the locusts’ song. These homes were mine\nAnd are not now forever, these on the steps\nChildren I think removed to many places,\nLost among hushed years, and so strangely known.\n\nThis business is well ended. If in the dark\nThe firefly made his gleam and sank therefrom\nYet someone’s hand would have him, the wet grass\nBed him no more … From corners of the lawn\nThe dusk-white dresses flutter and are past …\nBefore our bed-time there were things to say\nRemembering tree-bark, crickets, and the first star.\n\nAfter, and as the sullenness of time\nWent on from summer, here in a land alien\nMade I my perfect fears and flower of thought.\nSleep being no longer swift in the arms of pain,\nRevisitations are convenient with a cough\nAnd there is something I would say again\nIf I had not forever, if there were time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "night-images": { - "title": "“Night Images”", - "body": "Late in the cold night wakened, and heard wind,\nAnd lay with eyes closed and silent, knowing\nThese words how bodiless they are, this darkness\nEmpty under my roof and the panes rattling\nRoughed by wind. And so lay and imagined\nSomewhere far off black seas heavy-shouldered\nPlunging on sand and the ebb off-streaming and\nThunder forever. So lying bethought me, friend,\nWhat traffic ghouls have, or this be legend,\nIn low inland hollows of the earth, under\nShade of moon, the night moaning, and bitter frost;\nAnd feared the riches of my bones, long given\nInto this earth, should tumble to their hands.\nNo girl or ghost beside me, and I lonely,\nRemembering gardens, lilac scent, or twilight\nDescending late in summer on that town,\nI lay and found my years departed from me,\nAnd feared the cold bed and the wind, absurdly\nAlone with silence and the trick of tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "night-prayer": { - "title": "“Night Prayer”", - "body": "Anguish and delight are now\nCoiled in darkness on the bough,\nAnd iron time deflowers spring,\nSecretly, the secret thing.\nMind and body, as they must,\nInvent a terminus to lust,\nPreserving the despair they make\nPray the Lord my soul to take.\n\nWhen this incontinent despair\nTurns sick with love in sunless air\nA firmer bed than bed of stone\nTake up my cast of flesh and bone,\nA sharper song than rue or willow\nWeep me dead upon my pillow.\nI who strangled life with sleep\nPray the Lord my soul to keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-shore-of-life": { - "title": "“The Shore of Life”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI came then to the city of my brethren.\nNot Carthage, not Alexandria, not London.\n\nThe wide blue river cutting through the stone\nArrowy and cool lay down beside her,\nAnd the hazy and shining sea lay in the offing.\n\nFerries, pouring the foam before them, sliding\nInto her groaning timbers, rang and rang;\nAnd the chains tumbled taut in the winches.\n\nUpstream the matted tugs in the heavy water,\nTheir soiling smoke unwrapped by the salt wind,\nFooted with snowy trampling and snowy sound.\n\nOn tethers, pointing the way of the tide,\nThe crusted freighters swung with their sides gushing.\n\nOn evening’s ship pointing northward,\nA golden sailor at sunset stood at the bow,\nAs aloft in the strands a tramcar with tiny clanging\nSlowly soared over, far upward and humming still.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNot Athens, Alexandria, Vienna or London.\n\nAnd evening vast and clean above the city\nWashed the high storeys with sea-light, with a silken\nSky-tint on the planes and the embrasures:\nThe clump of crags and glitter sinking eastward\nWith the slow world, the shadow-lipping shores,\nPale after-conflagration of the air.\n\nOn terraces, by windows of tiredness,\nThe eyes dropped from that glow to the dusk atremble,\nAlive with its moving atomic monotone:\n\nThere the hot taxis at the pounding corner\nFitted their glossy flanks and shifted, waiting,\nAnd the girls went by with wavering tall walking,\nTheir combed heads nodding in the evening:\n\nThe hour of shops closing, the cocktail hour,\nLighting desire and cigarettes and lighting\nThe strange lamps on the streaming avenue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "souls-lake": { - "title": "“Souls Lake”", - "body": "The evergreen shadow and the pale magnolia\nStripping slowly to the air of May\nStood still in the night of honey trees,\nAt rest above a star pool with my friends,\nBeside the grove most fit for elegies\nI made my phrase to out-enchant the night.\n\nThe epithalamion, the hush were due,\nFor I had fasted and gone blind to see\nWhat night must be beyond our passages;\nThose stars so chevalier in fearful heaven\nCould not but lay their steel aside and come\nWith a grave glitter into my low room.\n\nVague though the population of the earth\nLay stretched and dry below the cypresses,\nIt was not round-about but in my night,\nBone of my bone, as an old man might say;\nAnd all its stone weighed my mortality;\nThe pool would be my body and my eyes,\n\nThe air my garment and material\nWhereof that wateriness and mirror lived--\nThe colorable, meek and limpid world.\nThough I had sworn my element alien\nTo the pure mind of night, the cold princes,\nBehold them there, and both worlds were the same.\n\nThe hearts’ planet seemed not so lonely then,\nSeeing what kin it found in that reclining.\nAnd ah, though sweet the catch of your chorales,\nI heard no singing there among my friends;\nBut still the great waves, the lions shining,\nAnd infinite still the discourse of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1980 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "sympathy-of-peoples": { - "title": "“Sympathy of Peoples”", - "body": "No but come closer. Come a little\nCloser. Let the wall-eyed hornyhanded\nPanhandler hit you for a dime\nSir and shiver. Snow like this\nDrives its pelting shadows over Bremen,\nOver sad Louvain and the eastern\nMarshes, the black wold. It sighs\nInto the cold sea of the north,\nThat vast contemptuous revery between\nAntiquity and you. Turn up your collar,\nPull your hatbrim down. Commune\nBriefly with your ignorant heart\nFor those bewildered raging children\nEurope surrenders her old gentry to.\n\nAll their eyes turn in the night from\nYour fretfulness and forgetfulness,\nYour talk; they turn away, friend.\nTheir eyes dilated with dreams of power\nFix on the image of the mob wet\nWith blood scaling the gates of order.\nAnarchist and incendiary\nCaesar bind that brotherhood\nTo use and crush the civil guard,\nDebauch the debauché, level\nTenement and court with soaring\nSideslipping squadrons and hard regiments,\nStripped for the smoking levée of the\nHowitzer, thunderstruck under the net.\n\nThe great mouth of hunger closes\nOn swineherd and princess, on the air\nOf jongleur and forest bell; Grendel\nSwims from the foul deep again.\nDeputy, cartelist, academician\nQuestion in haste any plumeless captain\nBefore the peremptory descent\nOf mankind, flattered and proud.\nWith whitening morning on the waste\nYou may discern through binoculars\nA long line of the shawled and frozen,\nMoving yet motionless, as if those\nWere populations whom the sun failed\nAnd the malicious moon enchanted\nTo wander and be still forever\nThe prey of wolves and bestial mazes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "winter-night": { - "title": "“Winter Night”", - "body": "The grey day left the dusk in doubt.\nNow it is dark.\nNightfall, and no stars are out,\nBut this black wind will set its mark\nLike anger on the souls that stir\nFrom chimney-side or sepulchre.\nFrom hill to pasture moans the snow.\nThe farms hug tight\nTheir shaking ribs against the blow.\n\nThere is no mercy in this night,\nNor scruple to its wrath. The dead\nSleep light with this wind overhead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-gould-fletcher": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Gould Fletcher", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american+english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gould_Fletcher", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 21 - }, - "poems": { - "along-the-highway": { - "title": "“Along the Highway”", - "body": "Here did we travel on to clouds,\nHigh pinnacles of eternal hope,\nAnd rainstorms, too, that slashed the earth,\nWe, chasing fourteen changetul springs;\nYou still had guided me aright,\nTo heart’s full happiness. I had seen\nThe earth we traveled grow a home:--\nA place to dream in and to know\nLove of our kind, who, winter nights,\nKnow earth’s cold charity, numbing bone.\n\nMy dear, whatever halts us now\nIs not reality but a ghost\nFrom the grey past. Within our hands\nWe hold reality. It is ours.\nAnd driving towards it we can find\nPinnacles of the eternal cloud,\nAnd rainstorms slaking sunny earth,\nAnd joys we never dreamed to know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-black-rock": { - "title": "“The Black Rock”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOff the long headland, threshed about by round-backed breakers,\nThere is a black rock, standing high at the full tide;\nOff the headland there is emptiness,\nAnd the moaning of the ocean,\nAnd the black rock standing alone.\n\nIn the orange wake of sunset,\nWhen the gulls have fallen silent,\nAnd the winds slip out and meet together from the edges of the sea,\nSettled down in the dark water,\nFragment of the earth abandoned,\nRagged and huge the black rock stands.\n\nIt is as if it listened,\nStood and listened very intently\nTo the everlasting swish and boom and hiss of spray,\nListened to the creeping-on of night;\nWhile afar off, to the westward,\nDark clouds silently are packed together,\nWith a dull red glow between.\n\nIt is listening, it is lonely;\nFor the sunlight\nShowed it houses near the headland,\nTrees and flowers;\nFor the sunlight caused to grow upon it scanty blades of grass,\nFor the crannies of the rock,\nHere and there;\nFor the sunlight brought it back remembrance of a world.\nLong rejected\n\nAnd long lost;\nShowed it white sails near the coast,\nChildren paddling in the bay,\nSigns of life and kinship with mankind\nLong forgot.\nNow the sunset leaves it there,\nBare, rejected, a black scrap of rock,\nBattered by the tides,\nWallowing in the sea.\n\nBleak, adrift,\nShattered like a monstrous ship of stone,\nLeft aground\nBy the waters, on its voyage;\nWith no foot to touch its deck,\nWith no hand to lift its sails,\nThere it stands.\n\n\n# II.\n\nGulls wheel near it in the sunlight,\nWhite backs flash;\nGray wings eddy, curl, are lifted, swept away,\nOn a wave;\nGulls pass rapidly in the sunlight\nRound about it.\n\nGulls pass, screaming harshly to the wave-thrusts,\nLaughing in uncanny voices;\nLonely flocks of great white birds,\nLike to ghosts;\n\nBut the black rock does not welcome them,\nKnows by heart already all their cries;\nHears, repeated, for the millionth millionth time\nAll the bitterness of ocean\nHowling through their voices.\n\nIt still dreams of other things,\nOf the cities and the fields,\nAnd the lands near to the coast\nWhere the lonely grassy valleys\nFull of dun herds deeply browsing,\nSweep in wide curves to the sea;\n\nIt still holds the memory\nOf the wild bees booming, murmuring,\nIn the fields of thyme and clover,\nAnd the shadows of broad trees\nTowards noon:\n\nIt still lifts its huge scarred sides\nVainly to the burning glare of sun,\nWith the memory of doom\nThick upon them;\nAnd the hope that by some fate\nIt may come once more to be\nPart of all the earth it had;\n\nFreed from clamor of the waves,\nFrom the broken planks and wreckage\nDrifting aimless here and there,\nWith the tides;\nFreed to share its life with earth,\nAnd to be a dwelling-place\nFor the outcast tribes of men,\nOnce again.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn the morning,\nWhen the dark clouds whirl swift over,\nFrom the southeast, dragging with them\nHeavy curtains of gray rain,\n\nThe black rock rejoices.\nAll its little gullies drip with cool refreshing showers.\nAll the crannies, all the steeps,\nAll the meagre sheltered places\nFill with drip and tinkle of the rain.\n\nBut when the afternoon between the clouds\nLeaves adrift cool patches of the sea,\nBetween floes of polar snow;\nThen the rock is all aflame;\nDiamond, emeralds, topazes,\nBurn and shatter, and it seems\nLike a garden filled with flowers.\n\nLike a garden where the rapid wheeling lights\nAnd black shadows lift and sway and fall;\nSpring and summer and red autumn chase each other\nMoment after moment, on its face,\n\nSo, till sunset\nLifts once more its lonely crimson torch,\nMenacing and mournful, far away;\nThen an altar left abandoned, it stands facing all the horizon\nWhere the light departs.\n\nMassive black and crimson towers,\nCities carven by the wind from out the clouds of sunset look at it;\nIt has dreamed them, it has made this sacrifice,\nNow it sees their rapid passing,\nSoon it will be bleak and all alone.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAbrupt and broken rock,\nBlack rock, awash in the midst of the waters,\nLonely, aloof, deserted,\nImpotent to change;\n\nStorm-clouds lift off,\nThe dawn strikes the hills far inland.\nBut you are forever tragic and apart,\nForever battling with the sea;\n\nTill the waves have ground you to dust--\nTill the ages are all accomplished,\nTill you have relinquished the last reluctant fragment\nTo the gnawing teeth of the wave;\n\nI know the force of your patience,\nI have shared your grim silent struggle,\nThe mad dream you have, and will not abandon,\nTo cover your strength with gay flowers;\n\nKeel of the world, apart,\nI have lived like you.\n\nSome men are soil of the earth;\nTheir lives are broad harvest fields\nGreen in the spring, and gold in their season,\nThen barren and mown;\n\nBut those whom my soul has loved\nAre bare rocks standing off headlands;\nCherishing, perhaps, a few bitter wild flowers,\nThat bloom in the granite, year after year.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blake": { - "title": "“Blake”", - "body": "Blake saw\nAngels in a London street;\nGod the Father on a hill,\nChrist before a tavern door.\nBlake saw\nAll these shapes, and more.\n\nBlake knew\nOther men saw not as he;\nSo he tried to give his sight\nTo that beggarman, the world.\n“You are mad,”\nWas all the blind world said.\n\nBlake died\nSinging songs of praise to God.\n“They are not mine,” he told his wife,\n“I may praise them, they are not mine.”\nThen he died. And the world called Blake divine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blue-water": { - "title": "“Blue Water”", - "body": "Sea-violins are playing on the sands;\nCurved bows of blue and white are flying over the pebbles,\nSee them attack the chords--dark basses, glinting trebles.\nDimly and faint they croon, blue violins.\n“Suffer without regret,” they seem to cry,\n“Though dark your suffering is, it may be music,\nWaves of blue heat that wash midsummer sky;\nSea-violins that play along the sands.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-everlasting-contradiction": { - "title": "“The Everlasting Contradiction”", - "body": "Yesterday I borrowed thirty silver pence\nFrom Judas: he gave them with a grin.\nToday, O Christ, I kneel before your cross.\n\nYesterday the Magdalen came to me and said,\n“I am starving.” I answered, “First, to bed.”\nToday, O Christ, I kneel before your cross.\n\nYesterday the Virgin passed sorrowing in the street.\nI flung a brick at her. Then, as was meet,\nI bore her to the house of Caiphas.\nToday, O Christ, I kneel before your cross.\n\nYesterday Pilate asked me for water: I must go.\nHe beat me, for the ewer trembled so.\nToday, O Christ, I kneel before your cross.\n\nYesterday, today, tomorrow, I am vile:\nYou hang there motionless and dead long while--\nIn your eyes, nothing; on your lips, a smile.\nThe world is rotten: would ’twould crash and pile\nUpon me kneeling yet before your cross!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-future": { - "title": "“The Future”", - "body": "After ten thousand centuries have gone,\nMan will ascend the last long pass to know\nThat all the summits which he saw at dawn\nAre buried deep in everlasting snow.\n\nBelow him endless gloomy valleys, chill,\nWill wreathe and whirl with fighting cloud, driven by the wind’s fierce breath;\nBut on the summit, wind and cloud are still:--\nOnly the sunlight, and death.\n\nAnd staggering up to the brink of the gulf man will look down\nAnd painfully strive with weak sight to explore\nThe silent gulfs below which the long shadows drown;\nThrough every one of these he passed before.\n\nThen since he has no further heights to climb,\nAnd naught to witness he has come this endless way,\nOn the wind-bitten ice cap he will wait for the last of time,\nAnd watch the crimson sunrays fading of the world’s latest day:\n\nAnd blazing stars will burst upon him there,\nDumb in the midnight of his hope and pain,\nSpeeding no answer back to his last prayer,\nAnd, if akin to him, akin in vain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "irradiations": { - "title": "“Irradiations”", - "body": "The spattering of the rain upon pale terraces\nOf afternoon is like the passing of a dream\nAmid the roses shuddering ’gainst the wet green stalks\nOf the streaming trees the passing of the wind\nUpon the pale lower terraces of my dream\nIs like the crinkling of the wet grey robes\nOf the hours that come to turn over the urn\nOf the day and spill its rainy dream.\nVague movement over the puddled terraces:\nHeavy gold pennons a pomp of solemn gardens\nHalf hidden under the liquid veil of spring:\nFar trumpets like a vague rout of faded roses\nBurst ’gainst the wet green silence of distant forests:\nA clash of cymbals then the swift swaying footsteps\nOf the wind that undulates along the languid terraces.\nPools of rain the vacant terraces\nWet, chill and glistening\nTowards the sunset beyond the broken doors of to-day.\n\nThe iridescent vibrations of midsummer light\nDancing, dancing, suddenly flickering and quivering\nLike little feet or the movement of quick hands clapping,\nOr the rustle of furbelows or the clash of polished gems.\nThe palpitant mosaic of the midday light\nColliding, sliding, leaping and lingering:\nO, I could lie on my back all day,\nAnd mark the mad ballet of the midsummer sky.\n\nOver the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds;\nLike horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street.\nWhirlpools of purple and gold,\nWinds from the mountains of cinnabar,\nLacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and balancing\nAmid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade balustrades.\nGlint of the glittering wings of dragon-flies in the light:\nSilver filaments, golden flakes settling downwards,\nRippling, quivering flutters, repulse and surrender,\nThe sun broidered upon the rain,\nThe rain rustling with the sun.\nOver the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds;\nLike horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street.\n\nThe balancing of gaudy broad pavilions\nOf summer against the insolent breeze:\nThe bellying of the sides of striped tents,\nSwelling taut, shuddering in quick collapse,\nSilent under the silence of the sky.\nEarth is streaked and spotted\nWith great splashes and dapples of sunlight:\nThe sun throws an immense circle of hot light upon the world,\nRolling slowly in ponderous rhythm\nDarkly, musically forward.\nAll is silent under the steep cone of afternoon:\nThe sky is imperturbably profound.\nThe ultimate divine union seems about to be accomplished,\nAll is troubled at the attainment\nOf the inexhaustible infinite.\nThe rolling and the tossing of the sides of immense pavilions\nUnder the whirling wind that screams up the cloudless sky.\n\nFlickering of incessant rain\nOn flashing pavements:\nSudden scurry of umbrellas:\nBending, recurved blossoms of the storm.\nThe winds came clanging and clattering\nFrom long white highroads whipping in ribbons up summits;\nThey strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-blossom,\nAnd the rustling of innumerable translucent leaves.\nUneven tinkling, the lazy rain\nDripping from the eaves.\n\nThe fountain blows its breathless spray\nfrom me to you and back to me.\nWhipped, tossed, curdled,\nCrashing, quivering:\nI hurl kisses like blows upon your lips.\nThe dance of a bee drunken with sunlight:\nInadiant ecstasies, white and gold,\nSigh and relapse.\nThe fountain tosses pallid spray\nFar in the sorrowful, silent sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "lincoln": { - "title": "“Lincoln”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLike a gaunt, scraggly pine\nWhich lifts its head above the mournful sandhills;\nAnd patiently, through dull years of bitter silence,\nUntended and uncared for, begins to grow.\n\nUngainly, labouring, huge,\nThe wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches;\nYet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds ring the horizon,\nA nation of men shall rest beneath its shade.\n\nAnd it shall protect them all,\nHold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence;\nUntil at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith\nShall strike it in an instant down to earth.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness,\nOf which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter;\nA darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth\nTowards old things;\nTowards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God,\nTowards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last;\nTowards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost,\nMany bitter winters of defeat;\nDown to the granite of patience\nThese roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking,\nAnd drew from the living rock and the living waters about it\nThe red sap to carry upwards to the sun.\n\nNot proud, but humble,\nOnly to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service;\nFor the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit\nShall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThere is silence abroad in the land to-day,\nAnd in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence;\nAnd, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly open,\nThose hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light.\n\nSlowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the endless silence\nLike labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos of rude clay-fields:\n“I went forward as the light goes forward in early spring,\nBut there were also many things which I left behind.”\n\n“Tombs that were quiet;\nOne, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the darkness,\nOne, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long falling,\nOne, only of a child, but it was mine.\n\nHave you forgot your graves? Go, question them in anguish,\nListen long to their unstirred lips. From your hostages to silence,\nLearn there is no life without death, no dawn without sun-setting,\nNo victory but to Him who has given all.”\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth of the battle is silent.\nThe midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes on afresh its bright colours.\nBut he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we scorned and mistrusted,\nHe has descended, like a god, to his rest.\n\nOver the uproar of cities,\nOver the million intricate threads of life wavering and crossing,\nIn the midst of problems we know not, tangling, perplexing, ensnaring,\nRises one white tomb alone.\n\nBeam over it, stars.\nWrap it round, stripes--stripes red for the pain that he bore for you--\nEnfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired through your anguish;\nLong as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow to your law.\n\nStrew over him flowers;\nBlue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink arbutus\nFrom the east, and from the west rich orange blossoms,\nBut from the heart of the land take the passion-flower.\n\nRayed, violet, dim,\nWith the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and the circlet,\nAnd beside it there, lay also one lonely snow-white magnolia,\nBitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "presidents_day" - } - } - }, - "memorial-for-1940": { - "title": "“Memorial for 1940”", - "body": "If we could but silence the gongs in thousands of cities,\nThrottle the sirens, quench the low roar of the motors,\nMuffle the click of the tickers, slow down the traffic,\nDrown out all mechanical noise and suddenly create silence,\nWe might come to know at last the meaning of this world;\nWhich is as a wave come from the dark, a sudden, unexpected movement,\nAlways arrested, never completed, made vital by half-realized beauty;\nAnd which--though unfinished--flings this final generation\nLike all those lost in the past, drowned in war, to die, gasping on the shore.\n\nDriven and driven and driven,\nLiving despite of dying, dying because of living,\nIs life’s last terrible giving;\nPoured out, overflowing, overwhelming, foaming away on the pavement,\nFroth of life, must of death, spilled deep upon the stones.\nWe cannot halt it since we are part of it,\nWe cannot hold it, since it holds us as this offering.\nOur doing is part of its dream, our darkness is all of its triumph.\nIt is given and it abides, whether we will or no.\n\nBut now, since the silence will not rise and surround us,\nLeaving us wondering about ourselves, looking each to the other,\nSketching the gesture that will finish with consummation\nWe shall not know what meaning was held by that dream.\nNot men, but a man; not life but be led; not triumph but brutal obedience--\nAnd laws graven deep in cold blood for the free play of instinct and wisdom.\nSince we have neither clear thoughts of ourselves nor the quiet of heaven--\nWhich is made out of fire and dark even as we, only wider and greater--\nNo joy shall be ours without horror, no peace without clamor.\nWith guns, tanks, aeroplanes, ships of iron, lies, bullyings, threats,\npropaganda, We shall go forward to a far alien land, and we shall there bury\nThis light that burned flickeringly, under mountains of dead men, tumuli of faith unremembered;\nTo burst forth as volcanic fire to the future, and blaze across the world", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "new-york": { - "title": "“New York”", - "body": "Out of the black granite she is rising surprising as sunrise\nover the head of the Sphinx, glittering towers coated in\nlinked scales that seem as if they might melt away-they are\nso pale--but that day pours multitudes about them to smile\nand to threaten, to sin and to ’scape the reckoning, to coagulate\nin iron knots against fate, to blot out life’s misery with\nrejoicing, to clamor and to pray.\nRestless hammers are carving new cities from the stagnant skies.\n\nBeneath, the earth is propped and caverned; monstrous\nhalls drop with vaulted echoing roofs dripping and sorrowful\nfar below; the bells toll and the trains start slowly,\nclanging, shaking the earth and the sad towers above them\nas they go banging their cargo of lost ones towards the secret\ngates of the sea; falling, falling with thunder and flame\nroaring and crawling, shooting and dying away.\nRestless hammers are carving new cities from the stagnant skies.\n\nAloft, red girders of riveted steel hang motionless over the\nabyss. Down below the traffic slides, and from precipitous\nsides unroll golden threads, like spiders contriving, carrying\ntheir freight. Men with hammers are striving to hack new\nprojections on. the edifice: and from the last impenetrable\noverhanging beam, a man is dangling on his belly guiding\nthe weight. The clouds explode in hissing ripples of snow\nabout him; the skies are dim and the stream of life falls\nthrough them sighing, like wheat that crashes into the hopper.\nBut the last pinnacles eat into the clouds and from their\nbronze sides pours down the day, sweeping away the sordid\nflood of men in streams of weeping glory.\nRestless hammers are carving new cities from the stagnant skies.\n\nScreaming and flickering, like loosened floods of blue\nflame, the streets run together amid the houses that huddle\nand leap and lower over them. The houses quiver with rage\nand heat from heads to feet; the façades seem wavering,\ntoppling, tearing with their weight: the glaring panes bulge\noutwards, and the bent red girders ooze away beneath them.\nBut above it all, above all the chaos, the struggle and the\nloss, the clouds part. Ivory and gold, heart of light petrified,\nbold and immortally beautiful, lifts a tower like a full lily\nstalk, with crammed pollen-coated petals, flame calyx, fretted\nand carven. White phoenix that beats its wings in the light,\nshrill ecstasy of leaping lines poised in flight, partaker of joy\nin the skies, mate of the sun.\nRestless hammers are carving new cities from the stagnant skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "night-song": { - "title": "“Night Song”", - "body": "Ask me no more but love,\n--See, the west is all roses!--\nDarkness comes down from above;\nNo more--the hour closes;\n\nAsk me no more but love,\nI have no other might.\nSun of my dusk, dream of my dawn, I come to you\nSure as the stars to-night!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rains-in-the-desert": { - "title": "“Rains in the Desert”", - "body": "The huge red-buttressed mesa over yonder\nIs merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning\nIts altar fires of pinyon and toyon for the day.\n\nThe old priests sleep, white-shrouded;\nTheir pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely feathered.\nOn every mummied face there glows a smile.\n\nThe sun is rolling slowly\nBeneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents,\nCoiling, uncoiling, blue black, sparked with fires.\n\nThe old dead priests\nFeel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them,\nAbove the smell of scorching, oozing pinyon,\nThe acrid smell of rain.\n\nAnd now the showers\nSurround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers:\nShaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring,\nWhirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-rebel": { - "title": "“A Rebel”", - "body": "Tie a bandage over his eyes,\nAnd at his feet\nLet rifles drearily patter\nTheir death-prayers of defeat.\n\nThrow a blanket over his body,\nIt need no longer stir;\nTruth will but stand the stronger\nFor all who died for her.\n\nNow he has broken through\nTo his own secret place;\nWhich, if we dared to do,\nWe would have no more power left to look on that dead face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rock": { - "title": "“The Rock”", - "body": "This rock, too, was a word;\nA word of flame and force when that which hurled\nThe stars into their places in the night\nFirst stirred.\n\nAnd, in the summer’s heat,\nLay not your hand on it, for while the iron hours beat\nGray anvils in the sky, it glows again\nWith unfulfilled desire.\n\nTouch it not; let it stand\nRagged, forlorn, still looking at the land;\nThe dry blue chaos of mountains in the distance,\nThe slender blades of grass it shelters are\nIts own dark thoughts of what is near and far.\nYour thoughts are yours, too; naked let them stand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-silence": { - "title": "“The Silence”", - "body": "There is a silence which I carry about with me always--\nA silence perpetual, for it is self-created:\nA silence of heat, of water, of unchecked fruitfulness,\nThrough which each year the heavy harvests bloom, and burst, and fall.\n\nDeep, matted green silence of my South,\nOften, within the push and the scorn of great cities,\nI have seen that mile-wide waste of water swaying out to you,\nAnd on its current glimmering I am going to the sea.\n\nThere is a silence I have achieved--I have walked beyond its threshold.\nI know it is without horizons, boundless, fathomless, perfect.\nAnd some day maybe, far away,\nI shall curl up in it at last and sleep an endless sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-skaters": { - "title": "“The Skaters”", - "body": "Black swallows swooping or gliding\nIn a flurry of entangled loops and curves;\nThe skaters skim over the frozen river.\nAnd the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,\nIs like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnets-at-sunset": { - "title": "“Sonnets at Sunset”", - "body": "# I.\n\nExcept when unexpected, death is still\nSomething that we must build for, every day;\nThe skull that watches the untroubled way:\nGuest at the banquet, brightness of hour unfulfilled.\nDescending curtain to the time-quickened play\nWhich has no audience, but the past. The shrill\nScream of the knife, stab of the fire that spilled\nAnother hope like ours, a stay that would not stay.\n\nWe are the victims death has not yet taken\nAway from our task of serving life. This world\nIs never too much with us, when we know\nThat all which is given must be soon forsaken,\nThe crown cast off, the task laid down. Now whirled\nBeyond the world’s verge, death stands here, aglow.\n\n\n# II.\n\nStrange that this inner fire which was the soul,\nFixed in the breastbone, running to the head,\nCloser than hands or feet, should be thus cold.\nAll is most motionless if one man be dead.\nBut yet this body, fit for nothing good,\nIs scarred and marked by that long battle made\nWith spirit, which the soul forced forth. The flood\nOf flesh formed by the soul knew not one battle stayed.\n\nOne sees the joy that spirit brought. One sees\nThe shattering impact of soul’s fire. One finds\nBefore the dead, life made both many and one:\nDefeat and victory, agony and ease\nAll in one helpless shape. The many kinds\nOf being merge to a breath before the sun.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThis is the shape that young Gotama saw,\nWhen with his charioteer he rode abroad;\nThe body of one dead laid by the road,\nEyes staring sightless, and thrust-open jaw.\nAnd yet there is still pity here and awe\nIn this cold rigid face. Death has bestowed\nA final touch of beauty. Lighted is man’s load.\nAmid the horror, glory stands without flaw.\n\nMemory that fades, and moan that makes alike,\nDeath brings to man nothing and everything:--\nGod poised amid the ruin God has made,\nThe light that mocked us, moving to a shade:\nA transitory glow time cannot strike,\nAnd the cold hair stroked by an angel’s wing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnets-of-life": { - "title": "“Sonnets of Life”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAt one time I had faith; now that is gone.\nAt one time I had hope; that is gone, too.\nAt one time love, like a broad burning sun\nLit up my path and made my old life new.\nBut that time now is past; bowed with the years\nBefore I am old, and broken with the weight\nOf too much knowledge, drained of useless tears,\nFor the last moment of life I idly wait.\nWho can live long with a cold empty heart?\nShould I live long or little, this I know:\nThat when to darkness I at last depart,\nI shall have given all I could bestow;\nI shall take with me nothing in my death,\nHaving cast on mankind my love, hope, faith.\n\n\n# II.\n\nJoy taught me grief and grief has brought me laughter;\nLife gives me death; shall death not offer life?\nFrom so much toil must nothing follow after,\nIs there no prize for pain, no crown for strife?\nWho knows, who knows? From what far shore is blown\nSilence we hear though it speak naught to us?\nFrom what dark sphere pours the great night that, sown\nWith stars and sleet, by quickening shall renew us?\nIs there a mockery in the light of day,\nAnd in dark night a secret well of sorrow,\nThat through the sunlight’s power we pass away\nBut in dumb sleep join yesterday to tomorrow?--\nShaping the web of time that, red or green,\nFalls like a blanket quenching truth unseen.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow were I free to choose my way of going\nWhat would I soonest take for my reward?\nNo mighty victory to the dumb sky glowing,\nNo golden city by the midnight starred.\nThis, only this--more strength to bear the weight\nOf a day’s burden that--my back knows well--\nHolds all the past packed dense; to share the fate\nOf life about me, mingling heaven and hell;\nSome souls to love, nor crave love in return;\nSome friends to keep, nor doubt their loyalties;\nBread broken oft in tears--so let me burn\nA lost spark, voiceless in the raging seas!\nTill at the last, in slackening dark release,\nGrant me, O Life, the cold eternal peace.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nImmeasurably the empty vault of heaven\nCold, dark and naked looms above, unlighted;\nAn ocean without bounds whereto, fate-driven,\nThe soul of man must go, when time is plighted.\nA thousand prayers into this void are hurled,\nBut none are answered, none could ever be;\nWithin its depths how many a ruined world\nReflects some broken gleam of majesty!\nMan is the tragic afterthought of time,\nPeering into the gulf, he there discovers\nThe long march, slowly rising from the slime,\nTo the last summit he must share with others--\nSpirits unseen. Quick as life’s cup is made,\nDeath fills it up with hemlock and nightshade.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe setting sun drifts slowly over the world;\nThe light breeze rises, moving steadily on;\nThrough pinnacles of dewy leaves unfurled\nSoon will sweet sleep and darkness bring the dawn.\nSo many thousand years have shaped this clay,\nSo old this world was ere I came to be;\nLife seems a midge’s dance within a ray,\nAnd death the sky’s unanswering vacancy.\nSo must all perish, every living spark\nSink to the final void from whence it rose,\nAnd the warm earth roll horror-stricken, dark\nBeneath the weight of equatorial snows.\nNo matter, since great deeds, once pure and bold,\nToday grow idle dreams, a tale long told.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nEach morning I cried out, “Where is the Christ?”\nLifting my empty hands to the dumb heaven;\nAnd every nightfall weariness sufficed\nTo make my soul forget how it had striven.\nThe world still bowed before the Lords of Hell--\nOdin, Priapus, Mammon--every day\nTen million Tudases strove their Lord to sell,\nAnd heaven was dumb and had no word to say.\nThen weary, hopeless, beaten by the lies\nOf life I wandered on a city street:\nAnd there a starving man with piteous eyes\nStopped me and asked me for a bite to eat:\nI who had called on Christ in my mad pride,\nLike Caiaphas now idly turned aside.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nLess than a grain of sand is man, far less;\nLess than the wind the utterance of his heart;\nLess than the rain his power to damn or bless,\nLess than the dust the temples of his art.\nHe is a feeble force, a flickering flame\nUpon the summit of a mountain; high\nAcross the night he strives to scrawl his name:\nBut soon he fades; too soon has power to die.\nAnd there is lesser effort in his thought\nThan in the atom’s whirling drift of spheres;\nThough he has learned through cunning dearly bought\nTo count the stars, he cannot count his tears.\nO outcast heir of dumb eternity,\nWhat is there left for you to do but die?\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nNot in the night, for night has need of men;\nNot in the noon, for noon is sick of power;\nBut in the dusk of early dawning, then\nOver the hillslopes let it come, mine hour.\nAs the earth wakens, let me see the Word\nBlaze through the eastern gates, and be outspread\nIn orient glory, by mankind unheard,\nA shadowless ring of light, about earth’s head.\nSo even death will be daunted, and the grave\nWill be consumed in a mounting crown of rays\nUp to the zenith rising, wave on wave;\nTo mark for me the last of earthly days.\nAs the world wakens to its work again,\nLet me slip out, a ship, athwart the tides of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "At the first hour, it was as if one said, “Arise.”\nAt the second hour, it was as if one said, “Go forth.”\nAnd the winter constellations that are like patient ox-eyes\nSank below the white horizon at the north.\n\nAt the third hour, it was as if one said, “I thirst”;\nAt the fourth hour, all the earth was still:\nThen the clouds suddenly swung over, stooped, and burst;\nAnd the rain flooded valley, plain and hill.\n\nAt the fifth hour, darkness took the throne;\nAt the sixth hour, the earth shook and the wind cried;\nAt the seventh hour, the hidden seed was sown;\nAt the eighth hour, it gave up the ghost and died.\n\nAt the ninth hour, they sealed up the tomb;\nAnd the earth was then silent for the space of three hours.\nBut at the twelfth hour, a single lily from the gloom\nShot forth, and was followed by a whole host of flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "to-the-unknown-god": { - "title": "“To the Unknown God”", - "body": "# I.\n\nYou, who are life entwined with death in fiery bonds of longing,\nDazzling flame in the night, black cloud across the noon-days\nYou are eternal; transient because eternal:\nYou are all things on-circling into one.\nForce of the darkened moment\nFresh-pulsing through my being,\nMadly caressing my naked heart, I hold you.\nSprung from the dust of earth, I meet you face to face.\n\nYou who have carved the foreheads of the mountains,\nDarted the billion spears of the rain down-pouring,\nCrashed in the fall of the torrent, roared in the glittering river,\nMurmured and whistled and hummed in the uprisen sea:\n\nYou gardener of the earth! Ten million blossoms\nBloom heedlessly and die for you each moment;\nForests cast down their leaves, renew in spring-like splendor,\nOn hills and plains great herds heed your wild voice.\n\nDancer amid the hurricanes of heaven,\nBreath of the black typhoon, shaper of sudden earthquake,\nLord of the tidal wave, king of the fire and the tempest,\nTo you be praise eternal!\n\nYou who have buried the universe in darkness,\nHave fashioned countless suns to wheel apart in darkness,\nHave fashioned man to bear the torch of soul athwart the darkness,\nYou, hid in the pulse of atoms through the darkness:\n\nSince we are lost in boundless night, and never\nMay we find out the light of truth that conquers every shadow:\nSince what is locked away in our own hearts eludes us,\nTo you be praise forever!\n\nPraise for each moment of life that is in vain;\nPraise for each idle breath, red praise from dawn to sunset,\nDark praise in seas of sleep, praise for awakening sorrow,\nPraise, endless praise unspoken!\n\nPraise above all for every sin and failure;\nPraise for all here that stumbles, falls, and struggles.\nSince error is burning life and death is black perfection,\nPraise that no life is perfect!\n\nPraise for each bitter moment of helpless courage,\nPraise for each grinding care, each dragging sorrow,\nPraise for despair that counsels us to perish,\nPraise for both hell and heaven!\n\nPraise because naught abides; praise because all is ever\nThe seed that is born and dies, renews itself to alter,\nHurrying from shape to shape the soul new-formed, unmeasured,\nBy time or space or life or love or death.\n\nOut of a thousand million living voices,\nOut of a thousand billion burning planets,\nOut of the boundless infinite, past and present, summed up in this moment,\nPraise without end, and glory!\n\n\n# II.\n\nHave mercy, O God, upon all mankind here upon earth,\nBecause we have nothing left to offer you:\nNothing but our broken bodies,\nNothing but our broken hearts,\nNothing but our broken lives,\nOur labors which are endless,\nOur sorrows which are useless,\nOur infamy which is perfect.\nBecause of this, O God,\nHave mercy now upon us!\n\nHave mercy upon us because we were born to sorrow;\nBecause the first thing that we feel is pain,\nAnd the second, hunger;\nBecause the winter makes us shiver and the summer pant for breath;\nBecause in heat or cold, in day or night we labor\nLabor, struggle, suffer, fight with time and hunger\nOnly to win strength for a further struggle;\nCheating ourselves of ease and sleep because we dare not take them,\nWorrying, quarrelling, oppressing the sickly and the weak,\nLying, stealing, defrauding, and laughing at those we defraud;\nJudging each other in hypocrisy, and applauding ourselves for our judgments;\nBecause the beginning and the end of life are alike injustice and sorrow,\nHave mercy now upon us!\nHave mercy upon us, O God, because the end is darkness;\nBecause faithless, hopeless, loveless, we yet cry out to you;\nThough you deafen your ears for eternity, and will never make us an answer,\nThough we have nothing left but to cry out and to pass on into darkness,\nBecause we are madmen mouthing before the eternal silence!\nFrom the depths of our degradation, from the bottom of our broken hearts,\nFrom the night of our hopeless lives, from the despairs of our failing strength,\nFrom the shame of our lying lips, from the pollution of our impure minds,\nFrom the sloth of our sordid souls, from our greed, from our need, from our anger,\nFrom our madness, from our horror, from the stark staring night of our hell,\nBut for one little instant, because we cry out without cause,\nWithout reason, without excuse, merely because we dare cry out,\nHave mercy now upon us!\n\n\n# III.\n\nWith your outlaws, O God, let me stand up at the judgment:\nWith those who blasphemed you because they sought you always;\nWith those who denied you because you denied yourself to them,\nWith those who were broken on the great terrible wheel of this earth,\nWith those who hated themselves because they loved you,\nWith those who labored against themselves because you cursed their labor,\nWith those to whom life was vain struggle and time was worth nothing but for a glimpse of your face,\nWith your outlaws, O God, I claim at last a place.\nGrant me, O God,\nNot to know bodies only but also the souls behind them:\nNot the green garment of grass the earth wears, but the fire of her naked flesh,\nNot the blue cloud-ridden sky but the song of the lark as it soars\nLike a young bridegroom, joyous, through the mystery of those spaces.\nLet me long desperately after the flesh but still more desperately after the spirit,\nLet me be never satisfied, let me pass on through life still seeking,\nLet me look at the stars aloof and love them, immoral and lawless:\nLet me look upon men and women and love them, even though you warn me not to love them.\nSince all the temples made by hands fall soon to dust and ruin,\nSince this song too is useless, a vain cry uncomprehended,\nSince I, at bottom, am lawless and you have promised and said\nThat the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent shall take it by storm,\nPlace me now among the violent, among those who admit of no gods,\nClass me among the outcasts, the broken and weary, the followers of every lost cause upon earth:\nMake me now one of them, fill me with their fury, let me, as they, seek you face to face,\nBeyond the last illusion, where amid the shouting stars\nThroned upon fire, in garments sealed with endless sacrifice,\nSacred and glorious, flesh and spirit fused and merged in one,\nYou turn the great wheel of the world under your bleeding feet.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nStony and grey, and agelessly old and chill,\nHe sits who craves no part in human will:\n\nUnspeaking and unwearied, stirring not,\nThe single living force time has forgot.\n\nAbout him rage ten billion suns. Their eyes\nBlaze on him, but he looks without surprise;\n\nWatching their shapes before him shift and run,\nAnd caring not what is undone or done.\n\nFor weary, idle, very old and stale\nTo him is now creation’s endless tale.\n\nAnd naught within it all can he now see,\nIts infinite naught but vacuity.\n\nAll is but shapeless dust his feet have trod,\nIn vain upstirring it. Not any God\n\nAs equal to himself he found; again\nHe has sought here and there, but all in vain.\n\nVain, idle, useless; neither in heaven nor hell\nNor in mankind’s dumb longing can he dwell:\n\nOnly within the void. Withdrawn behind\nThe veil of time can he rest now resigned.\n\nSometimes the fall of a lost star through night\nHe sees, but does not alter his fixed sight.\n\nSometimes a world explodes, and people shriek\nAs they are torn to bits. He does not speak.\n\nSometimes a new star-cluster swift expands\nOut of dead dust dark whirled. He does not move his\n hands.\nOnly from age to age across that face,\nVast, stony, lifeless, without any trace\n\nOf hope or struggle, slowly falls a tear\nAnd slides down cheek and chin till it drops clear\n\nInto the abyss of nothingness. And no spot\nOf space receives it. ’Tis as if it were not.\n\nAnd still he does not move. And still he sees,\nOut of the darkness crawling, new eternities\n\nWhich ebb and flow, though still his dark heart dreams\nThat all those tears, which have fallen down in streams\n\nFrom his eyes since the birth of time, have grown\nAn endless ocean, serene, still, alone,\n\nWhose brackish waters quench the failing power\nOf the far stars; and rising, hour by hour,\n\nWill conquer worlds of ice and flame and men,\nAnd when the last has sunken, then, oh then,\n\nBrooding on that still ocean will he be\nAlone at last to all eternity.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWe have no power of life that is not shared;\nWe have no past that is not ours; today\nEach burning moment that we live is filled\nWith deep incredible meanings, born in song.\n\nWe are the bearers of the word unheard.\nThe sharers of the flame unseen. We know\nThat love and death are one, yet in between,\nLife, like a point of steel, plucks at our strings anew.\n\nWe have no force to lift a little finger\nWithout awaking, in the harp of unimagined power,\nSome tune that travels on.\nWe are the players in your symphony,\n\nO God, and when strings break,\nAnd the faint frozen fingers cannot strike\nAught but the shuddering rattle of death upon them,\nOn far, far, distant strings the song of life is waking:\n\nWaking and rising and calling\nTo the dumb sleepers under earth,\nStirring the dust of long-forgotten planets\nOn million-miled horizons yet unseen.\n\nPlay on, play on and strike\nThe red strings of the will until they quiver.\nThrough fire, whirlwind, death, despair, and darkness\nLike a great wave sounds high the symphony;\nWe are, O God, one broken immortal music:\n\nAnd we will play on still,\nThough earth respond not, nor the skies make echo,\nTill dust of man on dust of earth is scattered,\nAnd the last sunset’s wave of flame enfolds us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "upon-the-hill": { - "title": "“Upon the Hill”", - "body": "A hundred miles of landscape spread before me like a fan;\nHills behind naked hills, bronze light of evening on them shed;\nHow many thousand ages have these summits spied on man?\nHow many thousand times shall I look on them ere this fire in me is dead?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "f-s-flint": { - "metadata": { - "name": "F. S. Flint", - "birth": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._S._Flint", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "fragment": { - "title": "“Fragment”", - "body": "… that night I loved you\nin the candlelight.\nYour golden hair\nstrewed the sweet whiteness of the pillows\nand the counterpane.\nO the darkness of the corners,\nthe warm air, and the stars\nframed in the casement of the ships’ lights!\nThe waves lapped into the harbour;\nthe boats creaked;\na man’s voice sang out on the quay;\nand you loved me.\nIn your love were the tall tree fuchsias,\nthe blue of the hortensias, the scarlet nasturtiums,\nthe trees on the hills,\nthe roads we had covered,\nand the sea that had borne your body\nbefore the rock of Hartland.\nYou loved me with these\nand with the kindness of people,\ncountry folk, sailors and fisherman,\nand the old lady who had lodged us and supped us.\nYou loved me with yourself\nthat was these and more,\nchanged as the earth is changed\ninto the bloom of flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "lament": { - "title": "“Lament”", - "body": "The young men of the world\nAre condemned to death.\nThey have been called up to die\nFor the crime of their fathers.\n\nThe young men of the world,\nThe growing, the ripening fruit,\nHave been torn from their branches,\nWhile the memory of the blossom\nIs sweet in women’s hearts;\nThey have been cast for a cruel purpose\nInto the mashing-press and furnace.\n\nThe young men of the world\nLook into each other’s eyes,\nAnd read there the same words:\nNot yet! Not yet!\nBut soon perhaps, and perhaps certain.\n\nThe young men of the world\nNo longer possess the road:\nThe road possesses them.\nThey no longer inherit the earth:\nThe earth inherits them.\nThey are no longer the masters of fire:\nFire is their master;\nThey serve him, he destroys them.\nThey no longer rule the waters:\nThe genius of the seas\nHas invented a new monster,\nAnd they fly from its teeth.\nThey no longer breathe freely:\nThe genius of the air\nHas contrived a new terror\nThat rends them into pieces.\n\nThe young men of the world\nAre encompassed with death\nHe is all about them\nIn a circle of fore and bayonets.\n\nWeep, weep, o women,\nAnd old men break your hearts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ford-madox-ford": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ford Madox Ford", - "birth": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Madox_Ford", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "after-all": { - "title": "“After All”", - "body": "Yes, what’s the use of striving on?\nAnd what’s to show when all is done?\nThe bells will toll as now they toil,\nHere’s an old lilt will summarize the whole:\n\n“This fell about in summertide,\nAbout the midmost of the year,\nOur master did to covert ride\nTo drive the fallow deer.\nChanced we upon the Douglas men ere ever one of us was ware.”\n\n“Then sped a shaft from covert side\nAnd pierced in behind his ear;\nThis fell about in summertide\nAt midmost of the year.”\n\nSo down he fell and rested there\nAmong the sedge hard by the brook,\nAbout the midmost of the year\nHis last and lasting rest he took.\n\nAnd so, “This fell in winter late,\nOr ever Candlemas drew near,\nHis bride had found another mate\nBefore the ending of the year.”\n\n“His goshawks decked another’s wrists,\nHis hounds another’s voice did fear.\nHis men another’s errands ride\nHis steed another burden bear,\nHim they forgot by Christmastide.\nEre Candlemas drew near.”\n\nOur hounds shall know another leash,\nOur men another master know,\nAnd we reck little of it all, so we but find good rest below.\n\nSo what’s the use of striving on?\nAnd what’s to show when all is done?\nThe ring of bells will chime and chime,\nAnd all the rest’s just waste--just waste of time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "and-afterwards": { - "title": "“And Afterwards”", - "body": "Once I was a gallant and bold I\nAnd you so tender and true,\nBut I’ll never again be the old I\nNor you the old you.\n\nI shall go lounging along on the edge\nOf the grass … You’ll loiter along by the hedge.\nI shall go dogged through dust and the dirt\nLike an ass in my moods.\nYou with a new sweetheart at your skirt\nEv’ry few roods …\n“Once I was a gallant,” etc.\n\nWe’ll maybe jog along together\nA long way;\nMaybe put up with the weather together,\nBetter or worse\nAs it chances day by day,\nOr maybe part with a kick and a curse\nI and you,\nAfter a turning or two …\n“But I’ll never again,” etc.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "antwerp": { - "title": "“Antwerp”", - "body": "# I.\n\nGloom!\nAn October like November;\nAugust a hundred thousand hours,\nAnd all September,\nA hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days,\nAnd half October like a thousand years …\nAnd doom!\nThat then was Antwerp …\n In the name of God,\nHow could they do it?\nThose souls that usually dived\nInto the dirty caverns of mines;\nWho usually hived\nIn whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;\nWho dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud,\nLumbering to work over the greasy sods …\nThose men there, with the appearance of clods\nWere the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God\nEver shrived …\nAnd it is not for us to make them an anthem.\nIf we found words there would come no wind that would fan them\nTo a tune that the trumpets might blow it,\nShrill through the heaven that’s ours or yet Allah’s,\nOr the wide halls of any Valhallas.\nWe can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours\nFor inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays\nIs this:\n“In the name of God, how could they do it?”\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor there is no new thing under the sun,\nOnly this uncomely man with a smoking gun\nIn the gloom …\nWhat the devil will he gain by it?\nDigging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it\nWaiting his doom;\nThe sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood,\nTill the trench of gray mud\nIs turned to a brown purple drain by it.\nWell, there have been scars\nWon in many wars …\nPunic,\nLacedaemonian, wars of Napoleon, wars for faith, wars for honour, for love, for possession,\nBut this Belgian man in his ugly tunic,\nHis ugly round cap, shooting on, in a sort of obsession,\nOverspreading his miserable land,\nStanding with his wet gun in his hand …\nDoom!\nHe finds that in a sudden scrimmage,\nAnd lies, an unsightly lump on the sodden grass …\nAn image that shall take long to pass!\n\n\n# III.\n\nFor the white-limbed heroes of Hellas ride by upon their horses\nForever through our brains.\nThe heroes of Cressy ride by upon their stallions;\nAnd battalions and battalions and battalions-- …\nThe Old Guard, the Young Guard, the men of Minden and of Waterloo,\nPass, for ever staunch,\nStand, for ever true;\nAnd the small man with the large paunch,\nAnd the gray coat, and the large hat, and the hands behind the back,\nWatches them pass\nIn our minds for ever …\nBut that clutter of sodden corses\nOn the sodden Belgian grass--\nThat is a strange new beauty.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWith no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty,\nAssuredly that is the way of it,\nThe way of beauty …\nAnd that is the highest word you can find to say of it.\nFor you cannot praise it with words\nCompounded of lyres and swords,\nBut the thought of the gloom and the rain\nAnd the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain,\nShall eat itself into your brain:\nAnd you will say of all heroes, “They fought like the Belgians!”\nAnd you will say: “He wrought like a Belgian his fate out of gloom.”\nAnd you will say: “He bought like a Belgian his doom.”\nAnd that shall be an honourable name;\n“Belgian” shall be an honourable word;\nAs honourable as the fame of the sword,\nAs honourable as the mention of the many-chorded lyre,\nAnd his old coat shall seem as beautiful as the fabrics woven in Tyre.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd what in the world did they bear it for?\nI don’t know.\nAnd what in the world did they dare it for?\nPerhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand.\nThey could very well have watched a hundred legions go\nOver their fields and between their cities\nDown into more southerly regions.\nThey could very well have let the legions pass through their woods,\nAnd have kept their lives and their wives and their children and cattle and goods.\nI don’t understand.\nWas it just love of their land?\nOh, poor dears!\nCan any man so love his land?\nGive them a thousand thousand pities\nAnd rivers and rivers of tears\nTo wash off the blood from the cities of Flanders.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThis is Charing Cross;\nIt is midnight;\nThere is a great crowd\nAnd no light.\nA great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud.\nSurely, that is a dead woman--a dead mother!\nShe has a dead face;\nShe is dressed all in black;\nShe wanders to the bookstall and back,\nAt the back of the crowd;\nAnd back again and again back,\nShe sways and wanders.\n\nThis is Charing Cross;\nIt is one o’clock.\nThere is still a great cloud, and very little light;\nImmense shafts of shadows over the black crowd\nThat hardly whispers aloud …\nAnd now! … That is another dead mother,\nAnd there is another and another and another …\nAnd little children, all in black,\nAll with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places,\nWandering from the doors of the waiting-room\nIn the dim gloom.\nThese are the women of Flanders.\nThey await the lost.\nThey await the lost that shall never leave the dock;\nThey await the lost that shall never again come by the train\nTo the embraces of all these women with dead faces;\nThey await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and foss,\nIn the dark of the night.\nThis is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock;\nThere is very little light.\n\nThere is so much pain.\n\n\n_L’Envoi_\n\nAnd it was for this that they endured this gloom;\nThis October like November,\nThat August like a hundred thousand hours,\nAnd that September,\nA hundred thousand dragging sunlit days,\nAnd half October like a thousand years …\nOh, poor dears!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "buckshee": { - "title": "“Buckshee”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI think God must have been a stupid man\nTo have sent a spirit, chivalrous and loyal,\nCruel and tender, arrogant and so meek,\nGallant and timorous, halting and as swift\nAs a hawk descending-to have sent such a spirit,\nCertain in all its attributes, into this age\nOf our banal world.\n\nHe had Infinity\nWhich must embrace infinities of worlds,\nAnd had Eternity\nAnd could have chosen any other age.\nHe had Omnipotence\nAnd could have framed a fitting world and time.\n\nBut, bruised and bruising, wounded, contumacious,\nAn eagle pinioned, an eagle on the wing;\nA leopard maimed, a leopard in its spring,\nA swallow caged, a swallow in the spacious\nAnd amethystine palpitating blue:\nA night-bird of the heath, shut off from the heath,\nA deathless being daubed with the mud of death,\nA moth all white, draggled with blood and dew,\n’Haitchka, the undaunted, loyal spirit of you\n\nCame to our world of cozening and pimping,\nOur globe compact of virtues all half-virtue,\nOf vices scarce half-vices; made of truth\nBlurred in the edges, and of lies so limping\nThey will not stir the pulse in the utterance\nFrom a New World that’s new and knows not youth\nUnto our France that’s France but knows not France,\nWhere charity and every virtue hurt you,\nO coin of gold dropped into leaden palms,\nManna and frankincense and myrrh and balms\nAnd bitter herbs and spices of the South\n\nBecause God was a stupid man and threw\nInto our outstretched palms, ’Haitchka, you.\n\n\n# II. _Compagnie Transatlantique_\n\nWhat a dead year! The sea\nSwings, a dull amethyst;\nAnd the doves and sparrows droop\nGrey, and the gulls in the mist\nOn the dull wet rim of the sea.\n\nSlowly, slowly, heavily, heavily; dully, so dully, the\nheavens lower.\nSlowly, slowly, heavily, dully, the sands of the hourglass\ndescend.\nI have neither foe nor friend;\nI am neither erect nor stoop;\nI am neither enslaved nor wield power.\nWill this endless day never end,\nOr this month or this year?\nSlow, heavy, dull, drear,\nWhy should they end?\n\nThe mists are riven;\nThe sea swings free.\nThere’s blue in the heaven\nAnd horns on the sea.\n\n_Iô! Iô!_ the conches blow.\n\nThe sparrows and doves\nAll follow their loves.\nWhite the gulls troop\nIn a lane on the sea.\nThere’s a horn on the hill!\nA furrow is driven\n(Though you are invisible still)\nStraight from the sky-line to me.\nAnd\n\n_Iô! Iô!_ the conches blow.\n_Iô! Iô! ’Ha-itchka!_\n\n\nIII. _Fleuve Profonde_s\n\n_Nuitée à l’américaine.\n\nYour brilliant friend\nBrilliantly lectures me on the feminine characters\nOf my female characters.\n\nOur striking host,\nHaving strikingly struck his striking head\nAgainst the bottom panel of his bedroom door,\nHas been conveyed to bed\n\nBy several combined but unconcerted efforts.\n\nHear how he sings …\n\nThe other guests\nDispersed among the apartments of the apartment.\nDazedly hearing the appraisements of Elaine\nConcerning half-forgotten feminines, I sit\nBeside her brilliance on the divan-edge,\nMy knees drawn up to my chin in the dim light.\nWe seem to be alone.\n\nShe tosses back\nHer brilliant mane and white uplifted chin.\nLong throat! Makes incantation with her spidery, white,\nButterfly-moving fingers. I JUST LOATHE\nMISS WANNOP!\n\n_There\nDrift sounds of harpsichords,\nOf saxophones and ukuleles, drums,\nMandolins, mandragoras, slapped faces, spirituals,\nLacing the Paris night._\n\nThat’s four o’clock,\nThe Luxemburg clock drones out.\n\n_But … hear them SING!_\n\nBeside her I\nSit like a drummer, peddling rubber pants\nAnd comforters in the Atlas mountain valleys\nBeside their largest lion. Knees drawn up\nAlmost to the chin; peeping, a-shiver, sideways,\nAt a lip-licking monster.\nI am all unused\nTo talk about my books.\n\nIF I COULD GET\nMY FINGERS ON YOUR ROTTEN CULLY’S\nTHROAT.\n\nShe can’t mean me. By rights I am the lion!\n\nI’M ALL FOR SYLVIA.\n\nThen it’s Tietjens’ throat\nIn jeopardy …\n_But hear them rolling along._\n\n_It aint sayin nothin_ … A black light’s shining\n_It aint doin nothin_ … Across the shadows\n_It keeps on rollin_ … A ray of granite\n\nI LOATHE YOUR TIETJENS\n\n… A cone of granite--\n\nWhat’s that dark shining?\n\nBUT THAT’S ’AITCHKA\nI LOATHE THAT WOMAN … NO, NOT ’AITCHKA\nHOW STUPID OF YOU … THE WANNOP TROLLOP\nMY BEST MOST INTIMATE FRIEND\n\nYou too had drawn\nYour knees up to your chin. And, motionless,\nIn an unwinking scrutiny you sat,\nA cone of granite, a granite falcon,\nA granite guardian of granite Pharaohs.\nThe leather chair\nYou’d chosen for your vigils made with you\nA cone, Egyptian, chiselled, oriental,\nHard, without motion. Polished shining granite.\nDid you watch to save your dearest friend from me,\nOr me from your dearest friend! … I wish they’d sing\nAnother rhythm. You gaze before you.\n\n_It must be seven. Are you-all going?_\n\n_Yes, Ezra’s going. Not one more hot dog.\nThe Halles for breakfast._\n\nI LOVE YOUR SYLVIA--\nSHE KEPT HIM JUMPING, SHE LOATHED HIS VITALS,\nSHE GAVE HIM THUMBSCREWS, THE CALLOUS MEALSACK.\n\n_Yes, Marjie’s going. Bill, ARE you coming?_\n\nI know why _she’s_ your dearest friend.\n\nElaine aw COME on … (Aitchka, bring her.)\nWhy, where’s ’Aitchka? … She’s with that writer.\nOh, with that WRITER. Aw, with THAT writer--\nShe’ll keep HIM rolling along.\n\nSchenehaia means “pretty creature.”\nSchenehaia! For short ’Aitchka.\nShe’ll keep him rolling along!\n\n\n# IV. _Chez nos Amis_\n\nSilent in the background, she\nGlowers now and then at me\nWith a smouldering tigress’ eye\nThat does dream of cruelty.\n\nLeopard, ounce or ocelot\nShe by turns is cold or hot;\nShe is sinuous and black,\nLong of limb and lithe of back.\n\nThe deep places of the mind\nShe can probe, and thus can find\nEvery weakness, every blot,\nEvery weary aching spot.\n\nShe will scrutinize her prey,\nTurn disdainfully away,\nSinuous and dark and cold.\nThen she’ll spring and then she’ll hold.\n\nThen with what a dreadful heat\nShe will mangle breasts and feet\nAnd hands and lacerate a heart.\n… And then listlessly depart.\n\n\n# V. _L’interprète-au Caveau Rouge_\n\nThey sing too fast for you? I will interpret:\nThat aged, faded, leonine-faced carle\nIn dim old tights and frayed striped gaberdine\nNow quavers the famous sonnet. This is it:\n\n_Sonnet de Ronsard:_\n\n_When you are old, and dim the candles burn,\nSeated beside your fire, with distafs gossiping,\nAnd reading out this verse say: “Here’s a thing!\nRonsard m’a célébrée du temps que j’étais jeune.”\nThere shall be no old spinster shall not turn,\nThough half asleep above the brands that sing\nAnd, hearing of my name, cry: “Here’s a thing--\nRonsard extols our dame from out his urn.”\n\nMy soul shall wander through the myrile dust\nOf fields Elysian, thou as thou must\nShalt bend, all bent, above the dying brands.\n\nAh, lady, seize the hour--the minute flies;\nResort thee thither where thy true love lies,\nNor wait till hail torture thy tender hands.\n\nYou did not know I was a poet? Few\nPossess that knowledge. I’ve the trick at times--\nGive me the subject, I will find you rhymes.\nThis Provençale, bright-cheeked, high-stomachered,\nWith coal-black eyes shall sing a thing. The tune\nMight make you cry if you had any heart.\n\n_Plaisir d’Amour:_\n\nLove’s sweets are sweet for such a little day,\nHer bitterness shall last your whole long life.\n\nThe world forsook, I followed Sylvia.\nMe now she leaves to be another’s wife.\n\n“Whilst still the waters of this stream shall glide\nBetween its banks of meadow-sweet and bracken,\nTis thee I’ll love.”\n\nThus, thus, once Sylvia cried.\nThe waters flow-their verge she has forsaken.\n\nLove’s truths are sweet for such a little day!\nHer bitter falsehoods last a whole long life.\n\nNow here’s your favorite she’s going to sing.\nKnowing, it’s said, what gentlemen prefer,\nShe’s flaxen-locked, but once was _brune piquante_\nAnd _Prix du Conservatoire_. Poor thing, she’ll write\nHer autograph on your programme if you smile at her.\nBut she’s a lovely voice.\n\n\n_Auprès de ma Blonde:_\n\nShe. Down in my father’s garden sweet blooms the lilac tree,\nDown in my father’s garden sweet blooms the lilac tree.\nAnd all the birds of Heaven there nest in company.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman fine it is to be!\n\nShe. Down in my father’s garden sweet blooms the lilac tree,\nAnd all the birds of heaven there nest in company-\nThe quail, the speckled partridge, the turtle fair to see.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman fine it is to be!\n\nShe. And all the birds of Heaven there nest in company,\nThe quail, the speckled partridge, the turtle fair to see;\nAnd eke my pretty stockdove sings night and day for me.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nShe. The quail, the speckled partridge, the turtle fair to see,\nAnd eke my pretty stockdove sings night and day for me.\nShe mourneth for such fair ones as not yet wedded be.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman fine it is to be!\n\nShe. And eke my pretty stockdove sings night and day for me,\nShe mourneth for such fair ones as not yet wedded be,\nBut I have my fair husband, so mourns she not for me.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nShe. She mourneth for such fair ones as not yet wedded be.\nBut I have my fair husband, so mourns she not for me.\nHe. Now tell me this, ah fair one, where may thy true love be?\nWhere lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nShe. But I have my fair husband, so mourns she not for me.\nHe. Now tell me this, ah fair one, where may thy true love be?\nShe. The fause Dutch have him taken, he lies in Batavie.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nHe. Now tell me this, ah fair one, where may thy true love be?\nShe. The fause Dutch have him taken, he lies in Batavie.\nHe. What would’ee give, my fair one, thine own true love to see?\nWhere lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nShe. The fause Dutch have him taken, he lies in Batavie.\nHe. What would’ee give, my fair one, thine own true love to see?\nShe. Oh, I would give Versailles and Paris, that great citie.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nHe. What would’ee give, my fair one, thine own true love to see?\nShe. Oh, I would give Versailles and Paris, that great citie,\nSt. Dennis, Notre Dame, and the spires of my countrie.\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\nShe. Oh, I would give Versailles and Paris, that great citie,\nSt. Dennis, Notre Dame, all the spires of my countrie,\nAnd eke my pretty stockdove that sings alway for me!\nHe. Where lieth my leman, blonde and warm and blonde is she!\nWhere lieth my leman, fine it is to be!\n\n\n\n\nVI. Champètre\n\nYesterday I found a bee-orchid.\nBut when I gave it you, you never raised your eyebrows.\n“That a bee-orchid? It’s like neither bee nor orchid”\nWas all you said. And dropped it amongst the tea-table débris,\nAnd went on gazing out over the lake;\nAs once you dropped my letters into a Sixth Avenue garbage-can,\nAnd went on gazing up West Ninth Street\nTowards Wanamaker’s.\n\nYears ago\nWe boys went spread out over Caesar’s Camp\nWith the Channel at our backs. In the sun shone\nAcross the strip of blue the pink-blue cliffs of France.\nAnd the wind whispered in the couch-grass\nAnd in the heat of the sun the small herbs’ scents were pungent\nAnd sweet and stirring.\nAnd one of us would find a bee-orchid.\nFrom fold to fold of the Downs the cry would go;\n“A bee-orchid!” “Ho! A bee-orchid!” “Hullo! A bee … _or_chid!”\nAnd God promised us the kingdoms of the earth, and a corner in France\nAnd the heart of an oriental woman.\nWell, here is the corner of France.\nThe kingdoms of the Earth are rather at a discount,\nWe should not know what to do with them if we had them.\nAnd you, you have no heart.\n\n\n# VII. _Ripostes_\n\nWhat did you do in Sodom Town?\nHow did you sin in Paris?\n I heard the small talk rise and die down\n And thought: “Her hands are tiny and brown.\n Curse on the time that tarries!”\n\nWhat did you do twixt then and now,\nSince it is past eleven?\n I heard the talk run anyhow\n And thought: “How brown and broad her brow,\n And her white teeth how even!”\n\nWhat will you do twixt now and when\nYou hide beneath carven marble?\n I do not know; but I know, then\n I’ll hear you laugh with gentlemen\n With your laugh like the blackbird’s warble.\n\n\n# VIII. _Vers L’oubli_\n\nWe shall have to give up watering the land\nAlmost altogether.\nThe maize must go.\nBut the chilis and tomatoes may still have\nA little water. The gourds must go.\nWe must begin to give a little to the mandarines\nAnd the lemon trees. Yes, and the string beans.\nWe will do our best to save\nThe chrysanthemums\nBecause you like them.\nThen, if only another big storm comes\nLike the one of Saturday fortnight’s,\nWe might just barely do it … So\nWe may get through to the autumn.\nAt any rate we are through with the season of short nights,\nAnd water given at dusk will remain in the earth until\nThe torrid sun and the immense north wind\nThey call the mistral burn up the face of our hill\n\nYou will find\nThere will be no change in the weather now until\nOctober. August nearly over, the season of storms is done\nAltogether. There will be nothing but this hot sun\nAnd no rain at all\nTill well into the Fall.\n\nTill then we must trust to the fruits\nThough their trees are dried down to the ends of their roots.\nThe muscats are done.\nThe bunch that hangs by the kitchen door\nIs the last but two we shall save.\nBut the wine-grapes and figs and quinces and gages will go on\nNearly till September.\n(If you lay down some of the muscat wine-grapes on paper on the garret floor\nThey will shrink and grow sweeter till honey\nIs acid beside them.)\n\nHow singular and vocal and sweet those birds’ voices are.\nFor them we thank the drouth.\nWithout it they never care\nTo come to us from their woods of the infinitely distant South.\n\nI wish we could have saved more of the plants, but the weather has tried them\nBeyond their endurance. And there is no goodness in our land\nOn this side of the hill.\nEven the wood has hardly enough heart to make fuel\nThough with vine-prunings in the winter days--\nWhen the sea below us is like ruffled satin,\nAnd the sky an infinite number of subtle greys,\nAnd the mistral sings an infinite number of lays in Latin--\n\nAnd you crouch beside the hearth, we shall manage to make up a blaze\nTo get up and go to bed by … But I like the baked, severe, bare\nHill with sea below and the great storms sooner or later. And for me\nThere is no satisfaction anywhere greater\nThan is given by that house-side, silver-grey\nAnd very high,\nWith the single black cypress against the sky\nOver the hill,\nAnd the palm-heads waving away at the mistral’s will.\n\nWell then:\nWe have outlived a winter season and a season of spring\nAnd more than one season of harvesting,\nIn this land\nWhere the harvests come by twos and threes\nOne on the other’s heels.\nDo you remember what grew where the egg-plants and chilis now stand?\nOr the opium poppies with heads like feathery wheels?\nDo you remember when the lemons were little and the oranges smaller than peas?\nWe have outlived sweet corn and haricots,\nThe short season of plentiful water and the rose\nThat covered the cistern in the time of showers\nAnd do you remember the thin bamboo canes?\n\nWe have outlived innumerable growths of flowers,\nThe two great hurricanes\nAnd the innumerable battlings back and forth\nOf the mistral from the Alps in the north\nAnd of siroccos filled with the hot breath--\n“Sirocco, thou that man unto short madness hurrieth!”--\nFrom the sands of Africa infinite miles to the South.\n\nAnd having so, ephemeral, outlived the herbs of the hill\nWe may maybe come through the drouth\nTo the winter’s mouth\nAnd the season of green things\nAnd flowing cisterns and springs.\n\nHark at the voices of those birds in the great catalpa’s shade\nHard by the hole where the swifts once made\nTheir nest on the rafter, thrilling all through the night.\nSingular birds with their portentous singular flight\nAnd human voices. They came all the way\nOver the sea to the bay\nFrom Africa.\nIt is only our drouth that could have lured them away\nSo far from the South. It was perhaps they\nUlysses took for the syrens calling, “Away!”\nWhen he took shelter here from the thunderous main.\nAnd perhaps we may never again\nHear their incomparable full resonance,\nCompact of wailing and indifferent mirth\nAnd undecipherable honeyed laughter,\nOr not on this earth under this torrid sun.\nFor they say\nIt is only once in a century they come this way\nIn time of drouth from their eyries far to the South\nIn Africa.\n\nOr perhaps we shall hear them only after,\nAll harvest gathered in and the time of all fruits being done,\nWe--oh but not too severed in time nor walking apart--\nShall pluck and cry the one to the other along the folds of Cap Brun\n“The Herb Oblivion!”\n\nFor this is a corner of France,\nAnd this the kingdoms of the earth beneath the sun,\nAnd this the garden sealed and set apart\nAnd that the fountain of Touvence.\nAnd, yes, you have a heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-end-piece": { - "title": "“An End Piece”", - "body": "Close the book and say good-bye to everything;\nPass up from the shore and pass by byre and stall,\n--For the smacks shall sail home on the tail of the tides,\nAnd the kine shall stand deep in the sweet water sides,\nAnd they still shall go burying, still wedding brides,\nBut I must be gone in the morning.\n\nOne more look, and so farewell, sweet summering,\nOne moment more and then no more at all,\nFor the skipper shall summon his hands to the sea,\nAnd the shepherd still shepherd his sheep on the lea,\nBut it’s over and done with the man that was me,\nAs over the hill comes the morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-house": { - "title": "“A House”", - "body": "> _The House:_\nI am the House!\nI resemble\nThe drawing of a child\nThat draws “just a house.” Two windows and two doors,\nTwo chimney pots;\nOnly two floors.\nThree windows on the upper one; a fourth\nLooks towards the north.\nI am very simple and mild;\nI am very gentle and sad and old.\nI have stood too long.\n\n> _The Tree:_\nI am the great Tree over above this House!\nI resemble\nThe drawing of a child. Drawing “just a tree”\nThe child draws Me!\nHeavy leaves, old branches, old knots:\nI am more old than the house is old.\nI have known nights so cold\nI used to tremble;\nFor the sap was frozen in my branches,\nAnd the mouse,\nThat stored her nuts in my knot-holes, died. I am strong\nNow … Let a storm come wild\nOver the Sussex Wold,\nI no longer fear it.\nI have stood too long!\n\n> _The Nightingale:_\nI am the Nightingale. The summer through I sit\nIn the great tree, watching the house, and throw jewels over it!\nThere is no one watching but I; no other soul to waken\nEchoes in this valley night!\n\n> _The Unborn Son of the House:_\nYou are mistaken!\nI am the Son of the House!--\nThat shall have silver limbs, and clean straight haunches,\nLean hips, clean lips and a tongue of gold;\nThat shall inherit\nA golden voice, and waken\nA whole world’s wonder!\n\n> _The Nightingale:_\nYoung blood! You are right,\nSo you and I only\nListen and watch and waken\nUnder\nThe stars of the night.\n\n> _The Dog of the House:_\nYou are mistaken!\nThis house stands lonely.\nLet but a sound sound in the seven acres that surround\nTheir sleeping house,\nAnd I, seeming to sleep, shall awaken.\nLet but a mouse\nCreep in the bracken,\nI seeming to drowse, I shall hearken.\nLet but a shadow darken\nTheir threshold; let but a finger\nLie long or linger,\nHolding their latch:\nI am their Dog. And I watch!\nI am just Dog. And being His hound\nI lie\nAll night with my head on my paws,\nWatchful and whist!\n\n> _The Nightingale:_\nSo you and I and their Son and I\nWatch alone, under the stars of the sky.\n\n> _The Cat of the House:_\nI am the Cat. And you lie!\nI am the Atheist!\nAll laws\nI coldly despise.\nI have yellow eyes;\nI am the Cat on the Mat the child draws\nWhen it first has a pencil to use.\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nI am the Goat. I give milk!\n\n> _The Cat of the House:_\nI muse\nOver the hearth with my ’minishing eyes\nUntil after\nThe last coal dies.\nEvery tunnel of the mouse,\nEvery channel of the cricket,\nI have smelt.\nI have felt\nThe secret shifting of the mouldered rafter,\nAnd heard\nEvery bird in the thicket.\nI see\nYou,\nNightingale up in your tree!\n\n> _The Nightingale:_\nThe night takes a turn towards coldness; the stars\nWaver and shake.\nTruly more wake,\nMore thoughts are afloat;\nMore folk are afoot than I knew!\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nI, even I, am the Goat!\n\n> _Cat of the House:_\nEnough of your stuff of dust and of mud!\nI, born of a race of strange things,\nOf deserts, great temples, great kings,\nIn the hot sands where the nightingale never sings!\nOld he-gods of ingle and hearth,\nYoung she-gods of fur and of silk--\nNot the mud of the earth--\nAre the things that I dream of!\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nTibby-Tab, more than you deem of\nI dream of when chewing the cud\nFor my milk:\nWho was born\nOf a Nan with one horn and a liking for gin\nIn the backyard of an inn.\nA child of Original Sin,\nWith a fleece of spun-silk\nAnd two horns in the bud--\nI, made in the image of Pan,\nWith my corrugate, vicious-cocked horn,\nNow make milk for a child yet unborn.\nThat’s a come-down!\nAnd you with your mouse-colored ruff,\nDiscoursing your stuff-of-a-dream,\nSell your birthright for cream,\nAnd bolt from a cuff or a frown.\nThat’s a come-down!\nSo let be! That’s enough!\n\n> _The House:_\nThe top star of the Plough now mounts\nUp to his highest place.\nThe dace\nHang silent in the pool.\nThe night is cool\nBefore the dawn. Behind the blind\nDies down the one thin candle.\nOur harried man,\nMy lease-of-a-life-long Master,\nStudies against disaster;\nGropes for some handle\nAgainst too heavy Fate; pores over his accounts,\nStudying into the morn\nFor the sake of his child unborn.\n\n> _The Unborn Son of the House:_\nThe vibrant notes of the spheres,\nThin, sifting sounds of the dew,\nI hear. The mist on the meres\nRising I hear … So here’s\nTo a lad shall be lusty and bold,\nWith a voice and a heart ringing true!\nTo a house of a livelier hue!\n\n> _The House:_\nThat is true!\nI have stood here too long and grown old.\n\n> _Himself:_\nWhat is the matter with the wicks?\nWhat on earth’s the matter with the wax?\nThe candle wastes in the draught;\nThe blind’s worn thin!\n… Thirty-four and four, ten …\nAnd ten … are forty-nine!\nAnd twenty pun twelve and six was all\nI made by the clover.\nIt’s a month since I laughed:\nI have given up wine.\nAnd then …\nThe Income Tax!\n\n> _The Dog of the House:_\nThe mare’s got out of the stable!\n\n> _The Cat of the House:_\nShe’s able, over and over,\nTo push up the stable latch …\nOver and over again. You would say she’s a witch,\nWith a spite on our Man!\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nHeu! Did you see how she ran!\nShe’s after the clover; she’s over the ditch,\nDoing more harm than a dozen of goats\nWhen there’s no one to watch.\nYet she is the sober old mare with her skin full of oats,\nWhereas we get dry bracken and heather;\nSnatching now and then a scrap of old leather,\nOr half an old tin,\nAs the price of original sin!\n\n> _Himself:_\nI shall live to sell\nThe clock from the hall;\nI shall have to pawn my old Dad’s watch,\nOr fell\nThe last old oak; or sell half the stock …\nOr all!\nOr the oak chest out of the hall.\nOne or the other--or all.\nGod, it is hell to be poor\nFor ever and ever, keeping the Wolf from the door!\n\n> _The Cat of the House:_\nWouldn’t you say\nThat Something, heavy and furry and grey,\nWas sniffing round the door?\nWouldn’t you say\nSkinny fingers, stretching from the thicket,\nFelt for the latch of the wicket?\n\n> _Himself:_\nYou would almost say\nThese blows were repercussions\nOf an avenging Fate!\nBut how have we earned them …\nThe sparks that fell on the cornricks and burned them\nStill in the ear;\nAnd all the set-backs of the year--\nFrost, drought and demurrage,\nThe tiles blown half off the roof?\nWhat is it, what is it all for?\nChastisement of pride? I swear we have no pride!\nWe ride\nBehind an old mare with a flea-bitten hide!\nOr over-much love for a year-old bride?\nBut it’s your duty to love your bride! … But still,\nAll the sows that died,\nAnd the cows all going off milk;\nThe cream coming out under proof;\nThe hens giving over laying;\nThe bullocks straying,\nGetting pounded over the hill!\nIt used to be something--cold feet going over\nThe front of a trench after Stand-to at four!\nBut these other things--God, how they make you blench!\nAye, these are the pip-squeaks that call for\nFour-in-the-morning courage …\nMay you never know, my wench,\nThat’s asleep up the stair!\n\n> _Herself [in her sleep]:_\nI’ll have a kitchen all white tiles;\nAnd a dairy, all marble the shelves and the floor;\nAnd a larder, cream-white and full of air.\nI’ll have whitewood kegs for the flour,\nAnd blackwood kegs for the rice and barley,\nAnd silvery jugs for the milk and cream …\nO glorious Me!\nAnd hour by hour by hour by hour,\nOn piles of cushions from hearth to door,\nI’ll sit sewing my silken seams,\nI’ll sit dreaming my silver dreams;\nWith a little, mettlesome, brown-legged Charley,\nTo leave his ploys and come to my knee,\nAnd question how God can be Three-in-One\nAnd One-in-Three.\nAnd all the day and all the day\nNothing but hoys for my dearest one;\nAnd no care at all but to kiss and twine;\nAnd nought to contrive for but ploys and play\nFor my son, my son, my son, my son!\nOnly at nine,\nWith the dinner finished, the men at their wine;\nAnd the girls in the parlor at forfeits for toffee,\nI’ll make such after-dinner coffee …\nBut it’s all like a dream!\n\n> _Himself:_\nIf Dixon could pay! … But he never will.\nHe promised to do it yesterday … But poor old Dicky’s been through the mill.\nAnd it’s late--it’s too late to sit railing at Fate!\nHe’d pay if he could; but he’s got his fix on …\nYet … If he could pay--\nGod!--It would carry us over the day\nOf Herself!\n\n> _The Clock in the Room:_\nI am the Clock on the Shelf!\nIs … Was … Is … Was!\nToo late … Because … Too late … Because …\nOne! … Two! … Three! … Four!\n\n> _Himself:_\nJust over The Day and a week or two more!\nAnd we’d maybe get through.\nNot with a hell of a lot\nOf margin to spare … But just through!\n\n> _The Clock in the Hall:_\nOne! … Two! … One! … Two!\nAs … your … hours … pass\nI re … cord them\nThough you … waste them\nOr have … stored them\nALL …\n One!\n Two!\n Three!\n Four!\n Begun!\n Half through!\n Let be!\n No more at all!\nI am the Great Clock in the Hall!\n\n> _Himself:_\nIt is four by the clock:\nThe creak of the stair\nMight waken Herself;\nIt would give her a shock\nIf I went up the stair.\nI will doze in the chair.\n\n> _The House:_\nSad! Sad!\nPoor lad!\nI am getting to talk like the clock!\nYear after year! Shock after shock!\nSunlight and starlight; moonlight and shadows!\nI’ve seen him sit on his three-legged stool,\nAnd heard him whimper, going to school.\nBut he’s paid all the debts that a proper lad owes\nStoutly enough … You might call me a clock\nWith a face of old brick-work instead of the brass\nOf a dial.\nFor I mark the generations as they pass:\nGeneration on generation,\nPassing like shadows over the dial\nTo triumph or trial;\nOver the grass, round the paths till they lie all\nSilent under the grass.\n\n> _Himself:_\nAnd it isn’t as if we courted the slap-up people …\n\n> _The House:_\nNow does he remember the night when he came from the station\nIn Flood-year December?\n\n> _Himself:_\nOr kicked our slippers over the steeple,\nOr leaving the whites ate only the yolk.\nWe’re such simple folk!\nWith an old house … Just any old house!\nOnly she’s clean: you won’t find a flea or a louse!\nWe’ve a few old cows--\nJust any old cows!--\nNo champion short-horns with fabulous yields …\nTwo or three good fields;\nAnd the old mare, going blinder and blinder …\nAnd too much Care to ride behind her!\n\n> _The House:_\nI’d like him to remember …\nThere were floods out far and wide;\nAnd that was my last night of pride,\nWith all my windows blazing across the tide …\nI wish he would remember …\n\n> _Himself:_\nJust to get through; keeping a stiff upper lip!\nJust … through! … With my lamb unshorn;\nSo that she mayn’t like me be torn by care!\nIt’s not\nSuch a hell of a lot!\nJust till the child is born …\nYou’d think: God, you’d think\nThey could let us little people … creep\nPast in the shadows …\nBut the sea’s … too … deep!\nNot to sink … Not … sink!\nJust to get through …\nChrist, I can’t keep … It’s too … deep …\n\n> _The Cat of the House:_\nHe has fallen asleep. Up onto his knee!\nI shall sleep in the pink.\n\n> _The House:_\nYou see!\nHis mind turns to me\nAs soon as he sleeps. For he called me a ship\nOn my last day of pride,\nAnd he dreams of me now as a ship\nAs I looked in the days of my pride.\nThen, he was driving his guests from the station,\nAnd the floods were wide\nAll over the countryside …\nAll my windows lit up and wide,\nAnd blazing like torches down a tide,\nOver the waters …\n\n> _The Mare [From the cloverfield]:_\nThat wouldn’t be me!\nWhen I was young I lived in Dover,\nIn Kent, by the sea. So he didn’t drive me.\nWhen I was young I went much faster\nOver the sticks as slick as a hare,\nWith a gunner officer for a master.\nAnd I took officers out to lunch\nWith their doxies to Folkestone. It wouldn’t be me!\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nMunch; munch … Munch; munch!\nIn the Master’s clover … But poor old Me!\n\n> _The Unborn Son of the House:_\nMalodorous Image-of-Sin-with-a-Beard,\nIt is time I was heard.\n\n> _The House:_\nThat Christmas night …\n\n> _Son of the House:_\nIt would have to be Christmas\nWith floods so they missed Mass …\n\n> _The House:_\nYour Dad’s never missed Mass\nAt Christmas! …\nSo all my windows, blazing with light\nCalled out Welcome across the night.\nAnd the Master’s voice came over to me:\n“The poor old shanty looks just like a ship,\nLit up and sailing across the sea!”\nThat was my lad …\nAnd another, just as young and as glad,\nAs they used to be, all, before the war,\nSaid: “And all of her lamps have all their wicks on!”\nThat would be Dickson …\n\n> _Son of the House:_\nMy mother, when her pains have loosed her\nAnd I am grown to man’s estate,\nShall go in gold and filagree;\nAnd I’ll be king and have a king’s glory …\n\n> _The Rooster:_\nKickeriko! Kickerikee!\nI am the Rooster!\n\n> _Son of the House:_\nThe Dad, with no hair on his pate,\nReading my story …\n\n> _The Rooster:_\nI am the Bird of the Dawn, calling the world to arouse.\nI, even I, am the cock of the house!\n\n> _The Skylark:_\nTime I was up in the sky!\nIt is time for the dew to dry.\nI am the Bird of the Dawn!\n\n> _The Nightingale:_\nTime I was down on my nest.\nThe moon has gone down in the west:\nDay-folk, goodbye!\n\n> _The House-dog:_\nHere’s our young maid! What a yawn!\n\n> _The Milch-goat:_\nThe houseboy is crossing the lawn\nUnder the fir.\nWill he give me a Swede?\nThat’s the thing I most need!\n\n> _The House:_\nWhat a stir! What a stir!\nDid you ever?\nAll of a sudden it’s day\nWith its tumult and fever!\nI must have nodded away!\n\n> _The Drake:_\nI am the Drake! I’m the Drake.\nWe too have been all night awake;\nBut making no fuss, not one of the seven of us.\nFor our heads were far under our legs\nDrinking the dregs of the lake.\nTherefore my ladies lay eggs,\nDucksegg green!\n\n> _The Maid:_\nWhere have you hid\nThe copper-lid?\nWhere on earth have you been?\nWhere on earth is it hidden?\n\n> _Houseboy:_\nI didn’t!\n\n> _Maid:_\nYou did!\n\n> _Houseboy:_\nI didn’t … I never …\n\n> _Maid:_\nI see you …\n\n> _Houseboy:_\nYou never!\n\n> _Maid:_\nHow on earth can I ever\nCook the pigs’ food if I can’t find the lid\nOf the copper?\n\n> _Houseboy:_\nYou whopper! I never\nTouched the old lid of your copper!\n\n> _Maid:_\nThe lid’s lying out in the midden.\nHimself must have took it!\n\n> _Houseboy:_\nSo there then! Give over!\n\n\n> _Maid:_\nDid you ever! What next!\nOur Master’s asleep in his chair!\nI’ll wager you never a leg he’s stirred\nSince four of the clock, with the cat on his knee!\n\n> _Postman:_\nThis letter’s registered!\n\n> _Maid [To Himself]:_\nNed Postman wants a receipt in ink …\n\n> _Himself [Opening letter]:_\nTo sink … No, not to sink!\n\n> _Maid:_\nIt’s a registered letter\nThe postman wants a receipt in ink for.\n\n> _Herself [Calling from upper window]:_\nCharley!\nThe mare’s in the clover,\nMaking for the barley.\nShe’s knocking down the sticks …\n\n> _Himself:_\nIt’s over--\nWe’re over this terrible fix\nFor a quarter or so!\n\n> _Herself:_\nAnd we were in such a terrible fix!--\nAnd you never let me know!\n\n> _Himself:_\nNot quite enough to take to drink for …\n[To Houseboy.] Fetch the mare from the barley,\nYou’d better …\n\n> _Herself:_\nOh, Charley!\n\n> _Himself:_\nI said: Not quite enough to take to drink for!\nIt was like being master of a ship,\nWatching a grey torpedo slip\nThrough waves all green.\nIt would have been …\nAnd all one’s folk aboard …\n\n> _Herself:_\nYourself! Yourself! You’ll surely now afford\nYourself a new coat …\nAnd a proper chain and collar for the goat!\n\n> _Himself:_\nGood Lord!\nYourself! Yourself! You may go to town\nAnd see a show: there are five or six on,\nAnd you can have the little new gown\nYou said you’d fix on …\n\n> _Herself:_\nBut, O Yourself, we can’t afford it!\n\n> _Himself:_\nYou’ve not had a jaunt since the honeymoon …\nThirteen months and a day. And very soon …\n\n> _The Unborn Son of the House:_\nI shall so pronk it and king it and lord it--\nOver the sunshine and under the moon …\n\n> _Himself:_\nIf Fate be kind and do not frown,\nAnd do not smite us knee and hip,\nThis poor old patched-up thing of a ship\nMay take us yet over fields all green,\nAnd you be a little dimity queen …\n\n> _Son of the House:_\nAs the years roll on and the days go by,\nI shall grow and grow in majesty …\n\n> _Herself:_\nYou always say I’ve no majesty!--\nNot even enough for a cobbler’s queen!\n\n> _The House:_\nBy and by\nThey’ll be talking of copper roofs for the stye!\n\n> _The Pigs:_\nWe were wondering when you would come to the Pigs!\nYet they say it’s we that pay the rent!\n\n> _Himself:_\nGreat golden ships in ancient rigs\nWent sailing under the firmament,\nAnd still sail under the sky and away--\nTall ships and small …\nAnd great ships sink and no soul to say.\nBut, God being good, in the last resort\nI will bring our cockle-shell into port\nIn a land-locked bay,\nAnd no more go sailing at all!\n\n> _Herself:_\nKind God! We are safe for a year and a day!\nAnd he is so skilful, my lord and my master,\nSo skilled to keep us all from disaster;\nSuch a clever, kindly, Working One!\nThat I’ll yet have my dairy with slabs of marble,\nA sweet-briar thicket where sweet birds warble,\nAnd an ordered life in a household whereof he\nMost shall praise the nine-o’clock coffee;\nAnd a little, mettlesome, brown-kneed One\nTo lie on my heart when the long day’s done …\n\n> _Rooster:_\nPullets, go in; run out of the sun!\nHe’s climbing high and the hayseed’s dun.\nI am the Rooster with marvelous legs!\nPullets, run nestwards and lay your eggs!\n\n> _Herself:_\nFor my son; my son; my son; my son!\n\n\n> _Epliogue_\n\n> _The House Itself:_\nI am their House! I resemble\nThe drawing of a child.\nDrawing, ‘just a house,’ a child draws one like me,\nWith a stye beside it maybe, or a willow-tree,\nOr aspens that tremble.\nThat’s as may be …\n\nBut all the other houses of all nations\nGrand or simple, in country or town,\nAll, all the houses standing beneath the sky\nShall have very much the same fate as I!\nThey shall see the pressing of generations\nOn the heels of generations;\nShall bear with folly; shall house melancholy;\nAt seasons dark and holy shall be hung with holly;\nOn given days they shall have the blinds drawn down,\nAnd so pass into the hands--\nHouses and lands into the hands\nOf new generations.\nThese shall remain\nFor a short space or a long,\nMasterful, cautious or strong;\nConfident or overbold.\nBut at last all strong hands falter;\nFrosts come; great winds and drought;\nThe tiles blow loose; the steps wear out;\nThe rain\nPercolates down by the rafter.\nTheir youths wear out;\nUntil, maybe, they become very gentle and mild.\nFor certain they shall become very gentle and old,\nHaving stood too long.\nAnd so, all over again,\nThe circle comes round:\nOver and over again.\nAnd …\nIf You rise on this earth a thousand years after\nI have fallen to the ground,\nYour fate shall be the same:\nOnly the name\nShall alter!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-tenebris": { - "title": "“In Tenebris”", - "body": "All within is warm,\nHere without it’s very cold,\nNow the year is grown so old\nAnd the dead leaves swarm.\n\nIn your heart is light,\nHere without it’s very dark,\nWhen shall I hear the lark?\nWhen see aright?\n\nOh, for a moment’s space!\nDraw the clinging curtains wide\nWhilst I wait and yearn outside\nLet the light fall on my face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "in-the-little-old-market-place": { - "title": "“In the Little Old Market-Place”", - "body": "It rains, it rains,\nFrom gutters and drains\nAnd gargoyles and gables:\nIt drips from the tables\nThat tell us the tolls upon grains,\nOxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls\nSet into the rain-soaked wall\nOf the old Town Hall.\n\nThe mountains being so tall\nAnd forcing the town on the river,\nThe market’s so small\nThat, with the wet cobbles, dark arches and all,\nThe owls\n(For in dark rainy weather the owls fly out\nWell before four), so the owls\nIn the gloom\nHave too little room\nAnd brush by the saint on the fountain\nIn veering about.\n\nThe poor saint on the fountain!\nSupported by plaques of the giver\nTo whom we’re beholden;\nHis name was de Sales\nAnd his wife’s name von Mangel.\n\n(Now is he a saint or archangel?)\nHe stands on a dragon\nOn a ball, on a column\nGazing up at the vines on the mountain:\nAnd his falchion is golden\nAnd his wings are all golden.\nHe bears golden scales\nAnd in spite of the coils of his dragon, without hint of alarm of invective\nLooks up at the mists on the mountain.\n\n(Now what saint or archangel\nStands winged on a dragon,\nBearing golden scales and a broad bladed sword all golden?\nAlas, my knowledge\nOf all the saints of the college,\nOf all these glimmering, olden\nSacred and misty stories\nOf angels and saints and old glories …\nIs sadly defective.)\nThe poor saint on the fountain …\n\nOn top of his column\nGazes up sad and solemn.\nBut is it towards the top of the mountain\nWhere the spindrifty haze is\nThat he gazes?\nOr is it into the casement\nWhere the girl sits sewing?\nThere’s no knowing.\n\nHear it rain!\nAnd from eight leaden pipes in the ball he stands on\nThat has eight leaden and copper bands on,\nThere gurgle and drain\nEight driblets of water down into the basin.\n\nAnd he stands on his dragon\nAnd the girl sits sewing\nHigh, very high in her casement\nAnd before her are many geraniums in a parket\nAll growing and blowing\nIn box upon box\nFrom the gables right down to the basement\nWith frescoes and carvings and paint …\n\nThe poor saint!\nIt rains and it rains,\nIn the market there isn’t an ox,\nAnd in all the emplacement\nFor waggons there isn’t a waggon,\nNot a stall for a grape or a raisin,\nNot a soul in the market\nSave the saint on his dragon\nWith the rain dribbling down in the basin,\nAnd the maiden that sews in the casement.\n\nThey are still and alone,\nMutterseelens alone,\nAnd the rain dribbles down from his heels and his crown,\nFrom wet stone to wet stone.\nIt’s grey as at dawn,\nAnd the owls, grey and fawn,\nCall from the little town hall\nWith its arch in the wall,\nWhere the fire-hooks are stored.\n\nFrom behind the flowers of her casement\nThat’s all gay with the carvings and paint,\nThe maiden gives a great yawn,\nBut the poor saint--\nNo doubt he’s as bored!\nStands still on his column\nUplifting his sword\nWith never the ease of a yawn\nFrom wet dawn to wet dawn …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-iron-music": { - "title": "“The Iron Music”", - "body": "The French guns roll continuously\nAnd our guns, heavy, slow;\nAlong the Ancre, sinuously,\nThe transport wagons go,\nAnd the dust is on the thistles\nAnd the larks sing up on high …\n_But I see the Golden Valley\nDown by Tintern on the Wye._\n\nFor it’s just nine weeks last Sunday\nSince we took the Chepstow train,\nAnd I’m wondering if one day\nWe shall do the like again;\nfor the four-point-two’s come screaming\nThro’ the sausages on high;\n_So there’s little use in dreaming\nHow we walked above the Wye._\n\nDust and corpses in the thistles\nWhere the pas-shells burst like snow,\nAnd the shrapnel screams and whistles\nOn the Bécourt road below,\nAnd the High Wood bursts and bristles\nWhere the mine-clouds foul the sky …\n_But I’m with you up at Wyndcroft,\nOver Tintern on the Wye._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-night-piece": { - "title": "“A Night Piece”", - "body": "As I lay awake by my good wife’s side,\nAnd heard the clock tick through a night in June,\nI thought of a song with a haunting tune;\nBut the songs that betide,\nAnd the tunes that we hear in the ear when the June moon rides in the sky,\nFade and die away with the coming of the day.\nAnd my haloed angels with golden wings,\nAnd the small sweet bells that rang in tune,\nAnd the strings that quivered above the quills,\nAnd all my mellow imaginings\nFaded and died away at the coming of the day\nWith the gradual growth and spread of grey\nAbove the hills.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-old-houses-of-flanders": { - "title": "“The Old Houses of Flanders”", - "body": "The old houses of Flanders,\nThey watch by the high cathedrals;\nThey overtop the high town-halls;\nThey have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic, for the ways of men\nIn the high, white, tiled gables.\n\nThe rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;\nIt is all wet darkness; you can see nothing.\n\nThen those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,\nLook at great, sudden, red lights,\nLook upon the shades of the cathedrals;\nAnd the golden rods of the illuminated rain,\nFor a second …\n\nAnd those old eyes,\nVery old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,\nClose for ever.\nThe high, white shoulders of the gables\nSlouch together for a consultation,\nSlant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.\n\nThey are no more, the old houses of Flanders.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-heaven": { - "title": "“On Heaven”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThat day the sunlight lay on the farms;\nOn the morrow the bitter frost that there was!\nThat night my young love lay in my arms,\nThe morrow how bitter it was!\n\nAnd because she is very tall and quaint\nAnd golden, like a quattrocento saint,\nI desire to write about Heaven;\nTo tell you the shape and the ways of it,\nAnd the joys and the toil in the maze of it,\nFor these there must be in Heaven,\nEven in Heaven!\n\nFor God is a good man, God is a kind man,\nAnd God’s a good brother, and God is no blind man,\nAnd God is our father.\n\nI will tell you how this thing began:\nHow I waited in a little town near Lyons for many years,\nAnd yet knew nothing of passing time, or of her tears,\nBut, for nine slow years, lounged away at my table in the shadowy sunlit square\nWhere the small cafes are.\n\nThe Place is small and shaded by great planes,\nOver a rather human monument\nSet up to Louis Dixhuit in the year\nEighteen fourteen, a funnny thing with dolphins\nAbout a pyramid of green-dripped, sordid stone.\nBut the enormous, monumental planes\nShade it all in, and in the flecks of sun\nSit market women. There’s a paper shop\nPainted all blue, a shipping agency,\nThree or four cafes; dank, dark colonnades\nOf an eighteen-forty Mairie. i’d no wish\nTo wait for her where it was picturesque,\nOr ancient or historic, or to love\nOver well any place in the land before she came\nAnd loved it too. I didn’t even go\nTo Lyons for the opera, Arles for the bulls,\nOr Avignon for glimpses of the Rhone.\nNot even to Beaucaire! I sat about\nAnd played long games of dominoes with the maire,\nOr passing commis-voyageurs. And so\nI sat and watched the trains come in, and read\nThe Libre Parole and sipped the thin, fresh wine\nThey call Piquette, and got to know the people,\nThe kindly, southern people …\n\nUntil, when the years were over, she came in her swift red car,\nShooting out past a pram; and she slowed and stopped and lighted absently down,\nA little dazed, in the heart of the town;\nAnd nodded imperceptibly,\nWith a sideways look at me.\n\nSo our days here began.\n\nAnd the wrinkled old woman who keeps the cafe,\nAnd the man\nWho sells the Libre Parole,\nAnd the sleepy gendarme,\nAnd the fat facteur who delivers letters only in the shady,\nPleasanter kind of streets;\nAnd the boy I often gave a penny,\nAnd the maire himself, and the little girl who loves toffee\nAnd me because I have given her many sweets;\nAnd the one-eyed droll\nBookseller of the rue Grand de Provence,--\nChancing to be going home to bed,\nSmiled with their kindly, fresh benevolence,\nBecause they knew I had waited for a lady\nWho should come in a swift, red, English car,\nTo the square where the little cafes are.\nAnd the old, old woman touched me on the wrist\nWith a wrinkled finger,\nAnd said: ‘Why do you linger?--\nToo many kisses can never be kissed!\nAnd comfort her--nobody here will think harm--\nTake her instantly to your arm!\nit is a little strange, you know, to your dear,\nTo be dead!\n\nBut one is English,\nThough one be never so much of a ghost;\nAnd if most of your life has been spent in the craze to relinquish\nWhat you want most,\nYou will go on relinquishing,\nYou will go on vanquishing\nHuman longings, even\nin Heaven.\n\nGod! You will have forgotten what the rest of the world is on fire for--\nThe madness of desire for the long and quiet embrace,\nThe coming nearer of a tear-wet face;\nForgotten the desire to slake\nThe thirst, and the long, slow ache,\nAnd to interlace\nLash with lash, lip with lip, limb with limb, and the fingers of the hand\nwith the hand\nAnd …\n\nYou will have forgotten …\nBut they will all awake;\nAye, all of them shall awaken\nin this dear place.\nAnd all that then we took\nOf all that we might have taken,\nWas that one embracing look,\nCoursing over features, over limbs, between eyes, a making sure, and a\nlong sigh,\nHaving the tranquility\nOf trees unshaken,\nAnd the softness of sweet tears,\nAnd the dearness of the dear brook\nTo wash away past years\n(For that too is the quality of Heaven,\nThat you are conscious always of great pain\nOnly when it is over\nAnd shall not come again.\nThank God, thank God, it shall not come again,\nThough your eyes be never so wet with the tears\nOf many years!)\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd so she stood a moment by the door\nOf the long, red car. Royally she stepped down,\nSettling one long foot and leaning back\nAmongst her russet fires. And she looked round …\nOf course it must be strange to come from England\nStraight into Heaven. You must take it in,\nSlowly, for a long instant, with some fear …\nNow that affiche, in orange, on the kiosque:\n‘Six Spanish bulls will fight on Sunday next\nAt Arles, in the arena’ … Well, it’s strange\nTill you get used to our ways. And, on the Mairie,\nThe untidy poster telling of the concours\nDe vers de soie, of silkworms. The cocoons\nPile, yellow, all across the little Places\nof ninety townships in the environs\nOf Lyons, the city famous for her silks.\nWhat if she’s pale? it must be more than strange,\nAfter these years, to come out here from England\nTo a strange place, to the stretched-out arms of me,\nA man never fully known, only divined,\nLoved, guessed at, pledged to, in your Sussex mud,\nAmongst the frost-bound farms by the yeasty sea.\nOh, the long look; the long, long searching look!\nAnd how my heart beat!\nWell, you see, in England\nShe had a husband. And four families--\nHis, hers, mine, and another woman’s too--\nWould have gone crazy. And, with all the rest,\nEight parents, and the children, seven aunts\nAnd sixteen uncles and a grandmother.\nThere were, besides, our names, a few real friends,\nAnd the decencies of life. A monstrous heap!\nThey made a monstrous heap. i’ve lain awake\nWhole aching nights to tot the figures up!\nHeap after heaps, of complications, griefs,\nWorries, tongue-clackings, nonsenses and shame\nFor not making good. You see the coil there was!\nAnd the poor strained fibres of our tortured brains,\nAnd the voice that called from depth in her to depth\nin me … my God, in the dreadful nights,\nThrough the roar of the great black winds, through the sound of the sea!\nOh agony! Agony! From out my breast\nit called whilst the dark house slept, and stairheads creaked;\nFrom within my breast it screamed and made no sound;\nAnd wailed … And made no sound.\nAnd howled like the damned … No sound! No sound!\nOnly the roar of the wind, the sound of the sea,\nThe tick of the clock …\nAnd our two voices, noiseless through the dark.\nOh God! Oh God!\n\n(That night my young love lay in my arms …\n\nThere was a bitter frost lay on the farms\nin England, by the shiver\nAnd the crawling of the tide;\nBy the broken silver of the English Channel,\nBeneath the aged moon that watched alone--\nPoor, dreary, lonely old moon to have to watch alone,\nOver the dreary beaches mangled with ancient foam\nLike shrunken flannel;\nThe moon, an intent, pale face, looking down\nOver the English Channel.\n\nBut soft and warm She lay in the crook of my arm.\nAnd came to no harm since we had come quietly home\nEven to Heaven:\nWhich is situate in a little old town\nNot very far from the side of the Rhone,\nThat mighty river\nThat is, just there by the Crau, in the lower reaches,\nFar wider than the Channel.)\n\nBut, in the market place of the other little town,\nWhere the Rhone is a narrower, greener affair,\nWhen she had looked at me, she beckoned with her long white hand,\nA little languidly, since it is a strain, if a blessed strain, to have just\ndied,\nAnd going back again,\ninto the long, red, English racing-car,\nMade room for me amongst the furs at her side.\nAnd we moved away from the kind looks of the kindly people\ninto the wine of the hurrying air.\nAnd very soon even the tall grey steeple\nof Lyons cathedral behind us grew little and far\nAnd was no more there …\nAnd, thank God, we had nothing any more to think of,\nAnd, thank God, we had nothing any more to talk of,\nUnless, as it chanced, the flashing silver stalk of the pampas\nGrowing down to the brink of the Rhone,\nOn the lawn of a little chateau, giving onto the river.\nAnd we were alone, alone, alone …\nAt last alone …\n\nThe poplars on the hill-crests go marching rank on rank,\nAnd far away to the left, like a pyramid, marches the ghost of Mont Blanc.\nThere are vines and vines and vines, all down to the river bank.\nThere will be a castle here,\nAnd an abbey there;\nAnd huge quarries and a long white farm,\nWith long thatched barns and a long wine shed,\nAs we ran alone, all down to the Rhone.\n\nAnd that day there was no puncturing of the tyres to fear;\nAnd no trouble at all with the engine and gear;\nSmoothly and softly we ran between the great poplar alley\nAll down the valley of the Rhone.\nFor the dear, good God knew how we needed rest and to be alone.\nBut, on other days, just as you must have perfect shadows to make perfect\nRembrandts,\nHe shall affect us with little lets and hindrances of His own\nDevising--just to let us be glad that we are dead …\nJust for remembrance.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHard by the castle of God in the Alpilles,\nin the eternal stone of Alpilles,\nThere’s this little old town, walled round by the old, grey gardens …\nThere were never such olives as grew in the gardens of God,\nThe green-grey trees, the wardens of agony\nAnd failure of gods,\nOf hatred and faith, of truth, of treachery\nThey whisper; they whisper that none of the living prevail;\nThey whirl in the great mistral over the white, dry sods,\nLike hair blown back from white foreheads in the enormous gale\nUp to the castle walls of God …\n\nBut in the town that’s our home,\nOnce you are past the wall,\nAmongst the trunks of the planes,\nThough they roar never so mightily overhead in the day,\nAll this tumult is quieted down, and all\nThe windows stand open because of the heat of the night\nThat shall come.\nAnd, from each little window, shines in the twilight a light,\nAnd, beneath t the eternal planes\nWith the huge, gnarled trunks that were aged and grey\nAt the creation of Time.\nThe Chinese lanthorns, hung out at the doors of hotels,\nShimmering in the dusk, here on an orange tree, there on a sweet-scented\nlime,\nThere on a golden inscription: ‘Hotel of the Three Holy Bells, ’\nOr ‘Hotel Sublime, ’ or ‘inn of the Real Good Will’.\nAnd yes, it is very warm and still,\nAnd all the world is afoot after the heat of the day,\nin the cool of the even in Heaven.\nAnd it is here that I have brought my dear to pay h er all that I owed her,\nAmidst thus crowd, with the soft voices, the soft footfalls, the rejoicing\nlaughter.\nAnd after the twilight there falls such a warm, soft darkness,\nAnd still there will come stealing under the planes a drowsy odour,\nCompounded of all cyclamen, of oranges, or rosemary and bay,\nTo take the remembrance of the toil of the day away.\n\nSo we sat at a little table, under an immense plane,\nAnd we remembered again\nThe blisters and foments\nAnd terrible harassments of the tired brain,\nThe cold and the frost and the pain,\nAs if we were looking at a picture and saying: ‘This is true!\nWhy this is a truly painted\nRendering of that street where--you remember?--I fainted.’\nAnd we remembered again\nTranquilly, our poor few tranquil moments,\nThe falling of the sunlight through the panes,\nThe flutter for ever in the chimney of the quiet flame,\nThe mutter of our two poor tortured voices, always a-whisper.\nAnd the endless nights when I would cry out, running through all\nthe gamut of misery, even to a lisp, her name;\nAnd we remembered our kisses, nine, maybe, or eleven--\nif you count two that I gave and she did not give again.\n\nAnd always the crowd drifted by in the cool of the even,\nAnd we saw the faces of friends,\nAnd the faces of those to who one day we must make amends,\nSmiling in welcome.\nAnd I said: ‘On another day--\nAnd such a day may well come soon--\nWe will play dominoes with Dick and Evelyn and Frances\nFor a while afternoon.\nAnd, in the time to come, Genee\nShall dance for us, fluttering over the ground as the sunlight dances.’\nAnd Arlesiennes with the beautiful faces went by us,\nAnd gipsies and Spanish shepherds, noiseless in sandals of straw, sauntered\nnight us,\nWearing slouch hats and old sheep-skins, and casting admiring glances\nFrom dark, foreign eyes at my dear …\n(And ah, it is Heaven alone, to have her alone and so near!)\nSo all this world rejoices\nin the cool of the even\nin Heaven …\nAnd, when the cool of the even was fully there,\nCame a great ha-ha of voices.\nMany children run together, and all laugh and rejoice and call,\nHurrying with little arms flying, and little feet flying, and little\nhurrying haunches,\nFrom the door of a stable,\nWhere, in an olla podrida, they had been playing at the corrida\nWith the black Spanish bull, whose nature\nis patience with children. And so, through the gaps of the branches\nOf Jasmine on our screen beneath the planes,\nWe saw, coming down from the road that leads to the olives and Alpilles,\nA man of great stature,\nin a great cloak,\nWith a great stride,\nAnd a little joke\nFor all and sundry, coming down with a hound at his side.\nAnd he stood at the cross-roads, passing the time of day\nin a great, kind voice, the voice of a man-and-a-half!--\nWith a great laugh, and a great clap on the back,\nFor a fellow in black--a priest I should say,\nOr may be a lover,\nWearing black for his mistress’s mood.\n‘A little toothache, ’ we could hear him say; ‘but that’s so good\nWhen it gives over.’ So he passed from sight\nin the soft twilight, into the soft night,\nin the soft riot and tumult of the crowd.\n\nAnd a magpie flew down, laughing, holding up his beak to us,\nAnd I said: ‘That was God! Presently, when he has walked through the town\nAnd the night has settled down,\nSo that you may not be afraid,\nin the darkness, he will come to our table and speak to us.’\nAnd past us many saints went walking in a company--\nThe kindly, thoughtful saints, devising and laughing and talking,\nAnd smiling at us with their pleasant solicitude.\nAnd because the thick of the crowd followed to the one side God,\nOr to the other the saints, we sat in solitude\nin the distance the saints went singing all in chorus,\nAnd our Lord went on the other side of the street,\nHolding a little boy.\nTaking him to pick the musk-roses that open at dusk,\nFor wreathing the statue of Jove,\nLeft on the Alpilles above\nBy the Romans; since Jove,\nEven Jove,\nMust not want for his quota of honour and love;\nBut round about him there must be,\nWith all its tender jollity,\nThe laughter of children in Heaven,\nMaking merry with roses in Heaven.\n\nYet never he looked at us, knowing that that would be such joy\nAs must be over-great for hearts that needed quiet;\nSuch a riot and tumult of joy as quiet hearts are not able\nTo taste to the full …\n\n… And my dear one sat in the shadows; very softly she wept:--\nSuch joy is in Heaven,\nin the cool of the even,\nAfter the burden and toil of the days,\nAfter the heat and haze\nin the vine-hills; or in the shady\nWhispering groves in high passes up in the Alpilles,\nGuarding the castle of God.\n\nAnd I went on talking towards her unseen face:\n‘So it is, so it goes, in this beloved place,\nThere shall be never a grief but passes; no, not any;\nThere shall be such bright light and no blindness;\nThere shall be so little awe and so much loving-kindness;\nThere shall be a little longing and enough care,\nThere shall be a little labor and enough of toil\nTo bring back the lost flavour of our human coil;\nNot enough to taint it;\nAnd all that we desire shall prove as fair as we can paint it.’\nFor, though that may be the very hardest trick of all\nGod set Himself, who fashioned this goodly hall.\nThus has He made Heaven;\nEven Heaven.\n\nFor God is a very clever mechanician;\nAnd if He made this proud and goodly ship of the world,\nFrom the maintop to the hull,\nDo you think He could not finish it to the full,\nWith a flag and all,\nAnd make it sail, tall and brave,\nOn the waters, beyond the grave?\nit should cost but very little rhetoric\nTo explain for you that last, fine, conjuring trick;\nTo give to each man after his heart\nWho knows very well what each man has in his heart:\nTo let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,\nif that is your idea of heaven; if you will, in the South of France;\nif you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night;\nWhere you will; how you will;\nOr in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall;\nHe would be a very little God if He could not do all this,\nAnd He is still\nThe great God of all.\n\nFor God is a good man; God is a kind man;\nin the darkness He came walking to our table beneath the planes, And spoke\nSo kindly to my dear,\nWith a little joke,\nGiving himself some pains\nTo take away her fear\nOf His stature,\nSo as not to abash her,\nin no way at all to dash her new pleasure beneath the planes,\nin the cool of the even\nin Heaven.\n\nThat, that is God’s nature,\nFor God’s a good brother, and God is no blind man,\nAnd God’s a good mother and loves sons who’re rovers,\nAnd God is our father and loves all good lovers.\nHe has a kindly smile for many a poor sinner;\nHe takes note to make it up to poor wayfarers on sodden roads;\nSuch as bear heavy loads\nHe takes note of, and of all that toil on bitter seas and frosty lands,\nHe takes care that they shall have good at His hands;\nWell He takes note of a poor old cook,\nCooking your dinner;\nAnd much He loves sweet joys in such as ever took\nSweet joy on earth. He has a kindly smile for a kiss\nGiven in a shady nook.\nAnd in the golden book\nWhere the accounts of His estate are kept,\nAll the round, golden sovereigns of bliss,\nKnown by poor lovers, married or never yet married,\nWhile the green world waked, or the black world quietly slept;\nAll joy, all sweetness, each sweet sight that’s sighed--\nTheir accounts are kept,\nAnd carried\nBy the love of God to His own credit’s side.\nSo that is why He came to our table to welcome my dear, dear bride,\nin the cool of the even\nin front of a cafe in Heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "one-last-prayer": { - "title": "“One Last Prayer”", - "body": "Let me wait, my dear,\nOne more day,\nLet me linger near,\nLet me stay.\nDo not bar the gate of draw the blind\nOr lock the door that yields,\nDear, be kind!\n\nI have only you beneath the skies\nTo rest my eyes\nFrom the cruel green of the fields\nAnd the cold, white seas\nAnd the weary hills\nAnd the naked trees.\nI have known the hundred ills\nOf the hated wars.\nDo not close the bars,\nOr draw the blind.\nI have only you beneath the stars:\nDear, be kind!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sanctuary": { - "title": "“Sanctuary”", - "body": "Shadowed by your dear hair, your dear kind eyes\nLook on wine-purple seas, whitened afar\nWith marble foam, where the dim islands are.\nWe sit forgetting. For the great pines rise\nAbove dark cypress to the dim white skies\nSo clear and black and still-to one great star.\nThe marble dryads and the veined white jar\nGleam from the grove. Glimmering, the white owl flies\nIn the dark shade …\n\nIf ever life was harsh\nHere we forget--or ever friends turned foes.\nThe sea cliffs beetle down above the marsh\nAnd through sea-holly the black panther goes.\nAnd in the shadows of this secret place\nYour kind, dear eyes shine in your dear, dear face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-sequence": { - "title": "“A Sequence”", - "body": "# I.\n\nYou make me think of lavender,\nAnd that is why I love you so:\nYour sloping shoulders, heavy hair,\nAnd long swan’s neck like snow,\nBefit those gracious girls of long ago,\nWho in closed gardens took the quiet air;\nWho lived the ordered life gently to pass\nFrom earth as from rose petals perfumes go,\nOr shadows from that dial in the grass;\nWhose fingers from the painted spinet keys\nDrew small heart-clutching melodies.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI Do not ask so much,\n--O, bright-hued; oh, tender-eyed--\nAs you should sometimes shimmer at my side,\nOh, Fair.\n\nI do not crave a touch,\nNor, at your comings hither,\nSound of soft laughter, savour of your hair,\nSight of your face; oh fair, oh full of grace,\nI ask not, I.\n\nBut that you do not die,\nNor fade, oh bright, nor wither,\nThat somewhere in the world your sweet, dim face\nBe unattainable, unpaled by fears,\nUnvisited by years,\nStained by no tears.\n\n\n# III.\n\nCome in the delicate stillness of dawn,\nYour eyelids heavy with sleep;\nWhen the faint moon slips to its line--dim-drawn,\nGrey and a shadow, the sea. And deep, very deep,\nThe tremulous stillness ere day in the dawn.\n\nCome, scarce stirring the dew on the lawn,\nYour face still shadowed by dreams;\nWhen the world’s all shadow, and rabbit and fawn--\nThose timorous creatures of shadows and gleams;\nAnd twilight and dewlight, still people the lawn.\n\nCome, more real than life is real,\nYour form half seen in the dawn;\nA warmth half felt, like the rays that steal\nHardly revealed from the East; oh warmth of my breast,\nO life of my heart, oh intimate solace of me …\nSo, when the landward breeze winds up from the quickening sea,\nAnd the leaves quiver of a sudden and life is here and the day,\nYou shall fade away and pass\nAs--when we breathed upon your mirror’s glass--\nOur faces died away.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIf we could have remembrance now\nAnd see, as in the winter’s snow\nWe shall, what’s golden in these hours,\nThe flitting, swift, intangible desires of sea and strand!\n\nWho sees what’s golden where we stand?\nThe sky’s too bright, the sapphire sea too green;\nI, I am fevered, you cold-sweet, serene,\nAnd … and …\n\nYet looking back in days of snow\nUnto this olden day that’s now,\nWe’ll see all golden in these hours\nThis memory of ours.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIt was the Autumn season of the year\nWhen ev’ry little bird doth ask his mate:\n“I wonder if the Spring will find us here,\nIt groweth late.”\n\nI saw two Lovers walking through the grass,\nAnd the sad He unto his weeping Dear\nDid say. “Alas!\nWhen Spring comes round I shall no more be here,\nFor I must sail across the weary sea\nAnd leave the waves a-churn ’twixt you and me.”\n\n“Oh, blessed Autumn! blest late Autumn-tide!\nFor ever with thy mists us Lovers hide.\nIgnore Time’s laws\nAnd leave thy scarlet haws\nFor ever on the dewy-dripping shaws\nOf this hillside.\nUntil the last, despite of Time and Tide,\nGive leave that we may wander in thy mist,\nWith the last, dread\nWord left for aye unsaid\nAnd the last kiss unkisst.”\n\nIt was the Autumn season of the year,\nWhen ev’ry little bird doth ask his mate:\n“I wonder if the Spring will find us here,\nIt groweth late.”\n\n\n# VI.\n\nWhen all the little hills are hid in snow,\nAnd all the small brown birds by frost are slain,\nAnd sad and slow the silly sheep do go\nAll seeking shelter to and fro;\nCome once again\nTo these familiar, silent, misty lands;\nUnlatch the lockless door\nAnd cross the drifted floor;\nIgnite the waiting, ever-willing brands,\nAnd warm thy frozen hands\nBy the old flame once more.\nAh, heart’s desire, once more by the old fire stretch out thy hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "seven-shepherds": { - "title": "“Seven Shepherds”", - "body": "Seven shepherds herd their sheep\nDown seven sleepy stubble fields.\nSeven angels stand and weep\nAnd say, “How small the harvest-yields!”\n\nSeven greybeards prate of tillage\nRound the ingle of the inn:\nSeven call our age an ill age,\nSeven wave their mugs and sing.\n\nAnd all the signboards of our village\nCreak as they swing.\nBut the seven stars above our village\nTwinkle and spin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-silver-music": { - "title": "“The Silver Music”", - "body": "In Chepstow stands a castle;\nMy love and I went there;\nThe foxgloves on the wall all heard\nHer footsteps on the stair.\n\nThe sun was high in heaven,\nAnd the perfume on the air\nCame from purple cat’s valerian …\nBut her footsteps on the stair\nMade a sound like silver music\nThro’ the perfume in the air.\n\nOh I’m weary for the castle,\nAnd I’m weary for the Wye,\nAnd the flowered walls are purple\nAnd the purple walls are high.\nAnd above the cat’s valerian\nThe foxgloves brush the sky.\nBut I must plod along the road\nThat leads to Germany.\n\nAnd another soldier fellow\nShall come courting of my dear\nAnd it’s I shall not be with her\nWith my lips beside her ear.\nFor it’s he shall walk beside her\nIn the perfume of the air\nTo the silver silver music\nOf her footstep on the stair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-solis-ortus-cardine": { - "title": "“A Solis Ortus Cardine”", - "body": "Oh quiet peoples sleeping bed by bed\nBeneath grey roof-trees in the glimmering West,\nWe who can see the silver grey and red\nRise over No Man’s Land--salute your rest.\n\nOh quiet comrades, sleeping in the clay\nBeneath a turmoil you need no more mark,\nWe who have lived through yet another day\nSalute your graves at setting in of dark.\n\nAnd rising from your beds or from the clay\nYou, dead, or far from lines of slain and slayers,\nThro’ your eternal or your finite day\nGive us your prayers!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-suabian-legend": { - "title": "“A Suabian Legend”", - "body": "God made all things,\nAnd, seeing they were good,\nHe set a limit to the springs,\nAnd circumscribed the flood,\nStayed the aspiring mountain ranges,\nAnd said: “Henceforth shall be no changes”;\nOn all the beasts he set that ban,\nAnd drew his line ’twixt woman and ’twixt man.\n\nGod, leaning down\nOver the world beneath,\nSurveyed his changeless work:\nNo creature drew its breath,\nNo cloud approached with rain unto the hills,\nNo waves white on the ocean, and no breeze;\nStill lay the cattle in the meads; the rills\nHung in the tufts of moss; the trees\nSeemed carven out of metal; manhood stood\nDrooping his silent head by womanhood.\nNor voice of beasts nor any song of bird\nNor sound of wind were from the woodlands heard.\n\nGod, leaning down\nOver the world beneath,\nKnitted his brows to a frown\nAnd fashioned Death:\n\nThe clouds faded around the mountain heads,\nThe rills and streams sank in their stony beds,\nThe ocean shivered and lay still and dead,\nAnd man fled and the beasts fled\nInto the crevices of mountains round;\nThe grass withered on the sod;\nBeetles and lizards faded into the ground:\nAnd God\nLooked on his last-made creature, Death, and frowned.\nHe paced in thought awhile\nHis darkened and resounding courts above:\nThey brightened at his smile:\nHe had imagined Love\n(Oh! help us ere we die: we die too soon;\nWe, who are born at dawn, have but one noon,\nAnd fade e’er nightfall) …\nThen the Lord made Love.\nAnd, looking down to Earth, he saw\nThe green flame out across each shaw,\nThe worms came creeping o’er the lawns,\nSweet showers in the pleasant dawns,\nThe lapwings crying in the fens,\nThe young lambs leaping from their pens,\nThe waves run tracing lines of white\nOn the cerulean ocean. But at night\nMan slept with woman in his arms.\nThen thunder shook\nAt the awful crown of God. His way he took\nOver the trembling hills to their embowered nook.\n\nBut standing there above those sleeping things\nGod was aware of one whose insubstantial wings\nA-quiver formed a penthouse o’er the place:\nTherefore God stayed his hand, and sighed\nTo see how lip matched lip, side mated side,\nAnd the remembered joy on each sealed face:\nTherefore God stayed his hand and smiled,\nShook his tremendous head and went his way;\nLove being his best begotten child,\nAnd having over Death and Sin God’s sway.\n\n(Oh! help us ere we die: we die too soon;\nWe, who are born at dawn, have but one noon,\nAnd fade e’er nightfall. Oh! Eternal One,\nHelp us to know short joy whose course is run\nSo soon: so soon.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "that-exploit-of-yours": { - "title": "“That Exploit of Yours”", - "body": "I meet with two soldiers sometimes here in Hell\nThe one, with a tear on the seat of his red pantaloons\nWas stuck by a pitchfork,\nClimbing a wall to steal apples.\n\nThe second has a seeming silver helmet,\nHaving died from a fall from his horse on some tram-lines\nIn Dortmund.\n\nThese two\nMeeting in the vaulted and vaporous caverns of Hell\nExclaim always in identical tones:\n“I at least have done my duty to Society and the Fatherland!”\nIt is strange how the cliché prevails …\nFor I will bet my hat that you sent me here to Hell\nAre saying the selfsame words at this very moment\nConcerning that exploit of yours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "there-shall-be-more-joy": { - "title": "“There Shall Be More Joy”", - "body": "The little angels of Heaven\nEach wear a long white dress,\nAnd in the tall arcadings\nPlay ball and play at chess;\n\nWith never a soil on their garments,\nNot a sigh the whole day long,\nNot a bitter note in their pleasure,\nNot a bitter note in their song.\n\nBut they shall know keener pleasure,\nAnd they shall know joy more rare--\nKeener, keener pleasure\nWhen you, my dear, come there.\n\nThe little angels of Heaven\nEach wear a long white gown,\nAnd they lean over the ramparts\nWaiting and looking down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-the-orderly-dog-saw": { - "title": "“What the Orderly Dog Saw”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe seven white peacocks against the castle wall\nIn the high trees and the dusk are like tapestry;\nThe sky being orange, the high wall a purple barrier,\nThe canal dead silver in the dusk:\nAnd you are far away.\n\nYet I see infinite miles of mountains,\nLittle lights shining in rows in the dark of them--\nInfinite miles of marshes;\nThin wisps of mist, shimmering like blue webs\nOver the dusk of them.\n\nGreat curves and horns of sea,\nAnd dusk and dusk, and the little village;\nAnd you, sitting in the firelight.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAround me are the two hundred and forty men of B Company,\nMud-colored;\nGoing about their avocations,\nResting between their practice of the art\nOf killing men;\nAs I too rest between my practice\nOf the art of killing men.\nTheir pipes glow over the mud and their mud-color, moving like fireflies beneath the trees--\nI too being mud-colored--\nBeneath the trees and the peacocks.\nWhen they come up to me in the dusk\nThey start, stiffen and salute, almost invisibly.\nAnd the forty-two prisoners from the battalion guard-room\nCrouch over the tea-cans in the shadow of the wall.\nAnd the bread hunks glimmer, beneath the peacocks--\nAnd you are far away.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPresently I shall go in\nI shall write down the names of the forty-two\nPrisoners in the battalion guard-room\nOn fair white foolscap:\nTheir names, rank and regimental numbers;\nCorps, Companies, Punishments and Offences,\nRemarks, and By whom confined.\nYet in spite of all I shall see only\nThe infinite miles of dark mountain,\nThe infinite miles of dark marshland,\nGreat curves and horns of sea;\nThe little village;\nAnd you,\nSitting in the firelight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-the-world-was-in-building": { - "title": "“When the World Was in Building”", - "body": "Thank Goodness, the moving is over,\nThey’ve swept up the straw in the passage\nAnd life will begin …\nThis tiny, white, tiled cottage by the bridge! …\nWhen we’ve had tea I will punt you\nTo Paradise for the sugar and onions …\nWe will drift home in the twilight,\nThe trout will be rising …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "francis-of-assisi": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Francis of Assisi", - "birth": { - "year": 1181 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1226 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "all-creatures-of-our-god-and-king": { - "title": "“All Creatures of our God and King”", - "body": "All creatures of our God and King,\nlift up your voice with us and sing:\nalleluia, alleluia!\nO burning sun with golden beam,\nand shining moon with silver gleam,\nO praise him, O praise him,\nalleluia, alleluia, alleluia!\n\nO rushing wind so wild and strong,\nwhite clouds that sail in heaven along,\nalleluia, alleluia!\nNew rising dawn, in praise rejoice,\nyou lights of evening, find a voice:\nO praise him, O praise him,\nalleluia, alleluia, alleluia!\n\nCool flowing water, pure and clear,\nmake music for your Lord to hear,\nalleluia, alleluia!\nFierce fire, so masterful and bright\nproviding us with warmth and light,\nO praise him, O praise him,\nalleluia, alleluia, alleluia!\n\nEarth ever fertile, day by day\nbring forth your blessings on our way;\nalleluia, alleluia!\nAll flowers and fruits that in you grow,\nlet them his glory also show:\nO praise him, O praise him,\nalleluia, alleluia, alleluia!\n\nPeople and nations, take your part;\nsing praise to God with all your heart:\nalleluia, alleluia!\nLet all things their Creator bless\nand worship him in lowliness:\nO praise him, O praise him,\nalleluia, alleluia, alleluia!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "canticle-of-the-sun": { - "title": "“Canticle of the Sun”", - "body": "Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is Yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To You, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your name.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun,\nwho brings the day; and You give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens You have made them bright, precious and beautiful.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which You give Your creatures sustenance.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom You brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of You; through those who endure sickness and trial.\n\nHappy those who endure in peace, for by You, Most High, they will be crowned.\n\nBe praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing Your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them.\n\nPraise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve Him with great humility.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "our-need-for-thee": { - "title": "“Our Need for Thee”", - "body": "In our ever present need for thee: Beloved, let us know your peace. Let us be your instruments that break every shackle, for do not the caged ones weep. And give us our inheritance of divine love so that we can forgive like you. And let us be wise, so that we do not wed another’s madness and then make them in debt to us for the deep gash their helpless raging lance will cause. Darkness is an unlit wick; it just needs your touch, Beloved, to become a sacred flame. And what sadness in this world could endure if it looked into your eyes? God is like a honeybee. He doesn’t mind me calling Him that; for when you are kind--sweet--He nears, and can draw you into Himself.\n\nWhat is there to understand of each other: if a wand turned the sun into a moon would not the moon mourn the ecstatic effulgence it once was. We are all in mourning for the experience of our essence we knew and now miss. Light is the cure, all else a placebo.\n\nYes, I will console any creature before me that is not laughing or full of passion for their art or life; for laughing and passion--beauty and joy--is our heart’s truth, all else is labor and foreign to the soul.\n\nI have stood in His rain and now fill granaries as do the fertile plains; giving is as natural to love as sound from the mouth. There is a courageous dying, it is called effacement. That holy death unfurls our spirit’s wings and allows us to embrace God even as we stand on the earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "salutation-of-the-virtues": { - "title": "“Salutation of the Virtues”", - "body": "Hail, queen wisdom! May the Lord save thee with thy sister holy pure simplicity!\nO Lady, holy poverty, may the Lord save thee with thy sister holy humility!\nO Lady, holy charity, may the Lord save thee with thy sister holy obedience!\nO all ye most holy virtues, may the Lord, from whom you proceed and come, save you!\nThere is absolutely no man in the whole world who can possess one among you unless he first die.\nHe who possesses one and does not offend the others, possesses all; and he who offends one, possesses none and offends all; and every one of them confounds vices and sins.\nHoly wisdom confounds Satan and all his wickednesses.\nPure holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.\nHoly poverty confounds cupidity and avarice and the cares of this world.\nHoly humility confounds pride and all the men of this world and all things that are in the world.\nHoly charity confounds all diabolical and fleshly temptations and all fleshly fears.\nHoly obedience confounds all bodily and fleshly desires and keeps the body mortified to the obedience of the spirit and to the obedience of one’s brother and makes a man subject to all the men of this world and not to men alone, but also to all beasts and wild animals, so that they may do with him whatsoever they will, in so far as it may be granted to them from above by the Lord.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Paschal Robinson", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-francis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Francis", - "birth": { - "year": 1901, - "month": "august", - "day": 1 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1987, - "month": "july", - "day": 13 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Francis_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "farm-boy-after-summer": { - "title": "“Farm Boy after Summer”", - "body": "A seated statue of himself he seems.\nA bronze slowness becomes him. Patently\nThe page he contemplates he doesn’t see.\n\nThe lesson, the long lesson, has been summer.\nHis mind holds summer as his skin holds sun.\nFor once the homework, all of it, was done.\n\nWhat were the crops, where were the fiery fields\nWhere for so many days so many hours\nThe sun assaulted him with glittering showers?\n\nExpect a certain absence in his presence.\nExpect all winter long a summer scholar,\nFor scarcely all its snows can cool that color.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-frost": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Frost", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 157 - }, - "poems": { - "acceptance": { - "title": "“Acceptance”", - "body": "When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud\nAnd goes down burning into the gulf below,\nNo voice in nature is heard to cry aloud\nAt what has happened. Birds, at least must know\nIt is the change to darkness in the sky.\nMurmuring something quiet in her breast,\nOne bird begins to close a faded eye;\nOr overtaken too far from his nest,\nHurrying low above the grove, some waif\nSwoops just in time to his remembered tree.\nAt most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!\nNow let the night be dark for all of me.\nLet the night bee too dark for me to see\nInto the future. Let what will be, be.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "acquainted-with-the-night": { - "title": "“Acquainted with the Night”", - "body": "I have been one acquainted with the night.\nI have walked out in rain--and back in rain.\nI have outwalked the furthest city light.\n\nI have looked down the saddest city lane.\nI have passed by the watchman on his beat\nAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.\n\nI have stood still and stopped the sound of feet\nWhen far away an interrupted cry\nCame over houses from another street,\n\nBut not to call me back or say good-bye;\nAnd further still at an unearthly height,\nOne luminary clock against the sky\n\nProclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.\nI have been one acquainted with the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "after-apple-picking": { - "title": "“After Apple-Picking”", - "body": "My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree\nToward heaven still\nAnd there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill\nBeside it and there may be two or three\nApples I didn’t pick upon some bough.\nBut I am done with apple-picking now.\nEssence of winter sleep is on the night\nThe scent of apples: I am drowsing off.\nI cannot rub the strangeness from my sight\nI got from looking through a pane of glass\nI skimmed this morning from the drinking trough\nAnd held against the world of hoary grass.\nIt melted and I let it fall and break.\nBut I was well\nUpon my way to sleep before it fell\nAnd I could tell\nWhat form my dreaming was about to take.\nMagnified apples appear and disappear\nStem end and blossom end\nAnd every fleck of russet showing clear.\nMy instep arch not only keeps the ache\nIt keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.\nI feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.\nAnd I keep hearing from the cellar bin\nThe rumbling sound\nOf load on load of apples coming in.\nFor I have had too much\nOf apple-picking: I am overtired\nOf the great harvest I myself desired.\nThere were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch\nCherish in hand lift down and not let fall.\nFor all\nThat struck the earth\nNo matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble\nWent surely to the cider-apple heap\nAs of no worth.\nOne can see what will trouble\nThis sleep of mine whatever sleep it is.\nWere he not gone\nThe woodchuck could say whether it’s like his\nLong sleep as I describe its coming on\nOr just some human sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-aim-was-song": { - "title": "“The Aim Was Song”", - "body": "Before man came to blow it right\nThe wind once blew itself untaught,\nAnd did its loudest day and night\nIn any rough place where it caught.\n\nMan came to tell it what was wrong:\nIt hadn’t found the place to blow;\nIt blew too hard--the aim was song.\nAnd listen--how it ought to go!\n\nHe took a little in his mouth,\nAnd held it long enough for north\nTo be converted into south,\nAnd then by measure blew it forth.\n\nBy measure. It was word and note,\nThe wind the wind had meant to be--\nA little through the lips and throat.\nThe aim was song--the wind could see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "asking-for-roses": { - "title": "“Asking for Roses”", - "body": "A house that lacks, seemingly, mistress and master,\nWith doors that none but the wind ever closes,\nIts floor all littered with glass and with plaster;\nIt stands in a garden of old-fashioned roses.\n\nI pass by that way in the gloaming with Mary;\n“I wonder,” I say, “who the owner of those is.”\n“Oh, no one you know,” she answers me airy,\n“But one we must ask if we want any roses.”\n\nSo we must join hands in the dew coming coldly\nThere in the hush of the wood that reposes,\nAnd turn and go up to the open door boldly,\nAnd knock to the echoes as beggars for roses.\n\n“Pray, are you within there, Mistress Who-were-you?”\n“Tis Mary that speaks and our errand discloses.”\n“Pray, are you within there? Bestir you, bestir you!”\n“Tis summer again; there’s two come for roses.”\n\n“A word with you, that of the singer recalling--\nOld Herrick: a saying that every maid knows is\nA flower unplucked is but left to the falling,\nAnd nothing is gained by not gathering roses.”\n\nWe do not loosen our hands’ intertwining\n(Not caring so very much what she supposes),\nThere when she comes on us mistily shining\nAnd grants us by silence the boon of her roses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "at-woodwards-gardens": { - "title": "“At Woodward’s Gardens”", - "body": "A boy, presuming on his intellect,\nOnce showed two little monkeys in a cage\nA burning-glass they could not understand,\nAnd never could be made to understand.\nWords are no good: to say it was a lens\nFor gathering solar rays would not have helped.\nBut let him show them how the weapon worked,\nHe made the sun a pin-point on the nose\nOf first one, then the other, till it brought\nA look of puzzled dimness to their eyes\nThat blinking could not seem to blink away.\nThey stood, arms linked together, at the bars\nAnd exchanged troubled glances over life.\nOne put a thoughtful hand up to his nose\nAs if reminded--or as if perhaps\nWithin a million years of an idea.\nHe got his purple little knuckles stung.\nThe already known had once more been confirmed\nBy psychological experiment;\nAnd that were all the finding to announce\nHad the boy not presumed too close and long.\nThere was a sudden flash, a monkey snatch,\nAnd the glass was the monkey’s, not the boy’s.\nPrecipitately they retired back-cage\nAnd instituted an investigation\nOn their part, but without the needed insight.\nThey bit the glass and listened for the flavor,\nThey broke the handle and the binding off it;\nThen, none the wiser, frankly gave it up,\nAnd having hid it in their bedding straw\nAgainst the day of prisoners’ ennui,\nCame dryly forward to the bars again\nTo answer for themselves.\n\nWho said it mattered--\nWhat monkeys did or didn’t understand?\nThey might not understand a burning-glass.\nThey might not understand the sun itself.\nIt’s knowing what to do with things that counts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ax-helve": { - "title": "“The Ax-Helve”", - "body": "I’ve known ere now an interfering branch\nOf alder catch my lifted ax behind me.\nBut that was in the woods, to hold my hand\nFrom striking at another alder’s roots,\nAnd that was, as I say, an alder branch.\nThis was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day\nBehind me on the snow in my own yard\nWhere I was working at the chopping block,\nAnd cutting nothing not cut down already.\nHe caught my ax expertly on the rise,\nWhen all my strength put forth was in his favor,\nHeld it a moment where it was, to calm me,\nThen took it from me--and I let him take it.\nI didn’t know him well enough to know\nWhat it was all about. There might be something\nHe had in mind to say to a bad neighbor\nHe might prefer to say to him disarmed.\nBut all he had to tell me in French-English\nWas what he thought of--not me, but my ax;\nMe only as I took my ax to heart.\nIt was the bad ax-helve some one had sold me--\n“Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain\nWith a thick thumbnail to show how it ran\nAcross the handle’s long-drawn serpentine,\nLike the two strokes across a dollar sign.\n“You give her ’one good crack, she’s snap raght off.\nDen where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?”\nAdmitted; and yet, what was that to him?\n\n “Come on my house and I put you one in\nWhat’s las’awhile--good hick’ry what’s grow crooked,\nDe second growt’I cut myself--tough, tough!”\n\n Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded.\n\n “Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing.\nTo-naght?”\n\n As well to-night as any night.\n\n Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove\nMy welcome differed from no other welcome.\nBaptiste knew best why I was where I was.\nSo long as he would leave enough unsaid,\nI shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed\n(If overjoyed he was) at having got me\nWhere I must judge if what he knew about an ax\nThat not everybody else knew was to count\nFor nothing in the measure of a neighbor.\nHard if, though cast away for life with Yankees,\nA Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating!\n\n Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair\nThat had as many motions as the world:\nOne back and forward, in and out of shadow,\nThat got her nowhere; one more gradual,\nSideways, that would have run her on the stove\nIn time, had she not realized her danger\nAnd caught herself up bodily, chair and all,\nAnd set herself back where she started from.\n“She ain’t spick too much Henglish--dat’s too bad.”\nI was afraid, in brightening first on me,\nThen on Baptiste, as if she understood\nWhat passed between us, she was only reigning.\nBaptiste was anxious for her; but no more\nThan for himself, so placed he couldn’t hope\nTo keep his bargain of the morning with me\nIn time to keep me from suspecting him\nOf really never having meant to keep it.\n\n Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out,\nA quiverful to choose from, since he wished me\nTo have the best he had, or had to spare--\nNot for me to ask which, when what he took\nHad beauties he had to point me out at length\nTo ensure their not being wasted on me.\nHe liked to have it slender as a whipstock,\nFree from the least knot, equal to the strain\nOf bending like a sword across the knee.\nHe showed me that the lines of a good helve\nWere native to the grain before the knife\nExpressed them, and its curves were no false curves\nPut on it from without. And there its strength lay\nFor the hard work. He chafed its long white body\nFrom end to end with his rough hand shut round it.\nHe tried it at the eye-hold in the ax-head.\n“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”\nBaptiste knew how to make a short job long\nFor love of it, and yet not waste time either.\n\n Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?\nBaptiste on his defense about the children\nHe kept from school, or did his best to keep--\nWhatever school and children and our doubts\nOf laid-on education had to do\nWith the curves of his ax-helves and his having\nUsed these unscrupulously to bring me\nTo see for once the inside of his house.\nWas I desired in friendship, partly as someone\nTo leave it to, whether the right to hold\nSuch doubts of education should depend\nUpon the education of those who held them.\n\n But now he brushed the shavings from his knee\nAnd stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof,\nErect, but not without its waves, as when\nThe snake stood up for evil in the Garden--\nTop-heavy with a heaviness his short,\nThick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down\nAnd in a little--a French touch in that.\nBaptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased:\n“See how she’s cock her head!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-bear": { - "title": "“The Bear”", - "body": "The bear puts both arms around the tree above her\nAnd draws it down as if it were a lover\nAnd its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,\nThen lets it snap back upright in the sky.\nHer next step rocks a boulder on the wall\n(She’s making her cross-country in the fall).\nHer great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples\nAs she flings over and off down through the maples,\nLeaving on one wire moth a lock of hair.\nSuch is the uncaged progress of the bear.\nThe world has room to make a bear feel free;\nThe universe seems cramped to you and me.\nMan acts more like the poor bear in a cage\nThat all day fights a nervous inward rage--\nHis mood rejecting all his mind suggests.\nHe paces back and forth and never rests\nThe me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,\nThe telescope at one end of his beat--\nAnd at the other end the microscope,\nTwo instruments of nearly equal hope,\nAnd in conjunction giving quite a spread.\nOr if he rests from scientific tread,\n’Tis only to sit back and sway his head\nThrough ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,\nBetween two metaphysical extremes.\nHe sits back on his fundamental butt\nWith lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,\n(lie almost looks religious but he’s not),\nAnd back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,\nAt one extreme agreeing with one Greek--\nAt the other agreeing with another Greek\nWhich may be thought, but only so to speak.\nA baggy figure, equally pathetic\nWhen sedentary and when peripatetic.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bereft": { - "title": "“Bereft”", - "body": "Where had I heard this wind before\nChange like this to a deeper roar?\nWhat would it take my standing there for,\nHolding open a restive door,\nLooking down hill to a frothy shore?\nSummer was past and day was past.\nSomber clouds in the west were massed.\nOut in the porch’s sagging floor,\nleaves got up in a coil and hissed,\nBlindly struck at my knee and missed.\nSomething sinister in the tone\nTold me my secret must be known:\nWord I was in the house alone\nSomehow must have gotten abroad,\nWord I was in my life alone,\nWord I had no one left but God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "birches": { - "title": "“Birches”", - "body": "When I see birches bend to left and right\nAcross the lines of straighter darker trees\nI like to think some boy’s been swinging them.\nBut swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.\nIce-storms do that. Often you must have seen them\nLoaded with ice a sunny winter morning\nAfter a rain. They click upon themselves\nAs the breeze rises and turn many-coloured\nAs the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.\nSoon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells\nShattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--\nSuch heaps of broken glass to sweep away\nYou’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.\nThey are dragged to the withered bracken by the load\nAnd they seem not to break; though once they are bowed\nSo low for long they never right themselves:\nYou may see their trunks arching in the woods\nYears afterwards trailing their leaves on the ground\nLike girls on hands and knees that throw their hair\nBefore them over their heads to dry in the sun.\nBut I was going to say when Truth broke in\nWith all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm\nI should prefer to have some boy bend them\nAs he went out and in to fetch the cows--\nSome boy too far from town to learn baseball\nWhose only play was what he found himself\nSummer or winter and could play alone.\nOne by one he subdued his father’s trees\nBy riding them down over and over again\nUntil he took the stiffness out of them\nAnd not one but hung limp not one was left\nFor him to conquer. He learned all there was\nTo learn about not launching out too soon\nAnd so not carrying the tree away\nClear to the ground. He always kept his poise\nTo the top branches climbing carefully\nWith the same pains you use to fill a cup\nUp to the brim and even above the brim.\nThen he flung outward feet first with a swish\nKicking his way down through the air to the ground.\nSo was I once myself a swinger of birches.\nAnd so I dream of going back to be.\nIt’s when I’m weary of considerations\nAnd life is too much like a pathless wood\nWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs\nBroken across it and one eye is weeping\nFrom a twig’s having lashed across it open.\nI’d like to get away from earth awhile\nAnd then come back to it and begin over.\nMay no fate wilfully misunderstand me\nAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me away\nNot to return. Earth’s the right place for love:\nI don’t know where it’s likely to go better.\nI’d like to go by climbing a birch tree\nAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunk\n_Toward_ heaven till the tree could bear no more\nBut dipped its top and set me down again.\nThat would be good both going and coming back.\nOne could do worse than be a swinger of birches.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-birthplace": { - "title": "“The Birthplace”", - "body": "Here further up the mountain slope\nThan there was every any hope,\nMy father built, enclosed a spring,\nStrung chains of wall round everything,\nSubdued the growth of earth to grass,\nAnd brought our various lives to pass.\nA dozen girls and boys we were.\nThe mountain seemed to like the stir,\nAnd made of us a little while--\nWith always something in her smile.\nToday she wouldn’t know our name.\n(No girl’s, of course, has stayed the same.)\nThe mountain pushed us off her knees.\nAnd now her lap is full of trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-black-cottage": { - "title": "“The Black Cottage”", - "body": "We chanced in passing by that afternoon\nTo catch it in a sort of special picture\nAmong tar-banded ancient cherry trees,\nSet well back from the road in rank lodged grass,\nThe little cottage we were speaking of,\nA front with just a door between two windows,\nFresh painted by the shower a velvet black.\nWe paused, the minister and I, to look.\nHe made as if to hold it at arm’s length\nOr put the leaves aside that framed it in.\n“Pretty,” he said. “Come in. No one will care.”\nThe path was a vague parting in the grass\nThat led us to a weathered window-sill.\nWe pressed our faces to the pane. “You see,” he said,\n“Everything’s as she left it when she died.\nHer sons won’t sell the house or the things in it.\nThey say they mean to come and summer here\nWhere they were boys. They haven’t come this year.\nThey live so far away--one is out west--\nIt will be hard for them to keep their word.\nAnyway they won’t have the place disturbed.”\nA buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms\nUnder a crayon portrait on the wall\nDone sadly from an old daguerreotype.\n“That was the father as he went to war.\nShe always, when she talked about war,\nSooner or later came and leaned, half knelt\nAgainst the lounge beside it, though I doubt\nIf such unlifelike lines kept power to stir\nAnything in her after all the years.\nHe fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,\nI ought to know--it makes a difference which:\nFredericksburg wasn’t Gettysburg, of course.\nBut what I’m getting to is how forsaken\nA little cottage this has always seemed;\nSince she went more than ever, but before--\nI don’t mean altogether by the lives\nThat had gone out of it, the father first,\nThen the two sons, till she was left alone.\n(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.\nShe valued the considerate neglect\nShe had at some cost taught them after years.)\nI mean by the world’s having passed it by--\nAs we almost got by this afternoon.\nIt always seems to me a sort of mark\nTo measure how far fifty years have brought us.\nWhy not sit down if you are in no haste?\nThese doorsteps seldom have a visitor.\nThe warping boards pull out their own old nails\nWith none to tread and put them in their place.\nShe had her own idea of things, the old lady.\nAnd she liked talk. She had seen Garrison\nAnd Whittier, and had her story of them.\nOne wasn’t long in learning that she thought\nWhatever else the Civil War was for\nIt wasn’t just to keep the States together,\nNor just to free the slaves, though it did both.\nShe wouldn’t have believed those ends enough\nTo have given outright for them all she gave.\nHer giving somehow touched the principle\nThat all men are created free and equal.\nAnd to hear her quaint phrases--so removed\nFrom the world’s view to-day of all those things.\nThat’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.\nWhat did he mean? Of course the easy way\nIs to decide it simply isn’t true.\nIt may not be. I heard a fellow say so.\nBut never mind, the Welshman got it planted\nWhere it will trouble us a thousand years.\nEach age will have to reconsider it.\nYou couldn’t tell her what the West was saying,\nAnd what the South to her serene belief.\nShe had some art of hearing and yet not\nHearing the latter wisdom of the world.\nWhite was the only race she ever knew.\nBlack she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.\nBut how could they be made so very unlike\nBy the same hand working in the same stuff?\nShe had supposed the war decided that.\nWhat are you going to do with such a person?\nStrange how such innocence gets its own way.\nI shouldn’t be surprised if in this world\nIt were the force that would at last prevail.\nDo you know but for her there was a time\nWhen to please younger members of the church,\nOr rather say non-members in the church,\nWhom we all have to think of nowadays,\nI would have changed the Creed a very little?\nNot that she ever had to ask me not to;\nIt never got so far as that; but the bare thought\nOf her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,\nAnd of her half asleep was too much for me.\nWhy, I might wake her up and startle her.\nIt was the words ‘descended into Hades’\nThat seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.\nYou know they suffered from a general onslaught.\nAnd well, if they weren’t true why keep right on\nSaying them like the heathen? We could drop them.\nOnly--there was the bonnet in the pew.\nSuch a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.\nBut suppose she had missed it from the Creed\nAs a child misses the unsaid Good-night,\nAnd falls asleep with heartache--how should I feel?\nI’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,\nFor, dear me, why abandon a belief\nMerely because it ceases to be true.\nCling to it long enough, and not a doubt\nIt will turn true again, for so it goes.\nMost of the change we think we see in life\nIs due to truths being in and out of favour.\nAs I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish\nI could be monarch of a desert land\nI could devote and dedicate forever\nTo the truths we keep coming back and back to.\nSo desert it would have to be, so walled\nBy mountain ranges half in summer snow,\nNo one would covet it or think it worth\nThe pains of conquering to force change on.\nScattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly\nSand dunes held loosely in tamarisk\nBlown over and over themselves in idleness.\nSand grains should sugar in the natal dew\nThe babe born to the desert, the sand storm\nRetard mid-waste my cowering caravans--”\n“There are bees in this wall.” He struck the clapboards,\nFierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.\nWe rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "blueberries": { - "title": "“Blueberries”", - "body": "“You ought to have seen what I saw on my way\nTo the village through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:\nBlueberries as big as the end of your thumb\nReal sky-blue and heavy and ready to drum\nIn the cavernous pail of the first one to come!\nAnd all ripe together not some of them green\nAnd some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!”\n\n“I don’t know what part of the pasture you mean.”\n\n“You know where they cut off the woods--let me see--\nIt was two years ago--or no!--can it be\nNo longer than that?--and the following fall\nThe fire ran and burned it all up but the wall.”\n\n“Why there hasn’t been time for the bushes to grow.\nThat’s always the way with the blueberries though:\nThere may not have been the ghost of a sign\nOf them anywhere under the shade of the pine\nBut get the pine out of the way you may burn\nThe pasture all over until not a fern\nOr grass-blade is left not to mention a stick\nAnd presto they’re up all around you as thick\nAnd hard to explain as a conjurer’s trick.”\n\n“It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit.\nI taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot.\n\nAnd after all really they’re ebony skinned:\nThe blue’s but a mist from the breath of the wind\nA tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand\nAnd less than the tan with which pickers are tanned.”\n\n“Does Mortenson know what he has do you think?”\n\n“He may and not care and so leave the chewink\nTo gather them for him--you know what he is.\nHe won’t make the fact that they’re rightfully his\nAn excuse for keeping us other folk out.”\n\n“I wonder you didn’t see Loren about.”\n\n“The best of it was that I did. Do you know\nI was just getting through what the field had to show\nAnd over the wall and into the road\nWhen who should come by with a democrat-load\nOf all the young chattering Lorens alive\nBut Loren the fatherly out for a drive.”\n\n“He saw you then? What did he do? Did he frown?”\n\n“He just kept nodding his head up and down.\nYou know how politely he always goes by.\nBut he thought a big thought--I could tell by his eye--\nWhich being expressed might be this in effect:\n‘I have left those there berries I shrewdly suspect\nTo ripen too long. I am greatly to blame.’”\n\n“He’s a thriftier person than some I could name.”\n\n“He seems to be thrifty; and hasn’t he need\nWith the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed?\nHe has brought them all up on wild berries they say\nLike birds. They store a great many away.\nThey eat them the year round and those they don’t eat\nThey sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet.”\n\n“Who cares what they say? It’s a nice way to live\nJust taking what Nature is willing to give\nNot forcing her hand with harrow and plow.”\n\n“I wish you had seen his perpetual bow--\nAnd the air of the youngsters! Not one of them turned\nAnd they looked so solemn-absurdly concerned.”\n\n“I wish I knew half what the flock of them know\nOf where all the berries and other things grow\nCranberries in bogs and raspberries on top\nOf the boulder-strewn mountain and when they will crop.\nI met them one day and each had a flower\nStuck into his berries as fresh as a shower;\nSome strange kind--they told me it hadn’t a name.”\n\n“I’ve told you how once not long after we came\nI almost provoked poor Loren to mirth\nBy going to him of all people on earth\nTo ask if he knew any fruit to be had\nFor the picking. The rascal he said he’d be glad\nTo tell if he knew. But the year had been bad.\nThere _had_ been some berries--but those were all gone.\nHe didn’t say where they had been. He went on:\n‘I’m sure--I’m sure’--as polite as could be.\nHe spoke to his wife in the door ‘Let me see\nMarne _we_ don’t know any good berrying place?’\nIt was all he could do to keep a straight face.”\n\n“If he thinks all the fruit that grows wild is for him\nHe’ll find he’s mistaken. See here for a whim\nWe’ll pick in the Mortensons’ pasture this year.\nWe’ll go in the morning that is if it’s clear\nAnd the sun shines out warm: the vines must be wet.\nIt’s so long since I picked I almost forget\nHow we used to pick berries: we took one look round\nThen sank out of sight like trolls underground\nAnd saw nothing more of each other or heard\nUnless when you said I was keeping a bird\nAway from its nest and I said it was you.\n‘Well one of us is.’ For complaining it flew\nAround and around us. And then for a while\nWe picked till I feared you had wandered a mile\nAnd I thought I had lost you. I lifted a shout\nToo loud for the distance you were it turned out\nFor when you made answer your voice was as low\nAs talking--you stood up beside me you know.”\n\n“We shan’t have the place to ourselves to enjoy--\nNot likely when all the young Lorens deploy.\nThey’ll be there to-morrow or even to-night.\nThey won’t be too friendly--they may be polite--\nTo people they look on as having no right\nTo pick where they’re picking. But we won’t complain.\nYou ought to have seen how it looked in the rain\nThe fruit mixed with water in layers of leaves\nLike two kinds of jewels a vision for thieves.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "bond-and-free": { - "title": "“Bond and Free”", - "body": "Love has earth to which she clings\nWith hills and circling arms about--\nWall within wall to shut fear out.\nBut Thought has need of no such things\nFor Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.\n\nOn snow and sand and turf I see\nWhere Love has left a printed trace\nWith straining in the world’s embrace.\nAnd such is Love and glad to be.\nBut thought has shaken his ankles free.\n\nThought cleaves the interstellar gloom\nAnd sits in Sirius’ disc all night\nTill day makes him retrace his flight\nWith smell of burning on every plume\nBack past the sun to an earthly room.\n\nHis gains in heaven are what they are.\nYet some say Love by being thrall\nAnd simply staying possesses all\nIn several beauty that Thought fares far\nTo find fused in another star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-bonfire": { - "title": "“The Bonfire”", - "body": "“Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,\nAs reckless as the best of them to-night,\nBy setting fire to all the brush we piled\nWith pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.\nOh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.\nThe pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough\nDown dark converging paths between the pines.\nLet’s not care what we do with it to-night.\nDivide it? No! But burn it as one pile\nThe way we piled it. And let’s be the talk\nOf people brought to windows by a light\nThrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.\nRouse them all, both the free and not so free\nWith saying what they’d like to do to us\nFor what they’d better wait till we have done.\nLet’s all but bring to life this old volcano,\nIf that is what the mountain ever was--\nAnd scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will …”\n\n“And scare you too?” the children said together.\n\n“Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire\nBegin in smudge with ropy smoke and know\nThat still, if I repent, I may recall it,\nBut in a moment not: a little spurt\nOf burning fatness, and then nothing but\nThe fire itself can put it out, and that\nBy burning out, and before it burns out\nIt will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,\nAnd sweeping round it with a flaming sword,\nMade the dim trees stand back in wider circle--\nDone so much and I know not how much more\nI mean it shall not do if I can bind it.\nWell if it doesn’t with its draft bring on\nA wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,\nAs once it did with me upon an April.\nThe breezes were so spent with winter blowing\nThey seemed to fail the bluebirds under them\nShort of the perch their languid flight was toward;\nAnd my flame made a pinnacle to heaven\nAs I walked once round it in possession.\nBut the wind out of doors--you know the saying.\nThere came a gust. You used to think the trees\nMade wind by fanning since you never knew\nIt blow but that you saw the trees in motion.\nSomething or someone watching made that gust.\nIt put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass\nOf over-winter with the least tip-touch\nYour tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.\nThe place it reached to blackened instantly.\nThe black was all there was by day-light,\nThat and the merest curl of cigarette smoke--\nAnd a flame slender as the hepaticas,\nBlood-root, and violets so soon to be now.\nBut the black spread like black death on the ground,\nAnd I think the sky darkened with a cloud\nLike winter and evening coming on together.\nThere were enough things to be thought of then.\nWhere the field stretches toward the north\nAnd setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it\nTo flames without twice thinking, where it verges\nUpon the road, to flames too, though in fear\nThey might find fuel there, in withered brake,\nGrass its full length, old silver golden-rod,\nAnd alder and grape vine entanglement,\nTo leap the dusty deadline. For my own\nI took what front there was beside. I knelt\nAnd thrust hands in and held my face away.\nFight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.\nA board is the best weapon if you have it.\nI had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,\nAnd said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother\nAnd heat so close in; but the thought of all\nThe woods and town on fire by me, and all\nThe town turned out to fight for me--that held me.\nI trusted the brook barrier, but feared\nThe road would fail; and on that side the fire\nDied not without a noise of crackling wood--\nOf something more than tinder-grass and weed--\nThat brought me to my feet to hold it back\nBy leaning back myself, as if the reins\nWere round my neck and I was at the plough.\nI won! But I’m sure no one ever spread\nAnother color over a tenth the space\nThat I spread coal-black over in the time\nIt took me. Neighbors coming home from town\nCouldn’t believe that so much black had come there\nWhile they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there\nWhen they had passed an hour or so before\nGoing the other way and they not seen it.\nThey looked about for someone to have done it.\nBut there was no one. I was somewhere wondering\nWhere all my weariness had gone and why\nI walked so light on air in heavy shoes\nIn spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.\nWhy wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?”\n\n“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”\n\n“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,\nWhat would you say to war if it should come?\nThat’s what for reasons I should like to know--\nIf you can comfort me by any answer.”\n\n“Oh, but war’s not for children--it’s for men.”\n\n“Now we are digging almost down to China.\nMy dears, my dears, you thought that--we all thought it.\nSo your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,\nAbout the ships where war has found them out\nAt sea, about the towns where war has come\nThrough opening clouds at night with droning speed\nFurther o’erhead than all but stars and angels,--\nAnd children in the ships and in the towns?\nHaven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?\nNothing so new--something we had forgotten:\nWar is for everyone, for children too.\nI wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.\nThe best way is to come up hill with me\nAnd have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "a-boundless-moment": { - "title": "“A Boundless Moment”", - "body": "He halted in the wind, and--what was that\nFar in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?\nHe stood there bringing March against his thought,\nAnd yet too ready to believe the most.\n\n“Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,” I said;\nAnd truly it was fair enough for flowers\nhad we but in us to assume in march\nSuch white luxuriance of May for ours.\n\nWe stood a moment so in a strange world,\nMyself as one his own pretense deceives;\nAnd then I said the truth (and we moved on).\nA young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "a-brook-in-the-city": { - "title": "“A Brook in the City”", - "body": "The farm house lingers, though averse to square\nWith the new city street it has to wear\nA number in. But what about the brook\nThat held the house as in an elbow-crook?\nI ask as one who knew the brook, its strength\nAnd impulse, having dipped a finger-length\nAnd made it leap my knuckle, having tossed\nA flower to try its currents where they crossed.\nThe meadow grass could be cemented down\nFrom growing under pavements of a town;\nThe apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.\nIs water wood to serve a brook the same?\nHow else dispose of an immortal force\nNo longer needed? Staunch it at its source\nWith cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown\nDeep in a sewer dungeon under stone\nIn fetid darkness still to live and run--\nAnd all for nothing it had ever done\nExcept forget to go in fear perhaps.\nNo one would know except for ancient maps\nThat such a brook ran water. But I wonder\nIf, from its being kept forever under,\nThese thoughts may not have risen that so keep\nThis new-built city from both work and sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "browns-descent": { - "title": "“Brown’s Descent”", - "body": "Brown lived at such a lofty farm\nThat everyone for miles could see\nHis lantern when he did his chores\nIn winter after half-past three.\n\nAnd many must have seen him make\nHis wild descent from there one night\n’Cross lots ’cross walls ’cross everything\nDescribing rings of lantern light.\n\nBetween the house and barn the gale\nGot him by something he had on\nAnd blew him out on the icy crust\nThat cased the world and he was gone!\n\nWalls were all buried trees were few:\nHe saw no stay unless he stove\nA hole in somewhere with his heel.\nBut though repeatedly he strove\n\nAnd stamped and said things to himself\nAnd sometimes something seemed to yield\nHe gained no foothold but pursued\nHis journey down from field to field.\n\nSometimes he came with arms outspread\nLike wings revolving in the scene\nUpon his longer axis and\nWith no small dignity of mien.\n\nFaster or slower as he chanced\nSitting or standing as he chose\nAccording as he feared to risk\nHis neck or thought to spare his clothes\n\nHe never let the lantern drop.\nAnd some exclaimed who saw afar\nThe figures he described with it\n“I wonder what those signals are\n\nBrown makes at such an hour of night!\nHe’s celebrating something strange.\nI wonder if he’s sold his farm\nOr been made Master of the Grange.”\n\nHe reeled he lurched he bobbed he checked;\nHe fell and made the lantern rattle\n(But saved the light from going out).\nSo half-way down he fought the battle\n\nIncredulous of his own bad luck.\nAnd then becoming reconciled\nTo everything he gave it up\nAnd came down like a coasting child.\n\n“Well--I--be----” that was all he said\nAs standing in the river road\nHe looked back up the slippery slope\n(Two miles it was) to his abode.\n\nSometimes as an authority\nOn motor-cars I’m asked if I\nShould say our stock was petered out\nAnd this is my sincere reply:\n\nYankees are what they always were.\nDon’t think Brown ever gave up hope\nOf getting home again because\nHe couldn’t climb that slippery slope;\n\nOr even thought of standing there\nUntil the January thaw\nShould take the polish off the crust.\nHe bowed with grace to natural law\n\nAnd then went round it on his feet\nAfter the manner of our stock;\nNot much concerned for those to whom\nAt that particular time o’clock\n\nIt must have looked as if the course\nHe steered was really straight away\nFrom that which he was headed for--\nNot much concerned for them I say.\n\nBut now he snapped his eyes three times;\nThen shook his lantern saying “Ile’s\n’Bout out!” and took the long way home\nBy road a matter of several miles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-census-taker": { - "title": "“The Census-Taker”", - "body": "I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening\nTo a slab-built, black-paper-covered house\nOf one room and one window and one door,\nThe only dwelling in a waste cut over\nA hundred square miles round it in the mountains:\nAnd that not dwelt in now by men or women.\n(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,\nSo what is this I make a sorrow of?)\nI came as census-taker to the waste\nTo count the people in it and found none,\nNone in the hundred miles, none in the house,\nWhere I came last with some hope, but not much,\nAfter hours’ overlooking from the cliffs\nAn emptiness flayed to the very stone.\nI found no people that dared show themselves,\nNone not in hiding from the outward eye.\nThe time was autumn, but how anyone\nCould tell the time of year when every tree\nThat could have dropped a leaf was down itself\nAnd nothing but the stump of it was left\nNow bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;\nAnd every tree up stood a rotting trunk\nWithout a single leaf to spend on autumn,\nOr branch to whistle after what was spent.\nPerhaps the wind the more without the help\nOf breathing trees said something of the time\nOf year or day the way it swung a door\nForever off the latch, as if rude men\nPassed in and slammed it shut each one behind him\nFor the next one to open for himself.\nI counted nine I had no right to count\n(But this was dreamy unofficial counting)\nBefore I made the tenth across the threshold.\nWhere was my supper? Where was anyone’s?\nNo lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table.\nThe stove was cold--the stove was off the chimney--\nAnd down by one side where it lacked a leg.\nThe people that had loudly passed the door\nWere people to the ear but not the eye.\nThey were not on the table with their elbows.\nThey were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.\nI saw no men there and no bones of men there.\nI armed myself against such bones as might be\nWith the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle\nI picked up off the straw-dust covered floor.\nNot bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.\nThe door was still because I held it shut\nWhile I thought what to do that could be done--\nAbout the house--about the people not there.\nThis house in one year fallen to decay\nFilled me with no less sorrow than the houses\nFallen to ruin in ten thousand years\nWhere Asia wedges Africa from Europe.\nNothing was left to do that I could see\nUnless to find that there was no one there\nAnd declare to the cliffs too far for echo,\n“The place is desert, and let whoso lurks\nIn silence, if in this he is aggrieved,\nBreak silence now or be forever silent.\nLet him say why it should not be declared so.”\nThe melancholy of having to count souls\nWhere they grow fewer and fewer every year\nIs extreme where they shrink to none at all.\nIt must be I want life to go on living.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "christmas-trees": { - "title": "“Christmas Trees”", - "body": "The city had withdrawn into itself\nAnd left at last the country to the country;\nWhen between whirls of snow not come to lie\nAnd whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove\nA stranger to our yard, who looked the city,\nYet did in country fashion in that there\nHe sat and waited till he drew us out\nA-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.\nHe proved to be the city come again\nTo look for something it had left behind\nAnd could not do without and keep its Christmas.\nHe asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;\nMy woods--the young fir balsams like a place\nWhere houses all are churches and have spires.\nI hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.\nI doubt if I was tempted for a moment\nTo sell them off their feet to go in cars\nAnd leave the slope behind the house all bare,\nWhere the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.\nI’d hate to have them know it if I was.\nYet more I’d hate to hold my trees except\nAs others hold theirs or refuse for them,\nBeyond the time of profitable growth,\nThe trial by market everything must come to.\nI dallied so much with the thought of selling.\nThen whether from mistaken courtesy\nAnd fear of seeming short of speech, or whether\nFrom hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,\n“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”\n“I could soon tell how many they would cut,\nYou let me look them over.”\n\n“You could look.\nBut don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”\nPasture they spring in, some in clumps too close\nThat lop each other of boughs, but not a few\nQuite solitary and having equal boughs\nAll round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,\nOr paused to say beneath some lovelier one,\nWith a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”\nI thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.\nWe climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,\nAnd came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”\n\n“A thousand Christmas trees!--at what apiece?”\n\nHe felt some need of softening that to me:\n“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”\n\nThen I was certain I had never meant\nTo let him have them. Never show surprise!\nBut thirty dollars seemed so small beside\nThe extent of pasture I should strip, three cents\n(For that was all they figured out apiece),\nThree cents so small beside the dollar friends\nI should be writing to within the hour\nWould pay in cities for good trees like those,\nRegular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools\nCould hang enough on to pick off enough.\nA thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!\nWorth three cents more to give away than sell,\nAs may be shown by a simple calculation.\nToo bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.\nI can’t help wishing I could send you one,\nIn wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "a-cliff-dwelling": { - "title": "“A Cliff Dwelling”", - "body": "There sandy seems the golden sky\nAnd golden seems the sandy plain.\nNo habitation meets the eye\nUnless in the horizon rim,\nSome halfway up the limestone wall,\nThat spot of black is not a stain\nOr shadow, but a cavern hole,\nWhere someone used to climb and crawl\nTo rest from his besetting fears.\nI see the callus on his soul\nThe disappearing last of him\nAnd of his race starvation slim,\nOh years ago--ten thousand years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cocoon": { - "title": "“The Cocoon”", - "body": "As far as I can see this autumn haze\nThat spreading in the evening air both way,\nMakes the new moon look anything but new,\nAnd pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,\nIs all the smoke from one poor house alone\nWith but one chimney it can call its own;\nSo close it will not light an early light,\nKeeping its life so close and out of sign\nNo one for hours has set a foot outdoors\nSo much as to take care of evening chores.\nThe inmates may be lonely women-folk.\nI want to tell them that with all this smoke\nThey prudently are spinning their cocoon\nAnd anchoring it to an earth and moon\nFrom which no winter gale can hope to blow it,--\nSpinning their own cocoon did they but know it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-code": { - "title": "“The Code”", - "body": "There were three in the meadow by the brook\nGathering up windrows piling cocks of hay\nWith an eye always lifted toward the west\nWhere an irregular sun-bordered cloud\nDarkly advanced with a perpetual dagger\nFlickering across its bosom. Suddenly\nOne helper thrusting pitchfork in the ground\nMarched himself off the field and home. One stayed.\nThe town-bred farmer failed to understand.\n\n“What was there wrong?”\n\n“Something you just now said.”\n\n“What did I say?”\n\n“About our taking pains.”\n\n“To cock the hay?--because it’s going to shower?\nI said that more than half an hour ago.\nI said it to myself as much as you.”\n\n“You didn’t know. But James is one big fool.\nHe thought you meant to find fault with his work.\nThat’s what the average farmer would have meant.\nJames would take time of course to chew it over\nBefore he acted: he’s just got round to act.”\n\n“He is a fool if that’s the way he takes me.”\n\n“Don’t let it bother you. You’ve found out something.\nThe hand that knows his business won’t be told\nTo do work better or faster--those two things.\nI’m as particular as anyone:\nMost likely I’d have served you just the same.\nBut I know you don’t understand our ways.\nYou were just talking what was in your mind\nWhat was in all our minds and you weren’t hinting.\n\nTell you a story of what happened once:\nI was up here in Salem at a man’s\nNamed Sanders with a gang of four or five\nDoing the haying. No one liked the boss.\nHe was one of the kind sports call a spider\nAll wiry arms and legs that spread out wavy\nFrom a humped body nigh as big’s a biscuit.\nBut work! that man could work especially\nIf by so doing he could get more work\nOut of his hired help. I’m not denying\nHe was hard on himself. I couldn’t find\nThat he kept any hours--not for himself.\nDaylight and lantern-light were one to him:\nI’ve heard him pounding in the barn all night.\nBut what he liked was someone to encourage.\nThem that he couldn’t lead he’d get behind\nAnd drive the way you can you know in mowing--\nKeep at their heels and threaten to mow their legs off.\nI’d seen about enough of his bulling tricks\n(We call that bulling). I’d been watching him.\nSo when he paired off with me in the hayfield\nTo load the load thinks I Look out for trouble.\nI built the load and topped it off; old Sanders\nCombed it down with a rake and says ‘O. K.’\nEverything went well till we reached the barn\nWith a big jag to empty in a bay.\nYou understand that meant the easy job\nFor the man up on top of throwing _down_\nThe hay and rolling it off wholesale\nWhere on a mow it would have been slow lifting.\nYou wouldn’t think a fellow’d need much urging\nUnder those circumstances would you now?\nBut the old fool seizes his fork in both hands\nAnd looking up bewhiskered out of the pit\nShouts like an army captain ‘Let her come!’\nThinks I D’ye mean it? ‘What was that you said?’\nI asked out loud so’s there’d be no mistake\n‘Did you say Let her come?’ ‘Yes let her come.’\nHe said it over but he said it softer.\nNever you say a thing like that to a man\nNot if he values what he is. God I’d as soon\nMurdered him as left out his middle name.\nI’d built the load and knew right where to find it.\nTwo or three forkfuls I picked lightly round for\nLike meditating and then I just dug in\nAnd dumped the rackful on him in ten lots\nI looked over the side once in the dust\nAnd caught sight of him treading-water-like\nKeeping his head above. ‘Damn ye’ I says\n‘That gets ye!’ He squeaked like a squeezed rat.\nThat was the last I saw or heard of him.\nI cleaned the rack and drove out to cool off.\nAs I sat mopping hayseed from my neck\nAnd sort of waiting to be asked about it\nOne of the boys sings out ‘Where’s the old man?’\n‘I left him in the barn under the hay.\nIf ye want him ye can go and dig him out.’\nThey realised from the way I swobbed my neck\nMore than was needed something must be up.\nThey headed for the barn; I stayed where I was.\nThey told me afterward. First they forked hay\nA lot of it out into the barn floor.\nNothing! They listened for him. Not a rustle.\nI guess they thought I’d spiked him in the temple\nBefore I buried him or I couldn’t have managed.\nThey excavated more. ‘Go keep his wife\nOut of the barn.’ Someone looked in a window\nAnd curse me if he wasn’t in the kitchen\nSlumped way down in a chair with both his feet\nStuck in the oven the hottest day that summer.\nHe looked so clean disgusted from behind\nThere was no one that dared to stir him up\nOr let him know that he was being looked at.\nApparently I hadn’t buried him\n(I may have knocked him down); but my just trying\nTo bury him had hurt his dignity.\nHe had gone to the house so’s not to meet me.\nHe kept away from us all afternoon.\nWe tended to his hay. We saw him out\nAfter a while picking peas in his garden:\nHe couldn’t keep away from doing something.”\n\n“Weren’t you relieved to find he wasn’t dead?”\n\n“No! and yet I don’t know--it’s hard to say.\nI went about to kill him fair enough.”\n\n“You took an awkward way. Did he discharge you?”\n“Discharge me? No! He knew I did just right.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "come-in": { - "title": "“Come In”", - "body": "As I came to the edge of the woods,\nThrush music--hark!\nNow if it was dusk outside,\nInside it was dark.\n\nToo dark in the woods for a bird\nBy sleight of wing\nTo better its perch for the night,\nThough it still could sing.\n\nThe last of the light of the sun\nThat had died in the west\nStill lived for one song more\nIn a thrush’s breast.\n\nFar in the pillared dark\nThrush music went--\nAlmost like a call to come in\nTo the dark and lament.\n\nBut no, I was out for stars;\nI would not come in.\nI meant not even if asked;\nAnd I hadn’t been.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cow-in-apple-time": { - "title": "“The Cow in Apple-Time”", - "body": "Something inspires the only cow of late\nTo make no more of a wall than an open gate\nAnd think no more of wall-builders than fools.\nHer face is flecked with pomace and she drools\nA cider syrup. Having tasted fruit\nShe scorns a pasture withering to the root.\nShe runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten\nThe windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.\nShe leaves them bitten when she has to fly.\nShe bellows on a knoll against the sky.\nHer udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-hired-man": { - "title": "“The Death of the Hired Man”", - "body": "Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table\nWaiting for Warren. When she heard his step\nShe ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage\nTo meet him in the doorway with the news\nAnd put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”\n\nShe pushed him outward with her through the door\nAnd shut it after her. “Be kind” she said.\nShe took the market things from Warren’s arms\nAnd set them on the porch then drew him down\nTo sit beside her on the wooden steps.\n\n“When was I ever anything but kind to him?\nBut I’ll not have the fellow back” he said.\n“I told him so last haying didn’t I?\n‘If he left then’ I said ‘that ended it.’\nWhat good is he? Who else will harbour him\nAt his age for the little he can do?\nWhat help he is there’s no depending on.\nOff he goes always when I need him most.\n\n‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay\nEnough at least to buy tobacco with\nSo he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’\n‘All right’ I say ‘I can’t afford to pay\nAny fixed wages though I wish I could.’\n‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have\nto.’\nI shouldn’t mind his bettering himself\nIf that was what it was. You can be certain\nWhen he begins like that there’s someone at him\nTrying to coax him off with pocket-money--\nIn haying time when any help is scarce.\nIn winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”\n\n“Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you” Mary said.\n\n“I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”\n\n“He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.\nWhen I came up from Rowe’s I found him here\nHuddled against the barn-door fast asleep\nA miserable sight and frightening too--\nYou needn’t smile--I didn’t recognise him--\nI wasn’t looking for him--and he’s changed.\nWait till you see.”\n\n“Where did you say he’d been?”\n\n“He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house\nAnd gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.\nI tried to make him talk about his travels.\nNothing would do: he just kept nodding off.”\n\n“What did he say? Did he say anything?”\n\n“But little.”\n\n“Anything? Mary confess\nHe said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.”\n\n“Warren!”\n\n“But did he? I just want to know.”\n\n“Of course he did. What would you have him say?\nSurely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man\nSome humble way to save his self-respect.\nHe added if you really care to know\nHe meant to clear the upper pasture too.\nThat sounds like something you have heard before?\nWarren I wish you could have heard the way\nHe jumbled everything. I stopped to look\nTwo or three times--he made me feel so queer--\nTo see if he was talking in his sleep.\nHe ran on Harold Wilson--you remember--\nThe boy you had in haying four years since.\nHe’s finished school and teaching in his college.\nSilas declares you’ll have to get him back.\nHe says they two will make a team for work:\nBetween them they will lay this farm as smooth!\nThe way he mixed that in with other things.\nHe thinks young Wilson a likely lad though daft\nOn education--you know how they fought\nAll through July under the blazing sun\nSilas up on the cart to build the load\nHarold along beside to pitch it on.”\n\n“Yes I took care to keep well out of earshot.”\n\n“Well those days trouble Silas like a dream.\nYou wouldn’t think they would. How some things\nlinger!\nHarold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him.\nAfter so many years he still keeps finding\nGood arguments he sees he might have used.\nI sympathise. I know just how it feels\nTo think of the right thing to say too late.\nHarold’s associated in his mind with Latin.\nHe asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying\nHe studied Latin like the violin\nBecause he liked it--that an argument!\nHe said he couldn’t make the boy believe\nHe could find water with a hazel prong--\nWhich showed how much good school had ever done\nhim.\nHe wanted to go over that. But most of all\nHe thinks if he could have another chance\nTo teach him how to build a load of hay----”\n\n“I know that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.\nHe bundles every forkful in its place\nAnd tags and numbers it for future reference\nSo he can find and easily dislodge it\nIn the unloading. Silas does that well.\nHe takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.\nYou never see him standing on the hay\nHe’s trying to lift straining to lift himself.”\n\n“He thinks if he could teach him that he’d be\nSome good perhaps to someone in the world.\nHe hates to see a boy the fool of books.\nPoor Silas so concerned for other folk\nAnd nothing to look backward to with pride\nAnd nothing to look forward to with hope\nSo now and never any different.”\n\nPart of a moon was falling down the west\nDragging the whole sky with it to the hills.\nIts light poured softly in her lap. She saw\nAnd spread her apron to it. She put out her hand\nAmong the harp-like morning-glory strings\nTaut with the dew from garden bed to eaves\nAs if she played unheard the tenderness\nThat wrought on him beside her in the night.\n“Warren” she said “he has come home to die:\nYou needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”\n\n“Home” he mocked gently.\n\n“Yes what else but home?\n\nIt all depends on what you mean by home.\nOf course he’s nothing to us any more\nThan was the hound that came a stranger to us\nOut of the woods worn out upon the trail.”\n\n“Home is the place where when you have to go\nthere\nThey have to take you in.”\n\n“I should have called it\nSomething you somehow haven’t to deserve.”\n\nWarren leaned out and took a step or two\nPicked up a little stick and brought it back\nAnd broke it in his hand and tossed it by.\n“Silas has better claim on us you think\nThan on his brother? Thirteen little miles\nAs the road winds would bring him to his door.\nSilas has walked that far no doubt to-day.\nWhy didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich\nA somebody--director in the bank.”\n\n“He never told us that.”\n\n“We know it though.”\n\n“I think his brother ought to help of course.\nI’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right\nTo take him in and might be willing to--\nHe may be better than appearances.\nBut have some pity on Silas. Do you think\nIf he’d had any pride in claiming kin\nOr anything he looked for from his brother\nHe’d keep so still about him all this time?”\n\n“I wonder what’s between them.”\n\n“I can tell you.\nSilas is what he is--we wouldn’t mind him--\nBut just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.\nHe never did a thing so very bad.\nHe don’t know why he isn’t quite as good\nAs anyone. He won’t be made ashamed\nTo please his brother worthless though he is.”\n\n“_I_ can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”\n\n“No but he hurt my heart the way he lay\nAnd rolled his old head on that sharp-edged\nchair-back.\nHe wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge.\nYou must go in and see what you can do.\nI made the bed up for him there to-night.\nYou’ll be surprised at him--how much he’s broken.\nHis working days are done; I’m sure of it.”\n\n“I’d not be in a hurry to say that.”\n\n“I haven’t been. Go look see for yourself.\nBut Warren please remember how it is:\nHe’s come to help you ditch the meadow.\nHe has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.\nHe may not speak of it and then he may.\nI’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud\nWill hit or miss the moon.”\n\nIt hit the moon.\nThen there were three there making a dim row\nThe moon the little silver cloud and she.\n\nWarren returned--too soon it seemed to her\nSlipped to her side caught up her hand and waited.\n\n“Warren” she questioned.\n\n“Dead” was all he answered.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-demiurges-laugh": { - "title": "“The Demiurge’s Laugh”", - "body": "It was far in the sameness of the wood;\nI was running with joy on the Demon’s trail,\nThough I knew what I hunted was no true god.\ni was just as the light was beginning to fail\nThat I suddenly head--all I needed to hear:\nIt has lasted me many and many a year.\n\nThe sound was behind me instead of before,\nA sleepy sound, but mocking half,\nAs one who utterly couldn’t care.\nThe Demon arose from his wallow to laugh,\nBrushing the dirt from his eye as he went;\nAnd well I knew what the Demon meant.\n\nI shall not forget how his laugh rang out.\nI felt as a fool to have been so caught,\nAnd checked my steps to make pretense\nI was something among the leaves I sought\n(Though doubtful whether he stayed to see).\nThereafter I sat me against a tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "desert-places": { - "title": "“Desert Places”", - "body": "Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast\nIn a field I looked into going past,\nAnd the ground almost covered smooth in snow,\nBut a few weeds and stubble showing last.\n\nThe woods around it have it--it is theirs.\nAll animals are smothered in their lairs.\nI am too absent-spirited to count;\nThe loneliness includes me unawares.\n\nAnd lonely as it is, that loneliness\nWill be more lonely ere it will be less--\nA blanker whiteness of benighted snow\nWith no expression, nothing to express.\n\nThey cannot scare me with their empty spaces\nBetween stars--on stars where no human race is.\nI have it in me so much nearer home\nTo scare myself with my own desert places.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-dream-pang": { - "title": "“A Dream Pang”", - "body": "I had withdrawn in forest, and my song\nWas swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;\nAnd to the forest edge you came one day\n(This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,\nBut did not enter, though the wish was strong:\nyou shook your pensive head as who should say,\n“I dare not--to far in his footsteps stray--\nHe must seek me would he undo the wrong.”\n\nNot far, but near, I stood and saw it all\nbehind low boughs the trees let down outside;\nAnd the sweet pang it cost me not to call\nAnd tell you that I saw does still abide.\nBut ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,\nFor the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "dust-of-snow": { - "title": "“Dust of Snow”", - "body": "The way a crow\nShook down on me\nThe dust of snow\nFrom a hemlock tree\n\nHas given my heart\nA change of mood\nAnd saved some part\nOf a day I had rued.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-egg-and-the-machine": { - "title": "“The Egg and the Machine”", - "body": "He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.\nFrom far away there came an answering tick\nAnd then another tick. He knew the code:\nHis hate had roused an engine up the road.\nHe wished when he had had the track alone\nHe had attacked it with a club or stone\nAnd bent some rail wide open like switch\nSo as to wreck the engine in the ditch.\nToo late though, now, he had himself to thank.\nIts click was rising to a nearer clank.\nHere it came breasting like a horse in skirts.\n(He stood well back for fear of scalding squirts.)\nThen for a moment all there was was size\nConfusion and a roar that drowned the cries\nHe raised against the gods in the machine.\nThen once again the sandbank lay serene.\nThe traveler’s eye picked up a turtle train,\nbetween the dotted feet a streak of tail,\nAnd followed it to where he made out vague\nBut certain signs of buried turtle’s egg;\nAnd probing with one finger not too rough,\nHe found suspicious sand, and sure enough,\nThe pocket of a little turtle mine.\nIf there was one egg in it there were nine,\nTorpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather\nAll packed in sand to wait the trump together.\n“You’d better not disturb any more,”\nHe told the distance, “I am armed for war.\nThe next machine that has the power to pass\nWill get this plasm in it goggle glass.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-empty-threat": { - "title": "“An Empty Threat”", - "body": "I stay;\nBut it isn’t as if\nThere wasn’t always Hudson’s Bay\nAnd the fur trade,\nA small skiff\nAnd a paddle blade.\n\nI can just see my tent pegged,\nAnd me on the floor,\nCross-legged,\nAnd a trapper looking in at the door\nWith furs to sell.\n\nHis name’s Joe,\nAlias John,\nAnd between what he doesn’t know\nAnd won’t tell\nAbout where Henry Hudson’s gone,\nI can’t say he’s much help;\nBut we get on.\n\nThe seal yelp\nOn an ice cake.\nIt’s not men by some mistake?\nNo,\nThere’s not a soul\nFor a windbreak\nBetween me and the North Pole--\n\nExcept always John-Joe,\nMy French Indian Esquimaux,\nAnd he’s off setting traps\nIn one himself perhaps.\n\nGive a headshake\nOver so much bay\nThrown away\nIn snow and mist\nThat doesn’t exist,\n\nI was going to say,\nFor God, man, or beast’s sake,\nYet does perhaps for all three.\n\nDon’t ask Joe\nWhat it is to him.\nIt’s sometimes dim\nWhat it is to me,\nUnless it be\nIt’s the old captain’s dark fate\nWho failed to find or force a strait\nIn its two-thousand-mile coast;\nAnd his crew left him where be failed,\nAnd nothing came of all be sailed.\n\nIt’s to say, “You and I--\nTo such a ghost--\nYou and I\nOff here\nWith the dead race of the Great Auk!”\nAnd, “Better defeat almost,\nIf seen clear,\nThan life’s victories of doubt\nThat need endless talk-talk\nTo make them out.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-encounter": { - "title": "“An Encounter”", - "body": "Once on the kind of day called “weather breeder”\nWhen the heat slowly hazes and the sun\nBy its own power seems to be undone\nI was half boring through half climbing through\nA swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar\nAnd scurf of plants and weary and over-heated\nAnd sorry I ever left the road I knew\nI paused and rested on a sort of hook\nThat had me by the coat as good as seated\nAnd since there was no other way to look\nLooked up toward heaven and there against the blue\nStood over me a resurrected tree\nA tree that had been down and raised again--\nA barkless spectre. He had halted too\nAs if for fear of treading upon me.\nI saw the strange position of his hands--\nUp at his shoulders dragging yellow strands\nOf wire with something in it from men to men.\n“You here?” I said. “Where aren’t you nowadays?\nAnd what’s the news you carry--if you know?\nAnd tell me where you’re off for--Montreal?\nMe? I’m not off for anywhere at all.\nSometimes I wander out of beaten ways\nHalf looking for the orchid Calypso.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "evening-in-a-sugar-orchard": { - "title": "“Evening in a Sugar Orchard”", - "body": "From where I lingered in a lull in march\noutside the sugar-house one night for choice,\nI called the fireman with a careful voice\nAnd bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:\n“O fireman, give the fire another stoke,\nAnd send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.”\nI thought a few might tangle, as they did,\nAmong bare maple boughs, and in the rare\nHill atmosphere not cease to glow,\nAnd so be added to the moon up there.\nThe moon, though slight, was moon enough to show\nOn every tree a bucket with a lid,\nAnd on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.\nThe sparks made no attempt to be the moon.\nThey were content to figure in the trees\nAs Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.\nAnd that was what the boughs were full of soon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-exposed-nest": { - "title": "“The Exposed Nest”", - "body": "You were forever finding some new play.\nSo when I saw you down on hands and knees\nI the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,\nTrying, I thought, to set it up on end,\nI went to show you how to make it stay,\nIf that was your idea, against the breeze,\nAnd, if you asked me, even help pretend\nTo make it root again and grow afresh.\nBut ’twas no make-believe with you today,\nNor was the grass itself your real concern,\nThough I found your hand full of wilted fern,\nSteel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.\n’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground\nThe cutter-bar had just gone champing over\n(Miraculously without tasking flesh)\nAnd left defenseless to the heat and light.\nYou wanted to restore them to their right\nOf something interposed between their sight\nAnd too much world at once--could means be found.\nThe way the nest-full every time we stirred\nStood up to us as to a mother-bird\nWhose coming home has been too long deferred,\nMade me ask would the mother-bird return\nAnd care for them in such a change of scene\nAnd might out meddling make her more afraid.\nThat was a thing we could not wait to learn.\nWe saw the risk we took in doing good,\nBut dared not spare to do the best we could\nThough harm should come of it; so built the screen\nYou had begun, and gave them back their shade.\nAll this to prove we cared. Why is there then\nNo more to tell? We turned to other things.\nI haven’t any memory--have you?--\nOf ever coming to the place again\nTo see if the birds lived the first night through,\nAnd so at last to learn to use their wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-fear": { - "title": "“The Fear”", - "body": "A lantern light from deeper in the barn\nShone on a man and woman in the door\nAnd threw their lurching shadows on a house\nNear by, all dark in every glossy window.\nA horse’s hoof pawed once the hollow floor,\nAnd the back of the gig they stood beside\nMoved in a little. The man grasped a wheel,\nThe woman spoke out sharply, “Whoa, stand still!”\n“I saw it just as plain as a white plate,”\nShe said, “as the light on the dashboard ran\nAlong the bushes at the roadside--a man’s face.\nYou must have seen it too.”\n“I didn’t see it.\nAre you sure--”\n“Yes, I’m sure!”\n“--it was a face?”\n“Joel, I’ll have to look. I can’t go in,\nI can’t, and leave a thing like that unsettled.\nDoors locked and curtains drawn will make no difference.\nI always have felt strange when we came home\nTo the dark house after so long an absence,\nAnd the key rattled loudly into place\nSeemed to warn someone to be getting out\nAt one door as we entered at another.\nWhat if I’m right, and someone all the time--\nDon’t hold my arm!”\n“I say it’s someone passing.”\n“You speak as if this were a travelled road.\nYou forget where we are. What is beyond\nThat he’d be going to or coming from\nAt such an hour of night, and on foot too.\nWhat was he standing still for in the bushes?”\n“It’s not so very late--it’s only dark.\nThere’s more in it than you’re inclined to say.\nDid he look like--?”\n“He looked like anyone.\nI’ll never rest to-night unless I know.\nGive me the lantern.”\n“You don’t want the lantern.”\nShe pushed past him and got it for herself.\n“You’re not to come,” she said. “This is my business.\nIf the time’s come to face it, I’m the one\nTo put it the right way. He’d never dare--\nListen! He kicked a stone. Hear that, hear that!\nHe’s coming towards us. Joel, go in--please.\nHark!--I don’t hear him now. But please go in.”\n“In the first place you can’t make me believe it’s--”\n“It is--or someone else he’s sent to watch.\nAnd now’s the time to have it out with him\nWhile we know definitely where he is.\nLet him get off and he’ll be everywhere\nAround us, looking out of trees and bushes\nTill I sha’n’t dare to set a foot outdoors.\nAnd I can’t stand it. Joel, let me go!”\n“But it’s nonsense to think he’d care enough.”\n“You mean you couldn’t understand his caring.\nOh, but you see he hadn’t had enough--\nJoel, I won’t--I won’t--I promise you.\nWe mustn’t say hard things. You mustn’t either.”\n“I’ll be the one, if anybody goes!\nBut you give him the advantage with this light.\nWhat couldn’t he do to us standing here!\nAnd if to see was what he wanted, why\nHe has seen all there was to see and gone.”\nHe appeared to forget to keep his hold,\nBut advanced with her as she crossed the grass.\n“What do you want?” she cried to all the dark.\nShe stretched up tall to overlook the light\nThat hung in both hands hot against her skirt.\n“There’s no one; so you’re wrong,” he said.\n“There is.--\nWhat do you want?” she cried, and then herself\nWas startled when an answer really came.\n“Nothing.” It came from well along the road.\nShe reached a hand to Joel for support:\nThe smell of scorching woollen made her faint.\n“What are you doing round this house at night?”\n“Nothing.” A pause: there seemed no more to say.\nAnd then the voice again: “You seem afraid.\nI saw by the way you whipped up the horse.\nI’ll just come forward in the lantern light\nAnd let you see.”\n“Yes, do.--Joel, go back!”\nShe stood her ground against the noisy steps\nThat came on, but her body rocked a little.\n“You see,” the voice said.\n“Oh.” She looked and looked.\n“You don’t see--I’ve a child here by the hand.”\n“What’s a child doing at this time of night--?”\n“Out walking. Every child should have the memory\nOf at least one long-after-bedtime walk.\nWhat, son?”\n“Then I should think you’d try to find\nSomewhere to walk--”\n“The highway as it happens--\nWe’re stopping for the fortnight down at Dean’s.”\n“But if that’s all--Joel--you realize--\nYou won’t think anything. You understand?\nYou understand that we have to be careful.\nThis is a very, very lonely place.\nJoel!” She spoke as if she couldn’t turn.\nThe swinging lantern lengthened to the ground,\nIt touched, it struck it, clattered and went out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fire-and-ice": { - "title": "“Fire and Ice”", - "body": "Some say the world will end in fire,\nSome say in ice.\nFrom what I’ve tasted of desire\nI hold with those who favour fire.\nBut if it had to perish twice,\nI think I know enough of hate\nTo say that for destruction ice\nIs also great\nAnd would suffice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fireflies-in-the-garden": { - "title": "“Fireflies in the Garden”", - "body": "Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,\nAnd here on earth come emulating flies,\nThat though they never equal stars in size,\n(And they were never really stars at heart)\nAchieve at times a very star-like start.\nOnly, of course, they can’t sustain the part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-flood": { - "title": "“The Flood”", - "body": "Blood has been harder to dam back than water.\nJust when we think we have it impounded safe\nBehind new barrier walls (and let it chafe!),\nIt breaks away in some new kind of slaughter.\nWe choose to say it is let loose by the devil;\nBut power of blood itself releases blood.\nIt goes by might of being such a flood\nHeld high at so unnatural a level.\nIt will have outlet, brave and not so brave.\nweapons of war and implements of peace\nAre but the points at which it finds release.\nAnd now it is once more the tidal wave\nThat when it has swept by leaves summits stained.\nOh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-flower-boat": { - "title": "“The Flower-Boat”", - "body": "The fisherman’s swapping a yarn for a yarn\nUnder the hand of the village barber;\nAnd here in the angle of house and barn\nHis deep-sea dory has found a harbor.\n\nAt anchor she rides the sunny sod\nAs full to the gunnel of flowers growing\nAs ever she turned her home with cod\nFrom Georges Bank when winds were blowing.\n\nAnd I judge from that Elysian freight\nThat all they ask is rougher weather,\nAnd dory and master will sail by fate\nTo seek for the Happy Isles together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "flower-gathering": { - "title": "“Flower-Gathering”", - "body": "I left you in the morning\nAnd in the morning glow\nYou walked a way beside me\nTo make me sad to go.\nDo you know me in the gloaming\nGaunt and dusty grey with roaming?\nAre you dumb because you know me not\nOr dumb because you know?\n\nAll for me? And not a question\nFor the faded flowers gay\nThat could take me from beside you\nFor the ages of a day?\nThey are yours and be the measure\nOf their worth for you to treasure\nThe measure of the little while\nThat I’ve been long away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "for-once-then-something": { - "title": "“For Once, Then, Something”", - "body": "Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs\nAlways wrong to the light, so never seeing\nDeeper down in the well than where the water\nGives me back in a shining surface picture\nMe myself in the summer heaven godlike\nLooking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.\nOnce, when trying with chin against a well-curb,\nI discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,\nThrough the picture, a something white, uncertain,\nSomething more of the depths--and then I lost it.\nWater came to rebuke the too clear water.\nOne drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple\nShook whatever it was lay there at bottom,\nBlurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?\nTruth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-fountain-a-bottle-a-donkeys-ears-and-some-books": { - "title": "“A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books”", - "body": "Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain\nIn Dalton that would someday make his fortune.\nThere’d been some Boston people out to see it:\nAnd experts said that deep down in the mountain\nThe mica sheets were big as plate-glass windows.\nHe’d like to take me there and show it to me.\n\n“I’ll tell you what you show me. You remember\nYou said you knew the place where once, on Kinsman,\nThe early Mormons made a settlement\nAnd built a stone baptismal font outdoors--\nBut Smith, or someone, called them off the mountain\nTo go West to a worse fight with the desert.\nYou said you’d seen the stone baptismal font.\nWell, take me there.”\n\n “Someday I will.”\n\n “Today.”\n\n“Huh, that old bathtub, what is that to see?\nLet’s talk about it.”\n\n “Let’s go see the place.”\n\n“To shut you up I’ll tell you what I’ll do:\nI’ll find that fountain if it takes all summer,\nAnd both of our united strengths, to do it.”\n\n“You’ve lost it, then?”\n\n “Not so but I can find it.\nNo doubt it’s grown up some to woods around it.\nThe mountain may have shifted since I saw it\nIn eighty-five.”\n\n “As long ago as that?”\n\n“If I remember rightly, it had sprung\nA leak and emptied then. And forty years\nCan do a good deal to bad masonry.\nYou won’t see any Mormon swimming in it.\nBut you have said it, and we’re off to find it.\nOld as I am, I’m going to let myself\nBe dragged by you all over everywhere--”\n“I thought you were a guide.”\n\n “I am a guide,\nAnd that’s why I can’t decently refuse you.”\n\nWe made a day of it out of the world,\nAscending to descend to reascend.\nThe old man seriously took his bearings,\nAnd spoke his doubts in every open place.\n\nWe came out on a look-off where we faced\nA cliff, and on the cliff a bottle painted,\nOr stained by vegetation from above,\nA likeness to surprise the thrilly tourist.\n\n“Well, if I haven’t brought you to the fountain,\nAt least I’ve brought you to the famous Bottle.”\n\n“I won’t accept the substitute. It’s empty.”\n\n“So’s everything.”\n\n“I want my fountain.”\n\n“I guess you’d find the fountain just as empty.\nAnd anyway this tells me where I am.”\n\n“Hadn’t you long suspected where you were?”\n\n“You mean miles from that Mormon settlement?\nLook here, you treat your guide with due respect\nIf you don’t want to spend the night outdoors.\nI vow we must be near the place from where\nThe two converging slides, the avalanches,\nOn Marshall, look like donkey’s ears.\nWe may as well see that and save the day.”\n\n“Don’t donkey’s ears suggest we shake our own?”\n\n“For God’s sake, aren’t you fond of viewing nature?\nYou don’t like nature. All you like is books.\nWhat signify a donkey’s cars and bottle,\nHowever natural? Give you your books!\nWell then, right here is where I show you books.\nCome straight down off this mountain just as fast\nAs we can fall and keep a-bouncing on our feet.\nIt’s hell for knees unless done hell-for-leather.”\n\nBe ready, I thought, for almost anything.\n\nWe struck a road I didn’t recognize,\nBut welcomed for the chance to lave my shoes\nIn dust once more. We followed this a mile,\nPerhaps, to where it ended at a house\nI didn’t know was there. It was the kind\nTo bring me to for broad-board paneling.\nI never saw so good a house deserted.\n\n“Excuse me if I ask you in a window\nThat happens to be broken,” Davis said.\n“The outside doors as yet have held against us.\nI want to introduce you to the people\nWho used to live here. They were Robinsons.\nYou must have heard of Clara Robinson,\nThe poetess who wrote the book of verses\nAnd had it published. It was all about\nThe posies on her inner windowsill,\nAnd the birds on her outer windowsill,\nAnd how she tended both, or had them tended:\nShe never tended anything herself.\nShe was ‘shut in’ for life. She lived her whole\nLife long in bed, and wrote her things in bed.\nI’ll show You how she had her sills extended\nTo entertain the birds and hold the flowers.\nOur business first’s up attic with her books.”\n\nWe trod uncomfortably on crunching glass\nThrough a house stripped of everything\nExcept, it seemed, the poetess’s poems.\nBooks, I should say!--if books are what is needed.\nA whole edition in a packing case\nThat, overflowing like a horn of plenty,\nOr like the poetess’s heart of love,\nHad spilled them near the window, toward the light\nWhere driven rain had wet and swollen them.\nEnough to stock a village library--\nUnfortunately all of one kind, though.\nThey bad been brought home from some publisher\nAnd taken thus into the family.\nBoys and bad hunters had known what to do\nWith stone and lead to unprotected glass:\nShatter it inward on the unswept floors.\nHow had the tender verse escaped their outrage?\nBy being invisible for what it was,\nOr else by some remoteness that defied them\nTo find out what to do to hurt a poem.\nYet oh! the tempting flatness of a book,\nTo send it sailing out the attic window\nTill it caught wind and, opening out its covers,\nTried to improve on sailing like a tile\nBy flying like a bird (silent in flight,\nBut all the burden of its body song),\nOnly to tumble like a stricken bird,\nAnd lie in stones and bushes unretrieved.\nBooks were not thrown irreverently about.\nThey simply lay where someone now and then,\nHaving tried one, had dropped it at his feet\nAnd left it lying where it fell rejected.\nHere were all those the poetess’s life\nHad been too short to sell or give away.\n\n“Take one,” Old Davis bade me graciously.\n\n“Why not take two or three?”\n\n “Take all you want.”\n“Good-looking books like that.” He picked one fresh\nIn virgin wrapper from deep in the box,\nAnd stroked it with a horny-handed kindness.\nHe read in one and I read in another,\nBoth either looking for or finding something.\n\nThe attic wasps went missing by like bullets.\n\nI was soon satisfied for the time being.\n\nAll the way home I kept remembering\nThe small book in my pocket. It was there.\nThe poetess had sighed, I knew, in heaven\nAt having eased her heart of one more copy--\nLegitimately. My demand upon her,\nThough slight, was a demand. She felt the tug.\nIn time she would be rid of all her books.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fragmentary-blue": { - "title": "“Fragmentary Blue”", - "body": "Why make so much of fragmentary blue\nIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,\nOr flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,\nWhen heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?\n\nSince earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--\nThough some savants make earth include the sky;\nAnd blue so far above us comes so high,\nIt only gives our wish for blue a whet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "gathering-leaves": { - "title": "“Gathering Leaves”", - "body": "Spades take up leaves\nNo better than spoons,\nAnd bags full of leaves\nAre light as balloons.\n\nI make a great noise\nOf rustling all day\nLike rabbit and deer\nRunning away.\n\nBut the mountains I raise\nElude my embrace,\nFlowing over my arms\nAnd into my face.\n\nI may load and unload\nAgain and again\nTill I fill the whole shed,\nAnd what have I then?\n\nNext to nothing for weight,\nAnd since they grew duller\nFrom contact with earth,\nNext to nothing for color.\n\nNext to nothing for use.\nBut a crop is a crop,\nAnd who’s to say where\nThe harvest shall stop?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-generations-of-men": { - "title": "“The Generations of Men”", - "body": "A governor it was proclaimed this time,\nWhen all who would come seeking in New Hampshire\nAncestral memories might come together.\nAnd those of the name Stark gathered in Bow,\nA rock-strewn town where farming has fallen off,\nAnd sprout-lands flourish where the axe has gone.\nSomeone had literally run to earth\nIn an old cellar hole in a by-road\nThe origin of all the family there.\nThence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe\nThat now not all the houses left in town\nMade shift to shelter them without the help\nOf here and there a tent in grove and orchard.\nThey were at Bow, but that was not enough:\nNothing would do but they must fix a day\nTo stand together on the crater’s verge\nThat turned them on the world, and try to fathom\nThe past and get some strangeness out of it.\nBut rain spoiled all. The day began uncertain,\nWith clouds low trailing and moments of rain that misted.\nThe young folk held some hope out to each other\nTill well toward noon when the storm settled down\nWith a swish in the grass. “What if the others\nAre there,” they said. “It isn’t going to rain.”\nOnly one from a farm not far away\nStrolled thither, not expecting he would find\nAnyone else, but out of idleness.\nOne, and one other, yes, for there were two.\nThe second round the curving hillside road\nWas a girl; and she halted some way off\nTo reconnoitre, and then made up her mind\nAt least to pass by and see who he was,\nAnd perhaps hear some word about the weather.\nThis was some Stark she didn’t know. He nodded.\n“No fête to-day,” he said.\n“It looks that way.”\nShe swept the heavens, turning on her heel.\n“I only idled down.”\n“I idled down.”\nProvision there had been for just such meeting\nOf stranger cousins, in a family tree\nDrawn on a sort of passport with the branch\nOf the one bearing it done in detail--\nSome zealous one’s laborious device.\nShe made a sudden movement toward her bodice,\nAs one who clasps her heart. They laughed together.\n“Stark?” he inquired. “No matter for the proof.”\n“Yes, Stark. And you?”\n“I’m Stark.” He drew his passport.\n“You know we might not be and still be cousins:\nThe town is full of Chases, Lowes, and Baileys,\nAll claiming some priority in Starkness.\nMy mother was a Lane, yet might have married\nAnyone upon earth and still her children\nWould have been Starks, and doubtless here to-day.”\n“You riddle with your genealogy\nLike a Viola. I don’t follow you.”\n“I only mean my mother was a Stark\nSeveral times over, and by marrying father\nNo more than brought us back into the name.”\n“One ought not to be thrown into confusion\nBy a plain statement of relationship,\nBut I own what you say makes my head spin.\nYou take my card--you seem so good at such things--\nAnd see if you can reckon our cousinship.\nWhy not take seats here on the cellar wall\nAnd dangle feet among the raspberry vines?”\n“Under the shelter of the family tree.”\n“Just so--that ought to be enough protection.”\n“Not from the rain. I think it’s going to rain.”\n“It’s raining.”\n“No, it’s misting; let’s be fair.\nDoes the rain seem to you to cool the eyes?”\nThe situation was like this: the road\nBowed outward on the mountain half-way up,\nAnd disappeared and ended not far off.\nNo one went home that way. The only house\nBeyond where they were was a shattered seedpod.\nAnd below roared a brook hidden in trees,\nThe sound of which was silence for the place.\nThis he sat listening to till she gave judgment.\n“On father’s side, it seems, we’re--let me see--”\n“Don’t be too technical.--You have three cards.”\n“Four cards, one yours, three mine, one for each branch\nOf the Stark family I’m a member of.”\n“D’you know a person so related to herself\nIs supposed to be mad.”\n“I may be mad.”\n“You look so, sitting out here in the rain\nStudying genealogy with me\nYou never saw before. What will we come to\nWith all this pride of ancestry, we Yankees?\nI think we’re all mad. Tell me why we’re here\nDrawn into town about this cellar hole\nLike wild geese on a lake before a storm?\nWhat do we see in such a hole, I wonder.”\n“The Indians had a myth of Chicamoztoc,\nWhich means The Seven Caves that We Came out of.\nThis is the pit from which we Starks were digged.”\n“You must be learned. That’s what you see in it?”\n“And what do you see?”\n“Yes, what do I see?\nFirst let me look. I see raspberry vines--”\n“Oh, if you’re going to use your eyes, just hear\nWhat I see. It’s a little, little boy,\nAs pale and dim as a match flame in the sun;\nHe’s groping in the cellar after jam,\nHe thinks it’s dark and it’s flooded with daylight.”\n“He’s nothing. Listen. When I lean like this\nI can make out old Grandsir Stark distinctly,--\nWith his pipe in his mouth and his brown jug--\nBless you, it isn’t Grandsir Stark, it’s Granny,\nBut the pipe’s there and smoking and the jug.\nShe’s after cider, the old girl, she’s thirsty;\nHere’s hoping she gets her drink and gets out safely.”\n“Tell me about her. Does she look like me?”\n“She should, shouldn’t she, you’re so many times\nOver descended from her. I believe\nShe does look like you. Stay the way you are.\nThe nose is just the same, and so’s the chin--\nMaking allowance, making due allowance.”\n“You poor, dear, great, great, great, great Granny!”\n“See that you get her greatness right. Don’t stint her.”\n“Yes, it’s important, though you think it isn’t.\nI won’t be teased. But see how wet I am.”\n“Yes, you must go; we can’t stay here for ever.\nBut wait until I give you a hand up.\nA bead of silver water more or less\nStrung on your hair won’t hurt your summer looks.\nI wanted to try something with the noise\nThat the brook raises in the empty valley.\nWe have seen visions--now consult the voices.\nSomething I must have learned riding in trains\nWhen I was young. I used the roar\nTo set the voices speaking out of it,\nSpeaking or singing, and the band-music playing.\nPerhaps you have the art of what I mean.\nI’ve never listened in among the sounds\nThat a brook makes in such a wild descent.\nIt ought to give a purer oracle.”\n“It’s as you throw a picture on a screen:\nThe meaning of it all is out of you;\nThe voices give you what you wish to hear.”\n“Strangely, it’s anything they wish to give.”\n“Then I don’t know. It must be strange enough.\nI wonder if it’s not your make-believe.\nWhat do you think you’re like to hear to-day?”\n“From the sense of our having been together--\nBut why take time for what I’m like to hear?\nI’ll tell you what the voices really say.\nYou will do very well right where you are\nA little longer. I mustn’t feel too hurried,\nOr I can’t give myself to hear the voices.”\n“Is this some trance you are withdrawing into?”\n“You must be very still; you mustn’t talk.”\n“I’ll hardly breathe.”\n“The voices seem to say--”\n“I’m waiting.”\n“Don’t! The voices seem to say:\nCall her Nausicaa, the unafraid\nOf an acquaintance made adventurously.”\n“I let you say that--on consideration.”\n“I don’t see very well how you can help it.\nYou want the truth. I speak but by the voices.\nYou see they know I haven’t had your name,\nThough what a name should matter between us--”\n“I shall suspect--”\n“Be good. The voices say:\nCall her Nausicaa, and take a timber\nThat you shall find lies in the cellar charred\nAmong the raspberries, and hew and shape it\nFor a door-sill or other corner piece\nIn a new cottage on the ancient spot.\nThe life is not yet all gone out of it.\nAnd come and make your summer dwelling here,\nAnd perhaps she will come, still unafraid,\nAnd sit before you in the open door\nWith flowers in her lap until they fade,\nBut not come in across the sacred sill--”\n“I wonder where your oracle is tending.\nYou can see that there’s something wrong with it,\nOr it would speak in dialect. Whose voice\nDoes it purport to speak in? Not old Grandsir’s\nNor Granny’s, surely. Call up one of them.\nThey have best right to be heard in this place.”\n“You seem so partial to our great-grandmother\n(Nine times removed. Correct me if I err.)\nYou will be likely to regard as sacred\nAnything she may say. But let me warn you,\nFolks in her day were given to plain speaking.\nYou think you’d best tempt her at such a time?”\n“It rests with us always to cut her off.”\n“Well then, it’s Granny speaking: ‘I dunnow!\nMebbe I’m wrong to take it as I do.\nThere ain’t no names quite like the old ones though,\nNor never will be to my way of thinking.\nOne mustn’t bear too hard on the new comers,\nBut there’s a dite too many of them for comfort.\nI should feel easier if I could see\nMore of the salt wherewith they’re to be salted.\nSon, you do as you’re told! You take the timber--\nIt’s as sound as the day when it was cut--\nAnd begin over--’ There, she’d better stop.\nYou can see what is troubling Granny, though.\nBut don’t you think we sometimes make too much\nOf the old stock? What counts is the ideals,\nAnd those will bear some keeping still about.”\n“I can see we are going to be good friends.”\n“I like your ‘going to be.’ You said just now\nIt’s going to rain.”\n“I know, and it was raining.\nI let you say all that. But I must go now.”\n“You let me say it? on consideration?\nHow shall we say good-bye in such a case?”\n“How shall we?”\n“Will you leave the way to me?”\n“No, I don’t trust your eyes. You’ve said enough.\nNow give me your hand up.--Pick me that flower.”\n“Where shall we meet again?”\n“Nowhere but here\nOnce more before we meet elsewhere.”\n“In rain?”\n“It ought to be in rain. Sometime in rain.\nIn rain to-morrow, shall we, if it rains?\nBut if we must, in sunshine.” So she went.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ghost-house": { - "title": "“Ghost House”", - "body": "I dwell in a lonely house I know\nThat vanished many a summer ago,\nAnd left no trace but the cellar walls,\nAnd a cellar in which the daylight falls,\nAnd the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.\n\nO’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield\nThe woods come back to the mowing field;\nThe orchard tree has grown one copse\nOf new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;\nThe footpath down to the well is healed.\n\nI dwell with a strangely aching heart\nIn that vanished abode there far apart\nOn that disused and forgotten road\nThat has no dust-bath now for the toad.\nNight comes; the black bats tumble and dart;\n\nThe whippoorwill is coming to shout\nAnd hush and cluck and flutter about:\nI hear him begin far enough away\nFull many a time to say his say\nBefore he arrives to say it out.\n\nIt is under the small, dim, summer star.\nI know not who these mute folk are\nWho share the unlit place with me--\nThose stones out under the low-limbed tree\nDoubtless bear names that the mosses mar.\n\nThey are tireless folk, but slow and sad,\nThough two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,--\nWith none among them that ever sings,\nAnd yet, in view of how many things,\nAs sweet companions as might be had.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-girls-garden": { - "title": "“A Girl’s Garden”", - "body": "A neighbor of mine in the village\n Likes to tell how one spring\nWhen she was a girl on the farm, she did\n A childlike thing.\n\nOne day she asked her father\n To give her a garden plot\nTo plant and tend and reap herself,\n And he said, “Why not?”\n\nIn casting about for a corner\n He thought of an idle bit\nOf walled-off ground where a shop had stood,\n And he said, “Just it.”\n\nAnd he said, “That ought to make you\n An ideal one-girl farm,\nAnd give you a chance to put some strength\n On your slim-jim arm.”\n\nIt was not enough of a garden,\n Her father said, to plough;\nSo she had to work it all by hand,\n But she don’t mind now.\n\nShe wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow\n Along a stretch of road;\nBut she always ran away and left\n Her not-nice load.\n\nAnd hid from anyone passing.\n And then she begged the seed.\nShe says she thinks she planted one\n Of all things but weed.\n\nA hill each of potatoes,\n Radishes, lettuce, peas,\nTomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,\n And even fruit trees\n\nAnd yes, she has long mistrusted\n That a cider apple tree\nIn bearing there to-day is hers,\n Or at least may be.\n\nHer crop was a miscellany\n When all was said and done,\nA little bit of everything,\n A great deal of none.\n\nNow when she sees in the village\n How village things go,\nJust when it seems to come in right,\n She says, “I know!\n\nIt’s as when I was a farmer--”\n Oh, never by way of advice!\nAnd she never sins by telling the tale\n To the same person twice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "going-for-water": { - "title": "“Going for Water”", - "body": "The well was dry beside the door,\nAnd so we went with pail and can\nAcross the fields behind the house\nTo seek the brook if still it ran;\n\nNot loth to have excuse to go,\nBecause the autumn eve was fair\n(Though chill), because the fields were ours,\nAnd by the brook our woods were there.\n\nWe ran as if to meet the moon\nThat slowly dawned behind the trees,\nThe barren boughs without the leaves,\nWithout the birds, without the breeze.\n\nBut once within the wood, we paused\nLike gnomes that hid us from the moon,\nReady to run to hiding new\nWith laughter when she found us soon.\n\nEach laid on other a staying hand\nTo listen ere we dared to look,\nAnd in the hush we joined to make\nWe heard, we knew we heard the brook.\n\nA note as from a single place,\nA slender tinkling fall that made\nNow drops that floated on the pool\nLike pearls, and now a silver blade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "good-hours": { - "title": "“Good Hours”", - "body": "I had for my winter evening walk--\nNo one at all with whom to talk,\nBut I had the cottages in a row\nUp to their shining eyes in snow.\n\nAnd I thought I had the folk within:\nI had the sound of a violin;\nI had a glimpse through curtain laces\nOf youthful forms and youthful faces.\n\nI had such company outward bound.\nI went till there were no cottages found.\nI turned and repented, but coming back\nI saw no window but that was black.\n\nOver the snow my creaking feet\nDisturbed the slumbering village street\nLike profanation, by your leave,\nAt ten o’clock of a winter eve.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "good-by-and-keep-cold": { - "title": "“Good-By and Keep Cold”", - "body": "This saying good-by on the edge of the dark\nAnd the cold to an orchard so young in the bark\nReminds me of all that can happen to harm\nAn orchard away at the end of the farm\nAll winter, cut off by a hill from the house.\nI don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,\nI don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse\nBy deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.\n(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call\nI’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall\nAnd warn them away with a stick for a gun.)\nI don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.\n(We made it secure against being, I hope,\nBy setting it out on a northerly slope.)\nNo orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;\nBut one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.\n“How often already you’ve had to be told,\nKeep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.\nDread fifty above more than fifty below.”\nI have to be gone for a season or so.\nMy business awhile is with different trees,\nless carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these,\nAnd such as is done to their wood with an ax--\nMaples and birches and tamaracks.\nI wish I could promise to lie in the night\nAnd think of an orchard’s arboreal plight\nWhen slowly (and nobody comes with a light)\nIts heart sinks lower under the sod.\nBut something has to be left to God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-grindstone": { - "title": "“The Grindstone”", - "body": "Having a wheel and four legs of its own\nHas never availed the cumbersome grindstone\nTo get it anywhere that I can see.\nThese hands have helped it go, and even race;\nNot all the motion, though, they ever lent,\nNot all tke miles it may have thought it went,\nHave got it one step from the starting place.\nIt stands beside the same old apple tree.\nThe shadow of the apple tree is thin\nUpon it now its feet as fast in snow.\nAll other farm machinery’s gone in,\nAnd some of it on no more legs and wheel\nThan the grindstone can boast to stand or go.\n(I’m thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.)\nFor months it hasn’t known the taste of steel\nWashed down with rusty water in a tin …\nBut standing outdoors hungry, in the cold,\nExcept in towns at night is not a sin.\nAnd anyway, it’s standing in the yard\nUnder a ruinous live apple tree\nHas nothing any more to do with me,\nExcept that I remember how of old\nOne summer day, all day I drove it hard,\nAnd someone mounted on it rode it hard\nAnd he and I between us ground a blade.\nI gave it the preliminary spin\nAnd poured on water (tears it might have been);\nAnd when it almost gaily jumped and flowed,\nA Father-Time-like man got on and rode,\nArmed with a scythe and spectacles that glowed.\nHe turned on will-power to increase the load\nAnd slow me down--and I abruptly slowed,\nLike coming to a sudden railroad station.\nI changed from hand to hand in desperation.\nI wondered what machine of ages gone\nThis represented an improvement on.\nFor all I knew it may have sharpened spears\nAnd arrowheads itself. Much use.for years\nHad gradually worn it an oblate\nSpheroid that kicked and struggled in its gait,\nAppearing to return me hate for hate;\n(But I forgive it now as easily\nAs any other boyhood enemy\nWhose pride has failed to get him anywhere).\nI wondered who it was the man thought ground\n--The one who held the wheel back or the one\nWho gave his life to keep it going round?\nI wondered if he really thought it fair\nFor him to have the say when we were done.\nSuch were the bitter thoughts to which I turned.\nNot for myself was I so much concerned\nOh no--Although, of course, I could have found\nA better way to pass the afternoon\nThan grinding discord out of a grindstone,\nAnd beating insects at their gritty tune.\nNor was I for the man so much concerned.\nOnce when the grindstone almost jumped its bearing\nIt looked as if he might be badly thrown\nAnd wounded on his blade. So far from caring,\nI laughed inside, and only cranked the faster\n(It ran as if it wasn’t greased but glued);\nI’d welcome any moderate disaster\nThat might be calculated to postpone\nWhat evidently nothing could conclude.\nThe thing that made me more and more afraid\nWas that we’d ground it sharp and hadn’t known,\nAnd now were only wasting precious blade.\nAnd when he raised it dripping once and tried\nThe creepy edge of it with wary touch\nAnd viewed it over his glasses funny-eyed,\nOnly disinterestedly to decide\nIt needed a turn more, I could have cried\nWasn’t there a danger of a turn too much?\nMightn’t we make it worse instead of better?\nI was for leaving something to the whettot.\nWhat if it wasn’t all it should be? I’d\nBe satisfied if he’d be satisfied.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-gum-gatherer": { - "title": "“The Gum-Gatherer”", - "body": "There overtook me and drew me in\nTo his down-hill early-morning stride\nAnd set me five miles on my road\nBetter than if he had had me ride\nA man with a swinging bag for load\nAnd half the bag wound round his hand.\nWe talked like barking above the din\nOf water we walked along beside.\nAnd for my telling him where I’d been\nAnd where I lived in mountain land\nTo be coming home the way I was\nHe told me a little about himself.\nHe came from higher up in the pass\nWhere the grist of the new-beginning brooks\nIs blocks split off the mountain mass--\nAnd hopeless grist enough it looks\nEver to grind to soil for grass.\n(The way it is will do for moss.)\nThere he had built his stolen shack.\nIt had to be a stolen shack\nBecause of the fears of fire and loss\nThat trouble the sleep of lumber folk:\nVisions of half the world burned black\nAnd the sun shrunken yellow in smoke.\nWe know who when they come to town\nBring berries under the wagon seat\nOr a basket of eggs between their feet;\nWhat this man brought in a cotton sack\nWas gum the gum of the mountain spruce.\nHe showed me lumps of the scented stuff\nLike uncut jewels dull and rough.\nIt comes to market golden brown;\nBut turns to pink between the teeth.\n\nI told him this is a pleasant life\nTo set your breast to the bark of trees\nThat all your days are dim beneath\nAnd reaching up with a little knife\nTo loose the resin and take it down\nAnd bring it to market when you please.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-hillside-thaw": { - "title": "“A Hillside Thaw”", - "body": "To think to know the country and now know\nThe hillside on the day the sun lets go\nTen million silver lizards out of snow!\nAs often as I’ve seen it done before\nI can’t pretend to tell the way it’s done.\nIt looks as if some magic of the sun\nLifted the rug that bred them on the floor\nAnd the light breaking on them made them run.\nBut if I though to stop the wet stampede,\nAnd caught one silver lizard by the tail,\nAnd put my foot on one without avail,\nAnd threw myself wet-elbowed and wet-kneed\nIn front of twenty others’ wriggling speed,--\nIn the confusion of them all aglitter,\nAnd birds that joined in the excited fun\nBy doubling and redoubling song and twitter,\nI have no doubt I’d end by holding none.\n\nIt takes the moon for this. The sun’s a wizard\nBy all I tell; but so’s the moon a witch.\nFrom the high west she makes a gentle cast\nAnd suddenly, without a jerk or twitch,\nShe has her speel on every single lizard.\nI fancied when I looked at six o’clock\nThe swarm still ran and scuttled just as fast.\nThe moon was waiting for her chill effect.\nI looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock\nIn every lifelike posture of the swarm,\nTransfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.\nAcross each other and side by side they lay.\nThe spell that so could hold them as they were\nWas wrought through trees without a breath of storm\nTo make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.\nOne lizard at the end of every ray.\nThe thought of my attempting such a stray!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "home-burial": { - "title": "“Home Burial”", - "body": "He saw her from the bottom of the stairs\nBefore she saw him. She was starting down\nLooking back over her shoulder at some fear.\nShe took a doubtful step and then undid it\nTo raise herself and look again. He spoke\nAdvancing toward her: “What is it you see\nFrom up there always--for I want to know.”\nShe turned and sank upon her skirts at that\nAnd her face changed from terrified to dull.\nHe said to gain time: “What is it you see?”\nMounting until she cowered under him.\n“I will find out now--you must tell me dear.”\nShe in her place refused him any help\nWith the least stiffening of her neck and silence.\nShe let him look sure that he wouldn’t see\nBlind creature; and a while he didn’t see.\nBut at last he murmured “Oh” and again “Oh.”\n\n“What is it--what?” she said.\n“Just that I see.”\n\n“You don’t” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”\n\n“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.\nI never noticed it from here before.\nI must be wonted to it--that’s the reason.\nThe little graveyard where my people are!\nSo small the window frames the whole of it.\nNot so much larger than a bedroom is it?\nThere are three stones of slate and one of marble\nBroad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight\nOn the sidehill. We haven’t to mind _those._\nBut I understand: it is not the stones\nBut the child’s mound----”\n\n“Don’t don’t don’t don’t” she cried.\n\nShe withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm\nThat rested on the banister and slid downstairs;\nAnd turned on him with such a daunting look\nHe said twice over before he knew himself:\n“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”\n\n“Not you! Oh where’s my hat? Oh I don’t\nneed it!\nI must get out of here. I must get air.\nI don’t know rightly whether any man can.”\n\n“Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.\nListen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.”\nHe sat and fixed his chin between his fists.\n“There’s something I should like to ask you dear.”\n\n“You don’t know how to ask it.”\n\n“Help me then.”\n\nHer fingers moved the latch for all reply.\n\n“My words are nearly always an offence.\nI don’t know how to speak of anything\nSo as to please you. But I might be taught\nI should suppose. I can’t say I see how.\nA man must partly give up being a man\nWith women-folk. We could have some\narrangement\nBy which I’d bind myself to keep hands off\nAnything special you’re a-mind to name.\nThough I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.\nTwo that don’t love can’t live together without them.\nBut two that do can’t live together with them.”\nShe moved the latch a little. “Don’t--don’t go.\nDon’t carry it to someone else this time.\nTell me about it if it’s something human.\nLet me into your grief. I’m not so much\nUnlike other folks as your standing there\nApart would make me out. Give me my chance.\nI do think though you overdo it a little.\nWhat was it brought you up to think it the thing\nTo take your mother-loss of a first child\nSo inconsolably--in the face of love.\nYou’d think his memory might be satisfied----”\n\n“There you go sneering now!”\n\n“I’m not I’m not!\nYou make me angry. I’ll come down to you.\nGod what a woman! And it’s come to this\nA man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.”\n“You can’t because you don’t know how.\nIf you had any feelings you that dug\nWith your own hand--how could you?--his little\ngrave;\nI saw you from that very window there\nMaking the gravel leap and leap in air\nLeap up like that like that and land so lightly\nAnd roll back down the mound beside the hole.\nI thought Who is that man? I didn’t know you.\nAnd I crept down the stairs and up the stairs\nTo look again and still your spade kept lifting.\nThen you came in. I heard your rumbling voice\nOut in the kitchen and I don’t know why\nBut I went near to see with my own eyes.\nYou could sit there with the stains on your shoes\nOf the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave\nAnd talk about your everyday concerns.\nYou had stood the spade up against the wall\nOutside there in the entry for I saw it.”\n\n“I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.\nI’m cursed. God if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”\n“I can repeat the very words you were saying.\n\n‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day\nWill rot the best birch fence a man can build.’\nThink of it talk like that at such a time!\nWhat had how long it takes a birch to rot\nTo do with what was in the darkened parlour?\nYou _couldn’t_ care! The nearest friends can go\nWith anyone to death comes so far short\nThey might as well not try to go at all.\nNo from the time when one is sick to death\nOne is alone and he dies more alone.\nFriends make pretence of following to the grave\nBut before one is in it their minds are turned\nAnd making the best of their way back to life\nAnd living people and things they understand.\nBut the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so\nIf I can change it. Oh I won’t I won’t!”\n\n“There you have said it all and you feel better.\nYou won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.\nThe heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up?\nAmy! There’s someone coming down the road!”\n\n“_You_--oh you think the talk is all. I must go--\nSomewhere out of this house. How can I make\nyou--”\n\n“If--you--do!” She was opening the door wider.\n“Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.\nI’ll follow and bring you back by force. I _will!_--”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-housekeeper": { - "title": "“The Housekeeper”", - "body": "I let myself in at the kitchen door.\n“It’s you,” she said. “I can’t get up. Forgive me\nNot answering your knock. I can no more\nLet people in than I can keep them out.\nI’m getting too old for my size, I tell them.\nMy fingers are about all I’ve the use of\nSo’s to take any comfort. I can sew:\nI help out with this beadwork what I can.”\n“That’s a smart pair of pumps you’re beading there.\nWho are they for?”\n“You mean?--oh, for some miss.\nI can’t keep track of other people’s daughters.\nLord, if I were to dream of everyone\nWhose shoes I primped to dance in!”\n“And where’s John?”\n“Haven’t you seen him? Strange what set you off\nTo come to his house when he’s gone to yours.\nYou can’t have passed each other. I know what:\nHe must have changed his mind and gone to Garlands.\nHe won’t be long in that case. You can wait.\nThough what good you can be, or anyone--\nIt’s gone so far. You’ve heard? Estelle’s run off.”\n“Yes, what’s it all about? When did she go?”\n“Two weeks since.”\n“She’s in earnest, it appears.”\n“I’m sure she won’t come back. She’s hiding somewhere.\nI don’t know where myself. John thinks I do.\nHe thinks I only have to say the word,\nAnd she’ll come back. But, bless you, I’m her mother--\nI can’t talk to her, and, Lord, if I could!”\n“It will go hard with John. What will he do?\nHe can’t find anyone to take her place.”\n“Oh, if you ask me that, what will he do?\nHe gets some sort of bakeshop meals together,\nWith me to sit and tell him everything,\nWhat’s wanted and how much and where it is.\nBut when I’m gone--of course I can’t stay here:\nEstelle’s to take me when she’s settled down.\nHe and I only hinder one another.\nI tell them they can’t get me through the door, though:\nI’ve been built in here like a big church organ.\nWe’ve been here fifteen years.”\n“That’s a long time\nTo live together and then pull apart.\nHow do you see him living when you’re gone?\nTwo of you out will leave an empty house.”\n“I don’t just see him living many years,\nLeft here with nothing but the furniture.\nI hate to think of the old place when we’re gone,\nWith the brook going by below the yard,\nAnd no one here but hens blowing about.\nIf he could sell the place, but then, he can’t:\nNo one will ever live on it again.\nIt’s too run down. This is the last of it.\nWhat I think he will do, is let things smash.\nHe’ll sort of swear the time away. He’s awful!\nI never saw a man let family troubles\nMake so much difference in his man’s affairs.\nHe’s just dropped everything. He’s like a child.\nI blame his being brought up by his mother.\nHe’s got hay down that’s been rained on three times.\nHe hoed a little yesterday for me:\nI thought the growing things would do him good.\nSomething went wrong. I saw him throw the hoe\nSky-high with both hands. I can see it now--\nCome here--I’ll show you--in that apple tree.\nThat’s no way for a man to do at his age:\nHe’s fifty-five, you know, if he’s a day.”\n“Aren’t you afraid of him? What’s that gun for?”\n“Oh, that’s been there for hawks since chicken-time.\nJohn Hall touch me! Not if he knows his friends.\nI’ll say that for him, John’s no threatener\nLike some men folk. No one’s afraid of him;\nAll is, he’s made up his mind not to stand\nWhat he has got to stand.”\n“Where is Estelle?\nCouldn’t one talk to her? What does she say?\nYou say you don’t know where she is.”\n“Nor want to!\nShe thinks if it was bad to live with him,\nIt must be right to leave him.”\n“Which is wrong!”\n“Yes, but he should have married her.”\n“I know.”\n“The strain’s been too much for her all these years:\nI can’t explain it any other way.\nIt’s different with a man, at least with John:\nHe knows he’s kinder than the run of men.\nBetter than married ought to be as good\nAs married--that’s what he has always said.\nI know the way he’s felt--but all the same!”\n“I wonder why he doesn’t marry her\nAnd end it.”\n“Too late now: she wouldn’t have him.\nHe’s given her time to think of something else.\nThat’s his mistake. The dear knows my interest\nHas been to keep the thing from breaking up.\nThis is a good home: I don’t ask for better.\nBut when I’ve said, ‘Why shouldn’t they be married,’\nHe’d say, ‘Why should they?’ no more words than that.”\n“And after all why should they? John’s been fair\nI take it. What was his was always hers.\nThere was no quarrel about property.”\n“Reason enough, there was no property.\nA friend or two as good as own the farm,\nSuch as it is. It isn’t worth the mortgage.”\n“I mean Estelle has always held the purse.”\n“The rights of that are harder to get at.\nI guess Estelle and I have filled the purse.\n’Twas we let him have money, not he us.\nJohn’s a bad farmer. I’m not blaming him.\nTake it year in, year out, he doesn’t make much.\nWe came here for a home for me, you know,\nEstelle to do the housework for the board\nOf both of us. But look how it turns out:\nShe seems to have the housework, and besides,\nHalf of the outdoor work, though as for that,\nHe’d say she does it more because she likes it.\nYou see our pretty things are all outdoors.\nOur hens and cows and pigs are always better\nThan folks like us have any business with.\nFarmers around twice as well off as we\nHaven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.\nOne thing you can’t help liking about John,\nHe’s fond of nice things--too fond, some would say.\nBut Estelle don’t complain: she’s like him there.\nShe wants our hens to be the best there are.\nYou never saw this room before a show,\nFull of lank, shivery, half-drowned birds\nIn separate coops, having their plumage done.\nThe smell of the wet feathers in the heat!\nYou spoke of John’s not being safe to stay with.\nYou don’t know what a gentle lot we are:\nWe wouldn’t hurt a hen! You ought to see us\nMoving a flock of hens from place to place.\nWe’re not allowed to take them upside down,\nAll we can hold together by the legs.\nTwo at a time’s the rule, one on each arm,\nNo matter how far and how many times\nWe have to go.”\n“You mean that’s John’s idea.”\n“And we live up to it; or I don’t know\nWhat childishness he wouldn’t give way to.\nHe manages to keep the upper hand\nOn his own farm. He’s boss. But as to hens:\nWe fence our flowers in and the hens range.\nNothing’s too good for them. We say it pays.\nJohn likes to tell the offers he has had,\nTwenty for this cock, twenty-five for that.\nHe never takes the money. If they’re worth\nThat much to sell, they’re worth as much to keep.\nBless you, it’s all expense, though. Reach me down\nThe little tin box on the cupboard shelf,\nThe upper shelf, the tin box. That’s the one.\nI’ll show you. Here you are.”\n“What’s this?”\n“A bill--\nFor fifty dollars for one Langshang cock--\nReceipted. And the cock is in the yard.”\n“Not in a glass case, then?”\n“He’d need a tall one:\nHe can eat off a barrel from the ground.\nHe’s been in a glass case, as you may say,\nThe Crystal Palace, London. He’s imported.\nJohn bought him, and we paid the bill with beads--\nWampum, I call it. Mind, we don’t complain.\nBut you see, don’t you, we take care of him.”\n“And like it, too. It makes it all the worse.”\n“It seems as if. And that’s not all: he’s helpless\nIn ways that I can hardly tell you of.\nSometimes he gets possessed to keep accounts\nTo see where all the money goes so fast.\nYou know how men will be ridiculous.\nBut it’s just fun the way he gets bedeviled--\nIf he’s untidy now, what will he be--?”\n“It makes it all the worse. You must be blind.”\n“Estelle’s the one. You needn’t talk to me.”\n“Can’t you and I get to the root of it?\nWhat’s the real trouble? What will satisfy her?”\n“It’s as I say: she’s turned from him, that’s all.”\n“But why, when she’s well off? Is it the neighbours,\nBeing cut off from friends?”\n“We have our friends.\nThat isn’t it. Folks aren’t afraid of us.”\n“She’s let it worry her. You stood the strain,\nAnd you’re her mother.”\n“But I didn’t always.\nI didn’t relish it along at first.\nBut I got wonted to it. And besides--\nJohn said I was too old to have grandchildren.\nBut what’s the use of talking when it’s done?\nShe won’t come back--it’s worse than that--she can’t.”\n“Why do you speak like that? What do you know?\nWhat do you mean?--she’s done harm to herself?”\n“I mean she’s married--married someone else.”\n“Oho, oho!”\n“You don’t believe me.”\n“Yes, I do,\nOnly too well. I knew there must be something!\nSo that was what was back. She’s bad, that’s all!”\n“Bad to get married when she had the chance?”\n“Nonsense! See what’s she done! But who, who--”\n“Who’d marry her straight out of such a mess?\nSay it right out--no matter for her mother.\nThe man was found. I’d better name no names.\nJohn himself won’t imagine who he is.”\n“Then it’s all up. I think I’ll get away.\nYou’ll be expecting John. I pity Estelle;\nI suppose she deserves some pity, too.\nYou ought to have the kitchen to yourself\nTo break it to him. You may have the job.”\n“You needn’t think you’re going to get away.\nJohn’s almost here. I’ve had my eye on someone\nComing down Ryan’s Hill. I thought ’twas him.\nHere he is now. This box! Put it away.\nAnd this bill.”\n“What’s the hurry? He’ll unhitch.”\n“No, he won’t, either. He’ll just drop the reins\nAnd turn Doll out to pasture, rig and all.\nShe won’t get far before the wheels hang up\nOn something--there’s no harm. See, there he is!\nMy, but he looks as if he must have heard!”\nJohn threw the door wide but he didn’t enter.\n“How are you, neighbour? Just the man I’m after.\nIsn’t it Hell,” he said. “I want to know.\nCome out here if you want to hear me talk.\nI’ll talk to you, old woman, afterward.\nI’ve got some news that maybe isn’t news.\nWhat are they trying to do to me, these two?”\n“Do go along with him and stop his shouting.”\nShe raised her voice against the closing door:\n“Who wants to hear your news, you--dreadful fool?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-hundred-collars": { - "title": "“A Hundred Collars”", - "body": "Lancaster bore him--such a little town\nSuch a great man. It doesn’t see him often\nOf late years though he keeps the old homestead\nAnd sends the children down there with their mother\nTo run wild in the summer--a little wild.\nSometimes he joins them for a day or two\nAnd sees old friends he somehow can’t get near.\nThey meet him in the general store at night\nPreoccupied with formidable mail\nRifling a printed letter as he talks.\nThey seem afraid. He wouldn’t have it so:\nThough a great scholar he’s a democrat\nIf not at heart at least on principle.\nLately when coming up to Lancaster\nHis train being late he missed another train\nAnd had four hours to wait at Woodsville Junction\nAfter eleven o’clock at night. Too tired\nTo think of sitting such an ordeal out\nHe turned to the hotel to find a bed.\n\n“No room” the night clerk said. “Unless--”\nWoodsville’s a place of shrieks and wandering lamps\nAnd cars that shock and rattle--and _one_ hotel.\n\n“You say ‘unless.’”\n\n“Unless you wouldn’t mind\nSharing a room with someone else.”\n\n“Who is it?”\n\n“A man.”\n\n“So I should hope. What kind of man?”\n\n“I know him: he’s all right. A man’s a man.\nSeparate beds of course you understand.”\n\nThe night clerk blinked his eyes and dared him on.\n“Who’s that man sleeping in the office chair?\nHas he had the refusal of my chance?”\n\n“He was afraid of being robbed or murdered.\nWhat do you say?”\n\n“I’ll have to have a bed.”\n\nThe night clerk led him up three flights of stairs\nAnd down a narrow passage full of doors\nAt the last one of which he knocked and entered\n“Lafe here’s a fellow wants to share your room.”\n\n“Show him this way. I’m not afraid of him\nI’m not so drunk I can’t take care of myself.”\nThe night clerk clapped a bedstead on the foot.\n“This will be yours. Good-night” he said and went.\n\n“Lafe was the name I think?”\n\n“Yes _Lay_fayette.\nYou got it the first time. And yours?”\n\n“Magoon.\n\nDoctor Magoon.”\n\n“A Doctor?”\n\n“Well a teacher.”\n\n“Professor Square-the-circle-till-you’re-tired?\nHold on there’s something I don’t think of now\nThat I had on my mind to ask the first\nMan that knew anything I happened in with.\nI’ll ask you later--don’t let me forget it.”\nThe Doctor looked at Lafe and looked away.\nA man? A brute. Naked above the waist\nHe sat there creased and shining in the light\nFumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.\n“I’m moving into a size-larger shirt.\nI’ve felt mean lately; mean’s no name for it.\nI just found what the matter was to-night:\nI’ve been a-choking like a nursery tree\nWhen it outgrows the wide band of its name tag.\nI blamed it on the hot spell we’ve been having.\n’Twas nothing but my foolish hanging back\nNot liking to own up I’d grown a size.\nNumber eighteen this is. What size do you wear?”\n\nThe Doctor caught his throat convulsively.\n“Oh--ah--fourteen--fourteen.”\n\n“Fourteen! You say so!\nI can remember when I wore fourteen.\nAnd come to think I must have back at home\nMore than a hundred collars size fourteen.\nToo bad to waste them all. You ought to have them.\nThey’re yours and welcome; let me send them to\nyou.\nWhat makes you stand there on one leg like that?\nYou’re not much furtherer than where Kike left you\nYou act as if you wished you hadn’t come.\nSit down or lie down friend; you make me nervous.”\n\nThe Doctor made a subdued dash for it\nAnd propped himself at bay against a pillow.\n\n“Not that way with your shoes on Kike’s white\nbed.\nYou can’t rest that way. Let me pull your shoes\noff.”\n\n“Don’t touch me please--I say don’t touch me\nplease.\nI’ll not be put to bed by you my man.”\n\n“Just as you say. Have it your own way then.\n‘My man’ is it? You talk like a professor.\nSpeaking of who’s afraid of who however\nI’m thinking I have more to lose than you\nIf anything should happen to be wrong.\nWho wants to cut your number fourteen throat!\nLet’s have a show down as an evidence\nOf good faith. There is ninety dollars.\nCome if you’re not afraid.”\n\n“_I_’m not afraid.\nThere’s five: that’s all I carry.”\n\n“I can search you?\nWhere are you moving over to? Stay still.\n\nYou’d better tuck your money under you\nAnd sleep on it the way I always do\nWhen I’m with people I don’t trust at night.”\n\n“Will you believe me if I put it there\nRight on the counterpane--that I do trust you?”\n\n“You’d say so Mister Man.--I’m a collector.\nMy ninety isn’t mine--you won’t think that.\nI pick it up a dollar at a time\nAll round the country for the _Weekly News_\nPublished in Bow. You know the _Weekly News?_”\n\n“Known it since I was young.”\n\n“Then you know me.\nNow we are getting on together--talking.\nI’m sort of Something for it at the front.\nMy business is to find what people want:\nThey pay for it and so they ought to have it.\nFairbanks he says to me--he’s editor--\nFeel out the public sentiment--he says.\nA good deal comes on me when all is said.\nThe only trouble is we disagree\nIn politics: I’m Vermont Democrat--\nYou know what that is sort of double-dyed;\nThe _News_ has always been Republican.\nFairbanks he says to me ‘Help us this year’\nMeaning by us their ticket. ‘No’ I says\n‘I can’t and won’t. You’ve been in long enough:\nIt’s time you turned around and boosted us.\nYou’ll have to pay me more than ten a week\nIf I’m expected to elect Bill Taft.\nI doubt if I could do it anyway.’”\n\n“You seem to shape the paper’s policy.”\n\n“You see I’m in with everybody know ’em all.\nI almost know their farms as well as they do.”\n\n“You drive around? It must be pleasant work.”\n\n“It’s business but I can’t say it’s not fun.\nWhat I like best’s the lay of different farms\nComing out on them from a stretch of woods\nOr over a hill or round a sudden corner.\nI like to find folks getting out in spring\nRaking the dooryard working near the house.\nLater they get out further in the fields.\nEverything’s shut sometimes except the barn;\nThe family’s all away in some back meadow.\nThere’s a hay load a-coming--when it comes.\nAnd later still they all get driven in:\nThe fields are stripped to lawn the garden patches\nStripped to bare ground the apple trees\nTo whips and poles. There’s nobody about.\nThe chimney though keeps up a good brisk\nsmoking.\nAnd I lie back and ride. I take the reins\nOnly when someone’s coming and the mare\nStops when she likes: I tell her when to go.\nI’ve spoiled Jemima in more ways than one.\nShe’s got so she turns in at every house\nAs if she had some sort of curvature\nNo matter if I have no errand there.\nShe thinks I’m sociable. I maybe am.\nIt’s seldom I get down except for meals though.\nFolks entertain me from the kitchen doorstep\nAll in a family row down to the youngest.”\n\n“One would suppose they might not be as glad\nTo see you as you are to see them.”\n\n“Oh\nBecause I want their dollar. I don’t want\nAnything they’ve not got. I never dun.\nI’m there and they can pay me if they like.\nI go nowhere on purpose: I happen by.\nSorry there is no cup to give you a drink.\nI drink out of the bottle--not your style.\nMayn’t I offer you--?”\n\n“No no no thank you.”\n\n“Just as you say. Here’s looking at you then.--\nAnd now I’m leaving you a little while.\n\nYou’ll rest easier when I’m gone perhaps--\nLie down--let yourself go and get some sleep.\nBut first--let’s see--what was I going to ask you?\nThose collars--who shall I address them to\nSuppose you aren’t awake when I come back?”\n\n“Really friend I can’t let you. You--may need them.”\n\n“Not till I shrink when they’ll be out of style.”\n\n“But really--I have so many collars.”\n\n“I don’t know who I rather would have have them.\nThey’re only turning yellow where they are.\nBut you’re the doctor as the saying is.\nI’ll put the light out. Don’t you wait for me:\nI’ve just begun the night. You get some sleep.\nI’ll knock so-fashion and peep round the door\nWhen I come back so you’ll know who it is.\nThere’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.\nI don’t want you should shoot me in the head.\nWhat am I doing carrying off this bottle?\nThere now you get some sleep.”\n\nHe shut the door\nThe Doctor slid a little down the pillow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hyla-brook": { - "title": "“Hyla Brook”", - "body": "By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.\nSought for much after that it will be found\nEither to have gone groping underground\n(And taken with it all the Hyla breed\nThat shouted in the mist a month ago\nLike ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)--\nOr flourished and come up in jewel-weed\nWeak foliage that is blown upon and bent\nEven against the way its waters went.\nIts bed is left a faded paper sheet\nOf dead leaves stuck together by the heat--\nA brook to none but who remember long.\nThis as it will be seen is other far\nThan with brooks taken otherwhere in song.\nWe love the things we love for what they are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "i-will-sing-you-one": { - "title": "“I Will Sing You One”", - "body": "It was long I lay\nAwake that night\nWishing that night\nWould name the hour\nAnd tell me whether\nTo call it day\n(Though not yet light)\nAnd give up sleep.\nThe snow fell deep\nWith the hiss of spray;\nTwo winds would meet,\nOne down one street,\nOne down another,\nAnd fight in a smother\nOf dust and feather.\nI could not say,\nBut feared the cold\nHad checked the pace\nOf the tower clock\nBy tying together\nIts hands of gold\nBefore its face.\n\nThen came one knock!\nA note unruffled\nOf earthly weather,\nThough strange and muffled.\nThe tower said, “One!”\nAnd then a steeple.\nThey spoke to themselves\nAnd such few people\nAs winds might rouse\nFrom sleeping warm\n(But not unhouse).\nThey left the storm\nThat struck en masse\nMy window glass\nLike a beaded fur.\nIn that grave One\nThey spoke of the sun\nAnd moon and stars,\nSaturn and Mars\nAnd Jupiter.\nStill more unfettered,\nThey left the named\nAnd spoke of the lettered,\nThe sigmas and taus\nOf constellations.\nThey filled their throats\nWith the furthest bodies\nTo which man sends his\nSpeculation,\nBeyond which God is;\nThe cosmic motes\nOf yawning lenses.\nTheir solemn peals\nWere not their own:\nThey spoke for the clock\nWith whose vast wheels\nTheirs interlock.\nIn that grave word\nUttered alone\nThe utmost star\nTrembled and stirred,\nThough set so far\nIts whirling frenzies\nAppear like standing\nin one self station.\nIt has not ranged,\nAnd save for the wonder\nOf once expanding\nTo be a nova,\nIt has not changed\nTo the eye of man\nOn planets over\nAround and under\nIt in creation\nSince man began\nTo drag down man\nAnd nation nation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-impulse": { - "title": "“The Impulse”", - "body": "It was too lonely for her there\nAnd too wild\nAnd since there were but two of them\nAnd no child\n\nAnd work was little in the house\nShe was free\nAnd followed where he furrowed field\nOr felled tree.\n\nShe rested on a log and tossed\nThe fresh chips\nWith a song only to herself\nOn her lips.\n\nAnd once she went to break a bough\nOf black alder.\nShe strayed so far she scarcely heard\nWhen he called her--\n\nAnd didn’t answer--didn’t speak--\nOr return.\nShe stood and then she ran and hid\nIn the fern.\n\nHe never found her though he looked\nEverywhere\nAnd he asked at her mother’s house\nWas she there.\n\nSudden and swift and light as that\nThe ties gave\nAnd he learned of finalities\nBesides the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-hardwood-groves": { - "title": "“In Hardwood Groves”", - "body": "The same leaves over and over again!\nThey fall from giving shade above\nTo make one texture of faded brown\nAnd fit the earth like a leather glove.\n\nBefore the leaves can mount again\nTo fill the trees with another shade,\nThey must go down past things coming up.\nThey must go down into the dark decayed.\n\nThey must be pierced by flowers and put\nBeneath the feet of dancing flowers.\nHowever it is in some other world\nI know that this is way in ours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "in-neglect": { - "title": "“In Neglect”", - "body": "They leave us so to the way we took,\nAs two in whom them were proved mistaken,\nThat we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,\nWith michievous, vagrant, seraphic look,\nAnd try if we cannot feel forsaken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-a-disused-graveyard": { - "title": "“In a Disused Graveyard”", - "body": "The living come with grassy tread\nTo read the gravestones on the hill;\nThe graveyard draws the living still,\nBut never anymore the dead.\nThe verses in it say and say:\n“The ones who living come today\nTo read the stones and go away\nTomorrow dead will come to stay.”\nSo sure of death the marbles rhyme,\nYet can’t help marking all the time\nHow no one dead will seem to come.\nWhat is it men are shrinking from?\nIt would be easy to be clever\nAnd tell the stones: Men hate to die\nAnd have stopped dying now forever.\nI think they would believe the lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-a-vale": { - "title": "“In a Vale”", - "body": "When I was young, we dwelt in a vale\nBy a misty fen that rang all night,\nAnd thus it was the maidens pale\nI knew so well, whose garments trail\nAcross the reeds to a window light.\n\nThe fen had every kind of bloom,\nAnd for every kind there was a face,\nAnd a voice that has sounded in my room\nAcross the sill from the outer gloom.\nEach came singly unto her place,\n\nBut all came every night with the mist;\nAnd often they brought so much to say\nOf things of moment to which, they wist,\nOne so lonely was fain to list,\nThat the stars were almost faded away\n\nBefore the last went, heavy with dew,\nBack to the place from which she came--\nWhere the bird was before it flew,\nWhere the flower was before it grew,\nWhere bird and flower were one and the same.\n\nAnd thus it is I know so well\nWhy the flower has odor, the bird has song.\nYou have only to ask me, and I can tell.\nNo, not vainly there did I dwell,\nNor vainly listen all the night long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-the-home-stretch": { - "title": "“In the Home Stretch”", - "body": "She stood against the kitchen sink, and looked\nOver the sink out through a dusty window\nAt weeds the water from the sink made tall.\nShe wore her cape; her hat was in her hand.\nBehind her was confusion in the room,\nOf chairs turned upside down to sit like people\nIn other chairs, and something, come to look,\nFor every room a house has--parlor, bed-room,\nAnd dining-room--thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.\nAnd now and then a smudged, infernal face\nLooked in a door behind her and addressed\nHer back. She always answered without turning.\n\n“Where will I put this walnut bureau, lady?”\n“Put it on top of something that’s on top\nOf something else,” she laughed. “Oh, put it where\nYou can to-night, and go. It’s almost dark;\nYou must be getting started back to town.”\nAnother blackened face thrust in and looked\nAnd smiled, and when she did not turn, spoke gently,\n“What are you seeing out the window, lady?”\n\n“Never was I beladied so before.\nWould evidence of having been called lady\nMore than so many times make me a lady\nIn common law, I wonder.”\n\n“But I ask,\nWhat are you seeing out the window, lady?”\n\n“What I’ll be seeing more of in the years\nTo come as here I stand and go the round\nOf many plates with towels many times.”\n\n“And what is that? You only put me off.”\n\n“Rank weeds that love the water from the dish-pan\nMore than some women like the dish-pan, Joe;\nA little stretch of mowing-field for you;\nNot much of that until I come to woods\nThat end all. And it’s scarce enough to call\nA view.”\n\n“And yet you think you like it, dear?”\n\n“That’s what you’re so concerned to know! You hope\nI like it. Bang goes something big away\nOff there upstairs. The very tread of men\nAs great as those is shattering to the frame\nOf such a little house. Once left alone,\nYou and I, dear, will go with softer steps\nUp and down stairs and through the rooms, and none\nBut sudden winds that snatch them from our hands\nWill ever slam the doors.”\n\n“I think you see\nMore than you like to own to out that window.”\n\n“No; for besides the things I tell you of,\nI only see the years. They come and go\nIn alternation with the weeds, the field,\nThe wood.”\n\n“What kind of years?”\n“Why, latter years--\nDifferent from early years.”\n“I see them, too.\nYou didn’t count them?”\n“No, the further off\nSo ran together that I didn’t try to.\nIt can scarce be that they would be in number\nWe’d care to know, for we are not young now.\nAnd bang goes something else away off there.\nIt sounds as if it were the men went down,\nAnd every crash meant one less to return\nTo lighted city streets we, too, have known,\nBut now are giving up for country darkness.”\n\n“Come from that window where you see too much for me,\nAnd take a livelier view of things from here.\nThey’re going. Watch this husky swarming up\nOver the wheel into the sky-high seat,\nLighting his pipe now, squinting down his nose\nAt the flame burning downward as he sucks it.”\n\n“See how it makes his nose-side bright, a proof\nHow dark it’s getting. Can you tell what time\nIt is by that? Or by the moon? The new moon!\nWhat shoulder did I see her over? Neither.\nA wire she is of silver, as new as we\nTo everything. Her light won’t last us long.\nIt’s something, though, to know we’re going to have her\nNight after night and stronger every night\nTo see us through our first two weeks. But, Joe,\nThe stove! Before they go! Knock on the window;\nAsk them to help you get it on its feet.\nWe stand here dreaming. Hurry! Call them back!”\n\n“They’re not gone yet.”\n\n“We’ve got to have the stove,\nWhatever else we want for. And a light.\nHave we a piece of candle if the lamp\nAnd oil are buried out of reach?”\nAgain\nThe house was full of tramping, and the dark,\nDoor-filling men burst in and seized the stove.\nA cannon-mouth-like hole was in the wall,\nTo which they set it true by eye; and then\nCame up the jointed stovepipe in their hands,\nSo much too light and airy for their strength\nIt almost seemed to come ballooning up,\nSlipping from clumsy clutches toward the ceiling.\n“A fit!” said one, and banged a stovepipe shoulder.\n“It’s good luck when you move in to begin\nWith good luck with your stovepipe. Never mind,\nIt’s not so bad in the country, settled down,\nWhen people’re getting on in life, You’ll like it.”\nJoe said: “You big boys ought to find a farm,\nAnd make good farmers, and leave other fellows\nThe city work to do. There’s not enough\nFor everybody as it is in there.”\n“God!” one said wildly, and, when no one spoke:\n“Say that to Jimmy here. He needs a farm.”\nBut Jimmy only made his jaw recede\nFool-like, and rolled his eyes as if to say\nHe saw himself a farmer. Then there was a French boy\nWho said with seriousness that made them laugh,\n“Ma friend, you ain’t know what it is you’re ask.”\nHe doffed his cap and held it with both hands\nAcross his chest to make as ’twere a bow:\n“We’re giving you our chances on de farm.”\nAnd then they all turned to with deafening boots\nAnd put each other bodily out of the house.\n“Goodby to them! We puzzle them. They think--\nI don’t know what they think we see in what\nThey leave us to: that pasture slope that seems\nThe back some farm presents us; and your woods\nTo northward from your window at the sink,\nWaiting to steal a step on us whenever\nWe drop our eyes or turn to other things,\nAs in the game ‘Ten-step’ the children play.”\n\n“Good boys they seemed, and let them love the city.\nAll they could say was ‘God!’ when you proposed\nTheir coming out and making useful farmers.”\n\n“Did they make something lonesome go through you?\nIt would take more than them to sicken you--\nUs of our bargain. But they left us so\nAs to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.\nThey almost shook me.”\n\n“It’s all so much\nWhat we have always wanted, I confess\nIt’s seeming bad for a moment makes it seem\nEven worse still, and so on down, down, down.\nIt’s nothing; it’s their leaving us at dusk.\nI never bore it well when people went.\nThe first night after guests have gone, the house\nSeems haunted or exposed. I always take\nA personal interest in the locking up\nAt bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off.”\nHe fetched a dingy lantern from behind\nA door. “There’s that we didn’t lose! And these!”--\nSome matches he unpocketed. “For food--\nThe meals we’ve had no one can take from us.\nI wish that everything on earth were just\nAs certain as the meals we’ve had. I wish\nThe meals we haven’t had were, anyway.\nWhat have you you know where to lay your hands on?”\n\n“The bread we bought in passing at the store.\nThere’s butter somewhere, too.”\n\n“Let’s rend the bread.\nI’ll light the fire for company for you;\nYou’ll not have any other company\nTill Ed begins to get out on a Sunday\nTo look us over and give us his idea\nOf what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up.\nHe’ll know what he would do if he were we,\nAnd all at once. He’ll plan for us and plan\nTo help us, but he’ll take it out in planning.\nWell, you can set the table with the loaf.\nLet’s see you find your loaf. I’ll light the fire.\nI like chairs occupying other chairs\nNot offering a lady--”\n\n“There again, Joe!\nYou’re tired.”\n\n“I’m drunk-nonsensical tired out;\nDon’t mind a word I say. It’s a day’s work\nTo empty one house of all household goods\nAnd fill another with ’em fifteen miles away,\nAlthough you do no more than dump them down.”\n\n“Dumped down in paradise we are and happy.”\n\n“It’s all so much what I have always wanted,\nI can’t believe it’s what you wanted, too.”\n\n“Shouldn’t you like to know?”\n\n“I’d like to know\nIf it is what you wanted, then how much\nYou wanted it for me.”\n\n“A troubled conscience!\nYou don’t want me to tell if I don’t know.”\n\n“I don’t want to find out what can’t be known.\n\nBut who first said the word to come?”\n\n“My dear,\nIt’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,\nFor things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.\nEnds and beginnings--there are no such things.\nThere are only middles.”\n\n“What is this?”\n“This life?\nOur sitting here by lantern-light together\nAmid the wreckage of a former home?\nYou won’t deny the lantern isn’t new.\nThe stove is not, and you are not to me,\nNor I to you.”\n\n“Perhaps you never were?”\n\n“It would take me forever to recite\nAll that’s not new in where we find ourselves.\nNew is a word for fools in towns who think\nStyle upon style in dress and thought at last\nMust get somewhere. I’ve heard you say as much.\nNo, this is no beginning.”\n\n“Then an end?”\n\n“End is a gloomy word.”\n“Is it too late\nTo drag you out for just a good-night call\nOn the old peach trees on the knoll to grope\nBy starlight in the grass for a last peach\nThe neighbors may not have taken as their right\nWhen the house wasn’t lived in? I’ve been looking:\nI doubt if they have left us many grapes.\nBefore we set ourselves to right the house,\nThe first thing in the morning, out we go\nTo go the round of apple, cherry, peach,\nPine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.\nAll of a farm it is.”\n\n“I know this much:\nI’m going to put you in your bed, if first\nI have to make you build it. Come, the light.”\n\nWhen there was no more lantern in the kitchen,\nThe fire got out through crannies in the stove\nAnd danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,\nAs much at home as if they’d always danced there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "into-my-own": { - "title": "“Into My Own”", - "body": "One of my wishes is that those dark trees\nSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze\nWere not as ’twere the merest mask of gloom\nBut stretched away unto the edge of doom.\n\nI should not be withheld but that some day\nInto their vastness I should steal away\nFearless of ever finding open land\nOr highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.\n\nI do not see why I should e’er turn back\nOr those should not set forth upon my track\nTo overtake me who should miss me here\nAnd long to know if still I held them dear.\n\nThey would not find me changed from him they knew--\nOnly more sure of all I thought was true.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-investment": { - "title": "“The Investment”", - "body": "Over back where they speak of life as staying\n(“You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t”),\nThere was an old, old house renewed with paint,\nAnd in it a piano loudly playing.\n\nOut in the plowed ground in the cold a digger,\nAmong unearthed potatoes standing still,\nWas counting winter dinners, one a hill,\nWith half an ear to the piano’s vigor.\n\nAll that piano and new paint back there,\nWas it some money suddenly come into?\nOr some extravagance young love had been to?\nOr old love on an impulse not to care--\n\nNot to sink under being man and wife,\nBut get some color and music out of life?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-last-mowing": { - "title": "“The Last Mowing”", - "body": "There’s a place called Far-away Meadow\nWe never shall mow in again,\nOr such is the talk at the farmhouse:\nThe meadow is finished with men.\nThen now is the chance for the flowers\nThat can’t stand mowers and plowers.\nIt must be now, through, in season\nBefore the not mowing brings trees on,\nBefore trees, seeing the opening,\nMarch into a shadowy claim.\nThe trees are all I’m afraid of,\nThat flowers can’t bloom in the shade of;\nIt’s no more men I’m afraid of;\nThe meadow is done with the tame.\nThe place for the moment is ours\nFor you, oh tumultuous flowers,\nTo go to waste and go wild in,\nAll shapes and colors of flowers,\nI needn’t call you by name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-last-word-of-a-blue-bird": { - "title": "“The Last Word of a Blue Bird”", - "body": "(As told to a child)\n\nAs I went out a Crow\nIn a low voice said, “Oh,\nI was looking for you.\nHow do you do?\nI just came to tell you\nTo tell Lesley (will you?)\nThat her little Bluebird\nWanted me to bring word\nThat the north wind last night\nThat made the stars bright\nAnd made ice on the trough\nAlmost made him cough\nHis tail feathers off.\nHe just had to fly!\nBut he sent her Good-by,\nAnd said to be good,\nAnd wear her red hood,\nAnd look for the skunk tracks\nIn the snow with an ax--\nAnd do everything!\nAnd perhaps in the spring\nHe would come back and sing.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "a-late-walk": { - "title": "“A Late Walk”", - "body": "When I go up through the mowing field,\nThe headless aftermath,\nSmooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,\nHalf closes the garden path.\n\nAnd when I come to the garden ground,\nThe whir of sober birds\nUp from the tangle of withered weeds\nIs sadder than any words\n\nA tree beside the wall stands bare,\nBut a leaf that lingered brown,\nDisturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,\nComes softly rattling down.\n\nI end not far from my going forth\nBy picking the faded blue\nOf the last remaining aster flower\nTo carry again to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-line-gang": { - "title": "“The Line-Gang”", - "body": "Here come the line-gang pioneering by,\nThey throw a forest down less cut than broken.\nThey plant dead trees for living, and the dead\nThey string together with a living thread.\nThey string an instrument against the sky\nWherein words whether beaten out or spoken\nWill run as hushed as when they were a thought\nBut in no hush they string it: they go past\nWith shouts afar to pull the cable taught,\nTo hold it hard until they make it fast,\nTo ease away--they have it. With a laugh,\nAn oath of towns that set the wild at naught\nThey bring the telephone and telegraph.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-line-storm-song": { - "title": "“A Line-Storm Song”", - "body": "The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift.\nThe road is forlorn all day,\nWhere a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,\nAnd the hoof-prints vanish away.\nThe roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,\nExpend their bloom in vain.\nCome over the hills and far with me,\nAnd be my love in the rain.\n\nThe birds have less to say for themselves\nIn the wood-world’s torn despair\nThan now these numberless years the elves,\nAlthough they are no less there:\nAll song of the woods is crushed like some\nWild, earily shattered rose.\nCome, be my love in the wet woods, come,\nWhere the boughs rain when it blows.\n\nThere is the gale to urge behind\nAnd bruit our singing down,\nAnd the shallow waters aflutter with wind\nFrom which to gather your gown.\nWhat matter if we go clear to the west,\nAnd come not through dry-shod?\nFor wilding brooch shall wet your breast\nThe rain-fresh goldenrod.\n\nOh, never this whelming east wind swells\nBut it seems like the sea’s return\nTo the ancient lands where it left the shells\nBefore the age of the fern;\nAnd it seems like the time when after doubt\nOur love came back amain.\nOh, come forth into the storm and rout\nAnd be my love in the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lockless-door": { - "title": "“The Lockless Door”", - "body": "It went many years,\nBut at last came a knock,\nAnd I though of the door\nWith no lock to lock.\n\nI blew out the light,\nI tip-toed the floor,\nAnd raised both hands\nIn prayer to the door.\n\nBut the knock came again.\nMy window was wide;\nI climbed on the sill\nAnd descended outside.\n\nBack over the sill\nI bade a ‘Come in’\nTo whatever the knock\nAt the door may have been.\n\nSo at a knock\nI emptied my cage\nTo hide in the world\nAnd alter with age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lodged": { - "title": "“Lodged”", - "body": "The rain to the wind said,\n“You push and I’ll pelt.”\nThey so smote the garden bed\nThat the flowers actually knelt,\nAnd lay lodged--though not dead.\nI know how the flowers felt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "loneliness": { - "title": "“Loneliness”", - "body": "One ought not to have to care\nSo much as you and I\nCare when the birds come round the house\nTo seem to say good-bye;\n\nOr care so much when they come back\nWith whatever it is they sing;\nThe truth being we are as much\nToo glad for the one thing\n\nAs we are too sad for the other here--\nWith birds that fill their breasts\nBut with each other and themselves\nAnd their built or driven nests.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "looking-for-a-sunset-bird-in-winter": { - "title": "“Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter”", - "body": "The west was getting out of gold,\nThe breath of air had died of cold,\nWhen shoeing home across the white,\nI thought I saw a bird alight.\n\nIn summer when I passed the place\nI had to stop and lift my face;\nA bird with an angelic gift\nWas singing in it sweet and swift.\n\nNo bird was singing in it now.\nA single leaf was on a bough,\nAnd that was all there was to see\nIn going twice around the tree.\n\nFrom my advantage on a hill\nI judged that such a crystal chill\nWas only adding frost to snow\nAs gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.\n\nA brush had left a crooked stroke\nOf what was either cloud or smoke\nFrom north to south across the blue;\nA piercing little star was through.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "love-and-a-question": { - "title": "“Love and a Question”", - "body": "A stranger came to the door at eve,\nAnd he spoke the bridegroom fair.\nHe bore a green-white stick in his hand,\nAnd, for all burden, care.\nHe asked with the eyes more than the lips\nFor a shelter for the night,\nAnd he turned and looked at the road afar\nWithout a window light.\n\nThe bridegroom came forth into the porch\nWith, “Let us look at the sky,\nAnd question what of the night to be,\nStranger, you and I.”\nThe woodbine leaves littered the yard,\nThe woodbine berries were blue,\nAutumn, yes, winter was in the wind;\n“Stranger, I wish I knew.”\n\nWithin, the bride in the dusk alone\nBent over the open fire,\nHer face rose-red with the glowing coal\nAnd the thought of the heart’s desire.\n\nThe bridegroom looked at the weary road,\nYet saw but her within,\nAnd wished her heart in a case of gold\nAnd pinned with a silver pin.\n\nThe bridegroom thought it little to give\nA dole of bread, a purse,\nA heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,\nOr for the rich a curse;\n\nBut whether or not a man was asked\nTo mar the love of two\nBy harboring woe in the bridal house,\nThe bridegroom wished he knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "maple": { - "title": "“Maple”", - "body": "Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabel\nMade Maple first take notice of her name.\nShe asked her father and he told her, “Maple--\nMaple is right.”\n“But teacher told the school\nThere’s no such name.”\n“Teachers don’t know as much\nAs fathers about children, you tell teacher.\nYou tell her that it’s M-A-P-L-E.\nYou ask her if she knows a maple tree.\nWell, you were named after a maple tree.\nYour mother named you. You and she just saw\nEach other in passing in the room upstairs,\nOne coming this way into life, and one\nGoing the other out of life--you know?\nSo you can’t have much recollection of her.\nShe had been having a long look at you.\nShe put her finger in your cheek so hard\nIt must have made your dimple there, and said,\n‘Maple.’ I said it too: ‘Yes, for her name.’\nShe nodded. So we’re sure there’s no mistake.\nI don’t know what she wanted it to mean,\nBut it seems like some word she left to bid you\nBe a good girl--be like a maple tree.\nHow like a maple tree’s for us to guess.\nOr for a little girl to guess sometime.\nNot now--at least I shouldn’t try too hard now.\nBy and by I will tell you all I know\nAbout the different trees, and something, too,\nAbout your mother that perhaps may help.”\nDangerous self-arousing words to sow.\nLuckily all she wanted of her name then\nWas to rebuke her teacher with it next day,\nAnd give the teacher a scare as from her father.\nAnything further had been wasted on her,\nOr so he tried to think to avoid blame.\nShe would forget it. She all but forgot it.\nWhat he sowed with her slept so long a sleep,\nAnd came so near death in the dark of years,\nThat when it woke and came to life again\nThe flower was different from the parent seed.\nIt carne back vaguely at the glass one day,\nAs she stood saying her name over aloud,\nStriking it gently across her lowered eyes\nTo make it go well with the way she looked.\nWhat was it about her name? Its strangeness lay\nIn having too much meaning. Other names,\nAs Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie,\nSignified nothing. Rose could have a meaning,\nBut hadn’t as it went. (She knew a Rose.)\nThis difference from other names it was\nMade people notice it--and notice her.\n(They either noticed it, or got it wrong.)\nHer problem was to find out what it asked\nIn dress or manner of the girl who bore it.\nIf she could form some notion of her mother--\nWhat she bad thought was lovely, and what good.\nThis was her mother’s childhood home;\nThe house one story high in front, three stories\nOn the end it presented to the road.\n(The arrangement made a pleasant sunny cellar.)\nHer mother’s bedroom was her father’s still,\nWhere she could watch her mother’s picture fading.\nOnce she found for a bookmark in the Bible\nA maple leaf she thought must have been laid\nIn wait for her there. She read every word\nOf the two pages it was pressed between,\nAs if it was her mother speaking to her.\nBut forgot to put the leaf back in closing\nAnd lost the place never to read again.\nShe was sure, though, there had been nothing in it.\n\nSo she looked for herself, as everyone\nLooks for himself, more or less outwardly.\nAnd her self-seeking, fitful though it was,\nMay still have been what led her on to read,\nAnd think a little, and get some city schooling.\nShe learned shorthand, whatever shorthand may\nHave had to do with it--she sometimes wondered.\nSo, till she found herself in a strange place\nFor the name Maple to have brought her to,\nTaking dictation on a paper pad\nAnd, in the pauses when she raised her eyes,\nWatching out of a nineteenth story window\nAn airship laboring with unshiplike motion\nAnd a vague all-disturbing roar above the river\nBeyond the highest city built with hands.\nSomeone was saying in such natural tones\nShe almost wrote the words down on her knee,\n“Do you know you remind me of a tree--\nA maple tree?”\n\n“Because my name is Maple?”\n“Isn’t it Mabel? I thought it was Mabel.”\n\n“No doubt you’ve heard the office call me Mabel.\nI have to let them call me what they like.”\n\nThey were both stirred that he should have divined\nWithout the name her personal mystery.\nIt made it seem as if there must be something\nShe must have missed herself. So they were married,\nAnd took the fancy home with them to live by.\n\nThey went on pilgrimage once to her father’s\n(The house one story high in front, three stories\nOn the side it presented to the road)\nTo see if there was not some special tree\nShe might have overlooked. They could find none,\nNot so much as a single tree for shade,\nLet alone grove of trees for sugar orchard.\nShe told him of the bookmark maple leaf\nIn the big Bible, and all she remembered\nof the place marked with it--“Wave offering,\nSomething about wave offering, it said.”\n\n“You’ve never asked your father outright, have you?”\n\n“I have, and been Put off sometime, I think.”\n(This was her faded memory of the way\nOnce long ago her father had put himself off.)\n“Because no telling but it may have been\nSomething between your father and your mother\nNot meant for us at all.”\n“Not meant for me?\nWhere would the fairness be in giving me\nA name to carry for life and never know\nThe secret of?”\n“And then it may have been\nSomething a father couldn’t tell a daughter\nAs well as could a mother. And again\nIt may have been their one lapse into fancy\n’Twould be too bad to make him sorry for\nBy bringing it up to him when be was too old.\nYour father feels us round him with our questing,\nAnd holds us off unnecessarily,\nAs if he didn’t know what little thing\nMight lead us on to a discovery.\nIt was as personal as be could be\nAbout the way he saw it was with you\nTo say your mother, bad she lived, would be\nAs far again as from being born to bearing.”\n\n“Just one look more with what you say in mind,\nAnd I give up”; which last look came to nothing.\nBut though they now gave up the search forever,\nThey clung to what one had seen in the other\nBy inspiration. It proved there was something.\nThey kept their thoughts away from when the maples\nStood uniform in buckets, and the steam\nOf sap and snow rolled off the sugarhouse.\nWhen they made her related to the maples,\nIt was the tree the autumn fire ran through\nAnd swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark\nUnscorched, unblackened, even, by any smoke.\nThey always took their holidays in autumn.\nOnce they came on a maple in a glade,\nStanding alone with smooth arms lifted up,\nAnd every leaf of foliage she’d worn\nLaid scarlet and pale pink about her feet.\nBut its age kept them from considering this one.\nTwenty-five years ago at Maple’s naming\nIt hardly could have been a two-leaved seedling\nThe next cow might have licked up out at pasture.\nCould it have been another maple like it?\nThey hovered for a moment near discovery,\nFigurative enough to see the symbol,\nBut lacking faith in anything to mean\nThe same at different times to different people.\nPerhaps a filial diffidence partly kept them\nFrom thinking it could be a thing so bridal.\nAnd anyway it came too late for Maple.\nShe used her hands to cover up her eyes.\n\n“We would not see the secret if we could now:\nWe are not looking for it any more.”\n\nThus had a name with meaning, given in death,\nMade a girl’s marriage, and ruled in her life.\nNo matter that the meaning was not clear.\nA name with meaning could bring up a child,\nTaking the child out of the parents’hands.\nBetter a meaningless name, I should say,\nAs leaving more to nature and happy chance.\nName children some names and see what you do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meeting-and-passing": { - "title": "“Meeting and Passing”", - "body": "As I went down the hill along the wall\nThere was a gate I had leaned at for the view\nAnd had just turned from when I first saw you\nAs you came up the hill. We met. But all\nWe did that day was mingle great and small\nFootprints in summer dust as if we drew\nThe figure of our being less that two\nBut more than one as yet. Your parasol\nPointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.\nAnd all the time we talked you seemed to see\nSomething down there to smile at in the dust.\n(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)\nAfterward I went past what you had passed\nBefore we met and you what I had passed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mending-wall": { - "title": "“Mending Wall”", - "body": "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall\nThat sends the frozen-ground-swell under it\nAnd spills the upper boulders in the sun;\nAnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast.\nThe work of hunters is another thing:\nI have come after them and made repair\nWhere they have left not one stone on a stone\nBut they would have the rabbit out of hiding\nTo please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean\nNo one has seen them made or heard them made\nBut at spring mending-time we find them there.\nI let my neighbour know beyond the hill;\nAnd on a day we meet to walk the line\nAnd set the wall between us once again.\nWe keep the wall between us as we go.\nTo each the boulders that have fallen to each.\nAnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls\nWe have to use a spell to make them balance:\n“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”\nWe wear our fingers rough with handling them.\nOh just another kind of out-door game\nOne on a side. It comes to little more:\nThere where it is we do not need the wall:\nHe is all pine and I am apple orchard.\nMy apple trees will never get across\nAnd eat the cones under his pines I tell him.\nHe only says “Good fences make good neighbours.”\nSpring is the mischief in me and I wonder\nIf I could put a notion in his head:\n“_Why_ do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it\nWhere there are cows? But here there are no cows.\nBefore I built a wall I’d ask to know\nWhat I was walling in or walling out\nAnd to whom I was like to give offence.\nSomething there is that doesn’t love a wall\nThat wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him\nBut it’s not elves exactly and I’d rather\nHe said it for himself. I see him there\nBringing a stone grasped firmly by the top\nIn each hand like an old-stone savage armed.\nHe moves in darkness as it seems to me\nNot of woods only and the shade of trees.\nHe will not go behind his father’s saying\nAnd he likes having thought of it so well\nHe says again “Good fences make good neighbours.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "misgiving": { - "title": "“Misgiving”", - "body": "All crying, “We will go with you, O Wind!”\nThe foliage follow him, leaf and stem;\nBut a sleep oppresses them as they go,\nAnd they end by bidding them as they go,\nAnd they end by bidding him stay with them.\n\nSince ever they flung abroad in spring\nThe leaves had promised themselves this flight,\nWho now would fain seek sheltering wall,\nOr thicket, or hollow place for the night.\n\nAnd now they answer his summoning blast\nWith an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,\nOr at utmost a little reluctant whirl\nThat drops them no further than where they were.\n\nI only hope that when I am free\nAs they are free to go in quest\nOf the knowledge beyond the bounds of life\nIt may not seem better to me to rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mountain": { - "title": "“The Mountain”", - "body": "The mountain held the town as in a shadow.\nI saw so much before I slept there once:\nI noticed that I missed stars in the west\nWhere its black body cut into the sky.\nNear me it seemed: I felt it like a wall\nBehind which I was sheltered from a wind.\nAnd yet between the town and it I found\nWhen I walked forth at dawn to see new things\nWere fields a river and beyond more fields.\nThe river at the time was fallen away\nAnd made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;\nBut the signs showed what it had done in spring;\nGood grass-land gullied out and in the grass\nRidges of sand and driftwood stripped of bark.\nI crossed the river and swung round the mountain.\nAnd there I met a man who moved so slow\nWith white-faced oxen in a heavy cart\nIt seemed no harm to stop him altogether.\n\n“What town is this?” I asked.\n\n“This? Lunenburg.”\nThen I was wrong: the town of my sojourn\nBeyond the bridge was not that of the mountain\nBut only felt at night its shadowy presence.\n“Where is your village? Very far from here?”\n\n“There is no village--only scattered farms.\nWe were but sixty voters last election.\nWe can’t in nature grow to many more:\nThat thing takes all the room!” He moved his goad.\nThe mountain stood there to be pointed at.\nPasture ran up the side a little way\nAnd then there was a wall of trees with trunks:\nAfter that only tops of trees and cliffs\nImperfectly concealed among the leaves.\nA dry ravine emerged from under boughs\nInto the pasture.\n\n“That looks like a path.\nIs that the way to reach the top from here?--\nNot for this morning but some other time:\nI must be getting back to breakfast now.”\n\n“I don’t advise your trying from this side.\nThere is no proper path but those that _have_\nBeen up I understand have climbed from Ladd’s.\nThat’s five miles back. You can’t mistake the place:\nThey logged it there last winter some way up.\nI’d take you but I’m bound the other way.”\n\n“You’ve never climbed it?”\n\n“I’ve been on the sides\nDeer-hunting and trout-fishing. There’s a brook\nThat starts up on it somewhere--I’ve heard say\nRight on the top tip-top--a curious thing.\nBut what would interest you about the brook\nIt’s always cold in summer warm in winter.\nOne of the great sights going is to see\nIt steam in winter like an ox’s breath.\nUntil the bushes all along its banks\nAre inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles--\nYou know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!”\n\n“There ought to be a view around the world\nFrom such a mountain--if it isn’t wooded\nClear to the top.” I saw through leafy screens\nGreat granite terraces in sun and shadow\nShelves one could rest a knee on getting up--\nWith depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;\nOr turn and sit on and look out and down\nWith little ferns in crevices at his elbow.\n\n“As to that I can’t say. But there’s the spring\nRight on the summit almost like a fountain.\nThat ought to be worth seeing.”\n\n“If it’s there.\nYou never saw it?”\n\n“I guess there’s no doubt\nAbout its being there. I never saw it.\nIt may not be right on the very top:\nIt wouldn’t have to be a long way down\nTo have some head of water from above\nAnd a _good distance_ down might not be noticed\nBy anyone who’d come a long way up.\nOne time I asked a fellow climbing it\nTo look and tell me later how it was.”\n\n“What did he say?”\n\n“He said there was a lake\nSomewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.”\n\n“But a lake’s different. What about the spring?”\n\n“He never got up high enough to see.\nThat’s why I don’t advise your trying this side.\nHe tried this side. I’ve always meant to go\nAnd look myself but you know how it is:\nIt doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain\nYou’ve worked around the foot of all your life.\nWhat would I do? Go in my overalls\nWith a big stick the same as when the cows\nHaven’t come down to the bars at milking time?\nOr with a shotgun for a stray black bear?”\n“Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it.”\n\n“I shouldn’t climb it if I didn’t want to--\nNot for the sake of climbing. What’s its name?”\n\n“We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right.”\n\n“Can one walk round it? Would it be too far?”\n\n“You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg\nBut it’s as much as ever you can do\nThe boundary lines keep in so close to it.\nHor is the township and the township’s Hor--\n_And_ a few houses sprinkled round the foot\nLike boulders broken off the upper cliff\nRolled out a little farther than the rest.”\n\n“Warm in December cold in June you say?”\n\n“I don’t suppose the waters changed at all.\nYou and I know enough to know it’s warm\nCompared with cold and cold compared with warm.\nBut all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”\n\n“You’ve lived here all your life?”\n\n“Ever since Hor\n\nWas no bigger than a----” What I did not hear.\nHe drew the oxen toward him with light touches\nOf his slim goad on nose and offside flank\nGave them their marching orders and was moving.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "mowing": { - "title": "“Mowing”", - "body": "There was never a sound beside the wood but one\nAnd that was my long scythe whispering to the\nground.\nWhat was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;\nPerhaps it was something about the heat of the sun\nSomething perhaps about the lack of sound--\nAnd that was why it whispered and did not speak.\nIt was no dream of the gift of idle hours\nOr easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:\nAnything more than the truth would have seemed\ntoo weak\nTo the earnest love that laid the swale in rows\nNot without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers\n(Pale orchises) and scared a bright green snake.\nThe fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.\nMy long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "my-butterfly": { - "title": "“My Butterfly”", - "body": "Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,\nAnd the daft sun-assaulter, he\nThat frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:\nSaave only me\n(Nor is it sad to thee!)\nSave only me\nThere is none left to mourn thee in the fields.\n\nThe gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow;\nIts two banks have not shut upon the river;\nBut it is long ago--\nIt seems forever--\nSince first I saw thee glance,\nWIth all thy dazzling other ones,\nIn airy dalliance,\nPrecipitate in love,\nTossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,\nLike a linp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.\n\nWhen that was, the soft mist\nOf my regret hung not on all the land,\nAnd I was glad for thee,\nAnd glad for me, I wist.\n\nThou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,\nThat fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,\nWith those great careless wings,\nNor yet did I.\n\nAnd there were othe rthings:\nIt seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:\nThen fearful he had let thee win\nToo far beyond him to be gathered in,\nSantched thee, o’ereager, with ungentle gasp.\n\nAh! I remember me\nHow once conspiracy was rife\nAgainst my life--\nThe languor of it and the dreaming fond;\nSurging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,\nThe breeze three odors brought,\nAnd a gem-flower waved in a wand!\n\nThen when I was distraught\nAnd could not speak,\nSidelong, full on my cheek,\nWhat should that reckless zephyr fling\nBut the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!\n\nI found that wing broken today!\nFor thou art dead, I said,\nAnd the strang birds say.\nI found it with the withered leaves\nUnder the eaves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-november-guest": { - "title": "“My November Guest”", - "body": "My Sorrow when she’s here with me\nThinks these dark days of autumn rain\nAre beautiful as days can be;\nShe loves the bare the withered tree;\nShe walks the sodden pasture lane.\n\nHer pleasure will not let me stay.\nShe talks and I am fain to list:\nShe’s glad the birds are gone away\nShe’s glad her simple worsted grey\nIs silver now with clinging mist.\n\nThe desolate deserted trees\nThe faded earth the heavy sky\nThe beauties she so truly sees\nShe thinks I have no eye for these\nAnd vexes me for reason why.\n\nNot yesterday I learned to know\nThe love of bare November days\nBefore the coming of the snow\nBut it were vain to tell her so\nAnd they are better for her praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-need-of-being-versed-in-country-things": { - "title": "“The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”", - "body": "The house had gone to bring again\nTo the midnight sky a sunset glow.\nNow the chimney was all of the house that stood,\nLike a pistil after the petals go.\nThe barn opposed across the way,\nThat would have joined the house in flame\nHad it been the will of the wind, was left\nTo bear forsaken the place’s name.\nNo more it opened with all one end\nFor teams that came by the stony road\nTo drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs\nAnd brush the mow with the summer load.\nThe birds that came to it through the air\nAt broken windows flew out and in,\nTheir murmur more like the sigh we sigh\nFrom too much dwelling on what has been.\nYet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,\nAnd the aged elm, though touched with fire;\nAnd the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;\nAnd the fence post carried a strand of wire.\nFor them there was really nothing sad.\nBut though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,\nOne had to be versed in country things\nNot to believe the phoebes wept.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "neither-out-far-nor-in-deep": { - "title": "“Neither out Far nor in Deep”", - "body": "The people along the sand\nAll turn and look one way.\nThey turn their back on the land.\nThey look at the sea all day.\n\nAs long as it takes to pass\nA ship keeps raising its hull;\nThe wetter ground like glass\nReflects a standing gull\n\nThe land may vary more;\nBut wherever the truth may be--\nThe water comes ashore,\nAnd the people look at the sea.\n\nThey cannot look out far.\nThey cannot look in deep.\nBut when was that ever a bar\nTo any watch they keep?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "never-again-would-birds-song-be-the-same": { - "title": "“Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same”", - "body": "He would declare and could himself believe\nThat the birds there in all the garden round\nFrom having heard the daylong voice of Eve\nHad added to their own an oversound,\nHer tone of meaning but without the words.\nAdmittedly an eloquence so soft\nCould only have had an influence on birds\nWhen call or laughter carried it aloft.\nBe that as may be, she was in their song.\nMoreover her voice upon their voices crossed\nHad now persisted in the woods so long\nThat probably it never would be lost.\nNever again would birds’ song be the same.\nAnd to do that to birds was why she came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "new-hampshire": { - "title": "“New Hampshire”", - "body": "I met a lady from the South who said\n(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):\n“None of my family ever worked, or had\nA thing to sell.” I don’t suppose the work\nMuch matters. You may work for all of me.\nI’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.\nThe having anything to sell is what\nIs the disgrace in man or state or nation.\n\nI met a traveler from Arkansas\nWho boasted of his state as beautiful\nFor diamonds and apples. “Diamonds\nAnd apples in commercial quantities?”\nI asked him, on my guard. “Oh, yes,” he answered,\n“Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.\nI see the porter’s made your bed,” I told him.\n\nI met a Californian who would\nTalk California--a state so blessed,\nHe said, in climate, none bad ever died there\nA natural death, and Vigilance Committees\nHad had to organize to stock the graveyards\nAnd vindicate the state’s humanity.\n“Just the way Stefansson runs on,” I murmured,\n“About the British Arctic. That’s what comes\nOf being in the market with a climate.”\n\nI met a poet from another state,\nA zealot full of fluid inspiration,\nWho in the name of fluid inspiration,\nBut in the best style of bad salesmanship,\nAngrily tried to male me write a protest\n(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.\nHe didn’t even offer me a drink\nUntil I asked for one to steady him.\nThis is called having an idea to sell.\n\nIt never could have happened in New Hampshire.\n\nThe only person really soiled with trade\nI ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire\nWas someone who had just come back ashamed\nFrom selling things in California.\nHe’d built a noble mansard roof with balls\nOn turrets, like Constantinople, deep\nIn woods some ten miles from a railroad station,\nAs if to put forever out of mind\nThe hope of being, as we say, received.\nI found him standing at the close of day\nInside the threshold of his open barn,\nLike a lone actor on a gloomy stage--\nAnd recognized him, through the iron gray\nIn which his face was muffled to the eyes,\nAs an old boyhood friend, and once indeed\nA drover with me on the road to Brighton.\nHis farm was “grounds,” and not a farm at all;\nHis house among the local sheds and shanties\nRose like a factor’s at a trading station.\nAnd be was rich, and I was still a rascal.\nI couldn’t keep from asking impolitely,\nWhere bad he been and what had he been doing?\nHow did he get so? (Rich was understood.)\nIn dealing in “old rags” in San Francisco.\nOh, it was terrible as well could be.\nWe both of us turned over in our graves.\n\nJust specimens is all New Hampshire has,\nOne each of everything as in a showcase,\nWhich naturally she doesn’t care to sell.\n\nShe had one President. (Pronounce him Purse,\nAnd make the most of it for better or worse.\nHe’s your one chance to score against the state.)\nShe had one Daniel Webster. He was all\nThe Daniel Webster ever was or shall be.\nShe had the Dartmouth’needed to produce him.\n\nI call her old. She has one family\nWhose claim is good to being settled here\nBefore the era of colonization,\nAnd before that of exploration even.\nJohn Smith remarked them as be coasted by,\nDangling their legs and fishing off a wharf\nAt the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself\nThey weren’t Red Indians but veritable\nPre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,\nLike those who furnished Adam’s sons with wives;\nHowever uninnocent they may have been\nIn being there so early in our history.\nThey’d been there then a hundred years or more.\nPity he didn’t ask what they were up to\nAt that date with a wharf already built,\nAnd take their name. They’ve since told me their name--\nToday an honored one in Nottingham.\nAs for what they were up to more than fishing--\nSuppose they weren’t behaving Puritanly,\nThe hour bad not yet struck for being good,\nMankind had not yet gone on the Sabbatical.\nIt became an explorer of the deep\nNot to explore too deep in others’business.\n\nDid you but know of him, New Hampshire has\nOne real reformer who would change the world\nSo it would be accepted by two classes,\nArtists the minute they set up as artists,\nBefore, that is, they are themselves accepted,\nAnd boys the minute they get out of college.\nI can’t help thinking those are tests to go by.\n\nAnd she has one I don’t know what to call him,\nWho comes from Philadelphia every year\nWith a great flock of chickens of rare breeds\nHe wants to give the educational\nAdvantages of growing almost wild\nUnder the watchful eye of hawk and eagle\nDorkings because they’re spoken of by Chaucer,\nSussex because they’re spoken of by Herrick.\n\nShe has a touch of gold. New Hampshire gold--\nYou may have heard of it. I had a farm\nOffered me not long since up Berlin way\nWith a mine on it that was worked for gold;\nBut not gold in commercial quantities,\nJust enough gold to make the engagement rings\nAnd marriage rings of those who owned the farm.\nWhat gold more innocent could one have asked for?\nOne of my children ranging after rocks\nLately brought home from Andover or Canaan\nA specimen of beryl with a trace\nOf radium. I know with radium\nThe trace would have to be the merest trace\nTo be below the threshold of commercial;\nBut trust New Hampshire not to have enough\nOf radium or anything to sell.\n\nA specimen of everything, I said.\nShe has one witch--old style. She lives in Colebrook.\n(The only other witch I ever met\nWas lately at a cut-glass dinner in Boston.\nThere were four candles and four people present.\nThe witch was young, and beautiful _new style_,\nAnd open-minded. She was free to question\nHer gift for reading letters locked in boxes.\nWhy was it so much greater when the boxes\nWere metal than it was when they were wooden?\nIt made the world seem so mysterious.\nThe S’ciety for Psychical Research\nWas cognizant. Her husband was worth millions.\nI think he owned some shares in Harvard College.)\n\nNew Hampshire used to have at Salem\nA company we called the White Corpuscles,\nWhose duty was at any hour of night\nTo rush in sheets and fool’s caps where they smelled\nA thing the least bit doubtfully perscented\nAnd give someone the Skipper Ireson’s Ride.\n\nOne each of everything as in a showcase.\n\nMore than enough land for a specimen\nYou’ll say she has, but there there enters in\nSomething else to protect her from herself.\nThere quality makes up for quantity.\nNot even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.\nThe farm I made my home on in the mountains\n1 had to take by force rather than buy.\n\nI caught the owner outdoors by himself\nRaking.up after winter, and I said,\n“I’m going to put you off this farm: I want it.”\n“Where are you going to put me? In the road?”\n“I’m going to put you on the farm next to it.”\n“Why won’t the farm next to it do for you?”\n“I like this better.” It was really better.\n\nApples? New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,\nWith no suspicion in stern end or blossom end\nOf vitriol or arsenate of lead,\nAnd so not good for anything but cider.\nHer unpruned grapes are flung like lariats\nFar up the birches out of reach of man.\n\nA state producing precious metals, stones,\nAnd--writing; none of these except perhaps\nThe precious literature in quantity\nOr quality to worry the producer\nAbout disposing of it. Do you know,\nConsidering the market, there are more\nPoems produced than any other thing?\nNo wonder poets sometimes have to seem\nSo much more businesslike than businessmen.\nTheir wares are so much harder to get rid of.\n\nShe’s one of the two best states in the Union.\nVermont’s the other. And the two have been\nYokefellows in the sap yoke from of old\nIn many Marches. And they lie like wedges,\nThick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,\nAnd are a figure of the way the strong\nOf mind and strong of arm should fit together,\nOne thick where one is thin and vice versa.\n\nIn a trout hatchery near Canada,\nBut soon divides the river with Vermont.\nBoth are delightful states for their absurdly\nSmall towns--Lost Nation, Bungey, Muddy Boo,\nPoplin, Still Corners (so called not because\nThe place is silent all day long, nor yet\nBecause it boasts a whisky still--because\nIt set out once to be a city and still\nIs only corners, crossroads in a wood).\nAnd I remember one whose name appeared\nBetween the pictures on a movie screen\nElection night once in Franconia,\nWhen everything had gone Republican\nAnd Democrats were sore in need of comfort:\nEaston goes Democratic, Wilson 4\nHughes 2. And everybody to the saddest\nLaughed the loud laugh the big laugh at the little.\nNew York (five million) laughs at Manchester,\nManchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs\nAt Littleton (four thousand), Littleton\nLaughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and\nFranconia laughs, I fear--did laugh that night--\nAt Easton. What has Easton left to laugh at,\nAnd like the actress exclaim “Oh, my God” at?\nThere’s Bungey; and for Bungey there are towns,\nWhole townships named but without population.\n\nAnything I can say about New Hampshire\nWill serve almost as well about Vermont,\nExcepting that they differ in their mountains.\nThe Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;\nNew Hampshire mountains Curl up in a coil.\n\nI had been coming to New Hampshire mountains.\nAnd here I am and what am I to say?\nHere first my theme becomes embarrassing.\nEmerson said, “The God who made New Hampshire\nTaunted the lofty land with little men.”\nAnotner Massachusetts poet said,\n“I go no more to summer in New Hampshire.\nI’ve given up my summer place in Dublin.”\nBut when I asked to know what ailed New Hampshire,\nShe said she couldn’t stand the people in it,\nThe little men (it’s Massachusetts speaking).\nAnd when I asked to know what ailed the people,\nShe said, “Go read your own books and find out.”\nI may as well confess myself the author\nOf several books against the world in general.\nTo take them as against a special state\nOr even nation’s to restrict my meaning.\nI’m what is called a sensibilitist,\nOr otherwise an environmentalist.\nI refuse to adapt myself a mite\nTo any change from hot to cold, from wet\nTo dry, from poor to rich, or back again.\nI make a virtue of my suffering\nFrom nearly everything that goes on round me.\nIn other words, I know wherever I am,\nBeing the creature of literature I am,\n1 sball not lack for pain to keep me awake.\nKit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:\n“Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.”\nSamoa, Russia, Ireland I complain of,\nNo less than England, France, and Italy.\nBecause I wrote my novels in New Hampshire\nIs no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire.\nWhen I left Massachusetts years ago\nBetween two days, the reason why I sought\nNew Hampshire, not Connecticut,\nRhode Island, New York, or Vermont was this:\nWhere I was living then, New Hampshire offered\nThe nearest boundary to escape across.\nI hadn’t an illusion in my handbag\nAbout the people being better there\nThan those I left behind. I thought they weren’t.\n I thought they couldn’t be. And yet they were.\nI’d sure had no such friends in Massachusetts\nAs Hall of Windham, Gay of Atkinson,\nBartlett of Raymond (now of Colorado),\nHarris of Derry, and Lynch of Bethlehem.\n\nThe glorious bards of Massachusetts seem\nTo want to make New Hampshire people over.\nThey taunt the lofty land with little men.\nI don’t know what to say about the people.\nFor art’s sake one could almost wish them worse\nRather than better. How are we to write\nThe Russian novel in America\nAs long as life goes so unterribly?\nThere is the pinch from which our only outcry\nIn literature to date is heard to come.\nWe get what little misery we can\nOut of not having cause for misery.\nIt makes the guild of novel writers sick\nTo be expected to be Dostoievskis\nOn nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.\nThis is not sorrow, though; it’s just the vapors,\nAnd recognized as such in Russia itself\nUnder the new regime, and so forbidden.\n\nIf well it is with Russia, then feel free\nTo say so or be stood against the wall\nAnd shot. It’s Pollyanna now or death.\nThis, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;\nAnd very sensible. No state can build\nA literature that shall at once be sound\nAnd sad on a foundation of well-being.\n\nTo show the level of intelligence\nAmong us: it was just a Warren farmer\nWhose horse had pulled him short up in the road\nBy me, a stranger. This is what he said,\nFrom nothing but embarrassment and want\nOf anything more sociable to say:\n“You hear those bound dogs sing on Moosilauke?\nWell, they remind me of the hue and cry\nWe’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians\nAnd never rightly understood till Bryan\nRetired from politics and joined the chorus.\nThe matter with the Mid-Victorians\nSeems to have been a man named Joh n L. Darwin.”\n“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.\n\nI knew a man who failing as a farmer\nBurned down his farmhouse for the fire insurance,\nAnd spent the proceeds on a telescope\nTo satisfy a lifelong curiosity\nAbout our place among the infinities.\nAnd how was that for otherworldliness?\n\nIf I must choose which I would elevate--\nThe people or the already lofty mountains\nI’d elevate the already lofty mountains\nThe only fault I find with old New Hampshire\nIs that her mountains aren’t quite high enough.\nI was not always so; I’ve come to be so.\nHow, to my sorrow, how have I attained\nA height from which to look down critical\nOn mountains? What has given me assurance\n To say what height becomes New Hampshire mountains,\nOr any mountains? Can it be some strength\nI feel, as of an earthquake in my back,\nTo heave them higher to the morning star?\nCan it be foreign travel in the Alps?\nOr having seen and credited a moment\nThe solid molding of vast peaks of cloud\nBehind the pitiful reality\nOf Lincoln, Lafayette, and Liberty?\nOr some such sense as says bow high shall jet\nThe fountain in proportion to the basin?\nNo, none of these has raised me to my throne\nOf intellectual dissatisfaction,\nBut the sad accident of having seen\nOur actual mountains given in a map\nOf early times as twice the height they are--\nTen thousand feet instead of only five--\nWhich shows how sad an accident may be.\nFive thousand is no longer high enough.\nWhereas I never had a good idea\nAbout improving people in the world,\nHere I am overfertile in suggestion,\nAnd cannot rest from planning day or night\nHow high I’d thrust the peaks in summer snow\nTo tap the upper sky and draw a flow\nOf frosty night air on the vale below\nDown from the stars to freeze the dew as starry.\n\nThe more the sensibilitist I am\nThe more I seem to want my mountains wild;\nThe way the wiry gang-boss liked the logjam.\nAfter he’d picked the lock and got it started,\nHe dodged a log that lifted like an arm\nAgainst the sky to break his back for him,\nThen came in dancing, skipping with his life\nAcross the roar and chaos, and the words\nWe saw him say along the zigzag journey\nWere doubtless as the words we heard him say\nOn coming nearer: “Wasn’t she an i-deal\nSon-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an i-deal.”\n\nFor all her mountains fall a little short,\nHer people not quite short enough for Art,\nShe’s still New Hampshire; a most restful state.\n\nLately in converse with a New York alec\nAbout the new school of the pseudo-phallic,\nI found myself in a close corner where\nI bad to make an almost funny choice.\n“Choose you which you will be--a prude, or puke,\nMewling and puking in the public arms.”\n“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”\n“But if you bad to choose, which would you be?”\n1 wouldn’t be a prude afraid of nature.\nI know a man who took a double ax\nAnd went alone against a grove of trees;\nBut his heart failing him, he dropped the ax\nAnd ran for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold:\n“‘Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood’:\nThere s been enough shed without shedding mine.\nRemember Birnam Wood! The wood’s in flux!”\n\nHe had a special terror of the flux\nThat showed itself in dendrophobia.\nThe only decent tree had been to mill\nAnd educated into boards, be said.\nHe knew too well for any earthly use\nThe line where man leaves off and nature starts.\nAnd never overstepped it save in dreams.\nHe stood on the safe side of the line talking--\nWhich is sheer Matthew Arnoldism,\nThe cult of one who owned himself “a foiled\nCircuitous wanderer,” and “took dejectedly\nHis seat upon the intellectual throne”--\nAgreed in ’frowning on these improvised\nAltars the woods are full of nowadays,\nAgain as in the days when Ahaz sinned\nBy worship under green trees in the open.\nScarcely a mile but that I come on one,\nA black-checked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal.\nEven to say the groves were God’s first temples\nComes too near to Ahaz’sin for safety.\nNothing not built with hands of course is sacred.\nBut here is not a question of what’s sacred;\nRather of what to face or run away from.\nI’d hate to be a runaway from nature.\nAnd neither would I choose to be a puke\nWho cares not what be does in company,\nAnd when he can’t do anything, falls back\nOn words, and tries his worst to make words speak\nLouder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.\nIt seems a narrow choice the age insists on\nHow about being a good Greek, for instance?\nThat course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year.\n“Come, but this isn’t choosing--puke or prude?”\n\nWell, if I have to choose one or the other,\nI choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer\nWith an income in cash of, say, a thousand\n(From, say, a publisher in New York City).\nIt’s restful to arrive at a decision,\nAnd restful just to think about New Hampshire.\nAt present I am living in Vermont.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-to-keep": { - "title": "“Not to Keep”", - "body": "They sent him back to her. The letter came\nSaying … And she could have him. And before\nShe could be sure there was no hidden ill\nUnder the formal writing, he was in her sight,\nLiving. They gave him back to her alive\nHow else? They are not known to send the dead\nAnd not disfigured visibly. His face?\nHis hands? She had to look, and ask,\n“What was it, dear?” And she had given all\nAnd still she had all they had they the lucky!\nWasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,\nAnd all the rest for them permissible ease.\nShe had to ask, “What was it, dear?”\n\n“Enough,\nYet not enough. A bullet through and through,\nHigh in the breast. Nothing but what good care\nAnd medicine and rest, and you a week,\nCan cure me of to go again.” The same\nGrim giving to do over for them both.\nShe dared no more than ask him with her eyes\nHow was it with him for a second trial.\nAnd with his eyes he asked her not to ask.\nThey had given him back to her, but not to keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nothing-gold-can-stay": { - "title": "“Nothing Gold Can Stay”", - "body": "Nature’s first green is gold,\nHer hardest hue to hold.\nHer early leaf’s a flower;\nBut only so an hour.\nThen leaf subsides to leaf.\nSo Eden sank to grief,\nSo dawn goes down to day.\nNothing gold can stay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "now-close-the-windows": { - "title": "“Now Close the Windows”", - "body": "Now close the windows and hush all the fields:\nIf the trees must, let them silently toss;\nNo bird is singing now, and if there is,\nBe it my loss.\n\nIt will be long ere the marshes resume,\nI will be long ere the earliest bird:\nSo close the windows and not hear the wind,\nBut see all wind-stirred.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "october": { - "title": "“October”", - "body": "O hushed October morning mild\nThy leaves have ripened to the fall;\nTo-morrow’s wind if it be wild\nShould waste them all.\nThe crows above the forest call;\nTo-morrow they may form and go.\nO hushed October morning mild\nBegin the hours of this day slow\nMake the day seem to us less brief.\nHearts not averse to being beguiled\nBeguile us in the way you know;\nRelease one leaf at break of day;\nAt noon release another leaf;\nOne from our trees one far away;\nRetard the sun with gentle mist;\nEnchant the land with amethyst.\nSlow slow!\nFor the grapes’ sake if they were all\nWhose leaves already are burnt with frost\nWhose clustered fruit must else be lost--\nFor the grapes’ sake along the wall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-oft-repeated-dream": { - "title": "“The Oft-Repeated Dream”", - "body": "She had no saying dark enough\nFor the dark pine that kept\nForever trying the window-latch\nOf the room where they slept.\n\nThe tireless but ineffectual hands\nThat with every futile pass\nMade the great tree seem as a little bird\nBefore the mystery of glass!\n\nIt never had been inside the room\nAnd only one of the two\nWas afraid in an oft-repeated dream\nOf what the tree might do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-old-mans-winter-night": { - "title": "“An Old Man’s Winter Night”", - "body": "All out of doors looked darkly in at him\nThrough the thin frost almost in separate stars\nThat gathers on the pane in empty rooms.\nWhat kept his eyes from giving back the gaze\nWas the lamp tilted near them in his hand.\nWhat kept him from remembering what it was\nThat brought him to that creaking room was age.\nHe stood with barrels round him--at a loss.\nAnd having scared the cellar under him\nIn clomping there he scared it once again\nIn clomping off;--and scared the outer night\nWhich has its sounds familiar like the roar\nOf trees and crack of branches common things\nBut nothing so like beating on a box.\nA light he was to no one but himself\nWhere now he sat concerned with he knew what\nA quiet light and then not even that.\nHe consigned to the moon such as she was\nSo late-arising to the broken moon\nAs better than the sun in any case\nFor such a charge his snow upon the roof\nHis icicles along the wall to keep;\nAnd slept. The log that shifted with a jolt\nOnce in the stove disturbed him and he shifted\nAnd eased his heavy breathing but still slept.\nOne aged man--one man--can’t keep a house\nA farm a countryside or if he can\nIt’s thus he does it of a winter night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "on-going-unnoticed": { - "title": "“On Going Unnoticed”", - "body": "As vain to raise a voice as a sigh\nIn the tumult of free leaves on high.\nWhat are you in the shadow of trees\nEngaged up there with the light and breeze?\n\nLess than the coral-root you know\nThat is content with the daylight low,\nAnd has no leaves at all of its own;\nWhose spotted flowers hang meanly down.\n\nYou grasp the bark by a rugged pleat,\nAnd look up small from the forest’s feet.\nThe only leaf it drops goes wide,\nYour name not written on either side.\n\nYou linger your little hour and are gone,\nAnd still the wood sweep leafily on,\nNot even missing the coral-root flower\nYou took as a trophy of the hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-looking-up-by-chance-at-the-constellations": { - "title": "“On Looking up by Chance at the Constellations”", - "body": "You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much\nTo happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud\nAnd the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.\nThe sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,\nNor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.\nThe planets seem to interfere in their curves\nBut nothing ever happens, no harm is done.\nWe may as well go patiently on with our life,\nAnd look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun\nFor the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.\nIt is true the longest drouth will end in rain,\nThe longest peace in China will end in strife.\nStill it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake\nIn hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break\nOn his particular time and personal sight.\nThat calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-a-tree-fallen-across-the-road": { - "title": "“On a Tree Fallen across the Road”", - "body": "(To hear us talk)\n\nThe tree the tempest with a crash of wood\nThrows down in front of us is not bar\nOur passage to our journey’s end for good,\nBut just to ask us who we think we are\n\nInsisting always on our own way so.\nShe likes to halt us in our runner tracks,\nAnd make us get down in a foot of snow\nDebating what to do without an ax.\n\nAnd yet she knows obstruction is in vain:\nWe will not be put off the final goal\nWe have it hidden in us to attain,\nNot though we have to seize earth by the pole\n\nAnd, tired of aimless circling in one place,\nSteer straight off after something into space.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "once-by-the-pacific": { - "title": "“Once by the Pacific”", - "body": "The shattered water made a misty din.\nGreat waves looked over others coming in,\nAnd thought of doing something to the shore\nThat water never did to land before.\nThe clouds were low and hairy in the skies,\nLike locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.\nYou could not tell, and yet it looked as if\nThe shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,\nThe cliff in being backed by continent;\nIt looked as if a night of dark intent\nWas coming, and not only a night, an age.\nSomeone had better be prepared for rage.\nThere would be more than ocean-water broken\nBefore God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-step-backward-taken": { - "title": "“One Step Backward Taken”", - "body": "Not only sands and gravels\nWere once more on their travels,\nBut gulping muddy gallons\nGreat boulders off their balance\nBumped heads together dully\nAnd started down the gully.\nWhole capes caked off in slices.\nI felt my standpoint shaken\nIn the universal crisis.\nBut with one step backward taken\nI saved myself from going.\nA world torn loose went by me.\nThen the rain stopped and the blowing,\nAnd the sun came out to dry me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-onset": { - "title": "“The Onset”", - "body": "Always the same, when on a fated night\nAt last the gathered snow lets down as white\nAs may be in dark woods, and with a song\nIt shall not make again all winter long\nOf hissing on the yet uncovered ground,\nI almost stumble looking up and round,\nAs one who overtaken by the end\nGives up his errand, and lets death descend\nUpon him where he is, with nothing done\nTo evil, no important triumph won,\nMore than if life had never been begun.\n\nYet all the precedent is on my side:\nI know that winter death has never tried\nThe earth but it has failed: the snow may heap\nIn long storms an undrifted four feet deep\nAs measured again maple, birch, and oak,\nIt cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;\nAnd I shall see the snow all go down hill\nIn water of a slender April rill\nThat flashes tail through last year’s withered brake\nAnd dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.\nNothing will be left white but here a birch,\nAnd there a clump of houses with a church.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "our-singing-strength": { - "title": "“Our Singing Strength”", - "body": "It snowed in spring on earth so dry and warm\nThe flakes could find no landing place to form.\nHordes spent themselves to make it wet and cold,\nAnd still they failed of any lasting hold.\nThey made no white impression on the black.\nThey disappeared as if earth sent them back.\nNot till from separate flakes they changed at night\nTo almost strips and tapes of ragged white\nDid grass and garden ground confess it snowed,\nAnd all go back to winter but the road.\nNext day the scene was piled and puffed and dead.\nThe grass lay flattened under one great tread.\nBorne down until the end almost took root,\nThe rangey bough anticipated fruit\nWith snowball cupped in every opening bud.\nThe road alone maintained itself in mud,\nWhatever its secret was of greater heat\nFrom inward fires or brush of passing feet.\n\nIn spring more mortal singers than belong\nTo any one place cover us with song.\nThrush, bluebird, blackbird, sparrow, and robin throng;\nSome to go further north to Hudson’s Bay,\nSome that have come too far north back away,\nReally a very few to build and stay.\nNow was seen how these liked belated snow.\nthe field had nowhere left for them to go;\nThey’d soon exhausted all there was in flying;\nThe trees they’d had enough of with once trying\nAnd setting off their heavy powder load.\nThey could find nothing open but the road.\nSot there they let their lives be narrowed in\nBy thousands the bad weather made akin.\nThe road became a channel running flocks\nOf glossy birds like ripples over rocks.\nI drove them under foot in bits of flight\nThat kept the ground. almost disputing right\nOf way with me from apathy of wing,\nA talking twitter all they had to sing.\nA few I must have driven to despair\nMade quick asides, but having done in air\nA whir among white branches great and small\nAs in some too much carven marble hall\nWhere one false wing beat would have brought down all,\nCame tamely back in front of me, the Drover,\nTo suffer the same driven nightmare over.\nOne such storm in a lifetime couldn’t teach them\nThat back behind pursuit it couldn’t reach them;\nNone flew behind me to be left alone.\n\nWell, something for a snowstorm to have shown\nThe country’s singing strength thus brought together,\nthe thought repressed and moody with the weather\nWas none the less there ready to be freed\nAnd sing the wildflowers up from root and seed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "out-out": { - "title": "“Out, Out”", - "body": "The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard\nAnd made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,\nSweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.\nAnd from there those that lifted eyes could count\nFive mountain ranges one behind the other\nUnder the sunset far into Vermont.\nAnd the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,\nAs it ran light, or had to bear a load.\nAnd nothing happened: day was all but done.\nCall it a day, I wish they might have said\nTo please the boy by giving him the half hour\nThat a boy counts so much when saved from work.\nHis sister stood beside them in her apron\nTo tell them “Supper”. At the word, the saw,\nAs if to prove saws knew what supper meant,\nLeaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap--\nHe must have given the hand. However it was,\nNeither refused the meeting. But the hand!\nThe boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh.\nAs he swung toward them holding up the hand\nHalf in appeal, but half as if to keep\nThe life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--\nSince he was old enough to know, big boy\nDoing a man’s work, though a child at heart--\nHe saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off\nThe doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”\nSo. But the hand was gone already.\nThe doctor put him in the dark of ether.\nHe lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.\nAnd then--the watcher at his pulse took fright.\nNo one believed. They listened at his heart.\nLittle--less--nothing!--and that ended it.\nNo more to build on there. And they, since they\nWere not the one dead, turned to their affairs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-oven-bird": { - "title": "“The Oven Bird”", - "body": "There is a singer everyone has heard\nLoud a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird\nWho makes the solid tree trunks sound again.\nHe says that leaves are old and that for flowers\nMid-summer is to spring as one to ten.\nHe says the early petal-fall is past\nWhen pear and cherry bloom went down in showers\nOn sunny days a moment overcast;\nAnd comes that other fall we name the fall.\nHe says the highway dust is over all.\nThe bird would cease and be as other birds\nBut that he knows in singing not to sing.\nThe question that he frames in all but words\nIs what to make of a diminished thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "pan-with-us": { - "title": "“Pan with Us”", - "body": "Pan came out of the woods one day,--\nHis skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,\nThe gray of the moss of walls were they,--\nAnd stood in the sun and looked his fill\nAt wooded valley and wooded hill.\n\nHe stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,\nOn a height of naked pasture land;\nIn all the country he did command\nHe saw no smoke and he saw no roof.\nThat was well! and he stamped a hoof.\n\nHis heart knew peace, for none came here\nTo this lean feeding save once a year\nSomeone to salt the half-wild steer,\nOr homespun children with clicking pails\nWho see so little they tell no tales.\n\nHe tossed his pipes, too hard to teach\nA new-world song, far out of reach,\nFor sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech\nAnd the whimper of hawks beside the sun\nWere music enough for him, for one.\n\nTimes were changed from what they were:\nSuch pipes kept less of power to stir\nThe fruited bough of the juniper\nAnd the fragile bluets clustered there\nThan the merest aimless breath of air.\n\nThey were pipes of pagan mirth,\nAnd the world had found new terms of worth.\nHe laid him down on the sun-burned earth\nAnd raveled a flower and looked away--\nPlay? Play?--What should he play?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-passing-glimpse": { - "title": "“A Passing Glimpse”", - "body": "I often see flowers from a passing car\nThat are gone before I can tell what they are.\n\nI want to get out of the train and go back\nTo see what they were beside the track.\n\nI name all the flowers I am sure they weren’t;\nNot fireweed loving where woods have burnt--\n\nNot bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--\nNot lupine living on sand and drouth.\n\nWas something brushed across my mind\nThat no one on earth will ever find?\n\nHeaven gives it glimpses only to those\nNot in position to look too close.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-pasture": { - "title": "“The Pasture”", - "body": "I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;\nI’ll only stop to rake the leaves away\n(And wait to watch the water clear I may):\nI shan’t be gone long.--You come too.\n\nI’m going out to fetch the little calf\nThat’s standing by the mother. It’s so young\nIt totters when she licks it with her tongue.\nI shan’t be gone long.--You come too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "pauls-wife": { - "title": "“Paul’s Wife”", - "body": "To drive Paul out of any lumber camp\nAll that was needed was to say to him,\n“How is the wife, Paul?”--and he’d disappear.\nSome said it was because be bad no wife,\nAnd hated to be twitted on the subject;\nOthers because he’d come within a day\nOr so of having one, and then been Jilted;\nOthers because he’d had one once, a good one,\nWho’d run away with someone else and left him;\nAnd others still because he had one now\nHe only had to be reminded of--\nHe was all duty to her in a minute:\nHe had to run right off to look her up,\nAs if to say, “That’s so, how is my wife?\nI hope she isn’t getting into mischief.”\nNo one was anxious to get rid of Paul.\nHe’d been the hero of the mountain camps\nEver since, just to show them, he bad slipped\nThe bark of a whole tamarack off whole\nAs clean as boys do off a willow twig\nTo make a willow whistle on a Sunday\nApril by subsiding meadow brooks.\nThey seemed to ask him just to see him go,\n“How is the wife, Paul?” and he always went.\nHe never stopped to murder anyone\nWho asked the question. He just disappeared--\nNobody knew in what direction,\nAlthough it wasn’t usually long\nBefore they beard of him in some new camp,\nThe same Paul at the same old feats of logging.\nThe question everywhere was why should Paul\nObject to being asked a civil question--\nA man you could say almost anything to\nShort of a fighting word. You have the answers.\nAnd there was one more not so fair to Paul:\nThat Paul had married a wife not his equal.\nPaul was ashamed of her. To match a hero\nShe would have had to be a heroine;\nInstead of which she was some half-breed squaw.\nBut if the story Murphy told was true,\nShe wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.\n\n You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone’s\nHeard how he thrashed the horses on a load\nThat wouldn’t budge, until they simply stretched\nTheir rawhide harness from the load to camp.\nPaul told the boss the load would be all right,\n“The sun will bring your load in”--and it did--\nBy shrinking the rawhide to natural length.\nThat’s what is called a stretcher. But I guess\nThe one about his jumping so’s to land\nWith both his feet at once against the ceiling,\nAnd then land safely right side up again,\nBack on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.\nWell, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife\nOut of a white-pine log. Murphy was there\nAnd, as you might say, saw the lady born.\nPaul worked at anything in lumbering.\nHe’d been bard at it taking boards away\nFor--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer\nTo want to find out if he couldn’t pile\nThe lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy.\nThey’d sliced the first slab off a big butt log,\nAnd the sawyer had slammed the carriage back\nTo slam end-on again against the saw teeth.\nTo judge them by the way they caught themselves\nWhen they saw what had happened to the log,\nThey must have had a guilty expectation\nSomething was going to go with their slambanging.\nSomething bad left a broad black streak of grease\nOn the new wood the whole length of the log\nExcept, perhaps, a foot at either end.\nBut when Paul put his finger in the grease,\nIt wasn’t grease at all, but a long slot.\nThe log was hollow. They were sawing pine.\n“First time I ever saw a hollow pine.\nThat comes of having Paul around the place.\nTake it to bell for me,” the sawyer said.\nEveryone had to have a look at it\nAnd tell Paul what he ought to do about it.\n(They treated it as his.) “You take a jackknife,\nAnd spread the opening, and you’ve got a dugout\nAll dug to go a-fishing in.” To Paul\nThe hollow looked too sound and clean and empty\nEver to have housed birds or beasts or bees.\nThere was no entrance for them to get in by.\nIt looked to him like some new kind of hollow\nHe thought he’d better take his jackknife to.\nSo after work that evening be came back\nAnd let enough light into it by cutting\nTo see if it was empty. He made out in there\nA slender length of pith, or was it pith?\nIt might have been the skin a snake had cast\nAnd left stood up on end inside the tree\nThe hundred years the tree must have been growing.\nMore cutting and he bad this in both hands,\nAnd looking from it to the pond nearby,\nPaul wondered how it would respond to water.\nNot a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air\nHe made in walking slowly to the beach\nBlew it once off his hands and almost broke it.\nHe laid it at the edge, where it could drink.\nAt the first drink it rustled and grew limp.\nAt the next drink it grew invisible.\nPaul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers,\nAnd thought it must have melted. It was gone.\nAnd then beyond the open water, dim with midges,\nWhere the log drive lay pressed against the boom,\nIt slowly rose a person, rose a girl,\nHer wet hair heavy on her like a helmet,\nWho, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul.\nAnd that made Paul in turn look back\nTo see if it was anyone behind him\nThat she was looking at instead of him.\n(Murphy had been there watching all the time,\nBut from a shed where neither of them could see him.)\nThere was a moment of suspense in birth\nWhen the girl seemed too waterlogged to live,\nBefore she caught her first breath with a gasp\nAnd laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet,\nAnd walked off, talking to herself or Paul,\nAcross the logs like backs of alligators,\nPaul taking after her around the pond.\n\nNext evening Murphy and some other fellows\nGot drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,\nFrom the bare top of which there is a view\nTo other hills across a kettle valley.\nAnd there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,\nThey saw Paul and his creature keeping house.\nIt was the only glimpse that anyone\nHas had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them\nFalling in love across the twilight millpond.\nMore than a mile across the wilderness\nThey sat together halfway up a cliff\nIn a small niche let into it, the girl\nBrightly, as if a star played on the place,\nPaul darkly, like her shadow. All the light\nWas from the girl herself, though, not from a star,\nAs was apparent from what happened next.\nAll those great ruffians put their throats together,\nAnd let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,\nAs a brute tribute of respect to beauty.\nOf course the bottle fell short by a mile,\nBut the shout reached the girl and put her light out.\nShe went out like a firefly, and that was all.\n\n So there were witnesses that Paul was married\nAnd not to anyone to be ashamed of\nEveryone had been wrong in judging Paul.\nMurphy told me Paul put on all those airs\nAbout his wife to keep her to himself.\nPaul was what’s called a terrible possessor.\nOwning a wife with him meant owning her.\nShe wasn’t anybody else’s business,\nEither to praise her or much as name her,\nAnd he’d thank people not to think of her.\nMurphy’s idea was that a man like Paul\nWouldn’t be spoken to about a wife\nIn any way the world knew how to speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pauper-witch-of-grafton": { - "title": "“The Pauper Witch of Grafton”", - "body": "Now that they’ve got it settled whose I be,\nI’m going to tell them something they won’t like:\nThey’ve got it settled wrong, and I can prove it.\nFlattered I must be to have two towns fighting\nTo make a present of me to each other.\nThey don’t dispose me, either one of them,\nTo spare them any trouble. Double trouble’s\nAlways the witch’s motto anyway.\nI’ll double theirs for both of them-you watch me.\nThey’ll find they’ve got the whole thing to do over,\nThat is, if facts is what they want to go by.\nThey set a lot (now don’t they?) by a record\nOf Arthur Amy’s having once been up\nFor Hog Reeve in March Meeting here in Warren.\nI could have told them any time this twelvemonth\nThe Arthur Amy I was married to\nCouldn’t have been the one they say was up\nIn Warren at March Meeting, for the reason\nHe wa’n’t but fifteen at the time they say.\nThe Arthur Amy I was married to\nVoted the only times he ever voted,\nWhich wasn’t many, in the town of Wentworth.\nOne of the times was when ’twas in the warrant\nTo see if the town wanted to take over\nThe tote road to our clearing where we lived.\nI’ll tell you who’d remember-Heman Lapish.\nTheir Arthur Amy was the father of mine.\nSo now they’ve dragged it through the law courts once\nI guess they’d better drag it through again.\nWentworth and Warren’s both good towns to live in,\nOnly I happen to prefer to live\nIn Wentworth from now on; and when all’s said,\nRight’s right, and the temptation to do right\nWhen I can hurt someone by doing it\nHas always been too much for me, it has.\nI know of some folks that’d be set up\nAt having in their town a noted witch:\nBut most would have to think of the expense\nThat even I would be. They ought to know\nThat as a witch I’d often milk a bat\nAnd that’d be enough to last for days.\nIt’d make my position stronger, think,\nIf I was to consent to give some sign\nTo make it surer that I was a witch?\nIt wa’n’t no sign, I s’pose, when Mallice Huse\nSaid that I took him out in his old age\nAnd rode all over everything on him\nUntil I’d bad him worn to skin and bones\nAnd if I’d left him bitched unblanketed\nIn front of one Town Hall, I’d left him hitched\nfront of every one in Grafton County.\nSome cried shame on me not to blanket him,\nThe poor old man. It would have been all right\nIf someone hadn’t said to gnaw the posts\nHe stood beside and leave his trademark on them,\nSo they could recognize them. Not a post\nThat they could hear tell of was scarified.\nThey made him keep on gnawing till he whined.\nThen that same smarty someone said to look\nHe’d bet Huse was a cribber and bad gnawed\nThe crib he slept in-and as sure’s you’re born\nThey found he’d gnawed the four posts of his bed,\nAll four of them to splinters. What did that prove?\nNot that he hadn’t gnawed the hitching posts\nHe said he had, besides. Because a horse\nGnaws in the stable ain’t no proof to me\nHe don’t gnaw trees and posts and fences too.\nBut everybody took it for a proof.\nI was a strapping girl of twenty then.\nThe smarty someone who spoiled everything\nWas Arthur Amy. You know who he was.\nThat was the way he started courting me.\nHe never said much after we were married,\nBut I mistrusted be was none too proud\nOf having interfered in the Huse business.\nI guess be found he got more out of me\nBy having me a witch. Or something happened\nTo turn him round. He got to saying things\nTo undo what he’d done and make it right,\nLike, “No, she ain’t come back from kiting yet.\nLast night was one of her nights out. She’s kiting.\nShe thinks when the wind makes a night of it\nShe might as well herself.” But he liked best\nTo let on he was plagued to death with me:\nIf anyone had seen me coming home\nOver the ridgepole,’ stride of a broomstick,\nAs often as he had in the tail of the night,\nHe guessed they’d know what he had to put up with.\nWell, I showed Arthur Amy signs enough\nOff from the house as far as we could keep\nAnd from barn smells you can’t wash out of plowed ground\nWith all the rain and snow of seven years;\nAnd I don’t mean just skulls of Rogers’Rangers\nOn Moosilauke, but woman signs to man,\nOnly bewitched so I would last him longer.\nUp where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,\nI made him gather me wet snowberries\nOn slippery rocks beside a waterfall.\nI made him do it for me in the dark.\nAnd he liked everything I made him do.\nI hope if he is where he sees me now\nHe’s so far off be can’t see what I’ve come to.\nYou can come down from everything to nothing.\nAll is, if I’d a-known when I was young\nAnd full of it, that this would be the end,\nIt doesn’t seem as if I’d had the courage\nTo make so free and kick up in folks’faces.\nI might have, but it doesn’t seem as if.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pea-brush": { - "title": "“Pea Brush”", - "body": "I walked down alone Sunday after church\n To the place where John has been cutting trees\nTo see for myself about the birch\n He said I could have to bush my peas.\n\nThe sun in the new-cut narrow gap\n Was hot enough for the first of May,\nAnd stifling hot with the odor of sap\n From stumps still bleeding their life away.\n\nThe frogs that were peeping a thousand shrill\n Wherever the ground was low and wet,\nThe minute they heard my step went still\n To watch me and see what I came to get.\n\nBirch boughs enough piled everywhere!--\n All fresh and sound from the recent axe.\nTime someone came with cart and pair\n And got them off the wild flower’s backs.\n\nThey might be good for garden things\n To curl a little finger round,\nThe same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings,\n And lift themselves up off the ground.\n\nSmall good to anything growing wild,\n They were crooking many a trillium\nThat had budded before the boughs were piled\n And since it was coming up had to come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 1, - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-peck-of-gold": { - "title": "“A Peck of Gold”", - "body": "Dust always blowing about the town,\nExcept when sea-fog laid it down,\nAnd I was one of the children told\nSome of the blowing dust was gold.\n\nAll the dust the wind blew high\nAppeared like God in the sunset sky,\nBut I was one of the children told\nSome of the dust was really gold.\n\nSuch was life in the Golden Gate:\nGold dusted all we drank and ate,\nAnd I was one of the children told,\n“We all must eat our peck of gold.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "place-for-a-third": { - "title": "“Place for a Third”", - "body": "Nothing to say to all those marriages!\nShe had made three herself to three of his.\nThe score was even for them, three to three.\nBut come to die she found she cared so much:\nShe thought of children in a burial row;\nThree children in a burial row were sad.\nOne man’s three women in a burial row\nSomehow made her impatient with the man.\nAnd so she said to Laban, “You have done\nA good deal right; don’t do the last thing wrong.\nDon’t make me lie with those two other women.”\n\nLaban said, No, he would not make her lie\nWith anyone but that she had a mind to,\nIf that was how she felt, of course, he said.\nShe went her way. But Laban having caught\nThis glimpse of lingering person in Eliza,\nAnd anxious to make all he could of it\nWith something he remembered in himself,\nTried to think how he could exceed his promise,\nAnd give good measure to the dead, though thankless.\nIf that was how she felt, he kept repeating.\nHis first thought under pressure was a grave\nIn a new boughten grave plot by herself,\nUnder he didn’t care how great a stone:\nHe’d sell a yoke of steers to pay for it.\nAnd weren’t there special cemetery flowers,\nThat, once grief sets to growing, grief may rest;\nThe flowers will go on with grief awhile,\nAnd no one seem neglecting or neglected?\nA prudent grief will not despise such aids.\nHe thought of evergreen and everlasting.\nAnd then he had a thought worth many of these.\nSomewhere must be the grave of the young boy\nWho married her for playmate more than helpmate,\nAnd sometimes laughed at what it was between them.\nHow would she like to sleep her last with him?\nWhere was his grave? Did Laban know his name?\n\nHe found the grave a town or two away,\nThe headstone cut with John, Beloved Husband,\nBeside it room reserved; the say a sister’s;\nA never-married sister’s of that husband,\nWhether Eliza would be welcome there.\nThe dead was bound to silence: ask the sister.\nSo Laban saw the sister, and, saying nothing\nOf where Eliza wanted not to lie,\nAnd who had thought to lay her with her first love,\nBegged simply for the grave. The sister’s face\nFell all in wrinkles of responsibility.\nShe wanted to do right. She’d have to think.\nLaban was old and poor, yet seemed to care;\nAnd she was old and poor-but she cared, too.\nThey sat. She cast one dull, old look at him,\nThen turned him out to go on other errands\nShe said he might attend to in the village,\nWhile she made up her mind how much she cared-\nAnd how much Laban cared-and why he cared,\n(She made shrewd eyes to see where he came in.)\n\nShe’d looked Eliza up her second time,\nA widow at her second husband’s grave,\nAnd offered her a home to rest awhile\nBefore she went the poor man’s widow’s way,\nHousekeeping for the next man out of wedlock.\nShe and Eliza had been friends through all.\nWho was she to judge marriage in a world\nWhose Bible’s so confused up in marriage counsel?\nThe sister had not come across this Laban;\nA decent product of life’s ironing-out;\nShe must not keep him waiting. Time would press\nBetween the death day and the funeral day.\nSo when she saw him coming in the street\nShe hurried her decision to be ready\nTo meet him with his answer at the door.\nLaban had known about what it would be\nFrom the way she had set her poor old mouth,\nTo do, as she had put it, what was right.\n\nShe gave it through the screen door closed between them:\n“No, not with John. There wouldn’t be no sense.\nEliza’s had too many other men.”\n\nLaban was forced to fall back on his plan\nTo buy Eliza a plot to lie alone in:\nWhich gives him for himself a choice of lots\nWhen his time comes to die and settle down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer-in-spring": { - "title": "“A Prayer in Spring”", - "body": "OH, give us pleasure in the flowers today;\nAnd give us not to think so far away\nAs the uncertain harvest; keep us here\nAll simply in the springing of the year.\n\nOh, give us pleasure in the orcahrd white,\nLike nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;\nAnd make us happy in the happy bees,\nThe swarm dilating round the perfect trees.\n\nAnd make us happy in the darting bird\nThat suddenly above the bees is heard,\nThe meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,\nAnd off a blossom in mid air stands still.\n\nFor this is love and nothing else is love,\nTo which it is reserved for God above\nTo sanctify to what far ends he will,\nBut which it only needs that we fulfill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "provide-provide": { - "title": "“Provide, Provide”", - "body": "The witch that came (the withered hag)\nTo wash the steps with pail and rag,\nWas once the beauty Abishag,\n\nThe picture pride of Hollywood.\nToo many fall from great and good\nFor you to doubt the likelihood.\n\nDie early and avoid the fate.\nOr if predestined to die late,\nMake up your mind to die in state.\n\nMake the whole stock exchange your own!\nIf need be occupy a throne,\nWhere nobody can call you crone.\n\nSome have relied on what they knew;\nOthers on simply being true.\nWhat worked for them might work for you.\n\nNo memory of having starred\nAtones for later disregard,\nOr keeps the end from being hard.\n\nBetter to go down dignified\nWith boughten friendship at your side\nThan none at all. Provide, provide!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "putting-in-the-seed": { - "title": "“Putting in the Seed”", - "body": "You come to fetch me from my work to-night\nWhen supper’s on the table and we’ll see\nIf I can leave off burying the white\nSoft petals fallen from the apple tree\n(Soft petals yes but not so barren quite\nMingled with these smooth bean and wrinkled pea);\nAnd go along with you ere you lose sight\nOf what you came for and become like me\nSlave to a springtime passion for the earth.\nHow Love bums through the Putting in the Seed\nOn through the watching for that early birth\nWhen just as the soil tarnishes with weed\nThe sturdy seedling with arched body comes\nShouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "a-question": { - "title": "“A Question”", - "body": "A voice said, Look me in the stars\nAnd tell me truly, men of earth,\nIf all the soul-and-body scars\nWere not too much to pay for birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reluctance": { - "title": "“Reluctance”", - "body": "Out through the fields and the woods\nAnd over the walls I have wended;\nI have climbed the hills of view\nAnd looked at the world, and descended;\nI have come by the highway home,\nAnd lo, it is ended.\n\nThe leaves are all dead on the ground,\nSave those that the oak is keeping\nTo ravel them one by one\nAnd let them go scraping and creeping\nOut over the crusted snow,\nWhen others are sleeping.\n\nAnd the dead leaves lie huddled and still,\nNo longer blown hither and thither;\nThe last long aster is gone;\nThe flowers of the witch-hazel wither;\nThe heart is still aching to seek,\nBut the feet question ‘Whither?’\n\nAh, when to the heart of man\nWas it ever less than a treason\nTo go with the drift of things,\nTo yield with a grace to reason,\nAnd bow and accept the end\nOf a love or a season?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "revelation": { - "title": "“Revelation”", - "body": "We make ourselves a place apart\nBehind light words that tease and flout\nBut oh the agitated heart\nTill someone really find us out.\n\nA pity if the case require\n(Or so we say) that in the end\nWe speak the literal to inspire\nThe understanding of a friend.\n\nBut so with all from babes that play\nAt hide-and-seek to God afar\nSo all who hide too well away\nMust speak and tell us where they are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "riders": { - "title": "“Riders”", - "body": "The surest thing there is is we are riders,\nAnd though none too successful at it, guiders,\nThrough everything presented, land and tide\nAnd now the very air, of what we ride.\n\nWhat is this talked-of mystery of birth\nBut being mounted bareback on the earth?\nWe can just see the infant up astride,\nHis small fist buried in the bushy hide.\n\nThere is our wildest mount--a headless horse.\nBut though it runs unbridled off its course,\nAnd all our blandishments would seem defied,\nWe have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-road-not-taken": { - "title": "“The Road Not Taken”", - "body": "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood\nAnd sorry I could not travel both\nAnd be one traveller long I stood\nAnd looked down one as far as I could\nTo where it bent in the undergrowth;\n\nThen took the other as just as fair\nAnd having perhaps the better claim\nBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;\nThough as for that the passing there\nHad worn them really about the same\n\nAnd both that morning equally lay\nIn leaves no step had trodden black.\nOh I kept the first for another day!\nYet knowing how way leads on to way\nI doubted if I should ever come back.\n\nI shall be telling this with a sigh\nSomewhere ages and ages hence:\nTwo roads diverged in a wood and I--\nI took the one less travelled by\nAnd that has made all the difference.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "rose-pogonias": { - "title": "“Rose Pogonias”", - "body": "A saturated meadow,\nSun-shaped and jewel-small,\nA circle scarcely wider\nThan the trees around were tall;\nWhere winds were quite excluded,\nAnd the air was stifling sweet\nWith the breath of many flowers,--\nA temple of the hear.\n\nThere we bowed us in the burning,\nAs the sun’s right worship is,\nTo pick where none could miss them\nA thousand orchises;\nFor though the grass was scattered,\nyet every second spear\nSeemed tipped with wings of color,\nThat tinged the atmosphere.\n\nWe raised a simple prayer\nBefore we left the spot,\nThat in the general mowing\nThat place might be forgot;\nOr if not all so favored,\nObtain such grace of hours,\nthat none should mow the grass there\nWhile so confused with flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-runaway": { - "title": "“The Runaway”", - "body": "Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall\nWe stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?”\nA little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall\nThe other curled at his breast. He dipped his head\nAnd snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.\nWe heard the miniature thunder where he fled\nAnd we saw him or thought we saw him dim and grey\nLike a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.\n“I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.\nHe isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play\nWith the little fellow at all. He’s running away.\nI doubt if even his mother could tell him ’Sakes,\nIt’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know!\nWhere is his mother? He can’t be out alone.”\nAnd now he comes again with a clatter of stone\nAnd mounts the wall again with whited eyes\nAnd all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.\nHe shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.\n“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late\nWhen other creatures have gone to stall and bin\nOught to be told to come and take him in.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "sand-dunes": { - "title": "“Sand Dunes”", - "body": "Sea waves are green and wet,\nBut up from where they die,\nRise others vaster yet,\nAnd those are brown and dry.\n\nThey are the sea made land\nTo come at the fisher town,\nAnd bury in solid sand\nThe men she could not drown.\n\nShe may know cove and cape,\nBut she does not know mankind\nIf by any change of shape,\nShe hopes to cut off mind.\n\nMen left her a ship to sink:\nThey can leave her a hut as well;\nAnd be but more free to think\nFor the one more cast-off shell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-self-seeker": { - "title": "“The Self-Seeker”", - "body": "“Willis, I didn’t want you here to-day:\nThe lawyer’s coming for the company.\nI’m going to sell my soul, or, rather, feet.\nFive hundred dollars for the pair, you know.”\n“With you the feet have nearly been the soul;\nAnd if you’re going to sell them to the devil,\nI want to see you do it. When’s he coming?”\n“I half suspect you knew, and came on purpose\nTo try to help me drive a better bargain.”\n“Well, if it’s true! Yours are no common feet.\nThe lawyer don’t know what it is he’s buying:\nSo many miles you might have walked you won’t walk.\nYou haven’t run your forty orchids down.\nWhat does he think?--How are the blessed feet?\nThe doctor’s sure you’re going to walk again?”\n“He thinks I’ll hobble. It’s both legs and feet.”\n“They must be terrible--I mean to look at.”\n“I haven’t dared to look at them uncovered.\nThrough the bed blankets I remind myself\nOf a starfish laid out with rigid points.”\n“The wonder is it hadn’t been your head.”\n“It’s hard to tell you how I managed it.\nWhen I saw the shaft had me by the coat,\nI didn’t try too long to pull away,\nOr fumble for my knife to cut away,\nI just embraced the shaft and rode it out--\nTill Weiss shut off the water in the wheel-pit.\nThat’s how I think I didn’t lose my head.\nBut my legs got their knocks against the ceiling.”\n“Awful. Why didn’t they throw off the belt\nInstead of going clear down in the wheel-pit?”\n“They say some time was wasted on the belt--\nOld streak of leather--doesn’t love me much\nBecause I make him spit fire at my knuckles,\nThe way Ben Franklin used to make the kite-string.\nThat must be it. Some days he won’t stay on.\nThat day a woman couldn’t coax him off.\nHe’s on his rounds now with his tail in his mouth\nSnatched right and left across the silver pulleys.\nEverything goes the same without me there.\nYou can hear the small buzz saws whine, the big saw\nCaterwaul to the hills around the village\nAs they both bite the wood. It’s all our music.\nOne ought as a good villager to like it.\nNo doubt it has a sort of prosperous sound,\nAnd it’s our life.”\n“Yes, when it’s not our death.”\n“You make that sound as if it wasn’t so\nWith everything. What we live by we die by.\nI wonder where my lawyer is. His train’s in.\nI want this over with; I’m hot and tired.”\n“You’re getting ready to do something foolish.”\n“Watch for him, will you, Will? You let him in.\nI’d rather Mrs. Corbin didn’t know;\nI’ve boarded here so long, she thinks she owns me.\nYou’re bad enough to manage without her.”\n“And I’m going to be worse instead of better.\nYou’ve got to tell me how far this is gone:\nHave you agreed to any price?”\n“Five hundred.\nFive hundred--five--five! One, two, three, four, five.\nYou needn’t look at me.”\n“I don’t believe you.”\n“I told you, Willis, when you first came in.\nDon’t you be hard on me. I have to take\nWhat I can get. You see they have the feet,\nWhich gives them the advantage in the trade.\nI can’t get back the feet in any case.”\n“But your flowers, man, you’re selling out your flowers.”\n“Yes, that’s one way to put it--all the flowers\nOf every kind everywhere in this region\nFor the next forty summers--call it forty.\nBut I’m not selling those, I’m giving them,\nThey never earned me so much as one cent:\nMoney can’t pay me for the loss of them.\nNo, the five hundred was the sum they named\nTo pay the doctor’s bill and tide me over.\nIt’s that or fight, and I don’t want to fight--\nI just want to get settled in my life,\nSuch as it’s going to be, and know the worst,\nOr best--it may not be so bad. The firm\nPromise me all the shooks I want to nail.”\n“But what about your flora of the valley?”\n“You have me there. But that--you didn’t think\nThat was worth money to me? Still I own\nIt goes against me not to finish it\nFor the friends it might bring me. By the way,\nI had a letter from Burroughs--did I tell you?--\nAbout my Cyprepedium reginae;\nHe says it’s not reported so far north.\nThere! there’s the bell. He’s rung. But you go down\nAnd bring him up, and don’t let Mrs. Corbin.--\nOh, well, we’ll soon be through with it. I’m tired.”\nWillis brought up besides the Boston lawyer\nA little barefoot girl who in the noise\nOf heavy footsteps in the old frame house,\nAnd baritone importance of the lawyer,\nStood for a while unnoticed with her hands\nShyly behind her.\n“Well, and how is Mister--”\nThe lawyer was already in his satchel\nAs if for papers that might bear the name\nHe hadn’t at command. “You must excuse me,\nI dropped in at the mill and was detained.”\n“Looking round, I suppose,” said Willis.\n“Yes,\nWell, yes.”\n“Hear anything that might prove useful?”\nThe Broken One saw Anne. “Why, here is Anne.\nWhat do you want, dear? Come, stand by the bed;\nTell me what is it?” Anne just wagged her dress\nWith both hands held behind her. “Guess,” she said.\n“Oh, guess which hand? My my! Once on a time\nI knew a lovely way to tell for certain\nBy looking in the ears. But I forget it.\nEr, let me see. I think I’ll take the right.\nThat’s sure to be right even if it’s wrong.\nCome, hold it out. Don’t change.--A Ram’s Horn orchid!\nA Ram’s Horn! What would I have got, I wonder,\nIf I had chosen left. Hold out the left.\nAnother Ram’s Horn! Where did you find those,\nUnder what beech tree, on what woodchuck’s knoll?”\nAnne looked at the large lawyer at her side,\nAnd thought she wouldn’t venture on so much.\n“Were there no others?”\n“There were four or five.\nI knew you wouldn’t let me pick them all.”\n“I wouldn’t--so I wouldn’t. You’re the girl!\nYou see Anne has her lesson learned by heart.”\n“I wanted there should be some there next year.”\n“Of course you did. You left the rest for seed,\nAnd for the backwoods woodchuck. You’re the girl!\nA Ram’s Horn orchid seedpod for a woodchuck\nSounds something like. Better than farmer’s beans\nTo a discriminating appetite,\nThough the Ram’s Horn is seldom to be had\nIn bushel lots--doesn’t come on the market.\nBut, Anne, I’m troubled; have you told me all?\nYou’re hiding something. That’s as bad as lying.\nYou ask this lawyer man. And it’s not safe\nWith a lawyer at hand to find you out.\nNothing is hidden from some people, Anne.\nYou don’t tell me that where you found a Ram’s Horn\nYou didn’t find a Yellow Lady’s Slipper.\nWhat did I tell you? What? I’d blush, I would.\nDon’t you defend yourself. If it was there,\nWhere is it now, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper?”\n“Well, wait--it’s common--it’s too common.”\n“Common?\nThe Purple Lady’s Slipper’s commoner.”\n“I didn’t bring a Purple Lady’s Slipper\nTo You--to you I mean--they’re both too common.”\nThe lawyer gave a laugh among his papers\nAs if with some idea that she had scored.\n“I’ve broken Anne of gathering bouquets.\nIt’s not fair to the child. It can’t be helped though:\nPressed into service means pressed out of shape.\nSomehow I’ll make it right with her--she’ll see.\nShe’s going to do my scouting in the field,\nOver stone walls and all along a wood\nAnd by a river bank for water flowers,\nThe floating Heart, with small leaf like a heart,\nAnd at the sinus under water a fist\nOf little fingers all kept down but one,\nAnd that thrust up to blossom in the sun\nAs if to say, ‘You! You’re the Heart’s desire.’\nAnne has a way with flowers to take the place\nOf that she’s lost: she goes down on one knee\nAnd lifts their faces by the chin to hers\nAnd says their names, and leaves them where they are.”\nThe lawyer wore a watch the case of which\nWas cunningly devised to make a noise\nLike a small pistol when he snapped it shut\nAt such a time as this. He snapped it now.\n“Well, Anne, go, dearie. Our affair will wait.\nThe lawyer man is thinking of his train.\nHe wants to give me lots and lots of money\nBefore he goes, because I hurt myself,\nAnd it may take him I don’t know how long.\nBut put our flowers in water first. Will, help her:\nThe pitcher’s too full for her. There’s no cup?\nJust hook them on the inside of the pitcher.\nNow run.--Get out your documents! You see\nI have to keep on the good side of Anne.\nI’m a great boy to think of number one.\nAnd you can’t blame me in the place I’m in.\nWho will take care of my necessities\nUnless I do?”\n“A pretty interlude,”\nThe lawyer said. “I’m sorry, but my train--\nLuckily terms are all agreed upon.\nYou only have to sign your name. Right--there.”\n“You, Will, stop making faces. Come round here\nWhere you can’t make them. What is it you want?\nI’ll put you out with Anne. Be good or go.”\n“You don’t mean you will sign that thing unread?”\n“Make yourself useful then, and read it for me.\nIsn’t it something I have seen before?”\n“You’ll find it is. Let your friend look at it.”\n“Yes, but all that takes time, and I’m as much\nIn haste to get it over with as you.\nBut read it, read it. That’s right, draw the curtain:\nHalf the time I don’t know what’s troubling me.--\nWhat do you say, Will? Don’t you be a fool,\nYou! crumpling folkses legal documents.\nOut with it if you’ve any real objection.”\n“Five hundred dollars!”\n“What would you think right?”\n“A thousand wouldn’t be a cent too much;\nYou know it, Mr. Lawyer. The sin is\nAccepting anything before he knows\nWhether he’s ever going to walk again.\nIt smells to me like a dishonest trick.”\n“I think--I think--from what I heard to-day--\nAnd saw myself--he would be ill-advised--”\n“What did you hear, for instance?” Willis said.\n“Now the place where the accident occurred--”\nThe Broken One was twisted in his bed.\n“This is between you two apparently.\nWhere I come in is what I want to know.\nYou stand up to it like a pair of cocks.\nGo outdoors if you want to fight. Spare me.\nWhen you come back, I’ll have the papers signed.\nWill pencil do? Then, please, your fountain pen.\nOne of you hold my head up from the pillow.”\nWillis flung off the bed. “I wash my hands--\nI’m no match--no, and don’t pretend to be--”\nThe lawyer gravely capped his fountain pen.\n“You’re doing the wise thing: you won’t regret it.\nWe’re very sorry for you.”\nWillis sneered:\n“Who’s we?--some stockholders in Boston?\nI’ll go outdoors, by gad, and won’t come back.”\n“Willis, bring Anne back with you when you come.\nYes. Thanks for caring. Don’t mind Will: he’s savage.\nHe thinks you ought to pay me for my flowers.\nYou don’t know what I mean about the flowers.\nDon’t stop to try to now. You’ll miss your train.\nGood-bye.” He flung his arms around his face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-servant-to-servants": { - "title": "“A Servant to Servants”", - "body": "I didn’t make you know how glad I was\nTo have you come and camp here on our land.\nI promised myself to get down some day\nAnd see the way you lived but I don’t know!\nWith a houseful of hungry men to feed\nI guess you’d find … It seems to me\nI can’t express my feelings any more\nThan I can raise my voice or want to lift\nMy hand (oh I can lift it when I have to).\nDid ever you feel so? I hope you never.\nIt’s got so I don’t even know for sure\nWhether I _am_ glad sorry or anything.\nThere’s nothing but a voice-like left inside\nThat seems to tell me how I ought to feel\nAnd would feel if I wasn’t all gone wrong.\nYou take the lake. I look and look at it.\nI see it’s a fair pretty sheet of water.\nI stand and make myself repeat out loud\nThe advantages it has so long and narrow\nLike a deep piece of some old running river\nCut short off at both ends. It lies five miles\nStraight away through the mountain notch\nFrom the sink window where I wash the plates\nAnd all our storms come up toward the house\nDrawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter.\nIt took my mind off doughnuts and soda biscuit\nTo step outdoors and take the water dazzle\nA sunny morning or take the rising wind\nAbout my face and body and through my wrapper\nWhen a storm threatened from the Dragon’s Den\nAnd a cold chill shivered across the lake.\nI see it’s a fair pretty sheet of water\nOur Willoughby! How did you hear of it?\nI expect though everyone’s heard of it.\nIn a book about ferns? Listen to that!\nYou let things more like feathers regulate\nYour going and coming. And you like it here?\nI can see how you might. But I don’t know!\nIt would be different if more people came\nFor then there would be business. As it is\nThe cottages Len built sometimes we rent them\nSometimes we don’t. We’ve a good piece of shore\nThat ought to be worth something and may yet.\nBut I don’t count on it as much as Len.\nHe looks on the bright side of everything\nIncluding me. He thinks I’ll be all right\nWith doctoring. But it’s not medicine--\nLowe is the only doctor’s dared to say so--\nIt’s rest I want--there I have said it out--\nFrom cooking meals for hungry hired men\nAnd washing dishes after them--from doing\nThings over and over that just won’t stay done.\nBy good rights I ought not to have so much\nPut on me but there seems no other way.\nLen says one steady pull more ought to do it.\nHe says the best way out is always through.\nAnd I agree to that or in so far\nAs that I can see no way out but through--\nLeastways for me--and then they’ll be convinced.\nIt’s not that Len don’t want the best for me.\nIt was his plan our moving over in\nBeside the lake from where that day I showed you\nWe used to live--ten miles from anywhere\nWe didn’t change without some sacrifice\nBut Len went at it to make up the loss.\nHis work’s a man’s of course from sun to sun\nBut he works when he works as hard as I do--\nThough there’s small profit in comparisons.\n(Women and men will make them all the same.)\nBut work ain’t all. Len undertakes too much.\nHe’s into everything in town. This year\nIt’s highways and he’s got too many men\nAround him to look after that make waste.\nThey take advantage of him shamefully\nAnd proud too of themselves for doing so.\nWe have four here to board great good-for-nothings\nSprawling about the kitchen with their talk\nWhile I fry their bacon. Much they care!\nNo more put out in what they do or say\nThan if I wasn’t in the room at all.\nComing and going all the time they are:\nI don’t learn what their names are let alone\nTheir characters or whether they are safe\nTo have inside the house with doors unlocked.\nI’m not afraid of them though if they’re not\nAfraid of me. There’s two can play at that.\nI have my fancies: it runs in the family.\nMy father’s brother wasn’t right. They kept him\nLocked up for years back there at the old farm.\nI’ve been away once--yes I’ve been away.\nThe State Asylum. I was prejudiced;\nI wouldn’t have sent anyone of mine there;\nYou know the old idea--the only asylum\nWas the poorhouse and those who could afford\nRather than send their folks to such a place\nKept them at home; and it does seem more human.\nBut it’s not so: the place is the asylum.\nThere they have every means proper to do with\nAnd you aren’t darkening other people’s lives--\nWorse than no good to them and they no good\nTo you in your condition; you can’t know\nAffection or the want of it in that state.\nI’ve heard too much of the old-fashioned way.\nMy father’s brother he went mad quite young.\nSome thought he had been bitten by a dog\nBecause his violence took on the form\nOf carrying his pillow in his teeth;\nBut it’s more likely he was crossed in love\nOr so the story goes. It was some girl.\nAnyway all he talked about was love.\nThey soon saw he would do someone a mischief\nIf he wa’n’t kept strict watch of and it ended\nIn father’s building him a sort of cage\nOr room within a room of hickory poles\nLike stanchions in the barn from floor to ceiling--\nA narrow passage all the way around.\nAnything they put in for furniture\nHe’d tear to pieces even a bed to lie on.\nSo they made the place comfortable with straw\nLike a beast’s stall to ease their consciences.\nOf course they had to feed him without dishes.\nThey tried to keep him clothed but he paraded\nWith his clothes on his arm--all of his clothes.\nCruel--it sounds. I s’pose they did the best\nThey knew. And just when he was at the height\nFather and mother married and mother came\nA bride to help take care of such a creature\nAnd accommodate her young life to his.\nThat was what marrying father meant to her.\nShe had to lie and hear love things made dreadful\nBy his shouts in the night. He’d shout and shout\nUntil the strength was shouted out of him\nAnd his voice died down slowly from exhaustion.\nHe’d pull his bars apart like bow and bow-string\nAnd let them go and make them twang until\nHis hands had worn them smooth as any ox-bow.\nAnd then he’d crow as if he thought that child’s play--\nThe only fun he had. I’ve heard them say though\nThey found a way to put a stop to it.\nHe was before my time--I never saw him;\nBut the pen stayed exactly as it was\nThere in the upper chamber in the ell\nA sort of catch-all full of attic clutter.\nI often think of the smooth hickory bars.\nIt got so I would say--you know half fooling--\n“It’s time I took my turn upstairs in jail”--\nJust as you will till it becomes a habit.\nNo wonder I was glad to get away.\nMind you I waited till Len said the word.\nI didn’t want the blame if things went wrong.\nI was glad though no end when we moved out\nAnd I looked to be happy and I was\nAs I said for a while--but I don’t know!\nSomehow the change wore out like a prescription.\nAnd there’s more to it than just window-views\nAnd living by a lake. I’m past such help--\nUnless Len took the notion which he won’t\nAnd I won’t ask him--it’s not sure enough.\nI ’spose I’ve got to go the road I’m going:\nOther folks have to and why shouldn’t I?\nI almost think if I could do like you\nDrop everything and live out on the ground--\nBut it might be come night I shouldn’t like it\nOr a long rain. I should soon get enough\nAnd be glad of a good roof overhead.\nI’ve lain awake thinking of you I’ll warrant\nMore than you have yourself some of these nights.\nThe wonder was the tents weren’t snatched away\nFrom over you as you lay in your beds.\nI haven’t courage for a risk like that.\nBless you of course you’re keeping me from work\nBut the thing of it is I need to _be_ kept.\nThere’s work enough to do--there’s always that;\nBut behind’s behind. The worst that you can do\nIs set me back a little more behind.\nI shan’t catch up in this world anyway.\nI’d rather you’d not go unless you must.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-silken-tent": { - "title": "“The Silken Tent”", - "body": "She is as in a field a silken tent\nAt midday when the sunny summer breeze\nHas dried the dew and all its ropes relent,\nSo that in guys it gently sways at ease,\nAnd its supporting central cedar pole,\nThat is its pinnacle to heavenward\nAnd signifies the sureness of the soul,\nSeems to owe naught to any single cord,\nBut strictly held by none, is loosely bound\nBy countless silken ties of love and thought\nTo everything on earth the compass round,\nAnd only by one’s going slightly taut\nIn the capriciousness of summer air\nIs of the slightest bondage made aware.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-smile": { - "title": "“The Smile”", - "body": "I didn’t like the way he went away.\nThat smile! It never came of being gay.\nStill he smiled--did you see him?--I was sure!\nPerhaps because we gave him only bread\nAnd the wretch knew from that that we were poor.\nPerhaps because he let us give instead\nOf seizing from us as he might have seized.\nPerhaps he mocked at us for being wed\nOr being very young (and he was pleased\nTo have a vision of us old and dead).\nI wonder how far down the road he’s got.\nHe’s watching from the woods as like as not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "snow": { - "title": "“Snow”", - "body": "The three stood listening to a fresh access\nOf wind that caught against the house a moment,\nGulped snow, and then blew free again--the Coles\nDressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,\nMeserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.\n\nMeserve was first to speak. He pointed backward\nOver his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,\n“You can just see it glancing off the roof\nMaking a great scroll upward toward the sky,\nLong enough for recording all our names on.--\nI think I’ll just call up my wife and tell her\nI’m here--so far--and starting on again.\nI’ll call her softly so that if she’s wise\nAnd gone to sleep, she needn’t wake to answer.”\nThree times he barely stirred the bell, then listened.\n“Why, Lett, still up? Lett, I’m at Cole’s. I’m late.\nI called you up to say Good-night from here\nBefore I went to say Good-morning there.--\nI thought I would.--I know, but, Lett--I know--\nI could, but what’s the sense? The rest won’t be\nSo bad.--Give me an hour for it.--Ho, ho,\nThree hours to here! But that was all up hill;\nThe rest is down.--Why no, no, not a wallow:\nThey kept their heads and took their time to it\nLike darlings, both of them. They’re in the barn.--\nMy dear, I’m coming just the same. I didn’t\nCall you to ask you to invite me home.--”\nHe lingered for some word she wouldn’t say,\nSaid it at last himself, “Good-night,” and then,\nGetting no answer, closed the telephone.\nThe three stood in the lamplight round the table\nWith lowered eyes a moment till he said,\n“I’ll just see how the horses are.”\n\n“Yes, do,”\nBoth the Coles said together. Mrs. Cole\nAdded: “You can judge better after seeing.--\nI want you here with me, Fred. Leave him here,\nBrother Meserve. You know to find your way\nOut through the shed.”\n\n“I guess I know my way,\nI guess I know where I can find my name\nCarved in the shed to tell me who I am\nIf it don’t tell me where I am. I used\nTo play--”\n\n“You tend your horses and come back.\nFred Cole, you’re going to let him!”\n\n“Well, aren’t you?\nHow can you help yourself?”\n\n“I called him Brother.\nWhy did I call him that?”\n\n“It’s right enough.\nThat’s all you ever heard him called round here.\nHe seems to have lost off his Christian name.”\n\n“Christian enough I should call that myself.\nHe took no notice, did he? Well, at least\nI didn’t use it out of love of him,\nThe dear knows. I detest the thought of him\nWith his ten children under ten years old.\nI hate his wretched little Racker Sect,\nAll’s ever I heard of it, which isn’t much.\nBut that’s not saying--Look, Fred Cole, it’s twelve,\nIsn’t it, now? He’s been here half an hour.\nHe says he left the village store at nine.\nThree hours to do four miles--a mile an hour\nOr not much better. Why, it doesn’t seem\nAs if a man could move that slow and move.\nTry to think what he did with all that time.\nAnd three miles more to go!”\n“Don’t let him go.\nStick to him, Helen. Make him answer you.\nThat sort of man talks straight on all his life\nFrom the last thing he said himself, stone deaf\nTo anything anyone else may say.\nI should have thought, though, you could make him hear you.”\n\n“What is he doing out a night like this?\nWhy can’t he stay at home?”\n\n“He had to preach.”\n\n“It’s no night to be out.”\n\n“He may be small,\nHe may be good, but one thing’s sure, he’s tough.”\n\n“And strong of stale tobacco.”\n\n“He’ll pull through.”\n“You only say so. Not another house\nOr shelter to put into from this place\nTo theirs. I’m going to call his wife again.”\n\n“Wait and he may. Let’s see what he will do.\nLet’s see if he will think of her again.\nBut then I doubt he’s thinking of himself\nHe doesn’t look on it as anything.”\n\n“He shan’t go--there!”\n\n“It is a night, my dear.”\n\n“One thing: he didn’t drag God into it.”\n\n“He don’t consider it a case for God.”\n\n“You think so, do you? You don’t know the kind.\nHe’s getting up a miracle this minute.\nPrivately--to himself, right now, he’s thinking\nHe’ll make a case of it if he succeeds,\nBut keep still if he fails.”\n\n“Keep still all over.\nHe’ll be dead--dead and buried.”\n\n“Such a trouble!\nNot but I’ve every reason not to care\nWhat happens to him if it only takes\nSome of the sanctimonious conceit\nOut of one of those pious scalawags.”\n\n“Nonsense to that! You want to see him safe.”\n\n“You like the runt.”\n\n“Don’t you a little?”\n\n“Well,\nI don’t like what he’s doing, which is what\nYou like, and like him for.”\n\n“Oh, yes you do.\nYou like your fun as well as anyone;\nOnly you women have to put these airs on\nTo impress men. You’ve got us so ashamed\nOf being men we can’t look at a good fight\nBetween two boys and not feel bound to stop it.\nLet the man freeze an ear or two, I say.--\nHe’s here. I leave him all to you. Go in\nAnd save his life.--All right, come in, Meserve.\nSit down, sit down. How did you find the horses?”\n\n“Fine, fine.”\n\n“And ready for some more? My wife here\nSays it won’t do. You’ve got to give it up.”\n\n“Won’t you to please me? Please! If I say please?\nMr. Meserve, I’ll leave it to your wife.\nWhat did your wife say on the telephone?”\n\nMeserve seemed to heed nothing but the lamp\nOr something not far from it on the table.\nBy straightening out and lifting a forefinger,\nHe pointed with his hand from where it lay\nLike a white crumpled spider on his knee:\n“That leaf there in your open book! It moved\nJust then, I thought. It’s stood erect like that,\nThere on the table, ever since I came,\nTrying to turn itself backward or forward,\nI’ve had my eye on it to make out which;\nIf forward, then it’s with a friend’s impatience--\nYou see I know--to get you on to things\nIt wants to see how you will take, if backward\nIt’s from regret for something you have passed\nAnd failed to see the good of. Never mind,\nThings must expect to come in front of us\nA many times--I don’t say just how many--\nThat varies with the things--before we see them.\nOne of the lies would make it out that nothing\nEver presents itself before us twice.\nWhere would we be at last if that were so?\nOur very life depends on everything’s\nRecurring till we answer from within.\nThe thousandth time may prove the charm.--That leaf!\nIt can’t turn either way. It needs the wind’s help.\nBut the wind didn’t move it if it moved.\nIt moved itself. The wind’s at naught in here.\nIt couldn’t stir so sensitively poised\nA thing as that. It couldn’t reach the lamp\nTo get a puff of black smoke from the flame,\nOr blow a rumple in the collie’s coat.\nYou make a little foursquare block of air,\nQuiet and light and warm, in spite of all\nThe illimitable dark and cold and storm,\nAnd by so doing give these three, lamp, dog,\nAnd book-leaf, that keep near you, their repose;\nThough for all anyone can tell, repose\nMay be the thing you haven’t, yet you give it.\nSo false it is that what we haven’t we can’t give;\nSo false, that what we always say is true.\nI’ll have to turn the leaf if no one else will.\nIt won’t lie down. Then let it stand. Who cares?”\n\n“I shouldn’t want to hurry you, Meserve,\nBut if you’re going--Say you’ll stay, you know?\nBut let me raise this curtain on a scene,\nAnd show you how it’s piling up against you.\nYou see the snow-white through the white of frost?\nAsk Helen how far up the sash it’s climbed\nSince last we read the gage.”\n\n“It looks as if\nSome pallid thing had squashed its features flat\nAnd its eyes shut with overeagerness\nTo see what people found so interesting\nIn one another, and had gone to sleep\nOf its own stupid lack of understanding,\nOr broken its white neck of mushroom stuff\nShort off, and died against the window-pane.”\n\n“Brother Meserve, take care, you’ll scare yourself\nMore than you will us with such nightmare talk.\nIt’s you it matters to, because it’s you\nWho have to go out into it alone.”\n\n“Let him talk, Helen, and perhaps he’ll stay.”\n\n“Before you drop the curtain--I’m reminded:\nYou recollect the boy who came out here\nTo breathe the air one winter--had a room\nDown at the Averys’? Well, one sunny morning\nAfter a downy storm, he passed our place\nAnd found me banking up the house with snow.\nAnd I was burrowing in deep for warmth,\nPiling it well above the window-sills.\nThe snow against the window caught his eye.\n‘Hey, that’s a pretty thought’--those were his words.\n‘So you can think it’s six feet deep outside,\nWhile you sit warm and read up balanced rations.\nYou can’t get too much winter in the winter.’\nThose were his words. And he went home and all\nBut banked the daylight out of Avery’s windows.\nNow you and I would go to no such length.\nAt the same time you can’t deny it makes\nIt not a mite worse, sitting here, we three,\nPlaying our fancy, to have the snowline run\nSo high across the pane outside. There where\nThere is a sort of tunnel in the frost\nMore like a tunnel than a hole--way down\nAt the far end of it you see a stir\nAnd quiver like the frayed edge of the drift\nBlown in the wind. I like that--I like that.\nWell, now I leave you, people.”\n\n“Come, Meserve,\nWe thought you were deciding not to go--\nThe ways you found to say the praise of comfort\nAnd being where you are. You want to stay.”\n\n“I’ll own it’s cold for such a fall of snow.\nThis house is frozen brittle, all except\nThis room you sit in. If you think the wind\nSounds further off, it’s not because it’s dying;\nYou’re further under in the snow--that’s all--\nAnd feel it less. Hear the soft bombs of dust\nIt bursts against us at the chimney mouth,\nAnd at the eaves. I like it from inside\nMore than I shall out in it. But the horses\nAre rested and it’s time to say good-night,\nAnd let you get to bed again. Good-night,\nSorry I had to break in on your sleep.”\n\n“Lucky for you you did. Lucky for you\nYou had us for a half-way station\nTo stop at. If you were the kind of man\nPaid heed to women, you’d take my advice\nAnd for your family’s sake stay where you are.\nBut what good is my saying it over and over?\nYou’ve done more than you had a right to think\nYou could do--now. You know the risk you take\nIn going on.”\n\n“Our snow-storms as a rule\nAren’t looked on as man-killers, and although\nI’d rather be the beast that sleeps the sleep\nUnder it all, his door sealed up and lost,\nThan the man fighting it to keep above it,\nYet think of the small birds at roost and not\nIn nests. Shall I be counted less than they are?\nTheir bulk in water would be frozen rock\nIn no time out to-night. And yet to-morrow\nThey will come budding boughs from tree to tree\nFlirting their wings and saying Chickadee,\nAs if not knowing what you meant by the word storm.”\n\n“But why when no one wants you to go on?\nYour wife--she doesn’t want you to. We don’t,\nAnd you yourself don’t want to. Who else is there?”\n\n“Save us from being cornered by a woman.\nWell, there’s”--She told Fred afterward that in\nThe pause right there, she thought the dreaded word\nWas coming, “God.” But no, he only said\n“Well, there’s--the storm. That says I must go on.\nThat wants me as a war might if it came.\nAsk any man.”\n\nHe threw her that as something\nTo last her till he got outside the door.\nHe had Cole with him to the barn to see him off.\nWhen Cole returned he found his wife still standing\nBeside the table near the open book,\nNot reading it.\n\n“Well, what kind of a man\nDo you call that?” she said.\n\n“He had the gift\nOf words, or is it tongues, I ought to say?”\n\n“Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?”\n\n“Or disregarding people’s civil questions--\nWhat? We’ve found out in one hour more about him\nThan we had seeing him pass by in the road\nA thousand times. If that’s the way he preaches!\nYou didn’t think you’d keep him after all.\nOh, I’m not blaming you. He didn’t leave you\nMuch say in the matter, and I’m just as glad\nWe’re not in for a night of him. No sleep\nIf he had stayed. The least thing set him going.\nIt’s quiet as an empty church without him.”\n\n“But how much better off are we as it is?\nWe’ll have to sit here till we know he’s safe.”\n\n“Yes, I suppose you’ll want to, but I shouldn’t.\nHe knows what he can do, or he wouldn’t try.\nGet into bed I say, and get some rest.\nHe won’t come back, and if he telephones,\nIt won’t be for an hour or two.”\n\n“Well then--\n\nWe can’t be any help by sitting here\nAnd living his fight through with him, I suppose.”\n\nCole had been telephoning in the dark.\nMrs. Cole’s voice came from an inner room:\n“Did she call you or you call her?”\n\n“She me.\nYou’d better dress: you won’t go back to bed.\nWe must have been asleep: it’s three and after.”\n\n“Had she been ringing long? I’ll get my wrapper.\nI want to speak to her.”\n\n“All she said was,\nHe hadn’t come and had he really started.”\n\n“She knew he had, poor thing, two hours ago.”\n\n“He had the shovel. He’ll have made a fight.”\n\n“Why did I ever let him leave this house!”\n\n“Don’t begin that. You did the best you could\nTo keep him--though perhaps you didn’t quite\nConceal a wish to see him show the spunk\nTo disobey you. Much his wife’ll thank you.”\n\n“Fred, after all I said! You shan’t make out\nThat it was any way but what it was.\nDid she let on by any word she said\nShe didn’t thank me?”\n\n“When I told her ‘Gone,’\n‘Well then,’ she said, and ‘Well then’--like a threat.\nAnd then her voice came scraping slow: ‘Oh, you,\nWhy did you let him go’?”\n\n“Asked why we let him?\nYou let me there. I’ll ask her why she let him.\nShe didn’t dare to speak when he was here.\n\nTheir number’s--twenty-one? The thing won’t work.\nSomeone’s receiver’s down. The handle stumbles.\n\nThe stubborn thing, the way it jars your arm!\nIt’s theirs. She’s dropped it from her hand and gone.”\n\n“Try speaking. Say ‘Hello’!”\n\n“Hello. Hello.”\n\n“What do you hear?”\n\n“I hear an empty room--\nYou know--it sounds that way. And yes, I hear--\nI think I hear a clock--and windows rattling.\nNo step though. If she’s there she’s sitting down.”\n\n“Shout, she may hear you.”\n\n“Shouting is no good.”\n\n“Keep speaking then.”\n\n“Hello. Hello. Hello.\nYou don’t suppose--? She wouldn’t go out doors?”\n\n“I’m half afraid that’s just what she might do.”\n\n“And leave the children?”\n\n“Wait and call again.\nYou can’t hear whether she has left the door\nWide open and the wind’s blown out the lamp\nAnd the fire’s died and the room’s dark and cold?”\n\n“One of two things, either she’s gone to bed\nOr gone out doors.”\n\n“In which case both are lost.\nDo you know what she’s like? Have you ever met her?\nIt’s strange she doesn’t want to speak to us.”\n\n“Fred, see if you can hear what I hear. Come.”\n\n“A clock maybe.”\n\n“Don’t you hear something else?”\n\n“Not talking.”\n“No.”\n\n“Why, yes, I hear--what is it?”\n\n“What do you say it is?”\n\n“A baby’s crying!\nFrantic it sounds, though muffled and far off.”\n\n“Its mother wouldn’t let it cry like that,\nNot if she’s there.”\n\n“What do you make of it?”\n\n“There’s only one thing possible to make,\nThat is, assuming--that she has gone out.\nOf course she hasn’t though.” They both sat down\nHelpless. “There’s nothing we can do till morning.”\n\n“Fred, I shan’t let you think of going out.”\n\n“Hold on.” The double bell began to chirp.\nThey started up. Fred took the telephone.\n“Hello, Meserve. You’re there, then!--And your wife?\n\nGood! Why I asked--she didn’t seem to answer.\nHe says she went to let him in the barn.--\nWe’re glad. Oh, say no more about it, man.\nDrop in and see us when you’re passing.”\n\n“Well,\nShe has him then, though what she wants him for\nI don’t see.”\n“Possibly not for herself.\nMaybe she only wants him for the children.”\n\n“The whole to-do seems to have been for nothing.\nWhat spoiled our night was to him just his fun.\nWhat did he come in for?--To talk and visit?\nThought he’d just call to tell us it was snowing.\nIf he thinks he is going to make our house\nA halfway coffee house ’twixt town and nowhere--”\n\n“I thought you’d feel you’d been too much concerned.”\n\n“You think you haven’t been concerned yourself.”\n\n“If you mean he was inconsiderate\nTo rout us out to think for him at midnight\nAnd then take our advice no more than nothing,\nWhy, I agree with you. But let’s forgive him.\nWe’ve had a share in one night of his life.\nWhat’ll you bet he ever calls again?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-soldier": { - "title": "“The Soldier”", - "body": "He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,\nThat lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,\nBut still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.\nIf we who sight along it round the world,\nSee nothing worthy to have been its mark,\nIt is because like men we look too near,\nForgetting that as fitted to the sphere,\nOur missiles always make too short an arc.\nThey fall, they rip the grass, they intersect\nThe curve of earth, and striking, break their own;\nThey make us cringe for metal-point on stone.\nBut this we know, the obstacle that checked\nAnd tripped the body, shot the spirit on\nFurther than target ever showed or shone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-soldier": { - "title": "“A Soldier”", - "body": "He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,\nThat lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,\nBut still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.\nIf we who sight along it round the world,\nSee nothing worthy to have been its mark,\nIt is because like men we look too near,\nForgetting that as fitted to the sphere,\nOur missiles always make too short an arc.\nThey fall, they rip the grass, they intersect\nThe curve of earth, and striking, break their own;\nThey make us cringe for metal-point on stone.\nBut this we know, the obstacle that checked\nAnd tripped the body, shot the spirit on\nFurther than target ever showed or shone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sound-of-the-trees": { - "title": "“The Sound of the Trees”", - "body": "I wonder about the trees.\nWhy do we wish to bear\nForever the noise of these\nMore than another noise\nSo close to our dwelling place?\nWe suffer them by the day\nTill we lose all measure of pace,\nAnd fixity in our joys,\nAnd acquire a listening air.\nThey are that that talks of going\nBut never gets away;\nAnd that talks no less for knowing,\nAs it grows wiser and older,\nThat now it means to stay.\nMy feet tug at the floor\nAnd my head sways to my shoulder\nSometimes when I watch trees sway,\nFrom the window or the door.\nI shall set forth for somewhere,\nI shall make the reckless choice\nSome day when they are in voice\nAnd tossing so as to scare\nThe white clouds over them on.\nI shall have less to say,\nBut I shall be gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "spring-pools": { - "title": "“Spring Pools”", - "body": "These pools that, though in forests, still reflect\nThe total sky almost without defect,\nAnd like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,\nWill like the flowers beside them soon be gone,\nAnd yet not out by any brook or river,\nBut up by roots to bring dark foliage on.\nThe trees that have it in their pent-up buds\nTo darken nature and be summer woods--\nLet them think twice before they use their powers\nTo blot out and drink up and sweep away\nThese flowery waters and these watery flowers\nFrom snow that melted only yesterday.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-star-in-a-stoneboat": { - "title": "“A Star in a Stoneboat”", - "body": "Never tell me that not one star of all\nThat slip from heaven at night and softly fall\nHas been picked up with stones to build a wall.\n\nSome laborer found one faded and stone-cold,\nAnd saving that its weight suggested gold\nAnd tugged it from his first too certain hold,\n\nHe noticed nothing in it to remark.\nHe was not used to handling stars thrown dark\nAnd lifeless from an interrupted arc.\n\nHe did not recognize in that smooth coal\nThe one thing palpable besides the soul\nTo penetrate the air in which we roll.\n\nHe did not see how like a flying thing\nIt brooded ant eggs, and bad one large wing,\nOne not so large for flying in a ring,\n\nAnd a long Bird of Paradise’s tail\n(Though these when not in use to fly and trail\nIt drew back in its body like a snail);\n\nNor know that be might move it from the spot--\nThe harm was done: from having been star-shot\nThe very nature of the soil was hot\n\nAnd burning to yield flowers instead of grain,\nFlowers fanned and not put out by all the rain\nPoured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.\n\nHe moved it roughly with an iron bar,\nHe loaded an old stoneboat with the star\nAnd not, as you might think, a flying car,\n\nSuch as even poets would admit perforce\nMore practical than Pegasus the horse\nIf it could put a star back in its course.\n\nHe dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace\nBut faintly reminiscent of the race\nOf jostling rock in interstellar space.\n\nIt went for building stone, and I, as though\nCommanded in a dream, forever go\nTo right the wrong that this should have been so.\n\nYet ask where else it could have gone as well,\nI do not know--I cannot stop to tell:\nHe might have left it lying where it fell.\n\nFrom following walls I never lift my eye,\nExcept at night to places in the sky\nWhere showers of charted meteors let fly.\n\nSome may know what they seek in school and church,\nAnd why they seek it there; for what I search\nI must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;\n\nSure that though not a star of death and birth,\nSo not to be compared, perhaps, in worth\nTo such resorts of life as Mars and Earth--\n\nThough not, I say, a star of death and sin,\nIt yet has poles, and only needs a spin\nTo show its worldly nature and begin\n\nTo chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm\nAnd run off in strange tangents with my arm,\nAs fish do with the line in first alarm.\n\nSuch as it is, it promises the prize\nOf the one world complete in any size\nThat I am like to compass, fool or wise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-star-splitter": { - "title": "“The Star-Splitter”", - "body": "“You know Orion always comes up sideways.\nThrowing a leg up over our fence of mountains,\nAnd rising on his hands, he looks in on me\nBusy outdoors by lantern-light with something\nI should have done by daylight, and indeed,\nAfter the ground is frozen, I should have done\nBefore it froze, and a gust flings a handful\nOf waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney\nTo make fun of my way of doing things,\nOr else fun of Orion’s having caught me.\nHas a man, I should like to ask, no rights\nThese forces are obliged to pay respect to?”\nSo Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk\nOf heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,\nTill having failed at hugger-mugger farming\nHe burned his house down for the fire insurance\nAnd spent the proceeds on a telescope\nTo satisfy a lifelong curiosity\nAbout our place among the infinities.\n\n“What do you want with one of those blame things?”\nI asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”\n\n“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything\nMore blameless in the sense of being less\nA weapon in our human fight,” he said.\n“I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”\nThere where he moved the rocks to plow the ground\nAnd plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,\nFew farms changed hands; so rather than spend years\nTrying to sell his farm and then not selling,\nHe burned his house down for the fire insurance\nAnd bought the telescope with what it came to.\nHe had been heard to say by several:\n“The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;\nThe strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s\nA telescope. Someone in every town\nSeems to me owes it to the town to keep one.\nIn Littleton it might as well be me.”\nAfter such loose talk it was no surprise\nWhen he did what he did and burned his house down.\n\nMean laughter went about the town that day\nTo let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,\nAnd he could wait--we’d see to him tomorrow.\nBut the first thing next morning we reflected\nIf one by one we counted people out\nFor the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long\nTo get so we had no one left to live with.\nFor to be social is to be forgiving.\nOur thief, the one who does our stealing from us,\nWe don’t cut off from coming to church suppers,\nBut what we miss we go to him and ask for.\nHe promptly gives it back, that is if still\nUneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.\nIt wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad\nAbout his telescope. Beyond the age\nOf being given one for Christmas gift,\nHe had to take the best way he knew how\nTo find himself in one. Well, all we said was\nHe took a strange thing to be roguish over.\nSome sympathy was wasted on the house,\nA good old-timer dating back along;\nBut a house isn’t sentient; the house\nDidn’t feel anything. And if it did,\nWhy not regard it as a sacrifice,\nAnd an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,\nInstead of a new-fashioned one at auction?\n\nOut of a house and so out of a farm\nAt one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn\nTo earn a living on the Concord railroad,\nAs under-ticket-agent at a station\nWhere his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,\nWas setting out, up track and down, not plants\nAs on a farm, but planets, evening stars\nThat varied in their hue from red to green.\n\nHe got a good glass for six hundred dollars.\nHis new job gave him leisure for stargazing.\nOften he bid me come and have a look\nUp the brass barrel, velvet black inside,\nAt a star quaking in the other end.\nI recollect a night of broken clouds\nAnd underfoot snow melted down to ice,\nAnd melting further in the wind to mud.\nBradford and I had out the telescope.\nWe spread our two legs as we spread its three,\nPointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,\nAnd standing at our leisure till the day broke,\nSaid some of the best things we ever said.\nThat telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,\nBecause it didn’t do a thing but split\nA star in two or three, the way you split\nA globule of quicksilver in your hand\nWith one stroke of your finger in the middle.\nIt’s a star-splitter if there ever was one,\nAnd ought to do some good if splitting stars\n’Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.\n\nWe’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?\nDo we know any better where we are,\nAnd how it stands between the night tonight\nAnd a man with a smoky lantern chimney?\nHow different from the way it ever stood?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "stars": { - "title": "“Stars”", - "body": "How countlessly they congregate\nO’er our tumultuous snow,\nWhich flows in shapes as tall as trees\nWhen wintry winds do blow!--\n\nAs if with keeness for our fate,\nOur faltering few steps on\nTo white rest, and a place of rest\nInvisible at dawn,--\n\nAnd yet with neither love nor hate,\nThose starts like somw snow-white\nMinerva’s snow-white marble eyes\nWithout the gift of sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening": { - "title": "“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”", - "body": "Whose woods these are I think I know.\nHis house is in the village, though;\nHe will not see me stopping here\nTo watch his woods fill up with snow.\nMy little horse must think it queer\nTo stop without a farmhouse near\nBetween the woods and frozen lake\nThe darkest evening of the year.\n\nHe gives his harness bells a shake\nTo ask if there is some mistake.\nThe only other sound’s the sweep\nOf easy wind and downy flake.\nThe woods are lovely, dark and deep,\nBut I have promises to keep,\nAnd miles to go before I sleep,\nAnd miles to go before I sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "storm-fear": { - "title": "“Storm-Fear”", - "body": "When the wind works against us in the dark\nAnd pelts with snow\nThe lower chamber window on the east\nAnd whispers with a sort of stifled bark\nThe beast\n“Come out! Come out!”--\nIt costs no inward struggle not to go\nAh do!\nI count our strength\nTwo and a child\nThose of us not asleep subdued to mark\nHow the cold creeps as the fire dies at length--\nHow drifts are piled\nDooryard and road ungraded\nTill even the comforting barn grows far away\nAnd my heart owns a doubt\nWhether ’tis in us to arise with day\nAnd save ourselves unaided.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-telephone": { - "title": "“The Telephone”", - "body": "“When I was just as far as I could walk\nFrom here today,\nThere was an hour\nAll still\nWhen leaning with my head again a flower\nI heard you talk.\nDon’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say--\nYou spoke from that flower on the window sill--\nDo you remember what it was you said?”\n\n“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”\n\n“Having found the flower and driven a bee away,\nI leaned on my head\nAnd holding by the stalk,\nI listened and I thought I caught the word--\nWhat was it? Did you call me by my name?\nOr did you say--\nSomeone said ‘Come’--I heard it as I bowed.”\n\n“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”\n\n“Well, so I came.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ten-mills": { - "title": "“Ten Mills”", - "body": "# _Precaution_\n\nI never dared be radical when young\nFor fear it would make me conservative when old.\n\n\n# _The Span of Life_\n\nThe old dog barks backward without getting up.\nI can remember when he was a pup.\n\n\n# _Pertinax_\n\nLet chaos storm!\nLet cloud shapes swarm!\nI wait for form.\n\n\n# _Assertive_\n\nLet me be the one\nTo do what is done.\n\n\n# _Tendencies Cancel_\n\nWill the blight kill the chestnut?\nThe farmers rather guess not.\nIt keeps smouldering at the roots\nAnd sending up new shoots,\nTill another parasite\nShall come to kill the blight.\n\n\n# _Untried_\n\nOn glossy wires artistically bent\nHe draws himself up to his full extent.\nHis natty wings with self-assurance perk.\nHis stinging quarters menacingly work.\nPoor egotist, he has no way of knowing--\nBut he’s as good as anybody going.\n\n\n# _Money_\n\nNever ask of money spent\nWhere the spender thinks it went.\nNobody was ever meant\nTo remember or invent\nWhat he did with every cent.\n\n\n# _Ring Around_\n\nWe dance round in a ring and suppose.\nBut the secret sits in the middle and knows.\n\n\n# _Not All There_\n\nI turned to speak to God\nAbout the world’s despair;\nBut to make bad matters worse,\nI found God wasn’t there.\nGod turned to speak to me\n(Don’t anybody laugh!)\nGod found I wasn’t there--\nAt least not over half.\n\n\n# _In Dive’s Dive_\n\nIt is late at night and still I am losing,\nBut still I am patient and unaccusing.\n\nAs long as the Declaration guards\nMy right to be equal in number of cards,\n\nIt is nothing to me who runs the Dive.\nLet’s have a look at another five.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-thatch": { - "title": "“The Thatch”", - "body": "Out alone in the winter rain,\nIntent on giving and taking pain.\nBut never was I far out of sight\nOf a certain upper-window light.\nThe light was what it was all about:\nI would not go in till the light went out;\nIt would not go out till I came in.\nWell, we should wee which one would win,\nWe should see which one would be first to yield.\nThe world was black invisible field.\nThe rain by rights was snow for cold.\nThe wind was another layer of mold.\nBut the strangest thing: in the thick old thatch,\nWhere summer birds had been given hatch,\nhad fed in chorus, and lived to fledge,\nSome still were living in hermitage.\nAnd as I passed along the eaves,\nSo low I brushed the straw with my sleeves,\nI flushed birds out of hole after hole,\nInto the darkness. It grieved my soul,\nIt started a grief within a grief,\nTo think their case was beyond relief--\nThey could not go flying about in search\nOf their nest again, nor find a perch.\nThey must brood where they fell in mulch and mire,\nTrusting feathers and inward fire\nTill daylight made it safe for a flyer.\nMy greater grief was by so much reduced\nAs I though of them without nest or roost.\nThat was how that grief started to melt.\nThey tell me the cottage where we dwelt,\nIts wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;\nIts life of hundred of years has ended\nBy letting the rain I knew outdoors\nIn on to the upper chamber floors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "they-were-welcome-to-their-belief": { - "title": "“They Were Welcome to Their Belief”", - "body": "Grief may have thought it was grief.\nCare may have thought it was care.\nThey were welcome to their belief,\nThe overimportant pair.\n\nNo, it took all the snows that clung\nTo the low roof over his bed,\nBeginning when he was young,\nTo induce the one snow on his head.\n\nBut whenever the roof came white\nThe head in the dark below\nWas a shade less the color of night,\nA shade more the color of snow.\n\nGrief may have thought it was grief.\nCare may have thought it was care.\nBut neither one was the thief\nOf his raven color of hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-time-to-talk": { - "title": "“A Time to Talk”", - "body": "When a friend calls to me from the road\nAnd slows his horse to a meaning walk\nI don’t stand still and look around\nOn all the hills I haven’t hoed\nAnd shout from where I am What is it?\nNo not as there is a time to talk.\nI thrust my hoe in the mellow ground\nBlade-end up and five feet tall\nAnd plod: I go up to the stone wall\nFor a friendly visit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-times-table": { - "title": "“The Times Table”", - "body": "More than halfway up the pass\nWas a spring with a broken drinking glass,\nAnd whether the farmer drank or not\nHis mare was sure to observe the spot\nBy cramping the wheel on a water-bar,\nturning her forehead with a star,\nAnd straining her ribs for a monster sigh;\nTo which the farmer would make reply,\n“A sigh for every so many breath,\nAnd for every so many sigh a death.\nThat’s what I always tell my wife\nIs the multiplication table of life.”\nThe saying may be ever so true;\nBut it’s just the kind of a thing that you\nNor I, nor nobody else may say,\nUnless our purpose is doing harm,\nAnd then I know of no better way\nTo close a road, abandon a farm,\nReduce the births of the human race,\nAnd bring back nature in people’s place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-earthward": { - "title": "“To Earthward”", - "body": "Love at the lips was touch\nAs sweet as I could bear;\nAnd once that seemed too much;\nI lived on air\nThat crossed me from sweet things,\nThe scent of--was it musk\nFrom hidden grapevine springs\nDown hill at dusk?\nI had the swirl and ache\nFrom sprays of honeysuckle\nThat when they’re gathered shake\nDew on the knuckle.\nI craved sweet things, but those\nSeemed strong when I was young;\nThe petal of the rose\nIt was that stung.\nNow no joy but lacks salt\nThat is not dashed with pain\nAnd weariness and fault;\nI crave the stain\nOf tears, the aftermark\nOf almost too much love,\nThe sweet of bitter bark\nAnd burning clove.\nWhen stiff and sore and scarred\nI take away my hand\nFrom leaning on it hard\nIn grass and sand,\nThe hurt is not enough:\nI long for weight and strength\nTo feel the earth as rough\nTo all my length.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-thawing-wind": { - "title": "“To the Thawing Wind”", - "body": "Come with rain O loud Southwester!\nBring the singer bring the nester;\nGive the buried flower a dream;\nMake the settled snow-bank steam;\nFind the brown beneath the white;\nBut whate’er you do to-night\nBathe my window make it flow\nMelt it as the ice will go;\nMelt the glass and leave the sticks\nLike a hermit’s crucifix;\nBurst into my narrow stall;\nSwing the picture on the wall;\nRun the rattling pages o’er;\nScatter poems on the floor;\nTurn the poet out of door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-trial-by-existence": { - "title": "“The Trial by Existence”", - "body": "Even the bravest that are slain\nShall not dissemble their surprise\nOn waking to find valor reign,\nEven as on earth, in paradise;\nAnd where they sought without the sword\nWide fields of asphodel fore’er,\nTo find that the utmost reward\nOf daring should be still to dare.\n\nThe light of heaven falls whole and white\nAnd is not shattered into dyes,\nThe light forever is morning light;\nThe hills are verdured pasture-wise;\nThe angle hosts with freshness go,\nAnd seek with laughter what to brave;--\nAnd binding all is the hushed snow\nOf the far-distant breaking wave.\n\nAnd from a cliff-top is proclaimed\nThe gathering of the souls for birth,\nThe trial by existence named,\nThe obscuration upon earth.\nAnd the slant spirits trooping by\nIn streams and cross- and counter-streams\nCan but give ear to that sweet cry\nFor its suggestion of what dreams!\n\nAnd the more loitering are turned\nTo view once more the sacrifice\nOf those who for some good discerned\nWill gladly give up paradise.\nAnd a white shimmering concourse rolls\nToward the throne to witness there\nThe speeding of devoted souls\nWhich God makes his especial care.\n\nAnd none are taken but who will,\nHaving first heard the life read out\nThat opens earthward, good and ill,\nBeyond the shadow of a doubt;\nAnd very beautifully God limns,\nAnd tenderly, life’s little dream,\nBut naught extenuates or dims,\nSetting the thing that is supreme.\n\nNor is there wanting in the press\nSome spirit to stand simply forth,\nHeroic in it nakedness,\nAgainst the uttermost of earth.\nThe tale of earth’s unhonored things\nSounds nobler there than ’neath the sun;\nAnd the mind whirls and the heart sings,\nAnd a shout greets the daring one.\n\nBut always God speaks at the end:\n“One thought in agony of strife\nThe bravest would have by for friend,\nThe memory that he chose the life;\nBut the pure fate to which you go\nAdmits no memory of choice,\nOr the woe were not earthly woe\nTo which you give the assenting voice.”\n\nAnd so the choice must be again,\nBut the last choice is still the same;\nAnd the awe passes wonder then,\nAnd a hush falls for all acclaim.\nAnd God has taken a flower of gold\nAnd broken it, and used therefrom\nThe mystic link to bind and hold\nSpirit to matter till death come.\n\n’Tis of the essence of life here,\nThough we choose greatly, still to lack\nThe lasting memory at all clear,\nThat life has for us on the wrack\nNothing but what we somehow chose;\nThus are we wholly stipped of pride\nIn the pain that has but one close,\nBearing it crushed and mystified.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tuft-of-flowers": { - "title": "“The Tuft of Flowers”", - "body": "I went to turn the grass once after one\nWho mowed it in the dew before the sun.\n\nThe dew was gone that made his blade so keen\nBefore I came to view the levelled scene.\n\nI looked for him behind an isle of trees;\nI listened for his whetstone on the breeze.\n\nBut he had gone his way the grass all mown\nAnd I must be as he had been--alone\n\n“As all must be” I said within my heart\n“Whether they work together or apart.”\n\nBut as I said it swift there passed me by\nOn noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly\n\nSeeking with memories grown dim o’er night\nSome resting flower of yesterday’s delight.\n\nAnd once I marked his flight go round and round\nAs where some flower lay withering on the ground.\n\nAnd then he flew as far as eye could see\nAnd then on tremulous wing came back to me.\n\nI thought of questions that have no reply\nAnd would have turned to toss the grass to dry;\n\nBut he turned first and led my eye to look\nAt a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook\n\nA leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared\nBeside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.\n\nI left my place to know them by their name\nFinding them butterfly weed when I came.\n\nThe mower in the dew had loved them thus\nBy leaving them to flourish not for us\n\nNor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.\nBut from sheer morning gladness at the brim.\n\nThe butterfly and I had lit upon\nNevertheless a message from the dawn.\n\nThat made me hear the wakening birds around\nAnd hear his long scythe whispering to the ground\n\nAnd feel a spirit kindred to my own;\nSo that henceforth I worked no more alone;\n\nBut glad with him I worked as with his aid\nAnd weary sought at noon with him the shade;\n\nAnd dreaming as it were held brotherly speech\nWith one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.\n\n“Men work together” I told him from the heart\n“Whether they work together or apart.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "two-look-at-two": { - "title": "“Two Look at Two”", - "body": "Love and forgetting might have carried them\nA little further up the mountain side\nWith night so near, but not much further up.\nThey must have halted soon in any case\nWith thoughts of a path back, how rough it was\nWith rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;\nWhen they were halted by a tumbled wall\nWith barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,\nSpending what onward impulse they still had\nIn One last look the way they must not go,\nOn up the failing path, where, if a stone\nOr earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;\nNo footstep moved it. “This is all,” they sighed,\n“Good-night to woods.” But not so; there was more.\nA doe from round a spruce stood looking at them\nAcross the wall, as near the wall as they.\nShe saw them in their field, they her in hers.\nThe difficulty of seeing what stood still,\nLike some up-ended boulder split in two,\nWas in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.\nShe seemed to think that two thus they were safe.\nThen, as if they were something that, though strange,\nShe could not trouble her mind with too long,\nShe sighed and passed unscared along the wall.\n“This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?”\nBut no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.\nA buck from round the spruce stood looking at them\nAcross the wall as near the wall as they.\nThis was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,\nNot the same doe come back into her place.\nHe viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,\nAs if to ask, “Why don’t you make some motion?\nOr give some sign of life? Because you can’t.\nI doubt if you’re as living as you look.”\nThus till he had them almost feeling dared\nTo stretch a proffering hand--and a spell-breaking.\nThen he too passed unscared along the wall.\nTwo had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.\n“This must be all.” It was all. Still they stood,\nA great wave from it going over them,\nAs if the earth in one unlooked-for favour\nHad made them certain earth returned their love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "two-tramps-in-mud-time": { - "title": "“Two Tramps in Mud Time”", - "body": "Out of the mud two strangers came\nAnd caught me splitting wood in the yard,\nAnd one of them put me off my aim\nBy hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”\nI knew pretty well why he had dropped behind\nAnd let the other go on a way.\nI knew pretty well what he had in mind:\nHe wanted to take my job for pay.\n\nGood blocks of oak it was I split,\nAs large around as the chopping block;\nAnd every piece I squarely hit\nFell splinterless as a cloven rock.\nThe blows that a life of self-control\nSpares to strike for the common good,\nThat day, giving a loose to my soul,\nI spent on the unimportant wood.\n\nThe sun was warm but the wind was chill.\nYou know how it is with an April day\nWhen the sun is out and the wind is still,\nYou’re one month on in the middle of May.\nBut if you so much as dare to speak,\nA cloud comes over the sunlit arch,\nA wind comes off a frozen peak,\nAnd you’re two months back in the middle of March.\n\nA bluebird comes tenderly up to alight\nAnd turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,\nHis song so pitched as not to excite\nA single flower as yet to bloom.\nIt is snowing a flake; and he half knew\nWinter was only playing possum.\nExcept in color he isn’t blue,\nBut he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.\n\nThe water for which we may have to look\nIn summertime with a witching wand,\nIn every wheelrut’s now a brook,\nIn every print of a hoof a pond.\nBe glad of water, but don’t forget\nThe lurking frost in the earth beneath\nThat will steal forth after the sun is set\nAnd show on the water its crystal teeth.\n\nThe time when most I loved my task\nThe two must make me love it more\nBy coming with what they came to ask.\nYou’d think I never had felt before\nThe weight of an ax-head poised aloft,\nThe grip of earth on outspread feet,\nThe life of muscles rocking soft\nAnd smooth and moist in vernal heat.\n\nOut of the wood two hulking tramps\n(From sleeping God knows where last night,\nBut not long since in the lumber camps).\nThey thought all chopping was theirs of right.\nMen of the woods and lumberjacks,\nThey judged me by their appropriate tool.\nExcept as a fellow handled an ax\nThey had no way of knowing a fool.\n\nNothing on either side was said.\nThey knew they had but to stay their stay\n\nAnd all their logic would fill my head:\nAs that I had no right to play\nWith what was another man’s work for gain.\nMy right might be love but theirs was need.\nAnd where the two exist in twain\nTheirs was the better right--agreed.\n\nBut yield who will to their separation,\nMy object in living is to unite\nMy avocation and my vocation\nAs my two eyes make one in sight.\nOnly where love and need are one,\nAnd the work is play for mortal stakes,\nIs the deed ever really done\nFor Heaven and the future’s sakes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-valleys-singing-day": { - "title": "“The Valley’s Singing Day”", - "body": "The sound of the closing outside door was all.\nYou made no sound in the grass with your footfall,\nAs far as you went from the door, which was not far;\nBut had awakened under the morning star\nThe first song-bird that awakened all the rest.\nHe could have slept but a moment more at best.\nAlready determined dawn began to lay\nIn place across a cloud the slender ray\nFor prying across a cloud the slender ray\nFor prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,\nAnd loosing the pent-up music of over-night.\nBut dawn was not to begin their ’pearly-pearly;\n(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,\nBefore it changes to diamonds in the sun),\nNeither was song that day to be self-begun.\nYou had begun it, and if there needed proof--\nI was asleep still under the dripping roof,\nMy window curtain hung over the sill to wet;\nBut I should awake to confirm your story yet;\nI should be willing to say and help you say\nThat once you had opened the valley’s singing day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-vanishing-red": { - "title": "“The Vanishing Red”", - "body": "He is said to have been the last Red man\nIn Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed--\nIf you like to call such a sound a laugh.\nBut he gave no one else a laugher’s license.\nFor he turned suddenly grave as if to say,\n“Whose business,--if I take it on myself,\nWhose business--but why talk round the barn?--\nWhen it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”\nYou can’t get back and see it as he saw it.\nIt’s too long a story to go into now.\nYou’d have to have been there and lived it.\nThey you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter\nOf who began it between the two races.\n\nSome guttural exclamation of surprise\nThe Red man gave in poking about the mill\nOver the great big thumping shuffling millstone\nDisgusted the Miller physically as coming\nFrom one who had no right to be heard from.\n“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel-pint?”\n\nHe took him down below a cramping rafter,\nAnd showed him, through a manhole in the floor,\nThe water in desperate straits like frantic fish,\nSalmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.\nThe he shut down the trap door with a ring in it\nThat jangled even above the general noise,\nAnd came upstairs alone--and gave that laugh,\nAnd said something to a man with a meal-sack\nThat the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch--then.\nOh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-vantage-point": { - "title": "“The Vantage Point”", - "body": "If tired of trees I seek again mankind,\nWell I know where to hie me--in the dawn,\nTo a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.\nThere amid lolling juniper reclined,\nMyself unseen, I see in white defined\nFar off the homes of men, and farther still,\nThe graves of men on an opposing hill,\nLiving or dead, whichever are to mind.\n\nAnd if by noon I have too much of these,\nI have but to turn on my arm, and lo,\nThe sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow,\nMy breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,\nI smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,\nI look into the crater of the ant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waiting": { - "title": "“Waiting”", - "body": "_(A field at dusk)_\n\nWhat things for dream there are when spectre-like,\nMoving among tall haycocks lightly piled,\nI enter alone upon the stubble field,\nFrom which the laborers’ voices late have died,\nAnd in the antiphony of afterglow\nAnd rising full moon, sit me down\nUpon the full moon’s side of the first haycock\nAnd lose myself amid so many alike.\n\nI dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,\nPreventing shadow until the moon prevail;\nI dream upon the night-hawks peopling heaven,\nEach circling each with vague unearthly cry,\nOr plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;\nAnd on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem\nDimly to have made out my secret place,\nOnly to lose it when he pirouettes,\nAnd seek it endlessly with purblind haste;\nOn the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp\nIn the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,\nThat, silenced by my advent, finds once more,\nAfter an interval, his instrument,\n\nAnd tries once--twice--and thrice if I be there;\nAnd on the worn book of old-golden song\nI brought not here to read, it seems, but hold\nAnd freshen in this air of withering sweetness;\nBut on the memory of one absent most,\nFor whom these lines when they shall greet her eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wild-grapes": { - "title": "“Wild Grapes”", - "body": "The grape may not be gathered from the birch?\nIt’s all you know the grape, or know the birch.\nAs a girl gathered from the birch myself\nEqually with my weight in grapes, one autumn,\nI ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.\nI was born, I suppose, like anyone,\nAnd grew to be a little boyish girl\nMy brother could not always leave at home.\nBut that beginning was wiped out in fear\nThe day I swung suspended with the grapes,\nAnd was come after like Eurydice\nAnd brought down safely from the upper regions;\nAnd the life I live now’s an extra life\nI can waste as I please on whom I please.\nSo if you see me celebrate two birthdays,\nAnd give myself out of two different ages,\nOne of them five years younger than I look-\n\nOne day my brother led me to a glade\nWhere a white birch he knew of stood alone,\nWearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves,\nAnd heavy on her heavy hair behind,\nAgainst her neck, an ornament of grapes.\nGrapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.\nOne bunch of them, and there began to be\nBunches all round me growing in white birches,\nThe way they grew round Leif the Lucky’s German;\nMostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though,\nAs the moon used to seem when I was younger,\nAnd only freely to be had for climbing.\nMy brother did the climbing; and at first\nThrew me down grapes to miss and scatter\nAnd have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack;\nWhich gave him some time to himself to eat,\nBut not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed.\nSo then, to make me wholly self-supporting,\nHe climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth\nAnd put it in my hands to pick my own grapes.\n“Here, take a tree-top, I’ll get down another.\nHold on with all your might when I let go.”\nI said I had the tree. It wasn’t true.\nThe opposite was true. The tree had me.\nThe minute it was left with me alone\nIt caught me up as if I were the fish\nAnd it the fishpole. So I was translated\nTo loud cries from my brother of “Let go!\nDon’t you know anything, you girl? Let go!”\nBut I, with something of the baby grip\nAcquired ancestrally in just such trees\nWhen wilder mothers than our wildest now\nHung babies out on branches by the hands\nTo dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which,\n(You’ll have to ask an evolutionist)-\nI held on uncomplainingly for life.\nMy brother tried to make me laugh to help me.\n“What are you doing up there in those grapes?\nDon’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you.\nI mean, they won’t pick you if you don’t them.”\nMuch danger of my picking anything!\nBy that time I was pretty well reduced\nTo a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.\n“Now you know how it feels,” my brother said,\n“To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them,\nThat when it thinks it has escaped the fox\nBy growing where it shouldn’t-on a birch,\nWhere a fox wouldn’t think to look for it-\nAnd if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it-\nJust then come you and I to gather it.\nOnly you have the advantage of the grapes\nIn one way: you have one more stem to cling by,\nAnd promise more resistance to the picker.”\n\nOne by one I lost off my hat and shoes,\nAnd still I clung. I let my head fall back,\nAnd shut my eyes against the sun, my ears\nAgainst my brother’s nonsense; “Drop,” he said,\n“I’ll catch you in my arms. It isn’t far.”\n(Stated in lengths of him it might not be.)\n“Drop or I’ll shake the tree and shake you down.”\nGrim silence on my part as I sank lower,\nMy small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings.\n“Why, if she isn’t serious about it!\nHold tight awhile till I think what to do.\nI’ll bend the tree down and let you down by it.”\nI don’t know much about the letting down;\nBut once I felt ground with my stocking feet\nAnd the world came revolving back to me,\nI know I looked long at my curled-up fingers,\nBefore I straightened them and brushed the bark off.\nMy brother said: “Don’t you weigh anything?\nTry to weigh something next time, so you won’t\nBe run off with by birch trees into space.”\n\nIt wasn’t my not weighing anything\nSo much as my not knowing anything--\nMy brother had been nearer right before.\nI had not taken the first step in knowledge;\nI had not learned to let go with the hands,\nAs still I have not learned to with the heart,\nAnd have no wish to with the heart-nor need,\nThat I can see. The mind-is not the heart.\nI may yet live, as I know others live,\nTo wish in vain to let go with the mind-\nOf cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me\nThat I need learn to let go with the heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wind-and-window-flower": { - "title": "“Wind and Window Flower”", - "body": "LOVERS, forget your love,\n And list to the love of these,\nShe a window flower,\n And he a winter breeze.\n\nWhen the frosty window veil\n Was melted down at noon,\nAnd the cagèd yellow bird\n Hung over her in tune,\n\nHe marked her through the pane,\n He could not help but mark,\nAnd only passed her by,\n To come again at dark.\n\nHe was a winter wind,\n Concerned with ice and snow,\nDead weeds and unmated birds,\n And little of love could know.\n\nBut he sighed upon the sill,\n He gave the sash a shake,\nAs witness all within\n Who lay that night awake.\n\nPerchance he half prevailed\n To win her for the flight\nFrom the firelit looking-glass\n And warm stove-window light.\n\nBut the flower leaned aside\n And thought of naught to say,\nAnd morning found the breeze\n A hundred miles away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-winter-eden": { - "title": "“A Winter Eden”", - "body": "A winter garden in an alder swamp,\nWhere conies now come out to sun and romp,\nAs near a paradise as it can be\nAnd not melt snow or start a dormant tree.\n\nIt lifts existence on a plane of snow\nOne level higher than the earth below,\nOne level nearer heaven overhead,\nAnd last year’s berries shining scarlet red.\n\nIt lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast\nWhere he can stretch and hold his highest feat\nOn some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,\nWhat well may prove the year’s high girdle mark.\n\nSo near to paradise all pairing ends:\nHere loveless birds now flock as winter friends,\nContent with bud-inspecting. They presume\nTo say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.\n\nA feather-hammer gives a double knock.\nThis Eden day is done at two o’clock.\nAn hour of winter day might seem too short\nTo make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-wood-pile": { - "title": "“The Wood-Pile”", - "body": "Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day\nI paused and said, “I will turn back from here.\nNo, I will go on farther--and we shall see”.\nThe hard snow held me, save where now and then\nOne foot went through. The view was all in lines\nStraight up and down of tail slim trees\nToo much alike to mark or name a place by\nSo as to say for certain I was here\nOr somewhere else: I was just far from home.\nA small bird flew before me. He was careful\nTo put a tree between us when he lighted,\nAnd say no word to tell me who he was\nWho was so foolish as to think what he thought.\nHe thought that I was after him for a feather-\nThe white one in his tail; like one who takes\nEverything said as personal to himself.\nOne flight out sideways would have undeceived him.\nAnd then there was a pile of wood for which\nI forgot him and let his little fear\nCarry him off the way I might have gone,\nWithout so much as wishing him good-night.\nHe went behind it to make his last stand.\nIt was a cord of maple, cut and split\nAnd piled--and measured, four by four by eight.\nAnd not another like it could I see.\nNo runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.\nAnd it was older sure than this year’s cutting,\nOr even last year’s or the year’s before.\nThe wood was gray and the bark warping off it\nAnd the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis\nHad wound strings round and round it like a bundle.\nWhat held it though on one side was a tree\nStill growing, and on one a stake and prop,\nThese latter about to fall. I thought that only\nSomeone who lived in turning to fresh tasks\nCould so forget his handiwork on which\nHe spent himself the labour of his axe,\nAnd leave it there far from a useful fireplace\nTo warm the frozen swamp as best it could\nWith the slow smokeless burning of decay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - } - } - }, - "theophile-gautier": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Théophile Gautier", - "birth": { - "year": 1811 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1872 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Théophile_Gautier", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "sea-gloom": { - "title": "“Sea Gloom”", - "body": "The sea-gulls restless gleam and glance,\nThe mad white coursers cleave the length\nOf ocean as they rear and prance\nAnd toss their manes in stormy strength.\n\nThe day is ending. Raindrops choke\nThe sunset furnaces. The gloom\nBrings the great steamboat spitting smoke,\nAnd beating down its long black plume.\n\nAnd I, more wan than heaven wide,\nFor land of soot and fog am bound,\nFor land of smoke and suicide--\nAnd right good weather have I found!\n\nHow eagerly I now would pierce\nThe gulf that groweth wild and hoar!\nThe vessel rocks. The waves are fierce.\nThe salt wind freshens more and more.\n\nAh! bitter is my soul’s unrest.\nThe very ocean sighing heaves\nIn pity its unhopeful breast,\nLike some good friend that knows and grieves.\n\nLet be--lost love’s despair supreme!\nLet be--illusions fair that rose\nAnd fell from pedestals of dream!\nOne leap! The dark wet ridges close.\n\nAway! ye sufferings gone by,\nThat evermore returning brood,\nAnd press the wounds that sleeping lie,\nTo make them weep afresh their blood.\n\nAway! regret, whose crimson heart\nHath seven swords. Yea, One, maybe,\nDoth know the anguish and the smart--\nMother of Seven Sorrows, She!\n\nEach ghostly grief sinks down the vast,\nAnd struggles with the waves that throb\nTo close about it, and at last\nDrown it forever with a sob.\n\nSoul’s ballast, treasures of life’s hand,\nSink! and we’ll wreck together down.\nPale on the pillow of the sand\nI’ll rest me well at evening brown.\n\nBut, now, a woman, as I gaze,\nSits in the bridge’s darker nook,\nA woman, who doth sweetly raise\nHer eyes to mine in one long look.\n\n’T is Sympathy with outstretched arms,\nWho smileth to me through the gray\nOf dusk with all her thousand charms.\nHail, azure eyes! Green sea, away!\n\nThe sea-gulls restless gleam and glance.\nThe mad white coursers cleave the length\nOf Ocean as they rear and prance\nAnd toss their manes in stormy strength.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "smoke": { - "title": "“Smoke”", - "body": "Beneath yon tree sits humble\nA squalid, hunchbacked house,\nWith roof precipitous,\nAnd mossy walls that crumble.\n\nBolted and barred the shanty.\nBut from its must and mould,\nLike breath of lips in cold,\nComes respiration scanty.\n\nA vapour upward welling,\nA slender, silver streak,\nTo God bears tidings meek\nOf the soul in the little dwelling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "springs-first-smile": { - "title": "“Spring’s First Smile”", - "body": "While up and down the earth men pant and plod,\nMarch, laughing at the showers and days unsteady,\nAnd whispering secret orders to the sod,\nFor Spring makes ready.\n\nAnd slyly when the world is sleeping yet,\nHe smooths out collars for the Easter daisies,\nAnd fashions golden buttercups to set\nIn woodland mazes.\n\nCoif-maker fine, he worketh well his plan.\nOrchard and vineyard for his touch are prouder.\nFrom a white swan he hath a down to fan\nThe trees with powder.\n\nWhile Nature still upon her couch doth lean,\nStealthily hies he to the garden closes,\nAnd laces in their bodices of green\nPale buds of roses.\n\nComposing his solfeggios in the shade,\nHe whistles them to blackbirds as he treadeth,\nAnd violets in the wood, and in the glade\nSnowdrops, he spreadeth.\n\nWhere for the restless stag the fountain wells,\nHis hidden hand glides soft amid the cresses,\nAnd scatters lily-of-the-valley bells,\nIn silver dresses.\n\nHe sinks the sweet, vermilion strawberries\nDeep in the grasses for thy roving fingers,\nAnd garlands leaflets for thy forehead’s ease,\nWhen sunshine lingers.\n\nWhen, labour done, he must away, turns he\nOn April’s threshold from his fair creating,\nAnd calleth unto Spring: “Come, Spring--for see,\nThe woods are waiting!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-supper-of-armor": { - "title": "“The Supper of Armor”", - "body": "Bjorn, a strange coenobite,\nOn the plateau of a bare rock,\nInhabits, out of the world and time,\nThe tower of a fortress demolished.\n\nAt his door the modern spirit\nIn vain lifts up the weighty knocker.\nBjorn bolts his postern shut\nAnd his castle keeps tight-locked.\n\nWhen every eye is toward the dawn\nBjorn, perched upon his dungeon,\nGazes still the horizon upon\nAt the place of the setting sun.\n\nRetrospective soul, he lodges\nIn his fortress in the past,\nThe pendulum of his grandfather clock\nSome centuries ago worked last.\n\nUnderneath his ogives feudal\nHe wanders, waking up the echoes,\nAnd his steps, the flagstones moot all,\nSeem to be followed by even steps.\n\nHe sees no laymen nor any presters,\nNor gentlemen, nor men of town,\nBut the portraits of his ancestors\nTalk with him again and now.\n\nAnd certain nights, to lend him spice,\nFinding dinner alone a bore there,\nBjorn, a funerary caprice,\nAsks to supper all his forebears.\n\nThe phantoms, when tolls the midnight bell,\nArrive in armor pie-a-cap,\nBjorn, who shivers in spite of himself,\nSalutes by lifting high his hanap.\n\nTo seat itself, each panoply\nWith its kneejoint makes an angle,\nWhose articulation yields\nGrating like an old doorbolt.\n\nAnd all of a piece, the suit of armor,\nGauche casket of a body not there,\nMaking a dull and hollow murmur,\nFalls twixt the arms of an easy chair.\n\nLandgraves, rhinegraves, also burgraves,\nCome from heaven or from hell,\nThey are all there, silent and grave,\nStiff convives of hardened steel!\n\nIn the dark, a wild beam plays\nOn a monster, wyvern, two-necked eagle,\nFrom the heraldic bestiary\nUpon their crests by many blows mangled.\n\nFrom the snout of beats deformed\nRaising up their nails arrogant,\nSpring forth varied plumes enormous,\nLambrequins extravagant,\n\nBut the open helmets are void\nAs the timbre on coats of arms;\nOnly two flames that are livid\nGleam within like strange alarms.\n\nEvery bit of scrap iron sits\nIn the hall of the old manor,\nAnd, on the wall, a shadow flits\nGiving each guest a page of honor.\n\nThe liquors in the fire of candles\nAre purplish with a tint that’s suspect,\nEach course within its red sauce spangled\nTakes on a singularmost aspect.\n\nNow and again a corslet sparkles,\nA morion shines for just a moment,\nA piece that’s come unhinged quite tumbles\nDown upon the tablecloth groaning.\n\nOne listens to the beating wings\nOf bats that are invisible,\nAnd along the wainscoting\nFlags of infidel nations tremble.\n\nWith the most fantastical movements\nCurling their phalanges of bronze\nGauntlets pour into the helmets\nGlassfuls of the Rhineland’s wines,\n\nOr with a dagger’s edge, they cut\nOn golden plates a wild boar …\nWhile vague noises pass from out\nThe organs of the corridor.\n\nWith a voice that still is hoarse\nFrom the dampness of the tomb,\nMax hums, playful drunkenness,\nA lied, in thirteen hundred, new.\n\nAlbrecht, having wine that’s fierce,\nQuarrels with his quondam cousins,\nWhom he pounds on, humped and beastly,\nAs he did the Saracens.\n\nOverheated, Fritz unhelms,\nWhere no skull was ever sunk,\nNever thinking his unmasked self\nLooks just like a headless trunk.\n\nQuickly now they roll pell-mell\nBeneath the table, among the crocks,\nHead below, showing the sole\nOf their shoes curvate with hooks.\n\nIt’s a hideous battlefield\nWhere an armet hits a pot,\nWhere the dead by each cut yield\nNo blood but each course in a vomit.\n\n--\n\nAnd Bjorn, his fist upon his thigh,\nContemplates them, drawn and haggard,\nWhileas, through the Swiss stained glass,\nSunup casts its blue regard.\n\nThe troupe, whom a sunbeam crosses,\nGrows pale like a torch at noon,\nAnd the drunkenmost back tosses\nThe stirrup cup before the tomb.\n\nThe cock crows, the specters fly\nAnd with a lofty air replete,\nOn the marble pillow lay\nTheir heads still aching from the feast!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "khalil-gibran": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Khalil Gibran", - "birth": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "lebanese+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇱🇧 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahlil_Gibran", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "lebanese" - ], - "n_poems": 94 - }, - "poems": { - "ahaz-the-portly": { - "title": "“Ahaz the Portly”", - "body": "Well do I remember the last time I saw Jesus the Nazarene. Judas had come to me at the noon hour of that Thursday, and bidden me prepare supper for Jesus and His friends.\nHe gave me two silver pieces and said, “Buy all that you deem needful for the meal.”\nAnd after He was gone my wife said to me, “This is indeed a distinction.” For Jesus had become a prophet and He had wrought many miracles.\nAt twilight He came and His followers, and they sat in the upper chamber around the board, but they were silent and quiet.\nLast year also and the year before they had come and then they had been joyous. They broke the bread and drank the wine and sang our ancient strains; and Jesus would talk to them till midnight.\nAfter that they would leave Him alone in the upper chamber and go to sleep in other rooms; for after midnight it was His desire to be alone.\nAnd He would remain awake; I would hear His steps as I lay upon my bed.\nBut this last time He and His friends were not happy.\nMy wife had prepared fishes from the Lake of Galilee, and pheasants from Houran stuffed with rice and pomegranate seeds, and I had carried them a jug of my cypress wine.\nAnd then I had left them for I felt that they wished to be alone.\nThey stayed until it was full dark, and then they all descended together from the upper chamber, but at the foot of the stairs Jesus tarried awhile. And He looked at me and my wife, and He placed His hand upon the head of my daughter and He said, “Good night to you all. We shall come back again to your upper chamber, but we shall not leave you at this early hour. We shall stay until the sun rises above the horizon.”\n“In a little while we shall return and ask for more bread and more wine. You and your wife have been good hosts to us, and we shall remember you when we come to our mansion and sit at our own board.”\nAnd I said, “Sir, it was an honor to serve you. The other innkeepers envy me because of your visits, and in my pride I smile at them in the market-place. Sometimes I even make a grimace.”\nAnd He said, “All innkeepers should be proud in serving. For he who gives bread and wine is the brother of him who reaps and gathers the sheaves for the threshing-floor, and of him who crushes the grapes at the winepress. And you are all kindly. You give of your bounty even to those who come with naught but hunger and thirst.”\nThen He turned to Judas Iscariot who kept the purse of the company, and He said, “Give me two shekels.”\nAnd Judas gave Him two shekels saying: “These are the last silver pieces in my purse.”\nJesus looked at him and said, “Soon, oversoon, your purse shall be filled with silver.”\nThen He put the two pieces into my hand and said, “With these buy a silken girdle for your daughter, and bid her wear it on the day of the passover, in remembrance of me.”\nAnd looking again into the face of my daughter, He leaned down and kissed her brow. And then He said once more, “Good-night to you all.”\nAnd He walked away.\nI have been told that what He said to us has been recorded upon a parchment by one of His friends, but I repeat it to you even as I heard it from His own lips.\nNever shall I forget the sound of His voice as He said those words, “Good night to you all.”\nIf you would know more of Him, ask my daughter. She is a woman now, but she cherishes the memory of her girlhood. And her words are more ready than mine.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "andrew-on-prostitutes": { - "title": "“Andrew on Prostitutes”", - "body": "The bitterness of death is less bitter than life without Him. The days were hushed and made still when he was silenced. Only the echo in my memory repeats His words. But not His voice.\nOnce I heard Him say: “Go forth in your longing to the fields, and sit by the lilies, and you shall hear them humming in the sun. They weave not cloth for raiment, nor do they raise wood or stone for shelter; yet they sing.”\n“He who works in the night fulfills their needs and the dew of His grace is upon their petals.”\n“And are not you also His care who never wearies nor rests?”\nAnd once I heard Him say, “The birds of the sky are counted and enrolled by Your Father even as the hairs of your head are numbered. Not a bird shall lie at the archer’s feet, neither shall a hair of your head turn gray or fall into the emptiness of age without His will.”\nAnd once again He said, “I have heard you murmur in your hearts: ‘Our God shall be more merciful unto us, children of Abraham, than unto those who knew Him not in the beginning.”\n“But I say unto you that the owner of the vineyard who calls a laborer in the morning to reap, and calls another at sundown, and yet renders wages to the last even as to the first, that man is indeed justified. Does he not pay out of his own purse and with his own will?”\n“So shall my Father open the gate of His mansion at the knocking of the Gentiles even as at your knocking. For His ear heeds the new melody with the same love that it feels for the oft-heard song. And with a special welcome because it is the youngest string of His heart.”\nAnd once again I heard Him say, “Remember this: a thief is a man in need, a liar is a man in fear; the hunter who is hunted by the watchman of your night is also hunted by the watchman of his own darkness.”\n“I would have you pity them all.”\n“Should they seek your house, see that you open your door and bid them sit at your board. If you do not accept them you shall not be free from whatever they have committed.”\nAnd on a day I followed Him to the market-place of Jerusalem as the others followed Him. And He told us the parable of the prodigal son, and the parable of the merchant who sold all his possessions that he might buy a pearl.\nBut as He was speaking the Pharisees brought into the midst of the crowd a woman whom they called a harlot. And they confronted Jesus and said to Him, “She defiled her marriage vow, and she was taken in the act.”\nAnd He gazed at her; and He placed His hand upon her forehead and looked deep into her eyes.\nThen he turned to the men who had brought her to Him, and He looked long at them; and He leaned down and with His finger He began to write upon the earth.\nHe wrote the name of every man, and beside the name He wrote the sin that every man had committed.\nAnd as He wrote they escaped in shame into the streets.\nAnd ere He had finished writing only that woman and ourselves stood before Him.\nAnd again He looked into her eyes, and He said, “You have loved overmuch. They who brought you here loved but little. But they brought you as a snare for my ensnaring.”\n“And now go in peace. None of them is here to judge you. And if it is in your desire to be wise even as you are loving, then seek me; for the Son of Man will not judge you.”\nAnd I wondered then whether He said this to her because He Himself was not without sin.\nBut since that day I have pondered long, and I know now that only the pure of heart forgive the thirst that leads to dead waters.\nAnd only the sure of foot can give a hand to him who stumbles.\nAnd again and yet again I say, the bitterness of death is less bitter than life without Him.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_andrew" - } - } - }, - "annas-the-high-priest": { - "title": "“Annas the High Priest”", - "body": "He was of the rabble, a brigand, a mountebank and a self-trumpeter. He appealed only to the unclean and the disinherited, and for this He had to go the way of all the tainted and the defiled.\nHe made sport of us and of our laws; He mocked at our honor and jeered at our dignity. He even said He would destroy the temple and desecrate the holy places. He was shameless, and for this He had to die a shameful death.\nHe was a man from Galilee of the Gentiles, an alien, from the North Country where Adonis and Ashtarte still claim power against Israel and the God of Israel.\nHe whose tongue halted when He spoke the speech of our prophets was loud and ear-splitting when he spoke the bastard language of the low-born and the vulgar.\nWhat else was there for me but to decree His death?\nAm I not a guardian of the temple? Am I not a keeper of the law? Could I have turned my back on Him, saying in all tranquility: “He is a madman among madmen. Let Him alone to exhaust Himself raving; for the mad and the crazed and those possessed with devils shall be naught in the path of Israel”?\nCould I have been deaf unto Him when he called us liars. hypocrites, wolves, vipers, and the sons of vipers?\nNay I could not be deaf to Him, for He was not a madman. He was self-possessed; and in His big-sounding sanity He denounced and challenged us all.\nFor this I had Him crucified, and His crucifixion was a signal and warning unto the others who are stamped with the same damned seal.\nI know well I have been blamed for this, even by some of the elders in the Sanhedrim. But I was mindful then as I am mindful now, that one man should die for the people rather than the people be led astray by one man.\nJesus was conquered by an enemy from without. I shall see that Judea is not conquered again, by an enemy from within.\nNo man from the cursed North shall reach our Holy of Holies nor lay His shadow across the Ark of the Covenant.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "at-the-fair": { - "title": "“At the Fair”", - "body": "There came to the Fair a girl from the country-side, most comely. There was a lily and a rose in her face. There was a sunset in her hair, and dawn smiled upon her lips.\nNo sooner did the lovely stranger appear in their sight than the young men sought her and surrounded her. One would dance with her, and another would cut a cake in her honor. And they all desired to kiss her cheek. For after all, was it not the Fair?\nBut the girl was shocked and started, and she thought ill of the young men. She rebuked them, and she even struck one or two of them in the face. Then she ran away from them.\nAnd on her way home that evening she was saying in her heart, “I am disgusted. How unmannerly and ill bred are these men. It is beyond all patience.”\nA year passed during which that very comely girl thought much of Fairs and men. Then she came again to the Fair with the lily and the rose in her face, the sunset in her hair and the smile of dawn upon her lips.\nBut now the young men, seeing her, turned from her. And all the day long she was unsought and alone.\nAnd at eventide as she walked the road toward her home she cried in her heart, “I am disgusted. How unmannerly and ill bred are these youths. It is beyond all patience.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "barabbas": { - "title": "“Barabbas”", - "body": "They released me and chose Him. Then He rose and I fell down.\nAnd they held Him a victim and a sacrifice for the passover.\nI was freed from my chains, and walked with the throng behind Him, but I was a living man going to my own grave.\nI should have fled to the desert where shame is burned out by the sun.\nYet I walked with those who had chosen Him to bear my crime.\nWhen they nailed Him on His cross I stood there.\nI saw and I heard but I seemed outside of my body.\nThe thief who was crucified on His right said to Him, “Are you bleeding with me, even you, Jesus of Nazareth?”\nAnd Jesus answered and said, “Were it not for this nail that stays my hand I would reach forth and clasp your hand.”\n“We are crucified together. Would they had raised your cross nearer to mine.”\nThen He looked down and gazed upon His mother and a young man who stood beside her.\nHe said, “Mother, behold your son standing beside you.”\n“Woman, behold a man who shall carry these drops of my blood to the North Country.”\nAnd when he heard the wailing of the women of Galilee He said, “Behold, they weep and I thirst.”\n“I am held too high to reach their tears.”\n“I will not take vinegar and gall to quench this thirst.”\nThen His eyes opened wide to the sky, and He said, “Father, why hast Thou foresaken us?”\nAnd then He said in compassion, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”\nWhen He uttered those words methought I saw all men prostrated before God beseeching forgiveness for the crucifixion of this one man.\nThen again He said with a great voice: “Father, into Thy hand I yield back my spirit.”\nAnd at last He lifted up His head and said, “Now it is finished, but only upon this hill.”\nAnd He closed His eyes.\nThen lightning cracked the dark skies, and there was a great thunder.\n\nI know now that those who slew Him in my stead achieved my endless torment.\nHis crucifixion endured but for an hour.\nBut I shall be crucified unto the end of my years.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "bartholomew-in-ephesus": { - "title": "“Bartholomew in Ephesus”", - "body": "The enemies of Jesus say that He addressed His appeal to slaves and outcasts, and would have incited them against their lords. They say that because He was of the lowly He invoked His own kind, yet that He sought to conceal His own origin.\nBut let us consider the followers of Jesus, and His leadership.\nIn the beginning He chose for companions few men from the North Country, and they were freemen. They were strong of body and bold of spirit, and in these past twoscore years they have had the courage to face death with willingness and defiance.\nThink you that these men were slaves or outcasts?\nAnd think you that the proud princes of Lebanon and Armenia have forgotten their station in accepting Jesus as a prophet of God?\nOr think you the high-born men and women of Antioch and Byzantium and Athens and Rome could be held by the voice of a leader of slaves?\nNay, the Nazarene was not with the servant against his master; neither was He with the master against his servant. He was with no man against another man.\nHe was a man above men, and the streams that ran in His sinews sang together with passion and with might.\nIf nobility lies in being protective, He was the noblest of all men. If freedom is in thought and word and action, He was the freest of all men. If high birth is in pride that yields only to love and in aloofness that is ever gentle and gracious, then He was of all men the highest born.\nForget not that only the strong and the swift shall win the race and the laurels, and that Jesus was crowned by those who loved Him, and also by His enemies though they knew it not.\nEven now He is crowned every day by the priestesses of Artemis in the secret places of her temple.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_bartholomew" - } - } - }, - "birbarah-of-yammouni": { - "title": "“Birbarah of Yammouni”", - "body": "Jesus was patient with the dullard and the stupid, even as the winter awaits the spring.\nHe was patient like a mountain in the wind.\nHe answered with kindliness the harsh questionings of His foes.\nHe could even be silent to cavil and dispute, for He was strong and the strong can be forbearing.\nBut Jesus was also impatient.\nHe spared not the hypocrite.\nHe yielded not to men of cunning nor to the jugglers of words.\nAnd He would not be governed.\nHe was impatient with those who believed not in light because they themselves dwelt in shadow; and with those who sought after signs in the sky rather than in their own hearts.\nHe was impatient with those who weighed and measured the day and the night before they would trust their dreams to dawn or eventide.\nJesus was patient.\nYet He was the most impatient of men.\nHe would have you weave the cloth though you spend years between the loom and the linen.\nBut He would have none tear an inch off the woven fabric.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "body-and-soul": { - "title": "“Body and Soul”", - "body": "A man and a woman sat by a window that opened upon Spring. They sat close one unto the other. And the woman said, “I love you. You are handsome, and you are rich, and you are always well-attired.”\nAnd the man said, “I love you. You are a beautiful thought, a thing too apart to hold in the hand, and a song in my dreaming.”\nBut the woman turned from him in anger, and she said, “Sir, please leave me now. I am not a thought, and I am not a thing that passes in your dreams. I am a woman. I would have you desire me, a wife, and the mother of unborn children.”\nAnd they parted. And the man was saying in his heart, “Behold another dream is even now turned into mist.”\nAnd the woman was saying, “Well, what of a man who turns me into a mist and a dream?”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "cleopas-of-bethroune": { - "title": "“Cleopas of Bethroune”", - "body": "When Jesus spoke the whole world was hushed to listen. His words were not for our ears but rather for the elements of which God made this earth.\nHe spoke to the sea, our vast mother, that gave us birth. He spoke to the mountain, our elder brother whose summit is a promise.\nAnd He spoke to the angels beyond the sea and the mountain to whom we entrusted our dreams ere the clay in us was made hard in the sun.\nAnd still His speech slumbers within our breast like a love-song half forgotten, and sometimes it burns itself through to our memory.\nHis speech was simple and joyous, and the sound of His voice was like cool water in a land of drought.\nOnce He raised His hand against the sky, and His fingers were like the branches of a sycamore tree; and He said with a great voice:\n“The prophets of old have spoken to you, and your ears are filled with their speech. But I say unto you, empty your ears of what you have heard.”\nAnd these words of Jesus, “But I say unto you,” were not uttered by a man of our race nor of our world; but rather by a host of seraphim marching across the sky of Judea.\nAgain and yet again He would quote the law and the prophets, and then he would say, “But I say unto you.”\nOh, what burning words, what waves of seas unknown to the shores of our mind, “But I say unto you.”\nWhat stars seeking the darkness of the soul, and what sleepless souls awaiting the dawn.\nTo tell of the speech of Jesus one must needs have His speech or the echo thereof. I have neither the speech nor the echo.\nI beg you to forgive me for beginning a story that I cannot end. But the end is not yet upon my lips. It is still a love song in the wind.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "a-cobbler-in-jerusalem": { - "title": "“A Cobbler in Jerusalem”", - "body": "I loved him not, yet I did not hate Him. I listened to Him not to hear His words but rather the sound of His voice; for His voice pleased me.\nAll that He said was vague to my mind, but the music thereof was clear to my ear.\nIndeed were it not for what others have said to me of His teaching, I should not have known even so much as whether He was with Judea or against it.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-curse": { - "title": "“The Curse”", - "body": "And old man of the sea once said to me, “It was thirty years ago that a sailor ran away with my daughter. And I cursed them both in my heart, for of all the world I loved but my daughter.\nNot long after that, the sailor youth went down with his ship to the bottom of the sea, and with him my lovely daughter was lost unto me.\nNow therefore behold in me the murderer of a youth and a maid. It was my curse that destroyed them. And now on my way to the grave I seek God’s forgiveness.”\nThis the old man said. But there was a tone of bragging in his words, and it seems that he is still proud of the power of his curse.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-eagle-and-the-skylark": { - "title": "“The Eagle and the Skylark”", - "body": "A skylark and an eagle met on a rock upon a high hill. The skylark said, “Good morrow to you, Sir.” And the eagle looked down upon him and said faintly, “Good morrow.”\nAnd the skylark said, “I hope all things are well with you, Sir.”\n“Aye,” said the eagle, “all is well with us. But do you not know that we are the king of birds, and that you shall not address us before we ourselves have spoken?”\nSaid the skylark, “Methinks we are of the same family.”\nThe eagle looked upon him with disdain and he said, “Who ever has said that you and I are of the same family?”\nThen said the shylark, “But I would remind you of this, I can fly even as high as you, and I can sing and give delight to the other creatures of this earth. And you give neither pleasure nor delight.”\nThen the eagle was angered, and he said, “Pleasure and delight! You little presumptuous creature! With one thrust of my beak I could destroy you. You are but the size of my foot.”\nThen the skylark flew up and alighted upon the back of the eagle and began to pick at his feathers. The eagle was annoyed, and he flew swift and high that he might rid himself of the little bird. But he failed to do so. At last he dropped back to that very rock upon the high hill, more fretted than ever, with the little creature still upon his back, and cursing the fate of the hour.\nNow at that moment a small turtle came by and laughed at the sight, and laughed so hard the she almost turned upon her back.\nAnd the eagle looked down upon the turtle and he said, “You slow creeping thing, ever one with the earth, what are you laughing at?”\nAnd the turtle said, “Why I see that you are turned horse, and that you have a small bird riding you, but the small bird is the better bird.”\nAnd the eagle said to her, “Go you about your business. This is a family affair between my brother, the lark, and myself.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "ephraim-of-jericho": { - "title": "“Ephraim of Jericho”", - "body": "When he came again to Jericho I sought Him out and said to Him, “Master, on the morrow my son will take a wife. I beg you come to the wedding-feast and do us honour, even as you honoured the wedding at Cana of Galilee.”\nAnd He answered, “It is true that I was once a guest at a wedding-feast, but I shall not be a guest again. I am myself now the Bridegroom.”\nAnd I said, “I entreat you, Master, come to the wedding-feast of my son.”\nAnd He smiled as though He would rebuke me, and said, “Why do you entreat me? Have you not wine enough?”\nAnd I said, “My jugs are full, Master; yet I beseech you, come to my son’s wedding-feast.”\nThen He said, “Who knows? I may come, I may surely come, if your heart is an altar in your temple.”\nUpon the morrow my son was married, but Jesus came not to the wedding-feast. And though we had many guests, I felt that no one had come.\nIn very truth, I myself who welcomed the guests, was not there.\nPerhaps my heart had not been an altar when I invited Him. Perhaps I desired another miracle.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-field-of-zaad": { - "title": "“The Field of Zaad”", - "body": "Upon the road of Zaad a traveler met a man who lived in a nearby village, and the traveler, pointing with his hand to a vast field, asked the man saying, “Was not this the battle-ground where King Ahlam overcame his enemies?”\nAnd the man answered and said, “This has never been a battle-ground. There once stood on this field the great city of Zaad, and it was burnt down to ashes. But now it is a good field, is it not?”\nAnd the traveler and the man parted.\nNot a half mile farther the traveler met another man, and pointing to the field again, he said, “So that is where the great city of Zaad once stood?”\nAnd the man said, “There has never been a city in this place. But once there was a monastery here, and it was destroyed by the people of the South Country.”\nShortly after, on that very road of Zaad, the traveler met a third man, and pointing once more to the vast field he said, “Is it not true that this is the place where once there stood a great monastery?”\nBut the man answered, “There has never been a monastery in this neighborhood, but our fathers and our forefathers have told us that once there fell a great meteor on this field.”\nThen the traveler walked on, wondering in his heart. And he met a very old man, and saluting his he said, “Sir, upon this road I have met three men who live in the neighborhood and I have asked each of them about this field, and each one denied what the other had said, and each one told me a new tale that the other had not told.”\nThen the old man raised his head, and answered, “My friend, each and every one of these men told you what was indeed so; but few of us are able to add fact to different fact and make a truth thereof.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-frogs": { - "title": "“The Frogs”", - "body": "Upon a summer day a frog said to his mate, “I fear those people living in that house on the shore are disturbed by our night-songs.”\nAnd his mate answered and said, “Well, do they not annoy our silence during the day with their talking?”\nThe frog said, “Let us not forget that we may sing too much in the night.”\nAnd his mate answered, “Let us not forget that they chatter and shout overmuch during the day.”\nSaid the frog, “How about the bullfrog who that they clatter and shout overmuch during the day.”\nSaid the frog, “How about the bullfrog who disturbs the whole neighborhood with his God-forbidden booming?”\nAnd his mate replied, “Aye, and what say you of the politician and the priest and the scientist who come to these shores and fill the air with noisy and rhymeless sound?”\nThen the frog said, “Well, let us be better than these human beings. Let us be quiet at night, and keep our songs in our hearts, even though the moon calls for our rhythm and the stars for our rhyme. At least, let us be silent for a night or two, or even for three nights.”\nAnd his mate said, “Very well, I agree. We shall see what your bountiful heart will bring forth.”\nThat night the frogs were silent; and they were silent the following night also, and again upon the third night.\nAnd strange to relate, the talkative woman who lived in the house beside the lake came down to breakfast on that third day and shouted to her husband, “I have not slept these three nights. I was secure with sleep when the noise of the frogs was in my ear. But something must have happened. They have not sung now for three nights; and I am almost maddened with sleeplessness.”\nThe frog heard this and turned to his mate and said, winking his eye, “And we were almost maddened with our silence, were we not?”\nAnd his mate answered, “Yes, the silence of the night was heavy upon us. And I can see now that there is no need for us to cease our singing for the comfort of those who must needs fill their emptiness with noise.”\nAnd that night the moon called not in vain for their rhythm nor the stars for their rhyme.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "georgus-of-beirut": { - "title": "“Georgus of Beirut”", - "body": "He and his friends were in the grove of pines beyond my hedge, and He was talking to them.\nI stood near the hedge and listened. And I knew who He was, for His fame had reached these shores ere He Himself visited them.\nWhen He ceased speaking I approached Him, and I said, “Sir, come with these men and honour me and my roof.”\nAnd He smiled upon me and said, “Not this day, my friend. Not this day.”\nAnd there was a blessing in His words, and His voice enfolded me like a garment on a cold night.\nThen He turned to His friends and said, “Behold a man who deems us not strangers, and though He has not seen us ere this day, he bids us to His threshold.”\n“Verily in my kingdom there are no strangers. Our life is but the life of all other men, given us that we may know all men, and in that knowledge love them.”\n“The deeds of all men are but our deeds, both the hidden and the revealed.”\n“I charge you not to be one self but rather many selves, the householder and the homeless, the ploughman and the sparrow that picks the grain ere it slumber in the earth, the giver who gives in gratitude, and the receiver who receives in pride and recognition.”\n“The beauty of the day is not only in what you see, but in what other men see.”\n“For this I have chosen you from among the many who have chosen me.”\nThen He turned to me again and smiled and said, “I say these things to you also, and you also shall remember them.”\nThen I entreated Him and said, “Master, will you not visit in my house?”\nAnd He answered, “I know your heart, and I have visited your larger house.”\nAnd as He walked away with His disciples He said, “Good-night, and may your house be large enough to shelter all the wanderers of the land.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-golden-belt": { - "title": "“The Golden Belt”", - "body": "Once upon a day two men who met on the road were walking together toward Salamis, the City of Columns. In the mid-afternoon they came to a wide river and there was no bridge to cross it. They must needs swim, or seek another road unknown to them.\nAnd they said to one another, “Let us swim. After all, the river is not so wide.” And they threw themselves into the water and swam.\nAnd one of the men who had always known rivers and the ways of rivers, in mid-stream suddenly began to lose himself; and to be carried away by the rushing waters; while the other who had never swum before crossed the river straight-way and stood upon the farther bank. Then seeing his companion stil wrestling with the stream, he threw himself again into the waters and brought him also safely to the shore.\nAnd the man who had been swept away by the current said, “But you told me you could not swim. How then did you cross that river with such assurance?”\nAnd the second man answered, “My friend, do you see this belt which girdles me? It is full of golden coins that I have earned for my wife and my children, a full year’s work. It is the weight of this belt of gold tha carried me across the river, to my wife and my children. And my wife and my children were upon my shoulders as I swam.”\nAnd the two men walked on together toward Salamis.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-greater-sea": { - "title": "“The Greater Sea”", - "body": "My soul and I went down to the great sea to bathe. And when we reached the shore, we went about looking for a hidden and lonely place.\nBut as we walked, we saw a man sitting on a grey rock taking pinches of salt from a bag and throwing them into the sea.\n“This is the pessimist,” said my soul, “Let us leave this place. We cannot bathe here.”\nWe walked on until we reached an inlet. There we saw, standing on a white rock, a man holding a bejewelled box, from which he took sugar and threw it into the sea.\n“And this is the optimist,” said my soul, “And he too must not see our naked bodies.”\nFurther on we walked. And on a beach we saw a man picking up dead fish and tenderly putting them back into the water.\n“And we cannot bathe before him,” said my soul. “He is the humane philanthropist.”\nAnd we passed on.\nThen we came where we saw a man tracing his shadow on the sand. Great waves came and erased it. But he went on tracing it again and again.\n“He is the mystic,” said my soul, “Let us leave him.”\nAnd we walked on, till in a quiet cove we saw a man scooping up the foam and putting it into an alabaster bowl.\n“He is the idealist,” said my soul, “Surely he must not see our nudity.”\nAnd on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, “This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea.” And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.\nAnd my soul said, “Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment.”\nSo we passed on. And in a weedy place among the rocks was a man with his head buried in the sand. And I said to my soul, “We can bathe here, for he cannot see us.”\n“Nay,” said my soul, “For he is the most deadly of them all. He is the puritan.”\nThen a great sadness came over the face of my soul, and into her voice.\n“Let us go hence,” she said, “For there is no lonely, hidden place where we can bathe. I would not have this wind lift my golden hair, or bare my white bosom in this air, or let the light disclose my scared nakedness.”\nThen we left that sea to seek the Greater Sea.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "hannah-of-bethsaida": { - "title": "“Hannah of Bethsaida”", - "body": "The sister of my father had left us in her youth to dwell in a hut beside her father’s ancient vineyard.\nShe lived alone, and the people of the countryside sought her in their maladies, and she healed them with green herbs, and with roots and flowers dried in the sun.\nAnd they deemed her a seeress; but there were those also who called her witch and sorceress.\nOne day my father said to me, “Take these loaves of wheaten bread to my sister, and take this jug of wine and this basket of raisins.”\nAnd it was all put upon the back of a colt, and I followed the road until I reached the vineyard, and the hut of my father’s sister. And she was gladdened.\nNow as we sat together in the cool of the day, a man came by upon the road, and He greeted the sister of my father, saying, “Good-even to you, and the blessing of the night be upon you.”\nThen she rose up; and she stood as in awe before Him and said, “Good-even to you, master of all good spirits, and conqueror of all evil spirits.”\nThe man looked at her with tender eyes, and then He passed on by.\nBut I laughed in my heart. Methought my father’s sister was mad. But now I know that she was not mad. It was I who did not understand.\nShe knew of my laughter, though it was hidden.\nAnd she spoke, but not in anger. She said, “Listen, my daughter, and hearken and keep my word in remembrance: the man who but now passed by, like the shadow of a bird flying between the sun and the earth, shall prevail against the Caesars and the empire of the Caesars. He shall wrestle with the crowned bull of Chaldea, and the man-headed lion of Egypt, and He shall overcome them; and He shall rule the world.”\n“But this land that now He walks shall come to naught; and Jerusalem, which sits proudly upon the hill, shall drift away in smoke upon the wind of desolation.”\nWhen she spoke thus, my laughter turned to stillness and I was quiet. Then I said, “Who is this man, and of what country and tribe does He come? And how shall He conquer the great kings and the empires of the great kings?”\nAnd she answered, “He is one born here in this land, but we have conceived Him in our longing from the beginning of years. He is of all tribes and yet of none. He shall conquer by the word of His mouth and by the flame of His spirit.”\nThen suddenly she rose and stood up like a pinnacle of rock; and she said, “May the angel of the Lord forgive me for pronouncing this word also: He shall be slain, and His youth shall be shrouded, and He shall be laid in silence beside the tongue-less heart of the earth. And the maidens of Judea shall weep for Him.”\nThen she lifted her hand skyward and spoke again, and she said, “But He shall be slain only in the body.”\n“In the spirit He shall rise and go forth leading His host from this land where the sun is born, to the land where the sun is slain at eventide.”\n“And His name shall be first among men.”\nShe was an aged seeress when she said these things, and I was but a girl, a field unploughed, a stone not yet in a wall.\nBut all that she beheld in the mirror of her mind has come to pass even in my day.\nJesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and led men and women unto the people of the sunset. The city that yielded Him to judgment was given unto destruction; and in the Judgment Hall where He was tried and sentenced, the owl hoots a dirge while the night weeps the dew of her heart upon the fallen marble.\nAnd I am an old woman, and the years bend me down. My people are no more and my race is vanished.\nI saw Him but once again after that day, and once again heard His voice. It was upon a hill-top when He was talking to His friends and followers.\nAnd now I am old and alone, yet still He visits my dreams.\nHe comes like a white angel with pinions; and with His grace He hushes my dread of darkness. And He uplifts me to dreams yet more distant.\nI am still a field unploughed, a ripe fruit that would not fall. The most that I possess is the warmth of the sun, and the memory of that man.\nI know that among my people these shall not rise again king nor prophet nor priest, even as the sister of my father foretold.\nWe shall pass with the flowing of the rivers, and we shall be nameless.\nBut those who crossed Him in mid-stream shall be remembered for crossing Him in mid-stream.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-hermit-prophet": { - "title": "“The Hermit Prophet”", - "body": "Once there lived a hermit prophet, and thrice a moon he would go down to the great city and in the market places he would preach giving and sharing to the people. And he was eloquent, and his fame was upon the land.\nUpon an evening three men came to his hermitage and he greeted them. And they said, “You have been preaching giving and sharing, and you have sought to teach those who have much to give unto those who have little; and we doubt not that your fame has brought you riches. Now come and give us of your riches, for we are in need.”\nAnd the hermit answered and said, “My friends, I have naught but this bed and this mat and this jug of water. Take them if it is in your desire. I have neither gold nor silver.”\nThen they looked down with distain upon him, and turned their faces from him, and the last man stood at the door for a moment, and said, “Oh, you cheat! You fraud! You teach and preach that which you yourself do not perform.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-hermit-and-the-beasts": { - "title": "“The Hermit and the Beasts”", - "body": "Once there lived among the green hills a hermit. He was pure of spirit and white of heart. And all the animals of the land and all the fowls of the air came to him in pairs and he spoke unto them. They heard him gladly, and they would gather near unto him, and would not go until nightfall, when he would send them away, entrusting them to the wind and the woods with his blessing.\nUpon an evening as he was speaking of love, a leopard raised her head and said to the hermit, “You speak to us of loving. Tell us, Sir, where is your mate?”\nAnd the hermit said, “I have no mate.”\nThen a great cry of surprise rose from the company of beasts and fowls, and they began to say among themselves, “How can he tell us of loving and mating when he himself knows naught thereof?” And quietly and in distain they left him alone.\nThat night the hermit lay upon his mat with his face earthward, and he wept bitterly and beat his hands upon his breast.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "john-at-patmos": { - "title": "“John at Patmos”", - "body": "Once more I would speak of Him.\nGod gave me the voice and the burning lips though not the speech.\nAnd unworthy am I for the fuller word, yet I would summon my heart to my lips.\nJesus loved me and I knew not why.\nAnd I loved Him because He quickened my spirit to heights beyond my stature, and to depths beyond my sounding.\nLove is a sacred mystery.\nTo those who love, it remains forever wordless;\nBut to those who do not love, it may be but a heartless jest.\nJesus called me and my brother when we were laboring in the field.\nI was young then and only the voice of dawn had visited my ears.\nBut His voice and the trumpet of His voice was the end of my labor and the beginning of my passion.\nAnd there were naught for me then but to walk in the sun and worship the loveliness of the hour.\nCould you conceive a majesty too kind to be majestic? And a beauty too radiant to seem beautiful?\nCould you hear in your dreams a voice shy of its own rapture?\nHe called me and I followed Him.\nThat evening I returned to my father’s house to get my other cloak.\nAnd I said to my mother, “Jesus of Nazareth would have me in His company.”\nAnd she said, “Go His way my son, even like your brother.”\nAnd I accompanied Him.\nHis fragrance called me and commanded me, but only to release me.\nLove is a gracious host to his guests though to the unbidden his house is a mirage and a mockery.\n\nNow you would have me explain the miracles of Jesus.\nWe are all the miraculous gesture of the moment; our Lord and Master was the centre of that moment.\nYet it was not in His desire that His gestures be known.\nI have heard Him say to the lame, “Rise and go home, but say not to the priest that I have made you whole.”\nAnd Jesus’ mind was not with the cripple; it was rather with the strong and the upright.\nHis mind sought and held other minds and His complete spirit visited other spirits.\nAnd is so doing His spirit changed these minds and these spirits.\nIt seemed miraculous, but with our Lord and Master it was simply like breathing the air of every day.\n\nAnd now let me speak of other things.\nOn a day when He and I were alone walking in a field, we were both hungry, and we came to a wild apple tree.\nThere were only two apples hanging on the bough.\nAnd He held the trunk of the tree with His arm and shook it, and the two apples fell down.\nHe picked them both up and gave one to me. The other He held in His hand.\nIn my hunger I ate the apple, and I ate it fast.\nThen I looked at Him and I saw that He still held the other apple in His hand.\nAnd He gave it to me saying, “Eat this also.”\nAnd I took the apple, and in my shameless hunger I ate it.\nAnd as we walked on I looked upon His face.\nBut how shall I tell you of what I saw?\nA night where candles burn in space,\nA dream beyond our reaching;\nA noon where all shepherds are at peace and happy that their flock are grazing;\nAn eventide, and a stillness, and a homecoming;\nThen a sleep and a dream.\nAll these things I saw in His face.\nHe had given me the two apples. And I knew He was hungry even as I was hungry.\nBut I now know that in giving them to me He had been satisfied. He Himself ate of other fruit from another tree.\nI would tell you more of Him, but how shall I?\nWhen love becomes vast love becomes wordless.\nAnd when memory is overladen it seeks the silent deep.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "john-the-baptist": { - "title": "“John the Baptist”", - "body": "I am not silent in this foul hole while the voice of Jesus is heard on the battlefield. I am not to be held nor confined while He is free.\nThey tell me the vipers are coiling round His loins, but I answer: The vipers shall awaken His strength, and He shall crush them with His heel.\nI am only the thunder of His lightning. Though I spoke first, His was the word and the purpose.\nThey caught me unwarned. Perhaps they will lay hands on Him also. Yet not before He has pronounced His word in full. And He shall overcome them.\nHis chariot shall pass over them, and the hoofs of His horses shall trample them, and He shall be triumphant.\nThey shall go forth with lance and sword, but He shall meet them with the power of the Spirit.\nHis blood shall run upon the earth, but they themselves shall know the wounds and the pain thereof, and they shall be baptized in their tears until they are cleansed of their sins.\nTheir legions shall march towards His cities with rams of iron, but on their way they shall be drowned in the River Jordan.\nAnd His walls and His towers shall rise higher, and the shields of His warriors shall shine brighter in the sun.\nThey say I am in league with Him, and that our design is to urge the people to rise and revolt against the kingdom of Judea.\nI answer, and would that I had flames for words: if they deem this pit of iniquity a kingdom, let it fall into destruction and be no more. Let it go the way Sodom and Gomorrah, and let this race be forgotten by God, and this land be turned to ashes.\nAye, behind these prison walls I am indeed an ally to Jesus of Nazareth, and He shall lead my armies, horse and foot. And I myself, though a captain, am not worthy to loose the strings of His sandals.\nGo to Him and repeat my words, and then in my name beg Him for comfort and blessing.\nI shall not be here long. At night ’twixt waking and waking I feel slow feet with measured steps treading above this body. And when I hearken, I hear the rain falling upon my grave.\nGo to Jesus, and say that John of Kedron whose soul is filled with shadows and then emptied again, prays for Him, while the grave-digger stands close by, and the swordman outstretches his hand for his wages.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_baptist" - } - } - }, - "john-the-beloved-disciple": { - "title": "“John the Beloved Disciple”", - "body": "You would have me speak of Jesus, but how can I lure the passion-song of the world into a hollowed reed?\nIn every aspect of the day Jesus was aware of the Father. He beheld Him in the clouds and in the shadows of the clouds that pass over the earth. He saw the Father’s face reflected in the quiet pools, and the faint print of His feet upon the sand; and He often closed His eyes to gaze into the Holy Eyes.\nThe night spoke to Him with the voice of the Father, and in solitude He heard the angel of the Lord calling to Him. And when He stilled Himself to sleep He heard the whispering of the heavens in His dreams.\nHe was often happy with us, and He would call us brothers.\nBehold, He who was the first Word called us brothers, though we were but syllables uttered yesterday.\nYou ask why I call Him the first Word.\nListen, and I will answer:\nIn the beginning God moved in space, and out of His measureless stirring the earth was born and the seasons thereof.\nThen God moved again, and life streamed forth, and the longing of life sought the height and the depth and would have more of itself.\nThen God spoke thus, and His words were man, and man was a spirit begotten by God’s Spirit.\nAnd when God spoke thus, the Christ was His first Word and that Word was perfect; and when Jesus of Nazareth came to the world the first Word was uttered unto us and the sound was made flesh and blood.\nJesus the Anointed was the first Word of God uttered unto man, even as if an apple tree in an orchard should bud and blossom a day before the other trees. And in God’s orchard that day was an aeon.\nWe are all sons and daughters of the Most High, but the Anointed One was His first-born, who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and He walked among us and we beheld Him.\nAll this I say that you may understand not only in the mind but rather in the spirit. The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.\nThe wind may blow and then cease, and the sea shall swell and then weary, but the heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "john-the-son-of-zebedee": { - "title": "“John the Son of Zebedee”", - "body": "You have remarked that some of us call Jesus the Christ, and some the Word, and others call Him the Nazarene, and still others the Son of Man.\nI will try to make these names clear in the light that is given me.\nThe Christ, He who was in the ancient of days, is the flame of God that dwells in the spirit of man. He is the breath of life that visits us, and takes unto Himself a body like our bodies.\nHe is the will of the Lord.\nHe is the first Word, which would speak with our voice and live in our ear that we may heed and understand.\nAnd the Word of the Lord our God builded a house of flesh and bones, and was man like unto you and myself.\nFor we could not hear the song of the bodiless wind nor see our greater self walking in the mist.\nMany times the Christ has come to the world, and He has walked many\nlands. And always He has been deemed a stranger and a madman.\nYet the sound of His voice descended never to emptiness, for the memory of man keeps\nthat which his mind takes no care to keep.\nThis is the Christ, the innermost and the height, who walks with man towards eternity.\nHave you not heard of Him at the cross-roads of India? And in the land of the Magi, and upon the sands of Egypt?\nAnd here in your North Country your bards of old sang of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, he who was the desire of man fulfilled, the caged hope made free; and Orpheus, who came with a voice and a lyre to quicken the spirit in beast and man.\nAnd know you not of Mithra the king, and of Zoroaster the prophet of the Persians, who woke from man’s ancient sleep and stood at the bed of our dreaming?\nWe ourselves become man anointed when we meet in the Temple Invisible, once every thousand years. Then comes one forth embodied, and at His coming our silence turns to singing.\nYet our ears turn not always to listening nor our eyes to seeing.\nJesus the Nazarene was born and reared like ourselves; His mother and father were like our parents, and He was a man.\nBut the Christ, the Word, who was in the beginning, the Spirit who would have us live our fuller life, came unto Jesus and was with Him.\nAnd the Spirit was the versed hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp.\nThe Spirit was the psalm, and Jesus was the turn thereof.\nAnd Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, was the host and the mouthpiece of the Christ, who walked with us in the sun and who called us His friends.\nIn those days the hills of Galilee and her valleys heard but His voice. And I was a youth then, and trod in His path and pursued His footprints.\nI pursued His footprints and trod in His path, to hear the words of the Christ from the lips of Jesus of Galilee.\nNow you would know why some of us call Him the Son of Man.\nHe Himself desired to be called by that name, for He knew the hunger and the thirst of man, and He beheld man seeking after His greater self.\nThe Son of Man was Christ the Gracious, who would be with us all.\nHe was Jesus the Nazarene who would lead His brothers to the Anointed One, even to the Word which was in the beginning with God.\nIn my heart dwells Jesus of Galilee, the Man above men, the Poet who makes poets of us all, the Spirit who knocks at our door that we may wake and rise and walk out to meet truth naked and unencumbered.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "joseph-surnamed-justus": { - "title": "“Joseph Surnamed Justus”", - "body": "They say he was vulgar, the common offspring of common seed, a man uncouth and violent.\nThey say that only the wind combed His hair, and only the rain brougth His clothes and His body together.\nThey deem Him mad, and they attribute His words to demons.\nYet behold, the Man despised sounded a challenge and the sound thereof shall never cease.\nHe sang a song and none shall arrest that melody. It shall hover from generation to generation and it shall rise from sphere to sphere remembering the lips that gace it birth and the ears that cradled it.\nHe was a stranger. Aye, He was a stranger, a wayfarer on His way to a shrine, a visitor who knocked at our door, a guest from a far country.\nAnd because He found not a gracious host, He has returned to His own place.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "joseph-of-arimathea": { - "title": "“Joseph of Arimathea”", - "body": "There were two streams running in the heart of the Nazarene: the stream of kinship to God whom He called Father, and the stream of rapture which He called the kingdom of the Above-world.\nAnd in my solitude I thought of Him and I followed these two streams in His heart. Upon the banks of the one I met my own soul; and sometimes my soul was a beggar and a wanderer, and sometimes it was a princess in her garden.\nThen I followed the other stream in His heart, and on my way I met one who had been beaten and robbed of his gold, and he was smiling. And farther on I saw the robber who had robbed him, and there were unshed tears upon his face.\nThen I heard the murmur of these two streams in my own bosom also, and I was gladdened.\nWhen I visited Jesus the day before Pontius Pilatus and the elders laid hands on Him, we talked long, and I asked Him many questions, and He answered my questionings with graciousness; and when I left Him I knew He was the Lord and Master of this our earth.\nIt is long since our cedar tree has fallen, but its fragrance endures, and will forever seek the four corners of the earth.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "judas-the-cousin-of-jesus": { - "title": "“Judas the Cousin of Jesus”", - "body": "Upon a night in the month of August we were with the Master on a heath not far from the lake. The heath was called by the ancients the Meadow of Skulls.\nAnd Jesus was reclining on the grass and gazing at the stars.\nAnd of a sudden two men came rushing towards us breathless. They were as if in agony, and they fell prostrate at the feet of Jesus.\nAnd Jesus stood up and He said, “Whence came you?”\nAnd one of the men answered, “From Machaereus.”\nAnd Jesus looked upon him and was troubled, and He said, “What of John?”\nAnd the man said, “He was slain this day. He was beheaded in his prison cell.”\nThen Jesus lifted up His head. And then He walked a little way from us. After a while He stood again in our midst.\nAnd He said, “The king could have slain the prophet ere this day. Verily the king has tried the pleasure of His subjects. Kings of yore were not so slow in giving the head of a prophet to the head-hunters.”\n“I grieve not for John, but rather for Herod, who let fall the sword. Poor king, like an animal caught and led with a ring and a rope.”\n“Poor petty tetrarchs lost in their own darkness, they stumble and fall down. And what could you of the stagnant sea but dead fishes?”\n“I hate not kings. Let them rule men, but only when they are wiser than men.”\nAnd the Master looked at the two sorrowful faces and then He looked at us, and He spoke again and said, “John was born wounded, and the blood of his wounds streamed forth with his words. He was freedom not yet free from itself, and patient only with the straight and the just.”\n“In truth he was a voice crying in the land of the deaf; and I loved him in his pain and his aloneness.”\n“And I loved his pride that would give its head to the sword ere it would yield it to the dust.”\n“Verily I say unto you that John, the son of Zachariah, was the last of his race, and like his forefathers he was slain between the threshold of the temple and the altar.”\nAnd again Jesus walked away from us.\nThen He returned and He said, “Forever it has been that those who rule for an hour would slay the rulers of years. And forever they would hold a trial and pronounce condemnation upon a man not yet born, and decree his death ere he commits the crime.”\n“The son of Zachariah shall live with me in my kingdom and his day shall be long.”\nThen He turned to the disciples of John and said, “Every deed has its morrow. I myself may be the morrow of this deed. Go back to my friend’s friends, and tell them I shall be with them.”\nAnd the two men walked away from us, and they seemed less heavy-hearted.\nThen Jesus laid Himself down again upon the grass and outstretched His arms, and again He gazed at the stars.\nNow it was late. And I lay not far from Him, and I would fain have rested, but there was a hand knocking upon the gate of my sleep, and I lay awake until Jesus and the dawn called me again to the road.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-king-hermit": { - "title": "“The King-Hermit”", - "body": "They told me that in a forest among the mountains lives a young man in solitude who once was a king of a vast country beyond the Two Rivers. And they also said that he, of his own will, had left his throne and the land of his glory and come to dwell in the wilderness.\nAnd I said, “I would seek that man, and learn the secret of his heart; for he who renounces a kingdom must needs be greater than a kingdom.”\nOn that very day I went to the forest where he dwells. And I found him sitting under a white cypress, and in his hand a reed as if it were a sceptre. And I greeted him even as I would greet a king. And he turned to me and said gently, “What would you in this forest of serenity? Seek you a lost self in the green shadows, or is it a home-coming in your twilight?”\nAnd I answered, “I sought but you--for I fain would know that which made you leave a kingdom for a forest.”\nAnd he said, “Brief is my story, for sudden was the bursting of the bubble. It happened thus: one day as I sat at a window in my palace, my chamberlain and an envoy from a foreign land were walking in my garden. And as they approached my window, the lord chamberlain was speaking of himself and saying, ‘I am like the king; I have a thirst for strong wine and a hunger for all games of chance. And like my lord the king I have storms of temper.’ And the lord chamberlain and the envoy disappeared among the trees. But in a few minutes they returned, and this time the lord chamberlain was speaking of me, and he was saying, ‘My lord the king is like myself--a good marksman; and like me he loves music and bathes thrice a day.’”\nAfter a moment he added, “On the eve of that day I left my palace with but my garment, for I would no longer be ruler over those who assume my vices and attribute to me their virtues.”\nAnd I said, “This is indeed a wonder, and passing strange.”\nAnd he said, “Nay, my friend, you knocked at the gate of my silences and received but a trifle. For who would not leave a kingdom for a forest where the seasons sing and dance ceaselessly? Many are those who have given their kingdom for less than solitude and the sweet fellowship of aloneness. Countless are the eagles who descend from the upper air to live with moles that they may know the secrets of the earth. There are those who renounce the kingdom of dreams that they may not seem distant from the dreamless. And those who renounce the kingdom of nakedness and cover their souls that others may not be ashamed in beholding truth uncovered and beauty unveiled. And greater yet than all of these is he who renounces the kingdom of sorrow that he may not seem proud and vainglorious.”\nThen rising he leaned upon his reed and said, “Go now to the great city and sit at its gate and watch all those who enter into it and those who go out. And see that you find him who, though born a king, is without kingdom; and him who though ruled in flesh rules in spirit--though neither he nor his subjects know this; abd him also who but seems to rule yet is in truth slave of his own slaves.”\nAfter he had said these things he smiled on me, and there were a thousand dawns upon his lips. Then he turned and walked away into the heart of the forest.\nAnd I returned to the city, and I sat at its gate to watch the passers-by even as he had told me. And from that day to this numberless are the kings whose shadows have passed over me and few are the subjects over whom my shadow passed.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-king": { - "title": "“The King”", - "body": "The people of the kingdom of Sadik surrounded the palace of their king shouting in rebellion against him. And he came down the steps of the palace carrying his crown in one hand and his sceptre in the other. The majesty of his appearance silenced the multitude, and he stood before them and said, “My friends, who are no longer my subjects, here I yield my crown and sceptre unto you. I would be one of you. I am only one man, but as a man I would work together with you that our lot may be made better. There is no need for king. Let us go therefore to the fields and the vineyards and labor hand with hand. Only you must tell me to what field or vineyard I should go. All of you now are king.”\nAnd the people marveled, and stillness was upon them, for the king whom they had deemed the source of their discontent now yielding his crown and sceptre to them and became as one of them.\nThen each and every one of them went his way, and the king walked with one man to a field.\nBut the Kingdom of Sadik fared not better without a king, and the mist of discontent was still upon the land. The people cried out in the market places saying that they have a king to rule them. And the elders and the youths said as if with one voice, “We will have our king.”\nAnd they sought the king and found him toiling in the field, and they brought him to his seat, and yielded unto his crown and his sceptre. And they said, “Now rule us, with might and with justice.”\nAnd he said, “I will indeed rule you with might, and may the gods of the heaven and the earth help me that I may also rule with justice.”\nNow, there came to his presence men and women and spoke unto him of a baron who mistreated them, and to whom they were but serfs.\nAnd straightway the king brought the baron before him and said, “The life of one man is as weighty in the scales of God as the life of another. And because you know not how to weigh the lives of those who work in your fiends and your vineyards, you are banished, and you shall leave this kingdom forever.”\nThe following day came another company to the king and spoke of the cruelty of a countess beyond the hills, and how she brought them down to misery. Instantly the countess was brought to court, and the king sentenced her also to banishment, saying, “Those who till our fields and care for our vineyards are nobler than we who eat the bread they prepare and drink the wine of their wine-press. And because you know not this, you shall leave this land and be afar from this kingdom.”\nThen came men and women who said that the bishop made them bring stones and hew the stones for the cathedral, yet he gave them naught, though they knew the bishop’s coffer was full of gold and silver while they themselves were empty with hunger.\nAnd the king called for the bishop, and when the bishop came the king spoke and said unto his, “That cross you wear upon your bosom should mean giving life unto life. But you have taken life from life and you have given none. Therefore you shall leave this kingdom never to return.”\nThus each day for a full moon men and women came to the king to tell him of the burdens laid upon them. And each and every day a full moon some oppressor was exiled from the land.\nAnd the people of Sadik were amazed, and there was cheer in their heart.\nAnd upon a day the elders and the youths came and surrounded the tower of the king and called for him. And he came down holding his crown with one hand and his sceptre with the other.\nAnd he spoke unto and said, “Now, what would you do of me? Behold, I yield back to you that which you desired me to hold.”\nBut they cried. “Nay, nay, you are our rightful king. You have made clean the land of vipers, and you have brought the wolves to naught, and we welcome to sing our thanksgiving unto you. The crown is yours in majesty and the sceptre is yours in glory.”\nThen the king said, “Not I, not I. You yourselves are king. When you deemed me weak and a misruler, you yourselves were weak and misruling. And now the land fares well because it is in your will. I am but a thought in the mind of you all, and I exist not save in your actions. There is no such person as governor. Only the governed exist to govern themselves.”\nAnd the king re-entered his tower with his crown and his sceptre. And the elders and the youths went their various ways and they were content.\nAnd each and every one thought of himself as king with a crown in one hand and a sceptre in the other.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "knowledge-and-half-knowledge": { - "title": "“Knowledge and Half-Knowledge”", - "body": "Four frogs sat upon a log that lay floating on the edge of a river. Suddenly the log was caught by the current and swept slowly down the stream. The frogs were delighted and absorbed, for never before had they sailed.\nAt length the first frog spoke, and said, “This is indeed a most marvellous log. It moves as if alive. No such log was ever known before.”\nThen the second frog spoke, and said, “Nay, my friend, the log is like other logs, and does not move. It is the river that is walking to the sea, and carries us and the log with it.”\nAnd the third frog spoke, and said, “It is neither the log nor the river that moves. The moving is in our thinking. For without thought nothing moves.”\nAnd the three frogs began to wrangle about what was really moving. The quarrel grew hotter and louder, but they could not agree.\nThen they turned to the fourth frog, who up to this time had been listening attentively but holding his peace, and they asked his opinion.\nAnd the fourth frog said, “Each of you is right, and none of you is wrong. The moving is in the log and the water and our thinking also.”\nAnd the three frogs became very angry, for none of them was willing to admit that his was not the whole truth, and that the other two were not wholly wrong.\nThen a strange thing happened. The three frogs got together and pushed the fourth frog off the log into the river.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "levi-a-disciple": { - "title": "“Levi, a Disciple”", - "body": "Upon an eventide He passed by my house, and my soul was quickened within me.\nHe spoke to me and said, “Come, Levi, and follow me.”\nAnd I followed Him that day.\nAnd at eventide of the next day I begged Him to enter my house and be my guest. And He and His friends crossed my threshold and blessed me and my wife and my children.\nAnd I had other guests. They were publicans and men of learning, but they were against Him in their hearts.\nAnd when we were sitting about the board, one of the publicans questioned Jesus, saying, “Is it true that you and your disciples break the law, and make fire on the sabbath day?”\nAnd Jesus answered him saying, “We do indeed make fire on the sabbath day. We would inflame the sabbath day, and we would burn with our touch the dry stubble of all days.”\nAnd another publican said, “It was brought to us that you drink wine with the unclean at the inn.”\nAnd Jesus answered, “Aye, these also we would comfort. Came we here except to share the loaf and the cup with the uncrowned and the unshod amongst you?”\n“Few, aye too few are the featherless who dare the wind, and many are the winged and fullfledged yet in the nest.”\n“And we would feed them all with our beak, both the sluggish and the swift.”\nAnd another publican said, “Have I not been told that you would protect the harlots of Jerusalem?”\nThen in the face of Jesus I saw, as it were, the rocky heights of Lebanon, and He said, “It is true.”\n“On the day of reckoning these women shall rise before the throne of my Father, and they shall be made pure by their own tears. But you shall be held down by the chains of your own judgment.”\n“Babylon was not put to waste by her prostitutes; Babylon fell to ashes that the eyes of her hypocrites might no longer see the light of day.”\nAnd other publicans would have questioned Him, but I made a sign and bade them be silent, for I knew He would confound them; and they too were my guests, and I would not have them put to shame.\nWhen it was midnight the publicans left my house, and their souls were limping.\nThen I closed my eyes and I saw, as if in a vision, seven women in white raiment standing about Jesus. Their arms were crossed upon their bosoms, and their heads were bent down, and I looked deep into the mist of my dream and beheld the face of one of the seven women, and it shone in my darkness.\nIt was the face of a harlot who lived in Jerusalem.\nThen I opened my eyes and looked at Him, and He was smiling at me and at the others who had not left the board.\nAnd I closed my eyes again, and I saw in a light seven men in white garments standing around Him. And I beheld the face of one of them.\nIt was the face of the thief who was crucified afterward at His right hand.\n\nAnd later Jesus and His comrades left my house for the road.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "luke": { - "title": "“Luke”", - "body": "Jesus despised and scorned the hypocrites, and His wrath was like a tempest that scourged them. His voice was thunder in their ears and He cowed them.\nIn their fear of Him they sought His death; and like moles in the dark earth they worked to undermine His footsteps. But He fell not into their snares.\nHe laughed at them, for well He knew that the spirit shall not be mocked, nor shall it be taken in the pitfall.\nHe held a mirror in His hand and therein He saw the sluggard and the limping and those who stagger and fall by the roadside on the way to the summit.\nAnd He pitied them all. He would even have raised them to His stature and He would have carried their burden. Nay, He would have bid their weakness lean on His strength.\nHe did not utterly condemn the liar or the thief or the murderer, but He did utterly condemn the hypocrite whose face is masked and whose hand is gloved.\nOften I have pondered on the heart that shelters all who come from the wasteland to its sanctuary, yet against the hypocrite is closed and sealed.\nOn a day as we rested with Him in the Garden of Pomegranates, I said to Him, “Master, you forgive and console the sinner and all the weak and the infirm save only the hypocrite alone.”\nAnd He said, “You have chosen your words well when you called the sinners weak and infirm. I do forgive them their weakness of body and their infirmity of spirit. For their failings have been laid upon them by their forefathers, or by the greed of their neighbours.”\n“But I tolerate not the hypocrite, because he himself lays a yoke upon the guileless and the yielding.”\n“Weaklings, whom you call sinners, are like the featherless young that fall from the nest. The hypocrite is the vulture waiting upon a rock for the death of the prey.”\n“Weaklings are men lost in a desert. But the hypocrite is not lost. He knows the way yet he laughs between the sand and the wind.”\n“For this cause I do not receive him.”\nThus our Master spoke, and I did not understand. But I understand now.\nThen the hypocrites of the land laid hands upon Him and they judged Him; and in so doing they deemed themselves justified. For they cited the law of Moses in the Sanhedrim in witness and evidence against Him.\nAnd they who break the law at the rise of every dawn and break it again at sunset, brought about His death.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_luke" - } - } - }, - "the-madman": { - "title": "“The Madman”", - "body": "It was in the garden of a madhouse that I met a youth with a face pale and lovely and full of wonder. And I sat beside him upon the bench, and I said, “Why are you here?”\nAnd he looked at me in astonishment, and he said, “It is an unseemly question, yet I will answer you. My father would make of me a reproduction of himself; so also would my uncle. My mother would have me the image of her seafaring husband as the perfect example for me to follow. My brother thinks I should be like him, a fine athlete.”\n“And my teachers also, the doctor of philosophy, and the music-master, and the logician, they too were determined, and each would have me but a reflection of his own face in a mirror.”\n“Therefore I came to this place. I find it more sane here. At least, I can be myself.”\nThen of a sudden he turned to me and he said, “But tell me, were you also driven to this place by education and good counsel?”\nAnd I answered, “No, I am a visitor.”\nAnd he answered, “Oh, you are one of those who live in the madhouse on the other side of the wall.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-man-from-the-desert": { - "title": "“The Man from the Desert”", - "body": "I was a stranger in Jerusalem. I had come to the Holy City to behold the great temple, and to sacrifice upon the altar, for my wife had given twin sons to my tribe.\nAnd after I had made my offering, I stood in the portico of them temple looking down upon the money-changers and those who sold doves for sacrifice, and listening to the great noise in the court.\nAnd as I stood there came of a sudden a man into the midst of the money-changers and those who sold doves.\nHe was a man of majesty, and He came swiftly.\nIn His hand He held a rope of goat’s hide; and He began to overturn the tables of the money-changers and to beat the pedlars of birds with the rope.\nAnd I heard Him saying with a loud voice, “Render these birds unto the sky which is their nest.”\nMen and women fled from before His face, and He moved amongst them as the whirling wind moves on the sad-hills.\nAll this came to pass in but a moment, and then the court of the Temple was emptied of the money-changers. Only the man stood there alone, and His followers stood at a distance.\nThen I turned my face and I saw another man in the portico of the temple. And I walked towards him and said, “Sir, who is this man who stands alone, even like another temple?” And he answered me, “This is Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet who has appeared of late in Galilee. Here in Jerusalem all men hate Him.”\nAnd I said, “My heart was strong enough to be with His whip, and yielding enough to be at His feet.”\nAnd Jesus turned towards His followers who were awaiting Him. But before He reached them, three of the temple doves flew back, and one alighted upon His left shoulder and the other two at His feet. And he touched each one tenderly. Then He walked on, and there were leagues in every step of His steps.\nNow tell me, what power had He to attack and disperse hundreds of men and women without opposition? I was told that they all hate Him, yet no one stood before Him on that day. Had He plucked out the fangs of hate on His way to the court of the temple?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "mary-magdalen-thirty-years-later": { - "title": "“Mary Magdalen Thirty Years Later”", - "body": "Once again I say that with death Jesus conquered death, and rose from the grave a spirit and a power. And He walked in our solitude and visited the gardens of our passion.\nHe lies not there in that cleft rock behind the stone.\nWe who love Him beheld Him with these our eyes which He made to see; and we touched Him with these our hands which He taught to reach forth.\nI know you who believe not in Him. I was one of you, and you are many; but your number shall be diminished.\nMust your break your harp and your lyre to find the music therein?\nOr must you fell a tree ere you can believe it bears fruit?\nYou hate Jesus because someone from the North Country said He was the Son of God. But you hate one another because each of you deems himself too great to be the brother of the next man.\nYou hate Him because someone said He was born of a virgin, and not of man’s seed.\nBut you know not the mothers who go to the tomb in virginity, nor the men who go down to the grave choked with their own thirst.\nYou know not that the earth was given in marriage to the sun, and that earth it is who sends us forth to the mountain and the desert.\nThere is a gulf that yawns between those who love Him and those who hate Him, between those who believe and those who do not believe.\nBut when the years have bridged that gulf you shall know that He who lived in us is deathless, that He was the Son of God even as we are the children of God; that He was born of a virgin even as we are born of the husbandless earth.\nIt is passing strange that the earth gives not to the unbelievers the roots that would suck at her breast, nor the wings wherewith to fly high and drink, and be filled with the dews of her space.\nBut I know what I know, and it is enough.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "mary-magdalen": { - "title": "“Mary Magdalen”", - "body": "It was in the month of June when I saw Him for the first time. He was walking in the wheatfield when I passed by with my handmaidens, and He was alone.\nThe rhythm of His steps was different from other men’s, and the movement of His body was like naught I had seen before.\nMen do not pace the earth in that manner. And even now I do not know whether He walked fast or slow.\nMy handmaidens pointed their fingers at Him and spoke in shy whispers to one another. And I stayed my steps for a moment, and raised my hand to hail Him. But He did not turn His face, and He did not look at me. And I hated Him. I was swept back into myself, and I was as cold as if I had been in a snow-drift. And I shivered.\nThat night I beheld Him in my dreaming; and they told me afterward that I screamed in my sleep and was restless upon my bed.\nIt was in the month of August that I saw Him again, through my window. He was sitting in the shadow of the cypress tree across my garden, and He was still as if He had been carved out of stone, like the statues in Antioch and other cities of the North Country.\nAnd my slave, the Egyptian, came to me and said, “That man is here again. He is sitting there across your garden.”\nAnd I gazed at Him, and my soul quivered within me, for He was beautiful. His body was single and each part seemed to love every other part.\nThen I clothed myself with raiment of Damascus, and I left my house and walked towards Him. Was it my aloneness, or was it His fragrance, that drew me to Him? Was it a hunger in my eyes that desired comeliness, or was it His beauty that sought the light of my eyes? Even now I do not know.\nI walked to Him with my scented garments and my golden sandals, the sandals the Roman captain had given me, even these sandals. And when I reached Him, I said, “Good-morrow to you.”\nAnd He said, “Good-morrow to you, Miriam.”\nAnd He looked at me, and His night-eyes saw me as no man had seen me. And suddenly I was as if naked, and I was shy. Yet He had only said, “Good-morrow to you.”\nAnd then I said to Him, “Will you not come to my house?”\nAnd He said, “Am I not already in your house?” I did not know what He meant then, but I know now.\nAnd I said, “Will you not have wine and bread with me?”\nAnd He said, “Yes, Miriam, but not now.”\n“Not now, not now,” He said. And the voice of the sea was in those two words, and the voice of the wind and the trees. And when He said them unto me, life spoke to death.\nFor mind you, my friend, I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul. I was living apart from this self which you now see. I belonged to all men, and to none. They called me harlot, and a woman possessed of seven devils. I was cursed, and I was envied.\nBut when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away, and I became Miriam, only Miriam, a woman lost to the earth she had known, and finding herself in new places.\nAnd now again I said to Him, “Come into my house and share bread and wine with me.”\nAnd He said, “Why do you bid me to be your guest?”\nAnd I said, “I beg you to come into my house.” And it was all that was sod in me, and all that was sky in me calling unto Him.\nThen He looked at me, and the noontide of His eyes was upon me, and He said, “You have many lovers, and yet I alone love you. Other men love themselves in your nearness. I love you in your self. Other men see a beauty in you that shall fade away sooner than their own years. But I see in you a beauty that shall not fade away, and in the autumn of your days that beauty shall not be afraid to gaze at itself in the mirror, and it shall not be offended.” “I alone love the unseen in you.”\nThen He said in a low voice, “Go away now. If this cypress tree is yours and you would not have me sit in its shadow, I will walk my way.”\nAnd I cried to Him and I said, “Master, come to my house. I have incense to burn for you, and a silver basin for your feet. You are a stranger and yet not a stranger. I entreat you, come to my house.”\nThen He stood up and looked at me even as the seasons might look down upon the field, and He smiled. And He said again: “All men love you for themselves. I love you for yourself.” And then He walked away.\nBut no other man ever walked the way He walked. Was it a breath born in my garden that moved to the east? Or was it a storm that would shake all things to their foundations?\nI knew not, but on that day the sunset of His eyes slew the dragon in me, and I became a woman, I became Miriam, Miriam of Mijdel.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "matthew": { - "title": "“Matthew”", - "body": "Upon an evening Jesus passed by a prison that was in the Tower of David. And we were walking after Him.\nOf a sudden He tarried and laid His cheek against the stones of the prison wall. And thus He spoke:\n“Brothers of my ancient day, my heart beats with your hearts behind the bars. Would that you could be free in my freedom and walk with me and my comrades.”\n“You are confined, but not alone. Many are the prisoners who walk the open streets. Their wings are not shorn, but like the peacock they flutter yet cannot fly.”\n“Brothers of my second day, I shall soon visit you in your cells and yield my shoulder to your burden. For the innocent and the guilty are not parted, and like the two bones of the forearm they shall never be cleaved.”\n“Brothers of this day, which is my day, you swam against the current of their reasoning and you were caught. They say I too shall swim against that current. Perhaps I shall soon be with you, a law-breaker among the law-breakers.”\n“Brothers of a day not yet come, these walls shall fall down, and out of the stones other shapes shall be fashioned by Him whose mallet is light, and whose chisel is the wind, and you shall stand free in the freedom of my new day.”\nThus spoke Jesus and He walked on, and His hand was upon the prison wall until He passed by the Tower of David.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_matthew" - } - } - }, - "miriam": { - "title": "“Miriam”", - "body": "His mouth was like the heart of a pomegranate, and the shadows in His eyes were deep.\nAnd He was gentle, like a man mindful of his own strength.\nIn my dreams I beheld the kings of the earth standing in awe in His presence.\nI would speak of His face, but how shall I?\nIt was like night without darkness, and like day without the noise of day.\nIt was a sad face, and it was a joyous face.\nAnd well I remember how once He raised His hand towards the sky, and His parted fingers were like the branches of an elm.\nAnd I remember Him pacing the evening. He was not walking. He Himself was a road above the road; even as a cloud above the earth that would descend to refresh the earth.\nBut when I stood before Him and spoke to him, He was a man, and His face was powerful to behold. And He said to me, “What would you, Miriam?”\nI would not answer Him, but my wings enfolded my secret, and I was made warm.\nAnd because I could bear His light no more, I turned and walked away, but not in shame. I was only shy, and I would be alone, with His fingers upon the strings of my heart.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "naaman-of-the-gadarenes": { - "title": "“Naaman of the Gadarenes”", - "body": "His disciples are dispersed. He gave them the legacy of pain ere He Himself was put to death. They are hunted like the deer, and the foxes of the fields, and the quiver of the hunter is yet full of arrows.\nBut when they are caught and led to death, they are joyous, and their faces shine like the face of the bridegroom at the wedding-feast. For He gave them also the legacy of joy.\nI had a friend from the North Country, and his name was Stephen; and because he proclaimed Jesus as the Son of God, he was led to the market-place and stoned.\nAnd when Stephen fell to earth he outstretched his arms as if he would die as his Master had died. His arms were spread like wings ready for flight. And when the last gleam of light was fading in his eyes, with my own eyes I saw a smile upon his lips. It was a smile like the breath that comes before the end of winter for a pledge and a promise of spring.\nHow shall I describe it?\nIt seemed that Stephen was saying, “If I should go to another world, and other men should lead me to another market-place to stone me, even then I would proclaim Him for the truth which was in Him, and for that same truth which is in me now.”\nAnd I noticed that there was a man standing near, and looking with pleasure upon the stoning of Stephen.\nHis name is Saul of Tarsus, and it was he who had yielded Stephen to the priests and the Romans and the crowd, for stoning.\nSaul was bald of head and short of stature. His shoulders were crooked and his features ill-sorted; and I liked him not.\nI have been told that he is now preaching Jesus from the house tops. It is hard to believe.\nBut the grave halts not Jesus’ walking to the enemies’ camp to tame and take captive those who had opposed Him.\nStill I do not like that man of Tarsus, though I have been told that after Stephen’s death he was tamed and conquered on the road to Damascus. But his head is too large for his heart to be that of a true disciple.\nAnd yet perhaps I am mistaken. I am often mistaken.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_peter_and_paul" - } - } - }, - "nicodemus-the-poet": { - "title": "“Nicodemus the Poet”", - "body": "Many are the fools who say that Jesus stood in His own path and opposed Himself; that He knew not His own mind, and in the absence of that knowledge confounded Himself.\nMany indeed are the owls who know no song unlike their own hooting.\nYou and I know the jugglers of words who would honor only a greater juggler, men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder.\nWe know the pygmies who abuse the sky-man. And we know what the weed would say of the oak tree and the cedar.\nI pity them that they cannot rise to the heights.\nI pity the shrivelling thorn envying the elm that dares the seasons.\nBut pity, though enfolded by the regret of all the angels, can bring them no light.\nI know the scarecrow whose rotting garments flutter in the corn, yet he himself is dead to the corn and to the singing wind.\nI know the wingless spider that weaves a net for all who fly.\nI know the crafty, the blowers of horns and the beaters of drums, who in the abundance of their own noise cannot hear the skylark nor the east wind in the forest.\nI know him who paddles against all streams, but never finds the source, who runs with all rivers, but never dares to the sea.\nI know him who offers his unskilled hands to the builder of the temple, and when his unskilled hands are rejected, says in the darkness of his heart, “I will destroy all that shall be builded.”\nI know all these. They are the men who object that Jesus said on a certain day, “I bring peace unto you,” and on another day, “I bring a sword.”\nThey cannot understand that in truth He said, “I bring peace unto men of goodwill, and I lay a sword between him who would peace and him who would a sword.”\nThey wonder that He who said, “My kingdom is not of this earth,” said also, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”; and know not that if they would indeed be free to enter the kingdom of their passion, they must not resist the gate-keeper of their necessities. It behooves them gladly to pay that dole to enter into that city.\nThere are the men who say, “He preached tenderness and kindliness and filial love, yet He would not heed His mother and His brothers when they sought Him in the streets of Jerusalem.”\nThey do not know that His mother and brothers in their loving fear would have had Him return to the bench of the carpenter, whereas He was opening our eyes to the dawn of a new day.\nHis mother and His brothers would have had Him live in the shadow of death, but He Himself was challenging death upon yonder hill that He might live in our sleepless memory.\nI know these moles that dig paths to nowhere. Are they not the ones who accuse Jesus of glorifying Himself in that He said to the multitude, “I am the path and the gate to salvation,” and even called Himself the life and the resurrection.\nBut Jesus was not claiming more than the month of May claims in her high tide.\nWas He not to tell the shining truth because it was so shining?\nHe indeed said that He was the way and the life and the resurrection of the heart; and I myself as a testimony to His truth.\nDo you not remember me, Nicodemus, who believed in naught but the laws and decrees and was in continual subjection to observances?\nAnd behold me now, a man who walks with life and laughs with the sun from the first moment it smiles upon the mountain until it yields itself to bed behind the hills.\nWhy do you halt before the word salvation? I myself through Him have attained my salvation.\nI care not for what shall befall me tomorrow, for I know that Jesus quickened my sleep and made my distant dreams my companions and my road-fellows.\nAm I less man because I believe in a greater man?\nThe barriers of flesh and bone fell down when the Poet of Galilee spoke to me; and I was held by a spirit, and was lifted to the heights, and in midair my wings gathered the song of passion.\nAnd when I dismounted from the wind and in the Sanhedrim my pinions were shorn, even then my ribs, my featherless wings, kept and guarded the song. And all the poverties of the lowlands cannot rob me of my treasure.\nI have said enough. Let the deaf bury the humming of life in their dead ears. I am content with the sound of His lyre, which He held and struck while the hands of His body were nailed and bleeding.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "the-old-old-wine": { - "title": "“The Old, Old Wine”", - "body": "Once there lived a rich man who was justly proud of his cellar and the wine therein. And there was one jug of ancient vintage kept for some occasion known only to himself.\nThe governor of the state visited him, and he bethought him and said, “That jug shall not be opened for a mere governor.”\nAnd a bishop of the diocese visited him, but he said to himself, “Nay, I will not open that jug. He would not know its value, nor would its aroma reach his nostrils.”\nThe prince of the realm came and supped with him. But he thought, “It is too royal a wine for a mere princeling.”\nAnd even on the day when his own nephew was married, he said to himself, “No, not to these guests shall that jug be brought forth.”\nAnd the years passed by, and he died, an old man, and he was buried like unto every seed and acorn.\nAnd upon the day that he was buried the ancient jug was brought out together with other jugs of wine, and it was shared by the peasants of the neighborhood. And none knew its great age.\nTo them, all that is poured into a cup is only wine.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "on-beauty": { - "title": "“On Beauty”", - "body": "And a poet said, “Speak to us of Beauty.” And he answered, saying:\n\nWhere shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?\nAnd how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?\nThe aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty is kind and gentle.\nLike a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.”\nAnd the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.\nLike the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.”\nThe tired and the weary say, “beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.\nHer voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”\nBut the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,\nAnd with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”\nAt night the watchmen of the city say, “Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.”\nAnd at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, “we have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.”\nIn winter say the snow-bound, “She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.”\nAnd in the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.”\nAll these things have you said of beauty.\nYet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,\nAnd beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.\nIt is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,\nBut rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.\nIt is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,\nBut rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.\nIt is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,\nBut rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.\nPeople of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.\nBut you are life and you are the veil.\nBeauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.\nBut you are eternity and your are the mirror.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-body-and-soul": { - "title": "“On Body and Soul”", - "body": "How long will you lament, my Soul, when you know how frail I am? How long will you clamor, when I possess only human words with which to depict your dreams?\nLook, my Soul, for I have spent my life listening to your teachings. Think, my torturer, for I have worn out my body following your footsteps.\nMy heart was my monarch, but now it has become your slave. My patience was my confidante, but under your influence it has become my critic. Youth was my boon companion, but now it reproaches me. And all this has befallen me from the gods. How will you demand more, and what do you crave?\nI have repudiated my essence and abandoned the delights of my life. I forsook my glory, and only you remain to me, so judge with justice, for justice is your glory. Or summon death and release your ward from prison.\nHave mercy, my Soul. For you have burdened me with a love that I cannot bear: you and Love are a unified force, whereas I and matter are fragmented in our weakness, and can your bonds long persist when stretched between force and weakness?\nHave mercy, my Soul. For you showed me happiness from a great distance. You and happiness are on a lofty mountain, while wretchedness and I subsist in the depths of a ravine. Can loftiness and abasement ever meet?\nHave mercy, my Soul. For you revealed Love to me and then concealed it. You and your beauty in light, and ignorance and I in the darkness. Can light and darkness ever mix?\nYou, my Soul, rejoice in the afterlife before it even arrives, while this body suffers from life even while it lives.\nYou approach eternity in haste, and this body takes slow steps toward annihilation. You do not tarry and it does not hasten; and this, my Soul, is the utmost misery.\nYou rise toward the heights, attracted by the heavens, whereas this body plummets downward because of the earth’s gravity. You do not console it, and it does not congratulate you; and that is rancor.\nYou, my Soul, are rich with your wisdom, but this body is poor by reason of its instincts. You show it no forbearance, and it does not follow; and that is the utmost wretchedness.\nYou go in the silence of the night toward the beloved and enjoy his embraces, and this body remains ever a martyr to yearning and separation.\nHave mercy, my Soul; have mercy.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-defeat": { - "title": "“On Defeat”", - "body": "Take heart, O imprisoned sovereign, for your tribulations in your cell are no greater than mine in my body.\nLie down and resign yourself to your fate, O fearsome one. For to be perturbed in the face of vicissitudes befits jackals, and caged monarchs can acquit themselves well only by showing contempt for the dungeon and the jailer.\nQuieten your alarm, O youth of high resolve, and look at me. For I subsist among the slaves of life as you subsist behind bars. What difference is there between us, save a restless dream that follows my soul but fears to come near you?\nWe are both exiled from our homelands, remote from our families and loved ones. Compose yourself and endure patiently, as I do, the torments of days and nights, ridiculing those weaklings who vanquished us by virtue of their numbers, not by means of their individual determination.\nWhat good can come of visitors, clamor, and the deaf who hear not?\nI shouted before you did in their ears, and caught the attention only of gloomy shades. Just as you did, I reviewed their ranks, and found none among them but cowards who wax bold and overbearing before those in chains, and weaklings who hold their heads high and affect severity before prisoners in their cells.\nGaze, mighty king, upon those who crowd around your prison now. Search their faces and you will find what you saw in the mien of the least of your subjects and courtiers in the trackless desert. Some are like rabbits in their faintness of heart; some are like foxes in their cunning; and some equal snakes in their vileness. But none has the blamelessness of a rabbit, the intelligence of a fox, or the wisdom of a serpent.\nLook, that one is like a filthy pig, but his flesh cannot be eaten. That one resembles a coarse water buffalo, but his hide is useless. That one is like a dim-witted donkey, but walks on two legs. That one looks like an ill-omened raven, but sells his croaking in temples. That one is like a haughty, preening peacock, but his feathers are borrowed.\nGaze, dreaded emperor, upon these mansions and edifices, for they are cramped nests wherein live human beings who pride themselves on the ornamented ceilings that block their view of the stars. They delight in the solidity of the walls which hide them from the rays of the sun. These buildings are murky caves, in the shadow of which the blossoms of youth wither, in the corners of which the torch of love turns to ash, and in the air of which the traces of dreams dissolve into columns of smoke. They are bizarre subterranean vaults, wherein the child’s cradle swings toward the couch of the deathly ill, while the bridal bed sits beside the bier of a corpse.\nLook, glorious prisoner, look at those wide avenues and narrow alleyways, for they are valleys of peril for those who travel them, with thieves crouched at every turn and bandits concealed on every side. They are an arena of continual battle between one object of desire and another, onto which descend spirits at war, though they lack swords, wrestling and snapping at one another without fangs. Or they are, rather, a forest of fear wherein dwell animals of tame appearance, with perfumed tails and polished horns, who are governed not by survival of the fittest but by endurance of the wiliest and most cunning. Their customs are not attributable to the best and strongest but to the most base and dishonest. As for their kings, they are no lions the like of yourself but, rather, odd creatures who possess the beaks of vultures, the claws of hyenas, the tongues of scorpions, and the croaking voices of frogs.\nMy spirit be your sacrifice, O captive king, for I have stood with you a long time and have talked at too great a length. But the heart that has been dethroned empathizes with overthrown monarchs, and the lonely, imprisoned soul takes delight in the company of lonesome prisoners. Make allowances for a youth who talks incessantly, preferring this amusement to eating itself, who imbibes thoughts instead of ale.\nUntil we meet again, O fearsome despot. Should it not be in this strange world, it will be in the world of specters, where the spirits of kings gather together with those of martyrs.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-faults": { - "title": "“On Faults”", - "body": "Yesterday--and how remote yesterday is, yet how near--I went with my soul to the great ocean, to wash away with its waters the dust and mire of the earth that had clung to us.\nWhen we reached the shore we searched for a vacant spot that would shield us from prying eyes. While we two were walking along we looked up and, behold, a man was sitting on a dusty rock. He grasped in his hand a bag, from which he took fistful after fistful of salt which he cast into the ocean.\nMy soul said to me, “That man is a cynic, who sees nothing of life but its shadow. A cynic is not worthy to lay eyes upon our naked bodies. Let us leave this place, since there is no way we can bathe here.”\nWe departed from that spot and walked on until we arrived at an inlet. There we discovered a man standing on a white stone, holding in his hand a jewel-studded box. He was taking from it cubes of sugar and tossing them into the ocean.\nMy soul said to me, “This man is an optimist, who sees good omens where none exist. Beware lest an optimist see our naked bodies.”\nWe began walking once more, until we happened upon a man standing near the shore, picking up dead fish and tenderly returning them to the ocean.\nMy soul said to me, “This is a compassionate person, who attempts to resuscitate those already in their graves. Let us avoid him.”\nWe finally arrived at a place where we saw a man drawing his fantasies in the sand. The waves came and erased his sketches, but he kept on doing what he was doing, time and again.\nMy soul said to me, “Here is a mystic who has set up in his imagination an idol to worship. Let us leave him and his affairs.”\nWe strolled on until we espied, near a placid bay, a man scooping the foam from the surface of the water and shaking it into a carnelian bowl.\nMy soul said to me, (“This is a dreamer, who weaves a robe from spider webs that he might array himself in it. He has no right to see our naked bodies.”)\nWe resumed our trek, and abruptly we heard a voice shouting, “This is the deep sea, this is the mighty, terrifying ocean.” We searched for the speaker and beheld a man standing with his back to the ocean. He had placed a seashell over his ear and was listening to its rumbling.\nMy soul said to me, “Let us go, for this is a materialist, who has turned his back on everything he cannot fathom and busies his essence with particulars that accord with his own premises.”\nWe walked on until we saw a man in a grassy place between the stones who had buried his head in the sand. I said to my soul, “Come, my soul, let us bathe here. For that man cannot see us.”\n\nMy soul shook her head, saying, “No, a thousand times no. The one you see is the worst of all people. He is pious and pure and veils himself from the tragedy of life, so that life has hidden its joys from his soul.”\nThen a profound sorrow appeared on the face of my soul. In a voice broken with bitterness, she said, “Let us get away from this shore, for there is no sheltered, concealed spot here where we can bathe. And I will never agree to loose my golden tresses in this wind, or to bare my tender breasts to this void, or to disrobe and stand naked before this light.”\nMy soul and I departed from that great ocean, and began to seek for the most great ocean.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-giving": { - "title": "“On Giving”", - "body": "My Soul is heavy laden with its fruits, so is there anyone hungering who will harvest them, and eat of them, and be satiated?\nIs there no one among the people who has been fasting who will graciously break the fast upon my offspring and relieve me of the burden of my fecundity and abundance?\nMy Soul is collapsing beneath the weight of gold ore and silver. Will anyone among the people fill his pockets and lighten my load?\nMy Soul is overflowing with the wine of eons. Is there anyone thirsting who will pour, and drink, and slake his thirst?\nThere stands a man in the middle of the road, thrusting toward passers-by a handful of gems, calling to them: “Look! Have mercy and snatch them from me. Take pity and relieve me of what I have!” As for the people, they walked on, paying no attention.\nIndeed, would that he were a beggar, entreating and stretching out his quivering hand toward the pedestrians, and bringing it back, empty and trembling. Would that he were sitting there blind, and the people were passing by, indifferent.\nThere is the wealthy, munificent sheik, who raises his tent between the white, unexplored peaks and the foothills of the mountains. He lights the fire of a hospitable reception every night and sends his servants to monitor the roads, in hopes that they will lead to him a guest whom he might feed and honor. But the trails prove miserly, yielding no caller who might eat of his free banquet and sending no seeker to accept his gifts.\nWould that he were a cast-out pauper!\nWould that he were a homeless vagabond who roamed the lands, a staff in his hand and a begging bowl at his waist, and that when evening came the bends in the alleyways gathered together him and his companions among the vagrants and tramps, and that he sat next to them and shared out the bread of charity.\nThere is the daughter of the great king, who awakens from her repose and rises from her bed. She clothes herself in purple and lavender, adorns herself with pearls and sapphires, sprays perfume on her hair, and soaks her fingers in liquid ambergris. Then she walks in her garden, where droplets of dew moisten the hems of her robes.\nIn the quiet of the night the daughter of the great king walks in her garden, looking for her beloved, but no one in all the realm of her father loves her.\nWould that she were the daughter of a peasant, herding her father’s sheep in the valleys and returning at night to his hovel, her feet dusty with her toil, the odor of vineyards lingering in the folds of her clothing. Then, when night descended and the people of the quarter had fallen asleep, she would steal away to the place where her lover was awaiting.\nWould that she were a nun in a convent, her heart burning with incense, the fragrance of which the wind would waft abroad. Her spirit would ignite a candle, and the ether would convey the light of her Soul. She would genuflect in prayer, and the specters of the unseen would bear her prayers to the treasure-hold of time, where the devotions of worshipers are safeguarded beside the flames of lovers and the misgivings of hermits.\nWould that she were aged and timeworn, sitting and sunning herself with the one who shared her youth. For that would be better than to be the daughter of the great king whose realm contains no suitor to eat of her heart like bread or drink of her blood like wine.\nMy Soul is heavy laden with its fruits; is there anyone on earth hungering who will harvest them, and eat them, and be satiated?\nMy Soul is overflowing with its wine. Is there anyone thirsting who will pour, and drink, and slake his thirst?\nWould that I were a never-blossoming tree, which gave no fruit. For the pain of fecundity is more bitter than the anguish of barrenness, and the torments of the well-to-do with their inalienable wealth hold horrors greater than any suffered by a pauper who goes without food.\nWould that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.\nWould that I were a crushed cane, trampled beneath the feet, for that would be better than to be a lyre with silver strings in the house of a master who has lost all his fingers and whose family is deaf.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-joy-and-sorrow": { - "title": "“On Joy and Sorrow”", - "body": "Then a woman said, “Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.” And he answered:\n\nYour joy is your sorrow unmasked.\nAnd the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.\nAnd how else can it be?\nThe deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.\nIs not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?\nAnd is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?\nWhen you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.\nWhen you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.\nSome of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”\nBut I say unto you, they are inseparable.\nTogether they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.\nVerily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.\nOnly when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.\nWhen the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-love": { - "title": "“On Love”", - "body": "Then said Almitra, “Speak to us of Love.” And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:\n\nWhen love beckons to you follow him,\nThough his ways are hard and steep.\nAnd when his wings enfold you yield to him,\nThough the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.\nAnd when he speaks to you believe in him,\nThough his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.\nFor even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.\nEven as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,\nSo shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.\nLike sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.\nHe threshes you to make you naked.\nHe sifts you to free you from your husks.\nHe grinds you to whiteness.\nHe kneads you until you are pliant;\nAnd then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.\nAll these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.\nBut if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,\nThen it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,\nInto the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.\nLove gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.\nLove possesses not nor would it be possessed;\nFor love is sufficient unto love.\nWhen you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”\nAnd think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.\nLove has no other desire but to fulfil itself.\nBut if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:\nTo melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.\nTo know the pain of too much tenderness.\nTo be wounded by your own understanding of love;\nAnd to bleed willingly and joyfully.\nTo wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;\nTo rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;\nTo return home at eventide with gratitude;\nAnd then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-marriage": { - "title": "“On Marriage”", - "body": "Then Almitra spoke again and said, “And what of Marriage, master?” And he answered saying:\n\nYou were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.\nYou shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.\nAye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.\nBut let there be spaces in your togetherness,\nAnd let the winds of the heavens dance between you.\nLove one another but make not a bond of love:\nLet it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.\nFill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.\nGive one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.\nSing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,\nEven as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.\nGive your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.\nFor only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.\nAnd stand together, yet not too near together:\nFor the pillars of the temple stand apart,\nAnd the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-pain": { - "title": "“On Pain”", - "body": "And a woman spoke, saying, “Tell us of Pain.” And he said:\n\nYour pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.\nEven as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.\nAnd could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;\nAnd you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.\nAnd you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.\nMuch of your pain is self-chosen.\nIt is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.\nTherefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:\nFor his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,\nAnd the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-pleasure": { - "title": "“On Pleasure”", - "body": "Then a hermit, who visited the city once a year, came forth and said, “Speak to us of Pleasure.” And he answered, saying:\n\nPleasure is a freedom song,\nBut it is not freedom.\nIt is the blossoming of your desires,\nBut it is not their fruit.\nIt is a depth calling unto a height,\nBut it is not the deep nor the high.\nIt is the caged taking wing,\nBut it is not space encompassed.\nAy, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom-song.\nAnd I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.\nSome of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked.\nI would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek.\nFor they shall find pleasure, but not her alone:\nSeven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.\nHave you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?\nAnd some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness.\nBut regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.\nThey should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.\nYet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.\nAnd there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember;\nAnd in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.\nBut even in their foregoing is their pleasure.\nAnd thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.\nBut tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?\nShall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?\nAnd shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?\nThink you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?\nOftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.\nWho knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?\nEven your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.\nAnd your body is the harp of your soul,\nAnd it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.\nAnd now you ask in your heart, “How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?”\nGo to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,\nBut it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.\nFor to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,\nAnd to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,\nAnd to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.\nPeople of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-progress": { - "title": "“On Progress”", - "body": "How amazing time is, and how amazing we are. Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration.\nYesterday we complained of time and feared it, but today we love and embrace it. Indeed, we have begun to perceive its purposes and characteristics, and to comprehend its secrets and enigmas.\nYesterday we crawled apprehensively, like phantoms quaking between the terrors of night and the horrors of day. Today we stride zealously toward the summits of mountains, where raging storms ensconce themselves and blazing lightning and crashing thunder are engendered.\nYesterday we ate bread kneaded with blood and drank water mingled with tears. But today we dine on manna from the hands of dawn-sprites and sip wine fragrant with the breaths of spring.\nYesterday we were playthings in the hand of fate, and fate was a drunken tyrant, bending us to the right and then to the left. But today fate has sobered up, and we play with it and it plays back; we jest with it and it laughs; then we lead it and it follows behind us.\nYesterday we burned incense before graven images and immolated sacrifices before irascible gods. But today we light incense only for ourselves and offer sacrifices only to our own essences. For the greatest and most gloriously beautiful of deities has made his temple in our breasts.\nYesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to the truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.\nYesterday we humbly lowered our eyes before priests and dreaded the visions of oracles. But today the times have changed and we have changed, and we stare only at the countenance of the sun, listen only to the melodies of the sea, and tremble only with the typhoon.\nYesterday we demolished the thrones of our souls in order to build from them the tombs of our grandfathers. But today our souls have been transformed into holy altars, which the ghosts of dusty centuries cannot approach and the grizzled fingers of the dead cannot touch.\nWe were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble.\nWe were a faint spark buried in ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.\nHow many are the nights that we stayed up late, cradling our heads on the dirt with snow for a blanket, weeping for lost friendships and possessions. How many are the days we spent lying about like sheep without a shepherd, nibbling at our thoughts and chewing our emotions, remaining hungry and thirsty. How often we stood between waning day and onrushing night, mourning our fading youth, yearning for an unknown person, lonely for some obscure reason, staring at a dark, empty sky, listening to the groans of silence and nothingness.\nThose centuries passed, like a thieving wolf-pack through a cemetery, but today the sky has awakened and we have awakened. We spend white nights on celestial beds, staying up late with our imaginations, keeping our thoughts company and embracing our passions.\nFlames glimmer all around us, and we seize them with steady fingers; the spirits of genies ascend all around us, and we address them unequivocally. Hosts of the angels pass by us, and we entice them by the yearning in our hearts and make them drunk with the rhapsodies of our spirits.\nYesterday we were and today we have become, and this is the will of the gods for their children. What, then, is your will, scions of the apes?\nHave you advanced even one stride forward since you issued from fissures in the earth? Or have you lifted your gaze toward the heights since the demons opened your eyes? Have you pronounced a single word from the Book of Truth since the serpents kissed your mouths with theirs?\nOr have you listened even an instant to the song of life since death stopped up your ears? I have been passing by you for seven thousand years and have seen you metamorphose like insects in the corners of grottoes. Seven minutes ago I looked at you from behind the pane of my window and found you ambling in filthy alleyways, led by the devils of apathy, the chains of servitude shackling your feet and the wings of death fluttering above your heads. You are today as you were yesterday and shall remain tomorrow and thereafter, just as I saw you in the beginning.\nYesterday we were and today we have become, for this is the wont of the gods with the children of gods. What, then, is the way of apes with you, O scions of the apes?", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-reason-and-passion": { - "title": "“On Reason and Passion”", - "body": "And the priestess spoke again and said: “Speak to us of Reason and Passion.” And he answered saying:\n\nYour soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.\nWould that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.\nBut how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?\nYour reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.\nIf either your sails or our rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.\nFor reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.\nTherefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion; that it may sing;\nAnd let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.\nI would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house.\nSurely you would not honor one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both.\nAmong the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows--then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”\nAnd when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky,--then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”\nAnd since you are a breath In God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-rebellion-and-liberty": { - "title": "“On Rebellion and Liberty”", - "body": "When night fell and slumber draped its mantle over the face of the earth, I left my bed and walked toward the sea, saying to myself, “The sea sleeps not. And in the wakefulness of the sea is a balm for the spirit that does not rest.”\nI arrived at the shore, where the mists had rolled down from the mountain peaks and enveloped that locale the way a grey veil cloaks the face of a beautiful girl. I stood staring at the armies of waves, listening to their jubilant shouts, contemplating the eternal, clandestine powers that lay behind them--the powers that race with storms, rage alongside volcanoes, smile with the mouths of roses, and lilt with brooks.\nAfter a little while I looked around to find three apparitions sitting on a nearby boulder, the mists concealing yet not concealing them. I walked slowly toward them, as if some force in their being attracted me and subdued my will.\nWhen I had come within a few footsteps of them, I halted and stood staring at them fixedly, as though sorcery pervaded that place, blunting my determination and awakening the imagination latent in my spirit.\nAt that very moment one of the three arose and, in a voice that seemed to issue from the depths of the sea, he said, “Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. Love without beauty is like flowers without fragrance and fruit without seeds … Life, love, and beauty--three persons in one substance, independent, absolute, accepting no change or separation.” Having spoken these words, he sat down again in the same place.\nThe second phantom stood and, in a voice like the roar of floodwaters, he said, “Life without rebellion is like the seasons without spring. Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert … Life, rebellion, and truth--three persons in one substance, accepting no separation or alteration.”\nThe third specter now gained his feet and, in a voice like a thunderclap, he said, “Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. Liberty without thought is like a disturbed spirit … Life, liberty, and thought--three persons in one substance, eternal, never-ending, and unceasing.”\nAll three apparitions now arose, and with horrifying voices they said unanimously, “Love and what generates it. Rebellion and what creates it. Liberty and what nourishes it. Three manifestations of God. And God is the conscience of the rational world.”\nA silence fell then, replete with the rustling of unseen wings and the trembling of ethereal bodies. I closed my eyes, listening to the echo of the words I had heard.\nWhen I opened them and looked again, I saw only the sea, wrapped in a shroud of mist. I drew near to the boulder where the three apparitions had been sitting, and descried only a column of incense rising into the sky.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-teaching": { - "title": "“On Teaching”", - "body": "Then said a teacher, “Speak to us of Teaching.” And he said:\n\nNo man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of our knowledge.\nThe teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.\nIf he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.\nThe astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.\nThe musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.\nAnd he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.\nFor the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.\nAnd even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-wisdom": { - "title": "“On Wisdom”", - "body": "In the quiet of the night Wisdom came and stood beside my bed, gazing at me like a doting mother. She wiped away my tears and said, “I heard the cry of your soul and came to solace you. Open your heart to me, that I might fill it with light. Ask me, and I shall show you the path of truth.”\nI said, ‘Who am I, O Wisdom, and how did I arrive in this ghastly place? What are these powerful longings, numerous books, and eldritch markings?\nWhat are these thoughts that pass like a flock of doves? What is this speech, ordered in affection and scattered in delight? What are these consequences that sadden and enrapture, that embrace my spirit and besiege my heart? What are these eyes fixed upon me, that gaze upon my innermost self and ignore my pain? What are these voices mourning over my days, singing of my childhood? What is this youth, who plays with my desires, mock my sentiments, forgets the deeds of yesterday, rejoices in the trivialities of the moment, and loathes the tardiness of tomorrow? What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt? What is this earth, its mouth gaping to swallow bodies, whose bosom offers relief to the abode of ambition? What is this person who acquiesces in loving happiness, but accepts hell if he cannot attain it; who seeks the kiss of life and receives the blows of death; who buys a moment of pleasure with a year of regrets; who surrenders to the slumber and dreams that call to him; who walks along the canals of ignorance to the gulf of darkness?\nWhat are all these things, O Wisdom?’\nShe said, “You desire, O mortal, to view this world through the eyes of a god, and wish to comprehend the mysteries of the world to come by means of your human intellect; and this is the utmost folly. Go out into the open country, and you will find the bee hovering over flowers and the eagle picking apart its prey. Enter the house of your neighbor, and you will see a child bedazzled by the fire’s rays, while the mother busies herself with housework. Imitate the bee and do not spend the days of spring gazing upon the deeds of the eagle. Be as the child and delight in the flame’s brightness, and pay no heed to your mother and her affairs.”\n“All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit … This youth who plays with your desires is the very same person who opened the door of your heart so as to flood it with light. This earth with its gaping maw is the one who delivers you from bondage to your body. This world that hastens you is your heart, and your heart is all that you conceive of as a world. The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.”\nWisdom placed her hand on my feverish forehead and said, “Advance and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-work": { - "title": "“On Work”", - "body": "Then a plowman said, “Speak to us of Work.” And he answered, saying:\n\nYou work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.\nFor to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.\nWhen you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.\nWhich of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?\nAlways you have been told that work is a curse and a labor, a misfortune.\nBut I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,\nAnd in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life,\nAnd to love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.\nBut if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.\nYou have been told also life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.\nAnd I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,\nAnd all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,\nAnd all knowledge is vain save when there is work,\nAnd all work is empty save when there is love;\nAnd when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.\nAnd what is it to work with love?\nIt is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.\nIt is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.\nIt is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.\nIt is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,\nAnd to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.\nOften have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “he who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is a nobler than he who ploughs the soil.\nAnd he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”\nBut I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;\nAnd he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.\nWork is love made visible.\nAnd if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.\nFor if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.\nAnd if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.\nAnd if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "on-the-next-world": { - "title": "“On the Next World”", - "body": "My heart wearied within me, until it bad me farewell and journeyed to the Realm of Happiness in the next world. When it arrived at the shrine sanctified by the soul, it stood bewildered, for it did not witness there what it had so long envisioned. It saw not power, wealth, or sovereignty. It saw only the youth of beauty; his consort, the daughter of love; and their child, wisdom.\nMy heart addressed the daughter of love, saying “Where is contentment, love? For I have heard that the inhabitants of this place partake thereof.”\nShe replied, “Contentment has gone to preach in the city of overweening ambition, for we have no need of her. Happiness does not seek containment; rather, Happiness is a yearning that is embraced by union, whereas contentment is forgetfulness assailed by oblivion. The immortal soul is never contented, for it desires perfection and perfection in infinity.”\nMy heart addressed the youth of beauty, saying, “Reveal to me the mystery of woman, Beauty, and enlighten me, for you are knowledge.”\nHe replied, “She is you, the human heart, and whatever describes you describes her. She and I are one, and wherever I alight she descends. She is like religion uncorrupted by the ignorant, like the moon not veiled by clouds, like a breeze unadulterated by the breaths of depravity.”\nMy heart approached Wisdom, the daughter of Love and Beauty and said, “Give me wisdom, that I may convey it to humanity.”\nShe replied, “It is happiness, which begins in the soul’s holiest of holies and never comes from without.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Prophet", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "one-of-the-marys": { - "title": "“One of the Mary’s”", - "body": "His head was always high, and the flame of God was in His eyes.\nHe was often sad, but His sadness was tenderness shown to those in pain, and comradeship given to the lonely.\nWhen He smiled His smile was as the hunger of those who long after the unknown. It was like the dust of stars falling upon the eyelids of children. And it was like a morsel of bread in the throat.\nHe was sad, yet it was a sadness that would rise to the lips and become a smile.\nIt was like a golden veil in the forest when autumn is upon the world. And sometimes it seemed like moonlight upon the shores of the lake.\nHe smiled as if His lips would sing at the wedding-feast.\nYet He was sad with the sadness of the winged who will not soar above his comrade.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-other-wanderer": { - "title": "“The Other Wanderer”", - "body": "Once on a time I met another man of the roads. He too was a little mad, and thus spoke to me:\n“I am a wanderer. Oftentimes it seems that I walk the earth among pygmies. And because my head is seventy cubits farther from the earth than theirs, it creates higher and freer thoughts.”\n“But in truth I walk not among men but above them, and all they can see of me is my footprints in their open fields.”\n“And often have I heard them discuss and disagree over the shape and size of my footprints. For there are some who say, ‘These are the tracks of a mammoth that roamed the earth in the far past.’ And others say, ‘Nay, these are places where meteors have fallen from the distant stars.’”\n“But you, my friend, you know full well that they are naught save the footprints of a wanderer.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-path": { - "title": "“The Path”", - "body": "There lived among the hills a woman and her son, and he was her first-born and her only child.\nAnd the boy died of a fever whilst the physician stood by.\nThe mother was distraught with sorrow, and she cried to the physician and besought him saying, “Tell me, tell me, what was it that made quiet his striving and silent his song?”\nAnd the physician said, “It was the fever.”\nAnd the mother said, “What is the fever?”\nAnd the physician answered, “I cannot explain it. It is a thing infinitely small that visits the body, and we cannot see it with the human eye.”\nThe physician left her. And she kept repeating to herself, “Something infinitely small. We cannot see it with our human eye.”\nAnd at evening the priest came to console her. And she wept and she cried out saying, “Oh, why have I lost my son, my only son, my first-born?”\nAnd the priest answered, “My child, it is the will of God.”\nAnd the woman said, “What is God and where is God? I would see God that I may tear my bosom before Him, and pour the blood of my heart at His feet. Tell me where I shall find Him.”\nAnd the priest said, “God is infinitely vast. He is not to be seen with our human eye.”\nThen the woman cried out, “The infinitely small has slain my son through the will of the infinitely great! Then what are we? What are we?”\nAt that moment the woman’s mother came into the room with the shroud for the dead boy, and she heard the words of the priest and also her daughter’s cry. And she laid down the shroud, and took her daughter’s hand in her own hand, and she said, “My daughter, we ourselves are the infinitely small and the infinitely great; and we are the path between the two.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "peace-contagious": { - "title": "“Peace Contagious”", - "body": "One branch in bloom said to his neighboring branch, “This is a dull and empty day.” And the other brance answered, “It is indeed empty and dull.”\nAt that moment a sparrow alighted on one of the branches, and the another sparrow, nearby.\nAnd one of the sparrows chirped and said, “My mate has left me.”\nAnd the other sparrow cried, “My mate has also gone, and she will not return. And what care I?”\nThen the two birds began to twitter and scold, and soon they were fighting and making harsh noise upon the air.\nAll of a sudden two other sparrows came sailing from th sky, and they sat quietly beside the restless two. And there was calm, and there was peace.\nThen the four flew away together in pairs.\nAnd the first branch said to his neighboring branch, “That was a mighty zig-zag of sound.”\nAnd the other branch answered, “Call it what you will, it is now both peaceful and spacious. And if the upper air makes peace it seems to me that those who dwell in the lower might make peace also. Will you not wave in the wind a little nearer to me?”\nAnd the first branch said, “Oh, perchance, for peace’ sake, ere the Spring is over.”\nAnd then he waved himself with the strong wind to embrace her.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "peace-and-war": { - "title": "“Peace and War”", - "body": "Three dogs were basking in the sun and conversing. The first dog said dreamily, “It is indeed wondrous to be living in this day of dogdom. Consider the ease with which we travel under the sea, upon the earth and even in the sky. And meditate for a moment upon the inventions brought forth for the comfort of dogs, even for our eyes and ears and noses.”\nAnd the second dog spoke and he said, “We are more heedful of the arts. We bark at the moon more rhythmically than did our forefathers. And when we gaze at ourselves in the water we see that our features are clearer than the features of yesterday.”\nThen the third dog spoke and said, “But what interests me most and beguiles my mind is the tranquil understanding existing between dogdoms.”\nAt that very moment they looked, and lo, the dog-catcher was approaching.\nThe three dogs sprang up and scampered down the street; and as they ran the third dog said, “For God’s sake, run for your lives. Civilization is after us.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "peter-on-the-neighbor": { - "title": "“Peter on the Neighbor”", - "body": "Once in Capernaum my Lord and Master spoke thus:\n“Your neighbour is your other self dwelling behind a wall. In understanding, all walls shall fall down.”\n“Who knows but that your neighbour is your better self wearing another body? See that you love him as you would love yourself.”\n“He too is a manifestation of the Most High, whom you do not know.”\n“Your neighbour is a field where the springs of your hope walk in their green garments, and where the winters of your desire dream of snowy heights.”\n“Your neighbour is a mirror wherein you shall behold your countenance made beautiful by a joy which you yourself if not know, and by a sorrow you yourself did not share.”\n“I would have you love your neighbour even as I have loved you.”\nThen I asked Him saying, “How can I love a neighbour who loves me not, and who covets my property? One who would steal my possessions?”\nAnd He answered, “When you are ploughing and your manservant is sowing the seed behind you, would you stop and look backward and put to flight a sparrow feeding upon a few of your seeds? Should you do this, you were not worthy of the riches of your harvest.”\nWhen Jesus had said this, I was ashamed and I was silent. But I was not in fear, for He smiled upon me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_peter_and_paul" - } - } - }, - "peter": { - "title": "“Peter”", - "body": "Once at sundown Jesus led us into the village of Beithsaida. We were a tired company, and the dust of the road was upon us. And we came to a great house in the midst of a garden, and the owner stood at the gate.\nAnd Jesus said to him, “These men are weary and footsore. Let them sleep in your house. The night is cold and they are in need of warmth and rest.”\nAnd the rich man said, “They shall not sleep in my house.”\nAnd Jesus said, “Suffer them then to sleep in your garden.”\nAnd the man answered, “Nay, they shall not sleep in my garden.”\nThen Jesus turned to us and said, “This is what your tomorrow will be, and this present is like your future. All doors shall be closed in your face, and not even the gardens that lie under the stars may be your couch.”\n“Should your feet indeed be patient with the road and follow me, it may be you will find a basin and a bed, and perhaps bread and wine also. But if it should be that you find none of those things, forget not then that you have crossed one of my deserts.”\n“Come, let us go forth.”\nAnd the rich man was disturbed, and his face was changed, and he muttered to himself words that I did not hear; and he shrank away from us and turned into his garden.\nAnd we followed Jesus upon the road.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_peter_and_paul" - } - } - }, - "philip": { - "title": "“Philip”", - "body": "When our beloved died, all mankind died and all things for a space were still and gray. Then the east was darkened, and a tempest rushed out of it and swept the land. The eyes of the sky opened and shut, and the rain came down in torrents and carried away the blood that streamed from His hands and His feet.\nI too died. But in the depth of my oblivion I heard Him speak and say, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”\nAnd His voice sought my drowned spirit and I was brought back to the shore.\nAnd I opened my eyes and I saw His white body hanging against the cloud, and His words that I had heard took the shape within me and became a new man. And I sorrowed no more.\nWho would sorrow for a sea that is unveiling its face, or for a mountain that laughs in the sun?\nWas it ever in the heart of man, when that heart was pierced, to say such words?\nWhat other judge of men has released His judges? And did ever love challenge hate with power more certain of itself?\nWas ever such a trumpet heard ’twixt heaven and earth?\nWas it known before that the murdered had compassion on his murderers? Or that the meteor stayed his footsteps for the mole?\nThe seasons shall tire and the years grow old, ere they exhaust these words: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”\nAnd you and I, though born again and again, shall keep them.\nAnd now I would go into my house, and stand an exalted beggar, at His door.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_philip_and_james" - } - } - }, - "the-philosopher-and-the-cobbler": { - "title": "“The Philosopher and the Cobbler”", - "body": "There came to a cobbler’s shop a philosopher with worn shoes. And the philosopher said to the cobbler, “Please mend my shoes.”\nAnd the cobbler said, “I am mending another man’s shoes now, and there are still other shoes to patch before I can come to yours. But leave your shoes here, and wear this other pair today, and come tomorrow for your own.”\nThen the philosopher was indignant, and he said, “I wear no shoes that are not mine own.”\nAnd the cobbler said, “Well then, are you in truth a philosopher, and cannot enfold your feet with the shoes of another man? Upon this very street there is another cobbler who understands philosophers better than I do. Go you to him for mending.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "a-philosopher": { - "title": "“A Philosopher”", - "body": "When he was with us He gazed at us and at our world with eyes of wonder, for His eyes were not veiled with the veil of years, and all that He saw was clear in the light of His youth.\nThough He knew the depth of beauty, He was for ever surprised by its peace and its majesty; and He stood before the earth as the first man had stood before the first day.\nWe whose senses have been dulled, we gaze in full daylight and yet we do not see. We would cup our ears, but we do not hear; and stretch forth our hands, but we do not touch. And though all the incense of Arabia is burned, we go our way and do not smell.\nWe see not the ploughman returning from his field at eventide; nor hear the shepherd’s flute when he leads his flock to the fold, nor do we stretch our arms to touch the sunset; and our nostrils hunger no longer for the roses of Sharon.\nNay, we honor no kings without kingdoms; nor hear the sound of harps save when the strings are plucked by hands; nor do we see a child playing in our olive grove as if he were a young olive tree. And all words must needs rise from lips of flesh, or else we deem each other dumb and deaf.\nIn truth we gaze but do not see, and hearken but do not hear; we eat and drink but do not taste. And there lies the difference between Jesus of Nazareth and ourselves.\nHis senses were all continually made new, and the world to Him was always a new world.\nTo Him the lisping of a babe was not less than the cry of all mankind, while to us it is only lisping.\nTo Him the root of a buttercup was a longing towards God, while to us it is naught but a root.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "pilates-wife-to-a-roman-lady": { - "title": "“Pilate’s Wife to a Roman Lady”", - "body": "I was walking with my maidens in the groves outside of Jerusalem when I saw Him with a few men and women sitting about Him; and He was speaking to them in a language which I only half understood.\nBut one needs not a language to perceive a pillar of light or a mountain of crystal. The heart knows what the tongue may never utter and the ears may never hear.\nHe was speaking to His friends of love and srength. I know He spoke of love because there was melody in His voice; and I know He spoke of strength because there were armies in His gestures. And He was tender, though even my husband could not have spoken with such authority.\nWhen He saw me passing by He stopped speaking for a moment and looked kindly upon me. And I was humbled; and in my soul I knew I had passed by a god.\nAfter that day His image visited my privacy when I would not be visited by man or woman; and His eyes searched my soul when my own eyes were closed. And His voice governs the stillness of my nights.\nI am held fast forevermore; and there is peace in my pain, and freedom in my tears.\nBeloved friend, you have never seen that man, and you will never see Him.\nHe is gone beyond our senses, but of all men He is now the nearest to me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-plutocrat": { - "title": "“The Plutocrat”", - "body": "In my wanderings I once saw upon an island a man-headed, iron-hoofed monster who ate of the earth and drank of the sea incessantly. And for a long while I watched him. Then I approached him and said, “Have you never enough; is your hunger never satisfied and your thirst never quenched?”\nAnd he answered saying, “Yes, I am satisfied, nay, I am weary of eating and drinking; but I am afraid that tomorrow there will be no more earth to eat and no more sea to drink.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-pomegranates": { - "title": "“The Pomegranates”", - "body": "There was once a man who had many pomegranate trees in his orchard. And for many an autumn he would put his pomegranates on silvery trays outside of his dwelling, and upon the trays he would place signs upon which he himself had written, “Take one for aught. You are welcome.”\nBut people passed by and no one took of the fruit.\nThen the man bethought him, and one autumn he placed no pomegranates on silvery trays outside of his dwelling, but he raised this sign in large lettering: “Here we have th best pomegranates in the land, but we sell them for more silver than any other pomegranates.”\nAnd now behold, all the men and women of the neighborhood came rushing to buy.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-pomegranate": { - "title": "“The Pomegranate”", - "body": "Once when I was living in the heart of a pomegranate, I heard a seed saying, “Someday I shall become a tree, and the wind will sing in my branches, and the sun will dance on my leaves, and I shall be strong and beautiful through all the seasons.”\nThen another seed spoke and said, “When I was as young as you, I too held such views; but now that I can weigh and measure things, I see that my hopes were vain.”\nAnd a third seed spoke also, “I see in us nothing that promises so great a future.”\nAnd a fourth said, “But what a mockery our life would be, without a greater future!”\nSaid a fifth, “Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.”\nBut a sixth replied, “Whatever we are, that we shall continue to be.”\nAnd a seventh said, “I have such a clear idea how everything will be, but I cannot put it into words.”\nThen an eighth spoke--and a ninth--and a tenth--and then many--until all were speaking, and I could distinguish nothing for the many voices.\nAnd so I moved that very day into the heart of a quince, where the seeds are few and almost silent.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-prophet-and-the-child": { - "title": "“The Prophet and the Child”", - "body": "Once on a day the prophet Sharia met a child in a garden. The child ran to him and said, “Good morrow to you, Sir,” and the prophet said, “Good morrow to you, Sir.” And in a moment, “I see that you are alone.”\nThen the child said, in laughter and delight, “It took a long time to lose my nurse. She thinks I am behind those hedges; but can’t you see that I am here?” Then he gazed at the prophet’s face and spoke again. “You are alone, too. What did you do with your nurse?”\nThe prophet answered and said, “Ah, that is a different thing. In very truth I cannot lose her oftentime. But now, when I came into this garden, she was seeking after me behind the hedges.”\nThe child clapped his hands and cried out, “So you are like me! Isn’t it good to be lost?” And then he said, “Who are you?”\nAnd the man answered, “They call me the prophet Sharia. And tell me, who are you?”\n“I am only myself,” said the child, “and my nurse is seeking after me, and she does not know where I am.”\nThen the prophet gazed into space saying, “I too have escaped my nurse for awhile, but she will find me out.”\nAnd the child said, “I know mine will find me out too.”\nAt that moment a woman’s voice was heard calling the child’s name, “See,” said the child, “I told you she would be finding me.”\nAnd at the same moment another voice was heard, “Where art thou, Sharia?”\nAnd the prophet said, “See my child, they have found me also.”\nAnd turning his face upward, Sharia answered, “Here I am.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-quest": { - "title": "“The Quest”", - "body": "A thousand years ago two philosophers met on a slope of Lebanon, and one said to the other, “Where goest thou?”\nAnd the other answered, “I am seeking after the fountain of youth which I know wells out among these hills. I have found writings which tell of that fountain flowering toward the sun. And you, what are you seeking?”\nThe first man answered, “I am seeking after the mystery of death.”\nThen each of the two philosophers conceived that the other was lacking in his great science, and they began to wrangle, and to accuse each other of spiritual blindness.\nNow while the two philosophers were loud upon the wind, a stranger, a man who was deemed a simpleton in his own village, passed by, and when he heard the two in hot dispute, he stood awhile and listened to their arguement.\nThen he came near to them and said, “My good men, it seems that you both really belong to the same school of philosophy, and that you are speaking of the same thing, only you speak in different words. One of you is seeks the fountain of youth, and the other seeks the mystery of death. Yet indeed they are but one, and as they dwell in you both.”\nThen the stranger turned away saying, “Farewell sages.” And as he departed he laughed a patient laughter.\nThe two philosophers looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then they laughed also. And one of them said, “Well now, shall we not walk and seek together.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "rafca": { - "title": "“Rafca”", - "body": "This happened before He was known to the people.\nI was in my mother’s garden tending the rose-bushes, when He stopped at our gate.\nAnd He said, “I am thirsty. Will you give me water from your well?”\nAnd I ran and brought the silver cup, and filled it with water; and I poured into it a few drops from the jasmine vial.\nAnd He drank deep and was pleased.\nThen He looked into my eyes and said, “My blessing shall be upon you.”\nWhen He said that I felt as it were a gust of wind rushing through my body. And I was no longer shy; and I said, “Sir, I am betrothed to a man of Cana in Galilee. And I shall be married on the fourth day of the coming week. Will you not come to my wedding and grace my marriage with your presence?”\nAnd He answered, “I will come, my child.”\nMind you, He said, “My child,” yet He was but a youth, and I was nearly twenty.\nThen He walked on down the road.\nAnd I stood at the gate of our garden until my mother called me into the house.\nOn the fourth day of the following week I was taken to the house of my bridegroom and given in marriage.\nAnd Jesus came, and with Him His mother and His brother James.\nAnd they sat around the wedding-board with our guests whilst my maiden comrades sang the wedding-songs of Solomon the King. And Jesus ate our food and drank our wine and smiled upon me and upon the others.\nAnd He heeded all the songs of the lover bringing his beloved into his tent; and of the young vineyard-keeper who loved the daughter of the lord of the vineyard and led her to his mother’s house; and of the prince who met the beggar maiden and bore her to his realm and crowned her with the crown of his fathers.\nAnd it seemed as if He were listening to yet other songs also, which I could not hear.\nAt sundown the father of my bridegroom came to the mother of Jesus and whispered saying, “We have no more wine for our guests. And the day is not yet over.”\nAnd Jesus heard the whispering, and He said, “The cup bearer knows that there is still more wine.”\nAnd so it was indeed--and as long as the guests remained there was fine wine for all who would drink.\nPresently Jesus began to speak with us. He spoke of the wonders of earth and heaven; of sky flowers that bloom when night is upon the earth, and of earth flowers that blossom when the day hides the stars.\nAnd He told us stories and parables, and His voice enchanted us so that we gazed upon Him as if seeing visions, and we forgot the cup and the plate.\nAnd as I listened to Him it seemed as if I were in a land distant and unknown.\nAfter a while one of the guests said to the father of my bridegroom, “You have kept the best wine till the end of the feast. Other hosts do not so.”\nAnd all believed that Jesus had wrought a miracle, that they should have more wine and better at the end of the wedding-feast than at the beginning.\nI too thought that Jesus had poured the wine, but I was not astonished; for in His voice I had already listened to miracles.\nAnd afterwards indeed, His voice remained close to my heart, even until I had been delivered of my first-born child.\nAnd now even to this day in our village and in the villages near by, the word of our guest is still remembered. And they say, “The spirit of Jesus of Nazareth is the best and the oldest wine.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "a-rich-levi-in-the-neighborhood-of-the-nazarene": { - "title": "“A Rich Levi in the Neighborhood of the Nazarene”", - "body": "He was a good carpenter. The doors He fashioned were never unlocked by thieves, and the windows he made were always ready to open to the east wind and to the west.\nAnd He made chests of cedar wood, polished and enduring, and ploughs and pitchforks strong and yielding to the hand.\nAnd He carved lecterns for our synagogues. He carved them out of the golden mulberry; and on both sides of the support, where the sacred book lies, He chiselled wings outspreading; and under the support, heads of bulls and doves, and large-eyed deer.\nAll this He wrought in the manner of the Chaldeans and the Greeks. But there was that in His skill which was neither Chaldean nor Greek.\nNow this my house was builded by many hands thirty years ago. I sought builders and carpenters in all the towns of Galilee. They had each the skill and the art of building, and I was pleased and satisfied with all that they did.\nBut come now, and behold two doors and a window that were fashioned by Jesus of Nazareth. They in their stability mock at all else in my house.\nSee you not that these two doors are different from all other doors? And this window opening to the east, is it not different from other windows?\nAll my doors and windows are yielding to the years save these which He made. They alone stand strong against the elements.\nAnd see those cross-beams, how he placed them; and these nails, how they are driven from one side of the board, and then caught and fastened so firmly upon the other side.\nAnd what is passing strange is that that labourer who was worthy the wages of two men received but the wage of one man; and that same labourer now is deemed a prophet in Israel.\nHad I known then that this youth with saw and plane was a prophet, I would have begged Him to speak rather than work, and then I would have overpaid Him for his words.\nAnd now I still have many men working in my house and fields. How shall I know the man whose own hand is upon his tool, from the man upon whose hand God lays His hand?\nYea, how shall I know God’s hand?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-river": { - "title": "“The River”", - "body": "In the valley of Kadisha where the mighty river flows, two little streams met and spoke to one another.\nOne stream said, “How came you, my friend, and how was your path?”\nAnd the other answered, “My path was most encumbered. The wheel of the mill was broken, and the master farmer who used to conduct me from my channel to his plants, is dead. I struggled down oozing with the filth of laziness in the sun. But how was your path, my brother?”\nAnd the other stream answered and said, “Mine was a different path. I came down the hills among fragrant flowers and shy willows; men and women drank of me with silvery cups, and little children paddled their rosy feet at my edges, and there was laughter all about me, and there were sweet songs. What a pity that your path was not so happy.”\nAt that moment the river spoke with a loud voice and said, “Come in, come in, we are going to the sea. Come in, come in, speak no more. Be with me now. We are going to the sea. Come in, come in, for in me you shall forget you wanderings, sad or gay. Come in, come in. And you and I will forget all our ways when we reach the heart of our mother the sea.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-saint": { - "title": "“The Saint”", - "body": "In my youth I once visited a saint in his silent grove beyond the hills; and as we were conversing upon the nature of virtue a brigand came limping wearily up the ridge. When he reached the grove he knelt down before the saint and said, “O saint, I would be comforted! My sins are heavy upon me.”\nAnd the saint replied, “My sins, too, are heavy upon me.”\nAnd the brigand said, “But I am a thief and a plunderer.”\nAnd the saint replied, “I too am a thief and a plunderer.”\nAnd the brigand said, “But I am a murderer, and the blood of many men cries in my ears.”\nAnd the saint replied, “I am a murderer, and in my ears cries the blood of many men.”\nAnd the brigand said, “I have committed countless crimes.”\nAnd the saint replied, “I too have committed crimes without number.”\nThen the brigand stood up and gazed at the saint, and there was a strange look in his eyes. And when he left us he went skipping down the hill.\nAnd I turned to the saint and said, “Wherefore did you accuse yourself of uncommitted crimes? See you not this man went away no longer believing in you?”\nAnd the saint answered, “It is true he no longer believes in me. But he went away much comforted.”\nAt that moment we heard the brigand singing in the distance, and the echo of his song filled the valley with gladness.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-shadow": { - "title": "“The Shadow”", - "body": "Upon a June day the grass said to the shadow of an elm tree, “You move to right and left over-often, and you disturb my peace.”\nAnd the shadow answered and said, “Not I, not I. Look skyward. There is a tree that moves in the wind to the east and to the west, between the sun and the earth.”\nAnd the grass looked up, and for the first time beheld the tree. And it said in its heart, “Why, behold, there is a larger grass than myself.”\nAnd the grass was silent.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "she-who-was-deaf": { - "title": "“She Who Was Deaf”", - "body": "Once there lived a rich man who had a young wife, and she was stone deaf.\nAnd upon a morning when they were breaking their feast, she spoke to him and she said, “Yesterday I visited the market place, and there were exibited silken raiment from Damascus, and coverchiefs from India, necklaces from Persia, and bracelets from Yamman. It seems that the caravans had but just brought these things to our city. And now behold me, in rags, yet the wife of a rich man. I would have some of those beautiful things.”\nThe husband, still busy with his morning coffee said, “My dear, there is no reason why you should not go down to the Street and buy all that your heart may desire.”\nAnd the deaf wife said, “‘No!’ You always say, ‘No, no.’ Must I needs appear in tatters among our friends to shame your wealth and my people?”\nAnd the husband said, “I did not say, ‘No.’ You may go forth freely to the market place and purchase the most beautiful apparel and jewels that have come to our city.”\nBut again the wife mis-read his words, and she replied, “Of all rich men you are the most miserly. You would deny me everything of beauty and loveliness, while other women of my age walk the gardens of the city clothed in rich raiment.”\nAnd she began to weep. And as her tears fell upon her breast she cried out again, “You always say, ‘Nay, nay’ to me when I desire a garment or a jewel.”\nThen the husband was moved, and he stood up and took out of his purse a handful of gold and placed it before her, saying in a kindly voice, “Go down to the market place, my dear, and buy all that you will.”\nFrom that day onward the deaf young wife, whenever she desired anything, would appear before her husband with a pearly tear in her eye, and he in silence would take out a handful of gold and place it in her lap.\nNow, it changed that the young woman fell in love with a youth whose habit it was to make long journeys. And whenever he was away she would sit in her casement and weep.\nWhen her husband found her thus weeping, he would say in his heart, “There must be some new caraven, and some silken garments and rare jewels in the Street.”\nAnd he would take a handful of gold and place it before her.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "a-shepherd-in-south-lebanon": { - "title": "“A Shepherd in South Lebanon”", - "body": "It was late summer when He and three other men first walked upon that road yonder. It was evening, and He stopped and stood there at the end of the pasture.\nI was playing upon my flute, and my flock was grazing all around me. When He stopped I rose and walked over and stood before Him.\nAnd He asked me, “Where is the grave of Elijah? Is it not somewhere near this place?”\nAnd I answered Him, “It is there, Sir, underneath that great heap of stones. Even unto this day every passer-by brings a stone and places it upon the heap.”\nAnd He thanked me and walked away, and His friends walked behind Him.\nAnd after three days Ganaliel who was also a shepherd, said to me that the man who had passed by was a prophet in Judea; but I did not believe him. Yet I thought of that man for many a moon.\nWhen spring came Jesus passed once more by this pasture, and this time He was alone.\nI was not playing on my flute that day for I had lost a sheep and I was bereaved, and my heart was downcast within me.\nAnd I walked towards Him and stood still before Him, for I desired to be comforted.\nAnd He looked at me and said, “You do not play upon your flute this day. Whence is the sorrow in your eyes?”\nAnd I answered, “A sheep from among my sheep is lost. I have sought her everywhere but I find her not. And I know not what to do.”\nAnd He was silent for a moment. Then He smiled upon me and said, “Wait here awhile and I will find your sheep.” And He walked away and disappeared among the hills.\nAfter an hour He returned, and my sheep was close behind Him. And as He stood before me, the sheep looked up into His face even as I was looking. Then I embraced her inn gladness.\nAnd He put His hand upon my shoulder and said, “From this day you shall love this sheep more than any other in your flock, for she was lost and now she is found.”\nAnd again I embraced my sheep in gladness, and she came close to me, and I was silent.\nBut when I raised my head to thank Jesus, He was already walking afar off, and I had not the courage to follow Him.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "simon-the-cyrene": { - "title": "“Simon the Cyrene”", - "body": "I was on my way to the fields when I saw Him carrying His cross; and multitudes were following Him.\nThen I too walked beside Him.\nHis burden stopped Him many a time, for His body was exhausted.\nThen a Roman soldier approached me, saying, “Come, you are strong and firm built; carry the cross of this man.”\nWhen I heard these words my heart swelled within me and I was grateful.\nAnd I carried His cross.\nIt was heavy, for it was made of poplar soaked through with the rains of winter.\nAnd Jesus looked at me. And the sweat of His forehead was running down upon His beard.\nAgain He looked at me and He said, “Do you too drink this cup? You shall indeed sip its rim with me to the end of time.”\nSo saying He placed His hand upon my free shoulder. And we walked together towards the Hill of the Skull.\nBut now I felt not the weight of the cross. I felt only His hand. And it was like the wing of a bird upon my shoulder.\nThen we reached the hill top, and there they were to crucify Him.\nAnd then I felt the weight of the tree.\nHe uttered no word when they drove the nails into His hands and feet, nor made He any sound.\nAnd His limbs did not quiver under the hammer.\nIt seemed as if His hands and feet had died and would only live again when bathed in blood. Yet it seemed also as if He sought the nails as the prince would seek the sceptre; and that He craved to be raised to the heights.\nAnd my heart did not think to pity Him, for I was too filled to wonder.\nNow, the man whose cross I carried has become my cross.\nShould they say to me again, “Carry the cross of this man,” I would carry it till my road ended at the grave.\nBut I would beg Him to place His hand upon my shoulder.\nThis happened many years ago; and still whenever I follow the furrow in the field, and in that drowsy moment before sleep, I think always of that Beloved Man.\nAnd I feel His winged hand, here, on my left shoulder.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "thomas": { - "title": "“Thomas”", - "body": "My grandfather who was a lawyer once said, “Let us observe truth, but only when truth is made manifest unto us.”\nWhen Jesus called me I heeded Him, for His command was more potent than my will; yet I kept my counsel.\nWhen He spoke and the others were swayed like branches in the wind, I listened immovable. Yet I loved Him.\nThree years ago He left us, a scattered company to sing His name, and to be His witnesses unto the nations.\nAt that time I was called Thomas the Doubter. The shadow of my grandfather was still upon me, and always I would have truth made manifest.\nI would even put my hand in my own wound to feel the blood ere I would believe in my pain.\nNow a man who loves with his heart yet holds a doubt in his mind, is but a slave in a galley who sleeps at his oar and dreams of his freedom, till the lash of the master wakes him.\nI myself was that slave, and I dreamed of freedom, but the sleep of my grandfather was upon me. My flesh needed the whip of my own day.\nEven in the presence of the Nazarene I had closed my eyes to see my hands chained to the oar.\nDoubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.\nDoubt is a foundling unhappy and astray, and though his own mother who gave him birth should find him and enfold him, he would withdraw in caution and in fear.\nFor Doubt will not know truth till his wounds are healed and restored.\nI doubted Jesus until He made Himself manifest to me, and thrust my own hand into His very wounds.\nThen indeed I believed, and after that I was rid of my yesterday and the yesterdays of my forefathers.\nThe dead in me buried their dead; and the living shall live for the Anointed King, even for Him who was the Son of Man.\nYesterday they told me that I must go and utter His name among the Persians and the Hindus.\nI shall go. And from this day to my last day, at dawn and at eventide, I shall see my Lord rising in majesty and I shall hear Him speak.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_thomas_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "the-two-guardian-angels": { - "title": "“The Two Guardian Angels”", - "body": "On an evening two angels met at the city gate, and they greeted one another, and they conversed.\nThe one angel said, “What are you doing these days, and what work is given you?”\nAnd the other answered, “It was been assigned me to be the guardian of a fallen man who lives down in the valley, a great sinner, most degraded. Let me assure you it is an important task, and I work hard.”\nThe first fallen angel said, “That is an easy commission. I have often known sinners, and have been their guardian many a time. But it has now been assigned me to be the guardian of the good saint who lives in a bower out yonder. And I assure you that is an exceedingly difficult work, and most subtle.”\nSaid the first angel, “This is but assumption. How can guarding a saint be harder than guarding a sinner?”\nAnd the other answered, “What impertinence, to call me assumptious! I have stated but the truth. Methinks it is you who are assumptious!”\nThen the angels wrangled and fought, first with words and then with fists and wings.\nWhile they were fighting an archangel came by. And he stopped them, and said, “Why do you fight? And what is it all about? Know you not that it is most unbecoming for guardian angels to fight at the city gate? Tell me, what is your disagreement?”\nThen both angels spoke at once, each claiming that the work given him was the harder, and that he deserved the greater recognition.\nThe archangel shook his head and bethought him.\nThen he said, “My friends, I cannot say now which one of you has the greater claim upon honor and reward. But since the power is bestowed in me, therefore for peace’ sake and for good guardianship, I give each of you the other’s occupation, since each of you insists that the other’s task is the easier one. Now go hence and be happy at your work.”\nThe angels thus ordered went their ways. But each one looked backward with greater anger at the archangel. And in his heart each was saying, “Oh, these archangels! Every day they make life harder and still harder for us angels!”\nBut the archangel stood there, and once more he bethought him. And he said in his heart, “We have indeed, to be watchful and to keep guard over our guardian angels.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "guardian_angels" - } - } - }, - "the-two-hunters": { - "title": "“The Two Hunters”", - "body": "Upon a day in May, Joy and Sorrow met beside a lake. They greeted one another, and they sat down near the quiet waters and conversed.\nJoy spoke of the beauty which is upon the earth, and the daily wonder of life in the forest and among the hills, and of the songs heard at dawn and eventide.\nAnd sorrow spoke, and agreed with all that Joy had said; for Sorrow knew the magic of the hour and the beauty thereof. And Sorrow was eloquent when he spoke of may in the fields and among the hills.\nAnd Joy and Sorrow talked long together, and they agreed upon all things of which they knew.\nNow there passed by on the other side of the lake two hunters. And as they looked across the water one of them said, “I wonder who are those two persons?” And the other said, “Did you say two? I see only one.”\nThe first hunter said, “But there are two.” And the second said, “There is only one that I can see, and the reflection in the lake is only one.”\n“Nay, there are two,” said the first hunter, “and the reflection in the still water is of two persons.”\nBut the second man said again, “Only one do I see.” And again the other said, “But I see two so plainly.”\nAnd even unto this day one hunter says that the other sees double; while the other says, “My friend is somewhat blind.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-two-learned-men": { - "title": "“The Two Learned Men”", - "body": "Once there lived in the ancient city of Afkar two learned men who hated and belittled each other’s learning. For one of them denied the existence of the gods and the other was a believer.\nOne day the two met in the market-place, and amidst their followers they began to dispute and to argue about the existence or the non-existence of the gods. And after hours of contention they parted.\nThat evening the unbeliever went to the temple and prostrated himself before the altar and prayed the gods to forgive his wayward past.\nAnd the same hour the other learned man, he who had upheld the gods, burned his sacred books. For he had become an unbeliever.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-two-poems": { - "title": "“The Two Poems”", - "body": "Many centuries ago, on a road to Athens, two poets met, and they were glad to see one another.\nAnd one poet asked the other saying, “What have you composed of late, and how goes it with your lyre?”\nAnd the other poet answered and said with pride, “I have but now finished the greatest of my poems, perchance the greatest poem yet written in Greek. It is an invocation to Zeus the Supreme.”\nThen he took from beneath his cloak a parchment, saying, “Here, behold, I have it with me, and I would fain read it to you. Come, let us sit in the shade of that white cypress.”\nAnd the poet read his poem. And it was a long poem.\nAnd the other poet said in kindliness, “This is a great poem. It will live through the ages, and in it you shall be glorified.”\nAnd the first poet said calmly, “And what have you been writing these late days?”\nAnd the other another, “I have written but little. Only eight lines in remembrance of a child playing in a garden.” And he recited the lines.\nThe first poet said, “Not so bad; not so bad.”\nAnd they parted.\nAnd now after two thousand years the eight lines of the one poet are read in every tongue, and are loved and cherished.\nAnd though the other poem has indeed come down through the ages in libraries and in the cells of scholars, and though it is remembered, it is neither loved nor read.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-two-princesses": { - "title": "“The Two Princesses”", - "body": "In the city of Shawakis lived a prince, and he was loved by everyone, men and women and children. Even the animals of the field came unto him in greeting.\nBut all the people said that his wife, the princess, loved him not; nay, that she even hated him.\nAnd upon a day the princess of a neighboring city came to visit the princess of Shawakis. And they sat and talked together, and their words led to their husbands.\nAnd the princess of Sharakis said with passion, “I envy you your happiness with the prince, your husband, though you have been married these many years. I hate my husband. He belongs not to me alone, and I am indeed a woman most unhappy.”\nThen the visiting princess gazed at her and said, “My friend, the truth is that you love your husband. Aye, and you still have him for a passion unspent, and that is life in woman like unto Spring in a garden. But pity me, and my husband, for we do but endure one another in silent patience. And yet you and others deem this happiness.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "the-wanderer": { - "title": "“The Wanderer”", - "body": "I met him at the crossroads, a man with but a cloak and a staff, and a veil of pain upon his face. And we greeted one another, and I said to him, “Come to my house and be my guest.”\nAnd he came.\nMy wife and my children met us at the threshold, and he smiled at them, and they loved his coming.\nThen we all sat together at the board and we were happy with the man for there was a silence and a mystery in him.\nAnd after supper we gathered to the fire and I asked him about his wanderings.\nHe told us many a tale that night and also the next day, but what I now record was born out of the bitterness of his days though he himself was kindly, and these tales are of the dust and patience of his road.\nAnd when he left us after three days we did not feel that a guest had departed but rather that one of us was still out in the garden and had not yet come in.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "war-and-the-small-nations": { - "title": "“War and the Small Nations”", - "body": "Once, high above a pasture, where a sheep and a lamb were grazing, an eagle was circling and gazing hungrily down upon the lamb. And as he was about to descend and seize his prey, another eagle appeared and hovered above the sheep and her young with the same hungry intent. Then the two rivals began to fight, filling the sky with their fierce cries.\nThe sheep looked up and was much astonished. She turned to the lamb and said, “How strange, my child, that these two noble birds should attack one another. Is not the vast sky large enough for both of them? Pray, my little one, pray in your heart that God may make peace between your winged brothers.”\nAnd the lamb prayed in his heart.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "when-my-sorrow-was-born": { - "title": "“When My Sorrow Was Born”", - "body": "When my sorrow was born I nursed it with care, and watched over it with loving tenderness.\nAnd my Sorrow grew like all living things, strong and beautiful and full of wondrous delights.\nAnd we loved one another, my Sorrow and I, and we loved the world about us; for Sorrow had a kindly heart and mine was kindly with Sorrow.\nAnd when we conversed, my Sorrow and I, our days were winged and our nights were girdled with dreams; for Sorrow had an eloquent tongue, and mine was eloquent with Sorrow.\nAnd when we sang together, my Sorrow and I, our neighbors sat at their windows and listenend; for our songs were deep as the sea and our melodies were full of strange memories.\nAnd when we walked together, my Sorrow and I, people gazed at us with gentle eyes and whispered in words of exceeding sweetness. And there were those who looked with envy upon us, for Sorrow was a noble thing and I was proud with Sorrow.\nBut my Sorrow died, like all living things, and alone I am left to muse and ponder.\nAnd now when I speak my words fall heavily upon my ears.\nAnd when I sing my songs my neighbours come not to listen.\nAnd when I walk the streets no one looks at me.\nOnly in my sleep I hear voices saying in pity, “See, there lies the man whose Sorrow is dead.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Madman", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "yesterday-today-and-tomorrow": { - "title": "“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”", - "body": "I said to my friend, “You see her leaning upon the arm of that man. It was but yesterday that she leaned thus upon my arm.”\nAnd my friend said, “And tomorrow she will lean upon mine.”\nI said, “Behold her sitting close at his side. It was but yesterday she sat close beside me.”\nAnd he answered, “Tomorrow she will sit beside me.”\nI said, “See, she drinks wine from his cup, and yesterday she drank from mine.”\nAnd he said, “Tomorrow, from my cup.”\nThen I said, “See how she gazes at him with love, and with yielding eyes. Yesterday she gazed thus upon me.”\nAnd my friend said, “It will be upon me she gazes tomorrow.”\nI said, “Do you not hear her now murmuring songs of love into his ears? Those very songs of love she murmured but yesterday into my ears.”\nAnd my friend said, “And tomorrow she will murmur them in mine.”\nI said, “Why see, she is embracing him. It was but yesterday that she embraced me.”\nAnd my friend said, “She will embrace me tomorrow.”\nThen I said, “What a strange woman.”\nBut he answered, “She is like unto life, possessed by all men; and like death, she conquers all men; and like eternity, she enfolds all men.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Wanderer", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "zacchaeus": { - "title": "“Zacchaeus”", - "body": "You believe in what you hear said. Believe in the unsaid, for the silence of men is nearer the truth than their words.\nYou ask if Jesus could have escaped His shameful death and saved His followers from persecution.\nI answer, He could indeed have escaped had He chosen, but He did not seek safety nor was He mindful of protecting His flock from wolves of the night.\nHe knew His fate and the morrow of His constant lovers. He foretold and prophesied what should befall every one of us. He sought not His death; but He accepted death as a husband-man shrouding his corn with earth, accepts the winter, and then awaits the spring and harvest; and as a builder lays the largest stone in the foundation.\nWe were men of Galilee and from the slopes of Lebanon. Our Master could have led us back to our country, to live with His youth in our gardens until old age should come and whisper us back into the years.\nWas anything barring His path back to the temples of our villages where others were reading the prophets and then disclosing their hearts?\nCould He not have said, “Now I go east with the west wind,” and so saying dismiss us with a smile upon His lips?\nAye, He could have said, “Go back to your kin. The world is not ready for me. I shall return a thousand years hence. Teach your children to await my return.”\nHe could have done this had He so chosen.\nBut He knew that to build the temple invisible He must needs lay Himself the corner-stone, and lay us around as little pebbles cemented close to Himself.\nHe knew that the sap of His tree must rise from its roots, and He poured His blood upon its roots; and to Him it was not sacrifice but rather gain.\nDeath is the revealer. The death of Jesus revealed His life.\nHad He escaped you and His enemies, you would have been the conquerors of the world. Therefore He did not escape.\nOnly He who desires all shall give all.\nAye, Jesus could have escaped His enemies and lived to old age. But He knew the passing of the seasons, and He would sing His song.\nWhat man facing the armed world would not be conquered for the moment that he might overcome the ages?\nAnd now you ask who, in very truth, slew Jesus, the Romans or the priests of Jerusalem?\nNeither the Romans slew Him, nor the priests. The whole world stood to honour Him upon that hill.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Jesus, The Son of Man", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - } - } - }, - "jack-gilbert": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jack Gilbert", - "birth": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2012 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Gilbert", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "a-brief-for-the-defense": { - "title": "“A Brief for the Defense”", - "body": "Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies\nare not starving someplace, they are starving\nsomewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.\nBut we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.\nOtherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not\nbe made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not\nbe fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women\nat the fountain are laughing together between\nthe suffering they have known and the awfulness\nin their future, smiling and laughing while somebody\nin the village is very sick. There is laughter\nevery day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,\nand the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.\nIf we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,\nwe lessen the importance of their deprivation.\nWe must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,\nbut not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have\nthe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless\nfurnace of this world. To make injustice the only\nmeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.\nIf the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,\nwe should give thanks that the end had magnitude.\nWe must admit there will be music despite everything.\nWe stand at the prow again of a small ship\nanchored late at night in the tiny port\nlooking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront\nis three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.\nTo hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat\ncomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth\nall the years of sorrow that are to come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-great-fires": { - "title": "“The Great Fires”", - "body": "Love is apart from all things.\nDesire and excitement are nothing beside it.\nIt is not the body that finds love.\nWhat leads us there is the body.\nWhat is not love provokes it.\nWhat is not love quenches it.\nLove lays hold of everything we know.\nThe passions which are called love\nalso change everything to a newness\nat first. Passion is clearly the path\nbut does not bring us to love.\nIt opens the castle of our spirit\nso that we might find the love which is\na mystery hidden there.\nLove is one of many great fires.\nPassion is a fire made of many woods,\neach of which gives off its special odor\nso we can know the many kinds\nthat are not love. Passion is the paper\nand twigs that kindle the flames\nbut cannot sustain them. Desire perishes\nbecause it tries to be love.\nLove is eaten away by appetite.\nLove does not last, but it is different\nfrom the passions that do not last.\nLove lasts by not lasting.\nIsaiah said each man walks in his own fire\nfor his sins. Love allows us to walk\nin the sweet music of our particular heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "horses-at-midnight-without-a-moon": { - "title": "“Horses at Midnight without a Moon”", - "body": "Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.\nOur dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.\nBut there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down\nbut the angel flies up again taking us with her.\nThe summer mornings begin inch by inch\nwhile we sleep, and walk with us later\nas long-legged beauty through\nthe dirty streets. It is no surprise\nthat danger and suffering surround us.\nWhat astonishes is the singing.\nWe know the horses are there in the dark\nmeadow because we can smell them,\ncan hear them breathing.\nOur spirit persists like a man struggling\nthrough the frozen valley\nwho suddenly smells flowers\nand realizes the snow is melting\nout of sight on top of the mountain,\nknows that spring has begun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-imagine-the-gods": { - "title": "“I Imagine the Gods”", - "body": "I imagine the gods saying, We will\nmake it up to you. We will give you\nthree wishes, they say. Let me see\nthe squirrels again, I tell them.\nLet me eat some of the great hog\nstuffed and roasted on its giant spit\nand put out, steaming, into the winter\nof my neighborhood when I was usually\ntoo broke to afford even the hundred grams\nI ate so happily walking up the cobbles,\npast the Street of the Moon\nand the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,\nthe Street of Silence and the Street\nof the Little Pissing. We can give you\nwisdom, they say in their rich voices.\nLet me go at last to Hugette, I say,\nthe Algerian student with her huge eyes\nwho timidly invited me to her room\nwhen I was too young and bewildered\nthat first year in Paris.\nLet me at least fail at my life.\nThink, they say patiently, we could\nmake you famous again. Let me fall\nin love one last time, I beg them.\nTeach me mortality, frighten me\ninto the present. Help me to find\nthe heft of these days. That the nights\nwill be full enough and my heart feral.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "loneliness": { - "title": "“Loneliness”", - "body": "It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees\nalong the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.\nIn southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.\nNow it waits in New England while I say grace over\nalmost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,\nthe sing light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,\nand because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets\nare exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side\nwith barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.\nThe heart is a foreign country whose language none\nof us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,\nbut already it looks discarded as the birds return\nand sing carelessly; as though there never was the power\nor size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.\nMy life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing\nand my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-sirens-again": { - "title": "“The Sirens Again”", - "body": "What am I to do with loveliness?\nI got past that singing early\nTo reach this honest severity.\nNow I farm the stone and reality\nWith ease. And consider those voices.\nNot to go back. But to resist\nThe security of easy pain.\nAnd the false purity of mountains.\nTo proceed. Into even the confusion\nOf beauty. To risk pleasure,\nAnd confront delight as triumph.\nAll of us have been\nIn the Children’s Crusade. Trusted,\nBeen sold bad boats, and gone under.\nBut who would survive so far,\nTo a beginning, merely to be\nThe veteran in a southern town\nFashionably maimed and grim.\n\nI hear them carol at night.\nAnd need to go on. Maybe\nTo come on those girls from inland.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-is-there-to-say": { - "title": "“What is There to Say”", - "body": "What do they say each new morning\nin heaven? They would\nweary of one always\nsinging how green the\ngreen trees are in\nParadise.\n\nSurely it would seem convention\nand affectation\nto rejoice every time\nHelen went by, since\nshe would have gone\ndaily by.\n\nWhat can I say then if each time\nyour whiteness glimmers\nand fashions in that dark?\nIf each time your voice\nopens so near\nin that dark\n\nnew? What can I say each morning\nafter that you will\nbelieve? But there is this\nstubborn provincial\nsinging in me\noh each time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "dana-gioia": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dana Gioia", - "birth": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Gioia", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "the-angel-with-the-broken-wing": { - "title": "“The Angel with the Broken Wing”", - "body": "I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,\nThe one large statue in this quiet room.\nThe staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut\nFaith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.\n\nThe docents praise my elegant design\nAbove the chatter of the gallery.\nPerhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts--\nThe perfect emblem of futility.\n\nMendoza carved me for a country church.\n(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)\nI stood beside a gilded altar where\nThe hopeless offered God their misery.\n\nI heard their women whispering at my feet--\nPrayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.\nTheir candles stretched my shadow up the wall,\nAnd I became the hunger that they fed.\n\nI broke my left wing in the Revolution\n(Even a saint can savor irony)\nWhen troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.\nThey hit me once--almost apologetically.\n\nFor even the godless feel something in a church,\nA twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?\nA trembling unaccounted by their laws,\nAn ancient memory they can’t dismiss.\n\nThere are so many things I must tell God!\nThe howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.\nBut I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,\nA crippled saint against a painted sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "california-hills-in-august": { - "title": "“California Hills in August”", - "body": "I can imagine someone who found\nthese fields unbearable, who climbed\nthe hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,\ncracking the brittle weeds underfoot,\nwishing a few more trees for shade.\n\nAn Easterner especially, who would scorn\nthe meagerness of summer, the dry\ntwisted shapes of black elm,\nscrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape\nAugust has already drained of green.\n\nOne who would hurry over the clinging\nthistle, foxtail, golden poppy,\nknowing everything was just a weed,\nunable to conceive that these trees\nand sparse brown bushes were alive.\n\nAnd hate the bright stillness of the noon\nwithout wind, without motion,\nthe only other living thing\na hawk, hungry for prey, suspended\nin the blinding, sunlit blue.\n\nAnd yet how gentle it seems to someone\nraised in a landscape short of rain--\nthe skyline of a hill broken by no more\ntrees than one can count, the grass,\nthe empty sky, the wish for water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "cuckoos": { - "title": "“Cuckoos”", - "body": "I heard them only once. Climbing in the mountains,\nI stopped to rest a moment on a ledge\nand listen to the river distantly below--\nwhen suddenly they began to call each other\nback and forth from trees across the valley,\ninvisible in pinetops but bright and clear\nlike the ring of crystal against crystal.\nI didn’t move but lay there wondering\nwhat they were like, amazed that folklore\nhad made their cry the omen of betrayal.\n\nSo now, reading how the Chinese took their call\nto mean _Pu ju kuei, pu ju kuei_--\n_Come home again, you must come home again_--\nI understand at last what they were telling me\nnot then, back in that high, green valley,\nbut here this evening in the memory of it\nreturned by these birds that I have never seen", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-the-world": { - "title": "“The End of the World”", - "body": "“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”\nSo they stopped the car where the river curled,\nAnd we scrambled down beneath the bridge\nOn the gravel track of a narrow ridge.\n\nWe tramped for miles on a wooded walk\nWhere dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.\nThen we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor\nWhile two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.\n\nWe came to a bend, where the river grew wide\nAnd green mountains rose on the opposite side.\nMy guides moved back. I stood alone,\nAs the current streaked over smooth flat stone.\n\nShelf by stone shelf the river fell.\nThe white water goosetailed with eddying swell.\nFaster and louder the current dropped\nTill it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.\n\nI stood at the edge where the mist ascended,\nMy journey done where the world ended.\nI looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,\nThe sound of the water, and the water’s reply.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "finding-a-box-of-family-letters": { - "title": "“Finding a Box of Family Letters”", - "body": "The dead say little in their letters\nthey haven’t said before.\nWe find no secrets, and yet\nhow different every sentence sounds\nheard across the years.\n\nMy father breaks my heart\nsimply by being so young and handsome.\nHe’s half my age, with jet-black hair.\nLook at him in his navy uniform\ngrinning beside his dive-bomber.\n\n_Come back, Dad!_ I want to shout.\nHe says he misses all of us\n(though I haven’t yet been born).\nHe writes from places I never knew he saw,\nand everyone he mentions now is dead.\n\nThere is a large, long photograph\ncurled like a diploma--a banquet sixty years ago.\nMy parents sit uncomfortably\namong tables of dark-suited strangers.\nThe mildewed paper reeks of regret.\n\nI wonder what song the band was playing,\njust out of frame, as the photographer\narranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?\n_Get out there on the floor and dance!\nYou don’t have forever._\n\nWhat does it cost to send a postcard\nto the underworld? I’ll buy\na penny stamp from World War II\nand mail it downtown at the old post office\njust as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.\n\nSurely the ghost of some postal worker\nstill makes his nightly rounds, his routine\ntoo tedious for him to notice when it ended.\nHe works so slowly he moves back in time\ncarrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.\n\nIt’s silly to get sentimental.\nThe dead have moved on. So should we.\nBut isn’t it equally simple-minded to miss\nthe special expertise of the departed\nin clarifying our long-term plans?\n\nThey never let us forget that the line\nbetween them and us is only temporary.\n_Get out there and dance!_ the letters shout\nadding, Love always. _Can’t wait to get home!_\nAnd soon we will be. _See you there._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-chandler-country": { - "title": "“In Chandler Country”", - "body": "California night. The Devil’s wind,\nthe Santa Ana, blows in from the east,\nraging through the canyon like a drunk\nscreaming in a bar. The air tastes like\n\na stubbed-out cigarette. But why complain?\nThe weather’s fine as long as you don’t breathe.\nJust lean back on the sweat-stained furniture,\nlights turned out, windows shut against the storm,\nand count your blessings. Another sleepless night,\n\nwhen every wrinkle in the bedsheet scratches\nlike a dry razor on a sunburned cheek,\nwhen even ten-year whiskey tastes like sand,\nand quiet women in the kitchen run\ntheir fingers on the edges of a knife\nand eye their husbands’ necks. I wish them luck.\n\nTonight it seems that if I took the coins\nout of my pocket and tossed them in the air\nthey’d stay a moment glistening like a net\nslowly falling through dark water. I remember\n\nthe headlights of the cars parked on the beach,\nthe narrow beams dissolving on the dark\nsurface of the lake, voices arguing\nabout the forms, the crackling radio,\nthe sheeted body lying on the sand,\nthe trawling net still damp beside it. No,\nshe wasn’t beautiful--but at that age\nwhen youth itself becomes a kind of beauty--\n“Taking good care of your clients, Marlowe?”\n\nRelentlessly the wind blows on. Next door\ncatching a scent, the dogs begin to howl.\nLean, furious, raw-eyed from the storm,\npacks of coyotes come down from the hills\nwhere there is nothing left to hunt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-lost-garden": { - "title": "“The Lost Garden”", - "body": "If ever we see those gardens again,\nThe summer will be gone--at least our summer.\nSome other mockingbird will concertize\nAmong the mulberries, and other vines\nWill climb the high brick wall to disappear.\n\nHow many footpaths crossed the old estate--\nThe gracious acreage of a grander age--\nSo many trees to kiss or argue under,\nAnd greenery enough for any mood.\nWhat pleasure to be sad in such surroundings.\n\nAt least in retrospect. For even sorrow\nSeems bearable when studied at a distance,\nAnd if we speak of private suffering,\nThe pain becomes part of a well-turned tale\nDescribing someone else who shares our name.\n\nStill, thinking of you, I sometimes play a game.\nWhat if we had walked a different path one day,\nWould some small incident have nudged us elsewhere\nThe way a pebble tossed into a brook\nMight change the course a hundred miles downstream?\n\nThe trick is making memory a blessing,\nTo learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,\nOf wanting nothing more than what has been,\nTo know the past forever lost, yet seeing\nBehind the wall a garden still in blossom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "night-watch": { - "title": "“Night Watch”", - "body": "I think of you standing on the sloping deck\nas the freighter pulls away from the coast of China,\nthe last lights of Asia disappearing in the fog,\nand the engine’s drone dissolving in the old\nmonotony of waves slapping up against the hull.\n\nLeaning on the rails, looking eastward to America\nacross the empty weeks of ocean,\nhow carefully you must have planned your life,\nso much of it already wasted on the sea.\nthe vast country of your homelessness.\n\nMacao. Vladivostak. Singapore.\nDante read by shiplamp on the bridge.\nThe names of fellow seamen lost in war.\nThese memories will die with you,\nbut tonight they rise up burning in your mind\n\ninterweaving like gulls crying in the wake,\nlike currents on a chart, like gulfweed\nswirling in a star-soaked sea, and interchangeable\nas all the words for night--_la notte, noche, Nacht, nuit,_\neach sound half-foreign, half-familiar, like America.\n\nFor now you know that mainland best from dreams.\nYour dead mother turning toward you slowly,\nalways on the edge of words, yet always\nsilent as the suffering madonna of a shrine.\nOr your father pounding his fist against the wall.\n\nThere are so many ways to waste a life.\nWhy choose between these icons of unhappiness,\nwhen there is the undisguised illusion of the sea,\nthe comfort of old books and solitude to fill\nthe long night watch, the endless argument of waves?\n\nBreathe in that dark and tangible air, for in a few weeks\nyou will be dead, burned beyond recognition,\nleft as a headstone in the unfamiliar earth\nwith no one to ask, neither wife nor children,\nwhy your thin ashes have been buried here\n\nand not scattered on the shifting grey Pacific.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "planting-a-sequoia": { - "title": "“Planting a Sequoia”", - "body": "All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,\nDigging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.\nRain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,\nAnd the sky above us stayed the dull gray\nOf an old year coming to an end.\n\nIn Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth--\nAn olive or a fig tree--a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.\nI would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,\nA green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,\nA promise of new fruit in other autumns.\n\nBut today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,\nDefying the practical custom of our fathers,\nWrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,\nAll that remains above earth of a first-born son,\nA few stray atoms brought back to the elements.\n\nWe will give you what we can--our labor and our soil,\nWater drawn from the earth when the skies fail,\nNights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.\nWe plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,\nA slender shoot against the sunset.\n\nAnd when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,\nEvery niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,\nHis mother’s beauty ashes in the air,\nI want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,\nSilently keeping the secret of your birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rough-country": { - "title": "“Rough Country”", - "body": "Give me a landscape made of obstacles,\nof steep hills and jutting glacial rock,\nwhere the low-running streams are quick to flood\nthe grassy fields and bottomlands. A place\n\nno engineers can master--where the roads\nmust twist like tendrils up the mountainside\non narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.\nWhere tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine\npush through the tangled woods to make a roost\nfor hawks and swarming crows. And sharp inclines\n\nwhere twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,\nscratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly\nto find an unexpected waterfall,\nnot half a mile from the nearest road,\na spot so hard to reach that no one comes--\na hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies\nand nesting jays, a sign that there is still\none piece of property that won’t be owned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "speaking-of-love": { - "title": "“Speaking of Love”", - "body": "Speaking of love was difficult at first.\nWe groped for those lost, untarnished words\nThat parents never traded casually at home,\nThe radio had not devalued.\nHow little there seemed left to us.\n\nSo, speaking of love, we chose\nThe harsh and level language of denial\nKnowing only what we did not wish to say,\nChoosing silence in our terror of a lie.\nFor surely love existed before words.\n\nBut silence can become its own cliché,\nAnd bodies lie as skillfully as words,\nSo one by one we spoke the easy lines\nThe other had resisted but desired,\nTrusting that love renewed their innocence.\n\nWas it then that words become unstuck?\nThat _star_ no longer seemed enough for star?\nOur borrowed speech demanded love so pure\nAnd so beyond our power that we saw\nHow words were only forms of our regret.\n\nAnd so at last we speak again of love,\nNow that there is nothing left unsaid,\nSurrendering our voices to the past,\nWhich has betrayed us. Each of us alone,\nObsessed by memory, befriended by desire,\n\nWith no words left to summon back our love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "special-treatments-ward": { - "title": "“Special Treatments Ward”", - "body": "# I.\n\nSo this is where the children come to die,\nhidden on the hospital’s highest floor.\nThey wear their bandages like uniforms\nand pull their iv rigs along the hall\nwith slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale,\nthey lie in bright pajamas on their beds,\nwatching another world on a screen.\n\nThe mothers spend their nights inside the ward,\nsleeping on chairs that fold out into beds,\ntoo small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip\nbeside their children, as if they might mesh\nthose small bruised bodies back into their flesh.\nInstinctively they feel that love so strong\nprotects a child. Each morning proves them wrong.\n\nNo one chooses to be here. We play the parts\nthat we are given--horrible as they are.\nWe try to play them well, whatever that means.\nWe need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts.\nThe doctors come and go like oracles,\ntheir manner cool, omniscient, and oblique.\nThere is a word that no one ever speaks.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI put this poem aside twelve years ago\nbecause I could not bear remembering\nthe faces it evoked, and every line\nseemed--still seems--so inadequate and grim.\n\nWhat right had I, whose son had walked away,\nto speak for those who died? And I’ll admit\nI wanted to forget. I’d lost one child\nand couldn’t bear to watch another die.\n\nNot just the silent boy who shared our room,\nbut even the bird-thin figures dimly glimpsed\nshuffling deliberately, disjointedly\nlike ancient soldiers after a parade.\n\nWhatever strength the task required I lacked.\nNo well-stitched words could suture shut these wounds.\nAnd so I stopped …\nBut there are poems we do not choose to write.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe children visit me, not just in dream,\nappearing suddenly, silently--\ninsistent, unprovoked, unwelcome.\n\nThey’ve taken off their milky bandages\nto show the raw, red lesions they still bear.\nRisen they are healed but not made whole.\n\nA few I recognize, untouched by years.\nI cannot name them--their faces pale and gray\nlike ashes fallen from a distant fire.\n\nWhat use am I to them, almost a stranger?\nI cannot wake them from their satin beds.\nWhy do they seek me? They never speak.\n\nAnd vagrant sorrow cannot bless the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sunday-news": { - "title": "“The Sunday News”", - "body": "Looking for something in the Sunday paper,\nI flipped by accident through _Local Weddings_,\nYet missed the photograph until I saw\nYour name among the headings.\n\nAnd there you were, looking almost unchanged,\nYour hair still long, though now long out of style,\nAnd you still wore that stiff and serious look\nYou called a smile.\n\nI felt as though we sat there face to face.\nMy stomach tightened. I read the item through.\nIt said too much about both families,\nToo little about you.\n\nFinished at last, I threw the paper down,\nStung by jealousy, my mind aflame,\nHating this man, this stranger whom you loved,\nThis printed name.\n\nAnd yet I clipped it out to put away\nInside a book like something I might use,\nA scrap I knew I wouldn’t read again\nYet couldn’t bear to lose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "louise-gluck": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louise Glück", - "birth": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Glück", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,\nit brings no relief from winter.\n\nMy neighbor stares out the window,\ntalking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,\ntrying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.\n\nIt’s a little early for all this.\nEverything’s still very bare--\nnevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.\n\nWe can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light.\nBut on the sides the snow’s melted, exposing bare rock.\n\nMy neighbor’s calling the dog, making her unconvincing doglike sounds.\nThe dog’s polite; he raises his head when she calls,\nbut he doesn’t move. So she goes on calling,\nher failed bark slowly deteriorating into a human voice.\n\nAll her life she dreamed of living by the sea\nbut fate didn’t put her there.\nIt laughed at her dreams;\nit locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.\n\nThe sun beats down on the earth, the earth flourishes.\nAnd every winter, it’s as though the rock underneath the earth rises\nhigher and higher and the earth becomes rock, cold and rejecting.\n\nShe says hope killed her parents, it killed her grandparents.\nIt rose up each spring with the wheat\nand died between the heat of summer and the raw cold.\nIn the end, they told her to live near the sea,\nas though that would make a difference.\nBy late spring she’ll be garrulous, but now she’s down to two words,\n_never_ and _only_, to express this sense that life’s cheated her.\n\nNever the cries of gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, the cicadas.\nOnly the smell of the field, when all she wanted\nwas the smell of the sea, of disappearance.\n\nThe sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink\nas the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.\n\nAnd everywhere the earth is rustling, not lying still.\nAnd the dog senses this stirring; his ears twitch.\n\nHe walks back and forth, vaguely remembering\nfrom other years this elation. The season of discoveries\nis beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog,\nintoxicating and new, not duplicitous.\n\nI tell my neighbor we’ll be like this\nwhen we lose our memories. I ask her if she’s ever seen the sea\nand she says, once, in a movie.\nIt was a sad story, nothing worked out at all.\n\nThe lovers part. The sea hammers the shore, the mark each wave leaves\nwiped out by the wave that follows.\nNever accumulation, never one wave trying to build on another,\nnever the promise of shelter--\n\nThe sea doesn’t change as the earth changes;\nit doesn’t lie.\nYou ask the sea, what can you promise me\nand it speaks the truth; it says _erasure._\n\nFinally the dog goes in.\nWe watch the crescent moon,\nvery faint at first, then clearer and clearer\nas the sky grows dark.\nSoon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns\n and violets.\n\nNothing can be forced to live.\nThe earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,\na lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.\nIt says forget, you forget.\nIt says begin again, you begin again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "parable-of-the-dove": { - "title": "“Parable of the Dove”", - "body": "A dove lived in a village.\nWhen it opened its mouth\nsweetness came out, sound\nlike a silver light around\nthe cherry bough. But\nthe dove wasn’t satisfied.\n\nIt saw the villagers\ngathered to listen under\nthe blossoming tree.\nIt didn’t think: I\nam higher than they are.\nIt wanted to walk among them,\nto experience the violence of human feeling,\nin part for its song’s sake.\n\nSo it became human.\nIt found passion, it found violence,\nfirst conflated, then\nas separate emotions\nand these were not\ncontained by music. Thus\nits song changed,\nthe sweet notes of its longing to be human\nsoured and flattened. Then\n\nthe world drew back; the mutant\nfell from love\nas from the cherry branch,\nit fell stained with the bloody\nfruit of the tree.\n\nSo it is true after all, not merely\na rule of art:\nchange your form and you change your nature.\nAnd time does this to us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "winter-morning": { - "title": "“Winter Morning”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nToday, when I woke up, I asked myself\nwhy did Christ die? Who knows\nthe meaning of such questions?\n\nIt was a winter morning, unbelievably cold.\nSo the thoughts went on,\nfrom each question came\nanother question, like a twig from a branch,\nlike a branch from a black trunk.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAt a time like this\na young woman traveled through the desert settlements\nlooking neither forward nor backward,\nsitting in perfect composure on the tired animal\nas the child stirred, still sealed in its profound attachment--\nThe husband walked slightly ahead, older, out of place;\nincreasingly, the mule stumbled, the path becoming\ndifficult in darkness, though they persisted\nin a world like our world, not ruled\nby man but by a statue in heaven--\n\n\n# 3.\n\nAbove the crowds representing\nhumankind, the lost\ncitizens of a remote time,\n\nthe insulted body\nraised on a cross like a criminal\nto die publicly\nabove Jerusalem, the shimmering city\n\nwhile in great flocks\nbirds circled the body, not partial\nto this form over the others\n\nsince men were all alike,\ndefeated by the air,\n\nwhereas in air\nthe body of a bird becomes a banner:\n\nBut the lesson that was needed\nwas another lesson.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "johann-wolfgang-von-goethe": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe", - "birth": { - "year": 1749 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "the-erl-king": { - "title": "“The Erl-King”", - "body": "Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?\nThe father it is, with his infant so dear;\nHe holdeth the boy tightly clasp’d in his arm,\nHe holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.\n\n“My son, wherefore seek’st thou thy face thus to hide?”\n“Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!\nDost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”\n“My son, ’tis the mist rising over the plain.”\n\n“Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!\nFull many a game I will play there with thee;\nOn my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,\nMy mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.”\n\n“My father, my father, and dost thou not hear\nThe words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?”\n“Be calm, dearest child, ’tis thy fancy deceives;\n’Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.”\n\n“Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?\nMy daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care\nMy daughters by night their glad festival keep,\nThey’ll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep.”\n\n“My father, my father, and dost thou not see,\nHow the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?”\n“My darling, my darling, I see it aright,\n’Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight.”\n\n“I love thee, I’m charm’d by thy beauty, dear boy!\nAnd if thou’rt unwilling, then force I’ll employ.”\n“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,\nFull sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”\n\nThe father now gallops, with terror half wild,\nHe grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;\nHe reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,--\nThe child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-fisherman": { - "title": "“The Fisherman”", - "body": "He water rushed, the water swelled,\nA fisherman sat by,\nAnd gazed upon his dancing float\nWith tranquil-dreaming eye.\nAnd as he sits, and as he looks,\nThe gurgling waves arise;\nA maid, all bright with water drops,\nStands straight before his eyes.\n\nShe sang to him, she spake to him:\n“My fish why dost thou snare,\nWith human wit and human guile,\nInto the killing air?\nCouldst see how happy fishes live\nUnder the stream so clear,\nThyself would plunge into the stream,\nAnd live for ever there.”\n\n“Bathe not the lovely sun and moon\nWithin the cool, deep sea,\nAnd with wave-breathing faces rise\nIn twofold witchery?\nLure not the misty heaven-deeps,\nSo beautiful and blue?\nLures not thine image, mirrored in\nThe Fresh eternal dew?”\n\n“The water rushed, the water swelled,\nIt clasped his feet, I wis’\nA thrill went through his yearning heart,\nAs when two lovers kiss!\nShe spake to him, she sang to him:\nResistless was her strain;\nHalf drew him in, half lured him in;\nHe ne’er was seen again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "in-summer": { - "title": "“In Summer”", - "body": "How plain and height\nWith dewdrops are bright!\nHow pearls have crown’d\nThe plants all around!\nHow sighs the breeze\nThro’ thicket and trees!\nHow loudly in the sun’s clear rays\nThe sweet birds carol forth their lays!\n\nBut, ah! above,\nWhere saw I my love,\nWithin her room,\nSmall, mantled in gloom,\nEnclosed around,\nWhere sunlight was drown’d,\nHow little there was earth to me,\nWith all its beauteous majesty!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "it-is-good": { - "title": "“It is Good”", - "body": "In Paradise while moonbeams played,\nJehovah found, in slumber deep,\nAdam fast sunk; He gently laid\nEve near him--she, too, fell asleep.\nThere lay they now, on earth’s fair shrine,\nGod’s two most beauteous thoughts divine--\nWhen this He saw, He cried: ’Tis good!\nAnd scarce could move from where He stood.\n\nNo wonder, that our joy’s complete\nWhile eye and eye responsive meet,\nWhen this blest thought of rapture moves us--\nThat we’re with Him who truly loves us,\nAnd if He cries--Good, let it be!\n’Tis so for both, it seems to me.\nThou’rt clasped within these arms of mine,\nDearest of all God’s thoughts divine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "june": { - "title": "“June”", - "body": "She behind yon mountain lives,\nWho my love’s sweet guerdon gives.\nTell me, mount, how this can be!\nVery glass thou seem’st to me,\nAnd I seem to be close by,\nFor I see her drawing nigh;\nNow, because I’m absent, sad,\nNow, because she sees me, glad!\n\nSoon between us rise to sight\nValleys cool, with bushes light,\nStreams and meadows; next appear\n\nMills and wheels, the surest token\nThat a level spot is near,\n\nPlains far-stretching and unbroken.\nAnd so onwards, onwards roam,\nTo my garden and my home!\n\nBut how comes it then to pass?\nAll this gives no joy, alas!--\nI was ravish’d by her sight,\nBy her eyes so fair and bright,\nBy her footstep soft and light.\nHow her peerless charms I praised,\nWhen from head to foot I gazed!\nI am here, she’s far away,--\nI am gone, with her to stay.\n\nIf on rugged hills she wander,\n\nIf she haste the vale along,\nPinions seem to flutter yonder,\n\nAnd the air is fill’d with song;\nWith the glow of youth still playing,\n\nJoyous vigour in each limb,\nOne in silence is delaying,\n\nShe alone ’tis blesses him.\n\nLove, thou art too fair, I ween!\nFairer I have never seen!\nFrom the heart full easily\nBlooming flowers are cull’d by thee.\nIf I think: “Oh, were it so,”\nBone and marrow seen to glow!\nIf rewarded by her love,\nCan I greater rapture prove?\n\nAnd still fairer is the bride,\nWhen in me she will confide,\nWhen she speaks and lets me know\nAll her tale of joy and woe.\nAll her lifetime’s history\nNow is fully known to me.\nWho in child or woman e’er\nSoul and body found so fair?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "The snow-flakes fall in showers,\n\nThe time is absent still,\nWhen all Spring’s beauteous flowers,\nWhen all Spring’s beauteous flowers\n\nOur hearts with joy shall fill.\n\nWith lustre false and fleeting\n\nThe sun’s bright rays are thrown;\nThe swallow’s self is cheating:\nThe swallow’s self is cheating,\n\nAnd why? He comes alone!\n\nCan I e’er feel delighted\n\nAlone, though Spring is near?\nYet when we are united,\nYet when we are united,\n\nThe Summer will be here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-metamorphosis-of-plants": { - "title": "“The Metamorphosis of Plants”", - "body": "Thou art confused, my beloved, at, seeing the thousandfold union\n\nShown in this flowery troop, over the garden dispers’d;\nany a name dost thou hear assign’d; one after another\n\nFalls on thy list’ning ear, with a barbarian sound.\nNone resembleth another, yet all their forms have a likeness;\n\nTherefore, a mystical law is by the chorus proclaim’d;\nYes, a sacred enigma! Oh, dearest friend, could I only\n\nHappily teach thee the word, which may the mystery solve!\nClosely observe how the plant, by little and little progressing,\n\nStep by step guided on, changeth to blossom and fruit!\nFirst from the seed it unravels itself, as soon as the silent\n\nFruit-bearing womb of the earth kindly allows Its escape,\nAnd to the charms of the light, the holy, the ever-in-motion,\n\nTrusteth the delicate leaves, feebly beginning to shoot.\nSimply slumber’d the force in the seed; a germ of the future,\n\nPeacefully lock’d in itself, ’neath the integument lay,\nLeaf and root, and bud, still void of colour, and shapeless;\n\nThus doth the kernel, while dry, cover that motionless life.\nUpward then strives it to swell, in gentle moisture confiding,\n\nAnd, from the night where it dwelt, straightway ascendeth to light.\nYet still simple remaineth its figure, when first it appeareth;\n\nAnd ’tis a token like this, points out the child ’mid the plants.\nSoon a shoot, succeeding it, riseth on high, and reneweth,\n\nPiling-up node upon node, ever the primitive form;\nYet not ever alike: for the following leaf, as thou seest,\n\nEver produceth itself, fashioned in manifold ways.\nLonger, more indented, in points and in parts more divided,\n\nWhich. all-deform’d until now, slept in the organ below,\nSo at length it attaineth the noble and destined perfection,\n\nWhich, in full many a tribe, fills thee with wondering awe.\nMany ribb’d and tooth’d, on a surface juicy and swelling,\n\nFree and unending the shoot seemeth in fullness to be;\nYet here Nature restraineth, with powerful hands, the formation,\n\nAnd to a perfecter end, guideth with softness its growth,\nLess abundantly yielding the sap, contracting the vessels,\n\nSo that the figure ere long gentler effects doth disclose.\nSoon and in silence is check’d the growth of the vigorous branches,\n\nAnd the rib of the stalk fuller becometh in form.\nLeafless, however, and quick the tenderer stem then up-springeth,\n\nAnd a miraculous sight doth the observer enchant.\nRanged in a circle, in numbers that now are small, and now countless,\n\nGather the smaller-sized leaves, close by the side of their like.\nRound the axis compress’d the sheltering calyx unfoldeth,\n\nAnd, as the perfectest type, brilliant-hued coronals forms.\nThus doth Nature bloom, in glory still nobler and fuller,\n\nShowing, in order arranged, member on member uprear’d.\nWonderment fresh dost thou feel, as soon as the stem rears the flower\n\nOver the scaffolding frail of the alternating leaves.\nBut this glory is only the new creation’s foreteller,\n\nYes, the leaf with its hues feeleth the hand all divine,\nAnd on a sudden contracteth itself; the tenderest figures\n\nTwofold as yet, hasten on, destined to blend into one.\nLovingly now the beauteous pairs are standing together,\n\nGather’d in countless array, there where the altar is raised.\nHymen hovereth o’er them, and scents delicious and mighty\n\nStream forth their fragrance so sweet, all things enliv’ning around.\nPresently, parcell’d out, unnumber’d germs are seen swelling,\n\nSweetly conceald in the womb, where is made perfect the fruit.\nHere doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal;\n\nYet doth a new one, at once, cling to the one gone before,\nSo that the chain be prolonged for ever through all generations,\n\nAnd that the whole may have life, e’en as enjoy’d by each part.\nNow, my beloved one, turn thy gaze on the many-hued thousands\n\nWhich, confusing no more, gladden the mind as they wave.\nEvery plant unto thee proclaimeth the laws everlasting,\n\nEvery flowered speaks louder and louder to thee;\nBut if thou here canst decipher the mystic words of the goddess,\n\nEverywhere will they be seen, e’en though the features are changed.\nCreeping insects may linger, the eager butterfly hasten,--\n\nPlastic and forming, may man change e’en the figure decreed!\nOh, then, bethink thee, as well, how out of the germ of acquaintance,\n\nKindly intercourse sprang, slowly unfolding its leaves;\nSoon how friendship with might unveil’d itself in our bosoms,\n\nAnd how Amor, at length, brought forth blossom and fruit\nThink of the manifold ways wherein Nature hath lent to our feelings,\n\nSilently giving them birth, either the first or the last!\nYes, and rejoice in the present day! For love that is holy\n\nSeeketh the noblest of fruits,--that where the thoughts are the same,\nWhere the opinions agree,--that the pair may, in rapt contemplation,\n\nLovingly blend into one,--find the more excellent world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "november-song": { - "title": "“November Song”", - "body": "To the great archer--not to him\n\nTo meet whom flies the sun,\nAnd who is wont his features dim\n\nWith clouds to overrun--\n\nBut to the boy be vow’d these rhymes,\n\nWho ’mongst the roses plays,\nWho hear us, and at proper times\n\nTo pierce fair hearts essays.\n\nThrough him the gloomy winter night,\n\nOf yore so cold and drear,\nBrings many a loved friend to our sight,\n\nAnd many a woman dear.\n\nHenceforward shall his image fair\n\nStand in yon starry skies,\nAnd, ever mild and gracious there,\n\nAlternate set and rise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "procemion": { - "title": "“Procemion”", - "body": "In His blest name, who was His own creation,\nWho from all time makes making his vocation;\nThe name of Him who makes our faith so bright,\nLove, confidence, activity, and might;\nIn that One’s name, who, named though oft He be,\nUnknown is ever in Reality:\nAs far as ear can reach, or eyesight dim,\nThou findest but the known resembling Him;\nHow high so’er thy fiery spirit hovers,\nIts simile and type it straight discovers\nOnward thou’rt drawn, with feelings light and gay,\nWhere’er thou goest, smiling is the way;\nNo more thou numbrest, reckonest no time,\nEach step is infinite, each step sublime.\n\nWhat God would outwardly alone control,\nAnd on his finger whirl the mighty Whole?\nHe loves the inner world to move, to view\nNature in Him, Himself in Nature too,\nSo that what in Him works, and is, and lives,\nThe measure of His strength, His spirit gives.\n\nWithin us all a universe doth dwell;\nAnd hence each people’s usage laudable,\nThat ev’ry one the Best that meets his eyes\nAs God, yea e’en his God, doth recognise;\nTo Him both earth and heaven surrenders he,\nFears Him, and loves Him too, if that may be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-reunion": { - "title": "“The Reunion”", - "body": "Can it be! of stars the star,\nDo I press thee to my heart?\nIn the night of distance far,\nWhat deep gulf, what bitter smart!\nYes, ’tis thou, indeed at last,\nOf my joys the partner dear!\nMindful, though, of sorrows past,\nI the present needs must fear.\n\nWhen the still unfashioned earth\nLay on God’s eternal breast,\nHe ordained its hour of birth,\nWith creative joy possessed.\nThen a heavy sigh arose,\nWhen He spake the sentence:--“Be!”\nAnd the All, with mighty throes,\nBurst into reality.\n\nAnd when thus was born the light,\nDarkness near it feared to stay,\nAnd the elements with might\nFled on every side away;\nEach on some far-distant trace,\nEach with visions wild employed,\nNumb, in boundless realms of space,\nHarmony and feeling-void.\n\nDumb was all, all still and dead,\nFor the first time, God alone!\nThen He formed the morning-red,\nWhich soon made its kindness known:\nIt unravelled from the waste\nBright and glowing harmony,\nAnd once more with love was graced\nWhat contended formerly.\n\nAnd with earnest, noble strife,\nEach its own peculiar sought;\nBack to full, unbounded life,\nSight and feeling soon were brought.\nWherefore, if ’tis done, explore\n_How?_ why give the manner, name?\nAllah need create no more,\nWe his world ourselves can frame.\n\nSo, with morning pinions brought,\nTo thy mouth was I impelled;\nStamped with thousand seals by night,\nStar-clear is the bond fast held.\nParagons on earth are we\nBoth of grief and joy sublime,\nAnd a second sentence:--“Be!”\nParts us not a second time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "to-the-distant-one": { - "title": "“To the Distant One”", - "body": "And have I lost thee evermore,\nHast thou, oh, fair one, from me flown?\nStill in mine ear sounds, as of yore,\nThine every word, thine every tone.\n\nAs when at morn the wanderer’s eye\nAttempts to pierce the air in vain,\nWhen, hidden in the azure sky,\nThe lark high o’er him chants his strain:\n\nSo do I cast my troubled gaze\nThrough bush, through forest, o’er the lea;\nThou art invoked by all my lays;\nOh, come then, loved one, back to me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "adam-lindsay-gordon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Adam Lindsay Gordon", - "birth": { - "year": 1833 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1870 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british+australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧 🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Lindsay_Gordon", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian", - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "a-fragment": { - "title": "“A Fragment”", - "body": "They say that poison-sprinkled flowers\nAre sweeter in perfume\nThan when, untouched by deadly dew,\nThey glowed in early bloom.\n\nThey say that men condemned to die\nHave quaffed the sweetened wine\nWith higher relish than the juice\nOf the untampered vine.\n\nThey say that in the witch’s song,\nThough rude and harsh it be,\nThere blends a wild, mysterious strain\nOf weirdest melody.\n\nAnd I believe the devil’s voice\nSinks deeper in our ear\nThan any whisper sent from Heaven,\nHowever sweet and clear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sick-stockrider": { - "title": "“The Sick Stockrider”", - "body": "Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade.\nOld man, you’ve had your work cut out to guide\nBoth horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I sway’d,\nAll through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride.\nThe dawn at ‘Moorabinda’ was a mist rack dull and dense,\nThe sunrise was a sullen, sluggish lamp;\nI was dozing in the gateway at Arbuthnot’s bound’ry fence,\nI was dreaming on the Limestone cattle camp.\nWe crossed the creek at Carricksford, and sharply through the haze,\nAnd suddenly the sun shot flaming forth;\nTo southward lay ‘Katawa’, with the sandpeaks all ablaze,\nAnd the flush’d fields of Glen Lomond lay to north.\nNow westward winds the bridle path that leads to Lindisfarm,\nAnd yonder looms the double-headed Bluff;\nFrom the far side of the first hill, when the skies are clear and calm,\nYou can see Sylvester’s woolshed fair enough.\nFive miles we used to call it from our homestead to the place\nWhere the big tree spans the roadway like an arch;\n’Twas here we ran the dingo down that gave us such a chase\nEight years ago--or was it nine?--last March.\n\n’Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming grass,\nTo wander as we’ve wandered many a mile,\nAnd blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pass,\nSitting loosely in the saddle all the while.\n’Twas merry ’mid the blackwoods, when we spied the station roofs,\nTo wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard,\nWith a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs;\nOh! the hardest day was never then too hard!\n\nAye! we had a glorious gallop after ‘Starlight’ and his gang,\nWhen they bolted from Sylvester’s on the flat;\nHow the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang\nTo the strokes of ‘Mountaineer’ and ‘Acrobat’.\nHard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath,\nClose beside them through the tea-tree scrub we dash’d;\nAnd the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath!\nAnd the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash’d!\n\nWe led the hunt throughout, Ned, on the chestnut and the grey,\nAnd the troopers were three hundred yards behind,\nWhile we emptied our six-shooters on the bushrangers at bay,\nIn the creek with stunted box-tree for a blind!\nThere you grappled with the leader, man to man and horse to horse,\nAnd you roll’d together when the chestnut rear’d;\nHe blazed away and missed you in that shallow watercourse--\nA narrow shave--his powder singed your beard!\n\nIn these hours when life is ebbing, how those days when life was young\nCome back to us; how clearly I recall\nEven the yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung;\nAnd where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?\n\nAye! nearly all our comrades of the old colonial school,\nOur ancient boon companions, Ned, are gone;\nHard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule,\nIt seems that you and I are left alone.\n\nThere was Hughes, who got in trouble through that business with the cards,\nIt matters little what became of him;\nBut a steer ripp’d up MacPherson in the Cooraminta yards,\nAnd Sullivan was drown’d at Sink-or-swim;\nAnd Mostyn--poor Frank Mostyn--died at last a fearful wreck,\nIn ‘the horrors’, at the Upper Wandinong,\nAnd Carisbrooke, the rider, at the Horsefall broke his neck,\nFaith! the wonder was he saved his neck so long!\n\nAh! those days and nights we squandered at the Logans’ in the glen--\nThe Logans, man and wife, have long been dead.\nElsie’s tallest girl seems taller than your little Elsie then;\nAnd Ethel is a woman grown and wed.\n\nI’ve had my share of pastime, and I’ve done my share of toil,\nAnd life is short--the longest life a span;\nI care not now to tarry for the corn or for the oil,\nOr for the wine that maketh glad the heart of man.\nFor good undone and gifts misspent and resolutions vain,\n’Tis somewhat late to trouble. This I know--\nI should live the same life over, if I had to live again;\nAnd the chances are I go where most men go.\n\nThe deep blue skies wax dusky, and the tall green trees grow dim,\nThe sward beneath me seems to heave and fall;\nAnd sickly, smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim,\nAnd on the very sun’s face weave their pall.\nLet me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,\nWith never stone or rail to fence my bed;\nShould the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,\nI may chance to hear them romping overhead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-autumn": { - "title": "“A Song of Autumn”", - "body": "“Where shall we go for our garlands glad\nAt the falling of the year,\nWhen the burnt-up banks are yellow and sad,\nWhen the boughs are yellow and sere?\nWhere are the old ones that once we had,\nAnd when are the new ones near?\nWhat shall we do for our garlands glad\nAt the falling of the year?”\n\n“Child! can I tell where the garlands go?\nCan I say where the lost leaves veer\nOn the brown-burnt banks, when the wild winds blow,\nWhen they drift through the dead-wood drear?\nGirl! when the garlands of next year glow,\nYou may gather again, my dear--\nBut I go where the last year’s lost leaves go\nAt the falling of the year.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-swimmer": { - "title": "“The Swimmer”", - "body": "With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid,\nTo southward far as the sight can roam,\nOnly the swirl of the surges livid,\nThe seas that climb and the surfs that comb.\nOnly the crag and the cliff to nor’ward,\nAnd the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,\nAnd waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward\nOn shallows sheeted with flaming foam.\n\nA grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly,\nAnd shores trod seldom by feet of men--\nWhere the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie,\nThey have lain embedded these long years ten.\nLove! when we wander’d here together,\nHand in hand through the sparkling weather,\nFrom the heights and hollows of fern and heather,\nGod surely loved us a little then.\n\nThe skies were fairer and shores were firmer--\nThe blue sea over the bright sand roll’d;\nBabble and prattle, and ripple and murmur,\nSheen of silver and glamour of gold--\nAnd the sunset bath’d in the gulf to lend her\nA garland of pinks and of purples tender,\nA tinge of the sun-god’s rosy splendour,\nA tithe of his glories manifold.\n\nMan’s works are graven, cunning, and skilful\nOn earth, where his tabernacles are;\nBut the sea is wanton, the sea is wilful,\nAnd who shall mend her and who shall mar?\nShall we carve success or record disaster\nOn the bosom of her heaving alabaster?\nWill her purple pulse beat fainter or faster\nFor fallen sparrow or fallen star?\n\nI would that with sleepy, soft embraces\nThe sea would fold me--would find me rest,\nIn luminous shades of her secret places,\nIn depths where her marvels are manifest;\nSo the earth beneath her should not discover\nMy hidden couch--nor the heaven above her--\nAs a strong love shielding a weary lover,\nI would have her shield me with shining breast.\n\nWhen light in the realms of space lay hidden,\nWhen life was yet in the womb of time,\nEre flesh was fettered to fruits forbidden,\nAnd souls were wedded to care and crime,\nWas the course foreshaped for the future spirit--\nA burden of folly, a void of merit--\nThat would fain the wisdom of stars inherit,\nAnd cannot fathom the seas sublime?\n\nUnder the sea or the soil (what matter?\nThe sea and the soil are under the sun),\nAs in the former days in the latter,\nThe sleeping or waking is known of none.\nSurely the sleeper shall not awaken\nTo griefs forgotten or joys forsaken,\nFor the price of all things given and taken,\nThe sum of all things done and undone.\n\nShall we count offences or coin excuses,\nOr weigh with scales the soul of a man,\nWhom a strong hand binds and a sure hand looses,\nWhose light is a spark and his life a span?\nThe seed he sow’d or the soil he cumber’d,\nThe time he served or the space he slumber’d,\nWill it profit a man when his days are number’d,\nOr his deeds since the days of his life began?\n\nOne, glad because of the light, saith, “Shall not\nThe righteous Judge of all the earth do right,\nFor behold the sparrows on the house-tops fall not\nSave as seemeth to Him good in His sight?”\nAnd this man’s joy shall have no abiding,\nThrough lights departing and lives dividing,\nHe is soon as one in the darkness hiding,\nOne loving darkness rather than light.\n\nA little season of love and laughter,\nOf light and life, and pleasure and pain,\nAnd a horror of outer darkness after,\nAnd dust returneth to dust again.\nThen the lesser life shall be as the greater,\nAnd the lover of life shall join the hater,\nAnd the one thing cometh sooner or later,\nAnd no one knoweth the loss or gain.\n\nLove of my life! we had lights in season--\nHard to part from, harder to keep--\nWe had strength to labour and souls to reason,\nAnd seed to scatter and fruits to reap.\nThough time estranges and fate disperses,\nWe have HAD our loves and our loving mercies;\nThough the gifts of the light in the end are curses,\nYet bides the gift of the darkness--sleep!\n\nSee! girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder,\nAnd clad with lightning and shod with sleet,\nThe strong winds treading the swift waves sunder\nThe flying rollers with frothy feet.\nOne gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on\nThe sky-line, staining the green gulf crimson,\nA death stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun,\nThat strikes through his stormy winding-sheet.\n\nOh! brave white horses! you gather and gallop,\nThe storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;\nNow the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop\nIn your hollow backs, or your high arch’d manes.\nI would ride as never a man has ridden\nIn your sleepy, swirling surges hidden,\nTo gulfs foreshadow’d through straits forbidden,\nWhere no light wearies and no love wanes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "maxim-gorky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Maxim Gorky", - "birth": { - "year": 1868 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Gorky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "song-of-the-falcon": { - "title": "“Song of the Falcon”", - "body": "The sea is vast--breathing lazily by the shore line,--and, in the distance, it is almost dormant and strangely still in the moonlight glow. There, far away on the horizon, the silvery sea softly fuses with the blue southern sky and is sound asleep, covered in lacy reflections of spindrift clouds whose gossamer fabric is motionless and does not obscure the golden glitter of stars. Over the dark waters, the sky hovers very low as if trying to hear the waves’ unsettled whisper as they slowly roll to shore.\n\nOn the shore’s forested mountains, ugly trees are misshapen by the nor’easter, their jagged, stiff tops project into the blue vastness above; yet, below, their gloomy outlines are relaxed and lush in the warmth and languor of the southern night.\n\nThe mountains are solemn as if suspended in thought. They throw dark shadows on the spongy, greenish crests of the waves below, enveloping them as if to arrest their singular motion, to muffle their incessant splashing and the sighs of their foam--all the sounds that disturb the mysterious fusion of the air’s calm and the silver-blue shine of the moon still hidden by the mountain tops.\n\n--Al-la-a-Akhba-a-ar!…--quietly exhales Nadyr-Raghim-Ogly, a gray-haired, old and wise Crimean herder, tall and withered, his skin deeply burnt by the southern sun.\n\nHe and I are lying on the sand by a huge stone that broke off from the nearest mountain, still under its shadow and overgrown with moss;--the stone looks glum and severe. The waves knurl over the sea side of it, depositing slime and algae; and the rock so adorned seems tethered by the narrow strip of sand that separates sea from mountains. The other side of the rock, the side that faces the mountain, is lit by our campfire, and each time the flames shiver, murky shadows dazzle the old stone’s surface deeply indented with cracks and scratches.\n\nRaghim and I are cooking fish soup from our fresh catch, and we both are in such a surreal mood when everything seems animate, inspires and opens your soul to deep feelings; the heart is pure, and the lightness of being expels all desires except the desire to think.\n\nAnd the sea caresses the shore, and the waves splash at it with such tenderness as if begging us to let them warm up by the campfire. At times, in the unified harmony of the waves’ sounds, one can distinguish a higher note, like a playful pitch,--that’s when one of the waves, the boldest of them, creeps up and almost touches us.\n\nRaghim lies with his chest in the sand and his face turned seaward, absorbed in thought and watching the sea; his elbows are planted in the sand and he holds his head in his palms, looking into the hazy distance as if transfixed. A shaggy goat-fur hat nearly slid off his head, and the sea breeze cools his high and deeply wrinkled brow. He seems to be conversing with the sea, and starts philosophizing without caring if I am even listening to him:\n\n--The one who is faithful to God, he goes to paradise. And the one who serves not God nor the Prophet?… Maybe, he is--in that sea foam. And those silver spots on the water, who knows? … maybe it’s him, too.\n\nThe dark expanse of the mighty sea brightens, and sporadically, like scattered glitter, there appear some patches of reflected moonlight. The moon has finally risen up from the disheveled mountain tops, and it now pours its pensive light over the waters which calmly breathe toward it, over the shore, and over the rock by which we lie.\n\n--Raghim! … Tell me a story.--I ask of the old man.\n\n--What for?--answers Raghim without turning to look at me.\n\n--… ’cause …! I love your tales.\n\n--I’ve already told you all of them. Don’t know any more.--He is just saying this because he wants me to beg him. So, I beg.\n\n--Want me to tell you a song?--says Raghim, agreeably.\n\nI do want to hear the old song; and, in sonorous cantillation, trying to preserve the peculiar melody, he begins.\n\n\n# I.\n\nHigh up the mountain crawled a snake and lay there in a slimy crevice, all curled up tightly and looking seaward.\n\nHigh in the sky the sun shone brightly, rocks breathing heat, and ocean waves were breaking stones beneath the mountain …\n\nCutting a canyon into the mountain, grinding the stones, a stream was rushing, all dark and foamy, toward the ocean …\n\nAll of a sudden into the crevice where Snake was resting there fell a falcon, blood on her feathers, and deeply wounded …\n\nHer cry was piercing; she fell and tumbled, crushing her breast in helpless anger upon the stones …\n\nFirst, Snake was frightened, crawled shrewdly backwards, but soon he figured that poor Falcon perhaps had only a few brief minutes of life remaining …\n\nHe slithered close to the wounded Falcon, and hissed directly into her ear:\n\n--Hey, are you dying?\n\n--Yes, I am dying!--responded Falcon with a heavy sigh.--I had a good life!… I knew fulfillment of dreams and hopes!… I saw the sky … I touched it, soared!… You’ll never know it so high and close!… You poor creature!\n\n--What is the sky to me? Nothing and empty … One cannot crawl there. I like it here … so warm and humid!\n\nSnake answered thus the bird of freedom, and deep inside he even chuckled at her delusions. And thought like this: “We fly or crawl, but in the end we know what happens: we all turn to dust, all end up buried in sand or soil …”\n\nBut wounded Falcon just shook herself, lifted her head up, and looked around the seeping crevice. Indeed, the stone around there was wet and slimy, the air was stifling and smelled of scavenge.\n\nAnd Falcon gathered all her strength remaining, and let out a cry of pain and yearning:\n\n--Oh, if I only could rise up flying--one last time only, while I’m still living--in the deep air of lucid heaven! …\n\nSnake heard, and whispered: “Why would she, dying, be so driven to grieve for flying? … This lucid air that bears flyers, indeed, may turn out to be delightful for living creatures.”\n\nHe said to Falcon, the dying dreamer: “Come on, move close to the cliff’s edge there, and throw down your wounded body. For … who would know?! … your wings and air might lift you upward, and once again let you enjoy the thrill of flying amidst your element.”\n\nAnd Falcon shuddered; with a loud cry, she labored to gain the canyon’s bluff, slipping and falling and yet still rising. But then she made it to the utmost edge and spread out her wings; inhaling deeply, she looked around with a flaming glare--and downward fell.\n\nAnd like a stone she rolled and tumbled, and slipped and scattered, breaking her wings and losing feathers …\n\nThe stream below caught her, all beaten, washed off her bleeding, covered with foam and gently carried her into the ocean.\n\nThe ocean waves were crushing stones with mournful roaring … The corpse of Falcon was never found in the vast expanses of rocks and water …\n\n\n# II.\n\nLaying in his crevice, Snake contemplated the death of Falcon, her love of flying. He lay a long time in the narrow crevice, staring into this puzzling air that teases the eyes of the misguided with silly dreams.\n\n--What did she see there, in total emptiness, without bottom or edge or cover? The likes of her, in death as living, why do they dare confuse one’s soul with their passion for skyward flying? What do they see there? What do they hear? And might not I grasp all its meanings if I could fly there for just one moment?\n\nSnake said--and did it! His body tightened, he fast uncoiled, cutting through the air, like a flash of lightning.\n\nThose born to crawl--will never fly!… Forgetting that, Snake hit the stones; not hurt, however, he thought, elated:\n\n--So, that’s the beauty of skyward flying! It is--in falling!… Birds are so foolish! Not knowing earth, depressed when grounded, they feel the calling to rise to heaven and seek life’s pleasures in empty vastness. It is but empty. It is filled with light but void of food and of protection for us the living. Why, then, was Falcon so bold and proud? Just to conceal the sheer madness of her desires and lack of fitness among the living. Birds are so foolish!… But I am wiser! I shan’t be bullied by their tattles. I know now! I saw their heaven, the sky of flying. I launched into it, its depths I measured; endured falling, but did not shudder, and gained much confidence from this endeavor. Let those wretches who cannot love this solid ground live in delusion. I know the truth. I won’t be fooled. Of earth created--by earth I’m living.\n\nAnd feeling proud, he coiled tightly, and was quite happy.\n\n* * *\n\nIn sunlit glory the ocean glittered, and waves crushed stones with thunderous roaring. And in that roaring one could just hear the song, or ballad, of the proud Falcon; the rocks were trembling from waves’ hard beating, and heaven echoed words of the ballad:\n\n“We praise the daring of valiant dreamers!”\n\n“Creation’s wisdom is in their boldness. Oh, blessed Falcon! You were defeated, and died pursuing your dream of freedom, of flying skyward. And yet … Oh, Falcon! Yours is the future--the blood you spilled, like sparks of fire, will light the darkness of grim existence, igniting hearts of countless many with thirst for living! And in this ballad, the song composed for the strong of spirit, you will be always the shining symbol, the proud caller to light and freedom!”\n\n“Praised be the daring of all bold dreamers!”\n\n* * *\n\n… Quiet is the opalescent remoteness of the sea, the waves roll over sand with rustling melodies, and I am silent, watching the distant horizon. The silver patches of moonlight on the sea surface are abundant now … Our cauldron is boiling slowly.\n\nOne of the waves rolls playfully out on the shore, and, with a defiant rattle, crawls straight toward Raghim’s head.\n\n--What the …? Get off!--Raghim brandishes his hand at it, and it obediently rolls back into the sea.\n\nRaghim’s treatment of waves as animate is neither funny nor troubling to me. In fact, everything around us looks mysteriously alive, soft, and tender. The sea is profoundly quiet, so quiet it is, that one feels its immense power--even in the refreshing breeze from the sea to the mountains still feverish from the day’s swelter--one feels the hidden, contained but all-mighty force. The sky, dark-blue and adorned by the golden lace of stars, evokes exultation that is all but enchanting, bewitching the soul, confusing the mind, as a sweet precursor of some awesome revelation.\n\nAll around, the world is in a slumber, but a slumber so tense and fragile, and so delicate that it seems any moment to shake it off and break into a melody of sublime and powerful harmony. This tune can tell of the secrets of the universe, bring reason to the mind and then extinguish it just as quickly as one puts out a candle; and entice your soul away, high up into the dark-blue abyss of the skies where the tremulous veil of the stars will welcome it with the exquisite, heavenly music of revelation …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Janna Kaplan", - "date": { - "year": 1895 - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-stormy-petrel": { - "title": "“Song of the Stormy Petrel”", - "body": "Alongside the grey-haired sea plain\nWind is gathering the clouds.\nBetween clouds and the sea plain\nThere’s a proud petrel flying,\nAs a black flicker of lightning.\nOnce he is touching the sea wave’s edge,\nThen is flying up to heavens\nAs an arrow, and he cries …\nThe clouds hear joy in his brave shout.\n\nIn this scream--the thirst for gale,\nForce of anger, flame of passion,\nAnd the certainty of triumph\nHear the clouds in his shout.\n\nSea gulls moan before the storming,\nMoan, rush above the sea plain,\nThey are ready to a bottom\nHide their horror before gale.\n\nAnd the loons are also scared,\nThey can’t catch the battle enjoyment,\nThey are frightened by a thunder.\n\nA silly penguin is shyly hiding\nHis fat body in the cliffs … Only\nThe proud petrel hovers bravely\nAbove the sea, covered with foam.\n\nDarker, darker are the clouds,\nClose they have come to sea plain,\nAnd the waves are singing, longing\nTo the height to meet a thunder.\n\nThunder’s rolling. In a wrath’s foam\nWaves are moaning, to wind resisting.\nWind embraces the flocks of waves and\nIn wild spite to cliffs them throws,\nBreaking into sprays and splashes\nBulks of the emerald-green waves hard.\n\nThe stormy petrel, screaming, hovers,\nAs the black lightning in heavens,\nAs an arrow, he is piercing\nThe grey clouds, with his wing\nHe is picking up the wave’s foam.\n\nHere flies he, as a demon,\nThe proud, black demon of gale,--\nAnd he is laughing, he is crying …\nAt the clouds he is laughing,\nFrom the joy he’s surely crying!\n\nIn thunder’s whirl--he’s the heedful demon,\nHe, for long, feels there the tiredness,\nHe’s aware, that the clouds\nCan’t hide sun forever, though!\n\nWind is howling … Thunder’s rolling …\n\nAs a blue flame the clouds’re blazing\nAbove the sea chasm. The sea is picking\nThe arrows of lightnings and extinguishes\nthem in depth. As the fiery snakes,\nthe reflections of lightnings\nWrithe in sea and disappear!\n\nGale! Soon it will be surely gale!\n\nThis is the brave petrel flying\nproudly among the lightnings,\nAbove the roaring sea in anger;\nthis is the prophetic shout:\n\n--Stronger be a coming gale!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1901 - } - } - }, - "a-wallachian-legend": { - "title": "“A Wallachian Legend”", - "body": "A fairy once dwelt in a forest,\nAnd bathed in its silvery streams;\nOne day she was caught by the fishers,\nWhile morning was shedding its gleams.\n\nThe fishers all scattered, affrighted,\nBut Marco, a fisherman young;\nHe kissed her, embraced, and caressed her,\nSo vigorous, youthful, and strong.\n\nThe fairy entwined like a serpent,\nSeductively tender and mild,\nAnd gazing upon him intently,\nShe silently, silently smiled.\n\nAll day she embraced and caressed him,\nBut--happiness ever is brief--\nWith nightfall the fairy had vanished\nAnd left him alone with his grief.\n\nAt daylight, at starlight he wanders,\nAnd seeks her, and withers, and craves,\n“Oh, where is my fairy?”--“We know not,”\nAre laughing the treacherous waves.\n\n“Be silent!” he cries to the wavelets.\n“Yourselves with my fairy you play!”\nAnd into the waters deceitful\nHe plunged, there to seek his sweet fay …\n\nThe fairy still dwells in the forest,\nStill beautiful, charming, and young …\nBut Marco is dead … Yet forever\nHe’ll live in the glory of Song.\n\nWhile you, self-contented and dormant,\nLike worms you will crawl on your way;\nNo tale shall relate of your doings,\nNo poet shall sing you a lay!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elbert Aidline", - "date": { - "year": 1892 - } - } - } - } - }, - "gunter-grass": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Günter Grass", - "birth": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Günter_Grass", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "dont-turn-around": { - "title": "“Don’t Turn Around”", - "body": "Don’t go into the wood,\nin the wood is the wood.\nWhoever walks in the wood,\nlooks for trees,\nwill not be looked for later in the wood.\n\nHave no fear,\nfear smells of fear.\nWhoever smells of fear\nwill be smelled out\nby heroes who smell like heroes.\n\nDon’t drink from the sea,\nthe sea tastes of more sea.\nWhoever drinks from the sea\nhenceforth feels\na thirst only for oceans.\n\nDon’t build a home,\nor you’ll be at home.\nWhoever is at home\nwaits for\nlate callers and opens the door.\n\nWrite no letters,\nletters that vex us end up in Texas.\nWhoever writes the letter\nlends his name\nto the posthumous paper game.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "family-matters": { - "title": "“Family Matters”", - "body": "In our museum--we always go there on Sundays--\nthey have opened a new department.\nOur aborted children, pale, serious embryos,\nsit there in plain glass jars\nand worry about their parents’ future.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "folding-chairs": { - "title": "“Folding Chairs”", - "body": "How sad these changes are.\nPeople unscrew the nameplates from the doors,\ntake the saucepan of cabbage\nand heat it up again, in a different place.\n\nWhat sort of furniture is this\nthat advertises departure?\nPeople take up their folding chairs\nand emigrate,\n\nShips laden with homesickness and the urge to vomit\ncarry patented seating contraptions\nand their unpatented owners\nto and fro.\n\nNow on both sides of the great ocean\nthere are folding chairs;\nhow sad these changes are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "happiness": { - "title": "“Happiness”", - "body": "An empty bus\nhurtles through the starry night.\nPerhaps the driver is singing\nand is happy because he sings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "hymn": { - "title": "“Hymn”", - "body": "As complicated as a nightingale,\nas tinny as,\nkind-hearted as,\nas cease-proof, as traditional,\nas green grave sour, as streaky,\nas symmetrical,\nas hairy,\nas near the water, true to the wind,\nas fireproof, frequently turned over,\nas childishly easy, well-thumbed as,\nas new ans creaking, expensive as,\nas deeply cellared, domestic as,\nas easily lost, shiny with use,\nas thinly blown, as snow-chilled as,\nas independent, as mature,\nas heartless as,\nas mortal as,\nas simple as my soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "in-the-egg": { - "title": "“In the Egg”", - "body": "We live in the egg.\nWe have covered the inside wall\nof the shell with dirty drawings\nand the Christian names of our enemies.\nWe are being hatched.\n\nWhoever is hatching us\nis hatching our pencils as well.\nSet free from the egg one day\nat once we shall make an image\nof whoever is hatching us.\n\nWe assume that we’re being hatched.\nWe imagine some good-natured fowl\nand write school essays\nabout the color and breed\nof the hen that is hatching us.\n\nWhen shall we break the shell?\nOur prophets inside the egg\nfor a middling salary argue\nabout the period of incubation.\nThey posit a day called X.\n\nOut of boredom and genuine need\nwe have invented incubators.\nWe are much concerned about our offspring inside the egg.\nWe should be glad to recommend our patent\nto her who looks after us.\n\nBut we have a roof over our heads.\nSenile chicks,\npolyglot embryos\nchatter all day\nand even discuss their dreams.\n\nAnd what if we’re not being hatched?\nIf this shell will never break?\nIf our horizon is only that\nof our scribbles, and always will be?\nWe hope that we’re being hatched.\n\nEven if we only talk of hatching\nthere remains fear that someone\noutside our shell will feel hungry\nand crack us into the frying pan with a pinch of salt.\nWhat shall we do then, my brethren inside the egg?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "open-wardrobe": { - "title": "“Open Wardrobe”", - "body": "The shoes are at the bottom.\nThey are afraid of a beetle\nOn the way out,\nOf a penny on the way back,\nOf a beetle and a penny on which they might tread\nTill it impresses itself.\nAt the top is the home of the headgear.\nTake heed, be wary, not headstrong.\nIncredible feathers,\nWhat was the bird called,\nWhere did its eyes roll\nWhen it knew that its wings were too gaudy?\nThe white balls asleep in the pockets\nDream of moths.\nHere a button is missing,\nIn this belt the clasp grows weary.\nDoleful silk,\nAsters and other inflammable flowers,\nAutumn becoming a dress.\nEvery Sunday filled with flesh\nAnd the salt of folded linen.\nBefore the wardrobe falls silent, turns into wood,\nA distant relation of pine-trees,--\nWho will wear the coat\nOne day when you’re dead?\nWho move his arm in the sleeve,\nAnticipate every movement?\nWho will turn up the collar,\nStop in front of the pictures\nAnd be alone under the windy cloche?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "saturn": { - "title": "“Saturn”", - "body": "In this big house--\nfrom the rats\nwho know about the drains,\nto the pigeons\nwho know nothing--\nI live and suppose much.\n\nCame home late,\nopened the house\nwith my key\nand noticed as I hunted for my key\nthat I needed a key\nto enter my own home.\n\nWas quite hungry,\nate a chicken\nwith my hands\nand noticed as I ate the chicken\nthat I was eating a chicken\nwhich was cold and dead.\n\nThen stooped,\ntook off both shoes\nand noticed as I took off my shoes\nthat we have to stoop\nif we want to take\nshoes off.\n\nI lay horizontal,\nsmoked the cigarette,\nand in the darkness was certain\nthat someone held out his open hand\nwhen I knocked the ashes\nfrom my cigarette.\n\nAt night Saturn comes\nand holds out his hand.\nWith my ashes, he\ncleans his teeth, Saturn.\nWe shall climb\ninto his jaws.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - }, - "sudden-fright": { - "title": "“Sudden Fright”", - "body": "When in summer in an easterly wind\nSeptember dust whirls and in the belated paper\neditorials are almost mystical,\n\nwhen the powers want to change beds\nand are allowed to beget openly\nnew instruments for control,\n\nwhen around footballs holiday makers camp\nand the playful glance of the nations\nmirrors weighty decisions,\n\nwhen columns of figures put one to sleep\nand through dreams a camouflaged enemy\nbreathes ans crawls nearer,\n\nwhen in conversations always the same word\nis backhandedly held in reserve\nand a match can strike terror,\n\nwhen from the backstroke position in swimming\nskyward only the sky seems to tower,\nfrightened people hurry back to the shore,\n\na sudden fright hangs in the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "transformation": { - "title": "“Transformation”", - "body": "Suddenly the cherries were there\nalthough I had forgotten\nthat they exist\nand caused to be proclaimed: There never have been cherries--\nthey were there, suddenly and dear.\n\nPlums fell on me;\nbut whoever thinks\nthat I was transformed\nbecause something fell and hit me\nhas never been hit by falling plums.\n\nOnly when they poured nuts into my shoes\nand I had to walk\nbecause the children wanted the kernels\nI cried out for cherries, wanted plums\nto hit me--and was transformed a little.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Michael Hamburger" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-graves": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Graves", - "birth": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-lovers": { - "title": "“Advice to Lovers”", - "body": "I knew an old man at a Fair\nWho made it his twice-yearly task\nTo clamber on a cider cask\nAnd cry to all the yokels there:--\n\n“Lovers to-day and for all time\nPreserve the meaning of my rhyme:\nLove is not kindly nor yet grim\nBut does to you as you to him.”\n\n“Whistle, and Love will come to you,\nHiss, and he fades without a word,\nDo wrong, and he great wrong will do,\nSpeak, he retells what he has heard.”\n\n“Then all you lovers have good heed\nVex not young Love in word or deed:\nLove never leaves an unpaid debt,\nHe will not pardon nor forget.”\n\nThe old man’s voice was sweet yet loud\nAnd this shows what a man was he,\nHe’d scatter apples to the crowd\nAnd give great draughts of cider, free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-childs-nightmare": { - "title": "“A Child’s Nightmare”", - "body": "Through long nursery nights he stood\nBy my bed unwearying,\nLoomed gigantic, formless, queer,\nPurring in my haunted ear\nThat same hideous nightmare thing,\nTalking, as he lapped my blood,\nIn a voice cruel and flat,\nSaying for ever, “Cat! … Cat! … Cat! …”\n\nThat one word was all he said,\nThat one word through all my sleep,\nIn monotonous mock despair.\nNonsense may be light as air,\nBut there’s Nonsense that can keep\nHorror bristling round the head,\nWhen a voice cruel and flat\nSays for ever, “Cat! … Cat! … Cat! …”\n\nHe had faded, he was gone\nYears ago with Nursery Land,\nWhen he leapt on me again\nFrom the clank of a night train,\nOverpowered me foot and head,\nLapped my blood, while on and on\nThe old voice cruel and flat\nSays for ever, “Cat! … Cat! … Cat! …”\n\nMorphia drowsed, again I lay\nIn a crater by High Wood:\nHe was there with straddling legs,\nStaring eyes as big as eggs,\nPurring as he lapped my blood,\nHis black bulk darkening the day,\nWith a voice cruel and flat,\n“Cat! … Cat! … Cat! … Cat! …” he said, “Cat! … Cat! …”\n\nWhen I’m shot through heart and head,\nAnd there’s no choice but to die,\nThe last word I’ll hear, no doubt,\nWon’t be “Charge!” or “Bomb them out!”\nNor the stretcher-bearer’s cry,\n“Let that body be, he’s dead!”\nBut a voice cruel and flat\nSaying for ever, “Cat! … Cat! … Cat!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-lover-since-childhood": { - "title": "“A Lover since Childhood”", - "body": "Tangled in thought am I,\nStumble in speech do I?\nDo I blunder and blush for the reason why?\nWander aloof do I,\nLean over gates and sigh,\nMaking friends with the bee and the butterfly?\n\nIf thus and thus I do,\nDazed by the thought of you,\nWalking my sorrowful way in the early dew,\nMy heart cut through and through\nIn this despair of you,\nStarved for a word or a look will my hope renew:\n\ngive then a thought for me\nWalking so miserably,\nWanting relief in the friendship of flower or tree;\nDo but remember, we\nOnce could in love agree,\nSwallow your pride, let us be as we used to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-gray": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Gray", - "birth": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "claire-de-lune": { - "title": "“Claire de Lune”", - "body": "How like a well-kept garden is your soul,\nWith bergomask and solemn minuet!\nPlaying upon the lute! The dancers seem\nBut sad, beneath their strange habiliments.\nWhile, in the minor key, their songs extol\nThe victor Love, and life’s sweet blandishments,\nTheir looks belie the burden of their lays,\nThe songs that mingle with the still moon-beams.\nSo strange, so beautiful, the pallid rays;\nMaking the birds among the branches dream,\nAnd sob with ecstasy the slender jets,\n\nThe fountains tall that leap upon the lawns\nAmid the garden gods, the marble fauns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "complaint": { - "title": "“Complaint”", - "body": "Men, women, call thee so or so;\nI do not know.\nThou hast no name\nFor me, but in my heart aflame\n\nBurns tireless, neath a silver vine.\nAnd round entwine\nIts purple girth\nAll things of fragrance and of worth.\n\nThou shout! thou burst of light! thou throb\nOf pain! thou sob!\nThou like a bar\nOf some sonata, heard from far\n\nThrough blue-hue’d veils! When in these wise,\nTo my soul’s eyes,\nThy shape appears,\nMy aching hands are full of tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "god-has-spoken": { - "title": "“God Has Spoken”", - "body": "God has spoken: Love me,\nson, thou must; Oh see\nMy broken side; my heart,\nits rays refulgent shine;\nMy feet, insulted, stabbed,\nthat Mary bathes with brine\nOf bitter tears my sad arms,\nhelpless, son, for thee;\n\nWith thy sins heavy; and my hands;\nthou seest the rod;\nThou seest the nails, the sponge,\nthe gall; and all my pain\nMust teach thee love, amidst a world\nwhere flesh doth reign,\nMy flesh alone, my blood,\nmy voice, the voice of God,\n\nSay, have I not loved thee,\nloved thee to death,\nO brother in my Father,\nin the Spirit son?\nSay, as the word is written,\nis my work not done?\nThy deepest woe have I not sobbed\nwith struggling breath?\nHas not thy sweat of anguished nights\nfrom all my pores in pain\nOf blood dripped, piteous friend,\nwho seekest me in vain?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "green": { - "title": "“Green”", - "body": "Leaves and branches, flowers and fruits are here;\nAnd here my heart, which throbs alone for thee.\nAh! do not wound my heart with those two dear\nWhite hands, but take the poor gift tenderly.\n\nI come, all covered with the dews of night\nThe morning breeze has pearled upon my face.\nLet my fatigue, at thy feet, in thy sight,\nDream through the moments of its sweet solace.\n\nWith thy late kisses ringing, let my head\nRoll in blest indolence on thy young breast;\nTo lull the tempest thy caresses bred,\nAnd soothe my senses with a little rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "mishka": { - "title": "“Mishka”", - "body": "Mishka is poet among the beasts.\nWhen roots are rotten, and rivers weep.\nThe bear is at play in the land of sleep.\nThough his head be heavy between his fists.\nThe bear is poet among the beasts.\n\nWide and large are the monster’s eyes,\nNought saying, save one word alone:\nMishka! Mishka, as turned to stone,\nHears no word else, nor in anywise\nCan see aught save the monster’s eyes.\n\nHoney is under the monster’s lips;\nAnd Mishka follows into her lair,\ndragged in the net of her yellow hair,\nKnowing all things when honey drips\nOn his tongue like rain, the song of the hips\n\nOf the honey-child, and of each twin mound.\nMishka! there screamed a far bird-note,\nDeep in the sky, when round his throat\nThe triple coil of her hair she wound.\nAnd stroked his limbs with a humming sound.\n\nMishka is white like a hunter’s son\nTor he knows no more of the ancient south\nWhen the honey-child’s lips are on his mouth,\nWhen all her kisses are joined in one,\nAnd his body is bathed in grass and sun.\n\nThe shadows lie mauven beneath the trees,\nAnd purple stains, where the finches pass,\nLeap in the stalks of the deep, rank grass.\nFlutter of-wing, and the buzz of bees,\nDeepen the silence, and sweeten ease.\n\nThe honey-child is an olive tree,\nThe voice of birds and the voice of flowers,\nEach of them all and all the hours,\nThe honey-child is a winged bee,\nHer touch is a perfume, a melody.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "parsifal": { - "title": "“Parsifal”", - "body": "Conquered the flower-maidens, and the wide embrace\nOf their round proffered arms, that tempt the virgin boy;\nConquered the trickling of their babbling tongues; the coy\nBack glances, and the mobile breasts of subtle grace;\n\nConquered the Woman Beautiful, the fatal charm\nOf her hot breast, the music of her babbling tongue;\nConquered the gate of Hell, into the gate the young\nMan passes, with the heavy trophy at his arm,\n\nThe holy Javelin that pierced the Heart of God.\nHe heals the dying king, he sits upon the throne,\nKing, and high priest of that great gift, the living Blood.\n\nIn robe of gold the youth adores the glorious Sign\nOf the green goblet, worships the mysterious Wine.\nAnd oh! the chime of children’s voices in the dome.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sensation": { - "title": "“Sensation”", - "body": "I walk the alleys trampled through the wheat,\nThrough whole blue summer eves, on velvet grass.\nDreaming, I feel the dampness at my feet;\nThe breezes bathe my naked head and pass.\n\nI do not think a single thought, nor say\nA word; but in my soul the mists upcurl\nOf infinite love. I will go far away\nWith nature, happily, as with a girl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "spleen": { - "title": "“Spleen”", - "body": "The roses every one were red,\nAnd all the ivy leaves were black.\n\nSweet, do not even stir your head,\nOr all of my despairs come back.\n\nThe sky is too blue, too delicate:\nToo soft the air, too green the sea.\n\nI fear--how long had I to wait!--\nThat you will tear yourself from me.\n\nThe shining box-leaves weary me,\nThe varnished holly’s glistening,\n\nThe stretch of infinite country;\nSo, saving you, does everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-past": { - "title": "“Summer Past”", - "body": "There was the summer. There\nWarm hours of leaf-lipped song,\nAnd dripping amber sweat.\nO sweet to see\nThe great trees condescend to cast a pearl\nDown to the myrtles; and the proud leaves curl\nIn ecstasy.\n\nFruit of a quest, despair.\nSmart of a sullen wrong.\nWhere may they hide them yet?\nOne hour, yet one,\nTo find the mossgod lurking in his nest,\nTo see the naiads’ floating hair, caressed\nBy fragrant sun.\n\nBeams. Softly lulled the eves\nThe song-tired birds to sleep,\nThat other things might tell\nTheir secrecies.\nThe beetle humming neath the fallen leaves.\nDeep in what hollow do the stern gods keep\nTheir bitter silence? By what listening well\nWhere holy trees,\n\nSong-set, unfurl eternally the sheen\nOf restless green?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-vines": { - "title": "“The Vines”", - "body": "“Have you seen the listening snake?”\nbramble clutches for his bride,\nLately she was by his side,\nWoodbine, with her gummy hands.\n\nIn the ground the mottled snake\nListens for the dawn of day;\nListens, listening death away,\nTill the day burst winter’s bands.\n\nPainted ivy is asleep,\nStretched upon the bank, all torn,\nSinewy though she be; love-lorn\nConvolvuluses cease to creep.\n\nBramble clutches for his bride,\nWoodbine, with her gummy hands,\nAll his horny claws expands;\nShe has withered in his grasp.\n\n“Till the day dawn, till the tide\nOf the winter’s afternoon.”\n“Who tells dawning?”--“Listen, soon.”\nHalf born tendrils, grasping, gasp.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-voyage-to-cythera": { - "title": "“The Voyage to Cythera”", - "body": "Bird-like, my heart was glad to soar and vault;\nFluttering among the cordages; and on\nThe vessel flew, under an empty vault:\nAn angel drunken of a radiant sun.\n\nTell me, what is that gray, that sombre isle?\n’Tis Cythera, famed on many a poet string;\nA name that has not lacked the slavering smile;\nBut now, you see, it is not much to sing.\n\nIsle of soft whispers, tremours of the heart!\nThe splendid phantom of thy rude goddess\nFloats on thy seas like breath of spikenard,\nCharging men’s souls with love and lusciousness.\n\nSweet isle of myrtles, once of open blooms:\nNow only of lean lands most lean: it seems\nA flinty desert bitter with shrill screams:\nBut one strange object on its horror looms.\n\nNot a fair temple, foiled with coppiced trees,\nWhere the young priestess, mistress of the flowers,\nGoes opening her gown to the cool breeze,\nTo still the fire, the torment that devours.\n\nBut as along the shore we skirted, near\nEnough to scare the birds with our white sails,\nWe saw a three-limbed gibbet rising sheer.\nDetached against the sky in spare details.\n\nPerched on their pasturage, ferocious fowl\nRiddled with rage a more than putrid roast;\nEach of them stabbing, like a tool, his foul\nBeak in the oozing members of his host.\n\nBelow, a troop of jealous quadrupeds,\nLooking aloft with eye and steadfast snout;\nA larger beast above the others’ heads,\nA hangman with his porters round about.\n\nThe eyes, two caves; and from the rotten paunch,\nIts freight, too heavy, streamed along the haunch,\nHang for these harpies’ hideous delight,\nPoor rag of flesh, torn of thy sex and sight!\n\nCythera’s child, child of so sweet a sky!\nSilent thou bearest insult--as we must--\nIn expiation of what faults deny\nThee even a shallow shelter in the dust.\n\nLudicrous sufferer! thy woes are mine.\nThere came, at seeing of thy dangling limbs,\nUp to my lips, like vomiting, the streams\nOf ancient miseries, of gall and brine.\n\nBefore thee, brother in my memory fresh!\nI felt the mangling of the appetites\nOf the black panthers, of the savage kites,\nThat were so fain to rend and pick my flesh.\n\nThe sea was sleeping. Blue and beautiful\nThe sky. Henceforth I saw but murk and blood,\nAlas! and as it had been in a shroud,\nMy heart lay buried in that parable,\n\nAll thine isle showed me, Venus! was upthrust,\nA symbol calvary where my image hung.\nGive me, Lord God, to look upon that dung,\nMy body and my heart, without disgust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "wings-in-the-dark": { - "title": "“Wings in the Dark”", - "body": "Forth into the warm darkness faring wide--\nMore silent momently the silent quay--\nTowards where the ranks of boats rock to the tide,\nMuffling their plaintive gurgling jealously.\n\nWith gentle nodding of her gracious snout,\nOne greets her master till he step aboard;\nShe flaps her wings, impatient to get out;\nShe runs to plunder, straining every cord,\n\nFull-winged and stealthy like a bird of prey,\nAll tense the muscles of her seemly flanks;\nShe, the coy creature that the idle day\nSees idly riding in the idle ranks.\n\nBackward and forth, over the chosen ground,\nLike a young horse, she drags the heavy trawl,\nTireless; or speeds her rapturous course unbound,\nAnd passing fishers through the darkness call\n\nDeep greeting, in the jargon of the sea.\nHaul upon haul, flounders and soles and dabs,\nAnd phosphorescent animalcule,\nSand, seadrift, weeds, thousands of worthless crabs.\n\nLow on the mud the darkling fishes grope.\nCautious to stir, staring with jewel eyes;\nDogs of the sea, the savage congers mope,\nWinding their sulky march Meander-wise.\n\nSuddenly all is light and life and flight,\nUpon the sandy bottom, agate strewn.\nThe fishers mumble, waiting till the night\nUrge on the clouds, and cover up the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "women-doomed": { - "title": "“Women Doomed”", - "body": "Like moody beasts they lie along the sands;,\nLook where the sky against the sea-rim clings:\nFoot stretches out to foot, and groping hands\nHave languors soft and bitter shudderings.\n\nSome, smitten hearts with the long secrecies,\nOn velvet moss, deep in their bowers’ ease,\nPrattling the love of timid infancies,\nAre tearing the green bark from the young trees.\n\nOthers, like sisters, slowly walk and grave;\nBy rocks that swarm with ghostly legions,\nWhere Anthony saw surging on the waves\nThe purple breasts of his temptations,\n\nSome, by the light of crumbling, resinous gums,\nIn the still hollows of old pagan dens,\nCall thee in aid to their deliriums\nO Bacchus! cajoler of ancient pains.\n\nAnd those whose breasts for scapulars are fain\nNurse under their long robes the cruel thong.\nThese, in dim woods, where huddling shadows throng.\nMix with the foam of pleasure tears of pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-gray": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Gray", - "birth": { - "year": 1716 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1771 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gray", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bard": { - "title": "“The Bard”", - "body": "I.1.\n\n“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!\nConfusion on thy banners wait,\nTho’ fann’d by Conquest’s crimson wing\nThey mock the air with idle state.\nHelm, nor hauberk’s twisted mail,\nNor even thy virtues, tyrant, shall avail\nTo save thy secret soul from nightly fears,\nFrom Cambria’s curse, from Cambria’s tears!”\nSuch were the sounds, that o’er the crested pride\nOf the first Edward scatter’d wild dismay,\nAs down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side\nHe wound with toilsome march his long array.\nStout Glo’ster stood aghast in speechless trance;\nTo arms! cried Mortimer, and couch’d his quiv’ring lance.\n\n\nI.2.\n\nOn a rock, whose haughty brow\nFrowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood,\nRob’d in the sable garb of woe,\nWith haggard eyes the poet stood;\n(Loose his beard, and hoary hair\nStream’d, like a meteor, to the troubled air)\nAnd with a master’s hand, and prophet’s fire,\nStruck the deep sorrows of his lyre;\n“Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave,\nSighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!\nO’er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,\nRevenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;\nVocal no more, since Cambria’s fatal day,\nTo high-born Hoel’s harp, or soft Llewellyn’s lay.”\n\n\nI.3.\n\n“Cold is Cadwallo’s tongue,\nThat hush’d the stormy main;\nBrave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed:\nMountains, ye mourn in vain\nModred, whose magic song\nMade huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topp’d head.\nOn dreary Arvon’s shore they lie,\nSmear’d with gore, and ghastly pale:\nFar, far aloof th’ affrighted ravens sail;\nThe famish’d eagle screams, and passes by.\nDear lost companions of my tuneful art,\nDear, as the light that visits these sad eyes,\nDear, as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,\nYe died amidst your dying country’s cries--\nNo more I weep. They do not sleep.\nOn yonder cliffs, a griesly band,\nI see them sit, they linger yet,\nAvengers of their native land:\nWith me in dreadful harmony they join,\nAnd weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line:--”\n\n\nII.1.\n\n“‘Weave the warp, and weave the woof,\nThe winding sheet of Edward’s race.\nGive ample room, and verge enough\nThe characters of hell to trace.\nMark the year, and mark the night,\nWhen Severn shall re-echo with affright\nThe shrieks of death, thro’ Berkley’s roofs that ring,\nShrieks of an agonising King!\nShe-Wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,\nThat tear’st the bowels of thy mangled mate,\nFrom thee be born, who o’er thy country hangs\nThe scourge of Heav’n. What terrors round him wait!\nAmazement in his van, with Flight combin’d,\nAnd Sorrow’s faded form, and Solitude behind.”\n\n\nII.2.\n\n“‘Mighty victor, mighty lord,\nLow on his funeral couch he lies!\nNo pitying heart, no eye, afford\nA tear to grace his obsequies.\nIs the Sable Warrior fled?\nThy son is gone. He rests among the dead.\nThe swarm, that in thy noon-tide beam were born?\nGone to salute the rising Morn.\nFair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,\nWhile proudly riding o’er the azure realm\nIn gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;\nYouth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;\nRegardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway,\nThat, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening prey.”\n\n\nII.3.\n\n“‘Fill high the sparkling bowl,\nThe rich repast prepare;\nReft of a crown, he yet may share the feast.\nClose by the regal chair\nFell Thirst and Famine scowl\nA baleful smile upon their baffled guest.\nHeard ye the din of battle bray,\nLance to lance, and horse to horse?\nLong years of havoc urge their destin’d course\nAnd thro’ the kindred squadrons mow their way.\nYe towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame,\nWith many a foul and midnight murther fed,\nRevere his consort’s faith, his father’s fame,\nAnd spare the meek usurper’s holy head.\nAbove, below, the rose of snow,\nTwined with her blushing foe, we spread:\nThe bristled Boar in infant-gore\nWallows beneath the thorny shade.\nNow, brothers, bending o’er th’ accursed loom\nStamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom.”\n\n\nIII.1.\n\n“‘Edward, lo! to sudden fate\n(Weave we the woof. The thread is spun)\nHalf of thy heart we consecrate.\n(The web is wove. The work is done.)’\nStay, oh stay! nor thus forlorn\nLeave me unbless’d, unpitied, here to mourn!\nIn yon bright track, that fires the western skies!\nThey melt, they vanish from my eyes.\nBut oh! what solemn scenes on Snowdon’s height\nDescending slow their glitt’ring skirts unroll?\nVisions of glory, spare my aching sight,\nYe unborn Ages, crowd not on my soul!\nNo more our long-lost Arthur we bewail.\nAll-hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia’s issue, hail!”\n\n\nIII.2.\n\n“Girt with many a baron bold\nSublime their starry fronts they rear;\nAnd gorgeous dames, and statesmen old\nIn bearded majesty appear.\nIn the midst a form divine!\nHer eye proclaims her of the Briton-line;\nHer lion-port, her awe-commanding face,\nAttemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.\nWhat strings symphonious tremble in the air,\nWhat strings of vocal transport round her play!\nHear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear;\nThey breathe a soul to animate thy clay.\nBright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings,\nWaves in the eye of Heav’n her many-colour’d wings.”\n\n\nIII.3.\n\n“The verse adorn again\nFierce War, and faithful Love,\nAnd Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest.\nIn buskin’d measures move\nPale Grief, and pleasing Pain,\nWith Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.\nA voice, as of the cherub-choir,\nGales from blooming Eden bear;\nAnd distant warblings lessen on my ear,\nThat lost in long futurity expire.\nFond impious man, think’st thou, yon sanguine cloud,\nRais’d by thy breath, has quench’d the orb of day?\nTo-morrow he repairs the golden flood,\nAnd warms the nations with redoubled ray.\nEnough for me: with joy I see\nThe different doom our Fates assign.\nBe thine Despair, and scept’red Care,\nTo triumph, and to die, are mine.”\nHe spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height\nDeep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard": { - "title": "“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”", - "body": "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,\nThe lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,\nThe plowman homeward plods his weary way,\nAnd leaves the world to darkness and to me.\n\nNow fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,\nAnd all the air a solemn stillness holds,\nSave where the beetle wheels his droning flight,\nAnd drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;\n\nSave that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r\nThe moping owl does to the moon complain\nOf such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,\nMolest her ancient solitary reign.\n\nBeneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,\nWhere heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,\nEach in his narrow cell for ever laid,\nThe rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.\n\nThe breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,\nThe swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,\nThe cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,\nNo more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.\n\nFor them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,\nOr busy housewife ply her evening care:\nNo children run to lisp their sire’s return,\nOr climb his knees the envied kiss to share.\n\nOft did the harvest to their sickle yield,\nTheir furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;\nHow jocund did they drive their team afield!\nHow bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!\n\nLet not Ambition mock their useful toil,\nTheir homely joys, and destiny obscure;\nNor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile\nThe short and simple annals of the poor.\n\nThe boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,\nAnd all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,\nAwaits alike th’ inevitable hour.\nThe paths of glory lead but to the grave.\n\nNor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,\nIf Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise,\nWhere thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault\nThe pealing anthem swells the note of praise.\n\nCan storied urn or animated bust\nBack to its mansion call the fleeting breath?\nCan Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,\nOr Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?\n\nPerhaps in this neglected spot is laid\nSome heart once pregnant with celestial fire;\nHands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,\nOr wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.\n\nBut Knowledge to their eyes her ample page\nRich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;\nChill Penury repress’d their noble rage,\nAnd froze the genial current of the soul.\n\nFull many a gem of purest ray serene,\nThe dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:\nFull many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,\nAnd waste its sweetness on the desert air.\n\nSome village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast\nThe little tyrant of his fields withstood;\nSome mute inglorious Milton here may rest,\nSome Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.\n\nTh’ applause of list’ning senates to command,\nThe threats of pain and ruin to despise,\nTo scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,\nAnd read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,\n\nTheir lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone\nTheir growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d;\nForbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,\nAnd shut the gates of mercy on mankind,\n\nThe struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,\nTo quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,\nOr heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride\nWith incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.\n\nFar from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,\nTheir sober wishes never learn’d to stray;\nAlong the cool sequester’d vale of life\nThey kept the noiseless tenor of their way.\n\nYet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,\nSome frail memorial still erected nigh,\nWith uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,\nImplores the passing tribute of a sigh.\n\nTheir name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse,\nThe place of fame and elegy supply:\nAnd many a holy text around she strews,\nThat teach the rustic moralist to die.\n\nFor who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,\nThis pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,\nLeft the warm precincts of the cheerful day,\nNor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?\n\nOn some fond breast the parting soul relies,\nSome pious drops the closing eye requires;\nEv’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,\nEv’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.\n\nFor thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead\nDost in these lines their artless tale relate;\nIf chance, by lonely contemplation led,\nSome kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,\n\nHaply some hoary-headed swain may say,\n“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn\nBrushing with hasty steps the dews away\nTo meet the sun upon the upland lawn.”\n\n“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech\nThat wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,\nHis listless length at noontide would he stretch,\nAnd pore upon the brook that babbles by.”\n\n“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,\nMutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove,\nNow drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,\nOr craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.”\n\n“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill,\nAlong the heath and near his fav’rite tree;\nAnother came; nor yet beside the rill,\nNor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;”\n\n“The next with dirges due in sad array\nSlow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne.\nApproach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,\nGrav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”\n\n\n# _Epitaph:_\n\nHere rests his head upon the lap of Earth\nA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.\nFair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,\nAnd Melancholy mark’d him for her own.\n\nLarge was his bounty, and his soul sincere,\nHeav’n did a recompense as largely send:\nHe gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,\nHe gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.\n\nNo farther seek his merits to disclose,\nOr draw his frailties from their dread abode,\n(There they alike in trembling hope repose)\nThe bosom of his Father and his God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "if-i-should-die": { - "title": "“If I Should Die”", - "body": "If I should die and leave you\nBe not like the others, quick undone\nWho keep long vigils by the silent\ndust and weep.\n\nFor my sake turn to life and smile\nNerving thy heart and trembling\nhand to comfort weaker souls than thee.\nComplete these unfinished tasks of mine\nAnd I perchance may therein comfort thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ode-on-the-spring": { - "title": "“Ode on the Spring”", - "body": "Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours,\nFair Venus’ train appear,\nDisclose the long-expecting flowers,\nAnd wake the purple year!\nThe Attic warbler pours her throat,\nResponsive to the cuckoo’s note,\nThe untaught harmony of spring:\nWhile whisp’ring pleasure as they fly,\nCool zephyrs thro’ the clear blue sky\nTheir gather’d fragrance fling.\n\nWhere’er the oak’s thick branches stretch\nA broader, browner shade;\nWhere’er the rude and moss-grown beech\nO’er-canopies the glade,\nBeside some water’s rushy brink\nWith me the Muse shall sit, and think\n(At ease reclin’d in rustic state)\nHow vain the ardour of the crowd,\nHow low, how little are the proud,\nHow indigent the great!\n\nStill is the toiling hand of Care:\nThe panting herds repose:\nYet hark, how thro’ the peopled air\nThe busy murmur glows!\nThe insect youth are on the wing,\nEager to taste the honied spring,\nAnd float amid the liquid noon:\nSome lightly o’er the current skim,\nSome show their gaily-gilded trim\nQuick-glancing to the sun.\n\nTo Contemplation’s sober eye\nSuch is the race of man:\nAnd they that creep, and they that fly,\nShall end where they began.\nAlike the busy and the gay\nBut flutter thro’ life’s little day,\nIn fortune’s varying colours drest:\nBrush’d by the hand of rough Mischance,\nOr chill’d by age, their airy dance\nThey leave, in dust to rest.\n\nMethinks I hear in accents low\nThe sportive kind reply:\nPoor moralist! and what art thou?\nA solitary fly!\nThy joys no glitt’ring female meets,\nNo hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,\nNo painted plumage to display:\nOn hasty wings thy youth is flown;\nThy sun is set, thy spring is gone--\nWe frolic, while ’tis May.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gregory-of-narek": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Gregory of Narek", - "birth": { - "year": 950, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1010, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "armenian", - "language": "armenian", - "flag": "🇦🇲", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_of_Narek", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "armenian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 95 - }, - "poems": { - "prayer-1": { - "title": "Prayer 1", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nThe voice of a sighing heart, its sobs and mournful cries,\nI offer up to you, O Seer of Secrets,\nplacing the fruits of my wavering mind\nas a savory sacrifice on the fire of my grieving soul\nto be delivered to you in the censer of my will.\n\nCompassionate Lord, breathe in\nthis offering and look more favorably on it\nthan upon a more sumptuous sacrifice\noffered with rich smoke. Please find\nthis simple string of words acceptable.\nDo not turn in disdain.\n\nMay this unsolicited gift reach you,\nthis sacrifice of words\nfrom the deep mystery-filled chamber\nof my feelings, consumed in flames\nfueled by whatever grace I may have within me.\n\nAs I pray, do not let these\npleas annoy you, Almighty,\nlike the raised hands of Jacob,\nwhose irreverence was rebuked\nby Isaiah, nor let them seem like the impudence\nof Babylon criticized in the seventy second Psalm.\n\nBut let these words be acceptable\nas were the fragrant offerings\nin the tabernacle at Shiloh\nraised again by David on his return from captivity\nas the resting place for the ark of the covenant,\na symbol for the restoration of my lost soul.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBecause your stern judgment\nechoes mightily in the valley of retribution,\ncontradictory impulses in my soul\nbrace for battle like clashing mobs.\nCrowds of thoughts strike each other, sword\nagainst armor, evil against good,\nensnaring me for death, as in other times,\nwhen your grace had not rescued me--\nthat grace of Christ, which Paul,\nchosen among the apostles,\ntaught was greater than the law of Moses.\n\nFor as the Scripture says, “The day\nof the Lord is upon us,”\nand in the narrow valley of Jehoshaphat\non the banks of the Kidron,\nthose small battle grounds\nforeshadow on earth\nvictory in the life to come.\nThus, the kingdom of God in a visible form\nhas come already, charging me\non truthful testimony with wrongs\ngraver than those of the Edomites,\nPhilistines and other barbarians--\nwrongs that brought down the hand of God.\n\nAnd whereas their sentences were measured in years,\nmy transgressions will be punished without term.\nAs the prophet and the parable-teller warned,\nthe dungeon and shackles\nare already at my threshold to show me\nhere and now my eternal disgrace.\n\nOnly you can work the miracle\nto make life possible for a soul\nso imperiled by doubt,\nO Atoner for all, exalted beyond saying\nin your boundless glory on high\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-2": { - "title": "Prayer 2", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, my heavy laden soul,\nwhat will you do?\nYou call with your lips and voice to\nGod most high,\nGod, who cares only for deeds and\nis not taken in by words.\nYou, my soul, with a heart always turned toward Egypt,\nhow can I describe you?\n\nAm I\na Sodom, to be punished likewise with destruction,\nor the prosecutor of Ninevah, who was struck dumb?\n\nAm I\nmore cowardly and barbarous than the\nqueen of the south,\nlower than Canaan,\nmore stubborn than Amalek,\nincurable as the city of idols,\na relic left behind from the rebellion of Israel,\na reminder of the broken covenant of Judah,\nmore reproachable than Tyre,\nmore shunned than Zidon,\nmore immoral than Galilee, more unpardonable than faithless Capernaum,\nmaligned like Korazin,\nslandered like Bethsaida?\n\nOr am I\nimmodest as Ephraim as he grayed,\nor a dove, whose gentleness seems due to\nfeeblemindedness and not to inner calm,\nor an evil serpent born of lion’s cubs,\nor the serpent’s egg filled with decay,\nor like the last blow against Jerusalem?\nOr am I\nin the words of our Lord\nand the sayings of the prophets,\nan abandoned tabernacle about to collapse,\nthe unlatched doors of the stronghold,\nmy speaking edifice stained again,\nhaving given up my rightful inheritance,\nmy home built by God,\nas Moses, David and Jeremiah prophesied?\nMy thinking body now consumed by disease,\nafflicted with carping counsel, rehabilitated by the law,\nanointed with the clay of mildness,\nincapable of finding my own salvation,\ntorn away from the maker’s hand,\nexpelled as just punishment\nby order of the Almighty, to an unholy place,\nrejected, exiled, greatly shunned, nothing spared,\nhaving buried my gift in the ground,\nlike the one chastised in the Gospel by\nlosing his inheritance.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut you, God,\nLord of souls and all flesh,\nin the words of one divinely graced,\nyou are long-suffering and abounding in mercy.\n\nIn the voice of blessed Jonah,\ngrant that I finish to your delight\nthis book of prayers, now begun.\nAnd having sown these words with tears\nand set forth on this journey toward the dwellings you\nhave prepared,\nmay I return joyfully in the time of harvest\nwith the bounty of atonement,\nwith sheaves of goodness and the fruits of delight.\n\nDo not give me a barren heart,\nlike the childless womb that was Israel’s,\nor eyes like dry breasts,\nbut hear the prayers of your thoughtful servant,\nalmighty and merciful Lord,\nbefore the prayers of heaven,\nas those of heaven are heard before those of earth,\nthe earth before offerings of wheat, wine and oil,\nand the wheat, wine and oil before Jezreel,\nso may the pleadings of the heavenly host\nmove my soul more than worldly temptation.\nYou--the potter, I--the clay\nShow me, here at the threshold of these contrite prayers,\nthe sweetness of your will.\nStrengthen me that I might not be unworthy\nof the light when the heavens open,\nso that I might not be consumed and snuffed out\nlike a candle.\nRather as you would for any earnest entreaty\ngive me heart, for I am exhausted,\ngive me strength, for I am weary,\ngive me life, for I am worn by pangs of conscience,\nand relieve my anguish in seeking you.\n\nAccept the gift of my prayers\nand grant the mercy of your grace.\nAccept this meager offering from a weakling like me,\nand grant greatly from your heavenly might.\nFortify my words of repentance, having sent the\nHoly Ghost, endowed with the message of the\nbreath of God.\nGrant, benevolent Lord, that we might be\nenlightened like Isaiah.\nOffer me, although I am deserving of death,\nthe gold of grace instead of the brass of a\ndisregarded voice,\nthe brightness of copper instead of blackness of\nunadorned iron, remembering copper as a symbol\nof virtue shining from Lebanon.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhy have you hardened my miserable heart\nso I do not fear you, who is beyond words and awe?\nHelp, so I will not be unfruitful in this task\nlike the planter vainly sowing seeds into barren ground.\nSpare me that I may not\nlabor without birth,\nsigh without tears,\nmeditate without voice,\ncloud without rain,\nstruggle without reaching,\ncall without being heard,\nimplore without being heeded,\ngroan without being comforted,\nbeg without being helped,\nsmolder without aroma,\nsee you without being fulfilled.\n\nHear me, Lord, before I cry out to you,\nwho alone are almighty,\nDo not leave the wages of my suffering unrecompensed\nfor the tallied days of my life of sin,\nwayward soul that I am.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nGrant me life, compassionate Lord.\nHear me, merciful Lord.\nBe charitable to me, forgiving Lord.\nSave me, long-suffering Lord.\nProtect me, defender Lord.\nBe generous, all-giving Lord.\nFree me, all-powerful Lord.\nRevive me, restoring Lord.\nRaise me again, awe-inspiring Lord.\nEnlighten me, heavenly Lord.\nCure me, omnipotent Lord.\nGrant pardon, inscrutable Lord.\nBestow gifts, bountiful Lord.\nAdorn me with grace, generous Lord.\nLet us be reconciled, healing Lord.\nBe accepting, unvengeful Lord.\nWipe away my transgressions, blessed Lord,\nso that on that Day of Misery,\nwhen I stare at the abyss on either side,\nI may also catch sight of your salvation,\nmy hope and guardian,\nand on that terrifying journey\nyour angel of peace may sweetly guide me.\n\nEndow me, Lord, on the day my breath is finished\nwith a clean spirit raised in light among\nthe joyful heavenly host,\nwith gifts of your love overtaking me.\nMay I arrive with the workers for justice.\nGrant to my wayward soul an unexpected kindness\non that day of despair.\nDo not assign, blessed Lord and Savior,\na wild beast to guide your sick sheep,\nbut grant me health, for I am dying of sin,\ngrant me salvation, for I am ruined by transgressions.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWill you, I wonder:\nForget to be charitable, my expectation?\nNeglect to be compassionate, caring Lord?\nRegret your charity toward humankind, constant Lord?\nRetreat from your life-giving, everlasting Lord?\nAbandon the cheerful fruit of your mercy?\nCorrupt the gracious flower of your sweetness?\nDishonor the grandeur of your generous bounty?\nVary the glory of your white-haired exaltation?\nWaste the fitting splendor of your crown?\n\nIf bliss is for the merciful,\nthen you, a kingdom unto yourself, filled with love,\nwill you not grant me full salvation?\nWill you not offer a salve for my wounds?\nWill you not minister to my pains?\nWill you not cure my weakness?\nWill you not shed light upon the darkness,\nfor me who trusts in your strength?\nYou, gift of life to the universe,\nwho alone have glory in oneself and of oneself,\nwhose everlasting being is witnessed by everything,\nblessed and glorified through three eternities,\nand beyond the limits of all conceivable infinities.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-3": { - "title": "Prayer 3", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord, my Lord, grantor of gifts, root of goodness,\nruler of all equally, creator of all from nothing,\nglorified, awesome, awe inspiring,\nbeyond understanding,\ndreadful, mighty, stern,\nunbearable, unapproachable, incomprehensible,\ninconceivable,\nineffable, invisible, unexaminable,\nuntouchable, unsearchable,\nwithout beginning, outside of time,\nunclouded knowledge, bold vision,\ntrue being, exalted and humble,\nblessed existence, shadowless dawn,\nray shining upon all, light professing to all,\nunwavering assurance, undisturbable calm,\nindelible seal, infinite image, witnessed name,\ntaste of sweetness, cup of bliss,\nsoul-nourishing bread, love in dark exile,\nunambiguous promise,\ncovering most desirable, garment most protective,\ncloak most worthy, ornament most glorious,\ngreat help, trustworthy refuge,\nundiminishing grace, inexhaustible treasure,\npure rain, glittering dew,\nuniversal cure, free healing,\nhealth restored, sublime spur,\nundeceiving call, good news for all,\nking who lifts up the slave,\ndefender who loves the poor,\ngiver of endless wealth,\nsafe harbor, unyielding command,\nhope without bounds,\nlong in vision, unsparing in generosity,\njust right hand that dispenses to all,\nimpartial eye, voice of comfort, consoling tidings,\nharbinger of bliss,\nliving name, finger of foresight,\nunstumbling start, sincere course,\nlife-giving will, candid advice, unenvying honor,\nbroad possibility, narrow restriction,\ntrack without trace, path without markers,\nimage indescribable, quantity immeasurable,\nmodel inimitable,\nunparalleled compassion, inexhaustible mercy,\nhumility celebrated, kiss of salvation.\n\nAnd more than these worthy epithets,\ndedicated to your Godliness,\nyou who are blessed, praised, lauded,\npreached, evangelized,\nproclaimed, exalted, recounted, sought with\nunflagging desire,\nwhatever your streams of sweetness bring us,\nshall be illustrated in these image-filled psalms,\nshowing you joyful in my salvation, blessed Lord,\nas if a ravenous hunger had been relieved by a\nsumptuous feast,\nfor you are glorified not because of some\nvain song of mine,\nbut because you may accept these modest prayers\nas justification for granting your great salvation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nA new book of psalms sings with urgency through me,\nfor all thinking people the world over,\nexpressing all human passions\nand serving with its images\nas an encyclopedic companion to our human condition,\nfor the entire, mixed congregation of the\nChurch universal,\nfor the newborn who have just arrived,\nfor adolescents in the second stage of life,\nfor adults whose days are ripe and numbered,\nfor the guilty and the just,\nfor the brazenly haughty and the falsely modest,\nfor the good and the evil,\nfor cowardly and brave,\nfor slaves and underlings,\nfor nobles and clerics,\nfor the middle class and princely,\nfor artisans and the lords,\nfor men and women,\nfor commanders and servants,\nfor high and low,\nfor exalted and menial,\nfor royalty and commoners,\nfor knights and footmen,\nfor city and country folk,\nfor those brutally bridled by arrogant kings,\nfor those cloistered in heavenly contemplation,\nfor sages with God-given wisdom,\nfor priests, pious and chosen,\nfor bishops, properly arrayed,\nfor patriarchs, charged with pious supervision.\n\nMay this book of prayers\nI have undertaken to compose\nwith the strength of the Holy Spirit\nand with a view to the multitudinous needs of all\nserve for some as heartfelt pleas of intercession and\nfor others as counsel toward virtue\nthat through this book they might constantly\nappear before you, Great Mercy.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMay you heal the souls and wash away the\ntransgressions of those who read this\nbook with pure hearts.\nForgive their debts and free them from the bonds of sin.\nRelease the flow of tears from those who study this book,\nand instill in them the desire to repent.\nAnd with them, Lord, grant me, contrition for my\nwillfulness, and give them grace-filled inspiration\nthrough my voice.\nMay their prayers, through this book, also be\noffered for me, and may their sighs rise like\nincense in place of mine.\nMay your light enter and dwell in those\nwho taste and embrace these mournful psalms.\nAnd if through me some pious readers dedicate\nthemselves to you, receive me also, merciful Lord, with\nthose who live for you.\nAnd if this book brings forth cleansing tears for our ills,\nmay they also rain upon me, Keeper.\nAnd if those who share the passion for life contained in\nthis book are enrolled in your heavenly kingdom and\nearn salvation, grant that by your will,\nO blessed Lord, I might be in their number.\nAnd if sighs pleasing to God should be evoked through\nthis book, may the benefit overflow to me also,\nexalted Lord.\nIf a pure hand lifts incense to you,\nmay my voice join with the sound and sighs of\nprayers and reach you.\nIf others’ petitions labor to be born with mine,\nmay mine, thus multiplied, be rededicated to you.\nIf my offering of the words of my soul is pleasing,\nmay they be offered to you with those who\nhave gone before.\nIf disheartened people falter in exhaustion,\nmay they regain their steadiness through these\nsighs, setting their hope on you.\nIf the bulwark of their faith crumbles with sin,\nmay it be rebuilt with these writings shaped by\nyour protecting right hand.\nIf the thread of hope is severed by the sword of\ntrangressions, may it be restored by the goodness of\nyour almighty will.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIf the perils of death besiege a person with pain,\nmay redemption and hope of life be found through\nthese words, victorious in you, O Life Giver,\n\nIf a confused heart is wounded by doubt,\nmay these words make it whole through your sweetness.\n\nIf one is defeated by an irreparable loss,\nor buried in the depths of an abyss,\nmay he come to the light under your watchfulness,\nhooked by this invention.\n\nIf one is ensnared by drugs and their torpor,\nand surrenders to dark tendencies,\nlet him be strengthened on your account, Sole Refuge,\nand find tranquility in you.\n\nIf deserted by the armor of faith,\nmay he be sustained through the hand of\nyour intercession,\nand held in your steadfastness.\n\nIf one strays from the watchful eye of his caretakers,\nlet him be watched over by these words until their\nreturn, Renewer.\n\nIf one is seized by the tremors of demonic fevers,\nawake his soul with the sign of the cross,\nproclaiming and worshiping this miracle.\n\nIf a violent storm suddenly strikes\nthe vessel of the human body on\nits voyage through this world,\nsteady its course with your rudder and\nsend it sailing back toward you.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd may you make this book of mournful psalms\nbegun in your name, Most High,\ninto a life-giving salve for the sufferings of\nbody and soul.\nMay you perfect what I have started\nand may your spirit be mixed with it.\nMay the breath of your great might\ninfuse these verses with grace\nso that you may brace the wilting heart\nand accept praise from us all.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-4": { - "title": "Prayer 4", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSince I have begun\nthese conversations with you\nwho holds in your hand\nthe life breath of my sinful soul,\nI am shaken, and rightly so,\ntrembling in constant fear, remembering,\nwith unbearable terror that defies words,\nO creator of heaven and earth,\nyour inescapable tribunal,\nwhich justly judges me a sinner.\nAnd what is more, there exists no remedy\nfor the multitude of incurable, mortal wounds\nand the stinging bites inflicted by the deadly fangs\nof him who pursues my soul’s destruction.\nEspecially since according to the Prophet,\nthere is no putting off the day of confrontation:\n\nNot by words of justification,\nnot by a cloak of protection,\nnot by a mask of obfuscation,\nnot by speeches of propitiation,\nnot by appearances of deception,\nnot by compositions of prevarication,\nnot by swift feet of evasion,\nnot by aversion,\nnot by the ashen dust of abnegation,\nnot by fixing one’s mouth to the earth,\n\nnot by self-burial in the depths of the earth,\nfor even the covered and the invisible are\nreadily seen by you.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMy virtue is dissipated and depleted,\nmy sins laid open and ever worsening,\nmy wrongs permanent and I am lost as\nthe weight of the right is ever decreasing\nand the weight of wrong is increasing,\nthe harvest of goodness washes\naway and the errors of my ways harden to stone.\n\nThe bail is lost even as the sentence is sealed.\nDeath’s mortgage is signed,\nwhile the covenant of good news is voided.\nThe doer of good is despondent,\nwhile the doer of evil is jubilant.\nThe host of angels grieve,\nwhile Satan’s horde dances in glee.\nThe army on high is orphaned,\nwhile the army below is elated.\nThe murderer’s bounty grows,\nwhile the protector’s treasure is plundered.\nThe third parties’ rights are upheld,\nand the true heir’s legacy is betrayed.\nThe creator’s gift is forgotten,\nwhile the destroyer’s ambush is remembered.\nThe Savior’s grace is mocked,\nwhile the tricks of Satan are celebrated.\nThe fountain of life runs dry,\nwhile the tyrant’s rust continues to corrode my soul.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now, would it not be better.\nas the prophecies foretold,\nnever to have been conceived,\nnever to have taken shape,\nnever to have been born,\nnever to have seen the light of life,\nnever to have been counted among mortals,\nnever to have struggled toward the state of immortality,\nnever to have been dressed in the image of beauty,\nnever to have been armed with words,\nthan to be seized by such horrible sins,\ntoo great for a hard rock to bear\nlet alone the frail body?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd now, compassionate God,\nI pray for your mercy,\nas you instructed in your own words,\n“Make offerings in the name of God’s salvation\nand you shall be made holy,\nfor I want contrition not sacrifice.”\nBe exalted anew in remembrance of this offering in\nincense,\nfor everything is in you, and everything is from you.\nTo you glory from all.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-5": { - "title": "Prayer 5", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, I, earthbound\nand preoccupied with the cares of everyday existence,\nnumbed by the deceitful wine of foolishness,\nI, who lie in all things and am truthful in none,\nmarked with these faults,\nhow shall I come before your judgment, Just Judge,\nterrible beyond words and telling, mighty God of all?\nThe more I compare my sinful ingratitude with your\nloving-kindness,\nthe more I prove that your law is always stronger,\nand my lawlessness, always defeated.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou made me in your glorious image,\nfavoring a weak being like me\nwith your sublime likeness,\nadorning me with speech,\nand burnishing me with your breath,\nenriching me with thought,\ncultivating me with wisdom,\nestablishing me with ingenuity\nsetting me apart from the animals,\nendowing my character with a thinking soul,\nembellishing me with a sovereign individuality,\ngiving birth as a father, nurturing as a nurse,\ncaring for me as a guardian,\n\nYou sowed a wayward being in your courtyard,\nirrigated me with the water of life,\ncleansed me with the dew of the baptismal fount,\nnourished me with heavenly bread,\nquenched my thirst with your blood,\nacquainted me with the impalpable and\nunreachable,\nemboldened my earthly eyes to seek you,\nembraced me in your glorious light,\npermitted my unclean earthly hands to\nmake offerings to you,\nhonored my base, mortal ashes,\nlike a flicker of light,\nimprinted upon a worthless wretch like me\nyour father’s image, awesome and blessed,\nout of your love for mankind.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou did not scald my mouth for daring to\ncall myself your co-heir,\ndid not reprimand me for arrogantly\nassociating with you,\ndid not darken the sight of my eyes for\ngazing upon you,\ndid not exile me in shackles with\nthose condemned to death,\ndid not break the wrist of my arm for\nimproperly reaching to you,\ndid not crack the digits of my fingers for\ntouching the word of life,\ndid not engulf me with fog for dedicating this\nto you, fearsome Lord,\ndid not crush the rows of my teeth for\nchewing your communion, infinite Lord,\ndid not turn in anger as I did with you,\nas with the stubborn house of Israel,\ndid not dishonor me at your wedding party,\nI, who am unworthy of singing and dancing,\ndid not scold me for my disheveled clothes,\nI, who am disorderly,\ndid not cast me into the dark, my hands and\nfeet shackled.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd I exchanged all these portions of\ngoodness, patience and forgiveness from you,\nO beneficent, blessed and always-tolerant God,\nfor all manner of waywardness of the flesh and the ego,\nfor the wavering passions of the mind and the\ndiversions of worldliness.\nYes, that is how, my God and Lord, I repaid you for\nyour abundant goodness.\nThus did I offer you evil in the manner of\nMoses’ ingratitude.\nAbandoning wisdom and pursuing foolishness,\nthus did I foully dissipate the bounty of your favor with\nthe ways of vanity,\nthus in a storm of mindlessness did I lose the beacon of\nyour ineffable grace glowing with your care,\nGod most high.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd although on many occasions you attempted\nto draw me to you by reaching out your helping hand,\nI rejected it, as the prophet accused Israel.\nAnd although I promised and made a\ncovenant to please you,\nI did not keep it,\nbut again perverted it into something evil.\nReverting to my old ways,\nI sowed the field of my heart with thorns of\nsin for a harvest of dissension.\nThe words of the God-fearing holy prophet apply to me,\nfor you expected grapes but instead I sprouted thorns.\nI became an unappetizing fruit of bitterness,\noutcast from the garden.\nSwaying violently in unsteady winds,\nalways blowing to and fro, I wavered.\nLike the voice of blessed Job, I followed my\npath of no return.\nI built my house upon the sands in foolishness.\nMisled by the broad gate, I missed the\nnarrow gate to life.\nI closed myself off from the pilgrimage of exodus.\nI spitefully uncovered the abyss of destruction.\nI blocked my hearing against your teaching of life.\nI covered the eyes of my soul against the cure of life.\nI did not recoil from the wasting of the mind from torpor,\nin spite of your trumpet of wrath.\nI was not sobered by the reports of the fiery trial,\non the day of judgment.\nI did not awaken from the slumber of mortal sleep.\nI did not give comfort to your Holy Spirit in my\nbodily tabernacle.\nI did not inhale the allotment of grace you granted me.\nWith my own hand I wreaked havoc, in the words of the\nproverb teller,\nkilling my living soul.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAnd what is the use of composing these meager and\npaltry verses\nin my state of remorse which passes all measure and\nevades all cure?\nNow it is up to you to offer life to my dead soul\nand without vengeance to visit me,\na condemned prisoner,\nO Son of the Living God, to you be all glory.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-6": { - "title": "Prayer 6", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nWhat use, what good is it to me\nto exhaust myself with this stream of words, the\nvoice of my sighing heart?\nWould it not be better to lance the accumulated words,\nlike deadly pus,\nor with fingers in the throat, to vomit up the heaviness of\nmy heart, weighed down with\nthe wounds of my soul?\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd since I was not found worthy of sharing\nin the glory of the saints with their blissful\nlaughter and smiles, as described by the proverb teller\nand psalmist, I shall be granted the second rank,\nthe rank where people like me are assigned.\nBut in view of the error of my ways,\neven they are superior to me just as the penitent is\nsuperior to the impenitent.\nManasseh should be celebrated,\nwhen compared with the excess of my transgressions.\nThe Pharisee should be honored when compared with\nmy foul baseness.\nThe Prodigal Son should be praised\nwhen compared to the betrayal of my vows.\nThe deceit of the Amasseh’s son should be commended,\nwhen compared with my thankless ingratitude.\n\nMore blessed is the thief who was prosecutor\nof the faithless.\nMore honorable is the prostitute, the example and the\nmother of all repentant.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNo less than Pharaoh have I hardened my heart.\nNo less blameworthy than the frenzied Israelite mob,\nhave I rebelled against my creator.\nNo less than the enemies of God have I\ntaken the battlefield,\nand I did not refrain from denying the creator of\nall from nothing.\nI make waves like the turbulent sea during a storm,\nbut I do not tremble, humbled by your\nsevere commandment,\nlike the waves of the sea against the shore.\nMy countless misdeeds are measured like\nmounds of sand.\nThe boundless accumulation is less than the\nmass of my lawlessness.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor although small things mount up\nas sands on the shore,\nnevertheless, they are unique and distinct in their\norigin and increase,\nand like my transgressions, so countless that\nthey are impossible to comprehend:\none with its kith,\nthe other with its kin,\none with its defects,\nthe other with its dangers,\none with its thorns,\nthe other with its roots,\none with its stem,\nthe other with its fruits,\none with its limbs,\nthe other with its branches,\none with its shoots,\nthe other with its joints,\none with its claws,\nthe other with its fingers,\none with its shakiness,\nthe other with its sturdiness,\none with its causes,\nthe other with its effects,\none with its imprint,\nthe other with its traces,\none with its shadow,\nthe other with its darkness,\none with its tactics,\nthe other with its strategy,\none with its guile,\nthe other with its intent,\none with its trajectory,\nthe other with its size,\none with its depth,\nthe other with its baseness,\none with its spark,\nthe other with its passion,\none with its goods,\nthe other with its treasures,\none with its pipes,\nthe other with its fountain,\none with its torrents,\nthe other with its lightening,\none with its flames,\nthe other with its shame,\none with its pits,\nthe other with its abysses,\none with its embers,\nthe other with its dullness,\none with its thunder,\nthe other with its raindrops,\none with its currents,\nthe other with its floods and frost,\none with its gates,\nthe other with its roadways,\nthe furnace and its heat,\nthe fire and its fumes,\nthe melting tallow and its scent,\nthe wormwood tree and its bitter sap,\nthe destroyer and its victim,\nthe thief and his assassins,\nthe bully and his accomplices,\nthe master and his servants,\nthe beast and its whelps,\nthe biter and the bitten,\nthe corrupter and its imitator.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd these are but the main categories\nof the soul’s common afflictions.\nThey are further divided into smaller classes,\neach of which has thousands upon\nthousands of subclasses,\nbut the total number can be comprehended\nonly by the one who sees as done\nthat which is scripted in us.\nIf a person does not indulge in self-deception nor\nput on a mask,\nand is not tricked by lack of faith,\nbut has self-knowledge,\nand senses our common human nature,\nand is cognizant of being earth born and knows our\nproper place and limitations,\nthen he shall understand this list of attributes,\nnot as some meaningless scribble,\nnor as a complete description of even the essential types\nand kinds of imperfections whirling in our nature.\nRather, he will know that I have identified certain seeds\nof the thousands of evils,\nand even if through these he learns of others,\nhe realizes that even these categories are not enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-7": { - "title": "Prayer 7", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSo that I will not give up hope of salvation,\nand, laying down my arms, surrender to so many\ninvisible attackers,\nwhich are nothing other than the tribe of foes,\nspringing up, of their own, in the categories\njust described,\nin numbers and forms that are terrifying,\nI shall show here as against these warriors,\nthe mightiest of godly champions,\nmost victorious and undefeated,\nwhich at the same time are summoned by a\nmost painful grief,\nlike a difficult-to-swallow fruit of an unreachable tree,\nor the toil and hardship of an untrodden path.\n\nFor a small teardrop from the eye\ncan cause an entire evil platoon of the Tempter’s\narmy to shrink away,\nlike the squirming of centipedes or earthworms,\ndrowning in a puddle of oil or a drop of\nsome lethal potion.\nAnd the faint groan of a sighing heart,\nrising from the soul,\nis like a warm southerly breeze, mixed with sun,\nthat melts the fiercest blizzard,\nfor like storms, they are easily born and when\nopposed, quickly die.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut I shall never stop judging my condemned self with\nanguished words,\nor reproaching myself for my sins,\nlike a wicked, irredeemable and incorrigible being.\nFor although I have slain some of my tormentors,\nI helped others to live and lost my soul.\nLike a plant with bitter branches,\nI have blossomed with the odor of wrongful ways,\nwith corrupting and fatal fruit,\nwhich I have made into the wine of destruction.\nThe offspring of Canaan and not Judah,\nin the words of the great prophet Daniel.\nI am\nthe child of hell and not paradise,\nthe heir of Hades, not of coveted glory,\nthe stuff of torment, not of rest,\nungrateful rather than grateful,\ndisgraceful rather than graced,\never sinful rather than forbearing,\none who embitters the sweetness of your beneficence,\nan evil and bad servant like the one who\nwas reprimanded by our Lord,\none who, as the Prophet Isaiah said,\nuses my learning for evil.\n\nI am\ndiligent in the baseness of corruption,\nconscientious in angering the Lord,\never active in satanic ventures,\na daily cause of grief to my Maker,\nweak in my flight toward goodness,\nlazy in the blessing of fidelity,\nslow in observing my promises,\nfainthearted in the necessary and useful,\nan unfaithful and ungrateful servant.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWoe to my sinful soul, for I have angered my creator.\nWoe to this son of perdition,\nfor I have forgotten the gift of life.\nWoe to this debtor of untold thousands of talents,\nfor I haven’t the means to repay\nWoe to this porter heavy laden with vile sins,\nfor I cannot lay down my burden to rest.\nWoe to this debtor of the Lord,\nfor I cannot face the Almighty.\nWoe to this heap of dried up reeds,\nfor I am consumed in Gehenna.\nWoe to me as I remember that the arrows of the\nwrath of God are fitted with flames.\nWoe for my stupidity, for I did not\nrecall that the hidden shall be revealed.\nWoe for my impiety, for I always and\nceaselessly wove the web of evil.\nWoe to my well-fed body\nwhich shall be food for the immortal worms,\nfor how shall I endure their fierce venom?\nWoe to me for having drunk of the cup of death,\nfor how shall I suffer eternity?\nWoe to me for raising this unworthy soul from\nthis corrupt body,\nfor how shall I face my judge?\nWoe to me for the lack of oil in my lamp,\nfor its darkness shall not be relit.\n\nWoe to me for the sudden alarm of the fear of dismay\nwhen the door of the marriage feast is closed.\nAnd woe to me for the terror of the voice of these words,\ntrembling and quaking, before the pronouncement\nof our heavenly king’s judgment:\nI do not know you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-8": { - "title": "Prayer 8", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, what will you do, my lost soul?\nWhere will you hide?\nHow will you live?\nAnd how can you escape the prison of your sin?\nYour transgressions are many and your\npunishments countless.\nThe scoldings severe and the harsh words endless.\nEven the angels have lost patience and the\njudge cannot be bribed.\nThe court is mighty and the tribunal just.\nThe vengeance is terrible and the retribution, merciless.\nThe sentence terrifying and the condemnation, direct.\nThe rivers fiery and the streams impassable.\nThe darkness is thick and the fog impenetrable.\nThe pit is vile and the torment eternal.\nHell is all-encompassing and the blizzard unrelenting.\nNow, indeed you have piled up all these bitter things,\na depraved and terrible cell of unbearable punishment,\nO my worthless sinful soul, evildoer, prostitute,\nsoiled, a refuse dump of filth.\n\nHere then are the wages of your handiwork:\nYou have turned from the straight path and\nstrayed from holiness.\nYou have been outcast from the ranks of the\nrighteous and honest.\nYou lack spiritual gifts and riches of our\nmost jealous benefactor and almighty king.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou have ensnared yourself in an inescapable prison,\nby confessing that your wounds are incurable\nand your punishment unequaled and\ntestifying that your soul is condemned to\ndeath and incurably broken.\nYou are\nevil among the good,\nbitter among the sweet,\ndark among the light,\nbruised among the adorned,\nrejected among the praised,\nimpious among the pious,\nbrute among the thoughtful,\nstupid among the intelligent,\nfoolish among the wise,\nunclean among the elect,\ndead among the living,\nfilthy among the saints,\ndrunken among the sober,\ndeceptive among the just,\nuseless among the useful,\ndishonored among the glorious,\ndeficient among the abundant,\nunderling among the superiors,\nmost lowly among the sublime,\npoor among the wealthy,\nunworthy among the saved,\nhomeless among the rich in spirit,\ncast away among the blessed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-9": { - "title": "Prayer 9", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, O wretched soul of mine,\nwhat appropriately revolting words shall\nI use to describe you\nin this book of woes, my testament of prayers?\nYou who are so completely discredited that\nI am at a loss for words to answer,\nunworthy to communicate with God and the saints.\nIf I were to fill the basin of the sea with ink,\nand to measure out parchment the length and\nbreadth of a field of many leagues\nand were to take all the reeds of the forests and\nwoods and turn them into pens,\nI still would not be able to record even a fraction of my\naccumulated wrong doings.\nIf I were to set the Cedars of Lebanon as a scale\nand to put Mount Ararat on one side and my\niniquities on the other,\nit would not come close to balancing.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI am like a tree, towering with branches,\ncovered with leaves, but barren of fruit,\na true member of the same species as that fig tree that the\nLord struck dry.\nFor although covered with lush flowing hair, that is,\nwith an attractive exterior,\nas if adorned with a halo,\nmesmerizing like a drumbeat at a distance,\nif the sower were to come close to pick the harvest,\nhe would find me devoid of any goods\nand revolting without beauty,\nan object of ridicule for viewers and a spectacle\nfor the malicious.\n\nFor the bushy plant without fruit and spirit is\nbut a metaphor for the hapless, unprepared soul\ncursed at an unvigilant moment.\nIf the earth, moistened with dew,\ncultivated by the farmer,\ndoes not produce crops to multiply this effort,\nit is abandoned and forgotten.\nThen, you, my miserable soul,\na thinking, breathing plant\nthat has not given timely fruit,\nshall you not suffer the same fate as those in the parable?\nFor you have indulged with unsparing excess\nin the harvest of all the human evils\nfrom Adam till the end of the species, and even found\nsome new ones,\ndespised and repugnant to your creator, God.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd I have fixed my mind’s eye upon you,\nO worthless soul of mine,\nsculpting a monument in words.\nI cast stones at you mercilessly like some\nuntamed wild beast.\nFor although I may never chance to be called just,\nstill following the counsel of the wise,\nas my first rebuttal, I criticize myself of my own free will,\nas if criticizing some bitter enemy,\nand having confessed the angst of the\nsecrets of my mind, that is, the accumulated burden\nof my evil deeds,\nI spread them before you, my God and Lord.\nWith what measure I mete out reprimand to my soul,\nlet your undiminishing compassion be measured for me,\nthat I might receive your abundant grace\nmany times greater than the magnitude of my sins,\nthough my wounds and injuries overpower me,\nincurable and inescapable,\nyet the genius of your curative art, exalted and\nhonored Physician, shines twice as brightly.\nThe increase of my sins is more than matched by\nyour generosity, my benefactor.\nBlessed Lord, may you always be wreathed\nin incense as in your parable.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor yours is salvation,\nand from you is redemption,\nand by your right hand is restoration,\nand your finger is fortification.\nYour command is justification.\nYour mercy is liberation.\nYour countenance is illumination.\nYour face is exultation.\nYour spirit is benefaction.\nYour anointing oil is consolation.\nA dew drop of your grace is exhilaration.\nYou give comfort.\nYou make us forget despair.\nYou lift away the gloom of grief.\nYou change the sighs of our heart into laughter.\nTo you is fitting blessing with praise\nin heaven and on earth\nfrom our forefathers and unto all their generations\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-10": { - "title": "Prayer 10", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nBoth unruly sin and deep regret\nplunge us into damnation, being\nessentially similar even though from different sources.\nBut when compared they share the same character flaws:\none doubts the strength of the Almighty’s\nhand like a cowardly skeptic,\nwhile the other, like a wild beast,\nbrutally cuts the thread of hope.\nSatan, flattered by the first,\nconstantly rejoices; while the second\nprovides fresh blood for the hounds of hell to lap up.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI catch my breath like one bludgeoned with a thick club,\nuntil he reaches death’s shores. I catch\nmy breath, mustering whatever life remains\nhoping that my soul will be rehabilitated, protected,\nrestored, and resurrected from mortal perdition\nwith the help of Christ’s hand,\nChrist who is merciful in all things.\nAnd with help from our heavenly Father,\nwho has granted salvation and healing\nto a failing sinner near death,\nI begin this book of prayers with supplications.\nI will build an edifice of faith,\nas one of our faith-filled forefathers did\nwhen he was instantly transported to heaven\nthrough the balm of repentance,\nthus bequeathing us the promise of immortality on earth,\nperhaps more so than the Apostle writing about those\nwho, enduring their trials on earth,\nput their faith in heaven and the hope of things to come,\nand were filled with the abundance of the unseen.\n\n\n# III.\n\nFor even he who has committed mortal sin,\neven he, recaptured in the evil spirit’s prison\nand cast down into the abyss of evil,\neven he still can grasp the slender hope of salvation.\nEven he has hope of escape through redemption,\nlike the remorseful sinner miraculously reclaimed\nthrough the raindrops of his eyes\ncaused by the compassion of the Almighty,\nthe Almighty who again made the earth flourish,\nas a gift from the Spirit of God.\nLet us remember also the healing and encouraging words\nof our Lord,\n“With faith, anything is possible.”\nFirst and foremost let us consider this the measure\nof what is good and favored in the eyes of God;\nfor the way to the holy of holies is through faith.\nWithout faith, the Lord of glory did not, will not\nshow his miraculous power to us, asking first\nthat his good work be met by our faith.\nFor this reason he who is with God\nis, of his own, capable of receiving life,\nfor the blessed mouth of God has promised,\n“Your faith shall save you.”:\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFaith, that happy and favored word,\nwhich lasts forever untarnished and unbounded,\nhonored together with charity and hope\nbrings the rewards of truly clear vision, perfect wisdom,\nacquaintance with God and familiarity with the Exalted.\n\nFor if the faith of a mustard seed\ncan cast a great mountain\ninto the depths of the sea, then truly\nwe should accept it as the first step\ntoward eternal life.\nFaith, this simple and clear form of worship,\nmeans setting aside doubt to see the future and hidden\nwith the eye of the soul.\n\nFaith is honored in a glorious trinity\nwith charity and hope. For if you view\nthese three as distinct aspects\nof one and the same mystery,\nyou shall forever be magnified in God.\nAnd if you believe, you shall love\nand through love have hope in his unseen rewards.\nGlory to him forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-11": { - "title": "Prayer 11", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, I, the most laggard of believers,\ndevoid of goodness, contemplate with my mind’s eye\nall creation out of nothing by the hand of our maker.\nAnd with hope, my faith grows\nthat Jesus Christ can do anything he wills,\nas Paul advised and David taught.\nAs I believe, so have I spoken.\nMay their prayers take life in me\nso that through faith I might know him and the power\nof his resurrection. And that I may,\nin the words of the Apostle, share in\nhis torment and the glory that followed.\nFor true faith attends and resembles\nthe transformation of renewal,\nfrom sin to atonement,\nfrom wrongdoing to righteousness,\nfrom uncleanness to holiness,\nfrom unforgivable mortal transgressions\nto blameless bliss,\nfrom earthly bondage to heavenly freedom.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor what is more wondrous\nthan the sinner laughing for all to see,\nyet secretly weeping, when his heart\nwith the help of God is purged\nof the thick darkness of doubt?\nAnd though cast from the highest summit\ninto the pit of the perdition,\nand weighed down by unforgivable sins,\nnever before conceived,\nhe grabs the life-giving wafer of salvation,\nclinging as to the last glimmer of light\npreserved in mind and soul.\nOr like the amazingly intense fire, kindled\nat the bottom of the sleeping well,\nby the Almighty’s command, the sinner,\nconsumed with grief,\nall expectation of goodness abandoned,\nall assurance of grace lost,\ncan but hope to regain\nthe blessed innocence of the new-born.\nThis spark of hope, which God keeps alive\nfor broken, contrite hearts,\nsouls laid low, whose offerings are\nsweeter to God than the finest of incense,\nfor they proclaim the good tidings\nof the Giver’s almighty power.\nIt was for this reason the Savior asks\nthe blind, “Do you believe I can do this\nfor you?” thus obtaining a token of faith\nbefore restoring light to their eyes.\nAnd what hope of revival seems more remote,\nthan for a corpse four days dead?\nYet, armed with faith the women of his family,\nfell at the feet of the creator, and they saw\nthe manifestation of God’s glory when their\nbrother was resurrected.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd there is proof that even after sin\nthe grace of God persists: First there is\nthe case of Enoch, then Aaron,\nthen David and next Peter. And Eliezer,\nthe younger, upon whom God took great pity\nthat he might be an example to his elders.\nAnd it is unnecessary to add the example of\nthe Prodigal Son,\nthe prostitute praised by the Lord,\nthe tax collector remembered for his good deed,\nthe lucky thief, who, with his last breath,\nearned a halo through faith.\nOr even those whose sins cannot be atoned for,\nsuch as those who took part in killing our creator,\nor Paul, foremost of the chosen,\nwho was formerly the chief of the unjust.\nAnd there are others who stumbled,\neven knowing the law,\nbut then raised themselves up ten thousand times higher\nthan those who lived under the law. And what of him\nwho, before the law was given,\nhonored the traditions of his fathers,\nremaining more faithful to the commandment of\nhis forefather\nand taking the guilt of man’s original sin upon himself,\npaid for it with the torment of mortal passions,\natoned for it, not by burial in earth,\nbut through the torments of the body,\nwas transfigured, miraculously triumphing\nover death’s grip to become the herald\nof the possibility of eternal life for us mortals.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd consider those who chose a dissolute life\nfrom a tender age and in the fullness of time\ndid not tumble from their high stations but rather\nwere raised from their squalid lives\ninto the vault of heaven.\nIn times past the wayward\nchanged their ways by their own efforts,\nturning earthen vessels into gold and\netching a princely image of our heavenly model\nin majestic, imperishable and irreplaceable relief.\nTriumphing over the betrayals toward which\nour nature inclines us, they give us more cause for hope,\nespecially now that the Light has been revealed.\nIts veil lifted, its curtain drawn,\nby the promise of our Lord Christ\nby whom the divine word is fixed firmly\nin us, and who is according to the voice\nof the prophet, “The covenant of peace and\nthe seal of constancy,”\nthe mediator of our reconciliation,\nour heavenly advocate, immortal, living and eternal.\nAnd therefore by this most true law,\nand the immutable terms set by the creator,\nI kiss the image of the Word with lips of faith\nand await the glory of grace,\nFor verily, in the words of the Apostle,\n“If God absolves us, no one retains\nthe power to condemn.”:\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd taking refuge in this unclouded assurance,\nI who was broken, am restored,\nwho was wretched, am triumphant,\nwho was dissipated, am healed,\nwho was desperately outlawed, find hope,\nwho was condemned to death, find life,\nwho was mortgaged by damnable deeds, find the light,\nwho was debauched by animal pleasures, find heaven,\nwho was twice caught in scandal, again find salvation,\nwho was bound by sin, find the promise of rest,\nwho was shaken by incurable wounds,\nfind the salve of immortality,\nwho was wildly rebellious, find the reins of tranquility,\nwho was a renegade, find calling,\nwho was brazenly self-willed, find humility,\nwho was quarrelsome, find forgiveness.\n\nTherefore, to Jesus Christ\nand his almighty and awe-inspiring Father,\nto the name and the will of\nthe beneficence of the true Holy Spirit,\nthe blessed essence and one Godhead,\nall power and dominion, majesty and glory\nforever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-12": { - "title": "Prayer 12", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAlthough I have let myself fall\ninto seemingly eternal despair,\nbeating myself with the rod of doubt,\nlet me now dare with the slightest hope\nto call upon the Holy Trinity to help me, a sinner.\nFor upon blessing and acknowledging\nthe life-giving God of all, and calling out to him\nas to a family member,\nit becomes possible for the benefactor\nwho grants all grace, to grant life\nto me, a mortal, as the Prophet foretold,\n“Whoever calls out the name of the Lord shall live.”:\n\n\n# II.\n\nNot only do I call, but I believe in the Lord’s greatness.\nI pray not only for his rewards but also for himself,\nthe essence of life, guarantor of giving and\ntaking of breath\nwithout whom there is no movement, no progress,\nto whom I am tied not so much by the knot of hope\nas by the bonds of love.\nI long not so much for the gifts\nas for the giver.\nI yearn not so much for the glory\nas the glorified.\nI burn not so much with the desire for life\nas in memory of the giver of life.\nI sigh not so much with the rapture of splendor\nas with the heartfelt fervor for its maker.\nI seek not so much for rest\nas for the face of our comforter.\nI pine not so much for the bridal feast\nas for the distress of the groom,\nthrough whose strength I wait with certain\nexpectation believing with unwavering\nhope that in spite of the weight of my transgressions\nI shall be saved by the Lord’s mighty hand and\nthat I will not only receive remission of sins\nbut that I will see the Lord himself\nin his mercy and compassion\nand receive the legacy of heaven\nalthough I richly deserve to be disowned.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow for my many humiliations\nmy head bowed in shame\nmy lips locked with embarrassment\nmy tongue not daring to move\nI resort again to intoning supplications,\nmournful sobs and cries, offered on high.\n\nAccept with sweetness almighty Lord my bitter prayers.\nLook with pity upon my mournful face.\nDispel, all-bestowing God, my shameful sadness.\nLift, merciful God, my unbearable burden.\nCast off, potent God, my mortal habits.\nSpoil, triumphant God, my wayward pleasures.\nDissipate, exalted God, my wanton fog.\n\nBlock, life-giving God, my destructive ways.\nUndo, secret-seeing God, my evil entrapments.\nFend off, inscrutable God, my assailants.\nInscribe your name on the skylight of my abode.\nCover the roof of my temple with your hand.\nMark the threshold of my cell with your blood.\nImprint the outside of my door with your sign.\nProtect the mat where I rest with your right hand.\nKeep my cot pure from all seductions.\nPreserve my suffering soul by your will.\nSteady the breath of life you have given my flesh.\nSurround me with your heavenly host.\nPost them on watch against the battalion of demons.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nGrant blissful rest\nlike the slumber of death\nin the depth of this night\nthrough the intercession of the Holy Mother of\nGod and the elect.\nFirmly close the windows of sight,\nsentient faculty of the mind,\nwith impregnable fortifications\nagainst the waves of anxiety,\nthe cares of daily life,\nnightmares, frenzy, hallucinations,\nand protected by the memory of your hope\nto wake again from the heaviness of sleep\ninto alert wakefulness and\nsoul-renewing cheerfulness\nto stand before you\nraising my prayerful voice\nin harmony with the heavenly choirs of praise\nwith the fragrance of faith,\nto you in heaven, all blessed king,\nwhose glory is beyond telling.\nFor you are glorified by all creation\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-13": { - "title": "Prayer 13", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nBeneficent, almighty, awe-inspiring God,\ngood Father, charitable donor of mercy,\nwhose very name heralds the good news of\nyour grandeur, compassion and fatherly affection,\nyou are gentle even toward the bitter and discontented.\n\nWith you also is your Son, who is like you,\nwhose hand is strong like yours,\nwhose awesome reign is eternal like yours,\nwhose exaltation is shared with you in your creation.\n\nSo too the Holy Spirit of your truth,\nthat flows from you without end,\nthe perfect essence of existence\nand eternal being, is equal to you\nin all things, reigning with the Son\nin equal glory.\nThree persons, one mystery,\nseparate faces, unique and distinct,\nmade one by their congruence\nand being of the same holy substance and nature,\nunconfused and undivided,\none in will and one in action.\nOne is not greater, one is not lesser,\nnot even by an eyelash, and because\nof the unobscurable light of heavenly love\nrevealed in our midst both have been\nglorified with a single crown of holiness\nfrom before the ages.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor verily, as Peter’s open profession of\nfaith in the Trinity earned for him\nthe blessed name, Rock, so\nin expectation of your clemency,\ndo I, a sinner condemned, await exoneration,\nO deliverer of captives.\nAnd though all rewards may be yours,\nso too is all mercy,\nbut you are not so acclaimed for rewards as for mercy,\nfor while the first brings glory, the second merely\nrecognizes the effort of labor,\nsince rewards are compensation for merit,\nbut mercy is an act of generosity toward the unworthy.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now, God of compassion, may human deeds\nnot prevail over your grace, even if they transgress\nthe laws of nature, but rather may your forbearance\ntriumph so that your ways may never be less\nthan those of mortals.\nFor when your light came to herald the new covenant,\nthose, like the Jews who prided themselves\nin keeping the law, were abandoned to greater heartache\nand became more needy of your charity,\nthan those wretched persons,\nforever lost in the wilderness.\nSince everything is possible for you, O benevolent God,\nhear my sighs of supplication to you.\nHave mercy, save us, and be generous.\nFor yours is forbearance, gentleness, salvation,\natonement and glory for all time, to all peoples.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-14": { - "title": "Prayer 14", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nI pray to you, ray of light,\nheavenly king, praised beyond telling,\nSon of God, majestic beyond words,\nincline your ear once again,\nexalted compassion, refuge of life,\ntoward the feeble sobs of this\nwounded soul.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNowhere is it shown,\nnowhere can we read that the traveler\nall but slain by the swords of bandits,\ncried out to you in his distress,\nfor he had grown stiff from his wounds.\nNor did he utter a single plea\nfor he was struck dumb.\nNor did he point out his serious plight\nwith trembling fingers, O Seer, for\nhe was shattered. Nor did he fix eyes\nfilled with tears upon you, doer of good,\nfor he was ashamed. Nor did he try to\ngain your favor through messengers\nfor he was disconsolate.\nNor did he try to rend your heart,\ncompassionate one, by showing\nhis blood soaked clothes and beaten body,\nfor he had lost hope. Nor did he crawl\nupon his knees, since he could not stand and walk\nfor his dead half said to the living half,\ndeath is at hand.\nAll the more since, after receiving your counsel,\nbenefiting from your forbearance and\nbasking in the radiance of your glory,\nhe nevertheless did not forswear his wicked ways\nbut in stiff-necked revolt,\njoined the ranks of your enemies\nallying himself with those who hate you.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut you, generous, kind, unspiteful, giver of life,\nnot only did you not record his sins\nbut you did not even scold him,\nyou did not kick him, but rather approached\nhim in sympathy and treated him with care.\nUnlike the priest’s custom in Aaron’s\nweak law, hurling aspersions and fistfuls of stones\nto speed death, you were in no rush\nto crush a wounded man.\nAnd unlike the Levite, our early predecessor,\nwho was the end of the old and the start of the new,\ncaught between the two, in soulless limbo,\nyou saw the plight\nof the wounded man and did not aim\nthe deadly axe at the root of life,\nfrightening him to death at what is to come\nby appearing as the minister of death.\nBut rather like the Assyrian pagans\nknown as the promise keepers, who received\nthe law from the Jews\nand kept it in tact, even when Jews\nhad forgotten it, you donned\nthe mortal cloak of our body to proclaim your\ngood tidings of deliverance to all peoples.\nAnd by the work of your incorruptible divinity,\nyou extended your hand to raise\nthe man condemned to death by his mortal sins,\nraising him along with all his generations.\n\nYou brought joy to the gloomy heart.\nYou steadied the fainting soul.\nYou restored happiness to the despondent spirit.\nYou filled his emptiness with the anointing\nof the life-giving baptismal font\nand the cup of light.\nYou renewed him through regenerative,\nheavenly bread, your body.\nThrough the watchful company of the happy\nelect, you cared, cured, and comforted him.\nWith a mare’s gentle gait you transported him\nunharmed until his deliverance to the abode of light.\nYou cured him through two\nintercessors, the life-giving testaments,\nold and new, given out of your love\nfor humanity. And as it was once with Moses,\nlike an eagle with outspread wings, you snatched\nhim midair and deposited him in calm safety,\nin the land of happiness, ordering\nhis doctors to nurture him with\nthe sustenance of your word.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd now, you who have miraculously endowed\nall things with the supreme light of your goodness,\ngathering as your own, the scattered treasures\nand re-establishing your inheritance,\nredeem me also, wiping out the debt of my sins.\nYou, who minister without charge to the unworthy,\ngrant me also atonement and healing,\nO compassionate, mighty, inscrutable, incorruptible\nand awesome, eternally blessed one,\nunto the ages of ages.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-15": { - "title": "Prayer 15", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow again with the same sighs\nfrom my distressed heart\npouring out the same wordy strains,\nI seek your mercy bestower of all gifts,\nand with my soul immersed in torment\nlike the dead, I pray to you\nliving, immortal God, confessing\nbefore your honor, my disgrace,\nbefore your goodness, my evil.\nI am more devastated than cured,\nmore embarrassed than emboldened,\nhaving broken my vows and forsaken\nthe trust reposed in me.\n\nI am like the pathetic sheep in the second parable,\nwhich strayed into inaccessible hills\nand wandered in a daze among beastly demons\nand fierce idols, without the slightest chance of\nreturning to the fold. Although my tongue was lost\nfor words to tell my anguish, and my hands\nlacked the agility to communicate like the mute,\nstill you found me, you who alone\nare praised from beginning to end\nthroughout the generations.\n\nYou found me, a sinner, lost in darkness\ncrying like the psalmist in prayer,\nand because of your willing care\nyou were called Shepherd, for not only\ndid you care, but you sought,\nnot only did you find, O worker of miracles,\nbut with the goodness of your love,\na love that defies description,\nyou rescued me,\nlifting me upon your shoulders,\nto set down alongside your heavenly army,\nthe heirs to your fatherly legacy.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, mighty savior,\nblessed visitor, compassionate comforter,\nyou, who heard the unspoken supplication\nof one suffering in silence at death’s door,\nand of another who wandered into\nthe wilderness, helpless, lost,\nunable to speak, bleating inarticulately,\nyou, who in your divine providence that\ngraces the universe,\ncared for those lost or in peril, now\nshow again your compassion and the bounty\nof your kindness to me whose iniquity\nexceeds everything told above,\nwhose mortal sins come in all varieties,\nwhose flavor is that of evil among the\nsweet taste of goodness,\nwhose body deserves to be broken to the last bone,\nwhose wounded soul is infected with\nall manner of vile ills,\nwhose stupor is on a level with the speechless beasts,\nwhose alienation has removed him from intelligent life,\nwhose nature no longer resembles that of his species.\nIf there were an example, I would cite it.\nIf there were others like me, I would describe them.\nIf there were a category, I would name it.\nIf there were my equal, I would note it.\nIf there were a parallel, I would mark it.\nIf there were a model, I would show it.\nIf there were a precedent, I would use it.\nIf there were a present example, I could take heart.\nBut since mine surpasses all measure\nand defies all categories, you are my only hope of\natonement, healing and salvation,\nredeemer of all mortals, renewer of the universe.\n\n\n# III.\n\nFor if in the view of blessed David’s pure heart,\nhis lawlessness was piled over his head,\nhis transgressions outweighed the heaviest\nburdens, then my wrongs are even greater than\nall the waters of seas in torrential flood,\ninundating and submerging the mountains.\nRelease but a breath of your kindness\nas in Noah’s day, a breath that can melt mountains,\nand the stormy flood of my billowing misdeeds\nwill evaporate along with\nmy earth-shattering transgressions\nand my mountain-high sins.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNow with your sharp and mighty word\nand the unbounded discretion of your swift judgment,\ngive me a way to redeem myself, even as the Prophet\npromised, even in my advanced stage of lawlessness.\n\nAnd forgiving my stubborn defiance,\nO long-suffering, merciful, blessed one,\nbe truly generous and forgive me all at once,\nwiping out my unrepayable debts\nand the crushing interest which has accrued,\nfor you have no wrath in your heart, nor vexation,\nnor deceit, nor traces of darkness,\nfor you wish only life and light.\nAnd as David and Solomon attest,\nyou did not make death or take\njoy in human misery.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIn your just laws, you set as a key rule\nthat one wrong should not be returned for another,\nbut that we should forgive seventy times seven\nthe sins committed against us each and every day.\nYou addressed this to us, wicked by nature,\nthe germs of sin sprouting in tens of thousands\nupon the fertile field of our thorny natures.\nAs you so rightly witnessed, “The human mind\nfrom childhood is inclined toward evil.”\nEven John, the Evangelist of your word of life,\nwho was exceedingly pure, nevertheless\nshared our common nature and said frankly\nin contrast to my roundabout manner of speech,\n“If we say that we have no sin, we make him a liar.”\n\nAnd now, your prophetic word is fulfilled\nand borne out beyond question by my iniquities.\nSo deliver me with your mercy,\nO fount of lovingkindness,\nwho alone are blessed through all eternity.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-16": { - "title": "Prayer 16", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nYours alone, God, in heaven, exalted and generous,\nyours is the power, and yours, forgiveness.\nYours is healing and yours, abundance.\nYours are the gifts and yours alone grace.\nYours atonement and yours protection.\nYours is creation beyond knowing.\nYours are arts beyond discovery.\nYours are bounds beyond measure.\nYou are the beginning and you are the end.\nSince the light of your mercy is never obscured\nby the darkness of indignity,\nyou are not subject to disease in any form.\nYou are too lofty for words, an image beyond framing,\nwhose being is immeasurable,\nthe breadth of whose glory is unbounded,\nthe reach of whose incisive power is indescribable,\nthe supremacy of whose absoluteness is uncontainable,\nthe compassion of whose good works is unflagging.\n\nYou turned, according to the Prophet,\nthe shadow of death into dawn.\nYou willingly descended into Tartaros,\nthe prison of those detained below,\nwhere even the door of prayer was sealed\nto free the captive and damned souls\nwith the commanding sword of\nyour victorious word.\n\nYou cut the bindings of wretched death\nand dispelled the suspicion of sin.\nTurn toward me, trembling in the confines\nof my squalid cell, fettered by sin,\nmortally wounded by the Troublemaker’s arrows.\n\n\n# II.\n\nRemember me, Lord of all, benefactor,\nlight in the darkness, treasure of blessing,\nmerciful, compassionate, kind, mighty,\npowerful beyond telling, understanding, or words,\nequal to all crises, you who are, in the words\nof Jacob, always ready to do the impossible.\nO fire that clears away sin’s underbrush,\nblazing ray that illumines every\ngreat mystery, remember me, blessed one,\nwith mercy rather than legalisms,\nwith forbearance rather than vengeance,\nwith lenience rather than evidence,\nso that you weigh my sins with your kindness\nand not with judgment.\nFor by the first, my burden is light,\nbut by the second, I am damned forever.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, cure me, O kindness,\neven as you did the ear of the one\nwho attacked you.\nTake away the whipping winds of death\nfrom this sinner, so that the calm of\nyour almighty spirit might rest in me.\nUnto you all glory, now and forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-17": { - "title": "Prayer 17", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, tormented by bitter grief I pray\nto you, keeper of imperiled souls.\nDo not add to the pain of my sighs.\nDo not wound me. I am already injured.\nDo not condemn me. I am already punished.\nDo not torture me. I am already tormented.\nDo not cudgel me. I am already beaten.\nDo not push me. I have already fallen.\nDo not destroy me. I am already discredited.\nDo not reject me. I am already banished.\nDo not exile me. I am already persecuted.\nDo not embarrass me. I am already humbled.\nDo not scold me. I am already cowering.\nDo not crush me. I am already broken.\nDo not upset me. I am already agitated.\nDo not shake me. I am already quivering.\nDo not confuse me. I am already bewildered.\nDo not flay me. I am already picked over.\nDo not pound me. I am already crushed.\nDo not taint me. I am already debased.\nDo not blind me. I am already in the dark.\nDo not frighten me. I am already perplexed.\nDo not roast me. I am already charred.\nDo not kill me. I am already dying.\nDo not overload me. I am already weakened.\nDo not yoke me. I am already bent over.\nDo not double my wailing. I am already weeping.\nDo not till my soil too deeply.\nDo not scatter my ashes too harshly.\nDo not judge my works too roughly.\nDo not blow my dust too meanly.\n\n\n# II.\n\nDo not measure your greatness against my smallness,\nyour light against my dimness,\nyour good nature against my native evil,\nyour cornucopia of blessing against my cursed fruit,\nyour genuine sweetness against my complete sourness,\nyour unchanging glory against my total debasement,\nyour shrine of life against my vessel of clay,\nyour lord of lords against my dust of the earth,\nyour undimishing fullness against my slavish poverty,\nyour unpillaged abundance against my\nabandoned torment,\nyour unblemished goodness against my\nmost wretched squalor,\nfor who can reach morning and\nat the light of daybreak expect dark,\nor at the portal of life expect death,\nor at liberation expect bondage,\nor at grace expect condemnation,\nor at salvation expect destruction,\nor at renewal expect ruination,\nor at blessing expect banishment,\nor at cure expect injury,\nor at fullness expect want,\nor at abundance of bread expect famine,\nor at the flow of rivers expect drought,\nor at motherly compassion expect deception,\nor at the care of God’s right hand expect persecution?\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now with my body shaken by disease\nand my soul in peril I pray\n“Lord, if you want you can make me clean.”\nLike a groping blind man,\nI cry with laments and call to you\nnot only the son of David,\nbut also profess your divine birth.\nI not only call you, “Rabbi,”\nthe name of honor given to teachers\nwho claim to know the truth, but I also\nbelieve you to be the Lord of heaven and earth.\nI not only expect to be cured when you are close,\nO compassionate God, by the touch of your hand,\nbut also when we are separated by great distances\nthrough the power of your words.\nI do not draw a line between your will\nand your compassion, a line of doubt,\nfor I believe that you will, because\nyou are compassionate and you are able,\nbecause you are our creator.\nSay the word and I will be cured.\nLet me join the centurion in his faith.\nLet my faith be not just for the short\ndistances from altar to altar,\nfor I know you are able to raise\nthe dead and make them whole.\nEven sitting in heaven you work miracles\nover the whole world below.\nAnd I have nothing to give in return.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nGrant me forgiveness, with the word of your judgment,\neven as you forgave the debt\nof five hundred dinars in the case of the prostitute,\nGod of goodness, Lord of bliss.\nThe more you bestow, the greater your glory.\nThe more you give, the more you are loved.\nThe more your mercy, the more your greatness.\nFor all your benevolence, you are rightly praised.\nThough Lord of all, you came to us as our equal.\nThough possessing everything, you weigh by\nour measure.\nThough you have gifts beyond telling,\nyou accept our skimpy payment.\nAnd to the account of mortals, you grant\nunlimited credit. Your generosity is sublime,\nyet not too high to receive our meager praise.\nShow the same compassion to me with my\ncountless debts so that I might\nin expressing gratitude for your gifts\nalso commemorate your love.\nTo you glory in all things.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-18": { - "title": "Prayer 18", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nI was born in sin, the child of mortal labor.\nNow, in one day, a penalty of countless thousands\nhas come due.\nI turn to you for forgiveness not on the meager human\nscale, but with the full undiminishing measure\nof lovingkindness shown toward us\nby our Savior Jesus Christ:\nBefore I was, you created me.\nBefore I could wish, you shaped me.\nBefore I glimpsed the world’s light, you saw me.\nBefore I emerged, you took pity on me.\nBefore I called, you heard me.\nBefore I raised a hand, you looked over me.\nBefore I asked, you dispensed mercy on me.\nBefore I uttered a sound, you turned your ear to me.\nBefore I sighed, you attended me.\nKnowing in advance my current trials,\nyou did not thrust me from your sight.\nNo, even foreseeing my misdeeds,\nyou fashioned me.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, do not let me\nwhom you made, saved and took into\nyour care, be lost to sin and\nthe Troublemaker’s deceptions.\nDo not let the fog of my willfulness prevail\nover the light of your forgiveness,\nnor the hardness of my heart\nover your long-suffering goodness,\nnor my mortal flaws\nover your perfect wholeness,\nnor my weak flesh\nover your invincible strength.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn your name, Almighty,\nI extend the shriveled arm of my soul\nso you will make it whole as before,\nas in the garden of Eden,\nwhen it reached to pick fruit of the tree of life.\nThe misery of my incorrigible soul,\nbound up, infirm, bent over,\nis like the stricken woman in the Gospel,\nbowed by sin, her gaze on the ground\nin Satan’s tyrannical chains,\nkept from your heavenly blessing.\n\nTurn your ear toward me, last hope of mercy\nand raise this humbled, fallen, dried up,\nthinking piece of wood,\nto make it blossom in piety,\nas foretold in the words of the holy prophet.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nLike one without light, blind from birth,\nI do not have vision to look upon your face, O creator,\nalmighty and compassionate, my only protector.\nIf you turn the caring gaze of your immeasurable love\nupon my breathing speaking vessel,\nyou could rekindle, out of nothing,\nthe light of being within me.\n\nLike the wretched woman in the Gospels,\nafflicted by evils for twelve years,\nI bleed with rivers of infirmity.\nLook down upon me from on high\ncloaked in blinding light,\nwhere sewn clothing does not exist,\nbut everything is covered in mighty miracles.\n\n\n# V.\n\nCondemned as I am, I do not approach\nthe soles of your life-giving feet\nto anoint them with oil\nor offer to wash them with my\ntear-drenched hair. But rather, a true believer,\nI kiss the earth, with pure faith,\nhands reaching up, sighing with streaming tears,\nbegging for the healing of my soul,\na soul wasted by shortcomings,\ndissipated by weakness.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAnd these two feet, means of motion,\nfoundation of my body’s structure,\nnow lame and unsteady,\nvanquished by evil,\nimpede my ascent to the tree of life-giving fruit.\nMay you again inhabit them, my only hope of cure.\nAnd the organ of glorification with which you endowed\nme, whose voice when moved by the magnanimity of\nyour mercy used to turn back the breath of the\nTroublemaker, silencing him,\nmay you miraculously restore your living word to me,\nso I might speak again without faltering,\nlike the one you healed in the Gospel.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nI lie here on a cot struck down by evil,\nsinking in disease and torment,\nlike the living dead yet able to speak.\nO kind Son of God,\nhave compassion upon my misery.\nHear the sobbing of my agitated voice.\nBring me back to life\nwith the dew of your blessed eyes\nas you brought back your friend from breathless death.\nIn a dungeon of infirmities, I am captive, bitter and\nin doubt.\nGive me your hand, sun that casts no shadows, Son on\nhigh, and lift me into your radiant light.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nLike the pitiful, wailing voice of the widow Nain,\nmourning her only son,\nfingers trembling, chest heaving,\ntears streaming down her face paralyzed with grief,\nI beg with my last sighing breath: Grant me,\nwho has lost hope, your comfort and pity.\nTeach me not to moan and protest like a prisoner,\nkind and praiseworthy creator of the universe,\nbut rather, like the young man you brought back to life,\nwho comforted his grieving mother,\nmay I too receive from you\na second chance for my condemned soul.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nYou took pity, O Savior of all,\neven on demon-possessed brutes,\nand those unfortunates, stoned, beaten, and deformed,\nwith their unkempt, knotted hair\nand their wild faces, raving in delirium.\nLike them, I petition you,\nturn back the legions of evil defiling\nyour sanctuary within me\nso that when your Spirit arrives\nyour goodness might dwell here\nand fill my body with your cleansing breath,\nbringing lucidity to my reeling mind.\n\n\n# X.\n\nLike souls banished to hell,\nI am held captive by illness.\nLet your light dawn in radiant rays of mercy\nupon my torture to rescue me\nfrom the clutches of the sickness\ntearing me apart.\nThe infirmities that cause disease\ntraveling invisible paths, secretly lying in wait,\nstraying from the ordained ways with\nmalicious purposes--\nall torment my soul.\n\nHidden from examination, the\nmalignant growth proceeds\nwith the poisonous work of the Evil-doer.\nWith your strength which knows no equal,\nSon of God, heal me so that I might live.\n\nWith your almighty hand pluck out\nthe harvest of destruction\nthat the various mortal illnesses,\neach dressed in its own way, produce.\nPluck out the evil roots\nsprouted upon the field of my unruly body\nwith your mighty hand\nthat plows and cultivates the plots of our souls\nso they may bear the fruit of the gospel of life.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nAnd because the torments of my infirmities\nsurpass even these examples,\nwhich like a spreading cancer,\nhave touched all the parts of my body,\nthere is no salve as there was none for Israel,\nfor my innumerable sores.\nEvery part of my body from head to toe\nis unhealthy and beyond the help of physicians.\nBut you, merciful, beneficent, blessed,\nlong-suffering, immortal king,\nhear the prayers of my embattled heart for mercy,\nwhen I cry to you, “Lord,”\nin my time of need.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-19": { - "title": "Prayer 19", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHear, all-seeing vision of hope and goodness of life,\nthe profuse sighs of my hurting soul,\nunreachable greatness, fearful name, living word,\nlonged for message, delectable taste,\nworshipful calling, confessed beneficence,\nsweet perception, professed reality,\nglorious essence, blessed existence,\nLord Christ, praised and worshiped with your Father\nand exalted and proclaimed with the Holy Spirit,\nwho alone became human like us for our sakes,\nso that you might make us like you for your sake,\nlight unto all, merciful, almighty and\nheavenly in all ways,\nI pray that with your divine miracle-working power,\ncompassionate God, you restore this,\nmy collapsing broken earthen vessel.\nAnd I pray that you recast the image you gave me,\nworn by sin,\nin the lightning crucible of your word.\nCleanse the temple of my body,\nthe vessel of my soul,\nthe altar of your repose,\nas your dwelling place,\nI pray you, O doer of good.\nDo not repay my evil deeds with evil.\nI am drunk, in the words of the prophet, but not\nwith wine. Empty out the dregs of iniquity\nfrom my stupefying cup of death. And by the command\nof your salvation, giver of all life,\nlet me with the last drop of your cup\nbe spared on the day of judgment.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou are just in your law\nand triumphant in your judgment.\nIf you hand down a death sentence,\nyour action is right.\nIf you reprimand before giving a stern condemnation,\nyour decision is just.\nIf you cast me into the abyss\nor still the movement of life,\nif you silence my power of speech,\nor darken the windows of my eyes,\nif you check my joy in life,\nor impair my ability to be nourished by ordinary food,\nif you reduce the richness of my days,\nor make drops of fire fall along with the dew drops,\nif you starve me by your silence,\nor shut the doors of my ears,\nif you cut off the bounty of your grace,\nor make the earth move under my feet,\nif you shut off the light of your countenance\nfor which I yearn, or expel me from\nthis world completely,\nif you terrify me with a lightening bolt,\nor condemn me to incurable pain,\nif you betray me to the demons of evil,\nor chew me up in the jaws of beasts,\nif you blow me away in billowing anger,\nor invent some new torture,\nmore evil than Tartaros,\nmore severe than Gehenna,\nmore vile than maggots,\nmore anguishing than darkness,\nmore terrifying than the abyss,\nmore pitiful than nakedness,\nI will testify against myself that\nI deserve these and more.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd since the punishments always match\nthe sins they are for,\nlike mirror images, identical,\nparallel, emblematic of the wrong,\nit is important to confess\nand lift the veil from my face\nto one who seeks to know me.\nFor as I did not tend the needs of\nmy fellow man with warm charity,\nit is right that I freeze with fear\nat the first sign of danger.\n\nAnd since I did not check my willful pride,\nit is fair that I should be consumed with\nunbridled disgrace.\n\nAnd since I did not love the light\nof the good news, it is just\nthat I should be condemned to grope\nin the darkness of ignorance and fog of perdition.\n\nAnd since I paid no heed to small faults,\nconsidering them harmless, it is fitting\nfor me to be wounded by the stings of insects.\n\nAnd since I did not lend a helping han\nto those in danger, it is proper for me\nto be cast into a pit of filth.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBut evil is not from your Godly bounty,\nsource of all good, and darkness\nis not from your radiant light.\nAnd temptation is not\npart of your protection. No, I found these myself\nlike a destructive child.\nAnd the mounting sins of my iniquity have justified\nyour anger. As the good book warns\nI became the servant of the prince\nof iniquity, giving him your place.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd since the scandal,\nthe most private secret, has been uncovered\nand its shamefulness leaves a mark\nupon my face. I show myself, as in\nthe parable of the prophet, in complete\noffensiveness like a naked prostitute.\n\nRekindle your light of atonement in me,\nheavenly king, so that\nshaking off the dust of sin,\nmy soul can stand upright like the\npeople returning from Babylon,\nhaving heard the voice of good tidings.\nAnd I will be able to sit up again,\non the firm foundation of your unshakable hope.\nIn the words of the prophet Isaiah,\nI shall be clothed in my former purity\nby your mighty hand, for the sweetness\nof your all-giving divinity and your great glory.\nBlessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-20": { - "title": "Prayer 20", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord, O Lord, who bears no grudges,\ntolerant, forgiving, compassionate, powerful,\nand merciful,\nbehold, your actions rest on truth,\nyour judgment upon confessions,\nyour decisions upon sound testimony,\nO seer of the unseen. Like the three\nfortunate youths who were tested by the caustic fires\nof Babylon but were unharmed,\nI groan a mournful refrain,\n“I have sinned. I am lawless. I have done wrong.\nI have been indicted and I have not heeded\nyour commandments.”\nThey being innocent of any wrong\ncried out this confession, while I am rightly\ncondemned to death and have yet more reason\nto plead even as Daniel,\nthe blessed holy prophet,\nwho was of your true lineage\nand the chosen branch of the house of Judah.\nTo his words and prayers of commitment that\nwere acceptable to you, I add my cries\nfor punishment and humiliation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nKnowing full well what was improper,\nI strayed from the path,\nsinning in all ways in all things,\nI fled from the balancing bounds\nof your will. And this is\nthe characteristic profile of base\nlawlessness that I practiced and\nperfected till my wrongdoing knew\nno limits. Is this not the very image\nof criminality? You admonished\nbut I was shameless. You entreated\nbut I took no heed. Both are flagrant signs\nof rebellion.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou clothed yourself in righteousness,\nO doer of good, and prepared\nshame and humiliation for me.\nFor you, fitting glory,\nfor me, deserving insult.\nFor you, sweetness immemorial,\nfor me, vinegary bile.\nFor you, praise that cannot be silenced,\nfor me, weeping laments.\nFor you, songs of blessing rising with incense,\nfor me, the alienation of exile.\nFor you, all rights justly deserved,\nfor me, every worrisome debt.\nFor you, exaltation and praise beyond words,\nfor me, the abject punishment of eating dust.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd you, O splendid goodness beyond measure,\nyou received our offering with sweet frankincense\nfitting to you, while\nI received my portion of censure compounded\nby aggravating circumstances.\nFor if the innocent prayed to you in this way,\nwhat apology shall I weave in my guilt, I who have\nfaltered more basely than anyone?\nI have strayed down wayward paths in my\nundisciplined mind.\nIn my everyday speech I have been brazen.\nI have been obsessed by shameful deeds.\nI have become puffed up and haughty.\nI have become arrogant and conceited\nthough I will soon be lowered into the earthly grave.\nI want to make a deal\nthough I cannot even give my breath as collateral.\n\n\n# V.\n\nI, breathing dust, have grown haughty.\nI, talking clay, have become presumptuous.\nI, filthy dirt, have grown proud.\nI, disgusting ashes, have risen up,\nraising my hands with my broken cup, strutting\nlike a swaggering peacock, but then\ncurling back into myself, as if rejected,\nmy speaking slime glowing with anger\nI grew arrogant, as if I were immortal,\nI, who face the same death as the four-legged creatures.\nI embraced the love of pleasure\nand instead of facing you, turned my back.\nIn flights of fancy I darted into lurid thought.\nIndulging my body I wore out my soul.\nIn strengthening the sinister side\nI weakened the force of my right side.\nI saw your concern for me, too deep for words,\nand paid no heed.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAs Hosea wrote of Ephraim, I rushed\ntoward my former ways like a wild fowl.\nIn my sanctuary I was immersed in my worldly\npreoccupations and I did not halt the meandering\nhorse of my mind with the reins of rationality.\nI added to my former wrong doings with new\ninventions. Like Job, I made my heavy yoke\neven more unbearable. Like Jeremiah,\nI became like a rotten cloth, and, as the preacher said,\nmy name is erased from the book of mankind\nlike a stillborn child. And as Isaiah said,\nI have become soiled like the napkin of the\nmenstruating woman and I am shattered and\nunmendable like a ceramic bowl. Like the Edomite\nchastised by the prophet, I have prepared myself\nfor a squalid end as the fourth penalty for\nmy lawlessness. And it would be no lie were I to add\nthat abandoning my inheritance in heaven I even built\na tabernacle to the demon Moloch, even fashioned\nan idol in the form of the Babylonian Star\nof Rephan like the one the Israelites had in the Sinai,\nso that my legacy should be hell.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAnd now with the license of my original grace revoked\nI have changed, I am dispossessed, I am exiled,\nI am banished, I am separated and irreparably cut off.\nNow, accept me, O Lord, and renew the impression of\nyour image on my soul, I who am unworthy of life,\na capital felon, evil person,\na fallen being trampled by Satan,\na terminal patient at death’s door,\ndepraved and unworthy of your calling,\ndefeated with one blow, wanderer, exile and outlaw,\na doubter, wretch, reject, battered, shattered,\nbroken, wounded, dejected, embattled soul.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nAnd again, O compassionate Lord who loves mankind,\nalmighty God, as you consider these words of pleading,\ntreat them as a confession from a contrite soul\nfallen at your feet in repentance.\nAnd as you judge, note and weigh\nthe tearful soul, the heaving sighs,\nthe quivering lips, the dry tongue,\nthe clenched face, the good will in the depth of the heart,\nyou who are the salvation of humanity,\nthe seer of the undone, the creator of all,\nthe healer of invisible wounds,\nthe defender of the hopeful and the guardian of all,\nto you glory forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-21": { - "title": "Prayer 21", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSince I of my own will mortgaged myself to death,\nnever standing as a man on my own two feet,\nand never having received a rational soul,\nas the Bible says,\nI did not turn away from my former sinful ways\nto travel the path of goodness.\nWhy should I not begin this chapter\nby disclosing my wayward tracks toward darkness?\nSo I shall adapt my writing to this purpose\nwithout changing my earlier testimony,\nand confess again the rest of the evil stains upon me.\n\n\n# II.\n\nDeserving the punishment of a foreign mercenary\nI joined the army of Beliar by my acts of obstinacy.\nSwept off by the agile dances, gleeful stunts,\nand foolery of the slithering demons,\ningenious deceivers, I wallowed in my sloth,\nand in the chambers of the fallen, I took comfort\nin secret floggings and invisible wounds instead of\nwarding off these outcasts with Christ’s cross.\nNo, I willingly joined them\nwith no reason other than my miserable lawlessness.\nYour name, O Jesus, was profaned among the demons,\nas it was among the Gentiles for the sake of Israel.\nThe vices I planted in myself blow by wicked blow\nlike thieves and evil spirits\nate away at the flower of my soul like corrosive rust.\nLike caterpillars and locusts,\nas the saintly prophet Joel described\nin his terrifying lament about the land of Israel.\nIndeed, I cultivated rather than uprooted them,\nrecruiting throngs of warriors armed\nwith deadly weapons.\nI collected them in my soul and\nnurtured those that goaded me toward\nlawlessness and iniquity,\nI strengthened my enemies so that they\nbecame invincible,\nI took bitterness as my portion instead of your\nsweet sustenance,\nalways deceitful toward the Creator,\nand faithful to the Deceiver.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHow dare I raise my voice in appeal,\nconsidering the wretchedness of my plight,\nthe anguish of my peril,\nthe shadow of my shame,\nthe darkness of my humiliation?\nThe voice of doom is overwhelming\nand the cry of my protests unbearable.\nAnd if I could see my soul,\ndeformed, shriveled, wasted away,\nI would sob yet more painfully in\nextreme embarrassment\nat the disgusting, ashen color of its baseness,\nlike a minion at a pagan temple.\nFor becoming a slave to sin is the same\nas worshiping a stone idol.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nSince I have traveled the path of destruction\npursuing the footprints of darkness,\nlike the priests of Israel scolded by the prophet, and\nsince I have traded your plot of paradise for\na barren desert,\nhow can I call myself human,\nwhen I have earned a place among the inhuman?\nHow can I be named a thinking being,\nwhen I indulge in brutish ways?\nHow can I be called a seeing being,\nwhen I have snuffed out my inner light?\nHow can I be known as cognizant,\nwhen I have slammed the door on wisdom?\nHow can I aspire to incorruptible grace,\nwhen with my own hand I have slain my soul?\nIndeed I lack attributes of a moving or even\nbreathing being,\nlet alone one capable of spiritual, thoughtful life.\n\n\n# V.\n\nChipped among the set of plates,\ndefective among the stones of the wall,\ndisdained among the ranks of the called,\nlowest of the tribe of the elect,\nweakest among those fearful of death,\nmost dejected with the pain of Jerusalem,\nas mournful as Jeremiah’s words,\n“My days have been wasted in wailing,\nand the course of my years in crying.”\nIn the songs of the musician,\n“Like wool eaten by moths, like wood\nchewed up by worms.”\nIn the words of the wiseman,\n“My heart was consumed by suspicion.”\nIn the words of the Psalmist,\n“I unravelled like a spiderweb,\nand became useless.”\nIn the words of the prophet,\n“I have disappeared, evaporated like the morning\ncloud and the dew at dawn.”:\n\n\n# VI.\n\nI do not put my hope in mankind,\nfor I would be cursed by the evil eye\nand falter in despair.\nRather I place my faith in you, my Lord,\nwho loves our souls.\nYou, who even at the hour\nyou were nailed to the cross\noverflowed with boundless compassion,\nand beseeched your Father on high\nto take mercy on your tormentors.\nNow grant me hope of atonement, life and refuge,\nso that when I take my last breath\nI might receive from you a healed soul.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nall power, victory, majesty and glory forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-22": { - "title": "Prayer 22", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now I continue to accuse my cursed soul\nin different terms confessing all my\nundisclosed evil doings so that perhaps\nthe all-knowing might record in my favor\nthese anguished words of penitence and contrition.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMy body the grievous tormentor of my soul,\nwounded, untreatable, beyond care or recovery\nis like a talking horse with a callous mouth,\nbreaking my reins and shaking off my bit,\na surly, wild and incorrigible colt,\nan untame, recalcitrant, and stubborn heifer,\na homeless man, banished and lost,\na street urchin, roguish and impudent,\na boss, deserving mortal punishment,\nunfaithful and indolent,\nan intelligent person, turned beastly and unclean,\nan abandoned olive tree, barren and dry,\na string of imperial gold coins, wasted and forfeited,\na delinquent servant, runaway and wretched.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI am of no use to you at all, Lord,\nfor I am willingly self-destructive of soul and body,\nand remain spiritually lost and mentally deluded,\nwith a twisted will and broken heart,\nabsent-minded and stagnant-brained,\nnumb and drained,\nbrazen and disagreeable,\nbesieged by inflammations,\nwracked by fatal sickness.\nI pity the womb that bore me and\nbemoan the breasts that fed me, asking\nwhy was their milk not curdled with bile?\nWhy was the sweetness that nurtured me not\nmixed with bitterness?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd because I have risen against myself\nwith words like a harsh prosecutor\nand have even taken up the sword\nof righteous anger that cannot be sheathed,\nwho among the earth-born will plead for me?\nI shall confess every scandalous detail.\nI shall submit my being to judgment.\nI shall beat down the army of destruction.\nI shall prosecute the marauders wounding me.\nI have sinned in everything and in all ways.\nHave mercy upon me, O compassionate God.\nIt is no new thing to find me in the fog of iniquity.\nI am always the same, breaking\nthe same commandments and appearing\nbefore you unreformed, stumbling\nin an unmendable garment.\nAnd only you, O truly compassionate and blessed,\nwith your love of mankind and your\nunwavering forgiveness\ncan speed my escape from Satan\nwho stands beside me.\n\n\n# V.\n\nNow, O caregiving, mighty, heavenly, kind,\ncreator of all out of nothing,\nsend the thunderbolt of wisdom in powerful words,\nupon the movements of my tongue\nthat it might cleanse the senses\nwith which you endowed me,\nso that with the faculties you created and\nfixed a second time,\nI might offer thanks to you\nwith unfailing voice and unbroken speech.\nFor the glory of the majesty of your Father,\nour God, forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-23": { - "title": "Prayer 23", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord God of all, able to do anything,\nall-encompassing space, unbounded, unlimited,\nclose to all with your very essence,\nnowhere, yet without you there are no bounds,\ninvisible, yet without the light of your dawn\nnothing is visible,\nawesome glory, incomprehensible name,\nvoice of majesty, sound of the infinite,\nessence beyond analysis,\nunreachable distance, immediate closeness,\nwho notes gentleness and sees distress,\nstands by grief and can cure all hopeless cases,\nFather of compassion who spreads mercy,\nGod of comfort.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLook with mercy, O Lord, on my anguish,\non the many symptoms of dread afflictions\nI set out before you.\nTreat me like a physician, rather than examining\nme like a judge.\nIndeed I am overwhelmed by anxieties\ncaused by vacillation and doubt.\nWhen the body is weakened by malady,\nwhen the soul is not fortified against evil,\nwhen the senses are paralyzed by passion,\nthe members of the body wallow in desire,\nthe heart’s wisdom is wounded by remorse,\nthe expectation of good is abandoned,\nand despite the ability to think,\nman sinks to the level of beasts.\nHis existence becomes enmeshed with disgust\neven while appearing outwardly whole,\nhis intellect frays within.\nRemembering the graveness of his mistakes,\nhe falls into despair\ntormented by past deeds and constantly worried.\nThe clarity of prayer becomes clouded\nas he smolders in the fires of conscience.\nAt work, although his hand stays on the plough,\nhis mind keeps turning over the past.\nWalking forward, his feet drag back.\nKnowing the essential, he is consumed by irrelevancies.\nIn battles of the mind, he is always defeated by details.\nAnd the door of his voice box is charred by the burning\nof his heart.\nEverywhere sunless fog rises from damp whims\nenshrouding everything and blocking the grasp of hope.\nHis senses are branded with unbearable pain.\nHis mind is obsessed by the misfortune of perdition\nand retribution occupies the tribunal of his thought.\nHis tender eye fills with anger.\nBright spirits disfavor my earthen vessel\nand I am worthy of being stoned to death with\nstones of justice.\nWith terror my meager nature collides with yours\nas your thundering words scatter my\nthought-bearing ashes.\nLike a prodigal son I have wasted the talent given me,\nand like the useless servant I buried the\nhonorable gifts received.\nThe fruits of my labor are covered with the\ndarkness of sloth,\nand fade like the afterglow of a candle when\nit is taken away.\nMy tongue, having lost the right to respond, is dumb.\nMy twisted lips have been justly silenced.\nMy mind whirls with anxiety\nunable to concentrate\ntoo stupefied to weigh and choose what is right.\nThe path of deliverance is blocked\nby the wreckage of evil,\nand the lamp of my soul is filled only with ash.\nThe letters of my name have been scratched from the\nbook of life,\nand blame is written in the place of blessing.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIf I see a soldier, I expect death,\na messenger, punishment,\na clerk, foreclosure,\na jurist, condemnation,\nan evangelist, the shaking of the dust off his feet,\na pious person, reprimand,\na snob, sarcasm,\nIf I am put to trial by water, I will drown.\nIf I take a remedy for my condemnation, I will die.\nAt the mere sight of the harvest of goodness, I recoil\nremembering my evil.\nIf a hand is raised, I take cover.\nAt the least trifle, I tremble.\nAt the slightest sound, I flinch.\nIf I am invited to join in a toast, I quiver.\nIf I am scolded, I cower.\nIf I am called for questioning, I mumble.\nIf I am interrogated, I become dumb.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNow, all these pitiful doubts, heaped upon each another,\nin the unconscious depths and inner chambers of my\nheart’s being,\nstifle me, piercing my heart with invisible arrows,\nunextractable, permanently lodged in my soul,\nfilling it with pus forewarning\na dreadful death.\nWith each breath I draw,\nthe ulcers and rust from these buried secrets,\nlocked away in iron, cause pain.\nThe cry of my voice strangled by these torments,\nI offer to heaven, mixed with tears and the sobbing grief\nof my soul,\nO doer of good, for whom everything is possible,\nalong with the prayers of other earth-bound sufferers.\nWith them I offer up my last sigh\nand tears here on earth,\nso that you will grant a calm peace to me,\na pitiful laborer engaged in vain earthly pursuits.\nEternal glory to you,\nwho are all in all through all.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-24": { - "title": "Prayer 24", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nWhat am I worthy to ask of you in prayer?\n\nMay I pray for\nparadise, from which I have strayed?\nyour magnificent glory, which I am denied?\nyour everlasting life, from which I was rejected?\nthe society of angels, from which I was expelled?\nthe company of the just, from which I am banished?\nthe living vine, from which I have been\nripped away?\nthe shoot of the plant of bliss, from which I have\ndried up?\nthe grace of the flower of glory, from which\nI have fallen?\nthe legacy of praise, from which I was disinherited?\nthe devoted fatherly embrace, from which\nI have pulled away?\n\n\n# II.\n\nOr may I pray\nthat I might be honored with clothing of light,\nfrom which I have been stripped?\nthat I might hope for return to my creator,\nfrom whom I have been estranged?\nthat I might turn my desires to the light,\nfrom which I have strayed?\nthat I might join the body of Christ,\nfrom which I was rejected?\nthat I might touch the hand of him,\nfrom whom I am separated?\nthat I might seek refuge in the sanctuary,\nfrom which I was spurned?\nOr might I pray for\nthe renewal of salvation, from which I fell?\nthe reawakening of joy, from which\nI was abandoned?\nthe rule of monastic life, from which\nI have been diverted?\nthe edge of steadfastness, from which\nI have slipped?\nthe bulwark of the immovable rock,\nfrom which I have been shaken?\nthe procession of the faithful, from which I strayed?\nOr may I pray that I might\nprosper in the city of firstborn,\nfrom which I was taken captive?\nreceive my daily bread, for which\nI have not worked?\nbe compensated for labor, for which\nI have not sweat?\nbe showered with rewards, which\nI have not earned?\nbe recorded in the book of life,\nfrom which I have been erased?\nremember the bounty of blessings, which\nI always forget?\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now the thread of the hope of life has snapped.\nI am dominated by a plague of leprosy, diseased all over.\nMy body has been eaten away by corruption.\nBesieged, I have been made dead to God.\nA small, shiny, ugly, white scar\nis all that remains of my earlier ambiguous symptoms,\nleaving no doubt of my uncleanness.\nAll vestiges of pride have been snuffed.\nSalvation is forsaken; the good darkened by shadows.\nAccess to life is completely closed; comfort removed.\nThe tribunal of judgment approaches.\nThe poisons of death quicken within me.\nThe malignancies reawaken.\nThe harbor is shut by reefs.\nThe path of hope is blocked.\nThe cloak of grace has been stripped away.\nThe splendor of majesty is eclipsed.\nThe sense of direction has been confused.\nThe stabs of reprimand have multiplied.\nThe horns of iniquity have sprouted.\nThe flames of hell have singed me.\nThe yoke of servitude weighs heavily.\nThe chains of slavery are strengthened.\nThe supporting structure has collapsed.\nThe base of the summit has disintegrated.\nThe unity of the family has fallen into the abyss.\nThe Spirit of God which loves holiness is dejected.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI have embraced the bitter dregs\nof torment, anguish, sorrow, spiritual distress,\npains beyond treatment,\ndoubt beyond steadying, shame beyond measure,\nscandal beyond concealment,\nhumiliation beyond brazenness,\nfleeing beyond return,\npersecution beyond human decency\na long, barren pilgrimage.\nWhereas you are salvation, strength, and relief,\nmercy, enlightenment, atonement and life eternal,\nLord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,\ncreator of heaven and earth,\nwho offers water to those parched from\nthirst in the desert.\nBlessed, kind, mighty, loving,\nforbearing, caring, ingenious, visitor,\ndefender without sparing, protector victorious,\nlife indestructible, intercessor to heaven,\nundiminishing fullness, bliss celebrated,\nlovingly extend your right hand of mercy.\nAccept and present me, a manifold sinner,\nmy sins forgiven and cleansed,\nto your Holy Spirit, equal to you in honor,\nO living Word,\nso that reconciled through you the Holy Spirit might\nreturn to me.\nThrough you, may the almighty Holy Spirit\ncleanse me with pure will and present me to your Father\nso that I may with him and through him\nalways be bound with grace to you\nthrough the breath of salutation\ninseparably united with you.\nAnd for these gifts, to you, the Father and\nthe Holy Spirit,\nthree persons, one nature and one godhead,\nglory and thanksgiving from your created beings,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-25": { - "title": "Prayer 25", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nIn describing my imprisonment and captivity,\nI have recounted some of the wicked torments\nthat have afflicted me one after another,\nmost unfortunate soul that I am.\nNow I change my figure of speech,\nbut not the subject of my laments.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe ways of my life are like the waves of the sea,\nmy soul tossing in this world upon countless,\nendless swells,\nriding in the shell of my body\nlike the ship lost at sea, as the prophet Isaiah\nonce said mourning the sudden destruction of Jerusalem\nand Samaria by Persian hordes.\n\nWould I then be wrong to use similar sounds and\nimages to describe the spiritual destruction that crashed\nupon me?\nFor as I strode through life free of doubts and cares,\nI had no inkling of the peril lying in wait for me\nbetween work and rest.\nIt arrived like the winter’s blast on a summer’s day,\na turbulent front thrusting me into turmoil.\n\nWrecked by the blows of the wild waves of the sea,\nlike a ship\nwhose rudder has become unhinged,\nwhose tall mast has been ripped from the deck,\nwhose flapping sails are in shreds,\nwhose well-built frame has lost its form,\nwhose ropes have unravelled,\nwhose lookout has been laid low,\nwhose cable strands have snapped,\nwhose anchor has come loose,\nwhose joints are unjointed,\nwhose guiding oar is bent,\nwhose keel is submerged,\nwhose helm is detached,\nwhose steering mechanism is gone,\nwhose backbone has snapped,\nwhose ribs are undone,\nwhose underbelly is shattered,\nwhose deck burst loose,\nwhose cabin has collapsed,\nwhose railing has fallen,\nwhose captain’s chair has tipped,\nwhose deck planks have split apart,\nwhose fastening nails are out.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThis image of destruction reminds me of my misery,\nlike a captain mourning his ship,\nchin in hand, tears streaming down,\nviewing traces of the wreckage\nbobbing on the crest of the waves.\nMy slain sanity sobs with pitiful grief.\n\nI did not stray from the truth\nin selecting these words to mourn\nthe shattered ark of my intellect.\nFor the Good Captain with his heavenly host\ntook pity on the sea of humanity in just this way.\nIndeed, our merciful Lord,\nwept like one of us mortals for the death of a friend\nand shed tears for fallen Jerusalem and\ntreacherous Judas.\nThose two, like sunken ships, were lost beyond hope,\nbut the first, having hit bottom,\nwas lifted up into tranquil peace,\nby the thread of hope held in the hand of our deliverer.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI wonder:\nWill I ever see the battered ark of\nmy body restored?\nWill I ever see my shipwrecked soul healthy again?\nWill I ever see what has been separated by\nso great a chasm rejoined?\nWill I ever see the sad and tired heart of\nthis grieved spirit in bliss?\nWill I ever see the defiled image of\nnature once again in full bloom?\nWill I ever see the destroyed temple of\nmy miserable self standing?\nIs there hope I might see this exiled slave set free?\nIndeed, may one fallen from grace expect\nto be lifted once more to the light?\nWill I ever see the native splendor of\nyour radiance appearing to me in mercy?\nWill I ever see the saddest aspect of my soul smile?\nWill I ever hear good tidings instead of bad news?\nWill I ever see the thousand cracks in\nmy vessel mended?\nWill I see through the windows of\nmy mind’s eye the bond of my debt torn up?\nWill I see the goodness of forgiving grace\ndawn upon the days of my anguish?\nWill you lead me again into the joyous altar of light?\nWill my dried bones come alive again like Ezekiel’s\nthrough your life-giving breath?\nWill I again set eyes upon your holy cathedral,\nI who cry forth like the prophet from\nthe belly of the whale,\nrejected from the light, standing\nbefore you in shame?\nAnd will morning’s light ever dawn to\ndispel my gloom,\nI, who was reared in darkness?\nWill one tormented in the deep frost of\nwinter ever see spring?\nWill the mist of the rain restore the green\npasture of my soul?\nWill the lost sheep, gashed by wild beasts,\nbe again counted among your flock\nthrough your merciful will?\n\n\n# V.\n\nFor as Job said, the snares of evil are all around,\nfrom these I cannot escape.\nBut by your good will\nif the light of compassion should shine,\nif the door of your mercy should open,\nif the rays of your glory should spread,\nif the care of your hand should be revealed,\nif the dawning sun of life should break forth,\nif the sight of your beautiful morn\nshould be unveiled,\nif the bounty of your sweetness should flow forth,\nif the stream from the maker’s side should run,\nif the drops of your pure love should shower down,\nif the good news of the dawn of your\ngrace should resound,\nif the tree of your gift should blossom,\nif the parts of your blessed body are distributed,\nif the dashed expectations should be reassembled,\nif the silenced sound of your beckoning voice, Lord,\nshould again be heard,\nif your banished peace should return,\nthen with this blessing\nshall the faith of steady hope be forever mine\nfinding refuge in the Holy Spirit,\nwho with the Father is worshiped with\nthe voice of sweetness\nand together with you bathed in light too bright for\nhuman eyes.\nGrant life, forgiveness and heavenly bliss to me, a sinner,\nholding your incorruptible grace, the true token of faith,\nas an indestructible legacy.\n\nThis we pray in the name of your awe-inspiring,\nmighty and holy oneness\nand the lordship of your three-fold person\nbeyond human words and understanding\nto you, who are in essence and in existence eternally\nexalted, crowned, clothed and\nenthroned with sweetness, mercy and benevolence.\nIndeed through you, O merciful Lord,\nall things, in all ways, for all people, are possible.\nTo you glory here, now and forever and in the eternity to\ncome on the great day of revelation.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-26": { - "title": "Prayer 26", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, truly and rightly, I join the others\nwho, modulating the sobs of their voices,\nappropriately dress their writing\nwith the same sound at the end of each verse,\nthereby more intensely inflaming and rending the heart,\nand the anguish of the pangs of its distress\nto the point of tears.\nThus I take my place at the head of the table of\nthe practitioners of this art,\nwho punctuate their poetry with sobs,\nand like them sighing and exclaiming “alas,”\nI lay open the grief of my soul,\nwhich is not totally dead to the world,\nbut is not truly alive to God,\npoetry neither especially hot, or particularly cold\nas the Evangelist wrote in the Revelations,\nthrice condemned by the Holy Trinity and\nall-knowing creator.\nThus, the fitting manifestation of my afflictions,\nmaking them twice as pitiful,\nis to set forth with a single rhyme\nmaking them the epitome of wretchedness,\nresonating response after response.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLike one, who renouncing debts, incurs even\nmore penalties, wretched person that I am,\nI am condemned by my unworthy acts\nto a double penalty and unwaivable judgment,\nliable before the Almighty, apprehended without\nany defense, in a matter of thousands of talents,\nbut without an ear’s worth of coins,\nheld captive in bitter confinement without\nan intercessor to sup on sighs and\npain in a prison of darkness,\ntormented without refuge or sustenance, I am pitiful,\nand chose here a different mode for my lamentations,\ntransposing my weeping with words,\narranged with regularity in the same manner,\nwith the indivisible, mystical symbol:\nthe pure vowel sound “ee” and the number of talents\nreturned by the industrious servant of the parable.\nThe flames of the furnace of spiritual poverty are\nfanned from all sides, around my miserable,\ndefenseless self.\nMy anguished heart is mortgaged and\nmy inconstant soul, easy prey to error.\nUnsparingly indicted, judgment shall be\ndemanded of me.\nMy senses shall be wounded by the weapons of\ndeath and sin.\nLike a slave condemned beyond salvation,\nmy very essence is shredded by the hacking of\nits sharp sword.\nAt the mere recollection of the tribunal of my judgment,\ngloom without a glimmer of light envelopes\nmy pessimistic eyes.\n\nHelpless captive of doubt, wretch that I am,\nthe image of heaven’s consternation overwhelms me.\nIn the severe sunless Tartaros, without cover,\nwithout refuge, singed by the flames of Gehenna, I am\nlost without trace, swallowed by the abyss of sin.\nThis is my net worth of useless silver\nwhich will never be honored or acceptable for deposit\nin the Lord’s treasury.\nMy petitions are tainted and my hands are\nunclean for an offering.\nI am heart broken and my fingers tremble in\nhope of redemption.\nWith my face to the ground, I beseech you,\nMother of Jesus,\nintercede and pray for forgiveness for me, a sinner.\nYou, who are the mighty savior of life, Queen of Heaven,\nto you we offer the blessing of our voices and\nthe fragrance of incense and the gift of sweet oils.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, let me add to the lamentations already written,\nanother part.\nI have offered to the grantor of grace the fruits of tears.\nHaving been unable to find the depth of my perdition,\nwhenever I tried to describe it in precise words,\neven the swift wings of my mind were not able to\ncomprehend its essence.\nBecause the defeat of my mental capacities by\nthe invincible forces of sin,\nI have taken the cup of wrath in my hand and\nI drink, as a taste of death, the perplexity of doubt.\nAnd now that I have set these rhythms of transgression\nto song with a pitiful voice,\nan invisible inferno blazes within me with flames that\ncannot be quenched,\nlike some invisible molten metal bubbling furiously in an\nblasting furnace,\nlike the shooting of poisoned arrows into the deepest\nchamber of my heart,\nlike jabs of pain from mortal wounds piercing through\nthe veins of my liver,\nlike pangs of labor, pain is stuck in my blocked intestines\nunable to escape,\nlike my two burning kidneys that cannot be cured,\nlike the unbearable bitterness of bile at the back of my\nthroat,\nthe fading voice of a sigh of “alas” can be heard in my\nwindpipe.\nThe various elements of the nature of my essence are like\nenemies at war with each other,\nwavering with the timidity of opinions in total crisis.\nAlthough kin, they are destroying each other in\nirreconcilable betrayal,\nneither dead nor alive, buried in the mire of\nthe baseness of sin.\nAnd with the suspicion of a convict I gaze upon\nyour benevolence,\nthat I might be lifted out of the pit of this hopeless life\ninto the light of our desire.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMay he who copies these words be crowned\namong the blissful.\nMay he expecting your mercy join the ranks of the pure.\nMay he be granted life through your beneficence for his\nhomage to God the Word.\nMay the praiseworthy blessings of your lips be\nupon the heart of him who distributes this book.\nMay the aspiration of Solomon’s book of\nProverbs be fulfilled.\nThrough your Spirit, exalted God, may the imprint of\nyour image be incorruptibly renewed,\nfor you alone are patient and forgiving,\nand to you all glory.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-27": { - "title": "Prayer 27", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAs I adapted the earlier chapters to the\nwordy creations offered up in my lamenting voice,\nwailing and sobbing, shrieking cries,\nweeping sighs of anguish,\nagain I begin my prayers\nwith confession and contrition,\nrevealing my dark secrets.\nAnd I shall place here, at\nthe beginning and end of each sentence\nthe same words, echoing each other\nto form a single supplication of similar litanies\nfor soul-saving humility.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI have sinned against your beneficence,\ndisrespectful sinner that I am.\nI have sinned against the rays of your dawn,\ndark sinner that I am.\nI have sinned against the boundless benefits of your\ngrace, verily I have sinned.\nI have sinned against the exalted mercy of love,\nbrazenly I have sinned.\nI have sinned against the creator ex nihilo,\ntruly I have sinned.\nI have sinned against the tenderness of your\nalmighty embrace,\nunworthy sinner that I am.\nI have sinned against the enlightenment of your\nundiminishing light,\ndeceitful sinner that I am.\nI have sinned against the eating of your ineffable life,\nmany times I have sinned.\nI have sinned against the talents of your\nincomprehensible gifts,\nat all times I have sinned.\nI have sinned against the praiseworthy body of God,\nmortally I have sinned.\nI have sinned against your worshipful blood, our creator,\ntruly I have sinned.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIndeed this “I have sinned” is a blessed phrase in this\nprayer for the heart set on hope,\nIt has an honorable lineage, an unforgettable image,\npaternal tribute, law of our forefathers,\nour common inheritance,\nirrefutable argument, forceful response,\nbridge of life, pleasing to Heaven,\nbeloved of the saints, unseverable tie,\nmagical words, inescapable logic, earnest request,\ninviting altar, heart-rending cry,\nhope for the hopeless, shield against hardship,\ncharter for the faithful, letter to the pagans,\nrule of the ancients, birthright of Christians,\nvictorious creative force, mighty abyss,\nterrifying separation, transcending art,\nincomprehensible depth, dazzling vision,\nsealed mystery that cannot be unlocked,\nbeyond the grasp of the quickest mind.\nA fitting, miraculous sound,\nwhich was not uttered by the outcast sinners,\nfor if it had been, perhaps at that very moment,\nthe just death sentence and culling of the flock\nno longer being applicable,\nthe eternal barrier would have been torn down.\nThis word is an ornament of crowning glory,\nby which the Godhead himself spreads his\nmagnanimity among us.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor who, having sought refuge by holding the\nhorn of the holy altar,\ndid not instantly escape punishment, being found pure?\nOr as Achan, son of Carmi, King Saul, and Judas,\nwere not absolved, merely by saying “I sinned”?\nThis, I affirm, with God as my witness, was just and fair,\nfor forced confession is not performed with loving\ncontrition and therefore cannot bring salvation.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBut I again embrace this happy word,\nrepeating it willingly\nlike a kind of baptism:\nI have sinned by forgetting your favor,\nagain I have sinned.\nI have sinned by slaying my soul with my hands of flesh,\nsenselessly I have sinned.\nI have sinned by betraying the life you gave,\nverily I have sinned.\nI have sinned by ignoring your word,\nbasely I have sinned.\nI have sinned by hastening the day of my death myself,\ndestructively I have sinned.\nI have sinned by mortgaging myself to lifeless death,\nmockingly I have sinned.\nI have sinned by my impudence before your greatness,\nannoyingly I have sinned.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nYet again I cry out my soul’s ultimate lament.\nFor its loss and destruction came about by my own hand,\nI strayed beyond return and though treated as a son,\nI turned hostile.\nI stumbled from the heights of heaven and only gathered\nthorns of life.\nMoreover, I cry out, for\nI defiled myself and turned myself into\nan altar to the Destroyer.\nThere is also another ache in my heart,\nfor they consider me to be something I am not.\nLike an outwardly sparkling cup, that is really dirty,\nor a whitewashed wall, that is filthy,\nor a showoff dressed in vain conceit,\nthat is really a light engulfed in gloom,\na miserable eye blinded not by a speck, but a stick,\nor an extinguished torch of glory,\ndestructive in all things, in all places, in all ways,\ntoward the providence of the Lord,\ntoward the manifestations of Godliness,\ntoward the images shaped by the creator,\ntoward the fearfulness of humility,\ntoward the one, whom I saw with my own eyes,\ntoward this, for which I am more accountable\nthan for the entire Gospel.\nAmazement, shock,\ngnawing cares, those infeasible intentions and\ncalculations beyond the mind’s ken,\nfailed escapes, faulty landings,\ndeserved disappointments, fair reprimand,\nappropriate ridicule, just denunciation,\nwell-deserved curses--\nsuch are the accusations and self-inflicted\ntorments of my sinful self.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAnd since you are able to forgive all these\ntransgressions and cure these deadly wounds,\nLord of mercies, God of all\nChrist King, Son of the exalted Father,\ncreator, compassionate, beneficent,\nblessed, generous, bountiful,\nawesome, mighty, merciful,\nguardian, rescuer, bulwark,\nsavior, reviver, resusciator,\nlong-suffering, unvengeful, refuge,\nphysician, praised, heavenly,\nineffable, light, life,\nresurrection, renewal, atonement.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nIf you would look upon me with that goodwill\ntoward mankind as you do,\nthen as I contemplate you, I will cry out in anguish.\nIf you would listen, I will sigh.\nIf you would incline your ear, I will whisper a prayer.\nIf you would take note, I will beseech you.\nIf you would forgive, I will ask forgiveness.\nIf you would turn toward me, I will call.\nFor if you turn away, I will be ruined.\nAnd if you kick me away, I will cry.\nIf you do not protect my soul, I shall die.\nIf you show me your terrible countenance, I will perish.\nAnd if you scold me, I will tremble.\nIf you glare at me, I will shake.\nIf you are stern, I cringe.\nIf you drive me away, I whimper.\nIf you knock me down, I will shatter.\nIf you do not put out the flames of despair, I agonize.\nIf you despise me, I will flee.\nIf you threaten me, I will collapse.\nIf you examine me, I will be stoned.\nIf you look hard at me, I will sink.\nIf you do not spare me, I will be rejected.\nIf you summon me, I will be paranoid.\nIf you stare at me, I will be shamed.\nIf you call me, I will fear.\nFor I have betrayed the gift of goodness,\nforsaken bliss, abandoned grace, disavowed my word,\nforgotten the gift of life, lost boldness and confidence,\nangered the creator of my being,\ntrampled that grace beyond words,\ndeformed the image of honor.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nBut if you, Lord Jesus, reach out\nto me in loving-kindness as I suffocate with sighs of pain,\nthen, as the Scriptures promised,\n“Your cure will cleanse away the greatest sins.”\nAnd through your boundless kindness\nI will be joined to you, with your image of light\nre-imprinted upon my soul.\nAtoned and re-established in your salvation,\nI will reach the immortal life of the virtuous\nand give glory forever to you\nwith the Father and Holy Spirit.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-28": { - "title": "Prayer 28", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nWhich of my sins shall I confess now?\nWhich shall we examine?\nOn which kind shall I discourse?\nHow much of the hidden shall I uncover?\nWhich shall I confess--\nthe present, which I am still doing?\nOr the past, which I have done?\nOr the future, which I fear?\nThe slippery places, where I stumbled?\nThose faults I thought small, but which\nGod reckoned large,\nor the insubstantial, which are not worth mentioning?\nThe minor, which are many,\nor the few, which are grave?\nThe psychological passions which are destructive\nor the physical ailments which are deadly?\nThose that began as easy pleasures,\nor those that ended in destruction?\nThe invisible or visible?\nThose committed directly by the hand,\nor those committed indirectly by one’s breath?\nThe scattershot of easy marks\nor the arrow shots at length?\nThose whose depth is beyond measure\nor those that totally cover the surface?\nMultifarious prostitution\nor incurable illness?\nThe body swollen with evil\nor the soul starved of the good?\nThe penchant for things unpleasing to God,\nor the equally frenzied tugging at the leash of restraint?\nThe mortal sins or my vain thoughts?\n\n\n# II.\n\nTruly like a willfully crazed person, stripped naked,\nI display my waywardness openly,\ncontradicting the wise man who said\nthat the clever cover up their shame.\nI who am estranged from religion,\nwho am expelled from the ranks,\nin holiness, profane; in celibacy, unclean,\nin justice, iniquitous; in piety, wicked,\nin words of my mouth, close to my creator,\nbut in my innermost organs, distant.\nBy my lips offering honor, as the Prophet says,\nbut not with my heart.\nAnd if I recount my full shame here,\nI would tempt fate with a worse punishment,\nfor I am the unreliable servant,\nvacillating between two paths,\nboth leading to damnation.\nI try, but I have no success.\nI press forward, but I do not arrive.\nI rush, but I am late.\nI strain, but I do not see.\nI desire, but I am not fulfilled.\nI long, but I do not meet.\nI have all earthly ills and thus can serve as\nan emissary offering prayers for the whole world.\n\n\n# III.\n\nForgive these sins, generous God,\nand do not focus only on them.\nIt is easier for you to erase them than\nfor me to describe my vile actions.\nTherefore I write without restraint\nso you may blot them out,\nyou, who for the sake of us sinners\nbecame long-suffering.\nMy soul, like Ezra’s yearning heart,\nis anxious, my spirit, restless\nas I list these faults,\nshowing how I am in danger of every mortal passion,\nhow I am fallen into a pit of sin.\nAnd like Job I doubt you hear me.\nNow, as a self-accused, self-condemned captive,\nbound by sin, I turn myself in\nand block all of life’s possibilities.\nBut by your mercy toward me\nyour greatness is multiplied, praiseworthy Lord.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd as advised by the good prophet,\nlet us try to pray with him in song,\nwith our firm faith in God’s protection,\n“Give your word,” says Hosea,\n“And turn away from sin and toward the Lord our God,\nand say to him, ‘ Would you forgive our sins? ’”\nthat you might be restored to the good,\nthat your souls might enjoy bliss.\nGod spoke, but who listened?\nHe himself gave witness, but who believed?\n\n\n# V.\n\nThese words, weighed and judged,\nthese terms describing God-given conditions,\nthis good news, this set of purposes,\nthis door to what is right,\nthis invitation to comfort,\nthis genuine picture,\nthe undiminishing treasure,\nthe indelible memory,\nI hereby set down in faith,\nand testify with the prophet--\nthat you are able to forgive all our sins,\nthereby magnifying, exalting yourself,\nfor this wretched soul.\nIn this you reign, providing all,\nreaching everywhere,\ntriumphing over all violence,\ncrumbling all hardness,\nfending off all blows,\nsoftening all severity,\novercoming all bitterness,\nsweetening sourness,\nlightening the inconsolable,\nforgiving all debts,\nremitting all transgressions,\nyou, able, mighty, master of all arts,\nsubmerge and destroy all sins and clear them away,\nas with a flash of lightning, which takes no space,\nbut penetrates the depths and is enveloped by the\nuniversal sea.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nNow, Father, through prayers offered by\nthe readers of this book,\nhave mercy, for the sake of the cross and\nthe suffering and death of your Son,\nwho is the source of the lamenting voice of\nthe one who sends these tearful psalms.\nMay he who prepared this remedy for\nthe salvation of our souls\nbe made whole in your name, Almighty.\nLet him who showed us the true path\nthrough confession,\nbe clear of all his transgression.\nLet him who taught us to clip the wings of our pride\nwith his message on the rule of life\nbe released from the evil bonds of deadly sins--\noriginal, final and all in between.\nThrough the beneficence of your Trinity,\nrestore us to the light and\nwe will deem ourselves blissful with him.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nNow, Father creator\nawesome name, miracle maker,\nshuddering voice, familiar exclamation,\nembracing thought, splendid effect, severe command,\nessence beyond examination, existence beyond words,\nreality beyond measure, might beyond thought,\ngood will, limitless dominion,\nimmeasurable greatness, exalted beyond comprehension,\nquantity beyond weighing, supremacy\nbeyond surpassing,\nthe origin of the Son by fatherhood, and not by priority\nby you and through your unbounded power,\nbanish the tormenting and demonic frenzied fever,\nwhich slyly entered with sin.\nBanish it from man so that\nfrightened by the wondrous and unending stream\nof blood of your heavenly lamb,\nwe might be cleansed forever.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nAnd now, before your wonders, in abject humility,\nmay Satan shrink in shame at the evil deeds\nof his angels, may he be tormented and driven away,\nbanished and exiled, into the outer darkness,\nfrom the altar of your dwelling place within us.\nAnd when you have purged them, wipe the tears\nfrom our faces, erase the sobbing of\nour voices from our hearts.\nAnd in memory of the blows, like thorns in the side,\nmortal and terrifying, by which the Only Begotten\nwas nailed to the cross,\nmay the evil one also suffer similar pain.\nAnd may the blow to the side by the piercing arrow,\ngravely wound him and\nkill the creator of death.\nAnd since Satan bowed his haughty head,\nbefore he breathed his last breath, O Exalted One,\nlet rebellious Beliar with his evil ways\nperish totally, condemned, vanquished.\nAnd again, since the truly immortal was concealed and\nburied in the womb of the earth,\nlet the haughty see himself bound in the darkness of\nthe shadows on the deadly pavement of hell.\nAnd may he remember the first irreversible blow\nby which the resistance to the poisonous snake died\nat the price of the suffering of the almighty Savior.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nFor your glory and in praise of your Son and through\nthe Holy Spirit,\nI confess this, Father of mercy,\nfor in the deep mystery of your unity,\none does not need the least power from the other,\nrather we glorify your Word made flesh\nwithout beginning, along with the timeless Father.\nTo you alone, Holy Trinity,\nfrom one stem, indivisible self,\nblessings, thanks and strength,\nand the ineffable splendor of greatness,\nfelicitous balance and equality forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-29": { - "title": "Prayer 29", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nYou alone are the origin of all goodness,\nmercy beyond telling, Son of the one God on high,\nwho made the whole day a purgatory for our sins,\nand not a house of condemnation.\nYou are for me the expectation of good news,\ninstead of a day of dread.\nYou, physician to the ailing,\nshepherd to the lost sheep,\nmaster to the servant under your care,\npure wine for the dejected,\ncurative ointment for the wounded,\nfreedom for the captives of sin,\nblessing of goodness for the rejected,\nseal of grace for the despised,\nthe calling to anointment for the dispossessed,\nrestoration to uprightness for the fallen,\na mighty fortress for the stumbling,\na sublime helping hand to the disgraced,\nthe gate to heaven for the doubting,\nstairway to bliss for the depraved,\nthe straight way for the confused,\nforgiving king for the trespasser,\nsweet hope for the abandoned,\nthe outstretched hand of life for the banished.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou alone are great and generous in everything.\nYou are the definition of abundant goodness,\nwho pours forth constantly without measure,\nmore than we ask or expect,\nas Paul said in gratitude.\nFor you commanded that we should do good,\nfrom dawn to dusk, in the same day,\nnine times fifty, plus three, plus four times ten.\nAlways attentive, forgiving with an unfettered heart,\nsomething more than the expectation of men’s prayers.\nAnd if we place my wretchedness and disgrace beside\nyour glory, omnipotent and awesome power,\nGod of all, blessed Lord Christ,\nby what measure of weight shall the balance between\nthe creator and the clay be set?\nYou remain in these things infinite and unexaminable,\ngood in all things, having no part in the wrath\nof darkness; therefore, far less are the number of\nstars than your greatness,\nfor you called them into existence from nothing\nby merely pronouncing their names.\nOr take the mass of the earth floating in air,\ncreated from nothing, from which you established the\ndry land of earth.\nThese are less than the number I formulated above,\nby which you taught us to be like you in forgiveness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAs the radiant light of your long-suffering will\ndispelled all evil without trace,\nlike a speck of fog in the heat of the sun,\nso here, our natural impulses are shown\nin our common behavior.\nFor who among mortals has sinned and not regretted?\nWho has been corrupted and not been ashamed?\nWho has been base and not been humiliated?\nWho has faltered and not repented?\nWho has been ruined and not sobbed?\nWho has been scandalized and not felt compunction?\nWho has been defeated and not closed his mouth?\nWho has been cheated and not sighed?\nWho has tasted bile and not become bitter?\nWho has fallen from the heights and\nnot been disheartened?\nWho has lost greatness and not mourned?\nWho has been deprived of happiness and not cried?\nWho has been robbed of the grace of glory and\nnot lamented?\nWho has done harm to his soul and\nnot been embarrassed?\nWho has been banished from God’s sight and\nnot felt the loss of his gaze?\nWho has heard God’s warnings and not trembled?\nWho has made one mistake and not sighed “alas”\na thousand times?\nWho has bared himself on a winter’s day and\nnot shivered?\nWho has done wrong and not pelted himself with\nstones in his mind?\nWho has seen the high and mighty slave and\nnot been vexed?\nWho has done evil and not cursed himself?\nWho has cultivated vices and not condemned his soul?\nWho has done shameful things and\nnot made a mockery of his body?\nWho has had hard times and not cursed his life?\nWho has remembered his misdeeds and not stewed?\nWho has recalled secrets and not become flustered?\nWho has seen the dark side and\nnot sought the perdition of death?\nWho has had visions of the invisible and\nnot hung his head back to earth?\nWho has committed sins of ease and not burned with\nthe inextinguishable flames of the furnace?\nWho has violated nature, and not been parched?\nWho has acted willfully and not prayed for\nhis own death?\nWho has done the unspeakable and\nnot become disturbed?\nWho has unbearably violated his essence and\nnot grieved?\nWho has become high and mighty and\nnot been worn down?\nWho has committed acts that corrupt innocence and\nnot burned?\nWho has done things condemnable by banishment and\nnot been anguished?\nWho has appeared with a grimy face and\nnot felt deserving of the heaven’s disapproval?\nWho has focused on one of his major sins and\nnot been wounded by sin’s weaponry?\nWho has committed a scandalous act and\nnot woven the discouraging woe into\nthe sighs of his voice?\nWho has been ousted from his chair in heaven and has\nnot fallen down cringing?\nWho has placed dirt on his head instead of a splendid\nhalo and not been tortured with a thousand deaths?\nWho has put on sack cloth instead of a bright cloak and\nnot been sad?\nWho has lost his life and not sweat tears of blood?\nWho has clothed himself in darkness instead of light and\nnot fainted?\nWho has mourned for a loved one and not wilted?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThese then faithfully describe me,\nthe sinner deserving reprimand,\na sad face, an extinguished ray, dried up liquid,\nshriveled lips,\na deformed mould, a dispirited soul, a distorted voice,\na twisted neck.\nIt would not be wrong to classify me as\na mind stripped of arrogance, a heart stripped of pride,\na wretch afraid to ask for help, too parched to pray,\nself-scolding wanderer,\nstarved by self-denial, hungry because of\nduly earned torment,\nstruck down by just condemnation, condemned to death\nby self-incrimination,\ndeservedly exiled, self-cursed outcast,\nlike the Pharisee who was rejected\nand the sinful tax collector who was pleasing to God.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd now, if the Slanderer takes credit\nas part of his day’s work,\nfor planting his bad seeds\nand using his evil devices on us, the wayward,\nwhy should you not count one by one the good things\nthat by your will and saving care\nare planted in us to fortify our souls,\nLord of merciful kindness, mighty and victorious,\nyou who atone for our sins,\nwho are salvation in all things for everything?\nIf you can exchange the abyss for heaven,\nor bring the dark of night into the light,\nif you can turn the bitter bile into sweet manna,\nor the groans of extreme grief\ninto the dancing circles at a joyful wedding,\nif for you these are easy and possible,\nthen you can do more than these,\nyou who reign over all in awesome power.\nTo you glory forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-30": { - "title": "Prayer 30", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, let us see the truth of your words,\nO merciful God of all,\nwho forgives and blesses the sinner,\neven the sinner faltering many times a day,\nif he turns back repentant,\neven if the choice to turn back is made\nwith his last breath,\nor in the very midst of sinning,\nespecially since our cruel companion,\nas we try to govern ourselves,\nis the always contrary, lying, cheating,\nflattering Instigator,\nthe same who, in the words of the Proverbs, grazes on\nthe wind.\nMy wayward body, which has been an unruly fugitive\nfrom you, my creator, and easy prey for the Predator,\nis like the thorns among the wheat endlessly wavering\non any excuse, so often only you can keep track.\nAnd then comes the pitiful wail,\nwhich follows the sinning,\nhopeless and tormented, hear me sighing, “alas”\nas I come before you, Lord,\nwith pleas for mercy and wretched groans,\nwritten with tears, humbled by pangs of guilt caused\nby the distress of boundless evil.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSo that the repetition does not add up\nto mere wordiness,\nI will make my plea even more pathetic\nbecause a sinner does not dare ask for paradise\nbut only reduced torment.\nHe does not ask to be among the immortals,\nwho live in the light,\nbut only among the feeling, breathing beings destined for\nthe dark grave,\nnot among the resurrected,\nbut among broken hearted and contrite,\njustly deserving in death, restrained in their merriment,\nwith a smiling face but an anguished mind,\ncheerful demeanor but mournful eyes,\ncomposed appearance but bitterly tearful heart.\n\n\n# III.\n\nTwo cups in two hands\none filled with blood, the other with milk,\ntwo censers flickering\none with incense, the other with crisp fat,\ntwo platters piled with delicacies,\none sweet, the other tart,\ntwo goblets overflowing\none with tears, the other with brimstone,\ntwo bowls at the finger tips\none with wine, the other with bile,\ntwo windows of sight\none crying, the other erring,\ntwo refiner’s cauldrons\none heating, one cooling,\ntwo outlooks on one face\none mildly affectionate, the other fiercely raging,\ntwo lifted hands\none to strike, the other to shield,\ntwo grimaces\none dejected, the other angry,\ntwo rebukes at a time\none for now, the other for later,\ntwo hideouts for doubt\none “at least,” the other “perhaps,”\ntwo sighs in one mouth,\none for misfortune, the other for confusion,\ntwo impulses in one heart,\none of doubtful hope, the other of certain doom,\ntwo downpours from one dark cloud,\none of arrows, one of stones,\ntwo thunderous downpours\none of hail, the other of fire,\ntwo sorrows of a painful night,\none disease, the other death,\ntwo insults to sad mourning,\none of rebuke, the other threat,\ntwo suns on opposite horizons\none dark, the other blazing.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd if a fist is raised, he cringes as if it is for him.\nIf a hand bearing gifts is extended, he thinks\nit is for someone else.\nIf someone swaggers, he cowers.\nIf another’s head is high, his hangs low.\nIf evil is recalled, he sighs.\nIf the saintly are remembered, he is ashamed.\nIf the next life is mentioned, he trembles.\nIf someone blesses him, he curses the blesser.\nIf someone praises him, he puts himself down.\nIf he is criticized, he agrees.\nIf viciously ridiculed, he considers it just.\nIf someone wishes his death, he seconds it.\nIf death thunders in, he barely raises his head.\nHis book of rights slammed shut,\nhis hope of being heard abandoned,\nhis path of action checked,\nhe would not hesitate at suicide\nto gain release from this dead end,\nif that did not foreclose salvation.\nIn the words of the soulful wise man,\ntruly, woeful is the sinner\nstanding in doubt at the fork in the road.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhy don’t you take pity, benevolent God,\nupon my wailing and sighing,\nyou, whose name is exalted for saying,\n“I am the merciful Lord”?\nGrant your goodness in the face of\nmy slavish wickedness,\nyour sweetness before my bitterness at being\ncondemned to death,\nyour beacon for my lost self, found again,\nyour mercy upon my brazen waywardness,\nyour humility before my destructive impudence,\nyour right arm to protect me from peril,\nyour hand to save me from drowning,\nyour finger to mend my incurable wounds,\nyour spirit to defend my traumatized soul,\nyour patience for my insolent ingratitude,\nyour strength upon anointing a scoundrel like me,\nyour commandments as atonement for my sins,\nyour foot as a refuge for a runaway like me,\nyour arm protecting a fugitive like me,\nyour light guiding a wayward soul like me,\nyour wisdom reassuring a doubter like me,\nyour blessedness for accepting the cursed like me,\nyour goad as encouragement for the\ndisheartened like me,\nyour cup as comfort for the grieving like me,\nyour will as relief for the anguished like me,\nyour love calling even those despised like me,\nyour word to steady those wavering like me,\nyour bloodshed for wounded souls like me,\nyour care for my ever increasing, unseen pains,\nyour mentorship for choosing me in my despair,\nyour communion rejoining those cut off like me,\nyour spark of life under death’s shadow like me,\nyour serenity for those troubled like me,\nyour welcome for those harshly persecuted like me,\nyour beckoning voice to those who have strayed like me,\nfor you rule all with mercy.\nWith you there is no darkness,\nand without you no goodness,\nand yours is the glory forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-31": { - "title": "Prayer 31", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, since I have increased\nthe distress of my sighing voice\nwith great cries and inconsolable grief,\nso that you, merciful forefather\nof confession of invisible secrets,\nSon of the living God, Lord Jesus Christ,\nmight look with kindness and grant atonement,\nfor you are indeed able and truly sufficient.\nIf you want, you have the means;\nas much as you want, you can do,\nyou, who are more enriched by giving than receiving.\nYour treasure increases more by sharing than gathering.\nYour estate grows more by disbursing than collecting.\nYour stores pile up more by distributing than hoarding.\nAll this gives me faith that through you\nI might find the path to salvation.\nI, the disgraced, believe along with the honorable.\nI hope with Abraham and Anna,\none of whom believed your word,\nand the other listened to the words\nof the high priest--and for that, in old age,\nbecame the father of countless sons.\nHe hoped to see the barren womb of Sarah\nas the fertile and blessed field of many peoples:\nsaints, prophets, and chosen kings.\nAnd the other, Anna,\nwith the untilled field of her womb,\nabounded with fruit of seven children,\na mystical number symbolizing the eternity of\nHim, who is, and the unexaminable bonds of\nthe eternity of the Godhead and the unending\nabundance of children of the baptismal font,\nthe glorious number which is unpunctuated,\nan infinite decimal,\nrather it is a prime number, inherently unique\nand eternal,\nwhose nature is eternally beyond telling\nand difficult for our minds to comprehend.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now count this small confession of faith in prayer\ntoward the justification and salvation of\nmy hopeless soul.\nHear the quivering voice of the cries of my sighing heart,\nand rank me with those blessed souls just described,\nso that I too might live with them and share in their bliss.\nTrusting more in your grace than my works,\nsince grace is far more exalted and glorious,\nfar greater than anything that can be\nmeasured by words-\na comfort to my distress and atonement for my sins,\nbeyond the feeble reach of our minds,\nfor with your awe-inspiring blood\nand the mother of your incarnation, worthy of adoration,\nthe circle of the apostles, ranks of prophets,\nhost of martyrs, both cavalry and foot soldiers,\narmed only with courage, wrestlers with fate,\nplatoons of hermits, orders of learned teachers,\nassemblies of the pious, legions of heavenly\nspirits on earth,\nthe heavenly patrol of guards, the offering of\nthe first fruits,\nsacrifice of bulls, lighting of lanterns,\nthe aroma of incense, the fragrance of scented oils,\nthe victorious sign of salvation,\nthe erection of altars where God dwells,\nthe hands of the priests that rest with grace.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe soul’s every movement\nis a reminder of God,\nthe taking of a step,\nthe extension of the right hand,\nthe raising of the arm,\nwith thanks for good works,\nwith shame for bad,\nfor familiar conversation\nand public addresses,\nin rational discourse,\nin works of success,\nin the fervor of virtue,\nday and night,\nwe are guided by you\nin the useful movements for our spirit,\nasleep or awake,\nin mortal battles or combat with demons,\nin large and small struggles with heretics,\nwhile drinking or eating,\nin all that once stirred feelings,\nwhether pleasant or unpleasant,\nwith the pleasant we pray to remain,\nand from the unpleasing, through your\nmiraculous intercession,\nwe pray to be free.\nFor you are capable of all things, as we all believe,\nthe suckling infants, rash youths,\nimmoral men, haughty outlaws,\neven the actor and the motley mob,\neven in the dancing\nand clapping of hands that do not please\nyour will, Almighty,\nyou are not forgotten.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nYou have created all and all is yours,\nyou who are all-compassionate, take mercy on all,\nand even those who sin are yours,\nfor they are in your accounting,\nfor they know your strength,\neven as the Proverb teller said,\nwhose prayer I echo with my wretched words,\ntestifying like a criminal,\nI dare to say\nthat whoever praises your name\nrecognizes your existence, and though he be\ntainted by the sevenfold sins,\ndeserving of double punishment\nto set a good example, yet,\nhe is yours, is he not?\nFor sometimes in the midst of black crows\none sees a flock of white doves,\nand in the middle of wild, unkempt horses,\nwill be a tame sheep,\nin the midst of beastly dogs, a sacrificial lamb,\nand mildness amid harshness,\nperfection amid defects,\nhumility amid haughtiness,\ntruth amid lies,\nsimplicity amid cunning,\npurity amid perversity,\nkindness amid wickedness,\nhonesty amid depravity,\nmercy amid cruelty,\nrepentance amid despair,\nsweetness amid anger,\nreconciliation amid hostility,\nforbearance amid sarcasm,\nencouragement amid insults,\nblessings amid slings and arrows,\nthat being why I could never understand,\nwho among us earthly born is destined\nfor your inheritance, for\nyou alone judge fairly\nand distinguish\nthe impious who thinks himself pure,\nand the prostitute who is repentant,\nO only king and benefactor of all,\nblessed in the highest and in all things forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-32": { - "title": "Prayer 32", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, being bereft of all the virtues mentioned\nand seeing myself among those who\nshould be punished, I pray for mercy\nwith the prayers of all others,\nwith the defeated and timid,\nthe weak and small,\nthe fallen and despised,\nthe banished and returned,\nthe doubter and the true believer,\nthe disgraced and the exalted,\nthe repressed and the upright,\nthe stumbling and the standing,\nthe rejected and the accepted,\nthe hated and the called,\nthe stupefied and the sober,\nthe wayward and the restrained,\nthe exiled and the invited,\nthe disowned and the beloved,\nthe dejected and the cheerful,\nthe somber and the joyful.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut here I will not recount again the sins of Jerusalem,\nas Micah commanded concerning his forefathers,\nor as Isaiah told of Jacob’s iniquity\nrather I will reveal my own transgressions,\nfor with the peril of death upon me, I utter, “Alas,” like\nthe prophet Micah,\nand reproach myself like the Psalmist,\nso that my full confession might find favor,\nand I will not need to say “alas” again,\nbut might be at once cleansed completely by your\nblessed command.\nNow, again upon my knees, before your\nsweet beneficence,\nI open my soul before you,\nshowing how I sink like an image of death,\nlike the crawling beasts\nlowered to the ground and covered in dust,\nI, who nailed myself on the path of destruction in\nthis fleeting life.\nLet me lean upon you, Lord, staff of life,\nbody springing from the root of David,\ninexplicably joined to your uncreated divinity.\nI stand bowed and humbled before you, good Lord,\nwith my face turned to the ground\nand my eyes raised to you on high,\ngazing pathetically upon you\nwho hears our sighing,\nperfectly compassionate, thoroughly sweet,\na lake filled with tears of light,\nI offer prayers of hope to your majesty.\n\n\n# III.\n\nO totally generous God, whose patience never ends,\nhear me though I cause you bitterness.\nYou alone are the means of our salvation,\nGod of all, great beyond telling,\nnature beyond comprehension,\ntruth beyond examination,\nmighty power, able benefactor, unending calm,\nindescribable inheritance, fitting fortune,\nabundant preparation, unobscured wisdom,\nfervent gift, desirable offering,\nlonged-for bliss, peace unspoiled by sadness,\ndiscovery beyond doubt, life that cannot be\nwrenched away,\nestate that cannot be sold, exaltation that\ncannot be exchanged,\ndoctor of all arts, unshakable foundation,\nwho turns back the wayward, finds the lost,\ngives hope to those who seek refuge, light for\nthose in darkness,\nforgiveness for sinners, a sanctuary for runaways,\ncalm for the troubled, salvation for the dead,\nwho liberates the captive, frees the betrayed,\nsteadies the slipping,\ngrieves with the scandalized,\nsuffers the doubters,\nO vision of light, sign of rejoicing, rain of blessing,\nbreath of our nostrils, strength of our visage,\ncovering of our head.\nO mover of lips, inspirer of speech,\nhelmsman of the soul, lifter of hands, extender of\narms, who holds the reins of the heart,\nO voice of a friend, called like one of the family,\ngenuine antiphon, fatherly minister of care,\nname given in confession, worshiped image,\nboundless stamp for communion wafers,\nlordship before which we bow, eulogized memory,\ngateway to joy, unfailing path, door to glory,\nway of truth, ladder to heaven,\nworthy of a multitude of other praises,\nof infinite forms and verses without end,\nwhich an earthbound mouth cannot pronounce\nand the body lacks the stamina to say\nand the soul’s yearnings cannot sustain.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAll eyes turn to you, O God of all.\nIncline your ear toward the prayers of\nthe weeping voices of your servants and handmaidens.\nAccept the dew of my woeful song, the tears of my sore\neyes, upon the immaculate feet of your humanity, Christ,\nas you did when the sinner Mary washed your feet with\nher hair and tears.\nLet me return to you professing faith with\nthe kiss of my lips upon tasting the communion of\nlife’s salvation, beneficent God,\nmercifully having received union with the same spirit\nand the same compassion as the sinful woman.\nI hope for the pledge of your great gifts\nin exchange for my meager faith.\nAnd through the compassion of your love for me,\nyour servant who proclaims your cherished name,\nmay the severe winter winds become tranquil air,\nthe gusty storm become a pleasant breeze,\nthe misgivings of fear become great confidence,\nthe meting out of punishment turn into bliss,\nthe perils of grief become spiritual rejoicing,\nthe tossing waves calm into placid water,\nthe arm-wrenching helm turn toward a safe harbor,\nthe harvest of heavy sin be transformed into\na stipend of grace.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd for the myriad of good things from you,\nmay your mighty name be magnified, proclaimed and\nhonored with incense.\nMay the instigator of evil be embarrassed,\nrejected and persecuted.\nMay the mortgage of sin be annulled,\nmay the snares be cut loose, the traps removed,\nmay the ties be undone, the abyss eliminated,\nmay perils be lifted, deceit torn away,\nmay the mortgage of sin be annuled,\nmay yokes fall off, ploughs unhitched,\nand instead of the gloomy darkness of\nevil transgressions,\nand the siege of the armies of demons,\nmay the sun of your glory shine forth,\ngiving life, salvation and light,\nfrom the right and the left, the front and the back.\nAnd may the morning rays of the soul’s springtime shine\nupon those who await your coming.\nFor you are charitable and comforting in all things,\nand all things are possible for you,\nyou who want life and salvation for all.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nO hand of Jesus Christ, giver of all gifts,\nturn also toward me extending your grace.\nDwell in me, become a part of me and do not leave\nmy anguished soul, the chamber of love.\nAnd may your incorruptible image,\na token of the brilliant light beckoning us\nto Christian salvation,\nstay with me to intercede for my entry\nin the book of your legacy of eternal life,\nHoly Spirit of the Gospel and heavenly creator.\nAnd to you who are your own sole cause,\nand to you, the only begotten of the sole cause,\nand to you who bear the sole cause,\nthree persons in one Godhead,\nworthy of glory from the greatest of mortals\nand the ranks of saints,\nforever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-33": { - "title": "Prayer 33", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLet this offering of words, compassionate God,\nfrom the fruits of my soul rise to you with incense,\nmixed by you with the sweet oil\nused by the pious Mary\nwhich you accepted with respect\njust as you also accept offerings astonishingly\nfrom prostitutes, fortunate to be making offerings.\nMay my humble words also praise you and may you\naccept their reaching toward\nyour unreachable head, God on high,\nin spite of the reproach of the Psalmist,\n“Do not let the leafy boughs of my head\nbe anointed with the oil of the sinner.”:\n\n\n# II.\n\nLet the perfume, the bouquet of this book of confessions\nbe redoubled and affect multitudes.\nLet its memory be told everywhere and fill the world\nlike the fragrant oil in the house of Lazarus.\nFor you are the same Lord who brought\nthe sinful plotting women to their senses.\nAnd their character you transformed in your true image,\nas in the allegory of the prophet.\nBy changing them you made me know\nthe perfection of your grace.\n\nInstead of barley for livestock you provided\nthe abundant wheat of the bread of life.\nInstead of tarnishing silver you presented\nyour majestic image.\nInstead of the oil taken from the wanton women of old,\nyou anointed me with your grace.\nInstead of shredding burial bindings around the head,\nthere is an incorruptible cloak.\nInstead of elaborate handcuffs, a free soaring toward\nperfect virtue according to the law and the Gospels.\nInstead of a splendid earring, the unfading memory\nof your lordly voice.\nInstead of a sparkling necklace, the bountiful inheritance\nof the sweet yoke of your righteous faith.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut am I proud of these writings,\nrather than feeling shame again?\nWhy change my style in this prayer book,\nin woeful song, to suit my fancy\nand earn punishment as sin’s wages?\nCiting briefly the words of the prophet,\nI enter this chamber solemnly like a stern prosecutor,\nmy charges prepared,\nand rather than reveling in them,\nI enter with weeping, a sighing voice in angry protest,\nwith bruising insults and grave wailing.\nBut your lovingkindness, O great God,\nthat reaches everyone,\nawakened in me hope as well,\nwhence comes my regret, confession,\ngood news, gifts, visions of light,\ndivine encouragement, splendid visions,\nthe source of hope for some,\nthe source of despair for others,\nand for me, who willingly destroyed myself,\nmy portion of perdition.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIf Ezekiel said that under God’s disguising cloak\nmany people patch together idols\nand act like harlots--\nhow much more severe will my punishment be\nfor cloaking my unclean self in God inside and out?\nI am amazed that I am not consumed in flames.\nI am astonished that I am not burning up.\nI am confounded that I am not taken hostage,\ntortured, abandoned, tormented, beaten,\npulverized, cracked, crushed, torn to shreds\nin the jaws of the Satan our destroyer\naccording to Scripture.\nAll that is left for me\nis the glimmer of a memory of\nhope of salvation. For the Gospel of Christ\nis truly life revealed where there is\nfor our sins, forgiveness,\nfor debts, grace,\nfor decay, renewal,\nfor iniquity, atonement,\nfor wounds, bandages,\nfor distress, calm,\nfor punishment, pardon,\nfor war, peace,\nfor fire, rain,\nfor condemnation, rewards,\nfor the dread of dying, lenience,\nfor the destruction of death, the salvation of life.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHow can I enumerate so many things here yet neglect\nto include what is beyond words? When speaking\nof the exalted Father, we must remember our tie\nto the Son, the only begotten son of the Father.\nAnd remembering these two we must commune with\nthe Holy Spirit, remembering also\nthat with the cross comes salvation,\nwith the word, comfort,\nwith God’s all-knowing judgment,\nthe reward of good will,\nwith the life-giving font of baptism,\nthe mediation of reconciliation,\nas well as all other countless blessings, bestowed by God:\nfreedom from compulsion, freedom from the yoke,\nfreedom to rule oneself and not be ruled.\nThese are the comforting heralds of the life to come\nin the midst the bitterness of death.\nFor if I did not have these things,\nsurely I would have perished long ago,\nas the Psalmist says.\nI do not glorify the Father by disparaging the Son.\nNor is the Holy Spirit subordinated by\nnaming the Son first.\nI hold the Trinity equal in glory and in creation\nco-created, for there are prayers to the Holy Spirit\nto be offered before the Divine Liturgy,\nwhen the heavenly lamb is sacrificed I pray this way:\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAlmighty, beneficent God of all, who\nloves mankind, maker of the visible and invisible,\nsavior and creator,\ndefender and peacemaker, spirit of the Father Almighty,\nwe beseech you with outstretched arms,\ntears and prayers,\nas we appear before you,\nyou, who strike terror in our hearts,\njudge us as we approach with trembling and fear,\npresenting first this sacrificial offering of\nwords to your power that is beyond understanding.\nYou share the throne, glory and creatorship of\nthe undiminishing honor of the Father.\nYou examine our deepest secrets and mysteries.\nO Emmanuel, who fulfill the will of your Father\nwho sent you as the Savior, life-giver and creator.\nThrough you he is made known to us,\nthree persons in one Godhead,\nof which only you, incomprehensibly, can be known.\nBy you and through you did our forefathers,\nthe first generation of the patriarchal tribe,\ncalled prophets,\ntell of the past and the future,\nwhat has been and what is yet to come,\nin plain words and images.\nSpirit of God, Moses proclaimed you as the one\nwho brooded on the water, an unbounded force,\ntaking the new-born under your protective\nwing with care,\nand with lovingkindness revealing the mystery of\nthe baptismal font.\nLikewise, in the pattern of the archetype,\nbefore fashioning the pliable substance with\nits final covering,\nyou shaped, in lordly manner, all nature,\nthe full range of existence, all beings from nothing.\n\nThrough you all that has been created shall receive\nthe renewal of the resurrection\non the last day of this life\nand the first day in the land of the living.\nChrist obeyed you with unity of will as he did his Father,\nbeing of the same family, of the same essence\nas the Father.\nBeing the first born son in our image,\nhe announced you, true God,\nequal and consubstantial with his mighty Father,\nHe preached against those who blasphemed you,\nand, as opponents of God, spoke impiously against you.\n\nHe silenced the blasphemous mouths and graced\nhis own people,\nhe, the just and spotless, who finds all,\nwho was betrayed for our sins,\nand rose from the dead to justify us.\nThrough you glory to him and praise to you,\nwith the Father almighty, forever and ever.\nAmen.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAgain, I shall continue in this manner\nuntil the assurance of the miraculous light\nheralds the good news of peace.\nWith all our souls\nwe pray and beseech you with tearful cries,\nglorious creator, incorruptible and uncreated,\ntimeless Holy Spirit of compassion.\nYou are the intercessor of our silent sighs to\nyour merciful Father.\nYou, who keep the saints, purify the sinners and\nbuild the temple of the living and life-giving\nwill of the Father,\nfree me now from all unclean deeds,\nwhich are not pleasing for your dwelling place.\nDo not extinguish the light of grace\nin us and in our minds’ eye,\nfor we have learned that you will join us\nthrough prayer and sumptuous incensing.\nOne of the Trinity is sacrificed and the other accepts it,\nfavoring us with the reconciling blood of his first born\nso that you might accept our supplications.\nPrepare for us honorable lodgings\nfor the partaking of your heavenly lamb,\nthat we might eat life-giving manna of the new salvation\nand escape the punishments of condemnation.\nOur blasphemy shall be purified in the refiner’s fire,\nas the prophet told of the live coal in the tongs of\noffering at the altar.\nIn all things you spread your mercy through\nthe Son of God.\nAlso spread the sweetness of the Father,\nas you embraced the prodigal son with\nfatherly inheritance,\nand led the prostitute to the bliss of\nthe heavenly kingdom.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nYes, yes, and I too am one of them.\nReceive me with them,\nas one who is needy of your great love for mankind,\none who lives only by your grace, redeemed by\nthe blood of Christ,\nso that your divinity might be revealed and in\nall ways glorified.\nYou are honored equally with the Father,\nwith one will and one rule, worthy of praise.\nFor yours is compassion, ability and lovingkindness,\nmight and glory forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-34": { - "title": "Prayer 34", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHere is my profession of faith, here,\nthe yearnings of my wretched breath to you\nwho constitute all things with your Word, God.\nWhat I have discoursed upon before, I set forth again,\nthese written instructions and interpretations\nfor the masses of different nations.\nI offer these prayers of intercession\nin the thanksgiving prayer below.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI pray to your unchanging, almighty Spirit:\nSend the dew of your sweetness upon my soul\nto rule over the impulses of my senses.\nSend the all-filling gifts of your merciful grace\nand cultivate the reasoning fields hardened by my heart,\nthat they might bear the fruit of your spiritual seeds.\nAll gifts that flourish and grow with us, Teacher,\ncome from your all-encompassing wisdom.\nYou who laid hands on the apostles,\nfilled the prophets,\ntaught the teachers,\nmade the speechless speak,\nand opened the ears of the deaf.\nYou, of the same family as the first and\nonly begotten Son of your consubstantial Father,\ncarry all this out through your mutual effort.\n\nYou proclaimed as the co-equal of your Father,\ngrant me, a sinner, to speak boldly of the life-giving,\nmystery of the good news of your Gospel,\nthat I might follow with soaring mind,\nthe infinite course of the inspired breath of\nyour testament.\nAnd when I embark upon the solemn interpretation\nof the Word, send me first your compassion,\nand let it speak through me\nin a manner worthy, useful and pleasing to you,\nin glory and praise for your Godhead,\nand in the silence of the universal church.\nExtend over me your right hand,\nand fortify me with your grace.\nClear my mind of the fog of forgetfulness,\ndispelling the darkness of sin,\nthat I might rise above this earthly life through wisdom.\nMay the dawn of that unobscured miracle,\nthe knowledge of your Godliness,\nshine within me again, Almighty.\nTo be worthy to do and teach\nand be an example of goodness for god-loving listeners.\nTo you all glory in all things,\nwith your Father almighty and\nyour only begotten and benevolent Son,\nnow and forever, without end.\nAmen.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe creed of the co-existing Holy Trinity,\nthe rule of life and grace of salvation,\nI taught in the following way:\nWe confess and profess, honor and worship\nthe shared glory and unity of the Holy Trinity\nGodhead beyond description, always good,\nof the same substance, equal in honor,\nbeyond the flight of the wings of our thought,\nhigher than all examples, beyond all analogies,\nsurpassing the limits on high.\nBefore the creation of eternal undifferentiated matter\nand the categories of creatures\nwith blessing that cannot be translated,\ncrowned forever with the richest greatness,\nsetting time in motion and all that has taken shape as\ntime unfolds,\nhimself the cause and shaper of everything visible\nand invisible,\nwho cannot be defined by name or denoted by label,\nnor likened in quality, nor weighed in quantity,\nnor formed by rules, nor known by kind,\nnor spread to exhaustion,\nnor occupying space, nor appearing in a place.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFather of compassion, God of the universe,\ncreator of everything in heaven and on earth\nexcept the only begotten Word, through whom\nall things exist, creator and giver of breath to all things\nexcept for the consubstantial Holy Spirit,\nthrough whom you formed all else.\n\n\n# V.\n\nOne of three glorified persons equal in power and awe,\nwho descended from on high to here below,\nwho was indeed by nature indistinguishable\nfrom those below,\nwithout relinquishing the throne of glory,\nwithout leaving the watchful gaze of the parent of love,\nmerely entering the vessel of the virgin womb purely\nand coming out joined with a body\ninseparable in essence,\nwithout any flaw in his humanity and lacking\nnothing in divinity,\none and only Son of the only Father and\nthe first born of the Mother of God, Virgin Bearer\nof the Lord,\ncreator becoming a true man as originally created,\nnot in the fallen state of mortals,\nbut new and splendid with the sublime glory of kings,\nnot seen in the ages or existing in time.\nThe first born, as the Psalmist said,\nhigher than all the kings of earth,\nformed from an incorruptible combination\nlike us in body,\nin the manner of the soul with body,\nand as gold with fire,\nor to put it more plainly,\nlight in air, neither transformed nor separated.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nHe submitted himself willingly to the cross of death,\nlike an innocent lamb led to slaughter,\nand girded himself with mighty self-discipline\nfor the salvation of those he created.\nHe truly suffered like a mortal.\nHe was placed in a tomb with no special treatment for\nhis divinity.\nOn the third day, in the hell of Tartarus,\nhe preached to the\ndowncast captives and showed renewal and light.\nAnd having carried out his providential\nmission of redemption,\nhe came back to life as God,\nand ruled on the wings of the winds,\nrising upon the Cherubim,\ncovered in an inscrutable cloud.\nHe ascended into heaven on high,\nsat in splendor upon the throne bequeathed to him\nfrom the beginning, equal with his Father,\nfrom whom he had never been separated,\nneither losing what had been acquired,\nnor diluting that which was his own.\nTherefore, he shall come to the judgment of retribution,\nexamining the unseen with the scales of justice,\nfor which we wait and pray\nwith faith in his almighty Lordship over and through all,\nwho truly is the only one of the only one\nin equal glory forever worshiped as one.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nWe always praise along with the Son and Father, the\nHoly Spirit,\nwhich is of the same essence,\nmighty, true, perfect and holy,\nwho from nothing brought into existence\neverything that exists,\nwho acts through itself and shares rule with\nthe other two,\nin the same indestructible, boundless kingdom,\nwho is the first cause, the awesome Word of his selfhood.\nAnd the same exalted Holy Spirit,\ngood ruler, who dispenses the gifts of the Father,\nin praise of the name and the glory of\nthe only begotten Son,\nwho acted through the Laws and inspired the Prophets,\nwith the encouragement of your co-equal Son\ncommissioned your apostles.\nIn the form of a dove you appeared at the River Jordan,\nfor the greater glory of the one who had come,\nshone forth in the writings of the evangelists,\ncreated genius, strengthened the wise,\nfilled the teachers, blessed the kingdom,\nassisted the kings, appointed the guardians,\nissued the decree of salvation, granted talents,\nprepared atonement,\ncleansed those baptized into Christ’s death that\nyou might dwell in them\na sacrament performed jointly by the Father and\nSon with the Holy Spirit,\nwho is God, honored as Lord, in all ways in all things.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nBeing named first among the Trinity does not make one\ngreater than the other,\nor being named after the other, less than the rest,\nor by saying that they are one, that there is a\nconfusion of persons,\nor by dividing into three, a separation of wills.\nFor the Father would be diminished\nif he did not have the power of the\nWord so too if he did not have the Holy Spirit and\nwas speechless,\nlifeless and deprived of any power to command.\nAnd the Word, if it were not known by\nthe name of the Father,\nwould be abandoned like some orphan or just\nanother mortal being.\nSimilarly the Holy Spirit, if not commissioned\nby its cause,\nwould be vagabond, an unruly wind.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nBut if one presumes in a refutation\nto snatch the Father from his Word,\non the ground that there was a time when\nthe Word was not,\nbelieving that such speculations exalt\nthe sublime greatness of the divine,\nor if one subordinates the Spirit which proceeds forth\non the ground that it is not by nature spiritual,\nthereby introducing an alien being or some\nunstable mixture\ninto the pure and sublime unity of the Holy Trinity,\nwe must reject such persons from our midst.\nWe must drive them away in disgrace\nwith our confession of faith\nlike a stoning of fierce demons or vicious beasts,\nand cast a curse upon their devilish lot,\nshutting the gates to the church of life in their face.\nWhile we glorify the Holy Trinity in the same lordship of\nunified equality,\nin parallel praise, uniform level,\nblessed on earth and in heaven,\nin the congregation of the nation of\nearthly thinking beings,\nnow and forever.\nAmen.\n\n\n# X.\n\nNow, I offer to your all-hearing ears, almighty God,\nthe secret thoughts in this book,\nand thus equipped, I venture forth in conversation,\nnot with the idea that my voice could\nsomehow exalt you,\nfor before you created everything,\nbefore the creation of the heavens\nwith the immortal choir of praise and\nthe earthly thinking beings,\nyou yourself in your perfection were already glorified,\nbut still you permit me, a reject, to taste\nyour indescribable sweetness, through\nthe communion of words.\nAnd what good is it to mouth your\nroyal command about\n“Adonai, Lord,” and not carry it out.\nI destroyed with my own hand\nthe golden tables of speech,\ndedicated to your message, written by\nthe finger of God.\nThat was true destruction.\nAnd I, with ashen-faced sorrow,\nnow provide a second copy, made in its likeness.\nBut now, since I have prayed much,\nin a voice of passionate and sincere praise,\nhear me, compassionate God, with this\nprofession of faith.\nMay the voice of this prayer be joined with those offered\nby clean worshipers obedient to your will\nso that this meager offering, a dry loaf of\nunleavened bread,\nmight be served with oil upon your altar of glory.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nBut you, beneficent and charitable in all things,\nO Christ, of one God, mighty and powerful,\nwho surpasses all with your sweet and\ncaring compassion\nnot only humanity in general and those like me\nwho are susceptible to all manner of contrariness,\nbut also the uncontaminated angels,\nand even the pure and saintly, who give praise.\nThere was Elijah, for example,\nwhose austere signs on Mt. Horeb were shown\nin three ways:\na great earthquake, strong winds and burning fire.\nBut you act in the mildness of patience and\nthe calm peacefulness of the sweet air,\nfor you alone, as the Scripture says,\nare the will of mercy\nAnd although our kind found joy in virtue\nand otherwise adopted heavenly ways,\nstill they were earthlings, though chosen\namong mankind.\nYou, on the contrary, are not even capable of evil:\nYou are good in your very essence\nand blessed in all things,\nsalvation for all, tranquility in all,\ncalm for all, cure for all disease,\nthe fount of life-giving water in the words of Jeremiah.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nTurn toward me and have mercy upon me,\nO God, who so thirsts, hungers and longs for\nmy salvation.\nYou have gone so far as to designate\na heavenly host of blessed immortals,\nto act as priests and intercessors for man’s salvation,\nso that on behalf of us earthly beings,\nfor the reconciliation of the wretched and\nabandoned like me,\nthey might perpetually pray for your great\nblessed mercy,\nwith this light-giving phrase,\n“Have mercy upon Jerusalem,”\nso that based upon your great revelation\nplaces left empty by the fallen angels,\nmight be filled by human beings,\nwho have joined you, in the manner of\nthe earthly Jerusalem,\nabout which you sent us good news.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nTruly, you hear, kind God,\nYou listen, king.\nYou lent an ear, life and light.\nYou paid attention, heavenly one.\nYou respected us, almighty.\nYou noted, knower of secrets.\nYou saw, keeper.\nYou empathized, Lord beyond telling.\nYou humbled yourself, exalted one.\nYou became meek, awesome one.\nYou were revealed, Lord beyond words.\nYou were defined, boundless one.\nYou were measured, unexaminable one.\nYou focused light, radiant one.\nYou became human, incorporeal one.\nYou became tangible, immeasurable one.\nYou took shape, you who are beyond quality.\nYou truly fulfilled the yearnings of those\nwho pray to you.\nWith the voice of the blissful,\nyou were even for me, miserable soul that I am,\na kind intercessor, a living mediator,\nan immortal offering, an endless sacrifice,\na gift of purity, a priceless burnt offering,\nan inexhaustible cup.\nMerciful Lord, who loves mankind,\nmay you always show\nthe favor of your life-giving will and your\nlong-suffering patience toward me, a sinner.\nTo you glory forever. Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-35": { - "title": "Prayer 35", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, Lord of hosts,\nawesome majesty, unwavering vision,\nall expansive will, undiminishing bounty,\nhow can our dances and songs of joy\ndo honor to even one drop of your goodness?\nYou earnestly strive to prepare for my salvation,\nbut let me write what is greater, that it might be\ntold in the future.\nYou have not been called “angel lover,”\nalthough the founder of their kingdom.\nAnd of the heavens with their luminaries,\nall your handiwork,\nnever have you been described as loving them.\nRather to your greater honor and praise,\nyou preferred the love of mankind.\nFor this reason you doubly magnified your name\nbeyond telling,\nwith frightening mystery.\nYou called the heavenly host dressed in light,\nyour servants and stewards of special missions,\nand us mortals, born below,\nyou adorned with your worshipful, lordly and\ngodly name,\nexceeding again all bounds of measure and weight,\nby the flow of your power and exceeding goodness,\nyou inspired endless praise.\nAnd by becoming man, you, one of “the One who is,”\nyour gifts of life, diverse talents,\nsplendid divine work and miracles,\npoured down abundantly upon some who\nasked for themselves, and others who\nasked blessings for others.\nMoved by the faith of his nurses,\nyou cured the cripple,\nthough he was lacking in faith.\nHow much more able, then, is your mighty word\nto cleanse the disease from the bodies of those\nwho cry out to you in prayer?\nFor truly, Lord, it is a greater miracle\nto keep a washed image pure,\nand protected against the attack of unruly diseases,\nthan to cleanse a corrupt soul,\nfrom the first, with the favor of the grace of\nthe baptismal font,\nyou exalt the glory of the Father.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIt is you, Lord, who cleanses us,\nas you did first with your chosen, Moses.\nIt is you, who looked over the tribe of Jacob\nin their sin and lawlessness,\nas they became accustomed to the dark pagan ways\nof the land of Egypt.\nIt is you, who, in the words of the Psalmist David,\nteaches the sinner to walk in the law of righteousness.\nIt is you who replaces the stubborn, hardness of\nstony hearts,\nwith the obedient softness of flesh, receptive to\nthe Word.\n\nIt is you who can guide hearts to a single way,\nrespecting you with their full lives.\nIt is you who instill respect, fear and faith,\nto heed you, according to the voice of the Prophet.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLike a key to the doors of my hearing,\nmay you sprinkle life-giving divine rain\nfrom your blessed lips that created the world.\nMay you remove the poison of the cunning serpent,\nthat troublemaker Satan, and heal me.\nAnd with your almighty hand guide\nmy tongue and strengthen my voice,\nwhich you have freely given to all,\nthat it might speak boldly,\nand teach fittingly,\nneither depriving me of hope or betraying me\ninto nonsense,\nby speaking impudently like our forefather Adam.\nIllumine again the light of my soul’s darkened eye\nwith the touch of your life-giving right hand,\nso the lamp of my boldness may not be extinguished\nby the serpent’s breath and be hidden under a bushel.\nLift away my sins, Lord, and cast them into\nthe depths of the sea,\nseas so small in comparison to your greatness that\nin the words of the prophet:\nthey can swallow up my evil.\nRestore confidence to my wrecked soul,\nso that a monument of disappointment not be erected to\nmy hidden faults.\nOpen, almighty and merciful, the handbook of\nlife-giving cures,\nso that the seeds sown and cultivated by\nthe Destroyer here below\nmight be cut down and uprooted with the sickle\nof your will.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIn the manner of Peter, seeking to follow you,\nGod of all,\nI was swallowed by the waves of the sea of my sinful life.\nExtend your life-giving right hand to help me, for I am\nfoundering.\nIn the voice the Canaanite women, I pray from\nthe bottom of my heart,\nlike a starving dog yelping, wretched and anxious,\nbegging for scraps,\na few crumbs of the bread of life\nfrom your bountiful table.\nSave my physical altar, Son of bitterness,\nwho came to rescue me when I was lost.\nFor yours is majesty, victory and power.\nAnd you are atonement and healing, renewal and bliss.\nTo you all glory and praise forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-36": { - "title": "Prayer 36", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNo matter how great the mounting debt of my sins,\nthe saving grace of your trials\nis greater by far.\nYou were nailed to the cross, the instrument of death,\non your all-embracing creative hands, which\nhold all souls,\nso my disobedient hand might be stilled.\nOut of compassion for my wantonness,\nyou bound the motion of your two life-giving feet,\nso they might be pawned for my miserable feet,\nalways racing toward brutishness.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou did not order the hands of those who beat\nyour head to shrivel.\nYou, who could uproot the fig tree without effort.\nThis example gives me hope of reprieve.\nYou did not threaten me with the evil whipping\nthat was your own lot,\nthough you are proclaimed God.\nYou who darkened the sun\nand grant rest with goodness to me a mortal.\nYou did not dry the evil mouth of those who cursed you,\nyou who tinted the image of the moon with\nthe color of blood,\nso you might strengthen my meek tongue to praise you.\n\nYou did not rebuke the wanton insultors,\nyou who shook the very firmament,\nso you might anoint my miserable head with\nthe oil of compassion.\n\nYou did not rip the jaws of the God-killer who called you\na fanatic, charlatan,\nyou who rent the hardness of the rocky tomb,\nso you might mercifully grant my soul,\nthough it is incapable of goodness,\na respite from the burden of emptiness.\n\nYou did not run the swords of the guards through\ntheir bowels,\nyou who condemned the snake to slither on the ground,\nso you might preserve the bones of my tormented body,\nto be worthy of resurrection.\n\nYou flatten and thrust into the abyss,\nthose who sealed the tomb upon the bearer of life,\nin order that you might rest the token of your light\nin the tomb of my soul.\n\nYou did not absolutely and for all generations\nstrike down\nthose who rumored your hand perished and\nyour body stolen like that of a mortal,\nso you might permit me, insignificant as I am,\nto partake of that goodness which neither perishes nor\ncan be harmed,\ntogether with those chosen for salvation.\n\nYou did not turn into stone, as with Moab in\ndays of old,\nyour frenzied persecutors who twice stole silver bribes\nfrom the offerings in your Father’s sanctuary\nto betray and degrade you,\nso that you might set me upon the steadfastness\nof your rock.\nAlthough I waver and am sold to the powers of death,\nI am redeemed by your blood.\nYou are blessed twice over and blessed again\npraised in all things, forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-37": { - "title": "Prayer 37", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, of all your gifts and favors I have received\nand described,\nmerciful, beneficent, praised and powerful Lord,\nonly a few have been set forth here.\nBut they are all nobles of the kingdom.\nThey are like freemen with rich estates,\nsons of military orders and offspring of the sublime,\ngreat in glory, renewed in light, honored in miracles.\nProclaimed with the unfurling flags of victory, each gift\nadorned with a crowning wreath on its heads and\nbringing countless other dominions and estates, gifts\npraising, endearing, meek, happy, peaceful,\nfrom those regions closest to God.\nOf these the prophet prayed,\n“Awake, Lord, your heavenly forces and\ncome to save us.”\nWho is better armed to drive out sin,\nfend off hail, melt the ice of despair,\nand repel those first rebels from the heavenly ranks,\nwhose nocturnal ways love the darkness,\nand who from the beginning revolted against God?\nIt is impossible to recount all the good gifts\nyou have rained down on me, a weak,\nbelligerent and ungrateful servant.\nBut if one were to try to speak\nabout even the least of this abundance,\none would be at a loss,\nrecalling the dust we were made of.\nLike a puny weakling, one would be struck dumb\nin defeat by the greatness of the maker.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAfter writing this much I testify again\nto the flawed immaturity of my soul\nwhen compared to your perfection, O creator, and\nmy waywardness in comparison to your kindness.\nHowever, the strength of your praiseworthy\ncreative force,\nyour everlasting light, generous and abundant,\ndefends me against the ways of the Trickster, who\naims to harden the heart, making it\na rock of despair,\nthreatening to dry up the two springs\nof the Eden of my sentiments that were\nestablished by the Gardener\nto water and make the garden of good works\nplanted in me flourish.\nMay we not be snatched again from our\noriginal paradise, through the evil trickery of heretical\nillusions that parch our eyes\nso that when the miraculously resurrected God stands\nas a mediator among the gods,\nbringing his gift of grace,\nall the injuries of deceit and short-sighted anxieties,\nill be pulverized as if dashed upon a hard rock,\nor washed away by the trickling of a stream,\nor blown away like the dust.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd so my reprimand shall come, as Job said,\nnot from myself,\nbut from your all-seeing eye,\nof which I am in terror,\nwrenched with anxieties, dread and fear.\nBut refuge for my broken spirit lies in your living,\nincorruptible, constant hope,\nthat looking on me with mercy,\nas one condemned to perdition,\nwhen I present myself before your heavenly beneficence,\nempty-handed and without gifts,\nbringing with me the evidence of your untold glory,\nI will remind you\nwho never slumber in forgetfulness,\nwho never shut your eyes,\nnever ignore the sighs of grief,\nthat with your cross of light\nyou may lift away from me, I beg you, the peril that\nchokes me,\nwith your comforting care, the vacillating sadness,\nwith your crown of thorns, the germs of my sin,\nwith the lashes of the whip, the blows of death,\nwith the memory of the slap in the face,\nthe neediness of my shame,\nwith the spitting of your enemies, my\ncontemptible vileness,\nwith your sip of vinegar, the bitterness of my soul.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor yours is all the boundless goodness,\nonly begotten Son of God,\ntogether with which, I remember my wrongs,\ncalling your all blessed name aloud\nwith supplications.\nLook upon my embarrassed confessions of defeat\nand grant mercifully to this son worthy of execution,\nthe death of immortality,\nso that on my sins, again and again,\ngrowing by leaps and bounds,\nthe goodness of your mercy might be proclaimed\nwith resounding solemnity in heaven as on earth.\nAnd to you with the Father and Holy Spirit,\nglory forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-38": { - "title": "Prayer 38", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, as I wrote in the beginning of this work,\nabout the dark origins of the cardinal sins and\nthe workings of the bodily organs,\nby which I am dominated, human heir of death,\nhere, in this prayer, I recount, even if it is\na drop taken from the limitless expanse of the sea,\na few aspects of the spiritual life\nthat liberate those born in the light\nthrough our Lord Jesus.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSome of these are truly splendid, and should be\nplaced on a high throne,\ntheir stores of grace, filled to the brim with\nkindness and wealth,\nthe king and his loving subjects,\nthe emperor and his nobles,\nthe crowned and their princes,\nthe famous and his good report,\nthe victor and his trumpets,\nthe general and his troops,\nthe hero and his glory,\nthe groom and his revelers,\nthe queen and her maids,\nthe lady in waiting and her retinue,\nfreedom and its benefits,\nthe visitation and its outstretched hand,\nthe promise and its atonement,\nthe protection and its right hand,\nthe gifts and their wrapping,\nthe seal of life and its indelibility,\nthe soul and its imprint,\nthe cloud and its shadow,\nart and its miracles,\nthe spirit and its immortality,\nthe word and its perfection,\nthe taking of the oath and its fulfillment,\nthe force and its order,\nthe baptismal font and its miraculous work,\nmanna and its incorruptibility,\nthe living rock and its stream,\nthe pillar of fire and its rays,\nthunder and its echo,\nhope and its salvation,\nthe tree of blessings and its fruit,\nthe bough and its bounty.\nAnd so that I shall not err by saying this,\nI note my omissions,\nfor as the eyes are blinded when looking at the sun,\nI have averted my attention from the greatest and\npresented the lesser points that are within\nmy meager ability.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI apologize for my always miserable, wretched soul,\nbecause my composition mixes\nthe voice of good news with mournful protests,\nbringing justice and judgment,\ndecision and penalty,\ninvestigation and spotlights,\nscolding and torches,\nnakedness and embarrassment,\nrevelation and shame,\ninnocence and reward,\nerror and punishment.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAgain and again, I flinch doubly misfortunate\nand wretched,\nfor unbearable anger is coming with a sickle\nto harvest my ripened sheaves of grain,\na judge for the court,\na strongman for the tribunal,\nan executioner for execution,\nan arm to carry out the judgment,\na rod to reprimand,\narmor for revenge,\na shepherd for sorting the flock,\nfor the words you said to me,\nshall judge me, the condemned, on the\nlast day of judgment.\nHurry, merciful Lord, with your sweet acceptance,\nattend the faint sighs of my cowardly wavering\nwith the great strength of your blessed hand.\nDo not be angry, but with your characteristic good will,\ncomfort, cure, forgive and save me,\nat my last trial.\nAnd to you glory, forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-39": { - "title": "Prayer 39", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSince I abandoned my former composure,\nled by the destroyer and\ntotally wasted by my own laziness,\nnow I address my former self,\nrecounting with heavy heart and pitiful sobs\nthe scandal of my ways\nbefore the congregation of the multitude of nations.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI am a living book,\nwritten like the scroll in the vision of Ezekiel,\ninside and out,\nlisting lamentations, moaning and woe.\nI am a city without walls or towers,\na house empty without doors for protection,\nsalt in looks but lacking taste,\nsea water unfit to quench the thirst,\nland, useless for cultivation,\nfield, barren and covered with briars.\nMy personal acres, cared for by God,\nbut already sown with the devices of the Slanderer,\nan olive tree that is wood without fruit,\na barren orchard to be cut down,\na hopeless, twice dead, talking plant,\na burned out candle that cannot be lit.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow again, in the same vein, I repeat\nsimilar pathetic images\nthat await me, miserable soul, as bitter punishment for\nmy shame.\nGnashing of teeth and endless wailing, for the eyes of\nmy wretched self,\npaternal anger that cannot be deflected by filial regret,\nunmendable corruption for my sinful body,\nnew reprimands for me, an inventor of evil for\nmy diseased soul,\nthe anxiety of doubt for my escape as a captive,\nwaiting to be visited by the heavenly host.\nTestifying I am a miserable, wounded soul,\nwho deserves to be burned in the bundles of weeds,\nwith a stern voice pronouncing me, incorrigible refuse.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nTruly, these are but the charming melodies of a harlot,\nwith her harp, strolling about and beating her breast,\nbrazenly wailing, miserably and scornfully,\nas the prophet Isaiah wrote in his admonition to Tyre.\nIf she could because of a minor misfortune ( the loss of\nher clientele),\nprotest with all manner of fake moaning and groaning,\nthen in what kind of desperate voice should I cry out?\nI who wait the coming of the Lord,\nand yet have been caught unprepared and naked.\n\n\n# V.\n\nNow, if I recount again the fearsome judgment,\nmy repentance should be multiplied.\nAnd if I present my tribulations realistically\nterror should seize me.\nAnd if I describe this vision in detail\nmy tribulations increase.\nFor having recognized all this in advance and\nnot repented, even in retrospect, I am grateful that\nyou spared me, merciful lover of mankind,\nmighty doer of good,\nAll-giving Christ, King, blessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-40": { - "title": "Prayer 40", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAlmighty God, doer of good, creator of all,\nhear the sound of my sighs of distress\nand my terror of imagined perils to come.\nSave me with your strength, ridding me of my sins.\nFor you are capable of all things and are\nthe key to all things with your boundless greatness\nand infinite wisdom.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd seeing with my mind’s eye in the distance\nthe terrible vision of the life to come,\nI observe in advance the day of light,\nthe hope of the saints,\nand the day of darkness, the punishment of the sinful,\nfrom which none can escape nor find refuge,\nneither in the deep abyss nor in the bottomless pits,\nneither on the heights of the mountains,\nnor in the caves in the stone,\nneither on the hardness of boulders,\nnor in the cavity of a hole,\nneither in the crevices of a pit,\nnor the waves of a flood,\nneither in the labyrinth of the basement,\nnor the loft of the attic,\nneither behind the closed doors of my cell,\nnor in the darkness of the valley,\nneither in the declines of the valleys,\nnor on the inclines of the hills,\neither in the blowing of the wind,\nnor in the undulation of the seas,\nneither in the swirling of a whirlpool,\nnor in the distant ends of the earth,\nneither in the sounds of lament,\nnor in the sighs of weeping,\nneither in the trembling of fingers,\nnor in the lifting of hands,\nneither in the prayers of the lips,\nnor in the cries of the tongue.\nOut of this terrible inescapable lot\nyou, Lord Christ, are the exit and respite,\nthe ease and calm of the salvation for\nmy ever sinning soul.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, look upon me besieged by overwhelming danger,\nyou who are alone sweet to all.\nCut me loose with your victorious sword of life, the\ncross, and release me from the nets that have snared me,\nnets that assail me on all sides as the captive of death.\nPlease steady my shaky feet on the crooked path and\nheal the burning fever of my anguished heart.\nTurn away the demonic whisper of temptation to\nsin against you.\nDrive away the despair of my dark soul that\ndwells with evil.\nDispel the thick smoke of sin that has infused and\nobscured me.\nDestroy the vile dark passions of my base needs.\nRenew the image of light revered by\nthe glory of your mighty name, my soul.\nFix your glowing grace upon my face and\nthe perception of my mind, an earthbound creature.\nAnd cleanse my squalid sinfulness with your purity\nso that you might restore and reveal your image in me.\nWith your divine, living, uncorrupted and\nheavenly light that envelopes your three persons.\nFor you alone are blessed with the Father and Holy Spirit\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-41": { - "title": "Prayer 41", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSon of the living God, blessed in all things,\nwhose awesome birth by your Father passes\nall understanding,\nfor whom nothing is impossible,\nbefore the dawning of the uneclipsed rays of the mercy\nof your glory\nsins melt away, demons flee, transgressions are erased,\nbindings are cut and chains undone.\nThe dead are born again, infirmities are cured,\nwounds are healed, corruption is cleansed,\nsadness withdraws, sighs retreat,\ndarkness flees, fog departs,\ntwilight vanishes, darkness lifts, the night passes,\nalarm is banished, evil is destroyed, despair is exiled.\nAnd your omnipotent hand rules, redeemer of all.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou who came not to destroy our mortal souls, but to\ngive them life,\nforgive my countless wrongs with your abundant mercy.\nFor you alone are in heaven beyond words, and on earth\nbeyond understanding,\nin the substance of existence unto the ends of the earth,\nthe beginning of everything and the completion of\neverything in all ways, blessed in the\nGlory forever to you\nwith the Father and the Holy Spirit.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-42": { - "title": "Prayer 42", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord God of compassion, salvation and mercy\nredemption and restoration, healing and health,\nenlightenment and life, resurrection and immortality,\nremember me, when you come with your kingdom,\nO awesome, mighty, doer of good and creator of all,\nliving, praised, perfecter of all,\naccessible to the sighs of all beings.\n\nWith the man who was crucified with you,\nwho was not captured for your sake and was not bound,\nwas not hanged and was not nailed,\nwas not beaten in your great name and\nwas not disgraced,\nwas not tortured and was not treated with contempt,\nwas not crushed and was not killed,\nI beg to be worthy of the Kingdom and\nthe most desired light that is the reward of the just.\nMay you, by the authority of saying the oath, “Amen,”\naffirm that your gifts are unchanging and\nare glorified for giving the hope of salvation to\nthose of us\nthat consider ourselves totally abandoned.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBlessed, blessed, and blessed again!\nHaving accepted me by that same faith,\nraise me up from my fallen state, doer of good,\ncure me of disease, merciful,\nreturn me from the edge of death to life, lifegiver,\nfor I am yours, same as man’s faith, my refuge.\nGrant the breath of life to the body of the dead,\nO resurrection,\nlife, immortality, and inexhaustible joy,\nboundless grace, unwavering forgiveness,\nomnipotent right hand, all-governing hand,\nall-reaching finger,\nyou have only to wish it, Lord, and I shall be saved,\nonly to think it, and by your mercy shall I be justified.\nSay the word, and I will be found spotless.\nForget my wrongs, and I shall venture to emerge.\nCultivate me and I shall cleave to you,\nyou who are glorified in all things forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-43": { - "title": "Prayer 43", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nWith every possible facet of the art of healing,\nLord Jesus,\ncause of all healthy life,\nmighty heavenly king,\nGod of all things apprehended by the mind and\nby the eye,\njoin me in the words of the prophet,\n“And behold, through this union with you\nthrough these words,\nyour light shall break forth in me to heal\nmy breath and body,”\nyou who are mighty and invincible.\n\n\n# II.\n\nTo heal our spiritual wounds, you do not\nneed ointments,\nnor time, nor intermediaries,\nnor the passing of days,\nnor the changing of prescriptions,\nnor amputation, nor cauterization, nor surgery\nas practiced by earthly medicine,\nin which there is always trial and error,\noften grave error.\nBut for you, the creator of the soul and body,\nall is illumined, all is clear,\nall is written,\nall is easy,\nall is possible,\nwisdom leads,\npromises are kept,\nwishes are fulfilled.\nYour testament is the gospel.\nYour judgment is freedom.\nYour lawbook is grace.\nYou are not limited by laws.\nYou are not bound by canons.\nYou are not hampered by imperfections.\nYou are not humbled by obedience.\nYou are not restricted by smallness.\nYou are not measured by boundaries.\nYou do not err out of anger.\nYou do not alter out of wrath.\nYou do not misjudge out of severity.\nYou do not simmer out of agitation.\nYou do not falter out of ignorance.\nYou do not waver out of soft-heartedness.\nYou do not diminish out of exaltation.\nYou do not abandon your duty of care.\nYou do not weaken your salvation.\nYou are the beginning and the end of all.\nEverything is from you alone.\nTherefore glory to you and worship forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-44": { - "title": "Prayer 44", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nBoundless God, genuine son of God, inexplicable,\ncreator of everything, Christ King,\nlight for the darkened hearts of the unknowing,\nlight who took human form like us,\nbut are in essence like him who sent you,\nwhose form is miraculously revealed through ours.\nBlessed by your heavenly Father,\nwho sent you and with whom\nyou share glory for creation.\nYou care enough for my salvation, an exiled slave,\nthat you delivered yourself to evil men\nand without resorting to your divinity\ndrank from the cup of death for me, a sinner,\naccording to the plan of your divine economy,\nwith true humanity and perfect divinity.\nAnd the Holy Ghost is also of the same essence as you\nand the Father,\nequal in honor with the Son and the Father,\none perfect trinity in three persons indivisible,\nwithout beginning or time,\nbenefactor to all, life giver of all, peacemaker of all,\ncreator of existence and shaper of all things,\nglorified with one indivisible nature.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor the sake of my transgressions for which\nI am condemned to death,\nthe merciful Father, heavenly, almighty, one of\nthe divine essence,\nhas offered the only son of his bosom.\nHis beloved son, his equal in honor he did not spare,\nbut willingly gave him to death by the arms of\nhis tormentors,\nas foretold by the prophet Zechariah:\n“For raise the sword upon the shepherd,\nand strike down the keeper of the flock,\nand the flock shall disperse.”\nThe Old Testament also gives another example\nof vows at the altar and the blood of the offering in\nthe story of Abraham’s sacrifice,\nwhich described to me how you wished\nto save the wretched.\nSo now, why do you grieve, my soul?\nYou are not destroyed by God\nbut by your own doing.\nAnd why am I upset,\nmy mind reeling with satanic despair?\nI should trust in God, confess to him\nand he will care for me,\nas David wrote in the Psalms,\nand the Prophet counseled.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe ways of the creator surpass\nthe understanding of angels and mortals.\nIf I were to try ten thousand times, my words\ncould not capture it,\nfor his good works are beyond comprehension\nand description.\nOne of the blessed trinity\nsent another of the trinity\nand to please the will of the sender,\nhe died. And the third, according to\nthe wishes of the other two\nworked together for the same good\nwith the same will.\nAs the soul is for the living beings and\nthought for the rational beings,\nas radiance is for glory, and form for substance,\nas caring for life, and mindfulness for mercy,\nas giving in charity, and resolve in salvation,\nas abundance in generosity, flow in continuity,\nas fullness for perfection, richness in inexhaustibility,\nas long in forbearance, exalted in unreachableness,\nthey are one perfect trinity, of three persons,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-45": { - "title": "Prayer 45", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, confess, my ruined soul\nwith hope in your heart for salvation\nwith the belt of faith tight over your kidneys,\nconfess your thoughts to God\nas if thoughts were actions,\nas if plans were accomplishments,\nas if invisible were seen,\nas if the heart’s secrets were voiced,\nas if sinful intentions were committed wrongs,\nas if words were deeds,\nas if footprints were flight from God’s will,\nhands raised in anger as if they shed blood,\nabandoned laughter as if abandoned grace,\nvows both reasonable and unreasonable\nas if compacts with the devil,\nhaughtiness as if it could detract\nfrom our creator,\nuneasiness of heart as if a lack of faith,\ncowardice as if it were defeat,\ncomplaints about passionate temptations\nas if betrayals of a vow to the Lord,\ninsolence as if it were impiety,\narrogance as if precious vanity,\npride as if fondness for evil,\nthe involuntary as well as voluntary,\nthe forced as well as the consenting,\nthe extrinsic as well as the intrinsic,\nthe lawless as well as the ungodly,\nthe smallest as well as the greatest,\nthe few as well as the many,\nthe things I have left unspoken as if\nthey were spoken by the all-knowing,\nthe unwritten wrongs as if\nthey were carved by the all-seeing upon a lodestone,\nthe slightest contentious thought as if\nit were the gravest of burdens,\na hidden matter of measure as if\nit were the just demand for payment of tribute\nin the amount of four drachmae\nfrom the mouth of a baby whale,\nburied deeds as if they were speeding to the ear of God.\nCompile and compound them redoubling your effort,\nand lament here again what is not, as if it were.\nOffer your vanquished soul to God\nso that you might receive the forgiveness of sins,\nlike the sinner who through the Lord’s grace\nwas justified,\neloquently proclaiming the merits of repentance rather\nthan faultfinding:\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow compile and condemn your soul’s sins,\nreproach yourself with varied images, my soul,\nin a relentless stream of words:\nevil, disobedience, error,\ndesertion, surrender,\nrage, impudence, stupidity,\nstupor, daydreaming, slumber,\npagan thoughts, base words,\npleasure in dissolution, dalliance,\ndesire of what is hateful to God,\nimpious, incorrigible, uncivilized,\nfaulty, feeble, weak, stingy,\nuntethered, ridiculous, lusting,\ncomic, scandalous, deceitful,\nbrazen, quarrelsome, outlaw,\nsuffocating the soul, shaking cowardice,\nunruly branching bush,\ndishonorable indulgence, contentiousness, sulking,\nbaseless hatred, lax titillation,\nfailure to weigh small things, breach of promise,\nforgetfulness of vows, distortion of similarity,\ndisguised by veils, extravagance of glory seeking,\narrogance, roguishness, egotism,\nwill to power, conspiracy with criminals,\nmeaningless gossip, vicious behavior,\ncollaboration with the conniving tempter,\nconfusion, selling of life for the price of butchery,\nloss of tradition, betrayal of homeland,\nattractive bondage,\nyoked to lawlessness like oxen,\nliving in filth, abandoning the good,\ngiving in to bad impulses, worse than\nbefore conversion,\nnew designs, untoward intentions, unstable will,\npointless shouting, letter over spirit,\nlawlessness, despotic rule,\nand other things that cannot be spoken, written, told\nor countenanced.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now, how shall you be cured, my poor soul,\nafter suffering so many slashes of the lance?\nYou are like an abandoned, exiled man, incurable,\nas the Prophet wrote. Anyone would be condemned\nto death for the wrongs listed above, let alone if besieged\nby the hordes of killers and vicious executioners.\nAnd these descriptions fail to convey fully\nthe weight of my misfortune.\nAlthough my skin-covered vessel may look\ngood from the outside, it is teaming with evil within\nas if swarming with scorpions that sting\nwith the deadly poison in their tails.\nIt is a storehouse of ruination and mass of grief,\nfilled with agents of destruction and sowers of death.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd now, your store of iniquities,\nthe accumulated wages of your wicked ways,\nmy soul, are enough to condemn you twice to death.\nSeeds sown by the enemy upon the grain fields\nof the world,\nwhich you willingly accepted in yourself,\nunclean man, dishonest and lazy, completely hateful,\ngluttonous lover of all that is filled with corruption,\nfor which the Apostle saved some of his most fearsome\nwords of reprimand:\n“And those who know,” he said, “God’s law, and still\ndo such things or are willing to do so,\nare deserving of death.”\nThus, I myself am deserving of double\ncondemnation to ruination and death, but still\nI pray you, spare me, with your mercy,\nO God, compassionate, living, mighty,\nobliging, able, potent, blessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-46": { - "title": "Prayer 46", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow I am lost, forever punishable,\nalways immoral,\ncondemning myself to death,\nshepherd of a flock of fetid sin, a flock of wild boars,\na despicable mercenary\na shepherd watching a flock of desert goats.\nThe image of the shepherds’ tent in the Song of Songs\naptly applies to me,\nfor I do not know or understand,\nby whom, in whose image or why I was created.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBehold, you were formed like an angel,\non two feet that take and bring you,\nas if in flight on two wings lifting you upward,\nto gaze down on my fatherland.\nO fool, why did you choose to be earthbound,\nalways preoccupied with the worldliness of\nthe here and now,\ncarrying on like wild asses in the desert?\nOn the lamp stand of your body, encircling your head,\na chandelier with many arms was placed,\nso that by its light you might\nnot stray and might see God and know what is everlasting.\nYou were doubly endowed in the womb of reason,\nso that you might speak with an unfettered tongue\nof the victory of the good things given you.\nAnd you were endowed with artful hands and\nnimble fingers\nto carry out the practical affairs of daily life\nlike the all-giving right hand of God,\nthat you might be called God.\nYou are assembled of three hundred sixty parts and five senses,\nthe number of the days of the year,\nand no aspect of your physical being remains invisible\nto your sight or unstudied by your mind.\nFor some parts are thick and strong,\nsome are small and others necessary,\nsome are sturdy but sensitive,\nsome are sublime, important and noble,\nsome are necessary but humble,\nand the explanation of the image of these things is\nengraved on you\nas on an uneraseable monument, wretched soul of mine,\nso that like the elements of time\nand the continuous train of days around the year\nby some inner law these parts function\nin unerring and inalterable order.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now another spiritual image,\ntied to the bonds of love uniting the church,\nis also reflected within you.\nLike the yoke that mediates between the great\nand the lowly,\nthe assembled body\nestablished in the name of Christ is sometimes impaired,\nas with the cutting off or loss of an unruly organ,\ninfecting the body.\nSomething is lost in your mortal structure,\nfeeling abode of mankind,\nand the usual shape of the person undergoes\nsome disfigurement.\nAnd now when the uniquely miraculous structure\nin the living image of God,\nis completely condemned, my enslaved soul,\nthat original likeness is stolen from you as\nby breaking the law in the Garden of Eden.\nBut by the light of the baptismal font\nthe breath of the Holy Spirit is received and\nthe image is restored to God’s likeness.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd now, why did you give up heavenly glory\nlike the original man Adam did in the earthly\nGarden of Eden?\nWhy did you yourself close heaven and lock\nthe door to ascent?\nWhy did you mix the clean water with\nimpurities of bitter tears?\nWhy did you soil newly washed clothes with dirty work?\nWhy did you put off the clothes given you\nand put on the cloak of sin?\nWhy did you infect the purity of your feet\nby taking the path of the fallen?\nWhy did you repeat the violation of just vows of\nthe Old Testament?\nWhy did you refuse the fruit of grace, as Adam did\nthe tree of life?\nWhy did you willfully lose the unshadowed hope\nof eternity?\nWhy did you cover your face with brazen shame?\nWhy did you arm your enemies against you,\nrepository of stupidity?\nWhy did you venture into the snares of death,\nabandoning the way of faith?\nWhy did you get caught on the fishhook of deception,\nyou who share the body of the life giver?\nBut again, relying upon him, call to him,\nthe redeemer of those seeking refuge, renewer,\nsavior, life maker and life giver,\nmerciful, caring, lover of humanity,\nungrudging, generously compassionate,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-47": { - "title": "Prayer 47", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nWhat can I be, but speechless\nbefore your awesome might?\nWhat can I be but embarrassed and silent\nmy words only quiet dust in my mouth,\nwhen I hope for virtue\nas the prophets advised?\nEven if I open my clamped lips,\nwhat would flow but more mournful elegies?\nNothing but the voice of my many wounds\npouring forth.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, weeping with the great sinner,\nwho willingly committed mortal sin,\nI join in his cry,\n“I have sinned, Lord, I have sinned,\nand to my lawlessness I myself am witness.”\nWeaving this cry with the words of the fiftieth Psalm,\nI conclude that the wages of my innumerable\nsins are greater\nthan the grains of sand that make up the earth\nand are scattered by the wind.\nI have sinned against heaven and you.\nLike the Prodigal Son, who though shamed,\nreceived his father’s forgiveness,\nI make my entreaty, prostrate before you,\nmy face twisted in grief, pleading:\nFather of compassion, God of all,\nI am not worthy to be called even a worthless,\nirresponsible hireling,\nlet alone “son,” or even to have this word\nuttered about me.\nStill accept me, a wandering exile, defeated by wounds,\nfaint with gnawing hunger.\nHeal me with your bread of life,\nconfront me with mercy, for you are my first refuge.\nClothe me, a lawless sinner, merciful and\nunvengeful God,\nwith the clothes of my former innocence.\nPlace, with your boundless generosity,\nthe ring with your seal of courage\non my sinful hand that lost everything by straying in sin.\nProtect the soles of my bare feet\nwith the sandals of the Gospels.\nGuard me from poisonous snakes.\nAnd even though I am wanting in virtue\nyou sacrifice the fatted calf of heaven,\nyour only begotten Son, out of\nlove for mankind.\nYour blessed Son who is always offered and\nyet remains whole,\nwho is sacrificed continuously upon innumerable altars\nwithout being consumed,\nwho is all in everyone and complete in all things,\nwho is in essence of heaven and in reality of earth,\nwho is lacking nothing in humanness and without\ndefect in divinity,\nwho is broken and distributed in individual parts,\nthat all may be collected in the same body with\nhim as head.\nGlory to you with him, Father most merciful.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-48": { - "title": "Prayer 48", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nExalted and mighty God,\nwho has no beginning, no becoming, and no end,\nobserver with an unsleeping eye,\nparent of the only begotten, glorious and inscrutable,\nbefore heaven and earth,\njustify granting your mercy to me to whom\nit has been denied.\nCelebrate my restoration to life.\nAnnounce the good news for me who is dying.\nReveal your good will, O praiseworthy Lord,\nto all creation.\nBe true to your name, ineffable, and grant me,\na miserable sinner, renewed salvation.\nWipe away the mortgage of my sins.\nAnd commute the death sentence upon my soul\nwith the blood of your beloved Son.\nWith his blood assure salvation for the good.\nShow the majesty of your mercy at the bridal feast.\nDo not shut me, a supplicant, out of the house of life.\nDo not bar me from your banquet table and do not\ndeprive me of your bounty.\nDo not keep the debts of my iniquity in your safe.\nDo not seal the vileness of my dissipation in\nyour good purse.\nDo not cover my diseased body with the wounds\nof my sins.\nDo not preserve the infectious deterioration of\nmy aching body to be buried with me,\nbut lift away the corrupting decay with your mercy,\nso that I might be restored to health.\nFor my grave ills, Father of compassion,\nprepare a strong balm.\nFor my fatal ailments, visit goodness,\nfor I am yours, Lord, lover of our souls.\nAnd although in one step I might commit\na thousand sins, still,\nI would not be deemed as completely sinful,\nbeneficent giver of life,\nhaving sought refuge in the grace of your gifts.\nFor to know you is complete justice,\nand to know your strength is the root of immortality.\nAs the wiseman wrote in ages past,\nyour sovereignty causes you to spare all.\nAnd he is close to you; whenever you want\nyou can find him.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI take Solomon as the model for my prayer of hope.\nFor no other person has matched my sinfulness.\nOnce a beloved son, but later despised,\nonce a peacemaker, but later the sower of discord,\nonce the giver of the law, but later\nthe mortgagor of death,\ntrampling divine service under foot and taking\na foreign name,\ninstigator of discord, undeprived depriver,\ncontented thief, pampered complainer,\ncoddled fugitive, repulsive traitor, irresponsible vandal,\nsweet curser, father-hating child,\nbetrayer of covenants, defamer of Moses,\nforgetter of favors,\nwise delinquent, knowing transgressor,\nshameful lamenter, wavering penitent,\ncovetous idolator, sluggish convert,\ndoubtful acceptance, vacillating reconciliation,\nshadow of the future, ambiguous salvation,\nuncertain discovery, trace of a remnant,\ndeceitful slave, half-escaped but voluntarily surrendered,\nlike an overindulged ruffian, an eccentric genius.\nAnd from the clashing of these two streams of words,\nmore reports of pity and praise,\nwith great shame and little honor,\nas on a person whose ruin is self-inflicted and\nmourning is mixed with blame,\nhis copious writings have encouraged people of\nall ages toward virtue,\nbut his vices bring forth moans of grief from all lips.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI am amazed, I faint, seized with doubt.\nIf Solomon strayed this much, what will become of me?\nWhy did the haughty fall?\nWhy did the steady falter?\nWhy did the sturdy collapse?\nWhy did the follower become alienated?\nWhy did the chosen son stray?\nWhy did the dear one flee?\nWhy did the shining tarnish?\nWhy was the teacher no longer an example?\nWhy did the famous turn obscure?\nWhy did the glorious become dishonored?\nWhy was the exalted humbled?\nWhy were the pious perverted?\nWhy was the chosen rejected?\nWhy was the covenant with heaven broken?\nI am ashamed to say that he consorted with the Devil,\nfor what business did he have with idols?\nWhence his love for graven images?\nWhy did he yearn for cults?\nDid he not remember Samuel’s reprimand to Saul--\n“Paganism is a sin”? Yet he labored and sacrificed for\nthe household gods.\nWhy did he not remember the ancestral reproof?\n“Idols,” it said, “are breathless, pagan demons.\nAnd so are their priests.”\nDid not Moses scold his people with scorn,\n“Only the Lord leads them, and there is no other\ngod for them but the one known to their fathers.”:\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhere is the death-bringing grotesque statue of Pagora?\nWhere is the ugly, infamous, accursed\nfemale statue of the Sodomites?\nWhere is the embarrassing statue of a woman?\nThe image which the prophets condemned as ungodly\nand beastial and the demon of intemperance.\nThis woman who shoved Solomon’s ancestors into\ndestruction, he mistook as a sign of favor.\nArrogance got the better of his wisdom.\nHaughtiness enslaved it.\nPampering stupified it.\nSilver enslaved it.\nThe weapons of the Destroyer deadened his soul,\nand torn from the embrace of God, he strayed\nto the path of iniquity.\nLuxury killed him, sloth numbed him.\nIntemperance poisoned him.\nO, easily deceived mortal body,\nwith what cries shall I mourn you?\nThis contradiction is found not only in him,\nbut with all those who err, all who willfully do wrong.\nFor he proves that it is wrong to take pride\nin the knowledge of the body\nunless guided by God’s judgment.\nFor even if a person is stupid,\nif he places his will in the hand of God,\nhe shall not succumb as Solomon did.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIn addition, Solomon has left a horrifying account\nof his perversion,\nfilled with self-accusatory reproof for being\ntruly dead to worldly honor.\nTo learn this truth, one need only read\nthe book of Vanities,\nor the books of the Priests, or the writings\nof Saint Silon.\nIn these he describes with sorrow the torments and\nerror of his ways.\nVain effort, fruitless labor,\nmindless devotion, aimless wandering,\ncapricious activity, alien fantasies,\ngroundless praise, rotten harvest,\nimproper conjecture, trivial concept,\nhouse built on sand, collapsed estate,\ncontemptible tasks, struggle against oneself,\nudgment upon one’s own soul,\nuseless sweat, dangerous attraction,\nroad to destruction, wayward path,\nruinous education, unwholesome practices,\nflawed eyesight, garish eye painting,\nwhorish get up, infectious germ,\nrevolting color, tragic splendor,\nstifling smoke, smothering steam,\neasily pilfered goods, fragile temple,\ninappropriate cries, baseless ridicule,\ndespicable ambition, self-incriminating writing,\ndestructive path, ungodly thought,\nlying speech, vexing stories,\nempty faultfinding, crazed inquest,\nshameful display, scandalous revelations,\nimpending dishonor, injurious acts,\nsordid story, slothful example,\nhidden pit, dark prey,\ndeathly pit, bottomless abyss,\nmurderous company, foolish prattle,\nbandits’ hideout, dilapidated house,\nshaken building, broken bridge,\nfleeting phantom, deceptive flatterer, inhumane traitor,\nantagonism toward the one on high.\nEcclesiastes put these confessional thoughts\ninto our heads as a prod to repentance\nso no one might wound either soul or friend\nwith the arrows of disparaging words.\nFor a person who looks pious but whose acts\ndisplease God\nis like a pagan under a veil.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAs we now see, Solomon sinned as much as\nhe atoned for,\nso let us not blame him but remember the good,\nand let this be our hope as supplicants at the Lord’s feet,\nso when he descends with the Spirit in undivided divinity\nto redeem the righteous,\nwe, the living, are assured of the good news by the\nexample of the dead.\nWith Solomon whose wisdom I lack,\nbut whose sins I surpass,\nI make this plea to your glorified greatness.\nFill my humble scribbling with his felicitous genius.\nMay my supplications mingle with the prayers of that\npenitent king,\nand may they be answered through the intercession of\nthat sublime monarch,\nwhom you set as a precursor of your only begotten Son,\nand by whose lineage we have partaken of the glory of\nyour co-equal Son.\nSave your servant, all powerful, almighty, and awesome.\nIncrease your glory as creator\nby granting repentance for our unforgivable sins.\nIn recognition of his good counsel, redeem Solomon too,\nfor he preached your divinity in the Old Testament\nwith words of sweetness, eloquence and edifying stories,\nthus leaving the church footprints toward goodness\nby teaching us to turn toward you, Father,\nshowing that except for a drop of despair that\ndampened his heart’s fervor and spurred him\ntoward repentance,\nhe was not far from salvation.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nNow remembering Solomon’s goodness,\nlet us greet him with compassion, instead of\nthe blame with which he has been trampled and\npilloried for ages.\nHis repentance filled the banquet hall with\na torrent of tears that gushed over the roof.\nAnd in passionate penitence he exceeded his father.\nI pray that your long-suffering forgiveness will blend\nhis tears with the tears of your Son, the Word,\nwho subjected himself to our frail human condition.\nMay the Psalm sometimes\nthought to be addressed to Solomon\nrather be addressed to your Son, co-equal in glory,\nthereby granting him the sweetness of salvation\nalong with the other wretched of the earth.\nFor living poets, it is ample reward for their words\nto be mingled with Solomon’s\nand to be offered on his behalf\nin harmonious prayer to you.\nMy justification for this plea is this:\nhis work, the parable of Job, the man from Uz,\nis a work of miraculous talent and prophecy,\nthat alone earns Solomon a place of honor in\nthe ranks of God’s defenders.\nHence, it is acceptable to plead for him rather than\nspeak ill of him.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nNow I too, with greater confidence, hope\nmy cries will be offered to you with his,\nfor if you destroy us, judging us by our deeds,\nyour glory will not be diminished, for you will\nbe judged as just.\nBut if you accept us, you will be exalted\nas befits your majesty.\nLean then, Lord, incline yourself in sweetness\nwith compassion and freely give the gift of\nlove to comfort us,\nwho like Solomon are chronically feverish with incurable\ngrief and turmoil.\nLay your hand of salvation on us.\nRenew us, forgive and defend us\nfrom the destruction of sin.\nAnd to you alone, who are\nthe beginning without beginning,\nthe source of all beginnings,\nthe holy Trinity and One Divinity,\nto you alone are due\nglory and dominion forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-49": { - "title": "Prayer 49", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now remembering the image of\nyour royal kingdom above,\nGod of light for all,\ndo not let iniquity rule me.\nDo not let the haughty rebel steal the grace\nof your breath from this creature you made.\nDo not let sin trap and rule my mortal body,\nenslaving me.\nNo king rules my soul except you, Christ,\nwho without force submits me to your easy yoke,\nwho lifts away my sinful passions with your\nall-powerful word,\nwho redeems me with your blood and nourishes me\nwith your body,\nwho sets forth and establishes the unchanging\ncovenant of life,\nwho by setting the stamp of your spirit on\nme as your cohort,\npresents me to your Father as a co-heir,\nand in the name of your sacrifice and memory\nof your torment,\nemboldened me to pray to the same benevolent God.\nCreator of all life,\nyou are the God of all souls\nwho made this gift of grace greater than\nall your other miracles.\nNeither the heavens with all their raiment, nor the angels\nin their brilliance,\nnor the earth and humanity and their wonders,\nnor the expanse of the seas and all in them,\nnor the abyss in its infiniteness and all in it,\nexalted you as sublimely as your sympathy toward me,\nwhen you said through the prophet, our hope\nof sweet goodness,\n“Who is a God like me, always pardoning sin\nand canceling the debts of iniquity?”\nBehold your words are honored with incense,\nmerciful God,\nand your good works proclaimed,\nglorified, deep mystery and worshiped,\noverflowing grace.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIndeed, no one is able to convey with human speech,\neven a small part of the acts of compassion which you\nhave shown me, creator.\nFor the power to restore what is worn-out to\nits former grandeur is greater than creating anew.\nAnd since weakness is not yours, mighty in all things,\nyou who with but a word can carry out all deeds,\narise, doer of good, and be glorified,\nand reclaim those whose salvation was beyond hope,\nso that by the exercise of the covenant,\nthe voice of your blessed good news might be\nmore exalted,\nand known for the grace of your forgiveness,\nmore for the light of your mercy dispensed,\nthan for the process of creation.\nFor in one we recognize the creator,\nwhereas in the other, creatorship is recalled\nas well as grace.\n\nWe recognize\nnot only the one who fashioned us, but also the one\nwho atoned for our sins,\nnot only the one who invented us, but also the one\nwho did good for us,\nnot only the one who established us, but also the one\nwho took pity on us,\nnot only the one who formed us, but also the one\nwho gave us possibilities,\nnot only the one who authored, but also the one\nwho humbled himself for us,\nnot only the one who designed us, but also the one\nwho performed miracles,\nnot only the one who started us, but also the one\nwho gave us light,\nnot only the anointed, but also the shepherd,\nnot only the healer, but also the caretaker,\nnot only the protector, but also the physician,\nnot only a supporter, but also a commander,\nnot only a victor, but also a king,\nnot only a creator, but also sweetness,\nnot only the giver of all gifts, but also a\ngenerous sponsor,\nnot only always patient, but also forgiving,\nnot only not angered, but also unvengeful,\nnot only sharing our sorrows, but also\nreading our hearts,\nnot only providing comfort, but also refuge,\nnot only supremely compassionate, but also God,\nnot only endless goodness, but also blessed in all things.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, as you created me, before I existed,\nand you revealed yourself as my sustenance,\nand I pray that you might reinstate my soul\ntogether with the tabernacle of my body in\nthe spotlessness of the clean holiness of\ntheir former being so\nthat your limitless marvels\nmight be bestowed more amply, frequently\nand increasingly\nupon the ever-renewing present rather\nthan upon the fading shadows of ages past.\nAnd when recounting my sins,\nhowever much the wings of my mind can\nbear to remember,\nmay I be justified in your name, Almighty\nin confessing my own stains upon my soul, and\nmay you forgive the baseness of the many sins\nI have revealed,\nAlmighty, seer of secrets, savior of all, so\nthat I might not, due to lack of good news,\nslide back and long for my former ways.\nEnvying with the Psalmist those who have been\nsaved by baptism,\nand wounded in my soul by the thorns of sin,\nmay your hand not press on me again more heavily\nmaking the burden of my transgressions greater than the\nsweetness of your gifts.\nRather, free me through your blessed Holy Spirit,\nI pray you, Lord of all, from the laws of sin and death.\nSpare me from falling with weakness before\nreaching the dawn of your truth as written in the\nScriptures.\nFor wherever forgiveness reigns, sin is banished,\nand wherever your living word gives encouragement,\nthere is no despair.\nAnd wherever your gifts abound, debts are dissolved.\nAnd the hand of God being close by,\nnothing is impossible.\nRather, everything basks in light, filled with strength\nand invincible potency.\nYours is salvation, life, renewal, mercy,\nand at the same time,\na sweet kingdom, incorruptible and glorified forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-50": { - "title": "Prayer 50", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSince there is no salvation for souls without Christ\nand there is no light without the sight of the eyes,\nnor is there sweetness of the sun without\nthe rays of dawn,\nin the same way there is no remission of sins\nwithout confession of secrets and the baring of the soul.\nFor what good is purity,\nif you are judged with the Pharisees?\nOr what harm are my transgressions,\nif I am to be praised with the tax collectors?\nWhere is it written that Joel was punished,\nfor repeating three times the distress of his soul?\nMight a holy man be blamed for reminding us\nof the Last Judgment?\nIs it possible that Isaiah can be called a man of\nunclean lips, when he stood apart from the deeds of\nthe house of Israel?\nAnd how can God, who took on Adam’s body out of\nsympathy for me, be considered blameworthy for\npraying to his Father like a sinner?\nHow can the proverb be interpreted:\n“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,\nbut the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”\nFor he, who does not confess the error of Adam\nto his own heart, and like the fortunate king who took\nupon himself the sins of his ancestors,\nconsider the sins of all his own\nshall lose his righteousness, like one who thinks our\nhuman nature incorruptible.\nAnd as it is written, a heart can not make\na merry countenance in expectation of the good news\nif one does not, as taught by Christ’s apostle\nexperience sorrow and repentance.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow, I must memorialize\nthe ancient counsel of the sage,\nadvice even our Lord saw fit to repeat\nwhen the ungodly gather,\ndo not go sit at the head of the table among the haughty\nthe place David and Jeremiah advised,\nas a hard and fast rule, to avoid.\nBut rather sit with the contrite, those humiliated by sin,\nand stricken by the fear of retribution on\nthe great day of judgment,\nthose who have humbled themselves willingly with the\nleast of those on earth.\nWith them God on high rejoices.\nAnd I dare to be deemed worthy of this rule\nin order to be ranked among the chosen on\nthe seats of bliss and to escape the rebuke of the prophet,\nwho remarked about the arrogant:\n“Do not come near me, for I am pure, and who can\nlook upon me?”\nThus drawing upon blessed David’s immeasurable\nhumility, I say with him:\nI am like an animal,\ndeprived of sensibility and besieged by evils.\nMy wounds have festered and become putrid\nbecause of my incorrigible stupidity.\nAnd even like certain of the chosen in Assyria, who were\nspotless in soul, but who by their own willful impudence\ncondemned themselves,\nI say with them in the words of the great priest Ezra,\n“I am unable even to lift up my face to you, God.”:\n\n\n# III.\n\nI, like a mirror of mankind,\nmix with their sins my own,\nand doubling the bitterness of my own with theirs,\nI sigh with them.\nAlthough there was no need to paint in harsher tones,\nan already ugly picture,\nyet I sinned here,\nwithout thinking, I did what was not pleasing to you\nwith many condemnable errors.\nLook upon me with compassion, Lord, for\nlike Peter caught in the act of denial,\nI am completely empty.\nShed light upon me with the rays of your mercy,\nyou who are benevolent in all ways,\nthat I might receive your blessing, Lord,\nthat I might be justified, live and be cleansed\nof my inner turmoil, not of the life with which\nyou endowed me.\nI do not dare spread my sinful hands before you\nuntil you offer your blessed right hand\nfor the renewal of my condemned self.\nNow, vanquish again my impudence with\nyour meekness,\nvisit upon me your lovingkindness toward humanity.\nAnd with your might to do all in all with all,\nforgive my wrongdoing, original, middle and last,\nChrist, king of the light of the just,\nfor whom the impossible is possible.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI am not worthy to mention your blessed name,\nfor I am capable of dealing mortal blows to you, though\nyou do only good,\nand to deface your seal, your grace, your breath of life,\nyour gifts, your legacy, your talents,\nyour image, your stamp, your anointing,\nyour name, your son-hood, your majestic honor,\nyour bounty, your courage, your friendship,\nyour life, your light, your blessedness,\nyour hope, your glory, your majesty that\ncannot be laid low,\nyour incorruptible halo, your promise of secrets,\nwhich through you, Lord Christ, was heralded to me in\nmanifold ways.\nI am as impudent as a serpent or adder,\nwith deaf ears, shut tight with wounds,\nwhich in the face of your ever growing goodness,\nmultiplied yet more my wrongdoing,\nand completely destroyed me,\ndenied me life, and bound me with death,\na slave to decadence.\n\n\n# V.\n\nNow you who alone are fair and just in your benevolent\njudgment, who are blessed in compassion,\nI have sinned against you. I have transgressed.\nI have been unjust.\nFor these I am ruined, corrupted, guilty, debased.\nI did not obey your confessed, worshiped, praised word.\nYou who revealed yourself among us with your love\nbeyond telling,\nthe mere writing of which is great and the meaning\nof which is overwhelming,\nto you justice and glory and eternal praise,\nand for me, ashamed before you, my caretaker,\natonement, mercy and healing,\nhelp and protection for heart and soul,\npraised in all forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-51": { - "title": "Prayer 51", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, should I, a mortal who has strayed in every way,\nplead with another earthly being,\nto whom it is vain to cry out?\nTo a mere rational mortal, on whom it would be false to\nplace hope of salvation?\nTo a frail human, whose strength is as feeble and\nfaltering as his word?\nTo the princes on earthly thrones,\nwhose trappings are as transitory as their beings?\nTo a blood brother,\nwho likewise is needy of contentment?\nTo my earthly father,\nwhose care diminishes with his dwindling days?\nTo my mother, who bore me,\nwhose compassion waned with her retreating life?\nTo the kingdoms of this world, perhaps, who are always\nmore artful in killing than giving life?\nOr to you, beneficent God, glorified in the highest,\nwho live and give life to all and\nwho after death are able to work incorruptible renewal.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor if we flee, it is you who come after us.\nIf we are weak, you give us strength.\nIf we falter, you set us on the right and easy path.\nIf we faint, you encourage us.\nIf we are ailing in body and soul, you heal us.\nIf we lie, you justify us with your truth.\nIf we stumble into the abyss, you direct us to heaven.\nIf we do not turn from our willfulness, you guide us.\nIf we sin, you weep.\nIf we are just, you smile.\nIf we are estranged, you mourn.\nIf we approach, you celebrate.\nIf we give, you receive.\nIf we become stubborn, you are patient.\nIf we are ungrateful, you grant abundantly.\nIf we quit, you are sad.\nIf we are brave, you rejoice.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe blessed and wonderful Psalm One Hundred Three\ncomforts my failing heart,\nand heralds the good news of the hope of life.\nIt is an assurance of salvation\nthat triumphs over demons and the doubts of\nthe Slanderer.\nIt is like the Lord’s cross, a sign of good fortune,\nglorious and resplendent,\nunshakable in its exalted light,\ninvincible in the strength on high,\nstanding as an irresistible champion,\nunmovable forever\nagainst the immoral ways of Satan’s tyranny.\nFor the discerning soul, it is a treasure of spiritual goods,\nshowing the defeat of death and the absolution\nof sin, plus\ndouble hopes for each, now and eternally.\nIt promises restoration for the righteous.\nIts rules preach goodness and give life as\nwritten by the Spirit of God.\nThe Psalms were songs of everything for\nthe pure in heart: a testament of life, written for all people.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor the Old law was a faint image of the New,\nholding in its bosom good news and assurance\nof the great, blessed victory over death\nand heavenly life like that of the angels forever,\nbeyond telling.\nThey were passing writings and replaceable rules.\nTheir function was to condemn the frailties\nof transgressors,\nand they were to be taken as earthly commitment and\nweak as an intercessor for reconciliation.\nThey leave undone the words of those who prayed.\nAlthough they show the salvation of Manasseh,\nwho after so many unforgivable sins,\nin the trustworthy account of the prophet,\nguilty of spilling the blood of the righteous in\nthe city of his ancestors, a city\nrenowned for its miracles and dedicated to\nthe great king.\nEven the greatest of the seers, his teacher\nand the steward of the estate built by his forebears,\nwas hacked in two by Manasseh with horrific torment.\nAs a symbol of his revolt, cutting off the last\nhope of his salvation,\nhe committed yet another brutal misdeed and still\nhe had the arrogance to enter into unlawful battle with\nthe Most High.\nNever even having respected the honor of the creator\nand having denied the name of him who\ndwells in the altar,\nhe persecuted the spirit of God and pledged\nhimself to Satan.\nAnd that very temple of the Lord,\ndesignated by God for adoration with incense,\nthe most renowned gathering place,\nrevered by the nations as a sacred place,\nwhere angelic visions and triumphant divine signs\nappeared in brilliant revelation.\nIn that place reminiscent of heaven,\nawesome, resplendent,\nhe erected the four-faced idol Kevan as\na competing deity\nturning it into a vile cult center, a wasteland of rubble,\nand altar for satanic sacrifices,\ndispossessing the heavenly king of his regal\ndwelling place,\nstripping the most bountiful of his belongings.\nTransforming the landlord into a vagabond with\nno place to rest,\nhe built a splendid tabernacle to Beelzebub,\nand expelled the awesome name from there.\nTaking the legacy of the praiseworthy hostage,\nwretchedly degrading the stature of the most merciful,\nhe turned the hall of light into a small fox hole\nand for him who holds the world in his hand,\nhe left not even a hut from his own creation to\ncover his head.\nHe tore down the sanctuary of the Holy of Holies,\nwhere the mysteries of blood sacrifice were conducted,\nand in their place installed fortune tellers.\nHe opened many ways to sinfulness.\nLike a shepherd of destruction he led his flock\nto slaughter, a frenzied priest of waywardness.\nAnd all this he did, knowing full well the religion\nof the Laws, having as a father the great King Hezekiah,\nthe likeness of David.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHe was so resourceful in his evil-doing that\nhe blasphemed and contested God’s honor\nwith which he had been granted the glory\nof the kingdom.\nHe butchered the multitude of the pious at prayer,\na traitor to his family, a bane to his associates,\nmurderer of his intimates, killer of his companions,\nhe could not turn toward God, for he had rejected him.\nHe could not remember Abraham,\nfor he had become estranged.\nHe could not pray by Isaac, for he had cursed him.\nHe could not take pride in Israel, for he had been\nbanished from the glory of that name\nof great mystery.\nHe could not sing a song of David,\nfor he had reprimanded him.\nHe could not approach the place of penitence,\nfor he had befouled it.\nHe could not take refuge in the tabernacle of God,\nfor he had replaced it with a molten idol.\nHe could not call to Moses, for his sins\nagainst him were unforgivable.\nHe could not pray to Aaron, for he was\nguilty before him.\nHe could not turn to the group of prophets close at hand,\nfor he had killed them all.\nNevertheless, he was granted forgiveness of sins\nand regained his rule over the kingdom,\nso that you, Lord who does good,\nmight multiply and inspire\npraise beyond words that cannot be silenced,\nthrough the peoples of all nations and\nthe ages of all times,\nso that you might keep the gates of hope open for entry,\nfor the glory of your exaltation\nand as salvation for condemned people like me, to whom\nChrist gives the gift of immortality.\nPraise forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-52": { - "title": "Prayer 52", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nBlessed in holy essence,\nboundless and unchangeable, truly good,\nworthy of adoration, happiness professed\nby all the earth,\nmost complete revelation of persistent hope,\ncompassionate and merciful,\nwithout grudges even for the blinking of an eye\ndespite the sin of many years.\nLord, with a new showering of grace and streams of\nmercy from on high,\nwho delights in pouring forth enlightenment\nmiraculously without end,\nmore abundantly than upon the nations of old\nand who opened and broadened those\nnarrow windows\nthrough which knowledge glimmers as Solomon said,\nfor him, and with him for me, a wretched sinner.\nYou lift the screen which blocked the entry\nof God’s freely given mercy,\nthe good news that was foretold\nin the Old Testament obliquely, for example:\n“Turn toward me and I will turn toward you,”\nand “when you turn and regret, then you shall revive.”:\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor he changes the gloom of twilight\ninto the brightness of snow,\nand people drenched in blood he washes white as wool.\nIn the midst of anger you still remember mercy.\nThe deserted cities of Israel are inhabited anew.\nThe overgrown byways abandoned by men\nare trod again.\nThose wasting from the famine of the soul are restored\nby your hand.\nGod withdrawing in anger, returns in mercy,\ngranting pardon and refuge, and\nin the midst of reprimands grants double protection.\nWith his heartache, he also feels compassionate caring.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe venerable voices of the prophets, foretold\nthe liberating mission of your blessed coming,\nwhich is beyond human telling.\nFor the manifestations of the revelation\nof your good news\nand the salvation of the cross,\nare countless and varied,\nfaint and feeble,\nold and fleeting.\nYou raised your altars everywhere as testimony to\nthe blood of your new covenant,\nwhich echoes more resoundingly\nthan the condemnation of Abel’s murder.\nYour victory in the battle for goodness,\nfor a new, immortal life of grace, baptism, resurrection,\nand renewal,\nfor our kinship with you and union with\nyour Holy Spirit,\nfor forgiveness, liberation, and enlightenment,\nfor eternal purity, true bliss,\nin communion with the angels, in unfading glory,\nis the plea for reconciliation upon our lips voiced by\nour Lord on high.\nAnd what is more awe-inspiring,\nfor it is a monument to your magnanimity: the gift of\ndivine nature by election of your grace,\nuniting us with you, Creator, by partaking of your body\nand sharing in your light of life,\nthe fulfillment of the good promise,\nwhich, in Paul’s words, the Old Law did not have.\nYou, Savior, came with your father’s bounty,\nperfected and fulfilled in perpetuity\nour undiminishing hope in you, Redeemer of all.\nTo you glory with your Father,\nwith praise and blessings to the Holy Spirit,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-53": { - "title": "Prayer 53", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord, Lord almighty, king of all creation,\nblessed mercy, God of all,\nwho surpasses the limits of the widespread expanses,\nyou are the sum of all infinities,\nThe solid is fluid for you, and the fluid solid.\nThere is nothing impossible for you, O terrifying,\ntriumphant power.\nFire is a refreshing mist and rain a consuming flame.\nYou can make a stone into a speaking figure,\nor turn a speaking figure into a breathless statue.\nYou honor the repentant sinner,\nand the seemingly pure you scrutinize justly\nand condemn.\nThose approaching death you release with\nthe joy of grace.\nAnd the humiliated you restore, anointing their faces\nwith cheer.\nYou rescue the one who has stumbled into a snare.\nAnd the one who wavers you set confidently\nupon a rock.\nThe one who is afflicted and sighing you make happy\nAnd the impudent you put in his place.\nAnd when our resources are exhausted\nyou perform the greatest miracles.\nFor you forgive sins and erase our iniquity;\nyou pardon our injustices and forget our sins\nas the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhen I consider, deeply grateful,\nthe grace of your new salvation\nI am dumb struck by its breadth.\nFor this inexhaustible favor of your light,\nwhich you have bestowed upon a stubborn\nwretch like me,\nI shall pray to you with the prayer you taught,\nwhile continuing my writings,\nfilling the leaves of this book of mournful psalms,\nwith grieving and sighs of the heart.\nBut in doing this I have, for the pleasure of the Giver,\nmixed the cure with the pain,\nencouragement with disappointment,\nthe name of our creator with discouragement,\nomfort with sadness,\nthe sweetness of our Savior with my bitterness,\ngrace with the retribution of the Law,\nyour liberating blessing with cursed punishments,\ncomplete renewal with the death of the body.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI believe in your almighty word, hence I bear witness.\nHear the silence of my heart, Lord Jesus, and\nthe great clamor of my voice crying perpetually for you,\nwho came to share our body and our image,\nwho came also\nas a high priest not under the Law, but throwing off the\nyoke of the Law.\nInstead of animal sacrifice, you offered your\nblessed body\nperpetually sacrificed without dying and\nwithout diminishing the pardon you grant,\nnot just for those of few sins,\nbut also for those whose expectation of life is cut off.\nWith these bodies so inclined to sin,\nhow could we reach salvation, even if we tried for\nten thousand years?\nBut you God of all, for this reason,\nwillingly made yourself the sacrifice,\nand suffering death are shared in communion\nfor our pardon.\nNot that you, O fountain of purity, are forced to be\nsacrificed daily; rather you chose it through\nthe Holy Spirit\nand with the approval of the Father for\nour reconciliation.\nYou are continuously sacrificed.\nAnd you, inscrutable God of all,\ntaking on my nature for my sake and in my stead,\nfor my salvation,\nas if I were united and participating in your very being\nthrough your all-embracing body.\nAnd you, benefactor, for me and those like me,\ntaking my sins upon you,\nthough you are sinless, and accepting death,\nwhich was the punishment I, a mortal sinner, deserved,\nand on my behalf bearing guilt,\nso I may suffer with you who\nwillingly dies but remains living.\nYou are offered in the divine mystery and\ndistributed in indivisible parts,\nnot by the hands of those who deny you,\nbut by the faith of those who confess to you.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nA certain pagan priest who had converted\nfrom idolatry\nonce made a weighty decision,\nwith presumptuous expectations for a person\nsuch as he, saying:\n“I believe that with the death of my passing body,\nI will more readily attain glory and bliss\nthrough communion\nthan through martyrdom or even,\nthrough right living, wretch that I am.”\nAnd from his paradoxical observation I concluded\nthat he actually believed, that even the pious,\nwithout partaking in communion,\ncannot be truly fulfilled,\nuntil they are united in spirit through this great mystery.\nWhen he said, “You were sacrificed twice\nfor me a sinner,”\nhe meant, “you truly became me,\nexchanging my vileness with your savor,\nsacrificing your material body,\nthrough the wafer of the life of light.”\nFor these reasons, at the last supper in the upper room,\nat the first partaking of this grace,\nas the cure for incurable diseases,\nhe distributed his body and blood for\nthe forgiveness of sins.\nThis he deemed higher than martyrs’ shedding\ntheir own blood.\nBy this example of hope, he sought to show\nGod gives more weight to this sacrifice of faith,\nthan through other efforts to obtain pardon, mercy or\ngrace.\nSo much greater is the force of the divine compared to\nthe human,\nand the willing sacrifice of the Lord’s body united with\nthe divine,\nthan the offering of animal sacrifices.\nthe immortal, not the mortal,\nthe awesome light, not the shadowy darkness,\nthe eternal, not the passing,\nthe exalted, not the earthly,\nthe uncreated, not the created,\ngoodness in its essence, not corruption by nature,\nespecially since his is the willing and his the\ngiving of life,\nand he is the occasion for blessing, not a cause\nfor cursing.\n\n\n# V.\n\nNow, I pray you, compassionate Lord,\ngrant me, broken in heart and spirit,\nthe salve of life from heaven on high.\nCome sweetly to me, ill with sin.\nPardon my debts, in your omnipotence.\nAnd for my part, the truth and trustworthiness of these\nwords lie in this:\nYou, creator of all, dwell in the saints.\nAnd in the true words of Paul, as we sow,\nso shall we reap.\nAnd, the infirm of sight can not bear the glare of sun.\nBut you, doer of good, who created everything\nfrom nothing,\nlook kindly upon those who truly have believed in you,\ndeeming this enough for salvation.\n\nYou who are not limited by law,\nbut prevail over it, breaking loose from its legalism.\nFor all us sinners in our bewilderment,\nyou remain the only condition for the good news.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nglory and power forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-54": { - "title": "Prayer 54", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, in all and for all, your mercy is hope,\nLord Jesus, the first light of our eyes and our hearts,\nall good deeds, life and immortality are from you.\nTurn with compassion toward me\nand make my soul return to you rejoicing.\nFor without you I cannot be transformed anew,\nand if your will is not in sympathy with me,\nI am unable to save myself since I am condemned\nto death.\nAnd if you, my guide, did not show me the way,\nmarking the footsteps on the path that leads to you,\nI would fall into the abyss on the right and the left.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI am not proud, for I am justly scorned.\nI am not arrogant, for I am blameworthy.\nI am not haughty, for I am abandoned.\nI do not boast, for I am reduced to silence.\nI do not rebel, for I am mocked.\nI do not rejoice, for I am pitiful.\nI do not justify myself, for I am wicked.\nA horse does not go straight without someone\nat the reins,\nnor does a ship sail forth without a helmsman,\nnor does a ploughshare make a furrow\nwithout a plowman,\nnor does a pair of oxen move properly without a driver,\nnor does a cloud float in the sky without the wind,\nnor do the stars appear and disappear without\na scheduler,\nnor does the sun course through the zodiac without\nthe action of air.\nNor do I, like them, do anything except at the pleasure\nof your commandments, doer of good.\nFor you alone give life to thinking beings.\nAnd you alone maintain order in the cycle of creatures.\nAnd you alone are my salvation, as the Psalmist said,\nand you proclaim in joyous voice the good news,\nwhich resounds in the ears of the attentive of all ages--\n“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden,\nand I will give you rest and cleanse you of your sins.”:\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut what does it avail me to be cleansed,\nif I am only to be soiled again?\nAnd what use is taking communion,\nif I am to be damned to Hell?\nOr why should I glory in Abraham,\nif I have strayed from his deeds,\nI, the abominable son of an Amorite father,\nand a Hittite or Canaanite mother,\nin the words of the Prophet, as if written for me.\nI deserve to be the disinherited offspring of\nthe Ethiopian, and not the fruit of Sarah’s womb,\nin the prophet’s words, apt to me.\n\nI am the brother of Samaria and Gomorrah.\nI am a child unwashed and unsalted,\nthe unripe fruit of the unripe womb of Aholah\nand Ahoblibah,\ndoubly condemned by the Prophet Ezekiel.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd like one imperiled on the high seas,\ntossed by waves whipped up by the winds,\nI am in terror and torment,\nswept away by the wild currents,\nclawing with my fingers this way and that to hold on,\nas if borne away in the torrents of a river\nflooding in spring,\nin an involuntary and pitiful downward course.\nGulping water, unable to breathe because of debris\nI have swallowed,\nfoul, slimy, prickly seaweed,\ndragging me into the pangs of death.\nLike a drowning man, carried by the flow,\nI am wretched:\nThey speak, but I do not understand.\nThey call, but I do not hear.\nThey shout, but I do not wake up.\nThey clamor, but I do not budge.\nThey trumpet, but I do not rally.\nI am wounded, but I do not feel.\nLike an abominable idol,\ndevoid of any sense of goodness,\nmy true essence is more evil\nthan this example,\nmore heinous and reprehensible,\ndeserving to be brought before the tribunal of Christ.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAnd since I leave readers this testament\nrecording my misdeeds along the path of no return,\nthat they might pray to God through my words\nday by day,\nmay this book remain as a guide for repentance,\ncontinuously lifted in voice to you, almighty Lord,\nits letters like my body, its message like my soul.\nMay it always be present before you, O boundless God.\nAccept my pleas as from an innocent petitioner,\ncompassionate God, who loves mankind,\nblessed through all eternity.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-55": { - "title": "Prayer 55", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nOn the wings of my soul I have soared\nthrough endless generations of mankind,\nweighing them in the scales of my rational mind.\nI found none my equal in sin.\nTherefore, I have adopted the Psalm of David\nas my theme,\nlike a stern reprimand delivered with the overseer’s staff,\n“Who equals me in my wrongdoing and iniquity?”\nAnd since these words literally apply to me,\na mortal man,\nI again testify against myself under oath,\nroundly condemning myself\nrather than letting others be banished for my words,\nso that perhaps you might pardon me,\nforgiver of my sins.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow, here in this book, what prayers,\nwhat fragrant incense\nshall I offer pleasing and acceptable to you,\nblessed heavenly king Christ?\nIf not a prayer that you bless those I have cursed,\nrelease those I have bound, free the condemned,\ncomfort the outcast, reconcile the antagonized,\nconsole the mournful, heal the afflicted,\ncare for the shunned, protect the betrayed,\nminister to the souls of those whose bodies are wounded.\nThus, when I greet people with blessings, hear me,\nand when with curses, pay no attention,\ncompassionate Lord.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI am most wretchedly tormented,\nthe least of those who pray to you with this book.\nI have forgiven my debtors with all my soul,\nso that you might block the cruel wishes of\nmy spiteful voice.\nAnd on my knees repeatedly, I have prayed,\nwith all my heart, for reconciliation with those who\nhave betrayed me.\nI pray for them along with those who have\nshown kindness.\nFor as you are greater than I,\nmay you visit a comparable portion of mercy upon me,\npraiseworthy guardian,\nyou who are life for mortals like me,\nstrength for the frail,\nmight for the unsteady,\nfountain of wisdom for the stupefied.\nFor I am always stumbling in error,\nlike an inexperienced diver in dark waters,\nunwittingly in the snare of death,\nI did not comprehend the danger.\nI did not recognize the trap.\nI did not see the hidden devices for capturing the quarry.\nI did not suspect camouflaged traps.\nI did not sense the ambush on all sides.\nI did not feel the hostage-taking fishhook net.\nAs the Psalmist said,\n“Evils visited me, and I was unable to recognize them.”:\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd as a certain foreign philosopher aptly said,\n“Evil is death that comes without warning or reason.”\nI shall confirm it in my own case:\nLike dumb cattle,\nwe die, but are not terrified.\nWe perish, but are not astonished.\nWe are buried, but are not humbled.\nWe are shunned, but are not contrite.\nWe are corrupted, but are not regretful.\nWe are worn down, but do not care.\nWe are robbed, but we do not gather ourselves.\nWe proceed, but without precautions.\nWe are enslaved, but are not aware.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThat happy man, Job, called mortal death rest,\nand with that holy man I too would agree,\nhad I not the heavy burden of mortal deeds and\nwere I not on the path of the hidden traps, where\nthe trapsetter is invisible,\nthe present is non-existent,\nthe past unknown, and the future questionable,\nI am impatient and my nature is skeptical,\nmy legs shaky and my mind reeling,\nmy passions are unruly and my habits intemperate,\nmy body is laced with sin and my inclinations toward\nthe worldly,\nmy rebelliousness innate and my character contradictory,\nmy dwelling clay and the rain pelting,\nmy needs innumerable and perils on all sides,\nmy mind fond of evil and my desires hating the good,\nmy life ephemeral and my joys rare,\nmy delusion stupefying and my pastimes childish,\nmy work vain and my pleasures illusory,\nmy hoarding is of nothing and my storehouse filled with\nthe wind,\nmy likeness is of a shadow and my image ridiculous.\nFor when the command came,\nas St. Paul wrote,\nit found me unprepared.\nSin came alive when confronted by justice\nand I died for life and came alive for death.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAs the Good Book foretold\nalien, evil forces, stole the wise treasure of my heart.\nWisdom waned in me, as the Proverb teller says,\nand evil impulses waxed.\nI did not fix the eye of my soul on the head of\nmy life, Christ,\nwho would have led me down the straight path.\nFor in trying to run too quickly, I dug myself in deeper.\nIn trying to reach the unreachable, I failed to reach my\nown level.\nIn pretending to greatness, I slipped from where I was.\nFrom the heavenly path, I sank to the abyss.\nTrying to avoid harm, I was permanently debilitated.\nTrying to be completely pure, I was\ncorrupted completely.\nI dodged to the left, and left myself open from the right.\nChasing the second, I lost the first.\nSeeking the insignificant, I forfeited the important.\nKeeping the small vow, I broke the covenant.\nTrying to break a habit, I picked up a vice.\nAvoiding the petty, I fell prey to the weighty.\nWhat I did, I did to myself,\nwhich is the worst testimony against me.\nOnly you are able to deliver me, a captive slave,\nfrom these things,\nrestoring to life a soul devoted to death.\nFor you alone, Lord Christ, revered doer of good,\nwith the boundless glory of the Father and\nthe Holy Spirit are blessed forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-56": { - "title": "Prayer 56", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAs for the agents of death,\nthe roots of the bitter fruit of the tree of damnation,\nhostile kin, intimate adversaries, traitorous sons, I now\nshall describe them in detail by name.\nThey are\nmy sinister heart,\nmy gossiping mouth,\nmy lustful eyes,\nmy wanton ears,\nmy murderous hands,\nmy weak kidneys,\nmy wayward feet,\nmy swaggering gait,\ncrooked footprints,\npolluted breath,\ndark inclinations,\ndried innards,\nmushy mind,\ninconstant will,\nincorrigible depravity,\nwavering virtue,\nbanished soul,\ndissipated legacy,\nwounded beast,\narrow-struck bird,\nfugitive on the precipice,\napprehended criminal,\ndrowning pirate,\ntreasonous soldier,\nreluctant fighter,\nundisciplined warrior,\nslovenly laborer,\nfaithless worshiper,\nworldly cleric,\nimpious priest,\nofficious minister,\nhaughty clerk,\nderanged sage,\ngrotesque rhetorician,\nimmodest manner,\nshameless countenance,\ninsolent grimace,\nrepulsive tone,\nsubhuman mold,\nlurid beauty,\nrotting meat,\nsickening flavor,\nweed-choked orchard,\nworm-eaten vine,\ngarden of briars,\nrusted ear of corn,\nmouse-infested honey,\nthreadbare outcast,\nhaughty desperado,\nclosed-minded heretic,\nirreconcilable sectarian,\nfast-talking charlatan,\nherd mentality blowhard,\nbrutishly wicked, hellishly greedy,\nunashamedly arrogant,\nfrenzied atheist, assassin ready to strike,\nsower of thorns, woeful contentment,\ndebased majesty, defiled splendor, wasted ability,\nhumbled greatness, trampled glory,\npersistent disobedience, willful error,\nnegligent steward, treacherous adviser, alienated friend,\ncorrupt official, covetous associate,\nstingy boss, crooked supervisor,\nsoul without compassion, wish without charity,\nhateful habit, insatiable appetite,\nimprudent actions, invisible damage,\nsecret curses, antagonizing events,\ncareless merchant, gluttonous exploiter,\ndrunken official, duplicitous treasure warden,\ndissension sowing emissary, sleeping doorman,\nproud beggar, rich ingrate,\ndishonest secretary, untrustworthy custodian,\nback-biting relatives,\ntardy messenger, wayward courier,\nvexing envoy, foolish mediator,\nbanished ruler, feeble king, broken-spirited emperor,\nrogue prince, plundering general,\nbiased judge, capricious rabble,\nfor enemies--cause for snickering,\nfor friends--cause for tears,\nfor writers--cause for reproach,\nfor adversaries--cause for accusation.\nFor though I was indeed called by the highest names,\nby my works I earned the worst of these descriptions.\nThus, these are the multitude of seductive devices,\nwhich I allowed to deceive me in my naiveté or\nI allowed to prevail over me in my weakness,\ncondemning myself willfully to death.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow, which of the things listed above,\nabhorrent to you and devastating for me,\nshall I offer in service to you?\nWhich of these things wrapped in corruption\nshall I present before your holy majesty?\nFor how long will your patience\nbear this many sins?\nHow much will you forgive?\nHow will you remain silent?\nHow will you even bear to listen?\nHow can you spare the rod\nwhen I am worthy of being beaten to death?\nBut you visit the mercy of your light\nin the pitch blackness of the dark side of the soul,\nto cure, pardon and give us life.\nO force that cannot be deterred,\nto you glory in all things,\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-57": { - "title": "Prayer 57", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nChrist God, awe-inspiring name, vision of majesty\ninscrutable image of sublimity, infinite force,\nmodel of the light of salvation, defender of life,\ngate to the kingdom of heavenly rest,\npath of tranquility\nrefuge of renewal that ends sadness,\nalmighty sovereign of all being,\ncall to blessing,\nvoice of good news,\nproclamation of bliss,\nsalve of immortality,\nindescribable son of the one and only God.\nWhat is impossible for me is easy for you.\nWhat is beyond my reach was put there by you.\nWhat is inaccessible for me is close to you.\nWhat is hidden from me in my fallen state\nis within view for your beatitude.\nWhat is impossible for me is done by you.\nWhat is incalculable for me is already tallied by you,\nwho are beyond telling.\nWhat is despair for me is consoling for you.\nWhat is incurable for me is harmless for you.\nWhat is sighing for me is rejoicing for you.\nWhat is heavy for me is light for you.\nWhat effaces me is written for your power.\nWhat is lost for me is conquered for you.\nWhat is inexpressible for me is comprehensible for you.\nWhat is gloom for me is radiance for you.\nWhat is infinite for me you hold in the palm of your\nblessed hand.\nWhat is somber for me is refreshing for you.\nWhat sets me to flight, you withstand.\nWhat holds me in check, you handily turn back.\nWhat is fatal for me is nothing before your\nalmighty essence.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut you, merciful God of all, Lord Christ Jesus,\nif you take pity on me, you can instantly find a way out\nof my predicament.\nFor the sake of the name of the majestic glory of your\nblessed Father,\nfor the sake of the compassionate will of your\nHoly Spirit,\nlook with favor upon this relentless expression of\ncontrition for my wrongdoing\nand the reproach I heap upon myself from the\ndepth of my heart.\nLook upon the distracted unreadiness of my nature.\nGrant healing for my wounds,\nand a way out for me, for I am lost,\ndeliverance from my multiple symptoms of\nimpending death,\nand the path of life, for I am wayward,\nrenewal for me who am corrupt,\nand entry into the light for me who am impious.\nAnd if I have displayed unprecedented will,\nhow much more will you show your\ncharacteristic goodness?\nAnd if a sweet fruit came forth from a thorn bush,\nhow much sweeter is the taste of immortality from\nthe tree of life?\nIf I begged for mercy for those who hate me,\nhow would you not grant me, one of yours,\na second portion, Almighty, of your\nundiminishing abundance?\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, look at your greatness, Lord most high,\nand then look at my smallness.\nAccept this meager confession of my innumerable sins,\nyou who see everything in its totality.\nAnd as you overlooked the fall of the Rock,\nmay you ignore my vacillation, a small grain of sand.\nAnd as you immediately pardoned him for his sins,\nwhen David said “I have sinned,”\nmay you do the same with your long-suffering\nforbearance for the voice of my sighing heart,\nwhich you grant to all generously and fairly\nmerciful creator of all.\nLike a good and judicious conqueror,\nwho does not disdain me, the least of your captives,\nyou did not destroy me, but renewed me,\nwho am sustained by your blood, compassionate Lord.\nFor yours is salvation, from you is pardon,\nand to you is befitting glory in all things forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-58": { - "title": "Prayer 58", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord Jesus, blessed with the Father,\nby favor of your Holy Spirit and\nall who are blessed through your blessedness,\nblessed only son of the blessed,\nno other king other than you, Christ, rules\nover my breath.\nAs the prophet Isaiah said,\nthe blessing of Jacob will come when I\nlift away his sins.\nNow, have mercy upon me, Lord, with lovingkindness,\nas you did in the past\nand bless me, your speaking, thinking vessel,\nas you did the voice of David and Moses,\nby the visitation of your word of salvation.\nMay I receive pardon with your blessing.\nMerciful heavenly ruler,\nwork a miracle upon me divinely,\nas you did for those gathered in the hall in Bethesda,\nwho were bedridden for many years.\nAmong them was a person,\na paralytic who had been stricken for thirty-eight years,\nwhom you did not refuse to heal by laying on of hands,\neven when knowing of the incurable malice\nthat awaited you on the day of your betrayal,\non the bitter night of the battle against the Lord,\nour assurance, great and beneficent.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLord, though you admonished him,\n“Do not sin so that nothing worse befalls you.”\nBut that did not deter him from being one of the first\nof the cruel accusers to condemn you to the cross.\nAnd for such a crippled, bewitched, ill-fated man,\nbrought to his knees by death, you took pity.\nLord, you are goodness beyond telling,\nwonder-filled human kindness,\nastonishing forgiveness, perplexing forbearance,\nunending sweetness, glorious mildness.\nYou, over whom compassion prevails, but\ndo not feel restrained.\nYou are overwhelmed by mercy, but are not blamed.\nYou are constrained by human kindness, but\nare not disdained.\nYou are compelled by goodness, but are not cursed.\nYou act out of love, but are not ridiculed.\nYou seek my return to you, but do not grow weary.\nYou run after me in my obstinacy, but do not give up.\nYou call out to me though I do not listen, but\ndo not lose patience.\nYou rush after me in my sloth and are not stopped.\nIn the face of my evil, you are good.\nIn the face of my total indebtedness, you are forgiving.\nIn the face of my sinfulness, you are indulgent.\nIn the face of my darkness, you are light.\nIn the face of my mortality, you are life.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThis is the message of all the books inspired for\nour benefit,\nwhich often bear heavenly fruits, indescribable\nand amazing.\nSay to me also, wretched soul that I am, Lord, blessed\nand revered in all ways,\n“Arise, take the bed of your infirmity, the place of\nyour destruction, and go to the tranquil repose of\nthe life without toil.”\nSever, with the omnipotent sword of your\ncommanding word,\nthe wrappings of the grave that hold me in the\nbonds of the underworld.\nRelease me from the strangling noose that brutally\ndemands my soul.\nDeliver those deserving death to the liberation of\nunending bliss on high\nby your life-giving and divine word.\nDo not hesitate, do not delay day by day,\nso the heavy burden of sin does not break my back,\nand destroy me, bend me downward, looking to hell,\nso that the haughty one with tyrannical violence\ndisarms my spiritual defenses and turns me into\na slave of death.\nCome to my aid, good Lord who suffered\nwith us the pangs of death’s torment.\nHaving lifted from me the cross of perdition,\nas you did once from the shoulder of the guard,\nto erect the fitting monument to your courageous might,\nwith steadfast faith and unshakable hope to be nailed to\nyou inseparably.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit, glory and\ndominion, forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-59": { - "title": "Prayer 59", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nI believe and bear witness in sound mind,\nthrough the insights of my soul and\nthe visions of my conscience inspired by you,\nthat for you, doer of good, the prayers of a sinner are\nmore desirable than the petitions of the just.\nFor the first, baring the defeated soul, awaits your grace\nand being well acquainted with the limits of\nhuman nature,\nrises up like a stern accuser,\na combatant bent on self-mortification,\na bitter critic and prosecutor who sees secrets.\nWhereas the second, looking upon his good works,\nplaces the hand of confidence on his soul,\nforgets the limitations of his nature\nand awaits rewards, rather than mercy\nFor that reason, the first is the subject of\ninnumerable accounts trumpeting your mercy,\nand the second has been passed over in silence,\nO inscrutable, awesome, and all-caring Lord!\nI shudder at the thought that my accounts,\nthe accounts of a mere mortal go too far.\nSo come Lord, do not let the gestures of a human hand\nseem grander than yours.\nDo not let your mercies be meted out in mortal measure.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut those who have healthy organs are not in need of\na physician’s care,\nand those who with good vision have no need of a guide,\nand those who are well off do not beg at\nthe doors of the wealthy,\nand those who are well fed do not wait for crumbs of\nbread from the table,\nand those who lead a saintly life are not needy of mercy,\nso heavenly Lord almighty on high, take mercy on me,\na tormented wretch,\nfor if I were like Job,\nI would say my soul was upright and pure like his.\nAnd if I were like Moses,\nI would confidently say with him,\n“The Lord recognizes his own.”\nAnd if I were like David, I would say,\n“I have done judgment and justice.”\nAnd again in words that exceed our physical nature:\n“If I see sin in my heart, may the Lord not hear me.”\nIf I were like Elijah, I would call myself a man of God.\nIf I were like Jeremiah, I would emulate your truth\nin my soul. If I were like Hezekiah, I would proudly\nsay, with justification, “I walked before you\nwith righteousness.”\nOr if I were like Paul, I would call myself\nthe dwelling place, oracle and receiver of God’s word.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut I, lawless despite knowing the law,\nnot only cannot present my soul to you,\nwith respectful words like them, I cannot even\nmention myself, who am totally corrupt,\nto you in the same breath as these good souls,\nfor my impious tongue is not worthy to utter your name\npraised by all creation.\nBut you, who are capable of everything,\ngrant me the spirit of salvation,\nthe sheltering right arm,\nthe helping hand,\nthe command of goodness,\nthe light of mercy,\nthe word of renewal,\nthe cause of pardon,\nand help of the staff of life.\nFor you are the hope of refuge, Lord Jesus Christ,\nblessed with the Father and Holy Spirit,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-60": { - "title": "Prayer 60", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLong ago I learned that blessings\nshould not come from the mouth of a sinner,\ntherefore, how can I, even regretfully,\ncontinue saying Psalms in worship\nthat earn only scorn for me?\n\nHow shall I praise my injuries and build monuments\nto my disgrace while gathering thorns in my bare chest\ninstead of lilies?\n\nHow shall I dare to say with David:\n“You have broken the teeth of the ungodly.”\nOr “The wicked shall dwell before your eyes.”\nOr “Judge me, Lord, according to your righteousness,\naccording to the integrity that is in me.”\nOr “Let wickedness be visited upon the sinful.”\nOr “Break the arms of the sinner and wicked,”\nand all that follows.\nOr “Upon the wicked he shall rain snares,\nfire and brimstone.”\nOr “The Lord shall cut off flattering lips and the boasting\ntongue.”\nOr “You have tested my heart and found no iniquity.”\nOr the next verse, “My steps have held fast\nto your path.”\nOr “I shall behold thy face in righteousness.”\nOr “I was upright before him.”\nOr the next verse, “The Lord paid me according to my\nrighteousness and the cleanness of my hands.”\nOr how can I cover up my lies, yet say with the holy,\n“I wash my hands in innocence.”\nOr wallowing in baseness brag, “I do not consort\nwith the impious.”\nOr proudly put on a happy face, pathetic though I am,\nand say, “Vindicate me, Lord, for I have\nwalked in integrity.”\nOr I, the stranger to goodness, beg you,\nknower of secrets,\n“Do not count my soul among the wicked.”\nOr when cursing others although I deserve cursing,\nI dare say, “Requite them, Lord, according\nto their works.”\nAnd shall I dare continue?\n\n\n# II.\n\nIf I should add to the previous verses,\nmy grief would double, my bitterness multiply.\nMy tears dammed up within me, daily seek\nthe comfort of the familiar scolding voice of the Psalms,\naccusing me.\nIf I add the last part of Psalm fifty,\nwhich dooms me as abominable,\ngags my speech and exposes my guilty soul\nto the prosecuting voice of God,\nhope of life is lost.\n\nI am pelted from the ramparts by deadly missiles.\nIt is a misfortune to be cursed by others, but\nit is worse to curse oneself. And if it is hard to be\nreproached by friends, how much more chilling,\nalarming and tormenting to be exposed before\nthe one who sees all.\n\nBut if one surrenders to humiliation and lashes\none’s soul with the reproaches of one’s own tongue,\none earns the blessings of the glorious and all-powerful\nLord for expressing one’s return to him\nwithout covering the traces of the past,\nfor the sake of love he cut the root of our\ntransgressions, undeterred by nay-sayers.\nThe sheep of Christ’s flock have found\nthe cure, the balm for their inner wounds.\n\nYet amidst green pastures blooming\nwith life-giving counsel, intelligent beings\nirrationally and willfully choose\nto graze in poisonous fields of delusion.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd now, since this reprimand suits me exactly\nand describes the evil situation\nwhere I myself fuel the consuming fire\npoured from on high upon my head,\nthe organ of thought.\n\nWhat did I profit from the Psalms,\nwhen I remained fruitless despite my repeated chants,\nfailing to sing with my soul as instructed by Paul?\nHow shall I mix our Lord’s words with those\nof the Prophet?\nHow can I, the greatest of sinners, the pinnacle\nof neediness,\nsay with the Saint, “Get away, you workers\nof iniquity”?\nOr how shall I, who has not fulfilled any of the multitude\nof commandments relating to grace or the law,\ncry with the happy man who has practiced all he\npreached, saying,\n“For I, your servant, have kept these commandments”\nand the words that follow?\n\nHow shall I, who am devoid of life’s wisdom,\npraise the Lord with the God-fearing?\n\nAnd how shall I add my prayer to that of the great one,\nwho said, “I sought but one thing from the Lord,\nto behold his splendor and to serve in his temple”?\n\nHow shall I seek what I am deprived of,\nwhen I hear, “It is fitting to bless the upright”?\n\nHow shall I curse my soul with my own lips, saying,\namong other things, “The gaze of the Lord is\nupon evil doers, whose memory shall be wiped\nfrom the face of the earth”?\n\nOr again in another verse,\n“The evil soon shall perish”?\n\nOr as in my case,\n“The arms of the wicked shall be stricken”?\n\n\nOr how can I pray for my destruction,\n“Behold how the sinners perish”?\n\nHow shall I utter these blessed words with\nmy unruly tongue: “I shall guard my way so that\nI do not sin with my tongue”?\n\nHow shall I boast with the innocent when I choke\non thorns of sin: “But you have upheld me because of\nmy integrity”?\n\nHow shall I, a sinner deserving double punishment,\ncomplain: “Deliver me, O God, from deceitful and\nunjust men”?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHow shall I dare say with David,\nas if I am not a hypocrite and idolator,\n“Have we forgotten the name of our God,\nor spread our hands in prayer to a strange god”?\nFor only one laid low in the baseness of sin,\nerects bestial statues and images,\ninciting infidelity and harlotry such as the statues to\nfemale Ashtoreth, Chemosh, the male Milcom, and\nthe vile Tharahad, with lewd, naked parts like donkeys.\n\nHow then shall I not be ashamed to pray with the martyr\nwho always held fast to the good:\n“For your sake we are slain all day long,”\nand the rest of this psalm?\n\nHow can I, the most foolish and perverse of humans,\nsay: “My mouth shall utter wisdom,\nand my heart, understanding”?\n\nHow can I, a flattering hypocrite, wish\nfor the bones of sycophants to be scattered?\n\nHow shall I recall the twice-repeated blessing\nof the Psalmist: “May I walk before God in\nthe land of the living”?\n\nHow shall I with my countless sins say:\n“I have no sin or transgressions,\nI walk without sin and am upright”?\n\nOr how shall I condemn myself by saying:\n“Spare none of those who treacherously plot evil”?\n\nHow shall I say: “Like candle wax melts in the fire,\nso sinners, before the face of God”?\n\n\n# V.\n\nHow shall I, who have indulged in mortal vices, utter:\n“I have humbled myself with fasting,”\nor in the similar, “When they were sick, I wore sackcloth,\nand bowed down as in mourning and grief”?\n\nHow shall I remain calm,\nwhen the punishment facing my ilk looms before me:\n“All wicked of the earth shall drink it\ndown to the dregs of God’s unceasing wrath,”\nand “He will cut off the horns of the wicked”?\n\nHow shall I mock Jacob’s ingratitude,\nwhen I myself embrace shadows as the truth\nand succumbing to their charms,\nforget Christ’s salvation through the divine\nmiracle of the cross, this being more condemnable\nthan failing to recognize the miraculous power of\nthe Moses’ rod,\ngiven us as assurance of divine providence?\n\nHow shall I point to the perils of attacking demons,\nas if they are foreign barbarians, saying:\n“They have given the bodies of the righteous among us\nas food to the birds,” that is, to the demons of the air?\n\nHow can I claim that the alliance of my will with evil\ncan be holy, when it is “like the seed of the word\nfallen by the wayside”?\n\nHow can I name those holy who pursue the hostile path\nof wickedness, namely the rebellious conflicts of my\ncamouflaged mind, in collaboration with the devices of\nthe Slanderer?\n\nAnd for these reasons I cannot pray, “God, be not silent,\ndo not hold your peace,” or “They have plotted against\nyour holy people and said …”?\n\nFor it is quite proper that through these words\nwe recognize the virulence of demons and their cohorts,\ncausing trouble at every turn.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nProtect us, Lord Christ, exalted son of great God.\nFortify and surround us with your heavenly host,\ndefend us from the gusting winds of the Deceiver\nwith your cross of light.\nFor although any number of offenses may be found\nin me, blasphemy is not among them.\nFor you were not gratified by\nthe destruction of the impious likes of me.\nRather with melancholy tenderness,\nyou are doubly aggrieved by the destruction\nof the iniquitous in the flood,\nconsidering their death intolerable and repugnant,\nand saying in your heart the amazing words:\n“I shall never again curse the earth because of the\ndeeds of man.”\nAnd you are greatly consoled and rejoice in\nthe deliverance of unclean men worthy of destruction,\nas in the parable of the plant that shaded Jonah,\nwhere you spared those deserving of destruction,\nO merciful Lord.\nAnd in another instance how greatly were you annoyed\nby the delay of the rain which would salvage those\nwho denied you.\nAnd in your last days you did great deeds\nbeyond telling, worthy of celebration,\ncommanding your disciples to spread your sweet\ngospel of peace to the Gentiles and all peoples far and\nwide.\nSprinkle upon me the dew of your compassionate\nfatherly love, living God, so I too may find salvation\nthrough the pardoning of my sins by your abundant\nmercy.\nAnd to you, with the Father through the Holy Spirit,\nglory forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-61": { - "title": "Prayer 61", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nTo what end should I recite the Psalms,\nto what purpose sing them daily\nwith the harp of my voice when\nin unison they condemn and curse me?\n\nHow can I adopt the persona of\nthe happy Psalmist, to say with him,\nwhen I am doomed, “let perverseness\nbe far removed from my heart”?\n\nHow disconcerting are the many virtues\nascribed to kings, militant prophets\nand commanders of the Old Law,\ndescribed in terms befitting the angels?\n\nHow can I recite them without\ndespondence at my life,\nI the preacher of the good news,\nI disciple of the New Covenant,\nwhen I am devoid of those virtues?\n\nHow can I, in the manner of the righteous,\n“Be armed to destroy the wicked at dawn,”\nand always be ready and vigilant as told in the parable,\nwhen I have not tamed and disciplined my own body?\n\nHow can I emulate the great valor of David\nand cleanse the Lord’s city of the unrighteous,\nwhen I have not uprooted the shortcomings from\nmy own soul?\n\nHow can I lie to one who writes what has not yet been\nrevealed, saying “I have eaten ashes like bread”?\nHow can I who have not mixed one tainted drop\nof my remorse with the pure springs of the\nPsalmist’s eyes, say with him, “I have mingled my drink\nwith tears” and “I have drenched my bed with tears”?\n\nHow can I confess my mortal sins,\nwhen he who loved God with all his heart,\nassumed the sins of his forefathers as his own,\nsaying, “We have sinned with our fathers\nand have done wickedly,”\nwhile all that follows is more rightly written\nfor me than for Israel.\n\nHow can I be counted among the good,\nwhen I have not used those remedies\nconsidered effective by human lights--\nfasting to the point of death,\nand frequent mortification of the flesh until the\nbody is spent--as practiced even by the Jews and the\npagans according to their religions?\n\nWhy then should “my righteousness endure forever,”\nwhen I have done nothing to attain it?\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut so that I do not become tedious and long-winded,\nlet me compress my words,\nwords I say echoing the blessed David\nin his inspired voice, “I seek you with all my heart.”\n\nHow shall I say with him something greater than this,\n“I hold back my feet from every evil way”?\n\nHow shall I add this to what has already been said,\n“I have laid up your word in my heart so that I might not\nsin against you”?\n\nHow shall I express my emptiness as if it were fullness\nalong with the saints, saying, “Through your precepts I\nget understanding; therefore I hate every false way”?\n\nHow shall I place my lies beside the true vows\nof the meek, pledging fidelity, saying, “I have sworn\nto observe your righteous ordinances”?\n\nHow can I repeat the verdict of the angel of death,\n“Salvation is far from the wicked”?\n\nHow shall I, who am truly wicked, put myself\namong the good, who receive their just reward from the\nLord, repeating, “Do good, O Lord, to those who ar\nupright in their hearts”?\n\nHow shall I, who have strayed, sentence myself justly,\n“But those who go off on their crooked ways,\nthe Lord will lead away with evildoers”?\n\nHow shall I so ashamed, cloak myself in pious dignity,\nsaying, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,\nmy eyes are not raised too high,”\nand the verses that follow?\n\nAnd how shall I, who has laid up my treasure in hell,\ntake words beyond human understanding\nas a sign of encouragement to the weary,\nand say with the anointed of God,\n\n“Even before a word was on my tongue you knew,\nO Lord, there was no cunning in it,”\nand the rest of this psalm from its first letter to the last?\n\nHow shall I, who conspire with miscreants,\na condemned man and depraved son, call out,\n“Do I not hate them that hate you, Lord,”\nand the verses that follow?\n\nHow shall you, my soul, the most pitiful in the world,\nwith the confidences of that sublime soul,\noffer your spirit without condemnation\nand presume to boast with him who has earned\nhis halo, saying,“Test me, Lord, and see if there is any\niniquity upon my hands,” and all that follows?\n\nHow shall I, being what I am, pray to be\ndelivered from evil and join my voice with those who\nhope in God, saying, “Guard me, Lord, from the hands\nof the wicked and preserve me from violent men”?\n\nHow shall I arise to pray with worthy David saying,\n“You are my refuge and my portion in the land of\nthe living”?\n\nHow shall I pray as if I had been in combat with evil,\nto offer the prize of victory to God the king,\nrepeating these unreasonable expectations,\n“The righteous will surround me;\nfor you will deal bountifully with me”?\n\n\n# III.\n\nHow blessed is the spiritual message of the Psalmist,\nwhich recalls our Lord’s own act of rebuffing his tempter,\ndespising all others and preferring only the first cause of\nall creation, saying, “Happy the people whose\nGod is the Lord!”\nHow sublime the exaltation of grace\nexpressed with prudent forthrightness, inspired by\nheavenly goodness, “Your saints shall bless you!”\n\nHow great the desire for the intimate kinship\nof spiritual communion\nto hope in God and built upon him\nin the joyous words of the psalm,\n“The Lord fulfills the desire of all who fear him,”\nfrom which the Psalmist concludes:\n“The Lord preserves all who love him,\nbut the wicked he will destroy.”\n\nThus, in the last chapters of songs of praise,\nthe Psalmist puts the just and unjust\non notice of their fates, repeating\nthe themes that grow out of and resonate with\neach other:\n“The Lord lifts up the downtrodden,\nhe casts the haughty to the ground.”\n\nWhat calamity, then, awaits me if,\n“the Lord takes pleasure in his holy people,\nand adorns the humble with victory.”\nWhere shall I stand?\n\nAnd if “God is blessed among the saints as Lord,”\nwhere do I fit, a stranger to saintliness?\nAnd if next to those other warnings\nI set the reminder,\n“Love the Lord, all you his saints!\nThe Lord preserves the faithful,\nbut punishes the haughty.”\nIn what camp do I find myself,\ncaptivated by the clever inventor of evil?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor like the leaves of the cedar tree\nwavering in the tempest, which stream down\nin the battering winds,\nso too the evil spirit tries to break\nthe fruitful branches of my life’s upward striving,\nshaped by your nurturing hand, O uncreated God.\n\nRestore these broken branches and\nlet them take root in the field of life\nunder the care of your good will,\nwith a new fruitful innocence.\nO Christ King, who\nbestows all good gifts,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-62": { - "title": "Prayer 62", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, why should I not add to the Psalms I have quoted\npassages from the Prophets?\nBut what pleasure is there from nourishment\nif my sense of taste is numbed by pain as I eat?\nAnd what advantage can I derive from the Psalms\nif I cannot take them to heart?\nFor I curse myself with them, but I do not know it.\nI am cleansed, but I do not glisten.\nThe sun dawns, but I am not enlightened.\nI eat honey but am not sweetened.\nI am filled with balm but am not cured.\nI rise early for prayers each day and return\nempty handed.\nI am mocked endlessly but never learn.\nI am warned but do not come to my senses.\n\n\n# II.\n\nTruly, my sin and lawlessness dwell in me\nand I am worn away by them,\nas the Prophet said of the transgressors,\nand the Lord taught in the parable\nof the new wine in old casks.\nFor as Isaiah foretold,\n“Rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together.”\nAnd the same is in store for me, wretch that I am,\nfor I recite the psalm, “The Lord abundantly requites\nthose who act haughtily,”\nto which I link the prophecy,\n“The Lord has a day against all who are proud\nand haughty,” when I recite,\n“The wicked go astray from the womb …”\nand I add, “Let the wicked of the earth be destroyed”\nand “the haughty be wiped from the earth”\nand “the unjust shall be uprooted from the earth.”:\n\n\n# III.\n\nWeep for me when you read,\n“As the tongue of fire devours the dry grass,\nso shall sinners be consumed in the furious flames.”\nWeep for me also at the psalm, saying,\n“Let burning coals fall upon them.”\nAnd pray I might be pardoned from divine judgment,\nforetold by the Prophet, “If you refuse to heed me,\nyou shall be devoured by the sword.”\n\nWeep at this psalm:\n“Death shall be their shepherd.”\nPrepare salty tears mixed with the sighs of my heart,\nwhen the Lord on high says to me, along\nwith Israel, “My people did not listen to me.”\n\nSigh “alas!” for me, when another Prophet says the same:\n“Woe to them, for they have strayed from me!”\n\nTrumpet the words of the heart, heavy before crying,\nwhen God who sees all puts me to shame,\nreprimanding me with the insolent house of Jacob,\n“Look, you, wicked nations, and see; wonder and\nbe astounded.”:\n\n\n# IV.\n\nO great God, reconsider and withhold the terrible\nsword of your righteous anger,\nmenacingly raised over me.\nI am fear-stricken before you\nas you extend the bounteous care of\nyour right hand over me.\nBestow the anointing oil of life\nupon your supplicant. And glory to you\nin heaven on high, and from mortals\non earth below, throughout all the nations\nand reaches of the earth,\nforever,\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-63": { - "title": "Prayer 63", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nOne and only king, compassionate, long-suffering,\ndoer of good who loves mankind,\nhonored with your Father and praised as the Lord of all,\nSon of the living God, never the cause of\nmy destruction,\nwho is not tempted by evil,\nwho does not seek the death of a sinner,\nwho offers salvation by your will,\nwho turns the storm of sin into the breeze of pardon,\nand transforms the fire of anger into rain,\n\nwho turned the woman that looked back from\nyour goodness, into a single statue with two natures,\nplacing her neither with the just nor unjust,\n\nwho transformed the liquidity of the sea,\ninto a wall of stone,\n\nwho caused a stream to spring and flow\nlike a waterfall from the hard rocks of the desert,\n\nwho stopped the rushing waters of the Jordan\ninto a pool for cleansing the pagans\nand fortified the walls of Jericho\nsymbolizing the destruction of Satan’s tyranny,\ndemolished by you as if it were straw,\n\nwho sweetened the poisonous waters\nwith miraculous salts, as a metaphor\nfor the conversion of evil to good,\nthat is, the salvation of the Canaanites,\n\nwho turned the bitter waters of Marah,\nthe symbol of disbelief,\ninto drinkable water with the staff of life\nthat you shouldered,\n\nwho took colorless water from the river\nand made it red as blood,\n\nwho transformed the rod into a serpent\nto prefigure your taking of our nature\nand to show how Gentiles might join the elect,\n\nwho with the blessed right hand of Moses\nforetold both your incarnation,\nO Lord on high, and through your grace,\nthe cleansing of my corrupt body\nthrough an immutable transformation,\n\nby these great signs, you have foretold\nthe rescue of long lost sinners\nby the caring art of your love,\nblessed and compassionate Lord.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAlmighty Lord, you who make the lifeless seed sprout\ngreen from the earth,\nwho make the roots of the immobile tree move,\nwho call those born of the unexalted womb,\nin your image,\nwho give children teeth to chew,\nwho make the beard grow,\nwho turn the black foliage of hair into snow,\nshowing that you reign over all.\n\nYou who transform the natural movements of the lips,\nin the words of Job, into meaningful expressions,\nwho shake the earth and its pillars from\ntheir foundations, showing that through all creation,\nonly you are indestructible.\n\nYou who vary the elements in their passing states\nand combine them in stable compounds,\nshowing that for the multitude of sins\nyou are likewise able to remember and forgive.\n\nYou train the inanimate dawning sun as if in a bridle,\nshowing you can, if you wish, tame\nthe evil impulses of nature.\n\nAnd you regulate the speechless globe of the moon\nso that it is empty or full,\nproviding illuminating hope to on-lookers\nthat you are able to restore a sinful body\ndepleted of goodness\nto its original state of innocent fullness.\n\nYou who gather and scatter the speechless constellations,\nlike a flock of sheep, symbolic of the hope\nof life that you, Lord, with your sweet providence\ndispense in your abundant mercy\neven to the slow of tongue who do not petition you.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou who chart the safe path on the sea\nbetween death and life, testifying that even\nin that perilous place we are protected through you.\n\nYou who, when the water is boiling in the cauldron\nlike a furious storm of sin, calm it with the word\nof your will.\n\nYou, whose mere glance toward the earth\ncauses tremors, rouse the animals to alert\nthe thinking beings.\n\nYou who shake the limitless density of the land\nlike a small sailboat tossing on the waves,\nby which you put all creatures on notice\nthat you are decisively in control,\nholding the whole world in your hand.\n\nYou who sow dead bodies in the earth,\nkeep them whole and bring them to life again,\nreceiving the perishable create the eternal,\nwho join the spark of life with mortal matter,\nwho with but an utterance created the entire universe\nin an instant and adorned its barrenness in every way.\nYours is the strength and the power,\nthat varies the seasons of the year,\neach with its fitting splendor.\n\nYou who command the unspeaking things as if\nthey were alive,\nyou who by merely giving the signal set them\ninto motion,\nyou alone weave the daylight and darkness with your\ncreative art that is beyond telling.\nYou who after the first order of creation\nstill performed miracles to the amazement\nof blessed Job.\nYou fashioned yet more permanent creations,\nand during your incarnation performed other\ncelebrated acts without number.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nYou who took our transgressions upon yourself,\nyou who graced us with your righteousness,\nyou who offered yourself as the ransom of\nour reconciliation,\nyou who never abandoned mercy,\nturn the impious toward good, God-fearing works,\nthe stupefied toward the sobriety of a vigilant heart,\nthe impure toward the holiness of shining character,\nthe sinners toward the purity of the tranquil\nsaintly nature,\nthe broken toward wholeness impervious to accidents,\nthe weeping toward the joy of unclouded bliss,\nthe hopeless toward the love of union,\nthe embarrassed toward firmness,\nthe people who live in darkness toward the light of\nendless joy,\nthe captives of death toward life incorruptible.\nFor your name is glorified, Lord Jesus,\nprofessed in all ways with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nin heaven on high and on earth below\namong all the inhabitants therein,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-64": { - "title": "Prayer 64", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nIn everything and toward everything you are upright,\nO God.\nYou judge justly and weigh fairly.\nYou measure truly and dispense blessings.\nYou act with goodness and uphold steadfastness.\nYou seek clarity and embrace enlightenment.\nYou admonish with experience and examine\nwith forbearance.\nYou are without guile and arrogance,\nbut in all things show gentleness, tranquility\nand compassion.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou showed your justice, heavenly wisdom of\nthe Father’s unchanging genius,\nwhich those adopted by grace confirm through\nthe witness of their unstinting praise.\nAs told in the holy sayings of the Gospel,\n“They wailed, but I did not mourn,\nthey played their flutes, but I did not dance.”\n\nYou advised me in my lawlessness, “Do not\nbreak the law,” but I persisted in errant ways.\n\nTo me a sinner, you said, “Do not lift your horn,”\nbut I opposed you. Oblivious and wayward,\n\nI never noticed that you lift and lower the\nroyal trumpets, as told by Habakkuk,\nDavid and Zechariah.\nYou wanted blessings for me, merciful Lord,\nbut I lean toward the damnation I deserved.\nI preferred anger to calm,\ngroping in darkness without light,\nas the Scripture says,\nI answered your compassionate voice with impudence.\n\nThrough Isaiah you said, “Even the worm is immortal,\nthe fire unquenchable,” the condemnation unending,\nthe place eternal, the image terrifying.\nAs in the words of the Psalmist, I neither heeded\nnor understood, but walked in the darkness of\nintellectual blindness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThrough prophecy you revealed, “he who upholds\nthe law shall be blessed,”\nwhile I was quick to cut corners.\nLord Jesus, you raised David with his writing,\nas a spiritual monument, a rock inscribed by you,\nwhile he, one of the elect, said,\n“I shall keep your law at all times,”\nand repeated, “forever and ever” for good measure.\nBut I, despite these words of warning and\nencouragement, was unmoved.\nI rushed to worship Baal instead of God,\nas Elijah said in his satirical admonition,\nI stumbled along the path of doubt,\nbeing of two inclinations, then\nI abandoned the right.\n\nI have the example of Moses with his laws\nreturning from the dead and I have the\nletters of the prophets, written on the tablet of my heart\nand the books of the apostles as bindings on\nmy fingers.\n\nAnd you, Lord of all, through your good news,\nyou raised countless dead from the grave,\nstill I remained on the blacksmith’s anvil,\ninert, with a heart of stone,\nmore disbelieving than the five brothers of\nthat rich man, who in that apt parable,\nwere as numb with gluttony as Belial,\nyet I was unrepentant.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBut grant your mercy nevertheless upon\nmy forsaken self, good king, who inspires awe,\nloves humanity and cares for his people,\nliving and holy Lord who always\nenlightens us by the power of the mystery of\nyour exalted cross.\nIn my barren fields, hardened by sin,\nfilled with folly, with fruitless heart,\nI am still sustained by your compassion, Almighty.\nMy soul shall be refreshed with springs of water\nand my sore eyes quenched with streams of tears,\noffered for purification and salvation and released\nby your acceptance, all-giving Lord, who is\nglorified forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-65": { - "title": "Prayer 65", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, I foremost among the impious and\nchief among sinners, the leader among the unjust,\nthe first among debtors, the epitome of a criminal,\nthe Attica of vice, not of virtue,\nhave dared to say what is unspeakable:\nI have boasted of my humiliation,\nI have exposed my secrets,\ndisclosed what I have covered up,\nshown what I have hidden,\nspread what I have stored up,\nsplattered the gall of my bitterness,\ndivulged my collaboration with the evil one,\nsqueezed my pus-filled wound,\nacknowledged the abyss of my sins,\nput on the mask of hypocrisy,\nlifted the veil from ugliness,\nstripped away the clothes from shamefulness,\nlaid open my baseness,\nthrown up the dregs of death,\nrevealed the abscessed wounds of my soul to you,\nChrist high priest.\n\nNot sparing my soul from peril,\nnot conceding to the love of my body,\nI examined down to the oldest roots.\nShowing no leniency for the human condition,\ncutting my tie with the brotherhood,\ndestroying the castle of my heart,\nI struggled with the stalking of my desires, as if\nambushed by death, laying open the storehouse\nof secrets,\nsetting forth before great God this hoarded treasure,\nappearing before the judge as a prosecutor,\nforeseeing the ominous things to come,\nbreaking my pact with the Devil,\nI recanted my vows to the Deceiver.\nI took refuge in you, Lord Jesus, for a victorious end to\nthis battle, marshalling the troops for war,\nplacing my hope in the word of God to fend off attacks,\nI delivered the forces of darkness to those\narmed with light.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, Christ, maker of all creation,\nSon of God on high,\nI have been blamed with these words,\nand struck with these blows,\nplease do not reproach me again at the Last Judgment,\nyou, who are our immortal, almighty king, who does\ngood in ways we cannot understand or express.\nDo not reproach me with my self-abasement and\nself-accusatory humiliation,\nby which I of my own volition condemned\nmyself relentlessly,\nand through this book of psalms confront the face of\nSatan with his shame,\nand strengthen the stamp of your cross upon my face,\nwretch that I am.\nLet the glow of your seal add luster to my countenance,\nthe sign of your steadfastness be stamped upon my face,\nthe shape of your cross be fixed upon my cheeks,\nthe glory of your miraculous work be marked\nupon my forehead,\nthe luster of your seal not be taken from me,\nthe radiance of your blessing not fade from the\nsight of my eyes,\nthe token of your assurance not be removed\nfrom my head,\nthe glory of your scripture not waver upon the firm\nthreshold of my mouth,\nyour praiseworthy armor shield the sentiments\nof my heart,\nyour four-winged radiance spread through the four\nelements of my being,\nthe power of your cross of salvation come to the aid of\nmy outstretched hand, and\nmay the sanctity of your valor realize the goodness\nof the offering for which my hands were made.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhen I depart this life, may holiness not abandon me.\nWhen I am wrapped in shrouds may your honor\nnot leave me.\nMay my soul not reject your unwavering salvation.\nMay your image engraved upon my soul, Giver of life,\nnot be effaced.\nMay the mark of your blood not be erased from my\nsoul’s altar bearing your seal.\nMay it dwell with me in my grave.\nWhen my miserable body is worn out may your\nanointing grace stay with me,\nthat I might on the day of renewal meet you,\ngroom of glory\nthat I may be known as one of yours,\nthat I may be clothed with your accomplishments,\nthat I may be honored by the assurances of\nyour greatness,\nthat I may be adorned with the robe of your baptism and\npardoned with mercy.\n\nGive me, O compassionate Lord, your cloak\nof incorruptibility,\nyou who suffer with the sins of my body.\nDo not let the Blasphemer gain control over your people.\nMay the one who wears out my soul waste away.\nMay the tricks of those who live on the dark side not\nhaunt me.\nMay the abyss of my final rest be blessed in your name,\nO merciful Lord.\nMay the cell of my captivity be filled with your mercy.\nMay the place of my torture be broken open\nthrough you.\nMay tranquility reign, my keeper, in my prison of terror.\nMay that dark womb nourish me toward resurrection.\nMay your hope preserve me that chamber of anxiety.\nMay your hand protect me upon the cot of my torment.\nMay your wings shield me in the house of anguish.\nStay with me, Lord most praised, in my room of peril.\nA thousand woes upon me,\nfor once I was angelic, but now I am in the abyss,\nonce I was celebrated, but now I am pitiful.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNow again, you who are blessed by all creation,\nby the heavenly and the earthly,\nand by the denizens of Hades,\nyou who were banished for me for no reason,\nfor it was I who strayed and was estranged,\nI who was stupid, lost, and found worthless.\nI was abandoned, extinguished and destroyed.\nI erred, I was caught, I was rejected.\nI was alienated, enslaved, and degraded.\nI was cursed, I became wretched, drunken and wasted.\nI was swallowed up, I was deceived, I rebelled.\nI was corrupted, died and destroyed completely.\nYou had no hand in this evil,\nfor you are only unchanging good.\n\n\n# V.\n\nNow, when your will is upon me, darkness becomes\nlight for me.\nWhen your lamp of hope is there, night is like the dawn.\nWhen your body is taken during communion, I live\ndown my shame.\nBut I do not consider my soul living,\nfor death is inevitable.\nNor do I consider it dead,\nfor renewal is not doubted.\nAnd though I see the path to life closed before me\nbecause of my unpardonable sins\nstill paradise is open before me\nbecause of the good news of salvation.\nFor the discouragement of bad news makes me\nless anxious than the encouragement of your hand\nextending salvation.\nTherefore, grant mercy, O Lord,\nfor all those who raise voices in thanks,\nLord blessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-66": { - "title": "Prayer 66", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow, whoever believes in the healing prayers\nin this humble book, praying sincerely\neven if he be one of the sinful,\nI too join him with my words.\nFor if he is among the just,\nmay we find mercy together through these prayers.\nAnd if he finds happiness,\nleaving misery to me alone,\nI shall nevertheless bear witness for him.\nBut may he remember Solomon and his inspired words:\n“Who can say, I have a pure heart,\nor boast of being clean of sin?”\nFor no man born on earth is free of sin.\nAnd not one of us is special because of our swiftness,\nnot even if wings carry us to the heights.\nTherefore, we should be careful, think twice,\nfor if we are on a pedestal, as Paul taught,\nwe may fall to the ground,\nlike the just judge who formulated this rule.\n\nBut let the righteous take this warning as a crown,\nso as not to fall from the unreachable heights.\nAnd may the condemned see this as hope of salvation.\nby which to rise from the perdition of spiritual death,\nand live in hope.\nAs for me may this message be like words\nengraved on a monument never to be effaced\na token of my wretched mortal soul\ncrying out forever, unsilenced,\nwith the echoes of uninterrupted sighing.\n\nMay my bones, undone\nin the earthen cloak of the tomb,\nconfess this with a soundless voice,\nand my body turned to dust\ndeliver these prayers to you\nwith an indiscernible cry, seer of secrets.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLord of compassion, fount of mercies,\nbounty of goodness,\nSon of the one on high, Lord Jesus Christ,\nhave mercy, save us, and love us humans.\nLook upon my peril. Gaze upon my broken heart.\nAttend to my misery.\nSee the confusion of my unending anxiety.\nCome to my aid in my time of mortal torment.\nTouch me, curing my most wretched infirmities.\nLend a kind ear to my pitiful sighs.\nListen to the silent cries from the depths of\nthe abysmal grave.\nMay the voice of my failing body in prayer reach your\nall-hearing ears\nand since the pledge for my life’s redemption\nis imperishable,\nso too let your love be also constant.\nGently help me, enfeebled with infirmity as I am.\n\n\n# III.\n\nDo not hold a grudge against me, the image of death.\nDo not berate my breathless figure.\nDo not strike me while I am suffering the\npangs of death.\nDo not deal harshly with the cracked clay vessel\nof my existence.\nDo not double your wrath: I am crushed by\nyour sentence.\nDo not condemn to destruction my already\ndilapidated structure.\nDo not throw stones at me: I am already like a dead dog.\nDo not fulminate at me sternly: I am like a\ncrushed flea.\nDo not roar at me mightily as if upon some braggart:\nI am lower than dirt.\nDo not summon me for trial by ordeal:\nI am but cast away ash.\nDo not view me, who am but vanishing dust,\nas your opponent.\nDo not deem me, who am loathsome sediment,\nto be your foe.\nDo not ward me off, a contemptible abomination,\nas if I am a warrior.\nDo not set me aside as material for hell:\nI am worthless refuse.\nDo not scold me again, who by this multitude of\nwords already\nhas been admonished many times over.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nSo these are the fruits of my broken and contrite heart\noffered in prayer from my wretched tomb shrouded\nin darkness.\nEstablish your blessed word in me indelibly\naccording to the yearnings of my heart.\nFor although I speak among the living,\nI am dead to you, who are beyond reach,\nyet on the day I succumb to death’s destruction,\nmay I be saved through my faith in your\nall-powerful orders.\n\nNow, I pray you, Lord Jesus Christ,\nlook upon me with compassion\nand do not let me be the cohort of Satan.\nAt the time of my pitiful burial, in the lifeless sepulchre,\nechoing with death, attend to the voice of my sighing\nheart lifted in reconciliation,\nLord, our sole benefactor, who cherishes our spirits,\nalmighty God, who loves mankind.\nMay your kind Spirit dwell with me,\nshedding light upon me in the darkness.\nMay the venerated, life-giving relics of your passion\nstay with me,\nlike a treasure deposited with you,\nso they may bestow the gift of renewed life.\nWith these inexhaustible weapons I am equipped\nas stones of a slingshot made of the spirit,\nto ward off the legions of evil.\nWith you on my side Lord,\nthe battle waged against me shall be checked,\nwhen enemies rise up and attack me,\nthinking that the citadel has no troops,\nand the alarms make no sounds.\nBut I have you, Lord, as my eternal keeper\nwho slumbers not, nor sleeps.\n\n\n# V.\n\nFor even now, if the evil one in anticipation of the\nDay of Judgment\nrushes to prepare a prison without escape for me,\nI will deliver the Lord’s prayer like a deathblow.\nIf he tries to deter me as I kneel before my creator,\nif he tries to bow my face to the dust,\nmay my bowing down to God turn him back.\nIf he tries to torment me with pain,\nmay the abundant sweat mixed with the blood of our\nSavior of the world frustrate him.\nAnd if he takes my breath hostage\nso I cannot travel the path to goodness,\nmay the bindings of the creator of the universe free me.\nIf he forces me to renounce the gifts of the light,\nmay your patience in the face of mockery by\nthe enemies of God,\nsilence them, just as you did.\nIf he should barrage me with secret arrows,\nmay the arrowheads from the Father’s glorious\nquiver befall him.\nIf the veil of darkness should make my eye shameless,\nmay the blow to his blindfolded head\nby the creator knock him down.\nIf he ventures to bind up my firm hands,\nmay the reed offered by the right hand of the\ncreator silence him.\nIf with jeering mockery he toys with me,\nmay the Almighty’s fortitude in the face of ridicule\nmock him back.\nIf he conjures a spell upon me,\nmay he be foiled by the Almighty’s slap to his face.\nIf at twilight he attacks shamelessly under\ncover of darkness,\nmay he be confounded by the radiance of the light of\nyour revelation, Lord.\nIf in the heat of noonday he thinks he can dry my roots\nwith scorching blasts of the sun’s furnace,\n\nmay he be uprooted and dried by the power of\nyour sign of light.\nIf he plots to deprive me of the grace of your breath,\nmay he be humiliated by the spit, which the Lord of the\ncherubim endured for me, a sinner.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIf he dares show his biting teeth,\nmay the silence of the mouth of our heavenly\nLord shut it.\nIf he causes desires to gnaw at my soul,\nmay the nails that pierced the creator hurt him.\nIf he tries to lead me astray along the path of\nunjust thoughts,\nmay the nails in the feet of our Lord, beyond\nunderstanding, hold him fast.\nIf he tries to make me drink a vile potion,\nmay the vinegar mixed with bile that was given\nour Savior to drink, embitter him.\nIf he lures me into eating from the first wood, the tree of\nthe forbidden fruit,\nmay the terrible spectacle of the second wood seize and\ncompletely vanquish him.\nIf he tries to teach me to rebel against\nGod’s commandments,\nmay the nod of the infinite Godhead destroy him.\nIf he tries to kill me by wounding and persecuting me,\nmay the lance that pierced the side of the creator of\nAdam cut him down.\nIf he envelops me in the pangs of hellish pain,\nmay the burial shrouds of the Lord who holds all\ncreation, wrap him up.\nIf he tricks me into gazing into the abyss of death,\nmay the living God who survived the stone\ntomb kill him.\nIf he takes joy in my mortal errors,\nmay he, with his crooked will, die again,\nwhen the immortal God, resurrected in glory,\nrenews all mortals.\nIf he is cheered by the prospect of release\nfrom these small bindings after a thousand years,\nmay he tremble again for the later chains that will\nbind him forever\nin the place of unremitting torment without end.\nIf the first blow is bad news for him,\nwait till he finds out about the inextinguishable\nfires of hell that await him and\nhis angels at the Last Judgment.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAnd for me, who has sought refuge in you, Lord Jesus,\nour only king, absolute and mighty,\ncreator of heaven and earth\nand every beauty in it,\nI await your coming with anticipation\nand hope in the mercy of your cross.\nI fall at your feet and kiss the traces of your footsteps.\nI confess my sin and publish my wrongdoing.\nI beat myself up and entomb my heart in sighs.\nI am wounded by pangs of conscience and smolder with\nfiery breath.\nI burn with the salty dew of tears and my insides are on\nfire with grief.\nI am parched by winds of despair and suffocated by the\nfoul fumes.\nI am weak with words of grief and shaking with\nwretched cries.\nI suffer with sorrowful afflictions and my soul\nshakes in alarm.\nI am tossed on the waves of the storm and jolted by the\ncrashing of the waves.\nI shudder at the news and am devastated by the memory\nof terror.\nI melt at the sight of the tribunal and am mortified by\nyour threats, great Lord.\nHear me, compassionate Lord, who pardons us,\nwho loves mankind,\nwho is patient with us, sweet beyond words,\ngood day, dawn of our longing,\nfor you are capable of all things\nand when I give up the spirit, you will be my\ngreat salvation.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit, glory forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-67": { - "title": "Prayer 67", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nBut since your judgment, Christ God,\nis much more lenient toward me\nthan toward Satan the forefather of evil,\nand because of him, “the Son of God was\nrevealed among us that he might destroy the works\nof the devil,”\nwhereas for me, he came to restore my\nworn-out image,\ntaking our image in its essence,\nhe united in himself the image of great God\nin indisputable unity.\nHe graced Satan with none of this bounty,\nand upon me he poured forth everything\nin abundance.\nHe did not suffer on the cross for Satan,\nbut for me he is continuously sacrificed.\nSatan does not partake in life,\nbut I am eternally favored with salvation.\nSatan is not protected by the cross,\nbut I am fortified by this sign.\nHe is banished from the light,\nbut I am joined with glory.\nGod did not promise him peace even on earth,\nbut he made me an owner of heaven.\nGod cut off his guarantee of hope,\nbut continued mine forever.\nGod confined him to a herd of pigs,\nbut in me God dwells more firmly\nGod compared him to a scorpion,\nand he called me the light of the world.\nGod made him resemble a snake,\nbut he placed the seal of his name upon me.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut I abandoned the favors of God,\nwho created so many good things, and I\ngave in to my inclination toward evil,\ngazing downward with him at the bottom of the abyss:\n\nLook at me,\nI am\nunworthy of good, undeserving of favor,\nincapable of love, drawn in by the strands of sin,\nwounded in the depth of my inner organs,\na broken palm tree,\nspilled wine,\ndamp wheat,\nbreached mortgage,\nripped up verdict,\ncounterfeit seal,\ndeformed image,\nsinged garment,\nlost goblet,\nsunken ship,\ncrushed pearl,\nburied gem,\ndried up plant,\nbroken beam,\nrotten wood,\nmutilated mandrake,\ncollapsed roof,\ndilapidated altar,\nuprooted plant,\noily filth on the street,\nmilk flowing through ash,\na dead man in the battalion of the brave.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMy pitiful soul, though you heard the warnings\nfrom Jerusalem\nand were told parables about Babylon by the prophet,\nyou did not listen, leaving me\nridiculous on the one hand,\nand scandalized on the other;\nhere accused, there reprimanded;\nhere mocked, there insulted;\nhere scorned, there opposed;\nhere confused, there abandoned;\nhere weeping, there sobbing;\nhere doubt, there finality;\nhere grief, there chastisement;\nhere calamity, there the court of judgment.\n\nHere I am,\nwith no right to speak, nor opportunity to plea,\nwhere days are without number and time has no end,\nwhere there is no bridge of hope, nor door of mercy,\nno protecting right hand, nor helping hand extended.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBut you are refuge and you yourself are salvation,\nyou are rescue and you are pardon,\nyou are bliss and through you is blessing and mercy,\nO Lord, who alone is mighty, living, and beyond words.\nLord Jesus Christ, God who does good, be\nblessed, blessed and blessed again,\nwith your Holy Spirit exalted forever,\nin the glory of your great Father’s essence,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-68": { - "title": "Prayer 68", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, recalling the stern wrath described above,\nthat awaits me from God,\nhow can I stop these new laments\nand how can the flow of tears from my eyes be dried?\n\nWere I to take the rushing streams of the four rivers\nthat water Eden and the rest of the earth to its\nfarthest reaches and direct them to the\nsprings of my eyes,\nthey would not cool the flames\nof my soul’s mortal sins.\n\nOr were the prophet’s wishes to come true for me\nand my head were inundated with water\nand upon my light of vision, fountains of tears\nwere to gush, still it would not suffice to measure the\npain of my broken soul.\n\nAnd were the tragic cries of a wailing woman,\nheart and soul pierced with pain, joined together,\nthey would not suffice to incant the melody\nor the harmony of the lament of my soul’s devastation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe day of my birth was cursed,\nand not that of Job or Jeremiah,\nfor their birthdays are to be celebrated and not erased,\nsince the world is not worth even one of them.\n\nBut looking at me, who does not deserve the light\nor any portion of goodness, they should curse the day\nI was born, I,\na destructive child, deadly neighbor, sower of sin and\nsatellite of iniquity.\n\nI, who did not honor the covenant of life\nthat you established, God, doer of good,\nand did not walk in the path of your life-giving salvation.\n\nI did not gather the harvest of grain,\nto store for my sustenance\nwhen snowy days of trouble come.\n\nI did not build firm walls\nand did not put a roof on my house\nto protect from the stormy gusts of air.\n\nI did not lay aside a store of sacramental wafers\nfor the endless journey to cure the turmoil of my hunger.\n\nI did not address you with prayers of supplication,\nso that I might have the audacity to stand before you.\n\nI did not amass the reward of salvation through\ngood works to assure the renewal of my soul.\n\n\n# III.\n\nOn my life’s journey I did not settle accounts with\nmy adversaries, so that I might here and now escape\nthe stern hand of the judge.\nI did not approach with hands filled with blessings and\nin hope of exoneration with the lawgiver.\nI did not look forward,\nnor did I protect my back,\nnor was I armed to the right,\nnor was I shielded from the left,\nto be spared harm in the battle.\nI did not dress my cavalry in armor\nnor did I equip my footsoldiers with arms\nthat I might send them to the front.\nI did not gather the early fruit,\nnor act in time for the late harvest,\nand now I am in limbo, bereft of goodness.\nI do not have the flower of innocence,\nnor the oil of mercy.\nHere, in the darkness of the night, without a\nflicker of light, I doze in the stupor of mortality\nwhile the trumpet call summons me.\nOnce again I have arrived without wedding clothes,\nand have left the oil of good works behind.\nAnd the door to the wedding feast has closed\nbefore me.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHow shall I find comfort for this much grief?\nHow much of the light of hope can I mix\nwith the darkness of doubt?\nWhere should I dig in my heels?\n\nOn what shall I fix my eyes?\nWhat calm can I await?\nTo what peace shall I lift my hands?\n\nShould I look for the vault of the heaven from where\nthe fiery rain fell on Sodom, as written?\n\nOr where earth\nopened its voracious throat\nto swallow Dathan with the army of Abiram?\n\nDare I flee my keeper\nto be captured by terrible leviathan?\n\nOr should I travel among those beasts, who\nwould be quicker to ask vengeance from the creator\nthan Elisha did against the pagan youth of Bethel?\n\nOr shall I turn to the expanse of clear skies\ncovering the Egyptians in thick darkness?\n\nLook to the birds on high\nthat feed like vultures on bloody carrion?\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat good is it to be brave as\na lion among the weak\nand then be devoured by wasps?\n\nOr to be delivered from the bears’ claws,\nonly to be engulfed in blood-sucking flies?\n\nIf I sit down to rest, impudent fleas swarm around me\nlike flecks of flaming ash from a fire.\n\nIf I escape being impaled on the horn of a unicorn,\nmy flesh will crawl with the chewing of little worms.\n\nAnd even huddled in the darkest corners of my closet,\nI could be accosted by the foulness, like heaps of dead\nfrogs, to disgust me.\n\nIf stand in the middle of a field,\nI can be surrounded by swarms of locusts.\n\nBut let me leave aside the grasshoppers and caterpillars,\na mighty army, together with the palmerworm and\nseemingly lifeless canker, and the hardened\nwater pellets of hail and the destructive frosts,\nwhich may to the eye seem less destructive,\nbut when wielded by God with his eternal wrath and\nstrength have struck down, laid low, and\ndriven out the high and mighty Pharaoh\nwith his rod of violent repression, vanquishing him.\n\nThese then are the visible manifestations of the\nhidden afflictions, the spiritual chastisements\nand unseen inner torment,\nsuffered by the Egyptians for their injustice.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nBut you, almighty creator of everything, Lord of all,\nwho rise up again at my enemies and scatter them,\nhave mercy on me, with compassion.\n\nExtend your hand of salvation to me,\nperplexed, weary, wayward, and worthy of death.\nFor you alone are known as God,\nglorified forever, with the Father and your Holy Spirit\nunto the ages of ages.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-69": { - "title": "Prayer 69", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, by your hand, great Lord and God,\nartist who with infinite ingenuity shaped my being\nin the crucible of your love where\nI am daily refined but never purified,\ncontinuously stirred but never smooth.\nIt is in vain, O silversmith, my heavenly architect,\nthat you squander effort working on me.\nAs the prophet said in his well known parable,\nmy wickedness does not melt away\n\nBecause I am woefully misguided\nI dare speak out of turn\nlike some pathetic, possessed maniac,\nincreasing the burden of my sin\ninstead of finding a means of reconciliation.\n\nAnd so that the punishment awaiting me in the next life\ndoes not come as a shock,\nextraordinary event, or unprecedented calamity,\nhe planted as a reminder here in my body\nthe token of that first curse,\nthat through this small insignificant speck the larger\nillness might be examined.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor in the womb are born and spontaneously multiply\nall manner of squirming worms, three hundred ten\nintestinal worms gnawing in secret,\nburning tumors, stinging ulcers, abnormal growths,\nand host of other sweaty, noisome, disgusting, annoying,\nitching conditions.\nPlus other savage marauders,\nlike demons attacking in the night,\nbarbarous mercenaries from the legions of darkness,\nwith the ferocity of Arabian wolves,\nstalking with their head curved down, their\nmelancholy color,\ntheir crooked, hooked jaw,\nresembling that of a scorpion,\npiercing with crude thorns,\nsucking, drawing blood,\nto turn the bed of rest into an instrument of punishment.\n\nAnd when one lifts one’s hand to give them their due,\nthey sense the danger in advance that man poses\nand immediately take flight\nwith their hairless bodies and dwarfed size,\nand hopping this way and that like grasshoppers\nthey scatter,\nand with the slyness of foxes conspire against the good,\nescaping through secret places, as if they have found\ndeliverance from death.\n\nAnd such vile and miserable beings,\nnot only pursue the vulgar and motley mob,\nbut also powerful and fearsome kings,\ndriving them to the attic of their habitations,\nor even forcing them to live outside.\n\nCourageous and brave men, who rule crowds\nand govern peoples and take cities of nations,\nhave witnessed defeat at the hands of this virulent\nforce, saying\n“We were not able to resist these tyrants, stronger\nthan ourselves;\ntherefore we took flight and reached this point.”:\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd why have I discoursed about\nsuch miniscule and abject things worthy of ridicule?\nOnly because they are the most powerful and irrefutable\nadvocates for the Divinity,\nreminding me of what awaits me in the next life, these\nbitter fruits\nof my unruly body.\nAnd even so deadly diseases happen upon us and\neat away relentlessly.\nFrom these there is no riddance\nother than through physical pains which foretell\nthe punishment that is to come.\nAnd there is no place to seek refuge,\nto escape them by fleeing.\nFor without the signal of your will,\nhuman efforts and methods fail.\nBut you, who do good, hold in ample measure the\nlife-giving cure for everything.\nYou have but to will it, in order to save, renew, pardon,\ncure and give life.\nTo you glory forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-70": { - "title": "Prayer 70", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow let me lift this discussion\nfrom the lowly things of earth\nunworthy of being considered part of creation\nto the higher things.\nLet me speak of God’s serious and stern Last Judgment\nfrom which there is no escape.\nEven those the closest to God such as the Patriarchs\nor the most saintly such as the Prophets,\nor the most spotless such as the Apostles,\nor the truly chosen such as the martyrs,\nif you did not grace them with your love\ntoward mankind,\nwith your undiminishing goodness,\nunchanging providence\nand unending mercy, they would be no use for\nmy salvation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor even if I were to call to Abraham himself\nwith a parched mouth, as taught by\nthe parable of the rich man,\nAbraham would not provide so much as a drop of water,\nsince he too is bound by our common humanity.\n\nAnd if I were to call to Moses, also a captive of\nhuman frailty,\nit would be useless for he could not save even the man\ngathering branches on the Sabbath.\n\nAnd as for Aaron, he himself needed an intercessor.\nAnd David, he too was blamed despite his abundant\ngood deeds.\nThen there are Noah, and Job and Daniel,\nas the prophet Ezekiel explained, inspired by God:\n“As I live, said the Lord God, they shall deliver neither\nsons nor daughters from the fury to come, only they\nthemselves shall be saved.”\n\nAs for Peter, the rock of faith,\nno sooner was he out of your providential care\nthan he succumbed to human anxieties.\nI leave unmentioned multitudes of others\nhumbled by various human frailties\nwho are, nevertheless, among the eternally blessed,\nfor example, the prophet Josiah who blasphemed even\nat the altar during the divine liturgy.\nLike these there are many more making up\nan inexplicable mystery\nsusceptible to various interpretations.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd since human power to reach salvation is finite,\nwe are objects of your mercy, beneficent God,\nand fortified by you, Almighty,\ncalled by you, God protector,\nand pardoned by you, God for whom everything\nis possible,\ngraced by you, God our liberator,\nand cured by you, God our healer,\ngranted life by you, God incorruptible,\nand granted light by you, God our renewer.\n\nTherefore, acknowledging the limitations\nof my earth-born nature,\nbut taking courage from those you have comforted,\nI petition only you, Son of the living God,\nChrist blessed in all things.\nWhat is written above is further justified\nwhen we recall the wisdom written\nin the same spirit as this prayer:\n“It is better for a happy wise man\nto fall into the hands of the Lord,\nthan to fall into the hands of men,\nfor the greater the power, the greater the mercy.”\n\nThese words also suit David,\nwho when faced with three penalties posed by God\nwillingly chose a horrible death, displaying faith\nreminiscent of the living Christ,\npreferring death to the two lesser penalties\nthat involved torment without mercy.\n\nAnd if I apply these words to myself\nsearching to sustain my lost soul,\nit would not be stretching the truth.\nFor in this book of lamentations\nI seek not to disparage\nthose who have been rescued,\nfor without them how would we approach the Lord?\nInstead I aim to glorify the name of our Savior,\nand praise his grace before all people,\nproclaiming those who have\nbeen raised by high deeds\nthrough the forever coveted salve of compassion.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nEven as you are life, you are salvation,\nyou are the cure, you are immortality,\nyou are bliss, you are enlightenment.\nGrant me peace from the torment of my sins,\nso that you might also have rest\nfrom my incessant, whining self-reproaches,\nyou who thrive on nothing but the salvation\nof us humans.\nBlessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-71": { - "title": "Prayer 71", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow let us turn to the happy and glorified ranks\nof the saints,\nsome of whom stumbled slightly but were steadied,\nsome who doubted a bit but were enlightened\nby the radiant purity of the Holy Spirit,\nthus exhibiting the faults of the ordinary humans\non the one hand, while on the other,\nthe ways and virtues of angels,\ntranscending the laws of nature.\n\nAnd now, those who are blessed\nby the divine mouth of our Father Christ,\ncommanding all alike, the chosen, celebrated, adored,\nand praised,\nwho are worshiped as members of the body of Christ\nand who are prepared as temples of the Holy Spirit,\nin whom there is no hint of darkness,\nbut who are instead completely guileless\nand glow with righteousness\nand are godly as much as humans can be:\ntheir faces are open and unashamed,\ntheir piety uplifting and intrepid,\ntheir lives sober and irreproachable,\ntheir worship stalwart and unwavering,\ntheir ways courageous and unflagging,\ntheir truth uniform and unshakable,\ntheir valor strong and indomitable,\ntheir vision is bright and unconfused,\ntheir wisdom is heavenly and invincible,\ntheir image is clean and incorruptible.\nBy their examples and in the memory of their names\nGod taught us to pray and\nthrough them find help amid troubles,\nas your word, Creator, teaches.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut I am unworthy in all things,\nand fail, as much as I try.\nAlthough I am awake, I dream.\nAlthough I seem alert, I am dazed.\nWhile worshiping, I blaspheme.\nWhile praying I err.\nIn my work I balk.\nWhile seeking forgiveness I sin.\nIn my resting, I am restless,\nWhile advancing, I retreat.\nWhen I walk, I walk backwards.\nTo the light, I bring darkness.\nTo sweet flavors, I add the bitterness of absinthe.\nInto the warp of goodness, I weave the woof of evil.\nAfter being lifted up, I stumble again.\nI blossom, but do not bear fruit.\nI speak and do not act.\nI promise but do not perform.\nI make vows I do not fulfill.\nI reach out but pull back.\nI display but do not offer.\nI bring forth but do not give.\nWhile tending my wounds I reopen them.\nWhile reconciling I cause friction.\nI complain without cause and am justly condemned.\nI am enrolled and immediately removed.\nI set sail and immediately lose course.\nI set out and do not reach the harbor.\nI poise myself and yet I fall.\nI am filled and yet drained dry.\nI am put in order here and fall apart there.\nI am gathered here and set afire there.\nI lay a foundation but do not finish building.\nI gain little and waste thousands.\nI save almost nothing and spend without end.\nI give others advice I do not practice.\nI study constantly but never learn the truth.\nEven when the evil is extinguished I keep stoking it.\nI take heart a bit, then feel yet more abandoned.\nI gear up and then as quickly slacken.\nI patch this and rip that.\nI pull up nettles and sow thorns.\nI try to ascend and am dragged down.\nI go to the nest as a dove and come out a crow.\nI arrive almost white and leave totally black.\nI pledge myself to you and then dedicate myself\nto an assassin.\nI face forward but turn back.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI am cleansed but am covered with soot.\nI am washed but am soiled just the same.\nI pretend to be David and act like Saul.\nI mouth truths and lie in my heart.\nI give with my right hand but steal with my left.\nI cultivate wheat but sow tares.\nI have retreated from the heights of wisdom and become\nas I was.\nI put on the face of an angel but have the mind of a devil.\nI am steady on my feet but wavering in my mind.\nI confess my shortcomings falsely but really err.\nI feign righteousness but am truly false.\nI pretend to be in the choir of the meek but strut\nwith the demons.\nI am praised by humans but reproached by you,\nall-seeing God.\nI am blessed among the earthly but\npitiful among the children of light.\nI am pleasing to the most vulgar but have fallen\nfrom your eyes, great king.\nI flee your just tribunal but plea before the impious.\nI reject the noble but cavort with the repulsive.\nI dress my body up with finery\nbut my soul in spotted feathers of a jay\nI approach to make a pact but I am rejected as a traitor.\nToday I am pure and filled with the Spirit\nbut tomorrow I am a crazed fool.\nI disobeyed the Lord’s commandments but\nfollowed the serpent’s suggestions.\nI became high and mighty but submitted like a weakling.\nI bear the burdens of the day but leave\nwithout my portion at pay time.\nI talk big at a distance but am nonplussed when\ncalled to account.\nAt sunrise I appear prosperous and at sunset I loiter\nempty-handed.\nI sit upon the elder’s chair but take counsel from fools.\nI fall asleep complaining and awake in terror.\nI plough the fields of my desires with special\ncare for evil.\n\nI who am\never the prodigal son,\nbanished forever, unrepentant, wayward,\ninconsolably dejected, in self-imposed captivity,\nservant of death and corruption,\nmercilessly tormented, condemned\nbeyond salvation,\ncut off beyond rejoining, extinguished\nbeyond resuscitation,\nbruised beyond healing, destroyed\nbeyond hope of the next life.\nAnd if sterner reproaches than these are needed\nagainst my unruly soul,\nI hereby commit them to writing,\nI heap them like kindling\nto fuel the flames of Hell.\n\nI am the jealous offspring of the new heavenly Adam\nas Cain was in the first instance toward the old and\nearthly Adam.\nAnd in this world I bear upon my soul the\nmark of blame, not with the respiration of breath,\nbut through the wordy torment of my conscience.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd where is salvation now?\nNow when the father of faith, Abraham, in our\ndesperate damnation, turns my cruelty in life back\non my soul after death?\nWhen the great prophets stone me with the\nharsh words?\nWhen the brave one adorned in glory, kills me\nwith the thrust of a javelin?\nWhen the image of the true Lord wipes me from\nthe face of the earth with Achor?\nWhen the most sublime of God’s chosen delivers me\nto the vengeance of the Gibeonites?\nWhen the seer born of the prophet slays me\nbefore the Lord with the Amalakites?\nWhen the zealot of God lays waste\nwith fire from heaven?\nWhen the consummation of the dim images of the old\ncovenant and the herald of the new covenant\npours upon us the winnowing of the chaff?\nWhen the chief of the disciples takes my life\nwith Sapphira’s?\nWhen the one judged admirable by the Holy Spirit\nmixes the savor of death with teaching of life?\nMeanwhile, the assembly of the blessed are\nindifferent to me, both angel and human,\nthose valiant forces poised to obey God’s command,\nthe universe of the world, and the elements,\nthe inanimate and the living,\nby whom I am forever scolded and condemned\nand reminded of terrors to come\nunsettling the tranquility and stability of my life\nlike waves whipped by storms.\n\nAnd if one were to study with wisdom\nthe diverse sea creatures\nfrom the smallest to the largest,\ncountless without number\nswarming in infinite schools, bustling\nand gliding this way and that through\nthe sea of my body, the truth of all\nI have written would be confirmed.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBut you yourself blessed, immortal king,\nkind, heavenly Christ, who loves mankind,\nonly-begotten Son of the living God,\nalmighty exalted beyond understanding,\nbeyond telling, who pardons us, awesome God,\nscold the undulating agitation of my soul\nwhipped up by the winter tempest,\ncalm the uncontrollable commotion in my troubled heart,\nwhip in the reins and subdue the wild urges of my mind.\n\nBy the grace of your command, O great God,\nmay the storm that constantly pelts me with\nicy gusts be calmed.\nPut to rest and banish forever\nthe multi-headed ghosts of secret shame\nwhich attack like pirates in their vulgar ways.\nConsider my constant prayer\nwhose letters are written with ever\nrenewed compunction in this book of the sighs of my\ngrieving heart.\nLift me out of the abyss of death’s\ndepths and grant me miraculous life among the\nredeemed prophets.\nReceive my repentance, my self-reproaches\noffered with savory smoke.\nConsole me, for I am out of hope,\nand ease my afflictions and sighs.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nglory, honor and dominion forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-72": { - "title": "Prayer 72", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow to you, monastic brothers,\ncommunities of disciples,\nyou who, bared-handed, have enlisted\nas the Lord’s soldiers, in expectation\nand hope of infinite good gifts,\nfor you I set this table with\nmy burnt sacrifice of words.\n\nAccept this testament of confession\nfor the edification and salvation of your souls.\nKnow through it the frailty of the body.\nRemember the warning words of the prophet\nand the apostle: “No flesh should exult\nbefore God.” And, “No one,\nnot a single person, is just.”\nDo not forget the word of the Lord:\n“Even when you have done the things commanded,\nadmit, we are useless servants.”\nDo not permit yourselves to become the prey\nof the Deceiver. Take heed from the scriptures.\n“The chosen are also Devil’s food.”\nFor even I, who nourish you with these meager fruits,\nwillingly blaming myself\nwith myriad accounts of all the incurable sins,\nfrom our first forefather through the end\nof his generations in all eternity,\nI charge myself with all these, voluntarily,\ntaking the debt of all your wrongdoing upon me.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI heard an innocent person once speak\nin a most unfitting manner to the One\nbefore whom no earthly being can be justified,\nand it was not pleasing as he boasted,\n“I have never committed adultery\nor fornication or tasted any other mortal pleasures\nof this world.” Saying this is no less impious\nthan those deeds. May God forgive him,\nfor even if what he said were true\nby bragging he shows he has not progressed\nas far as he has fallen.\nRepeating Zechariah’s words to the people of Israel:\n“Praise the Lord that we are great,”\nechoing the voice of the Pharisee who exalted himself.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut since I am condemned before the all-knowing God,\nwho has placed the unseen passions of the mind\nonto the scale of justice, and seeks to judge me\nby these in the most just way, I shall not\npretend before the all-seeing,\ndeceive the one who scrutinizes everything,\nlie to the one who counts faults when conceived, not\nwhen committed,\nuse trickery to favorably impress the Great One,\nmask my unruly debauchery with the appearance of\na good person,\ntake on airs of self-discipline while being\nforever weak,\ndress in other’s costumes,\nbask in other’s splendor,\nput on finery to cover the ugliness of my body.\nNo one is so sinful as I,\nso unruly, so impious,\nso unjust, so evil,\nso feeble, so misguided,\nso foolish, so crafty,\nso mired, so embarrassed, so blameworthy.\nI alone, and no one else,\nI in all, and all in me,\nnot the pagans, for they did not know,\nnot the Jews, for they were blind,\nnot the ignorant, for they were confused and\nlacking wisdom.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI was dubbed, “Master,” which testifies against me.\nI was called, “Teacher, teacher,”\ndetracting from the praise of God.\nI was said to be good because of my miserable plight.\nI was considered a saint by men,\nthough I am unclean before God.\nI was proclaimed just, though by all accounts\nI am ungodly.\nI reveled in the praise of men,\nthus becoming a mockery before the tribunal of Christ.\nI was called, “Awake” at the baptismal font,\nbut I slumber in the sleep of mortality.\nOn the day of salvation I was named “Vigilant,”\nbut I closed my eyes to vigilance.\nSo here are judgment and blame,\nnew reprimands and old sentences,\nshame to my face and turmoil to my soul,\npleas about seemingly small things and very\ngrave matters.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBut you alone, Lord God, who loves mankind without\nrevenge and with forbearing,\non the day of the terrible last judgment\nwhen my sinful soul is judged, take into account\nthese heart-rending words of self-reproach\nand contrition that I myself have written instead\nof waiting to hear them from you, God of compassion.\n\nNow lift away and annul the instances of my unruliness\nfor I am bound to you with all of the desires of my soul.\nTake away the reproaches of shame and scandal.\nCover the ugly appearance of my naked body\nwith your mighty right hand. Lead me to your rest,\nfor I am worn by the burden of sin.\nSet me on the path of goodness toward you,\nrefuge and life. Remember me in mercy\neven after death, O perfect life.\nBlessed in heaven and honored on earth,\npraised always in all things forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-73": { - "title": "Prayer 73", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nKing on high, mighty and awesome,\nblessed Lord Jesus Christ,\nfor someone like me who despairs of salvation\nonly you can change the curse of mortality\ninto the blessing of life.\nOnly you can turn the discouragement of blame\ninto joyous praise,\nshame into resilience,\nhumility into honor,\nbanishment into the hope of goodness,\nseparation into the expectation of reunion,\nmenacing words into compassionate comfort,\nfinal condemnation into a second chance\nat deliverance.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLord, have mercy on me, for I am condemned to death\non the day of my life-breath’s release,\nwhile I implore on high with my eyes’ pitiful gaze\nfixed the perils ahead on that unavoidable journey,\nwith danger on all sides in my terrified imagination.\nAnd while gazing at my cell’s ceiling where I will start\nmy outward journey, wretched and half dead with\na twisted face, with shaking fingers, muffled sighs,\nfailing cries, a thin voice, my grieving soul\nshaken by a panoply of\ndoubts, I shall lament from the bottom of\nmy invisible soul the sins I have committed.\n\nYou are able, compassionate God, to perform a miracle\nwith your everlasting might saying,\n“Be healed of your soul’s torment,”\nor “May your sins be forgiven,”\nor “Go in peace. You are cleansed of sin.”\nAnd whatever I do not manage to say at that hour\nreceive from me today in your love for mankind,\nO long-suffering, generous God, who gives life to all.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhen I, so eloquent now with my haughty voice\nand strutting stiff-necked ways,\nam laid out a lifeless cadaver, dispossessed\nof speech, hands bound, limbs atrophied,\nlips sealed, eyes shut, as still as\na board, a half-burnt log,\ninert statue, speechless image, breathless being,\npitiful spectacle, deplorable sight,\nlamentable form, miserable face,\ntear-causing likeness, silenced tongue,\nparched grass, petal-less flower,\nrun-down beauty, extinguished lamp,\ndeserted throat, devastated heart,\nmuted trumpet, dry well, wilted body,\nfestering womb, collapsed tent, broken branch,\nseparated joint, chopped tree, sawed off root,\nabandoned house, harvested field, uprooted plant,\nalienated friend, forgotten supplies,\nburied filth, cast away trash,\nbrushed aside clutter, contemptible skeleton,\nlike some useless thing trodden under foot.\nI am needy of the prayers of others,\nwhich rise to you, compassionate doer of good,\nwith the dew of tears amplifying\nthe sighs of the faith-filled pleas\nof my wretched voice.\nJoining in my prayer, they chant\nthe responsive hymn to you, whom I praise,\nthe sign of your cross of salvation, which I worship,\nthe truth of your resurrection, which I believe,\nthe revelation of your glory, which I praise,\nthe sternness of your judgment, which I confess,\nthe reprimand of your words, which I fear,\nthe guiding companionship of your Holy Spirit,\nwhich I revere,\nthe anointing seal of the Lord at last unction,\nwhich I embrace,\nthe reigning with you, Lord Jesus,\nfor which I pray\nAnd though it was abandoned, rejected, cast away,\nbroken, though it fled, flew, gave way in the tumult of life,\nyour hope, which is a gift from you,\nperseveres as a permanent and indelible reminder.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nLook with mercy upon me in my doubts and perils,\nglorified Son of God, who alone are compassionate\nand will pardon, heal, save, protect, renew, restore,\nlift up, support,\nand create me again in blissful purity.\nYours is the power, yours is the salvation, and\nyours the mercy.\nNothing is impossible for you.\n\nYours is might, exaltation, dominion\nand kingdom without end, true essence and selfhood,\nall-encompassing absolute being,\ngoodness and light, glorified as Lord,\nto which nothing can be added or taken away,\nadored in the Holy Trinity with inexplicable mystery\nand given thanks forever also in the Holy Trinity\nin the same act of worship equally with the same honor,\nyesterday, today and forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-74": { - "title": "Prayer 74", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHeavenly king, Lord of all,\npatient toward all in all things,\nSon of the living God, beyond our understanding,\nyour true mercy is manifest when\nthe expectation of reward is cut off.\nYour benevolence is displayed when the mind’s\nvision is blocked.\nYour love of mankind is expressed at the hour\nwhen weakness lays siege from without and within.\nThe divine healing of your hand is manifest\nwhen life departs completely from our bodies.\nYou visit where there is no exit.\nYour greatness is clear when you cure the\nwound of despair.\nYour genuine humanity shared with us is revealed\nwhen at unexpected times you dispense salvation.\nYour victory is obvious\nwhen you open the closed door of life\nat my last breath.\nYour magnificent grace is there\nwhen you forget my wrongs and\nremember your goodness.\nYour ungrudging generosity is manifest\nwhen you include me in your care,\ningrate that I am, along with the grateful.\nI know and recognize\nthat you look upon this offering of words with\nyour former compassion as you lift away my\nsinful habits.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor hymns rise up and chants are sung\nwhen the Lord in his kindness rewards the bad servant\nwith goodness.\nWhen he grants rest in the royal palace to one\nwho should be imprisoned.\nWhen he seats on the tufts of the sumptuous throne\none who belongs in the dust bin.\nWhen he lifts toward the heights of happiness\nthe eyes of one expecting them gouged.\nWhen he places the ring of royalty on the hand\nof him who expects his fingers cut off.\nWhen he draws into his comforting embrace\none expecting lashes of a whip.\nWhen in plain view of all he rescues\nsomeone poised for destruction.\nWhen he bestows glory as well as life\nto him waiting for death’s devastation.\nWhen he decorates with laurels\nthe head of one expecting beheading.\nThese are the blessed fruits of your magnificent vine,\ncompassionate Lord. This is the living harvest\nof your creative commandments.\nThese are the yearning thoughts inspired by\nfervor for you.\nThese are the rays of light of your\nall-encompassing radiance.\nThis is the pleasurable taste of your glorious sweetness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThese are yours alone, Lord,\nand by you was I moved to write them.\nI pray, blessed Lord, for those gifts uniquely\nyours to give,\nGrant them, I pray you.\nOpen, Lord, the treasures of your good things,\naccording to the prayer of the Proverbs.\nDo not mix my wrongdoing in the storehouse of\nyour good things.\nDo not store up vengeance and anger, which are\nhateful to you, with compassion and mercy,\nwhich you love.\nDo not keep in your venerable creation the darkness and\ncruelty displeasing to you\nor the sin and misery harmful to me.\nDo not record with your blessed right hand\ninto the book of life\nthe mortgage of my damning debts.\nRather bring to pass the seemingly impossible,\nexalt your name yet again, Lord, by showing\nhow simple and easy these are for you.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMy debts are too numerous to count,\nbut not so marvelous as your mercy.\nMy sins are many,\nbut small compared to your forgiveness.\nMy transgressions are frequent,\nbut your love for mankind vanquishes them all,\npowerful and almighty,\nThe stains on my soul are too numerous for me to count,\nbut for you they are very limited.\n\nThe weapons of sin produced by a miserable wretch like\nme are not so strong against life as the memory of your\ndeath, living Lord, for fending off the Destroyer.\nWhat effect can a small shadow have on the light of\nyour day, God?\nHow can the dusk withstand your radiance, great God?\nHow can my unruly frail body be placed on the scales\nwith the cross of your suffering?\nHow does the mass of all the sins of the universe appear\nto your eye, Almighty, who made everything in\nabundance? Are they not for you but a clump of earth\nthat easily crumbles or a drop of rain that splatters in all\ndirections and disappears at your command?\n\n\n# V.\n\nHow long would it take your omnipotent power to\npardon my transgressions?\nNot even the batting of the eye,\nnot the fleeting side glance,\nnot the quick glaring flash,\nnot the slightest hesitation,\nnot the hurried footstep,\nnot the raindrop’s coursing a cubit,\nnot the grasp of a line by the mind,\nnot the speed of light,\nnot the taking of a breath.\n\nNone of these insubstantial, fleeting events or\nephemeral states is so short or instantaneous as\nthe disintegration, destruction and melting of the\nglacier of my sins by your power God, Lord of all,\nJesus Christ, Son of the living God, beyond human\nunderstanding.\nYou grant the sun of sweetness to the evil as\nwell as the good, and make it rain upon both.\nYou mete out fairly the vicissitudes of life.\nThose who find contentment in the expectation\nof rewards, you pay with the spurs of temptation\nfor their few sins.\nAnd those who have chosen the worldly life,\nyou forgive with mercy\nministering your care to both alike,\nawaiting their return to you.\nTo you glory, Almighty, for the miraculous work\nof your patient loving care,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-75": { - "title": "Prayer 75", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, engulfed, entranced and overwhelmed\nby the magnitude, multitude and frequency\nof your gifts that overflow infinitely with abundant,\nundiminishing plenty, on the left and right,\nto the front and back,\nI approach to offer again, great God, a testament in\npraise of the true faith,\nfor although at times\nI was ensnared and lured away\nand expelled from Paradise\nby heretical doctrines, devices of the Deceiver,\nnow by this true doctrine in upright purity,\nas a token of true grace\nagain on wings of light\nI ascend in pursuit of heaven.\nAnd as I was conceived and born in the\nwomb of the Church,\nwith pangs of spiritual labor,\nremembering the profession of faith\nand the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,\nI now should address the great\nand favored immaculate queen,\ntrue maiden of all virgins, my glorious mother,\nworthy of praise, so she may be known\nand proclaimed and the extent of her venerable\nglory might be told to the nations in the future,\nworthy of honor\nand reverence as a pure body\nheaded by the incarnate Word of God.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, in the manner of this word picture drawn by\nthe Spirit,\nthis icon upon the altar of light,\naccept me, O compassionate and blessed God,\nand let me be pardoned and cleansed through it.\nRemove the sinful stains upon my soul.\nSeat me with the innocent and the pure under\nits shadow.\nGather me up, the weakest of the house of David,\nand move me from there to the house of God,\nas the Prophet said, referring to you, Jesus.\nDo not render my comings and goings from the chapel\nvain and useless.\nDo not find the fervor of my faith cold.\nDo not consider the embrace of my greeting out of place.\nDo not deem my service without grace.\nDo not leave my worship without inspiration.\nMay the vision of your image not be fruitless.\nMay this model of paradise not be lusterless.\nMay the fireless burnt offering not be overlooked.\nMay the sacrifice of this vow in words not be cast away.\nMay the taste of your light not be my death.\nMay the cup of the blood from your wounded side\nnot be my condemnation.\n\n\n# III.\n\nTo you, Lord Jesus, one of the divine essence,\nwhom we tasted, thereby coming to know the Father\nand Holy Spirit,\nto you, teacher who taught us\nthe all-rewarding ways of the church,\nto you who dwell in this light-filled house of prayer\ndedicated to the salvation of good souls\nto you, ruler of all, Holy Trinity\nwith hearts spread forth and hands outstretched,\nwe offer this incense of words\nforever, with grace and thanksgiving.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWe glorify you chanting hymns of praise,\nbelieving in the efficacy of the ministry of the Word,\nO good commanding cause of all being,\nHoly Trinity without beginning, peerless highness,\nunfathomable mystery, incomprehensible for our minds,\nunexaminable by our senses, beyond the capacity\nof all creation, whose greatness encompasses\nthe heavens on high and the limitless depths below,\nend of all ends and beginning of all beginnings,\none from three distinct persons,\nthree from one indivisible Godhead,\nbeyond the understanding of the unfettered mind\ntraversing all dimensions, unchanging good,\nunshakable uprightness, unadulterated image of love,\ngreatness beyond which there is nothing,\nheight which cannot be lowered,\nvision that cannot be marred,\nundiminishing beneficence, steadfast will,\nliving commandment, sign of salvation, true blessing,\nexpectation of faith, unfeignable promise,\ngenerous inheritance, trustworthy good news,\nsublime beyond reach.\nOne Father of the only Son, honored by the singular\nHoly Spirit,\nwith the richest goodness, completely devoid of evil,\nwith thanksgiving offered in a voice of blessing,\nexalted with hymns of praise beyond our understanding.\n\n\n# V.\n\nOne of the exalted, the awesome name\npartaker of the same honor,\nthe same ineffable nature,\nthe same substance of three conjoined lights,\nperfection to which nothing can be added,\nof his own free will reverently loving the Father,\nwhose likeness he bears,\nwith the aid of the Spirit of Holiness,\nwho humbled itself and descended to earth,\nwithout diminishing its inherent glory,\nto enter the maternal womb of the immaculate Virgin,\nMother of God, in whom he grew the seeds of blessings\nin that radiant field of purity\ncombining with the most perfect divine essence\nin an unfathomable unity,\nin a permeating union,\nhe miraculously combined into his divinity\nthe breath of our existence.\n\nIn this way, with the irresistible reins\nof his guiding bridle, he calmed my unruliness\nand willingly submitting to the cross.\nHe rose like the flower of the\nfruit-bearing tree of life\nupon the stem of immortality.\nHe was wounded, died\nwithout separating his divinity from\nthe flesh that is the same as ours\nand suffering forever with his physical body,\ninseparable from the essence of the creatorship\nwithin him he brought life out of the\ninstrument of defeat.\n\nDescending into the dark regions of hell,\nhe delivered the kidnapped beings of his creation\nfrom the bonds of the alienating serpent,\nand as if shaking off the stupor of sleep,\nhe forced death’s assault on him to retreat,\nand arose and came to life divinely\nascending from earth as the bread of life,\nshepherding the flock of thinking souls.\nThe world had faith in him and\nhe appeared again to his disciples as he was\nin no way diminished, for he\nhad come back whole and ascended\nin his entirety to sit upon\nthe exalted throne with the glory\nof his creatorship as simply\nas it had been formerly.\nWe confess him as God, doer of good\nand Lord of all who judges\nall the earth with justice on the great day,\nwho himself is the beginning and himself\nis the end, the first and the last,\nwho rules with his undiminished wholeness\nin light too bright to approach.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nWe praise with the Father and the Son\nthe Lord Holy Spirit, which springs inseparably\nforth from them sharing their glory,\nthe Spirit that created everything and gave life to all,\nthat Spirit which from the very beginning,\nwhen the universe was completely enveloped\nin misty darkness, brooded, designed and shaped\nthe sea which covered the earth with\nits infinite, all-powerful waters,\nan act symbolic of the true mystery\nof the holy baptismal font of light.\nFirst he created and now he acts.\nHe brought into existence and constantly\nperforms his handiwork, splendid miracles,\nforetold through the visions of saintly,\ndivine signs, amazing miracles,\nprophets, apostles, scholars,\nlearned in the teaching of wisdom.\n\nHe prepared the sanctuary for the offering\nof Christ’s blood. With mercy he ordered\nthe pardoning of souls and the healing of\nbodies in the manner of Christ.\nHe baptized with that which is greater than water\nand he renewed and enlightened through himself.\nHe daily grows stronger by his good works.\nHe bore witness to the only begotten of God\nat the flowing waters of the Jordan.\nWith the voice of the Father in the shape of a cloud\nhe appeared on Mount Tabor.\nIn the same form he protected the house of Jacob\nin its exodus from Egypt.\nOn the march led by Moses,\nhe engulfed Pharaoh with terrible winds.\nHe creates priests.\nHe shapes sages.\nHe strengthens kings.\n\nHe accords pardon.\nHe grants life to the dead in the renewal of\nthe resurrection.\nHe himself is the anointing of God made man,\nforever equally worshiped with the Father\nfor the honor of greatness of the Son,\nwith boundless glory praised forever,\nAmen.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nWe profess the true faith, unerring and pure,\nwith the kiss of our lips we greet the altar\nbuilt of lifeless stone, the body of the church\nas the dwelling place of God\nmore exalted than the most splendid heights of heaven\nand founded upon the congregation of the apostles,\nand revered by the disciples of the one on high,\nas the place where the servants of the Word worshiped.\nThis treasure of life had its beginning in\nthe upper room, the place where the miracle\nhappened on the great day of Pentecost.\nThe spirit of God radiant with power,\nfilled that beautiful house,\nbreathing upon it as a sign of the pre-eminence\nof the church,\nthen sanctifying it through this act of grace,\nthen endowing it and those within with glorious\nrenewing light. Thus the blood of the almighty God\ndistributed and offered forever\nis greater than Abel’s.\nFor Abel’s cries only the message of death\nbut this blood shouts with a blissful voice\nproclaiming life immortal.\n\nNo one has the power under heaven\nor before the sun to celebrate this awesome mystery\nexcept under the protective wing of the church,\nfor heaven is not pleased with a gift of the Lord’s body\nexcept when offered under the auspices\nof this blessed roof, and for this reason,\naccording to the Law, there is a curse of death\nupon one who makes the divine offering,\nexcept at the altar of communal sacrifice.\nMoreover, one who makes this offering,\nthe image of the soul, at a place other than the altar,\nshall be branded with blood guilt.\n\nIn the church, there is but one baptism into the\ndeath of Christ,\nso that his divinity might not unwittingly suffer\nsacrificed a second time to purify someone already\ncleansed by his light.\nThere is but one laying on of hands\nto be anointed with light so that deceit\nmight not be mixed with truth.\nThere is but one pardon,\nmore through grace than penance,\nso that the reality might not\nbe confused with appearances.\nThere is but one doctrine about the trial to come,\nso that the threat of punishment might not\nseem like mere talk about some stranger.\nThere is but one just warning for both of the elements\nof our nature, so that in the immortal power\nof the adoption into the kingdom of heaven\nthe recompense for good and evil\ndoes not appear solely for the inner soul, but\nfor the outer man too, so the true magnificence\nof the kingdom might be manifest through our earthly nature as well.\nThere is but one hope of life with the incorruptible saints,\nso that the certitude of things promised,\nas revealed to the minds of those who listen,\nmight be believed.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe inanimate church, venerable queen,\ngives life and rules over death,\nlike the fruit that Adam was said to have eaten.\nBut this church surpasses all animate beings,\nfor though inanimate, it performs miracles,\neven undertaking to perfect and renew us,\nby etching the image of the glorious light upon us.\nIt is written that the church shares the vault\nof heaven’s grandeur, before the hosts\nof spiritual beings that live there.\nShe uplifts bodies to soar again with\nthe lightness of the soul, endowing\nthe baser element with dignity.\nShe is not debased by her own faults,\nbut by being trampled by evil or faithless people.\nShe is an amazing sign, overwhelming our\nmind’s understanding,\nthis unthinking thing, created by thinking creatures,\nthat helps them as a superior helps its subordinate.\nShe is greater than man,\nas the invincible rod was greater than\nGod’s chosen Moses.\nShe surpasses the speaking beings\nas the miraculously blooming rod was\ngreater than Aaron.\nShe exceeds the thinking beings just as\nthe splendid cloak\nthat parted the rivers is greater than\nElijah and Elisha.\nShe delivers assistance again and again with hands\nmore saintly than militant, for her body\nof stone and mortar shares the same substance\nas the feeling beings and the saints.\nLike an immortal rock, she lives in the falling\nand rising of many\nLike the judge of all souls, she comes forth\nwith miraculous signs\nthrough curses and blessings.\nLike one who sees the unseen she exposes some,\nshelters others.\nLike the commander-in-chief she summons\nall by name.\nLike an eternal mountain she resists attack.\nLike a net cast by God she catches souls.\nSinless, unerring, she proceeds in the\nfootsteps of Christ.\nLike the praiseworthy, she lifts up her head in\nsublime magnificence, boldly and without shame.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nThe church has such great sanctity that her canons\nmake distinctions among the creatures made\nin God’s image.\nIf, despite care, an improper person\nventures through her portal,\nshe is not desecrated,\nbut rather distressed by this carelessness.\nShe is not cursed, but pardons those who do\nnot understand her sanctity.\nShe is not abandoned as if she caused the shortcomings,\nbut is tarnished by our deeds.\nShe does not permit a second approach to receive\nthe mystery of the Lord at the feet of the\nlife-giving God.\nShe does not permit that sacrament to be offered twice\nin one day so that this gift is not debased by\nindiscriminate use.\nShe has compassion for our frailties,\nthe same as one immune from passion’s corruption.\nWithout a word she judges with lordly authority.\n\n\n# X.\n\nFor she is an ark of purity\na second cause of rejoicing\nwho saves us from drowning\nin the tumult of our worldly lives.\nShe does not gather all sorts of beasts and just a few\nhumans, but rather gathers the heavenly host\ntogether with us mortals.\nShe is not tossed about on waves of agitation,\nbut rises above it to the heavenly heights.\nAs a disciple under the command of the\nHoly Spirit of God\nshe avoids iniquity.\nShe does not demand a death blow to the flesh\nbut rather guides those in her care to the\ngood news of life.\nShe is not built by the hand of Noah,\nbut is built by the command of the creator.\nShe is not adorned by Moses with the craftsman\nBezaleel, but by the only begotten Son of God\nwith the Holy Spirit.\nShe is not in perpetual motion, constantly changing\nbut is established permanently upon an\nunshakable foundation.\nLike the ark made of wooden planks,\nlacking the ability to speak and the sense of sight,\nstill she guides us anew.\nIn the image of the creator’s infinite plenitude\nshe goes ahead to prepare for us a place in\nthe light of life.\nShe strikes one dead on the spot, like Uzzah,\nif she is not shouldered like the cross in the soul.\nShe kills without pause or trace\nif she is carried off like some man-made vessel\non a cart harnessed to beasts in earthly desires.\nShe speaks not with the tongues of men,\nbut with the language of angels.\nShe does not listen with physical ears\nbut comprehends directly with her mind.\nShe does not proclaim with articulated sounds\nbut tells the message of Jesus’ works to all nations.\nShe does not have vocal cords but expresses\nherself with the breath of the living God.\nShe does not have joints of bones and nerves\nbut just as the armed throngs of Israelites\nthough the chosen army of God on high,\nwere made to stand two thousand cubits from the\nark of the covenant because of their impiety, she\nstill keeps her distance from those infected with sin\neven though they were delivered from the toil\nof brick-making in Egypt.\nEven the essence of God incarnate was\ncalled the “rock,”\nfor the thirst of the many was quenched by\nthe piercing of his side.\n\nIt is not the flow of blood through veins\nbut the rays of light from on high\npenetrating and becoming one with it\nthat give the Church life and renewal.\nIt is not masterful art of Solomon or Zurababel,\nbut the wisdom of God who holds all in his hands\nthat designs the Church.\nIt is not with the unconsecrated and common oil of Jacob\nthat is applied to it, but with the awesome\nblood and glory of the great God that it is anointed.\nIt is not a house made with the things of earth,\nbut rather the body of the heavenly light of God\nwhere he baptizes and ordains its children.\nThe Church nurtures not those born to the\nways of the world,\nbut rather those who are heirs to the\nheavenly kingdom,\nso that she might offer to the bosom of Abraham\nthose raised in her care.\nThe bridegroom of her wedding day is the\nSon of the living God.\nAnd the rejoicing entourage of bride’s maids are the\nassembly of patriarchs.\nShe makes us forget the high places of pagan\nworship where demons dwell, so that only God in\nheaven might be worshiped.\nShe is the complete refutation of the images\nof pagan gods for in her every stone Christ is exalted.\n\nShe is the open destruction of the self-indulgent\nnymph cults of the forest, so that above all other trees\nof this world, the Lord might be offered,\nlike the tree of life, in the Church.\n\nShe undermines all the false, magical, fertility idols\nbecause in her and with her the adored rock\nis established, set in light-giving rubies and living stones.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nThis graceful, God-pleasing house is free of all servility.\nIt is not the image of Zion on high, but rather\nthe true Zion as experienced in reality.\nIt is not a pagan fire altar or\na place of penance under the yoke of the Law,\nbut rather the Lord’s table which we kiss offering thanks\nfor his loving-kindness. It is unshakable,\nnever taking on a different image but rather\ngrows ever greater in the same radiant glory,\nproclaiming the heavens and representing\nheaven on earth in brilliant light.\nJust as without the Father, there is no Christ,\nso without the womb of the mother Church,\nthe soul cannot be fulfilled.\nThe infinite God would wander were it not for\nthe shelter of the tabernacle of this house of prayer.\nThe Lord of all would have no place to rest his head,\nif he did not lodge at this inn of life.\nHe is more honored in this material dwelling place\nthan in the vault of heaven on high.\nThe infinity of the divine light\nthat covered the face of the prophet and those\nwith him caused people to flee because the glorious\nradiance was overwhelming, whereas here in the Church,\nwhile celebrating those very prophets,\nthey approach the light and sing praise with\nthe host of angels. Here in the Church, God’s good will\nand repeated blessings exceed the splendor of paradise.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nThis spiritual, heavenly mother of light\ncared for me as a son more than a earthly, breathing,\nphysical mother could.\nThe milk of her bosom was the blood of Christ.\nIf one were to consider her the image of the Mother\nof God, it would not be impious.\nLike the sign of the cross of salvation with amazing\npowers and handiwork, it performs miracles.\nThe terrifying tribunal of the last judgment\nis established there visibly.\nThrough her the babbling mouths of immoral heretics\nare silenced.\nShe also has intelligent, speaking stones,\nby which she chases away the beastly and unclean.\nShe gives birth to godly mortals,\nsaints in the image of the sole God, Christ.\nShe faces east, our first place of habitation.\nShe points the way to the second coming of God,\nand making us face east guides us toward\nthe Lord’s brilliant light.\nThe dawn and rising of the sun foreshadow\nfor the creatures of earth the vision of Christ\non the day of the last judgment.\nShe drives away pain, heals the infirm, overcomes\nthe tyranny of demons.\nLike a jubilant bridal party the twelve apostles\nencircle her the life-giving fountain, the womb of life.\nSo much have her blessings and bliss increased\nand flourished that she has been called by the name of\nthe Savior himself\nand by those close to the only begotten Son,\nshe was consecrated in the name the radiant\n\nMother of God.\nFor sinners tossing about on the sea, she is a safe harbor;\nfor the heavenly choirs, a place of jubilation.\nFor the perplexed mortal, a place of sure healing.\nThe Holy Trinity, beyond telling, is glorified in her,\nthe blessed in all.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nAnd woe to him who raises a hand in malice\nagainst the heavenly kingdom as if\nthe doctrine of the church made by hands,\nwere some physical invention\nor human artifact or earthly handiwork,\nand not the gift of life and reflection of the divine,\na foreshadow of the renewing light revealed by\nthe Holy Spirit, and the abundant gifts of God on high,\nthe altar honoring the mystery of the will of the creator.\nand the institution founded with wisdom by the right\nhand of the apostles, in a word, the gate of heaven,\nthe city of the living God,\nthe mother of all living things, free of all sin,\nand the true model of our visible, thinking being.\nHer intellectual part is the mystery of our souls.\nHer palpable part is the image of our bodies.\nAnd a new holiness surpassing the holiness of old\nand crowned with the brilliantly glorious sign of Christ.\nThose who do not confess this\nare expelled from the Almighty’s presence\nby the hand of his consubstantial Word,\ndepriving them of the inheritance of grace\nfrom the co-glorified Holy Spirit,\nand closing before them the doors to the\nbridal chamber of life.\n\nAnd we who have written this bear witness to it\nand believe in what we have composed here,\nin the name of and for the glory of the almighty Trinity\nand of the one Godhead,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.\n\nThe first prayer was my credo to the Holy Trinity and this\nprayer my avowed profession of faith to my Mother\nChurch glorified with light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-76": { - "title": "Prayer 76", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nGod whose mercies are diverse and abundant,\nmighty and awesome God who loves mankind,\nblessed living God beyond description\nwhose mere word can make anything possible\nand for whose mind nothing is unthinkable.\nYou alone can repay the severity of thorns\nwith sweetness of fruit.\nYou who are the author of that new and\namazing law of life:\nto do good to those who hate\nand pray for those who persecute\nand to seek salvation for those who wound\nand ask forgiveness for those who murder.\nThese are the miraculous fruits you bestow,\nwith sweetness beyond compare\nmade delectable by your divine will\nand savory by your praiseworthy lips,\nLord Christ, blessed on high\nbreath of our nostrils,\nand the strength of our dignity.\n\nYet still, human beings, earth-born prone to err\nrender evil to the hand offering good,\nbut you, light and giver of light,\ndo not heed the blasphemy, take no pleasure\nin evil, do not want their destruction and\ndo not wish these sinners’ death.\n\nNeither are you vexed or agitated,\nnor do you succumb to anger.\nNor do you act rashly.\nNor do you wane in love.\nNor do you waver in compassion.\nNor do you change in goodness.\nNeither do you turn your back or\nturn your face away\nRather you are light on all paths\nwith the sole aim of salvation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIf you wish to pardon, you are able.\nIf to heal, you have the power.\nTo give life, you have the means.\nTo bestow, you are generous.\nTo make whole, you are able.\nTo grant, you are most bountiful.\nTo justify, you are most resourceful.\nTo comfort, you are all powerful.\nTo renew, you are all capable.\nTo perform a miracle, you are king of all.\nTo establish anew, you are the creator.\nTo re-create, you are God.\nTo care for us, you are Lord of all.\nTo rid us of sin, you are a guardian.\nTo aid us, though unworthy, you are blessed.\nTo rescue from the hunter, you are our savior.\nTo pour yours upon us, you are rich.\nTo reach us before we ask, you lack nothing.\nTo widen the narrow places, you are a comfort.\nTo call me who am last, you are a protector.\nTo steady me who wavers, you are a rock.\nTo give me a drink when parched,\nyou are a fountain.\nTo reveal to me what is covered, you are light.\nTo teach me what is useful, you are kind.\nTo overlook my faults, you are long-suffering.\nTo refrain from judging my minor transgressions,\nyou are exalted.\nTo lend a hand to a servant like me,\nyou are good master.\nTo shelter with your right hand, you are a provider.\nTo offer a remedy to me who am infirm,\nyou are a restorer.\nTo fill me when ignorant, you are a teacher.\nTo accept me when I petition, you are a refuge.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIndeed, all these are yours, Lord of mercy,\nnot just in words, but also in reality,\nespecially are you foremost among\nthe martyrs in your patient suffering,\nyou, who for my salvation\ncame to the battlefield in force to soften\nthe stiff-necked unruliness of my haughty body\nwith the tempering instruction of tormenting tribulation\nand taking our nature, bore on your blameless body\nthe penalty of grievous torment\nin order to teach by your example\nthe mercy you have for us.\nEver blessed.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-77": { - "title": "Prayer 77", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSince today is a blessed day,\nwhen morning came twice dividing day into\nequal parts,\nwhen the passing creatures of the earth\nwere transformed into a different and heavenly\nimmutable beings,\nwhen the high were laid low and the\nhumble raised up,\nmaking this the most awesome day of Lent, Holy Friday,\nwhen it is fitting for me to write\nthis prayer voicing joy mixed with terror, therefore\nI think it appropriate to speak now of\nthe suffering you endured for me, God of all.\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou stood, with my nature, before a tribunal of\nyour creatures, and did not speak, giver of speech.\nYou did not utter a word, creator of tongues.\nYou did not release your voice, shaker of the world.\nYou did not make a sound, trumpet of majesty.\nYou did not answer back with accounts of\nyour good deeds.\nYou did not silence them with their wrongs.\nYou did not deliver your betrayer to death.\nYou did not struggle when bound.\nYou did not squirm when whipped.\n\nYou did not fight back when spat upon.\nYou did not resist when beaten.\nYou did not take affront when mocked.\nYou did not frown when ridiculed.\n\nThey stripped you of your cloak, as from a weakling,\nand dressed you like a condemned prisoner.\nIf my Lord had not been forced twice to drink vinegar\nand gall, he would not have been able to cleanse\nme of the accumulated bile of our forefathers.\nHe tasted heartbreak and did not waver.\nThey dragged him violently and brought him\nback disrespectfully.\nThey condemned him, humiliated him by flogging\nbefore a motley crowd.\nThey knelt before him in ridicule\nand put a crown of disdain upon his head.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThey gave you no rest, Life-giver,\neven forcing you to bear the instrument of your death.\nYou accepted with forbearance.\nYou received it with sweetness.\nYou bore it with patience.\nYou submitted to the wooden cross of grief,\nlike one condemned.\nLike a lily of the field, you shouldered the\nweapon of life,\nso that your throne in my body might be protected\nagainst the terrors of the night\nturning the last judgment into a joyful banquet.\nThey led him out like a sacrificial lamb.\nThey hung him like Isaac’s ram whose horns were caught\nin the thicket.\nThey spread him on the table of the cross like a sacrifice.\nThey nailed him like a common criminal.\n\nThey persecuted you, like an outlaw, treating\nyou in your serenity, like a bandit,\nyou in your majesty, like a miserable wretch,\nyou who are adored by cherubim,\nlike a despised man,\nyou who are the definition of life, like one\ndeserving of a slaughter,\nyou, the author of the Gospels, like one\nwho blasphemed the Law,\nyou, the Lord and the fulfillment of the prophets,\nlike one who cut the Scriptures,\nyou, the radiance of glory and the image of\nthe mystery of the Father, beyond mortal\nunderstanding, as if you are the adversary\nof the will of him who bore you,\nyou who are blessed, like someone banished,\nyou who came to release the bonds of the Law,\nlike a heretic,\nyou, the consuming fire, like a\ncondemned prisoner,\nyou who inspire awe in heaven and earth,\nlike one deserving punishment,\nyou, covered in unapproachable light, like\nsome earthly quarry.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nO, sweet Lord,\nforbearing doer of good, merciful and compassionate,\nLord of all, who for the sake of infirm and unruly\nservants like me submitted to everything willingly\naccording to your plan\ntogether with your perfectly human body\nsubmitted even to the sleepy tomb of the sepulchre,\nwho lack nothing of divine perfection, being identical with\nGod who is beyond human understanding,\nyet bore human indignity with patience beyond words,\nyou rose with your body, alive and of your own power,\nin exalted light, with undiminished humanity\nand flawless divinity.\nYou are blessed for your glory\npraised for your compassion,\nand always exalted for your mercy,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-78": { - "title": "Prayer 78", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, fallen down upon my face with my\nearthly nature, humbly on my knees in worship,\nI kiss the life-giving feet of your mercifulness,\ndoer of good.\nOffering this to your majesty,\nI pray you, my sole keeper, who loves mankind,\ncompassionate, giver of life, mighty God, who rescues\nand protects us.\n\nMay your suffering for our salvation not be in vain,\nGod, who became man for my sake.\nMay the sweat mixed with blood on the night of your\nbetrayal not be without purpose.\nMay the gifts of your light not be eclipsed, gifts\nthat you have given freely and without compensation to\na wretch like me.\nMay the good news of your grace renewed by the blood\ndrops from your side not be erased.\nMay the fruit of your suffering, offered for my neediness,\nnot be senseless.\nMay the banished Deceiver not dare\nto possess me, whom you have made.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIndeed, you vanquish the desires of the Evil One\nby your will.\nYou confound anew the one whom you once cast out\nand again defeat completely the one condemned.\nDo not hold back your words of salvation,\nwhich being offered to you\nreturn your own creatures to you.\n\nYou have done good works beyond telling\nat the unexpected moment of despair,\nwhen all movement of life had ceased and disappeared,\nyou who are immortal died and brought the dead\nback to life.\nIf you changed the Old Testament rule of\n“an eye for an eye,” do not now block the easier,\nmore flexible and yet more\nfeasible rule,\nO source of mercy, compassionate, blessed and\nforbearing King.\nSay the word, by which with almighty force,\nyou brought light into existence on the first day\nand I will immediately be made well.\nAnd though I have failed to follow your light,\nmay you visit me anyway in the form of your Father’s\nradiant dawn, and may I, an unworthy servant, be su\nmoned before you for your mercy and grace.\nThe time has run out for paying my debts,\nso turn your face toward me, when I am in pain,\nyou who lighten the darkness for the disheartened.\n\nBlock and seal the escape routes\nthrough which your good things drain away\nfrom my memory.\nPreserve in me the grace of your permanently\nsparkling treasure by which I might be found worthy\nto be called yours\nand be protected by your boundless goodness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHave mercy upon me, compassionate Lord, I pray you.\nHave mercy upon me, almighty Lord, again have mercy.\nDo not repay my wrongdoing with pain, O Lord who is\ngood in all ways.\nDo not take from me the grace you have given.\nDo not snatch away the breath of the all-blessed\nHoly Spirit.\nDo not erase the venerable stamp of your majestic image.\nDo not raise the thorns of sin in the purity of my mind.\nDo not cut the tie that binds me to you with\nsteadfast love.\nDo not deprive me of the powerful art of speech.\nDo not weaken the ability of my right hand\nto distribute the parcels of your light.\nDo not enter my death sentence in your book of life.\nDo not record my sins and assess them to me.\nDo not recollect them and do not embarrass\nme with them.\nDo not blame me and do not trample me.\nDo not register my infirmity.\nDo not gather my destructive acts.\nDo not accuse me like some criminal.\nDo not let the tree of damnation grow within me.\nDo not unleash in me the branches of destruction.\nDo not let the buds of my sins blossom.\nDo not demand payment on my debt note.\nDo not permit these sins to mature into evil fruits.\nDo not count my prolific misdeeds on the tree branches,\nthe fingers of the earth you created.\nDo not pronounce your awesome word to confront me\nwith my iniquity.\nDo not permit my willfulness to betray my soul\ninto slavery.\nDo not honor me here, only to condemn me in\nthe hereafter.\nDo not let the lesser, passing things of this world\ndiminish my eternal good.\nDo not measure the endless glory to come by the meager\nintervals of the here and now.\nDo not pawn the incorruptible life for the valley\nof sighing grief.\nDo not exchange your light beyond words for the\nshadows of the darkness here.\nDo not drop the reins of my soul to follow my\nwayward tracks.\nDo not deem the bridge of my passing life as sufficient\nrepose for me.\nDo not keep the well of my mind in the shadows\nonly to be cleared when it is too late in the\nlife to come.\nIf you were to add all of my innumerable misdeeds,\nI would be the living dead.\nIf you were to take this all to heart,\nI would be spontaneously consumed in flameless fire.\nIf you were to examine my iniquities,\nI would completely melt away, without even coming\nbefore you.\nIf you were to allow the sprouts of sin to grow with me,\nI would be choked off by them and waste away.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAlways powerful, almighty God,\nglance my way, so that\nthe sins within me might be set to flight,\nso that your goodness might come in their stead.\nO compassionate God, praiseworthy provider,\ninextinguishable light, with unbounded power,\ncommand that the essence of my nature be\nestablished anew under the roof of my body\nand its parts, in order\nthat you might dwell here with happy fervor,\nand stay without ever leaving,\nuniting my soul with you and\nbanishing completely the corruption of sin,\nimmortal king, Lord Jesus Christ, who gives life to all,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-79": { - "title": "Prayer 79", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nRemember, Lord, Lord of mercies,\nwho loves justice, true God,\nto look again upon me in my ever erring\nhuman condition.\nCheck again the circulation of my blood\nthroughout my body.\nLike a physician examine me,\nfor I am a man possessed of an unripe mind filled\nwith faulty thoughts\nas you yourself know, seer of the non-existent, for you\nalone are devoid of the darkness of falsehood.\nThis is why it is more proper to record me\namong sinners,\nI who repeatedly succumb to the weaknesses of\nhuman frailty\nlike all other mortals born of the flesh on earth,\notherwise your word might appear false.\nFor you indeed know that\n“they were made evil and their wickedness is innate,\nand their way of thinking will never change,”\nas the learned man, wise in the ways of the soul,\nobserved long ago in his writings.\n\n\n# II.\n\nEase the severity of the torment that awaits me and\nthose children of hell, the ornaments of eternal death.\n\nLift away my shameful sins\nthat are kept to reprimand me, wretch that I am,\nat the tribunal of the last judgment.\n\nLet it be for my peace that my punishment has already\nbeen given by your mercy,\nso that unbearable terror does not loom before me\nand hopelessness might not overwhelm\nlife-giving contrition.\n\nTerrifying day of judgment,\njudge that cannot be bought or deceived,\nawful shame, fearsome rebuke,\ninescapable reprimand, unavoidable torment,\nterror that cannot be comforted,\ntrembling that cannot be stilled,\ninconsolable weeping, incurable gnashing of teeth,\nuntreatable disease,\nthe curse of your awesome divine word,\nthe shutting down of compassion, cutting off of mercy.\nAt the time when the heavens will be rolled up\nlike a scroll\nand the earth will be shaken to its very foundations,\nand billowing waves of the tempestuous sea,\npursue each other, crash against each other and\ncounteract each other’s force,\njolting and shaking\nthe foundations of the earth’s thick surface\nacross its expanse\nwith forceful blows to its very core\nand with thunderous sound,\nlaying the mountains low,\nand melting the substance of stone with fire,\nwith all the other elements of nature at that time:\nthen the heavens will be cleared in purity\nand the creatures together with all their elements\nwill be recreated in new form\nand our hidden misdeeds will be made known\nand our invisible passions will be revealed\nthe conduct of each person’s inner beliefs\nwill be displayed on our bodies\nand the king of heaven will sit at his tribunal\nwith the due sentence in his hands.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWoe to me, sevenfold woe!\nAn endless perdition in the measure of this cipher, seven,\nthat symbolizes the infinity of numbers.\nWhat shall my pitiful soul do on the solemn day of peril?\nFor the thought of what lies ahead is worse than the\nevent itself.\nAs one of the prophets vividly wrote,\nit is as if one were to escape from the clutches of a lion,\nonly to run into a bear,\nand fleeing the bear,\nyou enter a house and lean against the wall,\nonly to have a hand bitten by a snake.\nAnd he makes the situation yet more terrifying,\nsaying, “Indeed, the Day of the Lord is darkness”\n“That Day is gloom and darkness, a day of clouds and\nthick fog.”:\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhen the guardian angel who is our companion\nfor life,\naccuses us like a stern official\nand the awesome judge justly reprimands us,\nthe king’s servants rush about without delay,\ninviting some to life and condemning others to shame,\nshowing to some a cheerful face,\nbut to me appearing fearsome and horrifying.\nTo some they shall offer a halo of glistening light,\nand others mortal perdition.\nTo the just, the voice of good news,\nbut to me, the sad news of endless grief.\nWhen for the good, the victory of death itself expires,\nfor me, wayward soul, it is repeatedly extended.\nAt that point knocking at the door will do no good,\nfor my quota of mercy will have run out.\n\nThere, when the amazing and miraculous book is\nopened, showing all manner of hitherto hidden\nacts done by mankind and\nthe conduct of our human nature,\nfor which reason all beings were created,\nthen upon each body all this shall be manifest in full,\nso that before our eyes shall ineffably appear,\nthat which is sealed away from the comprehension of\nthis world.\nHere, heaven can be found at the cost of lamentations\nand tears,\nthere, these are despised and rejected like so much\nuntimely vanity.\nThe sighs of the heart that are not delivered now\nwill not be accepted later.\nKindness sparingly sown\nshall not light the way before us.\nThere, the loud-voiced accusers shall be\nthe ark against the lawless of the time of Noah,\nand the Old Testament against those who\nblasphemed the Lord, along with the awe-inspiring sign\nof the cross against us now.\nI will be accused\nfirst for breaking the natural law of our earliest forbears,\nsecond for dishonoring the tabernacle of worship to the\ninvisible spirit, and\nthird for the blood of great God.\nAnd I also accuse myself.\nHow shall I be consoled when my hope is cut short?\nFor if the forces of light, the ranks of the just,\nwho are glorified in benedictions, tremble in fear,\nand cannot bear the terrifying face of the great judge,\nhow shall I come before him, miserable wretch that I am,\na disinherited son condemned to death,\nwho does not expect a halo\nbut unbearable punishment\nand endless ruin?\n\n\n# V.\n\nHasten to extend your hand of salvation to me, for I am\ncaptured by the Destroyer,\nLord almighty beyond words, who gives all things.\nFor with your help, I might turn back from the\ngates of hell, and properly armed, I might escape\npunishment completely without harm,\nseeing with my mind’s eye the things to come,\nI am already sufficiently chastened\nby the terrifying reports of awful tortures that await me.\n\nBy your good will, I might be saved unscathed,\nand not thrown to the young lions,\nwho beg for me as food,\nso they can devour me with their ferocious teeth\nand fill their womb of death with me.\nThey, who have grown fat in this world,\nwill digest me and drag me away to the storehouse\nof surplus sin, there to consume me forever in torment.\nFor you alone are able to wrest me from the\njaws of death, and deliver me to everlasting life and bliss,\nrefuge of all, king of light,\nLord Jesus Christ, blessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-80": { - "title": "Prayer 80", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, after all this despair\nand terrible heartbreak,\nangry reprimands and divine wrath,\nwith a soul completely tormented by grief,\nI pray to you, Holy Mother of God,\nherald to mankind, angel in bodily form,\nheavenly queen,\npure as air, clean as light,\nclear as the image of the sun at its height,\nhigher than the forbidden dwelling place of the\nholy of holies,\nplace of the blessed covenant, a breathing Eden,\ntree of immortality, guarded by a fiery sword,\nstrengthened and protected by the exalted Father,\nprepared and purified by the Holy Spirit that\nrested upon you, adorned by the Son who dwelt\nin you as his tabernacle,\nonly Son of the Father, and for you the first born,\nyour Son by birth, and your Lord by creation,\ntogether with your unsoiled purity, spotless goodness,\ntogether with your immaculate holiness,\nguardian intercessor.\nReceive these prayers from me, who believe in you.\nTogether with my ode to you\noffer and present them to God as your own.\n\nWeave and mix into your prayers of happiness\nand adoration the bitter sighs that I, a sinner, utter,\nyou, who are the tree of life bearing the blessed fruit,\nso that always receiving help from you and through your\ngood deeds, and taking refuge in the light of your\nholy motherhood,\nI may live for Christ, your Son and Lord.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAssist me on your wings of prayer,\nyou, proclaimed Mother of all the living,\nso that my departure from this earthly valley\nmay be without torment, leading to life in the lodgings\nyou have prepared, that my death might be light,\nthough I am weighed down by iniquity.\n\nMake the day of my anguish a festive holiday,\nyou, healer of the sorrow of Eve.\nSpeak on my behalf, beg and beseech for my sake,\nfor as I believe your purity is beyond words,\nI also believe in the power of your words.\n\nBlessed among women, I am in trouble.\nHelp me with your tears.\nAsk on bended knee for my reconciliation,\nMother of God.\nCare for me who am miserable, altar of the exalted.\nLend me a hand, for I have fallen, heavenly temple.\nGlorify your Son,\nby performing upon me the divine miracle of\nmercy and pardon, handmaid and Mother of God.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMagnify your honor through me,\nand my salvation will be manifested through you\nif you find me, Madonna,\nif you pity me, blessed among women,\nif you rescue me in my waywardness,\nimmaculate one,\nif you care for me in my fear, happy one,\nif you lift my head bowed in shame, good grace,\nif you intercede for me in my despair,\never Holy Virgin,\nif you include me in my rejection, exalted of God,\nif you show me kindness, undoer of malice,\nif you steady me in my doubt, repose,\nif you calm my anxiety, pacifier,\nif you show me the way from which\nI have strayed, praised one,\nif you appear before the tribunal for me,\nvanquisher of death,\nif you mellow my bitterness, sweetness,\nif you eliminate my separation from God,\nreconciliation,\nif you lift away my uncleanness, you who\nstamp out corruption,\nif you save me in my condemnation, living light,\nif you cut off the sound of my wailing, bliss,\nif you restore me, for I am broken, salve of life,\nif you look upon me in my ruin, you filled\nwith the Spirit,\nif you visit me with compassion, legacy given us.\nYou alone shall be on the pure lips of happy tongues.\nIndeed if but a drop of your virgin milk\nwere to rain on me, it would give me life,\n\nMother of our exalted Lord Jesus,\ncreator of heaven and earth,\nwhom you bore complete in humanity and\ntotal in divinity,\nwho is glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nuniting his essence and our nature in a manner beyond\nhuman understanding.\nHe is all and in all, one of the Holy Trinity.\nTo him glory, forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-81": { - "title": "Prayer 81", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAccept kind and merciful God,\nwith the prayers of the Mother of God,\nthe petitions of the immortal angels, adorned in light,\nwhich sing, without ceasing, with their pure mouths\nin constant intercession for my sake.\nThe angels are virtuous, created good by you,\ndoer of good,\nThey are ignorant of evil, established by your command,\nwhich rules all, God who is.\nThey are a mighty force at your disposal, exalted God,\nholy, pure, spotless, blessed,\nsplendid, victorious and invincible,\nswift as a flash of the mind.\n\nThese guardian angels serve us and plead for us,\njust as for the barren fig tree\nthat did not give fruit for three years,\nan eternity encompassing past, present and future,\nfor a long period it took root\nin the vineyard of this world,\ndecorated with useless foliage, but gave no fruit.\nAnd this is the very image of wretched mankind.\n\nThe angels brood over us constantly.\nThey aid us in our frailty.\nThey tend our portion of virtue\nwith everlasting life they pray for our salvation,\nsaying these words: “Forsake not the work\nof your hands.”\nFor truly, this prayer is ours.\nYou, God on high arranged for them\nto say this for our sake,\nfor they were created by the word,\nand we by the action of your hand.\nThey shall come with your only begotten Son,\nas fearsome witnesses at the last judgment,\ntrue accusers of the sins of earthly beings,\nbefore the terrifying tribunal,\njustly and fairly counseling us.\nThere too, they sympathize with us, pleading with sighs,\nthe perpetual chant of their voices:\nHave mercy, you who created them.\nDo not destroy them.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow, with their voices in thanksgiving\nand their prayers, immortal and sublime,\ninhale also the savory scent of our sighs, creator of all.\nYou exceed those above and below with\nyour compassion,\nsince from you flow all good deeds for us and for them.\nAnd for the sake of the splendor of the\nincorruptible beings, miraculous in their fiery forms,\nunadulterated purity, sinless, made of fire and\nspirit, invincible, with the immense advantage of\ntheir higher status,\ntheir abundant, brilliant knowledge,\nfervent with an ardor that does not cool,\nwith an innate passion for the love of God,\nlike them, may our cold, smoldering hearts,\nbe rekindled brightly at the sublime mystery of\nthe holy table, which is your sanctuary\nand without drowsiness or lethargy\nmay we await the blessed command\nof your life-giving will, creator of all,\nto be united with God inseparably\nin cherubic virtue.\n\nThey are the great heavenly principalities,\nsoldiers, pure and awesome,\nthe virtuous and noble ministers in your\nheavenly kingdom,\nthe glimmering rays of your cloud of light, God on high.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThrough them, Jesus, show your merciful\nlove for mankind\nfor me also, sinner born of earth that I am.\nThrough the prayers of my guardian angel\nturn me toward the good path of your light,\nso that the inheritance of my soul\nwhich you entrusted to his protection,\nmay be received by you from this life,\nwith a joyous heart, jubilant within me,\nblameless and blessed by you,\nmight he bring me forward and present me\nwith a glad and cheerful face,\nto you, praised and merciful Lord,\nsublime king of glory beyond comprehension,\nin the midst of the blissful choir in tumultuous jubilation.\nAnd to you, who are beyond understanding,\nwith your Father, beyond reach,\nand your Holy Spirit beyond words--\nglory, honor and adoration,\nunto the ages of ages.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-82": { - "title": "Prayer 82", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord God, doer of good, generous king,\nrefuge of life, form of light,\nspacious place of repose,\nwho for the sake of sinners like me\ncame, took the form of man\naccomplishing things beyond telling\nand performed miracles,\neven perfecting our humanity\nwith the fullness of your divinity.\n\nNow for the holy apostles,\nwhom you ordained with your heavenly hand,\nand anointed by your Holy Spirit,\nwhose deserving praises I have sung\nas much as I could\nfor your glory, Lord of all, in another work.\nHave mercy upon me in the memory of your chosen.\n\nThrough them prepare for me a way to the\nmost desired bliss.\nMay the voice of these good shepherds\nbe heard beckoning me sweetly to eternal life.\nMay I partake of the jubilant hope\nof everlasting salvation\nwith the lives of our leaders, the first to be graced with\nthis honor,\nthe glorified choir, the spiritual rivers,\nthe sublime evangelists, the illustrious princes,\nthose with sparkling crowns,\nand those adorned in the untarnished\nbrilliant radiance of the strength of grace, yes,\nthose who have been made perfect with\nthe oil of gladness, your lordly light.\n\n\n# II.\n\nTogether with your disciples,\nChrist God on high,\nand the self-sacrifice of your chosen martyrs,\nwho through mortification and torments of the flesh,\nand peril to life and limb and all manner of suffering,\nand who despite their earthly nature\nstruggled against every element of material existence to\nwin halos, transcending and reborn in spirit,\ncourageously. They departed this world, as\nthe prophets said,\nas true witnesses to the trials and tribulations of death.\nThey comprehended the unequivocal good,\nunseen and hidden,\neven in this world with the hope of things seen.\nThe disciples of the apostles and their\ncompanions in suffering\nare also equal to them in their works\nand in their consummate and utter perfection\nare jubilant with endless bliss.\nBy their pleasing and acceptable pleading,\nhonoring their prayers as a blood-drenched sacrifice of\ndedicated service\noffered with the incense of sweat,\naccept me again to share their lot\nand be established in you with everlasting salvation.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThough a sinner deserving of punishment,\naccept me,\ntogether with those who fight with fire and sword,\ncovered in blood, and together with the holy ascetics,\nhermit fathers, and your other followers, Son of God,\nall who with invincible bravery and\nundistracted vigilance, have courageously struggled\nagainst the baseness of the body\nand fended off the bodiless Satan.\nIn the perpetual battlefield of our earthly life\nwithout being worn down\nupon the waves of this expansive worldly sea,\ndespite the heaviness of their bodily ark,\nthey sent their souls soaring in lightness,\nreaching the safe haven of eternal life.\nAnd like those who love the celestial realm,\ntruly and boldly, without reservations,\nthey have crowned themselves with\nthe tiara of victory, adorned with brilliant gems.\nBy grace of their worthy prayers and\ndedicated supplications,\naccept me too.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMixing my impure words\nwith the glorious prayers of the blessed,\nwho for my sake call out to you in a pleasing manner,\nI too call out with them,\nsour notes amidst the sweet,\nthorns amidst the smoothness,\nugliness amidst splendor,\nfilth amidst glistening diamonds,\nimpurities amidst pure gold,\nworthless rocks amidst silver,\ncontradictions amidst the truth,\ngrains of sand amidst the soft bread.\n\nListen, mighty, ingenious, praised, Lord,\nto their prayers for me and mine for them,\nfor their praise, my salvation, and for your glory,\nO Lord, all-compassionate, doer of good, blessed,\nlong-suffering, potent, beyond understanding,\nbeyond words, incorruptible and uncreated.\nYours are the gifts, and yours is grace.\nYou are the beginning and cause of all good.\n\n\n# V.\n\nYou are not the accuser, but the liberator,\nnot the destroyer, but the rescuer,\nnot the executioner, but the savior,\nnot the scatterer, but the gatherer,\nnot the traitor, but the deliverer.\nYou do not pull down, but lift up.\nYou do not knock down, but stand upright.\nYou do not curse, but bless.\nYou do not take revenge, but give grace.\nYou do not torment, but comfort.\nYou do not erase, but write.\nYou do not shake, but steady.\nYou do not trample, but console.\nYou do not invent the causes of death,\nbut seek the means to preserve life.\nYou do not forget to help.\nYou do not abandon the good.\nYou do not withhold compassion.\nYou do not bring the sentence of death, but\nthe legacy of life.\nYou are not opposed for your generosity.\nYou are not blasphemed for your grace.\nYou are not cursed for your bounty.\nYou are not insulted for your free gifts.\nYou are not mocked for your patience.\nYou are not blamed for your pardon.\nYou are not accused for your goodness.\nYou are not dishonored for your sweetness.\nYou are not despised for your meekness.\nFor these, we send not complaints,\nbut gratitude that cannot be silenced.\nTake away my sins, Almighty.\nRemove the curse from me, blessed.\nPardon my debts, merciful.\nErase my transgressions, compassionate.\nExtend your hand of deliverance\nand I will instantly be made perfect.\nWhat is easier than this for you Lord,\nand what is more important to you?\nThus, providential Lord, revive me\nmade in your image and brought to life by your breath\nin order to renew the breath of your pure\nenlightening grace,\nprotecting my sinful soul.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nDo not dispatch me, merciful Lord, before my time.\nDo not let me depart this life empty-handed, before my\njourney is accomplished.\nDo not offer me the cup of bitterness in my time of thirst.\nDo not block me, compassionate Lord, from the\npath of doing good,\nand do not permit the nightfall of death to overtake me\nlike a band of thieves in a sudden ambush.\nMay the feverish heat of the sun at an\nunexpected moment\nnot cut off and dry up my roots forever.\nAnd may the lunacy of the moon, arriving in secret,\nnot cause harm.\nMay rest not bring death\nand slumber not lead to slaughter.\nMay sleep not destroy me\nand may drowsiness not corrupt me.\nMay my death not strike me at an\ninappropriate moment.\nAnd may the release of my spirit upward not\nbe cast down.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nYou are the Lord, you are compassionate, you are the\ndoer of good.\nYou are patient and almighty.\nIn all things you are strong beyond comprehension\nand words\nto pardon, to save, to grant life,\nto enlighten, to establish anew,\nto snatch from the jaws of ferocious beasts,\nor from the teeth of dragons and restore life,\nto lead from the depths of the abyss to the light of bliss,\nand from drowning in the waves of sin\nto be seated among the righteous with the glory\nof the blessed.\nEvery soul awaits you with hope and expectation,\nlonging for your grace,\nwhether heavenly or earthly\nwhether fallen in sin or exalted with righteousness,\nwhether master or servant,\nwhether lady or maid.\nAnd in your hand is the life breath of every creature.\nTo you with the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nglory forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-83": { - "title": "Prayer 83", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nExalted and inscrutable, terrifying power,\nlord of creation, king of heaven,\ncreator of angels, who fashioned the spirits,\nand made the fiery beings,\ngood chief of souls, helping hand,\ntranquil repose, vision of enlightenment,\nbrightness of bliss, path to beatitude,\ncause of life, source of intelligence,\nsalvation without evil, guide to peace,\nrampart of strength, bulwark of protection,\nwall of the great fire of blessing, definition\nof unvengeful,\nremember the lamentations and confessions in this book,\nfor those of the human race who are our enemies as well,\nand for their benefit accord them pardon and mercy.\n\nDo not be angry at them for my sake, Lord,\nas if they blasphemed the saints,\non account of your love which is upon me,\nbut rather treat them as if they are reprimanding evil and\njustly rebuke me,\nwhile forgiving them their transgressions.\nFor when we both appear before you, just judge,\nperhaps some of those who have harmed me\nhave sinned little\nand justly spoken against me,\nwhereas I have committed innumerable and\nimmeasurable breaches of my vows,\nwith respect to you, generous Lord.\n\n\n# II.\n\nRemember your greatness, Lord,\nwhen looking upon my lowliness.\nAnd while I petition you to do good to my enemies,\nyou in your magnanimity beyond words\nshow your miraculous favor toward them who are\nalso your enemies.\nDo not destroy those who persecute me, but\nreform them,\nroot out the vile ways of this world,\nand plant the good in me and them,\nespecially since you are light and hope,\nand I am darkness and foolishness.\nYou are true good, praiseworthy Lord,\nand I am thoroughly evil and helpless.\nYou are the Lord of everything on earth and in\nthe heavens, and I do not control my breath or spirit.\nYou are exalted, free of any needs,\nand I am in pain and peril.\nYou are above all the passions of earth,\nand I am base, disgusting clay.\nIn the words of the prophet:\nyou endure in perpetual infinity on high\nand I continuously perish.\nIn you there is neither darkness nor deceit,\nand in me, they are complete,\nsince I have wasted my inheritance of goodness.\n\nTake me out of my prison and free me from my bonds.\nRemove my chains and rescue me from drowning.\nFree me from anxiety and release me from my irons.\nDeliver me from preoccupations and banish my doubts.\nConsole my sadness and calm my vexation.\nDispel my afflictions and quiet my agitation.\nCure me of my tears and stop my sighing.\nDrive away my lamentations and heal my sobbing.\n\nGod of mercy and giver of sweetness,\ndo not despise me, whom you have redeemed with your\nalmighty blood.\nDo not condemn me to a place of perdition.\nProp me up for I have reached the shores of death\nthrough all manner of fatal illness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLook how through the seasons of my life\nmy vain acts have piled up and accrued,\nfor from the day I appeared on this earth,\nI have been good for nothing,\nand in the field of my mother’s womb\nI was a sprouting thorn bush of sin.\nNevertheless, do not be a wounding sting for me,\nas you were for the house of Judah or the descendants\nof Ephraim.\nAnd since I sowed in my soul\nweeds that prick, poison that numbs me,\ninstead of the good seeds of wheat,\nas the Scriptures say, which are older than the Gospels,\nwhy should I not call my soul a foul field,\nchoking with the accursed thorns of sin?\nI did not sow justice, as Hosea said,\nso why should I reap and gather the fruit of life?\nI lost the pure innocence of my soul,\nas the prophet said of Israel:\nNow can you restore it, Lord?\nI spread forth and opened the bed of my will\nto the demons of lust, in the wayward ways of Judah.\nIt is in your hands to restore that innocence.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIf the union of the prostitute with the prophet\npurified her, how much more, Savior,\nwill our spiritual union purify me?\nIf the inanimate sun which you created,\nprovider of the earth, dries the foul swamps\nand brings the immature fruits to ripeness,\nthen you, Creator of all, Holy Spirit of God,\nhow much more can you flush away the silt of\nmy wrongdoing and cleanse the foul pus of\nmy accumulated sin?\n\nFor this reason I hasten in this prayer to ask that\nyou do good to those who hate me,\nso that you, blessed compassion, would not reject me,\nthough I am deserving of death for my mortal sins and\nyou should banish me from your all-protecting sight.\n\nGive me life, although I have sinned in all ways,\nwith every part of my body\nand the conduct of my soul, give me life\nthat I might contemplate only that which is\npleasing to you.\nTo seek benefits for those who have done good is\nthe law of nature, an instinctive urge.\nAnd indeed, all manner of people are capable\nof following this first rule.\n\nBut the second, that is, to pray for your enemies\nwith the care of the first, comes close to\nbeing the divine.\nFor this reason, I presented the second first,\nthat is praying for my enemies\nbefore asking favor for the good.\n\n\n# V.\n\nRemember twice those\nwho, in your exalted name,\naccepted me, unworthy soul that I am,\nand give them, most generous Lord, doer of good,\nwithout spite, the reward of the just and the prophets.\nAlthough I may be devoid of virtues forever,\nconsidering the belief and by the hope and expectation,\nthey in their reasonable judgment have regarded\nthose like me, a slave to sin,\nas if I had a secret compartment in my soul\nfilled with your life-giving relics.\n\nApproaching me with your infinite compassion,\ncleanse me, whose sins cannot be hidden from your sight\nor from your unerring judgment.\nThus protect me from being shamefully condemned\nbefore the tribunal of the universe.\n\nAnd as those whom you love, those who for your sake\nsee your glory reflected on me, unworthy though I am,\nfor they look upon my fine vestments\nwithout knowing the defects they conceal\nand call me in my pitiful state “blessed,”\nmay you, ingenious, bountiful, content\nLord, who loves mankind, with infinite mercy,\nfor the sake of the sighs of my most wretched soul,\nsettle with them according to their faith.\nOn the terrible day of judgment,\nwhen everything is tried and the good are separated\nfrom the bad,\noffer and grant them your incorruptible glory\nand your never fading crown.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nYou are the guarantee of salvation for a starving slave\nlike me,\nmade worthy by the Word, your gift,\nto be redeemed for the benefits of heaven\nby the largesse of your endless and priceless treasure.\n\nLead me beside the still waters.\nErect in me like a monument, unchanging God,\na ready assurance.\nEstablish in me, praised Lord, a sincere and\nunshakable hope.\nAccord me, you who provide everything, an\nimpartial defense.\nIn my unsteadiness, accord me the tranquility of virtue,\nin my doubt, the solace of enlightenment,\nin my mourning, great happiness,\nin my weariness, hope to live,\nin my abandonment, steadfast help,\nin my retreat, return without stumbling.\nFor all of this is yours, and all of this is from you,\nand through you are distributed the necessities of\nall creation,\nand to you is fitting glory, forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-84": { - "title": "Prayer 84", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHeavenly monarch, exalted king,\nLord of all, hope of each,\ncreator of the visible, establisher of the invisible,\ncause of being, shaper of the future,\ngiver of light, impulse of dawn that prepares\nthe morrow,\nwho makes the evening appear and conjures the night,\ningenious artisan, applied wisdom,\nblessed pardoner who liquidates sin, banishes pain,\nand neutralizes bitterness,\npreserver of tranquility, who induces slumber,\narranges sleep, grants rest,\nwho sustains our breathing, maintains our senses,\ndissipates our phantoms, moderates our imaginings,\ndisplaces our terrors,\ntransformation of sadness, suppression of anxiety,\ndispeller of doubts, calmer of turmoil,\nwho strikes fear in the heart of the wicked,\nand cuts down demons,\nwards off disease and drowns scandal,\nprotect me with your hand that shaped the heavens.\nStrengthen me with your exalted right hand.\nTake me under your almighty wings.\nBlanket me with your divine care.\nBolster me with the vigilance of your heavenly host.\nEncircle me with your army of immortals.\nSurround me with the attachments of angels.\nFend off the enemy with the forces of the vigilant.\nSupport me through prayers to your divine Mother, for\nI am shaken.\nAssign your best troops to guard me.\nOpen the eyes of my soul along with the eyes in my face.\nSober the passions that weigh me down along with\nmy troubled soul.\nLift away Lord, from my senses the stupor\nthat covers them.\nRemove, Lord who only does good, the heavy\nveil of darkness.\nMake your mercy dawn with the breaking of day.\nMake your righteous sun shine on the gloom of my\nheart with morning light.\nMay the ray of your glory illumine the chamber\nof my mind.\nMay the sign of your cross cast its shadow over\nmy whole spirit and body.\nI commit to you today\nthis tabernacle of mine,\nwhich you have given to shelter my soul.\nFor you are God beyond understanding,\ngenerous in all things,\nperfect in all ways,\nblessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-85": { - "title": "Prayer 85", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, since our waking vigilance\nappears like some kind of stupor to you\nand our profound silence, owing to our orthodox\nfaith in you,\nseems to you sleeping with open eyes,\ndirect me with your Holy Spirit’s wisdom\nto finish this the work of my hands,\nthe prayers of my sighing voice.\n\nStrengthen me, Lord, in my courageous labors\nto fight the good fight.\nBe my aid against human frailty.\nLighten the task of my repentance, for it has\nonly just begun.\nQuicken, always capable Lord, the work I have\nset before me.\nEase the course to its conclusion.\nHelp me achieve the bliss of accomplishment.\nHelp me reach the destination I hope for.\nBe my companion through the end of my journey\n\nIn my ascending flight, speed me on the course\ntoward the good.\nBe at my right side when I am in danger.\nMake your voice heard in my time of need.\nGrant me life with your hand in the hour of my death.\nIntervene with your finger in my time of alarm.\n\nLevel the most harmful obstacles of alienation.\nSend an angel, as you did to Habbakuk, to help me.\nInspire my speech before the tribunal of judgment.\nPlant wisdom in me when I am being scrutinized.\nWith the cloud of your will miraculously protect me.\nCalm my stormy seas with your tree of life, the cross.\nBy your command, bridle my earthly impulses.\nFor if your mercy wills it, Lord,\nthe fluid waves of the sea will become harder\nthan stone.\nBut if you abandon me on dry land, Lord,\nthe earth upon which I stand will move\nand crumble beneath me.\n\n\n# II.\n\nJesus, accept with favor\nthe supplications I make to you,\nand turn my gnawing apprehensions into solid faith.\nIn the time of the great flood that destroyed everything,\nthose who lived carelessly without fear\nupon the steady plains of earth\nwere destroyed, bereft of your mercy,\nwhile those who trusted in your name,\nstood on the rocking deck\nof the covered ark of logs\nand were saved.\nEven so, rescue me with your love of mankind,\nthough I forever sway this way and that, and\ndeliver me to the port of your peace, I pray you.\n\nBearing the fruits of your grace with me\nand leaving behind the heavy burden of sin that\nweighs me down,\nI fall before you, Lord, in the words of your parable,\nuniting with you completely, inseparably,\nO Lord, blessed in all things.\nNow chanting these prayers in antiphon\nwith the most pure angels\nand with the earthly martyrs\nwho were tested by water and fire\nand who upon their departure from this life, pray for us,\nleaving their memory as encouragement,\nlet us say with them, in unison:\nSo be it.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-86": { - "title": "Prayer 86", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHave mercy, praiseworthy and long-suffering king,\nupon all souls through these prayers\nof grieving lamentation,\ncomposed on various themes,\nand have mercy especially on those souls\nwho are cut off from the hope of salvation\nwho have died unprepared,\nwith lamps extinguished for lack of oil.\nRemember, then, my compassionate Lord,\nand consider me justified in this request also,\nfor in your splendid and awe-inspiring majesty\nyou combined opposites in the make-up of man,\na little gravity, a little levity,\non the one hand coolness, on the other heat,\nso that by keeping the opposites in balance,\nwe might be called just,\nbecause of this faithful equality.\nAnd however virtuous we might be judged\non this account, when transported upward,\nwe should bear in view that we are made of humble clay\nand accept the crown of tribulation.\nBut since we violated your commandment of the\nOld Testament\nand following our earthly nature, strayed like animals,\nwe were laid low and bound to the earth,\nin some instances by disease, and others by cruelty,\nsome by gluttony and passions,\nas if a ravenous beast is joined to our nature.\n\nSometimes one of four primary elements,\nlunges forward and uncontrollably, savagely and\nrelenlessly raises its head.\nAnd though warmed by the fervor of our love for you\nand by token of your spark which is in us,\nthe coldness that is its constant companion,\nextinguishes it, disrupting the good.\nAnd although we ascend to you with the\nairy ways of angels, the weight and density of\nour first element, earth,\nholds us down, and hinders us.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, defeated on all fronts and completely forsaken,\nlike a feeble cripple, I am rejected, I am banished that\nI might perish.\nWorn down by the multitude of blows, I was\ncaptured by death and deprived of grace.\nI seek mercy with a shameful face.\nI, who have committed all manner of sin,\npray for all the dead living in you.\nFor you are able, with infinite ingenuity,\nto save dying mortals like me.\nFor you everything is possible.\nEspecially since you have power that knows no limits,\nand you take delight in exercising your will for good.\nTherefore, when these two illustrious and\nrenewing graces come together--power and will--\nthe despair that afflicts the race of sinners is lifted away\nand the light of your good news arrives\nwith your prescription to heal our souls,\nLord of all, blessed forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-87": { - "title": "Prayer 87", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nAnd now, since I am approaching the end of this\nmodest testament of lamentations,\nLord, with these prayers, put an end\nto those demeaning blameworthy acts\nthat have become a bad habit with me.\nYou established the good news of hope for condemned\npeople like me, saying, “It is not the will of the Father,\nthat the least of these little ones should perish.”\nAnd further, “This is the will of my Father,\nthat I shall not lose those he has given to me.”:\n\n\n# II.\n\nBehold, you are blessed for compassion,\never praised for your sweetness,\nproclaimed for your patience,\nrecognized for your help,\npreached as the Lord for salvation,\ncelebrated for your bounty,\nhonored for your protection,\nglorified for your deliverance,\nworshiped for your infinite highness,\nadored for your greatness beyond understanding,\nalone acclaimed for your triumph,\nexalted for your great strength,\nrevered for your mercy,\nembraced for your mildness.\n\nSharing in humility\nwith your heavenly father,\nGod of all comfort,\ntogether with your Holy Spirit, filled with goodness\nwho established the Law\nnot to abandon the fallen beast of one’s enemy\nnor the man who stumbles by his own stupidity.\nYour gifts, Almighty, within me,\nand your virtue, great Lord, on high\nare celebrated endlessly by the eternal choir of angels,\nthus hear my prayful voice\nthrough the intercession of the angels\nand along with the supplications of the martyrs,\nin sweet and pleasing aroma.\n\nThrough the redeeming value of these prayers\nof reconciliation, almighty Lord,\nlet my original sin be pardoned and\nmy unseen wounds be cured,\nalong with those committed in\nthe course of my life and at my death,\nwounds that bring death to my body and my soul.\nHeal my inner and outer wounds,\ntheir traces, lines, and welts,\nwith the exalted and pure salve of your mercy.\nThe multitude of bites\nshow you the essence of my character,\nboth the base and that which is pleasing to you.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd if I reach old age,\nhaving been guided by you to my worthy death,\ndo not abandon me in my frailty.\nDo not despise my gray hair.\nDo not destroy what is already broken.\nDo not bring down the bent.\nDo not knock down the humbled.\nDo not extinguish the flickering flame with your wind.\nDo not shove the unsteady.\nDo not leave the shivering without a coat.\nDo not permit the afflicted to go without a cure.\nDo not leave the dilapidated untended.\nDo not let the old image be dishonored.\nDo not take the taste away from the sumptuous.\nDo not tarnish the splendor of grace.\nDo not insult the old.\nDo not send waves upon the ship of my soul.\nDo not cut the thread of hope.\nDo not sever the life line.\nDo not take away presence of mind or memory.\nDo not destroy what you have shaped.\nDo not clip the wings of ascension.\nDo not deform the cheerfulness of beauty.\nDo not retract the rays of light.\nDo not close the windows of the eyes.\nDo not block their light.\nDo not cut down my speaking image.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI pray you, compassionate Lord, I beseech you with\nall of the saints,\nlisten to my prayers now, so that they will not\nlater be forgotten.\nYou led me, as the Psalmist wrote, and\n“restored my soul.”\n\nRelieve me, Lord, as with the Psalmist,\nof the doubts and perplexities that cause me fear.\n\nBut I am not worthy of this,\nno, not even of the common sustenance of a\nhired servant.\nBut you are able, according to your ways,\nto show kindness even to people who whine as I do.\nYours are the amazing gifts beyond telling, you,\nwho alone work miracles, continuously blessed\nwith the Father and the Holy Spirit,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-88": { - "title": "Prayer 88", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nNow with my broken soul, my deserted mind and\nmy crushed heart,\nI pour forth the water of my will and the milk\nof my tears,\njust as the prophet Samuel,\npoured water before you, all-seeing God,\nto show his people how to bow\nin confession and obedience\nbefore your life-giving feet.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd now, accept these prayers of sighs and contrition,\nas you inhale the scent of this bloodless sacrifice of\nwords, king of heaven.\nBless and sanctify the letters of this book of lamentation,\nand fix your seal upon it,\nas an eternal monument of\nservanthood along with others pleasing to you.\nMay it stand before you forever,\nand echo in your ears constantly.\nMay it be pronounced upon the lips of your chosen,\nand may it be spoken by the mouths of your angels.\nMay it be spread before your throne,\nand may it be offered in your sacred temples.\nMay it rise as incense in the houses of worship dedicated\nto your name, and may it give fragrance at the\naltar of your glory.\nMay it be kept among your treasures\nlaid up in store with your property.\nMay it be recited to the ears of all generations,\nand may it be preached to all peoples.\nMay it be inscribed on the doors of the mind\nand imprinted on the threshold of the senses.\nAs if alive and in person, may it recount\nthe iniquities I have confessed.\nAnd although I shall die in the way of all mortals,\nmay I be deemed to live\nthrough the continued existence of this book.\nMay it be protected from destruction by your will, Lord,\nthat it might be for me, the condemned,\nan ever watchful judge, fair accuser,\nthat reprimands with vigor and blames with rigor,\nthat relentlessly criticizes and sternly shames me,\nthat inhumanely hands me over to\nthe unbribable executioner from whom there is no escape\nlike a ruthless informant coldly exposing me to\nthe whole world.\nMay it loudly trumpet my faults in confession\nwithout break or end.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThis book will cry out in my place, with my voice,\nas if it were me.\nIt will uncover what I have covered up and\nproclaim my secrets.\nIt will lament what I have done and\nextol what I have forgotten,\nreveal the invisible and relate my blasphemy,\npreach about the depths of my soul\nand tell of my sins.\nIt will lay bare the unseen and display the shape of\nwhat is hidden.\nThrough this book may traps be explored and\npitfalls be discovered.\nMay unspeakable faults be confronted and\nthe traces of evil wrung out.\nMay the life of your grace and mercy reign, O Christ.\nMay my dry bones be preserved in your treasury\nso that at the time of eternal life,\nat the dawn of that first spring light,\non the day of renewed splendor,\nthrough your dew my soul might again stir,\nwith your immortal salvation\nand according to the hope held out in your inspired\nScriptures, may I again become green and blossom,\nand send up shoots of spiritual goodness\nthat will never dry out.\nAnd to you, Savior, and to your Spirit,\nof the same essence as the Father,\nto your united lordship and your inexplicable Trinity,\nall glory and adoration\nwith mystic praise\nforever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-89": { - "title": "Prayer 89", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nGod and Lord, life and creator,\nmerciful, compassionate, light,\nlong-suffering, God who bears no grudges,\nall-merciful, generous God who loves mankind,\nsavior, blessed, praised, glorified,\nstorehouse of steadfastness, bulwark of faith,\ngood without guile,\nradiance without darkness,\npardoner of sins,\nhealer of wounds,\ncreator of unknowable mysteries,\nthe most approachable of the unreachables,\nrefuge from despair,\nyour name is proclaimed, God the Son,\nand your Father’s with you,\nmighty and awesome,\nand your almighty Holy Spirit\nworshiped with you,\nglory and thanksgiving forever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-90": { - "title": "Prayer 90", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nGlorified God in heaven,\nsole creator, lord of all,\nawesome majesty,\ncompassion worthy of blessing,\nmercy worthy of proclamation,\nprovidence worthy of worship,\nlove of mankind worthy of celebration,\nprotection worthy of adoration,\nexalted beyond understanding,\nclose to us by your choice,\nunfailing refuge,\nyou comfort our hearts,\nyou make our grief disappear and reassure us\nin our pain,\nyou end our despair and wipe away our debts,\nyou remedy our shortcomings, discipline our passions,\nand shape our words,\nyou rein in our tongues, regulate our breathing, and\ncontrol our speech,\nyou bring our thoughts together, discipline our will, and\nsettle our emotions,\nyou calm storms and restore tranquility to the waves,\nyou hold the rudder of my impulsive will\nand taming it with your wisdom,\nyou guide me back to you.\n\n\n# II.\n\nO ever exalted giver of gifts,\nyou are forbearing with lowly gentleness,\ndwelling with fervor and untold miracles in the\nsouls of the saints.\nO king of all beings, merciful one proclaimed by\nthe universe,\nyou are our forefather and originator of\nthe law of love.\nO path of life,\nyou sweetly lead me, a learner, toward your\nheavenly light.\nO most steady outstretched hand,\nyou do not let me stumble to my destruction.\nO image of hope,\nyou appear before praying human hands as\nthat truthful hope.\nO refuge of peace,\nyou never lead us to the risk of condemnation.\nO bestower of free grace,\nyou redeem us fully without compensation.\nO generosity that knows no jealousy,\nyou adorn with your glory the base earth of\nwhich I am made.\nO brilliance without shadows,\nwho engulfs me, a miserable wretch, in the\nradiance of your awesome majesty,\nrestore and make me flourish again.\nO pardoner of our multiple sins,\nrekindling the former brilliance of those\ndeprived of salvation,\nremake their splendor.\nO Almighty,\nyou make it possible to reach the infinite heights.\nO certain path,\nyou lead us toward the promised joy.\nO yearned for bliss,\nit is pleasing to give up the breath of life,\nthat I might find you, Living God.\nO unwavering will,\nwho is able to pardon me, a slave,\nyou deserve all praise.\nO unerring balm of life,\nwho performs miracles even over those\ncompletely without life.\nO undoubted creator of all,\nwho resurrects in the blink of an eye,\nthose consumed by fire, blown to the winds,\nor devoured in the jaws of beasts,\nback into their undiminished physical being.\nO brave nobility without equal,\nin whom it is right to boast and\nin whose glory we can bask.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLook, Lord, from heaven, with cheerful sweetness\nupon me, imperiled on all sides by destruction.\nCalm my anxious sobbing.\nGrant the ease of repose.\nThe deadly armies are mounted against me:\nbattalions of violent warriors armed with\nall manner of demonic devices,\nthe barrage of ugly sins hateful to you,\nthe strokes of pain and destructive disease.\nRepel them, take them away, cut them off, stop them,\ndrive them out, banishing them to a distant place.\nDestroy them yet again\nand erect the sign of your cross\nas a destiny of life and beacon at my death\nguiding me to your refuge,\nO Salvation.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd through the invincible, infallible and irresistible\npower of your awesome majesty,\nmay the secret snares of Satan be undone,\nmay his tools be snatched away and the\nstumbling blocks removed,\nmay his traps be foiled, may his ambush be discovered,\nmay his treachery be revealed,\nmay his nets be lifted away,\nmay his weeds be burned,\nmay the wicked spells be cast out,\nmay the deceptive ropes of the hunter of death be cut,\nmay the liar’s gossip be confounded.\nmay the troublemaker’s weapons run out,\nmay the swords fall from the hands of the\nbearer of death,\nmay the attacker’s preparations be scuttled,\nmay the ropes of the tormentor come undone,\nmay the false appearances of the hypocrites\nbe unmasked,\nmay the heavy-handedness of the haughty be banned,\nmay the bands of marauders be dispersed,\nmay the hordes of thieves be banished,\nmay the masses of barbarians be expelled,\nmay the fortresses of the rebels be demolished,\nmay the tempests of the boastful be checked,\nmay the rainstorms of the tempter be dispelled,\nmay the frost of the divider evaporate,\nmay the horns of the wicked be broken,\nmay the pedestals of idols collapse,\nmay the bragging of the proud be shattered,\nmay the agressors’ confrontations be repulsed,\nmay the troops of Belial be destroyed--\nboth spiritual and physical,\nmay the invaders from one route be set to flight\nin seven directions,\nmay they fall into the pits they have dug for me,\nmay the winters of discontent turn to summer,\nmay the ties that bind me to the tireless outlaw be cut,\nmay the kiss of the flatterer upon my forehead revolt me,\nmay the barrage of arrows from my tormentor cease,\nmay the boat of the trickster always be rocky,\nmay the teeth of the biter be ripped from their roots.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThrough the blessed wood of life,\nupon which you were bound,\nincomprehensible God,\nby the memory of those nails,\nwith which you were spread upon the instrument of\ndeath, creator of heaven and earth,\nby your lordly blood, by which, as with a fishhook, you\ncaught the great serpent,\nby the bitterness of the bile,\nwhich you drank, pouring out the deadly\npotion of the destroyer,\nby the blessed recounting of your horrible torment,\nthrough which you shamed and silenced\nthe impudence of the opponent,\nby your name that cannot be understood or explained in\nany way, before which the natures of the visible and\ninvisible, tremble with fear and awesome terror and\nare condemned,\nmay all these gifts of grace\nbe for me, who proclaim them,\nprotection, cure and pardon.\n\nAnd for the serpent that brought the bitter\npoison of death,\nby whom the universe was betrayed into evil,\nmay these bring the death for him.\nMay he be bound and taken captive,\nsubjected to the stroke of incurable torture.\n\nMay your mercy, O creator, toward me,\nand the breath of my soul toward you,\nbe united inseparably as one.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAnd let whoever may read these requests\nand supplications\nof the voice calling out in prayer,\nwith the love of God,\nwhether old or young, girl or boy,\nor one of the maidens,\nmay all equally receive, without distinction,\nfrom you a portion of the blessing of forgiveness of sin,\nand be restored to their former spotless purity,\nsealed with your unchanging image.\nYou who are almighty, powerful, beyond telling,\nbeyond understanding, beyond comprehension,\nlook upon the cries of the sighing heart,\noffered to you from the lips of all,\nfor your Father in heaven and doer of good,\nfor the Holy Spirit, co-equal in glory and giver of life,\nthrough the intercession of your Mother of God,\nand the prayers of all the saints.\n\nFor you created everything\nand from you all things came into being,\nand you rule over all,\nand to you is befitting glory from all creation.\nYou, one of the very essence of the timeless trinity,\ninfinitely glorified together,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-91": { - "title": "Prayer 91", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nLord, Lord filled with compassion, God of mercies,\nmajestic name, awe-inspiring voice,\nsevere summons, unbroken silence,\nthundering speech, shocking sound,\nhope of good deeds and all merciful sweetness,\nbefore which all creatures quake in fear.\nBefore your awesome wrath,\nthe seraphim take to flight and the cherubim\nhuddle together.\nthe choirs of angels hide their faces,\nall the principalities of heaven shake in amazement,\nand all of them rejoice with great trembling in\njubilant celebration.\nthe demons are frightened away and the\nevil bands recoil,\nthe spirits of darkness are exiled and\nthe angels of the banished one are condemned\nto the abyss.\nThe attacks of the aggressors are held in check by\nthe sign of your cross, and the vengeful Amalekites are\nlocked away in their infernal prison.\nThe enemy forces are bound with undoable knots.\nThe legions of the warriors of death are jailed in prisons\nfrom which there is no escape.\nThe demonic hordes are arrested as in irons by\nyour command.\nThe instigators of mutiny are silenced.\nThe mobs of evil spirits are tied up and waste away.\nThe emissaries of the Antichrist are locked in\nunbreakable chains.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn this midnight silence I lift\nmy hand toward you to make\nthe blessed sign of your cross, source of sight,\nwho never dims in the darkness of ignorance,\nbut eternally dwells in unapproachable light.\nWith a grateful heart I implore\nthat this grieving soul be taken\nunder the protection of your almighty wing.\nSave me from the onrush of external illusion.\nEndow my heart’s eye with pure light.\nStrengthen me with your cross, the wood of life,\nagainst nightmares.\nConsecrate the boundaries of my cell with drops of your\nlife-giving blood.\nSanctify my threshold with the water and blood from\nyour side.\nMay the roof of my dwelling bear the shape of\nyour cross.\nMay the miracle of your sacrifice for our salvation\nappear as a vision before my raised eyes.\nMay the instrument of your torment be fixed\nupon my door.\nMay my faith and hope hang upon your blessed tree.\nWith your cross, Lord, stop the slayer of souls.\nLet the protector of light enter.\nEase the severity of my pains\nand lighten the burden of my guilt.\nIn the silent chamber where my mind collects itself\nupon the cushion of my bed,\nrecalling the bitter fruits of despair,\nI confess to you, all-knowing God, my\ninnumerable deeds of wicked iniquity in all their forms.\n\n\n# III.\n\nGive me rest.\nI am exhausted from the multitude of cares and toil.\nRemove the turmoil of doubt from my broken spirit,\nthe bitterness along with the grief,\nthe sighing along with the misery,\nthe anxiety along with the wretchedness,\nthe cries along with the destruction,\nthe brokenness along with the stupor,\nthe delirium along with the folly,\nthe imprudence along with the stupidity,\nthe cooling of love along with the feverish\npassion for luxury.\n\nCome to my aid,\nfor I am weak with grief and poor in spirit.\nWith your right hand of beneficial grace,\nwith your finger of renewal, with your ever-radiant glory,\nwith your eternal, incorruptible presence,\nwith your cheerful countenance,\nwith the essence of your venerable being,\nwith your greatness worthy of worship,\nrelieve this labored sighing that is suffocating me.\n\nStop the new tricks of evil and the old deceptions of\nthe Troublemaker,\nthe alienating impulses of the teacher of death,\nthe unfitting imaginings prompted by the one who\nkills us daily,\nthe mirages caused by the treacherous demon,\nthe enchanting sorcerer’s fiery breath.\n\nProtect my place of rest in the tranquility\nresembling death,\nfrom hidden thoughts and new errors,\nfrom great misdeeds and small missteps,\nfrom the evil machinations of idleness.\n\nBanish from my senses, wayward servant that I am,\ninappropriate thoughts and base passions,\nblameworthy conduct and unbecoming ambitions,\nerring actions, ridiculous illusions,\nvile thoughts, and despicable babble.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nArm me, for I have taken refuge in you,\narm me with an unerring heart and undefiled body,\nagainst winds, the violent blows,\nthe battering of the storm, the pouncing of the tempest,\nthe attacks of beasts.\nWhen I close my eyes, do not let my heart-vision\ngrow dark, rather let it awaken,\nbecome bright and splendid\nto shine with you, Lord Jesus Christ,\nwith the burning of the inextinguishable light.\n\nWith your word, cleanse my bedchamber\nof cunning and distractions,\nof memories distasteful to you and thoughts\nhostile to heaven,\nof criminal follies and ingratitude toward your Lordship,\nand heresies against God.\n\nStand guard over me with your heavenly host,\nthe principalities and dominions, and invincible powers,\npure ministers of your holy Godhead,\nthe apostles with the tidings of your Gospel,\nthe prophets with their testaments,\nand the righteous with their prayers offered at the\nend of their lives,\nthat I might fall asleep in mourning pleasing to you\nand awaken anew with the grace of your joy.\nThough I sleep with trepidation,\nmay I arise again in spiritual bliss.\nThough I go to bed in sinfulness,\nmay I get up with a clear conscience\nand spotless purity.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHear the sighing of my voice in prayer,\nyou who alone are most compassionate,\nthrough the intercession of your Holy Mother,\nand all the righteous and the chosen martyrs.\n\nTo you glory from all people, which I offer up to you,\nalong with the choirs of immortal Holy Angels,\nin praise of your Father, our God,\nand the Holy Spirit, the creator and renewer\nof everything,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-92": { - "title": "Prayer 92", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nI give you thanks, compassionate Lord,\nfriend of mankind,\ncreator of heaven and earth,\nSon of the living God.\nAs soon as I awake I am seized by yearning\nfor your love, thanks to the sounding of your wooden bell.\nHearing the bell’s clipped resonance\nwe awake and arise from our deathlike slumber.\nAnd as if called by a consoling voice,\nwe are drawn to the service of blessing and come\nwith joy before your throne to be judged.\n\n\n# II.\n\nGlory to you,\nname beyond definition, uncontainable power,\nwho went to such amazing lengths to provide\nfor my salvation.\nImmortal essence, praised with thanksgiving,\nyour miracles in this world\nforeshadow the world to come.\nBy this instrument, this wooden vessel,\nyou firmly shake me from the stupor of sleep,\nas if you rouse me from my slothfulness\nwith an admonishing reproach,\nadding percussive accompaniment\nto the gentleness of your fatherly love.\nBy the clapping of two mallets,\nyou sweetly rain your loving-kindness upon us.\nYou do not plunge me back into the depths of sleep\nwith hushed syllables,\nnor frighten my anxious soul\nwith needless harshness.\nI worship you, upon my knees, Creator of all,\nwho has given us in this world a sample\nof the sound of that terrifying alarm that will echo\non the great day of resurrection.\nYou brought me back to life\nfrom the tomblike numbness of oblivion.\nYou sought a fool like me to invite\nto taste the wine of joy\nYou made this instrument to prepare\nthe immaculate bride for your love, O groom.\nWith this humble spur, you struck fear in the\nmonstrous demons.\nYou tamed the Rebel by placing a massive yoke\nupon his shoulders.\nYou muzzled the jaw of the Troublemaker with a\nrestraining bridle.\nMay your infinite highness be forever exalted great God,\nwho turned the tree symbolizing our transgression\ninto the liberating grace of salvation\nand who brought a muddled fool like me\nto my senses through the wisdom of your spirit.\nThrough the strokes of the mallet on this wooden board\nyou remind us that alone we cannot cure\nthe serpent’s bite.\nBy the three blows at the end of the call to worship,\nwhich symbolize the Trinity,\nyou reinforce the three chains that restrain\nmy destroyer.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI send up odes of praise, with fragrant incense, to you\nGod who cares for all,\nfor your ways are more potent than the multitude of\npagan gods,\nfrom whom you captured my sinful\nsoul guiding me to your worship.\n\nWith the voice of this sacred wood, hardy and robust,\nyou preached the truth.\n\nWith this worthy instrument\nyou increased the honor of your New Covenant.\n\nIts clamor calls your heavenly host to arms,\nLord Christ, who rules over all earthly states\nand emperors.\nIt is the sign of joy, Lord Jesus, upon your victory on the\nfield of battle, in which the Pharoah who oppresses souls\nis seized and bound.\nThis well-shaped piece of wood delivers a daily beating\nupon the head of the haughty evil doer.\nBy the sound of this wood, the sons of Zion are\nsummoned to battle against the despot who casts a\ndarkness over the world.\nAnd like a house of divine worship, built long ago,\nthis wood consecrated with oil, which neither grows old\nnor retires from service,\nalerts us well in advance of the Day of Reckoning that\nlies ahead.\n\nIt is like the tree of life in paradise, O God, inviting\nus to gather and hasten to the house of blessings.\nIt resembles the tree of knowledge\ncreated to distinguish good from evil.\nIt is a solemn reminder of the sign of the cross\nsealed upon my forehead by your Holy Spirit.\nIt announces the good news of your glorious\nsecond coming to the bride, kept pure for you, O King.\nIt encourages the ranks of the saintly to rejoice.\nIt inspires an innocent yearning for spiritual union\nwith the virgin queen, the mother of all, veiled\nin splendor.\nIt prepares the secret treasures that adorn the soul.\nIt is reminiscent of the thunderous message on Mt. Sinai\nand the aura of dwelling places of the Lord.\nIt crowns with glory the immaculate mother of\npure children, the splendid eternal virgin--the church.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWith the sounding of this wood,\nstronger than the trumpeting rams’ horns at Jericho,\nyou brought down and leveled the tyranny of Satan.\nWith this wooden slingshot you slew Goliath.\nYou fashioned this new javelin that foretells the\ndestruction of Satan,\nfor with this tool you pulled up the deep roots of sin\nand through its beneficial work\nyou recommitted me to duties I had forgotten.\nIf I call this alarm a voice,\nthat predicts the coming of your Word, O God,\nI would not be wrong, but would be telling the truth.\nBy this humble instrument,\nthough material, yet bearing the spirit,\nthe majesty of your works are proclaimed, O Jesus.\nThrough this unassuming sign,\nsignaling the place of refuge,\nyou draw our attention on earth\nto your bounteous help from on high.\n\n\n# V.\n\nYour name is proclaimed,\nGod, who loves mankind,\nwho provides and cares for us beyond reason.\nYou are adored in the mystery of your Holy Trinity,\nO light whose image cannot be drawn.\nBy this twice dedicated wood,\nyou shot arrows of sound,\nthrough the air, reaching their targets\nacross long distances, bearing a living spirit,\nfoiling the secret designs of the archer of darkness,\nforcing him into retreat.\nAs if waging battle from a high fortress,\nmighty and indestructible,\nyou hurl down the strokes of this wooden bell,\nlike an angel you send to confound the enemy.\nWith the words of your covenant, Your Majesty,\nconsecrated with grace by being mixed with your blood,\nyou have sharpened this horn\nlike a cross of redemption honed on the whetstone,\nto strike down the blustering bully.\nBy the clamor of this wooden bell,\nmore tumultuous than a celestial chorus,\nthe doors of the human will\nwith its half-hearted and unseemly impulses,\nare knocked down\ntaking with it the legalistic mentality of the\nOldTestament heart and its house which is but a shadow\nof your new covenant.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nI offer you glory and praise,\nimmortal king,\nI pray that you might renew\nwith your mighty right hand\nall that you have created.\nBy the reverberating wooden bell\nyou drove away the wicked peril of the\ncunning Troublemaker,\nthe feverish torment of sin,\nthe sour breath of the deceiver,\nthe impulsive and deadly misadventures and delusions,\nthe harmful and depressing acts caused by\nweakness of the flesh,\nthe diabolical whining that causes us to faint.\nHelped by the wings of the sign of your cross,\ndispel again with this wooden armament\nclouds that rain fire,\nthunder that brings hail,\nburning flames of smoky deception\nof the many-footed fire-breathing dragon,\nthe butcher’s knife, the confrontation of battle,\nthe wild thoughts that overtake me\nlike prancing demons.\nThey are set to flight by this little bell,\novercome with trembling,\nand they know the Lord\ncomes to judgment\nwith a sound like this.\nAnd the pious warriors,\nwell armed with the sword of the Holy Spirit,\nare spurred on with courage,\nwhen they hear the alarm of the wooden bell,\nwhich with an inarticulate cry calls all nations\nto sacrifice themselves for justice.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nListen to the great trumpet sound\nby which God is exalted in worship\nthroughout the world.\nIt resounds in the ears of the heathens, causing\nthem to scatter.\nIt reinforces the voice of the watchmen of great God,\nand, in the words of Isaiah, has us singing\ntogether for joy\nThanks to this wooden bell, the enemies of the cross,\nare separated like the waters.\nThe fruit of the first tree loses its\nfar-reaching significance,\nwhen wood becomes celebrated as the symbol of life.\nCompared to this wooden bell emitting the sound of life,\nthe iron sword of war loses its luster.\nAnd like something sacred,\nthis wooden bell that rings out life\nwas deemed worthy to be inscribed\nwith the sign of the cross,\nlike bells on horses, holy to the Lord.\nThe sword of human authority is sheathed\nin deference to this anointed staff of the\nheavenly shepherd.\nNo hammer of any artisan has nicked a\nstone of the temple,\nbut on the altar built by God this sacred wood\nsoaring with the wings of the cross wields power.\nNot only at the beginning of the month,\nnor upon the seven times seven years of the jubilee,\nis the wooden bell removed from its corner and sounded,\nbut from the dawn of the universe to its far reaches,\nupon the waves of the sea and its islands,\nit echoes, divinely,\nannouncing the good news.\nThe swords of the butcher were broken\nby the sight of this wood,\nand the useless were transformed into ploughshares and\npruning hooks.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe sound of the wooden bell, is not like the harsh echo\nof stones in the depths of a pit,\nnor does it do violence to the air, in the words of\na foreign sage.\nIt does not pierce the ear with a sharp and\nannoying sound,\nnor does it make the skull vibrate unpleasantly.\nIt does not cause bones to crack,\nnor does it stun the mind.\nIt does not clang like a bell of copper,\nnor does it clunk without any sweetness\nlike a stone on the pavement.\nIt is the invincible keeper of the New Zion.\nIt is one of the main, sacred vessels, given by God,\nthat Christian clerics, along with the Levites,\ntreat with care and reverence.\nIt is like the voice of an angel,\nwhich in the words of the parable-teller,\nresemble the song of a bird.\nIt is a new musical instrument to announce the grace of\nthe good news.\nIt awakens in us the Spirit of God\nmore readily than the odes of Elishe’s harp.\nIt is the prelude to the lamentations,\nplayed upon the strings of a sweet and\nharmonious violin.\nIt is cymbals with their allegorical expression.\nIt is a new flute of a different sort\nthat we have adopted instead of the old.\nIt does not make hollow noises like reeds of the pagans.\nIt does not make earthly noises like instruments of\nthe Jews, about which the Lord said through the prophet,\n“Take these away from me.”\nRather, it is a God-pleasing sound, doubly honored,\nfor it wards off attacking demons and other\nstrokes of evil.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nAnd now, I have accepted with blessing,\nveneration and praise, this sacred gift,\nas protection for me and glory for you,\nthanksgiving from me and worship to you,\na wonder of your creative glory, wanting in nothing.\nMay this Godly sound pierce through the joints\nof my body to drive from my soul the deceitful\nways of the demons and block corruption.\nMake this wooden bell a symbol,\na harp of light, an invitation that cannot be\nretracted, an endless praise of your\nlordly providence.\nHear us, O compassionate Lord, through\nthis wooden bell.\nGrant us, I pray, almighty Lord,\ntwofold protection against visible\nand invisible enemies.\nGive us, O generous hand,\nopen and ready to offer and share good things,\nthe sweetness of air and beneficial rains.\nMay your order, voiced in this medium,\ncurb the hellish blasts, the painful breathing,\nthe attacks of the deceitful and evil brigands.\nBy this instrument may we be delivered from\nthe aggressive warriors who lead us to evil.\nBy the cheerful voice of this anointed wood,\nmay the worm, canker, and their kind,\nthat draw strength from our sins and fight\nagainst us be driven away, cut down and killed.\nBy this plant of bliss\nmay our trust in you as our protector,\nCreator of all, lord of creation,\ntake root, like the thicket where Abraham\nfound the ram, at the end of whose branches\nthe sacred inheritance of my present salvation\nhangs before us, caused by you, Christ, to blossom\nand bear the fruit of eternal life.\nBefore the ringing out of the good news heralded by\nhis glorious wood,\nmay the demon-possessed enemies\nand the lying and tricky many-handed hellions\nbe set to flight and banished to the dark abyss.\nMay this bell drive away from the fertile fields\nof our toil, the devastating blights and trampling\nbands of animals.\nLet this bell remove unbecoming excesses\ncaused by the devices of evil,\nthat render us yet more ugly.\nMay this bell truly eliminate\nthe faults generated by traitors\nin our two natures:\nfrom the spiritual, strange, false thoughts;\nfrom the physical, corruption caused by\nimpure stirrings.\nDeliver me, Lord Jesus, I pray you!\nDeliver me, my benefactor.\nReach out to me with your almighty right hand,\nand having helped me,\nfree me of these enemies.\n\n\n# X.\n\nMix and unite your commandments with the\nsound of the bell,\nso that my callous heart, hard as a diamond,\nmight again bear the fruits of your word.\nMay the sound of the bell strike and pierce\nmy worn heart and forsaken soul\nand like a sharp stake of wonder,\nreinforce and shore them up,\nupright and steadfast,\nwhile softening the hardness of my soul,\nso that I might awaken, sobered with humility,\nlike Paul and Matthew.\nO God who loves mankind,\nthrough this venerable wooden bell\nremind me of the gifts of your cross\nby which you did things beyond words.\nLift away from me, Giver of life,\nthe weight of my sins\nby the glorious yoke of your new tabernacle.\nBy your will, Almighty,\nmay the ears of my stubborn heart be opened\nto the sound of life.\nBy this tiding of your magnificent good works,\nmay the ears of the deaf hear.\nThrough this bell may the tongues of the dumb speak.\nMay the sight of the eyes be restored,\nthat they might look upon you purely in\nunwavering adoration.\nMay the weary wills of men be refreshed,\nthat they might repent and return to you.\nIn my turmoil, O Lord,\ngrant me the rain of tears.\nLet this be from you to us\na message of joy,\na jubilant shout,\na tranquil song,\na thing of bliss,\na means of salvation,\nan occasion for pardon,\na banishment of grief,\nan extrication from entanglements,\nan easing of anxiety,\na ceasing of cares,\na dispelling of sighs\nan alleviation of groaning,\nan assurance of necessities,\na discipline of passions,\na consolation for disappointments,\na cure for pains,\nan immunization against backsliding,\na contemplation of things invisible.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nLead me across this bridge of yearning,\nwhich neither hinders nor causes us to stray,\non our upward journey,\nupon this heaven-bound ladder marked\nby the footsteps of the saints.\nOffer me to your blessed Father,\nwhose name inspires awe,\nO doer of good,\nmay I be guided by your Holy Spirit,\nto inseparable unity with you.\nAnd to your one and only, holy and united Lordship and\nincorruptible creatorship, for which your creatures,\nboth living and inanimate, give thanks,\nglory and dominion, forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-93": { - "title": "Prayer 93", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nHoly, awe-inspiring name, too sublime to utter,\never desired object of our yearning,\npraised without end by the glorious seraphim,\nwho sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy,”\nto you who dwell in the Holy of Holies,\nwho are filled with bountiful goodness,\nyou pour forth generously and without end,\nawesome and incomprehensible.\nYou are all and are in all.\nWith these words, as my contract of hope,\nmay I enter into a covenant with you, Almighty?\nYes, amen, alleluia!\nvenerated king of the universe,\nGod of all, creator of beings and sovereign Lord,\nsole cause of all consequences,\nforever adored, Savior and Christ, the anointed Messiah.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe meaning of this priceless treasure and\nirreplaceable wealth\nis given to us by your very name,\nJesus Christ heavenly king,\nwhom the immortal and sublime beings,\nwith mouths of light and breath of fire,\nserve with trembling,\nbowing to you on bended knee in thanksgiving,\ngladly without mental reservations,\nCreator of all beings visible and invisible.\nYou who are and were totally perfect and\nlacking nothing, took our nature truly and in its entirety,\nin order to complete it with your perfection.\nO blessed and praised Lord,\nforever proclaimed for the incomprehensible\nsacrifice you made for our salvation,\nto you, glory and praise for your goodness,\nyou, who are exalted beyond words,\nsublime and awe-inspiring.\nYou are the source of grace given through anointing,\na great mystery that miraculously adorns us,\nfor through it your light was revealed to us,\n\nO incomprehensible ray,\nboundless dawn,\nsun shining fairly on all,\nstar that divides the day in two,\nlamp unto our feet and light upon the path,\nthanks to you we see the meaning of this sacrament\nand compose this prayer,\ncelebrating with angelic singing and jubilation,\nwith a pure spirit,\nvenerating with incense fit for our Savior\nyour generous allotment of gifts, most wise Lord,\nthrough the oil of gladness and spotless belief.\nFor the first created man, my forefather, who,\nscarcely created, tragically lost the greatest gift,\nthe breath of eternal life,\nand forever withering in the hands of sin,\nbecame a captive of death.\nHe was tied into an undoable knot,\ninto deadly decadence,\nand fell because of the tree of knowledge,\nunable to stand, stumbling toward destruction,\nexpelled from the light,\nhe was condemned to the darkness of this world.\nBut you, compassionate Lord,\nalways knew your creature\nbetter than he knew himself.\nIn pursuit of the divine knowledge he could not have,\nhe lost the innocence he had,\nthereby becoming unable to look upon\nyour sublimity which dwells in unapproachable light,\nO infinite God.\n\nFor this reason you did not reveal yourself\nin an ever radiant light that does not wane,\nbut only as an aid against the terrors of the night,\nwhen the feet stumble.\nYou gave the oil, and in this oil you placed a wick,\nwhich exemplifies your union, without imperfection,\nwith our condition,\nformed and woven with your love of mankind,\nso that we, who find ourselves banished, in the\nshadow of death,\nbecause of the first transgressions against the tree,\nthrough the fruit of the tree akin to it,\nmight be enlightened with the flame of faith\nand restored to that former blessed state.\nAnd also by being spread upon the tree of death\nyou spread us upon it as well,\nand thanks to this great mystery\nunited us with the tree of life.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, just as the day is incomplete without night,\nso the household is incomplete without the staple oil.\nFor as ordinary, unconsecrated oil illumines the sight of\nthe physical eyes,\nso the oil sanctified and chosen by the mystery of your\nbreath of grace\ngives luster to our invisible souls in a glorious,\nmiraculous way\nuniting us with you, Lord who cannot be seen.\nFor as we believe, that by the washing of the body\nin the glow of holy baptismal font\nour souls are cleansed,\nso when anointed with chrism, that oil of hope,\nwe believe, without the least doubt,\nthat we receive through it the Holy Spirit.\nAnd since by your blessed commandment, Lord,\nyou arranged in advance the pardoning of\nthose afflicted with sin,\nand for those who do not believe in this pardon,\nyou performed before their eyes the miracle\nof healing as evidence for doubters.\nSimilarly, this oil of salvation, sanctified with light,\nis poured on us to anoint our outer temple,\nand enters us in secret and unseen,\nwhereby the inner man is born again.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThis physical thing is a superb analogy for you,\nfor the wise maidens who bore the oil\nreceived the benefit of your mercy,\nand in praise you defined yourself as merciful, saying:\n“I am merciful, said the Lord.”\nAs your name is synonymous with love, O God,\nso in part your mercy and love are manifested\nby coming down to be reimprinted upon our nature\naccording to the divine plan of salvation.\nThe sacrificial fat is a fitting analogy for a great\nand sublime mystery\nfor as the fat is to the animal,\nso the oil is to the plant--its heavy, earthen part.\nAnd as you commanded in the Old Law\nthat this part of the animal should not be eaten,\nbut should be offered as a sacrifice to you, O Creator,\nso under the New Testament,\nthis oil is a potent offering ceremonially given\nfor your favor, fitting only for you Lord,\nthe God who is,\nas the true travel-mate of my soul,\nto be kept and pledged to you, Creator.\n\nFor neither the lifeblood nor the savor of the burning\nfat, which are the symbols of the soul and strength,\nare burnt to ashes with the meat of sacrifice,\nbut are the portion offered before your throne\nin the heavenly kingdom, O Lord,\nso this light-giving substance\nmay always burn bright and inextinguishable.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe first-born male could not preside as a judge\nunless he was anointed,\nnor could the clergy set foot in the Holy of Holies,\nunless he were ordained and consecrated with oil.\nJacob poured oil upon the stone on which he slept,\nthus consecrating the distant archetype of\nthe altar of God.\nThis pouring out moreover symbolized your descent\non that splendid ladder, O God exalted beyond words,\nto take me up on my heavenly journey.\nAnd for this reason, he erected and anointed a monument\nto remind later generations.\nThe splendor of Aaron’s priesthood\nwas fulfilled by anointing him\naccording to your commandment, great God.\nIn the words of the Psalmist,\nwhen oil poured down over his head and beard,\nhe was miraculously transformed,\nregaining the original glory of Adam,\nand receiving your life-giving Holy Grace through union\nwith our nature.\nThe kings of this world would have no legitimacy,\nas the image of your creatorship on earth,\nwere it not for their consecration with a horn\nfilled with oil, and the placing of the crowns upon their\nheads in your name, Christ.\nAnd how could I forget the first among these sublime\nfigures, Melchisedek, the servant of your greatness and\nyour image beyond understanding?\nIs it possible that Melchisedek\nthe symbol of your awesome truth,\non the Mount of Olives,\nwhere later your feet, God incarnate, walked,\ncan it be possible he was not anointed by the fruits of this\nplace by the angels on high?\nThus he was invested by you\nto guard the tomb of our forefather Adam\nin princely episcopal honor,\nuntil you appeared, Lord,\nthe true priest fully revealed,\nthe regeneration and regenerator of Adam.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nSince yours is grace,\nand to you is befitting thanksgiving,\nO blessed Son of God,\nmay you yourself place the seal of your blessed image\nupon these prayers, imbued with the oil of humble love,\nthe incense of adoration\nand the myrrh of repentance\nthat they may bring glory for you\nand healing for me, a wretched sinner.\nApply, Lord Jesus, this oil of light to my invisible sores,\nand on the cauterized parts of these deadly wounds,\nput a drop of the blessed oil of your salvation\nwith the ever sweet wine of your love,\nbound by you with the protective bandages of your care,\nso that this testament, my explanatory discourse in prayer,\nmight be endowed with fitting dignity,\nunder the wings of your Holy Spirit.\n\nYour Spirit, O exalted God, came upon David,\nonly after the day he was consecrated and anointed.\nSaul became a different man and joined the\nband of prophets, when the anointing oil\ndescended upon his head.\nThe Assyrian Empire was conquered and taken captive\nby the anointed and joined to the house of Israel.\nCertain illustrious rulers, great and prominent\namong the uncouth and barbarous nations,\nupon whom was sprinkled the dew of this\nlife-giving oil, were caught as if in a trap,\njoining your family in service to you, great God.\nThe heavenly word, spoken through the prophets,\ncalling Cyrus, chosen of God,\nalso honored him by referring to him as\n“the Anointed One.”\nThe Psalmist esteemed the title, “anointed”\ngreater than that of “prophet,” first stating the\nprohibition, “Do not approach the anointed.”\nand then adding, “and do not harm the prophets.”\nThe divine mission entrusted to Elijah on Mount Horeb,\nwhich marked the end of the pagan cult of Baal,\nwas the anointing Jehu and Hazael.\nYour name, O bridegroom, the Christ,\n“the oil poured out,”\nis witnessed long ago by the inspired\nwords of the sage.\nIn this way, the Spirit, the eternal image and sign of God,\nmight imprint your great image on this small drop of oil\nthat we may be united with you, receiving your grace.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nWhy do I belabor this point\nwith images and farfetched analogies\nin long, complicated, poetic prayers to you,\nO exalted and awesome Lord\nO Lord and giver of life,\nO creator of heaven and earth?\nYou began to preach the good news of your kingdom,\nonly after you were anointed and proclaimed by\nJohn the Baptist as the Anointed One and “Lamb of God,\nwho takes away the sins of the world.”\nAlthough the Holy Spirit was always in you with its\ncomplete essence, and your perfect union of divinity\nwith humanity was an anointing in itself,\nthe word, anointed, when applied to the saints\ndescribes the miraculous grace acting upon them,\nand through this word you prepare the servile\nflesh of Adam to be eternally ennobled.\nOpening the book of the prophet Isaiah,\nyou read about yourself, O incarnate divinity,\nand in fulfillment of the words of your servants, O Lord,\nrevealed yourself as the anointed,\nthrough the prophetic words:\n“the Spirit of the Lord is upon me,\nbecause he has anointed me.”\nThen you closed the book,\nthereby showing the great difference in degree\nbetween these two anointings, ours and yours,\nand defined the great distance between them:\nours is a bit of luster from a drop of grace,\nand yours is the revelation of your divine essence\nshared equally with your Father and your Holy Spirit.\nWhen you first made your incarnation known\nat your birth, the angels in high praise proclaimed you\nthe Anointed One by which name you became known to\nall the creatures of earth.\nThe Prophet foretold the descent\nof your Father’s voice from the heavens\nat the River Jordan and on the chosen Mount Tabor,\nsaying “He proclaims among the people his\nAnointed One.”\nAnd the Psalmist also foretold your glory, Almighty,\nand of the honor bestowed by consecrating the human\nnature you have assumed, “God, your God has anointed\nyou with the oil of gladness.”:\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe breath of our face, Lord Christ,\nyour name is truly, “the Anointed One,”\nfor in your goodness, you gave our souls\nthe breath of life and light of your countenance.\nThe wise words of one favored by God\nproclaimed your love for mankind,\nwhile telling of a certain prophet:\n“He shall testify before the Lord and his anointed,”\nand confirmed the good news, saying:\n“I have not taken so much as a pair of sandals\nfrom any man.”\n\nIn praise of Christ’s bride, the holy church,\nthe Song of Songs, from beginning to end,\nexplains the divine mystery,\ncomparing incarnation to spiced wine\nand virtue to myrrh mixed with choice oil\nand perfect morals to a sweet perfume of\nmyrrh and incense mixed with delicious powders.\nWhen Daniel described in words that seemed\nbeyond human expression your life-giving death,\nChrist King of heaven, he predicted “the anointed one\nwill be killed in sixty-nine weeks,”\ncalling you the anointed leader.\nThe lamp stand of Zechariah, son of Berechiah\nand grandson of Iddo,\nthrough its ingenious system of oil supply\nto the seven lamps, keeping them constantly lit,\nsymbolizes the anointing and salvation\npoured from your bounty upon us.\nAnd according to the Old Law of prophecy,\ncereal offerings of round loafs of unleaven bread\nof fine flour mixed with the oil\nand peace offering of the anointed calf,\nthe portion called the Lord’s, and\npurification sacrifice performed with two birds,\nthe living one dipped in the blood of the other,\nas if with anointing oil,\nall were performed at your altar in the temple.\nAll these are manifestations of the mystery,\nall are signs relating to you,\nonly begotten Son, blessed of great God.\nYou alone are anointed in a new and marvelous way,\nin and through yourself, with your whole essence,\nperfectly and lacking absolutely nothing.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nBut does it make sense to multiply examples of\nthis great, inexplicable mystery?\nTo understand, we must taste you, sweet Lord,\nand learn through you\nthe true meaning of the oil\nfor what is it, if not\nthe gladness praised by the Psalmist\nthat you grant by curing the grief\nof the tree of our transgression?\nWhat is it, if not the rich, fullness of heart,\nby which you make us forget the food of death?\nWhat, if not the anointing, that transforms our ashen\nwretchedness into the brightness of perpetual good\ncheer, that through the salvation of your name,\nO Spirit of Might, we might become the\nchildren of God?\nWhat, if not the cure that is the fervent desire of the\nprophet’s heart, that is, to be anointed in his old age\nwith rich oil that he might be anointed upon\nhis head with oil\nby which with the help of your protecting hand,\nwe are saved from the tragedy of the fall,\nwhich brings death.\nWhat, if not the thanks\nexpressed for the lamp\nthat shed light on the fog of sin and the darkness\nof idolatry, your union in my nature to\nbecome in me, Emmanuel?\nWhat, if not the consolation prophesied by the prophet\nof gladdening blessings as a sign saying:\n“They will be anointed with oil free of impurities.”\n\nOr when the wiseman in the name of bride, says to the\nmaids of honor, “Sustain me with oil,\nshower me in apples,”\nand “Keep me in the embrace of the\nsweet balsam orchard,”\nreferring to that fine substance, filled with your Spirit,\nwhose light enables us to see\nyour finer, higher, ungraspable element, praised Lord.\n\nAnd now, our only provider and\ncause of all good things,\nlisten with compassion, Lord,\nto the supplications I call to you,\nwith my arms lifted up in prayer,\nbolstered from within,\nwith the sighs of my heart,\nwith the cries of my tongue and lips.\nExpressing thanks through these offerings,\nI offer up my gratitude to you,\nalmighty, awesome, exalted, incomprehensible,\nforever embraced in unending love,\nconstantly praised with the chant,\nHoly, Holy, only and always Holy,\nblessed forever.\nOut of your great goodness,\ngrant me yet more help,\nfor I am completely lost.\nGive me hope of sweetness,\nthough I am not worthy of the least drop of your light,\nso that I might understand through you, good Lord,\nthe subtle secret of this mystery.\nand mix thanks with my prayer,\nsaying with David,\n“We have received your mercy, Lord,”\nand “your hidden and invisible secrets,\nyou have revealed through your wisdom.”:\n\n\n# X.\n\nAnd now, majesty to you, God almighty,\nwhose generosity never ceases,\nwhose compassion streams in all directions,\nwho is always ready in healing,\nbecause you merged and mixed\nyour splendid miracles, awe-inspiring beyond telling,\ninto such a common and familiar material.\nFor that force which the heavens in their height,\nand the earth in its breadth,\nand the abyss in its depth,\nand the seas in their multitude\ncould not hold, you fit in this small drop of oil,\na mere speck, compared with your immensity,\ntruly and not just in appearance,\nso that when it performs a new miracle,\nunrelated to its nature,\nit does not appear to be some kind of\nillusion to onlookers.\nInstead it heals the doubting souls\nrather than wounding them.\nJust as out of the flour of wheat,\nblessed Son of God, you made your body,\nin reality and not in semblance,\nand out of the wine of the grape\nthe blood of your side,\nand out of the bountiful water,\nthe womb of spiritual birth,\nso you also bestowed on us, as you did upon\nyour disciples, the immortal breath of your Holy Spirit\nthrough and in this oil.\nFor the people who walked in darkness\nyou brought the dawn through your incarnation,\nand through your labors you gave birth to new life.\nYou placed a seal upon them\nthat cannot be effaced even by idolatry,\njust as no one can follow your example\nto further consecrate the wood of the cross, Lord.\nFor by this mark of grace\nyou brought light to the world,\nmanifesting yourself in your perfect fullness,\nbeyond understanding,\nin such a way, that the poor shall not want\nand the rich shall not take on airs,\nfor like the air is distributed\nand the sunlight is spread\nand the stream waters flow\nequally to all, just as the manna was equally\ndistributed to all people on earth alike,\nwith more for the poor than the rich and powerful.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nThe deep mystery of this substance is\nmarvelously explained by its very nature,\nfor it does not shift around constantly\nas if it cannot make up its mind,\nnor does it steal away from its place of rest,\nnor can it be removed by the strongest soap,\nnor is it washed away by any other kind of liquid.\nAnd just as color is a necessary and permanent attribute\nof physical existence,\nbecause when there is color, the body exists,\nand when there is no color, the body seems not to exist,\nin the same way, by virtue of its natural powers,\nthis oil takes hold and does not let go,\nand through it you were united and joined with us,\nLord Jesus Christ,\njoining the inner substance with its outward form.\nYou rendered visible\nthat which was invisible for the eyes\nand incomprehensible for the desires of our hearts,\nby providing us this oil,\nmade by pressing and squeezing fruits of the earth.\nMoreover, you did not command that this anointing oil\nbe prepared by mixing together all manner of flowers\ninto a strange concoction,\nin accordance with the old and benighted law.\nInstead, turning your name into reality,\nyou mixed yourself into this pure oil,\nmaking it radiant with heavenly light.\nAnd although the savors of your sweetness are\nbeyond expression and cannot be compared to anything,\nalthough you have variously been referred to as\nthe flowers of the field or the lilies-of-the-valley,\nexquisite nard or sandalwood mixed with aloe,\nthe scent of saffron, the blossoms of the vine or\na fine wine, you, Lord beyond understanding,\ndeemed it fitting\nthat your name be glorified simply as “oil poured out,”\nfor you are the consummation of all things\nand lacking in nothing.\nThus, not by the mixing of opposing elements,\nwhich at once symbolize a divided will,\nbut rather in confirmation of our love,\nyou revel in divine joy,\nfor our sake, you manifest yourself in all your splendor,\naccording to our needs,\nas the light of goodness\nor as a warming fire,\nor as the fervor of love,\ndevoid of any hard-hearted coldness,\nin ways to make understandable to our minds\nthat this drop of oil can really unite us with God.\nWith Solomon the anointed and adopted of God,\nI sing with the mouth of a bride, to you heavenly\nbridegroom, a song of praise and thanksgiving,\nyearning with the fervent desire of my heart\nfor your sweet scent, more than for any incense.\nIn the inspired words of the wiseman and the\ntheological evangelist, let us hasten in your footsteps\nand the trace of your scent.\nLike one who has the words of eternal life,\nhaving washed my face with the water of life,\nwhich is more exalted than the waters above the\nheavenly firmament, and having anointed my head\nwith the heavenly oil of incorruptibility,\nI come before you with joy, cheerfully and\nwithout sadness.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nThis venerated and blessed oil,\nwould not be an ointment for the chamber of my brain,\nor do the hair on my head any good,\nwere it not sealed with the sign of your\nlife-giving cross, Lord.\n\nThis miraculous oil brings the blessing of the Light to\nthe Jew and the Gentile,\nthe Indian and the barbarian,\nthe Scythian and the Greek,\nthe cruel savage and the fearsome dog-headed giants,\nthe freeborn master and the slave by birth,\nmaking them Christians,\nbaptizing them in your name,\ndedicating them to your Holy Spirit, and\nadopting them as the true sons of your Heavenly Father.\nSee how varied its powers,\nfirst in the physical and then in inner strength.\nFor as a wooden vessel easily cracks unless it is\nrubbed with oil\nand becomes useless and worthless,\nso a person, if not anointed, is easily led astray,\nand separated from you, and\nremains unenlightened.\nThis oil is your finger, O Jesus,\nwith which you perform miracles,\nwhich like unscratchable, impenetrable armor,\ncovers us with an ever protective cloak,\nfrom dark and foreign marauders.\nFor one pure as wool, dipped in this oil,\ncan neither be stained with blood,\nnor fade into somber colors.\nSpiritually, this oil enters\nand penetrates the very substance of our being.\nAnd if the curse of the Psalmist\ncould soak the bones of the evildoer like oil,\nhow much more will your Spirit\nthrough this oil of light,\nheal and make whole\nour invisible inner beings,\nfrom our windpipes\nto our toes,\ncompletely submerging\nany disturbing thought of death.\nFor your awesome, life-giving power, Lord Christ,\nis mixed in this oil and truly dwells in it.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nOil, this magnificent substance applied by wrestlers\nto their naked bodies, as an enhancement\nduring tournaments, making it difficult for their\nopponents to take hold of them,\nsets demons and diseases to flight.\nFor, in the words Ezekiel addressed to the\nspiritual Pharaoh, in the form of a satirical allegory:\n“On the day you were created,\nI placed you with an anointed guardian cherub\namidst the fiery stones of the holy mountain of God.”\nO blessed and awesome universal help,\nwho is always beyond words and beyond understanding,\nwho is constantly venerated through the gospel of life\nas the new-born, anointed one from the city of David,\nand constantly sought as in the question of the\nchief priest,\n“Are you the Christ, son of the blessed?”\nand in the blessed proclamation by Peter,\n“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,”\nand by your suspicious interrogators,\n“If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”\nAnd because of your teachings,\nwe believe you to be the Christ,\nteacher and Lord of all.\nAnd even before this,\nHerod directly asked for you by name, O Christ,\nand you yourself answered, “How is it written\nthat the anointed of God, the Son without beginning,\nthe one David calls Lord, could be his son in time?”\nAnd we understand from this as a fitting interpretation,\nthat the consummation of this mystic calling is\nrealized in us, who have the honor of being called\nChristians.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nThe awesome word “anointing,”\nevokes at once trepidation, veneration and\nrich adoration, that no earth-dweller dares be called God,\nbut only godly.\nLikewise, no human being has been called the Christ,\nbut only Christian.\nNot even the greatest of the prophets, John the Baptist,\nwho by baptizing with water\nprepared the way for the baptism with the spirit,\ncould claim this name,\nfor he said, “I am not the Christ, but was sent\nbefore him.”\nIn the words of the evangelist Mark,\nthe disciples set out in pairs,\nand as if acting with the genuine hand of God\nthey would anoint with oil\nand without invoking any other human devices,\nthey would heal people.\nFor as darkness yields to the light,\nand ailments to health\nand night to day\nand death to life,\nso by virtue of this substance, given by the Lord,\nall evil works are rejected, checked, and\ncompletely suppressed.\nAnd just as for flies, spiders and insects that\ncrawl into the ears,\nthe oil is a deadly poison that kills them,\nso this oil strengthened with the abundant\nblessings of grace,\nwards off demons, dissolves the mortgage of evil and\ntears up the death sentence.\nThe baptismal font is not complete\nunless accompanied by anointing.\nTo the first man left mortally wounded by brigands,\nthis salve of salvation was applied,\nand it also served honorably\nas ointment for the incurable wounds of\nJacob and Israel.\nDavid wanted this oil\nas a fruitful olive tree in the house of the Lord,\ndwelling there always in trust,\npredicting abandonment of circumcision\nand adoption of the grace of baptism.\nBut how can I discourse\nconvinced that I understand this completely,\nespecially regarding holiness,\nwhen even the angels cannot explain it in words?\nHow indeed could I hope to describe its true essence?\n\n\n# XV.\n\nGlory to you always and in all things,\nimmortal king, in the praise I now sing,\nwhich you created and perfected through me,\ngood, caring, merciful and patient,\nwealthy and abundant, Lord, triumphant over all.\nThe idea of anointing sketched by our forefathers,\nyou made a reality in the fullness of time.\nYou are light in your very nature\nand the ever-shining sun,\nand you called your disciples the light of the world,\nfor through them you filled the creatures of all the earth\nwith rays of blissful grace.\nYou accepted the anointing of your feet with the\noil of sweetness\nas a symbol that our prayers are acceptable to you.\nAnd by the anointing of your head by a\nwoman of ill-repute,\nyou showed your compassionate love for us.\nAnd with such great pleasure, O infinite Lord,\ndid you inhale the aroma of the oil,\nthat you ordered as an inviolable commandment\nthat wherever the gospel is preached\nthroughout the world\nthat seemingly insignificant act of anointing\nshould be remembered,\nto the amazement of your listeners\nand raising the hopes of future generations.\n“You have been anointed by the Holy One,”\nsaid that most blessed of your disciples,\nexplaining the mystery poured out upon us\nfrom your overflowing bounty, O source of life.\nThis drop of blessing from you who are praised on high,\nwhich endlessly innoculates us,\nbears a close, fitting and lasting resemblance\nto you who are light and to your Holy Spirit.\nIt is called light,\nbecause it is like the first element of creation,\nand the very symbol of you, our Creator,\nby which you drive away the gloomy\ndarkness of evil.\nIt is called fire,\nbecause in every element of creation\nthere is distributed in some measure, your essence,\nhidden and manifest, silent and known,\nthat unless provoked by the devilish adversary,\nit will not flare up by itself.\nIt is also called anointing,\nbecause through it we are adopted\ninto your majesty\nand are offered to your Father as his inheritance\nand marked indelibly with your mercy by this oil,\nlike you, so we might shine brightly in the next life.\nIt is also called spirit,\nbecause we are cleansed of the calamities of deceit,\ncunningly instigated by that troublemaker Satan,\nso we might worship our heavenly Father\nrenewed in soul and with truth,\nnailed to you with faith and hope,\nall-giving God.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nIn truth, eternally and in reality,\nthis oil filled with light is\na venerable proof of your love, God on high.\nThis is why Paul himself deemed it fitting\nto say directly in his teaching on grace and thanksgiving,\n“He who establishes us with you in Christ and has\nanointed us is God, who has also sealed us and given\nus the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee,”\nand also, “Do not,” he said, “grieve the\nHoly Spirit of God,\nby whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”\n“Anointed” is a title honorable and invincible\nin the Old Testament, yet more so in the New.\nIn the words of the Psalm of David,\nthat predict faithfully the mystery of your providential\nsuffering, Lord, “The rulers of the people band together\nagainst the Lord and his anointed.”\nA great prophecy that imprinted upon the\nJewish throngs the unredeemable sin of\nspilling your blood, caused by audacity toward you,\nLord, “Who can put forth his hand against the Lord’s\nanointed, and be guiltless?”\nFor although Saul was killed by one of his own,\nstill they were not rejected in shame\nor subject to the insults of foreign nations,\nuntil they were implicated in the spilling of\nyour blood, Lord.\nAnd these pleas in the Psalms are a great pledge,\nreminding us of the inheritance of future generations:\n“For the sake of your beloved servant David,\nyou do not turn away the face of your anointed one,”\nand again, “Look upon the face of your anointed”\nand “show steadfast love for your anointed.”:\n\n\n# XVII.\n\nThis light-filled fluid, O Christ,\nis the venerated gift of your hand,\nfor out of all riches in your kingdom,\nthe Prophet deemed nothing higher, Lord,\nthan that you would say,\n“I have found David, my servant,\nand with my holy oil I have anointed him.”\nThus, by this instructive example,\nembracing your anointing with the light, our\nLord Jesus Christ,\nyou are known to us, unchanging and eternal.\nYou are all and in all, the only king of kings,\nand the true anointed one among the anointed,\nglorified and worshiped yesterday and today\nFor as the wick, soaked in oil, does not give light\nuntil lit with a flame,\nso we, who are anointed with the light,\ndo not glow until we are lit like torches in heaven.\nThis is a clear explanation of its nature,\ntransmitted from the ancients till today,\npainted in marvelously brilliant colors\nthrough these felicitous analogies.\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\nNow, the cause of these sublime, life-giving,\ndivine effects,\ncharacteristic of you, Creator,\nwithout which one cannot be considered a Christian,\nor named a Nazarite,\nor be remembered as a son of Judah,\nor raise a battle cry in the name of the Lord of Jacob,\nis this substance, the oil of blessings,\nin which your Holy Trinity is mixed and joined:\nthe ray of grace, the splendor of our forehead,\nthe image of our face, the comeliness of our traits,\nthe light of our eyes, the sign of the cross on our pupils,\nthe tenderness of our cheeks, the decoration of\nour countenance,\nthe guardian of our lips, the attendant of our faith,\nthe guide of our behavior, the tie that binds,\nthe strength of souls, the fortitude of resistance,\nthe barrier to spells, the destroyer of talismans,\nthe repeller of wizards, the confounder of sorcerers,\nthe exposer of heretics, the vanquisher of demons,\nthe dispeller of pain, the fulfiller of the baptized,\nthe fervent desire of converts, the incomprehensible\nmystery of outsiders,\nthe bewilderment of pagans,\nthe envy of non-believers,\nthe unmasker of secrets, the honor of the humble,\nthe glory of slaves, the adornment of women,\nthe growth of children, the joy of the aged,\nthe consecrator of the ordained, the counsel of the pure,\nthe crown of kings, the grandeur of monarchs,\nthe excellence of emperors.\nFor as a sealed container indicates the value of\nthe contents,\nso the sublimity of your grace sealed in us\nby being anointed in your name, God and\nLord Jesus Christ,\nis beautifully symbolized by anointing.\nAnd the name of this substance, muron,\naccording to the inspired wisemen,\noriginated with the Egyptians and\nexpresses its very essence\nas an image of an awe-inspiring mystery.\n\n\n# XIX.\n\nFor this blessed muron,\nwhich the prophet foreshadowed,\nreferring in his prayer to the light of his eyes,\naccording to its etymology is derived from homeron,\nwhich means mother for me,\nthat is to say, that which strongly attracts our\nnature to itself,\nand solidifies through a wonderful transformation,\nthe fluid water of the font of light,\nand like the ingredient that curdles milk into yogurt,\nso it stabilizes my untame ravings and\nthe perpetually flowing stream of my consciousness.\nAccording to another etymology,\nthe word muron means ‘ somber, ’\nthat is, ‘ obscure, ’\nsince it refers to something dark, hidden or unseen.\nAnd this name is not some baseless metaphor,\nsince this word truly refers to something\nthat symbolizes a secret deeper than the holy of holies.\nFor muron does not wash away dirt like water,\nor bolster the heart like bread.\nInstead in a fittingly new way, with divine providence,\nit imprints the Lord on our senses,\nnevertheless remaining exalted beyond our\ncomprehension, thus its name is beyond our understanding.\n\nFor as God truly dwells in light that\ncannot be approached,\nwith your boundless glory in its infinity,\nyou covered yourself in impenetrable cloud\nexternally sealed from our faculties.\nIn the same way, the flow of light\nfrom the eloquent tongues of some,\nin appropriate poetic composition is called obscure,\nbecause worldly natures cannot understand\nessential truths.\nThe holy chrism richly and properly\ncommands both these divine names,\nfor the very name chrism resembles the name of our\nexalted Lord, Christ, doubly glorifying this oil,\nconsecrated with fine and fragrant incense.\nFor “Our God is a consuming fire,”\naccording to Moses, and also,\n“the light,” according to John,\nthus Isaiah’s allusion is justified:\n“The light of Israel shall become a fire.”:\n\n\n# XX.\n\nOnce again I shall express the same idea\nin different words and comparisons,\nwith renewed praise and blessings,\nfor I cannot forget my bitterness,\nwhich you sweetened in your great compassion.\nFor mera, which means ‘bitterness,’\nappropriately signifies ‘wearisome torment and pain,’\nso in Armenian, muron is explained etymologically\nas a derivative of merelutyun, that is, ‘mortification.’\nFor by being anointed with this spirit-bearing oil,\nwe are cut off from the vanities of this world,\nthose vile and deadly excesses of the Adversary,\nwhose dankness makes my lyre go out of tune,\nwhose dampness muffles the sound of my drums\nthat used to resound strong and bold when struck\nbut whose soggy wetness drags us down\ninto the deaf numbness of death.\nYet again through this anointing we are bound with hope\nto the miracle of your cross, beyond telling, O Christ,\nfor by baptism into your death, O living God,\nwe partake in your divine immortality through you\nyourself, God, placing complete trust in you,\nforever, fully and inseparably.\n\n\n# XXI.\n\nThis oil seals us in your name, Jesus,\nwith a four-pointed mark in the form of your sign,\nconferring grace in glory and dignity to your blood,\nO Savior and giver of life,\nand crowned with the same invincible glory\nthis oil is exalted.\nIt is called the wood-blessing oil,\nin the words of the Prophets,\nfor when this oil is miraculously applied\nto common wood of the forest,\nraw material, wild with evil and strange ideas,\nbecomes the mature equivalent of your cross,\nto be offered up to you, O Creator.\nSimilarly, the windows of our soul, which are\nalways open, were sealed by you, in the name of your\nawesome majesty, with the sign of the cross\nin providential modesty,\nthat we might inhabit a dwelling favored by your\nHoly Spirit, and might be impervious to the evil\ndelusions of the trickster\nand his dark fog.\nRestrained by this light, we gather for the\nhymns of thanksgiving at the evening service\nwith the stars, your heavenly lamps,\nsymbolic of the light of your grace, the muron,\nthat burns in us.\nAnd in this light, the oil reminds us of the\nsalvation of the good, planting this thought in our souls,\nmaking it blossom and bear fruit.\nTo make ready for the banquet\non the last night of your Second Coming,\nwe use this light like a torch.\n\n\n# XXII.\n\nNow, if using the numerical value of the\nArmenian alphabet,\nwe take the twenty-fourth letter with the value of four hundred [n],\nand apply it to the profound mystery of the oil,\nwe come up with an easily digestible explanation\nto nourish those hungry for understanding.\nFor when we multiply twenty times four, we get eighty [dz],\nwhich is the first letter of the word oil [dzet/dzyut]\nin Armenian.\nAnd when we substitute the letter four hundred [n] for eighty [dz],\nwe change the word for oil [dzyut] in to the word\nfor matter [nyut], which symbolizes the new leaven\nthat miraculously raises up the lump of dough.\nAnd as the Gospel parable teaches,\nthough the smaller [80] does not contain the larger [400],\nnevertheless it can transform the whole mass and\nmake it grow, so the anointing oil mixed into\nour nature transforms and makes us grow.\n\n\n# XXIII.\n\nThis gentle oil is a constant reminder\nof elevation and humility.\nFor when eaten in food it goes down soft,\nlike a balanced and kind word,\nbut when put on liquids, slippery and unstable,\nit rises above them,\nshowing its glorious excellence and superiority,\nsymbolizing its miraculous mystery.\nAnd when applied to a leather container,\nit is not absorbed like water or wine,\nbut rather stays on the surface within its proper bounds.\nThus understanding the incomparable excellence of\nyour goodness,\nO Son of the living God,\nby virtue of your blood,\nwe write on our foreheads\nwith this oil of sacred gifts,\nand we imprint the breath of our nature with your\nHoly Spirit,\nbelieving with the conviction of our heart\nthat this oil will forever show forth and shine anew with\nbrilliant radiance upon the varied and marvelous expanse\nlike a beacon toward the glory of everlasting life.\nAnd may this spiritual oil,\nfull of bliss and heavenly glow,\nmake the sign of your cross\nshine upon my face, in your image.\n\n\n# XXIV.\n\nAnd being incomprehensible, a power too\ngreat for understanding,\neven soaring with the swift wings of the mind,\nbefore the pursuit of my thought\nflying without trace into infinity,\ncompletely disappeared, hid from me,\nand it left no likeness,\nresembled no parallel,\nwas defined by no formula,\nand could be measured by no companion,\nbut rather was spiritually superior to them,\nlike the sign of your divine cross,\nthe equal to your blood, O Savior.\nAnd now, Lord, bless us through it and in it.\nAnd by it may your name become our salvation,\nO awesome, light, heavenly and marvelous,\nvenerated with incense by the pure in spirit in praise of\nyour ineffable glory,\nholy, holy, beyond understanding, beyond telling,\nexalted, merciful, lauded, true, doer of good and holiness,\nPardon us.\nGrant us healing.\nClothe us in grace.\nEndow us with bliss.\nBy being anointed with this oil, this heavenly\nshower of light, may I be found sinless.\nDo not let the sorrow of sinful infirmity,\ninvade and take over this anointed rational\nfabric of mine, and commingle with the image of my soul.\nFor those who present themselves to be anointed\nwith this oil, let them be like a bride,\nas for a glorious wedding,\nbeautifully arrayed in holy splendor,\ntheir souls adorned with happiness.\nAnd for those who approach it for purification,\nmay this light, this glorious fire, given by God,\nbe a double tempering and second immersion,\nwith fervent striving for the good,\nthrough which they emerge as if newly created.\nAnd in all ways fully armed with ever-ready\nsteadfastness, may I dwell upon your unshakeable rock,\nstanding firm, my faith grounded in you without any doubt.\nFor those who are on fire with this gift,\nby this sign of victory, may they\nnot be doused with water,\nnot be burned by the fire,\nnot be frozen by the cold,\nnot be extinguished by the harmful wind,\nnot be stained by unclean dreams,\nnot betray Jesus’ own to the Evil One,\nnot throw away the accumulated treasures of life\nat their moment of exit from this world,\nnot be outside the protection of your wings,\nnot be stripped of our being anointed by unclean living.\nBut by your grace, may we be set on fire by it,\nbe filled with it,\nbe enlightened through it,\nbe justified by it,\nbe liberated, crowned and reign by it.\nAnd to you alone, the only Anointed,\ntogether with your Father and your Holy Spirit,\nmay all give\nhymns of blessing, alleluias in all tongues,\nresounding voices, triumphant praise,\nlips lauding your goodness,\nholy words of the Psalms,\nforever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-94": { - "title": "Prayer 94", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nEternal God, almighty, doer of good,\ncreator of light and inventor of night,\nlife in death and light in the darkness,\nhope for the expectant and patient with the doubters,\nwho with your ingenious wisdom\nturns the darkness of death into morning,\ndawn that does not dim, sun that does not set.\nThe dark of the night is not able to cover the glory\nof your Lordship, before which all creation\nkneels constantly in worship,\nthose in heaven and on earth, and those confined in hell.\nYou who hear the sighs of those who are bound,\nand who attend to the prayers of the humble,\nand receive their supplications,\nmy God and my king,\nmy life and my refuge,\nmy hope and my confidence,\nJesus Christ, O God of all,\nholiness that dwells in the souls of the saints,\nconsolation for the afflicted and pardon for sinners,\nyou who know all things before they happen,\nsend the protective strength of your right hand\nand save me from the terror of the night and\nevil demons, so that always embracing your awesome\nmemory and your holy name\non the lips of my soul and with the desires of my breath,\nI might be saved and protected along with those\nwho call to you with all their hearts.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd by the seal of the sign of your cross,\nwhich you renewed by staining it with your divine blood,\nand by the same grace of your fatherhood,\nwith which you baptized us,\nand in the glory of your image, in which you fashioned\nand created us,\nwith these divine gifts,\nmay Satan be confounded and his machinations foiled,\nmay his snares be removed and his forces be defeated,\nmay his sharp edged weapons be ineffective,\nmay his fog be lifted, his darkness dispelled, his\nshadow withdrawn.\nMay your arm shield me and your right hand seal me,\nfor you are compassionate and merciful,\nand your servants are called by your name.\nTo you with the Father and your Holy Spirit,\nglory and power forever and ever.\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - }, - "prayer-95": { - "title": "Prayer 95", - "body": "_Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart:_\n\n# I.\n\nSun of justice, ray of blessings, form of light,\ncherished desire, exalted beyond understanding,\nmighty beyond telling, joy of goodness,\nhope realized, praised by heaven,\nking of glory Christ creator,\nlife proclaimed, finish, I pray,\nthe meanderings of my wretched, errant voice\nwith your own mighty words.\nHelp me to polish a pleasing prayer,\nto bring before your Father on high.\nYou who took on my likeness\nsubmitting for my sake to trial and condemnation,\ntake pity on me.\nYou who bless all life, God of Goodness,\nwho provide all things above and below,\nwho were willing to die for me,\nGod and lord of all,\nwho have borne the pangs of mortal flesh,\ntake pity on me, for I am wracked with pain.\nTake pity on me, stay with me, a wretched sinner,\nand pray with me to your Father, your equal in glory.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBy your noble and glorious blood,\noffered unceasingly to please God who sent you,\nmay the dangers be lifted from me, the condemned,\nmay my transgressions be forgiven,\nmay my vices be pardoned,\nmay my shamelessness be forgotten,\nmay my sentence be commuted,\nmay the worms shrivel,\nmay the wailing stop,\nand the gnashing of teeth fall silent.\nLet the laments lessen and tears dry.\nLet mourning end and darkness be banished.\nMay the vengeful fire be tamped out\nand torments of every kind be exiled.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMay you who grant life to all be compassionate now.\nLet your light dawn, your salvation be swift,\nyour help come in time, and the hour of your\narrival be at hand.\nMay the dew of your mercy quench the parched field\nwhere my bones have fallen into the pit of death.\nPrepare the earth for the day of light\nand let the soil bloom and bring forth fruit,\nheavenly cup of life-giving blood,\never sacrificed, never running dry\nall for the salvation and life of the souls in eternal rest.\nAnd though my body die in sin,\nwith your grace and compassion,\nmay I be strengthened in you, cleansed of sin\nthrough you, and renewed by you with life everlasting,\nand at the resurrection of the righteous\nbe deemed worthy of your Father’s blessing.\nTo him together with you, all glory,\nand with the Holy Spirit, praise and resounding thanks,\nnow, always and forever,\nAmen.\n\n\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "armenian", - "translator": "Thomas J. Samuelian" - } - } - } - }, - "nikolai-gumilev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolai Gumilev", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Gumilev", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 22 - }, - "poems": { - "a-ballad": { - "title": "“A Ballad”", - "body": "My friend, Lucifer gave five horses to me,\nAnd a radiant ruby-stone beautiful ring,\nSo that I could go down to marvelous caves,\nAnd could see there heaven’s celestial face.\n\nSnorted horses, and zealous, they hoofed, and they begged\nTo race over and over the space of the earth,\nI believed that the sun rose exactly for me,\nShining crazy like ruby of that golden ring.\n\nWandered endlessly during the days and the nights\nUnder sun in the day and the night full of stars,\nI was laughing at horses so eager to race\nAnd the light of the ring as a heavenly grace.\n\nThere’s madness and snow at the heights of my mind\nBut I’ve hurried the horses with furious cries\nSo that they reach these heights in the violent run\nAnd a virgin with sad face I saw having come.\n\nAnd a music of string her quite voice produced\nThere question and answer were mixed and reduced\nTo the touches of shades of her heir all strewn,\nSo I gave ruby-ring to that virgin or Lune.\n\nMocking, laughing at me, having me in contempt,\nBroken open the gates for a wasted attempt\nTo the darkness, He gave me the horse number six\nLucifer named Despair this horse as a gift.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Bondar", - "date": { - "year": 1918, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "cains-descendants": { - "title": "“Cain’s Descendants”", - "body": "He didn’t deceive us, that sad, somber spirit\nWho wears the morning star as pseudonym\nAnd said: “Shun not the highest gain, nor fear it:\nTaste of the fruit and you will equal Him.”\n\nInstantly, for the youth, all roads lay open,\nAnd for old men, all mysteries to know,\nAnd to the maids, amber fruits came bespoken\nAnd gallant unicorns as white as snow.\n\nThen why do we stoop low, drained of all strength,\nSensing that Someone has forgotten us,\nAnd feel the terror of that ancient loss\n\nWhen by some chance a hand picks up and joins\nTwo staffs, two flagpoles or two blades of grass\nDistinctly in the manner of a cross?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Philip Nikolayev", - "date": { - "year": 1909, - "month": "november", - "day": 26 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 26 - } - } - }, - "the-choice": { - "title": "“The Choice”", - "body": "He who builds the tower will fall.\nHe will fall straight down, terribly,\nand at the deep bottom of the world’s well\nhe will curse himself for his madness.\n\nHe who pulls the tower down will be crushed,\nflattened by stone shards;\nand left to lie there, by All-Seeing God,\nhe will howl his torment.\n\nAnd he who went into the caverns of night,\nand he who went to the backwaters of a quiet river,\nwill suddenly confront the awful eyes\nof the bloodthirsty panther.\n\nFate is inescapable,\neveryone on earth has his own destiny.\nBut hush! The one incomparable right\nis to choose your death for yourself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alla Burago & Burton Raffel", - "date": { - "year": 1908, - "month": "april", - "day": 22 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "constantinople": { - "title": "“Constantinople”", - "body": "The sailors near the port\nshouted in chorus, demanding wine,\nand over Stambul and over the Bosphorus\nthe full moon shone.\n\nTonight they will hurl an unfaithful wife\nto the bottom of the bay,\na wife who was too beautiful\nand looked like the moon.\n\nShe loved her daydreams,\nthe summer-house in the reed thicket,\nold women fortune-tellers and their fortune-telling\nand everything the Pasha did not like.\n\nFather was sad, but understands\nand whispers to the husband: “Well, is it time?,”\nbut the younger sister does not lift\nher stubborn eyes and muses:\n\n“Many, many other lovers\nlie in the deep bays,\nintertwined, languid and silent …\nWhat happiness to be among them!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "don-juan": { - "title": "“Don Juan”", - "body": "My fantasy is proud and plain:\nTo grasp the crop, leap the stirrup,\nOutrace sluggish time,\nAnd always kiss fresh lips;\n\nAnd in old age before Christ’s grace,\nWith ash on head and eyes cast down\nBreast burdened by an iron cross,\nAt last to take salvation’s burden.\n\nFor only then, released from orgy,\nLike sleepwalkers, night done,\nScared white by a silent stalker,\n\nMight wake, so I recall this paltry atom\nHad neither child from any woman\nNor help from any human brother.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Don Mager", - "date": { - "year": 1910, - "month": "april", - "day": 16 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 16 - } - } - }, - "the-forest": { - "title": "“The Forest”", - "body": "White trunks\nwere stark, suddenly, against the haze,\n\nRoots wound up out of the ground\nlike corpses’ arms.\n\nThe leaves’ bright fire\nhid giants, dwarves, lions;\n\nFishermen saw in the sand\nthe print of a six-fingered hand.\n\nNo French noble, no knight of the Round Table,\never walked here.\n\nNo robber slept in these bushes,\nno monk dug caves in these hills.\n\nOnce, one stormy night,\na woman with a cat’s head came out of this forest,\n\nWearing a silver crown,\nbut she moaned all night\n\nAnd died at dawn\nbefore a priest could save her soul.\n\nAh, but that was so long ago\nthat no one remembers,\n\nThat--that was in a land\nyour dreams won’t take you to.\n\nAnd I invented all this, staring\nat your braids, the coils of a flaming snake,\n\nYour green eyes\nlike round Persian turquoise.\n\nThat forest--it might be your soul.\nThat forest--it might be my love--\n\nOr maybe, when we die,\nthat forest is where we’ll go, together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Burton Raffel & Alla Burago", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "april", - "day": 31 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "front-of-statue-of-madonna": { - "title": "“Front of statue of Madonna …”", - "body": "Front of statue of Madonna\nIn a dark and simple place\nHe swore be faithful to the Donna\nWho was glorious and chaste.\n\nThen, forgetting secret knot,\nHe was pleasing many women.\nOnce while fighting he was slaughtered.\nCame to holy gates of Eden.\n\nSpoke virtuous Madonna:\n“Did you swear to my face\nTo be faithful to the Donna.\nWho is glorious and chaste?\n\nGo now! Not these crops\nKing of Heaven gathers here.\nOne who has forsaken oath--\nHe is dying unforgiven.”\n\nKnelt front feet of sweet Madonna,\nSad and stubborn asked for grace:\n“Nowhere met I Donna,\nWho is glorious and chaste.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Kristina Kamaeva", - "date": { - "year": 1910, - "month": "may", - "day": 8 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 8 - } - } - }, - "i-have-languished-not-lived": { - "title": "“I have languished, not lived …”", - "body": "I have languished, not lived\nThrough half of my earthly life,\nAnd now. Lord, You appear to me\nIn the shape of an impossible dream.\n\nI see the light on Mount Tabor\nAnd I feel a great remorse\nThat I have so loved the land and the sea.\nThe whole deep sleep of existence;\n\nThat my youthful powers\nHave not submitted to Yours,\nThat the beauty of Your daughters\nSo acutely torments my heart.\n\nBut really, is love but a little red flower\nThat has only a moment to live,\nBut really, is love but a small flame\nThat is easily extinguished?\n\nWith this quiet, melancholy thought\nI will somehow drag out this life;\nBut You look to the next one,\nI’ve ruined one as it is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Earl D. Sampson", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "april", - "day": 3 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "transfiguration" - } - } - }, - "i-loved-the-great-meadows": { - "title": "“I loved the great meadows …”", - "body": "I loved the great meadows\nand their honey scent\nand clumps of trees, and dry grass\nand bull’s horns in the grass.\n\nEvery dusty bush along the road\nshouted, “I’m playing with you!\nWalk around me, watch out,\nand you’ll see who I really am!”\n\nOnly the fierce autumn wind, roaring,\ncould stop my games:\nmy heart would thump, it was heaven itself,\nI felt sure I would die\n\nWith my friends, never alone,\nwith soft warm flowers, with cool cold flowers,\nand up over those far-off skies\nI would guess it all, all at once.\n\nIf I love this new game, this war\nand its big bangs,\nit’s simply that human blood is no more sacred\nthan the emerald juice from a blade of grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Burton Raffel & Alla Burago", - "date": { - "year": 1916, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "i-trusted-i-thought": { - "title": "“I trusted, I thought …”", - "body": "I trusted, I thought and the light for me shone at last.\nFor ever Creator let fate have my soul, forever.\nI am sold and alone! My god went away so fast.\nMy buyer is looking at me--he is mocking and clever.\n\nMy Yesterday rushes at me like a big flying hill\nAnd like an abyss before me my Tomorrow goes.\nI am on my way … But some day by abyss’ cruel will\nThe hill disappears … My road is useless, I know.\n\nAnd if by my will and desire I conquer the men,\nAnd if in the night’s flying down to me inspiration,\nIf I am a poet, sorcerer--now and then\nThe Lord of the Universe--harder will be my damnation.\n\nAnd I had a dream that my heart, free of pain, didn’t cry,\nIn yellow China on motley pagoda it’s ringing.\nMy heart is a porcelain bell--in enamel dense sky\nExiting the flocks of the cranes it is affably singing.\n\nAnd tender meek girl in the dress of the red fine silks\nEmbroidered with flowers, wasps, dragons of old times,\nWithout a thought and a dream, cross-legged, quietly sits,\nIntently, attentively listening to slight soothing chimes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Joan Kovalevskaya", - "date": { - "year": 1911, - "month": "october", - "day": 20 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "i-was-torn-out-of-this-narrow-life": { - "title": "“I was torn out of this narrow life …”", - "body": "I was torn out of this narrow life.\nThis meager, ordinary life,\nBy your tormenting, wondrous,\nIrresistible beauty.\n\nAnd I died … and I saw a flame.\nOne that had never been seen before,\nBefore my dazzled eyes\nShone a blue star.\n\nTransforming my spirit and my body,\nA musical strain rose, and fell again;\nIt was the speaking and the ringing\nOf your blood, singing like a lute.\n\nAnd there was a fragrance, sweeter and more fiery\nThan anything found in life,\nAnd even than that lily that grows\nIn the angels’ lofty garden.\n\nAnd suddenly, out of the radiant abyss\nThe earthly sphere arose again;\nYou suddenly appeared before me,\nTrembling like a wounded bird.\n\nYou repeated, “I am suffering,”\nBut what can I do, knowing\nAt last with such sweet certainty\nThat you are but a blue star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Earl D. Sampson", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "i-who-could-have-been-the-best-of-poems": { - "title": "“I, who could have been the best of poems …”", - "body": "I, who could have been the best of poems,\nA resonant violin, or a white rose,\nHave, in this world, turned into nothing;\nSo here I live, and do nothing.\n\nMy life is often hard, often painful,\nBut even this pain of mine\nIs saddled to no fiery steed,\nBut weariness and empty languishing.\n\nI can understand nothing in life.\nI can only whisper: “It may be hard for me, but\nIt was worse for my God\nAnd more painful for His Mother.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Simon Franklin", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_sorrows" - } - } - }, - "kha": { - "title": "“Kha”", - "body": "Beautiful lassies, we are you now?\nYou who don’t answer me anymore\nYou who forgot all about me;\nLeft me behind--now my weakened voice\nWakes up the echo in vain.\n\nHave you been eaten by angry beasts?\nOr by your lovers you’re being kept?\nGo on, answer me dearest,\nI fell in love with you and I came\nDown to meet with you here.\n\nI caught a glimpse of you naked when\nYou were bathing in a clear lake.\nAnd I came down thinking not\nOf who you are--daughters of the moon\nI--who am black robin’s son.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maya Jouravel", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-lost-streetcar": { - "title": "“The Lost Streetcar”", - "body": "I was walking along the street as a stranger\nAnd suddenly heard the cawing of crows.\nThe playing of lutes and distant thunder …\nBefore me a rushing streetcar arose.\n\nHow I managed to jump on the step as it passed me\nHas remained a riddle to this day,\nFor it left a path in the air that was flaming\nEven in daylight as it went its way.\n\nIt rushed like a storm that was dark and wingéd,\nLost in the depths of time somehow.\nStop the streetcar! Stop, stop, driver!\nStop the streetcar! Stop right now!\n\nToo late. We had passed the wall already,\nSlipped through the grove where the palm trees toss.\nThe Neva, the Nile, the Seine beneath us.\nThree bridges we thundered across.\n\nThe face of an old beggar flashed past the window.\nAnd his glance studied us, following us from the rear …\nThe same man, of course, the very same beggar,\nWho died in Beirut sometime last year.\n\nWhere am I? My heart beats in replying\n(Filled with a languor and care past control).\nDo you see a station in which one can purchase\nA ticket to the India of the soul?\n\nSignboard … And the vegetable shop letters\nAre painted with blood. I know here instead\nOf cabbages, instead of rutabagas,\nThey sell only heads that are dead.\n\nA man in a red shirt, face like an udder.\nCuts my head off too on the blocks.\nIt is lying together with the others\nOn the very bottom in a slippery box.\n\nAnd there is a board fence in the alley,\nA house with three windows and a lawn grown gray.\nStop the streetcar! Stop, stop, driver!\nStop the streetcar right away!\n\nNow, Mashenka, you lived and sang here.\nWove carpets for me, the man you would wed.\nWhere now then is your voice and body?\nIs it conceivable you are dead?\n\nHow you cried in your room so tiny!\nAnd I in a powdered wig at the door\nWas going to be presented to the Empress.\nAnd I never saw you anymore.\n\nI understand it now: Our freedom\nIs only a light striking us from out-there.\nPeople and spirits stand at the entrance\nTo a zoological garden of planets somewhere.\n\nThe sweet and familiar wind comes swiftly--\nAnd across the bridge toward me full force\nFlies the iron-gloved hand of the rider\n--And two hoofs of his rearing horse.\n\nThe faithful fortress of orthodoxy,\nSaint Isaac’s, rises heavenly.\nThere I’ll say a prayer for the health of\nMashenka And a simple ‘Rest in peace’ for me.\n\nTo breathe is hard; to live is painful …\nMy desolate heart is forever sad.\nMashenka, I never thought it possible\nTo love one so much and to feel so bad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "december", - "day": 30 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "masquerade": { - "title": "“Masquerade”", - "body": "In barren halls and secluded corridors\nToday merry maskers were amassing,\nToday in parlors, variegated colors\nLike mad whirlwinds, swept through, dancing.\n\nThey snaked about beneath dragons and moons,\nChinese vases were tossed among them,\nTorches flamed and lutes strings kept on\nRepeating the same impenetrable name.\n\nThe call to the headlong mazurka was made\nAnd I danced with Sodom’s courtesan,\nSome things I grieved, at some I laughed,\nAnd some seemed strangely, too well known.\n\nI pleaded with her: “Take off your mask,\nAnd who is your brother, pray tell?\nYou remind me of some ancient fairy tale\nThat I heard in the long distant past.\n\nYou remain forever-strange, to all,\nAnd to me you are no boon-companion,\nBut it’s true, of all the masks, all the people,\nYou are known as Tsarina of Sodom.”\n\nUnder my mask I heard her youthful laugh,\nBut her glances would not connect with mine,\nAs they snaked about beneath dragons and moons,\nAnd Chinese vases were tossed among them,\n\nSuddenly beneath the window as night\nVainly threatened to hide her face in dark,\nSlipping away from me like a snake,\nShe pulled off her mask and her eyes glanced back.\n\nI recall everything once again--such a song,\nWith a wild chilly voluptuousness\nSuch tender enticing whispers: “Rise up,\nRise again to live in the anguish of bliss!”\n\nMuch I saw in that brief while\nBut her fearsome oath did not deter me.\nTsarina, Tsarina, I am your captive, see,\nYou can take my body, you can take my soul!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Don Mager", - "date": { - "year": 1907, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "offensive": { - "title": "“Offensive”", - "body": "This country could have been paradise:\nit’s a den of fire.\nWe’ve been advancing for four days,\nwe’ve not eaten for four days.\n\nIn this strange, bright hour\nwe don’t need earth’s bread:\nthe Lord’s Word\nis better nourishment.\n\nThe blood-filled weeks\nare blinding, insubstantial;\nshrapnel bursts over my head,\nknives fly faster than birds.\n\nI shout, my voice wild,\n“That’s brass banging on brass!”\nI carry a Great Idea,\nI cannot die, I cannot.\n\nLike thunder hammering,\nlike angry sea-waves,\nRussia’s golden heart\nbeats steadily in my chest.\n\nAnd how sweet to dress Victory,\nlike a girl, in ropes of pearls,\nas you follow the enemy’s\nsmoke-covered retreating tracks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Burton Raffel & Alla Burago", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "from-remembrance": { - "title": "From “Remembrance”", - "body": "Only serpents let their skin be fallen\nAnd a soul--all grown up and old.\nWe, alas, change an eternal soul,\nLeaving body in eternal hold.\n\nOh, remembrance, power, she-giant,\nYou direct a horse-life with a bridle,\nYou will tell me all these men about,\nWho had had my body before I’d.\n\nThe first one was ugly, thin and tragic,\nLoving darkness of the garden lane,\nFalling Leaf, the child of gloomy magic,\nWhose one word could fully stop the rain.\n\nSecond one--he liked the wind from South,\nEvery noise for him was strings’ accord,\nHe believed that life is just his spouse,\nAnd the rag under his feet--the world.\n\nI don’t like him: in his mind, he’s roused,\nTo the crowns of the King and God,\nHe had hanged on entrance to my house\nThe signboard with a script “The Bard.”\n\nI do like the favorite of freedom,\nHim, who used to sail in sea and shoot:\nWhat a song he heard in water’s kingdom,\nWhat a cloud followed his routes!\n\nI’m a builder, which is working smartly\nO’er the temple, arising in a haze,\nSeek for fame for my beloved country\nAs in Heavens, so on the earth.\n\nHeart is scorched by non-extinguished fire,\nTill the day, in which, as made of light,\nWalls of New Jerusalem will spire\nOn the fields of my beloved land.\n\nThen the queer wind will start to blow,\nAnd the awful light will pour on us,\nIt’s the Milky Way--begins to grow\nAs a garden of the dazzling stars.\n\nAnd the tiered stranger will appear,\nHiding face, but I will catch his dream,\nLooking at a lion, going near,\nAnd an eagle, flying straight to him.\n\nI will scream, but who will hear my groan,\nWho will save my soul from a crash?\nOnly snakes could let their skin be fallen,\nPeople lose the soul--not the flesh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1920, - "month": "april", - "day": 15 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "sixth-sense": { - "title": "“Sixth Sense”", - "body": "O beautiful the wine in love with us!\nThe good bread in the oven--for us baking!\nAnd that woman, who gave torment and fuss.\nWhom now we can enjoy--for just the taking!\n\nBut what to do with this rose sunset over\nA sky becoming cold as hues disperse.\nWhere silence and unearthly calm still hover,\nWhat should we do with our immortal verse?\n\nYou can’t eat, drink, or kiss sunsets or lines …\nThe moment runs unchecked and we, hand-wringing,\nAre still condemned to overlook the signs\nAnd somehow miss the mark--with our wide swinging.\n\nJust as a boy sometimes watching girls bathing\n(Having forgotten all about his games.\nYet innocent of love and love’s behaving)\nIs tortured by a strange desire’s flames;\n\nJust as that slippery creature at one time,\nFeeling still-unformed wings upon his shoulders,\nRoared out his sense of helplessness through slime\nAnd geologic giant ferns and boulders--\n\nSo century on century (Lord, quickly?)\nBeneath nature and art’s knife our intense\nSpirit cries out, our flesh grows faint and sickly--\nTrying to birth organs for our sixth sense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1920, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-slaughter-of-the-suitors": { - "title": "“The Slaughter of the Suitors”", - "body": "A lone two horned moon hung above the town\nWhen abruptly the mist was sharply sliced\nAnd Odysseus stood high above the transom\nTo shoot his arrow through Antinoüs’s chest.\n\nA chalice fell from Antinoüs’s hand,\nHis eyes were swathed in a haze of dark blood,\nA slight tremor … and the hero of that land,\nOf the youth of Greece, no longer stood,\n\nGripped with terror, the others all arose\nReluctant to grab their shields and swords.\nIn vain! With the swiftness of steel-tipped arrows,\nCame down these regal, derisive, keen words:\n\n“What now, renowned princes of Ithaca,\nWhy are you in no hurry to meet your master,\nAnd why is there no sacrificial display\nAs sacred sign of welcome on his altar?\n\nLike a crash of cymbals you smashed the shrine\nThat was made for the tributes to the gods,\nThe fatted bull, and the sharp-horned ram,\nAnd the golden wine from Cyprus’s hills.\n\nYou whispered sweet words in Penelope’s ear,\nAt night, lewdly fondled the servant maids--\nSweeter than the music of battling spears;\nWhile I drifted in fear on the watery waste!\n\nWhat now can any of you say to me?\n‘He abandoned his house without a line,\nFor, in the deep bottomless sea,\nOn his blind corpse, the fish to dine.’\n\nSo? For all the hard feelings you want to make\nThings right? And offer me your palace?\nI would not trade the whole Atlantic,\nFor today’s new graves in the burial place!\n\nWhen the bell clangs, sure arrows will sing,\nAnd measured, the slash of the sword will glint,\nAnd you, princes all, cowardly or daring,\nWill prepare to lie in heaps and grow white.\n\nHere lies Eurymachus, dumpy, fat\nAnd pale … as white as a marble slab.\nAnd like plagues of flies, the false virgins sit\nExpectant with fear, captive and locked up.\n\nHere lies Antinoüs … one glance tells all …\nA heavy massy pile, like an elephant,\nWhen with us of Ilion, he should have set sail\nTo be first among the heroes of the Iliad.\n\nAll will fall--fall--whether tiger or deer,\nAnd never alive will any again stand.\nWho is that red one? Flung up there\nStill steaming and flowing in blood?\n\nWell, everyone in my path, make way,\nFair-haired youth, my son, Telemachus!\nThe merciless gods above will show\nThe black path you now must use.\n\nAgain I fondly recall from afar\nThe golden moon riding on the horizon\nAnd see along the frothing Pontic shore\nThe grove of sacred palms in the wind.\n\nNut none who held lewd dreams of fondling her,\nHave ever despoiled the royal sheets.\nLike soaring gulls, the queen is white and pure,\nTerrifying and dark in her loveliness.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Don Mager", - "date": { - "year": 1909, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "their-souls-love-near-the-sea-was-born": { - "title": "“Their souls’ love near the sea was born …”", - "body": "Their souls’ love near the sea was born\nIn sacred groves of virgin devotees,\nWhere the play of strings and agile breeze\nCompetes with joyful songs from dusk till dawn.\n\nThe Priest … Unlikely human shape\nCould be that weird handsome …\nHis lips were shut; his look was awesome;\nAnd on his head--a scarf of bloody shade.\n\nWhen hazes came upon the sea,\nThe Priest started sacred rite.\nAnd dancing virgins, pliable and bright\nShined on the shore as necklace pearly.\n\nThe one of them, more beautiful than fairy,\nThe Priest distinguished more …\nOh, he forgot that elegance may draw,\nThat bloody scarf can make you so hungry.\n\nBefore the dawn, beneeth the blinking stars\nThe Priest forgot his vow.\nHer honey lips did not say “no”.\nHer eyes rejected not his love.\n\nBanished by others, they were gone\nFrom shadows of sacred groves.\nThe strength abandoned their souls,\nSince then they live with love alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Kristina Kamaeva", - "date": { - "year": 1907, - "month": "november", - "day": 30 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "the-urchin": { - "title": "“The Urchin”", - "body": "I’ll walk along the tracks,\nthinking, following\nthe thread of the running rails\nacross the yellow sky, the scarlet sky.\n\nI’ll go to the gloomy\nstation, shivering--\nif the watchmen don’t shout\nand chase me off.\n\nAnd later, determined to remember,\nI’ll think--again, again--\nof the beautiful lady, and how she looked up,\nquickly, as she got into the train.\n\nProud, distant:\nWhy should she care if I love her?\nBut when will I ever see\nanother lady with eyes so blue!\n\nI’ll tell my friend,\nI’ll tease him, a little,\nwhen evening spreads smoke\nacross the meadow.\n\nAnd with an ugly smile\nhe’ll say, “You see?\nYou read all kinds of junk\nand you start to talk like that.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Burton Raffel & Alla Burago", - "date": { - "year": 1912, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-word": { - "title": "“The Word”", - "body": "In those primal days when God Almighty\nBent His face over the fresh world--then\nThe word made the sun stand still in heaven,\nThe word tore apart the towns of men.\n\nAnd when the word--like a pink flame burning--\nFloated freely in the highest flight,\nEagles did not stir their wings or flutter\nAnd the stars crouched toward the moon in fright.\n\nThose on lower planes were given numbers--\nLike domestic cattle under yoke;\nFor all shades of meaning can be rendered\nBy sagacious numbers at one stroke.\n\nAnd the hoary patriarch is bringing\nBoth evil and good neath his command;\nNot prone to turn to the sound, he sketches\nNumbers with his cane upon the sand.\n\nWe forget that just the word is haloed\nHere where earthly cares leave us perplexed.\nIn the Gospel of St John is written\nThat the word is God: that is the text.\n\nWe have put a limit to its meaning:\nOnly to this life, this shallow shell.\nAnd like bees in an abandoned beehive,\nDead, deserted words have a bad smell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "august", - "day": 31 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - } - } - }, - "thom-gunn": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thom Gunn", - "birth": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2004 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Gunn", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dump": { - "title": "“The Dump”", - "body": "He died, and I admired\nthe crisp vehemence\nof a lifetime reduced to\nhalf a foot of shelf space.\nBut others came to me saying,\nwe too loved him, let us take you\nto the place of our love.\nSo they showed me\neverything, everything--\na cliff of notebooks\nwith every draft and erasure\nof every poem he\npublished or rejected,\nthatched already\nwith webs of annotation.\nI went in further and saw\na hill of matchcovers\nfrom every bar or restaurant\nhe’d ever entered. Trucks\nbacked up constantly,\npiled with papers, and awaited\nby archivists with shovels;\nforklifts bumped through\ntrough and valley\nto adjust the spillage.\nHere odors of rubbery sweat\nintruded on the pervasive\nsmell of stale paper,\nno doubt from the mound\nof his collected sneakers.\nI clambered up the highest\npile and found myself\nlooking across not history\nbut the vistas of a steaming\nrange of garbage\nreaching to the coast itself. Then\nI lost my footing! and was\ncarried down on a soft\navalanche of letters, paid bills,\nsexual polaroids, and notes\nrefusing invitations, thanking\nfans, resisting scholars.\nIn nightmare I slid,\nno ground to stop me,\n\nuntil I woke at last\nwhere I had napped beside\nthe precious half foot. Beyond that,\nnothing, nothing at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-sad-captains": { - "title": "“My Sad Captains”", - "body": "One by one they appear in\nthe darkness: a few friends, and\na few with historical\nnames. How late they start to shine!\nbut before they fade they stand\nperfectly embodied, all\n\nthe past lapping them like a\ncloak of chaos. They were men\nwho, I thought, lived only to\nrenew the wasteful force they\nspent with each hot convulsion.\nThey remind me, distant now.\n\nTrue, they are not at rest yet,\nbut now they are indeed\napart, winnowed from failures,\nthey withdraw to an orbit\nand turn with disinterested\nhard energy, like the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-move": { - "title": "“On the Move”", - "body": "The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows\nSome hidden purpose, and the gush of birds\nThat spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,\nHave nested in the trees and undergrowth.\nSeeking their instinct, or their pose, or both,\nOne moves with an uncertain violence\nUnder the dust thrown by a baffled sense\nOr the dull thunder of approximate words.\n\nOn motorcycles, up the road, they come:\nSmall, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,\nUntil the distance throws them forth, their hum\nBulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.\nIn goggles, donned impersonality,\nIn gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,\nThey strap in doubt--by hiding it, robust--\nAnd almost hear a meaning in their noise.\n\nExact conclusion of their hardiness\nHas no shape yet, but from known whereabouts\nThey ride, directions where the tires press.\nThey scare a flight of birds across the field:\nMuch that is natural, to the will must yield.\nMen manufacture both machine and soul,\nAnd use what they imperfectly control\nTo dare a future from the taken routes.\n\nIt is part solution, after all.\nOne is not necessarily discord\nOn Earth; or damned because, half animal,\nOne lacks direct instinct, because one wakes\nAfloat on movement that divides and breaks.\nOne joins the movement in a valueless world,\nCrossing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,\nOne moves as well, always toward, toward.\n\nA minute holds them, who have come to go:\nThe self-denied, astride the created will.\nThey burst away; the towns they travel through\nAre home for neither birds nor holiness,\nFor birds and saints complete their purposes.\nAt worse, one is in motion; and at best,\nReaching no absolute, in which to rest,\nOne is always nearer by not keeping still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "hadewijch": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Hadewijch of Antwerp", - "birth": { - "year": 1200, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1260, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "dutch", - "language": "dutch", - "flag": "🇳🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadewijch", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "dutch" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "from-defense-of-love": { - "title": "From “Defense of Love”", - "body": "How she first made me beautiful promises\nAnd then grew cruel, I now know.\nThat Love did not deceive or mock me\nIn that woe, would I might understand it!\nBut she meant to make clear\nAnd reveal to me\nHow reason illuminates the entire abyss of Love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - }, - "god-must-give-us-a-renewed-mind": { - "title": "“God must give us a renewed mind …”", - "body": "God must give us a renewed mind\nFor nobler and freer love,\nTo make us so new in our life\nThat Love may bless us\nAnd renew, with new taste,\nThose to whom she can give new fulness;\nLove is the new and powerful recompense\nOf those whose life renews itself for Love alone.\n--Ay, vale, vale, millies--\nThat renewing of new Love\n--Si dixero, non satis est--\nWhich renewal will newly experience.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - }, - "imagining": { - "title": "“Imagining”", - "body": "What is sweetest in love is her tempestuousness,\nHer deepest abyss is her most beautiful form;\nTo lose one’s way in her is to touch her close at hand.\nTo die of hunger for her is to feed and taste;…\n\nWe can say yet more about Love:\nHer wealth is her lack of everything;\nHer truest fidelity brings about our fall;\nHer highest being drowns us in the depths;…\n\nHer revelation is the total hiding of herself;\nHer gifts, besides, are thieveries;\nHer promises are all seductions;\nHer adornments are all undressing;\nHer truth is all deception;\nTo many her assurance appears to lie--\n\nThis is the witness that can be truly borne\nAt any moment by me and many others\nTo whom Love has often shown\nWonders by which we were mocked,\nImagining we possessed what she kept back for herself.\n\nAfter she first played these tricks on me,\nAnd I considered all her methods,\nI went to work in an entirely different way:\nBy her threats and her promises\nI was no longer deceived.\n\nI will belong to her, whatever she may be,\nGracious or merciless; to me it is all one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch" - } - }, - "knowing-love-in-herself": { - "title": "“Knowing Love In Herself”", - "body": "I do not complain of suffering for Love,\nIt is right that I should always obey her,\nFor I can know her only as she is in herself,\nWhether she commands in storm or in stillness.\nThis is a marvel beyond my understanding,\nWhich fills my whole heart\nAnd makes me stray in a wild desert.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch" - } - }, - "love-has-subjugated-me": { - "title": "“Love Has Subjugated Me”", - "body": "Love has subjugated me:\nTo me this is no surprise,\nFor she is strong and I am weak.\nShe makes me unfree of myself,\nContinually against my will.\nShe does with me what she wishes;\nNothing of myself remains to me;\nFormerly I was rich,\nNow I am poor: everything is lost in love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - }, - "love-has-seven-names": { - "title": "“Love has seven names …”", - "body": "Love has seven names.\nDo you know what they are?\nRope, Light, Fire, Coal\nmake up its domain.\n\nThe others, also good,\nmore modest but alive:\nDew, Hell, the Living Water.\nI name them here (for they\nare in the Scriptures),\nexplaining every sign\nfor virtue and form.\nI tell the truth in signs.\nLove appears every day\nfor one who offers love.\nThat wisdom is enough.\n\nLove is a ROPE, for it ties\nand holds us in its yoke.\nIt can do all, nothing snaps it.\nYou who love must know.\n\nThe meaning of LIGHT\nis known to those who\noffer gifts of love,\napproved or condemned.\n\nThe Scripture tell us\nthe symbol of COAL:\nthe one sublime gift\nGod gives the intimate soul.\n\nUnder the name of FIRE, luck,\nbad luck, joy or no joy,\nconsumes. We are seized\nby the same heat from both.\n\nWhen everything is burnt\nin its own violence, the DEW,\ncoming like a breeze, pauses\nand brings the good.\n\nLIVING WATER (its sixth name)\nflows and ebbs\nas my love grows\nand disappears from sight.\n\nHELL (I feel its torture)\ndamns, covering the world.\nNothing escapes. No one has grace\nto see a way out.\n\nTake care, you who wish\nto deal with names\nfor love. Behind their sweetness\nand wrath, nothing endures.\nNothing but wounds and kisses.\n\nThough love appears far off,\nyou will move into its depth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Willis Barnstone & Elene Kolb" - } - }, - "loves-constancy": { - "title": "“Love’s Constancy”", - "body": "Anyone who has waded\nThrough Love’s turbulent waters,\nNow feeling hunger and now satiety,\nIs untouched by the season\nOf withering or blooming,\nFor in the deepest\nAnd most dangerous waters,\nOn the highest peaks,\nLove is always the same.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Oliver Davies" - } - }, - "loves-maturity": { - "title": "“Love’s Maturity”", - "body": "In the beginning Love satisfies us.\nWhen Love first spoke to me of love--\nHow I laughed at her in return!\nBut then she made me like the hazel trees,\nWhich blossom early in the season of darkness,\nAnd bear fruit slowly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch" - } - }, - "from-loves-seven-names": { - "title": "From “Love’s Seven Names”", - "body": "Dew is a name under which Love works:\nWhen that Fire has burned up all in its violence,\nThe dew falls, imparting moisture everywhere\nLike a strong wind of unheard-of sweetness.\nIt calls forth the kiss of noble natures\nAnd gives them constancy in the midst of changes.\nLove’s zeal engulfs her gifts to such an extent\nThat the dew’s gentle action must always be present.\nThen are appeased all the storms\nThat previously arose in the soul;\nCalm reigns at last,\nWhen the loved one receives from her Beloved\nThe kisses that truly pertain to love.\nWhen he takes possession of the loved soul in every way,\nLove drinks in these kisses and tastes them to the end.\nAs soon as Love thus touches the soul,\nShe eats its flesh and drinks its blood.\nLove that thus dissolves the loved soul\nSweetly leads them both\nTo the indivisible kiss--\nThat same kiss which fully unites\nThe Three Persons in one sole Being.\nThus the noble dew appeases the conflagration\nThat had been raging in the land of Love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - }, - "the-madness-of-love": { - "title": "“The Madness of Love”", - "body": "The madness of love\nIs a rich fief;\nAnyone who recognized this\nWould not ask Love for anything else:\nIt can unite Opposites\nAnd reverse the paradox.\nI am declaring the truth about this:\nThe madness of love makes bitter what was sweet,\nIt makes the stranger a kinsman,\nAnd it makes the smallest the most proud.\n\nTo souls who have not reached such love,\nI give this good counsel:\nIf they cannot do more,\nLet them beg Love for amnesty,\nAnd serve with faith,\nAccording to the counsel of noble Love,\nAnd think: ‘It can happen,\nLove’s power is so great!’\nOnly after his death\nIs a man beyond cure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch" - } - }, - "the-queen-of-sheba": { - "title": "“The Queen of Sheba”", - "body": "The Queen of Sheba\nCame to Solomon;\nThat was in order to gain wisdom.\nWhen she had found him, indeed,\nHis wonders streamed upon her so suddenly\nThat she melted in contemplation.\nShe gave him all,\nAnd the gift robbed her\nOf everything she had within--\nIn both heart and mind,\nNothing remained:\nEverything was engulfed in love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - }, - "to-live-out-what-i-am": { - "title": "“To Live Out What I Am”", - "body": "My distress is great and unknown to men.\nThey are cruel to me, for they wish to dissuade me\nFrom all that the forces of Love urge me to.\nThey do not understand it, and I cannot explain it to them.\nI must then live out what I am;\nWhat love counsels my spirit,\nIn this is my being: for this reason I will do my best.\nWhatever vicissitudes men lead me through for Love’s sake\nI wish to stand firm and take no harm from them.\nFor I understand from the nobility of my soul\nThat in suffering for sublime Love, I conquer.\nI will therefore gladly surrender myself\nIn pain, in repose, in dying, in living,\nFor I know the command of lofty fidelity.\nI do not complain of suffering for Love:\nIt becomes me always to submit to her,\nWhether she commands in storm or in stillness.\nOne can know her only in herself.\nThis is an unconceivable wonder,\nWhich has thus filled my heart\nAnd makes me stray in a wild desert.", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch" - } - }, - "what-i-sang-so-often-of-love": { - "title": "“What I sang so often of Love …”", - "body": "What I sang so often of Love\nDid not avail me much--in fact, very little.\nYet the minds of old and young\nAre enlightened by a song of Love.\nBut my good fortune holds\nSo small a share of love:\nMy song, my weeping seem without success.\n\nI cry out, and I lament:\nLove has the days--\nAnd I, the nights and the madness of love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "dutch", - "translator": "Mother Columba Hart" - } - } - } - }, - "donald-hall": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Donald Hall", - "birth": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2018 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Hall", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "after-horace": { - "title": "“After Horace”", - "body": " Ibyas, man of property,\nChloris’s husband, stop chasing young\n women. Now that you’re\njust about ready to die, give up\n\n fucking around. It won’t do\nto try passing for one of the randy studs\n and darken the vigorous air\nwith Viagra’s lechery. Your grandson Nathus\n\n runs after pretty girls, as well\nhe might, pursuing them into their villas.\n Like a satyr piping his lust,\nhe’s a billygoat in his desire for Phloe,\n\n but as for you, at your age,\nit’s time to sit and snore. Forget love songs,\n Ibyas. Stop lusting over\nthe Swimsuit Issue while you drink Bud all day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-black-faced-sheep": { - "title": "“The Black-Faced Sheep”", - "body": "# I.\n\nRuminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders!\n\nIf one of you found a gap in a stone wall,\nthe rest of you--rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs;\nmothers and daughters, old grandfather-father,\ncousins and aunts, small bleating sons--\nfollowed onward, stupid\nas sheep, wherever\nyour leader’s sheep-brain wandered to.\n\nMy grandfather spent all day searching the valley\nand edges of Ragged Mountain,\ncalling “Ke-_day_!” as if he brought you salt,\n“Ke-_day_! Ke-_day_!”\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhen the shirt wore out, and darns in the woolen\nshirt needed darning,\na woman in a white collar\ncut the shirt into strips and braided it,\nas she braided her hair every morning.\n\nIn a hundred years\nthe knees of her great-granddaughter\ncrawled on a rug made from the wool of sheep\nwhose bones were mud,\nlike the bones of the woman, who stares\nfrom an oval in the parlor.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI forked the brambly hay down to you\nin nineteen-fifty. I delved my hands deep\nin the winter grass of your hair.\n\nWhen the shearer cut to your nakedness in April\nand you dropped black eyes in shame,\nhiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide,\nI brought grain to raise your spirits,\nand ten thousand years\nwound us through pasture and hayfield together,\nthreads of us woven\ntogether, three hundred generations\nfrom Africa’s hills to New Hampshire’s.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nYou were not shrewd like the pig.\nYou were not strong like the horse.\nYou were not brave like the rooster.\n\nYet none of the others looked like a lump of granite\nthat grew hair,\nand none of the others\ncarried white fleece as soft as dandelion seed\naround a black face,\nand none of them sang such a flat and sociable song.\n\n\n# V.\n\n\nNow the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return,\neven if I should search the valleys\nand call “Ke-_day_,” as if I brought them salt.\nNow the railroad draws\na line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple\nlean from cellarholes\nand cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain\nexcept where machines make snow\nand cables pull money up hill, to slide back down.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nAt South Danbury Church twelve of us sit--\ncousins and aunts, sons--\nwhere the great-grandfathers of the forty-acre farms\nfilled every pew.\nI look out the window at summer places,\nat Boston lawyers’ houses\nwith swimming pools cunningly added to cowsheds,\nand we read an old poem aloud, about Israel’s sheep,\nold lumps of wool, and we read\n\nthat the rich farmer, though he names his farm for himself,\ntakes nothing into his grave;\nthat even if people praise us, because we are successful,\nwe will go under the ground\nto meet our ancestors collected there in the darkness;\nthat we are all of us sheep, and death is our shepherd,\nand we die as the animals die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "christmas-eve-in-whitneyville": { - "title": "“Christmas Eve in Whitneyville”", - "body": "December, and the closing of the year;\nThe momentary carolers complete\nTheir Christmas Eves, and quickly disappear\nInto their houses on each lighted street.\n\nEach car is put away in each garage;\nEach husband home from work, to celebrate,\nHas closed his house around him like a cage,\nAnd wedged the tree until the tree stood straight.\n\nTonight you lie in Whitneyville again,\nNear where you lived, and near the woods or farms\nWhich Eli Whitney settled with the men\nWho worked at mass-producing firearms.\n\nThe main street, which was nothing after all\nExcept a school, a stable, and two stores,\nWas improvised and individual,\nPicking its way alone, among the wars.\n\nNow Whitneyville is like the other places,\nRanch houses stretching flat beyond the square,\nSame stores and movie, same composite faces\nSpeaking the language of the public air.\n\nOld houses of brown shingle still surround\nThis graveyard where you wept when you were ten\nAnd helped to set a coffin in the ground.\nYou left a friend from school behind you then,\n\nAnd now return, a man of fifty-two.\nTalk to the boy. Tell him about the years\nWhen Whitneyville quadrupled, and how you\nAnd all his friends went on to make careers,\n\nHad cars as long as hayracks, boarded planes\nFor Rome or Paris where the pace was slow\nAnd took the time to think how yearly gains,\nProfit and volume made the business grow.\n\n“The things I had to miss,” you said last week,\n“Or thought I had to, take my breath away.”\nYou propped yourself on pillows, where your cheek\nWas hollow, stubbled lightly with new gray.\n\nThis love is jail; another sets us free.\nTonight the houses and their noise distort\nThe thin rewards of solidarity.\nThe houses lean together for support.\n\nThe noises fail, and lights go upstairs.\nThe men and women are undressing now\nTo go to sleep. They put their clothes on chairs\nTo take them up again. I think of how,\n\nAll over Whitneyville, when midnight comes,\nThey lie together and are quieted,\nTo sleep as children sleep, who suck their thumbs,\nCramped in the narrow rumple of each bed.\n\nThey will not have unpleasant thoughts tonight.\nThey make their houses jails, and they will take\nNo risk of freedom for the appetite,\nOr knowledge of it, when they are awake.\n\nThe lights go out and it is Christmas Day.\nThe stones are white, the grass is black and deep.\nI will go back and leave you here to stay\nWhere the dark houses harden into sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-footsteps": { - "title": "“The Footsteps”", - "body": "In the kitchen of the old house, late,\nI was making some coffee\nand I day-dreamed sleepily of old friends.\nThen the dream turned. I waited.\nI walked alone all day in the town\nwhere I was born. It was cold,\na Saturday in January\nwhen nothing happens. The streets\nchanged as the sky grew dark around me.\nThe lamps in the small houses\nhad tassels on them, and the black cars\nat the curb were old and square.\nA ragman passed with his horse, their breaths\nblooming like white peonies,\nwhen I turned into a darker street\nand I recognized the house\nfrom snapshots. I felt as separate\nas if the city and the house\nwere closed inside a globe which I shook\nto make it snow. No sooner\ndid I think of snow, but snow started\nto fill the heavy darkness\naround me. It reflected the glare\nof the streetlight as it fell\nmelting on the warmth of the sidewalk\nand frozen on frozen grass.\nThen I heard out of the dark the sound\nof steps on the bare cement\nin a familiar rhythm. Under\nthe streetlight, bent to the snow,\nhatless, younger than I, so young that\nI was not born, my father\nwalked home to his bride and his supper.\nA shout gathered inside me\nlike a cold wind, to break the rhythm,\nto keep him from entering\nthat heavy door--but I stood under\na tree, closed in by the snow,\nand did not shout, to tell what happened\nin twenty years, in winter,\nwhen his early death grew inside him\nlike snow piling on the grass.\nHe opened the door and met the young\nwoman who waited for him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "names-of-horses": { - "title": "“Names of Horses”", - "body": "All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding\nand steerhide over the ash hames, to haul\nsledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,\nfor the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.\n\nIn April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,\ndark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.\nAll summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine\nclacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;\n\nand after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,\ngathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,\nand the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,\nthree loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.\n\nSundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load\na leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.\nGeneration on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill\nof the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.\n\nWhen you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,\none October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,\nled you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,\nand dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,\n\nand lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,\nand fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,\nshoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,\nwhere by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.\n\nFor a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,\nroots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,\nyellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter\nfrost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers:\n\nO Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "ox-cart-man": { - "title": "“Ox Cart Man”", - "body": "In October of the year,\nhe counts potatoes dug from the brown field,\ncounting the seed, counting\nthe cellar’s portion out,\nand bags the rest on the cart’s floor.\n\nHe packs wool sheared in April, honey\nin combs, linen, leather\ntanned from deerhide,\nand vinegar in a barrel\nhooped by hand at the forge’s fire.\n\nHe walks by his ox’s head, ten days\nto Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,\nand the bag that carried potatoes,\nflaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose\nfeathers, yarn.\n\nWhen the cart is empty he sells the cart.\nWhen the cart is sold he sells the ox,\nharness and yoke, and walks\nhome, his pockets heavy\nwith the year’s coin for salt and taxes,\n\nand at home by fire’s light in November cold\nstitches new harness\nfor next year’s ox in the barn,\nand carves the yoke, and saws planks\nbuilding the cart again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "poem-beginning-with-a-line-of-wittgenstein": { - "title": "“Poem Beginning with a Line of Wittgenstein”", - "body": "The world is everything that is the case.\nNow stop your blubbering and wash your face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "safe-sex": { - "title": "“Safe Sex”", - "body": "If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident\nthey will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;\n\nif she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire\nonly the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other\n\nas revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel--\nthen there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,\n\nno frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,\nno trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated\n\napparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sudden-things": { - "title": "“Sudden Things”", - "body": "A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, full of children and old people. The lion was loose. Either because of the wind, or by malevolent human energy, which is the same thing, the cage had come open. Suppose a child walked outside!\n\nA child walked outside. I knew that I must protect him from the lion. I threw myself on top of the child. The lion roared over me. In the branches and the bushes there was suddenly a loud crackling. The lion cringed. I looked up and saw that the elephant was loose!\n\nThe elephant was taller than the redwoods. He was hairy like a mammoth. His tusks trailed vines. Parrots screeched around his head. His eyes rolled crazily. He trumpeted. The ice-cap was breaking up!\n\nThe lion backed off, whining. The boy ran for the house. I covered his retreat, locked all the doors and pulled the bars across them. An old lady tried to open a door to get a better look. I spoke sharply to her, she sat down grumbling and pulled a blanket over her knees.\n\nOut of the window I saw zebras and rattlesnakes and wildebeests and cougars and woodchucks on the lawns and in the tennis courts. I worried how, after the storm, we would put the animals back in their cages, and get to the mainland.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wells": { - "title": "“Wells”", - "body": "I lived in a dry well\nunder the rank grass of a meadow.\n\nA white ladder leaned out of it\nbut I was afraid of the sounds\n\nof animals grazing.\nI crouched by the wall ten years\n\nuntil the circle of a woman’s darkness\nmoved over mine like a mouth.\n\nThe ladder broke out in leaves\nand fruit hung from the branches.\n\nI climbed to the meadow grass.\nI drink from the well of cattle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "white-apples": { - "title": "“White Apples”", - "body": "when my father had been dead a week\nI woke\nwith his voice in my ear\n I sat up in bed\nand held my breath\nand stared at the pale closed door\n\nwhite apples and the taste of stone\n\nif he called again\nI would put on my coat and galoshes", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wreckage": { - "title": "“The Wreckage”", - "body": "At the edge of the city the pickerel\nvomits and dies. The river\nwith its white hair staggers to the sea.\n\nMy life lay crumpled like a smashed car.\n\nWindows barred, ivy, square stone.\nLines gather at mouth and at eyes\nlike cracks in a membrane.\nEyeballs and tongue spill on the floor\nin a puddle of yolks and whites.\n\nThe intact 707\nunder the clear wave, the sun shining.\n\nThe playhouse of my grandfather’s mother\nstands north of the shed: spiders\nand the dolls’ teacups of dead women.\nIn Ohio the K Mart shrugs;\nit knows it is going to die.\n\nA stone, the closed eye of the dirt.\n\nOutside before dawn\nhouses sail up\nlike wrecks from the bottom of the sea.\nA door clicks; a light opens.\n\nIf the world is a dream,\nso is the puffed stomach of Juan,\nand the rich in Connecticut are dreamers.\n\nThere are bachelors\nwho live in shacks made of oil cans\nand broken doors, who stitch their shirts\nuntil the cloth disappears under stitches,\nwho collect nails in Ball jars.\n\nA trolley car comes out of the elms,\nthe tracks laid through an acre of wheat stubble,\nslanting downhill. I board it,\nand cross the field into the new pine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-hardy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Hardy", - "birth": { - "year": 1840 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "after-a-journey": { - "title": "“After a Journey”", - "body": "Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;\nWhither, O whither will its whim now draw me?\nUp the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,\nAnd the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.\nWhere you will next be there’s no knowing,\nFacing round about me everywhere,\nWith your nut-coloured hair,\nAnd gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.\n\nYes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;\nThrough the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;\nWhat have you now found to say of our past--\nViewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?\nSummer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?\nThings were not lastly as firstly well\nWith us twain, you tell?\nBut all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.\n\nI see what you are doing: you are leading me on\nTo the spots we knew when we haunted here together,\nThe waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone\nAt the then fair hour in the then fair weather,\nAnd the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow\nThat it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,\nWhen you were all aglow,\nAnd not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!\n\nIgnorant of what there is flitting here to see,\nThe waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,\nSoon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,\nFor the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.\nTrust me, I mind not, though Life lours,\nThe bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!\nI am just the same as when\nOur days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "and-there-was-a-great-calm": { - "title": "“And There Was a Great Calm”", - "body": "There had been years of Passion--scorching, cold,\nAnd much Despair, and Anger heaving high,\nCare whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,\nAmong the young, among the weak and old,\nAnd the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”\n\nMen had not paused to answer. Foes distraught\nPierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,\nPhilosophies that sages long had taught,\nAnd Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,\nAnd “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.\n\nThe feeble folk at home had grown full-used\nTo ‘dug-outs’, ‘snipers’, ‘Huns’, from the war-adept\nIn the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;\nTo day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused--\nTo nightmare-men in millions when they slept.\n\nWaking to wish existence timeless, null,\nSirius they watched above where armies fell;\nHe seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull\nOf night a boom came thencewise, like the dull\nPlunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.\n\nSo, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly\nWere dead and damned, there sounded “War is done!”\nOne morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,\n“Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,\nAnd in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?”\n\nBreathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance\nTo where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,\nAs they had raised it through the four years’ dance\nOf Death in the now familiar flats of France;\nAnd murmured, “Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?”\n\nAye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,\nThe aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.\nOne checkless regiment slung a clinching shot\nAnd turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, “What?\nSpoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?”\n\nThenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,\nNo hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,\nNo moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;\nWorn horses mused: “We are not whipped to-day;”\nNo weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.\n\nCalm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;\nThere was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;\nSome could, some could not, shake off misery:\nThe Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”\nAnd again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "before-marching-and-after": { - "title": "“Before Marching and After”", - "body": "Orion swung southward aslant\nWhere the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned,\nThe Pleiads aloft seemed to pant\nWith the heather that twitched in the wind;\nBut he looked on indifferent to sights such as these,\nUnswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow,\nAnd wondered to what he would march on the morrow.\n\nThe crazed household-clock with its whirr\nRang midnight within as he stood,\nHe heard the low sighing of her\nWho had striven from his birth for his good;\nBut he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze,\nWhat great thing or small thing his history would borrow\nFrom that Game with Death he would play on the morrow.\n\nWhen the heath wore the robe of late summer,\nAnd the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun,\nHung red by the door, a quick comer\nBrought tidings that marching was done\nFor him who had joined in that game overseas\nWhere Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow\nA brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "a-broken-appointment": { - "title": "“A Broken Appointment”", - "body": "You did not come,\nAnd marching Time drew on, and wore me numb,--\nYet less for loss of your dear presence there\nThan that I thus found lacking in your make\nThat high compassion which can overbear\nReluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake\nGrieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,\nYou did not come.\n\nYou love not me,\nAnd love alone can lend you loyalty;\n--I know and knew it. But, unto the store\nOf human deeds divine in all but name,\nWas it not worth a little hour or more\nTo add yet this: Once you, a woman, came\nTo soothe a time-torn man; even though it be\nYou love not me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-tenebris": { - "title": "“In Tenebris”", - "body": "_“Percussus sum sicut foenum, et aruit cor meum.”_\n--Ps. _ci._\n\nWintertime nighs;\nBut my bereavement-pain\nIt cannot bring again:\nTwice no one dies.\n\nFlower-petals flee;\nBut, since it once hath been,\nNo more that severing scene\nCan harrow me.\n\nBirds faint in dread:\nI shall not lose old strength\nIn the lone frost’s black length:\nStrength long since fled!\n\nLeaves freeze to dun;\nBut friends can not turn cold\nThis season as of old\nFor him with none.\n\nTempests may scath;\nBut love can not make smart\nAgain this year his heart\nWho no heart hath.\n\nBlack is night’s cope;\nBut death will not appal\nOne who, past doubtings all,\nWaits in unhope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-last-performance": { - "title": "“The Last Performance”", - "body": "“I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she,\n “All the old tunes I know,--\nThose I learnt ever so long ago.”\n--Why she should think just then she’d play them\n Silence cloaks like snow.\n\nWhen I returned from the town at nightfall\n Notes continued to pour\nAs when I had left two hours before:\n“It’s the very last time,” she said in closing;\n “From now I play no more.”\n\nA few morns onward found her fading,\n And, as her life outflew,\nI thought of her playing her tunes right through;\nAnd I felt she had known of what was coming,\n And wondered how she knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "men-who-march-away": { - "title": "“Men Who March Away”", - "body": "What of the faith and fire within us\nMen who march away\nEre the barn-cocks say\nNight is growing gray,\nLeaving all that here can win us;\nWhat of the faith and fire within us\nMen who march away?\n\nIs it a purblind prank, O think you,\nFriend with the musing eye,\nWho watch us stepping by\nWith doubt and dolorous sigh?\nCan much pondering so hoodwink you!\nIs it a purblind prank, O think you,\nFriend with the musing eye?\n\nNay. We well see what we are doing,\nThough some may not see--\nDalliers as they be--\nEngland’s need are we;\nHer distress would leave us rueing:\nNay. We well see what we are doing,\nThough some may not see!\n\nIn our heart of hearts believing\nVictory crowns the just,\nAnd that braggarts must\nSurely bite the dust,\nPress we to the field ungrieving,\nIn our heart of hearts believing\nVictory crowns the just.\n\nHence the faith and fire within us\nMen who march away\nEre the barn-cocks say\nNight is growing gray,\nLeaving all that here can win us;\nHence the faith and fire within us\nMen who march away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-new-years-eve-in-war-time": { - "title": "“A New Year’s Eve in War Time”", - "body": "Phantasmal fears,\nAnd the flap of the flame,\nAnd the throb of the clock,\nAnd a loosened slate,\nAnd the blind night’s drone,\nWhich tiredly the spectral pines intone!\n\nAnd the blood in my ears\nStrumming always the same,\nAnd the gable-cock\nWith its fitful grate,\nAnd myself, alone.\n\nThe twelfth hour nears\nHand-hid, as in shame;\nI undo the lock,\nAnd listen, and wait\nFor the Young Unknown.\n\nIn the dark there careers--\nAs if Death astride came\nTo numb all with his knock--\nA horse at mad rate\nOver rut and stone.\n\nNo figure appears,\nNo call of my name,\nNo sound but ‘Tic-toc’\nWithout check. Past the gate\nIt clatters--is gone.\n\nWhat rider it bears\nThere is none to proclaim;\nAnd the Old Year has struck,\nAnd, scarce animate,\nThe New makes moan.\n\nMaybe that ‘More Tears!--\nMore Famine and Flame--\nMore Severance and Shock!’\nIs the order from Fate\nThat the Rider speeds on\nTo pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-oxen": { - "title": "“The Oxen”", - "body": "Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.\n“Now they are all on their knees,”\nAn elder said as we sat in a flock\nBy the embers in hearthside ease.\n\nWe pictured the meek mild creatures where\nThey dwelt in their strawy pen,\nNor did it occur to one of us there\nTo doubt they were kneeling then.\n\nSo fair a fancy few would weave\nIn these years! Yet, I feel,\nIf someone said on Christmas Eve,\n“Come; see the oxen kneel,”\n\n“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb\nOur childhood used to know,”\nI should go with him in the gloom,\nHoping it might be so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "rain-on-a-grave": { - "title": "“Rain on a Grave”", - "body": "Clouds spout upon her\nTheir waters amain\nIn ruthless disdain,--\nHer who but lately\nHad shivered with pain\nAs at touch of dishonour\nIf there had lit on her\nSo coldly, so straightly\nSuch arrows of rain:\n\nOne who to shelter\nHer delicate head\nWould quicken and quicken\nEach tentative tread\nIf drops chanced to pelt her\nThat summertime spills\nIn dust-paven rills\nWhen thunder-clouds thicken\nAnd birds close their bills.\n\nWould that I lay there\nAnd she were housed here!\nOr better, together\nWere folded away there\nExposed to one weather\nWe both,--who would stray there\nWhen sunny the day there,\nOr evening was clear\nAt the prime of the year.\n\nSoon will be growing\nGreen blades from her mound,\nAnd daisies be showing\nLike stars on the ground,\nTill she form part of them--\nAy--the sweet heart of them,\nLoved beyond measure\nWith a child’s pleasure\nAll her life’s round.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-self-unseeing": { - "title": "“The Self-Unseeing”", - "body": "Here is the ancient floor,\nFootworn and hollowed and thin,\nHere was the former door\nWhere the dead feet walked in.\n\nShe sat here in her chair,\nSmiling into the fire;\nHe who played stood there,\nBowing it higher and higher.\n\nChildlike, I danced in a dream;\nBlessings emblazoned that day;\nEverything glowed with a gleam;\nYet we were looking away!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shut-out-that-moon": { - "title": "“Shut out that Moon”", - "body": "Close up the casement, draw the blind,\nShut out that stealing moon,\nShe wears too much the guise she wore\nBefore our lutes were strewn\nWith years-deep dust, and names we read\nOn a white stone were hewn.\n\nStep not forth on the dew-dashed lawn\nTo view the Lady’s Chair,\nImmense Orion’s glittering form,\nThe Less and Greater Bear:\nStay in; to such sights we were drawn\nWhen faded ones were fair.\n\nBrush not the bough for midnight scents\nThat come forth lingeringly,\nAnd wake the same sweet sentiments\nThey breathed to you and me\nWhen living seemed a laugh, and love\nAll it was said to be.\n\nWithin the common lamp-lit room\nPrison my eyes and thought;\nLet dingy details crudely loom,\nMechanic speech be wrought:\nToo fragrant was Life’s early bloom,\nToo tart the fruit it brought!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-to-be-forgotten": { - "title": "“The To-Be-Forgotten”", - "body": "I heard a small sad sound,\nAnd stood awhile among the tombs around:\n“Wherefore, old friends,” said I, “are you distrest,\nNow, screened from life’s unrest?”\n\n--“O not at being here;\nBut that our future second death is near;\nWhen, with the living, memory of us numbs,\nAnd blank oblivion comes!”\n\n“These, our sped ancestry,\nLie here embraced by deeper death than we;\nNor shape nor thought of theirs can you descry\nWith keenest backward eye.”\n\n“They count as quite forgot;\nThey are as men who have existed not;\nTheirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath;\nIt is the second death.”\n\n“We here, as yet, each day\nAre blest with dear recall; as yet, can say\nWe hold in some soul loved continuance\nOf shape and voice and glance.”\n\n“But what has been will be--\nFirst memory, then oblivion’s swallowing sea;\nLike men foregone, shall we merge into those\nWhose story no one knows.”\n\n“For which of us could hope\nTo show in life that world-awakening scope\nGranted the few whose memory none lets die,\nBut all men magnify?”\n\n“We were but Fortune’s sport;\nThings true, things lovely, things of good report\nWe neither shunned nor sought … We see our bourne,\nAnd seeing it we mourn.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-voice": { - "title": "“The Voice”", - "body": "Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,\nSaying that now you are not as you were\nWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,\nBut as at first, when our day was fair.\n\nCan it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,\nStanding as when I drew near to the town\nWhere you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,\nEven to the original air-blue gown!\n\nOr is it only the breeze, in its listlessness\nTravelling across the wet mead to me here,\nYou being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,\nHeard no more again far or near?\n\nThus I; faltering forward,\nLeaves around me falling,\nWind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,\nAnd the woman calling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "minnie-louise-haskins": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Minnie Louise Haskins", - "birth": { - "year": 1875 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Louise_Haskins", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-gate-of-the-year": { - "title": "“The Gate of the Year”", - "body": "And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:\n“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”\nAnd he replied:\n“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.\nThat shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”\nSo I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.\nAnd He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.\n\n_So heart be still:\nWhat need our little life\nOur human life to know,\nIf God hath comprehension?\nIn all the dizzy strife\nOf things both high and low,\nGod hideth His intention._\n\n_God knows. His will\nIs best. The stretch of years\nWhich wind ahead, so dim\nTo our imperfect vision,\nAre clear to God. Our fears\nAre premature; In Him,\nAll time hath full provision._\n\n_Then rest: until\nGod moves to lift the veil\nFrom our impatient eyes,\nWhen, as the sweeter features\nOf Life’s stern face we hail,\nFair beyond all surmise\nGod’s thought around His creatures\nOur mind shall fill._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-hayden": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Hayden", - "birth": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1980 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hayden", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-prisoners": { - "title": "“The Prisoners”", - "body": "Steel doors--guillotine gates--\nof the doorless house closed massively.\nWe were locked in with loss.\n\nGuards frisked us, marked our wrists,\nthen let us into the drab Rec Hall--\nsplotched green walls, high windows barred--\n\nwhere the dispossessed awaited us.\nHands intimate with knife and pistol,\nhands that had cruelly grasped and throttled\n\nclasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea\nof men denied: Believe us human\nlike yourselves, who but for Grace …\n\nWe shared reprieving Hidden Words\nrevealed by the Godlike imprisoned\nOne, whose crime was truth.\n\nAnd I read poems I hoped were true.\nIt’s like you been there, brother, been there,\nthe scarred young lifer said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "those-winter-sundays": { - "title": "“Those Winter Sundays”", - "body": "Sundays too my father got up early\nAnd put his clothes on in the blueback cold,\nthen with cracked hands that ached\nfrom labor in the weekday weather made\nbanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.\n\nI’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.\nWhen the rooms were warm, he’d call,\nand slowly I would rise and dress,\nfearing the chronic angers of that house,\n\nSpeaking indifferently to him,\nwho had driven out the cold\nand polished my good shoes as well.\nWhat did I know, what did I know\nof love’s austere and lonely offices?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "seamus-heaney": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Seamus Heaney", - "birth": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2013 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "blackberry-picking": { - "title": "“Blackberry-Picking”", - "body": "Late August, given heavy rain and sun\nFor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.\nAt first, just one, a glossy purple clot\nAmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.\nYou ate that first one and its flesh was sweet\nLike thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it\nLeaving stains upon the tongue and lust for\nPicking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger\nSent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots\nWhere briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.\nRound hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills\nWe trekked and picked until the cans were full,\nUntil the tinkling bottom had been covered\nWith green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned\nLike a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered\nWith thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.\n\nWe hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.\nBut when the bath was filled we found a fur,\nA rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.\nThe juice was stinking too. Once off the bush\nThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.\nI always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair\nThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.\nEach year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "casualty": { - "title": "“Casualty”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe would drink by himself\nAnd raise a weathered thumb\nTowards the high shelf,\nCalling another rum\nAnd blackcurrant, without\nHaving to raise his voice,\nOr order a quick stout\nBy a lifting of the eyes\nAnd a discreet dumb-show\nOf pulling off the top;\nAt closing time would go\nIn waders and peaked cap\nInto the showery dark,\nA dole-kept breadwinner\nBut a natural for work.\nI loved his whole manner,\nSure-footed but too sly,\nHis deadpan sidling tact,\nHis fisherman’s quick eye\nAnd turned observant back.\n\nIncomprehensible\nTo him, my other life.\nSometimes, on the high stool,\nToo busy with his knife\nAt a tobacco plug\nAnd not meeting my eye,\nIn the pause after a slug\nHe mentioned poetry.\nWe would be on our own\nAnd, always politic\nAnd shy of condescension,\nI would manage by some trick\nTo switch the talk to eels\nOr lore of the horse and cart\nOr the Provisionals.\n\nBut my tentative art\nHis turned back watches too:\nHe was blown to bits\nOut drinking in a curfew\nOthers obeyed, three nights\nAfter they shot dead\nThe thirteen men in Derry.\nPARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,\nBOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday\nEveryone held\nHis breath and trembled.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIt was a day of cold\nRaw silence, wind-blown\nsurplice and soutane:\nRained-on, flower-laden\nCoffin after coffin\nSeemed to float from the door\nOf the packed cathedral\nLike blossoms on slow water.\nThe common funeral\nUnrolled its swaddling band,\nLapping, tightening\nTill we were braced and bound\nLike brothers in a ring.\n\nBut he would not be held\nAt home by his own crowd\nWhatever threats were phoned,\nWhatever black flags waved.\nI see him as he turned\nIn that bombed offending place,\nRemorse fused with terror\nIn his still knowable face,\nHis cornered outfaced stare\nBlinding in the flash.\n\nHe had gone miles away\nFor he drank like a fish\nNightly, naturally\nSwimming towards the lure\nOf warm lit-up places,\nThe blurred mesh and murmur\nDrifting among glasses\nIn the gregarious smoke.\nHow culpable was he\nThat last night when he broke\nOur tribe’s complicity?\n“Now, you’re supposed to be\nAn educated man,”\nI hear him say. “Puzzle me\nThe right answer to that one.”\n\n\n# III.\n\nI missed his funeral,\nThose quiet walkers\nAnd sideways talkers\nShoaling out of his lane\nTo the respectable\nPurring of the hearse …\nThey move in equal pace\nWith the habitual\nSlow consolation\nOf a dawdling engine,\nThe line lifted, hand\nOver fist, cold sunshine\nOn the water, the land\nBanked under fog: that morning\nI was taken in his boat,\nThe Screw purling, turning\nIndolent fathoms white,\nI tasted freedom with him.\nTo get out early, haul\nSteadily off the bottom,\nDispraise the catch, and smile\nAs you find a rhythm\nWorking you, slow mile by mile,\nInto your proper haunt\nSomewhere, well out, beyond …\n\nDawn-sniffing revenant,\nPlodder through midnight rain,\nQuestion me again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "clearances": { - "title": "“Clearances”", - "body": "_She taught me what her uncle once taught her:\nHow easily the biggest coal block split\nIf you got the grain and hammer angled right.\n\nThe sound of that relaxed alluring blow,\nIts co-opted and obliterated echo,\nTaught me to hit, taught me to loosen,\n\nTaught me between the hammer and the block\nTo face the music. Teach me now to listen,\nTo strike it rich behind the linear black._\n\n\n# 1.\n\nA cobble thrown a hundred years ago\nKeeps coming at me, the first stone\nAimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow.\nThe pony jerks and the riot’s on.\nShe’s crouched low in the trap\nRunning the gauntlet that first Sunday\nDown the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.\nHe whips on through the town to cries of ‘Lundy!’\n\nCall her ‘The Convert’. ‘The Exogamous Bride’.\nAnyhow, it is a genre piece\nInherited on my mother’s side\nAnd mine to dispose with now she’s gone.\nInstead of silver and Victorian lace,\nThe exonerating, exonerated stone.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nPolished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.\nThe china cups were very white and big--\nAn unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.\nThe kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone\nWere present and correct. In case it run,\nThe butter must be kept out of the sun.\nAnd don’t be dropping crumbs. Don’t tilt your chair.\nDon’t reach. Don’t point. Don’t make noise when you stir.\n\nIt is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,\nWhere grandfather is rising from his place\nWith spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head\nTo welcome a bewildered homing daughter\nBefore she even knocks. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’\nAnd they sit down in the shining room together.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nWhen all the others were away at Mass\nI was all hers as we peeled potatoes.\nThey broke the silence, let fall one by one\nLike solder weeping off the soldering iron:\nCold comforts set between us, things to share\nGleaming in a bucket of clean water.\nAnd again let fall. Little pleasant splashes\nFrom each other’s work would bring us to our senses.\n\nSo while the parish priest at her bedside\nWent hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying\nAnd some were responding and some crying\nI remembered her head bent towards my head,\nHer breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--\nNever closer the whole rest of our lives.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nFear of affectation made her affect\nInadequacy whenever it came to\nPronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.\nShe’d manage something hampered and askew\nEvery time, as if she might betray\nThe hampered and inadequate by too\nWell-adjusted a vocabulary.\nWith more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You\nKnow all them things.’ So I governed my tongue\nIn front of her, a genuinely well-\nAdjusted adequate betrayal\nOf what I knew better. I’d naw and aye\nAnd decently relapse into the wrong\nGrammar which kept us allied and at bay.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThe cool that came off sheets just off the line\nMade me think the damp must still be in them\nBut when I took my corners of the linen\nAnd pulled against her, first straight down the hem\nAnd then diagonally, then flapped and shook\nThe fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,\nThey made a dried-out undulating thwack.\nSo we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand\nFor a split second as if nothing had happened\nFor nothing had that had not always happened\nBeforehand, day by day, just touch and go,\nComing close again by holding back\nIn moves where I was x and she was o\nInscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nIn the first flush of the Easter holidays\nThe ceremonies during Holy Week\nWere highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.\nThe midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.\nElbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next\nTo each other up there near the front\nOf the packed church, we would follow the text\nAnd rubrics for the blessing of the font.\nAs the hind longs for the streams, so my soul …\nDippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.\nThe water mixed with chrism and with oil.\nCruet tinkle. Formal incensation\nAnd the psalmist’s outcry taken up with pride:\nDay and night my tears have been my bread.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nIn the last minutes he said more to her\nAlmost than in all their life together.\n‘You’ll be in New Row on Monday night\nAnd I’ll come up for you and you’ll be glad\nWhen I walk in the door … Isn’t that right?’\nHis head was bent down to her propped-up head.\nShe could not hear but we were overjoyed.\nHe called her good and girl. Then she was dead,\nThe searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned\nAnd we all knew one thing by being there.\nThe space we stood around had been emptied\nInto us to keep, it penetrated\nClearances that suddenly stood open.\nHigh cries were felled and a pure change happened.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nI thought of walking round and round a space\nUtterly empty, utterly a source\nWhere the decked chestnut tree had lost its place\nIn our front hedge above the wallflowers.\nThe white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.\nI heard the hatchet’s differentiated\nAccurate cut, the crack, the sigh\nAnd collapse of what luxuriated\nThrough the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.\nDeep-planted and long gone, my coeval\nChestnut from a jam jar in a hole,\nIts heft and hush become a bright nowhere,\nA soul ramifying and forever\nSilent, beyond silence listened for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "death-of-a-naturalist": { - "title": "“Death of a Naturalist”", - "body": "All year the flax-dam festered in the heart\nOf the townland; green and heavy headed\nFlax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.\nDaily it sweltered in the punishing sun.\nBubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles\nWove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.\nThere were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,\nBut best of all was the warm thick slobber\nOf frogspawn that grew like clotted water\nIn the shade of the banks. Here, every spring\nI would fill jampotfuls of the jellied\nSpecks to range on window sills at home,\nOn shelves at school, and wait and watch until\nThe fattening dots burst, into nimble\nSwimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how\nThe daddy frog was called a bullfrog\nAnd how he croaked and how the mammy frog\nLaid hundreds of little eggs and this was\nFrogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too\nFor they were yellow in the sun and brown\nIn rain.\n\nThen one hot day when fields were rank\nWith cowdung in the grass the angry frogs\nInvaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges\nTo a coarse croaking that I had not heard\nBefore. The air was thick with a bass chorus.\nRight down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked\nOn sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:\nThe slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat\nPoised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.\nI sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings\nWere gathered there for vengeance and I knew\nThat if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "follower": { - "title": "“Follower”", - "body": "My father worked with a horse-plough,\nHis shoulders globed like a full sail strung\nBetween the shafts and the furrow.\nThe horses strained at his clicking tongue.\n\nAn expert. He would set the wing\nAnd fit the bright steel-pointed sock.\nThe sod rolled over without breaking.\nAt the headrig, with a single pluck\n\nOf reins, the sweating team turned round\nAnd back into the land. His eye\nNarrowed and angled at the ground,\nMapping the furrow exactly.\n\nI stumbled in his hobnailed wake,\nFell sometimes on the polished sod;\nSometimes he rode me on his back\nDipping and rising to his plod.\n\nI wanted to grow up and plough,\nTo close one eye, stiffen my arm.\nAll I ever did was follow\nIn his broad shadow round the farm.\n\nI was a nuisance, tripping, falling,\nYapping always. But today\nIt is my father who keeps stumbling\nBehind me, and will not go away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-grauballe-man": { - "title": "“The Grauballe Man”", - "body": "As if he had been poured\nin tar, he lies\non a pillow of turf\nand seems to weep\n\nthe black river of himself.\nThe grain of his wrists\nis like bog oak,\nthe ball of his heel\n\nlike a basalt egg.\nHis instep has shrunk\ncold as a swan’s foot\nor a wet swamp root.\n\nHis hips are the ridge\nand purse of a mussel,\nhis spine an eel arrested\nunder a glisten of mud.\n\nThe head lifts,\nthe chin is a visor\nraised above the vent\nof his slashed throat\n\nthat has tanned and toughened.\nThe cured wound\nopens inwards to a dark\nelderberry place.\n\nWho will say ‘corpse’\nto his vivid cast?\nWho will say ‘body’\nto his opaque repose?\n\nAnd his rusted hair,\na mat unlikely\nas a foetus’s.\nI first saw his twisted face\n\nin a photograph,\na head and shoulder\nout of the peat,\nbruised like a forceps baby,\n\nbut now he lies\nperfected in my memory,\ndown to the red horn\nof his nails,\n\nhung in the scales\nwith beauty and atrocity:\nwith the Dying Gaul\ntoo strictly compassed\n\non his shield,\nwith the actual weight\nof each hooded victim,\nslashed and dumped.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "may": { - "title": "“May”", - "body": "When I looked down from the bridge\nTrout were flipping the sky\nInto smithereens, the stones\nOf the wall warmed me.\n\nWading green stems, lugs of leaf\nThat untangle and bruise\n(Their tiny gushers of juice)\nMy toecaps sparkle now\n\nOver the soft fontanel\nOf Ireland. I should wear\nHide shoes, the hair next my skin,\nFor walking this ground:\n\nWasn’t there a spa-well,\nIts coping grassy, pendent?\nAnd then the spring issuing\nRight across the tarmac.\n\nI’m out to find that village,\nIts low sills fragrant\nWith lady’s-smock and celandine,\nMarshlights in the summer dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "mid-term-break": { - "title": "“Mid-Term Break”", - "body": "I sat all morning in the college sick bay\nCounting bells knelling classes to a close.\nAt two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.\n\nIn the porch I met my father crying--\nHe had always taken funerals in his stride--\nAnd Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.\n\nThe baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram\nWhen I came in, and I was embarrassed\nBy old men standing up to shake my hand\n\nAnd tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.\nWhispers informed strangers I was the eldest,\nAway at school, as my mother held my hand\n\nIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.\nAt ten o’clock the ambulance arrived\nWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.\n\nNext morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops\nAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw him\nFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,\n\nWearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,\nHe lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.\nNo gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.\n\nA four-foot box, a foot for every year.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "north": { - "title": "“North”", - "body": "I returned to a long strand,\nthe hammered curve of a bay,\nand found only the secular\npowers of the Atlantic thundering.\n\nI faced the unmagical\ninvitations of Iceland,\nthe pathetic colonies\nof Greenland, and suddenly\n\nthose fabulous raiders,\nthose lying in Orkney and Dublin\nmeasured against\ntheir long swords rusting,\n\nthose in the solid\nbelly of stone ships,\nthose hacked and glinting\nin the gravel of thawed streams\n\nwere ocean-deafened voices\nwarning me, lifted again\nin violence and epiphany.\nThe longship’s swimming tongue\n\nwas buoyant with hindsight--\nit said Thor’s hammer swung\nto geography and trade,\nthick-witted couplings and revenges,\n\nthe hatreds and behind-backs\nof the althing, lies and women,\nexhaustions nominated peace,\nmemory incubating the spilled blood.\n\nIt said, ‘Lie down\nin the word-hoard, burrow\nthe coil and gleam\nof your furrowed brain.\n\nCompose in darkness.\nExpect aurora borealis\nin the long foray\nbut no cascade of light.\n\nKeep your eye clear\nas the bleb of the icicle,\ntrust the feel of what nubbed treasure\nyour hands have known.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "strange-fruit": { - "title": "“Strange Fruit”", - "body": "Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd.\nOval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.\n\nThey unswaddled the wet fern of her hair\nAnd made an exhibition of its coil,\nLet the air at her leathery beauty.\nPash of tallow, perishable treasure:\nHer broken nose is dark as a turf clod,\nHer eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.\nDiodorus Siculus confessed\nHis gradual ease with the likes of this:\nMurdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible\nBeheaded girl, outstaring axe\nAnd beatification, outstaring\nWhat had begun to feel like reverence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-hearst": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Hearst", - "birth": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1983 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hearst", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "frost": { - "title": "“Frost”", - "body": "Though nothing came that could be heard\nGreen turned yellow-and from no drouth\nIn my cornfield; and the last blackbird\nHas swallowed his notes and drifted south.\nIf the change is death, then the color and all\nOf blood in the leaves, of smoke in the sky,\nHas deceived me with beauty; I heard no call\nOf roots to the sap and no answering cry.\nIt is time, then, for me to walk alone,\nTo watch leaves fall, while thought runs slow\nOn the stubborn permanence found in stone,\nOn the sharp bright virtue of the plow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-grail": { - "title": "“The Grail”", - "body": "The snow falls like flakes of light--\nWherefore we come, Lord, bearing our promises.\n\nLet the wind-lash curl the drifts and smother\nThe world in flying ice.\n\nFrost knits the road into a carpet of iron\nAnd locks the pond against the sun’s finger.\n\nWe alone move through Death’s false harmony,\nSaying:\n\nIf a tree drains its body of life,\nShall the root perish?\nWho holds safely now the small seed?\n\nLet it not vanish, Lord, let it seek haven\nAnd if in the spring there remains one spark of growth,\nOnly enough for one pale blossom,\n\nWe shall come forward singing,\nOur hands curved to the plow handles\nOur eyes raised to the light.\n\nWhat greater praise canst thou have\nThan that we seek the grail,\nNot in the heavens, Lord, among the stars’ cold radiance,\n\nBut in the furrow, the plowed field, the meadow,\nThe places where it blooms for man in his short life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "landmark": { - "title": "“Landmark”", - "body": "The road wound back among the hills of mind\nRutted and worn, in a wagon with my father\nWho wore a horsehide coat and knew the way\nToward home, I saw him and the tree together.\n\nFor me now fields are whirling in a wheel\nAnd the spokes are many paths in all directions,\nEach day I come to crossroads after dark\nNo place to stay, no aunts, no close connections.\n\nCalendars shed their leaves, mark down a time\nWhen chrome danced brightly, The roadside tree is rotten,\nI told a circling hawk, Widen the gate\nFor the new machine, a landmark’s soon forgotten.\n\nYou say the word, he mocked, I’m used to exile.\nBut the furrow’s tongue never tells the harvest true,\nWhen my engine saw had redesigned the landscape\nFor a tractor’s path, the stump bled what I knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-oracle": { - "title": "“The Oracle”", - "body": "The oracle whose customer I am\nHides in the bottom drawer among my shirts\nOr back of curtains, or upon the desk\nBehind my unpaid bills, my solemn debts.\n\nShe won’t take questions that aren’t ready made.\nAnd neatly wrapped, delivered to my door,\nShe sends two answers, both ambiguous,\nAnd I can choose the one on which I swear.\n\nBut still the morning seems like afternoon,\nAnd floors I walk on echo underneath,\nMy oracle has told me I should take\nThings just the way they are and save my breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-same-in-this-as-other-lands": { - "title": "“The Same in This as Other Lands”", - "body": "He bows his head against the wind\nthat dries the muscles of his hands\nand chills the poor and needy folk\nthe same in this as other lands.\n\nMud and the litter on his boots\nwitness the chores that he has done,\nhow many stables has he cleaned\nand never owned a part of one?\n\nHis helpless eyes watch time unfold\nvague leaves of promise everywhere\nthat are not written in his tongue\nthough he is often mentioned there.\n\nThe same in this as other lands\nhe grinds his labor for our bread\nworking the daily miracle\nby which the multitude is fed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "reginald-heber": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Reginald Heber", - "birth": { - "year": 1783 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1826 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Heber", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "anglican", - "christian", - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "bread-of-the-world-in-mercy-broken": { - "title": "“Bread of the world, in mercy broken …”", - "body": "Bread of the world, in mercy broken,\nWine of the soul, in mercy shed,\nBy Whom the words of life were spoken,\nAnd in Whose death our sins are dead.\n\nLook on the heart by sorrow broken,\nLook on the tears by sinners shed;\nAnd be Thy feast to us the token,\nThat by Thy grace our souls are fed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "brightest-and-best": { - "title": "“Brightest and Best”", - "body": "Brightest and best of the sons of the morning;\nDawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;\nStar of the East, the horizon adorning,\nGuide where our infant Redeemer is laid.\n\nCold on His cradle the dewdrops are shining;\nLow lies His head with the beasts of the stall;\nAngels adore Him in slumber reclining,\nMaker and Monarch and Savior of all!\n\nSay, shall we yield Him, in costly devotion,\nOdors of Edom and offerings divine?\nGems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean,\nMyrrh from the forest, or gold from the mine?\n\nVainly we offer each ample oblation,\nVainly with gifts would His favor secure;\nRicher by far is the heart’s adoration,\nDearer to God are the prayers of the poor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - } - } - }, - "anthony-hecht": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anthony Hecht", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2004 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Hecht", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 37 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-rain": { - "title": "“After the Rain”", - "body": "The barbed-wire fences rust\nAs their cedar uprights blacken\nAfter a night of rain.\nSome early, innocent lust\nGets me outdoors to smell\nThe teasle, the pelted bracken,\nThe cold, mossed-over well,\nRank with its iron chain,\n\nAnd takes me off for a stroll.\nWetness has taken over.\nFrom drain and creeper twine\nIt’s runnelled and trenched and edged\nA pebbled serpentine\nSecretly, as though pledged\nTo attain a difficult goal\nAnd join some important river.\n\nThe air is a smear of ashes\nWith a cool taste of coins.\nStiff among misty washes,\nThe trees are as black as wicks,\nSilent, detached and old.\nA pallor undermines\nSome damp and swollen sticks.\nThe woods are rich with mould.\n\nHow even and pure this light!\nAll things stand on their own,\nEqual and shadowless,\nIn a world gone pale and neuter,\nYet riddled with fresh delight.\nThe heart of every stone\nConceals a toad, and the grass\nShines with a douse of pewter.\n\nSomewhere a branch rustles\nWith the life of squirrels or birds,\nSome life that is quick and right.\nThis queer, delicious bareness,\nThis plain, uniform light,\nIn which both elms and thistles,\nGrass, boulders, even words,\nSpeak for a Spartan fairness,\n\nMight, as I think it over,\nSpeak in a form of signs,\nIf only one could know\nAll of its hidden tricks,\nSaying that I must go\nWith a cool taste of coins\nTo join some important river,\nSome damp and swollen Styx.\n\nYet what puzzles me the most\nIs my unwavering taste\nFor these dim, weathery ghosts,\nAnd how, from the very first,\nAn early, innocent lust\nDelighted in such wastes,\nSought with a reckless thirst\nA light so pure and just.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "alceste-in-the-wilderness": { - "title": "“Alceste in the Wilderness”", - "body": "_(In Le Misanthrope Alceste, having become disgusted with all forms and manners of society, goes off into exile, leaving behind Philinte, who shall now become his rival in love.)_\n\nEvening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,\nAnd branches bloom with gold and copper screams\nOf birds with fancy prices on their tails\nTo plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails\nThrough Africa upon dissimilar themes.\n\nA little snuff-box whereon Daphnis sings\nIn pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,\nCalls up the color of her underthings\nAnd plays upon the taut memorial strings,\nTrailing her laces down into this heat.\n\nOne day he found, topped with a smutty grin,\nThe small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.\nForce of the sun had split the bluish skin,\nWhich, by their questioning and entering in,\nA swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.\n\nHe could distill no essence out of this.\nThat yellow majesty and molten light\nShould bless this carcass with a sticky kiss\nArgued a brute and filthy emphasis.\nThe half-moons of the finger-nails were white,\n\nAnd where the nostrils opened on the skies,\nIssuing to the sinus, where the ant\nCrawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes\nOf cloudy aspic, nothing could diguise\nHow terribly the thing looked like Philinte.\n\nWill-o-the-wisp, on the scum laden water,\nBurns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,\nIn the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.\nHeat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,\nFor he is burning with the monkey’s fever.\n\nBefore the bees have diagramed their comb\nWithin the skull, before summer has cracked\nThe back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,\nParis shall see the tempered exile home,\nPeruked and stately for the final act.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "application-for-a-grant": { - "title": "“Application for a Grant”", - "body": "Noble executors of the munificent testament\nOf the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch\nOf benefactors, there are certain kinds of men\nWho set their hearts on being bartenders,\nFor whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths,\nTapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes\nWho can master neither their bladders nor consonants,\nIs the only life, greatly to be desired.\nThere’s the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose\nRhythmical lists of enemies, while someone else\nWants to be known to the Tour d’Argent’s head waiter.\nAs the Sibyl of Cumae said: It takes all kinds.\nNothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member\nOf the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love\nHis fellow, whereas it’s just the opposite\nWith interior decorators; that’s what makes horse races.\nOne man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters,\nScrewing the IRS with mirth and profit;\nAnother devote himself to his shell collection,\nDeaf to his offspring, indifferent to the feast\nWith which his wife hopes to attract his notice.\nSome at the Health Club sweating under bar bells\nLabor away like grunting troglodytes,\nSmelly and thick and inarticulate,\nTheir brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion.\nAs for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift\nFor amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe,\nWith perhaps a laurel crown of the evergreen\nImperishable of your fine endowment\nWould supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing\nBut a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "birdwatchers-of-america": { - "title": "“Birdwatchers of America”", - "body": "It’s all very well to dream of a dove that saves,\nPicasso’s or the Pope’s,\nThe one that annually coos in Our Lady’s ear\nHalf the world’s hopes,\nAnd the other one that shall cunningly engineer\nThe retirement of all businessmen to their graves,\nAnd when this is brought about\nMake us the loving brothers of every lout--\nBut in our part of the country a false dusk\nLingers for hours; it steams\nFrom the soaked hay, wades in the cloudy woods,\nEngendering other dreams.\nFormless and soft beyond the fence it broods\nOr rises as a faint and rotten musk\nOut of a broken stalk.\nThere are some things of which we seldom talk;\nFor instance, the woman next door, whom we hear at night,\nClaims that when she was small\nShe found a man stone dead near the cedar trees\nAfter the first snowfall.\nThe air was clear. He seemed in ultimate peace\nExcept that he had no eyes. Rigid and bright\nUpon the forehead, furred\nWith a light frost, crouched an outrageous bird.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "chorus-from-oedipus-at-colonos": { - "title": "“Chorus From Oedipus At Colonos”", - "body": "What is unwisdom but the lusting after\nLongevity: to be old and full of days!\nFor the vast and unremitting tide of years\nCasts up to view more sorrowful things than joyful;\nAnd as for pleasures, once beyond our prime,\nThey all drift out of reach, they are washed away.\nAnd the same gaunt bailiff calls upon us all.\nSummoning into Darkness, to those wards\nWhere is no music, dance, or marriage hymn\nThat soothes or gladdens. To the tenements of Death.\n\nNot to be born is, past all yearning, best.\nAnd second best is, having seen the light.\nTo return at once to deep oblivion.\nWhen youth has gone, and the baseless dreams of youth,\nWhat misery does not then jostle man’s elbow,\nJoin him as a companion, share his bread?\nBetrayal, envy, calumny and bloodshed\nMove in on him, and finally Old Age--\nInfirm, despised Old Age--joins in his ruin,\nThe crowning taunt of his indignities.\n\nSo is it with that man, not just with me.\nHe seems like a frail jetty facing North\nWhose pilings the waves batter from all quarters;\nFrom where the sun comes up, from where it sets,\nFrom freezing boreal regions, from below,\nA whole winter of miseries now assails him,\nThrashes his sides and breaks over his head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "death-sauntering-about": { - "title": "“Death Sauntering About”", - "body": "The crowds have gathered here by the paddock gates\nAnd racing silks like the flags of foreign states\nBillow and snap in the sun,\nAnd thoroughbreds prance and paw the turf, the race\nIs hotly contested, for win and show and place,\nBefore it has yet begun.\n\nThe ladies’ gowns in corals and mauves and reds,\nLike fluently-changing variegated beds\nOf a wild informal garden,\nFloat hither and yon where gentlemen advance\nQuestions of form, the inscrutable ways of chance,\nAs edges of shadow harden.\n\nAmong these holiday throngs, a passer-by,\nMute, unremarked, insouciant, saunter I,\nOne who has placed\nDespite the tumult, the pounding of hooves, the sweat,\nAnd the urgent importance of everybody’s bet--\nNo premium on haste.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-the-archbishop": { - "title": "“Death the Archbishop”", - "body": "_ … and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goeth to his long home; and the mourners go about the streets._\n\n Ah my poor erring flock,\nTruant and slow to come unto my ways,\n Making an airy mock\nOf those choice pastures where my chosen graze,\nYou loiter childishly in pleasure’s maze,\n nheedful of the clock.\n\n Mere tuneless vanities\nDeflect you from the music of my word;\n You haste or take your ease\nAs if your cadences could be deferred,\nGiving your whole consent to brief, absurd\n And piping symphonies.\n\n The crozier, alb and cope\nCompose the ancient blazons of my truth\n Whose broad intent and scope\nShows how discordant are the glees of youth,\nHow weak the serum of that serpent’s tooth\n The ignorant call _hope_.\n\n Yet shall you come to see\nIn articles and emblems of my faith\n That in mortality\nLies all our comfort, as the preacher saith,\nAnd to the blessèd kingdom of the wraith\n I have been given the key.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-the-copperplate-printer": { - "title": "“Death the Copperplate Printer”", - "body": "I turn Christ’s cross till it turns Catherine’s wheel,\nIxion’s wheel becoming Andrew’s cross,\n All four being windlass ways\nTo press my truth full home, force you to feel\n The brevity of your days,\nYour strength’s, health’s, teeth’s, desire’s and memory’s loss.\n\nThe bitten plate, removed from its Dutch Bath\nOf mordants, has been set below a screw\n That will enforce my will\nLike the press that crushed Isaiah’s grapes of wrath.\n My lightest touch can kill,\nMy costly first impressions can subdue.\n\nSlowly I crank my winch, and the bones crack,\nThe skull splits open and the ribs give way.\n Who, then, thinks to endure?\nConfess the artistry of my attack;\n Admire the fine gravure,\nThe trenched darks, the cross-hatching, the pale gray.\n\nThis is no metaphor. Margaret Clitheroe,\nA pious woman, even as she prayed\n Was cheated of her breath\nBy a court verdict that some years ago\n Ordered her pressed to death.\nI’m always grateful for such human aid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-the-mexican-revolutionary": { - "title": "“Death the Mexican Revolutionary”", - "body": "Wines of the great châteaux\nHave been uncorked for you;\nCome, take this terrace chair;\nExamine the menu.\nThe view from here is such\nAs cannot find a match,\nFor even as you dine\nYou’re so placed as to watch\nStarvation in our streets\nThat gives your canapé\nA more exquisite taste\nBy contrast, like the play\nOf shadow and of light.\nThe misery of the poor\nAppears, as on TV.\nSet off by the allure\nAnd glamour of the ads.\nWe recommend the quail,\nWhich you’d do well to eat\nBefore your powers fail,\nFor I inaugurate\nA brand-new social order\nSix cold, decisive feet\nSouth of the border.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-the-painter": { - "title": "“Death the Painter”", - "body": "Snub-nosed, bone-fingered, deft with engraving tools,\nI have alone been given\nThe powers of Joshua, who stayed the sun\nIn its traverse of heaven.\nHere in this Gotham of unnumbered fools\nI have sought out and arrested everyone.\n\nUnder my watchful eye all human creatures\nConvert to a _still life_,\nAs with unique precision I apply\nWhite lead and palette knife.\nA model student of remodelled features,\nThe final barber, the last beautician, I.\n\nYou lordlings, what is Man, his blood and vitals,\nWhen all is said and done?\nA poor forked animal, a nest of flies.\nTell us, what is this one\nOnce shorn of all his dignities and titles,\nDivested of his testicles and eyes?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-the-punchinello": { - "title": "“Death the Punchinello”", - "body": "_Kent._ This is not altogether fool, my lord.\n_Fool._ No, faith, lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t. And ladies too, they will not let me have all the fool to myself; they’ll be snatching.\n\nTwo servants were paid to set his house on fire\nAnd, when he fled, to pierce him with little darts.\nAnd so this man, widely praised and admired,\nEnvied by many, a soldier, philosopher,\nA young Adonis, was dead at forty-six.\nSo much, alas, for Alcibiades.\nNow as for me, admittedly grotesque,\nCheated of feature by dissembling Nature,\nBearing an envious mountain on my back\nWhere sits deformity to mock my body,\nI’m your imperishable comedian.\nI suffer multi-interments, executions,\nYet like Donne’s lovers, I die and rise the same,\nVulgar, mean, selfish, undefeatable.\nYou wouldn’t think me much to look at me,\nA clown’s hooked nose and all the rest of it,\nYet, for all that, I have a way with women.\nLove ’em and leave ’em, as I like to say.\nAnd nothing pleases the kids more than my cudgel.\nThey see the justice of it, don’t you see.\nHow, against all odds, this ugly man,\nHated, unmanumitted just like them,\nWields his big stick and whacks authority\nHard on its wooden head. I lack the graces\nThat everyone observed in the young Greek,\nWomen and men alike. He grew so vain\nHe wouldn’t play the flute, claimed it distorted\nThe sculptural virtues of his classic features.\nThat, I would venture to say, is not my problem.\nYou find me always dressed, made-up, in white,\nAll dredged in flour, like an apprentice baker,\nThough sometimes masked, like your Jack Ketch, in black.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dilemma": { - "title": "“Dilemma”", - "body": "“Dark and amusing he is, this handsome gallant,\n Of chamois-polished charm,\nAthlete and dancer of uncommon talent--\n Is there cause for alarm\nIn his smooth demeanor, the proud tilt of his chin,\n This _cavaliere servente_, this Harlequin?”\n\n“Gentle and kindly this other, ardent but shy,\n With an intelligence\nWho would not glory to be guided by--\n And would it not make sense\nTo trust in someone so devoted, so\n Worshipful as this tender, pale Pierrot?”\n\n“Since both of them delight, if I must choose\n I win a matchless mate,\nBut by that very winning choice I lose--\n I pause, I hesitate,\nPutting decision off,” says Columbine,\n“And while I hesitate, they both are mine.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "double-sonnet": { - "title": "“Double Sonnet”", - "body": "I recall everything, but more than all,\nWords being nothing now, an ease that ever\nRemembers her to my unfailing fever,\nHow she came forward to me, letting fall\nLamplight upon her dress till every small\nMotion made visible seemed no mere endeavor\nOf body to articulate its offer,\nBut more a grace won by the way from all\nStriving in what is difficult, from all\nLosses, so that she moved but to discover\nA practice of the blood, as the gulls hover,\nWinged with their life, above the harbor wall,\nTracing inflected silence in the tall\nAir with a tilt of mastery and quiver\nAgainst the light, as the light fell to favor\nHer coming forth; this chiefly I recall.\n\nIt is a part of pride, guiding the hand\nAt the piano in the splash and passage\nOf sacred dolphins, making numbers human\nBy sheer extravagance that can command\nPythagorean heavens to spell their message\nOf some unlooked-for peace, out of the common;\nTaking no thought at all that man and woman,\nLost in the trance of lamplight, felt the presage\nOf the unbidden terror and bone hand\nOf gracelessness, or the unspoken omen\nThat yet shall render all, by its first usage,\nSpeechless, inept, and totally unmanned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eclogue-of-the-shepherd-and-the-townie": { - "title": "“Eclogue of the Shepherd and the Townie”", - "body": "> _Shepherd:_\nNot the blue-fountained Florida hotel,\nBell-capped, bellevued, straight-jacketed and decked\nWith chromium palms and a fromage of moon,\nNot goodnight chocolates, nor the soothing slide\nOf huîtres and sentinel straight-up martinis,\nNeither the yacht heraldic nor the stretch\nLimos and pants, Swiss banks or Alpine stocks\nShall solace you, or quiet the long pain\nOf cold ancestral disinheritance,\nSevering your friendly commerce with the beasts,\nGone, lapsed, and cancelled, rendered obsolete\nAs the gonfalon of Bessarabia,\nThe shawm, the jitney, the equestrian order,\nThe dark daguerreotypes of Paradise.\n\n\n> _Townie:_\nNo humble folding cot, no steaming sty\nOr sheep-dipped meadow now shall dignify\nYour brute and sordid commerce with the beasts,\nScotch your flea-bitten bitterness or down\nThe voice that keeps repeating, “Up your Ars\nPoetica, your earliest diapered dream\nOf the long-gone Odd Fellows amity\nOf bunny and scorpion, the entente cordiale\nOf lamb and lion, the old nursery fraud\nAnd droll Aesopic zoo in which the chatter\nOf chimp and chaffinch, manticore and mouse,\nDiverts us from all thought of entrecôtes,\nPrime ribs and rashers, filets mignonnettes,\nProvided for the paired pythons and jackals,\nOff to their catered second honeymoons\nOn Noah’s forty-day excursion cruise.”\n\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nCall it. if this should please you, but a dream,\nA bald, long-standing lie and mockery,\nYet it deserves better than your contempt.\nThink also of that interstellar darkness,\nSilence and desolation from which the Tempter,\nLike a space capsule exiled into orbit,\nLooks down on our green cabinet of peace,\nA place classless and weaponless, without\nEnvy or fossil fuel or architecture.\nThink of him as at dawn he views a snail\nTraveling with blind caution up the spine\nOf a frond asway with its little inching weight\nIn windless nods that deepen with assent\nTill the ambler at last comes back to earth,\nLeaving his route, as on the boughs of heaven,\nTraced with a silver scrawl. The morning mist\nHaunts all about that action till the sun\nMakes of it a small glory, and the dew\nHolds the whole scale of rainbow, the accord\nOf stars and waters, luminously viewed\nAt the same time by water-walking spiders\nThat dimple a surface with their passages.\nIn the lewd Viennese catalogue of dreams\nIt’s one of the few to speak of without shame.\n\n\n> _Townie:_\nIt is the dream of a shepherd king or child,\nAnd is without all blemish except one:\nThat it supposes all virtue to stem\nFrom pure simplicity. But many cures\nOf body and of spirit are the fruit\nOf cultivated thought. Kindness itself\nDepends on what we call consideration.\nYour fear of corruption is a fear of thought,\nTherefore you would be thoughtless. Think again.\nConsider the perfect hexagrams of snow,\nThose broadcast emblems of divinity,\nThat prove in their unduplicable shapes\nInsights of Thales and Pythagoras.\nIf you must dream, dream of the ratio\nOf Nine to Six to Four Palladio used\nTo shape those rooms and chapels where the soul\nImagines itself blessed, and finds its peace\nEven in chambers of the Malcontenta,\nThose just proportions we hypostatize\nNot as flat prairies but the City of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-end-of-the-weekend": { - "title": "“The End of the Weekend”", - "body": "A dying firelight slides along the quirt\nOf the cast iron cowboy where he leans\nAgainst my father’s books. The lariat\nWhirls into darkness. My girl in skin tight jeans\nFingers a page of Captain Marriat\nInviting insolent shadows to her shirt.\nWe rise together to the second floor.\nOutside, across the lake, an endless wind\nWhips against the headstones of the dead and wails\nIn the trees for all who have and have not sinned.\nShe rubs against me and I feel her nails.\nAlthough we are alone, I lock the door.\nThe eventual shapes of all our formless prayers:\nThis dark, this cabin of loose imaginings,\nWind, lip, lake, everything awaits\nThe slow unloosening of her underthings\nAnd then the noise. Something is dropped. It grates\nagainst the attic beams. I climb the stairs\nArmed with a belt.\nA long magnesium shaft\nOf moonlight from the dormer cuts a path\nAmong the shattered skeletons of mice.\nA great black presence beats its wings in wrath.\nAbove the boneyard burn its golden eyes.\nSome small grey fur is pulsing in its grip.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-friend-killed-in-the-war": { - "title": "“A Friend Killed in the War”", - "body": "Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants,\nIntent upon the apples of his eyes;\nA heavy bandoleer hung like a prize\nAround his neck, and tropical red ants\nMounted his body, and he heard advance,\nLittle by little, the thin female cries\nOf mortar shells. He thought of Paradise.\nSuch is the vision that extremity grants.\n\nIn the clean brightness of magnesium\nFlares, there were seven angels by a tree.\nTheir hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt\nThey were not really from Elysium.\nAnd his flesh opened like a peony,\nRed at the heart, white petals furling out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ghost-in-the-martini": { - "title": "“The Ghost In The Martini”", - "body": " Over the rim of the glass\nContaining a good martini with a twist\nI eye her bosom and consider a pass,\n Certain we’d not be missed\n\n In the general hubbub.\nHer lips, which I forgot to say, are superb,\nNever stop babbling once (Aye, there’s the rub)\n But who would want to curb\n\n Such delicious, artful flattery?\nIt seems she adores my work, the distinguished grey\nOf my hair. I muse on the salt and battery\n Of the sexual clinch, and say\n\n Something terse and gruff\nAbout the marked disparity in our ages.\nShe looks like twenty-three, though eager enough.\n As for the famous wages\n\n Of sin, she can’t have attained\nEven to union scale, though you never can tell.\nHer waist is slender and suggestively chained,\n And things are going well.\n\n The martini does its job,\nGod bless it, seeping down to the dark old id.\n(“Is there no cradle, Sir, you would not rob?”\n Says ego, but the lid\n\n Is off. The word is Strike\nWhile the iron’s hot.) And now, ingenuous and gay,\nShe is asking me about what I was like\n At twenty. (Twenty, eh?)\n\n You wouldn’t have liked me then,\nI answer, looking carefully into her eyes.\nI was shy, withdrawn, awkward, one of those men\n That girls seemed to despise,\n\n Moody and self-obsessed,\nUnhappy, defiant, with guilty dreams galore,\nFull of ill-natured pride, an unconfessed\n Snob and a thorough bore.\n\n Her smile is meant to convey\nHow changed or modest I am, I can’t tell which,\nWhen I suddenly hear someone close to me say,\n “You lousy son-of-a-bitch!”\n\n A young man’s voice, by the sound,\nComing, it seems, from the twist in the martini.\n“You arrogant, elderly letch, you broken-down\n Brother of Apeneck Sweeney!\n\n Thought I was buried for good\nUnder six thick feet of mindless self-regard?\nDance on my grave, would you, you galliard stud,\n Silenus in leotard?\n\n Well, summon me you did,\nAnd I come unwillingly, like Samuel’s ghost.\n‘All things shall be revealed that have been hid.’\n There’s something for you to toast!\n\n You only got where you are\nBy standing upon my ectoplasmic shoulders,\nAnd wherever that is may not be so high or far\n In the eyes of some beholders.\n\n Take, for example, me.\nI have sat alone in the dark, accomplishing little,\nAnd worth no more to myself, in pride and fee,\n Than a cup of luke-warm spittle.\n\n But honest about it, withal …”\n(“Withal,” forsooth!) “Please not to interrupt.\nAnd the lovelies went by, ‘the long and the short and the tall,’\n Hankered for, but untupped.\n\n Bloody monastic it was.\nA neurotic mixture of self-denial and fear;\nThe verse halting, the cataleptic pause,\n No sensible pain, no tear,\n\n But an interior drip\nAs from an ulcer, where, in the humid deep\nCenter of myself, I would scratch and grip\n The wet walls of the keep,\n\n Or lie on my back and smell\nFrom the corners the sharp, ammoniac, urine stink.\n‘No light, but rather darkness visible.’\n And plenty of time to think.\n\n In that thick, fetid air\nI talked to myself in giddy recitative:\n‘I have been studying how I may compare\n This prison where I live\n\n Unto the world …’ I learned\nLittle, and was awarded no degrees.\nYet all that sunken hideousness earned\n Your negligence and ease.\n\n Nor was it wholly sick,\nHaving procured you a certain modest fame;\nA devotion, rather, a grim device to stick\n To something I could not name.”\n\n Meanwhile, she babbles on\nAbout men, or whatever, and the juniper juice\nShuts up at last, having sung, I trust, like a swan.\n Still given to self-abuse!\n\n Better get out of here;\nIf he opens his trap again it could get much worse.\nI touch her elbow, and, leaning toward her ear,\n Tell her to find her purse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "going-the-rounds-a-sort-of-love-poem": { - "title": "“Going the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem”", - "body": "Some people cannot endure\nLooking down from the parapet atop the Empire State\nOr the Statue of Liberty--they go limp, insecure,\nThe vertiginous height hums to their numbered bones\n Some homily on Fate;\nNeither virtue past nor vow to be good atones\n\n To the queasy stomach, the quick,\nInvoluntary softening of the bowels.\n“What goes up must come down,” it hums: the ultimate, sick\nJoke of Fortuna. The spine, the world vibrates\n With terse, ruthless avowals\nFrom “The Life of More,” “A Mirror For Magistrates”.\n\n And there are heights of spirit.\nAnd one of these is love. From way up here,\nI observe the puny view, without much merit,\nOf all my days. High on the house are nailed\n Banners of pride and fear.\nAnd that small wood to the west, the girls I have failed.\n\n It is, on the whole, rather glum:\nThe cyclone fence, the tar-stained railroad ties,\nWith, now and again, surprising the viewer, some\nGarden of selflessness or effort. And, as I must,\n I acknowledge on this high rise\nThe ancient metaphysical distrust.\n\n But candor is not enough,\nNor is it enough to say that I don’t deserve\nYour gentle, dazzling love, or to be in love.\nThat goddess is remorseless, watching us rise\n In all our ignorant nerve,\nAnd when we have reached the top, putting us wise.\n\n My dear, in spite of this,\nAnd the moralized landscape down there below,\nNeither of which might seem the ground for bliss,\nKnow that I love you, know that you are most dear\n To one who seeks to know\nHow, for your sake, to confront his pride and fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-hill": { - "title": "“A Hill”", - "body": "In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,\nI had a vision once; though you understand\nIt was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints,\nAnd perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,\nPicking my way through a warm sunlit piazza\nIn the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows\nFrom huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made\nA sort of lucent shallows in which was moored\nA small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,\nCheap landscapes and ugly religious prints\nWere all on sale. The colors and noise\nLike the flying hands were gestures of exultation,\nSo that even the bargaining\nRose to the ear like a voluble godliness.\nAnd then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,\nAnd it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved\nAnd even the great Farnese Palace itself\nWas gone, for all its marble; in its place\nWas a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,\nClose to freezing, with a promise of snow.\nThe trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap\nOutside a factory wall. There was no wind,\nAnd the only sound for a while was the little click\nOf ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.\nI saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,\nBut no other sign of life. And then I heard\nWhat seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;\nAt least I was not alone. But just after that\nCame the soft and papery crash\nOf a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.\nAnd that was all, except for the cold and silence\nThat promised to last forever, like the hill.\nThen prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored\nTo the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week\nI was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.\nAll this happened about ten years ago,\nAnd it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,\nI remembered that hill; it lies just to the left\nOf the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy\nI stood before it for hours in wintertime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "horatian-virtue": { - "title": "“Horatian Virtue”", - "body": "A blameless, upright life, an unblemished conscience,\nPlus the fact that clearly I’m not on anyone’s shit list,\nNeither the Fed’s nor any of my neighbors’,\n Bolsters me, Hanson,\n\nMore solidly than a Saturday Night Special;\nWhether footslogging through Brooklyn at four AM\nOr risking the gloom-filled catacombs of the subway,\n Everything’s dandy.\n\nFor when catastrophe struck at Three Mile Island\nI was miles away, singing about my Mabel,\nMating my rhymes, while even the liquid coolant\n Turned radioactive.\n\nThings were quite tense in eastern Pennsylvania:\nWould the milk, the air, the bloodstreams all grow radiant,\nWomen give birth to prodigies, their husbands\n Die prematurely?\n\nYou could set me anywhere-on a desert island\nWithout a TV set and no Man Friday,\nCondemned to a steady diet of bark and berries\n And frittered star-fish,\n\nOr banish me to the freezing wastes of Sodus,\nWhere, by report, the men spit solid ice-cubes--\nAnd you’ld find me engrossed in innocent, flowing numbers,\n Measuring Mabel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-out-herods-herod-pray-you-avoid-it": { - "title": "“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You Avoid It”", - "body": "Tonight my children hunch\nToward their Western, and are glad\nAs, with a Sunday punch,\nThe Good casts out the Bad.\n\nAnd in their fairy tales\nThe warty giant and witch\nGet sealed in doorless jails\nAnd the match-girl strikes it rich.\n\nI’ve made myself a drink.\nThe giant and witch are set\nTo bust out of the clink\nWhen my children have gone to bed.\n\nAll frequencies are loud\nWith signals of despair;\nIn flash and morse they crowd\nThe rondure of the air.\n\nFor the wicked have grown strong,\nTheir numbers mock at death,\nTheir cow brings forth its young,\nTheir bull engendereth.\n\nTheir very fund of strength,\nSatan, bestrides the globe;\nHe stalks its breadth and length\nAnd finds out even Job.\n\nYet by quite other laws\nMy children make their case;\nHalf God, half Santa Claus,\nBut with my voice and face,\n\nA hero comes to save\nThe poorman, beggarman, thief,\nAnd make the world behave\nAnd put an end to grief.\n\nAnd that their sleep be sound\nI say this childermas\nWho could not, at one time,\nHave saved them from the gas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "late-afternoon-the-onslaught-of-love": { - "title": "“Late Afternoon: The Onslaught Of Love”", - "body": "At this time of day\nOne could hear the caulking irons sound\nAgainst the hulls in the dockyard.\nTar smoke rose between trees\nAnd large oily patches floated on the water,\nUndulating unevenly\nIn the purple sunlight\nLike the surfaces of Florentine bronze.\n\nAt this time of day\nSounds carried clearly\nThrough hot silences of fading daylight.\nThe weedy fields lay drowned\nIn odors of creosote and salt.\nRicher than double-colored taffeta,\nOil floated in the harbor,\nAmoeboid, iridescent, limp.\nIt called to mind the slender limbs\nOf Donatello’s David.\n\nIt was lovely and she was in love.\nThey had taken a covered boat to one of the islands.\nThe city sounds were faint in the distance:\nRattling of carriages, tumult of voices,\nYelping of dogs on the decks of barges.\n\nAt this time of day\nSunlight empurpled the world.\nThe poplars darkened in ranks\nLike imperial servants.\nWater lapped and lisped\nIn its native and quiet tongue.\nOakum was in the air and the scent of grasses.\nThere would be fried smelts and cherries and cream.\nNothing designed by Italian artisans\nWould match this evening’s perfection.\nThe puddled oil was a miracle of colors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-letter": { - "title": "“A Letter”", - "body": " I have been wondering\n What you are thinking about, and by now suppose\n It is certainly not me.\n But the crocus is up, and the lark, and the blundering\n Blood knows what it knows.\nIt talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.\n\n Of course, it is talking of you.\n At dawn, where the ocean has netted its catch of lights,\n The sun plants one lithe foot\n On that spill of mirrors, but the blood goes worming through\n Its warm Arabian nights,\nNaming your pounding name again in the dark heart-root.\n\n Who shall, of course, be nameless.\n Anyway, I should want you to know I have done my best,\n As I’m sure you have, too.\n Others are bound to us, the gentle and blameless\n Whose names are not confessed\nIn the ceaseless palaver. My dearest, the clear unquaried blue\n\n Of those depths is all but blinding.\n You may remember that once you brought my boys\n Two little woolly birds.\n Yesterday the older one asked for you upon finding\n Your thrush among his toys.\nAnd the tides welled about me, and I could find no words.\n\n There is not much else to tell.\n One tries one’s best to continue as before,\n Doing some little good.\n But I would have you know that all is not well\n With a man dead set to ignore\nThe endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "lizards-and-snakes": { - "title": "“Lizards And Snakes”", - "body": "On the summer road that ran by our front porch\n Lizards and snakes came out to sun.\nIt was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch\n A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun\nTo lie in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,\n They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile\nIn the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat\nWorking away like Jack Doyle’s after he’d run the mile.\n\nAunt Martha had an unfair prejudice\n Against them (as well as being cold\nToward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,\n Being a spinster and all, and old.\nSo we used to slip them into her knitting box.\n In the evening she’d bring in things to mend\nAnd a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.\nIt broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.\n\nBut we never did it again after the day\n Of the big wind when you could hear the trees\nCreak like rocking chairs. She was looking away\n Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please\nDon’t let him near me. He’s as like as twins.\n He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.\nI can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins\nAnd swings the scaly horror of his folded tail.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "lots-wife": { - "title": "“Lot’s Wife”", - "body": "How simple the pleasures of those childhood days,\nSimple but filled with exquisite satisfactions.\nThe iridescent labyrinth of the spider,\nIts tethered tensor nest of polygons\nPuffed by the breeze to a little bellying sail--\nMerely observing this gave infinite pleasure.\nThe sound of rain. The gentle graphite veil\nOf rain that makes of the world a steel engraving,\nFull of soft fadings and faint distances.\nThe self-congratulations of a fly,\nRubbing its hands. The brown bicameral brain\nOf a walnut. The smell of wax. The feel\nOf sugar to the tongue: a delicious sand.\nOne understands immediately how Proust\nMight cherish all such postage-stamp details.\nWho can resist the charms of retrospection?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mathematics-considered-as-a-vice": { - "title": "“Mathematics Considered as a Vice”", - "body": "I would invoke that man\nWho chipped for all posterity an ass\n (The one that Jesus rode)\nOut of hard stone, and set its either wing\nAmong the wings of the most saintly clan\nOn Chartres Cathedral, and that it might sing\n The praise to all who pass\n Of its unearthly load,\nHung from its neck a harp-like instrument.\n I would invoke that man\n To aid my argument.\n\n The ass smiles on us all,\nBeing astonished that an ass might rise\n To such sure eminence\nNot merely among asses but mankind,\nSimpers, almost, upon the western wall\nIn praise of folly, who midst sow and kine,\n Saw with its foolish eyes\n Gold, Myrrh, and Frankincense\nEnter the stable door, against all odds.\n The ass smiles on us all.\n Our butt at last is God’s.\n\n That man is but an ass--\nMore perfectly, that ass is but a man\n Who struggles to describe\nOur rich, contingent and substantial world\nIn ideal signs: the dunged and pagan grass,\nMisted in summer, or the mother-of-pearled\n Home of the bachelor-clam.\n A cold and toothless tribe\nHas he for brothers, who would coldly think.\n That man is but an ass\n Who smells not his own stink.\n\n For all his abstract style\nSpeaks not to our humanity, and shows\n Neither the purity\nOf heaven, nor the impurity beneath,\nAnd cannot see the feasted crocodile\nRinged with St. Francis’ birds to pick its teeth,\n Nor can his thought disclose\n To normal intimacy,\nSiamese twins, the double-beasted back,\n For all his abstract style\n Utters our chiefest lack.\n\n Despite his abstract style,\nPickerel will dawdle in their summer pools\n Lit by the flitterings\nOf light dashing the gusty surfaces,\nOr lie suspended among shades of bile\nAnd lime in fluent shift, for all he says.\n And all the grey-haired mules,\n Simple and neuter things,\nWill bray hosannas, blessing harp and wing.\n For all his abstract style,\n The ass will learn to sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "more-light-more-light": { - "title": "“More Light! More Light!”", - "body": "Composed in the Tower before his execution\nThese moving verses, and being brought at that time\nPainfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:\n“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”\n\nNor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,\nThe sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.\nHis legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap\nBubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.\n\nAnd that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;\nPermitted at least his pitiful dignity;\nAnd such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,\nThat shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.\n\nWe move now to outside a German wood.\nThree men are there commanded to dig a hole\nIn which the two Jews are ordered to lie down\nAnd be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.\n\nNot light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill\nNor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.\nA Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.\nHe was ordered to change places with the Jews.\n\nMuch casual death had drained away their souls.\nThe thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.\nWhen only the head was exposed the order came\nTo dig him out again and to get back in.\n\nNo light, no light in the blue Polish eye.\nWhen he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.\nThe Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.\nHe was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.\n\nNo prayers or incense rose up in those hours\nWhich grew to be years, and every day came mute\nGhosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,\nAnd settled upon his eyes in a black soot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "naming-the-animals": { - "title": "“Naming the Animals”", - "body": "Having commanded Adam to bestow\nNames upon all the creatures, God withdrew\nTo empyrean palaces of blue\nThat warm and windless morning long ago,\nAnd seemed to take no notice of the vexed\nLook on the young man’s face as he took thought\nOf all the miracles the Lord had wrought,\nNow to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.\n\nBefore an addled mind and puddled brow,\nThe feathered nation and the finny prey\nPassed by; there went biped and quadruped.\nAdam looked forth with bottomless dismay\nInto the tragic eyes of his first cow,\nAnd shyly ventured, “Thou shalt be called ‘Fred.’”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-offering-for-patricia": { - "title": "“An Offering for Patricia”", - "body": "_“The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before.”_\n --From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.\n\n\nHardly enough for me that the pail of water\n Alive with the wrinkling light\n Brings clearness home and whiter\nThan mind conceives the walls mature to white,\nOr that the washed tomatoes whose name is given\n To love fulfill their bowl\n And the Roman sea is woven\nTogether by threading fish and made most whole.\n\nI delight in each of these, delight moreover\n In the dark skill of those hands\n Closer to wise than clever\nOf our blind Italian landlady who stands\nHer shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit\n Lightly dispatched and dressed\n Fixing it to the gibbet\nOf the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest.\n\nThese textures solicit of us our instant homage\n But are disparate senseless things\n Unless a reigning image\nBring them to purpose as your presence brings\nThe world in offering, like a chaplet worn\n In Aphrodite’s name,\n The furious unicorn\nCome to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame.\n\nAnd thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows\n Where ancient chamber pots\n Are grown to little meadows\nOf mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots\nThe winds for Ulysses and recalls to man\n A summer without cease;\n Sprung from the same dishpan\nOnion and lily work their primal peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "an-old-malediction": { - "title": "“An Old Malediction”", - "body": "What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex\nHairstylist and bathed in Russian Leather,\nDallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha,\nIn your expensive sublet? For whom do you\nSlip into something simple by, say, Gucci?\nThe more fool he who has mapped out for himself\nThe saline latitudes of incontinent grief.\nDazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks\nYour locks fetched up out of a bottle of Clairol,\nHe will know that the wind changes, the smooth sailing\nIs done for, when the breakers wallop him broadside,\nWhen he’s rudderless, dismasted, thoroughly swamped\nIn that mindless rip-tide that got the best of me\nOnce, when I ventured on your deeps, Piranha.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "paradise-lost-book-5-an-epitome": { - "title": "“Paradise Lost Book 5: An Epitome”", - "body": "Higgledy piggeldy\nArchangel Rafael,\nSpeaking of Satan’s re-\nBellion from God:\n\n“Chap was decidedly\nTurgiversational,\nGiven to lewdness and\nRodomontade.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-plate": { - "title": "“The Plate”", - "body": "Now he has silver in him. When sometime\nDeath shall boil down unnecessary fat\nTo reach the nub of our identity,\n When in the run of crime\nThe skull is rifled for the gold in teeth,\nAnd chemistry has eaten from the spine\nSuperfluous life and vigor, why then he\nWill show a richness to be wondered at,\n And shall be thought a mine\nWhose claim and stake are stone and floral wreath.\n\nThe body burns away, and burning gives\nLight to the eye and moisture to the lip\nAnd warmth to our desires, but it burns\n Whatever body lives\nInto extinction though it wear a plate\nOf armor in it: therefore do we thrive\nIn fear of fire, in terror of the ship\nThat carries us to fire. A soldier learns\n To bear the silver weight\nWhere in his head the fire is most alive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "prospects": { - "title": "“Prospects”", - "body": "We have set out from here for the sublime\nPastures of summer shade and mountain stream;\nI have no doubt we shall arrive on time.\nIs all the green of that enameled prime\nA snapshot recollection or a dream?\nWe have set out from here for the sublime\nWithout provisions, without one thin dime,\nAnd yet, for all our clumsiness, I deem\nIt certain that we shall arrive on time.\nNo guidebook tells you if you’ll have to climb\nOr swim. However foolish we may seem,\nWe have set out from here for the sublime\nAnd must get past the scene of an old crime\nBefore we falter and run out of steam,\nRiddled by doubt that we’ll arrive on time.\nYet even in winter a pale paradigm\nOf birdsong utters its obsessive theme.\nWe have set out from here for the sublime;\nI have no doubt we shall arrive on time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sarabande-on-attaining-the-age-of-seventy-seven": { - "title": "“Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven”", - "body": "_The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;\nWhite is their colour; and behold my head._\n --George Herbert\n\nLong gone the smoke-and-pepper childhood smell\nOf the smoldering immolation of the year,\nLeaf-strewn in scattered grandeur where it fell,\nGolden and poxed with frost, tarnished and sere.\n\nAnd I myself have whitened in the weathers\nOf heaped-up Januaries as they bequeath\nThe annual rings and wrongs that wring my withers,\nSober my thoughts, and undermine my teeth.\n\nThe dramatis personae of our lives\nDwindle and wizen; familiar boyhood shames,\nThe tribulations one somehow survives,\nRise smokily from propitiatory flames\n\nOf our forgetfulness until we find\nIt becomes strangely easy to forgive\nEven ourselves with this clouding of the mind,\nThis cinerous blur and smudge in which we live.\n\nA turn, a glide, a quarter turn and bow,\nThe stately dance advances; these are airs\nBone-deep and numbing as I should know by now,\nDiminishing the cast, like musical chairs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "third-avenue-in-sunlight": { - "title": "“Third Avenue in Sunlight”", - "body": "Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature’s error.\nAlready the bars are filled and John is there.\nBeneath a plentiful lady over the mirror\nHe tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.\n\nI think of him when he first got out of college,\nSerious, thin, unlikely to succeed;\nFor several months he hung around the Village,\nBoldly T-shirted, unfettered but unfreed.\n\nNow he confides to a stranger, “I was first scout,\nAnd kept my glimmers peeled till after dark.\nOur outfit had as its sign a bloody knout,\nWe met behind the museum in Central Park.\n\nOf course, we were kids.” But still those savages,\nWar-painted, a flap of leather at the loins,\nFile silently against him. Hostages\nAre never taken. One summer, in Des Moines,\n\nThey entered his hotel room, tomahawks\nFlashing like barracuda. He tried to pray.\nThree years of treatment. Occasionally he talks\nAbout how he almost didn’t get away.\n\nDaily the prowling sunlight whets its knife\nAlong the sidewalk. We almost never meet.\nIn the Rembrandt dark he lifts his amber life.\nMy bar is somewhat further down the street.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-phyllis": { - "title": "“To Phyllis”", - "body": "If thou must wander in these Woods,\nAs vagrant as Affection’s moods,\nBe thou directed, Phyllis, by\nSome vigilant Philosophy\nThat may dissociate thy grief\nFrom seasons simple to the leaf.\n\nSuch Learning, though it set thee free\nTo relish Summer’s prodigy,\nTo love all Ripeness, and to dote\nFreely upon the Poet’s Oat,\nMay save thee breathing thy despair\nInto this wide incessant Air.\n\nFor we must master, if we can,\nA Craft particular to Man,\nAnd study through our little Term\nTo smile at the Ironic Worm\nSequestered at the core of Love\nThat smiles when it is spoken of.\n\nThe Apple that was Venus’ prize\nInclines to dazzle human eyes,\nAnd, winning in its golden hue,\nCore of the circumscribing Blue,\nSeems to enchant the willing Mind\nOut of the forces of the wind.\n\nWherefore I offer thee the Plan\nOf a most earnest, gifted man\nWho learned “to use my selfe in jest,”\nAnd in this wise might we ingest\nThe airy Differences that turn\nThe Thinking Reed or potted Fern.\n\nThe new-born Child, held like a Fowl\nHigh by the heels, is taught to howl\nFor Air and for his mother’s Pap\nBy an invigorating slap;\nThus do our lives at once begin\nWith an ambiguous Medicine.\n\nAnd therefore, Girl, when thou dost rove,\nFull of uncomplemented Love,\nMourn not to see the Apple fall,\nFor we are fallen, and may call\nLove into being only by\nThe Shifts of Multiplicity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-transparent-man": { - "title": "“The Transparent Man”", - "body": "I’m mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,\nAnd thank you very kindly for this visit--\nEspecially now when all the others here\nAre having holiday visitors, and I feel\nA little conspicuous and in the way.\nIt’s mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers\nAnd wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully\nAnd feel they should break up their box of chocolates\nFor a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake.\nWhat they don’t understand and never guess\nIs that it’s better for me without a family;\nIt’s a great blessing. Though I mean no harm.\nAnd as for visitors, why, I have you,\nAll cheerful, brisk and punctual every Sunday,\nLike church, even if the aisles smell of phenol.\nAnd you always bring even better gifts than any\nOn your book-trolley. Though they mean only good,\nFamilies can become a sort of burden.\nI’ve only got my father, and he won’t come,\nPoor man, because it would be too much for him.\nAnd for me, too, so it’s best the way it is.\nHe knows, you see, that I will predecease him,\nWhich is hard enough. It would take a callous man\nTo come and stand around and watch me failing.\n(Now don’t you fuss; we both know the plain facts.)\nBut for him it’s even harder. He loved my mother.\nThey say she looked like me; I suppose she may have.\nOr rather, as I grew older I came to look\nMore and more like she must one time have looked,\nAnd so the prospect for my father now\nOf losing me is like having to lose her twice.\nI know he frets about me. Dr. Frazer\nTells me he phones in every single day,\nHoping that things will take a turn for the better.\nBut with leukemia things don’t improve.\nIt’s like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,\nA deep, severe, unseasonable winter,\nBurying everything. The white blood cells\nMultiply crazily and storm around,\nOut of control. The chemotherapy\nHasn’t helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.\nI know I look a sight, but I don’t care.\nI care about fewer things; I’m more selective.\nIt’s got so I can’t even bring myself\nTo read through any of your books these days.\nIt’s partly weariness, and partly the fact\nThat I seem not to care much about the endings,\nHow things work out, or whether they even do.\nWhat I do instead is sit here by this window\nAnd look out at the trees across the way.\nYou wouldn’t think that was much, but let me tell you,\nIt keeps me quite intent and occupied.\nNow all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,\nDelicate structures of the sycamores,\nThe fine articulation of the beeches.\nI have sat here for days studying them,\nAnd I have only just begun to see\nWhat it is that they resemble. One by one,\nThey stand there like magnificent enlargements\nOf the vascular system of the human brain.\nI see them there like huge discarnate minds,\nLost in their meditative silences.\nThe trunks, branches and twigs compose the vessels\nThat feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts.\nSo I’ve assigned them names. There, near the path,\nIs the great brain of Beethoven, and Kepler\nHaunts the wide spaces of that mountain ash.\nThis view, you see, has become my Hall of Fame,\nIt came to me one day when I remembered\nMary Beth Finley who used to play with me\nWhen we were girls. One year her parents gave her\nA birthday toy called “The Transparent Man.”\nIt was made of plastic, with different colored organs,\nAnd the circulatory system all mapped out\nIn rivers of red and blue. She’d ask me over\nAnd the two of us would sit and study him\nTogether, and do a powerful lot of giggling.\nI figure he’s most likely the only man\nEither of us would ever get to know\nIntimately, because Mary Beth became\nA Sister of Mercy when she was old enough.\nShe must be thirty-one; she was a year\nOlder than I, and about four inches taller.\nI used to envy both those advantages\nBack in those days. Anyway, I was struck\nRight from the start by the sea-weed intricacy,\nThe fine-haired, silken-threaded filiations\nThat wove, like Belgian lace, throughout the head.\nBut this last week it seems I have found myself\nLooking beyond, or through, individual trees\nAt the dense, clustered woodland just behind them,\nWhere those great, nameless crowds patiently stand.\nIt’s become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle\nAnd keeps me fascinated. My eyes are twenty-twenty,\nOr used to be, but of course I can’t unravel\nThe tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,\nThat mackled, cinder grayness. It’s a riddle\nBeyond the eye’s solution. Impenetrable.\nIf there is order in all that anarchy\nOf granite mezzotint, that wilderness,\nIt takes a better eye than mine to see it.\nIt set me on to wondering how to deal\nWith such a thickness of particulars,\nDeal with it faithfully, you understand,\nWithout blurring the issue. Of course I know\nThat within a month the sleeving snows will come\nWith cold, selective emphases, with massings\nAnd arbitrary contrasts, rendering things\nDeceptively simple, thickening the twigs\nTo frosty veins, bestowing epaulets\nAnd decorations on every birch and aspen.\nAnd the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled,\nThinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last\nIt can look forth and comprehend the world.\nThat’s when you have to really watch yourself.\nSo I hope that you won’t think me plain ungrateful\nFor not selecting one of your fine books,\nAnd I take it very kindly that you came\nAnd sat here and let me rattle on this way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - } - } - }, - "verner-von-heidenstam": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Verner von Heidenstam", - "birth": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swedish", - "language": "swedish", - "flag": "🇸🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner_von_Heidenstam", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "swedish" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-fig-tree": { - "title": "“The Fig-Tree”", - "body": "Welcome, thou cool oriental evening, welcome! After the hot day thou art as a pitcher of water after a ride in the desert. Thou art as a pale young wife, who from the hill beckons home the sweating toiler of the fields. Thou art like the Tartar jeweler’s opal, for thy color shifts between the white of milk and the glowing red of wine in the same manner that thy joy shifts between healthful, strengthening repose and enkindling merriment.\n\nWith this apostrophe I saluted the evening and reined up my jenny in a small ravine which clambered up toward Jerusalem. The city lay on a height, with its surrounding wall and its cupola-ed white houses, like a four-cornered basket full of eggs. Before the city gate, white-clad widows were sitting motionless at the graves of their husbands, mirrored in a great, quiet, colorless pool.\n\nAll at once came the dusk. The road of the ravine became full of people--for the time of the Passover was drawing near.\n\nAt the door of a small cottage, where women were preparing supper, was seated Christ, the Brotherer. Although His face could not be wholly distinguished, because the light of an oil-lamp within the house fell upon his back, yet one could tell at once who He was. His dark hair hung in rough luxuriance down to His knees. His white prophet’s garment was frayed, His feet dusty. With His left hand He compressed the nozzle of a leather skin of wine. Whenever one of the friends who were sitting with crossed legs in a circle about him attempted to rise, He pressed him back to his place again and offered him drink. No cares, no thought of labor came to disturb the still evening joy.\n\nThen arose, unobserved, Judas, the Jew of Jews. His well-tended hands and feet were white as marble, and the nails carefully polished. He did not wipe the sweat from his forehead with a fold of his garment as did the other disciples, but drew out always a long Roman handkerchief. His clean-shaven, prosperous-looking face with its small, sedate, intelligent eyes was altogether that of the sober, discreet man of property.\n\nHe stole away softly behind the cottage on the road to Jerusalem, while his green head-cloth fluttered among the twisted black olive trees. He smote himself on the forehead and spoke half-aloud, and it was not difficult to divine his thoughts.\n\n_What does it lead to,_ thought he, _if one follow this man who forbids us to work and to think of the future, and upon whose head they have finally set a price? Have not I year by year and day by day saved coin after coin? There lack but thirty pieces of silver--but thirty!--and I shall be sitting under my own fig-tree._\n\nInvoluntarily I reached for a stone. Then Christ, the Brotherer, arose in the lighted doorway.\n\n“Thou art still young,” he called out to me. “Thy first thought upon thine own fig-tree shall go forth and sell me.”\n\nMeanwhile the ravine became so dark that nothing could any longer be distinguished. All sank back into the Orient’s indescribable stillness, a stillness that has brought forth prophets. But from that evening I understood them who desire that no man shall possess an own fig-tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Charles Wharton Stork", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "the-heaviest-road": { - "title": "“The Heaviest Road”", - "body": "Hard do you press on me, dark hand,\nAnd heavily you rest upon my head.\nI vowed that unlamenting I would stand;\nBoldly set garlands on my hair instead.\nThe sorrow of the old is other\nThan bird-song grief in springtime’s glow.\nAround me chilling shadows gather.\nThe heaviest road is still to go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Charles Wharton Stork", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "starting-on-the-journey": { - "title": "“Starting on the Journey”", - "body": "Already I’m upon the bridge that leads\nFrom Earth unto a land beyond my ken,\nAnd far to me is now what once was near.\nBeneath, as formerly, the race of men\nPraise, blame, and forge their darts for warlike deeds;\nBut now I see that true and noble creeds\nEven on my foemen’s shields are blazoned clear.\nNo more does life bewilder with its riot,\nI am as lonely as a man may be;\nStill is the air, austere and winter-quiet;\nSelf is forgot, and I go forward free.\nI loose my shoes and cast aside my stave.\nSoftly I go, for I would not defile\nWith dust a world so pure, all white as snow.\nBeneath, men soon may carry to a grave\nA wretched shape of human clay, the while\nMumbling a name--’twas mine once long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Charles Wharton Stork", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-theme-with-two-variations": { - "title": "“A Theme with Two Variations”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMany a man who quietly lays his head on the block has swooned at a prick under the finger-nail. Nekir and Munkar, the angels who record the actions of mankind, had every day unconcernedly made entry of the heaviest sins, but they were much startled and became almost pale with terror when once upon a time they heard a pious man on the threshold of Paradise thank God that He had protected him against frivolity, the commonest sin on earth. Since Nekir and Munkar were not fully agreed as to what he meant by this never-before-mentioned sin, they commanded the most frivolous man on earth to show himself.\n\nSo Don Juan came, guffawing and whistling. It was impossible to get a serious word from him, but a Jew to whom he had pawned his plate pointed at him and whispered in passing: “Dot man amuses himself all de time und iss shoost mad about pretty vimmen! Coot-bye!”\n\nNekir answered: “To use every hour of his short life is, as long as others don’t suffer from it, no sin in our sight, though it may be in that of the narrow but possibly needful laws of men. It was not he whom we meant.”\n\nAfter that the Recording Angels repeated their command. Thereupon, timid and trembling, came Sheik Rifat Hassan, who died long ago. He knelt and sobbed: “Oh Munkar, I lived the first forty years of my life in such a whirl of pleasure that for the remaining forty I had to go about as a sick beggar.”\n\nThen answered Munkar: “My friend, to sacrifice the worst forty years of one’s life in order to have double enjoyment from the best is no frivolity. That is taking life seriously.”\n\nAfter that the Recording Angels for the third time summoned the most frivolous man living. But no one answered. There was silence over all the earth.\n\nFor the fourth and fifth time they repeated the summons without answer. They only heard in the distance a lengthy, apathetic yawning, and a ridiculous, emaciated old man approached. He stood still and cried out insolently and defiantly: “What is it ye desire to know? Ask of me! I am Diogenes and am so wise that I scorn the pleasures of life.”\n\nThen answered Nekir: “In that thou deemest thyself wise, thou art a blockhead. In that thou failest to make use of well-tasting meat and drink, of beautiful furnishings and garments and all the trifles that in their measure gladden the short space of life, thou art frivolous.”\n\nTherewith Nekir dipped his pen and inscribed in his book the following: Number 5,989,700,402. Diogenes. The world’s most frivolous man.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn one of the spreading valleys overgrown with peach-trees hard by Sana in Araby the Blest, Ildis, the Turkish governor’s daughter, had wreathed a mighty garland. In her joy at the silent, limpid Oriental evening she resolved to present the garland to that man of Sana’s inhabitants who best understood how to use the moment.\n\nIn her great childishness she asked the watchman at the city gate where she could find this man. He led her straightway to a writer of books. Who in Sana knew not the name of the writer of books? With hurried step he was going back and forth in his garden. Finally he stood still with an air of satisfaction and murmured: “At length I discern clearly wherein your charm consists, O evening of the Orient!” Thereafter he wrote on a slip of paper the following:\n\n_What is thy beauty. Orient Land,\nThou desert region of stones and sand,\nWith bare, parched mountain-wall?\n ’Tis color and silence all!\nThrow o’er the sunlight Europa’s glum\nOctober clouds wtih their dark-gray scowl,\nAnd set on the mountain a man with a drum,\n And the Orient Land would be foul!_\n\nAs soon as he had written down the last exclamation mark he sank down weary on a bench and went to sleep forthwith. Ildis looked at him and said: “As thou art a writer of books, it is thy fortune to be unfortunate. As thou art so unfortunate as to pluck apart every impression, thou dost rob thy life of all joy.--Let us go further!”\n\nThe watchman led her now to the market-place to a wealthy tallow-chandler. This man had passed his entire youth in a damp vault with his chandlery. His provision for the future had never won him a day’s leisure. Still he was sitting on the steps of his house, evidently broken-down and in his dotage, but provided for.\n\nIldis shook her head and turned toward him. “My friend, when thou didst labor for the morrow, thou wert a self-betrayer, because even before night thou might’st have lain on a bier. When thou didst offer up thy youth for thy age, thou wert a spendthrift who bought pebbles for diamonds.”\n\nAt last the watchman became impatient, shrugged his shoulders, and moodily retired, while his big slippers flapped on the stone pavement.\n\nNight had already come on, and Ildis noted with alarm that she had arrived in front of the forbidding hovel which was inhabited by Muchail, the city swineherd, a giaour of ill-repute, on whom the writer of books had composed the following epigram:\n\n_Muchail exalts the noble three,\nTobacco, dancing-girls and wine.\nBy day the city swineherd he,\nBy night he is the city swine._\n\nIldis looked anxiously about her at the empty street. Through the half-open door she made out the handsome, curly-haired Muchail, a fellow of scarce twenty, who in the faintly lighted room was talking in a low voice with a friend. He cast two copper coins on the table and cried to his comrade:\n\n“One coin shall be thine. I am but a poor swineherd, seest thou, but the little that I earn I always divide with my friends on condition that they immediately spend it. Do thou buy a little tobacco and wine, and I’ll knock at the house of the dancing-girls. A piastre is only a fish-hook with which one catches a little much-sought-after goldfish that is called Happiness. While the others of the city quite absurdly hoard up fish-hooks, let us to-night catch the fish themselves!”\n\nThe maiden felt that she was red with blushes. She stepped back a couple of steps into the bright, glad southern moonlight which outlined her shadow on the door. She hesitated, cautiously thrust off her slippers, and finally, barefoot, stepped stealthily up on the stone threshold, hung the great garland on the key and kissed it. Then she took the slippers in her hand and sprang quickly away in the shadow of the houses as if she had done something wicked.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Charles Wharton Stork" - } - }, - "from-thoughts-in-loneliness": { - "title": "From “Thoughts in Loneliness”", - "body": "# I. _The Spark._\n\nThere is a spark dwells deep within my soul.\nTo get it out into the daylight’s glow\nIs my life’s aim both first and last, the whole.\n\nIt slips away, it burns and tortures me.\nThat little spark is all the wealth I know;\nThat little spark is my life’s misery.\n\n\n# II. _An Elder Day._\n\nIn solitude my life-years drift away;\nI babble to my dog, I stir my fire.\nI do not feel the loss of yesterday,\n’Tis hours fled long since that I desire,\nWhen yonder bent and grizzled serving-man\nWho brought my supper in was young.\nWhen, children yet, my parents played among\nThe grasses, ere my life began.\n\n\n# IV. _Childhood Scenes._\n\nI’ve longed for home these eight long years, I know.\nI long in sleep as well as through the day.\nI long for home. I seek where’er I go--\nNot men-folk, but the fields where I would stray,\nThe stones where as a child I used to play.\n\n\n# V. _The Shifting Self._\n\nEach night my old self in the grave I lay\nAnd get me another on waking.\nWith a hundred thoughts I begin the day,\nNot one to my slumber-time taking.\n’Twixt sorrow and joy I roam without pause;\nI seem like a riddle, none dafter.\nBut lucky is he who for any cause,\nCan burst into tears or laughter.\n\n\n# VII. _My Mother._\n\nAs years would fade, I often kept returning\nTo an old empty house, deserted quite,\nIts hundred windows burning\nWith vivid sunset light.\nOpening and closing, anxiously I strayed there\nFrom room to room, but found no clocks that swayed their\nBright pendulums, nor furniture beneath.\nTo the last room I came. Displayed there\nUpon the wall in withered wreath\nA dark, half-ruined picture hung:\nA small, old dame in black arrayed,--\nA starched cap round her comely features clung.\nAnd yonder woman, silently portrayed\nOn canvas dark, I saw when I was young,\nShe prayed my life might have a worthy goal.\nAnd ’twas her picture, when all else was gone,\nThat still was left me, that alone.\nYon empty dwelling was my soul.\n\n\n# VIII. _Fame._\n\nYou seek for fame; but I would choose another\nAnd greater blessing: so to be forgotten\nThat none should hear my name; no, not my mother.\n\n\n# IX. _Obedience._\n\nNow even-song is ringing,\nI ride to win me rest.\nMy steed, let us be springing\nOut into the glowing west!\nHow glad among men my life would be,\nWere not “Obey!” our A and Z!\n\nIf the world had one mouth like a great black well\nAnd should cry as loud as a booming bell:\n“Obey, or in fetters double\nOf iron and wood thou shalt straight be bound!”\nI hardly should take the trouble\nTo look up and glance around.\n\nIf the Lord of the World from an evening cloud\nShould thunder “Obey!” with menacings loud,\nI would answer: “Lower your voice, God, pray,\nAnd perhaps I shall hear what you say!”\n\nMy steed so strong,\nNot yet do I long\nFor my stuffy home and the stove.\nKeep on for an hour, for twain maybe!\nAnd you purchase for me\nTwo hours of the respite I love.\n\n\n# X. _Helpless Animals._\n\nIf I should have a friend, one only friend,\nAnd that friend slew a helpless beast and gave\nHis hand, to which of late mine warmly clave,\nThough I still longed an answering grasp to lend,\nMy hand with his I never more would blend.\n\nIf he lay sick, the friend who had the heart\nTo slay a helpless beast, and felt the smart\nOf thirst, and I was sitting there beside him\nOn his last night, no drink would I provide him,\nBut fill and drain my glass, and so depart.\n\n\n# XII. _The Trap._\n\nA cunning trap I’m laying.\nYour love I have truly sought,\nBut just as you will be saying\nDeep down in your inmost thought:\n\n“I’ll give the bad man his due then,\nMy heart that he’s begged so long;”\nI’ll turn my back on you then\nAnd make a merry song.\n\n\n# XVI. _The Cup._\n\nA mighty cup my sires possessed,\nA mighty great pewter cup.\nMy heart is warmed as I fill it up\nAnd lift it on high with a zest.\n\nThen out of the ale sighs an ancient song,\nLike torches the strophes flame.\nGod grant that our children may hear it long\nWhile of us it murmurs the same!\n\n\n# XVII. _Self-Impatience._\n\nWithin my heart of hearts I’m well advised\nThat I am worst among the men I know of.\nNot only friends I mean, but this is so of\nAll those as well whom I have most despised.\n\nWhen comes the day when, young and strong for strife\nI may step forth and prove with eager passion\nThe tithe of greatness in my composition\nAnd for a sacred cause yield up my life?\n\n\n# XVIII. _Insight._\n\nI’ve searched half the world over everywhere\nFor a place that I fairest might call.\nSo lovely, though, were they all\nThat none could well be most fair.\n\nTake all that is mine or mine can be,\nBut leave me my one best gift:\nThat scenes may delight me, uplift,\nWhich another scarcely would see.\n\n\n# XXI. _A Farewell._\n\nYou cared for me, and at your behest\nI’d have laid my all at your feet.\nBut late I’d have given the world, my sweet,\nFor your heart, your lips, your breast.\n\nBut lucky our love, ever hid from sight,\nWhich bound not for weal or for woe\nTill it languished away, till we slew it outright\nBy faults neither one could forego!\n\nWhat can be forgotten with years, forget!\nCast me out as a corpse might be cast!\nThis mournful dream of our love may be yet\nA memory of youth at the last.\n\n\n# XXIV. _Self-Atonement._\n\nToo proud am I to see another suffer\nA death abhorred\nMy guilt to ease;\nToo tender to look on when Christ should offer\nTo thorns his forehead--\nMy thorns are these.\nFor my life’s care, in my heart I hide it.\nThe sin that I on man and beast have wrought\nAnd against thee, O Nature, be it brought\nUpon my life, and let my memory abide it!\n\n\n# XXVI. _Last Prayer._\n\nQuickly my little life will have departed.\nTo whom then should I pray, if at the last I could,\nLying upon my pillow, heavy-hearted\nFor the much ill I’d done and little good?\n\nShall hopeless prayers be hushed in their up-springing?\nShall I in dumb despair upon my death-bed lie?\nOr to deaf Nature’s might shall I be flinging\nA cry that fades away without reply?\n\nNo, but I will pray, lest my spirit harden,\nSilent but heart-warm prayers to those of my own clay,\nThat they forgive my sins as theirs I pardon.\nUnto my living fellow-men I’ll pray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Charles Wharton Stork" - } - } - } - }, - "heinrich-heine": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Heinrich Heine", - "birth": { - "year": 1797 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1856 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "declaration": { - "title": "“Declaration”", - "body": "Onward glimmering came the evening,\nWilder tossèd the flood,\nAnd I sat on the strand, regarding\nThe snowy dance of the billows,\nAnd soon my bosom swell’d like the sea;\nA deep home-sickness yearningly seized me\nFor thee, thou darling form,\nWho everywhere surround’st me,\nAnd everywhere call’st me,\nEverywhere, everywhere,\nIn the moan of the wind, in the roar of the ocean,\nIn the sigh within my own breast.\n\nWith brittle reed I wrote on the sand:\n“Agnes, I love thee!”\nBut wicked billows soon pour’d themselves\nOver the blissful confession,\nEffacing it all.\n\nAh too fragile reed, all fast-scatter’d sand,\nAh fugitive billows, I’ll trust you no more!\nThe heavens grow darker, my heart grows wilder\nAnd with vigorous hand from the forests of Norway\nTear I the highest fir-tree,\nAnd plunge it deep\nIn Etna’s glowing abyss, and thereafter\nWith fire-imbued giant-pen\nI write on the dark veil of heaven:\n“Agnes, I love thee!”\nEvery night gleams thenceforward\nOn high that eternal fiery writing,\nAnd all generations of farthest descendants\nRead gladly the heavenly sentence:\n“Agnes, I love thee!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "een-as-a-lovely-flower": { - "title": "“E’en as a Lovely Flower”", - "body": "E’en as a lovely flower,\nSo fair, so pure thou art;\nI gaze on thee, and sadness\nComes stealing o’er my heart.\n\nMy hands I fain had folded\nUpon thy soft brown hair,\nPraying that God may keep thee\nSo lovely, pure and fair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-fir-tree": { - "title": "“A Fir-Tree”", - "body": "A single fir-tree, lonely,\nOn a northern mountain height,\nSleeps in a white blanket,\nDraped in snow and ice.\nHis dreams are of a palm-tree,\nWho, far in eastern lands,\nWeeps, all alone and silent,\nAmong the burning sands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-dont-know-what-it-means": { - "title": "“I Don’t Know What It Means”", - "body": "I don’t know what it could mean,\nOr why I’m so sad: I find,\nA fairy-tale, from times unseen,\nWon’t vanish from my mind.\nThe air is cool and it darkens,\nAnd quiet flows the Rhine:\nThe tops of the mountains sparkle,\nIn evening’s after-shine.\nThe loveliest of maidens,\nShe’s wonderful, sits there,\nHer golden jewels glisten,\nShe combs her golden hair.\nShe combs it with a comb of gold,\nAnd sings a song as well:\nIts strangeness too is old\nAnd casts a powerful spell.\nIt grips the boatman in his boat\nWith a wild pang of woe:\nHe only looks up to the heights,\nCan’t see the rocks below.\nThe waves end by swallowing\nThe boat and its boatman,\nThat’s what, by her singing,\nThe Lorelei has done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "in-the-cabin-at-night": { - "title": "“In the Cabin at Night”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe sea its pearls possesseth,\nAnd heaven its stars containeth,\nBut, O my heart, my heart,\nMy heart its love hath also.\n\nVast is the sea and the heavens,\nYet vaster is my heart,\nAnd fairer than pearls or the stars\nGlitt’reth and beameth my love.\n\nThou little youthful maiden,\nCome to my heart so vast;\nMy heart and the sea and the heavens\nFor very love are dying.\n\n\n# II.\n\n’Gainst the azure veil of heaven,\nWhere the beauteous stars are twinkling,\nFain I’d press my lips with ardour,\nPress them wildly, madly weeping.\n\nYonder stars the very eyes are\nOf my loved one, thousand-changing\nGlimmer they and greet me kindly\nFrom the azure veil of heaven.\n\nTow’rd the azure veil of heaven,\nTow’rd the eyes of my beloved one,\nLift I up my arms in worship,\nAnd I pray, and thus beseech them:\n\nBeauteous eyes, ye lights of mercy,\nO make happy my poor spirit,\nLet me die, and as my guerdon,\nWin both you and all your heaven!\n\n\n# III.\n\nFrom those heavenly eyes above me\nLight and trembling sparks are falling\nThrough the night, and then my spirit\nLoving-wide and wider stretcheth.\n\nO ye heavenly eyes above me!\nWeep yourselves into my spirit,\nThat my spirit may run over\nWith those tears so sweet and starry!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nCradled by the ocean billows,\nAnd by thoughts that seem like visions,\nSilent lie I in the cabin,\nIn the dark bed in the corner.\n\nThrough the open hatchway see I\nThere on high the stars all-radiant,\nThose sweet eyes so dearly cherish’d\nOf my sweet and dearly loved one.\n\nThose sweet eyes so dearly cherish’d\nFar above my head are watching,\nAnd they tinkle and they beckon\nFrom the azure veil of heaven.\n\nTow’rd the azure veil of heaven\nGaze I many an hour with rapture,\nTill a white and misty curtain\nFrom me hides those eyes so cherish’d.\n\n’Gainst the boarded side of the ship,\nWhere my dreaming head is lying,\nRave the billows, the furious billows.\nThey roar and they murmur\nThus soft in my ear:\n\n“O foolish young fellow!\nThine arm is short, and the heavens are wide,\nAnd yonder stars are firmly nailed there;\nIn vain is thy yearning, in vain is thy sighing,\nThe best thou can’st do is to sleep!”\n\nI dreamt, and dreaming saw a spacious heath,\nFar overspread with white, with whitest snow,\nAnd ’neath that white snow buried I was lying,\nAnd slept the lonesome, chilly sleep of death.\n\nYet from on high, from out the darkling heavens,\nLook’d down upon my grave those eyes all-starry,\nThose eyes so sweet! In triumph they were gleaming\nIn calm and radiant but excessive love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "meeting-again": { - "title": "“Meeting Again”", - "body": "One summer eve, in the woodbine bower\n We sat once more at the window lonely;\nThe moon arose with life-giving power,\n But we appear’d two spectres only.\n\nTwelve years had pass’d since the last occasion\n When we on this spot had sat together;\nEach tender glow, each loving persuasion\n Had meanwhile been quench’d in life’s rough weather.\n\nI silently sat. The woman, however,\n Just like her sex, amongst love’s ashes\nMust needs be raking, but vain her endeavour\n To kindle again its long-quench’d flashes.\n\nAnd she recounted how she had contended\n With evil thoughts, the story disclosing\nHow hardly she once her virtue defended,--\n I stupidly listened to all her prosing.\n\nWhen homeward I rode, the trees beside me\n Like spirits beneath the moon’s rays flitted;\nSad voices call’d, but onward I hied me,\n Yes, I and the dead, who my side ne’er quitted.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-night-is-still": { - "title": "“The Night is Still”", - "body": "The night is so still, the streets are at rest,\nThis is the house that my love graced,\nThis is the town she’s long since left,\nBut the house is here in the selfsame place.\nA man’s there too, who stands and stares,\nAnd wrings his hands, in violent pain:\nWhen I see his look it makes me scared--\nThe moonlight shows my face again.\nYou doppel-gänger! You pallid creature!\nWhy do you act that torment through,\nLove, torturing me on this very corner,\nFor so many nights, those years I knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-night-on-the-strand": { - "title": "“The Night on the Strand”", - "body": "Starless and cold is the night,\nThe ocean boils;\nAnd over the sea, flat on its belly,\nLies the misshapen Northwind;\nWith groaning and stifled mysterious voice,\nA sullen grumbler, good-humour’d for once,\nPrates he away to the waves,\nTelling many a wild tradition,\nGiant-legends, murderous-humorous,\nPrimeval Sagas from Norway,\nAnd the while, far echoing, laughs he and howls he\nExorcists’ songs of the Edda,\nGrey old Runic proverbs,\nSo darkly-daring, and magic-forcible,\nThat the white sons of Ocean\nSpring up on high, all exulting,\nIn madden’d excitement.\n\nMeanwhile, along the flat shore,\nOver the flood-moisten’d sand,\nPaces a stranger, whose heart within him\nIs wilder far than wind and waters;\nThere where he walks\nSparks fly out, and shells are crackling,\nAnd he veils himself in his dark-grey mantle,\nAnd quickly moves on through the blustering night;--\nGuided in safety by yon little light,\nThat sweetly, invitingly glimmers,\nFrom the lone fisherman’s cottage.\n\nFather and brother are out on the sea,\nAnd all all alone is staying\nWithin the hut the fisherman’s daughter,\nThe wondrously lovely fisherman’s daughter.\nBy the hearth she’s sitting,\nAnd lists to the water-kettle’s\nHomely, sweet foreboding humming,\nAnd shakes in the fire the crackling brushwood\nAnd on it blows,\nSo that the lights, all ruddy and flickering,\nMagic-sweetly are reflected\nOn her fair blooming features,\nOn her tender, snowy shoulder,\nWhich, moving gently, peeps\nFrom out her coarse grey smock,\nAnd on her little, anxious hand,\nWhich fastens firmer her under-garment,\nOver her graceful hip.\n\nBut sudden, the door bursts open,\nThe nightly stranger entereth in;\nLove-secure, his eye reposes\nOn the snowy, slender maiden,\nWho, trembling, near him stands,\nLike to a startled lily;\nAnd he throws his mantle to earth,\nAnd laughs and speaks:\n\n“See now, my child, I’ve kept my word,\nAnd I come, and with me hath come\nThe olden time, when the gods from the heavens\nCame down to earth, to the daughters of mortals,\nAnd the daughters of mortals embraced they,\nAnd from them there issued\nSceptre-bearing races of monarchs,\nAnd heroes, wonders of earth.”\n\n“But start not, my child, any longer\nBecause of my godhead,\nAnd I pray thee give me some tea mix’d with rum\nFor ’tis cold out of doors,\nAnd amid such night breezes\nFreeze even we, we godheads immortal,\nAnd easily catch the divinest of colds,\nAnd a cough that proves quite eternal.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "old-scents": { - "title": "“Old Scents”", - "body": "The nosegay Matilda twined for me,\nAnd smilingly offer’d entreatingly,\nI push’d away, o’erpower’d completely\nBy the sight of the flowers that blossom’d so sweetly.\n\nAt the scent of the flowers, my tears fast flow,--\nI feel that in all this fair world below,\nIts beauty, sunlight, joy, love are bereft me,\nAnd nought but its bitter tears are left me.\n\nThey tell me that I no longer share\nA part in life and its circle fair,\nThat I belong to death’s kingdom dreary,\nYes, I, a corpse unburied and weary.\n\nHow happy was I when erst I saw\nThe dance of rats at the Opera!\nBut now I hear the odious scuffling\nOf churchyard rats and grave-moles shuffling.\n\nThe scent of the flowers recalls again\nA perfect ballet, a joyous train\nOf recollections perfumed and glowing,\nFrom the hidden depths of the past o’erflowing,\n\nTo sound of cornet and castanet,\nIn spangled dresses (full short, I regret),--\nYet all their toying, each laugh, each titter,\nCan only render my thoughts more bitter.\n\nAway with the flowers! O, how I abhor\nThe scent that maliciously tells once more\nOf days long vanish’d and hours of gladness--\nI weep at the thought with speechless sadness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-phoenix": { - "title": "“The Phoenix”", - "body": "There comes a bird who hath flown from the westward,\nHe flies tow’rd the east,\nTow’rd the eastern garden-home,\nWhere the spices so fragrant are growing,\nAnd palms are waving and wells are cooling--\nAnd, flying, the wondrous bird thus singeth\nShe loves him, she loves him!\nHis image she bears in her little bosom,\nAnd bears it sweetly and secretly hidden,\nNor knows it herself!\nBut in her vision, before her he stands,\nShe prays, and she weeps, and she kisses his hands,\nAnd calls on his name,\nAnd calling awakes she and lieth all-startled,\nAnd rubbeth her beauteous eyes in amazement--\nShe loves him! she loves him!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "questions": { - "title": "“Questions”", - "body": "By the sea, by the desert night-cover’d sea\nStandeth a youth,\nHis breast full of sadness, his head full of doubtings,\nAnd with gloomy lips he asks of the billows:\n\n“O answer me life’s hidden riddle,\nThe riddle primeval and painful,\nOver which many a head has been poring,\nHeads in hieroglyphical nightcaps,\nHeads in turbans and swarthy bonnets,\nHeads in perukes, and a thousand other\nPoor and perspiring heads of us mortals--\nTell me what signifies man?\nFrom whence doth he come? And where doth he go?\nWho dwelleth amongst the golden stars yonder?”\n\nThe billows are murm’ring their murmur eternal,\nThe wind is blowing, the clouds are flying,\nThe stars are twinkling, all listless and cold,\nAnd a fool is awaiting an answer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "sea-salutation": { - "title": "“Sea Salutation”", - "body": "Thalatta! Thalatta!\nHail to thee, O thou Ocean eterne!\nHail to thee ten thousand times\nFrom hearts all exulting,\nAs formerly hail’d thee\nTen thousand Grecian hearts,\nMisfortune-contending, homeward-aspiring,\nWorld-renown’d Grecian hearts.\n\nThe billows were heaving,\nThey heaved and they bluster’d,\nThe sun shed hastily downwards\nHis light so sportive and rosy-hued;\nThe sudden-startled flocks of sea-mews\nFlutter’d along, loud screaming,\nThe horses were stamping, the bucklers were ringing,\nAnd afar there resounded triumphantly:\nThalatta! Thalatta!\nHail to thee, O thou Ocean eterne!\nLike voices of home thy waters are rushing,\nLike visions of childhood saw I a glimmering\nOver thy heaving billowy-realm,\nAnd olden remembrance again tells me stories\nOf all the darling, beautiful playthings,\nOf all the glittering Christmas presents,\nOf all the ruddy coral branches,\nThe gold fish, pearls and colour’d shells\nWhich thou mysteriously dost keep\nDown yonder in bright crystal house.\n\nO how have I languish’d in drear foreign lands!\nLike to a wither’d flower\nIn the tin case of a botanist,\nLay in my bosom my heart;\nMethought whole winters long I sat\nAn invalid, in darksome sick-room,\nAnd now I suddenly leave it,\nAnd with dazzling rays am I greeted\nBy emerald springtime, the sunny-awaken’d,\nAnd the snowy blossoming trees are all rustling,\nAnd the youthful flowers upon me gaze\nWith eyes all chequer’d and fragrant;\nThere’s a perfume and humming and breathing and laughing,\nAnd the birds in the azure heavens are singing--\nThalatta! Thalatta!\n\nThou valiant retreating heart!\nHow oft, how bitter-oft, wast thou\nHard press’d by the Northern barbarian women\nFrom large victorious eyes\nShot they their burning arrows;\nWith words both crooked and polish’d\nThey threatened to cleave my breast,\nWith cuniform billets-doux harass’d they\nMy poor distracted brain--\nIn vain I held my shield to resist them,\nThe arrows whizz’d and the blows crash’d heavily,\nAnd by the Northern barbarian women\nBack to the sea was I driven,\nAnd freely breathing I hailèd the sea,\nThe darling life-saving sea,\nThalatta! Thalatta!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "sunset": { - "title": "“Sunset”", - "body": "The beauteous sun\nHath calmly descended down to the sea;\nThe heaving waters already are dyed\nBy dusky night;\nNought but the evening’s red\nWith golden light still spreadeth o’er them,\nAnd the rushing force of the flood\n’Gainst the shore presseth the snowy billows\nWhich merrily, hastily skip,\nLike wool-cover’d flocks of lambkins\nWhom the singing sheep-boy at even\nHomeward doth drive.\n\n“How fair is the sun!”--\nSo spake, after long silence, my friend,\nWho with me wander’d along the strand,\nAnd half in sport and half in sad earnest\nAssured he me that the sun was only\nA lovely woman, whom the old sea-god\nOut of convenience married;\nAll the day long she joyously wander’d\nIn the high heavens, deck’d out with purple,\nAnd glitt’ring with diamonds,\nAnd all-beloved and all-admired\nBy every mortal creature,\nAnd every mortal creature rejoicing\nWith her sweet glances’ light and warmth;\nBut in the evening, impell’d all-disconsolate.\nOnce more returneth she home\nTo the moist house and desert arms\nOf her grey-headed spouse.\n\n“Believe me”--here added my friend,\nWith laughter and sighing and laughter again:\n“They’re living below in the tenderest union!\nEither they’re sleeping or quarrelling fiercely,\nSo that up here e’en the ocean is roaring,\nAnd the fisherman hears in the rush of the waves\nHow the old man’s abusing his wife:\n‘Thou round wench of the universe!\nBeaming coquettish one!\nAll the day long thou art glowing for others,\nAt night for me thou art frosty and tired.’\nAfter this curtain lecture\nAs a matter of course the proud sun\nBursts into tears, lamenting her misery,\nAnd cries so sadly and long, that the sea-god\nSuddenly springs from his bed all distracted,\nAnd hastily swims to the surface of ocean,\nTo recover his breath and his senses.\nI saw him myself, in the night just past,\nRising out of the sea as high as his bosom;\nA jacket of yellow flannel he wore,\nAnd a lily-white nightcap,\nAnd a face all wither’d and dry.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "there-was-a-king": { - "title": "“There Was a King”", - "body": "There was a king, now ageing,\nWith heart of lead, and head so grey.\nHe took a wife, the old king,\nA young wife too, men say.\nThere was a handsome pageboy\nWith hair of gold, and thoughts so free:\nHe bore the silks with joy\nThat trailed behind the queen.\nDo you know the ancient singing?\nIt rings so true: it rings so sweet!\nBoth had to die, of loving,\nOf love that was too deep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "they-loved-each-other": { - "title": "“They Loved Each Other”", - "body": "They loved each other, but neither\nWould admit to the other they could:\nAs enemies, they saw each other,\nAnd almost died of their love.\nIn the end they parted and only\nSaw each other sometimes in dreams:\nIt was long ago they had died,\nBut they scarcely knew it, it seems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "this-mad-carnival-of-loving": { - "title": "“This Mad Carnival of Loving”", - "body": "This mad carnival of loving,\nThis wild orgy of the flesh,\nEnds at last and we two, sobered,\nLook at one another, yawning.\n\nEmptied the inflaming cup\nThat was filled with sensuous potions,\nFoaming, almost running over--\nEmptied is the flaming cup.\n\nAll the violins are silent\nThat impelled our feet to dancing,\nTo the giddy dance of passion--\nSilent are the violins.\n\nAll the lanterns now are darkened\nThat once poured their streaming brilliance\nOn the masquerades and murmurs--\nDarkened now are all the lanterns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "thunderstorm": { - "title": "“Thunderstorm”", - "body": "Heavily lies on the ocean the storm,\nAnd through the darksome wall of clouds\nQuivers the forkèd lightning flash,\nSuddenly gleaming and suddenly vanishing,\nLike a thought from the head of Cronion.\nOver the desert, far-heaving water\nAfar the thunders are rolling,\nThe snowy billowy horses are springing,\nWhich Boreas’ self did engender\nOut of the beautiful mares of Erichton,\nAnd the seafowl are mournfully fluttering,\nLike shadowy corpses by Styx,\nBy Charon repulsed from his desolate bark.\n\nPoor, but merry little ship,\nYonder dancing the strangest dance!\nAeolus sends it his briskest attendants,\nWho wildly strike up for the frolicsome dance;\nThe one is piping, another is blowing,\nThe third is beating the hollow double-bass--\nAnd the staggering sailor stands at the rudder,\nAnd on the compass is steadily looking,\nThat trembling soul of the vessel,\nAnd raises his hands in entreaty to heaven;\n“O rescue me, Castor, thou hero gigantic,\nAnd thou, knight of the ring, Polydeuces!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-whims-of-the-amorous": { - "title": "“The Whims of the Amorous”", - "body": "Upon the hedge the beetle sits sadly,\nHe has fallen in love with a lady-fly madly.\n\nO fly of my soul, ’tis thou alone\nArt the wife I have chosen to be my own.\n\nO marry me, and be not cold,\nFor I have a belly of glistening gold.\n\nMy back is a mass of glory and show,\nThere rubies glitter, there emeralds glow--\n\nO would that I were a fool just now!\nI’d never marry a beetle, I vow.\n\nI care not for emeralds, rubies, or gold,\nI know that no happiness riches enfold.\n\n’Tis tow’rd the ideal my thought soars high,\nFor I am in truth a haughty fly.--\n\nThe beetle flew off, with a heart like to break,\nThe fly went away, a bath to take.\n\nO what has become of my maid, the bee,\nThat she when I’m washing may wait on me,\n\nThat she may stroke my soft hair outside,\nFor I am now a beetle’s bride.\n\nIn truth, a splendid party I’ll give,\nFor handsomer beetle never did live.\n\nHis back is a mass of glory and show,\nThere rubies glitter, there emeralds glow.\n\nHis belly is golden, and noble each feature;\nWith envy will burst full many a creature.\n\nMake haste, Miss Bee, and dress my hair,\nAnd lace my waist, use perfumes rare.\n\nWith otto of roses rub me o’er,\nAnd lavender oil on my feet then pour,\n\nThat I mayn’t stink or nastily smell,\nWhen I in my bridegroom’s arms shall dwell.\n\nAlready are flitting the dragonflies blue,\nAs maids of honour to wait on me too.\n\nInto my bridal garland they’ll twine\nThe blossoms white of the orange so fine.\n\nFull many musicians are asked to the place,\nAnd singers as well, of the grasshopper race.\n\nThe bittern, drone, hornet, and gadfly all come,\nTo blow on the trumpet, and beat the drum.\n\nThey’re all to strike up for the glad wedding feast--\nThe gay-wingèd guests, from greatest to least,\n\nAre coming in families dapper and brisk,\nThe commoner insects amongst them frisk.\n\nThe grasshoppers, wasps, and the aunts, and the cousins\nAre coming, whilst trumpets are blowing by dozens.\n\nThe pastor, the mole, in black dignified state,\nHas also arrived, and the hour grows late.\n\nThe bells are all sounding ding-dong, ding-a-dong--\nBut where’s my dear bridegroom ling’ring so long?\n\nDing dong, ding-a-dong, sound the bells all the day,\nThe bridegroom however has flown far away.\n\nThe bells are all sounding ding-dong, ding-a-dong--\nBut where’s my dear bridegroom ling’ring so long?\n\nThe bridegroom has meanwhile taken his seat\nOn a distant dunghill, enjoying the heat.\n\nSeven years there sits he, until his forgotten\nPoor bride has long been dead and rotten.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "a-woman": { - "title": "“A Woman”", - "body": "They loved each other with love so deep,\nShe was a tramp and he was a thief.\nWhen he was plying his naughty craft,\nShe lay on the bed and laughed.\nThe days went by in pleasure and joy,\nAt night in the sheets she hugged her boy.\nWhen they dragged him off to jail at last,\nShe stood at the window and laughed.\nHe wrote to her saying: “O come to me,\nI long for you, so badly, you see,\nI’m weeping: I’m fading fast--”\nShe shook her head and laughed.\nAt six in the morning they hung him high,\nAt seven they buried him under the sky,\nBut as eight o’clock went past\nShe drank red wine and laughed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "felicia-hemans": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Felicia Hemans", - "birth": { - "year": 1793 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1835 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english+welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Hemans", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english", - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "casabianca": { - "title": "“Casabianca”", - "body": "The boy stood on the burning deck\nWhence all but he had fled;\nThe flame that lit the battle’s wreck\nShone round him o’er the dead.\n\nYet beautiful and bright he stood,\nAs born to rule the storm;\nA creature of heroic blood,\nA proud, though childlike form.\n\nThe flames roll’d on … he would not go\nWithout his father’s word;\nThat father, faint in death below,\nHis voice no longer heard.\n\nHe call’d aloud … “Say, father, say\nIf yet my task is done!”\nHe knew not that the chieftain lay\nUnconscious of his son.\n\n“Speak, father!” once again he cried\n“If I may yet be gone!”\nAnd but the booming shots replied,\nAnd fast the flames roll’d on.\n\nUpon his brow he felt their breath,\nAnd in his waving hair,\nAnd looked from that lone post of death,\nIn still yet brave despair;\n\nAnd shouted but one more aloud,\n“My father, must I stay?”\nWhile o’er him fast, through sail and shroud\nThe wreathing fires made way,\n\nThey wrapt the ship in splendour wild,\nThey caught the flag on high,\nAnd stream’d above the gallant child,\nLike banners in the sky.\n\nThere came a burst of thunder sound …\nThe boy--oh! where was he?\nAsk of the winds that far around\nWith fragments strewed the sea.\n\nWith mast, and helm, and pennon fair,\nThat well had borne their part;\nBut the noblest thing which perished there\nWas that young faithful heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flight-of-the-spirit": { - "title": "“Flight of the Spirit”", - "body": "Whither, oh! whither wilt thou wing thy way?\nWhat solemn region first upon thy sight\nShall break, unveiled for terror or delight?\nWhat hosts, magnificent in dread array,\nMy spirit! when thy prison-house of clay\nAfter long strife is rent? Fond, fruitless quest!\nThe unfledged bird, within his narrow nest,\nSees but a few green branches oer him play,\nAnd through their parting leaves, by fits revealed,\nA glimpse of summer sky; nor knows the field\nWherein his dormant powers must yet be tried.\nThou art that bird!--of what beyond thee lies\nFar in the untracked immeasurable skies\nKnowing but this--that thou shalt find thy guide!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "sabbath-sonnet": { - "title": "“Sabbath Sonnet”", - "body": "How many blessed groups this hour are bending,\nThrough England’s primrose meadow-paths, their way\nTowards spire and tower, ’midst shadowy elms ascending,\nWhence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallowed day!\nThe halls from old heroic ages gray\nPour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,\nWith those thick orchard-blooms the soft winds play,\nSend out their inmates in a happy flow,\nLike a freed vernal stream. I may not tread\nWith them those pathways, to the feverish bed\nOf sickness bound; yet, O my God! I bless\nThy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled\nMy chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled\nTo one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday", - "month": "may" - } - } - } - } - }, - "ernest-hemingway": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ernest Hemingway", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-a-son": { - "title": "“Advice to a Son”", - "body": "Never trust a white man,\nNever kill a Jew,\nNever sign a contract,\nNever rent a pew.\nDon’t enlist in armies;\nNor marry many wives;\nNever write for magazines;\nNever scratch your hives.\nAlways put paper on the seat,\nDon’t believe in wars,\nKeep yourself both clean and neat,\nNever marry whores.\nNever pay a blackmailer,\nNever go to law,\nNever trust a publisher,\nOr you’ll sleep on straw.\nAll your friends will leave you\nAll your friends will die\nSo lead a clean and wholesome life\nAnd join them in the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "along-with-youth": { - "title": "“Along with Youth”", - "body": "A porcupine skin,\nStiff with bad tanning,\nIt must have ended somewhere.\nStuffed horned owl\nPompous\nYellow eyed;\nChuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig\nSooted with dust.\nPiles of old magazines,\nDrawers of boy’s letters\nAnd the line of love\nThey must have ended somewhere.\nYesterday’s Tribune is gone\nAlong with youth\nAnd the canoe that went to pieces on the beach\nThe year of the big storm\nWhen the hotel burned down\nAt Seney, Michigan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "blood-is-thicker-than-water": { - "title": "“Blood is thicker than water …”", - "body": "“Blood is thicker than water.”\nThe young man said\nAs he knifed his friend\nFor a drooling old bitch\nAnd a house full of lies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "captives": { - "title": "“Captives”", - "body": "Some came in chains\nUnrepentant but tired.\nToo tired but to stumble.\nThinking and hating were finished\nThinking and fighting were finished\nRetreating and hoping were finished.\nCures thus a long campaign,\nMaking death easy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-earnest-liberals-lament": { - "title": "“The Earnest Liberal’s Lament”", - "body": "I know monks masturbate at night\nThat pet cats screw\nThat some girls bite\nAnd yet\nWhat can I do\nTo set things right?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "for-we-have-thought-the-longer-thoughts": { - "title": "“For we have thought the longer thoughts …”", - "body": "For we have thought the longer thoughts\n And gone the shorter way.\nAnd we have danced to devils’ tunes,\n Shivering home to pray;\nTo serve one master in the night,\n Another in the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "grass-smooth-on-the-prairies": { - "title": "“Grass smooth on the prairies …”", - "body": "Grass smooth on the prairies\n Plows breaking\nStreets smooth and shining\n Trucks crumbling.\nAsphalt, tell me what follows the asphalt.\nWops, he said, wops follow the asphalt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "i-like-americans": { - "title": "“I Like Americans”", - "body": "_By A Foreigner._\n\nI like Americans.\nThey are so unlike Canadians.\nThey do not take their policemen seriously.\nThey come to Montreal to drink.\nNot to criticize.\nThey claim they won the war.\nBut they know at heart that they didn’t.\nThey have such respect for Englishmen.\nThey like to live abroad.\nThey do not brag about how they take baths.\nBut they take them.\nTheir teeth are so good.\nAnd they wear B.V.D.’s all the year round.\nI wish they didn’t brag about it.\nThey have the second best navy in the world.\nBut they never mention it.\nThey would like to have Henry Ford for president.\nBut they will not elect him.\nThey saw through Bill Bryan.\nThey have gotten tired of Billy Sunday.\nTheir men have such funny hair cuts.\nThey are hard to suck in on Europe.\nThey have been there once.\nThey produced Barney Google, Mutt and Jeff.\nAnd Jiggs.\nThey do not hang lady murderers.\nThey put them in vaudeville.\nThey read the Saturday Evening Post\nAnd believe in Santa Claus.\nWhen they make money\nThey make a lot of money.\nThey are fine people.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-like-canadians": { - "title": "“I Like Canadians”", - "body": "_By A Foreigner._\n\nI like Canadians.\nThey are so unlike Americans.\nThey go home at night.\nTheir cigarettes don’t smell bad.\nTheir hats fit.\nThey really believe that they won the war.\nThey don’t believe in Literature.\nThey think Art has been exaggerated.\nBut they are wonderful on ice skates.\nA few of them are very rich.\nBut when they are rich they buy more horses\nThan motor cars.\nChicago calls Toronto a puritan town.\nBut both boxing and horse-racing are illegal\nIn Chicago.\nNobody works on Sunday.\nNobody.\nThat doesn’t make me mad.\nThere is only one Woodbine.\nBut were you ever at Blue Bonnets?\nIf you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario\nYou are liable to go to jail.\nSo it isn’t done.\nThere have been over 500 people killed by motor cars\nIn Chicago\nSo far this year.\nIt is hard to get rich in Canada.\nBut it is easy to make money.\nThere are too many tea rooms.\nBut, then, there are no cabarets.\nIf you tip a waiter a quarter\nHe says ‘Thank you.’\nInstead of calling the bouncer.\nThey let women stand up in the street cars.\nEven if they are good-looking.\nThey are all in a hurry to get home to supper\nAnd their radio sets.\nThey are a fine people.\nI like them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "im-offn-wild-wimmen": { - "title": "“I’m off’n wild wimmen …”", - "body": "I’m off’n wild wimmen\nAn Cognac\nAn Sinnin’\nFor I’m in loOOOOOOOve.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "killed-paive": { - "title": "“Killed Paive”", - "body": "Desire and\nAll the sweet pulsing aches\nAnd gentle hurtings\nThat were you,\nAre gone into the sullen dark.\nNow in the night you come unsmiling\nTo lie with me\nA dull, cold, rigid bayonet\nOn my hot-swollen, throbbing soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "montparnasse": { - "title": "“Montparnasse”", - "body": "There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows\nNo successful suicides.\nA Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.\n(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)\nA Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.\n(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)\nThey find a model dead\nalone in bed and very dead.\n(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)\nSweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds\nand stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.\nEvery afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "oily-weather": { - "title": "“Oily Weather”", - "body": "The sea desires deep hulls--\nIt swells and rolls.\nThe screw churns a throb--\nDriving, throbbing, progressing.\nThe sea rolls with love,\nSurging, caressing,\nUndulating its great loving belly.\nThe sea is big and old--\nThrobbing ships scorn it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "oklahoma": { - "title": "“Oklahoma”", - "body": "All of the Indians are dead\n(a good Indian is a dead Indian)\nOr riding in motor cars--\n(the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich)\nSmoke smarts my eyes,\nCottonwood twigs and buffalo dung\nSmoke grey in the teepee--\n(or is it myopic trachoma)\n\nThe prairies are long,\nThe moon rises,\nPonies\nDrag at their pickets.\nThe grass has gone brown in the summer--\n(or is it the hay crop failing)\n\nPull an arrow out:\nIf you break it\nThe wound closes.\nSalt is good too\nAnd wood ashes.\nPounding it throbs in the night--\n(or is it the gonorrhea)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "requiem": { - "title": "“Requiem”", - "body": "Under the wide and starry sky,\nGive me new glands and let me lie,\nOh how I try and try and try,\nBut I need much more than a will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "the-soul-of-spain": { - "title": "“The Soul of Spain”", - "body": "In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain.\nDoes it rain in Spain?\nOh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights.\nThe dancers dance in long white pants\nIt isn’t right to yence your aunts\nCome Uncle, let’s go home.\nHome is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.\nCome let us fart in the home.\nThere is no art in a fart.\nStill a fart may not be artless.\nLet us fart an artless fart in the home.\nDemocracy.\nDemocracy.\nBill says democracy must go.\nGo democracy.\nGo\nGo\nGo\n\nBill’s father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat.\nNow Bill says democracy must go.\nGo on democracy.\nDemocracy is the shit.\nRelativity is the shit.\n\nDictators are the shit.\nMenken is the shit.\nWaldo Frank is the shit.\nThe Broom is the shit.\nDada is the shit.\nDempsey is the shit.\nThis is not a complete list.\nThey say Ezra is the shit.\nBut Ezra is nice.\nCome let us build a monument to Ezra.\nGood a very nice monument.\nYou did that nicely\nCan you do another?\nLet me try and do one.\nLet us all try and do one.\nLet the little girl over there on the corner try and do one.\nCome on little girl.\nDo one for Ezra.\nGood.\nYou have all been successful children.\nNow let us clean the mess up.\nThe Dial does a monument to Proust.\nWe have done a monument to Ezra.\nA monument is a monument.\nAfter all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-crazy-christian": { - "title": "“To Crazy Christian”", - "body": "There was a cat named Crazy Christian\nWho never lived long enough to screw\nHe was gay hearted, young and handsome\nAnd all the secrets of life he knew\nHe would always arrive on time for breakfast\nScamper on your feet and chase the ball\nHe was faster than any polo pony\nHe never worried a minute at all\nHis tail was a plume that scampered with him\nHe was black as night and as fast as light.\nSo the bad cats killed him in the fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - }, - "ultimately": { - "title": "“Ultimately”", - "body": "He tried to spit out the truth;\nDry-mouthed at first,\nHe drooled and slobbered in the end;\nTruth dribbling his chin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-age-demanded-that-we-sing": { - "title": "“The age demanded that we sing …”", - "body": "The age demanded that we sing\nAnd cut away our tongue.\nThe age demanded that we flow\nAnd hammered in the bung.\nThe age demanded that we dance\nAnd jammed us into iron pants.\nAnd in the end the age was handed\nThe sort of shit that it demanded.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "circa": true - }, - "location": "Paris" - } - } - } - }, - "william-ernest-henley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Ernest Henley", - "birth": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ernest_Henley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "fill-a-glass": { - "title": "“Fill a Glass”", - "body": "Fill a glass with golden wine,\nAnd the while your lips are wet\nSet your perfume unto mine,\nAnd forget.\nEvery kiss we take and give\nLeaves us less of life to live.\n\nYet again! Your whim and mine\nIn a happy while have met.\nAll your sweets to me resign,\nNor regret\nThat we press with every breath,\nSighed or singing, nearer death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "invictus": { - "title": "“Invictus”", - "body": "Out of the night that covers me,\n Black as the pit from pole to pole,\nI thank whatever gods may be\n For my unconquerable soul.\n\nIn the fell clutch of circumstance\n I have not winced nor cried aloud.\nUnder the bludgeonings of chance\n My head is bloody, but unbowed.\n\nBeyond this place of wrath and tears\n Looms but the Horror of the shade,\nAnd yet the menace of the years\n Finds and shall find me unafraid.\n\nIt matters not how strait the gate,\n How charged with punishments the scroll,\nI am the master of my fate,\n I am the captain of my soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "longing": { - "title": "“Longing”", - "body": "Between the dusk of a summer night\nAnd the dawn of a summer day,\nWe caught at a mood as it passed in flight,\nAnd we bade it stoop and stay.\nAnd what with the dawn of night began\nWith the dusk of day was done;\nFor that is the way of woman and man,\nWhen a hazard has made them one.\nArc upon arc, from shade to shine,\nThe World went thundering free;\nAnd what was his errand but hers and mine--\nThe lords of him, I and she?\nO, it’s die we must, but it’s live we can,\nAnd the marvel of earth and sun\nIs all for the joy of woman and man\nAnd the longing that makes them one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-the-nothingness-of-things": { - "title": "“On the Nothingness of Things”", - "body": "The big teetotum twirls,\nAnd epochs wax and wane\nAs chance subsides or swirls;\nBut of the loss and gain\nThe sum is always plain.\nRead on the mighty pall,\nThe weed of funeral\nThat covers praise and blame,\nThe -isms and the -anities,\nMagnificence and shame:--\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\nThe Fates are subtile girls!\nThey give us chaff for grain.\nAnd Time, the Thunderer, hurls,\nLike bolted death, disdain\nAt all thaTheart and brain\nConceive, or great or small,\nUpon this earthly ball.\nWould you be knight and dame?\nOr woo the sweet humanities?\nOr illustrate a name?\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\nWe sound the sea for pearls,\nOr drown them in a drain;\nWe flute it with the merles,\nOr tug and sweat and strain;\nWe grovel, or we reign;\nWe saunter, or we brawl;\nWe answer, or we call;\nWe search the stars for Fame,\nOr sink her subterranities;\nThe legend’s still the same:--\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\nHere at the wine one birls,\nThere some one clanks a chain.\nThe flag that this man furls\nThat man to float is fain.\nPleasure gives place to pain:\nThese in the kennel crawl,\nWhile others take the wall.\nShe has a glorious aim,\nHe lives for the inanities.\nWhat comes of every claim?\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\nAlike are clods and earls.\nFor sot, and seer, and swain,\nFor emperors and for churls,\nFor antidote and bane,\nThere is but one refrain:\nBut one for king and thrall,\nFor David and for Saul,\nFor fleet of foot and lame,\nFor pieties and profanities,\nThe picture and the frame:--\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\nLife is a smoke that curls--\nCurls in a flickering skein,\nThat winds and whisks and whirls,\nA figment thin and vain,\nInto the vast Inane.\nOne end for hut and hall!\nOne end for cell and stall!\nBurned in one common flame\nAre wisdoms and insanities.\nFor this alone we came:--\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_\n\n\n_Envoy_\n\nPrince, pride must have a fall.\nWhat is the worth of all\nYour state’s supreme urbanities?\nBad at the best ‘s the game.\nWell might the Sage exclaim:--\n_O Vanity of Vanities!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "suicide": { - "title": "“Suicide”", - "body": "Staring corpselike at the ceiling,\nSee his harsh, unrazored features,\nGhastly brown against the pillow,\nAnd his throat--so strangely bandaged!\n\nLack of work and lack of victuals,\nA debauch of smuggled whisky,\nAnd his children in the workhouse\nMade the world so black a riddle\n\nThat he plunged for a solution;\nAnd, although his knife was edgeless,\nHe was sinking fast towards one,\nWhen they came, and found, and saved him.\n\nStupid now with shame and sorrow,\nIn the night I hear him sobbing.\nBut sometimes he talks a little.\nHe has told me all his troubles.\n\nIn his broad face, tanned and bloodless,\nWhite and wild his eyeballs glisten;\nAnd his smile, occult and tragic,\nYet so slavish, makes you shudder!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-wink-from-hesper": { - "title": "“A Wink from Hesper”", - "body": "A wink from Hesper, falling\nFast in the wintry sky,\nComes through the even blue,\nDear, like a word from you …\nIs it good-bye?\n\nAcross the miles between us\nI send you sigh for sigh.\nGood-Night, sweet friend, good-night:\nTill life and all take flight,\nNever good-bye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "george-herbert": { - "metadata": { - "name": "George Herbert", - "birth": { - "year": 1593 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1633 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 68 - }, - "poems": { - "aaron": { - "title": "“Aaron”", - "body": "Holiness on the head,\nLight and perfection on the breast,\nHarmonious bells below, raising the dead\nTo led them unto life and rest.\nThus are true Aarons dressed.\n\nProfaneness in my head,\nDefects and darkness in my breast,\nA noise of passions ringing me for dead\nUnto a place where is no rest.\nPoor priest thus am I dressed.\n\nOnly another head\nI have, another heart and breast,\nanother music, making live not dead,\nwithout whom I could have no rest:\nIn him I am well dressed.\n\nChrist is my only head,\nMy alone only heart and breast,\nMy only music, striking me even dead;\nThat to the old man I may rest,\nAnd be in him new dressed.\n\nSo holy in my head,\nPerfect and light in my dear breast,\nMy doctrine tuned by Christ, (who is not dead,\nBut lives in me while I do rest)\nCome people; Aaron’s dressed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-affliction": { - "title": "“The Affliction”", - "body": "When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,\nI thought the service brave;\nSo many joys I writ down for my part,\nBesides what I might have\nOut of my stock of natural delights,\nAugmented with thy gracious benefits.\n\nI looked on thy furniture so fine,\nAnd made it fine to me;\nThy glorious household-stuff did me entwine,\nAnd ’tice me unto thee.\nSuch stars I counted mine: both heav’n and earth;\nPaid me my wages in a world of mirth.\n\nWhat pleasures could I want, whose King I serv’d,\nWhere joys my fellows were?\nThus argu’d into hopes, my thoughts reserv’d\nNo place for grief or fear.\nTherefore my sudden soul caught at the place,\nAnd made her youth and fierceness seek thy face.\n\nAt first thou gav’st me milk and sweetnesses;\nI had my wish and way;\nMy days were straw’d with flow’rs and happiness;\nThere was no month but May.\nBut with my years sorrow did twist and grow,\nAnd made a party unawares for woe.\n\nMy flesh began unto my soul in pain,\n“Sicknesses cleave my bones;\nConsuming agues dwell in ev’ry vein,\nAnd tune my breath to groans.”\nSorrow was all my soul; I scarce believ’d,\nTill grief did tell me roundly, that I liv’d.\n\nWhen I got health, thou took’st away my life,\nAnd more, for my friends die;\nMy mirth and edge was lost, a blunted knife\nWas of more use than I.\nThus thin and lean without a fence or friend,\nI was blown through with ev’ry storm and wind.\n\nWhereas my birth and spirit rather took\nThe way that takes the town;\nThou didst betray me to a ling’ring book,\nAnd wrap me in a gown.\nI was entangled in the world of strife,\nBefore I had the power to change my life.\n\nYet, for I threaten’d oft the siege to raise,\nNot simp’ring all mine age,\nThou often didst with academic praise\nMelt and dissolve my rage.\nI took thy sweet’ned pill, till I came where\nI could not go away, nor persevere.\n\nYet lest perchance I should too happy be\nIn my unhappiness,\nTurning my purge to food, thou throwest me\nInto more sicknesses.\nThus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making\nThine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.\n\nNow I am here, what thou wilt do with me\nNone of my books will show;\nI read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,\nFor sure then I should grow\nTo fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust\nHer household to me, and I should be just.\n\nYet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;\nIn weakness must be stout;\nWell, I will change the service, and go seek\nSome other master out.\nAh my dear God! though I am clean forgot,\nLet me not love thee, if I love thee not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-agony": { - "title": "“The Agony”", - "body": "Philosophers have measur’d mountains,\nFathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,\nWalk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:\nBut there are two vast, spacious things,\nThe which to measure it doth more behove:\nYet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.\n\nWho would know Sin, let him repair\nUnto mount Olivet; there shall he see\nA man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,\nHis skin, his garments bloody be.\nSin is that press and vice, which forceth pain\nTo hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.\n\nWho knows not Love, let him assay\nAnd taste that juice, which on the cross a pike\nDid set again abroach, then let him say\nIf ever he did taste the like.\nLove is that liquor sweet and most divine,\nWhich my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "the-altar": { - "title": "“The Altar”", - "body": "A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,\nMade of a heart and cemented with tears;\nWhose parts are as thy hand did frame;\nNo workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.\nA HEART alone\nIs such a stone,\nAs nothing but\nThy pow’r doth cut.\nWherefore each part\nOf my hard heart\nMeets in this frame\nTo praise thy name.\nThat if I chance to hold my peace,\nThese stones to praise thee may not cease.\nOh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,\nAnd sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "artillery": { - "title": "“Artillery”", - "body": "As I one ev’ning sat before my cell,\nMe thoughts a star did shoot into my lap.\nI rose, and shook my clothes, as knowing well,\nThat from small fires comes oft no small mishap.\nWhen suddenly I heard one say,\n“Do as thou usest, disobey,\nExpell good motions from thy breast,\nWhich have the face of fire, but end in rest.”\n\nI, who had heard of music in the spheres,\nBut not of speech in stars, began to muse:\nBut turning to my God, whose ministers\nThe stars and all things are; if I refuse,\nDread Lord, said I, so oft my good;\nThen I refuse not ev’n with blood\nTo wash away my stubborn thought:\nFor I will do, or suffer what I ought.\n\nBut I have also stars and shooters too,\nBorn where thy servants both artilleries use.\nMy tears and prayers night and day do woo,\nAnd work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse.\nNot but that I am (I must say still)\nMuch more oblig’d to do thy will,\nThan thou to grant mine: but because\nThy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws.\n\nThen we are shooters both, and thou dost deign\nTo enter combat with us, and contest\nWith thine own clay. But I would parley fain:\nShun not my arrows, and behold my breast.\nYet if thou shunnest, I am thine:\nI must be so, if I am mine.\nThere is no articling with thee:\nI am but finite, yet thine infinitely.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ash-wednesday": { - "title": "“Ash Wednesday”", - "body": "Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,\nHe loves not Temperance, or Authority,\nBut is composed of passion.\nThe Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:\nGive to your Mother, what you would allow\nTo every Corporation.\n\nIt’s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;\nYet to go part of that religious way,\nIs better than to rest:\nWe cannot reach our Savior’s purity;\nYet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.\nIn both let’s do our best.\n\nWho goes in the way which Christ has gone,\nIs much more sure to meet with him, than one\nWho travels the by-ways:\nPerhaps my God, though he be far before,\nMay turn, and take me by the hand, and more\nMay strengthen my decays.\n\nYet Lord instruct us to improve our fast\nBy starving sin and taking such repast\nAs may our faults control:\nThat ev’ry man may revel at his door,\nNot in his parlor; banqueting the poor,\nAnd among those his soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "baptism": { - "title": "“Baptism”", - "body": "Since, Lord, to thee\nA narrow way and little gate\nIs all the passage, on my infancy\nThou didst lay hold, and antedate\nMy faith in me.\n\nO let me still\nWrite thee great God, and me a child:\nLet me be soft and supple to thy will,\nSmall to my self, to others mild,\nBehither ill.\n\nAlthough by stealth\nMy flesh get on, yet let her sister\nMy soul bid nothing, but preserve her wealth:\nThe growth of flesh is but a blister;\nChildhood is health.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "baptism" - } - } - }, - "bitter-sweet": { - "title": "“Bitter-Sweet”", - "body": "Ah, my dear angry Lord,\nSince thou dost love, yet strike;\nCast down, yet help afford;\nSure I will do the like.\n\nI will complain, yet praise;\nI will bewail, approve;\nAnd all my sour-sweet days\nI will lament and love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "broken-in-pieces-all-asunder": { - "title": "“Broken in Pieces All Asunder”", - "body": "Broken in pieces all asunder,\nLord, hunt me not,\nA thing forgot,\nOnce a poor creature, now a wonder,\nA wonder tortur’d in the space\nBetwixt this world and that of grace.\n\nMy thoughts are all a case of knives,\nWounding my heart\nWith scatter’d smart,\nAs wat’ring pots give flowers their lives.\nNothing their fury can control,\nWhile they do wound and prick my soul.\n\nAll my attendants are at strife,\nQuitting their place\nUnto my face:\nNothing performs the task of life:\nThe elements are let loose to fight,\nAnd while I live, try out their right.\n\nOh help, my God! let not their plot\nKill them and me,\nAnd also thee,\nWho art my life: dissolve the knot,\nAs the sun scatters by his light\nAll the rebellions of the night.\n\nThen shall those powers, which work for grief,\nEnter thy pay,\nAnd day by day\nLabour thy praise, and my relief;\nWith care and courage building me,\nTill I reach heav’n, and much more, thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "church-monuments": { - "title": "“Church Monuments”", - "body": "While that my soul repairs to her devotion,\nHere I intomb my flesh, that it betimes\nMay take acquaintance of this heap of dust;\nTo which the blast of death’s incessant motion,\nFed with the exhalation of our crimes,\nDrives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust\n\nMy body to this school, that it may learn\nTo spell his elements, and find his birth\nWritten in dusty heraldry and lines;\nWhich dissolution sure doth best discern,\nComparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.\nThese laugh at jet and marble put for signs,\n\nTo sever the good fellowship of dust,\nAnd spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,\nWhen they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat\nTo kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?\nDear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem\nAnd true descent, that when thou shalt grow fat\n\nAnd wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know\nThat flesh is but the glass which holds the dust\nThat measures all our time; which also shall\nBe crumbled into dust. Mark, here below\nHow tame these ashes are, how free from lust,\nThat thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "clasping-of-hands": { - "title": "“Clasping of Hands”", - "body": "Lord, Thou art mine, and I am Thine,\nIf mine I am; and Thine much more\nThen I or ought or can be mine.\nYet to be Thine doth me restore,\nSo that again I now am mine,\nAnd with advantage mine the more,\nSince this being mine brings with it Thine,\nAnd Thou with me dost Thee restore:\nIf I without Thee would be mine,\nI neither should be mine nor Thine.\n\nLord, I am Thine, and Thou art mine;\nSo mine Thou art, that something more\nI may presume Thee mine then Thine,\nFor Thou didst suffer to restore\nNot Thee, but me, and to be mine:\nAnd with advantage mine the more,\nSince Thou in death wast none of Thine,\nYet then as mine didst me restore:\nO, be mine still; still make me Thine;\nOr rather make no Thine and Mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-collar": { - "title": "“The Collar”", - "body": "I struck the board, and cried “No more!\nI will abroad.\nWhat, shall I ever sigh and pine?\nMy lines and life are free; free as the road,\nLoose as the wind, as large as store.\nShall I be still in suit?\nHave I no harvest but a thorn\nTo let me blood, and not restore\nWhat I have lost with cordial fruit?\nSure there was wine\nBefore my sighs did dry it; there was corn\nBefore my tears did drown it.\nIs the year only lost to me?\nHave I no bays to crown it?\nNo flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?\nAll wasted?\nNot so, my heart: but there is fruit,\nAnd thou hast hands.\nRecover all thy sigh-blown age\nOn double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute\nOf what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,\nThy rope of sands,\nWhich petty thoughts have made, and made to thee\nGood cable, to enforce and draw,\nAnd be thy law,\nWhile thou didst wink and wouldst not see.\nAway; take heed:\nI will abroad.\nCall in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears.\nHe that forbears\nTo suit and serve his need,\nDeserves his load.”\nBut as I raved and grew more fierce and wild\nAt every word,\nMethoughts I heard one calling “Child!”\nAnd I replied “My Lord”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dawning": { - "title": "“The Dawning”", - "body": "Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;\nTake up thine eyes, which feed on earth;\nUnfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns;\nThy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth:\nAwake, awake,\nAnd with a thankful heart His comforts take.\nBut thou dost still lament, and pine, and cry,\nAnd feel His death, but not His victory.\n\nArise, sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,\nChrist’s resurrection thine may be;\nDo not by hanging down break from the hand\nWhich, as it riseth, raiseth thee:\nArise, Arise;\nAnd with His burial linen drie thine eyes.\nChrist left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief\nDraws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,\nNothing but bones,\nThe sad effect of sadder groans:\nThy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.\n\nFor we considered thee as at some six\nOr ten years hence,\nAfter the loss of life and sense,\nFlesh being turned to dust, and bones to sticks.\n\nWe looked on this side of thee, shooting short;\nWhere we did find\nThe shells of fledge souls left behind,\nDry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.\n\nBut since our Savior’s death did put some blood\nInto thy face,\nThou art grown fair and full of grace,\nMuch in request, much sought for as a good.\n\nFor we do now behold thee gay and glad,\nAs at Doomsday;\nWhen souls shall wear their new array,\nAnd all thy bones with beauty shall be clad.\n\nTherefore we can go die as sleep, and trust\nHalf that we have\nUnto an honest faithful grave;\nMaking our pillows either down, or dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "denial": { - "title": "“Denial”", - "body": "When my devotions could not pierce\nThy silent ears;\nThen was my heart broken, as was my verse:\nMy breast was full of fears\nAnd disorder:\n\nMy bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,\nDid fly asunder:\nEach took his way; some would to pleasures go,\nSome to the wars and thunder\nOf alarms.\n\nAs good go any where, they say,\nAs to benumb\nBoth knees and heart, in crying night and day,\nCome, come, my God, O come,\nBut no hearing.\n\nO that thou shouldst give dust a tongue\nTo cry to thee,\nAnd then not hear it crying! all day long\nMy heart was in my knee,\nBut no hearing.\n\nTherefore my soul lay out of sight,\nUntuned, unstrung:\nMy feeble spirit, unable to look right,\nLike a nipped blossom, hung\nDiscontented.\n\nO cheer and tune my heartless breast,\nDefer no time;\nThat so thy favors granting my request,\nThey and my mind may chime,\nAnd mend my rime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-dialogue-anthem": { - "title": "“A Dialogue-Anthem”", - "body": "Alas, poor Death! Where is thy glory?\nWhere is thy famous force, thy ancient sting?\n\nAlas, poor mortal, void of story!\nGo spell and read how I have killed thy King.\n\nPoor Death! And who was hurt thereby?\nThy curse being laid on Him makes thee accurst.\n\nLet losers talk, yet thou shalt die;\nThese arms shall crush thee.\n\nSpare not, do thy worst.\nI shall be one day better than before;\nThou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dialogue": { - "title": "“A Dialogue”", - "body": "_Man._ Sweetest Saviour, if my soul\nWere but worth the having,\nQuickly should I then control\nAny thought of waving.\nBut when all my care and pains\nCannot give the name of gains\nTo Thy wretch so full of stains,\nWhat delight or hope remains?\n\n_Saviour._ What, child, is the balance thine,\nThine the poise and measure?\nIf I say, “Thou shalt be Mine,”\nFinger not My treasure.\nWhat the gains in having thee\nDo amount to, only He\nWho for man was sold can see;\nThat transferr’d th’ accounts to Me.\n\n_Man._ But as I can see no merit\nLeading to this favour,\nSo the way to fit me for it\nIs beyond my savour.\nAs the reason, then, is Thine,\nSo the way is none of mine;\nI disclaim the whole design;\nSin disclaims and I resign.\n\n_Saviour._ That is all: if that I could\nGet without repining;\nAnd My clay, My creature, would\nFollow My resigning;\nThat as I did freely part\nWith My glory and desert,\nLeft all joys to feel all smart--\n\n_Man._ Ah, no more! Thou break’st my heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "discipline": { - "title": "“Discipline”", - "body": "Throw away thy rod,\nThrow away thy wrath:\nO my God,\nTake the gentle path.\n\nFor my heart’s desire\nUnto thine is bent:\nI aspire\nTo a full consent.\n\nNot a word or look\nI affect to own,\nBut by book,\nAnd thy book alone.\n\nThough I fail, I weep:\nThough I halt in pace,\nYet I creep\nTo the throne of grace.\n\nThen let wrath remove;\nLove will do the deed:\nFor with love\nStony hearts will bleed.\n\nLove is swift of foot;\nLove’s a man of war,\nAnd can shoot,\nAnd can hit from far.\n\nWho can ’scape his bow?\nThat which wrought on thee,\nBrought thee low,\nNeeds must work on me.\n\nThrow away thy rod;\nThough man frailties hath,\nThou art God:\nThrow away thy wrath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "easter-song": { - "title": "“Easter Song”", - "body": "I got me flowers to straw Thy way,\nI got me boughs off many a tree;\nBut Thou wast up by break of day,\nAnd brought’st Thy sweets along with Thee.\n\nThe sunne arising in the East,\nThough he give light, and th’ East perfume,\nIf they should offer to contest\nWith Thy arising, they presume.\n\nCan there be any day but this,\nThough many sunnes to shine endeavour?\nWe count three hundred, but we misse:\nThere is but one, and that one ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "easter-wings": { - "title": "“Easter Wings”", - "body": "Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,\nThough foolishly he lost the same,\nDecaying more and more,\nTill he became\nMost poor:\nWith thee\nO let me rise\nAs larks, harmoniously,\nAnd sing this day thy victories:\nThen shall the fall further the flight in me.\n\nMy tender age in sorrow did begin:\nAnd still with sicknesses and shame\nThou didst so punish sin,\nThat I became\nMost thin.\nWith thee\nLet me combine\nAnd feel this day thy victory:\nFor, if I imp my wing on thine,\nAffliction shall advance the flight in me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "easter": { - "title": "“Easter”", - "body": "Rise, heart, thy lord is risen. Sing his praise\nWithout delays,\nWho takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise\nWith him may’st rise:\nThat, as his death calcinèd thee to dust,\nHis life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.\n\nAwake, my lute, and struggle for thy part\nWith all thy art,\nThe cross taught all wood to resound his name\nWho bore the same.\nHis stretchèd sinews taught all strings what key\nIs best to celebrate this most high day.\n\nConsort, both heart and lute, and twist a song\nPleasant and long;\nOr, since all music is but three parts vied\nAnd multiplied\nOh let thy blessèd Spirit bear a part,\nAnd make up our defects with his sweet art.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-elixir": { - "title": "“The Elixir”", - "body": "Teach me, my God and King,\nIn all things Thee to see,\nAnd what I do in anything\nTo do it as for Thee.\n\nNot rudely, as a beast,\nTo run into an action;\nBut still to make Thee prepossest,\nAnd give it his perfection.\n\nA man that looks on glass,\nOn it may stay his eye;\nOr it he pleaseth, through it pass,\nAnd then the heav’n espy.\n\nAll may of Thee partake:\nNothing can be so mean,\nWhich with his tincture--“for Thy sake”--\nWill not grow bright and clean.\n\nA servant with this clause\nMakes drudgery divine:\nWho sweeps a room as for Thy laws,\nMakes that and th’ action fine.\n\nThis is the famous stone\nThat turneth all to gold;\nFor that which God doth touch and own\nCannot for less be told.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "even-song": { - "title": "“Even-Song”", - "body": "Blest be the God of love,\nWho gave me eyes, and light, and power this day,\nBoth to be busy, and to play.\nBut much more blest be God above,\nWho gave me sight alone,\nWhich to himself he did deny:\nFor when he sees my ways, I die:\nBut I have got his son, and he hath none.\n\nWhat have I brought thee home\nFor this thy love? have I discharg’d the debt,\nWhich this day’s favour did beget?\nI ran; but all I brought, was foam.\nThy diet, care and cost\nDo end in bubbles, balls of wind;\nOf wind to thee whom I have crost,\nBut balls of wild-fire to my troubled mind.\n\nYet still thou goest on,\nAnd now with darkness closest weary eyes,\nSaying to man, “It doth suffice:\nHenceforth repose; your work is done.”\nThus in thy Ebony box\nThou dost enclose us, till the day\nPut our amendment in our way,\nAnd give new wheels to our disorder’d clocks.\n\nI muse, which shows more love,\nThe day or night: that is the gale, this th’ harbour;\nThat is the walk, and this the arbour;\nOr that is the garden, this the grove.\nMy God, thou art all love.\nNot one poor minute scapes thy breast,\nBut brings a favour from above;\nAnd in this love, more than in bed, I rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "faith": { - "title": "“Faith”", - "body": "Lord, how couldst thou so much appease\nThy wrath for sin, as when man’s sight was dim,\nAnd could see little, to regard his ease,\nAnd bring by Faith all things to him?\n\nHungry I was, and had no meat:\nI did conceit a most delicious feast;\nI had it straight, and did as truly eat,\nAs ever did a welcome guest.\n\nThere is a rare outlandish root,\nWhich when I could not get, I thought it here:\nThat apprehension cur’d so well my foot,\nThat I can walk to heav’n well near.\n\nI owed thousands and much more.\nI did believe that I did nothing owe,\nAnd liv’d accordingly; my creditor\nBelieves so too, and lets me go.\n\nFaith makes me any thing, or all\nThat I believe is in the sacred story:\nAnd where sin placeth me in Adam’s fall,\nFaith sets me higher in his glory.\n\nIf I go lower in the book,\nWhat can be lower than the common manger?\nFaith puts me there with him, who sweetly took\nOur flesh and frailty, death and danger.\n\nIf bliss had lien in art or strength,\nNone but the wise or strong had gained it:\nWhere now by Faith all arms are of a length;\nOne size doth all conditions fit.\n\nA peasant may believe as much\nAs a great Clerk, and reach the highest stature.\nThus dost thou make proud knowledge bend and crouch\nWhile grace fills up uneven nature.\n\nWhen creatures had no real light\nInherent in them, thou didst make the sun\nImpute a lustre, and allow them bright;\nAnd in this show what Christ hath done.\n\nThat which before was darkned clean\nWith bushy groves, pricking the looker’s eye,\nVanisht away, when Faith did change the scene:\nAnd then appear’d a glorious sky.\n\nWhat though my body run to dust?\nFaith cleaves unto it, counting ev’ry grain\nWith an exact and most particular trust,\nReserving all for flesh again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fleet-astronomer-can-bore": { - "title": "“The Fleet Astronomer Can Bore”", - "body": "The fleet astronomer can bore\nAnd thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind:\nHe views theirs stations, walks from door to door,\nSurveys, as if he had designed\nTo make a purchase there: he sees their dances,\nAnd knoweth long before,\nBoth their full-eyed aspects, and secret glances.\n\nThe nimble diver with his side\nCuts through the working waves, that he may fetch\nHis dearly-earned pearl, which God did hide\nOn purpose from the ventrous wretch;\nThat he might save his life, and also hers,\nWho with excessive pride\nHer own destruction and his danger wears.\n\nThe subtle chymick can devest\nAnd strip the creature naked, till he find\nThe callow principles within their nest:\nThere he imparts to them his mind,\nAdmitted to their bed-chamber, before\nThey appear trim and drest\nTo ordinary suitors at the door.\n\nWhat hath not man sought out and found,\nBut his dear God? who yet his glorious law\nEmbosoms in us, mellowing the ground\nWith showers and frosts, with love and awe,\nSo that we need not say, Where’s this command?\nPoor man, thou searchest round\nTo find out death, but missest life at hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-flower": { - "title": "“The Flower”", - "body": "How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean\nAre thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;\nTo which, besides their own demean,\nThe late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.\nGrief melts away\nLike snow in May,\nAs if there were no such cold thing.\n\nWho would have thought my shriveled heart\nCould have recovered greenness? It was gone\nQuite underground; as flowers depart\nTo see their mother-root, when they have blown,\nWhere they together\nAll the hard weather,\nDead to the world, keep house unknown.\n\nThese are thy wonders, Lord of power,\nKilling and quickening, bringing down to hell\nAnd up to heaven in an hour;\nMaking a chiming of a passing-bell.\nWe say amiss\nThis or that is:\nThy word is all, if we could spell.\n\nOh that I once past changing were,\nFast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!\nMany a spring I shoot up fair,\nOffering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;\nNor doth my flower\nWant a spring shower,\nMy sins and I joining together.\n\nBut while I grow in a straight line,\nStill upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,\nThy anger comes, and I decline:\nWhat frost to that? what pole is not the zone\nWhere all things burn,\nWhen thou dost turn,\nAnd the least frown of thine is shown?\n\nAnd now in age I bud again,\nAfter so many deaths I live and write;\nI once more smell the dew and rain,\nAnd relish versing. Oh, my only light,\nIt cannot be\nThat I am he\nOn whom thy tempests fell all night.\n\nThese are thy wonders, Lord of love,\nTo make us see we are but flowers that glide;\nWhich when we once can find and prove,\nThou hast a garden for us where to bide;\nWho would be more,\nSwelling through store,\nForfeit their Paradise by their pride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-forerunners": { - "title": "“The Forerunners”", - "body": "The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;\nWhite is their colour, and behold my head.\nBut must they have my brain? must they dispark\nThose sparkling notions, which therein were bred?\nMust dulnesse turn me to a clod?\nYet have they left me, Thou art still my God.\n\nGood men ye be, to leave me my best room,\nEv’n all my heart, and what is lodged there:\nI passe not, I, what of the rest become,\nSo Thou art still my God, be out of fear.\nHe will be pleased with that dittie;\nAnd if I please him, I write fine and wittie.\n\nFarewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors.\nBut will ye leave me thus? when ye before\nOf stews and brothels onely knew the doores,\nThen did I wash you with my tears, and more,\nBrought you to Church well drest and clad;\nMy God must have my best, ev’n all I had.\n\nLovely enchanting language, sugar-cane,\nHony of roses, whither wilt thou flie?\nHath some fond lover tic’d thee to thy bane?\nAnd wilt thou leave the Church, and love a stie?\nFie, thou wilt soil thy broider’d coat,\nAnd hurt thy self, and him that sings the note.\n\nLet foolish lovers, if they will love dung,\nWith canvas, not with arras clothe their shame:\nLet follie speak in her own native tongue.\nTrue beautie dwells on high: ours is a flame\nBut borrow’d thence to light us thither.\nBeautie and beauteous words should go together.\n\nYet if you go, I passe not; take your way:\nFor, Thou art still my God, is all that ye\nPerhaps with more embellishment can say,\nGo birds of spring: let winter have his fee,\nLet a bleak palenesse chalk the doore,\nSo all within be livelier then before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "good-friday": { - "title": "“Good Friday”", - "body": "O my chief good,\nHow shall I measure out thy blood?\nHow shall I count what thee befell,\nAnd each grief tell?\n\nShall I thy woes\nNumber according to thy foes?\nOr, since one star show’d thy first breath,\nShall all thy death?\n\nOr shall each leaf,\nWhich falls in Autumn, score a grief?\nOr cannot leaves, but fruit be sign\nOf the true vine?\n\nThen let each hour\nOf my whole life one grief devour:\nThat thy distress through all may run,\nAnd be my sun.\n\nOr rather let\nMy several sins their sorrows get;\nThat as each beast his cure doth know,\nEach sin may so.\n\nSince blood is fittest, Lord to write\nThy sorrows in, and bloody fight;\nMy heart hath store, write there, where in\nOne box doth lie both ink and sin:\n\nThat when sin spies so many foes,\nThy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes\nAll come to lodge there, sin may say,\n“No room for me,” and fly away.\n\nSin being gone, oh fill the place,\nAnd keep possession with thy grace;\nLest sin take courage and return,\nAnd all the writings blot or burn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "grace": { - "title": "“Grace”", - "body": "My stock lies dead and no increase\nDoth my dull husbandry improve:\nO let thy graces without cease\nDrop from above!\n\nIf still the sun should hide his face,\nThy house would but a dungeon prove,\nThy works, night’s captives: O let grace\nDrop from above!\n\nThe dew doth ev’ry morning fall;\nAnd shall the dew outstrip thy dove?\nThe dew, for which grass cannot call,\nDrop from above.\n\nDeath is still working like a mole,\nAnd digs my grave at each remove:\nLet grace work too, and on my soul\nDrop from above.\n\nSin is still hammering my heart\nUnto a hardness, void of love:\nLet suppling grace, to cross his art,\nDrop from above.\n\nO come! for thou dost know the way.\nOr if to me thou wilt not move,\nRemove me, where I need not say,\n“Drop from above.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "grief": { - "title": "“Grief”", - "body": "O who will give me tears? Come, all ye springs,\nDwell in my head and eyes; come, clouds and rain;\nMy grief hath need of all the watery things\nThat nature hath produced: let every vein\nSuck up a river to supply mine eyes,\nMy weary weeping eyes, too dry for me,\nUnless they get new conduits, new supplies,\nTo bear them out, and with my state agree.\nWhat are two shallow fords, two little spouts\nOf a less world? the greater is but small,\nA narrow cupboard for my griefs and doubts,\nWhich want provision in the midst of all.\nVerses, ye are too fine a thing, too wise\nFor my rough sorrows; cease, be dumb and mute,\nGive up your feet and running to mine eyes,\nAnd keep your measures for some lover’s lute,\nWhose grief allows him music and a rhyme;\nFor mine excludes both measure, tune, and time:\nAlas, my God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-holy-communion": { - "title": "“The Holy Communion”", - "body": "Not in rich furniture, or fine array,\nNor in a wedge of gold,\nThou, who from me wast sold,\nTo me dost now thy self convey;\nFor so thou should’st without me still have been,\nLeaving within me sin:\n\nBut by the way of nourishment and strength\nThou creep’st into my breast;\nMaking thy way my rest,\nAnd thy small quantities my length;\nWhich spread their forces into every part,\nMeeting sin’s force and art.\n\nYet can these not get over to my soul,\nLeaping the wall that parts\nOur souls, and fleshly hearts;\nBut as th’outworks, they may control\nMy rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name,\nAffright both sin and shame.\n\nOnly thy grace, which with these elements comes,\nKnoweth the ready way,\nAnd hath the privy key,\nOp’ning the soul’s most subtle rooms;\nWhile those to spirits refin’d, at door attend\nDispatches from their friend.\n\nGive me my captive soul, or take\nMy body also thither,\nAnother lift like this will make\nThem both to be together.\n\nBefore that sin turn’d flesh into stone,\nAnd all our lump to leaven,\nA fervent sigh might well have blown\nOur innocent earth to heaven.\n\nFor sure when Adam did not know\nTo sin, or sin to smother;\nHe might to heav’n from Paradise go,\nAs from one room t’another.\n\nThou hast restor’d to us this ease\nBy this thy heav’nly blood;\nWhich I can go to, when I please,\nAnd leave th’earth to their food.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "if-as-a-flower-doth-spread-and-die": { - "title": "“If as a Flower Doth Spread and Die”", - "body": "If as a flower doth spread and die,\nThou wouldst extend me to some good,\nBefore I were by frost’s extremity\nNipt in the bud;\n\nThe sweetness and the praise were thine;\nBut the extension and the room,\nWhich in thy garland I should fill, were mine\nAt thy great doom.\n\nFor as thou dost impart thy grace,\nThe greater shall our glory be.\nThe measure of our joys is in this place,\nThe stuff with thee.\n\nLet me not languish then, and spend\nA life as barren to thy praise,\nAs is the dust, to which that life doth tend,\nBut with delays.\n\nAll things are busy; only I\nNeither bring honey with the bees,\nNor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry\nTo water these.\n\nI am no link of thy great chain,\nBut all my company is a weed.\nLord place me in thy consort; give one strain\nTo my poor reed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "immortal-heat": { - "title": "“Immortal Heat”", - "body": "Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame\nAttract the lesser to it: let those fires\nWhich shall consume the world, first make it tame,\nAnd kindle in our hearts such true desires,\n\nAs may consume our lusts, and make thee way.\nThen shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain\nAll her invention on thine Altar lay,\nAnd there in hymnes send back thy fire again:\n\nOur eies shall see thee, which before saw dust;\nDust blown by wit, till that they both were blinde:\nThou shalt recover all thy goods in kinde,\nWho wert disseized by usurping lust:\n\nAll knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,\nAnd praise him who did make and mend our eies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "immortal-love": { - "title": "“Immortal Love”", - "body": "Immortal love, authour of this great frame,\nSprung from that beautie which can never fade;\nHow hath man parcel’d out thy glorious name,\nAnd thrown it on that dust which thou hast made,\n\nWhile mortall love doth all the title gain!\nWhich siding with invention, they together\nBear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,\n(Thy workmanship) and give thee share in neither.\n\nWit fancies beautie, beautie raiseth wit:\nThe world is theirs; they two play out the game,\nThou standing by: and though thy glorious name\nWrought our deliverance from th’ infernall pit,\n\nWho sings thy praise? onely a skarf or glove\nDoth warm our hands, and make them write of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "jordan": { - "title": "“Jordan”", - "body": "Who says that fictions only and false hair\nBecome a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?\nIs all good structure in a winding stair?\nMay no lines pass, except they do their duty\nNot to a true, but painted chair?\n\nIs it no verse, except enchanted groves\nAnd sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?\nMust purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?\nMust all be veiled, while he that reads divines,\nCatching the sense at two removes?\n\nShepherds are honest people: let them sing:\nRiddle who list, for me, and pull for prime:\nI envy no man’s nightingale or spring;\nNor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,\nWho plainly say, My God, My King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "josephs-coat": { - "title": "“Joseph’s Coat”", - "body": "Wounded I sing, tormented I indite,\nThrown down I fall into a bed, and rest:\nSorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will\nWho changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.\nFor well he knows, if but one grief and smart\nAmong my many had his full career,\nSure it would carry with it ev’n my heart,\nAnd both would run until they found a bier\nTo fetch the body; both being due to grief.\nBut he hath spoil’d the race; and giv’n to anguish\nOne of Joy’s coats, ’ticing it with relief\nTo linger in me, and together languish.\nI live to shew his power, who once did bring\nMy joys to weep, and now my griefs to sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kill-me-not-evry-day": { - "title": "“Kill Me Not Ev’ry Day”", - "body": "Kill me not ev’ry day,\nThou Lord of life, since thy one death for me\nIs more than all my deaths can be,\nThough I in broken pay\nDie over each hour of Methusalem’s stay.\n\nIf all men’s tears were let\nInto one common sewer, sea, and brine;\nWhat were they all, compar’d to thine?\nWherein if they were set,\nThey would discolour thy most bloody sweat.\n\nThou art my grief alone,\nThou Lord conceal it not: and as thou art\nAll my delight, so all my smart:\nThy cross took up in one,\nBy way of imprest, all my future moan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "life": { - "title": "“Life”", - "body": "I made a posy, while the day ran by:\n“Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie\nMy life within this band.”\nBut Time did beckon to the flowers, and they\nBy noon most cunningly did steal away,\nAnd withered in my hand.\n\nMy hand was next to them, and then my heart;\nI took, without more thinking, in good part\nTime’s gentle admonition;\nWho did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey,\nMaking my mind to smell my fatal day,\nYet, sug’ring the suspicion.\n\nFarewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,\nFit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,\nAnd after death for cures.\nI follow straight without complaints or grief,\nSince, if my scent be good, I care not if\nIt be as short as yours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,\nGuilty of dust and sin.\nBut quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack\nFrom my first entrance in,\nDrew nearer to me, sweetly questioning\nIf I lacked anything.\n\n“A guest,” I answered “worthy to be here”;\nLove said “You shall be he.”\n“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,\nI cannot look on Thee.”\nLove took my hand, and smiling did reply\n“Who made the eyes but I?”\n\n“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them: let my shame\nGo where it doth deserve.”\n“And know you not,” says Love “who bore the blame?”\n“My dear, then I will serve.”\n“You must sit down,” says Love “and taste my meat.”\nSo I did sit and eat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "mans-medley": { - "title": "“Man’s Medley”", - "body": "Hark, how the birds do sing,\nAnd woods do ring!\nAll creatures have their joy, and man hath his.\nYet if we rightly measure,\nMan’s joy and pleasure\nRather hereafter than in present is.\n\nTo this life things of sense\nMake their pretence;\nIn th’ other angels have a right by birth.\nMan ties them both alone,\nAnd makes them one,\nWith th’ one hand touching heaven, with th’ other earth.\n\nIn soul he mounts and flies,\nIn flesh he dies.\nHe wears a stuff whose thread is coarse and round,\nBut trimmed with curious lace,\nAnd should take place\nAfter the trimming, not the stuff and ground.\n\nNot that he may not here\nTaste of the cheer;\n\nBut as birds drink and straight lift up their head,\nSo must he sip and think\nOf better drink\nHe may attain to after he is dead.\n\nBut as his joys are double,\nSo is his trouble.\nHe hath two winters, other things but one:\nBoth frosts and thoughts do nip\nAnd bite his lip,\nAnd he of all things fears two deaths alone.\n\nYet even the greatest griefs\nMay be reliefs,\nCould he but take them right, and in their ways.\nHappy is he whose heart\nHath found the art\nTo turn his double pains to double praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "man": { - "title": "“Man”", - "body": "My God, I heard this day,\nThat none doth build a stately habitation,\nBut he that means to dwell therein.\nWhat house more stately hath there been,\nOr can be, than is Man? to whose creation\nAll things are in decay.\n\nFor Man is ev’ry thing,\nAnd more:\nHe is a tree, yet bears no fruit;\nA beast, yet is, or should be more:\nReason and speech we only bring.\nParrots may thank us, if they are not mute,\nThey go upon the score.\n\nMan is all symmetry,\nFull of proportions, one limb to another,\nAnd all to all the world besides:\nEach part may call the farthest brother:\nFor head with foot hath private amity,\nAnd both with moons and tides.\n\nNothing hath got so far,\nBut Man hath caught and kept it, as his prey.\nHis eyes dismount the highest star:\nHe is in little all the sphere.\nHerbs gladly cure our flesh; because that they\nFind their acquaintance there.\n\nFor us the winds do blow,\nThe earth doth rest, heav’n move, and fountains flow.\nNothing we see, but means our good,\nAs our delight, or as our treasure:\nThe whole is, either our cupboard of food,\nOr cabinet of pleasure.\n\nThe stars have us to bed;\nNight draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws;\nMusic and light attend our head.\nAll things unto our flesh are kind\nIn their descent and being; to our mind\nIn their ascent and cause.\n\nEach thing is full of duty:\nWaters united are our navigation;\nDistinguished, our habitation;\nBelow, our drink; above, our meat;\nBoth are our cleanliness.\nHath one such beauty?\nThen how are all things neat?\n\nMore servants wait on Man,\nThan he’ll take notice of: in ev’ry path\nHe treads down that which doth befriend him,\nWhen sickness makes him pale and wan.\nOh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath\nAnother to attend him.\n\nSince then, my God, thou hast\nSo brave a palace built; O dwell in it,\nThat it may dwell with thee at last!\nTill then, afford us so much wit;\nThat, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,\nAnd both thy servants be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "matins": { - "title": "“Matins”", - "body": "I cannot ope mine eyes,\nBut thou art ready there to catch\nMy morning-soul and sacrifice:\nThen we must needs for that day make a match.\n\nMy God, what is a heart?\nSilver, or gold, or precious stone,\nOr star, or rainbow, or a part\nOf all these things or all of them in one?\n\nMy God, what is a heart?\nThat thou should’st it so eye, and woo,\nPouring upon it all thy art,\nAs if that thou hadst nothing else to do?\n\nIndeed man’s whole estate\nAmounts (and richly) to serve thee:\nHe did not heav’n and earth create,\nYet studies them, not him by whom they be.\n\nTeach me thy love to know;\nThat this new light, which now I see,\nMay both the work and workman show:\nThen by a sun-beam I will climb to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mortification": { - "title": "“Mortification”", - "body": "How soon doth man decay!\nWhen clothes are taken from a chest of sweets\nTo swaddle infants, whose young breath\nScarce knows the way;\nThose clouts are little winding-sheets,\nWhich do consign and send them unto Death.\n\nWhen boyes go first to bed,\nThey step into their voluntarie graves;\nSleep binds them fast; onely their breath\nMakes them not dead:\nSuccessive nights, like rolling waves,\nConvey them quickly who are bound for Death.\n\nWhen Youth is frank and free,\nAnd calls for musick, while his veins do swell,\nAll day exchanging mirth and breath\nIn companie,\nThat musick summons to the knell\nWhich shall befriend him at the house of Death.\n\nWhen man grows staid and wise,\nGetting a house and home, where he may move\nWithin the circle of his breath,\nSchooling his eyes,\nThat dumbe inclosure maketh love\nUnto the coffin, that attends his death.\n\nWhen Age grows low and weak,\nMarking his grave, and thawing ev’ry year,\nTill all do melt and drown his breath\nWhen he would speak,\nA chair or litter shows the biere\nWhich shall convey him to the house of Death.\n\nMan, ere he is aware,\nHath put together a solemnitie,\nAnd drest his hearse, while he has breath\nAs yet to spare;\nYet, Lord, instruct us so to die,\nThat all these dyings may be LIFE in DEATH.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "my-heart-did-heave": { - "title": "“My Heart Did Heave”", - "body": "My heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God”!\nBy that I knew that thou wast in the grief,\nTo guide and govern it to my relief,\nMaking a sceptre of the rod:\nHadst thou not had thy part,\nSure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.\n\nBut since thy breath gave me both life and shape,\nThou know’st my tallies; and when there’s assigned\nSo much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?\nOr if some years with it escape,\nThe sigh then only is\nA gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.\n\nThy life on earth was grief, and thou art still\nConstant unto it, making it to be\nA point of honour now to grieve in me,\nAnd in thy members suffer ill.\nThey who lament one cross,\nThou dying daily, praise thee to thy loss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nature": { - "title": "“Nature”", - "body": "Full of rebellion, I would die,\nOr fight, or travel, or deny\nThat thou has aught to do with me.\nO tame my heart;\nIt is thy highest art\nTo captivate strong holds to thee.\n\nIf thou shalt let this venom lurk,\nAnd in suggestions fume and work,\nMy soul will turn to bubbles straight,\nAnd thence by kind\nVanish into a wind,\nMaking thy workmanship deceit.\n\nO smooth my rugged heart, and there\nEngrave thy rev’rend law and fear;\nOr make a new one, since the old\nIs sapless grown,\nAnd a much fitter stone\nTo hide my dust, than thee to hold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "o-that-i-could-a-sin-once-see": { - "title": "“O that I Could a Sin once See”", - "body": "O that I could a sin once see!\nWe paint the devil foul, yet he\nHath some good in him, all agree.\nSin is flat opposite to th’ Almighty, seeing\nIt wants the good of virtue, and of being.\n\nBut God more care of us hath had:\nIf apparitions make us sad,\nBy sight of sin we should grow mad.\nYet as in sleep we see foul death, and live:\nSo devils are our sins in perspective.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peace": { - "title": "“Peace”", - "body": "Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave,\nLet me once know.\nI sought thee in a secret cave,\nAnd ask’d, if Peace were there,\nA hollow wind did seem to answer, No:\nGo seek elsewhere.\n\nI did; and going did a rainbow note:\nSurely, thought I,\nThis is the lace of Peace’s coat:\nI will search out the matter.\nBut while I looked the clouds immediately\nDid break and scatter.\n\nThen went I to a garden and did spy\nA gallant flower,\nThe crown-imperial: Sure, said I,\nPeace at the root must dwell.\nBut when I digged, I saw a worm devour\nWhat showed so well.\n\nAt length I met a rev’rend good old man;\nWhom when for Peace\n\nI did demand, he thus began:\nThere was a Prince of old\nAt Salem dwelt, who lived with good increase\nOf flock and fold.\n\nHe sweetly lived; yet sweetness did not save\nHis life from foes.\nBut after death out of his grave\nThere sprang twelve stalks of wheat;\nWhich many wond’ring at, got some of those\nTo plant and set.\n\nIt prospered strangely, and did soon disperse\nThrough all the earth:\nFor they that taste it do rehearse\nThat virtue lies therein;\nA secret virtue, bringing peace and mirth\nBy flight of sin.\n\nTake of this grain, which in my garden grows,\nAnd grows for you;\nMake bread of it: and that repose\nAnd peace, which ev’ry where\nWith so much earnestness you do pursue,\nIs only there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pearl": { - "title": "“The Pearl”", - "body": "_The Kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls; who, when he had found one, sold all that he had and bought it._\n --Matthew 13.45\n\nI know the ways of Learning; both the head\nAnd pipes that feed the press, and make it run;\nWhat reason hath from nature borrowed,\nOr of itself, like a good huswife, spun\nIn laws and policy; what the stars conspire,\nWhat willing nature speaks, what forced by fire;\nBoth th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,\nThe stock and surplus, cause and history:\nAll these stand open, or I have the keys:\nYet I love thee.\n\nI know the ways of Honour, what maintains\nThe quick returns of courtesy and wit:\nIn vies of favours whether party gains,\nWhen glory swells the heart, and moldeth it\nTo all expressions both of hand and eye,\nWhich on the world a true-love-knot may tie,\nAnd bear the bundle, wheresoe’er it goes:\nHow many drams of spirit there must be\nTo sell my life unto my friends or foes:\nYet I love thee.\n\nI know the ways of Pleasure, the sweet strains,\nThe lullings and the relishes of it;\nThe propositions of hot blood and brains;\nWhat mirth and music mean; what love and wit\nHave done these twenty hundred years, and more:\nI know the projects of unbridled store:\nMy stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,\nAnd grumble oft, that they have more in me\nThan he that curbs them, being but one to five:\nYet I love thee.\n\nI know all these, and have them in my hand:\nTherefore not sealed, but with open eyes\nI fly to thee, and fully understand\nBoth the main sale, and the commodities;\nAnd at what rate and price I have thy love;\nWith all the circumstances that may move:\nYet through these labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,\nBut thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,\nDid both conduct and teach me, how by it\nTo climb to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "praise": { - "title": "“Praise”", - "body": "To write a verse or two is all the praise\nThat I can raise:\nMend my estate in any ways,\nThou shalt have more.\n\nI go to Church; help me to wings, and I\nWill thither fly;\nOr, if I mount unto the sky,\nI will do more.\n\nMan is all weakness; there is no such thing\nAs Prince or King:\nHis arm is short; yet with a sling\nHe may do more.\n\nAn herb distill’d, and drunk, may dwell next door,\nOn the same floor,\nTo a brave soul: Exalt the poor,\nThey can do more.\n\nO raise me then! poor bees, that work all day,\nSting my delay,\nWho have a work, as well as they,\nAnd much, much more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "providence": { - "title": "“Providence”", - "body": "O Sacred Providence, who from end to end\nStrongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,\nAnd not of thee, through whom my fingers bend\nTo hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?\n\nOf all the creatures both in sea and land\nOnely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,\nAnd put the penne alone into his hand,\nAnd made him Secretarie of thy praise.\n\nBeasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes;\nTrees would be tuning on their native lute\nTo thy renown: but all their hands and throats\nAre brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.\n\nMan is the worlds high Priest: he doth present\nThe sacrifice for all; while they below\nUnto the service mutter an assent,\nSuch as springs use that fall, and windes that blow.\n\nHe that to praise and laud thee doth refrain,\nDoth not refrain unto himself alone,\nBut robs a thousand who would praise thee fain,\nAnd doth commit a world of sinne in one.\n\nThe beasts say, Eat me: but, if beasts must teach,\nThe tongue is yours to eat, but mine to praise.\nThe trees say, Pull me: but the hand you stretch,\nIs mine to write, as it is yours to raise.\n\nWherefore, most sacred Spirit, I here present\nFor me and all my fellows praise to thee:\nAnd just it is that I should pay the rent,\nBecause the benefit accrues to me.\n\nWe all acknowledge both thy power and love\nTo be exact, transcendent, and divine;\nWho dost so strongly and so sweetly move,\nWhile all things have their will, yet none but thine.\n\nFor either thy command, or thy permission\nLay hands on all: they are thy right and left.\nThe first puts on with speed and expedition;\nThe other curbs sinnes stealing pace and theft.\n\nNothing escapes them both; all must appeare,\nAnd be dispos’d, and dress’d, and tun’d by thee,\nWho sweetly temper’st all. If we could heare\nThy skill and art, what musick would it be!\n\nThou art in small things great, not small in any:\nThy even praise can neither rise, nor fall.\nThou art in all things one, in each thing many:\nFor thou art infinite in one and all.\n\nTempests are calm to thee; they know thy hand,\nAnd hold it fast, as children do their fathers,\nWhich crie and follow. Thou hast made poore sand\nCheck the proud sea, ev’n when it swells and gathers.\n\nThy cupboard serves the world: the meat is set,\nWhere all may reach: no beast but knows his feed.\nBirds teach us hawking; fishes have their net:\nThe great prey on the lesse, they on some weed.\n\nNothing ingendred doth prevent his meat:\nFlies have their table spread, ere they appeare.\nSome creatures have in winter what to eat;\nOthers do sleep, and envie not their cheer.\n\nHow finely dost thou times and seasons spin.\nAnd make a twist checker’d with night and day!\nWhich as it lengthens windes, and windes us in,\nAs bouls go on, but turning all the way.\n\nEach creature hath a wisdome for his good.\nThe pigeons feed their tender off-spring, crying,\nWhen they are callow; but withdraw their food\nWhen they are fledge, that need may teach them flying.\n\nBees work for man; and yet they never bruise\nTheir masters flower, but leave it, having done,\nAs fair as ever, and as fit to use;\nSo both the flower doth stay, and hony run.\n\nSheep eat the grasse, and dung the ground for more:\nTrees after bearing drop their leaves for soil:\nSprings vent their streams, and by expense get store:\nClouds cool by heat, and baths by cooling boil.\n\nWho hath the vertue to expresse the rare\nAnd curious vertues both of herbs and stones?\nIs there a herb for that? O that thy care\nWould show a root, that gives expressions!\n\nAnd if an herb hath power, what have the starres?\nA rose, besides his beautie, is a cure.\nDoubtlesse our plagues and plentie, peace and warres\nAre there much surer then our art is sure.\n\nThou hast hid metals: man may take them thence;\nBut at his peril: when he digs the place,\nHe makes a grave; as if the thing had sense,\nAnd threatned man, that he should fill the space.\n\nEv’n poysons praise thee. Should a thing be lost?\nShould creatures want for want of heed their due?\nSince where are poysons, antidots are most:\nThe help stands close, and keeps the fear in view.\n\nThe sea, which seems to stop the traveller,\nIs by a ship the speedier passage made.\nThe windes, who think they rule the mariner,\nAre rul’d by him, and taught to serve his trade.\n\nAnd as thy house is full, so I adore\nThy curious art in marshalling thy goods.\nThe hills and health abound; the vales with store;\nThe South with marble; North with furres & woods.\n\nHard things are glorious; easie things good cheap.\nThe common all men have; that which is rare,\nMen therefore seek to have, and care to keep.\nThe healthy frosts with summer-fruits compare.\n\nLight without winde is glasse: warm without weight\nIs wooll and furres: cool without closenesse, shade:\nSpeed without pains, a horse: tall without height,\nA servile hawk: low without losse, a spade.\n\nAll countreys have enough to serve their need:\nIf they seek fine things, thou dost make them run\nFor their offence; and then dost turn their speed\nTo be commerce and trade from sunne to sunne.\n\nNothing wears clothes, but Man; nothing doth need\nBut he to wear them. Nothing useth fire,\nBut Man alone, to show his heav’nly breed:\nAnd onely he hath fuell in desire.\n\nWhen th’earth was dry, thou mad’st a sea of wet:\nWhen that lay gather’d, thou didst broach the mountains:\nWhen yet some places could no moisture get,\nThe windes grew gard’ners, and the clouds good fountains.\n\nRain, do not hurt my flowers; but gently spend\nYour hony drops: presse not to smell them here:\nWhen they are ripe, their odour will ascend,\nAnd at your lodging with their thanks appeare.\n\nHow harsh are thorns to pears! and yet they make\nA better hedge, and need lesse reparation.\nHow smooth are silks compared with a stake,\nOr with a stone! yet make no good foundation.\n\nSometimes thou dost divide thy gifts to man,\nSometimes unite. The Indian nut alone\nIs clothing, meat and trencher, drink and kan,\nBoat, cable, sail and needle, all in one.\n\nMost herbs that grow in brooks, are hot and dry.\nCold fruits warm kernells help against the winde.\nThe lemmons juice and rinde cure mutually.\nThe whey of milk doth loose, the milk doth binde.\n\nThy creatures leap not, but expresse a feast,\nWhere all the guests sit close, and nothing wants.\nFrogs marry fish and flesh; bats, bird and beast;\nSponges, non-sense and sense; mines, th’earth & plants.\n\nTo show thou art not bound, as if thy lot\nWere worse then ours; sometimes thou shiftest hands.\nMost things move th’under-jaw; the Crocodile not.\nMost things sleep lying; th’ Elephant leans or stands.\n\nBut who hath praise enough? nay who hath any?\nNone can expresse thy works, but he that knows them:\nAnd none can know thy works, which are so many,\nAnd so complete, but onely he that owes them.\n\nAll things that are, though they have sev’rall wayes,\nYet in their being joyn with one advise\nTo honour thee: and so I give thee praise\nIn all my other hymnes, but in this twice.\n\nEach thing that is, although in use and name\nIt go for one, hath many wayes in store\nTo honour thee; and so each hymne thy fame\nExtolleth many wayes, yet this one more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pulley": { - "title": "“The Pulley”", - "body": "When God at first made man,\nHaving a glass of blessings standing by,\nLet us (said He) pour on him all we can:\nLet the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,\nContract into a span.\n\nSo strength first made a way;\nThen beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:\nWhen almost all was out, God made a stay,\nPerceiving that alone of all His treasure\nRest in the bottom lay.\n\nFor if I should (said He)\nBestow this jewel also on my creature,\nHe would adore My gifts instead of Me,\nAnd rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:\nSo both should losers be.\n\nYet let him keep the rest,\nBut keep them with repining restlessness:\nLet him be rich and weary, that, at least,\nIf goodness lead him not, yet weariness\nMay toss him to My breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quip": { - "title": "“The Quip”", - "body": "The merry World did on a day\nWith his train-bands and mates agree\nTo meet together where I lay,\nAnd all in sport to jeer at me.\n\nFirst Beauty crept into a rose,\nWhich when I pluck’d not, “Sir,” said she,\n“Tell me, I pray, whose hands are those?”\nBut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.\n\nThen Money came, and chinking still,\n“What tune is this, poor man?” said he;\n“I heard in music you had skill:”\nBut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.\n\nThen came brave Glory puffing by\nIn silks that whistled, who but he?\nHe scarce allow’d me half an eye:\nBut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.\n\nThen came quick Wit and Conversation,\nAnd he would needs a comfort be,\nAnd, to be short, make an oration:\nBut Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.\n\nYet when the hour of Thy design\nTo answer these fine things shall come,\nSpeak not at large, say, I am Thine;\nAnd then they have their answer home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "redemption": { - "title": "“Redemption”", - "body": "Having been tenant long to a rich lord,\nNot thriving, I resolved to be bold,\nAnd make a suit unto him, to afford\nA new small-rented lease, and cancel the old.\nIn heaven at his manor I him sought;\nThey told me there that he was lately gone\nAbout some land, which he had dearly bought\nLong since on earth, to take possession.\nI straight returned, and knowing his great birth,\nSought him accordingly in great resorts;\nIn cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;\nAt length I heard a ragged noise and mirth\nOf thieves and murderers; there I him espied,\nWho straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "repentance": { - "title": "“Repentance”", - "body": "Lord, I confess my sin is great;\nGreat is my sin. Oh! gently treat\nWith thy quick flow’r, thy momentany bloom;\nWhose life still pressing\nIs one undressing,\nA steady aiming at a tomb.\n\nMan’s age is two hours’ work, or three:\nEach day doth round about us see.\nThus are we to delights: but we are all\nTo sorrows old,\nIf life be told\nFrom what life feeleth, Adam’s fall.\n\nO let thy height of mercy then\nCompassionate short-breathed men.\nCut me not off for my most foul transgression:\nI do confess\nMy foolishness;\nMy God, accept of my confession.\n\nSweeten at length this bitter bowl,\nWhich thou hast pour’d into my soul;\nThy wormwood turn to health, winds to fair weather:\nFor if thou stay,\nI and this day,\nAs we did rise, we die together.\n\nWhen thou for sin rebukest man,\nForthwith he waxeth woe and wan:\nBitterness fills our bowels; all our hearts\nPine, and decay,\nAnd dropp away,\nAnd carry with them th’other parts.\n\nBut thou wilt sin and grief destroy;\nThat so the broken bones may joy,\nAnd tune together in a well-set song,\nFull of his praises,\nWho dead men raises;\nFractures well cur’d make us more strong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sacrifice": { - "title": "“The Sacrifice”", - "body": "Oh all ye, who pass by, whose eyes and mind\nTo worldly things are sharp, but to me blind;\nTo me, who took eyes that I might you find:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThe Princes of my people make a head\nAgainst their Maker: they do wish me dead,\nWho cannot wish, except I give them bread:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nWithout me each one, who doth now me brave,\nHad to this day been an Egyptian slave.\nThey use that power against me, which I gave:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nMine own Apostle, who the bag did bear,\nThough he had all I had, did not forebear\nTo sell me also, and to put me there:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nFor thirty pence he did my death devise,\nWho at three hundred did the ointment prize,\nNot half so sweet as my sweet sacrifice:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nTherefore my soul melts, and my heart’s dear treasure\nDrops blood (the only beads) my words to measure:\nO let this cup pass, if it be thy pleasure:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThese drops being temper’d with a sinner’s tears,\nA Balsam are for both the Hemispheres:\nCuring all wounds but mine; all, but my fears,\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nYet my Disciples sleep: I cannot gain\nOne hour of watching; but their drowsy brain\nComforts not me, and doth my doctrine stain:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nArise, arise, they come. Look how they run.\nAlas! what haste they make to be undone!\nHow with their lanterns do they seek the sun!\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nWith clubs and staves they seek me, as a thief,\nWho am the way of truth, the true relief;\nMost true to those, who are my greatest grief:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nJudas, dost thou betray me with a kiss?\nCanst thou find hell about my lips? and miss\nOf life, just at the gates of life and bliss?\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nSee, they lay hold on me, not with the hands\nOf faith, but fury: yet at their commands\nI suffer binding, who have loos’d their bands:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nAll my Disciples fly; fear puts a bar\nBetwixt my friends and me. They leave the star\nThat brought the wise men of the East from far.\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen from one ruler to another bound\nThey lead me; urging, that it was not sound\nWhat I taught: Comments would the text confound.\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThe Priest and rulers all false witness seek\n’Gainst him, who seeks not life, but is the meek\nAnd ready Paschal Lamb of this great week:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen they accuse me of great blasphemy,\nThat I did thrust into the Deity,\nWho never thought that any robbery:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nSome said, that I the Temple to the floor\nIn three days raz’d, and raised as before.\nWhy, he that built the world can do much more:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen they condemn me all with that same breath,\nWhich I do give them daily, unto death.\nThus Adam my first breathing rendereth:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey bind, and lead me unto Herod: he\nSends me to Pilate. This makes them agree;\nBut yet their friendship is my enmity:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nHerod and all his bands do set me light,\nWho teach all hands to war, fingers to fight,\nAnd only am the Lord of hosts and might:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nHerod in judgement sits while I do stand;\nExamines me with a censorious hand:\nI him obey, who all things else command:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThe Jews accuse me with despitefulness;\nAnd vying malice with my gentleness,\nPick quarrels with their only happiness:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nI answer nothing, but with patience prove\nIf stony hearts will melt with gentle love.\nBut who does hawk at eagles with a dove?\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nMy silence rather doth augment their cry;\nMy dove doth back into my bosom fly;\nBecause the raging waters still are high:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nHark how they cry aloud still, “Crucify:\nIt is not fit he live a day,” they cry,\nWho cannot live less than eternally:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nPilate a stranger holdeth off; but they,\nMine own dear people, cry, “Away, away,”\nWith noises confused frighting the day:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nYet still they shout, and cry, and stop their ears,\nPutting my life among their sins and fears,\nAnd therefore wish my blood on them and theirs:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nSee how spite cankers things. These words aright\nUsed, and wished, are the whole world’s light:\nBut honey is their gall, brightness their night:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey choose a murderer, and all agree\nIn him to do themselves a courtesy:\nFor it was their own cause who killed me:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nAnd a seditious murderer he was:\nBut I the Prince of peace; peace that doth pass\nAll understanding, more than heav’n doth glass:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nWhy, Caesar is their only King, not I:\nHe clave the stony rock, when they were dry;\nBut surely not their hearts, as I well try:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nAh! how they scourge me! yet my tenderness\nDoubles each lash: and yet their bitterness\nWinds up my grief to a mysteriousness.\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey buffet me, and box me as they list,\nWho grasp the earth and heaven with my fist,\nAnd never yet, whom I would punish, miss’d:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nBehold, they spit on me in scornful wise,\nWho by my spittle gave the blind man eyes,\nLeaving his blindness to mine enemies:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nMy face they cover, though it be divine.\nAs Moses’ face was veiled, so is mine,\nLest on their double-dark souls either shine:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nServants and abjects flout me; they are witty:\n“Now prophesy who strikes thee,” is their ditty.\nSo they in me deny themselves all pity:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nAnd now I am deliver’d unto death,\nWhich each one calls for so with utmost breath,\nThat he before me well nigh suffereth:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nWeep not, dear friends, since I for both have wept\nWhen all my tears were blood, the while you slept:\nYour tears for your own fortunes should be kept:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThe soldiers lead me to the common hall;\nThere they deride me, they abuse me all:\nYet for twelve heavn’ly legions I could call:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen with a scarlet robe they me array;\nWhich shows my blood to be the only way.\nAnd cordial left to repair man’s decay:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen on my head a crown of thorns I wear:\nFor these are all the grapes SIon doth bear,\nThough I my vine planted and watred there:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nSo sits the earth’s great curse in Adam’s fall\nUpon my head: so I remove it all\nFrom th’ earth unto my brows, and bear the thrall:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThen with the reed they gave to me before,\nThey strike my head, the rock from whence all store\nOf heavn’ly blessings issue evermore:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey bow their knees to me, and cry, “Hail king”:\nWhat ever scoffs or scornfulness can bring,\nI am the floor, the sink, where they it fling:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nYet since man’s sceptres are as frail as reeds,\nAnd thorny all their crowns, bloody their weeds;\nI, who am Truth, turn into truth their deeds:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThe soldiers also spit upon that face,\nWhich Angels did desire to have the grace,\nAnd Prophets once to see, but found no place:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThus trimmed forth they bring me to the rout,\nWho “Crucify him,” cry with one strong shout.\nGod holds his peace at man, and man cries out.\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey lead me in once more, and putting then\nMine own clothes on, they lead me out again.\nWhom devils fly, thus is he toss’d of men:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nAnd now weary of sport, glad to engross\nAll spite in one, counting my life their loss,\nThey carry me to my most bitter cross:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nMy cross I bear my self, until I faint:\nThen Simon bears it for me by constraint,\nThe decreed burden of each mortal Saint:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nO all ye who pass by, behold and see;\nMan stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;\nThe tree of life to all, but only me:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nLo, here I hang, charg’d with a world of sin,\nThe greater world o’ th’ two; for that came in\nBy words, but this by sorrow I must win:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nSuch sorrow, as if sinful man could feel,\nOr feel his part, he would not cease to kneel,\nTill all were melted, though he were all steel:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nBut, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me,\nThe son, in whom thou dost delight to be?\nMy God, my God--\nNever was grief like mine.\n\nShame tears my soul, my body many a wound;\nSharp nails pierce this, but sharper that confound;\nReproaches, which are free, while I am bound.\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nNow heal thy self, Physician; now come down.\nAlas! I did so, when I left my crown\nAnd father’s smile for you, to feel his frown:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nIn healing not my self, there doth consist\nAll that salvation, which ye now resist;\nYour safety in my sickness doth subsist:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nBetwixt two thieves I spend my utmost breath,\nAs he that for some robbery suffereth.\nAlas! what have I stolen from you? death:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nA king my title is, prefixt on high;\nYet by my subjects am condemn’d to die\nA servile death in servile company;\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey gave me vinegar mingled with gall,\nBut more with malice: yet, when they did call,\nWith Manna, Angels’ food, I fed them all:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nThey part my garments, and by lot dispose\nMy coat, the type of love, which once cur’d those\nWho sought for help, never malicious foes:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nNay, after death their spite shall further go;\nFor they will pierce my side, I full well know;\nThat as sin came, so Sacraments might flow:\nWas ever grief like mine?\n\nBut now I die; now all is finished.\nMy woe, man’s weal: and now I bow my head.\nOnly let others say, when I am dead,\nNever was grief like mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "sepulchre": { - "title": "“Sepulchre”", - "body": "O blessed body! Whither are thou thrown?\nNo lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?\nSo many hearts on earth, and yet not one\nReceive thee?\nSure there is room within our hearts’ good store;\nFor they can lodge transgressions by the score:\nThousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door\nThey leave thee.\nBut that which shows them large, shows them unfit.\nWhat ever sin did this pure rock commit,\nWhich holds thee now? Who hath indicted it\nOf murder?\nWhere our hard hearts have took up stories to brain thee,\nAnd missing this, most falsely did arraign thee,\nAnd order.\nAnd as of old, the law by heav’nly art\nWas writ in stone; so thou, which also art\nThe letter of the word, find’st no fit heart\nTo hold thee.\nYet do we still persist as we began,\nAnd so should perish, but that nothing can,\nThough it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man\nWithold thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "sighs-and-groans": { - "title": "“Sighs and Groans”", - "body": "O do not use me\nAfter my sins! look not on my dessert,\nBut on your glory! Then you will reform\nAnd not refuse me: for you only art\nThe mighty God, but I a silly worm;\nO do not bruise me!\n\nO do not urge me!\nFor what account can your ill steward make?\nI have abused your stock, destroyed your woods,\nSucked all your storehouses: my head did ache,\nTill it found out how to consume your goods:\nO do not scourge me!\n\nO do not blind me!\nI have deserved that an Egyptian night\nShould thicken all my powers; because my lust\nHas still sewed fig-leaves to exclude your light:\nBut I am frailty, and already dust;\nO do not grind me!\n\nO do not fill me\nWith the turned vial of your bitter wrath!\nFor you have other vessels full of blood,\nA part whereof my Savior emptied hath,\nEven unto death: since he died for my good,\nO do not kill me!\n\nBut O reprieve me!\nFor you have life and death at your command;\nYou are both Judge and Savior, feast and rod,\nCordial and Corrosive: put not your hand\nInto the bitter box; but O my God,\nMy God, relieve me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-sinner": { - "title": "“The Sinner”", - "body": "Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek\nWhat I have treasur’d in my memory!\nSince, if my soul make even with the week,\nEach seventh note by right is due to thee.\nI find there quarries of pil’d vanities,\nBut shreds of holiness, that dare not venture\nTo show their face, since cross to thy decrees:\nThere the circumference earth is, heav’n the centre.\nIn so much dregs the quintessence is small:\nThe spirit and good extract of my heart\nComes to about the many hundredth part.\nYet Lord restore thine image, hear my call:\nAnd though my hard heart scarce to thee can groan,\nRemember that thou once didst write in stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sins-round": { - "title": "“Sin’s Round”", - "body": "Sorry I am, my God, sorry I am,\nThat my offences course it in a ring.\nMy thoughts are working like a busy flame,\nUntil their cockatrice they hatch and bring:\nAnd when they once have perfected their draughts,\nMy words take fire from my inflamed thoughts.\n\nMy words take fire fro m my inflamed thoughts,\nWhich spit it forth like the Sicilian hill.\nThey vent their wares, and pass them with their faults,\nAnd by their breathing ventilate the ill.\nBut words suffice not, where are lewd intentions:\nMy hands do join to finish the inventions.\n\nMy hands do join to finish the inventions:\nAnd so my sins ascend three stories high,\nAs Babel grew, before there were dissentions.\nLet ill deeds loiter not: for they supply\nNew thoughts of sinning:\nwherefore, to my shame,\nSorry I am, my God, sorry I am.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee,\nWherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn,\nBesides their other flames? Doth Poetry\nWear Venus livery? only serve her turn?\nWhy are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes\nUpon thine Altar burnt? Cannot thy love\nHeighten a spirit to sound out thy praise\nAs well as any she? Cannot thy Dove\nOut-strip their Cupid easily in flight?\nOr, since thy wayes are deep, and still the fame,\nWill not a verse run smooth that bears thy name!\nWhy doth that fire, which by thy power and might\nEach breast does feel, no braver fuel choose\nThan that, which one day, Worms, may chance refuse?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-storm": { - "title": "“The Storm”", - "body": "If as the winds and waters here below\nDo fly and flow,\nMy sighs and tears as busy were above;\nSure they would move\nAnd much affect thee, as tempestuous times\nAmaze poor mortals, and object their crimes.\n\nStars have their storms, ev’n in a high degree,\nAs well as we.\nA throbbing conscience spurred by remorse\nHath a strange force:\nIt quits the earth, and mounting more and more,\nDares to assault, and besiege thy door.\n\nThere it stands knocking, to thy musick’s wrong,\nAnd drowns the song.\nGlory and honour are set by till it\nAn answer get.\nPoets have wrong’d poor storms: such days are best;\nThey purge the air without, within the breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-temper": { - "title": "“The Temper”", - "body": "How should I praise thee, Lord! how should my rhymes\nGladly engrave thy love in steel,\nIf what my soul doth feel sometimes\nMy soul might ever feel!\n\nAlthough there were some forty heav’ns, or more,\nSometimes I peer above them all;\nSometimes I hardly reach a score,\nSometimes to hell I fall.\n\nO rack me not to such a vast extent;\nThose distances belong to thee:\nThe world’s too little for thy tent,\nA grave too big for me.\n\nWilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch\nA crum of dust from heav’n to hell?\nWill great God measure with a wretch?\nShall he thy stature spell?\n\nO let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,\nO let me roost and nestle there:\nThen of a sinner thou art rid,\nAnd I of hope and fear.\n\nYet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:\nStretch or contract me, thy poor debtor:\nThis is but tuning of my breast,\nTo make the music better.\n\nWhether I fly with angels, fall with dust,\nThy hands made both, and I am there:\nThy power and love, my love and trust\nMake one place ev’ry where.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-thanksgiving": { - "title": "“The Thanksgiving”", - "body": "Oh King of grief! (a title strange, yet true,\nTo thee of all kings only due)\nOh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,\nWho in all grief preventest me?\nShall I weep blood? why thou has wept such store\nThat all thy body was one door.\nShall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?\n’Tis but to tell the tale is told.\n“My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?”\nWas such a grief as cannot be.\nShall I then sing, skipping, thy doleful story,\nAnd side with thy triumphant glory?\nShall thy strokes be my stroking? thorns, my flower?\nThy rod, my posy? cross, my bower?\nBut how then shall I imitate thee, and\nCopy thy fair, though bloody hand?\nSurely I will revenge me on thy love,\nAnd try who shall victorious prove.\nIf thou dost give me wealth, I will restore\nAll back unto thee by the poor.\nIf thou dost give me honour, men shall see,\nThe honour doth belong to thee.\nI will not marry; or, if she be mine,\nShe and her children shall be thine.\nMy bosom friend, if he blaspheme thy name,\nI will tear thence his love and fame.\nOne half of me being gone, the rest I give\nUnto some Chapel, die or live.\nAs for thy passion--But of that anon,\nWhen with the other I have done.\nFor thy predestination I’ll contrive,\nThat three years hence, if I survive,\nI’ll build a spittle, or mend common ways,\nBut mend mine own without delays.\nThen I will use the works of thy creation,\nAs if I us’d them but for fashion.\nThe world and I will quarrel; and the year\nShall not perceive, that I am here.\nMy music shall find thee, and ev’ry string\nShall have his attribute to sing;\nThat all together may accord in thee,\nAnd prove one God, one harmony.\nIf thou shalt give me wit, it shall appear;\nIf thou hast giv’n it me, ’tis here.\nNay, I will read thy book, and never move\nTill I have found therein thy love;\nThy art of love, which I’ll turn back on thee,\nO my dear Saviour, Victory!\nThen for thy passion--I will do for that--\nAlas, my God, I know not what.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "virtue": { - "title": "“Virtue”", - "body": "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,\nThe bridal of the earth and sky:\nThe dew shall weep thy fall to-night;\nFor thou must die.\n\nSweet rose, whose hue angry and brave\nBids the rash gazer wipe his eye:\nThy root is ever in its grave,\nAnd thou must die.\n\nSweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,\nA box where sweets compacted lie;\nMy music shows ye have your closes,\nAnd all must die.\n\nOnly a sweet and virtuous soul,\nLike season’d timber, never gives;\nBut though the whole world turn to coal,\nThen chiefly lives.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "where-is-that-mighty-joy": { - "title": "“Where is that Mighty Joy”", - "body": "It cannot be. Where is that mighty joy,\nWhich just now took up all my heart?\nLord, if thou must needs use thy dart,\nSave that, and me; or sin for both destroy.\n\nThe grosser world stand to thy word and art;\nBut thy diviner world of grace\nThou suddenly dost raise and race,\nAnd ev’ry day a new Creator art\n\nO fix thy chair of grace, that all my powers\nMay also fix their reverence:\nFor when thou dost depart from hence,\nThey grow unruly, and sit in thy bowers.\n\nScatter, or bind them all to bend to thee:\nThough elements change, and heaven move,\nLet not thy higher Court remove,\nBut keep a standing Majesty in me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "whitsunday": { - "title": "“Whitsunday”", - "body": "Listen sweet Dove unto my song,\nAnd spread thy golden wings in me;\nHatching my tender heart so long,\nTill it get wing, and fly away with thee.\n\nWhere is that fire which once descended\nOn thy Apostles? thou didst then\nKeep open house, richly attended,\nFeasting all comers by twelve chosen men.\n\nSuch glorious gifts thou didst bestow,\nThat th’earth did like a heav’n appear;\nThe stars were coming down to know\nIf they might mend their wages, and serve here.\n\nThe sun which once did shine alone,\nHung down his head, and wisht for night,\nWhen he beheld twelve suns for one\nGoing about the world, and giving light.\n\nBut since those pipes of gold, which brought\nThat cordial water to our ground,\nWere cut and martyr’d by the fault\nOf those, who did themselves through their side wound,\n\nThou shutt’st the door, and keep’st within;\nScarce a good joy creeps through the chink:\nAnd if the braves of conqu’ring sin\nDid not excite thee, we should wholly sink.\n\nLord, though we change, thou art the same;\nThe same sweet God of love and light:\nRestore this day, for thy great name,\nUnto his ancient and miraculous right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "the-windows": { - "title": "“The Windows”", - "body": "Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?\nHe is a brittle crazy glass;\nYet in thy temple thou dost him afford\nThis glorious and transcendent place,\nTo be a window, through thy grace.\n\nBut when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,\nMaking thy life to shine within\nThe holy preachers, then the light and glory\nMore reverend grows, and more doth win;\nWhich else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.\n\nDoctrine and life, colors and light, in one\nWhen they combine and mingle, bring\nA strong regard and awe; but speech alone\nDoth vanish like a flaring thing,\nAnd in the ear, not conscience, ring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-world": { - "title": "“The World”", - "body": "Love built a stately house, where Fortune came,\nAnd spinning fancies, she was heard to say\nThat her fine cobwebs did support the frame,\nWhereas they were supported by the same;\nBut Wisdom quickly swept them all away.\n\nThe Pleasure came, who, liking not the fashion,\nBegan to make balconies, terraces,\nTill she had weakened all by alteration;\nBut reverend laws, and many a proclomation\nReformèd all at length with menaces.\n\nThen entered Sin, and with that sycamore\nWhose leaves first sheltered man from drought and dew,\nWorking and winding slily evermore,\nThe inward walls and summers cleft and tore;\nBut Grace shored these, and cut that as it grew.\n\nThen Sin combined with death in a firm band,\nTo raze the building to the very floor;\nWhich they effected,--none could them withstand;\nBut Love and Grace took Glory by the hand,\nAnd built a braver palace than before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "zbigniew-herbert": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Zbigniew Herbert", - "birth": { - "year": 1924 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1998 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Herbert", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 41 - }, - "poems": { - "about-troy": { - "title": "“About Troy”", - "body": "1.\n\nTroy O Troy\nan archeologist\nwill sift your ashes through his fingers\nyet a fire occurred greater than that of the Iliad\nfor seven strings--\n\ntoo few strings\none needs a chorus\na sea of laments\nand thunder of mountains\nrain of stone\n\n--how to lead\npeople away from the ruins\nhow to lead\nthe chorus from poems--\n\nthinks the faultless poet\nrespectably mute\nas a pillar of salt\n--The song will escape unharmed\nIt escaped\nwith flaming wing\ninto a pure sky\n\nThe moon rises over the ruins\nTroy O Troy\nThe city is silent\n\nThe poet struggles with his own shadow\nThe poet cries like a bird in the void\n\nThe moon repeats its landscape\ngentle metal in smoldering ash\n\n\n2.\n\nThey walked along ravines of former streets\nas if on a red sea of cinders\n\nand wind lifted the red dust\nfaithfully painted the sunset of the city\n\nThey walked along ravines of former streets\nthey breathed on the frozen dawn in vain\n\nthey said: long years will pass\nbefore the first house stands here\n\nthey walked along ravines of former streets\nthey thought they would find some traces\n\na cripple plays\non a harmonica\nabout the braids of a willow\nabout a girl\n\nthe poet is silent\nrain falls", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "an-answer": { - "title": "“An Answer”", - "body": "This will be a night in deep snow\nwhich has the power to muffle steps\nin deep shadow transforming\nbodies to two puddles of darkness\nwe lie holding our breath\nand even the slightest whisper of thought\n\nif we are not tracked down by wolves\nand the man in a Russian sheepskin who swings\nquick-firing death on his chest\nwe must spring and run\nin the clapping of short dry salvos\nto that other longed-for shore\n\nthe earth is the same everywhere\nwisdom teaches everywhere the man\nweeps with white tears\nmothers rock their children\nthe moon rises\nand builds a white house for us\n\nthis will be night after hard reality\na conspiracy of the imagination\nit has a taste of bread and lightness of vodka\nbut the choice to remain here\nis confirmed by every dream about palm trees\n\nthe dream is interrupted suddenly by the arrival of three\ntall men of rubber and iron\nthey will check your name your fear\norder you to go downstairs\nthey won’t allow you to take anything\nbut the compassionate face of the janitor\n\nHellenic Roman Medieval\nEast Indian Elizabethan Italian\nperhaps above all French\na bit of Weimar and Versailles\nwe carry so many homelands\non the shoulders of a single earth\n\nbut the only one guarded\nby the most singular number\nis here where they will trample you into the ground\nor with boldly ringing spade\nmake a large pit for your longing", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "architecture": { - "title": "“Architecture”", - "body": "Over a delicate arch--\nan eyebrow of stone--\n\non the unruffled forehead\nof a wall\n\nin joyful and open windows\nwhere there are faces instead of geraniums\n\nwhere rigorous rectangles\nborder a dreaming perspective\n\nwhere a stream awakened by an ornament\nflows on a quiet field of surfaces\n\nmovement meets stillness a line meets a shout\ntrembling uncertainty simple clarity\n\nyou are there\narchitecture\nart of fantasy and stone\n\nthere you reside beauty\nover an arch\nlight as a sigh\n\non a wall\npale from altitude\n\nand a window\ntearful with a pane of glass\n\na fugitive from apparent forms\nI proclaim your motionless dance", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-ardennes-forest": { - "title": "“The Ardennes Forest”", - "body": "Cup your hands to scoop up sleep\nas you would draw a grain of water\nand the forest will come: a green cloud\na birch trunk like a chord of light\nand a thousand eyelids fluttering\nwith forgotten leafy speech\nthen you will recall the white morning\nwhen you waited for the opening of the gates\n\nyou know this land is opened by a bird\nthat sleeps in a tree and the tree in the earth\nbut here is a spring of new questions\nunderfoot the currents of bad roots\nlook at the pattern on the bark where\na chord of music tightens\nthe lute player who presses the frets\nso the silent resounds\n\npush away leaves: a wild strawberry\ndew on a leaf the comb of grass\nfurther a wing of a yellow damselfly\nand an ant burying its sister\na wild pear sweetly ripens\nabove the treacheries of belladonnas\nwithout waiting for greater rewards\nsit under the tree\n\ncup your hands to draw up memory\nof the dead names dried grain\nagain the forest: a charred cloud\nforehead branded by black light\nand a thousand lids pressed\ntightly on motionless eyeballs\na tree and the air broken\nbetrayed faith of empty shelters\n\nthat other forest is for us is for you\nthe dead also ask for fairy tales\nfor a handful of herbs water of memories\ntherefore by needles by rustling\nand faint threads of fragrances--\nno matter that a branch stops you\na shadow leads you through winding passages--\nyou will find and open\nour Ardennes Forest", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-ballad-that-we-do-not-perish": { - "title": "“A Ballad That We Do Not Perish”", - "body": "Those who sailed at dawn\nbut will never return\nleft their trace on a wave--\n\na shell fell to the bottom of the sea\nbeautiful as lips turned to stone\n\nthose who walked on a sandy road\nbut could not reach the shuttered windows\nthough they already saw the roofs--\n\nthey have found shelter in a bell of air\n\nbut those who leave behind only\na room grown cold a few books\nan empty inkwell white paper--\n\nin truth they have not completely died\ntheir whisper travels through thickets of wallpaper\ntheir level head still lives in the ceiling\n\ntheir paradise was made of air\nof water lime and earth an angel of wind\nwill pulverize the body in its hand\nthey will be\ncarried over the meadows of this world", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "daedalus-and-icarus": { - "title": "“Daedalus And Icarus”", - "body": "> _Daedalus says:_\nGo on sonny but remember that you are walking and not flying\nthe wings are just an ornament and you are stepping on a meadow\nthat warm gust is just the humid earth of summer\nand that cold one is a brook\nthe sky is full of leaves and small animals\n\n\n> _Icarus says:_\nThe eyes like two stones return straight to earth\nand see a farmer who knocks asunder oily till\na grub which wiggles in a furrow\nbad grub which cuts the bond of a plant with the earth\n\n\n> _Daedalus says:_\nSonny this is not true The Cosmos is merely light\nand earth is a bowl of shadows. Look as here colors play\ndust rises from above the sea smoke rises to the sky\nof noblest atoms a rainbow sets itself now\n\n\n> _Icarus says:_\nArms hurt father from this beating at vacuum\nlegs are getting numb and miss thorns and sharp stones\nI cannot keep looking at the sun as you do father\nI sunken whole in the dark rays of the earth\n\n\n> _Description of the catastrophe:_\nNow Icarus falls down head first\nthe last frame of him is a glimpse of a heal childlike small\nbeing swallowed by the devouring sea\nUp above the father cries out the name\nwhich no longer belongs to a neck or a head\nbut only to a remembrance\n\n\n> _Commentary:_\nHe was so young did not understand that wings are just a metaphor\na bit of wax and feathers and a contempt for the laws of gravitation\nI cannot hold a body at an elevation of a great many feet\nThe essence of the matter is in having our hearts\nwhich are coursed by heavy blood\nfill with air\nand this very thing Icarus did not want to accept\n\nlet us pray", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-description-of-the-king": { - "title": "“A Description of the King”", - "body": "The king’s beard on which sauces and ovations\nfell until it became heavy as an axe\nappears suddenly in a dream to a man condemned to die\nand on a candlestick of flesh shines alone in the dark.\n\nOne hand for tearing meat is huge as a whole province\nthrough which a ploughman inches forward a corvette lingers\nThe hand wielding the sceptre has withered from distinction\nhas grown grey from old age like an ancient coin\n\nIn the hour-glass of the heart sand trickles lazily\nFeet taken off with boots stand in a corner\non guard when at night stiffening on the throne\nthe king heirlessly forfeits his third dimension", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "elegy-of-fortinbras": { - "title": "“Elegy Of Fortinbras”", - "body": "Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man\nthough you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant\nnothing but black sun with broken rays\nI could never think of your hands without smiling\nand now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests\nthey are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this\nThe hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart\nand the knight’s feet in soft slippers\n\nYou will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier\nthe only ritual I am acquainted with a little\nThere will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts\ncrepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite\nthose will be my manoeuvers before I start to rule\none has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit\n\nAnyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life\nyou believed in crystal notions not in human clay\nalways twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras\nwolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit\nyou knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe\n\nNow you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to\nand you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me\nyou chose the easier part of an elegant thrust\nbut what is heroic death compared with eternal watching\nwith a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair\nwith a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial\n\nAdieu prince I have tasks a sewer project\nand a decree on prostitutes and beggars\nI must also elaborate a better system of prisons\nsince as you justly said Denmark is a prison\nI go to my affairs This night is born\na star named Hamlet We shall never meet\nwhat I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy\n\nIt is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos\nand that water these words what can they do what can they do prince", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-emperors-dream": { - "title": "“The Emperor’s Dream”", - "body": "A crevice! shouts the Emperor in his sleep, and the canopy of ostrich plumes trembles. The soldiers who pace the corridors with unsheathed swords believe the Emperor dreams about a siege. Just now he saw a fissure in the wall and wants them to break into the fortress.\nIn fact the Emperor is now a wood-louse who scurries across the floor, seeking remnants of food. Suddenly he sees overhead an immense foot about to crush him. The Emperor hunts for a crevice in which to squeeze. The floor is smooth and slippery.\nYes. Nothing is more ordinary than the dreams of Emperors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-envoy-of-mr-cogito": { - "title": "“The Envoy of Mr Cogito”", - "body": "Go where those others went to the dark boundary\nfor the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize\ngo upright among those who are on their knees\namong those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust\nyou were saved not in order to live\nyou have little time you must give testimony\nbe courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous\nin the final account only this is important\nand let your helpless Anger be like the sea\nwhenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten\nlet you sister Scorn not leave you\nfor the informers executioners cowards--they will win\nthey will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth\nthe woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography\nand do not forgive truly it is not in your power\nto forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn\nbeware however of unnecessary pride\nkeep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror\nrepeat: I was called--weren’t there better ones than I\nbeware of dryness of heart love the morning spring\nthe bird with an unknown name the winter oak\nlight on a wall the splendour of the sky\nthey don’t need your warm breath\nthey are there to say: no one will console you\nbe vigilant--when the light on the mountains gives the sign--arise and go\nas long as blood turns in the breast your dark star\nrepeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends\nbecause this is how you will attain the good you will not attain\nrepeat great words repeat them stubbornly\nlike those crossing the desert who perished in the sand\nand they will reward you with what they have at hand\nwith the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap\ngo because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls\nto the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland\nthe defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes\nBe faithful Go", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "episode": { - "title": "“Episode”", - "body": "We walk by the sea-shore\nholding firmly in our hands\nthe two ends of an antique dialogue\n--do you love me?\n--I love you\n\nwith furrowed eyebrows\nI summarize all wisdom\nof the two testaments\nastrologers prophets\nphilosophers of the gardens\nand cloistered philosophers\n\nand it sounds about like this:\n--don’t cry\n--be brave\n--look how everybody\n\nyou pout your lips and say\n--you should be a clergyman\nand fed up you walk off\nnobody loves moralists\n\nwhat should I say on the shore of\na small dead sea\n\nslowly the water fills\nthe shapes of feet which have vanished", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-fable-about-a-nail": { - "title": "“The Fable About A Nail”", - "body": "For lack of a nail the kingdom has fallen\n--according to the wisdom of nursery schools--but in our kingdom\nthere have been no nails for a long time there aren’t and won’t be\neither the small ones for hanging a picture\non a wall or large ones for closing a coffin\n\nbut despite this or maybe because of it\nthe kingdom persists and is even admired by others\nhow can one live without a nail paper or string\nbricks oxygen freedom and whatever else\nobviously one can since the kingdom lasts and lasts\n\npeople live in homes in our country not in caves\nfactories smoke on the steppe a train runs through the tundra\nand a ship bleats on the cold ocean\nthere is an army and police an official seal hymn and flag\nin appearance everything like anywhere in the world\n\nbut only in appearance for our kingdom\nis not a creation of nature or a human creation\nseemingly permanent built on the bones of mammoths\nin reality it is weak as if brought to a stop\nbetween act and thought being and nonbeing\n\nwhat is real--a leaf and a stone--falls\nbut spectres live long obstinately despite\nthe rising and setting of the sun revolutions of heavenly bodies\non the shamed earth fall the tears of objects", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "from-mythology": { - "title": "“From Mythology”", - "body": "First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared with blood. Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many gods with wives, children, creaking beds, and harmlessly exploding thunderbolts. At the end only superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time.\nThen came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "from-the-top-of-the-stairs": { - "title": "“From The Top Of The Stairs”", - "body": "Of course\nthose who are standing at the top of the stairs\nknow\nthey know everything\n\nwith us it’s different\nsweepers of squares\nhostages of a better future\nthose at the top of the stairs\nappear to us rarely\nwith a hushing finger always at the mouth\n\nwe are patient\nour wives darn the sunday shirts\nwe talk of food rations\nsoccer prices of shoes\nwhile on saturday we tilt the head backward\nand drink\n\nwe aren’t those\nwho clench their fists\nbrandish chains\ntalk and ask questions\nin a fever of excitement\nurging to rebel\nincessantly talking and asking questions\n\nhere is their fairy tale--\nwe will dash at the stairs\nand capture them by storm\nthe heads of those who were standing at the top\nwill roll down the stairs\nand at last we will gaze\nat what can be seen from those heights\nwhat future\nwhat emptiness\n\nwe don’t desire the view\nof rolling heads\nwe know how easily heads grow back\nand at the top there will always remain\none or three\nwhile at the bottom it is black from brooms and shovels\n\nsometimes we dream\nthose at the top of the stairs\ncome down\nthat is to us\nand as we are chewing bread over the newspaper\nthey say\n\n--now let’s talk\nman to man\nwhat the posters shout out isn’t true\nwe carry the truth in tightly locked lips\nit is cruel and much too heavy\nso we bear the burden by ourselves\nwe aren’t happy\nwe would gladly stay\nhere\n\nthese are dreams of course\nthey can come true\nor not come true\nso we will\ncontinue to cultivate\nour square of dirt\nsquare of stone\n\nwith a light head\na cigarette behind the ear\nand not a drop of hope in the heart", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-halt": { - "title": "“A Halt”", - "body": "We halted in a town the host\nordered the table to be moved to the garden the first star\nshone out and faded we were breaking bread\ncrickets were heard in the twilight loosestrife\na cry but a cry of a child otherwise the bustle\nof insects of men a thick scent of earth\nthose who were sitting with their backs to the wall\nsaw violet now--the gallows hill\non the wall the dense ivy of executions\n\nwe were eating much\nas is usual when nobody pays", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "home": { - "title": "“Home”", - "body": "A home above the year’s seasons\nhome of children animals and apples\na square of empty space\nunder an absent star\n\nhome was the telescope of childhood\nthe skin of emotion\na sister’s cheek\nbranch of a tree\n\nthe cheek was extinguished by flame\nthe branch crossed out by a shell\nover the powdery ash of the nest\na song of homeless infantry\n\nhome is the die of emotion\nhome is the cube of childhood\n\nthe wing of a burned sister\n\nleaf of a dead tree", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "how-we-were-introduced": { - "title": "“How We Were Introduced”", - "body": "_--for perfidious protectors_\n\nI was playing in the street\nno one paid attention to me\nas I made forms out of sand\nmumbling Rimbaud under my breath\n\nonce an elderly gentleman overheard it\n--little boy you are a poet\njust now we are organizing\na grass-roots literary movement\n\nhe stroked my dirty head\ngave me a large lollypop\nand even bought clothes\nin the protective coloring of youth\n\nI didn’t have such a splendid suit\nsince first communion\nshort trousers and a wide\nsailor’s collar\n\nblack patent leather shoes with a buckle\nwhite knee-high socks\nthe elderly gentleman took me by the hand\nand led the way to the ball\n\nother boys were there\nalso in short trousers\ncarefully shaven\nshuffling their feet\n\n--well boys now it’s time to play\nwhy are you standing in the corners\nasked the elderly gentleman\n--make a circle holding hands\n\nbut we didn’t want tag\nor blindman’s buff\nwe had enough of the elderly gentleman\nwe were very hungry\n\nso we were seated promptly\naround a large table\ngiven lemonade\nand pieces of cake\n\nnow disguised as adults\nwith deep voices\nthe boys got up they praised us\nor slapped us on our hands\n\nwe didn’t hear anything\ndidn’t feel anything\nstaring with great eyes\nat the piece of cake\nthat kept melting\nin our hot hands\nand this sweet taste the first in our lives\ndisappeared inside our dark sleeves", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "i-would-like-to-describe": { - "title": "“I would like to describe …”", - "body": "I would like to describe the simplest emotion\njoy or sadness\nbut not as others do\nreaching for shafts of rain or sun\n\nI would like to describe a light\nwhich is being born in me\nbut I know it does not resemble\nany star\nfor it is not so bright\nnot so pure\nand is uncertain\n\nI would like to describe courage\nwithout dragging behind me a dusty lion\nand also anxiety\nwithout shaking a glass full of water\n\nto put it another way\nI would give all metaphors\nin return for one word\ndrawn out of my breast like a rib\nfor one word\ncontained within the boundaries\nof my skin\n\nbut apparently this is not possible\n\nand just to say--I love\nI run around like mad\npicking up handfuls of birds\nand my tenderness\nwhich after all is not made of water\nasks the water for a face\n\nand anger\ndifferent from fire\nborrows from it\na loquacious tongue\n\nso is blurred\nso is blurred\nin me\nwhat white-haired gentleman\nseparated once and for all\nand said\nthis in the subject\nthis is the object\n\nwe fall asleep\nwith one hand under our head\nand with the other in a mound of planets\n\nour feet abandon us\nand taste the earth\nwith their tiny roots\nwhich next morning\nwe tear out painfully", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "in-a-city": { - "title": "“In A City”", - "body": "In an eastern city where I won’t return\nthere is a winged stone light and huge\nlightning strikes this winged stone\nI close my eyes to remember\nin my city where I won’t return\nthere is heavy and nourishing water\nthe one who gives you a cup of this water\ngives you the faith you will still return\nin my faraway city that has gone\nfrom all maps of the world there is bread that can nourish\nthroughout life black as the faith you will see again\nstone bread water and the presence of towers at dawn", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-knocker": { - "title": "“A Knocker”", - "body": "There are those who grow\ngardens in their heads\npaths lead from their hair\nto sunny and white cities\n\nit’s easy for them to write\nthey close their eyes\nimmediately schools of images\nstream down their foreheads\n\nmy imagination\nis a piece of board\nmy sole instrument\nis a wooden stick\n\nI strike the board\nit answer me\nyes--yes\nno--no\n\nfor others the green bell of a tree\nthe blue bell of water\nI have a knocker\nfrom unprotected gardens\n\nI thump on the board\nand it prompts me\nwith the moralists dry poem\nyes--yes\nno--no", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "lament": { - "title": "“Lament”", - "body": "And now she has over her head brown clouds of roots\na slim lily of salt on the temples beads of sand\nwhile she sails on the bottle of a boat through foaming nebulas\n\nA mile beyond us where the river turns\nvisible-invisible as the light on a wave\ntruly she isn’t differen--abandoned like all of us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-last-attack": { - "title": "“The Last Attack”", - "body": "Permit me to open by expressing joy and wonder\nthat we’re marching at the head of our companies\nin different uniforms under a different command\nbut with a single aim--to survive\n\nYou say to me--look here we should probably let\nthese boys go home to their Margot to their Kasia\nwar is beautiful only in parades\nbut apart from that as we know--mud and blood and rats\n\nAs you speak comes an avalanche of artillery fire\nit’s that bastard Parkinson who is taking so long\nhe caught up with us at last when we took a walk\non an irregular route our collars loose at the chin\nour hands in our pockets we were on leave already\nwhen Parkinson suddenly reminded us that it was\nnot the end yet that this blasted war isn’t over yet", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-monster-of-mr-cogito": { - "title": "“The Monster of Mr Cogito”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nLucky Saint George\nfrom his knight’s saddle\ncould exactly evaluate\nthe strength and movements of the dragon\n\nthe first principle of strategy\nis to assess the enemy accurately\n\nMr Cogito\nis in a worse position\nhe sits in the low\nsaddle of a valley\ncovered with thick fog\n\nthrough fog it is impossible to perceive\nfiery eyes\ngreedy claws\njaws\n\nthrough fog\none sees only\nthe shimmering of nothingness\n\nthe monster of Mr Cogito\nhas no measurements\nit is difficult to describe\nescapes definition\n\nit is like an immense depression\nspread out over the country\n\nit can’t be pierced\nwith a pen\n\nwith an argument\nor spear\n\nwere it not for its suffocating weight\nand the death it sends down\none would think\nit is the hallucination\nof a sick imagination\n but it exists\nfor certain it exists\n\nlike carbon monoxide it fills\nhouses temples markets\n\npoisons wells\ndestroys the structures of the mind\ncovers bread with mould\n\nthe proof of the existence of the monster\nis its victims\n\nit is not direct proof\nbut sufficient\n\n\n# 2.\n\nreasonable people say\nwe can live together\nwith the monster\n\nwe only have to avoid\nsudden movements\nsudden speech\n\nif there is a threat assume\nthe form of a rock or a leaf\n\nlisten to wise Nature\nrecommending mimicry\n\nthat we breathe shallowly\npretend we aren’t there\n\n\nMr Cogito however\ndoes not want a life of make-believe\nhe would like to fight\nwith the monster\non firm ground\n\nso he walks out at dawn\ninto a sleepy suburb\ncarefully equipped\nwith a long sharp object\n\nhe calls to the monster\non the empty streets\nhe offends the monster\nprovokes the monster\n\nlike a bold skirmisher\nof an army that doesn’t exist\n\nhe calls--\ncome out contemptible coward\n\nthrough the fog\none sees only\nthe huge snout of nothingness\n\nMr Cogito wants to enter\nthe uneven battle\nit ought to happen\npossibly soon\n\nbefore there is\na fall from inertia\nan ordinary death without glory\nsuffocation from formlessness", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "mr-cogito-and-the-imagination": { - "title": "“Mr Cogito And The Imagination”", - "body": "1.\n\nMr Cogito never trusted\ntricks of the imagination\n\nthe piano at the top of the Alps\nplayed false concerts for him\n\nhe didn’t appreciate labyrinths\nthe Sphinx filled him with loathing\n\nhe lived in a house with no basement\nwithout mirrors or dialectics\n\njungles of tangled images\nwere not his home\n\nhe would rarely soar\non the wings of a metaphor\nand then he fell like Icarus\ninto the embrace of the Great Mother\n\nhe adored tautologies\nexplanations\nidem per idem\n\nthat a bird is a bird\nslavery means slavery\na knife is a knife\ndeath remains death\n\nhe loved\nthe flat horizon\na straight line\nthe gravity of the earth\n\n\n2.\n\nMr Cogito will be numbered\namong the species minores\n\nhe will accept indifferently the verdict\nof future scholars of the letter\n\nhe used the imagination\nfor entirely different purposes\n\nhe wanted to make it\nan instrument of compassion\n\nhe wanted to understand to the very end\n\n--Pascal’s night\n--the nature of a diamond\n--the melancholy of the prophets\n--Achilles’ wrath\n--the madness of those who kill\n--the dreams of Mary Stuart\n--Neanderthal fear\n--the despair of the last Aztecs\n--Nietzsche’s long death throes\n--the joy of the painter of Lascaux\n--the rise and fall of an oak\n--the rise and fall of Rome\n\nand so to bring the dead back to life\nto preserve the covenant\n\nMr Cogito’s imagination\nhas the motion of a pendulum\n\nit crosses with precision\nfrom suffering to suffering\n\nthere is no place in it\nfor the artificial fires of poetry\n\nhe would like to remain faithful\nto uncertain clarity", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "nothing-special": { - "title": "“Nothing Special”", - "body": "nothing special\nboards paint\nnails paste\npaper string\n\nmr artist\nbuilds a world\nnot from atoms\nbut from remnants\n\nforest of arden\nfrom umbrella\nionian sea\nfrom parkers quink\n\njust as long as\nhis look is wise\njust as long as\nhis hand is sure--\n\nand presto the world--\n\nhooks of flowers\non needles of grass\nclouds of wire\ndrawn out by the wind", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "objects": { - "title": "“Objects”", - "body": "Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "our-fear": { - "title": "“Our Fear”", - "body": "Our fear\ndoes not wear a night shirt\ndoes not have owl’s eyes\ndoes not lift a casket lid\ndoes not extinguish a candle\n\ndoes not have a dead man’s face either\n\nour fear\nis a scrap of paper\nfound in a pocket\n“warn Wójcik\nthe place on Dluga Street is hot”\n\nour fear\ndoes not rise on the wings of the tempest\ndoes not sit on a church tower\nit is down-to-earth\n\nit has the shape\nof a bundle made in haste\nwith warm clothing\nprovisions\nand arms\n\nour fear\ndoes not have the face of a dead man\nthe dead are gentle to us\nwe carry them on our shoulders\nsleep under the same blanket\n\nclose their eyes\nadjust their lips\npick a dry spot\nand bury them\n\nnot too deep\nnot too shallow", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "pebble": { - "title": "“Pebble”", - "body": "The pebble\nis a perfect creature\nequal to itself\nmindful of its limits\nfilled exactly\nwith a pebbly meaning\nwith a scent that does not remind one of anything\ndoes not frighten anything away does not arouse desire\nits ardour and coldness\nare just and full of dignity\nI feel a heavy remorse\nwhen I hold it in my hand\nand its noble body\nis permeated by false warmth\n--Pebbles cannot be tamed\nto the end they will look at us\nwith a calm and very clear eye", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Peter Dale Scott & Czesław Miłosz" - } - }, - "the-power-of-taste": { - "title": "“The Power Of Taste”", - "body": "It didn’t require great character at all\nour refusal disagreement and resistance\nwe had a shred of necessary courage\nbut fundamentally it was a matter of taste\n Yes taste\nin which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience\n\nWho knows if we had been better and more attractively tempted\nsent rose-skinned women thin as a wafer\nor fantastic creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch\nbut what kind of hell was there at this time\na wet pit the murderers’ alley the barrack\ncalled a palace of justice\na home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket\nsent Aurora’s grandchildren out into the field\nboys with potato faces\nvery ugly girls with red hands\n\nVerily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking\n(Marcus Tullius kept turning in his grave)\nchains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flails\nthe dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoning\nsyntax deprived of beauty of the subjunctive\n\nSo aesthetics can be helpful in life\none should not neglect the study of beauty\n\nBefore we declare our consent we must carefully examine\nthe shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes\nofficial colors the despicable ritual of funerals\n\n Our eyes and ears refused obedience\n the princes of our senses proudly chose exile\n\nIt did not require great character at all\nwe had a shred of necessary courage\nbut fundamentally it was a matter of taste\n Yes taste\nthat commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer\neven if for this the precious capital of the body the head\n must fall", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "prayer-of-pan-cogito": { - "title": "“Prayer of Pan Cogito”", - "body": "Lord\nThank you for creating the world beautiful and of such variety\nAnd also for allowing me in your inexhaustible goodness\nTo visit places which were not the scene of my daily torments\n\n--for lying at night near a well in a square in Tarquinia while the swaying\nbronze declared from the tower your wrath and forgiveness\n\nand a little donkey on the island of Corcyra sang to mi from\nits incredible bellowing lungs the landscape’s melancholy\n\nand in the very ugly city of Manchester I came across\nvery good and sensible people\n\nnature reiterated her wise tautologies the forest was\nforest the sea was sea and rock was rock\n\nstars orbited and things were as they should be--Jovis omnia plena\n\n--forgive me thinking only of myself when the life of\nothers cruel and irreversible turned round me like the huge\nastrological clock in the church at Beauvais\n\nfor being too cowardly and stupid because I did not understand\nso many things\n\nand also forgive me for not fighting for the happiness of\npoor and vanquished nations and for seeing only moonrise and museums\n--thank you for the works created to glorify you which\nhave shared with me part of there mystery so that in gross conceit\n\nI concluded that Duccio Van Eyck Bellini painted for me too\n\nand likewise the Acropolis which I had never fully understood\npatiently revealed to me its mutilated flesh\n\n--I pray that you do not forget to reward the white-haired old\nman who brought me fruit from his garden in the bay of the island of Ithaca\n\nand also the teacher Miss Hellen on the isle of Mull whose\nhospitality was Greek or Christian and who ordered light\nto be placed in the window facing Holy Iona so that human\nlights might greet one another\n\nand furthermore all those who had shown me the way and said\nkato kyrie kato\n\nand that you should have in your care the Mother from Spoleto\nSpiridion from Paxos and the good student from Berlin who\ngot me out of a tight spot and later, when I unexpectedly\nran into him in Arizona, drove me to Grand Canyon which\nis like a hundred thousand cathedrals standing on their heads\n\n--grant O Lord that I may forget my foolish and very weary\npersecutors when the sun sets into the vast uncharted\nIonian sea\n\nthat I may comprehend other men other tongues other suffering\nand that I be not stubborn because my limitations are\nwithout limits\n\nand above all that I be humble, that is, one who sees\none who drinks at the spring\n\nthank you O Lord for creating a world very beautiful and varied\n\nand if this is Your temptation I am tempted for ever\nand without forgiveness", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-rain": { - "title": "“The Rain”", - "body": "When my older brother\ncame back from war\nhe had on his forehead a little silver star\nand under the star\nan abyss\n\na splinter of shrapnel\nhit him at Verdun\nor perhaps at Grünwald\n(he’d forgotten the details)\n\nhe used to talk much\nin many languages\nbut he liked most of all\nthe language of history\n\nuntil losing breath\nhe commanded his dead pals to run\nRoland Kowaski Hannibal\n\nhe shouted\nthat this was the last crusade\nthat Carthage soon would fall\nand then sobbing confessed\nthat Napoleon did not like him\n\nwe looked at him\ngetting paler and paler\nabandoned by his senses\nhe turned slowly into a monument\n\ninto musical shells of ears\nentered a stone forest\nand the skin of his face\nwas secured\nwith the blind dry\nbuttons of eyes\n\nnothing was left him\nbut touch\n\nwhat stories\nhe told with his hands\nin the right he had romances\nin the left soldier’s memories\n\nthey took my brother\nand carried him out of town\nhe returns every fall\nslim and very quiet\nhe does not want to come in\nhe knocks at the window for me\n\nwe walk together in the streets\nand he recites to me\nimprobable tales\ntouching my face\nwith blind fingers of rain", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "report-from-paradise": { - "title": "“Report From Paradise”", - "body": "In paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours\nsalaries are higher prices steadily go down\nmanual labour is not tiring (because of reduced gravity)\nchopping wood is no harder than typing\nthe social system is stable and the rulers are wise\nreally in paradise one is better off than in whatever country\n\nAt first it was to have been different\nluminous circles choirs and degrees of abstraction\nbut they were not able to separate exactly\nthe soul from the flesh and so it would come here\nwith a drop of fat a thread of muscle\nit was necessary to face the consequences\nto mix a grain of the absolute with a grain of clay\none more departure from doctrine the last departure\nonly John foresaw it: you will be resurrected in the flesh\n\nnot many behold God\nhe is only for those of 100 per cent pneuma\nthe rest listen to communiqués about miracles and floods\nsome day God will be seen by all\nwhen it will happen nobody knows\n\nAs it is now every Saturday at noon\nsirens sweetly bellow\nand from the factories go the heavenly proletarians\nawkwardly under their arms they carry their wings like violins", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "report-from-the-besieged-city": { - "title": "“Report from the Besieged City”", - "body": "Too old to carry arms and fight like the others--\n\nthey graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler\nI record--I don’t know for whom--the history of the siege\n\nI am supposed to be exact but I don’t know when the invasion began\ntwo hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn\neveryone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time\n\nall we have left is the place the attachment to the place\nwe still rule over the ruins of temples spectres of gardens and houses\nif we lose the ruins nothing will be left\n\nI write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks\nmonday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency\ntuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants\nwednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy has imprisoned our messengers\nwe don’t know where they are held that is the place of torture\nthursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected\nthe motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender\nfriday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender\nN.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back\nan attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance\n\nall of this is monotonous I know it can’t move anyone\n\nI avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts\nonly they it seems are appreciated in foreign markets\nyet with a certain pride I would like to inform the world\nthat thanks to the war we have raised a new species of children\nour children don’t like fairy tales they play at killing\nawake and asleep they dream of soup of bread and bones\njust like dogs and cats\n\nin the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the city\nalong the frontier of our uncertain freedom.\nI look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights\nI listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks\ntruly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself\nthe siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns\nnothing unites them except the desire for our extermination\nGoths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the Transfiguration\nwho can count them\nthe colours of their banners change like the forest on the horizon\nfrom delicate bird’s yellow in spring through green through red to winter’s black\n\nand so in the evening released from facts I can think\nabout distant ancient matters for example our\nfriends beyond the sea I know they sincerely sympathize\nthey send us flour lard sacks of comfort and good advice\nthey don’t even know their fathers betrayed us\nour former allies at the time of the second Apocalypse\ntheir sons are blameless they deserve our gratitude therefore we are grateful\nthey have not experienced a siege as long as eternity\nthose struck by misfortune are always alone\nthe defenders of the Dalai Lama the Kurds the Afghan mountaineers\n\nnow as I write these words the advocates of conciliation\nhave won the upper hand over the party of inflexibles\na normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance\n\ncemeteries grow larger the number of defenders is smaller\nyet the defence continues it will continue to the end\nand if the City falls but a single man escapes\nhe will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile\nhe will be the City\n\nwe look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death\nworst of all--the face of betrayal\nand only our dreams have not been humiliated", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-return-of-the-proconsul": { - "title": "“The Return of the Proconsul”", - "body": "I’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court\nonce more I shall see if it’s possible to live there\nI could stay here in this remote province\nunder the full sweet leaves of sycamores\nunder the rule of sickly nepotists\n\nwhen I return I don’t intend to commend myself\nI shall applaud in measured portions\nsmile in ounces frown discreetly\nfor that they will not give me a golden chain\nthis iron one will suffice\n\nI’ve decided to return tomorrow or the next day\nI cannot live among vineyards nothing here is mine\ntrees have no roots houses no foundations the rain is glassy flowers smell of wax\na dry cloud rattles against the empty sky\nso I shall return tomorrow the next day in any case I shall return\n\nI must come to terms with my face again\nwith my lower lip so it knows how to check scorn\nwith my eyes so they remain ideally empty\nand with that miserable chin the hare of my face\nwhich trembles when the chief of guards walks in\n\nof one thing I am sure I will not drink wine with him\nwhen he brings his goblet nearer I will lower my eyes\nand pretend I’m picking bits of food from between my teeth\nbesides the emperor likes courage of convictions\nto a certain extent to a certain reasonable extent\nhe is after all a man like everyone\nand already tired by all those tricks with poison\nhe cannot drink his fill incessant chess\nthis left cup is for Drusus from the right one pretend to sip\nthen drink only water never lose sight of Tacitus\n\ntake a walk in the garden and return when the corpse has been removed\nI’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court\nI really hope that things will work out somehow", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-russian-tale": { - "title": "“A Russian Tale”", - "body": "The tsar our little father had grown old, very old. Now he could not even strangle a dove with his own hands. Sitting on his throne he was golden and frigid. Only his beard grew, down to the floor and farther.\n\nThen someone else ruled, it was not known who. Curious folk peeped into the palace windows but Krivonosov screened the windows with gibbets. Thus only the hanged saw anything.\n\nIn the end the tsar our little father died for good. The bells rang and rang, yet they did not bring his body out. Our tsar had grown into the throne. The legs of the throne had become all mixed up with the legs of the tsar. His arm and the armrest were one. It was impossible to tear him loose. And to bury the tsar along with the golden throne--what a shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "three-poems-by-heart": { - "title": "“Three Poems by Heart”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI can’t find the title\nof a memory about you\nwith a hand torn from darkness\nI step on fragments of faces\n\nsoft friendly profiles\nfrozen into a hard contour\n\ncircling above my head\nempty as a forehead of air\na man’s silhouette of black paper\n\n\n# II.\n\nliving--despite\nliving--against\nI reproach myself for the sin of forgetfulness\n\nyou left an embrace like a superfluous sweater\na look like a question\n\nour hands won’t transmit the shape of your hands\nwe squander them touching ordinary things\n\ncalm as a mirror\nnot mildewed with breath\nthe eyes will send back the question\n\nevery day I renew my sight\nevery day my touch grows\ntickled by the proximity of so many things\n\nlife bubbles over like blood\nShadows gently melt\nlet us not allow the dead to be killed--\n\nperhaps a cloud will transmit remembrance--\na worn profile of Roman coins\n\n\n# III.\n\nthe women on our street\nwere plain and good\nthey patiently carried from the markets\nbouquets of nourishing vegetables\n\nthe children on our street\nscourge of cats\n\nthe pigeons--\n\nsoftly gray\n\na Poet’s statue was in the park\nchildren would roll their hoops\nand colorful shouts\nbirds sat on the Poet’s hand\nread his silence\n\non summer evenings wives\nwaited patiently for lips\nsmelling of familiar tobacco\n\nwomen could not answer\ntheir children: will he return\nwhen the city was setting\nthey put the fire out with hands\npressing their eyes\n\nthe children on our street\nhad a difficult death\npigeons fell lightly\nlike shot down air\n\nnow the lips of the Poet\nform an empty horizon\nbirds children and wives cannot live\nin the city’s funereal shells\nin cold eiderdowns of ashes\n\nthe city stands over water\nsmooth as the memory of a mirror\nit reflects in the water from the bottom\n\nand flies to a high star\nwhere a distant fire is burning\nlike a page of the Iliad", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "to-my-bones": { - "title": "“To My Bones”", - "body": "In my sleep it rips through\nmy meagre skin\nthrows off the red bandage of the flesh\nand goes strolling through the room\nmy monument a little incomplete\n\none can be prodigal\nwith tears and blood\nwhat will endure here the longest\nmust be thoughtfully provided for\n\nbetter (than with a priest’s dry finger\nto the rains which drip from a cloud of sand)\nto give one’s monument to the academey\n\nthey will prop it up in a glass display case\nand in Latin they will pray before\nthe little altar made from an os frontalis\n\nthey will reckon the bones and surfaces\nthey will not forget not overlook\n\nhappily I will give my color of eyes\npattern of nails and curve of eyelids\nI the perfectly objective\nmade from white crystals of anatomy\n\ncan for thoughts\nheart cage\nbony pile\nand two shins\n\nyou my little monument not quite complete", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-tongue": { - "title": "“The Tongue”", - "body": "Inadvertently I passed the border of her teeth and swallowed\nher agile tongue. It lives inside me now, like a Japanese fish. It\nbrushes against my heart and my diaphragm as if against the walls\nof an aquarium. It stirs silt from the bottom.\nShe whom I deprived of a voice stares at me with big eyes\nand waits for a word.\nYet I do not know which tongue to use when speaking to\nher--the stolen one or the one which melts in my mouth from an\nexcess of heavy goodness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-trial": { - "title": "“The Trial”", - "body": "During his great speech the prosecutor\nkept piercing me with his yellow index finger\nI’m afraid I didn’t appear self-assured\nunintentionally I put on a mask of fear and depravity\nlike a rat caught in a trap an informer a fratricide\nthe reporters were dancing a war dance\nslowly I burned at a stake of magnesia\n\nall of this took place in a small stifling room\nthe floor creaked plaster fell from the ceiling\nI counted knots in the boards holes in the wall faces\nthe faces were alike almost identical\npolicemen the tribunal witnesses the audience\nthey belonged to the party of those without any pity\nand even my defender smiling pleasantly\nwas an honorary member of the firing squad\n\nin the first row sat an old fat woman\ndressed up as my mother with a theatrical gesture she raised\na handkerchief to her dirty eyes but didn’t cry\nit must have lasted a long time I don’t know even how long\nthe red blood of the sunset was rising in the gowns of the judges\n\nthe real trial went on in my cells\nthey certainly knew the verdict earlier\nafter a short rebellion they capitulated and started to die one after the other\nI looked in amazement at my wax fingers\n\nI didn’t speak the last word and yet\nfor so many years I was composing the final speech\nto God to the court of the world to the conscience\nto the dead rather than the living\nroused to my feet by the guards\nI managed only to blink and then\nthe room burst out in healthy laughter\nmy adoptive mother laughed also\nthe gavel banged and this really was the end\n\nbut what happened after that--death by a noose\nor perhaps a punishment generously chained to a dungeon\nI’m afraid there is a third dark solution\nbeyond the limits of time the senses and reason\n\ntherefore when I wake I don’t open my eyes\nI clench my fingers don’t lift my head\nbreathe lightly because truly I don’t know\nhow many minutes of air I still have left", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "wasp": { - "title": "“Wasp”", - "body": "When the honey, fruit and flowery tablecloth were whisked from the table in one sweep, it flew of with a start. Entangled in the suffocating smoke of the curtains, it buzzed for a long time. At last it reached the window. It beat its weakening body repeatedly against the cold, solid air of the pane. In the last flutter of its wings drowsed the faith that the body’s unrest can awaken a wind carrying us to longed-for worlds.\nYou who stood under the window of your beloved, who saw your happiness in a shop window--do you know how to take away the sting of this death?", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "what-our-dead-do": { - "title": "“What Our Dead Do”", - "body": "Jan came this morning\n--I dreamt of my father\nhe says\n\nhe was riding in an oak coffin\nI walked next to the hearse\nand father turned to me:\n\nyou dressed me nicely\nand the funeral is very beautiful\nat this time of year so many flowers\nit must have cost a lot\n\ndon’t worry about it father\n--I say--let people see\nwe loved you\nthat we spared nothing\n\n six men in black livery\n walk nicely at our sides\n\nfather thought for a while\nand said--the key to the desk\nis in the silver inkwell\nthere is still some money\nin the second drawer on the left\n\nwith this money--I say--\nwe will buy you a gravestone\na large one of black marble\n\nit isn’t necessary--says father--\nbetter give it to the poor\n\n six men in black livery\n walk nicely at our sides\n they carry burning lanterns\n\nagain he seemed to be thinking\n--take care of the flowers in the garden\ncover them for the winter\nI don’t want them to be wasted\n\nyou are the oldest--he says--\nfrom a little felt bag behind the painting\ntake out the cuff links with real pearls\nlet them bring you luck\nmy mother gave them to me\nwhen I finished high school\nthen he didn’t say anything\nhe must have entered a deeper sleep\n\nthis is how our dead\nlook after us\nthey warn us through dreams\nbring back lost money\nhunt for jobs\nwhisper the numbers of lottery tickets\nor when they can’t do this\nknock with their fingers on the windows\n\nand out of gratitude\nwe imagine immortality for them\nsnug as the burrow of a mouse", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-herrick": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Herrick", - "birth": { - "year": 1591 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1674 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Herrick_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "his-prayer-for-absolution": { - "title": "“His Prayer for Absolution”", - "body": "For those my unbaptized rhymes,\nWrit in my wild unhallowed times,\nFor every sentence, clause, and word,\nThat’s not inlaid with Thee, my Lord,\nForgive me, God, and blot each line\nOut of my book, that is not Thine.\nBut if, ’mongst all, Thou find’st here one\nWorthy thy benediction,\nThat one of all the rest shall be\nThe glory of my work, and me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "night-piece": { - "title": "“Night Piece”", - "body": "Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee,\nThe shooting stars attend thee;\nAnd the elves also,\nWhose little eyes glow\nLike the sparks of fire, befriend thee.\n\nNo Will-o’-th’-Wisp mis-light thee,\nNor snake or slow-worm bite thee;\nBut on, on thy way,\nNot making a stay,\nSince ghost there’s none to affright thee.\n\nLet not the dark thee cumber;\nWhat though the moon does slumber?\nThe stars of the night\nWill lend thee their light,\nLike tapers clear without number.\n\nThen Julia let me woo thee,\nThus, thus to come unto me;\nAnd when I shall meet\nThy silv’ry feet,\nMy soul I’ll pour into thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-thanksgiving-to-god": { - "title": "“A Thanksgiving to God”", - "body": "Lord, Thou hast given me a cell\n Wherein to dwell,\nA little house, whose humble roof\n Is weather-proof:\nUnder the spars of which I lie\n Both soft, and dry;\nWhere Thou my chamber for to ward\n Hast set a guard\nOf harmless thoughts, to watch and keep\n Me, while I sleep.\nLow is my porch, as is my fate,\n Both void of state;\nAnd yet the threshold of my door\n Is worn by th’ poor,\nWho thither come and freely get\n Good words, or meat.\nLike as my parlour, so my hall\n And kitchen’s small;\nA little buttery, and therein\n A little bin,\nWhich keeps my little loaf of bread\n Unchipp’d, unflead;\nSome brittle sticks of thorn or briar\n Make me a fire,\nClose by whose living coal I sit,\n And glow like it.\nLord, I confess too, when I dine,\n The pulse is Thine,\nAnd all those other bits, that be\n There plac’d by Thee;\nThe worts, the purslain, and the mess\n Of water-cress,\nWhich of Thy kindness Thou hast sent;\n And my content\nMakes those, and my beloved beet,\n To be more sweet.\n’Tis Thou that crown’st my glittering hearth\n With guiltless mirth;\nAnd giv’st me wassail-bowls to drink,\n Spic’d to the brink.\nLord, ’tis Thy plenty-dropping hand\n That soils my land;\nAnd giv’st me, for my bushel sown,\n Twice ten for one;\nThou mak’st my teeming hen to lay\n Her egg each day;\nBesides my healthful ewes to bear\n Me twins each year;\nThe while the conduits of my kine\n Run cream, for wine.\nAll these, and better, Thou dost send\n Me, to this end,\nThat I should render, for my part,\n A thankful heart,\nWhich, fir’d with incense, I resign,\n As wholly Thine;\nBut the acceptance, that must be,\n My Christ, by Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "to-find-god": { - "title": "“To Find God”", - "body": "Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find\nA way to measure out the wind?\nDistinguish all those floods that are\nMixed in that wat’ry theater,\nAnd taste thou them as saltless there,\nAs in their channel first they were.\nTell me the people that do keep\nWithin the kingdoms of the deep;\nOr fetch me back that cloud again,\nBeshivered into seeds of rain.\nTell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears\nOf corn, when summer shakes his ears;\nShow me that world of stars, and whence\nThey noiseless spill their influence.\nThis if thou canst; then show me Him\nThat rides the glorious cherubim.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-the-virgins-to-make-much-of-time": { - "title": "“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”", - "body": "Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,\nOld Time is still a-flying:\nAnd this same flower that smiles to day,\nTo morrow will be dying.\n\nThe glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,\nThe higher he’s a getting;\nThe sooner will his Race be run,\nAnd neerer he’s to Setting.\n\nThat Age is best, which is the first,\nWhen Youth and Blood are warmer;\nBut being spent, the worse, and worst\nTimes, still succeed the former.\n\nThen be not coy, but use your time;\nAnd while ye may, go marry:\nFor having lost but once your prime,\nYou may forever tarry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "hermann-hesse": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Hermann Hesse", - "birth": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german+swiss", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪 🇨🇭", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Hesse", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "german", - "swiss" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "across-the-fields": { - "title": "“Across the Fields”", - "body": "Across the sky, the clouds move,\nAcross the fields, the wind,\nAcross the fields the lost child\nOf my mother wanders.\n\nAcross the street, leaves blow,\nAcross the trees, birds cry--\nAcross the mountains, far away,\nMy home must be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "at-night-on-the-high-seas": { - "title": "“At Night on the High Seas”", - "body": "At night, when the sea cradles me\nAnd the pale star gleam\nLies down on its broad waves,\nThen I free myself wholly\nFrom all activity and all the love\nAnd stand silent and breathe purely,\nAlone, alone cradled by the sea\nThat lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.\nThen I have to think of my friends\nAnd my gaze sinks into their gazes\nAnd I ask each one, silent, alone:\n“Are you still mine\nIs my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?\nDo you feel from my love, my grief,\nJust a breath, just an echo?”\nAnd the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,\nAnd smiles: no.\nAnd no greeting and now answer comes from anywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "elizabeth": { - "title": "“Elizabeth”", - "body": "I should tell you a story,\nThe night is already so late-\nDo you want to torment me,\nLovely Elizabeth?\n\nI write poems about that,\nJust as you do;\nAnd the entire history of my love\nIs you and this evening.\n\nYou mustn’t be troublesome,\nAnd blow these poems away,\nSoon you will listen to them,\nListen, and not understand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "evil-time": { - "title": "“Evil Time”", - "body": "Now we are silent\nAnd sing no songs any more,\nOur pace grows heavy;\nThis is the night, that was bound to come.\n\nGive me your hand,\nPerhaps we still have a long way to go.\nIt’s snowing, it’s snowing.\nWinter is a hard thing in a strange country.\n\nWhere is the time\nWhen a light, a hearth burned for us?\nGive me your hand!\nPerhaps we still have a long way to go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "how-heavy-the-days-are": { - "title": "“How Heavy the Days Are”", - "body": "How heavy the days are.\nThere’s not a fire that can warm me,\nNot a sun to laugh with me,\nEverything bare,\nEverything cold and merciless,\nAnd even the beloved, clear\nStars look desolately down,\nSince I learned in my heart that\nLove can die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-know-you-walk": { - "title": "“I Know, You Walk”", - "body": "I walk so often, late, along the streets,\nLower my gaze, and hurry, full of dread,\nSuddenly, silently, you still might rise\nAnd I would have to gaze on all your grief\nWith my own eyes,\nWhile you demand your happiness, that’s dead.\nI know, you walk beyond me, every night,\nWith a coy footfall, in a wretched dress\nAnd walk for money, looking miserable!\nYour shoes gather God knows what ugly mess,\nThe wind plays in your hair with lewd delight--\nYou walk, and walk, and find no home at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1899 - } - } - }, - "lonesome-night": { - "title": "“Lonesome Night”", - "body": "You brothers, who are mine,\nPoor people, near and far,\nLonging for every star,\nDream of relief from pain,\nYou, stumbling dumb\nAt night, as pale stars break,\nLift your thin hands for some\nHope, and suffer, and wake,\nPoor muddling commonplace,\nYou sailors who must live\nUnstarred by hopelessness,\nWe share a single face.\nGive me my welcome back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "lying-in-grass": { - "title": "“Lying in Grass”", - "body": "Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers,\nAnd the down colors of the bright summer meadow,\nThe soft blue spread of heaven, the bees’ song,\nIs this everything only a god’s\nGroaning dream,\nThe cry of unconscious powers for deliverance?\nThe distant line of the mountain,\nThat beautifully and courageously rests in the blue,\nIs this too only a convulsion,\nOnly the wild strain of fermenting nature,\nOnly grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling,\nNever resting, never a blessed movement?\nNo! Leave me alone, you impure dream\nOf the world in suffering!\nThe dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance,\nThe bird’s cry cradles you,\nA breath of wind cools my forehead\nWith consolation.\nLeave me alone, you unendurably old human grief!\nLet it all be pain.\nLet it all be suffering, let it be wretched--\nBut not this one sweet hour in the summer,\nAnd not the fragrance of the red clover,\nAnd not the deep tender pleasure\nIn my soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "mountains-at-night": { - "title": "“Mountains at Night”", - "body": "The lake has died down,\nThe reed, black in its sleep,\nWhispers in a dream.\nExpanding immensely into the countryside,\nThe mountains loom, outspread.\nThey are not resting.\nThey breathe deeply, and hold themselves,\nPressed tightly, to one another.\nDeeply breathing,\nLaden with mute forces,\nCaught in a wasting passion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - } - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "I like the dark night well enough;\nBut sometimes, when it turns bleak\nAnd peaked, as my suffering laughs at me,\nIts dreadful kingdom horrifies me,\nAnd I wish to God I could take one look at the sunlight\nAnd the blue of heaven brought back to light by its clouds,\nAnd I want to lie down warm in the wide spaces of the day.\nThen I can dream of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - } - } - }, - "on-a-journey": { - "title": "“On a Journey”", - "body": "Don’t be downcast, soon the night will come,\nWhen we can see the cool moon laughing in secret\nOver the faint countryside,\nAnd we rest, hand in hand.\n\nDon’t be downcast, the time will soon come\nWhen we can have rest. Our small crosses will stand\nOn the bright edge of the road together,\nAnd rain fall, and snow fall,\nAnd the winds come and go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-swarm-of-gnats": { - "title": "“A Swarm of Gnats”", - "body": "Many thousand glittering motes\nCrowd forward greedily together\nIn trembling circles.\nExtravagantly carousing away\nFor a whole hour rapidly vanishing,\nThey rave, delirious, a shrill whir,\nShivering with joy against death.\nWhile kingdoms, sunk into ruin,\nWhose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered\nInto night and legend, without leaving a trace,\nHave never known so fierce a dancing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - } - } - }, - "thinking-of-a-friend-at-night": { - "title": "“Thinking of a Friend at Night”", - "body": "In this evil year, autumn comes early …\nI walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,\nThe wind on my hat … And you? And you, my friend?\n\nYou are standing--maybe--and seeing the sickle moon\nMove in a small arc over the forests\nAnd bivouac fire, red in the black valley.\nYou are lying--maybe--in a straw field and sleeping\nAnd dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.\n\nIt’s possible tonight you’re on horseback,\nThe farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,\nSmiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.\nMaybe--I keep imagining--you are spending the night\nAs a guest in a strange castle with a park\nAnd writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping\nOn the piano keys by the window,\nGroping for a sound …\n\n--And maybe\nYou are already silent, already dead, and the day\nWill shine no longer into your beloved\nSerious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,\nAnd your white forehead split open--Oh, if only,\nIf only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you\nSomething of my love, that was too timid to speak!\n\nBut you know me, you know … and, smiling, you nod\nTonight in front of your strange castle,\nAnd you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,\nAnd you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,\nAnd think about me, and smile.\nAnd maybe,\nMaybe some day you will come back from the war,\nand take a walk with me some evening,\nAnd somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,\nAnd smile gravely, and everything will be as before,\nAnd no one will speak a word of his worry,\nOf his worry and tenderness by night in the field,\nOf his love. And with a single joke\nYou will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,\nThe summer lightning of shy human friendship,\nInto the cool past that will never come back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "without-you": { - "title": "“Without You”", - "body": "My Pillow gazes upon me at night\nEmpty as a gravestone;\nI never thought it would be so bitter\nTo be alone,\nNot to lie down asleep in your hair.\n\nI lie alone in a silent house,\nThe hanging lamp darkened,\nAnd gently stretch out my hands\nTo gather in yours,\nAnd softly press my warm mouth\nToward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak--\nThen suddenly I’m awake\nAnd all around me the cold night grows still.\nThe star in the window shines clearly--\nWhere is your blond hair,\nWhere your sweet mouth?\n\nNow I drink pain in every delight\nAnd poison in every wine;\nI never knew it would be so bitter\nTo be alone,\nAlone, without you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - } - } - }, - "georg-heym": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Georg Heym", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Heym", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-battle": { - "title": "“After the Battle”", - "body": "Now he has arisen: he, who slept so long,\nfrom the depth arisen, out of arches strong.\nHuge he stands and unknown in the twilight land,\nand the moon he crushes in his blackened hand.\n\nBroad on city’s evening, broad and angrily\nshadow falls, and frost of strange obscurity\nmakes the market’s bustle stop in icy scare.\nSilence reigns. They turn--and no one is aware.\n\nIn the street it comes to touch her shoulders light:\nJust a question. Answerless. A face goes white.\nFrom afar sound whining abbey bells so thin\nand the beards are quaking round the pointed chin.\n\nHigh up, on the mountains, he begins to dance,\nand he cries: You fighters, rise up and advance!\nEchoes sound: around his shaking, blackened head\nswings a chain of skulls he wrenched from thousand dead.\n\nTower-like he squashes embers’ dying gleam\nand, where day is fleeing, fills with blood the stream.\nCountless are the corpses swept into the reeds,\ncovered by white feathers, where the vulture feeds.\n\nHe stands over ramparts blue of flames around,\nover darkened streets with heavy weapons sound,\nover broken gates where gatemen lie across,\nover bridges bending under human dross.\n\nThrough the night he chases fire across the world:\nred-fanged hound of hell with savage scream unfurled.\nOut of darkness leaps dominion of night,\nfrightful at its border shine volcanoes bright.\n\nAnd a thousand redcaps, pointed far and wide,\nlitter up the dark plain, flicker up astride.\nWho below in alleys still runs to and fro\nhe sweeps in the fire, that it hotter grow.\n\nAnd the flames are leaping, burning tree by tree.\nYellow bats of fire clawing endlessly.\nAnd he thrusts his kiln-staff, dark and charcoal-bound\ndeep amongst the trees to stoke the flames around.\n\nAn important city, chocked in yellow glow,\njumped without a whisper to the depths below,\nwhile he stands, a giant, over glowing urns,\nwild, in bloody heavens, thrice his torch he turns\n\nover stormstrung clouds reflecting fiery brands,\nto the deadly dark of frigid desert sands,\ndown he pours the fires, withering the night,\nphosphorus and brimstone on Gomorrha bright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "why-do-you-come-white-moths": { - "title": "“Why do you come, white moths …”", - "body": "Why do you come, white moths, so oft to me?\nSouls of the dea, why do you flutter so oft\nUpon my hand; your wingbeat often\nLeaven then a tiny trace of ashes.\n\nYou who are dwelling near urns, in a place where dreams repose\nStooped in eternal shade, in the dim expanse\nAs on the vaults of tombs the bats\nThat nightly whir away in the tumult.\n\nI oft hear in my sleep the vampires’s yaps;\nThey sound as if the somber moon were laughing.\nAnd I see deep in empty caverns\nThe candles of the homeless shadows.\n\nWhat is all life? The brief flare-up of torchlights\nRinged by distorted frights out of black darkness\nAnd some of them come close already\nAnd with thin hands reach for the flames.\n\nWhat is all life? Small vessel in abysses\nOf sea forgotten. Dreadful rigid skies.\nOr as at night across bare fields lost moonlight\nMeanders till it disappears.\n\nWoe unto him who once saw someone dying,\nWhen in the calmness of cool autumn death\nUnseen stepped up to the sick one’s moist bed\nAnd bade him pass away, while like the whistling\n\nAnd rattling of a rusty organ pipe\nHis throat exhaled its last breath with a wheeze.\nWoe to such witnesses. They bear forever\nThe pallid flower of a leaden horror.\n\nWho will unlock the lands beyond our death\nAnd who the gate of the gigantic rune.\nWhat do the dying see that makes them roll\nThe blind white of their eyes so terribly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Reinhold Grimm" - } - } - } - }, - "hildegard-of-bingen": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Hildegard of Bingen", - "birth": { - "year": 1098, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1179 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "ave-generosa": { - "title": "“Ave, Generosa”", - "body": "Hail, girl of a noble house,\nshimmering and unpolluted,\nyou pupil in the eye of chastity,\nyou essence of sanctity,\nwhich was pleasing to God.\n\nFor the Heavenly potion was poured into you,\nin that the Heavenly word\nreceived a raiment of flesh in you.\n\nYou are the lily that dazzles,\nwhom God knew\nbefore all others.\n\nO most beautiful and delectable one;\nhow greatly God delighted in you!\nIn the clasp of His fire\nHe implanted in you so that\nHis son might be suckled by you.\n\nThus your womb held joy,\nwhen the harmony of all Heaven chimed out from you,\nbecause, Virgin, you carried the son of God\nwhence your chastity blazed in God.\n\nYour flesh has known delight,\nlike the grassland touched by dew\nand immersed in its freshness:\nso it was with you, O mother of all joy.\n\nNow let the sunrise of joy be over all Ecclesia,\nand let it resound in music\nfor the sweetest Virgin,\nMary compelling all praise,\nmother of God. Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "o-ecclesia": { - "title": "“O Ecclesia”", - "body": "O Ecclesia,\nyour eyes are like sapphire:\nyour ears the mount of Bethel,\nyour nose\nlike a mountain of myrrh and incense,\nand your mouth is like the sound\nof many waters.\n\nIn a vision of true faith\nUrsula loved the son of God\nand rejected betrothed and world alike;\nshe gazed at the sun\nand implored the most beautiful youth,\nsaying:\n\nWith a great desire\nI have desired to come to you\nand rest with you in the marriage of Heaven\nrunning to you by a new path\nas the clouds course in the purest air\nlike sapphire.\n\nAnd after Ursula had said this\nrumour spread amongst the people.\n\nAnd they said:\nIn the innocence of girlish ignorance\nshe does not know what she is saying.\n\nAnd they began to play with her\nin a great music,\nuntil the burden of fire\nfell upon her.\n\nWhence they all knew,\nfor scorn of the world\nis like the mount of Bethel.\n\nAnd they sensed also\nthe sweetest odour of myrrh and incense,\nfor scorn of the world\nrises over all things.\n\nThen the devil\ninvaded those that were his own,\nthey that in the bodies of these women\nhad struck down the noblest qualities.\n\nAnd all the Elements\nheard the great cry,\nand before the throne of God\nthey said:\n\nO! the red blood\nof the innocent lamb\nhas streamed out\nin the moment of union.\n\nLet all the Heavens hear this,\nand let them praise the lamb of God\nwith the celestial harmony,\nfor the throat of the Ancient Serpent\nhas been choked with these pearls\nmade of the word of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "o-eucharius": { - "title": "“O Eucharius”", - "body": "O Eucharius,\nyou trod in the path of joyousness\nwhen you tarried with the son of God,\ntouching Him\nand seeing the miracles that He wrought.\n\nYou loved Him perfectly\nwhen your fellow-travellers were terrified\nbecause they were men\nand had no chance\nto see Divine Good perfectly.\n\nBut you\nin the full love of burning devotion\ncherished Him\nwhen you garnered the bales\nof His commands for yourself.\n\nO Eucharius,\nyou were greatly blessed\nwhen the word of God\ntouched you with the dove’s fire, whence\nyou were made shimmering like daybreak,\nand thus so fashioned\nthe foundation of Ecclesia.\n\nThe daylight gleams in your breast\nin which three shrines\nstand on a marble pillar\nin the city of God.\n\nIn your mouth Ecclesia savours\nthe old and the new wine\nwhich is the potion of holiness.\n\nAnd in your preaching\nEcclesia is filled with understanding,\nso that she has proclaimed in the high places\nthat the hills and trees should bend\nand be suckled by her.\n\nNow, in your shining voice,\nbeseech son of God for this multitude\nthat they may not desert the rites of God\nbut may always make\nthe living sacrifice before His altar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "o-ignis-spiritus": { - "title": "“O Ignis Spiritus”", - "body": "O fire of the comforting Spirit,\nlife of the life of all Creation,\nyou are holy in quickening all Kind.\n\nYou are holy in anointing\nthe dangerously stricken;\nyou are holy in wiping\nthe reeking wound.\n\nO breath of holiness, O fire of love,\nO sweet draught in the breast and flooding of the heart\nin the good aroma of virtues.\n\nO purest fountain, in whom it is seen\nthat God has summoned the gentiles\nand sought out the lost.\n\nO mail-coat of life and hope\nof binding all the members of Ecclesia,\nO sword-belt of honesty, save the blessed.\n\nGuard all those who have been imprisoned by the Enemy,\nand release the fettered\nwhom Divine Power wishes to save.\n\nO most steadfast path which penetrates all things;\nin the highest places, on the plains,\nand in every abyss\nyou summon and unite all.\n\nThrough you the clouds stream, the upper air flies,\nthe stones have their temper,\nthe waters lead forth from their rills\nand the earth exudes freshness.\n\nYou also always lead forth the comprehending\nmade joyful by the inspiration of wisdom.\n\nWhence praise be to you\nwho are the sound of praise\nand bliss of life,\nhope and richest gift\ngiving the rewards of light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "o-presul-vere-civitatis": { - "title": "“O Presul Vere Civitatis”", - "body": "O dance-leader of the true city,\nwho in the temple with the finial-stone\nsoaring Heavenwards\nwas prostrate on the earth\nfor God.\n\nYou, wanderer of the seed of Man,\nlonged to be an exile\nfor the love of Christ.\n\nO summit of the cloistered mind\nyou tirelessly showed a beautiful face\nin the mirror of the dove.\n\nYou lived hidden in a secluded place,\nintoxicated with the aroma of flowers,\nreaching forth to God\nthrough the lattices of the saints.\n\nO gable on the cloisters of Heaven,\nbecause you have bartered the world\nfor an unclouded life\nyou will always have this prize in the Lord,\nO nourishing witness.\n\nFor in your mind\nthe living fountain in clearest light\ncourses purest rills\nthrough the channel of salvation.\n\nYou are an immense tower\nbefore the altar of the Highest\nand you cloud the roof of this tower\nwith the smoke of perfumes.\n\nO Disibod, by your light,\nand with models of pure sound,\nyou have wondrously built aisles of praise\nwith two parts\nthrough the Son of Man.\n\nYou stand on high\nnot blushing before the living God,\nand you cover all with refreshing dew:\nlet us praise God with these words:\n\nO sweet life,\nand O blessed constancy,\nwhich in the celestial Jerusalem\nhas always built a glorious light\nin this blessed Disibod.\n\nNow praise be to God\nin the worthy form\nof the meaningful, beautiful tonsure.\n\nAnd let the Heavenly citizens\nrejoice in those\nwho have imitated them in this way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "o-viridissima-virga": { - "title": "“O Viridissima Virga”", - "body": "Hail, O greenest branch,\nsprung forth in the airy breezes\nof the prayers of the saints.\n\nSo the time has come\nthat your sprays have flourished:\nhail, hail to you,\nbecause the heat of the sun has exuded from you\nlike the aroma of balm.\n\nFor the beautiful flower sprung from you\nwhich gave all parched perfumes\ntheir aroma.\n\nAnd they have radiated anew\nin their full freshness.\n\nWhence the skies bestowed dew upon the pasture,\nand all the earth was made joyful\nbecause her womb\nbrought forth corn,\nand because the birds of the firmament\nbuilt their nests in her.\n\nThen there was harvest ready for Man\nand a great rejoicing of banqueters,\nwhence, O sweet Virgin,\nno joy is lacking in you.\n\nEve rejected all these things.\n\nNow let there be praise to the Highest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "holiday": "marymas" - } - } - } - } - }, - "geoffrey-hill": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Geoffrey Hill", - "birth": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2016 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hill", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "in-memory-of-jane-fraser": { - "title": "“In Memory of Jane Fraser”", - "body": "When snow like sheep lay in the fold\nAnd winds went begging at each door,\nAnd the far hills were blue with cold,\nAnd a cold shroud lay on the moor,\n\nShe kept the siege. And every day\nWe watched her brooding over death\nLike a strong bird above its prey.\nThe room filled with the kettle’s breath.\n\nDamp curtains glued against the pane\nSealed time away. Her body froze\nAs if to freeze us all, and chain\nCreation to a stunned repose.\n\nShe died before the world could stir.\nIn March the ice unloosed the brook\nAnd water ruffled the sun’s hair.\nDead cones upon the alder shook.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "ovid-in-the-third-reich": { - "title": "“Ovid in the Third Reich”", - "body": "non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,\nsolaque famosam culpa professa facit.\n\n_Amores, III, xiv_\n\nI love my work and my children. God\nIs distant, difficult. Things happen.\nToo near the ancient troughs of blood\nInnocence is no earthly weapon.\n\nI have learned one thing: not to look down\nSo much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,\nHarmonize strangely with the divine\nLove. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "requiem-for-the-plantagenet-kings": { - "title": "“Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings”", - "body": "For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,\nRuinous arms; being fired, and for good,\nTo sound the constitution of just wars,\nMen, in their eloquent fashion, understood.\n\nRelieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,\nTheir usage, pride, admitted within doors;\nAt home, under caved chantries, set in trust,\nWith well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs\nThey lie; they lie; secure in the decay\nOf blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,\nBefore the scouring fires of trial-day\nAlight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,\nBudge through the clay and gravel, and the sea\nAcross daubed rock evacuates its dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "september-song": { - "title": "“September Song”", - "body": "_born 19.6.32 deported 24.9.42_\n\nUndesirable you may have been, untouchable\nyou were not. Not forgotten\nor passed over at the proper time.\n\nAs estimated, you died. Things marched,\nsufficient, to that end.\nJust so much Zyklon and leather, patented\nterror, so many routine cries.\n\n(I have made\nan elegy for myself it\nis true)\n\nSeptember fattens on vines. Roses\nflake from the wall. The smoke\nof harmless fires drifts to my eyes.\n\nThis is plenty. This is more than enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 24 - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-hillyer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Hillyer", - "birth": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hillyer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "how-should-i-think-of-thee": { - "title": "“How Should I Think of Thee”", - "body": "How should I think of thee but with delight?\nHow should I greet thy face but with a smile?\nAnd yet dark tears within my heart defile\nThe dreams of thee that I would have so bright.\nIf thou shouldst come and end this lonely while,\nThese leaden hours of the sleepless night,\nStill should I fear to show thee what I write,\nLest I repent in vain, and thou revile.\n\nYet couldst thou read these scriptures of my heart,\nGraven in passion with no base control,\nFor one brief moment, then, they might impart\nSome almost worthy offering from my soul.\nI write for thee, and cannot let thee read,\nThus love denies itself its utmost need.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-strange": { - "title": "“How Strange”", - "body": "How strange it is that thine ethereal grace\nShould make me sorry by its loveliness,\nFor surely beauty is designed to bless\nThose hours of youth that have so short a race,\nAnd yet the memory of some old distress\nShadows me over when I see thy face,\nAnd yearning ever for one swift embrace\nHas tinged my joy in thee with bitterness.\n\nThe young smiles flashing brightly free and fair,\nThe laughing stars that in thy deep eyes shine,--\nIt is not love for me that lights them there,\nI see their beauty, but they are not mine.\nThy loveliness is joy poisoned with pain;\nRapture to love, torment to love in vain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thou-wert-my-only-hope": { - "title": "“Thou Wert My only Hope”", - "body": "Thou only wert my hope, and thou art gone.\nThou, the one star in monotones of sky,\nArt vanished like a meteor, and I,\nLost in the night, have ceased to pray for dawn.\nI watched thee fade, I saw thee passing by\nAnd tried to call thee, but my lips were dumb;\nIt had been better hadst thou never come,--\nRemembered riches mock my poverty.\n\nBlow from afar the little sounds of bells,\nWood-smoke hangs thinly on the autumn air,\nThe town’s unconscious hush is like a prayer,\nAnd night sleeps pleasantly among the dells;\nI only wander on, and know not where,\nThrough the great dark, pursued by faint farewells.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "who-follows-love": { - "title": "“Who Follows Love”", - "body": "Who follows Love shall walk in outland places,\nBeyond the common cheer of hall and town,\nHe shall forget all things, the friendly faces,\nThe strife for wealth, the struggle for renown.\nA young crusader putting by his crown,\nA pilgrim following a holy vision,\nHeeding nor threat of king nor gibe of clown,\nThe tyrant’s hatred nor the world’s derision,--\n\nThus shall he wander; in no bright Elysian\nMeadows shall be his quest, but through the vast\nAnd midnight fears that shake his heart’s decision\nWith staring madness, till he see at last\nLike Parsifal in ages long ago,\nLove’s flaming chalice out of darkness glow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "daniel-hoffmann": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Daniel Hoffmann", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2013 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hoffman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "aphrodite": { - "title": "“Aphrodite”", - "body": "How could she come to us inviolate\nFrom that uncomplicated country\nOf pure feeling? History\n\nAlters all it touches,\nAnd if her image now is such\nThat we cannot know\n\nWhich sacred objects her slim hands\nHeld, still, her glance,\nResting a moment on our eyes,\n\nStays, then quickens with clamorous beat\nThe bursting heart abandoned to desire …\nIf some goatherd with his rude\n\nMattock, or pillager’s keen blade\nGash the cover of her mound\nTo seize her, as though mortal,\n\nFrom memory’s chamber underground,\nThe imperfections of her image\nAre not her imperfections, the scarred\n\nSeam, the limb sheared\nBy avid diggers or the gnaw\nOf vandal centuries. Her face\n\nRequites the tribute of our awe,\nHer body’s lithe, incomparable grace\nDrives imagination wild\n\nShould it please her to appear\nAs the one in whose embrace\nThe love that is engendered is beguiled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blood": { - "title": "“Blood”", - "body": "At a wolf’s wild dugs\nWhen the world was young\nWith eager tongue\nTwin brothers tugged,\n\nFrom foster mother\nDrew their nurture.\nHer harsh milk ran\nThence in the blood of man,\n\nIn the blood of kings\nWho contrived the State.\nWhat wolvish lust to head the pack\nThe memory of that taste brings back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "burning-bush": { - "title": "“Burning Bush”", - "body": "If a bush were to speak with a tongue of fire\nTo me, it would be a briar:\nThe barberry, bearing unreachable droplets of blood,\nOr, bristling in winter, rugosas with their red hoard\n\nOf rosehips and a caucus of birds singing.\nCome Spring, in a burst at the road’s turning,\nA snowblossom bank of the prickly hawthorn;\nOr drooping in June on their spiny, forbidding stem,\n\nBlackberries ripe with the freight of dark juice in them.\nIf I should listen to a bush in fame\nAnnounce the Unpronounceable Name\nAnd demand requital by a doom\n\nOn my seed, compelling more\nThan I’d answer for--what no one else would ask--\nThat voice of fire would blaze in a briar\nI cannot grasp.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-center-of-attention": { - "title": "“The Center of Attention”", - "body": "As grit swirls in the wind the word spreads.\nOn pavements approaching the bridge a crowd\nSprings up like mushrooms.\nThey are hushed at first, intently\n\nLooking. At the top of the pylon\nThe target of their gaze leans toward them.\nThe sky sobs\nWith the sirens of disaster crews\n\nCareening toward the crowd with nets,\nLadders, resuscitation gear, their First\nAid attendants antiseptic in white duck.\nThe police, strapped into their holsters,\n\nExert themselves in crowd-control.They can’t\nControl the situation.\nAtop the pylon there’s a man who threatens\nViolence. He shouts, I’m gonna jump--\n\nAnd from the river of upturned faces\n--Construction workers pausing in their construction work,\nShoppers diverted from their shopping,\nThe idlers relishing this diversion\n\nIn the vacuity of their day--arises\nA chorus of cries--Jump!\nJump! and No--\nCome down! Come down! Maybe, if he can hear them,\n\nThey seem to be saying Jump down! The truth is,\nThe crowd cannot make up its mind.\nThis is a tough decision. The man beside me\nReaches into his lunchbox and lets him have it.\n\nJump! before he bites his sandwich,\nWhile next to him a young blonde clutches\nHer handbag to her breasts and moans\nDon’t Don’t Don’t so very softly\n\nYou’d think she was afraid of being heard.\nThe will of the people is divided.\nUp there he hasn’t made his mind up either.\nHe has climbed and climbed on spikes imbedded in the pylon\n\nTo get where he has arrived at.\nIs he sure now that this is where he was going?\nHe looks down one way into the river.\nHe looks down the other way into the people.\n\nHe seems to be looking for something\nOr for somebody in particular.\nIs there anyone here who is that person\nOr can give him what it is that he needs?\n\nFrom the back of a firetruck a ladder teeters.\nInching along, up up up up up, a policeman\nHolds on with one hand, sliding it on ahead of him.\nIn the other, outstretched, a pack of cigarettes.\n\nSoon the man will decide between\nThe creature comfort of one more smoke\nAnd surcease from being a creature.\nMeanwhile the crowd calls Jump! and calls Come down!\n\nNow, his cassock billowing in the bulges of Death’s black flag,\nA priest creeps up the ladder too\nWhat will the priest and the policeman together\nPersuade the man to do?\n\nHe has turned his back to them.\nHe has turned away from everyone.\nHis solitariness is nearly complete.\nHe is alone with his decision.\n\nNo one on the ground or halfway into the sky can know\nThe hugeness of the emptiness that surrounds him.\nAll of his senses are orphans.\nHis ribs are cold andirons.\n\nDoes he regret his rejection of furtive pills,\nOf closet noose or engine idling in closed garage?\nA body will plummet through shrieking air,\nThe audience dumb with horror, the spattered street …\n\nThe world he has left is as small as toys at his feet.\nWhere he stands, though nearer the sun, the wind is chill.\nHe clutches his arms--a caress, or is he trying\nMerely to warm himself with his arms?\n\nThe people below, their necks are beginning to ache.\nThey are getting impatient for this diversion\nTo come to some conclusion. The priest\nInches further narrowly up the ladder.\n\nThe center of everybody’s attention\nFor some reason has lit up a butt. He sits down.\nHe looks down on the people gathered, and sprinkles\nSome of his ashes upon them.\n\nBefore he is halfway down\nThe crowd is half-dispersed.\nIt was his aloneness that clutched them together.\nThey were spellbound by his despair\n\nAnd now each rung brings him nearer,\nNearer to their condition\nWhich is not sufficiently interesting\nTo detain them from business or idleness either,\n\nOr is too close to a despair\nThey do not dare\nExhibit before a crowd\nOr admit to themselves they share.\n\nNow the police are taking notes\nOn clipboards, filling the forms.\nHe looks round as though searching for what he came down for.\nTraffic flows over the bridge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "comanches": { - "title": "“Comanches”", - "body": "I read this once: how the Comanche,\nWeak after long fasting, felt a slow\nTrembling shake the earth--the buffalo!--\n\nAnd raced his pony barebacked toward the herd.\nThat morning not a brave in camp could gird\nHimself with strength to bend the stout bowstem,\n\nYet with bursting arms he twangs his arrow\nDeep in the bison’s heart. Comanches know\nThe Great Spirit, when it possesses them.\n\nAnd now the poet, half a savage bound\nBy the hungers of his tribe, paces his swift\nForay across a desolate hunting-ground\n\nIn hopes to run to earth a fleeting creature\nAnd, with the unpremeditated gift\nOf spirit, seize imagination’s meat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cowhead": { - "title": "“Cowhead”", - "body": "_“Mrs. Smith: I seed that woman with a cowhead on, sure.\nMrs. Richardson: A mighty bad head to carry to Jesus, in my estimation.”_\n --Transcribed by R. M. Dorson, _Negro Folktales in Michigan_\n\n\nI dared this. But love’s a power\nMakes one risk mockery, lose fear of shame\nOr sheer incomprehension … One forgets\nThe unleavened burden of the flesh\nCaged in fivewits, and the five chimaeras\nThose senses take for tangibles. I came,\nI stood before you,--you still garbed in flesh\nLoomed within my once-quick womb,--and you,\nYour eyes bright beetles in two spoons of ice,\nYour hair aspine like daddylonglegs’ legs,\nDidn’t stay to hear me.\nYou, among those herds in Michigan\nWhere seed and stalk and flower stretch toward the sun\nIn sorrowful gestures marking time’s demesne,\nCould only feel, beneath your breasts, fear’s thrill\nLike the wind-rung tingle of an icicle,\nAnd never sensed that love that brought me here.\nI came,\nThe new moon’s crescent my corona, falling\nThrough the twilight toward your trysting-place\nWhere pasture joins the cornfield. There in shadows\nYour first impatient lover waited, tearing\nTassels from a ripe ear till you came.\nI tried to tell you--spoke to the heedless cows--\nDaughter,\nCouldn’t you feel the moonshorn in your temples\nThrobbing, and the rising in your breasts,\nThe fecund blood weft in your swelling womb?\n--I would have told you what his name is,\nWhat his fate. But let the cornfields reach\nToward heaven. In ruts beneath their tasseled roofs\nOf green hair, rumpled by the starry wind,\nPredestined seed falls in the waiting warmth.\nYou will not hear me bless the sprouting issue\nNor know my tongue among the rustling voices;\nTo one another now we cannot speak,\nBut in the life that leaps forth fierce to suckle,\nExult and sow seed gaily before its fall\nBe power of our communion, and our grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-deliverance": { - "title": "“A Deliverance”", - "body": "Striving over tortuous trails, we come to\nA clapboard oldtime Opera House\nPast ticket-taker down a wooden corridor\nToward the opening of the light from two high windows,\nIt’s a room with benches. A door clicks behind.\nTrapped in the room now, and the windows giving\nOn a steep drop down.\nFar below a stream unfurls in silver tumbling.\nFrom here there’s no way out, and we’ve our mission\nStill to do, rattling the locked doorjamb …\n\nI’ve come to redress wrongs. You will agree\nIt is disgraceful that the Library Staff\nOf Aeronautical Sciences should dress\nIn eyepatches and pantaloons\nTo waylay travellers with promises\nAnd keep men from their business in locked rooms?\nWith awed apologies he led me on inspection.\nHis staff leapt to attention as we came.\nI saw the ones: That white-faced man, myopic,\nWith the pimples, and the other\nBarrel-chested with a smirk around the eyes.\nThis one sneered and that one quailed to see me\nState my charges to the colonel.\nThe staff was singing now, festive chorale\nIn Saturday night at the Yacht Club burst and gusto\nAs we stalked past their tables down a hall\nThat opened to a room with two high windows.\nBehind the click of doors their singing ceased.\n\nThe windows gave out on a sheer drop down.\nBelow, a littering stream unpurled in silver light.\n‘Why not come in my car?’ said the colonel.\nIn the dark I placed my newspaper\nBeneath the rear wheel on the snow--\n‘For better traction.’ I turned the front door handle.\n‘You’ll sit in back,’ he said. The doors, I noticed\nWere hinged to open forward, as in old cars.\nWhen I went round to get into the rear seat\nThe car was rolling and I saw\nMy Grandfather slide in beside him stiffly\nWearing a Panama. He said no word.\nWe swerved in silence through the darkness,\nNo headlights down this road.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "door": { - "title": "“Door”", - "body": "Why should I care\nWhich way you go through me?\n\nI am responsible only\nFor dividing the furniture\n\nFrom the changeful weather,\nThe past from the future,\n\nThe dream from the waker.\nInside, outside,\n\nIt’s all one to me.\nWho passes through one way\n\nMay come back the other way.\nIf what’s promised on one side\n\nIs denied on the other,\nYou work it out then.\n\nBeing neutral,\nI choose to stay just here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "entering-doorways": { - "title": "“Entering Doorways”", - "body": "Entering doorways\nExchanging rooms\nThe last room leaving\nLost words ringing\nIn the head clinging\nSeeking silence\nThe silence clanging\nThis side the threshhold\nSnatches of old talk\nEntering doorways.\nExchanging rooms\nA room once entered\nInvades the new space\nThese doors where the doors were\nOld chests in their place\nChairs where the chairs were\nWind in the fireplace\nBed in the bed place\nVoices and faces\nRecurrent in strangeness\nAnd in this new room\nEnmeshed in these traces\nStrain toward the doorway\nTo the next room\nEntering doorways\nExchanging rooms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "haunted-houses": { - "title": "“Haunted Houses”", - "body": "Junior Johnson mocked and Fu Bigonzi dared me,\nWaiting at the gate-end of the weedy walk\nFor me to prove they lied. So at each further step\nThrough burrs and reeking goldenrod, retreat became\nUnlikelier. I climbed the trellis up the porch\nWhere one board was split. I pulled that board ajar\nAnd leaning upward, pried the window open. Then,\nWith a clear way awaiting me, the slanting sun\nThrobbed on the porch roof heat that pulsed as my head pulsed.\nI turned, to turn back down the tindery splintered shingles,\nShimmy down the raingutter and fall in a shower\nOf rust on blistered hands to the crushed cool grass\n--Taunted a quitter?--Iron-breath’d, I climbed in\nOne leg, both legs, dropped then into the murky coolness\nOn the landing of the stairs: Below, in half-light\nNeedles of light, their eyes knotholes in the boarded windows,\nSewed light-seams slantwise toward the shadowed floor.\nI gripped the bannister, dislodged a shower of dust\nThat fell and rose and swirled along the five sunbeams.\nI took a slow step down. A mahogony table still\nHeld two majolica paperweights upon a pile\nOf letters someone had received and had not answered.\nA look of life half-lived, a table setting still\nAwaiting two, two chairs by the ashen log on the firedogs.\nTwo glasses on the sideboard next the staircase stood,\nA dust-stoppered decanter by them, dust and dead\nFlies in the glasses. Who had lived together here\nBeneath a mica shade where wrought-iron Nina, Pinta,\nAnd Santa Maria sail their circles round and round\nAn unlit globe of glass on dark and dusty seas?\nWho left and never have returned to claim their own?\nWhy don’t they come to claim their own,\nTo live companionable lives out at this hearth\nFor two, table for two, decanter set for two\n--Or do they still move here among these mouse-gnawed letters,\nCaress familiar furniture with touch that can’t\nDislodge one grain of dust in the half-light? As I turned\nAt the bottom of the stair some silent thing turned toward me.\nRaised its arms and shrieked my shriek--pure terror\nSlit its frogwhite face with voice I knew and know.\nNo doubt that bulging china closet’s glass bow front\nHad caught grotesque reflections from these stairs before--\nBut I was skinning down the rainspout when that thought\nFound chink to clutch to in the riptide of my fear.\nYet I’d been, and not on dares, in eerier houses\nWhere one among one of a pair of candelbra,\nSix of a dozen goblets, half a set of silver\nKept house where every swelling spoon’s a mantic mirror\nThat makes her huge who sits to table, makes the empty\nFacing chair a thin vein round the mirror’s eyelid;\nAnd another where another’s half-dozen of a dozen\nKnives, forks, spoons, six of twelve matched goblets\nAnd half a pair of candelabra makes a setting\nFor a half-life where the absent ghost exacts\nA compound interest from this capital, as he\n--Inmate of a present no reflection ends--\nExacts like interest whose own penury’s the same.\nThere’s an oval glass in either’s hallway. I have seen\nMy hand on the knobs before those mirrors and behind,\nAlmost proof, you’d think, henceforth against all haunting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "a-historian": { - "title": "“A Historian”", - "body": "The dead again\nBurst from their levelled graves\nThey reassemble on the hill\nReady for disastrous victory\nWhere a great empire fell\nOn its foe and fell\n\nAgain in the hot wide\nLandscape of his mind\nThe captains sit astride\nTheir festooned chomping horses send\nBatallions into certain\nEnfillade\n\nO they can never\nChange the outcome they have fought\nThis battle over\nNever knowing\nWhy they are there\nStill following\n\nTattered pennants ignorant\nOf trade routes or the pride\nOf prince or diplomat whose ruse\nCharges them to ride\nThe bloodspecked foaming crest\nOf this riptide\n\nNo more than he can know\nThe soldier’s brute obedience to orders\nThe captain’s fealty to the general’s plan\nThe commanders wrapped in webbed illusion\nThat their strategy will follow\nTheir will\n\nNor know the iron taste of fear\nIn throats that do not seem a part\nOf the same contraption as the legs\nWildly going their own way\nOr the gut that retches at the smell of blood\nOr the heart\n\nBooming its dark cannonade\nUntil the heartbeat or the battle ends.\nThe tallying of losses starts again.\nThe sky thickens with buzzards’ wings.\nThey settle, gorge, and circle, waiting for\nThe future", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-legacy": { - "title": "“A Legacy”", - "body": "I walk down Cedar Lane in Swarthmore, Pa.\nI stride beneath the barbarian sun.\nI suck wind that last week steamed in the Congo.\nI believe in 1961.\nI do believe that the whirling seasons\n--Heat after rains, rain after melting snow--\nWill actually come round again as heretofore.\nMy legacy from history is right now.\nReality is what I’m all for. Yes, I’ll take it\nIn the air, in the mouth, in the dandle bed,\nIn the New York Times, in the constellations,\nIn my dancy children’s cockadoo laughter,\nIn that dream I dreamed when I was eleven\nIn which my legs were icicles because I’m dead.\nReality is vintage and delicious\nEspecially when you taste it while it brews\nBecause it comes as love comes, either sudden\nOr gradual lifetime in a once past wishes,\nA gift you could not have the wit to choose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "stone": { - "title": "“Stone”", - "body": "Ever since the first fires\nCooled and colors went out of the air\nAnd on my fanks water sizzled and seethed\nAnd collected in warm pools in my pockets\nI have not changed. Cold came,\nPrying its levers of ice in my veins,\nRoots thrust into my pores and split them,\nThe sun roared overhead streaming\nIts heat on my hard glazed skin\nTrying each summer all summer\nTo roast me to ember. Rain\nCame again, and again and again\nLacing and creasing my forehead with furrows\nAnd rivers. Later it came as snow\nCracking and brittle, as though\nI would turn brittle and crack.\nWell, waves have broken me into pieces,\nPounded my pieces against one another--\nSome of my flesh is pebbles, sand.\nI have been here since before the arrival\nOf the creatures who have come and are most of them gone now.\nBut nothing can change me. Split me apart,\nTest me by fire, grind me down\n--I’m still what I was, with my heart of stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "today": { - "title": "“Today”", - "body": "Today the sun rose, as it used to do\nWhen its mission was to shine on you.\nSince in unrelenting dark you’re gone,\nWhat now can be the purpose of the sun?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-my-wiser-brother": { - "title": "“When My Wiser Brother”", - "body": "When my wiser brother\nWho speaks so rarely\nAnd only in my voice\n\n(He is too busy matching souls\nTo the trees they will resemble, lovers\nWith one another,\nThe seahorse and the sun,\nSweet labor,\nThere’s little time for speech)--when he\n\nFinds words\nAcceptable I will declare him,\nFor I am ready:\nMy phonemes, signs, parentheses\nAwait his spell.\n\nAll will be well\nDisposed to consecrate the map\nOf new peninsulas he will bequeath me.\nBut just when I’ve stepped out to choose the wine\nFor the banquet of our fond reunion\nHe will be gone,\nOff to that republic\nOf pure possibility\nWhere he plots a _coup d’état_ against my exile.\nSometime, he may reveal it,\n\nBut I am left meanwhile\nUnbrothered,\nMy words all fled from split cicada skins\nInto a busy fraction of the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "yours": { - "title": "“Yours”", - "body": "I am yours as the summer air at evening is\nPossessed by the scent of linden blossoms,\n\nAs the snowcap gleams with light\nLent it by the brimming moon.\n\nWithout you I’d be an unleafed tree\nBlasted in a bleakness with no Spring.\n\nYour love is the weather of my being.\nWhat is an island without the sea?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "oliver-wendell-holmes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Oliver Wendell Holmes", - "birth": { - "year": 1809 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wendell_Holmes_Sr.", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "contentment": { - "title": "“Contentment”", - "body": "_“Man wants but little here below”_\n\nLittle I ask; my wants are few;\nI only wish a hut of stone,\n(A _very plain_ brown stone will do,)\nThat I may call my own;--\nAnd close at hand is such a one,\nIn yonder street that fronts the sun.\n\nPlain food is quite enough for me;\nThree courses are as good as ten;--\nIf Nature can subsist on three,\nThank Heaven for three. Amen!\nI always thought cold victual nice;--\nMy _choice_ would be vanilla-ice.\n\nI care not much for gold or land;--\nGive me a mortgage here and there,--\nSome good bank-stock, some note of hand,\nOr trifling railroad share,--\nI only ask that Fortune send\nA _little_ more than I shall spend.\n\nHonors are silly toys, I know,\nAnd titles are but empty names;\nI would, _perhaps_, be Plenipo,--\nBut only near St. James;\nI’m very sure I should not care\nTo fill our Gubernator’s chair.\n\nJewels are baubles; ’t is a sin\nTo care for such unfruitful things;--\nOne good-sized diamond in a pin,--\nSome, _not so large_, in rings,--\nA ruby, and a pearl, or so,\nWill do for me;--I laugh at show.\n\nMy dame should dress in cheap attire;\n(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)--\nI own perhaps I _might_ desire\nSome shawls of true Cashmere,--\nSome marrowy crapes of China silk,\nLike wrinkled skins on scalded milk.\n\nI would not have the horse I drive\nSo fast that folks must stop and stare;\nAn easy gait--two forty-five--\nSuits me; I do not care;--\nPerhaps, for just a _single spurt_,\nSome seconds less would do no hurt.\n\nOf pictures, I should like to own\nTitians and Raphaels three or four,--\nI love so much their style and tone,\nOne Turner, and no more,\n(A landscape,--foreground golden dirt,--\nThe sunshine painted with a squirt.)\n\nOf books but few,--some fifty score\nFor daily use, and bound for wear;\nThe rest upon an upper floor;--\nSome _little_ luxury _there_\nOf red morocco’s gilded gleam\nAnd vellum rich as country cream.\n\nBusts, cameos, gems,--such things as these,\nWhich others often show for pride,\n_I_ value for their power to please,\nAnd selfish churls deride;--\n_One_ Stradivarius, I confess,\n_Two_ Meerschaums, I would fain possess.\n\nWealth’s wasteful tricks I will not learn,\nNor ape the glittering upstart fool;--\nShall not carved tables serve my turn,\nBut _all_ must be of buhl?\nGive grasping pomp its double share,--\nI ask but _one_ recumbent chair.\n\nThus humble let me live and die,\nNor long for Midas’ golden touch;\nIf Heaven more generous gifts deny,\nI shall not miss them _much_,--\nToo grateful for the blessing lent\nOf simple tastes and mind content!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "daily-trials-by-a-sensitive-man": { - "title": "“Daily Trials by a Sensitive Man”", - "body": "Oh, there are times\nWhen all this fret and tumult that we hear\nDo seem more stale than to the sexton’s ear\nHis own dull chimes.\n\nDing dong! ding dong!\nThe world is in a simmer like a sea\nOver a pent volcano,--woe is me\nAll the day long!\n\nFrom crib to shroud!\nNurse o’er our cradles screameth lullaby,\nAnd friends in boots tramp round us as we die,\nSnuffling aloud.\n\nAt morning’s call\nThe small-voiced pug-dog welcomes in the sun,\nAnd flea-bit mongrels, wakening one by one,\nGive answer all.\n\nWhen evening dim\nDraws round us, then the lonely caterwaul,\nTart solo, sour duet, and general squall,--\nThese are our hymn.\n\nWomen, with tongues\nLike polar needles, ever on the jar;\nMen, plugless word-spouts, whose deep fountains are\nWithin their lungs.\n\nChildren, with drums\nStrapped round them by the fond paternal ass;\nPeripatetics with a blade of grass\nBetween their thumbs.\n\nVagrants, whose arts\nHave caged some devil in their mad machine,\nWhich grinding, squeaks, with husky groans between,\nCome out by starts.\n\nCockneys that kill\nThin horses of a Sunday,--men, with clams,\nHoarse as young bisons roaring for their dams\nFrom hill to hill.\n\nSoldiers, with guns,\nMaking a nuisance of the blessed air,\nChild-crying bellman, children in despair,\nScreeching for buns.\n\nStorms, thunders, waves!\nHowl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill;\nYe sometimes rest; men never can be still\nBut in their graves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-two-streams": { - "title": "“The Two Streams”", - "body": "Behold the rocky wall\nThat down its sloping sides\nPours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,\nIn rushing river-tides!\n\nYon stream, whose sources run\nTurned by a pebble’s edge,\nIs Athabasca, rolling toward the sun\nThrough the cleft mountain-ledge.\n\nThe slender rill had strayed,\nBut for the slanting stone,\nTo evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid\nOf foam-flecked Oregon.\n\nSo from the heights of Will\nLife’s parting stream descends,\nAnd, as a moment turns its slender rill,\nEach widening torrent bends,--\n\nFrom the same cradle’s side,\nFrom the same mother’s knee,--\nOne to long darkness and the frozen tide,\nOne to the Peaceful Sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "arno-holz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Arno Holz", - "birth": { - "year": 1863 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Holz", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "childhood-paradise": { - "title": "“Childhood Paradise”", - "body": "_Birth and Baptism_\n\n# 1.\n\nI was … born\non\na first\nfull, luminous streaming\nwonderful,\nwonderblue, wonderwarm\nspring day,\nin\na royal Prussian\npharmacy--\n“To the Black Eagle,”--\nwith a narrow facade and a deep perspective;\nspacious,\nglassdoor klingeling, protected by shutters\nand quaint;\nbuilt\n“anno domini,” in “days of yore,” already there\nunder\nthe Great Elector;\ndignified, cosy,\nwith four stories and so many front steps, with sharp gables and\na double roof,\ntowering high above it all\nand beautiful;\nshelf on shelf, drawer on drawer,\ncontainer near container, small box by small box,\nbottle by bottle,\nalways\nmost carefully neat, always most prudently exact,\nalways\nmost pitilessly orderly,\nmost well\nsorted.\nA pharmacy frequently\ninspected,\nrevised, so as not to say molested,\nsuddenly,\ncompletely\nunexpecte d, unawaited, unsuspected;\ninspected by\ntopmast spygalss commissioners--\naustere, officious, majestically bespectacled,\nsnooping,\nsnuffling, sniffing, sniffling,\nrummaging through\nall boxes, all vessels, all\nprovision rooms,\nwith suspicion, curiosity, mistrust,\nfor\nhours,\nhours and hours--\nuseless,\nfruitless, ineffectual,\nfully\nunnecessary and superfluous.\nA pharmacy\nnot yet new-fashioned,\nso atrociously moulded, so gruesomely\nschematicized,\nshrewdly like a factory, cleverly commercial, slyly\ncold and business-like;\nlacking the divine,\nthe fairy-tale magic, the romance;\namericanized;\nas if\npredestined for me\nby “God,”\nas if\nby a special “destiny,” as if by a higher “power”.\nA pharmacy,\njust\nopposite\nthe precinct station:\nhonestly upright, peaceably lowly,\ncomfortably one-storied,\nstretched\nout, yellow/pink piebald,\npatched up,\ngingerbreadbrown, bright red,\ntile-roofed,\ncaring for citizens,\nrustling,\nrushing, rumbling, whooshing, scarily swooshing,\ncellar-deep\nteeming with rats;\nthe precinct station\nwith the\nbig, heavy, monstrous,\nold-fashioned,\nold-frankish, outmoded fire alarm;\na fire bell\nof black iron,\ndusty with cobwebs, a polished clapper,\ndangling, now and then swaying\nunder a gray, leaking, under a decaying, splintered, under a\nslanted shingle roof\npenetrable by\nrain,\nhail, and blizzard;\na fire bell\nbegging and whining\nfor\nrescue,\nhelp in need and resistance.\nThere\nI was … born!\n\n\n# 2.\n\nNo one shouted\n“Rätin, he lives!”\nThe\naspects:\nMars in opposition to Venus, Mercury in opposition to Saturn,\nJupiter in opposition to Uranus,\nNeptune\nin dispute\nwith all:\nAries, Aquarius\nand\nLibra … you don’t see them that way … every day,\nLeo, Capricorn\nand\nScorpio,--oh, it was pure mockery,--\nstood\nthreateningly … fiercely armed, signalled in a terrible manner,\n# I.protested, I rebelled, I revolted,\n\n# I.opposed.\n\n\nBut!\n\nThe\ngood,\nold, honest,\ndiligent, industrious, eager\nFrau\nPommerŠhnke,\nusually\nloaded and armed\nwith an\nalmost\nsuitcase-sized, mysterious, black-leather\npurse\ncontaining\na syringe;\nwith a\nflesh-colored, self-knitted,\ncrumpled, wrinkled, rumpled\ncardigan;\nFrau\nPommerähnke,\nwho\nhad already helped\ninto the world\nthe whole city and half of the country\nwho\nhelped\nso many already\nto\nthe light, to the air;\nFrau PommerŠhnke assisted,\nand the\nrefined, venerable, bachelor\nDoctor Piehdong,\n“clean as a whistle”\nalways\nlooking lie the death from Warsaw, always moving like Magnificence itself,\nwhite\ngloved, with a gray top-hat, blue bespectacled;\nDoctor Piehdong\ncongratulated, Father inspected, Mother triumphed,\neverything\nfunctioned.\n\nChubby\nand\nround! Red-cheeked and sound! Fully nine pound!\n\nAnd\nthen as the christening procession\nslowly turned\naround the corner--\nmost joyful of\nthrongs, Mother in lace with three prongs,\nFather\nin\nfestive\ntuxedo with tails, very tight pants and with ivory cane,\nbehind him\nin a\nstately and pressing\nblock, Godparents and guests total two score,\nthe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie,\namidst the resounding\njoyous swekks of pious, honest trusty bels,\nand\nmost golden blue\nsunshine, mob and public right behind,\npace\nby pace, trace on\ntrace,\ndown the\npine-strewn church street,\nfrom the marketplace\ntowards Saint George’s\n(there’s\nmore at stake here than\nfun and games, “the manly heart pounds wildly in its cage,”\na\nbrimstone butterfly\nthat\nflew and flutter-tumbled, beat its wings to\nhover overhead,\nand\nswung and tottered, shivered and\nquivered,\npicturesquely\nbrightening up the scene):\nas\nthe procession\nslowly turned\nthe corner,\nsuddenly:\nan idea\noccurred to … Mother!\n\nStop\nit all! It must be so!\n\nMen and women\nfreeze,\nstand, wonderingly\nstaring, not to say as if they were “carved of stone”:\nThe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie!\nMother\nhanded me over,\nin my resplendent\ndisplay,\neyes wide open, delighted, making goo-goo-ga-ga noises,\ngave me\nher\nlittle one,\nto the old PommerŠhnke, the\nloyal soul, the kindly valiant one,\nthe\ntrusty doting mother,\ninto\nthe arms,\nat once\nrescuing, open, obligingly reaching out\nand,\nclick, clack\n“Hold on to the kid for a moment, I’ll be right back,”\nthrough the crowd, through the people, through the ones\nwho\nwere surprised;\ncourageous, energized,\ndetermined, vigorous, resolute,\nback\ninto the pharmacy,\nit\nwas something!\n\nWhereto?! Wherefore?! What for?!\nIdiot!\n\nMotherlove! Motherknowledge!\nMotherconcern!\n\nA\nboy who, at his baptism,\nhad a\npen, or a pencil, or a goose-quill\nstuck into\nhis jacket, or into his swaddling clothes, or into his bunting,\nsecretly,\ncraftily, inconspicuously,\nwill become\nsomething\n“famous”!\n\nAnd\nbarely five minutes later\nin\nthe church,\nwith the blessing of Pastor Dreschhoff,\nwhile\nI was crowned with\nnames,\nall around me, the little\nwiseguy,\nin\ndensely\ncircling, snircling,\nclosing\norbit, yes so be it,\nthe\nLiedtkes, the Tiedtkes, the Ziedtkes,\nthe\nZorns, the Hebestreits, and the Haberkorns,\nthe\nKluwes, the Struwes, the Druwes,\nthe\nBrodiens, the Scharfenbergs and the Lewertiens,\nthe\nKuhnkes, the Gruhnkes, the Ruhnkes,\nthe\nRieks, the Tuleweits, and the Papendieks,\nin short, in\nfull\narray, dignified and elegant, each by rank and degree,\nmost of the upper\nbourgeoisie,\nI suddenly cried\nout\nand\nmoaned, and consequently groaned,\nnot because\nI was feeling my oats\nbut rather being stuck\nby a very sharp Faber pencil\nwith the … imprint\n\nNumber\nOne!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "pain": { - "title": "“Pain”", - "body": "Forgive? I? To you\nA long time ago.\nI did it before I knew it.\nBut forget? Forget? … Ah, if I could!\nOften,\nin the brightest sunshine,\nwhen I’m happy and “don’t think about anything,”\nsuddenly,\nthere,\ngray it crouches in front of me\n… like a toad!\nAnd everything, everything seems stale to me again. shawl and desolate.\nThe whole life.\nAnd I am sad. sorry about you … and me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "purzmalunder": { - "title": "“Purzmalunder”", - "body": "At\nthe age of five\nI was … certain about\neverything.\n\nIn\nChina\nFrench was\nspoken,\nin\nAfrica\nthere was a bird, called a kangaroo,\nand\nthe Virgin Mary\nwas\nCatholic and had a\nskyblue\nrobe on.\n\nShe was made of wax and was the dear\nLord’s mother.\n\nWhen I grew up,\nI wanted\nto become\nSchiller and Goethe\nand\nlive\nin Berlin behind the palace.\n\nWhen I had children,\nI wanted\nto have them all\npainted.\n\nThat\nwouldn’t be so expensive,\nand\nthey wouldn’t tear\ntheir\npants.\n\nAt\nPollakowski’s book bindery\nhung a\nlarge colorful\nflyspeckbespeckled\nposter\nwith a white stallion, rearing on his hind legs.\n\nThe fat Turk with the shining saber on the post\nwas\nAli Pascha.\n\nIf I ever\ngot a dime,\nI wanted\nto buy … it for myself.\n\nBut\nmostly\nI did so want … to discover\nthe source of the Nile.\n# I.knew exactly\n\nhow\nyou would do it.\n\nWhere\nit flowed out,\nyou simply go into a\nboat,\npaddled, piddled and puddled\nto where\neverything stops.\n\nThen you were there.\n\nThere,\nthere were apes,\nthrowing oranges and coconuts at each other,\ngold dust,\nand\ngrape-raisin trees with bushels of almonds\non them.\n\nAnd\nso I wouldn’t starve,\nI would\ntake\nlots of barley-sugar bars along and a mess of carob bread.\n\nBut\nI wouldn’t tell\nanyone.\n\nThat\nI kept for myself\nalone.\n\nOnly\nI wondered\nto myself,\nwhy the others were\nall\nso dumb!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "self-assured-upbeat": { - "title": "“Self-Assured Upbeat”", - "body": "In\nthe last, deep,\nspellbound, weaving, weighty\nnight sleep,\nthrough the\npurple … convex\npoem,\nfrom light of spheres beyond those worlds, a free-from-earthly-body\nglowing face\nwhispered to me, occurred to me, formed\nin me\nthe\ncertainty:\nSeven trillion … years … before my birth\nI was\na sword lily.\nMy searching roots\nsucked\nthemselves\naround a star.\nOut of\nhis vaulting\nwaters,\nscarry like flower-leaves, dusty like golden arrow threads,\ndreamblue,\ngrew,\nsoared, shoved,\ngrew steeper, parted, skewered,\nburned out, streamed out, sprayed out\ninto\nnew,\nflowing, waxing, waving,\nbrewing, bubbling,\ncircling\nworld rings,\nmost pregnant with secret, most majestic with secret,\nmost exalted with secret,\nself-procreating, self-begetting, self-shadowing, self-\ndividing\nmeteoric ball of flames,\ncascades of comets, colored crown of planets,\nextravagantly\nshowering about herself, benevolently blessing about herself,\nwastefully\ncatapulting\nabout herself,\nmy\ndark-metallic, halcyon-phallic, ringing crystallic\ngiantflower-sceptercrown!\nStill\nin my\nheavy early-up sleep-shaking, in my becoming a person again, in my once again full waking,\nher\npower-proud joy,\nher creator fired-up courage, her\nconfidence\nlaughed, glistened, jubilated\nin crashing cascades!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-hood": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Hood", - "birth": { - "year": 1799 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1845 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hood", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bridge-of-sighs": { - "title": "“The Bridge of Sighs”", - "body": "One more Unfortunate,\nWeary of breath,\nRashly importunate,\nGone to her death!\n\nTake her up tenderly,\nLift her with care;\nFashion’d so slenderly\nYoung, and so fair!\n\nLook at her garments\nClinging like cerements;\nWhilst the wave constantly\nDrips from her clothing;\nTake her up instantly,\nLoving, not loathing.\n\nTouch her not scornfully;\nThink of her mournfully,\nGently and humanly;\nNot of the stains of her,\nAll that remains of her\nNow is pure womanly.\n\nMake no deep scrutiny\nInto her mutiny\nRash and undutiful:\nPast all dishonour,\nDeath has left on her\nOnly the beautiful.\n\nStill, for all slips of hers,\nOne of Eve’s family--\nWipe those poor lips of hers\nOozing so clammily.\n\nLoop up her tresses\nEscaped from the comb,\nHer fair auburn tresses;\nWhilst wonderment guesses\nWhere was her home?\n\nWho was her father?\nWho was her mother?\nHad she a sister?\nHad she a brother?\nOr was there a dearer one\nStill, and a nearer one\nYet, than all other?\n\nAlas! for the rarity\nOf Christian charity\nUnder the sun!\nO, it was pitiful!\nNear a whole city full,\nHome she had none.\n\nSisterly, brotherly,\nFatherly, motherly\nFeelings had changed:\nLove, by harsh evidence,\nThrown from its eminence;\nEven God’s providence\nSeeming estranged.\n\nWhere the lamps quiver\nSo far in the river,\nWith many a light\nFrom window and casement,\nFrom garret to basement,\nShe stood, with amazement,\nHouseless by night.\n\nThe bleak wind of March\nMade her tremble and shiver;\nBut not the dark arch,\nOr the black flowing river:\nMad from life’s history,\nGlad to death’s mystery,\nSwift to be hurl’d--\nAnywhere, anywhere\nOut of the world!\n\nIn she plunged boldly--\nNo matter how coldly\nThe rough river ran--\nOver the brink of it,\nPicture it--think of it,\nDissolute Man!\nLave in it, drink of it,\nThen, if you can!\n\nTake her up tenderly,\nLift her with care;\nFashion’d so slenderly,\nYoung, and so fair!\n\nEre her limbs frigidly\nStiffen too rigidly,\nDecently, kindly,\nSmooth and compose them;\nAnd her eyes, close them,\nStaring so blindly!\n\nDreadfully staring\nThro’ muddy impurity,\nAs when with the daring\nLast look of despairing\nFix’d on futurity.\n\nPerishing gloomily,\nSpurr’d by contumely,\nCold inhumanity,\nBurning insanity,\nInto her rest.--\nCross her hands humbly\nAs if praying dumbly,\nOver her breast!\n\nOwning her weakness,\nHer evil behaviour,\nAnd leaving, with meekness,\nHer sins to her Saviour!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "no": { - "title": "“No!”", - "body": "No sun--no moon!\nNo morn--no noon--\nNo dawn--\nNo sky--no earthly view--\nNo distance looking blue--\nNo road--no street--no “t’other side the way”--\nNo end to any Row--\nNo indications where the Crescents go--\nNo top to any steeple--\nNo recognitions of familiar people--\nNo courtesies for showing ’em--\nNo knowing ’em!\nNo traveling at all--no locomotion,\nNo inkling of the way--no notion--\n“No go”--by land or ocean--\nNo mail--no post--\nNo news from any foreign coast--\nNo park--no ring--no afternoon gentility--\nNo company--no nobility--\nNo warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,\nNo comfortable feel in any member--\nNo shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,\nNo fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,\nNovember!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "past-and-present": { - "title": "“Past and Present”", - "body": "I remember, I remember\nThe house where I was born,\nThe little window where the sun\nCame peeping in at morn;\nHe never came a wink too soon\nNor bought too long a day;\nBut now, I often wish the night\nHad borne my breath away.\n\nI remember, I remember\nThe roses, red and white,\nThe violets, and the lily-cups--\nThose flowers made of light!\nThe lilacs where the robin built,\nAnd where my brother set\nThe laburnum on his birthday,--\nThe tree is living yet!\n\nI remember, I remember\nWhere I was used to swing,\nAnd throught the air must rush as fresh\nTo swallows on the wing;\nMy spirit flew in feathers then\nThat is so heavy now,\nAnd summer pools could hardly cool\nThe fever on my brow.\n\nI remember, I remember\nThe fir frees dark and high;\nI used to think their slender tops\nWere close against the sky:\nIt was a childish ignorance,\nBut now ’tis little joy\nTo know I’m farther off from Heaven\nThan when I was a boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "silence": { - "title": "“Silence”", - "body": "There is a silence where hath been no sound,\nThere is a silence where no sound may be,\nIn the cold grave--under the deep deep sea,\nOr in wide desert where no life is found,\nWhich hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;\nNo voice is hush’d--no life treads silently,\nBut clouds and cloudy shadows wander free.\nThat never spoke, over the idle ground:\nBut in green ruins, in the desolate walls\nOf antique palaces, where Man hath been,\nThough the dun fox, or wild hyaena, calls,\nAnd owls, that flit continually between,\nShriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,--\nThere the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-of-the-shirt": { - "title": "“Song of the Shirt”", - "body": "With fingers weary and worn,\nWith eyelids heavy and red,\nA woman sat in unwomanly rags,\nPlying her needle and thread--\nStitch! stitch! stitch!\nIn poverty, hunger, and dirt,\nAnd still with a voice of dolorous pitch\nShe sang the “Song of the Shirt.”\n\n“Work! work! work!\nWhile the cock is crowing aloof!\nAnd work--work--work,\nTill the stars shine through the roof!\nIt’s O! to be a slave\nAlong with the barbarous Turk,\nWhere woman has never a soul to save,\nIf this is Christian work!”\n\n“Work--work--work,\nTill the brain begins to swim;\nWork--work--work,\nTill the eyes are heavy and dim!\nSeam, and gusset, and band,\nBand, and gusset, and seam,\nTill over the buttons I fall asleep,\nAnd sew them on in a dream!”\n\n“O, men, with sisters dear!\nO, men, with mothers and wives!\nIt is not linen you’re wearing out,\nBut human creatures’ lives!\nStitch--stitch--stitch,\nIn poverty, hunger and dirt,\nSewing at once, with a double thread,\nA Shroud as well as a Shirt.”\n\n“But why do I talk of death?\nThat phantom of grisly bone,\nI hardly fear his terrible shape,\nIt seems so like my own--\nIt seems so like my own,\nBecause of the fasts I keep;\nOh, God! that bread should be so dear.\nAnd flesh and blood so cheap!”\n\n“Work--work--work!\nMy labour never flags;\nAnd what are its wages? A bed of straw,\nA crust of bread--and rags.\nThat shattered roof--this naked floor--\nA table--a broken chair--\nAnd a wall so blank, my shadow I thank\nFor sometimes falling there!”\n\n“Work--work--work!\nFrom weary chime to chime,\nWork--work--work,\nAs prisoners work for crime!\nBand, and gusset, and seam,\nSeam, and gusset, and band,\nTill the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed,\nAs well as the weary hand.”\n\n“Work--work--work,\nIn the dull December light,\nAnd work--work--work,\nWhen the weather is warm and bright--\nWhile underneath the eaves\nThe brooding swallows cling\nAs if to show me their sunny backs\nAnd twit me with the spring.”\n\n“O! but to breathe the breath\nOf the cowslip and primrose sweet--\nWith the sky above my head,\nAnd the grass beneath my feet;\nFor only one short hour\nTo feel as I used to feel,\nBefore I knew the woes of want\nAnd the walk that costs a meal!”\n\n“O! but for one short hour!\nA respite however brief!\nNo blessèd leisure for Love or hope,\nBut only time for grief!\nA little weeping would ease my heart,\nBut in their briny bed\nMy tears must stop, for every drop\nHinders needle and thread!”\n\nWith fingers weary and worn,\nWith eyelids heavy and red,\nA woman sat in unwomanly rags,\nPlying her needle and thread--\nStitch! stitch! stitch!\nIn poverty, hunger, and dirt,\nAnd still with a voice of dolorous pitch,--\nWould that its tone could reach the Rich!--\nShe sang this “Song of the Shirt!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gerard-manley-hopkins": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gerard Manley Hopkins", - "birth": { - "year": 1844 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 80 - }, - "poems": { - "the-alchemist-in-the-city": { - "title": "“The Alchemist in the City”", - "body": "My window shews the travelling clouds,\nLeaves spent, new seasons, alter’d sky,\nThe making and the melting crowds:\nThe whole world passes; I stand by.\n\nThey do not waste their meted hours,\nBut men and masters plan and build:\nI see the crowning of their towers,\nAnd happy promises fulfill’d.\n\nAnd I--perhaps if my intent\nCould count on prediluvian age,\nThe labours I should then have spent\nMight so attain their heritage,\n\nBut now before the pot can glow\nWith not to be discover’d gold,\nAt length the bellows shall not blow,\nThe furnace shall at last be cold.\n\nYet it is now too late to heal\nThe incapable and cumbrous shame\nWhich makes me when with men I deal\nMore powerless than the blind or lame.\n\nNo, I should love the city less\nEven than this my thankless lore;\nBut I desire the wilderness\nOr weeded landslips of the shore.\n\nI walk my breezy belvedere\nTo watch the low or levant sun,\nI see the city pigeons veer,\nI mark the tower swallows run\n\nBetween the tower-top and the ground\nBelow me in the bearing air;\nThen find in the horizon-round\nOne spot and hunger to be there.\n\nAnd then I hate the most that lore\nThat holds no promise of success;\nThen sweetest seems the houseless shore,\nThen free and kind the wilderness,\n\nOr ancient mounds that cover bones,\nOr rocks where rockdoves do repair\nAnd trees of terebinth and stones\nAnd silence and a gulf of air.\n\nThere on a long and squared height\nAfter the sunset I would lie,\nAnd pierce the yellow waxen light\nWith free long looking, ere I die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "andromeda": { - "title": "“Andromeda”", - "body": "Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,\nWith not her either beauty’s equal or\nHer injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,\nHer flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.\nTime past she has been attempted and pursued\nBy many blows and banes; but now hears roar\nA wilder beast from West than all were, more\nRife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.\n\nHer Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes?--\nPillowy air he treads a time and hangs\nHis thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,\nAll while her patience, morselled into pangs,\nMounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,\nWith Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1879 - }, - "location": "Oxford" - } - }, - "as-kingfishers-catch-fire": { - "title": "“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”", - "body": "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;\nAs tumbled over rim in roundy wells\nStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s\nBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;\nEach mortal thing does one thing and the same:\nDeals out that being indoors each one dwells;\nSelves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,\nCrying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.\n\nÍ say móre: the just man justices;\nKéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;\nActs in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is--\nChríst--for Christ plays in ten thousand places,\nLovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his\nTo the Father through the features of men’s faces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales" - } - }, - "ashboughs": { - "title": "“Ashboughs”", - "body": "Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,\nIs anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep\nPoetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.\nSay it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled\nFast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep\nApart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.\nThey touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep\nThe smouldering enormous winter welkin! May\nMells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray\nOf greenery: it is old earth’s groping towards the steep\nHeaven whom she childs us by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "at-the-wedding-march": { - "title": "“At the Wedding March”", - "body": "God with honour hang your head,\nGroom, and grace you, bride, your bed\nWith lissome scions, sweet scions,\nOut of hallowed bodies bred.\n\nEach be other’s comfort kind:\nDéep, déeper than divined,\nDivine charity, dear charity,\nFast you ever, fast bind.\n\nThen let the March tread our ears:\nI to him turn with tears\nWho to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,\nDéals tríumph and immortal years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "barnfloor-and-winepress": { - "title": "“Barnfloor and Winepress”", - "body": "_And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?_\n --2 Kings VI: 27\n\nThou that on sin’s wages starvest,\nBehold we have the joy in harvest:\nFor us was gather’d the first fruits,\nFor us was lifted from the roots,\nSheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore,\nScourged upon the threshing-floor;\nWhere the upper mill-stone roof’d His head,\nAt morn we found the heavenly Bread,\nAnd, on a thousand altars laid,\nChrist our Sacrifice is made!\n\nThou whose dry plot for moisture gapes,\nWe shout with them that tread the grapes:\nFor us the Vine was fenced with thorn,\nFive ways the precious branches torn;\nTerrible fruit was on the tree\nIn the acre of Gethsemane;\nFor us by Calvary’s distress\nThe wine was racked from the press;\nNow in our altar-vessels stored\nIs the sweet Vintage of our Lord.\n\nIn Joseph’s garden they threw by\nThe riv’n Vine, leafless, lifeless, dry:\nOn Easter morn the Tree was forth,\nIn forty days reach’d heaven from earth;\nSoon the whole world is overspread;\nYe weary, come into the shade.\n\nThe field where He has planted us\nShall shake her fruit as Libanus,\nWhen He has sheaved us in His sheaf,\nWhen He has made us bear his leaf.--\nWe scarcely call that banquet food,\nBut even our Saviour’s and our blood,\nWe are so grafted on His wood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1865 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "binsey-poplars": { - "title": "“Binsey Poplars”", - "body": "My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,\nQuelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,\nAll felled, felled, are all felled;\nOf a fresh and following folded rank\nNot spared, not one\nThat dandled a sandalled\nShadow that swam or sank\nOn meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.\n\nO if we but knew what we do\nWhen we delve or hew--\nHack and rack the growing green!\nSince country is so tender\nTo touch, her being só slender,\nThat, like this sleek and seeing ball\nBut a prick will make no eye at all,\nWhere we, even where we mean\nTo mend her we end her,\nWhen we hew or delve:\nAfter-comers cannot guess the beauty been.\nTen or twelve, only ten or twelve\nStrokes of havoc únselve\nThe sweet especial scene,\nRural scene, a rural scene,\nSweet especial rural scene.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1879, - "month": "march" - }, - "location": "Port Meadow", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-blessed-virgin-compared-to-the-air-we-breathe": { - "title": "“The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”", - "body": "Wild air, world-mothering air,\nNestling me everywhere,\nThat each eyelash or hair\nGirdles; goes home betwixt\nThe fleeciest, frailest-flixed\nSnowflake; that’s fairly mixed\nWith, riddles, and is rife\nIn every least thing’s life;\nThis needful, never spent,\nAnd nursing element;\nMy more than meat and drink,\nMy meal at every wink;\nThis air, which, by life’s law,\nMy lung must draw and draw\nNow but to breathe its praise,\nMinds me in many ways\nOf her who not only\nGave God’s infinity\nDwindled to infancy\nWelcome in womb and breast,\nBirth, milk, and all the rest\nBut mothers each new grace\nThat does now reach our race--\nMary Immaculate,\nMerely a woman, yet\nWhose presence, power is\nGreat as no goddess’s\nWas deemèd, dreamèd; who\nThis one work has to do--\nLet all God’s glory through,\nGod’s glory which would go\nThrough her and from her flow\nOff, and no way but so.\n\nI say that we are wound\nWith mercy round and round\nAs if with air: the same\nIs Mary, more by name.\nShe, wild web, wondrous robe,\nMantles the guilty globe,\nSince God has let dispense\nHer prayers his providence:\nNay, more than almoner,\nThe sweet alms’ self is her\nAnd men are meant to share\nHer life as life does air.\n If I have understood,\nShe holds high motherhood\nTowards all our ghostly good\nAnd plays in grace her part\nAbout man’s beating heart,\nLaying, like air’s fine flood,\nThe deathdance in his blood;\nYet no part but what will\nBe Christ our Saviour still.\nOf her flesh he took flesh:\nHe does take fresh and fresh,\nThough much the mystery how,\nNot flesh but spirit now\nAnd makes, O marvellous!\nNew Nazareths in us,\nWhere she shall yet conceive\nHim, morning, noon, and eve;\nNew Bethlems, and he born\nThere, evening, noon, and morn\nBethlem or Nazareth,\nMen here may draw like breath\nMore Christ and baffle death;\nWho, born so, comes to be\nNew self and nobler me\nIn each one and each one\nMore makes, when all is done,\nBoth God’s and Mary’s Son.\n Again, look overhead\nHow air is azurèd;\nO how! nay do but stand\nWhere you can lift your hand\nSkywards: rich, rich it laps\nRound the four fingergaps.\nYet such a sapphire-shot,\nCharged, steepèd sky will not\nStain light. Yea, mark you this:\nIt does no prejudice.\nThe glass-blue days are those\nWhen every colour glows,\nEach shape and shadow shows.\nBlue be it: this blue heaven\nThe seven or seven times seven\nHued sunbeam will transmit\nPerfect, not alter it.\nOr if there does some soft,\nOn things aloof, aloft,\nBloom breathe, that one breath more\nEarth is the fairer for.\nWhereas did air not make\nThis bath of blue and slake\nHis fire, the sun would shake,\nA blear and blinding ball\nWith blackness bound, and all\nThe thick stars round him roll\nFlashing like flecks of coal,\nQuartz-fret, or sparks of salt,\nIn grimy vasty vault.\n So God was god of old:\nA mother came to mould\nThose limbs like ours which are\nWhat must make our daystar\nMuch dearer to mankind;\nWhose glory bare would blind\nOr less would win man’s mind.\nThrough her we may see him\nMade sweeter, not made dim,\nAnd her hand leaves his light\nSifted to suit our sight.\n Be thou then, thou dear\nMother, my atmosphere;\nMy happier world, wherein\nTo wend and meet no sin;\nAbove me, round me lie\nFronting my froward eye\nWith sweet and scarless sky;\nStir in my ears, speak there\nOf God’s love, O live air,\nOf patience, penance, prayer:\nWorld-mothering air, air wild,\nWound with thee, in thee isled,\nFold home, fast fold thy child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1883, - "month": "may" - }, - "location": "Lancashire", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "a-brother-and-sister": { - "title": "“A Brother and Sister”", - "body": "O I admire and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves\nDiscovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.\nA juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,\nAnd beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears.\n\nHappy the father, mother of these! Too fast:\nNot that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest\nIn one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast,\nCreatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest.\n\nAnd are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams\nTheir young delightful hour do feature down\nThat fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams\nOr ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown.\n\nShe leans on him with such contentment fond\nAs well the sister sits, would well the wife;\nHis looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond,\nGaze on, and fall directly forth on life.\n\nBut ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are\nOf favoured make and mind and health and youth,\nWhere lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star?\nThere’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.\n\nThere’s none but good can bé good, both for you\nAnd what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid;\nNone good but God--a warning wavèd to\nOne once that was found wanting when Good weighed.\n\nMan lives that list, that leaning in the will\nNo wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,\nThe selfless self of self, most strange, most still,\nFast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.\n\nYour feast of; that most in you earnest eye\nMay but call on your banes to more carouse.\nWorst will the best. What worm was here, we cry,\nTo have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?\n\nEnough: corruption was the world’s first woe.\nWhat need I strain my heart beyond my ken?\nO but I bear my burning witness though\nAgainst the wild and wanton work of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "brothers": { - "title": "“Brothers”", - "body": "How lovely the elder brother’s\nLife all laced in the other’s,\nLóve-laced!--what once I well\nWitnessed; so fortune fell.\nWhen Shrovetide, two years gone,\nOur boys’ plays brought on\nPart was picked for John,\nYoung Jóhn: then fear, then joy\nRan revel in the elder boy.\nTheir night was come now; all\nOur company thronged the hall;\nHenry, by the wall,\nBeckoned me beside him:\nI came where called, and eyed him\nBy meanwhiles; making mý play\nTurn most on tender byplay.\nFor, wrung all on love’s rack,\nMy lad, and lost in Jack,\nSmiled, blushed, and bit his lip;\nOr drove, with a diver’s dip,\nClutched hands down through clasped knees--\nTruth’s tokens tricks like these,\nOld telltales, with what stress\nHe hung on the imp’s success.\nNow the other was bráss-bóld:\nHé had no work to hold\nHis heart up at the strain;\nNay, roguish ran the vein.\nTwo tedious acts were past;\nJack’s call and cue at last;\nWhen Henry, heart-forsook,\nDropped eyes and dared not look.\nEh, how áll rúng!\nYoung dog, he did give tongue!\nBut Harry--in his hands he has flung\nHis tear-tricked cheeks of flame\nFor fond love and for shame.\n\nAh Nature, framed in fault,\nThere ’s comfort then, there ’s salt;\nNature, bad, base, and blind,\nDearly thou canst be kind;\nThere dearly thén, deárly,\nI’ll cry thou canst be kind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1880, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "the-buglers-first-communion": { - "title": "“The Bugler’s First Communion”", - "body": "A bugler boy from barrack (it is over the hill\nThere)--boy bugler, born, he tells me, of Irish\nMother to an English sire (he\nShares their best gifts surely, fall how things will),\n\nThis very very day came down to us after a boon he on\nMy late being there begged of me, overflowing\nBoon in my bestowing,\nCame, I say, this day to it--to a First Communion.\n\nHere he knelt then ín regimental red.\nForth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet\nTo his youngster take his treat!\nLow-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.\n\nThere! and your sweetest sendings, ah divine,\nBy it, heavens, befall him! as a heart Christ’s darling, dauntless;\nTongue true, vaunt- and tauntless;\nBreathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine.\n\nFrowning and forefending angel-warder\nSquander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him;\nMarch, kind comrade, abreast him;\nDress his days to a dexterous and starlight order.\n\nHow it dóes my heart good, visiting at that bleak hill,\nWhen limber liquid youth, that to all I teach\nYields tender as a pushed peach,\nHies headstrong to its wellbeing of a self-wise self-will!\n\nThen though I should tread tufts of consolation\nDáys áfter, só I in a sort deserve to\nAnd do serve God to serve to\nJust such slips of soldiery Christ’s royal ration.\n\nNothing élse is like it, no, not all so strains\nUs: fresh youth fretted in a bloomfall all portending\nThat sweet’s sweeter ending;\nRealm both Christ is heir to and thére réigns.\n\nO now well work that sealing sacred ointment!\nO for now charms, arms, what bans off bad\nAnd locks love ever in a lad!\nLet mé though see no more of him, and not disappointment\n\nThose sweet hopes quell whose least me quickenings lift.\nIn scarlet or somewhere of some day seeing\nThat brow and bead of being,\nAn our day’s God’s own Galahad. Though this child’s drift\n\nSeems by a divíne doom chánnelled, nor do I cry\nDisaster there; but may he not rankle and roam\nIn backwheels though bound home?--\nThat left to the Lord of the Eucharist, I here lie by;\n\nRecorded only, I have put my lips on pleas\nWould brandle adamantine heaven with ride and jar, did\nPrayer go disregarded:\nForward-like, but however, and like favourable heaven heard these.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1879, - "month": "july", - "day": 27 - }, - "location": "Oxford", - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "the-caged-skylark": { - "title": "“The Caged Skylark”", - "body": "As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage\n Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells--\n That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;\nThis in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age.\nThough aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,\n Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,\n Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells\nOr wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.\n\nNot that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest--\nWhy, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,\n But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.\n\nMan’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,\nBut uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed\n For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales" - } - }, - "the-candle-indoors": { - "title": "“The Candle Indoors”", - "body": "Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.\nI muse at how its being puts blissful back\nWith yellowy moisture mild night’s blear-all black,\nOr to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.\nBy that window what task what fingers ply,\nI plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack\nOf answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack\nThere God to aggrándise, God to glorify.--\n\nCome you indoors, come home; your fading fire\nMend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault:\nYou there are master, do your own desire;\nWhat hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault\nIn a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar\nAnd cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "location": "Liverpool" - } - }, - "carrion-comfort": { - "title": "“Carrion Comfort”", - "body": "Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;\nNot untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man\nIn me ór, most weary, cry _I can no more_. I can;\nCan something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.\nBut ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me\nThy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan\nWith darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,\nO in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?\n\nWhy? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.\nNay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,\nHand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.\nCheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród\nMe? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year\nOf now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1885, - "month": "august" - }, - "location": "Dublin", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "cheery-beggar": { - "title": "“Cheery Beggar”", - "body": "Beyond Mágdalen and by the Bridge, on a place called there the Plain,\nIn Summer, in a burst of summertime\nFollowing falls and falls of rain,\nWhen the air was sweet-and-sour of the flown fineflower of\nThose goldnails and their gaylinks that hang along a lime;\n\nThe motion of that man’s heart is fine\nWhom want could not make píne, píne\nThat struggling should not sear him, a gift should cheer him\nLike that poor pocket of pence, poor pence of mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "location": "Oxford", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-child-is-father-to-the-man": { - "title": "“The Child is Father to the Man”", - "body": "“The child is father to the man.”\nHow can he be? The words are wild.\nSuck any sense from that who can:\n“The child is father to the man.”\nNo; what the poet did write ran,\n“The man is father to the child.”\n“The child is father to the man!”\nHow can he be? The words are wild.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "denis": { - "title": "“Denis”", - "body": "Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit\nCaps occasion with an intellectual fit.\nYet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber’ll hit\nThe bald and bóld blínking gold when áll’s dóne\nRight rooting in the bare butt’s wincing navel in the sight of the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "duns-scotuss-oxford": { - "title": "“Duns Scotus’s Oxford”", - "body": "Towery city and branchy between towers;\nCuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;\nThe dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did\nOnce encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;\n\nThou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours\nThat neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded\nBest in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded\nRural, rural keeping--folk, flocks, and flowers.\n\nYet ah! this air I gather and I release\nHe lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what\nHe haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;\n\nOf realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not\nRivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;\nWho fired France for Mary without spot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1879 - }, - "location": "Oxford", - "context": { - "holiday": "blessed_john_duns_scotus" - } - } - }, - "easter-communion": { - "title": "“Easter Communion”", - "body": "Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:\nGod comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.\nYou striped in secret with breath-taking whips,\nThose crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced\nTo crosses meant for Jesu’s; you whom the East\nWith draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips\nBreathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,\nYou vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,\n\nGod shall o’er-brim the measures you have spent\nWith oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze\nAnd the ever-fretting shirt of punishment\nGive myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.\nYour scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:\nLo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "epithalamion": { - "title": "“Epithalamion”", - "body": "Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe\nWe are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood\nOf some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,\nSouthern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,\nThat leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown\nMarbled river, boisterously beautiful, between\nRoots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and water-blowballs, down.\nWe are there, when we hear a shout\nThat the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover\nMakes dither, makes hover\nAnd the riot of a rout\nOf, it must be, boys from the town\nBathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.\n\nBy there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise\nHe drops towards the river: unseen\nSees the bevy of them, how the boys\nWith dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,\nAre earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.\n\nThis garland of their gambols flashes in his breast\nInto such a sudden zest\nOf summertime joys\nThat he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best\nThere; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;\nFairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood\nBy. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,\nHang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,\nLike the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots\nRose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with--down he dings\nHis bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:\nCareless these in coloured wisp\nAll lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks\nForward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp\nOver finger-teasing task, his twiny boots\nFast he opens, last he offwrings\nTill walk the world he can with bare his feet\nAnd come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks\nBuilt of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks\nAnd the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots\nAnd with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,\nDark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet\nFlinty kindcold element let break across his limbs\nLong. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.\n\nEnough now; since the sacred matter that I mean\nI should be wronging longer leaving it to float\nUpon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note--\nWhat is … the delightful dene?\nWedlock. What the water? Spousal love.\n\nFather, mother, brothers, sisters, friends\nInto fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns\nRankèd round the bower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "felix-randal": { - "title": "“Felix Randal”", - "body": "Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,\nWho have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome\nPining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some\nFatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?\n\nSickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended\nBeing anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some\nMonths earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom\nTendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!\n\nThis seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.\nMy tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,\nThy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;\n\nHow far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,\nWhen thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,\nDidst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1881 - }, - "location": "Liverpool" - } - }, - "for-a-picture-of-st-dorothea": { - "title": "“For a Picture of St. Dorothea”", - "body": "I BEAR a basket lined with grass;\nI am so light, I am so fair,\nThat men must wonder as I pass\nAnd at the basket that I bear,\nWhere in a newly-drawn green litter\nSweet flowers I carry,--sweets for bitter.\n\nLilies I shew you, lilies none,\nNone in Caesar’s gardens blow,--\nAnd a quince in hand,--not one\nIs set upon your boughs below;\nNot set, because their buds not spring;\nSpring not, ’cause world is wintering.\n\nBut these were found in the East and South\nWhere Winter is the clime forgot.--\nThe dewdrop on the larkspur’s mouth\nO should it then be quenchèd not?\nIn starry water-meads they drew\nThese drops: which be they? stars or dew?\n\nHad she a quince in hand? Yet gaze:\nRather it is the sizing moon.\nLo, linked heavens with milky ways!\nThat was her larkspur row.--So soon?\nSphered so fast, sweet soul?--We see\nNor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 6 - } - } - }, - "fragments-from-richard": { - "title": "“Fragments from Richard”", - "body": "But what drew shepherd Richard from his downs,\nAnd bred acquaintance of unused towns?\nWhat put taught graces on his country lip,\nAnd brought the sense of gentle fellowship\nThat many centres found in many hearts?\nAnd the tinklings on the falls and swells\nGave the much music of our Oxford bells?\n\nA Sylvester, come, Sylvester; you may trust\nYour footing now to the much dreaded dust,\nCrisp’d up and starchy from a short half-hour\nOf standing to he blossom-hitting shower\nThat still makes counter-roundels in the pond.\nA rainbow also shapes itself beyond\nThe shining slates and houses. Come and see.\nYou may quote Wordsworth, if you like, to me.\nSylvester came: they went by Cumnor Hill,\nMet a new shower and saw the rainbow fill\nFrom one frail horn that crumbled to the plain\nHis steady wheel quite to the full again.\nThey watched the brush of the swift stringy drops,\nHelp’d by the darkness of a block of copse\nClose-rooted in the downward-hollowing fields;\nThen sought such leafy shelter as it yields,\nAnd each drew bluebells up, and for relief\nTook primroses, their pull’d and plotted leaf\nBeing not forgotten, for primroses note\nThe blue with brighter places not remote.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "location": "Oxford" - } - }, - "the-furl-of-fresh-leaved-dogrose-down": { - "title": "“The Furl of Fresh-Leaved Dogrose Down”", - "body": "The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down\nHis cheeks the forth-and-flaunting sun\nHad swarthed about with lion-brown\nBefore the Spring was done.\n\nHis locks like all a ravel-rope’s-end,\nWith hempen strands in spray--\nFallow, foam-fallow, hanks--fall’n off their ranks,\nSwung down at a disarray.\n\nOr like a juicy and jostling shock\nOf bluebells sheaved in May\nOr wind-long fleeces on the flock\nA day off shearing day.\n\nThen over his turnèd temples--here--\nWas a rose, or, failing that,\nRough-Robin or five-lipped campion clear\nFor a beauty-bow to his hat,\nAnd the sunlight sidled, like dewdrops, like dandled diamonds\nThrough the sieve of the straw of the plait.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "gods-grandeur": { - "title": "“God’s Grandeur”", - "body": "The world is charged with the grandeur of God.\n It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;\n It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil\nCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?\nGenerations have trod, have trod, have trod;\n And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;\n And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil\nIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.\n\nAnd for all this, nature is never spent;\n There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;\nAnd though the last lights off the black West went\n Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--\nBecause the Holy Ghost over the bent\n World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "the-habit-of-perfection": { - "title": "“The Habit of Perfection”", - "body": "Elected Silence, sing to me\nAnd beat upon my whorlèd ear,\nPipe me to pastures still and be\nThe music that I care to hear.\n\nShape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:\nIt is the shut, the curfew sent\nFrom there where all surrenders come\nWhich only makes you eloquent.\n\nBe shellèd, eyes, with double dark\nAnd find the uncreated light:\nThis ruck and reel which you remark\nCoils, keeps, and teases simple sight.\n\nPalate, the hutch of tasty lust,\nDesire not to be rinsed with wine:\nThe can must be so sweet, the crust\nSo fresh that come in fasts divine!\n\nNostrils, your careless breath that spend\nUpon the stir and keep of pride,\nWhat relish shall the censers send\nAlong the sanctuary side!\n\nO feel-of-primrose hands, O feet\nThat want the yield of plushy sward,\nBut you shall walk the golden street\nAnd you unhouse and house the Lord.\n\nAnd, Poverty, be thou the bride\nAnd now the marriage feast begun,\nAnd lily-coloured clothes provide\nYour spouse not laboured-at nor spun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "the-half-way-house": { - "title": "“The Half-Way House”", - "body": "Love I was shewn upon the mountain-side\nAnd bid to catch Him ere the dropp of day.\nSee, Love, I creep and Thou on wings dost ride:\nLove it is evening now and Thou away;\nLove, it grows darker here and Thou art above;\nLove, come down to me if Thy name be Love.\n\nMy national old Egyptian reed gave way;\nI took of vine a cross-barred rod or rood.\nThen next I hungered: Love when here, they say,\nOr once or never took love’s proper food;\nBut I must yield the chase, or rest and eat.--\nPeace and food cheered me where four rough ways meet.\n\nHear yet my paradox: Love, when all is given,\nTo see Thee I must _see_ Thee, to love, love;\nI must o’ertake Thee at once and under heaven\nIf I shall overtake Thee at last above.\nYou have your wish; enter these walls, one said:\nHe is with you in the breaking of the bread.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1865 - }, - "location": "Oxford" - } - }, - "the-handsome-heart-at-a-gracious-answer": { - "title": "“The Handsome Heart at a Gracious Answer”", - "body": "“But tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy\nYou?”--“Father, what you buy me I like best.”\nWith the sweetest air that said, still plied and pressed,\nHe swung to his first poised purport of reply.\n\nWhat the heart is! which, like carriers let fly--\nDoff darkness, homing nature knows the rest--\nTo its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,\nFalls light as ten years long taught how to and why.\n\nMannerly-hearted! more than handsome face--\nBeauty’s bearing or muse of mounting vein,\nAll, in this case, bathed in high hallowing grace …\n\nOf heaven what boon to buy you, boy, or gain\nNot granted?--Only … O on that path you pace\nRun all your race, O brace sterner that strain!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "harry-ploughman": { - "title": "“Harry Ploughman”", - "body": "Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue\nBreathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank\nRope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank--\n Head and foot, shoulder and shank--\nBy a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to;\nStand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew\nThat onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank--\n Soared or sank--,\nThough as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a roll-\n call, rank\nAnd features, in flesh, what deed he each must do--\n His sinew-service where do.\n\nHe leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and\n liquid waist\nIn him, all quail to the wallowing o’ the plough:\n ’s cheek crimsons; curls\nWag or crossbridle, in a wind lifted, windlaced--\n See his wind- lilylocks -laced;\nChurlsgrace, too, child of Amansstrength, how it hangs\n or hurls\nThem--broad in bluff hide his frowning feet lashed! raced\nWith, along them, cragiron under and cold furls--\n With-a-fountain’s shining-shot furls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Autumn", - "year": 1887 - }, - "location": "Dromore" - } - }, - "heaven-haven": { - "title": "“Heaven-Haven”", - "body": " I have desired to go\n Where springs not fail,\nTo fields where flies no sharp and sided hail\n And a few lilies blow.\n\n And I have asked to be\n Where no storms come,\nWhere the green swell is in the havens dumb,\n And out of the swing of the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1864 - }, - "location": "Oxford", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "hope-holds-to-christ": { - "title": "“Hope Holds to Christ”", - "body": "Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out\nTo take His lovely likeness more and more.\nIt will not well, so she would bring about\nAn ever brighter burnish than before\nAnd turns to wash it from her welling eyes\nAnd breathes the blots off all with sighs on sighs.\nHer glass is blest but she as good as blind\nHolds till hand aches and wonders what is there;\nHer glass drinks light, she darkles down behind,\nAll of her glorious gainings unaware.\n\nI told you that she turned her mirror dim\nBetweenwhiles, but she sees herself not Him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hurrahing-in-harvest": { - "title": "“Hurrahing in Harvest”", - "body": "Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise\nAround; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour\nOf silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier\nMeal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?\n\nI walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,\nDown all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;\nAnd, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a\nRapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?\n\nAnd the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder\nMajestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--\nThese things, these things were here and but the beholder\nWanting; which two when they once meet,\nThe heart rears wings bold and bolder\nAnd hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "i-wake-and-feel-the-fell-of-dark-not-day": { - "title": "“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day …”", - "body": "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.\nWhat hours, O what black hoürs we have spent\nThis night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!\nAnd more must, in yet longer light’s delay.\nWith witness I speak this. But where I say\nHours I mean years, mean life. And my lament\nIs cries countless, cries like dead letters sent\nTo dearest him that lives alas! away.\n\nI am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree\nBitter would have me taste: my taste was me;\nBones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.\nSelfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see\nThe lost are like this, and their scourge to be\nAs I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "location": "Dublin", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "in-the-valley-of-the-elwy": { - "title": "“In the Valley of the Elwy”", - "body": "I remember a house where all were good\n To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:\n Comforting smell breathed at very entering,\nFetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.\nThat cordial air made those kind people a hood\n All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing\n Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring:\nWhy, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.\n\nLovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,\nAll the air things wear that build this world of Wales;\n Only the inmate does not correspond:\nGod, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,\nComplete thy creature dear O where it fails,\n Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877, - "month": "may", - "day": 23 - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "inversnaid": { - "title": "“Inversnaid”", - "body": "This darksome burn, horseback brown,\nHis rollrock highroad roaring down,\nIn coop and in comb the fleece of his foam\nFlutes and low to the lake falls home.\n\nA windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth\nTurns and twindles over the broth\nOf a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,\nIt rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.\n\nDegged with dew, dappled with dew\nAre the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,\nWiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,\nAnd the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.\n\nWhat would the world be, once bereft\nOf wet and of wildness? Let them be left,\nO let them be left, wildness and wet;\nLong live the weeds and the wilderness yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1881 - }, - "location": "Scotland" - } - }, - "the-lantern-out-of-doors": { - "title": "“The Lantern out of Doors”", - "body": "Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,\nThat interests our eyes. And who goes there?\nI think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,\nWith, all down darkness wide, his wading light?\n\nMen go by me whom either beauty bright\nIn mould or mind or what not else makes rare:\nThey rain against our much-thick and marsh air\nRich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.\n\nDeath or distance soon consumes them: wind\nWhat most I may eye after, be in at the end\nI cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.\n\nChrist minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend\nThere, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,\nTheir ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1878 - } - } - }, - "the-leaden-echo-and-the-golden-echo": { - "title": "“The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”", - "body": "_The Leaden Echo_\n\nHow to keep--is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep\nBack beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?\n\nÓ is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,\nDówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?\nNo there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,\nNor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,\nDo what you may do, what, do what you may,\nAnd wisdom is early to despair:\nBe beginning; since, no, nothing can be done\nTo keep at bay\nAge and age’s evils, hoar hair,\nRuck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;\nSo be beginning, be beginning to despair.\nO there’s none; no no no there’s none:\nBe beginning to despair, to despair,\nDespair, despair, despair, despair.\n\n\n_The Golden Echo_\n\nSpare!\nThere is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);\nOnly not within seeing of the sun,\nNot within the singeing of the strong sun,\nTall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air.\nSomewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,\nÓne. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,\nWhere whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,\nUndone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet\nOf us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,\nThe flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,\nNever fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth\nTo its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!\nCome then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,\nWinning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--\nResign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,\nAnd with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver\nThem; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death\nGive beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.\nSee; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair\nIs, hair of the head, numbered.\nNay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould\nWill have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,\nThis side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold\nWhat while we, while we slumbered.\nO then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,\nWhen the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,\nFonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept\nFar with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder\nA care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.--\nYonder.--What high as that! We follow, now we follow.--\nYonder, yes yonder, yonder,\nYonder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1882, - "month": "october" - }, - "location": "Lancashire", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "let-me-be-to-thee-as-the-circling-bird": { - "title": "“Let Me Be to Thee as the Circling Bird”", - "body": "Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,\nOr bat with tender and air-crisping wings\nThat shapes in half-light his departing rings,\nFrom both of whom a changeless note is heard.\nI have found my music in a common word,\nTrying each pleasurable throat that sings\nAnd every praised sequence of sweet strings,\nAnd know infallibly which I preferred.\n\nThe authentic cadence was discovered late\nWhich ends those only strains that I approve,\nAnd other science all gone out of date\nAnd minor sweetness scarce made mention of:\nI have found the dominant of my range and state--\nLove, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-loss-of-the-eurydice": { - "title": "“The Loss of the Eurydice”", - "body": "# 1.\nThe Eurydice--it concerned thee, O Lord:\nThree hundred souls, O alas! on board,\n Some asleep unawakened, all un-\nwarned, eleven fathoms fallen\n\n# 2.\nWhere she foundered! One stroke\nFelled and furled them, the hearts of oak!\n And flockbells off the aerial\nDowns’ forefalls beat to the burial.\n\n# 3.\nFor did she pride her, freighted fully, on\nBounden bales or a hoard of bullion?--\n Precious passing measure,\nLads and men her lade and treasure.\n\n# 4.\nShe had come from a cruise, training seamen--\nMen, boldboys soon to be men:\n Must it, worst weather,\nBlast bole and bloom together?\n\n# 5.\nNo Atlantic squall overwrought her\nOr rearing billow of the Biscay water:\n Home was hard at hand\nAnd the blow bore from land.\n\n# 6.\nAnd you were a liar, O blue March day.\nBright sun lanced fire in the heavenly bay;\n But what black Boreas wrecked her? he\nCame equipped, deadly-electric,\n\n# 7.\nA beetling baldbright cloud thorough England\nRiding: there did storms not mingle? and\n Hailropes hustle and grind their\nHeavengravel? wolfsnow, worlds of it, wind there?\n\n# 8.\nNow Carisbrook keep goes under in gloom;\nNow it overvaults Appledurcombe;\n Now near by Ventnor town\nIt hurls, hurls off Boniface Down.\n\n# 9.\nToo proud, too proud, what a press she bore!\nRoyal, and all her royals wore.\n Sharp with her, shorten sail!\nToo late; lost; gone with the gale.\n\n# 10.\nThis was that fell capsize,\nAs half she had righted and hoped to rise\n Death teeming in by her portholes\nRaced down decks, round messes of mortals.\n\n# 11.\nThen a lurch forward, frigate and men;\n“All hands for themselves” the cry ran then;\n But she who had housed them thither\nWas around them, bound them or wound them with her.\n\n# 12.\nMarcus Hare, high her captain,\nKept to her--care-drowned and wrapped in\n Cheer’s death, would follow\nHis charge through the champ-white water-in-a-wallow.\n\n# 13.\nAll under Channel to bury in a beach her\nCheeks: Right, rude of feature,\n He thought he heard say\n“Her commander! and thou too, and thou this way.”\n\n# 14.\nIt is even seen, time’s something server,\nIn mankind’s medley a duty-swerver,\n At downright “No or yes?”\nDoffs all, drives full for righteousness.\n\n# 15.\nSydney Fletcher, Bristol-bred,\n(Low lie his mates now on watery bed)\n Takes to the seas and snows\nAs sheer down the ship goes.\n\n# 16.\nNow her afterdraught gullies him too down;\nNow he wrings for breath with the deathgush brown;\n Till a lifebelt and God’s will\nLend him a lift from the sea-swill.\n\n# 17.\nNow he shoots short up to the round air;\nNow he gasps, now he gazes everywhere;\n But his eye no cliff, no coast or\nMark makes in the rivelling snowstorm.\n\n# 18.\nHim, after an hour of wintry waves,\nA schooner sights, with another, and saves,\n And he boards her in Oh! such joy\nHe has lost count what came next, poor boy.--\n\n# 19.\nThey say who saw one sea-corpse cold\nHe was all of lovely manly mould,\n Every inch a tar,\nOf the best we boast our sailors are.\n\n# 20.\nLook, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he\nIs strung by duty, is strained to beauty,\n And brown-as-dawning-skinned\nWith brine and shine and whirling wind.\n\n# 21.\nO his nimble finger, his gnarled grip!\nLeagues, leagues of seamanship\n Slumber in these forsaken\nBones, this sinew, and will not waken.\n\n# 22.\nHe was but one like thousands more,\nDay and night I deplore\n My people and born own nation,\nFast foundering own generation,\n\n# 23.\nI might let bygones be--our curse\nOf ruinous shrine no hand or, worse,\n Robbery’s hand is busy to\nDress, hoar-hallowèd shrines unvisited;\n\n# 24.\nOnly the breathing temple and fleet\nLife, this wildworth blown so sweet,\n These daredeaths, ay this crew, in\nUnchrist, all rolled in ruin--\n\n# 25.\nDeeply surely I need to deplore it,\nWondering why my master bore it,\n The riving off that race\nSo at home, time was, to his truth and grace\n\n# 26.\nThat a starlight-wender of ours would say\nThe marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way\n And one--but let be, let be:\nMore, more than was will yet be.--\n\n# 27.\nO well wept, mother have lost son;\nWept, wife; wept, sweetheart would be one:\n Though grief yield them no good\nYet shed what tears sad truelove should.\n\n# 28.\nBut to Christ lord of thunder\nCrouch; lay knee by earth low under:\n “Holiest, loveliest, bravest,\nSave my hero, O Hero savest.\n\n# 29.\nAnd the prayer thou hearst me making\nHave, at the awful overtaking,\n Heard; have heard and granted\nGrace that day grace was wanted.”\n\n# 30.\nNot that hell knows redeeming,\nBut for souls sunk in seeming\n Fresh, till doomfire burn all,\nPrayer shall fetch pity eternal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1878, - "month": "april" - }, - "location": "Derbyshire", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "love-preparing-to-fly": { - "title": "“Love Preparing to Fly”", - "body": "He play’d his wings as tho’ for flight;\nThey webb’d the sky with glassy light.\nHis body sway’d upon tiptoes,\nLike a wind-perplexed rose;\nIn eddies of the wind he went\nAt last up the blue element.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-may-magnificat": { - "title": "“The May Magnificat”", - "body": "May is Mary’s month, and I\nMuse at that and wonder why:\n Her feasts follow reason,\n Dated due to season--\n\nCandlemas, Lady Day;\nBut the Lady Month, May,\n Why fasten that upon her,\n With a feasting in her honour?\n\nIs it only its being brighter\nThan the most are must delight her?\n Is it opportunest\n And flowers finds soonest?\n\nAsk of her, the mighty mother:\nHer reply puts this other\n Question: What is Spring?--\n Growth in every thing--\n\nFlesh and fleece, fur and feather,\nGrass and green world all together;\n Star-eyed strawberry-breasted\n Throstle above her nested\n\nCluster of bugle blue eggs thin\nForms and warms the life within;\n And bird and blossom swell\n In sod or sheath or shell.\n\nAll things rising, all things sizing\nMary sees, sympathising\n With that world of good,\n Nature’s motherhood.\n\nTheir magnifying of each its kind\nWith delight calls to mind\n How she did in her stored\n Magnify the Lord.\n\nWell but there was more than this:\nSpring’s universal bliss\n Much, had much to say\n To offering Mary May.\n\nWhen drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple\nBloom lights the orchard-apple\n And thicket and thorp are merry\n With silver-surfèd cherry\n\nAnd azuring-over greybell makes\nWood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes\n And magic cuckoocall\n Caps, clears, and clinches all--\n\nThis ecstacy all through mothering earth\nTells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth\n To remember and exultation\n In God who was her salvation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "moonless-darkness-stands-between": { - "title": "“Moonless Darkness Stands Between”", - "body": "Moonless darkness stands between.\nPast, the Past, no more be seen!\nBut the Bethlehem-star may lead me\nTo the sight of Him Who freed me\nFrom the self that I have been.\nMake me pure, Lord: Thou art holy;\nMake me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly;\nNow beginning, and alway:\nNow begin, on Christmas day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "moonrise": { - "title": "“Moonrise”", - "body": "I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:\nThe moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,\nOr paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,\nStepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;\nA cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly.\nThis was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,\nParted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "morning-midday-and-evening-sacrifice": { - "title": "“Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice”", - "body": "The dappled die-away\nCheek and wimpled lip,\nThe gold-wisp, the airy-grey\nEye, all in fellowship--\nThis, all this beauty blooming,\nThis, all this freshness fuming,\nGive God while worth consuming.\n\nBoth thought and thew now bolder\nAnd told by Nature: Tower;\nHead, heart, hand, heel, and shoulder\nThat beat and breathe in power--\nThis pride of prime’s enjoyment\nTake as for tool, not toy meant\nAnd hold at Christ’s employment.\n\nThe vault and scope and schooling\nAnd mastery in the mind,\nIn silk-ash kept from cooling,\nAnd ripest under rind--\nWhat life half lifts the latch of,\nWhat hell stalks towards the snatch of,\nYour offering, with despatch, of!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1887 - } - } - }, - "my-prayers-must-meet-a-brazen-heaven": { - "title": "“My Prayers Must Meet a Brazen Heaven”", - "body": "My prayers must meet a brazen heaven\nAnd fail and scatter all away.\nUnclean and seeming unforgiven\nMy prayers I scarcely call to pray.\nI cannot buoy my heart above;\nAbove I cannot entrance win.\nI reckon precedents of love,\nBut feel the long success of sin.\n\nMy heaven is brass and iron my earth:\nYea, iron is mingled with my clay,\nSo harden’d is it in this dearth\nWhich praying fails to do away.\nNor tears, nor tears this clay uncouth\nCould mould, if any tears there were.\nA warfare of my lips in truth,\nBattling with God, is now my prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-own-heart-let-me-have-more-pity-on": { - "title": "“My own heart let me have more pity on …”", - "body": "My own heart let me have more pity on; let\nMe live to my sad self hereafter kind,\nCharitable; not live this tormented mind\nWith this tormented mind tormenting yet.\nI cast for comfort I can no more get\nBy groping round my comfortless, than blind\nEyes in their dark can day or thirst can find\nThirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.\n\nSoul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise\nYou, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile\nElsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size\nAt God knows when to God knows what; whose smile\n’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather--as skies\nBetween pie mountains--lights a lovely mile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "location": "Dublin" - } - }, - "no-worst-there-is-none-pitched-past-pitch-of-grief": { - "title": "“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief …”", - "body": "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,\nMore pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.\nComforter, where, where is your comforting?\nMary, mother of us, where is your relief?\nMy cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief\nWoe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing--\nThen lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling-\nering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief”.\n\nO the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall\nFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap\nMay who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small\nDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,\nWretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all\nLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "location": "Dublin" - } - }, - "on-the-portrait-of-two-beautiful-young-people": { - "title": "“On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People”", - "body": "O I admire and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves\nDiscovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.\nA juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,\nAnd beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears.\n\nHappy the father, mother of these! Too fast:\nNot that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest\nIn one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast,\nCreatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest.\n\nAnd are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams\nTheir young delightful hour do feature down\nThat fleeted else like day-dissolvéd dreams\nOr ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown.\n\nShe leans on him with such contentment fond\nAs well the sister sits, would well the wife;\nHis looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond,\nGaze on, and fall directly forth on life.\n\nBut ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are\nOf favoured make and mind and health and youth,\nWhere lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star?\nThere’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.\n\nThere’s none but good can bé good, both for you\nAnd what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid;\nNone good but God--a warning wavéd to\nOne once that was found wanting when Good weighed.\n\nMan lives that liscat, that leaning in the will\nNo wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,\nThe selfless self of self, most strange, most still,\nFast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.\n\nYour feast of; that most in you earnest eye\nMay but call on your banes to more carouse.\nWorst will the best. What worm was here, we cry,\nTo have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?\n\nEnough: corruption was the world’s first woe.\nWhat need I strain my heart beyond my ken?\nO but I bear my burning witness though\nAgainst the wild and wanton work of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "patience-hard-thing-the-hard-thing-but-to-pray": { - "title": "“Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray …”", - "body": "Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,\nBut bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks\nWants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;\nTo do without, take tosses, and obey.\n Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,\nNowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks\nOur ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks\nPurple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.\n\n We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills\nTo bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills\nOf us we do bid God bend to him even so.\n And where is he who more and more distils\nDelicious kindness?--He is patient. Patience fills\nHis crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peace": { - "title": "“Peace”", - "body": "When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,\nYour round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?\nWhen, when, Peacè, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite\nTo own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but\nThat piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows\nAlarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?\n\nO surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu\nSome good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,\nThat plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house\nHe comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,\nHe comes to brood and sit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1879, - "month": "october", - "day": 2 - }, - "location": "Oxford", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "penmaen-pool": { - "title": "“Penmaen Pool”", - "body": "Who long for rest, who look for pleasure\nAway from counter, court, or school\nO where live well your lease of leisure\nBut here at, here at Penmaen Pool?\n\nYou’ll dare the Alp? you’ll dart the skiff?--\nEach sport has here its tackle and tool:\nCome, plant the staff by Cadair cliff;\nCome, swing the sculls on Penmaen Pool.\n\nWhat’s yonder?--Grizzled Dyphwys dim:\nThe triple-hummocked Giant’s stool,\nHoar messmate, hobs and nobs with him\nTo halve the bowl of Penmaen Pool.\n\nAnd all the landscape under survey,\nAt tranquil turns, by nature’s rule,\nRides repeated topsyturvy\nIn frank, in fairy Penmaen Pool.\n\nAnd Charles’s Wain, the wondrous seven,\nAnd sheep-flock clouds like worlds of wool.\nFor all they shine so, high in heaven,\nShew brighter shaken in Penmaen Pool.\n\nThe Mawddach, how she trips! though throttled\nIf floodtide teeming thrills her full,\nAnd mazy sands all water-wattled\nWaylay her at ebb, past Penmaen Pool.\n\nBut what’s to see in stormy weather,\nWhen grey showers gather and gusts are cool?--\nWhy, raindrop-roundels looped together\nThat lace the face of Penmaen Pool.\n\nThen even in weariest wintry hour\nOf New Year’s month or surly Yule\nFurred snows, charged tuft above tuft, tower\nFrom darksome darksome Penmaen Pool.\n\nAnd ever, if bound here hardest home,\nYou’ve parlour-pastime left and (who’ll\nNot honour it?) ale like goldy foam\nThat frocks an oar in Penmaen Pool.\n\nThen come who pine for peace or pleasure\nAway from counter, court, or school,\nSpend here your measure of time and treasure\nAnd taste the treats of Penmaen Pool.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1876 - }, - "location": "Wales" - } - }, - "pied-beauty": { - "title": "“Pied Beauty”", - "body": "Glory be to God for dappled things--\nFor skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;\nFor rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:\nFresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;\nLandscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;\nAnd àll tràdes, their gear and tackle and trim.\n\nAll things counter, original, spare, strange;\nWhatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)\nWith swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;\nHe fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:\nPraise him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales" - } - }, - "repeat-that-repeat": { - "title": "“Repeat That, Repeat”", - "body": "Repeat that, repeat,\nCuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,\nWith a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound\nOff trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:\nThe whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "ribblesdale": { - "title": "“Ribblesdale”", - "body": "Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leavès throng\nAnd louchèd low grass, heaven that dost appeal\nTo, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;\nThat canst but only be, but dost that long--\n\nThou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong\nThy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,\nThy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel\nThy river, and o’er gives all to rack or wrong.\n\nAnd what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where\nElse, but in dear and dogged man?--Ah, the heir\nTo his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,\nTo thriftless reave both our rich round world bare\nAnd none reck of world after, this bids wear\nEarth brows of such care, care and dear concern.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "location": "Lancashire" - } - }, - "the-sea-took-pity": { - "title": "“The Sea Took Pity”", - "body": "The sea took pity: it interposed with doom:\n“I have tall daughters dear that heed my hand:\nLet Winter wed one, sow them in her womb,\nAnd she shall child them on the New-world strand.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-sea-and-the-skylark": { - "title": "“The Sea and the Skylark”", - "body": "On ear and ear two noises too old to end\nTrench--right, the tide that ramps against the shore;\nWith a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,\nFrequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.\n\nLeft hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,\nHis rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score\nIn crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour\nAnd pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.\n\nHow these two shame this shallow and frail town!\nHow ring right out our sordid turbid time,\nBeing pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,\n\nHave lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:\nOur make and making break, are breaking, down\nTo man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877, - "month": "may" - }, - "location": "Rhyl", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-shepherds-brow": { - "title": "“The Shepherd’s Brow”", - "body": "The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns\nThe horror and the havoc and the glory\nOf it. Angels fall, they are towers, from heaven--a story\nOf just, majestical, and giant groans.\nBut man--we, scaffold of score brittle bones;\nWho breathe, from groundlong babyhood to hoary\nAge gasp; whose breath is our memento mori--\nWhat bass is our viol for tragic tones?\nHe! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;\nAnd, blazoned in however bold the name,\nMan Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.\nAnd I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,\nThat … in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame\nMy tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-soldier": { - "title": "“The Soldier”", - "body": "Yes. Whý do we áll, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless\nOur redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,\nBut frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,\nSince, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess\nThat, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;\nIt fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;\nAnd fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,\nAnd scarlet wear the spirit of wár thére express.\n\nMark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;\nHe of all can handle a rope best. There he bides in bliss\nNow, and séeing somewhére some mán do all that man can do,\nFor love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,\nAnd cry “O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:\nWere I come o’er again” cries Christ “it should be this”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spelt-from-sibyls-leaves": { - "title": "“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”", - "body": "Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous\nEvening strains to be tíme’s vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.\nHer fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, | her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height\nWaste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, | stárs principal, overbend us,\nFíre-féaturing heaven. For earth | her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; | self ín self steepèd and pashed--qúite\nDisremembering, dísmembering | àll now. Heart, you round me right\nWith: Óur évening is over us; óur night | whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.\nOnly the beak-leaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,\nEver so black on it. Óur tale, óur oracle! | Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind\nOff hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck\nNow her áll in twó flocks, twó folds--black, white; | right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind\nBut thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these | twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack\nWhere, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "location": "Dublin" - } - }, - "spring-and-fall": { - "title": "“Spring and Fall”", - "body": "Márgarét, áre you gríeving\nOver Goldengrove unleaving?\nLeáves like the things of man, you\nWith your fresh thoughts care for, can you?\nAh! ás the heart grows older\nIt will come to such sights colder\nBy and by, nor spare a sigh\nThough worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;\nAnd yet you wíll weep and know why.\nNow no matter, child, the name:\nSórrow’s spríngs áre the same.\nNor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed\nWhat heart heard of, ghost guessed:\nIt ís the blight man was born for,\nIt is Margaret you mourn for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1880, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Nothing is so beautiful as spring--\n When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;\n Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush\nThrough the echoing timber does so rinse and wring\nThe ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;\n The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush\n The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush\nWith richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.\n\nWhat is all this juice and all this joy?\n A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning\nIn Eden garden. Have, get, before it cloy,\n Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,\nInnocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,\n Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877, - "month": "may" - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "holiday": "may_day" - } - } - }, - "st-winefreds-well": { - "title": "“St. Winefred’s Well”", - "body": "Act I Scene I\n\n_Enter Teryth from riding, Winefred following._\n\n_T._ WHAT is it, Gwen, my girl? why do you hover and haunt me?\n\n_W._ You came by Caerwys, sir?\n\n_T._ I came by Caerwys.\n\n_W._ There\nSome messenger there might have met you from my uncle.\n\n_T._ Your uncle met the messenger--met me; and this the message:\nLord Beuno comes to-night.\n\n_W._ To-night, sir!\n\n_T._ Soon, now: therefore\nHave all things ready in his room.\n\n_W._ There needs but little doing.\n\n_T._ Let what there needs be done. Stay! with him one companion,\nHis deacon, Dirvan Warm: twice over must the welcome be,\nBut both will share one cell. This was good news, Gwenvrewi.\n\n_W._ Ah yes!\n\n_T._ Why, get thee gone then; tell thy mother I want her.\n _Exit Winefred._\nNo man has such a daughter. The fathers of the world\nCall no such maiden ‘mine’. The deeper grows her dearness\nAnd more and more times laces round and round my heart,\nThe more some monstrous hand gropes with clammy fingers there,\nTampering with those sweet bines, draws them out, strains them, strains them;\nMeantime some tongue cries “What, Teryth! what, thou poor fond father!\nHow when this bloom, this honeysuckle, that rides the air so rich about thee,\nIs all, all sheared away, thus!” Then I sweat for fear.\nOr else a funeral, and yet ’tis not a funeral,\nSome pageant which takes tears and I must foot with feeling that\nAlive or dead my girl is carried in it, endlessly\nGoes marching thro’ my mind. What sense is this? It has none.\nThis is too much the father; nay the mother. Fanciful!\nI here forbid my thoughts to fool themselves with fears.\n\n _Enter Gwenlo._\n\n\nAct II --_Scene, a wood ending in a steep bank over a dry dene, Winefred having been murdered within. Re-enter Caradoc with a bloody sword._\n\n_C._ My heart, where have we been? What have we seen, my mind?\nWhat stroke has Caradoc’s right arm dealt? what done? Head of a rebel\nStruck off it has; written upon lovely limbs,\nIn bloody letters, lessons of earnest, of revenge;\nMonuments of my earnest, records of my revenge,\nOn one that went against me whéreas I had warned her--\nWarned her! well she knew. I warned her of this work.\nWhat work? what harm ’s done? There is no harm done, none yet;\nPerhaps we struck no blow, Gwenvrewi lives perhaps;\nTo makebelieve my mood was--mock. I might think so\nBut here, here is a workman from his day’s task sweats.\nWiped I am sure this was; it seems not well; for still,\nStill the scarlet swings and dances on the blade.\nSo be it. Thou steel, thou butcher,\nI cán scour thee, fresh burnish thee, sheathe thee in thy dark lair; these drops\nNever, never, never in their blue banks again.\nThe woeful, Cradock, the woeful word! Then what,\nWhat have we seen? Her head, sheared from her shoulders, fall,\nAnd lapped in shining hair, roll to the bank’s edge; then\nDown the beetling banks, like water in waterfalls,\nIt stooped and flashed and fell and ran like water away.\nHer eyes, oh and her eyes!\nIn all her beauty, and sunlight to it is a pit, den, darkness,\nFoam-falling is not fresh to it, rainbow by it not beaming,\nIn all her body, I say, no place was like her eyes,\nNo piece matched those eyes kept most part much cast down\nBut, being lifted, immortal, of immortal brightness.\nSeveral times I saw them, thrice or four times turning;\nRound and round they came and flashed towards heaven: O there,\nThere they did appeal. Therefore airy vengeances\nAre afoot; heaven-vault fast purpling portends, and what first lightning\nAny instant falls means me. And I do not repent;\nI do not and I will not repent, not repent.\nThe blame bear who aroused me. What I have done violent\nI have like a lion done, lionlike done,\nHonouring an uncontrolled royal wrathful nature,\nMantling passion in a grandeur, crimson grandeur.\nNow be my pride then perfect, all one piece. Henceforth\nIn a wide world of defiance Caradoc lives alone,\nLoyal to his own soul, laying his own law down, no law nor\nLord now curb him for ever. O daring! O deep insight!\nWhat is virtue? Valour; only the heart valiant.\nAnd right? Only resolution; will, his will unwavering\nWho, like me, knowing his nature to the heart home, nature’s business,\nDespatches with no flinching. But will flesh, O can flesh\nSecond this fiery strain? Not always; O no no!\nWe cannot live this life out; sometimes we must weary\nAnd in this darksome world what comfort can I find?\nDown this darksome world cómfort whére can I find\nWhen ’ts light I quenched; its rose, time’s one rich rose, my hand,\nBy her bloom, fast by her fresh, her fleecèd bloom,\nHideous dashed down, leaving earth a winter withering\nWith no now, no Gwenvrewi. I must miss her most\nThat might have spared her were it but for passion-sake. Yes,\nTo hunger and not have, yét hope ón for, to storm and strive and\nBe at every assault fresh foiled, worse flung, deeper disappointed,\nThe turmoil and the torment, it has, I swear, a sweetness,\nKeeps a kind of joy in it, a zest, an edge, an ecstasy,\nNext after sweet success. I am not left even this;\nI all my being have hacked in half with her neck: one part,\nReason, selfdisposal, choice of better or worse way,\nIs corpse now, cannot change; my other self, this soul,\nLife’s quick, this kínd, this kéen self-feeling,\nWith dreadful distillation of thoughts sour as blood,\nMust all day long taste murder. What do nów then? Do? Nay,\nDeed-bound I am; one deed treads all down here cramps all doing. What do? Not yield,\nNot hope, not pray; despair; ay, that: brazen despair out,\nBrave all, and take what comes--as here this rabble is come,\nWhose bloods I reck no more of, no more rank with hers\nThan sewers with sacred oils. Mankind, that mobs, comes.\nCome!\n\n_Enter a crowd, among them Teryth, Gwenlo, Beuno._\n\n_After Winefred’s raising from the dead and the breaking out of the fountain._\n\n_BEUNO._ O now while skies are blue, now while seas are salt,\nWhile rushy rains shall fall or brooks shall fleet from fountains,\nWhile sick men shall cast sighs, of sweet health all despairing.\nWhile blind men’s eyes shall thirst after daylight, draughts of daylight,\nOr deaf ears shall desire that lipmusic that’s lost upon them,\nWhile cripples are, while lepers, dancers in dismal limbdance,\nFallers in dreadful frothpits, waterfearers wild,\nStone, palsy, cancer, cough, lung wasting, womb not bearing,\nRupture, running sores, what more? in brief, in burden,\nAs long as men are mortal and God merciful,\nSo long to this sweet spot, this leafy lean-over,\nThis Dry Dene, now no longer dry nor dumb, but moist and musical\nWith the uproll and the downcarol of day and night delivering\nWater, which keeps thy name, (for not in róck wrítten,\nBut in pale water, frail water, wild rash and reeling water,\nThat will not wear a print, that will not stain a pen,\nThy venerable record, virgin, is recorded).\nHere to this holy well shall pilgrimages be,\nAnd not from purple Wales only nor from elmy England,\nBut from beyond seas, Erin, France and Flanders, everywhere,\nPilgrims, still pilgrims, móre pílgrims, still more poor pilgrims.\n\nWhat sights shall be when some that swung, wretches, on crutches\nTheir crutches shall cast from them, on heels of air departing,\nOr they go rich as roseleaves hence that loathsome cáme hither!\nNot now to náme even\nThose dearer, more divine boons whose haven the heart is.\n\nAs sure as what is most sure, sure as that spring primroses\nShall new-dapple next year, sure as to-morrow morning,\nAmongst come-back-again things, thíngs with a revival, things with a recovery,\nThy name …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-starlight-night": { - "title": "“The Starlight Night”", - "body": "Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!\nO look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!\nThe bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!\nDown in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!\nThe grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!\nWind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!\nFlake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!--\nAh well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.\n\nBuy then! bid then!--What?--Prayer, patience, alms, vows.\nLook, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!\nLook! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!\nThese are indeed the barn; withindoors house\nThe shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse\nChrist home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "strike-churl": { - "title": "“Strike, Churl”", - "body": "Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail\nMay’s beauty massacre and wispéd wild clouds grow\nOut on the giant air; tell Summer No,\nBid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "summa": { - "title": "“Summa”", - "body": "The best ideal is the true\nAnd other truth is none.\nAll glory be ascribèd to\nThe holy Three in One.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "that-nature-is-a-heraclitean-fire-and-of-the-comfort-of-the-resurrection": { - "title": "“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”", - "body": "Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-\nbuilt thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.\nDown roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,\nShivelights and shadowtackle in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.\nDelightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare\nOf yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches\nSquandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches\nSquadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there\nFootfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.\nBut quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark\nMan, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!\nBoth are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark\nDrowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone\nSheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark\n Is any of him at all so stark\nBut vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,\nA heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.\n Across my foundering deck shone\nA beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash\nFall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:\n In a flash, at a trumpet crash,\nI am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and\nThis Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,\n Is immortal diamond.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "thee-god-i-come-from-to-thee-go": { - "title": "“Thee, God, I come from, to thee go …”", - "body": "Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,\nAll day long I like fountain flow\nFrom thy hand out, swayed about\nMote-like in thy mighty glow.\n\nWhat I know of thee I bless,\nAs acknowledging thy stress\nOn my being and as seeing\nSomething of thy holiness.\n\nOnce I turned from thee and hid,\nBound on what thou hadst forbid;\nSow the wind I would; I sinned:\nI repent of what I did.\n\nBad I am, but yet thy child.\nFather, be thou reconciled.\nSpare thou me, since I see\nWith thy might that thou art mild.\n\nI have life before me still\nAnd thy purpose to fulfil;\nYea a debt to pay thee yet:\nHelp me, sir, and so I will.\n\nBut thou bidst, and just thou art,\nMe shew mercy from my heart\nTowards my brother, every other\nMan my mate and counterpart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thou-art-indeed-just-lord-if-i-contend": { - "title": "“Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend …”", - "body": "_Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen\njusta loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c._\n\nThou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend\nWith thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.\nWhy do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must\nDisappointment all I endeavour end?\n Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,\nHow wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost\nDefeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust\nDo in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,\nSir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes\nNow, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again\nWith fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes\nThem; birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,\nTime’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.\nMine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1889, - "month": "march", - "day": 17 - }, - "location": "Dublin", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 17 - } - } - }, - "the-times-are-nightfall": { - "title": "“The Times Are Nightfall”", - "body": "The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;\nThe times are winter, watch, a world undone:\nThey waste, they wither worse; they as they run\nOr bring more or more blazon man’s distress.\nAnd I not help. Nor word now of success:\nAll is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one--\nWork which to see scarce so much as begun\nMakes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.\n\nOr what is else? There is your world within.\nThere rid the dragons, root out there the sin.\nYour will is law in that small commonweal …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-him-who-ever-thought-with-love-of-me": { - "title": "“To Him Who Ever Thought with Love of Me”", - "body": "To him who ever thought with love of me\nOr ever did for my sake some good deed\nI will appear, looking such charity\nAnd kind compassion, at his life’s last need\nThat he will out of hand and heartily\nRepent he sinned and all his sins be freed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - }, - "to-his-watch": { - "title": "“To His Watch”", - "body": "Mortal my mate, bearing my rock-a-heart\nWarm beat with cold beat company, shall I\nEarlier or you fail at our force, and lie\nThe ruins of, rifled, once a world of art?\nThe telling time our task is; time’s some part,\nNot all, but we were framed to fail and die--\nOne spell and well that one. There, ah thereby\nIs comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.\n\nField-flown the departed day no morning brings\nSaying “This was yours” with her, but new one, worse.\nAnd then that last and shortest …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-r-b": { - "title": "“To R. B.”", - "body": "The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong\nSpur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,\nBreathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came,\nLeaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.\nNine months she then, nay years, nine years she long\nWithin her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same:\nThe widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim\nNow known and hand at work now never wrong.\n\nSweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;\nI want the one rapture of an inspiration.\nO then if in my lagging lines you miss\nThe roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,\nMy winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss\nNow, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-seem-the-stranger-lies-my-lot": { - "title": "“To Seem the Stranger Lies My Lot”", - "body": "To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life\nAmong strangèrs. Father and mother dear,\nBrothers and sisters are in Christ not near\nAnd he my peace my parting, sword and strife.\n\nEngland, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife\nTo my creating thought, would neither hear\nMe, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I weary\nof idle a being but by where wars are rife.\n\nI am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd\nRemove. Not but in all removes I can\nKind love both give and get. Only what word\nWisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban\nBars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,\nHeard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "location": "Dublin" - } - }, - "to-what-serves-mortal-beauty": { - "title": "“To What Serves Mortal Beauty?”", - "body": "To what serves mortal beauty dangerous; does set danc-\ning blood the O-seal-that-so feature, flung prouder form\nThan Purcell tune lets tread to? See: it does this: keeps warm\nMen’s wits to the things that are; what good means--where a glance\nMaster more may than gaze, gaze out of countenance.\nThose lovely lads once, wet-fresh windfalls of war’s storm,\nHow then should Gregory, a father, have gleanèd else from swarmed Rome?\nBut God to a nation dealt that day’s dear chance.\n\nTo man, that needs would worship block or barren stone,\nOur law says: Love what are love’s worthiest, were all known;\nWorld’s loveliest--men’s selves. Self flashes off frame and face.\nWhat do then? how meet beauty? Merely meet it; own,\nHome at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then leave, let that alone.\nYea, wish that though, wish all, God’s better beauty, grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "toms-garland": { - "title": "“Tom’s Garland”", - "body": "Tom--garlanded with squat and surly steel\nTom; then Tom’s fallowbootfellow piles pick\nBy him and rips out rockfire homeforth--sturdy Dick;\nTom Heart-at-ease, Tom Navvy: he is all for his meal\nSure, ’s bed now. Low be it: lustily he his low lot (feel\nThat ne’er need hunger, Tom; Tom seldom sick,\nSeldomer heartsore; that treads through, prickproof, thick\nThousands of thorns, thoughts) swings though. Common-weal\nLittle I reck ho! lacklevel in, if all had bread:\nWhat! Country is honour enough in all us--lordly head,\nWith heaven’s lights high hung round, or, mother-ground\nThat mammocks, mighty foot. But no way sped,\nNor mind nor mainstrength; gold go garlanded\nWith, perilous, O nó; nor yet plod safe shod sound;\nUndenizened, beyond bound\nOf earth’s glory, earth’s ease, all; no one, nowhere,\nIn wide the world’s weal; rare gold, bold steel, bare\nIn both; care, but share care--\nThis, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage,\nManwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "location": "Dublin" - } - }, - "what-being-in-rank-old-nature": { - "title": "“What Being in Rank-Old Nature”", - "body": "What being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been\nThat hére pérsonal tells off these heart-song powerful peals?--\nA bush-browed, beetle-brówed bíllow is it?\nWith a soúth-wésterly wínd blústering, with a tide rolls reels\nOf crumbling, fore-foundering, thundering all-surfy seas in; seen\nÚnderneath, their glassy barrel, of a fairy green.\n\nOr a jaunting vaunting vaulting assaulting trumpet telling", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "what-shall-i-do-for-the-land-that-bred-me": { - "title": "“What Shall I Do for the Land that Bred Me”", - "body": "What shall I do for the land that bred me,\nHer homes and fields that folded and fed me?--\nBe under her banner and live for her honour:\nUnder her banner I’ll live for her honour.\n_Under her banner live for her honour._\n\nNot the pleasure, the pay, the plunder,\nBut country and flag, the flag I am under--\nThere is the shilling that finds me willing\nTo follow a banner and fight for honour.\n_We follow her banner, we fight for her honour._\n\nCall me England’s fame’s fond lover,\nHer fame to keep, her fame to recover.\nSpend me or end me what God shall send me,\nBut under her banner I live for her honour.\n_Under her banner we march for her honour._\n\nWhere is the field I must play the man on?\nO welcome there their steel or cannon.\nImmortal beauty is death with duty,\nIf under her banner I fall for her honour.\n_Under her banner we fall for her honour._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-windhover": { - "title": "“The Windhover”", - "body": "_To Christ our Lord_\n\nI caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding\nOf the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding\nHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing\nIn his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing,\nAs a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding\nRebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding\nStirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!\n\nBrute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here\nBuckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion\nTimes told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!\n\nNo wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion\nShine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,\nFall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-woodlark": { - "title": "“The Woodlark”", - "body": "_Teevo cheetio cheevio chee:_\nO where, what can thát be?\n_Weedio-weedio:_ there again!\nSo tiny a trickle of sóng-strain;\nAnd all round not to be found\nFor brier, bough, furrow, or gréen ground\nBefore or behind or far or at hand\nEither left either right\nAnywhere in the súnlight.\nWell, after all! Ah but hark--\nI am the little woodlark.\n\nTo-day the sky is two and two\nWith white strokes and strains of the blue\n\nRound a ring, around a ring\nAnd while I sail (must listen) I sing\n\nThe skylark is my cousin and he\nIs known to men more than me\n\n… when the cry within\nSays Go on then I go on\nTill the longing is less and the good gone\n\nBut down drop, if it says Stop,\nTo the all-a-leaf of the tréetop\nAnd after that off the bough\n\nI ám so véry, O só very glad\nThat I dó thínk there is not to be had …\n\nThe blue wheat-acre is underneath\nAnd the braided ear breaks out of the sheath,\nThe ear in milk, lush the sash,\nAnd crush-silk poppies aflash,\nThe blood-gush blade-gash\nFlame-rash rudred\nBud shelling or broad-shed\nTatter-tassel-tangled and dingle-a-dangled\nDandy-hung dainty head.\n\nAnd down … the furrow dry\nSunspurge and oxeye\nAnd laced-leaved lovely\nFoam-tuft fumitory\n\nThrough the velvety wind V-winged\nTo the nest’s nook I balance and buoy\nWith a sweet joy of a sweet joy,\nSweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joy\nOf a sweet--a sweet--sweet--joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-wreck-of-the-deutschland": { - "title": "“The Wreck of the Deutschland”", - "body": "_To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875_\n\n# I.\n\nThou mastering me\nGod! giver of breath and bread;\nWorld’s strand, sway of the sea;\nLord of living and dead;\nThou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,\nAnd after it almost unmade, what with dread,\nThy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?\nOver again I feel thy finger and find thee.\n\nI did say yes\nO at lightning and lashed rod;\nThou heardst me truer than tongue confess\nThy terror, O Christ, O God;\nThou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:\nThe swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod\nHard down with a horror of height:\nAnd the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.\n\nThe frown of his face\nBefore me, the hurtle of hell\nBehind, where, where was a, where was a place?\nI whirled out wings that spell\nAnd fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.\nMy heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,\nCarrier-witted, I am bold to boast,\nTo flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.\n\nI am soft sift\nIn an hourglass--at the wall\nFast, but mined with a motion, a drift,\nAnd it crowds and it combs to the fall;\nI steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,\nBut roped with, always, all the way down from the tall\nFells or flanks of the voel, a vein\nOf the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.\n\nI kiss my hand\nTo the stars, lovely-asunder\nStarlight, wafting him out of it; and\nGlow, glory in thunder;\nKiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:\nSince, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,\nHis mystery must be instressed, stressed;\nFor I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.\n\nNot out of his bliss\nSprings the stress felt\nNor first from heaven (and few know this)\nSwings the stroke dealt--\nStroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,\nThat guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt--\nBut it rides time like riding a river\n(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).\n\nIt dates from day\nOf his going in Galilee;\nWarm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;\nManger, maiden’s knee;\nThe dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;\nThence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,\nThough felt before, though in high flood yet--\nWhat none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,\n\nIs out with it! Oh,\nWe lash with the best or worst\nWord last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe\nWill, mouthed to flesh-burst,\nGush!--flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,\nBrim, in a flash, full!--Hither then, last or first,\nTo hero of Calvary, Christ,’s feet--\nNever ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it--men go.\n\nBe adored among men,\nGod, three-numberéd form;\nWring thy rebel, dogged in den,\nMan’s malice, with wrecking and storm.\nBeyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,\nThou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;\nFather and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:\nHast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.\n\nWith an anvil-ding\nAnd with fire in him forge thy will\nOr rather, rather then, stealing as Spring\nThrough him, melt him but master him still:\nWhether at once, as once at a crash Paul,\nOr as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll,\nMake mercy in all of us, out of us all\nMastery, but be adored, but be adored King.\n\n\n# II.\n\n“Some find me a sword; some\nThe flange and the rail; flame,\nFang, or flood” goes Death on drum,\nAnd storms bugle his fame.\nBut wé dréam we are rooted in earth--Dust!\nFlesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,\nWave with the meadow, forget that there must\nThe sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.\n\nOn Saturday sailed from Bremen,\nAmerican-outward-bound,\nTake settler and seamen, tell men with women,\nTwo hundred souls in the round--\nO Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing\nThe goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;\nYet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing\nNot vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?\n\nInto the snows she sweeps,\nHurling the haven behind,\nThe Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,\nFor the infinite air is unkind,\nAnd the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,\nSitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;\nWiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow\nSpins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.\n\nShe drove in the dark to leeward,\nShe struck--not a reef or a rock\nBut the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her\nDead to the Kentish Knock;\nAnd she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:\nThe breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;\nAnd canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel\nIdle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.\n\nHope had grown grey hairs,\nHope had mourning on,\nTrenched with tears, carved with cares,\nHope was twelve hours gone;\nAnd frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day\nNor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,\nAnd lives at last were washing away:\nTo the shrouds they took,--they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.\n\nOne stirred from the rigging to save\nThe wild woman-kind below,\nWith a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave--\nHe was pitched to his death at a blow,\nFor all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:\nThey could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro\nThrough the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do\nWith the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?\n\nThey fought with God’s cold--\nAnd they could not and fell to the deck\n(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled\nWith the sea-romp over the wreck.\nNight roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,\nThe woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check--\nTill a lioness arose breasting the babble,\nA prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.\n\nAh, touched in your bower of bone\nAre you! turned for an exquisite smart,\nHave you! make words break from me here all alone,\nDo you!--mother of being in me, heart.\nO unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,\nWhy, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!\nNever-eldering revel and river of youth,\nWhat can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?\n\nSister, a sister calling\nA master, her master and mine!--\nAnd the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;\nThe rash smart sloggering brine\nBlinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;\nHas one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine\nEars, and the call of the tall nun\nTo the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.\n\nShe was first of a five and came\nOf a coifèd sisterhood.\n(O Deutschland, double a desperate name!\nO world wide of its good!\nBut Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,\nChrist’s lily and beast of the waste wood:\nFrom life’s dawn it is drawn down,\nAbel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)\n\nLoathed for a love men knew in them,\nBanned by the land of their birth,\nRhine refused them, Thames would ruin them;\nSurf, snow, river and earth\nGnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;\nThy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,\nThou martyr-master: in thy sight\nStorm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers--sweet heaven was astrew in them.\n\nFive! the finding and sake\nAnd cipher of suffering Christ.\nMark, the mark is of man’s make\nAnd the word of it Sacrificed.\nBut he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,\nBefore-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced--\nStigma, signal, cinquefoil token\nFor lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.\n\nJoy fall to thee, father Francis,\nDrawn to the Life that died;\nWith the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his\nLovescape crucified\nAnd seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters\nAnd five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,\nAre sisterly sealed in wild waters,\nTo bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.\n\nAway in the loveable west,\nOn a pastoral forehead of Wales,\nI was under a roof here, I was at rest,\nAnd they the prey of the gales;\nShe to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly\nFalling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails\nWas calling “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”:\nThe cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best.\n\nThe majesty! what did she mean?\nBreathe, arch and original Breath.\nIs it love in her of the being as her lover had been?\nBreathe, body of lovely Death.\nThey were else-minded then, altogether, the men\nWoke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.\nOr ís it that she cried for the crown then,\nThe keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?\n\nFor how to the heart’s cheering\nThe down-dugged ground-hugged grey\nHovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing\nOf pied and peeled May!\nBlue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,\nWith belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way,\nWhat by your measure is the heaven of desire,\nThe treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?\n\nNo, but it was not these.\nThe jading and jar of the cart,\nTime’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease\nOf the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,\nNot danger, electrical horror; then further it finds\nThe appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:\nOther, I gather, in measure her mind’s\nBurden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.\n\nBut how shall I … make me room there:\nReach me a … Fancy, come faster--\nStrike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,\nThing that she … there then! the Master,\nIpse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:\nHe was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;\nDo, deal, lord it with living and dead;\nLet him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.\n\nAh! there was a heart right\nThere was single eye!\nRead the unshapeable shock night\nAnd knew the who and the why;\nWording it how but by him that present and past,\nHeaven and earth are word of, worded by?--\nThe Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast\nTarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.\n\nJesu, heart’s light,\nJesu, maid’s son,\nWhat was the feast followed the night\nThou hadst glory of this nun?--\nFeast of the one woman without stain.\nFor so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;\nBut here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,\nWord, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.\n\nWell, she has thee for the pain, for the\nPatience; but pity of the rest of them!\nHeart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the\nComfortless unconfessed of them--\nNo not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence\nFinger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the\nMaiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and\nStartle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?\n\nI admire thee, master of the tides,\nOf the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;\nThe recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,\nThe girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;\nStaunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;\nGround of being, and granite of it: past all\nGrasp God, throned behind\nDeath with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;\n\nWith a mercy that outrides\nThe all of water, an ark\nFor the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides\nLower than death and the dark;\nA vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,\nThe-last-breath penitent spirits--the uttermost mark\nOur passion-plungèd giant risen,\nThe Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.\n\nNow burn, new born to the world,\nDoubled-naturèd name,\nThe heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled\nMiracle-in-Mary-of-flame,\nMid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!\nNot a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;\nKind, but royally reclaiming his own;\nA released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.\n\nDame, at our door\nDrowned, and among our shoals,\nRemember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:\nOur Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls!\nLet him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,\nMore brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,\nPride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,\nOur hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1875, - "month": "december" - }, - "location": "Wales", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-hopko": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Hopko", - "birth": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hopko", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "christian", - "orthodox" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "o-my-gracious-savior": { - "title": "“O my gracious Savior …”", - "body": "O my gracious Savior,\nbe my Healer and Redeemer,\nand cast me not away.\nRaise me up when you see me fallen,\n lying in sin,\nsince You are all-powerful,\nthat I may know your deeds and cry out to You:\n“Before I perish completely,\n save me, O Lord.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "horace": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Horace", - "birth": { - "year": -65 - }, - "death": { - "year": -8 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "roman", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "roman" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "lydia-by-all-above": { - "title": "“Lydia, by All Above”", - "body": " Lydia, by all above,\nWhy bear so hard on Sybaris, to ruin him with love?\n What change has made him shun\nThe playing-ground, who once so well could bear the dust and sun?\n Why does he never sit\nOn horseback in his company, nor with uneven bit\n His Gallic courser tame?\nWhy dreads he yellow Tiber, as ’twould sully that fair frame?\n Like poison loathes the oil,\nHis arms no longer black and blue with honourable toil,\n He who erewhile was known\nFor quoit or javelin oft and oft beyond the limit thrown?\n Why skulks he, as they say\nDid Thetis’ son before the dawn of Ilion’s fatal day,\n For fear the manly dress\nShould fling him into danger’s arms, amid the Lycian press?", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "no-ones-allowed-to-know-his-fate": { - "title": "“No One’s Allowed to Know His Fate”", - "body": "Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,\nNot you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers\nIn tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.\nThis could be our last winter, it could be many\nMore, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:\nDo what you must, be wise, cut your vines\nAnd forget about hope. Time goes running, even\nAs we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "o-wont-the-flying-nymphs-to-woo": { - "title": "“O Wont the Flying Nymphs to Woo”", - "body": "O wont the flying Nymphs to woo,\nGood Faunus, through my sunny farm\nPass gently, gently pass, nor do\n My younglings harm.\nEach year, thou know’st, a kid must die\nFor thee; nor lacks the wine’s full stream\nTo Venus’ mate, the bowl; and high\n The altars steam.\nSure as December’s nones appear,\nAll o’er the grass the cattle play;\nThe village, with the lazy steer,\n Keeps holyday.\nWolves rove among the fearless sheep;\nThe woods for thee their foliage strow;\nThe delver loves on earth to leap,\n His ancient foe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "priapus": { - "title": "“Priapus”", - "body": "There was a time when I was nothing but\nA useless figwood log. Some carpenter\nCouldn’t make up his mind which I should be,\nA stool or a Priapus, but finally he\nDecided to make me a god. I am a god,\nChief scarer-off of birds and also thieves.\nMy right hand warns off thieves and so does this\nBig red obscene pole sticking out of my crotch.\nAs for the mischievous birds, they get scared off\nBy the flapping reed attached to the top of my head.\nIt frightens them all away from the garden I guard.\n\nThis was the place in the old days where a slave\nWould pay to have some other slave’s cadaver,\nThrown out of the little hole in the wall he’d lived in,\nCarried out here in a cheap wooden box and pitched\nInto the common grave where they all end up,\nLike Pántolábus the scrounger, or Nomentánus\nThe layabout. A stone pillar stood there, saying\n‘A thousand feet across, three hundred deep,’\nAnd ‘Potters Field: Nobody Owns This Place.’\n\nThese days the Esquiline’s salubrious;\nIt’s possible to live there. In the daytime\nPeople walk about on the sunny Rampart\nFrom which they used to view the grisly sight\nOf whitening bones. As far as I’m concerned\nThe animals and thieves that always still\nLurk about the place at night don’t cause me\nHalf as much trouble as the witches do,\nWho, bent on harassing human souls, come out\nTo gather bones and poisonous herbs, as soon\nAs wandering Luna shows her beautiful face.\n\nWith my own eyes I’ve seen the witch Canidia\nCome out at night with the witch Sagana the Elder,\nBoth of them barefoot, their black skirts pulled up high\nAround their middles, their hair spread out, their faces\nYellow-green, a hideous sight, the two of them,\nWailing as they scrabble up the dirt\nWith their long nails, and ripping off with their teeth\nA black lamb’s flesh and pouring its blood into\nThe trench they’d dug to call the Mane up\nOut of their Place below to tell the answers\nTo the questions they were asking them to tell.\n\nTwo images with them, dolls, the woolen doll\nThe bigger one, standing up over the other,\nReady to punish the servile waxen doll,\nThe suppliant looking up, expecting to die.\nOne of the witches wailing to Hecaté,\nThe other wailing to dread Tisiphoné.\n\nI’ve seen the snakes and hell-dogs wandering there,\nI’ve seen the blushing Moon hiding herself\nBehind the tombs to keep from seeing the sight.\nIf this is a lie, let the ravens foul my head\nWith their white droppings and Pediatia\nThat queen, and Julius, and Voranus\nUse me as their place to piss and shit on.\nLet me tell you how in answer to Sagana\nThe echoing doleful high-pitched voices of\nThe Shades of the Dead reverberated, and\nHow the witches furtively dug a hole in the ground\nAnd buried the beard of a wolf there and with it a tooth\nOf a spotted female snake, and how the fire\nBlazed up because of the burning waxen doll,\nAnd how I, witnessing the words and deeds\nOf those two Furies, shuddered and shook with horror,\nBut then, because of the fire the witches built\nMy heated-up figwood buttocks suddenly split\nWith a loud sound like the sound of a bursting bladder,\nAnd the witches ran away, back into the town,\nAnd as they ran Canidia’s false teeth\nFell out and Sagana’s big witch-wig fell off\nAnd all their magic herbs and love-chains scattered,\nAnd there was mirth and laughter everywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "what-slender-youth": { - "title": "“What Slender Youth”", - "body": "What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors,\nCourts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,\n Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou\n In wreaths thy golden hair,\nPlain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he\nOf faith and changed gods complain, and seas\n Rough with black winds, and storms\n Unwonted shall admire!\nWho now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,\nWho, always vacant, always amiable\n Hopes thee, of flattering gales\n Unmindful. Hapless they\nTo whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d\nPicture, the sacred wall declares to have hung\n My dank and dropping weeds\n To the stern god of sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "when-guilt-goes-forth": { - "title": "“When Guilt Goes Forth”", - "body": "When guilt goes forth, let lapwings shrill,\nAnd dogs and foxes great with young,\nAnd wolves from far Lanuvian hill,\n Give clamorous tongue:\nAcross the roadway dart the snake,\nFrightening, like arrow loosed from string,\nThe horses. I, for friendship’s sake,\n Watching each wing,\nEre to his haunt, the stagnant marsh,\nThe harbinger of tempest flies,\nWill call the raven, croaking harsh,\n From eastern skies.\nFarewell!--and wheresoe’er you go,\nMy Galatea, think of me:\nLet lefthand pie and roving crow\n Still leave you free.\nBut mark with what a front of fear\nOrion lowers. Ah! well I know\nHow Hadria glooms, how falsely clear\n The west-winds blow.\nLet foemen’s wives and children feel\nThe gathering south-wind’s angry roar,\nThe black wave’s crash, the thunder-peal,\n The quivering shore.\nSo to the bull Europa gave\nHer beauteous form, and when she saw\nThe monstrous deep, the yawning grave,\n Grew pale with awe.\nThat morn of meadow-flowers she thought,\nWeaving a crown the nymphs to please:\nThat gloomy night she look’d on nought\n But stars and seas.\nThen, as in hundred-citied Crete\nShe landed,--“O my sire!” she said,\n“O childly duty! passion’s heat\n Has struck thee dead.\nWhence came I? death, for maiden’s shame,\nWere little. Do I wake to weep\nMy sin? or am I pure of blame,\n And is it sleep\nFrom dreamland brings a form to trick\nMy senses? Which was best? to go\nOver the long, long waves, or pick\n The flowers in blow?\nO, were that monster made my prize,\nHow would I strive to wound that brow,\nHow tear those horns, my frantic eyes\n Adored but now!\nShameless I left my father’s home;\nShameless I cheat the expectant grave;\nO heaven, that naked I might roam\n In lions’ cave!\nNow, ere decay my bloom devour\nOr thin the richness of my blood,\nFain would I fall in youth’s first flower,\n The tigers’ food.\nHark! ’tis my father--Worthless one!\nWhat, yet alive? the oak is nigh.\n’Twas well you kept your maiden zone,\n The noose to tie.\nOr if your choice be that rude pike,\nNew barb’d with death, leap down and ask\nThe wind to bear you. Would you like\n The bondmaid’s task,\nYou, child of kings, a master’s toy,\nA mistress’ slave?” Beside her, lo!\nStood Venus smiling, and her boy\n With unstrung bow.\nThen, when her laughter ceased, “Have done\nWith fume and fret,” she cried, “my fair;\nThat odious bull will give you soon\n His horns to tear.\nYou know not you are Jove’s own dame:\nAway with sobbing; be resign’d\nTo greatness: you shall give your name\n To half mankind.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "whither-bacchus": { - "title": "“Whither, Bacchus”", - "body": " Whither, Bacchus, tear’st thou me,\nFill’d with thy strength? What dens, what forests these,\n Thus in wildering race I see?\nWhat cave shall hearken to my melodies,\n Tuned to tell of Caesar’s praise\nAnd throne him high the heavenly ranks among?\n Sweet and strange shall be my lays,\nA tale till now by poet voice unsung.\n As the Evian on the height,\nRoused from her sleep, looks wonderingly abroad,\n Looks on Thrace with snow-drifts white,\nAnd Rhodope by barbarous footstep trod,\n So my truant eyes admire\nThe banks, the desolate forests. O great King\n Who the Naiads dost inspire,\nAnd Bacchants, strong from earth huge trees to wring!\n Not a lowly strain is mine,\nNo mere man’s utterance. O, ’tis venture sweet\n Thee to follow, God of wine,\nMaking the vine-branch round thy temples meet!", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "you-praise-him-still": { - "title": "“You Praise Him Still”", - "body": "Telephus--you praise him still,\n His waxen arms, his rosy-tinted neck;\nAh! and all the while I thrill\nWith jealous pangs I cannot, cannot check.\n See, my colour comes and goes,\nMy poor heart flutters, Lydia, and the dew,\n Down my cheek soft stealing, shows\nWhat lingering torments rack me through and through.\n Oh, ’tis agony to see\nThose snowwhite shoulders scarr’d in drunken fray,\n Or those ruby lips, where he\nHas left strange marks, that show how rough his play!\n Never, never look to find\nA faithful heart in him whose rage can harm\n Sweetest lips, which Venus kind\nHas tinctured with her quintessential charm.\n Happy, happy, happy they\nWhose living love, untroubled by all strife,\n Binds them till the last sad day,\nNor parts asunder but with parting life!", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - } - } - }, - "a-e-housman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "A. E. Housman", - "birth": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._Housman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 30 - }, - "poems": { - "along-the-field": { - "title": "“Along the Field”", - "body": "Along the field as we came by\nA year ago, my love and I,\nThe aspen over stile and stone\nWas talking to itself alone.\n“Oh who are these that kiss and pass?\nA country lover and his lass;\nTwo lovers looking to be wed;\nAnd time shall put them both to bed,\nBut she shall lie with earth above,\nAnd he beside another love.”\n\nAnd sure enough beneath the tree\nThere walks another love with me,\nAnd overhead the aspen heaves\nIts rainy-sounding silver leaves;\nAnd I spell nothing in their stir,\nBut now perhaps they speak to her,\nAnd plain for her to understand\nThey talk about a time at hand\nWhen I shall sleep with clover clad,\nAnd she beside another lad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "as-i-gird-on-for-fighting": { - "title": "“As I gird on for fighting …”", - "body": "As I gird on for fighting\n My sword upon my thigh,\nI think on old ill fortunes\n Of better men than I.\n\nThink I, the round world over,\n What golden lads are low\nWith hurts not mine to mourn for\n And shames I shall not know.\n\nWhat evil luck soever\n For me remains in store,\n’Tis sure much finer fellows\n Have fared much worse before.\n\nSo here are things to think on\n That ought to make me brave,\nAs I strap on for fighting\n My sword that will not save.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "astronomy": { - "title": "“Astronomy”", - "body": "The Wain upon the northern steep\n Descends and lifts away.\nOh I will sit me down and weep\n For bones in Africa.\n\nFor pay and medals, name and rank,\n Things that he has not found,\nHe hove the Cross to heaven and sank\n The pole-star underground.\n\nAnd now he does not even see\n Signs of the nadir roll\nAt night over the ground where he\n Is buried with the pole.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "be-still-my-soul": { - "title": "“Be Still, My Soul”", - "body": "Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,\nEarth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.\nThink rather,--call to thought, if now you grieve a little,\nThe days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.\n\nMen loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarry\nI slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;\nSweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:\nThen it was well with me, in days ere I was born.\n\nNow, and I muse for why and never find the reason,\nI pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.\nBe still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:\nLet us endure an hour and see injustice done.\n\nAy, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;\nAll thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:\nHorror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation--\nOh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "could-man-be-drunk-for-ever": { - "title": "“Could man be drunk for ever …”", - "body": "Could man be drunk for ever\n With liquor, love, or fights,\nLief should I rouse at morning\n And lief lie down of nights.\n\nBut men at whiles are sober\n And think by fits and starts,\nAnd if they think, they fasten\n Their hands upon their hearts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-culprit": { - "title": "“The Culprit”", - "body": "The night my father got me\n His mind was not on me;\nHe did not plague his fancy\n To muse if I should be\n The son you see.\n\nThe day my mother bore me\n She was a fool and glad,\nFor all the pain I cost her,\n That she had borne the lad\n That borne she had.\n\nMy mother and my father\n Out of the light they lie;\nThe warrant would not find them,\n And here ’tis only I\n Shall hang so high.\n\nOh let not man remember\n The soul that God forgot,\nBut fetch the county kerchief\n And noose me in the knot,\n And I will rot.\n\nFor so the game is ended\n That should not have begun.\nMy father and my mother\n They had a likely son,\n And I have none.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-end-of-may": { - "title": "“An End of May”", - "body": "The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers\n Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,\nThe doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.\n Pass me the can, lad; there’s an end of May.\n\nThere’s one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,\n One season ruined of our little store.\nMay will be fine next year as like as not:\n Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.\n\nWe for a certainty are not the first\n Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled\nTheir hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed\n Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.\n\nIt is in truth iniquity on high\n To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,\nAnd mar the merriment as you and I\n Fare on our long fool’s-errand to the grave.\n\nIniquity it is; but pass the can.\n My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;\nOur only portion is the estate of man:\n We want the moon, but we shall get no more.\n\nIf here to-day the cloud of thunder lours\n To-morrow it will hie on far behests;\nThe flesh will grieve on other bones than ours\n Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.\n\nThe troubles of our proud and angry dust\n Are from eternity, and shall not fail.\nBear them we can, and if we can we must.\n Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "her-strong-enchantments-failing": { - "title": "“Her strong enchantments failing …”", - "body": "Her strong enchantments failing,\n Her towers of fear in wreck,\nHer limbecks dried of poisons\n And the knife at her neck,\n\nThe Queen of air and darkness\n Begins to shrill and cry,\n“O young man, O my slayer,\n To-morrow you shall die.”\n\nO Queen of air and darkness,\n I think ’tis truth you say,\nAnd I shall die to-morrow;\n But you will die to-day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "here-dead-we-lie": { - "title": "“Here Dead We Lie”", - "body": "Here dead we lie\nBecause we did not choose\nTo live and shame the land\nFrom which we sprung.\n\nLife, to be sure,\nIs nothing much to lose,\nBut young men think it is,\nAnd we were young.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "illic-jacet": { - "title": "“Illic Jacet”", - "body": "Oh hard is the bed they have made him,\n And common the blanket and cheap;\nBut there he will lie as they laid him:\n Where else could you trust him to sleep?\n\nTo sleep when the bugle is crying\n And cravens have heard and are brave,\nWhen mothers and sweethearts are sighing\n And lads are in love with the grave.\n\nOh dark is the chamber and lonely,\n And lights and companions depart;\nBut lief will he lose them and only\n Behold the desire of his heart.\n\nAnd low is the roof, but it covers\n A sleeper content to repose;\nAnd far from his friends and his lovers\n He lies with the sweetheart he chose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-midnights-of-november": { - "title": "“In midnights of November …”", - "body": "In midnights of November,\n When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh,\nAnd danger in the valley,\n And anger in the sky,\n\nAround the huddling homesteads\n The leafless timber roars,\nAnd the dead call the dying\n And finger at the doors.\n\nOh, yonder faltering fingers\n Are hands I used to hold;\nTheir false companion drowses\n And leaves them in the cold.\n\nOh, to the bed of ocean,\n To Africk and to Ind,\nI will arise and follow\n Along the rainy wind.\n\nThe night goes out and under\n With all its train forlorn;\nHues in the east assemble\n And cocks crow up the morn.\n\nThe living are the living\n And dead the dead will stay,\nAnd I will sort with comrades\n That face the beam of day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "in-the-morning": { - "title": "“In the Morning”", - "body": "In the morning, in the morning,\n In the happy field of hay,\nOh they looked at one another\n By the light of day.\n\nIn the blue and silver morning\n On the haycock as they lay,\nOh they looked at one another\n And they looked away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "in-valleys-green-and-still": { - "title": "“In valleys green and still …”", - "body": "In valleys green and still\n Where lovers wander maying\nThey hear from over hill\n A music playing.\n\nBehind the drum and fife,\n Past hawthornwood and hollow,\nThrough earth and out of life\n The soldiers follow.\n\nThe soldier’s is the trade:\n In any wind or weather\nHe steals the heart of maid\n And man together.\n\nThe lover and his lass\n Beneath the hawthorn lying\nHave heard the soldiers pass,\n And both are sighing.\n\nAnd down the distance they\n With dying note and swelling\nWalk the resounding way\n To the still dwelling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "into-my-heart": { - "title": "“Into My Heart”", - "body": "Into my heart an air that kills\nFrom yon far country blows:\nWhat are those blue remembered hills,\nWhat spires, what farms are those?\n\nThat is the land of lost content,\nI see it shining plain,\nThe happy highways where I went\nAnd cannot come again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "is-my-team-ploughing": { - "title": "“Is My Team Ploughing”", - "body": "“Is my team ploughing,\nThat I was used to drive\nAnd hear the harness jingle\nWhen I was man alive?”\n\nAy, the horses trample,\nThe harness jingles now;\nNo change though you lie under\nThe land you used to plough.\n\n“Is football playing\nAlong the river shore,\nWith lads to chase the leather,\nNow I stand up no more?”\n\nAy, the ball is flying,\nThe lads play heart and soul;\nThe goal stands up, the keeper\nStands up to keep the goal.\n\n“Is my girl happy,\nThat I thought hard to leave,\nAnd has she tired of weeping\nAs she lies down at eve?”\n\nAy, she lies down lightly,\nShe lies not down to weep,\nYour girl is well contented.\nBe still, my lad, and sleep.\n\n“Is my friend hearty,\nNow I am thin and pine,\nAnd has he found to sleep in\nA better bed than mine?”\n\nYes, lad, I lie easy,\nI lie as lads would choose;\nI cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,\nNever ask me whose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lent-lilly": { - "title": "“The Lent Lilly”", - "body": "’Tis spring; come out to ramble\nThe hilly brakes around,\nFor under thorn and bramble\n\nAbout the hollow ground\nThe primroses are found.\nAnd there’s the windflower chilly\nWith all the winds at play,\nAnd there’s the Lenten lily\nThat has not long to stay\nAnd dies on Easter day.\n\nAnd since till girls go maying\nYou find the primrose still,\nAnd find the windflower playing\nWith every wind at will,\nBut not the daffodil,\n\nBring baskets now, and sally\nUpon the spring’s array,\nAnd bear from hill and valley\nThe daffodil away\nThat dies on Easter day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-oracles": { - "title": "“The Oracles”", - "body": "’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain\n When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,\nAnd mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain,\n And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.\n\nI took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking,\n The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain;\nAnd from the cave of oracles I heard the priestess shrieking\n That she and I should surely die and never live again.\n\nOh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;\n But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.\n’Tis true there’s better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;\n And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.\n\nThe King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;\n Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.\nAnd he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning.\n The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rain": { - "title": "“The Rain”", - "body": "The rain, it streams on stone and hillock,\n The boot clings to the clay.\nSince all is done that’s due and right\nLet’s home; and now, my lad, good-night,\n For I must turn away.\n\nGood-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal;\n No league of ours, for sure.\nTomorrow I shall miss you less,\nAnd ache of heart and heaviness\n Are things that time should cure.\n\nOver the hill the highway marches\n And what’s beyond is wide:\nOh soon enough will pine to nought\nRemembrance and the faithful thought\n That sits the grave beside.\n\nThe skies, they are not always raining\n Nor grey the twelvemonth through;\nAnd I shall meet good days and mirth,\nAnd range the lovely lands of earth\n With friends no worse than you.\n\nBut oh, my man, the house is fallen\n That none can build again;\nMy man, how full of joy and woe\nYour mother bore you years ago\n To-night to lie in the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sinners-rue": { - "title": "“Sinner’s Rue”", - "body": "I walked alone and thinking,\n And faint the nightwind blew\nAnd stirred on mounds at crossways\n The flower of sinner’s rue.\n\nWhere the roads part they bury\n Him that his own hand slays,\nAnd so the weed of sorrow\n Springs at the four cross ways.\n\nBy night I plucked it hueless,\n When morning broke ’twas blue:\nBlue at my breast I fastened\n The flower of sinner’s rue.\n\nIt seemed a herb of healing,\n A balsam and a sign,\nFlower of a heart whose trouble\n Must have been worse than mine.\n\nDead clay that did me kindness,\n I can do none to you,\nBut only wear for breastknot\n The flower of sinner’s rue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "spring-morning": { - "title": "“Spring Morning”", - "body": "Star and coronal and bell\n April underfoot renews,\nAnd the hope of man as well\n Flowers among the morning dews.\n\nNow the old come out to look,\n Winter past and winter’s pains.\nHow the sky in pool and brook\n Glitters on the grassy plains.\n\nEasily the gentle air\n Wafts the turning season on;\nThings to comfort them are there,\n Though ’tis true the best are gone.\n\nNow the scorned unlucky lad\n Rousing from his pillow gnawn\nMans his heart and deep and glad\n Drinks the valiant air of dawn.\n\nHalf the night he longed to die,\n Now are sown on hill and plain\nPleasures worth his while to try\n Ere he longs to die again.\n\nBlue the sky from east to west\n Arches, and the world is wide,\nThough the girl he loves the best\n Rouses from another’s side.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "tell-me-not-here": { - "title": "“Tell Me Not Here”", - "body": "Tell me not here, it needs not saying,\n What tune the enchantress plays\nIn aftermaths of soft September\n Or under blanching mays,\nFor she and I were long acquainted\n And I knew all her ways.\n\nOn russet floors, by waters idle,\n The pine lets fall its cone;\nThe cuckoo shouts all day at nothing\n In leafy dells alone;\nAnd traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn\n Hearts that have lost their own.\n\nOn acres of the seeded grasses\n The changing burnish heaves;\nOr marshalled under moons of harvest\n Stand still all night the sheaves;\nOr beeches strip in storms for winter\n And stain the wind with leaves.\n\nPossess, as I possessed a season,\n The countries I resign,\nWhere over elmy plains the highway\n Would mount the hills and shine,\nAnd full of shade the pillared forest\n Would murmur and be mine.\n\nFor nature, heartless, witless nature,\n Will neither care nor know\nWhat stranger’s feet may find the meadow\n And trespass there and go,\nNor ask amid the dews of morning\n If they are mine or no.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-west": { - "title": "“The West”", - "body": "Beyond the moor and the mountain crest\n--Comrade, look not on the west--\nThe sun is down and drinks away\nFrom air and land the lees of day.\n\nThe long cloud and the single pine\nSentinel the ending line,\nAnd out beyond it, clear and wan,\nReach the gulfs of evening on.\n\nThe son of woman turns his brow\nWest from forty countries now,\nAnd, as the edge of heaven he eyes,\nThinks eternal thoughts, and sighs.\n\nOh wide’s the world, to rest or roam,\nWith change abroad and cheer at home,\nFights and furloughs, talk and tale,\nCompany and beef and ale.\n\nBut if I front the evening sky\nSilent on the west look I,\nAnd my comrade, stride for stride,\nPaces silent at my side,\n\nComrade, look not on the west:\n’Twill have the heart out of your breast;\n’Twill take your thoughts and sink them far,\nLeagues beyond the sunset bar.\n\nOh lad, I fear that yon’s the sea\nWhere they fished for you and me,\nAnd there, from whence we both were ta’en,\nYou and I shall drown again.\n\nSend not on your soul before\nTo dive from that beguiling shore,\nAnd let not yet the swimmer leave\nHis clothes upon the sands of eve.\n\nToo fast to yonder strand forlorn\nWe journey, to the sunken bourn,\nTo flush the fading tinges eyed\nBy other lads at eventide.\n\nWide is the world, to rest or roam,\nAnd early ’tis for turning home:\nPlant your heel on earth and stand,\nAnd let’s forget our native land.\n\nWhen you and I are split on air\nLong we shall be strangers there;\nFriends of flesh and bone are best;\nComrade, look not on the west.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "well-to-the-woods-no-more": { - "title": "“We’ll to the woods no more …”", - "body": "We’ll to the woods no more,\nThe laurels are all cut,\nThe bowers are bare of bay\nThat once the Muses wore;\nThe year draws in the day\nAnd soon will evening shut:\nThe laurels all are cut,\nWe’ll to the woods no more.\nOh we’ll no more, no more\nTo the leafy woods away,\nTo the high wild woods of laurel\nAnd the bowers of bay no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "when-summers-end-is-nighing": { - "title": "“When Summer’s End is Nighing”", - "body": "When summer’s end is nighing\n And skies at evening cloud,\nI muse on change and fortune\n And all the feats I vowed\n When I was young and proud.\n\nThe weathercock at sunset\n Would lose the slanted ray,\nAnd I would climb the beacon\n That looked to Wales away\n And saw the last of day.\n\nFrom hill and cloud and heaven\n The hues of evening died;\nNight welled through lane and hollow\n And hushed the countryside,\n But I had youth and pride.\n\nAnd I with earth and nightfall\n In converse high would stand,\nLate, till the west was ashen\n And darkness hard at hand,\n And the eye lost the land.\n\nThe year might age, and cloudy\n The lessening day might close,\nBut air of other summers\n Breathed from beyond the snows,\n And I had hope of those.\n\nThey came and were and are not\n And come no more anew;\nAnd all the years and seasons\n That ever can ensue\n Must now be worse and few.\n\nSo here’s an end of roaming\n On eves when autumn nighs:\nThe ear too fondly listens\n For summer’s parting sighs,\n And then the heart replies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "when-the-eye-of-day-is-shut": { - "title": "“When the eye of day is shut …”", - "body": "When the eye of day is shut,\n And the stars deny their beams,\nAnd about the forest hut\n Blows the roaring wood of dreams,\n\nFrom deep clay, from desert rock,\n From the sunk sands of the main,\nCome not at my door to knock,\n Hearts that loved me not again.\n\nSleep, be still, turn to your rest\n In the lands where you are laid;\nIn far lodgings east and west\n Lie down on the beds you made.\n\nIn gross marl, in blowing dust,\n In the drowned ooze of the sea,\nWhere you would not, lie you must,\n Lie you must, and not with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "yonder-see-the-morning-blink": { - "title": "“Yonder see the morning blink …”", - "body": "Yonder see the morning blink:\n The sun is up, and up must I,\nTo wash and dress and eat and drink\nAnd look at things and talk and think\n And work, and God knows why.\n\nOh often have I washed and dressed\n And what’s to show for all my pain?\nLet me lie abed and rest:\nTen thousand times I’ve done my best\n And all’s to do again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "you-know-no-more-than-i": { - "title": "“You Know No More than I”", - "body": "The half-moon westers low, my love,\n And the wind brings up the rain;\nAnd wide apart lie we, my love,\n And seas between the twain.\n\nI know not if it rains, my love,\n In the land where you do lie;\nAnd oh, so sound you sleep, my love,\n You know no more than I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-night-is-freezing-fast": { - "title": "“The night is freezing fast …”", - "body": "The night is freezing fast,\n To-morrow comes December;\n And winterfalls of old\nAre with me from the past;\n And chiefly I remember\n How Dick would hate the cold.\n\nFall, winter, fall; for he,\n Prompt hand and headpiece clever,\n Has woven a winter robe,\nAnd made of earth and sea\n His overcoat for ever,\n And wears the turning globe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "the-sigh-that-heaves-the-grasses": { - "title": "“The sigh that heaves the grasses …”", - "body": "The sigh that heaves the grasses\n Whence thou wilt never rise\nIs of the air that passes\n And knows not if it sighs.\n\nThe diamond tears adorning\n Thy low mound on the lea,\nThose are the tears of morning,\n That weeps, but not for thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sloe-was-lost-in-flower": { - "title": "“The sloe was lost in flower …”", - "body": "The sloe was lost in flower,\n The April elm was dim;\nThat was the lover’s hour,\n The hour for lies and him.\n\nIf thorns are all the bower,\n If north winds freeze the fir,\nWhy, ’tis another’s hour,\n The hour for truth and her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - } - } - }, - "walsham-how": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Walsham How", - "birth": { - "year": 1823 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1897 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walsham_How", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "for-all-the-saints": { - "title": "“For all the saints …”", - "body": "For all the saints who from their labor rest,\nWho Thee by faith before the world confessed,\nThy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed,\n_Alleluia! Alleluia!_\n\nO blest communion, fellowship divine.\nWe feebly struggle, they in glory shine;\nYet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.\n_Alleluia! Alleluia!_\n\nAnd when the fight is fierce, the warfare long,\nSteals on the ear the distant triumph song,\nAnd hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.\n_Alleluia! Alleluia!_\n\nFrom earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,\nThrough gates of pearl streams in the countless host,\nSinging to Father, Son and Holy Ghost,\n_Alleluia! Alleluia!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - } - } - }, - "andrew-hudgins": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Andrew Hudgins", - "birth": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hudgins", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "airport-boulevard": { - "title": "“Airport Boulevard”", - "body": "Driving home past the dives on Airport Boulevard\nI counted, on Sunday mornings, the drunks passed out\nbeside their cars, their bodies pressed slightly into the gravel\nand crushed oystershell.\n\nI’d never done that, slept the night,\ndrunk, beside my car, and I knew already\nthat I never would. Even if I became a drunk\nI’d drink quietly at home in front of the television,\nso I envied and hated the drunks slumped in the crushed oystershell\nbecause my life was already so ordered and driven by work\nthat all leisure, from rough drunk to country club swell,\nlooked romantic to me, romantic because it was impossible:\neven the numb, sobbing despairs I fell into, kicking\nagainst order and obsession, were orderly and obsessive.\n\nAt work I sold tickets to rich people leaving town,\nthen stood at the black glass and watched the after-midnight flights\nturn into lights, then watched those lights accelerate, rise and dwindle\ninto darkness and the east--Atlanta and the world,\nwhich I had little desire to see, though I knew I would.\n\nDriving from job to school to another job, I often thought\nof those drunks and how hard I worked. Though I’d’ve denied it,\nI wanted to turn into a light myself\nso I could rise and disappear. I didn’t want\nto go anywhere, I simply wanted to be left alone--\nand since I knew that was impossible\nI worked and went to school and worked some more,\nwaiting to see what would happen, and there those drunks were,\nnestled into the ground, half-buried and asleep, while I sped past,\nsleepy myself, but sober, very sober. I’ve never talked\nso elegiacally about myself and I don’t care for it,\nthe puzzled arrogance and bland\nforgiveness of it, as if I were beyond the night wind’s buffeting\nand the day wind’s bite, as if from my great height of understanding\nI’ll fade into death, afflicted\nwith no greater grief or suffering than I can bear\nwith graceful indifference, classical restraint.\nBut it feels so much like wisdom to talk this way.\n\nI finished school and because I was now married\nI kept two jobs and sometimes, briefly, three.\nFor a couple of hours late Sunday afternoons my first wife and I\nsat on the porch, talking, watching\nthe cut grass and the bright water arching across\nthe neighbors’ yards. Children shouted.\nGunshots and laughter wafted from the nearby houses,\nthe television world all wrong\n--excessive, always too much violence,\ntoo much laughter. The lovely fragrance of roasting meat\nrose from a dozen grills, including mine, and while we talked\nice cubes clicked in gin and every now and then\none cracked, a solitary explosion in our hands,\na sound that startled her and made her laugh.\nThey weren’t what I was living for, those moments.\nPerhaps they should have been. But how can I now regret\nthe great accusations and sudden acquiescences, the paltry squabbles\nand quick capitulations of people straining\nto be dignified, to be noble, inside their bad behavior,\nguilt, rage, and greed? How glibly elliptical\nabstractions are! Mumbling, winking--but gracefully! I no longer\nhave much to say or much to hint. I’m simply using them\nfor the Olympian pleasure of pronouncing on myself,\nand to build a walkway to my new life. New life?\nWhat life is new? It’s the same life, still mine,\nbut with--there are only a few ways to say this--a better wife,\nbetter gin, better meat on an equivalent grill outside a better house\nin a different city, with children that for all I know or care\ncould be the same ones shouting over the hedge, the same\ndogs barking in the distance. Not a different life.\nA better life. Only shorter. What great height have I attained\nthat the young me and the person I am now can slip so easily,\nlike prey, into the crosshairs of my sorrow and pity?\nA sip of red wine, the scent of red meat on the grill\nand the whole disordered world falls into order.\n\nDriving to work or back from it, I still think of those distant drunks,\nnot with the rage I felt when I actually saw them,\nbut gently, as if sentimentality were my reward\nfor living my life, because I want to lie down on pea gravel\nand oystershell still warm with the day’s heat\nand burrow into it and sleep for a long time\nand dream someone else’s dreams--not live their lives,\njust dream their dreams--and wake to whatever\nyou wake to after such different sleep. Then I’d drive home\nand face the consequences. What? I don’t know. I can’t imagine.\nBut memory and imagination have consequences.\nWhen I think of those sleeping drunks, that distant town. I remember\nSennacherib’s report to the state god of Assyria.\nTo quiet the heart of Ashur, his Lord, he reports\nobliterating Babylon, that great city, burning it,\nrazing the charred buildings, killing all inhabitants, young and old,\nbut before he flooded it, he swept up the dust of Babylon\nto give as presents and he stored it in a covered jar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday", - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "child-on-the-marsh": { - "title": "“Child on the Marsh”", - "body": "I worked the river’s slick banks, grabbling\nin mud holes underneath tree roots.\nYou’d think it would be dangerous,\nbut I never came up with a cooter\nor cottonmouth hung on my fingertips.\nOccasionally, though, I leapt upright,\nmy fingers hooked through the red gills\nof a mudcat. And then I thrilled\nthe thrill my father felt when he\nburst home from fishing, drunk, and yelled,\nwell before dawn, “Wake up! Come here!”\nHe tossed some fatwood on the fire\nand flames raged, spat, and flickered. He held\na four-foot mudcat. “I caught it!”\nhe yelled. “I caught this monster!” At first,\ndream-dazed, I thought it was something\nhe’d saved us from. By firelight, the fish\ngleamed wickedly. But Father laughed\nand hugged me hard, pressing my head\nagainst his coat, which stank, and glittered\nwhere dried scales caught the light. For breakfast,\nhe fried enormous chunks of fish,\nthe whole house glorious for days\nwith their rich stink. One scale stuck to my face,\nand as we ate he blinked, until\nhe understood what made me glitter.\nHe laughed, reached over, flicked the star\noff of my face. That’s how I felt\n--that wild!--when I jerked struggling fish\nout of the mud and held them up,\nlong muscles shuddering on my fingers.\nOnce, grabbling, I got lost. I traced\nthe river to the marsh, absorbed\nwith fishing, then absorbed with ants.\nWith a flat piece of bark, I’d scoop\nred ants onto a black-ant hill\nand watch. Then I would shovel black\nants on a red-ant hill to see\nwhat difference that would make.\nNot much. And I returned to grabbling,\nthen skimming stones. Before I knew it,\nI’d worked my way from fresh water to salt,\nand I was lost. Sawgrass waved, swayed,\nand swung above my head. Pushed down,\nit sprang back. Slashed at, it slashed back.\nAll I could see was sawgrass. Where was\nthe sea, where land? With every step,\nthe mud sucked at my feet with gasps\nand sobs that came so close to speech\nI sang in harmony with them.\nMy footprints filled with brine as I\nwalked on, still fascinated with\nthe sweat bees, hornets, burrow bees;\nand, God forgive me, I was not afraid\nof anything. Lost in sawgrass,\nI knew for sure just _up_ and _down_.\nAlmost enough. Since then, they are\nthe only things I’ve had much faith in.\nNight fell. The slow moon rose from sawgrass.\nSoon afterward I heard some cries\nand answered them. So I was saved\nfrom things I didn’t want to be\nsaved from. Ma tested her green switch\n--_zip! zip!_--then laid it on my thighs,\noh, maybe twice, before she fell,\nin tears, across my neck. She sobbed\nand combed my hair of cockleburs.\nShe laughed as she dabbed alcohol\ninto my cuts. I flinched. She chuckled.\nAnd even as a child, I heard,\ninside her sobs and chuckling,\nthe lovely sucking sound of earth\nthat followed me, gasped, called my name\nas I stomped through the mud, wrenched free,\nand heard the earth’s voice under me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-glass-hammer": { - "title": "“The Glass Hammer”", - "body": "My mother’s knickknack crystal hammer\ngleamed by her silver tray.\n_O pick me up and play with me,_\nI heard the hammer say.\n\nI tapped it on the silver tray.\nI tapped my sister’s kitty.\n“Put that thing down,” my mother yelled.\n“It’s not a damn play-pretty.”\n\nOh. I’m a hammer. Work with me,\nthe wicked hammer goaded\nI found a nail. I hit the nail.\nThe hammer, it exploded.\n\nThe doctors stitched my hands and face\nand sewed up my right knee.\nMy mother gave me good advice.\n_The hammer lied to me._\n\nThe hammer said it was a tool\nalthough it couldn’t hammer.\nThe better hammer was my mom,\nwho hammered me.--goddamn’er.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-of-the-drunkards-whose-throats-will-be-cut-in-a-moment": { - "title": "“Song of the Drunkards Whose Throats Will Be Cut in a Moment”", - "body": "When the knife is through and our throats cleanly cut,\n let red wine,\nlike blood, slop on the ground from our tipped bottles,\n but let us drink\nwhile the orders for our death hum on the wire.\n Let us drink\nwhile the knife is sharpened, and while the knife is stropped\n let us drink,\nand while the knifemen stride toward us up the hill\n let us drink\nand chant in rhythm to their approaching footfall,\n “Let us drink.”\nAnd while grim poets scorn our frivolity\n let us drink\nand mock them for thinking they will live forever.\n Let us drink\nand sing of valleys where our loved ones grieve us.\n Let us drink\nso when the knife blade nicks our throats, we’ll sing\n “No hangovers tomorrow,”\nand while we bite and claw we’ll keep on singing\n “No hangover tomorrow,”\nand when our throats are cut and our song severed\n let red wine\ncleanse the red knife, which never drinks or sings,\n and tells no stories.\nThe knife is serious and it will suffer\n no hangovers tomorrow\nwhen it returns to work among the singers.\n Let us drink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "langston-hughes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Langston Hughes", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "life-is-fine": { - "title": "“Life is Fine”", - "body": "I went down to the river,\nI set down on the bank.\nI tried to think but couldn’t,\nSo I jumped in and sank.\n\nI came up once and hollered!\nI came up twice and cried!\nIf that water hadn’t a-been so cold\nI might’ve sunk and died.\n\nBut it was\nCold in that water!\nIt was cold!\n\nI took the elevator\nSixteen floors above the ground.\nI thought about my baby\nAnd thought I would jump down.\n\nI stood there and I hollered!\nI stood there and I cried!\nIf it hadn’t a-been so high\nI might’ve jumped and died.\n\nBut it was\nHigh up there!\nIt was high!\n\nSo since I’m still here livin’,\nI guess I will live on.\nI could’ve died for love--\nBut for livin’ I was born\n\nThough you may hear me holler,\nAnd you may see me cry--\nI’ll be dogged, sweet baby,\nIf you gonna see me die.\n\nLife is fine!\nFine as wine!\nLife is fine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mother-to-son": { - "title": "“Mother to Son”", - "body": "Well, son, I’ll tell you:\nLife for me ain’t been no crystal stair.\nIt’s had tacks in it,\nAnd splinters,\nAnd boards torn up,\nAnd places with no carpet on the floor--\nBare.\nBut all the time\nI’se been a-climbin’ on,\nAnd reachin’ landin’s,\nAnd turnin’ corners,\nAnd sometimes goin’ in the dark\nWhere there ain’t been no light.\nSo, boy, don’t you turn back.\nDon’t you set down on the steps.\n’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.\nDon’t you fall now--\nFor I’se still goin’, honey,\nI’se still climbin’,\nAnd life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ted-hughes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ted Hughes", - "birth": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1998 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "gods-grandeur": { - "title": "“God’s Grandeur”", - "body": "The world is charged with the grandeur of God.\nIt will flame out, like shining from shook foil;\nIt gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil\nCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?\nGenerations have trod, have trod, have trod;\nAnd all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;\nAnd wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil\nIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.\nAnd for all this, nature is never spent;\nThere lives the dearest freshness deep down things;\nAnd though the last lights off the black West went\nOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--\nBecause the Holy Ghost over the bent\nWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-age-gets-up": { - "title": "“Old Age Gets Up”", - "body": "Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks\n\nAn eye powdered over, half melted and solid again\nPonders\nIdeas that collapse\nAt the first touch of attention\n\nThe light at the window, so square and so same\nSo full-strong as ever, the window frame\nA scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on\n\nSupporting the body, shaped to its old work\nMaking small movements in gray air\nNumbed from the blurred accident\nOf having lived, the fatal, real injury\nUnder the amnesia\n\nSomething tries to save itself-searches\nFor defenses-but words evade\nLike flies with their own notions\n\nOld age slowly gets dressed\nHeavily dosed with death’s night\nSits on the bed’s edge\n\nPulls its pieces together\nLoosely tucks in its shirt", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "september": { - "title": "“September”", - "body": "We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:\nNo clock counts this.\nWhen kisses are repeated and the arms hold\nThere is no telling where time is.\n\nIt is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:\nBehind the eye a star,\nUnder the silk of the wrist a sea, tell\nTime is nowhere.\n\nWe stand; leaves have not timed the summer.\nNo clock now needs\nTell we have only what we remember:\nMinutes uproaring with our heads\n\nLike an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s\nWhen the senseless mob rules;\nAnd quietly the trees casting their crowns\nInto the pools.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-thought-fox": { - "title": "“The Thought-Fox”", - "body": "I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:\nSomething else is alive\nBeside the clock’s loneliness\nAnd this blank page where my fingers move.\n\nThrough the window I see no star:\nSomething more near\nThough deeper within darkness\nIs entering the loneliness:\n\nCold, delicately as the dark snow,\nA fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;\nTwo eyes serve a movement, that now\nAnd again now, and now, and now\n\nSets neat prints into the snow\nBetween trees, and warily a lame\nShadow lags by stump and in hollow\nOf a body that is bold to come\n\nAcross clearings, an eye,\nA widening deepening greenness,\nBrilliantly, concentratedly,\nComing about its own business\n\nTill, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox\nIt enters the dark hole of the head.\nThe window is starless still; the clock ticks,\nThe page is printed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "wind": { - "title": "“Wind”", - "body": "This house has been far out at sea all night,\nThe woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,\nWinds stampeding the fields under the window\nFloundering black astride and blinding wet\n\nTill day rose; then under an orange sky\nThe hills had new places, and wind wielded\nBlade-light, luminous black and emerald,\nFlexing like the lens of a mad eye.\n\nAt noon I scaled along the house-side as far as\nThe coal-house door. Once I looked up--\nThrough the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes\nThe tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,\n\nThe fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,\nAt any second to bang and vanish with a flap;\nThe wind flung a magpie away and a black--\nBack gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house\n\nRang like some fine green goblet in the note\nThat any second would shatter it. Now deep\nIn chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip\nOur hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,\n\nOr each other. We watch the fire blazing,\nAnd feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,\nSeeing the window tremble to come in,\nHearing the stones cry out under the horizons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "work-and-play": { - "title": "“Work and Play”", - "body": "The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,\nA blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,\nA whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.\nBut the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust\nIn shimmering exhaust\nSearching to slake\nIts fever in ocean\nWill play and be idle or else it will bust.\n\nThe swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,\nShe flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,\nDips her glow in the pond and is perfect.\nBut the serpent of cars that collapsed on the beach\nDisgorges its organs\nA scamper of colours\nWhich roll like tomatoes\nNude as tomatoes\nWith sand in their creases\nTo cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.\n\nThe swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,\nShe scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,\nShe draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.\nBut the holiday people\nAre laid out like wounded\nFlat as in ovens\nRoasting and basting\nWith faces of torment as space burns them blue\nTheir heads are transistors\nTheir teeth grit on sand grains\nTheir lost kids are squalling\nWhile man-eating flies\nJab electric shock needles but what can they do?\n\nThey can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces\nAnd start up the serpent\nAnd headache it homeward\nA car full of squabbles\nAnd sobbing and stickiness\nWith sand in their crannies\nInhaling petroleum\nThat pours from the foxgloves\nWhile the evening swallow\nThe swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,\nTouches the honey-slow river and turning\nReturns to the hand stretched from under the eaves--\nA boomerang of rejoicing shadow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "victor-hugo": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Victor Hugo", - "birth": { - "year": 1802 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-battle": { - "title": "“After the Battle”", - "body": "My father, hero of benignant mien,\nOn horseback visited the gory scene,\nAfter the battle as the evening fell,\nAnd took with him a trooper loved right well,\nBecause of bravery and presence bold.\nThe field was covered with the dead, all cold,\nAnd shades of night were deepening: came a sound,\nFeeble and hoarse, from something on the ground;\nIt was a Spaniard of the vanquished force,\nWho dragged himself with pain beside their course.\nWounded and bleeding, livid and half dead,\n“Give me to drink--in pity, drink!” he said.\nMy father, touched, stretched to his follower now\nA flask of rum that from his saddle-bow\nHung down: “The poor soul--give him drink,” said he\nBut while the trooper prompt, obediently\nStooped towards the other, he of Moorish race\nPointed a pistol at my father’s face,\nAnd with a savage oath the trigger drew:\nThe hat flew off, a bullet passing through.\nAs swerved his charger in a backward stride,\n“Give him to drink the same,” my father cried.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "the-grave-said-to-the-rose": { - "title": "“The Grave Said to the Rose”", - "body": "The grave said to the rose:\n“With the tears that dawn sprinkles upon you\nWhat do you make, flower of love?”\nThe rose said to the tomb:\n“What do you make of those who fall\nIn your ever-open abyss?”\n\nThe rose said, “sombre tomb,\nFrom these tears I make in the shade\nA fragrance of amber and of honey.”\nThe tomb said, “wistful flower,\nFrom each soul that arrives to me\nI make an angel in heaven.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "june-nights": { - "title": "“June Nights”", - "body": "In summer, when day has fled, the plain covered with flowers\nPours out far away an intoxicating scent;\nEyes shut, ears half open to noises,\nWe only half sleep in a transparent slumber.\n\nThe stars are purer, the shade seems pleasanter;\nA hazy half-day colours the eternal dome;\nAnd the sweet pale dawn awaiting her hour\nSeems to wander all night at the bottom of the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "more-strong-than-time": { - "title": "“More Strong than Time”", - "body": "Since I have set my lips to your full cup, my sweet,\nSince I my pallid face between your hands have laid,\nSince I have known your soul, and all the bloom of it,\nAnd all the perfume rare, now buried in the shade;\n\nSince it was given to me to hear on happy while,\nThe words wherein your heart spoke all its mysteries,\nSince I have seen you weep, and since I have seen you smile,\nYour lips upon my lips, and your eyes upon my eyes;\n\nSince I have known above my forehead glance and gleam,\nA ray, a single ray, of your star, veiled always,\nSince I have felt the fall, upon my lifetime’s stream,\nOf one rose petal plucked from the roses of your days;\n\nI now am bold to say to the swift changing hours,\nPass, pass upon your way, for I grow never old,\nFleet to the dark abysm with all your fading flowers,\nOne rose that none may pluck, within my heart I hold.\n\nYour flying wings may smite, but they can never spill\nThe cup fulfilled of love, from which my lips are wet;\nMy heart has far more fire than you can frost to chill,\nMy soul more love than you can make my soul forget.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "a-sunset": { - "title": "“A Sunset”", - "body": "I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,\nWhether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,\nIn numerous leafage bosomed close;\nWhether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,\nOr a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere\nOn cloudy archipelagos.\n\nOh, gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion,\nUp-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds’ commotion,\nTheir unimagined shapes accord:\nUnder their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through,\nAs if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew\nA sudden elemental sword.\n\nThe sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold;\nAnd momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,\nThe thatched roof of a cot a-glance;\nOr on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze;\nOr pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze,\nGreat moveless meres of radiance.\n\nThen mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament’s swept track,\nYonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back,\nA triple row of pointed teeth?\nUnder its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,\nThe flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side\nWith scales of golden mail ensheathe.\n\nThen mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.\nConfounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice\nRuins immense in mounded wrack;\nAfar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone\nHangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown\nWhen the earthquake heaves its hugy back.\n\nThese vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzèd glows,\nWhere the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,\nMuttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,--\n’Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,\nAs a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep\nHis dreadful and resounding arms!\n\nAll vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated,\nLike a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red\nInto the furnace stirred to fume,\nShocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,\nEven to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire\nThe vaporous and inflamèd spaume.\n\nO contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale,\nIn every season, every place, gaze through their every veil?\nWith love that has not speech for need!\nBeneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite:\nIf winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night\nFantasy them starre brede.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "tomorrow": { - "title": "“Tomorrow”", - "body": "Tomorrow, at dawn, when the countryside turns white,\nI leave. You see, I know you are waiting for me.\nI will go through the forest, I will go across the mountains.\nI cannot stay away from you any longer.\n\nI will walk with my eyes fixed on my thoughts,\nWithout seeing anything outside, without hearing any noise,\nAlone, unknown, back bent, hands crossed,\nSad, and the day for me will be like night.\n\nI will not watch the gold of the falling evening,\nNor the sails in the distance descending towards Harfleur,\nAnd when I arrive, I’ll put on your grave\nA bouquet of green holly and flowering heather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - } - } - }, - "t-e-hulme": { - "metadata": { - "name": "T. E. Hulme", - "birth": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Hulme", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "A touch of cold in the Autumn night--\nI walked abroad,\nAnd saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge\nLike a red-faced farmer.\nI did not stop to speak, but nodded,\nAnd round about were the wistful stars\nWith white faces like town children.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-embankment": { - "title": "“The Embankment”", - "body": "Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,\nIn the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.\nNow see I\nThat warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.\nOh, God, make small\nThe old star-eaten blanket of the sky,\nThat I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "leigh-hunt": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Leigh Hunt", - "birth": { - "year": 1784 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Hunt", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "abou-ben-adhem": { - "title": "“Abou Ben Adhem”", - "body": "Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)\nAwoke one night from a deep dream of peace,\nAnd saw, within the moonlight in his room,\nMaking it rich, and like a lily in bloom,\nAn angel writing in a book of gold:--\nExceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,\nAnd to the presence in the room he said,\n“What writest thou?”--The vision raised its head,\nAnd with a look made of all sweet accord,\nAnswered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”\n“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”\nReplied the angel. Abou spoke more low,\nBut cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,\nWrite me as one that loves his fellow men.”\n\nThe angel wrote, and vanished. The next night\nIt came again with a great wakening light,\nAnd showed the names whom love of God had blest,\nAnd lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "aldous-huxley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Aldous Huxley", - "birth": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 21 - }, - "poems": { - "anniversaries": { - "title": "“Anniversaries”", - "body": "Once more the windless days are here\nQuiet of autumn when the year\nHalts and looks backward and draws breath\nBefore it plunges into death.\nSilver of mist and gossamers\nThrough-shine of noonday’s glassy gold\nPale blue of skies where nothing stirs\nSave one blanched leaf weary and old\nThat over and over slowly falls\nFrom the mute elm-trees hanging on air\nLike tattered flags along the walls\nOf chapels deep in sunlit prayer.\nOnce more … Within its flawless glass\nTo-day reflects that other day\nWhen under the bracken on the grass\nWe who were lovers happily lay\nAnd hardly spoke or framed a thought\nThat was not one with the calm hills\nAnd crystal sky. Ourselves were nought\nOur gusty passions our burning wills\nDissolved in boundlessness and we\nWere almost bodiless almost free.\nThe wind has shattered silver and gold;\nNight after night of sparkling cold\nOrion lifts his tangled feet\nFrom where the tossing branches beat\nIn a fine surf against the sky.\nSo the trance ended and we grew\nRestless we knew not how or why;\nAnd there were sudden gusts that blew\nOur dreaming banners into storm;\nWe wore the uncertain crumbling form\nOf a brown swirl of windy leaves\nA phantom shape that stirs and heaves\nShuddering from earth to fall again\nWith a dry whisper of withered rain.\n\nLast from the dead and shrunken days\nWe conjured spring lighting the blaze\nOf burnished tulips in the dark;\nAnd from black frost we struck a spark\nOf blue delight and fragrance new\nA little world of flowers and dew.\nWinter for us was over and done:\nThe drought of fluttering leaves had grown\nEmerald shining in the sun\nAs light as glass as firm as stone.\nReal once more: for we had passed\nThrough passion into thought again;\nShaped our desires and made that fast\nWhich was before a cloudy pain;\nMoulded the dimness fixed defined\nIn a fair statue strong and free\nTwin bodies flaming into mind\nPoised on the brink of ecstasy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "books-and-thoughts": { - "title": "“Books and Thoughts”", - "body": "Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry\nAcross the Lethe of the years--\nThese are my friends and at their tears\nI weep and with their mirth am merry.\nOn a high tower whose battlements\nGive me all heaven at a glance\nI lie long summer nights in trance\nDrowsed by the murmurs and the scents\nThat rise from earth while the sky above me\nMerges its peace with my soul’s peace\nDeep meeting deep. No stir can move me\nNought break the quiet of my release:\nIn vain the windy sunlight raves\nAt the hush and gloom of polar caves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-the-fire": { - "title": "“By the Fire”", - "body": "We who are lovers sit by the fire\nCradled warm ’twixt thought and will\nSit and drowse like sleeping dogs\nIn the equipoise of all desire\nSit and listen to the still\nSmall hiss and whisper of green logs\nThat burn away that burn away\nWith the sound of a far-off falling stream\nOf threaded water blown to steam\nGrey ghost in the mountain world of grey.\nVapours blue as distance rise\nBetween the hissing logs that show\nA glimpse of rosy heat below;\nAnd candles watch with tireless eyes\nWhile we sit drowsing here. I know\nDimly that there exists a world\nThat there is time perhaps and space\nOther and wider than this place\nWhere at the fireside drowsily curled\nWe hear the whisper and watch the flame\nBurn blinkless and inscrutable.\nAnd then I know those other names\nThat through my brain from cell to cell\nEcho--reverberated shout\nOf waiters mournful along corridors:\nBut nobody carries the orders out\nAnd the names (dear friends your name and yours)\nEvoke no sign. But here I sit\nOn the wide hearth and there are you:\nThat is enough and only true.\nThe world and the friends that lived in it\nAre shadows: you alone remain\nReal in this drowsing room\nFull of the whispers of distant rain\nAnd candles staring into the gloom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-elms": { - "title": "“The Elms”", - "body": "Fine as the dust of plumy fountains blowing\nAcross the lanterns of a revelling night\nThe tiny leaves of April’s earliest growing\nPowder the trees--so vaporously light\nThey seem to float billows of emerald foam\nBlown by the South on its bright airy tide\nSeeming less trees than things beatified\nCome from the world of thought which was their home.\n\nFor a while only. Rooted strong and fast\nSoon will they lift towards the summer sky\nTheir mountain-mass of clotted greenery.\nTheir immaterial season quickly past\nThey grow opaque and therefore needs must die\nSince every earth to earth returns at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-flowers": { - "title": "“The Flowers”", - "body": "Day after day\nAt spring’s return\nI watch my flowers how they burn\nTheir lives away.\n\nThe candle crocus\nAnd daffodil gold\nDrink fire of the sunshine--\nQuickly cold.\n\nAnd the proud tulip--\nHow red he glows!--\nIs quenched ere summer\nCan kindle the rose.\n\nPurple as the innermost\nCore of a sinking flame\nDeep in the leaves the violets smoulder\nTo the dust whence they came.\n\nDay after day\nAt spring’s return\nI watch my flowers how they burn\nTheir lives away\nDay after day …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-higher-sensualism": { - "title": "“The Higher Sensualism”", - "body": "There’s a church by a lake in Italy\nStands white on a hill against the sky;\nAnd a path of immemorial cobbles\nLeads up and up where the pilgrim hobbles\nPast a score or so of neat reposories\nWhere you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries\nTo the shrined terra-cotta mannikins\nThat expound with the liveliest quirks and grins\nKnown texts of Scripture. But no long stay\nShould the pilgrim make upon his way;\nBut as means to the end these shrines stand here\nTo guide to something holier\nThe church on the hill top.\n\n Your heaven’s so\nWith a path leading up to it past a row\nOf votary Priapulids;\nAt each you pause and tell your beads\nAlong the quintuple strings of sense:\nThen on to face Heaven’s eminence\nNew stimulated new inspired.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "italy": { - "title": "“Italy”", - "body": "There is a country in my mind\nLovelier than a poet blind\nCould dream of who had never known\nThis world of drought and dust and stone\nIn all its ugliness: a place\nFull of an all but human grace;\nWhose dells retain the printed form\nOf heavenly sleep and seem yet warm\nFrom some pure body newly risen;\nWhere matter is no more a prison\nBut freedom for the soul to know\nIts native beauty. For things glow\nThere with an inward truth and are\nAll fire and colour like a star.\nAnd in that land are domes and towers\nThat hang as light and bright as flowers\nUpon the sky and seem a birth\nRather of air than solid earth.\n\nSometimes I dream that walking there\nIn the green shade all unaware\nAt a new turn of the golden glade\nI shall see her and as though afraid\nShall halt a moment and almost fall\nFor passing faintness like a man\nWho feels the sudden spirit of Pan\nBrimming his narrow soul with all\nThe illimitable world. And she\nTurning her head will let me see\nThe first sharp dawn of her surprise\nTurning to welcome in her eyes.\nAnd I shall come and take my lover\nAnd looking on her re-discover\nAll her beauty:--her dark hair\nAnd the little ears beneath it where\nRoses of lucid shadow sleep;\nHer brooding mouth and in the deep\nWells of her eyes reflected stars.\n\nOh the imperishable things\nThat hands and lips as well as words\nShall speak! Oh movement of white wings\nOh wheeling galaxies of birds!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-little-memory": { - "title": "“A Little Memory”", - "body": "White in the moonlight\nWet with dew\nWe have known the languor\nOf being two.\n\nWe have been weary\nAs children are\nWhen over them radiant\nA stooping star\n\nBends their Good-Night\nKissed and smiled:--\nEach was mother\nEach was child.\n\nChild from your forehead\nI kissed the hair\nGently ah gently:\nAnd you were\n\nMistress and mother\nWhen on your breast\nI lay so safely\nAnd could rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mole": { - "title": "“Mole”", - "body": "Tunnelled in solid blackness creeps\nThe old mole-soul and wakes or sleeps\nHe knows not which but tunnels on\nThrough ages of oblivion;\nUntil at last the long constraint\nOf each hand-wall is lost and faint\nComes daylight creeping from afar\nAnd mole-work grows crepuscular.\nTunnel meets air and bursts; mole sees\nMen as strange as walking trees?\nAnd far horizons smoking blue\nAnd chasing clouds for ever new;\nGreen hills like lighted lamps aglow\nOr quenched beneath the cloud-shadow;\nQuenching and blazing turn by turn\nSpring’s great green signals fitfully burn.\nMole travels on but finds the steering\nA harder task of pioneering\nThan when he thridded through the strait\nBlind catacombs that ancient fate\nHad carved for him. Stupid and dumb\nAnd blind and touchless he had come\nA way without a turn; but here\nUnder the sky the passenger\nChooses his own best way; and mole\nDistracted wanders yet his hole\nRegrets not much wherein he crept\nBut runs a joyous nympholept\nThis way and that by all made mad--\nRiver nymph and oread\nOcean’s daughters and Lorelei\nCombing the silken mystery\nThe glaucous gold of her rivery tresses--\nEach haunts the traveller each possesses\nThe drunken wavering soul awhile;\nThen with a phantom’s cock-crow smile\nMocks craving with sheer vanishment.\nMole-eyes grow hawk’s: knowledge is lent\nIn grudging driblets that pay high\nUnconscionable usury.\nTo unrelenting life. Mole learns\nTo travel more secure; the turns\nOf his long way less puzzling seem\nAnd all those magic forms that gleam\nIn airy invitation cheat\nLess often than they did of old.\nThe earth slopes upward fold by fold\nOf quiet hills that meet the gold\nSerenity of western skies.\nOver the world’s edge with clear eyes\nOur mole transcendent sees his way\nTunnelled in light: he must obey\nNecessity again and thrid\nClose catacombs as erst he did\nFate’s tunnellings himself must bore\nThrough the sunset’s inmost core.\nThe guiding walls to each-hand shine\nLuminous and crystalline;\nAnd mole shall tunnel on and on\nTill night let fall oblivion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "out-of-the-window": { - "title": "“Out of the Window”", - "body": "In the middle of countries far from hills and sea\nAre the little places one passes by in trains\nAnd never stops at; where the skies extend\nUninterrupted and the level plains\nStretch green and yellow and green without an end.\nAnd behind the glass of their Grand Express\nFolk yawn away a province through\nWith nothing to think of nothing to do\nNothing even to look at--never a “view”\nIn this damned wilderness.\nBut I look out of the window and find\nMuch to satisfy the mind.\nMark how the furrows formed and wheeled\nIn a motion orderly and staid\nSweep as we pass across the field\nLike a drilled army on parade.\nAnd here’s a market-garden barred\nWith stripe on stripe of varied greens …\nBright potatoes flower starred\nAnd the opacous colour of beans.\nEach line deliberately swings\nTowards me till I see a straight\nGreen avenue to the heart of things\nThe glimpse of a sudden opened gate\nPiercing the adverse walls of fate …\nA moment only and then fast fast\nThe gate swings to the avenue closes;\nFate laughs and once more interposes\nIts barriers.\nThe train has passed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "perils-of-the-small-hours": { - "title": "“Perils of the Small Hours”", - "body": "When life burns low as the fire in the grate\nAnd all the evening’s books are read\nI sit alone save for the dead\nAnd the lovers I have grown to hate.\n\nBut all at once the narrow gloom\nOf hatred and despair expands\nIn tenderness: thought stretches hands\nTo welcome to the midnight room\n\nAnother presence:--a memory\nOf how last year in the sunlit field\nLaughing you suddenly revealed\nBeauty in immortality.\n\nFor so it is; a gesture strips\nLife bare of all its make-believe.\nAll unprepared we may receive\nOur casual apocalypse.\n\nSheer beauty then you seemed to stir\nUnbodied soul; soul sleeps to night\nAnd love comes dimming spirit’s sight\nWhen body plays interpreter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "philoclea-in-the-forest": { - "title": "“Philoclea in the Forest”", - "body": "# I.\n\n’Twas I that leaned to Amoret\nWith: “What if the briars have tangled Time\nTill lost in the wood-ways he quite forget\nHow plaintive in cities at midnight sounds the chime\nOf bells slow-dying from discord to the hush whence they rose and met?”\n\n“And in the forest we shall live free\nFree from the bondage that Time has made\nTo hedge our soul from its liberty;\nWe shall not fear what is mighty and unafraid\nShall look wide-eyed at beauty nor shrink from its majesty.”\n\nBut Amoret answered me again:\n“We are lost in the forest you and I;\nLost lost not free though no bonds restrain;\nFor no spire rises for comfort no landmark in the sky\nAnd the long glades as they curve from sight are dark with a nameless pain.\n\nAnd Time creates what he devours--\nMusic that sweetly dreams itself away\nFrail-swung leaves of autumn and the scent of flowers\nAnd the beauty of that poised moment when the day\nHangs ’twixt the quiet of darkness and the mirth of the sunlit hours.”\n\n\n# II.\n\nMottled and grey and brown they pass\nThe wood-moths wheeling fluttering;\nAnd we chase and they vanish; and in the grass\nAre starry flowers and the birds sing\nFaint broken songs of the dying spring.\nAnd on the beech-hole smooth and grey\nSome lover of an older day\nHas carved in time-blurred lettering\n One world only:--“Alas.”\n\n\n# III.\n\nLutes I forbid you! You must never play\nWhen shimmeringly glimpse by glimpse\nSeen through the leaves the silken figures sway\nIn measured dance. Never at shut of day\nWhen Time perversely loitering limps\nThrough endless twilights should your strings\nWhisper of light remembered things\nThat happened long ago and far away:\nLutes I forbid you! You must never play …\n\nAnd you pale marble statues far descried\nWhere vistas open suddenly\nI bid you shew yourselves no more but hide\nYour loveliness lest too much glorified\nBy western radiance slantingly\nShot down the glade you turn from stone\nTo living gods immortal grown\nAnd ageless mock my beauty’s fleeting pride\nYou pale relentless statues far descried …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-reef": { - "title": "“The Reef”", - "body": "My green aquarium of phantom fish\nGoggling in on me through the misty panes;\nMy rotting leaves and fields spongy with rains;\nMy few clear quiet autumn days--I wish\n\nI could leave all clearness and mistiness;\nSodden or goldenly crystal all too still.\nYes and I too rot with the leaves that fill\nThe hollows in the woods; I am grown less\n\nThan human listless aimless as the green\nIdiot fishes of my aquarium\nWho loiter down their dim tunnels and come\nAnd look at me and drift away nought seen\n\nOr understood but only glazedly\nReflected. Upwards upwards through the shadows\nThrough the lush sponginess of deep-sea meadows\nWhere hare-lipped monsters batten let me ply\n\nWinged fins bursting this matrix dark to find\nJewels and movement mintage of sunlight\nScattered largely by the profuse wind\nAnd gulfs of blue brightness too deep for sight.\n\nFree newly born on roads of music and air\nSpeeding and singing I shall seek the place\nWhere all the shining threads of water race\nDrawn in green ropes and foamy meshes. There\n\nOn the red fretted ramparts of a tower\nOf coral rooted in the depths shall break\nAn endless sequence of joy and speed and power:\nGreen shall shatter to foam; flake with white flake\n\nShall create an instant’s shining constellation\nUpon the blue; and all the air shall be\nFull of a million wings that swift and free\nLaugh in the sun all power and strong elation.\n\nYes I shall seek that reef which is beyond\nAll isles however magically sleeping\nIn tideless seas uncharted and unconned\nSave by blind eyes: beyond the laughter and weeping\n\nThat brood like a cloud over the lands of men.\nMovement passion of colour and pure wings\nCurving to cut like knives--these are the things\nI search for:--passion beyond the ken\n\nOf our foiled violences and more swift\nThan any blow which man aims against time\nThe invulnerable motion that shall rift\nAll dimness with the lightning of a rhyme\n\nOr note or colour. And the body shall be\nQuick as the mind; and will shall find release\nFrom bondage to brute things; and joyously\nSoul will and body in the strength of triune peace\n\nShall live the perfect grace of power unwasted.\nAnd love consummate marvellously blending\nPassion and reverence in a single spring\nOf quickening force till now never yet tasted\n\nBut ever ceaselessly thirsted for shall crown\nThe new life with its ageless starry fire.\nI go to seek that reef far down far down\nBelow the edge of everyday’s desire\n\nBeyond the magical islands where of old\nI was content dreaming to give the lie\nTo misery. They were all strong and bold\nThat thither came; and shall I dare to try?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "return-to-an-old-home": { - "title": "“Return to an Old Home”", - "body": "In this wood--how the hazels have grown!--\nI left a treasure all my own\nOf childish kisses and laughter and pain;\nLeft till I might come back again\nTo take from the familiar earth\nMy hoarded secret and count its worth.\nAnd all the spider-work of the years\nAll the time-spun gossamers\nDewed with each succeeding spring;\nAnd the piled up leaves the Autumns fling\nTo the sweet corruption of death on death …\nAt the sudden stir of my spirit’s breath\nAll scattered. New and fair and bright\nAs ever it was before my sight\nThe treasure lay and nothing missed.\nSo having handled all and kissed\nI put them back adding one new\nAnd precious memory of you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "scenes-of-the-mind": { - "title": "“Scenes of the Mind”", - "body": "I have run where festival was loud\nWith drum and brass among the crowd\nOf panic revellers whose cries\nAffront the quiet of the skies;\nWhose dancing lights contract the deep\nInfinity of night and sleep\nTo a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.\nAnd I have found my heart’s desire\nIn beechen caverns that autumn fills\nWith the blue shadowiness of distant hills;\nWhose luminous grey pillars bear\nThe stooping sky: calm is the air\nNor any sound is heard to mar\nThat crystal silence--as from far\nFar off a man may see\nThe busy world all utterly\nHushed as an old memorial scene.\nLong evenings I have sat and been\nStrangely content while in my hands\nI held a wealth of coloured strands\nShimmering plaits of silk and skeins\nOf soft bright wool. Each colour drains\nNew life at the lamp’s round pool of gold;\nEach sinks again when I withhold\nThe quickening radiance to a wan\nAnd shadowy oblivion\nOf what it was. And in my mind\nBeauty or sudden love has shined\nAnd wakened colour in what was dead\nAnd turned to gold the sullen lead\nOf mean desires and everyday’s\nPoor thoughts and customary ways.\nSometimes in lands where mountains throw\nTheir silent spell on all below\nDrawing a magic circle wide\nAbout their feet on every side\nRobbed of all speech and thought and act\nI have seen God in the cataract.\nIn falling water and in flame\nNever at rest yet still the same\nGod shows himself. And I have known\nThe swift fire frozen into stone\nAnd water frozen changelessly\nInto the death of gems. And I\nLong sitting by the thunderous mill\nHave seen the headlong wheel made still\nAnd in the silence that ensued\nHave known the endless solitude\nOf being dead and utterly nought.\nInhabitant of mine own thought\nI look abroad and all I see\nIs my creation made for me:\nAlong my thread of life are pearled\nThe moments that make up the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-of-poplars": { - "title": "“Song of Poplars”", - "body": "Shepherd to yon tall poplars tune your flute:\nLet them pierce keenly subtly shrill\nThe slow blue rumour of the hill;\nLet the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold\nAnd the great sky be mute.\n\nThen hearken how the poplar trees unfold\nTheir buds yet close and gummed and blind\nIn airy leafage of the mind\nRustling in silvery whispers the twin-hued scales\nThat fade not nor grow old.\n\n“Poplars and fountains and you cypress spires\nSpringing in dark and rusty flame\nSeek you aught that hath a name?\nOr say say: Are you all an upward agony\nOf undefined desires?”\n\n“Say are you happy in the golden march\nOf sunlight all across the day?\nOr do you watch the uncertain way\nThat leads the withering moon on cloudy stairs\nOver the heaven’s wide arch?”\n\n“Is it towards sorrow or towards joy you lift\nThe sharpness of your trembling spears?\nOr do you seek through the grey tears\nThat blur the sky in the heart of the triumphing blue\nA deeper calmer rift?”\n\nSo; I have tuned my music to the trees\nAnd there were voices dim below\nTheir shrillness voices swelling slow\nIn the blue murmur of hills and a golden cry\nAnd then vast silences.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "stanzas": { - "title": "“Stanzas”", - "body": "Thought is an unseen net wherein our mind\nIs taken and vainly struggles to be free:\nWords that should loose our spirit do but bind\nNew fetters on our hoped-for liberty:\nAnd action bears us onward like a stream\nPast fabulous shores scarce seen in our swift course;\nGlorious--and yet its headlong currents seem\nBut backwaters of some diviner force.\n\nThere are slow curves more subtle far than thought\nThat stoop to carry the grace of a girl’s breast;\nAnd hanging flowers so exquisitely wrought\nIn airy metal that they seem possessed\nOf souls; and there are distant hills that lift\nThe shoulder of a god towards the light;\nAnd arrowy trees sudden and sharp and swift\nPiercing the spirit deeply with delight.\n\nWould I might make these miracles my own!\nLike a pure angel thinking colour and form;\nHardening to rage in a flame of chiselled stone;\nSpilling my love like sunlight golden and warm\nOn noonday flowers; speaking the song of birds\nAmong the branches; whispering the fall of rain;\nBeyond all thought past action and past words\nI would live in beauty free from self and pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-stillness": { - "title": "“Summer Stillness”", - "body": "The stars are golden instants in the deep\nFlawless expanse of night: the moon is set:\nThe river sleeps entranced a smooth cool sleep\nSeeming so motionless that I forget\nThe hollow booming bridges where it slides\nDark with the sad looks that it bears along\nTowards a sea whose unreturning tides\nRavish the sighted ships and the sailors’ song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "two-realities": { - "title": "“Two Realities”", - "body": "A waggon passed with scarlet wheels\nAnd a yellow body shining new.\n“Splendid!” said I. “How fine it feels\nTo be alive when beauty peels\nThe grimy husk from life.” And you\n\nSaid “Splendid!” and I thought you’d seen\nThat waggon blazing down the street;\nBut I looked and saw that your gaze had been\nOn a child that was kicking an obscene\nBrown ordure with his feet.\n\nOur souls are elephants thought I\nRemote behind a prisoning grill\nWith trunks thrust out to peer and pry\nAnd pounce upon reality;\nAnd each at his own sweet will\n\nSeizes the bun that he likes best\nAnd passes over all the rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "valedictory": { - "title": "“Valedictory”", - "body": "I had remarked--how sharply one observes\nWhen life is disappearing round the curves\nOf yet another corner out of sight!--\nI had remarked when it was “good luck” and “good night”\nAnd “a good journey to you” on her face\nCertain enigmas penned in the hieroglyphs\nOf that half frown and queer fixed smile and trace\nOf clouded thought in those brown eyes\nAlways so happily clear of hows and ifs--\nMy poor bleared mind!--and haunting whys.\n\nThere I stood holding her farewell hand\n(Pressing my life and soul and all\nThe world to one good-bye till small\nAnd smaller pressed why there I’d stand\nDead when they vanished with the sight of her).\nAnd I saw that she had grown aware\nQueer puzzled face! of other things\nBeyond the present and her own young speed\nOf yesterday and what new days might breed\nMonstrously when the future brings\nA charger with your late-lamented head:\nAware of other people’s lives and will\nAware perhaps aware even of me …\nThe joyous hope of it! But still\nI pitied her; for it was sad to see\nA goddess shorn of her divinity.\nIn the midst of her speed she had made pause\nAnd doubts with all their threat of claws\nOutstripped till now by her unconsciousness\nHad seized on her; she was proved mortal now.\n“Live only live? For you were meant\nNever to know a thought’s distress\nBut a long glad astonishment\nAt the world’s beauty and your own.\nThe pity of you goddess grown\nPerplexed and mortal!”\n\nYet … yet … can it be\nThat she is aware perhaps even of me?\n\nAnd life recedes recedes; the curve is bare\nMy handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;\nAnd the question rumbles in the void:\nWas she aware was she after all aware?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waking": { - "title": "“Waking”", - "body": "Darkness had stretched its colour\nDeep blue across the pane:\nNo cloud to make night duller\nNo moon with its tarnish stain;\nBut only here and there a star\nOne sharp point of frosty fire\nHanging infinitely far\nIn mockery of our life and death\nAnd all our small desire.\n\nNow in this hour of waking\nFrom under brows of stone\nA new pale day is breaking\nAnd the deep night is gone.\nSordid now and mean and small\nThe daylight world is seen again\nWith only the veils of mist that fall\nDeaf and muffling over all\nTo hide its ugliness and pain.\n\nBut to-day this dawn of meanness\nShines in my eyes as when\nThe new world’s brightness and cleanness\nBroke on the first of men.\nFor the light that shows the huddled things\nOf this close-pressing earth\nShines also on your face and brings\nAll its dear beauty back to me\nIn a new miracle of birth.\n\nI see you asleep and unpassioned\nWhite-faced in the dusk of your hair--\nYour beauty so fleetingly fashioned\nThat it filled me once with despair\nTo look on its exquisite transience\nAnd think that our love and thought and laughter\nPuff out with the death of our flickering sense\nWhile we pass ever on and away\nTowards some blank hereafter.\n\nBut now I am happy knowing\nThat swift time is our friend\nAnd that our love’s passionate glowing\nThough it turn ash in the end\nIs a rose of fire that must blossom its way\nThrough temporal stuff nor else could be\nMore than a nothing. Into day\nThe boundless spaces of night contract\nAnd in your opening eyes I see\nNight born in day in time eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "mikhail-isakovsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mikhail Isakovsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Isakovsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "katyusha": { - "title": "“Katyusha”", - "body": "All the apple and pear trees are in blossom,\nMorning fogs along the river creep,\nAnd the girl, Katyusha, young and lovesome,\nComes the river bank that’s high and steep.\n\nShe walks out and starts a song about\nHer brave boy--a steppe dove-colored eagle,\nHow she waits for him, without doubt\nTo his letters glad she’s been and will.\n\nLet you, song, according to her order\nFly to heights, and follow the Earth,\nTo the soldier at the country’s border\nFrom Katyusha bring the greeting warmth.\n\nLet him hear the song true and sincere,\nBy the honest girl sent as a dove.\nLet him keep safe earth beloved, dear,\nAnd Katyusha will take care of love.\n\nAll the apple and pear trees are in blossom,\nMorning fogs along the river creep,\nAnd the girl, Katyusha, young and lovesome,\nComes the river bank that’s high and steep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-lonely-accordion": { - "title": "“A Lonely Accordion”", - "body": "All is frozen till dawn and only\n(No creak of a door, no light)\nOnly someone’s accordion lonely\nStrolls about the streets whole night.\n\nIn the fields he is going now,\nThen comes back, as if changing his mind,\nLike he’s looking for someone around\nBut, in no way, manage to find.\n\nAt midnight the whole village is sleeping.\nFrom the apple trees flowers fall …\nYou just tell, what is it you are seeking.\nYou confess, who is she, if at all.\n\nIt may be she is near, but only\nDoesn’t know, you’re looking for her.\nWhy are you strolling the whole night lonely,\nJust in vain waking up other girls?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Gurvich", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - } - } - }, - "vyacheslav-ivanov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vyacheslav Ivanov", - "birth": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Ivanov_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-alpine-horn": { - "title": "“The Alpine Horn”", - "body": "Far up in empty mountains I met a shepherd\nBlowing low notes on a long alpine horn.\nFlowing pleasantly and loud, both song\nAnd horn were merely instruments for waking\nA more captivating mountain melody.\nEach time, after a few notes, the shepherd listened\nAs the echo traveled back through narrow gorges\nWith indescribably sweet resonance,\nAnd I imagined an unseen choir of spirits\nWith instruments not of this earth translating\nEarth’s utterings into the language of heaven.\nAnd I thought: “Genius! Like this alpine horn\nYou must sing a song of earth to wake in hearts\nAnother song. Blessed is he who hears.”\nAnd from the mountains rang an answering voice:\n“Nature is a symbol, like this horn\nSounding for the sound of the answer--God.\nBlessed is he who hears both song and answer.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "George M. Young", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "the-vineyard-of-dionysus": { - "title": "“The Vineyard of Dionysus”", - "body": "Dionysus walks his vineyard, his beloved;\nTwo women in dark clothing--two vintagers--follow him.\nDionysus tells the two mournful guards--The vintagers:\n“Take your sharp knife, my vintners, Grief and Torment;\nHarvest, Grief and Torment, my beloved grapes!\nGather the blood of scarlet bunches, the tears of my golden clusters--\nTake the victim of bliss to the whetstone of grief,\nThe purple of suffering to the whetstone of bliss;\nPour the fervent liquid of scarlet delights into my ardent Grail!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - } - } - }, - "ryurik-ivnev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ryurik Ivnev", - "birth": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1981 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryurik_Ivnev", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "without-you": { - "title": "“Without You”", - "body": "In spite of all your dream-world’s straying vapour,\nAnd all the mist that cloaks the cosmic earth,\nI still can read in all your gaze’s coldness\nWhat others could not see, for what it’s worth.\n\nAnd now, forgetting all my daily worries\nAnd all the friends with whom I’ve broken bread,\nOn rocky road I will not come towards you\nlike lunatic who from the moon has fled.\n\nSo let the heavens judge our brooding’s feelings\nAnd let them send us thunder or a lull.\nWithout you, life is sad and agonising,\nAlone with you, you all my senses dull.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton" - } - } - } - }, - "randall-jarrell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Randall Jarrell", - "birth": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1965 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Jarrell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "90-north": { - "title": "“90 North”", - "body": "At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,\nI clambered to bed; up the globe’s impossible sides\nI sailed all night--till at last, with my black beard,\nMy furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.\n\nThere in the childish night my companions lay frozen,\nThe stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,\nAnd I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,\nWere they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.\n\n--Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence\nOf the unbroken ice. I stand here,\nThe dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare\nAt the North Pole …\n\n And now what? Why, go back.\n\nTurn as I please, my step is to the south.\nThe world--my world spins on this final point\nOf cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds\nEnd in this whirlpool I at last discover.\n\nAnd it is meaningless. In the child’s bed\nAfter the night’s voyage, in that warm world\nWhere people work and suffer for the end\nThat crowns the pain--in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land\n\nI reached my North and it had meaning.\nHere at the actual pole of my existence,\nWhere all that I have done is meaningless,\nWhere I die or live by accident alone--\n\nWhere, living or dying, I am still alone;\nHere where North, the night, the berg of death\nCrowd me out of the ignorant darkness,\nI see at last that all the knowledge\n\nI wrung from the darkness--that the darkness flung me--\nIs worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,\nThe darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness\nAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-lost-world": { - "title": "“The Lost World”", - "body": "# I. _Children’s Arms_\n\nOn my way home I pass a cameraman\nOn a platform on the bumper of a car\nInside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian\nIs working; on one white lot I see a star\nStumble to her igloo through the howling gale\nOf the wind machines. On Melrose a dinosaur\nAnd pterodactyl, with their immense pale\nPapier-mâché smiles, look over the fence\nOf The Lost World.\n\nWhispering to myself the tale\nThese shout--done with my schoolwork, I commence\nMy real life: my arsenal, my workshop\nOpens, and in impotent omnipotence\nI put on the helmet and the breastplate Pop\nCut out and soldered for me. Here is the shield\nI sawed from beaver board and painted; here on top\nThe bow that only Odysseus can wield\nAnd eleven vermilion-ringed, goose-feathered arrows.\n(The twelfth was broken on the battlefield\nWhen, searching among snap beans and potatoes,\nI stepped on it.) Some dry weeds, a dead cane\nAre my spears. The knife on the bureau’s\nMy throwing-knife; the small unpainted biplane\nWithout wheels--that so often, helped by human hands,\nHas taken off from, landed on, the counterpane--\nIs my Spad.\n\nO dead list, that misunderstands\nAnd laughs at and lies about the new live wild\nLoves it lists! that sets upright, in the sands\nOf age in which nothing grows, where all our friends are old,\nA few dried leaves marked THIS IS THE GREENWOOD--\nO arms that arm, for a child’s wars, the child!\n\nAnd yet they are good, if anything is good,\nAgainst his enemies … Across the seas\nAt the bottom of the world, where Childhood\nSits on its desert island with Achilles\nAnd Pitamakan, the White Blackfoot:\nIn the black auditorium, my heart at ease,\nI watch the furred castaways (the seniors put\nA play on every spring) tame their wild beasts,\nErect their tree house. Chatting over their fruit,\nTheir coconuts, they relish their stately feasts.\nThe family’s servant, their magnanimous\nMaster now, rules them by right. Nature’s priests,\nThey worship at Nature’s altar; when with decorous\nAffection the Admirable Crichton\nKisses a girl like a big Wendy, all of us\nSquirm or sit up in our seats … Undone\nWhen an English sail is sighted, the prisoners\nEscape from their Eden to the world: the real one\nWhere servants are servants, masters masters,\nAnd no one’s magnanimous. The lights go on\nAnd we go off, robbed of our fruit, our furs--\nThe island that the children ran is gone.\n\nThe island sang to me: Believe! Believe!\nAnd didn’t I know a lady with a lion?\nEach evening, as the sun sank, didn’t I grieve\nTo leave my tree house for reality?\nThere was nothing there for me to disbelieve.\nAt peace among my weapons, I sit in my tree\nAnd feel: Friday night, then Saturday, then Sunday!\n\nI’m dreaming of a wolf, as Mama wakes me,\nAnd a tall girl who is--outside it’s gray,\nI can’t remember, I jump up and dress.\nWe eat in the lighted kitchen. And what is play\nFor me, for them is habit. Happiness\nIs a quiet presence, breathless and familiar:\nMy grandfather and I sit there in oneness\nAs the Sunset bus, lit by the lavender\nAnd rose of sunrise, takes us to the dark\nEchoing cavern where Pop, a worker,\nWorks for our living. As he rules a mark,\nA short square pencil in his short square hand,\nOn a great sheet of copper, I make some remark\nHe doesn’t hear. In that hard maze--in that land\nThat grown men live in--in the world of work,\nHe measures, shears, solders; and I stand\nEmpty-handed, watching him. I wander into the murk\nThe naked light bulbs pierce: the workmen, making something,\nSay something to the boy in his white shirt. I jerk\nAs the sparks fly at me. The man hammering\nAs acid hisses, and the solder turns to silver,\nSeems to me a dwarf hammering out the Ring\nIn the world under the world. The hours blur;\nBored and not bored, I bend things out of lead.\nI wash my smudged hands, as my grandfather\nWashes his black ones, with their gritty soap: ahead,\nPast their time clock, their pay window, is the blue\nAnd gold and white of noon. The sooty thread\nUp which the laborers feel their way into\nTheir wives and houses, is money; the fact of life,\nThe secret the grown-ups share, is what to do\nTo make money. The husband Adam, Eve his wife\nHave learned how not to have to do without\nTill Santa Claus brings them their Boy Scout knife--\nNor do they find things in dreams, carry a paper route,\nSell Christmas seals …\n Starting his Saturday, his Sunday,\nPop tells me what I love to hear about,\nHis boyhood in Shelbyville. I play\nWhat he plays, hunt what he hunts, remember\nWhat he remembers: it seems to me I could stay\nIn that dark forest, lit by one fading ember\nOf his campfire, forever … But we’re home.\nI run in love to each familiar member\nOf this little state, clustered about the Dome\nOf St. Nicholas--this city in which my rabbit\nDepends on me, and I on everyone--this first Rome\nOf childhood, so absolute in every habit\nThat when we hear the world our jailor say:\n“Tell me, art thou a Roman?” the time we inhabit\nDrops from our shoulders, and we answer: “Yea.\nI stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, I appeal\nUnto Caesar.”\n I wash my hands, Pop gives his pay\nEnvelope to Mama; we sit down to our meal.\nThe phone rings: Mrs. Mercer wonders if I’d care\nTo go to the library. That would be ideal,\nI say when Mama lets me. I comb my hair\nAnd find the four books I have out: The Food\nOf the Gods was best. Liking that world where\nThe children eat, and grow giant and good,\nI swear as I’ve often sworn: “I’ll never forget\nWhat it’s like, when I’ve grown up.” A prelude\nBy Chopin, hammered note by note, like alphabet\nBlocks, comes from next door. It’s played with real feeling,\nThe feeling of being indoors practicing. “And yet\nIt’s not as if--” a gray electric, stealing\nTo the curb on silent wheels, has come; and I\nSee on the back seat (sight more appealing\nThan any human sight!) my own friend Lucky,\nHalf wolf, half police-dog. And he can play the piano--\nPlay that he does, that is--and jump so high\nFor a ball that he turns a somersault. “Hello,”\nI say to the lady, and hug Lucky … In my\nTalk with the world, in which it tells me what I know\nAnd I tell it, “I know--” how strange that I\nKnow nothing, and yet it tells me what I know!--\nI appreciate the animals, who stand by\nPurring. Or else they sit and pant. It’s so--\nSo agreeable. If only people purred and panted!\nSo, now, Lucky and I sit in our row,\nMrs. Mercer in hers. I take for granted\nThe tiller by which she steers, the yellow roses\nIn the bud vases, the whole enchanted\nDrawing room of our progress. The glass encloses\nAs glass does, a womanish and childish\nAnd doggish universe. We press our noses\nTo the glass and wish: the angel- and devilfish\nFloating by on Vine, on Sunset, shut their eyes\nAnd press their noses to their glass and wish.\n\n\n# II. _A Night with Lions_\n\nWhen I was twelve we’d visit my aunt’s friend\nWho owned a lion, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer\nLion. I’d play with him, and he’d pretend\nTo play with me. I was the real player\nBut he’d trot back and forth inside his cage\nTill he got bored. I put Tawny in the prayer\nI didn’t believe in, not at my age,\nBut said still; just as I did everything in fours\nAnd gave to Something, on the average,\nOne cookie out of three. And by my quartz, my ores,\nMy wood with the bark on it, from the Petrified\nForest, I put his dewclaw …\n Now the lion roars\nHis slow comfortable roars; I lie beside\nMy young, tall, brown aunt, out there in the past\nOr future, and I sleepily confide\nMy dream-discovery: my breath comes fast\nWhenever I see someone with your skin,\nHear someone with your voice. The lion’s steadfast\nRoar goes on in the darkness. I have been\nAsleep a while when I remember: you\nAre--you, and Tawny was the lion in--\nIn Tarzan. In Tarzan! Just as we used to,\nI talk to you, you talk to me or pretend\nTo talk to me as grown-up people do,\nOf Jurgen and Rupert Hughes, till in the end\nI think as a child thinks: “You’re my real friend.”\n\n\n# III. _A Street off Sunset_\n\nSometimes as I drive by the factory\nThat manufactures, after so long, Vicks\nVapoRub Ointment, there rises over me\nA eucalyptus tree. I feel its stair-sticks\nImpressed on my palms, my insteps, as I climb\nTo my tree house. The gray leaves make me mix\nMy coughing chest, anointed at bedtime,\nWith the smell of the sap trickling from the tan\nTrunk, where the nails go in.\n My lifetime\nGot rid of, I sit in a dark blue sedan\nBeside my great-grandmother, in Hollywood.\nWe pass a windmill, a pink sphinx, an Allbran\nBillboard; thinking of Salâmmbo, Robin Hood,\nThe old prospector with his flapjack in the air,\nI sit with my hands folded: I am good.\n\nThat night as I lie crossways in an armchair\nReading Amazing Stories (just as, long before,\nI’d lie by my rich uncle’s polar bear\nOn his domed library’s reflecting floor\nIn the last year of the first World War, and see\nA poor two-seater being attacked by four\nTriplanes, on the cover of the Literary\nDigest, and a Camel coming to its aid;\nI’d feel the bear’s fur warm and rough against me,\nThe colors of the afternoon would fade,\nI’d reach into the bear’s mouth and hold tight\nTo its front tooth and think, “I’m not afraid”)\n\nThere off Sunset, in the lamplit starlight,\nA scientist is getting ready to destroy\nThe world. “It’s time for you to say good night,”\nMama tells me; I go on in breathless joy.\n“Remember, tomorrow is a school day,”\nMama tells me; I go on in breathless joy.\n\nAt last I go to Mama in her gray\nSilk, to Pop, to Dandeen in her black\nSilk. I put my arms around them, they\nPut their arms around me. Then I go back\nTo my bedroom; I read as I undress.\nThe scientist is ready to attack.\nMama calls, “Is your light out?” I call back, “Yes,”\nAnd turn the light out. Forced out of life into\nBed, for a moment I lie comfortless\nIn the blank darkness; then as I always do,\nI put on the earphones of the crystal set--\nEach bed has its earphones--and the uneasy tissue\nOf their far-off star-sound, of the blue-violet\nOf space, surrounds the sweet voice from the Tabernacle\nOf the Four-Square Gospel. A vague marionette,\nTall, auburn, holds her arms out, to unshackle\nThe bonds of sin, of sleep--as, next instant, the sun\nHolds its arms out through the fig, the lemon tree,\nIn the back yard the clucking hens all cackle\nAs Mama brings their chicken feed. I see\nMy magazine. My magazine! Dressing for school,\nI read how the good world wins its victory\nOver that bad man. Books; book strap; jump the footstool\nYou made in Manual Training … Then we three\nSit down, and one says grace; and then, by rule,\nBy that habit that moves the stars, some coffee--\nOne spoonful--is poured out into my milk\nAnd the milk, transubstantiated, is coffee.\nAnd Mama’s weekday wash-dress, Dandeen’s soft black silk\nAre ways that habit itself makes holy\nJust as, on Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, His will\nComes in their ways--of Church, of Prayer Meeting--to set free\nThe spirit from the flesh it questions.\n So,\nSo unquestioned, my own habit moves me\nTo and through and from school, like a domino,\nTill, home, I wake to find that I am playing\nDominoes with Dandeen. Her old face is slow\nIn pleasure, slow in doubt, as she sits weighing\nStrategies: patient, equable, and humble,\nShe hears what this last child of hers is saying\nIn pride or bewilderment; and she will grumble\nLike a child or animal when, indifferent\nTo the reasons of my better self, I mumble:\n“I’d better stop now--the rabbit …”\n I relent\nAnd play her one more game. It is miraculous\nTo have a great-grandmother: I feel different\nFrom others as, between moves, we discuss\nThe War Between the States. The cheerful troops\nRide up to our farmhouse, steal from us\nThe spoons, the horses--when their captain stoops\nTo Dandeen and puts Dandeen on his horse,\nShe cries … As I run by the chicken coops\nWith lettuce for my rabbit, real remorse\nHurts me, here, now: the little girl is crying\nBecause I didn’t write. Because--\n of course,\nI was a child, I missed them so. But justifying\nHurts too: if only I could play you one more game,\nSee you all one more time! I think of you dying\nForgiving me--or not, it is all the same\nTo the forgiven … My rabbit’s glad to see me;\nHe scrambles to me, gives me little tame\nBites before he eats the lettuce. His furry\nLong warm soft floppy ears, his crinkling nose\nAre reassuring to a child. They guarantee,\nAs so much here does, that the child knows\nWho takes care of him, whom he takes care of.\n\nMama comes out and takes in the clothes\nFrom the clothesline. She looks with righteous love\nAt all of us, her spare face half a girl’s.\nShe enters a chicken coop, and the hens shove\nAnd flap and squawk, in fear; the whole flock whirls\nInto the farthest corner. She chooses one,\nComes out, and wrings its neck. The body hurls\nItself out--lunging, reeling, it begins to run\nAway from Something, to fly away from Something\nIn great flopping circles. Mama stands like a nun\nIn the center of each awful, anguished ring.\nThe thudding and scrambling go on, go on--then they fade,\nI open my eyes, it’s over … Could such a thing\nHappen to anything? It could to a rabbit, I’m afraid;\nIt could to--\n “Mama, you won’t kill Reddy ever,\nYou won’t ever, will you?” The farm woman tries to persuade\nThe little boy, her grandson, that she’d never\nKill the boy’s rabbit, never even think of it.\nHe would like to believe her … And whenever\nI see her, there in that dark infinite,\nStanding like Judith, with the hen’s head in her hand,\nI explain it away, in vain--a hypocrite,\nLike all who love.\n Into the blue wonderland\nOf Hollywood, the sun sinks, past the eucalyptus,\nThe sphinx, the windmill, and I watch and read and\nHold my story tight. And when the bus\nStops at the corner and Pop--Pop!--steps down\nAnd I run out to meet him, a blurred nimbus,\nHalf-red, half-gold, enchants his sober brown\nFace, his stooped shoulders, into the All-Father’s.\nHe tells me about the work he’s done downtown,\nWe sit there on the steps. My universe\nMended almost, I tell him about the scientist. I say,\n“He couldn’t really, could he, Pop?” My comforter’s\nEyes light up, and he laughs. “No, that’s just play,\nJust make-believe,” he says. The sky is gray,\nWe sit there, at the end of our good day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "next-day": { - "title": "“Next Day”", - "body": "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,\nI take a box\nAnd add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.\nThe slacked or shorted, basketed, identical\nFood-gathering flocks\nAre selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,\n\nIs learning what to overlook. And I am wise\nIf that is wisdom.\nYet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves\nAnd the boy takes it to my station wagon,\nWhat I’ve become\nTroubles me even if I shut my eyes.\n\nWhen I was young and miserable and pretty\nAnd poor, I’d wish\nWhat all girls wish: to have a husband,\nA house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish\nIs womanish:\nThat the boy putting groceries in my car\n\nSee me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.\nFor so many years\nI was good enough to eat: the world looked at me\nAnd its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,\nThe eyes of strangers!\nAnd, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile\n\nImaginings within my imagining,\nI too have taken\nThe chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog\nAnd we start home. Now I am good.\nThe last mistaken,\nEcstatic, accidental bliss, the blind\n\nHappiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm\nSome soap and water--\nIt was so long ago, back in some Gay\nTwenties, Nineties, I don’t know … Today I miss\nMy lovely daughter\nAway at school, my sons away at school,\n\nMy husband away at work--I wish for them.\nThe dog, the maid,\nAnd I go through the sure unvarying days\nAt home in them. As I look at my life,\nI am afraid\nOnly that it will change, as I am changing:\n\nI am afraid, this morning, of my face.\nIt looks at me\nFrom the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,\nThe smile I hate. Its plain, lined look\nOf gray discovery\nRepeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.\n\nAnd yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral\nI went to yesterday.\nMy friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,\nHer undressed, operated-on, dressed body\nWere my face and body.\nAs I think of her and I hear her telling me\n\nHow young I seem; I am exceptional;\nI think of all I have.\nBut really no one is exceptional,\nNo one has anything, I’m anybody,\nI stand beside my grave\nConfused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-woman-at-washington-zoo": { - "title": "“The Woman at Washington Zoo”", - "body": "The saris go by me from the embassies.\n\nCloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.\nThey look back at the leopard like the leopard.\n\nAnd I …\n this print of mine, that has kept its color\nAlive through so many cleanings; this dull null\nNavy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so\nTo my bed, so to my grave, with no\nComplaints, no comment: neither from my chief,\nThe Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--\nOnly I complain … this serviceable\nBody that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses\nBut, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,\nWavy beneath fountains--small, far-off, shining\nIn the eyes of animals, these beings trapped\nAs I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,\nAging, but without knowledge of their age,\nKept safe here, knowing not of death, for death--\nOh, bars of my own body, open, open!\n\nThe world goes by my cage and never sees me.\nAnd there come not to me, as come to these,\nThe wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,\nPigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards\nTearing the meat the flies have clouded …\n Vulture,\nWhen you come for the white rat that the foxes left,\nTake off the red helmet of your head, the black\nWings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:\nThe wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,\nTo whose hand of power the great lioness\nStalks, purring …\n\nYou know what I was,\nYou see what I am: change me, change me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robinson-jeffers": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robinson Jeffers", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Jeffers", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "ascent-to-the-sierras": { - "title": "“Ascent to the Sierras”", - "body": "Here at the foot of the pass\nThe fierce clans of the mountain you’d think for\nthousands of years,\nMen with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles’ hunger,\nHave gathered among these rocks at the dead hour\nOf the morning star and the stars waning\nTo raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven\nTheir scared booty to the highlands, the tossing horns\nAnd glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have\nlooked back\nStanding above these rock-heads to bark laughter\nAt the burning granaries and the farms and the town\nThat sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies …\nlighting the dead …\nIt is not true: from this land\nThe curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace\nwith the valleys; no\nblood in the sod; there is no old sword\nKeeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are\nall one people, their\nhomes never knew harrying;\nThe tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless\nas deer. Oh, fortunate\nearth; you must find someone\nTo make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds\nof the future,\nagainst the wolf in men’s hearts?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ave-caesar": { - "title": "“Ave Caesar”", - "body": "No bitterness: our ancestors did it.\nThey were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.\nTheir children will learn to hope for a Caesar.\nOr rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--\nSome kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep\nPoverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,\nWe are easy to manage, a gregarious people,\nFull of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.\n\nBeyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising\nBegins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers\nto little humps and\nbarrows, low aimless ridges,\nA sudden violence of rock crowns them. The crowded\norchards end, they\nhave come to a stone knife;\nThe farms are finished; the sudden foot of the\nslerra. Hill over hill,\nsnow-ridge beyond mountain gather\nThe blue air of their height about them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-beauty-of-things": { - "title": "“The Beauty of Things”", - "body": "To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things--earth, stone and water,\nBeast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars--\nThe blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,\nAnd unhuman nature its towering reality\nFor man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock\nAnd water and sky are constant--to feel\nGreatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural\nBeauty, is the sole business of poetry.\nThe rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,\nThe love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-excesses-of-god": { - "title": "“The Excesses of God”", - "body": "Is it not by his high superfluousness we know\nOur God? For to be equal a need\nIs natural, animal, mineral: but to fling\nRainbows over the rain\nAnd beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows\nOn the domes of deep sea-shells,\nAnd make the necessary embrace of breeding\nBeautiful also as fire,\nNot even the weeds to multiply without blossom\nNor the birds without music:\nThere is the great humaneness at the heart of things,\nThe extravagant kindness, the fountain\nHumanity can understand, and would flow likewise\nIf power and desire were perch-mates.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hurt-hawks": { - "title": "“Hurt Hawks”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,\nThe wing trails like a banner in defeat,\nNo more to use the sky forever but live with famine\nAnd pain a few days: cat nor coyote\nWill shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.\nHe stands under the oak-bush and waits\nThe lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom\nAnd flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.\nHe is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.\nThe curs of the day come and torment him\nAt distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,\nThe intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.\nThe wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those\nThat ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.\nYou do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;\nIntemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;\nBeautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail\nHad nothing left but unable misery\nFrom the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.\nWe had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,\nHe wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,\nNot like a beggar, still eyed with the old\nImplacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,\nOwl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what\nSoared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising\nBefore it was quite unsheathed from reality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "july-fourth-by-the-ocean": { - "title": "“July Fourth by the Ocean”", - "body": "The continent’s a tamed ox, with all its mountains,\nPowerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is\nfor park and playground, this helpless\nCataract for power; it lies behind us at heel\nAll docile between this ocean and the other. If\nflood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake\nCracks walls, it is only a slave’s blunder or the natural\nShudder of a new made slave. Therefore we happy\nmasters about the solstice\nLight bonfires on the shore and celebrate our power.\nThe bay’s necklaced with fire, the bombs make crystal\nfountains in the air, the rockets\nShower swan’s-neck over the night water … I imagined\nThe stars drew apart a little as if from troublesome\nchildren, coldly compassionate;\nBut the ocean neither seemed astonished nor in awe:\nIf this had been the little sea that Xerxes whipped,\nhow it would have feared us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "the-maids-thought": { - "title": "“The Maid’s Thought”", - "body": "Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.\nThe west wind is dead, the waves\nForget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons\nWhole hillsides burst aglow\nWith golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,\nAnd every pool was rimmed\nWith sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.\nNow tall and slender suddenly\nThe stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,\nThe pencilled ones on the hill;\nThis deerweed shivers with gold, the white globe-tulips\nBlow out their silky bubbles,\nBut in the next glen bronze-bells nod, the does\nScalded by some hot longing\nCan hardly set their pointed hoofs to expect\nLove but they crush a flower;\nShells pair on the rock, birds mate, the moths fly double.\nO it Is time for us now\nMouth kindling mouth to entangle our maiden bodies\nTo make that burning flower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "praise-life": { - "title": "“Praise Life”", - "body": "This country least, but every inhabited country\nIs clotted with human anguish.\nRemember that at your feasts.\n\nAnd this is no new thing but from time out of mind,\nNo transient thing, but exactly\nConterminous with human life.\n\nPraise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life\nThat forgets the pain is a pebble\nRattled in a dry gourd.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-purse-seine": { - "title": "“The Purse-Seine”", - "body": "Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark\nof the moon; daylight or moonlight\nThey could not tell where to spread the net,\nunable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.\nThey work northward from Monterey, coasting\nSanta Cruz; off New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point\nThe look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color\nlight on the sea’s night-purple; he points,\nand the helmsman\nTurns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the\ngleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.\nThey close the circle\nAnd purse the bottom of the net, then with great\nlabor haul it in.\n\nI cannot tell you\nHow beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,\nthen, when the crowded fish\nKnow they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall\nto the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent\nWater to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body\nsheeted with flame, like a live rocket\nA comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing\nFloats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up\nto watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night\nStand erect to the stars.\n\nLately I was looking from a night mountain-top\nOn a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:\nhow could I help but recall the seine-net\nGathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how\nbeautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.\nI thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together\ninto inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now\nThere is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable\nof free survival, insulated\nFrom the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all\ndependent. The circle is closed, and the net\nIs being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet\nthey shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters\nWill not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we\nand our children\nMust watch the net draw narrower, government take all\npowers--or revolution, and the new government\nTake more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy,\nthe mass-disasters.\nThese things are Progress;\nDo you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps\nits reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow\nIn the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,\nsplintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are\nquite wrong.\nThere is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew\nthat cultures decay, and life’s end is death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "return": { - "title": "“Return”", - "body": "A little too abstract, a little too wise,\nIt is time for us to kiss the earth again,\nIt is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,\nLet the rich life run to the roots again.\nI will go to the lovely Sur Rivers\nAnd dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.\nI will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers\nIn the ocean wind over the river boulders.\nI will touch things and things and no more thoughts,\nThat breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,\nThe insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks\nSo that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.\nThings are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble\nPico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "rock-and-hawk": { - "title": "“Rock and Hawk”", - "body": "Here is a symbol in which\nMany high tragic thoughts\nWatch their own eyes.\n\nThis gray rock, standing tall\nOn the headland, where the seawind\nLets no tree grow,\n\nEarthquake-proved, and signatured\nBy ages of storms: on its peak\nA falcon has perched.\n\nI think here is your emblem\nTo hang in the future sky;\nNot the cross, not the hive,\n\nBut this; bright power, dark peace;\nFierce consciousness joined with final\nDisinterestedness;\n\nLife with calm death; the falcon’s\nRealist eyes and act\nMarried to the massive\n\nMysticism of stone,\nWhich failure cannot cast down\nNor success make proud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shine-perishing-republic": { - "title": "“Shine, Perishing Republic”", - "body": "While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire\nAnd protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,\nI sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.\nOut of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.\n\nYou making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly\nA mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.\nBut for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption\nNever has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.\nAnd boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.\nThere is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--God, when he walked on earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-silent-shepherds": { - "title": "“The Silent Shepherds”", - "body": "What’s the best life for a man?\n--Never to have been born, sings the choros, and the next best\nIs to die young. I saw the Sybil at Cumae\nHung in her cage over the public street--\nWhat do you want, Sybil? I want to die.\nApothanein Thelo. Apothanein Thelo. Apothanein Thelo.\nYou have got your wish. But I meant life, not death.\nWhat’s the best life for a man? To ride in the wind. To ride\nhorses and herd cattle\nIn solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain,\nand come home hungry in the evening\nAnd eat and sleep. He will live in the wild wind and quick rain,\nhe will not ruin his eyes with reading,\nNor think too much.\nHowever, we must have philosophers.\nI will have shepherds for my philosophers,\nTall dreary men lying on the hills all night\nWatching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I’ll have lunatics\nFor my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting\nThe country news into supernaturalism--\nFor all men to such minds are devils or gods--and that increases\nMan’s dignity, man’s importance, necessary lies\nBest told by fools.\nI will have no lawyers nor constables\nEach man guard his own goods: there will be manslaughter,\nBut no more wars, no more mass-sacrifice. Nor I’ll have no doctors,\nExcept old women gathering herbs on the mountain,\nLet each have her sack of opium to ease the death-pains.\n\nThat would be a good world, free and out-doors.\nBut the vast hungry spirit of the time\nCries to his chosen that there is nothing good\nExcept discovery, experiment and experience and discovery: To look\ntruth in the eyes,\nTo strip truth naked, let our dogs do our living for us\nBut man discover.\nIt is a fine ambition,\nBut the wrong tools. Science and mathematics\nRun parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,\nThey never touch it: consider what an explosion\nWould rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world\nIf any mind for a moment touch truth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-stars-go-over-the-lonely-ocean": { - "title": "“The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean”", - "body": "Unhappy about some far off things\nThat are not my affair, wandering\nAlong the coast and up the lean ridges,\nI saw in the evening\nThe stars go over the lonely ocean,\nAnd a black-maned wild boar\nPlowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.\n\nThe old monster snuffled, “Here are sweet roots,\nFat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.\nThe best nation in Europe has fallen,\nAnd that is Finland,\nBut the stars go over the lonely ocean,”\nThe old black-bristled boar,\nTearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.\n\n“The world’s in a bad way, my man,\nAnd bound to be worse before it mends;\nBetter lie up in the mountain here\nFour or five centuries,\nWhile the stars go over the lonely ocean,”\nSaid the old father of wild pigs,\nPlowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.\n\n“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy\nAnd the dogs that talk revolution,\nDrunk with talk, liars and believers.\nI believe in my tusks.\nLong live freedom and damn the ideologies,”\nSaid the gamey black-maned boar\nTusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-holiday": { - "title": "“Summer Holiday”", - "body": "When the sun shouts and people abound\nOne thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze\nAnd the iron age; iron the unstable metal;\nSteel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities\nWill be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.\nRoots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,\nThen nothing will remain of the iron age\nAnd all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem\nStuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass\nIn the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-summit-redwood": { - "title": "“The Summit Redwood”", - "body": "Only stand high a long enough time your lightning will come; that is what blunts the peaks of redwoods;\nBut this old tower of life on the hilltop has taken it more than twice a century, this knows in every\nCell the salty and the burning taste, the shudder and the voice.\n\nThe fire from heaven; it has felt the earth’s too\nRoaring up hill in autumn, thorned oak-leaves tossing their bright ruin to the bitter laurel-leaves, and all\nIts under-forest has died and died, and lives to be burnt; the redwood has lived. Though the fire entered,\nIt cored the trunk while the sapwood increased. The trunk is a tower, the bole of the trunk is a black cavern,\nThe mast of the trunk with its green boughs the mountain stars are strained through\nIs like the helmet-spike on the highest head of an army; black on lit blue or hidden in cloud\nIt is like the hill’s finger in heaven. And when the cloud hides it, though in barren summer, the boughs\nMake their own rain.\n\nOld Escobar had a cunning trick when he stole beef. He and his grandsons\nWould drive the cow up here to a starlight death and hoist the carcass into the tree’s hollow,\nThen let them search his cabin he could smile for pleasure, to think of his meat hanging secure\nExalted over the earth and the ocean, a theft like a star, secret against the supreme sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "time-of-disturbance": { - "title": "“Time of Disturbance”", - "body": "The best is, in war or faction or ordinary vindictive life, not to take sides.\nLeave it for children, and the emotional rabble of the streets, to back their horse or support a brawler.\n\nBut if you are forced into it: remember that good and evil are as common as air, and like air shared\nBy the panting belligerents; the moral indignation that hoarsens orators is mostly a fool.\n\nHold your nose and compromise; keep a cold mind. Fight, if needs must; hate no one. Do as God does,\nOr the tragic poets: they crush their man without hating him, their Lear or Hitler, and often save without love.\n\nAs for these quarrels, they are like the moon, recurrent and fantastic. They have their beauty but night’s is better.\nIt is better to be silent than make a noise. It is better to strike dead than strike often. It is better not to strike.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-death": { - "title": "“To Death”", - "body": "I think of you as a great king, cold and austere;\nThe throne is not gold but iron, the stones of the high hall\nare black basalt blocks, and the pavement also,\nWith blood in the corners:\nYet you are merciful; it is for you we labor,\nAnd after a time you give us eternal peace.\n\nI think of you as a mean little servant, but steward of the estate,\nPale and a hunchback, shuffling along the corridors,\nTapping at every door. You have the keys of the treasury.\n\nYou are the arbiter of the games and bestower of prizes.\nFor you the young men sweat and the boys play battle, for your award\nTheir hot young lives: what can they win with their lives--\nWhether they bide at home or bleed on the capes of Asia,\nOr add columns of figures or the fates of Europe--\nBut eternal peace?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-young-artist": { - "title": "“To a Young Artist”", - "body": "It is good for strength not to be merciful\nTo its own weakness, good for the deep urn to run over, good to explore\nThe peaks and the deeps, who can endure it,\nGood to be hurt, who can be healed afterward: but you that have whetted consciousness\nToo bitter an edge, too keenly daring,\nSo that the color of a leaf can make you tremble and your own thoughts like harriers\nTear the live mind: were your bones mountains,\nYour blood rivers to endure it? and all that labor of discipline labors to death.\nDelight is exquisite, pain is more present;\nYou have sold the armor, you have bought shining with burning, one should be stronger than strength\nTo fight baresark in the stabbing field\nIn the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness is the treasure, the tower, the fortress;\nReferred to that one may live anything;\nThe temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints and shards in the temple porches, turn home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-stone-cutters": { - "title": "“To the Stone-Cutters”", - "body": "Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated\nChallengers of oblivion\nEat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,\nThe square-limbed Roman letters\nScale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well\nBuilds his monument mockingly;\nFor man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun\nDie blind and blacken to the heart:\nYet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found\nThe honey of peace in old poems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-trumpet": { - "title": "“The Trumpet”", - "body": "# I.\n\n_Reference to a Passage in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla_\n\nThe people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,\nWere all suddenly struck quiet\nAnd ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,\nSo fierce and final, a brazen\nPealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.\nThey marvelled; the soothsayers answered:\n“Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period\nA sign is declared in heaven\nIndicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans\nRule, and Etruria is finished;\nA wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind.”\n\nI heard yesterday\nSo shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,\nIt was hard to be wise … You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled\nFor the people; they will have their happiness.\nWhen the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It;\nWhen life grows hateful, there’s power …\n\n\n# II.\n\n_To the Children_\n\nPower’s good; life is not always good but power’s good.\nSo you must think when abundance\nMakes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough.\nThe steep singleness of passion\nDies; they will say, “What was that?” but the power triumphs.\nLoveliness will live under glass\nAnd beauty will go savage in the secret mountains.\nThere is beauty in power also.\nYou children must widen your minds’ eyes to take mountains\nInstead of faces, and millions\nInstead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power\nAfter the lone hawk’s dead.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThat light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow\nFire licking the sides of the gray stones,\nHas a more passionate and more pure heart\nIn the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;\nBut he is betrayed by his own courage,\nThe man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.\n\nThen praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;\nThe black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock\nWith shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills\nThe red-shafted woodpecker flying,\nA white star between blood-color wing-clouds,\nAcross the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.\n\nThese live their felt natures; they know their norm\nAnd live it to the brim; they understand life.\nWhile men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked\nTheir natures until the souls the in them;\nThey have sold themselves for toys and protection:\nNo, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys.\n\nUneasy and fractional people, having no center\nBut in the eyes and mouths that surround them,\nHaving no function but to serve and support\nCivilization, the enemy of man,\nNo wonder they live insanely, and desire\nWith their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.\n\nTheir ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman,\nBut now the world is turned upside down;\nThe good do evil, the hope’s in criminals; in vice\nThat dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.\nThrough wars and corruptions the house will fall.\nMourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nRain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots,\nThe pitiless pruning-iron in the branches,\nStrengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends\nOr powerless foes until the grapes purple.\nBut when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish.\n\nThe world sickens with change, rain becomes poison,\nThe earth is a pit, it Is time to perish.\nThe vines are fey, the very kindness of nature\nCorrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.\nWhen you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.\n\nReach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow,\nDiscover the depths; let the long pale tendrils\nSpend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good\nBut only the steel mirrors of discovery …\nAnd the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.\n\n\n# V.\n\nMourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth\nUnder men’s hands and their minds,\nThe beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,\nThe spreading fungus, the slime-threads\nAnd spores; my own coast’s obscene future: I remember the farther\nFuture, and the last man dying\nWithout succession under the confident eyes of the stars.\nIt was only a moment’s accident,\nThe race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal\nSplendor; from here I can even\nPerceive that that snuffed candle had something … a fantastic virtue,\nA faint and unshapely pathos …\nSo death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape’s by-shot\nWas moderately admirable?\n\n\n# VI.\n\n_Palinode_\n\nAll summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants’\nPerch, and their droppings have painted it shining white.\nIf the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain\nAt noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise\nOn the black water: it is barely possible that even men’s present\nLives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)\nNot wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nUnder my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass\nStands narrowed between the people and the storm.\nThe ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet\nSummer after summer encroach and destroy.\nStubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color,\nGray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars;\nBut laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeance’s and suck\nThe arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "we-are-those-people": { - "title": "“We Are Those People”", - "body": "I have abhorred the wars and despised the liars, laughed at the frightened\nAnd forecast victory; never one moment’s doubt.\nBut now not far, over the backs of some crawling years, the next\nGreat war’s column of dust and fire writhes\nUp the sides of the sky: it becomes clear that we too may suffer\nWhat others have, the brutal horror of defeat--\nOr if not in the next, then in the next--therefore watch Germany\nAnd read the future. We wish, of course, that our women\nWould die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain:\nIt will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey;\nOur women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-worlds-wonders": { - "title": "“The World’s Wonders”", - "body": "Being now three or four years more than sixty,\nI have seen strange things in my time. I have seen a merman\nstanding waist-deep in the ocean off my rock shore,\n\nUnmistakably human and unmistakably a sea-beast: he submerged and never came up again,\nWhile we stood watching. I do not know what he was, and I have no theory: but this was the least of wonders.\n\nI have seen the United States grow up the strongest and wealthiest of nations, and swim in the wind over bankruptcy.\nI have seen Europe, for twenty-five hundred years the crown of the world, become its beggar and cripple.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "elizabeth-jennings": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Elizabeth Jennings", - "birth": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2001 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Jennings_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "absence": { - "title": "“Absence”", - "body": "I visited the place where we last met.\nNothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended,\nThe fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;\nThere was no sign that anything had ended\nAnd nothing to instruct me to forget.\n\nThe thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,\nSinging an ecstasy I could not share,\nPlayed cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these\nPleasures there could not be a pain to bear\nOr any discord shake the level breeze.\n\nIt was because the place was just the same\nThat made your absence seem a savage force,\nFor under all the gentleness there came\nAn earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass\nWere shaken by my thinking of your name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "accepted": { - "title": "“Accepted”", - "body": "You are no longer young,\nNor are you very old.\nThere are homes where those belong.\nYou know you do not fit\nWhen you observe the cold\nStares of those who sit\n\nIn bath-chairs or the park\n(A stick, then, at their side)\nOr find yourself in the dark\nAnd see the lovers who,\nIn love and in their stride,\nDon’t even notice you.\n\nThis is a time to begin\nYour life. It could be new.\nThe sheer not fitting in\nWith the old who envy you\nAnd the young who want to win,\nNot knowing false from true,\n\nMeans you have liberty\nDenied to their extremes.\nAt last now you can be\nWhat the old cannot recall\nAnd the young long for in dreams,\nYet still include them all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "answers": { - "title": "“Answers”", - "body": "I keep my answers small and keep them near;\nBig questions bruised my mind but still I let\nSmall answers be a bulwark to my fear.\n\nThe huge abstractions I keep from the light;\nSmall things I handled and caressed and loved.\nI let the stars assume the whole of night.\n\nBut the big answers clamoured to be moved\nInto my life. Their great audacity\nShouted to be acknowledged and believed.\n\nEven when all small answers build up to\nProtection of my spirit, I still hear\nBig answers striving for their overthrow\n\nAnd all the great conclusions coming near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-chorus": { - "title": "“A Chorus”", - "body": "Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,\nOver the pastoral valleys and the meadows,\nOver the cities with their factory darkness,\nOver the lands where peace is still a power,\nOver all these and all this planet carries\nA power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger\nTo some, but by many trusted. Man’s a believer\nUntil corrupted. This huge trusted power\nIs spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,\nIn continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines\nFrom the matchless skies. He is the day’s surrender.\nRecognize him in the eye of the angry tiger,\nIn the sign of a child stepping at last into sleep,\nIn whatever touches, graces and confesses,\nIn hopes fulfilled or forgotten, in promises\n\nKept, in the resignation of old men--\nThis spirit, this power, this holder together of space\nIs about, is aware, is working in your breathing.\nBut most he is the need that shows in hunger\nAnd in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.\nAnd in sorrow after anger.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-enemies": { - "title": "“The Enemies”", - "body": "Last night they came across the river and\nEntered the city. Women were awake\nWith lights and food. They entertained the band,\nNot asking what the men had come to take\nOr what strange tongue they spoke\nOr why they came so suddenly through the land.\n\nNow in the morning all the town is filled\nWith stories of the swift and dark invasion;\nThe women say that not one stranger told\nA reason for his coming. The intrusion\nWas not for devastation:\nPeace is apparent still on hearth and field.\n\nYet all the city is a haunted place.\nMan meeting man speaks cautiously. Old friends\nClose up the candid looks upon their face.\nThere is no warmth in hands accepting hands;\nEach ponders, “Better hide myself in case\nThose strangers have set up their homes in minds\nI used to walk in. Better draw the blinds\nEven if the strangers haunt in my own house.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "friday": { - "title": "“Friday”", - "body": "We nailed the hands long ago,\nWove the thorns, took up the scourge and shouted\nFor excitement’s sake, we stood at the dusty edge\nOf the pebbled path and watched the extreme of pain.\n\nBut one or two prayed, one or two\nWere silent, shocked, stood back\nAnd remembered remnants of words, a new vision,\nThe cross is up with its crying victim, the clouds\nCover the sun, we learn a new way to lose\nWhat we did not know we had\nUntil this bleak and sacrificial day,\nUntil we turned from our bad\nPast and knelt and cried out our dismay,\nThe dice still clicking, the voices dying away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "in-memory-of-anyone-unknown-to-me": { - "title": "“In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me”", - "body": "At this particular time I have no one\nParticular person to grieve for, though there must\nBe many, many unknown ones going to dust\nSlowly, not remembered for what they have done\nOr left undone. For these, then, I will grieve\nBeing impartial, unable to deceive.\n\nHow they lived, or died, is quite unknown,\nAnd, by that fact gives my grief purity--\nAn important person quite apart from me\nOr one obscure who drifted down alone.\nBoth or all I remember, have a place.\nFor these I never encountered face to face.\n\nSentiment will creep in. I cast it out\nWishing to give these classical repose,\nNo epitaph, no poppy and no rose\nFrom me, and certainly no wish to learn about\nThe way they lived or died. In earth or fire\nThey are gone. Simply because they were human, I admire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-a-garden": { - "title": "“In a Garden”", - "body": "When the gardener has gone this garden\nLooks wistful and seems waiting an event.\nIt is so spruce, a metaphor of Eden\nAnd even more so since the gardener went,\n\nQuietly godlike, but of course, he had\nNot made me promise anything and I\nHad no one tempting me to make the bad\nChoice. Yet I still felt lost and wonder why.\n\nEven the beech tree from next door which shares\nIts shadow with me, seemed a kind of threat.\nEverything was too neat, and someone cares\n\nIn the wrong way. I need not have stood long\nMocked by the smell of a mown lawn, and yet\nI did. Sickness for Eden was so strong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "need": { - "title": "“Need”", - "body": "You said “It is a great thing to be needed,”\nAnd I was silenced by the wonder of\nYour words. I can’t remember if I pleaded,\n“Yes, but one wants to give, return, and love.”\n\nYour words probed to my mind so very deep,\nAnd to my heart, that long before I went\nTo bed, they filled me. As I fell asleep\nI was possessed by all that you had meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "penelope": { - "title": "“Penelope”", - "body": "Weave on Penelope, you must,\nWaiting for your lover who\nTravels half the world. No lust,\nOnly love abides in you.\n\nThe suitors come. You cast them off.\nLet your faithful weaving go\nOn and on until your love\nCan return and cherish you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rembrandts-late-self-portraits": { - "title": "“Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits”", - "body": "You are confronted with yourself. Each year\nThe pouches fill, the skin is uglier.\nYou give it all unflinchingly. You stare\nInto yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care\nRuns with self-knowledge. Here\n\nIs a humility at one with craft.\nThere is no arrogance. Pride is apart\nFrom this self-scrutiny. You make light drift\nThe way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt\nBut there is still love left.\n\nLove of the art and others. To the last\nExperiment went on. You stared beyond\nYour age, the times. You also plucked the past\nAnd tempered it. Self-portraits understand,\nAnd old age can divest,\n\nWith truthful changes, us of fear of death.\nLook, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,\nThe sadness and the joy. To paint’s to breathe,\nAnd all the darknesses are dared. You chose\nWhat each must reckon with.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sister-of-charity": { - "title": "“Sister of Charity”", - "body": "Yes before my window many times\nI’ve seen you pass, white linen at your cheek.\nAnd I have stood there watching, did not speak\nNor did you turn. So slow the long month climbs,\nSo adamant yet average through the year.\nYes there again I see you disappear,\nYour silence spreads a tumult through my week.\n\nNo brightness goes as you move by and yet\nSomething is taken from me when you pass--\nMore than a face that spurns the looking-glass,\nMore than a sky storms shift before it’s set.\nThere is some stillness in your face I need,\nSome love to which your patience seems to lead;\nYour coming leaves me somehow in your debt\n\nAlthough my simply watching was decreed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-workers": { - "title": "“The Workers”", - "body": "They go to work each day and everyone\nIs happy all day through. When night arrives\nThey eagerly look forward to the leisure;\nYes, each one thrives\nOn all this careful blend of work with pleasure.\nThe day is happy when the night’s begun.\n\nI am among those quiet ones who sit\nWorking at this and that. Day must suffice\nBy single day to make the pieces fit.\nI am alone\nIn all I try to do. It is precise\nEven if only by myself quite known.\n\nDay, glorious as birds upon the wing\nAnd sea which batters on the rocks and coves,\nI see a glory now in everything,\nEach thing I love\nIs drawn into my work tight as a thread.\nAll this the morning meant, the noontide said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "juan-ramon-jimenez": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Juan Ramón Jiménez", - "birth": { - "year": 1881 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Ramón_Jiménez", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "dawn-outside-the-city-walls": { - "title": "“Dawn outside the City Walls”", - "body": "You can see the face of everything, and it is white--\nplaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold--\nturned to the east. Oh closeness to life!\nHardness of life! Like something\nin the body that is animal--root, slag-ends--\nwith the soul still not set well there--\nand mineral and vegetable!\nSun standing stiffly against man,\nagainst the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall!\n--False joy, because you are merely\nin time, as they say, and not in the soul!\n\nThe entire sky taken up\nby moist and steaming heaps,\na horizon of dung piles.\nSour remains, here and ther e,\nof the night. Slices\nof the green moon, half-eaten,\ncrystal bits from false stars,\nplaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly\nsky-blue. The birds\nnot really awake yet, in the raw moon,\nstreetlight nearly out.\nMob of beings and things!\n--A true sadness, because you are really deep\nin the soul, as they say, not in time at all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "full-moon": { - "title": "“Full Moon”", - "body": "The door is open,\nthe cricket is singing.\nAre you going around naked\nin the fields?\n\nLike an immortal water,\ngoing in and out of everything.\nAre you going around naked\nin the air?\n\nThe basil is not asleep,\nthe ant is busy.\nAre you going around naked\nin the house?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "i-am-not-i": { - "title": "“I am not I …”", - "body": "I am not I.\n I am this one\nwalking beside me whom I do not see,\nwhom at times I manage to visit,\nand whom at other times I forget;\nwho remains calm and silent while I talk,\nand forgives, gently, when I hate,\nwho walks where I am not,\nwho will remain standing when I die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "i-shall-not-return": { - "title": "“I shall not return …”", - "body": "I shall not return. And night, mildly warm, serene and silent,\nwill lull the world, under beams of its solitary moon.\nMy body will not be there, and through the wide-open window,\na refreshing breeze will come inquiring for my soul.\nI don’t know if any await the end of my double absence,\nor who will kiss my memory amidst caresses and weeping.\nBut, there will be stars and flowers, there will be sighs and hopes,\nand love in the avenues in the shadows of the trees.\nAnd that piano will be playing as in this untroubled night,\nand no one there to listen, pensive, by my window frame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "oceans": { - "title": "“Oceans”", - "body": "I have a feeling that my boat\nhas struck, down there in the depths,\nagainst a great thing. And nothing\nhappens! Nothing … Silence … Waves …\n\n--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,\nand are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "return-for-an-instant": { - "title": "“Return for an Instant”", - "body": "What was it like, God of mine, what was it like?\n--Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence!\nWas it like the going by of the wind?\nLike the disappearance of the spring?\n\nAs nimble, as changeable, as weightless\nas milkweed seeds in summer … Yes! Indefinite\nas a smile which is lost forever in a laugh …\nArrogant in the air, just like a flag!\n\nFlag, smile, milkweed pod, swift\nspring in June, clear wind! …\nYour celebration was so wild, so sad!\n\nAll of your changes ended up in nothing--\nremembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!--\nI don’t know what you were like, but you were!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "who-knows-what-is-going-on": { - "title": "“Who knows what is going on …”", - "body": "Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?\n\nHow many times the sunrise was there, behind a mountain!\n\nHow many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off was already a golden body full of thunder!\n\nThis rose was poison.\n\nThat sword gave life.\n\nI was thinking of a flowery meadow at the end of a road, and found myself in the slough.\n\nI was thinking of the greatness of what was human, and found myself in the divine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "you-are-carrying-me-full-consciousness": { - "title": "“You are carrying me, full consciousness …”", - "body": "You are carrying me, full consciousness,\ngod that has desires,\nall through the world.\nHere, in the third sea,\nI almost hear your voice: your voice, the wind,\nfilling entirely all movements;\neternal colors and eternal lights,\nsea colors and sea lights.\n\nYour voice of white fire\nin the universe of water, the ship, the sky,\nmarking out the roads with delight,\nengraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit:\na black body with the glowing diamond in its center.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "the-street-is-waiting-for-the-night": { - "title": "“The street is waiting for the night …”", - "body": "The street is waiting for the night.\nAll is history and silence.\nThe trees along the walk\nare asleep along the sky.\n\nAnd the sad sky is violet.\nan April sky, beautiful\nviolet sky with gentle\npreludes of starlight.\n\nNow the lamps are shining\nat the barred windows. A dog whines\nat a closed door. A black cat\ntwirls in the smooth sky …\n\nAh! that yellow lamp,\nthe peace of the blind children,\nthe nostalgia of the widows,\nthe presence of the dead!\n\nAnd the stories that we told\non those April evenings\nthat have never returned,\nwhile we gazed at the stars!\n\nAnd the darkness is falling,\nsweet and great and peaceful,\namong the distant murmurs\nof the little villages …", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Lysander Kemp", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-of-the-cross": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint John of the Cross", - "birth": { - "year": 1542 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1591 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "saint", - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dark-night": { - "title": "“The Dark Night”", - "body": "One dark night,\nfired with love’s urgent longings\n--ah, the sheer grace!--\nI went out unseen,\nmy house being now all stilled.\n\nIn darkness, and secure,\nby the secret ladder, disguised,\n--ah, the sheer grace!--\nin darkness and concealment,\nmy house being now all stilled.\n\nOn that glad night\nin secret, for no one saw me,\nnor did I look at anything\nwith no other light or guide\nthan the One that burned in my heart.\n\nThis guided me\nmore surely than the light of noon\nto where he was awaiting me\n--him I knew so well--\nthere in a place where no one appeared.\n\nO guiding night!\nO night more lovely than the dawn!\nO night that has united\nthe Lover with his beloved,\ntransforming the Beloved into his Lover.\n\nUpon my flowering breast,\nwhich I kept wholly for him alone,\nthere he lay sleeping,\nand I caressing him\nthere in a breeze from the fanning cedars.\n\nWhen the breeze blew from the turret,\nas I parted his hair,\nit wounded my neck\nwith its gentle hand,\nsuspending all my senses.\n\nI abandoned and forgot myself,\nlaying my face on my Beloved;\nall things ceased; I went out from myself,\nleaving my cares\nforgotten among the lilies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "the-fountain": { - "title": "“The Fountain”", - "body": "How well I know that flowing spring\n in black of night.\n\nThe eternal fountain is unseen.\nHow well I know where she has been\n in black of night.\n\nI do not know her origin.\nNone. Yet in her all things begin\n in black of night.\n\nI know that nothing is so fair\nand earth and firmament drink there\n in black of night.\n\nI know that none can wade inside\nto find her bright bottomless tide\n in black of night.\n\nHer shining never has a blur;\nI know that all light comes from her\n in black of night.\n\nI know her streams converge and swell\nand nourish people, skies and hell\n in black of night.\n\nThe stream whose birth is in this source\nI know has a gigantic force\n in black of night.\n\nThe stream from but these two proceeds\nyet neither one, I know, precedes\n in black of night.\n\nThe eternal fountain is unseen\nin living bread that gives us being\n in black of night.\n\nShe calls on all mankind to start\nto drink her water, though in dark,\n for black is night.\n\nO living fountain that I crave,\nin bread of life I see her flame\n in black of night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "full-of-hope-i-climbed-the-day": { - "title": "“Full of Hope I Climbed the Day”", - "body": "Full of hope I climbed the day\nwhile hunting the game of love,\nand soared so high, high above\nthat I at last caught my prey.\n\nIn order to seize the game\n--the divine love in the sky--\nI had to fly so high, high\nI floated unseen and became\nlost in that dangerous day;\nand so my flight fell short of\nheight--yet so high was my love\nthat I at last caught my prey.\n\nDazzled and stunned by light\nas I rose nearer the sun,\nmy greatest conquest was won\nin the very black of night.\nYet since love opened my way\nI leapt dark, blindly above\nand was so high, near my love,\nthat at last I caught my prey.\n\nIn this most exalted quest\nthe higher I began to soar\nthe lower I felt--more sore\nand broken and depressed.\nI said: None can seize the prey!\nand groveled so low, so low\nthat high, higher did I go,\nand at last I caught my prey.\n\nBy strange reckoning I saw\na thousand flights in one flight;\nfor hope of heavenly light\nis achieved by hoping now.\nI hoped only for this way\nand was right to wait for love,\nand climbed so high, high above\nthat at last I caught my prey.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "i-entered-the-unknown": { - "title": "“I Entered the Unknown”", - "body": "_I entered the unknown,\nand there I remained unknowing,\nall knowledge transcended._\n\nWhere I entered I knew not,\nbut seeing myself there,\nnot knowing where,\ngreat things then made themselves known.\nWhat I sensed I cannot say,\nfor I remained unknowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nIn this peace and purity\nwas perfect knowledge.\nIn profoundest solitude\nI understood with absolute clarity\nsomething so secret\nthat I was left stammering,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nSo deep was I within,\nso absorbed, transported,\nthat all senses fled,\nand outer awareness fell away.\nMy spirit received the gift\nof unknowing knowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nHe who reaches this realm\nloses himself,\nfor all he once knew\nnow is beneath his notice,\nand his mind so expands\nthat he remains unknowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nAnd the higher he rises\nthe less he knows:\nThat is the dark cloud\nthat shines in the night.\nThe one who knows this\nalways remains unknowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nThis knowing by unknowing\nis of such exalted power,\nthat the disputations of the learned\nfail to grasp it,\nfor their knowledge does not reach\nto knowing by unknowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._\n\nOf such supreme perfection\nis this knowledge\nthat no faculty or method of mind\ncan comprehend it;\nbut he who conquers himself\nwith this unknowing knowing,\n_will always transcend._\n\nAnd if you are ready to receive it,\nthis sum of all knowledge is discovered\nin the deepest ecstasy\nof the Divine Essence.\nGoodness and grace\ngrant us this unknowing,\n_all knowledge transcended._", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "i-live-yet-do-not-live-in-me": { - "title": "“I Live yet Do Not Live in Me”", - "body": "I live yet do not live in me,\nam waiting as my life goes by,\nand die because I do not die.\n\nNo longer do I live in me,\nand without God I cannot live;\nto him or me I cannot give\nmy self, so what can living be?\nA thousand deaths my agony\nwaiting as my life goes by,\ndying because I do not die.\n\nThis life I live alone I view\nas robbery of life, and so\nit is a constant death--with no\nway out until I live with you.\nGod, hear me, what I say is true:\nI do not want this life of mine,\nand die because I do not die.\n\nBeing so removed from you I say\nwhat kind of life can I have here\nbut death so ugly and severe\nand worse than any form of pain?\nI pity me--and yet my fate\nis that I must keep up this lie,\nand die because I do not die.\n\nThe fish taken out of the sea\nis not without a consolation:\nhis dying is of brief duration\nand ultimately brings relief.\nYet what convulsive death can be\nas bad as my pathetic life?\nThe more I live the more I die.\n\nWhen I begin to feel relief\non seeing you in the sacrament,\nI sink in deeper discontent,\ndeprived of your sweet company.\nNow everything compels my grief:\nI want--yet can’t--see you nearby,\nand die because I do not die.\n\nAlthough I find my pleasure, Sir,\nin hope of someday seeing you,\nI see that I can lose you too,\nwhich makes my pain doubly severe,\nand so I live in darkest fear,\nand hope, wait as life goes by,\ndying because I do not die.\n\nDeliver me from death, my God,\nand give me life; now you have wound\na rope about me; harshly bound\nI ask you to release the cord.\nSee how I die to see you, Lord,\nand I am shattered where I lie,\ndying because I do not die.\n\nMy death will trigger tears in me,\nand I shall mourn my life: a day\nannihilated by the way\nI fail and sin relentlessly.\nO Father God, when will it be\nthat I can say without a lie:\nI live because I do not die?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "loves-living-flame": { - "title": "“Love’s Living Flame”", - "body": "O love’s living flame,\nso softly do you sear\nthe deepest center of my soul!\nNow that you no longer shy away,\nend this game, I beg of you, today:\n\nRip open the veil separating us\nin this sweet rendezvous!\n\nO tender burn!\nO burning boon!\nO gentle hand!\nO delicate caress,\nthat infers eternal life\nand renders all debts paid!\nKilling,\ndeath into life you have made!\n\nO beacons of fire,\nin whose splendor\nthe blind, dark\ndeep grottoes\nof the senses,\nwith strange and stately art,\nwarm and enlighten,\nand win my love!\n\nHow tenderly is your memory\ncherished in my breast,\nwhere you alone reside and in secret rest:\nHere I taste in your perfumed breath\ngoodness a-flood with glory--\n\nHow gracefully you’ve won my love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "on-the-communion-of-the-three-persons": { - "title": "“On the Communion of the Three Persons”", - "body": "Born of the limitless love\nflooding from them both,\nthe Father sang words\nof celebration to the Son,\n\nWords of such sweet delight\nnone can truly know.\nIn his solitude the Son rejoiced,\nwhispered as they were for him alone.\n\nHere, though, is the sum\nof what in secret was said:\n--“Nothing, my Son, satisfies me,\nsave your company.”\n\n“When a thing is sweet,\nthrough you alone do I taste it.\nThe more of you I savor,\nthe more do I smile.”\n\n“What is unlike you,\nis flavorless to me.\nYou alone are my joy,\nlife of my life!”\n\n“You are the fire of my fire,\nmy knowing.\nYou are the form of my substance.\nIn you am I well pleased.”\n\n“Whoever gives his love to you, my Son,\nto him I give myself.\nHim I fill\nwith the love I feel for you\njust for making you beloved,\nmy Beloved.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-soul": { - "title": "“Song of the Soul”", - "body": "_Well I know the fountain that runs and flows,\nthough it is night!_\n\nThis eternal fountain is hidden deep.\nWell I know where it has its spring,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nIn this life’s dark night,\nFaith has taught where this cold fountain lies,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nIts origin I cannot know, it has none,\nAnd I know all origins come from it,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nAnd I know there can be nothing more fair,\nThe heavens and earth drink there,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nAnd I know it has no bed,\nAnd I know no one can cross its depths,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nIts clarity is never clouded,\nAnd I know all light shines from it,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nI know her streams swell so abundantly,\nThey water people, heaven and even hell,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nThe current born of this fountain\nI know to be wide and mighty,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nAnd from these two another stream flows,\nAnd I know neither comes before,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nI know Three in only one water live,\nAnd each the other feeds,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nThis eternal fountain is hiding from sight\nWithin this living bread to give us life,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nHe calls all creatures to this light,\nAnd of this water they drink, though in the dark,\n_Though it is night!_\n\nThis living fountain I desire,\nI see it here within this living bread,\n_Though it is night!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "the-spiritual-canticle": { - "title": "“The Spiritual Canticle”", - "body": "Where have you fled and vanished,\nBeloved, since you left me here to moan?\nDeer-like you leaped; then, banished\nand wounded by my own,\nI followed you with cries, but you had flown.\n\nShepherds, if you discover,\ngoing about this knoll to tend your sheep,\nthe dwelling of that lover\nwhose memory I keep,\ntell him I sicken unto death and weep.\n\nTo seek him, I shall scour\nthese trackless woods to where the rivers flow--\nnot stop to pick a flower,\nnot run from beasts--but go\npast every fort and border that I know.\n\nO forests darkly glooming,\nseeded by my beloved’s very hand!\nO pasture richly blooming,\nyou flower-jeweled band!\nI beg you, say if he has crossed your land.\n\nYes, with his thousand graces\nstreaming from him, he crossed these groves with speed,\nand, glancing at these places--\nwith no more word or deed--\nleft them in his own beauty liveried.\n\nAlas, who can content me?\nGive yourself up to me, at last, entire;\nnor send, as you have sent me,\nthose messengers you hire\nwho cannot tell me all that I desire.\n\nAnd those who pass make clamor,\nyour thousand graces to my ear relaying,\nwound me with words they stammer,\nand kill me, ill-conveying\nthe who-knows-what that baffles all their saying.\n\nBut how do you persever,\nO life! in life not living, as you do,\npursued to death forever\nby arrows that strike true,\naimed by that love the lover sows in you?\nAnd why, having arrived\nhome to my heart, not heal it with relieving?\nWhy, since you have deprived\nme of it, leave it grieving,\nrather than grasp the plunder of your thieving?\n\nExtinguish all my plight,\nsince there is none but you alone to do it;\nBe present to my sight,\nSince you alone renew it,\nand you alone, when seen, give value to it.\n\nBe present, drop your veil,\nand let me die your beauty apprehending;\nthis grief that makes me pale\nwith love, can have no ending\nwithout your presence, every joy transcending.\n\nO crystal fountain flowing,\nif in your silver stream I might discern\nthem there, suddenly glowing--\nthose eyes that make me burn,\ndeep in my heart inscribed--for which I yearn!\n\nTurn them, Beloved, from me,\nor I must fly to find you!\n\n\n_Turn, my dove,\nlove’s wound has overcome me;\nDeer-like, I stand above,\ncooled by the breezes stirred by wings of love._\n\n\nMy lover is the highlands,\nhe is the wooded valleys lone and deep,\nthe far, mysterious islands,\nthe streams that sing and leap,\nwhispering winds that court the fields they sweep,\n\nthe night whose stillness pleases\nand ushers morning and the rising sun,\nsilence whose music eases,\nmusic from silence spun,\nand supper that delights when day is done.\n\nHunt the quick foxes finding\nour vineyard, where the tender shoots abound,\nwhile we make garlands, binding\nthe stems of roses round,\nand let no man be seen on the high ground.\n\nHalt, you North wind, death-maker;\nnow come, wind from the South, by love beguiled,\nbreathe on my flowered acre,\nspreading your fragrance mild,\nand my Lover shall graze where blooms grow wild.\n\nO, you Judean maidens!\nNow that the rosetrees and the garden’s flowers\nwith rich perfume are laden,\nkeep to your distant bowers\nand do not tread these thresholds that are ours.\n\nMy dear one, hide, take shelter,\nturn your face to the hills that stand in rows,\nand speak not; see the welter\nof maids about her where she goes,\nwandering the strange islands no one knows.\n\n\n_Birds who fly hither lightly,\nyou lions, fawns, and leaping fallow deer,\nwoods, vales, and rivers sprightly,\nwinds, waters, heats that sear,\nand terrors that surround the night with fear:\n\nBy lyres and their soft sighing\nI do beseech you, by the sirens’ song:\nsilence your angry crying,\nhalt where the walls rise strong,\nto keep the sleeping bride secure from wrong.\n\nThe bride has come to rest in\nthe pleasant garden’s most alluring space,\nand at her ease to nest in\nher quiet leaning place,\nwithin the sweetness of the groom’s embrace.\n\nUnder the apple boughs,\nthere did I take you when our troth was plighted,\nthere gave my hand and vows,\nand there you were requited,\nwhere once your mother was abased and slighted._\n\n\nOur marriage-couch, made festive\nwith flowers, with lion’s grottoes posted round,\nall purple-hung, suggestive\nof peace within it bound,\nand with a thousand golden emblems crowned.\n\nThere where your steps precede them,\nthe maidens follow in an eager line\nwhere torches lead them,\nand the spiced wine,\nand the balsamic scent of the divine.\n\nIn my Beloved’s cellar\nI drank, and after tasting from his store,\nwandered those fields, a dweller\nin bliss, and cared no more\nfor the lost flocks that were my care before.\n\nThere at his breast he fed me,\nthere taught me knowledge sweet, with pleasure rife;\nthere where he led me\nI gave myself for life\nentirely, and pledged to be his wife.\n\nMy soul, in his employment,\nspends all its wealth, forsakes its own affairs;\nno flocks provide enjoyment,\nno task, but that which bears\non love alone, and on no other cares.\n\nIf, where the flocks are feeding,\nfrom this day forth I am no longer found,\nsay Love is leading\nme a dizzy round,\nand I have let myself be lost--and bound.\n\nWe shall weave emeralds, flowers\npicked when the earliest rays of morning shine,\ngarlands grown by the powers\nof your own love, to twine\nabout a single strand, a hair of mine.\n\nOne hair you chanced to note,\nabout my neck, that did your glance awaken.\nYou glimpsed it at my throat,\nwere snared and shaken,\nand wounded by my eye and wholly taken.\n\nWhenever you beheld me,\nyour eyes imprinted all their graces there,\nmastered and quelled me;\nand my eyes earned their share:\nto worship all in you that sight laid bare.\n\nDo not, I beg, despise\nthe swarthy skin in which your sight first knew me;\nlook on me now: your eyes\nhave scattered through me\nthe beauty of the gaze with which you drew me.\n\n\n_That snowy little dove\nbearing the branch back to the ark is flying--\nthe turtle, high above--\nhappily spying\non the green banks the Love for which she’s sighing.\n\nShe once lived lonely,\nand now, alone, has settled in her nest,\nguided alone and only\nby One she loves the best,\nwho, wounded for love’s sake, has come to rest._\n\n\nLet us find joy together,\nBeloved, in your beauty find our looks\nreflected, whether\non hills or in pure brooks;\nlet us go deep into those wooded nooks.\n\nThen to high, hidden\ncrevices in stony desert waste--\ncaves none can find unbidden--\nwe’ll go, untraced,\nwhere pomegranate wine is ours to taste.\n\nYou would delight me, showing\nme, there, those things my spirit yearns to know,\nand later by bestowing,\nO Love I treasure so!\nwhat first you gave to me some days ago.\n\nAir, in its even breathing;\nthe song sweet Philomel sings in her flight;\nthe grove, its peace bequeathing\nto gentle night,\nwith flames consuming all in painless light.\n\nAnd none to apprehend it;\nAminadab quite gone, without a trace;\nthe siege quietly ended,\nhorsemen halting their race,\ndismounting near the waters of that place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "the-sum-of-perfection": { - "title": "“The Sum of Perfection”", - "body": "Creation forgotten,\nCreator only known,\nAttention turned inward\nIn love with the Beloved alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "that-by-fortune-i-may-reach": { - "title": "“That by Fortune I May Reach”", - "body": "_Not for all the beauty\nwill I ever be lost,\nbut for I-know-not-what\nthat by fortune I may reach._\n\nThe taste of what is finite,\nGoes only as far\nAs to weary the appetite\nAnd destroy the taste;\nThus not for sweetness\nWill I ever be lost,\nBut for I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nThe generous heart\nNever cares to stop\nWhere it is easy to cross,\nBut tries where it is hard;\nNothing satisfies him,\nAnd with faith he climbs so high,\nThat he tastes I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nHe who is pierced by love,\nOr touched by the divine,\nHas his taste so changed\nThat to all taste he is dead;\nAs someone may leave\nThe food he sees when he is sick,\nAnd craves for I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nDo not be surprised\nThat taste be thus changed,\nFor the cause of this evil\nIs alien to all the rest;\nThus every creature\nSees itself estranged,\nAnd tastes I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nFor as soon as the will\nis touched from above,\nIt cannot be satisfied\nBut with the divine;\nIts beauty being such\nThat only faith may show it,\nFor it tastes of I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nTell me if for such a lover,\nYou will feel any pain,\nFor he finds no pleasure\nAmong created things;\nAlone, with no figure or shape,\nWithout company or even memory,\nExcept the taste of I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nDo not think that the soul,\nThat is worth much more,\nFinds joy and happiness\nIn what on earth gives taste;\nIt is beyond beauty,\nIn what is, was or will be,\nThat it tastes I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nWhoever wants to advance\nWould better use care\nIn what is left to gain\nThan in what he has already won;\nAnd thus aiming for the heights,\nI will always try\nFor that I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._\n\nWhat comes through the senses\nAnd may here be understood\nAnd whatever may be learned,\nEven though very high,\nNot for all that beauty\nWill I ever be lost,\nBut for that I-know-not-what\n_That by fortune I may reach._", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - }, - "without-a-place-and-with-a-place": { - "title": "“Without a place and with a place …”", - "body": "Without a place and with a place\nto rest--living darkly with no ray\nof light--I burn my self away.\n\nMy soul--no longer bound--is free\nfrom the creations of the world;\nabove itself it rises hurled\ninto a life of ecstasy,\nleaning only on God. The world\nwill therefore clarify at last\nwhat I esteem of highest grace:\nmy soul revealing it can rest\nwithout a place and with a place.\n\nAlthough I suffer a dark night\nin mortal life, I also know\nmy agony is slight, for though\nI am in darkness without light,\na clear heavenly life I know;\nfor love gives power to my life,\nhowever black and blind my day,\nto yield my soul, and free of strife\nto rest--living darkly with no ray.\n\nLove can perform a wondrous labor\nwhich I have learned internally,\nand all the good or bad in me\ntakes on a penetrating savor,\nchanging my soul so it can be\nconsumed in a delicious flame.\nI feel it in me as a ray;\nand quickly killing every trace\nof light--I burn my self away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_of_the_cross" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lionel-johnson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lionel Johnson", - "birth": { - "year": 1867 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Johnson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dark-angel": { - "title": "“The Dark Angel”", - "body": "Dark Angel, with thine aching lust\nTo rid the world of penitence:\nMalicious Angel, who still dost\nMy soul such subtile violence!\n\nBecause of thee, no thought, no thing,\nAbides for me undesecrate:\nDark Angel, ever on the wing,\nWho never reachest me too late!\n\nWhen music sounds, then changest thou\nIts silvery to a sultry fire:\nNor will thine envious heart allow\nDelight untortured by desire.\n\nThrough thee, the gracious Muses turn,\nTo Furies, O mine Enemy!\nAnd all the things of beauty burn\nWith flames of evil ecstasy.\n\nBecause of thee, the land of dreams\nBecomes a gathering place of fears:\nUntil tormented slumber seems\nOne vehemence of useless tears.\n\nWhen sunlight glows upon the flowers,\nOr ripples down the dancing sea:\nThou, with thy troop of passionate powers,\nBeleaguerest, bewilderest, me.\n\nWithin the breath of autumn woods,\nWithin the winter silences:\nThy venomous spirit stirs and broods,\nO Master of impieties!\n\nThe ardour of red flame is thine,\nAnd thine the steely soul of ice:\nThou poisonest the fair design\nOf nature, with unfair device.\n\nApples of ashes, golden bright;\nWaters of bitterness, how sweet!\nO banquet of a foul delight,\nPrepared by thee, dark Paraclete!\n\nThou art the whisper in the gloom,\nThe hinting tone, the haunting laugh:\nThou art the adorner of my tomb,\nThe minstrel of mine epitaph.\n\nI fight thee, in the Holy Name!\nYet, what thou dost, is what God saith:\nTempter! should I escape thy flame,\nThou wilt have helped my soul from Death:\n\nThe second Death, that never dies,\nThat cannot die, when time is dead:\nLive Death, wherein the lost soul cries,\nEternally uncomforted.\n\nDark Angel, with thine aching lust!\nOf two defeats, of two despairs:\nLess dread, a change to drifting dust,\nThan thine eternity of cares.\n\nDo what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,\nDark Angel! triumph over me:\nLonely, unto the Lone I go;\nDivine, to the Divinity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-destroyer-of-a-soul": { - "title": "“The Destroyer of a Soul”", - "body": "I hate you with a necessary hate.\nFirst, I sought patience: passionate was she:\nMy patience turned in very scorn of me,\nThat I should dare forgive a sin so great,\nAs this, through which I sit disconsolate;\nMourning for that live soul, I used to see;\nSoul of a saint, whose friend I used to be:\nTill you came by! a cold, corrupting, fate.\n\nWhy come you now? You, whom I cannot cease\nWith pure and perfect hate to hate? Go, ring\nThe death-bell with a deep, triumphant toll!\nSay you, my friend sits by me still? Ah, peace!\nCall you this thing my friend? this nameless thing?\nThis living body, hiding its dead soul?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-friend": { - "title": "“A Friend”", - "body": "All, that he came to give,\nHe gave, and went again:\nI have seen one man live,\nI have seen one man reign,\nWith all the graces in his train.\n\nAs one of us, he wrought\nThings of the common hour:\nWhence was the charmed soul brought,\nThat gave each act such power;\nThe natural beauty of a flower?\n\nMagnificence and grace,\nExcellent courtesy:\nA brightness on the face,\nAirs of high memory:\nWhence came all these, to such as he?\n\nLike young Shakespearian kings,\nHe won the adoring throng:\nAnd, as Apollo sings,\nHe triumphed with a song:\nTriumphed, and sang, and passed along.\n\nWith a light word, he took\nThe hearts of men in thrall:\nAnd, with a golden look,\nWelcomed them, at his call\nGiving their love, their strength, their all.\n\nNo man less proud than he,\nNor cared for homage less:\nOnly, he could not be\nFar off from happiness:\nNature was bound to his success.\n\nWeary, the cares, the jars,\nThe lets, of every day,\nBut the heavens filled with stars,\nChanced he upon the way:\nAnd where he stayed, all joy would stay.\n\nNow, when sad night draws down,\nWhen the austere stars burn:\nRoaming the vast live town,\nMy thoughts and memories yearn\nToward him, who never will return.\n\nYet have I seen him live,\nAnd owned my friend, a king:\nAll that he came to give\nHe gave: and I, who sing\nHis praise, bring all I have to bring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "the-precept-of-silence": { - "title": "“The Precept of Silence”", - "body": "I know you: solitary griefs,\nDesolate passions, aching hours!\nI know you: tremulous beliefs,\nAgonised hopes, and ashen flowers!\n\nThe winds are sometimes sad to me;\nThe starry spaces, full of fear:\nMine is the sorrow on the sea,\nAnd mine the sigh of places drear.\n\nSome players upon plaintive strings\nPublish their wistfulness abroad:\nI have not spoken of these things,\nSave to one man, and unto God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-morfydd": { - "title": "“To Morfydd”", - "body": "A voice on the winds,\nA voice by the waters,\nWanders and cries:\nOh! what are the winds?\nAnd what are the waters?\nMine are your eyes!\n\nWestern the winds are,\nAnd western the waters,\nWhere the light lies:\nOh! what are the winds?\nAnd what are the waters?\nMine are your eyes!\n\nCold, cold grow the winds,\nAnd wild grow the waters,\nWhere the sun dies:\nOh! what are the winds?\nAnd what are the waters?\nMine are your eyes!\n\nAnd down the night winds,\nAnd down the night waters,\nThe music flies:\nOh! what are the winds?\nAnd what are the waters?\nCold be the winds,\nAnd wild be the waters,\nSo mine be your eyes!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "samuel-johnson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Samuel Johnson", - "birth": { - "year": 1709 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1784 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "Alas! with swift and silent pace,\nImpatient time rolls on the year;\nThe Seasons change, and Nature’s face\nNow sweetly smiles, now frowns severe.\n\n’Twas Spring, ’twas Summer, all was gay,\nNow Autumn bends a cloudy brow;\nThe flowers of Spring are swept away,\nAnd Summer fruits desert the bough.\n\nThe verdant leaves that play’d on high,\nAnd wanton’d on the western breeze,\nNow trod in dust neglected lie,\nAs Boreas strips the bending trees.\n\nThe fields that waved with golden grain,\nAs russet heaths are wild and bare;\nNot moist with dew, but drench’d in rain,\nNor health nor pleasure wanders there.\n\nNo more, while through the midnight shade\nBeneath the moon’s pale orb I stray,\nSoft pleasing woes my heart invade,\nAs Progne pours the melting lay.\n\nFrom this capricious clime she soars,\nO! would some god but wings supply!\nTo where each morn the Spring restores,\nCompanion of her flight I’d try.\n\nVain wish! me fate compels to bear\nThe downward season’s iron reign,\nCompels to breathe the polluted air,\nAnd shiver on a blasted plain.\n\nWhat bliss to life can Autumn yield,\nIf glooms, and showers, and storms prevail;\nAnd Ceres flies the naked field,\nAnd flowers and fruits, and Phoebus fail.\n\nOh! what remains, what lingers yet,\nTo cheer me in the darkening hour!\nThe grape remains! the friend of wit,\nIn love, and mirth, of mighty power.\n\nHaste--press the clusters, fill the bowl;\nApollo! shoot thy parting ray:\nThis gives the sunshine of the soul,\nThis god of health, and verse, and day.\n\nStill--still the jocund train shall flow,\nThe pulse with vigorous rapture beat;\nMy Stella with new charms shall glow,\nAnd every bliss in wine shall meet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-city-of-god": { - "title": "“The City of God”", - "body": "City of God, how broad and far\n Outspread thy walls sublime!\nThe true thy chartered freemen are,\n Of every age and clime.\n\nOne holy Church, one army strong,\n One steadfast high intent,\nOne working band, one harvest-song,\n One King Omnipotent.\n\nHow purely hath thy speech come down\n From man’s primeval youth;\nHow grandly hath thine empire grown\n Of Freedom, Love, and Truth!\n\nHow gleam thy watchfires through the night,\n With never fainting ray;\nHow rise thy towers, serene and bright,\n To meet the dawning day!\n\nIn vain the surge’s angry shock,\n In vain the drifting sands;\nUnharmed, upon the Eternal Rock,\n The Eternal City stands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "evening-ode": { - "title": "“Evening Ode”", - "body": "Evening now from purple wings\nSheds the grateful gifts she brings;\nBrilliant drops bedeck the mead,\nCooling breezes shake the reed;\nShake the reed, and curl the stream\nSilver’d o’er with Cynthia’s beam;\nNear the chequer’d, lonely grove,\nHears, and keeps thy secrets, love!\nStella, thither let us stray,\nLightly o’er the dewy way.\nPhoebus drives his burning car,\nHence, my lovely Stella, far;\nIn his stead, the queen of night\nRound us pours a lambent light:\nLight that seems but just to show\nBreasts that beat, and cheeks that glow;\nLet us now, in whisper’d joy,\nEvening’s silent hours employ,\nSilent best, and conscious shades,\nPlease the hearts that love invades,\nOther pleasures give them pain,\nLovers all but love disdain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "friendship": { - "title": "“Friendship”", - "body": "Friendship! peculiar boon of Heaven,\nThe noble mind’s delight and pride,\nTo men and angels only given,\nTo all the lower world denied.\n\nWhile love, unknown among the bless’d,\nParent of thousand wild desires,\nThe savage and the human breast\nTorments alike with raging fires.\n\nWith bright, but oft destructive gleam,\nAlike o’er all his lightnings fly,\nThy lambent glories only beam\nAround the favourites of the sky.\n\nThy gentle flows of guiltless joys\nOn fools and villains ne’er descend;\nIn vain for thee the tyrant sighs,\nAnd hugs a flatterer for a friend.\n\nDirectness of the brave and just,\nOh guide us through life’s darksome way!\nAnd let the tortures of mistrust\nOn selfish bosoms only prey.\n\nNor shall thine ardours cease to glow,\nWhen souls to peaceful climes remove.\nWhat raised our virtue here below\nShall aid our happiness above.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-boethius": { - "title": "“From Boethius”", - "body": "O Thou! whose power o’er moving worlds presides,\nWhose voice created, and whose wisdom guides,\nOn darkling man in pure effulgence shine,\nAnd cheer the clouded mind with light divine.\n’Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast\nWith silent confidence and holy rest;\nFrom thee, great God! we spring; to thee we bend;\nPath, motive, guide, original, and end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Stern Winter now, by Spring repress’d\nForbears the long-continued strife;\nAnd Nature, on her naked breast,\nDelights to catch the gales of life.\n\nNow o’er the rural kingdom roves,\nSoft pleasures with her laughing train,\nLove warbles in the vocal groves,\nAnd vegetation plants the plain.\n\nUnhappy! whom to beds of pain\nArthritic tyranny consigns;\nWhom smiling Nature courts in vain,\nThough rapture sings and beauty shines.\n\nYet though my limbs disease invades,\nHer wings imagination tries,\nAnd bears me to the peaceful shades,\nWhere ----’s humble turrets rise.\n\nHere let me through the vales pursue,\nA guide--a father--and a friend,\nOnce more great Nature’s works renew,\nOnce more on Wisdom’s voice attend.\n\nFrom false caresses, causeless strife,\nWild hope, vain fear, alike removed;\nHere let me learn the use of life,\nWhen best enjoy’d--when most improved.\n\nTeach me, thou venerable bower,\nCool meditation’s quiet seat,\nThe generous scorn of venal power,\nThe silent grandeur of retreat.\n\nWhen pride by guilt to greatness climbs,\nOr raging factions rush to war,\nHere let me learn to shun the crimes\nI can’t prevent and will not share.\n\nBut lest I fall by subtler foes,\nBright wisdom teach me Curio’s art,\nThe swelling passions to compose,\nAnd quell the rebels of the heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-winters-walk": { - "title": "“The Winter’s Walk”", - "body": "Behold, my fair, where’er we rove,\nWhat dreary prospects round us rise,\nThe naked hill, the leafless grove,\nThe hoary ground, the frowning skies.\n\nNor only through the wasted plain,\nStern Winter is thy force confess’d;\nStill wider spreads thy horrid reign,\nI feel thy power usurp my breast.\n\nEnlivening hope, and fond desire,\nResign the heart to spleen and care;\nScarce frighted love maintains her fire,\nAnd rapture saddens to despair.\n\nIn groundless hope, and causeless fear,\nUnhappy man! behold thy doom;\nStill changing with the changeful year\nThe slave of sunshine and of gloom.\n\nTired with vain joys, the false alarms,\nWith mental and corporeal strife,\nSnatch me, my Stella, to thy arms,\nAnd screen me from the ills of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "david-jones": { - "metadata": { - "name": "David Jones", - "birth": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1975 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jones_(artist-poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-tutelar-of-the-place": { - "title": "“The Tutelar of the Place”", - "body": "She that loves place, time, demarcation, hearth, kin, enclosure, site, differentiated cult, though she is but one mother of us all: one earth brings us all forth, one womb receives us all, yet to each she is other, named of some name other …\n\n… other sons, beyond hill, over strath, or never so neighbouring by nigh field or near crannog up stream. What co-tidal line can plot if nigrin or flax- head marching their wattles be cognate or german of common totem?\n\nTellus of the myriad names answers to but one name: From this tump she answers Jac o’ the Tump only if he call Great-Jill-of-the-tump-that-bare-me, not if he cry by some new fangle moder of far gentes over the flud, fer-goddess name from anaphora of far folk wont woo her; she’s a rare one for locality.\n\nOr, gently she bends her head from far-height when tongue-strings chime the name she whispered on known-site, as between sister and brother at the time of beginnings … when the wrapped bands are cast and the worst mewling is over, after the weaning and before the august initiations, in the years of becoming. When she and he ’twixt door-stone and fire-stane prefigure and puppet on narrow floor-stone the world-masque on wide world-floor.\n\nWhen she attentively changes her doll-shift, lets pretend with solemnity as rocking the womb-gift.\n\nWhen he chivvies house-pet with his toy _hasta_, makes believe the cat o’ the wold falls to the pitiless bronze.\n\nMan-travail and woman-war here we see enacted are.\n\nWhen she and he beside the settle, he and she between the trestle-struts, mime the bitter dance to come.\n\nCheek by chin at the childer-crock where the quick tears drop and the quick laughter dries the tears, within the rim of the shared curd-cup each fore-reads the world-storm.\n\nTill the spoil-sport gammers sigh: Now come on now little children, come on now it’s past the hour. Sun’s to roost, brood’s in pent, dusk-star tops mound, lupa sniffs the lode-damps for stragglers late to byre.\n\nCome now it’s time to come now for tarry awhile and slow\n cot’s best for yeanlings\n crib’s best for babes\nhere’s a rush to light you to bed\nhere’s a fleece to cover your head\nagainst the world-storm\n brother by sister\nunder one _brethyn_\nkith of the kin warmed at the one hearth-flame\n(of the seed of far-gaffer? fair gammer’s wer-gifts?)\ncribbed in garth that the garth-Jill wards.\n\nThough she inclines with attention from far fair-height outside all boundaries, beyond the known and kindly nomenclatures, where all names are one name, where all stones of demarcation dance and interchange, troia the skipping mountains, nod recognitions.\n\nAs when on known-site ritual frolics keep bucolic interval at eves and divisions when they mark the inflexions of the year and conjugate with trope and turn the seasons’ syntax, with beating feet, with wands and pentagons to spell out the Trisagion.\n\nWho laud and magnify with made, mutable and beggarly elements the unmade immutable begettings and precessions of fair-height, with halting sequences and unresolved rhythms, searchingly, with what’s to hand, under the inconstant lights that hover world-flats, that bright by fit and start the tangle of world-wood rifting the dark drifts for the wanderers that wind the world-meander, who seek some hidden grammar to give back anathema its first benignity.\n\nGathering all things in, twining each bruised stem to the swaying trellis of the dance, the dance about the sawn lode-stake on the hill where the hidden stillness is at the core of struggle, the dance around the green lode-tree on far fair-height where the secret guerdons hang and the bright prizes nod, where sits the queen _im Rosenhage_ eating the honey-cake, where the king sits, counting-out his man-geld, rhyming the audits of all the world-holdings.\n\nWhere the marauder leaps the wall and the wall dances to the marauder’s leaping, where the plunging wolf-spear and the wolf’s pierced diaphragm sing the same song …\n\nYet, when she stoops to hear you children cry\n from the scattered and single habitations\nor from the nucleated holdings\n\n from tower’d _castra_\n paved _civitas_\n treble-ramped _caer_\n or wattled _tref_\n stockaded gorod or\n trenched _burh_\nfrom which ever child-crib within whatever enclosure\ndemarked by a dynast or staked by consent\nwherever in which of the wide world-ridings\n you must not call her but by that name\nwhich accords to the morphology of that place.\n\nNow pray now little children pray for us all now, pray our gammer’s prayer according to our disciplina given to us within our labyrinth on our dark mountain.\n Say now little children:\nSweet Jill of our hill hear us\nbring slow bones safe at the lode-ford\nkeep lupa’s bite without our wattles\nmake her bark keep children good\nsave us all from dux of far folk\nsave us from the men who plan.\nNow sleep on, little children, sleep on now, while I tell out the greater suffrages, not yet for young heads to understand:\n\nQueen of the differentiated sites, administratrix of the demarcations, let our cry come unto you.\n In all times of imperium save us\nwhen the _mercatores_ come save us\nfrom the guile of the negotiatores save us\nfrom the _missi_, from the agents\n who think no shame\nby inquest to audit what is shameful to tell\n deliver us.\n\nWhen they check their capitularies in their curias\nconfuse their reckonings.\nWhen they narrowly assess the _trefydd_\nby hide and rod\nby _pentan_ and pent\nby impost and fee on beast-head\nand roof-tree\nand number the souls of men\nnotch their tallies false\ndisorder what they have collated.\nWhen they proscribe the diverse uses and impose the rootless uniformities, pray for us.\nWhen they sit in Consilium to liquidate the holy diversities\nmother of particular perfections\nqueen of otherness\nmistress of asymmetry\npatroness of things counter, parti, pied, several\nprotectress of things known and handled\nhelp of things familiar and small\nwardress of the secret crevices\nof things wrapped and hidden\nmediatrix of all the deposits\nmargravine of the troia\nempress of the labyrinth\nreceive our prayers.\nWhen they escheat to the Ram\nin the Ram’s curia\nthe seisin where the naiad sings\nabove where the forked rod bends\nor where the dark outcrop\ntells on the hidden seam\npray for the green valley.\nWhen they come with writs of oyer and terminer\n\nto hear the false and\ndetermine the evil\naccording to the advices of the Ram’s magnates who serve\nthe Ram’s wife, who write in the Ram’s book of Death.\nIn the bland megalopolitan light where no shadow is by day or by night be our shadow.\nRemember the mound-kin, the kith of the tarren gone from this mountain because of the exorbitance of the Ram … remember them in the rectangular tenements, in the houses of the engines that fabricate the ingenuities of the Ram\nMother of Flowers save them then where no fower blows.\nThough they shall not come again because of the requirements of the Ram with respect to the world plan, remember them where the dead forms multiply, where no stamen leans, where the carried pollen falls to the adamant surfaces, where is no crevice.\n\nIn all times of _Gleichschaltung_, in the days of the central economies, set up the hedges of illusion round some remnant of us, twine the wattles of mist, white-web a Gwydion-hedge\nlike fog on the _bryniau_\nagainst the commissioners\nand assessors bearing the writs of the Ram to square the world-\nfloor and number the tribes and write down the secret things and\ntake away the diversities by which we are, by which we call on\nyour name, sweet Till of the demarcations\narc of differences\ntower of individuation\nqueen of the minivers\nlaughing in the mantle of variety\nbelle of the mound\nfor Jac o’ the mound\nour belle and donnabelle\non all the world-mountain.\n\nIn the December of our culture ward somewhere the secret seed, under the mountain, under and between, between the grids of the Ram’s survey when he squares the world-circle.\nSweet Mair devise a mazy-guard\nin and out and round about\ndouble-dance defences\ncountermure and echelon meanders round\nthe holy mound\nfence within the fence\npile the dun ash for the bright seed\n(within the curtained wood the canister\nwithin the canister the budding rod)\ntroia in depth the shifting wattles of illusion for the ancilia for the palladia for the kept memorials, because of the commissioners of the Ram and the Ram’s decree concerning the utility of the hidden things.\n\nWhen the technicians manipulate the dead limbs of our culture as though it yet had life, have mercy on us. Open unto us, let us enter a second time within your stola-folds in those days-ventricle and refuge both, hendref for world-winter, asylum from world-storm, Womb of the Lamb the spoiler of the Ram.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "ben-jonson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ben Jonson", - "birth": { - "year": 1572 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1637 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "to-celia": { - "title": "“To Celia”", - "body": "Drink to me only with thine eyes,\n And I will pledge with mine;\nOr leave a kiss but in the cup,\n And I’ll not look for wine.\nThe thirst that from the soul doth rise\n Doth ask a drink divine;\nBut might I of Jove’s nectar sup,\n I would not change for thine.\n\nI sent thee late a rosy wreath,\n Not so much honouring thee\nAs giving it a hope, that there\n It could not withered be.\nBut thou thereon didst only breathe,\n And sent’st it back to me;\nSince when it grows, and smells, I swear,\n Not of itself, but thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-heaven": { - "title": "“To Heaven”", - "body": "Good and great God, can I not think of thee\nBut it must straight my melancholy be?\nIs it interpreted in me disease\nThat, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?\nOh be thou witness, that the reins dost know\nAnd hearts of all, if I be sad for show,\nAnd judge me after; if I dare pretend\nTo ought but grace or aim at other end.\nAs thou art all, so be thou all to me,\nFirst, midst, and last, converted one, and three;\nMy faith, my hope, my love; and in this state\nMy judge, my witness, and my advocate.\nWhere have I been this while exil’d from thee?\nAnd whither rap’d, now thou but stoop’st to me?\nDwell, dwell here still. O, being everywhere,\nHow can I doubt to find thee ever here?\nI know my state, both full of shame and scorn,\nConceiv’d in sin, and unto labour borne,\nStanding with fear, and must with horror fall,\nAnd destin’d unto judgment, after all.\nI feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground\nUpon my flesh t’ inflict another wound.\nYet dare I not complain, or wish for death\nWith holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath\nOf discontent; or that these prayers be\nFor weariness of life, not love of thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "jenny-joseph": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jenny Joseph", - "birth": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2018 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Joseph", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "warning": { - "title": "“Warning”", - "body": "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple\nWith a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.\nAnd I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves\nAnd satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.\nI shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired\nAnd gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells\nAnd run my stick along the public railings\nAnd make up for the sobriety of my youth.\nI shall go out in my slippers in the rain\nAnd pick flowers in other people’s gardens\nAnd learn to spit.\n\nYou can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat\nAnd eat three pounds of sausages at a go\nOr only bread and pickle for a week\nAnd hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.\n\nBut now we must have clothes that keep us dry\nAnd pay our rent and not swear in the street\nAnd set a good example for the children.\nWe must have friends to dinner and read the papers.\n\nBut maybe I ought to practise a little now?\nSo people who know me are not too shocked and surprised\nWhen suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-joyce": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Joyce", - "birth": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "The moon’s soft golden meshes make\nAll night a veil;\nThe shore-lamps in the sleeping lake\nLaburnum tendrils trail.\n\nThe sly reeds whisper in the night\nA name--her name,\nAnd all my soul is a delight,\nA swoon or shame", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flood": { - "title": "“Flood”", - "body": "Gold-brown upon the sated flood\nThe rock-vine clusters lift and sway:\nVast wings above the lambent waters brood\nOf sullen day.\n\nA waste of waters ruthlessly\nSways and uplifts its weedy mane,\nWhere brooding day stares down upon the sea\nIn dull disdain.\n\nUplift and sway, O golden vine,\nThy clustered fruits to love’s full flood,\nLambent and vast and ruthless as is thine\nIncertitude.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "night-piece": { - "title": "“Night Piece”", - "body": "Gaunt in gloom\nThe pale stars their torches,\nEnshrouded, wave.\nGhost-fires from heaven’s far verges faint illume--\nArches on soaring arches--\nNight’s sin-dark nave.\n\nSeraphim\nThe lost hosts awaken\nTo service, till\nIn moonless gloom each lapses, muted, dim,\nRaised when she has and shaken\nHer thurible.\n\nAnd long and loud\nTo night’s nave upsoaring,\nA star-knell tolls\nAs the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,\nVoidward from the adoring\nWaste of souls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tutto-e-sciolto": { - "title": "“Tutto È Sciolto”", - "body": "A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star\nSad in the west;\nAnd thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far,\nRememberest:\n\nHer silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow\nAnd fragrant hair,\nFalling as in the silence falleth now\nDusk from the air.\n\nAh, why wilt thou remember these, or why,\nPoor heart, repine,\nIf the sweet love she yielded with a sigh\nWas never thine?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "julian-of-norwich": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Julian of Norwich", - "birth": { - "year": 1343, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1416 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "infinite-love": { - "title": "“Infinite Love”", - "body": "Because of the great,\ninfinite love which God has for all humankind,\nhe makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ\nand the lowliest of the souls that are to be saved …\nWe should highly rejoice that God dwells in our soul\nand still more highly should we rejoice that our soul dwells in God.\nOur soul is made to be God’s dwelling place,\nand the dwelling place of our soul\nis God who was never made.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "donald-justice": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Donald Justice", - "birth": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2004 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Justice", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 32 - }, - "poems": { - "aboard-aboard": { - "title": "“Aboard! Aboard!”", - "body": "O how the little towns flare in passing!\nOn the sidings, the obsolete engines,\nHow black by moonlight they gleam, thy cast skins,\nO serpent, over the dead coals gliding,\nMore beautiful than the illustrations\nIn medical texts, or illegible\nManuscripts, corrupt beyond restoring!\nAlways to be longing to be elsewhere\nO the distancel the futures receding!\nAnd always within, one’s own vacancies,\nDark, dark as the spaces between the stars.\nAh, old companion, much-travelled Satan,\nAlas, what destination but oneself?\nAnd O how the miles reel at the wide gaze!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "absence": { - "title": "“Absence”", - "body": "It’s snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.\nThere is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,\nLike the memory of scales descending the white keys\nOf a childhood piano--outside the window, palms!\nAnd the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,\nSoon to let down its white or yellow-white.\n\nNow, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,\nLike the memory of a white dress cast down …\nSo much has fallen.\n\n And I, who have listened for a step\nAll afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,\nAlready in memory. And the terrible scales descending\nOn the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers abounding.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "american-sketches": { - "title": "“American Sketches”", - "body": "The telephone poles\nHave been holding their\nArms out\nA long time now\nTo birds\nThat will not\nSettle there\nBut pass with\nStrange cawings\nWestward to\nWhere dark trees\nGather about a\nWater hole this\nIs Kansas the\nMountains start here\nJust behind\nThe closed eyes\nOf a farmer’s\nSons asleep\nIn their work clothes", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-assassination": { - "title": "“The Assassination”", - "body": "It begins again, the nocturnal pulse.\nIt courses through the cables laid for it.\nIt mounts to the chandeliers and beats there, hotly.\nWe are too close. Too late, we would move back.\nWe are involved with the surge.\n\nNow it bursts. Now it has been announced.\nNow it is being soaked up by newspapers.\nNow it is running through the streets.\nThe crowd has it. The woman selling carnations\nAnd the man in the straw hat stand with it in their shoes.\n\nHere is the red marquee it sheltered under.\nHere is the ballroom, here\nThe sadly various orchestra led\nBy a single gesture. My arms open.\nIt enters. Look, we are dancing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "banjo-dog-variations": { - "title": "“Banjo Dog Variations”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nAgriculture and Industry\nEmbraced in public on a wall--\nHeroes in shirt-sleeves! Next to them\nThe average man felt small.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,\nBy Vassar girls surrounded.\nThey harmonized expertly; oh,\nTheir little true hearts pounded.\n\nJoe went on smiling.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nI thought I saw what Trotsky saw,\nA friendly cossack wink;\nAnd then his friends brought down their clubs.\nChrist, what would Trotsky think!\n\n\n# 4.\n\nTrain had just slowed for the crossing when\nOut from the bushes jumped a hundred men.\nWith baseball bats and iron bars\nThey persuaded us back onto the cars.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nAnd out of dirty fists sometimes\nWould bloom the melancholy harp.\nThen low-low-low on the gon-doh-lah\nWe swayed beneath our tarp.\n\nAnd far lights moving in and out of rain.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nWhat you do with the Sunday news\nOh, citizens of the great riffraff,\nIs you put the funny papers in your shoes.\nIt gives the feet a laugh.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nWe read our brothers’ shirts for lice\nAnd moved around with the fruit,\nWent north to Billings for the beets\nAnd had three good days in the jail at Butte.\n\n\n\n# 8.\n\nWe chalked our names on red cliffsides,\nHigh up, where only eagles dwelled.\nEach time a big truck went by below,\nThe earth trembled like a woman held.\n\n\n\n# 9.\n\nAnd we passed fields of smoking stumps\nWhere goats sometimes or ponies grazed.\nAbandoned tractors stood against the sky\nLike giant fists upraised.\n\n\n\n# 10.\n\nBut if we bent our knees it was\nTo drink from a creek’s rust-colored slime,\nAnd splash our chests with it, and rub our eyes,\nAnd wake into another world and time.\n\n\n\n# 11.\n\nLet us go then, you and me,\nWhile the neon bubbles upward ceaselessly\nTo lure us down back streets and alleyways,\nWhere we may wander and be lost for days.\n\nMany days and many hours.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nI miss the smell of the ratty furs\nAnd saturday night cologne and beer,\nAnd I miss the juke and the sign that read:\nNO POLICE SERVED HERE.\n\n\n# 13.\n\nOff Mission, wasn’t it? The old\nWhite Angel Breadline, where we met?\nYou had just come west from Arkansas,\nBut the rest of it I forget.\n\nA cup of coffee; afterwards a hymn.\n\n\n# 14.\n\nOnce we stood on a high bluff,\nLights fanning out across the bay.\nA little ragged band of Christs we were,\nAnd tempted--but we turned away.\n\n\n# 15.\n\nAnd didn’t I see you Saturday night,\nAfter the paycheck from the mill,\nBearing a pot of store-bought lilies home,\nOne budding still?\n\nAh, oh, my banjo dog!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bus-stop": { - "title": "“Bus Stop”", - "body": "Lights are burning\nIn quiet rooms\nWhere lives go on\nResembling ours.\n\nThe quiet lives\nThat follow us--\nThese lives we lead\nBut do not own--\n\nStand in the rain\nSo quietly\nWhen we are gone,\nSo quietly …\n\nAnd the last bus\nComes letting dark\nUmbrellas out--\nBlack flowers, black flowers.\n\nAnd lives go on.\nAnd lives go on\nLike sudden lights\nAt street corners\n\nOr like the lights\nIn quiet rooms\nLeft on for hours,\nBurning, burning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "counting-the-mad": { - "title": "“Counting the Mad”", - "body": "This one was put in a jacket,\nThis one was sent home,\nThis one was given bread and meat\nBut would eat none,\nAnd this one cried No No No No\nAll day long.\n\nThis one looked at the window\nAs though it were a wall,\nThis one saw things that were not there,\nThis one things that were,\nAnd this one cried No No No No\nAll day long.\n\nThis one thought himself a bird,\nThis one a dog,\nAnd this one thought himself a man,\nAn ordinary man,\nAnd cried and cried No No No No\nAll day long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dancers-life": { - "title": "“A Dancer’s Life”", - "body": "The lights in the theater fail. The long racks\nOf costumes abandoned by the other dancers\nTrouble Celeste. The conductor asks\nIf she is sad because autumn is coming on,\nBut when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored.\nOn her way back from the holidays, a man\nWho appears to have no face rattles the door\nTo her compartment. How disgusting, she thinks;\nHow disgusting it always must be to grow old.\nDusk falls, and a few drops of rain.\nOn the train window trembles the blurred\nReflection of her own transparent beauty,\nAnd through this, beautiful ruined cities passing,\nDark forests, and people everywhere\nPacing on lighted platforms, some\nBeating their children, some apparently dancing.\nThe costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness.\nNow sinking into sleep is like sinking again\nInto the lake of her youth. Her parents\nLean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving,\nAs the boat glides farther out across the waves.\nNo one, it seems, is meeting her at the station.\nThe city is frozen. She warms herself\nIn the pink and scented twilight of a bar.\nThe waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent.\nThe conversation dies in bed. Later,\nShe hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby,\nDizzy still with the weight of her own body,\nShe waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself\nAnd bright posters announcing events to come.\nHer life--she feels it closing about her now\nLike a small theater, empty, without lights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "the-evening-of-the-mind": { - "title": "“The Evening of the Mind”", - "body": "Now comes the evening of the mind.\nHere are the fireflies twitching in the blood;\nHere is the shadow moving down the page\nWhere you sit reading by the garden wall.\nNow the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,\nShudder and droop. Your know their voices now,\nFaintly the martyred peaches crying out\nYour name, the name nobody knows but you.\nIt is the aura and the coming on.\nIt is the thing descending, circling, here.\nAnd now it puts a claw out and you take it.\nThankfully in your lap you take it, so.\n\nYou said you would not go away again,\nYou did not want to go away--and yet,\nIt is as if you stood out on the dock\nWatching a little boat drift out\nBeyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish …\nAnd you were in it, skimming past old snags,\nBeyond, beyond, under a brazen sky\nAs soundless as a gong before it’s struck--\nSuspended how?--and now they strike it, now\nThe ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,\nAnd you must wake again to your own blood\nAnd empty spaces in the throat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "hell": { - "title": "“Hell”", - "body": "_R. B. Vaughn speaks:_\n\n“After so many years of pursuing the ideal\nI came home. But I had caught sight of it.\nYou see it sometimes in the blue-silver wake\nOf island schooners, bound for Anegada, say.\nAnd it takes other forms. I saw it flickering once\nIn torches by the railroad tracks in Medellín.\nWhen I was very young I thought that love would come\nAnd seize and take me south and I would see the rose;\nAnd that all ambiguities we knew would merge\nLike orchids on a word. Say this:\nI sought the immortal word.”\n\nSo saying he went on\nTo join those who preceded him;\nand there were those that followed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "henry-james-at-the-pacific": { - "title": "“Henry James at the Pacific”", - "body": "In a hotel room by the sea, the Master\nSits brooding on the continent he has crossed.\nNot that he foresees immediate disaster,\nOnly a sort of freshness being lost--\nOr should he go on calling it Innocence?\nThe sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;\nWall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense\nNovel in all this waiting to be done.\nBut not, not--sadly enough--by him. His talents,\nSuch as they may be, want a different theme,\nRather more civilized than this, on balance.\nFor him now always the recurring dream\nIs just the mild, dear light of Lamb House falling\nBeautifully down the pages of his calling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "here-lies-love": { - "title": "“Here Lies Love”", - "body": "Though books said nothing could save\nLove from an early grave\nAnd love from the wear and tear,\nWhat flesh and blood was ours for love’s repair\nWe freely gave.\n\nThis way and that we have\nEased love into the grave\nAnd covered all with dirt\nAnd laid the spirit too, through that witch’s heart\nKnocking the stave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "here-in-katmandu": { - "title": "“Here in Katmandu”", - "body": "We have climbed the mountain.\nThere’s nothing more to do.\nIt is terrible to come down\nTo the valley\nWhere, amidst many flowers,\nOne thinks of snow,\n\nAs formerly, amidst snow,\nClimbing the mountain,\nOne thought of flowers,\nTremulous, ruddy with dew,\nIn the valley.\nOne caught their scent coming down.\n\nIt is difficult to adjust, once down,\nTo the absence of snow.\nClear days, from the valley,\nOne looks up at the mountain.\nWhat else is there to do?\nPrayer wheels, flowers!\n\nLet the flowers\nFade, the prayer wheels run down.\nWhat have they to do\nWith us who have stood atop the snow\nAtop the mountain,\nFlags seen from the valley?\n\nIt might be possible to live in the valley,\nTo bury oneself among flowers,\nIf one could forget the mountain,\nHow, never once looking down,\nStiff, blinded with snow,\nOne knew what to do.\n\nMeanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,\nEspecially when to the valley\nThat wind which means snow\nElsewhere, but here means flowers,\nComes down,\nAs soon it must, from the mountain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-bertrams-garden": { - "title": "“In Bertram’s Garden”", - "body": "Jane looks down at her organdy skirt\nAs if it somehow were the thing disgraced,\nFor being there, on the floor, in the dirt,\nAnd she catches it up about her waist,\nSmooths it out along one hip,\nAnd pulls it over the crumpled slip.\n\nOn the porch, green-shuttered, cool,\nAsleep is Bertram that bronze boy,\nWho, having wound her around a spool,\nSends her spinning like a toy\nOut to the garden, all alone,\nTo sit and weep on a bench of stone.\n\nSoon the purple dark must bruise\nLily and bleeding-heart and rose,\nAnd the little cupid lose\nEyes and ears and chin and nose,\nAnd Jane lie down with others soon,\nNaked to the naked moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lethargy": { - "title": "“Lethargy”", - "body": "It smiles to see me\nStill in my bathrobe.\n\nIt sits in my lap\nAnd will not let me rise.\n\nNow it is kissing my eyes.\nArms enfold me, arms\n\nPale with a thick down.\nIt seems I am falling asleep\n\nTo the sound of a story\nBeing read me.\n\nThis is the story.\nWeeks have passed\n\nSince first I lifted my hand\nTo set it down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "letter": { - "title": "“Letter”", - "body": "You write that you are ill, confused. The trees\nOutside the window of the room they gave you\nAre wet with tears each morning when they wake you\nOut of the sleep you never quite fall into.\nThere is this dream of traffic in your head\n\nThat stops and goes, and goes, and does not stop\nSometimes all night, all day. The motorcade\nWinds past you like the funeral cortège\nOf someone famous you had slept with, once or twice.\n(Another fit of tears dampens the leaves, the page.)\n\nYou would expose your wounds, pull down your blouse,\nUnbosom yourself wholly to the young doctor\nWho has the power to sign prescriptions, passes,\nWho seems to like you … And so to pass\nInto the city once again, one of us,\n\nHurrying by the damp trees of a park\nTowards a familiar intersection where\nThe traffic signals warn you not to cross,\nTo wait, just as before, alone--but suddenly\nTen years older, tamed now, less mad, less beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "loves-strategems": { - "title": "“Love’s Strategems”", - "body": "But these maneuverings to avoid\nThe touching of hands,\nThese shifts to keep the eyes employed\nOn objects more or less neutral\n(As honor, for time being, commands)\nWill hardly prevent their downfall.\n\nStronger medicines are needed.\nAlready they find\nNone of their stratagems have succeeded,\nNor would have, no,\nNot had their eyes been stricken blind,\nHands cut off at the elbow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-map-of-love": { - "title": "“A Map of Love”", - "body": "Your face more than others’ faces\nMaps the half-remembered places\nI have come to I while I slept--\nContinents a dream had kept\nSecret from all waking folk\nTill to your face I awoke,\nAnd remembered then the shore,\nAnd the dark interior.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "men-at-forty": { - "title": "“Men at Forty”", - "body": "Men at forty\nLearn to close softly\nThe doors to rooms they will not be\nComing back to.\n\nAt rest on a stair-landing,\nThey feel it moving\nBeneath them now like the deck of a ship,\nThough the swell is gentle.\n\nAnd deep in mirrors\nThey rediscover\nThe face of the boy as he practices tying\nHis father’s tie there in secret,\n\nAnd the face of that father,\nStill warm with the mystery of lather.\nThey are more fathers than sons themselves now.\nSomething is filling them, something\n\nThat is like the twilight sound\nOf the crickets, immense,\nFilling the woods at the foot of the slope\nBehind their mortgaged houses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-miami-of-other-days": { - "title": "“The Miami of Other Days”", - "body": "The winter streets an orchestra of horns\nAnd gods slept under tabernacle tents\nThat sprang up overnight on circus grounds\nLike giant toadstools yearning for respectability.\n\nIn a portrait of himself at age seven he writes:\n\nsometimes he would squat among the foul weeds of the vacant lot,\nWaiting for dusk and someone dear to come\nAnd whip him down the street, but gently, home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "nostalgia-of-the-lakefronts": { - "title": "“Nostalgia of the Lakefronts”", - "body": "Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters.\nA tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes;\nAnother, by the lake, the times of cruises.\nChildhood, once vast with terrors and surprises,\nIs fading to a landscape deep with distance--\nAnd always the sad piano in the distance,\n\nFaintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling\n(O indecipherable blurred harmonies)\nOr some far horn repeating over water\nIts high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies.\nAt such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world,\nAnd this is the world we run to from the world.\n\nOr the two worlds come together and are one\nOn dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain,\nAnd stereopticons brought out and dusted,\nStacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain,\nA mad wet dash to the local movie palace\nAnd the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo.\n(Would this have been summer, 1942?)\n\nBy June the city always seems neurotic.\nBut lakes are good all summer for reflection,\nAnd ours is famed among painters for its blues,\nYet not entirely sad, upon reflection.\nWhy sad at all? Is their wish so unique--\nTo anthropomorphize the inanimate\nWith a love that masquerades as pure technique?\n\nO art and the child were innocent together!\nBut landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents.\nSoon now the war will shutter the grand hotels,\nAnd we, when we come back, will come as parents.\nThere are no lanterns now strung between pines--\nOnly, like history, the stark bare northern pines.\n\nAnd after a time the lakefront disappears\nInto the stubborn verses of its exiles\nOr a few gifted sketches of old piers.\nIt rains perhaps on the other side of the heart;\nThen we remember, whether we would or no.\n--Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "october": { - "title": "“October”", - "body": "Summer, goodbye.\nThe days grow shorter.\nCranes walk the fairway now\nIn careless order.\n\nThey step so gradually\nToward the distant green\nThey might be brushstrokes\nAnimating a screen.\n\nMist canopies\nThe water hazard.\nNearby, the little flag lifts,\nBrave but frazzled.\n\nUnder sad clouds\nTow white-capped golfers\nStand looking off, dreamy and strange,\nLike young girls in Balthus.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "on-a-painting-by-patient-b-of-the-independence-state-hospital-for-the-insane": { - "title": "“On a Painting by Patient B of the Independence State Hospital for the Insane”", - "body": "These seven houses have learned to face one another,\nBut not at the expected angles. Those silly brown lumps,\nThat are probably meant for hills and not other houses,\nAfter ages of being themselves, though naturally slow,\nAre learning to be exclusive without offending.\nThe arches and entrances (down to the right out of sight)\nHave mastered the lesson of remaining closed.\nAnd even the skies keep a certain understandable distance,\nFor these are the houses of the very rich.\n\nOne sees their children playing with leopards, tamed\nAt great cost, or perhaps it is only other children,\nFor none of these objects is anything more than a spot,\nAnd perhaps there are not any children but only leopards\nPlaying with leopards, and perhaps there are only the spots.\nAnd the little maids that hang from the windows like tongues,\nCalling the children in, admiring the leopards,\nAre the dashes a child might represent motion by means of,\nOr dazzlement possibly, the brilliance of solid-gold houses.\n\nThe clouds resemble those empty balloons in cartoons\nWhich approximate silence. These clouds, if clouds they are\n(And not the smoke from the seven aspiring chimneys),\nThe more one studies them the more it appears\nThey too have expressions. One might almost say\nThey have their habits, their wrong opinions, that their\nImpassivity masks an essentially lovable foolishness,\nAnd they will be given names by those who live under them\nNot public like mountains’ but private like companions’.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pantoum-of-the-great-depression": { - "title": "“Pantoum of the Great Depression”", - "body": "Our lives avoided tragedy\nSimply by going on and on,\nWithout end and with little apparent meaning.\nOh, there were storms and small catastrophes.\n\nSimply by going on and on\nWe managed. No need for the heroic.\nOh, there were storms and small catastrophes.\nI don’t remember all the particulars.\n\nWe managed. No need for the heroic.\nThere were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.\nI don’t remember all the particulars.\nAcross the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.\n\nThere were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows\nThank god no one said anything in verse.\nThe neighbors were our only chorus,\nAnd if we suffered we kept quiet about it.\n\nAt no time did anyone say anything in verse.\nIt was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,\nAnd if we suffered we kept quiet about it.\nNo audience would ever know our story.\n\nIt was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.\nWe gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.\nWhat audience would ever know our story?\nBeyond our windows shone the actual world.\n\nWe gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.\nAnd time went by, drawn by slow horses.\nSomewhere beyond our windows shone the actual world.\nThe Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.\n\nAnd time went by, drawn by slow horses.\nWe did not ourselves know what the end was.\nThe Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.\nWe had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.\n\nBut we did not ourselves know what the end was.\nPeople like us simply go on.\nWe had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,\nBut it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.\n\nAnd there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "poem-to-be-read-at-3-am": { - "title": "“Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M.”", - "body": "Excepting the diner\nOn the outskirts\nThe town of Ladora\nAt 3 A.M.\nWas dark but\nFor my headlights\nAnd up in\nOne second-story room\nA single light\nWhere someone\nWas sick or\nPerhaps reading\nAs I drove past\nAt seventy\nNot thinking\nThis poem\nIs for whoever\nHad the light on", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "portrait-with-brown-hair": { - "title": "“Portrait with Brown Hair”", - "body": "The days, the days!\nAnd the scissors you cut\nYour hair with--oh, how dull.\nTime to change the needle.\n\nPut on another record\n(No, something baroque)\nAnd think of the good times.\nThink of lakes and rivers.\n\nIt’s hot. Let in some air.\nLet the smell of leftovers\nBe one with the perfume\nOf cooling asphalt, leaves.\n\nAnd the nights? Ah, wonderful--\nYou alone,\nAlone with the slums,\nThe flowerpots, the stars.\n\nThink of the sea. Unzip,\nJust as though someone were\nAround to be made love to\nOr anyway to pose for.\n\nThe mysteries of sex!\nOne day you’ll wake up\nBack on that Christmas morning\nIn Mexico, still a virgin", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sadness": { - "title": "“Sadness”", - "body": "Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,\nWhy were you so sad on porches, whispering?\nWhat great melancholies were loosed among our swings!\nAs before a storm one hears the leaves whispering\nAnd marks each small change in the atmosphere,\nSo was it then to overhear and to fear.\n\nBut all things then were oracle and secret.\nRemember the night when, lost, returning, we turned back\nConfused, and our headlights singled out the fox?\nOur thoughts went with it then, turning and turning back\nWith the same terror, into the deep thicket\nBeside the highway, at home in the dark thicket.\n\nI say the wood within is the dark wood,\nOr wound no torn shirt can entirely bandage,\nBut the sad hand returns to it in secret\nRepeatedly, encouraging the bandage\nTo speak of that other world we might have borne,\nThe lost world buried before it could be born.\n\nBurchfield describes the pinched white souls of violets\nFrothing the mouth of a derelict old mine\nJust as an evil August night comes down,\nAll umber, but for one smudge of dusky carmine.\nIt is the sky of a peculiar sadness--\nThe other side perhaps of some rare gladness.\n\nWhat is it to be happy, after all? Think\nOf the first small joys. Think of how our parents\nWould whistle as they packed for the long summers,\nOr, busy about the usual tasks of parents,\nSmile down at us suddenly for some secret reason,\nOr simply smile, not needing any reason.\n\nBut even in the summers we remember\nThe forest had its eyes, the sea its voices,\nAnd there were roads no map would ever master,\nLost roads and moonless nights and ancient voices--\nAnd night crept down with an awful slowness toward the water;\nAnd there were lanterns once, doubled in the water.\n\nSadness has its own beauty, of course. Toward dusk,\nLet us say, the river darkens and look bruised,\nAnd we stand looking out at it through rain.\nIt is as if life itself were somehow bruised\nAnd tender at this hour; and a few tears commence.\nNot that they are but that they feel immense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sestina": { - "title": "“Sestina”", - "body": "I often wonder about the others,\nWhere they are bound for on the voyage,\nWhat is the reason for their silence,\nWas there some reason to go away?\nIt may be they carry a dark burden,\nExpect some harm, or have done harm.\n\nHow can we show them we mean no harm?\nApproach them? But they shy from others.\nOffer, perhaps, to share the burden?\nThey change the subject to the voyage,\nOr turn abruptly, walk away,\nTo brood against the rail in silence.\n\nWhat is defeated by their silence\nMore than love, less than harm?\nMany already are looking their way,\nPretending not to. Eyes of others\nWill follow them now the whole voyage\nAnd add a little to the burden.\n\nOthers touch hands to ease the burden,\nOr stroll, companionable in silence,\nCounting the stars which bless the voyage,\nBut let the foghorn speak of harm,\nTheir hearts will stammer like the others’,\nTheir hands seem in each other’s way.\n\nIt is so obvious, in a way.\nEach is alone, each with his burden.\nTo others they are always others,\nAnd they can never break the silence,\nSay, lightly, thou, but to their harm\nAlthough they make many a voyage.\n\nWhat do they wish for from the voyage\nBut to awaken far away\nBy miracle free from every harm,\nHearing at dawn that sweet burden\nThe birds cry after a long silence?\nWhere is that country not like others?\n\nThere is no way to ease the burden.\nThe voyage leads on from harm to harm,\nA land of others and of silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "there-is-a-gold-light-in-certain-old-paintings": { - "title": "“There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings”", - "body": "There is a gold light in certain old paintings\nThat represents a diffusion of sunlight.\nIt is like happiness, when we are happy.\nIt comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,\n And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross\n Share in its charity equally with the cross.\n\nOrpheus hesitated beside the black river.\nWith so much to look forward to he looked back.\nWe think he sang then, but the song is lost.\nAt least he had seen once more the beloved back.\n I say the song went this way: _O prolong\n Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong._\n\nThe world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.\nOne day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.\nThe orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.\nOur work will be seen as strong and clean and good.\n And all that we suffered through having existed\n Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-ten-months-child": { - "title": "“To a Ten-Month’s Child”", - "body": "Late arrival, no\nOne would think of blaming you\nFor hesitating so.\n\nWho, setting his hand to knock\nAt a door so strange as this one,\nMight not draw back?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "villanelle-at-sundown": { - "title": "“Villanelle at Sundown”", - "body": "Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.\nThe river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.\nWhy this is, I’ll never be able to tell you.\n\nOr are Americans half in love with failure?\nOne used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.\n(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow--\n\nremember?) Or does mere distance lend a value\nto things?--false, it may be, but the view is hardly cheapened.\nWhy this is, I’ll never be able to tell you.\n\nThe smoke, those tiny cars, the whole urban milieu--\nOne can like anything diminishment has sharpened.\nOur painter friend, Lang, might show the whole thing yellow\n\nand not be much off. It’s nuance that counts, not color--\nAs in some late James novel, saved up for the long weekend\nand vivid with all the Master simply won’t tell you.\n\nHow frail our generation has got, how sallow\nand pinched with just surviving! We all go off the deep end\nfinally, gold beaten thinly out to yellow.\nAnd why this is, I’ll never be able to tell you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "women-in-love": { - "title": "“Women in Love”", - "body": "It always comes, and when it comes they know.\nTo will it is enough to bring them there.\nThe knack is this, to fasten and not let go.\n\nTheir limbs are charmed; they cannot stay or go.\nDesire is limbo: they’re unhappy there.\nIt always comes, and when it comes they know.\n\nTheir choice of hells would be the one they know.\nDante describes it, the wind circling there.\nThe knack is this, to fasten and not let go.\n\nThe wind carries them where they want to go.\nYet it seems cruel to strangers passing there.\nIt always comes, and when it comes they know\nThe knack is this, to fasten and not let go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "kabir": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kabir", - "birth": { - "year": 1440, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1518, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "indian", - "language": "hindi", - "flag": "🇮🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabir", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "indian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "i-said-to-the-wanting-creature-inside-me": { - "title": "“I said to the wanting-creature inside me …”", - "body": "I said to the wanting-creature inside me:\nWhat is this river you want to cross?\nThere are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.\nDo you see anyone moving about on that bank, or resting?\n\nThere is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.\nThere is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.\nThere is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!\n\nAnd there is no body, and no mind!\nDo you believe there is some place that will make the soul less thirsty?\nIn that great absence you will find nothing.\n\nBe strong then, and enter into your own body;\nthere you have a solid place for your feet.\nThink about it carefully!\nDon’t go off somewhere else!\n\nKabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,\nand stand firm in that which you are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hindi" - } - }, - "the-time-before-death": { - "title": "“The Time Before Death”", - "body": "Friend? hope for the Guest while you are alive.\nJump into experience while you are alive!\nThink … and think … while you are alive.\nWhat you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.\n\nIf you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,\ndo you think ghosts will do it after?\n\nThe idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic\njust because the body is rotten--\nthat is all fantasy.\nWhat is found now is found then.\nIf you find nothing now,\nyou will simply end up with an apartment in the\n City of Death.\nIf you make love with the divine now, in the next\nlife you will have the face of satisfied desire.\n\nSo plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,\nBelieve in the Great Sound!\n\nKabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,\nit is the intensity of the longing for the Guest\nthat does all the work.\n\nLook at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hindi", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - } - } - }, - "anna-kamienska": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anna Kamieńska", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1986 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Kamieńska", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "angels": { - "title": "“Angels”", - "body": "There are angels there really are angels\ndressed in jackets in out-of-fashion dresses\nthey sit at a table drink beer chat\nyawn go to bed late\nand there in the wardrobe a white wing rests\nThey don’t feel disgust at the dead\nat their toil and sweat\nbecause to die is as hard as to pull a plough in spring\nIn a doctor’s white coat they bend over the ill\nand to the old they say Well you have to accept it all\nIn halos of baldness in braids of gray\nthey pretend sometimes to be a priest who cries alone\nwith forehead resting on a table\nSuddenly they call out a poet’s word\ntheir high voice pushes its way through a symphony\nand they die young in place of those who don’t want to die\nor disappear suddenly from under the surgeon’s knife\nThe anesthetist runs shouts Tie up the veins\nbut they’re already far\nalready in heaven\nand only a cloud rustles nearby only a cloud rustles\nThere are angels there really are angels\nthey catch every sound idea with the fishing-rod of intelligence\nand from pails full of truth pour a bit for good luck\nthey bake cake poach fish in white wine\nthey like good jokes\nthe whites of their eyes shine with laughter\nand we don’t know whether in a moon-bound vehicle\none won’t on the sly squeeze into a space suit\nTheir calves are too strong as in Flemish paintings\nthey are corporeal like pale oxen at the stream\nbut a fiercely kind force is in them\na friendly breeze billows their robes\nThey sit quietly in a waiting room at the dentist\nin an empty chair and are the last to enter\nA long silence trails behind them\nthat’s how you can recognize there are angels", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "futile": { - "title": "“Futile”", - "body": "I carry from childhood all this baggage:\nFather’s violin in a black case,\nA wooden plate with an inscription\n_To break bread with friends is best,_\nOne narrow road\nWith a passing shadow of a horse and cart,\nA wall marked with mold,\nA child’s folding bed,\nA vase painted with doves,\nObjects\nMore durable than life,\nA stuffed bird\nOn top of a beat-up cupboard,\nAh, and this huge\nPyramid of stairs and doors.\nIt’s not easy\nTo carry so much.\nAnd I know that until the end\nI won’t dispose of a single piece.\nUntil my wise mother\nComes from nowhere to nowhere\nAnd says,\n“Give it up, my darling daughter.\nIt makes no sense.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "grandparents": { - "title": "“Grandparents”", - "body": "Our grandparents are happy\nin the photo, green as a leaf.\nOur young grandmother in love\nlays her head on her husband’s shoulder.\nGrandfather doesn’t know yet he has died.\nHe puffs up his chest garlanded with a fob-chain.\nIndulgently he holds his arm around\nour young dead grandmother.\nHe doesn’t know yet that next to them\nstrange cousins rest, and their dead children,\nunder the porch where breakfast was served\non past mornings of a pleasant summer.\nOur grandmother doesn’t know at all\nthat her hands clasp a cold rosary.\nIn the tilt of her neck happiness plays\nlike music in a dead instrument.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-hand": { - "title": "“A Hand”", - "body": "This thing is called a hand.\nThis thing brought closer to the eyes\ncovers the world.\nBigger than the sun, a horse, a house,\na cloud, a fly.\nThis thing of fingers.\nThis thing with a lovely pink surface.\nIt is me myself.\nIt’s not merely lovely.\nIt grabs, holds, pulls, rips off\nand its other works are numberless.\nIt’s not merely lovely.\nIt directs armies,\nworks the soil,\nmurders with an axe,\nspreads women’s thighs\nand its other works are numberless.\nIts five fingers--five crimes.\nIts five fingers--one merit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "i-was-born": { - "title": "“I Was Born”", - "body": "I was born\nand I died\nI don’t remember anything else\na green river perhaps\na green tree\ngreen eyes\nand about this so much ado\nsuch regrets about this", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "i-was-standing": { - "title": "“I Was Standing”", - "body": "I was standing with my sister over the patch of grave\nAnd we were speaking about some very important things.\nThe boy is doing better at school. The youngest already chatters.\nIf you aren’t mean to people, they’ll be good to you.\nThe apartment’s freshly painted. We bought a table, chairs.\nA neighbor stops by sometimes, and says, ‘Your place looks nice.’\nThe plant that mother liked so much is in bloom.\nI wanted to bring flowers but was afraid they’d wilt.\nThe air, tree, stone and earth all listen as we talk\nAnd only the one for whom we bring this news can’t hear.\nBut perhaps she stands behind us and smiles at life’s affairs\nAnd whispers, ‘I know, my darlings. No need to tell me any more.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-path-in-the-woods": { - "title": "“A Path in the Woods”", - "body": "I don’t trust the truth of memories\nbecause what leaves us\ndeparts forever\nThere’s only one current of this sacred river\nbut I still want to remain faithful\nto my first astonishments\nto recognize as wisdom the child’s wonder\nand to carry in myself until the end a path\nin the woods of my childhood\ndappled with patches of sunlight\nto search for it everywhere\nin museums in the shade of churches\nthis path on which I ran unaware\na six-year old\ntoward my primary mysterious aloneness", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-prayer-that-will-be-answered": { - "title": "“A Prayer that Will Be Answered”", - "body": "Lord let me suffer much\nand then die\n\nLet me walk through silence\nand leave nothing behind not even fear\n\nMake the world continue\nlet the ocean kiss the sand just as before\n\nLet the grass stay green\nso that the frogs can hide in it\n\nso that someone can bury his face in it\nand sob out his love\n\nMake the day rise brightly\nas if there were no more pain\n\nAnd let my poem stand clear as a windowpane\nbumped by a bumblebee’s head", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "she-gets-up": { - "title": "“She Gets Up”", - "body": "She gets up, moves away from her closed mouth,\nShe, immobile for so long,\nWalks! Steps carefully, like someone\nGetting up after a long, long illness.\nShe walks through his forehead, through my heart,\nThrough another’s tangled hair. She walks--on her own.\nFor a moment she looks, puzzled,\nAt the abandoned body and, without regrets,\nAt us, bent in pain in a morning fog\nLike roadside branches. She pushes them\nAside and departs. She fades into radiance.\n\nIf I could only believe it! But I didn’t see anything\nBesides the eyes congealed with tears\nAnd the cold indifferent hands. Mama!", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "those-who-carry": { - "title": "“Those Who Carry”", - "body": "Those who carry grand pianos\nto the tenth floor wardrobes and coffins\nthe old man with a bundle of wood hobbling toward the horizon\nthe lady with a hump of nettles\nthe madwoman pushing her baby carriage\nfull of empty vodka bottles\nthey all will be raised up\nlike a seagull’s feather like a dry leaf\nlike an eggshell a scrap of newspaper on the street\n\nBlessed are those who carry\nfor they will be raised", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - } - } - }, - "kostas-kariotakis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kostas Kariotakis", - "birth": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostas_Karyotakis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "lives": { - "title": "“Lives”", - "body": "And so they go and die the same way they live.\n\nI speak of lives given to the light\nof serene love, and while they flow\nlike streams, they keep that light inside\neternally inseparable, just as\nthe sky glints in rivers,\njust as suns flow through the skies.\nI speak of lives given to the light …\n\nI speak of brief lives draping\na woman’s rubied lips, just as\nvotive offerings, silver hearts, are draped\non the icon-screen up front.\nThese lives on a woman’s beloved lips\nare likewise humble and true.\nI speak of brief lives draping …\n\nNo one mistrusts them.\nJust as--quiet and dark\nand foreign and sad--they follow\nthe footstep, the idea of a lithe woman\n(and she isn’t mistrusted), so they\nwill droop toward the earth, will fade quietly.\nNo one mistrusts them …", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Keith Taylor & William W. Reader" - } - }, - "nostalgia": { - "title": "“Nostalgia”", - "body": "From the depth of good times\nour loves greet us bitterly\n\nYou’re not in love, you say, and you don’t remember.\nAnd if your heart has filled and you shed the tears\nthat you couldn’t shed like you did at first,\nyou’re not in love and you don’t remember, even though you cry.\n\nSuddenly you’ll see two blue eyes\n--how long it’s been!--that you caressed one night;\nas though inside yourself you hear\nan old unhappiness stirring and waking up.\n\nThese memories of time past\nwill begin their danse macabre;\nand like then, your bitter tear will\nwell up on your eyelid and fall.\n\nThe eyes suspended--pale suns--\nthe light that thaws the frozen heart,\nthe dead loves that begin to stir,\nthe old sorrows that again ignite …", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Keith Taylor & William W. Reader" - } - }, - "posthumous-fame": { - "title": "“Posthumous Fame”", - "body": "Our death is needed by the boundless nature all around\nand is craved by the purple mouths of flowers.\nIf Spring were again to come, it will again leave us,\nand then we shall not even be shadows of other shadows.\n\nOur death is awaited by the bright sunlight.\nTo experience another such triumphant dusk,\nand then to leave those April evenings,\nfor the distant kingdoms of the dark.\n\nOnly our lines may stay behind us,\nten solitary lines just to remain, like\npigeons scattered by castaways at luck,\nbut when the message comes it is already late.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Haris Stavrakis" - } - }, - "preveza": { - "title": "“Preveza”", - "body": "Death is the bullies bashing\nagainst the black walls and roof tiling,\ndeath is the women being loved\nin the course of onion peeling.\n\nDeath the squalid, unimportant streets\nwith their glamorous and pompous names,\nthe olive-grove, the surrounding sea, and even\nthe sun, death among all other deaths.\n\nDeath the policeman bending over\nto weigh, a “lacking” portion,\ndeath the harebells on the balcony\nand the teacher with the newspaper.\n\nBase, Guard, Sixty-man Prevezian Rule.\nOn Sunday we’ll listen to the band.\nI’ve taken out a savings booklet,\nmy first deposit drachmas thirty one.\n\nWalking slowly on the quay,\n“do I exist?” you say, and then: “you do not!”\nThe ship approaches. The flag is flying.\nPerhaps Mr. Prefect will be coming.\n\nIf at least, among these people,\none would die of sheer disgust\nsilent, bereaved, with humble manners,\nat the funeral we’d all have fun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Haris Stavrakis", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-story": { - "title": "“A Story”", - "body": "At sixteen they laughed\nyonder, in the springtime afternoon.\nLater their lips became silent\nand in their heart old age did intrude.\nThey had set out as friends\ntwo dry leaves upon the ground.\nLater they even went apart\non some autumn afternoon.\nNow each of them, with lips all pale,\nstooping, kisses his bonds.\nLater they shall bend completely down\nand will pass into the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Haris Stavrakis" - } - }, - "strophes": { - "title": "“Strophes”", - "body": "1.\n\nFor twenty years I gambled\nwith books instead of cards;\nfor twenty years I gambled\nand I squandered my life.\nPoor now I lie down here\nto listen to an easy wisdom\nwhich an old plane tree\nwhispers to me.\n\n\n2.\n\nFree from everything I want\nto sail to the end of the world.\nIf I have any friend left,\nhe should flee, escape.\nAnd when death demands\nthe wealth I’ve amassed,\nyou, my vast bitterness,\nwill be my only estate.\n\n\n3.\n\nYou told me about your life,\nabout the loss of youth,\nabout our love which cries\nover its own death,\nand while in your eyes,\nthe hint of a tear glinted\nbriefly, through the open window\nbright sunlight entered.\n\n\n4.\n\nWhy do I squander my days\none after another?\nAnd as my hair grays\nso the wine turns sour.\nOnly when I gaze\nthrough a crystal glass\nfilled with fresh retsina,\ndoes my life look golden.\n\n\n5.\n\nBefore life abroad could do so,\nnight had already separated us\nfrom everyone we love.\n(Are they all there on the pier?)\nBlow your whistle, ship, we’re late.\nAnd if we approach our destination,\nhold up for a while, then\nblow your whistle so we can finally disembark.\n\n\n6.\n\nPoplars, giants fixed\nhere on the road-side,\nmy trees, you’ve agreed to let\nthe north wind take your leaves.\nYou’re still the shadow of shadows\ncascading across my brow\nwhile I walk the ground below\nand the moon is up on high.\n\n\n7.\n\nJoy! The Joy! Ah the joy of young\nchildren! They capture that girl\nlife and bind her--these handsome,\ndark highwaymen--and make love to her.\nBut your book is always open,\na breeze flips its pages.\nFool, fool, you’ve grown old\nwithout ever being young.\n\n\n8.\n\n--Poet, my laughter flows\nlike honey and scorn, but you\nnever stop beating out\nyour crown of sounds.\n--Girl, I work in vain\nbut what use is the barren\nand wordless vanity\nof your agate eye?\n\n\n9.\n\nFarewell! Farewell! You’ve gone\nwith your heavenly eyes\nand with flowers around your neck,\nyou fair hopes for new loves.\nFarewell, and you--the one\nwho looked back when all the rest\nhad vanished--you saw me again\ntaking the deep dark road.\n\n\n10.\n\nBronze gypsy--tralala!--\nskips wildly over there, filled\nwith joy because he’s worked\nhis bronze all day long,\nand because he has his wife,\nhis property and realm.\nBronze gypsy--tralala!--\ngives a kick to the sun!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Keith Taylor & William W. Reader" - } - }, - "they-betrayed-virtue-and-the-last-came-first": { - "title": "“They betrayed virtue and the last came first …”", - "body": "They betrayed virtue and the last came first.\nWith money the heart is taken and the friend is appraised.\nIf once it was shimmering in the mind, in the eyes, in everything,\nlife is already dark and unfeasible like a legend,\nit’s bitterness on the lip.\n\nDeep Night. With a spirit full of rage I pushed the bed.\nI opened the cobweb-filled rooms. No\nhope. From the window, I saw the shadow\nof the last passer-by. And I shouted in the peacefulness:\n“Misery!”\n\nThe awful word with fire was written in the sky.\nTrees are pointing at it, stars are looking it,\nthe houses have it for a sign and they are graves,\neven the dogs must have heard it and are howling:\nMen do not listen", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Yiannis Vogiatzis" - } - } - } - }, - "erik-axel-karlfeldt": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Erik Axel Karlfeldt", - "birth": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swedish", - "language": "swedish", - "flag": "🇸🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Axel_Karlfeldt", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "swedish" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "nothing-is-like-waiting-times": { - "title": "“Nothing is Like Waiting Times”", - "body": "Nothing is like waiting times,\nspring flood weeks, budding times,\nno may a days spread\nas the clarifying April.\nGet on the last slip of the trail,\nthe forest gives its dull coolness\nand his deep whisper to it.\nI want to donate the lust of summer\nfor the first straws, which glitter\nin a dark pine sink,\nand the drill of the first thrush.\n\nNothing is like times of longing,\nwaiting years, engagement times.\nNo spring a shimmer spreads\nas a secret heartbeat.\nRarely meet, divorce soon,\ndream of everything sweet and dangerous\nlife in its womb bears!\nGolden fruit may shake others;\nI want to linger and give up,\nin my garden I want to watch,\nwhile the trees are budding there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "virgin-mary": { - "title": "“Virgin Mary”", - "body": "She comes down the meadows at Sjugareby.\nShe’s a little hill with almond flower skin,\nyes, like almond blossoms and rose hips far away from the road and the village,\nwhere it never dusts and hikes.\nWhich paths have you walked so that the sun did not burn you?\nWhat have you dreamed, Maria, in your young breast and felt,\nthat your blood does not burn like the others?\nIt shines so wonderfully from your bare hair,\nand thy forehead is as the bow of the moon,\nwhen over Bergsängsbackar he walks white and sloping\nand shines through the spring beats.\n\nNow the evening wind is cooling in the columbine’s trust,\nand yellow lily bells ring holiday and peace;\nbarely gnaws the hem of the pasture, barely breaks the kid of the hem,\nit barely beeps in swallow nests and groves.\nNow Dalarna’s boys and girls go pair by pair:\nyou are chosen above others, you are desired by one where,\nwhat do you go so alone and ponder?\nYou are like a virgin, coming from her first communion table,\nwho wants to stay awake on the quiet night of Pentecost\nwith all the trembling of his heart and think of those words\nshe felt and those under her got to taste.\n\nTurn around, turn around, Maria, now the evening is late.\nYour mother may mourn that you are wandering so alone.\nYou are small and fragile like the crotch arrow branch,\nand in the forest goes the striking bear.\nAlas, the rose you hold is your sign and your care,\nit is brought by an angel from a blessed herb garden:\nyou can step on snakes and thorns.\nYes, that ray, which is so shining and long\nfrom the stronghold of the evening root over Lake Siljan--\nyou could go to paradise tonight your wedding\non the narrow and trembling tiljan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "winter-greeting": { - "title": "“Winter Greeting”", - "body": "Do you meet the north wind, man,\nthen you meet song and dizziness.\nNordens Apoll among the pines father\nwith snow on his lyre.\n\nDo you meet the north wind, man,\nthen you encounter fire and flame.\nNordic Cupid among the spruce father\nwith lingonberry-wrapped bow.\n\nThe weather blows without calm\nfrom the sixteen gates of heaven.\nWho can you trust and believe\nof all the wild winds?\n\nDo you meet the north wind, man,\nthen you meet man and glory,\nfunny and bold, with his eyes clear\nas the New Year’s moon.\n\nGlad I heard his cheerful appeal,\nwhen he drummed on the box.\nSounded his signal through cracks and dampers,\nthen I hid the hard-hearted conclusion.\n\nGlad I have followed so many miles\nhis creaking, white roads,\ndrank from the mountains’ freezing il\nhis abundant health beaks.\n\nCome on, do you agree for the sake of the old man?\nThe chilly evening is low,\nthe sky is full of glistening strings\nto lyres and to arches.\n\nChief, jerk on; I’m your husband,\nyour husband under rare stars.\nBitter fighters follow your team\nand smiling winter terns.\n\nCome and join for the sake of the boy,\nanyone who can smile and sing!\nThe clouds go like flags of gold:\nforward, you combatively young!", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - } - } - }, - "patrick-kavanagh": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Patrick Kavanagh", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Kavanagh", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "advent": { - "title": "“Advent”", - "body": "We have tested and tasted too much, lover--\nThrough a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.\nBut here in the Advent-darkened room\nWhere the dry black bread and the sugarless tea\nOf penance will charm back the luxury\nOf a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom\nThe knowledge we stole but could not use.\n\nAnd the newness that was in every stale thing\nWhen we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking\nWonder in a black slanting Ulster hill\nOr the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking\nOf an old fool will awake for us and bring\nYou and me to the yard gate to watch the whins\nAnd the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.\n\nO after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching\nFor the difference that sets an old phrase burning--\nWe’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning\nOr in the streets where the village boys are lurching.\nAnd we’ll hear it among decent men too\nWho barrow dung in gardens under trees,\nWherever life pours ordinary plenty.\nWon’t we be rich, my love and I, and\nGod we shall not ask for reason’s payment,\nThe why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges\nNor analyse God’s breath in common statement.\nWe have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages\nOf pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour--\nAnd Christ comes with a January flower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "canal-bank-walk": { - "title": "“Canal Bank Walk”", - "body": "Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal\nPouring redemption for me, that I do\nThe will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,\nGrow with nature again as before I grew.\nThe bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third\nParty to the couple kissing on an old seat,\nAnd a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word\nEloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.\nO unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web\nOf fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,\nFeed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib\nTo pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech\nFor this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven\nFrom green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-great-hunger": { - "title": "“The Great Hunger”", - "body": "# I.\n\nClay is the word and clay is the flesh\nWhere the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move\nAlong the side-fall of the hill--Maguire and his men.\nIf we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove\nOf life as it is broken-backed over the Book\nOf Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs\nAnd the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.\nIs there some light of imagination in these wet clods?\nOr why do we stand here shivering?\nWhich of these men\nLoved the light and the queen\nToo long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself\nBefore apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en?\nWe will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,\nTill the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay\nRolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles\nWhere the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.\nA dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,\nA horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing\nA rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.\nOctober playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.\nMaguire watches the drills flattened out\nAnd the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar\nFlameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by\nAnd he trembled his head away and ran free from the world’s halter,\nAnd thought himself wiser than any man in the townland\nWhen he laughed over pints of porter\nOf how he came free from every net spread\nIn the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head\nAnd pretended to his soul\nThat children are tedious in hurrying fields of April\nWhere men are spanning across wide furrows.\nLost in the passion that never needs a wife\nThe pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.\nChildren scream so loud that the crows could bring\nThe seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.\nPatrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air\nAnd hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.\nTurn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.\nWhat is he looking for there?\nHe thinks it is a potato, but we know better\nThan his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.\n‘Move forward the basket and balance it steady\nIn this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,\nAnd straddle the horse,’ Maguire calls.\n‘The wind’s over Brannagan’s, now that means rain.\nGraip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls\nOver the tail-board going down the ruckety pass--\nAnd that’s a job we’ll have to do in December,\nGravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy’s ass\nOut in my clover? Curse o’ God\nWhere is that dog?.\nNever where he’s wanted’ Maguire grunts and spits\nThrough a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.\nHis dream changes like the cloud-swung wind\nAnd he is not so sure now if his mother was right\nWhen she praised the man who made a field his bride.\nWatch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit\nIs a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.\nHe lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body\nIs spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ’s Name.\nHe was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,\nWhen girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant\nThe cry of fillies in season. He could not walk\nThe easy road to destiny. He dreamt\nThe innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.\nO the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.\nIt could not be that back of the hills love was free\nAnd ditches straight.\nNo monster hand lifted up children and put down apes\nAs here.\n ‘O God if I had been wiser!’\nThat was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.\nHe looks, towards his house and haggard. ‘O God if I had been wiser!’\nBut now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes\nDarts like a frightened robin, and the fence\nShows the green of after-grass through a little window,\nAnd he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar\nGod’s truth is life--even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.\nThe horse lifts its head and cranes\nThrough the whins and stones\nTo lip late passion in the crawling clover.\nIn the gap there’s a bush weighted with boulders like morality,\nThe fools of life bleed if they climb over.\nThe wind leans from Brady’s, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,\nRain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;\nA yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne\nThe poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.\nCome with me, Imagination, into this iron house\nAnd we will watch from the doorway the years run back,\nAnd we will know what a peasant’s left hand wrote on the page.\nBe easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMaguire was faithful to death:\nHe stayed with his mother till she died\nAt the age of ninety-one.\nShe stayed too long,\nWife and mother in one.\nWhen she died\nThe knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside\nAnd he was sixty-five.\nO he loved his mother\nAbove all others.\nO he loved his ploughs\nAnd he loved his cows\nAnd his happiest dream\nWas to clean his arse\nWith perennial grass\nOn the bank of some summer stream;\nTo smoke his pipe\nIn a sheltered gripe\nIn the middle of July.\nHis face in a mist\nAnd two stones in his fist\nAnd an impotent worm on his thigh.\nBut his passion became a plague\nFor he grew feeble bringing the vague\nWomen of his mind to lust nearness,\nOnce a week at least flesh must make an appearance.\nSo Maguire got tired\nOf the no-target gun fired\nAnd returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage\nTo the fields once again\nWhere eunuchs can be men\nAnd life is more lousy than savage.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPoor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day\nHe worked for years. It was he that lit the fire\nAnd boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.\nHis mother tall hard as a Protestant spire\nCame down the stairs barefoot at the kettle-call\nAnd talked to her son sharply: ‘Did you let\nThe hens out, you?’ She had a venomous drawl\nAnd a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.\nTwo black cats peeped between the banisters\nAnd gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.\nOutside the window showed tin canisters.\nThe snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring stone\nAnd Patrick on a headland stood alone.\nThe pull is on the traces, it is March\nAnd a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk.\nThe twisting sod rolls over on her back\nThe virgin screams before the irresistible sock.\nNo worry on Maguire’s mind this day\nExcept that he forgot to bring his matches.\n‘Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae,\nFrom every second hill a neighbour watches\nWith all the sharpened interest of rivalry.\nYet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap\nThese men know God the Father in a tree:\nThe Holy Spirit is the rising sap,\nAnd Christ will be the green leaves that will come\nAt Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.\nPrimroses and the unearthly start of ferns\nAmong the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,\nA dead sparrow and an old waistcoat. Maguire learns\nAs the horses turn slowly round the which is which\nOf love and fear and things half born to mind\nHe stands between the plough-handles and he sees\nAt the end of a long furrow his name signed\nAmong the poets, prostitutes. With all miseries\nHe is one. Here with the unfortunate\nWho for half-moments of paradise\nPay out good days and wait and wait\nFor sunlight-woven cloaks. O to be wise\nAs Respectability that knows the price of all things\nAnd marks God’s truth in pounds and pence and farthings.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nApril, and no one able to calculate\nHow far it is to harvest. They put down\nThe seeds blindly with sensuous groping fingers\nAnd sensual dreams sleep dreams subtly underground.\nTomorrow is Wednesday--who cares?\n‘Remember Eileen Farrelly? I was thinking\nA man might do a damned sight worse …’ That voice is blown\nThrough a hole in a garden wall--\nAnd who was Eileen now cannot be known.\nThe cattle are out on grass\nThe corn is coming up evenly.\nThe farm folk are hurrying to catch Mass:\nChrist will meet them at the end of the world, the slow and the speedier.\nBut the fields say: only Time can bless.\nMaguire knelt beside a pillar where he could spit\nWithout being seen. He turned an old prayer round:\n‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph pray for us\nNow and at the Hour.’ Heaven dazzled death.\n‘Wonder should I cross-plough that turnip-ground.’\nThe tension broke. The congregation lifted it head\nAs one man and coughed in unison.\nFive hundred hearts were hungry for life-\nWho lives in Christ shall never die the death.\nAnd the candle-lit Altar and the flowers\nAnd the pregnant Tabernacle lifted a moment to Prophecy\nOut of the clayey hours\nMaguire sprinkled his face with holy water\nAs the congregation stood up for the Last Gospel.\nHe rubbed the dust off his knees with his palm, and then\nCoughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed: Amen.\nOnce one day in June when he was walking\nAmong his cattle in the Yellow Meadow\nHe met a girl carrying a basket\nAnd he was then a young and heated fellow.\nToo earnest, too earnest! He rushed beyond the thing\nTo the unreal. And he saw Sin\nWritten in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.\nFor the strangled impulse there is no redemption.\nAnd that girl was gone and he was counting\nThe dangers in the fields where love ranted\nHe was helpless. He saw his cattle\nAnd stroked their flanks in lieu of wife to handle.\nHe would have changed the circle if he could,\nThe circle that was the grass track where he ran.\nTwenty times a day he ran round the field\nAnd still there was no winning-post where the runner is cheered home.\nDesperately he broke the tune,\nBut however he tried always the same melody lept up from the background,\nThe dragging step of a ploughman going home through the guttery\nHeadlands under an April-watery moon.\nReligion, the fields and the fear of the Lord\nAnd Ignorance giving him the coward’s blow,\nHe dared not rise to pluck the fantasies\nFrom the fruited Tree of Life. He bowed his head\nAnd saw a wet weed twined about his toe.\n\n\n# V.\n\nEvening at the cross-roads--\nHeavy heads nodding out words as wise\nAs the ruminations of cows after milking.\nFrom the ragged road surface a boy picks up\nA piece of gravel and stares at it-and then\nTosses it across the elm tree on to the railway.\nHe means nothing.\nNot a damn thing\nSomebody is coming over the metal railway bridge\nAnd his hobnailed boots on the arches sound like a gong\nCalling men awake. But the bridge is too narrow--\nThe men lift their heads a moment. That was only John,\nSo they dream on.\nNight in the elms, night in the grass.\nO we are too tired to go home yet. Two cyclists pass\nTalking loudly of Kitty and Molly?\nHorses or women? wisdom or folly?\nA door closes on an evicted dog\nWhere prayers begin in Barney Meegan’s kitchen:\nRosie curses the cat between her devotions;\nThe daughter prays that she may have three wishes--\nHealth and wealth and love--\nFrom the fairy who is faith or hope or compounds of.\nAt the cross-roads the crowd had thinned out:\nLast words were uttered. There is no to-morrow;\nNo future but only time stretched for the mowing of the hay\nOr putting an axle in the turf-barrow.\nPatrick Maguire went home and made cocoa\nAnd broke a chunk off the loaf of wheaten bread;\nHis mother called down to him to look again\nAnd make sure that the hen-house was locked. His sister grunted in bed\nThe sound of a sow taking up a new position.\nPat opened his trousers wide over the ashes\nAnd dreamt himself to lewd sleepiness.\nThe clock ticked on. Time passes.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nHealth and wealth and love he too dreamed of in May\nAs he sat on the railway slope and watched the children of the place\nPicking up a primrose here and a daisy there--\nThey were picking up life’s truth singly.\nBut he dreamt of the Absolute envased bouquet--\nAIl or nothing. And it was nothing. For God is not all\nIn one place, complete\nTill Hope comes in and takes it on his shoulder--\nO Christ, that is what you have done for us:\nIn a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.\nHe read the symbol too sharply and turned\nFrom the five simple doors of sense\nTo the door whose combination lock has puzzled\nPhilosopher and priest and common dunce.\nMen build their heavens as they build their circles\nOf friends. God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday--\nA kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears,\nA pearl necklace round the neck of poverty.\nHe sat on the railway slope and watched the evening,\nToo beautifully perfect to use,\nAnd his three wishes were three stones too sharp to sit on,\nToo hard to carve. Three frozen idols of a speechless muse.\n\n\n# VII.\n\n‘Now go to Mass and pray and confess your sins\nAnd you’ll have all the luck,’ his mother said.\nHe listened to the lie that is a woman’s screen\nAround a conscience when soft thighs are spread.\nAnd all the while she was setting up the lie\nShe trusted in Nature that never deceives.\nBut her son took it as literal truth.\nReligion’s walls expand to the push of nature. Morality yields\nTo sense--but not in little tillage fields.\nLife went on like that. One summer morning\nAgain through a hay-field on her way to the shop--\nThe grass was wet and over-leaned the path--\nAnd Agnes held her skirts sensationally up,\nAnd not because the grass was wet either.\nA man was watching her, Patrick Maguire.\nShe was in love with passion and its weakness\nAnd the wet grass could never cool the fire\nThat radiated from her unwanted womb in that metaphysical land\nWhere flesh was thought more spiritual than music\nAmong the stars--out of reach of the peasant’s hand.\nAh, but the priest was one of the people too--\nA farmers son--and surely he knew\nThe needs of a brother and sister.\nReligion could not be a counter-irritant like a blister,\nBut the certain standard, measured and known\nBy which man might re-make his soul though all walls were down\nAnd all earth’s pedestalled gods thrown.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nSitting on a wooden gate,\nSitting on a wooden gate,\nSitting on a wooden gate\nHe didn’t care a damn.\nSaid whatever came into his head,\nSaid whatever came into his head,\nSaid whatever came into his head\nAnd inconsequently sang.\nWhile his world withered away,\nHe had a cigarette to smoke and a pound to spend\nOn drink the next Saturday.\nHis cattle were fat\nAnd his horses all that\nMidsummer grass could make them.\nThe young women ran wild\nAnd dreamed of a child\nJoy dreams though the fathers might forsake them\nBut no one would take them;\nNo man could ever see\nThat their skirts had loosed buttons,\nO the men were as blind as could be.\nAnd Patrick Maguire\nFrom his. purgatory fire\nCalled the gods of the Christian to prove\nThat this twisted skein\nWas the necessary pain\nAnd not the rope that was strangling true love.\nBut sitting on a wooden gate\nSometime in July\nWhen he was thirty-four or five\nHe gloried in the lie:\nHe made it read the way it should,\nHe made life read the evil good\nWhile he cursed the ascetic brotherhood\nWithout knowing why.\nSitting on a wooden gate\nAll, all alone\nHe sang and laughed\nLike a man quite daft,\nOr like a man on a channel raft\nHe fantasied forth his groan.\nSitting on a wooden gate,\nSitting on a wooden gate,\nSitting on a wooden gate\nHe rode in day-dream cars.\nHe locked his body with his knees\nWhen the gate swung too much in the breeze.\nBut while he caught high ecstasies\nLife slipped between the bars.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nHe gave himself another year,\nSomething was bound to happen before then--\nThe circle would break down\nAnd he would carve the new one to his own will.\nA new rhythm is a new life\nAnd in it marriage is hung and money.\nHe would be a new man walking through unbroken meadows\nOf dawn in the year of One.\nThe poor peasant talking to himself in a stable door\nAn ignorant peasant deep in dung.\nWhat can the passers-by think otherwise?\nWhere is his silver bowl of knowledge hung?\nWhy should men be asked to believe in a soul\nThat is only the mark of a hoof in guttery gaps?\nA man is what is written on the label.\nAnd the passing world stares but no one stops\nTo look closer. So back to the growing crops\nAnd the ridges he never loved.\nNobody will ever know how much tortured poetry the pulled weeds on the ridge wrote\nBefore they withered in the July sun,\nNobody will ever read the wild, sprawling, scrawling mad woman’s signature,\nThe hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought.\nLike the afterbirth of a cow stretched on a branch in the wind\nLife dried in the veins of these women and men:\n‘The grey and grief and unloved,\nThe bones in the backs of their hands,\nAnd the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.\nSometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight,\nA narrow slice of divine instruction.\nGoing along the river at the bend of Sunday\nThe trout played in the pools encouragement\nTo jump in love though death bait the hook.\nAnd there would be girls sitting on the grass banks of lanes.\nStretch-legged and lingering staring--\nA man might take one of them if he had the courage.\nBut ‘No’ was in every sentence of their story\nExcept when the public-house came in and shouted its piece.\nThe yellow buttercups and the bluebells among the whin bushes\nOn rocks in the middle of ploughing\nWas a bright spoke in the wheel\nOf the peasant’s mill.\nThe goldfinches on the railway paling were worth looking at--\nA man might imagine then\nHimself in Brazil and these birds the birds of paradise\nAnd the Amazon and the romance traced on the school map lived again.\nTalk in evening corners and under trees\nWas like an old book found in a king’s tomb.\nThe children gathered round like students and listened\nAnd some of the saga defied the draught in the open tomb\nAnd was not blown.\n\n\n# X.\n\nTheir intellectual life consisted in reading\nReynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch,\nWith sometimes an old almanac brought down from the ceiling\nOr a school reader brown with the droppings of thatch.\nThe sporting results or the headlines of war\nWas a humbug profound as the highbrow’s Arcana.\nPat tried to be wise to the abstraction of all that\nBut its secret dribbled down his waistcoat like a drink from a strainer.\nHe wagered a bob each way on the Derby,\nHe got a straight tip from a man in a shop--\nA double from the Guineas it was and thought himself\nA master mathematician when one of them came up\nAnd he could explain how much he’d have drawn\nOn the double if the second leg had followed the first.\nHe was betting on form and breeding, he claimed,\nAnd the man that did that could never be burst.\nAfter that they went on to the war, and the generals\nOn both sides were shown to be stupid as hell.\nIf he’d taken that road, they remarked of a Marshal,\nHe’d have … O they know their geography well\nThis was their university. Maguire was an undergraduate\nWho dreamed from his lowly position of rising\nTo a professorship like Larry McKenna or Duffy\nOr the pig-gelder Nallon whose knowledge was amazing.\n‘A treble, full multiple odds … That’s flat porter …\nAnother one … No, you’re wrong about that thing I was telling you …\nDid you part with your filly, Jack? I heard that you sold her …’\nThe students were all savants by the time of pub-close.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nA year passed and another hurried after it\nAnd Patrick Maguire was still six months behind life--\nHis mother six months ahead of it;\nHis sister straddle-legged across it:--\nOne leg in hell and the other in heaven\nAnd between the purgatory of middle-aged virginity--\nShe prayed for release to heaven or hell.\nHis mother’s voice grew thinner like a rust-worn knife\nBut it cut venomously as it thinned,\nIt cut him up the middle till he became more woman than man,\nAnd it cut through to his mind before the end.\nAnother field whitened in the April air\nAnd the harrows rattled over the seed.\nHe gathered the loose stones off the ridges carefully\nAnd grumbled to his men to hurry. He looked like a man who could give advice\nTo foolish young fellows. He was forty-seven,\nAnd there was depth in his jaw and his voice was the voice of a great cattle-dealer,\nA man with whom the fair-green gods break even.\n‘I think I ploughed that lea the proper depth,\nShe ought to give a crop if any land gives …\nDrive slower with the foal-mare, Joe.’\nJoe, a young man of imagined wives,\nSmiles to himself and answered like a slave:\n‘You needn’t fear or fret.\nI’m taking her as easy, as easy as …\nEasy there Fanny, easy, pet.’\nThey loaded the day-scoured implements on the cart\nAs the shadows of poplars crookened the furrows.\nIt was the evening, evening. Patrick was forgetting to be lonely\nAs he used to be in Aprils long ago.\nIt was the menopause, the misery-pause.\nThe schoolgirls passed his house laughing every morning\nAnd sometimes they spoke to him familiarly--\nHe had an idea. Schoolgirls of thirteen\nWould see no political intrigue in an old man’s friendship.\nLove\nThe heifer waiting to be nosed by the old bull.\nThat notion passed too--there was the danger of talk\nAnd jails are narrower than the five-sod ridge\nAnd colder than the black hills facing Armagh in February.\nHe sinned over the warm ashes again and his crime\nThe law’s long arm could not serve with time.\nHis face set like an old judge’s pose:\nRespectability and righteousness,\nStand for no nonsense.\nThe priest from the altar called Patrick Maguire’s name\nTo hold the collecting-box in the chapel door\nDuring all the Sundays of May.\nHis neighbours envied him his holy rise,\nBut he walked down from the church with affected indifference\nAnd took the measure of heaven angle-wise.\nHe still could laugh and sing,\nBut not the wild laugh or the abandoned harmony now\nThat called the world to new silliness from the top of a wooden gate\nWhen thirty-five could take the sparrow’s bow.\nLet us be kind, let us be kind and sympathetic:\nMaybe life is not for joking or for finding happiness in--\nThis tiny light in Oriental Darkness\nLooking out chance windows of poetry or prayer.\nAnd the grief and defeat of men like these peasants\nIs God’s way--maybe--and we must not want too much\nTo see.\nThe twisted thread is stronger than the wind-swept fleece.\nAnd in the end who shall rest in truth’s high peace?\nOr whose is the world now, even now?\nO let us kneel where the blind ploughman kneels\nAnd learn to live without despairing\nIn a mud-walled space--\nIlliterate unknown and unknowing.\nLet us kneel where he kneels\nAnd feel what he feels.\nOne day he saw a daisy and he thought it\nReminded him of his childhood--\nHe stopped his cart to look at it.\nWas there a fairy hiding behind it?\nHe helped a poor woman whose cow\nHad died on her;\nHe dragged home a drunken man on a winter’s night\nAnd one rare moment he heard the young people playing on the railway stile\nAnd he wished them happiness and whatever they most desired from life.\nHe saw the sunlight and begrudged no man\nHis share of what the miserly soil and soul\nGives in a season to a ploughman.\nAnd he cried for his own loss one late night on the pillow\nAnd yet thanked the God who had arranged these things.\nWas he then a saint?\nA Matt Talbot of Monaghan?\nHis sister Mary Anne spat poison at the children\nWho sometimes came to the door selling raffle tickets\nFor holy funds.\n‘Get out, you little tramps!’ she would scream\nAs she shook to the hens an armful of crumbs,\nBut Patrick often put his hand deep down\nIn his trouser-pocket and fingered out a penny\nOr maybe a tobacco-stained caramel.\n‘You’re soft,’ said the sister; ‘with other people’s money\nIt’s not a bit funny.’\nThe cards are shuffled and the deck\nLaid flat for cutting--Tom Malone\nCut for trump. I think we’ll make\nThis game, the last, a tanner one.\nHearts. Right. I see you’re breaking\nYour two-year-old. Play quick, Maguire,\nThe clock there says it’s half-past ten--\nKate, throw another sod on that fire.\nOne of the card-players laughs and spits\nInto the flame across a shoulder.\nOutside, a noise like a rat\nAmong the hen-roosts.\nThe cock crows over\nThe frosted townland of the night.\nEleven o’clock and still the game\nGoes on and the players seem to be\nDrunk in an Orient opium den.\nMidnight, one o’clock, two.\nSomebody’s leg has fallen asleep.\nWhat about home? Maguire, are you\nUsing your double-tree this week?\nWhy? do you want it? Play the ace.\nThere’s it, and that’s the last card for me.\nA wonderful night, we had. Duffy’s place\nIs very convenient. Is that a ghost or a tree?\nAnd so they go home with dragging feet\nAnd their voices rumble like laden carts.\nAnd they are happy as the dead or sleeping …\nI should have led that ace of hearts.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nThe fields were bleached white,\nThe wooden tubs full of water\nWere white in the winds\nThat blew through Brannagan’s Gap on their way from Siberia;\nThe cows on the grassless heights.\nFollowed the hay that had wings--\nThe February fodder that hung itself on the black branches\nOf the hill-top hedge.\nA man stood beside a potato-pit\nAnd clapped his arms\nAnd pranced on the crisp roots\nAnd shouted to warm himself.\nThen he buck-leaped about the potatoes\nAnd scooped them into a basket.\nHe looked like a bucking suck-calf\nWhose spine was being tickled.\nSometimes he stared across the bogs\nAnd sometimes he straightened his back and vaguely whistled\nA tune that weakened his spirit\nAnd saddened his terrier dog’s.\nA neighbour passed with a spade on his shoulder\nAnd Patrick Maguire bent like a bridge\nWhistled-good morning under his oxter\nAnd the man the other side of the hedge\nChamped his spade on the road at his toes\nAnd talked an old sentimentality\nWhile the wind blew under his clothes.\nThe mother sickened and stayed in bed all day,\nHer head hardly dented the pillow, so light and thin it had worn,\nBut she still enquired after the household affairs.\nShe held the strings of her children’s Punch and Judy, and when a mouth opened\nIt was her truth that the dolls would have spoken\nIf they hadn’t been made of wood and tin--\n‘Did you open the barn door, Pat, to let the young calves in?’\nThe priest called to see her every Saturday\nAnd she told him her troubles and fears:\n‘If Mary Anne was settled I’d die in peace--\nI’m getting on in years.’\n‘You were a good woman,’ said the priest,\n‘And your children will miss you when you’re gone.\nThe likes of you this parish never knew,\nI’m sure they’ll not forget the work you’ve done.’\nShe reached five bony crooks under the tick--\n‘Five pounds for Masses--won’t you say them quick.’\nShe died one morning in the beginning of May\nAnd a shower of sparrow-notes was the litany for her dying.\nThe holy water was sprinkled on the bed-clothes\nAnd her children stood around the bed and cried because it was too late for crying.\nA mother dead! The tired sentiment:\n‘Mother, Mother’ was a shallow pool\nWhere sorrow hardly could wash its feet …\nMary Anne came away from the deathbed and boiled the calves their gruel.\n‘O what was I doing when the procession passed?\nWhere was I looking? Young women and men\nAnd I might have joined them.\nWho bent the coin of my destiny\nThat it stuck in the slot?\nI remember a night we walked\nThrough the moon of Donaghmoyne,\nFour of us seeking adventure,\nIt was midsummer forty years ago.\nNow I know\nThe moment that gave the turn to my life.\nO Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever.’\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nThe world looks on\nAnd talks of the peasant:\nThe peasant has no worries;\nIn his little lyrical fields He ploughs and sows;\nHe eats fresh food,\nHe loves fresh women, He is his own master\nAs it was in the Beginning\nThe simpleness of peasant life.\nThe birds that sing for him are eternal choirs,\nEverywhere he walks there are flowers.\nHis heart is pure, His mind is clear,\nHe can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah talked\nThe peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives.\nThe travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:--\nThere is the source from which all cultures rise,\nAnd all religions,\nThere is the pool in which the poet dips\nAnd the musician.\nWithout the peasant base civilisation must die,\nUnless the clay is in the mouth the singer’s singing is useless.\nThe travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed\nWhen they grasp the steering wheels again.\nThe peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,\nThe peasant is all virtues--let us salute him without irony\nThe peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable--\nWho can react to sun and rain and sometimes even\nRegret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more intensely.\nBrought him up from the sub-soil to an existence\nOf conscious joy. He was not born blind.\nHe is not always blind: sometimes the cataract yields\nTo sudden stone-falling or the desire to breed.\nThe girls pass along the roads\nAnd he can remember what man is,\nBut there is nothing he can do.\nIs there nothing he can do?\nIs there no escape?\nNo escape, no escape.\nThe cows and horses breed,\nAnd the potato-seed\nGives a bud and a root and rots\nIn the good mother’s way with her sons;\nThe fledged bird is thrown\nFrom the nest--on its own.\nBut the peasant in his little acres is tied\nTo a mother’s womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord\nLike a goat tethered to the stump of a tree--\nHe circles around and around wondering why it should be.\nNo crash, No drama.\nThat was how his life happened.\nNo mad hooves galloping in the sky,\nBut the weak, washy way of true tragedy--\nA sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nWe may come out in the October reality, Imagination,\nThe sleety wind no longer slants to the black hill where Maguire\nAnd his men are now collecting the scattered harness and baskets.\nThe dog sitting on a wisp of dry stalks\nWatches them through the shadows.\n‘Back in, back in.’ One talks to the horse as to a brother.\nMaguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather--\nAn old man fondling a new-piled grave:\n‘Joe, I hope you didn’t forget to hide the spade.\nFor there’s rogues in the townland.\nHide it flat in a furrow.\nI think we ought to be finished by to-morrow.\nTheir voices through the darkness sound like voices from a cave,\nA dull thudding far away, futile, feeble, far away,\nFirst cousins to the ghosts of the townland.\nA light stands in a window. Mary Anne\nHas the table set and the tea-pot waiting in the ashes.\nShe goes to the door and listens and then she calls\nFrom the top of the haggard-wall:\n‘What’s keeping you\nAnd the cows to be milked and all the other work there’s to do?’\n‘All right, all right\nWe’ll not stay here all night’\nApplause, applause,\nThe curtain falls.\nApplause, applause\nFrom the homing carts and the trees\nAnd the bawling cows at the gates.\nFrom the screeching water-hens\nAnd the mill-race heavy with the Lammas floods curving over the weir\nA train at the station blowing off steam\nAnd the hysterical laughter of the defeated everywhere.\nNight, and the futile cards are shuffled again.\nMaguire spreads his legs over the impotent cinders that wake no manhood now\nAnd he hardly looks to see which card is trump.\nHis sister tightens her legs and her lips and frizzles up\nLike the wick of an oil-less lamp.\nThe curtain falls--\nApplause, applause.\nMaguire is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a candle\nTo see his way through the vaults and he’ll understand the\nQuality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin.\nHe’ll know the names of the roots that climb down to tickle his feet.\nAnd he will feel no different than when he walked through Donaghmoyne.\nIf he stretches out a hand--a wet clod,\nIf he opens his nostrils--a dungy smell;\nIf he opens his eyes once in a million years--\nThrough a crack in the crust of the earth he may see a face nodding in\nOr a woman’s legs.\nShut them again for that sight is sin.\nHe will hardly remember that life happened to him--\nSomething was brighter a moment. Somebody sang in the distance\nA procession passed down a mesmerized street.\nHe remembers names like Easter and Christmas\nBy colour his fields were.\nMaybe he will be born again, a bird of an angel’s conceit\nTo sing the gospel of life\nTo a music as flighty tangent\nAs a tune on an oboe.\nAnd the serious look of his fields will have changed to the leer of a hobo.\nSwaggering celestially home to his three wishes granted.\nWill that be? will that be?\nOr is the earth right that laughs haw-haw\nAnd does not believe\nIn an unearthly law.\nThe earth that says:\nPatrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:\nThe graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field\nWhere the seed gets no chance to come through\nTo the fun of the sun.\nThe tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.\nSilence, silence. The story is done.\nHe stands in the doorway of his house\nA ragged sculpture of the wind,\nOctober creaks the rotted mattress,\nThe bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.\nThe hungry fiend\nScreams the apocalypse of clay\nIn every corner of this land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "having-confessed": { - "title": "“Having Confessed”", - "body": "Having confessed he feels\nThat he should go down on his knees and pray\nFor forgiveness for his pride, for having\nDared to view his soul from the outside.\nLie at the heart of the emotion, time\nHas its own work to do. We must not anticipate\nOr awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us\nUnless we stay in the unconscious room\nOf our hearts. We must be nothing,\nNothing that God may make us something.\nWe must not touch the immortal material\nWe must not daydream to-morrow’s judgement--\nGod must be allowed to surprise us.\nWe have sinned, sinned like Lucifer\nBy this anticipation. Let us lie down again\nDeep in anonymous humility and God\nMay find us worthy material for His hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "on-raglan-road": { - "title": "“On Raglan Road”", - "body": "On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew\nThat her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;\nI saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,\nAnd I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.\n\nOn Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge\nOf the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,\nThe Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay--\nO I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.\n\nI gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known\nTo the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone\nAnd word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.\nWith her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May\n\nOn a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now\nAway from me so hurriedly my reason must allow\nThat I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay--\nWhen the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "on-an-apple-ripe-september-morning": { - "title": "“On an Apple-Ripe September Morning”", - "body": "On an apple-ripe September morning\nThrough the mist-chill fields I went\nWith a pitch-fork on my shoulder\nLess for use than for devilment.\n\nThe threshing mill was set-up, I knew,\nIn Cassidy’s haggard last night,\nAnd we owed them a day at the threshing\nSince last year. O it was delight\n\nTo be paying bills of laughter\nAnd chaffy gossip in kind\nWith work thrown in to ballast\nThe fantasy-soaring mind.\n\nAs I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered\nAs I looked into the drain\nIf ever a summer morning should find me\nShovelling up eels again.\n\nAnd I thought of the wasps’ nest in the bank\nAnd how I got chased one day\nLeaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,\nHow I covered my face with hay.\n\nThe wet leaves of the cocksfoot\nPolished my boots as I\nWent round by the glistening bog-holes\nLost in unthinking joy.\n\nI’ll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,\nThe best job at the mill\nWith plenty of time to talk of our loves\nAs we wait for the bags to fill.\n\nMaybe Mary might call round …\nAnd then I came to the haggard gate,\nAnd I knew as I entered that I had come\nThrough fields that were part of no earthly estate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "peace": { - "title": "“Peace”", - "body": "And sometimes I am sorry when the grass\nIs growing over the stones in quiet hollows\nAnd the cocksfoot leans across the rutted cart-pass\nThat I am not the voice of country fellows\nWho now are standing by some headland talking\nOf turnips and potatoes or young corn\nOf turf banks stripped for victory.\nHere Peace is still hawking\nHis coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn.\n\nUpon a headland by a whinny hedge\nA hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrow\nThere’s an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridge\nAnd someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.\nOut of that childhood country what fools climb\nTo fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-self-slaved": { - "title": "“The Self-Slaved”", - "body": "Me, I will throw away,\nMe, sufficient for the day.\nThe sticky self that clings adhesions on the wings to love and adventure.\nTo go on the grand tour a man must be free from self-necessity.\n\nSee over there, a created splendor made by one individual from things residual,\nWith all the various qualities hilarious of what hitherto was not.\n\nThrow away thy sloth, self.\nCarry off my wrath with its self-righteous satirizing blotches.\nNo self-exposure, the weakness of the prosa, but undefeatable by means of the beatable.\n\nI will have love.\nHave love from anything made of.\nAnd a life with a shapely form,\nWith gaity and charm and capable of receiving with grace the grace of living.\nAnd wild moments, too, self, when freed from you.\nPrometheus calls me on.\nPrometheus calls me: Son, we’ll both go off together, in this delightful weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shancoduff": { - "title": "“Shancoduff”", - "body": "My black hills have never seen the sun rising,\nEternally they look north towards Armagh.\nLot’s wife would not be salt if she had been\nIncurious as my black hills that are happy\nWhen dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel.\n\nMy hills hoard the bright shillings of March\nWhile the sun searches in every pocket.\nThey are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn\nWith a sheaf of hay for three perishing calves\nIn the field under the Big Forth of Rocksavage.\n\nThe sleety winds fondle the rushy beards of Shancoduff\nWhile the cattle-drovers sheltering in the Featherna Bush\nLook up and say: “Who owns them hungry hills\nThat the water-hen and snipe must have forsaken?\nA poet? Then by heavens he must be poor.”\nI hear and is my heart not badly shaken?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - } - } - }, - "sheila-kaye-smith": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sheila Kaye-Smith", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Kaye-Smith", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "the-ascension-day": { - "title": "“The Ascension Day”", - "body": "So Thou hast left us and our meadows,\nLord, Who hast blessed us and our meadows--\nLord of the sorrel-hearted hay,\nLord of the pollened flowers of May.\nFrom our fields Thou hast ascended,\nPassing into the anthered light\nBeyond the sun, by the winds attended--\nAnd the Sussex fields are white\nWith daisies, and the diadem\nOf the hawthorn crowns the hedge,\nAnd at the blue pond’s reedy edge,\nLike a broidered, silken hem\nThe yellow irises are blown.\nLord, Thou art gone, and gone alone.\n\nDost Thou think of us and our meadows,\nLord, Who hast left us and our meadows?\nIn shining pastures of the sky\nThou walkest, Lord, ascended high.\nThe stars are flowers about Thy feet,\nAnd looking up to Thee we see\nThe River flowing silently--\nThe Milky River, broad and sweet\nAs Rother River here below,\nWhile planets the dim marshes strow,\nAnd constellations flower and fade …\nO Lord, Thou hast Thy country there,\nThe fields and meadows of the sky,\nThe fields and meadows ever fair,\nThe dear, divine, undying glade.\nAt night we too walk in Thy meadows,\nWe walk beside Thee in Thy meadows.\nAt midnight I may hear Thy call,\nAnd ride to Thee on the moon’s light--\nTo where the living waters fall,\nAnd the unfading fields are bright.\nThe stars are flowers about our feet,\nAnd at my side Thou art the sweet\nPerfumed, eternal Breath of May …\n\nWith a sob the pale-eyed day\nWakens at the Rother’s mouth,\nAnd back to earthly fields I go,\nAnd back to earthly toil, and slow\nHot days of the slow, drawling South,\nToiling to keep the fields alive,\nFor our poor meadows cannot thrive\nOn just the memory of Thy feet,\nWhich trod them once and found them sweet.\nOur tears, our sweat, must give them life,\nFor Thou, our Lord, hast gone on high\nTo golden countries of the sky,\nTo golden fields of golden stars,\nBeyond the echo of our strife …\nYet there, upon the shining hill,\nThou dreamest of our meadows still,\nAnd, Lord, we have Thy promise plain\nThat Thou wilt walk in them again.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "the-conception": { - "title": "“The Conception”", - "body": "_Anna’s Voice_:\n\nDown by the rushes I paused and bent--\nI bent with a sudden lovely pang of joy,\nAnd I knew that my hope was true …\nLord God of our fathers, if Thou send me a son\nHe shall be bred in Thy fear,\nBut if Thou send me a daughter\nShe shall be bred in Thy love.\nLord, I pray Thee, send me a girl.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "corpus-christi": { - "title": "“Corpus Christi”", - "body": "Now Thou hast come to the end of Thy pilgrimage, Lord;\nThy lamp glows red like a star at the dim lane’s turning:\nThe bread and the wine of Thy supper are set in the shadows,\nAnd the gleam of Thy cottage calls toilers and wanderers home.\n\nIn the feathery green of the hedges the chervil is blooming--\nPetals and wafers of scent, like the Host in a dream …\nThe night wind is singing the Mass of Thy living and dying,\nO Pilgrim of Love, Who at last hast come to Thy shrine.\n\nThou art at peace. At Thy journey’s end Thou sittest,\nThy cheek on Thy folded hands, before Thee the bread and wine,\nWhile far down the sky the yellow moon dips to her dying,\nAnd the big stars hang like lamps in the fading west.\n\nLord of the journey’s end, if I too should stumble\nAt last to the long lane’s turning, there may I see\nThe beckon and gleam of the lamp that is hung in Thy cottage,\nCalling me home to my supper, my friends, and sleep.\n\nThe Saints sup with Thee, there in the dusk and lamplight--\nMary and Joseph and Peter and all my friends--\nWith faces propped on their tired and toil-worn fingers,\nAnd kind eyes full of the peace of the journey’s end.\n\nTo that feast of the Saints in Light, dear Lord, please bring me,\nWash my dusty feet as on Maundy long ago;\nAt the end of the day let me find my Lord at supper,\nAnd forget my toils with Him in the Breaking of Bread.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - }, - "lady-day-in-harvest": { - "title": "“Lady Day in Harvest”", - "body": "_Mary sleeps--and as she sleeps the angels sing:_\n\nSleep, sleep, sweetly sleep,\nSweetly sleep, sleep, sleep,\nYou who rocked the cradle--so--\nIn the stable long ago.\nGolden Rose of David’s stem,\nSleep, and dream of Bethlehem;\nDream of herald angels singing,\nDream of Christmas bells a-ringing\nIn the steeples of the town,\nTelling of the Christ come down\nTo a stable long ago;\nDream in harvest of the snow;\nDream His head is on your breast,\nThen, smiling, sleep and take your rest--\nGolden Rose of David’s stem,\nSleep and dream of Bethlehem.\n\n\n_Mary sleeps--and as she sleeps her Son sings:_\n\nSleep, sleep, sweetly sleep,\nSweetly sleep, sleep, sleep:\nYou rocked the cradle once for Me,\nMother of sweet liberty;\nAnd now I sing your lullaby,\nWhile angels watch us from the sky,\nAnd the August stars are bright\nIn the dark, hop-scented night.\nRest, darling mother, rest\nWith your head upon My breast,\nFor all the hundred happy hours\nThat My head has lain on yours.\nMother whose hair is grey with love,\n With memories of Calvary’s day …\nDarling, in the fields above\n The young angels wait to play,\nAnd all the holy innocents,\n Who once laid down their lives for Me,\nWill climb into your lap and lie\n Where once I lay so lovingly.\nRest, darling mother, rest\nWith your head upon My breast.\n\n\n_Mary sleeps--and as she sleeps we all sing:_\n\nSleep, sleep, mother, sleep,\nSweetly sleep, sleep, sleep;\nOn His bosom lay your head,\nWhile the angels watch your bed,\nAnd the August stars are red--\n Little mother of joy divine,\n Little mother of purity,\n Sweet mother of eternity--\n(You our mother and He our Brother);\nSo shall heaven’s windows shine\nWith lights of home, burning softly down,\n On your children on their way\n To your door--until the day\nWhen we reach our native town:\nAnd our hands shall knock, and yours unlatch,\nAnd we shall come home to you under the thatch--\nTo you our mother, to Him our Brother,\nSo shall we love you and Him and each other.\n Little mother of joy divine,\nFrom your window in heaven look down,\nAnd light the way to our native town.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "pentecost": { - "title": "“Pentecost”", - "body": "_Veni Creator_\n\nDear Heart of the Eternal Rose--\n O many-coloured Heart of Fire--\nThat in our Lord’s green garden grows,\n Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire.\n\nSweet Honey of the heavenly flowers,\n Distilled from the white lily’s heart,\nDrip on these thirsty lips of ours--\n Thou the anointing Spirit art.\n\nO Wind, down heaven’s long lanes ablow,\n Warm, perfume-laden Breath of Love,\nO Sweetness, on our hearts bestow\n Thy blessed unction from above.\n\nO Sun, in the mild skies ashine,\n O Moon, bewitching all the night,\nThese dark and groping ways of mine\n Enable with perpetual light.\n\nDear Absolution of the Sun,\n Dear Quickener of the meadow’s grace,\nWhen the day’s course of toil is run,\n Anoint and cheer our soiléd face.\n\nWhen evening falls and darkness creeps,\n And the long starry hours have come,\nAnd all the world is tired, and sleeps,\n Keep far our foes, give peace at home.\n\nO Sun, O Wind, O Flower, O Fire! …\nCome, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "st-andrew": { - "title": "“St. Andrew”", - "body": "_The Men of Sussex crying after him_\n\nAndrew, what of the North?\nIn November shadows drear\nWe have heard thee marching forth\nWith songs of a glad new year.\nThou goest to mountains high,\nTo Picts in a Northern fen--\nBut, Andrew, tarry and hear the cry\nOf the little Southern Men.\n\nDown by the seas of Gaul,\nWhere the Roman eagles stand,\nAnderida they call\nOur shaggy forest land.\nWe have no saving health,\nTo us no Word comes forth,\nOn us the gods bestow no wealth--\nYet Andrew goes to the North.\n\nOh, stay and give us grace,\nFor our hearts are grey with dule,\nAs each man lifts his face\nIn the dreadful days of Yule,\nWhen the burning Wheel stands still\nIn the black and dropping skies,\nAnd the Long Man screams upon the hill\nWith the human sacrifice.\n\nAndrew, what of the North?\nOur Druids tell sad tales,\nOur arms have lost their worth\nIn the scrubby hills of Wales;\nBut thy mighty banners go\nForward and pass us by,\nAs the Northern streamers fly and flow\nOn the red wings of the sky.\n\nWe hear strange tales of thee--\nWe hear thou preachest still\nA Man more fair than Bald, a Tree\nMore tall than Ygdrasyl,\nA Bread more strong than meat,\nWater more fierce than wine--\nThan the mead which drunken gods find sweet\nIn the halls where Heroes dine …\n\nTo the little Southern Men\nSaint Andrew answered he:\n“I have heard from the Northern fen\nYour moan from the Gaulish sea;\nAnd though I pass you by,\nAnd may not see your face,\nYet my Lord hath heard your cry,\nAnd He sends you hope of grace.”\n\n“Three saints shall teach the land\nThat lies by the Southern sea;\nThree saints on your shores shall stand--\nA thrice-noble company.\nThe Word that heals and saves,\nWhich to the Scots I send,\nWilfred shall teach by the waves\nThat beat on Manhood’s End.”\n\n“On Havant’s drawling tide,\nWhich round the island swells,\nThe solemn ships shall glide\nTo the chime of Richard’s bells:\nOn Mayfield’s hills the iron\nOf Dunstan’s anvil rings\nAs he hammers gates for Zion\nAnd fights Unholy Things.”\n\n“So faint not--all is well,\nAnd the price of hope is paid\nBy the Lord Who hath harrowed hell,\nAnd hath made the gods afraid.\nEternity keeps the hours\nTill the Sussex Saints go forth--\nWilfred and Richard and Dunstan are yours,\nBut Andrew goes to the North.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_andrew" - } - } - }, - "st-mary-magdalene": { - "title": "“St. Mary Magdalene”", - "body": "Mary Magdalene has looked out of her window,\nHigh in her cottage at Horeham Road;\nFrom her high window has Mary looked down,\nAnd seen all the doings and sights of the town:\nThe boys look up as they pass her abode--\nThe boys look up, but the girls look down.\n\nMary Magdalene has caught sight of the Preacher--\nThe Preacher Who’s come from the town in the west;\nShe hears Him preaching out there on the Green:\nHis words have troubled her heart--she has seen\nHis face, and the sobs are all thick in her breast,\nAnd her tears are the saltest that ever were seen.\n\nFrom Horeham Road to Boreham Street\nAnd High Horse Bridge where the waters meet--\nEast or west, was there ever seen\nSuch a preaching, such a teaching for Mary Magdalene?\n\nA boy calls up to her there at the window:\n“Come down, my sweet, for the night is here,\nAnd the stars are dim in the mists above,\nAnd the darkening field is the place for love--\nCome down, my lovely, come down, my dear,\nAnd show me beauty and give me love.”\n\nBut Mary Magdalene still stands at the window,\nAnd the dusk is white on her tear-stained face,\nFor the Preacher has broken her heart, and it turns\nTo the Word that freezes, the Word that burns,\nThe Word that is Flesh in the market-place,\nWhere the Preacher’s voice through the silence burns.\n\nFrom Horeham Road to Boreham Street\nAnd High Horse Bridge where the waters meet--\nEast or west, was there ever seen\nSuch a turning, such a burning for Mary Magdalene?\n\nMary Magdalene has gone down to the Preacher--\nThe strange Young Man from the western town:\nWith silk she is shining, with scent she is sweet,\nHer eyes are like water, like flowers are her feet,\nAnd when she has come to the Green she falls down\nBefore the Young Preacher and kisses His feet.\n\nShe kisses His feet and she cries out for pardon,\nWith tears and with kisses His feet are all wet;\nThe boys are all staring and no word is said,\nFor she wipes His wet feet with the hair of her head--\nHer lovely brown hair that no boy can forget,\nIt is like a brown beech-wood, the hair of her head.\n\nFrom Horeham Road to Boreham Street\nAnd High Horse Bridge where the waters meet--\nEast or west, was there ever seen\nSuch a sighing, such a crying for Mary Magdalene?\n\nAnd the Preacher has stooped, and has blessed her and raised her,\nAnd the boys are all laughing to see them stand so:\n“Ah, lovely, and have you forgotten so soon\nThe ways of a woman, the ways of the moon,\nAnd all the gay gallants with whom you would go\nAnd show them the madness that’s under the moon?”\n\nThe Preacher has brought Magdalene to His mother,\nAnd His mother has given her a white gown to wear,\nAnd they’ve sat down to supper together all three,\nAnd the boys stand outside in the street and agree\nThat the joke’s gone too far--“Come out, Mary, my dear,\nFor you and these strangers will never agree.”\n\nBut Mary Magdalene has looked out of the window--\nShe stands in the window all white and alone--\n“I will never return while the stars are above\nTo the ways that were far from the true ways of love.\nOh, many a lover poor Mary has known,\nBut never till now has she learned to know love.”\n\nFrom Horeham Road to Boreham Street\nAnd High Horse Bridge where the waters meet--\nEast or west, was there ever seen\nSuch a story, such a glory for Mary Magdalene?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "st-matthew": { - "title": "“St. Matthew”", - "body": "Matthew the Publican sits at the gate of September,\nCounting the gold of the passing and vanishing year--\nThe gold that the Summer must pay with her tears and sighings--\nThe gold of the falling leaves.\n\nThe Lord goes by and, turning, says unto Matthew:\n“Follow Me--follow Me down the long months into Winter,\nFollow Me--follow Me down through the fogs of November,\nWhen the coin of the year is spent and the trees are beggared,\nWith never a golden leaf to drop at the gate--\nFollow Me.”\n\nMatthew the Publican rises to follow his Lord;\nBut first he will make a feast at the gate of September--\nHe will make a feast for the sinners and Saints of the year.\nThe way is long and the Autumn paths are dreary,\nSo before he treads the dark road into the rain\nHe makes a great golden feast, the last feast of Summer,\nAnd he throws his golden treasury over the fields.\nThe dying, fluttering, shimmering leaves of September,\nThe last of the daisies and coltsfoot and dandelions,\nAre Matthew the Publican’s treasure, his gold and silver,\nWhich he throws at his Master’s feet, the feet he must follow\nDown, down the Autumn, into the fogs--\nTo the end of the year.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_matthew" - } - } - }, - "st-peter-&-st-paul": { - "title": "“St. Peter & St. Paul”", - "body": "_The Gate of Lewes_\n\nSt. Peter sits on Caburn Hill,\n St. Paul sits high on Beacon Down,\nAnd there, each side of Wakeland’s Mill,\n They guard the way to Lewes Town:\nThey hold the Sword and Keys in state--\n Our bands are loosed, our sins forgiven--\nThey sit there guarding Lewes Gate\n As they would guard the Gate of Heaven.\n\n_For Lewes Town like Heaven is,\nAnd Heaven is like Lewes Town._\n\nThe golden streets go up the hill,\nIn sunshine dreaming, warm and still;\nOuse river through the vale below\nLike Sion’s Stream of Life doth flow,\nAnd many fruits our fruit-trees bear--\nPlum, cherry, apple, quince, and pear--\nAnd in our streets the live-long day\nThe girls and boys are at their play.\nWhen evening falls the church bells ring,\nAnd faithful voices pray and sing;\nWhen morning comes the faithful feet\nTread to the altar-paces sweet.\nThe Lamb is with us day and night,\nSo, like high Heaven’s, our streets are bright.\nThe Lamb is with us night and day,\nSo two Apostles guard the way\n’Twixt Caburn Hill and Beacon Down,\nThe way that leads to Lewes Town.\n\n_For Lewes Town like Heaven is,\nAnd Heaven is like Lewes Town._\n\nOh, great St. Peter, hear our cry\n From your high sunset seat on Firle,\nPromise by Him you did deny\n That our dear city’s gates of pearl\nShall not be forced by any foe;\n Nor any soul that mongers sin,\nOr in defilement loves to go,\n Or makes a lie, shall enter in.\n\nOh, great St. Paul on Mount Caburn,\n Promise by Him you sought to slay\nThat your fierce, fiery sword shall turn\n Both east and west and every way\nTo guard the sunrise road that swings\n Past Glynde and Wick and Stonery,\nBecause it is the road of kings,\n Who bring their glory from the sea.\n\nThey bring their glory to our feast,\n As to the New Jerusalem;\nThey are the Wise Kings of the East,\n Who journeyed once to Bethlehem;\nAnd through our streets they’ll ride in state,\n From Brooks to Priory, up and down,\nAnd praise the Saints who guard our Gate--\n The holy Gate of Lewes Town.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_peter_and_paul" - } - } - }, - "st-philip-&-st-james-to-st-simon-&-st-jude": { - "title": "“St. Philip & St. James to St. Simon & St. Jude”", - "body": "Said the May Day Saints to the Grey Day Saints,\nSinging across the year:\nHow is it with you in October?\nWith us the meadows are green,\nAnd the grass is warm with the sun,\nAnd strown with the golden pence\nOf the coltsfoot, our offertory.\nThe tapers are lit for our feast--\nTall tapers are lit for our feast\nIn the drooping horse-chestnut boughs;\nAnd the thrushes serve our Mass\nThere in the white thorn hedge,\nWhere the bloom is breaking against\nA smudgy, sweet, grey sky\nThat shall give us holy water …\nOh, tell us, October Saints,\nHow you fare at the end of the year.\nAre you cold in the draught of the year?--\nOn the edge of the fog of All Saints\nAnd the gloom of the Holy Souls?\n\nSaid the Grey Day Saints to the May Day Saints,\nSinging across the year:\nHow is it with you in the Spring?\nThe leaves in the wood are red,\nAnd the frightened trees are a-shake\nDown by the moaning brook.\nThe birds sweep the sky with desperate wings of escape.\nThere is none to serve our Mass,\nAnd the high wind is our Priest.\nNo censer swings for us\nFrom the lime-tree’s blossomed boughs;\nYet have we joy of our feast,\nFor we know that the Child is near--\nThe Child Who is born in December,\nIn the frozen December stillness.\nRound Him the year shall wake,\nAnd climb up the Spring into May,\nTo the feast of Philip and James.\nThe tapers of Christ’s own Mass\nShall rekindle the fading sun,\nAnd Mary shall lift her Babe\nTo the horn of the wintry moon,\nAnd ride Him into a Happy New Year.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Saints in Sussex", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_simon_and_jude" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-keats": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Keats", - "birth": { - "year": 1795 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1821 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-eve-of-st-agnes": { - "title": "“The Eve of St. Agnes”", - "body": "St. Agnes’ Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was!\n The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;\n The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,\n And silent was the flock in woolly fold:\n Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told\n His rosary, and while his frosted breath,\n Like pious incense from a censer old,\n Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,\nPast the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.\n\n His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;\n Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,\n And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,\n Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:\n The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze,\n Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails:\n Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,\n He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails\nTo think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.\n\n Northward he turneth through a little door,\n And scarce three steps, ere Music’s golden tongue\n Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor;\n But no--already had his deathbell rung;\n The joys of all his life were said and sung:\n His was harsh penance on St. Agnes’ Eve:\n Another way he went, and soon among\n Rough ashes sat he for his soul’s reprieve,\nAnd all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve.\n\n That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft;\n And so it chanc’d, for many a door was wide,\n From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft,\n The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide:\n The level chambers, ready with their pride,\n Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:\n The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,\n Star’d, where upon their heads the cornice rests,\nWith hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts.\n\n At length burst in the argent revelry,\n With plume, tiara, and all rich array,\n Numerous as shadows haunting faerily\n The brain, new stuff’d, in youth, with triumphs gay\n Of old romance. These let us wish away,\n And turn, sole-thoughted, to one Lady there,\n Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day,\n On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care,\nAs she had heard old dames full many times declare.\n\n They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,\n Young virgins might have visions of delight,\n And soft adorings from their loves receive\n Upon the honey’d middle of the night,\n If ceremonies due they did aright;\n As, supperless to bed they must retire,\n And couch supine their beauties, lily white;\n Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require\nOf Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.\n\n Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:\n The music, yearning like a God in pain,\n She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,\n Fix’d on the floor, saw many a sweeping train\n Pass by--she heeded not at all: in vain\n Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,\n And back retir’d; not cool’d by high disdain,\n But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:\nShe sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.\n\n She danc’d along with vague, regardless eyes,\n Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short:\n The hallow’d hour was near at hand: she sighs\n Amid the timbrels, and the throng’d resort\n Of whisperers in anger, or in sport;\n ’Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,\n Hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort,\n Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,\nAnd all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn.\n\n So, purposing each moment to retire,\n She linger’d still. Meantime, across the moors,\n Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire\n For Madeline. Beside the portal doors,\n Buttress’d from moonlight, stands he, and implores\n All saints to give him sight of Madeline,\n But for one moment in the tedious hours,\n That he might gaze and worship all unseen;\nPerchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss--in sooth such things have been.\n\n He ventures in: let no buzz’d whisper tell:\n All eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords\n Will storm his heart, Love’s fev’rous citadel:\n For him, those chambers held barbarian hordes,\n Hyena foemen, and hot-blooded lords,\n Whose very dogs would execrations howl\n Against his lineage: not one breast affords\n Him any mercy, in that mansion foul,\nSave one old beldame, weak in body and in soul.\n\n Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came,\n Shuffling along with ivory-headed wand,\n To where he stood, hid from the torch’s flame,\n Behind a broad half-pillar, far beyond\n The sound of merriment and chorus bland:\n He startled her; but soon she knew his face,\n And grasp’d his fingers in her palsied hand,\n Saying, “Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;\nThey are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!”\n\n “Get hence! get hence! there’s dwarfish Hildebrand;\n He had a fever late, and in the fit\n He cursed thee and thine, both house and land:\n Then there’s that old Lord Maurice, not a whit\n More tame for his gray hairs--Alas me! flit!\n Flit like a ghost away.”--“Ah, Gossip dear,\n We’re safe enough; here in this arm-chair sit,\n And tell me how”--“Good Saints! not here, not here;\nFollow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier.”\n\n He follow’d through a lowly arched way,\n Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,\n And as she mutter’d “Well-a--well-a-day!”\n He found him in a little moonlight room,\n Pale, lattic’d, chill, and silent as a tomb.\n “Now tell me where is Madeline,” said he,\n “O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom\n Which none but secret sisterhood may see,\nWhen they St. Agnes’ wool are weaving piously.”\n\n “St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes’ Eve--\n Yet men will murder upon holy days:\n Thou must hold water in a witch’s sieve,\n And be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays,\n To venture so: it fills me with amaze\n To see thee, Porphyro!--St. Agnes’ Eve!\n God’s help! my lady fair the conjuror plays\n This very night: good angels her deceive!\nBut let me laugh awhile, I’ve mickle time to grieve.”\n\n Feebly she laugheth in the languid moon,\n While Porphyro upon her face doth look,\n Like puzzled urchin on an aged crone\n Who keepeth clos’d a wond’rous riddle-book,\n As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.\n But soon his eyes grew brilliant, when she told\n His lady’s purpose; and he scarce could brook\n Tears, at the thought of those enchantments cold,\nAnd Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.\n\n Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,\n Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart\n Made purple riot: then doth he propose\n A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:\n “A cruel man and impious thou art:\n Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream\n Alone with her good angels, far apart\n From wicked men like thee. Go, go!--I deem\nThou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem.”\n\n “I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,”\n Quoth Porphyro: “O may I ne’er find grace\n When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,\n If one of her soft ringlets I displace,\n Or look with ruffian passion in her face:\n Good Angela, believe me by these tears;\n Or I will, even in a moment’s space,\n Awake, with horrid shout, my foemen’s ears,\nAnd beard them, though they be more fang’d than wolves and bears.”\n\n “Ah! why wilt thou affright a feeble soul?\n A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,\n Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;\n Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,\n Were never miss’d.”--Thus plaining, doth she bring\n A gentler speech from burning Porphyro;\n So woful, and of such deep sorrowing,\n That Angela gives promise she will do\nWhatever he shall wish, betide her weal or woe.\n\n Which was, to lead him, in close secrecy,\n Even to Madeline’s chamber, and there hide\n Him in a closet, of such privacy\n That he might see her beauty unespy’d,\n And win perhaps that night a peerless bride,\n While legion’d faeries pac’d the coverlet,\n And pale enchantment held her sleepy-ey’d.\n Never on such a night have lovers met,\nSince Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt.\n\n “It shall be as thou wishest,” said the Dame:\n “All cates and dainties shall be stored there\n Quickly on this feast-night: by the tambour frame\n Her own lute thou wilt see: no time to spare,\n For I am slow and feeble, and scarce dare\n On such a catering trust my dizzy head.\n Wait here, my child, with patience; kneel in prayer\n The while: Ah! thou must needs the lady wed,\nOr may I never leave my grave among the dead.”\n\n So saying, she hobbled off with busy fear.\n The lover’s endless minutes slowly pass’d;\n The dame return’d, and whisper’d in his ear\n To follow her; with aged eyes aghast\n From fright of dim espial. Safe at last,\n Through many a dusky gallery, they gain\n The maiden’s chamber, silken, hush’d, and chaste;\n Where Porphyro took covert, pleas’d amain.\nHis poor guide hurried back with agues in her brain.\n\n Her falt’ring hand upon the balustrade,\n Old Angela was feeling for the stair,\n When Madeline, St. Agnes’ charmed maid,\n Rose, like a mission’d spirit, unaware:\n With silver taper’s light, and pious care,\n She turn’d, and down the aged gossip led\n To a safe level matting. Now prepare,\n Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;\nShe comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray’d and fled.\n\n Out went the taper as she hurried in;\n Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:\n She clos’d the door, she panted, all akin\n To spirits of the air, and visions wide:\n No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!\n But to her heart, her heart was voluble,\n Paining with eloquence her balmy side;\n As though a tongueless nightingale should swell\nHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.\n\n A casement high and triple-arch’d there was,\n All garlanded with carven imag’ries\n Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,\n And diamonded with panes of quaint device,\n Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,\n As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings;\n And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,\n And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,\nA shielded scutcheon blush’d with blood of queens and kings.\n\n Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,\n And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,\n As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;\n Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,\n And on her silver cross soft amethyst,\n And on her hair a glory, like a saint:\n She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,\n Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint:\nShe knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.\n\n Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,\n Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;\n Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;\n Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees\n Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:\n Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,\n Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,\n In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,\nBut dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.\n\n Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,\n In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex’d she lay,\n Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d\n Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away;\n Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;\n Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain;\n Clasp’d like a missal where swart Paynims pray;\n Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,\nAs though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.\n\n Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,\n Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress,\n And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced\n To wake into a slumberous tenderness;\n Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,\n And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,\n Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,\n And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,\nAnd ’tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo!--how fast she slept.\n\n Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon\n Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set\n A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon\n A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:--\n O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!\n The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,\n The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet,\n Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:--\nThe hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.\n\n And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,\n In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,\n While he forth from the closet brought a heap\n Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;\n With jellies soother than the creamy curd,\n And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;\n Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d\n From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,\nFrom silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.\n\n These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand\n On golden dishes and in baskets bright\n Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand\n In the retired quiet of the night,\n Filling the chilly room with perfume light.--\n “And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!\n Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:\n Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,\nOr I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”\n\n Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm\n Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream\n By the dusk curtains:--’twas a midnight charm\n Impossible to melt as iced stream:\n The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam;\n Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies:\n It seem’d he never, never could redeem\n From such a stedfast spell his lady’s eyes;\nSo mus’d awhile, entoil’d in woofed phantasies.\n\n Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,--\n Tumultuous,--and, in chords that tenderest be,\n He play’d an ancient ditty, long since mute,\n In Provence call’d, “La belle dame sans mercy”:\n Close to her ear touching the melody;--\n Wherewith disturb’d, she utter’d a soft moan:\n He ceas’d--she panted quick--and suddenly\n Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone:\nUpon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.\n\n Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,\n Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:\n There was a painful change, that nigh expell’d\n The blisses of her dream so pure and deep\n At which fair Madeline began to weep,\n And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;\n While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;\n Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,\nFearing to move or speak, she look’d so dreamingly.\n\n “Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now\n Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,\n Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;\n And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:\n How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!\n Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,\n Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!\n Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,\nFor if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”\n\n Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far\n At these voluptuous accents, he arose\n Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star\n Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;\n Into her dream he melted, as the rose\n Blendeth its odour with the violet,--\n Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows\n Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet\nAgainst the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.\n\n ’Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:\n “This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!”\n ’Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:\n “No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!\n Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.--\n Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?\n I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine,\n Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;--\nA dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing.”\n\n “My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!\n Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?\n Thy beauty’s shield, heart-shap’d and vermeil dyed?\n Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest\n After so many hours of toil and quest,\n A famish’d pilgrim,--sav’d by miracle.\n Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest\n Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think’st well\nTo trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.”\n\n “Hark! ’tis an elfin-storm from faery land,\n Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:\n Arise--arise! the morning is at hand;--\n The bloated wassaillers will never heed:--\n Let us away, my love, with happy speed;\n There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,--\n Drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:\n Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,\nFor o’er the southern moors I have a home for thee.”\n\n She hurried at his words, beset with fears,\n For there were sleeping dragons all around,\n At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears--\n Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found.--\n In all the house was heard no human sound.\n A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door;\n The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,\n Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar;\nAnd the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.\n\n They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;\n Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;\n Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,\n With a huge empty flaggon by his side:\n The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,\n But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:\n By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:--\n The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;--\nThe key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.\n\n And they are gone: ay, ages long ago\n These lovers fled away into the storm.\n That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,\n And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form\n Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,\n Were long be-nightmar’d. Angela the old\n Died palsy-twitch’d, with meagre face deform;\n The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,\nFor aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_agnes_eve" - } - } - }, - "fancy": { - "title": "“Fancy”", - "body": "Ever let the Fancy roam,\nPleasure never is at home:\nAt a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,\nLike to bubbles when rain pelteth;\nThen let winged Fancy wander\nThrough the thought still spread beyond her:\nOpen wide the mind’s cage-door,\nShe’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.\nO sweet Fancy! let her loose;\nSummer’s joys are spoilt by use,\nAnd the enjoying of the Spring\nFades as does its blossoming;\nAutumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too,\nBlushing through the mist and dew,\nCloys with tasting: What do then?\nSit thee by the ingle, when\nThe sear faggot blazes bright,\nSpirit of a winter’s night;\nWhen the soundless earth is muffled,\nAnd the caked snow is shuffled\nFrom the ploughboy’s heavy shoon;\nWhen the Night doth meet the Noon\nIn a dark conspiracy\nTo banish Even from her sky.\nSit thee there, and send abroad,\nWith a mind self-overaw’d,\nFancy, high-commission’d:--send her!\nShe has vassals to attend her:\nShe will bring, in spite of frost,\nBeauties that the earth hath lost;\nShe will bring thee, all together,\nAll delights of summer weather;\nAll the buds and bells of May,\nFrom dewy sward or thorny spray;\nAll the heaped Autumn’s wealth,\nWith a still, mysterious stealth:\nShe will mix these pleasures up\nLike three fit wines in a cup,\nAnd thou shalt quaff it:--thou shalt hear\nDistant harvest-carols clear;\nRustle of the reaped corn;\nSweet birds antheming the morn:\nAnd, in the same moment, hark!\n’Tis the early April lark,\nOr the rooks, with busy caw,\nForaging for sticks and straw.\nThou shalt, at one glance, behold\nThe daisy and the marigold;\nWhite-plum’d lillies, and the first\nHedge-grown primrose that hath burst;\nShaded hyacinth, alway\nSapphire queen of the mid-May;\nAnd every leaf, and every flower\nPearled with the self-same shower.\nThou shalt see the field-mouse peep\nMeagre from its celled sleep;\nAnd the snake all winter-thin\nCast on sunny bank its skin;\nFreckled nest-eggs thou shalt see\nHatching in the hawthorn-tree,\nWhen the hen-bird’s wing doth rest\nQuiet on her mossy nest;\nThen the hurry and alarm\nWhen the bee-hive casts its swarm;\nAcorns ripe down-pattering,\nWhile the autumn breezes sing.\n\nOh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;\nEvery thing is spoilt by use:\nWhere’s the cheek that doth not fade,\nToo much gaz’d at? Where’s the maid\nWhose lip mature is ever new?\nWhere’s the eye, however blue,\nDoth not weary? Where’s the face\nOne would meet in every place?\nWhere’s the voice, however soft,\nOne would hear so very oft?\nAt a touch sweet Pleasure melteth\nLike to bubbles when rain pelteth.\nLet, then, winged Fancy find\nThee a mistress to thy mind:\nDulcet-ey’d as Ceres’ daughter,\nEre the God of Torment taught her\nHow to frown and how to chide;\nWith a waist and with a side\nWhite as Hebe’s, when her zone\nSlipt its golden clasp, and down\nFell her kirtle to her feet,\nWhile she held the goblet sweet\nAnd Jove grew languid.--Break the mesh\nOf the Fancy’s silken leash;\nQuickly break her prison-string\nAnd such joys as these she’ll bring.--\nLet the winged Fancy roam,\nPleasure never is at home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1820 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "la-belle-dame-sans-merci": { - "title": "“La Belle Dame Sans Merci”", - "body": "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,\n Alone and palely loitering?\nThe sedge has withered from the lake,\n And no birds sing.\n\nO what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,\n So haggard and so woe-begone?\nThe squirrel’s granary is full,\n And the harvest’s done.\n\nI see a lily on thy brow,\n With anguish moist and fever-dew,\nAnd on thy cheeks a fading rose\n Fast withereth too.\n\nI met a lady in the meads,\n Full beautiful--a faery’s child,\nHer hair was long, her foot was light,\n And her eyes were wild.\n\nI made a garland for her head,\n And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;\nShe looked at me as she did love,\n And made sweet moan\n\nI set her on my pacing steed,\n And nothing else saw all day long,\nFor sidelong would she bend, and sing\n A faery’s song.\n\nShe found me roots of relish sweet,\n And honey wild, and manna-dew,\nAnd sure in language strange she said--\n “I love thee true”.\n\nShe took me to her Elfin grot,\n And there she wept and sighed full sore,\nAnd there I shut her wild wild eyes\n With kisses four.\n\nAnd there she lullèd me asleep,\n And there I dreamed--Ah! woe betide!--\nThe latest dream I ever dreamt\n On the cold hill side.\n\nI saw pale kings and princes too,\n Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;\nThey cried--“La Belle Dame sans Merci\n Thee hath in thrall!”\n\nI saw their starved lips in the gloam,\n With horrid warning gapèd wide,\nAnd I awoke and found me here,\n On the cold hill’s side.\n\nAnd this is why I sojourn here,\n Alone and palely loitering,\nThough the sedge is withered from the lake,\n And no birds sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "ode-on-a-grecian-urn": { - "title": "“Ode on a Grecian Urn”", - "body": "Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,\n Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,\nSylvan historian, who canst thus express\n A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:\nWhat leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape\n Of deities or mortals, or of both,\n In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?\nWhat men or gods are these? What maidens loth?\n What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?\n What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?\n\nHeard melodies are sweet, but those unheard\n Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;\nNot to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,\n Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:\nFair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave\n Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;\n Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,\nThough winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;\n She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,\n For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!\n\nAh, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed\n Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;\nAnd, happy melodist, unwearied,\n For ever piping songs for ever new;\nMore happy love! more happy, happy love!\n For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,\n For ever panting, and for ever young;\nAll breathing human passion far above,\n That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,\n A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.\n\nWho are these coming to the sacrifice?\n To what green altar, O mysterious priest,\nLead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,\n And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?\nWhat little town by river or sea shore,\n Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,\n Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?\nAnd, little town, thy streets for evermore\n Will silent be; and not a soul to tell\n Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.\n\nO Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede\n Of marble men and maidens overwrought,\nWith forest branches and the trodden weed;\n Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought\nAs doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!\n When old age shall this generation waste,\n Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe\nThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,\n “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all\n Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "to-autumn": { - "title": "“To Autumn”", - "body": "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,\nClose bosom-friend of the maturing sun;\nConspiring with him how to load and bless\nWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;\nTo bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,\nAnd fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;\nTo swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells\nWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,\nAnd still more, later flowers for the bees,\nUntil they think warm days will never cease,\nFor summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.\n\nWho hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?\nSometimes whoever seeks abroad may find\nThee sitting careless on a granary floor,\nThy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;\nOr on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,\nDrows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook\nSpares the next swath and all its twined flowers:\nAnd sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep\nSteady thy laden head across a brook;\nOr by a cyder-press, with patient look,\nThou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.\n\nWhere are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?\nThink not of them, thou hast thy music too,--\nWhile barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,\nAnd touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;\nThen in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn\nAmong the river sallows, borne aloft\nOr sinking as the light wind lives or dies;\nAnd full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;\nHedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft\nThe red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;\nAnd gathering swallows twitter in the skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819, - "month": "september", - "day": 19 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-keble": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Keble", - "birth": { - "year": 1792 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keble", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "advent-sunday": { - "title": "“Advent Sunday”", - "body": "Awake--again the Gospel-trump is blown--\nFrom year to year it swells with louder tone,\n From year to year the signs of wrath\n Are gathering round the Judge’s path,\nStrange words fulfilled, and mighty works achieved,\nAnd truth in all the world both hated and believed.\n\nAwake! why linger in the gorgeous town,\nSworn liegemen of the Cross and thorny crown?\n Up from your beds of sloth for shame,\n Speed to the eastern mount like flame,\nNor wonder, should ye find your King in tears,\nE’en with the loud Hosanna ringing in His ears.\n\nAlas! no need to rouse them: long ago\nThey are gone forth to swell Messiah’s show:\n With glittering robes and garlands sweet\n They strew the ground beneath His feet:\nAll but your hearts are there--O doomed to prove\nThe arrows winged in Heaven for Faith that will not love!\n\nMeanwhile He passes through th’ adoring crowd,\nCalm as the march of some majestic cloud,\n That o’er wild scenes of ocean-war\n Holds its still course in Heaven afar:\nE’en so, heart-searching Lord, as years roll on,\nThou keepest silent watch from Thy triumphal throne:\n\nE’en so, the world is thronging round to gaze\nOn the dread vision of the latter days,\n Constrained to own Thee, but in heart\n Prepared to take Barabbas’ part:\n‘Hosanna’ now, to-morrow ‘Crucify,’\nThe changeful burden still of their rude lawless cry.\n\nYet in that throng of selfish hearts untrue\nThy sad eye rests upon Thy faithful few,\n Children and childlike souls are there,\n Blind Bartimeus’ humble prayer,\nAnd Lazarus wakened from his four days’ sleep,\nEnduring life again, that Passover to keep.\n\nAnd fast beside the olive-bordered way\nStands the blessed home where Jesus deigned to stay,\n The peaceful home, to Zeal sincere\n And heavenly Contemplation dear,\nWhere Martha loved to wait with reverence meet,\nAnd wiser Mary lingered at Thy sacred feet.\n\nStill through decaying ages as they glide,\nThou lov’st Thy chosen remnant to divide;\n Sprinkled along the waste of years\n Full many a soft green isle appears:\nPause where we may upon the desert road,\nSome shelter is in sight, some sacred safe abode.\n\nWhen withering blasts of error swept the sky,\nAnd Love’s last flower seemed fain to droop and die,\n How sweet, how lone the ray benign\n On sheltered nooks of Palestine!\nThen to his early home did Love repair,\nAnd cheered his sickening heart with his own native air.\n\nYears roll away: again the tide of crime\nHas swept Thy footsteps from the favoured clime\n Where shall the holy Cross find rest?\n On a crowned monarch’s mailed breast:\nLike some bright angel o’er the darkling scene,\nThrough court and camp he holds his heavenward course serene.\n\nA fouler vision yet; an age of light,\nLight without love, glares on the aching sight:\n Oh, who can tell how calm and sweet,\n Meek Walton, shows thy green retreat,\nWhen wearied with the tale thy times disclose,\nThe eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose?\n\nThus bad and good their several warnings give\nOf His approach, whom none may see and live:\n Faith’s ear, with awful still delight,\n Counts them like minute-bells at night.\nKeeping the heart awake till dawn of morn,\nWhile to her funeral pile this aged world is borne.\n\nBut what are Heaven’s alarms to hearts that cower\nIn wilful slumber, deepening every hour,\n That draw their curtains closer round,\n The nearer swells the trumpet’s sound?\nLord, ere our trembling lamps sink down and die,\nTouch us with chastening hand, and make us feel Thee nigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "advent_sunday" - } - } - }, - "ascension-day": { - "title": "“Ascension Day”", - "body": "Soft cloud, that while the breeze of May\nChants her glad matins in the leafy arch,\nDraw’st thy bright veil across the heavenly way\nMeet pavement for an angel’s glorious march:\n\nMy soul is envious of mine eye,\nThat it should soar and glide with thee so fast,\nThe while my grovelling thoughts half buried lie,\nOr lawless roam around this earthly waste.\n\nChains of my heart, avaunt I say--\nI will arise, and in the strength of love\nPursue the bright track ere it fade away,\nMy Saviour’s pathway to His home above.\n\nSure, when I reach the point where earth\nMelts into nothing from th’ uncumbered sight,\nHeaven will o’ercome th’ attraction of my birth.\nAnd I shall sink in yonder sea of light:\n\nTill resting by th’ incarnate LORD,\nOnce bleeding, now triumphant for my sake,\nI mark Him, how by seraph hosts adored,\nHe to earth’s lowest cares is still awake.\n\nThe sun and every vassal star,\nAll space, beyond the soar of angel wings,\nWait on His word: and yet He stays His car\nFor every sigh a contrite suppliant brings.\n\nHe listens to the silent tear\nFor all the anthems of the boundless sky--\nAnd shall our dreams of music bar our ear\nTo His soul-piercing voice for ever nigh?\n\nNay, gracious Saviour--but as now\nOur thoughts have traced Thee to Thy glory-throne\nSo help us evermore with thee to bow\nWhere human sorrow breathes her lowly moan.\n\nWe must not stand to gaze too long,\nThough on unfolding Heaven our gaze we bend\nWhere lost behind the bright angelic throng\nWe see CHRIST’S entering triumph slow ascend.\n\nNo fear but we shall soon behold,\nFaster than now it fades, that gleam revive,\nWhen issuing from his cloud of fiery gold\nOur wasted frames feel the true sun, and live.\n\nThen shall we see Thee as Thou art,\nFor ever fixed in no unfruitful gaze,\nBut such as lifts the new-created heart,\nAge after age, in worthier love and praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "ash-wednesday": { - "title": "“Ash Wednesday”", - "body": "“Yes--deep within and deeper yet\nThe rankling shaft of conscience hide,\nQuick let the swelling eye forget\nThe tears that in the heart abide.\nCalm be the voice, the aspect bold,\nNo shuddering pass o’er lip or brow,\nFor why should Innocence be told\nThe pangs that guilty spirits bow?”\n\n“The loving eye that watches thine\nClose as the air that wraps thee round--\nWhy in thy sorrow should it pine,\nSince never of thy sin it found?\nAnd wherefore should the heathen see\nWhat chains of darkness thee enslave,\nAnd mocking say, ‘Lo, this is he\nWho owned a God that could not save’?”\n\nThus oft the mourner’s wayward heart\nTempts him to hide his grief and die,\nToo feeble for Confession’s smart,\nToo proud to bear a pitying eye;\nHow sweet, in that dark hour, to fall\nOn bosoms waiting to receive\nOur sighs, and gently whisper all!\nThey love us--will not God forgive?\n\nElse let us keep our fast within,\nTill Heaven and we are quite alone,\nThen let the grief, the shame, the sin,\nBefore the mercy-seat be thrown.\nBetween the porch and altar weep,\nUnworthy of the holiest place,\nYet hoping near the shrine to keep\nOne lowly cell in sight of grace.\n\nNor fear lest sympathy should fail--\nHast thou not seen, in night hours drear,\nWhen racking thoughts the heart assail,\nThe glimmering stars by turns appear,\nAnd from the eternal house above\nWith silent news of mercy steal?\nSo Angels pause on tasks of love,\nTo look where sorrowing sinners kneel.\n\nOr if no Angel pass that way,\nHe who in secret sees, perchance\nMay bid His own heart-warming ray\nToward thee stream with kindlier glance,\nAs when upon His drooping head\nHis Father’s light was poured from Heaven,\nWhat time, unsheltered and unfed,\nFar in the wild His steps were driven.\n\nHigh thoughts were with Him in that hour,\nUntold, unspeakable on earth--\nAnd who can stay the soaring power\nOf spirits weaned from worldly mirth,\nWhile far beyond the sound of praise\nWith upward eye they float serene,\nAnd learn to bear their Saviour’s blaze\nWhen Judgment shall undraw the screen?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "easter-eve": { - "title": "“Easter Eve”", - "body": "At length the worst is o’er, and Thou art laid\n Deep in Thy darksome bed;\nAll still and cold beneath yon dreary stone\n Thy sacred form is gone;\nAround those lips where power and mercy hung,\n The dews of deaths have clung;\nThe dull earth o’er Thee, and Thy foes around,\nThou sleep’st a silent corse, in funeral fetters wound.\n\nSleep’st Thou indeed? or is Thy spirit fled,\n At large among the dead?\nWhether in Eden bowers Thy welcome voice\n Wake Abraham to rejoice,\nOr in some drearier scene Thine eye controls\n The thronging band of souls;\nThat, as Thy blood won earth, Thine agony\nMight set the shadowy realm from sin and sorrow free.\n\nWhere’er Thou roam’st, one happy soul, we know,\n Seen at Thy side in woe,\nWaits on Thy triumphs--even as all the blest\n With him and Thee shall rest.\nEach on his cross; by Thee we hang a while,\n Watching Thy patient smile,\nTill we have learned to say, “’Tis justly done,\nOnly in glory, LORD, Thy sinful servant own.”\n\nSoon wilt Thou take us to Thy tranquil bower\n To rest one little hour,\nTill Thine elect are numbered, and the grave\n Call Thee to come and save:\nThen on Thy bosom borne shall we descend\n Again with earth to blend,\nEarth all refined with bright supernal fires,\nTinctured with holy blood, and winged with pure desires.\n\nMeanwhile with every son and saint of Thine\n Along the glorious line,\nSitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet\n We’ll hold communion sweet,\nKnow them by look and voice, and thank them all\n For helping us in thrall,\nFor words of hope, and bright examples given\nTo show through moonless skies that there is light in Heaven.\n\nO come that day, when in this restless heart\n Earth shall resign her part,\nWhen in the grave with Thee my limbs shall rest,\n My soul with Thee be blest!\nBut stay, presumptuous--CHRIST with Thee abides\n In the rock’s dreary sides:\nHe from this stone will wring Celestial dew\nIf but this prisoner’s heart he faithful found and true.\n\nWhen tears are spent, and then art left alone\n With ghosts of blessings gone,\nThink thou art taken from the cross, and laid\n In JESUS’ burial shade;\nTake Moses’ rod, the rod of prayer, and call\n Out of the rocky wall\nThe fount of holy blood; and lift on high\nThy grovelling soul that feels so desolate and dry.\n\nPrisoner of Hope thou art--look up and sing\n In hope of promised spring.\nAs in the pit his father’s darling lay\n Beside the desert way,\nAnd knew not how, but knew his GOD would save\n E’en from that living grave,\nSo, buried with our LORD, we’ll chose our eyes\nTo the decaying world, till Angels bid us rise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-holy-innocents": { - "title": "“The Holy Innocents”", - "body": "Say, ye celestial guards, who wait\nIn Bethlehem, round the Saviour’s palace gate,\nSay, who are these on golden wings,\nThat hover o’er the new-born King of kings,\nTheir palms and garlands telling plain\nThat they are of the glorious martyr-train,\nNext to yourselves ordained to praise\nHis Name, and brighten as on Him they gaze?\n\nBut where their spoils and trophies? where\nThe glorious dint a martyr’s shield should bear?\nHow chance no cheek among them wears\nThe deep-worn trace of penitential tears,\nBut all is bright and smiling love,\nAs if, fresh-borne from Eden’s happy grove,\nThey had flown here, their King to see,\nNor ever had been heirs of dark mortality?\n\nAsk, and some angel will reply,\n“These, like yourselves, were born to sin and die,\nBut ere the poison root was grown,\nGod set His seal, and marked them for His own.\nBaptised its blood for Jesus’ sake,\nNow underneath the Cross their bed they make,\nNot to be scared from that sure rest\nBy frightened mother’s shriek, or warrior’s waving crest.”\n\nMindful of these, the firstfruits sweet\nBorne by this suffering Church her Lord to greet;\nBlessed Jesus ever loved to trace\nThe ‘innocent brightness’ of an infant’s face.\nHe raised them in His holy arms,\nHe blessed them from the world and all its harms:\nHeirs though they were of sin and shame,\nHe blessed them in his own and in his Father’s Name.\n\nThen, as each fond unconscious child\nOn the everlasting Parent sweetly smiled\n (Like infants sporting on the shore,\nThat tremble not at Ocean’s boundless roar),\nWere they not present to Thy thought,\nAll souls, that in their cradles Thou hast bought?\nBut chiefly these, who died for Thee,\nThat Thou might’st live for them a sadder death to see.\n\nAnd next to these, Thy gracious word\nWas as a pledge of benediction stored\nFor Christian mothers, while they moan\nTheir treasured hopes, just born, baptised, and gone.\nOh, joy for Rachel’s broken heart!\nShe and her babes shall meet no more to part;\nSo dear to Christ her pious haste\nTo trust them in His arms for ever safe embraced.\n\nShe dares not grudge to leave them there,\nWhere to behold them was her heart’s first prayer;\nShe dares not grieve--but she must weep,\nAs her pale placid martyr sinks to sleep,\nTeaching so well and silently\nHow at the shepherd’s call the lamb should die:\nHow happier far than life the end\nOf souls that infant-like beneath their burthen bend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_innocents" - } - } - }, - "sun-of-my-soul": { - "title": "“Sun of My Soul”", - "body": "Sun of my soul, Thou Savior dear,\nIt is not night if Thou be near;\nO may no earthborn cloud arise\nTo hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes.\n\nWhen the soft dews of kindly sleep\nMy wearied eyelids gently steep,\nBe my last thought, how sweet to rest\nForever on my Savior’s breast.\n\nAbide with me from morn till eve,\nFor without Thee I cannot live;\nAbide with me when night is nigh,\nFor without Thee I dare not die.\n\nIf some poor wandering child of Thine\nHas spurned today the voice Divine,\nNow, Lord, the gracious work begin;\nLet him no more lie down in sin.\n\nWatch by the sick, enrich the poor\nWith blessings from Thy boundless store;\nBe every mourner’s sleep tonight,\nLike infants’ slumbers, pure and right.\n\nCome near and bless us when we wake,\nEre through the world our way we take,\nTill in the ocean of Thy love\nWe lose ourselves in heaven above.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-a-kempis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas à Kempis", - "birth": { - "year": 1380, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1471 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german+dutch", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "🇩🇪 🇳🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_à_Kempis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "dutch", - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "Grant me, O Lord, to know what I ought to know,\nTo love what I ought to love,\nTo praise what delights thee most,\nTo value what is precious in thy sight,\nTo hate what is offensive to thee.\nDo not suffer me to judge according to the sight of my eyes,\nNor to pass sentence according to the hearing of the ears of ignorant men;\nBut to discern with a true judgment between things visible and spiritual,\nAnd above all, always to inquire what is the good pleasure of thy will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - } - } - }, - "henry-kendall": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry Kendall", - "birth": { - "year": 1839 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kendall_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "bellbirds": { - "title": "“Bellbirds”", - "body": "By channels of coolness the echoes are calling,\nAnd down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling;\nIt lives in the mountain, where moss and the sedges\nTouch with their beauty the banks and the ledges;\nThrough brakes of the cedar and sycamore bowers\nStruggles the light that is love to the flowers.\nAnd, softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,\nThe notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing.\n\nThe silver-voiced bell-birds, the darlings of day-time,\nThey sing in September their songs of the May-time.\nWhen shadows wax strong and the thunder-bolts hurtle,\nThey hide with their fear in the leaves of the myrtle;\nWhen rain and the sunbeams shine mingled together\nThey start up like fairies that follow fair weather,\nAnd straightway the hues of their feathers unfolden\nAre the green and the purple, the blue and the golden.\n\nOctober, the maiden of bright yellow tresses,\nLoiters for love in these cool wildernesses;\nLoiters knee-deep in the grasses to listen,\nWhere dripping rocks gleam and the leafy pools glisten.\nThen is the time when the water-moons splendid\nBreak with their gold, and are scattered or blended\nOver the creeks, till the woodlands have warning\nOf songs of the bell-bird and wings of the morning.\n\nWelcome as waters unkissed by the summers\nAre the voices of bell-birds to thirsty far-comers.\nWhen fiery December sets foot in the forest,\nAnd the need of the wayfarer presses the sorest,\nPent in the ridges for ever and ever.\nThe bell-birds direct him to spring and to river,\nWith ring and with ripple, like runnels whose torrents\nAre toned by the pebbles and leaves in the currents.\n\nOften I sit, looking back to a childhood\nMixt with the sights and the sounds of the wildwood,\nLonging for power and the sweetness to fashion\nLyrics with beats like the heart-beats of passion--\nSongs interwoven of lights and of laughters\nBorrowed from bell-birds in far forest rafters;\nSo I might keep in the city and alleys\nThe beauty and strength of the deep mountain valleys,\nCharming to slumber the pain of my losses\nWith glimpses of creeks and a vision of mosses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "geoffrey-studdert-kennedy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy", - "birth": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Studdert_Kennedy", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "easter": { - "title": "“Easter”", - "body": "There was rapture of spring in the morning\nWhen we told our love in the wood,\nFor you were the spring in my heart, dear lad.\nAnd I vowed that my life was good.\nBut there’s winter of war in the evening,\nAnd lowering clouds overhead,\nThere’s wailing of wind in the chimney nook,\nAnd I vow that my life lies dead.\nFor the sun may shine on the meadow lands\nAnd the dog rose bloom in the lanes,\nBut I’ve only weeds in my garden, lad,\nWild weeds that are rank with the rains.\nOne solace there is for me, sweet but faint,\nAs it floats on the wind of the years,\nA whisper that spring is the last true thing\nAnd that triumph is born of tears.\nIt comes from a garden of other days,\nAnd an echoing voice that cries,\nBehold I am alive for evermore,\nAnd in Me shall the dead arise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "indifference": { - "title": "“Indifference”", - "body": "_Mt. 25:31-46_\n\nWhen Jesus came to Golgotha\nThey hanged Him on a tree,\nThey drove great nails through hands and feet,\nAnd made a Calvary.\nThey crowned Him with a crown of thorns;\nRed were His wounds and deep,\nFor those were crude and cruel days,\nAnd human flesh was cheap.\n\nWhen Jesus came to Birmingham,\nThey simply passed Him by;\nThey never hurt a hair of Him,\nThey only let Him die.\nFor men had grown more tender,\nAnd they would not give Him pain;\nThey only just passed down the street,\nAnd left Him in the rain.\n\nStill Jesus cried, “Forgive them,\nFor they know not what they do.”\nAnd still it rained the winter rain\nThat drenched Him through and through.\nThe crowds went home and left the streets\nWithout a soul to see;\nAnd Jesus crouched against a wall\nAnd cried for Calvary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "it-is-not-finished": { - "title": "“It is Not Finished”", - "body": "It is not finished, Lord.\nThere is not one thing done,\nThere is no battle of my life,\nThat I have really won.\nAnd now I come to tell Thee\nHow I fought to fail,\nMy human, all too human, tale\nOf weakness and futility.\nAnd yet there is a faith in me,\nThat Thou wilt find in it\nOne word that Thou canst take\nAnd make\nThe centre of a sentence\nIn Thy book of poetry.\nI cannot read this writing of the years,\nMy eyes are full of tears,\nIt gets all blurred, and won’t make sense\nIt’s full of contradictions\nLike the scribblings of a child,\nSuch wild, wild\nHopes, and longing as intense\nAs pain, which trivial deeds\nMake folly of--or worse:\nI can but hand it in, and hope\nThat Thy great mind, which reads\nThe writings of so many lives,\nWill understand this scrawl\nAnd what it strives\nTo say--but leaves unsaid.\n\nI cannot write it over,\nThe stars are coming out,\nMy body needs its bed.\nI have no strength for more,\nSo it must stand or fall--Dear Lord--\nThat’s all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "judgment": { - "title": "“Judgment”", - "body": "_There is mercy with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared._\n\nI saw no thronged angelic court, I saw no great white throne,\nI saw no open judgment books, I seemed to stand alone.\nI seemed to stand alone beside a solemn sounding sea,\nWhile, at my feet upon the shore, broke waves of memory.\nTheir murmuring music sobbed and sought a way into my soul,\nThe perfect past was present there, and I could see it whole,\nIts beauty and its ugliness, its sorrow and its sin,\nIts splendour and its sordidness, as wave on wave rolled in.\nAnd ever deeper pierced the pain of all that I had lost,\nMy dear dead dreams of perfect things, I saw them tempest-tossed.\nThey fell like wreckage at my feet, and, as I turned them o’er,\nThe solemn waves, in Memory’s caves, kept booming “Nevermore!”\nThere came one dream, more dear than all, a corpse without a head,\nThe flying spray hissed cowardice, and it was dead, cold dead.\nThen suddenly a shadow fell, and I was not alone,\nHe stood with me beside the sea, and listened to its moan.\nI did not dare to raise my eyes, I feared what I might see,\nA cold sweat broke and bathed my brow, I longed to turn and flee,\nBut could not; rooted there I stood, in shiv’ring shame and fear,\nThe subtle shadow substance took, and nearer came, and near.\nO was it days or was it years, we stood beside that sea,\nOr was it aeons, timeless times? It seemed eternity.\nAt last, compelled, I raised my eyes. Two eyes looked into mine,\nAnd shattered all my soul with shame, so sad and so divine.\nIt palsied all my pride with pain, the terror of those tears,\nAnd wrought into my soul the woe of all my wasted years.\n“Depart from me,” I cried, “depart, I cannot stand with Thee\nAnd face the sorrow of those eyes, beside this cruel sea.\nDepart from me, I dare not tread the sands those feet have trod,\nNor look into those eyes that tell the agony of God.\nDepart,” I cried, and He was gone. I stood there all alone,\nIn silence save that Memory’s sea still made perpetual moan.\nNight shadowed all, and wandering winds came wailing from afar,\nBut out across the darkening sea shone forth one single star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mans-soul": { - "title": "“Man’s Soul”", - "body": "The Great God stooped to save my soul\nAnd lift it up to Paradise;\nBut something bound it still to earth,\nA careless woman’s eyes.\n\nThen Satan came to damn my soul,\nAnd drag it down to his own place;\nBut something bound it still to earth,\nAnother woman’s face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "my-peace-i-leave-with-you": { - "title": "“My Peace I Leave with You”", - "body": "Thy Peace! Thou pale, despisèd Christ!\nWhat Peace is there in Thee,\nNailed to the Cross that crowns the world,\nIn agony?\n\nNo Peace of home was Thine; no rest\nWhen Thy day’s work was done.\nWhen darkness called the world to sleep\nAnd veiled the sun,\n\nNo children gathered round Thy knee,\nNo hand soothed care away\nThou hadst not where to lay Thy head\nAt close of day.\n\nWhat Peace was Thine? Misunderstood,\nRejected by Thine own,\nPacing Thy grim Gethsemane,\nOutcast and lone.\n\nWhat Peace hast Thou to give the world?\nThere is enough of pain;\nAlways upon my window beats\nThe sound of rain.\n\nThe source of sorrow is not dried,\nNor stays the stream of tears,\nBut winds on weeping to the sea,\nAll down the years.\n\nFor millions come to Golgotha\nTo suffer and to die,\nForsaken in their hour of need,\nAnd asking, Why?\n\nMan’s Via Crucis never ends,\nEarth’s Calvaries increase,\nThe world is full of spears and nails,\nBut where is Peace?\n\n“Take up Thy Cross and follow Me,\nI am the Way, my son,\nVia Crucis, Via Pacis,\nMeet and are one.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "non-angli-sed-angeli": { - "title": "“Non Angli Sed Angeli”", - "body": "“Not Angels merely but of angel stock,\nThese boys blue-eyed and shining from the sea,\nWhich like a silver girdle belts their home.\nNot slaves, but souls, not tools to use for gain,\nBut men to love and lead and save for God\nWho made them and for that great King who died\nThe death of shame and glory on the Cross.”\nSo spake the master Christian of the world\nLong years ago when, in the streets of Rome\nImperial, he met the ancestors\nOf that yet greater Rome which was to be.\nSo spake he, taught by Him to whose great soul\nThere were no slaves, nor chattels in the world\nBut only men and brothers, Sons of God,\nThe last and greatest works of wondrous Love,\nFrom whose eternal, energy pain\nThe greatest and the least of things is sprung.\nSo spoke he, taught by Him who mirrored forth\nTo men’s blind eyes that Love divine of God,\nWho, like a father, mourns, the one lost son,\nAnd, like a faithful shepherd, wanders wide\nAcross the hills and calls through dawnless dark\nThe one lost sheep that strays forth from the fold,\nChrist lived in him, and he had learned full well\nThe first and chiefest lesson of His life,\nThe value of a man to God, the price\nGod puts, on human, souls, the price of blood\nAnd pain paid out in coin of Calvary.\nAnd in that blazing light of Love he saw\nThe sin of slavery, the sin supreme,\nThat slays, the world because it values life\nAs death, and dares to use as mere machines,\nFor pleasure, or for profit, living men.\nThis blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,\nWhich, neither in this world nor in the next,\nCan find forgiveness in the heart of God,\nWho only knows the value of a man,\nHe saw it with the eyes of Christ, and spoke\nIn all unconscious prophecy, the doom\nOf slavery, which these same blue-eyed boys\nWould one day die to banish from the world.\nAnd I have seen them die in these last days:\nYes, I have seen their bright blue eyes grow dim\nWith agony, yet never lose their smile,\nThe dauntless smile of Angles that reveals\nTheir angel souls, and crowns them Kings by right,\nThe destined saviours of the world from sin,\nAnd from the curse of tyranny which kills\nThe souls of men, and turns them into slaves.\nYes, I have seen them smile at death, and known,\nBy instinct of sure prophecy, the Truth\nThat seas of dead tyrannic force would break\nIn vain against the rock of British hearts,\nWhereon the love of freedom sits enthroned.\nThis have I known, and have with tears rejoiced,\nUntil there shivered through me like the chill\nOf death, the fear lest gold be strong where steel\nIs weak; lest men whose pride no sword can slay\nMay yet be bought and sold to slavery.\nThe day of tyrant kings is dead, and thrones\nShall nevermore dethrone men’s souls.\nBut now A dull inhuman monster takes their place.\nThe minotaur of Mammon tears the wings\nFrom new-fledged souls and flings them bleeding down\nTo dogs of greed and lust. To him they are\nDead hands, machines that make machines, and grind\nOut gold to swell the coffers of the rich.\nThey have no right to fly, their wings are best\nCut short, that so their hands may be more strong\nTo work, make wealth, build up the State, and set\nThe Commonwealth on sure foundations, made\nOf gold and silver and of precious stones.\nTo him a man is of less value than\nA beast of burden, for the beast must needs\nBe bought for gold, and if he dies be bought\nAgain, but men need not be bought; they are\nMachines for hire that can be scrapped at will,\nAnd new ones hired with no fresh cost at all,\nBecause they die or weaken in their work.\nSupply is plentiful, and men are drugs\nUpon the crowded markets of the world.\nSo Satan takes new forms, and when he finds\nThe sword is weak, too weak to win brave hearts\nAs slaves, creeps snakelike in, in time of Peace,\nTo fetter free-born men with golden chains\nAnd lead them helpless captives down to hell.\nO England, when this wave of war is spent,\nAnd rolls back baffled from thy rocky breast,\nWilt thou be strong to slay the Minotaur,\nAnd strangle that great golden snake that crept\nIn time of Peace about thy home to kill,\nWith venom of low greed and lust of wealth,\nThe soul of Freedom and the heart of Love?\nShall wealth still grow, and woe increase to breed\nIn filthy slums the slaves of poverty?\nShall senseless pride and vulgar luxury\nBy gilding over evil make it good?\nShall souls be only hands again, dead hands,\nThat toil for wealth that makes none rich save those\nWho need it not? Shall men still seek in drink\nA refuge from the burden of their strife,\nAnd from that dull monotony of grey\nThat shadows half our cities from the sun?\nShall women still be bought and sold, like dogs\nUpon the streets, because the wage they earn\nBy work will not keep bodies for their souls?\nShall children come to birth, too weak to live,\nNot even hands of strength, but feeble hands,\nThat clutch at life and die--just born to die\nAnd cry--cry shame upon the grimy world\nThat murdered them? If this be what must come,\nThen blessed are the dead who die in war,\nTheir bodies shattered, but their souls untouched\nBy slime of sin, unpoisoned by the snake,\nFor war is kinder than a Godless peace.\nO England, let this message from the past\nRing down the ages like a trumpet call,\nNot Angles these but Angels, souls not slaves,\nLet not thy wealth be counted in base coin\nBut in chaste mothers, comely maids, strong men\nWith kindly eyes, in sound of children’s play,\nAnd in those happy aged ones who stand\nBetween the seas of life, and, looking back\nAnd forwards, vow that human life is good.\nSo must our land be reckoned rich or poor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "patience": { - "title": "“Patience”", - "body": "Sometimes I wish that I might do\nJust one grand deed and die,\nAnd by that one grand deed reach up\nTo meet God in the sky.\nBut such is not Thy way, O God,\nNot such is Thy decree,\nBut deed by deed, and tear by tear,\nOur souls must climb to Thee,\nAs climbed the only Son of God\nFrom manger unto Cross,\nWho learned, through tears and bloody sweat,\nTo count this world but loss;\nWho left the Virgin Mother’s Arms\nTo seek those arms of shame,\nOutstretched upon the lonely hill\nTo which the darkness came.\nAs deed by deed, and tear by tear,\nHe climbed up to the height,\nEach deed a splendid deed, each tear\nA jewel shining bright,\nSo grant us, Lord, the patient heart,\nTo climb the upward way,\nUntil we stand upon the height,\nAnd see the perfect day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-soul-of-doubt": { - "title": "“The Soul of Doubt”", - "body": "That’s it. Doubt’s very soul of doubt\nLies here. Is God just faith in God,\nOr can God work His will without\nOur human faith? Is flesh and blood\nMade by, or maker of, the mind\nThat works upon the mass of things\nInanimate? Has this wild wind\nA master, riding on its wings\nHis chosen way, or is it free\nOf any but its own mad will\nTo sweep in wanton liberty\nOver the patient earth, and spill\nDestruction, breaking hearts and homes,\nA drunken thing without a plan\nOr purpose anywhere? It comes\nTo that at last. Is mortal man\nFated to fight a senseless world\nOf blind material force alone,\nBy its haphazard powers hurled\nThis way and that, until his own\nSmall wit in desperation finds\nA way to short uncertain Peace?\nAround this core of doubt thought winds\nIts endless coil, seeking release,\nAnd, finding none, for ever binds\nIts meshes tighter round the soul.\n\nThe preachers blame our. lack of faith\nFor all our human ills, but why?\nDoes God depend on man? “Thus saith\nThe Lord omnipotent,” they cry.\nAye, God for ever says, but we\nMust do, and how? We lack the power,\nAnd from the task’s immensity\nReel back in fear, as hour by hour\nIt grows, and frowning peak on peak\nThe evil mountains rise ahead.\nWe stumble on bewildered, weak,\nHalf blind, trusting what we have read\nOf God, that legendary Love\nUrgent to help us, and redeem\nOur souls, a Love we cannot prove,\nBut shut out aching eyes and dream\nIt true. Could any God endure\nThe sight unmoved and silent still?\nWould not a real God assure\nOur doubts, and work His mighty\nWill Without our faith? So many wrecks;\nWrecked faith, wrecked hope, wrecked love, wrecked dreams;\nAnd still we bow our helpless necks\nTo meet the storm. God’s silence seems\nDecisive. God is only faith\nIn God, and when Faith dies, God dies,\nAnd Hope, a homeless weeping wraith,\nBeats on her shrivelled breasts, and cries,\nRefusing to be comforted,\nBecause her little ones are dead,\nAll dead.\nAnd yet--and yet--doubt may deceive,\nJoy may give truer thought than grief.\nIt may be so, Lord, I believe,\nIn mercy help mine unbelief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "temptation": { - "title": "“Temptation”", - "body": "Pray! Have I prayed! When I’m worn with all my praying\nWhen I’ve bored the blessed angels with my battery of prayer!\nIt’s the proper thing to say--but it’s only saying, saying,\nAnd I cannot get to Jesus for the glory of her hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "trees": { - "title": "“Trees”", - "body": "Once glistering green,\nWith dewy sheen,\nAnd summer glory round them cast\nNow black and bare,\nThe trees stand there,\nAnd mourn their beauty that is past.\n\nLook, leaf by leaf,\nEach leaf a grief,\nThe hand of Autumn strips them bare.\nNo sound nor cry,\nAs they fall and die,\nBecause they know that Life is there.\n\nSo stiff and strong,\nThe winter long,\nAll uncomplaining stand the trees.\nGod make my life,\nThrough all its strife,\nAs true to Spring as one of these.\n\nSo would I stand,\nSerene and grand,\nWhile age strips off the joys of youth;\nBecause I know\nThat, as they go,\nMy soul draws nearer to the Truth.\n\nHe is the Truth,\nIn very sooth,\nThe Word made flesh, who dwelt with men,\nAnd the world shall ring\nWith the song of Spring,\nWhen thy soul turns to its Lord again.\n\nWhen God’s soft breath,\nThat men call death,\nFalls gently on thy closing eyes,\nThy youth, that goes\nLike the red June rose,\nShall burst to bloom in Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "x-j-kennedy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "X. J. Kennedy", - "birth": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X._J._Kennedy", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "narcissus-suitor": { - "title": "“Narcissus Suitor”", - "body": "He touched her and her gooseflesh crept--\nHe loved her as it were\nNot for her depth nor clarity\nBut what he saw in her.\n\nDrew her up wobbling in his arms,\nLaid lips by her smooth cheek\nAnd would have joined the two of him\nIn one cohesive Greek\n\nWhen soft by his obdurate ear\nA pair of ripples pursed\nAnd syllables distinct and pure\nCame bubbling up and burst:\n\n“Oh keep your big feet to yourself\nGood sir, goddammit stop!\nI’m not the pool you think I am!\nI’ll scream! I’ll call a cop!”\n\n“Settle me back in my right bed\nOr you shall edge your skiff\nThrough ice as limber as your eyes,\nAs blue, as frozen stiff.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "one-am-with-voices": { - "title": "“One A.M. with Voices”", - "body": "> _Hers:_\nWhat do you squander night for\nIn coupling on a page\nRimes no man pronounces?--\nIs it love or rage?\nThe crouched cat pounces dream-mice,\nTrue mice play blindman’s buff.\nFor God’s sake give the thing a pitch,\nI’ve lain cold long enough.\n\n> _His:_\nDid I write rimes for love, sweet mouse,\nThen I’d have taken instead\nA sheaf of verses to my thighs,\nAnd rage that’s rape indeed.\nYou are the single love I have.\nBe still. A further rime\nPlays cat-and-mouse about my head--\nJust a few minutes. I’m\nA mouser that must hunt awake\nWith a green eye that roams,\nA shivering candle I must bear\nWhere shapes twitch in dark rooms.\n\n> _Hers:_\nMore endless rooms, old creeping tom,\nThan light can overtake.\nWhen did you ever catch a mouse\nBut lean ones, wide awake?\nThe plump drop to the hunter\nWho gropes them out when blind--\nEvery mousehole of the mind?\nPut cat and light out. You shall have\nThe warmed side of the bed\nThat sleep may with a breath blow out\nThis guttering in your head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jack-kerouac": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jack Kerouac", - "birth": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1969 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "149th-chorus": { - "title": "“149th Chorus”", - "body": "I keep falling in love\n with my mother,\nI dont want to hurt her\n--Of all people to hurt.\n\nEvery time I see her\n she’s grown older\nBut her uniform always\n amazes me\nFor its Dutch simplicity\nAnd the Doll she is,\nThe doll-like way\n she stands\nBowlegged in my dreams,\nWaiting to serve me.\n\n And I am only an Apache\n Smoking Hashi\n In old Cabashy\n By the Lamp.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bottoms-of-my-shoes": { - "title": "“The Bottoms of My Shoes”", - "body": "The bottoms of my shoes are clean\nFrom walking in the rain", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bus-east": { - "title": "“Bus East”", - "body": "Society has good intentions Bureaucracy is like a friend\n5\nyears ago--other furies other losses--\n\nAmerica’s\ntrying to control the uncontrollable Forest fires, Vice\n\nThe\nessential smile In the essential sleep Of the children Of the essential mind\n\nI’m\nall thru playing the American\nNow I’m going to live a good quiet life\n\nThe\nworld should be built for foot walkers\n\nOily\nrivers Of spiney Nevady\n\n# I.am Jake Cake\n\nRake\nWrite like Blake\n\nThe\nhorse is not pleased Sight of his\ngorgeous finery\nin the dust Its silken\nnostrils\ndid disgust\n\nCats\narent kind Kiddies anent sweet\n\nApril\nin Nevada--Investigating Dismal Cheyenne Where the war parties\nIn fields\nof straw\nAimed over oxen At Indian Chiefs\nIn wild headdress Pouring thru\nthe gap\nIn Wyoming plain\nTo make the settlers\nEat more dust than dust\nwas eaten In the States From East at Seacoast Where wagons made up To dreadful\nPlains\nOf clazer vup\n\nSaltry\nsettlers\nAnxious to masturbate The Mongol Sea (I’m too tired in Cheyenne--\nNo sleep in 4 nights now, & 2 to go)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "cerrada-medellin-blues": { - "title": "“Cerrada Medellin Blues”", - "body": "Even when I was a little boy\nI was always alone\n with my guardian angel\n\nPlaying Tarzan\nAn icicle fell on me\n & cut my arm\nI had a rope around my neck\nI was hanged in Innifree\nHad my hand cut off in Perfidee\nNever had my fill\n of Thee\n\nST MICHAEL IN THE CORNER,\n NINE FEET TALL", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "michaelmas" - } - } - }, - "hitchhiker": { - "title": "“Hitchhiker”", - "body": "“Tryna get to sunny Californy”--\nBoom. It’s the awful raincoat\nmaking me look like a selfdefeated self-murdering imaginary gangster, an idiot in a rueful coat, how can they understand my damp packs--my mud packs--\n“Look John, a hitchhiker”\n“He looks like he’s got a gun underneath that I.R.A. coat”\n“Look Fred, that man by the road”\n“Some sexfiend got in print in 1938 in Sex Magazine”--\n“You found his blue corpse in a greenshade edition, with axe blots”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-to-meditate": { - "title": "“How to Meditate”", - "body": "--lights out--\nfall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous\necstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,\nthe gland inside of my brain discharging\nthe good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as\ni hap-down and hold all my body parts\ndown to a deadstop trance--Healing\nall my sicknesses--erasing all--not\neven the shred of a ‘I-hope-you’ or a\nLoony Balloon left in it, but the mind\nblank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought\ncomes a-springing from afar with its held-\nforth figure of image, you spoof it out,\nyou spuff it off, you fake it, and\nit fades, and thought never comes--and\nwith joy you realize for the first time\n‘thinking’s just like not thinking--\nSo I don’t have to think\nany\nmore’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-vain": { - "title": "“In Vain”", - "body": "The stars in the sky\nIn vain\nThe tragedy of Hamlet\n In vain\nThe key in the lock\n In vain\nThe sleeping mother\n In vain\nThe lamp in the corner\n In vain\nThe lamp in the corner unlit\n In vain\nAbraham Lincoln\n In vain\nThe Aztec empire\n In vain\nThe writing hand: in vain\n(The shoetrees in the shoes\n In vain\nThe windowshade string upon the hand bible\n In vain--\n The glitter of the greenglass ashtray\nIn vain\nThe bear in the woods\n In vain\nThe Life of Buddha\n In vain)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mexico-city-blues": { - "title": "“Mexico City Blues”", - "body": "Got up and dressed up\n and went out & got laid\nThen died and got buried\n in a coffin in the grave,\nMan--\n Yet everything is perfect,\nBecause it is empty,\nBecause it is perfect\n with emptiness,\nBecause it’s not even happening.\n\nEverything\nIs Ignorant of its own emptiness--\nAnger\nDoesn’t like to be reminded of fits--\n\nYou start with the Teaching\n Inscrutable of the Diamond\nAnd end with it, your goal\n is your startingplace,\nNo race was run, no walk\n of prophetic toenails\nAcross Arabies of hot\n meaning--you just\n numbly don’t get there", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - } - } - }, - "nebraska": { - "title": "“Nebraska”", - "body": "April doesnt hurt here\nLike it does in New England\nThe ground\nVast and brown\nSurrounds dry towns\nLocated in the dust\nOf the coming locust\nLive for survival, not for “kicks”\nBe a bangtail describer,\nlike of shrouded traveler\nin Textile tenement & the birds fighting in yr ears-like Burroughs exact to describe & gettin $\nThe Angry Hunger\n(hunger is anger)\n who fears the\n hungry feareth\n the angry)\nAnd so I came home\nTo Golden far away\nTwas on the horizon\nEvery blessed day\nAs we rolled And we rolled\nFrom Donner tragic Pass\nThru April in Nevada And out Salt City Way Into the dry Nebraskas And sad Wyomings Where young girls And pretty lover boys\nWith Mickey Mantle eyes\nWander under moons\nSawing in lost cradle\nAnd Judge O Fasterc\nPasses whiggling by To ask of young love: “Was it the same wind Of April Plains eve that ruffled the dress\nOf my lost love\nLouanna\nIn the Western\nFar off night\n Lost as the whistle\n Of the passing Train\n Everywhere West\n Roams moaning\n The deep basso\n--Vom! Vom!\n--Was it the same love\nNotified my bones As mortify yrs now\nChildren of the soft\nWyoming April night?\n Couldna been!\n But was! But was!”\nAnd on the prairie\nThe wildflower blows\nIn the night For bees & birds And sleeping hidden Animals of life.\nThe Chicago\nSpitters in the spotty street\nCheap beans, loop, Girls made eyes at me And I had 35 Cents in my jeans--\nThen Toledo\nSpringtime starry\nLover night Of hot rod boys And cool girls A wandering\nA wandering\nIn search of April pain A plash of rain\nWill not dispel This fumigatin hell Of lover lane This park of roses Blue as bees\nIn former airy poses\nIn aerial O Way hoses\nNo tamarand And figancine Can the musterand Be less kind\n Sol--\n Sol--\nBring forth yr Ah Sunflower--Ah me Montana\nPhosphorescent Rose\nAnd bridge in\n fairly land\nI’d understand it all--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "orlanda-blues": { - "title": "“Orlanda Blues”", - "body": "There’s a middlewestern prurience\nabout Greeks.--\n\nYour little earth-nut, O potato\nwar, riots mama dears around papap’s paternal root", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tenorman": { - "title": "“Tenorman”", - "body": "Sweet sad young tenor\nHorn slumped around neck\nBearded full of junk\nSlouches waiting\nFor Apocalypse,\nListens to the new\nNegro raw trumpet kid\nTell him the wooden news;\nAnd the beat of the bass\nThe bass--drives in\nDrummer drops a bomb\nPiano tinkle tackles\nSweet tenor lifting\nAll American sorrows\nRaises mouthpiece to mouth\nAnd blows to finger\nThe iron sounds", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "daniil-kharms": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Daniil Kharms", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1942 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "empty-speeches": { - "title": "“Empty speeches”", - "body": "Seated at a table, flighty thoughts,\nShoulders spread, inflated chest,\nI pronounced empty speeches,\nStill as a statue and just as loved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "a-fairy-tale": { - "title": "“A Fairy Tale”", - "body": "There once was a man by the name of Semyonov.\nAnd Semyonov went out for a walk and lost his handkerchief.\nAnd Semyonov started looking for a handkerchief and lost his hat.\nAnd looking for a hat, he lost his jacket.\nHe began to look for a jacket and lost his boots.\n--Yes--said Semyonov--this is a loss--I shall go home.\nSemyonov began walking home--and he got lost.\n--No--said Semyonov--I’d rather sit. And he sat down.\nAnd he sat on a stone, and fell asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky", - "date": { - "year": 1933 - } - } - }, - "heres-the-rain-crashing-down": { - "title": "“Here’s the rain crashing down …”", - "body": "Here’s the rain crashing down,\ntime has stopped.\nThe clocks go on helplessly knocking.\nGrow, grass, you don’t need time.\nSpeak, Holy Spirit, you don’t need words.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1937, - "month": "august", - "day": 12 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "i-thought-of-eagles-for-a-long-time": { - "title": "“I thought of eagles for a long time …”", - "body": "I thought of eagles for a long time\nand understood such a whole lot:\nthe eagles soar above the clouds,\nthey fly and fly and touch no one.\nThey live on cliffs and on mountains\nand are intimate with water sprites,\nI thought a long time about eagles\nbut confused them, I think, with flies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1939, - "month": "march", - "day": 15 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "perpetuity-of-merriment-and-dirt": { - "title": "“Perpetuity of merriment and dirt”", - "body": "The water murmurs, cool and clear,\nAnd shade sets in open fields;\nthe light has dimmed. And birds\nhave taken to the sky in dreams.\nAnd Sweeper with his raven whiskers\nstands all night through under the gates,\nscratches his head under his soiled cap,\nwith dirt-encrusted fingers. And\nin the windows merry shrieks are heard,\nand stomping feet, and jangling bottles.\n\nA day goes by, a week then passes,\nand one by one the years follow,\nand people marching in formations\nkeep disappearing in their graves.\nAnd Sweeper with his raven whiskers\nagain stands at the gate, and through the night\nscratches his head under his soiled cap,\nwith dirt-encrusted fingers. And\nin the windows merry shrieks are heard,\nand stomping feet, and jangling bottles.\n\nBoth Moon and Sun have dimmed and paled.\nthe constellations’ forms have changed.\nthen Motion became like syrup\nand Time now became like sand.\nAnd Sweeper with his raven whiskers\nagain stands at the gate, and through the night\nscratches his head under his soiled cap,\nwith dirt-encrusted fingers. And\nin the windows heard are merry shrieks,\nand stomping feet, and jangling bottles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Roman Turovsky", - "date": { - "year": 1933, - "month": "october", - "day": 14 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 14 - } - } - }, - "prayer-before-sleep": { - "title": "“Prayer before sleep”", - "body": "Lord, in broad daylight\napathy overcame me.\nAllow me to lie down and fall asleep Lord,\nand while I sleep fill me Lord\nwith your strength.\nThere is much I want to know,\nbut neither books nor people\nwill tell me this.\nMay You alone Lord enlighten me\nby means of my verses.\nWake me strong for the battle with meaning,\nswift in the arrangement of words\nand zealous to praise the name of God\nfor ever and ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1931, - "month": "march", - "day": 28 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 28 - } - } - }, - "this-is-how-hunger-begins": { - "title": "“This is how hunger begins …”", - "body": "This is how hunger begins:\nfirst you wake in good cheer,\nthen weakness begins,\nand then boredom,\nand then comes the losss\nof the power of swift reason\nand then comes calm--\nand then the horror.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "what-are-we-to-do": { - "title": "“What Are We To Do?”", - "body": "While the dolphin and the sea-horse\nPlayed silly games together,\nThe ocean beat against the cliffs\nAnd washed the cliffs with its water.\nThe scary water moaned and cried.\nThe stars shone. Years went by.\n\nThen the horrid hour came:\nI am no more, and so are you,\nThe sea is gone, the cliffs, the mountains,\nAnd the stars gone, too;\nOnly the choir sounds out of the dead void.\nAnd for simplicity’s sake, our wrathful God\nSprung up and blew away the dust of centuries,\nAnd now, freed from the shackles of time\nHe flies alone, his own and only dearest friend.\nCold everywhere, and darkness blind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Matvei Yankelevich", - "date": { - "year": 1934, - "month": "october", - "day": 15 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 15 - } - } - } - } - }, - "velimir-khlebnikov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Velimir Khlebnikov", - "birth": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velimir_Khlebnikov", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 26 - }, - "poems": { - "beast-+-number": { - "title": "“Beast + Number”", - "body": "When the blue shimmer of the damsel-fly\nshines through the smoke of villages,\nA Thing appears, some new conception,\nand shipwrecks intellect on Number’s shore.\n\n“Children, children!” the priest exclaimed,\nwhen he heard the Athenian envoy speak.\nAbout the austere neck of Number\nmind and matter hang like a cloak.\n\nWhen mortal minds tire pondering\nsome equation--wine-dark, foam-born--\ntheir goal, remember, is to tower\nuntil they touch the sky.\n\nReplace the stake, the block, the cross!\nThink of Number as an iron device.\nEven the whirlwind slackens,\nconfronting Number face to face.\n\nI write these lines in ink: Believe me,\nthe day is near that glorifies us all!\nAnd the rough beast slouches in silence,\na pair of virgin ciphers in his paw!\n\nBut when he hears the tender tumult\nof these voices and these days,\nhe will fall down as if struck\nupon the rocks, upon the rocks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1915, - "month": "september", - "day": 21 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 21 - } - } - }, - "black-king-dance-out-front-of-the-crowd": { - "title": "“Black king dance out front of the crowd …”", - "body": "Black king dance out front of the crowd,\nand witch-doctors batter the tom-tom.\nBig black women laugh bawdy and loud,\nPelele stain their mouths, and burn.\nThe dirty cauldron bubble:\nsome bird bones, and a child.\nOur Elder Father Helper Sun\nhe hurt us unaware.\nSeven times the light go by,\nseven times to earth from sun.\nWe look and see the dark turn cold.\nWe look and we see Requiem.\nBlack king dance out front of the crowd,\nand witch-doctors batter the tom-tom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "brooding-dark-and-elegant": { - "title": "“Brooding, dark, and elegant …”", - "body": "Brooding, dark, and elegant--\nStranger, aren’t you the man\nwho frightened the children yesterday?\n“Mama!” they shouted, “he’s wicked!” and ran.\n\nYou went to visit my sweetheart\nwhere she took the evening air,\nsaid: “Permit me to introduce myself …”\nAnd laughed: “… how beautiful you are …”\n\nShe twisted the ring on her finger,\nsmiled like any coquette, and said:\n“Sir, I’ve heard of your wicked adventures--\nbut why is your glove stained red?”\n\n“Believe me, Lady,\nthose stories aren’t true--\nDo I look like an evil adventurer?\nI’m only as old as you.”\n\n“Oh sir, I can hardly believe that …\nyou have such melancholy eyes!”\nStrands of spider-glitter drifted\nin the water-mirrored skies.\n\nTwo figures were seen on the pathway,\nthe little boat was gone …\nAnd a long embrace of water\nsilenced my sweetheart’s moan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - } - } - }, - "grasshopper": { - "title": "“Grasshopper”", - "body": "Wingletting with the golden scrawl\nOf its finest sinews,\nThe grasshopper loaded its trailer-belly\nWith many coastal herbs and faiths.\n “Ping, ping, ping!” tra-lah-ed the zingzinger.\nO, swanderful!\nO, illuminate!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "hunger": { - "title": "“Hunger”", - "body": "Why do elks and rabbits cavort through the forest?\nDrawing away?\nThe people ate the bark of the asp,\nThe green sprouts of firs …\nWives and children wander through the woods,\nCollecting birch leaves\nFor their schi, okroschka and borsch,\nFir tops and silvery moss,--\nThe sustenance of the forest.\nThe children are its scouts,\nWandering through the woods,\nRoasting white worms in the fire,\nSorrel, fat caterpillars\nOr large spiders--they are sweeter than nuts.\nThey catch moles, grey lizards,\nShoot hissing serpents with a bow and arrow,\nMake crisp bread from saltbush,\nThey run after butterflies:\nThey have got a whole sack.\nThere will be butterfly borsch today--\nMom will cook.\nBut the rabbit, tenderly cavorting through the forest,\nThe children behold as in a dream,\nAs a vision of a bright world,\nEnthralled, with large eyes,\nSaintly from the hunger,\nDisbelieving the truth,\nIt runs away a nimble apparition,\nGoing black with the tip of its ear.\nAn arrow flies after it,\nBut too late--a filling meal has gotten away,\nAnd the children stand spellbound …\n“A butterfly, look, over there …\nQuick, after it! And there’s a blue one!…”\nIt’s gloomy in the woods. A wolf came from afar\nTo the spot where last year\nHe had devoured a lamb.\nFor a long while he whirled as a spinning top,\nSniffing the entire place out,\nBut nothing was left--\nThe ants’ doing--except for a withered hoof.\nUnsettled, he drew in his lumpy ribs\nAnd skulked from the thicket.\nWith a heavy paw, he shall crush the red-brow\nWoodcocks that fell asleep under the snow,\nHimself bespattered with the cold white …\nThe little fox with the fiery down,\nClumped itself on a tree stump,\nRuminating about the future …\nShould I become a dog?\nEnter the service of people?\nThere are many stretched nets--\nJust lie in one of them …\nNo, that’s a risky business.\nThey shall devour the gingery fox,\nThe same way they devoured the dogs!\nNo dogs bark in the village …\nAnd the fox washed itself with its downy paws,\nRaising the fiery sail of its tail,\nThe squirrel said, fussily:\n“Where are my nuts and my acorns?--\nThe people ate them!”\nThe translucent quiet of evening descended.\nWith a faint lisp, the pine kissed\nThe asp,\nPerhaps they shall be cut down\nTomorrow for breakfast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrew Stempton", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "october", - "day": 7 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 7 - } - } - }, - "i-call-you-to-try-with-a-sword": { - "title": "“I call you to try with a sword …”", - "body": "I call you to try with a sword\nTo touch the shirt.\nIt’s away.\nSay with the sword: the King is naked.\nWhat we’ve done with fuzz of breath\nI call you to do with iron.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Zorin", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "month": "february", - "day": 15 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "i-saw-a-tiger-he-crouched-by-a-wood": { - "title": "“I saw a tiger, he crouched by a wood …”", - "body": "I saw a tiger, he crouched by a wood\nand filled a bamboo flute with his sighs;\nhis ferine forces contracted in waves,\nand mocking fires burned in his eyes.\nBeside him an elegant maid discoursed\nwith an elegant tilt to her head:\n“Tigers and lions, as everyone knows,\ncannot carry a tune,” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "if-i-turn-mankind-into-a-clock": { - "title": "“If I turn mankind into a clock …”", - "body": "If I turn mankind into a clock\nAnd show how the hand of the century moves on,\nWill really from our time’s flock\nNo war take off like the needless upsilon?\nWhere the human race has contracted piles,\nSitting in armchairs of spring-loaded war for thousands of years,\nI am going to tell you that I sense from miles\nAway my suprahuman dreams.\nI know you are wolf-zealots,\nWith mine I shake your five gunshots,\nBut can you really not hear fate’s needle whisper,\nThat miraculous knitter?\nI shall flood with my power, deluge of thought\nExisting governments’ buildings,\nIncredibly grown Kitezh\nFor bondmen of the old inanity I shall plot.\nAnd, when the planet Earth chairmen crew\nIs tossed to horrific hunger--a green rind,\nEvery government’s in existence screw\nBy our driver will be spinned.\nAnd, when a woman with a beard\nTosses a promised stone,\nYou will say: “This is it,\nWhat we’ve been expecting for aeons.”\nO clock of mankind, as you pat,\nWith my hand cause to move on thoughts!\nLet these grow through self-murder of governments and through books--those.\nEarth shall be irrevogreat!\nPreterglogreat!\nSong be its stranglegreat:\nI am going to say that the universe is a lamp-black match\nOn the outcome’s face.\nAnd my thought--like a pick to the latch\nOn the door, behind it someone who shot himself dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Victor Pechorin" - } - }, - "in-periwinkle-potion": { - "title": "“In periwinkle potion …”", - "body": "In periwinkle potion,\nyou earthworms, kindle\ntwo watery rocks\nin a black thread.\nI’m a charred log\nof obscure reputation;\nit’s not that I’m empty\nor especially awful--\nI’m just worn out,\nI’m not hot anymore.\nI sit here. Warm me.\nKeep my face from moving\non the cliff of my shoulders,\nbut let the speech of someone’s singing hands\nawake my own hands’ hearing.\nFor with this periwinkle water\nI will find out at last--\ndid her scarf cut me off cold,\nlike winter leaving the land?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "let-us-all-be-heads-of-lettuce": { - "title": "“Let us all be heads of lettuce …”", - "body": "Let us all be heads of lettuce;\nlet us not let knives upset us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "lice-stupidly-prayed-godding-me": { - "title": "“Lice stupidly prayed godding me …”", - "body": "Lice stupidly prayed godding me,\nEvery morning they crawled through my clothes,\nEvery morning I killed them,--\nListen to their cracks,--\nBut they came again like quietly confident surf.\n\nThe white godlike marrow of mine\nI gave, Russia, you:\nBe Khlebnikov, be my mind.\nWedged piles in the people’s brain, and axes, too,\nI built a small house of piles\n“We’re the future-be-men”.\nI’ve done all of this as a beggar,\nAs a thief whom everyone damned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Zorin" - } - }, - "okay-graylegs-time-to-set-the-plow": { - "title": "“Okay, Graylegs, time to set the plow …”", - "body": "Okay, Graylegs, time to set the plow\naside. Rainstorm lashes our faces.\nTime to turn back to the barn,\nto dinner, dreams, and darkness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "once-again-once-again": { - "title": "“Once again, once again …”", - "body": "Once again, once again\nI’m a star for\nyou.\nWoe to the sailor who has taken\nThe wrong angle of the ship\nOn a star:\nHe will be shattered on the rocks,\nOn the underwater sandbanks.\nWoe to you also who have taken\nThe heart’s wrong angle on me.\nYou will be shattered on the rocks,\nAnd rocks will laugh\nAt you\nAs you laught\nAt me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitrii Obolensky", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "month": "february", - "day": 15 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "rue": { - "title": "“Rue”", - "body": "_A Fable_\n\nYou know the herb they use for doses;\nit grows at the edge of filthy places.\nThis is a tale of ancient princes:\nRussia fought the Mongols here\nin the lighter days of a younger year.\nWith a rough sack of sour complaints\nthe New Year took the old one’s place,\nwith all his horde of helpmates hustling\nafter joking, jostling, whistling\nlewdly into their country pipes\nand puffing out their piggy cheeks.\nBut that same land no longer laughs\nsince the swan-song sounded overhead,\n\nand the bones, the bones--“Rue,” they madly cry\nbeneath their shroud of spring-green rye.\nAnd the bones, they wail forevermore:\n“We will always remember war.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "sayan": { - "title": "“Sayan”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe Sayan rolls with one swell after another,\nAnd with shores of chalk.\nHere, is the brooding of the past,\nWhere time has turned numb.\nAbove, with a vast blanket,\nThe sails rustle ominously,\nA shuttle boat perturbs the second\nSky of the river with its hulk bottom.\nWhat have you seen? Troops?\nAn assembly of mute priests?\nOr has anguish led you\nThere, to the land of the fathers?\nWhy have you become morose and boring,\nYou were carried by the stream,\nAnd have taken the wide oar\nOut of the rowlock?\nAnd, leaning towards the tip of the oar,\nYou stood bewitched,\nThe bleary glance was riveted\nTo the single stone.\nA hunter came and shed off\nThe old garment,\nAnd threw his hands up to the sky\nWith a trapper’s prayer.\nA deep bow thrice,\nThe custom of a nomad.\n“Understand, these are the ancestors’ images,\nNeighbours of the white clouds.”\nIn the heights, where the pinewood rustled\nAnd where the pine strings rang,\nThe master could carve out\nThe enigmatic runes of the fathers.\nYour eyes, old god,\nPeek from the cracks in the wall.\nThe ancient sons of the desert\nHobble and shepherd harts.\nAnd the harts scurry behind\nThe austere cuneiform.\nThe fathers’ writings froze\nAs fabled birds in the firmament,\nBelow, the hoary redwood\nSings with the evening paridae.\nIn its wretched magnanimity\nAn elk ascends the mountain top\nTo observe the agreements with god\nOver the sign-covered cliff.\nHe strokes the stone of his horns\nAgainst the black stony threshold.\nHe snaps the branch, chewing the leaves,\nAnd stares dully and wearily\nAt the crudely-ancient lineaments\nOf that which is no more.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut above the belt of writings,\nSomehow, the stricken drawing on the birch\nHas been preserved,\nShining with old beauty.\nWith a child’s countenance, he bowed down\nTo the wide abyss in front of him,\nBent over the precipice as a nail,\nSpared by the savage thunderstorm,\nCovering the birch’s front with a board,\nHe, froze, spellbound.\nOnly the black raven, a loner,\nFlew in the sky with a grim call.\nDid the birch say something to him\nWith its clear bark,\nAnd the precipice silence something\nIn front of the bewitched mountain?\nHe widened his foreign eyes--\nA blue-lit garden in them--\nLooking where the waterfall\nHas dug its stream bed for the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Zorin", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-one-come-to-confusion": { - "title": "“The Song of One Come to Confusion …”", - "body": "I saw black pine-needles\non a canvas of stone;\nher hand, I thought, thin as bone--\nthen it knocks at my very vitals.\n\nSo soon? So strange, now to stand\nbeside you in the evening, a skeleton;\nto stretch out a long thin hand\nand conjure constellations into your room.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "the-tangled-wood": { - "title": "“The Tangled Wood”", - "body": "The tangled wood was full of sound\nthe forest screamed, the forest groaned\nwith fear\nto see the spear-man beast his spear.\n\nWhy does hart’s horn hang heavy\nwith the moving mark of love?\nArrow’s flash of metal hits a haunch,\nand reckons right. Now beast is broken\n\nto his knees, beaten to the ground.\nHis eyes look deep at death.\nThe horses clatter, snort, and chatter:\n“We bring the Tall Ones. Useless to run.”\n\nUseless only your exquisite motion,\nyour almost feminine face. No action\ncan save you. You fly from rack and ruin,\nand searching spear-man follows fast.\n\nPanting horses always closer,\nbranching antlers always lower,\ntwangling bowstrings over and over,\nnor help nor hart from hurt and hazard.\n\nBut he rears abruptly, bristles, roars--\nand shows a lion’s cruel claws.\nWith lazy ease he touches, teases--\nteaches the trick of terror.\n\nAcquiescent and still,\nthey fall to fill their graves.\nHe rises rampant. Regal roar.\nAnd around him everywhere lay beaten slaves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "when-drinking-warm-breaths-of-a-pigeon": { - "title": "“When drinking warm breaths of a pigeon …”", - "body": "When drinking warm breaths of a pigeon,\nYou, wholly laughing, called him spiky\nAnd he, inserting a hooked beak into lips’ coloured region,\nShaking his wing, did he consider you a dove?\n Unlikely!\nA flock of orioles was flying,\nLike triangle of dawns, onto the body\nIn brows’ twilight trying to conceal\nThe mirrors of the morning seas\nAnd those fell low, akin to the singing of kings.\nBehind their shining haulm,\nAs with an air of golden weather,\nAt times would shudder known\nSteep flight of hill towards the nether.\nA pigeon’s legs of crimson\nWere buried in a hairdo fluffy.\nAutumnal-chilly, he has come.\nHe’s in disfavour with his covey.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Victor Pechorin", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "when-horses-die": { - "title": "“When horses die …”", - "body": "When horses die, they breathe\nWhen grasses die, they wither,\nWhen suns die, they go out,\nWhen people die, they sing songs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "wind-is-song": { - "title": "“Wind is song”", - "body": "Wind is song\nOf whom and of what?\nOf the sword’s longing\nTo be the word.\nPeople cherish the day of death\nLike a favorite daisy.\nBelieve that the strings of the great\nAre strummed by the East these days.\nPerhaps we’ll be given new pride\nBy the wizard of those shining mountains,\nAnd I, of many souls captain,\nWill wear a white snowcap of reason.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-bowl-is-banished-from-the-long-tables": { - "title": "“The bowl is banished from the long tables …”", - "body": "The bowl is banished from the long tables--\nsomeone has drunk the liquor of the gods.\nDivine wine is a beast-feast also--\nthe oxen raise their blue-gray horns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - } - } - }, - "the-girls-those-who-pace": { - "title": "“The girls, those who pace …”", - "body": "The girls, those who pace\nWith boots of black eyes\nUpon the flowers of my heart.\nThe girls who put javelins\nUpon their eyelashes’ lakes.\nThe girls who wash their feet\nIn the lake of my words.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "a-goblin-grabbles-in-the-greeny-forest": { - "title": "“A goblin grabbles in the greeny forest …”", - "body": "A goblin grabbles in the greeny forest--\nWood-willy, slurping his mouth-organ--\nwhere a clump of aspens quivers\nand benefolent spruces cascade.\n\nA smear of pungent forest honey\nlicky on the tongue-tip of daylight;\nOh! His grasping arms were icy:\nI was completely taken in.\n\nI couldn’t stand his eyes’ unblinking\npoint-blank confrontation--\nhis look, full of pleading promises,\nthe icicle anguish in his eyes.\n\nLawn-rake fingers crabbing at me\nfrom a shaky clump of catkins;\nhe had dark blue sighters\nand a body all mush-flesh and flow.\n\nI had missed a turn or two, tearing\nalong in a juventy frenzy. Slying,\nthe wood-wart winked and jostled\nme: “Which way where? And why?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-monster-inhabits-mountains-high": { - "title": "“A monster inhabits mountain’s high …”", - "body": "A monster inhabits mountain’s high\nAnd has a terrifying bottom.\nIt’s grabbed a girl carrying a pot\nAnd flashes her a comely smile.\nAnd she is ready to drop just like\na fruit in his paws like hairy branches.\nThe monster is as a monster looks.\nSelf-satisfied it scratches its haunches.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1908 - } - } - }, - "the-moon-begins-to-flow": { - "title": "“The moon begins to flow …”", - "body": "The moon begins to flow--\nreveals herself,\nconceals herself,\nthen somebody squeals: oh!\nand disintegrates the sky.\nGloss-face drapes herself\nin a chorus of clouds.\nBread’s set out on the table. Soup’s on.\nThey say a naked woman\nis beautiful by moonlight.\nRough voices, red faces\nmunching mushrooms; they\ndrink, dribble, bolt about.\nI can’t get away from you, ever.\nThe sky takes scraps of blue, black, gray,\nquietly quilts them into evening.\nAnd they’re busy gobbling the caviar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-sticky-sky-smells-blue-gray": { - "title": "“The sticky sky smells blue-gray …”", - "body": "The sticky sky smells blue-gray, it’s the odor of udder.\nShow me some loving, be good to me!\nI am bleeding. You are my fatality.\nI am nailed up to die on an old empty tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Schmidt", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "vladislav-khodasevich": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vladislav Khodasevich", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Khodasevich", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 20 - }, - "poems": { - "the-ape": { - "title": "“The Ape”", - "body": "The heat was unbearable. The forests were burning.\nTime passed languorously. At the neighboring dacha\nA cock was crowing. I went outside the gate.\nThere, leaning upon the fence, an itinerant Serb,\nRail-thin and dark, was snoozing on the bench.\nA heavy silver cross hung suspended\nOn his half-exposed chest. Drops of sweat\nRolling down it. Above him, on the fence,\nDressed in a red skirt, sat a monkey,\nGreedily masticating the dusty leaves\nOf the lilac bush. A leather collar,\nPulled back by a heavy chain,\nThrottled its neck. The Serb, having heard me,\nCame to, wiped the sweat, and asked if I would give him\nSome water to drink. But having only lifted it to his lips--\nNot too cold--placed the little bowl\nOn the bench, and that very moment the ape,\nDipping its fingers in the water, grabbed\nThe bowl with both of its hands.\nShe drank, getting down on all fours,\nLeaning with her elbows on the bench.\nThe chin almost touching the boards,\nThe back arched severely above the animal’s\nBalding head. It must have been just so\nThat Darius did once upon a time fall to his knees\nTo drink from the roadside puddle, as he retreated\nBefore Alexander’s mighty phalanx.\nHaving drunk every drop of the water, the ape\nBrushed the bowl off the bench, raised itself\nAnd--will I ever forget this moment?--\nOffered me its black, calloused hand,\nStill cool with the moisture …\nI had shaken the hands of beauties, poets,\nHeads of state--but never did a single hand\nEncompass in itself such graceful\nAspect! Nor ever did a hand\nTouch my hand in such a spirit of brotherhood!\nAnd, as God is my witness, no one gazed into my eyes\nWith such wisdom and to such depths,\nVerily--to the bottom of my soul.\nThe sweetest legends of deepest antiquity\nThat lowly beast did stir within my heart,\nAnd in that second my life appeared complete,\nAnd it seemed a choir of heavenly lights and sea waves,\nOf the winds and of the spheres, with organ music\nBurst into my ears, and thundered, as once upon a time\nIn other, immemorial days.\n\nAnd the Serb took his leave, thumping on a tambourine.\nHaving saddled his left shoulder,\nThe monkey rocked rhythmically,\nAs Indian maharajas do atop an elephant.\nThe huge crimson sun,\nDeprived of its rays,\nHung in the opalescent smoke. The relentless swelter\nPoured forth beyond the withered field of wheat.\n\nThat day, war was declared.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "february", - "day": 20 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-the-one-armed-man-with-the-pregnant-wife": { - "title": "“The Ballad of the One-Armed Man with the Pregnant Wife”", - "body": "What’s this? Am I in what they call a life?\nAre we in France or in Nineveh?\nA one-armed man with pregnant wife\nJust walked into the cinema.\n\nThe angels give me lyres to play,\nMy world’s pellucid, clear as glass;\nAnd, meanwhile, this guy gapes away,\nWhile Charlie Chaplin shows his ass.\n\nHow come this twerp with ravaged sleeve,\nA man of peace, of no small charm,\nCan trudge so calmly, unaggrieved\nThrough worlds that take away an arm?\n\nThis can’t be here; it’s Nineveh,\nIs what I think when with his wife\nThe unarmed leaves the cinema,\nAnd heads for home to live his life.\n\nThat’s when I shriek, my molars gnash,\nI take my leather belt in hand,\nMy angels’ backs I whip and lash;\nMy angels scatter, then disband,\n\nFly high into the city skies.\nReminds me of the way spooked doves,\nOn St. Mark’s Square did flutter-flies\nBeneath the feet of my best love.\n\nThen graciously I doffed my hat\nAnd walked up to the unarmed man;\nFirst touched his sleeve, tried brief chitchat,\nThen made this speech in trite deadpan:\n\n“Pardon, monsieur, when I’m in hell,\nFor my disgusting sins requited,\nWhile you, with spouse, in heaven dwell,\n(‘Tis true, my life is sore benighted),\n\nYou’ll be aloft, immured in grace,\nAn eye trained on the sins below,\nWith no vexations, not a trace,\nYour white wings wreathed in hallowed glow,\n\nThen from your perch on cloudlet blest\nPlease throw me down a feather light;\nOr, soothing to my scorched, burnt breast,\nLet one small snowflake land, alight.”\n\nThe man with one arm looked at me,\nA grin upon his phizog soft,\nDeparted then his wife and he;\nHis derby hat he left undoffed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1925, - "month": "august", - "day": 17 - }, - "location": "Meudon", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 17 - } - } - }, - "before-the-mirror": { - "title": "“Before the Mirror”", - "body": "“I, I, I”. What a weird word!\nIs that man there really I?\nCan it be that mother loved such a person,\nGreyish-yellow, with hair turning grey,\nAnd omniscient as a serpent?\n\nCan it be that the boy who used to dance\nAt Ostankino in the summer--\nIs I, who, by each of my answers,\nInspire loathing, anger and fear\nIn newly hatched poets?\n\nCan it be that the same person\nWho used to throw all his boyish vivacity--\nInto midnight arguments--is I,\nWho have learned to be silent\nAnd to jest when faced with tragic conversations?\n\nYet it’s always like this midway\nOn the fatal journey through life;\n[You go] from one trivial cause to another,\nAnd behold, you have lost your way in the desert,\nAnd cannot find your own tracks.\n\nNo panther leaping in pursuit\nHas driven me into my Parisian garret\nAnd there is no Virgil standing at my shoulder.\nThere is only loneliness--framed in the mirror\nThat speaks the truth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitrii Obolensky", - "date": { - "year": 1924, - "month": "june", - "day": 23 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "burial": { - "title": "“Burial”", - "body": "Forehead--\nChalk.\nCoffin\nPale.\n\nPriest\nSang.\nShaft\nBang!\n\nDay\nSacred!\nCrypt\nBlind.\n\nShade--\nTo hell!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1928, - "month": "march", - "day": 9 - }, - "location": "Paris", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 9 - } - } - }, - "good-poems-torment-me-much": { - "title": "“Good poems torment me much …”", - "body": "Good poems torment me much,\nBad ones--are nice without reason:\nThey can’t sting souls, nor they bite,\nThey have the warmth of home, isn’t it?\n\nSo--that’s a real lemonade, of course,\n(They’re light, as a silk morning gown).\nAnd genius ones takes minute to concern, oh …\nThe grey verses hold evening whole.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "the-grains-path": { - "title": "“The Grain’s Path”", - "body": "The sower walks down the even furrows;\nhis fathers all furrowed the path he follows.\n\nThe young seed glitters gold in his hand,\nbut it must fall into the black ground.\n\nThere, amid the tunnels of the blind worm,\nit will die on its due day--and grow again.\n\nSo now my soul treads the path of the grain--\ndown into darkness--and spring’s return.\n\nAnd you, my people, and you, my native land,\nyou will die and live, when the dark months end,\n\nfor we have been granted only this one truth:\nwhatever lives must follow the grain’s path.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-house": { - "title": "“The House”", - "body": "There was a house here. They recently dismantled\nthe upstairs for firewood, leaving just the rough\nlower stonework structure. I go there\noften of an evening to relax. The open sky\nand green trees in the little courtyard\nrise up so fresh from all that’s fallen,\nand there’s the clear outline of the wide\nwindow-frames. A tumbled beam resembles\na column. A musty chill is coming\nfrom the piles of rubble and debris\nfilling up the rooms, where once\nthe people nested …\nWhere they quarrelled, they reconciled, they\nstored up greasy money in a stocking\nfor a rainy day; where in the stuffy dark\nspouses embraced; where they sweated\nin a fever’s heat; where people were born\nand died in private--all of it now\nopen to the passer-by. O, blessed is he\nwhose untrammelled foot treads cheerfully\non this dust, and whose indifferent staff\ncan knock against the abandoned walls!\nThe royal palace of great Rameses\nor an unknown labourer’s shack, they’re\nequal to the wanderer, taking the same\ncomfort in the song of passing time; whether\nceremonious ranks of columns, or gaps\nfrom yesterday’s doors, much the same\nthey lead the traveller from one emptiness\ninto another …\n\nWith a pattern of broken banisters\nthe stairs are walking up into the sky,\nand where the landing has been interrupted\nseems to me like an elevated podium.\nBut there’s no orator. And in the sky\nthe evening star has started shining,\ninstigator of high-flown meditations.\n\nYes, Time: you are so good. It’s good\nto inhale your awful spaciousness.\nWhy hide the fact? The human heart\nis playing like an infant fresh from sleep,\nwhen war, or famine, or civil turmoil\nswoop down suddenly, and shake the earth;\nthe times like opening skies will gape apart\nand man will throw himself, and his ever--\nunsatisfied soul, longingly into the deep.\n\nLike a bird up in the air, a fish in the ocean,\na slippery worm in a damp layer of earth,\nlike a salamander in flames--man lives\nin time. A half-wild nomad, using the moon’s\nchanges and sketched-out constellations,\nhe makes attempts to measure the abyss,\nwith his unpractised letters noting down\nevents like islands plotted on a map …\nBut son displaces father. Cities, empires,\nscriptures, truths--they pass away. And man\nbreaks and builds up again with equal joy.\nHe has invented history--what a pleasure!\nAnd with both horror and a secret lust\nthe madman watches how, somewhere between\nthe past and the future--like clear water\nslipping between the fingers--unceasingly\nlife is trickling away. And the heart flutters\nlike the flag aloft on the mast of a ship,\nbetween the recollection and the hope\n--that memory of a future …\n\n But here--\nthe rustle of footsteps. A hunched old woman\ncarrying a big sack. With a wrinkled hand\nshe’s ripping down old oakum off the walls,\npulling out laths. I go up silently\nto help her, and in pleasant harmony\nwe do some of the work for time. It’s darker:\nout from behind the walls a green crescent rises,\nits feeble light, like a little stream, flows\nover the glazed tiles of the collapsing stove.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - } - } - }, - "ladys-washed-her-hands-so-long": { - "title": "“Lady’s washed her hands so long …”", - "body": "Lady’s washed her hands so long,\nLady’s scrubbed her hands so hard,\nand this lady won’t forget\nthe blood around the neck.\n\nLady, lady! Like a bird\nyou twitch about your sleepless bed.\nThree hundred years you’ve had no sleep--\nand six years now I’ve stayed awake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "month": "january", - "day": 9 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 9 - } - } - }, - "monument": { - "title": "“Monument”", - "body": "In me is the beginning, in me the end.\nWhat’s been accomplished by me a blink!\nYet still I am a reliable chain link:\nThis happiness to me has been given.\n\nIn the new but greater Russia they will\nerect to me a Janus-faced idol at\nthe broad cross-roads of two city streets\nwhere there’s sand, time, and the wind whines …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1928, - "month": "january", - "day": 28 - }, - "location": "Paris", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 28 - } - } - }, - "my-heart-is-singing-singing-singing": { - "title": "“My heart is singing, singing, singing …”", - "body": "My heart is singing, singing, singing,\n In it there is the blossoming,\nOf course, I can not have excuse\n In these so awful years.\n\nThe coffins are across my earth\n And hunger, murrain, death--\nBut I feel, for some reason, glee\n As if the sun is in me.\n\nThis feeling is my shame, it’s true,\n But what can I do here?--\nMy heart against everything\n Is singing, singing, singing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Tatiana Kocherova", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "december", - "day": 5 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 5 - } - } - }, - "nights": { - "title": "“Nights”", - "body": "A thin howl from the dogs on guard.\nTonight still camped in the same place,\nno-good vagabond orphans, we are\nwarming our hands at the bonfire.\n\nA sullen look beneath the brows\nfrom empty nights of far-fetched sleep.\nThe smoke is full of ruby floaters\nwhirled from flames that whistle and crack.\n\nThe waste says nothing. Silent, barbed,\na distant wind pursues the dust;\nwe sing with an evil dreariness\nthat’s chafing at our curling lips …\n\nA thin howl from the dogs on guard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1907, - "month": "may", - "day": 7 - }, - "location": "Lidino", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 7 - } - } - }, - "not-my-mother-but-a-tula-peasant": { - "title": "“Not my mother, but a Tula peasant …”", - "body": "Not my mother, but a Tula peasant,\nEléna Kúzina, fed me her breast.\nShe warmed my swaddling-clothes above the stove,\nand with her cross at night my dreams were blessed.\n\nShe knew no fairy tales and never sang:\nbut always kept as treats for me instead\ninside her treasured white enamel tin\na peppermint horse or fruity gingerbread.\n\nShe never taught me how to say my prayers,\nbut gave up everything she had for me:\neven her own bitter motherhood,\nall that was dear to her, unconditionally.\n\nOnly the time I tumbled from the window, but\nstood up alive (that day for ever mine!),\nwith half a kopek for the miracle\nher candle graced Iberian Mary’s shrine.\n\nAnd you, Russia, ‘great resounding power’:\ntaking her nipples for my lips to pull,\nI suckled the excruciating right\nto love you, and to curse at you as well.\n\nMy honest, joyful task of making psalms,\nin which I serve each moment all day long,\nyour wonder-making genius teaches me,\nand my profession is your magic tongue.\n\nAnd I may stand before your feeble sons\npriding myself at times that I can guard\nthis language, handed down from age to age,\nwith a more jealous love for every word…\n\nThe years fly by. The future has no use,\nthe past has burnt itself into my soul.\nAnd yet the secret joy is still alive,\nfor me there is one refuge from it all:\n\nwhere with the still imperishable love\neven a maggot-eaten heart can keep,\nbeside the trampled coronation crowd\nmy nurse, Elena Kuzina, asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1922, - "month": "march", - "day": 2 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "mothers_day" - } - } - }, - "orpheus": { - "title": "“Orpheus”", - "body": "Brightly lit from above I am sitting\nin my circular room; this is I--\nlooking up at a sky made of stucco,\nat a sixty-watt sun in that sky.\n\nAll around me, and also lit brightly,\nall around me my furniture stands,\nchair and table and bed--and I wonder\nsitting there what to do with my hands.\n\nFrost-engendered white feathery palmtrees\non the window-panes silently bloom;\nloud and quick clicks the watch in my pocket\nas I sit in my circular room.\n\nOh, the leaden, the beggarly bareness\nof a life where no issue I see!\nWhom on earth could I tell how I pity\nmy own self and the things around me?\n\nAnd then clasping my knees I start slowly\nto sway backwards and forwards, and soon\nI am speaking in verse, I am crooning\nto myself as I sway in a swoon.\n\nWhat a vague, what a passionate murmur\nlacking any intelligent plan;\nbut a sound may be truer than reason\nand a word may be stronger than man.\n\nAnd then melody, melody, melody\nblends my accents and joins in their quest\nand a delicate, delicate, delicate\npointed blade seems to enter my breast.\n\nHigh above my own spirit I tower,\nhigh above mortal matter I grow:\nsubterranean flames lick my ankles,\npast my brow the cool galaxies flow.\n\nWith big eyes-as my singing grows wilder--\nwith the eyes of a serpent maybe,\nI keep watching the helpless expression\nof the poor things that listen to me.\n\nAnd the room and the furniture slowly,\nslowly start in a circle to sail,\nand a great heavy lyre is from nowhere\nhanded me by a ghost through the gale.\n\nAnd the sixty-watt sun has now vanished,\nand away the false heavens are blown:\non the smoothness of glossy black boulders\nthis is Orpheus standing alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Nabokov", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "step-over-leap-across": { - "title": "“Step over, leap across …”", - "body": "Step over, leap across,\nfly beyond, however you like, get through it--\nbut tear yourself off: be a stone from a sling,\nbe a star that breaks away from the night …\nYou lost it yourself--now look for it.\n\nGod knows what you grunt to yourself,\nlooking for spectacles or keys.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "the-stopper": { - "title": "“The Stopper”", - "body": "The stopper in the iodine\nhas rotted from the strength inside,\nthe way the soul will burn unseen\nand eat the flesh it’s occupied.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Daniels", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "the-tears-of-rachel": { - "title": "“The Tears Of Rachel”", - "body": "Peace to the earth of the evens and sinners!\nBarriers, glasses, and pools are in a glow.\nI go under the rain’s flows, thinnest,\nMy shoulders--wet and my hat is all raw.\nNow we all are the homeless bastards,\nAs if we always were vagabonds here,\nAnd it sings to us--the rain, everlasting,--\nSongs of the Rachel’s perpetual tears.\n\nLet our grandchildren create their ballads\nOf fabulous fits of their great-great grandfathers,\nIn our heart, every day, as the bloodiest,\nMost shameful of days, is left for the others.\nIt is our pest that, to God, we were thrust in\nThis real cold world--in the time of a fear!\nAnd on the pale cheeks of the old woman, passing,\nFlow the Rachel’s embittered tears.\n\nI will take never nor glory nor honor,\nIf on last week--like I really saw it--\nShe has received, as a parcel, a lone,\nOozed with his blood piece of his overcoat.\nUnder all our cumbersome burden,\nAll those songs, we can there sing and hear,\nHave only one, one refrain that’s a good one:\nIt is the Rachel’s disconsolate tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1916, - "month": "october", - "day": 30 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "temptation": { - "title": "“Temptation”", - "body": "“Enough! for beauty is not needed.\nThe sordid world’s not worth a song.\nGrow dim, O Tasso’s lamp! Unheeded\nLie, Homer, friend for centuries long!”\n\n“And revolution is not needed;\nIts armies dissipate and fade.\nIt has one crown for which it pleaded,\nIt has one liberty--to trade.”\n\n“In vain on public squares stands preaching\nHarmony’s hungry son to men;\nUnwelcome is his gospel-teaching\nTo the successful citizen.”\n\n“Content, and recking proudly of it,\nOn heaps where blossoming banners stand,\nThe scabs of drudgery and profit\nHe scratches with an itching hand.”\n\n“--Be off! Don’t trouble me. I’m selling.\n--No bourgeois, and no farmer, I.\n--I hide my profits daily swelling\n--In flaming cap of liberty.”\n\n“Soul, here confined and sickly grieving,\nOn heaps of this dishonoured lot.\nLook up to heaven for relieving,\nBut near, upon the earth, look not!”\n\nSo speaks the wicked Heart in trying\nTo tempt the Soul’s unsullied dreams.\n“O earthly one,” says Soul, replying:\n“What knowest thou where heaven gleams?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra" - } - }, - "too-late": { - "title": "“Too late”", - "body": "Fell to thinking I. And woke up.\nRang out belfry’s toll!\nTapered, smoke-dimmed icons--churchward\nBeckons pealing, dole.\n\nTardy, tardy--church is empty.\nLastly tolls the bell.\nYearnful heart impatient, sorry\nHeartful groan so fell.\n\nMuch too late. It’s snuffed, the candle.\nHere--the only one.\nNot remembering church is joy-filled,\nSad, returning, son.\n\nHow I want to turn the clock back,\nDown on knees I fall!\nGod, O God! Your tabernacle\nHolds me in its thrall!\n\nQuesting, I am now imprisoned.\nSpectres o’er me flap--\nThreatening, threatening, lure-enticing,\nSpider’s silky trap!\n\nMuch too late. In darkened hell-hole\nBlind, condemned to rot…\nYet, regretful, dallying light’s call--\nStrengthless, take my lot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1904, - "month": "december", - "day": 5 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "twilight-was-turning-to-darkness-outside": { - "title": "“Twilight was turning to darkness outside …”", - "body": "Twilight was turning to darkness outside.\nUnder the eaves a window banged wide.\n\nA curtain was lifted, a light briefly shone,\nA swift shadow fell down the wall and was gone.\n\nHappy the man who falls head first to death:\nAt least for a moment his viewpoint is fresh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Michael Frayn", - "date": { - "year": 1923, - "month": "december", - "day": 23 - }, - "location": "Saarow", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "twilight": { - "title": "“Twilight”", - "body": "The snow has drifted. Quietness descends.\nBlind walls beside the alley here, and empty ground.\nHere comes a man. To take the knife and stab him now!\n--Without a sound he’ll lean against the fence,\nThen slowly sink onto his knees, and lie face down.\nThe snowy breath that stirs among the trees,\nThe smoke that softly hazes evening skies--\nThose heralds of a deep and perfect peace--\nWill lightly whirl about him where he lies.\nFrom streets and yards they’ll all come running out to see,\nLike swarming ants, and stand between his corpse and me.\nThey’ll question me on how I killed him, and what for.--\nNot one will understand the love for him I bore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Michael Frayn", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "amir-khusrau": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Amir Khusrau", - "birth": { - "year": 1253 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1325 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "indian+persian", - "language": "urdu", - "flag": "🇮🇳 ", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Khusrau", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "indian", - "persian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "couplet": { - "title": "“Couplet”", - "body": "Oh Khusrau, the river of love runs in strange directions.\nOne who jumps into it drowns, and one who drowns, gets across.", - "metadata": { - "language": "urdu" - } - }, - "he-visits-my-town-once-a-year": { - "title": "“He visits my town once a year …”", - "body": "He visits my town once a year.\nHe fills my mouth with kisses and nectar.\nI spend all my money on him.\n_Who, girl, your man?_\nNo, a mango.", - "metadata": { - "language": "urdu", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "soren-kierkegaard": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Søren Kierkegaard", - "birth": { - "year": 1813 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "danish", - "language": "danish", - "flag": "🇩🇰", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Søren_Kierkegaard", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "danish", - "philosopher" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "father-in-heaven-thou-art-incomprehensible-in-thy-creation": { - "title": "“Father in Heaven! Thou art incomprehensible in Thy creation …”", - "body": "Father in Heaven! Thou art incomprehensible in Thy creation;\nThou livest afar off in a light which no one can penetrate and if we recognize Thee in Thy providence,\nour knowledge is feeble and veils Thy splendor,\nThou who are incomprehensible in Thy splendor.\nBut Thou art still more incomprehensible in Thy grace and in Thy mercy.\nWhat is man that Thou art mindful of him,\nThou Infinite One--but even more, what is the son of a fallen race, that yea Thou wouldst visit him, Thou Holy One;\nyea what is the sinner that Thy Son wouldst come into the world because of him,\nnot to judge but to save,\nnot to make known His own dwelling place so that the lost might seek Him,\nbut in order to seek out that which is lost,\nhaving no dens such as wild beasts have,\nhaving no place on which to lay his head,\nknowing hunger in the desert, thirst on the Cross.\nLord, Father of compassion! What is man able to do for such great benefits;\nhe is not even able to give Thee thanks without Thee.\nTeach us then the humble discernment of true intelligence that,\nas a broken heart sighs under the weight of its guilt.\nsaying in its sorrow: “It is impossible! it is impossible that God is able to show such compassion,”\nso that the one who appropriates this assurance in faith must also say in his joy, “it is impossible.”\nIf death too seemed to separate those who love one another and again they were given to each other,\ntheir first cry at the moment of their reunion would be, “it is impossible.”\nAnd this joyous message of Thy compassion, Father in Heaven, even if man has heard it since his tender infancy, is not for that the less incomprehensible!\nAnd even if man meditates on it day by day, it does not become for that less incomprehensible!\nWas then Thy incomprehensible mercy like that of a man, which disappeared on closer acquaintance,\nlike the happiness of those who loved each other once in days of old incomprehensible (then) but not any more.\nO torpid human reason!\nO guileful earthly wisdom!\nO cold thought of slumbering faith!\nO miserable forgetfulness of the cold heart!\nNo, Lord, keep Thou everyone who believes in Thee in the proper humble understanding and deliver him from evil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "danish" - } - }, - "father-in-heaven-thou-has-loved-us-first": { - "title": "“Father in Heaven! Thou has loved us first …”", - "body": "Father in Heaven! Thou has loved us first, help us never to forget that Thou art love so that this sure conviction might triumph in our hearts over the seduction of the world, over the inquietude of the soul, over the anxiety for the future, over the fright of the past, over the distress of the moment. But grant also that this conviction might discipline our soul so that our heart might remain faithful and sincere in the love which we bear to all those whom Thou hast commanded us to love as we love ourselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "danish" - } - }, - "o-lord-calm-the-waves-of-this-heart": { - "title": "“O Lord, calm the waves of this heart …”", - "body": "O Lord, calm the waves of this heart; calm its tempests. Calm yourself, O my soul, so that the divine can act in you. Calm yourself, O my soul, so that God is able to repose in you, so that his peace may cover you. Yes, father in heaven, often have we found that the world cannot give us peace, O but make us feel that you are able to give peace; let us know the truth of your promise: that the whole world may not be able to take away your peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "danish" - } - }, - "you-changeless-one": { - "title": "“You Changeless One …”", - "body": "You Changeless One, whom nothing changes! You who are changeless in love, who just for our own good do not let yourself change-would that we also might will our own well-being, let ourselves be brought up, in unconditional obedience, by your changelessness to find rest and to rest in your changelessness! You are not like a human being. If he is to maintain a mere measure of changelessness, he must not have too much that can move him and must not let himself be moved too much. But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a trifle and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love. But nothing changes you, you Changeless One! O you who in infinite love let yourself be moved, may this our prayer also move you to bless it so that the prayer may change the one who is praying into conformity with your changeless will, you Changeless One!", - "metadata": { - "language": "danish" - } - } - } - }, - "aline-murray-kilmer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Aline Murray Kilmer", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Murray_Kilmer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "atonement": { - "title": "“Atonement”", - "body": "When a storm comes up at night and the wind is crying,\nWhen the trees are moaning like masts on laboring ships,\nI wake in fear and put out my hand to find you\nWith your name on my lips.\n\nNo pain that the heart can hold is like to this one--\nTo call, forgetting, into aching space,\nTo reach out confident hands and find beside you\nOnly an empty place.\n\nThis should atone for the hours when I forget you.\nTake then my offering, clean and sharp and sweet,\nAn agony brighter than years of dull remembrance.\nI lay it at your feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "bound": { - "title": "“Bound”", - "body": "If I had loved you, soon, ah, soon I had lost you.\nHad I been kind you had kissed me and gone your faithless way.\nThe kiss that I would not give is the kiss that your lips are holding:\nNow you are mine forever, because of all I have cost you.\n\nYou think that you are free and have given over your sighing,\nYou think that from my coldness your love has flown away:\nBut mine are the hands you shall dream that your own are holding,\nAnd mine is the face you shall look for when you are dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-heart-knoweth-its-own-bitterness": { - "title": "“The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness”", - "body": "The heart knoweth? If this be true indeed\nThen the thing that I bear in my bosom is not a heart;\nFor it knows no more than a hollow, whispering reed\nThat answers to every wind.\nI am sick of the thing! I think we had better part.\n\nMy heart will come to any piper’s calling,\nA fool in motley that dances for any king;\nBut my body knows, and its tears unbidden falling\nSay that my heart has sinned.\nYou would have my heart? You may. I am sick of the thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light-lover": { - "title": "“Light Lover”", - "body": "Why don’t you go back to the sea, my dear?\nI am not one who would hold you;\nThe sea is the woman you really love,\nSo let hers be the arms that fold you.\nYour bright blue eyes are sailor’s eyes,\nYour hungry heart is a sailor’s, too.\nAnd I know each port that you pass through\nWill give one lass both bonny and wise\nWho has learned light love from a sailor’s eyes.\n\nIf you ever go back to the sea, my dear,\nI shall miss you--yes, can you doubt it?\nBut women have lived through worse than that\nSo why should we worry about it?\nTake your restless heart to the restless sea,\nYour light, light love to a lighter lass\nWho will smile when you come and smile when you pass.\nHere you can only trouble me.\nOh, I think you had better go back to sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "perversity": { - "title": "“Perversity”", - "body": "All my life I have loved where I was not loved,\nAnd always those whom I did not love loved me;\nOnly the God who made my wild heart knows\nWhy this should be.\n\nOh, I am strange, inscrutable, and proud;\nYou cannot prove me though you try and try.\nI’ll keep your love alive and wondering\nUntil you die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "joyce-kilmer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Joyce Kilmer", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Kilmer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 41 - }, - "poems": { - "alarm-clocks": { - "title": "“Alarm Clocks”", - "body": "When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farm\nAcross green fields and yellow hills of hay\nThe little twittering birds laugh in his way\nAnd poise triumphant on his shining arm.\nHe bears a sword of flame but not to harm\nThe wakened life that feels his quickening sway\nAnd barnyard voices shrilling “It is day!”\nTake by his grace a new and alien charm.\n\nBut in the city, like a wounded thing\nThat limps to cover from the angry chase,\nHe steals down streets where sickly arc-lights sing,\nAnd wanly mock his young and shameful face;\nAnd tiny gongs with cruel fervor ring\nIn many a high and dreary sleeping place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-annunciation": { - "title": "“The Annunciation”", - "body": "“Hail Mary, full of grace,” the Angel saith.\nOur Lady bows her head, and is ashamed;\nShe has a Bridegroom Who may not be named,\nHer mortal flesh bears Him Who conquers death.\nNow in the dust her spirit grovelleth;\nToo bright a Sun before her eyes has flamed,\nToo fair a herald joy too high proclaimed,\nAnd human lips have trembled in God’s breath.\nO Mother-Maid, thou art ashamed to cover\nWith thy white self, whereon no stain can be,\nThy God, Who came from Heaven to be thy Lover,\nThy God, Who came from Heaven to dwell in thee.\nAbout thy head celestial legions hover,\nChanting the praise of thy humility.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "as-winds-that-blow-against-a-star": { - "title": "“As Winds that Blow against a Star”", - "body": "Now by what whim of wanton chance\nDo radiant eyes know sombre days?\nAnd feet that shod in light should dance\nWalk weary and laborious ways?\n\nBut rays from Heaven, white and whole,\nMay penetrate the gloom of earth;\nAnd tears but nourish, in your soul,\nThe glory of celestial mirth.\n\nThe darts of toil and sorrow, sent\nAgainst your peaceful beauty, are\nAs foolish and as impotent\nAs winds that blow against a star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-blue-valentine": { - "title": "“A Blue Valentine”", - "body": "Monsignore,\nRight Reverend Bishop Valentinus,\nSometime of Interamna, which is called Ferni,\nNow of the delightful Court of Heaven,\nI respectfully salute you,\nI genuflect\nAnd I kiss your episcopal ring.\nIt is not, Monsignore,\nThe fragrant memory of your holy life,\nNor that of your shining and joyous martyrdom,\nWhich causes me now to address you.\nBut since this is your august festival, Monsignore,\nIt seems appropriate to me to state\nAccording to a venerable and agreeable custom,\nThat I love a beautiful lady.\nHer eyes, Monsignore,\nAre so blue that they put lovely little blue reflections\nOn everything that she looks at,\nSuch as a wall\nOr the moon\nOr my heart.\nIt is like the light coming through blue stained glass,\nYet not quite like it,\nFor the blueness is not transparent,\nOnly translucent.\nHer soul’s light shines through,\nBut her soul cannot be seen.\nIt is something elusive, whimsical, tender, wanton, infantile, wise\nAnd noble.\nShe wears, Monsignore, a blue garment,\nMade in the manner of the Japanese.\nIt is very blue--\nI think that her eyes have made it more blue,\nSweetly staining it\nAs the pressure of her body has graciously given it form.\nLoving her, Monsignore,\nI love all her attributes;\nBut I believe\nThat even if I did not love her\nI would love the blueness of her eyes,\nAnd her blue garment, made in the manner of the Japanese.\nMonsignore,\nI have never before troubled you with a request.\nThe saints whose ears I chiefly worry with my pleas\nare the most exquisite and maternal Brigid,\nGallant Saint Stephen, who puts fire in my blood,\nAnd your brother bishop, my patron,\nThe generous and jovial Saint Nicholas of Bari.\nBut, of your courtesy, Monsignore,\nDo me this favour:\nWhen you this morning make your way\nTo the Ivory Throne that bursts into bloom with roses\nbecause of her who sits upon it,\nWhen you come to pay your devoir to Our Lady,\nI beg you, say to her:\n“Madame, a poor poet, one of your singing servants yet on earth,\nHas asked me to say that at this moment he is especially grateful to you\nFor wearing a blue gown.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "citizen-of-the-world": { - "title": "“Citizen of the World”", - "body": "No longer of Him be it said\n“He hath no place to lay His head.”\n\nIn every land a constant lamp\nFlames by His small and mighty camp.\n\nThere is no strange and distant place\nThat is not gladdened by His face.\n\nAnd every nation kneels to hail\nThe Splendour shining through Its veil.\n\nCloistered beside the shouting street,\nSilent, He calls me to His feet.\n\nImprisoned for His love of me\nHe makes my spirit greatly free.\n\nAnd through my lips that uttered sin\nThe King of Glory enters in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dave-lilly": { - "title": "“Dave Lilly”", - "body": "There’s a brook on the side of Greylock that used to be full of trout,\nBut there’s nothing there now but minnows; they say it is all fished out.\nI fished there many a Summer day some twenty years ago,\nAnd I never quit without getting a mess of a dozen or so.\nThere was a man, Dave Lilly, who lived on the North Adams road,\nAnd he spent all his time fishing, while his neighbors reaped and sowed.\nHe was the luckiest fisherman in the Berkshire hills, I think.\nAnd when he didn’t go fishing he’d sit in the tavern and drink.\nWell, Dave is dead and buried and nobody cares very much;\nThey have no use in Greylock for drunkards and loafers and such.\nBut I always liked Dave Lilly, he was pleasant as you could wish;\nHe was shiftless and good-for-nothing, but he certainly could fish.\nThe other night I was walking up the hill from Williamstown\nAnd I came to the brook I mentioned, and I stopped on the bridge and sat down.\nI looked at the blackened water with its little flecks of white\nAnd I heard it ripple and whisper in the still of the Summer night.\nAnd after I’d been there a minute it seemed to me I could feel\nThe presence of someone near me, and I heard the hum of a reel.\nAnd the water was churned and broken, and something was brought to land\nBy a twist and flirt of a shadowy rod in a deft and shadowy hand.\nI scrambled down to the brookside and hunted all about;\nThere wasn’t a sign of a fisherman; there wasn’t a sign of a trout.\nBut I heard somebody chuckle behind the hollow oak\nAnd I got a whiff of tobacco like Lilly used to smoke.\nIt’s fifteen years, they tell me, since anyone fished that brook;\nAnd there’s nothing in it but minnows that nibble the bait off your hook.\nBut before the sun has risen and after the moon has set\nI know that it’s full of ghostly trout for Lilly’s ghost to get.\nI guess I’ll go to the tavern and get a bottle of rye\nAnd leave it down by the hollow oak, where Lilly’s ghost went by.\nI meant to go up on the hillside and try to find his grave\nAnd put some flowers on it--but this will be better for Dave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "delicatessen": { - "title": "“Delicatessen”", - "body": "Why is that wanton gossip Fame\nSo dumb about this man’s affairs?\nWhy do we titter at his name\nWho come to buy his curious wares?\n\nHere is a shop of wonderment.\nFrom every land has come a prize;\nRich spices from the Orient,\nAnd fruit that knew Italian skies,\n\nAnd figs that ripened by the sea\nIn Smyrna, nuts from hot Brazil,\nStrange pungent meats from Germany,\nAnd currants from a Grecian hill.\n\nHe is the lord of goodly things\nThat make the poor man’s table gay,\nYet of his worth no minstrel sings\nAnd on his tomb there is no bay.\n\nPerhaps he lives and dies unpraised,\nThis trafficker in humble sweets,\nBecause his little shops are raised\nBy thousands in the city streets.\n\nYet stars in greater numbers shine,\nAnd violets in millions grow,\nAnd they in many a golden line\nAre sung, as every child must know.\n\nPerhaps Fame thinks his worried eyes,\nHis wrinkled, shrewd, pathetic face,\nHis shop, and all he sells and buys\nAre desperately commonplace.\n\nWell, it is true he has no sword\nTo dangle at his booted knees.\nHe leans across a slab of board,\nAnd draws his knife and slices cheese.\n\nHe never heard of chivalry,\nHe longs for no heroic times;\nHe thinks of pickles, olives, tea,\nAnd dollars, nickles, cents and dimes.\n\nHis world has narrow walls, it seems;\nBy counters is his soul confined;\nHis wares are all his hopes and dreams,\nThey are the fabric of his mind.\n\nYet--in a room above the store\nThere is a woman--and a child\nPattered just now across the floor;\nThe shopman looked at him and smiled.\n\nFor, once he thrilled with high romance\nAnd tuned to love his eager voice.\nLike any cavalier of France\nHe wooed the maiden of his choice.\n\nAnd now deep in his weary heart\nAre sacred flames that whitely burn.\nHe has of Heaven’s grace a part\nWho loves, who is beloved in turn.\n\nAnd when the long day’s work is done,\n(How slow the leaden minutes ran!)\nHome, with his wife and little son,\nHe is no huckster, but a man!\n\nAnd there are those who grasp his hand,\nWho drink with him and wish him well.\nO in no drear and lonely land\nShall he who honors friendship dwell.\n\nAnd in his little shop, who knows\nWhat bitter games of war are played?\nWhy, daily on each corner grows\nA foe to rob him of his trade.\n\nHe fights, and for his fireside’s sake;\nHe fights for clothing and for bread:\nThe lances of his foemen make\nA steely halo round his head.\n\nHe decks his window artfully,\nHe haggles over paltry sums.\nIn this strange field his war must be\nAnd by such blows his triumph comes.\n\nWhat if no trumpet sounds to call\nHis armed legions to his side?\nWhat if, to no ancestral hall\nHe comes in all a victor’s pride?\n\nThe scene shall never fit the deed.\nGrotesquely wonders come to pass.\nThe fool shall mount an Arab steed\nAnd Jesus ride upon an ass.\n\nThis man has home and child and wife\nAnd battle set for every day.\nThis man has God and love and life;\nThese stand, all else shall pass away.\n\nO Carpenter of Nazareth,\nWhose mother was a village maid,\nShall we, Thy children, blow our breath\nIn scorn on any humble trade?\n\nHave pity on our foolishness\nAnd give us eyes, that we may see\nBeneath the shopman’s clumsy dress\nThe splendor of humanity!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fourth-shepherd": { - "title": "“The Fourth Shepherd”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOn nights like this the huddled sheep\nAre like white clouds upon the grass,\nAnd merry herdsmen guard their sleep\nAnd chat and watch the big stars pass.\n\nIt is a pleasant thing to lie\nUpon the meadow on the hill\nWith kindly fellowship near by\nOf sheep and men of gentle will.\n\nI lean upon my broken crook\nAnd dream of sheep and grass and men--\nO shameful eyes that cannot look\nOn any honest thing again!\n\nOn bloody feet I clambered down\nAnd fled the wages of my sin,\nI am the leavings of the town,\nAnd meanly serve its meanest inn.\n\nI tramp the courtyard stones in grief,\nWhile sleep takes man and beast to her.\nAnd every cloud is calling “Thief!”\nAnd every star calls “Murderer!”\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe hand of God is sure and strong,\nNor shall a man forever flee\nThe bitter punishment of wrong.\nThe wrath of God is over me!\n\nWith ashen bread and wine of tears\nShall I be solaced in my pain.\nI wear through black and endless years\nUpon my brow the mark of Cain.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPoor vagabond, so old and mild,\nWill they not keep him for a night?\nAnd She, a woman great with child,\nSo frail and pitiful and white.\n\nGood people, since the tavern door\nIs shut to you, come here instead.\nSee, I have cleansed my stable floor\nAnd piled fresh hay to make a bed.\n\nHere is some milk and oaten cake.\nLie down and sleep and rest you fair,\nNor fear, O simple folk, to take\nThe bounty of a child of care.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nOn nights like this the huddled sheep--\nI never saw a night so fair.\nHow huge the sky is, and how deep!\nAnd how the planets flash and glare!\n\nAt dawn beside my drowsy flock\nWhat winged music I have heard!\nBut now the clouds with singing rock\nAs if the sky were turning bird.\n\nO blinding Light, O blinding Light!\nBurn through my heart with sweetest pain.\nO flaming Song, most loudly bright,\nConsume away my deadly stain!\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe stable glows against the sky,\nAnd who are these that throng the way?\nMy three old comrades hasten by\nAnd shining angels kneel and pray.\n\nThe door swings wide--I cannot go--\nI must and yet I dare not see.\nLord, who am I that I should know--\nLord, God, be merciful to me!\n\n\n# VI.\n\nO Whiteness, whiter than the fleece\nOf new-washed sheep on April sod!\nO Breath of Life, O Prince of Peace,\nO Lamb of God, O Lamb of God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "gates-and-doors": { - "title": "“Gates and Doors”", - "body": "There was a gentle hostler\n(And blessed be his name!)\nHe opened up the stable\nThe night Our Lady came.\nOur Lady and Saint Joseph,\nHe gave them food and bed,\nAnd Jesus Christ has given him\nA glory round his head.\nSo let the gate swing open\nHowever poor the yard,\nLest weary people visit you\nAnd find their passage barred;\nUnlatch the door at midnight\nAnd let your lantern’s glow\nShine out to guide the traveler’s feet\nTo you across the snow.\nThere was a courteous hostler\n(He is in Heaven to-night)\nHe held Our Lady’s bridle\nAnd helped her to alight;\nHe spread clean straw before her\nWhereon she might lie down,\nAnd Jesus Christ has given him\nAn everlasting crown.\nUnlock the door this evening\nAnd let your gate swing wide,\nLet all who ask for shelter\nCome speedily inside.\nWhat if your yard be narrow?\nWhat if your house be small?\nThere is a Guest is coming\nWill glorify it all.\nThere was a joyous hostler\nWho knelt on Christmas morn\nBeside the radiant manger\nWherein his Lord was born.\nHis heart was full of laughter,\nHis soul was full of bliss\nWhen Jesus, on His Mother’s lap,\nGave him His hand to kiss.\nUnbar your heart this evening\nAnd keep no stranger out,\nTake from your soul’s great portal\nThe barrier of doubt.\nTo humble folk and weary\nGive hearty welcoming,\nYour breast shall be to-morrow\nThe cradle of a King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-house-with-nobody-in-it": { - "title": "“The House with Nobody in It”", - "body": "Whenever I walk to Suffern along the Erie track\nI go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.\nI suppose I’ve passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute\nAnd look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.\n\nI never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;\nThat they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.\nI know this house isn’t haunted, and I wish it were, I do;\nFor it wouldn’t be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.\n\nThis house on the road to Suffern needs a dozen panes of glass,\nAnd somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.\nIt needs new paint and shingles, and the vines should be trimmed and tied;\nBut what it needs the most of all is some people living inside.\n\nIf I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid\nI’d put a gang of men to work with brush and saw and spade.\nI’d buy that place and fix it up the way it used to be\nAnd I’d find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free.\n\nNow, a new house standing empty, with staring window and door,\nLooks idle, perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store.\nBut there’s nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and lone\nFor the lack of something within it that it has never known.\n\nBut a house that has done what a house should do,\n a house that has sheltered life,\nThat has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,\nA house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet,\nIs the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.\n\nSo whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track\nI never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back,\nYet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart,\nFor I can’t help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "houses": { - "title": "“Houses”", - "body": "When you shall die and to the sky\nSerenely, delicately go,\nSaint Peter, when he sees you there,\nWill clash his keys and say:\n“Now talk to her, Sir Christopher!\nAnd hurry, Michelangelo!\nShe wants to play at building,\nAnd you’ve got to help her play!”\nEvery architect will help erect\nA palace on a lawn of cloud,\nWith rainbow beams and a sunset roof,\nAnd a level star-tiled floor;\nAnd at your will you may use the skill\nOf this gay angelic crowd,\nWhen a house is made you will throw it down,\nAnd they’ll build you twenty more.\nFor Christopher Wren and these other men\nWho used to build on earth\nWill love to go to work again\nIf they may work for you.\n“This porch,” you’ll say, “should go this way!”\nAnd they’ll work for all they’re worth,\nAnd they’ll come to your palace every morning,\nAnd ask you what to do.\nAnd when night comes down on Heaven-town\n(If there should be night up there)\nYou will choose the house you like the best\nOf all that you can see:\nAnd its walls will glow as you drowsily go\nTo the bed up the golden stair,\nAnd I hope you’ll be gentle enough to keep\nA room in your house for me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-memory": { - "title": "“In Memory”", - "body": "# I.\n\nSerene and beautiful and very wise,\nMost erudite in curious Grecian lore,\nYou lay and read your learned books, and bore\nA weight of unshed tears and silent sighs.\nThe song within your heart could never rise\nUntil love bade it spread its wings and soar.\nNor could you look on Beauty’s face before\nA poet’s burning mouth had touched your eyes.\nLove is made out of ecstasy and wonder;\nLove is a poignant and accustomed pain.\nIt is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;\nIt is a linnet’s fluting after rain.\nLove’s voice is through your song; above and under\nAnd in each note to echo and remain.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBecause Mankind is glad and brave and young,\nFull of gay flames that white and scarlet glow,\nAll joys and passions that Mankind may know\nBy you were nobly felt and nobly sung.\nBecause Mankind’s heart every day is wrung\nBy Fate’s wild hands that twist and tear it so,\nTherefore you echoed Man’s undying woe,\nA harp Aeolian on Life’s branches hung.\nSo did the ghosts of toiling children hover\nAbout the piteous portals of your mind;\nYour eyes, that looked on glory, could discover\nThe angry scar to which the world was blind:\nAnd it was grief that made Mankind your lover,\nAnd it was grief that made you love Mankind.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBefore Christ left the Citadel of Light,\nTo tread the dreadful way of human birth,\nHis shadow sometimes fell upon the earth\nAnd those who saw it wept with joy and fright.\n“Thou art Apollo, than the sun more bright!”\nThey cried. “Our music is of little worth,\nBut thrill our blood with thy creative mirth\nThou god of song, thou lord of lyric might!”\nO singing pilgrim! who could love and follow\nYour lover Christ, through even love’s despair,\nYou knew within the cypress-darkened hollow\nThe feet that on the mountain are so fair.\nFor it was Christ that was your own Apollo,\nAnd thorns were in the laurel on your hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kings": { - "title": "“Kings”", - "body": "The Kings of the earth are men of might,\nAnd cities are burned for their delight,\nAnd the skies rain death in the silent night,\nAnd the hills belch death all day!\nBut the King of Heaven, Who made them all,\nIs fair and gentle, and very small;\nHe lies in the straw, by the oxen’s stall--\nLet them think of Him to-day!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "loves-lantern": { - "title": "“Love’s Lantern”", - "body": "Because the road was steep and long\nAnd through a dark and lonely land,\nGod set upon my lips a song\nAnd put a lantern in my hand.\nThrough miles on weary miles of night\nThat stretch relentless in my way\nMy lantern burns serene and white,\nAn unexhausted cup of day.\nO golden lights and lights like wine,\nHow dim your boasted splendors are.\nBehold this little lamp of mine;\nIt is more starlike than a star!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "madness": { - "title": "“Madness”", - "body": "The lonely farm, the crowded street,\nThe palace and the slum,\nGive welcome to my silent feet\nAs, bearing gifts, I come.\nLast night a beggar crouched alone,\nA ragged helpless thing;\nI set him on a moonbeam throne--\nToday he is a king.\nLast night a king in orb and crown\nHeld court with splendid cheer;\nToday he tears his purple gown\nAnd moans and shrieks in fear.\nNot iron bars, nor flashing spears,\nNot land, nor sky, nor sea,\nNor love’s artillery of tears\nCan keep mine own from me.\nSerene, unchanging, ever fair,\nI smile with secret mirth\nAnd in a net of mine own hair\nI swing the captive earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "main-street": { - "title": "“Main Street”", - "body": "I like to look at the blossomy track of the moon upon the sea,\nBut it isn’t half so fine a sight as Main Street used to be\nWhen it all was covered over with a couple of feet of snow,\nAnd over the crisp and radiant road the ringing sleighs would go.\nNow, Main Street bordered with autumn leaves, it was a pleasant thing,\nAnd its gutters were gay with dandelions early in the Spring;\nI like to think of it white with frost or dusty in the heat,\nBecause I think it is humaner than any other street.\nA city street that is busy and wide is ground by a thousand wheels,\nAnd a burden of traffic on its breast is all it ever feels:\nIt is dully conscious of weight and speed and of work that never ends,\nBut it cannot be human like Main Street, and recognise its friends.\nThere were only about a hundred teams on Main Street in a day,\nAnd twenty or thirty people, I guess, and some children out to play.\nAnd there wasn’t a wagon or buggy, or a man or a girl or a boy\nThat Main Street didn’t remember, and somehow seem to enjoy.\nThe truck and the motor and trolley car and the elevated train\nThey make the weary city street reverberate with pain:\nBut there is yet an echo left deep down within my heart\nOf the music the Main Street cobblestones made beneath a butcher’s cart.\nGod be thanked for the Milky Way that runs across the sky,\nThat’s the path that my feet would tread whenever I have to die.\nSome folks call it a Silver Sword, and some a Pearly Crown,\nBut the only thing I think it is, is Main Street, Heaventown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "memorial-day": { - "title": "“Memorial Day”", - "body": "_“Dulce et decorum est”_\n\nThe bugle echoes shrill and sweet,\nBut not of war it sings to-day.\nThe road is rhythmic with the feet\nOf men-at-arms who come to pray.\nThe roses blossom white and red\nOn tombs where weary soldiers lie;\nFlags wave above the honored dead\nAnd martial music cleaves the sky.\nAbove their wreath-strewn graves we kneel,\nThey kept the faith and fought the fight.\nThrough flying lead and crimson steel\nThey plunged for Freedom and the Right.\nMay we, their grateful children, learn\nTheir strength, who lie beneath this sod,\nWho went through fire and death to earn\nAt last the accolade of God.\nIn shining rank on rank arrayed\nThey march, the legions of the Lord;\nHe is their Captain unafraid,\nThe Prince of Peace … Who brought a sword.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "mount-houvenkopf": { - "title": "“Mount Houvenkopf”", - "body": "Serene he stands, with mist serenely crowned,\nAnd draws a cloak of trees about his breast.\nThe thunder roars but cannot break his rest\nAnd from his rugged face the tempests bound.\nHe does not heed the angry lightning’s wound,\nThe raging blizzard is his harmless guest,\nAnd human life is but a passing jest\nTo him who sees Time spin the years around.\n\nBut fragile souls, in skyey reaches find\nHigh vantage-points and view him from afar.\nHow low he seems to the ascended mind,\nHow brief he seems where all things endless are;\nThis little playmate of the mighty wind\nThis young companion of an ancient star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "multiplication": { - "title": "“Multiplication”", - "body": "I take my leave, with sorrow, of Him I love so well;\nI look my last upon His small and radiant prison-cell;\nO happy lamp! to serve Him with never ceasing light!\nO happy flame! to tremble forever in His sight!\nI leave the holy quiet for the loudly human train,\nAnd my heart that He has breathed upon is filled with lonely pain.\nO King, O Friend, O Lover! What sorer grief can be\nIn all the reddest depths of Hell than banishment from Thee?\nBut from my window as I speed across the sleeping land\nI see the towns and villages wherein His houses stand.\nAbove the roofs I see a cross outlined against the night,\nAnd I know that there my Lover dwells in His sacramental might.\nDominions kneel before Him, and Powers kiss His feet,\nYet for me He keeps His weary watch in the turmoil of the street:\nThe King of Kings awaits me, wherever I may go,\nO who am I that He should deign to love and serve me so?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-school": { - "title": "“The New School”", - "body": "The halls that were loud with the merry tread of\nyoung and careless feet\nAre still with a stillness that is too drear to seem like holiday,\nAnd never a gust of laughter breaks the calm of the dreaming street\nOr rises to shake the ivied walls and frighten the doves away.\nThe dust is on book and on empty desk, and the tennis-racquet and balls\nLie still in their lonely locker and wait for a game that is never played,\nAnd over the study and lecture-room and the river and meadow falls\nA stern peace, a strange peace, a peace that War has made.\nFor many a youthful shoulder now is gay with an epaulet,\nAnd the hand that was deft with a cricket-bat is defter with a sword,\nAnd some of the lads will laugh to-day where the trench is red and wet,\nAnd some will win on the bloody field the accolade of the Lord.\nThey have taken their youth and mirth awayfrom the study and playing-ground\nTo a new school in an alien land beneath an alien sky;\nOut in the smoke and roar of the fight their lessons and games are found,\nAnd they who were learning how to live are learning how to die.\nAnd after the golden day has come and the war is at an end,\nA slab of bronze on the chapel wall will tell of the noble dead.\nAnd every name on that radiant list will be the name of a friend,\nA name that shall through the centuries in grateful prayers be said.\nAnd there will be ghosts in the old school, brave ghosts with laughing eyes,\nOn the field with a ghostly cricket-bat, by the stream with a ghostly rod;\nThey will touch the hearts of the living with a flame that sanctifies,\nA flame that they took with strong young hands from the altar-fires of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-poets": { - "title": "“Old Poets”", - "body": "If I should live in a forest\nAnd sleep underneath a tree,\nNo grove of impudent saplings\nWould make a home for me.\nI’d go where the old oaks gather,\nSerene and good and strong,\nAnd they would not sigh and tremble\nAnd vex me with a song.\nThe pleasantest sort of poet\nIs the poet who’s old and wise,\nWith an old white beard and wrinkles\nAbout his kind old eyes.\nFor these young flippertigibbets\nA-rhyming their hours away\nThey won’t be still like honest men\nAnd listen to what you say.\nThe young poet screams forever\nAbout his sex and his soul;\nBut the old man listens, and smokes his pipe,\nAnd polishes its bowl.\nThere should be a club for poets\nWho have come to seventy year.\nThey should sit in a great hall drinking\nRed wine and golden beer.\nThey would shuffle in of an evening,\nEach one to his cushioned seat,\nAnd there would be mellow talking\nAnd silence rich and sweet.\nThere is no peace to be taken\nWith poets who are young,\nFor they worry about the wars to be fought\nAnd the songs that must be sung.\nBut the old man knows that he’s in his chair\nAnd that God’s on His throne in the sky.\nSo he sits by the fire in comfort\nAnd he lets the world spin by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pennies": { - "title": "“Pennies”", - "body": "A few long-hoarded pennies in his hand\nBehold him stand;\nA kilted Hedonist, perplexed and sad.\nThe joy that once he had,\nThe first delight of ownership is fled.\nHe bows his little head.\nAh, cruel Time, to kill\nThat splendid thrill!\n\nThen in his tear-dimmed eyes\nNew lights arise.\nHe drops his treasured pennies on the ground,\nThey roll and bound\nAnd scattered, rest.\nNow with what zest\nHe runs to find his errant wealth again!\n\nSo unto men\nDoth God, depriving that He may bestow.\nFame, health and money go,\nBut that they may, new found, be newly sweet.\nYea, at His feet\nSit, waiting us, to their concealment bid,\nAll they, our lovers, whom His Love hath hid.\n\nLo, comfort blooms on pain, and peace on strife,\nAnd gain on loss.\nWhat is the key to Everlasting Life?\nA blood-stained Cross.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-proud-poet": { - "title": "“The Proud Poet”", - "body": "One winter night a Devil came and sat upon my bed,\nHis eyes were full of laughter for his heart was full of crime.\n“Why don’t you take up fancy work, or embroidery?” he said,\n“For a needle is as manly a tool as a pen that makes a rhyme!”\n“You little ugly Devil,” said I, “go back to Hell\nFor the idea you express I will not listen to:\nI have trouble enough with poetry and poverty as well,\nWithout having to pay attention to orators like you.”\n\n“When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is woman’s work\nYou forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.\nThere was Byron who left all his lady-loves to fight against the Turk,\nAnd David, the Singing King of the Jews, who was born with a sword in his hand.\nIt was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the Wars and died,\nAnd Sir Philip Sidney’s lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was strong;\nAnd Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,\nBecause he carried in his soul the courage of his song.”\n\n“And there is no consolation so quickening to the heart\nAs the warmth and whiteness that come from the lines of noble poetry.\nIt is strong joy to read it when the wounds of the spirit smart,\nIt puts the flame in a lonely breast where only ashes be.\nIt is strong joy to read it, and to make it is a thing\nThat exalts a man with a sacreder pride than any pride on earth.\nFor it makes him kneel to a broken slave and set his foot on a king,\nAnd it shakes the walls of his little soul with the echo of God’s mirth.”\n\n“There was the poet Homer had the sorrow to be blind,\nYet a hundred people with good eyes would listen to him all night;\nFor they took great enjoyment in the heaven of his mind,\nAnd were glad when the old blind poet let them share his powers of sight.\nAnd there was Heine lying on his mattress all day long,\nHe had no wealth, he had no friends, he had no joy at all,\nExcept to pour his sorrow into little cups of song,\nAnd the world finds in them the magic wine that his broken heart let fall.”\n\n“And these are only a couple of names from a list of a thousand score\nWho have put their glory on the world in poverty and pain.\nAnd the title of poet’s a noble thing, worth living and dying for,\nThough all the devils on earth and in Hell spit at me their disdain.\nIt is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun\nAnd pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men:\nBut Prometheus, torn by the claws and beaks whose task is never done,\nWould be tortured another eternity to go stealing fire again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "roofs": { - "title": "“Roofs”", - "body": "The road is wide and the stars are out\nand the breath of the night is sweet,\nAnd this is the time when wanderlust should seize upon my feet.\nBut I’m glad to turn from the open road and the starlight on my face,\nAnd to leave the splendour of out-of-doors for a human dwelling place.\nI never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam\nAll up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home:\nThe tramp who slept in your barn last night and left at break of day\nWill wander only until he finds another place to stay.\nA gypsy-man will sleep in his cart with canvas overhead;\nOr else he’ll go into his tent when it is time for bed.\nHe’ll sit on the grass and take his ease so long as the sun is high,\nBut when it is dark he wants a roof to keep away the sky.\nIf you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong,\nFor he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along.\nAnd the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows,\nIs just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.\nThey say that life is a highway and its milestones are the years,\nAnd now and then there’s a toll-gate where you buy your way with tears.\nIt’s a rough road and a steep road and it stretches broad and far,\nBut at last it leads to a golden Town where golden Houses are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rosary": { - "title": "“The Rosary”", - "body": "Not on the lute, nor harp of many strings\nShall all men praise the Master of all song.\nOur life is brief, one saith, and art is long;\nAnd skilled must be the laureates of kings.\nSilent, O lips that utter foolish things!\nRest, awkward fingers striking all notes wrong!\nHow from your toil shall issue, white and strong,\nMusic like that God’s chosen poet sings?\n\nThere is one harp that any hand can play,\nAnd from its strings what harmonies arise!\nThere is one song that any mouth can say,--\nA song that lingers when all singing dies.\nWhen on their beads our Mother’s children pray\nImmortal music charms the grateful skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "roses": { - "title": "“Roses”", - "body": "I went to gather roses and twine them in a ring,\nFor I would make a posy, a posy for the King.\nI got an hundred roses, the loveliest there be,\nFrom the white rose vine and the pink rose bush and from the red rose tree.\nBut when I took my posy and laid it at His feet\nI found He had His roses a million times more sweet.\nThere was a scarlet blossom upon each foot and hand,\nAnd a great pink rose bloomed from His side for the healing of the land.\nNow of this fair and awful King there is this marvel told,\nThat He wears a crown of linked thorns instead of one of gold.\nWhere there are thorns are roses, and I saw a line of red,\nA little wreath of roses around His radiant head.\nA red rose is His Sacred Heart, a white rose is His face,\nAnd His breath has turned the barren world to a rich and flowery place.\nHe is the Rose of Sharon, His gardener am I,\nAnd I shall drink His fragrance in Heaven when I die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - }, - "servant-girl-and-grocers-boy": { - "title": "“Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy”", - "body": "Her lips’ remark was: “Oh, you kid!”\nHer soul spoke thus (I know it did):\n\n“O king of realms of endless joy,\nMy own, my golden grocer’s boy,\n\nI am a princess forced to dwell\nWithin a lonely kitchen cell,\n\nWhile you go dashing through the land\nWith loveliness on every hand.\n\nYour whistle strikes my eager ears\nLike music of the choiring spheres.\n\nThe mighty earth grows faint and reels\nBeneath your thundering wagon wheels.\n\nHow keenly, perilously sweet\nTo cling upon that swaying seat!\n\nHow happy she who by your side\nMay share the splendors of that ride!\n\nAh, if you will not take my hand\nAnd bear me off across the land,\n\nThen, traveller from Arcady,\nRemain awhile and comfort me.\n\nWhat other maiden can you find\nSo young and delicate and kind?”\n\nHer lips’ remark was: “Oh, you kid!”\nHer soul spoke thus (I know it did).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-singing-girl": { - "title": "“The Singing Girl”", - "body": "There was a little maiden\nIn blue and silver drest,\nShe sang to God in Heaven\nAnd God within her breast.\nIt flooded me with pleasure,\nIt pierced me like a sword,\nWhen this young maiden sang: “My soul\nDoth magnify the Lord.”\nThe stars sing all together\nAnd hear the angels sing,\nBut they said they had never heard\nSo beautiful a thing.\nSaint Mary and Saint Joseph,\nAnd Saint Elizabeth,\nPray for us poets now\nAnd at the hour of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-snowman-in-the-yard": { - "title": "“The Snowman in the Yard”", - "body": "The Judge’s house has a splendid porch, with pillars\nand steps of stone,\nAnd the Judge has a lovely flowering hedge that came from across the seas;\nIn the Hales’ garage you could put my house and everything I own,\nAnd the Hales have a lawn like an emerald and a row of poplar trees.\nNow I have only a little house, and only a little lot,\nAnd only a few square yards of lawn, with dandelions starred;\nBut when Winter comes, I have something there\nthat the Judge and the Hales have not,\nAnd it’s better worth having than all their wealth--\nit’s a snowman in the yard.\nThe Judge’s money brings architects to make his mansion fair;\nThe Hales have seven gardeners to make their roses grow;\nThe Judge can get his trees from Spain and France and everywhere,\nAnd raise his orchids under glass in the midst of all the snow.\nBut I have something no architect or gardener ever made,\nA thing that is shaped by the busy touch of little mittened hands:\nAnd the Judge would give up his lonely estate, where the level snow is laid\nFor the tiny house with the trampled yard,\nthe yard where the snowman stands.\nThey say that after Adam and Eve were driven away in tears\nTo toil and suffer their life-time through,\nbecause of the sin they sinned,\nThe Lord made Winter to punish them for half their exiled years,\nTo chill their blood with the snow, and pierce\ntheir flesh with the icy wind.\nBut we who inherit the primal curse, and labour for our bread,\nHave yet, thank God, the gift of Home, though Eden’s gate is barred:\nAnd through the Winter’s crystal veil, Love’s roses blossom red,\nFor him who lives in a house that has a snowman in the yard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "st-alexis-patron-of-beggars": { - "title": "“St. Alexis, Patron of Beggars”", - "body": "We who beg for bread as we daily tread\nCountry lane and city street,\nLet us kneel and pray on the broad highway\nTo the saint with the vagrant feet.\nOur altar light is a buttercup bright,\nAnd our shrine is a bank of sod,\nBut still we share St. Alexis’ care,\nThe Vagabond of God.\nThey gave him a home in purple Rome\nAnd a princess for his bride,\nBut he rowed away on his wedding day\nDown the Tiber’s rushing tide.\nAnd he came to land on the Asian strand\nWhere the heathen people dwell;\nAs a beggar he strayed and he preached and prayed\nAnd he saved their souls from hell.\nBowed with years and pain he came back again\nTo his father’s dwelling place.\nThere was none to see who this tramp might be,\nFor they knew not his bearded face.\nBut his father said, “Give him drink and bread\nAnd a couch underneath the stair.”\nSo Alexis crept to his hole and slept.\nBut he might not linger there.\nFor when night came down on the seven-hilled town,\nAnd the emperor hurried in,\nSaying, “Lo, I hear that a saint is near\nWho will cleanse us of our sin,”\nThen they looked in vain where the saint had lain,\nFor his soul had fled afar,\nFrom his fleshly home he had gone to roam\nWhere the gold-paved highways are.\nWe who beg for bread as we daily tread\nCountry lane and city street,\nLet us kneel and pray on the broad highway\nTo the saint with the vagrant feet.\nOur altar light is a buttercup bright,\nAnd our shrine is a bank of sod,\nBut still we share St. Alexis’ care,\nThe Vagabond of God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_alexis" - } - } - }, - "st-laurence": { - "title": "“St. Laurence”", - "body": "Within the broken Vatican\nThe murdered Pope is lying dead.\nThe soldiers of Valerian\nTheir evil hands are wet and red.\n\nUnarmed, unmoved, St. Laurence waits,\nHis cassock is his only mail.\nThe troops of Hell have burst the gates,\nBut Christ is Lord, He shall prevail.\n\nThey have encompassed him with steel,\nThey spit upon his gentle face,\nHe smiles and bleeds, nor will reveal\nThe Church’s hidden treasure-place.\n\nAh, faithful steward, worthy knight,\nWell hast thou done. Behold thy fee!\nSince thou hast fought the goodly fight\nA martyr’s death is fixed for thee.\n\nSt. Laurence, pray for us to bear\nThe faith which glorifies thy name.\nSt. Laurence, pray for us to share\nThe wounds of Love’s consuming flame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_lawrence" - } - } - }, - "thanksgiving": { - "title": "“Thanksgiving”", - "body": "The roar of the world is in my ears.\nThank God for the roar of the world!\nThank God for the mighty tide of fears\nAgainst me always hurled!\nThank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife,\nAnd the sting of His chastening rod!\nThank God for the stress and the pain of life,\nAnd Oh, thank God for God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "to-a-blackbird-and-his-mate-who-died-in-the-spring": { - "title": "“To a Blackbird and His Mate Who Died in the Spring”", - "body": "An iron hand has stilled the throats\nThat throbbed with loud and rhythmic glee\nAnd dammed the flood of silver notes\nThat drenched the world in melody.\nThe blosmy apple boughs are yearning\nFor their wild choristers’ returning,\nBut no swift wings flash through the tree.\n\nYe that were glad and fleet and strong,\nShall Silence take you in her net?\nAnd shall Death quell that radiant song\nWhose echo thrills the meadow yet?\nBurst the frail web about you clinging\nAnd charm Death’s cruel heart with singing\nTill with strange tears his eyes are wet.\n\nThe scented morning of the year\nIs old and stale now ye are gone.\nNo friendly songs the children hear\nAmong the bushes on the lawn.\nWhen babies wander out a-Maying\nWill ye, their bards, afar be straying?\nUnhymned by you, what is the dawn?\n\nNay, since ye loved ye cannot die.\nAbove the stars is set your nest.\nThrough Heaven’s fields ye sing and fly\nAnd in the trees of Heaven rest.\nAnd little children in their dreaming\nShall see your soft black plumage gleaming\nAnd smile, by your clear music blest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "to-a-young-poet-who-killed-himself": { - "title": "“To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself”", - "body": "When you had played with life a space\nAnd made it drink and lust and sing,\nYou flung it back into God’s face\nAnd thought you did a noble thing.\n“Lo, I have lived and loved,” you said,\n“And sung to fools too dull to hear me.\nNow for a cool and grassy bed\nWith violets in blossom near me.”\n\nWell, rest is good for weary feet,\nAlthough they ran for no great prize;\nAnd violets are very sweet,\nAlthough their roots are in your eyes.\nBut hark to what the earthworms say\nWho share with you your muddy haven:\n“The fight was on--you ran away.\nYou are a coward and a craven.”\n\n“The rug is ruined where you bled;\nIt was a dirty way to die!\nTo put a bullet through your head\nAnd make a silly woman cry!\nYou could not vex the merry stars\nNor make them heed you, dead or living.\nNot all your puny anger mars\nGod’s irresistible forgiving.”\n\n“Yes, God forgives and men forget,\nAnd you’re forgiven and forgotten.\nYou might be gaily sinning yet\nAnd quick and fresh instead of rotten.\nAnd when you think of love and fame\nAnd all that might have come to pass,\nThen don’t you feel a little shame?\nAnd don’t you think you were an ass?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "trees": { - "title": "“Trees”", - "body": "I think that I shall never see\nA poem lovely as a tree.\n\nA tree whose hungry mouth is prest\nAgainst the earth’s sweet flowing breast;\n\nA tree that looks at God all day,\nAnd lifts her leafy arms to pray;\n\nA tree that may in Summer wear\nA nest of robins in her hair;\n\nUpon whose bosom snow has lain;\nWho intimately lives with rain.\n\nPoems are made by fools like me,\nBut only God can make a tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "the-twelve-forty-five": { - "title": "“The Twelve-Forty-Five”", - "body": "Within the Jersey City shed\nThe engine coughs and shakes its head,\nThe smoke, a plume of red and white,\nWaves madly in the face of night.\nAnd now the grave incurious stars\nGleam on the groaning hurrying cars.\nAgainst the kind and awful reign\nOf darkness, this our angry train,\nA noisy little rebel, pouts\nIts brief defiance, flames and shouts--\nAnd passes on, and leaves no trace.\nFor darkness holds its ancient place,\nSerene and absolute, the king\nUnchanged, of every living thing.\nThe houses lie obscure and still\nIn Rutherford and Carlton Hill.\nOur lamps intensify the dark\nOf slumbering Passaic Park.\nAnd quiet holds the weary feet\nThat daily tramp through Prospect Street.\nWhat though we clang and clank and roar\nThrough all Passaic’s streets? No door\nWill open, not an eye will see\nWho this loud vagabond may be.\nUpon my crimson cushioned seat,\nIn manufactured light and heat,\nI feel unnatural and mean.\nOutside the towns are cool and clean;\nCurtained awhile from sound and sight\nThey take God’s gracious gift of night.\nThe stars are watchful over them.\nOn Clifton as on Bethlehem\nThe angels, leaning down the sky,\nShed peace and gentle dreams. And I--\nI ride, I blasphemously ride\nThrough all the silent countryside.\nThe engine’s shriek, the headlight’s glare,\nPollute the still nocturnal air.\nThe cottages of Lake View sigh\nAnd sleeping, frown as we pass by.\nWhy, even strident Paterson\nRests quietly as any nun.\nHer foolish warring children keep\nThe grateful armistice of sleep.\nFor what tremendous errand’s sake\nAre we so blatantly awake?\nWhat precious secret is our freight?\nWhat king must be abroad so late?\nPerhaps Death roams the hills to-night\nAnd we rush forth to give him fight.\nOr else, perhaps, we speed his way\nTo some remote unthinking prey.\nPerhaps a woman writhes in pain\nAnd listens--listens for the train!\nThe train, that like an angel sings,\nThe train, with healing on its wings.\nNow “Hawthorne!” the conductor cries.\nMy neighbor starts and rubs his eyes.\nHe hurries yawning through the car\nAnd steps out where the houses are.\nThis is the reason of our quest!\nNot wantonly we break the rest\nOf town and village, nor do we\nLightly profane night’s sanctity.\nWhat Love commands the train fulfills,\nAnd beautiful upon the hills\nAre these our feet of burnished steel.\nSubtly and certainly I feel\nThat Glen Rock welcomes us to her\nAnd silent Ridgewood seems to stir\nAnd smile, because she knows the train\nHas brought her children back again.\nWe carry people home--and so\nGod speeds us, wheresoe’er we go.\nHohokus, Waldwick, Allendale\nLift sleepy heads to give us hail.\nIn Ramsey, Mahwah, Suffern stand\nHouses that wistfully demand\nA father--son--some human thing\nThat this, the midnight train, may bring.\nThe trains that travel in the day\nThey hurry folks to work or play.\nThe midnight train is slow and old\nBut of it let this thing be told,\nTo its high honor be it said\nIt carries people home to bed.\nMy cottage lamp shines white and clear.\nGod bless the train that brought me here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vision": { - "title": "“Vision”", - "body": "Homer, they tell us, was blind and could not see the beautiful faces\nLooking up into his own and reflecting the joy of his dream,\nYet did he seem\nGifted with eyes that could follow the gods to their holiest places.\n\nI have no vision of gods, not of Eros with love-arrows laden,\nJupiter thundering death or of Juno his white-breasted queen,\nYet have I seen\nAll of the joy of the world in the innocent heart of a maiden.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "the-visitation": { - "title": "“The Visitation”", - "body": "There is a wall of flesh before the eyes\nOf John, who yet perceives and hails his King.\nIt is Our Lady’s painful bliss to bring\nBefore mankind the Glory of the skies.\nHer cousin feels her womb’s sweet burden rise\nAnd leap with joy, and she comes forth to sing,\nWith trembling mouth, her words of welcoming.\nShe knows her hidden God, and prophesies.\nSaint John, pray for us, weary souls that tarry\nWhere life is withered by sin’s deadly breath.\nPray for us, whom the dogs of Satan harry,\nSaint John, Saint Anne, and Saint Elizabeth.\nAnd, Mother Mary, give us Christ to carry\nWithin our hearts, that we may conquer death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "visitation" - } - } - }, - "wartime-christmas": { - "title": "“Wartime Christmas”", - "body": "Led by a star, a golden star,\nThe youngest star, an olden star,\nHere the kings and the shepherds are,\nAkneeling on the ground.\nWhat did they come to the inn to see?\nGod in the Highest, and this is He,\nA baby asleep on His mother’s knee\nAnd with her kisses crowned.\n\nNow is the earth a dreary place,\nA troubled place, a weary place.\nPeace has hidden her lovely face\nAnd turned in tears away.\nYet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees\nBabies asleep on their mother’s knees.\nWhile there are love and home--and these--\nThere shall be Christmas Day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "wealth": { - "title": "“Wealth”", - "body": "From what old ballad, or from what rich frame\nDid you descend to glorify the earth?\nWas it from Chaucer’s singing book you came?\nOr did Watteau’s small brushes give you birth?\nNothing so exquisite as that slight hand\nCould Raphael or Leonardo trace.\nNor could the poets know in Fairyland\nThe changing wonder of your lyric face.\nI would possess a host of lovely things,\nBut I am poor and such joys may not be.\nSo God who lifts the poor and humbles kings\nSent loveliness itself to dwell with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-white-ships-and-the-red": { - "title": "“The White Ships and the Red”", - "body": "With drooping sail and pennant\nThat never a wind may reach,\nThey float in sunless waters\nBeside a sunless beach.\nTheir mighty masts and funnels\nAre white as driven snow,\nAnd with a pallid radiance\nTheir ghostly bulwarks glow.\nHere is a Spanish galleon\nThat once with gold was gay,\nHere is a Roman trireme\nWhose hues outshone the day.\nBut Tyrian dyes have faded,\nAnd prows that once were bright\nWith rainbow stains wear only\nDeath’s livid, dreadful white.\nWhite as the ice that clove her\nThat unforgotten day,\nAmong her pallid sisters\nThe grim Titanic lay.\nAnd through the leagues above her\nShe looked aghast, and said:\n“What is this living ship that comes\nWhere every ship is dead?”\nThe ghostly vessels trembled\nFrom ruined stern to prow;\nWhat was this thing of terror\nThat broke their vigil now?\nDown through the startled ocean\nA mighty vessel came,\nNot white, as all dead ships must be,\nBut red, like living flame!\nThe pale green waves about her\nWere swiftly, strangely dyed,\nBy the great scarlet stream that flowed\nFrom out her wounded side.\nAnd all her decks were scarlet\nAnd all her shattered crew.\nShe sank among the white ghost ships\nAnd stained them through and through.\nThe grim Titanic greeted her\n“And who art thou?” she said;\n“Why dost thou join our ghostly fleet\nArrayed in living red?\nWe are the ships of sorrow\nWho spend the weary night,\nUntil the dawn of Judgment Day,\nObscure and still and white.”\n“Nay,” said the scarlet visitor,\n“Though I sink through the sea,\nA ruined thing that was a ship,\nI sink not as did ye.\nFor ye met with your destiny\nBy storm or rock or fight,\nSo through the lagging centuries\nYe wear your robes of white.”\n“But never crashing iceberg\nNor honest shot of foe,\nNor hidden reef has sent me\nThe way that I must go.\nMy wound that stains the waters,\nMy blood that is like flame,\nBear witness to a loathly deed,\nA deed without a name.”\n“I went not forth to battle,\nI carried friendly men,\nThe children played about my decks,\nThe women sang--and then--\nAnd then--the sun blushed scarlet\nAnd Heaven hid its face,\nThe world that God created\nBecame a shameful place!”\n“My wrong cries out for vengeance,\nThe blow that sent me here\nWas aimed in Hell. My dying scream\nHas reached Jehovah’s ear.\nNot all the seven oceans\nShall wash away that stain;\nUpon a brow that wears a crown\nI am the brand of Cain.”\nWhen God’s great voice assembles\nThe fleet on Judgment Day,\nThe ghosts of ruined ships will rise\nIn sea and strait and bay.\nThough they have lain for ages\nBeneath the changeless flood,\nThey shall be white as silver,\nBut one--shall be like blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - } - } - }, - "rudyard-kipling": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rudyard Kipling", - "birth": { - "year": 1865 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "a-death-bed": { - "title": "“A Death-Bed”", - "body": "“This is the State above the Law.\nThe State exists for the State alone.”\n(This is a gland at the back of the jaw,\nAnd an answering lump by the collar-bone.)\n\nSome die shouting in gas or fire;\nSome die silent, by shell and shot.\nSome die desperate, caught on the wire;\nSome die suddenly. This will not.\n\n“Regis suprema voluntas Lex”\n(It will follow the regular course of--throats.)\nSome die pinned by the broken decks,\nSome die sobbing between the boats.\n\nSome die eloquent, pressed to death\nBy the sliding trench as their friends can hear.\nSome die wholly in half a breath.\nSome--give trouble for half a year.\n\n“There is neither Evil nor Good in life.\nExcept as the needs of the State ordain.”\n(Since it is rather too late for the knife,\nAll we can do is mask the pain.)\n\nSome die saintly in faith and hope--\nSome die thus in a prison-yard--\nSome die broken by rape or the rope;\nSome die easily. This dies hard.\n\n“I will dash to pieces who bar my way.\nWoe to the traitor! Woe to the weak!”\n(Let him write what he wishes to say.\nIt tires him out if he tries to speak.)\n\nSome die quietly. Some abound\nIn loud self-pity. Others spread\nBad morale through the cots around …\nThis is a type that is better dead.\n\n“The war was forced on me by my foes.\nAll that I sought was the right to live.”\n(Don’t be afraid of a triple dose;\nThe pain will neutralize half we give.\n\nHere are the needles. See that he dies\nWhile the effects of the drug endure …\nWhat is the question he asks with his eyes?--\nYes, All-Highest, to God, be sure.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-glory-of-the-garden": { - "title": "“The Glory of the Garden”", - "body": "Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,\nOf borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,\nWith statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;\nBut the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.\n\nFor where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,\nYou’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all\nThe cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dung-pits and the tanks,\nThe rollers, carts, and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.\n\nAnd there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ’prentice boys\nTold off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;\nFor, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,\nThe Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.\n\nAnd some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,\nAnd some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;\nBut they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,\nFor the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.\n\nOur England is a garden, and such gardens are not made\nBy singing:--“Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade\nWhile better men than we go out and start their working lives\nAt grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.\n\nThere’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,\nThere’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick\nBut it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,\nFor the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.\n\nThen seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,\nIf it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;\nAnd when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,\nYou will find yourself a partner In the Glory of the Garden.\n\nOh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees\nThat half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,\nSo when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray\nFor the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!\nAnd the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "gunga-din": { - "title": "“Gunga Din”", - "body": "You may talk o’ gin and beer\nWhen you’re quartered safe out ’ere,\nAn’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;\nBut when it comes to slaughter\nYou will do your work on water,\nAn’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.\nNow in Injia’s sunny clime,\nWhere I used to spend my time\nA-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,\nOf all them blackfaced crew\nThe finest man I knew\nWas our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din,\n He was “Din! Din! Din!\nYou limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!\n Hi! Slippy hitherao\n Water, get it! Panee lao,\nYou squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.”\n\nThe uniform ’e wore\nWas nothin’ much before,\nAn’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind,\nFor a piece o’ twisty rag\nAn’ a goatskin water-bag\nWas all the field-equipment ’e could find.\nWhen the sweatin’ troop-train lay\nIn a sidin’ through the day,\nWhere the ’eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl,\nWe shouted “Harry By!”\nTill our throats were bricky-dry,\nThen we wopped ’im ’cause ’e couldn’t serve us all.\n It was “Din! Din! Din!\nYou ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been?\n You put some juldee in it\n Or I’ll marrow you this minute\nIf you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!”\n\n’E would dot an’ carry one\nTill the longest day was done;\nAn’ ’e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.\nIf we charged or broke or cut,\nYou could bet your bloomin’ nut,\n’E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.\nWith ’is mussick on ’is back,\n’E would skip with our attack,\nAn’ watch us till the bugles made “Retire,”\nAn’ for all ’is dirty ’ide\n’E was white, clear white, inside\nWhen ’e went to tend the wounded under fire!\n It was “Din! Din! Din!”\nWith the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green.\n When the cartridges ran out,\n You could hear the front-ranks shout,\n“Hi! ammunition-mules an’ Gunga Din!”\n\nI shan’t forgit the night\nWhen I dropped be’ind the fight\nWith a bullet where my belt-plate should ’a’ been.\nI was chokin’ mad with thirst,\nAn’ the man that spied me first\nWas our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.\n’E lifted up my ’ead,\nAn’ he plugged me where I bled,\nAn’ ’e guv me ’arf-a-pint o’ water green.\nIt was crawlin’ and it stunk,\nBut of all the drinks I’ve drunk,\nI’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.\n It was “Din! Din! Din!\n’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ’is spleen;\n’E’s chawin’ up the ground,\n An’ ’e’s kickin’ all around:\nFor Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!”\n\n’E carried me away\nTo where a dooli lay,\nAn’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.\n’E put me safe inside,\nAn’ just before ’e died,\n“I ’ope you liked your drink,” sez Gunga Din.\nSo I’ll meet ’im later on\nAt the place where ’e is gone--\nWhere it’s always double drill and no canteen.\n’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals\nGivin’ drink to poor damned souls,\nAn’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!\n Yes, Din! Din! Din!\nYou Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!\nThough I’ve belted you and flayed you,\n By the livin’ Gawd that made you,\nYou’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if": { - "title": "“If”", - "body": "If you can keep your head when all about you\nAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,\nIf you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,\nBut make allowance for their doubting too;\nIf you can wait and not be tired by waiting,\nOr being lied about, don’t deal in lies,\nOr being hated, don’t give way to hating,\nAnd yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:\n\nIf you can dream--and not make dreams your master;\nIf you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;\nIf you can meet with Triumph and Disaster\nAnd treat those two impostors just the same;\nIf you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken\nTwisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,\nOr watch the things you gave your life to, broken,\nAnd stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:\n\nIf you can make one heap of all your winnings\nAnd risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,\nAnd lose, and start again at your beginnings\nAnd never breathe a word about your loss;\nIf you can force your heart and nerve and sinew\nTo serve your turn long after they are gone,\nAnd so hold on when there is nothing in you\nExcept the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”\n\nIf you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,\nOr walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch,\nIf neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,\nIf all men count with you, but none too much;\nIf you can fill the unforgiving minute\nWith sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,\nYours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,\nAnd--which is more--you’ll be a Man, my son!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-long-trail": { - "title": "“The Long Trail”", - "body": "There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,\nAnd the ricks stand grey to the sun,\nSinging: “Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,\nAnd your English summer’s done.”\n You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind,\n And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;\n You have heard the song--how long? how long?\n Pull out on the trail again!\nHa’ done with the Tents of Shem, dear lass,\nWe’ve seen the seasons through,\nAnd it’s time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\nPull out, pull out, on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new!\n\nIt’s North you may run to the rime-ringed sun\nOr South to the blind Horn’s hate;\nOr East all the way into Mississippi Bay,\nOr West to the Golden Gate--\n Where the blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass,\n And the wildest tales are true,\n And the men bulk big on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n And life runs large on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nThe days are sick and cold, and the skies are grey and old,\nAnd the twice-breathed airs blow damp;\nAnd I’d sell my tired soul for the bucking beam-sea roll\nOf a black Bilbao tramp,\n With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,\n And a drunken Dago crew,\n And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail\n From Cadiz south on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nThere be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,\nOr the way of a man with a maid;\nBut the sweetest way to me is a ship’s upon the sea\nIn the heel of the North-East Trade.\n Can you hear the crash on her bows, dear lass,\n And the drum of the racing screw,\n As she ships it green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n As she lifts and ’scends on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new?\n\nSee the shaking funnels roar, with the Peter at the fore,\nAnd the fenders grind and heave,\nAnd the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate,\nAnd the fall-rope whines through the sheave;\n It’s “Gang-plank up and in,” dear lass,\n It’s “Hawsers warp her through!”\n And it’s “All clear aft” on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n We’re backing down on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nO the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied,\nAnd the sirens hoot their dread,\nWhen foot by foot we creep o’er the hueless, viewless deep\nTo the sob of the questing lead!\n It’s down by the Lower Hope, dear lass,\n With the Gunfleet Sands in view,\n Till the Mouse swings green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n And the Gull Light lifts on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nO the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light\nThat holds the hot sky tame,\nAnd the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powdered floors\nWhere the scared whale flukes in flame!\n Her plates are flaked by the sun, dear lass,\n And her ropes are taut with the dew,\n For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n We’re sagging south on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nThen home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,\nAnd the shouting seas drive by,\nAnd the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing,\nAnd the Southern Cross rides high!\n Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,\n That blaze in the velvet blue.\n They’re all old friends on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\n They’re God’s own guides on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.\n\nFly forward, O my heart, from the Foreland to the Start--\nWe’re steaming all too slow,\nAnd it’s twenty thousand mile to our little lazy isle\nWhere the trumpet-orchids blow!\n You have heard the call of the off-shore wind\n And the voice of the deep-sea rain;\n You have heard the song--how long? how long?\n Pull out on the trail again!\n\nThe Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,\nAnd The Deuce knows what we may do--\nBut we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,\nWe’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-way-through-the-woods": { - "title": "“The Way through the Woods”", - "body": "They shut the road through the woods\nSeventy years ago.\nWeather and rain have undone it again,\nAnd now you would never know\nThere was once a road through the woods\nBefore they planted the trees.\nIt is underneath the coppice and heath,\nAnd the thin anemones.\nOnly the keeper sees\nThat, where the ring-dove broods,\nAnd the badgers roll at ease,\nThere was once a road through the woods.\n\nYet, if you enter the woods\nOf a summer evening late,\nWhen the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools\nWhere the otter whistles his mate,\n(They fear not men in the woods,\nBecause they see so few.)\nYou will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,\nAnd the swish of a skirt in the dew,\nSteadily cantering through\nThe misty solitudes,\nAs though they perfectly knew\nThe old lost road through the woods.\nBut there is no road through the woods.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "watson-kirkconnell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Watson Kirkconnell", - "birth": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1977 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Kirkconnell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "loss": { - "title": "“Loss”", - "body": "The spring has gone. And I have lost the flowers\nI might have gathered from its meadow-grass.\nI merely marked the sudden spring aspire\nUp through the turf in frost and golden fire,\nAnd, as I dallied, saw that glory pass\nAs swiftly as the rainbow of June showers.\nAh, maiden beauty, fleeting are thy hours!\n\nSummer has gone. And I have missed the gleaning\nI might have gathered from its harvest-field.\nI merely marked the flaming wheat-waves swaying\nAcross the leas where summer winds were playing;\nBut as I gazed, time seized that yellow yield\nAnd fate forestalled my frantic intervening--\nAh, love, at last I know thy tragic meaning!\n\nAutumn has come. Bare stubbled prairies taunt me\nIn my sad brooding on what might have been.\nAcross the sky the haggard mists are weaving\nA fog-shroud for the dying sun’s receiving;\nAnd fears of these dark days, bereavement’s keen\nHeart-hunger and deep thirst of spirit haunt me.\nAlas, the terrors of love’s winter daunt me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "friedrich-gottlieb-klopstock": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock", - "birth": { - "year": 1724 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1803 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Gottlieb_Klopstock", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "hermann-and-thusnelda": { - "title": "“Hermann and Thusnelda”", - "body": "> _Thusnelda:_\n\nHa! there comes he, with sweat, with blood of Romans,\nAnd with dust of the fight all stained! O, never\nSaw I Hermann so lovely!\nNever such fire in his eyes!\n\nCome! I tremble for joy; hand me the Eagle,\nAnd the red, dripping sword! come, breathe, and rest thee;\nRest thee here in my bosom;\nRest from the terrible fight!\n\nRest thee, while from thy brow I wipe the big drops,\nAnd the blood from thy cheek!--that cheek, how glowing!\nHermann! Hermann! Thusnelda\nNever so loved thee before!\n\nNo, not then when thou first, in old oak-shadows,\nWith that manly brown arm didst wildly grasp me!\nSpell-bound I read in thy look\nThat immortality, then,\n\nWhich thou now hast won. Tell to the forests,\nGreat Augustus, with trembling, amidst his gods now,\nDrinks his nectar; for Hermann,\nHermann immortal is found!\n\n\n> _Hermann:_\n\nWherefore curl’st thou my hair? Lies not our father\nCold and silent in death? O, had Augustus\nOnly headed his army,--\nHe should lie bloodier there!\n\n\n> _Thusnelda:_\n\nLet me lift up thy hair; ’tis sinking, Hermann;\nProudly thy locks should curl above the crown now!\nSigmar is with the immortals!\nFollow, and mourn him no more!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Charles Timothy Brooks" - } - } - } - }, - "nikolai-klyuev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolai Klyuev", - "birth": { - "year": 1884 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Klyuev", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "dont-think-that-the-demons-are-winged": { - "title": "“Don’t think that the demons are winged …”", - "body": "Don’t think that the demons are winged,\nFor they have a bladder like fish.\nThey’re fond of mute, desolate sunsets,\nAnd the ocean’s expanse at midnight.\n\nThey swim after boats like a shark-pack.\nThe cheek bones of rocks undersea\nAre shelter for their hellish spirits,\nAs if they were greedy octopi.\n\nThey’re demons of smile and of silence,\nOf sleep, of the bolt on the door …\nIn grave--also in baby cradle\nThere they seethe--in their own fiery wave.\n\nThe flocks of the small demons gather\nIn cuckoos, in a spinning song.\nThe bony fears of the old women\nGuarantee us that Hell is quite close.\n\nO, Mountains, fall down here upon us!\nAnd gorges, come cover us up!\nA thundery tale has been written\nOn an aphis and hoof of an ox.\n\nAt feasts, at the meal of a beggar,\nHorned shadows rise up everywhere …\nFor whom, then, do angels at sunset\nWeave their paradise hems and kerchiefs?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "i-have-forgotten-what-is-in-my-hands": { - "title": "“I have forgotten what is in my hands …”", - "body": "I have forgotten what is in my hands:\nA heart, a hat, or a cane?\nIn the gardens of the Lord\nGrape bunches ripen.\n\nAhead the cry: “don’t,”\nBehind: “return.”\nAll that is quiet is the path\nLeading upwards.\n\nShouldn’t I follow it?\nMaybe, if no sin is committed,\nOn the azure path\nThe soul will become a bird.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Michael Makin", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-autumns-of-the-earth-are-like-a-bishops-grave": { - "title": "“The autumns of the earth are like a bishop’s grave …”", - "body": "The autumns of the earth are like a bishop’s grave\nWhere incense and brocade--half-rotten, mix and set in\nWith the cadaver’s mold. The aspen backwoods wave,\nBrowner than any brick. Like some crypt thieves can get in,\nThe sky is yawning wide. There--lees, the trash of cold\nGraves, and the twangy talk, the sexton wind’s endeavor:\n“The omophorion and censer of pure gold\nAre stolen; the most sacred grave profaned forever:\nA miter--lump of dirt, the eagle-rug rags curled.”\nThe autumns of the earth are sad unendingly …\nThey are the living pledge the rich crypt of the world\nIs stolen piece by piece--and without lock and key\nWill be only received by the sacristan death.\nOh Lord, you pacify--with fire and wounds of war--\nThe spirit of the thief, the fats our bodies store;\nBut you soften the scabs with balms of Spring’s fresh breath\nAnd scare us with the fall--as with some dread landmark\nAt crossroads of the worlds where the graves’ dusk is dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "kenneth-koch": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kenneth Koch", - "birth": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2002 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Koch", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "the-boiling-water": { - "title": "“The Boiling Water”", - "body": "A serious moment for the water is\nwhen it boils\nAnd though one usually regards it\nmerely as a convenience\nTo have the boiling water\navailable for bath or table\nOccasionally there is someone\naround who understands\nThe importance of this moment\nfor the water--maybe a saint,\nMaybe a poet, maybe a crazy\nman, or just someone\ntemporarily disturbed\nWith his mind “floating” in a\nsense, away from his deepest\nPersonal concerns to more\n“unreal” things …\n\nA serious moment for the island\nis when its trees\nBegin to give it shade, and\nanother is when the ocean washes\nBig heavy things against its side.\nOne walks around and looks at\nthe island\nBut not really at it, at what is on\nit, and one thinks,\nIt must be serious, even, to be this\nisland, at all, here.\nSince it is lying here exposed to\nthe whole sea. All its\nMoments might be serious. It is\nserious, in such windy weather,\nto be a sail\nOr an open window, or a feather\nflying in the street …\n\nSeriousness, how often I have\nthought of seriousness\nAnd how little I have understood\nit, except this: serious is urgent\nAnd it has to do with change. You\nsay to the water,\nIt’s not necessary to boil now,\nand you turn it off. It stops\nFidgeting. And starts to cool. You\nput your hand in it\nAnd say, The water isn’t serious\nany more. It has the potential,\nHowever--that urgency to give off bubbles, to\nChange itself to steam. And the wind,\nWhen it becomes part of a\nhurricane, blowing up the beach\nAnd the sand dunes can’t keep it away.\nFainting is one sign of seriousness, crying is another.\nShuddering all over is another one.\n\nA serious moment for the\ntelephone is when it rings.\nAnd a person answers, it is\nAngelica, or is it you.\n\nA serious moment for the fly is\nwhen its wings\nAre moving, and a serious\nmoment for the duck\nIs when it swims, when it first\ntouches water, then spreads\nIts smile upon the water …\n\nA serious moment for the match\nis when it burst into flame …\n\nSerious for me that I met you, and\nserious for you\nThat you met me, and that we do\nnot know\nIf we will ever be close to anyone\nagain. Serious the recognition\nof the probability\nThat we will, although time\nstretches terribly in\nbetween …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "mountain": { - "title": "“Mountain”", - "body": "Nothing’s moving I don’t see anybody\nAnd I know that it’s not a trick\nThere really is nothing moving there\nAnd there aren’t any people. It is the very utmost top\nWhere, as is not unusual,\nThere is snow, lying like the hair on a white-haired person’s head\nCombed sideways and backward and forward to cover as much of the top\nAs possible, for the snow is thinning, it’s September\nAlthough a few months from now there will be a new crop\nProbably, though this no one KNOWS (so neither do we)\nBut every other year it has happened by November\nExcept for one year that’s known about, nineteen twenty-three\nWhen the top was more and more uncovered until December fifteenth\nWhen finally it snowed and snowed\nI love seeing this mountain like a mouse\nAttached to the tail of another mouse, and to another and to another\nIn total mountain silence\nThere is no way to get up there, and no means to stay.\nIt is uninhabitable. No roads and no possibility\nOf roads. You don’t have a history\nDo you, mountain top? This doesn’t make you either a mystery\nOr a dull person and you’re certainly not a truck stop.\nNo industry can exploit you\nNo developer can divide you into estates or lots\nNo dazzling disquieting woman can tie your heart in knots.\nI could never lead my life on one of those spots\nYou leave uncovered up there. No way to be there\nBut I’m moved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "day": 15 - } - } - }, - "pregnancy": { - "title": "“Pregnancy”", - "body": "Inside the pomegranate is the blue sky.\n\nWe have been living out the year in Wisconsin.\nSometimes it rains there--tremendous green drops!\n\nWe smiled up at the snow--how tremulously! Still …\n\nDeath is better …\n\nThe hog leafed through the almanac.\n\nIf there is a difference between fortune and misfortune\nWhich you do not catch immediately, just remember\nThe house of the orange and yellow squirrels, or the three pigs,\nAny house which has easily distinguishable animals in it,\nAnd remember that all animals are unfortunate.\n“Yet every animal is fortunate,” spoffed the mineral water\nFrom its light green bottle on the Western tea leaves store shelf,\nA bossy cow came and stood in the door;\nHer hide was mangy. And then we saw the fire extinguisher. Man is unhappy!\nA Western boy came and took the bossy cow away.\nThe Western boy was dressed in leather knickers, and his lean face was brown;\nA smile played there as he looked at the sissy flowers\nAnd led the bossy cow away to the range. In the cow’s mind, pastures of green\nWere replacing the brown architecture of the store.\n\nUnder the archways I could see the yellow pulverization\nOf all you had meant to put into Paris--\n--but they were a failure,\nYour statues! your stores! and your triumphal arches!\nYou should have put in mere little shops selling dry goods and trumpets,\nWith here and there a tree and a necktie, the arch of someone’s foot\nWho turns out not to be beautiful, but extremely civilized, and a showerbath, which turns red\nOn certain nights, showering the green busses of my favorite city with cold blood! Oh ask me again\nWhat you should do, and I will tell you differently!\nAsk me!\n\nShall any laundry be put out to dry\nWith so many yellow and orange sequins falling through the air?\n\nYes, the donkey has become very corpulent.\n\nWill the blue carpet be sufficiently big to cover the tennis court?\n\nDown the street walked a midget. “She’s a good looker, hey?”\n\nHe said to a passerby. O tremulous stomach!\n\nWe’ve been spending the winter in Paris …\n\nIt rains on the sweater …\n\nI’ve a dog in my stomach!\n\nThe dogs moved delicately\nOn the yellow squares,\nAnd if they sat down to play cards\nWeren’t they happier than we are?\n\nI am at present owner\nOf a great chain of dog-supply stores,\nSo naturally I hope that your child is a dog …\n\nO son! or daughter!\nWill you ever forgive\nYour maddened daddy\nFor imagining a doggie\nIn place of a baby?\n\nOut on the range\nThe blue sky is changing\nTo black, and the baby\nCows are rehearsing\nTheir lives by eating.\n\nNear a blaze of straw\nSit the drooping cowhands;\nOne has on a red hat,\nThe other has a blue one.\nThey look at the babies and mothers.\n\nDo you not think they are thinking\nThoughts like mine? O Paris,\nFrance! with the coffee of your\nCafés, I feel life has arrived\nFor me! Where are you, city?\n\nIt rains on the dachshund\nAnd the collie;\nOn the beach the red, green, and orange\nCrustaceans are moved …\nTell me, sons of Atlantis, what will happen next?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-you": { - "title": "“To You”", - "body": "I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut\nThat will solve a murder case unsolved for years\nBecause the murderer left it in the snow beside a window\nThrough which he saw her head, connecting with\nHer shoulders by a neck, and laid a red\nRoof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;\nFor this we love, and we live because we love, we are not\nInside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a\nKid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails\nIn the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from\nThe big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;\nI think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields\nAlways, to be near you, even in my heart\nWhen I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you\nAre trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to\nThe place where I again think of you, a new\nHarmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow\nOf a ship which sails\nFrom Hartford to Miami, and I love you\nBest at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun\nReceives me in the questions which you always pose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - } - } - }, - "zygmunt-krasinski": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Zygmunt Krasiński", - "birth": { - "year": 1812 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Krasiński", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "god-has-denied-me": { - "title": "“God Has Denied Me”", - "body": "That Angel burning at my left side\nHarps on an old string.\nAnd I am with you\nAmong the plains where white seagulls ride,\nLocked in a coffin in the Siberian snow.\nHyenas howl out of the wind. Reindeer\nGraze on the graves, under your sure care.\n\nThe roots of lilies probe my corpse. It shines,\nA white goblet wonderfully transformed,\nA lantern corpse that fills the night with signs,\n--And the music of the soul makes silence alarmed.\nYou dim the lamp and ask the music to\nKeep silent that my spirit may sleep through.\n\nAlone, you say your prayers. You go on speaking\nInto the holy sapphire. And from your hair,\nLike diamonds, a chain of stars is streaking\nInto the heavens--and each star is a prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alfred-kreymborg": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alfred Kreymborg", - "birth": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kreymborg", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "and-white-the-white-invokes": { - "title": "“ … and White the White Invokes”", - "body": "The breasts of white camelias lead the way\nThrough boskages of cypress and of pine,\nThe lips of red camelias kiss and slay\nConfusions of the blood and quaff the wine;\nThe leaves and arms and feathers of the old,\nGolden and pale mimosas and live oaks\nEmbrace, protect two bodies in the mould\nWhere red the red and white the white invokes:\n\nThat she was innocent, is now the sigh\nShe shudders with, imploring all the trees\nTo stretch a dome of green, wall out the sky,\nAnd fill the cave with silences of seas,\nWhose calm no passion’s wave has ever rent--\nThat soothe her with an echoed, “innocent.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-grieving-forest": { - "title": "“Another Grieving Forest”", - "body": "The blood of petals blown adorns the ground;\nThe ravishment of roses has begun;\nA rivulet of crimson fills a mound;\nAnother grieving forest hides the sun:\nPossession sated, gone without a sound,\nThe wind with ghosts of bodies must have run;\nNot even memory can heal the wound,\nNor melody give reeds a life undone:\nThe evergreens enfold the shrine; and proud,\nBold cypresses themselves embalm their lust;\nThe shadows myrtles bow with hold the shroud,\nAnd agonies of cedars lay the dust:\nGray laurels, now beheaded, once endowed\nWith nodding blue, lament the lonely trust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lanes": { - "title": "“Lanes”", - "body": "Do you wish to hear songs,\nSilent songs--\nGone,\nTo come,\nOr never to come?\nNo lane of fallen leaves,\nHowever red ar brown or gold,\nHowever soft to the tread,\nIs as caressing\nAs the hard gray flagstone\nOf a city street.\nLook at one and hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "stanley-kunitz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Stanley Kunitz", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2006 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kunitz", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 43 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-last-dynasty": { - "title": "“After the Last Dynasty”", - "body": "Reading in Li Po\nhow “the peach blossom follows the water”\nI keep thinking of you\nbecause you were so much like\nChairman Mao,\nnaturally with the sex\ntransposed\nand the figure slighter.\nLoving you was a kind\nof Chinese guerrilla war.\nThanks to your lightfoot genius\nno Eighth Route Army\nkept its lines more fluid,\ntraveled with less baggage,\nso nibbled the advantage.\nEven with your small bad heart\nyou made a dance of departures.\nIn the cold spring rains\nwhen last you failed me\nI had nothing left to spend\nbut a red crayon language\non the character of the enemy\nto break appointments,\nto fight us not\nwith his strength\nbut with his weakness,\nto kill us\nnot with his health\nbut with his sickness.\n\nPet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,\nhere is a new note\nI want to pin on your door,\nthough I am ten years late\nand you are nowhere:\nTell me,\nare you still mistress of the valley,\nwhat trophies drift down-river,\nwhy did you keep me waiting?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "benediction": { - "title": "“Benediction”", - "body": "God banish from your house\nThe fly, the roach, the mouse\n\nThat riots in the walls\nUntil the plaster falls;\n\nAdmonish from your door\nThe hypocrite and liar;\n\nNo shy, soft, tigrish fear\nPermit upon your stair,\n\nNor agents of your doubt.\nGod drive them whistling out.\n\nLet nothing touched with evil,\nLet nothing that can shrivel\n\nHeart’s tenderest frond, intrude\nUpon your still, deep blood.\n\nAgainst the drip of night\nGod keep all windows tight,\n\nProtect your mirrors from\nSurprise, delirium,\n\nAdmit no trailing wind\nInto your shuttered mind\n\nTo plume the lake of sleep\nWith dreams. If you must weep\n\nGod give you tears, but leave\nYou secrecy to grieve,\n\nAnd islands for your pride,\nAnd love to nest in your side.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "between-the-acts": { - "title": "“Between the Acts”", - "body": "Fate hired me once to play a villain’s part.\nI did it badly, wasting valued blood;\nNow when the call is given to the good\nIt is that knave who answers in my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dark-and-the-fair": { - "title": "“The Dark and the Fair”", - "body": "A roaring company that festive night;\nThe beast of dialectic dragged his chains,\nProwling from chair to chair in the smoking light,\nWhile the snow hissed against the windowpanes.\n\nOur politics, our science, and our faith\nWere whiskey on the tongue; I, being rent\nBy the fierce divisions of our time, cried death\nAnd death again, and my own dying meant.\n\nOut of her secret life, that griffin-land\nWhere ivory empires build their stage, she came,\nPutting in mine her small impulsive hand,\nFive-fingered gift, and the palm not tame.\n\nThe moment clanged: beauty and terror danced\nTo the wild vibration of a sister-bell,\nWhose unremitting stroke discountenanced\nThe marvel that the mirrors blazed to tell.\n\nA darker image took this fairer form\nWho once, in the purgatory of my pride,\nWhen innocence betrayed me in a room\nOf mocking elders, swept handsome to my side,\n\nUntil we rose together, arm in arm,\nAnd fled together back into the world.\nWhat brought her now, in the semblance of the warm.\nOut of cold spaces, damned by colder blood?\n\nThat furied woman did me grievous wrong,\nBut does it matter much, given our years?\nWe learn, as the thread plays out, that we belong\nLess to what flatters us than to what scars;\n\nSo, freshly turning, as the turn condones,\nFor her I killed the propitiatory bird,\nKissing her down. Peace to her bitter bones,\nWho taught me the serpent’s word, but yet the word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-daughter-of-the-sun-is-she": { - "title": "“A Daughter of the Sun is She”", - "body": "A daughter of the sun is she,\nDelicate and neat,\nWhom a divine geometry\nHas made complete.\n\nThe subtle air was spun with fire\nFor a body bright and wild,\nImmaculate in clean desire,\nA strange wise child.\n\nWith elemental grace of wind\nHer symmetry is plain;\nPrecisely is each thought defined\nIn her dainty brain.\n\nHer secret will not keep the night.\nWhat will her lover say\nWhen, springing on a horse of light,\nShe rides away?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-daughters-of-the-horseleech": { - "title": "“The Daughters of the Horseleech”", - "body": "The daughters of the horseleech crying “Give! Give!”\nImplore the young men for the blood of martyrs.\nHow shall we keep the old senator alive\nUnless we satisfy his thirst for cultures?\n\nEntreat the rat, the weasel, and the fox\nTo forage for their toothless master;\nHave mercy, boys, on the monkey in his box;\nDear Judas goat, lead out the sheep to slaughter,\n\nFor if the warlock with the gilded claws\nWithers away, and of his bones are waters,\nWho will transmute our foreheads into brass,\nAnd who will keep his five charming daughters?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-end-of-summer": { - "title": "“The End of Summer”", - "body": "An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light\nAdmonished me the unloved year\nWould turn on its hinge that night.\n\nI stood in the disenchanted field\nAmid the stubble and the stones,\nAmazed, while a small worm lisped to me\nThe song of my marrow-bones.\n\nBlue poured into summer blue,\nA hawk broke from his cloudless tower,\nThe roof of the silo blazed, and I knew\nThat part of my life was over.\n\nAlready the iron door of the north\nClangs open: birds, leaves, snows\nOrder their populations forth,\nAnd a cruel wind blows.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "father-and-son": { - "title": "“Father and Son”", - "body": "Now in the suburbs and the falling light\nI followed him, and now down sandy road\nWhitter than bone-dust, through the sweet\nCurdle of fields, where the plums\nDropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.\nMile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,\nAfter the secret master of my blood,\nHim, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love\nKept me in chains. Strode years; stretched into bird;\nRaced through the sleeping country where I was young,\nThe silence unrolling before me as I came,\nThe night nailed like an orange to my brow.\n\nHow should I tell him my fable and the fears,\nHow bridge the chasm in a casual tone,\nSaying, “The house, the stucco one you built,\nWe lost. Sister married and went from home,\nAnd nothing comes back, it’s strange, from where she goes.\nI lived on a hill that had too many rooms;\nLight we could make, but not enough of warmth,\nAnd when the light failed, I climbed under the hill.\nThe papers are delivered every day;\nI am alone and never shed a tear.”\n\nAt the water’s edge, where the smothering ferns lifted\nTheir arms, “Father!” I cried, “Return! You know\nThe way. I’ll wipe the mudstains from your clothes;\nNo trace, I promise, will remain. Instruct\nYou son, whirling between two wars,\nIn the Gemara of your gentleness,\nFor I would be a child to those who mourn\nAnd brother to the foundlings of the field\nAnd friend of innocence and all bright eyes.\nO teach me how to work and keep me kind.”\n\nAmong the turtles and the lilies he turned to me\nThe white ignorant hollow of his face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "first-love": { - "title": "“First Love”", - "body": "At his incipient sun\nThe ice of twenty winters broke,\nCrackling, in her eyes.\n\nHer mirroring, still mind,\nThat held the world (made double) calm,\nWent Auid, and it ran.\n\nThere was a stir of music,\nMixed with flowers, in her blood;\nA swift impulsive balm\n\nFrom obscure roots; gold bees\nOf clinging light swarmed in her brow.\nThis Beautiful is good,\n\nThis Wonderful is true.\nLove’s large, slow, motherly hands have touched\nLike years; quietly now\n\nThe blind impalpable lids\nOf prescient selves, opening, start\nUpon an astral view.\n\nHer throat is full of songs,\nShe hums, she is sensible of wings\nGrowing on her heart.\n\nShe is a tree in spring\nTrembling with the hope of leaves,\nOf which the leaves are tongues.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-game": { - "title": "“The Game”", - "body": "Let’s spin the bottle\nNo I don’t want to be kissed\n\nSometimes I feel my arm\nIs turning into a tree\n\nOr hardening to stone\nPast memory of green\n\nI’ve a long way to go\nWho never learned to pray\n\nO the night is coming on\nAnd I am nobody’s son\n\nFather it’s true\nBut only for a day", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "goose-pond": { - "title": "“Goose Pond”", - "body": "Goose Pond’s imaginable snows,\nThe fall of twenty years at once,\nLike subtler moons reflect the rose\nDecompositions of the sun.\n\nA feather tumbling from a cloud\nScrolls thunders of the natural law;\nThe cat-tails rattle; cinnamon-fern\nRaises rag banners towards the thaw,\n\nAnd early-footed ghost-flowers scour\nThrough willow-dapplings to a cave\nWhere secrecy grows fur. Self burns\nAt the pulpits where Jack-preachers rave!\n\nNow a sulky weather dogs the heart,\nThere is no bottom to the day,\nThe water-lily’s Chinese stalk\nDrags heavy, as the white-lipped boy\n\nClimbs from detritus of his birth,\nThe rusted hoop, the broken wheels,\nThe sunken boat of little worth,\nPast balconies of limber eels\n\nUntil, along that marshy brink,\nThe springy trails devoid of plan,\nHe meets his childhood beating back\nTo find what furies made him man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-guilty-man": { - "title": "“The Guilty Man”", - "body": "The years of my life were odd that now are even.\nThink! to be young, amused, and not a fool;\nPlaying the world’s game--think!--with world’s own rules,\nAnd nothing lost, I think, I think … but years.\nHeart against mouth is singing out of tune,\nNight’s whisperings and blanks betrayed; this is\nThe end of lies: my bones are angry with me.\n\nFather, the darkness of the self goes out\nAnd spreads contagion on the flowing air.\nI walk obscurely in a cloud of dark:\nYea, when I kneeled, the dark kneeled down with me.\nTouch me: my folds and my defenses fall;\nI stand within myself, myself my shield.\n\nTeach me my reasons, I would know their names,\nCry havoc, drive my secrets out, because\nI hate the excellence that spoils the world.\nDepart from me, therefore, you virtuous men\nWhose treason is to turn the conscience kind.\nNone may forgive us for the ancient wrongs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-harsh-judgment": { - "title": "“The Harsh Judgment”", - "body": "Inside, a hundred doors by which to leave;\nOutside, you never can come in again.\nThe gesture made is woven in the sleeve,\nThe spiral echo sinks into the grain,\nWhat died in me will warn me if you turn\nNot to be tender-minded, though I burn,\nIn time so cruel, so difficult for love.\n\nThe burden of the personal, the life\nBy profit ploughed, the tapping of our power--\nYou know the long rebellion and the spleen.\nLast night, last year, with the tumbling of a leaf\nThe autumn came. Dark leaf from darker tower\nFalls miles, deeper than coals, and still goes down.\nCourage! That pity made our hearts unclean.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "i-dreamed-that-i-was-old": { - "title": "“I Dreamed that I Was Old”", - "body": "I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension\nFallen from my prime, when company\nWas mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,\nBefore time took my leafy hours away.\n\nMy wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found\nItself tart recompense for what was lost\nIn false exchange: since wisdom in the ground\nHas no apocalypse or pentecost.\n\nI wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,\nAnd cozy women dead that by my side\nOnce lay: I wept with bitter longing, not\nRemembering how in my youth I cried.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-illusionist": { - "title": "“The Illusionist”", - "body": "My name is sand: I make\nDumbshows on windowshades;\nWring hands; dissolve; swirl back;\nPlay furious, grim charades.\nIn airless room confined.\nThick with the curds of night,\nI live upon my mind,\nAm six-foot parasite;\nAm envy, like a vein\nRun dry; am hypocrite,\nWhose bonecase (melted down)\nShimmers with scaly wit.\nWhat have I not permitted?\nWhat flagrant postures taken?\nNor shown the head matted\nNor the white forehead broken,\nBut parodied my life,\nAssumed eccentric forms,\nRetreated into leaf,\nMade branches of my arms;\nGroveled; ah clung in hiding\nTo my father’s rotten wall.\n\n_Kneel, spirit. At this beheading\nThy spongy faces fall._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "king-of-the-river": { - "title": "“King of the River”", - "body": "If the water were clear enough,\nif the water were still,\nbut the water is not clear,\nthe water is not still,\nyou would see yourself,\nslipped out of your skin,\nnosing upstream,\nslapping, thrashing,\ntumbling\nover the rocks\ntill you paint them\nwith your belly’s blood:\nFinned Ego,\nyard of muscle that coils,\nuncoils.\nIf the knowledge were given you,\nbut it is not given,\nfor the membrane is clouded\nwith self-deceptions\nand the iridescent image swims\nthrough a mirror that flows,\nyou would surprise yourself\nin that other flesh\nheavy with milt,\nbruised, battering toward the dam\nthat lips the orgiastic pool.\n\nCome. Bathe in these waters.\nIncrease and die.\n\nIf the power were granted you\nto break out of your cells,\nbut the imagination fails\nand the doors of the senses close\non the child within,\nyou would dare to be changed,\nas you are changing now,\ninto the shape you dread\nbeyond the merely human.\nA dry fire eats you.\nFat drips from your bones.\nThe flutes of your gills discolor.\nYou have become a ship for parasites.\nThe great clock of your life\nis slowing down,\nand the small clocks run wild.\nFor this you were born.\nYou have cried to the wind\nand heard the wind’s reply:\n“I did not choose the way,\nthe way chose me.”\nYou have tasted the fire on your tongue\ntill it is swollen black\nwith a prophetic joy:\n“Burn with me!\nThe only music is time,\nthe only dance is love.”\n\nIf the heart were pure enough,\nbut it is not pure,\nyou would admit\nthat nothing compels you\nany more, nothing\nat all abides,\nbut nostalgia and desire,\nthe two-way ladder\nbetween heaven and hell.\nOn the threshold\nof the last mystery,\nat the brute absolute hour,\nyou have looked into the eyes\nof your creature self,\nwhich are glazed with madness,\nand you say\nhe is not broken but endures,\nlimber and firm\nin the state of his shining,\nforever inheriting his salt kingdom,\nfrom which he is banished\nforever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-last-question": { - "title": "“The Last Question”", - "body": "Oh the good times! the laughter on the hill!\nThe parties down at Larry’s in the spring!\nYour sovereign pleasure, careless itself to save,\nGoes naked at the heart. Touching, you bring\nRumors of heaven and its generous spoils\nHere, even, where our hooded shadows rise\nTo play the stab-scene, the end of love,\nWhile grief intones, ever the third that stays.\nNow that your pity shines in other hall,\nNow that your grain again comes to the mill,\nShall I be happy soon, shall I rejoice,\nOr wrestle with that stranger whom you praise?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "last-words": { - "title": "“Last Words”", - "body": "Listen: from sleep’s long pillow I arise\nTo go away. One moment let me lean\nOn falling air before I lock my eyes.\nAre the leaves red now? No matter. Trees are green.\n\nThe colors of the world are permanent\nDespite the bleach of change. Pure stain on stain\nThe bow of light’s eternal forms is bent\nAcross steep heaven in the general brain.\n\nWho cries, “The beautiful, the proud, are fallen!”\n(O silly child, it was myself that cried.)\nDeath, eater of the heads of flowers, spills pollen:\nOur little strength, our beauty, and our pride\n\nAre for the race to keep; we can discover\nSecrets with our broken skulls; our dead feet run\nUnder the lid of earth that closes over\nThe generations marching to the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-layers": { - "title": "“The Layers”", - "body": "I have walked through many lives,\nsome of them my own,\nand I am not who I was,\nthough some principle of being\nabides, from which I struggle\nnot to stray.\nWhen I look behind,\nas I am compelled to look\nbefore I can gather strength\nto proceed on my journey,\nI see the milestones dwindling\ntoward the horizon\nand the slow fires trailing\nfrom the abandoned camp-sites,\nover which scavenger angels\nwheel on heavy wings.\nOh, I have made myself a tribe\nout of my true affections,\nand my tribe is scattered!\nHow shall the heart be reconciled\nto its feast of losses?\nIn a rising wind\nthe manic dust of my friends,\nthose who fell along the way,\nbitterly stings my face.\nYet I turn, I turn,\nexulting somewhat,\nwith my will intact to go\nwherever I need to go,\nand every stone on the road\nprecious to me.\nIn my darkest night,\nwhen the moon was covered\nand I roamed through wreckage,\na nimbus-clouded voice\ndirected me:\n“Live in the layers,\nnot on the litter.”\nThough I lack the art\nto decipher it,\nno doubt the next chapter\nin my book of transformations\nis already written.\nI am not done with my changes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-man-in-the-park": { - "title": "“The Man in the Park”", - "body": "The people made a ring\nAround the man in the park.\nHe was our banished king\nOf blames and staunchless flows,\nExhibitor of the dark\nAbominable rose;\n\nOur chief, returned at last\nFrom exile, with the grim\nStamina of the lost,\nTo show his sovereign hurt.\nWildly we dreaded him\nAnd the menace of his heart\n\nUnbosomed, crawling down\nDitches where papers blow,\nSmearing the sills of the town,\nStrangling the hydra-drains\nCoiled under. Stop! we know\nHow much a man contains.\n\nWe picnicked all that day,\nDishonored signs that nayed us,\nPulled marigolds, were gay\nBefore the apes, smashed glass.\nRifles could not have made us\nKeep off the bloody grass;\n\nFor we were sick of crimes\nAgainst us, and the head\nPitched on the absorbing _Times_,\nAnd no one to accuse,\nAnd nothing paid for, and we read,\nWe read that day what blotted out the news.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "master-and-mistress": { - "title": "“Master and Mistress”", - "body": "As if I were composed of dust and air,\nThe shape confronting me upon the stair\n(Athlete of shadow, lighted by a stain\nOn its disjunctive breast--I saw it plain--)\nMoved through my middle flesh. I turned around,\nShaken and it was marching without sound\nBeyond the door; and when my hand was taken\n\nFrom my mouth to beat the standing heart, I cried\nMy distant name, thinking myself had died.\nOne moment I was entered; one moment then\nI knew a total century of pain\nBetween the twinkling of two thoughts. The ghost\nKnocked on my ribs, demanding, “Host! Host!\nI am diseased with motion. Give me bread\nBefore I quickly go. Shall I be fed?”\nYielding, I begged of him: “Partake of me.\nWhatever runneth from the artery,\nThis body and its unfamiliar wine,\nStored in whatever dark of love, are thine.”\nBut he denied me, saying, “Every part\nof thee is given, yea, thy flesh, thy heart.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mulch": { - "title": "“The Mulch”", - "body": "A man with a leaf in his head\nwatches an indefatigable gull\ndropping a piss-clam on the rocks\nto break it open.\nRepeat. Repeat.\nHe is an inlander\nwho loves the margins of the sea,\nand everywhere he goes he carries\na bag of earth on his back.\nWhy is he down in the tide marsh?\nWhy is he gathering salt hay\nin bushel baskets crammed to his chin?\n“It is a blue and northern air,”\nhe says, as if the shiftings of the sky\nhad taught him husbandry.\nBirthdays for him are when he wakes\nand falls into the news of weather.\n“Try! Try!” clicks the beetle in his wrist,\nhis heart is an educated swamp,\nand he is mindful of his garden,\nwhich prepares to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "my-surgeons": { - "title": "“My Surgeons”", - "body": "My surgeons are a savage band,\nSurely their patient is ill-fated.\nTheir tricks are coarse: the small sweet hand\nI seized was wax, or amputated.\nWith the humiliated swollen-footed\nAnd the lost persecuted their traps are baited.\n\nDeftly they opened the brain of a child,\nAnd it was full of flying dreams;\nFather was prowling in a field\nWith speckled tongue and a collar of flame.\nThey labeled it, “Polluted Streams,\nThe body floating with the name.”\n\nThey studied a prostrate fever-chart\nWith unmitigating eyes; one said,\n“Bohemian germs, Weltschmerz, bad art\nAnd Spanish fly. Off with his head.”\nAnother, “Fascist. His boot is filled with blood.”\nThey cut me up till I was red.\n\nLastly they squeezed out of my veins\nThe bright liquor of sympathy;\nI lost the touch of souls, the reins\nOn white revenge, and I was free\nOf pity, a solid man of snow.\nBut in the night to whom could I go?\n\nLie down with me, dear girl, before\nMy butcher-boys begin to rave.\n“No hope for persons any more,”\nThey cry, “on either side of the grave.”\nTell them I say the heart forgives\nThe world. Yes, I believe. In love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "off-point-lotus": { - "title": "“Off Point Lotus”", - "body": "Three years I lolled in that country of the girls,\nThick with their wine, their loose idolatry,\nNor saw that I was only prince of gulls,\nNor heard the ambiguous whisper of the sea.\n\nUsed … used! Eating their morphine leaf,\nI breathed a cloud of self-congratulations\nTo pillow me, while my boat slapped on the wharf\nAnd twenty spiders scribbled invitations.\n\nAll right, my bully-boys, you who connived\nMy fall, I thank you for your dirty part,\nI kiss you for each lie you took to wife\nAnd for that salt you packed around my heart.\n\nGoodbye, old things, I am forever lost!\nMy crazy vessel dances to the rail,\nSea-drunken since I left that barbarous coast,\nThe stain of anger spreading on my sail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-clothes-man": { - "title": "“The Old Clothes Man”", - "body": "Have you any old clothes to sell?\nThe years make a stain you can’t conceal,\nYour fabric’s eaten, you discard\nThat part of your life for which you cared.\n\nYou pluck a thread from your cuff; it winces\nStraight to your shoulder. Ambition grieves\nIn trunks and bags; moth-featured, minces\nFrom closets, beating empty sleeves.\n\nHistory stagnates in your house.\nI smelt the ruinous time, will buy\nYour waste of talent. There’s an ooze\nOf souls too virulent to die\n\nContagious on the baffling walls.\nYou sit and watch the ceiling crack;\nHorror sifts through and softly falls\nFrom worlds beyond the zodiac.\n\nYou fear the penitential bone\nThat growls in your breast, and the mind’s long feather,\nThe heart that imitates a stone,\nAnd if your hands should grow together\n\nAnd violence unstring your voice.\nI know what hangs behind your stair,\nSpoiling with conscience and disuse:\nThe uniform you never wear,\n\nThe fitness and the pride, so vilely\nDishonored, the smiling target mouth,\nInnocence ambushed, in the sharp volley\nReeling before the huntsmen of youth.\n\nTherefore I come to mobilize\nYour poor blind wounds, as in the coat,\nThe form betrayed, the defeated eyes,\nMy brother my groom, my dear recruit.\n\nThere will be skirmishing and loot\nAnd fires to light our marches. Let\nThe enemies of life beware\nWhen these old clothes shall go to war.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "passing-through": { - "title": "“Passing Through”", - "body": "Nobody in the widow’s household\never celebrated anniversaries.\nIn the secrecy of my room\nI would not admit I cared\nthat my friends were given parties.\nBefore I left town for school\nmy birthday went up in smoke\nin a fire at City Hall that gutted\nthe Department of Vital Statistics.\nIf it weren’t for a census report\nof a five-year-old White Male\nsharing my mother’s address\nat the Green Street tenement in Worcester\nI’d have no documentary proof\nthat I exist. You are the first,\nmy dear, to bully me\ninto these festive occasions.\n\nSometimes, you say, I wear\nan abstracted look that drives you\nup the wall, as though it signified\ndistress or disaffection.\nDon’t take it so to heart.\nMaybe I enjoy not-being as much\nas being who I am. Maybe\nit’s time for me to practice\ngrowing old. The way I look\nat it, I’m passing through a phase:\ngradually I’m changing to a word.\nWhatever you choose to claim\nof me is always yours:\nnothing is truly mine\nexcept my name. I only\nborrowed this dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poem": { - "title": "“Poem”", - "body": "O Heart: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.\nLovingly, lovingly, I wept, but my tears did not rhyme.\n\nIn the year of my mother’s blood, when I was born,\nShe buried my innocent head in a field, because the earth\n\nWas sleepy with the winter. And I spoke the corn,\nAnd I cried the clover up, with the dewy mouth of my mirth.\n\nIn the honey of summer my brain conceived: a child, I flowered\nOver the maiden-stalks, drinking sweet upper light,\n\nFor I was intimate with the sun, till he devoured\nMe utterly, O Heart, his tenderest neophyte.\n\nSo I died. Small gluttonous birds picked on my limpid brow,\nMy pale drooped feet were manacled with rushing worms;\n\nAnd when I was sufficiently dead (torturer thou!)\nI was born again. Dissolving, memory reforms\n\nThe cyclic hour I pulled life’s bony root, slow inch\nBy inch, from its loamy trap; shrilly, like a mandrake, screamed\n\nTo rip the cord, suck liberal air, after the pinch\nOf planetary rock. Womanly, a shadow combed\n\nHer dark tremendous hair beyond the violet border\nOf my sleep. Strong passionate hands I had, but could not find\n\nThe red position of her heart, nor the subtle order\nOf her lips and breasts, nor the breathing cities of her mind.\n\nLovingly, lovingly, I wept for her absent eyes,\nLarge pity of her thought; I broke the spine of my pride\n\nUpon a stone, seeing she did not recognize\nMy tears, because our sorrows did not coincide.\n\nSoftly grieving, ironic with a smile forlorn,\nI took my baffled head and buried it under the corn.\n\nO Heart: this is a dream I had, or not a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "postscript": { - "title": "“Postscript”", - "body": "Darling, darling, by narrow ambages\nOf fate, by gardens flowering with beasts,\nI came unto this place. The forest marches\nBehind the stalker, and the running grass\nSteps lightly over his defeated bones.\nThis is the perilous way without return.\nIn glassy prison now of contemplation\nI, fugitive from progress, leap erect\nIn analytic dance on time’s acute\nAnd bitter needle. Crueler than a spine,\nIt penetrates the body till it pricks\nThe bubbling brain, exploding life’s grey tumor\nTogether with its iridescent world.\nI lost by winning, and I shall not win\nAgain except by loss. The smoky past,\nMixed with the wind, will not evaporate\nInto the color of air. Let life be false,\nBut in our circular trap the blood remembers\nIts throbbing on the lip; the hands observe\nCommunion, touching in the sleep of thought;\nAnd the punctual heart reiterates love’s name.\nSome little comfort I have found to think\nThat though this phoenix will not hatch an egg,\nYet will its lyric history be saved\nIn generations of its mental brood.\nAnd I have found some little comfort too\nIn colloquy with death the quiet-eyed,\nOur profound and inexhaustible old father,\nStill loyal to his tall obedient sons.\nI have been social with the pale abstractions\nThat congregate within a lethal room;\nBut these strict walls encounter me; this house\nExhales resentment of audacious hope.\nA man can starve upon the golden-sweet\nImpossible apples of Cézanne; a man\nCan eagerly consult a woman’s head\n(Picasso’s), but her slow and stupid eyes\nDrink light in vegetative apathy.\nO darling, a man can cry unto his love\nAll night and day, and still be comfortless.\nThe meaning of a mouth, a breast, is plain,\nBut what you mean to me is dipped in blood\nAnd tangled like the bright threads of a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "propechy-of-lethe": { - "title": "“Propechy of Lethe”", - "body": "Echo, the beating of the tide,\nInfringes on the blond curved shore;\nArchaic weeds from sleep’s green side\nBind skull and pelvis till the four\nSeasons of the blood are unified.\n\nAnonymous sweet carrion,\nBlind mammal floating on the stream\nOf depthless sound, completely one\nIn the cinnamon-dark of no dream:--\nA pod of silence, bursting when the sun\n\nClings to the forehead, will surprise\nThe gasping turtle and the leech\nWith your strange brain blooming as it lies\nAbandoned to the bipeds on the beach;\nYour jelly-mouth and, crushed, your polyp eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflection-by-a-mailbox": { - "title": "“Reflection by a Mailbox”", - "body": "When I stand in the center of that man’s madness,\nDeep in his trauma, as in the crater of a wound,\nMy ancestors step from my American bones.\nThere’s mother in a woven shawl, and that,\nNo doubt, is father picking up his pack\nFor the return voyage through those dreadful years\nInto the winter of the raging eye.\n\nOne generation past, two days by plane away,\nMy house is dispossessed, my friends dispersed,\nMy teeth and pride knocked in, my people game\nFor the hunters of man-skins in the warrens of Europe,\nThe impossible creatures of an hysteric’s dream\nAdvancing with hatchets sunk into their skulls\nTo rip the god out of the machines.\n\nAre these the citizens of the new estate\nTo which the continental selves aspire;\nOr the powerful get of a dying age, corrupt\nAnd passion-smeared, with fluid on their lips,\nAs if a soul had been given to petroleum?\n\nHow shall we uncreate that lawless energy?\n\nNow I wait under the hemlock by the road\nFor the red-haired postman with the smiling hand\nTo bring me my passport to the war.\nFamiliarly his car shifts into gear\nAround the curve; he coasts up to my drive; the day\nStrikes noon; I think of Pavlov and his dogs\nAnd the motto carved on the broad lintel of his brain:\n“Sequence, consequence, and again consequence.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "river-road": { - "title": "“River Road”", - "body": "That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,\nI slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth,\nfighting my sleep,\nand one night saw a Hessian soldier\nstand at attention there in full\nregalia, till his head broke into flames.\nMy only other callers were the FBI\nsent to investigate me as a Russian spy\nby patriotic neighbors on the river road;\nand flying squirrels parachuting from the elms\nwho squeaked in rodent heat between the walls\nand upstairs rumbled at their nutty games.\nI never dared open the attic door.\nEven my nervous Leghorns joined the act,\nindulging their taste for chicken from behind.\nA glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes;\nthey caught a sort of dancing-sickness,\na variation of the blind staggers,\nthat hunched their narrow backs and struck\na stiffened wing akimbo,\nas round and round the poultry yard\nthey flapped and dropped and flapped again.\nThe county agent shook his head:\nnot one of them was spared the cyanide.\n\nThat year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,\nI paced up and down the bottom-fields,\ntamping the mud-puddled nurslings in\nwith a sharp blow of the heel\ntimed to the chop-chop of the hoe:\nred pine and white, larch, balsam fir,\none stride apart, two hundred to the row,\nuntil I heard from Rossiter’s woods\nthe downward spiral of a veery’s song\nunwinding on the eve of war.\n\nLord! Lord! who has lived so long?\nCount it ten thousand trees ago,\nfive houses and ten thousand trees,\nsince the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower\nover the place where the hermit sang,\nwhile I held a fantail of squirming roots\nthat kissed the palm of my dirty hand,\nas if in reply to a bird.\nThe stranger who hammers No Trespass signs\nto the staghorn sumac along the road\nmust think he owns this property.\nI park my car below the curve\nand climbing over the tumbled stones\nwhere the wild foxgrape perseveres,\nI walk into the woods I made,\nmy dark and resinous, blistered land,\nthrough the deep litter of the years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "robin-redbreast": { - "title": "“Robin Redbreast”", - "body": "It was the dingiest bird\nyou ever saw, all the color\nwashed from him, as if\nhe had been standing in the rain,\nfriendless and stiff and cold,\nsince Eden went wrong.\nIn the house marked For Sale,\nwhere nobody made a sound,\nin the room where I lived\nwith an empty page, I had heard\nthe squawking of the jays\nunder the wild persimmons\ntormenting him.\nSo I scooped him up\nafter they knocked him down,\nin league with that ounce of heart\npounding in my palm,\nthat dumb beak gaping\nPoor thing! Poor foolish life!\nwithout sense enough to stop\nrunning in desperate circles,\nneeding my lucky help\nto toss him back into his element.\nBut when I held him high,\nfear clutched my hand,\nfor through the hole in his head,\ncut whistle-clean …\nthrough the old dried wound\nbetween his eyes\nwhere the hunter’s brand\nhad tunneled out his wits …\nI caught the cold flash of the blue\nunappeasable sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-round": { - "title": "“The Round”", - "body": "Light splashed this morning\non the shell-pink anemones\nswaying on their tall stems;\ndown blue-spiked veronica\nlight flowed in rivulets\nover the humps of the honeybees;\nthis morning I saw light kiss\nthe silk of the roses\nin their second flowering,\nmy late bloomers\nflushed with their brandy.\nA curious gladness shook me.\nSo I have shut the doors of my house,\nso I have trudged downstairs to my cell,\nso I am sitting in semi-dark\nhunched over my desk\nwith nothing for a view\nto tempt me\nbut a bloated compost heap,\nsteamy old stinkpile,\nunder my window;\nand I pick my notebook up\nand I start to read aloud\nthe still-wet words I scribbled\non the blotted page:\n“Light splashed …”\n\nI can scarcely wait till tomorrow\nwhen a new life begins for me,\nas it does each day,\nas it does each day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-snakes-of-september": { - "title": "“The Snakes of September”", - "body": "All summer I heard them\nrustling in the shrubbery,\noutracing me from tier\nto tier in my garden,\na whisper among the viburnums,\na signal flashed from the hedgerow,\na shadow pulsing\nin the barberry thicket.\nNow that the nights are chill\nand the annuals spent,\nI should have thought them gone,\nin a torpor of blood\nslipped to the nether world\nbefore the sickle frost.\nNot so. In the deceptive balm\nof noon, as if defiant of the curse\nthat spoiled another garden,\nthese two appear on show\nthrough a narrow slit\nin the dense green brocade\nof a north-country spruce,\ndangling head-down, entwined\nin a brazen love-knot.\nI put out my hand and stroke\nthe fine, dry grit of their skins.\nAfter all,\nwe are partners in this land,\nco-signers of a covenant.\nAt my touch the wild\nbraid of creation\ntrembles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "a-spark-of-laurel": { - "title": "“A Spark of Laurel”", - "body": "This man, this poet, said,\n“I’ve carried in my head\nFor twenty years and more\nSome lines you wrote before\nI knew the meaning of\nEuripides or love”\nAnd gravely then intoned,\nLured from the underground\nThe greekness of my song\nStill melancholy-young;\nWhile she, long since forgotten,\nFor whom the song was written,\nBurned wanton once again\nThrough centuries of rain,\nSmiling, as she must do,\nTo keep her legend true,\nAnd struck the mortal blow,\nBut not that blood could flow.\nHa! Once again I heard\nThe transubstantial word\nThat is not mine to speak\nUnless I break, I break;\nThe spiral verb that weaves\nThrough the crystal of our lives,\nOf myth and water made\nAnd incoherent blood;\nWhat sirens on the coast\nTrilled to Ulysses lost,\nAnd Agamemnon’s thigh\nOpened at length to cry:\n\n_This laurel-sparking rhyme\nThat we repeat in time\nUntil the fathers rest\nOn the inhuman breast\nThat is both fire and stone,\nMother and mistress, one._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-supper-before-last": { - "title": "“The Supper before Last”", - "body": "The intellectuals at the feast,\nEmaciated on their fare,\nClap hands at the fabulous new beast\nUpon the massive platter borne.\nTheir tongues rejoice, steeped in the rare\nTuices of the unicorn,\nWhile drunk with ptomaines now, the crow\nThat hoarsely to the table came,\nSnatches at gobbets flung below,\nAnd smirking in his greasy frock\nClamps beak on the honeyed mortal game\nUnder the dreaming hip and hock.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-testing-tree": { - "title": "“The Testing-Tree”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOn my way home from school\nup tribal Providence Hill\npast the Academy ballpark\nwhere I could never hope to play\nI scuffed in the drainage ditch\namong the sodden seethe of leaves\nhunting for perfect stones\nrolled out of glacial time\ninto my pitcher’s hand;\nthen sprinted lickety-\nsplit on my magic Keds\nfrom a crouching start,\nscarcely touching the ground\nwith my flying skin\nas I poured it on\nfor the prize of the mastery\nover that stretch of road,\nwith no one no where to deny\nwhen I flung myself down\nthat on the given course\nI was the world’s fastest human.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAround the bend\nthat tried to loop me home\ndawdling came natural\nacross a nettled field\nriddled with rabbit-life\nwhere the bees sank sugar-wells\nin the trunks of the maples\nand a stringy old lilac\nmore than two stories tall\nblazing with mildew\nremembered a door in the\nlong teeth of the woods.\nAll of it happened slow:\nbrushing the stickseed off,\nwading through jewelweed\nstrangled by angel’s hair,\nspotting the print of the deer\nand the red fox’s scats.\nOnce I owned the key\nto an umbrageous trail\nthickened with mosses\nwhere flickering presences\ngave me right of passage\nas I followed in the steps\nof straight-backed Massassoit\nsoundlessly heel-and-toe\npracticing my Indian walk.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPast the abandoned quarry\nwhere the pale sun bobbed\nin the sump of the granite,\npast copperhead ledge,\nwhere the ferns gave foothold,\nI walked, deliberate,\non to the clearing,\nwith the stones in my pocket\nchanging to oracles\nand my coiled ear tuned\nto the slightest leaf-stir.\nI had kept my appointment.\nThere I stood int he shadow,\nat fifty measured paces,\nof the inexhaustible oak,\ntyrant and target,\nJehovah of acorns,\nwatchtower of the thunders,\nthat locked King Philip’s War\nin its annulated core\nunder the cut of my name.\nFather wherever you are\nI have only three throws\nbless my good right arm.\nIn the haze of afternoon,\nwhile the air flowed saffron,\nI played my game for keeps--\nfor love, for poetry,\nand for eternal life--\nafter the trials of summer.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIn the recurring dream\nmy mother stands\nin her bridal gown\nunder the burning lilac,\nwith Bernard Shaw and Bertie\nRussell kissing her hands;\nthe house behind her is in ruins;\nshe is wearing an owl’s face\nand makes barking noises.\nHer minatory finger points.\nI pass through the cardboard doorway\naskew in the field\nand peer down a well\nwhere an albino walrus huffs.\nHe has the gentlest eyes.\nIf the dirt keeps sifting in,\nstaining the water yellow,\nwhy should I be blamed?\nNever try to explain.\nThat single Model A\nsputtering up the grade\nunfurled a highway behind\nwhere the tanks maneuver,\nrevolving their turrets.\nIn a murderous time\nthe heart breaks and breaks\nand lives by breaking.\nIt is necessary to go\nthrough dark and deeper dark\nand not to turn.\nI am looking for the trail.\nWhere is my testing-tree?\nGive me back my stones!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "the-thief": { - "title": "“The Thief”", - "body": "In a Roman tram, where the famous Roman mob,\nWrung from the bowels of the hippodrome,\nMauled into shape its many-elbowed god\nTo fight for exit through its civil wars,\nSomebody Roman picked my pocket clean.\nA pagan and a Christian curse on him!\nSomebody Roman, may he find tonight\nIn the street of the serpents or the lion’s mouth,\nStrewn on a wine-soaked board,\nMore than he reached for, more than cash,\nGreen trumpeters, for whom the legions march\nThrough solid stone. (Meanwhile the Carthaginians\nPlay redskins in the ambush of the sea\nTo whom must be meted out the standard destruction:\nIt is a heavy responsibility.)\n\nLet the _ladrone_ sneer\nAs the leathered fold yields him my haunt of years,\nThe papers of a life I wanted lost,\nMemos, addresses, the snapshot of a child,\nTo plague him through his alley nights until\nHe begs for mercy for the thing well-robbed.\nWorlds in my pocket older than his own,\nMay they erupt on him like hissing gold,\nTooth of the pythoness, chimaera’s scales,\nStones of the temple and Isaiah’s beard--\nToss him, sweet Furies, from Tarpeia’s Rock!\n\nMore even than my purse,\nAnd that’s no laughing matter, it is my pride\nThat has been hurt: a fine Italian hand,\nWith its mimosa touch, has made me feel\nBlind-skinned, indelicate, a fool Americano\nTouring a culture like a grand museum,\nPeople and statues interchangeable shows,\nPerception blunted as one’s syntax fails.\nWhy am I here? Some thirty years ago\nA set of lantern slides I saw at school\nOf these antiquities gave me an image\nOf the rare serene that brimmed my eyes,\nFor nothing pleased me then in my legacy;\nBut the past that tempted me, the frozen pure,\nWas a pedagogic lie. All’s motion here,\nAnd motion like emotion is impure,\nA flower flawed by mutability,\nReligion by its ruins, and yet thereby\nMore lovely and more graced, perhaps\nMore true. Still, still the chariot wheels\nTurn, the assassin motorcyclists charge,\nWolves prowl in the streets under arcades of bells,\nTiberius grovels through his dungeon halls\nDreaming of boy-sized fishes in his bath;\nBehind the balcony of the Cardinal’s palace,\nSmelling the laureled Mamertine blood,\nA bald-pate awaits his rhetorical cue,\nAnd the clouds drift\nThrough a triumph of broken columns.\n\nPick-pocket, pick-thank music plucks the strings\nFor the rag-madonna with perdurable babe\nMost dolorously hallowing the square\nWhere Caesar walks three steps to meet Bernini,\nWhose sumptuous art runs wild\nFrom gate to gate, pausing in tiptoe-joy\nOnly to light a torch of fountains, to set\nHis tritons dancing, or at a blest façade\nTo cast up from his wrist a flight of angels,\nVolute on volute, wing on climbing wing.\nIn the middle of my life I heard the waters playing.\n\nMater Cloaca, feast thee well, I pray,\nOn what has been subtracted from my fate--\nTen days of lectures, thirty days abroad:\nIn this excess that’s Rome I’ll not mope long,\nWearing my heart less Roman than baroque,\nThough damn it all! I wish I’d lived in style,\nJogged in _carrozze_ round and round the town,\nGuzzled Spumante by the bucket-full,\nBought wagons of daffodils to please my dear.\nNow that I face the moment and the loss,\nDriven to language on the Ides of March\nHere in my blistered room\nWhere the wind flaps my ceiling like a sail\n(A miracle, no doubt, to be left at that!)\nI recognize the gods’ capricious hand\nAnd write this poem for money, rage, and love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-day-this-world": { - "title": "“This Day This World”", - "body": "My architects, forsaking me,\nSubmit designs for a bomb-proof mansion;\nMy scholars of the fourth dimension\nComplain they starve to death in three;\nMy correspondents write all day\nThe business of the enemy.\nTapped of their useful energies\nMy soldiers pace the mind’s frontier;\nEngine recoils from engineer\nAnd strikes at the courage in his eyes.\nWhen shall my swarthy workmen rise,\nDemand the power and the keys?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-floors": { - "title": "“Three Floors”", - "body": "Mother was a crack of light\nAnd a gray eye peeping;\nI made believe by breathing hard\nThat I was sleeping.\n\nSister’s doughboy on last leave\nHad robbed me of her hand;\nDownstairs at intervals she played\n_Warum_ on the baby grand.\n\nUnder the roof a wardrobe trunk\nWhose lock a boy could pick\nContained a red Masonic hat\nAnd a walking stick.\n\nBolt upright in my bed that night\nI saw my father flying.\nThe wind was walking on my neck,\nThe window-panes were crying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tutored-child": { - "title": "“The Tutored Child”", - "body": "Your mother, whom the mirror-world has claimed.\nPlucks at the tell-tale hairs with violent hand\nAnd thinks time backward to a brassy song,\nRolling the grape of hysteria under her tongue.\n\nYour father, in whom two ambitions rave,\nLike stations wrangling on the foreign-wave\nFor spheres of influence, loathes the heart that blends\nHis guilty love; but the quarrel never ends.\n\nYou are of nature’s bright unlucky brood,\nBorn of the drop of talent in your blood\nWherewith the gates of mystery are oiled.\nMortals will touch you and your taste be spoiled,\n\nWitches in metals test you. I observe\nDefeat, taking short cuts from nerve to nerve,\nClimb through the narrow transom of your will;\nAnd I weep, for having made you vulnerable.\n\nMy poor poor child whose terrors never cease.\nHere is my pity penny. Buy you peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "twilight": { - "title": "“Twilight”", - "body": "I wait. I deepen in the room.\nFed lions, glowing, congregate\nIn corners, sleep and fade. For whom\nIt may concern, I, tawny, wait.\n\nTime flowing through the window; day\nSpilling on the board its bright\nLast blood. Folding--big, gauzy, gray--\nA moth sits on the western light.\n\nSits on my heart that, darkened, drips\nNo honey from its punctured core,\nYet feeds my hands and feeds my lips.\nThe Moon, the Moon, is at the door!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vita-nuova": { - "title": "“Vita Nuova”", - "body": "I abdicate my daily self that bled,\nAs others breathe, for porridge it might sup.\nHenceforth apocalypse will get my bread\nFor me. I bit my tongue and gnawed my lip,\nBut now the visor of my name is up.\n\nGiving to love my undivided nature,\nCherishing beauty with the breath I keep,\nI have been otherwise a part-time creature,\nWith many selves to fool myself with hope,\nAnd in myself a gentler self to weep.\n\nNow I will peel that vision from my brain\nOf numbers wrangling in a common place,\nAnd I will go, unburdened, on the quiet lane\nOf my eternal kind, till shadowless\nWith inner light I wear my father’s face.\n\nMoon of the soul, accompany me now,\nShine on the coliseums of my sense,\nBe in the tabernacles of my brow.\nMy dark will make, reflecting thee at once,\nThe single beam of all my life intense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "mikhail kuzmin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mikhail Kuzmin", - "birth": { - "year": 1872 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kuzmin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "night-was-done": { - "title": "“Night was done …”", - "body": "Night was done. We rose and after\nWashing, dressing,--kissed with laughter,--\nAfter all the sweet night knows.\nLilac breakfast cups were clinking\nWhile we sat like brothers drinking\nTea,--and kept our dominoes.\n\nAnd our dominoes smiled greeting,\nAnd our eyes avoided meeting\nWith our dumb lips’ secrecy.\n“Faust” we sang, we played, denying\nNight’s strange memories, strangely dying,\nAs though night’s twain were not we.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1906, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - } - } - }, - "par-lagerkvist": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Pär Lagerkvist", - "birth": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1974 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swedish", - "language": "swedish", - "flag": "🇸🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pär_Lagerkvist", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "swedish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "anguish": { - "title": "“Anguish”", - "body": "Anguish, anguish is my heritage,\nthe wound of my throat,\nthe cry of my heart in the world.\nNow the lathered sky congeals\nin the coarse hand of night;\nnow the forests\nand the rigid heights\nrise barrenly against\nthe dwarfed vault of the sky.\nHow hard everything is,\nhow stiffened, black and silent!\n\nI grope about this darkened room,\nI feel the sharp edge of the cliff against my finger.\nI tear my sore and aching hands\non the hills and darkened woods,\non the black iron of sky\nand on the cold earth!\n\nAnguish, anguish is my heritage,\nthe wound of my throat,\nthe cry of my heart in the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-wanted-to-know": { - "title": "“I Wanted to Know”", - "body": "I wanted to know\nbut was only allowed to ask,\nI wanted light\nbut was only allowed to burn.\nI demanded the ineffable\nbut was only allowed to live.\n\nI complained,\nbut nobody understood what I meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish" - } - } - } - }, - "charles-lamb": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Lamb", - "birth": { - "year": 1775 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1834 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lamb", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "a-farewell-to-tobacco": { - "title": "“A Farewell to Tobacco”", - "body": "May the Babylonish curse,\nStrait confound my stammering verse,\nIf I can a passage see\nIn this word-perplexity,\nOr a fit expression find,\nOr a language to my mind,\n(Still the phrase is wide or scant)\nTo take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT!\nOr in any terms relate\nHalf my love, or half my hate:\nFor I hate, yet love, thee so,\nThat, whichever thing I shew,\nThe plain truth will seem to be\nA constrained hyperbole,\nAnd the passion to proceed\nMore from a mistress than a weed.\nSooty retainer to the vine,\nBacchus’ black servant, negro fine;\nSorcerer, that mak’st us dote upon\nThy begrimed complexion,\nAnd, for thy pernicious sake,\nMore and greater oaths to break\nThan reclaimed lovers take\n’Gainst women: thou thy siege dost lay\nMuch too in the female way,\nWhile thou suck’st the laboring breath\nFaster than kisses or than death.\nThou in such a cloud dost bind us,\nThat our worst foes cannot find us,\nAnd ill fortune, that would thwart us,\nShoots at rovers, shooting at us;\nWhile each man, thro’ thy heightening steam,\nDoes like a smoking Etna seem,\nAnd all about us does express\n(Fancy and wit in richest dress)\nA Sicilian fruitfulness.\nThou through such a mist dost shew us,\nThat our best friends do not know us,\nAnd, for those allowed features,\nDue to reasonable creatures,\nLiken’st us to fell Chimeras,\nMonsters that, who see us, fear us\nWorse than Cerberus or Geryon,\nOr, who first lov’d a cloud, Ixion.\nBacchus we know, and we allow\nHis tipsy rites. But what art thou,\nThat but by reflex can’st shew\nWhat his deity can do,\nAs the false Egyptian spell\nAped the true Hebrew miracle?\nSome few vapours thou may’st raise,\nThe weak brain may serve to amaze,\nBut to the reigns and nobler heart\nCan’st nor life nor heat impart.\nBrother of Bacchus, later born,\nThe old world was sure forlorn,\nWanting thee, that aidest more\nThe god’s victories than before\nAll his panthers, and the brawls\nOf his piping Bacchanals.\nThese, as stale, we disallow,\nOr judge of thee meant--only thou\nHis true Indian conquest art\nAnd, for ivy round his dart,\nThe reformed god now weaves\nA finer thyrsus of thy leaves.\nScent to match thy rich perfume\nChemic art did ne’er presume\nThrough her quaint alembic strain,\nNone so sov’reign to the brain.\nNature, that did in thee excel,\nFram’d again no second smell.\nRoses, violets, but toys\nFor the smaller sort of boys,\nOr for greener damsels meant;\nThou art the only manly scent.\nStinking’st of the stinking kind,\nFilth of the mouth and fog of the mind,\nAfrica, that brags her foyson,\nBreeds no such prodigious poison,\nHenbane, nightshade, both together,\nHemlock, aconite--\nNay, rather, Plant divine, of rarest virtue;\nBlisters on the tongue would hurt you.\n’Twas but in a sort I blam’d thee;\nNone e’er prosper’d who defam’d thee;\nIrony all, and feign’d abuse,\nSuch as perplext lovers use,\nAt a need, when, in despair\nTo paint forth their fairest fair,\nOr in part but to express\nThat exceeding comeliness\nWhich their fancies doth so strike,\nThey borrow language of dislike;\nAnd, instead of Dearest Miss,\nJewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss,\nAnd those forms of old admiring,\nCall her Cockatrice and Siren,\nBasilisk, and all that’s evil,\nWitch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil,\nEthiop, Wench, and Blackamoor,\nMonkey, Ape, and twenty more;\nFriendly Trait’ress, loving Foe,--\nNot that she is truly so,\nBut no other way they know\nA contentment to express,\nBorders so upon excess,\nThat they do not rightly wot\nWhether it be pain or not.\nOr, as men, constrained to part\nWith what’s nearest to their heart,\nWhile their sorrow’s at the height,\nLose discrimination quite,\nAnd their hasty wrath let fall,\nTo appease their frantic gall,\nOn the darling thing whatever\nWhence they feel it death to sever,\nThough it be, as they, perforce,\nGuiltless of the sad divorce.\nFor I must (nor let it grieve thee,\nFriendliest of plants, that I must) leave the.\nFor thy sake, TOBACCO, I\nWould do any thing but die,\nAnd but seek to extend my days\nLong enough to sing thy praise.\nBut, as she, who once hath been\nA king’s consort, is a queen\nEver after, nor will bate\nAny tittle of her state,\nThough a widow, or divorced,\nSo I, from thy converse forced,\nThe old name and style retain,\nA right Katherine of Spain;\nAnd a seat, too, ’mongst the joys\nOf the blest Tobacco Boys;\nWhere, though I, by sour physician,\nAm debarr’d the full fruition\nOf thy favours, I may catch\nSome collateral sweets, and snatch\nSidelong odours, that give life\nLike glances from a neighbour’s wife;\nAnd still live in the by-places\nAnd the suburbs of thy graces;\nAnd in thy borders take delight,\nAn unconquer’d Canaanite.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-familiar-faces": { - "title": "“The Old Familiar Faces”", - "body": "Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?\nI had a mother, but she died, and left me,\nDied prematurely in a day of horrors--\nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.\n\nI have had playmates, I have had companions,\nIn my days of childhood, in my joyful school days--\nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.\n\nI have been laughing, I have been carousing,\nDrinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies--\nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.\n\nI lov’d a love once, fairest among women;\nClos’d are her doors on me, I must not see her--\nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.\n\nI have a friend, a kinder friend has no man.\nLike an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;\nLeft him, to muse on the old familiar faces.\n\nGhost-like, I pac’d round the haunts of my childhood.\nEarth seem’d a desert I was bound to traverse,\nSeeking to find the old familiar faces.\n\nFriend of my bosom, thou more than a brother!\nWhy were not thou born in my father’s dwelling?\nSo might we talk of the old familiar faces.\n\nFor some they have died, and some they have left me,\n_And some are taken from me_; all are departed;\nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-an-infant-dying-as-soon-as-born": { - "title": "“On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born”", - "body": "I saw where in the shroud did lurk\nA curious frame of Nature’s work.\nA flow’ret crushed in the bud,\nA nameless piece of Babyhood,\nWas in a cradle-coffin lying;\nExtinct, with scarce the sense of dying;\nSo soon to exchange the imprisoning womb\nFor darker closets of the tomb!\nShe did but ope an eye, and put\nA clear beam forth, then strait up shut\nFor the long dark: ne’er more to see\nThrough glasses of mortality.\nRiddle of destiny, who can show\nWhat thy short visit meant, or know\nWhat thy errand here below?\nShall we say, that Nature blind\nCheck’d her hand, and changed her mind,\nJust when she had exactly wrought\nA finish’d pattern without fault?\nCould she flag, or could she tire,\nOr lack’d she the Promethean fire\n(With her nine moons’ long workings sicken’d)\nThat should thy little limbs have quicken’d?\nLimbs so firm, they seem’d to assure\nLife of health, and days mature:\nWoman’s self in miniature!\nLimbs so fair, they might supply\n(Themselves now but cold imagery)\nThe sculptor to make Beauty by.\nOr did the stern-eyed Fate descry,\nThat babe, or mother, one must die;\nSo in mercy left the stock,\nAnd cut the branch; to save the shock\nOf young years widow’d; and the pain,\nWhen Single State comes back again\nTo the lone man who, ’reft of wife,\nThenceforward drags a maimed life?\nThe economy of Heaven is dark;\nAnd wisest clerks have miss’d the mark,\nWhy Human Buds, like this, should fall,\nMore brief than fly ephemeral,\nThat has his day; while shrivel’d crones\nStiffen with age to stocks and stones;\nAnd crabbed use the conscience sears\nIn sinners of an hundred years.\nMother’s prattle, mother’s kiss,\nBaby fond, thou ne’er wilt miss.\nRites, which custom does impose,\nSilver bells and baby clothes;\nCoral redder than those lips,\nWhich pale death did late eclipse;\nMusic framed for infants’ glee,\nWhistle never tuned for thee;\nThough thou want’st not, thou shalt have them,\nLoving hearts were they which gave them.\nLet not one be missing; nurse,\nSee them laid upon the hearse\nOf infant slain by doom perverse.\nWhy should kings and nobles have\nPictured trophies to their grave;\nAnd we, churls, to thee deny\nThy pretty toys with thee to lie,\nA more harmless vanity?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thoughtless-cruelty": { - "title": "“Thoughtless Cruelty”", - "body": "There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly--,\nAnd should you thousand ages try\nThe life you’ve taken to supply,\nYou could not do it.\n\nYou surely must have been devoid\nOf thought and sense, to have destroy’d\nA thing which no way you annoy’d--\nYou’ll one day rue it.\n\nTwas but a fly perhaps you’ll say,\nThat’s born in April, dies in May;\nThat does but just learn to display\nHis wings one minute,\n\nAnd in the next is vanish’d quite.\nA bird devours it in his flight--\nOr come a cold blast in the night,\nThere’s no breath in it.\n\nThe bird but seeks his proper food--\nAnd Providence, whose power endu’d\nThat fly with life, when it thinks good,\nMay justly take it.\n\nBut you have no excuses for’t--\nA life by Nature made so short,\nLess reason is that you for sport\nShould shorter make it.\n\nA fly a little thing you rate--\nBut, Robert do not estimate\nA creature’s pain by small or great;\nThe greatest being\n\nCan have but fibres, nerves, and flesh,\nAnd these the smallest ones possess,\nAlthough their frame and structure less\nEscape our seeing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "walter-savage-landor": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Walter Savage Landor", - "birth": { - "year": 1775 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Savage_Landor", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "absence": { - "title": "“Absence”", - "body": "Here, ever since you went abroad,\nIf there be change no change I see:\nI only walk our wonted road,\nThe road is only walk’d by me.\n\nYes; I forgot; a change there is--\nWas it of that you bade me tell?\nI catch at times, at times I miss\nThe sight, the tone, I know so well.\n\nOnly two months since you stood here?\nTwo shortest months? Then tell me why\nVoices are harsher than they were,\nAnd tears are longer ere they dry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ianthes-question": { - "title": "“Ianthe’s Question”", - "body": "“Do you remember me? or are you proud?”\nLightly advancing thro’ her star-trimm’d crowd,\nIanthe said, and look’d into my eyes.\n“A yes, a yes to both: for Memory\nWhere you but once have been must ever be,\nAnd at your voice Pride from his throne must rise.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-maids-lament": { - "title": "“The Maid’s Lament”", - "body": "I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,\n I feel I am alone.\nI check’d him while he spoke; yet, could he speak,\n Alas! I would not check.\nFor reasons not to love him once I sought,\n And wearied all my thought\nTo vex myself and him: I now would give\n My love could he but live\nWho lately lived for me, and, when he found\n ’Twas vain, in holy ground\nHe hid his face amid the shades of death.\n I waste for him my breath\nWho wasted his for me! but mine returns,\n And this lorn bosom burns\nWith stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,\n And waking me to weep\nTears that had melted his soft heart: for years\n Wept he as bitter tears.\n_Merciful God!_ such was his latest prayer,\n _These may she never share._\nQuieter is his breath, his breast more cold,\n Than daisies in the mould,\nWhere children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,\n His name and life’s brief date.\nPray for him, gentle souls, whoe’er you be,\n And oh! pray too for me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rose-aylmer": { - "title": "“Rose Aylmer”", - "body": "Ah, what avails the sceptred race,\nAh, what the form divine!\nWhat every virtue, every grace!\nRose Aylmer, all were thine.\nRose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes\nMay weep, but never see,\nA night of memories and of sighs\nI consecrate to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "philip-larkin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Philip Larkin", - "birth": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Larkin", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 31 - }, - "poems": { - "an-arundel-tomb": { - "title": "“An Arundel Tomb”", - "body": "Side by side, their faces blurred,\nThe earl and countess lie in stone,\nTheir proper habits vaguely shown\nAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,\nAnd that faint hint of the absurd--\nThe little dogs under their feet.\n\nSuch plainness of the pre-baroque\nHardly involves the eye, until\nIt meets his left-hand gauntlet, still\nClasped empty in the other; and\nOne sees, with a sharp tender shock,\nHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.\n\nThey would not think to lie so long.\nSuch faithfulness in effigy\nWas just a detail friends would see:\nA sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace\nThrown off in helping to prolong\nThe Latin names around the base.\n\nThey would no guess how early in\nTheir supine stationary voyage\nThe air would change to soundless damage,\nTurn the old tenantry away;\nHow soon succeeding eyes begin\nTo look, not read. Rigidly they\n\nPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadths\nOf time. Snow fell, undated. Light\nEach summer thronged the grass. A bright\nLitter of birdcalls strewed the same\nBone-littered ground. And up the paths\nThe endless altered people came,\n\nWashing at their identity.\nNow, helpless in the hollow of\nAn unarmorial age, a trough\nOf smoke in slow suspended skeins\nAbove their scrap of history,\nOnly an attitude remains:\n\nTime has transfigures them into\nUntruth. The stone fidelity\nThey hardly meant has come to be\nTheir final blazon, and to prove\nOur almost-instinct almost true:\nWhat will survive of us is love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "at-grass": { - "title": "“At Grass”", - "body": "The eye can hardly pick them out\nFrom the cold shade they shelter in,\nTill wind distresses tail and mane;\nThen one crops grass, and moves about\n--The other seeming to look on--\nAnd stands anonymous again\n\nYet fifteen years ago, perhaps\nTwo dozen distances sufficed\nTo fable them: faint afternoons\nOf Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,\nWhereby their names were artificed\nTo inlay faded, classic Junes--\n\nSilks at the start: against the sky\nNumbers and parasols: outside,\nSquadrons of empty cars, and heat,\nAnd littered grass: then the long cry\nHanging unhushed till it subside\nTo stop-press columns on the street.\n\nDo memories plague their ears like flies?\nThey shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.\nSummer by summer all stole away,\nThe starting-gates, the crowd and cries--\nAll but the unmolesting meadows.\nAlmanacked, their names live; they\n\nHave slipped their names, and stand at ease,\nOr gallop for what must be joy,\nAnd not a fieldglass sees them home,\nOr curious stop-watch prophesies :\nOnly the grooms, and the grooms boy,\nWith bridles in the evening come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "aubade": { - "title": "“Aubade”", - "body": "I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.\nWaking at four to soundless dark, I stare.\nIn time the curtain-edges will grow light.\nTill then I see what’s really always there:\nUnresting death, a whole day nearer now,\nMaking all thought impossible but how\nAnd where and when I shall myself die.\nArid interrogation: yet the dread\nOf dying, and being dead,\nFlashes afresh to hold and horrify.\n\nThe mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse\n--The good not done, the love not given, time\nTorn off unused--nor wretchedly because\nAn only life can take so long to climb\nClear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;\nBut at the total emptiness for ever,\nThe sure extinction that we travel to\nAnd shall be lost in always. Not to be here,\nNot to be anywhere,\nAnd soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.\n\nThis is a special way of being afraid\nNo trick dispels. Religion used to try,\nThat vast moth-eaten musical brocade\nCreated to pretend we never die,\nAnd specious stuff that says No rational being\nCan fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing\nThat this is what we fear--no sight, no sound,\nNo touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,\nNothing to love or link with,\nThe anaesthetic from which none come round.\n\nAnd so it stays just on the edge of vision,\nA small unfocused blur, a standing chill\nThat slows each impulse down to indecision.\nMost things may never happen: this one will,\nAnd realisation of it rages out\nIn furnace-fear when we are caught without\nPeople or drink. Courage is no good:\nIt means not scaring others. Being brave\nLets no one off the grave.\nDeath is no different whined at than withstood.\n\nSlowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.\nIt stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,\nHave always known, know that we can’t escape,\nYet can’t accept. One side will have to go.\nMeanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring\nIn locked-up offices, and all the uncaring\nIntricate rented world begins to rouse.\nThe sky is white as clay, with no sun.\nWork has to be done.\nPostmen like doctors go from house to house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "breadfruit": { - "title": "“Breadfruit”", - "body": "Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,\n Whatever they are,\nAs bribes to teach them how to execute\nSixteen sexual positions on the sand;\nThis makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,\nJive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and\nOn Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub\n By private car.\n\nSuch uncorrected visions end in church\n Or registrar:\nA mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;\nNippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme\nWith money; illness; age. So absolute\nMaturity falls, when old men sit and dream\nOf naked native girls who bring breadfruit\n Whatever they are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-building": { - "title": "“The Building”", - "body": "Higher than the handsomest hotel\nThe lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,\nAll round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall\nLike a great sigh out of the last century.\nThe porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up\nAt the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall\nAs well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.\n\nThere are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,\nLike an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit\nOn rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags\nHaven’t come far. More like a local bus.\nThese outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags\nAnd faces restless and resigned, although\nEvery few minutes comes a kind of nurse\n\nTo fetch someone away: the rest refit\nCups back to saucers, cough, or glance below\nSeats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught\nOn ground curiously neutral, homes and names\nSuddenly in abeyance; some are young,\nSome old, but most at that vague age that claims\nThe end of choice, the last of hope; and all\n\nHere to confess that something has gone wrong.\nIt must be error of a serious sort,\nFor see how many floors it needs, how tall\nIt’s grown by now, and how much money goes\nIn trying to correct it. See the time,\nHalf-past eleven on a working day,\nAnd these picked out of it; see, as they c1imb\n\nTo their appointed levels, how their eyes\nGo to each other, guessing; on the way\nSomeone’s wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:\nThey see him, too. They’re quiet. To realise\nThis new thing held in common makes them quiet,\nFor past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,\nAnd more rooms yet, each one further off\n\nAnd harder to return from; and who knows\nWhich he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,\nLook down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:\nRed brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it\nOut to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,\nTraffic; a locked church; short terraced streets\nWhere kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch\n\nTheir separates from the cleaners--O world,\nYour loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch\nOf any hand from here! And so, unreal\nA touching dream to which we all are lulled\nBut wake from separately. In it, conceits\nAnd self-protecting ignorance congeal\nTo carry life, collapsing only when\n\nCalled to these corridors (for now once more\nThe nurse beckons--). Each gets up and goes\nAt last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;\nOthers, not knowing it, have come to join\nThe unseen congregations whose white rows\nLie set apart above--women, men;\nOld, young; crude facets of the only coin\n\nThis place accepts. All know they are going to die.\nNot yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,\nAnd somewhere like this. That is what it means,\nThis clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend\nThe thought of dying, for unless its powers\nOutbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes\nThe coming dark, though crowds each evening try\n\nWith wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "days": { - "title": "“Days”", - "body": "What are days for?\nDays are where we live.\nThey come, they wake us\nTime and time over.\nThey are to be happy in:\nWhere can we live but days?\n\nAh, solving that question\nBrings the priest and the doctor\nIn their long coats\nRunning over the fields.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "the-explosion": { - "title": "“The Explosion”", - "body": "On the day of the explosion\nShadows pointed towards the pithead:\nIn thesun the slagheap slept.\n\nDown the lane came men in pitboots\nCoughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke\nShouldering off the freshened silence.\n\nOne chased after rabbits; lost them;\nCame back with a nest of lark’s eggs;\nShowed them; lodged them in the grasses.\n\nSo they passed in beards and moleskins\nFathers brothers nicknames laughter\nThrough the tall gates standing open.\n\nAt noon there came a tremor; cows\nStopped chewing for a second; sun\nScarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.\n\nThe dead go on before us they\nAre sitting in God’s house in comfort\nWe shall see them face to face--\n\nplian as lettering in the chapels\nIt was said and for a second\nWives saw men of the explosion\n\nLarger than in life they managed--\nGold as on a coin or walking\nSomehow from the sun towards them\n\nOne showing the eggs unbroken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "faith-healing": { - "title": "“Faith Healing”", - "body": "Slowly the women file to where he stands\nUpright in rimless glasses, silver hair,\nDark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly\nPersuade them onwards to his voice and hands,\nWithin whose warm spring rain of loving care\nEach dwells some twenty seconds. _Now, dear child,\nWhat’s wrong,_ the deep American voice demands,\nAnd, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer\nDirecting God about this eye, that knee.\nTheir heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled\n\nLike losing thoughts, they go in silence; some\nSheepishly stray, not back into their lives\nJust yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud\nWith deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb\nAnd idiot child within them still survives\nTo re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice\nAt last calls them alone, that hands have come\nTo lift and lighten; and such joy arrives\nTheir thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd\nOf huge unheard answers jam and rejoice--\n\nWhat’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:\nBy now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps\nA sense of life lived according to love.\nTo some it means the difference they could make\nBy loving others, but across most it sweeps\nAs all they might have done had they been loved.\nThat nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,\nAs when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,\nSpreads slowly through them--that, and the voice above\nSaying _Dear child,_ and all time has disproved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "going": { - "title": "“Going”", - "body": "There is an evening coming in\nAcross the fields, one never seen before,\nThat lights no lamps.\n\nSilken it seems at a distance, yet\nWhen it is drawn up over the knees and breast\nIt brings no comfort.\n\nWhere has the tree gone, that locked\nEarth to the sky? What is under my hands,\nThat I cannot feel?\n\nWhat loads my hands down?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "high-windows": { - "title": "“High Windows”", - "body": "When I see a couple of kids\nAnd guess he’s fucking her and she’s\nTaking pills or wearing a diaphragm,\nI know this is paradise\n\nEveryone old has dreamed of all their lives--\nBonds and gestures pushed to one side\nLike an outdated combine harvester,\nAnd everyone young going down the long slide\n\nTo happiness, endlessly. I wonder if\nAnyone looked at me, forty years back,\nAnd thought, _That’ll be the life;\nNo God any more, or sweating in the dark\n\nAbout hell and that, or having to hide\nWhat you think of the priest. He\nAnd his lot will all go down the long slide\nLike free bloody birds._ And immediately\n\nRather than words comes the thought of high windows:\nThe sun-comprehending glass,\nAnd beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows\nNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "if-hands-could-free-you-heart": { - "title": "“If hands could free you, heart …”", - "body": "If hands could free you, heart,\n Where would you fly?\nFar, beyond every part\nOf earth this running sky\nMakes desolate? Would you cross\nCity and hill and sea,\n If hands could set you free?\n\nI would not lift the latch;\n For I could run\nThrough fields, pit-valleys, catch\nAll beauty under the sun--\nStill end in loss:\nI should find no bent arm, no bed\n To rest my head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "love-again": { - "title": "“Love Again”", - "body": "Love again: wanking at ten past three\n(Surely he’s taken her home by now?),\nThe bedroom hot as a bakery,\nThe drink gone dead, without showing how\nTo meet tomorrow, and afterwards,\nAnd the usual pain, like dysentery.\n\nSomeone else feeling her breasts and cunt,\nSomeone else drowned in that lash-wide stare,\nAnd me supposed to be ignorant,\nOr find it funny, or not to care,\nEven … but why put it into words?\nIsolate rather this element\n\nThat spreads through other lives like a tree\nAnd sways them on in a sort of sense\nAnd say why it never worked for me.\nSomething to do with violence\nA long way back, and wrong rewards,\nAnd arrogant eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "love-songs-in-age": { - "title": "“Love Songs In Age”", - "body": "She kept her songs, they kept so little space,\n The covers pleased her:\nOne bleached from lying in a sunny place,\nOne marked in circles by a vase of water,\nOne mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,\n And coloured, by her daughter--\nSo they had waited, till, in widowhood\nShe found them, looking for something else, and stood\n\nRelearning how each frank submissive chord\n Had ushered in\nWord after sprawling hyphenated word,\nAnd the unfailing sense of being young\nSpread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein\n That hidden freshness sung,\nThat certainty of time laid up in store\nAs when she played them first. But, even more,\n\nThe glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,\n Broke out, to show\nIts bright incipience sailing above,\nStill promising to solve, and satisfy,\nAnd set unchangeably in order. So\n To pile them back, to cry,\nWas hard, without lamely admitting how\nIt had not done so then, and could not now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "love-we-must-part-now": { - "title": "“Love, we must part now …”", - "body": "Love, we must part now: do not let it be\nCalamitious and bitter. In the past\nThere has been too much moonlight and self-pity:\nLet us have done with it: for now at last\nNever has sun more boldly paced the sky,\nNever were hearts more eager to be free,\nTo kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I\nNo longer hold them; we are husks, that see\nThe grain going forward to a different use.\n\nThere is regret. Always, there is regret.\nBut it is better that our lives unloose,\nAs two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,\nBreak from an estuary with their courses set,\nAnd waving part, and waving drop from sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "mcmxiv": { - "title": "“MCMXIV”", - "body": "Those long uneven lines\nStanding as patiently\nAs if they were stretched outside\nThe Oval or Villa Park,\nThe crowns of hats, the sun\nOn moustached archaic faces\nGrinning as if it were all\nAn August Bank Holiday lark;\nAnd the shut shops, the bleached\nEstablished names on the sunblinds,\nThe farthings and sovereigns,\nAnd dark-clothed children at play\nCalled after kings and queens,\nThe tin advertisements\nFor cocoa and twist, and the pubs\nWide open all day;\nAnd the countryside not caring\nThe place-names all hazed over\nWith flowering grasses, and fields\nShadowing Domesday lines\nUnder wheats’ restless silence;\nThe differently-dressed servants\nWith tiny rooms in huge houses,\nThe dust behind limousines;\nNever such innocence,\nNever before or since,\nAs changed itself to past\nWithout a word--the men\nLeaving the gardens tidy,\nThe thousands of marriages\nLasting a little while longer:\nNever such innocence again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "money": { - "title": "“Money”", - "body": "Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:\n “Why do you let me lie here wastefully?\nI am all you never had of goods and sex.\n You could get them still by writing a few cheques.”\n\nSo I look at others, what they do with theirs:\n They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.\nBy now they’ve a second house and car and wife:\n Clearly money has something to do with life\n\n--In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:\n You can’t put off being young until you retire,\nAnd however you bank your screw, the money you save\n Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.\n\nI listen to money singing. It’s like looking down\n From long french windows at a provincial town,\nThe slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad\n In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "mr-bleaney": { - "title": "“Mr Bleaney”", - "body": "“This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed\nThe whole time he was at the Bodies, till\nThey moved him.” Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,\nFall to within five inches of the sill,\n\nWhose window shows a strip of building land,\nTussocky, littered. “Mr Bleaney took\nMy bit of garden properly in hand.”\nBed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook\n\nBehind the door, no room for books or bags--\n“I’ll take it.” So it happens that I lie\nWhere Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags\nOn the same saucer-souvenir, and try\n\nStuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown\nThe jabbering set he egged her on to buy.\nI know his habits--what time he came down,\nHis preference for sauce to gravy, why\n\nHe kept on plugging at the four aways--\nLikewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk\nWho put him up for summer holidays,\nAnd Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.\n\nBut if he stood and watched the frigid wind\nTousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed\nTelling himself that this was home, and grinned,\nAnd shivered, without shaking off the dread\n\nThat how we live measures our own nature,\nAnd at his age having no more to show\nThan one hired box should make him pretty sure\nHe warranted no better, I don’t know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1955, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "night-music": { - "title": "“Night Music”", - "body": "At one the wind rose,\nAnd with it the noise\nOf the black poplars.\n\nLong since had the living\nBy a thin twine\nBeen led into their dreams\nWhere lanterns shine\nUnder a still veil\nOf falling streams;\nLong since had the dead\nBecome untroubled\nIn the light soil.\nThere were no mouths\nTo drink of the wind,\nNor any eyes\nTo sharpen on the stars’\nWide heaven-holding,\nOnly the sound\nLong sibilant-muscled trees\nWere lifting up, the black poplars.\n\nAnd in their blazing solitude\nThe stars sang in their sockets through\nthe night:\n“Blow bright, blow bright\nThe coal of this unquickened world.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "no-road": { - "title": "“No Road”", - "body": "Since we agreed to let the road between us\nFall to disuse,\nAnd bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,\nAnd turned all time’s eroding agents loose,\nSilence, and space, and strangers--our neglect\nHas not had much effect.\n\nLeaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;\nNo other change.\nSo clear it stands, so little overgrown,\nWalking that way tonight would not seem strange,\nAnd still would be allowed. A little longer,\nAnd time would be the stronger,\n\nDrafting a world where no such road will run\nFrom you to me;\nTo watch that world come up like a cold sun,\nRewarding others, is my liberty.\nNot to prevent it is my will’s fulfillment.\nWilling it, my ailment.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-north-ship": { - "title": "“The North Ship”", - "body": "I saw three ships go sailing by,\nOver the sea, the lifting sea,\nAnd the wind rose in the morning sky,\nAnd one was rigged for a long journey.\n\nThe first ship turned towards the west,\nOver the sea, the running sea,\nAnd by the wind was all possessed\nAnd carried to a rich country.\n\nThe second ship turned towards the east,\nOver the sea, the quaking sea,\nAnd the wind hunted it like a beast\nTo anchor in captivity.\n\nThe third ship drove towards the north,\nOver the sea, the darkening sea,\nBut no breath of wind came forth,\nAnd the decks shone frostily.\n\nThe northern sky rose high and black\nOver the proud unfruitful sea,\nEast and west the ships came back\nHappily or unhappily:\n\nBut the third went wide and far\nInto an unforgiving sea\nUnder a fire-spilling star,\nAnd it was rigged for a long journey.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "nothing-to-be-said": { - "title": "“Nothing to be Said”", - "body": "For nations vague as weed,\nFor nomads among stones,\nSmall-statured cross-faced tribes\nAnd cobble-close families\nIn mill-towns on dark mornings\nLife is slow dying.\n\nSo are their separate ways\nOf building, benediction,\nMeasuring love and money\nWays of slowly dying.\nThe day spent hunting pig\nOr holding a garden-party,\n\nHours giving evidence\nOr birth, advance\nOn death equally slowly.\nAnd saying so to some\nMeans nothing; others it leaves\nNothing to be said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-old-fools": { - "title": "“The Old Fools”", - "body": "What do they think has happened, the old fools,\nTo make them like this? Do they somehow suppose\nIt’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,\nAnd you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember\nWho called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,\nThey could alter things back to when they danced all night,\nOr went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?\nOr do they fancy there’s really been no change,\nAnd they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,\nOr sat through days of thin continuous dreaming\nWatching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:\nWhy aren’t they screaming?\n\nAt death, you break up: the bits that were you\nStart speeding away from each other for ever\nWith no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:\nWe had it before, but then it was going to end,\nAnd was all the time merging with a unique endeavour\nTo bring to bloom the million-petaled flower\nOf being here. Next time you can’t pretend\nThere’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:\nNot knowing how, not hearing who, the power\nOf choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:\nAsh hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines--\nHow can they ignore it?\n\nPerhaps being old is having lighted rooms\nInside your head, and people in them, acting.\nPeople you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms\nLike a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,\nSetting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting\nA known book from the shelves; or sometimes only\nThe rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,\nThe blown bush at the window, or the sun’s\nFaint friendliness on the wall some lonely\nRain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:\nNot here and now, but where all happened once.\nThis is why they give\n\nAn air of baffled absence, trying to be there\nYet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving\nIncompetent cold, the constant wear and tear\nOf taken breath, and them crouching below\nExtinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving\nHow near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:\nThe peak that stays in view wherever we go\nFor them is rising ground. Can they never tell\nWhat is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?\nNot when the strangers come? Never, throughout\nThe whole hideous, inverted childhood? Well,\nWe shall find out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "sad-steps": { - "title": "“Sad Steps”", - "body": "Groping back to bed after a piss\nI part thick curtains, and am startled by\nThe rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.\n\nFour o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie\nUnder a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.\nThere’s something laughable about this,\n\nThe way the moon dashes through clouds that blow\nLoosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart\n(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)\n\nHigh and preposterous and separate--\nLozenge of love! Medallion of art!\nO wolves of memory! Immensements! No,\n\nOne shivers slightly, looking up there.\nThe hardness and the brightness and the plain\nFar-reaching singleness of that wide stare\n\nIs a reminder of the strength and pain\nOf being young; that it can’t come again,\nBut is for others undiminished somewhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "since-the-majority-of-me": { - "title": "“Since the majority of me …”", - "body": "Since the majority of me\nRejects the majority of you,\nDebating ends forwith, and we\nDivide. And sure of what to do\n\nWe disinfect new blocks of days\nFor our majorities to rent\nWith unshared friends and unwalked ways,\nBut silence too is eloquent:\n\nA silence of minorities\nThat, unopposed at last, return\nEach night with cancelled promises\nThey want renewed. They never learn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "a-study-of-reading-habits": { - "title": "“A Study Of Reading Habits”", - "body": " When getting my nose in a book\nCured most things short of school,\nIt was worth ruining my eyes\nTo know I could still keep cool,\nAnd deal out the old right hook\nTo dirty dogs twice my size.\n\nLater, with inch-thick specs,\nEvil was just my lark:\nMe and my cloak and fangs\nHad ripping times in the dark.\nThe women I clubbed with sex!\nI broke them up like meringues.\n\nDon’t read much now: the dude\nWho lets the girl down before\nThe hero arrives, the chap\nWho’s yellow and keeps the store\nSeem far too familiar. Get stewed:\nBooks are a load of crap.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "sunny-prestatyn": { - "title": "“Sunny Prestatyn”", - "body": "_Come To Sunny Prestatyn_\nLaughed the girl on the poster,\nKneeling up on the sand\nIn tautened white satin.\nBehind her, a hunk of coast, a\nHotel with palms\nSeemed to expand from her thighs and\nSpread breast-lifting arms.\n\nShe was slapped up one day in March.\nA couple of weeks, and her face\nWas snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;\nHuge tits and a fissured crotch\nWere scored well in, and the space\nBetween her legs held scrawls\nThat set her fairly astride\nA tuberous cock and balls.\n\nAutographed _Titch Thomas,_ while\nSomeone had used a knife\nOr something to stab right through\nThe moustached lips of her smile.\nShe was too good for this life.\nVery soon, a great transverse tear\nLeft only a hand and some blue.\nNow _Fight Cancer_ is there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "talking-in-bed": { - "title": "“Talking in Bed”", - "body": "Talking in bed ought to be easiest,\nLying together there goes back so far,\nAn emblem of two people being honest.\nYet more and more time passes silently.\nOutside, the wind’s incomplete unrest\nBuilds and disperses clouds in the sky,\nAnd dark towns heap up on the horizon.\nNone of this cares for us. Nothing shows why\nAt this unique distance from isolation\nIt becomes still more difficult to find\nWords at once true and kind,\nOr not untrue and not unkind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "toads": { - "title": "“Toads”", - "body": "Why should I let the toad work\nSquat on my life?\nCan’t I use my wit as a pitchfork\nAnd drive the brute off?\n\nSix days of the week it soils\nWith its sickening poison--\nJust for paying a few bills!\nThat’s out of proportion.\n\nLots of folk live on their wits:\nLecturers, lispers,\nLosers, loblolly-men, louts-\nThey don’t end as paupers;\n\nLots of folk live up lanes\nWith fires in a bucket,\nEat windfalls and tinned sardines-\nThey seem to like it.\n\nTheir nippers have got bare feet,\nTheir unspeakable wives\nAre skinny as whippets--and yet\nNo one actually _starves_.\n\nAh, were I courageous enough\nTo shout, Stuff your pension!\nBut I know, all too well, that’s the stuff\nThat dreams are made on:\n\nFor something sufficiently toad-like\nSquats in me, too;\nIts hunkers are heavy as hard luck,\nAnd cold as snow,\n\nAnd will never allow me to blarney\nMy way of getting\nThe fame and the girl and the money\nAll at one sitting.\n\nI don’t say, one bodies the other\nOne’s spiritual truth;\nBut I do say it’s hard to lose either,\nWhen you have both.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "wants": { - "title": "“Wants”", - "body": "Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:\nHowever the sky grows dark with invitation-cards\nHowever we follow the printed directions of sex\nHowever the family is photographed under the flag-staff--\nBeyond all this, the wish to be alone.\n\nBeneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:\nDespite the artful tensions of the calendar,\nThe life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,\nThe costly aversion of the eyes away from death--\nBeneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-whitsun-weddings": { - "title": "“The Whitsun Weddings”", - "body": "That Whitsun, I was late getting away:\n Not till about\nOne-twenty on the sunlit Saturday\nDid my three-quarters-empty train pull out,\nAll windows down, all cushions hot, all sense\nOf being in a hurry gone. We ran\nBehind the backs of houses, crossed a street\nOf blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence\nThe river’s level drifting breadth began,\nWhere sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.\n\nAll afternoon, through the tall heat that slept\n For miles inland,\nA slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.\nWide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and\nCanals with floatings of industrial froth;\nA hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped\nAnd rose: and now and then a smell of grass\nDisplaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth\nUntil the next town, new and nondescript,\nApproached with acres of dismantled cars.\n\nAt first, I didn’t notice what a noise\n The weddings made\nEach station that we stopped at: sun destroys\nThe interest of what’s happening in the shade,\nAnd down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls\nI took for porters larking with the mails,\nAnd went on reading. Once we started, though,\nWe passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls\nIn parodies of fashion, heels and veils,\nAll posed irresolutely, watching us go,\n\nAs if out on the end of an event\n Waving goodbye\nTo something that survived it. Struck, I leant\nMore promptly out next time, more curiously,\nAnd saw it all again in different terms:\nThe fathers with broad belts under their suits\nAnd seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;\nAn uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,\nThe nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,\nThe lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that\n\nMarked off the girls unreally from the rest.\n Yes, from cafés\nAnd banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed\nCoach-party annexes, the wedding-days\nWere coming to an end. All down the line\nFresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;\nThe last confetti and advice were thrown,\nAnd, as we moved, each face seemed to define\nJust what it saw departing: children frowned\nAt something dull; fathers had never known\n\nSuccess so huge and wholly farcical;\n The women shared\nThe secret like a happy funeral;\nWhile girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared\nAt a religious wounding. Free at last,\nAnd loaded with the sum of all they saw,\nWe hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.\nNow fields were building-plots, and poplars cast\nLong shadows over major roads, and for\nSome fifty minutes, that in time would seem\n\nJust long enough to settle hats and say\n I nearly died,\nA dozen marriages got under way.\nThey watched the landscape, sitting side by side\n--An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,\nAnd someone running up to bowl--and none\nThought of the others they would never meet\nOr how their lives would all contain this hour.\nI thought of London spread out in the sun,\nIts postal districts packed like squares of wheat:\n\nThere we were aimed. And as we raced across\n Bright knots of rail\nPast standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss\nCame close, and it was nearly done, this frail\nTravelling coincidence; and what it held\nStood ready to be loosed with all the power\nThat being changed can give. We slowed again,\nAnd as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled\nA sense of falling, like an arrow-shower\nSent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "wild-oats": { - "title": "“Wild Oats”", - "body": "About twenty years ago\nTwo girls came in where I worked--\nA bosomy English rose\nAnd her friend in specs I could talk to.\nFaces in those days sparked\nThe whole shooting-match off, and I doubt\nIf ever one had like hers:\nBut it was the friend I took out,\n\nAnd in seven years after that\nWrote over four hundred letters,\nGave a ten-guinea ring\nI got back in the end, and met\nAt numerous cathedral cities\nUnknown to the clergy. I believe\nI met beautiful twice. She was trying\nBoth times (so I thought) not to laugh.\n\nParting, after about five\nRehearsals, was an agreement\nThat I was too selfish, withdrawn,\nAnd easily bored to love.\nWell, useful to get that learnt.\nIn my wallet are still two snaps\nOf bosomy rose with fur gloves on.\nUnlucky charms, perhaps.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - } - } - }, - "d-h-lawrence": { - "metadata": { - "name": "D. H. Lawrence", - "birth": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 51 - }, - "poems": { - "all-of-roses": { - "title": "“All of Roses”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBy the Isar, in the twilight\nWe were wandering and singing;\nBy the Isar, in the evening\nWe climbed the huntsman’s ladder and sat swinging\nIn the fir-tree overlooking the marshes;\nWhile river met with river, and the ringing\nOf their pale-green glacier-water filled the evening.\n\nBy the Isar, in the twilight\nWe found our warm wild roses\nHanging red at the river; and simmering\nFrogs were singing, and over the river closes\nWas scent of roses, and glimmering\nIn the twilight, our kisses across the roses\nMet, and her face, and my face, were roses.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhen she rises in the morning\nI linger to watch her.\nShe stands in silhouette against the window,\nAnd the sunbeams catch her\nGlistening white on the shoulders;\n While down her sides, the mellow\n Golden shadow glows, and her breasts\n Swing like full-blown yellow\n _Gloire de Dijon_ roses.\n\nShe drips herself with water,\nAnd her shoulders\nGlisten as silver, they crumple up\nLike wet and shaken roses, and I listen\nFor the rustling of their white, unfolding petals.\n In the window full of sunlight\n She stirs her golden shadow,\n And flashes all herself as sun-bright\n As if roses fought with roses.\n\n\n# III.\n\nJust a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar\nAre fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the cloth\nFloat like boats on a river, waiting\nFor a fairy-wind to wake them from their sloth.\n\nShe laughs at me across the table, saying\nShe loves me; and I blow a little boat\nRocking down the shoals between the tea-cups\nAnd so kiss-beladen that it scarce can float.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNow like a rose come tip-toe out of bud\nI see the woman’s soul steal in her eyes,\nAnd wide in ecstasy I sit and watch\nThe unknown flower issued magic-wise.\n\nAnd day by day out of the envious bud\nMy treasure softly slips uncurled,\nAnd day by day my happiness vibrates\nIn wide and wider circles round the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "almond-blossom": { - "title": "“Almond Blossom”", - "body": "Even iron can put forth,\nEven iron.\n\nThis is the iron age,\nBut let us take heart\nSeeing iron break and bud,\nSeeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.\n\nThe almond-tree,\nDecember’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.\n\nThe almond-tree,\nThat knows the deadliest poison, like a snake\nIn supreme bitterness.\n\nUpon the iron, and upon the steel,\nOdd flakes as if of snow, odd bits of snow,\nOdd crumbs of melting snow.\n\nBut you mistake, it is not from the sky;\nFrom out the iron, and from out the steel,\nFlying not down from heaven, but storming up,\nStrange storming up from the dense under-earth\nAlong the iron, to the living steel\nIn rose-hot tips, and flakes of rose-pale snow\nSetting supreme annunciation to the world.\n\nNay, what a heart of delicate super-faith,\nIron-breaking,\nThe rusty swords of almond-trees.\n\nTrees suffer, like races, down the long ages.\nThey wander and are exiled, they live in exile through long ages\nLike drawn blades never sheathed, hacked and gone black,\nThe alien trees in alien lands: and yet\nThe heart of blossom,\nThe unquenchable heart of blossom!\n\nLook at the many-cicatrised frail vine, none more scarred and frail,\nYet see him fling himself abroad in fresh abandon\nFrom the small wound-stump.\n\nEven the wilful, obstinate, gummy fig-tree\nCan be kept down, but he’ll burst like a polyp into prolixity.\n\nAnd the almond-tree, in exile, in the iron age!\n\nThis is the ancient southern earth whence the vases were baked, amphoras, craters, cantharus, oenochoe, and open-hearted cylix,\nBristling now with the iron of almond-trees\n\nIron, but unforgotten,\nIron, dawn-hearted,\nEver-beating dawn-heart, enveloped in iron against the exile, against the ages.\n\nSee it come forth in blossom\nFrom the snow-remembering heart\nIn long-nighted January,\nIn the long dark nights of the evening star, and Sirius, and the Etna snow-wind through the long night.\n\nSweating his drops of blood through the long-nighted Gethsemane\nInto blossom, into pride, into honey-triumph, into most exquisite splendour.\nOh, give me the tree of life in blossom\nAnd the Cross sprouting its superb and fearless flowers!\n\nSomething must be reassuring to the almond, in the evening star, and the snow-wind, and the long, long, nights,\nSome memory of far, sun-gentler lands,\nSo that the faith in his heart smiles again\nAnd his blood ripples with that untenable delight of once-more-vindicated faith,\nAnd the Gethsemane blood at the iron pores unfolds, unfolds,\nPearls itself into tenderness of bud\nAnd in a great and sacred forthcoming steps forth, steps out in one stride\nA naked tree of blossom, like a bridegroom bathing in dew, divested of cover,\nFrail-naked, utterly uncovered\nTo the green night-baying of the dog-star, Etna’s snow-edged wind\nAnd January’s loud-seeming sun.\n\nThink of it, from the iron fastness\nSuddenly to dare to come out naked, in perfection of blossom, beyond the sword-rust.\nThink, to stand there in full-unfolded nudity, smiling,\nWith all the snow-wind, and the sun-glare, and the dog-star baying epithalamion.\n\nOh, honey-bodied beautiful one,\nCome forth from iron,\nRed your heart is.\nFragile-tender, fragile-tender life-body,\nMore fearless than iron all the time,\nAnd so much prouder, so disdainful of reluctances.\n\nIn the distance like hoar-frost, like silvery ghosts communing on a green hill,\nHoar-frost-like and mysterious.\n\nIn the garden raying out\nWith a body like spray, dawn-tender, and looking about\nWith such insuperable, subtly-smiling assurance,\nSword-blade-born.\n\nUnpromised,\nNo bounds being set.\nFlaked out and come unpromised,\nThe tree being life-divine,\nFearing nothing, life-blissful at the core\nWithin iron and earth.\n\nKnots of pink, fish-silvery\nIn heaven, in blue, blue heaven,\nSoundless, bliss-full, wide-rayed, honey-bodied,\nRed at the core,\nRed at the core,\nKnotted in heaven upon the fine light.\n\nOpen,\nOpen,\nFive times wide open,\nSix times wide open,\nAnd given, and perfect;\nAnd red at the core with the last sore-heartedness,\nSore-hearted-looking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-almond-tree": { - "title": "“The Almond Tree”", - "body": "You promised to send me some violets. Did you forget?\nWhite ones and blue ones from under the orchard hedge?\nSweet dark purple and white ones mixed for a pledge\nOf our early love that hardly has opened yet.\n\nHere there’s an almond tree--you have never seen\nSuch a one in the north--it flowers on the street and I stand\nEvery day by the fence to look up for the flowers that expand\nAt rest in the blue and wonder at what they mean.\n\nUnder the almond tree the happy lands\nProvence Japan and Italy repose\nAnd passing feet are chatter and clapping of those\nWho play around us country girls clapping their hands.\n\nYou my love the foremost in a flowered gown\nAll your unbearable tenderness you with the laughter\nStartled upon your eyes now so wide with here-after\nYou with loose hands of abandonment hanging down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "autumn-sunshine": { - "title": "“Autumn Sunshine”", - "body": "The sun sets out the autumn crocuses\nAnd fills them up a pouring measure\nOf death-producing wine till treasure\nRuns waste down their chalices.\n\nAll all Persephone’s pale cups of mould\nAre on the board are over-filled;\nThe portion to the gods is spilled;\nNow mortals all take hold!\n\nThe time is now the wine-cup full and full\nOf lambent heaven a pledging-cup;\nLet now all mortal men take up\nThe drink and a long strong pull.\n\nOut of the hell-queen’s cup the heaven’s pale wine--\nDrink then invisible heroes drink.\nLips to the vessels never shrink\nThroats to the heavens incline.\n\nAnd take within the wine the god’s great oath\nBy heaven and earth and hellish stream\nTo break this sick and nauseous dream\nWe writhe and lust in both.\n\nSwear in the pale wine poured from the cups of the queen\nOf hell to wake and be free\nFrom this nightmare we writhe in\nBreak out of this foul has-been.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "bats": { - "title": "“Bats”", - "body": "At evening, sitting on this terrace,\nWhen the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara\nDeparts, and the world is taken by surprise …\n\nWhen the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing\nBrown hills surrounding …\n\nWhen under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio\nA green light enters against stream, flush from the west,\nAgainst the current of obscure Arno …\n\nLook up, and you see things flying\nBetween the day and the night;\nSwallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.\n\nA circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches\nWhere light pushes through;\nA sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.\nA dip to the water.\n\nAnd you think:\n“The swallows are flying so late!”\n\nSwallows?\n\nDark air-life looping\nYet missing the pure loop …\nA twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight\nAnd serrated wings against the sky,\nLike a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,\nAnd falling back.\n\nNever swallows!\nBats!\nThe swallows are gone.\n\nAt a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats\nBy the Ponte Vecchio …\nChanging guard.\n\nBats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp\nAs the bats swoop overhead!\nFlying madly.\n\nPipistrello!\nBlack piper on an infinitesimal pipe.\nLittle lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;\n\nWings like bits of umbrella.\n\nBats!\n\nCreatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;\nAnd disgustingly upside down.\n\nHanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags\nAnd grinning in their sleep.\nBats!\n\nIn China the bat is symbol for happiness.\n\nNot for me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "birthday": { - "title": "“Birthday”", - "body": "If I were well-to-do\nI would put roses on roses, and cover your grave\nWith multitude of white roses, and just a few\nRed ones, a bloody-white flag over you.\n\nSo people passing under\nThe ash-trees of the valley road, should raise\nTheir eyes to your bright place, and then in wonder\nShould climb the hill, and put the flowers asunder.\n\nAnd seeing it is your birthday,\nThey would say, seeing each mouth of white rose praise\nYou highly, every blood-red rose display\nYour triumph of anguish above you, they would say:\n\n“’Tis strange, we never knew\nWhile she was here and walking in our ways\nThat she was as the wine-jar whence we drew\nOur draught of faith that sent us on anew.”\n\nAnd so I’d raise\nA rose-bush unto you in all their hearts\nA rose of memory with a scent of praise\nWafting like solace down their length of days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bitterness-of-death": { - "title": "“Bitterness of Death”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAH stern cold man\nHow can you lie so relentless hard\nWhile I wash you with weeping water!\nDo you set your face against the daughter\nOf life? Can you never discard\nYour curt pride’s ban?\n\nYou masquerader!\nHow can you shame to act this part\nOf unswerving indifference to me?\nYou want at last ah me!\nTo break my heart\nEvader!\n\nYou know your mouth\nWas always sooner to soften\nEven than your eyes.\nNow shut it lies\nRelentless however often\nI kiss it in drouth.\n\nIt has no breath\nNor any relaxing. Where\nWhere are you what have you done?\nWhat is this mouth of stone?\nHow did you dare\nTake cover in death!\n\n# II.\n\nOnce you could see\nThe white moon show like a breast revealed\nBy the slipping shawl of stars.\nCould see the small stars tremble\nAs the heart beneath did wield\nSystole diastole.\n\nAll the lovely macrocosm\nWas woman once to you\nBride to your groom.\nNo tree in bloom\nBut it leaned you a new\nWhite bosom.\n\nAnd always and ever\nSoft as a summering tree\nUnfolds from the sky for your good\nUnfolded womanhood;\nShedding you down as a tree\nSheds its flowers on a river.\n\nI saw your brows\nSet like rocks beside a sea of gloom\nAnd I shed my very soul down into your thought;\nLike flowers I fell to be caught\nOn the comforted pool like bloom\nThat leaves the boughs.\n\n\n# III.\n\nOh masquerader\nWith a hard face white-enamelled\nWhat are you now?\nDo you care no longer how\nMy heart is trammelled\nEvader?\n\nIs this you after all\nMetallic obdurate\nWith bowels of steel?\nDid you _never_ feel?--\nCold insensate\nMechanical!\n\nAh no!--you multiform\nYou that I loved you wonderful\nYou who darkened and shone\nYou were many men in one;\nBut never this null\nThis never-warm!\n\nIs this the sum of you?\nIs it all nought?\nCold metal-cold?\nAre you all told\nHere iron-wrought?\nIs _this_ what’s become of you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bread-upon-the-waters": { - "title": "“Bread upon the Waters”", - "body": "So, you are lost to me.\n\nAh you, you ear of corn straight lying,\nWhat food is here for the darkly flying\nFowls of the Afterwards?\n\nWhite bread afloat on the waters,\nCast out by the hand that scatters\nFood untowards,\n\nWill you come back when the tide turns?\nAfter many days? My heart burns\nTo know.\n\nWill you come back after many days\nTo say your say as a traveller says\nMore marvel than woe?\n\nDrift then, for the soundless birds,\nAs fish, in their shadow-waved herds,\nTo approach you.\n\nDrift then, bread cast out;\nDrift, lest I fall in doubt\nAnd reproach you.\n\nFor you are lost to me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bride": { - "title": "“The Bride”", - "body": "My love looks like a girl to-night,\n But she is old.\nThe plaits that lie along her pillow\n Are not gold,\nBut threaded with filigree silver,\n And uncanny cold.\n\nShe looks like a young maiden, since her brow\n Is smooth and fair,\nHer cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed.\n She sleeps a rare\nStill winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.\n\nNay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her dreams\n Of perfect things.\nShe lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,\n And her dead mouth sings\nBy its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "casualty": { - "title": "“Casualty”", - "body": "As I went down the street in my rose-red pelerine\nSome one stopped me and said, “Your lover is hurt.”\n“Oh, bring him to me,” I said. “Oh, lay him between\nMy arms, let me cover him up in my skirt.”\n\nAnd you--oh, see the myriad doves that walk\nBeneath the steps of St. Paul’s! Catch several\nAnd kill for Aphrodite. Don’t speak, do not talk!--\nOne of you kindle a fire to consume them withal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-child-and-the-soldier": { - "title": "“The Child and the Soldier”", - "body": "O brother, put me in your pouch\nAs you would a fresh, sweet locust-pod.\nFor I am frail as a flask of glass,\nAs a fine grey egg, or a slender rod,\nO brother; and I am the golden ring\nYou wear on your finger so gladly. For God\nTakes everything from you tomorrow, and gives me everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cruelty-and-love": { - "title": "“Cruelty and Love”", - "body": "What large, dark hands are those at the window\nLifted, grasping the golden light\nWhich weaves its way through the creeper leaves\nTo my heart’s delight?\n\nAh, only the leaves! But in the west,\nIn the west I see a redness come\nOver the evening’s burning breast--\n--’Tis the wound of love goes home!\n\nThe woodbine creeps abroad\nCalling low to her lover:\nThe sun-lit flirt who all the day\nHas poised above her lips in play\nAnd stolen kisses, shallow and gay\nOf pollen, now has gone away\n--She woos the moth with her sweet, low word,\nAnd when above her his broad wings hover\nThen her bright breast she will uncover\nAnd yield her honey-drop to her lover.\n\nInto the yellow, evening glow\nSaunters a man from the farm below,\nLeans, and looks in at the low-built shed\nWhere hangs the swallow’s marriage bed.\nThe bird lies warm against the wall.\nShe glances quick her startled eyes\nTowards him, then she turns away\nHer small head, making warm display\nOf red upon the throat. His terrors sway\nHer out of the nest’s warm, busy ball,\nWhose plaintive cry is heard as she flies\nIn one blue stoop from out the sties\nInto the evening’s empty hall.\n\nOh, water-hen, beside the rushes\nHide your quaint, unfading blushes,\nStill your quick tail, and lie as dead,\nTill the distance folds over his ominous tread.\n\nThe rabbit presses back her ears,\nTurns back her liquid, anguished eyes\nAnd crouches low: then with wild spring\nSpurts from the terror of his oncoming\nTo be choked back, the wire ring\nHer frantic effort throttling:\nPiteous brown ball of quivering fears!\n\nAh soon in his large, hard hands she dies,\nAnd swings all loose to the swing of his walk.\nYet calm and kindly are his eyes\nAnd ready to open in brown surprise\nShould I not answer to his talk\nOr should he my tears surmise.\n\nI hear his hand on the latch, and rise from my chair\nWatching the door open: he flashes bare\nHis strong teeth in a smile, and flashes his eyes\nIn a smile like triumph upon me; then careless-wise\nHe flings the rabbit soft on the table board\nAnd comes towards me: ah, the uplifted sword\nOf his hand against my bosom, and oh, the broad\nBlade of his hand that raises my face to applaud\nHis coming: he raises up my face to him\nAnd caresses my mouth with his fingers, which still smell grim\nOf the rabbit’s fur! God, I am caught in a snare!\nI know not what fine wire is round my throat,\nI only know I let him finger there\nMy pulse of life, letting him nose like a stoat\nWho sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood:\nAnd down his mouth comes to my mouth, and down\nHis dark bright eyes descend like a fiery hood\nUpon my mind: his mouth meets mine, and a flood\nOf sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown\nWithin him, die, and find death good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "daughter-of-the-great-man": { - "title": "“Daughter of the Great Man”", - "body": "The daughter of the great man rolls her khaki wool,\nAnd in her hands the sparkling needles fly\nSwiftly. I wish I might kiss her fingers; but full\nOf danger I find her, even worse than the fields where we die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "debacle": { - "title": "“Debacle”", - "body": "The trees in trouble because of autumn\nAnd scarlet berries falling from the bush\nAnd all the myriad houseless seeds\nLoosing hold in the wind’s insistent push\n\nMoan softly with autumnal parturition\nPoor obscure fruits extruded out of light\nInto the world of shadow carried down\nBetween the bitter knees of the after-night.\n\nBushed in an uncouth ardour coiled at core\nWith a knot of life that only bliss can unravel\nFall all the fruits most bitterly into earth\nBitterly into corrosion bitterly travel.\n\nWhat is it internecine that is locked\nBy very fierceness into a quiescence\nWithin the rage? We shall not know till it burst\nOut of corrosion into new florescence.\n\nNay but how tortured is the frightful seed\nThe spark intense within it all without\nMordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard\nFor ruin on the naked small redoubt.\n\nBitter to fold the issue and make no sally;\nTo have the mystery but not go forth;\nTo bear but retaliate nothing given to save\nThe spark in storms of corrosion as seeds from the north.\n\nThe sharper more horrid the pressure the harder the heart\nThat saves the blue grain of eternal fire\nWithin its quick committed to hold and wait\nAnd suffer unheeding only forbidden to expire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "don-juan": { - "title": "“Don Juan”", - "body": "It is Isis the mystery\nMust be in love with me.\n\nHere this round ball of earth,\nWhere all the mountains sit\nSolemn in groups,\nAnd the bright rivers flit\nRound them for girth:\n\nHere the trees and troops\nDarken the shining grass;\nAnd many bright people pass\nLike plunder from heaven:\nMany bright people pass\nPlundered from heaven.\n\nBut what of the mistresses,\nWhat the beloved seven?\n--They were but witnesses,\nI was just driven.\n\nWhere is there peace for me?\nIt is Isis the mystery\nMust be in love with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-enkindled-spring": { - "title": "“The Enkindled Spring”", - "body": "This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,\nWild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,\nThorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between\nWhere the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.\n\nI am amazed at this spring, this conflagration\nOf green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze\nOf growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,\nFaces of people streaming across my gaze.\n\nAnd I, what fountain of fire am I among\nThis leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed\nAbout like a shadow buffeted in the throng\nOf flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "fireflies-in-the-corn": { - "title": "“Fireflies in the Corn”", - "body": "_A woman taunts her lover._\n\nLook at the little darlings in the corn!\nThe rye is taller than you, who think yourself\nSo high and mighty: look how its heads are borne\nDark and proud on the sky, like a number of knights\nPassing with spears and pennants and manly scorn.\n\nAnd always likely!--Oh, if I could ride\nWith my head held high-serene. against the sky\nDo you think I’d have a creature like you at my side\nWith your gloom and your doubt that you love me? O darling rye,\nHow I adore you for your simple pride!\n\nAnd those bright fireflies wafting in between\nAnd over the swaying cornstalks, just above\nAll their dark-feathered helmets, like little green\nStars come low and wandering here for love\nOf this dark earth, and wandering all serene.\n\nHow I adore you, you happy things, you dears\nRiding the air and carrying all the time\nYour little lanterns behind you: it cheers\nMy heart to see you settling and trying to climb\nThe corn-stalks, tipping with fire their spears.\n\nAll over the corn’s dim motion, against the blue\nDark sky of night, the wandering glitter, the swarm\nOf questing brilliant things:--you joy, you true\nSpirit of careless joy: ah, how I warm\nMy poor and perished soul at the joy of you!\n\n\n_The man answers and she mocks._\n\nYou’re a fool, woman. I love you, and you know I do!\n--Lord, take his love away, it makes him whine.\nAnd I give you everything that you want me to.\n--Lord, dear Lord, do you think he ever _can_ shine?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "flapper": { - "title": "“Flapper”", - "body": "Love has crept out of her sealéd heart\nAs a field-bee black and amber\nBreaks from the winter-cell to clamber\nUp the warm grass where the sunbeams start.\n\nMischief has come in her dawning eyes\nAnd a glint of coloured iris brings\nSuch as lies along the folded wings\nOf the bee before he flies.\n\nWho with a ruffling careful breath\nHas opened the wings of the wild young sprite?\nHas fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight\nIn her eyes as a young bee stumbleth?\n\nLove makes the burden of her voice.\nThe hum of his heavy staggering wings\nSets quivering with wisdom the common things\nThat she says and her words rejoice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-a-college-window": { - "title": "“From a College Window”", - "body": "The glimmer of the limes sun-heavy sleeping\nGoes trembling past me up the College wall.\nBelow the lawn in soft blue shade is keeping\nThe daisy-froth quiescent softly in thrall.\n\nBeyond the leaves that overhang the street\nAlong the flagged clean pavement summer-white\nPasses the world with shadows at their feet\nGoing left and right.\n\nRemote although I hear the beggar’s cough\nSee the woman’s twinkling fingers tend him a coin\nI sit absolved assured I am better off\nBeyond a world I never want to join.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "green": { - "title": "“Green”", - "body": "The dawn was apple-green,\nThe sky was green wine held up in the sun,\nThe moon was a golden petal between.\n\nShe opened her eyes, and green\nThey shone, clear like flowers undone,\nFor the first time, now for the first time seen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-grey-nurse": { - "title": "“The Grey Nurse”", - "body": "The grey nurse entered a rose garden\nWhere roses’ shadows dappled her.\nHer apron was brown with blood. She prayed,\nAnd roses wondered at her prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "grief": { - "title": "“Grief”", - "body": "The darkness steals the forms of all the queens.\nBut oh, the palms of her two black hands are red!\n--It is Death I fear so much, it is not the dead--\nNot this gray book, but the red and bloody scenes.\n\nThe lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass;\nThe town is like a churchyard, all so still\nAnd gray, now night is here: nor will\nAnother torn red sunset come to pass.\n\nAnd so I sit and turn the book of gray,\nFeeling the shadows like a blind man reading,\nAll fearful lest I find some next word bleeding.\n--Nay, take my painted missal book away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "heimweh": { - "title": "“Heimweh”", - "body": "Far-off the lily-statues stand white-ranked in the garden at home.\nWould God they were shattered quickly the cattle would tread them out in the loam.\nI wish the elder trees in flower could suddenly heave and burst\nThe walls of the house and nettles puff out from the hearth at which I was nursed.\n\nIt stands so still in the hush composed of trees and inviolate peace\nThe home of my fathers the place that is mine my fate and my old increase.\nAnd now that the skies are falling the world is spouting in fountains of dirt\nI would give my soul for the homestead to fall with me go with me both in one hurt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "intime": { - "title": "“Intime”", - "body": "Returning I find her just the same\nAt just the same old delicate game.\n\nStill she says: “Nay loose no flame\nTo lick me up and do me harm!\nBe all yourself!--for oh the charm\nOf your heart of fire in which I look!\nOh better there than in any book\nGlow and enact the dramas and dreams\nI love for ever!--there it seems\nYou are lovelier than life itself till desire\nComes licking through the bars of your lips\nAnd over my face the stray fire slips\nLeaving a burn and an ugly smart\nThat will have the oil of illusion. Oh heart\nOf fire and beauty loose no more\nYour reptile flames of lust; ah store\nYour passion in the basket of your soul\nBe all yourself one bonny burning coal\nThat stays with steady joy of its own fire.\nBut do not seek to take me by desire.\nOh do not seek to thrust on me your fire!\nFor in the firing all my porcelain\nOf flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain\nMy ivory and marble black with stain\nMy veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain\nMy altars sullied I bereft remain\nA priestess execrable taken in vain--”\n\n So the refrain\nSings itself over and so the game\nRe-starts itself wherein I am kept\nLike a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame\nSo that the delicate love-adept\nCan warm her hands and invite her soul\nSprinkling incense and salt of words\nAnd kisses pale and sipping the toll\nOf incense-smoke that rises like birds.\n\nYet I’ve forgotten in playing this game\nThings I have known that shall have no name;\nForgetting the place from which I came\nI watch her ward away the flame\nYet warm herself at the fire--then blame\nMe that I flicker in the basket;\nMe that I glow not with content\nTo have my substance so subtly spent;\nMe that I interrupt her game.\nI ought to be proud that she should ask it\nOf me to be her fire-opal--.\n\n It is well\nSince I am here for so short a spell\nNot to interrupt her?--Why should I\nBreak in by making any reply!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "last-words-to-miriam": { - "title": "“Last Words to Miriam”", - "body": "Yours is the shame and sorrow,\nBut the disgrace is mine;\nYour love was dark and thorough,\nMine was the love of the sun for a flower\nHe creates with his shine.\n\nI was diligent to explore you,\nBlossom you stalk by stalk,\nTill my fire of creation bore you\nShrivelling down in the final dour\nAnguish--then I suffered a balk.\n\nI knew your pain, and it broke\nMy fine, craftsman’s nerve;\nYour body quailed at my stroke,\nAnd my courage failed to give you the last\nFine torture you did deserve.\n\nYou are shapely, you are adorned,\nBut opaque and dull in the flesh,\nWho, had I but pierced with the thorned\nFire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast\nIn a lovely illumined mesh.\n\nLike a painted window: the best\nSuffering burnt through your flesh,\nUndrossed it and left it blest\nWith a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now\nWho shall take you afresh?\n\nNow who will burn you free\nFrom your body’s terrors and dross,\nSince the fire has failed in me?\nWhat man will stoop in your flesh to plough\nThe shrieking cross?\n\nA mute, nearly beautiful thing\nIs your face, that fills me with shame\nAs I see it hardening,\nWarping the perfect image of God,\nAnd darkening my eternal fame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-storm": { - "title": "“Love Storm”", - "body": "Many roses in the wind\nAre tapping at the window-sash.\nA hawk is in the sky; his wings\nSlowly begin to plash.\n\nThe roses with the west wind rapping\nAre torn away and a splash\nOf red goes down the billowing air.\n\nStill hangs the hawk with the whole sky moving\nPast him--only a wing-beat proving\nThe will that holds him there.\n\nThe daisies in the grass are bending\nThe hawk has dropped the wind is spending\nAll the roses and unending\nRustle of leaves washes out the rending\nCry of a bird.\n\nA red rose goes on the wind.--Ascending\nThe hawk his wind-swept way is wending\nEasily down the sky. The daisies sending\nStrange white signals seem intending\nTo show the place whence the scream was heard.\n\nBut oh my heart what birds are piping!\nA silver wind is hastily wiping\nThe face of the youngest rose.\n\nAnd oh my heart cease apprehending!\nThe hawk is gone a rose is tapping\nThe window-sash as the west-wind blows.\n\nKnock knock ’tis no more than a red rose rapping\nAnd fear is a plash of wings.\nWhat then if a scarlet rose goes flapping\nDown the bright-grey ruin of things!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "lui-et-elle": { - "title": "“Lui et Elle”", - "body": "She is large and matronly\nAnd rather dirty,\nA little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.\n\nThough what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year\nAnd put up with her husband,\nI don’t know.\n\nShe likes to eat.\nShe hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs,\nWhen food is going.\nOh yes, she can make haste when she likes.\n\nShe snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls,\nOpening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face\nInto an enormously wide-beaked mouth\nLike sudden curved scissors,\nAnd gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue,\nAnd having the bread hanging over her chin.\n\nO Mistress, Mistress,\nReptile Mistress,\nYour eye is very dark, very bright,\nAnd it never softens\nAlthough you watch.\n\nShe knows,\nShe knows well enough to come for food,\nYet she sees me not;\nHer bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,\nSightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,\nReptile mistress.\n\nTaking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth,\nShe has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums,\nBut she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her,\nShe does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak.\nSnake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away.\n\nMistress, reptile mistress,\nYou are almost too large, I am almost frightened.\n\nHe is much smaller,\nDapper beside her,\nAnd ridiculously small.\n\nHer laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look,\nHis, poor darling, is almost fiery.\n\nHis wimple, his blunt-prowed face,\nHis low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs,\nSo striving, striving,\nAre all more delicate than she,\nAnd he has a cruel scar on his shell.\n\nPoor darling, biting at her feet,\nRunning beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet,\nNipping her ankles,\nWhich she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell.\n\nAgelessly silent,\nAnd with a grim, reptile determination,\nCold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents’ long obstinacy\nOf horizontal persistence.\n\nLittle old man\nScuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity,\nParting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle,\nAnd hanging grimly on,\nLetting go at last as she drags away,\nAnd closing his steel-trap face.\n\nHis steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face.\nAlas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle.\n\nAnd how he feels it!\nThe lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos,\nThe immune, the animate,\nEnveloped in isolation,\nForerunner.\nNow look at him!\n\nAlas, the spear is through the side of his isolation.\nHis adolescence saw him crucified into sex,\nDoomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself.\nDivided into passionate duality,\nHe, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness,\nDoomed to make an intolerable fool of himself\nIn his effort toward completion again.\n\nPoor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris,\nThe mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces,\nAnd he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously.\n\nAnd so behold him following the tail\nOf that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse,\nLike some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,\nBut with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence,\nSuddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,\nRoaming over the sods,\nOr, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail\nBeneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.\n\nTheir two shells like domed boats bumping,\nHers huge, his small;\nTheir splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles,\nAnd stumbling mixed up in one another,\nIn the race of love--\nTwo tortoises,\nShe huge, he small.\n\nShe seems earthily apathetic,\nAnd he has a reptile’s awful persistence.\n\nI heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue.\nWhile I, I pity Monsieur.\n“He pesters her and torments her,” said the woman.\nHow much more is he pestered and tormented, say I.\n\nWhat can he do?\nHe is dumb, he is visionless,\nConceptionless.\nHis black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not\nAs her earthen mound moves on,\nBut he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin,\nNail-studded, that shake beneath her shell,\nAnd drags at these with his beak,\nDrags and drags and bites,\nWhile she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "moonrise": { - "title": "“Moonrise”", - "body": "And who has seen the moon, who has not seen\nHer rise from out the chamber of the deep\nFlushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber\nOf finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw\nConfession of delight upon the wave,\nLittering the waves with her own superscription\nOf bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us\nSpread out and known at last: and we are sure\nThat beauty is a thing beyond the grave,\nThat perfect, bright experience never falls\nTo nothingness, and time will dim the moon\nSooner than our full consummation here\nIn this odd life will tarnish or pass away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "mosquito": { - "title": "“Mosquito”", - "body": "When did you start your tricks\nMonsieur?\n\nWhat do you stand on such high legs for?\nWhy this length of shredded shank\nYou exaltation?\n\nIs it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards\nAnd weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,\nStand upon me weightless, you phantom?\n\nI heard a woman call you the Winged Victory\nIn sluggish Venice.\nYou turn your head towards your tail, and smile.\n\nHow can you put so much devilry\nInto that translucent phantom shred\nOf a frail corpus?\n\nQueer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs\nHow you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,\nA nothingness.\n\nYet what an aura surrounds you;\nYour evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.\n\nThat is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:\nInvisibility, and the anaesthetic power\nTo deaden my attention in your direction.\n\nBut I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.\n\nQueer, how you stalk and prowl the air\nIn circles and evasions, enveloping me,\nGhoul on wings\nWinged Victory.\n\nSettle, and stand on long thin shanks\nEyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,\nYou speck.\n\nI hate the way you lurch off sideways into air\nHaving read my thoughts against you.\n\nCome then, let us play at unawares,\nAnd see who wins in this sly game of bluff.\nMan or mosquito.\n\nYou don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.\nNow then!\n\nIt is your trump\nIt is your hateful little trump\nYou pointed fiend,\nWhich shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:\nIt is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.\n\nWhy do you do it?\nSurely it is bad policy.\n\nThey say you can’t help it.\n\nIf that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.\nBut it sounds so amazingly like a slogan\nA yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.\n\nBlood, red blood\nSuper-magical\nForbidden liquor.\n\nI behold you stand\nFor a second enspasmed in oblivion,\nObscenely ecstasied\nSucking live blood\nMy blood.\n\nSuch silence, such suspended transport,\nSuch gorging,\nSuch obscenity of trespass.\n\nYou stagger\nAs well as you may.\nOnly your accursed hairy frailty\nYour own imponderable weightlessness\nSaves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.\n\nAway with a paean of derision\nYou winged blood-drop.\nCan I not overtake you?\nAre you one too many for me\nWinged Victory?\nAm I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?\n\nQueer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes\nBeside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!\nQueer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "mothers-son-in-salonika": { - "title": "“Mother’s Son in Salonika”", - "body": "The midnight shadow sinking down has slung\nOver your tent the one tent of us all, my love;\nIn whose close folds above you, near above,\nThe flame of my soul like a trembling star is hung.\n\nThat is my spirit hovering close above\nYou now as you turn your face towards the sky.\nOh, as you stand looking up, do you know it is I?\nDo you lift your lips to kiss me good-night, my love?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mourning": { - "title": "“Mourning”", - "body": "Why do you go about looking for me, mother?\nI and my betrothed are together in the shed--\nSitting there together for a little while.\nWhy are you so anxious? Leave me peaceful with my dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "narcissus": { - "title": "“Narcissus”", - "body": "Where the minnows trace\nA glinting web quick hid in the gloom of the brook\nWhen I think of the place\nAnd remember the small lad lying intent to look\nThrough the shadowy face\nAt the little fish thread-threading the watery nook--\n\nIt seems to me\nThe woman you are should be nixie there is a pool\nWhere we ought to be.\nYou undine-clear and pearly soullessly cool\nAnd waterly\nThe pool for my limbs to fathom my soul’s last school.\n\nNarcissus\nVentured so long ago in the deeps of reflection.\nIllyssus\nBroke the bounds and beyond!--Dim recollection\nOf fishes\nSoundlessly moving in heaven’s other direction!\n\nBe\nUndine towards the waters moving back;\nFor me\nA pool! Put off the soul you’ve got oh lack\nYour human self immortal; take the watery track.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "neither-moth-nor-rust": { - "title": "“Neither Moth nor Rust”", - "body": "God, only God, is eternally.\nGod is forever, and only He.\nWhere, white maid, are the men you have loved?-\nThey are dead, so God was between you, you see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-north-country": { - "title": "“The North Country”", - "body": "In another country black poplars shake themselves over a pond\nAnd rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter and wheel from the works beyond;\nThe air is dark with north and with sulphur the grass is a darker green\nAnd people darkly invested with purple move palpable through the scene.\n\nSoundlessly down across the counties out of the resonant gloom\nThat wraps the north in stupor and purple travels the deep slow boom\nOf the man-life north-imprisoned shut in the hum of the purpled steel\nAs it spins to sleep on its motion drugged dense in the sleep of the wheel.\n\nOut of the sleep from the gloom of motion soundlessly somnambule\nMoans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned asleep in the rule\nOf the strong machine that runs mesmeric booming the spell of its word\nUpon them and moving them helpless mechanic their will to its will deferred.\n\nYet all the while comes the droning inaudible out of the violet air\nThe moaning of sleep-bound beings in travail that toil and are will-less there\nIn the spell-bound north convulsive now with a dream near morning strong\nWith violent achings heaving to burst the sleep that is now not long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "nostalgia": { - "title": "“Nostalgia”", - "body": "The waning moon looks upward, this grey night\nSheers round the heavens in one smooth curve\nOf easy sailing. Odd red wicks serve\nTo show where the ships at sea move out of sight.\n\nThis place is palpable me, for here I was born\nOf this self-same darkness. Yet the shadowy house belor\nIs out of bounds, and only the old ghosts know\nI have come--they whimper about me, welcome and mourn.\n\nMy father suddenly died in the harvesting corn,\nAnd the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear\nNo sound from the strangers; the place is dark, and fear\nOpens my eyes till the roots of my vision seem torn.\n\nCan I go nearer, never towards the door?\nThe ghosts and I, we mourn together, and shrink\nIn the shadow of the cart-shed-hovering on the brink\nFor ever, to enter the homestead no more.\n\nIs it irrevocable? Can I really not go\nThrough the open yard-way? Can I not pass the sheds\nAnd through to the mowie? Only the dead in their beds\nCan know the fearful anguish that this is so.\n\nI kiss the stones. I kiss the moss on the wall,\nAnd wish I could pass impregnate into the place.\nI wish I could take it all in a last embrace.\nI wish with my breast I could crush it, perish it all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-a-grey-evening-in-march": { - "title": "“On a Grey Evening in March”", - "body": "The clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you\nWhile north of them all at the farthest ends stands one bright-bosomed aglance\nWith fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts red-fire seas running through\nThe rocks where ravens flying to windward melt as a well-shot lance.\n\nYou should be out by the orchard where violets secretly darken the earth\nOr there in the woods of the twilight with northern wind-flowers shaken astir.\nThink of me here in the library trying and trying a song that is worth\nTears and swords to my heart arrows no armour will turn or deter.\n\nYou tell me the lambs have come they lie like daisies white in the grass\nOf the dark-green hills; new calves in shed; peewits turn after the plough--\nIt is well for you. For me the navvies work in the road where I pass\nAnd I want to smite in anger the barren rock of each waterless brow.\n\nLike the sough of a wind that is caught up high in the mesh of the budding trees\nA sudden car goes sweeping past and I strain my soul to hear\nThe voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it rushes past like a breeze\nTo hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting the after-echo of fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "on-that-day": { - "title": "“On that Day”", - "body": "On that day\nI shall put roses on roses and cover your grave\nWith multitude of white roses: and since you were brave\nOne bright red ray.\n\nSo people passing under\nThe ash-trees of the valley-road will raise\nTheir eyes and look at the grave on the hill in wonder\nWondering mount and put the flowers asunder\n\nTo see whose praise\nIs blazoned here so white and so bloodily red.\nThen they will say: “’Tis long since she is dead\nWho has remembered her after many days?”\n\nAnd standing there\nThey will consider how you went your ways\nUnnoticed among them a still queen lost in the maze\nOf this earthly affair.\n\nA queen they’ll say\nHas slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill.\nSleeps on unknown unnoticed there until\nDawns my insurgent day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peach": { - "title": "“Peach”", - "body": "Would you like to throw a stone at me?\nHere, take all that’s left of my peach.\n\nBlood-red, deep:\nHeaven knows how it came to pass.\nSomebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.\n\nWrinkled with secrets\nAnd hard with the intention to keep them.\n\nWhy, from silvery peach-bloom,\nFrom that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem\nThis rolling, dropping, heavy globule?\n\nI am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.\n\nWhy so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?\nWhy hanging with such inordinate weight?\nWhy so indented?\n\nWhy the groove?\nWhy the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?\nWhy the ripple down the sphere?\nWhy the suggestion of incision?\n\nWhy was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?\nIt would have been if man had made it.\nThough I’ve eaten it now.\n\nBut it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball;\nAnd because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.\n\nHere, you can have my peach stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pentacostal": { - "title": "“Pentacostal”", - "body": "Shall I tell you then how it is?\n\nThere came a cloven gleam\nLike a tongue of darkened flame\nTo burn in me.\n\nAnd so I seem\nTo have you still the same\nIn one world with me.\n\nIn the flicker of a flower\nIn a worm that is blind yet strives\nIn the mouse that pauses to listen\n\nGlimmers our\nShadow as well and deprives\nThem none of their glisten.\n\nIn each shaken morsel\nOur shadow trembles\nAs if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.\n\nWe are part and parcel\nIn shadow nothing dissembles\nOur darkened universe. You understand?\n\nFor I have told you plainly how it is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "people": { - "title": "“People”", - "body": "The great gold apples of night\nHang from the street’s long bough\nDripping their light\nOn the faces that drift below,\nOn the faces that drift and blow\nDown the night-time, out of sight\nIn the wind’s sad sough.\n\nThe ripeness of these apples of night\nDistilling over me\nMakes sickening the white\nGhost-flux of faces that hie\nThem endlessly, endlessly by\nWithout meaning or reason why\nThey ever should be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "piano": { - "title": "“Piano”", - "body": "Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;\nTaking me back down the vista of years, till I see\nA child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings\nAnd pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.\n\nIn spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song\nBetrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong\nTo the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside\nAnd hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.\n\nSo now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour\nWith the great black piano appassionato. The glamour\nOf childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast\nDown in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "poemgranate": { - "title": "“Poemgranate”", - "body": "You tell me I am wrong.\nWho are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?\nI am not wrong.\n\nIn Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women,\nNo doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate trees in flower,\nOh so red, and such a lot of them.\n\nWhereas at Venice,\nAbhorrent, green, slippery city\nWhose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes,\nIn the dense foliage of the inner garden\nPomegranates like bright green stone,\nAnd barbed, barbed with a crown.\nOh, crown of spiked green metal\nActually growing!\n\nNow, in Tuscany,\nPomegranates to warm your hands at;\nAnd crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns\nOver the left eyebrow.\n\nAnd, if you dare, the fissure!\n\nDo you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?\nDo you prefer to look on the plain side?\n\nFor all that, the setting suns are open.\nThe end cracks open with the beginning:\nRosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.\n\nDo you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?\nNo glittering, compact drops of dawn?\nDo you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured?\n\nFor my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.\nIt is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reading-a-letter": { - "title": "“Reading a Letter”", - "body": "She sits on the recreation ground\nUnder an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale blue sky.\nThe young grass twinkles in the wind and the sound\nOf the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.\n\nSo sitting under the knotted canopy\nOf the wind she is lifted and carried away as in a balloon\nAcross the insensible void till she stoops to see\nThe sandy desert beneath her the dreary platoon.\n\nShe knows the waste all dry beneath her in one place\nStirring with earth-coloured life ever turning and stirring.\nBut never the motion has a human face\nNor sound save intermittent machinery whirring.\n\nAnd so again on the recreation ground\nShe alights a stranger wondering unused to the scene;\nSuffering at sight of the children playing around\nHurt at the chalk-coloured tulips and the evening-green.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "service-of-all-the-souls": { - "title": "“Service of All the Souls”", - "body": "Between the avenue of cypresses,\nAll in their scarlet capes and surplices\nOf linen, go the chaunting choristers,\nThe priests in gold and black, the villagers.\n\nAnd all along the path to the cemetery\nThe round dark heads of men crowd silently;\nAnd black-scarfed faces of women-folk wistfully\nWatch at the banner of death, and the mystery.\n\nAnd at the foot of a grave a father stands\nWith sunken head and forgotten, folded hands;\nAnd at the foot of a grave a mother kneels\nWith pale shut face, nor neither hears nor feels\n\nThe coming of the chaunting choristers\nBetween the avenue of cypresses,\nThe silence of the many villagers,\nThe candle-flames beside the surplices.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "seven-seals": { - "title": "“Seven Seals”", - "body": "Since this is the last night I keep you home\nCome I will consecrate you for the journey.\n\nRather I had you would not go. Nay come\nI will not again reproach you. Lie back\nAnd let me love you a long time ere you go.\nFor you are sullen-hearted still and lack\nThe will to love me. But even so\nI will set a seal upon you from my lip\nWill set a guard of honour at each door\nSeal up each channel out of which might slip\nYour love for me.\n\nI kiss your mouth. Ah love\nCould I but seal its ruddy shining spring\nOf passion parch it up destroy remove\nIts softly-stirring crimson welling-up\nOf kisses! Oh help me God! Here at the source\nI’d lie for ever drinking and drawing in\nYour fountains as heaven drinks from out their course\nThe floods.\n\nI close your ears with kisses\nAnd seal your nostrils; and round your neck you’ll wear--\nNay let me work--a delicate chain of kisses.\nLike beads they go around and not one misses\nTo touch its fellow on either side.\n\nAnd there\nFull mid-between the champaign of your breast\nI place a great and burning seal of love\nLike a dark rose a mystery of rest\nOn the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.\n\nNay I persist and very faith shall keep\nYou integral to me. Each door each mystic port\nOf egress from you I will seal and steep\nIn perfect chrism. Now it is done. The mort\nWill sound in heaven before it is undone.\n\nBut let me finish what I have begun\nAnd shirt you now invulnerable in the mail\nOf iron kisses kisses linked like steel.\nPut greaves upon your thighs and knees and frail\nWebbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel\nEnsheathed invulnerable with me with seven\nGreat seals upon your outgoings and woven\nChain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly\nUpon you wrapped in indomitable me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sigh-no-more": { - "title": "“Sigh No More”", - "body": "The cuckoo and the coo-dove’s ceaseless calling\nCalling\nOf a meaningless monotony is palling\nAll my morning’s pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered wood.\nMay-blossom and blue bird’s-eye flowers falling\nFalling\nIn a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling\nMessages of true-love down the dust of the high-road.\nI do not like to hear the gentle grieving\nGrieving\nOf the she-dove in the blossom still believing\nLove will yet again return to her and make all good.\n\nWhen I know that there must ever be deceiving\nDeceiving\nOf the mournful constant heart that while she’s weaving\nHer woes her lover woos and sings within another wood.\n\nOh boisterous the cuckoo shouts forestalling\nStalling\nA progress down the intricate enthralling\nBy-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff their hood.\n\nAnd like a laughter leads me onward heaving\nHeaving\nA sigh among the shadows thus retrieving\nA decent short regret for that which once was very good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "twenty-years-ago": { - "title": "“Twenty Years Ago”", - "body": "Round the house were lilacs and strawberries\nAnd foal-foots spangling the paths\nAnd far away on the sand-hills dewberries\nCaught dust from the sea’s long swaths.\n\nUp the wolds the woods were walking\nAnd nuts fell out of their hair.\nAt the gate the nets hung balking\nThe star-lit rush of a hare.\n\nIn the autumn fields the stubble\nTinkled the music of gleaning.\nAt a mother’s knees the trouble\nLost all its meaning.\n\nYea what good beginnings\nTo this sad end!\nHave we had our innings?\nGod forfend!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "under-the-oak": { - "title": "“Under the Oak”", - "body": "You if you were sensible\nWhen I tell you the stars flash signals each one dreadful\nYou would not turn and answer me\n“The night is wonderful.”\n\nEven you if you knew\nHow this darkness soaks me through and through and infuses\nUnholy fear in my vapour you would pause to distinguish\nWhat hurts from what amuses.\n\nFor I tell you\nBeneath this powerful tree my whole soul’s fluid\nOozes away from me as a sacrifice steam\nAt the knife of a Druid.\n\nAgain I tell you I bleed I am bound with withies\nMy life runs out.\nI tell you my blood runs out on the floor of this oak\nGout upon gout.\n\nAbove me springs the blood-born mistletoe\nIn the shady smoke.\nBut who are you twittering to and fro\nBeneath the oak?\n\nWhat thing better are you what worse?\nWhat have you to do with the mysteries\nOf this ancient place of my ancient curse?\nWhat place have you in my histories?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "the-wild-common": { - "title": "“The Wild Common”", - "body": "The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,\nLittle jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;\nAbove them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping:\nThey are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.\n\nRabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie\nLow-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick.\nAre they asleep?--Are they alive?--Now see, when I\nMove my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick.\n\nThe common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes\nCrowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;\nThere the lazy streamlet pushes\nIts curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes.\n\nInto a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,\nDark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow,\nNaked on the steep, soft lip\nOf the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro.\n\nWhat if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost?\nWithout the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook!\nIf my veins and my breasts with love embossed\nWithered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took.\n\nSo my soul like a passionate woman turns,\nFilled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love\nFor myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns,\nRuns ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above.\n\nOver my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air,\nRich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.\nAnd the soul of the wind and my blood compare\nTheir wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad.\n\nOh but the water loves me and folds me,\nPlays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood,\nBlood of a heaving woman who holds me,\nOwning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wind-the-rascal": { - "title": "“The Wind, the Rascal”", - "body": "The wind, the rascal, knocked at my door, and I said:\nMy love is come!\nBut oh, wind, what a knave thou art\nTo make sport of me when the days of my heart\nAre drearisome,\nAnd wearisome.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-in-the-boulevard": { - "title": "“Winter in the Boulevard”", - "body": "The frost has settled down upon the trees\nAnd ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies\nOf leaves that have gone unnoticed swept like old\nRomantic stories now no more to be told.\n\nThe trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought\nTheir abundant summery wordage silenced caught\nIn the grim undertow; naked the trees confront\nImplacable winter’s long cross-questioning brunt.\n\nHas some hand balanced more leaves in the depths of the twigs?\nSome dim little efforts placed in the threads of the birch?--\nIt is only the sparrows like dead black leaves on the sprigs\nSitting huddled against the cerulean one flesh with their perch.\n\nThe clear cold sky coldly bethinks itself.\nLike vivid thought the air spins bright and all\nTrees birds and earth arrested in the after-thought\nAwaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "emma-lazarus": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Emma Lazarus", - "birth": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "long-island-sound": { - "title": "“Long Island Sound”", - "body": "I see it as it looked one afternoon\nIn August,--by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown.\nThe swiftness of the tide, the light thereon,\nA far-off sail, white as a crescent moon.\nThe shining waters with pale currents strewn,\nThe quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove,\nThe semi-circle of its dark, green grove.\nThe luminous grasses, and the merry sun\nIn the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide,\nLaughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp\nOf crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide,\nLight summer clouds fantastical as sleep\nChanging unnoted while I gazed thereon.\nAll these fair sounds and sights I made my own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-south": { - "title": "“The South”", - "body": "Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies\nBehold the Spirit of the musky South,\nA creole with still-burning, languid eyes,\nVoluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:\nSwathed in spun gauze is she,\nFrom fibres of her own anana tree.\n\nWithin these sumptuous woods she lies at ease,\nBy rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed:\n’Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees,\nLike to the golden oriole’s hanging nest,\nHer airy hammock swings,\nAnd through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings.\n\nHow beautiful she is! A tulip-wreath\nTwines round her shadowy, free-floating hair:\nYoung, weary, passionate, and sad as death,\nDark visions haunt for her the vacant air,\nWhile noiselessly she lies\nWith lithe, lax, folded hands and heavy eyes.\n\nFull well knows she how wide and fair extend\nHer groves bright flowered, her tangled everglades,\nMajestic streams that indolently wend\nThrough lush savanna or dense forest shades,\nWhere the brown buzzard flies\nTo broad bayous ’neath hazy-golden skies.\n\nHers is the savage splendor of the swamp,\nWith pomp of scarlet and of purple bloom,\nWhere blow warm, furtive breezes faint and damp,\nStrange insects whir, and stalking bitterns boom--\nWhere from stale waters dead\nOft looms the great jawed alligator’s head.\n\nHer wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,--\nOf all she is aware: luxuriant woods,\nFresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees;\nAnd ever midst those verdant solitudes\nThe soldier’s wooden cross,\nO’ergrown by creeping tendrils and rank moss.\n\nWas hers a dream of empire? was it sin?\nAnd is it well that all was borne in vain?\nShe knows no more than one who slow doth win,\nAfter fierce fever, conscious life again,\nToo tired, too weak, too sad,\nBy the new light to be or stirred or glad.\n\nFrom rich sea-islands fringing her green shore,\nFrom broad plantations where swart freemen bend\nBronzed backs in willing labor, from her store\nOf golden fruit, from stream, from town, ascend\nLife-currents of pure health:\nHer aims shall be subserved with boundless wealth.\n\nYet now how listless and how still she lies,\nLike some half-savage, dusky Indian queen,\nRocked in her hammock ’neath her native skies,\nWith the pathetic, passive, broken mien\nOf one who, sorely proved,\nGreat-souled, hath suffered much and much hath loved!\n\nBut look! along the wide-branched, dewy glade\nGlimmers the dawn: the light palmetto trees\nAnd cypresses reissue from the shade,\nAnd she hath wakened. Through clear air she sees\nThe pledge, the brightening ray,\nAnd leaps from dreams to hail the coming day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "edward-lear": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edward Lear", - "birth": { - "year": 1812 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "the-courtship-of-the-yonghy-bonghy-bo": { - "title": "“The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”", - "body": "On the Coast of Coromandel\nWhere the early pumpkins blow,\nIn the middle of the woods\nLived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\nTwo old chairs, and half a candle,--\nOne old jug without a handle,--\nThese were all his worldly goods:\nIn the middle of the woods,\nThese were all the worldly goods,\nOf the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nOf the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\nOnce, among the Bong-trees walking\nWhere the early pumpkins blow,\nTo a little heap of stones\nCame the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\nThere he heard a Lady talking,\nTo some milk-white Hens of Dorking,--\n“’Tis the lady Jingly Jones!\nOn that little heap of stones\nSits the Lady Jingly Jones!”\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\n“Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!\nSitting where the pumpkins blow,\nWill you come and be my wife?”\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n“I am tired of living singly,--\nOn this coast so wild and shingly,--\nI’m a-weary of my life:\nIf you’ll come and be my wife,\nQuite serene would be my life!”--\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\n“On this Coast of Coromandel,\nShrimps and watercresses grow,\nPrawns are plentiful and cheap,”\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n“You shall have my chairs and candle,\nAnd my jug without a handle!--\nGaze upon the rolling deep\nFish is plentiful and cheap\nAs the sea, my love is deep!”\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\nLady Jingly answered sadly,\nAnd her tears began to flow,--\n“Your proposal comes too late,\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nI would be your wife most gladly!”\n(Here she twirled her fingers madly,)\n“But in England I’ve a mate!\nYes! you’ve asked me far too late,\nFor in England I’ve a mate,\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!”\n\n“Mr. Jones--(his name is Handel,--\nHandel Jones, Esquire, & Co.)\nDorking fowls delights to send,\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nKeep, oh! keep your chairs and candle,\nAnd your jug without a handle,--\nI can merely be your friend!\n--Should my Jones more Dorkings send,\nI will give you three, my friend!\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!”\n\n“Though you’ve such a tiny body,\nAnd your head so large doth grow,--\nThough your hat may blow away,\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nThough you’re such a Hoddy Doddy--\nYet a wish that I could modi-\nfy the words I needs must say!\nWill you please to go away?\nThat is all I have to say--\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!\nMr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!”.\n\nDown the slippery slopes of Myrtle,\nWhere the early pumpkins blow,\nTo the calm and silent sea\nFled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\nThere, beyond the Bay of Gurtle,\nLay a large and lively Turtle,--\n“You’re the Cove,” he said, “for me\nOn your back beyond the sea,\nTurtle, you shall carry me!”\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nSaid the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\nThrough the silent-roaring ocean\nDid the Turtle swiftly go;\nHolding fast upon his shell\nRode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\nWith a sad primaeval motion\nTowards the sunset isles of Boshen\nStill the Turtle bore him well.\nHolding fast upon his shell,\n“Lady Jingly Jones, farewell!”\nSang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nSang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\n\nFrom the Coast of Coromandel,\nDid that Lady never go;\nOn that heap of stones she mourns\nFor the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.\nOn that Coast of Coromandel,\nIn his jug without a handle\nStill she weeps, and daily moans;\nOn that little hep of stones\nTo her Dorking Hens she moans,\nFor the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,\nFor the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dong-with-the-luminous-nose": { - "title": "“The Dong with the Luminous Nose”", - "body": "When awful darkness and silence reign\nOver the great Gromboolian plain,\nThrough the long, long wintry nights;--\nWhen the angry breakers roar\nAs they beat on the rocky shore;--\nWhen Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights\nOf the Hills of the Chankly Bore:--\n\nThen, through the vast and gloomy dark,\nThere moves what seems a fiery spark,\nA lonely spark with silvery rays\nPiercing the coal-black night,--\nA Meteor strange and bright:--\nHither and thither the vision strays,\nA single lurid light.\n\nSlowly it wander,--pauses,--creeps,--\nAnon it sparkles,--flashes and leaps;\nAnd ever as onward it gleaming goes\nA light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.\nAnd those who watch at that midnight hour\nFrom Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,\nCry, as the wild light passes along,--\n“The Dong!--the Dong!\nThe wandering Dong through the forest goes!\nThe Dong! the Dong!\nThe Dong with a luminous Nose!”\n\nLong years ago\nThe Dong was happy and gay,\nTill he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl\nWho came to those shores one day.\nFor the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did,--\nLanding at eve near the Zemmery Fidd\nWhere the Oblong Oysters grow,\nAnd the rocks are smooth and gray.\nAnd all the woods and the valleys rang\nWith the Chorus they daily and nightly sang,--\n“Far and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live;\nTheir heads are green, and the hands are blue\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.”\n\nHappily, happily passed those days!\nWhile the cheerful Jumblies staid;\nThey danced in circlets all night long,\nTo the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,\nIn moonlight, shine, or shade.\nFor day and night he was always there\nBy the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,\nWith her sky-blue hands, and her sea-green hair.\nTill the morning came of that hateful day\nWhen the Jumblies sailed in their sieve away,\nAnd the Dong was left on the cruel shore\nGazing--gazing for evermore,--\nEver keeping his weary eyes on\nThat pea-green sail on the far horizon,--\nSinging the Jumbly Chorus still\nAs he sate all day on the grassy hill,--\n“Far and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live;\nTheir heads are green, and the hands are blue\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.”\n\nBut when the sun was low in the West,\nThe Dong arose and said;\n--“What little sense I once possessed\nHas quite gone out of my head!”--\nAnd since that day he wanders still\nBy lake and forest, marsh and hills,\nSinging--“O somewhere, in valley or plain\nMight I find my Jumbly Girl again!\nFor ever I’ll seek by lake and shore\nTill I find my Jumbly Girl once more!”\n\nPlaying a pipe with silvery squeaks,\nSince then his Jumbly Girl he seeks,\nAnd because by night he could not see,\nHe gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree\nOn the flowery plain that grows.\nAnd he wove him a wondrous Nose,--\nA Nose as strange as a Nose could be!\nOf vast proportions and painted red,\nAnd tied with cords to the back of his head.\n--In a hollow rounded space it ended\nWith a luminous Lamp within suspended,\nAll fenced about\nWith a bandage stout\nTo prevent the wind from blowing it out;--\nAnd with holes all round to send the light,\nIn gleaming rays on the dismal night.\n\nAnd now each night, and all night long,\nOver those plains still roams the Dong;\nAnd above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe\nYou may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe\nWhile ever he seeks, but seeks in vain\nTo meet with his Jumbly Girl again;\nLonely and wild--all night he goes,--\nThe Dong with a luminous Nose!\nAnd all who watch at the midnight hour,\nFrom Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,\nCry, as they trace the Meteor bright,\nMoving along through the dreary night,--\n“This is the hour when forth he goes,\nThe Dong with a luminous Nose!\nYonder--over the plain he goes;\nHe goes!\nHe goes;\nThe Dong with a luminous Nose!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-duck-and-the-kangaroo": { - "title": "“The Duck and the Kangaroo”", - "body": "Said the Duck to the Kangaroo,\n“Good gracious! how you hop!\nOver the fields and the water too,\nAs if you never would stop!\nMy life is a bore in this nasty pond,\nAnd I long to go out in the world beyond!\nI wish I could hop like you!”\nSaid the Duck to the Kangaroo.\n\n“Please give me a ride on your back!”\nSaid the Duck to the Kangaroo.\n“I would sit quite still, and say nothing but ‘Quack’,\nThe whole of the long day through!\nAnd we’d go to the Dee, and the Jelly Bo Lee,\nOver the land, and over the sea;--\nPlease take me a ride! O do!”\nSaid the Duck to the Kangaroo.\n\nSaid the Kangaroo to the Duck,\n“This requires some little reflection;\nPerhaps on the whole it might bring me luck,\nAnd there seems but one objection,\nWhich is, if you’ll let me speak so bold,\nYour feet are unpleasantly wet and cold,\nAnd would probably give me the roo-\nMatiz!” said the Kangaroo.\n\nSaid the Duck, “As I sate on the rocks,\nI have thought over that completely,\nAnd I bought four pairs of worsted socks\nWhich fit my web-feet neatly.\nAnd to keep out the cold I’ve bought a cloak,\nAnd every day a cigar I’ll smoke,\nAll to follow my own dear true\nLove of a Kangaroo!”\n\nSaid the Kangaroo, “I’m ready!\nAll in the moonlight pale;\nBut to balance me well, dear Duck, sit steady!\nAnd quite at the end of my tail!”\nSo away they went with a hop and a bound,\nAnd they hopped the whole world three times round;\nAnd who so happy,--O who,\nAs the Duck and the Kangaroo?.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-jumblies": { - "title": "“The Jumblies”", - "body": "They went to sea in a sieve, they did;\nIn a sieve they went to sea:\nIn spite of all their friends could say,\nOn a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,\nIn a sieve they went to sea.\nAnd when the sieve turned round and round,\nAnd every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”\nThey called aloud, “Our sieve ain’t big;\nBut we don’t care a button, we don’t care a fig:\nIn a sieve we’ll go to sea!”\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.\n\nThey sailed away in a sieve, they did,\nIn a sieve they sailed so fast,\nWith only a beautiful pea-green veil\nTied with a ribbon, by way of a sail,\nTo a small tobacco-pipe mast.\nAnd every one said who saw them go,\n“Oh! won’t they be soon upset, you know?\nFor the sky is dark, and the voyage is long;\nAnd, happen what may, it’s extremely wrong\nIn a sieve to sail so fast.”\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue;\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.\n\nThe water it soon came in, it did;\nThe water it soon came in:\nSo, to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet\nIn a pinky paper all folded neat;\nAnd they fastened it down with a pin.\nAnd they passed the night in a crockery-jar;\nAnd each of them said, “How wise we are!\nThough the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,\nYet we never can think we were rash or wrong,\nWhile round in our sieve we spin.”\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue;\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.\n\nAnd all night long they sailed away;\nAnd when the sun went down,\nThey whistled and warbled a moony song\nTo the echoing sound of a coppery gong,\nIn the shade of the mountains brown.\n“O Timballoo! How happy we are\nWhen we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar!\nAnd all night long, in the moonlight pale,\nWe sail away with a pea-green sail\nIn the shade of the mountains brown.”\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue;\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.\n\nThey sailed to the Western Sea, they did,--\nTo a land all covered with trees:\nAnd they bought an owl, and a useful cart,\nAnd a pound of rice, and a cranberry-tart,\nAnd a hive of silvery bees;\nAnd they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws,\nAnd a lovely monkey with lollipop paws,\nAnd forty bottles of ring-bo-ree,\nAnd no end of Stilton cheese.\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue;\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.\n\nAnd in twenty years they all came back,--\nIn twenty years or more;\nAnd every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!\nFor they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,\nAnd the hills of the Chankly Bore.”\nAnd they drank their health, and gave them a feast\nOf dumplings made of beautiful yeast;\nAnd every one said, “If we only live,\nWe, too, will go to sea in a sieve,\nTo the hills of the Chankly Bore.”\nFar and few, far and few,\nAre the lands where the Jumblies live:\nTheir heads are green, and their hands are blue;\nAnd they went to sea in a sieve.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-owl-and-the-pussy-cat": { - "title": "“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”", - "body": "The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea\nIn a beautiful pea-green boat,\nThey took some honey, and plenty of money,\nWrapped up in a five-pound note.\nThe Owl looked up to the stars above,\nAnd sang to a small guitar,\n“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,\nWhat a beautiful Pussy you are,\nYou are,\nYou are!\nWhat a beautiful Pussy you are!”\n\nPussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!\nHow charmingly sweet you sing!\nO let us be married! too long we have tarried:\nBut what shall we do for a ring?”\nThey sailed away, for a year and a day,\nTo the land where the Bong-Tree grows\nAnd there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood\nWith a ring at the end of his nose,\nHis nose,\nHis nose,\nWith a ring at the end of his nose.\n\n“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling\nYour ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”\nSo they took it away, and were married next day\nBy the Turkey who lives on the hill.\nThey dined on mince, and slices of quince,\nWhich they ate with a runcible spoon;\nAnd hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,\nThey danced by the light of the moon,\nThe moon,\nThe moon,\nThey danced by the light of the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pobble-who-has-no-toes": { - "title": "“The Pobble Who Has No Toes”", - "body": "The Pobble who has no toes\nHad once as many as we;\nWhen they said “Some day you may lose them all;”\nHe replied “Fish, fiddle-de-dee!”\nAnd his Aunt Jobiska made him drink\nLavender water tinged with pink,\nFor she said “The World in general knows\nThere’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes!”\n\nThe Pobble who has no toes\nSwam across the Bristol Channel;\nBut before he set out he wrapped his nose\nIn a piece of scarlet flannel.\nFor his Aunt Jobiska said “No harm\nCan come to his toes if his nose is warm;\nAnd it’s perfectly known that a Pobble’s toes\nAre safe,--provided he minds his nose!”\n\nThe Pobble swam fast and well,\nAnd when boats or ships came near him,\nHe tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,\nSo that all the world could hear him.\nAnd all the Sailors and Admirals cried,\nWhen they saw him nearing the further side--\n“He has gone to fish for his Aunt Jobiska’s\nRuncible Cat with crimson whiskers!”\n\nBut before he touched the shore,\nThe shore of the Bristol Channel,\nA sea-green porpoise carried away\nHis wrapper of scarlet flannel.\nAnd when he came to observe his feet,\nFormerly garnished with toes so neat,\nHis face at once became forlorn,\nOn perceiving that all his toes were gone!\n\nAnd nobody ever knew,\nFrom that dark day to the present,\nWhoso had taken the Pobble’s toes,\nIn a manner so far from pleasant.\nWhether the shrimps, or crawfish grey,\nOr crafty Mermaids stole them away--\nNobody knew: and nobody knows\nHow the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!\n\nThe Pobble who has no toes\nWas placed in a friendly Bark,\nAnd they rowed him back, and carried him up\nTo his Aunt Jobiska’s Park.\nAnd she made him a feast at his earnest wish\nOf eggs and buttercups fried with fish,--\nAnd she said “It’s a fact the whole world knows,\nThat Pobbles are happier without their toes!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quangle-wangles-hat": { - "title": "“The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”", - "body": "On the top of the Crumpetty Tree\nThe Quangle Wangle sat,\nBut his face you could not see,\nOn account of his Beaver Hat.\nFor his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,\nWith ribbons and bibbons on every side\nAnd bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,\nSo that nobody ever could see the face\nOf the Quangle Wangle Quee.\n\nThe Quangle Wangle said\nTo himself on the Crumpetty Tree,--\n“Jam; and jelly; and bread;\nAre the best of food for me!\nBut the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree\nThe plainer than ever it seems to me\nThat very few people come this way\nAnd that life on the whole is far from gay!”\nSaid the Quangle Wangle Quee.\n\nBut there came to the Crumpetty Tree,\nMr. and Mrs. Canary;\nAnd they said,--“Did ever you see\nAny spot so charmingly airy?\nMay we build a nest on your lovely Hat?\nMr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!\nO please let us come and build a nest\nOf whatever material suits you best,\nMr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”\n\nAnd besides, to the Crumpetty Tree\nCame the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;\nThe Snail, and the Bumble-Bee,\nThe Frog, and the Fimble Fowl;\n(The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg;)\nAnd all of them said,--“We humbly beg,\nWe may build out homes on your lovely Hat,--\nMr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!\nMr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”\n\nAnd the Golden Grouse came there,\nAnd the Pobble who has no toes,--\nAnd the small Olympian bear,--\nAnd the Dong with a luminous nose.\nAnd the Blue Baboon, who played the Flute,--\nAnd the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute,--\nAnd the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,--\nAll came and built on the lovely Hat\nOf the Quangle Wangle Quee.\n\nAnd the Quangle Wangle said\nTo himself on the Crumpetty Tree,--\n“When all these creatures move\nWhat a wonderful noise there’ll be!”\nAnd at night by the light of the Mulberry moon\nThey danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon,\nOn the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree,\nAnd all were as happy as happy could be,\nWith the Quangle Wangle Quee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-table-and-the-chair": { - "title": "“The Table and the Chair”", - "body": "Said the Table to the Chair,\n“You can hardly be aware,\nHow I suffer from the heat,\nAnd from chilblains on my feet!\nIf we took a little walk,\nWe might have a little talk!\nPray let us take the air!”\nSaid the Table to the Chair.\n\nSaid the Chair unto the Table,\n“Now you know we are not able!\nHow foolishly you talk,\nWhen you know we cannot walk!”\nSaid the Table, with a sigh,\n“It can do no harm to try,\nI’ve as many legs as you,\nWhy can’t we walk on two?”\n\nSo they both went slowly down,\nAnd walked about the town\nWith a cheerful bumpy sound,\nAs they toddled round and round.\nAnd everybody cried,\nAs they hastened to their side,\n“See! the Table and the Chair\nHave come out to take the air!”\n\nBut in going down an alley,\nTo a castle in a valley,\nThey completely lost their way,\nAnd wandered all the day,\nTill, to see them safely back,\nThey paid a Ducky-quack,\nAnd a Beetle, and a Mouse,\nWho took them to their house.\n\nThen they whispered to each other,\n“O delightful little brother!\nWhat a lovely walk we’ve taken!\nLet us dine on Beans and Bacon!”\nSo the Ducky, and the leetle\nBrowny-Mousy and the Beetle\nDined, and danced upon their heads\nTill they toddled to their beds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "luis-de-leon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Luis de León", - "birth": { - "year": 1527, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1591 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_León", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-life-removed": { - "title": "“The Life Removed”", - "body": "How tranquil is the life\nOf him who, shunning the vain world’s uproar,\nMay follow, free from strife,\nThe hidden path, of yore\nChosen by the few who conned true wisdom’s lore!\n\nFor he, with thoughts aloof,\nBy proud men’s great estate is not oppressed.\nNor marvels at the roof\nOf gold, built to attest\nThe Moor’s skill, that on jasper pillars rests.\n\nHe heeds not though fame raise\nHis name afar on wings of rumour flung,\nHe cares not for the praise\nOf cunning flatterer’s tongue,\nNor for what truth sincere would leave unsung.\n\nWhat boots it my content\nThat the vain voice of fame should favour me,\nIf in its service spent\nI find myself to be\nVexed by dull care and gnawing misery?\n\nO hill, O stream, O field,\nO solitary refuge of delight,\nSince my bark now must yield\nTo storm, your solace bright\nI seek and flee this sea’s tempestuous might.\n\nSleep broken by no fear\nBe mine, and a day clear, serene, and free,\nShunning the look severe,\nLofty exceedingly,\nOf him whom gold exalts or ancestry.\n\nMe may the birds awake\nWith their sweet, unpremeditated song,\nAnd those dark cares forsake\nThat e’er to him belong\nWho lives not in his independence strong!\n\nI to myself would live,\nTo enjoy the blessings that to Heaven I owe,\nAlone, contemplative,\nAnd freely love forgo,\nNor hope, fear, hatred, jealousy e’er know.\n\nUpon the bare hillside\nAn orchard I have made with my own hand,\nThat in the sweet Springtide\nAll in fair flower doth stand\nAnd promise sure of fruit shows through the land.\n\nAnd, as though swift it strove\nTo see and to increase that loveliness,\nFrom the clear ridge above\nA stream pure, weariless\nHurrying to reach that ground doth onward press;\n\nAnd straightway in repose\nIts course it winds there tree and tree between,\nAnd ever as it goes\nThe earth decks with new green\nAnd with gay wealth of flowers spreads the scene.\n\nThe air in gentle breeze\nA myriad scents for my delight distils,\nIt moves among the trees\nWith a soft sound that fills\nThe mind, and thought of gold or scepter kills.\n\nTreasure and gold be theirs\nWho to a frail bark would entrust their life:\nI envy not the cares\nOf those whose fears are rife\nWhen the north wind with south wind is at strife.\n\nIn the storm’s strain the mast\nGroans, and clear day is turned to eyeless night,\nWhile to the skies aghast\nRise wild cries of affright\nAnd they enrich the sea in their despite.\n\nBut me may still suffice,\nRich only in meek peace, a humble fare;\nAnd the wrought artifice\nBe his of gold plate rare\nWho dreads not o’er the raging sea to fare.\n\nAnd while in misery\nOthers are pledged to fierce ambition’s throng,\nAfire insatiably\nFor power that stays not long,\nMay I in pleasant shade recite my song;\n\nYea, lying in the shade,\nMy brow with bay and ivy immortal crowned,\nMy ear attentive made\nTo the soft, tuneful sound\nOf zither touched by fingers’ skill profound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Aubrey F. G. Bell" - } - } - } - }, - "giacomo-leopardi": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Giacomo Leopardi", - "birth": { - "year": 1798 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1837 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Leopardi", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "calm-after-storm": { - "title": "“Calm after Storm”", - "body": "The storm hath passed;\nI hear the birds rejoice; the hen,\nReturned into the road again,\nHer cheerful notes repeats. The sky serene\nIs, in the west, upon the mountain seen:\nThe country smiles; bright runs the silver stream.\nEach heart is cheered; on every side revive\nThe sounds, the labors of the busy hive.\nThe workman gazes at the watery sky,\nAs standing at the door he sings,\nHis work in hand; the little wife goes forth,\nAnd in her pail the gathered rain-drops brings;\nThe vendor of his wares, from lane to lane,\nBegins his daily cry again.\nThe sun returns, and with his smile illumes\nThe villas on the neighboring hills;\nThrough open terraces and balconies,\nThe genial light pervades the cheerful rooms;\nAnd, on the highway, from afar are heard\nThe tinkling of the bells, the creaking wheels\nOf waggoner, his journey who resumes.\n\nCheered is each heart.\nWhene’er, as now, doth life appear\nA thing so pleasant and so dear?\nWhen, with such love,\nDoes man unto his books or work return?\nOr on himself new tasks impose?\nWhen is he less regardful of his woes?\nO pleasure, born of pain!\nO idle joy, and vain,\nFruit of the fear just passed, which shook\nThe wretch who life abhorred, yet dreaded death!\nWith which each neighbor held his breath,\nSilent, and cold, and wan,\nAffrighted sore to see\nThe lightnings, clouds, and winds arrayed,\nTo do us injury!\n\nO Nature courteous!\nThese are thy boons to us,\nThese the delights to mortals given!\nEscape from pain, best gift of heaven!\nThou scatterest sorrows with a bounteous hand;\nGrief springs spontaneous;\nIf, by some monstrous growth, miraculous,\nPleasure at times is born of pain,\nIt is a precious gain!\nO human race, unto the gods so dear!\nToo happy, in a respite brief\nFrom any grief!\nThen only blessed,\nWhen Death releases thee unto thy rest!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-dream": { - "title": "“The Dream”", - "body": "It was the morning; through the shutters closed,\nAlong the balcony, the earliest rays\nOf sunlight my dark room were entering;\nWhen, at the time that sleep upon our eyes\nIts softest and most grateful shadows casts,\nThere stood beside me, looking in my face,\nThe image dear of her, who taught me first\nTo love, then left me to lament her loss.\nTo me she seemed not dead, but sad, with such\nA countenance as the unhappy wear.\nHer right hand near my head she sighing placed;\n“Dost thou still live,” she said to me, “and dost\nThou still remember what we _were_ and are?”\nAnd I replied: “Whence comest thou, and how,\nBeloved and beautiful? Oh how, how I\nHave grieved, still grieve for thee! Nor did I think\nThou e’er couldst know it more; and oh, that thought\nMy sorrow rendered more disconsolate!\nBut art thou now again to leave me?\nI fear so. Say, what hath befallen thee?\nArt thou the same? What preys upon thee thus?”\n“Oblivion weighs upon thy thoughts, and sleep\nEnvelops them,” she answered; “I am dead,\nAnd many months have passed, since last we met.”\nWhat grief oppressed me, as these words I heard!\nAnd she continued: “In the flower of youth\nCut off, when life is sweetest, and before\nThe heart that lesson sad and sure hath learnt,\nThe utter vanity of human hope!\nThe sick man may e’en covet, as a boon,\nThat which withdraws him from all suffering;\nBut to the young, Death comes, disconsolate;\nAnd hard the fate of hope, that in the grave\nIs quenched! And yet, how vain that knowledge is,\nThat Nature from the inexperienced hides!\nAnd a blind sorrow is to be preferred\nTo wisdom premature!”--“Hush, hush!” I cried,\n“Unhappy one, and dear! My heart is crushed\nWith these thy words! And art thou dead, indeed,\nO my beloved? and am I still alive?\nAnd was it, then, in heaven decreed, that this,\nThy tender body the last damps of death\nShould feel, and my poor, wretched frame remain\nUnharmed? Oh, often, often as I think\nThat thou no longer livest, and that I\nShall never see thee on the earth again,\nIncredible it seems! Alas, alas!\nWhat _is_ this thing, that they call death? Oh, would\nThat I, this day, the mystery could solve,\nAnd my defenceless head withdraw from Fate’s\nRelentless hate! I still am young, and still\nFeel all the blight and misery of age,\nWhich I so dread; and distant far it seems;\nBut, ah, how little different from age,\nThe flower of my years!”--“We both were born,”\nShe said, “to weep; unhappy were our lives,\nAnd heaven took pleasure in our sufferings.”\n“Oh if my eyes with tears,” I added, “then,\nMy face with pallor veiled thou seest, for loss\nOf thee, and anguish weighing on my heart;\nTell me, was any spark of pity or of love\nFor the poor lover kindled in thy heart,\nWhile thou didst live? I, then, between my hope\nAnd my despair, passed weary nights and days;\nAnd now, my mind is with vain doubts oppressed.\nOh if but once compassion smote thee for\nMy darkened life, conceal it not from me,\nI pray thee; let the memory console me,\nSince of their future our young days were robbed!”\nAnd she: “Be comforted, unhappy one!\nI was not churlish of my pity whilst\nI lived, and am not now, myself so wretched!\nOh, do not chide this most unhappy child!”\n“By all our sufferings, and by the love\nWhich preys upon me,” I exclaimed, “and by\nOur youth, and by the hope that faded from\nOur lives, O let me, dearest, touch thy hand!”\nAnd sweetly, sadly, she extended it.\nAnd while I covered it with kisses, while\nWith sorrow and with rapture quivering,\nI to my panting bosom fondly pressed it,\nWith fervent passion glowed my face and breast,\nMy trembling voice refused its utterance,\nAnd all things swam before my sight; when she,\nHer eyes fixed tenderly on mine, replied:\n“And dost thou, then, forget, dear friend, that I\nAm of my beauty utterly deprived?\nAnd vainly thou, unhappy one, dost yield\nTo passion’s transports. Now, a last farewell!\nOur wretched minds, our feeble bodies, too,\nEternally are parted. Thou to me\nNo longer livest, nevermore shall live.\nFate hath annulled the faith that thou hast sworn.”\nThen, in my anguish as I seemed to cry\nAloud, convulsed, my eyes o’erflowing with\nThe tears of utter, helpless misery,\nI started from my sleep. The image still\nWas seen, and in the sun’s uncertain light\nAbove my couch she seemed to linger still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-evening-of-the-holiday": { - "title": "“The Evening of the Holiday”", - "body": "The night is mild and clear, and without wind,\nAnd o’er the roofs, and o’er the gardens round\nThe moon shines soft, and from afar reveals\nEach mountain-peak serene. O lady, mine,\nHushed now is every path, and few and dim\nThe lamps that glimmer through the balconies.\nThou sleepest! in thy quiet rooms, how light\nAnd easy is thy sleep! No care thy heart\nConsumes; and little dost thou know or think,\nHow deep a wound thou in my heart hast made.\nThou sleepest; I to yonder heaven turn,\nThat seems to greet me with a loving smile,\nAnd to that Nature old, omnipotent,\nThat doomed me still to suffer. “I to thee\nAll hope deny,” she said, “e’en hope; nor may\nThose eyes of thine e’er shine, save through their tears.”\n\nThis was a holiday; its pleasures o’er,\nThou seek’st repose; and happy in thy dreams\nRecallest those whom thou hast pleased to-day,\nAnd those who have pleased thee: not I, indeed,--\nI hoped it not,--unto thy thoughts occur.\nMeanwhile, I ask, how much of life remains\nTo me; and on the earth I cast myself,\nAnd cry, and groan. How wretched are my days,\nAnd still so young! Hark, on the road I hear,\nNot far away, the solitary song\nOf workman, who returns at this late hour,\nIn merry mood, unto his humble home;\nAnd in my heart a cruel pang I feel,\nAt thought, how all things earthly pass away,\nAnd leave no trace behind. This festal day\nHath fled; a working-day now follows it,\nAnd all, alike, are swept away by Time.\nWhere is the glory of the antique nations now?\nWhere now the fame of our great ancestors?\nThe empire vast of Rome, the clash of arms?\nNow all is peace and silence, all the world\nAt rest; their very names are heard no more.\nE’en from my earliest years, when we\nExpect so eagerly a holiday,\nThe moment it was past, I sought my couch,\nWakeful and sad; and at the midnight hour,\nWhen I the song heard of some passer-by,\nThat slowly in the distance died away,\nThe same deep anguish felt I in my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "first-love": { - "title": "“First Love”", - "body": "Ah, well can I the day recall, when first\nThe conflict fierce of love I felt, and said:\nIf _this_ be love, how hard it is to bear!\n\nWith eyes still fixed intent upon the ground,\nI saw but _her_, whose artless innocence,\nTriumphant took possession of this heart.\n\nAh, Love, how badly hast thou governed me!\nWhy should affection so sincere and pure,\nBring with it such desire, such suffering?\n\nWhy not serene, and full, and free from guile\nBut sorrow-laden, and lamenting sore,\nShould joy so great into my heart descend?\n\nO tell me, tender heart, that sufferest so,\nWhy with that thought such anguish should be blent,\nCompared with which, all other thoughts were naught?\n\nThat thought, that ever present in the day,\nThat in the night more vivid still appeared,\nWhen all things round in sweet sleep seemed to rest:\n\nThou, restless, both with joy and misery\nDidst with thy constant throbbings weary so\nMy breast, as panting in my bed I lay.\n\nAnd when worn out with grief and weariness,\nIn sleep my eyes I closed, ah, no relief\nIt gave, so broken and so feverish!\n\nHow brightly from the depths of darkness, then,\nThe lovely image rose, and my closed eyes,\nBeneath their lids, their gaze upon it fed!\n\nO what delicious impulses, diffused,\nMy weary frame with sweet emotion filled!\nWhat myriad thoughts, unstable and confused,\n\nWere floating in my mind! As through the leaves\nOf some old grove, the west wind, wandering,\nA long, mysterious murmur leaves behind.\n\nAnd as I, silent, to their influence yield,\nWhat saidst thou, heart, when she departed, who\nHad caused thee all thy throbs, and suffering?\n\nNo sooner had I felt within, the heat\nOf love’s first flame, than with it flew away\nThe gentle breeze, that fanned it into life.\n\nSleepless I lay, until the dawn of day;\nThe steeds, that were to leave me desolate,\nTheir hoofs were beating at my father’s gate.\n\nAnd I, in mute suspense, poor timid fool,\nWith eye that vainly would the darkness pierce,\nAnd eager ear intent, lay, listening,\n\nThat voice to hear, if, for the last time, I\nMight catch the accents from those lovely lips;\nThe voice alone; all else forever lost!\n\nHow many vulgar tones my doubtful ear\nWould smite, with deep disgust inspiring me,\nWith doubt tormented, holding hard my breath!\n\nAnd when, at last, that voice into my heart\nDescended, passing sweet, and when the sound\nOf horses and of wheels had died away;\n\nIn utter desolation, then, my head\nI in my pillow buried, closed my eyes,\nAnd pressed my hand against my heart, and sighed.\n\nThen, listlessly, my trembling knees across\nThe silent chamber dragging, I exclaimed,\n“Nothing on earth can interest me more!”\n\nThe bitter recollection cherishing\nWithin my breast, to every voice my heart,\nTo every face, insensible remained.\n\nLong I remained in hopeless sorrow drowned;\nAs when the heavens far and wide their showers\nIncessant pour upon the fields around.\n\nNor had I, Love, thy cruel power known,\nA boy of eighteen summers flown, until\nThat day, when I thy bitter lesson learned;\n\nWhen I each pleasure held in scorn, nor cared\nThe shining stars to see, or meadows green,\nOr felt the charm of holy morning light;\n\nThe love of glory, too, no longer found\nAn echo in my irresponsive breast,\nThat, once, the love of beauty with it shared.\n\nMy favorite studies I neglected quite;\nAnd those things vain appeared, compared with which,\nI used to think all other pleasures vain.\n\nAh! how could I have changed so utterly?\nHow could one passion all the rest destroy?\nIndeed, what helpless mortals are we all!\n\nMy heart my only comfort was, and with\nThat heart, in conference perpetual,\nA constant watch upon my grief to keep.\n\nMy eye still sought the ground, or in itself\nAbsorbed, shrank from encountering the glance\nOf lovely or unlovely countenance;\n\nThe stainless image fearing to disturb,\nSo faithfully reflected in my breast;\nAs winds disturb the mirror of the lake.\n\nAnd that regret, that I could not enjoy\nSuch happiness, which weighs upon the mind,\nAnd turns to poison pleasure that has passed,\n\nDid still its thorn within my bosom lodge,\nAs I the past recalled; but shame, indeed,\nLeft not its cruel sting within this heart.\n\nTo heaven, to you, ye gentle souls, I swear,\nNo base desire intruded on my thought;\nBut with a pure and sacred flame I burned.\n\nThat flame still lives, and that affection pure;\nStill in my thought that lovely image breathes,\nFrom which, save heavenly, I no other joy,\n\nHave ever known; my only comfort, now!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-infinite": { - "title": "“The Infinite”", - "body": "This lonely hill to me was ever dear,\nThis hedge, which shuts from view so large a part\nOf the remote horizon. As I sit\nAnd gaze, absorbed, I in my thought conceive\nThe boundless spaces that beyond it range,\nThe silence supernatural, and rest\nProfound; and for a moment I am calm.\nAnd as I listen to the wind, that through\nThese trees is murmuring, its plaintive voice\nI with that infinite compare;\nAnd things eternal I recall, and all\nThe seasons dead, and this, that round me lives,\nAnd utters its complaint. Thus wandering\nMy thought in this immensity is drowned;\nAnd sweet to me is shipwreck on this sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Frederick Townsend" - } - }, - "the-lonely-life": { - "title": "“The Lonely Life”", - "body": "The morning rain, when, from her coop released,\nThe hen, exulting, flaps her wings, when from\nThe balcony the husbandman looks forth,\nAnd when the rising sun his trembling rays\nDarts through the falling drops, against my roof\nAnd windows gently beating, wakens me.\nI rise, and grateful, bless the flying clouds,\nThe cheerful twitter of the early birds,\nThe smiling fields, and the refreshing air.\nFor I of you, unhappy city walls,\nEnough have seen and known; where hatred still\nCompanion is to grief; and grieving still\nI live, and so shall die, and that, how soon!\nBut here some pity Nature shows, though small,\nOnce in this spot to me so courteous!\nThou, too, O Nature, turn’st away thy gaze\nFrom misery; thou, too, thy sympathy\nWithholding from the suffering and the sad,\nDost homage pay to royal happiness.\nNo friend in heaven, on earth, the wretched hath,\nNo refuge, save his trusty dagger’s edge.\nSometimes I sit in perfect solitude,\nUpon a hill, that overlooks a lake,\nThat is encircled quite with silent trees.\nThere, when the sun his mid-day course hath reached,\nHis tranquil face he in a mirror sees:\nNor grass nor leaf is shaken by the wind;\nThere is no ripple on the wave, no chirp\nOf cricket, rustling wing of bird in bush,\nNor hum of butterfly; no motion, voice,\nOr far or near, is either seen or heard.\nIts shores are locked in quiet most profound;\nSo that myself, the world I quite forget,\nAs motionless I sit; my limbs appear\nTo lie dissolved, of breath and sense deprived;\nAs if, in immemorial rest, they seemed\nConfounded with the silent scene around.\n\nO love, O love, long since, thou from this breast\nHast flown, that was so warm, so ardent, once.\nMisfortune in her cold and cruel grasp\nHas held it fast, and it to ice has turned,\nE’en in the flower of my youth. The time\nI well recall, when thou this heart didst fill;\nThat sweet, irrevocable time it was,\nWhen this unhappy scene of life unto\nThe ardent gaze of youth reveals itself,\nExpands, and wears the smile of Paradise.\nHow throbs the heart within the boyish breast,\nBy virgin hope and fond desire impelled!\nThe wretched dupe for life’s hard work prepares,\nAs if it were a dance, or merry game.\nBut when _I_ first, O love, thy presence felt,\nMisfortune had already crushed my life,\nAnd these poor eyes with constant tears were filled.\nYet if, at times, upon the sun-lit slopes,\nAt silent dawn, or when, in broad noonday,\nThe roofs and hills and fields are shining bright,\nI of some lonely maiden meet the gaze;\nOr when, in silence of the summer night,\nMy wandering steps arresting, I before\nThe houses of the village pause, to gaze\nUpon the lonely scene, and hear the voice,\nSo clear and cheerful, of the maiden, who,\nHer ditty chanting, in her quiet room,\nHer daily task protracts into the night,\nAh, then this stony heart will throb once more;\nBut soon, alas, its lethargy returns,\nFor all things sweet are strangers to this breast!\n\nBelovèd moon, beneath whose tranquil rays\nThe hares dance in the groves, and at the dawn\nThe huntsman, vexed at heart, beholds the tracks\nConfused and intricate, that from their forms\nHis steps mislead; hail, thou benignant Queen\nOf Night! How unpropitious fall thy rays,\nAmong the cliffs and thickets, or within\nDeserted buildings, on the gleaming steel\nOf robber pale, who with attentive ear\nUnto the distant noise of horses and\nOf wheels, is listening, or the tramp of feet\nUpon the silent road; then, suddenly,\nWith sound of arms, and hoarse, harsh voice, and look\nOf death, the traveller’s heart doth chill,\nWhom he half-dead, and naked, shortly leaves\nAmong the rocks. How unpropitious, too,\nIs thy bright light along the city streets,\nUnto the worthless paramour, who picks\nHis way, close to the walls, in anxious search\nOf friendly shade, and halts, and dreads the sight\nOf blazing lamps, and open balconies.\nTo evil spirits unpropitious still,\nTo _me_ thy face will ever seem benign,\nAlong these heights, where nought save smiling hills,\nAnd spacious fields, thou offer’st to my view.\nAnd yet it was my wayward custom once,\nThough I was innocent, thy gracious ray\nTo chide, amid the haunts of men, whene’er\nIt would my face to them betray, and when\nIt would their faces unto me reveal.\nNow will I, grateful, sing its constant praise,\nWhen I behold thee, sailing through the clouds,\nOr when, mild sovereign of the realms of air,\nThou lookest down on this, our vale of tears.\nMe wilt thou oft behold, mute wanderer\nAmong the groves, along the verdant banks,\nOr seated on the grass, content enough,\nIf heart and breath are left me, for a sigh!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-lonely-sparrow": { - "title": "“The Lonely Sparrow”", - "body": "Thou from the top of yonder antique tower,\nO lonely sparrow, wandering, hast gone,\nThy song repeating till the day is done,\nAnd through this valley strays the harmony.\nHow Spring rejoices in the fields around,\nAnd fills the air with light,\nSo that the heart is melted at the sight!\nHark to the bleating flocks, the lowing herds!\nIn sweet content, the other birds\nThrough the free sky in emulous circles wheel,\nIn pure enjoyment of their happy time:\nThou, pensive, gazest on the scene apart,\nNor wilt thou join them in the merry round;\nShy playmate, thou for mirth hast little heart;\nAnd with thy plaintive music, dost consume\nBoth of the year, and of thy life, the bloom.\n\nAlas, how much my ways\nResemble thine! The laughter and the sport,\nThat fill with glee our youthful days,\nAnd thee, O love, who art youth’s brother still,\nToo oft the bitter sigh of later years,\nI care not for; I know not why,\nBut from them ever distant fly:\nHere in my native place,\nAs if of alien race,\nMy spring of life I like a hermit pass.\nThis day, that to the evening now gives way,\nIs in our town an ancient holiday.\nHark, through the air, that voice of festal bell,\nWhile rustic guns in frequent thunders sound,\nReverberated from the hills around.\nIn festal robes arrayed,\nThe neighboring youth,\nTheir houses leaving, o’er the roads are spread;\nThey pleasant looks exchange, and in their hearts\nRejoice. I, lonely, in this distant spot,\nAlong the country wandering,\nPostpone all pleasure and delight\nTo some more genial time: meanwhile,\nAs through the sunny air around I gaze,\nMy brow is smitten by his rays,\nAs after such a day serene,\nDropping behind yon distant hills,\nHe vanishes, and seems to say,\nThat thus all happy youth must pass away.\n\nThou, lonely little bird, when thou\nHast reached the evening of the days\nThy stars assign to thee,\nWilt surely not regret thy ways;\nFor all thy wishes are\nObedient to Nature’s law. But ah!\nIf I, in spite of all my prayers,\nAm doomed the hateful threshold of old age\nTo cross, when these dull eyes will give\nNo response to another’s heart,\nThe world to them a void will be,\nEach day become more full of misery,\nHow then, will this, my wish appear\nIn those dark hours, that dungeon drear?\nMy blighted youth, my sore distress,\nAlas, will _then_ seem happiness!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "night-song-of-a-wandering-shepherd-in-asia": { - "title": "“Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”", - "body": "What doest thou in heaven, O moon?\nSay, silent moon, what doest thou?\nThou risest in the evening; thoughtfully\nThou wanderest o’er the plain,\nThen sinkest to thy rest again.\nAnd art thou never satisfied\nWith going o’er and o’er the selfsame ways?\nArt never wearied? Dost thou still\nUpon these valleys love to gaze?\nHow much thy life is like\nThe shepherd’s life, forlorn!\nHe rises in the early dawn,\nHe moves his flock along the plain;\nThe selfsame flocks, and streams, and herbs\nHe sees again;\nThen drops to rest, the day’s work o’er;\nAnd hopes for nothing more.\nTell me, O moon, what signifies his life\nTo him, thy life to thee? Say, whither tend\nMy weary, short-lived pilgrimage,\nThy course, that knows no end?\n\nAnd old man, gray, infirm,\nHalf-clad, and barefoot, he,\nBeneath his burden bending wearily,\nO’er mountain and o’er vale,\nSharp rocks, and briars, and burning sand,\nIn wind, and storm, alike in sultry heat\nAnd in the winter’s cold,\nHis constant course doth hold;\nOn, on, he, panting, goes,\nNor pause, nor rest he knows;\nThrough rushing torrents, over watery wastes;\nHe falls, gets up again,\nAnd ever more and more he hastes,\nTorn, bleeding, and arrives at last\nWhere ends the path,\nWhere all his troubles end;\nA vast abyss and horrible,\nWhere plunging headlong, he forgets them all.\nSuch scene of suffering, and of strife,\nO moon, is this our mortal life.\nIn travail man is born;\nHis birth too oft the cause of death,\nAnd with his earliest breath\nHe pain and torment feels: e’en from the first,\nHis parents fondly strive\nTo comfort him in his distress;\nAnd if he lives and grows,\nThey struggle hard, as best they may,\nWith pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up,\nAnd seek with kindly care,\nTo strengthen him his cruel lot to bear.\nThis is the best that they can do\nFor the poor child, however fond and true.\nBut wherefore give him life?\nWhy bring him up at all,\nIf _this_ be all?\nIf life is nought but pain and care,\nWhy, why should we the burden bear?\nO spotless moon, such _is_\nOur mortal life, indeed;\nBut thou immortal art,\nNor wilt, perhaps, unto my words give heed.\n\nYet thou, eternal, lonely wanderer,\nWho, thoughtful, lookest on this earthly scene,\nMust surely understand\nWhat all our sighs and sufferings mean;\nWhat means this death,\nThis color from our cheeks that fades,\nThis passing from the earth, and losing sight\nOf every dear, familiar scene.\nWell must thou comprehend\nThe reason of these things; must see\nThe good the morning and the evening bring:\nThou knowest, thou, what love it is\nThat brings sweet smiles unto the face of spring;\nThe meaning of the Summer’s glow,\nAnd of the Winter’s frost and snow,\nAnd of the silent, endless flight of Time.\nA thousand things to thee their secrets yield,\nThat from the simple shepherd are concealed.\nOft as I gaze at thee,\nIn silence resting o’er the desert plain,\nWhich in the distance borders on the sky,\nOr following me, as I, by slow degrees,\nMy flocks before me drive;\nAnd when I gaze upon the stars at night,\nIn thought I ask myself,\n“Why all these torches bright?\nWhat mean these depths of air,\nThis vast, this silent sky,\nThis nightly solitude? And what am I?”\nThus to myself I talk; and of this grand,\nMagnificent expanse,\nAnd its untold inhabitants,\nAnd all this mighty motion, and this stir\nOf things above, and things below,\nNo rest that ever know,\nBut as they still revolve, must still return\nUnto the place from which they came,--\nOf this, alas, I find nor end nor aim!\nBut thou, immortal, surely knowest all.\n_This_ I well know, and feel;\nFrom these eternal rounds,\nAnd from my being frail,\nOthers, perchance, may pleasure, profit gain;\nTo _me_ life is but pain.\n\nMy flock, now resting there, how happy thou,\nThat knowest not, I think, thy misery!\nO how I envy thee!\nNot only that from suffering\nThou seemingly art free;\nThat every trouble, every loss,\nEach sudden fear, thou canst so soon forget;\nBut more because thou sufferest\nNo weariness of mind.\nWhen in the shade, upon the grass reclined,\nThou seemest happy and content,\nAnd great part of the year by thee\nIn sweet release from care is spent.\nBut when _I_ sit upon the grass\nAnd in the friendly shade, upon my mind\nA weight I feel, a sense of weariness,\nThat, as I sit, doth still increase\nAnd rob me of all rest and peace.\nAnd yet I wish for nought,\nAnd have, till now, no reason to complain.\nWhat joy, how much I cannot say;\nBut thou _some_ pleasure dost obtain.\nMy joys are few enough;\nBut not for that do I lament.\nAh, couldst thou speak, I would inquire:\nTell me, dear flock, the reason why\nEach weary breast can rest at ease,\nWhile all things round him seem to please;\nAnd yet, if _I_ lie down to rest,\nI am by anxious thoughts oppressed?\n\nPerhaps, if I had wings\nAbove the clouds to fly,\nAnd could the stars all number, one by one,\nOr like the lightning leap from rock to rock,\nI might be happier, my dear flock,\nI might be happier, gentle moon!\nPerhaps my thought still wanders from the truth,\nWhen I at others’ fortunes look:\nPerhaps in every state beneath the sun,\nOr high, or low, in cradle or in stall,\nThe day of birth is fatal to us all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-ruling-thought": { - "title": "“The Ruling Thought”", - "body": "Most sweet, most powerful,\nController of my inmost soul;\nThe terrible, yet precious gift\nOf heaven, companion kind\nOf all my days of misery,\nO thought, that ever dost recur to me;\n\nOf thy mysterious power\nWho speaketh not? Who hath not felt\nIts subtle influence?\nYet, when one is by feeling deep impelled\nIts secret joys and sorrows to unfold,\nThe theme seems ever new however old.\n\nHow isolated is my mind,\nSince thou in it hast come to dwell!\nAs by some magic spell,\nMy other thoughts have all,\nLike lightning, disappeared;\nAnd thou, alone, like some huge tower,\nIn a deserted plain,\nGigantic, solitary, dost remain.\n\nHow worthless quite,\nSave but for thee, have in my sight\nAll earthly things, and life itself become!\nHow wearisome its days;\nAnd all its works, and all its plays,\nA vain pursuit of pleasures vain,\nCompared with the felicity,\nThe heavenly joy, that springs from thee!\n\nAs from the naked rocks\nOf the rough Apennine,\nThe weary pilgrim turns his longing eyes\nTo the bright plain that in the distance lies;\nSo from the rough and barren intercourse\nOf worldly men, to thee I gladly turn,\nAs to a Paradise, my weary mind,\nAnd sweet refreshment for my senses find.\n\nIt seems to me incredible, that I\nThis dreary world, this wretched life,\nSo full of folly and of strife,\nWithout thy aid, could have so long endured;\nNor can I well conceive,\nHow one’s desires _could_ cling\nTo other joys than those which thou dost bring.\n\nNever, since first I knew\nBy hard experience what life is,\nCould fear of death my soul subdue.\nTo-day, a jest to me appears,\nThat which the silly world,\nPraising at times, yet ever hates and fears,\nThe last extremity!\nIf danger comes, I, with undaunted mien,\nIts threats encounter with a smile serene.\n\nI always hated coward souls,\nAnd meanness held in scorn.\n_Now_, each unworthy act\nAt once through all my senses thrills;\nEach instance vile of human worthlessness,\nMy soul with holy anger fills.\nThis arrogant, this foolish age,\nWhich feeds itself on empty hopes,\nAbsorbed in trifles, virtue’s enemy,\nWhich idly clamors for utility,\nAnd has not sense enough to see\nHow _useless_ all life thenceforth must become,\nI feel _beneath_ me, and its judgments laugh\nTo scorn. The motley crew,\nThe foes of every lofty thought,\nWho laugh at _thee_, I trample under foot.\n\nTo that, which thee inspires,\nWhat passion yieldeth not?\nWhat other, save this one,\nControls our hearts’ desires?\nAmbition, avarice, disdain, and hate,\nThe love of power, love of fame,\nWhat are they but an empty name,\nCompared with it? And this,\nThe source, the spring of all,\nThat sovereign reigns within the breast,\nEternal laws have on our hearts impressed.\n\nLife hath no value, meaning hath,\nSave but for thee, our only hope and stay;\nThe sole excuse for Fate,\nThat cruelly hath placed us here,\nTo undergo such useless misery;\nFor thee alone, the wise man, not the fool,\nTo life still fondly clings,\nNor calls on death to end his sufferings.\n\nThy joys to gather, thou sweet thought,\nLong years of sorrow I endure,\nAnd bear of weary life the strain;\nBut not in vain!\nAnd I would still return,\nIn spite of all my sad experience,\nTowards such a goal, my course to recommence;\nFor through the sands, and through the viper-brood\nOf this, our mortal wilderness,\nMy steps I ne’er so wearily have dragged\nTo thee, that all the danger and distress\nWere not repaid by such pure happiness.\n\nO what a world, what new immensity,\nWhat paradise is that,\nTo which, so oft, by thy stupendous charm\nImpelled, I seem to soar! Where I\nBeneath a brighter light am wandering,\nAnd my poor earthly state,\nAnd all life’s bitter truths forget!\nSuch are, I ween, the dreams\nOf the Immortals. Ah, what _but_ a dream,\nArt thou, sweet thought,\nThe truth, that thus embellished?\nA dream, an error manifest!\nBut of a nature, still divine,\nAn error brave and strong,\nThat will with truth the fight prolong,\nAnd oft for truth doth compensate;\nNor leave us e’er, till summoned hence by Fate.\nAnd surely thou, my thought,\nThou sole sustainer of my days,\nThe cause beloved of sorrows infinite,\nIn Death alone wilt be extinguished quite;\nFor by sure signs within my soul I feel\nThy sovereign sway, perpetual.\nAll other fancies sweet\nThe aspect of the truth\nHath weakened ever. But whene’er I turn\nTo gaze again on her, of whom with thee\nTo speak, is all I live for, ah,\nThat great delight increases still,\nThat frenzy fine, the breath of life, to me!\n\nAngelic beauty! Every lovely face,\nOn which I gaze,\nA phantom seems to me,\nThat vainly strives to copy thee,\nOf all the graces that our souls inthral,\nSole fount, divine original!\n\nSince first I thee beheld,\nOf what most anxious care of mine,\nHast thou not been the end and aim?\nWhat day has ever passed, what hour,\nWhen I thought not of thee? What dream of mine\nHas not been haunted by thy face divine?\nAngelic countenance, that we\nIn dreams, alas, alone may see,\nWhat else on earth, what in the universe,\nDo I e’er ask, or hope for, more,\nThan those dear eyes forever to behold?\nThan thy sweet thought still in my heart to hold?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "to-himself": { - "title": "“To Himself”", - "body": "Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart.\nThe last illusion is destroyed,\nThat I eternal thought. Destroyed!\nI feel all hope and all desire depart,\nFor life and its deceitful joys.\nForever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease!\nNaught can requite thy miseries;\nNor is earth worthy of thy sighs.\nLife is a bitter, weary load,\nThe world a slough. And now, repose!\nDespair no more, but find in Death\nThe only boon Fate on our race bestows!\nStill, Nature, art thou doomed to fall,\nThe victim scorned of that blind, brutal power\nThat rules and ruins all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "to-his-lady": { - "title": "“To His Lady”", - "body": "Beloved beauty who inspires\nlove in me from afar, your face obscured\nexcept when your celestial image\nstirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields\nwhere light and nature’s laughter shine more lovely--\nwas it maybe you who blessed\nthe innocent age called golden,\nand do you now, blithe spirit,\nfly among men? Or does that miser fate\nwho hides you from us save you for the future?\n\nNo hope of seeing you alive\nremains for me now,\nexcept when, naked and alone,\nmy soul will go down a new street\nto its unknown home. Already at the dawn\nof my dark, uncertain day\nI imagined you a fellow traveler\non this arid ground. But there’s no thing\nthat resembles you on earth. And if someone\nhad a face like yours, in act and word she’d be,\nthough something like you, far less beautiful.\n\nIn spite of all the suffering\nfate decreed for human time,\nif there were anyone on earth\nwho truly loved you as my thought depicts you,\nthis life for him would be a blessing.\nAnd I see clearly how your love\nwould lead me still to strive for praise and virtue,\nas I used to in my early years.\nThough heaven gave no comfort for our troubles,\nyet with you mortal life would be\nlike what in heaven leads to divinity.\n\nIn the valleys, where the song\nof the weary farmer sounds,\nand when I sit and mourn\nthe illusions of youth fading,\nand on the hills where I recall\nand grieve for my lost desires\nand my life’s lost hope, I think of you\nand start to shake. If only I, in this\nsad age and unhealthy atmosphere,\ncould keep hold of your noble look; for since the real thing’s\nmissing I must make do with the image.\n\nWhether you are the only one\nof the eternal ideas eternal wisdom\nrefuses to see arrayed in sensible form\nto know the pains of mortal life\nin transitory spoils,\nor if in the supernal spheres another earth\nfrom among unnumbered worlds receives you\nand a near star lovelier than the Sun\nwarms you and you breathe benigner ether,\nfrom here, where years are both ill-starred and brief,\naccept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Jonathan Galassi" - } - }, - "to-sylvia": { - "title": "“To Sylvia”", - "body": "O Sylvia, dost thou remember still\nThat period of thy mortal life,\nWhen beauty so bewildering\nShone in thy laughing, glancing eyes,\nAs thou, so merry, yet so wise,\nYouth’s threshold then wast entering?\n\nHow did the quiet rooms,\nAnd all the paths around,\nWith thy perpetual song resound,\nAs thou didst sit, on woman’s work intent,\nAbundantly content\nWith the vague future, floating on thy mind!\nThy custom thus to spend the day\nIn that sweet time of youth and May!\n\nHow could I, then, at times,\nIn those fair days of youth,\nThe only happy days I ever knew,\nMy hard tasks dropping, or my careless rhymes,\nMy station take, on father’s balcony,\nAnd listen to thy voice’s melody,\nAnd watch thy hands, as they would deftly fly\nO’er thy embroidery!\nI gazed upon the heaven serene,\nThe sun-lit paths, the orchards green,\nThe distant mountain here,\nAnd there, the far-off sea.\nAh, mortal tongue cannot express\nWhat then I felt of happiness!\n\nWhat gentle thoughts, what hopes divine,\nWhat loving hearts, O Sylvia mine!\nIn what bright colors then portrayed\nWere human life and fate!\nOh, when I think of such fond hopes betrayed,\nA feeling seizes me\nOf bitterness and misery,\nAnd tenfold is my grief renewed!\nO Nature, why this treachery?\nWhy thus, with broken promises,\nThy children’s hearts delude?\n\nThou, ere the grass was touched with winter’s frost,\nBy fell disease attacked and overcome,\nO tender plant, didst die!\nThe flower of thy days thou ne’er didst see;\nNor did thy soft heart move\nNow of thy raven locks the tender praise,\nNow of thy eyes, so loving and so shy;\nNor with thee, on the holidays,\nDid thy companions talk of love.\n\nSo perished, too, erelong,\nMy own sweet hope;\nSo too, unto my years\nDid Fate their youth deny.\nAlas, alas the day,\nLamented hope, companion dear,\nHow hast thou passed away!\nIs _this_ that world? These the delights,\nThe love, the labors, the events,\nOf which we once so fondly spoke?\nAnd must _all_ mortals wear this weary yoke?\nAh, when the truth appeared,\nIt better seemed to die!\nCold death, the barren tomb, didst thou prefer\nTo harsh reality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "the-village-saturday-night": { - "title": "“The Village Saturday Night”", - "body": "The damsel from the field returns,\nThe sun is sinking in the west;\nHer bundle on her head she sets,\nAnd in her hand she bears\nA bunch of roses and of violets.\nTo-morrow is a holiday,\nAnd she, as usual, must them wear\nUpon her bodice, in her hair.\nThe old crone sits among her mates,\nUpon the stairs, and spins;\nAnd, looking at the fading light,\nOf good old-fashioned times she prates,\nWhen she, too, dressed for holidays,\nAnd with light heart, and limb as light,\nWould dance at night\nWith the companions of her merry days.\nThe twilight shades around us close,\nThe sky to deepest blue is turned;\nFrom hills and roofs the shadows fall,\nAnd the new moon her face of silver shows.\nAnd now the cheerful bell\nProclaims the coming festival.\nBy its familiar voice\nHow every heart is cheered!\nThe children all in troops,\nAround the little square\nGo, leaping here and there,\nAnd make a joyful sound.\nMeanwhile the ploughman, whistling, returns\nUnto his humble nest,\nAnd thinks with pleasure of his day of rest.\n\nThen, when all other lights are out,\nAnd all is silent round,\nThe hammer’s stroke we hear,\nWe hear the saw of carpenter,\nWho with closed doors his vigil keeps,\nToils o’er his lamp and strives so hard,\nHis work to finish ere the dawn appear.\n\nThe dearest day of all the week\nIs this, of hope and joy so full;\nTo-morrow, sad and dull,\nThe hours will bring, for each must in his thought\nHis customary task-work seek.\n\nThou little, sportive boy,\nThis blooming age of thine\nIs like to-day, so full of joy;\nAnd is the day, indeed,\nThat must the sabbath of thy life precede.\n\nEnjoy, it, then, my darling child,\nNor speed the flying hours!\nI say to thee no more:\nAlas, in this sad world of ours,\nHow far exceeds the holiday,\nThe day that goes before!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday", - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-younger-brutus": { - "title": "“The Younger Brutus”", - "body": "When in the Thracian dust uprooted lay,\nIn ruin vast, the strength of Italy,\nAnd Fate had doomed Hesperia’s valleys green,\nAnd Tiber’s shores,\nThe trampling of barbarian steeds to feel,\nAnd from the leafless groves,\nOn which the Northern Bear looks down,\nHad called the Gothic hordes,\nThat Rome’s proud walls might fall before their swords;\nExhausted, wet with brothers’ blood,\nAlone sat Brutus, in the dismal night;\nResolved on death, the gods implacable\nOf heaven and hell he chides,\nAnd smites the listless, drowsy air\nWith his fierce cries of anger and despair.\n\n“O foolish virtue, empty mists,\nThe realms of shadows, are thy schools,\nAnd at thy heels repentance follows fast.\nTo you, ye marble gods\n(If ye in Phlegethon reside, or dwell\nAbove the clouds), a mockery and scorn\nIs the unhappy race,\nOf whom you temples ask,\nAnd fraudulent the law that you impose.\nSay, then, does earthly piety provoke\nThe anger of the gods?\nO Jove, dost thou protect the impious?\nAnd when the storm-cloud rushes through the air,\nAnd thou thy thunderbolts dost aim,\nAgainst the _just_ dost thou impel the sacred flame?\nUnconquered Fate and stern necessity\nOppress the feeble slaves of Death:\nUnable to avert their injuries,\nThe common herd endure them patiently.\nBut is the ill less hard to bear,\nBecause it has no remedy?\nDoes he who knows no hope no sorrow feel?\nThe hero wages war with thee,\nEternal deadly war, ungracious Fate,\nAnd knows not how to yield; and thy right hand,\nImperious, proudly shaking off,\nE’en when it weighs upon him most,\nThough conquered, is triumphant still,\nWhen his sharp sword inflicts the fatal blow;\nAnd seeks with haughty smile the shades below.”\n\n“Who storms the gates of Tartarus,\nOffends the gods.\nSuch valor does not suit, forsooth,\nTheir soft, eternal bosoms; no?\nOr are our toils and miseries,\nAnd all the anguish of our hearts,\nA pleasant sport, their leisure to beguile?\nYet no such life of crime and wretchedness,\nBut pure and free as her own woods and fields,\nNature to us prescribed; a queen\nAnd goddess once. Since impious custom, now,\nHer happy realm hath scattered to the winds,\nAnd other laws on this poor life imposed,\nWill Nature of fool-hardiness accuse\nThe manly souls, who such a life refuse?”\n\n“Of crime, and their own sufferings ignorant,\nSerene old age the beasts conducts\nUnto the death they ne’er foresee.\nBut if, by misery impelled, they sought\nTo dash their heads against the rugged tree,\nOr, plunging headlong from the lofty rock,\nTheir limbs to scatter to the winds.\nNo law mysterious, misconception dark,\nWould the sad wish refuse to grant.\nOf all that breathe the breath of life,\nYou, only, children of Prometheus, feel\nThat life a burden hard to bear;\nYet, would you seek the silent shores of death,\nIf sluggish fate the boon delay,\nTo you, alone, stern Jove forbids the way.”\n\n“And thou, white moon, art rising from the sea,\nThat with our blood is stained;\nThe troubled night dost thou survey,\nAnd field, so fatal unto Italy.\nOn brothers’ breasts the conqueror treads;\nThe hills with fear are thrilled;\nFrom her proud heights Rome totters to her fall.\nAnd smilest thou upon the dismal scene?\nLavinia’s children from their birth,\nAnd all their prosperous years,\nAnd well-earned laurels, hast thou seen;\nAnd thou _wilt_ smile, with ray unchanged,\nUpon the Alps, when, bowed with grief and shame,\nThe haughty city, desolate and lone,\nBeneath the tread of Gothic hordes shall groan.”\n\n“Behold, amid the naked rocks,\nOr on the verdant bough, the beast and bird,\nWhose breasts are ne’er by thought or memory stirred,\nOf the vast ruin take no heed,\nOr of the altered fortunes of the world;\nAnd when the humble herdsman’s cot\nIs tinted with the earliest rays of dawn,\nThe one will wake the valleys with his song,\nThe other, o’er the cliffs, the frightened throng\nOf smaller beasts before him drive.\nO foolish race! Most wretched we, of all!\nNor are these blood-stained fields,\nThese caverns, that our groans have heard,\nRegardful of our misery;\nNor shines one star less brightly in the sky.\nNot the deaf kings of heaven or hell,\nOr the unworthy earth,\nOr night, do I in death invoke,\nOr thee, last gleam the dying hour that cheers,\nThe voice of coming ages. I no tomb\nDesire, to be with sobs disturbed, or with\nThe words and gifts of wretched fools adorned.\nThe times grow worse and worse;\nAnd who, unto a vile posterity,\nThe honor of great souls would trust,\nOr fit atonement for their wrongs?\nThen let the birds of prey around me wheel:\nAnd let my wretched corpse\nThe lightning blast, the wild beast tear;\nAnd let my name and memory melt in air!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - } - } - }, - "mikhail-lermontov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mikhail Lermontov", - "birth": { - "year": 1814 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1841 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lermontov", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 27 - }, - "poems": { - "alone-i-set-out-on-the-road": { - "title": "“Alone I Set out on the Road”", - "body": "Alone I set out on the road;\nThe flinty path is sparkling in the mist;\nThe night is still. The desert harks to God,\nAnd star with star converses.\n\nThe vault is overwhelmed with solemn wonder\nThe earth in cobalt aura sleeps …\nWhy do I feel so pained and troubled?\nWhat do I harbor: hope, regrets?\n\nI see no hope in years to come,\nHave no regrets for things gone by.\nAll that I seek is peace and freedom!\nTo lose myself and sleep!\n\nBut not the frozen slumber of the grave …\nI’d like eternal sleep to leave\nMy life force dozing in my breast\nGently with my breath to rise and fall;\n\nBy night and day, my hearing would be soothed\nBy voices sweet, singing to me of love.\nAnd over me, forever green,\nA dark oak tree would bend and rustle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "Alone, I come to the road.\nThe stony track gleams in the mist:\nthe calm night listens to God,\nand star is speaking to star.\n\nAll’s marvellous, grave, in the sky!\nEarth sleeps in the radiant blue …\nWhy such pain then, such weight on the heart?\nDo I regret, wait for something new?\n\nI expect no more from this life\nand I’ve no regrets for the past.\nI look for freedom and peace:\nI want rest and oblivion at last …\n\nBut not the chill peace of the grave:\nI’d like to sleep for all time\nso life’s powers slept in my chest,\nand it heaved with my gentle breath:\n\nan enchanted voice in my ear\nsinging, day and night, of love:\nand a dark oak to rustle over me,\nand bend down from above.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1841 - } - } - }, - "the-angel": { - "title": "“The Angel”", - "body": "An angel was crossing the pale vault of night,\nAnd his song was as soft as his flight,\nAnd the moon and the stars and the clouds in a throng\nStood enthralled by this holy song.\n\nHe sang of the bliss of the innocent shades\nIn the depths of celestial glades;\nHe sang of the Sovereign Being, and free\nOf guile was his eulogy.\n\nHe carried a soul in his arms, a young life\nTo the world of sorrow and strife,\nAnd the young soul retained the throb of that song\n--without words, but vivid and strong.\n\nAnd tied to this planet long did it pine\nFull of yearnings dimly divine,\nAnd our dull little ditties could never replace\nSongs belonging to infinite space.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Nabokov", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "bored-and-sad": { - "title": "“Bored and Sad”", - "body": "And boring and sad, and none to be given a hand\nWhen a minute of suffering comes\nDesires! … what’s the use of desiring vainly without a stand? …\nWhile the years slip by--the best ones!\n\nTo love … whom again? … for a while--it is worth no pains,\nBut to love for eternity no one could.\nShall you look in yourself?--of the past no vestige remains:\nThere all has been nothing, every joy, every wound …\n\nWhat passions?--After all sooner or later their pleasant disease\nShall vanish, if you reason it out at rest\nAnd life, if you look it all over with icy attention--it is\nSuch an empty and foolish jest …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "captive-knight": { - "title": "“Captive Knight”", - "body": "Silent I sit by the prison’s high window,\nWhere through the bars the blue heavens are breaking.\nFlecks in the azure, the free birds are playing;\nWatching them fly there, my shamed heart is aching.\n\nBut on my sinful lips never a prayer,\nNever a song in the praise of my charmer;\nAll I recall are far fights and old battles,\nMy heavy sword and my old iron armor.\n\nNow in stone armor I hopelessly languish,\nAnd a stone helmet my hot head encases,\nThis shield is proof against arrows and sword-play,\nAnd without whip, without spur, my horse races.\n\nTime is my horse, the swift-galloping charger,\nAnd for a visor this bleak prison grating,\nWalls of my prison are heavy stone armor;\nShielded by cast-iron doors, I am waiting.\n\nHurry, oh fast-flying Time, fly more quickly!\nIn my new armor I faint, I am choking.\nI shall alight, with Death holding my stirrup,\nThen my cold face from this visor uncloaking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1840, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-clouds": { - "title": "“The Clouds”", - "body": "Clouds in the sky, you are ceaselessly wandering,\nAs pearly chains in the azure steppes glimmering,\nExiled as I have been, constantly hurrying\nFrom native North into South you are quickening.\n\nWhat drives you there: the command of your destiny?\nSome secret jealousy? Or open wickedness?\nOr crimes hang heavy on you or some mutiny?\nOr your friends’ calumny is cruel and poisonous?\n\nNo, you were bored to death with these fields’ fruitlessness\nWith all these passions and alien misery,\nIce cold eternally, in steady idleness\nYou have no homeland and suffer no outlawry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitri Smirnov", - "date": { - "year": 1840 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "confession": { - "title": "“Confession”", - "body": "I’m to believe, but with some fear,\nFor I haven’t tried it all before,\nThat every monk could be sincere\nAnd live as he by altar swore;\nThat smiles and kisses of all people\nCould be perfidious only once;\nThat, sometimes, they forgive the little\nMistakes, the others make by chance;\nThat time heals sufferers around,\nThe world is one of joy and gleam;\nThat virtue is not just a sound,\nAnd life is more than a dream.\n\nBut rough and hardened life’s experience,\nRepulse my warm faith every time,\nMy mind, sunk, as before, in grievance,\nHas not achieved its goal, prime,\nAnd heart, full of the sharp frustrations,\nHolds in its deep the clear trace\nOf dead--but blest imaginations,\nAnd vanished senses’ easy shades;\nThere will be none for it to fear,\nAnd what’s a poison for all them,\nMakes it alive and feeds it here\nWith its ironic, mocking flame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "the-cup-of-life": { - "title": "“The Cup of Life”", - "body": "We drink the cup of life while yet\nA veil our eyes is keeping;\nAnd the cup’s golden brim is wet\nWith tears of our own weeping.\n\nBut when the veil falls from our eyes.\nAs Death appears before us.\nThen with the veil the mystery flies\nThat held enchantment o’er us.\n\nOh then we see the golden cup\nWas empty in its gleaming,\nThat only dreaming filled it up.\nNor even ours the dreaming!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "the-demon": { - "title": "“The Demon”", - "body": "_Part I_\n\n# I.\n\nA Demon, soul of all the banished,\nsadly above the sinful world\nfloated, and thoughts of days now vanished\nbefore him crowdingly unfurled;\ndays when, in glory’s habitation,\nhe shone out a pure cherubim,\nwhen comets dying on their station\nrejoiced to exchange a salutation\nof welcome and of love with him,\nwhen through the vapours of creation,\nhungry for knowledge, he flew on\nwith caravans in their migration\nto space where headlong stars have gone;\nwith love and faith to lean upon,\nhappy first-born of our condition,\nhe knew no evil, no suspicion,\nhis mind undaunted by the length\nof fruitless aeons sadly falling …\nso much, so much there was … the strength,\nthe will now fails him for recalling!\n\n\n# II.\n\nHe wandered, now long-since outcast;\nhis desert had no refuge in it:\nand one by one the ages passed,\nas minute follows after minute,\neach one monotonously dull.\nThe world he ruled was void and null;\nthe ill he sowed in his existence\nbrought no delight. His technique scored,\nhe found no traces of resistance--\nyet evil left him deeply bored.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAbove the steep Caucasian places\nheaven’s expatriate flew full-pelt:\nbelow him, Kazbek’s diamond-faces\nglittered with snows that never melt,\nand far beneath them, dark, arresting\nas some crevasse where snakes are nesting,\nDaryal wound its twisted belt,\nand Terek, lioness-like, was springing,\nshaggily-maned all down its back;\nit roared, and mountain beasts and swinging\nbirds high on their circuitous track\nin the azure heard its lilting water;\nand clouds from far-off southern lands\nescorted him in gilded bands\ntoward horizon’s northern quarter;\nand closely packed massifs of stone,\ndeep-sunk in their mysterious dreaming\nhad bowed their peaks as he had flown\nabove the bed where waves were gleaming;\nand towered castles on the hard\nprecipice-top, above the entry\nto Caucasus, in cloud stood guard\ngrim as some Cyclopean sentry!\nHow strange, how savage was the whole\ndivine landscape; but that proud soul\nviewed with disdain and some derision\nthe product of his Maker’s will;\nhis lofty forehead at this vision\nexpressed no thought, exactly nil.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBefore him now the picture changes;\na different scene, a brilliant hue:\nluxurious Georgia’s vales and ranges\nare counterpaned-out for his view;\nfortunate land, and sumptuous too!\nPillar-like ruined halls and granges,\nand watercourses that run loud,\nover the dappled pebbles rolling,\nand nightingales that in the crowd\nof roses voice their amorous trolling\nto which no answer is allowed;\nplane-trees inside their ivy sheathing\nwith branching shadows; caves where deer\nat flaming midday hide their fear;\nand life, and sound of leaves, and glow,\na hundred tongues that murmur low,\nand plants in thousands gently breathing!\nThe sensual heat of high noondays,\nnights which the never-failing sprays\nof dew have drenched in aromatic,\nand stars like eyes, clear and dramatic,\nsharp as a Georgian maiden’s gaze! …\nand yet, apart from envy’s chilling,\nthis natural glory could inspire\nthe barren exile with no thrilling\nof new emotion or new Are;\nand everything he contemplated\nhe either scorned or execrated.\n\n\n# V.\n\nA lofty hall, a broad courtyard,\ngrey-haired Gudál built for his pleasure …\nthe building cost his slaves much treasure\nof tears and labour long and hard.\nHis towers in light of morning barred\nwith stripes of shade the mountain fairway.\nOut of the cliff was hacked a stairway\nfrom where the angled bastions gleam\ndown to the river; Gudál’s daughter,\nwhite-veiled and flashing like a dream,\nPrincess Tamara, seeking water\nruns down to the Arágva’s stream.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nFrom the steep mountain every minute\nthe voiceless house stares at the vale;\ntoday, though, there’s a feast, pipes wail--\nthe hall resounds, wine’s flowing in it,\nfor Gudal has betrothed his girl,\nthe whole clan’s here, all’s in a whirl.\nUp on the roof, among her bidden\ngirl-friends, the bride looks on the hall:\nsitting on rugs, they sing and call\nand play. Already sunk and hidden\nby distant peaks the sun’s half-ball;\nto keep the measure of their singing\nthe girls clap hands; the youthful bride\ntakes up her tambourine and, swinging\nit round her head in sweeping-wide\ncircles, abruptly starts to glide;\none moment, like a bird, she dashes\nand swoops; the next, she stands at gaze\nand her moist eyes dart out their rays\nfrom underneath malicious lashes;\nand now she twitches a dark brow,\nnow suddenly she stops her gliding,\nand halts, and makes a little bow;\nmeanwhile a heavenly foot is sliding\nover the carpet; infantile\nis the enjoyment in her smile.\nEven the moonbeam’s fitful shivers\nplaying on water can’t in truth\nrival that peerless smile: it quivers\nas full of joy as life, or youth.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nI swear it on the midnight star,\non rays of sunset or of dawning,\nnever did autocrat of far\ngolden Iran, or earthly tsar,\nkiss such an eye; on sultry morning\nno sparkling fount of the harem\never in summertime was splashing\na waist so heavenly in the flashing,\nthe pearly dewfall of its stream!\n\nOr by no human fingers, pressing\na loved one’s brow in their caressing,\nwas ever hair like this undone;\nsince earth lost heaven, with humble duty\nI swear it, never did such beauty\nblossom beneath the southern sun.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nShe’d dance no more. Alas, there waited\na different morrow; she was fated,\nshe, heiress of the celebrated\nGudál, she, lively freedom’s own\nnursling, to grim incarceration,\nvowed to a strange expatriation\nand to a family unknown.\nSometimes a secret hesitation\nobscured the brilliance of her face;\nand, with her, every single motion\nwas so compact of inner notion,\nfull of such sweet and simple grace,\nthat if the Demon, as he floated\nabove, had looked upon the bride,\nthinking of brothers once devoted\nhe would have turned away--and sighed …\n\n\n# IX.\n\nAnd he did see her … For a second\nby turmoil too deep to be reckoned\nthe Demon sensed that he was bound.\nHis dumb soul’s emptiness was slowly\nfilled with loud chords of blissful sound--\nand once again he reached that holy\nshrine where love, beauty, goodness gleam! …\nAnd long he gazed, with fascination,\nat the sweet view; as if in dream\nhis earlier blisses’ constellation\ncame as on summons from afar\nand swam before him, star on star.\nThen, riveted by unseen forces,\nhe came to feel a new sorrow;\nemotion started on discourses\nin language that he used to know.\nWas this a sign of new begetting?\nthe cunning, covetousness-whetting\nwords came no more … had he forgot?\nGod never gave that: and he’d not\nat any price accept forgetting …\n\n\n# X.\n\nAt sunset, spurring on his beast,\nthe bridegroom to the wedding feast\nwith all impatient haste was riding,\nand the green banks of brightly gliding\nArágva he had safely gained.\nBehind him staggered, limped and strained\nan endless line of camels bringing\nhis wedding gifts in towering load;\nthey gleamed, and all their bells were ringing\nas they strung out along the road.\nSinodal’s lord himself was heading\nthe sumptuous caravan. His waist\ninside its belt is tightly laced;\nsabre and dagger-mounts are shedding\nthe sun’s reflections; his flintlock,\nslung back, has notches on its stock.\nAnd in the wind his sleeves are straying,\nsleeves of a chukha that all round\nwith trimming of galloon is crowned.\n\nA saddle where bright silks are playing;\na bit with tassels downward swaying;\nand, lathered under him, his bold\ncharger with that rare hue of gold.\nKarabakh’s brave offspring, ears with tension\npricked, all taut in apprehension\nsnorts as he squints down in the gloom\non the careering river’s spume.\nA path to make the bravest shiver!\nThe cliff to leftward; deep as doom,\nto right the chasm of the wild river.\nIt’s late; on snowy peaks the sliver\nof radiance fades; mists rise apace …\nthe caravan begins to race.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nA wayside chapel … here is sleeping\nsince days of old, in God’s good keeping,\nnow sanctified, an ancient prince\ncut down by vengeance. Ever since,\nheading for feast or bloody fighting,\nhere, as he hurried on his way,\nthe traveller never missed finditing\nthe strongest prayer that he could say:\nthat prayer, so fervently directed,\nkept him from Moslem’s knife protected.\nBut the bold bridegroom now disdained\nthe rite his forefathers maintained.\nThe crafty Demon with infernal\nreveries had tempted him; in thought\nbeneath the gloom, the shades nocturnal,\nit was his sweetheart’s lips he sought.\nBut suddenly, ahead, a figure--\nno, two--no, more--a shot--whose trigger?\nIn clinking stirrups rising now,\nramming his fur cap on his brow\nthe dauntless prince in silence lifted\nhis Turkish whip; it flashed, it whirred,\ncrack went the lash; he spoke no word\nas, eagle-like, he swooped, he shifted …\nAnother shot! a screaming man--\nthen from the valley dull groans rended\nthe still of night. The Georgians ran,\nthe battle all too soon was ended!\n\n\n# XII.\n\nNow calm returned; the sheepish flock\nof camels on the road, in shock,\ngazed back upon the dead, astounded;\nand in the still of steppe and rock\ndully their little bells resounded.\nThe sumptuous caravan was sacked;\nabove those Christian corpses packed\nthe bird of night invigilated!\nno peaceful sepulchre awaited\ntheir bodies, in some cloister’s trust,\nwhere rested their forefather’s dust;\nno sisters and no mothers, trailing\nlengths of impenetrable veiling,\nwith sobs and prayers and sighs and wailing\nvisit their grave and mourn their loss!\nAnd yet, by loving hands erected\nhere at the highway verge, protected\nby the steep cliff, there stands a cross;\nin spring the amorous, neglected\nivy, in emerald nets displayed,\nclasps it in tenderest embraces;\nand, turning in from far-off places,\nthe walker, tired from the long grade,\nrests in the consecrated shade …\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nSwift as a deer the horse is rushing,\nsnorting as if for battle; hushing\nsometimes, he halts in mid-career,\nblows out his nostrils wide in fear,\nand listens to the breeze’s sighing;\nnow thunderously his hooves are flying,\nbeating tattoos of rhythmic sort;\nhis mane all tangled, wildly spraying,\nhe gallops on without a thought.\nHe bears a silent horseman, swaying\nacross the saddle or, down-pressed,\ncollapsed upon that golden crest.\nHis hand no longer steers the bridle,\nfeet in the stirrups are thrust back,\nbloodstreams are flowing, broad and idle,\nacross the cloth of his shabrack.\nBrave galloper, you brought your master\nout from the battle like a dart,\nbut the Ossetian’s bullet, faster\nthan you, in darkness found his heart!\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nIn Gudál’s hall there’s grief and moaning,\nthe guests swarm out to the courtyard;\nwhose charger, broken past atoning,\noutside the gates has fallen so hard?\nand who’s the lifeless rider? traces\nof war’s alarm lurk in the spaces\nof his dark-favoured, furrowed brow.\nOn clothes, on weapons, blood is freezing;\nhis hand in a last furious squeezing\nupon the mane is frozen now …\nOh, not for long the bride had waited\nher young groom’s coming: and at least,\nhis princely word unviolated,\nhe galloped to the wedding feast …\nAlas, no more that brave, hard-bitten\ncharger shall bear him--so it’s written! …\n\n\n# XV.\n\nHeaven’s punishment like thunder swooped\ndown on that family, so light-hearted!\npitiable, Tamara drooped\nonto her bed; she sobbed, then started,\nsuddenly, tear on rolling tear,\nher bosom laboured, breath oppressed her--\nwhen, from above, a voice addressed her;\nshe seemed in magic tones to hear:\n“Don’t weep, my child! no use in steeping\na voiceless corpse with tears unsleeping!\nSuch tears are no life-giving dew:\nthey simply cloud your eyes; such weeping\nburns up complexion’s virgin hue!\nhe’s far from here, he’s past all knowing,\nfrom him your grief can earn no praise;\ncelestial radiance now is glowing\nbefore his incorporeal gaze;\nfor him heaven’s choirs are now intoning …\nwhat are life’s paltry dreams, the oppressed\ntears of a poor young girl, her groaning,\nto the celestial country’s guest?\nNo mortal creature should be reckoned,\nwhatever be his lot, as worth--\nbelieve me--for a single second,\nyour grief, my angel of the earth!”\n\n“On the heavens’ ethereal ocean,\nrudderless, without a sail,\nstarry choirs in ordered motion\ncalmly float through vapour’s veil;\nover heaven’s unbounded spaces,\nunattainable, unheard,\nleaving after them no traces,\npass the clouds in fleecy herd.\nTimes for meeting, or leave-taking,\nbring them neither joy nor pain;\nfuture brings them no wish-making,\npast, no will to live again.\nIn the grievous hour of sorrows,\nthey are what you should recall;\ntake no heed for earthly morrows,\nbe uncaring, like them all!”\n\n“As soon as night on the Caucasian\nsummits has cast its mantle round,\nas soon as its bewitching suasion\nhas stilled the world, as if spellbound;\nas soon as on the cliff there passes\na night wind through the withered grasses,\nand hidden deep in them a bird\ncheerfully in the dark has stirred;\nas soon as, under vineyard railing\nthirstily drinking the unfailing\ndewfall, the flower of night has bloomed;\nas soon as the gold moon has loomed\nsilently from the mountain-sill,\nlooked at you sidelong in the still--\nthen I shall fly to you and keep\ntryst with you till the daystar flashes,\nand on the silk of your eyelashes\nI shall infuse the gold of sleep …”\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nThen the voice faded like illusion,\nthe sound had come, the sound died out.\nShe started up, she looked about …\nand inexpressible confusion\nreigned in her breast; fear, grief, joy, doubt,\ncompared to this were just delusion.\nHer feelings bubbled up in rout;\nher soul arose and snapped its shackles,\nwhile fire came racing through each vein;\nthat voice, so strange it raised the hackles,\nshe thought she heard it speak again.\nJust before daybreak, welcome-seeming\nslumber had dimmed Tamara’s gaze;\nand yet her mind was in a daze,\nastonished with prophetic dreaming.\nA stranger, mute, through mists that curled,\nin beauty clad not of this world,\ncame to her, leaned above her pillow;\nand in his glance was such a billow\nof love and grief that you’d infer\nall his compassion was for her.\nThis was no angel to befriend her,\nthis was no heaven-sent defender:\nno crown of iridescent beams\nadorned his forehead with its gleams;\nnor one of those who burn together\nin hell, no tortured sinner--no!\nhe was like evening in clear weather:\nnot day, nor night--not gloom, nor glow!\n\n\n_Part II._\n\n# I.\n\n“Oh, father, father, cease from chiding,\nleave your Tamara free from threat;\nI weep: see how my tears are gliding,\nthey’ve flowed for days, they’re flowing yet.\nIt’s futile that from distant places\nsuitors crowd hither to my side …\nGeorgia abounds in maiden graces;\nmy fate is to be no one’s bride! …\nOh, father, throw stern words away.\nYou’ve noted how, from day to day,\nvictim of poison’s curse, I’m fading:\nan evil dream, past all evading,\ntorments me; there’s no way to flee;\nI’m lost, it’s pressing down on me!\nTo holy sanctuary send me,\nsend me to cool my raging head;\nfor there my Saviour will defend me,\nwith Him my anguish will be shed.\nNo worldly joys can now deceive me …\nso in a shrine’s protecting gloom\nrather let some dim cell receive me,\nan early foretaste of the tomb …”\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd so to a secluded holy\ncloister her parents took her; dressed\nin a habiliment of lowly\nhairshirting was that maiden breast.\nBut even in her monastic twilling,\nas under damask’s figured gleam,\nstill with the same illicit dream\njust as before her heart was thrilling.\nAt the altar, in the candle’s glow,\nat moments of most solemn singing,\nor while the voice of prayer was ringing,\nwould sound those tones she had to know.\nAnd where the dim cathedral lifted\nits vaulting, often would repair,\nsoundless and traceless as the air,\nwhere the thin films of incense drifted,\na starlike figure, shining there;\nit called, it beckoned her … but where?\n\n\n# III.\n\nBetween two hills, in shade abounding,\nthe sacred convent hid away\nin planes and poplars tight-surrounding;\nsometimes, when darkness came to stay\non the ravine, a lamp, appearing\nin a faint glimmer through the clearing,\nrevealed where that young sinner lay.\nIn shade that almond-trees projected,\nsad crosses in their rows protected\nthe voiceless graves; there the small birds\nin choirs of song rehearsed their words.\nOver the stones ran, bubbling, springing,\nfountains of water, chilled as ice,\nthat under beetling cliffs would slice\nacross the valley--bed and, singing,\ntumble on further through a scrub\nwhose bloom hoar-frosted every shrub.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nTo northward, mountain peaks were showing.\nAnd when Aurora, early glowing,\nwatches the smoky mists of blue\nrise from the valley, layer on layer,\nand when, face to the east, as due,\nall the muezzins call to prayer,\nand the clear voice of the bell-tower\nwakens the people with its shaking;\nin that pacific, solemn hour\nat which the Georgian maiden, taking\nher long and tapering pitcher, goes\nfor water down the steep, there grows\na mountain range, all capped in snows;\nagainst the limpid heaven it throws\na wall of lilac past comparing;\nor in the sunset hour it’s wearing\na chasuble that darkly glows;\nand in the middle stands, invading\ncloudland, the supreme peak by far,\nKazbek, all turbaned in brocading,\nof Caucasus the mighty tsar.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWith guilty thoughts in crowding session,\nTamara’s deaf to the intercession\nof honest pleasures. In her eyes\nthe whole world’s wrapped in shade and sadness;\nall things are cause for pain and madness--\nnight’s gloom, or radiance of sunrise.\nNo sooner has the chill infusion\nof sleepy night flowed all around,\nthan she in frenzy and confusion\nbefore the icon falls to ground;\nshe weeps; and in the silent tension\nof night her sobs with apprehension\ntrouble the wayfarer’s attention:\n“There groans some spirit of the height,\nchained in a cavern, sadly stirring!”\nhe listens hard through the still night,\nthen gives his weary horse a spurring.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nTamara at the window-sill\nstares at the distant scene, and still\nstares, languid, full of trepidation;\nshe sits in lonely meditation,\nshe sighs and waits, waits the whole day …\na whisper comes: he’s on his way!\nHer dreams, his manner of appearing,\nsuch flattery had not failed to reach\nher heart; his sad gaze, the endearing,\nthe tender strangeness of his speech.\nHerself not knowing rhyme or reason,\nshe’s pined and languished many days;\nher heart may wish to pray in season\nto holy saints, to him it prays;\nworn out by struggle unabating,\nif she lies down on slumber’s bed,\nher pillow burns, she’s suffocating,\nshe starts up, shivering with dread;\nher breast, her shoulders flame, she races\nto breathe, she chokes, mist’s in her eyes,\nher arms are thirsting for embraces,\nand on her lips a kiss that dies …\n\n\n# VII.\n\nNow Georgia’s mountains had been vested\nin aery robes of twilight hue.\nDown to the cloister, as suggested\nby his sweet wont, the Demon flew.\nAnd yet he shrank, long minutes through,\nhe started back from violating\nthe peace in which that shrine was waiting.\nThere was a moment when he dreamed\nof giving up his grim designing.\nAround the high wall, brooding, pining,\nhe roamed: without a breeze, it seemed\nthe leaves had stirred from his returning.\nIn shade he looked up; her undone\nwindow displays a lantern burning;\nshe’s long been waiting for someone!\nAnd now, amid the silence reigning,\nchingar’s2 harmonious complaining\nlilted, and strains of song began;\nthey flowed, these sounds, they ran and ran,\nthey pressed, like tears, hard on each other;\nso tender was that song, you’d find\nthat up in heaven, for mankind,\nits melodies had been designed.\nPerhaps to a forgotten brother\nsome angel, moved to meet again,\nhad flown in stealth and raised this strain\nto alleviate the other’s pain,\nsongs where time past found sweet narration? …\nLove’s swooning and love’s agitation--\nfor the first time the Demon now\nexperienced them; in shock and shiver\nhe thinks of fleeing--but no quiver\nstirs in his wing! from his dimmed brow\na heavy teardrop, a slow river …\nwhat marvel! till today, quite near\nthat cell, there stands in wondrous fashion\na stone scorched by a tear of passion,\nburnt through by an inhuman tear! …\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nAnd, as he enters, love is winning,\nhis soul is opened to the good;\nhe thinks, for life a new beginning\nhas come, as he had prayed it would.\nThe vague alarm of expectation,\nthe unspoken fear of the unknown,\nas if at a first confrontation\nto that proud soul had now been shown.\nThen comes a grim prefiguration!\nhe enters--there in front of him\nheaven’s envoy, the cherubim,\nradiant, on his protective mission\nkeeps the fair sinner from all things\nevil, defends her from perdition\ninside the shadow of his wings;\nand sudden light, from heaven down-beating,\nblinded the Demon’s unclean sight;\ninstead of a sweet-spoken greeting,\nheavy rebuke was prompt to smite:\n\n\n# IX.\n\n“Oh, soul of evil, soul unsleeping,\nin midnight gloom, what tryst is keeping?\nNone of your votaries are here,\nno breeze of ill has dared to roister\ntill now in this my well-loved cloister;\nso bring no wicked footsteps near.\nWho summoned you?” A crafty sneer\nwas Demon’s manner of replying;\nall red with envy was his look;\nand once more in his soul, undying,\nhate’s poison brew began to cook.\n“She’s mine!” cried out the grim contender,\n“release her, for you come too late,\ntoo late to serve as her defender\nand stand in judgement on her fate\nor mine. On her proud soul, I tell you,\nI have affixed my seal above;\nso from your cloister I repel you,\nthis is my kingdom, here I love!”\nAnd on the victim, now past saving,\nthe Angel cast a sorrowing eye\nand slow as slow, with pinions waving,\nwas drowned in the ethereal sky.\n\n\n# X.\n\n> _Tamara:_\nWho are you, tempter-tongue? What duty\nbrings you to me--from heaven? from hell?\nWhat do you want of me? …\n\n> _Demon:_\nYour beauty …\n\n> _Tamara:_\nTell me, who are you? Answer. Tell …\n\n> _Demon:_\nHe to whose voice with rapt attention\nyou listened in the still midnight,\nwhose grief you guessed at, whose intention\nspoke to your soul, whose vague dimension\nyou saw in dreaming; who can blight\nhopes with one glance, and bring them crashing;\nwhom no one loves; who lives for lashing\nhis earthly slaves with furious beat,\nthe king of freedom and cognition,\nheaven’s foe, and nature’s own perdition,\nand yet, you see him at your feet!\nI bring a message of devotion,\na prayer of love; for you I’ve kept\nmy first pains of earthbound emotion,\nand the first tears I ever wept.\nOh, hear me out! oh, have some notion\nof pity! back to heaven you\nwith just a single word could send me.\nWith your love’s raiment to defend me,\nthus vested, I’d stand there, a new\nangel with a new gleam to attend me;\noh, only hear me out, I pray--\nI love you like a slave! the day\nwhen I set eyes on you there started\nin me a secret but whole-hearted\nhatred for my immortal sway.\nI found I envied such deficient\nhappiness as exists down here;\nall life not yours was insufficient,\nall life away from you brought fear.\nThen in my dull heart, unexpected,\na glow began to warm and wake;\ndeep in an old wound and undetected,\ngrief started stirring like a snake.\nWhat, without you, is life eternal?\nwhat are my boundless realms infernal?\nJust empty words, a loud discord,\na vast cathedral--with no lord!\n\n> _Tamara:_\nDeceitful spirit, you must leave me!\nBe still, I’ll not believe the foe …\nOh, my Creator … grief and woe!\nno prayer comes out … my wits deceive me,\nthey falter, gripped by venom’s ire!\nListen, you pile up doom above me\nwith words of poison and of fire …\nTell me the reason why you love me!\n\n> _Demon:_\nThe reason why, fair one, you said?\nAlas, I know it not! … elated\nwith new life, from my guilty head\nthe thorny crown I relegated,\nthrew in the ashes all my days:\nmy heaven, my hell are in your gaze.\nI love you with no earthly passion,\nsuch love that you could never find:\nwith rapture, in the towering fashion\nof an immortal heart and mind.\nOn my sad soul, from world’s first aeon,\ndeeply your image was impressed;\never before me it progressed\nthrough wastes of timeless empyrean.\nMy thoughts had long been stirred and racked\nby just one name of passing sweetness:\nmy days in paradise had lacked\njust your perfection for completeness.\nIf you could guess, if you could know\nhow much it costs in tribulation\nthroughout the ages’ long gradation\nto take one’s pleasure, suffer woe,\nto expect no praise for evil, no\nprize for good deeds; what condemnation\nto live for self, by self be bored\nin endless struggle--no reward,\nno crown, no reconciliation!\nTo regret all, to seek no prize,\nto know, feel, see all things for ever,\nto seek to hate the world--whatever\nthere may be in it, to despise! …\nAs soon as I from heaven’s employment\nwas banned by curses, from that day\nall nature’s warmth and sweet enjoyment\ngrew chilled for ever, froze away;\nbluer before me stretched the spaces;\nI saw apparelled in their places,\nlike wedding guests, the lights I knew …\ncrowned, gliding one behind another;\nand yet their former friend and brother\nnot one would recognise anew.\nSo, in despair, the expatriated,\nthe outcasts I began to call,\nbut faces, words, and looks that hated,\nI failed to recognise them all.\nAnd so, in horror, wings inflected,\nI swooped away--but whither? why?\nI know not … I had been rejected\nby my old friends; like Adam I\nfound the world gone deaf-mute and dry.\nSo, at the current’s free impulsion,\na helpless and storm-crippled boat,\nsailless and rudderless, will float,\nknowing no goal for its propulsion;\nso at the earliest morning-tide\na scrap of thunder-cloud will ride,\nin heaven’s azure vaults the only\nvisible speck, unhalting, lonely,\nwill without trace and without sense\nfly God knows whither, God knows whence!\nBriefly I guided mankind’s thought,\nbriefly the ways of sin I taught,\ndiscredited what’s noble, brought\neverything beautiful to nought;\nbriefly … the flame of all committed\nbelief in man I firmly drowned …\nbut was it worthwhile to confound\njust hypocrites and the half-witted?\nI hid where the ravines run deep;\nI started, meteor-like, to sweep\non course through midnight’s darkest glooming …\nA lonely wayfarer was looming,\nenticed by a near lamp--to fall\nover the cliff-edge, horse and all;\nvainly he called out--bloody traces\nfollowed him down the mountain-side …\nbut hatred’s tricks, its sad grimaces,\nbrought me a solace that soon died!\nHow often, locked in dusty battle\nwith some great hurricane, in shroud\nof mist and lightning I would rattle\nand swoop and storm amid the cloud,\nand hope in elemental churning\nto stifle all my heart’s regret,\nto escape from thoughts that kept returning,\nthe unforgotten to forget!\nWhat is the sum of the privations,\nthe labours and the grief of man,\nof past, of future generations,\ncompared with just one minute’s span\nof all my untold tribulations?\nWhat is man’s life? his labour? why--\nhe’s passed, he’s died, he’ll pass and die …\nhis hopes on Judgement Day rely:\nsure judgement, possible forgiving!\nbut my sorrow is endless, I\nam damned to sorrow everliving;\nfor it, no grave in which to doze!\nsometimes, snakelike, it creeps, or glows\nlike flame, it crackles, blazes, rushes,\nor, like a tomb, it chokes and crushes--\na granite tomb for the repose\nof ruined passions, hopes and woes.\n\n> _Tamara:_\nWhy should I share your griefs, your inner\ntorments? why listen to your moan?\nYou’ve sinned …\n\n> _Demon:_\nTowards you, I’m no sinner.\n\n> _Tamara:_\nSomeone will hear us! …\n\n> _Demon:_\nWe’re alone.\n\n> _Tamara:_\nAnd God?\n\n> _Demon:_\nWon’t glance at us: eternal\nfor heaven, but not for earth, his care.\n\n> _Tamara:_\nAnd punishment, and pains infernal?\n\n> _Demon:_\nWhat of them, if we both are there?]\n\n> _Tamara:_\nSufferer, stranger-friend, unwilling--\nwhoever you may be--I find\nyour words set secret pleasure thrilling,\nceaselessly they disturb my mind.\nBut if there’s cunning in your story,\nif there’s a secret, wicked goal …\noh, have some mercy! where’s the glory\nto you, what value is my soul?\nIn heaven’s eye could I be reckoned\ndearer than those you spurned instead?\nthey too are beauties, though unbeckoned!\nas here, no mortal for a second\nhas dared defile their maiden bed …\nSwear me a fateful oath … in anguish\nI bid you swear … see how I languish;\nyou know the stuff of women’s dreams!\ninstinctively you soothe my terrors …\nyou understand my ways, my errors--\nand you’ll have pity that redeems!\nSwear it … from evil machinations\nyou’ll cease for ever, swear it now.\nHave you no oaths, no adjurations,\nhave you no single sacred vow? …\n\n> _Demon:_\nBy the first day of our creation\nI swear, and by its final night,\nI swear by evil’s condemnation\nand by the triumph of the right,\nby downfall, with its bitter smarting,\nby victories I dream to score,\nby bliss of seeing you once more\nand by the threat of once more parting.\nI swear by all the souls of those\nwho serve me in predestined fashion,\nI swear by my unsleeping foes;\nby heaven, by hell, by earth’s profession\nof holiness, and by your head,\nI swear by your last look’s expression,\nI swear by the first tear you shed,\nthe air your sweet lips are inhaling,\nthose silky curls that wave above,\nI swear by bliss and by travailing,\nI swear, believe it, by my love.\nOld plans of vengeance and destruction\nI have renounced, and dreams of pride;\nhenceforth, by evil’s sly seduction\nno human spirit shall be tried;\nwith heaven I seek to end my warring,\nto live for praying and adoring,\nto live for faith in all that’s good.\nTears of repentance, as they should,\nwill from my forehead, thus deserving\nyour virtues, wash off heaven’s brand,\nand may the world, calm, unobserving,\nflourish untroubled by my hand!\nTill now, you’ve found appreciation\nat your true worth from me alone:\nI chose you for my adoration,\nlaid at your feet my realms, my throne.\nI need your love, my benefaction\nto you will be eternal life;\nin love, just as in evil action,\nI’m strong and quite unmoved by strife.\nWith me, free son of the ethereal,\nto stellar regions you’ll be whirled;\nyou’re fated to be my imperial\nconsort, and first queen of the world.\nThen without pity, without caring,\nyou’ll learn to look down at the earth,\nwhere no true bliss and no long-wearing\nbeauty exist, which brings to birth\nonly misdeeds and retribution,\nwhere only paltry passions live;\nwhere love and hate, without dilution\nby fear, are past man’s power to give.\nSurely you know how short and fleeting\nis human love’s ephemeral rule?\njust for a flash, young blood is heating--\nthen days go flying, blood runs cool!\nWho can stand up to pain of parting,\nor to new beauty’s tempting gleams,\nto weariness or boredom starting,\nor to the waywardness of dreams?\nBe sure that you were never fated,\nmy consort, to destroy your bloom\nand fade away incarcerated,\nenslaved in envy’s narrow room,\namongst the cold and the small-minded,\nthe false friends and the open foes,\nthe fears, the toils that vainly grinded,\nthe fruitless hopes, the crushing woes.\nNo, pitifully, without passion,\nyou’ll not expire, in prayer, behind\nhigh walls, removed in equal fashion\nfrom God, and from all human kind.\nOh, no, you wonder of creation,\na different destiny is yours;\nyou face a different tribulation\nand different bliss in bounteous stores;\ngive up all previous ambition,\nrenounce the fate of this sad world:\ninstead, a lofty, splendid mission\nbefore your eyes will be unfurled.\nA host of souls who owe me duty\nI’ll bring, I’ll throw them at your feet;\nmagically for you, my beauty,\nhandmaids will labour, deft and fleet;\nfor you from the eastern star I’ll ravish\na golden crown; I’ll take for you\nfrom flowers the midnight dew, and lavish\nupon your crown that selfsame dew;\nI’ll bring a sunset ray; ecstatic,\nI’ll clasp it, belt-like, round your waist,\nwith breath of healing aromatic\nthe airs around you will be laced;\nall day the strains of heavenly playing\nwill lull your hearing with their tune;\nI’ll build you halls with an inlaying\nof turquoise, rooms with amber strewn;\nI’ll sound the bottom of the ocean,\nhigh up above the clouds I’ll climb,\nall, all, that’s earthly, my devotion\nwill give you--love me! …\n\n\n# XI.\n\nAnd this time\nwith ardent lips so lightly grazing\nhe kissed her trembling mouth, and then\nanswered her pleas, in language dazing\nwith sweet temptation; once again\nthose mighty eyes were fixed and gazing\ndeep into hers. He set her blazing.\nHe gleamed above her like a spark\nor like a knife that finds its mark.\nThat devil triumphed! In the dark,\nalas, to her bosom the infernal\npoison of his embrace could pierce.\nA cry resounded, tortured, fierce,\ntroubling the stillnesses nocturnal.\nIn it were love, and pain’s hard kernel,\nreproaches, a last desperate prayer,\nand then a hopeless, an eternal\nfarewell to life--all these were there.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nMeanwhile, alone, the watchman pacing\npast the steep wall serenely made\nhis nightly duty-round, embracing\nthe iron gong that told his trade;\nand near the cell of that young sinner\nhe slowed the measure of his tread;\nabove the gong his hand in inner\npuzzlement poised, he halted dead.\nAnd through the stillness all around him\nhe thought he heard an undertone,\ntwo mouths that kissed, then came to astound him\na short, sharp cry, a feeble moan.\nAnd a detestable suspicion\npierced to the old man’s heart … but stay,\na moment passed in this condition\nand all was silent; far away\nonly a breeze began to play\nand brought the sound of leaves that rustled;\nin its dark bed the torrent bustled\nand sadly murmured on its way.\nIn fear the old night-watchman hurries\nto say a text from holy writ,\nand chase the wicked thought that worries\nwith its bad spell his sinful wit;\nhe crosses with his quavering fingers\na breast disturbed by reverie’s force,\nin silence he no longer lingers\nbut goes his customary course.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nLike a sweet peri sleeping lightly\nshe lay inside her coffin now;\ncleaner than counterpane, and whitely\nblooming, the dull hue of her brow.\nLowered for ever were her lashes …\nBut heavens! who would not have supposed\nthe eyes beneath them simply dozed\nand marvellously just reposed\nwaiting a kiss, or daystar’s flashes?\nBut fruitlessly the light of day\npoured on them all its golden ray;\nher parents’ lips kissed them but vainly\nin speechless sorrow. All too plainly\nfrom them there’s nothing has the power\nto tear death’s seal off at this hour!\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nNever in festal days’ confusion\nhad sweet Tamara been so dressed,\nin such bright hues, so rich a vest.\nFlowers from her valley in profusion\n(such is tradition’s strict behest)\nabove her shed their perfume; pressed\nin her dead hand, they looked like making\nfarewell to earth, a last leave-taking!\nand nothing in her face implied\nto onlookers how she had died\nin blaze of rapture and of passion;\nno, all her features were instilled\nwith a calm beauty that was chilled,\nexpressionless in marble-fashion,\nblank of all thought, of feeling’s breath,\nimpenetrable, just like death.\nAnd a strange smile that had come fleeting\nacross her lips was frozen cold.\nOf grief and much heartbreak, on meeting\nany perceptive eye, it told:\nit carried cool contempts impression,\nthe scorn of one prepared to die,\nit carried a last thought’s expression\nand, to the earth, a dumb goodbye--\nof life now gone, a vain reflection,\ndeader than those death sets apart,\nof eyes grown dim, a recollection\neven more hopeless for the heart.\nJust as, at sunset’s grave occasion,\nfar on the skyline the Caucasian\nsnow-ranges--when in molten gold\nday’s chariot founders--iridescent,\ntheir radiance for a moment hold,\nin dark of distance incandescent--\nand yet this half-dead light can show\nno glimmer down to the benighted\ndesert, and no one’s path is lighted\nby gleams those icy summits throw.\n\n\n# XV.\n\nNow every neighbour, each relation,\nfor the sad pilgrimage is bound.\nHis grey locks all in laceration,\nbeating his breast without a sound,\nfor the last time Gudál has mounted\nhis faithful, his white-crested horse,\nand the cortege begins its course.\nThree days and three nights must be counted\nto reach the calm refuge she shares\nwith bones of her long-dead forebears.\nOf every traveller and each village\nthe scourge, an ancestor of hers,\nchained down by illness, all his pillage\nrepented--history so avers--\nwished for past crimes to win redemption,\nand vowed to build a minster, right\non top of a granitic height\nwhere blizzard’s dirge had the preemption,\nwhere no bird ventured but the kite.\nAnd soon from Kazbek’s snows a lonely\ntemple arose, and on the crest\nthe bones of that wrong-doer only\nin such a scene could find new rest;\nso to a graveyard was converted\nthat rock, the kin of clouds on high:\nas if, the nearer to the sky,\nthe tomb was warmer … or, averted\nand shut away from human gaze,\nas if death’s sleep were sounder-seeming …\nvain hope! for dead men, there’s no dreaming\nthe joys, the griefs of earlier days.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nA holy Angel through ethereal\nimmensities of heaven’s blue\nwinged it on golden pinions, who\nwas carrying off from things material\na sinful spirit as he flew.\nAnd with sweet words of consolation\nand hope he scattered all her doubt;\nall trace of crime and tribulation,\nwith flowing tears he washed it out.\nAlready, from far off, there swept them\nhomeward the sounds of heavenly bliss--\nwhen there flew up to intercept them\na hellish soul from the abyss.\nHe was as mighty as the roaring\nwhirlwind, as lightning did he shine;\nproudly, and vyith insanely soaring\naudacity he cried: “She’s mine!”\n\nTamara’s sinful soul was riding\ntight-gripped against her guardian’s breast;\nby prayer her terrors were suppressed.\nAnd now her fate was for deciding,\nagain he stood before her eyes,\nbut, God!--too changed to recognise!\nso evil was the whole impression,\nso full of poison and aggression\nand endless hatred; in a wave\nthe Demon’s motionless expression\nbreathed out the coldness of the grave.\n“Begone, dark spirit of denial!”\nso heaven’s ambassador replied:\n“for long enough your wicked pride\nhas triumphed--God will now decide,\nfor this is judgement hour; her trial\nis past, the days of test by fire;\nwith earth’s corruptible attire\nfrom evil’s thrall she’s liberated.\nHer soul is ours, and long-awaited!\nHer spirit, one of those by right\nwhose life on earth is to be reckoned\na flash of sharpest pain, a second\nof unattainable delight:\nwoven by God from an ethereal\nsubstance are all their vital strings;\nthey were not made for things material,\nnor made for them, material things!\nIn cruel, costly expiation\nshe has atoned for all her doubt.\nShe suffered love and tribulation--\nand heaven for love has opened out.”\n\nThe Angel, with stern gaze unsleeping,\nstared at the tempter, then on high,\nhis pinions joyfully upsweeping,\nmerged in the radiance of the sky.\nVanquished, the Demon execrated\nhis reveries and their mad scope,\nwas left once more to his inflated\narrogance, left there isolated\nin all the world--no love, no hope!\n\nAbove Koishaur’s ravine, where climbs\nthe mountain through its rocky stages,\nthere stands, preserved to modern times,\na jagged wreck from bygone ages.\nAbout it, tales for children’s ears\ntoo frightful, linger in tradition …\nAnd voiceless as an apparition,\nwitness of those uncanny years,\nit lifts, through trees, its blackened towers.\nBelow, the aül houses spill,\nthe earth is green and bright with flowers;\na hum of voices grows, falls still\nlost in the distance, and the tinkling\ncaravan bells sound far away,\nwhile through the vapours, gleaming, twinkling,\nthe river shoots in foam and spray.\nAnd vital, youthfully eternal,\nloving the sunshine and the vernal\ncoolness, old Nature frolics there\njust like a child without a care.\nBut the sad castle, after giving\nlong years of duty-service, ends\nas some poor old man does, outliving\nall of his dear ones and his friends.\nOnly its unseen dwellers, waiting\nfor moonrise, then begin to stir;\nthen is their time for celebrating!\nthey buzz, they scurry, and they whirr.\nA spider, anchorite-beginner,\nworks at his web, the grey old spinner;\nup on the roof a jolly pack\nof lizard families are brawling;\na canny snake from his dark crack\ncomes out punctiliously crawling\nacross the flags of the old stair;\nnow in three coils he gathers there,\nand now in one long streak he’s creeping,\njust like a blade, all bright and steeled,\nforgot on some old battlefield,\nno use to heroes dead and sleeping! …\nAll’s wild, nowhere is any trace\nof years gone by: no, in this place\nTime’s hand has long been busy sweeping,\nnothing there is that now recalls\nthe glorious state Gudál was keeping,\nwith his sweet daughter, in these halls!\n\nBut the church on the mountain-tower\nwhere to the earth their bones were vowed,\nkept safely by some sacred power,\ncan still be seen amidst the cloud.\nBy the church-door, on sentry-go,\na line of black granitic boulders,\nwith snowy mantles on their shoulders,\nwear as breastplate against the foe\neternal ice’s glittering show.\nRelics of landslide, dreaming masses\nlike waterfalls, grooved with crevasses,\nhang down where they were snapped and caught\nby frost, as if in frowning thought.\nAnd there the blizzard goes patrolling,\npuffing snow-dust from those grey walls,\nnow setting a lament a-rolling,\nnow answering with sentry-calls.\nAnd hearing in some far direction\nof a famed minster in this land,\nfrom eastward, clouds in serried band\nhurry to make their genuflection;\nbut on that circle of tombstones\nno one now weeps, and no one moans.\nThere Kazbek’s cliff, in dour ill-humour,\nlocks up its booty far from harm,\nand mankind’s everlasting rumour\ntroubles not that eternal calm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Charles Johnson", - "date": { - "year": 1839 - } - } - }, - "do-you-remember-how-together": { - "title": "“Do you remember how together …”", - "body": "Do you remember how together\nWe said good-bye in evening weather?\nLoud was the cannon’s curfew sound.\nTo it across the waves we listened.\nThe setting sun no longer glistened,\nAnd on the sea mist gathered round.\nThe straining shock passed through the air.\nAnd suddenly died everywhere.\n\nWhen the day’s work is done at last,\nHow often then I dream about you!\nThe empty sea I wander past\nAnd hear the curfew-shot without you.\nWhen its loud echo comes again\nFrom the grey waters back to me,\nI weep, worn out by sorrow’s pain.\nAnd long to perish in the sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1830 - } - } - }, - "dream": { - "title": "“Dream”", - "body": "At blazing noon, in Dagestan’s deep valley,\na bullet in my chest, dead still I lay,\nas steam yet rose above my wound, I tallied\neach drop of blood, as life now now seeped away.\n\nAlone I lay within a sandy hollow,\nas jagged ledges teemed there, rising steep,\nwith sun-scorched peaks above me, burning yellow,\nI too was scorched, yet slept a lifeless sleep.\n\nI dreamt of lights upon an evening hour,\na lavish feast held in my native land,\nand fair young maidens garlanded with flowers:\ntheir talk of me was merry and off-hand.\n\nBut one of them, not joining their free chatter,\nsat timidly apart, bemused, alone,\nsunk in a dream, her soul by sadness shattered:\nGod only knows what made her so forlorn;\n\nshe dreamed of sand in Dagestan’s deep valley,\na gorge in which a man she knew lay dead,\nblack steam still rose above the wound’s scorched hollow,\nas blood streamed down and cooled like molten lead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Levitsky", - "date": { - "year": 1841 - } - } - }, - "an-evening-after-rain": { - "title": "“An Evening after Rain”", - "body": "Beyond my window now horizon fades,\nDeclining ray atop the colonnades--\nThe domes, the chimneys, crosses golden-leaved--\nIs glistening, burning eyes of the deceived;\nAnd fiery edges of the cloudy veil\nLike snakes are sketched as if by pencil’s trail,\nAnd softly breezes through the garden pass\nCaressing stems of quivering rain-soaked grass …\nBetween those stems I spied a little bloom,\nAs ’twere an eastern pearl amidst the gloom,\nAnd trembling, sparkling droplet from it hung,\nIts head inclined, it yet to standing clung,\nJust like a mourning girl confronting dole,\nHer spirit quenched, her joy departing soul:\nDespite her eyes that streamed with angry tears,\nHer beauty she’ll recall in coming years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1830 - } - } - }, - "from-beneath-a-mysterious-and-ice-cold-half-mask": { - "title": "“From beneath a mysterious and ice-cold half-mask …”", - "body": "From beneath a mysterious and ice-cold half-mask\nYour voice sounded to me as flattering as a dream,\nYour charming eyes were shining at me,\nAnd your cunning mouth was smiling.\n\nThrough the wispy haze I noticed unconsciously\nThe paleness of your virgin cheeks and neck,\nLucky creature! I saw a wilful curl\nLeaving the wave of its native locks! …\n\nAnd I created then by these light signs\nA lovely beauty in my imagination;\nAnd from that time I carry in my soul,\nCaress and love this ethereal apparition.\n\nAnd all seems thus to me: this lively conversation\nI have already heard in the former years,\nAnd someone whispers to me: after this encounter\nWe will meet again as good old friends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitri Smirnov", - "date": { - "year": 1840 - } - } - }, - "the-ghost-ship": { - "title": "“The Ghost Ship”", - "body": "As Darkness descends on the ocean,\nAs Night spreads her silvery veil,\nA brigantine cuts through the waters\nAnd glides downwind at full sail.\n\nHer tall topsail masts are not bending,\nHer vanes are not moved by the air,\nHer cannons face open deck hatches\nWith silent indifferent stare.\n\nYou won’t hear the captain’s curt orders\nYou won’t see the sailors on deck,\nYet treacherous reefs or fierce tempests\nWill not bring this vessel to wreck.\n\nIt steers to a wild distant island\nEngulfed by funereal gloom.\nA tomb has been carved in its granite\nAn emperor lies in that tomb.\n\nHe rests there, buried by rivals\nWithout the honors of war,\nHis heavy headstone would not let him\nEscape from that desolate shore.\n\nThe day of the emperor’s passing\nEach year, on his doleful death day\nThe mystic ship quietly anchors\nAnd lies in a small tranquil bay.\n\nAt midnight, the powerful emperor\nDoes suddenly rise from the dead--\nHe’s dressed in his combat attire\nA gray bicorn hat on his head.\n\nHis noble head slightly bent forward,\nWithout a farewell glance,\nHe steps on board, ready to steer\nHis ship on her journey to France.\n\nFor France he is ardently yearning\nThe land of his glorious reign;\nThe land where his son and successor\nAnd old loyal guard have remained.\n\nAs soon as familiar shorelines\nEmerge from the fog into sight,\nThe emperor’s heart starts to flutter\nHis eager eyes shine with delight.\n\nThe emperor boldly strides forward\nNow setting his foot on the shore,\nHe loudly calls for his marshals,\nHe forcibly summons his corps.\n\nBut his grenadiers cannot hear--\nThey now rest forever amid\nThe infinite snows of cold Russia\nThe hot sands of great pyramids.\n\nAnd his gallant marshals are silent;\nSome fell on the Elbe’s grassy sward,\nAnd others acceded to treason\nAnd sold out their honor and sword.\n\nThe emperor angrily paces\nThe shore back and forth, all in vain;\nAnd stomping his foot on the ground,\nHe fervently calls once again:\n\nHe calls for his son’s love and favor\nTo amend his sad circumstance;\nHe pledges the world to his heir\nExcept for his own, his sweet France.\n\nBut when he was still in full vigor,\nDeath claimed his beloved dauphin;\nAll night, the sad father awaits him\nNot willing to leave or give in.\n\nAlone, by the sea he is standing\nTill dawn puts her blush on the sky.\nHis eyes well with hot bitter tears,\nHe breathes out a long heavy sigh.\n\nTo his magic ship, the doomed emperor\nWalks slowly, his eyes downcast.\nDismissing all hope with a hand wave,\nHe heaves up the anchor at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Olga Dumer", - "date": { - "year": 1840, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "i-look-with-fear-toward-the-future": { - "title": "“I look with fear toward the future …”", - "body": "I look with fear toward the future,\nWith yearning back toward the past,\nAnd as a criminal before execution\nI search in vain for a kindred soul;\nWill there be a messenger of my salvation,\nCome to show me my life’s purpose,\nThe goal of my prayers and passions?\nTo tell me what God has in store for me,\nAnd why he has so bitterly crossed\nThe hopes of my youth?\n\nI gave the earth her earthly dues\nOf love, hopes, good, and evil;\nI am ready to start life anew,\nSilent I wait: the time has come.\nI leave no kindred soul behind me,\nAnd embraced by cold and darkness\nIs my tired spirit.\nLike an early fruit, devoid of life-giving waters,\nIt has been engulfed in fate’s storms\nUnder the harsh sun of the day-to-day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1838 - } - } - }, - "meditation": { - "title": "“Meditation”", - "body": "With sadness I survey our present generation!\nTheir future seems so empty, dark, and cold,\nWeighed down beneath a load of knowing hesitation,\nIn idleness stagnating, growing old.\nWe have received, when barely finished weaning,\nThe errors of our sires, their tardiness of mind,\nAnd life oppresses us, a flat road without meaning,\nAn alien feast where we have dined.\nToward good and evil shamefully uncaring\nWe wilt without a fight when starting on life’s race;\nWhen danger threatens us--ignoble want of daring,\nBefore those set on high--despicable and base.\nA wizened fruit grown ripe before its hour,\nNo pleasure to the eye and no delight to taste,\nAn orphan stranger there, he hangs beside the flower--\nThe time of its full bloom is his to fall and waste.\n\nFor we have dried our brains with fruitless speculations,\nWithholding enviously from friends and those about\nThe ringing voice of lofty aspirations\nAnd noble passions, undermined by doubt.\nOur lips have barely brushed the cup of delectation,\nBut youthful strength we did not thus retain;\nFrom every joy we found, in fear of saturation,\nWe took the best and never came again.\nThe dreams of poesy, pure art, and its creation\nWith its sweet ecstasy our senses never move;\nWe greedily retain the remnants of sensation--\nDug deep and miserly, a useless treasure trove.\nAnd we both love and hate by chance, without conviction,\nWe make no sacrifice for malice, or for good,\nThere reigns within our souls a kind of chill constriction,\nWhenever the flame ignites the blood.\nThe pastimes of our sires we think a boring story,\nTheir guileless, boyish dissipations unrefined;\nWe hurry to our graves, unhappy, without glory,\nWith one last sneering glance behind.\n\nA gloomy throng are we, condemned and soon forgotten,\nWe pass across the world in silence, without trace,\nNo thoughts that might bear fruit for ages unbegotten,\nNo work of genius to inspire the race.\nOur ashes will receive a harsh and just portrayal,\nPosterity will sneer with skilled and scornful verse,\nA curse of bitterness from sons at their betrayal\nBy their own father’s spendthrift purse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "monologue": { - "title": "“Monologue”", - "body": "Believe that to be nothing is a boon in this world!\nTo what end are deep knowledge, thirst for fame,\nTalent, and ardent love of freedom,\nSince we cannot make use of them?\nWe, the children of the north, like the local plants,\nFlourish not for long; we fade quickly …\nAs the winter sun on the grey horizon\nSo is our life as gloomy, as transient\nIts monotonous flow …\nAnd it feels stifling in the mother country,\nAnd the heart is heavy and the soul yearns.\nKnowing neither love nor sweet friendship,\nAmidst the futile storms our youth pines away\nAnd quickly the poison of evil darkens it,\nAnd for us is bitter the chilled cup of life,\nAnd nothing cheers our soul again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "B. A. Rudzinsky & Stella Gardiner", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - } - } - }, - "new-years-poem": { - "title": "“New Year’s Poem”", - "body": "When I often stay a motley crowd in,\nWhen before my eyes, as in an awful dream,\nTo humming orchestras and dances,\nAnd foolish whispering of speeches learnt by eart,\nFlit figures of the people lost of heart,\nAnd masques with a false politeness;\nWhen my hands are touched, by any chance,\nWith heedless boldness of the city’s lass,\nBy hands without virgin fear,--\nExternally involved in their gleam and whim,\nI cherish in my heart an old and dear dream,\nThe sacred sounds of the bygone years.\nAnd if in some way I can lose, at last,\nThe dark reality, then to the resent past\nI fly in mind--as birds fly to the South;\nI see myself a child, I see once more them all:\nThe gentry’s manor, so old and tall,\nThe garden with the broken hothouse.\nHere sleeps a quiet pool under a net of grass,\nBehind the pool, a village smokes, and they rise--\nThe mists--above the lawns so endless.\nI enter a dark lane; the evening beams\nPeer through the bushes; and the yellow leaves\nRustle at my footsteps sadness.\nAnd sadness, very strange, lies my poor breast above:\nI think about her, I weep and I do love,\nI love my sacred dreams’ creation\nWith eyes that full of ever-azure light,\nWith a rosy smile, as if, a grove behind,\nThe light of the young day’s invasion.\nThus, proud liege of the bewitching land,\nFor the long hours, immovable, I sat--\nAnd their memory exists till now\nBeneath the mighty storm of passions and mistrusts,\nLike some fresh island, safe midst ocean’s floods,\nIn water desert has been flowered.\nWhen, coming to my senses, I notice the fraud,\nWhen the crowd’s noise has completely destroyed\nMy dream--the wrong guest at their banquet--\nOh, how, then, I want to shock their foolish mirth\nAnd boldly cast in their eyes my iron verse,\nSteeped in bitterness and hatred!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1840, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "When faints the heart for sorrow,\nIn life’s hard, darkened hour,\nMy spirit breathes a wondrous prayer\nFull of love’s inward power.\n\nThere is a might inspiring\nEach consecrated word,\nThat speaks the inconceivable\nAnd holy will of God.\n\nThe heavy load slips from my heart--\nOppressing doubt takes flight,\nThe soul believes, the tears break forth--\nAnd all is light, so light!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Martha Dickinson Bianchi", - "date": { - "year": 1839 - } - } - }, - "prophet": { - "title": "“Prophet”", - "body": "Since that time when the highest court\nHad given me the prophet’s vision,\nIn eyes of men I always caught\nThe images of sin and treason.\n\nThen I began to promulgate\nThe clear love’s and truth’s commandment:\nAt me all humans threw for that\nHard sticks and stones, like the madmen.\n\nI put sackcloth and ashes on,\nAnd ran--a beggar--from the town,\nAnd there I live in desert lone,\nLike birds, on food that God sends down;\n\nHere earthly creatures serve me right,\nThe laws of the Lord obeying;\nAnd stars here hear me in night,\nWith their rays, like babies, playing.\n\nAnd when to towns’ walls, by chance,\nI hurry through the noisy places,\nThe old men say to younger ones,\nWith selfish smiles on their faces,\n\n“Look, there is an example for us!\nHe was expelled from life, like ours:\nThe fool was forcing us to trust\nThat God is speaking through his mouth!\n\nSo, see, my children: how grim,\nThin, pale he is--with shaggy hair!\nLook, how poor he is and bare,\nHow despise all people him!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1841 - } - } - }, - "sail": { - "title": "“Sail”", - "body": "Amid the blue haze of the ocean\nA sail is passing, white and frail.\nWhat do you seek in a far country?\nWhat have you left at home, lone sail?\n\nThe billows play, the breezes whistle,\nAnd rhythmically creaks the mast.\nAlas, you seek no happy future,\nNor do you flee a happy past.\n\nBelow the mirrored azure brightens,\nAbove the golden rays increase--\nBut you, wild rover, pray for tempests,\nAs if in tempests there was peace!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Nabokov", - "date": { - "year": 1832 - } - } - }, - "the-silhouette": { - "title": "“The Silhouette”", - "body": "I have your silhouette,\nIts sad color is dear to me;\nIt hangs upon my breast,\nAnd is as somber as the heart within.\n\nIts eyes hold neither life nor fire,\nAnd yet it is always close to me;\nIt is your shadow, but I love\nYour shadow as a shadow of bliss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "the-sky-and-the-stars": { - "title": "“The Sky and the Stars”", - "body": "Fair is the evening sky,\nClear are the stars in the distance,\nAs clear as the joy of an infant.\nOh, why can’t I tell myself even in thought:\nThe stars are as clear as my joy!\n\nWhat is your trouble?\nPeople might query.\nJust this is my trouble,\nExcellent people: the sky and the stars\nAre the stars and the sky, whereas I am a man.\n\nPeople are envious\nOf one another.\nI, on the contrary,\nOnly the beautiful stars do I envy,\nOnly to be in their place do I wish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Nabokov", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "their-love-was-so-gentle": { - "title": "“Their love was so gentle …”", - "body": "_Sie liebten beiden, doch keiner\nWollt’es dem andern gestehn._\n --Heine\n\nTheir love was so gentle, so long, and surprising,\nWith pining, so deep, and zeal, like a crazy uprising!\nBut, much like foes, they shunned their meetings, confessions …\nAnd were cold and empty their short conversations.\n\nThey left each other in suffering, wordless and proud,\nAnd only in dreams, saw the image beloved, farther.\nDeath had come and commenced their date in the world, that is out …\nBut they didn’t discern in this new world each other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1841 - } - } - }, - "when-the-yellowing-cornfield-is-waving": { - "title": "“When the yellowing cornfield is waving …”", - "body": "When, in the cornfield, yellow waves are rising,\nThe wood is rustling at the sound of soft wind,\nAnd, in the garden, crimson plums are hiding\nIn pleasant shade of leaves, so shining ones and green;\n\nWhen, spilled with fragrant dew in calmness of the alley,\nIn morning of a gold or evening of a red,\nUnder the bush, the lily of a valley,\nIs gladly nodding me with silver of her head;\n\nWhen the icy brook in the ravine is playing,\nAnd, sinking thoughts in somewhat misty dreams,\nIn bubbling tones secretly tale-telling\nOf those peaceful lands from which it gaily streams--\n\nThen wrinkles are smoothing on my knitted brow,\nMy heart is losing troubles and distress--\nAnd I can apprehend the happiness on earth,\nAnd see Almighty in the heavens now …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "date": { - "year": 1837, - "month": "february" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "when-your-voice-i-hear": { - "title": "“When your voice I hear …”", - "body": "When your voice I hear\nSo tenderly ringing,\nLike a captive bird\nI wake with a song.\n\nWhen your glance I meet,\nIn your azure eyes,\nMy soul arises\nWith a longing for you.\n\nI fain would weep\nIn my happiness:\nOh to hold you, dear,\nClose to my heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Eugene Mark Kayden", - "date": { - "year": 1839 - } - } - }, - "wherefore": { - "title": "“Wherefore”", - "body": "I grieve because I love, and loving you,\nI know their crafty rumors will pursue\nYour youth in flower, lying out of spite.\nFor every shining hour and true delight\nFate will demand in ache and tears its pay.\nI grieve--because you are so free and gay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Eugene Mark Kayden", - "date": { - "year": 1840 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "doris-lessing": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Doris Lessing", - "birth": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2013 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british+zimbabwean", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧 🇿🇼", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british", - "zimbabwean" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "fable": { - "title": "“Fable”", - "body": "When I look back I seem to remember singing.\nYet it was always silent in that long warm room.\n\nImpenetrable, those walls, we thought,\nDark with ancient shields. The light\nShone on the head of a girl or young limbs\nSpread carelessly. And the low voices\nRose in the silence and were lost as in water.\n\nYet, for all it was quiet and warm as a hand,\nIf one of us drew the curtains\nA threaded rain blew carelessly outside.\nSometimes a wind crept, swaying the flames,\nAnd set shadows crouching on the walls,\nOr a wolf howled in the wide night outside,\nAnd feeling our flesh chilled we drew together.\n\nBut for a while the dance went on--\nThat is how it seems to me now:\nSlow forms moving calm through\nPools of light like gold net on the floor.\nIt might have gone on, dream-like, for ever.\n\nBut between one year and the next--a new wind blew?\nThe rain rotted the walls at last?\nWolves’ snouts came thrusting at the fallen beams?\n\nIt is so long ago.\nBut sometimes I remember the curtained room\nAnd hear the far-off youthful voices singing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "denise-levertov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Denise Levertov", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Levertov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 35 - }, - "poems": { - "adams-complaint": { - "title": "“Adam’s Complaint”", - "body": "Some people,\nno matter what you give them,\nstill want the moon.\n\nThe bread,\nthe salt,\nwhite meat and dark,\nstill hungry.\n\nThe marriage bed\nand the cradle,\nstill empty arms.\n\nYou give them land,\ntheir own earth under their feet,\nstill they take to the roads\n\nAnd water: dig them the deepest well,\nstill it’s not deep enough\nto drink the moon from.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-breathing": { - "title": "“The Breathing”", - "body": "An absolute\npatience.\nTrees stand\nup to their knees in\nfog. The fog\nslowly flows\nuphill.\nWhite\ncobwebs, the grass\nleaning where deer\nhave looked for apples.\nThe woods\nfrom brook to where\nthe top of the hill looks\nover the fog, send up\nnot one bird.\nSo absolute, it is\nno other than\nhappiness itself, a breathing\ntoo quiet to hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "celebration": { - "title": "“Celebration”", - "body": "Brilliant, this day--a young virtuoso of a day.\nMorning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,\ndeft hands. And every prodigy of green--\nwhether it’s ferns or lichens or needles\nor impatient points of buds on spindly bushes--\ngreener than ever before. And the way the conifers\nhold new cones to the light for the blessing,\na festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind\ntranscribes for them!\nA day that shines in the cold\nlike a first-prize brass band swinging along\nthe street\nof a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds\nwith the claims of reasonable gloom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "contraband": { - "title": "“Contraband”", - "body": "The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.\nThat’s why the taste of it\ndrove us from Eden. That fruit\nwas meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder\nfor use a pinch at a time, a condiment.\nGod had probably planned to tell us later\nabout this new pleasure.\n\nWe stuffed our mouths full of it,\ngorged on but and if and how and again\nbut, knowing no better.\nIt’s toxic in large quantities; fumes\nswirled in our heads and around us\nto form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,\na wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.\nNot that God is unreasonable--but reason\nin such excess was tyranny\nand locked us into its own limits, a polished cell\nreflecting our own faces. God lives\non the other side of that mirror,\nbut through the slit where the barrier doesn’t\nquite touch ground, manages still\nto squeeze in--as filtered light,\nsplinters of fire, a strain of music heard\nthen lost, then heard again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "everything-that-acts-is-actual": { - "title": "“Everything that Acts is Actual”", - "body": "From the tawny light\nfrom the rainy nights\nfrom the imagination finding\nitself and more than itself\nalone and more than alone\nat the bottom of the well where the moon lives,\ncan you pull me\n\ninto December? a lowland\nof space, perception of space\ntowering of shadows of clouds blown upon\nclouds over new ground, new made\nunder heavy December footsteps? the only\nway to live?\n\nThe flawed moon\nacts on the truth, and makes\nan autumn of tentative silences.\nYou lived, but somewhere else,\nyour presence touched others, ring upon ring,\nand changed. Did you think\nI would not change?\n\nThe black moon\nturns away, its work done. A tenderness,\nunspoken autumn.\nWe are faithful\nonly to the imagination. What the\nimagination seizes\nas beauty must be truth. What holds you\nto what you see of me is\nthat grasp alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "february-evening-in-new-york": { - "title": "“February Evening in New York”", - "body": "As the stores close, a winter light\nopens air to iris blue,\nglint of frost through the smoke\ngrains of mica, salt of the sidewalk.\nAs the buildings close, released autonomous\nfeet pattern the streets\nin hurry and stroll; balloon heads\ndrift and dive above them; the bodies\naren’t really there.\nAs the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,\na woman with crooked heels says to another woman\nwhile they step along at a fair pace,\n“You know, I’m telling you, what I love best\nis life. I love life! Even if I ever get\nto be old and wheezy--or limp! You know?\nLimping along?--I’d still …” Out of hearing.\nTo the multiple disordered tones\nof gears changing, a dance\nto the compass points, out, four-way river.\nProspect of sky\nwedged into avenues, left at the ends of streets,\nwest sky, east sky: more life tonight! A range\nof open time at winter’s outskirts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "from-the-roof": { - "title": "“From the Roof”", - "body": "This wild night, gathering the washing as if it were flowers\n animal vines twisting over the line and\n slapping my face lightly, soundless merriment\n in the gesticulations of shirtsleeves,\nI recall out of my joy a night of misery\n\nwalking in the dark and the wind over broken earth,\n halfmade foundations and unfinished\n drainage trenches and the spaced-out\n circles of glaring light\n marking streets that were to be\nwalking with you but so far from you,\n\nand now alone in October’s\nfirst decision towards winter, so close to you--\n my arms full of playful rebellious linen, a freighter\n going down-river two blocks away, outward bound,\n the green wolf-eyes of the Harborside Terminal\n glittering on the Jersey shore,\nand a train somewhere under ground bringing you towards me\nto our new living-place from which we can see\n\na river and its traffic (the Hudson and the\nhidden river, who can say which it is we see, we see\nsomething of both. Or who can say\nthe crippled broom-vendor yesterday, who passed\njust as we needed a new broom, was not\none of the Hidden Ones?)\n Crates of fruit are unloading\n across the street on the cobbles,\n and a brazier flaring\n to warm the men and burn trash. He wished us\nluck when we bought the broom. But not luck\nbrought us here. By design\n\nclean air and cold wind polish\nthe river lights, by design\nwe are to live now in a new place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-great-black-heron": { - "title": "“The Great Black Heron”", - "body": "Since I stroll in the woods more often\nthan on this frequented path, it’s usually\ntrees I observe; but among fellow humans\nwhat I like best is to see an old woman\nfishing alone at the end of a jetty,\nhours on end, plainly content.\nThe Russians mushroom-hunting after a rain\ntrail after themselves a world of red sarafans,\nnightingales, samovars, stoves to sleep on\n(though without doubt those are not\nwhat they can remember). Vietnamese families\nfishing or simply sitting as close as they can\nto the water, make me recall that lake in Hanoi\nin the amber light, our first, jet-lagged evening,\npeace in the war we had come to witness.\nThis woman engaged in her pleasure evokes\nan entire culture, tenacious field-flower\ngrowing itself among the rows of cotton\nin red-earth country, under the feet\nof mules and masters. I see her\na barefoot child by a muddy river\nlearning her skill with the pole. What battles\nhas she survived, what labors?\nShe’s gathered up all the time in the world\n--nothing else--and waits for scanty trophies,\ncomplete in herself as a heron.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-harrowing-of-hell": { - "title": "“The Harrowing of Hell”", - "body": "Down through the tomb’s inward arch\nHe has shouldered out into Limbo\nto gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:\nthe merciful dead, the prophets,\nthe innocents just His own age and those\nunnumbered others waiting here\nunaware, in an endless void He is ending\nnow, stooping to tug at their hands,\nto pull them from their sarcophagi,\ndazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,\nneighbor in death, Golgotha dust\nstill streaked on the dried sweat of his body\nno one had washed and anointed, is here,\nfor sequence is not known in Limbo;\nthe promise, given from cross to cross\nat noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.\nAll these He will swiftly lead\nto the Paradise road: they are safe.\nThat done, there must take place that struggle\nno human presumes to picture:\nliving, dying, descending to rescue the just\nfrom shadow, were lesser travails\nthan this: to break\nthrough earth and stone of the faithless world\nback to the cold sepulchre, tearstained\nstifling shroud; to break from them\nback into breath and heartbeat, and walk\nthe world again, closed into days and weeks again,\nwounds of His anguish open, and Spirit\nstreaming through every cell of flesh\nso that if mortal sight could bear\nto perceive it, it would be seen\nHis mortal flesh was lit from within, now,\nand aching for home. He must return,\nfirst, in Divine patience, and know\nhunger again, and give\nto humble friends the joy\nof giving Him food--fish and a honeycomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "illustrious-ancestors": { - "title": "“Illustrious Ancestors”", - "body": "The Rav\nof Northern White Russia declined,\nin his youth, to learn the\nlanguage of birds, because\nthe extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless\nwhen he grew old it was found\nhe understood them anyway, having\nlistened well, and as it is said, ‘prayed with the bench and the floor.’ He used\nwhat was at hand--as did\nAngel Jones of Mold, whose meditations\nwere sewn into coats and britches.\n\nWell, I would like to make,\nthinking some line still taut between me and them,\npoems direct as what the birds said,\nhard as a floor, sound as a bench,\nmysterious as the silence when the tailor\nwould pause with his needle in the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-california-morning-evening-late-january": { - "title": "“In California: Morning, Evening, Late January”", - "body": "Pale, then enkindled,\nlight\nadvancing,\nemblazoning\nsummits of palm and pine,\n\nthe dew\nlingering,\nscripture of\nscintillas.\n\nSoon the roar\nof mowers\ncropping the already short\ngrass of lawns,\n\nmen with long-nozzled\ncylinders of pesticide\npoking at weeds,\nat moss in cracks of cement,\n\nand louder roar\nof helicopters off to spray\nvineyards where braceros try\nto hold their breath,\n\nand in the distance, bulldozers, excavators,\nbabel of destructive construction.\n\nBanded by deep\noakshadow, airy\nshadow of eucalyptus,\n\nminer’s lettuce,\ntender, untasted,\nand other grass, unmown,\nluxuriant,\nno green more brilliant.\n\nFragile paradise.\n\nAt day’s end the whole sky,\nvast, unstinting, flooded with transparent\nmauve,\ntint of wisteria,\ncloudless\nover the malls, the industrial parks,\nthe homes with the lights going on,\nthe homeless arranging their bundles.\n\nWho can utter\nthe poignance of all that is constantly\nthreatened, invaded, expended\n\nand constantly\nnevertheless\npersists in beauty,\n\ntranquil as this young moon\njust risen and slowly\ndrinking light\nfrom the vanished sun.\n\nWho can utter\nthe praise of such generosity\nor the shame?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "in-mind": { - "title": "“In Mind”", - "body": "There’s in my mind a woman\nof innocence, unadorned but\n\nfair-featured and smelling of\napples or grass. She wears\n\na utopian smock or shift, her hair\nis light brown and smooth, and she\n\nis kind and very clean without\nostentation--\n\nbut she has\nno imagination\n\nAnd there’s a\nturbulent moon-ridden girl\n\nor old woman, or both,\ndressed in opals and rags, feathers\n\nand torn taffeta,\nwho knows strange songs\n\nbut she is not kind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "intrusion": { - "title": "“Intrusion”", - "body": "After I had cut off my hands\nand grown new ones\n\nsomething my former hands had longed for\ncame and asked to be rocked.\n\nAfter my plucked out eyes\nhad withered, and new ones grown\n\nsomething my former eyes had wept for\ncame asking to be pitied.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "living": { - "title": "“Living”", - "body": "The fire in leaf and grass\nso green it seems\neach summer the last summer.\n\nThe wind blowing, the leaves\nshivering in the sun,\neach day the last day.\n\nA red salamander\nso cold and so\neasy to catch, dreamily\n\nmoves his delicate feet\nand long tail. I hold\nmy hand open for him to go.\n\nEach minute the last minute.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "losing-track": { - "title": "“Losing Track”", - "body": "Long after you have swung back\naway from me\nI think you are still with me:\n\nyou come in close to the shore\non the tide\nand nudge me awake the way\n\na boat adrift nudges the pier:\nam I a pier\nhalf-in half-out of the water?\n\nand in the pleasure of that communion\nI lose track,\nthe moon I watch goes down, the\n\ntide swings you away before\nI know I’m\nalone again long since,\n\nmud sucking at gray and black\ntimbers of me,\na light growth of green dreams drying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "matins": { - "title": "“Matins”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe authentic! Shadows of it\nsweep past in dreams, one could say imprecisely,\nevoking the almost-silent\nripping apart of giant\nsheets of cellophane. No.\nIt thrusts up close. Exactly in dreams\nit has you off-guard, you\nrecognize it before you have time.\nFor a second before waking\nthe alarm bell is a red conical hat, it\ntakes form.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe authentic! I said\nrising from the toilet seat.\nThe radiator in rhythmic knockings\nspoke of the rising steam.\nThe authentic, I said\nbreaking the handle of my hairbrush as I\nbrushed my hair in\nrhythmic strokes: That’s it,\nthat’s joy, it’s always\na recognition, the known\nappearing fully itself, and\nmore itself than one knew.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe new day rises\nas heat rises,\nknocking in the pipes\nwith rhythms it seizes for its own\nto speak of its invention--\nthe real, the new-laid\negg whose speckled shell\nthe poet fondles and must break\nif he will be nourished.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nA shadow painted where\nyes, a shadow must fall.\nThe cow’s breath\nnot forgotten in the mist, in the\nwords. Yes,\nverisimilitude draws up\nheat in us, zest\nto follow through,\nfollow through,\nfollow\ntransformations of day\nin its turning, in its becoming.\n\n\n# V.\n\nStir the holy grains, set\nthe bowls on the table and\ncall the child to eat.\n\nWhile we eat we think,\nas we think an undercurrent\nof dream runs through us\nfaster than thought\ntowards recognition.\n\nCall the child to eat,\nsend him off, his mouth\ntasting of toothpaste, to go down\ninto the ground, into a roaring train\nand to school.\n\nHis cheeks are pink\nhis black eyes hold his dreams, he has left\nforgetting his glasses.\n\nFollow down the stairs at a clatter\nto give them to him and save\nhis clear sight.\n\nCold air\ncomes in at the street door.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThe authentic! It rolls\njust out of reach, beyond\nrunning feet and\nstretching fingers, down\nthe green slope and into\nthe black waves of the sea.\nSpeak to me, little horse, beloved,\ntell me\nhow to follow the iron ball,\nhow to follow through to the country\nbeneath the waves\nto the place where I must kill you and you step out\nof your bones and flystrewn meat\ntall, smiling, renewed,\nformed in your own likeness.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nMarvelous Truth, confront us\nat every turn,\nin every guise, iron ball,\negg, dark horse, shadow,\ncloud\nof breath on the air,\n\ndwell\nin our crowded hearts\nour steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of\nthings to be done, the\nordinary streets.\n\nThrust close your smile\nthat we know you, terrible joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mutes": { - "title": "“The Mutes”", - "body": "Those groans men use\npassing a woman on the street\nor on the steps of the subway\n\nto tell her she is a female\nand their flesh knows it,\n\nare they a sort of tune,\nan ugly enough song, sung\nby a bird with a slit tongue\n\nbut meant for music?\n\nOr are they the muffled roaring\nof deafmutes trapped in a building that is\nslowly filling with smoke?\n\nPerhaps both.\n\nSuch men most often\nlook as if groan were all they could do,\nyet a woman, in spite of herself,\n\nknows it’s a tribute:\nif she were lacking all grace\nthey’d pass her in silence:\n\nso it’s not only to say she’s\na warm hole. It’s a word\n\nin grief-language, nothing to do with\nprimitive, not an ur-language;\nlanguage stricken, sickened, cast down\n\nin decrepitude. She wants to\nthrow the tribute away, dis-\ngusted, and can’t,\n\nit goes on buzzing in her ear,\nit changes the pace of her walk,\nthe torn posters in echoing corridors\n\nspell it out, it\nquakes and gnashes as the train comes in.\nHer pulse sullenly\n\nhad picked up speed,\nbut the cars slow down and\njar to a stop while her understanding\n\nkeeps on translating:\n‘Life after life after life goes by\n\nwithout poetry,\nwithout seemliness,\nwithout love.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-wedding-ring": { - "title": "“My Wedding-Ring”", - "body": "My wedding-ring lies in a basket\nas if at the bottom of a well.\nNothing will come to fish it back up\nand onto my finger again. It lies\namong keys to abandoned houses,\nnails waiting to be needed and hammered into some wall,\ntelephone numbers with no names attached,\nidle paperclips. It can’t be given away\nfor fear of bringing ill-luck. It can’t be sold\nfor the marriage was good in its own\ntime, though that time is gone. Could some artificer\nbeat into it bright stones, transform it\ninto a dazzling circlet no one could take\nfor solemn betrothal or to make promises\nliving will not let them keep? Change it\ninto a simple gift I could give in friendship?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-metier-of-blossoming": { - "title": "“The Métier of Blossoming”", - "body": "Fully occupied with growing--that’s\nthe amaryllis. Growing especially\nat night: it would take\nonly a bit more patience than I’ve got\nto sit keeping watch with it till daylight;\nthe naked eye could register every hour’s\nincrease in height. Like a child against a barn door,\nproudly topping each year’s achievement,\nsteadily up\ngoes each green stem, smooth, matte,\ntraces of reddish purple at the base, and almost\nimperceptible vertical ridges\nrunning the length of them:\nTwo robust stems from each bulb,\nsometimes with sturdy leaves for company,\nelegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.\nAloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.\n\nOne morning--and so soon!--the first flower\nhas opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised\nin a single, brief\nmoment of hesitation.\nNext day, another,\nshy at first like a foal,\neven a third, a fourth,\ncarried triumphantly at the summit\nof those strong columns, and each\na Juno, calm in brilliance,\na maiden giantess in modest splendor.\nIf humans could be\nthat intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,\nswift from sheer\nunswerving impetus! If we could blossom\nout of ourselves, giving\nnothing imperfect, withholding nothing!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "on-the-mystery-of-the-incarnation": { - "title": "“On the Mystery of the Incarnation”", - "body": "It’s when we face for a moment\nthe worst our kind can do, and shudder to know\nthe taint in our own selves, that awe\ncracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:\nnot to a flower, not to a dolphin,\nto no innocent form\nbut to this creature vainly sure\nit and no other is god-like, God\n(out of compassion for our ugly\nfailure to evolve) entrusts,\nas guest, as brother,\nthe Word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "pleasures": { - "title": "“Pleasures”", - "body": "I like to find\nwhat’s not found\nat once, but lies\n\nwithin something of another nature,\nin repose, distinct.\nGull feathers of glass, hidden\n\nin white pulp: the bones of squid\nwhich I pull out and lay\nblade by blade on the draining board--\n\ntapered as if for swiftness, to pierce\nthe heart, but fragile, substance\nbelying design. Or a fruit, mamey,\n\ncased in rough brown peel, the flesh\nrose-amber, and the seed:\nthe seed a stone of wood, carved and\n\npolished, walnut-colored, formed\nlike a brazilnut, but large,\nlarge enough to fill\nthe hungry palm of a hand.\n\nI like the juicy stem of grass that grows\nwithin the coarser leaf folded round,\nand the butteryellow glow\n\nin the narrow flute from which the morning-glory\nopens blue and cool on a hot morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "psalm-concerning-the-castle": { - "title": "“Psalm concerning the Castle”", - "body": "Let me be at the place of the castle.\nLet the castle be within me.\nLet it rise foursquare from the moat’s ring.\nLet the moat’s waters reflect green plumage of ducks, let\nthe shells of swimming turtles break the surface or be\nseen through the rippling depths.\nLet horsemen be stationed at the rim of it, and a dog,\nalways alert on the brink of sleep.\nLet the space under the first storey be dark, let the water\nlap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon\nthem; let a boat be kept there.\nLet the caryatids of the second storey be bears upheld on\nbeams that are dragons.\nOn the parapet of the central room, let there be four\narchers, looking off to the four horizons. Within, let\nthe prince be at home, let him sit in deep thought, at\npeace, all the windows open to the loggias.\nLet the young queen sit above, in the cool air, her child in\nher arms; let her look with joy at the great circle, the\npilgrim shadows, the work of the sun and the play of\nthe wind. Let her walk to and fro. Let the columns uphold\nthe roof, let the storeys uphold the columns, let there\nbe dark space below the lowest floor, let the castle rise\nfoursquare out of the moat, let the moat be a ring and\nthe water deep, let the guardians guard it, let there be\nwide lands around it, let that country where it stands be\nwithin me, let me be where it is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quest": { - "title": "“The Quest”", - "body": "High, hollowed in green\nabove the rocks of reason\nlies the crater lake\nwhose ice the dreamer breaks\nto find a summer season.\n\n‘He will plunge like a plummet down\nfar into hungry tides’\nthey cry, but as the sea\nclimbs to a lunar magnet\nso the dreamer pursues\nthe lake where love resides.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "saint-peter-and-the-angel": { - "title": "“Saint Peter and the Angel”", - "body": "Delivered out of raw continual pain,\nsmell of darkness, groans of those others\nto whom he was chained--\n\nunchained, and led\npast the sleepers,\ndoor after door silently opening--\nout! And along a long street’s\nmajestic emptiness under the moon:\n\none hand on the angel’s shoulder, one\nfeeling the air before him,\neyes open but fixed …\n\nAnd not till he saw the angel had left him,\nalone and free to resume\nthe ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of\nwhat he had still to do,\nnot till then did he recognize\nthis was no dream. More frightening\nthan arrest, than being chained to his warders:\nhe could hear his own footsteps suddenly.\nHad the angel’s feet\nmade any sound? He could not recall.\nNo one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.\nHe himself must be\nthe key, now, to the next door,\nthe next terrors of freedom and joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saints_peter_and_paul" - } - } - }, - "the-secret": { - "title": "“The Secret”", - "body": "Two girls discover\nthe secret of life\nin a sudden line of\npoetry.\n\nI who don’t know the\nsecret wrote\nthe line. They\ntold me\n\n(through a third person)\nthey had found it\nbut not what it was\nnot even\n\nwhat line it was. No doubt\nby now, more than a week\nlater, they have forgotten\nthe secret,\n\nthe line, the name of\nthe poem. I love them\nfor finding what\nI can’t find,\n\nand for loving me\nfor the line I wrote,\nand for forgetting it\nso that\n\na thousand times, till death\nfinds them, they may\ndiscover it again, in other\nlines\n\nin other\nhappenings. And for\nwanting to know it,\nfor\n\nassuming there is\nsuch a secret, yes,\nfor that\nmost of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seeing-for-a-moment": { - "title": "“Seeing for a Moment”", - "body": "I thought I was growing wings--\nit was a cocoon.\n\nI thought, now is the time to step\ninto the fire--\nit was deep water.\n\nEschatology is a word I learned\nas a child: the study of Last Things;\n\nfacing my mirror--no longer young,\nthe news--always of death,\nthe dogs--rising from sleep and clamoring\nand howling, howling,\n\nnevertheless\nI see for a moment\nthat’s not it: it is\nthe First Things.\n\nWord after word\nfloats through the glass.\nTowards me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seems-like-we-must-be-somewhere-else": { - "title": "“Seems Like We Must Be Somewhere Else”", - "body": "Sweet procession, rose-blue,\nand all them bells.\nBandstand red, the eyes\nat treetop level seeing it.\n“Are we\nwhat we think we are or are we\nwhat befalls us?”\nThe people from an open window\nthe eyes\nseeing it!\nDaytime! Or twilight!\nIf we’re here let’s be here now\nSweet procession, rose-blue.\nIf we’re here let’s be here now.\nAnd the train whistle? who\ninvented that? Lonesome man, wanted the trains\nto speak for him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "september-1961": { - "title": "“September 1961”", - "body": "This is the year the old ones,\nthe old great ones\nleave us alone on the road.\n\nThe road leads to the sea.\nWe have the words in our pockets,\nobscure directions. The old ones\n\nhave taken away the light of their presence,\nwe see it moving away over a hill\noff to one side.\n\nThey are not dying,\nthey are withdrawn\ninto a painful privacy\n\nlearning to live without words.\nE. P. “It looks like dying”--Williams: “I can’t\ndescribe to you what has been\n\nhappening to me”--\nH. D. “unable to speak.”\nThe darkness\n\ntwists itself in the wind, the stars\nare small, the horizon\nringed with confused urban light-haze.\n\nThey have told us\nthe road leads to the sea,\nand given\n\nthe language into our hands.\nWe hear\nour footsteps each time a truck\n\nhas dazzled past us and gone\nleaving us new silence.\nOne can’t reach\n\nthe sea on this endless\nroad to the sea unless\none turns aside at the end, it seems,\n\nfollows\nthe owl that silently glides above it\naslant, back and forth,\n\nand away into deep woods.\n\nBut for usthe road\nunfurls itself, we count the\nwords in our pockets, we wonder\n\nhow it will be without them, we don’t\nstop walking, we know\nthere is far to go, sometimes\n\nwe think the night wind carries\na smell of the sea …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "stepping-westward": { - "title": "“Stepping Westward”", - "body": "What is green in me\ndarkens, muscadine.\nIf woman is inconstant,\ngood, I am faithful to\nebb and flow, I fall\nin season and now\nis a time of ripening.\nIf her part\nis to be true,\na north star,\ngood, I hold steady\nin the black sky\nand vanish by day,\nyet burn there\nin blue or above\nquilts of cloud.\nThere is no savor\nmore sweet, more salt\nthan to be glad to be\nwhat, woman,\nand who, myself,\nI am, a shadow\nthat grows longer as the sun\nmoves, drawn out\non a thread of wonder.\nIf I bear burdens\nthey begin to be remembered\nas gifts, goods, a basket\nof bread that hurts\nmy shoulders but closes me\nin fragrance. I can\neat as I go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "talking-to-grief": { - "title": "“Talking to Grief”", - "body": "Ah, Grief, I should not treat you\nlike a homeless dog\nwho comes to the back door\nfor a crust, for a meatless bone.\nI should trust you.\n\nI should coax you\ninto the house and give you\nyour own corner,\na worn mat to lie on,\nyour own water dish.\n\nYou think I don’t know you’ve been living\nunder my porch.\nYou long for your real place to be readied\nbefore winter comes. You need\nyour name,\nyour collar and tag. You need\nthe right to warn off intruders,\nto consider\nmy house your own\nand me your person\nand yourself\nmy own dog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "to-live-in-the-mercy-of-god": { - "title": "“To Live in the Mercy of God”", - "body": "To lie back under the tallest\noldest trees. How far the stems\nrise, rise\nbefore ribs of shelter\nopen!\n\nTo live in the mercy of God. The complete\nsentence too adequate, has no give.\nAwe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of\nstony wood beneath lenient\nmoss bed.\n\nAnd awe suddenly\npassing beyond itself. Becomes\na form of comfort.\nBecomes the steady\nair you glide on, arms\nstretched like the wings of flying foxes.\nTo hear the multiple silence\nof trees, the rainy\nforest depths of their listening.\n\nTo float, upheld,\nas salt water\nwould hold you,\nonce you dared.\n\nTo live in the mercy of God.\n\nTo feel vibrate the enraptured\nwaterfall flinging itself\nunabating down and down\nto clenched fists of rock.\nSwiftness of plunge,\nhour after year after century,\nO or Ah\nuninterrupted, voice\nmany-stranded.\nTo breathe\nspray. The smoke of it.\nArcs\nof steelwhite foam, glissades\nof fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion--\nrage or joy?\nThus, not mild, not temperate,\nGod’s love for the world. Vast\nflood of mercy\nflung on resistance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-tree-telling-of-orpheus": { - "title": "“A Tree Telling of Orpheus”", - "body": "White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began\nI took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors\nof salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog\ndidn’t stir; the leaved of my brothers remained outstretched,\nunmoving.\n\nYet the rippling drew nearer--and then\nmy own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if\nfire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips\nwere drying and curling.\nYet I was not afraid, only\ndeeply alert.\n\nI was the first to see him, for I grew\nout on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.\nHe was a man, it seemed: the two\nmoving stems, the short trunk, the two\narm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless\ntwigs at their ends,\nand the head that’s crowned by brown or gold grass,\nbearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,\nmore like a flower’s.\nHe carried a burden made of\nsome cut branch bent while it was green,\nstrands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,\nwhen he touched it, and from his voice\nwhich unlike the wind’s voice had no need of our\nleaves and branches to complete its sound,\ncame the ripple.\nBut it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and\nstopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me\nas if rain\nrose from below and around me\ninstead of falling.\nAnd what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:\nI seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know\nwhat the lark knows; all my sap\nwas mounting towards the sun that by now\nhad risen, the mist was rising, the grass\nwas drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them\ndeep under earth.\n\nHe came still closer, leaned on my trunk:\nthe bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.\nMusic! there was no twig of me not\ntrembling with joy and fear.\n\nThen as he sang\nit was no longer sounds only that made the music:\nhe spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language\ncame into my roots\nout of the earth,\ninto my bark\nout of the air,\ninto the pores of my greenest shoots\ngently as dew\nand there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.\nHe told of journeys,\nof where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,\nof an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day\ndeeper than roots …\nHe told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,\nand I, a tree, understood words--ah, it seemed\nmy thick bark would split like a sapling’s that\ngrew too fast in the spring\nwhen a late frost wounds it.\n\nFire he sang,\nthat trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.\nNew buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.\nAs though his lyre (now I knew its name)\nwere both frost and fire, its chord flamed\nup to the crown of me.\n\nI was seed again.\nI was fern in the swamp.\nI was coal.\n\nAnd at the heart of my wood\n(so close I was to becoming man or god)\nthere was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,\nsomething akin to what men call boredom,\nsomething\n(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)\nthat gives to a candle a coldness\nin the midst of its burning, he said.\n\nIt was then,\nwhen in the blaze of his power that\nreached me and changed me\nI thought I should fall my length,\nthat the singer began\nto leave me. Slowly\nmoved from my noon shadow\nto open light,\nwords leaping and dancing over his shoulders\nback to me\nrivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming\nslowly again\nripple.\n\nAnd I in terror\nbut not in doubt of\nwhat I must do\nin anguish, in haste,\nwrenched from the earth root after root,\nthe soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder--\nand behind me the others: my brothers\nforgotten since dawn. In the forest\nthey too had heard,\nand were pulling their roots in pain\nout of a thousand year’s layers of dead leaves,\nrolling the rocks away,\nbreaking themselves\nout of\ntheir depths.\n\nYou would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,\nof the singing\nso dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,\nno wind but the rush of our\nbranches moving, our trunks breasting the air.\nBut the music!\nThe music reached us.\nClumsily,\nstumbling over our own roots,\nrustling our leaves\nin answer,\nwe moved, we followed.\n\nAll day we followed, up hill and down.\nWe learned to dance,\nfor he would stop, where the ground was flat,\nand words he said\ntaught us to leap and to wind in and out\naround one another in figures the lyre’s measure designed.\n\nThe singer\nlaughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.\nAt sunset\nwe came to this place I stand in, this knoll\nwith its ancient grove that was bare grass then.\nIn the last light of that day his song became\nfarewell.\nHe stilled our longing.\nHe sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,\nwatered them: all-night rain of music so quiet\nwe could almost\nnot hear it in the\nmoonless dark.\nBy dawn he was gone.\nWe have stood here since,\nin our new life.\nWe have waited.\nHe does not return.\nIt is said he made his earth-journey, and lost\nwhat he sought.\nIt is said they felled him\nand cut up his limbs for firewood.\nAnd it is said\nhis head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.\nPerhaps he will not return.\nBut what we have lived\ncomes back to us.\nWe see more.\nWe feel, as our rings increase,\nsomething that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest\nleaf-tips\nfurther.\nThe wind, the birds,\ndo not sound poorer but clearer,\nrecalling our agony, and the way we danced.\nThe music!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "via-crucis": { - "title": "“Via Crucis”", - "body": "Maybe he looked indeed\nmuch as Rembrandt envisioned Him\nin those small heads that seem in fact\nportraits of more than a model.\nA dark, still young, very intelligent face,\na soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.\nThat face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth\nin a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.\nThe burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him\nthat He taste also the humiliation of dread,\ncold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,\nlike any mortal hero out of his depth,\nlike anyone who has taken a step too far\nand wants herself back.\nThe painters, even the greatest, don’t show how,\nin the midnight Garden,\nor staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,\nHe went through with even the human longing\nto simply cease, to not be.\nNot torture of body,\nnot the hideous betrayals humans commit\nnor the faithless weakness of friends, and surely\nnot the anticipation of death (not then, in agony’s grip)\nwas Incarnation’s heaviest weight,\nbut this sickened desire to renege,\nto step back from what He, Who was God,\nhad promised Himself, and had entered\ntime and flesh to enact.\nSublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled\nup from those depths where purpose\ndrifted for mortal moments.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "the-well": { - "title": "“The Well”", - "body": "At sixteen I believed the moonlight\ncould change me if it would.\nI moved my head\non the pillow, even moved my bed\nas the moon slowly\ncrossed the open lattice.\n\nI wanted beauty, a dangerous\ngleam of steel, my body thinner,\nmy pale face paler.\nI moonbathed\ndiligently, as others sunbathe.\nBut the moon’s unsmiling stare\nkept me awake. Mornings,\nI was flushed and cross.\n\nIt was on dark nights of deep sleep\nthat I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,\nand woke rested, and if not beautiful,\nfilled with some other power.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-were-they-like": { - "title": "“What Were They Like?”", - "body": "Did the people of Viet Nam\nuse lanterns of stone?\nDid they hold ceremonies\nto reverence the opening of buds?\nWere they inclined to quiet laughter?\nDid they use bone and ivory,\njade and silver, for ornament?\nHad they an epic poem?\nDid they distinguish between speech and singing?\n\nSir, their light hearts turned to stone.\nIt is not remembered whether in gardens\nstone gardens illumined pleasant ways.\nPerhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,\nbut after their children were killed\nthere were no more buds.\nSir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.\nA dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.\nAll the bones were charred.\nit is not remembered. Remember,\nmost were peasants; their life\nwas in rice and bamboo.\nWhen peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies\nand the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,\nmaybe fathers told their sons old tales.\nWhen bombs smashed those mirrors\nthere was time only to scream.\nThere is an echo yet\nof their speech which was like a song.\nIt was reported their singing resembled\nthe flight of moths in moonlight.\nWho can say? It is silent now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "philip-levine": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Philip Levine", - "birth": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Levine_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 78 - }, - "poems": { - "an-abandoned-factory-detroit": { - "title": "“An Abandoned Factory, Detroit”", - "body": "The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,\nAn iron authority against the snow,\nAnd this grey monument to common sense\nResists the weather. Fears of idle hands,\nOf protest, men in league, and of the slow\nCorrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.\n\nBeyond, through broken windows one can see\nWhere the great presses paused between their strokes\nAnd thus remain, in air suspended, caught\nIn the sure margin of eternity.\nThe cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes\nWhich movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,\n\nAnd estimates the loss of human power,\nExperienced and slow, the loss of years,\nThe gradual decay of dignity.\nMen lived within these foundries, hour by hour;\nNothing they forged outlived the rusted gears\nWhich might have served to grind their eulogy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "among-children": { - "title": "“Among Children”", - "body": "I walk among the rows of bowed heads--\nthe children are sleeping through fourth grade\nso as to be ready for what is ahead,\nthe monumental boredom of junior high\nand the rush forward tearing their wings\nloose and turning their eyes forever inward.\nThese are the children of Flint, their fathers\nwork at the spark plug factory or truck\nbottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs\nto the widows of the suburbs. You can see\nalready how their backs have thickened,\nhow their small hands, soiled by pig iron,\nleap and stutter even in dreams. I would like\nto sit down among them and read slowly\nfrom The Book of Job until the windows\npale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea\nof industrial scum, her gowns streaming\nwith light, her foolish words transformed\ninto song, I would like to arm each one\nwith a quiver of arrows so that they might\nrush like wind there where no battle rages\nshouting among the trumpets, Ha! Ha!\nHow dear the gift of laughter in the face\nof the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings\nwithout coffee and oranges, the long lines\nof mothers in old coats waiting silently\nwhere the gates have closed. Ten years ago\nI went among these same children, just born,\nin the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned\ndown to hear their breaths delivered that day,\nburning with joy. There was such wonder\nin their sleep, such purpose in their eyes\ndosed against autumn, in their damp heads\nblurred with the hair of ponds, and not one\nturned against me or the light, not one\nsaid, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,\nnot one complained or drifted alone,\nunloved, on the hardest day of their lives.\nEleven years from now they will become\nthe men and women of Flint or Paradise,\nthe majors of a minor town, and I\nwill be gone into smoke or memory,\nso I bow to them here and whisper\nall I know, all I will never know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "animals-are-passing-from-our-lives": { - "title": "“Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”", - "body": "It’s wonderful how I jog\non four honed-down ivory toes\nmy massive buttocks slipping\nlike oiled parts with each light step.\n\nI’m to market. I can smell\nthe sour, grooved block, I can smell\nthe blade that opens the hole\nand the pudgy white fingers\n\nthat shake out the intestines\nlike a hankie. In my dreams\nthe snouts drool on the marble,\nsuffering children, suffering flies,\n\nsuffering the consumers\nwho won’t meet their steady eyes\nfor fear they could see. The boy\nwho drives me along believes\n\nthat any moment I’ll fall\non my side and drum my toes\nlike a typewriter or squeal\nand shit like a new housewife\n\ndiscovering television,\nor that I’ll turn like a beast\ncleverly to hook his teeth\nwith my teeth. No. Not this pig.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-song": { - "title": "“Another Song”", - "body": "Words go on travelling from voice\nto voice while the phones are still\nand the wires hum in the cold. Now\nand then dark winter birds settle\nslowly on the crossbars, where huddled\nthey caw out their loneliness. Except\nfor them the March world is white\nand barely alive. The train to Providence\nmoans somewhere near the end\nof town, and the churning of metal\non metal from so many miles away\nis only a high thin note trilling\nthe frozen air. Years ago I lived\nnot far from here, grown to fat\nand austerity, a man who came\nclosely shaven to breakfast and ate\nin silence and left punctually, alone,\nfor work. So it was I saw it all\nand turned away to where snow\nfell into snow and the wind spoke\nin the incomprehensible syllable\nof wind, and I could be anyone:\na man whose life lay open before him,\na book with no ending, a widow\nbearing white carnations at dusk\nto a hillside graveyard turned\nto blank rubble, a cinder floating\ndown to earth and blinking slowly out,\ntoo small to mean a thing, too tired\nto even sigh. If life comes back,\nas we are told it does, each time one\nstep closer to the edge of truth,\nthen I am ready for the dawn\nthat calls a sullen boy from sleep\nrubbing his eyes on a white window\nand knowing none of it can last the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "any-night": { - "title": "“Any Night”", - "body": "Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine,\nthe yellowing ash, all the trees\nare gone, and I was older than\nall of them. I am older than the moon,\nthan the stars that fill my plate,\nthan the unseen planets that huddle\ntogether here at the end of a year\nno one wanted. A year more than a year,\nin which the sparrows learned\nto fly backwards into eternity.\nTheir brothers and sisters saw this\nand refuse to build nests. Before\nthe week is over they will all\nhave gone, and the chorus of love\nthat filled my yard and spilled\ninto my kitchen each evening\nwill be gone. I will have to learn\nto sing in the voices of pure joy\nand pure pain. I will have to forget\nmy name, my childhood, the years\nunder the cold dominion of the clock\nso that this voice, torn and cracked,\ncan reach the low hills that shielded\nthe orange trees once. I will stand\non the back porch as the cold\ndrifts in, and sing, not for joy,\nnot for love, not even to be heard.\nI will sing so that the darkness\ncan take hold and whatever\nis left, the fallen fruit, the last\nleaf, the puzzled squirrel, the child\nfar from home, lost, will believe\nthis could be any night. That boy,\nwalking alone, thinking of nothing\nor reciting his favorite names\nto the moon and stars, let him\nfind the home he left this morning,\nlet him hear a prayer out\nof the raging mouth of the wind.\nLet him repeat that prayer,\nthe prayer that night follows day,\nthat life follows death, that in time\nwe find our lives. Don’t let him see\nall that has gone. Let him love\nthe darkness. Look, he’s running\nand singing too. He could be happy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "at-bessemer": { - "title": "“At Bessemer”", - "body": "19 years old and going nowhere,\nI got a ride to Bessemer and walked\nthe night road toward Birmingham\npassing dark groups of men cursing\nthe end of a week like every week.\nOut of town I found a small grove\nof trees, high narrow pines, and I\nsat back against the trunk of one\nas the first rains began slowly.\nSouth, the lights of Bessemer glowed\nas though a new sun rose there,\nbut it was midnight and another shift\ntooled the rolling mills. I must\nhave slept awhile, for someone\nelse was there beside me. I could\nsee a cigarette’s soft light,\nand once a hand grazed mine, man\nor woman’s I never knew. Slowly\nI could feel the darkness fill\nmy eyes and the dream that came was\nof a bright world where sunlight\nfell on the long even rows of houses\nand I looked down from great height\nat a burned world I believed\nI never had to enter. When\nthe true sun rose I was stiff\nand wet, and there beside me was\nthe small white proof that someone\nrolled and smoked and left me there\nunharmed, truly untouched.\nA hundred yards off I could hear\ncars on the highway. A life\nwas calling to be lived, but how\nand why I had still to learn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "belle-isle": { - "title": "“Belle Isle”", - "body": "We stripped in the first warm spring night\nand ran down into the Detroit River\nto baptize ourselves in the brine\nof car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,\nmelted snow. I remember going under\nhand in hand with a Polish highschool girl\nI’d never seen before, and the cries\nour breath made caught at the same time\non the cold, and rising through the layers\nof darkness into the final moonless atmosphere\nthat was this world, the girl breaking\nthe surface after me and swimming out\non the starless waters towards the lights\nof Jefferson Ave. and the stacks\nof the old stove factory unwinking.\nTurning at last to see no island at all\nbut a perfect calm dark as far\nas there was sight, and then a light\nand another riding low out ahead\nto bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers\nwalking alone. Back panting\nto the gray coarse beach we didn’t dare\nfall on, the damp piles of clothes,\nand dressing side by side in silence\nto go back where we came from.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "bitterness": { - "title": "“Bitterness”", - "body": "Here in February, the fine\ndark branches of the almond\nbegin to sprout tiny clusters\nof leaves, sticky to the touch.\nNot far off, about the length\nof my morning shadow, the grass\nis littered with the petals\nof the plum that less than\na week ago blazed, a living\ncandle in the hand of earth.\nI was living far off two years\nago, fifteen floors above\n119th Street when I heard\na love of my young manhood\nhad died mysteriously in\na public ward. I did not\ngo out into the streets to\nwalk among the cold, sullen\npoor of Harlem, I did not\nturn toward the filthy window\nto question a distant pale sky.\nI did not do anything.\nThe grass is coming back, some\npatches already bright, though\nat this hour still silvered\nwith dew. By noon I can stand\nsweating in the free air, spading\nthe difficult clay for the bare\nroots of a pear or apple that\nwill give flower and fruit longer\nthan I care to think about.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "call-it-music": { - "title": "“Call It Music”", - "body": "Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song\nin my own breath. I’m alone here\nin Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky\nabove the St. George Hotel clear, clear\nfor New York, that is. The radio playing\n“Bird Flight,” Parker in his California\ntragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering\n“Lover Man” just before he crashed into chaos.\nI would guess that outside the recording studio\nin Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,\nit was late March, the worst of yesterday’s rain\nhad come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird\ncould have seen for miles if he’d looked, but what\nhe saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,\nshook his head, and barked like a dog--just once--\nand then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him\nhe’d be OK. I know this because Howard told me\nyears later that he thought Bird could\nlie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep\nfor an hour or more, and waken as himself.\nThe perfect sunlight angles into my little room\nabove Willow Street. I listen to my breath\ncome and go and try to catch its curious taste,\npart milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes\nfrom me into the world. This is not me,\nthis is automatic, this entering and exiting,\nmy body’s essential occupation without which\nI am a thing. The whole process has a name,\na word I don’t know, an elegant word not\nin English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word\nthat means nothing to me. Howard truly believed\nwhat he said that day when he steered\nParker into a cab and drove the silent miles\nbeside him while the bright world\nunfurled around them: filling stations, stands\nof fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets\nfrom Mexico and the Philippines. It was all\nso actual and Western, it was a new creation\ncoming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker\nsomeone later called “glad,” though that day\nI would have said silent, “the silent music\nof Charlie Parker.” Howard said nothing.\nHe paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights\nto their room, got his boots off, and went out\nto let him sleep as the afternoon entered\nthe history of darkness. I’m not judging\nHoward, he did better than I could have\nnow or then. Then I was 19, working\non the loading docks at Railway Express\ncoming day by day into the damaged body\nof a man while I sang into the filthy air\nthe Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me\nbefore his breath failed. Now Howard is gone,\neleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced.\n“The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro,”\nthey later wrote, all that rising passion\na footnote to others. I remember in ’85\nwalking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school\nwhere he taught after his performing days,\nwhen suddenly he took my left hand in his\ntwo hands to tell me it all worked out\nfor the best. Maybe he’d gotten religion,\nmaybe he knew how little time was left,\nmaybe that day he was just worn down\nby my questions about Parker. To him Bird\nwas truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note\ngoing out forever on the breath of genius\nwhich now I hear soaring above my own breath\nas this bright morning fades into afternoon.\nMusic, I’ll call it music. It’s what we need\nas the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds\nblowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,\nthe calm and endless one I’ve still to cross.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "clouds-above-the-sea": { - "title": "“Clouds above the Sea”", - "body": "My father and mother, two tiny figures,\nside by side, facing the clouds that move\nin from the Atlantic. August, ’33.\nThe whole weight of the rain to come, the weight\nof all that has fallen on their houses\ngathers for a last onslaught, and yet they\nhold, side by side, in the eye of memory.\nWhat was she wearing, you ask, what did he\nsay to make the riding clouds hold their breath?\nOur late August afternoons were chilly\nin America, so I shall drape her throat\nin a silken scarf above a black dress.\n\nI could give her a rope of genuine pearls\nas a gift for bearing my father’s sons,\nand let each pearl glow with a child’s fire.\nI could turn her toward you now with a smile\nso that we might joy in her constancy,\nI could bury the past in dust rising,\ndense rain falling, and the absence of sky\nso that you could turn this page and smile.\nMy father and mother, two tiny figures,\nside by side, facing the clouds that move\nin from the Atlantic. They are silent\nunder the whole weight of the rain to come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "clouds": { - "title": "“Clouds”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nDawn. First light tearing\nat the rough tongues of the zinnias,\nat the leaves of the just born.\n\nToday it will rain. On the road\nblack cars are abandoned, but the clouds\nride above, their wisdom intact.\n\nThey are predictions. They never matter.\nThe jet fighters lift above the flat roofs,\nblack arrowheads trailing their future.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nWhen the night comes small fires go out.\nBlood runs to the heart and finds it locked.\n\nMorning is exhaustion, tranquilizers, gasoline,\nthe screaming of frozen bearings,\nthe failures ofwill, the TV talking to itself\n\nThe clouds go on eating oil, cigars,\nhousewives, sighing letters,\nthe breath of lies. In their great silent pockets\nthey carry off all our dead.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThe clouds collect until there’s no sky.\nA boat slips its moorings and drifts\ntoward the open sea, turning and turning.\n\nThe moon bends to the canal and bathes\nher torn lips, and the earth goes on\ngiving off her angers and sighs\n\nand who knows or cares except these\nbreathing the first rains,\nthe last rivers running over iron.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nYou cut an apple in two pieces\nand ate them both. In the rain\nthe door knocked and you dreamed it.\nOn bad roads the poor walked under cardboard boxes.\n\nThe houses are angry because they’re watched.\nA soldier wants to talk with God\nbut his mouth fills with lost tags.\n\nThe clouds have seen it all, in the dark\nthey pass over the graves of the forgotten\nand they don’t cry or whisper.\n\nThey should be punished every morning,\nthey should be bitten and boiled like spoons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "coming-close": { - "title": "“Coming Close”", - "body": "Take this quiet woman, she has been\nstanding before a polishing wheel\nfor over three hours, and she lacks\ntwenty minutes before she can take\na lunch break. Is she a woman?\nConsider the arms as they press\nthe long brass tube against the buffer,\nthey are striated along the triceps,\nthe three heads of which clearly show.\nConsider the fine dusting of dark down\nabove the upper lip, and the beads\nof sweat that run from under the red\nkerchief across the brow and are wiped\naway with a blackening wrist band\nin one odd motion a child might make\nto say No! No! You must come closer\nto find out, you must hang your tie\nand jacket in one of the lockers\nin favor of a black smock, you must\nbe prepared to spend shift after shift\nhauling off the metal trays of stock,\nbowing first, knees bent for a purchase,\nthen lifting with a gasp, the first word\nof tenderness between the two of you,\nthen you must bring new trays of dull\nunpolished tubes. You must feed her,\nas they say in the language of the place.\nMake no mistake, the place has a language,\nand if by some luck the power were cut,\nthe wheel slowed to a stop so that you\nsuddenly saw it was not a solid object\nbut so many separate bristles forming\nin motion a perfect circle, she would turn\nto you and say, “Why?” Not the old why\nof why must I spend five nights a week?\nJust, “Why?” Even if by some magic\nyou knew, you wouldn’t dare speak\nfor fear of her laughter, which now\nyou have anyway as she places the five\ntapering fingers of her filthy hand\non the arm of your white shirt to mark\nyou for your own, now and forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dead": { - "title": "“The Dead”", - "body": "A good man is seized by the police\nand spirited away. Months later\nsomeone brags that he shot him once\nthrough the back of the head\nwith a Walther 7.65, and his life\nended just there. Those who loved\nhim go on searching the cafés\nin the Barrio Chino or the bars\nnear the harbor. A comrade swears\nhe saw him at a distance buying\ntwo kilos of oranges in the market\nof San José and called out, “Andrés,\nAndrés,” but instead of turning\nto a man he’d known since child-\nhood and opening his great arms\nwide, he scurried off, the oranges\ntumbling out of the damp sack, one\nafter another, a short bright trail\nleft on the sidewalk to say,\nFarewell! Farewell to what? I ask.\nI asked then and I ask now. I first\nheard the story fifty years ago;\nit became part of the mythology I\nhauled with me from one graveyard\nto another, this belief in the power\nof my yearning. The dead are every-\n\nwhere, crowding the narrow streets\nthat jut out from the wide boulevard\non which we take our morning walk.\nThey stand in the cold shadows\nof men and women come to sell\nthemselves to anyone, they stride\nalong beside me and stop when I\nstop to admire the bright garlands\nor the little pyramids of fruit,\nthey reach a hand out to give\nmoney or to take change, they say\n“Good morning” or “Thank you,” they\nturn with me and retrace my steps\nback to the bare little room I’ve\ncome to call home. Patiently,\nthey stand beside me staring out\nover the soiled roofs of the world\nuntil the light fades and we are\nall one or no one. They ask for\nso little, a prayer now and then,\na toast to their health which is\nour health, a few lies no one reads\nincised on a dull plaque between\na pharmacy and a sports store,\nthe least little daily miracle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-distant-winter": { - "title": "“The Distant Winter”", - "body": "_from an officer’s diary during the last war_\n\n# I.\n\nThe sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids.\n“Stephan! Stephan!” The rattling orderly\nComes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands:\nToast whitening with oleo, brown tea,\n\nYesterday’s napkins, and an opened letter.\n“Your asthma’s bad, old man.” He doesn’t answer,\nAnd turns to the grey windows and the weather.\n“Don’t worry, Stephan, the lungs will go to cancer.”\n\n\n# II.\n\nI speak, “the enemy’s exhausted, victory\nIs almost ours …” These twenty new recruits,\nConscripted for the battles lost already,\nWere once the young, exchanging bitter winks,\n\nAnd shuffling when I rose to eloquence,\nDetermined not to die and not to show\nThe fear that held them in their careless stance,\nAnd yet they died, how many wars ago?\n\nOr came back cream puffs, 45, and fat.\nI know that I am touched for my eyes brim\nWith tears I had forgotten. Death is not\nFor these car salesmen whose only dream\n\nIs of a small percentage of the take.\nOh my eternal smilers, weep for death\nWhose harvest withers with your aged aches\nAnd cannot make the grave for lack of breath.\n\n\n# III.\n\nDid you wet? Oh no, he had not wet.\nHow could he say it, it was hard to say\nBecause he did not understand it yet.\nIt had to do, maybe, with being away,\n\nWith being here where nothing seemed to matter.\nIt will be better, you will see tomorrow,\nI told him, in a while it will be better,\nAnd all the while staring from the mirror\n\nI saw those eyes, my eyes devouring me.\nI cannot fire my rifle, I’m aftaid\nEven to aim at what I cannot see.\nThis was his voice, or was it mine I heard?\n\nHow do I know that in this foul latrine\nI calmed a soldier, infantile, manic?\nCould he be real with such eyes pinched between\nThe immense floating shoulders of his tunic?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAround the table where the map is spread\nThe officers gather. Now the colonel leans\nInto the blinkered light from overhead\nAnd with a penknife improvises plans\n\nFor our departure. Plans delivered by\nAn old staff courier on his bicycle.\nOne looks at him and wonders does he say,\nI lean out and I let my shadow fall\n\nShouldering the picture that we call the world\nAnd there is darkness? Does he say such things?\nOr is there merely silence in his head?\nOr other voices which the silence rings?\n\nSuch a fine skull and forehead, broad and flat,\nThe eyes opaque and slightly animal.\nI can come closer to a starving cat,\nI can read hunger in its eyes and feel\n\nIn the irregular motions of its tail\nA need that I could feel. He slips his knife\nInto the terminal where we entrain\nAnd something seems to issue from my life.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIn the mice-sawed potato fields dusk waits.\nMy dull ones march by fours on the playground,\nKicking up dust; The column hesitates\nAs though in answer to the rising wind,\n\nTo darkness and the coldness it must enter.\nListen, my heroes, my half frozen men,\nThe corporal calls us to that distant winter\nWhere we will merge the nothingness within.\n\nAnd they salute as one and stand at peace.\nKeeping an arm’s distance from everything,\nI answer them, knowing they see no face\nBetween my helmet and my helmet thong.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nBut three more days and we’ll be moving out.\nThe cupboard of the state is bare, no one,\nNot God himself, can raise another recruit.\nDrinking my hot tea, listening to the rain,\n\nI sit while Stephan packs, grumbling a bit.\nHe breaks the china that my mother sent,\nHer own first china, as a wedding gift.\n“Now that your wife is dead, Captain, why can’t\n\nThe two of us really make love together?”\nI cannot answer. When I lift a plate\nIt seems I almost hear my long-dead mother\nSaying, Watch out, the glass is underfoot.\n\nStephan is touching me. “Captain, why not?\nThree days from now and this will all be gone.\nIt no longer is!” Son, you don’t shout,\nIn the long run it doesn’t help the pain.\n\nI gather the brittle bits and cut my finger\nOn the chipped rim of my wife’s favorite glass,\nAnd cannot make the simple bleeding linger.\n“Captain, Captain, there’s no one watching us.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-drunkard": { - "title": "“The Drunkard”", - "body": "He fears the tiger standing in his way.\nThe tiger takes its time, it smiles and growls.\nLike moons, the two blank eyes tug at his bowels.\n“God help me now,” is all that he can say.\n\n“God help me now, how close I’ve come to God.\nTo love and to be loved, I’ve drunk for love.\nSend me the faith of Paul, or send a dove.”\nThe tiger hears and stiffens like a rod.\n\nAt last the tiger leaps, and when it hits\nA putrid surf breaks in the drunkard’s soul.\nThe tiger, done, returns to its patrol.\nThe world takes up its trades; the man his wits,\nAnd, bottom up, he mumbles from the deep,\n“Life was a dream, Oh, may this death be sleep.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "during-the-war": { - "title": "“During the War”", - "body": "When my brother came home from war\nhe carried his left arm in a black sling\nbut assured us most of it was still there.\nSpring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out.\n\nI stood in a long line waiting for bread.\nThe woman behind me said it was shameless,\nsomeone as strong as I still home, still intact\nwhile her Michael was burning to death.\n\nYes, she could feel the fire, could smell\nhis pain all the way from Tarawa--\nor was it Midway?--and he so young,\nyounger than I, who was only fourteen,\n\ntaller, more handsome in his white uniform\nturning slowly gray the way unprimed wood\ngrays slowly in the grate when the flames\nsputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,”\n\nshe said when I turned to face her. She placed\nboth hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid,\nhugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly\nin my bad ear words I’d never heard before.\n\nWhen I got home my brother ate the bread\ncarefully one slice at a time until\nnothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,”\nhe asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?”\n\nThat afternoon I walked the crowded streets\nlooking for something I couldn’t name,\nsomething familiar, a face or a voice or less,\nbut not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-your-life": { - "title": "“The End of Your Life”", - "body": "First light. This misted field\nis the world, that man\nslipping the greased bolt\n\nback and forth, that man\ntunneled with blood\nthe dark smudges of whose eyes\n\ncall for sleep, calls\nfor quiet, and the woman\ndown your line,\n\nthe woman who screamed the loudest,\nwill be quiet.\nThe rushes, the grassless shale,\n\nthe dust, whiten like droppings.\nOne blue\ngrape hyacinth whistles\n\nin the thin and birdless air\nwithout breath.\nTen minutes later\n\na lost dog poked\nfor rabbits, the stones\nslipped, a single blade\n\nof grass stiffened in sun;\nwhere the wall\nbroke a twisted fig\n\nthrust its arms ahead\nlike a man\nin full light blinded.\n\nIn the full light the field\nyour eyes held\nbecame grain by grain\n\nthe slope of father mountain,\none stone of earth\nset in the perfect blackness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-ending": { - "title": "“An Ending”", - "body": "Early March.\nThe cold beach deserted. My kids\nhome in a bare house, bundled up\nand listening to rock music\npirated from England. My wife\nwaiting for me in a bar, alone\nfor an hour over her sherry, and none\nof us knows why I have to pace\nback and forth on this flat\nand birdless stretch of gleaming sand\nwhile the violent air shouts\nout its rags of speech. I recall\nthe calm warm sea of Florida\n30 years ago, and my brother\nand I staring out in the hope\nthat someone known and loved\nwould return out of air and water\nand no more, a miracle a kid\ncould half-believe, could see\nas something everyday and possible.\nLater I slept alone and dreamed\nof the home I never had and wakened\nin the dark. A silver light sprayed\nacross the bed, and the little\nrented room ticked toward dawn.\nI did not rise. I did not go\nto the window and address\nthe moon. I did not cry\nor cry out against the hour\nor the loneliness that still\nwas mine, for I had grown\ninto the man I am, and I\nknew better. A sudden voice\ncalls out my name or a name\nI think is mine. I turn.\nThe waves have darkened; the sky’s\ndescending all around me. I read\nonce that the sea would come\nto be the color of heaven.\nThey would be two seas tied\ntogether, and between the two\na third, the sea of my own heart.\nI read and believed nothing.\nThis little beach at the end\nof the world is anywhere, and I\nstand in a stillness that will last\nforever or until the first light\nbreaks beyond these waters. Don’t\nbe scared, the book said, don’t flee\nas wave after wave the breakers rise\nin darkness toward their ghostly crests,\nfor he has set a limit to the sea\nand he is at your side. The sea\nand I breathe in and out as one.\nMaybe this is done at last\nor for now, this search for what\nis never here. Maybe all that\nancient namesake sang is true.\nThe voice I hear now is\nmy own night voice, going out\nand coming back in an old chant\nthat calms me, that calms\n--for all I know--the waves\nstill lost out there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "everything": { - "title": "“Everything”", - "body": "Lately the wind burns\nthe last leaves and evening\ncomes too late to be\nof use, lately I learned\nthat the year has turned\nits face to winter\nand nothing I say or do\ncan change anything.\nSo I sleep late and waken\nlong after the sun has risen\nin an empty house and walk\nthe dusty halls or sit\nand listen to the wind\ncreak in the eaves and struts\nof this old house. I say\ntomorrow will be different\nbut I know it won’t.\nI know the days are shortening\nand when the sun pools\nat my feet I can reach\ninto that magic circle\nand not be burned. So\nI take the few things\nthat matter, my book,\nmy glasses, my father’s ring,\nmy brush, and put them aside\nin a brown sack and wait--\nsomeone is coming for me.\nA voice I’ve never heard\nwill speak my name\nor a face press to the window\nas mine once pressed\nwhen the world held me out.\nI had to see what it was\nit loved so much. Nothing\nhad time to show me\nhow a leaf spun itself\nfrom water or water cried\nitself to sleep for\nevery human thirst. Now\nI must wait and be still\nand say nothing I don’t know,\nnothing I haven’t lived\nover and over,\nand that’s everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "father": { - "title": "“Father”", - "body": "The long lines of diesels\ngroan toward evening\ncarrying off the breath\nof the living.\nThe face of your house\nis black,\nit is your face, black\nand fire bombed\nin the first street wars,\na black tooth planted in the earth\nof Michigan\nand bearing nothing,\nand the earth is black,\nsick on used oils.\n\nDid you look for me in that house\nbehind the sofa\nwhere I had to be?\nin the basement where the shirts\nyellowed on hangers?\nin the bedroom\nwhere a woman lay her face\non a locked chest?\nI waited\nat windows the rain streaked\nand no one told me.\n\nI found you later\nface torn\nfrom The History of Siege,\neyes turned to a public wall\nand gone\nbefore I turned back, mouth\nin mine and gone.\nI found you whole\ntoward the autumn of my 43rd year\nin this chair beside\na masonjar of dried zinnias\nand I turned away.\n\nI find you\nin these tears, few,\nuseless and here at last.\n\nDon’t come back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "for-the-country": { - "title": "“For the Country”", - "body": "_The Dream_\n\nThis has nothing to do with war\nor the end of the world. She\ndreams there are gray starlings\non the winter lawn and the buds\nof next year’s oranges alongside\nthis year’s oranges, and the sun\nis still up, a watery circle\nof fire settling into the sky\nat dinner time, but there’s no\nflame racing through the house\nor threatening the bed. When she\nwakens the phone is ringing\nin a distant room, but she\ndoesn’t go to answer it. No\none is home with her, and the cars\npassing before the house hiss\nin the rain. “My children!” she\nalmost says, but there are no\nlonger children at home, there\nare no longer those who would\nturn to her, their faces running\nwith tears, and ask her forgiveness.\n\n\n_The War_\n\nThe Michigan Central Terminal\nthe day after victory. Her brother\nhome from Europe after years\nof her mother’s terror, and he still\nso young but now with the dark\nshadow of a beard, holding her\ntightly among all the others\ncalling for their wives or girls.\nThat night in the front room\ncrowded with family and neighbors--\nhe was first back on the block--\nhe sat cross-legged on the floor\nstill in his wool uniform, smoking\nand drinking as he spoke of passing\nhigh over the dark cities she’d\nonly read about. He’d wanted to\ngo back again and again. He’d wanted\nto do this for the country,\nfor this--a small house with upstairs\nbedrooms--so he’d asked to go\non raid after raid as though\nhe hungered to kill or be killed.\n\n\n_The President_\n\nToday on television men\nwill enter space and return,\nmen she cannot imagine.\nLost in gigantic paper suits,\nthey move like sea creatures.\nA voice will crackle from out\nthere where no voices are\nspeaking of the great theater\nof conquest, of advancing\nbeyond the simple miracles\nof flight, the small ventures\nof birds and beasts. The President\nwill answer with words she\ncannot remember having\nspoken ever to anyone.\n\n\n_The Phone Call_\n\nShe calls Chicago, but no one\nis home. The operator asks\nfor another number but still\nno one answers. Together\nthey try twenty-one numbers,\nand at each no one is ever home.\n“Can I call Baltimore?” she asks.\nShe can, but she knows no one\nin Baltimore, no one in\nSt. Louis, Boston, Washington.\nShe imagines herself standing\nbefore the glass wall high\nover Lake Shore Drive, the cars\nbelow fanning into the city.\nEast she can see all the way\nto Gary and the great gray clouds\nof exhaustion rolling over\nthe lake where her vision ends.\nThis is where her brother lives.\nAt such height there’s nothing,\nno birds, no growing, no noise.\nShe leans her sweating forehead\nagainst the cold glass, shudders,\nand puts down the receiver.\n\n\n_The Garden_\n\nWherever she turns her garden\nis alive and growing. The thin\nspears of wild asparagus, shaft\nof tulip and flag, green stain\nof berry buds along the vines,\neven in the eaten leaf of\npepper plants and clipped stalk\nof snap bean. Mid-afternoon\nand already the grass is dry\nunder the low sun. Bluejay\nand dark capped juncos hidden\nin dense foliage waiting\nthe sun’s early fall, when she\nreturns alone to hear them\ncall and call back, and finally\nin the long shadows settle\ndown to rest and to silence\nin the sudden rising chill.\n\n\n_The Game_\n\nTwo boys are playing ball\nin the backyard, throwing it\nback and forth in the afternoon’s\nbright sunshine as a black mongrel\nbig as a shepherd races\nfrom one to the other. She\nhides behind the heavy drapes\nin her dining room and listens,\nbut they’re too far. Who are\nthey? They move about her yard\nas though it were theirs. Are they\nthe sons of her sons? They’ve\ntaken off their shirts, and she\nsees they’re not boys at all--\na dark smudge of hair rises\nalong the belly of one--, and now\nthey have the dog down thrashing\non his back, snarling and flashing\nhis teeth, and they’re laughing.\n\n\n_After Dinner_\n\nShe’s eaten dinner talking\nback to the television, she’s\nhad coffee and brandy, done\nthe dishes and drifted into\nand out of sleep over a book\nshe found beside the couch. It’s\ntime for bed, but she goes\ninstead to the front door, unlocks\nit, and steps onto the porch.\nBehind her she can hear only\nthe silence of the house. The lights\nthrow her shadow down the stairs\nand onto the lawn, and she walks\ncarefully to meet it. Now she’s\nstanding in the huge, whispering\narena of night, hearing her\nown breath tearing out of her\nlike the cries of an animal.\nShe could keep going into\nwhatever the darkness brings,\nshe could find a presence there\nher shaking hands could hold\ninstead of each other.\n\n\n_Sleep_\n\nA dark sister lies beside her\nall night, whispering\nthat it’s not a dream, that fire\nhas entered the spaces between\none face and another.\nThere will be no wakening.\nWhen she wakens, she can’t\ncatch her own breath, so she yells\nfor help. It comes in the form\nof sleep. They whisper\nback and forth, using new words\nthat have no meaning\nto anyone. The aspen shreds\nitself against her window.\nThe oranges she saw that day\nin her yard explode\nin circles of oil, the few stars\nquiet and darken. They go on,\ntwo little girls up long past\ntheir hour, playing in bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "gangrene": { - "title": "“Gangrene”", - "body": "_Vous êtes sorti sain et sauf des basses calomnies, vous avey conquis les coeurs._\n--Zola, J’accuse\n\n\nOne was kicked in the stomach\nuntil he vomited, then\nmade to put back\ninto his mouth what they had\nbrought forth; when he tried to drown\nin his own stew\nhe was recovered. “You are\nworse than a nigger or Jew,”\n\nthe helmeted one said. “You\nare an intellectal.\nI hate your brown\nskin; it makes me sick.” The tall\nintense one, his penis wired,\nwas shocked out of\nhis senses in three seconds.\nWeakened, he watched them install\n\nanother battery in\nthe crude electric device.\nThe genitals\nof a third were beaten with\na short wooden ruler: “Reach\nfor your black balls.\nI’ll show you how to make love.”\nWhen two of the beaten passed\n\nin the hall they did not know\neach other. “His face had turned\ninto a wound:\nthe nose was gone, the eyes ground\nso far back into the face\nthey too seemed gone,\nthe lips, puffed pieces of cracked\nblood.” None of them was asked\n\nanything. The clerks, the police,\nthe booted ones, seemed content\nto inflict pain,\nto make, they said, each instant\nmemorable and exquisite,\nreform the brain\nthrough the senses. “Kiss my boot\nand learn the taste of French shit.”\n\nReader, does the heart demand\nthat you bend to the live wound\nas you would bend\nto the familiar body\nof your beloved, to kiss\nthe green flower\nwhich blooms always from the ground\nhuman and ripe with terror,\n\nto face with love what we have\nmade of hatred? We must live\nwith what we are,\nyou say, is enough. I\ntaste death. I am among you\nand I accuse\nyou where, secretly thrilled by\nthe circus of excrement,\n\nyou study my strophes or\nyawn into the evening air,\ntired, not amused.\nRemember what you have said\nwhen from your pacific dream\nyou awaken\nat last, deafened by the scream\nof your own stench. You are dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "Wherever she turns her garden\nis alive and growing. The thin\nspears of wild asparagus, shaft\nof tulip and flag, green stain\nof berry buds along the vines,\neven in the eaten leaf of\npepper plants and clipped stalk\nof snap bean. Mid-afternoon\nand already the grass is dry\nunder the low sun. Bluejay\nand dark capped juncos hidden\nin dense foliage waiting\nthe sun’s early fall, when she\nreturns alone to hear them\ncall and call back, and finally\nin the long shadows settle\ndown to rest and to silence\nin the sudden rising chill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "gin": { - "title": "“Gin”", - "body": "The first time I drank gin\nI thought it must be hair tonic.\nMy brother swiped the bottle\nfrom a guy whose father owned\na drug store that sold booze\nin those ancient, honorable days\nwhen we acknowledged the stuff\nwas a drug. Three of us passed\nthe bottle around, each tasting\nwith disbelief. People paid\nfor this? People had to have\nit, the way we had to have\nthe women we never got near.\n(Actually they were girls, but\nnever mind, the important fact\nwas their impenetrability. )\nLeo, the third foolish partner,\nsuggested my brother should have\nswiped Canadian whiskey or brandy,\nbut Eddie defended his choice\non the grounds of the expressions\n“gin house” and “gin lane,” both\nof which indicated the preeminence\nof gin in the world of drinking,\na world we were entering without\nunderstanding how difficult\nexit might be. Maybe the bliss\nthat came with drinking came\nonly after a certain period\nof apprenticeship. Eddie likened\nit to the holy man’s self-flagellation\nto experience the fullness of faith.\n(He was very well read for a kid\nof fourteen in the public schools. )\nSo we dug in and passed the bottle\naround a second time and then a third,\nin the silence each of us expecting\nsome transformation. “You get used\nto it,” Leo said. “You don’t\nlike it but you get used to it.”\nI know now that brain cells\nwere dying for no earthly purpose,\nthat three boys were becoming\nincreasingly despiritualized\neven as they took into themselves\nthese spirits, but I thought then\nI was at last sharing the world\nwith the movie stars, that before\nlong I would be shaving because\nI needed to, that hair would\nsprout across the flat prairie\nof my chest and plunge even\nto my groin, that first girls\nand then women would be drawn\nto my qualities. Amazingly, later\nsome of this took place, but\nfirst the bottle had to be\nemptied, and then the three boys\nhad to empty themselves of all\nthey had so painfully taken in\nand by means even more painful\nas they bowed by turns over\nthe eye of the toilet bowl\nto discharge their shame. Ahead\nlay cigarettes, the futility\nof guaranteed programs of\nexercise, the elaborate lies\nof conquest no one believed,\nforms of sexual torture and\nrejection undreamed of. Ahead\nlay our fifteenth birthdays,\nacne, deodorants, crabs, salves,\nbutch haircuts, draft registration,\nthe military and political victories\nof Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us\nRichard Nixon with wife and dog.\nAny wonder we tried gin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-grave-of-the-kitchen-mouse": { - "title": "“The Grave of the Kitchen Mouse”", - "body": "The stone says “Coors”\nThe gay carpet says “Camels”\nSpears of dried grass\nThe little sticks the children gathered\nThe leaves the wind gathered\n\nThe cat did not kill him\nThe dog did not, not the trap\nOr lightning, or the rain’s anger\nThe tree’s claws\nThe black teeth of the moon\n\nThe sun drilled over and over\nDusk of his first death\nThe earth is worn away\nA tuft of gray fur ruffles the wind\nOne paw, like a carrot\nLunges downward in darkness\nFor the soul\n\nDawn scratching at the windows\nCounted and closed\nThe doors holding\nThe house quiet\nThe kitchen bites its tongue\nAnd makes bread", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "green-thumb": { - "title": "“Green Thumb”", - "body": "Shake out my pockets! Harken to the call\nOf that calm voice that makes no sound at all!\nTake of me all you can; my average weight\nMay make amends for this, my low estate.\nBut do not shake, Green Thumb, as once you did\nMy heart and liver, or my prostate bid\nGood Morning to--leave it, the savage gland\nContent within the mercy of my hand.\n\nThe world was safe in winter, I was spring,\nEnslaved and rattling to the slightest thing\nThat she might give. If planter were my trade\nWhy was I then not like a planter made:\nWith veins like rivers, smudge-pots for a soul,\nA simple mind geared to a simple goal?\nYou fashioned me, great headed and obscene\nOn two weak legs, the weakest thing between.\n\nMy blood was bubbling like a ten-day stew;\nit kept on telling me the thing to do.\nI asked, she acquiesced, and then we fell\nTo private Edens in the midst of hell.\nFor forty days temptation was our meal,\nThe night our guide, and what we could not feel\nWe could not trust. Later, beneath the bed,\nWe found you taking notes of all we said.\n\nAt last we parted, she to East Moline,\nI to the service of the great unseen.\nAll the way home I watched a circling crow\nAnd read your falling portents in the snow.\nI burned my clothes, I moved, I changed my name,\nBut every night, unstamped her letter came:\n“Ominous cramps and pains.” I cursed the vows\nThat cattle make to grass when cattle browse.\n\nHeartsick and tired, to you, Green Thumb, I prayed\nFor her reprieve and that our debt be paid\nBy my remorse. “Give me a sign,” I said,\n“Give me my burning bush.” You squeaked the bed.\nI hid my face like Moses on the hill,\nBut unlike Moses did not feel my will\nSwell with new strength; I put my choice to sleep.\nThat night we cowered, choice and I, like sheep.\n\nWhen I awoke I found beneath the door\nOnly the invoice from the liquor store.\nThe grape-vine brought the word. I switched to beer:\nShe had become a civil engineer.\nWhen I went walking birds and children fled.\nI took my love, myself, behind the shed;\nThe shed burned down. I switched to milk and eggs.\nAt night a dream ran up and down my legs.\n\nI have endured, as Godless Nazarite,\nLife like a bone even a dog would slight;\nAll that the dog would have, I have refused.\nMay I, of all your subjects, be excused?\nThe world is yours, Green Thumb; I smell your heat\nLicking the winter to a green defeat.\nThe creatures join, the coupling seasons start;\nLeave me, Green Thumb, my solitary part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "heaven": { - "title": "“Heaven”", - "body": "If you were twenty-seven\nand had done time for beating\nour ex-wife and had\nno dreams you remembered\nin the morning, you might\nlie on your bed and listen\nto a mad canary sing\nand think it all right to be\nthere every Saturday\nignoring your neighbors, the streets,\nthe signs that said join,\nand the need to be helping.\nYou might build, as he did,\na network of golden ladders\nso that the bird could roam\non all levels of the room;\nyou might paint the ceiling blue,\nthe floor green, and shade\nthe place you called the sun\nso that things came softly to order\nwhen the light came on.\nHe and the bird lived\nin the fine weather of heaven;\nthey never aged, they\nnever tired or wanted\nall through that war,\nbut when it was over\nand the nation had been saved,\nhe knew they’d be hunted.\nHe knew, as you would too,\nthat he’d be laid off\nfor not being braver\nand it would do no good\nto show how he had taken\nclothespins and cardboard\nand made each step safe.\nIt would do no good\nto have been one of the few\nthat climbed higher and higher\neven in time of war,\nfor now there would be the poor\nasking for their share,\nand hurt men in uniforms,\nand no one to believe\nthat heaven was really here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-helmet": { - "title": "“The Helmet”", - "body": "All the way\non the road to Gary\nhe could see\nwhere the sky shone\njust out of reach\nand smell the rich\nsmell of work\nas strong as money,\nbut when he got there\nthe night was over.\n\nPeople were going\nto work and back,\nthe sidewalks were lakes\nno one walked on,\nthe diners were saying\ntime to eat\nso he stopped\nand talked to a woman\nwho’d been up late\nmaking helmets.\n\nThere are white hands\nthe color of steel,\nthey have put their lives\ninto steel,\nand if hands could lay down\ntheir lives these hands\nwould be helmets.\nHe and the woman\ndid not lie down\n\nnot because\nshe would praise\nthe steel helmet\nboarding a train\nfor no war,\nnot because\nhe would find\nthe unjewelled crown\nin a surplus store\nwhere hands were sold.\n\nThey did not lie down\nface to face\nbecause of the waste\nof being so close\nand they were too tired\nof being each other\nto try to be lovers\nand because they had\nto sit up straight\nso they could eat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "holding-on": { - "title": "“Holding On”", - "body": "Green fingers\nholding the hillside,\nmustard whipping in\nthe sea winds, one blood-bright\npoppy breathing in\nand out. The odor\nof Spanish earth comes\nup to me, yellowed\nwith my own piss.\n\n40 miles from Málaga\nhalf the world away\nfrom home, I am home and\nnowhere, a man who envies\ngrass. Two oxen browse\n\nyoked together in the green clearing\nbelow. Their bells cough. When\nthe darkness and the wet roll in\nat dusk they gather\ntheir great slow bodies toward\nthe stalls. If my spirit\n\ndescended now, it would be\na lost gull flaring against\na deepening hillside, or an angel\nwho cries too easily, or a single\nglass of seawater, no longer blue\nor mysterious, and still salty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "holy-day": { - "title": "“Holy Day”", - "body": "Los Angeles hums\na little tune--\ntrucks down\nthe coast road\nfor Monday Market\npacked with small faces\nblinking in the dark.\nMy mother dreams\nby the open window.\nOn the drainboard\nthe gray roast humps\nuntouched, the oven\nbangs its iron jaws,\nbut it’s over.\nBefore her on the table\nset for so many\nher glass of fire\ngoes out.\nThe childish photographs,\nthe letters and cards\nscatter at last.\nThe dead burn alone\ntoward dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "monday" - } - } - }, - "house-of-silence": { - "title": "“House of Silence”", - "body": "The winter sun, golden and tired,\nsettles on the irregular army\nof bottles. Outside the trucks\njostle toward the open road,\noutside it’s Saturday afternoon,\nand young women in black pass by\narm in arm. This bar\nis the house of silence, and we drink\nto silence without raising our voices\nin the old way. We drink to doors\nthat don’t open, to the four walls\nthat dose their eyes, hands that run,\nfingers that count change, toes\nthat add up to ten. Suspended\nas we are between our business\nand our rest, we feel the sudden peace\nof wine and the agony of stale bread.\nColumbus sailed from here 30 years ago\nand never wrote home. On Saturdays\nlike this the phone still rings for him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday", - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "how-much-earth": { - "title": "“How Much Earth”", - "body": "Torn into light, you woke wriggling\non a woman’s palm. Halved, quartered,\nshredded to the wind, you were the life\nthat thrilled along the underbelly\nof a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond\nyou rinsed heaven with a sigh.\n\nHow much earth is a man.\nA wall fies down and roses\nrush from its teeth; in the fists\nof the hungry, cucumbers sleep\ntheir lives away, under your nails\nthe ocean moans in its bed.\n\nHow much earth.\nThe great ice fields slip\nand the broken veins of an eye\nstartle under light, a hand is planted\nand the grave blooms upward\nin sunlight and walks the roads.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-won-you-lost": { - "title": "“I Won, You Lost”", - "body": "The last of day gathers\nin the yellow parlor\nand drifts like fine dust\nacross the face of\nthe gilt-framed mirror\nI ofien prayed to.\nAn old man’s room\nwithout him, a room I\ncame back to again\nand again to steal\ncigarettes and loose change,\nto open cans of sardines,\nto break open crackers\nand share what he had.\nSomething is missing.\nThe cut glass ashtray\nis here and overflowing,\nthe big bottle of homemade,\nthe pack of English Ovals,\nthe new red bicycle deck\nwrapped in cellophane\nand gold edged, the dishes\ncrusted with the last snack.\nThe music is gone. The lilt\nof his worn voice broken\nwith the weight of all\nthose lost languages--\n“If you knew Solly like\nI knew Solly, oy oy\noy what a girl.” That music\nmade new each day and absent\nforever from the corners\nofrooms like this one\ndarkening with dusk.\nThe music a boy would laugh\nat until it went out\nand days began and ended\nwithout the banging fist,\nwithout the old truths\nof blood and water, without\nthe loud cries of I won,\nyou lost, without song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-a-light-time": { - "title": "“In a Light Time”", - "body": "The alder shudders in the April winds\noff the moon. No one is awake and yet\nsunlight streams across\nthe hundred still beds\nof the public wards\nfor children. At ten\ndo we truly sleep\nin a blessed sleep\nguarded by angels\nand social workers?\nDo we dream of gold\nfound in secret trunks\nin familiar rooms?\nDo we talk to cats\nand dogs? I think not.\nI think when I was\nten I was almost\nan adult, slightly\nless sentimental\nthan now and better\nwith figures. No one\ncould force me to cry,\nnothing could convince\nme of God’s concern\nfor America\nmuch less the fall of\na sparrow. I spit\ninto the wind, even\non mornings like this,\nthe air clear, the sky\nutterly silent,\nthe fresh light flooding\nacross bed after\nbed as though something\nwere reaching blindly--\nfor we are blindest\nin sunlight--for hands\nto take and eyelids\nto caress and bless\nbefore they open\nto the alder gone\nstill and the winds hushed,\nbefore the children\nwaken separately\ninto their childhoods.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "in-the-new-sun": { - "title": "“In the New Sun”", - "body": "Filaments of light\nslant like windswept rain.\nThe orange seller hawks\ninto the sky, a man with a hat\nstops below my window\nand shakes his tassels. Awake\n\nin Tetuan, the room filling\nwith the first colors, and water running\nin a tub.\n\nA row of sparkling carp\niced in the new sun, odor\nof first love, of childhood,\nthe fingers held to the nose,\nor hours while the clock hummed.\n\nThe fat woman in the orange smock\nplaces tiny greens at mouth\nand tail as though she remembered\nor yearned instead for forests, deep floors\nof needles, and the hushed breath.\n\nBlue nosed cannisters\nas fat as barrels silently\nslipping by. “Nitro,” he says.\nOn the roof he shows me\nwhere Reuban lay down\nto fuck-off and never woke.\n“We’re takin little whiffs\nall the time.” Slivers\n\nof glass work their way\nthrough the canvas gloves\nand burn. Lifting my black glasses\nin the chemical light, I stop\nto squeeze one out and the asbestos\nglows like a hand in moonlight\nor a face in dreams.\n\nPinpoints of blue\nalong the arms, light rushing\ndown across the breasts\nmissing the dry shadows\nunder them. She stretches\n\nand rises on her knees\nand smiles and far down\nto the sudden embroidery of curls\nthe belly smiles\nthat three times stretched slowly moonward\nin a hill of child.\n\nSun through the cracked glass,\nbartender at the cave end\npeeling a hard-boiled egg. Four\nin the afternoon,\nthe dogs asleep, the river\nmust bridge seven parched flats\nto Cordoba by nightfall.\nIt will never make it. I will\n\nnever make it. Like the old man\nin gray corduroy asleep\nunder the stifled fan, I have\nno more moves,\nstranded on an empty board.\n\nFrom the high hill\nbehind Ford Rouge, we could see\nthe ore boats pulling\ndown river, the rail yards,\nand the smoking mountain.\nEast, the city spreading\ntoward St. Clair, miles of houses,\nfactories, shops burning\nin the still white snow.\n\n“Share this with your brother,”\nhe said, and it was always winter\nand a dark snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "last-words": { - "title": "“Last Words”", - "body": "If the shoe fell from the other foot\nwho would hear? If the door\nopened onto a pure darkness\nand it was no dream? If your life\nended the way a book ends\nwith half a blank page and the survivors\ngone off to Africa or madness?\nIf my life ended in late spring\nof 1964 while I walked alone\nback down the mountain road?\nI sing an old song to myself. I study\nthe way the snow remains, gray\nand damp, in the deep shadows of the firs.\nI wonder if the bike is safe hidden\njust off the highway. Up ahead\nthe road, black and winding, falls\naway, and there is the valley where\nI lived half of my life, spectral\nand calm. I sigh with gratitude,\nand then I feel an odd pain rising\nthrough the back of my head,\nand my eyes go dark. I bend forward\nand place my palms on something rough,\nthe black asphalt or a field of stubble,\nand the movement is that of the penitent\njust before he stands to his full height\nwith the knowledge of his enormity.\nFor that moment which will survive\nthe burning of all the small pockets\nof fat and oil that are the soul,\nI am the soul stretching into\nthe furthest reaches of my fingers\nand beyond, glowing like ten candles\nin the vault of night for anyone\nwho could see, even though it is\n12:40 in the afternoon and I\nhave passed from darkness into sunlight\nso fierce the sweat streams down\ninto my eyes. I did not rise.\nA wind or a stray animal or a group\nof kids dragged me to the side\nof the road and turned me over\nso that my open eyes could flood heaven.\nMy clothes went skittering down\nthe road without me, ballooning\nout into any shape, giddy\nwith release. My coins, my rings,\nthe keys to my house shattered\nlike ice and fell into the mountain\nthorns and grasses, little bright points\nthat make you think there is magic\nin everything you see. No, it can’t\nbe, you say, for someone is speaking\ncalmly to you in a voice you know.\nSomeone alive and confident has put\neach of these words down exactly\nas he wants them on the page.\nYou have lived through years\nof denial, of public lies, of death\nfalling like snow on any head\nit chooses. You’re not a child.\nYou know the real thing. I am\nhere, as I always was, faithful\nto a need to speak even when all\nyou hear is a light current of air\ntickling your ear. Perhaps.\nBut what if that dried bundle\nof leaves and dirt were not dirt\nand leaves but the spent wafer\nof a desire to be human? Stop the car,\nturn off the engine, and stand\nin the silence above your life. See\nhow the grass mirrors fire, how\na wind rides up the hillside\nsteadily toward you until it surges\ninto your ears like breath coming\nand going, released from its bondage\nto blood or speech and denying nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "late-light": { - "title": "“Late Light”", - "body": "Rain filled the streets\nonce a year, rising almost\nto door and window sills,\nbattering walls and roofs\nuntil it cleaned away the mess\nwe’d made. My father told\nme this, he told me it ran\ndowntown and spilled into\nthe river, which in turn\nemptied finally into the sea.\nHe said this only once\nwhile I sat on the arm\nof his chair and stared out\nat the banks of gray snow\nmelting as the March rain\nstreaked past. All the rest\nof that day passed on\ninto childhood, into nothing,\nor perhaps some portion hung\non in a tiny corner of thought.\nPerhaps a clot of cinders\nthat peppered the front yard\nclung to a spar of old weed\nor the concrete lip of the curb\nand worked its way back under\nthe new growth spring brought\nand is a part of that yard\nstill. Perhaps light falling\non distant houses becomes\nthose houses, hunching them\ndown at dusk like sheep\nbrowsing on a far hillside,\nor at daybreak gilds\nthe roofs until they groan\nunder the new weight, or\nafter rain lifts haloes\nof steam from the rinsed,\nwhite aluminum siding,\nand those houses and all\nthey contain live that day\nin the sight of heaven.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn the blue, winking light\nof the International Institute\nof Social Revolution\nI fell asleep one afternoon\nover a book of memoirs\nof a Spanish priest who’d\nserved his own private faith\nin a long forgotten war.\nAn Anarchist and a Catholic,\nhis remembrances moved\ninexplicably from Castilian\nto Catalan, a language I\ncouldn’t follow. That dust,\nfine and gray, peculiar\nto libraries, slipped\nbetween the glossy pages\nand my sight, a slow darkness\ncalmed me, and I forgot\nthe agony of those men\nI’d come to love, forgot\nthe battles lost and won,\nforgot the final trek\nover hopeless mountain roads,\ndefeat, surrender, the vows\nto live on. I slept until\nthe lights came on and off.\nA girl was prodding my arm,\nfor the place was closing.\nA slender Indonesian girl\nin sweater and American jeans,\nher black hair falling\nalmost to my eyes, she told\nme in perfect English\nthat I could come back,\nand she swept up into a folder\nthe yellowing newspaper stories\nand photos spilled out before\nme on the desk, the little\nchronicles of death themselves\ncurling and blurring\ninto death, and took away\nthe book still unfinished\nof a man more confused\neven than I, and switched off\nthe light, and left me alone.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn June of 1975 I wakened\none late afternoon in Amsterdam\nin a dim corner of a library.\nI had fallen asleep over a book\nand was roused by a young girl\nwhose hand lay on my hand.\nI turned my head up and stared\ninto her brown eyes, deep\nand gleaming. She was crying.\nFor a second I was confused\nand started to speak, to offer\nsome comfort or aid, but I\nkept still, for she was crying\nfor me, for the knowledge\nthat I had wakened to a life\nin which loss was final.\nI closed my eyes a moment.\nWhen I opened them she’d gone,\nthe place was dark. I went\nout into the golden sunlight;\nthe cobbled streets gleamed\nas after rain, the street cafes\ncrowded and alive. Not\nfar off the great bell\nof the Westerkirk tolled\nin the early evening. I thought\nof my oldest son, who years\nbefore had sailed from here\ninto an unknown life in Sweden,\na life which failed, of how\nhe’d gone alone to Copenhagen,\nBremen, where he’d loaded trains,\nHamburg, Munich, and finally\n--sick and weary--he’d returned\nto us. He slept in a corner\nof the living room for days,\nand woke gaunt and quiet,\nstill only seventeen, his face\nin its own shadows. I thought\nof my father on the run\nfrom an older war, and wondered\nhad he passed through Amsterdam,\nhad he stood, as I did now,\ngazing up at the pale sky,\ndistant and opaque, for the sign\nthat never comes. Had he drifted\nin the same winds of doubt\nand change to another continent,\nanother life, a family, some\nyears of peace, an early death.\nI walked on by myself for miles\nand still the light hung on\nas though the day would\nnever end. The gray canals\ndarkened slowly, the sky\nabove the high, narrow houses\ndeepened into blue, and one\nby one the stars began\ntheir singular voyages.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "late-moon": { - "title": "“Late Moon”", - "body": "2 a.m.\nDecember, and still no moon\nrising from the river.\n\nMy mother\nhome from the beer garden\nstands before the open closet\n\nher hands still burning.\nShe smooths the fur collar,\nthe scarf, opens the gloves\n\ncrumpled like letters.\nNothing is lost\nshe says to the darkness, nothing.\n\nThe moon finally above the town,\nThe breathless stacks,\nthe coal clumps,\n\nthe quiet cars\nwhitened at last.\nHer small round hand whitens,\n\nthe hand a stranger held\nand released\nwhile the Polish music wheezed.\n\nI’m drunk, she says,\nand knows she’s not. In her chair\nundoing brassiere and garters\n\nshe sighs\nand waits for the need\nto move.\n\nThe moon descends\nin a spasm of silver\ntearing the screen door,\n\nthe eyes of fire\ndrown in the still river,\nand she’s herself.\n\nThe little jewels\non cheek and chin\ndarken and go out,\n\nand in darkness\nnothing falls\nstaining her lap.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "magpiety": { - "title": "“Magpiety”", - "body": "You pull over to the shoulder\n of the two-lane\nroad and sit for a moment wondering\n where you were going\nin such a hurry. The valley is burned\n out, the oaks\ndream day and night of rain\n that never comes.\nAt noon or just before noon\n the short shadows\nare gray and hold what little\n life survives.\nIn the still heat the engine\n clicks, although\nthe real heat is hours ahead.\n You get out and step\ncautiously over a low wire\n fence and begin\nthe climb up the yellowed hill.\n A hundred feet\nahead the trunks of two\n fallen oaks\nrust; something passes over\n them, a lizard\nperhaps or a trick of sight.\n The next tree\nyou pass is unfamiliar,\n the trunk dark,\nas black as an olive’s; the low\n branches stab\nout, gnarled and dull: a carob\n or a Joshua tree.\nA sudden flaring-up ahead,\n a black-winged\nbird rises from nowhere,\n white patches\nunderneath its wings, and is gone.\n You hear your own\nbreath catching in your ears,\n a roaring, a sea\nsound that goes on and on\n until you lean\nforward to place both hands\n--fingers spread--\ninto the bleached grasses\n and let your knees\nslowly down. Your breath slows\n and you know\nyou’re back in central\n California\non your way to San Francisco\n or the coastal towns\nwith their damp sea breezes\n you haven’t\neven a hint of. But first\n you must cross\nthe Pacheco Pass. People\n expect you, and yet\nyou remain, still leaning forward\n into the grasses\nthat if you could hear them\n would tell you\nall you need to know about\n the life ahead.\n\nOut of a sense of modesty\n or to avoid the truth\nI’ve been writing in the second\n person, but in truth\nit was I, not you, who pulled\n the green Ford\nover to the side of the road\n and decided to get\nup that last hill to look\n back at the valley\nhe’d come to call home.\n I can’t believe\nthat man, only thirty-two,\n less than half\nmy age, could be the person\n fashioning these lines.\nThat was late July of ’60.\n I had heard\nall about magpies, how they\n snooped and meddled\nin the affairs of others, not\n birds so much\nas people. If you dared\n to remove a wedding\nring as you washed away\n the stickiness of love\nor the cherished odors of another\n man or woman,\nas you turned away\n from the mirror\nhaving admired your new-found\n potency--humming\n“My Funny Valentine” or\n “Body and Soul”--\nto reach for a rough towel\n or some garment\non which to dry yourself,\n he would enter\nthe open window behind you\n that gave gratefully\nonto the fields and the roads\n bathed in dawn--\nhe, the magpie--and snatch\n up the ring\nin his hard beak and shoulder\n his way back\ninto the currents of the world\n on his way\nto the only person who could\n change your life:\na king or a bride or an old woman\n asleep on her porch.\n\nCan you believe the bird\n stood beside you\njust long enough, though far\n smaller than you\nbut fearless in a way\n a man or woman\ncould never be? An apparition\n with two dark\nand urgent eyes and motions\n so quick and precise\nthey were barely motions at all?\n When he was gone\nyou turned, alarmed by the rustling\n of oily feathers\nand the curious pungency,\n and were sure\nyou’d heard him say the words\n that could explain\nthe meaning of blond grasses\n burning on a hillside\nbeneath the hands of a man\n in the middle of\nhis life caught in the posture\n of prayer. I’d\nheard that a magpie could talk,\n so I waited\nfor the words, knowing without\n the least doubt\nwhat he’d do, for up ahead\n an old woman\nwaited on her wide front porch.\n My children\nbehind her house played\n in a silted pond\npoking sticks at the slow\n carp that flashed\nin the fallen sunlight. You\n are thirty-two\nonly once in your life, and though\n July comes\ntoo quickly, you pray for\n the overbearing\nheat to pass. It does, and\n the year turns\nbefore it holds still for\n even a moment.\nBeyond the last carob\n or Joshua tree\nthe magpie flashes his sudden\n wings; a second\nflames and vanishes into the pale\n blue air.\nJuly 23, 1960.\n I lean down\ncloser to hear the burned grasses\n whisper all I\nneed to know. The words rise\n around me, separate\nand finite. A yellow dust\n rises and stops\ncaught in the noon’s driving light.\n Three ants pass\nacross the back of my reddened\n right hand.\nEverything is speaking or singing.\n We’re still here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "making-it-work": { - "title": "“Making It Work”", - "body": "3-foot blue cannisters of nitro\nalong a conveyor belt, slow fish\nspeaking the language of silence.\nOn the roof, I in my respirator\npatching the asbestos gas lines\nas big around as the thick waist\nof an oak tree. “These here are\nthe veins of the place, stuff\ninside’s the blood.” We work in rain,\nheat, snow, sleet. First warm\nspring winds up from Ohio, I\npause at the top of the ladder\nto take in the wide world reaching\ndownriver and beyond. Sunlight\ndumped on standing and moving\nlines of freight cars, new fields\nof bright weeds blowing, scoured\nvalleys, false mountains of coke\nand slag. At the ends of sight\na rolling mass of clouds as dark\nas money brings the weather in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "making-light-of-it": { - "title": "“Making Light of It”", - "body": "I call out a secret name, the name\nof the angel who guards my sleep,\nand light grows in the east, a new light\nlike no other, as soft as the petals\nof the blown rose in late summer.\nYes, it is late summer in the West.\nEven the grasses climbing the Sierras\nreach for the next outcropping of rock\nwith tough, burned fingers. The thistle\nsheds its royal robes and quivers\nawake in the hot winds off the sun.\nA cloudless sky fills my room, the room\nI was born in and where my father sleeps\nhis long dark sleep guarding the name\nhe shared with me. I can follow the day\nto the black rags and corners it will\nscatter to because someone always\ngoes ahead burning the little candle\nof his breath, making light of it all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-mercy": { - "title": "“The Mercy”", - "body": "The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island\nEighty-three years ago was named “The Mercy.”\nShe remembers trying to eat a banana\nwithout first peeling it and seeing her first orange\nin the hands of a young Scot, a seaman\nwho gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her\nwith a red bandana and taught her the word,\n“orange,” saying it patiently over and over.\nA long autumn voyage, the days darkening\nwith the black waters calming as night came on,\nthen nothing as far as her eyes could see and space\nwithout limit rushing off to the corners\nof creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish\nto find her family in New York, prayers\nunheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored\nby all the powers that swept the waves of darkness\nbefore she woke, that kept “The Mercy” afloat\nwhile smallpox raged among the passengers\nand crew until the dead were buried at sea\nwith strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.\n“The Mercy,” I read on the yellowing pages of a book\nI located in a windowless room of the library\non 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days\noffshore in quarantine before the passengers\ndisembarked. There a story ends. Other ships\narrived, “Tancred” out of Glasgow, “The Neptune”\nregistered as Danish, “Umberto IV,”\nthe list goes on for pages, November gives\nway to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.\nItalian miners from Piemonte dig\nunder towns in western Pennsylvania\nonly to rediscover the same nightmare\nthey left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels\nall night by train with one suitcase and an orange.\nShe learns that mercy is something you can eat\nagain and again while the juice spills over\nyour chin, you can wipe it away with the back\nof your hands and you can never get enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "milkweed": { - "title": "“Milkweed”", - "body": "Remember how unimportant\nthey seemed, growing loosely\nin the open fields we crossed\non the way to school. We\nwould carve wooden swords\nand slash at the luscious trunks\nuntil the white milk started\nand then flowed. Then we’d\ngo on to the long day\nafter day of the History of History\nor the tables of numbers and order\nas the clock slowly paid\nout the moments. The windows\nwent dark first with rain\nand then snow, and then the days,\nthen the years ran together and not\none mattered more than\nanother, and not one mattered.\n\nTwo days ago I walked\nthe empty woods, bent over,\ncrunching through oak leaves,\nasking myself questions\nwithout answers. From somewhere\na froth of seeds drifted by touched\nwith gold in the last light\nof a lost day, going with\nthe wind as they always did.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "my-fathers-the-baltic": { - "title": "“My Fathers, the Baltic”", - "body": "Along the strand stones,\nbusted shells, wood scraps,\nbottle tops, dimpled\nand stainless beer cans.\nSomething began here\na century ago,\na nameless disaster,\nperhaps a voyage\nto the lost continent\nwhere I was born.\nNow the cold winds\nof March dimple\nthe gray, incoming\nwaves. I kneel\non the wet earth\nlooking for a sign,\nmaybe an old coin,\nan amulet\nagainst storms,\nand find my face\nblackened in a pool\nof oil and water.\nMy grandfather crossed\nthis sea in ’04\nand never returned,\nso I’ve come alone\nto thank creation\nas he would never\nfor bringing him home\nto work, defeat,\nand death, those three\nblood brothers\nfaithful to the end.\nYusel Prishkulnick,\nI bless your laughter\nthrown in the wind’s face,\nyour gall, your rages,\nyour abiding love\nfor women and money\nand all that money\nnever bought,\nfor what the sea taught\nyou and you taught me:\nthat the waves go out\nand nothing comes back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-new-world": { - "title": "“The New World”", - "body": "A man roams the streets with a basket\nof freestone peaches hollering, “Peaches,\npeaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale.”\n\nMy grandfather in his prime could outshout\nthe Tigers of Wrath or the factory whistles\nalong the river. Hamtramck hungered\n\nfor yellow freestone peaches, downriver\nwakened from a dream of work, Zug Island danced\ninto the bright day glad to be alive.\n\nFull-figured women in their negligees\nstreamed into the streets from the dark doorways\nto demand in Polish or Armenian\n\nthe ripened offerings of this new world.\nJosef Prisckulnick out of Dubrovitsa\nto Detroit by way of Ellis Island\n\nraised himself regally to his full height\nof five feet two and transacted until\nthe fruit was gone into those eager hands.\n\nThus would there be a letter sent across\nan ocean and a continent, and thus\nwould Sadie waken to the news of wealth\n\nwithout limit in the bright and distant land,\nand thus bags were packed and she set sail\nfor America. Some of this is true.\n\nThe women were gaunt. All day the kids dug\nin the back lots searching for anything.\nThe place was Russia with another name.\n\nJoe was five feet two. Dubrovitsa burned\nto gray ashes the west wind carried off,\nthen Rovno went, then the Dnieper turned to dust.\n\nWe sat around the table telling lies\nwhile the late light filled an empty glass.\nBread, onions, the smell of burning butter,\n\nsmall white potatoes we shared with no one\nbecause the hour was wrong, the guest was late,\nand this was Michigan in 1928.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "night-thoughts-over-a-sick-child": { - "title": "“Night Thoughts over a Sick Child”", - "body": "Numb, stiff, broken by no sleep,\nI keep night watch. Looking for\nsigns to quiet fear, I creep\ncloser to his bed and hear\nhis breath come and go, holding\nmy own as if my own were\nall I paid. Nothing I bring,\nsay, or do has meaning here.\n\nOutside, ice crusts on river\nand pond; wild hare come to my\ndoor pacified by torture.\nNo less ignorant than they\nof what grips and why, I am\nmoved to prayer, the quaint gestures\nwhich ennoble beyond shame\nonly the mute listener.\n\nNo one hears. A dry wind shifts\ndry snow, indifferently;\nthe roof, rotting beneath drifts,\nsighs and holds. Terrified by\nsleep, the child strives toward\nconsciousness and the known pain.\nIf it were mine by one word\nI would not save any man,\n\nmyself or the universe\nat such cost: reality.\nHeir to an ancestral curse\nthough fallen from Judah’s tree,\nI take up into my arms my hopes,\nmy son, for what it’s worth give\nbodily warmth. When he escapes\nhis heritage, then what have\n\nI left but false remembrance\nand the name? Against that day\nthere is no armor or stance,\nonly the frail dignity\nof surrender, which is all\nthat can separate me now\nor then from the dumb beast’s fall,\nunseen in the frozen snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "night-words": { - "title": "“Night Words”", - "body": "A child wakens in a cold apartment.\nThe windows are frosted. Outside he hears\nwords rising from the streets, words he cannot\nunderstand, and then the semis gear down\nfor the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps\nagain and dreams of another city\non a high hill above a wide river\nbathed in sunlight, and the dream is his life\nas he will live it twenty years from now.\nNo, no, you say, dreams do not work that way,\nthey function otherwise. Perhaps in the world\nyou’re right, but on Houston tonight two men\nare trying to change a tire as snow gathers\non their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands.\nThe older one, the father, is close to tears,\nfor he’s sure his son, who’s drunk, is laughing\nsecretly at him for all his failures\nas a man and a father, and he is\nlaughing to himself but because he’s happy\nto be alone with his father as he was\nyears ago in another life where snow\nnever fell. At last he slips the tire iron\ngently from his father’s grip and kneels\ndown in the unstained snow and unbolts the wheel\nwhile he sings of drinking a glass of wine,\nthe black common wine of Alicante,\nin raw sunlight. Now the father joins in,\nand the words rise between the falling flakes\nonly to be transformed into the music\nspreading slowly over the oiled surface\nof the river that runs through every child’s dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "noon": { - "title": "“Noon”", - "body": "I bend to the ground\nto catch\nsomething whispered,\nurgent, drifting\nacross the ditches.\nThe heaviness of\nflies stuttering\nin orbit, dirt\nripening, the sweat\nof eggs. There are\n\nsmall streams\nthe width ofa thumb\nrunning in the villages\nof sheaves, whole\neras of grain\nwakening on\nthe stalks, a roof\nthat breathes over\nmy head. Behind me\n\nthe tracks creaking\nlike a harness,\nan abandoned bicycle\nthat cries and cries,\na bottle of common\nwine that won’t\npour.\nAt such times\nI expect the earth\nto pronounce. I say,\n“I’ve been waiting\nso long.” Up ahead\n\na stand of eucalyptus\nguards the river,\nthe river moving\neast, the heavy light\nsifts down driving\nthe sparrows for\ncover, and the women\nbow as they slap\nthe life out\nof sheets and pants\nand worn hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "once": { - "title": "“Once”", - "body": "Hungry and cold, I stood in a doorway\non Delancey Street in 1946\nas the rain came down. The worst part is this\nis not from a bad movie. I’d read Dos Passos’\nUSA and thought, “Before the night ends\nmy life will change.” A stranger would stop\nto ask for my help, a single stranger\nmore needy than I, if such a woman\nwere possible. I still had cigarettes,\ndamp matches, and an inaccurate map\nof Manhattan in my head, and the change\nfrom the one $20 traveler’s check\nI’d cashed in a dairy restaurant where\nthe amazed owner actually proclaimed\nto the busy heads, “They got Jews in Detroit!”\n\nYou can forgive the night. No one else was dumb\nenough to be out. Sure, it was Easter.\nWas I expecting crocus and lilac\nto burst from the pavement and sweeten\nthe air the way they did in Michigan once\nupon a time? This wouldn’t be so bad\nif you were only young once. Once would be fine.\nYou stand out in the rain once and get wet\nexpecting to enter fiction. You huddle\nunder the Williamsburg Bridge posing for Life.\nYou trek to the Owl Hotel to lie awake\nin a room the size of a cat box and smell\nthe dawn as it leaks under the shade\nwith the damp welcome you deserve. Just the once\nyou earn your doctorate in mismanagement.\n\nSo I was eighteen, once, fifty years ago,\na kid from a small town with big ideas.\nGatsby said if Detroit is your idea\nof a small town you need another idea,\nand I needed several. I retied my shoes, washed\nmy face, brushed my teeth with a furry tongue,\ncounted out my $11.80\non the broken bed, and decided the time\nhad come to mature. How else can I explain\nvoting for Adlai Stevenson once and once\nagain, planting a lemon tree in hard pan,\nloaning my Charlie Parker 78s\nto an out-of-work actor, eating pork loin\nbarbecued on Passover, tangoing\nperfectly without music even with you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "our-valley": { - "title": "“Our Valley”", - "body": "We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August\nwhen the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay\nof this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard\nwhen suddenly the wind cools and for a moment\nyou get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost\nbelieve something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,\nsomething massive, irrational, and so powerful even\nthe mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.\n\nYou probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains\nhave no word for ocean, but if you live here\nyou begin to believe they know everything.\nThey maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,\na silence that grows in autumn when snow falls\nslowly between the pines and the wind dies\nto less than a whisper and you can barely catch\nyour breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.\n\nYou have to remember this isn’t your land.\nIt belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside\nand thought was yours. Remember the small boats\nthat bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men\nwho carved a living from it only to find themselves\ncarved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,\nso go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,\nwait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2009 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "passing-out": { - "title": "“Passing Out”", - "body": "The doctor fingers my bruise.\n“Magnificent,” he says, “black\nat the edges and purple\ncored.” Seated, he spies for clues,\ngingerly probing the slack\nflesh, while I, standing, fazed, pull\n\nfor air, losing the battle.\nFaced by his aged diploma,\nthe heavy head of the X-\nray, and the iron saddle,\nI grow lonely. He finds my\nsecrets common and my sex\n\nneither objectionable\nnor lovely, though he is on\nthe hunt for significance.\nThe shelved cutlery twinkles\nbehind glass, and I am on\nthe way out, “an instance\n\nof the succumbed through extreme\nfantasy.” He is alarmed\nat last, and would raise me, but\nI am floorward in a dream\nof lowered trousers, unarmed\nand weakly fighting to shut\n\nthe window of my drawers.\nThere are others in the room,\nvoices of women above\nwhite oxfords; and the old floor,\nthe friendly linoleum,\ndeparts. I whisper, “my love,”\n\nand am safe, tabled, sniffing\nspirits of ammonia\nin the land of my fellows.\n“Open house!” my openings\nsing: pores, nose, anus let go\ntheir charges, a shameless flow\n\ninto the outer world;\nand the ceiling, equipped with\nintelligence, surveys my\nproduce. The doctor is thrilled\nby my display, for he is half\nthe slave of necessity;\n\nI, enormous in my need,\njustify his sciences.\n“We have alternatives,” he\nsays, “Removal …” (And my blood\nwhitens as on their dull trays\nthe tubes dance. I must study\n\nthe dark bellows of the gas\nmachine, the painless maker.)\n“… and learning to live with it.”\nOh, but I am learning fast\nto live with any pain, ache,\ngrowth to keep myself intact;\n\nand in imagination\nI hug my bruise like an old\nPooh Bear, already attuned\nto its moods. “Oh, my dark one,\ntell of the coming of cold\nand of Kings, ancient and ruined.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "picture-postcard-from-the-other-world": { - "title": "“Picture Postcard from the Other World”", - "body": "Since I don’t know who will be reading\nthis or even if it will be read, I must\ninvent someone on the other end\nof eternity, a distant cousin laboring\nunder the same faint stars I labored\nall those unnumbered years ago. I make you\nlike me in everything I can--a man\nor woman in middle years who having\nlost whatever faiths he held goes on\nwith only the faith that even more\nwill be lost. Like me a wanderer,\nsomeone with a taste for coastal towns\nsparkling in the cold winter sun, boardwalks\nwithout walkers, perfect beaches shrouded\nin the dense fogs of December, morning cafes\nbefore the second customer arrives,\nthe cats have been fed, and the proprietor\nstops muttering into the cold dishwater.\nI give you the gift of language, my gift\nand no more, so that wherever you go\nwords fall around you meaning no more\nthan the full force of their making, and you\ntranslate the clicking of teeth against\nteeth and tongue as morning light spilling\ninto the enclosed squares of a white town,\nbreath drawn in and held as the ocean\nwhen no one sees it, the waves still,\nthe fishing boats drift in a calm beyond sleep.\nThe gift of sleep, too, and the waking\nfrom it day after day without knowing\nwhy the small sunlit room with its single bed,\nwhite counterpane going yellow, and bare floor\nholds itself with such assurance\nwhile the flaming nebulae of dust\nswirl around you. And the sense not to ask.\nLike me you rise immediately and sit\non the bed’s edge and let whatever dream\nof a childhood home or a rightful place\nyou had withdraw into the long shadows\nof the tilted wardrobe and the one chair.\nBefore you’ve even washed your face you\nsee it on the bedoilied chiffonier--there,\nbalanced precariously on the orange you bought\nat yesterday’s market and saved for now.\nSomeone entered soundlessly while you slept\nand left you sleeping and left this postcard\nfrom me and thought to close the door\nwith no more fuss than the moon makes.\nThere’s your name in black ink in a hand\nas familiar as your own and not\nyour own, and the address even you\ndidn’t know you’d have an hour before\nyou got it. When you turn it over,\nthere it is, not the photo of a star,\nor the bright sailboats your sister would\nhave chosen or the green urban meadows\nmy brother painted. What is it? It could be\nanother planet just after its birth\nexcept that at the center the colors\nare earth colors. It could be the cloud\nthat formed above the rivers of our blood,\nthe one that brought rain to a dry time\nor took wine from a hungry one. It could\nbe my way of telling you that I too\nburned and froze by turns and the face I\ncame to was more dirt than flame, it\ncould be the face I put on everything,\nor it could be my way of saying\nnothing and saying it perfectly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "the-present": { - "title": "“The Present”", - "body": "The day comes slowly in the railyard\nbehind the ice factory. It broods on\none cinder after another until each\nglows like lead or the eye of a dog\npossessed of no inner fire, the brown\nand greasy pointer who raises his muzzle\na moment and sighing lets it thud\ndown on the loading dock. In no time\nthe day has crossed two sets of tracks,\na semi-trailer with no tractor, and crawled\ndown three stories of the bottling plant\nat the end of the alley. It is now\nless than five hours until mid-day\nwhen nothing will be left in doubt,\neach scrap of news, each banished carton,\neach forgotten letter, its ink bled of lies,\nwill stare back at the one eye that sees\nit all and never blinks. But for now\nthere is water settling in a clean glass\non the shelf beside the razor, the slap\nof bare feet on the floor above. Soon\nthe scent of rivers borne across roof\nafter roof by winds without names,\nthe aroma of opened beds better left\nclosed, of mouths without teeth, of light\nrustling among the mice droppings\nat the back of a bin of potatoes.\n\nThe old man who sleeps among the cases\nof empty bottles in a little nest of rags\nand newspapers at the back of the plant\nis not an old man. He is twenty years\nyounger than I am now putting this down\nin permanent ink on a yellow legal pad\nduring a crisp morning in October.\nWhen he fell from a high pallet, his sleeve\ncaught on a nail and spread his arms\nlike a figure out of myth. His head\ntore open on a spear of wood, and he\nswore in French. No, he didn’t want\na doctor. He wanted toilet paper\nand a drink, which were fetched. He used\nthe tiny bottle of whisky to straighten\nout his eyes and the toilet paper to clean\nhis pants, fouled in the fall, and he did\nboth with seven teenage boys looking on\nin wonder and fear. At last the blood\nslowed and caked above his ear, and he\nnever once touched the wound. Instead,\nin a voice no one could hear, he spoke\nto himself, probably in French, and smoked\nsitting back against a pallet, his legs\nthrust out on the damp cement floor.\n\nIn his white coveralls, crisp and pressed,\nTeddy the Polack told us a fat tit\nwould stop a toothache, two a headache.\nHe told it to anyone who asked, and grinned--\nthe small eyes watering at the corners--\nas Alcibiades might have grinned\nwhen at last he learned that love leads\neven the body beloved to a moment\nin the present when desire calms, the skin\nglows, the soul takes the light of day,\neven a working day in 1944.\nFor Baharozian at seventeen the present\nwas a gift. Seeing my ashen face,\nthe cold sweats starting, he seated me\nin a corner of the boxcar and did\nboth our jobs, stacking the full cases\nneatly row upon row and whistling\nthe songs of Kate Smith. In the bathroom\nthat night I posed naked before the mirror,\nthe new cross of hair staining my chest,\nplunging to my groin. That was Wednesday,\nfor every Wednesday ended in darkness.\n\nOne of those teenage boys was my brother.\nThat night as we lay in bed, the lights\nout, we spoke of Froggy, of how at first\nwe thought he would die and how little\nhe seemed to care as the blood rose\nto fill and overflow his ear. Slowly\nthe long day came over us and our breath\nquieted and eased at last, and we slept.\nWhen I close my eyes now his bare legs\nglow before me again, pure and lovely\nin their perfect whiteness, the buttocks\ndimpled and firm. I see again the rope\nof his sex, unwrinkled, flushed and swaying,\nthe hard flat belly as he raises his shirt\nto clean himself. He gazes at no one\nor nothing, but seems instead to look off\ninto a darkness I hadn’t seen, a pool\nof shadow that forms before his eyes,\nin my memory now as solid as onyx.\n\nI began this poem in the present\nbecause nothing is past. The ice factory,\nthe bottling plant, the cindered yard\nall gave way to a low brick building\na block wide and windowless where they\ndesigned gun mounts for personnel carriers\nthat never made it to Korea. My brother\nrises early, and on clear days he walks\nto the corner to have toast and coffee.\nSeventeen winters have melted into an earth\nof stone, bottle caps, and old iron to carry\noff the hard remains of Froggy Frenchman\nwithout a blessing or a stone to bear it.\nA little spar of him the size of a finger,\npointed and speckled as though blood-flaked,\nwashed ashore from Lake Erie near Buffalo\nbefore the rest slipped down the falls out\ninto the St. Lawrence. He could be at sea,\nhe could be part of an ocean, by now\nhe could even be home. This morning I\nrose later than usual in a great house\nfull of sunlight, but I believe it came\ndown step by step on each wet sheet\nof wooden siding before it crawled\nfrom the ceiling and touched my pillow\nto waken me. When I heave myself\nout of this chair with a great groan of age\nand stand shakily, the three mice still\nin the wall. From across the lots\nthe wind brings voices I can’t make out,\nscraps of song or sea sounds, daylight\nbreaking into dust, the perfume of waiting\nrain, of onions and potatoes frying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-rains": { - "title": "“The Rains”", - "body": "The river rises\nand the rains keep coming.\nMy Papa says\nit can’t flood for\nthe water can run\naway as fast as\nit comes down. I believe\nhim because he’s Papa\nand because I’m afraid\nofwater I know I can’t stop.\nAll day in school I\nsee the windows darken,\nand hearing the steady drum\nof rain, I wonder\nif it wil1 ever stop\nand how can I get home.\n\nIt did not flood.\nI cannot now remember\nhow I got home.\nI recall only that the house\nwas dark and cold, and I went\nfrom room to room calling\nout the names\nof all those I lived with\nand no one answered. For a time\nI thought the waters had swept\nthem out to sea\nand this was all I had. At last\nI heard the door opening\ndownstairs and my brother\nstamping his wet boots\non the mat.\n\nNow when the autumn comes\nI go alone\ninto the high mountains\nor sometimes with my wife,\nand we walk in silence\ndown the trails\nof pine needles\nand hear the winds\nhumming through the branches\nthe long dirge of the world.\nBelow us is the world\nwe cannot see, have come\nnot to see, soured\nwith years of never\ngiving enough, darkened\nwith oils and fire, the world\nwe could have come\nto call home.\n\nOne day the rain\nwill find us far\nfrom anything, crossing\nthe great meadows\nthe sun had hidden in.\nHand in hand, we\nwill go forward toward nothing\nwhile our clothes darken\nand our faces stream\nwith the sweet waters\nof heaven. Your eyes,\nsuddenly deep and dark in that light,\nwill overflow with joy\nor sadness, with all\nyou have no names for.\nThis is who you are.\nThat other life below\nwas what you dreamed\nand I am the man beside you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-rat-of-faith": { - "title": "“The Rat of Faith”", - "body": "A blue jay poses on a stake\nmeant to support an apple tree\nnewly planted. A strong wind\non this clear cold morning\nbarely ruffles his tail feathers.\nWhen he turns his attention\ntoward me, I face his eyes\nwithout blinking. A week ago\nmy wife called me to come see\nthis same bird chase a rat\ninto the thick leaves\nof an orange tree. We came as\nclose as we could and watched\nthe rat dig his way into an orange,\nclaws working meticulously.\nThen he feasted, face deep\ninto the meal, and afterwards\nwashed himself in juice, paws\nscrubbing soberly. Surprised\nby the whiteness of the belly,\nhow open it was and vulnerable,\nI suggested I fetch my .22.\nShe said, “Do you want to kill him?”\nI didn’t. There are oranges\nenough for him, the jays, and us,\nacross the fence in the yard\nnext door oranges rotting\non the ground. There is power\nin the name rat, a horror\nthat may be private. When I\nwas a boy and heir to tales\nof savagery, of sleeping men\nand kids eaten half away before\nthey could wake, I came to know\nthat horror. I was afraid\nthat left alive the animal\nwould invade my sleep, grown\nimmense now and powerful\nwith the need to eat flesh.\nI was wrong. Night after night\nI wake from dreams of a city\nlike no other, the bright city\nof beauty I thought I’d lost\nwhen I lost my faith that one day\nwe would come into our lives.\nThe wind gusts and calms\nshaking this miniature budding\napple tree that in three months\nhas taken to the hard clay\nof our front yard. In one hop\nthe jay turns his back on me,\ndips as though about to drink\nthe air itself, and flies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "red-dust": { - "title": "“Red Dust”", - "body": "This harpie with dry red curls\ntalked openly of her husband,\nhis impotence, his death, the death\nof her lover, the birth and death\nof her own beauty. She stared\ninto the mirror next to\nour table littered with the wreck\nof her appetite and groaned:\nLook what you’ve done to me!\nas though only that moment\nshe’d discovered her own face.\nLook, and she shoved the burden\nof her ruin on the waiter.\n\nI do not believe in sorrow;\nit is not American.\nAt 8,000 feet the towns\nof this blond valley smoke\nlike the thin pipes of the Chinese,\nand I go higher where the air\nis clean, thin, and the underside\nof light is clearer than the light.\nAbove the tree line the pines\ncrowd below like moments of the past\nand on above the snow line\nthe cold underside of my arm,\nthe half in shadow, sweats with fear\nas though it lay along the edge\nof revelation.\n\nAnd so my mind closes around\na square oil can crushed on the road\none morning, startled it was not\nthe usual cat. If a crow\nhad come out of the air to choose\nits entrails could I have laughed?\nIf eagles formed now in the\nshocked vegetation of my sight\nwould they be friendly? I can hear\ntheir wings lifting them down, the feathers\ntipped with red dust, that dust which\neven here I taste, having eaten it\nall these years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-return": { - "title": "“The Return”", - "body": "All afternoon my father drove the country roads\nbetween Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for\nI never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,\nthough he would grab any unfamiliar side road\nand follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn\nin August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.\nOften he’d leave the Terraplane beside the highway\nto enter the stunned silence of mid-September,\nhis eyes cast down for a sign, the only music\nhis own breath or the wind tracking slowly through\nthe stalks or riding above the barren ground. Later\nhe’d come home, his dress shoes coated with dust or mud,\nhis long black overcoat stained or tattered\nat the hem, sit wordless in his favorite chair,\nhis necktie loosened, and stare at nothing. At first\nmy brothers and I tried conversation, questions\nonly he could answer: Why had he gone to war?\nWhere did he learn Arabic? Where was his father?\nI remember none of this. I read it all later,\nyears later as an old man, a grandfather myself,\nin a journal he left my mother with little drawings\nof ruined barns and telephone poles, receding\ntoward a future he never lived, aphorisms\nfrom Montaigne, Juvenal, Voltaire, and perhaps a few\nof his own: “He who looks for answers finds questions.”\nThree times he wrote, “I was meant to be someone else,”\nand went on to describe the perfumes of the damp fields.\n“It all starts with seeds,” and a pencil drawing\nof young apple trees he saw somewhere or else dreamed.\n\nI inherited the book when I was almost seventy\nand with it the need to return to who we were.\nIn the Detroit airport I rented a Taurus;\nthe woman at the counter was bored or crazy:\nDid I want company? she asked; she knew every road\nfrom here to Chicago. She had a slight accent,\nDutch or German, long black hair, and one frozen eye.\nI considered but decided to go alone,\ndetermined to find what he had never found.\nSlowly the autumn morning warmed, flocks of starlings\nrose above the vacant fields and blotted out the sun.\nI drove on until I found the grove of apple trees\nheavy with fruit, and left the car, the motor running,\nbeside a sagging fence, and entered his life\non my own for maybe the first time. A crow welcomed\nme home, the sun rode above, austere and silent,\nthe early afternoon was cloudless, perfect.\nWhen the crow dragged itself off to another world,\nthe shade deepened slowly in pools that darkened around\nthe trees; for a moment everything in sight stopped.\nThe wind hummed in my good ear, not words exactly,\nnot nonsense either, nor what I spoke to myself,\njust the language creation once wakened to.\nI took off my hat, a mistake in the presence\nof my father’s God, wiped my brow with what I had,\nthe back of my hand, and marveled at what was here:\nnothing at all except the stubbornness of things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "salts-and-oils": { - "title": "“Salts and Oils”", - "body": "In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog\nbelieving it was Peking duck. Later,\nin Tampa I bunked with an insane sailor\nwho kept a .38 Smith and Wesson in his shorts.\nIn the same room were twins, oilers\nfrom Toledo, who argued for hours\neach night whose turn it was\nto get breakfast and should he turn\nthe eggs or not. On the way north\nI lived for three days on warm water\nin a DC-6 with a burned out radio\non the runway at Athens, Georgia. We sang\na song, “Georgia’s Big Behind,” and prayed\nfor WWIII and complete, unconditional surrender.\nNapping in an open field near Newport News,\nI chewed on grass while the shadows of September\nlengthened; in the distance a man hammered\non the roof of a hangar and groaned how he\nwas out of luck and vittles. Bummed a ride\nin from Mitchell Field and had beet borscht\nand white bread at 34th and 8th Avenue.\nI threw up in the alley behind the YMCA\nand slept until they turned me out.\nI walked the bridge to Brooklyn\nwhile the East River browned below.\nA mile from Ebbetts Field, from all\nthat history, I found Murray, my papa’s\nbuddy, in his greasy truck shop, polishing\nreplacement parts. Short, unshaven, puffed,\nhe strutted the filthy aisles,\na tiny Ghengis Khan. He sent out for soup\nand sandwiches. The world turned on barley,\npickled meats, yellow mustard, kasha,\nrye breads. It rained in October, rained\nso hard I couldn’t walk and smoke, so I\nchewed pepsin chewing gum. The rain\nspoiled Armistice Day in Lancaster, Pa.\nThe open cars overflowed, girls cried,\nthe tubas and trombones went dumb,\nthe floral displays shredded, the gutters\nclogged with petals. Afterwards had ham\non buttered whole-wheat bread, ham\nand butter for the first time\non the same day in Zanesville with snow\nforecast, snow, high winds, closed roads,\nsolid darkness before 5 p.m. These were not\nthe labors of Hercules, these were not\nof meat or moment to anyone but me\nor destined for story or to learn from\nor to make me fit to take the hand\nof a toad or a toad princess or to stand\nin line for food stamps. One quiet morning\nat the end of my thirteenth year a little bird\nwith a dark head and tattered tail feathers\nhad come to the bedroom window and commanded\nme to pass through the winding miles\nof narrow dark corridors and passageways\nof my growing body the filth and glory\nof the palatable world. Since then I’ve\nbeen going out and coming back\nthe way a swallow does with unerring grace\nand foreknowledge because all of this\nwas prophesied in the final, unread book\nof the Midrash and because I have to\ngrow up and because it pleases me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "sierra-kid": { - "title": "“Sierra Kid”", - "body": "_“I’ve been where it hurts.”_\n --the Kid\n\n\n_He becomes Sierra Kid_\n\nI passed Slimgullion, Morgan Mine,\nCamp Seco, and the rotting Lode.\nDark walls of sugar pine--,\nAnd where I left the road\n\nI left myself behind;\nTalked to no one, thought\nOf nothing. When my luck ran out\nLived on berries, nuts, bleached grass.\nDriven by the wind\nThrough great Sonora pass,\n\nI found an Indian’s teeth;\nTurned and climbed again\nWithout direction, compass, path,\nWithout a way of coming down,\nUntil I stopped somewhere\nAnd gave the place a name.\n\nI called the forests mine;\nWhatever I could hear\nI took to be a voice: a man\nWas something I would never hear.\n\n\n_He faces his second winter in the Sierra_\n\nA hard brown bug, maybe a beetle,\nPacking a ball of sparrow shit--\nWhat shall I call it?\nShit beetle? Why’s it pushing here\nAt this great height in the thin air\nWith its ridiculous waddle\n\nUp the hard side of Hard Luck Hill?\nAnd the furred thing that frightened me--\nBobcat, coyote, wild dog--\nFlat eyes in winter bush, stiff tail\nHolding his ground, a rotted log.\nGrass snakes that wouldn’t die,\n\nAnd night hawks hanging on the rim\nOf what was mine. I know them now;\nThey have absorbed a mind\nWhich must endure the freezing snow\nThey endure and, freezing, find\nA clear sustaining stream.\n\n\n_He learns to lose_\n\nShe was afraid\nOf everything,\nThe little Digger girl.\nPah Utes had killed\nHer older brother\nWho may have been her lover\nThe way she cried\nOver his ring--\n\nThe heavy brass\nOn the heavy hand.\nShe carried it for weeks\nClenched in her fist\nAs if it might\nKeep out the loneliness\nOr the plain fact\nThat he was gone.\n\nWhen the first snows\nBegan to fall\nShe stopped her crying, picked\nBerries, sweet grass,\nMended her clothes\nAnd sewed a patchwork shawl.\nWe slept together\nBut did not speak.\n\nIt may have been\nThe Pah Utes took\nHer off, perhaps her kin.\nI came back\nTo find her gone\nWith half the winter left\nTo face alone--\nThe slow grey dark\n\nMoving along\nThe dark tipped grass\nBetween the numbed pines.\nNight after night\nFor four long months\nMy face to her dark face\nWe two had lain\nTill the first light.\n\n\n_Civilization comes to Sierra Kid_\n\nThey levelled Tater Hill\nAnd I was sick.\nFirst sun, and the chain saws\nComing on; blue haze,\nDull blue exhaust\nRising, dust rising, and the smell.\n\nMoving from their thatched huts\nThe crazed wood rats\nBy the thousand; grouse, spotted quail\nAbandoning the hills\nFor the sparse trail\nOn which, exposed, I also packed.\n\nSix weeks. I went back down\nThrough my own woods\nAfraid of what I knew they’d done.\nThere, there, an A&P,\nAnd not a tree\nFor Miles, and mammoth hills of goods.\n\nFat men in uniforms,\nYoung men in aprons\nWith one face shouting, “He is mad!”\nI answered: “I am Lincoln,\nAaron Burr,\nThe aging son of Appleseed.”\n\n“I am American\nAnd I am cold.”\nBut not a one would hear me out.\nOh God, what have I seen\nThat was not sold!\nThey shot an old man in the gut.\n\n\n_Mad, dying, Sierra Kid enters the capital_\n\nWhat have I changed?\nI unwound burdocks from my hair\nAnd scalded stains\nOf the black grape\nAnd hid beneath long underwear\nThe yellowed tape.\n\nWho will they find\nIn the dark woods of the dark mind\nNow I have gone\nInto the world?\nAcross the blazing civic lawn\nA shadow’s hurled\n\nAnd I must follow.\nSomething slides beneath my vest\nLike melted tallow,\nThick but thin,\nBurning where it comes to rest\nOn what was skin.\n\nWho will they find?\nA man with no eyes in his head?\nOr just a mind\nCalm and alone?\nOr just a mouth, silent, dead,\nThe lips half gone?\n\nWill they presume\nThat someone once was half alive\nAnd that the air\nWas massive where\nThe sickening pyracanthus thrive\nStaining his tomb?\n\nI came to touch\nThe great heart of a dying state.\nHere is the wound!\nIt makes no sound.\nAll that we learn we learn too late,\nAnd it’s not much.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-simple-truth": { - "title": "“The Simple Truth”", - "body": "I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,\ntook them home, boiled them in their jackets\nand ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.\nThen I walked through the dried fields\non the edge of town. In middle June the light\nhung on in the dark furrows at my feet,\nand in the mountain oaks overhead the birds\nwere gathering for the night, the jays and mockers\nsquawking back and forth, the finches still darting\ninto the dusty light. The woman who sold me\nthe potatoes was from Poland; she was someone\nout of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses\npraising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables\nat the road-side stand and urging me to taste\neven the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,\nshe swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat” she said,\n“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.” Some things\n\nyou know all your life. They are so simple and true\nthey must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,\nthey must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,\nthe glass of water, the absence of light gathering\nin the shadows of picture frames, they must be\nnaked and alone, they must stand for themselves.\nMy friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965\nbefore I went away, before he began to kill himself,\nand the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste\nwhat I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch\nof simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,\nit stays in the back of your throat like a truth\nyou never uttered because the time was always wrong,\nit stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,\nmade of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,\nin a form we have no words for, and you live on it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "small-game": { - "title": "“Small Game”", - "body": "In borrowed boots which don’t fit\nand an old olive greatcoat,\nI hunt the corn-fed rabbit,\ngame fowl, squirrel, starved bobcat,\nanything small. I bring down\nyoung deer wandered from the doe’s\ngaze, and reload, and move on\nleaving flesh to inform crows.\n\nAt dusk they seem to suspect\nme, burrowed in a corn field\nverging their stream. The unpecked\nstalks call them. Nervous, they yield\nto what they must: hunger, thirst,\nhabit. Closer and closer\ncomes the scratching which at first\nsounds like sheaves clicked together.\n\nI know them better than they\nthemselves, so I win. At night\nthe darkness is against me.\nI can’t see enough to sight\nmy weapon, which becomes freight\nto be endured or at best\na crutch to ease swollen feet\nthat demand but don’t get rest\n\nunless I invade your barn,\nwhich I do. Under my dark\ncoat, monstrous and vague, I turn\ndown your lane, float through the yard,\nand roost. Or so I appear\nto you who call me spirit\nor devil, though I’m neither.\nWhat’s more, under all, I’m white\n\nand soft, more like yourself than\nyou ever would have guessed before\nyou claimed your barn with shot gun,\ntorch, and hounds. Why am I here?\nWhat do I want? Who am I?\nYou demand from the blank mask\nwhich amuses the dogs. Leave me!\nI do your work so why ask?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "smoke": { - "title": "“Smoke”", - "body": "Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?\nIt was. The city was vanishing before noon\nor was it earlier than that? I can’t say because\nthe light came from nowhere and went nowhere.\nThis was years ago, before you were born, before\nyour parents met in a bus station downtown.\nShe’d come on Friday after work all the way\nfrom Toledo, and he’d dressed in his only suit.\n\nBack then we called this a date, some times\na blind date, though they’d written back and forth\nfor weeks. What actually took place is now lost.\nIt’s become part of the mythology of a family,\n\nthe stories told by children around the dinner table.\nNo, they aren’t dead, they’re just treated that way,\nas objects turned one way and then another\nto catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.\n\nGo back to the beginning, you insist. Why\nis the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work.\nWork was something that thrived on fire, that without\nfire couldn’t catch its breath or hang on for life.\n\nWe came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash,\nWilliams, and I, it was late March, a new war\nwas starting up in Asia or closer to home,\none that meant to kill us, but for a moment\n\nthe air held still in the gray poplars and elms\nundoing their branches. I understood the moon\nfor the very first time, why it came and went, why\nit wasn’t there that day to greet the four of us.\n\nBefore the bus came a small black bird settled\non the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up\nas though questioning the day. “A baby crow,”\nsomeone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement,\n\nhis lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly\nfor a long time. “A grackle far from home,” he said.\nOne of the four of us mentioned tenderness,\na word I wasn’t used to, so it wasn’t me.\n\nThe bus must have arrived. I’m not there today.\nThe windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that\nover the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue,\nheading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "something-has-fallen": { - "title": "“Something Has Fallen”", - "body": "Something has fallen wordlessly\nand holds still on the black driveway.\n\nYou find it, like a jewel,\namong the empty bottles and cans\n\nwhere the dogs toppled the garbage.\nYou pick it up, not sure\n\nif it is stone or wood\nor some new plastic made\n\nto replace them both.\nWhen you raise your sunglasses\n\nto see exactly what you have\nyou see it is only a shadow\n\nthat has darkened your fingers,\na black ink or oil,\n\nand your hand suddenly smells\nof c1assrooms when the rain\n\npounded the windows and you\nshuddered thinking of the cold\n\nand the walk back to an empty house.\nYou smell all of your childhood,\n\nthe damp bed you struggled from\nto dress in half-light and go out\n\ninto a world that never tired.\nLater, your hand thickened and flat\n\nslid out of a rubber glove,\nas you stood, your mask raised,\n\nto light a cigarette and rest\nwhile the acid tanks that were\n\nyours to dean went on bathing\nthe arteries of broken sinks.\n\nRemember, you were afraid\nof the great hissing jugs.\n\nThere were stories of burnings,\nof flesh shredded to lace.\n\nOn other nights men spoke\nof rats as big as dogs.\n\nWomen spoke of men\nwho trapped them in corners.\n\nAlways there was grease that hid\nthe faces of worn faucets, grease\n\nthat had to be eaten one\nfinger-print at a time,\n\nthere was oil, paint, blood,\nyour own blood sliding across\n\nyour nose and running over\nyour lips with that bright, certain\n\ntaste that was neither earth\nor air, and there was air,\n\nthe darkest element of all,\nfalling all night\n\ninto the bruised river\nyou slept beside, falling\n\ninto the glass of water\nyou filled two times for breakfast\n\nand the eyes you turned upward\nto see what time it was.\n\nAir that stained everything\nwith its millions of small deaths,\n\nthat turned all five fingers\nto grease or black ink or ashes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "songs": { - "title": "“Songs”", - "body": "Dawn coming in over the fields\nof darkness takes me by surprise\nand I look up from my solitary road\npleased not to be alone, the birds\nnow choiring from the orange groves\nhuddling to the low hills. But sorry\nthat this night has ended, a night\nin which you spoke of how little love\nwe seemed to have known and all of it\ngoing from one of us to the other.\nYou could tell the words took me\nby surprise, as they often will, and you\ngrew shy and held me away for a while,\nyour eyes enormous in the darkness,\nalmost as large as your hunger\nto see and be seen over and over.\n\n30 years ago I heard a woman sing\nof the motherless child sometimes\nshe felt like. In a white dress\nthis black woman with a gardenia\nin her hair leaned on the piano\nand stared out into the breathing darkness\nof unknown men and women needing\nher songs. There were those among\nus who cried, those who rejoiced\nthat she was back before us for a time,\na time not to be much longer, for\nthe voice was going and the habits\nslowly becoming all there was of her.\n\nAnd I believe that night she cared\nfor the purity of the songs and not\nmuch else. Oh, she still saw\nthe slow gathering of that red dusk\nthat hovered over her cities, and no\ndoubt dawns like this one caught\nher on the roads from job to job,\nbut the words she’d lived by were\ndrained of mystery as this sky\nis now, and there was no more “Easy\nLiving” and she was “Miss Brown” to\nno one and no one was her “Lover Man.”\nThe only songs that mattered were wordless\nlike those rising in confusion from\nthe trees or wind-songs that waken\nthe grass that slept a century, that\nwaken me to how far we’ve come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "At Ox Bow beach, the August sun a rake\nThat ground the skull. Fouled in the mud and reeds\nI dug oars for the center of the lake,\nWhipping away the strangling spawn of weeds.\nI found a ten foot hole and dove to where\nThe squashed-in beer cans played with fire. The sun\nWas hunting even here. Heavy for air,\nI saw the trumpet yellow lily run\nBetween the junk and rocks, too soft for hands.\nSurfaced. The old man in the prow awake.\nBeneath his parasol he growled commands\nAnd damned me and that hot and rotten lake.\n\nToward dusk, out from the gray and falling dock\nI cast without a hook, scribbling the scum\nThat jelled above my line. As mute as rock\nThe sky was closing round the reel’s thin scream.\nBehind the cottage back and forth he swung\nAs back and forth I pushed the infant’s swing\nHung many years ago with his own care\nFrom what was now an old and broken oak\nBack and then forth. I thought the tree would tear.\nIt moaned so loud that even he awoke.\n\nLater beneath a bare electric light\nWe were contenders circled by defeat--\nWith beer and rummy quarreling toward the night.\nIn order not to win I had to cheat\nAnd still I won and it was he who paid,\nFingering through the wallet stuffed and frayed\nWith trust, to name and separate the bills\nAnd slap them on the table with a curse\nFor all they cost. After the yellow pills\nThe red--then sleep, a more than patient nurse.\n\nAnd it was I who couldn’t sleep, who heard\nThe sound of something sucking up the lake,\nA human laugh that couldn’t be a bird\nBut was, and had to see if I could wake\nHim from his sleep and did and lost my head\nFrom fear of what he nuzzled toward in bed.\nI could have pushed the rowboat from the dock\nAnd pulled away and left him there awake.\nI stayed, though not because I had some share\nIn what I knew would come. Out on the lake\nWhatever had been stirring settled back\nAnd waited for the sun to fix its stare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "then": { - "title": "“Then”", - "body": "A solitary apartment house, the last one\nbefore the boulevard ends and a dusty road\nwinds its slow way out of town. On the third floor\nthrough the dusty windows Karen beholds\nthe elegant couples walking arm in arm\nin the public park. It is Saturday afternoon,\nand she is waiting for a particular young man\nwhose name I cannot now recall, if name\nhe ever had. She runs the thumb of her left hand\nacross her finger tips and feels the little tags\nof flesh the needle made that morning at work\nand wonders if he will feel them. She loves her work,\nthe unspooling of the wide burgundy ribbons\nthat tumble across her lap, the delicate laces,\nthe heavy felts for winter, buried now that spring\nis rising in the trees. She recalls a black hat\nhidden in a deep drawer in the back of the shop.\nShe made it in February when the snows piled\nas high as her waist, and the river stopped at noon,\nand she thought she would die. She had tried it on,\na small, close-fitting cap, almost nothing,\npinned down at front and back. Her hair tumbled\nout at the sides in dark rags. When she turned\nit around, the black felt cupped her forehead\nperfectly, the teal feathers trailing out behind,\ntwin cool jets of flame. Suddenly he is here.\nAs she goes to the door, the dark hat falls back\ninto the closed drawer of memory to wait\nuntil the trees are bare and the days shut down\nabruptly at five. They touch, cheek to cheek,\nand only there, both bodies stiffly arched apart.\nAs she draws her white gloves on, she can smell\nthe heat rising from his heavy laundered shirt,\nshe can almost feel the weight of the iron\nhissing across the collar. It’s cool out, he says,\ncooler than she thinks. There are tiny dots\nof perspiration below his hairline. What a day\nfor strolling in the park! Refusing the chair\nby the window, he seems to have no time,\nas though this day were passing forever,\nalthough it is barely after two of a late May\nafternoon a whole year before the modern era.\nOf course she’ll take a jacket, she tells him,\nof course she was planning to, and she opens her hands,\nthe fingers spread wide to indicate the enormity\nof his folly, for she has on only a blouse,\nprotection against nothing. In the bedroom\nshe considers a hat, something dull and proper\nas a rebuke, but shaking out her glowing hair\nshe decides against it. The jacket is there,\nthe arms spread out on the bed, the arms\nof a dressed doll or a soldier at attention\nor a boy modelling his first suit, my own arms\nwhen at six I stood beside my sister waiting\nto be photographed. She removes her gloves\nto feel her balled left hand pass through the silk\nof the lining, and then her right, fingers open.\nAs she buttons herself in, she watches\na slow wind moving through the planted fields\nbehind the building. She stops and stares.\nWhat was that dark shape she saw a moment\ntrembling between the sheaves? The sky lowers,\nthe small fat cypresses by the fields’ edge\npart, and something is going. Is that the way\nshe too must take? The world blurs before her eyes\nor her sight is failing. I cannot take her hand,\nthen or now, and lead her to a resting place\nwhere our love matters. She stands frozen\nbefore the twenty-third summer of her life,\nsomeone I know, someone I will always know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "they-feed-they-lion": { - "title": "“They Feed They Lion”", - "body": "Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,\nOut of black bean and wet slate bread,\nOut of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,\nOut of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,\nThey Lion grow.\n Out of the gray hills\nOf industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,\nWest Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,\nMothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,\nOut of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,\nThey Lion grow.\n Earth is eating trees, fence posts,\nGutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,\n“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,\nFrom the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,\nFrom the furred ear and the full jowl come\nThe repose of the hung belly, from the purpose\nThey Lion grow.\n From the sweet glues of the trotters\nCome the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower\nOf the hams the thorax of caves,\nFrom “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”\nCome they Lion from the reeds of shovels,\nThe grained arm that pulls the hands,\nThey Lion grow.\n From my five arms and all my hands,\nFrom all my white sins forgiven, they feed,\nFrom my car passing under the stars,\nThey Lion, from my children inherit,\nFrom the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,\nFrom they sack and they belly opened\nAnd all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth\nThey feed they Lion and he comes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "those-were-the-days": { - "title": "“Those Were the Days”", - "body": "The sun came up before breakfast,\nperfectly round and yellow, and we\ndressed in the soft light and shook out\nour long blond curls and waited\nfor Maid to brush them flat and place\nthe part just where it belonged.\nWe came down the carpeted stairs\none step at a time, in single file,\ngleaming in our sailor suits, two\nfour year olds with unscratched knees\nand scrubbed teeth. Breakfast came\non silver dishes with silver covers\nand was set in table center, and Mother\nhanded out the portions of eggs\nand bacon, toast and juice. We could\nhear the ocean, not far off, and boats\nfiring up their engines, and the shouts\nof couples in white on the tennis courts.\nI thought, Yes, this is the beginning\nof another summer, and it will go on\nuntil the sun tires of us or the moon\nrises in its place on a silvered dawn\nand no one wakens. My brother flung\nhis fork on the polished wooden floor\nand cried out, “My eggs are cold, cold!”\nand turned his plate over. I laughed\nout loud, and Mother slapped my face,\nand when I cleared my eyes the table\nwas bare of even a simple white cloth,\nand the steaming plates had vanished.\nMy brother said, “It’s time,” and we\nstruggled into our galoshes and snapped\nthem up, slumped into our pea coats,\none year older now and on our way\nto the top through the freezing rains\nof the end of November, lunch boxes\nunder our arms, tight fists pocketed,\nout the door and down the front stoop,\nheads bent low, tacking into the wind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "told": { - "title": "“Told”", - "body": "The air lay soffly on the green fur\nof the almond, it was April\n\nand I said, I begin again\nbut my hands burned in the damp earth\n\nthe light ran between my fingers\na black light like no other\n\nthis was not home, the linnet\nsettling on the oleander\n\nthe green pod swelling\nthe leaf slowly untwisting\n\nthe slashed egg fallen from the nest\nthe tongue of grass tasting\n\nI was being told by a pulse slowing\nin the eyes\n\nthe dove mourning in shadow\na nerve waking in the groin\n\nthe distant hills\nturning their white heads away\n\ntold by the clouds assembling\nin the trees, told by the blooming\n\nof a black mouth beneath the rose\nthe worm sobbing, the dust\n\nsettling on my eyelid, told\nby salt, by water, told and told.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-turning": { - "title": "“The Turning”", - "body": "Unknown faces in the street\nAnd winter coming on. I\nStand in the last moments of\nThe city, no more a child,\nOnly a man,--one who has\nLooked upon his own nakedness\nWithout shame, and in defeat\nHas seen nothing to bless.\nTouched once, like a plum, I turned\nRotten in the meat, or like\nThe plum blossom I never\nSaw, hard at the edges, burned\nAt the first entrance of life,\nAnd so endured, unreckoned,\nUntaken, with nothing to give.\nThe first Jew was God; the second\nDenied him; I am alive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "voyages": { - "title": "“Voyages”", - "body": "Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart--\nI walk by sedge and brown river rot\nto where the old lake boats went daily out.\nAll the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen\nin upon itself. Even the channel’s\ngrown over. Once we set sail here\nfor Bob-Lo, the Brewery Isles, Cleveland.\nWe would have gone as far as Niagara\nor headed out to open sea if the Captain\nsaid so, but the Captain drank. Blood-eyed\nin the morning, coffee shaking in his hand,\nhe’d plead to be put ashore or drowned,\nbut no one heard. Enormous in his long coat,\nSinbad would take the helm and shout out\norders swiped from pirate movies. Once\nwe docked north of Vermillion to meet\na single spur of the old Ohio Western\nand sat for days waiting for a train,\nwaiting for someone to claim the cargo\nor give us anything to take back,\nlike the silver Cadillac roadster\nit was rumored we had once freighted\nby itself. The others went foraging\nand left me with the Captain, locked up\nin the head and sober. Two days passed,\nI counted eighty tankers pulling\nthrough the flat lake waters on their way,\nI counted blackbirds gathering at dusk\nin the low trees, clustered like bees.\nI counted the hours from noon to noon\nand got nowhere. At last the Captain slept.\nI banked the fire, raised anchor, cast off,\nand jumping ship left her drifting out\non the black bay. I walked seven miles\nto the Interstate and caught a meat truck\nheading west, and came to over beer,\nhashbrowns, and fried eggs in a cafe\nnorthwest of Omaha. I could write\nhow the radio spoke of war, how\nthe century was half its age, how\ndark clouds gathered in the passes\nup ahead, the dispossessed had clogged\nthe roads, but none the less I alone\nmade my way to the western waters,\na foreign ship, another life, and disappeared\nfrom all Id known. In fact I\ncome home every year, I walk the same streets\nwhere I grew up, but now with my boys.\nI settled down, just as you did, took\na degree in library sciences,\nand got my present position with\nthe county. I’m supposed to believe\nsomething ended. I’m supposed to be\ndried up. I’m supposed to represent\na yearning, but I like it the way it is.\nNot once has the ocean wind changed\nand brought the taste of salt\nover the coastal hills and through\nthe orchards to my back yard. Not once\nhave I wakened cold and scared\nout of a dreamless sleep\ninto a dreamless life and cried\nand cried out for what I left behind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waking-in-march": { - "title": "“Waking in March”", - "body": "Last night, again, I dreamed\nmy children were back at home,\nsmall boys huddled in their separate beds,\nand I went from one to the other\nlistening to their breathing--regular,\nalmost soundless--until a white light\nhardened against the bedroom wall,\nthe light of Los Angeles burning south\nof here, going at last as we\nknew it would. I didn’t waken.\nInstead the four of us went out\ninto the front yard and the false dawn\nthat rose over the Tehachipis and stood\nin our bare feet on the wet lawn\nas the world shook like a burning house.\nEach human voice reached us\nwithout sound, a warm breath on the cheek,\na dry kiss. Why am I so quiet?\n\nThis is the end of the world, I am dreaming\nthe end of the world, and I go from bed\nto bed bowing to the small damp heads\nof my sons in a bedroom that turns\nslowly from darkness to fire. Everyone\nelse is gone, their last words\nreach us in the language of light.\nThe great eucalyptus trees along the road\nswim in the new wind pouring\nlike water over the mountains. Each day\nthis is what we waken to, a water\nlike wind bearing the voices of the world,\nthe generations of the unborn chanting\nin the language of fire. This will be\ntomorrow. Why am I so quiet?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-waters-chant": { - "title": "“The Water’s Chant”", - "body": "Seven years ago I went into\nthe High Sierras stunned by the desire\nto die. For hours I stared into a clear\nmountain stream that fell down\nover speckled rocks, and then I\nclosed my eyes and prayed that when\nI opened them I would be gone\nand somewhere a purple and golden\nthistle would overflow with light.\nI had not prayed since I was a child\nand at first I felt foolish saying\nthe name of God, and then it became\nanother word. All the while\nI could hear the water’s chant\nbelow my voice. At last I opened\nmy eyes to the same place, my hands\ncupped and I drank long from\nthe stream, and then turned for home\nnot even stopping to find the thistle\nthat blazed by my path. Since then\n\nI have gone home to the city\nof my birth and found it gone,\na gray and treeless one now in its place.\nThe one house I loved the most\nsimply missing in a row of houses,\nthe park where I napped on summer days\nfenced and locked, the great shop\nwhere we forged, a plane of rubble,\nthe old hurt faces turned away.\nMy brother was with me, thickened\nby the years, but still my brother,\nand when we embraced I felt the rough\ncheek and his hand upon my back tapping\nas though to tell me, I know! I know!\nbrother, I know! Here in California\n\na new day begins. Full dull clouds ride\nin from the sea, and this dry valley\ncalls out for rain. My brother has\nrisen hours ago and hobbled to the shower\nand gone out into the city of death\nto trade his life for nothing because\nthis is the world. I could pray now,\nbut not to die, for that will come one\nday or another. I could pray for\nhis bad leg or my son John whose luck\nis rotten, or for four new teeth, but\ninstead I watch my eucalyptus,\nthe giant in my front yard, bucking\nand swaying in the wind and hear its\ntidal roar. In the strange new light\nthe leaves overflow purple and gold,\nand a fiery dust showers into the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "what-work-is": { - "title": "“What Work Is”", - "body": "We stand in the rain in a long line\nwaiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.\nYou know what work is--if you’re\nold enough to read this you know what\nwork is, although you may not do it.\nForget you. This is about waiting,\nshifting from one foot to another.\nFeeling the light rain falling like mist\ninto your hair, blurring your vision\nuntil you think you see your own brother\nahead of you, maybe ten places.\nYou rub your glasses with your fingers,\nand of course it’s someone else’s brother,\nnarrower across the shoulders than\nyours but with the same sad slouch, the grin\nthat does not hide the stubbornness,\nthe sad refusal to give in to\nrain, to the hours of wasted waiting,\nto the knowledge that somewhere ahead\na man is waiting who will say, “No,\nwe’re not hiring today,” for any\nreason he wants. You love your brother,\nnow suddenly you can hardly stand\nthe love flooding you for your brother,\nwho’s not beside you or behind or\nahead because he’s home trying to\nsleep off a miserable night shift\nat Cadillac so he can get up\nbefore noon to study his German.\nWorks eight hours a night so he can sing\nWagner, the opera you hate most,\nthe worst music ever invented.\nHow long has it been since you told him\nyou loved him, held his wide shoulders,\nopened your eyes wide and said those words,\nand maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never\ndone something so simple, so obvious,\nnot because you’re too young or too dumb,\nnot because you’re jealous or even mean\nor incapable of crying in\nthe presence of another man, no,\njust because you don’t know what work is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "where-we-live-now": { - "title": "“Where We Live Now”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWe live here because the houses\nare clean, the lawns run\nright to the street\n\nand the streets run away.\nNo one walks here.\nNo one wakens at night or dies.\n\nThe cars sit open-eyed\nin the driveways.\nThe lights are on all day.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAt home forever, she has removed\nher long foreign names\nthat stained her face like hair.\n\nShe smiles at you, and you think\ntears will start from the corners\nof her mouth. Such a look\n\nof tenderness, you look away.\nShe’s your sister. Quietly she says,\nYou’re a shit, I’ll get you for it.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nMoney’s the same, he says.\nHe brings it home in white slabs\nthat smell like soap.\n\nThrows them down\non the table as though\nhe didn’t care.\n\nThe children hear\nand come in from play glowing\nlike honey and so hungry.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nWith it all we have\nsuch a talent for laughing.\nWe can laugh at anything.\n\nAnd we forget no one.\nShe listens to mother\non the phone, and he remembers\n\nthe exact phrasing of a child’s sorrows,\nthe oaths taken by bear and tiger\nnever to forgive.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nOn Sunday we’re having a party.\nThe children are taken away\nin a black Dodge, their faces erased\n\nfrom the mirrors. Outside a scum\nis forming on the afternoon.\nA car parks but no one gets out.\n\nBrother is loading the fridge.\nSister is polishing and spraying herself.\nToday we’re having a party.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nFor fun we talk about you.\nEverything’s better for being said.\nThat’s a rule.\n\nThis is going to be some long night, she says.\nHow could you? How could you?\nFor the love of mother, he says.\n\nThere will be no dawn\nuntil the laughing stops. Even the pines\nare burning in the dark.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nWhy do you love me? he says.\nBecause. Because.\nYou’re best to me, she purrs.\n\nIn the kitchen, in the closets,\nbehind the doors, above the toilets,\nthe calendars are eating it up.\n\nOne blackened one watches you\nlike another window. Why\nare you listening? it says.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nNo one says, There’s a war.\nNo one says, Children are burning.\nNo one says, Bizniz as usual.\n\nBut you have to take it all back.\nYou have to hunt through your socks\nand dirty underwear\n\nand crush each word. If you’re serious\nyou have to sit in the corner\nand eat ten new dollars. Eat’em.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nWhose rifles are brooding\nin the closet? What are\nthe bolts whispering\n\nback and forth? And the pyramids\nof ammunition, so many\nhungry mouths to feed.\n\nWhen you hide in bed\nthe revolver under the pillow\nsmiles and shows its teeth.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nOn the last night the children\nwaken from the same dream\nof leaves burning.\n\nTwo girls in the dark\nknowing there are no wolves\nor bad men in the room.\n\nOnly electricity on the loose,\nthe television screaming at itself,\nthe dishwasher tearing its heart out.\n\n\n# 11.\n\nWe’re going away. The house\nis too warm. We disconnect\nthe telephone.\n\nBones, cans, broken dolls, bronzed shoes,\nground down to face powder. Burn\nthe toilet paper collected in the basement.\n\nTake back the bottles.\nThe back stairs are raining glass.\nCancel the milk.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nYou may go now, says Cupboard.\nI won’t talk,\nsays Clock.\n\nYour bag is black and waiting.\nHow can you leave your house?\nThe stove hunches its shoulders,\n\nthe kitchen table stares at the sky.\nYou’re heaving yourself out in the snow\ngroping toward the front door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-whole-soul": { - "title": "“The Whole Soul”", - "body": "Is it long as a noodle\nor fat as an egg? Is it\nlumpy like a potato or\nringed like an oak or an\nonion and like the onion\nthe same as you go toward\nthe core? That would be\nsuitable, for is it not\nthe human core and the rest\nmeant either to keep it\nwarm or cold depending\non the season or just who\nyou’re talking to, the rest\na means of getting it from\none place to another, for it\nmust go on two legs down\nthe stairs and out the front\ndoor, it must greet the sun\nwith a sigh of pleasure as\nit stands on the front porch\nconsidering the day’s agenda.\nWhether to go straight ahead\npassing through the ranch houses\nof the rich, living rooms\npanelled with a veneer of fake\nPhilippine mahogany and bedrooms\nwith ermined floors and tangled\nseas of silk sheets, through\nadobe walls and secret gardens\nof sweet corn and marijuana\nuntil it crosses several sets\nof tracks, four freeways, and\na mountain range and faces\na great ocean each drop of\nwhich is known and like\nno other, each with its own\nparticular tang, one suitable\nto bring forth the flavor\nof a noodle, still another\nwhen dried on an open palm,\nsparkling and tiny, just right\nfor a bite of ripe tomato\nor to incite a heavy tongue\nthat dragged across a brow\ncould utter the awful words,\n“Oh, my love!” and mean them.\nThe more one considers\nthe more puzzling become\nthese shapes. I stare out\nat the Pacific and wonder--\nnoodle, onion, lump, double\nyolked egg on two legs,\na star as perfect as salt--\nand my own shape a compound\nof so many lengths, lumps,\nand flat palms. And while I’m\nhere at the shore I bow to\ntake a few handfuls of water\nwhich run between my fingers,\nthose poor noodles good for\nholding nothing for long, and\nI speak in a tongue hungering\nfor salt and water without salt,\nI give a shape to the air going\nout and the air coming in,\nand the sea winds scatter it\nlike so many burning crystals\nsettling on the evening ocean.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wisteria": { - "title": "“Wisteria”", - "body": "The first purple wisteria\nI recall from boyhood hung\non a wire outside the windows\nof the breakfast room next door\nat the home of Steve Pisaris.\nI loved his tall, skinny daughter,\nor so I thought, and I would wait\nbeside the back door, prostrate,\nbegging to be taken in. Perhaps\nit was only the flowers of spring\nwith their sickening perfumes\nthat had infected me. When Steve\nand Sophie and the three children\npacked up and made the move west,\nI went on spring after spring,\nleaden with desire, half-asleep,\npraying to die. Now I know\nthose prayers were answered.\nThat boy died, the brick houses\ndeepened and darkened with rain,\nage, use, and finally closed\ntheir eyes and dreamed the sleep\nof California. I learned this\nonly today. Wakened early\nin an empty house not lately\nbattered by storms, I looked\nfor nothing. On the surface\nof the rain barrel, the paled,\nshredded blossoms floated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-woman-waking": { - "title": "“A Woman Waking”", - "body": "She wakens early remembering\nher father rising in the dark\nlighting the stove with a match\nscraped on the floor. Then measuring\nwater for coffee, and later the smell\ncoming through. She would hear\nhim drying spoons, dropping\nthem one by one in the drawer.\nThen he was on the stairs\ngoing for the milk. So soon\nhe would be at her door\nto wake her gently, he thought,\nwith a hand at her nape, shaking\nto and fro, smelling of gasoline\nand whispering. Then he left.\nNow she shakes her head, shakes\nhim away and will not rise.\nThere is fog at the window\nand thickening the high branches\nof the sycamores. She thinks\nof her own kitchen, the dishwasher\nyawning open, the dripping carton\nleft on the counter. Her boys\nhave gone off steaming like sheep.\nWere they here last night?\nWhere do they live? she wonders,\nwith whom? Are they home?\nIn her yard the young plum tree,\nbarely taller than she, drops\nits first yellow leaf. She listens\nand hears nothing. If she rose\nand walked barefoot on the wood floor\nno one would come to lead her\nback to bed or give her\na glass ofwater. If she\nboiled an egg it would darken\nbefore her eyes. The sky tires\nand turns away without a word.\nThe pillow beside hers is cold,\nthe old odor of soap is there.\nHer hands are cold. What time is it?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - } - } - }, - "c-s-lewis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "C. S. Lewis", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 33 - }, - "poems": { - "after-prayers": { - "title": "“After Prayers”", - "body": "Arise my body, my small body, we have striven\nEnough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.\nArise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,\nWhite as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,\nUndress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,\nAnd be alone, hush’d mortal, in the sacred night,\n--A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup\nEmptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,\nFaded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness\nBy dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.\nBe not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent\nTo weariness’ and pardon’s watery element.\nDrink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;\nSoon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "alexandrines": { - "title": "“Alexandrines”", - "body": "There is a house that most of all on earth I hate.\nThough I have passed through many sorrows and have been\nIn bloody fields, sad seas, and countries desolate,\nYet most I fear that empty house where the grasses green\nGrow in the silent court the gaping flags between,\nAnd down the moss-grown paths and terrace no man treads\nWhere the old, old weeds rise deep on the waste garden beds.\nLike eyes of one long dead the empty windows stare\nAnd I fear to cross the garden, I fear to linger there,\nFor in that house I know a little, silent room\nWhere Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom\nTo draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast--\nYet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "apology": { - "title": "“Apology”", - "body": "If men should ask, Despoina, why I tell\nOf nothing glad nor noble in my verse\nTo lighten hearts beneath this present curse\nAnd build a heaven of dreams in real hell,\nGo you to them and speak among them thus:\n“There were no greater grief than to recall,\nDown in the rotting grave where the lithe worms crawl,\nGreen fields above that smiled so sweet to us.”\nIs it good to tell old tales of Troynovant\nOr praises of dead heroes, tried and sage,\nOr sing the queens of unforgotten age,\nBrynhild and Maeve and virgin Bradamant?\nHow should I sing of them? Can it be good\nTo think of glory now, when all is done,\nAnd all our labour underneath the sun\nHas brought us this-and not the thing we would?\nAll these were rosy visions of the night,\nThe loveliness and wisdom feigned of old.\nBut now we wake. The East is pale and cold,\nNo hope is in the dawn, and no delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "as-the-ruin-falls": { - "title": "“As the Ruin Falls”", - "body": "All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.\nI never had a selfless thought since I was born.\nI am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:\nI want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.\n\nPeace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,\nI cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:\nI talk of love--a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek--\nBut, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.\n\nOnly that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.\nI see the chasm. And everything you are was making\nMy heart into a bridge by which I might get back\nFrom exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.\n\nFor this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains\nYou give me are more precious than all other gains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ass": { - "title": "“The Ass”", - "body": "I woke and rose and slipt away\nTo the heathery hills in the morning grey.\nIn a field where the dew lay cold and deep\nI met an ass, new-roused from sleep.\nI stroked his nose and I tickled his ears,\nAnd spoke soft words to quiet his fears.\nHis eyes stared into the eyes of me\nAnd he kissed my hands of his courtesy.\n“O big, brown brother out of the waste,\nHow do thistles for breakfast taste?\nAnd do you rejoice in the dawn divine\nWith a heart that is glad no less than mine?\nFor, brother, the depth of your gentle eyes\nIs strange and mystic as the skies:\nWhat are the thoughts that grope behind,\nDown in the mist of a donkey mind?\nCan it be true, as the wise men tell,\nThat you are a mask of God as well,\nAnd, as in us, so in you no less\nSpeaks the eternal Loveliness,\nAnd words of the lips that all things know\nAmong the thoughts of a donkey go?\nHowever it be, O four-foot brother,\nFair to-day is the earth, our mother.\nGod send you peace and delight thereof,\nAnd all green meat of the waste you love,\nAnd guard you well from violent men\nWho’d put you back in the shafts again.”\nBut the ass had far too wise a head\nTo answer one of the things I said,\nSo he twitched his fair ears up and down\nAnd turned to nuzzle his shoulder brown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-autumn-morning": { - "title": "“An Autumn Morning”", - "body": "See! the pale autumn dawn\nIs faint, upon the lawn\n That lies in powdered white\n Of hoar-frost dight\n\nAnd now from tree to tree\nThe ghostly mist we see\n Hung like a silver pall\n To hallow all.\n\nIt wreathes the burdened air\nSo strangely everywhere\n That I could almost fear\n This silence drear\n\nWhere no one song-bird sings\nAnd dream that wizard things\n Mighty for hate or love\n Were close above.\n\nWhite as the fog and fair\nDrifting through the middle air\n In magic dances dread\n Over my head.\n\nYet these should know me too\nLover and bondman true,\n One that has honoured well\n The mystic spell\n\nOf earth’s most solemn hours\nWherein the ancient powers\n Of dryad, elf, or faun\n Or leprechaun\n\nOft have their faces shown\nTo me that walked alone\n Seashore or haunted fen\n Or mountain glen\n\nWherefore I will not fear\nTo walk the woodlands sere\n Into this autumn day\n Far, far away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "cliche-came-out-of-its-cage": { - "title": "“Cliche Came out of Its Cage”", - "body": "# I.\n\nYou said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.\nOh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House\nSpill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,\nAnd Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,\nLeading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses\nTo pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.\nHestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before\nThe Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands\nTended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother\nDomum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour\nOf sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave\nBefore their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush\nArose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,\nGleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.\nWalk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,\nShun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,\nAre best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged\nIs wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die\nDefending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.\nThus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune\nCooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;\nHeathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …\nYou said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.\n\n\n# II.\n\nOr did you mean another kind of heathenry?\nThink, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,\nFortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.\nOver its icy bastions faces of giant and troll\nLook in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;\nBut the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,\nScarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,\nWill limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope\nTo be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;\nFor the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die\nHis second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong\nUnteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,\nAnd every man of decent blood is on the losing side.\nTake as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits\nWho walked back into burning houses to die with men,\nOr him who as the death spear entered into his vitals\nMade critical comments on its workmanship and aim.\nAre these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;\nYou that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event\nYour goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-country-of-the-blind": { - "title": "“The Country of the Blind”", - "body": "Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,\nDark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long\nProcess, clearly, a slow curse,\nDrained through centuries, left them thus.\n\nAt some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,\nNo doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,\nNormal type had achieved snug\nDarkness, safe from the guns of heaven;\n\nWhose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their\nGreat-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some\nEunuch’d, etiolated,\nFungoid sense, as a symbol of\n\nAbstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor\nMisfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green--\nSloped sea waves, or admired how\nWarm tints change in a lady’s cheek,\n\nNone complained he had used words from an alien tongue,\nNone question’d. It was worse. All would agree. “Of course,”\nCame their answer. “We’ve all felt\nJust like that.” They were wrong. And he\n\nKnew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words--\nSold, raped flung to the dogs--now could avail no more;\nHence silence. But the mouldwarps,\nWith glib confidence, easily\n\nShowed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set\nFools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.\nDo you think this a far-fetched\nPicture? Go then about among\n\nMen now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,\nOpaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,\nDear but dear as a mountain--\nMass, stood plain to the inward eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "de-profundis": { - "title": "“De Profundis”", - "body": "Come let us curse our Master ere we die,\nFor all our hopes in endless ruin lie.\nThe good is dead. Let us curse God most High.\n\nFour thousand years of toil and hope and thought\nWherein man laboured upward and still wrought\nNew worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.\n\nWe built us joyful cities, strong and fair,\nKnowledge we sought and gathered wisdom rare.\nAnd all this time you laughed upon our care,\n\nAnd suddenly the earth grew black with wrong,\nOur hope was crushed and silenced was our song,\nThe heaven grew loud with weeping. Thou art strong.\n\nCome then and curse the Lord. Over the earth\nGross darkness falls, and evil was our birth\nAnd our few happy days of little worth.\n\nEven if it be not all a dream in vain\n--The ancient hope that still will rise again--\nOf a just God that cares for earthly pain,\n\nYet far away beyond our labouring night,\nHe wanders in the depths of endless light,\nSinging alone his musics of delight;\n\nOnly the far, spent echo of his song\nOur dungeons and deep cells can smite along,\nAnd Thou art nearer. Thou art very strong.\n\nO universal strength, I know it well,\nIt is but froth of folly to rebel;\nFor thou art Lord and hast the keys of Hell.\n\nYet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,\nFor looking in my own heart I can prove thee,\nAnd know this frail, bruised being is above thee.\n\nOur love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,\nOur mercy and long seeking of the light,\nShall we change these for thy relentless might?\n\nLaugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,\nHeap torment still on torment for thy mirth--\nThou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-in-battle": { - "title": "“Death in Battle”", - "body": "Open the gates for me,\nOpen the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,\nIn the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast,\nOpen the gates for me!\nSorely pressed have I been\nAnd driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,\nBut the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,\nAll’s cool and green.\nBut a moment agone,\nAmong men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,\nBut the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,\nAnd now-alone!\nAh, to be ever alone,\nIn flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,\nIn the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,\nThis would atone!\nI shall not see\nThe brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown\nInto the faces of devils--yea, even as my own--\nWhen I find thee,\nO Country of Dreams!\nBeyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,\nOut of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,\nFull of dim woods and streams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "dungeon-grates": { - "title": "“Dungeon Grates”", - "body": "So piteously the lonely soul of man\nShudders before this universal plan,\nSo grievous is the burden and the pain,\nSo heavy weighs the long, material chain\nFrom cause to cause, too merciless for hate,\nThe nightmare march of unrelenting fate,\nI think that he must die thereof unless\nEver and again across the dreariness\nThere came a sudden glimpse of spirit faces,\nA fragrant breath to tell of flowery places\nAnd wider oceans, breaking on the shore\nFrom which the hearts of men are always sore.\nIt lies beyond endeavour; neither prayer\nNor fasting, nor much wisdom winneth there,\nSeeing how many prophets and wise men\nHave sought for it and still returned again\nWith hope undone. But only the strange power\nOf unsought Beauty in some casual hour\nCan build a bridge of light or sound or form\nTo lead you out of all this strife and storm;\nWhen of some beauty we are grown a part\nTill from its very glory’s midmost heart\nOut leaps a sudden beam of larger light\nInto our souls. All things are seen aright\nAmid the blinding pillar of its gold,\nSeven times more true than what for truth we hold\nIn vulgar hours. The miracle is done\nAnd for one little moment we are one\nWith the eternal stream of loveliness\nThat flows so calm, aloft from all distress\nYet leaps and lives around us as a fire\nMaking us faint with overstrong desire\nTo sport and swim for ever in its deep--\nOnly a moment.\n\nO! but we shall keep\nOur vision still. One moment was enough,\nWe know we are not made of mortal stuff.\nAnd we can bear all trials that come after,\nThe hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter\nAnd Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean,\nFor we have seen the Glory--we have seen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "evolutionary-hymn": { - "title": "“Evolutionary Hymn”", - "body": "Lead us, Evolution, lead us\nUp the future’s endless stair;\nChop us, change us, prod us, weed us.\nFor stagnation is despair:\nGroping, guessing, yet progressing,\nLead us nobody knows where.\n\nWrong or justice, joy or sorrow,\nIn the present what are they\nwhile there’s always jam-tomorrow,\nWhile we tread the onward way?\nNever knowing where we’re going,\nWe can never go astray.\n\nTo whatever variation\nOur posterity may turn\nHairy, squashy, or crustacean,\nBulbous-eyed or square of stern,\nTusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,\nTowards that unknown god we yearn.\n\nAsk not if it’s god or devil,\nBrethren, lest your words imply\nStatic norms of good and evil\n(As in Plato) throned on high;\nSuch scholastic, inelastic,\nAbstract yardsticks we deny.\n\nFar too long have sages vainly\nGlossed great Nature’s simple text;\nHe who runs can read it plainly,\n‘Goodness = what comes next.’\nBy evolving, Life is solving\nAll the questions we perplexed.\n\nOh then! Value means survival--\nValue. If our progeny\nSpreads and spawns and licks each rival,\nThat will prove its deity\n(Far from pleasant, by our present,\nStandards, though it may well be).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hesperus": { - "title": "“Hesperus”", - "body": "Through the starry hollow\nOf the summer night\nI would follow, follow\nHesperus the bright,\nTo seek beyond the western wave\nHis garden of delight.\nHesperus the fairest\nOf all gods that are,\nPeace and dreams thou bearest\nIn thy shadowy car,\nAnd often in my evening walks\nI’ve blessed thee from afar.\nStars without number,\nDust the noon of night,\nThou the early slumber\nAnd the still delight\nOf the gentle twilit hours\nRulest in thy right.\nWhen the pale skies shiver,\nSeeing night is done,\nPast the ocean-river,\nLightly thou dost run,\nTo look for pleasant, sleepy lands,\nThat never fear the sun.\nWhere, beyond the waters\nOf the outer sea,\nThy triple crown of daughters\nThat guards the golden tree\nSing out across the lonely tide\nA welcome home to thee.\nAnd while the old, old dragon\nFor joy lifts up his head,\nThey bring thee forth a flagon\nOf nectar foaming red,\nAnd underneath the drowsy trees\nOf poppies strew thy bed.\nAh! that I could follow\nIn thy footsteps bright,\nThrough the starry hollow\nOf the summer night,\nSloping down the western ways\nTo find my heart’s delight!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "how-he-saw-angus-the-god": { - "title": "“How He Saw Angus the God”", - "body": "I heard the swallow sing in the eaves and rose\nAll in a strange delight while others slept,\nAnd down the creaking stair, alone, tip-toes,\n So carefully I crept.\n\nThe house was dark with silly blinds yet drawn,\nBut outside the clean air was filled with light,\nAnd underneath my feet the cold, wet lawn\n With dew was twinkling bright.\n\nThe cobwebs hung from every branch and spray\nGleaming with pearly strands of laden thread,\nAnd long and still the morning shadows lay\n Across the meadows spread.\n\nAt that pure hour when yet no sound of man,\nStirs in the whiteness of the wakening earth,\nAlone through innocent solitudes I ran\n Singing aloud for mirth.\n\nTill I had found the open mountain heath\nYellow with gorse, and rested there and stood\nTo gaze upon the misty sea beneath,\n Or on the neighbouring wood,\n\n--That little wood of hazel and tall pine\nAnd youngling fir, where oft we have loved to see\nThe level beams of early morning shine\n Freshly from tree to tree.\n\nThrough the denser wood there’s many a pool\nOf deep and night-born shadow lingers yet\nWhere the new-wakened flowers are damp and cool\n And the long grass is wet.\n\nIn the sweet heather long I rested there\nLooking upon the dappled, early sky,\nWhen suddenly, from out the shining air\n A god came flashing by.\n\nSwift, naked, eager, pitilessly fair,\nWith a live crown of birds about his head,\nSinging and fluttering, and his fiery hair,\n Far out behind him spread,\n\nStreamed like a rippling torch upon the breeze\nOf his own glorious swiftness: in the grass\nHe bruised no feathery stalk, and through the trees\n I saw his whiteness pass.\n\nBut when I followed him beyond the wood,\nLo! He was changed into a solemn bull\nThat there upon the open pasture stood\n And browsed his lazy full.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-praise-of-solid-people": { - "title": "“In Praise of Solid People”", - "body": "Thank God that there are solid folk\nWho water flowers and roll the lawn,\nAnd sit and sew and talk and smoke,\nAnd snore all through the summer dawn.\n\nWho pass untroubled nights and days\nFull-fed and sleepily content,\nRejoicing in each other’s praise,\nRespectable and innocent.\n\nWho feel the things that all men feel,\nAnd think in well-worn grooves of thought,\nWhose honest spirits never reel\nBefore man’s mystery, overwrought.\n\nYet not unfaithful nor unkind,\nWith work-day virtues surely staid,\nTheirs is the sane and humble mind,\nAnd dull affections undismayed.\n\nO happy people! I have seen\nNo verse yet written in your praise,\nAnd, truth to tell, the time has been\nI would have scorned your easy ways.\n\nBut now thro’ weariness and strife\nI learn your worthiness indeed,\nThe world is better for such life\nAs stout suburban people lead.\n\nToo often have I sat alone\nWhen the wet night falls heavily,\nAnd fretting winds around me moan,\nAnd homeless longing vexes me\n\nFor lore that I shall never know,\nAnd visions none can hope to see,\nTill brooding works upon me so\nA childish fear steals over me.\n\nI look around the empty room,\nThe clock still ticking in its place,\nAnd all else silent as the tomb,\nTill suddenly, I think, a face\n\nGrows from the darkness just beside.\nI turn, and lo! it fades away,\nAnd soon another phantom tide\nOf shifting dreams begins to play,\n\nAnd dusky galleys past me sail,\nFull freighted on a faerie sea;\nI hear the silken merchants hail\nAcross the ringing waves to me\n\n--Then suddenly, again, the room,\nFamiliar books about me piled,\nAnd I alone amid the gloom,\nBy one more mocking dream beguiled.\n\nAnd still no nearer to the Light,\nAnd still no further from myself,\nAlone and lost in clinging night\n--(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).\n\nThen do I envy solid folk\nWho sit of evenings by the fire,\nAfter their work and doze and smoke,\nAnd are not fretted by desire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "in-prison": { - "title": "“In Prison”", - "body": "I cried out for the pain of man,\nI cried out for my bitter wrath\nAgainst the hopeless life that ran\nFor ever in a circling path\nFrom death to death since all began;\nTill on a summer night\nI lost my way in the pale starlight\nAnd saw our planet, far and small,\nThrough endless depths of nothing fall\nA lonely pin-prick spark of light,\nUpon the wide, enfolding night,\nWith leagues on leagues of stars above it,\nAnd powdered dust of stars below--\nDead things that neither hate nor love it\nNot even their own loveliness can know,\nBeing but cosmic dust and dead.\nAnd if some tears be shed,\nSome evil God have power,\nSome crown of sorrow sit\nUpon a little world for a little hour--\nWho shall remember? Who shall care for it?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-meteorite": { - "title": "“The Meteorite”", - "body": "Among the hills a meteorite\nLies huge; and moss has overgrown,\nAnd wind and rain with touches light\nMade soft, the contours of the stone.\n\nThus easily can Earth digest\nA cinder of sidereal fire,\nAnd make her translunary guest\nThe native of an English shire.\n\nNor is it strange these wanderers\nFind in her lap their fitting place,\nFor every particle that’s hers\nCame at the first from outer space.\n\nAll that is Earth has once been sky;\nDown from the sun of old she came,\nOr from some star that travelled by\nToo close to his entangling flame.\n\nHence, if belated drops yet fall\nFrom heaven, on these her plastic power\nStill works as once it worked on all\nThe glad rush of the golden shower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nearly-they-stood-who-fall": { - "title": "“Nearly they stood who fall …”", - "body": "Nearly they stood who fall;\nThemselves as they look back\nSee always in the track\nThe one false step, where all\nEven yet, by lightest swerve\nOf foot not yet enslaved,\nBy smallest tremor of the smallest nerve,\nMight have been saved.\n\nNearly they fell who stand,\nAnd with cold after fear\nLook back to mark how near\nThey grazed the Siren’s land,\nWondering that subtle fate,\nBy threads so spidery fine,\nThe choice of ways so small, the event so great,\nShould thus entwine.\n\nTherefore oh, man, have fear\nLest oldest fears be true,\nLest thou too far pursue\nThe road that seems so clear,\nAnd step, secure, a hair-breadth bourne,\nWhich, being once crossed forever unawares,\nDenies return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "After the fret and failure of this day,\nAnd weariness of thought, O Mother Night,\nCome with soft kiss to soothe our care away\nAnd all our little tumults set to right;\nMost pitiful of all death’s kindred fair,\nRiding above us through the curtained air\nOn thy dusk car, thou scatterest to the earth\nSweet dreams and drowsy charms of tender might\nAnd lovers’ dear delight before to-morrow’s birth.\nThus art thou wont thy quiet lands to leave\nAnd pillared courts beyond the Milky Way,\nWherein thou tarriest all our solar day\nWhile unsubstantial dreams before thee weave\nA foamy dance, and fluttering fancies play\nAbout thy palace in the silver ray\nOf some far, moony globe. But when the hour,\nThe long-expected comes, the ivory gates\nOpen on noiseless hinge before thy bower\nUnbidden, and the jewelled chariot waits\nWith magic steeds. Thou from the fronting rim\nBending to urge them, whilst thy sea-dark hair\nFalls in ambrosial ripples o’er each limb,\nWith beautiful pale arms, untrammelled, bare\nFor horsemanship, to those twin chargers fleet\nDost give full rein across the fires that glow\nIn the wide floor of heaven, from off their feet\nScattering the powdery star-dust as they go.\nCome swiftly down the sky, O Lady Night,\nFall through the shadow-country, O most kind,\nShake out thy strands of gentle dreams and light\nFor chains, wherewith thou still art used to bind\nWith tenderest love of careful leeches’ art\nThe bruised and weary heart\nIn slumber blind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "noon": { - "title": "“Noon”", - "body": "Noon! and in the garden bower\nThe hot air quivers o’er the grass,\nThe little lake is smooth as glass\nAnd still so heavily the hour\nDrags, that scarce the proudest flower\nPressed upon its burning bed\nHas strength to lift a languid head:\n--Rose and fainting violet\nBy the water’s margin set\nSwoon and sink as they were dead\nThough their weary leaves be fed\nWith the foam-drops of the pool\nWhere it trembles dark and cool\nWrinkled by the fountain spraying\nO’er it. And the honey-bee\nHums his drowsy melody\nAnd wanders in his course a-straying\nThrough the sweet and tangled glade\nWith his golden mead o’erladen,\nWhere beneath the pleasant shade\nOf the darkling boughs a maiden\n--Milky limb and fiery tress,\nAll at sweetest random laid--\nSlumbers, drunken with the excess\nOf the noontide’s loveliness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-ocean-strand": { - "title": "“The Ocean Strand”", - "body": "O leave the labouring roadways of the town,\nThe shifting faces and the changeful hue\nOf markets, and broad echoing streets that drown\nThe heart’s own silent music. Though they too\nSing in their proper rhythm, and still delight\nThe friendly ear that loves warm human kind,\nYet it is good to leave them all behind,\nNow when from lily dawn to purple night\nSummer is queen,\nSummer is queen in all the happy land.\nFar, far away among the valleys green\nLet us go forth and wander hand in hand\nBeyond those solemn hills that we have seen\nSo often welcome home the falling sun\nInto their cloudy peaks when day was done--\nBeyond them till we find the ocean strand\nAnd hear the great waves run,\nWith the waste song whose melodies I’d follow\nAnd weary not for many a summer day,\nBorn of the vaulted breakers arching hollow\nBefore they flash and scatter into spray,\nOn, if we should be weary of their play\nThen I would lead you further into land\nWhere, with their ragged walls, the stately rocks\nShunt in smooth courts and paved with quiet sand\nTo silence dedicate. The sea-god’s flocks\nHave rested here, and mortal eyes have seen\nBy great adventure at the dead of noon\nA lonely nereid drowsing half a-swoon\nBuried beneath her dark and dripping locks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ode-for-new-years-day": { - "title": "“Ode for New Year’s Day”", - "body": "Woe unto you, ye sons of pain that are this day in earth,\nNow cry for all your torment: now curse your hour of birth\nAnd the fathers who begat you to a portion nothing worth.\nAnd Thou, my own beloved, for as brave as ere thou art,\nBow down thine head, Despoina, clasp thy pale arms over it,\nLie low with fast-closed eyelids, clenched teeth, enduring heart,\nFor sorrow on sorrow is coming wherein all flesh has part.\nThe sky above is sickening, the clouds of God’s hate cover it,\nBody and soul shall suffer beyond all word or thought,\nTill the pain and noisy terror that these first years have wrought\nSeem but the soft arising and prelude of the storm\nThat fiercer still and heavier with sharper lightnings fraught\nShall pour red wrath upon us over a world deform.\nThrice happy, O Despoina, were the men who were alive\nIn the great age and the golden age when still the cycle ran\nOn upward curve and easily, for them both maid and man\nAnd beast and tree and spirit in the green earth could thrive.\nBut now one age is ending, and God calls home the stars\nAnd looses the wheel of the ages and sends it spinning back\nAmid the death of nations, and points a downward track,\nAnd madness is come over us and great and little wars.\nHe has not left one valley, one isle of fresh and green\nWhere old friends could forgather amid the howling wreck.\nIt’s vainly we are praying. We cannot, cannot check\nThe Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.\nIt’s truth they tell, Despoina, none hears the heart’s complaining\nFor Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear,\nYet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining\nAnd lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear\nThe curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead.\nBut lo! I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts\nHave made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped\nOver a little planet. And what should the great Lord know of it\nWho tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts?\nHither and thither he moves them; for an hour we see the show of it:\nOnly a little hour, and the life of the race is done.\nAnd here he builds a nebula, and there he slays a sun\nAnd works his own fierce pleasure. All things he shall fulfill,\nAnd O, my poor Despoina, do you think he ever hears\nThe wail of hearts he has broken, the sound of human ill?\nHe cares not for our virtues, our little hopes and fears,\nAnd how could it all go on, love, if he knew of laughter and tears?\nAh, sweet, if a man could cheat him! If you could flee away\nInto some other country beyond the rosy West,\nTo hide in the deep forests and be for ever at rest\nFrom the rankling hate of God and the outworn world’s decay!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "on-being-human": { - "title": "“On Being Human”", - "body": "Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence\nBehold the Forms of nature. They discern\nUnerringly the Archtypes, all the verities\nWhich mortals lack or indirectly learn.\nTransparent in primordial truth, unvarying,\nPure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,\nHigh eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal\nHuge Principles appear.\n\nThe Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of\nArboreal life, how from earth’s salty lap\nThe solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness\nEnacted by leaves’ fall and rising sap;\n\nBut never an angel knows the knife-edged severance\nOf sun from shadow where the trees begin,\nThe blessed cool at every pore caressing us\n--An angel has no skin.\n\nThey see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it\nDrink the whole summer down into the breast.\nThe lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing\nSea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.\nThe tremor on the rippled pool of memory\nThat from each smell in widening circles goes,\nThe pleasure and the pang--can angels measure it?\n--An angel has no nose.\n\nThe nourishing of life, and how it flourishes\nOn death, and why, they utterly know; but not\nThe hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.\nThe ripe peach from the southern wall still hot\nFull-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate\nHalf-lyric lamb, a new loaf’s billowy curves,\nNor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.\n--An angel has no nerves.\n\nFar richer they! I know the senses’ witchery\nGuards us like air, from heavens too big to see;\nImminent death to man that barb’d sublimity\nAnd dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.\nYet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,\nThis parlour of the brain, their Maker shares\nWith living men some secrets in a privacy\nForever ours, not theirs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-a-vulgar-error": { - "title": "“On a Vulgar Error”", - "body": "No. It’s an impudent falsehood. Men did not\nInvariably think the newer way Prosaic\nmad, inelegant, or what not.\n\nWas the first pointed arch esteemed a blot\nUpon the church? Did anybody say How\nmodern and how ugly? They did not.\n\nPlate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot\nWith rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,\nWere these at first a horror? They were not.\n\nIf, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food\nAll set us hankering after yesterday,\nNeed this be only an archaising mood?\n\nWhy, any man whose purse has been let blood\nBy sharpers, when he finds all drained away\nMust compare how he stands with how he stood.\n\nIf a quack doctor’s breezy ineptitude\nHas cost me a leg, must I forget straightway\nAll that I can’t do now, all that I could?\n\nSo, when our guides unanimously decry\nThe backward glance, I think we can guess why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "our-daily-bread": { - "title": "“Our Daily Bread”", - "body": "We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell\nTo raise the unknown. It lies before our feet;\nThere have been men who sank down into Hell\n In some suburban street,\n\nAnd some there are that in their daily walks\nHave met archangels fresh from sight of God,\nOr watched how in their beans and cabbage-stalks\n Long files of faerie trod.\n\nOften me too the Living voices call\nIn many a vulgar and habitual place,\nI catch a sight of lands beyond the wall,\n I see a strange god’s face.\n\nAnd some day this work will work upon me so\nI shall arise and leave both friends and home\nAnd over many lands a pilgrim go\n Through alien woods and foam,\n\nSeeking the last steep edges of the earth\nWhence I may leap into that gulf of light\nWherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,\n Part of me lived aright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prelude-to-space": { - "title": "“A Prelude to Space”", - "body": "_An Epithaliamium_\n\nSo Man, grown vigorous now,\nHolds himself ripe to breed,\nDaily devises how\nTo ejaculate his seed\nAnd boldly fertilize\nThe black womb of the unconsenting skies.\n\nSome now alive expect\n(I am told) to see the large,\nSteel member grow erect,\nTurgid with the fierce charge\nOf our whole planet’s skill,\nCourage, wealth, knowledge, concentrated will,\n\nStraining with lust to stamp\nOur likeness on the abyss--\nBombs, gallows, Belsen camp,\nPox, polio, Thais’ kiss\nOr Judas, Moloch’s fires\nAnd Torquemada’s (sons resemble sires).\n\nShall we, when the grim shape\nRoars upward, dance and sing?\nYes: if we honour rape,\nIf we take pride to Ring\nSo bountifully on space\nThe sperm of our long woes, our large disgrace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-roads": { - "title": "“The Roads”", - "body": "I stand on the windy uplands among the hills of Down\nWith all the world spread out beneath, meadow and sea and town,\nAnd ploughlands on the far-off hills that glow with friendly brown.\n\nAnd ever across the rolling land to the far horizon line,\nWhere the blue hills border the misty west, I see the white roads twine,\nThe rare roads and the fair roads that call this heart of mine.\n\nI see them dip in the valleys and vanish and rise and bend\nFrom shadowy dell to windswept fell, and still to the West they wend,\nAnd over the cold blue ridge at last to the great world’s uttermost end.\n\nAnd the call of the roads is upon me, a desire in my spirit has grown\nTo wander forth in the highways, ‘twixt earth and sky alone,\nAnd seek for the lands no foot has trod and the seas no sail has known:\n\nFor the lands to the west of the evening and east of the morning’s birth,\nWhere the gods unseen in their valleys green are glad at the ends of the earth\nAnd fear no morrow to bring them sorrow, nor night to quench their mirth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "satan-speaks": { - "title": "“Satan Speaks”", - "body": "I am the Lord your God: even he that made\nMaterial things, and all these signs arrayed\nAbove you and have set beneath the race\nOf mankind, who forget their Father’s face\nAnd even while they drink my light of day\nDream of some other gods and disobey\nMy warnings, and despise my holy laws,\nEven tho’ their sin shall slay them. For which cause,\nDreams dreamed in vain, a never-filled desire\nAnd in close flesh a spiritual fire,\nA thirst for good their kind shall not attain,\nA backward cleaving to the beast again.\nA loathing for the life that I have given,\nA haunted, twisted soul for ever riven\nBetween their will and mine--such lot I give\nWhite still in my despite the vermin live.\nThey hate my world! Then let that other God\nCome from the outer spaces glory-shod,\nAnd from this castle I have built on Night\nSteal forth my own thought’s children into light,\nIf such an one there be. But far away\nHe walks the airy fields of endless day,\nAnd my rebellious sons have called Him long\nAnd vainly called. My order still is strong\nAnd like to me nor second none I know.\nWhither the mammoth went this creature too shall go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-satyr": { - "title": "“The Satyr”", - "body": "When the flowery hands of spring\nForth their woodland riches fling,\n Through the meadows, through the valleys\nGoes the satyr carolling.\n\nFrom the mountain and the moor,\nForest green and ocean shore\n All the faerie kin he rallies\nMaking music evermore.\n\nSee! the shaggy pelt doth grow\nOn his twisted shanks below,\n And his dreadful feet are cloven\nThough his brow be white as snow--\n\nThough his brow be clear and white\nAnd beneath it fancies bright,\n Wisdom and high thoughts are woven\nAnd the musics of delight,\n\nThough his temples too be fair\nYet two horns are growing there\n Bursting forth to part asunder\nAll the riches of his hair.\n\nFaerie maidens he may meet\nFly the horns and cloven feet,\n But, his sad brown eyes with wonder\nSeeing-stay from their retreat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall\nAbout a dreaming garden still and sweet,\nI hear the unseen bats above me bleat\nAmong the ghostly moths their hunting call,\nAnd twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl.\nNow for a chamber dim, a pillow meet\nFor slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet,\nCool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall\nWith poppies strewn where sleep that is so dear\nWith magic sponge can wipe away an hour\nOr twelve and make them naught. Why not a year,\nWhy could a man not loiter in that bower\nUntil a thousand painless cycles wore,\nAnd then--what if it held him evermore?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spooks": { - "title": "“Spooks”", - "body": "Last night I dreamed that I was come again\nUnto the house where my beloved dwells\nAfter long years of wandering and pain.\nAnd I stood out beneath the drenching rain\nAnd all the street was bare, and black with night,\nBut in my true love’s house was warmth and light.\nYet I could not draw near nor enter in,\nAnd long I wondered if some secret sin\nOr old, unhappy anger held me fast;\nTill suddenly it came into my head\nThat I was killed long since and lying dead--\nOnly a homeless wraith that way had passed.\nSo thus I found my true love’s house again\nAnd stood unseen amid the winter night\nAnd the lamp burned within, a rosy light,\nAnd the wet street was shining in the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-star-bath": { - "title": "“The Star Bath”", - "body": "A place uplifted towards the midnight sky\nFar, far away among the mountains old,\nA treeless waste of rocks and freezing cold,\nWhere the dead, cheerless moon rode neighbouring by--\nAnd in the midst a silent tarn there lay,\nA narrow pool, cold as the tide that flows\nWhere monstrous bergs beyond Varanger stray,\nRising from sunless depths that no man knows;\nThither as clustering fireflies have I seen\nAt fixed seasons all the stars come down\nTo wash in that cold wave their brightness clean\nAnd win the special fire wherewith they crown\nThe wintry heavens in frost. Even as a flock\nOf falling birds, down to the pool they came.\nI saw them and I heard the icy shock\nOf stars engulfed with hissing of faint flame\n--Ages ago before the birth of men\nOr earliest beast. Yet I was still the same\nThat now remember, knowing not where or when.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "worlds-desire": { - "title": "“World’s Desire”", - "body": "Love, there is a castle built in a country desolate,\nOn a rock above a forest where the trees are grim and great,\nBlasted with the lightning sharp--giant boulders strewn between,\nAnd the mountains rise above, and the cold ravine\nEchoes to the crushing roar and thunder of a mighty river\nRaging down a cataract. Very tower and forest quiver\nAnd the grey wolves are afraid and the call of birds is drowned,\nAnd the thought and speech of man in the boiling water’s sound.\nBut upon the further side of the barren, sharp ravine\nWith the sunlight on its turrets is the castle seen,\nCalm and very wonderful, white above the green\nOf the wet and waving forest, slanted all away,\nBecause the driving Northern wind will not rest by night or day.\nYet the towers are sure above, very mighty is the stead,\nThe gates are made of ivory, the roofs of copper red.\n\nRound and round the warders grave walk upon the walls for ever\nAnd the wakeful dragons couch in the ports of ivory,\nNothing is can trouble it, hate of the gods nor man’s endeavour,\nAnd it shall be a resting-place, dear heart, for you and me.\n\nThrough the wet and waving forest with an age-old sorrow laden\nSinging of the world’s regret wanders wild the faerie maiden,\nThrough the thistle and the brier, through the tangles of the thorn,\nTill her eyes be dim with weeping and her homeless feet are torn.\n\nOften to the castle gate up she looks with vain endeavour,\nFor her soulless loveliness to the castle winneth never.\n\nBut within the sacred court, hidden high upon the mountain,\nWandering in the castle gardens lovely folk enough there be,\nBreathing in another air, drinking of a purer fountain\nAnd among that folk, beloved, there’s a place for you and me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "saunders-lewis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saunders Lewis", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "welsh", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saunders_Lewis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "lavernock": { - "title": "“Lavernock”", - "body": "Moor and sea, skylark’s song\nascending through the wind’s demesnes,\nwe too standing listening\nas we’d listened formerly.\n\nWhat wealth remains, then, after\nthe journey’s adversities?\nMoor and sea, skylark’s song\ndescending from the wind’s demesnes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "welsh" - } - }, - "prayer-at-the-end": { - "title": "“Prayer at the End”", - "body": "It’s an experience nobody else shares\nEveryone on his own and in his own way\nOwns his death\nThroughout the thousands of years of human story.\nIt can be watched, Sometimes the moment be recognized;\nIt’s impossible to sympathize with anyone in that moment\nWhen the breathing and the person together cease.\nAfterwards? There’s no stretching to the afterwards only prayer groping\nHow pitiful is man, how childish his imagination;\n“In my Father’s house are many mansions”.\nAs impoverished as we, just as earthly confused\nWas his genius in the days of his kenosis.\nAs for us similarly we can only picture hope:\n“He sits at the right hand of God Almighty Father”--\nA general with his celebration through Rome\nWith the slaughter in Persia as a creation\nCrowned Augustus, a Co-Augustus with his Father--\nHow laughable are our own highest faith-statements.\nAnd around us remains silence and the deep void\nInto which our world one night will silently sink.\nWords cannot trace the boundaries of silence\nNor say God meaningfully.\nOne prayer remains for all, silently to go to silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "welsh", - "translator": "John Heywood Thomas" - } - } - } - }, - "li-po": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Li Po", - "birth": { - "year": 701 - }, - "death": { - "year": 762 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chinese", - "language": "chinese", - "flag": "🇨🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chinese" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "drinking-alone-in-the-moonlight": { - "title": "“Drinking Alone in the Moonlight”", - "body": "Beneath the blossoms with a pot of wine,\nNo friends at hand, so I poured alone;\nI raised my cup to invite the moon,\nTurned to my shadow, and we became three.\nNow the moon had never learned about drinking,\nAnd my shadow had merely followed my form,\nBut I quickly made friends with the moon and my shadow;\nTo find pleasure in life, make the most of the spring.\n\nWhenever I sang, the moon swayed with me;\nWhenever I danced, my shadow went wild.\nDrinking, we shared our enjoyment together;\nDrunk, then each went off on his own.\nBut forever agreed on dispassionate revels,\nWe promised to meet in the far Milky Way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Arthur Waley", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alphonsus-liguori": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Alphonsus Liguori", - "birth": { - "year": 1696 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1787 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonsus_Liguori", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "great-king-from-heavens-high-throne-descending-low": { - "title": "“Great King! from Heaven’s high throne descending low …”", - "body": "Great King! from Heaven’s high throne descending low,\nIn Bethlehem’s stable born in cold and woe,\nThou shiverest in a manger, Babe divine,\nMuch hast Thou borne for sins: how much for mine!\n\nThe world’s creator Thou, our God adored,\nThou sufferest cold and want, O humbled Lord!\nDear chosen Child! when love transforms Thee so,\nFor Thee my heart the more with love shall glow.\n\nIn joy reposing on Thy Father’s breast,\nHow can a couch of straw afford Thee rest?\nSweet love, thus pained, inflame my frozen heart,\nJesus! to me Thy purest love impart.\n\nIf thus to suffer was Thy gracious will,\nYet, loving Savior! let me ask Thee still,\nWhat could Thy blissful soul to suffering move?\nThou weepest--not for grief--Ah no! for love.\n\nThou grievest, after all Thy love, to see\nThyself so little loved, O God, by me;\nYet if the past so little love has shown,\nI love Thee now, O Jesus, Thee alone.\n\nThou sleepest, holy Infant! but Thou art\nFor us still wakeful in Thy tender heart:\nTell me, O beauteous Lamb! say what may be\nThy thoughts?--I hear thee lisp: “To die for thee.”\n\nThou dwellest on Thy death for me, with joy;\nWho then, save Thee, shall all my thoughts employ?\nMary, my hope! if less I love your Son,\nO love Him you for me, and all is done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "James Jones", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - } - } - }, - "vachel-lindsay": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vachel Lindsay", - "birth": { - "year": 1879 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vachel_Lindsay", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "aladdin-and-the-jinn": { - "title": "“Aladdin and the Jinn”", - "body": "“Bring me soft song,” said Aladdin.\n“This tailor-shop sings not at all.\nChant me a word of the twilight,\nOf roses that mourn in the fall.\nBring me a song like hashish\nThat will comfort the stale and the sad,\nFor I would be mending my spirit,\nForgetting these days that are bad,\nForgetting companions too shallow,\nTheir quarrels and arguments thin,\nForgetting the shouting Muezzin:”--\n“I AM YOUR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.\n\n“Bring me old wines,” said Aladdin.\n“I have been a starved pauper too long.\nServe them in vessels of jade and of shell,\nServe them with fruit and with song:--\nWines of pre-Adamite Sultans\nDigged from beneath the black seas:--\nNew-gathered dew from the heavens\nDripped down from Heaven’s sweet trees,\nCups from the angels’ pale tables\nThat will make me both handsome and wise,\nFor I have beheld her, the princess,\nFirelight and starlight her eyes.\nPauper I am, I would woo her.\nAnd--let me drink wine, to begin,\nThough the Koran expressly forbids it.”\n“I AM YOUR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.\n\n“Plan me a dome,” said Aladdin,\n“That is drawn like the dawn of the MOON,\nWhen the sphere seems to rest on the mountains,\nHalf-hidden, yet full-risen soon.”\n“Build me a dome,” said Aladdin,\n“That shall cause all young lovers to sigh,\nThe fullness of life and of beauty,\nPeace beyond peace to the eye--\nA palace of foam and of opal,\nPure moonlight without and within,\nWhere I may enthrone my sweet lady.”\n“I AM YOUR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "alone-in-the-wind-on-the-prarie": { - "title": "“Alone in the Wind on the Prarie”", - "body": "I know a seraph who has golden eyes,\nAnd hair of gold, and body like the snow.\nHere in the wind I dream her unbound hair\nIs blowing round me, that desire’s sweet glow\nHas touched her pale keen face, and willful mien.\nAnd though she steps as one in manner born\nTo tread the forests of fair Paradise,\nDark memory’s wood she chooses to adorn.\nHere with bowed head, bashful with half-desire\nShe glides into my yesterday’s deep dream,\nAll glowing by the misty ferny cliff\nBeside the far forbidden thundering stream.\nWithin my dream I shake with the old flood.\nI fear its going, ere the spring days go.\nYet pray the glory may have deathless years,\nAnd kiss her hair, and sweet throat like the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-broncho-that-would-not-be-broken": { - "title": "“The Broncho that Would Not Be Broken”", - "body": "A little colt--broncho, loaned to the farm\nTo be broken in time without fury or harm,\nYet black crows flew past you, shouting alarm,\nCalling “Beware,” with lugubrious singing …\nThe butterflies there in the bush were romancing,\nThe smell of the grass caught your soul in a trance,\nSo why be a-fearing the spurs and the traces,\nO broncho that would not be broken of dancing?\n\nYou were born with the pride of the lords great and olden\nWho danced, through the ages, in corridors golden.\nIn all the wide farm-place the person most human.\nYou spoke out so plainly with squealing and capering,\nWith whinnying, snorting, contorting and prancing,\nAs you dodged your pursuers, looking askance,\nWith Greek-footed figures, and Parthenon paces,\nO broncho that would not be broken of dancing.\n\nThe grasshoppers cheered. “Keep whirling,” they said.\nThe insolent sparrows called from the shed\n“If men will not laugh, make them wish they were dead.”\nBut arch were your thoughts, all malice displacing,\nThough the horse-killers came, with snake-whips advancing.\nYou bantered and cantered away your last chance.\nAnd they scourged you, with Hell in their speech and their faces,\nO broncho that would not be broken of dancing.\n\n“Nobody cares for you,” rattled the crows,\nAs you dragged the whole reaper, next day, down the rows.\nThe three mules held back, yet you danced on your toes.\nYou pulled like a racer, and kept the mules chasing.\nYou tangled the harness with bright eyes side-glancing,\nWhile the drunk driver bled you--a pole for a lance--\nAnd the giant mules bit at you--keeping their places.\nO broncho that would not be broken of dancing.\n\nIn that last afternoon your boyish heart broke.\nThe hot wind came down like a sledge-hammer stroke.\nThe blood-sucking flies to a rare feast awoke.\nAnd they searched out your wounds, your death-warrant tracing.\nAnd the merciful men, their religion enhancing,\nStopped the red reaper, to give you a chance.\nThen you died on the prairie, and scorned all disgraces,\nO broncho that would not be broken of dancing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "by-the-spring-at-sunset": { - "title": "“By the Spring, at Sunset”", - "body": "Sometimes we remember kisses,\nRemember the dear heart-leap when they came:\nNot always, but sometimes we remember\nThe kindness, the dumbness, the good flame\nOf laughter and farewell.\nBeside the road\nAfar from those who said “Good-by” I write,\nFar from my city task, my lawful load.\n\nSun in my face, wind beside my shoulder,\nStreaming clouds, banners of new-born night\nEnchant me now. The splendors growing bolder\nMake bold my soul for some new wise delight.\n\nI write the day’s event, and quench my drouth,\nPausing beside the spring with happy mind.\nAnd now I feel those kisses on my mouth,\nHers most of all, one little friend most kind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dandelion": { - "title": "“The Dandelion”", - "body": "O dandelion, rich and haughty,\nKing of village flowers!\nEach day is coronation time,\nYou have no humble hours.\nI like to see you bring a troop\nTo beat the blue-grass spears,\nTo scorn the lawn-mower that would be\nLike fate’s triumphant shears.\nYour yellow heads are cut away,\nIt seems your reign is o’er.\nBy noon you raise a sea of stars\nMore golden than before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-eagle-that-is-forgotten": { - "title": "“The Eagle that is Forgotten”", - "body": "Sleep softly … eagle forgotten … under the stone.\nTime has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.\n\n“We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.\nThey made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.\nThey had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day.\nNow you were ended. They praised you … and laid you away.\n\nThe others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,\nThe window bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,\nThe mocked and the scorned and the sounded, the lame and the poor,\nThat should have remembered forever, … Remember no more.\n\nWhere are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,\nThe lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?\nThey call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,\nA hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons,\nThe zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began.\nThe valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.\n\nSleep softly … eagle forgotten … under the stone.\nTime has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.\nSleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame--\nTo live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,\nTo live in mankind, far, far more than … to live in a name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "euclid": { - "title": "“Euclid”", - "body": "Old Euclid drew a circle\nOn a sand-beach long ago.\nHe bounded and enclosed it\nWith angles thus and so.\nHis set of solemn greybeards\nNodded and argued much\nOf arc and circumference,\nDiameter and such.\nA silent child stood by them\nFrom morning until noon\nBecause they drew such charming\nRound pictures of the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-flower-fed-buffaloes": { - "title": "“The Flower-Fed Buffaloes”", - "body": "The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring\nIn the days of long ago,\nRanged where the locomotives sing\nAnd the prairie flowers lie low:--\nThe tossing, blooming, perfumed grass\nIs swept away by the wheat,\nWheels and wheels and wheels spin by\nIn the spring that still is sweet.\nBut the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring\nLeft us, long ago.\nThey gore no more, they bellow no more,\nThey trundle around the hills no more:--\nWith the Blackfeet, lying low,\nWith the Pawnee, lying low,\nLying low.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-memory-of-a-child": { - "title": "“In Memory of a Child”", - "body": "The angels guide him now,\nAnd watch his curly head,\nAnd lead him in their games,\nThe little boy we led.\n\nHe cannot come to harm,\nHe knows more than we know,\nHis light is brighter far\nThan daytime here below.\n\nHis path leads on and on,\nThrough pleasant lawns and flowers,\nHis brown eyes open wide\nAt grass more green than ours.\n\nWith playmates like himself,\nThe shining boy will sing,\nExploring wondrous woods,\nSweet with eternal spring.\n\nYet, he is lost to us,\nFar is his path of gold,\nFar does the city seem,\nLonely our hearts and old.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-praise-of-johnny-appleseed": { - "title": "“In Praise of Johnny Appleseed”", - "body": "# I. _Over the Appalachian Barricade_\n\n_To be read like old leaves on the elm tree of Time.\nSifting soft winds with sentence and rhyme_.\n\nIn the days of President Washington,\nThe glory of the nations,\nDust and ashes,\nSnow and sleet,\nAnd hay and oats and wheat,\nBlew west,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nFound the glades of rotting leaves, the soft deer-pastures,\nThe farms of the far-off future\nIn the forest.\nColts jumped the fence,\nSnorting, ramping, snapping, sniffing,\nWith gastronomic calculations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nThe east walls of our citadel,\nAnd turned to gold-horned unicorns,\nFeasting in the dim, volunteer farms of the forest.\nStripedest, kickingest kittens escaped,\nCaterwauling “Yankee Doodle Dandy,”\nRenounced their poor relations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nAnd turned to tiny tigers\nIn the humorous forest.\nChickens escaped\nFrom farmyard congregations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nAnd turned to amber trumpets\nOn the ramparts of our Hoosiers’ nest and citadel,\nMillennial heralds\nOf the foggy mazy forest.\nPigs broke loose, scrambled west,\nScorned their loathsome stations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nTurned to roaming, foaming wild boars\nOf the forest.\nThe smallest, blindest puppies toddled west\nWhile their eyes were coming open,\nAnd, with misty observations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nBarked, barked, barked\nAt the glow-worms and the marsh lights and the lightning-bugs,\nAnd turned to ravening wolves\nOf the forest.\nCrazy parrots and canaries flew west,\nDrunk on May-time revelations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nAnd turned to delirious, flower-dressed fairies\nOf the lazy forest.\nHaughtiest swans and peacocks swept west,\nAnd, despite soft derivations,\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nAnd turned to blazing warrior souls\nOf the forest,\nSinging the ways\nOf the Ancient of Days.\nAnd the “Old Continentals\nIn their ragged regimentals,”\nWith bard’s imaginations,\nCrossed the Appalachians.\nAnd\nA boy\nBlew west\nAnd with prayers and incantations,\nAnd with “Yankee Doodle Dandy,”\nCrossed the Appalachians,\nAnd was “young John Chapman,”\nThen\n“Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,”\nChief of the fastnesses, dappled and vast,\nIn a pack on his back,\nIn a deer-hide sack,\nThe beautiful orchards of the past,\nThe ghosts of all the forests and the groves--\nIn that pack on his back,\nIn that talisman sack,\nTo-morrow’s peaches, pears and cherries,\nTo-morrow’s grapes and red raspberries,\nSeeds and tree souls, precious things,\nFeathered with microscopic wings,\nAll the outdoors the child heart knows,\nAnd the apple, green, red, and white,\nSun of his day and his night--\nThe apple allied to the thorn,\nChild of the rose.\nPorches untrod of forest houses\nAll before him, all day long,\n“Yankee Doodle” his marching song;\nAnd the evening breeze\nJoined his psalms of praise\nAs he sang the ways\nOf the Ancient of Days.\n\nLeaving behind august Virginia,\nProud Massachusetts, and proud Maine,\nPlanting the trees that would march and train\nOn, in his name to the great Pacific,\nLike Birnam wood to Dunsinane,\nJohnny Appleseed swept on,\nEvery shackle gone,\nLoving every sloshy brake,\nLoving every skunk and snake,\nLoving every leathery weed,\nJohnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,\nMaster and ruler of the unicorn-ramping forest,\nThe tiger-mewing forest,\nThe rooster-trumpeting, boar-foaming, wolf-ravening forest,\nThe spirit-haunted, fairy-enchanted forest,\nStupendous and endless,\nSearching its perilous ways\nIn the name of the Ancient of Days.\n\n\n# II. _The Indians Worship Him, but He hurries on_\n\nPainted kings in the midst of the clearing\nHeard him asking his friends the eagles\nTo guard each planted seed and seedling.\nThen he was a god, to the red man’s dreaming;\nThen the chiefs brought treasures grotesque and fair,--\nMagical trinkets and pipes and guns,\nBeads and furs from their medicine-lair,--\nStuck holy feathers in his hair,\nHailed him with austere delight.\nThe orchard god was their guest through the night.\n\nWhile the late snow blew from bleak Lake Erie,\nScourging rock and river and reed,\nAll night long they made great medicine\nFor Jonathan Chapman,\nJohnny Appleseed,\nJohnny Appleseed;\nAnd as though his heart were a wind-blown wheat-sheaf,\nAs though his heart were a new-built nest,\nAs though their heaven house were his breast,\nIn swept the snow-birds singing glory.\nAnd I hear his bird heart beat its story,\nHear yet how the ghost of the forest shivers,\nHear yet the cry of the gray, old orchards,\nDim and decaying by the rivers,\nAnd the timid wings of the bird-ghosts beating,\nAnd the ghosts of the tom-toms beating, beating.\n\n_While you read, hear the hoof-beats of deer in the snow.\nAnd see, by their track, bleeding footprints we know._\n\nBut he left their wigwams and their love.\nBy the hour of dawn he was proud and stark,\nKissed the Indian babes with a sigh,\nWent forth to live on roots and bark,\nSleep in the trees, while the years howled by--\n\nCalling the catamounts by name,\nAnd buffalo bulls no hand could tame,\nSlaying never a living creature,\nJoining the birds in every game,\nWith the gorgeous turkey gobblers mocking,\nWith the lean-necked eagles boxing and shouting;\nSticking their feathers in his hair,--\nTurkey feathers,\nEagle feathers,--\nTrading hearts with all beasts and weathers\nHe swept on, winged and wonder-crested,\nBare-armed, barefooted, and bare-breasted.\n\n_While you read, see conventions of deer go by.\nThe bucks toss their horns, the fuzzy fawns fly._\n\nThe maples, shedding their spinning seeds,\nCalled to his appleseeds in the ground,\nVast chestnut-trees, with their butterfly nations,\nCalled to his seeds without a sound.\nAnd the chipmunk turned a “summer-set,”\nAnd the foxes danced the Virginia reel;\nHawthorne and crab-thorn bent, rain-wet,\nAnd dropped their flowers in his night-black hair;\nAnd the soft fawns stopped for his perorations;\nAnd his black eyes shone through the forest-gleam,\nAnd he plunged young hands into new-turned earth,\nAnd prayed dear orchard boughs into birth;\nAnd he ran with the rabbit and slept with the stream.\nAnd he ran with the rabbit and slept with the stream.\nAnd so for us he made great medicine,\nAnd so for us he made great medicine,\nIn the days of President Washington.\n\n\n# III. _Johnny Appleseed’s Old Age_\n\n_To be read\nlike faint\nhoof-beats\nof fawns\nlong gone\nFrom respectable\npasture, and\npark and\nlawn,\nAnd heartbeats\nof\nfawns that\nare coming\nagain\nWhen the\nforest, once\nmore, is the\nmaster of\nmen._\n\nLong, long after,\nWhen settlers put up beam and rafter,\nThey asked of the birds: “Who gave this fruit?\nWho watched this fence till the seeds took root?\nWho gave these boughs?” They asked the sky,\nAnd there was no reply.\nBut the robin might have said,\n“To the farthest West he has followed the sun,\nHis life and his empire just begun.”\n\nSelf-scourged, like a monk, with a throne for wages,\nStripped like the iron-souled Hindu sages,\nDraped like a statue, in strings like a scarecrow,\nHis helmet-hat an old tin pan,\nBut worn in the love of the heart of man,\nMore sane than the helm of Tamerlane,\nHairy Ainu, wild man of Borneo, Robinson Crusoe--Johnny Appleseed;\nAnd the robin might have said,\n“Sowing, he goes to the far, new West,\nWith the apple, the sun of his burning breast--\nThe apple allied to the thorn,\nChild of the rose.”\n\nWashington buried in Virginia,\nJackson buried in Tennessee,\nYoung Lincoln, brooding in Illinois,\nAnd Johnny Appleseed, priestly and free,\nKnotted and gnarled, past seventy years,\nStill planted on in the woods alone.\nOhio and young Indiana--\nThese were his wide altar-stone,\nWhere still he burnt out flesh and bone.\nTwenty days ahead of the Indian, twenty years ahead of the white man,\nAt last the Indian overtook him, at last the Indian hurried past him;\nAt last the white man overtook him, at last the white man hurried past him;\nAt last his own trees overtook him, at last his own trees hurried past him.\nMany cats were tame again,\nMany ponies tame again,\nMany pigs were tame again,\nMany canaries tame again;\nAnd the real frontier was his sun-burnt breast.\n\nFrom the fiery core of that apple, the earth,\nSprang apple-amaranths divine.\nLove’s orchards climbed to the heavens of the West,\nAnd snowed the earthly sod with flowers.\nFarm hands from the terraces of the blest\nDanced on the mists with their ladies fine;\nAnd Johnny Appleseed laughed with his dreams,\nAnd swam once more the ice-cold streams.\nAnd the doves of the spirit swept through the hours,\nWith doom-calls, love-calls, death-calls, dream-calls;\nAnd Johnny Appleseed, all that year,\nLifted his hands to the farm-filled sky,\nTo the apple-harvesters busy on high;\nAnd so once more his youth began,\nAnd so for us he made great medicine--\nJohnny Appleseed, medicine-man.\nThen\nThe sun was his turned-up broken barrel,\nOut of which his juicy apples rolled,\nDown the repeated terraces,\nThumping across the gold,\nAn angel in each apple that touched the forest mold,\nA ballot-box in each apple,\nA state capital in each apple,\nGreat high schools, great colleges,\nAll America in each apple,\nEach red, rich, round, and bouncing moon\nThat touched the forest mold.\nLike scrolls and rolled-up flags of silk,\nHe saw the fruits unfold,\nAnd all our expectations in one wild-flower-written dream,\nConfusion and death sweetness, and a thicket of crab-thorns,\nHeart of a hundred midnights, heart of the merciful morns.\nHeaven’s boughs bent down with their alchemy,\nPerfumed airs, and thoughts of wonder.\nAnd the dew on the grass and his own cold tears\nWere one in brooding mystery,\nThough death’s loud thunder came upon him,\nThough death’s loud thunder struck him down--\nThe boughs and the proud thoughts swept through the thunder,\nTill he saw our wide nation, each State a flower,\nEach petal a park for holy feet,\nWith wild fawns merry on every street,\nWith wild fawns merry on every street,\nThe vista of ten thousand years, flower-lighted and complete.\n\nHear the lazy weeds murmuring, bays and rivers whispering,\nFrom Michigan to Texas, California to Maine;\nListen to the eagles, screaming, calling,\n“Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,”\nThere by the doors of old Fort Wayne.\n\nIn the four-poster bed Johnny Appleseed built,\nAutumn rains were the curtains, autumn leaves were the quilt.\nHe laid him down sweetly, and slept through the night,\nLike a bump on a log, like a stone washed white,\nThere by the doors of old Fort Wayne.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "an-indian-summer-day": { - "title": "“An Indian Summer Day”", - "body": "# _In the Beginning_\n\nThe sun is a huntress young,\nThe sun is a red, red joy,\nThe sun is an indian girl,\nOf the tribe of the Illinois.\n\n\n# _Mid-Morning_\n\nThe sun is a smouldering fire,\nThat creeps through the high gray plain,\nAnd leaves not a bush of cloud\nTo blossom with flowers of rain.\n\n\n# _Noon_\n\nThe sun is a wounded deer,\nThat treads pale grass in the skies,\nShaking his golden horns,\nFlashing his baleful eyes.\n\n\n# _Sunset_\n\nThe sun is an eagle old,\nThere in the windless west.\nAtop of the spirit-cliffs\nHe builds him a crimson nest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-leaden-eyed": { - "title": "“The Leaden-Eyed”", - "body": "Let not young souls be smothered out before\nThey do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.\nIt is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,\nIts poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.\nNot that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly,\nNot that they sow, but that they seldom reap,\nNot that they serve, but have no gods to serve,\nNot that they die, but that they die like sheep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lincoln-walks-at-midnight": { - "title": "“Lincoln Walks at Midnight”", - "body": "It is portentous, and a thing of state\nThat here at midnight, in our little town\nA mourning figure walks, and will not rest,\nNear the old court-house pacing up and down.\n\nOr by his homestead, or in shadowed yards\nHe lingers where his children used to play,\nOr through the market, on the well-worn stones\nHe stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.\n\nA bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,\nA famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl\nMake him the quaint great figure that men love,\nThe prairie-lawyer, master of us all.\n\nHe cannot sleep upon his hillside now.\nHe is among us:--as in times before!\nAnd we who toss and lie awake for long\nBreathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.\n\nHis head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings.\nYea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?\nToo many peasants fight, they know not why,\nToo many homesteads in black terror weep.\n\nThe sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.\nHe sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.\nHe carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now\nThe bitterness, the folly and the pain.\n\nHe cannot rest until a spirit-dawn\nShall come;--the shining hope of Europe free;\nThe league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth,\nBringing long peace to Cornwall, Alp and Sea.\n\nIt breaks his heart that kings must murder still,\nThat all his hours of travail here for men\nSeem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace\nThat he may sleep upon his hill again?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "st-francis-of-assisi": { - "title": "“St. Francis of Assisi”", - "body": "Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,\nBrother of birds and trees, God’s Troubadour,\nBlinded with weeping for the sad and poor;\nOur wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men,\nCome, let us chant the canticle again\nOf mother earth and the enduring sun.\nGod make each soul the lonely leper’s slave;\nGod make us saints, and brave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - } - } - }, - "henry-wadsworth-longfellow": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow", - "birth": { - "year": 1807 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "the-day-is-done": { - "title": "“The Day is Done”", - "body": "The day is done, and the darkness\nFalls from the wings of Night,\nAs a feather is wafted downward\nFrom an eagle in his flight.\nI see the lights of the village\nGleam through the rain and the mist,\nAnd a feeling of sadness comes o’er me\nThat my soul cannot resist:\nA feeling of sadness and longing,\nThat is not akin to pain,\nAnd resembles sorrow only\nAs the mist resembles the rain.\nCome, read to me some poem,\nSome simple and heartfelt lay,\nThat shall soothe this restless feeling,\nAnd banish the thoughts of day.\nNot from the grand old masters,\nNot from the bards sublime,\nWhose distant footsteps echo\nThrough the corridors of Time.\nFor, like strains of martial music,\nTheir mighty thoughts suggest\nLife’s endless toil and endeavor;\nAnd to-night I long for rest.\nRead from some humbler poet,\nWhose songs gushed from his heart,\nAs showers from the clouds of summer,\nOr tears from the eyelids start;\nWho, through long days of labor,\nAnd nights devoid of ease,\nStill heard in his soul the music\nOf wonderful melodies.\nSuch songs have power to quiet\nThe restless pulse of care,\nAnd come like the benediction\nThat follows after prayer.\nThen read from the treasured volume\nThe poem of thy choice,\nAnd lend to the rhyme of the poet\nThe beauty of thy voice.\nAnd the night shall be filled with music\nAnd the cares, that infest the day,\nShall fold their tents, like the Arabs,\nAnd as silently steal away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "decoration-day": { - "title": "“Decoration Day”", - "body": "Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest\nOn this Field of the Grounded Arms,\nWhere foes no more molest,\nNor sentry’s shot alarms!\n\nYe have slept on the ground before,\nAnd started to your feet\nAt the cannon’s sudden roar,\nOr the drum’s redoubling beat.\n\nBut in this camp of Death\nNo sound your slumber breaks;\nHere is no fevered breath,\nNo wound that bleeds and aches.\n\nAll is repose and peace,\nUntrampled lies the sod;\nThe shouts of battle cease,\nIt is the Truce of God!\n\nRest, comrades, rest and sleep!\nThe thoughts of men shall be\nAs sentinels to keep\nYour rest from danger free.\n\nYour silent tents of green\nWe deck with fragrant flowers;\nYours has the suffering been,\nThe memory shall be ours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "the-ladder-of-st-augustine": { - "title": "“The Ladder of St. Augustine”", - "body": "Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,\nThat of our vices we can frame\nA ladder, if we will but tread\nBeneath our feet each deed of shame!\nAll common things, each day’s events,\nThat with the hour begin and end,\nOur pleasures and our discontents,\nAre rounds by which we may ascend.\nThe low desire, the base design,\nThat makes another’s virtues less;\nThe revel of the ruddy wine,\nAnd all occasions of excess;\nThe longing for ignoble things;\nThe strife for triumph more than truth;\nThe hardening of the heart, that brings\nIrreverence for the dreams of youth;\nAll thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,\nThat have their root in thoughts of ill;\nWhatever hinders or impedes\nThe action of the nobler will;--\nAll these must first be trampled down\nBeneath our feet, if we would gain\nIn the bright fields of fair renown\nThe right of eminent domain.\nWe have not wings, we cannot soar;\nBut we have feet to scale and climb\nBy slow degrees, by more and more,\nThe cloudy summits of our time.\nThe mighty pyramids of stone\nThat wedge-like cleave the desert airs,\nWhen nearer seen, and better known,\nAre but gigantic flights of stairs.\nThe distant mountains, that uprear\nTheir solid bastions to the skies,\nAre crossed by pathways, that appear\nAs we to higher levels rise.\nThe heights by great men reached and kept\nWere not attained by sudden flight,\nBut they, while their companions slept,\nWere toiling upward in the night.\nStanding on what too long we bore\nWith shoulders bent and downcast eyes,\nWe may discern--unseen before--\nA path to higher destinies.\nNor deem the irrevocable Past,\nAs wholly wasted, wholly vain,\nIf, rising on its wrecks, at last\nTo something nobler we attain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "a-psalm-of-life": { - "title": "“A Psalm of Life”", - "body": "Tell me not, in mournful numbers,\n Life is but an empty dream!\nFor the soul is dead that slumbers,\n And things are not what they seem.\n\nLife is real! Life is earnest!\n And the grave is not its goal;\nDust thou art, to dust returnest,\n Was not spoken of the soul.\n\nNot enjoyment, and not sorrow,\n Is our destined end or way;\nBut to act, that each to-morrow\n Find us farther than to-day.\n\nArt is long, and Time is fleeting,\n And our hearts, though stout and brave,\nStill, like muffled drums, are beating\n Funeral marches to the grave.\n\nIn the world’s broad field of battle,\n In the bivouac of Life,\nBe not like dumb, driven cattle!\n Be a hero in the strife!\n\nTrust no Future, howe’er pleasant!\n Let the dead Past bury its dead!\nAct,--act in the living Present!\n Heart within, and God o’erhead!\n\nLives of great men all remind us\n We can make our lives sublime,\nAnd, departing, leave behind us\n Footprints on the sands of time;\n\nFootprints, that perhaps another,\n Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,\nA forlorn and shipwrecked brother,\n Seeing, shall take heart again.\n\nLet us, then, be up and doing,\n With a heart for any fate;\nStill achieving, still pursuing,\n Learn to labor and to wait.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rainy-day": { - "title": "“The Rainy Day”", - "body": "The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;\nIt rains, and the wind is never weary;\nThe vine still clings to the mouldering wall,\nBut at every gust the dead leaves fall,\nAnd the day is dark and dreary.\n\nMy life is cold, and dark, and dreary;\nIt rains, and the wind is never weary;\nMy thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,\nBut the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,\nAnd the days are dark and dreary.\n\nBe still, sad heart! and cease repining;\nBehind the clouds is the sun still shining;\nThy fate is the common fate of all,\nInto each life some rain must fall,\nSome days must be dark and dreary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-reaper-and-the-flowers": { - "title": "“The Reaper and the Flowers”", - "body": "There is a Reaper, whose name is Death,\nAnd, with his sickle keen,\nHe reaps the bearded grain at a breath,\nAnd the flowers that grow between.\n\n“Shall I have naught that is fair?” saith he;\n“Have naught but the bearded grain?\nThough the breath of these flowers is sweet to me,\nI will give them all back again.”\n\nHe gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,\nHe kissed their drooping leaves;\nIt was for the Lord of Paradise\nHe bound them in his sheaves.\n\n“My Lord has need of these flowerets gay,”\nThe Reaper said, and smiled;\n“Dear tokens of the earth are they,\nWhere He was once a child.”\n\n“They shall all bloom in fields of light,\nTransplanted by my care,\nAnd saints, upon their garments white,\nThese sacred blossoms wear.”\n\nAnd the mother gave, in tears and pain,\nThe flowers she most did love;\nShe knew she should find them all again\nIn the fields of light above.\n\nOh, not in cruelty, not in wrath,\nThe Reaper came that day;\n’T was an angel visited the green earth,\nAnd took the flowers away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "federico-garcia-lorca": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Federico García Lorca", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_García_Lorca", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "ballad-of-the-moon-moon": { - "title": "“Ballad of the Moon Moon”", - "body": "The moon came to the forge\nwearing a bustle of Spikenards.\nThe boy is looking at her.\nThe boy is looking hard.\nIn the troubled air,\nthe wind moves her arms,\nshowing lewd and pure,\nher hard, tin breasts.\n“Run, moon, moon, moon.\nIf the gypsies came,\nthey would make of your heart\nnecklaces and white rings.”\n“Child, let me dance.\nWhen the gypsies come,\nthey will find you on the anvil\nwith your little eyes shut tight.”\n“Run, moon moon moon.\nI can hear their horses.\nChild, let me be, don’t walk\non my starchy white.”\n\nThe rider was drawing closer\nplaying the drum of the plain.\nIn the forge the child\nhas his eyes shut tight.\nBronze and dream, the gypsies\ncross the olive grove.\nTheir heads held high,\ntheir eyes half open.\n\nAy how the nightjar sings!\nHow it sings in the tree!\nThe moon goes through the sky\nwith a child in her hand.\n\nIn the forge the gypsies\nwept and cried aloud.\nThe air is watching, watching.\nThe air watched all night long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-city-that-does-not-sleep": { - "title": "“The City that Does Not Sleep”", - "body": "In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.\nNobody is asleep.\nThe creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.\nThe living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,\nand the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner\nthe unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.\n\nNobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.\nNobody is asleep.\nIn a graveyard far off there is a corpse\nwho has moaned for three years\nbecause of a dry countryside on his knee;\nand that boy they buried this morning cried so much\nit was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.\n\nLife is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!\nWe fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth\nor we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.\nBut forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;\nflesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths\nin a thicket of new veins,\nand whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever\nand whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.\n\nOne day\nthe horses will live in the saloons\nand the enraged ants\nwill throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the\neyes of cows.\n\nAnother day\nwe will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead\nand still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats\nwe will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.\nCareful! Be careful! Be careful!\nThe men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,\nand that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,\nor that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,\nwe must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,\nwhere the bear’s teeth are waiting,\nwhere the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,\nand the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.\n\nNobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.\nNobody is sleeping.\nIf someone does close his eyes,\na whip, boys, a whip!\nLet there be a landscape of open eyes\nand bitter wounds on fire.\nNo one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.\nI have said it before.\n\nNo one is sleeping.\nBut if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,\nopen the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight\nthe lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ditty-of-first-desire": { - "title": "“Ditty of First Desire”", - "body": "In the green morning\nI wanted to be a heart.\na heart.\n\nAnd in the ripe evening\nI wanted to be a nightingale.\nA nightingale.\n\n(Soul,\nturn oranged colored.\nSoul, turn the color of love.)\n\nIn the vivid morning\nI wanted to be myself.\nA heart.\n\nAnd at the evenings end\nI wanted to be my voice\nA nightingale.\n\nSoul,\nturn orange colored.\nSoul,\nturn the color of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-faithless-wife": { - "title": "“The Faithless Wife”", - "body": "So I took her to the river\nbelieving she was a maiden,\nbut she already had a husband.\nIt was on St. James night\nand almost as if I was obliged to.\nThe lanterns went out\nand the crickets lighted up.\nIn the farthest street corners\nI touched her sleeping breasts\nand they opened to me suddenly\nlike spikes of hyacinth.\nThe starch of her petticoat\nsounded in my ears\nlike a piece of silk\nrent by ten knives.\nWithout silver light on their foliage\nthe trees had grown larger\nand a horizon of dogs\nbarked very far from the river.\n\nPast the blackberries,\nthe reeds and the hawthorne\nunderneath her cluster of hair\nI made a hollow in the earth\nI took off my tie,\nshe too off her dress.\nI, my belt with the revolver,\nShe, her four bodices.\nNor nard nor mother-o’-pearl\nhave skin so fine,\nnor does glass with silver\nshine with such brilliance.\nHer thighs slipped away from me\nlike startled fish,\nhalf full of fire,\nhalf full of cold.\nThat night I ran\non the best of roads\nmounted on a nacre mare\nwithout bridle stirrups.\n\nAs a man, I won’t repeat\nthe things she said to me.\nThe light of understanding\nhas made me more discreet.\nSmeared with sand and kisses\nI took her away from the river.\nThe swords of the lilies\nbattled with the air.\n\nI behaved like what I am,\nlike a proper gypsy.\nI gave her a large sewing basket,\nof straw-colored satin,\nbut I did not fall in love\nfor although she had a husband\nshe told me she was a maiden\nwhen I took her to the river.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_james" - } - } - }, - "gacela-of-the-dark-death": { - "title": "“Gacela of the Dark Death”", - "body": "I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,\nI want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.\nI want to sleep the sleep of that child\nwho longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.\n\nI don’t want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,\nhow the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.\nI’d rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for\nnor about how the moon does all its work before dawn\nwith its snakelike nose.\n\nI want to sleep for half a second,\na second, a minute, a century,\nbut I want everyone to know that I am still alive,\nthat I have a golden manger inside my lips,\nthat I am the little friend of the west wind,\nthat I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.\n\nWhen it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me\nbecause I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,\nand pour a little hard water over my shoes\nso that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.\n\nBecause I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,\nand learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,\nbecause I want to live with that shadowy child\nwho longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "the-gypsy-and-the-wind": { - "title": "“The Gypsy and the Wind”", - "body": "Playing her parchment moon\nPrecosia comes\nalong a watery path of laurels and crystal lights.\nThe starless silence, fleeing\nfrom her rhythmic tambourine,\nfalls where the sea whips and sings,\nhis night filled with silvery swarms.\nHigh atop the mountain peaks\nthe sentinels are weeping;\nthey guard the tall white towers\nof the English consulate.\nAnd gypsies of the water\nfor their pleasure erect\nlittle castles of conch shells\nand arbors of greening pine.\n\nPlaying her parchment moon\nPrecosia comes.\nThe wind sees her and rises,\nthe wind that never slumbers.\nNaked Saint Christopher swells,\nwatching the girl as he plays\nwith tongues of celestial bells\non an invisible bagpipe.\n\nGypsy, let me lift your skirt\nand have a look at you.\nOpen in my ancient fingers\nthe blue rose of your womb.\n\nPrecosia throws the tambourine\nand runs away in terror.\nBut the virile wind pursues her\nwith his breathing and burning sword.\n\nThe sea darkens and roars,\nwhile the olive trees turn pale.\nThe flutes of darkness sound,\nand a muted gong of the snow.\n\nPrecosia, run, Precosia!\nOr the green wind will catch you!\nPrecosia, run, Precosia!\nAnd look how fast he comes!\nA satyr of low-born stars\nwith their long and glistening tongues.\n\nPrecosia, filled with fear,\nnow makes her way to that house\nbeyond the tall green pines\nwhere the English consul lives.\n\nAlarmed by the anguished cries,\nthree riflemen come running,\ntheir black capes tightly drawn,\nand berets down over their brow.\n\nThe Englishman gives the gypsy\na glass of tepid milk\nand a shot of Holland gin\nwhich Precosia does not drink.\n\nAnd while she tells them, weeping,\nof her strange adventure,\nthe wind furiously gnashes\nagainst the slate roof tiles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "lament-for-ignacio-sanchez-mejias": { - "title": "“Lament For Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”", - "body": "1. _Cogida and death_\n\nAt five in the afternoon.\nIt was exactly five in the afternoon.\nA boy brought the white sheet\nat five in the afternoon.\nA trail of lime ready prepared\nat five in the afternoon.\nThe rest was death, and death alone.\n\nThe wind carried away the cottonwool\nat five in the afternoon.\nAnd the oxide scattered crystal and nickel\nat five in the afternoon.\nNow the dove and the leopard wrestle\nat five in the afternoon.\nAnd a thigh with a desolated horn\nat five in the afternoon.\nThe bass-string struck up\nat five in the afternoon.\nArsenic bells and smoke\nat five in the afternoon.\nGroups of silence in the corners\nat five in the afternoon.\nAnd the bull alone with a high heart!\nAt five in the afternoon.\nWhen the sweat of snow was coming\nat five in the afternoon,\nwhen the bull ring was covered with iodine\nat five in the afternoon.\nDeath laid eggs in the wound\nat five in the afternoon.\nAt five in the afternoon.\nAt five o’clock in the afternoon.\n\nA coffin on wheels is his bed\nat five in the afternoon.\nBones and flutes resound in his ears\nat five in the afternoon.\nNow the bull was bellowing through his forehead\nat five in the afternoon.\nThe room was iridescent with agony\nat five in the afternoon.\nIn the distance the gangrene now comes\nat five in the afternoon.\nHorn of the lily through green groins\nat five in the afternoon.\nThe wounds were burning like suns\nat five in the afternoon.\nAt five in the afternoon.\nAh, that fatal five in the afternoon!\nIt was five by all the clocks!\nIt was five in the shade of the afternoon!\n\n\n\n2. _The Spilled Blood_\n\nI will not see it!\n\nTell the moon to come,\nfor I do not want to see the blood\nof Ignacio on the sand.\n\nI will not see it!\n\nThe moon wide open.\nHorse of still clouds,\nand the grey bull ring of dreams\nwith willows in the barreras.\n\nI will not see it!\n\nLet my memory kindle!\nWarm the jasmines\nof such minute whiteness!\n\nI will not see it!\n\nThe cow of the ancient world\npassed her sad tongue\nover a snout of blood\nspilled on the sand,\nand the bulls of Guisando,\npartly death and partly stone,\nbellowed like two centuries\nsated with threading the earth.\nNo.\nI will not see it!\n\nIgnacio goes up the tiers\nwith all his death on his shoulders.\nHe sought for the dawn\nbut the dawn was no more.\nHe seeks for his confident profile\nand the dream bewilders him\nHe sought for his beautiful body\nand encountered his opened blood\nDo not ask me to see it!\nI do not want to hear it spurt\neach time with less strength:\nthe spurt that illuminates\nthe tiers of seats, and spills\nover the corduroy and the leather\nof a thirsty multitude.\nWho shouts that I should come near!\nDo not ask me to see it!\n\nHis eyes did not close\nwhen he saw the horns near,\nbut the terrible mothers\nlifted their heads.\nAnd across the ranches,\nan air of secret voices rose,\nshouting to celestial bulls,\nherdsmen of pale mist.\nThere was no prince in Sevilla\nwho could compare to him,\nnor sword like his sword\nnor heart so true.\nLike a river of lions\nwas his marvellous strength,\nand like a marble torso\nhis firm drawn moderation.\nThe air of Andalusian Rome\ngilded his head\nwhere his smile was a spiked\nof wit and intelligence.\nWhat a great torero in the ring!\nWhat a good peasant in the sierra!\nHow gentle with the sheaves!\nHow hard with the spurs!\nHow tender with the dew!\nHow dazzling the fiesta!\nHow tremendous with the final\nbanderillas of darkness!\n\nBut now he sleeps without end.\nNow the moss and the grass\nopen with sure fingers\nthe flower of his skull.\nAnd now his blood comes out singing;\nsinging along marshes and meadows,\nslides on frozen horns,\nfaltering souls in the mist\nstumbling over a thousand hoofs\nlike a long, dark, sad tongue,\nto form a pool of agony\nclose to the starry Guadalquivir.\nOh, white wall of Spain!\nOh, black bull of sorrow!\nOh, hard blood of Ignacio!\nOh, nightingale of his veins!\nNo.\nI will not see it!\nNo chalice can contain it,\nno swallows can drink it,\nno frost of light can cool it,\nnor song nor deluge of white Lillie’s,\nno glass can cover it with silver.\nNo.\nI will not see it!\n\n\n\n3. _The Laid Out Body_\n\nStone is a forehead where dreams grieve\nwithout curving waters and frozen cypresses.\nStone is a shoulder on which to bear Time\nwith trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.\n\nI have seen grey showers move towards the waves\nraising their tender riddle arms,\nto avoid being caught by lying stone\nwhich loosens their limbs without soaking their blood.\n\nFor stone gathers seed and clouds,\nskeleton larks and wolves of penumbra:\nbut yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,\nonly bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls.\n\nNow, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.\nAll is finished. What is happening! Contemplate his face:\ndeath has covered him with pale sulphur\nand has place on him the head of dark Minotaur.\n\nAll is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.\nThe air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,\nand Love, soaked through with tears of snow,\nwarms itself on the peak of the herd.\n\nWhat are they saying? A stenching silence settles down.\nWe are here with a body laid out which fades away,\nwith a pure shape which had nightingales\nand we see it being filled with depth less holes.\n\nWho creases the shroud? What he says is not true!\nNobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,\nnobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.\nHere I want nothing else but the round eyes\nto see his body without a chance of rest.\n\nHere I want to see those men of hard voice.\nThose that break horses and dominate rivers;\nthose men of sonorous skeleton who sing\nwith a mouth full of sun and flint.\n\nHere I want to see them. Before the stone.\nBefore this body with broken reins.\nI want to know from them the way out\nfor this captain stripped down by death.\n\nI want them to show me a lament like a river\nwhich will have sweet mists and deep shores,\nto take the body of Ignacio where it looses itself\nwithout hearing the double planting of the bulls.\n\nLoses itself in the round bull ring of the moon\nwhich feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull,\nloses itself in the night without song of fishes\nand in the white thicket of frozen smoke.\n\nI don’t want to cover his face with handkerchiefs\nthat he may get used to the death he carries.\nGo, Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing\nSleep, fly, rest, even the sea dies!\n\n\n\n4. _Absence of the Soul_\n\nThe bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,\nnor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.\nThe child and the afternoon do not know you\nbecause you have dead forever.\n\nThe shoulder of the stone does not know you\nnor the black silk, where you are shuttered.\nYour silent memory does not know you\nbecause you have died forever\n\nThe autumn will come with small white snails,\nmisty grapes and clustered hills,\nbut no one will look into your eyes\nbecause you have died forever.\n\nBecause you have died for ever,\nlike all the dead of the earth,\nlike all the dead who are forgotten\nin a heap of lifeless dogs.\n\nNobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.\nFor posterity I sing of your profile and grace.\nOf the signal maturity of your understanding.\nOf your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.\nOf the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.\n\nIt will be a long time, if ever, before there is born\nan Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.\nI sing of his elegance with words that groan,\nand I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "landscapes-of-a-vomiting-multitude": { - "title": "“Landscapes of a Vomiting Multitude”", - "body": "The fat lady came out first,\ntearing out roots and moistening drumskins.\nThe fat lady\nwho turns dying octopuses inside out.\nThe fat lady, the moon’s antagonist,\nwas running through the streets and deserted buildings\nand leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners\nand stirring up the furies of the last centuries’ feasts\nand summoning the demon of bread through the sky’s clean-swept hills\nand filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.\nThe graveyards, yes the graveyards\nand the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,\nthe dead, pheasants and apples of another era,\npushing it into our throat.\n\nThere were murmuring from the jungle of vomit\nwith the empty women, with hot wax children,\nwith fermented trees and tireless waiters\nwho serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.\nThere’s no other way, my son, vomit! There’s no other way.\nIt’s not the vomit of hussars on the breasts of their whores,\nnor the vomit of cats that inadvertently swallowed frogs,\nbut the dead who scratch with clay hands\non flint gates where clouds and desserts decay.\n\nThe fat lady came first\nwith the crowds from the ships, taverns, and parks.\nVomit was delicately shaking its drums\namong a few little girls of blood\nwho were begging the moon for protection.\nWho could imagine my sadness?\nThe look on my face was mine, but now isn’t me,\nthe naked look on my face, trembling for alcohol\nand launching incredible ships\nthrough the anemones of the piers.\nI protect myself with this look\nthat flows from waves where no dawn would go,\nI, poet without arms, lost\nin the vomiting multitude,\nwith no effusive horse to shear\nthe thick moss from my temples.\n\nThe fat lady went first\nand the crowds kept looking for pharmacies\nwhere the bitter tropics could be found.\nOnly when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived\ndid the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "moon-romance-moon": { - "title": "“Moon Romance, Moon”", - "body": "The moon came to the forge\nwith its tuberose bustle.\nThe boy looks at her.\nThe boy is looking at her.\nin the shaken air\nthe moon moves its arms\nand teaches, lubricious and pure,\nher breasts of hard tin.\nRun away moon, moon, moon.\nIf the gypsies came\nthey would do with your heart\nwhite necklaces and rings.\nBoy, let me dance.\nWhen the gypsies come\nthey will find you on the anvil\nwith eyes closed.\n\nRun away moon, moon, moon,\nI already feel their horses.\nBoy, leave me, don’t step\nmy starched white.\n\nthe horseman approached\nplaying the drum of the plain\nInside the forge the child,\nhis eyes are closed.\n\nThrough the olive grove they came,\nbronze and dream, the gypsies.\nheads up\nand narrowed eyes.\n\nHow the zumaya sings,\noh how he sings in the tree!\nThe moon goes through the sky\nwith a child by the hand.\n\nInside the forge they cry,\nscreaming, the gypsies.\nThe air watches over her, watches over her.\nThe air is veiling her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "of-the-dark-doves": { - "title": "“Of the Dark Doves”", - "body": "In the branches of the laurel tree\nI saw two dark doves\nOne was the sun\nand one the moon\nLittle neighbors I said\nwhere is my grave--\nIn my tail said the sun\nOn my throat said the moon\nAnd I who was walking\nwith the land around my waist\nsaw two snow eagles\nand a naked girl\nOne was the other\nand the girl was none\nLittle eagles I said\nwhere is my grave--\nIn my tail said the sun\nOn my throat said the moon\nIn the branches of the laurel tree\nI saw two naked doves\nOne was the other\nand both were none", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "serenata": { - "title": "“Serenata”", - "body": "The night soaks itself\nalong the shore of the river\nand in Lolita’s breasts\nthe branches die of love.\n\nThe branches die of love.\n\nNaked the night sings\nabove the bridges of March.\nLolita bathes her body\nwith salt water and roses.\n\nThe branches die of love.\n\nThe night of anise and silver\nshines over the rooftops.\nSilver of streams and mirrors\nAnise of your white thighs.\n\nThe branches die of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Derek Parker" - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-barren-orange-tree": { - "title": "“The Song of the Barren Orange Tree”", - "body": "Woodcutter.\nCut my shadow from me.\nFree me from the torment\nof being without fruit.\n\nWhy was I born among mirrors?\nDay goes round and round me.\nThe night copies me\nin all its stars.\n\nI want to live without my reflection.\nAnd then let me dream\nthat ants and thistledown\nare my leaves and my parrots.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - } - } - }, - "richard-lovelace": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Lovelace", - "birth": { - "year": 1617 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1657 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lovelace_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "song-to-amarantha-that-she-would-dishevel-her-hair": { - "title": "“Song to Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair”", - "body": "Amarantha sweet and fair\nAh braid no more that shining hair!\nAs my curious hand or eye\nHovering round thee let it fly.\n\nLet it fly as unconfin’d\nAs its calm ravisher, the wind,\nWho hath left his darling th’East,\nTo wanton o’er that spicy nest.\n\nEv’ry tress must be confest\nBut neatly tangled at the best;\nLike a clue of golden thread,\nMost excellently ravelled.\n\nDo not then wind up that light\nIn ribands, and o’er-cloud in night;\nLike the sun in’s early ray,\nBut shake your head and scatter day.\n\nSee ’tis broke! Within this grove\nThe bower, and the walks of love,\nWeary lie we down and rest,\nAnd fan each other’s panting breast.\n\nHere we’ll strip and cool our fire\nIn cream below, in milk-baths higher:\nAnd when all wells are drawn dry,\nI’ll drink a tear out of thine eye,\n\nWhich our very joys shall leave\nThat sorrows thus we can deceive;\nOr our very sorrows weep,\nThat joys so ripe, so little keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-althea-from-prison": { - "title": "“To Althea, from Prison”", - "body": "When Love with unconfinèd wings\nHovers within my Gates,\nAnd my divine _Althea_ brings\nTo whisper at the Grates;\nWhen I lie tangled in her hair,\nAnd fettered to her eye,\nThe Gods that wanton in the Air,\nKnow no such Liberty.\n\nWhen flowing Cups run swiftly round\nWith no allaying _Thames_,\nOur careless heads with Roses bound,\nOur hearts with Loyal Flames;\nWhen thirsty grief in Wine we steep,\nWhen Healths and draughts go free,\nFishes that tipple in the Deep\nKnow no such Liberty.\n\nWhen (like committed linnets) I\nWith shriller throat shall sing\nThe sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,\nAnd glories of my King;\nWhen I shall voice aloud how good\nHe is, how Great should be,\nEnlargèd Winds, that curl the Flood,\nKnow no such Liberty.\n\nStone Walls do not a Prison make,\nNor Iron bars a Cage;\nMinds innocent and quiet take\nThat for an Hermitage.\nIf I have freedom in my Love,\nAnd in my soul am free,\nAngels alone that soar above,\nEnjoy such Liberty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-lucasta-going-to-the-wars": { - "title": "“To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”", - "body": "Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,\n That from the nunnery\nOf thy chaste breast and quiet mind\n To war and arms I fly.\n\nTrue, a new mistress now I chase,\n The first foe in the field;\nAnd with a stronger faith embrace\n A sword, a horse, a shield.\n\nYet this inconstancy is such\n As you too shall adore;\nI could not love thee (Dear) so much,\n Lov’d I not Honour more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "amy-lowell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Amy Lowell", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Lowell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "lilacs": { - "title": "“Lilacs”", - "body": "Lilacs,\nFalse blue,\nWhite,\nPurple,\nColor of lilac,\nYour great puffs of flowers\nAre everywhere in this my New England.\nAmong your heart-shaped leaves\nOrange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing\nTheir little weak soft songs;\nIn the crooks of your branches\nThe bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs\nPeer restlessly through the light and shadow\nOf all Springs.\nLilacs in dooryards\nHolding quiet conversations with an early moon;\nLilacs watching a deserted house\nSettling sideways into the grass of an old road;\nLilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom\nAbove a cellar dug into a hill.\nYou are everywhere.\nYou were everywhere.\nYou tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,\nAnd ran along the road beside the boy going to school.\nYou stood by pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,\nYou persuaded the housewife that her dish-pan was of silver\nAnd her husband an image of pure gold.\nYou flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms\nThrough the wide doors of Custom Houses--\nYou, and sandal-wood, and tea,\nCharging the noses of quill-driving clerks\nWhen a ship was in from China.\nYou called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,\nMay is a month for flitting,”\nUntil they writhed on their high stools\nAnd wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.\nParadoxical New England clerks,\nWriting inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night,\nSo many verses before bedtime,\nBecause it was the Bible.\nThe dead fed you\nAmid the slant stones of graveyards.\nPale ghosts who planted you\nCame in the night time\nAnd let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.\nYou are of the green sea,\nAnd of the stone hills which reach a long distance.\nYou are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,\nYou are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.\nYou cover the blind sides of greenhouses\nAnd lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass\nTo your friends, the grapes, inside.\n\nLilacs,\nFalse blue,\nWhite,\nPurple,\nColor of lilac,\nYou have forgotten your Eastern origin,\nThe veiled women with eyes like panthers,\nThe swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled Pashas.\nNow you are a very decent flower,\nA reticent flower,\nA curiously clear-cut, candid flower,\nStanding beside clean doorways,\nFriendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles,\nMaking poetry out of a bit of moonlight\nAnd a hundred or two sharp blossoms.\n\nMaine knows you,\nHas for years and years;\nNew Hampshire knows you,\nAnd Massachusetts\nAnd Vermont.\nCape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island;\nConnecticut takes you from a river to the sea.\nYou are brighter than apples,\nSweeter than tulips,\nYou are the great flood of our souls\nBursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,\nYou are the smell of all Summers,\nThe love of wives and children,\nThe recollection of the gardens of little children,\nYou are State Houses and Charters\nAnd the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows.\nMay is lilac here in New England,\nMay is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash-tree,\nMay is white clouds behind pine-trees\nPuffed out and marching upon a blue sky.\nMay is a green as no other,\nMay is much sun through small leaves,\nMay is soft earth,\nAnd apple-blossoms,\nAnd windows open to a South wind.\nMay is a full light wind of lilac\nFrom Canada to Narragansett Bay.\n\nLilacs,\nFalse blue,\nWhite,\nPurple,\nColor of lilac,\nHeart-leaves of lilac all over New England,\nRoots of lilac under all the soil of New England,\nLilac in me because I am New England,\nBecause my roots are in it,\nBecause my leaves are of it,\nBecause my flowers are for it,\nBecause it is my country\nAnd I speak to it of itself\nAnd sing of it with my own voice\nSince certainly it is mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "prime": { - "title": "“Prime”", - "body": "Your voice is like bells over roofs at dawn\nWhen a bird flies\nAnd the sky changes to a fresher color.\n\nSpeak, speak, Beloved.\nSay little things\nFor my ears to catch\nAnd run with them to my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-russell-lowell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Russell Lowell", - "birth": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Russell_Lowell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "she-came-and-went": { - "title": "“She Came and Went”", - "body": "As a twig trembles, which a bird\nLights on to sing, then leaves unbent,\nSo is my memory thrilled and stirred;--\nI only know she came and went.\n\nAs clasps some lake, by gusts unriven,\nThe blue dome’s measureless content,\nSo my soul held that moment’s heaven;--\nI only know she came and went.\n\nAs, at one bound, our swift spring heaps\nThe orchards full of bloom and scent,\nSo clove her May my wintry sleeps;--\nI only know she came and went.\n\nAn angel stood and met my gaze,\nThrough the low doorway of my tent;\nThe tent is struck, the vision stays;--\nI only know she came and went.\n\nOh, when the room grows slowly dim,\nAnd life’s last oil is nearly spent,\nOne gush of light these eyes will brim,\nOnly to think she came and went.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-lowell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Lowell", - "birth": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1977 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-surprising-conversions": { - "title": "“After the Surprising Conversions”", - "body": "September twenty-second, Sir: today\nI answer. In the latter part of May,\nHard on our Lord’s Ascension, it began\nTo be more sensible. A gentleman\nOf more than common understanding, strict\nIn morals, pious in behavior, kicked\nAgainst our goad. A man of some renown,\nAn useful, honored person in the town,\nHe came of melancholy parents; prone\nTo secret spells, for years they kept alone--\nHis uncle, I believe, was killed of it:\nGood people, but of too much or little wit.\nI preached one Sabbath on a text from Kings;\nHe showed concernment for his soul. Some things\nIn his experience were hopeful. He\nWould sit and watch the wind knocking a tree\nAnd praise this countryside our Lord has made.\nOnce when a poor man’s heifer died, he laid\nA shilling on the doorsill; though a thirst\nFor loving shook him like a snake, he durst\nNot entertain much hope of his estate\nIn heaven. Once we saw him sitting late\nBehind his attic window by a light\nThat guttered on his Bible; through that night\nHe meditated terror, and he seemed\nBeyond advice or reason, for he dreamed\nThat he was called to trumpet Judgment Day\nTo Concord. In the latter part of May\nHe cut his throat. And though the coroner\nJudged him delirious, soon a noisome stir\nPalsied our village. At Jehovah’s nod\nSatan seemed more let loose amongst us: God\nAbandoned us to Satan, and he pressed\nUs hard, until we thought we could not rest\nTill we had done with life. Content was gone.\nAll the good work was quashed. We were undone.\nThe breath of God had carried out a planned\nAnd sensible withdrawal from this land;\nThe multitude, once unconcerned with doubt,\nOnce neither callous, curious nor devout,\nJumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned\nAt it in its familiar twang: “My friend,\nCut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!”\nSeptember twenty-second, Sir, the bough\nCracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn\nThe small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "children-of-light": { - "title": "“Children of Light”", - "body": "Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones\nAnd fenced their gardens with the Redmen’s bones;\nEmbarking from the Nether Land of Holland,\nPilgrims unhouseled by Geneva’s night,\nThey planted here the Serpent’s seeds of light;\nAnd here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock\nThe riotous glass houses built on rock,\nAnd candles gutter by an empty altar,\nAnd light is where the landless blood of Cain\nIs burning, burning the unburied grain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-drunken-fisherman": { - "title": "“The Drunken Fisherman”", - "body": "Wallowing in this bloody sty,\nI cast for fish that pleased my eye\n(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends\nNo pots of gold to weight its ends);\nOnly the blood-mouthed rainbow trout\nRose to my bait. They flopped about\nMy canvas creel until the moth\nCorrupted its unstable cloth.\n\nA calendar to tell the day;\nA handkerchief to wave away\nThe gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm\nPouching a bottle in one arm;\nA whiskey bottle full of worms;\nAnd bedroom slacks: are these fit terms\nTo mete the worm whose molten rage\nBoils in the belly of old age?\n\nOnce fishing was a rabbit’s foot--\nO wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,\nLet suns stay in or suns step out:\nLife danced a jig on the sperm-whale’s spout--\nThe fisher’s fluent and obscene\nCatches kept his conscience clean.\nChildren, the raging memory drools\nOver the glory of past pools.\n\nNow the hot river, ebbing, hauls\nIts bloody waters into holes;\nA grain of sand inside my shoe\nMimics the moon that might undo\nMan and Creation too; remorse,\nStinking, has puddled up its source;\nHere tantrums thrash to a whale’s rage.\nThis is the pot-hole of old age.\n\nIs there no way to cast my hook\nOut of this dynamited brook?\nThe Fisher’s sons must cast about\nWhen shallow waters peter out.\nI will catch Christ with a greased worm,\nAnd when the Prince of Darkness stalks\nMy bloodstream to its Stygian term …\nOn water the Man-Fisher walks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "history": { - "title": "“History”", - "body": "History has to live with what was here,\nclutching and close to fumbling all we had--\nit is so dull and gruesome how we die,\nunlike writing, life never finishes.\nAbel was finished; death is not remote,\na flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,\nhis cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,\nhis baby crying all night like a new machine.\nAs in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,\nthe beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends--\na child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,\nmy eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose--\nO there’s a terrifying innocence in my face\ndrenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "homecoming": { - "title": "“Homecoming”", - "body": "What was is … since 1930;\nthe boys in my old gang\nare senior partners. They start up\nbald like baby birds\nto embrace retirement.\n\nAt the altar of surrender,\nI met you\nin the hour of credulity.\nHow your misfortune came out clearly\nto us at twenty.\n\nAt the gingerbread casino,\nhow innocent the nights we made it\non our Vesuvio martinis\nwith no vermouth but vodka\nto sweeten the dry gin--\n\nthe lash across my face\nthat night we adored …\nsoon every night and all,\nwhen your sweet, amorous\nrepetition changed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "skunk-hour": { - "title": "“Skunk Hour”", - "body": "Nautilus Island’s hermit\nheiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;\nher sheep still graze above the sea.\nHer son’s a bishop. Her farmer\nis first selectman in our village;\nshe’s in her dotage.\n\nThirsting for\nthe hierarchic privacy\nof Queen Victoria’s century,\nshe buys up all\nthe eyesores facing her shore,\nand lets them fall.\n\nThe season’s ill--\nwe’ve lost our summer millionaire,\nwho seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean\ncatalogue. His nine-knot yawl\nwas auctioned off to lobstermen.\nA red fox stain covers Blue Hill.\n\nAnd now our fairy\ndecorator brightens his shop for fall;\nhis fishnet’s filled with orange cork,\norange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;\nthere is no money in his work,\nhe’d rather marry.\n\nOne dark night,\nmy Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;\nI watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,\nthey lay together, hull to hull,\nwhere the graveyard shelves on the town …\nMy mind’s not right.\n\nA car radio bleats,\n“Love, O careless Love …” I hear\nmy ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,\nas if my hand were at its throat …\nI myself am hell;\nnobody’s here--\n\nonly skunks, that search\nin the moonlight for a bite to eat.\nThey march on their soles up Main Street:\nwhite stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire\nunder the chalk-dry and spar spire\nof the Trinitarian Church.\n\nI stand on top\nof our back steps and breathe the rich air--\na mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail\nShe jabs her wedge-head in a cup\nof sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,\nand will not scare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-speak-of-woe-that-is-in-marriage": { - "title": "“To Speak of Woe that is in Marriage”", - "body": "_“It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.”_\n --Schopenhauer\n\nThe hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.\nOur magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.\nMy hopped up husband drops his home disputes,\nand hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,\nfree-lancing out along the razor’s edge.\nThis screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.\nOh the monotonous meanness of his lust …\nIt’s the injustice … he is so unjust--\nwhiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.\nMy only thought is how to keep alive.\nWhat makes him tick? Each night now I tie\nten dollars and his car key to my thigh …\nGored by the climacteric of his want,\nhe stalls above me like an elephant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "waking-in-the-blue": { - "title": "“Waking in the Blue”", - "body": "The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,\nrouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head\npropped on The Meaning of Meaning.\nHe catwalks down our corridor.\nAzure day\nmakes my agonized blue window bleaker.\nCrows maunder on the petrified fairway.\nAbsence! My hearts grows tense\nas though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.\n(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)\n\nWhat use is my sense of humour?\nI grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,\nonce a Harvard all-American fullback,\n(if such were possible!)\nstill hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,\nas he soaks, a ramrod\nwith a muscle of a seal\nin his long tub,\nvaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.\nA kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,\nworn all day, all night,\nhe thinks only of his figure,\nof slimming on sherbert and ginger ale--\nmore cut off from words than a seal.\nThis is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;\nthe hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”\nPorcellian ’29,\na replica of Louis XVI\nwithout the wig--\nredolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,\nas he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit\nand horses at chairs.\n\nThese victorious figures of bravado ossified young.\n\nIn between the limits of day,\nhours and hours go by under the crew haircuts\nand slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle\nof the Roman Catholic attendants.\n(There are no Mayflower\nscrewballs in the Catholic Church.)\n\nAfter a hearty New England breakfast,\nI weigh two hundred pounds\nthis morning. Cock of the walk,\nI strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey\nbefore the metal shaving mirrors,\nand see the shaky future grow familiar\nin the pinched, indigenous faces\nof these thoroughbred mental cases,\ntwice my age and half my weight.\nWe are all old-timers,\neach of us holds a locked razor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "water": { - "title": "“Water”", - "body": "It was a Maine lobster town--\neach morning boatloads of hands\npushed off for granite\nquarries on the islands,\n\nand left dozens of bleak\nwhite frame houses stuck\nlike oyster shells\non a hill of rock,\n\nand below us, the sea lapped\nthe raw little match-stick\nmazes of a weir,\nwhere the fish for bait were trapped.\n\nRemember? We sat on a slab of rock.\nFrom this distance in time\nit seems the color\nof iris, rotting and turning purpler,\n\nbut it was only\nthe usual gray rock\nturning the usual green\nwhen drenched by the sea.\n\nThe sea drenched the rock\nat our feet all day,\nand kept tearing away\nflake after flake.\n\nOne night you dreamed\nyou were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,\nand trying to pull\noff the barnacles with your hands.\n\nWe wished our two souls\nmight return like gulls\nto the rock. In the end,\nthe water was too cold for us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-withdrawal": { - "title": "“The Withdrawal”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nOnly today and just for this minute,\nwhen the sunslant finds its true angle,\nyou can see yellow and pinkish leaves spangle\nour gentle, fluffy tree--\nsuddenly the green summer is momentary …\nAutumn is my favorite season--\nwhy does it change clothes and withdraw?\n\nThis week the house went on the market--\nsuddenly I woke up among strangers;\nwhen I go into a room, it moves\nwith embarrassment, and joins another room.\n\nI don’t need conversation, but you to laugh with--\nyou and a room and a fire,\ncold starlight blowing through an open window--whither?\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAfter sunfall, heaven is melodramatic,\na temporary, puckering, burning green.\nThe patched-up oak\nand blacker, indelible pines\nhave the indigestible meagerness of spines.\n\nOne wishes heaven had less solemnity:\na sensual table\nwith five half-filled bottles of red wine\nset round the hectic carved roast--\nBohemia for ourselves\nand the familiars of a lifetime\ncharmed to communion by resurrection--\nrunning together in the rain to mail a single letter,\nnot the chafe and cling\nof this despondent chaff.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nYet for a moment, the children\ncould play truant from their tuition.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nWhen I look back, I see a collapsing\naccordion of my receding houses,\nand myself receding\nto a boy of twenty-five or thirty,\ntoo shopworn for less, too impressionable for more--\nblackmaned, illmade\nin a washed blue workshirt and coalblack trousers,\nmoving from house to house,\nstill seeking a boy’s license\nto see the countryside without arrival.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "malcolm-lowry": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Malcolm Lowry", - "birth": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Lowry", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "quartermaster-at-the-wheel": { - "title": "“Quartermaster at the Wheel”", - "body": "The Harkness light! Another hour spelled out,\nStruck by myself with unction but with doubt.\nA man is killed but does not hear the shot\nWhich kills him; four bells kills me.\nLucky to hear it if I killed myself,--\nWhose age haunts calendars upon the screen;\nThe heroine horn in nineteen eighteen,\nWho yesterday was born in nineteen eight.\nA pile of magazines assess dead love\nOn shore, where one light burns no love will wait.\n--Past years are volcanoes beyond the wake,\nTomorrow is the sea and then the sea,\nTo both least faithless when we most forsake,\nThe one unsealed, the other vomitless\nOf Jonah to his gourd or Nineveh …\nIt is a straw to tickle bloodshot eyes\nOf quartermasters soldered to darkness,\nThe stiff wheel and the remembrance of the drowned,\nFor sinking men to suck at or to claw,\nThe thought that what we saw we often hear\nToo late or not at all, or cannot bear\nTo know resounding eardrums register …\nOur siren now! What ugliest ship has not\nBorne heart from heart with that deep plangency,\nSadder than masthead’s light, a soul\nIn mourning whose voice is grief gone by.\nRoll on, you witless, dark brown ocean, roll,\nAnd light light years and grey ones let us live\nWithin that gracious nexus of reprieve\nBetween the fated sight and fatal sound\n--Now leave the world to Harkness and to me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-bitterest-coast": { - "title": "“This Bitterest Coast”", - "body": "This is the end but since it is the end,\nYou are happy at least in this one certainty,\nAs you were in the eternity\nOf childhood’s blue summer with seagull and yacht for friend,\nWhen God was good; love, true; sea, sea; land, land.\nYet dare not to base immunity\nFrom baseness on this triviality!\nThe murdered once gathered sea poppies with a hand\nTo be scarleter, to be pressed to the blacker\nAnd less amorous heart of death … Oh, Christ,\nWash up some bone-clear memory on this bitterest coast\nWhere is no wreck, dead beak nor feather\nThough none venture here without disaster. Give at the last\nOne half-passionate tryst with the past;\nSome little joy to gather to my salt grey breast\nThough children were betrayed, and money was kissed first.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "this-dead-letter": { - "title": "“This Dead Letter”", - "body": "When I am in the purgatory of the unread,\nOf the backward, of those with wandering attention,\nWhat survives must go back to Pier Head\nTo mingle with the bereaved, with those who weep\nAs freighters bear their hearts out with the tide.\nIt will not be a spirit worthy of mention,\nNot one to recommend the down-and-out sailor:\nNor will it be a ghost to help my father\nStruggling in the gale with his poor newspaper\nOr flying behind his bowler hat to work,\nAs once before to race his new school cap.\nI shall not be looking for anyone to help;\nThe salt grey prop looks after itself.\nI shall not stir a metaphor in a poet’s head\nGrown greyer than my book on his top shelf:\nI spoke too much of wounds that never mend,\nOf ships sailing in rain that never come back.\nStill I shall watch them sail, but turn my back\nTo Saigon, the equator or Port Said.\nI lived with sadness: I shall be stern\nAs this dead letter, I shall never send.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "whirlpool": { - "title": "“Whirlpool”", - "body": "Resurgent sorrow is a sea in the cave\nOf the mind--just as in the poem\nIt gluts it--though no nymphs will quire a hymn;\nAbandon it! … Take a trip to the upper shore.\nLave Yourself in sand; gather poppies; brave\nThe fringe of things, denying that inner chasm.\nWhy, the hush of the sea’s in the seashell; in the limb\nOf the smashed ship, its tempest; and your grave\nThe sand itself if you’d have it so. Yet glare\nThrough a sky of love all day, still must you receive\nIn that cave the special anguish of your life;\nWith the skull of the seagull and the wreck you may fare\nWell enough, but will not escape that other surf,\nRemorse, your host, who haunts the whirlpool where\nThe past’s not washed up dead and black and dry\nBut whirls in its gulf forever, to no relief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "mina-loy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mina Loy", - "birth": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina_Loy", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dead": { - "title": "“The Dead”", - "body": "We have flowed out of ourselves\nBeginning on the outside\nThat shrivvable skin\nWhere you leave off\n\nOf infinite elastic\nWalking the ceiling\nOur eyelashes polish stars\n\nCurled close in the youngest corpuscle\nOf a descendant\nWe spit up our passions in our grand-dams\n\nFixing the extension of your reactions\nOur shadow lengthens\nIn your fear\n\nYou are so old\nBorn in our immortality\nStuck fast as Life\nIn one impalpable\nOmniprevalent Dimension\n\nWe are turned inside out\nYour cities lie digesting in our stomachs\nStreet lights footle in our ocular darkness\n\nHaving swallowed your irate hungers\nSatisfied before bread-breaking\nTo your dissolution\nWe splinter into Wholes\nStirring the remorses of your tomorrow\nAmong the refuse of your unborn centuries\nIn our busy ashbins\nStink the melodies\nOf your\nSo easily reducible\nAdolescences\n\nOur tissue is of that which escapes you\nBirth-Breaths and orgasms\nThe shattering tremor of the static\nThe far-shore of an instant\nThe unsurpassable openness of the circle\nLegerdemain of God\n\nOnly in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums\nDo those who have strained to exceeding themselves\nBreak on our edgeless contours\n\nThe mouthed echoes of what\nhas exuded to our companionship\nIs horrible to the ear\nOf the half that is left inside them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "love-song": { - "title": "“Love Song”", - "body": "Spawn of fantasies\nSitting the appraisable\nPig Cupid his rosy snout\nRooting erotic garbage\n“Once upon a time”\nPulls a weed white star-topped\nAmong wild oats sown in mucous membrane\nI would an eye in a Bengal light\nEternity in a sky-rocket\nConstellations in an ocean\nWhose rivers run no fresher\nThan a trickle of saliva\n\nThere are suspect places\n\nI must live in my lantern\nTrimming subliminal flicker\nVirginal to the bellows\nOf experience\n Colored glass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "songs-to-joannes-vii": { - "title": "“Songs to Joannes, VII”", - "body": "My pair of feet\nSmack the flag-stones\nThat are something left over from your walking\nThe wind stuffs the scum of the white street\nInto my lungs and my nostrils\nExhilarated birds\nProlonging flight into the night\nNever reaching--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-lydgate": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Lydgate", - "birth": { - "year": 1370, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1451, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lydgate", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "from-the-testament-of-john-lydgate": { - "title": "From “The Testament of John Lydgate”", - "body": "Beholde, o man! lyft up thyn eye and see\nWhat mortall peyne I suffre for thi trespace.\nWith pietous voys I crye and sey to the:\nBeholde my woundes, behold my blody face,\nBeholde the rebukes that do me so manace,\nBeholde my enemyes that do me so despice,\nAnd how that I, to reforme the to grace,\nWas like a lambe offred in sacryfice.\n\nAnd geyn thi pryde behold my gret mekenesse;\nGeyn thyn envie behold my charité;\nGeyn thi leccherye behold my chast clennesse;\nGeyn thi covetyse behold my poverté.\nAtweene too thevys nayléd to a tree,\nRayled with reed blood, they lyst me so desguyse,\nBehold, O man! all this I did for the,\nMeke as a lambe offred in sacryfice.\n\nBehold my love, and gyf me thyn ageyn;\nBehold, I deyde thy raunsom for to paye.\nSe howe myn herte is open brode and pleyn,\nThy gostly enemyes onely to affraye.\nAn hardere batayle no man myght assaye,\nOf all tryumphes the grettest hye empryse.\nWher-for, O man! no lenger to dismaye,\nI gaf for the my blood in sacryfice.\n\nTurne home ageyn, thy synne do forsake.\nBehold and se yf ought be left behynde,\nHow I to mercy am redy the to take.\nGyf me thyn herte and be no more unkynde;\nThy love and myn, togedyr do hem bynde,\nAnd late hem never departe in any wyse.\nWhan thou were lost, thy sowle ageyn to fynde,\nMy blod I offred for the in sacryfice.\n\nEmprente thes thynges in thyn inward thought,\nAnd grave hem depe in thy remembraunce;\nThynke on hem, and forgete hem nowght.\nAl this I suffred to do the allegeaunce,\nAnd with my seyntes to yeve the suffisaunce,\nIn the hevenly court for the I do devyse\nA place eternall, a place of all plesaunce;\nFor which my blood I gaf in sacryfice.\n\nAnd more my mercy to putte att a preef,\nTo every synnere that non ne shal it mysse,\nRemembre how I gaf mercy to the theef\nWhich hadde so longe trespaced and doon amys;\nWent he not frely with me to paradise?\nHave this in mende, how it is my guyse\nAll repentaunt to bryng hem to my blysse,\nFor whom my blood I gaf in sacryfice.\n\nTarye no lenger toward thyn herytage;\nHast on thy weye and be of ryght good chere.\nGo eche day onward on thy pylgrymage;\nThynke howe short tyme thou hast abyden here.\nThy place is bygged above the sterres clere,--\nNoon erthly palys wrought in so statly wyse.\nKome on, my frend, my brother most entere!\nFor the I offered my blood in sacryfice!\nAmen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vox-ultima-crucis": { - "title": "“Vox Ultima Crucis”", - "body": "Tarye no lenger; toward thyn heritage\nHast on thy weye, and be of ryght good chere.\nGo eche day onward on thy pylgrymage;\nThynke howe short tyme thou hast abyden here.\nThy place is bygged above the sterres clere,\nNoon erthly palys wrought in so statly wyse.\nCome on, my frend, my brother most entere!\nFor the I offered my blood in sacryfice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "henry-francis-lyte": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry Francis Lyte", - "birth": { - "year": 1793 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Francis_Lyte", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "abide-with-me": { - "title": "“Abide With Me”", - "body": "Abide With Me; fast falls the eventide;\nThe darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.\nWhen other helpers fail and comforts flee,\nHelp of the helpless, O abide with me.\n\nSwift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;\nEarth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;\nChange and decay in all around I see;\nO Thou who changest not, abide with me.\n\nNot a brief glance I beg, a passing word;\nBut as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord,\nFamiliar, condescending, patient, free.\nCome not to sojourn, but abide with me.\n\nCome not in terrors, as the King of kings,\nBut kind and good, with healing in Thy wings,\nTears for all woes, a heart for every plea--\nCome, Friend of sinners, and thus bide with me.\n\nThou on my head in early youth didst smile;\nAnd, though rebellious and perverse meanwhile,\nThou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee,\nOn to the close, O Lord, abide with me.\n\nI need Thy presence every passing hour.\nWhat but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?\nWho, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?\nThrough cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.\n\nI fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;\nIlls have no weight, and tears no bitterness.\nWhere is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?\nI triumph still, if Thou abide with me.\n\nHold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;\nShine through the gloom and point me to the skies.\nHeaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;\nIn life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "george-macdonald": { - "metadata": { - "name": "George MacDonald", - "birth": { - "year": 1824 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 17 - }, - "poems": { - "after-an-old-legend": { - "title": "“After an Old Legend”", - "body": "The monk was praying in his cell,\nAnd he did pray full sore;\nHe had been praying on his knees\nFor two long hours and more.\n\nAnd in the midst, and suddenly,\nHe felt his eyes ope wide;\nAnd he lifted not his head, but saw\nA man’s feet him beside.\n\nAnd almost to his feet there reached\nA garment strangely knit;\nSome woman’s fingers, ages agone,\nHad trembled, in making it.\n\nThe monk’s eyes went up the garment,\nUntil a hand they spied;\nA cut from a chisel was on it,\nAnd another scar beside.\n\nThen his eyes sprang to the face\nWith a single thirsty bound;\n’Twas He, and he nigh had fainted;\nHis eyes had the Master found.\n\nOn his ear fell the convent bell,\nThat told him the poor did wait\nFor his hand to divide the daily bread,\nAll at the convent-gate.\n\nAnd a storm of thoughts within him\nBlew hither and thither long;\nAnd the bell kept calling all the time\nWith its iron merciless tongue.\n\nHe looked in the Master’s eyes,\nAnd he sprang to his feet in strength:\n“Though I find him not when I come back,\nI shall find him the more at length.”\n\nHe went, and he fed the poor,\nAll at the convent-gate;\nAnd like one bereft, with heavy feet\nWent back to be desolate.\n\nHe stood by the door, unwilling\nTo see the cell so bare;\nHe opened the door, and lo!\nThe Master was standing there.\n\n“I have waited for thee, because\nThe poor had not to wait;\nAnd I stood beside thee all the time,\nIn the crowd at the convent-gate.”\n\nBut it seems to me, though the story\nSayeth no word of this,\nIf the monk had stayed, the Lord would have stayed,\nNor crushed that heart of his.\n\nFor out of the far-off times\nA word sounds tenderly:\n“The poor ye have always with you,\nAnd ye have not always me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-old-year": { - "title": "“The Death of the Old Year”", - "body": "The weary Old Year is dead at last;\nHis corpse ’mid the ruins of Time is cast\nWhere the mouldering wrecks of lost Thought lie\nAnd the rich-hued blossoms of Passion die\nTo a withering grass that droops o’er his grave\nThe shadowy Titan’s refuge cave.\nStrange lights from pale moony Memory lie\nOn the weedy columns beneath its eye;\nAnd strange is the sound of the ghostlike breeze\nIn the lingering leaves on the skeleton trees;\nAnd strange is the sound of the falling shower\nWhen the clouds of dead pain o’er the spirit lower;\nUnheard in the home he inhabiteth\nThe land where all lost things are gathered by Death.\n\nAlone I reclined in the closing year;\nVoice nor breathing nor step was near;\nAnd I said in the weariness of my breast:\nWeary Old Year thou art going to rest;\nO weary Old Year I would I might be\nOne hour alone in thy dying with thee!\nWould thou wert a spirit whose low lament\nMight mix with the sighs from my spirit sent;\nFor I am weary of man and life;\nWeary of restless unchanging strife;\nWeary of change that is ever changing;\nWeary of thought that is ever ranging\nEver falling in efforts vain\nFluttering upspringing from earth again\nStruggling once more through the darkness to wing\nThat hangs o’er the birthplace of everything\nAnd choked yet again in the vapour’s breast\nSinking once more to a helpless rest.\nI am weary of tears that scarce are dry\nEre their founts are filled as the cloud goes by;\nWeary of feelings where each in the throng\nMocks at the rest as they crowd along;\nWhere Pride over all like a god on high\nSits enshrined in his self-complacency;\nWhere Selfishness crawls the snake-demon of ill\nThe least suspected where busiest still;\nWhere all things evil and painful entwine\nAnd all in their hate and their sorrow are mine:\nO weary Old Year I would I might be\nOne hour by thy dying to weep with thee!\n\nPeace the soul’s slumber was round me shed;\nThe sleep where thought lives but its pain is dead;\nAnd my musings led me a spirit-band\nThrough the wide realms of their native land;\nTill I stood by the couch of the mighty dying\nA lonely shore in the midnight lying.\nHe lay as if he had laid him to sleep\nAnd the stars above him their watch did keep;\nAnd the mournful wind with the dreamy sigh\nThe homeless wanderer of the sky\nWas the only attendant whose gentle breath\nSoothed him yet on the couch of death;\nAnd the dying waves of the heedless sea\nFell at his feet most listlessly.\n\nBut he lay in peace with his solemn eye\nLooking far through the mists of futurity.\nA smile gleamed over the death-dew that lay\nOn his withered cheek as life ebbed away.\nA darkness lay on his forehead vast;\nBut the light of expectancy o’er it was cast--\nA light that shone from the coming day\nTravelling unseen to the East away.\nIn his cloudy robes that lay shadowing wide\nI stretched myself motionless by his side;\nAnd his eyes with their calm unimpassioned power\nSoothing my heart like an evening shower\nLed in a spectral far-billowing train\nThe hours of the Past through my spirit again.\n\nThere were fears of evil whose stony eyes\nFroze joy in its gushing melodies.\nSome floated afar on thy tranquil wave\nAnd the heart looked up from its search for a grave;\nWhile others as guests to the bosom came\nAnd left its wild children more sorrow less shame;\nFor the death-look parts from their chilling brow\nAnd they bless the heads that before them bow;\nAnd floating away in the far-off gloom.\nThankfulness follows them to their tomb.\nThere were Hopes that found not a place to rest\nTheir foot ’mid the rush of all-ocean’s breast;\nAnd home to the sickening heart flew back\nBut changed into sorrows upon their track;\nAnd through the moan of the darkening sea\nBearing no leaf from the olive-tree.\nThere were joys that looked forth with their maiden eyes\nAnd smiled and were gone with a sad surprise;\nAnd the Love of the Earthly whose beauteous form\nBeckoned me on through sunshine and storm;\nBut when the bounding heart sprang high\nMeeting her smile with a speechless sigh\nThe arms sunk home with a painful start\nClasping a vacancy to the heart.\n\nAnd the voice of the dying I seem to hear\nBut whether his breathing is in mine ear\nOr the sounds of the breaking billows roll\nThe lingering accents upon my soul\nI know not; but thus they seem to bear\nReproof to my soul for its faint despair:--\nBlame not life it is scarce begun;\nBlame not mankind thyself art one.\nAnd change is holy oh! blame it never;\nThy soul shall live by its changing ever;\nNot the bubbling change of a stagnant pool\nBut the change of a river flowing and full;\nWhere all that is noble and good will grow\nMightier still as the full tides flow;\nTill it joins the hidden the boundless sea\nRolling through depths of Eternity.\nBlame not thy thought that it cannot reach\nThat which the Infinite must teach;\nBless thy God that the Word came nigh\nTo guide thee home to thy native sky\nWhere all things are homely and glorious too\nAnd the children are wondering and glad and true.\n\nAnd he pointed away to an Eastern star\nThat gleamed through his robes o’er the ocean afar;\nAnd I knew that a star had looked o’er the rim\nOf my world that lay all dreary and dim;\nAnd was slowly dissolving the darkness deep\nWhich like evil nurse had soothed me to sleep;\nAnd rising higher and shining clearer\nWould draw the day-spring ever nearer\nTill the sunshine of God burst full on the morn\nAnd every hill and valley would start\nWith the joy of light and new gratitude born\nTo Him who had led me home to His heart;\nAnd all things that lived in my world within\nWith the gladness of tears to His feet come in;\nAnd the false Self be banished with fiends to dwell\nIn the gloomiest haunts of his native hell;\nAnd Pride that ruled like a god above\nBe trod ’neath the feet of triumphant Love.\n\nAnd again he pointed across the sea\nAnd another vision arose in me:\nAnd I knew I walked an ocean of fear\nYet of safety too for the Master was near;\nAnd every wave of sorrow or dread\nO’er which strong faith should upraise my head\nWould show from the height of its troubled crest\nStill nearer and nearer the Land of Rest.\nAnd when the storm-spray on the wind should arise\nAnd with tears unbidden should blind mine eyes\nAnd hide from my vision the Home of Love\nI knew I must look to the star above\nAnd the mists of Passion would quickly flee\nAnd the storm would faint to serenity.\n\nAnd again it seemed as if words found scope\nThe sorrowing words of a farewell Hope:\n“I will meet thee again in that deathless land\nWhenever thy foot shall imprint the strand;\nAnd the loveliest things that have here been mine\nShall there in eternal beauty shine;\nFor there I shall live and never die\nPart of a glorious Eternity;\nFor the death of Time is _To be forgot_\nAnd I go where oblivion entereth not.”\n\nHe was dead. He had gone to the rest of his race\nWith a sad smile frozen upon his face.\nDeadness clouded his eyes. And his death-bell rung\nAnd my sorrowing thoughts his low requiem sung;\nAnd with trembling steps his worn body cast\nIn the wide charnel-house of the dreary Past.\nThus met the noble Old Year his end:\nRest him in peace for he was my friend.\n\nAs my thoughts returned from their wandering\nA voice in my spirit was lingering;\nAnd its sounds were like Spring’s first breeze’s hum\nWhen the oak-leaves fall and the young leaves come:\n\nTime dieth ever is ever born:\nOn the footsteps of night so treadeth the morn;\nShadow and brightness death and birth\nChasing each other o’er the round earth.\nBut the spirit of Time from his tomb is springing\nThe dust of decay from his pinions flinging;\nEver renewing his glorious youth\nScattering around him the dew of Truth.\nOh let it raise in the desert heart\nFountains and flowers that shall never depart!\nThis spirit will fill us with thought sublime;\nFor the _End of God_ is the spirit of Time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-hills": { - "title": "“The Hills”", - "body": "Behind my father’s house there lies\nA little grassy brae\nWhose face my childhood’s busy feet\nRan often up in play\nWhence on the chimneys I looked down\nIn wonderment alway.\n\nAround the house where’er I turned\nGreat hills closed up the view;\nThe town ’midst their converging roots\nWas clasped by rivers two;\nFrom one hill to another sprang\nThe sky’s great arch of blue.\n\nOh! how I loved to climb their sides\nAnd in the heather lie;\nThe bridle on my arm did hold\nThe pony feeding by;\nBeneath the silvery streams; above\nThe white clouds in the sky.\n\nAnd now in wandering about\nWhene’er I see a hill\nA childish feeling of delight\nSprings in my bosom still;\nAnd longings for the high unknown\nFollow and flow and fill.\n\nFor I am always climbing hills\nAnd ever passing on\nHoping on some high mountain peak\nTo find my Father’s throne;\nFor hitherto I’ve only found\nHis footsteps in the stone.\n\nAnd in my wanderings I have met\nA spirit child like me\nWho laid a trusting hand in mine\nSo fearlessly and free\nThat so together we have gone\nClimbing continually.\n\nUpfolded in a spirit bud\nThe child appeared in space\nNot born amid the silent hills\nBut in a busy place;\nAnd yet in every hill we see\nA strange familiar face.\n\nFor they are near our common home;\nAnd so in trust we go\nClimbing and climbing on and on\nWhither we do not know;\nNot waiting for the mournful dark\nBut for the dawning slow.\n\nClasp my hand closer yet my child--\nA long way we have come!\nClasp my hand closer yet my child--\nFor we have far to roam\nClimbing and climbing till we reach\nOur Heavenly Father’s home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-holy-snowdrops": { - "title": "“The Holy Snowdrops”", - "body": "Of old, with goodwill from the skies,\nThe holy angels came;\nThey walked the earth with human eyes,\nAnd passed away in flame.\n\nBut now the angels are withdrawn,\nBecause the flowers can speak;\nWith Christ, we see the dayspring dawn\nIn every snowdrop meek.\n\nGod sends them forth; to God they tend;\nNot less with love they burn,\nThat to the earth they lowly bend,\nAnd unto dust return.\n\nNo miracle in them hath place,\nFor this world is their home;\nAn utterance of essential grace\nThe angel-snowdrops come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "hope-deferred": { - "title": "“Hope Deferred”", - "body": "Summer is come again. The sun is bright\nAnd the soft wind is breathing. We will joy;\nAnd seeing in each other’s eyes the light\nOf the same joy smile hopeful. Our employ\nShall like the birds’ be airy castles things\nBuilt by gay hopes and fond imaginings\nPeopling the land within us. We will tell\nOf the green hills and of the silent sea\nAnd of all summer things that calmly dwell\nA waiting Paradise for you and me.\nAnd if our thoughts should wander upon sorrow\nYet hope will wait upon the far-off morrow.\n\nLook on those leaves. It was not Summer’s mouth\nThat breathed that hue upon them. And look there--\nOn that thin tree. See through its branches bare\nHow low the sun is in the mid-day South!\nThis day is but a gleam of gladness flown\nBack from the past to tell us what is gone.\nFor the dead leaves are falling; and our heart\nWhich with the world is ever changing so\nGives back in echoes sad and low\nThe rustling sigh wherewith dead leaves depart:\nA sound not murmuring but faint and wild;\nA sorrow for the Past that hath no child--\nNo sweet-voiced child with the bright name of Hope.\n\nWe are like you poor leaves! but have more scope\nFor sorrow; for our summers pass away\nWith a slow year-long overshadowing decay.\nYea Spring’s first blossom disappears\nSlain by the shadow of the coming years.\n\nCome round me my beloved. We will hold\nAll of us compassed thus: a winter day\nIs drawing nigh us. We are growing old;\nAnd if we be not as a ring enchanted\nAbout each other’s heart to keep us gay\nThe young who claim that joy which haunted\nOur visions once will push us far away\nInto the desolate regions dim and grey\nWhere the sea hath no moaning and the cloud\nNo rain of tears but apathy doth shroud\nAll being and all time. But if we keep\nTogether thus the tide of youth will sweep\nRound us with thousand joyous waves\nAs round some palmy island of the deep;\nAnd our youth hover round us like the breath\nOf one that sleeps and sleepeth not to death.\n\nThus onward hand in hand to parted graves\nThe sundered doors into one palace home\nThrough age’s thickets faltering we will go\nIf He who leads us wills it so\nBelieving in our youth and in the Past;\nWithin us tending to the last\nLove’s radiant lamp which burns in cave or dome;\nAnd like the lamps that ages long have glowed\nIn blessed graves when once the weary load\nOf tomb-built years is heaved up and cast\nFor youth and immortality away\nWill flash abroad in open day\nClear as a star in heaven’s blue-vaulted night;\nShining till then through every wrinkled fold\nWith the Transfiguration’s conquering might;\nThat Youth our faces wondering shall behold\nAnd shall be glad not fearing to be old.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "transfiguration" - } - } - }, - "i-know-what-beauty-is": { - "title": "“I Know What Beauty Is”", - "body": "I know what beauty is, for Thou\nHast set the world within my heart;\nIts glory from me will not part;\nI never loved it more than now.\n\nI know the Sabbath afternoon:\nThe light lies sleeping on the graves;\nAgainst the sky the poplar waves;\nThe river plays a Sabbath tune.\n\nAh, know I not the spring’s snow-bell?\nThe summer woods at close of even?\nAutumn, when earth dies into heaven,\nAnd winter’s storms, I know them well.\n\nI know the rapture music brings,\nThe power that dwells in ordered tones,\nA living voice that loves and moans,\nAnd speaks unutterable things.\n\nConsenting beauties in a whole;\nThe living eye, the imperial head,\nThe gait of inward music bred,\nThe woman form, a radiant soul.\n\nAnd splendours all unspoken bide\nWithin the ken of spirit’s eye;\nAnd many a glory saileth by,\nBorne on the Godhead’s living tide.\n\nBut I leave all, thou man of woe!\nPut off my shoes, and come to Thee;\nThou art most beautiful to me;\nMore wonderful than all I know.\n\nAs child forsakes his favourite toy,\nHis sisters’ sport, his wild bird’s nest;\nAnd climbing to his mother’s breast,\nEnjoys yet more his former joy--\n\nI lose to find. On forehead wide\nThe jewels tenfold light afford:\nSo, gathered round thy glory, Lord,\nAll beauty else is glorified.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-journey": { - "title": "“The Journey”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHark the rain is on my roof!\nEvery sound drops through the dark\nOn my soul with dull reproof\nLike a half-extinguished spark.\nI! alas how am I here\nIn the midnight and alone?\nCaught within a net of fear!\nAll my dreams of beauty gone!\n\nI will rise: I must go forth.\nBetter face the hideous night\nBetter dare the unseen north\nThan be still without the light!\nBlack wind rushing round my brow\nSown with stinging points of rain!\nPlace or time I know not now--\nI am here and so is pain!\n\nI will leave the sleeping street\nHie me forth on darker roads.\nAh! I cannot stay my feet\nOnward onward something goads.\nI will take the mountain path\nBeard the storm within its den\nKnow the worst of this dim wrath\nVexing thus the souls of men.\n\nChasm ’neath chasm! rock piled on rock:\nRoots and crumbling earth and stones!\nHark the torrent’s thundering shock!\nHark the swaying pine tree’s groans!\nAh I faint I fall I die!\nSink to nothingness away!--\nLo a streak upon the sky!\nLo the opening eye of day!\n\n\n# II.\n\nMountain heights that lift their snows\nO’er a valley green and low;\nAnd a winding path that goes\nGuided by the river’s flow;\nAnd a music rising ever\nAs of peace and low content\nFrom the pebble-paven river\nAs an odour upward sent.\n\nAnd a sighing of the storm\nFar away amid the hills\nLike the humming of a swarm\nThat the summer forest fills;\nAnd a frequent fall of rain\nFrom a cloud with ragged weft;\nAnd a burst of wind amain\nFrom the mountain’s sudden cleft.\n\nThen a night that hath a moon\nStaining all the cloudy white;\nSinking with a soundless tune\nDeep into the spirit’s night.\nThen a morning clear and soft\nAmber on the purple hills;\nWarm high day of summer oft\nCooled by wandering windy rills.\n\nJoy to travel thus along\nWith the universe around!\nI the centre of the throng;\nEvery sight and every sound\nSpeeding with its burden laden\nSpeeding homewards to my soul!\nMine the eye the stars are made in!\nI the heart of all this whole!\n\n\n# III.\n\nHills retreat on either hand\nSinking down into the plain;\nSlowly through the level land\nGlides the river to the main.\nWhat is that before me white\nGleaming through the dusky air?\nDimmer in the gathering night;\nStill beheld I know not where?\n\nIs it but a chalky ridge\nBared by many a trodden mark?\nOr a river-spanning bridge\nMiles away into the dark?\nOr the foremost leaping waves\nOf the everlasting sea\nWhere the Undivided laves\nTime with its eternity?\n\nNo tis but an eye-made sight\nIn my brain a fancied gleam;\nOr a thousand things as white\nSet in darkness well might seem.\nThere it wavers shines is gone;\nWhat it is I cannot tell;\nWhen the morning star hath shone\nI shall see and know it well.\n\nOnward onward through the night!\nMatters it I cannot see?\nI am moving in a might\nDwelling in the dark and me.\nUp or down or here or there\nI can never be alone;\nMy own being tells me where\nGod is as the Father known.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nJoy! O joy! the Eastern sea\nAnswers to the Eastern sky;\nWide and featured gloriously\nWith swift billows bursting high.\nNearer nearer oh! the sheen\nOn a thousand waves at once!\nOh! the changing crowding green!\nOh my beating heart’s response!\n\nDown rejoicing to the strand\nWhere the sea-waves shore-ward lean\nCurve their graceful heads and stand\nGleaming with ethereal green\nThen in foam fall heavily--\nThis is what I saw at night!\nLo a boat! I’ll forth on thee\nDancing-floor for my delight.\n\nFrom the bay wind-winged we glance;\nSea-winds seize me by the hair!\nWhat a terrible expanse!\nHow the ocean tumbles there!\nI am helpless here afloat\nFor the wild waves know not me;\nGladly would I change my boat\nFor the snow wings of the sea!\n\nLook below. Each watery whirl\nCast in beauty’s living mould!\nLook above! Each feathery curl\nFaintly tinged with morning gold!--\nOh I tremble with the gush\nOf an everlasting youth!\nLove and fear together rush:\nI am free in God the Truth!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "longing": { - "title": "“Longing”", - "body": "Away from the city’s herds!\nAway from the noisy street!\nAway from the storm of words\nWhere hateful and hating meet!\n\nAway from the vapour grey\nThat like a boding of ill\nIs blotting the morning gay\nAnd gathers and darkens still!\n\nAway from the stupid book!\nFor like the fog’s weary rest\nWith anger dull it fills each nook\nOf my aching and misty breast.\n\nOver some shining shore\nThere hangeth a space of blue;\nA parting ’mid thin clouds hoar\nWhere the sunlight is falling through.\n\nThe glad waves are kissing the shore\nRejoice and tell it for ever;\nThe boat glides on while its oar\nIs flashing out of the river.\n\nOh to be there with thee!\nThou and I only my love!\nThe sparkling sands and the sea!\nAnd the sunshine of God above!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mary-magdalene": { - "title": "“Mary Magdalene”", - "body": "With eyes aglow and aimless zeal\nThroughout the land she goes;\nHer tones her motions all reveal\nA mind without repose.\n\nShe climbs the hills she haunts the sea\nBy madness tortured driven;\nOne hour’s forgetfulness would be\nA gift from very heaven.\n\nThe night brings sleep the sleep distress;\nThe torture of the day\nReturns as free in darker dress\nIn more secure dismay.\n\nNo soft-caressing soothing palm\nHer confidence can raise;\nNo eye hath loving force to calm\nAnd draw her answering gaze.\n\nHe comes. He speaks. A light divine\nDawns gracious in thy soul;\nThou seest love and order shine--\nHis health will make thee whole.\n\nOne wrench of pain one pang of death\nAnd in a faint delight\nThou liest waiting for new breath\nFor morning out of night.\n\nThou risest up: the earth is fair\nThe wind is cool and free;\nAs when a dream of mad despair\nDissolves in ecstasy.\n\nAnd pledge of life and future high\nThou seest the Master stand;\nThe life of love is in his eye\nIts power is in his hand.\n\nWhat matter that the coming time\nWill stain thy virgin name;\nAttribute thy distress to crime\nThe worst for woman-fame;\n\nYea call that woman Magdalen\nWhom slow-reviving grace\nTurneth at last from evil men\nTo seek the Father’s face.\n\nWhat matters it? The night is gone;\nRight joyous shines the sun;\nThe same clear sun that always shone\nEre sorrow had begun.\n\nOh! any name may come and bide\nIf he be well content\nTo see not seldom by his side\nThy head serenely bent.\n\nThou sharing in the awful doom\nWilt help thy Lord to die;\nAnd mourning o’er his empty tomb\nFirst share his victory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "my-heart": { - "title": "“My Heart”", - "body": "I heard in darkness on my bed\nThe beating of my heart\nTo servant feet and regnant head\nA common life impart\nBy the liquid cords in every thread\nUnbroken as they start.\n\nNight with its power to silence day\nFilled up my lonely room;\nAll motion quenching save what lay\nBeyond its passing doom\nWhere in his shed the workman gay\nWent on despite the gloom.\n\nI listened and I knew the sound\nAnd the trade that he was plying;\nFor backwards forwards bound and bound\n’Twas a shuttle flying flying;\nWeaving ever life’s garment round\nTill the weft go out with sighing.\n\nI said O mystic thing thou goest\nOn working in the dark;\nIn space’s shoreless sea thou rowest\nConcealed within thy bark;\nAll wondrous things thou wonder showest\nYet dost not any mark.\n\nFor all the world is woven by thee\nBesides this fleshly dress;\nWith earth and sky thou clothest me\nForm distance loftiness;\nA globe of glory spouting free\nAround the visionless.\n\nFor when thy busy efforts fail\nAnd thy shuttle moveless lies\nThey will fall from me like a veil\nFrom before a lady’s eyes;\nAs a night-perused just-finished tale\nIn the new daylight dies.\n\nBut not alone dost thou unroll\nThe mountains fields and seas\nA mighty wonder-painted scroll\nLike the Patmos mysteries;\nThou mediator ’twixt my soul\nAnd higher things than these.\n\nIn holy ephod clothing me\nThou makest me a seer;\nIn all the lovely things I see\nThe inner truths appear;\nAnd the deaf spirit without thee\nNo spirit-word could hear.\n\nYet though so high thy mission is\nAnd thought to spirit brings\nThy web is but the chrysalis\nWhere lie the future wings\nNow growing into perfectness\nBy thy inwoven things.\n\nThen thou God’s pulse wilt cease to beat;\nBut His heart will still beat on\nWeaving another garment meet\nIf needful for his son;\nAnd sights more glorious to complete\nThe web thou hast begun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "oh-thou-of-little-faith": { - "title": "“Oh Thou of Little Faith!”", - "body": "Sad-hearted be at peace: the snowdrop lies\nUnder the cold sad earth-clods and the snow;\nBut spring is floating up the southern skies\nAnd the pale snowdrop silent waits below.\n\nO loved if known! in dull December’s day\nOne scarce believes there is a month of June;\nBut up the stairs of April and of May\nThe dear sun climbeth to the summer’s noon.\n\nDear mourner! I love God and so I rest;\nO better! God loves thee and so rest thou:\nHe is our spring-time our dim-visioned Best\nAnd He will help thee--do not fear the _How._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "a-prayer-for-the-past": { - "title": "“A Prayer for the Past”", - "body": "All sights and sounds of every year\nAll groups and forms each leaf and gem\nAre thine O God nor need I fear\nTo speak to Thee of them.\n\nToo great thy heart is to despise;\nThy day girds centuries about;\nFrom things which we count small thine eyes\nSee great things looking out.\n\nTherefore this prayerful song I sing\nMay come to Thee in ordered words;\nTherefore its sweet sounds need not cling\nIn terror to their chords.\n\nI know that nothing made is lost;\nThat not a moon hath ever shone\nThat not a cloud my eyes hath crost\nBut to my soul hath gone.\n\nThat all the dead years garnered lie\nIn this gem-casket my dim soul;\nAnd that thy hand may once apply\nThe key that opes the whole.\n\nBut what lies dead in me yet lives\nIn Thee whose Parable is--Time\nAnd Worlds and Forms and Sound that gives\nWords and the music-chime.\n\nAnd after my next coming birth\nThe new child’s prayer will rise to Thee:\nTo hear again the sounds of Earth\nIts sights again to see.\n\nWith child’s glad eyes to see once more\nThe visioned glories of the gloom\nWith climbing suns and starry store\nCeiling my little room.\n\nO call again the moons that glide\nBehind old vapours sailing slow;\nLost sights of solemn skies that slide\nO’er eyelids sunken low.\n\nShow me the tides of dawning swell\nAnd lift the world’s dim eastern eye\nAnd the dark tears that all night fell\nWith radiance glorify.\n\nFirst I would see oh sore bereft!\nMy father’s house my childhood’s home;\nWhere the wild snow-storms raved and left\nWhite mounds of frozen foam.\n\nTill going out one dewy morn\nA man was turning up the mould;\nAnd in our hearts the spring was born\nCrept hither through the cold.\n\nAnd with the glad year I would go\nThe troops of daisies round my feet;\nFlying the kite or in the glow\nOf arching summer heat\n\nOutstretched in fear upon the bank\nLest gazing up on awful space\nI should fall down into the blank\nFrom off the round world’s face.\n\nAnd let my brothers be with me\nTo play our old games yet again;\nAnd all should go as lovingly\nAs now that we are men.\n\nIf over Earth the shade of Death\nPassed like a cloud’s wide noiseless wing\nWe’d tell a secret in low breath:\n“Mind ’tis a _dream_ of Spring.”\n\n“And in this dream our brother’s gone\nUpstairs; he heard our father call;\nFor one by one we go alone\nTill he has gathered all.”\n\nFather in joy our knees we bow;\nThis earth is not a place of tombs:\nWe are but in the nursery now;\nThey in the upper rooms.\n\nFor are we not at home in Thee\nAnd all this world a visioned show;\nThat knowing what _Abroad_ is we\nWhat _Home_ is too may know?\n\nAnd at thy feet I sit O Lord\nAs years ago in moonlight pale\nI sat and heard my father’s word\nReading a lofty tale.\n\nSo in this vision I would go\nStill onward through the gliding years\nReaping great Noontide’s joyous glow\nStill Eve’s refreshing tears.\n\nOne afternoon sit pondering\nIn that old chair in that old room\nWhere passing pigeon’s sudden wing\nFlashed lightning through the gloom.\n\nThere try once more with effort vain\nTo mould in one perplexed things;\nAnd find the solace yet again\nFaith in the Father brings.\n\nOr on my horse go wandering round\nMid desert moors and mountains high;\nWhile storm-clouds darkly brooding found\nIn me another sky.\n\nFor so thy Visible grew mine\nThough half its power I could not know;\nAnd in me wrought a work divine\nWhich Thou hadst ordered so;\n\nFilling my brain with form and word\nFrom thy full utterance unto men;\nShapes that might ancient Truth afford\nAnd find it words again.\n\nTill Spring in after years of youth\nWove its dear form with every form;\nNow a glad bursting into Truth\nNow a low sighing storm.\n\nBut in this vision of the Past\nSpring-world to summer leading in\nWhose joys but not whose sorrows last\nI have left out the sin.\n\nI picture but development\nGreen leaves unfolding to their fruits\nExpanding flowers aspiring scent\nBut not the writhing roots.\n\nThen follow English sunsets o’er\nA warm rich land outspread below;\nA green sea from a level shore\nBright boats that come and go.\n\nAnd one beside me in whose eyes\nOld Nature found a welcome home\nA treasury of changeful skies\nBeneath a changeless dome.\n\nBut will it still be thus O God?\nAnd shall I always wish to see\nAnd trace again the hilly road\nBy which I went to Thee?\n\nWe bend above a joy new given\nThat gives new feelings gladsome birth;\nA living gift from one in heaven\nTo two upon the earth.\n\nAre no days creeping softly on\nWhich I should tremble to renew?\nI thank thee Lord for what is gone--\nThine is the future too.\n\nAnd are we not at home in Thee\nAnd all this world a visioned show;\nThat knowing what _Abroad_ is we\nWhat _Home_ is too may know?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rest": { - "title": "“Rest”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhen round the earth the Father’s hands\nHave gently drawn the dark;\nSent off the sun to fresher lands\nAnd curtained in the lark;\n’Tis sweet all tired with glowing day\nTo fade with faded light;\nTo lie once more the old weary way\nUpfolded in the night.\n\nA mother o’er the couch may bend\nAnd rose-leaf kisses heap:\nIn soothing dreams with sleep they blend\nTill even in dreams we sleep.\nAnd if we wake while night is dumb\n’Tis sweet to turn and say\nIt is an hour ere dawning come\nAnd I will sleep till day.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere is a dearer warmer bed\nWhere one all day may lie\nEarth’s bosom pillowing the head\nAnd let the world go by.\nInstead of mother’s love-lit eyes\nThe church’s storied pane\nAll blank beneath cold starry skies\nOr sounding in the rain.\n\nThe great world shouting forward fares:\nThis chamber hid from none\nHides safe from all for no one cares\nFor those whose work is done.\nCheer thee my heart though tired and slow\nAn unknown grassy place\nSomewhere on earth is waiting now\nTo rest thee from thy race.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThere is a calmer than all calms\nA quiet more deep than death:\nA folding in the Father’s palms\nA breathing in his breath;\nA rest made deeper by alarms\nAnd stormy sounds combined:\nThe child within its mother’s arms\nSleeps sounder for the wind.\n\nThere needs no curtained bed to hide\nThe world with all its wars\nNor grassy cover to divide\nFrom sun and moon and stars\nA window open to the skies\nA sense of changeless life\nWith oft returning still surprise\nRepels the sounds of strife.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAs one bestrides a wild scared horse\nBeneath a stormy moon\nAnd still his heart with quiet force\nBeats on its own calm tune;\nSo if my heart with trouble now\nBe throbbing in my breast\nThou art my deeper heart and Thou\nO God dost ever rest.\n\nWhen mighty sea-winds madly blow\nAnd tear the scattered waves;\nAs still as summer woods below\nLie darkling ocean caves:\nThe wind of words may toss my heart\nBut what is that to me!\n’Tis but a surface storm--Thou art\nMy deep still resting sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-thanksgiving": { - "title": "“A Thanksgiving”", - "body": "I Thank Thee boundless Giver\nThat the thoughts Thou givest flow\nIn sounds that like a river\nAll through the darkness go.\nAnd though few should swell the pleasure\nBy sharing this my wine\nMy heart will clasp its treasure\nThis secret gift of Thine.\n\nMy heart the joy inherits\nAnd will oft be sung to rest;\nAnd some wandering hoping spirits\nMay listen and be blest.\nFor the sound may break the hours\nIn a dark and gloomy mood\nAs the wind breaks up the bowers\nOf the brooding sunless wood.\n\nFor every sound of gladness\nIs a prophet-wind that tells\nOf a summer without sadness\nAnd a love without farewells;\nAnd a heart that hath no ailing\nAnd an eye that is not dim\nAnd a faith that without failing\nShall be complete in Him.\n\nAnd when my heart is mourning\nThe songs it lately gave\nBack to their fount returning\nMake sweet the bitter wave;\nAnd forth a new stream floweth\nIn sunshine winding fair;\nAnd through the dark wood goeth\nGlad laughter on the air.\n\nFor the heart of man that waketh\nYet hath not ceased to dream\nIs the only fount that maketh\nThe sweet and bitter stream.\nBut the sweet will still be flowing\nWhen the bitter stream is dry\nAnd glad music only going\nOn the breezes of the sky.\n\nI thank Thee boundless Giver\nThat the thoughts Thou givest flow\nIn sounds that like a river\nAll through the darkness go.\nAnd though few should swell the pleasure\nBy sharing this my wine\nMy heart will clasp its treasure\nThis secret gift of Thine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "the-trees-prayer": { - "title": "“The Tree’s Prayer”", - "body": "Alas! ’tis cold and dark;\nThe wind all night has sung a wintry tune;\nHail from black clouds that swallowed up the moon\nHas beat against my bark.\n\nOh! when will it be spring?\nThe sap moves not within my withered veins;\nThrough all my frozen roots creep numbing pains\nThat they can hardly cling.\n\nThe sun shone out last morn;\nI felt the warmth through every fibre float;\nI thought I heard a thrush’s piping note\nOf hope and sadness born.\n\nThen came the sea-cloud driven;\nThe tempest hissed through all my outstretched boughs\nHither and thither tossed me in its snows\nBeneath the joyless heaven.\n\nO for the sunny leaves!\nAlmost I have forgot the breath of June!\nForgot the feathery light-flakes from the moon!\nThe praying summer-eves!\n\nO for the joyous birds\nWhich are the tongues of us mute longing trees!\nO for the billowy odours and the bees\nAbroad in scattered herds!\n\nThe blessing of cool showers!\nThe gratefulness that thrills through every shoot!\nThe children playing round my deep-sunk root\nShadowed in hot noon hours!\n\nAlas! the cold clear dawn\nThrough the bare lattice-work of twigs around!\nAnother weary day of moaning sound\nOn the thin-shadowed lawn!\n\nYet winter’s noon is past:\nI’ll stretch my arms all night into the wind\nEndure all day the chill air and unkind;\nMy leaves _will_ come at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "the-woman-that-cried-in-the-crowd": { - "title": "“The Woman that Cried in the Crowd”", - "body": "She says within: “It is a man\nA man of mother born;\nShe is a woman--I am one\nAlive this holy morn.”\n\nFilled with his words that flow in light\nHer heart will break or cry:\nA woman’s cry bursts forth in might\nOf loving agony.\n\n“Blessed the womb Thee Lord that bore!\nThe breast where Thou hast fed!”\nStorm-like those words the silence tore\nThough words the silence bred.\n\nHe ceases listens to the cry\nAnd knows from whence it springs;\nA woman’s heart that glad would die\nFor this her best of things.\n\nYet there is better than the birth\nOf such a mighty son;\nBetter than know of all the earth\nThyself the chosen one.\n\n“Yea rather blessed they that hear\nAnd keep the word of God.”\nThe voice was gentle not severe:\nNo answer came abroad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-woman-that-was-a-sinner": { - "title": "“The Woman that Was a Sinner”", - "body": "She washes them with sorrow sweet\nShe wipes them with her hair;\nHer kisses soothe the weary feet\nTo all her kisses bare.\n\nThe best of woman beauty’s crown\nShe spends upon his feet;\nHer eyes her lips her hair flung down\nIn one devotion meet.\n\nHis face his words her heart had woke.\nShe judged Him well in sooth:\nBelieving Him her bonds she broke\nAnd fled to Him for truth.\n\nHis holy manhood’s perfect worth\nRedeems the woman’s ill:\nHer thanks intense to Him burn forth\nWho owns her woman still.\n\nAnd so in kisses ointment tears\nAnd outspread lavish hair\nAn earnest of the coming years\nAscends her thankful prayer.\n\nIf Mary too her hair did wind\nThe holy feet around;\nSuch tears no virgin eyes could find\nAs this sad woman found.\n\nAnd if indeed his wayworn feet\nWith love she healed from pain;\nThis woman found the homage meet\nAnd taught it her again.\n\nThe first in grief ah I let her be\nAnd love that springs from woe;\nWoe soothed by Him more tenderly\nThat sin doth make it flow.\n\nSimon such kisses will not soil;\nHer tears are pure as rain;\nHer hair--’tis Love unwinds the coil\nLove and her sister Pain.\n\nIf He be kind for life she cares;\nA light lights up the day;\nShe to herself a value bears\nNot yet a castaway.\n\nAnd evermore her heart arose\nAnd ever sank away;\nFor something crowned Him o’er her woes\nMore than her best could say.\n\nRejoice sweet sisters holy pure\nWho hardly know her case:\nThere is no sin but has its cure\nBut finds its answering grace.\n\nHer heart although it sinned and sank\nRose other hearts above:\nBless her dear sisters bless and thank\nFor teaching how to love.\n\nHe from his own had welcome sad--\n“Away with him” said they;\nYet never lord or poet had\nSuch homage in his day.\n\nAh Lord! in whose forgiveness sweet\nOur life becomes intense!\nWe brothers sisters crowd thy feet--\nAh! make no difference.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alexandru-macedonski": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexandru Macedonski", - "birth": { - "year": 1854 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "romanian", - "language": "romanian", - "flag": "🇷🇴", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandru_Macedonski", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "romanian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bouquet": { - "title": "“The Bouquet”", - "body": "The sun was shining high above\nWhen I gave you in a bouquet\nMy precious and consuming love\nAnd my heart’s secret in that day.\nThe posy was my youth, my pearl,\nAnd if today lies withered here,\nYou maybe didn’t kiss it, girl,\nO, lovely Mary, O, my dear.\n\nFor eons you cannot be mine,\nYou know it and I know it well,\nBut love is like a sweet red wine\nAnd getting sober is a hell.\nYet, when in reverie you’re caught,\nIf you can see that bouquet clear,\nGive to the poet a nice thought,\nO, lovely Mary, O, my dear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "romanian", - "translator": "Octavian Cocoş" - } - }, - "philosophy-of-death": { - "title": "“Philosophy of Death”", - "body": "To Death, with unwise voice, such words I will not pour\n“Stop coming for a while and wait a little more!,”\nTo breathe my last I’m ready right now or anytime!\nIn it there’s always freedom, in life man slave becomes …\nEternity is waiting for us with open arms …\nAnd thus we all re-enter the bosom sweet, sublime!\n\nIt’s not at all appalling, as people say and sigh;\nIts glance is calm and bluish like the unclouded sky.\nThe state before inception is mirrored by its face!\nStays at the worldly border like a triumphant gate\nIts fires wash the passions which have been sent by fate,\nAnd cleans the clay that covers our souls so full of grace!\n\nIf any of the spirits denies its high domain\nIs worthy then to live here and feel the bitter pain!\nWhen cease to be you’re rescued from suffering and cry!\nBy Jove! I’m sick of sleeping, and drinking in delight,\nAgain to do the same things from dawn till late at night,\nTo live, but have the feeling I cannot choose to die!\n\nBut what’s beyond the dying? … Another life may be\nWhen blood has frozen solid and stopped to flow in thee? …\nTo say a No what being of this wide world would dare? …\nAnd Death what’s in its essence? … A sleep, a holy rest,\nWhen once again our soft clay is kneaded and is pressed\nAnd for that change majestic it has to wait and bear!\n\nWhen paper burns, a fraction of it in ashes lies,\nWhile smoke--the other fraction--above the flame will rise;\nThe same is with the body, made of two parts, no doubt,\nThe clay remains behind it and flowers will grow then,\nWhile gases go in heaven to freshen once again\nThose elements eternal from which they all came out!\n\nO, shadows, you who passed away,\nIn death you never will subside,\nYou live in all we see today,\nFrom where you left after you died;\nYour soul is everywhere you please,\nBurns with the flames, flies with the breeze,\nLies in the leaf that’s turning green,\nSpeaks in the river winding, clean,\nSmells from the flower that is seen,\nWe live in it, in us it lies,\nMothers in mourning, wipe your eyes,\nYour children still are here with you!\n\nNothing is lost in world at all,\nNothing will pass, alive will stay,\nThe blade of grass, however small,\nAnd my own body made of clay!\nThe tombstone tries, but all in vain,\nTo keep us in the moist terrain;\nBirds come on it to drink and rest;\nIt’s hit by wind, by rain oppressed!\nTime breaks it and in moss is dressed;\nPadlock and handles then will rust\nOur country’s soldiers, dead in dust,\nWill be all over, in us, too!\n\nI will not go to search in Hell\nThose in the world who surely die\nAnd Paradise is far, I tell,\nLong is the ladder to the sky!\nBut in two vines, which join above,\nI’ll find two hearts that fell in love,\nAnd in the willows sheding tears,\nPoets with harps that soothe the ears,\nIn flowers, lovers young of years!\nMoms in the stems stick in the ground\nAnd heroes in the mounts around!\n\nLet all the stupid people to fear the death today,\nWhich, to avoid temptation, will surely come and lay\nAt life’s remotest border a barrier, alas;\nBut those who can see farther and hear the grave’s loud call,\nWhen feel they’re on its edges and ready are to fall,\nLike me, for Death, to drink up this necessary glass!", - "metadata": { - "language": "romanian", - "translator": "Octavian Cocoş", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-well": { - "title": "“The Well”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI know a small well in the shadowy vale\nA chirping gold starling has urged me to sleep\nBeneath the high poplars, with green foliage veil,\nForgetting the city where my sigh was deep.\n\nI know a small well in the shadowy vale\nA blackbird I talked to down there, for it pried,\nWhen learned that I suffered and heard my sad wail,\nLaughed loudly and deeply, but I only sighed …\n\nI know a small well in the shadowy vale.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn foliage lies hidden the white-looking vale\nAnd what have I wanted in this passing world?\nI pity myself, the sad folks who prevail …\nO, you, finely chirping and nice golden bird.\n\nIn foliage lies hidden the white-looking vale\nIts spring in the morning is kissed by the sky,\nWith it flows my fate, beginning to fail,\nO, blackbird whose laughter is not gonna die!\n\nThe small hidden well turns white in the vale.", - "metadata": { - "language": "romanian", - "translator": "Octavian Cocoş", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "antonio-machado": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Antonio Machado", - "birth": { - "year": 1875 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Machado", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "last-night-as-i-was-sleeping": { - "title": "“Last night as I was sleeping …”", - "body": "Last night as I was sleeping,\nI dreamt--marvelous error!--\nthat a spring was breaking\nout in my heart.\nI said: Along which secret aqueduct,\nOh water, are you coming to me,\nwater of a new life\nthat I have never drunk?\n\nLast night as I was sleeping,\nI dreamt--marvelous error!--\nthat I had a beehive\nhere inside my heart.\nAnd the golden bees\nwere making white combs\nand sweet honey\nfrom my old failures.\n\nLast night as I was sleeping,\nI dreamt--marvelous error!--\nthat a fiery sun was giving\nlight inside my heart.\nIt was fiery because I felt\nwarmth as from a hearth,\nand sun because it gave light\nand brought tears to my eyes.\n\nLast night as I slept,\nI dreamt--marvelous error!--\nthat it was God I had\nhere inside my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Roberty Bly", - "date": { - "year": 1903 - } - } - }, - "the-wind-one-brilliant-day": { - "title": "“The wind, one brilliant day …”", - "body": "The wind, one brilliant day, called\nto my soul with an odor of jasmine.\n\n“In return for the odor of my jasmine,\nI’d like all the odor of your roses.”\n\n“I have no roses; all the flowers\nin my garden are dead.”\n\n“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals\nand the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”\n\nthe wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:\n“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Roberty Bly" - } - } - } - }, - "archibald-macleish": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Archibald MacLeish", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_MacLeish", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "before-march": { - "title": "“Before March”", - "body": "The gull’s image and the gull\nMeet upon the water\nAll day I have thought of her\nThere is nothing left of that year\n(There is sere-grass\nSalt colored)\nWe have annulled it with\nSalt\nWe have galled it clean to the clay with that one autumn\nThe hedge-rows keep the rubbish and the leaves\nThere is nothing left of that year in our lives but the leaves of it\nAs though it had not been at all\nAs though the love the love and the life altered\nEven ourselves are as strangers in these thoughts\nWhy should I weep for this?\nWhat have I brought her?\nOf sorrow of sorrow of sorrow her heart full\nThe gull\nMeets with his image on the winter water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-the-world": { - "title": "“The End of the World”", - "body": "Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot\nThe armless ambidextrian was lighting\nA match between his great and second toe,\nAnd Ralph the lion was engaged in biting\nThe neck of Madame Sossman while the drum\nPointed, and Teeny was about to cough\nIn waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--\nQuite unexpectedly the top blew off:\n\nAnd there, there overhead, there, there hung over\nThose thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,\nThere in the starless dark the poise, the hover,\nThere with vast wings across the canceled skies,\nThere in the sudden blackness the black pall\nOf nothing, nothing, nothing--nothing at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "epistle-to-be-left-in-the-earth": { - "title": "“Epistle to Be Left in the Earth”", - "body": "… It is colder now\nthere are many stars\nwe are drifting\nNorth by the Great Bear\nthe leaves are falling\nThe water is stone in the scooped rock\nto southward\nRed sun grey air\nthe crows are\nSlow on their crooked wings\nthe jays have left us\nLong since we passed the flares of Orion\nEach man believes in his heart he will die\nMany have written last thoughts and last letters\nNone know if our deaths are now or forever\nNone know if this wandering earth will be found\n\nWe lie down and the snow covers our garments\nI pray you\nyou (if any open this writing)\nMake in your mouths the words that were our names\nI will tell you all we have learned\nI will tell you everything\nThe earth is round\nthere are springs under the orchards\nThe loam cuts with a blunt knife\nbeware of\nElms in thunder\nthe lights in the sky are stars\nWe think they do not see\nwe think also\nThe trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us\nThe birds too are ignorant\ndo not listen\nDo not stand at dark in the open windows\nWe before you have heard this\nthey are voices\nThey are not words at all but the wind rising\nAlso no one among us has seen God\n( … We have thought often\nthe flaws of sun in the late and driving weather\npointed to one tree but it was not so.)\nAs for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous\nThe wind changes at night and the dreams come\n\nIt is very cold\nthere are strange stars near Arcturus\nVoices are crying an unknown name in the sky", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "an-eternity": { - "title": "“An Eternity”", - "body": "There is no dusk to be,\nThere is no dawn that was,\nOnly there’s now, and now,\nAnd the wind in the grass.\n\nDays I remember of\nNow in my heart, are now;\nDays that I dream will bloom\nWhite the peach bough.\n\nDying shall never be\nNow in the windy grass;\nNow under shooken leaves\nDeath never was.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "immortal-autumn": { - "title": "“Immortal Autumn”", - "body": "I speak this poem now with grave and level voice\nIn praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.\n\nI praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall\nUnanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.\n\nI praise the fall: it is the human season.\nNow\nNo more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,\nEnforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,\nNor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,\n\nBut now in autumn with the black and outcast crows\nShare we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:\nThere is more room to live now: the once secret dawn\nComes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.\n\nBetween the mutinous brave burning of the leaves\nAnd winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow\nWe are alone: there are no evening birds: we know\nThe naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.\n\nIt is the human season. On this sterile air\nDo words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.\nI hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.\nI cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "two-poems-from-the-war": { - "title": "“Two Poems from the War”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOh, not the loss of the accomplished thing!\nNot dumb farewells, nor long relinquishment\nOf beauty had, and golden summer spent,\nAnd savage glory of the fluttering\nTorn banners of the rain, and frosty ring\nOf moon-white winters, and the imminent\nLong-lunging seas, and glowing students bent\nTo race on some smooth beach the gull’s wing:\n\nNot these, nor all we’ve been, nor all we’ve loved,\nThe pitiful familiar names, had moved\nOur hearts to weep for them; but oh, the star\nThe future is! Eternity’s too wan\nTo give again that undefeated, far,\nAll-possible irradiance of dawn.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLike moon-dark, like brown water you escape,\nO laughing mouth, O sweet uplifted lips.\nWithin the peering brain old ghosts take shape;\nYou flame and wither as the white foam slips\nBack from the broken wave: sometimes a start,\nA gesture of the hands, a way you own\nOf bending that smooth head above your heart,--\nThen these are varied, then the dream is gone.\n\nOh, you are too much mine and flesh of me\nTo seal upon the brain, who in the blood\nAre so intense a pulse, so swift a flood\nOf beauty, such unceasing instancy.\nDear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,\nAll beauty has become your dwelling place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "louis-macneice": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louis MacNeice", - "birth": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish+british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪 🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_MacNeice", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british", - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 15 - }, - "poems": { - "autobiography": { - "title": "“Autobiography”", - "body": "In my childhood trees were green\nAnd there was plenty to be seen.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nMy father made the walls resound,\nHe wore his collar the wrong way round.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nMy mother wore a yellow dress;\nGently, gently, gentleness.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nWhen I was five the black dreams came;\nNothing after was quite the same.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nThe dark was talking to the dead;\nThe lamp was dark beside my bed.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nWhen I woke they did not care;\nNobody, nobody was there.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nWhen my silent terror cried,\nNobody, nobody replied.\n\nCome back early or never come.\n\nI got up; the chilly sun\nSaw me walk away alone.\n\nCome back early or never come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bagpipe-music": { - "title": "“Bagpipe Music”", - "body": "It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,\nAll we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.\nTheir knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,\nTheir halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.\n\nJohn MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,\nWaited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,\nSold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,\nKept its bones for dumbbells to use when he was fifty.\n\nIt’s no go the Yogi-man, it’s no go Blavatsky,\nAll we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.\n\nAnnie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,\nWoke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.\nIt’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,\nAll we want is a Dunlop tire and the devil mend the puncture.\n\nThe Laird o’ Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,\nCounted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.\nMrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,\nSaid to the midwife “Take it away; I’m through with overproduction.”\n\nIt’s no go the gossip column, it’s no go the Ceilidh,\nAll we want is a mother’s help and a sugar-stick for the baby.\n\nWillie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage,\nTook the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.\nHis brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,\nThrew the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.\n\nIt’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,\nAll we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.\n\nIt’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,\nIt’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,\nIt’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,\nSit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.\n\nIt’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;\nWork your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.\nThe glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,\nBut if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-brandy-glass": { - "title": "“The Brandy Glass”", - "body": "Only let it form within his hands once more--\nThe moment cradled like a brandy glass.\nSitting alone in the empty dining hall …\nFrom the chandeliers the snow begins to fall\nPiling around carafes and table legs\nAnd chokes the passage of the revolving door.\nThe last diner, like a ventriloquist’s doll\nLeft by his master, gazes before him, begs:\n“Only let it form within my hands once more.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eclogue-by-a-five-barred-gate": { - "title": "“Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate”", - "body": "Well, I dreamt it was a hot day, the territorials\nWere out on melting asphalt under the howitzers,\nThe brass music bounced on the houses. Come\nI heard cry as it were a water-nymph, come and fulfil me\nAnd I sped floating, my feet plashing in the tops of the wheat\nBut my eyes were blind,\nI found her with my hands lying on the drying hay,\nWet heat in the deeps of the hay, as my hand delved,\nAnd I possessed her, gross and good like the hay,\nAnd she went and my eyes regained sight and the sky was full of ladders\nAngels ascending and descending with a shine like mackerel--\nNow I come to tell it it sounds nonsense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "house-on-a-cliff": { - "title": "“House on a Cliff”", - "body": "Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors\nThe winking signal on the waste of sea.\nIndoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.\nIndoors the locked heart and the lost key.\n\nOutdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors\nThe strong man pained to find his red blood cools,\nWhile the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors\nThe silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.\n\nIndoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors\nThe empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.\nIndoors a purposeful man who talks at cross\nPurposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "june-thunder": { - "title": "“June Thunder”", - "body": "The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny\nRoads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,\nThrough fields of mustard and under boldly embattled\nMays and chestnuts\n\nOr between beeches verdurous and voluptuous\nOr where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--\nAll the flare and gusto of the unenduring\nJoys of a season\n\nNow returned but I note as more appropriate\nTo the maturer mood impending thunder\nWith an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for\nThe treetops moving.\n\nThen the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,\nThe shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,\nThe white flowers fade to nothing on the trees and rain comes\nDown like a dropscene.\n\nNow there comes catharsis, the cleansing downpour\nBreaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies\nOur old sentimentality and whimsicality\nLoves of the morning.\n\nBlackness at half-past eight, the night’s precursor,\nClouds like falling masonry and lightning’s lavish\nAnnunciation, the sword of the mad archangel\nFlashed from the scabbard.\n\nIf only you would come and dare the crystal\nRampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,\nIf only now you would come I should be happy\nNow if now only.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "last-before-america": { - "title": "“Last before America”", - "body": "A spiral of green hay on the end of a rake:\nThe moment is sweat and sun-prick--children and old women\nBig in a tiny field, midgets against the mountain,\nSo toy-like yet so purposed you could take\nThis for the Middle Ages.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "london-rain": { - "title": "“London Rain”", - "body": "The rain of London pimples\nThe ebony street with white\nAnd the neon lamps of London\nStain the canals of night\nAnd the park becomes a jungle\nIn the alchemy of night.\n\nMy wishes turn to violent\nHorses black as coal--\nThe randy mares of fancy,\nThe stallions of the soul--\nEager to take the fences\nThat fence about my soul.\n\nAcross the countless chimneys\nThe horses ride and across\nThe country to the channel\nWhere warning beacons toss,\nTo a place where God and No-God\nPlay at pitch and toss.\n\nWhichever wins I am happy\nFor God will give me bliss\nBut No-God will absolve me\nFrom all I do amiss\nAnd I need not suffer conscience\nIf the world was made amiss.\n\nUnder God we can reckon\nOn pardon when we fall\nBut if we are under No-God\nNothing will matter at all,\nAdultery and murder\nWill count for nothing at all.\n\nSo reinforced by logic\nAs having nothing to lose\nMy lust goes riding horseback\nTo ravish where I choose,\nTo burgle all the turrets\nOf beauty as I choose.\n\nBut now the rain gives over\nIts dance upon the town,\nLogic and lust together\nCome dimly tumbling down,\nAnd neither God nor No-God\nIs either up or down.\n\nThe argument was wilful,\nThe alternatives untrue,\nWe need no metaphysics\nTo sanction what we do\nOr to muffle us in comfort\nFrom what we did not do.\n\nWhether the living river\nBegan in bog or lake,\nThe world is what was given,\nThe world is what we make.\nAnd we only can discover\nLife in the life we make.\n\nSo let the water sizzle\nUpon the gleaming slates,\nThere will be sunshine after\nWhen the rain abates\nAnd rain returning duly\nWhen the sun abates.\n\nMy wishes now come homeward,\nTheir gallopings in vain,\nLogic and lust are quiet,\nAnd again it starts to rain;\nFalling asleep I listen\nTo the falling London rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "prayer-before-birth": { - "title": "“Prayer before Birth”", - "body": "I am not yet born; O hear me.\nLet not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the\nclub-footed ghoul come near me.\n\nI am not yet born, console me.\nI fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,\nwith strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,\non black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.\n\nI am not yet born; provide me\nWith water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk\nto me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light\nin the back of my mind to guide me.\n\nI am not yet born; forgive me\nFor the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words\nwhen they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,\nmy treason engendered by traitors beyond me,\nmy life when they murder by means of my\nhands, my death when they live me.\n\nI am not yet born; rehearse me\nIn the parts I must play and the cues I must take when\nold men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains\nfrown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white\nwaves call me to folly and the desert calls\nme to doom and the beggar refuses\nmy gift and my children curse me.\n\nI am not yet born; O hear me,\nLet not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God\ncome near me.\n\nI am not yet born; O fill me\nWith strength against those who would freeze my\nhumanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,\nwould make me a cog in a machine, a thing with\none face, a thing, and against all those\nwho would dissipate my entirety, would\nblow me like thistledown hither and\nthither or hither and thither\nlike water held in the\nhands would spill me.\n\nLet them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.\nOtherwise kill me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "snow": { - "title": "“Snow”", - "body": "The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was\nSpawning snow and pink roses against it\nSoundlessly collateral and incompatible:\nWorld is suddener than we fancy it.\n\nWorld is crazier and more of it than we think,\nIncorrigibly plural. I peel and portion\nA tangerine and spit the pips and feel\nThe drunkenness of things being various.\n\nAnd the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world\nIs more spiteful and gay than one supposes--\nOn the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands--\nThere is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "soap-suds": { - "title": "“Soap Suds”", - "body": "This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big\nHouse he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open\nTo reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop\nTo rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.\nAnd these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;\nTwo great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;\nA stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;\nA rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.\nTo which he has now returned. The day of course is fine\nAnd a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,\nThen crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball\nSkims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then\nThrough hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn\nAnd the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!\nBut the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands\nUnder the running tap that are not the hands of a child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "star-gazer": { - "title": "“Star-Gazer”", - "body": "Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else\nThe number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night\nAnd the westward train was empty and had no corridors\nSo darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight\nOf those almost intolerably bright\nHoles, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because\nOf their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks\nHow very far off they were, it seemed their light\nHad left them (some at least) long years before I was.\n\nAnd this remembering now I mark that what\nLight was leaving some of them at least then,\nForty-two years ago, will never arrive\nIn time for me to catch it, which light when\nIt does get here may find that there is not\nAnyone left alive\nTo run from side to side in a late night train\nAdmiring it and adding noughts in vain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sunday-morning": { - "title": "“Sunday Morning”", - "body": "Down the road someone is practising scales,\nThe notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,\nMan’s heart expands to tinker with his car\nFor this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;\nRegard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,\n\nAnd you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,\nTake corners on two wheels until you go so fast\nThat you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,\nThat you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time\nA small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.\n\nBut listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire\nOpen its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire\nTo tell how there is no music or movement which secures\nEscape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-sunlight-on-the-garden": { - "title": "“The Sunlight on the Garden”", - "body": "The sunlight on the garden\nHardens and grows cold,\nWe cannot cage the minute\nWithin its nets of gold,\nWhen all is told\nWe cannot beg for pardon.\n\nOur freedom as free lances\nAdvances towards its end;\nThe earth compels, upon it\nSonnets and birds descend;\nAnd soon, my friend,\nWe shall have no time for dances.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "wolves": { - "title": "“Wolves”", - "body": "I do not want to be reflective any more\nEnvying and despising unreflective things\nFinding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting\nAnd young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand\nFlushed by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.\n\nThe tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want\nTo be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,\nI do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus\nBut to keep my eye only on the nearer future\nAnd after that let the sea flow over us.\n\nCome then all of you, come closer, form a circle,\nJoin hands and make believe that joined\nHands will keep away the wolves of water\nWho howl along our coast. And be it assumed\nThat no one hears them among the talk and laughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-macpherson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Macpherson", - "birth": { - "year": 1736 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1796 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Macpherson", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 29 - }, - "poems": { - "the-battle-of-lora": { - "title": "“The Battle of Lora”", - "body": "Son of the distant land, who dwellest in the secret cell! do I hear the sounds of thy grove? or is it thy voice of songs?--The torrent was loud in my ear, but I heard a tuneful voice; dost thou praise the chiefs of thy land; or the spirits of the wind?--But, lonely dweller of the rock! look over that heathy plain: thou seest green tombs, with their rank, whistling grass; with their stones of mossy heads: thou seest them, son of the rock, but Ossian’s eyes have failed.\n\nA mountain-stream comes roaring down and sends its waters round a green hill: four mossy stones, in the midst of withered grass, rear their heads on the top: two trees, which the storms have bent, spread their whistling branches around.--This is thy dwelling, Erragon; this thy narrow house: the sound of thy shells have been long forgot in Sora: and thy shield is become dark in thy hall.--Erragon, king of ships! chief of distant Sora! how hast thou fallen on our mountains! How is the mighty low!\n\nSon of the secret cell! dost thou delight in songs? Hear the battle of Lora; the sound of its steel is long since past. So thunder on the darkened hill roars and is no more. The sun returns with his silent beams: the glittering rocks, and green heads of the mountains smile.\n\nThe bay of Cona received our ships, from Ullin’s rolling waves: our white sheets hung loose to the masts: and the boisterous winds roared behind the groves of Morven.--The horn of the king is sounded, and the deer start from their rocks. Our arrows flew in the woods; the feast of the hill is spread. Our joy was great on our rocks, for the fall of the terrible Swaran.\n\nTwo heroes were forgot at our feast; and the rage of their bosoms burned. They rolled their red eyes in secret: the sigh bursts from their breasts. They were seen to talk together, and to throw their spears on earth. They were two dark clouds, in the midst of our joy; like pillars of mist on the settled sea: it glitters to the sun, but the mariners fear a storm.\n\nRaise my white sails, said Ma-ronnan, raise them to the winds of the west; let us rush, O Aldo, through the foam of the northern wave. We are forgot at the feast: but our arms have been red in blood. Let us leave the hills of Fingal, and serve the king of Sora.--His countenance is fierce, and the war darkens round his spear. Let us be renowned, O Aldo, in the battles of ecchoing Sora.\n\nThey took their swords and shields of thongs; and rushed to Lumar’s sounding bay. They came to Sora’s haughty king, the chief of bounding steeds.--Erragon had returned from the chace: his spear was red in blood. He bent his dark face to the ground: and whistled as he went.--He took the strangers to his feasts: they fought and conquered in his wars.\n\nAldo returned with his fame towards Sora’s lofty walls.--From her tower looked the spouse of Erragon, the humid, rolling eyes of Lormar.--Her dark-brown hair flies on the wind of ocean: her white breast heaves, like snow on heath; when the gentle winds arise, and slowly move it in the light. She saw young Aldo, like the beam of Sora’s setting sun. Her soft heart sighed: tears filled her eyes; and her white arm supported her head.\n\nThree days she sat within the hall, and covered grief with joy.--On the fourth she fled with the hero, along the rolling sea.--They came to Cona’s mossy towers, to Fingal king of spears.\n\nAldo of the heart of pride! said the rising king of Morven, shall I defend thee from the wrath of Sora’s injured king? who will now receive my people into their halls, or give the feast of strangers, since Aldo, of the little soul, has carried away the fair of Sora? Go to thy hills, thou feeble hand, and hide thee in thy caves; mournful is the battle we must fight, with Sora’s gloomy king.--Spirit of the noble Trenmor! When will Fingal cease to fight? I was born in the midst of battles, and my steps must move in blood to my tomb. But my hand did not injure the weak, my steel did not touch the feeble in arms.--I behold thy tempests, O Morven, which will overtrun my halls; when my children are dead in battle, and none remains to dwell in Selma. Then will the feeble come, but they will not know my tomb: my renown is in the song: and my actions shall be as a dream to future times.\n\nHis people gathered around Erragon, as the storms round the ghost of night; when he calls them from the top of Morven, and prepares to pour them on the land of the stranger.--He came to the shore of Cona, and sent his bard to the king; to demand the combat of thousands; or the land of many hills.\n\nFingal sat in his hall with the companions of his youth around him. The young heroes were at the chace, and far distant in the desart. The gray-haired chiefs talked of other times, and of the actions of their youth; when the aged Narthmor came, the king of streamy Lora.\n\nThis is no time, begun the chief, to hear the songs of other years: Erragon frowns on the coast, and lifts ten thousand swords. Gloomy is the king among his chiefs! he is like the darkened moon, amidst the meteors of night.\n\nCome, said Fingal, from thy hall, thou daughter of my love; come from thy hall, Bosmina, maid of streamy Morven! Narthmor, take the steeds of the strangers, and attend the daughter of Fingal: let her bid the king of Sora to our feast, to Selma’s shaded wall.--Offer him, O Bosmina, the peace of heroes, and the wealth of generous Aldo: our youths are far distant, and age is on our trembling hands.\n\nShe came to the host of Erragon, like a beam of light to a cloud.--In her right hand shone an arrow of gold: and in her left a sparkling shell, the sign of Morven’s peace.\n\nErragon brightened in her presence as a rock, before the sudden beams of the sun; when they issue from a broken cloud, divided by the roaring wind.\n\nSon of the distant Sora, begun the mildly blushing maid, come to the feast of Morven’s king, to Selma’s shaded walls. Take the peace of heroes, O warrior, and let the dark sword rest by thy side.--And if thou chusest the wealth of kings, hear the words of the generous Aldo.--He gives to Erragon an hundred steeds, the children of the rein; an hundred maids from distant lands; an hundred hawks with fluttering wing, that fly across the sky. An hundred girdles shall also be thine, to bind high-bosomed women; the friends of the births of heroes, and the cure of the sons of toil.--Ten shells studded with gems shall shine in Sora’s towers: the blue water trembles on their stars, and seems to be sparkling wine.--They gladdened once the kings of the world, in the midst of their ecchoing halls. These, O hero, shall be thine; or thy white-bosomed spouse.--Lorma shall roll her bright eyes in thy halls; though Fingal loves the generous Aldo:--Fingal!--who never injured a hero, though his arm is strong.\n\nSoft voice of Cona! replied the king, tell him, that he spreads his feast in vain.--Let Fingal pour his spoils around me; and bend beneath my power. Let him give me the swords of his fathers, and the shields of other times; that my children may behold them in my halls, and say, “These are the arms of Fingal.”\n\nNever shall they behold them in thy halls, said the rising pride of the maid; they are in the mighty hands of heroes who never yielded in war.--King of the ecchoing Sora! the storm is gathering on our hills. Dost thou not foresee the fall of thy people, son of the distant land?\n\nShe came to Selma’s silent halls; the king beheld her down-cast eyes. He rose from his place, in his strength, and shook his aged locks.--He took the sounding mail of Trenmor, and the dark-brown shield of his fathers. Darkness filled Selma’s hall, when he stretched his hand to his spear:--the ghosts of thousands were near, and foresaw the death of the people. Terrible joy rose in the face of the aged heroes: they rushed to meet the foe; their thoughts are on the actions of other years: and on the fame of the tomb.\n\nNow the dogs of the chace appeared at Trathal’s tomb: Fingal know that his young heroes followed them, and he stopt in the midst of his course.--Oscar appeared the first;--then Morni’s son, and Nemi’s race:--Fercuth shewed his gloomy form: Dermid spread his dark hair on the wind. Ossian came the last, O son of the rock, I hummed the song of other times: my spear supported my steps over the little streams, and my thoughts were of mighty men. Fingal struck his bossy shield; and gave the dismal sign of war; a thousand swords, at once unsheathed, gleam on the waving heath. Three gray-haired sons of the song raise the tunesul, mournful voice.--Deep and dark with sounding steps, we rush, a gloomy ridge, along: like the shower of a storm when it pours on the narrow vale.\n\nThe king of Morven sat on his hill: the sun-beam of battle flew on the wind: the companions of his youth are near, with all their waving locks of age.--Joy rose in the hero’s eyes when he beheld his sons in war; when he saw them amidst the lightning of swords, and mindful of the deeds of their fathers.--Erragon came on, in his strength, like the roar of a winter stream: the battle falls in his course, and death is at his side.\n\nWho comes, said Fingal, like the bounding roe, like the hart of ecchoing Cona? His shield glitters on his side; and the clang of his armour is mournful.--He meets with Erragon in the strife!--Behold the battle of the chiefs!--it is like the contending of ghosts in a gloomy storm.--But fallest thou, son of the hill, and is thy white bosom stained with blood? Weep, unhappy Lorma, Aldo is no more.\n\nThe king took the spear of his strength; for he was sad for the fall of Aldo: he bent his deathful eyes on the foe; but Gaul met the king of Sora.--Who can relate the fight of the chiefs?--The mighty stranger fell.\n\nSons of Cona! Fingal cried aloud, stop the hand of death.--Mighty was he that is now so low! and much is he mourned in Sora! The stranger will come towards his hall, and wonder why it is silent. The king is fallen, O stranger, and the joy of his house is ceased.--Listen to the sound of his woods: perhaps his ghost is there; but he is far distant, on Morven, beneath the sword of a foreign foe.\n\nSuch were the words of Fingal, when the bard raised the song of peace; we stopped our uplifted swords, and spared the feeble foe. We laid Erragon in that tomb; and I raised the voice of grief: the clouds of night came rolling down, and the ghost of Erragon appeared to some.--His face was cloudy and dark; and an halfsormed sigh is in his breast.--Blest be thy soul, O king of Sora! thine arm was terrible in war!\n\nLorma sat, in Aldo’s hall, at the light of a flaming oak: the night came, but he did not return; and the soul of Lorma is sad.--What detains thee, hunter of Cona? for thou didst promise to return.--Has the deer been distant far; and do the dark winds sigh, round thee, on the heath? I am in the land of strangers, where is my friend, but Aldo? Come from thy ecchoing hills, O my best beloved!\n\nHer eyes are turned toward the gate, and she listens to the rustling blast. She thinks it is Aldo’s tread, and joy rises in her face:--but sorrow returns again, like a thin cloud on the moon.--And thou wilt not return, my love? Let me behold the face of the hill. The moon is in the east. Calm and bright is the breast of the lake! When shall I behold his dogs returning from the chace? When shall I hear his voice, loud and distant on the wind? Come from thy ecchoing hills, hunter of woody Cona!\n\nHis thin ghost appeared, on a rock, like the watry beam of the moon, when it rushes from between two clouds, and the midnight shower is on the field.--She followed the empty sorm over the heath, for she knew that her hero fell.--I heard her approaching cries on the wind, like the mournsul voice of the breeze, when it sighs on the grass of the cave.\n\nShe came, she found her hero: her voice was heard no more: silent she rolled her sad eyes; she was pale as a watry cloud, that rises from the lake, to the beam of the moon.\n\nFew were her days on Cona: she sunk into the tomb: Fingal commanded his bards; and they sung over the death of Lorma. The daughters of Morven mourned her for one day in the year, when the dark winds of returned.\n\nSon of the distant land, thou dwellest in the field of fame: O let thy song rise, at times, in the praise of those that fell: that their thin ghosts may rejoice around thee; and the soul of Lorma come on a moon-beam, when thou liest down to rest, and the moon looks into thy cave. Then shalt thou see her lovely; but the tear is still on her cheek.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "berrathon": { - "title": "“Berrathon”", - "body": "Bend thy blue course, O stream, round the narrow plain of Lutha. Let the green woods hang over it from their mountains: and the sun look on it at noon. The thistle is there on its rock, and shakes its beard to the wind. The flower hangs its heavy head, waving, at times, to the gale. Why dost thou awake me, O gale, it seems to say, I am covered with the drops of heaven? The time of of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves. To-morrow shall the traveller come, he that saw me in my beauty shall come; his eyes will search the field, but they will not find me?--So shall they search in vain, for the voice of Cona, after it has failed in the field. The hunter shall come forth in the morning, and the voice of my harp shall not be heard. “Where is the son of car-borne Fingal?”The tear will be on his cheek.\n\nThen come thou, O Malvina, with all thy music, come; lay Ossian in the plain of Lutha: let his tomb rise in the lovely field.--Malvina! where art thou, with thy songs: with the soft sound of thy steps?--Son of Alpin art thou near? where is the daughter of Toscar?\n\nI Passed, O son of Fingal, by Tar-lutha’s mossy walls. The smoke of the hall was ceased: silence was among the trees of the hill. The voice of the chace was over. I saw the daughters of the bow. I asked about Malvina, but they answered not. They turned their faces away: thin darkness covered their beauty. They were like stars, on a rainy hill, by night, each looking faintly through her mist.\n\nPleasant be thy rest, O lovely beam! soon hast thou set on our hills! The steps of thy departure were stately, like the moon on the blue, trembling wave. But thou hast left us in darkness, first of the maids of Lutha! We sit, at the rock, and there is no voice; no light but the meteor of fire! Son hast thou set, Malvina, daughter of generous Toscar!\n\nBut thou risest like the beam of the east, among the spirits of thy friends, where they sit in their stormy halls, the chambers of the thunder.--A cloud hovers over Cona: its blue curling sides are high. The winds are beneath it, with their wings; within it is the dwelling of Fingal. There the hero sits in darkness; his airy spear is in his hand. His shield half covered with clouds, is like the darkened moon; when one half still remains in the wave, and the other looks sickly on the field.\n\nHis friends sit around the king, on mist; and hear the songs of Ullin: he strikes the half-viewless harp; and raises the feeble voice. The lesser heroes, with a thousand meteors, light the airy hall. Malvina rises, in the midst; a blush is on her cheek. She beholds the unknown faces of her fathers, and turns aside her humid eyes.\n\nArt thou come so soon, said Fingal, daughter of generous Toscar? Sadness dwells in the halls of Lutha. My aged son is sad. I hear the breeze of Cona, that was wont to lift thy heavy locks. It comes to the hall, but thou art not there; its voice is mournful among the arms of thy fathers. Go with thy rustling wing, O breeze! and sigh on Malvina’s tomb. It rises yonder beneath the rock, at the blue stream of Lutha. The maids are departed to their place; and thou alone, O breeze mournest there.\n\nBut who comes from the dusky west, supported on a cloud? A smile is on his gray, watry face; his locks of mist fly on the wind: he bends forward on his airy spear: it is thy father, Malvina! Why shinest thou, so soon, on our clouds, he says, O lovely light of Lutha!--But thou wert sad, my daughter, for thy friends were passed away. The sons of little men were in the hall; and none remained of the heroes, but Ossian king of spears.\n\nAnd dost thou remember Ossian, car-borne Toscar son of Conloch? The battles of our youth were many; our swords went together to the field. They saw us coming like two falling rocks; and the sons of the stranger fled. There come the warriors of Cona, they said; their steps are in the paths of the vanquished.\n\nDraw near, son of Alpin, to the song of the aged. The actions of other times are in my soul: my memory beams on the days that are past. On the days of the mighty Toscar, when our path was in the deep. Draw near, son of Alpin, to the last sound of the voice of Cona.\n\nThe king of Morven commanded, and I raised my sails to the wind. Toscar chief of Lutha stood at my side, as I rose on the dark-blue wave. Our course was to sea-surrounded Berrathon, the isle of many storms. There dwelt, with his locks of age, the stately strength of Larthmor. Larthmor who spread the feast of shells to Comhal’s mighty son, when he went to Starno’s halls, in the days of Agandecca. But when the chief was old, the pride of his son arose, the pride of fair-haired Uthal, the love of a thousand maids. He bound the aged Larthmor, and dwelt in his sounding halls.\n\nLong pined the king in his cave, beside his rolling sea. Day did not come to his dwelling; nor the burning oak by night. But the wind of ocean was there, and the parting beam of the moon. The red star looked on the king, when it trembled on the western wave. Snitho came to Selma’s hall: Snitho companion of Larthmor’s youth. He told of the king of Berrathon: the wrath of Fingal rose. Thrice he assumed the spear, resolved to stretch his hand to Uthal. But the memory of his actions rose before the king, and he sent his son and Toscar. Our joy was great on the rolling sea; and we often half-unsheathed our swords. For never before had we fought alone, in the battles of the spear. Night came down on the ocean; the winds departed on their wings. Cold and pale is the moon. The red stars lift their heads. Our course is slow along the coast of Berrathon; the white waves tumble on the rocks.\n\nWhat voice is that, said Toscar, which comes between the sounds of the waves? It is soft but mournsul, like the voice of departed bards. But I behold the maid, she sits on the rock alone. Her head bends on her arm of snow: her dark hair is in the wind. Hear, son of Fingal, her song, it is smooth as the gliding waters of Lavath.--We came to the silent bay, and heard the maid of night.\n\nHow long will ye roll around me, blue-tumbling waters of ocean? My dwelling was not always in caves, nor beneath the whistling tree. The feast was spread in Torthóma’s hall; my father delighted in my voice. The youths beheld me in the steps of my loveliness, and they blessed the dark-haired Nina-thoma. It was then thou didst come, O Uthal! like the sun of heaven. The souls of the virgins are thine, son of generous Larthmor! But why dost thou leave me alone in the midst of roaring waters. Was my soul dark with thy death? Did my white hand lift the sword? Why then hast thou left me alone, king of high Finthormo!\n\nThe tear started from my eye, when I heard the voice of the maid. I stood before her in my arms, and spoke the words of peace.--Lovely dweller of the cave, what sigh is in that breast? Shall Ossian lift his sword in thy presence, the destruction of thy foes?--Daughter of Torthóma, rise, I have heard the words of thy grief. The race of Morven are around thee, who never injured the weak. Come to our dark-bosomed ship, thou brighter than that setting moon. Our course is to the rocky Berrathon, to the ecchoing walls of Finthormo.--She came in her beauty, she came with all her lovely steps. Silent joy brightened in her face, as when the shadows fly from the field of spring; the blue-stream is rolling in brightness, and the green bush bends over its course.\n\nThe morning rose with its beams. We came to Rothma’s bay. A boar rushed from the wood; my spear pierced his side. I rejoiced over the blood, and foresaw my growing fame.--But now the sound of Uthal’s train came from the high Fin-thormo; they spread over the heath to the chance of the boar. Himself comes slowly on, in the pride of his strength. He lifts two pointed spears. On his side is the hero’s sword. Three youths carry his polished bows: the bounding of five dogs is before him. His heroes move on, at a distance, admiring the steps of the king. Stately was the son of Larthmor! but his soul was dark. Dark as the troubled face of the moon, when it foretels the storms.\n\nWe rose on the heath before the king; he stopt in the midst of his course. His heroes gathered around, and a gray-haired bard advanced. Whence are the sons of the strangers! begun the bard of the song; the children of the unhappy come to Berrathon; to the sword of car-borne Uthal. He spreads no feast in his hall: the blood of strangers is on his streams. If from Selma’s walls ye come, from the mossy walls of Fingal, chuse three youths to go to your king to tell of the fall of his people. Perhaps the hero may come and pour his blood on Uthal’s sword; so shall the fame of Finthormo arise, like the growing tree of the vale.\n\nNever will it rise, O bard, I said in the pride of my wrath. He would shrink in the presence of Fingal, whose eyes are the flames of death. The son of Comhal comes, and the kings vanish in his presence; they are rolled together, like mist, by the breath of his rage. Shall three tell to Fingal, that his people fell? Yes!--they may tell it, bard! but his people shall fall with fame.\n\nI Stood in the darkness of my strength; Toscar drew his sword at my side. The foe came on like a stream: the mingled sound of death arose. Man took man, shield met shield; steel mixed its beams with steel.--Darts hiss through air; spears ring on mails; and swords on broken bucklers bound. As the noise of an aged grove beneath the roaring wind, when a thousand ghosts break the trees by night, such was the din of arms.--But Uthal fell beneath my sword; and the sons of Berrathon fled.--It was then I saw him in his beauty, and the tear hung in my eye. Thou art fallen, young tree, I said, with all thy beauty round thee. Thou art fallen on thy plains, and the field is bare. The winds come from the desart, and there is no sound in thy leaves! Lovely art thou in death, son of car-borne Larthmor.\n\nNina-Thoma sat on the shore, and heard the sound of battle. She turned her red eyes on Lethmal the gray-haired bard of Selma, for he had remained on the coast, with the daughter of Torthóma. Son of the times of old! she said, I hear the noise of death. Thy friends have met with Uthal and the chief is low! O that I had remained on the rock, inclosed with the tumbling waves! Then would my soul be sad, but his death would not reach my ear. Art thou fallen on thy heath, O son of high Finthormo! thou didst leave me on a rock, but my soul was full of thee. Son of high Finthormo! art thou fallen on thy heath?\n\nShe rose pale in her tears, and saw the bloody shield of Uthal; she saw it in Ossian’s hand; her steps were distracted on the heath. She flew; she found him; she fell. Her soul came forth in a sigh. Her hair is spread on his face. My bursting tears descend. A tomb arose on the unhappy; and my song was heard.\n\nRest, hapless children of youth! and the noise of that mossy stream. The virgins will see your tomb, at the chace, and turn away their weeping eyes. Your fame will be in the song; the voice of the harp will be heard in your praise. The daughters of Selma shall hear it; and your renown shall be in other lands.--Rest, children of youth, at the noise of the mossy stream.\n\nTwo days we remained on the coast. The heroes of Berrathon convened. We brought Larthmor to his halls; the feast of shells is spread.--The joy of the aged was great; he looked to the arms of his fathers; the arms which he left in his hall, when the pride of Uthal arose--We were renowned before Larthmor, and he blessed the chiefs of Morven; but he knew not that his son was low, the stately strength of Uthal. They had told, that he had retired to the woods, with the tears of grief; they had told it, but he was silent in the tomb of Rothma’s heath.\n\nOn the fourth day we raised our sails to the roar of the northern wind. Larthmor came to the coast, and his bards raised the song. The joy of the king was great, he looked to Rothma’s gloomy heath; he saw the tomb of his son; and the memory of Uthal rose.--Who of my heroes, he said, lies there: he seems to have been of the kings of spears? Was he renowned in my halls, before the pride of Uthal rose?\n\nYe are silent, ye sons of Berrathon, is the king of heroes low?--My heart melts for thee, O Uthal; though thy hand was against thy father.--O that I had remained in the cave! that my son had dwelt in Finthormo!--I might have heard the tread of his feet, when he went to the chace of the boar.--I might have heard his voice on the blast of my cave. Then would my soul be glad: but now darkness dwells in my halls.\n\nSuch were my deeds, son of Alpin, when the arm of my youth was strong; such were the actions of Toscar, the car-borne son of Conloch. But Toscar is on his flying cloud; and I am alone at Lutha: my voice is like the last sound of the wind, when it forsakes the woods. But Ossian shall not be long alone, he sees the mist that shall receive his ghost. He beholds the mist that shall sorm his robe, when he appears on his hills. The sons of little men shall behold me, and admire the stature of the chiefs of old. They shall creep to their caves, and look to the sky with fear; for my steps shall be in the clouds, and darkness shall roll on my side.\n\nLead, son of Alpin, lead the aged to his woods. The winds begin to rise. The dark wave of the lake resounds. Bends there not a tree from Mora with its branches bare? It bends, son of Alpin, in the rustling blast. My harp hangs on a blasted branch. The sound of its strings is mournful.--Does the wind touch thee, O harp, or is it some passing ghost!--It is the hand of Malvina! but bring me the harp, son of Alpin; another song shall rise. My soul shall depart in the sound; my fathers shall hear it in their airy hall.--Their dim faces shall hang, with joy, from their clouds; and their hands receive their son.\n\nThe aged oak bends over the stream. It sighs with all its moss. The withered fern whistles near, and mixes, as it waves, with Ossian’s hair.--Strike the harp and raise the song: be near, with all your wings, ye winds. Bear the mournful sound away to Fingal’s airy hall. Bear it to Fingal’s hall, that he may hear the voice of his son; the voice of him that praised the mighty.--The blast of north opens thy gates, O king, and I behold thee sitting on mist, dimly gleaming in all thine arms. Thy form now is not the terror of the valiant: but like a watery cloud; when we see the stars behind it with their weeping eyes. Thy shield is like the aged moon: thy sword a vapour half-kindled with fire. Dim and feeble is the chief, who travelled in brightness before.--\n\nBut thy steps are on the winds of the desart, and the storms darken in thy hand. Thou takest the sun in thy wrath, and hidest him in thy clouds. The sons of little men are afraid; and a thousand showers descend.--\n\nBut when thou comest forth in thy mildness; the gale of the morning is near thy course. The sun laughs in his blue fields; and the gray stream winds in its valley.--The bushes shake their green heads in the wind. The roes bound towards the desart.\n\nBut there is a murmur in the heath! the stormy winds abate! I hear the voice of Fingal. Long has it been absent from mine ear!--Come, Ossian, come away, he says: Fingal has received his fame. We passed away, like flames that had shone for a season, our departure was in renown. Though the plains of our battles are dark and silent; our fame is in the four gray stones. The voice of Ossian has been heard; and the harp was strung in Selma.--Come Ossian, come away, he says, and fly with thy fathers on clouds.\n\nAnd come I will, thou king of men! the life of Ossian fails. I begin to vanish on Cona; and my steps are not seen in Selma. Beside the stone of Mora I shall fall asleep. The winds whistling in my grey hair, shall not waken me.--Depart on thy wings, O wind: thou canst not disturb the rest of the bard. The night is long, but his eyes are heavy; depart, thou rustling blast.\n\nBut why art thou sad, son of Fingal? Why grows the cloud of thy soul? The chiefs of other times are departed; they have gone without their fame. The sons of future years shall pass away; and another race arise. The people are like the waves of ocean: like the leaves of woody Morven, they pass away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift their green heads.--\n\nDid thy beauty last, O Ryno? Stood the strength of car-borne Oscar? Fingal himself passed away; and the halls of his fathers forgot his steps.--And shalt thou remain, aged bard! when the mighty have failed?--But my fame shall remain, and grow like the oak of Morven; which lifts its broad head to the storm, and rejoices in the course of the wind.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "calthon-and-colmal": { - "title": "“Calthon and Colmal”", - "body": "Pleasant is the voice of thy song, thou lonely dweller of the rock. It comes on the sound of the stream, along the narrow vale. My soul awakes, O stranger! in the midst of my hall. I stretch my hand to the spear, as in the days of other years.--I stretch my hand, but it is feeble; and the sigh of my bosom grows.--Wilt thou not listen, son of the rock, to the song of Ossian? My soul is full of other times; the joy of my youth returns. Thus the sun appears in the west, after the steps of his brightness have moved behind a storm; the green hills lift their dewy heads: the blue streams rejoice in the vale. The aged hero comes forth on his staff, and his grey hair glitters in the beam.\n\nDost thou not behold, son of the rock, a shield in Ossian’s hall? It is marked with the strokes of battle; and the brightness of its bosses has failed. That shield the great Dunthalmo bore, the chief of streamy Teutha.--Dunthalmo bore it in battle, before he fell by Ossian’s spear. Listen, son of the rock, to the tale of other years.--\n\nRathmor was a chief of Clutha. The feeble dwelt in his hall. The gates of Rathmor were never closed; his feast was always spread. The sons of the stranger came, and blessed the generous chief of Clutha. Bards raised the song, and touched the harp: and joy brightened on the face of the mournful.--Dunthalmo came, in his pride, and rushed into the combat of Rathmor. The chief of Clutha overcame: the rage of Dunthalmo rose--He came, by night, with his warriors; and the mighty Rathmor fell. He fell in his halls, where his feast was often spread for strangers.--\n\nColmar and Calthon were young, the sons of car-borne Rathmor. They came, in the joy of youth, into their father’s hall. They behold him in his blood, and their bursting tears descend.--The soul of Dunthalmo melted, when he saw the children of youth; he brought them to Alteutha’s. walls; they grew in the house of their foe.--They bent the bow in his presence; and came forth to his battles.\n\nThey saw the sallen walls of their fathers; they saw the green thorn in the hall. Their tears descended in secret; and, at times, their faces were mournful. Dunthalmo beheld their grief: his darkening soul designed their death. He closed them in two caves, on the ecchoing banks of Teutha. The sun did not come there with his beams; nor the moon of heaven by night. The sons of Rathmor remained in darkness, and soresaw their death.\n\nThe daughter of Dunthalmo wept in silence, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Colmal. Her eye had rolled in secret on Calthon; his loveliness swelled in her soul. She trembled for her warrior; but what could Colmal do? Her arm could not lift the spear; nor was the sword sormed for her side. Her white breast never rose beneath a mail. Neither was her eye the terror of heroes. What canst thou do, O Colmal! for the falling chief?--Her steps are unequal; her hair is loose: her eye looked wildly through her tears.--She came, by night, to the hall; and armed her lovely form in steel; the steel of a young warrior, who fell in the first of his battles.--She came to the cave of Calthon, and loosed the thong from his hands.\n\nArise, son of Rathmor, she said, arise, the night is dark. Let us fly to the king of Selma, chief of fallen Clutha! I am the son of Lamgal, who dwelt in thy father’s hall. I heard of thy dark dwelling in the cave, and my soul arose. Arise, son of Rathmor, for the night is dark.--\n\nBlest voice! replied the chief, comest thou from the darkly-rolling clouds? for often the ghosts of his fathers descend to Calthon’s dreams, since the sun has retired from his eyes, and darkness has dwelt around him. Or art thou the son of Lamgal, the chief I often saw in Clutha? But will I fly to Fingal, and Colmar my brother low? Will I fly to Morven, and the hero closed in night? No: give me that spear, son of Lamgal, Calthon will defend his brother.\n\nA Thousand heroes, replied the maid, stretch their spears round car-borne Colmar. What can Calthon do against a host so great? Let us fly to the king of Morven, he will come with battle. His arm is stretched forth to the unhappy; the lightning of his sword is round the weak.--Arise, thou son of Rathmor; the shadows will fly away. Dunthalmo will behold thy steps on the field, and thou must fall in thy youth.\n\nThe sighing hero rose; his tears descend for car-borne Colmar. He came with the maid to Selma’s hall; but he knew not that it was Colmal. The helmet cover’d her lovely face; and her breast rose beneath the steel. Fingal returned from the chace, and found the lovely strangers. They were like two beams of light, in the midst of the hall.\n\nThe kind heard the tale of grief; and turned his eyes around. A thousand heroes half-rose before him; claiming the war of Teutha.--I came with my spear from the hill, and the joy of battle rose in my breast: for the king spoke to Ossian in the midst of the people.\n\nSon of my strength, he said, take the spear of Fingal; go to Teutha’s mighty stream, and save the car-borne Colmar.--Let thy fame return before thee like a pleasant gale; that my soul may rejoice over my son, who renews the renown of our fathers.--Ossian! be thou a storm in battle; but mild when the foes are low!--It was thus my fame arose, O my son; and be thou like Selma’s chief.--When the haughty come to my halls, my eyes behold them not. But my arm is stretched forth to the unhappy. My sword defends the weak.\n\nI Rejoiced in the words of the king: and took my rattling arms.--Diaran rose at my side, and Dargo king of spears.--Three hundred youths followed our steps: the lovely strangers were at my side. Dunthalmo heard the sound of our approach; he gathered the strength of Teutha.--He stood on a hill with his host; they were like rocks broken with thunder, when their bent trees are singed and bare, and the streams of their chinks have failed.\n\nThe stream of Teutha rolled, in its pride, before the gloomy foe. I sent a bard to Dunthalmo, to offer the combat on the plain; but he smiled in the darkness of his pride.--His unsettled host moved on the hill; like the mountain-cloud, when the blast has entered its womb, and scatters the curling gloom on every side.\n\nThey brought Colmar to Teutha’s bank, bound with a thousand thongs. The chief is sad, but lovely, and his eye is on his friends; for we stood, in our arms, on the opposite bank of Teutha. Dunthalmo came with his spear, and pierced the hero’s side: he rolled on the bank in his blood, and we heard his broken sighs.\n\nCalthon rushed into the stream: I bounded forward on my spear. Teutha’s race fell before us. Night came rolling down. Dunthalmo rested on a rock, amidst an aged wood. The rage of his bosom burned against the car-borne Calthon.--But Calthon stood in his grief; he mourned the fallen Colmar; Colmar slain in youth, before his fame arose.\n\nI Bade the song of woe to rise, to sooth the mournful chief; but he stood beneath a tree, and often threw his spear on earth.--The humid eye of Colmal rolled near in a secret tear: she foresaw the fall of Dunthalmo, or of Clutha’s battling chief.\n\nNow half the night had passed away. Silence and darkness were on the field; sleep rested on the eyes of the heroes: Calthon’s settling soul was still. His eyes were half-closed; but the murmur of Teutha had not yet failed in his ear.--Pale, and shewing his wounds, the ghost of Colmar came: he bended his head over the hero, and raised his feeble voice.\n\nSleeps the son of Rathmor in his night, and his brother low? Did we not rise to the chace together, and pursue the dark-brown hinds? Colmar was not forgot till he fell; till death had blasted his youth. I lie pale beneath the rock of Lona. O let Calthon rise! the morning comes with its beams; and Dunthalmo will dishonour the fallen.\n\nHe passed away in his blast. The rising Calthon saw the steps of his departure.--He rushed in the sound of his steel; and unhappy Colmal rose. She followed her hero through night, and dragged her spear behind.--But when Calthon came to Lona’s rock, he found his fallen brother--The rage of his bosom rose, and he rushed among the foe. The groans of death ascend. They close around the chief.--He is bound in the midst, and brought to gloomy Dunthalmo.--The shout of joy arose; and the hills of night replied.--\n\nI started at the sound: and took my father’s spear. Diaran rose at my side; and the youthful strength of Dargo. We missed the chief of Clutha, and our souls were sad.--I dreaded the departure of my fame; the pride of my valour rose.\n\nSons of Morven, I said, it is not thus our fathers fought. They rested not on the field of strangers, when the foe did not fall before them.--Their strength was like the eagles of heaven; their renown is in the song. But our people fall by degrees, and our fame begins to depart.--What shall the king of Morven say, if Ossian conquers not at Teutha? Rise in your steel, ye warriors, and sollow the sound of Ossian’s course. He will not return, but renowned, to the echoing walls of Selma.\n\nMorning rose on the blue waters of Teutha; Colmal stood before me in tears. She told of the chief of Clutha: and thrice the spear fell from her hand. My wrath turned against the stranger; for my soul trembled for Calthon.\n\nSon of the feeble hand, I said, do Teutha’s warriors fight with tears? The battle is not won with grief; nor dwells the sigh in the soul of war.--Go to the deer of Carmun, or the lowing herds of Teutha.--But leave these arms, thou son of fear; a warrior may lift them in battle.--\n\nI tore the mail from her shoulders. Her snowy breast appeared. She bent her red face to the ground.--I looked in silence to the chiefs. The spear fell from my hand; and the sigh of my bosom rose.--But when I heard the name of the maid, my crowding tears descended. I blessed the lovely beam of youth, and bade the battle move.--\n\nWhy, son of the rock, should Ossian tell how Teutha’s warriors died? They are now forgot in their land; and their tombs are not found on the heath.--Years came on with their tempests; and the green mounds mouldered away.--Scarce is the grave of Dunthalmo seen, or the place where he fell by the spear of Ossian.--Some gray warrior, half blind with age, sitting by night at the flaming oak of the hall, tells now my actions to his sons, and the fall of the dark Dunthalmo. The saces of youth bend sidelong towards his voice; surprize and joy burn in their eyes.--\n\nI Found the son of Rathmor bound to an oak; my sword cut the thongs from his hands. And I gave him the white-bosomed Colmal.--They dwelt in the halls of Teutha; and Ossian returned to Selma.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "carric-thura": { - "title": "“Carric-Thura”", - "body": "Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven, golden-haired son of the sky! The west has opened its gates; the bed of thy repose is there. The waves come to behold thy beauty: they lift their trembling heads: they see thee lovely in thy sleep; but they shrink away with fear. Rest, in thy shadowy cave, O sun! and let thy return be in joy.--But let a thousand lights arise to the sound of the harps of Selma: let the beam spread in the hall, the king of shells is returned! The strife of Crona is past, like sounds that are no more: raise the song, O bards, the king is returned, with his fame!\n\nSuch was the song of Ullin, when Fingal returned from battle: when he returned in the fair blushing of youth; with all his heavy locks. His blue arms were on the hero; like a gray cloud on the sun, when he moves in his robes of mist, and shews but half his beams. His heroes follow the king: the feast of shells is spread. Fingal turns to his bards, and bids the song to rise.\n\nVoices of ecchoing Cona! he said, O bards of other times! Ye, on whose souls the blue hosts of our fathers rise! strike the harp in my hall; and let Fingal hear the song. Pleasant is the joy of grief! it is like the shower of spring, when it softens the branch of the oak, and the young leaf lifts its green head. Sing on, O bards, to-morrow we lift the sail. My blue course is through the ocean, to Carric-thura’s walls; the mossy walls of Sarno, where Comála dwelt. There the noble Cathulla, spreads the feast of shells. The boars of his woods are many, and the sound of the chace shall arise.\n\nCronnan, son of the song! said Ullin, Minona, graceful at the harp! raise the song of Shilric, to please the king of Morven. Let Vinvela come in her beauty, like the showery bow, when it shews its lovely head on the lake, and the setting sun is bright. And she comes, O Fingal! her voice is soft but sad.\n\n> _Vinvela:_\nMy love is a son of the hill. He pursues the flying deer. His gray dogs are panting around him; his bow-string sounds in the wind. Dost thou rest by the sount of the rock, or by the noise of the mountain-stream? the rushes are nodding with the wind, the mist is flying over the hill. I will approach my love unperceived, and see him from the rock. Lovely I saw thee first by the aged oak of Branno; thou wert returning tall from the chace; the fairest among thy friends.\n\n> _Shilric:_\nWhat voice is that I hear? that voice like the summer-wind.--I sit not by the nodding rushes; I hear not the fount of the rock. Afar, Vinvela, afar I go to the wars of Fingal. My dogs attend me no more. No more I tread the hill. No more from on high I see thee, fair-moving by the stream of the plain; bright as the bow of heaven; as the moon on the western wave.\n\n> _Vinvela:_\nThen thou art gone, O Shilric! and I am alone on the hill. The deer are seen on the brow; void of fear they graze along. No more they dread the wind; no more the rustling tree. The hunter is far removed; he is in the field of graves. Strangers! sons of the waves! spare my lovely\n\n> _Shilric:_\nIf fall I must in the field, raise high my grave, Vinvela. Gray stones and heaped-up earth, shall mark me to future times. When the hunter shall sit by the mound, and produce his food at noon, “Some warrior rests here,”he will say; and my fame shall live in his praise. Remember me, Vinvela, when low on earth I lie!\n\n> _Vinvela:_\nYes!--I will remember thee--Indeed my Shilric will fall. What shall I do, my love! when thou art gone for ever? Through these hills I will go at noon: I will go through the silent heath. There I will see the place of thy rest, returning from the chace. Indeed, my Shilric will fall; but I will remember him.\n\nAnd I remember the chief, said the king of woody Morven; he consumed the battle in his rage. But now my eyes behold him not. I met him, one day, on the hill; his cheek was pale; his brow was dark. The sigh was frequent in his breast: his steps were towards the desart. But now he is not in the crowd of my chiefs, when the sounds of my shields arise. Dwells he in the narrow house, the chief of high Carmora?\n\nCronnan! said Ullin of other times, raise the song of Shilric; when he returned to his hills, and Vinvela was no more. He leaned on her gray mossy stone; he thought Vinvela lived. He saw her fair-moving on the plain: but the bright form lasted not: the sun-beam fled from the field, and she was seen no more. Hear the song of Shilric, it is soft but sad.\n\nI Sit by the mossy fountain; on the top of the hill of winds. One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath. The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No hunter at a distance is seen; no whistling cow-herd is nigh. It is mid-day: but all is silent. Sad are my thoughts alone. Didst thou but appear, O my love, a wanderer on the heath! thy hair floating on the wind behind thee; thy bosom heaving on the sight; thine eyes full of tears for thy friends, whom the mist of the hill had concealed! Thee I would comfort, my love, and bring thee to thy father’s house.\n\nBut is it she that there appears, like a beam of light on the heath? bright as the moon in autumn, as the sun in a summerstorm, comest thou, lovely maid, over rocks, over mountains to me?--She speaks: but how weak her voice! like the breeze in the reeds of the pool.\n\nReturnest thou safe from the war? Where are thy friends, my love? I heard of thy death on the hill; I heard and mourned thee, Shilric!\n\nYes, my fair, I return; but I alone of my race. Thou shalt see them no more: their graves I raised on the plain. But why art thou on the desert hill? Why on the heath, alone?\n\nAlone I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief for thee I expired. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.\n\nShe fleets, she sails away; as gray mist before the wind!--and, wilt thou not stay, my love? Stay and behold my tears? fair thou appearest, Vinvela! fair thou wast, when alive!\n\nBy the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When mid-day is silent around, converse, O my love, with me! come on the wings of the gale! on the blast of the mountain, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around.\n\nSuch was the song of Cronnan, on the night of Selma’s joy. But morning rose in the east; the blue waters rolled in light. Fingal bade his sails to rise, and the winds come rustling, from their hills. Inis-tore rose to sight, and Carric-thura’s mossy towers. But the sign of distress was on their top: the green flame edged with smoke. The king of Morven struck his breast: he assumed, at once, his spear. His darkened brow bends forward to the coast: he looks back to the lagging winds. His hair is disordered on his back. The silence of the king is terrible.\n\nNight came down on the sea; Rotha’s bay received the ship. A rock bends along the coast with all its ecchoing wood. On the top is the circle of Loda, and the mossy stone of power. A narrow plain spreads beneath, covered with grass and aged trees, which the midnight winds, in their wrath, had torn from the shaggy rock. The blue course of a stream is there; and the lonely blast of ocean pursues the thistle’s beard.\n\nThe flame of three oaks arose: the feast is spread around: but the soul of the king is sad, for Carric-thura’s battling chief. The wan, cold moon rose, in the east. Sleep descended on the youths! Their blue helmets glitter to the beam; the fading fire decays. But sleep did not rest on the king: he rose in the midst of his arms, and slowly ascended the hill to behold the flame of Sarno’s tower.\n\nThe flame was dim and distant; the moon hid her red face in the east. A blast came from the mountain, and bore, on its wings, the spirit of Loda. He came to his place in his terrors, and he shook his dusky spear.--His eyes appear like flames in his dark face; and his voice is like distant thunder. Fingal advanced with the spear of his strength, and raised his voice on high.\n\nSon of night, retire: call thy winds and fly! Why dost thou come to my presence, with thy shadowy arms? Do I fear thy gloomy form, dismal spirit of Loda? Weak is thy shield of clouds: feeble is that meteor, thy sword. The blast rolls them together; and thou thyself dost vanish. Fly from my presence son of night! call thy winds and fly!\n\nDost thou force me from my place, replied the hollow voice? The people bend before me. I turn the battle in the field of the valiant. I look on the nations and they vanish: my nostrils pour the blast of death. I come abroad on the winds: the tempests are before my face. But my dwelling is calm, above the clouds, the fields of my rest are pleasant.\n\nDwell then in thy calm fields, said Fingal, and let Comhal’s son be forgot. Do my steps ascend, from my hills, into thy peaceful plains? Do I meet thee, with a spear, on thy cloud, spirit of dismal Loda? Why then dost thou frown on Fingal? or shake thine airy spear? But thou frownest in vain: I never fled from mighty men. And shall the sons of the wind frighten the king of Morven? No: he knows the weakness of their arms.\n\nFly to thy land, replied the form: receive the wind and fly. The blasts are in the hollow of my hand: the course of the storm is mine. The king of Sora is my son, he bends at the stone of my power. His battle is around Carric-thura; and he will prevail. Fly to thy land, son of Comhal, or feel my flaming wrath.\n\nHe lifted high his shadowy spear; and bent forward his terrible height. But the king, advancing, drew his sword; the blade of dark-brown Luno. The gleaming path of the steel winds thro’ the gloomy ghost. The form fell shapeless into air, like a column of smoke, which the staff of the boy disturbs, as it rises from the half-extinguished furnace.\n\nThe spirit of Loda shrieked, as, rolled into himself, he rose on the wind. Inistore shook at the sound. The waves heard it on the deep: they stopped, in their course, with fear: the companions of Fingal started, at once; and took their heavy spears. They missed the king: they rose with rage; all their arms resound.\n\nThe moon came forth in the east. The king returned in the gleam of his arms. The joy of his youths was great, their souls settled, as a sea from a storm. Ullin raised the song of gladness. The hills of Inistore rejoiced. The flame of the oak arose; and the tales of heroes are told.\n\nBut Frothal, Sora’s battling king, sits in sadness beneath a tree. The host spreads around Carric-thura. He looks towards the walls with rage. He longs for the blood of Cathulla, who, once, overcame the king in war.--When Annir reigned in Sora, the father of car-borne Frothal, a blast rose on the sea, and carried Frothal to Inistore. Three days he feasted in Sarno’s halls, and saw the slow rolling eyes of Comála. He loved her, in the rage of youth, and rushed to seize the white-armed maid. Cathulla met the chief. The gloomy battle rose. Frothal is bound in the hall: three days he pined alone. On the fourth, Sarno sent him to his ship, and he returned to his land. But wrath darkened in his soul against the noble Cathulla. When Annir’s stone of fame arose, Frothal came in his strength. The battle burned round Carric-thura, and Sarno’s mossy walls.\n\nMorning rose on Inistore. Frothal struck his dark-brown shield. His chiefs started at the sound; they stood, but their eyes were turned to the sea. They saw Fingal coming in his strength; and first the noble Thubar spoke.\n\nWho comes like the stag of the mountain, with all his herd behind him? Frothal, it is a foe; I see his forward spear. Perhaps it is the king of Morven, Fingal the first of men. His actions are well known on Gormal; the blood of his foes is in Starno’s halls. Shall I ask the peace of kings? He is like the thunder of heaven.\n\nSon of the feeble hand, said Frothal, shall my days begin in darkness? Shall I yield before I have conquered in battle, chief of streamy Tora? The people would say in Sora, Frothal flew forth like a meteor; but the dark cloud met it, and it is no more. No: Thubar, I will never yield; my fame shall surround me like light. No: I will never yield, king of streamy Tora.\n\nHe went forth with the stream of his people, but they met a rock: Fingal stood unmoved, broken they rolled back from his side. Nor did they roll in safety; the spear of the king pursued their flight. The field is covered with heroes. A rising hill preserved the flying host.\n\nFrothal saw their flight. The rage of his bosom rose. He bent his eyes to the ground, and called the noble Thubar.--Thubar! my people fled. My fame has ceased to rise. I will fight the king; I feel my burning soul. Send a bard to demand the combat. Speak not against Frothal’s words.--But, Thubar! I love a maid; she dwells by Thano’s stream, the white-bosomed daughter of Herman, Utha with the softly-rolling eyes. She feared the daughter of Inistore, and her soft sighs rose, at my departure. Tell to Utha that I am low; but that my soul delighted in her.\n\nSuch were his words, resolved to fight. But the soft sigh of Utha was near. She had followed her hero over the sea, in the armour of a man. She rolled her eye on the youth, in secret, from beneath a glittering helmet. But now she saw the bard as he went, and the spear fell thrice from her hand. Her loose hair flew on the wind. Her white breast rose, with sighs. She lifted up her eyes to the king; she would speak, but thrice she failed.\n\nFingal heard the words of the bard; he came in the strength of steel. They mixed their deathful spears, and raised the gleam of their swords. But the steel of Fingal descended and cut Frothal’s shield in twain. His fair side is exposed; half bent he foresees his death.\n\nDarkness gathered on Utha’s soul. The tear rolled down her cheek. She rushed to cover the chief with her shield; but a fallen oak met her steps. She fell on her arm of snow; her shield, her helmet flew wide. Her white bosom heaved to the sight; her dark-brown hair is spread on earth.\n\nFingal pitied the white-armed maid: he stayed the uplifted sword. The tear was in the eye of the king, as, bending forward, he spoke. King of streamy Sora! fear not the sword of Fingal. It was never stained with the blood of the vanquished; it never pierced a fallen foe. Let thy people rejoice along the blue waters of Tora: let the maids of thy love be glad. Why shouldest thou fall in thy youth, king of streamy Sora?\n\nFrothal heard the words of Fingal, and saw the rising maid: they stood in silence, in their beauty: like two young trees of the plain, when the shower of spring is on their leaves, and the loud winds are laid.\n\nDaughter of Herman, said Frothal, didst thou come from Tora’s streams; didst thou come, in thy beauty, to behold thy warrior low? But he was low before the mighty, maid of the slow-rolling eye! The feeble did not overcome the son of car-borne Annir. Terrible art thou, O king of Morven! in battles of the spear. But, in peace, thou art like the sun, when he looks thro’ a silent shower: the flowers lift their fair heads before him; and the gales shake their rustling wings. O that thou wert in Sora! that my feast were spread!--The future kings of Sora would see thy arms and rejoice. They would rejoice at the fame of their fathers, who beheld the mighty Fingal.\n\nSon of Annir, replied the king, the fame of Sora’s race shall be heard.--When chiefs are strong in battle, then does the song arise! But if their swords are stretched over the feeble: if the blood of the weak has stained their arms; the bard shall forget them in the song, and their tombs shall not be known. The stranger shall come and build there, and remove the heaped-up earth. An half-worn sword shall rise before him; and bending above it, he will say, “These are the arms of chiefs of old, but their names are not in the song.”--Come thou, O Frothal, to the feast of Inistore; let the maid of thy love be there; and our faces will brighten with joy.\n\nFingal took his spear, moving in the steps of his might. The gates of Carric-thura are opened. The feast of shells is spread.--The voice of music arose. Gladness brightened in the hall.--The voice of Ullin was heard; the harp of Selma was strung.--Utha rejoiced in his presence, and demanded the song of grief; the big tear hung in her eye, when the soft Crimora spoke. Crimora the daughter of Rinval, who dwelt at Lotha’s mighty stream. The tale was long, but lovely; and pleased the blushing maid of Tora.\n\n> _Crimora:_\nWho cometh from the hill, like a cloud tinged with the beam of the west? Whose voice is that, loud as the wind, but pleasant as the harp of Carril? It is my love in the light of steel; but sad is his darkened brow. Live the mighty race of Fingal? or what disturbs my Connal?\n\n> _Connal:_\nThey live. I saw them return from the chace, like a stream of light. The sun was on their shields. Like a ridge of fire they descended the hill. Loud is the voice of the youth; the war, my love, is near. To-morrow the terrible Dargo comes to try the force of our race. The race of Fingal he defies; the race of battle and wounds.\n\n> _Crimora:_\nConnal, I saw his sails like gray mist on the sable wave. They slowly came to land. Connal, many are the warriors of Dargo!\n\n> _Connal:_\nBring me thy father’s shield; the bossy, iron shield of Rinval; that shield like the full moon when it moves darkened through heaven.\n\n> _Crimora:_\nThat shield I bring, O Connal; but it did not defend my father. By the spear of Gormar he fell. Thou may’st fall, O Connal!\n\n> _Connal:_\nFall indeed I may: But raise my tomb, Crimora. Gray stones, a mound of earth, shall keep my memory. Bend thy red eye over my tomb, and beat thy mournful heaving breast. Though fair thou art, my love, as the light; more pleasant than the gale of the hill; yet I will not stay. Raise my tomb,\n\n> _Crimora:_\nThen give me those arms of light; that sword, and that spear of steel. I shall meet Dargo with thee, and aid my lovely Connal. Farewel, ye rocks of Ardven! ye deer! and ye streams of the hill!--We shall return no more. Our tombs are distant far.\n\nAnd did they return no more? said Utha’s bursting sigh. Fell the mighty in battle, and did Crimora live?--Her steps were lonely, and her soul was sad for Connal. Was he not young and lovely; like the beam of the setting sun? Ullin saw the virgin’s tear, and took the softly-trembling harp: the song was lovely, but sad, and silence was in Carric-thura.\n\nAutumn is dark on the mountains; gray mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill, and marks the slumbering Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind, and strew the grave of the dead. At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath.\n\nWho can reach the source of thy race, O Connal? and who recount thy fathers? Thy family grew like an oak on the mountain, which meeteth the wind with its lofty head. But now it is torn from the earth. Who shall supply the place of Connal?\n\nHere was the din of arms; and here the groans of the dying. Bloody are the wars of Fingal! O Connal! it was here thou didst fall. Thine arm was like a storm; thy sword a beam of the sky; thy height, a rock on the plain; thine eyes, a furnace of fire. Louder than a storm was thy voice, in the battles of thy steel. Warriors fell by thy sword, as the thistle by the staff of a boy.\n\nDargo the mighty came on, like a cloud of thunder. His brows were contracted and dark. His eyes like two caves in a rock. Bright rose their swords on each side; dire was the clang of their steel.\n\nThe daughter of Rinval was near; Crimora bright in the armour of man; her yellow hair is loose behind, her bow is in her hand. She followed the youth to the war, Connal her much-beloved. She drew the string on Dargo; but erring pierced her Connal. He falls like an oak on the plain; like a rock from the shaggy hill. What shall she do, hapless maid!--He bleeds; her Connal dies. All the night long she cries, and all the day, O Connal, my love, and my friend! With grief the sad mourner dies.\n\nEarth here incloses the loveliest pair on the hill. The grass grows between the stones of the tomb; I often sit in the mournful shade. The wind sighs through the grass; their memory rushes on my mind. Undisturbed you now sleep together; in the tomb of the mountain you rest alone.\n\nAnd soft be your rest, said Utha, children of streamy Lotha. I will remember you with tears, and my secret song shall rise; when the wind is in the groves of Tora, and the stream is roaring near. Then shall ye come on my soul, with all your lovely grief.\n\nThree days feasted the kings: on the fourth their white sails arose. The winds of the north carry the ship of Fingal to Morven’s woody land.--But the spirit of Loda sat, in his cloud, behind the ships of Frothal. He hung forward with all his blasts, and spread the white-bosomed sails.--The wounds of his form were not forgot; he still feared the hand of the king.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "carthon": { - "title": "“Carthon”", - "body": "A Tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years!--The murmur of thy streams, O Lora, brings back the memory of the past. The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is lovely in mine ear. Dost thou not behold, Malvina, a rock with its head of heath? Three aged firs bend from its face; green is the narrow plain at its feet; there the flower of the mountain grows, and shakes its white head in the breeze. The thistle is there alone, and shades its aged beard. Two stones, half sunk in the ground, shew their heads of moss. The deer of the mountain avoids the place, for he beholds the gray ghost that guards it: for the mighty lie, O Malvina, in the narrow plain of the rock. A tale of the times of old! the deeds of days of other years!\n\nWho comes from the land of strangers, with his thousands around him? the sun-beam pours its bright stream before him; and his hair meets the wind of his hills. His face is settled from war. He is calm as the evening beam that looks, from the cloud of the west, on Cona’s silent vale. Who is it but Comhal’s son, the king of mighty deeds! He beholds his hills with joy, and bids a thousand voices rise.--Ye have fled over your fields, ye sons of the distant land! The king of the world sits in his hall, and hears of his people’s flight. He lifts his red eye of pride, and takes his father’s sword. Ye have fled over your fields, sons of the distant land!\n\nSuch were the words of the bards, when they came to Selma’s halls.--A thousand lights from the stranger’s land rose, in the midst of the people. The feast is spread around; and the night passed away in joy.--Where is the noble Clessámmor, said the fair-haired Fingal? Where is the companion of my father, in the days of my joy? Sullen and dark he passes his days in the vale of ecchoing Lora: but, behold, he comes from the hill, like a steed in his strength, who finds his companions in the breeze; and tosses his bright mane in the wind.--Blest be the soul of Clessámmor, why so long from Selma?\n\nReturns the chief, said Clessámmor, in the midst of his fame? Such was the renown of Comhal in the battles of his youth. Often did we pass over Carun to the land of the strangers: our swords returned, not unstained with blood: nor did the kings of the world rejoice.--Why do I remember the battles of my youth? My hair is mixed with gray. My hand forgets to bend the bow: and I lift a lighter spear. O that my joy would return, as when I first beheld the maid; the white bosomed daughter of strangers, Moina with the dark-blue eyes!\n\nTell, said the mighty Fingal, the tale of thy youthful days. Sorrow, like a cloud on the sun, shades the soul of Clessámmor. Mournful are thy thoughts, alone, on the banks of the roaring Lora. Let us hear the sorrow of thy youth, and the darkness of thy days.\n\nIt was in the days of peace, replied the great Clessámmor, I came, in my bounding ship, to Balclutha’s walls of towers. The winds had roared behind my sails, and Clutha’s streams received my dark-bosomed vessel. Three days I remained in Reuthámir’s halls, and saw that beam of light, his daughter. The joy of the shell went round, and the aged hero gave the fair. Her breasts were like foam on the wave, and her eyes like stars of light: her hair was dark as the raven’s wing: her soul was generous and mild. My love for Moina was great: and my heart poured forth in joy.\n\nThe son of a stranger came; a chief who loved the white-bosomed Moina. His words were mighty in the hall, and he often half-unsheathed his sword.--Where, he said, is the mighty Comhal, the restless wanderer of the heath? Comes he, with his host, to Balclutha, since Clessámmor is so bold?\n\nMy Soul, I replied, O warrior! burns in a light of its own. I stand without fear in the midst of thousands, though the valiant are distant far.--Stranger! thy words are mighty, for Clessammor is alone. But my sword trembles by my side, and longs to glitter in my hand.--Speak no more of Comhal, son of the winding Clutha!\n\nThe strength of his pride arose. We fought; he fell beneath my sword. The banks of Clutha heard his fall, and a thousand spears glittered around. I fought: the strangers prevailed: I plunged into the stream of Clutha. My white sails rose over the waves, and I bounded on the dark-blue sea.--Moina came to the shore, and rolled the red eye of her tears: her dark hair flew on the wind; and I heard her cries.--Often did I turn my ship! but the winds of the East prevailed. Nor Clutha ever since have I seen: nor Moina of the dark brown hair.--She fell in Balclutha: for I have seen her ghost. I knew her as she came through the dusky night, along the murmur of Lora: she was like the new moon seen through the gathered mist: when the sky pours down its flaky snow, and the world is silent and dark.\n\nRaise, ye bards, said the mighty Fingal, the praise of unhappy Moina. Call her ghost, with your songs, to our hills; that she may rest with the fair of Morven, the sun-beams of other days, and the delight of heroes of old.--I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls: and the voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed from its place, by the fall of the walls.--The thistle shook, there, its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out, from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round his head.--Desolate is the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers.--Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us: for, one day, we must fall.--Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desart comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield.--And let the blast of the desart come! we shall be renowned in our day. The mark of my arm shall be in the battle, and my name in the song of bards.--Raise the song; send round the shell: and let joy be heard in my hall.--When thou, sun of heaven, shalt fail! if thou shalt fail, thou mighty light! if thy brightness is for a season, like Fingal; our fame shall survive thy beams.\n\nSuch was the song of Fingal, in the day of his joy. His thousand bards leaned forward from their seats, to hear the voice of the king. It was like the music of the harp on the gale of the spring.--Lovely were thy thoughts, O Fingal! why had not Ossian the strength of thy soul?--But thou standest alone, my father; and who can equal the king of Morven?\n\nThe night passed away in the song, and morning returned in joy;--the mountains shewed their gray heads; and the blue face of ocean smiled.--The white wave is seen tumbling round the distant rock; the gray mist rises, slowly, from the lake. It came, in the figure of an aged man, along the silent plain. Its large limbs did not move in steps; for a ghost supported it in mid air. It came towards Selma’s hall, and dissolved in a shower of blood.\n\nThe king alone beheld the terrible sight, and he foresaw the death of the people. He came, in silence, to his hall; and took his father’s spear.--The mail rattled on his breast. The heroes rose around. They looked, in silence, on each other, marking the eyes of Fingal.--They saw the battle in his face: the death of armies on his spear.--A thousand shields, at once, are placed on their arms; and they drew a thousand swords. The hall of Selma brightened around. The clang of arms ascends.--The gray dogs howl in their place. No word is among the mighty chiefs.--Each marked the eyes of the King; and half assumed his spear.\n\nSons of Morven, begun the king, this is no time to fill the shell. The battle darkens near us; and death hovers over the land. Some ghost, the friend of Fingal, has forewarned us of the foe.--The sons of the stranger come from the darkly-rolling sea. For, from the water, came the sign of Morven’s gloomy danger.--Let each assume his heavy spear, and gird on his father’s sword.--Let the dark helmet rise on every head; and the mail pour its lightening from every side.--The battle gathers like a tempest, and soon shall ye hear the roar of death.\n\nThe hero moved on before his host, like a cloud before a ridge of green fire; when it pours on the sky of night, and mariners forsee a storm. On Cona’s rising heath they stood: the white-bosomed maids beheld them above like a grove; they foresaw the death of their youths, and looked towards the sea with fear.--The white wave deceived them for distant sails, and the tear is on their cheek.\n\nThe sun rose on the sea, and we beheld a distant fleet.--Like the mist of ocean they came: and poured their youth upon the coast.--The chief was among them, like the stag in the midst of the herd.--His shield is studded with gold, and stately strode the king of spears.--He moved towards Selma; his thousands moved behind.\n\nGo, with thy song of peace, said Fingal; go, Ullin, to the king of swords. Tell him that we are mighty in battle; and that the ghosts of our foes are many.--But renowned are they who have feasted in my halls! they shew the arms of my fathers in a foreign land: the sons of the strangers wonder, and bless the friends of Morven’s race; for our names have been heard afar; the kings of the world shook in the midst of their people.\n\nUllin went with his song. Fingal rested on his spear: he saw the mighty foe in his armour: and he blest the stranger’s son.\n\nHow stately art thou, son of the sea! said the king of woody Morven. Thy sword is a beam of might by thy side: thy spear is a fir that defies the storm. The varied face of the moon is not broader than thy shield.--Ruddy is thy face of youth! soft the ringlets of thy hair!--But this tree may fall; and his memory be forgot!--The daughter of the stranger will be sad, and look to the rolling sea:--the children will say, “We see a ship; perhaps it is the king of Balclutha.”The tear starts from their mother’s eye. Her thoughts are of him that sleeps in Morven.\n\nSuch were the words of the king, when Ullin came to the mighty Carthon: he threw down the spear before him; and raised the song of peace.\n\nCome to the feast of Fingal, Carthon, from the rolling sea! partake the feast of the king, or lift the spear of war. The ghosts of our foes are many: but renowned are the friends of Morven!\n\nBehold that field, O Carthon; many a green hill rises there, with mossy stones and rustling grass: these are the tombs of Fingal’s foes, the sons of the rolling sea.\n\nDost thou speak to the feeble in arms, said Carthon, bard of the woody Morven? Is my face pale for fear, son of the peaceful song? Why, then, dost thou think to darken my soul with the tales of those who fell?--My arm has fought in the battle; my renown is known afar. Go to the feeble in arms, and bid them yield to Fingal.--Have not I seen the fallen Balclutha? And shall I feast with Comhal’s son? Comhal! who threw his fire in the midst of my father’s hall! I was young, and knew not the cause why the virgins wept. The columns of smoke pleased mine eye, when they rose above my walls; I often looked back, with gladness, when my friends fled along the hill.--But when the years of my youth came on, I beheld the moss of my fallen walls: my sigh arose with the morning, and my tears descended with night.--Shall I not fight, I said to my soul, against the children of my foes? And I will fight, O bard; I feel the strength of my soul.\n\nHis people gathered around the hero, and drew, at once, their shining swords. He stands, in the midst, like a pillar of fire; the tear half-starting from his eye; for he thought of the fallen Balclutha, and the crowded pride of his soul arose. Sidelong he looked up to the hill, where our heroes shone in arms; the spear trembled in his hand: and, bending foreward, he seemed to threaten the king.\n\nShall I, said Fingal to his soul, meet, at once, the king? Shall I stop him, in the midst of his course, before his fame shall arise? But the bard, hereafter, may say, when he sees the tomb of Carthon; Fingal took his thousands, along with him, to battle, before the noble Carthon fell.--No:--bard of the times to come! thou shalt not lessen Fingal’s fame. My heroes will fight the youth, and Fingal behold the battle. If he overcomes, I rush, in my strength, like the roaring stream of Cona.\n\nWho, of my heroes, will meet the son of the rolling sea? Many are his warriors on the coast: and strong is his ashen spear!\n\nCathul rose, in his strength, the son of the mighty Lormar: three hundred youths attend the chief, the race of his native streams. Feeble was his arm against Carthon, he fell; and his heroes fled.\n\nConnal resumed the battle, but he broke his heavy spear: he lay bound on the field: and Carthon pursued his people.\n\nClessammor! said the king of Morven, where is the spear of thy strength? Wilt thou behold Connal bound; thy friend, at the stream of Lora? Rise, in the light of thy steel, thou friend of Comhal. Let the youth of Balclutha feel the strength of Morven’s race.\n\nHe rose in the strength of his steel, shaking his grizly locks. He fitted the shield to his side; and rushed, in the pride of valour.\n\nCarthon stood, on that heathy rock, and saw the heroes approach. He loved the terrible joy of his face: and his strength, in the locks of age.--Shall I lift that spear, he said, that never strikes, but once, a foe? Or shall I, with the words of peace, preserve the warrior’s life? Stately are his steps of age!--lovely the remnant of his years. Perhaps it is the love of Moina; the father of car-borne Carthon. Often have I heard, that he dwelt at the ecchoing stream of Lora.\n\nSuch were his words, when Clessámmor came, and lifted high his spear. The youth received it on his shield, and spoke the words of peace.--Warrior of the aged locks! Is there no youth to lift the spear? Hast thou no son, to raise the shield before his father, and to meet the arm of youth? Is the spouse of thy love no more? or weeps she over the tombs of thy sons? Art thou of the kings of men? What will be the fame of my sword if thou shalt fall?\n\nIt will be great, thou son of pride! begun the tall Clessámmor. I have been renowned in battle; but I never told my name to a soe. Yield to me, son of the wave, and then thou shalt know, that the mark of my sword is in many a field.\n\nI Never yielded, king of spears! replied the noble pride of Carthon: I have also fought in battles; and I behold my future fame. Despise me not, thou chief of men; my arm, my spear is strong. Retire among thy friends, and let young heroes fight.\n\nWhy dost thou wound my soul, replied Clessámmor with a tear? Age does not tremble on my hand; I still can lift the sword. Shall I fly in Fingal’s sight; in the sight of him I loved? Son of the sea! I never fled: exalt thy pointed spear.\n\nThey fought, like two contending winds, that strive to roll the wave. Carthon bade his spear to err; for he still thought that the foe was the spouse of Moina.--He broke Clessámmor’s beamy spear in twain: and seized his shining sword. But as Carthon was binding the chief; the chief drew the dagger of his fathers. He saw the foe’s uncovered side; and opened, there, a wound.\n\nFingal saw Clessámmor low: he moved in the sound of his steel. The host stood silent, in his presence; they turned their eyes towards the hero.--He came, like the sullen noise of a storm, before the winds arise: the hunter hears it in the vale, and retires to the cave of the rock.\n\nCarthon stood in his place: the blood is rushing down his side: he saw the coming down of the king; and his hopes of fame arose; but pale was his cheek: his hair flew loose, his helmet shook on high: the force of Carthon failed; but his soul was strong.\n\nFingal beheld the heroe’s blood; he stopt the uplifted spear. Yield, king of swords! said Comhal’s son; I behold thy blood. Thou hast been mighty in battle; and thy fame shall never fade.\n\nArt thou the king so far renowned, replied the car-borne Carthon? Art thou that light of death, that frightens the kings of the world?--But why should Carthon ask? for he is like the stream of his desart; strong as a river, in his course: swift as the eagle of the sky.--O that I had sought with the king; that my same might be great in the song! that the hunter, beholding my tomb, might say, he fought with the mighty Fingal. But Carthon dies unknown; he has poured out his force on the feeble.\n\nBut thou shalt not die unknown, replied the king of woody Morven: my bards are many, O Carthon, and their songs descend to future times. The children of the years to come shall hear the fame of Carthon; when they sit round the burning oak, and the night is spent in the songs of old. The hunter, sitting in the heath, shall hear the rustling blast; and, raising his eyes, behold the rock where Carthon fell. He shall turn to his son, and shew the place where the mighty fought; “There the king of Balclutha fought, like the strength of a thousand streams.”\n\nJoy rose in Carthon’s face: he lifted his heavy eyes.--He gave his sword to Fingal, to lie within his hall, that the memory of Balclutha’s king might remain on Morven.--The battle ceased along the field, for the bard had sung the song of peace. The chiefs gathered round the falling Carthon, and heard his words, with sighs. Silent they leaned on their spears, while Balclutha’s hero spoke. His hair sighed in the wind, and his words were feeble.\n\nKing of Morven, Carthon said, I fall in the midst of my course. A foreign tomb receives, in youth, the last of Reuthámir’s race. Darkness dwells in Balclutha: and the shadows of grief in Crathmo.--But raise my remembrance on the banks of Lora: where my fathers dwelt. Perhaps the husband of Moina will mourn over his fallen Carthon.\n\nHis words reached the heart of Clessámmor: he fell, in silence, on his son. The host stood darkened around: no voice is on the plains of Lora. Night came, and the moon, from the east, looked on the mournful field: but still they stood, like a silent grove that lifts its head on Gormal, when the loud winds are laid, and dark is on the plain.\n\nThree days they mourned above Carthon; on the fourth his father died. In the narrow plain of the rock they lie; and a dim ghost defends their tomb. There lovely Moina is often seen; when the sun-beam darts on the rock, and all around is dark. There she is seen, Malvina, but not like the daughters of the hill. Her robes are from the stranger’s land; and she is still alone.\n\nFingal was sad for Carthon; he desired his bards to mark the day, when shadowy returned. And often did they mark the day and sing the hero’s praise. Who comes so dark from ocean’s roar, like autumn’s shadowy cloud? Death is trembling in his hand! his eyes are flames of fire!--Who roars along dark Lora’s heath? Who but Carthon, king of swords? The people fall! see! how he strides, like the sullen ghost of Morven!--But there he lies a goodly oak, which sudden blasts overturned! When shalt thou rise, Balclutha’s joy! lovely car-borne Carthon?--Who comes so dark from ocean’s roar, like autumn’s shadowy cloud?\n\nSuch were the words of the bards, in the day of their mourning: I have accompanied their voice; and added to their song. My soul has been mournful for Carthon; he fell in the days of his valour: and thou, O Clessámmor! where is thy dwelling in the air?--Has the youth forgot his wound? And flies he, on the clouds, with thee?--I feel the sun, O Malvina, leave me to my rest. Perhaps they may come to my dreams; I think I hear a feeble voice.--The beam of heaven delights to shine on the grave of Carthon: I feel it warm around.\n\nO Thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth, in thy awful beauty, and the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave. But thou thyself movest alone: who can be a companion of thy course! The oaks of the mountains fall: the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again: the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art for ever the same; rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests; when thunder rolls, and lightning flies; thou lookest in thy beauty, from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian, thou lookest in vain; for he beholds thy beams no more; whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season, and thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning.--Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon, when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills; the blast of north is on the plain, the traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "comala-a-dramatic-poem": { - "title": "“Comála: A Dramatic Poem”", - "body": "The Persons.\n\n Fingal.\n Hidallan.\n ComÁLa.\n daughters of Morni.\n Melilcoma,\n Dersagrena,\n Bards.\n\nDersagrena.\n\nThe chace is over.--No noise on Ardven but the torrent’s roar!--Daughter of Morni, come from Crona’s banks. Lay down the bow and take the harp. Let the night come on with songs, and our joy be great on Ardven.\nMelilcoma.\n\nAnd night comes on, thou blue-eyed maid, gray night grows dim along the plain. I saw a deer at Crona’s stream; a mossy bank he seemed through the gloom, but soon he bounded away. A meteor played round his branchy horns; and the awful faces of other times looked from the clouds of Crona.\nDersagrena.\n\nThese are the signs of Fingal’s death.--The king of shields is fallen!--and Caracul prevails. Rise, Comala, from thy rocks; daughter of Sarno, rise in tears. The youth of thy love is low, and his ghost is already on our hills.\nMelilcoma.\n\nThere Comala sits forlorn! two gray dogs near shake their rough ears, and catch the flying breeze. Her red cheek rests on her arm, and the mountain wind is in her hair. She turns her blue-rolling eyes toward the fields of his promise.--Where art thou, O Fingal, for the night is gathering around?\nComala.\n\nO Carun of the streams! why do I behold thy waters rolling in blood? Has the noise of the battle been heard on thy banks; and sleeps the king of Morven?--Rise, moon, thou daughter of the sky! look from between thy clouds, that I may behold the light of his steel, on the field of his promise.--Or rather let the meteor, that lights our departed fathers through the night, come, with its red light, to shew me the way to my fallen hero. Who will defend me from sorrow? Who from the love of Hidallan? Long shall Comala look before she can behold Fingal in the midst of his host; bright as the beam of the morning in the cloud of an early shower.\nHidallan.\n\nRoll, thou mist of gloomy Crona, roll on the path of the hunter. Hide his steps from mine eyes, and let me remember my friend no more. The bands of battle are scattered, and no crowding steps are round the noise of his steel. O Carun, roll thy streams of blood, for the chief of the people fell.\nComala.\n\nWho fell on Carun’s grassy banks, son of the cloudy night? Was he white as the snow of Ardven? Blooming as the bow of the shower? Was his hair like the mist of the hill, soft and curling in the day of the sun? Was he like the thunder of heaven in battle? Fleet as the roe of the desart?\nHidallan.\n\nO That I might behold his love, fair-leaning from her rock! Her red eye dim in tears, and her blushing cheek half hid in her locks! Blow, thou gentle breeze, and lift the heavy locks of the maid, that I may behold her white arm, and lovely cheek of her sorrow!\nComala.\n\nAnd is the son of Comhal fallen, chief of the mournful tale? The thunder rolls on the hill!--The lightening flies on wings of fire! But they frighten not Comala; for her Fingal fell. Say, chief of the mournful tale, fell the breaker of the shields?\nHidallan.\n\nThe nations are scattered on their hills; for they shall hear the voice of the chief no more.\nComala.\n\nConfusion pursue thee over thy plains; and destruction overtake thee, thou king of the world. Few be thy steps to thy grave; and let one virgin mourn thee. Let her be, like Comala, tearful in the days of her youth.--Why hast thou told me, Hidallan, that my hero fell? I might have hoped a little while his return, and have thought I saw him on the distant rock; a tree might have deceived me with his appearance; and the wind of the hill been the sound of his horn in mine ear. O that I were on the banks of Carun! that my tears might be warm on his cheek!\nHidalllan.\n\nHe lies not on the banks of Carun: on Ardven heroes raise his tomb. Look on them, O moon, from thy clouds; be thy beam bright on his breast, that Comala may behold him in the light of his armour.\nComala.\n\nStop, ye sons of the grave, till I behold my love. He left me at the chace alone. I knew not that he went to war. He said he would return with the night; and the king of Morven is returned. Why didst thou not tell me that he would fall, O trembling son of the rock! Thou hast seen him in the blood of his youth, but thou didst not tell Comala!\nMelilcoma.\n\nWhat sound is that on Ardven? Who is that bright in the vale? Who comes like the strength of rivers, when their crowded waters glitter to the moon?\nComala.\n\nWho is it but the foe of Comala, the son of the king of the world! Ghost of Fingal! do thou, from thy cloud, direct Comala’s bow. Let him fall like the hart of the desart.--It is Fingal in the crowd of his ghosts.--Why dost thou come, my love, to frighten and please my soul?\nFingal.\n\nRaise, ye bards of the song, the wars of the streamy Carun. Caracul has fled from my arms along the fields of his pride. He sets far distant like a meteor that incloses a spirit of night, when the winds drive it over the heath, and the dark woods are gleaming around.\n\nI Heard a voice like the breeze of my hills. Is it the huntress of Galmal, the white-handed daughter of Sarno? Look from thy rocks, my love; and let me hear the voice of Comala.\nComala.\n\nTake me to the cave of thy rest, O lovely son of death!--\nFingal.\n\nCome to the cave of my rest.--The storm is over, and the sun is on our fields. Come to the cave of my rest, huntress of ecchoing Cona.\nComala.\n\nHe is returned with his fame; I feel the right hand of his battles.--But I must rest beside the rock till my soul settle from fear.--Let the harp be near; and raise the song, ye daughters of Morni.\nDersagrena.\n\nComala has slain three deer on Ardven, and the fire ascends on the rock; go to the feast of Comala, king of the woody Morven!\nFingal.\n\nRaise, ye sons of the song, the wars of the streamy Carun; that my white-handed maid may rejoice: while I behold the feast of my love.\nBards.\n\nRoll, streamy Carun, roll in joy, the sons of battle fled. The steed is not seen on our fields; and the wings of their pride spread in other lands. The sun will now rise in peace, and the shadows descend in joy. The voice of the chace will be heard; and the shields hang in the hall. Our delight will be in the war of the ocean, and our hands be red in the blood of Lochlin. Roll, streamy Carun, roll in joy, the sons of battle fled.\nMelilcoma.\n\nDescend, ye light mists from high; ye moon-beams, lift her soul.--Pale lies the maid at the rock! Comala is no more!\nFingal.\n\nIs the daughter of Sarno dead; the white-bosomed maid of my love? Meet me, Comala, on my heaths, when I sit alone at the streams of my hills.\nHidallan.\n\nCeased the voice of the huntress of Galmal? Why did I trouble the soul of the maid? When shall I see thee, with joy, in the chace of the dark-brown hinds?\nFingal.\n\nYouth of the gloomy brow! no more shalt thou feast in my halls. Thou shalt not pursue my chace, and my foes shall not fall by thy sword.--Lead me to the place of her rest that I may behold her beauty.--Pale she lies at the rock, and the cold winds lift her hair. Her bow-string sounds in the blast, and her arrow was broken in her fall. Raise the praise of the daughter of Sarno, and give her name to the wind of the hills.\nBards.\n\nSee! meteors roll around the maid; and moon-beams lift her soul! Around her, from their clouds, bend the awful faces of her fathers; Sarno of the gloomy brow; and the red-rolling eyes of Fidallan. When shall thy white hand arise, and thy voice be heard on our rocks? The maids shall seek thee on the heath, but they will not find thee. Thou shalt come, at times, to their dreams, and settle peace in their soul. Thy voice shall remain in their ears, and they shall think with joy on the dreams of their rest. Meteors roll around the maid, and moon-beams lift her soul!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "conlath-and-cuthona": { - "title": "“Conlath and Cuthóna”", - "body": "Did not Ossian hear a voice? or is it the sound of days that are no more? Often does the memory of former times come, like the evening sun, on my soul. The noise of the chace is renewed; and, in thought, I lift the spear.--But Ossian did hear a voice: Who art thou, son of the night? The sons of little men are asleep, and the midnight wind is in my hall. Perhaps it is the shield of Fingal that echoes to the blast, it hangs in Ossian’s hall, and he feels it sometimes with his hands.--Yes!--I hear thee, my friend; long has thy voice been absent from mine ear! What brings thee, on thy cloud, to Ossian, son of the generous Morni? Are the friends of the aged near thee? Where is Oscar, son of fame?--He was often near thee, O Conlath, when the din of battle rose.\n\n> _Ghost of Conlath:_\nSleeps the sweet voice of Cona, in the midst of his rustling hall? Sleeps Ossian in his hall, and his friends without their fame? The sea rolls round the dark I-thona, and our tombs are not seen by the stranger. How long shall our fame be unheard, son of the ecchoing Morven?\n\n> _Ossian:_\nO That mine eyes could behold thee, as thou sittest, dim, on thy cloud! Art thou like the mist of Lano; or an half extinguished meteor? Of what are the skirts of thy robe? Of what is thine airy bow?--But he is gone on his blast like the shadow of mist.--Come from thy wall, my harp, and let me hear thy sound. Let the light of memory rise on I-thona; that I may behold my friends. And Ossian does behold his friends, on the dark-blue isle.--The cave of Thona appears, with its mossy rocks and bending trees. A stream roars at its mouth, and Toscar bends over its course. Fercuth is sad by his side: and the maid of his love sits at a distance, and weeps. Does the wind of the waves deceive me? Or do I hear them speak?\n\n> _Toscar:_\nThe night was stormy. From their hills the groaning oaks came down. The sea darkly-tumbled beneath the blast, and the roaring waves were climbing against our rocks.--The lightning came often and shewed the blasted sern.--Fercuth! I saw the ghost of night. Silent he stood, on that bank; his robe of mist flew on the wind.--I could behold his tears: an aged man he seemed, and full of thought.\n\n> _Fercuth:_\nIt was thy father, O Toscar; and he foresees some death among his race. Such was his appearance on Cromla, before the great Ma-ronnan fell.--Ullin! with thy hills of grass, how pleasant are thy vales! Silence is near thy blue streams, and the sun is on thy fields. Soft is the sound of the harp in Seláma, and lovely the cry of the hunter on Crómla. But we are in the dark I-thona, surrounded by the storm. The billows lift their white heads above our rocks: and we tremble amidst the night.\n\n> _Toscar:_\nWhither is the soul of battle fled, Fercuth with the locks of age? I have seen thee undaunted in danger, and thine eyes burning with joy in the fight. Whither is the soul of battle fled? Our fathers never feared.--Go: view the settling sea: the stormy wind is laid. The billows still tremble on the deep, and seem to fear the blast. But view the settling sea: morning is gray on our rocks. The sun will look soon from his east; in all his pride of light.\n\nI Lifted up my sails, with joy, before the halls of generous Conlath. My course was by the isle of waves, where his love pursued the deer. I saw her, like that beam of the sun that issues from the cloud. Her hair was on her heaving breast; she, bending forward, drew the bow: her white arm seemed, behind her, like the snow of Cromla:--Come to my soul, I said, thou huntress of the isle of waves! But she spends her time in tears, and thinks of the generous Conlath. Where can I find thy peace, Cuthona, lovely maid!\n\n> _Cuthona:_\nA Distant steep bends over the sea, with aged trees and mossy rocks: the billows roll at its feet: on its side is the dwelling of roes. The people call it Ardven. There the towers of Mora rise. There Conlath looks over the sea for his only love. The daughters of the chace returned, and he beheld their downcast eyes. Where is the daughter of Rumar? But they answered not.--My peace dwells on Ardven, son of the distant land!\n\n> _Toscar:_\nAnd Cuthona shall return to her peace; to the halls of generous Conlath. He is the friend of Toscar: I have feasted in his halls.--Rise, ye gentle breezes of Ullin, and stretch my sails towards Ardven’s shores. Cuthona shall rest on Ardven: but the days of Toscar will be sad.--I shall sit in my cave in the field of the sun. The blast will rustle in my trees, and I shall think it is Cuthona’s voice. But she is distant far, in the halls of the mighty Conlath.\n\n> _Cuthona:_\nOh! what cloud is that? It carries the ghosts of my fathers. I see the skirts of their robes, like gray and watry mist. When shall I fall, O Rumar?--Sad Cuthona sees her death. Will not Conlath behold me, before I enter the narrow house?\n\n> _Ossian:_\nAnd he will behold thee, O maid: he comes along the rolling sea. The death of Toscar is dark on his spear; and a wound is in his side. He is pale at the cave of Thona, and shews his ghastly wound. Where art thou with thy tears, Cuthona? the chief of Mora dies.--The vision grows dim on my mind:--I behold the chiefs no more. But, O ye bards of future times, remember the fall of Conlath with tears: he fell before his day; and sadness darkened in his hall. His mother looked to his shield on the wall, and it was bloody. She knew that her hero died, and her sorrow was heard on Mora.\n\nArt thou pale on thy rock, Cuthona, beside the fallen chiefs? The night comes, and the day returns, but none appears to raise their tomb. Thou frightnest the screaming fowls away, and thy tears forever flow. Thou art pale as a watry cloud, that rises from a lake.\n\nThe sons of the desart came, and they found her dead. They raise a tomb over the heroes; and she rests at the side of Conlath.--Come not to my dreams, O Conlath; for thou hast received thy fame. Be thy voice far distant from my hall; that sleep may descend at night. O that I could forget my friends: till my footsteps cease to be seen! till I come among them with joy! and lay my aged limbs in the narrow house!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "croma": { - "title": "“Croma”", - "body": "It was the voice of my love! few are his visits to the dreams of Malvina! Open your airy halls, ye fathers of mighty Toscar. Unfold the gates of your clouds; the steps of Malvina’s departure are near. I have heard a voice in my dream. I feel the fluttering of my soul. Why didst thou come, O blast, from the dark-rolling of the lake? Thy rustling wing was in the trees, the dream of Malvina departed. But she beheld her love, when his robe of mist flew on the wind; the beam of the sun was on his skirts, they glittered like the gold of the stranger. It was the voice of my love! few are his visits to my dreams!\n\nBut thou dwellest in the soul of Malvina, son of mighty Ossian. My sighs arise with the beam of the east; my tears descend with the drops of night. I was a lovely tree, in thy presence, Oscar, with all my branches round me; but thy death came like a blast from the desart, and laid my green head low; the spring returned with its showers, but no leaf of mine arose. The virgins saw me silent in the hall, and they touched the harp of joy. The tear was on the cheek of Malvina: the virgins beheld me in my grief. Why art thou sad, they said; thou first of the maids of Lutha? Was he lovely as the beam of the morning, and stately in thy sight?\n\nPleasant is thy song in Ossian’s ear, daughter of streamy Lutha! Thou hast heard the music of departed bards in the dream of thy rest, when sleep fell on thine eyes, at the murmur of Moruth. When thou didst return from the chace, in the day of the sun, thou hast heard the music of the bards, and thy song is lovely. It is lovely, O Malvina, but it melts the soul. There is a joy in grief when peace dwells in the breast of the sad. But sorrow wastes the mournful, O daughter of Toscar, and their days are few. They fall away, like the flower on which the sun looks in his strength after the mildew has passed over it, and its head is heavy with the drops of night. Attend to the tale of Ossian, O maid; he remembers the days of his youth.\n\nThe king commanded; I raised my sails, and rushed into the bay of Croma; into Croma’s sounding bay in lovely Inisfail. High on the coast arose the towers of Crothar king of spears; Crothar renowned in the battles of his youth; but age dwelt then around the chief. Rothmar raised the sword against the hero; and the wrath of Fingal burned. He sent Ossian to meet Rothmar in battle, for the chief of Croma was the companion of his youth.\n\nI Sent the bard before me with songs; I came into the hall of Crothar. There sat the hero amidst the arms of his fathers, but his eyes had failed. His gray locks waved around a staff, on which the warrior leaned. He hummed the song of other times, when the sound of our arms reached his ears. Crothar rose, stretched his aged hand and blessed the son of Fingal.\n\nOssian! said the hero, the strength of Crothar’s arm has failed. O could I list the sword, as on the day that Fingal fought at Strutha! He was the first of mortal men; but Crothar had also his fame. The king of Morven praised me, and he placed on my arm the bossy shield of Calthar, whom the hero had slain in war. Dost thou not behold it on the wall, for Crothar’s eyes have failed? Is thy strength, like thy fathers, Ossian? let the aged feel thine arm.\n\nI Gave my arm to the king; he seels it with his aged hands. The sigh rose in his breast, and his tears descended. Thou art strong, my son, he said, but not like the king of Morven. But who is like the hero among the mighty in war! Let the feast of my halls be spread; and let my bards raise the song. Great is he that is within my walls, sons of ecchoing Croma!\n\nThe feast is spread. The harp is heard; and joy is in the hall. But it was joy covering a sigh, that darkly dwelt in every breast. It was like the faint beam of the moon spread on a cloud in heaven. At length the music ceased, and the aged king of Croma spoke; he spoke without a tear, but the sigh swelled in the midst of his voice.\n\nSon of Fingal! dost thou not behold the darkness of Crothar’s hall of shells? My soul was not dark at the feast, when my people lived. I rejoiced in the presence of strangers, when my son shone in the hall. But, Ossian, he is a beam that is departed, and left no streak of light behind. He is fallen, son of Fingal, in the battles of his father.--Rothmar the chief of grassy Tromlo heard that my eyes had sailed; he heard that my arms were fixed in the hall, and the pride of his soul arose. He came towards Croma; my people fell before him. I took my arms in the hall, but what could sightless Crothar do? My steps were unequal; my grief was great. I wished for the days that were past. Days! wherein I fought; and won in the field of blood. My son returned from the chace; the fair-haired Fovar-gormo. He had not lifted his sword in battle, for his arm was young. But the soul of the youth was great; the fire of valour burnt in his eyes. He saw the disordered steps of his father, and his sigh arose. King of Croma, he said, is it because thou hast no son; is it for the weakness of Fovar-gormo’s arm that thy sighs arise? I begin, my father, to feel the strength of my arm; I have drawn the sword of my youth; and I have bent the bow. Let me meet this Rothmar, with the youths of Croma: let me meet him, O my father; for I feel my burning soul.\n\nAnd thou shalt meet him, I said, son of the sightless Crothar! But let others advance before thee, that I may hear the tread of thy feet at thy return; for my eyes behold thee not, fair-haired Fovar-gormo!--He went, he met the foe; he fell. The foe advances towards Croma. He who slew my son is near, with all his pointed spears.\n\nIt is not time to fill the shell, I replied, and took my spear. My people saw the fire of my eyes, and they rose around. All night we strode along the heath. Gray morning rose in the east. A green narrow vale appeared before us; nor did it want its blue stream. The dark host of Rothmar are on its banks, with all their glittering arms. We fought along the vale; they fled; Rothmar sunk beneath my sword. Day had not descended in the west when I brought his arms to Crothar. The aged hero felt them with his hands; and joy brightened in his soul.\n\nThe people gather to the hall; the shells of the feast are heard. Ten harps are strung; five bards advance, and sing, by turns,, the praise of Ossian; they poured forth their burning souls, and the harp answered to their voice. The joy of Croma was great: for peace returned to the land. The night came on with silence, and the morning returned with joy. No foe came in darkness, with his glittering spear. The joy of Croma was great; for the gloomy Rothmar fell.\n\nI Raised my voice for Fovar-gormo, when they laid the chief in earth. The aged Crothar was there, but his sigh was not heard. He searched for the wound of his son, and found it in his breast. Joy rose in the face of the aged. He came and spoke to Ossian.\n\nKing of spears! he said, my son has not fallen without his fame. The young warrior did not fly; but met death, as he went forward in his strength. Happy are they who die in youth, when their renown is heard! The feeble will not behold them in the hall; or smile at their trembling hands. Their memory shall be honoured in the song; the young tear of the virgin falls. But the aged wither away, by degrees, and the fame of their youth begins to be forgot. They fall in secret; the sigh of their son is not heard. Joy is around their tomb; and the stone of their fame is placed without a tear. Happy are they who die in youth, when their renown is around them!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "dar-thula-a-poem": { - "title": "“Dar-Thula: A Poem”", - "body": "Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is pleasant. Thou comest forth in loveliness: the stars attend thy blue steps in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon, and brighten their dark-brown sides. Who is like thee in heaven, daughter of the night? The stars are ashamed in thy presence, and turn aside their green, sparkling eyes.--Whither dost thou retire from thy course, when the darkness of thy countenance grows? Hast thou thy hall like Ossian? Dwellest thou in the shadow of grief? Have thy sisters fallen from heaven? Are they who rejoiced with thee, at night, no more?--Yes!--they have fallen, fair light! and thou dost often retire to mourn.--But thou thyself shalt fail, one night; and leave thy blue path in heaven. The stars will then lift their green heads: they who were ashamed in thy presence, will rejoice.\n\nThou art now clothed with thy brightness: look from thy gates in the sky. Burst the cloud, O wind, that the daughter of night may look forth, that the shaggy mountains may brighten, and the ocean roll its blue waves, in light.\n\nNathos is on the deep, and Althos that beam of youth, Ardan is near his brothers; they move in the gloom of their course. The sons of Usnoth move in darkness, from the wrath of car-borne Cairbar.\n\nWho is that dim, by their side? the night has covered her beauty. Her hair sighs on ocean’s wind; her robe streams in dusky wreaths. She is like the fair ghost of heaven, in the midst of his shadowy mist. Who is it but Dar-thula, the first of Erin’s maids? She has fled from the love of Cairbar, with the car-borne Nathos. But the winds deceive thee, O Dar-thula; and deny the woody Etha, to thy sails. These are not thy mountains, Nathos, nor is that the roar of thy climbing waves. The halls of Cairbar are near; and the towers of the foe lift their heads. Ullin stretches its green head into the sea; and Tura’s bay receives the ship. Where have ye been, ye southern winds! when the sons of my love were deceived? But ye have been sporting on plains, and pursuing the thistle’s beard. O that ye had been rustling in the sails of Nathos, till the hills of Etha rose! till they rose in their clouds, and saw their coming chief! Long hast thou been absent, Nathos! and the day of thy return is past.\n\nBut the land of strangers saw thee, lovely: thou wast lovely in the eyes of Dar-thula. Thy face was like the light of the morning, thy hair like the raven’s wing. Thy soul was generous and mild, like the hour of the setting sun. Thy words were the gale of the reeds, or the gliding stream of Lora.\n\nBut when the rage of battle rose, thou wast like a sea in a storm; the clang of thy arms was terrible: the host vanished at the sound of thy course.--It was then Dar-thula beheld thee, from the top of her mossy tower: from the tower of Seláma, where her fathers dwelt.\n\nLOVEly art thou, O stranger! she said, for her trembling soul arose. Fair art thou in thy battles, friend of the fallen Cormac! Why dost thou rush on, in thy valour, youth of the ruddy look? Few are thy hands, in battle, against the car-borne Cairbar!--O that I might be freed of his love! that I might rejoice in the presence of Nathos!--Blest are the rocks of Etha; they will behold his steps at the chace! they will see his white bosom, when the winds lift his raven hair!\n\nSuch were thy words, Dar-thula, in Seláma’s mossy towers. But, now, the night is round thee: and the winds have deceived thy sails. The winds have deceived thy sails, Dar-thula: their blustering sound is high. Cease a little while, O north wind, and let me hear the voice of the lovely. Thy voice is lovely, Dar-thula, between the rustling blasts.\n\nAre these the rocks of Nathos, and the roar of his mountain-streams? Comes that beam of light from Usnoth’s nightly hall? The mist rolls around, and the beam is feeble: but the light of Dar-thula’s soul is the car-borne chief of Etha! Son of the generous Usnoth, why that broken sigh? Are we not in the land of strangers, chief of echoing Etha?\n\nThese are not the rocks of Nathos, he replied, nor the roar of his streams. No light comes from Etha’s halls, for they are distant far. We are in the land of strangers, in the land of car-borne Cairbar. The winds have deceived us, Dar-thula. Ullin lifts here her green hills.--Go towards the north, Althos; be thy steps, Ardan, along the coast; that the foe may not come in darkness, and our hopes of Etha fail.--\n\nI Will go towards that mossy tower, and see who dwells about the beam.--Rest, Dar-thula, on the shore! rest in peace, thou beam of light! the sword of Nathos is around thee, like the lightning of heaven.\n\nHe went. She sat alone, and heard the rolling of the wave. The big tear is in her eye; and she looked for the car-borne Nathos.--Her soul trembles at the blast. And she turns her ear towards the tread of his feet.--The tread of his feet is not heard. Where art thou, son of my love! The roar of the blast is around me. Dark is the cloudy night.--But Nathos does not return. What detains thee, chief of Etha?--Have the foes met the hero in the strife of the night?--\n\nHe returned, but his face was dark: he had seen his departed friend.--It was the wall of Tura, and the ghost of Cuchullin stalked there. The sighing of his breast was frequent; and the decayed flame of his eyes terrible. His spear was a column of mist: the stars looked dim through his form. His voice was like hollow wind in a cave: and he told the tale of grief. The soul of Nathos was sad, like the sun in the day of mist, when his face is watry and dim.\n\nWhy art thou sad, O Nathos, said the lovely daughter of Colla? Thou art a pillar of light to Dar-thula: the joy of her eyes is in Etha’s chief. Where is my friend, but Nathos? My father rests in the tomb. Silence dwells on Seláma: sadness spreads on the blue streams of my land. My friends have fallen, with Cormac. The mighty were slain in the battle of Ullin.\n\nEvening darkened on the plain. The blue streams failed before mine eyes. The unfrequent blast came rustling in the tops of Seláma’s groves. My feat was beneath a tree on the walls of my fathers. Truthil past before my soul; the brother of my love; he that was absent in battle against the car-borne Cairbar.\n\nBending on his spear, the gray-haired Colla came: his down-cast face is dark, and sorrow dwells in his soul. His sword is on the side of the hero: the helmet of his fathers on his head.--The battle grows in his breast. He strives to hide the tear.\n\nDar-thula, he sighing said, thou art the last of Colla’s race. Truthil is fallen in battle. The king of Seláma is no more.--Cairbar comes, with his thousands, towards Seláma’s walls.--Colla will meet his pride, and revenge his son. But where shall I find thy safety, Dar-thula with the dark-brown hair! thou art lovely as the sun-beam of heaven, and thy friends are low!\n\nAnd is the son of battle fallen, I said with a bursting sigh? Ceased the generous soul of Truthil to lighten through the field?--My safety, Colla, is in that bow; I have learned to pierce the deer. Is not Cairbar like the hart of the desart, father of fallen Truthil?\n\nThe face of age brightened with joy: and the crouded tears of his eyes poured down. The lips of Colla trembled. His gray beard whistled in the blast. Thou art the sister of Truthil, he said, and thou burnest in the fire of his soul. Take, Dar-thula, take that spear, that brazen shield, that burnished helmet: they are the spoils of a warrior: a son of early youth.--When the light rises on Seláma, we go to meet the car-borne Cairbar.--But keep thou near the arm of Colla; beneath the shadow of my shield. Thy father, Darthula, could once defend thee; but age is trembling on his hand.--The strength of his arm has failed, and his soul is darkened with grief.\n\nWe passed the night in sorrow. The light of morning rose. I shone in the arms of battle. The gray-haired hero moved before. The sons of Seláma convened around the sounding shield of Colla. But few were they in the plain, and their locks were gray. The youths had fallen with Truthil, in the battle of car-borne Cormac.\n\nCompanions of my youth! said Colla, it was not thus you have seen me in arms. It was not thus I strode to battle, when the great Confadan fell. But ye are laden with grief. The darkness of age comes like the mist of the desart. My shield is worn with years; my sword is fixed in its place. I said to my soul, thy evening shall be calm, and thy departure like a fading light. But the storm has returned; I bend like an aged oak. My boughs are fallen on Seláma, and I tremble in my place.--Where art thou, with thy fallen heroes, O my car-borne Truthil! Thou answerest not from thy rushing blast; and the soul of thy father is sad. But I will be sad no more, Cairbar or Colla must fall. I feel the returning strength of my arm. My heart leaps at the sound of battle.\n\nThe hero drew his sword. The gleaming blades of his people rose. They moved along the plain. Their gray hair streamed in the wind.--Cairbar sat, at the feast, in the silent plain of Lona. He saw the coming of the heroes, and he called his chiefs to battle.\n\nWhy should I tell to Nathos, how the strife of battle grew! I have seen thee, in the midst of thousands, like the beam of heaven’s fire; it is beautiful, but terrible; the people fall in its red course.--The spear of Colla slew, for he remembered the battles of his youth. An arrow came with its sound, and pierced the hero’s side. He fell on his ecchoing shield. My soul started with fear; I stretched my buckler over him; but my heaving breast was seen. Cairbar came, with his spear, and he beheld Seláma’s maid: joy rose on his dark-brown face; he stayed the lifted steel. He raised the tomb of Colla; and brought me weeping to Seláma. He spoke the words of love, but my soul was sad. I saw the shields of my fathers, and the sword of car-borne Truthil. I saw the arms of the dead, and the tear was on my cheek.\n\nThen thou didst come, O Nathos: and gloomy Cairbar fled. He fled like the ghost of the desart before the morning’s beam. His hosts were not near: and feeble was his arm against thy steel.\n\nWhy art thou sad, O Nathos! said the lovely maid of Colla?\n\nI Have met, replied the hero, the battle in my youth. My arm could not lift the spear, when first the danger rose; but my soul brightened before the war, as the green narrow vale, when the sun pours his streamy beams, before he hides his head in a storm. My soul brightened in danger before I saw Seláma’s fair; before I saw thee, like a star, that shines on the hill, at night; the cloud slowly comes, and threatens the lovely light.\n\nWe are in the land of the foe, and the winds have deceived us, Dar-thula! the strength of our friends is not near, nor the mountains of Etha. Where shall I find thy peace, daughter of mighty Colla! The brothers of Nathos are brave: and his own sword has shone in war. But what are the sons of Usnoth to the host of car-borne Cairbar! O that the winds had brought thy sails, Oscar king of men! thou didst promise to come to the battles of fallen Cormac. Then would my hand be strong as the flaming arm of death. Cairbar would tremble in his halls, and peace dwell round the lovely Dar-thula. But why dost thou fall, my soul? The sons of Usnoth may prevail.\n\nAnd they will prevail, O Nathos, said the rising soul of the maid: never shall Dar-thula behold the halls of gloomy Cairbar. Give me those arms of brass, that glitter to that passing meteor; I see them in the dark-bosomed ship. Dar-thula will enter the battle of steel.--Ghost of the noble Colla! do I behold thee on that cloud? Who is that dim beside thee? It is the car-borne Truthil. Shall I behold the halls of him that slew Seláma’s chief! No: I will not behold them, spirits of my love!\n\nJoy rose in the face of Nathos, when he heard the white bosomed maid. Daughter of Seláma! thou shinest on my soul. Come, with thy thousands, Cairbar! the strength of Nathos is returned. And thou, O aged Usnoth, shalt not hear that thy son has fled. I remember thy words on Etha; when my sails begun to rise: when I spread them towards Ullin, towards the mossy walls of Tura. Thou goest, he said, O Nathos, to the king of shields; to Cuchullin chief of men who never fled from danger. Let not thine arm be feeble: neither be thy thoughts of flight; lest the son of Semo say that Etha’s race are weak. His words may come to Usnoth, and sadden his soul in the hall.--The tear is on his cheek. He gave this shining sword.\n\nI came to Tura’s bay: but the halls of Tura were silent; I looked around, and there was none to tell of the chief of Dunscaich. I went to the hall of his shells, where the arms of his fathers hung. But the arms were gone, and aged Lamhor sat in tears.\n\nWhence are the arms of steel, said the rising Lamhor? The light of the spear has long been absent from Tura’s dusky walls.--Come ye from the rolling sea? Or from Temora’s mournful halls?\n\nWe come from the sea, I said, from Usnoth’s rising towers. We are the sons of Slis-sáma, the daughter of car-borne Semo. Where is Tura’s chief, son of the silent hall? But why should Nathos ask? for I behold thy tears. How did the mighty fall, son of the lonely Tura?\n\nHe fell not, Lamhor replied, like the silent star of night, when it shoots through darkness and is no more. But he was like a meteor that salls in a distant land; death attends its green course, and itself is the sign of wars.--Mournful are the banks of Lego, and the roar of streamy Lara! There the hero fell, son of the noble Usnoth.\n\nAnd the hero fell in the midst of slaughter, I said with a bursting sigh. His hand was strong in battle; and death was behind his sword.--We came to Lego’s mournful banks. We found his rising tomb. His conpanions in battle are there; his bards of many songs. Three days we mourned over the hero: on the fourth, I struck the shield of Caithbat. The heroes gathered around with joy, and shook their beamy spears.\n\nCorlath was near with his host, the friend of car-borne Cairbar. We came like a stream by night, and his heroes fell. When the people of the valley rose, they saw their blood with morning’s light. But we rolled away, like wreaths of mist, to Cormac’s ecchoing hall. Our swords rose to defend the king. But Temora’s halls were empty. Cormac had fallen in his youth. The king of Erin was no more.\n\nSadness seized the sons of Ullin, they slowly, gloomily retired: like clouds that, long having threatened rain, retire behind the hills. The sons of Usnoth moved, in their grief, towards Tura’s sounding bay. We passed by Seláma, and Cairbar retired like Lano’s mist, when it is driven by the winds of the desart.\n\nIt was then I beheld thee, O maid, like the light of Etha’s sun. Lovely is that beam, I said, and the crowded sigh of my bosom rose. Thou camest in thy beauty, Dar-thula, to Etha’s mournful chief.--But the winds have deceived us, daughter of Colla, and the foe is near.\n\nYes!--the foe is near, said the rustling strength of Althos. I heard their clanging arms on the coast, and saw the dark wreaths of Erin’s standard. Distinct is the voice of Cairbar, and loud as Cromla’s falling stream. He had seen the dark ship on the sea, before the dusky night came down. His people watch on Lena’s plain, and lift ten thousand swords.\n\nAnd let them lift ten thousand swords, said Nathos with a smile. The sons of car-borne Usnoth will never tremble in danger. Why dost thou roll with all thy foam, thou roaring sea of Ullin? Why do ye rustle, on your dark wings, ye whistling tempests of the sky?--Do ye think, ye storms, that ye keep Nathos on the coast? No: his sould detains him, children of the night!--Althos! bring my father’s arms: thou seest them beaming to the stars. Bring the spear of Semo, it stands in the dark-bosomed ship.\n\nHe brought the arms. Nathos clothed his limbs in all their shining steel. The stride of the chief is lovely: the joy of his eyes terrible. He looks towards the coming of Cairbar. The wind is rustling in his hair. Dar-thula is silent at his side: her look is fixed on the chief. She strives to hide the rising sigh, and two tears swell in her eyes.\n\nAlthos! said the chief of Etha, I see a cave in that rock. Place Dar-thula there: and let thy arm be strong. Ardan! we meet the foe, and call to battle gloomy Cairbar. O that he came in his sounding steel, to meet the son of Usnoth!--Darthula! if thou shalt escape, look not on the fallen Nathos. Lift thy sails, O Althos, towards the ecchoing groves of Etha.\n\nTell to the chief, that his son fell with fame; that my sword did not shun the battle. Tell him I fell in the midst of thousands, and let the joy of his grief be great. Daughter of Colla! call the maids to Etha’s echoing hall. Let their songs arise for Nathos, when shadowy returns.--O that the voice of Cona might be heard in my praise! then would my spirit rejoice in the midst of my mountain winds.\n\nAnd my voice shall praise thee, Nathos chief of the woody Etha! The voice of Ossian shall rise in thy praise, son of the generous Usnoth! Why was I not on Lena, when the battle rose? Then would the sword of Ossian defend thee; or himself fall low.\n\nWe sat, that night, in Selma round the strength of the shell. The wind was abroad, in the oaks; the spirit of the mountain shrieked. The blast came rustling through the hall, and gently touched my harp. The sound was mournful and low, like the song of the tomb. Fingal heard it first, and the crouded sighs of his bosom rose.--Some of my heroes are low, said the gray-haired king of Morven. I hear the sound of death on the harp of my son. Ossian, touch the sounding string; bid the sorrow rise; that their spirits may fly with joy to Morven’s woody hills.\n\nI Touched the harp before the king, the sound was mournful and low. Bend forward from your clouds, I said, ghosts of my fathers! bend; lay by the red terror of your course, and receive the falling chief; whether he comes from a distant land, or rises from the rolling sea. Let his robe of mist be near; his spear that is formed of a cloud. Place an half-extinguished meteor by his side, in the form of the hero’s sword. And, oh! let his countenance be lovely, that his friends may delight in his presence. Bend from your clouds, I said, ghosts of my fathers! bend.\n\nSuch was my song, in Selma, to the lightly-trembling harp. But Nathos was on Ullin’s shore, surrounded by the night; he heard the voice of the foe amidst the roar of tumbling waves. Silent he heard their voice, and rested on his spear.\n\nMorning rose, with its beams; the sons of Erin appear; like gray rocks, with all their trees, they spread along the coast. Cairbar stood, in the midst, and grimly smiled when he saw the foe.\n\nNathos rushed forward, in his strength; nor could Dar-thula stay behind. She came with the hero, lifting her shining spear. And who are these, in their armour, in the pride of youth? Who but the sons of Usnoth, Althos and dark-haired Ardan?\n\nCome, said Nathos, come! chief of the high Temora! Let our battle be on the coast for the white-bosomed maid. His people are not with Nathos; they are behind that rolling sea. Why dost thou bring thy thousands against the chief of Etha? Thou didst fly from him, in battle, when his friends were around him.\n\nYouth of the heart of pride, shall Erin’s king fight with thee? Thy fathers were not among the renowned, nor of the kings of men. Are the arms of soes in their halls? Or the shields of other times? Cairbar is renowned in Temora, nor does he fight with little men.\n\nThe tear starts from car-borne Nathos; he turned his eyes to his brothers. Their spears flew, at once, and three heroes lay on earth. Then the light of their swords gleamed on high; the ranks of Erin yield; as a ridge of dark clouds before a blast of wind.\n\nThen Cairbar ordered his people, and they drew a thousand bows. A thousand arrows flew; the sons of Usnoth fell. They fell like three young oaks which stood alone on the hill; the traveller saw the lovely trees and wondered how they grew so lonely; the blast of the desart came, by night, and laid their green heads low; next day he returned but they were withered, and the heath was bare.\n\nDar-thula stood in silent grief, and beheld their fall; no tear is in her eye: but her look is wildly sad. Pale was her cheek; her trembling lips broke short an half-formed word. Her dark hair flew on the wind.--But gloomy Cairbar came. Where is thy lover now? the car-borne chief of Etha? Hast thou beheld the halls of Usnoth? Or the dark-brown hills of Fingal? My battle had roared on Morven, did not the winds meet Dar-thula. Fingal himself would have been low and sorrow dwelling in Selma.\n\nHer shield fell from Dar-thula’s arm, her breast of snow appeared. It appeared, but it was stained with blood for an arrow was fixed in her side. She fell on the fallen Nathos, like a wreath of snow. Her dark hair spreads on his face, and their blood is mixing round.\n\nDaughter of Colla! thou art low! said Cairbar’s hundred bards; silence is at the blue streams of Seláma, for Truthil’s race have failed. When wilt thou rise in thy beauty, first of Erin’s maids? Thy sleep is long in the tomb, and the morning distant far. The sun shall not come to thy bed and say, Awake Dar-thula! awake, thou first of women! the wind of spring is abroad. The flowers shake their heads on the green hills, the woods wave their growing leaves. Retire, O sun, the daughter of Colla is asleep. She will not come forth in her beauty: she will not move, in the steps of her loveliness.\n\nSuch was the song of the bards, when they raised the tomb. I sung, afterwards, over the grave, when the king of Morven came; when he came to green Ullin to fight with car-borne Cairbar.\n\n\n\n“The Death of Cuchullin: A Poem”\n\n\nIs the wind on Fingal’s shield? Or is the voice of past times in my hall? Sing on, sweet voice, for thou art pleasant, and carriest away my night with joy. Sing on, O Bragela, daughter of Car-borne Songlan!\n\nIt is the white wave of the rock, and not Cuchullin’s sails. Often do the mists deceive me for the ship of my love! when they rise round some ghost, and spread their gray skirts on the wind. Why dost thou delay thy coming, son of the generous Semo?--Four times has returned with its winds, and raised the seas of Togorma, since thou hast been in the roar of battles, and Bragéla distant far.--Hills of the isle of mist! when will ye answer to his hounds?--But ye are dark in your clouds, and sad Bragéla calls in vain. Night comes rolling down: the face of ocean fails. The heath-cock’s head is beneath his wing: the hind sleeps with the hart of the desart. They shall rise with the morning’s light, and feed on the mossy stream. But my tears return with the sun, my sighs come on with the night. When wilt thou come in thine arms, O chief of mossy Tura?\n\nPleasant is thy voice in Ossian’s ear, daughter of car-borne Sorglan! But retire to the hall of shells; to the beam of the burning oak.--Attend to the murmur of the sea: it rolls at Dunscaich’s walls: let sleep descend on thy blue eyes, and the hero come to thy dreams.\n\nCuchullin sits at Lego’s lake, at the dark rolling of waters. Night is around the hero; and his thousands spread on the heath: a hundred oaks burn in the midst, the feast of shells is smoking wide.--Carril strikes the harp, beneath a tree; his gray locks glitter in the beam; the rustling blast of night is near, and lifts his aged hair.--His song is of the blue Togorma, and of its chief, Cuchullin’s friend.\n\nWhy art thou absent, Connal, in the day of the gloomy storm? The chiefs of the south have convened against the car-borne Cormac: the winds detain thy sails, and thy blue waters roll around thee. But Cormac is not alone: the son of Semo fights his battles. Semo’s son his battles fights! the terror of the stranger! he that is like the vapour of death, slowly borne by sultry winds. The sun reddens in its presence, the people fall around.\n\nSuch was the song of Carril, when a son of the foe appeared; he threw down his pointless spear, and spoke the words of Torlath: Torlath the chief of heroes, from Lego’s sable surge: he that led his thousands to battle, against car-borne Cormac. Cormac who was distant far, in Temora’s ecchoing halls: he learned to bend the bow of his fathers; and to lift the spear. Nor long didst thou lift the spear, mildly-shining beam of youth! death stands dim behind thee, like the darkened half of the moon behind its growing light.\n\nCuchullin rose before the bard, that came from generous Torlath; he offered him the shell of joy, and honoured the son of songs. Sweet voice of Lego! he said, what are the words of Torlath? Comes he to our feast or battle, the car-borne son of Cantéla?\n\nHe comes to thy battle, replied the bard, to the sounding strife of spears.--When morning is gray on Lego, Torlath will fight on the plain: and wilt thou meet him, in thine arms, king of the isle of mist? Terrible is the spear of Torlath! it is a meteor of night. He lifts it, and the people fall: death sits in the lightning of his sword.\n\nDo I fear, replied Cuchullin, the spear of car-borne Torlath? He is brave as a thousand heroes; but my soul delights in war. The sword rests not by the side of Cuchullin, bard of the times of old! Morning shall meet me on the plain, and gleam on the blue arms of Semo’s son.--But sit thou, on the heath, O bard! and let us hear thy voice: partake of the joyful shell; and hear the songs of Temora.\n\nThis is no time, replied the bard, to hear the song of joy; when the mighty are to meet in battle like the strength of the waves of Lego. Why art thou so dark, Slimora! with all thy silent woods? No green star trembles on thy top; no moon-beam on thy side. But the meteors of death are there, and the gray watry forms of ghosts. Why art thou dark, Slimora! with thy silent woods?\n\nHe retired, in the sound of his song; Carril accompanied his voice. The music was like the memory of joys that are past, pleasant and mournful to the soul. The ghosts of departed bards heard it from Slimora’s side. Soft sounds spread along the wood, and the silent valleys of night rejoice.--So, when he sits in the silence of noon, in the valley of his breeze, the humming of the mountain bee comes to Ossian’s ear: the gale drowns it often in its course; but the pleasant sound returns again.\n\nRaise, said Cuchullin, to his hundred bards, the song of the noble Fingal: that song which he hears at night, when the dreams of his rest descend: when the bards strike the distant harp, and the faint light gleams on Selma’s walls. Or let the grief of Lara rise, and the sighs of the mother of Calmar, when he was sought, in vain, on his hills; and she beheld his bow in the hall.--Carril, place the shield of Caithbat on that branch; and let the spear of Cuchullin be near; that the sound of my battle may rise with the gray beam of the east.\n\nThe hero leaned on his father’s shield: the song of Lara rose. The hundred bards were distant far: Carril alone is near the chief. The words of the song were his; and the sound of his harp was mournful.\n\nAlcletha with the aged locks! mother of car-borne Calmar! why dost thou look towards the desart, to behold the return of thy son? These are not his heroes, dark on the heath: nor is that the voice of Calmar: it is but the distant grove, Alcletha! but the roar of the mountain wind!\n\nWho bounds over Lara’s stream, sister of the noble Calmar? Does not Alclétha behold his spear? But her eyes are dim! Is it not the son of Matha, daughter of my love?\n\nIt is but an aged oak, Alcletha! replied the lovely weeping Alona; it is but an oak, Alclétha, bent over Lara’s stream. But who comes along the plain? sorrow is in his speed. He lifts high the spear of Calmar. Alclétha, it is covered with blood!\n\nBut it is covered with the blood of foes, sister of car-borne Calmar! his spear never returned unstained with blood, nor his bow from the strife of the mighty. The battle is consumed in his presence: he is a flame of death, Alona!--Youth of the mournful speed! where is the son of Alcletha? Does he return with his fame? in the midst of his echoing shields?--Thou art dark and silent!--Calmar is then no more. Tell me not, warrior, how he fell, for I cannot hear of his wound.--\n\nWhy dost thou look towards the desart, mother of car-borne Calmar?--\n\nSuch was the song of Carril, when Cuchullin lay on his shield: the bards rested on their harps, and sleep fell softly around.--The son of Semo was awake alone; his soul was fixed on the war.--The burning oaks began to decay; faint red light is spread around.--A feeble voice is heard: the ghost of Calmar came. He stalked in the beam. Dark is the wound in his side. His hair is disordered and loose. Joy sits darkly on his face; and he seems to invite Cuchullin to his cave.\n\nSon of the cloudy night! said the rising chief of Erin; Why dost thou bend thy dark eyes on me, ghost of the car-borne Calmar? Wouldest thou frighten me, O Matha’s son! from the battles of Cormac? Thy hand was not feeble in war; neither was thy voice for peace. How art thou changed, chief of Lara! if thou now dost advise to fly!--But, Calmar, I never fled. I never feared the ghosts of the desart. Small is their knowledge, and weak their hands; their dwelling is in the wind.--But my soul grows in danger, and rejoices in the noise of steel. Retire thou to thy cave; thou art not Calmar’s ghost; he delighted in battle, and his arm was like the thunder of heaven.\n\nHe retired in his blast with joy, for he had heard the voice of his praise. The faint beam of the morning rose, and the sound of Caithbat’s buckler spread. Green Ullin’s warriors convened, like the roar of many streams.--The horn of war is heard over Lego; the mighty Torlath came.\n\nWhy dost thou come with thy thousands, Cuchullin, said the chief of Lego. I know the strength of thy arm, and thy soul is an unextinguished fire.--Why fight we not on the plain, and let our hosts behold our deeds? Let them behold us like roaring waves, that tumble round a rock: the mariners hasten away, and look on their strife with fear.\n\nThou risest, like the sun, on my soul, replied the son of Semo. Thine arm is mighty, O Torlath! and worthy of my wrath. Retire, ye men of Ullin, to Slimora’s shady side; behold the chief of Erin, in the day of his fame.--Carril! tell to mighty Connal, if Cuchullin must fall, tell him I accused the winds which roar on Togorma’s waves.--Never was he absent in battle, when the strife of my fame arose.--Let this sword be before Cormac, like the beam of heaven: let his counsel sound in Temora in the day of danger.--\n\nHe rushed, in the sound of his arms, like the terrible spirit of Loda, when he comes in the roar of a thousand storms, and scatters battles from his eyes.--He sits on a cloud over Lochlin’s seas: his mighty hand is on his sword, and the winds lift his flaming locks.--So terrible was Cuchullin in the day of his fame.--Torlath fell by his hand, and Lego’s heroes mourned.--They gather around the chief like the clouds of the desart.--A thousand swords rose at once; a thousand arrows flew; but he stood like a rock in the midst of a roaring sea.--They fell around; he strode in blood: dark Slimora ecchoed wide.--The sons of Ullin came, and the battle spread over Lego.--The chief of Erin overcame; he returned over the field with his fame.--\n\nBut pale he returned! The joy of his face was dark. He rolled his eyes in silence.--The sword hung, unsheathed, in his hand, and his spear bent at every step.\n\nCarril, said the king in secret, the strength of Cuchullin fails. My days are with the years that are past: and no morning of mine shall arise.--They shall seek me at Temora, but I shall not be found. Cormac will weep in his hall, and fay, “Where is Tura’s chief?”--But my name is renowned! my fame in the song of bards.--The youth will say in secret, O let me die as Cuchullin died; renown cloathed him like a robe; and the light of his fame is great. Draw the arrow from my side; and lay Cuchullin beneath that oak. Place the shield of Caithbat near, that they may behold me amidst the arms of my fathers.--\n\nAnd is the son of Semo fallen, said Carril with a sigh?--Mournful are Tura’s walls; and sorrow dwells at Dunscaich.--Thy spouse is left alone in her youth, the son of thy love is alone.--He shall come to Bragela, and ask her why she weeps.--He shall lift his eyes to the wall, and see his father’s sword.--Whose sword is that? he will say: and the soul of his mother is sad. Who is that, like the hart of the desart, in the murmur of his course?--His eyes look wildly round in search of his friend.--Connal, son of Colgar, where hast thou been, when the mighty fell? Did the seas of Togorma roll round thee? Was the wind of the south in thy sails? The mighty have fallen in battle, and thou wast not there.--Let none tell it in Selma, nor in Morven’s woody land; Fingal will be sad, and the sons of the desart mourn.\n\nBy the dark rolling waves of Lego they raised the hero’s tomb.--Luäth, at a distance, lies, the companion of Cuchullin, at the chace.--Blest be thy soul, son of Semo; thou wert mighty in battle.--Thy strength was like the strength of a stream: thy speed like the eagle’s wing.--Thy path in the battle was terrible: the steps of death were behind thy sword.--Blest be thy soul, son of Semo; car-borne chief of Dunscaich!\n\nThou hast not fallen by the sword of the mighty, neither was thy blood on the spear of the valiant.--The arrow came, like the sting of death in a blast: nor did the feeble hand, which drew the bow, perceive it. Peace to thy soul, in thy cave, chief of the isle of Mist!\n\nThe mighty are dispersed at Temora: there is none in Cormac’s hall. The king mourns in his youth, for he does not behold thy coming. The sound of thy shield is ceased: his foes are gathering round. Soft be thy rest in thy cave, chief of Erin’s wars!\n\nBragéla will not hope thy return, or see thy sails in ocean’s foam.--Her steps are not on the shore: nor her ear open to the voice of thy rowers.--She sits in the hall of shells, and sees the arms of him that is no more.--Thine eyes are full of tears, daughter of car-borne Sorglan!--Blest be thy soul in death, O chief of shady Cromla!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-1": { - "title": "“Fragment 1”", - "body": "> _Vinvela:_\n\nMy love is a son of the hill. He pursues the flying deer. His grey dogs are panting around him; his bow-string sounds in the wind. Whether by the fount of the rock, or by the stream of the mountain thou liest; when the rushes are nodding with the wind, and the mist is flying over thee, let me approach my love unperceived, and see him from the rock. Lovely I saw thee first by the aged oak; thou wert returning tall from the chace; the fairest among thy friends.\n\n> _Shilric:_\n\nWhat voice is that I hear? that voice like the summer-wind.--I sit not by the nodding rushes; I hear not the fount of the rock. Afar, Vinvela, afar I go to the wars of Fingal. My dogs attend me no more. No more I tread the hill. No more from on high I see thee, fair-moving by the stream of the plain; bright as the bow of heaven; as the moon on the western wave.\n\n> _Vinvela:_\n\nThen thou art gone, O Shilric! and I am alone on the hill. The deer are seen on the brow; void of fear they graze along. No more they dread the wind; no more the rustling tree. The hunter is far removed; he is in the field of graves. Strangers! sons of the waves! spare my lovely Shilric.\n\n> _Shilric:_\n\nIf fall I must in the field, raise high my grave, Vinvela. Grey stones, and heaped-up earth, shall mark me to future times. When the hunter shall sit by the mound, and produce his food at noon, “some warrior rests here,” he will say; and my fame shall live in his praise. Remember me, Vinvela, when low on earth I lie!\n\n> _Vinvela:_\n\nYes!--I will remember thee--indeed my Shilric will fall. What shall I do, my love! when thou art gone for ever? Through these hills I will go at noon: O will go through the silent heath. There I will see where often thou sattest returning from the chace. Indeed, my Shilric will fall; but I will remember him.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "fragment-2": { - "title": "“Fragment 2”", - "body": "I Sit by the mossy fountain; on the top of the hill of winds. One tree is rustling above me. Dark waves roll over the heath. The lake is troubled below. The deer descend from the hill. No hunter at a distance is seen; no whistling cow-herd is nigh. It is mid-day: but all is silent. Sad are my thoughts as I sit alone. Didst thou but appear, O my love, a wanderer on the heath! thy hair floating on the wind behind thee; thy bosom heaving on the sight; thine eyes full of tears for thy friends, whom the mist of the hill had concealed! Thee I would comfort, my love, and bring thee to thy father’s house.\n\nBut is it she that there appears, like a beam of light on the heath? bright as the moon in autumn, as the sun in a summer-storm?--She speaks: but how weak her voice! like the breeze in the reeds of the pool. Hark!\n\nReturnest thou safe from the war? Where are thy friends, my love? I heard of thy death on the hill; I heard and mourned thee, Shilric!\n\nYes, my fair, I return; but I alone of my race. Thou shalt see them no more: their graves I raised on the plain. But why art thou on the desert hill? why on the heath, alone?\n\nAlone I am, O Shilric! alone in the winter-house. With grief for thee I expired. Shilric, I am pale in the tomb.\n\nShe fleets, she sails away; as grey mist before the wind!--and, wilt thou not stay, my love? Stay and behold my tears? fair thou appearest, my love! fair thou wast, when alive!\n\nBy the mossy fountain I will sit; on the top of the hill of winds. When mid-day is silent around, converse, O my love, with me! come on the wings of the gale! on the blast of the mountain, come! Let me hear thy voice, as thou passest, when mid-day is silent around.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "fragment-3": { - "title": "“Fragment 3”", - "body": "Evening is grey on the hills. The north wind resounds through the woods. White clouds rise on the sky: the trembling snow descends. The river howls afar, along its winding course. Sad, by a hollow rock, the grey-hair’d Carryl sat. Dry fern waves over his head; his seat is in an aged birch. Clear to the roaring winds he lifts his voice of woe.\n\nTossed on the wavy ocean is He, the hope of the isles; Malcolm, the support of the poor; foe to the proud in arms! Why hast thou left us behind? why live we to mourn thy fate? We might have heard, with thee, the voice of the deep; have seen the oozy rock.\n\nSad on the sea-beat shore thy spouse looketh for thy return. The time of thy promise is come; the night is gathering around. But no white sail is on the sea; no voice is heard except the blustering winds. Low is the soul of the war! Wet are the locks of youth! By the foot of some rock thou liest; washed by the waves as they come. Why, ye winds, did ye bear him on the desert rock? Why, ye waves, did ye roll over him?\n\nBut, Oh! what voice is that? Who rides on that meteor of fire! Green are his airy limbs. It is he! it is the ghost of Malcolm!--Rest, lovely soul, rest on the rock; and let me hear thy voice!--He is gone, like a dream of the night. I see him through the trees. Daughter of Reynold! he is gone. Thy spouse shall return no more. No more shall his hounds come from the hill, forerunners of their master. No more from the distant rock shall his voice greet thine ear. Silent is he in the deep, unhappy daughter of Reynold!\n\nI will sit by the stream of the plain. Ye rocks! hang over my head. Hear my voice, ye trees! as ye bend on the shaggy hill. My voice shall preserve the praise of him, the hope of the isles.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "fragment-4": { - "title": "“Fragment 4”", - "body": "> _Crimora:_\nWho cometh from the hill, like a cloud tinged with the beam of the west? Whose voice is that, loud as the wind, but pleasant as the harp of Carryl? It is my love in the light of steel; but sad is his darkened brow. Live the mighty race of Fingal? or what disturbs my Connal?\n\n> _Connal:_\nThey live. I saw them return from the chace, like a stream of light. The sun was on their shields: In a line they descended the hill. Loud is the voice of the youth; the war, my love, is near. To-morrow the enormous Dargo comes to try the force of our race. The race of Fingal he defies; the race of battle and wounds.\n\n> _Crimora:_\nConnal, I saw his sails like grey mist on the sable wave. They came to land. Connnal, many are the warriors of Dargo!\n\n> _Connal:_\nBring me thy father’s shield; the iron shield of Rinval; that shield like the full moon when it is darkened in the sky.\n\n> _Crimora:_\nThat shield I bring, O Connal; but it did not defend my father. By the spear of Gauror he fell. Thou mayst fall, O Connal!\n\n> _Connal:_\nFall indeed I may: But raise my tomb, Crimora. Some stones, a mound of earth, shall keep my memory. Though fair thou art, my love, as the light; more pleasant than the gale of the hill; yet I will not stay. Raise my tomb,\n> _Crimora:_\n> _Crimora:_\nThen give me those arms of light; that sword, and that spear of steel. I shall meet Dargo with thee, and aid my lovely Connal. Farewell, ye rocks of Ardven! ye deer! and ye streams of the hill!--We shall return no more. Our tombs are distant far.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-5": { - "title": "“Fragment 5”", - "body": "Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill, and marks the grave of Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind, and strew the grave of the dead. At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath.\n\nWho can reach the source of thy race, O Connal? and who recount thy Fathers? Thy family grew like an oak on the mountain, which meeteth the wind with its lofty head. But now it is torn from the earth. Who shall supply the place of Connal?\n\nHere was the din of arms; and here the groans of the dying. Mournful are the wars of Fingal! O Connal! it was here thou didst fall. Thine arm was like a storm; thy sword, a beam of the sky; thy height, a rock on the plain; thine eyes, a furnace of fire. Louder than a storm was thy voice, when thou confoundedst the field. Warriors fell by thy sword, as the thistle by the staff of a boy.\n\nDargo the mighty came on, like a cloud of thunder. His brows were contracted and dark. His eyes like two caves in a rock. Bright rose their swords on each side; dire was the clang of their steel.\n\nThe daughter of Rinval was near; Crimora, bright in the armour of man; her hair loose behind, her bow in her hand. She followed the youth to the war, Connal her much beloved. She drew the string on Dargo; but erring pierced her Connal. He falls like an oak on the plain; like a rock from the shaggy hill. What shall she do, hapless maid!--He bleeds; her Connal dies. All the night long she cries, and all the day, O Connal, my love, and my friend! With grief the sad mourner died.\n\nEarth here incloseth the loveliest pair on the hill. The grass grows between the stones of their tomb; I sit in the mournful shade. The wind sighs through the grass; and their memory rushes on my mind. Undisturbed you now sleep together; in the tomb of the mountain you rest alone.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "fragment-6": { - "title": "“Fragment 6”", - "body": "Son of the noble Fingal, Oscian, Prince of men! what tears run down the cheeks of age? what shades thy mighty soul?\n\nMemory, son of Alpin, memory wounds the aged. Of former times are my thoughts; my thoughts are of the noble Fingal. The race of the king return into my mind, and wound me with remembrance.\n\nOne day, returned from the sport of the mountains, from pursuing the sons of the hill, we covered this heath with our youth. Fingal the mighty was here, and Oscur, my son, great in war. Fair on our sight from the sea, at once, a virgin came. Her breast was like the snow of one night. Her cheek like the bud of the rose. Mild was her blue rolling eye: but sorrow was big in her heart.\n\nFingal renowned in war! she cries, sons of the king, preserve me! Speak secure, replies the king, daughter of beauty, speak: our ear is open to all: our swords redress the injured. I fly from Ullin, she cries, from Ullin famous in war. I fly from the embrace of him who would debase my blood. Cremor, the friend of men, was my father; Cremor the Prince of Inverne.\n\nFingal’s younger sons arose; Carryl expert in the bow; Fillan beloved of the fair; and Fergus first in the race.--Who from the farthest Lochlyn? who to the seas of Molochasquir? who dares hurt the maid whom the sons of Fingal guard? Daughter of beauty, rest secure; rest in peace, thou fairest of women.\n\nFar in the blue distance of the deep, some spot appeared like the back of the ridge-wave. But soon the ship increased on our sight. The hand of Ullin drew her to land. The mountains trembled as he moved. The hills shook at his steps. Dire rattled his armour around him. Death and destruction were in his eyes. His stature like the roe of Morven. He moved in the lightning of steel.\n\nOur warriours fell before him, like the field before the reapers. Fingal’s three sons he bound. He plunged his sword into the fair-one’s breast. She fell as a wreath of snow before the sun in spring. Her bosom heaved in death; her soul came forth in blood.\n\nOscur my son came down; the mighty in battle descended. His armour rattled as thunder; and the lightning of his eyes was terrible. There, was the clashing of swords; there, was the voice of steel. They struck and they thrust; they digged for death with their swords. But death was distant far, and delayed to come. The sun began to decline; and the cow-herd thought of home. Then Oscur’s keen steel found the heart of Ullin. He fell like a mountain-oak covered over with glistering frost: He shone like a rock on the plain.--Here the daughter of beauty lieth; and here the bravest of men. Here one day ended the fair and the valiant. Here rest the pursuer and the pursued.\n\nSon of Alpin! the woes of the aged are many: their tears are for the past. This raised my sorrow, warriour; memory awaked my grief. Oscur my son was brave; but Oscur is now no more. Thou hast heard my grief, O son of Alpin; forgive the tears of the aged.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-7": { - "title": "“Fragment 7”", - "body": "Why openest thou afresh the spring of my grief, O son of Alpin, inquiring how Oscur fell? My eyes are blind with tears; but memory beams on my heart. How can I relate the mournful death of the head of the people! Prince of the warriours, Oscur my son, shall I see thee no more!\n\nHe fell as the moon in a storm; as the sun from the midst of his course, when clouds rise from the waste of the waves, when the blackness of the storm inwraps the rocks of Ardannider. I, like an ancient oak on Morven, I moulder alone in my place. The blast hath lopped my branches away; and I tremble at the wings of the north. Prince of the warriors, Oscur my son! shall I see thee no more!\n\nDermid and Oscur were one: They reaped the battle together. Their friendship was strong as their steel; and death walked between them to the field. They came on the foe like two rocks falling from the brows of Ardven. Their swords were stained with the blood of the valiant: warriours fainted at their names. Who was a match for Oscur, but Dermid? and who for Dermid, but Oscur?\n\nThey killed, mighty Dargo in the field; Dargo before invincible. His daughter was fair as the morn; mild as the beam of night. Her eyes, like two stars in a shower: her breath, the gale of spring: her breasts, as the new-fallen snow floating on the moving heath. The warriours saw her, and loved; their souls were fixed on the maid. Each loved her, as his fame; each must possess her or die. But her soul was fixed on Oscur; my son was the youth of her love. She forgot the blood of her father; and loved the hand that slew him.\n\nSon of Oscian, said Dermid, I love; O Oscur, I love this maid. But her soul cleaveth unto thee; and nothing can heal Dermid. Here, pierce this bosom, Oscur; relieve me, my friend, with thy sword.\n\nMy sword, son of Morny, shall never be stained with the blood of Dermid.\n\nWho then is worthy to slay me, O Oscur son of Oscian? Let not my life pass away unknown. Let none but Oscur slay me. Send me with honour to the grave, and let my death be renowned.\n\nDermid, make use of thy sword; son of Morny, wield thy steel. Would that I fell with thee! that my death came from the hand of Dermid!\n\nThey sought by the brook of the mountain; by the streams of Branno. Blood tinged the silvery stream, and crudled round the mossy stones. Dermid the graceful fell; fell, and smiled in death.\n\nAnd fallest thou, son of Morny; fallest thou by Oscur’s hand! Dermid invincible in war, thus do I see thee fall!--He went, and returned to the maid whom he loved; returned, but she perceived his grief.\n\nWhy that gloom, son of Oscian? what shades thy mighty soul?\n\nThough once renowned for the bow, O maid, I have lost my same. Fixed on a tree by the brook of the hill, is the shield of Gormur the brave, whom in battle I slew. I have wasted the day in vain, nor could my arrow pierce it.\n\nLet me try, son of Oscian, the skill of Dargo’s daughter. My hands were taught the bow: my father delighted in my skill.\n\nShe went. He stood behind the shield. Her arrow flew and pierced his breast.\n\nBlessed be that hand of snow; and blessed thy bow of yew! I fall resolved on death: and who but the daughter of Dargo was worthy to slay me? Lay me in the earth, my fair-one; lay me by the side of Dermid.\n\nOscur! I have the blood, the soul of the mighty Dargo. Well pleased I can meet death. My sorrow I can end thus.--She pierced her white bosom with steel. She fell; she trembled; and died.\n\nBy the brook of the hill their graves are laid; a birch’s unequal shade covers their tomb. Often on their green earthen tombs the branchy sons of the mountain feed, when mid-day is all in flames, and silence is over all the hills.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-8": { - "title": "“Fragment 8”", - "body": "By the side of a rock on the hill, beneath the aged trees, old Oscian sat on the moss; the last of the race of Fingal. Sightless are his aged eyes; his beard is waving in the wind. Dull through the leafless trees he heard the voice of the north. Sorrow revived in his soul: he began and lamented the dead.\n\nHow hast thou fallen like an oak, with all thy branches round thee! Where is Fingal the King? where is Oscur my son? where are all my race? Alas! in the earth they lie. I feel their tombs with my hands. I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou bringest back the memory of the past.\n\nThe race of Fingal stood on thy banks, like a wood in a fertile soil. Keen were their spears of steel. Hardy was he who dared to encounter their rage. Fillan the great was there. Thou Oscur wert there, my son! Fingal himself was there, strong in the grey locks of years. Full rose his sinewy limbs; and wide his shoulders spread. The unhappy met with his arm, when the pride of his wrath arose.\n\nThe son of Morny came; Gaul, the tallest of men. He stood on the hill like an oak; his voice was like the streams of the hill. Why reigneth alone, he cries, the son of the mighty Corval? Fingal is not strong to save: he is no support for the people. I am strong as a storm in the ocean; as a whirlwind on the hill. Yield, son of Corval; Fingal, yield to me.\n\nOscur stood forth to meet him; my son would meet the foe. But Fingal came in his strength, and smiled at the vaunter’s boast. They threw their arms round each other; they struggled on the plain. The earth is ploughed with their heels. Their bones crack as the boat on the ocean, when it leaps from wave to wave. Long did they toil; with night, they fell on the sounding plain; as two oaks, with their branches mingled, fall crashing from the hill. The tall son of Morny is bound; the aged overcame.\n\nFair with her locks of gold, her smooth neck, and her breasts of snow; fair, as the spirits of the hill when at silent noon they glide along the heath; fair, as the rain-bow of heaven; came Minvane the maid. Fingal! she softly saith, loose me my brother Gaul. Loose me the hope of my race, the terror of all but Fingal. Can I, replies the King, can I deny the lovely daughter of the hill? take thy brother, O Minvane, thou fairer than the snow of the north!\n\nSuch, Fingal! were thy words; but thy words I hear no more. Sightless I sit by thy tomb. I hear the wind in the wood; but no more I hear my friends. The cry of the hunter is over. The voice of war is ceased.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-9": { - "title": "“Fragment 9”", - "body": "Thou askest, fair daughter of the isles! whose memory is preserved in these tombs? The memory of Ronnan the bold, and Connan the chief of men; and of her, the fairest of maids, Rivine the lovely and the good. The wing of time is laden with care. Every moment hath woes of its own. Why seek we our grief from afar? or give our tears to those of other times? But thou commandest, and I obey, O fair daughter of the isles!\n\nConar was mighty in war. Caul was the friend of strangers. His gates were open to all; midnight darkened not on his barred door. Both lived upon the sons of the mountains. Their bow was the support of the poor.\n\nConnan was the image of Conar’s soul. Caul was renewed in Ronnan his son. Rivine the daughter of Conar was the love of Ronnan; her brother Connan was his friend. She was fair as the harvest-moon setting in the seas of Molochasquir. Her soul was settled on Ronnan; the youth was the dream of her nights.\n\nRivine, my love! says Ronnan, I go to my king in Norway. A year and a day shall bring me back. Wilt thou be true to Ronnan?\n\nRonnan! a year and a day I will spend in sorrow. Ronnan, behave like a man, and my soul shall exult in thy valour. Connan my friend, says Ronnan, wilt thou preserve Rivine thy sister? Durstan is in love with the maid; and soon shall the sea bring the stranger to our coast.\n\nRonnan, I will defend: Do thou securely go.--He went. He returned on his day. But Durstan returned before him.\n\nGive me thy daughter, Conar, says Durstan; or fear and feel my power.\n\nHe who dares attempt my sister, says Connan, must meet this edge of steel. Unerring in battle is my arm: my sword, as the lightning of heaven.\n\nRonnan the warriour came; and much he threatened Durstan.\n\nBut, faith Euran the servant of gold, Ronnan! by the gate of the north shall Durstan this night carry thy fairone away. Accursed, answers Ronnan, be this arm if death meet him not there.\n\nConnan! faith Euran, this night shall the stranger carry thy sister away. My sword shall meet him, replies Connan, and he shall lie low on earth.\n\nThe friends met by night, and they sought. Blood and sweat ran down their limbs as water on the mossy rock. Connan falls; and cries, O Durstan, be favourable to Rivine!--And is it my friend, cries Ronnan, I have slain? O Connan! I knew thee not.\n\nHe went, and he fought with Durstan. Day began to rise on the combat, when fainting they fell, and expired. Rivine came out with the morn; and--O what detains my Ronnan!--She saw him lying pale in his blood; and her brother lying pale by his side. What could she say? what could she do? her complaints were many and vain. She opened this grave for the warriours; and fell into it herself, before it was closed; like the sun snatched away in a storm.\n\nThou hast heard this tale of grief, O fair daughter of the isles! Rivine was fair as thyself: shed on her grave a tear.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-10": { - "title": "“Fragment 10”", - "body": "It is night; and I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent shrieks down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds.\n\nRise, moon! from behind thy clouds; stars of the night, appear! Lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the toil of the chace! his bow near him, unstrung; his dogs panting around him. But here I must sit alone, by the rock of the mossy stream. The stream and the wind roar; nor can I hear the voice of my love.\n\nWhy delayeth my Shalgar, why the son of the hill, his promise? Here is the rock; and the tree; and here the roaring stream. Thou promisedst with night to be here. Ah! whither is my Shalgar gone? With thee I would fly my father; with thee, my brother of pride. Our race have long been foes; but we are not foes, O Shalgar!\n\nCease a little while, O wind! stream, be thou silent a while! let my voice be heard over the heath; let my wanderer hear me. Shalgar! it is I who call. Here is the tree, and the rock. Shalgar, my love! I am here. Why delayest thou thy coming? Alas! no answer.\n\nLo! the moon appeareth. The flood is bright in the vale. The rocks are grey on the face of the hill. But I see him not on the brow; his dogs before him tell not that he is coming. Here I must sit alone.\n\nBut who are these that lie beyond me on the heath? Are they my love and my brother?--Speak to me, O my friends! they answer not. My soul is tormented with fears.--Ah! they are dead. Their swords are red from the fight. O my brother! my brother! why hast thou slain my Shalgar? why, O Shalgar! hast thou slain my brother? Dear were ye both to me! speak to me; hear my voice, sons of my love! But alas! they are silent; silent for ever! Cold are their breasts of clay!\n\nOh! from the rock of the hill; from the top of the mountain of winds, speak ye ghosts of the dead! speak, and I will not be afraid.--Whither are ye gone to rest? In what cave of the hill shall I find you?\n\nI sit in my grief. I wait for morning in my tears. Rear the tomb, ye friends of the dead; but close it not till I come. My life flieth away like a dream: why should I stay behind? Here shall I rest with my friends by the stream of the sounding rock. When night comes on the hill; when the wind is up on the heath; my ghost shall stand in the wind, and mourn the death of my friends. The hunter shall hear from his booth. He shall sear, but love my voice. For sweet shall my voice be for my friends; for pleasant were they both to me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-11": { - "title": "“Fragment 11”", - "body": "Sad! I am sad indeed: nor small my cause of woe!--Kirmor, thou hast lost no son; thou hast lost no daughter of beauty. Connar the valiant lives; and Annir the fairest of maids. The boughs of thy family flourish, O Kirmor! but Armyn is the last of his race.\n\nRise, winds of autumn, rise; blow upon the dark heath! streams of the mountains, roar! howl, ye tempests, in the trees! walk through broken clouds, O moon! show by intervals thy pale face! bring to my mind that sad night, when all my children fell; when Arindel the mighty fell; when Daura the lovely died.\n\nDaura, my daughter! thou wert fair; fair as the moon on the hills of Jura; white as the driven snow; sweet as the breathing gale. Armor renowned in war came, and sought Daura’s love; he was not long denied; fair was the hope of their friends.\n\nEarch son of Odgal repined; for his brother was slain by Armor. He came disguised like a son of the sea: fair was his skiff on the wave; white his locks of age; calm his serious brow. Fairest of women, he said, lovely daughter of Armyn! a rock not distant in the sea, bears a tree on its side; red shines the fruit afar. There Armor waiteth for Daura. I came to fetch his love. Come, fair daughter of Armyn!\n\nShe went; and she called on Armor. Nought answered, but the son of the rock. Armor, my love! my love! why tormentest thou me with fear? come, graceful son of Ardnart, come; it is Daura who calleth thee!--Earch the traitor fled laughing to the land. She lifted up her voice, and cried for her brother and her father. Arindel! Armyn! none to relieve your Daura?\n\nHer voice came over the sea. Arindel my son descended from the hill; rough in the spoils of the chace. His arrows rattled by his side; his bow was in his hand; five grey dogs attended his steps. He saw fierce Earch on the shore; he seized and bound him to an oak. Thick fly the thongs of the hide around his limbs; he loads the wind with his groans.\n\nArindel ascends the surgy deep in his boat, to bring Daura to the land. Armor came in his wrath, and let fly the grey-feathered shaft. It sung; it sunk in thy heart, O Arindel my son! for Earch the traitor thou diedst. What is thy grief, O Daura, when round thy feet is poured thy brother’s blood!\n\nThe boat is broken in twain by the waves. Armor plunges into the sea, to rescue his Daura or die. Sudden a blast from the hill comes over the waves. He sunk, and he rose no more.\n\nAlone, on the sea-beat rock, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries; nor could her father relieve her. All night I stood on the shore. All night I heard her cries. Loud was the wind; and the rain beat hard on the side of the mountain. Before morning appeared, her voice was weak. It died away, like the evening-breeze among the grass of the rocks. Spent with grief she expired. O lay me soon by her side.\n\nWhen the storms of the mountain come; when the north lifts the waves on high; I sit by the founding shore, and look on the fatal rock. Often by the setting moon I see the ghosts of my children. Indistinct, they walk in mournful conference together. Will none of you speak to me?--But they do not regard their father.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-12": { - "title": "“Fragment 12”", - "body": "> _Ryno:_\n\nThe wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day. The clouds are divided in heaven. Over the green hills flies the inconstant sun. Red through the stony vale comes down the stream of the hill. Sweet are thy murmurs, O stream! but more sweet is the voice I hear. It is the voice of Alpin the son of the song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, and red his tearful, eye. Alpin, thou son of the song, why alone on the silent hill? why complainest thou, as a blast in the wood; as a wave on the lonely shore?\n\n\n> _Alpin:_\n\nMy tears, O Ryno! are for the dead; my voice, for the inhabitants of the grave. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the plain. But thou shalt fall like Morar; and the mourner shalt sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in the hall, unstrung.\n\nThou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the hill; terrible as a meteor of fire. Thy wrath was as the storm of December. Thy sword in battle, as lightning in the field. Thy voice was like a stream after rain; like thunder on distant hills. Many fell by thy arm; they were consumed in the flames of thy wrath.\n\nBut when thou returnedst from war, how peaceful was thy brow! Thy face was like the sun after rain; like the moon in the silence of night; calm as the breast of the lake when the loud wind is laid.\n\nNarrow is thy dwelling now; dark the place of thine abode. With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before! Four stones with their heads of moss are the only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass which whistles in the wind, mark to the hunter’s eye the grave of the mighty Morar. Morar! thou art low indeed. Thou hast no mother to mourn thee; no maid with her tears of love. Dead is she that brought thee forth. Fallen is the daughter of Morglan.\n\nWho on his staff is this? who is this, whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step?--It is thy father, O Morar! the father of none but thee. He heard of thy fame in battle; he heard of foes dispersed. He heard of Morar’s fame; why did he not hear of his wound? Weep, thou father of Morar! weep; but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead; low their pillow of dust. No more shall he hear thy voice; no more shall he awake at thy call. When shall it be morn in the grave, to bid the slumberer awake?\n\nFarewell, thou bravest of men! thou conqueror in the field! but the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee; they shall hear of the fallen Morar.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-13": { - "title": "“Fragment 13”", - "body": "Cuchlaid sat by the wall; by the tree of the rustling leaf. His spear leaned against the mossy rock. His shield lay by him on the grass. Whilst he thought on the mighty Carbre whom he slew in battle, the scout of the ocean came, Moran the son of Fithil.\n\nRise, Cuchulaid, rise! I see the ships of Garve. Many are the foe, Cuchulaid; many the sons of Lochlyn.\n\nMoran! thou ever tremblest; thy fears increase the foe. They are the ships of the Desert of hills arrived to assist Cuchulaid.\n\nI saw their chief, says Moran, tall as a rock of ice. His spear is like that fir; his shield like the rising moon. He sat upon a rock on the shore, as a grey cloud upon the hill. Many, mighty man! I said, many are our heroes; Garve, well art thou named, many are the sons of our king.\n\nHe answered like a wave on the rock; who is like me here? The valiant live not with me; they go to the earth from my hand. The king of the Desert of hills alone can fight with Garve. Once we wrestled on the hill. Our heels overturned the wood. Rocks fell from their place, and rivulets changed their course. Three days we strove together; heroes stood at a distance, and feared. On the fourth, the King saith that I fell; but Garve saith, he stood. Let Cuchulaid yield to him that is strong as a storm.\n\nNo. I will never yield to man. Cuchulaid will conquer or die. Go, Moran, take my spear; strike the shield of Caithbait which hangs before the gate. It never rings in peace. My heroes shall hear on the hill.--", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-14": { - "title": "“Fragment 14”", - "body": "> _Duchommar:_\n\nMorna, thou fairest of women, daughter of Cormac-Carbre! why in the circle of stones, in the cave of the rock, alone? The stream murmureth hoarsely. The blast groaneth in the aged tree. The lake is troubled before thee. Dark are the clouds of the sky. But thou art like snow on the heath. Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold on the top of Cromleach. Thy breasts like two smooth rocks on the hill which is seen from the stream of Brannuin. Thy arms, as two white pillars in the hall of Fingal.\n\n\n> _Morna:_\n\nWhence the son of Mugruch, Duchommar the most gloomy of men? Dark are thy brows of terror. Red thy rolling eyes. Does Garve appear on the sea? What of the foe, Duchommar?\n\n\n> _Duchommar:_\n\nFrom the hill I return, O Morna, from the hill of the flying deer. Three have I slain with my bow; three with my panting dogs. Daughter of Cormac-Carbre, I love thee as my soul. I have slain a deer for thee. High was his branchy head; and fleet his feet of wind.\n\n\n> _Morna:_\n\nGloomy son of Mugruch, Duchommar! I love thee not: hard is thy heart of rock; dark thy terrible brow. But Cadmor the son of Tarman, thou art the love of Morna! thou art like a sunbeam on the hill, in the day of the gloomy storm. Sawest thou the son of Tarman, lovely on the hill of the chace? Here the daughter of Cormac-Carbre waiteth the coming of Cadmor.\n\n\n> _Duchommar:_\n\nAnd long shall Morna wait. His blood is on my sword. I met him by the mossy stone, by the oak of the noisy stream. He fought; but I slew him; his blood is on my sword. High on the hill I will raise his tomb, daughter of Cormac-Carbre. But love thou the son of Mugruch; his arm is strong as a storm.\n\n\n> _Morna:_\n\nAnd is the son of Tarman fallen; the youth with the breast of snow! the first in the chase of the hill; the foe of the sons of the ocean!--Duchommar, thou art gloomy indeed; cruel is thy arm to me.--But give me that sword, son of Mugruch; I love the blood of Cadmor.\n\n[He gives her the sword, with which she instantly stabs him.]\n\n\n> _Duchommar:_\n\nDaughter of Cormac-Carbre, thou hast pierced Duchommar! the sword is cold in my breast; thou hast killed the son of Mugruch. Give me to Moinic the maid; for much she loved Duchommar. My tomb she will raise on the hill; the hunter shall see it, and praise me.--But draw the sword from my side, Morna; I feel it cold.--\n\n[Upon her coming near him, he stabs her. As she fell, she plucked a stone from the side of the cave, and placed it betwixt them, that his blood might not be mingled with hers.]", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "fragment-15": { - "title": "“Fragment 15”", - "body": "Where is Gealchossa my love, the daughter of Tuathal-Teachvar? I left her in the hall of the plain, when I fought with the hairy Ulfadha. Return soon, she said, O Lamderg! for here I wait in sorrow. Her white breast rose with sighs; her cheek was wet with tears. But she cometh not to meet Lamderg; or sooth his soul after battle. Silent is the hall of joy; I hear not the voice of the singer. Brann does not shake his chains at the gate, glad at the coming of his master. Where is Gealchossa my love, the daughter of Tuathal-Teachvar?\n\nLamderg! says Firchios son of Aydon, Gealchossa may be on the hill; she and her chosen maids pursuing the flying deer.\n\nFirchios! no noise I hear. No sound in the wood of the hill. No deer fly in my sight; no panting dog pursueth. I see not Gealchossa my love; fair as the full moon setting on the hills of Cromleach. Go, Firchios! go to Allad, the grey-haired son of the rock. He liveth in the circle of stones; he may tell of Gealchossa.\n\nAllad! saith Firchios, thou who dwellest in the rock; thou who tremblest alone; what saw thine eyes of age?\n\nI saw, answered Allad the old, Ullin the son of Carbre: He came like a cloud from the hill; he hummed a surly song as he came, like a storm in leafless wood. He entered the hall of the plain. Lamderg, he cried, most dreadful of men! fight, or yield to Ullin. Lamderg, replied Gealchossa, Lamderg is not here: he fights the hairy Ulfadha; mighty man, he is not here. But Lamderg never yields; he will fight the son of Carbre. Lovely art thou, O daughter of Tuathal-Teachvar! said Ullin. I carry thee to the house of Carbre; the valiant shall have Gealchossa. Three days from the top of Cromleach will I call Lamderg to fight. The fourth, you belong to Ullin, if Lamderg die, or fly my sword.\n\nAllad! peace to thy dreams!--sound the horn, Firchios!--Ullin may hear, and meet me on the top of Cromleach.\n\nLamderg rushed on like a storm. On his spear he leaped over rivers. Few were his strides up the hill. The rocks fly back from his heels; loud crashing they bound to the plain. His armour, his buckler rung. He hummed a surly song, like the noise of the falling stream. Dark as a cloud he stood above; his arms, like meteors, shone. From the summit of the hill, he rolled a rock. Ullin heard in the hall of Carbre.--", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "lathmon-a-poem": { - "title": "“Lathmon: A Poem”", - "body": "Selma, thy halls are silent. There is no sound in the woods of Morven. The wave tumbles alone on the coast. The silent beam of the sun is on the field. The daughters of Morven come forth, like the bow of the shower; they look towards green Ullin for the white sails of the king. He had promised to return, but the winds of the north arose.\n\nWho pours from the eastern hill, like a stream of darkness? It is the host of Lathmon. He has heard of the absence of Fingal. He trusts in the wind of the north. His soul brightens with joy. Why dost thou come, Lathmon? The mighty are not in Selma. Why comest thou with thy forward spear? Will the daughters of Morven fight? But stop, O mighty stream, in thy course! Does not Lathmon behold these sails? Why dost thou vanish, Lathmon, like the mist of the lake? But the squally storm is behind thee; Fingal pursues thy steps!\n\nThe king of Morven started from sleep, as we rolled on the dark-blue wave. He stretched his hand to his spear, and his heroes rose around. We knew that he had seen his fathers, for they often descended to his dreams, when the sword of the foe rose over the land; and the battle darkened before us.\n\nWhither hast thou fled, O wind, said the king of Morven? Dost thou rustle in the chambers of the south, and pursue the shower in other lands? Why dost thou not come to my sails? to the blue face of my seas? The foe is in the land of Morven, and the king is absent. But let each bind on his mail, and each assume his shield. Stretch every spear over the wave; let every sword be unsheathed. Lathmon is before us with his host: he that fled from Fingal on the plains of Lona. But he returns, like a collected stream, and his roar is between our hills.\n\nSuch were the words of Fingal. We rushed into Carmona’s bay. Ossian ascended the hill; and thrice struck his bossy shield. The rock of Morven replied; and the bounding roes came forth. The foes were troubled in my presence: and collected their darkened host; for I stood, like a cloud on the hill, rejoicing in the arma of my youth.\n\nMorni sat beneath a tree, at the roaring waters of Strumon: his locks of age are gray: he leans forward on his staff; young Gaul is near the hero, hearing the battles of his youth. Often did he rise, in the fire of his soul, at the mighty deeds of Morni.\n\nThe aged heard the sound of Ossian’s shield: he knew the sign of battle. He started at once from his place. His gray hair parted on his back. He remembers the actions of other years. My son, he said to fair haired Gaul, I hear the sound of battle. The king of Morven is returned, the sign of war is heard. Go to the halls of Strumon, and bring his arms to Morni. Bring the arms which my father wore in his age, for my arm begins to fail. Take thou thy armour, O Gaul; and rush to the first of thy battles. Let thine arm reach to the renown of thy fathers. Be thy course in the field, like the eagle’s wing. Why shouldst thou fear death, my son! the valiant fall with fame; their shields turn the dark stream of danger away, and renown dwells on their gray hairs. Dost thou not see, O Gaul, how the steps of my age are honoured? Morni moves forth, and the young meet him, with reverence, and turn their eyes, with silent joy, on his course. But I never fled from danger, my son! my sword lightened through the darkness of battle. The stranger melted before me; the mighty were blasted in my presence.\n\nGaul brought the arms to Morni: the aged warrior covered himself with steel. He took the spear in his hand, which was often stained with the blood of the valiant. He came towards Fingal, his son attended his steps. The son of Comhal rejoiced over the warrior, when he came in the locks of his age.\n\nKing of the roaring Strumon! said the rising joy of Fingal; do I behold thee in arms, after thy strength has failed? Often has Morni shone in battles, like the beam of the rising sun; when he disperses the storms of the hill, and brings peace to the glittering fields. But why didst thou not rest in thine age? Thy renown is in the song. The people behold thee, and bless the departure of mighty Morni. Why didst thou not rest in thine age? For the foe will vanish before Fingal.\n\nSon of Comhal, replied the chief, the strength of Morni’s arm has failed. I attempt to draw the sword of my youth, but it remains in its place. I throw the spear, but it falls short of the mark; and I feel the weight of my shield. We decay, like the grass of the mountain, and our strength returns no more. I have a son, O Fingal, his soul has delighted in the actions of Morni’s youth; but his sword has not been lifted against the foe, neither has his fame begun. I come with him to battle; to direct his arm. His renown will be a sun to my soul, in the dark hour of my departure. O that the name of Morni were forgot among the people! that the heroes would only say, “Behold the father of Gaul!”\n\nKing of Strumon, Fingal replied, Gaul shall lift the sword in battle. But he shall lift it before Fingal; my arm shall defend his youth. But rest thou in the halls of Selma; and hear of our renown. Bid the harp be strung; and the voice of the bard arise, that those who fall may rejoice in their fame; and the soul of Morni brighten with gladness.--Ossian! thou hast sought in battles: the blood of strangers is on thy spear: let thy course be with Gaul in the strife; but depart not from the side of Fingal; lest the foe find you alone, and your fame fail at once.\n\nI Saw Gaul in his arms, and my soul was mixed with his: for the fire of the battle was in his eyes! he looked to the soe with joy. We spoke the words of friendship in secret; and the lightning of our swords poured together; for we drew them behind the wood, and tried the strength of our arms on the empty air.\n\nNight came down on Morven. Fingal sat at the beam of the oak. Morni sat by his side with all his gray waving locks. Their discourse is of other times, and the actions of their fathers. Three bards, at times, touched the harp; and Ullin was near with his song. He sung of the mighty Comhal; but darkness gathered on Morni’s brow. He rolled his red eye on Ullin; and the song of the bard ceased. Fingal observed the aged hero, and he mildly spoke.\n\nChief of Strumon, why that darkness? Let the days of other years be forgot. Our fathers contended in battle; but we meet together, at the feast. Our swords are turned on the foes, and they melt before us on the field. Let the days of our fathers be forgot, king of mossy Strumon.\n\nKing of Morven, replied the chief, I remember thy father with joy. He was terrible in battle; the rage of the chief was deadly. My eyes were full of tears, when the king of heroes sell. The valiant fall, O Fingal, and the feeble remain on the hills. How many heroes have passed away, in the days of Morni! And I did not shun the battle; neither did I fly from the strife of the valiant.\n\nNow let the friends of Fingal rest; for the night is around; that they may rise, with strength, to battle against car-borne Lathmon. I hear the sound of his host, like thunder heard on a distant heath. Ossian! and fair-haired Gaul! ye are swift in the race. Observe the foes of Fingal from that woody hill. But approach them not, your fathers are not near to shield you. Let not your fame fall at once. The valour of youth may fail.\n\nWe heard the words of the chief with joy, and moved in the clang of our arms. Our steps are on the woody hill. Heaven burns with all its stars. The meteors of death fly over the field. The distant noise of the foe reached our ears. It was then Gaul spoke, in his valour; his hand half-unsheathed the sword.\n\nSon of Fingal, he said, why burns the soul of Gaul? My heart beats high. My steps are disordered; and my hand trembles on my sword. When I look towards the foe, my soul lightens before me, and I see their sleeping host. Tremble thus the souls of the valiant in battles of the spear?--How would the soul of Morni rise if we should rush on the foe! Our renown would grow in the song; and our steps be stately in the eyes of the brave.\n\nSon of Morni, I replied, my soul delights in battle. I delight to shine in battle alone, and to give my name to the bards. But what if the foe should prevail; shall I behold the eyes of the king? They are terrible in his displeasure, and like the flames of death.--But I will not behold them in his wrath. Ossian shall prevail or fall. But shall the fame of the vanquished rise?--They pass away like a shadow. But the fame of Ossian shall rise. His deeds shall be like his fathers. Let us rush in our arms; son of Morni, let us rush to battle. Gaul! if thou shalt return, go to Selma’s lofty wall. Tell to Evirallin that I fell with fame; carry this sword to Branno’s daughter. Let her give it to Oscar, when the years of his youth shall arise.\n\nSon of Fingal, Gaul replied with a sigh; will I return after Ossian is low!--What would my father say, and Fingal king of men? The feeble would turn their eyes and say, “Behold the mighty Gaul who left his friend in his blood!”Ye shall not behold me, ye feeble, but in the midst of my renown. Ossian! I have heard from my father the mighty deeds of heroes; their mighty deeds when alone; for the soul increases in danger.\n\nSon of Morni, I replied and strode before him on the heath, our fathers shall praise our valour, when they mourn our fall. A beam of gladness shall rise on their souls, when their eyes are full of tears. They will say, “Our sons have not fallen like the grass of the field, for they spread death around them.”--But why should we think of the narrow house? The sword defends the valiant. But death pursues the flight of the feeble; and their renown is not heard.\n\nWe rushed forward through night; and came to the roar of a stream which bent its blue course round the foe, through trees that ecchoed to its noise; we came to the bank of the stream, and saw the sleeping host. Their fires were decayed on the plain; and the lonely steps of their scouts were distant far. I stretched my spear before me to support my steps over the stream. But Gaul took my hand, and spoke the words of the valiant.\n\nShall the son of Fingal rush on a sleeping foe? Shall he come like a blast by night when it overturns the young trees in secret? Fingal did not thus receive his fame, nor dwells renown on the gray hairs of Morni, for actions like these. Strike, Ossian, strike the shield of battle, and let their thousands rise. Let them meet Gaul in his first battle, that he may try the strength of his arm.\n\nMy soul rejoiced over the warrior, and my bursting tears descended. And the foe shall meet Gaul, I said: the fame of Morni’s son shall arise. But rush not too far, my hero: let the gleam of thy steel be near to Ossian. Let our hands join in slaughter.--Gaul! dost thou not behold that rock? Its gray side dimly gleams to the stars. If the foe shall prevail, let our back be towards the rock. Then shall they fear to approach our spears; for death is in our hands.\n\nI Struck thrice my ecchoing shield. The starting foe arose. We rushed on in the sound of our arms. Their crouded steps fly over the heath; for they thought that the mighty Fingal came; and the strength of their arms withered away. The sound of their flight was like that of flame, when it rushes thro’ the blasted groves.\n\nIt was then the spear of Gaul flew in its strength; it was then his sword arose. Cremor fell; and mighty Leth. Dunthormo struggled in his blood. The steel rushed through Crotho’s side, as bent, he rose on his spear; the black stream poured from the wound, and hissed on the half-extinguished oak. Cathmin saw the steps of the hero behind him, and ascended a blasted tree; but the spear pierced him from behind. Shrieking, panting, he fell; moss and withered branches pursue his fall, and strew the blue arms of Gaul.\n\nSuch were thy deeds, son of Morni, in the first of thy battles. Nor slept the sword by thy side, thou last of Fingal’s race! Ossian rushed forward in his strength, and the people fell before him; as the grass by the staff of the boy, when he whistles along the field, and the gray beard of the thistle falls. But careless the youth moves on; his steps are towards the desart.\n\nGray morning rose around us, the winding streams are bright along the heath. The foe gathered on a hill; and the rage of Lathmon rose. He bent the red eye of his wrath: he is silent in his rising grief. He often struck his bossy shield; and his steps are unequal on the heath. I saw the distant darkness of the hero, and I spoke to Morni’s son.\n\nCar-borne chief of Strumon, dost thou behold the foe? They gather on the hill in their wrath. Let our steps be towards the king. He shall rise in his strength, and the host of Lathmon vanish. Our fame is around us, warrior, the eyes of the aged will rejoice. But let us fly, son of Morni, Lathmon descends the hill.\n\nThen let our steps be slow, replied the fair--haired Gaul; lest the foe say, with a smile, “Behold the warriors of night, they are, like ghosts, terrible in darkness, but they melt away before the beam of the east.”Ossian, take the shield of Gormar who fell beneath thy spear, that the aged heroes may rejoice, when they shall behold the actions of their sons.\n\nSuch were our words on the plain, when Sulmath came to car-borne Lathmon: Sulmath chief of Dutha at the dark-rolling stream of Duvranna. Why dost thou not rush, son of Nuäth, with a thousand of thy heroes? Why dost thou not descend with thy host, before the warriors fly? Their blue arms are beaming to the rising light, and their steps are before us on the heath.\n\nSon of the feeble hand, said Lathmon, shall my host descend! They are but two, son of Dutha, and shall a thousand lift their steel! Nuäth would mourn, in his hall, for the departure of his fame. His eyes would turn from Lathmon, when the tread of his feet approached.\n\nGo thou to the heroes, chief of Dutha, for I behold the stately steps of Ossian. His fame is worthy of my steel; let him fight with Lathmon.\n\nThe noble Sulmath came. I rejoiced in the words of the king. I raised the shield on my arm; and Gaul placed in my hand the sword of Morni. We returned to the murmuring stream; Lathmon came in his strength. His dark host rolled, like the clouds, behind him: but the son of Nuäth was bright in his steel.\n\nSon of Fingal, said the hero, thy fame has grown on our fall. How many lie there of my people by thy hand, thou king of men! Lift now thy spear against Lathmon; and lay the son of Nuäth low. Lay him low among his people, or thou thyself must fall. It shall never be told in my halls that my warriors fell in my presence; that they fell in the presence of Lathmon when his sword rested by his side: the blue eyes of Cutha would roll in tears, and her steps be lonely in the vales of Dunlathmon.\n\nNeither shall it be told, I replied, that the son of Fingal fled. Were his steps covered with darkness, yet would not Ossian fly; his soul would meet him and say, “Does the bard of Selma fear the foe?”No: he does not fear the foe. His joy is in the midst of battle.\n\nLathmon came on with his spear, and pierced the shield of Ossian. I felt the cold steel at my side; and drew the swored of Morni; I cut the spear in twain; the bright point fell glittering on the ground. The son of Nuäth burnt in his wrath, and lifted high his sounding shield. His dark eyes rolled above it, as bending forward, it shone like a gate of brass. But Ossian’s spear pierced the brightness of its bosses, and sunk in a tree that rose behind. The shield hung on the quivering lance! but Lathmon still advanced. Gaul foresaw the fall of the chief, and stretched his buckler before my sword; when it descended, in a stream of light over the king of Dunlathmon.\n\nLathmon beheld the son of Morni, and the tear started from his eye. He threw the sword of his fathers on the ground, and spoke the words of the valiant. Why should Lathmon fight against the first of mortal men? Your souls are beams from heaven; your swords the flames of death. Who can equal the renown of the heroes, whose actions are so great in youth! O that ye were in the halls of Nuäth, in the green dwelling of Lathmon! then would my father say, that his son did not yield to the feeble.--But who comes, a mighty stream, along the ecchoing heath? the little hills are troubled before him, and a thousand ghosts are on the beams of his steel; the ghosts of those who are to fall by the arm of the king of resounding Morven.--Happy art thou, O Fingal, thy sons shall fight thy battles; they go forth before thee; and they return with the steps of their renown.\n\nFingal came, in his mildness, rejoicing in secret over the actions of his son. Morni’s face brightened with gladness, and his aged eyes look faintly through the tears of joy. We came to the halls of Selma, and sat round the feast of shells. The maids of the song came into our presence, and the mildly blushing Evirallin. Her dark hair spreads on her neck of snow, her eye rolled in secret on Ossian; she touched the harp of music, and we blessed the daughter of Branno.\n\nFingal rose in his place, and spoke to Dunlathmon’s battling king. The sword of Trenmor trembled by his side, as he lifted up his mighty arm. Son of Nuäth, he said, why dost thou search for fame in Morven? We are not of the race of the feeble; nor do our swords gleam over the weak. When did we come to Dunlathmon, with the sound of war? Fingal does not delight in battle, though his arm is strong. My renown grows on the fall of the haughty. The lightning of my steel pours on the proud in arms. The battle comes; and the tombs of the valiant rise; the tombs of my people rise, O my fathers! and I at last must remain alone. But I will remain renowned, and the departure of my soul shall be one stream of light. Lathmon! retire to thy place. Turn thy battles to other lands. The race of Morven are renowned, and their foes are the sons of the unhappy.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "oithona-a-poem": { - "title": "“Oithóna: A Poem”", - "body": "Darkness dwells around Dunlathmon, though the moon shews half her face on the hill. The daughter of night turns her eyes away; for she beholds the grief that is coming.--The son of Morni is on the plain; but there is no sound in the hall. No long-streaming beam of light comes trembling through the gloom. The voice of Oithona is not heard amidst the noise of the streams of Duvranna.--\n\nWhither art thou gone in thy beauty, dark-haired daughter of Nuäth? Lathmon is in the field of the valiant, but thou didst promise to remain in the hall; thou didst promise to remain in the hall till the son of Morni returned. Till he returned from Strumon, to the maid of his love. The tear was on thy cheek at his departure; the sigh rose in secret in thy breast. But thou dost not come to meet him, with songs, with the lightly-trembling sound of the harp.--\n\nSuch were the words of Gaul, when he came to Dunlathmon’s towers. The gates were open and dark. The winds were blustering in the hall. The trees strowed the threshold with leaves; and the murmur of night is abroad.--Sad and silent, at a rock, the son of Morni sat: his soul trembled for the maid; but he knew not whither to turn his course. The son of Leth stood at a distance, and heard the winds in his bushy hair. But he did not raise his voice, for he saw the sorrow of Gaul.\n\nSleep descended on the heroes. The visions of night arose. Oithona stood in a dream, before the eyes of Morni’s son. Her dark hair was loose and disordered: her lovely eye rolled in tears. Blood stained her snowy arm. The robe half hid the wound of her breast. She stood over the chief, and her voice was heard.\n\nSleeps the son of Morni, he that was lovely in the eyes of Oithona? Sleeps Gaul at the distant rock, and the daughter of Nuäth low? The sea rolls round the dark isle of Tromáthon; I sit in my tears in the cave. Nor do I sit alone, O Gaul, the dark chief of Cuthal is there. He is there in the rage of his love.--And what can Oithona do?\n\nA Rougher blast rushed through the oak. The dream of night departed. Gaul took his aspen spear; he stood in the rage of wrath. Often did his eyes turn to the east, and accuse the lagging light.--At length the morning came forth. The hero lifted up the sail. The winds came rustling from the hill; and he bounded on the waves of the deep.--On the third day arose Tromathon,, like a blue shield in the midst of the sea. The white wave roared against its rocks; sad Oithona sat on the coast. She looked on the rolling waters, and her tears descend.--But when she saw Gaul in his arms, she started and turned her eyes away. Her lovely cheek is bent and red; her white arm trembles by her side.--Thrice she strove to fly from his presence; but her steps failed her as she went.\n\nDaughter of Nuäth, said the hero, why dost thou fly from Gaul? Do my eyes send forth the flame of death? Or darkens hatred in my soul? Thou art to me the beam of the east rising in a land unknown. But thou coverest thy face with sadness, daughter of high Dunlathmon! Is the foe of Oithona near? My soul burns to meet him in battle. The sword trembles on the side of Gaul, and longs to glitter in his hand.--Speak, daughter of Nuäth, dost thou not behold my tears?\n\nCar-borne chief of Strumon, replied the sighing maid, why comest thou over the dark-blue wave to Nuäth’s mournful daughter? Why did I not pass away in secret, like the flower of the rock, that lifts its fair head unseen, and strows its withered leaves on the blast? Why didst thou come, O Gaul, to hear my departing sigh? I pass away in my youth; and my name shall not be heard. Or it will be heard with sorrow, and the tears of Nuäth will fall. Thou wilt be sad, son of Morni, for the fallen fame of Oithona. But she shall sleep in the narrow tomb, far from the voice of the mourner.--Why didst thou come, chief of Strumon, to the sea-beat rocks of Tromathon.\n\nI Came to meet thy foes, daughter of car-borne Nuäth! the death of Cuthal’s chief darkens before me; or Morni’s son shall fall.--Oithona! when Gaul is low, raise my tomb on that oozy rock; and when the dark-bounding ship shall pass, call the sons of the sea; call them, and give this sword, that they may carry it to Morni’s hall; that the grey-haired hero may cease to look towards the desart for the return of his son.\n\nAnd shall the daughter of Nuäth live, she replied with a bursting sigh? Shall I live in Tromáthon, and the son of Morni low? My heart is not of that rock; nor my soul careless as that sea, which lifts its blue waves to every wind, and rolls beneath the storm. The blast which shall lay thee low, shall spread the branches of Oithona on earth. We shall wither together, son of car-borne Morni!--The narrow house is pleasant to me, and the gray stone of the dead: for never more will I leave thy rocks, sea-surrounded Tromáthon!--Night came on with her clouds, after the departure of Lathmon, when he went to the wars of his fathers, to the moss-covered rock of Duthórmoth; night came on, and I sat in the hall, at the beam of the oak. The wind was abroad in the trees. I heard the sound of arms. Joy rose in my face; for I thought of thy return. It was the chief of Cuthal, the red-haired strength of Dunrommath. His eyes rolled in fire: the blood of my people was on his sword. They who defended Oithona fell by the gloomy chief.--What could I do? My arm was weak; it could not lift the spear. He took me in my grief, amidst my tears he raised the sail. He feared the returning strength of Lathmon, the brother of unhappy Oithona.--But behold, he comes with his people! the dark wave is divided before him!--Whither wilt thou turn thy steps, son of Morni? Many are the warriors of Dunrommath!\n\nMy steps never turned from battle, replied the hero, as he unsheathed his sword; and will I begin to fear, Oithona, when thy foes are near? Go to thy cave, daughter of Nuath, till our battle cease. Son of Leth, bring the bows of our fathers; and the sounding quiver of Morni. Let our three warriors bend the yew. Our selves will lift the spear. They are an host on the rock; but our souls are strong.\n\nThe daughter of Nuäth went to the cave: a troubled joy rose on her mind, like the red path of the lightning on a stormy cloud.--Her soul was resolved, and the tear was dried from her wildlylooking eye.--Dunrommath slowly approached; for he saw the son of Morni. Contempt contracted his face, a smile is on his dark-brown cheek; his red eye rolled, half-conceal’d, beneath his shaggy brows.\n\nWhence are the sons of the sea, begun the gloomy chief? Have the winds driven you to the rocks of Tromáthon? Or come you in search of the white-handed daughter of Nuäth? The sons of the unhappy, ye feeble men, come to the hand of Dunrommath. His eye spares not the weak; and he delights in the blood of strangers. Oithona is a beam of light, and the chief of Cuthal enjoys it in secret; wouldst thou come on its loveliness like a cloud, son of the feeble hand!--Thou mayst come, but shalt thou return to the halls of thy fathers?\n\nDost thou not know me, said Gaul, red-haired chief of Cuthal? Thy feet were swift on the heath, in the battle of car-borne Lathmon; when the sword of Morni’s son pursued his host, in Morven’s woody land. Dunrommath! thy words are mighty, for thy warriors gather behind thee. But do I fear them, son of pride? I am not of the race of the feeble.\n\nGaul advanced in his arms; Dunrommath shrunk behind his people. But the spear of Gaul pierced the gloomy chief, and his sword lopped off his head, as it bended in death.--The son of Morni shook it thrice by the lock; the warriors of Dunrommath fled. The arrows of Morven pursued them: ten fell on the mossy rocks. The rest lift the sounding sail, and bound on the ecchoing deep.\n\nGaul advanced towards the cave of Oithona. He beheld a youth leaning against a rock. An arrow had pierced his side; and his eye rolled faintly beneath his helmet.--The soul of Morni’s son is sad, he came and spoke the words of peace.\n\nCan the hand of Gaul heal thee, youth of the mournful brow? I have searched for the herbs of the mountains; I have gathered them on the secret banks of their streams. My hand has closed the wound of the valiant, and their eyes have blessed the son of Morni. Where dwelt thy fathers, warrior? Were they of the sons of the mighty? Sadness shall come, like night, on thy native streams; for thou art fallen in thy youth.--\n\nMy fathers, replied the stranger, were of the sons of the mighty; but they shall not be sad; for my fame is departed like morning mist. High walls rise on the banks of Duvranna; and see their mossy towers in the stream; a rock ascends behind them with its bending firs. Thou mayst behold it far distant. There my brother dwells. He is renowned in battle: give him this glittering helmet.\n\nThe helmet fell from the hand of Gaul; for it was the wounded Oithona. She had armed herself in the cave, and came in search of death. Her heavy eyes are half closed; the blood pours from her side.--\n\nSon of Morni, she said, prepare the narrow tomb. Sleep comes, like a cloud, on my soul. The eyes of Oithona are dim. O had I dwelt at Duvranna, in the bright beam of my fame! then had my years come on with joy; and the virgins would bless my steps. But I fall in youth, son of Morni, and my father shall blush in his hall.--\n\nShe fell pale on the rock of Tromáthon. The mournful hero raised her tomb.--He came to Morven; but we saw the darkness of his soul. Ossian took the harp in the praise of Oithona. The brightness of the face of Gaul returned. But his sigh rose, at times, in the midst of his friends, like blasts that shake their unfrequent wings, after the stormy winds are laid.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "the-songs-of-selma": { - "title": "“The Songs of Selma”", - "body": "Star of the falling night! fair is thy light in the west! thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud: thy steps are stately on thy hill. What dost thou behold in the plain? The stormy winds are laid. The murmur of the torrent comes from afar. Roaring waves climb the distant rock. The flies of evening are on their feeble wings, and the hum of their course is on the field. What dost thou behold, fair light? But thou dost smile and depart. The waves come with joy around thee, and bathe thy lovely hair. Farewel, thou silent beam!--Let the light of Ossian’s soul arise.\n\nAnd it does arise in its strength! I behold my departed friends. Their gathering is on Lora, as in the days that are past.--Fingal comes like a watry column of mist; his heroes are around. And see the bards of the song, gray-haired Ullin; stately Ryno; Alpin, with the tuneful voice, and the soft complaint of Minona!--How are ye changed, my friends, since the days of Selma’s feast! when we contended, like the gales of the spring, that, flying over the hill, by turns bend the feebly-whistling grafs.\n\nMinona came sorth in her beauty; with down-cast look and tearful eye; her hair flew slowly on the blast that rushed unfrequent from the hill.--The souls of the heroes were sad when she raised the tuneful voice; for often had they seen the grave of Salgar, and the dark dwelling of white-bosomed Colma. Colma left alone on the hill, with all her voice of music! Salgar promised to come: but the night descended round.--Hear the voice of Colma, when she sat alone on the hill!\n\n> _Colma:_\nIt is night;--I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. The torrent shrieks down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds.\n\nRise, moon! from behind thy clouds; stars of the night appear! Lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the toil of the chace! his bow near him, unstrung; his dogs panting around him. But here I must sit alone, by the rock of the mossy stream. The stream and the wind roar; nor can I hear the voice of my love.\n\nWhy delays my Salgar, why the son of the hill, his promise? Here is the rock, and the tree; and here the roaring stream. Thou didst promise with night to be here. Ah! whither is my Salgar gone? With thee I would fly, my father; with thee, my brother of pride. Our race have long been soes; but we are not foes, O Salgar!\n\nCease a little while, O wind! stream, be thou silent a while! let my voice be heard over the heath; let my wanderer hear me. Salgar! it is I who call. Here is the tree, and the rock. Salgar, my love! I am here. Why delayest thou thy coming?\n\nLo! the moon appeareth. The flood is bright in the vale. The rocks are grey on the face of the hill. But I see him not on the brow; his dogs before him tell not that he is coming. Here I must sit alone.\n\nBut who are these that lie beyond me on the heath? Are they my love and my brother?--Speak to me, O my friends! they answer not. My soul is tormented with fears.--Ah! they are dead. Their swords are red from the fight. O my brother! my brother! why hast thou slain my Salgar? why, O Salgar! hast thou slain my brother? Dear were ye both to me! what shall I say in your praise? Thou wert fair on the hill among thousands; he was terrible in fight. Speak to me; hear my voice, sons of my-love! But alas! they are silent; silent for ever! Cold are their breasts of clay!\n\nOh! from the rock of the hill; from the top of the windy mountain, speak ye ghosts of the dead! speak, I will not be afraid.--Whither are ye gone to rest? In what cave of the hill shall I find you? No feeble voice is on the wind: no answer half-drowned in the storms of the hill.\n\nI Sit in my grief. I wait for morning in my tears. Rear the tomb, ye friends of the dead; but close it not till Colma come. My life flies away like a dream: why should I stay behind? Here shall I rest with my friends, by the stream of the sounding rock. When night comes on the hill; when the wind is on the heath; my ghost shall stand in the wind, and mourn the death of my friends. The hunter shall hear from his booth. He shall fear but love my voice. For sweet shall my voice be for my friends; for pleasant were they both to me.\n\nSuch was thy song, Minona softly-blushing maid of Torman. Our tears descended for Colma, and our souls were sad.--Ullin came with the harp, and gave the song of Alpin.--The voice of Alpin was pleasant: the soul of Ryno was a beam of fire. But they had rested in the narrow house: and their voice was not heard in Selma.--Ullin had returned one day from the chace, before the heroes fell. He heard their strife on the hill; their song was soft but sad. They mourned the fall of Morar, first of mortal men. His soul was like the soul of Fingal; his sword like the sword of Oscar.--But he fell, and his father mourned: his sister’s eyes were full of tears.--Minona’s eyes were full of tears, the sister of car-borne Morar. She retired from the song of Ullin, like the moon in the west, when she foresees the shower, and hides her fair head in a cloud.--I touched the harp, with Ullin; the song of mourning rose.\n\n> _Ryno:_\nThe wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day. The clouds are divided in heaven. Over the green hills flies the inconstant sun. Red through the stony vale comes down the stream of the hill. Sweet are thy murmurs, O stream! but more sweet is the voice I hear. It is the voice of Alpin, the son of the song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, and red his tearful eye. Alpin, thou son of the song, why alone on the silent hill? why complainest thou, as a blast in the wood; as a wave on the lonely shore?\n\n> _Alpin:_\nMy tears, O Ryno! are for the dead; my voice, for the inhabitants of the grave. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the plain. But thou shalt fall like Morar; and the mourner shall sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in the hall, unstrung.\n\nThou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the hill; terrible as a meteor of fire. Thy wrath was as the storm. Thy sword in battle, as lightning in the field. Thy voice was like a stream after rain; like thunder on distant hills. Many fell by thy arm; they were consumed in the flames of thy wrath.\n\nBut when thou didst return from war, how peaceful was thy brow! Thy face was like the sun after rain; like the moon in the silence of night; calm as the breast of the lake when the loud wind is laid.\n\nNarrow is thy dwelling now; dark the place of thine abode. With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before! Four stones, with their heads of moss, are the only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass which whistles in the wind, mark to the hunter’s eye the grave of the mighty Morar. Morar! thou art low indeed. Thou hast no mother to mourn thee; no maid with her tears of love. Dead is she that brought thee forth. Fallen is the daughter of Morglan.\n\nWho on his staff is this? who is this, whose head is white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step.--It is thy father, O Morar! the father of no son but thee. He heard of thy fame in battle; he heard of foes dispersed. He heard of Morar’s fame; why did he not hear of his wound? Weep, thou father of Morar! weep; but thy son heareth thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead; low their pillow of dust. No more shall he hear thy voice; no more shall he awake at thy call. When shall it be morn in the grave, to bid the slumberer awake?\n\nFarewel, thou bravest of men! thou conqueror in the field! but the field shall see thee no more; nor the dark wood be lightened with the splendor of thy steel. Thou hast left no son. But the song shall preserve thy name. Future times shall hear of thee; they shall hear of the fallen Morar.\n\nThe grief of all arose, but most the bursting sigh of Armin. He remembers the death of his son, who fell in the days of his youth. Carmor was near the hero, the chief of the ecchoing Galmal. Why bursts the sigh of Armin, he said? Is there a cause to mourn? The song comes, with its music, to melt and please the soul. It is like soft mist, that, rising from a lake, pours on the silent vale; the green flowers are filled with dew, but the sun returns in his strength, and the mist is gone. Why art thou sad, O Armin, chief of sea-surrounded Gorma?\n\nSad! I am indeed: nor small my cause of woe!--Carmor, thou hast lost no son; thou hast lost no daughter of beauty. Colgar the valiant lives; and Annira fairest maid. The boughs of thy family flourish, O Carmor! but Armin is the last of his race. Dark is thy bed, O Daura! and deep thy sleep in the tomb.--When shalt thou awake with thy songs? with all thy voice of music?\n\nRise, winds of autumn, rise; blow upon the dark heath! streams of the mountains, roar! howl, ye tempests, in the top of the oak! walk through broken clouds, O moon! show by intervals thy pale face! bring to my mind that sad night, when all my children fell; when Arindal the mighty fell; when Dura the lovely failed.\n\nDaura, my daughter! thou wert fair; fair as the moon on the hills of Fura; white as the driven snow; sweet as the breathing gale. Arindal, thy bow was strong, thy spear was swift in the field: thy look was like mist on the wave; thy shield, a red cloud in a storm. Armar, renowned in war, came, and sought Daura’s love; he was not long denied; fair was the hope of their friends.\n\nErath, son of Odgal, repined; for his brother was slain by Armar. He came disguised like a son of the sea: fair was his skiff on the wave; white his locks of age; calm his serious brow. Fairest of women, he said, lovely daughter of Armin! a rock not distant in the sea, bears a tree on its side; red shines the fruit afar. There Armor waits for Daura. I came to carry his love along the rolling sea.\n\nShe went; and she called on Armar. Nought answered, but the son of the rock. Armor, my love! my love! why tormentest thou me with fear? hear, son of Ardnart, hear: it is Daura who calleth thee! Erath the traitor fled laughing to the land. She lifted up her voice, and cried for her brother and her father. Arindal! Armin! none to relieve your Daura.\n\nHer voice came over the sea. Arindal my son descended from the hill; rough in the spoils of the chace. His arrows rattled by his side; his bow was in his hand: five dark gray dogs attended his steps. He saw fierce Erath on the shore: he seized and bound him to an oak. Thick fly the thongs of the hide around his limbs; he loads the wind with his groans.\n\nArindal ascends the deep in his boat, to bring Daura to land. Armar came in his wrath, and let fly the gray-feathered shaft. It sung; it sunk in thy heart, O Arindal my son! for Erath the traitor thou diedst. The oar is stopped at once; he panted on the rock and expired. What is thy grief, O Daura, when round thy feet is poured thy brother’s blood.\n\nThe boat is broken in twain by the waves. Armar plunges into the sea, to rescue his Daura or die. Sudden a blast from the hill comes over the waves. He sunk, and he rose no more.\n\nAlone, on the sea-beat rock, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries; nor could her father relieve her. All night I stood on the shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon. All night I heard her cries. Loud was the wind; and the rain beat hard on the side of the mountain. Before morning appeared, her voice was weak. It died away, like the evening-breeze among the grass of the rocks. Spent with grief she expired. And left thee Armin alone: gone is my strength in the war, and fallen my pride among women.\n\nWhen the storms of the mountain come; when the north lifts the waves on high; I sit by the sounding shore, and look on the fatal rock. Often by the setting moon I see the ghosts of my children. Half-viewless, they walk in mournful conference together. Will none of you speak in pity? They do not regard their father. I am sad, O Carmor, nor small my cause of woe!\n\nSuch were the words of the bards in the days of the song; when the king heard the music of harps, and the tales of other times. The chiefs gathered from all their hills, and heard the lovely sound. They praised the voice of Cona! the first among a thousand bards. But age is now on my tongue; and my soul has failed. I hear, sometimes, the ghosts of bards, and learn their pleasant song. But memory fails on my mind; I hear the call of years. They say, as they pass along, why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame.\n\nRoll on, ye dark-brown years, for ye bring no joy on your course. Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of the song are gone to rest; my voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid. The dark moss whistles there, and the distant mariner sees the waving trees.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "the-war-of-caros-a-poem": { - "title": "“The War of Caros: A Poem”", - "body": "Bring, daughter of Toscar, bring the harp; the light of the song rises in Ossian’s soul. It is like the field, when darkness covers the hills around, and the shadow grows slowly on the plain of the sun.\n\nI Behold my son, O Malvina, near the mossy rock of Crona; but it is the mist of the desart tinged with the beam of the west: Lovely is the mist that assumes the form of Oscar! turn from it, ye winds, when ye roar on the side of Ardven.\n\nWho comes towards my son, with the murmur of a song? His staff is in his hand, his gray hair loose on the wind. Surly joy lightens his face; and he often looks back to Caros. It is Ryno of the song, he that went to view the foe.\n\nWhat does Caros king of ships, said the son of the now mournful Ossian? spreads he the wings of his pride, bard of the times of old?\n\nHe spreads them, Oscar, replied the bard, but it is behind his gathered heap. He looks over his stones with fear, and beholds thee terrible, as the ghost of night that rolls the wave to his ships.\n\nGo, thou first of my bards, says Oscar, and take the spear of Fingal. Fix a flame on its point, and shake it to the winds of heaven. Bid him, in songs, to advance, and leave the rolling of his wave. Tell to Caros that I long for battle; and that my bow is weary of the chace of Cona. Tell him the mighty are not here; and that my arm is young.\n\nHe went with the murmur of his song. Oscar reared his voice on high. It reached his heroes on Ardven, like the noise of a cave; when the sea of Togorma rolls before it; and its trees meet the roaring winds.--They gather round my son like the streams of the hill; when, after rain, they roll in the pride of their course.\n\nRyno came to the mighty Caros, and struck his flaming spear. Come to the battle of Oscar, O thou that sittest on the rolling of waters. Fingal is distant far; he hears the songs of his bards in Morven: and the wind of his hall is in his hair. His terrible spear is at his side; and his shield that is like that darkened moon. Come to the battle of Oscar; the hero is alone.\n\nHe came not over the streamy Carun; the bard returned with his song. Gray night grows dim on Crona. The feast of shells is spread. A hundred oaks burn to the wind, and faint light gleams over the heath. The ghosts of Ardven pass through the beam, and shew their dim and distant forms. Comala is half-unseen on her meteor; and Hidallan is sullen and dim, like the darkened moon behind the mist of night.\n\nWhy art thou sad? said Ryno; for he alone beheld the chief. Why art thou sad, Hidallan, hast thou not received thy fame? The songs of Ossian have been heard, and thy ghost has brightened in the wind, when thou didst bend from thy cloud to hear the song of Morven’s bard.\n\nAnd do thine eyes behold the hero, said Oscar, like the dim meteor of night? Say, Ryno, say, how fell the chief that was so renowned in the days of our fathers?--His name remains on the rocks of Cona; and I have often seen the streams of his hills.\n\nFingal, replied the bard, had driven Hidallan from his wars. The king’s soul was sad for Comala, and his eyes could not behold Hidallan.\n\nLonely, sad along the heath he slowly moved with silent steps. His arms hang disordered on his side. His hair flies loose from his helmet. The tear is in his down-cast eyes; and the sigh half-silent in his breast.\n\nThree days he strayed unseen, alone, before he came to Lamor’s halls: the mossy halls of his fathers, at the stream of Balva.--There Lamor sat alone beneath a tree; for he had sent his people with Hidallan to war. The stream ran at his feet, and his gray head rested on his staff. Sightless are his aged eyes. He hums the song of other times.--The noise of Hidallan’s feet came to his ear: he knew the tread of his son.\n\nIs the son of Lamor returned; or is it the sound of his ghost? Hast thou fallen on the banks of Carun, son of the aged Lamor? Or, if I hear the sound of Hidallan’s feet; where are the mighty in the war? where are my people, Hidallan, that were wont to return with their echoing shields?--Have they fallen on the banks of Carun?\n\nNo: replied the sighing youth, the people of Lamor live. They are renowned in battle, my father; but Hidallan is renowned no more. I must sit alone on the banks of Balva, when the roar of the battle grows.\n\nBut thy fathers never sat alone, replied the rising pride of Lamor; they never sat alone on the banks of Balva, when the roar of battle rose.--Dost thou not behold that tomb? My eyes discern it not; there rests the noble Garmállon who never fled from war.--Come, thou renowned in battle, he says, come to thy father’s tomb.--How am I renowned, Garmállon, for my son has fled from war?\n\nKing of the streamy Balva! said Hidallan with a sigh, why dost thou torment my soul? Lamor, I never feared.--Fingal was sad for Comala, and denied his wars to Hidallan; go to the gray streams of thy land, he said, and moulder like a leafless oak, which the winds have bent over Balva, never more to grow.\n\nAnd must I hear, Lamor replied, the lonely tread of Hidallan’s feet? When thousands are renowned in battle, shall he bend over my gray streams? Spirit of the noble Garmállon! carry Lamor to his place; his eyes are dark; his soul is sad; and his son has lost his fame.\n\nWhere, said the youth, shall I search for same to gladden the soul of Lamor? From whence shall I return with renown, that the sound of my arms may be pleasant in his ear?--If I go to the chace of hinds, my name will not be heard.--Lamor will not feel my dogs, with his hands, glad at my arrival from the hill. He will not enquire of his mountains, or of the dark-brown deer of his desarts.\n\nI Must fall, said Lamor, like a leafless oak: it grew on a rock, but the winds have overturned it.--My ghost will be seen on my hills, mournful for my young Hidallan. Will not ye, ye mists, as ye rise, hide him from my sight?--My son!--go to Lamor’s hall: there the arms of our fathers hang.--Bring the sword of Garmállon;--he took it from a foe.\n\nHe went and brought the sword with all its studded thongs.--He gave it to his father. The gray-haired hero felt the point with his hand.--\n\nMy son!--lead me to Garmállon’s tomb: it rises beside that rustling tree. The long grass is withered;--I heard the breeze whistling there.--A little fountain murmurs near, and sends its water to Balva. There let me rest; it is noon: and the sun is on our fields.\n\nHe led him to Garmállon’s tomb. Lamor pierced the side of his son.--They sleep together: and their ancient halls moulder on Balva’s banks.--Ghosts are seen there at noon: the valley is silent, and the people shun the place of Lamor.\n\nMournful is thy tale, said Oscar, son of the times of old!--My soul sighs for Hidallan; he fell in the days of his youth. He flies on the blast of the desart, and his wandering is in a foreign land.--\n\nSons of the ecchoing Morven! draw near to the foes of Fingal. Send the night away in songs; and watch the strength of Caros. Oscar goes to the people of other times; to the shades of silent Ardven; where his fathers sit dim in their clouds, and behold the future war.--And art thou there, Hidallan, like a half-extinguished meteor? Come to my sight, in thy sorrow, chief of the roaring Balva!\n\nThe heroes move with their songs.--Oscar slowly ascends the hill.--The meteors of night set on the heath before him. A distant torrent faintly roars.--Unfrequent blasts rush through aged oaks. The half-enlightened moon sinks dim and red behind her hill.--Feeble voices are heard on the heath.--Oscar drew his sword.\n\nCome, said the hero, O ye ghosts of my fathers! ye that fought against the kings of the world!--Tell me the deeds of future times; and your converse in your caves; when you talk together and behold your sons in the fields of the valiant.\n\nTrenmor came, from his hill, at the voice of his mighty son.--A cloud, like the steed of the stranger, supported his airy limbs. His robe is of the mist of Lano, that brings death to the people. His sword is a green meteor half-extinguished. His face is without form, and dark. He sighed thrice over the hero: and thrice the winds of the night roared around. Many were his words to Oscar: but they only came by halves to our ears: they were dark as the tales of other times, before the light of the song arose. He slowly vanished, like a mist that melts on the sunny hill.\n\nIt was then, O daughter of Toscar, my son begun first to be sad. He foresaw the fall of his race; and, at times, he was thoughtful and dark; like the sun when he carries a cloud on his face; but he looks afterwards on the hills of Cona.\n\nOscar passed the night among his fathers, gray morning met him on the banks of Carun.\n\nA Green vale surrounded a tomb which arose in the times of old. Little hills lift their head at a distance; and stretch their old trees to the wind. The warriors of Caros sat there, for they had passed the stream by night. They appeared, like the trunks of aged pines, to the pale light of the morning.\n\nOscar stood at the tomb, and raised thrice his terrible voice. The rocking hills ecchoed around: the starting roes bounded away. And the trembling ghosts of the dead fled, shrieking on their clouds. So terrible was the voice of my son, when he called his friends.\n\nA Thousand spears rose around; the people of Caros rose.--Why, daughter of Toscar, why that tear? My son, though alone, is brave. Oscar is like a beam of the sky; he turns around and the people fall. His hand is like the arm of a ghost, when he stretches it from a cloud: the rest of his thin form is unseen: but the people die in the vale.\n\nMy son beheld the approach of the foe; and he stood in the silent darkness of his strength.--Am I alone, said Oscar, in the midst of a thousand foes?--Many a spear is there!--many a darkly-rolling eye!--Shall I fly to Ardven?--But did my fathers ever fly!--The mark of their arm is in a thousand battles.--Oscar too will be renowned.--Come, ye dim ghosts of my fathers, and behold my deeds in war!--I may fall; but I will be renowned like the race of the ecchoing Morven.\n\nHe stood, growing in his place, like the flood of the narrow vale. The battle came, but they fell: bloody was the sword of Oscar.\n\nThe noise reached his people at Crona; they came like a hundred streams. The warriors of Caros fled, and Oscar remained like a rock left by the ebbing sea.\n\nNow dark and deep, with all his steeds, Caros rolled his might along: the little streams are lost in his course; and the earth is rocking round.--Battle spreads from wing to wing: ten thousand swords gleam at once in the sky.--But why should Ossian sing of battles?--For never more shall my steel shine in war. I remember the days of my youth with sorrow; when I feel the weakness of my arm. Happy are they who fell in their youth, in the midst of their renown!--They have not beheld the tombs of their friend: or failed to bend the bow of their strength.--Happy art thou, O Oscar, in the midst of thy rushing blast. Thou often goest to the fields of thy fame, where Caros fled from thy lifted sword.\n\nDarkness comes on my soul, O fair daughter of Toscar, I behold not the form of my son at Carun; nor the figure of Oscar on Crona. The rustling winds have carried him far away; and the heart of his father is sad.\n\nBut lead me, O Malvina, to the found of my woods, and the roar of my mountain streams. Let the chace be heard on Cona; that I may think on the days of other years.--And bring me the harp, O maid, that I may touch it when the light of my soul shall arise.--Be thou near, to learn the song; and future times shall hear of Ossian.\n\nThe sons of the feeble hereafter will lift the voice on Cona; and, looking up to the rocks, say, “Here Ossian dwelt.”They shall admire the chiefs of old, and the race that are no more: while we ride on our clouds, Malvina, on the wings of the roaring winds. Our voices shall be heard, at times, in the desart; and we shall sing on the winds of the rock.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - }, - "the-war-of-inis-thona-a-poem": { - "title": "“The War of Inis-Thona: A Poem”", - "body": "Our youth is like the dream of the hunter on the hill of heath. He sleeps in the mild beams of the sun; but he awakes amidst a storm; the red lightning flies around: and the trees shake their heads to the wind. He looks back with joy, on the day of the sun; and the pleasant dreams of his rest!\n\nWhen shall Ossian’s youth return, or his ear delight in the sound of arms? When shall I, like Oscar, travel in the light of my steel?--Come, with your streams, ye hills of Cona, and listen to the voice of Ossian! The song rises, like the sun, in my soul; and my heart feels the joys of other times.\n\nI Behold thy towers, O Selma! and the oaks of thy shaded wall:--thy streams sound in my ear; thy heroes gather round. Fingal sits in the midst; and leans on the shield of Trenmor:--his spear stands against the wall; he listens to the song of his bards.--The deeds of his arm are heard; and the actions of the king in his youth.\n\nOscar had returned from the chace, and heard the hero’s praise.--He took the shield of Branno from the wall; his eyes were filled with tears. Red was the cheek of youth. His voice was trembling, low. My spear shook its bright head in his hand: he spoke to Morven’s king.\n\nFingal! thou king of heroes! Ossian, next to him in war! ye have fought the battle in your youth; your names are renowned in the song.--Oscar is like the mist of Cona; I appear and vanish.--The bard will not know my name.--The hunter will not search in the heath for my tomb. Let me fight, O heroes, in the battles of Inis-thona. Distant is the land of my war!--ye shall not hear of Oscar’s fall.--Some bard may find me there, and give my name to the song.--The daughter of the stranger shall see my tomb, and weep over the youth that came from afar. The bard shall say, at the feast, hear the song of Oscar from the distant land!\n\nOscar, replied the king of Morven; thou shalt fight, son of my fame!--Prepare my dark-bosomed ship to carry my hero to Inis-thona. Son of my son, regard our fame;--for thou art of the race of renown. Let not the children of strangers say, feeble are the sons of Morven!--Be thou, in battle, like the roaring storm: mild as the evening sun in peace.--Tell, Oscar, to Inis-thona’s king, that Fingal remembers his youth; when we strove in the combat together in the days of Agandecca.\n\nThey lifted up the sounding sail; the wind whistled through the thongs of their masts. Waves lash the oozy rocks: the strength of ocean roars.--My son beheld, from the wave, the land of groves. He rushed into the ecchoing bay of Runa; and sent his sword to Annir king of spears.\n\nThe gray-haired hero rose, when he saw the sword of Fingal. His eyes were full of tears, and he remembered the battles of their youth. Twice they lifted the spear before the lovely Agandecca: heroes stood far distant, as if two ghosts contended.\n\nBut now, begun the king, I am old; the sword lies useless in my hall. Thou who art of Morven’s race! Annir has been in the strife of spears; but he is pale and withered now, like the oak of Lano. I have no son to meet thee with joy, or to carry thee to the halls of his fathers. Argon is pale in the tomb, and Ruro is no more.--My daughter is in the hall of strangers, and longs to behold my tomb.--Her spouse shakes ten thousand spears; and comes like cloud of death from Lano.--Come, to share the feast of Annir, son of ecchoing Morven.\n\nThree days they feasted together; on the fourth Annir heard the name of Oscar.--They rejoiced in the shell; and pursued the boars of Runa.\n\nBeside the fount of mossy stones, the weary heroes rest. The tear steals in secret from Annir: and he broke the rising sigh.--Here darkly rest, the hero said, the children of my youth.--This stone is the tomb of Ruro: that tree sounds over the grave of Argon. Do ye hear my voice, O my sons, within your narrow house? Or do ye speak in these rustling leaves, when the winds of the desart rise?\n\nKing of Inis-thona, said Oscar, how fell the children of youth? The wild boar often rushes over their tombs, but he does not disturb the hunters. They pursue deer formed of clouds, and bend their airy bow.--They still love the sport of their youth; and mount the wind with joy.\n\nCormalo, replied the king, is chief of ten thousand spears; he dwells at the dark-rolling waters of Lano; which sent forth the cloud of death. He came to Runa’s ecchoing halls, and sought the honour of the spear. The youth was lovely as the first beam of the sun; and few were they who could meet him in fight!--My heroes yielded to Cormalo: and my daughter loved the son of Lano.\n\nArgon and Ruro returned from the chace; the tears of their pride descend:--They rolled their silent eyes on Runa’s heroes, because they yielded to a stranger: three days they feasted with Cormalo: on the fourth my Argon fought.--But who could fight with Argon!--Lano’s chief is overcome. His heart swelled with the grief of pride, and he resolved, in secret, to behold the death of my sons.\n\nThey went to the hills of Runa, and pursued the dark-brown hinds. The arrow of Cormalo flew in secret; and my children fell. He came to the maid of his love; to Inis-thona’s dark-haired maid.--They fled over the desart--and Annir remained alone.\n\nNight came on and day appeared; nor Argon’s voice, nor Ruro’s came. At length their much-loved dog is seen; the fleet and bounding Runar. He came into the hall and howled; and seemed to look towards the place of their fall.--We followed him: we found them here: and laid them by this mossy stream. This is the haunt of Annir, when the chace of the hinds is over. I bend like the trunk of an aged oak above them: and my tears for ever flow.\n\nO Ronnan! said the rising Oscar, Ogar king of spears! call my heroes to my side, the sons of streamy Morven. To-day we go to Lano’s water, that sends forth the cloud of death. Cormalo will not long rejoice: death is often at the point of our swords.\n\nThey came over the desart like stormy clouds, when the winds roll them over the heath: their edges are tinged with lightning: and the ecchoing groves foresee the storm. The horn of Oscar’s battle is heard; and Lano shook over all its waves. The children of the lake convened around the sounding shield of Cormalo.\n\nOscar fought, as he was wont in battle. Cormalo fell beneath his sword: and the sons of the dismal Lano fled to their secret vales.--Oscar brought the daughter of Inis-thona to Annir’s ecchoing halls. The face of age is bright with joy; he blest the king of swords.\n\nHow great was the joy of Ossian, when he beheld the distant sail of his son! it was like a cloud of light that rises in the east, when the traveller is sad in a land unknown; and dismal night, with her ghosts, is sitting around him.\n\nWe brought him, with songs, to Selma’s halls. Fingal ordered the feast of shells to be spread. A thousand bards raised the name of Oscar: and Morven answered to the noise. The daughter of Toscar was there, and her voice was like the harp; when the distant sound comes, in the evening, on the soft-rustling breeze of the vale.\n\nO Lay me, ye that see the light, near some rock of my hills: let the thick hazels be around, let the rustling oak be near. Green be the place of my rest; and let the sound of the distant torrent be heard. Daughter of Toscar, take the harp, and raise the lovely song of Selma; that sleep may overtake my soul in the midst of joy; that the dreams of my youth may return, and the days of the mighty Fingal.\n\nSelma! I behold thy towers, thy trees, and shaded wall. I see the heroes of Morven; and hear the song of bards. Oscar lifts the sword of Cormalo; and a thousand youths admire its studded thongs. They look with wonder on my son; and admire the strength of his arm. They mark the joy of his father’s eyes; they long for an equal fame.\n\nAnd ye shall have your fame, O sons of streamy Morven.--My soul is often brightened with the song; and I remember the companions of my youth.--But sleep descends with the sound of the harp; and pleasant dreams begin to rise. Ye sons of the chace stand far distant, nor disturb my rest. The bard of other times converses now with his fathers, the chiefs of the days of old.--Sons of the chace, stand far distant; disturb not the dreams of Ossian.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Fingal: an ancient epic poem, in six books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic language", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1760 - } - } - } - } - }, - "maurice-maeterlinck": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Maurice Maeterlinck", - "birth": { - "year": 1862 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "belgian", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇧🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Maeterlinck", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "belgian" - ], - "n_poems": 28 - }, - "poems": { - "afternoon": { - "title": "“Afternoon”", - "body": "Mine eyes have snared my soul. But O,\nGrant me, O Lord, my one desire:\nLet fall Thy leaves upon the snow,\nLet fall Thy rain upon the fire.\n\nThe sun upon my pillow plays,\nThe self-same hours they sound again,\nAnd always falls my questing gaze\nOn dying men that harvest grain.\n\nMy hands they pluck the withered grass,\nMine eyes with sleep are all undone,\nAre sick folk in a springless pass,\nOr flowers of darkness in the sun.\n\nWhen will my dreams unchanging know\nThe rain, and when the meadows brown\nAlong the far horizon, lo,\nThe lambs are herded toward the town.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "amen": { - "title": "“Amen”", - "body": "At length the consecrating hour is here\nThat sains the slave’s extenuated sleep.\nAnd I who wait shall see its hands appear,\nFull of white roses in these caverns deep.\n\nI wait--at length to feel its cooling wind\nStrike on my heart, impregnable to lies,\nA paschal lamb lost amid marshes blind,\nA wound o’er which the surging waters rise.\n\nI wait--for nights no morrow shall defy,\nI wait--for weakness nothing shall avail;\nTo feel upon my hands its shadow lie,\nTo see in peaceful tides its image pale.\n\nI wait until those nights of thine shall show\nAll my desires with cleansed eyes go by,\nFor then my dreams shall bathe in evening’s glow,\nAnd then within their crystal castle die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "contacts": { - "title": "“Contacts”", - "body": "The sense of contact!\nDarkness lies between your fingers!\nThe cries of brazen instruments in a tempest!\nThe music of organs in the sunlight!\nAll the flocks of the soul in the depths of a night of eclipse!\nAll the salt of the sea on the grass of the meadows!\nAnd the blaze of blue lightning on every horizon!\n(Have pity on this human sense!)\n\nBut O these sadder, wearier contacts!\nO the touch of your poor moist hands!\nI hear your pure fingers as they glide between mine,\nAnd flocks of lambs are departing by moonlight\nAlong the banks of a misty river.\n\nI can remember all the hands that have touched my hands,\nAnd again I see all that was protected by those hands,\nAnd I see to-day what I was, protected by those cool hands.\nI was often the beggar who gnaws his crust on the steps of a throne.\n\nI was sometimes the diver, who cannot evade the surging waters.\nI was often a whole people, no longer able to escape from the town!\nAnd some hands were like a convent without a garden!\nAnd some confined me like a group of invalids in a glass-house on a rainy day!\nUntil other cooler hands should come to set the doors ajar,\nAnd sprinkle a little water upon the threshold!\n\n\nO, I have known strange contacts,\nAnd here they surround me forever!\nSome were wont to give alms on a day of sun-shine,\nSome gathered a harvest in the depths of a cavern,\nAnd the music of mountebanks was heard outside the prison.\nThere were wax-work figures in the summer woods,\nAnd elsewhere the moon had swept the whole oasis,\nAnd at times I found a virgin, flushed and sweating, in a grotto of ice!\n\nPity these strange hands!\nThese hands contain the secrets of all the kings!\nPity these hands too pale!\nThey seem to have emerged from the caverns of the moon;\nThey are worn with spinning threads from the\ndistaffs of fountains!\nPity these hands, too white, too moist!\nThey are like princesses that slumber at noon all the summer through.\n\nAvoid these hard harsh hands!\nThey seem to have issued from the rocks!\nBut pity these cold hands!\nI see a heart bleeding under ribs of ice!\nAnd pity these evil hands,\nFor these have poisoned the springs!\nThey have set young cygnets in a nest of hemlock!\nI have seen the angels of evil open the gates at noon!\nHere are only madmen on a pestilent river!\nHere are black sheep only in starless pastures!\nAnd lambs hasting away to graze in darkness!\n\nBut O these cool faithful hands!\nThey come to offer ripe fruits to the dying!\nThey bring clear cold water in their palms!\nThey water the battlefields with milk!\nThey have surely come from wonderful and eternally virgin forests!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-fevered-soul": { - "title": "“The Fevered Soul”", - "body": "The dark brings visions to mine eyes:\nThro’ my desires they seek their goal.\nO nights within the humid soul,\nO heart to dreams that open lies!\n\nWith azure reveries I bedew\nThe roses of attempts undone;\nMy lashes close the gates upon\nThe longings that will ne’er come true.\n\nMy pallid indolent fingers plant\nEver in vain, at close of day,\nThe emerald bells of hope that lay\nOver the purple leaves of want.\n\nHelpless, my soul beholds with dread\nThe bitter musings of my lips,\nAmid the crowding lily-tips:\nO that this wavering heart were dead", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "glances": { - "title": "“Glances”", - "body": "O all these poor weary glances!\nAnd yours, and mine!\nAnd those that are no more, and those to be!\nAnd those that will never be, and yet exist!\nThere are those that seem to visit the poor on a Sabbath;\nThere are some like sick folk who are houseless,\nThere are some like lambs in a meadow full of bleaching linen;\nAnd O, these strange unwonted glances!\nUnder the vaults of some we behold\nA maiden being put to death in a chamber with closed doors.\nAnd some make us dream of unknown sorrows,\n\nOf peasants at the windows of a factory,\nOf a gardener turned weaver,\nOf a summer afternoon in a wax-work show,\nOf the thoughts of a queen on beholding sick man in a garden,\nOf an odour of camphor in the forest,\nOf a princess locked in a tower on a day of rejoicing,\nOf men sailing all the week on the stagnant waters of a canal.\n\nHave pity on those that come creeping forth like convalescents at harvest-tide!\nHave pity on those that have the air of children who have lost their way at supper-time!\nHave pity on the glances of the wounded man at the surgeon,\nLike tents stricken by a hurricane!\nHave pity on the glances of the virgin tempted!\n(Rivers of milk are flowing away in the darkness;\nAnd the swans have died in the midst of serpents!)\nAnd the gaze of the virgin who surrenders!\n\nThere are princesses deserted in swamps that have no issue!\nAnd lo, those eyes in which you may see ships in full sail, lit up by flashes of the storm!\nAnd how pitiful are all those glances which suffer because they are not elsewhere!\nAnd so much suffering, so indistinguishable and yet so various!\nAnd those glances which no one will ever understand!\nAnd those poor glances which are all but dumb!\nAnd those poor whispering glances!\nAnd those poor stifled glances!\n\nAmid some of these you might think yourself in a mansion serving as hospital,\nAnd many others have the air of tents, lilies of war, on the little lawn of the convent!\nAnd many others have the air of wounded men tended in a hot-house!\nOr Sisters of Charity on an ocean devoid of patients!\n\nOh, to have encountered all these glances,\nTo have admitted them all,\nAnd to have exhausted mine thereby!\nAnd henceforth to be unable to close mine eyes!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-hearts-foliage": { - "title": "“The Heart’s Foliage”", - "body": "Neath the azure crystal bell\nOf my listless melancholy\nAll my formless sorrows wholly\nSink to rest, and all is well;\n\nSymbols all, the plans entwine:\nWater lilies, flowers of pleasure,\nPalms desirous, slow with leisure,\nFrigid mosses, pliant bine.\n\n’Mid them all a lily only,\nPale and fragile and unbending,\nImperceptibly ascending\nIn that place of leafage lonely,\n\nLike a moon the prisoned air\nFills with glimmering light wherethro’\nRises to the crystal blue,\nWhite and mystical, its prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "her-lover-went-his-way": { - "title": "“Her Lover Went His Way”", - "body": "Her lover went his way\n(I heard the gate),\nHer lover went his way;\nYet she was gay.\n\nWhen he came again\n(I heard the lamp),\nWhen he came again\nAnother made the twain.\n\nAnd the dead I met\n(I heard her spirit cry),\nAnd the dead I met:\nShe who waits him yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "the-hot-house": { - "title": "“The Hot-House”", - "body": "O Hot-house deep in the forest’s heart!\nO doors forever sealed!\nLo, all that lives beneath thy dome,\nAnd in my soul, and the likeness of these things!\n\nThe thoughts of a princess who is sick with hunger,\nThe listless mood of a mariner in the desert,\nAnd brazen music at the windows\nOf men who are sick to death!\n\nSeek out the coolest corners--\nAnd you think of a woman who has swooned on a day of harvest.\n\nPostilions have entered the courtyard of the hospital,\nAnd there passes yonder an Uhlan, who has turned sick-nurse.\n\nBehold it all by moonlight!\n(Nothing, nothing is in its rightful place!)\nAnd you think of a madwoman haled before the judges,\nA warship in full sail on the waters of a canal,\nBirds of the night perched among lilies,\nAnd the knell of a passing-bell at the mid-day hour of Angelus.\nAnd yonder--beneath those domes of glass--\nA group of sick folk halted amid the meadows,\nAn odour of ether abroad on the sunny air!\n\nMy God, my God, when shall we feel the rain,\nAnd the snow, and the wind, in this close house of glass?", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-hold-to-every-sin": { - "title": "“I Hold, to Every Sin”", - "body": "I hold, to every sin,\nTo every soul that weeps,\nMy hands with pardon filled\nOut of the starry deeps.\n\nThere is no sin that lives\nWhen love hath vigil kept;\nThere is no soul that mourns\nWhen love but once hath wept.\n\nAnd tho’ on many paths\nOf earth love lose its way,\nIts tears will find me out\nAnd shall not go astray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "lassitude": { - "title": "“Lassitude”", - "body": "These lips have long forgotten to bestow\nTheir kiss on blind eyes chiller than the snow,\nHenceforth absorbed in their magnificent dream.\nDrowsy as hounds deep in the grass they seem;\nThey watch the grey flocks on the sky-line pass,\nBrowsing on moonlight scattered o’er the grass,\nBy skies as vague as their own life caressed.\nThey see, unvexed by envy or unrest,\nThe roses of joy that open on every hand,\nThe long green peace they cannot understand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "maidens-with-bounden-eyes": { - "title": "“Maidens with Bounden Eyes”", - "body": "Maidens with bounden eyes\n(O loose the scarves of gold!)\nMaidens with bounden eyes,\nThey sought their destinies.\n\nAt noon they opened wide\n(O keep the scarves of gold!)\nAt noon they opened wide\nThe palace in the plain:\n\nThere they greeted life\n(Bind close the scarves of gold!)\nThere they greeted life,\nAnd turned them back again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "night-prayer": { - "title": "“Night Prayer”", - "body": "Below the somnolence of prayer,\nUnder languid visions I\nHear the passions surge and cry:\nLust with lust is warring there.\n\nThro’ the lassitude of dreams\nShines the moon as thro’ a mesh;\nAnd the wandering joy of flesh\nStill on pestilent beaches gleams.\n\nUnder ever-shrouded skies,\nThirsting for their starry fires,\nThro’ my veins I hear desires\nToward the green horizon rise.\n\nEvil fondnesses I hear\nBlackly surging through my mind:\nPhantom marshes vanish blind\nSudden on the sky-line drear.\n\nO Lord, thy wrath will slay me soon!\nHave pity on me, Lord, I pray!\nSweating and sick, O let me stray\nThro’ pastures glimmering in the moon!\n\nFor now, O Lord, the time is nigh\nTo rase the hemlock with the steel,\nWhose moon my secret hopes reveal\nGreen as a serpent in the sky:\n\nAnd the plague of dreams mine eyes\nSmites, and all its sins subdue,\nAnd the rustling fountains blue\nToward the sovereign moon arise!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "My soul is sick at the end of all,\nSick and sad, being weary too,\nWeary of being so vain, so vain,\nWeary and sad at the end of all,\nAnd O I long for the touch of you!\n\nI long for your hands upon my face;\nSnow-cold as spirits they will be;\nI wait until they bring the ring.\nI wait for their coolness over my face\nLike a treasure deep in the sea.\n\nI wait to know their healing spell,\nLest in the desolate sun I die,\nSo that I die not out in the sun;\nO bathe mine eyes and make them well,\nWhere things unhappy slumbering lie.\n\nWhere many swans upon the sea,\nSwans that wander over the sea,\nStretch forth their mournful throats in vain\nIn wintry gardens by the sea\nSick men pluck roses in their pain.\n\nI long for your hands upon my face;\nSnow-cold as spirits they will be,\nAnd soothe my aching sight, alas!\nMy vision like the withered grass\nWhere listless lambs irresolute pass!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-passions": { - "title": "“The Passions”", - "body": "Narrow paths my passions tread:\nLaughter rings there, sorrow cries\nSick and sad, with half-shut eyes,\nThro’ the leaves the woods have shed,\n\nMy sins like yellow mongrels slink;\nUncouth hyaenas, my hates complain,\nAnd on the pale and listless plain\nCouching low, love’s lions blink.\n\nPowerless, deep in a dream of peace,\nSunk in a languid spell they lie,\nUnder a colourless desolate sky,\nThere they gaze and never cease,\n\nWhere like sheep temptations graze,\nOne by one departing slow:\nIn the moon’s unchanging glow\nMy unchanging passions gaze.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "Thou know’st, O Lord, my spirit’s dearth\nThou see’st the worth of what I bring\nThe evil blossoms of the earth,\nThe light upon a perished thing.\n\nThou see’st my sick and weary mood:\nThe moon is dark, the dawn is slain.\nThy glory on my solitude\nShed Thou like fructifying rain.\n\nLight Thou, O Lord, beneath my feet\nThe way my weary soul should pass,\nFor now the pain of all things sweet\nIs piteous as the ice-bound grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "reflections": { - "title": "“Reflections”", - "body": "Under the brimming tide of dreams\nO, my soul is full of fear!\nIn my heart the moon is clear;\nDeep it lies in the tide of dreams.\n\nUnder the listless reeds asleep,\nOnly the deep reflection shows\nOf palm, of lily and of rose,\nWeeping yet in the waters deep;\n\nAnd the flowers, late and soon,\nFall upon the mirrored sky,\nTo sink and sink eternally\nThro’ dreamy waters and the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "sisters-sisters": { - "title": "“Sisters, Sisters”", - "body": "Sisters, sisters, thirty years\nI sought where he might be;\nThirty years I sought for him:\nNever did I see.\n\nThirty years the way I trod;\nLong the road and hot;\nSisters, he was everywhere,\nHe who yet is not.\n\nSisters, sad the hour and late,\nMy sandal’s thongs unpick.\nEven as I the evening dies,\nAnd my soul is sick.\n\nYou whose years are seventeen,\nForth and seek him too;\nSisters, sisters, take my staff,\nSeek the whole world through.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "the-soul": { - "title": "“The Soul”", - "body": "My soul!\nO, my soul, verily too closely sheltered!\nAnd the flocks of my desires, imprisoned in a house of glass!\nWaiting until the tempest break upon the meadows!\n\nCome first of all to these, so sick and fragile:\nFrom these a strange effluvium rises.\nAnd lo, it seems I am with my mother,\nCrossing a field of battle.\nThey are burying a brother-in-arms at noon,\nWhile the sentinels are snatching a meal.\n\nNow let us go to the feeblest:\nThese are covered with a strange sweat.\nHere is an ailing bride,\nAnd an act of treachery done upon a Sabbath,\nAnd little children in prison,\nAnd yonder, yonder through the mist,\nDo I see there a woman dying at the door of a kitchen,\nOr a Sister of Charity, shelling peas at the bedside of a dying patient?\n\nLast of all let us go to the saddest:\n(Last of all, for these are venom’d.)\nO, my lips are pressed by the kisses of a wounded man!\n\nIn the castles of my soul this summer all the chatelaines have died of hunger!\n\nNow it is twilight on the morning of a day of festival!\nI catch a glimpse of sheep along the quays,\nAnd there is a sail by the windows of the hospital.\n\nThe road is long from my heart to my soul,\nAnd all the sentinels have died at their posts!\nOne day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul!\nThey were mowing the hemlock there one Sunday morning,\nAnd all the maiden women of the convent\nwere watching the passing vessels,\nOn the canal, one sunny fast-day.\nBut the swans were ailing, in the shadow of the rotting bridge.\nThey were lopping the trees about the prison,\nThey were bringing remedies, on an afternoon of June,\nAnd on every hand there were sick folk feasting!\n\nAlas, my soul,\nAnd alas, the sadness of all these things!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "stagnant-hours": { - "title": "“Stagnant Hours”", - "body": "Here are the old desires that pass,\nThe dreams of weary men, that die,\nThe dreams that faint and fail, alas!\nAnd there the days of hope gone by!\n\nWhere to fly shall we find a place?\nNever a star shines late or soon:\nWeariness only with frozen face,\nAnd sheets of blue in the icy moon.\n\nBehold the fireless sick, and lo!\nThe sobbing victims of the snare!\nLambs whose pasture is only snow!\nPity them all, O Lord, my prayer!\n\nFor me, I wait the awakening call:\nI pray that slumber leave me soon.\nI wait until the sunlight fall\nOn hands yet frozen by the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "temptations": { - "title": "“Temptations”", - "body": "Green as the sea, temptations creep\nThrough the shadows of the mind,\nWhere with flaming flowers entwined\nDark ejaculations leap--\n\nStems obscure that coil and thrust\nIn the moon’s unhallowed glow,\nAnd the autumnal shadows throw\nOf their auguries of lust.\n\nAnd the moon may hardly shine\nThrough their fevered fast embrace:\nLimb and slimy limb enlace,\nEmerald and serpentine.\n\nSacrilegiously they grow,\nAnd their secret will reveal,\nDismal as regrets that steal\nO’er men dying in the snow;\n\nAnd their mournful shadows hide\nTangled wounds that mark the thrust\nOf the azure swords of lust\nIn the crimson flesh of pride.\n\nWhen will the dreams of earth, alas,\nFind in my heart their final tomb?\nO let Thy glory, Lord, illume\nThis dark and evil house of glass,\n\nAnd that oblivion nought may win!\nThe dead leaves of their fevers fall,\nThe stars between their lips, and all\nThe viscerae of woe and sin!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "there-were-three-sisters-fain-to-die": { - "title": "“There Were Three Sisters Fain to Die”", - "body": "There were three sisters fain to die.\nHer crown of gold each putteth on,\nAnd forth to seek their death they’re gone.\n\nThey wander to the forest forth:\n“Give us our death, O forest old,\nFor here are our three crowns of gold.”\n\nThe forest broke into a smile,\nAnd kisses gave to each twice twain,\nThat showed them all the future plain.\n\nThere were three sisters fain to die:\nThey wandered forth to seek the sea:\nThey found it after summers three.\n\n“Give us our death, thou ocean old,\nFor here are our three crowns of gold.”\nThen the ocean began to weep:\n\nThree hundred kisses it gave the three,\nAnd all the past was plain to see.\nThere were three sisters fain to die,\n\nTo find the city they sought awhile;\nThey found it midmost of an isle.\n\n“Give us our death, thou city old,\nFor here are our three crowns of gold.”\n\nThe city opened then and there,\nAnd covered them with kisses dear\nThat showed them all the present clear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "three-little-maids": { - "title": "“Three Little Maids”", - "body": "Three little maids they did to death,\nTo see what hid within their hearts.\n\nThe first little heart was full of bliss,\nAnd lo, wherever its blood might run,\nThree serpents hissed till three years were done.\n\nThe second was full of gentlehood,\nAnd lo, wherever its blood might run\nThree lambs that fed till three years were done.\n\nThe third was full of pain and woe,\nAnd lo, wherever the red blood crept\nArchangels three their vigil kept.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "toward-the-castle-she-made-her-way": { - "title": "“Toward the Castle She Made Her Way”", - "body": "Toward the castle she made her way\n(Hardly yet was the sun on the sea),\nToward the castle she made her way;\nKnight looked at knight and looked away;\nThe women had never a word to say.\n\nShe came to rest before the door\n(Hardly yet was the sun on the sea),\nShe came to rest before the door;\nThey heard the queen as she paced the floor,\nAnd the king that asked her what would she.\n\n“What do you seek, O where do you go?\n(Have a care, it is hard to see),\nWhat do you seek, O where do you go?\nDoth one await you there below?”\nBut never a word, a word spake she.\n\nDown she went to the one unknown\n(Have a care, it is hard to see),\nDown she went to the one unknown,\nAnd round the queen her arms were thrown;\nNever a word did either say;\nWithout a word they went their way.\n\nThe king wept on the threshold sore\n(Have a care, it is hard to see),\nThe king wept by the open door;\nThey heard the footsteps of the queen,\nAnd the fall of the leaves where she had been.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "vigil": { - "title": "“Vigil”", - "body": "My soul her unused hands to pray\nFolds, that hide the world away:\nLord, my broken dreams complete,\nThat Thine angels’ lips repeat.\n\nWhile beneath my wearied eyes\nShe breathes the prayers that in her rise--\nPrayers that find my lids a tomb,\nAnd whose lilies may not bloom:\n\nWhile in dreams her barren breast\nHushes ’neath my gaze to rest--\nStill her eyes from perils cower,\nSuch as wake by falsehood’s power.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "visions": { - "title": "“Visions”", - "body": "All the tears that I have shed,\nAll my kisses, lo, they pass\nThro’ my mind as in a glass:\nAll my kisses whose joy is dead.\n\nThere are flowers without a hue,\nLilies that under the moonlight fade,\nMoonlight over the meadows laid,\nFountains far on the sky-line blue.\n\nWeary and heavy with slumber I\nSee thro’ the lids that slumber closes\nCrows that gather amid the roses,\nSick folk under a sunbright sky.\n\nOf these vague loves the weary smart\nShines unchanging late and soon\nLike a pale slow-moving moon\nSadly into my indolent heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "the-weary-hunting": { - "title": "“The Weary Hunting”", - "body": "My soul is sick, in an evil mood;\nStricken with many a lack it lies,\nStricken with silence, and mine eyes\nIllume it with their lassitude.\n\nArrested visions of the chase\nObsess me; memory whips them on;\nThe sleuth-hounds of Desire are gone\nOn fading scents--a weary race.\n\nIn misty woods the hunt is met;\nThe questing packs of dreams depart;\nToward the white stags of falsehood dart\nThe jaundiced arrows of Regret.\n\nAh, my desires! For breath they swoon\nThe wearied longings of mine eyes\nHave clouded with their azure sighs,\nWithin my soul, the flooding moon!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - }, - "wintry-desires": { - "title": "“Wintry Desires”", - "body": "I mourn the lips of yesterday,\nLips whose kisses are yet unborn,\nAnd the old desires outworn,\nUnder sorrows hid away.\n\nAlways rain on the far sky-line;\nAlways snow on the beaches gleams,\nWhile by the bolted gate of dreams\nCrouching wolves in the grasses whine.\n\nInto my listless soul I gaze:\nWith clouded eyes I search the past,\nAt all the long-spilt blood aghast\nOf lambs that died in wintry ways.\n\nOnly the moon its mournful fires\nEnkindles, and a desolate light\nFalls where the autumn frosts are white\nOver my famishing desires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-womans-fears-my-heart-control": { - "title": "“A Woman’s Fears My Heart Control”", - "body": "A woman’s fears my heart control:\nWhat have I done with these, my part,\nMy hands, the lilies of my soul,\nMine eyes, the heavens of my heart?\n\nO Lord, have pity on my grief:\nI have lost the palm and ring, alas!\nPity my prayers, my poor relief,\nCut flowers and fragile in a glass.\n\nPity the trespass of my mouth,\nAnd things undone, and words unsaid;\nShed lilies on my fever’s drouth,\nAnd roses on the marshes shed!\n\nO God! The doves whose flights are gold\nOn heavens remembered! Pity too\nThese garments that my loins enfold,\nThat rustle round me, dimly blue!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Bernard Miall" - } - } - } - }, - "desanka-maksimovic": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Desanka Maksimović", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1993 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "serbian", - "language": "serbian", - "flag": "🇷🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desanka_Maksimović", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "serbian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "girls-poem": { - "title": "“Girl’s Poem”", - "body": "So many stars in the sky\nand even if they were all my eyes\nI wouldn’t be able to look at him enough.\n\nSo many branches in the highlands\nand even if they were all my hands\nI wouldn’t be able to hug him enough.\n\nSo many springs on this earth\nand even if all would give their murmur,\nI wouldn’t be able to sing to him so.\n\nSo many birds in the world\nand even if all turn into girls\nthere wouldn’t be enough for him, though.\n\nSo many rocks on the ground\nand even if all of them on my chest lain\nit wouldn’t match the half of this pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "serbian", - "translator": "Stephen Capus" - } - }, - "warning": { - "title": "“Warning”", - "body": "Listen, I’ll tell you my secret:\nNever leave me alone\nwhen music plays.\n\nIt could seem to me\nthat some eyes gray\nare so deep and soft,\nthe eyes that are actually plain.\n\nIt could seem to me\nthat I dive into the sound\nand I could give my hands\nto anyone around.\n\nIt could seem to me\nso easy, so gay\nto love someone\nfor only one day.\n\nOr, I could tell someone\nmy dearest, magically growing secret\nhow much I love you.\n\nOh, never leave me alone\nwhen music plays.\n\nIt could seem to me that again,\nsomewhere in a forest,\nmy tears flow through a new well.\n\nIt could seem to me that a black butterfly\nmakes patterns on heavy water -\nthose that no one feels free to tell.\n\nIt could seem to me that somewhere in the dark zone\nsomeone sings and with a bitter flower\ntouches my heart where the incurable wound stays.\n\nOh, never leave me alone,\nnever alone,\nwhen music plays.", - "metadata": { - "language": "serbian", - "translator": "Stephen Capus" - } - } - } - }, - "stephane-mallarme": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Stéphane Mallarmé", - "birth": { - "year": 1842 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stéphane_Mallarmé", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "distress": { - "title": "“Distress”", - "body": "I don’t come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast\nIn whom are the sins of the race, nor to stir\nIn your foul tresses a mournful tempest\nBeneath the fatal boredom my kisses pour:\n\nA heavy sleep without those dreams that creep\nUnder curtains alien to remorse, I ask of your bed,\nSleep you can savour after your dark deceits,\nYou who know more of Nothingness than the dead.\n\nFor Vice, gnawing this inborn nobleness of mine\nMarked me, like you, with its sterility,\nBut shroud-haunted, pale, destroyed, I flee\n\nWhile that heart no tooth of any crime\nCan wound lives in your breast of stone,\nFrightened of dying while I sleep alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "lapres-midi-dun-faune": { - "title": "“L’après-Midi D’un Faune”", - "body": "I would immortalize these nymphs; so bright\nTheir sunlit colouring so airy light\nIt floats like drowsy down. Loved I a dream?\nMy doubts born of oblivious darkness seem\nA subtle tracery of branches grown\nThe tree’s true self--proving that I have known\nThinking it love the blushing of a rose.\nBut think. These nymphs their loveliness … suppose\nThey bodied forth your senses’ fabulous thirst?\nIllusion! which the blue eyes of the first\nAs cold and chaste as is the weeping spring\nBeget: the other sighing passioning\nIs she the wind warm in your fleece at noon?\nNo; through this quiet when a weary swoon\nCrushes and chokes the latest faint essay\nOf morning cool against the encroaching day\nThere is no murmuring water save the gush\nOf my clear fluted notes; and in the hush\nBlows never a wind save that which through my reed\nPuffs out before the rain of notes can speed\nUpon the air with that calm breath of art\nThat mounts the unwrinkled zenith visibly\nWhere inspiration seeks its native sky.\nYou fringes of a calm Sicilian lake\nThe sun’s own mirror which I love to take\nSilent beneath your starry flowers tell\n_How here I cut the hollow rushes well\nTamed by my skill when on the glaucous gold\nOf distant lawns about their fountain cold\nA living whiteness stirs like a lazy wave;\nAnd at the first slow notes my panpipes gave\nThese flocking swans these naiads rather fly\nOr dive_. Noon burns inert and tawny dry\nNor marks how clean that Hymen slipped away\nFrom me who seek in song the real A.\nWake then to the first ardour and the sight\nO lonely faun of the old fierce white light\nWith lilies one of you for innocence.\nOther than their lips’ delicate pretence\nThe light caress that quiets treacherous lovers\nMy breast I know not how to tell discovers\nThe bitten print of some immortal’s kiss.\nBut hush! a mystery so great as this\nI dare not tell save to my double reed\nWhich sharer of my every joy and need\nDreams down its cadenced monologues that we\nFalsely confuse the beauties that we see\nWith the bright palpable shapes our song creates:\nMy flute as loud as passion modulates\nPurges the common dream of flank and breast\nSeen through closed eyes and inwardly caressed\nOf every empty and monotonous line.\n\nBloom then O Syrinx in thy flight malign\nA reed once more beside our trysting-lake.\nProud of my music let me often make\nA song of goddesses and see their rape\nProfanely done on many a painted shape.\nSo when the grape’s transparent juice I drain\nI quell regret for pleasures past and feign\nA new real grape. For holding towards the sky\nThe empty skin I blow it tight and lie\nDream-drunk till evening eyeing it.\n\nTell o’er\nRemembered joys and plump the grape once more.\n_Between the reeds I saw their bodies gleam\nWho cool no mortal fever in the stream\nCrying to the woods the rage of their desire:\nAnd their bright hair went down in jewelled fire\nWhere crystal broke and dazzled shudderingly.\nI check my swift pursuit: for see where lie\nBruised being twins in love by languor sweet\nTwo sleeping girls clasped at my very feet.\nI seize and run with them nor part the pair\nBreaking this covert of frail petals where\nRoses drink scent of the sun and our light play\n’Mid tumbled flowers shall match the death of day._\nI love that virginal fury--ah the wild\nThrill when a maiden body shrinks defiled\nShuddering like arctic light from lips that sear\nIts nakedness … the flesh in secret fear!\nContagiously through my linked pair it flies\nWhere innocence in either struggling dies\nWet with fond tears or some less piteous dew.\n_Gay in the conquest of these fears I grew\nSo rash that I must needs the sheaf divide\nOf ruffled kisses heaven itself had tied.\nFor as I leaned to stifle in the hair\nOf one my passionate laughter taking care\n(With a stretched finger that her innocence\nMight stain with her companion’s kindling sense\nTo touch the younger little one who lay\nChild-like unblushing) my ungrateful prey\nSlips from me freed by passion’s sudden death\nNor heeds the frenzy of my sobbing breath._\n\nLet it pass! others of their hair shall twist\nA rope to drag me to those joys I missed.\nSee how the ripe pomegranates bursting red\nTo quench the thirst of the mumbling bees have bled;\nSo too our blood kindled by some chance fire\nFlows for the swarming legions of desire.\nAt evening when the woodland green turns gold\nAnd ashen grey ’mid the quenched leaves behold!\nRed Etna glows by Venus visited\nWalking the lava with her snowy tread\nWhene’er the flames in thunderous slumber die.\nI hold the goddess! Ah sure penalty!\n\nBut the unthinking soul and body swoon\nAt last beneath the heavy hush of noon.\nForgetful let me lie where summer’s drouth\nSifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth\nDream planet-struck by the grape’s round wine-red star.\n\nNymphs I shall see the shade that now you are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-pipe": { - "title": "“The Pipe”", - "body": "Yesterday I found my pipe while pondering a long evening of work,\nof fine winter work. Thrown aside were my cigarettes, with all the childish\njoys of summer, into the past which the leaves shining blue in the sun,\nthe muslins, illuminate, and taken up once again was the grave pipe\nof a serious man who wants to smoke for a long while without being disturbed,\nso as better to work: but I was not prepared for the surprise that this\nabandoned object had in store for me; for hardly had I drawn the first puff\nwhen I forgot the grand books I was planning to write, and, amazed, moved to\na feeling of tenderness, I breathed in the air of the previous winter\nwhich was now coming back to me. I had not been in contact with my\nfaithful sweetheart since returning to France, and now all of London,\nLondon as I had lived it a year ago entirely alone, appeared before my eyes:\nfirst the dear fogs that muffle one’s brains and have an odor of their own\nthere when they penetrate beneath the casements. My tobacco had the scent\nof a somber room with leather furniture sprinkled by coal dust, on which\nthe thin black cat would curl and stretch; the big fires! and the maid\nwith red arms pouring coals, and the noise of those coals falling from\nthe sheet--iron bucket into the iron scuttle in the morning--when the postman\ngave the solemn double knock that kept me alive! Once again I saw through\nthe windows those sickly trees of the deserted square--I saw the open sea,\ncrossed so often that winter, shivering on the deck of the steamer wet with\ndrizzle and blackened from the fumes--with my poor wandering beloved, decked out\nin traveller’s clothes, a long dress, dull as the dust of the roads,\na coat clinging damply to her cold shoulders, one of those straw hats with\nno feather and hardly any ribbons that wealthy ladies throw away upon arrival,\nmangled as they are by the sea, and that poor loved ones refurbish for many\nanother season. Around her neck was wound the terrible handkerchief that\none waves when saying goodbye forever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sea-breeze": { - "title": "“Sea Breeze”", - "body": "The flesh is sad, alas!--and I’ve read all the books.\nLet’s go! Far off. Let’s go! I sense\nThat the birds, intoxicated, fly\nDeep into unknown spume and sky!\nNothing--not even old gardens mirrored by eyes--\nCan restrain this heart that drenches itself in the sea,\nO nights, or the abandoned light of my lamp,\nOn the void of paper, that whiteness defends,\nNo, not even the young woman feeding her child.\nI shall go! Steamer, straining at your ropes\nLift your anchor towards an exotic rawness!\nA Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope\nStill believes in the last goodbye of handkerchiefs!\nAnd perhaps the masts, inviting lightning,\nAre those the gale bends over shipwrecks,\nLost, without masts, without masts, no fertile islands …\nBut, oh my heart, listen to the sailors’ chant!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "osip-mandelstam": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Osip Mandelstam", - "birth": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osip_Mandelstam", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "i-want-to-serve-you": { - "title": "“I Want to Serve You”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nI want to serve you\nOn an equal footing with others;\nFrom jealousy, to tell your fortune\nWith dry lips. The word does not slake\nMy parched mouth,\nAnd without you, the dense air\nIs empty for me again.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI am not jealous anymore,\nBut I want you,\nAlone I will take myself,\nLike a sacrifice, to the hangman.\nI will call you\nNeither joy, nor love;\nSome wild and strange blood\nWas switched with mine.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nOne more moment,\nAnd I will say to you:\nIt is not joy, but torment\nI find in you.\nAnd, like a crime,\nI am drawn to you by\nYour tender cherry mouth\nBitten in confusion.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nReturn to me at once:\nIt is awful without you,\nI have never felt\nMore strongly about you.\nAnd in the midnight drama\nIn dream or reality,\nIn alarm or languor,\nI will call you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "i-was-washing-at-night-out-in-the-yard": { - "title": "“I Was Washing at Night out in the Yard”", - "body": "I was washing at night out in the yard--\nthe heavens glowing with rough stars.\nA star-beam like salt upon an axe,\nthe water barrel brimful and cold.\n\nA padlock makes the gate secure,\nand conscience gives sternness to the earth--\nhard to find a standard anywhere\npurer than the truth of new-made cloth.\n\nA star melts in the barrel like salt,\nand the ice-cold winter is blacker still,\ndeath is more pure, disaster saltier\nand earth more truthful and more terrible.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter France", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-clarence-mangan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Clarence Mangan", - "birth": { - "year": 1803 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clarence_Mangan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "and-then-no-more": { - "title": "“And Then No More”", - "body": "I saw her once, one little while, and then no more:\n’Twas Eden’s light on Earth a while, and then no more.\nAmid the throng she passed along the meadow-floor:\nSpring seemed to smile on Earth awhile, and then no more;\nBut whence she came, which way she went, what garb she wore\nI noted not; I gazed a while, and then no more!\n\nI saw her once, one little while, and then no more:\n’Twas Paradise on Earth a while, and then no more.\nAh! what avail my vigils pale, my magic lore?\nShe shone before mine eyes awhile, and then no more.\nThe shallop of my peace is wrecked on Beauty’s shore.\nNear Hope’s fair isle it rode awhile, and then no more!\n\nI saw her once, one little while, and then no more:\nEarth looked like Heaven a little while, and then no more.\nHer presence thrilled and lighted to its inner core\nMy desert breast a little while, and then no more.\nSo may, perchance, a meteor glance at midnight o’er\nSome ruined pile a little while, and then no more!\n\nI saw her once, one little while, and then no more:\nThe earth was Peri-land awhile, and then no more.\nOh, might I see but once again, as once before,\nThrough chance or wile, that shape awhile, and then no more!\nDeath soon would heal my griefs! This heart, now sad and sore,\nWould beat anew a little while, and then no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "cahal-mor-of-the-wine-red-hand": { - "title": "“Cahal Mór of the Wine-Red Hand”", - "body": "I walked entranced\nThrough a land of Morn:\nThe sun, with wondrous excess of light,\nShone down and glanced\nOver seas of corn\nAnd lustrous gardens aleft and right.\nEven in the clime\nOf resplendent Spain,\nBeams no such sun upon such a land;\nBut it was the time,\n’T was in the reign,\nOf Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.\n\nAnon stood nigh\nBy my side a man\nOf princely aspect and port sublime\nHim queried I--\n“Oh, my Lord and Khan,\nWhat clime is this, and what golden time?”\nWhen he--“The clime\nIs a clime to praise,\nThe clime is Erin’s, the green and bland;\nAnd it is the time,\nThese be the days,\nOf Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”\n\nThen saw I thrones\nAnd circling fires,\nAnd a Dome rose near me, as by a spell,\nWhence flowed the tones\nOf silver lyres,\nAnd many voices in wreathèd swell;\nAnd their thrilling chime\nFell on mine ears\nAs the heavenly hymn of an angel-band--\n“It is now the time\nThese be the years,\nOf Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”\n\nI sought the hall,\nAnd behold!--a change\nFrom light to darkness, from joy to woe!\nKings, nobles, all,\nLooked aghast and strange;\nThe minstrel group sate in dumbest show!\nHad some great crime\nWrought this dread amaze,\nThis terror? None seemed to understand\n’Twas then the time,\nWe were in the days,\nOf Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.\n\nI again walked forth;\nBut lo! the sky\nShowed flecked with blood, and an alien sun\nGlared from the north,\nAnd there stood on high,\nAmid his shorn beams, a skeleton!\nIt was by the stream\nOf the castled Maine,\nOne Autumn eve, in the Teuton’s land,\nThat I dreamed this dream\nOf the time and reign\nOf Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "dark-rosaleen": { - "title": "“Dark Rosaleen”", - "body": "Oh! my Dark Rosaleen,\nDo no sigh, do not weep!\nThe priests are on the ocean green,\nThey march along the Deep.\nThere’s wine from the royal Pope\nUpon the ocean green;\nAnd Spanish ale shall give you hope,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy own Rosaleen!\nShall glad your heart, shall give you hope,\nShall give you health, and help, and hope,\nMy Dark Rosaleen.\n\nOver hills and through dales\nHave I roamed for your sake;\nAll yesterday I sailed with sails\nOn river and on lake.\nThe Erne, at its highest flood,\nI dashed across unseen,\nFor there was lightning in my blood,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy own Rosaleen!\nOh! there was lightning in my blood,\nRed lightning lightened through my blood,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\n\nAll day long in unrest\nTo and fro do I move,\nThe very soul within my breast\nIs wasted for you love!\nThe heart in my bosom faints\nTo think of you, my Queen,\nMy life of life, my saint of saints,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy own Rosaleen!\nTo hear your sweet and sad complaints,\nMy life, my love, my saint of saints,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\n\nWoe and pain, pain and woe,\nAre my lot night and noon,\nTo see your bright face clouded so,\nLike to the mournful moon.\nBut yet will I rear your throne\nAgain in golden sheen;\n’Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy own Rosaleen!\n’Tis you shall have the golden throne,\n’Tis you shall reign, and reign alone,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\n\nOver dews, over sands\nWill I fly for your weal;\nYour holy delicate white hands\nShall girdle me with steel.\nAt home in your emerald bowers,\nFrom morning’s dawn till e’en,\nYou’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy fond Rosaleen!\nYou’ll think of me through daylight’s hours,\nMy virgin flower, my flower of flowers,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\n\nI could scale the blue air,\nI could plough the high hills,\nOh, I could kneel all night in prayer,\nTo heal your many ills!\nAnd one beamy smile for you\nWould float like light between\nMy toils and me, my own, my true,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy fond Rosaleen!\nWould give me life and soul anew,\nA second life, a soul anew,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\n\nO! the Erne shall run red\nWith redundance of blood,\nThe earth shall rock beneath our tread,\nAnd flames wrap hill and wood,\nAnd gun-peal, a slogan cry,\nWake many a glen serene,\nEre you shall fade, ere you shall die,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!\nMy own Rosaleen!\nThe Judgement Hour must first be nigh,\nEre you can fade, ere you can die,\nMy Dark Rosaleen!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "kathaleen-ny-houlahan": { - "title": "“Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan”", - "body": "Long they pine in weary woe--the nobles of our land--\nLong they wander to and fro, proscribed, alas! and banned;\nFeastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exie’s brand,\nBut their hope is in the coming-to of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.\n\nThink not her a ghastly hag, too hideous to be seen;\nCall her not unseemly names, our matchless Kathaleen;\nYoung she is, and fair she is, and would be crowned a qeeen,\nWere the king’s son at home here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.\n\nSweet and mild would look her face--Oh! none so sweet and mild--\nCould she crush the foes by whom her beauty is reviled;\nWoolen plaids would grace herself and robes of silk her child,\nIf the king’s son were living here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.\n\nSore disgrace it is to see the Arbitress of thrones\nVassal to a Saxoneen of cold and hapless bones!\nBitter anguish wrings our souls--with heavy sighs and groans\nWe wait the Young Deliverer of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.\n\nLet us pray to Him who holds life’s issues in His hands,\nHim who formed the mighty globe, with all his thousand lands;\nGirding them with sea and mountains, rivers deep, and strands,\nTo cast a look of pity upon Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.\n\nHe, who over sands and waves led Israel along--\nHe who fed, with heavenly bread, that chosen tribe and throng;\nHe who stood by Moses when his foes were fierce and strong,\nMay He show forth His might in saving Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-nameless-one": { - "title": "“The Nameless One”", - "body": "Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,\nThat sweeps along to the mighty sea;\nGod will inspire me while I deliver\nMy soul of thee!\n\nTell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening\nAmid the last homes of youth and eld,\nThat once there was one whose veins ran lightning\nNo eye beheld.\n\nTell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,\nHow shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,\nNo star of all heaven sends to light our\nPath to the tomb.\n\nRoll on, my song, and to after ages\nTell how, disdaining all earth can give,\nHe would have taught men, from wisdom’s pages,\nThe way to live.\n\nAnd tell how trampled, derided, hated,\nAnd worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,\nHe fled for shelter to God, who mated\nHis soul with song.\n\n--With song which alway, sublime or vapid,\nFlow’d like a rill in the morning beam,\nPerchance not deep, but intense and rapid--\nA mountain stream.\n\nTell how this Nameless, condemn’d for years long\nTo herd with demons from hell beneath,\nSaw things that made him, with groans and tears, long\nFor even death.\n\nGo on to tell how, with genius wasted,\nBetray’d in friendship, befool’d in love,\nWith spirit shipwreck’d, and young hopes blasted,\nHe still, still strove;\n\nTill, spent with toil, dreeing death for others\n(And some whose hands should have wrought for him,\nIf children live not for sires and mothers),\nHis mind grew dim;\n\nAnd he fell far through that pit abysmal,\nThe gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,\nAnd pawn’d his soul for the devil’s dismal\nStock of returns.\n\nBut yet redeem’d it in days of darkness,\nAnd shapes and signs of the final wrath,\nWhen death, in hideous and ghastly starkness,\nStood on his path.\n\nAnd tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,\nAnd want, and sickness, and houseless nights,\nHe bides in calmness the silent morrow,\nThat no ray lights.\n\nAnd lives he still, then? Yes! Old and hoary\nAt thirty-nine, from despair and woe,\nHe lives, enduring what future story\nWill never know.\n\nHim grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,\nDeep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!\nHe, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,\nHere and in hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shapes-and-signs": { - "title": "“Shapes and Signs”", - "body": "I see black dragons mount the sky,\nI see earth yawn beneath my feet--\nI feel within the asp, the worm\nThat will not sleep and cannot die,\nFair though may show the winding-sheet!\nI hear all night as through a storm\nHoarse voices calling, calling\nMy name upon the wind--\nAll omens monstrous and appalling\nAffright my guilty mind.\n\nI exult alone in one wild hour--\nThat hour in which the red cup drowns\nThe memories it anon renews\nIn ghastlier guise, in fiercer power--\nThen Fancy brings me golden crowns,\nAnd visions of all brilliant hues\nLap my lost soul in gladness,\nUntil I awake again,\nAnd the dark lava-fires of madness\nOnce more sweep through my brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "siberia": { - "title": "“Siberia”", - "body": "In Siberia’s wastes\nThe ice-wind’s breath\nWoundeth like the toothed steel;\nLost Siberia doth reveal\nOnly blight and death.\n\nBlight and death alone.\nNo Summer shines.\nNight is interblent with Day.\nIn Siberia’s wastes alway\nThe blood blackens, the heart pines.\n\nIn Siberia’s wastes\nNo tears are shed,\nFor they freeze within the brain.\nNought is felt but dullest pain,\nPain acute, yet dead;\n\nPain as in a dream,\nWhen years go by\nFuneral-paced, yet fugitive,\nWhen man lives, and doth not live.\nDoth not live--nor die.\n\nIn Siberia’s wastes\nAre sands and rocks\nNothing blooms of green or soft,\nBut the snow-peaks rise aloft\nAnd the gaunt ice-blocks.\n\nAnd the exile there\nIs one with those;\nThey are part, and lie is part,\nFor the sands are in his heart,\nAnd the killing snows.\n\nTherefore, in those wastes\nNone curse the Czar.\nEach man’s tongue is cloven by\nThe North Blast, that heweth nigh\nWith sharp scymitar.\n\nAnd such doom each sees,\nTill, hunger-gnawn,\nAnd cold-slain, he at length sinks there,\nYet scarce more a corpse than ere\nHis last breath was drawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "eugene-marais": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Eugène Marais", - "birth": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "south_african", - "language": "afrikaans", - "flag": "🇿🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Marais", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "south_african" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "winters-night": { - "title": "“Winter’s Night”", - "body": "O cold is the slight wind, and keen.\nBare and bright in dim light is seen,\nas vast as the graces of God,\nthe veld’s starlit and fire-scarred sod.\nTo the high edge of the lands,\nspread through the scorched sands,\nnew seed-grass is stirring\nlike beckoning hands.\n\nO mournful the tune\nof the East-wind refrain,\nlike the song of a girl\nwho loved but in vain.\nOne drop of dew glistens\non each grass-blade’s fold\nand fast does it pale\nto frost in the cold!", - "metadata": { - "language": "afrikaans", - "translator": "At de Lange", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "walter-de-la-mare": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Walter de la Mare", - "birth": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1965 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_de_la_Mare", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 22 - }, - "poems": { - "all-thats-past": { - "title": "“All That’s Past”", - "body": "Very old are the woods;\nAnd the buds that break\nOut of the brier’s boughs,\nWhen March winds wake,\nSo old with their beauty are--\nOh, no man knows\nThrough what wild centuries\nRoves back the rose.\nVery old are the brooks;\nAnd the rills that rise\nWhere snow sleeps cold beneath\nThe azure skies\nSing such a history\nOf come and gone,\nTheir every drop is as wise\nAs Solomon.\n\nVery old are we men;\nOur dreams are tales\nTold in dim Eden\nBy Eve’s nightingales;\nWe wake and whisper awhile,\nBut, the day gone by,\nSilence and sleep like fields\nOf amaranth lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "As I mused by the hearthside,\nPuss said to me;\n“there burns the fire, man,\nand here sit we.\n\nFour walls around us\nagainst the cold air;\nand the latch drawn close\nto the draughty stair.\n\nA roof o’er our heads\nstar-proof, moon immune,\nand a wind in the chimney\nto wail us a tune.”\n\n“What felicity!” miaowed he,\n“where none may intrude;\njust man and beast--met\nin this solitude!”\n\n“Dear God, what security,\ncomfort and bliss!\nand to think, too what ages\nhave brought us to this!”\n\n“You in your sheep’s’ wool coat,\nbuttons of bone,\nand me in my fur-about\non the warm hearthstone”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "arabia": { - "title": "“Arabia”", - "body": "Far are the shades of Arabia,\nWhere the Princes ride at noon,\n’Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,\nUnder the ghost of the moon;\nAnd so dark is that vaulted purple\nFlowers in the forest rise\nAnd toss into blossom ’gainst the phantom stars\nPale in the noonday skies.\n\nSweet is the music of Arabia\nIn my heart, when out of dreams\nI still in the thin clear mirk of dawn\nDescry her gliding streams;\nHear her strange lutes on the green banks\nRing loud with the grief and delight\nOf the dim-silked, dark-haired Musicians\nIn the brooding silence of night.\n\nThey haunt me--her lutes and her forests;\nNo beauty on earth I see\nBut shadowed with that dream recalls\nHer loveliness to me:\nStill eyes look coldly upon me,\nCold voices whisper and say--\n“He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,\nThey have stolen his wits away.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dull-boy": { - "title": "“A Dull Boy”", - "body": "“Work”? Well, not _work_--this vain lone urgent quest\nTo conjure life, love, wonder into words;\nDiviner songs than any me have blessed\nWere sung, at ease, this daybreak, by the birds.\n\nI watch, with loving envy, in her glass\nThe dreamlike image of the snow-white swan;\nAs mute a miracle is the common grass\nThat springs into green again, June’s sickle gone.\n\nWhat music could be mine compared with that\nThe idling wind woos from the sand dune’s bent?\nWhat meaning deeper than the smile whereat\nA burning heart conceives the loved intent?\n\n_“And what didst thou?”_ … I see the vaulted throng,\nSeraph and human, in that dread array\nBefore the Judge, to whom all dooms belong.\nWill the lost child in me cry bravely “Play”?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-empty-house": { - "title": "“The Empty House”", - "body": "See this house, how dark it is\nBeneath its vast-boughed trees!\nNot one trembling leaflet cries\nTo that Watcher in the skies--\n“Remove, remove thy searching gaze,\nInnocent of heaven’s ways,\nBrood not, Moon, so wildly bright,\nOn secrets hidden from sight.”\n\n“Secrets,” sighs the night-wind,\n“Vacancy is all I find;\nEvery keyhole I have made\nWails a summons, faint and sad,\nNo voice ever answers me,\nOnly vacancy.”\n“Once, once … ” the cricket shrills,\nAnd far and near the quiet fills\nWith its tiny voice, and then\nHush falls again.\n\nMute shadows creeping slow\nMark how the hours go.\nEvery stone is mouldering slow.\nAnd the least winds that blow\nSome minutest atom shake,\nSome fretting ruin make\nIn roof and walls. How black it is\nBeneath these thick boughed trees!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "the-fiddler": { - "title": "“The Fiddler”", - "body": "Here lies a fiddler, play could he\nSweet as a bird in an almond tree.\nFingers and strings--they seemed to agree\nLife itself is a melody.\n\nUp slid his bow, sloped leisurely.\nMusic’s self was its witchery.\nHis gut is broken. Mute lies he.\nAnd the bird sings on in the almond tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "finished-with": { - "title": "“Finished With”", - "body": "Not less alone than when alone,\nThese two--leagues distant--sat.\nThrough the lamp’s shine he gazed at her.\nAs Scullion may at Cat.\n\n“Only one word, before I gol\nYou loved me--once? A day?”\nSidling her eyes, she smiled to herself;\nBut nothing would she say.\n\n“Some proof, dark heart, I’ve touched your lips,\nAnd never may again!”\nShe pouted; eyebrows arched to heaven;\nBut tongueless did remain.\n\n“A nod, a whisper, we two have lain\nClasped in the selfsame bed.”\n_Fie!_ seemed her cherry mouth to shape,\nThough never a word she said.\n\n“Fool that I’ve been! Not even a hint.\nSoul-pocket-spent their all?”\nShe tilted her round chin an inch,\nBut nothing could recall\n\n“You lovely thing! Stay motionless!\nA ditch may mirror heaven!”\nHer parted lips stirred sluggishly\nBut never whispered even.\n\n“Shut those cold eyes, then, and say out,\nPerish in ice, for _me!_”\nThe snake lids widened a little space,\nBut not as if to see.\n\n“Ay? Then I go to death and hell--\nWith broken heart and mind!”\n“Others have done the same. And, well--\nWell, now they’re more resigned!”.\n\nStark silence settled in the room.\nThe lamp-flame ducked; then shone\nMore brightly, calmly, softly now\nThat the night-wind’s sigh was gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gloria-mundi": { - "title": "“Gloria Mundi”", - "body": "Upon a bank, easeless with knobs of gold,\nBeneath a canopy of noonday smoke,\nI saw a measureless Beast, morose and bold,\nWith eyes like one from filthy dreams awoke,\nWho stares upon the daylight in despair\nFor very terror of the nothing there.\n\nThis beast in one flat hand clutched vulture-wise\nA glittering image of itself in jet,\nAnd with the other groped about its eyes\nTo drive away the dreams that pestered it;\nAnd never ceased its coils to toss and beat\nThe mire encumbering its feeble feet.\n\nSharp was its hunger, though continually\nIt seemed a cud of stones to ruminate,\nAnd often like a dog let glittering lie\nThis meatless fare, its foolish gaze to sate;\nOnce more convulsively to stoop its jaw,\nOr seize the morsel with an envious paw.\n\nIndeed, it seemed a hidden enemy\nMust lurk within the clouds above that bank,\nIt strained so wildly its pale, stubborn eye,\nTo pierce its own foul vapours dim and dank;\nTill, wearied out, it raved in wrath and foam,\nDaring that Nought Invisible to come.\n\nAy, and it seemed some strange delight to find\nIn this unmeaning din, till, suddenly,\nAs if it heard a rumour on the wind,\nOr far away its freer children cry,\nLifting its face made-quiet, there it stayed,\nTill died the echo its own rage had made.\n\nThat place alone was barren where it lay;\nFlowers bloomed beyond, utterly sweet and fair;\nAnd even its own dull heart might think to stay\nIn livelong thirst of a clear river there,\nFlowing from unseen hills to unheard seas,\nThrough a still vale of yew and almond trees.\n\nAnd then I spied in the lush green below\nIts tortured belly, One, like silver, pale,\nWith fingers closed upon a rope of straw,\nThat bound the Beast, squat neck to hoary tail;\nLonely in all that verdure faint and deep,\nHe watched the monster as a shepherd sheep.\n\nI marvelled at the power, strength, and rage\nOf this poor creature in such slavery bound;\nFettered with worms of fear; forlorn with age;\nIts blue wing-stumps stretched helpless on the ground;\nWhile twilight faded into darkness deep,\nAnd he who watched it piped its pangs asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "good-bye": { - "title": "“Good-Bye”", - "body": "The last of last words spoken is, Good-bye--\nThe last dismantled flower in the weed-grown hedge,\nThe last thin rumour of a feeble bell far ringing,\nThe last blind rat to spurn the mildewed rye.\n\nA hardening darkness glasses the haunted eye,\nShines into nothing the watcher’s burnt-out candle,\nWreathes into scentless nothing the wasting incense,\nFaints in the outer silence the hunting-cry.\n\nLove of its muted music breathes no sigh,\nThought in her ivory tower gropes in her spinning,\nToss on in vain the whispering trees of Eden,\nLast of all last words spoken is, Good-bye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "harvest-home": { - "title": "“Harvest Home”", - "body": "A bird flies up from the hayfield;\nSweet is the new-mown grass;\nBut all those fowers laid low at noonday!\nAnd only my sighed Alas!\n\nMan garners his own with scythe and gun--\nSeed of the weed or blood:\nBut the life dries out of a foolish heart\nWhen the dust is christened mud.\n\nThe beauty is gone … Saints sing of heaven:\nDeath’s but the narrow pass\nFrom a transient dream to a changeless Real--\nYet I mourn the flower of the grass.\n\nI grieve for the nameless lost ones,\nFor the broken loves, the woe,\nThe godlike courage, the bitter end,\nAnd the facing a lightless No.\n\nOh, my bird from the swathes of the hayfield,\nThe rancid stench of the grass!\nAnd a soul stricken mute by a sorrowing world,\nAnd the sigh of that one Alas!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "the-hostage": { - "title": "“The Hostage”", - "body": "In dead of dark to his starry North\nSaint Nicholas drew near--\nHe had ranged the world this wintry night,\nHis elk-bells jangling clear.\nNow bitter-worn with age was he,\nAnd weary of mankind, for few\nHad shown him love or courtesy.\n\nHis sacks lay empty--all save one;\nAnd this to his affright\nStirred as he stooped with fingers numb,\nAblaze with hoar-frost bright.\nAghast he stood. Showed fumbling thumb,\nSmall shoulder, a wing--what stowaway\nWas this, and whence was ’t come?\n\nAnd out there crept a lovely Thing--Half angel and half child:\n“I, youngest of all Heaven, am here, to be thy joy,” he smiled.\n“O Nicholas, our Master Christ thy grief hath seen; and He\nHath bidden me come to keep His tryst, and bring His love to thee:\nTo serve thee well, and sing Nowell, and thine own son to be.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "in-stagnant-gloom-i-toil-thro-day": { - "title": "“In stagnant gloom I toil thro’ day …”", - "body": "In stagnant gloom I toil thro’ day,\nAll that delights me put away.\nNot even a bird, to one oppressed,\nWarbles in an o’erlabored breast,\nNor from the fountains of delight\nFalls one clear drop to ease my sight.\n\nYet, Thou who mad’st of dust my face,\nAnd shut me in this bitter place,\nThou also, past the world to know,\nDid hinges hang where heart may go\nAfter day’s travail--vain all words--\nInto this garden of the Lord’s.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1941, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-keys-of-morning": { - "title": "“The Keys of Morning”", - "body": "While at her bedroom window once,\nLearning her task for school,\nLittle Louisa lonely sat\nIn the morning clear and cool,\nShe slanted her small bead-brown eyes\nAcross the empty street,\nAnd saw Death softly watching her\nIn the sunshine pale and sweet.\n\nHis was a long lean sallow face;\nHe sat with half-shut eyes,\nLike a old sailor in a ship\nBecalmed ’neath tropic skies.\nBeside him in the dust he had set\nHis staff and shady hat;\nThese, peeping small, Louisa saw\nQuite clearly where she sat--\nThe thinness of his coal-black locks,\nHis hands so long and lean\nThey scarcely seemed to grasp at all\nThe keys that hung between:\nBoth were of gold, but one was small,\nAnd with this last did he\nWag in the air, as if to say,\n“Come hither, child, to me!”\n\nLouisa laid her lesson book\nOn the cold window-sill;\nAnd in the sleepy sunshine house\nWent softly down, until\nShe stood in the half-opened door,\nAnd peeped. But strange to say\nWhere Death just now had sunning sat\nOnly a shadow lay:\nJust the tall chimney’s round-topped cowl,\nAnd the small sun behind,\nHad with its shadow in the dust\nCalled sleepy Death to mind.\nBut most she thought how strange it was\nTwo keys that he should bear,\nAnd that, when beckoning, he should wag\nThe littlest in the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lethe": { - "title": "“Lethe”", - "body": "Only the Blessed of Lethe’s dews\nMay stoop to drink. And yet,\nWere their Elysium mine to lose,\nCould I, sans all repining, choose\nLife’s _sorrows_ to forget?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-listeners": { - "title": "“The Listeners”", - "body": "“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,\nKnocking on the moonlit door;\nAnd his horse in the silence champed the grass\nOf the forest’s ferny floor;\nAnd a bird flew up out of the turret,\nAbove the Traveller’s head:\nAnd he smote upon the door again a second time;\n“Is there anybody there?” he said.\nBut no one descended to the Traveller;\nNo head from the leaf-fringed sill\nLeaned over and looked into his grey eyes,\nWhere he stood perplexed and still.\nBut only a host of phantom listeners\nThat dwelt in the lone house then\nStood listening in the quiet of the moonlight\nTo that voice from the world of men:\nStood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,\nThat goes down to the empty hall,\nHearkening in an air stirred and shaken\nBy the lonely Traveller’s call.\nAnd he felt in his heart their strangeness,\nTheir stillness answering his cry,\nWhile his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,\n’Neath the starred and leafy sky;\nFor he suddenly smote on the door, even\nLouder, and lifted his head:--\n“Tell them I came, and no one answered,\nThat I kept my word,” he said.\nNever the least stir made the listeners,\nThough every word he spake\nFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house\nFrom the one man left awake:\nAy, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,\nAnd the sound of iron on stone,\nAnd how the silence surged softly backward,\nWhen the plunging hoofs were gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-market-place": { - "title": "“The Market Place”", - "body": "My mind is like a clamorous market-place.\n All day in wind, rain, sun, its babel wells;\n Voice answering to voice in tumult swells.\nChaffering and laughing, pushing for a place,\nMy thoughts haste on, gay, strange, poor, simple, base;\n This one buys dust, and that a bauble sells:\n But none to any scrutiny hints or tells\nThe haunting secrets hidden in each sad face.\n\nThe clamour quietens when the dark draws near;\n Strange looms the earth in twilight of the West,\nLonely with one sweet star serene and clear,\n Dwelling, when all this place is hushed to rest,\n On vacant stall, gold, refuse, worst and best,\nAbandoned utterly in haste and fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mistletoe": { - "title": "“Mistletoe”", - "body": "Sitting under the mistletoe\n(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),\nOne last candle burning low,\nAll the sleepy dancers gone,\nJust one candle burning on,\nShadows lurking everywhere:\nSome one came, and kissed me there.\n\nTired I was; my head would go\nNodding under the mistletoe\n(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),\nNo footsteps came, no voice, but only,\nJust as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,\nStooped in the still and shadowy air\nLips unseen--and kissed me there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,\nAnd all her lovely things even lovelier grow;\nHer flowers in vision flame, her forest trees\nLift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.\n\nWhen music sounds, out of the water rise\nNaiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,\nRapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face,\nWith solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.\n\nWhen music sounds, all that I was I am\nEre to this haunt of brooding dust I came;\nAnd from Time’s woods break into distant song\nThe swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "There is wind where the rose was,\nCold rain where sweet grass was,\nAnd clouds like sheep\nStream o’er the steep\nGrey skies where the lark was.\n\nNought warm where your hand was,\nNought gold where your hair was,\nBut phantom, forlorn,\nBeneath the thorn,\nYour ghost where your face was.\n\nCold wind where your voice was,\nTears, tears where my heart was,\nAnd ever with me,\nChild, ever with me,\nSilence where hope was.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-secret": { - "title": "“The Secret”", - "body": "I bless the hand that once held mine,\n The lips that said:\nNo heart, though kiss were Circe’s wine,\n Can long be comforted.\n\nAy, if we’d talked day in, night out,\n Of all life marvels at--\nOne secret, soul can utter not,\n Nor self to self relate.\n\nWe gazed, enravished, thou and I\n As flower might at flower;\nBut speechless stayed, past even a sigh.\n Not even Babel Tower\n\nHeard language strange and sweet enough\n To tell that moment’s peace,\nWhere broods the Phoenix, timeless Love,\n And divine silence is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "things": { - "title": "“Things”", - "body": "Things are the mind’s mute looking-glass\nThat vase of flowers, this work-box here,\nWhen false love flattered me, alas,\nGlowed with a beauty crystal clear.\n\nNow they are hostile. The tulip’s glow\nBurns with the mockery of despair;\nAnd when I open the box, I know\nWhat kind of self awaits me there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "two-epitaphs": { - "title": "“Two Epitaphs”", - "body": "# I.\n\nYe say we sleep;\nBut nay, we wake;\nLife was that strange and chequered dream\nOnly for waking’s sake.\n\n\n# II.\n\nO passer--by, beware!\nIs the day fair?--\nYet unto evening shall the day spin on\nAnd soon thy sun be gone;\nThen darkness come,\nAnd this, a narrow home.\nNot that I bid thee fear;\nOnly, when thou at last lie here,\nBethink thee, there shall only be\nThyself for company.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - } - } - }, - "paul-mariani": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Paul Mariani", - "birth": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mariani", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "ghost": { - "title": "“Ghost”", - "body": "After so much time you think\nyou’d have it netted\nin the mesh of language. But again\nit reconfigures, slick as Proteus.\n\nYou’re in the kitchen talking\nwith your ex-Navy brother, his two kids\nsnaking over his tattooed arms, as he goes on\n& on about being out of work again.\n\nFor an hour now you’ve listened,\nhis face growing dimmer in the lamplight\nas you keep glancing at your watch\nuntil it’s there again: the ghost rising\n\nas it did that first time when you,\nthe oldest, left home to marry.\nYou’re in the boat again, alone, and staring\nat the six of them, your sisters\n\n& your brothers, their faces bobbing\nin the water, as their fingers grapple\nfor the gunwales. The ship is going down,\nyour mother with it. One oar’s locked\n\nand feathered, and one oar’s lost,\nthere’s a slop of gurry pooling\nin the bottom, and your tiny boat\nkeeps drifting further from them.\n\nBetween each bitter wave you can count\ntheir upturned faces--white roses\nscattered on a mash of sea, eyes fixed\nto see what you will do. And you?\n\nYou their old protector, you their guardian\nand go-between? _Each man for himself_,\nyou remember thinking, their faces\ngrowing dimmer with each oarstroke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-gods-who-come-among-us-in-the-guise-of-strangers": { - "title": "“The Gods Who Come among Us in the Guise of Strangers”", - "body": "Late nights, with summer moths clinging\nto the screens & the shadows of the Old Great\nflickering across the tv screen, suddenly,\nthere would be Charlie’s inquisitorial head\npeering in the window, the shock of white hair,\nfollowed by the heart-stopping shock\nof greeting. Just passing through, he’d say,\nand--seeing as the light was on--\nthought we might have ourselves a talk.\n\nDid I ever have time enough for Charlie?\nUsually not. The story of my life,\nof the one, as Chaucer says of someone,\nwho seems always busier than he is.\nThen, abruptly, & discourteously,\ndeath put a stop to Charlie’s visits.\nSummer moths collect still at the windows.\nThen leaves & winter ice. Then summer moths\nagain. Each year, old ghost, I seem\nto miss you more and more, your youth spent\nwith Auden & the Big Ones, words--\ntheirs, yours--helping you survive\na brutal youth. Too late I see now\nhow you honored me like those hidden\ngods of old who walk among us like\nthe dispossessed, and who, if you are\namong the lucky ones, tap at your window\nwhen you least expect to ask you for a cup\nof water and a little of your time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "quid-pro-quo": { - "title": "“Quid Pro Quo”", - "body": "Just after my wife’s miscarriage (her second\nin four months), I was sitting in an empty\nclassroom exchanging notes with my friend,\na budding Joyce scholar with steelrimmed\nglasses, when, lapsed Irish Catholic that he was,\nhe surprised me by asking what I thought now\nof God’s ways toward man. It was spring,\n\nsuch spring as came to the flintbacked Chenango\nValley thirty years ago, the full force of Siberia\nbehind each blast of wind. Once more my poor wife\nwas in the local four-room hospital, recovering.\nThe sun was going down, the room’s pinewood panels\nall but swallowing the gelid light, when, suddenly,\nI surprised not only myself but my colleague\n\nby raising my middle finger up to heaven, _quid\npro quo_, the hardly grand defiant gesture a variant\non Vanni Fucci’s figs, shocking not only my friend\nbut in truth the gesture’s perpetrator too. I was 24,\nand, in spite of having pored over the _Confessions_\n& that Catholic Tractate called the _Summa_, was sure\nI’d seen enough of God’s erstwhile ways toward man.\n\nThat summer, under a pulsing midnight sky\nshimmering with Van Gogh stars, in a creaking,\ncedarscented cabin off Lake George, having lied\nto the gentrified owner of the boys’ camp\nthat indeed I knew wilderness & lakes and could,\nif need be, lead a whole fleet of canoes down\nthe turbulent whitewater passages of the Fulton Chain\n\n(I who had last been in a rowboat with my parents\nat the age of six), my wife and I made love, trying\nnot to disturb whosever headboard & waterglass\nlie just beyond the paperthin partition at our feet.\nIn the great black Adirondack stillness, as we lay\nthere on our sagging mattress, my wife & I gazed out\nthrough the broken roof into a sky that seemed\n\nsomehow to look back down on us, and in that place,\nthat holy place, she must have conceived again,\nfor nine months later in a New York hospital she\nbrought forth a son, a little buddha-bellied\nrumplestiltskin runt of a man who burned\nto face the sun, the fact of his being there\nboth terrifying & lifting me at once, this son,\n\nthis gift, whom I still look upon with joy & awe. Worst,\nbest, just last year, this same son, grown\nto manhood now, knelt before a marble altar to vow\neverything he had to the same God I had had my own\nerstwhile dealings with. How does one bargain\nwith a God like this, who, _quid pro quo_, ups\nthe ante each time He answers one sign with another?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "republic": { - "title": "“Republic”", - "body": "Midnight. For the past three hours\nI’ve raked over Plato’s _Republic_\nwith my students, all of them John\nJay cops, and now some of us\nhave come to Rooney’s to unwind.\nBoilermakers. Double shots and triples.\nFitzgerald’s still in his undercover\nclothes and giveaway white socks, and two\nlieutenants--Seluzzi in the sharkskin suit\n& D’Ambruzzo in the leather--have just\ninvited me to catch their fancy (and illegal)\ndigs somewhere up in Harlem, when\nthis cop begins to tell his story:\n\nhow he and his partner trailed\nthis pusher for six weeks before\nthey trapped him in a burnt-out\ntenement somewhere down in SoHo,\none coming at him up the stairwell,\nthe other up the fire escape\nand through a busted window. But by\nthe time they’ve grabbed him\nhe’s standing over an open window\nand he’s clean. The partner races down\ninto the courtyard and begins going\nthrough the garbage until he finds\nwhat it is he’s after: a white bag\nhanging from a junk mimosa like\nthe Christmas gift it is, and which now\nhe plants back on the suspect.\nCross-examined by a lawyer who does his best\nto rattle them, he and his partner\nstick by their story, and the charges stick.\nFitzgerald shrugs. Business as usual.\nBut the cop goes on. Better to let\nthe guy go free than under oath\nto have to lie like that.\nAnd suddenly you can hear the heavy\nsuck of air before Seluzzi, who\nhalf an hour before was boasting\nabout being on the take, staggers\nto his feet, outraged at what he’s heard,\nand insists on taking the bastard\ndowntown so they can book him.\n\nWhich naturally brings to an end\nthe discussion we’ve been having,\nand soon each of us is heading\nfor an exit, embarrassed by the awkward\nlight the cop has thrown on things.\nWhich makes it clearer now to me why\nthe State would offer someone like Socrates\na shot of hemlock. And even clearer\nwhy Socrates would want to drink it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "filippo-tommaso-marinetti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti", - "birth": { - "year": 1876 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1944 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-joy-of-mechanical-force": { - "title": "“The Joy of Mechanical Force”", - "body": "We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose copper domes, as open-worked as our souls, yet had electric hearts. And while we trod our native sloth into opulent Persian carpets, we carried our discussion to the farthest limits of logic and covered sheets of paper with insane scrawls.\n\nA vast pride swelled in our breasts, to feel ourselves standing alone, like lighthouses or advanced guards, facing the army of enemy stars that camp in heavenly bivouacs. Alone with the greasers in the infernal engine-rooms of great ships, alone with the dark phantoms that rummage in the red bellies of bewitched locomotives, alone with the drunks fluttering, battering their wings against the walls!\n\nAnd unexpectedly, like festive villages that the Po in flood suddenly unsettles and uproots to sweep them off, over the falls and eddies of a deluge, to the sea, we were disturbed by the rumbling of enormous double-decker trams, passing in fits and starts, streaked with lights.\n\nThen the silence got worse. As we listened to the exhausted prayer of the old canal and heard the grating bones of palaces moribund in their greenery whiskers, all of a sudden hungry cars roared beneath our windows.\n\n“Come,” I said, “my friends! Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic Ideal have been surpassed. We shall witness the birth of the Centaur and, soon, we’ll see the first Angels fly! We must shake the gates of life to test the hinges and the locks! … Let us go! This is truly the first sun that dawns above the earth! Nothing equals the splendor of our red sword battling for the first time in the millennial gloom.”\n\nWe approached the three snuffling machines to stroke their breasts. I stretched out on mine like a corpse in my coffin, but suddenly awoke beneath the steering wheel--blade of a guillotine--that threatened my stomach.\n\nThe great broom of folly tore us from ourselves and swept us through the streets, precipitous and profound like dry torrent beds. Here and there, unhappy lamps in windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. “The scent,” I cried, “the scent suffices for wild beasts!”\n\nAnd we pursued, alike to young lions, Death of the dark fur spotted with pale crosses that slipped ahead of us in the vast mauve sky, palpable and alive.\n\nAnd yet we had no ideal Mistress high as the clouds, no cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into Byzantine rings! Nothing to die for besides the desire to rid ourselves of our too weighty courage!\n\nWe went on, crushing the watchdogs on the thresholds of houses, leaving them flattened under our tires like a collar under the iron. Cajoling Death preceded me on every curve, offering her pretty paw and, by turns, lying flat with a jarring clamp of jaws to throw me velvety looks from the depths of puddles.\n\n“Let us abandon Wisdom like a hideous vein-stone and enter like pride-spiced fruit into the vast maw of the wind! Let us give ourselves to the Unknown to eat, not for despair, but simply to enrich the unplumbable wells of Absurdity!”\n\nAs I spoke these words, I veered suddenly upon myself with the drunken folly of poodles chasing their own tail and there, at once, were two disapproving cyclists, reeling before me like two persuasive and yet contradictory arguments. Their inane undulations scanned over my ground … What a bore! Phooey! … I cup off sharply and, in disgust, I pitched--bang!--into a ditch …\n\nAh! motherly ditch, half full of muddy water! Factory ditch! I tasted by mouthfuls your bracing slime that recalls the saintly black breast of my Sudanese nurse!\n\nAs I rose, a shiny, stinking gadabout, I felt the red-hot iron of joy deliciously pierce my heart.\n\nA crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists had gathered in terror around the prodigy. Patient and meddlesome, they raised high above great iron casting nets to fish out my car that lay like a great mired shark. It emerged slowly, leaving behind in the ditch like scales, its heavy body of common sense, and its padding of comfort.\n\nThey thought my good shark dead, but I awoke it with a single caress on its all-powerful rump and there it was, revived, running full speech ahead upon its fins.\n\nThen, face hidden by the good factory slime, covered by metal dross, by useless sweat and heavenly soot, carrying out crushed arms in a sling, amid the plaints of prudent fishermen and distressed naturalists, we dictated our first wills to all the living men on earth:", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - } - } - }, - "edwin-markham": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edwin Markham", - "birth": { - "year": 1852 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1940 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Markham", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-man-with-the-hoe": { - "title": "“The Man with the Hoe”", - "body": "_God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him._\n --Genesis\n\nBowed by the weight of centuries he leans\nUpon his hoe and gazes on the ground,\nThe emptiness of ages in his face,\nAnd on his back the burden of the world.\nWho made him dead to rapture and despair,\nA thing that grieves not and that never hopes,\nStolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?\nWho loosened and let down this brutal jaw?\nWhose was the hand that slanted back this brow?\nWhose breath blew out the light within this brain?\nIs this the Thing the Lord God made and gave\nTo have dominion over sea and land;\nTo trace the stars and search the heavens for power.\nTo feel the passion of Eternity?\nIs this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns\nAnd marked their ways upon the ancient deep?\nDown all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf\nThere is no shape more terrible than this--\nMore tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed--\nMore filled with signs and portents for the soul--\nMore fraught with menace to the universe.\n\nWhat gulfs between him and the seraphim!\nSlave of the wheel of labor, what to him\nAre Plato and the swing of Pleiades?\nWhat the long reaches of the peaks of song,\nThe rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?\nThrough this dread shape the suffering ages look;\nTime’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;\nThrough this dread shape humanity betrayed,\nPlundered, profaned and disinherited,\nCries protest to the Judges of the World,\nA protest that is also prophecy.\n\nO masters, lords and rulers in all lands,\nIs this the handiwork you give to God,\nThis monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?\nHow will you ever straighten up this shape;\nTouch it again with immortality;\nGive back the upward looking and the light;\nRebuild in it the music and the dream;\nMake right the immemorial infamies,\nPerfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?\n\nO masters, lords and rulers in all lands,\nHow will the Future reckon with this Man?\nHow answer his brute question in that hour\nWhen whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?\nHow will it be with kingdoms and with kings--\nWith those who shaped him to the thing he is--\nWhen this dumb Terror shall reply to God,\nAfter the silence of the centuries?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer": { - "title": "“A Prayer”", - "body": "Teach me, Father, how to go\nSoftly as the grasses grow;\nHush my soul to meet the shock\nOf the wild world as a rock;\nBut my spirit, propt with power,\nMake as simple as a flower.\nLet the dry heart fill its cup,\nLike a poppy looking up;\nLet life lightly wear her crown\nLike a poppy looking down,\nWhen its heart is filled with dew,\nAnd its life begins anew.\n\nTeach me, Father, how to be\nKind and patient as a tree.\nJoyfully the crickets croon\nUnder the shady oak at noon;\nBeetle, on his mission bent,\nTarries in that cooling tent.\nLet me, also, cheer a spot,\nHidden field or garden grot--\nPlace where passing souls can rest\nOn the way and be their best.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "christopher-marlowe": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Christopher Marlowe", - "birth": { - "year": 1564 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1593 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-face-that-launchd-a-thousand-ships": { - "title": "“The Face that Launch’d a Thousand Ships”", - "body": "Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,\nAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?\nSweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.\nHer lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!\nCome, Helen, come, give me my soul again.\nHere will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,\nAnd all is dross that is not Helena.\nI will be Paris, and for love of thee,\nInstead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d;\nAnd I will combat with weak Menelaus,\nAnd wear thy colours on my plumed crest;\nYea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,\nAnd then return to Helen for a kiss.\nO, thou art fairer than the evening air\nClad in the beauty of a thousand stars;\nBrighter art thou than flaming Jupiter\nWhen he appear’d to hapless Semele;\nMore lovely than the monarch of the sky\nIn wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;\nAnd none but thou shalt be my paramour!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hero-and-leander": { - "title": "“Hero and Leander”", - "body": "It lies not in our power to love or hate,\nFor will in us is over-rul’d by fate.\nhen two are stript long ere the course begin,\nWe wish that one should lose, the other win;\nAnd one especially do we affect\nOf two gold ingots, like in each respect:\nThe reason no man knows; let it suffice,\nWhat we behold is censur’d by our eyes.\nWhere both deliberate, the love is slight:\nWho ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-passionate-shepherd-to-his-love": { - "title": "“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”", - "body": "Come live with me and be my love,\nAnd we will all the pleasures prove,\nThat valleys, groves, hills, and fields,\nWoods, or steepy mountain yields.\nAnd we will sit upon the rocks,\nSeeing the shepherds feed their flocks,\nBy shallow rivers, to whose falls\nMelodious birds sing madrigals.\nAnd I will make thee beds of roses,\nAnd a thousand fragrant posies,\nA cap of flowers and a kirtle\nEmbroider’d all with leaves of myrtle:\nA gown made of the finest wool,\nWhich from our pretty lambs we pull;\nFair lined slippers for the cold,\nWith buckles of the purest gold:\nA belt of straw and ivy buds,\nWith coral clasps and amber studs;\nAnd if these pleasures may thee move,\nCome live with me and be my love.\nThe shepherd swains shall dance and sing\nFor thy delight each May morning;\nIf these delights thy mind may move,\nThen live with me and be my love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - } - } - }, - "clement-marot": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Clément Marot", - "birth": { - "year": 1496 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1544 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clément_Marot", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "love-or-friendship": { - "title": "“Love or Friendship”", - "body": "What is it, lovely one, I beg you,\nthat stops you loving me more?\nI’ll always be filled with sadness,\nuntil you tell me the truth, I’m sure.\nPerhaps you only want Friendship,\nor something ill’s been said of me,\nor your heart’s found a newer love.\n\nIf you forsake love’s sweet path,\nyou render your beauty prisoner;\nif you’ve forgot me for another,\nHeaven grant the good you seek;\nbut if you’ve heard aught ill of me,\nthen, I trust, as fair you seem to me,\nso much or more you’ll punish me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "A. S. Kline" - } - }, - "the-rose": { - "title": "“The Rose”", - "body": "The lovely rose, to Venus consecrated,\nwould give greater pleasure to eye and mind,\nif I tell you, lady, who pleases me,\nwhy we see it dressed all in red.\n\nOne day Venus with her Adonis\nthrough a garden, full of briars,\ntrod sleeveless and bare-footed;\na rose-thorn pricked here, there;\nand all the roses, white before,\nwere reddened with her blood.\n\nAnd I have profited from that rose,\nin enjoying you, for, above all else,\nyour face, in embracing sweetness,\nseems a fresh and reddened rose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "song-of-may-and-virtue": { - "title": "“Song of May and Virtue”", - "body": "Gladly, in this month of May,\nearth transforms, and renews,\nand many a lover does so too,\nmade to forge their love anew,\nby the fickleness of their hearts,\nand be more content elsewhere.\nThat way of loving is not for me,\nmy love will endure eternally.\n\nThere is no lovely lady, here,\nwhose beauty will not fade,\nthrough time, illness, anxiety\nimperfection seeks them out;\nbut no shade can touch the one\nwhom I claim to love endlessly;\nand since she is forever lovely;\nmy love will endure eternally.\n\nShe of whom I say these things\nis Virtue the unfading Nymph,\nwho to Honour’s shining peak,\ncalls all true lovers perpetually:\n“Come, lovers, come,” she cries,\n“come to me, for I wait for you.”\n“Come” she cries, the lovely girl,\n“my love will endure eternally.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-tormenter": { - "title": "“The Tormenter”", - "body": "She who has so tormented me,\nhas taken pity on my distress:\nfor into her garden she had led me,\nwhere all the trees grow lustily.\nAnd so employs no harshness:\nif I kiss her, she embraces me;\nshe gave her noble heart to me,\nfrom which I am advised to flee.\n\nWhen I see her heart is mine,\nI put all fear behind me, saying\n“Lovely one, it’s no great thing\nfor me to slumber in your arms.”\nBut the lady then replies: “No,\nno more of such demands. He’s\nmaster enough of all the body,\nwho has its heart at his command.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "A. S. Kline" - } - } - } - }, - "jose-marti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "José Martí", - "birth": { - "year": 1853 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "cuban", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇨🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Martí", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "cuban" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "because-your-eyes-were-two-flames": { - "title": "“Because your eyes were two flames …”", - "body": "Because your eyes were two flames\nAnd your brooch wasn’t pinned right,\nI thought you had spent the night\nIn playing forbidden games.\n\nBecause you were vile and devious\nSuch deadly hatred I bore you:\nTo see you was to abhor you\nSo lovely and yet so villainous.\n\nBecause a note came to light,\nI know now where you had been,\nAnd what you had done unseen--\nCried for me all the long night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - }, - "the-girl-of-guatemala": { - "title": "“The Girl of Guatemala”", - "body": "In the shadow of a wing\nI wish to tell this flowered tale\nOf the girl from Guatemala\nWho died of love.\n\nThe wreaths were of lilies\nAnd jasmine and mignonette;\nWe laid the girl to rest\nIn a silken casket.\n\nShe gave a little scented pillow\nTo the forgetful one, and he\nReturned, returned now wedded.\nShe died of love.\n\nAmbassadors and bishops\nCarried her bier, and there were\nRelays of people following,\nAll with flowers.\n\nWishing to see him again,\nShe went out on the belvedere;\nHe returned with his wife:\nShe died of love.\n\nHer brow was like molten bronze\nAt his parting kiss,\nThe brow I loved the best\nin all my life!\n\nAt dusk she entered the river,\nThe doctor pulled out her body.\nThey say she died of cold; I know\nShe died of love.\n\nThey laid her out on two benches\nthere in the frigid vault;\nI kissed her slender hand\nAnd her white shoes.\n\nSoftly, when evening fell,\nThe gravedigger bid me come.\nNever again did I see that girl\nWho died of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Elinor Randall", - "date": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-have-a-white-rose-to-tend": { - "title": "“I have a white rose to tend …”", - "body": "I have a white rose to tend\nIn July as in January;\nI give it to the true friend\nWho offers his frank hand to me.\nAnd for the cruel one whose blows\nBreak the heart by which I live,\nThistle nor thorn do I give:\nFor him, too, I have a white rose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - }, - "i-want-to-leave-the-world": { - "title": "“I want to leave the world …”", - "body": "I want to leave the world\nThrough the natural gate:\nIn a cart of green leaves\nThey have to take me to die.\n\nDon’t put me in the dark\nTo die as a traitor:\nI am good, and as good\nI will die facing the sun!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - }, - "ill-never-forget-i-vow": { - "title": "“I’ll never forget, I vow …”", - "body": "I’ll never forget, I vow,\nThat fall morning long ago,\nWhen I saw a new leaf grow\nUpon the old withered bow.\n\nThat dear morning when for naught,\nBy a stove whose flame had died,\nA girl in love stood beside\nAn old man, and his hand sought.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "love-in-the-city": { - "title": "“Love in the City”", - "body": "Times of gorge and rush are these:\nVoices fly like light: lightning,\nlike a ship hurled upon dread quicksand,\nplunges down the high rod, and in delicate craft\nman, as if winged, cleaves the air.\nAnd love, without splendor or mystery,\ndies when newly born, of glut.\nThe city is a cage of dead doves\nand avid hunters! If men’s bosoms\nwere to open and their torn flesh\nfall to the earth, inside would be\nnothing but a scatter of small, crushed fruit!\n\nLove happens in the street, standing in the dust\nof saloons and public squares: the flower\ndies the day it’s born. The trembling\nvirgin who would rather death\nhave her than some unknown youth;\nthe joy of trepidation; that feeling of heart\nset free from chest; the ineffable\npleasure of deserving; the sweet alarm\nof walking quick and straight\nfrom your love’s home and breaking\ninto tears like a happy child;--\nand that gazing of our love at the fire,\nas roses slowly blush a deeper color,--\nBah, it’s all a sham! Who has the time\nto be noble? Though like a golden\nbowl or sumptuous painting\na genteel lady sits in the magnate’s home!\n\nBut if you’re thirsty, reach out your arm,\nand drain some passing cup!\nThe dirtied cup rolls to the dust, then,\nand the expert taster--breast blotted\nwith invisible blood--goes happily,\ncrowned with myrtle, on his way!\nBodies are nothing now but trash,\npits and tatters! And souls\nare not the tree’s lush fruit\ndown whose tender skin runs\nsweet juice in time of ripeness,--\nbut fruit of the marketplace, ripened\nby the hardened laborer’s brutal blows!\n\nIt is an age of dry lips!\nOf undreaming nights! Of life\ncrushed unripe! What is it that we lack,\nwithout which there is no gladness? Like a startled\nhare in the wild thicket of our breast,\nfleeing, tremulous, from a gleeful hunter,\nthe spirit takes cover;\nand Desire, on Fever’s arm,\nbeats the thicket, like the rich hunter.\n\nThe city appals me! Full\nof cups to be emptied, and empty cups!\nI fear--ah me!--that this wine\nmay be poison, and sink its teeth,\nvengeful imp, in my veins!\nI thirst--but for a wine that none on earth\nknows how to drink! I have not yet\nendured enough to break through the wall\nthat keeps me, ah grief!, from my vineyard!\nTake, oh squalid tasters\nof humble human wines, these cups\nfrom which, with no fear or pity,\nyou swill the lily’s juice!\nTake them! I am honorable, and I am afraid!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Esther Allen", - "date": { - "year": 1882, - "month": "april" - }, - "location": "New York", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-two-princes": { - "title": "“The Two Princes”", - "body": "The palace is in mourning,\nThe king cries on his throne;\nThe queen is also crying,\nShe’s crying all alone.\nIn handkerchiefs of pure lace\nThey cry in disbelief,\nThe nobles of the palace,\nBeside themselves with grief.\nThe royal horses, once so bright,\nAre now in black-array:\nThe horses did not eat last night--\nNor wanted food today.\nThe courtyard’s stately laurel tree\nIs stripped of all its leaves:\nThe people of the country\nAll carry laurel wreaths.\nThe king’s son has died today:\nThe king’s heir has passed away.\n\nUpon the hill, the shepherd\nHas built his simple home:\nThe shepherdess to ask is heard:\n“Why does the sun still come?”\nWith lowered heads, the sheep\nApproach the shepherd’s door:\nA box he’s lining, long and deep,\nUpon the cottage floor.\nA sad dog keeps watch there;\nFrom the hut is heard a moan:\n“Little bird, take me where\nMy precious one has flown.”\nThe weeping shepherd takes the spade,\nAnd sinks it in the bower,\nAnd in the hole that he has made\nThe shepherd lays his flower.\nThe shepherd’s son has died today,\nThe shepherd’s heir has passed away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - }, - "a-sincere-man-am-i": { - "title": "“A sincere man am I …”", - "body": "A sincere man am I\nFrom the land where palm trees grow,\nAnd I want before I die\nMy soul’s verses to bestow.\n\nI’m a traveller to all parts,\nAnd a newcomer to none:\nI am art among the arts,\nWith the mountains I am one.\n\nI know how to name and class\nAll the strange flowers that grow;\nI know every blade of grass,\nFatal lie and sublime woe.\n\nI have seen through dead of night\nUpon my head softly fall,\nRays formed of the purest light\nFrom beauty celestial.\n\nI have seen wings that were surging\nFrom beautiful women’s shoulders,\nAnd seen butterflies emerging\nFrom the refuse heap that moulders.\n\nI have known a man to live\nWith a dagger at his side,\nAnd never once the name give\nOf she by whose hand he died.\n\nTwice, for an instant, did I\nMy soul’s reflection espy:\nTwice: when my poor father died\nAnd when she bade me good-bye.\n\nI trembled once, when I flung\nThe vineyard gate, and to my dread,\nThe wicked hornet had stung\nMy little girl on the forehead.\n\nI rejoiced once and felt lucky\nThe day that my jailer came\nTo read the death warrant to me\nThat bore his tears and my name.\n\nI hear a sigh across the earth,\nI hear a sigh over the deep:\nIt is no sign reaching my hearth,\nBut my son waking from sleep.\n\nIf they say I have obtained\nThe pick of the jeweller’s trove,\nA good friend is what I’ve gained\nAnd I have put aside love.\n\nI have seen across the skies\nA wounded eagle still flying;\nI know the cubby where lies\nThe snake of its venom dying.\n\nI know that the world is weak\nAnd must soon fall to the ground,\nThen the gentle brook will speak\nAbove the quiet profound.\n\nWhile trembling with joy and dread,\nI have touched with hand so bold\nA once-bright star that fell dead\nFrom heaven at my threshold.\n\nOn my brave heart is engraved\nThe sorrow hidden from all eyes:\nThe son of a land enslaved,\nLives for it, suffers and dies.\n\nAll is beautiful and right,\nAll is as music and reason;\nAnd all, like diamonds, is light\nThat was coal before its season.\n\nI know when fools are laid to rest\nHonor and tears will abound,\nAnd that of all fruits, the best\nIs left to rot in holy ground.\n\nWithout a word, the pompous muse\nI’ve set aside, and understood:\nFrom a withered branch, I choose\nTo hang my doctoral hood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Manuel A. Tellechea" - } - } - } - }, - "harry-martinson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Harry Martinson", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1978 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swedish", - "language": "swedish", - "flag": "🇸🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Martinson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "swedish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "dusk-in-the-country": { - "title": "“Dusk in the Country”", - "body": "The riddle silently sees its image. It spins evening\namong the motionless reeds.\nThere is a frailty no one notices\nthere, in the web of grass.\n\nSilent cattle stare with green eyes.\nThey mosey in evening calm down to the water.\nAnd the lake holds its immense spoon\nup to all the mouths.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Robert Bly", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "power": { - "title": "“Power”", - "body": "The engineer sits by the big wheel,\nall through the June night, reading.\nThe power station mumbles introverted in the turbines,\nits leafy, embedded heart beats calm and strong.\nThe timid birch stands tall by the concrete mouth of the dam;\nnot a leaf quivers.\nThe hedgehog slobbers along the river bank.\n\nThe guard’s cat listens hungrily to birdsong.\nAnd the power whistles away along a hundred miles of wire\nbefore it suddenly rumbles down into the braggart cities.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Robert Bly", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - } - } - }, - "leonid-martynov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Leonid Martynov", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1980 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Martynov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "leaves": { - "title": "“Leaves”", - "body": "The leaves\nWere lying\nOn the pavement …\n\nWhen suddenly\nThey seemed possessed\nAnd their autumnal colours changing\nBegan to dance with fiendish zest.\n\nI cried: “Who are you?\nWhy the bustle?”\n\nI heard them heave a mournful sigh.\n“We’re autumn leaves …”\nThey sadly rustled.\n\n“We hoped an artist would come by\nBut those who came with paint and brush\nDid not so much as look at us.\nSo off we fly,\nGoodbye …”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter Tempest", - "date": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-river-of-silence": { - "title": "“The River of Silence”", - "body": "--Do you want to return\nTo the River of Silence?\n--I do.\nOn the first night it freezes.\n--But would you find a boat, even one,\nAnd can you cross it\nthe River of Silence?\nWill you not drown, in the snowy dark\nOn the night the river freezes?\n--No, I won’t drown.\nI know a house in the town.\nIf I knock on the window, they’ll open.\nI know a woman. She’s ugly.\nI never loved her.\n--Don’t lie:\nYou did love her!\n--No--we’re not friends: nor enemies.\nI’ve forgotten her.\nSo, though it seems that the ferry’s destroyed\nI want to float once more on the River of Silence\nIn the snowy dark,\non the night it freezes.\n\n--The night is windy and damp.\nTrembling this night, logs smolder in the stoves.\nBut whom will the logs warm as they burn out?\nMy advice is to think of warmer nights.\n--Shall we go?\n--Let us go.\n\nFrom the woodshed, on their shoulders,\nHer brothers will bring out the boat\nAnd set it down on the Silence.\nAnd snowstorm holds captive the river:\nI shall not look at my companion\nBut will say to her only:\n“Sit there, in the stern.”\nShe will say only\n“I’ll bring my cloak\nI’ll come straight away.”\nWe shall float into the gloom\nPast the village of Wolf s Tail\nUnder the wooden bridge\nUnder the Tin bridge\nUnder the bridge without name--\n\nI shall row into the dark\nShe will sit in the stern,\nThe stern oar in her hand.\nBut of course she won’t steer--\nI’ll steer myself.\nSnow melts on her cheeks\nClings to her hair.\n\n--And how wide is the River Silence?\nDo you know how wide?\nWe can hardly see the right bank--\nA dim chain of lights …\nAnd we shall set out for the islands.\nYou know them? There are two in the river.\nAnd how long is the River Silence?\nDo you know how long?\nFrom the depths of midnight to noonday heights\nSeven thousand eight hundred\nKilometers --the whole way the same\nProfound silence!\n\nIn that snowy twilight\nEver duller the creak of oarlocks\nAnd the voiceless spasms of fish\nThat jerk and die in the nets.\nThe boatmen leave the barges,\nThe pilots go home.\nInvisible and silent\nAre the banks of the Silence.\nSlower and slower, gray seagulls\nBatter the snowstorm with wings.\n\n--But wait: what will you tell the woman?\n--Seagulls batter the snowstorm with their wings.\n--No, wait! What will you say to the woman?\n--I don’t understand: what woman?\n--She who bent over the oar in the stern.\n--Oh: I’ll say: Be silent, don’t cry.\nYou’ve no right\nThe night when the east wind, the trumpeter,\nSounds the long call of the frost.\nListen!\nThere is my answer.\nThere is no River of Silence.\nThe silence is broken.\nThat is your fault.\nNo!\nIt is your happiness, your good fortune.\nYou yourself broke it,\nThat deepest Silence\nWhose captive you were.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "J. R. Rowland", - "date": { - "year": 1929 - } - } - } - } - }, - "andrew-marvell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Andrew Marvell", - "birth": { - "year": 1621 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1678 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "bermudas": { - "title": "“Bermudas”", - "body": "Where the remote Bermudas ride\nIn th’ Oceans bosome unespy’d,\nFrom a small Boat, that row’d along,\nThe listning Winds receiv’d this Song.\nWhat should we do but sing his Praise\nThat led us through the watry Maze,\nUnto an Isle so long unknown,\nAnd yet far kinder than our own?\nWhere he the huge Sea-Monsters wracks,\nThat lift the Deep upon their Backs.\nHe lands us on a grassy stage;\nSafe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage.\nHe gave us this eternal Spring,\nWhich here enamells every thing;\nAnd sends the Fowl’s to us in care,\nOn daily Visits through the Air,\nHe hangs in shades the Orange bright,\nLike golden Lamps in a green Night.\nAnd does in the Pomgranates close,\nJewels more rich than Ormus show’s.\nHe makes the Figs our mouths to meet;\nAnd throws the Melons at our feet.\nBut Apples plants of such a price,\nNo Tree could ever bear them twice.\nWith Cedars, chosen by his hand,\nFrom Lebanon, he stores the Land.\nAnd makes the hollow Seas, that roar,\nProclaime the Ambergris on shoar.\nHe cast (of which we rather boast)\nThe Gospels Pearl upon our coast.\nAnd in these Rocks for us did frame\nA Temple, where to sound his Name.\nOh let our Voice his Praise exalt,\nTill it arrive at Heavens Vault:\nWhich thence (perhaps) rebounding, may\nEccho beyond the Mexique Bay.\nThus sung they, in the English boat,\nAn holy and a chearful Note,\nAnd all the way, to guide their Chime,\nWith falling Oars they kept the time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "the-coronet": { - "title": "“The Coronet”", - "body": "When for the Thorns with which I long, too long,\nWith many a piercing wound,\nMy Saviours head have crown’d,\nI seek with Garlands to redress that Wrong:\nThrough every Garden, every Mead,\nI gather flow’rs (my fruits are only flow’rs)\nDismantling all the fragrant Towers\nThat once adorn’d my Shepherdesses head.\nAnd now when I have summ’d up all my store,\nThinking (so I my self deceive)\nSo rich a Chaplet thence to weave\nAs never yet the king of Glory wore:\nAlas I find the Serpent old\nThat, twining in his speckled breast,\nAbout the flow’rs disguis’d does fold,\nWith wreaths of Fame and Interest.\nAh, foolish Man, that would’st debase with them,\nAnd mortal Glory, Heavens Diadem!\nBut thou who only could’st the Serpent tame,\nEither his slipp’ry knots at once untie,\nAnd disintangle all his winding Snare:\nOr shatter too with him my curious frame:\nAnd let these wither, so that he may die,\nThough set with Skill and chosen out with Care.\nThat they, while Thou on both their Spoils dost tread,\nMay crown thy Feet, that could not crown thy Head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "the-definition-of-love": { - "title": "“The Definition of Love”", - "body": "My Love is of a birth as rare\nAs ’tis for object strange and high:\nIt was begotten by despair\nUpon Impossibility.\n\nMagnanimous Despair alone.\nCould show me so divine a thing,\nWhere feeble Hope could ne’r have flown\nBut vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.\n\nAnd yet I quickly might arrive\nWhere my extended Soul is fixt,\nBut Fate does Iron wedges drive,\nAnd alwaies crouds it self betwixt.\n\nFor Fate with jealous Eye does see.\nTwo perfect Loves; nor lets them close:\nTheir union would her ruine be,\nAnd her Tyrannick pow’r depose.\n\nAnd therefore her Decrees of Steel\nUs as the distant Poles have plac’d,\n(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)\nNot by themselves to be embrac’d.\n\nUnless the giddy Heaven fall,\nAnd Earth some new Convulsion tear;\nAnd, us to joyn, the World should all\nBe cramp’d into a Planisphere.\n\nAs Lines so Loves Oblique may well\nThemselves in every Angle greet:\nBut ours so truly Paralel,\nThough infinite can never meet.\n\nTherefore the Love which us doth bind,\nBut Fate so enviously debarrs,\nIs the Conjunction of the Mind,\nAnd Opposition of the Stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "a-dialogue-between-soul-and-body": { - "title": "“A Dialogue between Soul and Body”", - "body": "> _Soul:_\n\nO Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise\nA Soul inslav’d so many wayes?\nWith bolts of Bones, that fetter’d stands\nIn Feet; and manacled in Hands.\nHere blinded with an Eye; and there\nDeaf with the drumming of an Ear.\nA Soul hung up, as ’twere, in Chains\nOf Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins.\nTortur’d, besides each other part,\nIn a vain Head, and double Heart.\n\n\n> _Body:_\n\nO who shall me deliver whole,\nFrom bonds of this Tyrannic Soul?\nWhich, stretcht upright, impales me so,\nThat mine own Precipice I go;\nAnd warms and moves this needless Frame:\n(A Fever could but do the same.)\nAnd, wanting where its spight to try,\nHas made me live to let me dye.\nA Body that could never rest,\nSince this ill Spirit it possest.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nWhat Magic could me thus confine\nWithin anothers Grief to pine?\nWhere whatsoever it complain,\nI feel, that cannot feel, the pain.\nAnd all my Care its self employes,\nThat to preserve, which me destroys:\nConstrain’d not only to indure\nDiseases, but, whats worse, the Cure:\nAnd ready oft the Port to gain,\nAm Shipwrackt into Health again.\n\n\n> _Body:_\n\nBut Physick yet could never reach\nThe Maladies Thou me dost teach;\nWhom first the Cramp of Hope does Tear:\nAnd then the Palsie Shakes of Fear.\nThe Pestilence of Love does heat:\nOr Hatred’s hidden Ulcer eat.\nJoy’s chearful Madness does perplex:\nOr Sorrow’s other Madness vex.\nWhich Knowledge forces me to know;\nAnd Memory will not foregoe.\nWhat but a Soul could have the wit\nTo build me up for Sin so fit?\nSo Architects do square and hew,\nGreen Trees that in the Forest grew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "a-dialogue-between-soul-and-pleasure": { - "title": "“A Dialogue between Soul and Pleasure”", - "body": "> _Soul:_\n\nCourage my Soul, now learn to wield\nThe weight of thine immortal Shield.\nClose on thy Head thy Helmet bright.\nBallance thy Sword against the Fight.\nSee where an Army, strong as fair,\nWith silken Banners spreads the air.\nNow, if thou bee’st that thing Divine,\nIn this day’s Combat let it shine:\nAnd shew that Nature wants an Art\nTo conquer one resolved Heart.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nWelcome the Creations Guest,\nLord of Earth, and Heavens Heir.\nLay aside that Warlike Crest,\nAnd of Nature’s banquet share:\nWhere the Souls of fruits and flow’rs\nStand prepar’d to heighten yours.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nI sup above, and cannot stay\nTo bait so long upon the way.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nOn these downy Pillows lye,\nWhose soft Plumes will thither fly:\nOn these Roses strow’d so plain\nLest one Leaf thy Side should strain.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nMy gentler Rest is on a Thought,\nConscious of doing what I ought.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nIf thou bee’st with Perfumes pleas’d,\nSuch as oft the Gods appeas’d,\nThou in fragrant Clouds shalt show\nLike another God below.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nA Soul that knowes not to presume\nIs Heaven’s and its own perfume.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nEvery thing does seem to vie\nWhich should first attract thine Eye:\nBut since none deserves that grace,\nIn this Crystal view thy face.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nWhen the Creator’s skill is priz’d,\nThe rest is all but Earth disguis’d.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nHeark how Musick then prepares\nFor thy Stay these charming Aires;\nWhich the posting Winds recall,\nAnd suspend the Rivers Fall.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nHad I but any time to lose,\nOn this I would it all dispose.\nCease Tempter. None can chain a mind\nWhom this sweet Chordage cannot bind.\n\n\n> _Chorus:_\n\nEarth cannot shew so brave a Sight\nAs when a single Soul does fence\nThe Batteries of alluring Sense,\nAnd Heaven views it with delight.\nThen persevere: for still new Charges sound:\nAnd if thou overcom’st thou shalt be crown’d.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nAll this fair, and cost, and sweet,\nWhich scatteringly doth shine,\nShall within one Beauty meet,\nAnd she be only thine.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nIf things of Sight such Heavens be,\nWhat Heavens are those we cannot see?\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nWhere so e’re thy Foot shall go\nThe minted Gold shall lie;\nTill thou purchase all below,\nAnd want new Worlds to buy.\n\n\n_Soul_:\n\nWer’t not a price who ’ld value Gold?\nAnd that’s worth nought that can be sold.\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nWilt thou all the Glory have\nThat War or Peace commend?\nHalf the World shall be thy Slave\nThe other half thy Friend.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nWhat Friends, if to my self untrue?\nWhat Slaves, unless I captive you?\n\n\n> _Pleasure:_\n\nThou shalt know each hidden Cause;\nAnd see the future Time:\nTry what depth the Centre draws;\nAnd then to Heaven climb.\n\n\n> _Soul:_\n\nNone thither mounts by the degree\nOf Knowledge, but Humility.\n\n\n> _Chorus_\n\nTriumph, triumph, victorious Soul;\nThe World has not one Pleasure more:\nThe rest does lie beyond the pole,\nAnd is thine everlasting Store.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "eyes-and-tears": { - "title": "“Eyes and Tears”", - "body": "How wisely Nature did decree,\nWith the same Eyes to weep and see!\nThat, having view’d the object vain,\nThey might be ready to complain.\n\nAnd since the Self-deluding Sight,\nIn a false Angle takes each hight;\nThese Tears which better measure all,\nLike wat’ry Lines and Plummets fall.\n\nTwo Tears, which Sorrow long did weigh\nWithin the Scales of either Eye,\nAnd then paid out in equal Poise,\nAre the true price of all my Joyes.\n\nWhat in the World most fair appears,\nYea even Laughter, turns to Tears:\nAnd all the Jewels which we prize,\nMelt in these Pendants of the Eyes.\n\nI have through every Garden been,\nAmongst the Red, the White, the Green;\nAnd yet, from all the flow’rs I saw,\nNo Hony, but these Tears could draw.\n\nSo the all-seeing Sun each day\nDistills the World with Chymick Ray;\nBut finds the Essence only Showers,\nWhich straight in pity back he powers.\n\nYet happy they whom Grief doth bless,\nThat weep the more, and see the less:\nAnd, to preserve their Sight more true,\nBath still their Eyes in their own Dew.\n\nSo Magdalen, in Tears more wise\nDissolv’d those captivating Eyes,\nWhose liquid Chains could flowing meet\nTo fetter her Redeemers feet.\n\nNot full sailes hasting loaden home,\nNor the chast Ladies pregnant Womb,\nNor Cynthia Teeming show’s so fair,\nAs two Eyes swoln with weeping are.\n\nThe sparkling Glance that shoots Desire,\nDrench’d in these Waves, does lose it fire.\nYea oft the Thund’rer pitty takes\nAnd here the hissing Lightning slakes.\n\nThe Incense was to Heaven dear,\nNot as a Perfume, but a Tear.\nAnd Stars shew lovely in the Night,\nBut as they seem the Tears of Light.\n\nOpe then mine Eyes your double Sluice,\nAnd practise so your noblest Use.\nFor others too can see, or sleep;\nBut only humane Eyes can weep.\n\nNow like two Clouds dissolving, drop,\nAnd at each Tear in distance stop:\nNow like two Fountains trickle down:\nNow like two floods o’return and drown.\n\nThus let your Streams o’reflow your Springs,\nTill Eyes and Tears be the same things:\nAnd each the other’s difference bears;\nThese weeping Eyes, those seeing Tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - } - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "How vainly men themselves amaze\nTo win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes;\nAnd their uncessant Labours see\nCrown’d from some single Herb or Tree,\nWhose short and narrow verged Shade\nDoes prudently their Toyles upbraid;\nWhile all Flow’rs and all Trees do close\nTo weave the Garlands of repose.\nFair quiet, have I found thee here,\nAnd Innocence thy Sister dear!\nMistaken long, I sought you then\nIn busie Companies of Men.\nYour sacred Plants, if here below,\nOnly among the Plants will grow.\nSociety is all but rude,\nTo this delicious Solitude.\nNo white nor red was ever seen\nSo am’rous as this lovely green.\nFond Lovers, cruel as their Flame,\nCut in these Trees their Mistress name.\nLittle, Alas, they know, or heed,\nHow far these Beauties Hers exceed!\nFair Trees! where s’eer your barkes I wound,\nNo Name shall but your own be found.\nWhen we have run our Passions heat,\nLove hither makes his best retreat.\nThe Gods, that mortal Beauty chase,\nStill in a Tree did end their race.\nApollo hunted Daphne so,\nOnly that She might Laurel grow.\nAnd Pan did after Syrinx speed,\nNot as a Nymph, but for a Reed.\nWhat wond’rous Life in this I lead!\nRipe Apples drop about my head;\nThe Luscious Clusters of the Vine\nUpon my Mouth do crush their Wine;\nThe Nectaren, and curious Peach,\nInto my hands themselves do reach;\nStumbling on Melons, as I pass,\nInsnar’d with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass.\nMean while the Mind, from pleasure less,\nWithdraws into its happiness:\nThe Mind, that Ocean where each kind\nDoes streight its own resemblance find;\nYet it creates, transcending these,\nFar other Worlds, and other Seas;\nAnnihilating all that’s made\nTo a green Thought in a green Shade.\nHere at the Fountains sliding foot,\nOr at some Fruit-trees mossy root,\nCasting the Bodies Vest aside,\nMy Soul into the boughs does glide:\nThere like a Bird it sits, and sings,\nThen whets, and combs its silver Wings;\nAnd, till prepar’d for longer flight,\nWaves in its Plumes the various Light.\nSuch was that happy Garden-state,\nWhile Man there walk’d without a Mate:\nAfter a Place so pure, and sweet,\nWhat other Help could yet be meet!\nBut ’twas beyond a Mortal’s share\nTo wander solitary there:\nTwo Paradises ’twere in one\nTo live in Paradise alone.\nHow well the skilful Gardner drew\nOf flow’rs and herbes this Dial new;\nWhere from above the milder Sun\nDoes through a fragrant Zodiack run;\nAnd, as it works, th’ industrious Bee\nComputes its time as well as we.\nHow could such sweet and wholsome Hours\nBe reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "an-horatian-ode": { - "title": "“An Horatian Ode”", - "body": "The forward Youth that would appear\nMust now forsake his Muses dear,\nNor in the Shadows sing\nHis Numbers languishing.\n’Tis time to leave the Books in dust,\nAnd oyl th’unused Armours rust:\nRemoving from the Wall\nThe Corslet of the Hall.\nSo restless Cromwell could not cease\nIn the inglorious Arts of Peace,\nBut through adventrous War\nUrged his active Star.\nAnd, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first\nBreaking the Clouds where it was nurst,\nDid through his own Side\nHis fiery way divide.\nFor ’tis all one to Courage high\nThe Emulous or Enemy;\nAnd with such to inclose\nIs more then to oppose.\nThen burning through the Air he went,\nAnd Pallaces and Temples rent:\nAnd Caesars head at last\nDid through his Laurels blast.\n’Tis Madness to resist or blame\nThe force of angry Heavens flame:\nAnd, if we would speak true,\nMuch to the Man is due.\nWho, from his private Gardens, where\nHe liv’d reserved and austere,\nAs if his hightest plot\nTo plant the Bergamot,\nCould by industrious Valour climbe\nTo ruine the great Work of Time,\nAnd cast the Kingdome old\nInto another Mold.\nThough Justice against Fate complain,\nAnd plead the antient Rights in vain:\nBut those do hold or break\nAs Men are strong or weak.\nNature that hateth emptiness,\nAllows of penetration less:\nAnd therefore must make room.\nWhere greater Spirits come.\nWhat Field of all the Civil Wars,\nWhere his were not the deepest Scars?\nAnd Hampton shows what part\nHe had of wiser Art.\nWhere, twining subtile fears with hope,\nHe wove a Net of such a scope,\nThat Charles himself might chase\nTo Caresbrooks narrow case.\nThat thence the Royal Actor born\nThe Tragick Scaffold might adorn\nWhile round the armed Bands\nDid clap their bloody hands.\nHe nothing common did or mean\nUpon that memorable Scene:\nBut with his keener Eye\nThe Axes edge did try:\nNor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight\nTo vindicate his helpless Right,\nBut bow’d his comely Head,\nDown as upon a Bed.\nThis was that memorable Hour\nWhich first assur’d the forced Pow’r.\nSo when they did design\nThe Capitols first Line,\nA bleeding Head where they begun,\nDid fright the Architects to run;\nAnd yet in that the State\nForesaw it’s happy Fate.\nAnd now the Irish are asham’d\nTo see themselves in one Year tam’d:\nSo much one Man can do,\nThat does both act and know.\nThey can affirm his Praises best,\nAnd Have, though overcome, confest\nHow good he is, how just,\nAnd fit for highest Trust:\nNor yet grown stiffer with Command,\nBut still in the Republick’s hand:\nHow fit he is to sway\nThat can so well obey.\nHe to the Common Feet presents\nA Kingdome, for his first years rents:\nAnd, what he may, forbears\nHis Fame to make it theirs:\nAnd has his Sword and Spoyls ungirt,\nTo lay them at the Publick’s skirt.\nSo when the Falcon high\nFalls heavy from the Sky,\nShe, having kill’d no more does search,\nBut on the next green Bow to pearch;\nWhere, when he first does lure,\nThe Falckner has her sure.\nWhat may not then our Isle presume\nWhile Victory his Crest does plume!\nWhat may not others fear\nIf thus he crown each Year!\nA Caesar he ere long to Gaul,\nTo Italy an Hannibal,\nAnd to all States not free\nShall Clymacterick be.\nThe Pict no shelter now shall find\nWithin his party-colour’d Mind;\nBut from this Valour sad\nShrink underneath the Plad:\nHappy if in the tufted brake\nThe English Hunter him mistake;\nNor lay his Hounds in near\nThe Caledonian Deer.\nBut thou the Wars and Fortunes Son\nMarch indefatigably on;\nAnd for the last effect\nStill keep thy Sword erect:\nBesides the Force it has to fright\nThe Spirits of the shady Night,\nThe same Arts that did gain\nA Pow’r must it maintain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1650 - } - } - }, - "to-his-coy-mistress": { - "title": "“To His Coy Mistress”", - "body": "Had we but World enough, and Time,\nThis coyness Lady were no crime.\nWe would sit down, and think which way\nTo walk, and pass our long Loves Day.\nThou by the Indian Ganges side.\nShould’st Rubies find: I by the Tide\nOf Humber would complain. I would\nLove you ten years before the Flood:\nAnd you should if you please refuse\nTill the Conversion of the Jews.\nMy vegetable Love should grow\nVaster then Empires, and more slow.\nAn hundred years should go to praise\nThine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.\nTwo hundred to adore each Breast.\nBut thirty thousand to the rest.\nAn Age at least to every part,\nAnd the last Age should show your Heart.\nFor Lady you deserve this State;\nNor would I love at lower rate.\nBut at my back I alwaies hear\nTimes winged Charriot hurrying near:\nAnd yonder all before us lye\nDesarts of vast Eternity.\nThy Beauty shall no more be found;\nNor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound\nMy ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try\nThat long preserv’d Virginity:\nAnd your quaint Honour turn to durst;\nAnd into ashes all my Lust.\nThe Grave’s a fine and private place,\nBut none I think do there embrace.\nNow therefore, while the youthful hew\nSits on thy skin like morning glew,\nAnd while thy willing Soul transpires\nAt every pore with instant Fires,\nNow let us sport us while we may;\nAnd now, like am’rous birds of prey,\nRather at once our Time devour,\nThan languish in his slow-chapt pow’r.\nLet us roll all our Strength, and all\nOur sweetness, up into one Ball:\nAnd tear our Pleasures with rough strife,\nThorough the Iron gates of Life.\nThus, though we cannot make our Sun\nStand still, yet we will make him run.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1650, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "young-love": { - "title": "“Young Love”", - "body": "Come little Infant, Love me now,\nWhile thine unsuspected years\nClear thine aged Fathers brow\nFrom cold Jealousie and Fears.\n\nPretty surely ’twere to see\nBy young Love old Time beguil’d:\nWhile our Sportings are as free\nAs the Nurses with the Child.\n\nCommon Beauties stay fifteen;\nSuch as yours should swifter move;\nWhole fair Blossoms are too green\nYet for lust, but not for Love.\n\nLove as much the snowy Lamb\nOr the wanton Kid does prize,\nAs the lusty Bull or Ram,\nFor his morning Sacrifice.\n\nNow then love me: time may take\nThee before thy time away:\nOf this Need wee’l Virtue make,\nAnd learn Love before we may.\n\nSo we win of doubtful Fate;\nAnd, if good she to us meant,\nWe that Good shall antedate,\nOr, if ill, that Ill prevent.\n\nThus as Kingdomes, frustrating\nOther Titles to their Crown,\nIn the craddle crown their King,\nSo all Forraign Claims to drown.\n\nSo, to make all Rivals vain,\nNow I crown thee with my Love:\nCrown me with thy Love again,\nAnd we both shall Monarchs prove.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1681 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-masefield": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Masefield", - "birth": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masefield", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 49 - }, - "poems": { - "ah-we-are-neither-heaven-nor-earth-but-men": { - "title": "“Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men …”", - "body": "Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;\nSomething that uses and despises both,\nThat takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,\nThen sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,\nAnd flinging off youth’s happy promise, flies\nUp to some breach, despising earthly things,\nAnd, in contempt of hell and heaven, dies\nRather than bear some yoke of priests or kings.\nOur joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,\nA woman’s beauty, or a child’s delight,\nThe trembling blood when the discoverer scans\nThe sought-for world, the gussed-at satellite;\nThe ringing scene, the stone at point to blush\nFor unborn men to look at and say ‘Hush.’", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "all-early-in-the-april": { - "title": "“All early in the April …”", - "body": "All early in the April, when daylight comes at five,\nI went into the garden most glad to be alive;\nThe thrushes and the blackbirds were singing in the thorn,\nThe April flowers were singing for joy of being born.\n\nI smelt the dewy morning come blowing through the woods\nWhere all the wilding cherries do toss their snowy snoods;\nI thought of the running water where sweet white violets grow.\nI said: “I’ll pick them for her; because she loves them so.”\n\nSo in the dewy morning I turned to climb the hill,\nBeside the running water whose tongue is never still.\nOh, delicate green and dewy were all the budding trees;\nThe blue dog-violets grew there, and many primroses.\n\nOut of the wood I wandered, but paused upon the heath\nTo watch, beyond the tree-tops, the wrinkled sea beneath;\nIts blueness and its stillness were trembling as it lay\nIn the old un-autumned beauty that never goes away.\n\nAnd the beauty of the water brought my love into my mind,\nBecause all sweet love is beauty, and the loved thing turns to kind;\nAnd I thought, “It is a beauty spread for setting of your grace,\nO white violet of a woman with the April in your face.”\n\nSo I gathered the white violets where young men pick them still,\nAnd I turned to cross the woodland to her house beneath the hill,\nAnd I thought of her delight in the flowers that I brought her,\nBright like sunlight, sweet like singing, cool like running of the water.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Enslaved", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "and-all-their-passionate-hearts-are-dust": { - "title": "“And all their passionate hearts are dust …”", - "body": "And all their passionate hearts are dust,\nAnd dust the great idea that burned\nIn various flames of love and lust\nTill the world’s brain was turned.\n\nGod, moving darkly in men’s brains,\nUsing their passions as his tool,\nBrings freedom with a tyrant’s chains\nAnd wisdom with the fool.\n\nBlindly and bloodily we drift,\nOur interests clog our hearts with dreams,\nGod make my brooding soul a rift\nThrough which a meaning gleams.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Pompey the Great", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "animula": { - "title": "“Animula”", - "body": "This is the place, this house beside the sea;\nThis was the setting where they played their parts.\nTwo men, who knew them all, have talked to me:\nBeauty she had, and all had passionate hearts.\nI write this in the window where she sat.\nTwo fields, all green with summer, lie below;\nThen the grey sea, at thought, cloud-coloured, flat,\nWind-dappled from the glen, the tide at flow.\nHer portrait and her husband’s hang together\nOne on each side the fire; it is close;\nThe tree-tops toss, it is a change of weather.\nThey were most lovely and unhappy, those,\nThat married pair and he who loved too well;\nThis was the door by which they entered hell.\n\nThis is a drawing of her as a child,\nThis is she wed; the faces are the same,\nOnly the beauty of the babe is wild,\nThe woman’s beauty has been broken tame.\nWitty, bright, gentle, earnest, with great eyes,\nDark hair in heaps, pure colour, lips that smile;\nBeauty that is more wisdom than the wise\nLived in this woman for a little while.\nDressed in that beauty that our mothers wore\n(So touching now), she looks out of the frame\nWith stag-like eyes, that wept till they were sore\nMany’s the time, till she was broken tame.\nWitty, bright, gentle, earnest, even so,\nDestiny calls and spirits come and go.\n\nThis is her husband in his youth; and this\nIs he in manhood; this is he in age.\nThere is a devil in those eyes of his,\nA glittering devil, restless in his cage.\nA grand man, with a beauty and a pride,\nA manner and a power and a fire,\nWith beaks of vultures eating at his side,\nThe great brain mad with unfulfilled desire.\n“With grand ideas,” they say; tall, wicked, proud,\nCold, cruel, bitter, clever, dainty, skilled;\nSplendid to see, a head above the crowd;\nSplendid with every strength, yet unfulfilled.\nCutting himself (and all those near) with hate\nFrom that sharp mind which should have shaped a state.\n\nAnd many years ago I saw the third\nBowed in old age and mad with misery;\nMad with the bright eyes of the eagle-bird,\nBurning his heart at fires of memory.\nHe stood behind a chair, and bent and muttered;\nGrand still, grey, sunburnt, bright with mad eyes brown,\nBurning, though dying, like a torch that guttered,\nThat once had lit Queen Helen through the town.\nI only saw him once: I saw him go\nLeaning uphill his body to the rain,\nToo good a man for life to punish so,\nTheirs were the pride and passion, his the pain.\nHis old coat flapped; the little children turned\nTo see him pass, that passionate age that burned.\n\n“I knew them well, all three,” the old man said;\n“He was an unused force, and she a child.\nShe caught him with her beauty, being a maid.\nThe thought that she had trapped him drove him wild.\nHe would not work with others, could not rest,\nAnd nothing here could use him or engage him;\nYet here he stayed, with devils in his breast,\nTo blast the woman who had dared to cage him.\nThen, when the scholar came, it made the three:\nShe turned to him, and he, he turned to her.\nThey both were saints: elopement could not be;\nSo here they stayed, and passion plied the spur.\nThen the men fought, and later she was found\nIn that green pool beyond the headland, drowned.”\n\n“They carried her drowned body up the grass\nHere to the house; they laid it on the bed\n(This very bed, where I have slept, it was).\nThe scholar begged to see her, being dead.\nThe husband walked downstairs, to see him there\nBegging to see her as one asks an alms.\nHe spat at him and cut his cheek-bone bare.\n‘There’s pay,’ he said, ‘my poet, for your psalms.’\nAnd then they fought together at the door,\nBiting each other, like two dogs, while she\nLay dead, poor woman, dripping on the floor\nOut of her hair the death-drops of the sea.\nLater, they fought whenever they might meet,\nIn church, or in the fields, or in the street.”\n\nUp on the hill another aged man\nRemembered them. He said: “They were afraid;\nThey feared to end the passions they began.\nThey held the cards, and yet they never played.\nHe should have broken from her at all cost;\nShe should have loved her lover and gone free.\nThey all held winning cards, and yet they lost;\nSo two were wrecked and one drowned in the sea.\nSome harshness or some law, or else some fear\nStifled their souls; God help us! when we know\nCertainly, certain things, the way is clear.\nAnd yet they paid, and one respects them so.\nPerhaps they were too fine. I know not, I.\nMen must have mercy, being ripe to die.”\n\nSo this old house of mourning was the stage\n(This house and those green fields) for all that woe.\nThere are her books, her writing on the page;\nIn those choked beds she made the flowers grow.\nMost desolate it is, the rain is pouring,\nThe trees all toss and drip and scatter evil,\nThe floods are out, the waterfall is roaring,\nThe bar is mad with many a leaping devil.\nAnd in this house the wind goes whining wild,\nThe door blows open, till I think to see\nThat delicate sweet woman, like a child,\nStanding with great dark stag’s eyes watching me;\nWatching as though her sorrow might make plain\n(Had I but wit) the meaning of such pain.\n\nI wonder if she sang in this old room.\nAh, never! No; they tell me that she stood\nFor hours together staring into gloom\nOut of the prison bars of flesh and blood.\nSo, when the ninth wave drowned her, haply she\nWakened, with merging senses, till she blent\nInto the joy and colour of the sea,\nOne with the purpose of the element.\nAnd there, perhaps, she cannot feel the woe\nPassed in this rotting house, but runs like light\nOver the billows where the clippers go,\nOne with the blue sea’s pureness of delight;\nLaughing, perhaps, at that old woe of hers\nChained in the cage with fellow-prisoners.\n\nHe died in that lone cottage near the sea.\nIn the grey morning when the tide was turning,\nThe wards of life slipt back and set him free\nFrom cares of meat and dress, from joys and yearning.\nThen like an old man gathering strength, he strayed\nOver the beach, and strength came into him,\nBeauty that never threatened nor betrayed\nMade bright the eyes that sorrow had made dim;\nSo that upon that stretch of barren sand\nHe knew his dreams; he saw her beauty run\nWith Sorrowful Beauty, laughing, hand in hand;\nHe heard the trumpets blow in Avalon.\nHe saw the golden statue stretching down\nThe wreath, for him, of roses, in a crown.\n\nThey say that as her husband lay a-dying\nHe clamoured for a chain to beat the hound.\nThey say that all the garden rang with crying\nThat came out of the air, out of the ground,\nOut of the waste that was his soul, may be,\nOut of the running wolf-hound of his soul,\nThat had been kennelled in and now broke free\nOut to the moors where stags go, past control.\nAll through his life his will had kennelled him;\nNow he was free, and with a hackling fell\nHe snarled out of the body to the dim,\nTo run the spirits with the hounds of hell;\nTo run forever at the quarry gone,\nThe uncaught thing a little further on.\n\nSo, one by one, Time took them to his keeping,\nThose broken lanterns that had held his fire;\nDust went to dust, and flesh had time for sleeping,\nAnd soul the stag escaped the hound desire.\nAnd now, perhaps, the memory of their hate\nHas passed from them, and they are friends again,\nLaughing at all the trouble of this state\nWhere men and women work each other pain.\nAnd in the wind that runs along the glen\nBeating at cottage doors, they may go by,\nExulting now, and helping sorrowing men\nTo do some little good before they die.\nFor from these ploughed-up souls the spirit brings\nHarvest at last, and sweet from bitter things.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Enslaved", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-john-silver": { - "title": "“The Ballad of John Silver”", - "body": "We were schooner-rigged and rakish, with a long and lissome hull,\nAnd we flew the pretty colours of the cross-bones and the skull;\nWe’d a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore,\nAnd we sailed the Spanish Water in the happy days of yore.\n\nWe’d a long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,\nWe had each a brace of pistols and a cutlass at the hip;\nIt’s a point which tells against us, and a fact to be deplored,\nBut we chased the goodly merchant-men and laid their ships aboard.\n\nThen the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains,\nAnd the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people’s brains,\nShe was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank,\nAnd the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.\n\nO! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop)\nWe could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken-coop;\nThen, having washed the blood away, we’d little else to do\nThan to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to.\n\nO! the fiddle on the fo’c’s’le, and the slapping naked soles,\nAnd the genial “Down the middle, Jake, and curtsey when she rolls!”\nWith the silver seas around us and the pale moon overhead,\nAnd the look-out not a-looking and his pipe-bowl glowing red.\n\nAh! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played,\nAll have since been put a stop-to by the naughty Board of Trade;\nThe schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,\nA little south the sunset in the Islands of the Blest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "beauty": { - "title": "“Beauty”", - "body": "I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills\nComing in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain:\nI have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils,\nBringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain.\n\nI have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea,\nAnd seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships;\nBut the loveliest thing of beauty God ever has shown to me,\nAre her voice, and her hair, and eyes, and the dear red curve of her lips.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "between-the-barren-pasture-and-the-wood": { - "title": "“Between the barren pasture and the wood”", - "body": "Between the barren pasture and the wood\nThere is a patch of poultry-stricken grass,\nWhere, in old time, Ryemeadows’ Farmhouse stood,\nAnd human fate brought tragic things to pass.\nA spring comes bubbling up there, cold as glass,\nIt bubbles down, crusting the leaves with lime,\nBabbling the self-same song that it has sung through time.\n\nDucks gobble at the selvage of the brook,\nBut still it slips away, the cold hill-spring,\nPast the Ryemeadows’ lonely woodland nook\nWhere many a stubble gray-goose preens her wing,\nOn, by the woodland side. You hear it sing\nPast the lone copse where poachers set their wires,\nPast the green hill once grim with sacrificial fires.\n\nAnother water joins it; then it turns,\nRuns through the Ponton Wood, still turning west,\nPast foxgloves, Canterbury bells, and ferns,\nAnd many a blackbird’s, many a thrush’s nest;\nThe cattle tread it there; then, with a zest\nIt sparkles out, babbling its pretty chatter\nThrough Foxholes Farm, where it gives white-faced cattle water.\n\nUnder the road it runs, and now it slips\nPast the great ploughland, babbling, drop and linn,\nTo the moss’d stumps of elm trees which it lips,\nAnd blackberry-bramble-trails where eddies spin.\nThen, on its left, some short-grassed fields begin,\nRed-clayed and pleasant, which the young spring fills\nWith the never-quiet joy of dancing daffodils.\n\nThere are three fields where daffodils are found;\nThe grass is dotted blue-gray with their leaves;\nTheir nodding beauty shakes along the ground\nUp to a fir-clump shutting out the eaves\nOf an old farm where always the wind grieves\nHigh in the fir boughs, moaning; people call\nThis farm The Roughs, but some call it the Poor Maid’s Hall.\n\nThere, when the first green shoots of tender corn\nShow on the plough; when the first drift of white\nStars the black branches of the spiky thorn,\nAnd afternoons are warm and evenings light,\nThe shivering daffodils do take delight,\nShaking beside the brook, and grass comes green,\nAnd blue dog-violets come and glistening celandine.\n\nAnd there the pickers come, picking for town\nThose dancing daffodils; all day they pick;\nHard-featured women, weather-beaten brown,\nOr swarthy-red, the colour of old brick.\nAt noon they break their meats under the rick.\nThe smoke of all three farms lifts blue in air\nAs though man’s passionate mind had never suffered there.\n\nAnd sometimes as they rest an old man comes,\nShepherd or carter, to the hedgerow-side,\nAnd looks upon their gangrel tribe, and hums,\nAnd thinks all gone to wreck since master died;\nAnd sighs over a passionate harvest-tide\nWhich Death’s red sickle reaped under those hills,\nThere, in the quiet fields among the daffodils.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "biography": { - "title": "“Biography”", - "body": "When I am buried, all my thoughts and acts\nWill be reduced to lists of dates and facts,\nAnd long before this wandering flesh is rotten\nThe dates which made me will be all forgotten;\nAnd none will know the gleam there used to be\nAbout the feast days freshly kept by me,\nBut men will call the golden hour of bliss\n‘About this time,’ or ‘shortly after this.’\n\nMen do not heed the rungs by which men climb\nThose glittering steps, those milestones upon time,\nThose tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth,\nThose moments of the soul in years of earth.\nThey mark the height achieved, the main result,\nThe power of freedom in the perished cult,\nThe power of boredom in the dead man’s deeds\nNot the bright moments of the sprinkled seeds.\n\nBy many waters and on many ways\nI have known golden instants and bright days;\nThe day on which, beneath an arching sail,\nI saw the Cordilleras and gave hail;\nThe summer day on which in heart’s delight\nI saw the Swansea Mumbles bursting white,\nThe glittering day when all the waves wore flags\nAnd the ship Wanderer came with sails in rags;\nThat curlew-calling time in Irish dusk\nWhen life became more splendid than its husk,\nWhen the rent chapel on the brae at Slains\nShone with a doorway opening beyond brains;\nThe dawn when, with a brace-block’s creaking cry,\nOut of the mist a little barque slipped by,\nSpilling the mist with changing gleams of red,\nThen gone, with one raised hand and one turned head;\nThe howling evening when the spindrift’s mists\nBroke to display the four Evangelists,\nSnow-capped, divinely granite, lashed by breakers,\nWind-beaten bones of long-since-buried acres;\nThe night alone near water when I heard\nAll the sea’s spirit spoken by a bird;\nThe English dusk when I beheld once more\n(With eyes so changed) the ship, the citied shore,\nThe lines of masts, the streets so cheerly trod\nIn happier seasons, and gave thanks to God.\nAll had their beauty, their bright moments’ gift,\nTheir something caught from Time, the ever-swift.\n\nAll of those gleams were golden; but life’s hands\nHave given more constant gifts in changing lands;\nAnd when I count those gifts, I think them such\nAs no man’s bounty could have bettered much:\nThe gift of country life, near hills and woods\nWhere happy waters sing in solitudes,\nThe gift of being near ships, of seeing each day\nA city of ships with great ships under weigh,\nThe great street paved with water, filled with shipping,\nAnd all the world’s flags flying and seagulls dipping.\n\nYet when I am dust my penman may not know\nThose water-trampling ships which made me glow,\nBut think my wonder mad and fail to find,\nTheir glory, even dimly, from my mind,\nAnd yet they made me: not alone the ships\n\nBut men hard-palmed from tallying-on to whips,\nThe two close friends of nearly twenty years\nSea-followers both, sea-wrestlers and sea-peers,\nWhose feet with mine wore many a bolthead bright\nTreading the decks beneath the riding light.\nYet death will make that warmth of friendship cold,\nAnd who’ll know what one said and what one told,\nOur hearts’ communion, and the broken spells\nWhen the loud call blew at the strike of bells?\nNo one, I know, yet let me be believed--\nA soul entirely known is life achieved.\n\nYears blank with hardship never speak a word\nLive in the soul to make the being stirred;\nTowns can be prisons where the spirit dulls\nAway from mates and ocean-wandering hulls,\nAway from all bright water and great hills\nAnd sheep-walks where the curlews cry their fills;\nAway in towns, where eyes have nought to see\nBut dead museums and miles of misery\nAnd floating life un-rooted from man’s need\nAnd miles of fish-hooks baited to catch greed\nAnd life made wretched out of human ken\nAnd miles of shopping women served by men.\nSo, if the penman sums my London days,\nLet him but say that there were holy ways,\nDull Bloomsbury streets of dull brick mansions old\nWith stinking doors where women stood to scold\nAnd drunken waits at Christmas with their horn\nDroning the news, in snow, that Christ was born;\nAnd windy gas lamps and the wet roads shining\nAnd that old carol of the midnight whining,\nAnd that old room above the noisy slum\nWhere there was wine and fire and talk with some\nUnder strange pictures of the wakened soul\nTo whom this earth was but a burnt-out coal.\n\nO Time, bring back those midnights and those friends,\nThose glittering moments that a spirit lends,\nThat all may be imagined from the flash,\nThe cloud-hid god-game through the lightning gash;\nThose hours of stricken sparks from which men took\nLight to send out to men in song or book;\nThose friends who heard St. Pancras’ bells strike two,\nYet stayed until the barber’s cockerel crew,\nTalking of noble styles, the Frenchman’s best,\nThe thought beyond great poets not expressed,\nThe glory of mood where human frailty failed,\nThe forts of human light not yet assailed,\nTill the dim room had mind and seemed to brood,\nBinding our wills to mental brotherhood;\nTill we became a college, and each night\nWas discipline and manhood and delight;\nTill our farewells and winding down the stairs\nAt each gray dawn had meaning that Time spares\nThat we, so linked, should roam the whole world round\nTeaching the ways our brooding minds had found,\nMaking that room our Chapter, our one mind\nWhere all that this world soiled should be refined.\n\nOften at night I tread those streets again\nAnd see the alleys glimmering in the rain,\nYet now I miss that sign of earlier tramps,\nA house with shadows of plane-boughs under lamps,\nThe secret house where once a beggar stood,\nTrembling and blind, to show his woe for food.\nAnd now I miss that friend who used to walk\nHome to my lodgings with me, deep in talk,\nWearing the last of night out in still streets\nTrodden by us and policemen on their beats\nAnd cats, but else deserted; now I miss\nThat lively mind and guttural laugh of his\nAnd that strange way he had of making gleam,\nLike something real, the art we used to dream.\nLondon has been my prison; but my books\nHills and great waters, labouring men and brooks,\nShips and deep friendships and remembered days\nWhich even now set all my mind ablaze--\nAs that June day when, in the red bricks’ chinks\nI saw the old Roman ruins white with pinks\nAnd felt the hillside haunted even then\nBy not dead memory of the Roman men;\nAnd felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen\nWho knew the interest in me, and were keen\nThat man alive should understand man dead\nSo many centuries since the blood was shed,\nAnd quickened with strange hush because this comer\nSensed a strange soul alive behind the summer.\nThat other day on Ercall when the stones\nWere sunbleached white, like long unburied bones,\nWhile the bees droned and all the air was sweet\nFrom honey buried underneath my feet,\nHoney of purple heather and white clover\nSealed in its gummy bags till summer’s over.\nThen other days by water, by bright sea,\nClear as clean glass, and my bright friend with me;\nThe cove clean bottomed where we saw the brown\nRed spotted plaice go skimming six feet down,\nAnd saw the long fronds waving, white with shells,\nWaving, unfolding, drooping, to the swells;\nThat sadder day when we beheld the great\nAnd terrible beauty of a Lammas spate\nRoaring white-mouthed in all the great cliff’s gaps,\nHeadlong, tree-tumbling fury of collapse,\nWhile drenching clouds drove by and every sense\nWas water roaring or rushing or in offence,\nAnd mountain sheep stood huddled and blown gaps gleamed\nWhere torn white hair of torrents shook and streamed.\nThat sadder day when we beheld again\nA spate going down in sunshine after rain\nWhen the blue reach of water leaping bright\nWas one long ripple and clatter, flecked with white.\nAnd that far day, that never blotted page\nWhen youth was bright like flowers about old age,\nFair generations bringing thanks for life\nTo that old kindly man and trembling wife\nAfter their sixty years: Time never made\nA better beauty since the Earth was laid,\nThan that thanksgiving given to grey hair\nFor the great gift of life which brought them there.\n\nDays of endeavour have been good: the days\nRacing in cutters for the comrade’s praise.\nThe day they led my cutter at the turn,\nYet could not keep the lead, and dropped astern;\nThe moment in the spurt when both boats’ oars\nDipped in each other’s wash, and throats grew hoarse,\nAnd teeth ground into teeth, and both strokes quickened\nLashing the sea, and gasps came, and hearts sickened,\nAnd coxswains damned us, dancing, banking stroke,\nTo put our weights on, though our hearts were broke,\nAnd both boats seemed to stick and sea seemed glue,\nThe tide a mill race we were struggling through;\nAnd every quick recover gave us squints\nOf them still there, and oar-tossed water-glints,\nAnd cheering came, our friends, our foemen cheering,\nA long, wild, rallying murmur on the hearing,\n‘Port Fore!’ and ‘Starboard Fore!’ ‘Port Fore’ ‘Port Fore,’\n‘Up with her,’ ‘Starboard’; and at that each oar\nLightened, though arms were bursting, and eyes shut,\nAnd the oak stretchers grunted in the strut,\nAnd the curse quickened from the cox, our bows\nCrashed, and drove talking water, we made vows,\nChastity vows and temperance; in our pain\nWe numbered things we’d never eat again\nIf we could only win; then came the yell\n‘Starboard,’ ‘Port Fore,’ and then a beaten bell\nRung as for fire to cheer us. ‘Now.’ Oars bent,\nSoul took the looms now body’s bolt was spent,\n‘Damn it, come on now.’ ‘On now,’ ‘On now,’ ‘Starboard.’\n‘Port Fore,’ ‘Up with her, Port’; each cutter harboured\nTen eye-shut painsick strugglers, ‘Heave, oh heave,’\nCatcalls waked echoes like a shrieking sheave.\n‘Heave,’ and I saw a back, then two. ‘Port Fore,’\n‘Starboard,’ ‘Come on’; I saw the midship oar,\nAnd knew we had done them. ‘Port Fore,’ ‘Starboard,’ ‘Now.’\nI saw bright water spurting at their bow,\nTheir cox’ full face an instant. They were done.\nThe watchers’ cheering almost drowned the gun.\nWe had hardly strength to toss our oars; our cry\nCheering the losing cutter was a sigh.\n\nOther bright days of action have seemed great:\nWild days in a pampero off the Plate;\nGood swimming days, at Hog Back or the Coves\nWhich the young gannet and the corbie loves;\nSurf-swimming between rollers, catching breath\nBetween the advancing grave and breaking death,\nThen shooting up into the sunbright smooth\nTo watch the advancing roller bare her tooth;\nAnd days of labour also, loading, hauling;\nLong days at winch or capstan, heaving, pawling;\nThe days with oxen, dragging stone from blasting,\nAnd dusty days in mills, and hot days masting.\nTrucking on dust-dry deckings smooth like ice,\nAnd hunts in mighty wool-racks after mice;\nMornings with buckwheat when the fields did blanch\nWith White Leghorns come from the chicken ranch;\nDays near the spring upon the sunburnt hill,\nPlying the maul or gripping tight the drill;\nDelights of work most real, delights that change\nThe headache life of towns to rapture strange\nNot known by townsmen, nor imagined; health\nThat puts new glory upon mental wealth\nAnd makes the poor man rich. But that ends, too.\n\nHealth, with its thoughts of life; and that bright view,\nThat sunny landscape from life’s peak, that glory,\nAnd all a glad man’s comments on life’s story,\nAnd thoughts of marvellous towns and living men,\nAnd what pens tell, and all beyond the pen,\nEnd, and are summed in words so truly dead\nThey raise no image of the heart and head,\nThe life, the man alive, the friend we knew,\nThe minds ours argued with or listened to,\nNone; but are dead, and all life’s keenness, all,\nIs dead as print before the funeral;\nEven deader after, when the dates are sought,\nAnd cold minds disagree with what we thought.\n\nThis many-pictured world of many passions\nWears out the nations as a woman fashions,\nAnd what life is is much to very few;\nMen being so strange, so mad, and what men do\nSo good to watch or share; but when men count\nThose hours of life that were a bursting fount\nSparkling the dusty heart with living springs,\nThere seems a world, beyond our earthly things,\nGated by golden moments, each bright time\nOpening to show the city white like lime,\nHigh-towered and many-peopled. This made sure,\nWork that obscures those moments seems impure,\nMaking our not-returning time of breath\nDull with the ritual and records of death,\nThat frost of fact by which our wisdom gives\nCorrectly stated death to all that lives.\n\nBest trust the happy moments. What they gave\nMakes man less fearful of the certain grave,\nAnd gives his work compassion and new eyes.\nThe days that make us happy make us wise.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Philip the King", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "the-builders": { - "title": "“The Builders”", - "body": "Before the unseen cock had called the time,\nThose workers left their beds and stumbled out\nInto the street, where dust lay white as lime\nUnder the last star that keeps bats about.\nThen blinking still from bed, they trod the street,\nThe doors closed up and down; the traveller heard\nDoors opened, closed, then silence, then men’s feet\nMoving to toil, the men too drowsed for word.\nThe bean-field was a greyness as they passed,\nThe darkness of the hedge was starred with flowers,\nThe moth, with wings like dead leaves, sucked his last,\nThe triumphing cock cried out with all his powers;\nHis fire of crying made the twilight quick,\nThen clink, clink, clink, men’s trowels tapped the brick.\n\nI saw the delicate man who built the tower\nLook from the turret at the ground below,\nThe granite column wavered like a flower,\nBut stood in air whatever winds might blow.\nIts roots were in the rock, its head stood proud,\nNo earthly forest reared a head so high;\nSometimes the eagle came there, sometimes cloud,\nIt was man’s ultimate footstep to the sky.\nAnd in that peak the builder kept his treasure,\nBooks with the symbols of his art, the signs\nOf knowledge in excitement, skill in pleasure,\nThe edge that cut, the rule that kept the lines.\nHe who had seen his tower beneath the grass,\nRock in the earth, now smiled, because it was.\n\nHow many thousand men had done his will,\nMen who had hands, or arms, or strength to spend,\nOr cunning with machines, or art, or skill!\nAll had obeyed him, working to this end.\nHundreds in distant lands had given their share\nOf power, to deck it; on its every stone\nTheir oddity of pleasure was laid bare,\nYet was the tower his offspring, his alone.\nHis inner eye had seen, his will had made it,\nAll the opposing army of men’s minds\nHad bowed, had turned, had striven as he bade it,\nEach to his purpose in their myriad kinds.\nNow it was done, and in the peak he stood\nSeeing his work, and smiled to find it good.\n\nIt had been stone, earth’s body, hidden deep,\nLightless and shapeless, where it cooled and hardened.\nNow it was as the banner on man’s keep\nOr as the Apple in Eden where God gardened.\nLilies of stone ran round it, and like fires\nThe tongues of crockets shot from it and paused,\nHorsemen who raced were carven on’t, the spires\nWere bright with gold; all this the builder caused.\nAnd standing there, it seemed that all the hive\nOf human skill which now it had become,\nWas stone no more, nor building, but alive,\nTrying to speak, this tower that was dumb,\nTrying to speak, nay, speaking, soul to soul\nWith powers who are, to raven or control.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - } - } - }, - "the-death-rooms": { - "title": "“The Death Rooms”", - "body": "My soul has many an old decaying room\n Hung with the ragged arras of the past,\nWhere startled faces flicker in the gloom,\n And horrid whispers set the cheek aghast.\n\nThose dropping rooms are haunted by a death,\n A something like a worm gnawing a brain,\nThat bids me heed what bitter lesson saith\n The blind wind beating on the widow-pane.\n\nNone dwells in those old rooms: none ever can:\n I pass them through at night with hidden head;\nLock’d rotting rooms her eyes must never scan,\n Floors that her blessed feet must never tread.\n\nHaunted old rooms: rooms she must never know,\nWhere death-ticks knock and mouldering panels glow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "death-lies-in-wait-for-you-you-wild-thing-in-the-wood": { - "title": "“Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood …”", - "body": "Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood,\nShy-footed, beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood,\nGlimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir,\nShy like a fawn and sweet and beauty’s minister.\nGlimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon,\nA wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.\n\nOnly a moment held, only an hour seen,\nOnly an instant known in all that life has been,\nOne instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace,\nThe beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.\n\nDeath lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives;\nI perish even as you by whom all spirit lives.\nCome to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breath\nWith hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "the-end-of-the-trouble": { - "title": "“The End of the Trouble”", - "body": "Lion lay still while the cold tides of death\nCame brimming up his channels. With one hand\nHe groped to know if Michael still drew breath.\nHis little hour was running out its sand.\nThen, in a mist, he saw his Mary stand\nAbove. He cried aloud, “He was my brother.\nI was his comrade sworn, and we have killed each other.”\n\n“Oh desolate grief, beloved, and through me.\nWe wise who try to change. Oh, you wild birds,\nHelp my unhappy spirit to the sea.\nThe golden bowl is scattered into sherds.”\nAnd Mary knelt and murmured passionate words\nTo that poor body on the dabbled flowers:\n“Oh, beauty, oh, sweet soul, oh, little love of ours--”\n\n“Michael, my own heart’s darling, speak; it’s me,\nMary. You know my voice. I’m here, dear, here.\nOh, little golden-haired one, listen. See,\nIt’s Mary, Michael. Speak to Mary, dear.\nOh, Michael, little love, he cannot hear;\nAnd you have killed him, Lion; he is dead.\nMy little friend, my love, my Michael, golden head.”\n\n“We had such fun together, such sweet fun,\nMy love and I, my merry love and I.\nOh, love, you shone upon me like the sun.\nOh, Michael, say some little last good-bye.”\nThen in a calm voice Lion called, “I die.\nGo home and tell my people. Mary. Hear.\nThough I have wrought this ruin, I have loved you, dear.”\n\n“Better than he; not better, dear, as well.\nIf you could kiss me, dearest, at this last.\nWe have made bloody doorways from our hell,\nCutting our tangle. Now, the murder past,\nWe are but pitiful poor souls; and fast\nThe darkness and the cold come. Kiss me, sweet;\nI loved you all my life; but some lives never meet”\n\n“Though they go wandering side by side through Time.\nKiss me,” he cried. She bent, she kissed his brow.\n“Oh, friend,” she said, “you’re lying in the slime.”\n“Three blind ones, dear,” he murmured, “in the slough,\nCaught fast for death; but never mind that now;\nGo home and tell my people. I am dying,\nDying dear, dying now.” He died; she left him lying,\n\nAnd kissed her dead one’s head and crossed the field.\n“They have been killed,” she called, in a great crying.\n“Killed, and our spirits’ eyes are all unsealed\nThe blood is scattered on the flowers drying.”\nIt was the hush of dusk, and owls were flying;\nThey hooted as the Occleves ran to bring\nThat sorry harvest home from Death’s red harvesting.\n\nThey laid the bodies on the bed together.\nAnd “You were beautiful,” she said, “and you\nWere my own darling in the April weather.\nYou knew my very soul, you knew, you knew.\nOh, my sweet, piteous love, I was not true.\nFetch me fair water and the flowers of spring;\nMy love is dead, and I must deck his burying.”\n\nThey left her with her dead; they could not choose\nBut grant the spirit burning in her face\nRights that their pity urged them to refuse.\nThey did her sorrow and the dead a grace.\nAll night they heard her passing footsteps trace\nAbout the flooring in the room of death.\nThey heard her singing there, lowly, with gentle breath,\n\nYet when the darkness passed they tried the door,\nAnd burst it, fearing; there the singer lay\nDrooped at her lover’s bedside on the floor,\nSinging her passionate last of life away.\nWhite flowers had fallen from a blackthorn spray\nOver her loosened hair. Pale flowers of spring\nFilled the white room of death; they everything.\n\nPrimroses, daffodils, and cuckoo-flowers.\nShe bowed her singing head on Michael’s breast.\n“Oh, it was sweet,” she cried, “that love of ours.\nYou were the dearest, sweet; I loved you best.\nBeloved, my beloved, let me rest\nBy you forever, little Michael mine.\nNow the great hour is stricken, and the bread and wine”\n\n“Broken and spilt; and now the homing birds\nDraw to a covert, Michael; I to you.\nBury us two together,” came her words.\nThe dropping petals fell about the two.\nHer heart had broken; she was dead. They drew\nHer gentle head aside; they found it pressed\nAgainst the broidered ’kerchief spread on Michael’s breast,\n\nThe one that bore her name in Michael’s hair,\nGiven so long before. They let her lie\nWhile the dim moon died out upon the air,\nAnd happy sunlight coloured all the sky.\nThe lack cock crowed for morning; carts went by;\nSmoke rose from cottage chimneys; from the byre\nThe yokes went clanking by, to dairy, through the mire.\n\nIn the day’s noise the water’s noise was stilled,\nBut still it slipped along, the cold hill-spring,\nDropping from leafy hollows, which it filled,\nOn to the pebbly shelves which made it sing;\nGlints glittered on it from the ’fisher’s wing;\nIt saw the moorhen nesting; then it stayed\nIn a great space of reeds where merry otters played.\n\nSlowly it loitered past the shivering reeds\nInto a mightier water; thence its course\nBecomes a pasture where the salmon feeds,\nWherein no bubble tells its humble source;\nBut the great waves go rolling, and the horse\nSnorts at the bursting waves and will not drink,\nAnd the great ships go outward, bubbling to the brink,\n\nOutward, with men upon them, stretched in line,\nHandling the halliards to the ocean’s gates,\nWhere flicking windflaws fill the air with brine,\nAnd all the ocean opens. Then the mates\nCry, and the sunburnt crew no longer waits,\nBut sings triumphant and the topsail fills\nTo this old tale of woe among the daffodils.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Daffodil Fields", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-end": { - "title": "“The End”", - "body": "Some of life’s sad ones are too strong to die,\nGrief doesn’t kill them as it kills the weak,\nSorrow is not for those who sit and cry\nLapped in the love of turning t’other cheek,\nBut for the noble souls austere and bleak\nWho have had the bitter dose and drained the cup\nAnd wait for Death face fronted, standing up.\n\nAs the last man upon the sinking ship,\nSeeing the brine creep brightly on the deck,\nHearing aloft the slatting topsails rip,\nRipping to rags among the topmast’s wreck,\nYet hoists the new red ensign without speck,\nThat she, so fair, may sink with colours flying,\nSo the old widowed mother kept from dying.\n\nShe tottered home, back to the little room\nIt was all over for her, but for life;\nShe drew the blinds, and trembled in the gloom;\n“I sat here thus when I was wedded wife;\nSorrow sometimes, and joy; but always strife.\nStruggle to live except just at the last,\nO God, I thank Thee for the mercies past.\nHarry, my man, when we were courting; eh ...\nThe April morning up the Cony-gree.\nHow grand he looked upon our wedding day.\n‘I wish we’d had the bells,’ he said to me;\nAnd we’d the moon that evening, I and he,\nAnd dew come wet, oh, I remember how,\nAnd we come home to where I’m sitting now.\nAnd he lay dead here, and his son was born here;\nHe never saw his son, his little Jim.\nAnd now I’m all alone here, left to mourn here,\nAnd there are all his clothes, but never him.\nHe’s down under the prison in the dim,\nWith quicklime working on him to the bone,\nThe flesh I made with many and many a groan.\n\nAnd then he ran so, he was strong at running,\nAlways a strong one, like his dad at that.\nIn summertimes I done my sewing sunning,\nAnd he’d be sprawling, playing with the cat.\nAnd neighbours brought their knitting out to chat\nTill five o’clock; he had his tea at five;\nHow sweet life was when Jimmy was alive.”\n\nAnd sometimes she will walk the cindery mile,\nSinging, as she and Jimmy used to do,\nSinging “The parson’s dog lep over a stile,”\nAlong the path where water lilies grew.\nThe stars are placid on the evening’s blue,\nBurning like eyes so calm, so unafraid.\nOn all that God has given and man has made.\n\nBurning they watch, and mothlike owls come out,\nThe redbreast warbles shrilly once and stops;\nThe homing cowman gives his dog a shout,\nThe lamps are lighted in the village shops.\nSilence; the last bird passes; in the copse\nThe hazels cross the moon, a nightjar spins,\nDew wets the grass, the nightingale begins.\n\nSinging her crazy song the mother goes,\nSinging as though her heart were full of peace,\nMoths knock the petals from the dropping rose,\nStars make the glimmering pool a golden fleece,\nThe moon droops west, but still she does not cease,\nThe little mice peep out to hear her sing,\nUntil the inn-man’s cockerel shakes his wing.\n\nAnd in the sunny dawns of hot Julys,\nThe labourers going to meadow see her there.\nRubbing the sleep out of their heavy eyes,\nThey lean upon the parapet to stare;\nThey see her plaiting basil in her hair,\nBasil, the dark red wound-wort, cops of clover,\nThe blue self-heal and golden Jacks of Dover.\nDully they watch her, then they turn to go\nTo that high Shropshire upland of late hay;\nHer singing lingers with them as they mow,\nAnd many times they try it, now grave, now gay,\nTill, with full throat, over the hills away,\nThey lift it clear; oh, very clear it towers\nMixed with the swish of many falling flowers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "From The Widow in the Bye Street", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "an-epilogue": { - "title": "“An Epilogue”", - "body": "I have seen flowers come in stony places\nAnd kind things done by men with ugly faces,\nAnd the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,\nSo I trust, too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "fragments": { - "title": "“Fragments”", - "body": "Troy Town is covered up with weeds,\nThe rabbits and the pismires brood\nOn broken gold, and shards, and beads\nWhere Priam’s ancient palace stood.\n\nThe floors of many a gallant house\nAre matted with the roots of grass;\nThe glow-worm and the nimble mouse\nAmong her ruins flit and pass.\n\nAnd there, in orts of blackened bone,\nThe widowed Trojan beauties lie,\nAnd Simois babbles over stone\nAnd waps and gurgles to the sky.\n\nOnce there were merry days in Troy,\nHer chimneys smoked with cooking meals,\nThe passing chariots did annoy\nThe sunning housewives at their wheels.\n\nAnd many a lovely Trojan maid\nSet Trojan lads to lovely things;\nThe game of life was nobly played,\nThey played the game like Queens and Kings.\n\nSo that, when Troy had greatly passed\nIn one red roaring fiery coal,\nThe courts the Grecians overcast\nBecame a city in the soul.\n\nIn some green island of the sea,\nWhere now the shadowy coral grows\nIn pride and pomp and empery\nThe courts of old Atlantis rose.\n\nIn many a glittering house of glass\nThe Atlanteans wandered there;\nThe paleness of their faces was\nLike ivory, so pale they were.\n\nAnd hushed they were, no noise of words\nIn those bright cities ever rang;\nOnly their thoughts, like golden birds,\nAbout their chambers thrilled and sang.\n\nThey knew all wisdom, for they knew\nThe souls of those Egyptian Kings\nWho learned, in ancient Babilu,\nThe beauty of immortal things.\n\nThey knew all beauty--when they thought\nThe air chimed like a stricken lyre,\nThe elemental birds were wrought,\nThe golden birds became a fire.\n\nAnd straight to busy camps and marts\nThe singing flames were swiftly gone;\nThe trembling leaves of human hearts\nHid boughs for them to perch upon.\n\nAnd men in desert places, men\nAbandoned, broken, sick with fears,\nRose singing, swung their swords agen,\nAnd laughed and died among the spears.\n\nThe green and greedy seas have drowned\nThat city’s glittering walls and towers,\nHer sunken minarets are crowned\nWith red and russet water-flowers.\n\nIn towers and rooms and golden courts\nThe shadowy coral lifts her sprays;\nThe scrawl hath gorged her broken orts,\nThe shark doth haunt her hidden ways.\n\nBut, at the falling of the tide,\nThe golden birds still sing and gleam,\nThe Atlanteans have not died,\nImmortal things still give us dream.\n\nThe dream that fires man’s heart to make,\nTo build, to do, to sing or say\nA beauty Death can never take,\nAn Adam from the crumbled clay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - } - } - }, - "the-haunted": { - "title": "“The Haunted”", - "body": "Here, in this darkened room of this old house,\n I sit beside the fire. I hear again,\nWithin, the scutter where the mice carouse,\n Without, the gutter dropping with the rain.\nOpposite, are black shelves of wormy books,\n To left, glazed cases, dusty with the same,\nBehind, a wall, with rusty guns on hooks,\n To right, the fire, that chokes one panting flame.\nOver the mantel, black as funeral cloth,\n A portrait hangs, a man, whose flesh the worm\nHas mawed this hundred years, whose clothes the moth\n A century since, has channelled to a term.\nI cannot see his face: I only know\nHe stares at me, that man of long ago.\n\nI light the candles in the long brass sticks,\n I see him now, a pale-eyed, simpering man,\nFramed in carved wood, wherein the death-watch ticks,\n A most dead face: yet when the work began\nThat face, the pale puce coat, the simpering smile,\n The hands that hold a book, the eyes that gaze,\nMoved to the touch of mind a little while.\n The painter sat in judgment on his ways:\nThe painter turned him to and from the light,\n Talked about art, or bade him lift his head.\nJudged the lips’ paleness and the temples’ white,\n And now his work abides; the man is dead.\nBut is he dead? This dusty study drear\nCreaks in its panels that the man is here.\n\nHere, beyond doubt, he lived, in that old day.\n “He was a Doctor here,” the student thought.\nHere, when the puce was new, that now is grey,\n That simpering man his daily practice wrought.\nHere he let blood, prescribed the pill and drop,\n The leech, the diet; here his verdict given\nBrought agonies of hoping to a stop,\n Here his condemned confessioners were shriven.\nWhat is that book he holds, the key, too dim\n To read, to know; some little book he wrote,\nForgotten now, but still the key to him.\n He sacrificed his vision for his coat.\nI see the man; a simpering mask that hid\nA seeing mind that simpering men forbid.\n\nThose are his books no doubt, untoucht, undusted,\n Unread, since last he left them on the shelves,\nOctavo sermons that the fox has rusted,\n Sides splitting off from brown decaying twelves.\nThis was his room, this darkness of old death,\n This coffin-room with lights like embrasures,\nThe place is poisonous with him; like a breath\n On glass, he stains the spirit; he endures.\nHere is his name within the sermon book,\n And verse, “When hungry Worms my Body eat”;\nHe leans across my shoulder as I look,\n He who is God or pasture to the wheat.\nHe who is Dead is still upon the soul\n A check, an inhibition, a control.\n\nI draw the bolts. I am alone within.\n The moonlight through the coloured glass comes faint,\nMottling the passage wall like human skin,\n Pale with the breathings left of withered paint.\nBut others walk the empty house with me,\n There is no loneliness within these walls\nNo more than there is stillness in the sea\n Or silence in the eternal waterfalls.\nThere in the room, to right, they sit at feast;\n The dropping grey-beard with the cold blue eye,\nThe lad, his son, that should have been a priest,\n And he, the rake, who made his mother die.\nAnd he, the gambling man, who staked the throw,\nThey look me through, they follow when I go.\n\nThey follow with still footing down the hall,\n I know their souls, those fellow-tenants mine,\nTheir shadows dim those colours on the wall,\n They point my every gesture with a sign.\nThat grey-beard cast his aged servant forth\n After his forty years of service done,\nThe gambler supped up riches as the north\n Sups with his death the glories of the sun.\nThe lad betrayed his trust; the rake was he\n Who broke two women’s hearts to ease his own:\nThey nudge each other as they look at me,\n Shadows, all our, and yet as hard as stone.\nAnd there, he comes, that simpering man, who sold\nHis mind for coat of puce and penny gold.\n\nO ruinous house, within whose corridors\n None but the wicked and the mad go free.\n(On the dark stairs they wait, behind the doors\n They crouch, they watch, or creep to follow me.)\nDeep in old blood your ominous bricks are red,\n Firm in old bones your walls’ foundations stand,\nWith dead men’s passions built upon the dead,\n With broken hearts for lime and oaths for sand.\nTerrible house, whose horror I have built,\n Sin after sin, unseen, as sand that slips\nTelling the time, till now the heaped guilt\n Cries, and the planets circle to eclipse.\nYou only are the Daunter, you alone\nClutch, till I feel your ivy on the bone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hells-pavement": { - "title": "“Hell’s Pavement”", - "body": "“When I’m discharged at Liverpool ’n draws my bit o’ pay,\nI won’t come to sea no more;\nI’ll court a pretty little lass ’n have a weddin’ day,\n’N settle somewhere down shore;\nI’ll never fare to sea again a-temptin’ Davy Jones,\nA-hearkening to the cruel sharks a-hungerin’ for my bones;\nI’ll run a blushin’ dairy-farm or go a-crackin’ stones,\nOr buy ’n keep a little liquor-store” &mdash\nSo he said.\n\nThey towed her in to Liverpool, we made the hooker fast,\nAnd the copper-bound official paid the crew,\nAnd Billy drew his money, but the money didn’t last,\nFor he painted the alongshore blue, &mdash\nIt was rum for Poll, and rum for Nan, and gin for Jolly Jack;\nHe shipped a week later in the clothes upon his back;\nHe had to pinch a little straw, he had to beg a sack\nTo sleep on, when his watch was through, &mdash\nSo he did.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "here-in-the-self-is-all-that-man-can-know": { - "title": "“Here in the self is all that man can know …”", - "body": "Here in the self is all that man can know\nOf Beauty, all the wonder, all the power,\nAll the unearthly colour, all the glow,\nHere in the self which withers like a flower;\nHere in the self which fades as hours pass,\nAnd droops and dies and rots and is forgotten\nSooner, by ages, than the mirroring glass\nIn which it sees its glory still unrotten.\nHere in the flesh, within the flesh, behind,\nSwift in the blood and throbbing on the bone,\nBeauty herself, the universal mind,\nEternal April wandering alone;\nThe God, the holy Ghost, the atoning Lord,\nHere in the flesh, the never yet explored.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "how-swift-the-summer-goes": { - "title": "“How swift the summer goes …”", - "body": "How swift the summer goes,\nForget-me-not, pink, rose.\nThe young grass when I started\nAnd now the hay is carted,\nAnd now my song is ended,\nAnd all the summer spended;\nThe blackbird’s second brood\nRouts beech leaves in the wood;\nThe pink and rose have speeded,\nForget-me-not has seeded\nOnly the winds that blew,\nThe rain that makes things new,\nThe earth that hides things old,\nAnd blessings manifold.\n\n _O lovely lily clean,\n O lily springing green,\n O lily bursting white,\n Dear lily of delight,\n Spring in my heart agen\n That I may flower to men._", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Everlasting Mercy", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "i-went-into-the-fields-but-you-were-there": { - "title": "“I went into the fields, but you were there …”", - "body": "I went into the fields, but you were there\nWaiting for me, so all the summer flowers\nWere only glimpses of your starry powers;\nBeautiful and inspired dust they were.\n\nI went down by the waters, and a bird\nSang with your voice in all the unknown tones\nOf all that self of you I have not heard,\nSo that my being felt you to the bones.\n\nI went into the house, and shut the door\nTo be alone, but you were there with me;\nAll beauty in a little room may be,\nThough the roof lean and muddy be the floor.\n\nThen in my bed I bound my tired eyes\nTo make a darkness for my weary brain;\nBut like a presence you were there again,\nBeing and real, beautiful and wise,\n\nSo that I could not sleep, and cried aloud,\n“You strange grave thing, what is it you would say?”\nThe redness of your dear lips dimmed to grey,\nThe waters ebbed, the moon hid in a cloud.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "if-i-could-get-within-this-changing-i": { - "title": "“If I could get within this changing I …”", - "body": "If I could get within this changing I,\nThis ever altering thing which yet persists,\nKeeping the features it is reckoned by,\nWhile each component atom breaks or twists;\nIf, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,\nCells at their hidden marvels hard at work,\nPale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,\nI might attain to where the Rulers lurk;\nIf, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,\nThe brain’s most folded, intertwisted shell,\nI might attain to that which alters fates,\nThe King, the supreme self, the Master Cell;\nThen, on Man’s earthly peak, I might behold\nThe unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "invocation": { - "title": "“Invocation”", - "body": "O wanderer into many brains,\nO spark the emperor’s purple hides,\nYou sow the dusk with fiery grains\nWhen the gold horseman rides.\n O beauty on the darkness hurled,\n Be it through me you shame the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "the-island-of-skyros": { - "title": "“The Island of Skyros”", - "body": "Here, where we stood together, we three men,\nBefore the war had swept us to the East\nThree thousand miles away, I stand again\nAnd hear the bells, and breathe, and go to feast.\nWe trod the same path, to the selfsame place,\nYet here I stand, having beheld their graves,\nSkyros whose shadows the great seas erase,\nAnd Seddul Bahr that ever more blood craves.\nSo, since we communed here, our bones have been\nNearer, perhaps, than they again will be,\nEarth and the worldwide battle lie between,\nDeath lies between, and friend-destroying sea.\nYet here, a year ago, we talked and stood\nAs I stnad now, with pulses beating blood.\n\nI saw her like a shadow on the sky\nIn the last light, a blur upon the sea,\nThen the gale’s darkness put the shadow by,\nBut from one grave that island talked to me;\nAnd, in the midnight, in the breaking storm,\nI saw its blackness and a blinking light,\nAnd thought, “So death obscures your gentle form,\nSo memory strives to make the darkness bright;\nAnd, in that heap of rocks, your body lies,\nPart of the island till the planet ends,\nMy gentle comrade, beautiful and wise,\nPart of this crag this bitter surge offends,\nWhile I, who pass, a little obscure thing,\nWar with this force, and breathe, and am its king.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - } - } - }, - "kneel-to-the-beautiful-women": { - "title": "“Kneel to the beautiful women …”", - "body": "Kneel to the beautiful women who bear us this strange brave fruit.\nMan with his soul so noble: man half god and half brute.\nWomen bear him in pain that he may bring them tears.\nHe is a king on earth, he rules for a term of years.\nAnd the conqueror’s prize is dust and lost endeavour.\nAnd the beaten man becomes a story for ever.\nFor the gods employ strange means to bring their will to be.\nWe are in the wise gods’ hands and more we cannot see.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Pompey the Great", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "laugh-and-be-merry": { - "title": "“Laugh and Be Merry”", - "body": "Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,\nBetter the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.\nLaugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.\nLaugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.\n\nLaugh and be merry: remember, in olden time.\nGod made Heaven and Earth for joy He took in a rhyme,\nMade them, and filled them full with the strong red wine of His mirth\nThe splendid joy of the stars: the joy of the earth.\n\nSo we must laugh and drink from the deep blue cup of the sky,\nJoin the jubilant song of the great stars sweeping by,\nLaugh, and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured\nIn the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord.\n\nLaugh and be merry together, like brothers akin,\nGuesting awhile in the rooms of a beautiful inn,\nGlad till the dancing stops, and the lilt of the music ends.\nLaugh till the game is played; and be you merry, my friends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lemmings": { - "title": "“The Lemmings”", - "body": "Once in a hundred years the Lemmings come\nWestward, in search of food, over the snow;\nWestward until the salt sea drowns them dumb;\nWestward, till all are drowned, those Lemmings go.\nOnce, it is thought, there was a westward land\nNow drowned where there was food for those starved things,\nAnd memory of the place has burnt its brand\nIn the little brains of all the Lemming Kings.\nPerhaps, long since, there was a land beyond\nWestward from death, some city, some calm place\nWhere one could taste God’s quiet and be fond\nWith the little beauty of a human face;\nBut now the land is drowned. Yet we still press\nWestward, in search, to death, to nothingness.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Reynard the Fox", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "madman": { - "title": "“Madman”", - "body": "They cut my face, there’s blood upon my brow.\nSo, let it run, I am an old man now,\nAn old, blind beggar picking filth for bread.\nOnce I wore silk, drank wine,\nSpent gold on women, feasted, all was mine;\nBut this uneasy current in my head\nBurst, one full moon, and cleansed me, then I saw\nTruth like a perfect crystal, life its flaw,\nI told the world, but I was mad, they said.\n\nI had a valley farm above a brook,\nMy sheep bells there were sweet,\nAnd in the summer heat\nMy mill wheels turned, yet all these things they took;\nAh, and I gave them, all things I forsook\nBut that green blade of wheat,\nMy own soul’s courage, that they did not take.\nI will go on, although my old heart ache.\nNot long, not long.\nSoon I shall pass behind\nThis changing veil to that which does not change,\nMy tired feet will range\nIn some green valley of eternal mind\nWhere Truth is daily like the water’s song.\n\nThe wild-duck, stringing through the sky,\nAre south away.\nTheir green necks glitter as they fly,\nThe lake is gray,\nSo still, so lone, the fowler never heeds.\nThe wind goes rustle, rustle, through the reeds.\n\nThere they find peace to have their own wild souls.\nIn that still lake,\nOnly the moonrise or the wind controls\nThe way they take,\nThrough the gray reeds, the cocking moorhen’s lair,\nRippling the pool, or over leagues of air.\n\nNot thus, not thus are the wild souls of men.\nNo peace for those\nWho step beyond the blindness of the pen\nTo where the skies unclose.\nFor them the spitting mob, the cross, the crown of thorns,\nThe bull gone mad, the saviour on his horns.\n\nBeauty and Peace have made\nNo peace, no still retreat,\nNo solace, none.\nOnly the unafraid\nBefore life’s roaring street\nTouch Beauty’s feet,\nKnow Truth, do as God bade,\nBecome God’s son.\n\n[_Pause._]\n\nDarkness come down, cover a brave man’s pain.\nLet the bright soul go back to God again.\nCover that tortured flesh, it only serves\nTo hold that thing which other power nerves.\nDarkness, come down, let it be midnight here,\nIn the dark night the untroubled soul sings clear.\n\n[_It darkens._]\n\nI have been scourged, blinded and crucified,\nMy blood burns on the stones of every street\nIn every town; wherever people meet\nI have been hounded down, in anguish died.\n\n[_It darkens._]\n\nThe creaking door of flesh rolls slowly back.\nNerve by red nerve the links of living crack,\nLoosing the soul to tread another track.\n\nBeyond the pain, beyond the broken clay,\nA glimmering country lies\nWhere life is being wise,\nAll of the beauty seen by truthful eyes\nAre lilies there, growing beside the way.\nThose golden ones will loose the torted hands,\nSmooth the scarred brow, gather the breaking soul,\nWhose earthly moments drop like falling sands\nTo leave the spirit whole.\n\nOnly a penny, a penny,\nLilies brighter than any,\nLilies whiter than snow.\nBeautiful lilies grow\nWherever the truth so sweet\nHas trodden with bloody feet,\nHas stood with a bloody brow.\nFriend, it is over now,\nThe passion, the sweat, the pains,\nOnly the truth remains.\n\nI cannot see what others see;\nWisdom alone is kind to me,\nWisdom that comes from Agony.\n\nWisdom that lives in the pure skies,\nThe untouched star, the spirit’s eyes;\nO Beauty, touch me, make me wise.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Good Friday", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "man-is-a-sacred-city": { - "title": "“Man is a sacred city …”", - "body": "Man is a sacred city, built of marvellous earth.\nLife was lived nobly here to give this body birth.\nSomething was in this brain and in this eager hand.\nDeath is so dumb and blind, Death cannot understand.\nDeath drifts the brain with dust and soils the young limbs’ glory.\nDeath makes women a dream and men a traveller’s story,\nDeath drives the lovely soul to wander under the sky,\nDeath opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Pompey the Great", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "on-growing-old": { - "title": "“On Growing Old”", - "body": "Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying;\nMy dog and I are old, too old for roving.\nMan, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying,\nIs soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.\nI take the book and gather to the fire,\nTurning old yellow leaves; minute by minute\nThe clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,\nMoves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.\nI cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander\nYour cornland, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys\nEver again, nor share the battle yonder\nWhere the young knight the broken squadron rallies.\nOnly stay quiet while my mind remembers\nThe beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.\n\nBeauty, have pity! for the strong have power,\nThe rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,\nSummer of man its sunlight and its flower.\nSpring-time of man, all April in a face.\nOnly, as in the jostling in the Strand,\nWhere the mob thrusts, or loiters, or is loud,\nThe beggar with the saucer in his hand\nAsks only a penny from the passing crowd,\nSo, from this glittering world with all its fashion,\nIts fire, and play of men, its stir, its march,\nLet me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,\nBread to the soul, rain when the summers parch.\nGive me but these, and though the darkness close\nEven the night will blossom as the rose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-passing-strange": { - "title": "“The Passing Strange”", - "body": "Out of the earth to rest or range\nPerpetual in perpetual change,\nThe unknown passing through the strange.\n\nWater and saltness held together\nTo tread the dust and stand the weather,\nAnd plough the field and stretch the tether,\n\nTo pass the wine-cup and be witty,\nWater the sands and build the city,\nSlaughter like devils and have pity,\n\nBe red with rage and pale with lust,\nMake beauty come, make peace, make trust,\nWater and saltness mixed with dust;\n\nDrive over earth, swim under sea,\nFly in the eagle’s secrecy,\nGuess where the hidden comets be;\n\nKnow all the deathy seeds that still\nQueen Helen’s beauty, Caesar’s will,\nAnd slay them even as they kill;\n\nFashion an altar for a rood,\nDefile a continent with blood,\nAnd watch a brother starve for food:\n\nLove like a madman, shaking, blind,\nTill self is burnt into a kind\nPossession of another mind;\n\nBrood upon beauty, till the grace\nOf beauty with the holy face\nBrings peace into the bitter place;\n\nProve in the lifeless granites, scan\nThe stars for hope, for guide, for plan;\nLive as a woman or a man;\n\nFasten to lover or to friend,\nUntil the heart break at the end:\nThe break of death that cannot mend;\n\nThen to lie useless, helpless, still,\nDown in the earth, in dark, to fill\nThe roots of grass or daffodil.\n\nDown in the earth, in dark, alone,\nA mockery of the ghost in bone,\nThe strangeness, passing the unknown.\n\nTime will go by, that outlasts clocks,\nDawn in the thorps will rouse the cocks,\nSunset be glory on the rocks:\n\nBut it, the thing, will never heed\nEven the rootling from the seed\nThrusting to suck it for its need.\n\nSince moons decay and suns decline,\nHow else should end this life of mine?\nWater and saltness are not wine.\n\nBut in the darkest hour of night,\nWhen even the foxes peer for sight,\nThe byre-cock crows; he feels the light.\n\nSo, in this water mixed with dust,\nThe byre-cock spirit crows from trust\nThat death will change because it must;\n\nFor all things change, the darkness changes,\nThe wandering spirits change their ranges,\nThe corn is gathered to the granges.\n\nThe corn is sown again, it grows;\nThe stars burn out, the darkness goes;\nThe rhythms change, they do not close.\n\nThey change, and we, who pass like foam,\nLike dust blown through the streets of Rome,\nChange ever, too; we have no home,\n\nOnly a beauty, only a power,\nSad in the fruit, bright in the flower,\nEndlessly erring for its hour,\n\nBut gathering, as we stray, a sense\nOf Life, so lovely and intense,\nIt lingers when we wander hence,\n\nThat those who follow feel behind\nTheir backs, when all before is blind,\nOur joy, a rampart to the mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "personal": { - "title": "“Personal”", - "body": "Tramping at night in the cold and wet, I passed the lighted inn,\nAnd an old tune, a sweet tune, was being played within.\nIt was full of the laugh of the leaves and the song the wind sings;\nIt brought the tears and the choked throat, and a catch to the heart-strings.\n\nAnd it brought a bitter thought of the days that now were dead to me,\nThe merry days in the old home before I went to sea--\nDays that were dead to me indeed. I bowed my head to the rain,\nAnd I passed by the lighted inn to the lonely roads again.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "When the last sea is sailed and the last shallow charted,\nWhen the last field is reaped and the last harvest stored,\nWhen the last fire is out and the last guest departed,\nGrant the last prayer that I shall pray, Be good to me, O Lord!\n\nAnd let me pass in a night at sea, a night of storm and thunder,\nIn the loud crying of the wind through sail and rope and spar;\nSend me a ninth great peaceful wave to drown and roll me under\nTo the cold tunny-fishes’ home where the drowned galleons are.\n\nAnd in the dim green quiet place far out of sight and hearing,\nGrant I may hear at whiles the wash and thresh of the sea-foam\nAbout the fine keen bows of the stately clippers steering\nTowards the lone northern star and the fair ports of home.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "the-racer": { - "title": "“The Racer”", - "body": "I saw the racer coming to the jump,\n Staring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht,\nI heard the blood within his body thump,\n I saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht.\nAnd as he landed I beheld his soul\n Kindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight\nWith all its thousands roaring at the goal,\n He laughed, he took the moment for his mate.\nWould that the passionate moods on which we ride\n Might kindle thus to oneness with the will;\nWould we might see the end to which we stride,\n And feel, not strain in struggle, only thrill,\nAnd laugh like him and know in all our nerves\nBeauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "roadways": { - "title": "“Roadways”", - "body": "One road leads to London,\nOne road leads to Wales,\nMy road leads me seawards\nTo the white dipping sails.\n\nOne road leads to the river,\nAs it goes singing slow;\nMy road leads to shipping,\nWhere the bronzed sailors go.\n\nLeads me, lures me, calls me\nTo salt green tossing sea;\nA road without earth’s road-dust\nIs the right road for me.\n\nA wet road heaving, shining,\nAnd wild with segulls’ cries,\nA mad salt sea-wind blowing\nThe salt spray in my eyes.\n\nMy road calls me, lures me\nWest, east, south, and north;\nMost roads lead men homewards,\nMy road leads me forth\n\nTo add more miles to the tally\nOf grey miles left behind,\nIn quest of that one beauty\nGod put me here to find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "roses-are-beauty-but-i-never-see": { - "title": "“Roses are beauty, but I never see …”", - "body": "Roses are beauty, but I never see\nThose blood drops from the burning heart of June\nGlowing like thought upon the living tree\nWithout a pity that they die so soon,\nDie into petals, like those roses old,\nThose women, who were summer in men’s hearts\nBefore the smile upon the Sphinx was cold\nOr sand had hid the Syrian and his arts.\nO myriad dust of beauty that lies thick\nUnder our feet that not a single grain\nBut stirred and moved in beauty and was quick\nFor one brief moon and died nor lived again;\nBut when the moon rose lay upon the grass\nPasture to living beauty, life that was.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "sea-fever": { - "title": "“Sea Fever”", - "body": "I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,\nAnd all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,\nAnd the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,\nAnd a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a gray dawn breaking.\n\nI must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide\nIs a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;\nAnd all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,\nAnd the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.\n\nI must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,\nTo the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;\nAnd all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,\nAnd quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - } - } - }, - "the-seekers": { - "title": "“The Seekers”", - "body": "Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth nor blessed abode,\nBut the hope of the City of God at the other end of the road.\n\nNot for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind,\nFor we go seeking a city that we shall never find.\n\nThere is no solace on earth for us--for such as we--\nWho search for a hidden city that we shall never see.\n\nOnly the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,\nAnd the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.\n\nWe seek the City of God, and the haunt where beauty dwells,\nAnd we find the noisy mart and the sound of burial bells.\n\nNever the golden city, where radiant people meet,\nBut the dolorous town where mourners are going about the street.\n\nWe travel the dusty road till the light of the day is dim,\nAnd sunset shows us spires away on the world’s rim.\n\nWe travel from dawn to dusk, till the day is past and by,\nSeeking the Holy City beyond the rim of the sky.\n\nFriends and loves we have none, nor wealth nor blest abode,\nBut the hope of the City of God at the other end of the road.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - } - } - }, - "the-ship-and-her-makers": { - "title": "“The Ship and Her Makers”", - "body": "> _The Ore_\nBefore Man’s labouring wisdom gave me birth\nI had not even seen the light of day;\nDown in the central darkness of the earth,\nCrushed by the weight of continents I lay,\nGround by the weight to heat, not knowing then\nThe air, the light, the noise, the world of men.\n\n\n> _The Trees_\nWe grew on mountains where the glaciers cry,\nInfinite sombre armies of us stood\nBelow the snow-peaks which defy the sky;\nA song like the gods moaning filled our wood;\nWe knew no men--our life was to stand staunch,\nSinging our song, against the avalanche.\n\n\n> _The Hemp and Flax_\nWe were a million grasses on the hill,\nA million herbs which bowed as the wind blew,\nTrembling in every fibre, never still;\nOut of the summer earth sweet life we drew.\nLittle blue-flowered grasses up the glen,\nGlad of the sun, what did we know of men?\n\n\n> _The Workers_\nWe tore the iron from the mountain’s hold,\nBy blasting fires we smithied it to steel;\nOut of the shapeless stone we learned to mould\nThe sweeping bow, the rectilinear keel;\nWe hewed the pine to plank, we split the fir,\nWe pulled the myriad flax to fashion her.\n\nOut of a million lives our knowledge came,\nA million subtle craftsmen forged the means;\nSteam was our handmaid and our servant flame,\nWater our strength, all bowed to our machines.\nOut of the rock, the tree, the springing herb\nWe built this wandering beauty so superb.\n\n\n> _The Sailors_\nWe, who were born on earth and live by air,\nMake this thing pass across the fatal floor,\nThe speechless sea; alone we commune there\nJesting with death, that ever open door.\nSun, moon and stars are signs by which we drive\nThis wind-blown iron like a thing alive.\n\n\n> _The Ship_\nI march across great waters like a queen,\nI whom so many wisdoms helped to make;\nOver the uncruddled billows of seas green\nI blanch the bubbled highway of my wake.\nBy me my wandering tenants clasp the hands,\nAnd know the thoughts of men in other lands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "Flesh, I have knocked at many a dusty door,\nGone down full many a midnight lane,\nProbed in old walls and felt along the floor,\nPressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane,\nBut useless all, though sometimes when the moon\nWas full in heaven and the sea was full,\nAlong my body’s alleys came a tune\nPlayed in the tavern by the Beautiful.\nThen for an instant I have felt at point\nTo find and seize her, whosoe’er she be,\nWhether some saint whose glory doth anoint\nThose whom she loves, or but a part of me,\nOr something that the things not understood\nMake for their uses out of flesh and blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tewkesbury-road": { - "title": "“The Tewkesbury Road”", - "body": "It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where,\nGoing through meadow and village, one knows not whither or why;\nThrough the grey light drift of the dust, in the keen cool rush of the air,\nUnder the flying white clouds, and the broad blue lift of the sky.\n\nAnd to halt at the chattering brook, in a tall green fern at the brink\nWhere the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the foxgloves purple and white;\nWhere the shy-eyed delicate deer troop down to the brook to drink\nWhen the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night.\n\nO, to feel the beat of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth,\nIs a tune for the blood to jig to, and joy past power of words;\nAnd the blessed green comely meadows are all a-ripple with mirth\nAt the noise of the lambs at play and the dear wild cry of the birds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "truth": { - "title": "“Truth”", - "body": "Man with his burning soul\nHas but an hour of breath\nTo build a ship of truth\nIn which his soul may sail.\nSail on the sea of death,\nFor death takes toll\nOf beauty, courage, youth,\nOf all but truth.\n\nLife’s city ways are dark,\nMen mutter by; the wells\nOf the great waters moan.\nO death! O sea! O tide!\nThe waters moan like bells;\nNo light, no mark,\nThe soul goes out alone\nOn seas unknown.\n\nStripped of all purple robes,\nStripped of all golden lies,\nI will not be afraid,\nTruth will preserve through death.\nPerhaps the stars will rise,\nThe stars like globes;\nThe ship my striving made\nMay see night fade.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Enslaved", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "twilight": { - "title": "“Twilight”", - "body": "Twilight it is, and the far woods are dim, and the rooks cry and call.\nDown in the valley the lamps, and the mist, and a star over all,\nThere by the rick, where they thresh, is the drone at an end,\nTwilight it is, and I travel the road with my friend.\n\nI think of the friends who are dead, who were dear long ago in the past,\nBeautiful friends who are dead, though I know that death cannot last;\nFriends with the beautiful eyes that the dust has defiled,\nBeautiful souls who were gentle when I was a child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "a-wanderers-song": { - "title": "“A Wanderer’s Song”", - "body": "A wind’s in the heart of me, a fire’s in my heels,\nI am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;\nI hunger for the sea’s edge, the limit of the land,\nWhere the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.\n\nOh I’ll be going, leaving the noises of the street,\nTo where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;\nTo a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,\nOh I’ll be going, going, until I meet the tide.\n\nAnd first I’ll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,\nThe clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,\nThe songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,\nAnd then the heart of me’ll know I’m there or thereabout.\n\nOh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,\nFor windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;\nAnd I’ll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,\nFor a wind’s in the heart of me, a fire’s in my heels.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1932 - } - } - }, - "waste": { - "title": "“Waste”", - "body": "No rose but fades: no glory but must pass:\n No hue but dims: no precious silk but frets.\nHer beauty must go underneath the grass,\n Under the long roots of the violets.\n\nO, many glowing beauties Time has hid\n In that dark, blotting box the villain sends.\nHe covers over with a coffin-lid\n Mothers and sons, and foes and lovely friends.\n\nMaids that were redly-lipped and comely-skinned,\n Friends that deserved a sweeter bed than clay.\nAll are as blossoms blowing down the wind,\n Things the old envious villain sweeps away.\n\nAnd though the mutterer laughs and church bells toll,\nDeath brings another April to the soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "we-therefore-commit-our-brother": { - "title": "“We Therefore Commit our Brother”", - "body": "Night fell, and all night long the Dauber lay\nCovered upon the table; all night long\nThe pitiless storm exulted at her prey,\nHuddling the waters with her icy thong.\nBut to the covered shape she did no wrong.\nHe lay beneath the sailcloth. Bell by bell\nThe night wore through; the stars rose, the stars fell.\n\nBlowing most pitiless cold out of clear sky\nThe wind roared all night long; and all night through\nThe green seas on the deck went washing by,\nFlooding the half-deck; bitter hard it blew.\nBut little of it all the Dauber knew;\nThe sopping bunks, the floating chests, the wet,\nThe darkness, and the misery, and the sweat.\n\nHe was off duty. So it blew all night,\nAnd when the watches changed the men would come\nDripping within the door to strike a light\nAnd stare upon the Dauber lying dumb,\nAnd say, “He come a cruel thump, poor chum.”\nOr, “He’d a-been a fine big man”; or, “He ...\nA smart young seaman he was getting to be.”\n\nOr, “Damn it all, it’s what we’ve all to face!...\nI knew another fellow one time ...” then\nCame a strange tale of death in a strange place\nOut on the sea, in ships, with wandering men.\nIn many ways Death puts us into pen.\nThe reefers came down tired and looked and slept.\nBelow the skylight little dribbles crept.\n\nAlong the painted woodwork, glistening, slow,\nFollowing the roll and dripping, never fast,\nBut dripping on the quiet form below,\nLike passing time talking to time long past.\nAnd all night long “Ai, ai!” went the wind’s blast,\nAnd creaming water swished below the pale,\nUnheeding body stretched beneath the sail.\n\nAt dawn they sewed him up, and at eight bells\nThey bore him to the gangway, wading deep,\nThrough the green-clutching, white-toothed water-hells\nThat flung his carriers over in their sweep.\nThey laid an old red ensign on the heap,\nAnd all hands stood bare-headed, stooping, swaying,\nWashed by the sea while the old man was praying\n\nOut of a borrowed prayer-book. At a sign\nThey twitched the ensign back and tipped the grating.\nA creamier bubbling broke the bubbling brine.\nThe muffled figure tilted to the weighting;\nIt dwindled slowly down, slowly gyrating.\nSome craned to see; it dimmed, it disappeared;\nThe last green milky bubble blinked and cleared.\n\n“Mister, shake out your reefs,” the Captain called.\n“Out topsail reefs!” the Mate cried; then all hands\nHurried, the great sails shook, and all hands hauled,\nSinging that desolate song of lonely lands,\nOf how a lover came in dripping bands,\nGreen with the wet and cold, to tell his lover\nThat Death was in the sea, and all was over.\n\nFair came the falling wind; a seaman said\nThe Dauber was a Jonah; once again\nThe clipper held her course, showing red lead,\nShattering the sea-tops into golden rain.\nThe waves bowed down before her like blown grain;\nOnwards she thundered, on; her voyage was short,\nBefore the tier’s bells rang her into port.\n\nCheerly they rang her in, those beating bells,\nThe new-come beauty stately from the sea,\nWhitening the blue heave of the drowsy swells,\nTreading the bubbles down. With three times three\nThey cheered her moving beauty in, and she\nCame to her berth so noble, so superb;\nSwayed like a queen, and answered to the curb.\n\nThen in the sunset’s flush they went aloft,\nAnd unbent sails in that most lovely hour,\nWhen the light gentles and the wind is soft,\nAnd beauty in the heart breaks like a flower.\nWorking aloft they saw the mountain tower,\nSnow to the peak; they heard the launchmen shout;\nAnd bright along the bay the lights came out.\n\nAnd then the night fell dark, and all night long\nThe pointed mountain pointed at the stars,\nFrozen, alert, austere; the eagle’s song\nScreamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.\nOn her intense crags where the air is sparse\nThe stars looked down; their many golden eyes\nWatched her and burned, burned out, and came to rise.\n\nSilent the finger of the summit stood,\nIcy in pure, thin air, glittering with snows.\nThen the sun’s coming turned the peak to blood,\nAnd in the rest-house the muleteers arose.\nAnd all day long, where only the eagle goes,\nStones, loosened by the sun, fall; the stones falling\nFill empty gorge on gorge with echoes calling.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Dauber", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-west-wind": { - "title": "“The West Wind”", - "body": "It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries;\nI never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.\nFor it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills.\nAnd April’s in the west wind, and daffodils.\n\nIt’s a fine land, the west land, for hearts as tired as mine,\nApple orchards blossom there, and the air’s like wine.\nThere is cool green grass there, where men may lie at rest,\nAnd the thrushes are in song there, fluting from the nest.\n\n“Will ye not come home, brother? Ye have been long away,\nIt’s April, and blossom time, and white is the May;\nAnd bright is the sun brother, and warm is the rain,--\nWill ye not come home, brother, home to us again?”\n\n“The young corn is green, brother, where the rabbits run.\nIt’s blue sky, and white clouds, and warm rain and sun.\nIt’s song to a man’s soul, brother, fire to a man’s brain,\nTo hear the wild bees and see the merry spring again.”\n\n“Larks are singing in the west, brother, above the green wheat,\nSo will ye not come home, brother, and rest your tired feet?\nI’ve a balm for bruised hearts, brother, sleep for aching eyes,”\nSays the warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries.\n\nIt’s the white road westwards is the road I must tread\nTo the green grass, the cool grass, and rest for heart and head,\nTo the violets, and the warm hearts, and the thrushes’ song,\nIn the fine land, the west land, the land where I belong.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Salt-Water Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "what-am-i-life": { - "title": "“What am I, Life? …”", - "body": "What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt\nHeld in cohesion by unresting cells\nWhich work they know not why, which never halt,\nMyself unwitting where their master dwells.\nI do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin;\nA world which uses me as I use them,\nNor do I know which end or which begin,\nNor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.\nSo, like a marvel in a marvel set,\nI answer to the vast, as wave by wave\nThe sea of air goes over, dry or wet,\nOr the full moon comes swimming from her cave,\nOr the great sun comes north, this myriad I\nTingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lollingdon Downs", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "when-bony-death": { - "title": "“When Bony Death”", - "body": "When bony Death has chilled her gentle blood,\n And dimmed the brightness of her wistful eyes,\nAnd changed her glorious beauty into mud\n By his old skill in hateful wizardries;\n\nWhen an old lichened marble strives to tell\n How sweet a grace, how red a lip was hers;\nWhen rheumy grey-beards say, “I knew her well,”\n Showing the grave to curious worshippers;\n\nWhen all the roses that she sowed in me\n Have dripped their crimson petals and decayed,\nLeaving no greenery on any tree\n That her dear hands in my heart’s garden laid,\n\nThen grant, old Time, to my green mouldering skull,\nThese songs may keep her memory beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "the-wild-duck": { - "title": "“The Wild Duck”", - "body": "Twilight. Red in the West.\nDimness. A glow on the wood.\nThe teams plod home to rest.\nThe wild duck come to glean.\nO souls not understood,\nWhat a wild cry in the pool;\nWhat things have the farm ducks seen\nThat they cry so--huddle and cry?\nOnly the soul that goes.\nEager. Eager. Flying.\nOver the globe of the moon,\nOver the wood that glows.\nWings linked. Necks a-strain,\nA rush and a wild crying.\n\nA cry of the long pain\nIn the reeds of a steel lagoon,\nIn a land that no man knows.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - } - } - }, - "r-a-k-mason": { - "metadata": { - "name": "R. A. K. Mason", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1971 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "new_zealand", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇳🇿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._K._Mason", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "new_zealand" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "curse-the-beggar-in-the-street": { - "title": "“Curse the Beggar in the Street”", - "body": "Curse the beggar in the street\nthat he has less joy than I\nas at these fine old trees’ feet\nbody-satisfied I lie.\n\nI It is he whose threne sobs thin\nall along this lovely dale\ntill slight pleasure grows rank sin\nagainst Pan’s pipes his pipes prevail.\n\nIt is he with loathsome mien\ngibbers by the sweeping car\nas for joy we steer for green\nfields where frail pools sleeping are.\n\nHe has damned my fine-bound book\nand my pleasantness of meat\nblasted with his withering look\nall that once I glad could greet.\n\nCurse the beggar in the street\ncurse the beggar that he die\ncurse him for his shrivelled feet\nand his cruel sight-striving eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "vladimir-mayakovsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vladimir Mayakovsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "adulthood": { - "title": "“Adulthood”", - "body": "Adults are busy.\nWith bills in each pocket.\nLove?\nSure!\nFor a hundred or so.\nBut I\nwandered broke,\nhomeless\nand ragged,\nhaving no money\nand no place to go.\nIt’s night.\nYou put on your finest faces.\nOn wives and widows, you practice your moves.\nI’m\nchoked in Moscow’s loving embrace\nin the ring of its endless Sadovaya loops.\nIn the heart,\nalmost clock-like,\nthe lovers are ticking,\nin passionate bedrooms, alone lovers flare.\nbut I heard the thundering heartbeats\nof cities,\nsprawling across the Strastnoya Square.\nMy jacket’s wide open,\nwith my heart on my sleeve--\nI’ve opened myself to the sun and the street.\nEnter with passion,\nclimb into my soul!\nMy heart is now free! I’ve lost all control!\nIn others, I know where the heart had been placed.\nEveryone knows--it beats in the chest.\nBut even anatomy\nis absurd in my case--\nthere’s just one massive heart\nand no room for the rest.\nIn the last twenty years,\nhow many springs there,\nin my sizzling body, have gathered?\nTheir weight, still unused, is too much to bear,\nand not just\nin verse,\nbut in reality, rather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "as-a-young-man": { - "title": "“As a Young Man”", - "body": "Youth has a mass of occupations.\nWe hammer grammar into the thickest skulls.\nBut I\nwas expelled from the fifth class.\nThen they began to shove me into Moscow prisons.\nIn your\ncosy\nlittle apartment world,\ncurly-headed lyricists sprout in bedrooms.\nWhat do you find in these lapdog lyricists?!\nAs for me,\nI learned\nabout love\nin Butyrki.\nDoes nostalgia for the Bois de Boulogne mean anything?!\nOr to gaze at the sea and sigh?!\nIn the “Funeral Parlor,”\nI\nfell in love\nwith the keyhole of Cell 103.\nStaring at the daily sun,\npeople ask:\n“How much do they cost, these little sunbeams?”\nBut I\nfor a yellow patch\nof light jumping on the wall\nwould then have given everything in the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Hayward & George Reavey" - } - }, - "attitude-to-a-miss": { - "title": "“Attitude to a Miss”", - "body": "That night was to decide\nif she and I\nwere to be lovers.\nUnder cover\nof darkness\nno one would see, you see.\nI bent over her, it’s the truth,\nand as I did,\nit’s the truth, I swear it,\nI said\nlike a kindly parent:\n“Passion’s a precipice--\nso won’t you please\nmove away?\nMove away,\nplease!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "a-cloud-in-trousers": { - "title": "“A Cloud in Trousers”", - "body": "_Prologue_\n\nYour thought,\nFantasizing on a sodden brain,\nLike a bloated lackey on a greasy couch sprawling,--\nWith my heart’s bloody tatters, I’ll mock it again.\nUntil I’m contempt, I’ll be ruthless and galling.\n\nThere’s no grandfatherly fondness in me,\nThere are no gray hairs in my soul!\nShaking the world with my voice and grinning,\nI pass you by,--handsome,\nTwentytwoyearold.\n\nGentle souls!\nYou play your love on the violin.\nThe crude ones play it on the drums violently.\nBut can you turn yourselves inside out, like me\nAnd become just two lips entirely?\n\nCome and learn--\nYou, decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues!\nStep out of those cambric drawing-rooms\n\nAnd you, who can leaf your lips\nLike a cook turns the pages of her recipe books.\n\nIf you wish--\nI’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal\nOr change into hues that the sunrise arouses,\nIf you wish--\nI can be irreproachably gentle,\nNot a man--but a cloud in trousers.\n\nI refuse to believe in Nice blossoming!\nI will glorify you regardless,--\nMen, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,\nAnd women, battered like overused proverbs.\n\n\n# I.\n\nYou think I’m delirious with malaria?\n\nThis happened.\nIn Odessa, this happened.\n\n“I’ll come at four,” promised Maria.\n\nEight …\nNine …\nTen.\n\nSoon after,\nThe evening,\nFrowning,\nAnd Decemberish,\n\nLeft the windows\nAnd vanished in dire darkness.\n\nBehind me, I hear the neighing and laughter\nOf candelabras.\n\nYou wouldn’t recognize me if you knew me prior:\nA bulk of sinews\nMoaning,\nFidgeting.\nWhat can such a clod desire?\nBut a clod desires many things.\n\nBecause for oneself it doesn’t matter\nWhether you’re cast of copper\nOr whether the heart is cold metal.\nAt night, you want to wrap your clamor\nIn something feminine,\nGentle.\n\nAnd thus,\nEnormous,\nI hunch in the frame,\nAnd with my forehead, I melt the window glass.\nWill this love be tremendous or lame?\nWill it sustain or pass?\nA big one wouldn’t fit a body like this:\nIt must be a little love,--a baby, sort of,\nIt shies away when the cars honk and hiss,\nBut adores the bells on the horse-tram.\nI come face to face\nWith the rippling rain,\nYet once more,\nAnd wait\nSplashed by the city surf’s thundering roar.\n\nRunning amok with a knife outside,\nThe night caught up to him\nAnd stabbed him,\nUnseen.\n\nThe stroke of midnight\nFell like a head from a guillotine.\n\nThe silver raindrops on the windowpane\nWere piling a grimace\nAnd yelling.\nIt was as if the gargoyles of Notre Dame\nStarted yelping.\n\nDamn you!\nHaven’t you had enough yet?\nCries will soon cut my throat all around.\n\nI heard:\nSoftly,\nLike a patient out of his bed,\nA nerve leapt\nDown.\nAt first,\nHe barely moved.\nThen, apprehensive\nAnd distinct,\nHe started prancing.\nAnd now, he and another two,\nDarted about, step-dancing.\n\nOn the ground floor, the plaster was falling fast.\n\nNerves,\nBig ones\nLittle ones,--\nVarious!--\nGalloped madly\nUntil, at last,\nTheir legs wouldn’t carry them.\n\nThe night oozed through the room and sank.\nStuck in slime, the eye couldn’t slither out of it.\nSuddenly the doors started to bang\nAs if the hotel’s teeth were chattering.\n\nYou entered,\nAbrupt like “Take it!,”\nMauling suede gloves, you tarried,\nAnd said:\n“You know,--\nI’m soon getting married.”\n\nGet married then.\nIt’s all right,\nI can handle it.\nYou see--I’m calm, of course!\nLike the pulse\nOf a corpse.\n\nRemember?\nYou used to say:\n“Jack London,\nMoney,\nLove and ardor,”--\nI saw one thing only:\nYou were La Gioconda,\nWhich had to be stolen!\n\nAnd someone stole you.\n\nAgain in love, I shall start gambling,\nWith fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows.\nAnd why not?\nSometimes, the homeless ramblers\nWill seek to find shelter in a burnt down house!\n\nYou’re mocking me?\n“You’ve fewer emeralds of madness\nthan a beggar kopecks, there’s no disproving this!”\nBut remember\nPompeii came to end thus\nWhen somebody teased Vesuvius!\n\nHey!\nGentlemen!\nYou care for\nSacrilege,\nCrime\nAnd war.\nBut have you seen\nThe frightening terror\nOf my face\nWhen\nIt’s\nPerfectly calm?\n\nAnd I feel--\n“I”\nIs too small to fit me.\nSomeone inside me is getting smothered.\n\nHello!\nWho’s speaking?\nMother?\nMother!\nYour son has a wonderful sickness!\nMother!\nHis heart has been set alight!\nTell Lydia and Olga, his sisters,\nThat there’s simply no where to hide.\nEvery word,\nWhether funny or crude,\nThat he spews from his scorching mouth,\nJumps like a naked prostitute\nFrom a burning brothel.\n\nPeople sniff--\nSomething’s burned down.\nThey call the firemen.\nIn glittering helmets,\nThey carelessly start intruding.\nHey, tell the firemen:\nNo boots allowed!\nWith a sizzling heart one has to be prudent.\nI’ll do it!\nI’ll pump my watery eyes into containers.\nJust let me push off my ribs and I’ll start.\nI’ll leap out! I’ll leap out! You can’t restrain me!\nThey’ve collapsed.\nYou can’t leap out of the heart!\n\nFrom the cracks of the lips,\nA cindering kiss springs,\nRunning away from the smoldering face.\n\nMother!\nI can’t sing.\nIn the heart’s chapel, the choir was set ablaze!\n\nThe figurines of words and numbers\nFrom the skull,\nLike kids from a burning building, scurry.\nThus fear,\nReaching up to the sky, called\nAnd raised\nLusitania’s fiery arms with worry.\n\nA hundred-eyed blaze looked into the peace\nOf apartments, where the people perspired.\nWith a final outcry,\nWill you moan, at least,\nTo report to the centuries that I’m on fire?\n\n\n# II.\n\nGlorify me!\nThe great ones are no match for me!\nUpon everything that’s been done\nI stamp the word “naught.”\n\nAs of now, I have no desire to read.\nNovels?\nSo what!\n\nThis is how books are made,\nI used to think:--\nAlong comes a poet,\nAnd opens his lips with ease.\nInspired, the fool simply begins to sing--\nOh please!\nIt turns out:\nBefore they can sing with elation,\nOn their calloused feet they tramp for some time,\nWhile the brainless fishes of imagination\nAre splashing and wallowing in the heart’s slime.\nAnd while, hissing with rhymes, they boil\nAll the loves and the nightingales in a broth-like liquid,\nThe tongueless street merely squirms and coils--\nIt has nothing to yell or even speak with.\n\nIn our pride, we work all day with goodwill\nAnd the city towers of Babel are again restored.\nBut God\nGrinds\nThese cites into empty fields,\nStirring the word.\n\nIn silence, the street dragged on the ordeal.\nA scream stood erect on the gullet’s road.\nWhile fat taxies and cabs were bristling still,\nWedged in the throat.\nAs if from consumption,\nThe trodden chest gasped for air.\n\nThe city, with gloom, blocked the road rather fast.\n\nAnd when--\nNevertheless!--\nThe street coughed up the strain onto the square\nAnd pushed the portico off its throat, at last,\nIt seemed as if,\nAccompanied by the choirs of an archangel’s chorus,\nRecently robbed, God would show us His heat!\n\nBut the street squatted down and yelled out coarsely:\n“Let’s go eat!”\n\nThe Krupps and the Krupplets gather around\nTo paint menacing brows on the city,\nWhile in the gorge\nCorpses of words are scatted about,--\nTwo live and thrive,--\n“Swine”\nAnd another one,--\nI believe “borsch”.\n\nAnd poets, soaking in sobs and complaining,\nRun from the street, resentful and sour:\n“With those two words there’s no way to portray now\nA beautiful lady,\nOr love\nOr a dew-covered flower.”\n\nAnd after the poets,\nThousands of others stampeded:\nStudents,\nProstitutes,\nSalesmen.\n\nGentlemen,\nStop!\nYou are not the needy;\nSo how dare you to beg them, gentlemen!\n\nCovering yards with each stride,\nWe are healthy and ardent!\nDon’t listen to them, but thrash them instead!\nThem,\nWho are stuck like a free add-on\nTo each king-size bed!\n\nAre we to ask them humbly:\n“Help us, please!”\nImploring them for hymns\nAnd oratorios?\nWe are the creators with the burning hymns\nTo the hum of the mills and laboratories.\n\nWhy should I care about Faust?\nIn a fairy display of the fireworks’ loot,\nHe’s gliding with Mephistopheles on the parquet of galaxies!\nI know--\nA nail in my boot\nIs more frightening than Goethe’s fantasies!\n\nI am\nThe most golden-mouthed,\nWith every word I am giving\nThe body a name-day,\nAnd the soul a rebirth,\nI assure you:\nThe minutest speck of the living\nIs worth more than all that I’ll ever do on this earth!\n\nListen!\nThe present-day Zarathustra,\nWet with sweat,\nIs dashing around you and preaching here.\nWe,\nWith faces crumpled like a bed spread,\nWith lips sagging like a chandelier,\nWe,\nThe Leprous City detainees,\nWhere, from filth and gold, lepers’ sores were raised,\nWe are purer than the Venetian azure seas,\nWashed by the sunshine’s balmy rays.\n\nI spit on the fact\nThat Homer and Ovid didn’t create\nSoot-covered with pox,\nMen like us all,\nBut at the same time, I know\nThat the sun would fade\nIf it looked at the golden fields of our souls.\n\nMuscles are surer than prayers to us!\nWe won’t pray for aid any more!\nWe--\nEach one of us--\nHolds in his grasp\nThe driving reins of the world!\n\nThis led to Golgotha in the auditoriums\nOf Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa,\nAnd there wasn’t one of you\nWho wasn’t imploring thus:\n“Crucify him!\nTeach him a lesson!”\nBut to me,--\nPeople,\nEven those of you who were mean,--\nTo me, you are dear and I love you with passion.\n\nHaven’t you seen\nA dog licking the hand that it’s being thrashed by?\n\nI am laughed at\nBy the present-day tribe.\nThey’ve made\nA scabrous joke out of me.\nBut I can see crossing the mountains of time,\nHim, whom the others can’t see.\n\nWhere men’s sight falls short,\nWearing the revolutions’ thorny crown,\nLeading at the head of the hungry horde,\nThe year 1916 is coming around.\n\nAmong you, his precursor,\nWherever there’s pain, I’ll be near.\nI have nailed myself to the cross there,\nOn every single drop of a tear.\nThere’s nothing left to pardon now!\nIn souls that bred pity, I burnt out the fields.\nThat is much harder than\nTaking a thousand thousands of Bastilles.\n\nAnd when\nHis advent announcing,\nJoyful and proud,\nYou’ll step up to greet the savior--\nI will drag\nMy soul outside,\nAnd trample it\nUntil it spreads out!\nAnd give it to you, red in blood, as a flag.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAh, how and wherefrom\nDid it come to this\nThat the dirty fists of madness\nAgainst the luminous joy were raised in the air?\n\nShe came,--\nThe thought of a madhouse\nAnd curtained my head with despair.\n\nAnd\nAs in the Dreadnought’s downfall\nWith chocking spasms\nThe men jumped into the hatch, before the ship died,\nThe crazed Burlyuk crawled on, passing\nThrough the screaming gaps of his eye.\nAlmost bloodying his eyelids,\nHe emerged on his knees,\nStood up and walked\nAnd in the passionate mood,\nWith tenderness, unexpected from one so obese,\nHe simply said:\n“Good!”\n\nIt’s good when from scrutiny a yellow sweater\nHides the soul!\nIt’s good when\nOn the gibbet, in the face of terror,\nYou shout:\n“Drink Cocoa--Van Houten!”\n\nThis moment,\nLike a Bengal light,\nCrackling from the blast,\nI wouldn’t exchange for anything,\nNot for any money.\n\nClouded by cigar smoke,\nAnd stretching like a liquor glass,\nOne could make out the drunken face of Severyanin.\n\nHow dare you call yourself a poet\nAnd gray, like a quail, twitter away your soul!\nWhen\nWith brass knuckles\nThis very moment\nYou have to split the world’s skull!\n\nYou,\nWith one thought alone in your head,\n“Am I dancing with style?”\nLook how happy I am\nInstead,\nI,--\nA pimp and a fraud all the while.\n\nFrom all of you,\nWho soaked in love for plain fun,\nWho spilled\nTears into centuries while you cried,\nI’ll walk away\nAnd place the monocle of the sun\nInto my gaping, wide-open eye.\n\nI’ll wear colorful clothes, the most outlandish\nAnd roam the earth\nTo please and scorch the public,\nAnd in front of me,\nOn a metal leash,\nNapoleon will run like a little puppy.\n\nLike a woman, quivering, the earth will lie down,\nWanting to give in, she will slowly slump.\nThings will come alive\nAnd from all around,\nTheir lips will lisp:\n“Yum-yum-yum-yum-yum!”\n\nSuddenly,\nThe clouds\nAnd other stuff in the air\nStirred in some astonishing commotion,\nAs if the workers in white, up there,\nDeclared a strike, all bitter and emotional.\n\nThe savage thunder peeked out of the cloud, irate.\nSnorting from huge nostrils, it howled\nAnd for a moment, the face of the sky bent out of shape,\nResembling the iron Bismarck’s scowl.\n\nAnd someone,\nEntangled in the clouds’ maze,\nTo the café, stretched out his hand now:\nBoth, tender somehow,\nAnd with a womanly face,\nAnd at once, like a firing cannon.\n\nYou think\nThat’s the sun above the attics\nGently stretching to caress the cheeks of the café?\nNo, advancing again to slaughter the radicals\nIt’s General Galliffet!\n\nTake your hands out of your pockets, wanderers--\nPick up a bomb, a knife or a stone\nAnd if one happens to be armless,\nLet him come to fight with his forehead alone!\n\nGo on, starving,\nServile\nAnd abused ones,\nIn this flea-swarming filth, do not rot!\n\nGo on!\nWe’ll turn Mondays and Tuesdays\nInto holidays, painting them with blood!\nRemind the earth whom it tried to debase!\nWith your knives be rough!\nThe earth\nHas grown fat like the mistress’ face,\nWhom Rothschild had over-loved!\n\nMay the flags flutter in the line of fire\nAs they do on holidays, with a flare!\nHey, street-lamps, raise the traders up higher,\nLet their carcasses hang in the air.\n\nI cursed,\nStabbed\nAnd hit in the face,\nCrawled after somebody,\nBiting into their ribs.\n\nIn the sky, red like La Marseillaise,\nThe sunset gasped with its shuddering lips.\n\nIt’s insanity!\n\nNot a thing will remain from the war.\n\nThe night will come,\nBite into you\nAnd swallow you stale.\n\nLook--\nIs the sky playing Judas once more,\nWith a handful of stars that were soaked in betrayal?\n\nThe night,\nLike Mamai, feasted with delight,\nCrushing the city with its bottom’s heft.\nOur eyes won’t be able break through this night,\nAs black as Azef!\n\nSlumped in the corner of the saloon, I sit,\nSpilling wine on my soul and the floor,\nAnd I see:\nIn the corner, round eyes are lit\nAnd with them, Madonna bites the heart’s core.\n\nWhy bestow such radiance on this drunken mass?\nWhat do they have to offer?\nYou see--once again,\nThey prefer Barabbas\nOver the Man of Golgotha?\n\nMaybe, deliberately,\nIn the human mash, not once\nDo I wear a fresh-looking face.\nI am,\nPerhaps,\nThe handsomest of your sons\nIn the whole human race.\n\nGive them,\nThe ones molded with delight,\nA quick death already,\nSo that their children may grow up right;\nBoys--into fathers\nGirls--into pregnant ladies.\n\nLike the wise men, let the new born babes\nGrow gray with insight and thought\nAnd they’ll come\nTo baptize the infants with names\nOf the poems I wrote.\n\nI praise the machine and the industrial Britain.\nIn some ordinary, common gospel,\nIt may perhaps, be written\nThat I’m the thirteenth apostle.\n\nAnd when my voice rumbles bawdily,\nEvery evening,\nFor hours and hours,\nawaiting my call,\nJesus, Himself, may be sniffling\nThe forget-me-nots of my soul.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMaria! Maria!\nLet me in, Maria!\nDon’t leave me out on the street!\nYou can’t?\nMy cheeks cave in,\nBut you wait ruthlessly.\nSoon, sampled by everyone,\nStale and pallid,\nI’ll come out\nAnd mumble toothlessly\nThat today I’m\n“Remarkably candid.”\n\nMaria,\nYou see--\nMy shoulders are drooping again.\n\nIn the streets, the men\nPrick the fat in their four-story craws.\nThey show their eyes,\nWorn out in the forty years of despair, and restless--\nThey snicker because\nIn my teeth,\nAgain,\nI hold the hardened crust of last night’s caresses.\n\nThe rain wept over the sidewalks,--\nThat puddle-imprisoned fraudster.\nThe corpse of the street, clobbered by cobbles, soaked in its cries.\nBut the gray lashes--\nYes!--\nThe eyelashes of icicles became frosted\nWith tears from the eyes--\nYes!--\nFrom the drainpipes’ overcast eyes.\n\nEvery pedestrian was licked by the rain’s snout:\nAthletes glistened in the carriages on the street.\nPeople burst\nOverstuffed,\nAnd their fat oozed out.\nLike a muddy river, it streamed on the ground,\nTogether with juices from\nA cud of old meat.\n\nMaria!\nHow can I fit a tender word into bulging ears?\nA bird\nSings for alms\nWith a hungry voice\nRather well,\nBut I am a man,\nMaria,\nCoughed up by the ailing night into Presnya’s filthy palms.\n\nMaria, do you want me?\nMaria, take me in, please.\nWith shivering fingers I’ll squeeze the iron throat of the bell!\n\nMaria!\n\nThe pastures of streets turn wild and loud!\nThey’re squeezing my neck and I’m almost collapsing.\n\nOpen!\n\nI’m hurt!\n\nLook--my eyes are pricked out\nBy the common womanly hatpins!\n\nYou’ve opened the door.\n\nMy child!\nOh, don’t be alarmed!\nYou see these women,\nHanging on my neck like mountains,--\nThrough life, I drag with me\nA million of massive, enormous, pure loves\nAnd a million millions of filthy, disgusting lovelets.\nDon’t be afraid\nIf betraying the vow\nOf honesty,\nSeeing a thousand pretty faces, I’ll throw myself at them,--\n“Those, who love Mayakovsky!”--\nPlease, understand that that is the dynasty\nOf the queens, who have mounted the heart of a madman.\n\nMaria, closer!\n\nWhether naked and shameless,\nOr shivering in dismay,\nYield the wonder of your lips, so gentle:\nMy heart and I have never lived until May,\nBut in my past,\nA hundreds of Aprils assembled.\n\nMaria!\nA poet sings praises to Tiana all day,\nBut I--\nI’m made of flesh,\nI’m a man,--\nI ask for your body,\nLike the Christians pray:\n“Give us this day\nOur daily bread.”\n\nMaria, give it to me!\n\nMaria!\nI fear to forget your name\nAs a poet fears to forget under pressure\nA word\nHe conceived in a restless night,\nEqual to God in effect.\n\nYour body\nI shall continue to love and treasure\nAs a soldier\nAmputated by war,\nAlone\nAnd unwanted,\nCherishes his remaining leg.\n\nMaria,--\nYou won’t have me?\nYou won’t!\n\nHa!\n\nThen gloomy and dismal,\nOnce more,\nI shall carry\nMy tear-stained heart\nForward,\nLike a dog,\nLimping,\nCarries the paw\nThat the speeding train had ran over.\n\nWith the blood from the heart I cheer the road that I roam,\nFlowers cling to my jacket, making it dusty,\nThe sun will dance a thousand times round the earth,\nLike Salome\nDanced around the head of the Baptist.\n\nAnd when my years, at their very end,\nWill finish their dance and wrinkle,\nA million bloodstains will spread\nThe path to my Father’s kingdom.\n\nI’ll climb out\nFilthy (sleeping in gullies all night),\nAnd into his ears, I’ll whisper\nWhile I stand\nAt his side:\n\n“Mister God, listen!\nIsn’t it tedious\nTo dip your generous eyes into clouds\nEvery day, every evening?\nLet’s, instead,\nStart a festive merry-go-round\nOn the tree of knowledge of good and evil!\nOmnipresent, you’ll be all around us!\nFrom the wine, all the fun will ensue\nAnd Apostle Peter, who’s always been frowning,\nWill perform the fast-paced dance--ki-ka-pu.\nWe’ll bring all the Eves back into Eden:\nOrder me\nAnd I’ll go--\nFrom the boulevards, I’ll pick up all the pretty girls needed\nAnd bring them to you!”\n\nShould I?\n\nNo?\n\nYou’re shaking your curly head coarsely?\nYou’re knitting your brows like you’re rough?\nDo you think\nThat this\nWinged one, close by,\nKnows the meaning of love?\n\nI too am an angel; used to be one before--\nWith a sugar lamb’s eye, I stared at your faces,\nBut I don’t want to give presents to mares anymore,--\nAll the torture of Sevres that’s been made into vases.\nAlmighty, You created two hands,\nAnd with care,\nMade a head, and went down the list,--\nBut why did you make it\nSo that it pained\nWhen one had to kiss, kiss, kiss?!\n\nI thought that you were the Great God, Almighty\nBut you’re a miniature idol,--a dunce in a suit,\nBending over, I’m already reaching\nFor the knife that I’m hiding\nAt the top of my boot.\n\nYou, swindlers with wings,\nHuddle in fright!\nRuffle your shuddering feathers, rascals!\nYou, reeking of incense, I’ll open you wide,\nFrom here all the way to Alaska.\n\nLet me go!\n\nYou can’t stop me!\nWhether I’m right or wrong\nMakes no difference,\nI will not be calmer.\nLook,--\nThe stars were beheaded all night long\nAnd the sky is again bloody with slaughter.\n\nHey you,\nHeaven!\nTake your hat off,\nWhen you see me near!\n\nSilence.\n\nThe universe sleeps.\nPlacing its paw\nUnder the black, star-infested ear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "an-extraordinary-adventure-which-happened-to-me-vladimir-mayakovsky-one-summer-in-the-country": { - "title": "“An Extraordinary Adventure Which Happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the Country”", - "body": "A hundred suns the sunset fired,\ninto July summer shunted,\nit was so hot,\neven heat perspired--\nit happened in the country.\nThe little hamlet known as Pushkino,\nAkula’s Mount\nmade hunchbacked.\nBelow, the village\nseemed pushed-in so--\nits crooked roof-crusts cracked.\nAnd beyond that village\nyawned a hole,\ninto that hole--and not just maybe--\nthe sun for certain always rolled,\nslowly, surely, daily.\nAt morn\nto flood the world\nagain\nthe sun rose up--\nand ruddied it.\nDay after day\nit happened this way,\ntill I got\nfed up with it.\nAnd one day I let out such a shout,\nthat everything grew pale,\npoint-blank at the sun I yelled:\n“Get out!\nEnough of loafing there in hell!”\nTo the sun I yelled:\n“You lazy mummer!\nin the clouds cushioning,\nwhile here--knowing neither winter nor summer,\nI sit, just posters brushing!”\nI yelled to the sun:\n“Hey, wait there!\nListen, golden brightbrow,\ninstead of vainly\nsetting in the air,\nhave tea with me\nright now!”\nWhat have I done!\nFor ruin I’m heading!\nTo me,\nof his own goodwill,\nthe sun himself,\nray-strides outspreading,\nis marching over the hill.\nNot wanting to show him I’m afraid--\nback I retreat, guardedly.\nNow his eyes lighten the garden shade.\nHe’s actually in the garden now.\nThrough windows,\ndoors,\ncrannies he spread;\nin flooded a sunny mass,\nhaving burst in\nhe drew his breath,\nand spoke in a deep bass.\n“I’ve withheld my fires you see\nthe first time since creation began.\nYou’ve invited me?\nSo lay out the tea,\nand, poet, lay on the jam!”\nTears from my poor eyes were streaming--\nthe heat really made me scary,\nall the same--\nI got the samovar steaming:\n“Of course,\nsit down, comrade luminary!”\nWhat possessed me to shout at him like a fool,\ninwardly myself I cursed,--\nand sat confused\non the corner of a stool,\nfrightened it might be worse!\nBut a radiance strange\nstreamed from the sun,--\nand my tact\nno longer taxing,\nI sit and chat with the luminated one,\ngradually relaxing.\nAbout this,\nand about that I chatted,\nworn out with ROSTA publicity,\nbut the sun:\n“Alright,\ndon’t get so rattled,\nsee things with greater simplicity!\nYou think it’s easy\nfor me\nto shine so?\n--If so, come and have a test!--\nBut once you go--\nwhy have a go\ngo--and shine your damnedest!”\nWe gossiped like that till darkness appeared,\ntill the night before, that is.\nFor how could there be any darkness here?\nAnd now\nlike chums we chatted.\nAnd soon,\nin open friendship bonded,\nto slap him on the back I dared.\nAnd likewise the sun\nwarmly responded:\n“Why, comrade, we’re a pair!\nCome, poet,\nlet us dawn\nand sing\naway the drabness of the universe.\nAs the sun, myself I’ll fling,\nand you--yourself,\nin verse.”\nAnd shadows’ walls,\nand jails of night\nfell to its double-barreled shot.\nBattering barrage of poetry and light--\nshine out, no matter what!\nAnd when the sun gets tired,\nand night\nwants to rest\nits sleepy-headed,\nwhy suddenly--\nI shine with all my might--\nand once more day is trumpeted.\nShine all the time,\nfor ever shine.\nthe last days’ depths to plumb,\nto shine--!\nspite every hell combined!\nSo runs my slogan--\nand the sun’s!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg", - "context": { - "month": "july", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "from-street-to-street": { - "title": "“From Street to Street”", - "body": "A\nstreet.\nMastiff\nfaces\nsharp-\ner\nthan years. O-\nver\niron horses\nthe first cubes leapt\nfrom the windows of running houses.\nSwans of bell necks\ncurve themselves in nooses of cables!\nIn the sky a cartoon giraffe is about\nto show off motley rusty forelocks.\nDappled like a trout,\nthe son\nof unploughed fields.\nA magician,\nhidden behind the clock tower faces,\nis pulling rails\nout of the streetcar’s mouth.\nWe’ve been conquered!\nBathtubs.\nShowers.\nAn elevator.\nThe bodice of the soul is undone.\nHands burn your body.\nGo ahead and scream:\n“I didn’t want to!”\nit’s sharp\ntorments\nburn.\nThe thorny wind\ntears\na clump of smoky wool\nfrom a chimney.\nA bald-headed street lamp\nlasciviously pulls off\nthe street’s\nblack stocking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Jenny Wade", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-call": { - "title": "“I Call”", - "body": "Like a heavyweight lifter,\nI stumbled on, tired.\nI called,\nas if summoning people to vote,\nor alarming\nthe villagers\nthat there’s a fire:\n“Here!\nHere it is!\nHelp me carry my load!”\nWhen they saw\nsuch a bulk sobbing and wailing--\nthrough snow\nand through mud\nrunning,\nin fright,\nall the ladies\nquickly\nscurried away from me:\n“That’s too much …\nWe just wanted a tango tonight.”\nI can do it no more,--\nAnd yet, I carry this burden.\nI want to throw it away--\nbut I won’t,\nthat’s for certain!\nI walked on, enduring the pain in my chest.\nMy ribcage was trembling under the stress.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller" - } - }, - "impossible": { - "title": "“Impossible”", - "body": "I can’t lift the grand piano\nall on my own,\n(the steel safe\nis too heavy too)\nBut if not the safe\nor the piano,\nalone,\nhow could I carry my heart back from you?\nBankers know:\n“In money, we bathe.\nIf the pockets are full,--\nplace it all in the safe.”\nI’ve hid\nall my love\ninto you\nlike riches in steel,\nand walked on, like Croesus,\nbut wealthier still.\nand,\nif desire really demands it,\nI’ll take out a smile,\nor whatever\nthe cost,\nand party all night\nwith all of my friends there\nspending some fifteen lyrics, at most.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller" - } - }, - "i": { - "title": "“I”", - "body": "On the pavement\nof my trampled soul\nthe steps of madmen\nweave the prints of rude crude words.\nWhere cities\nhang\nand in the noose of cloud\nthe towers’\ncrooked spires\ncongeal--\nI go\nalone to weep\nthat crossroads\ncrucify\npolicemen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Hayward & George Reavey" - } - }, - "lilichka": { - "title": "“Lilichka”", - "body": "Tobacco smoke has consumed the air.\nThe room\nis a chapter in Kruchenykh’s inferno.\nRemember--\nbeyond that window\nin a frenzy\nI first stroked your hands.\nYou sit here today\nwith an iron-clad heart.\nOone more day\nyou’ll toss me out,\nperhaps, cursing.\nIn the dim front hall my arm,\nbroken by trembling won’t fit right away in my sleeve.\nI’ll run out,\nthrow my body into the street.\nI’ll rave,\nwild,\nlashed by despair.\nDon’t let it happen\nmy dear,\nmy darling,\nlet us part now.\nAfter all\nmy love\nis a heavy weight\nhanging on you\nno matter where you go.\nLet me bellow a final cry\nof bitter, wounded grievance.\nIf you drive a bull to exhaustion\nhe will run away,\nlay himself down in the cold waters.\nBesides your love\nI have\nno ocean\nand your love won’t grant even a tearful plea for rest.\nWhen a tired elephant wants peace\nhe lies down regally in the firebound sand.\nBesides your love\nI have\nno sun,\nbut I don’t even know where you are and with whom.\nIf you tortured a poet like this,\nhe\nwould berate his beloved for money and fame,\nbut for me\nno sound is joyous\nbut the sound of your beloved name.\nI won’t throw myself downstairs\nor drink poison\nnor can I put a gun to my head.\nNo blade\nholds me transfixed\nbut your glance.\nTomorrow you’ll forget\nthat I have crowned you,\nthat I burned my flowering soul with love,\nand the whirling carnival of trivial days\nwill ruffle the pages of my books …\nWould the dry leaves of my words\nforce you to a stop\ngasping for air?\n\nAt least let me\npave with a parting endearment\nyour retreating path.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg" - } - }, - "listen": { - "title": "“Listen”", - "body": "Listen,\nif stars are lit\nit means--there is someone who needs it.\nIt means--someone wants them to be,\nthat someone deems those specks of spit\nmagnificent.\n\nAnd overwrought,\nin the swirls of afternoon dust,\nhe bursts in on God,\nafraid he might be already late.\nIn tears,\nhe kisses God’s sinewy hand\nand begs him to guarantee\nthat there will definitely be a star.\nHe swears\nhe won’t be able to stand\nthat starless ordeal.\n\nLater,\nHe wanders around, worried,\nbut outwardly calm.\n\nAnd to everyone else, he says:\n“Now,\nit’s all right.\nYou are no longer afraid,\nare you?”\n\nListen,\nif stars are lit,\nit means--there is someone who needs it.\nIt means it is essential\nthat every evening\nat least one star should ascend\nover the crest of the building.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maria Enzensberger & Elaine Feinstein" - } - }, - "past-one-oclock": { - "title": "“Past One O’Clock”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nShe loves me--loves me not.\nMy hands I pick\nand having broken my fingers\nfling away.\nSo the first daisy-heads\none happens to flick\nare plucked,\nand guessing,\nscattered into May.\nLet a cut and shave\nreveal my grey hairs.\nLet the silver of the years\nring out endlessly!\nShameful common sense--\nI hope, I swear--\nWill never come\nto me.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nIt’s already two.\nNo doubt, you’ve gone to sleep.\nIn the night\nThe Milky Way\nwith silver filigrees.\nI don’t hurry,\nand there is no point in me\nwaking and disturbing you\nwith express telegrams.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThe sea goes to weep.\nThe sea goes to sleep.\nAs they say,\nthe incident has petered out.\nThe love boat of life\nhas crashed on philistine reefs\nYou and I\nare quits.\nNo need to reiterate\nmutual injuries,\ntroubles\nand griefs.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nD’you see,\nIn the world what a quiet sleeps.\nNight tributes the sky\nwith silver constellations.\nIn such an hour as this,\none rises and speaks\nto eras,\nhistory,\nand world creation.\n\n# 5.\n\nI know the power of words, I know words’ tocsin.\nThey’re not the kind applauded by the boxes.\nFrom words like these coffins burst from the earth\nand on their own four oaken legs stride forth.\nIt happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.\nBut saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.\nSee how the centuries ring and trains crawl\nto lick poetry’s calloused hands.\nI know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall\nlike petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.\nBut man with his soul, his lips, his bones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "soon-onto-the-clean-streets-body-at-a-time": { - "title": "“Soon onto the Clean Streets, Body at a Time”", - "body": "Soon onto the clean streets, body at a time,\nThis place will squeeze out all your sloppy lard,\nAnd I unlocked for you so much verse confined,\nI--of priceless words the waster and prodigal.\n\nTake you, mister, your moustache has cabbage\nFrom soup you couldn’t even eat up, cloyed;\nTake you, madam, white from thick maquillage,\nYour oyster face looks from the shell of clog.\n\nAll of you on the butterfly heart of a verser\nWill mount, filthy, caring of galoshes or not a bit,\nThe frenzied crowd will begin to jostle,\nThe centi-head louse, bristled, will raise its feet.\n\nAnd if today I, lowbred and bully,\nWon’t feel like grimacing for you--after all,\nI’ll burst with laughter and spit with glee,\nSpit straight in your face,\nI--of priceless words the waster and prodigal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Evgenia Sarkisyants" - } - }, - "to-all-and-everything": { - "title": "“To All and Everything”", - "body": "No.\nIt can’t be.\nNo!\nYou too, beloved?\nWhy? What for?\nDarling, look--\nI came,\nI brought flowers,\nbut, but … I never took\nsilver spoons from your drawer!\n\nAshen-faced,\nI staggered down five flights of stairs.\nThe street eddied round me. Blasts. Blares.\nTires screeched.\nIt was gusty.\nThe wind stung my cheeks.\nHorn mounted horn lustfully.\n\nAbove the capital’s madness\nI raised my face,\nstern as the faces of ancient icons.\nSorrow-rent,\non your body as on a death-bed, its days\nmy heart ended.\n\nYou did not sully your hands with brute murder.\nInstead,\nyou let drop calmly:\n“He’s in bed.\nThere’s fruit and wine\nOn the bedstand’s palm.”\n\nLove!\nYou only existed in my inflamed brain.\nEnough!\nStop this foolish comedy\nand take notice:\nI’m ripping off\nmy toy armour,\nI,\nthe greatest of all Don Quixotes!\n\nRemember?\nWeighed down by the cross,\nChrist stopped for a moment,\nweary.\nWatching him, the mob\nyelled, jeering:\n“Get movin’, you clod!”\n\nThat’s right!\nBe spiteful.\nSpit upon him who begs for a rest\non his day of days,\nharry and curse him.\nTo the army of zealots, doomed to do good,\nman shows no mercy!\n\nThat does it!\n\nI swear by my pagan strength--\ngimme a girl,\nyoung,\neye-filling,\nand I won’t waste my feelings on her.\nI’ll rape her\nand spear her heart with a gibe\nwillingly.\n\nAn eye for an eye!\n\nA thousand times over reap of revenge the crops’\nNever stop!\nPetrify, stun,\nhowl into every ear:\n“The earth is a convict, hear,\nhis head half shaved by the sun!”\n\nAn eye for an eye!\n\nKill me,\nbury me--\nI’ll dig myself out,\nthe knives of my teeth by stone--no wonder!--\nmade sharper,\nA snarling dog, under\nthe plank-beds of barracks I’ll crawl,\nsneaking out to bite feet that smell\nof sweat and of market stalls!\n\nYou’ll leap from bed in the night’s early hours.\n“Moo!” I’ll roar.\nOver my neck,\na yoke-savaged sore,\ntornados of flies\nwill rise.\nI’m a white bull over the earth towering!\n\nInto an elk I’ll turn,\nmy horns-branches entangled in wires,\nmy eyes red with blood.\nAbove the world,\na beast brought to bay,\nI’ll stand tirelessly.\n\nMan can’t escape!\nFilthy and humble,\na prayer mumbling,\non cold stone he lies.\nWhat I’ll do is paint\non the royal gates,\nover God’s own\nthe face of Razin.\n\nDry up, rivers, stop him from quenching his thirst! Scorn him!\nDon’t waste your rays, sun! Glare!\nLet thousands of my disciples be born\nto trumpet anathemas on the squares!\nAnd when at last there comes,\nstepping onto the peaks of the ages,\nchillingly,\nthe last of their days,\nin the black souls of anarchists and killers\nI, a gory vision, will blaze!\n\nIt’s dawning,\nThe sky’s mouth stretches out more and more,\nit drinks up the night\nsip by sip, thirstily.\nThe windows send off a glow.\nThrough the panes heat pours.\nThe sun, viscous, streams down onto the sleeping city.\n\nO sacred vengeance!\nLead me again\nabove the dust without\nand up the steps of my poetic lines.\nThis heart of mine,\nfull to the brim,\nin a confession\nI will pour out.\n\nMen of the future!\nWho are you?\nI must know. Please!\nHere am I,\nall bruises and aches,\npain-scorched …\nTo you of my great soul I bequeath\nthe orchard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "usually-so": { - "title": "“Usually So”", - "body": "To every infant love is given,--\nbut between work,\nprofits\nand other stuff,\nfrom evening to evening,\nthe crust of the heart grows rough.\nThe heart wears a body,\nthat body--a shirt.\nand that’s not all, they’re obsessed!\nan idiot!--\ninventing cuff-links,\nsomebody\nstarted pouring starch all over his chest.\nGetting old, they see their mistakes.\nThe women start creaming.\nThe men exercise, resembling windmills.\nToo late.\nThe skin is already covered with wrinkles.\nLove gets nourished,\nflourishes--\nfor a bit and withers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller" - } - }, - "you": { - "title": "“You”", - "body": "You came--\ndetermined,\nbecause I was large,\nbecause I was roaring,\nbut on close inspection\nyou saw a mere boy.\nYou seized\nand snatched away my heart\nand began\nto play with it--\nlike a girl with a bouncing ball.\nAnd before this miracle\nevery woman\nwas either a lady astounded\nor a maiden inquiring:\n“Love such a fellow?\nWhy, he’ll pounce on you!\nShe must be a lion tamer,\na girl from the zoo!”\nBut I was triumphant.\nI didn’t feel it--\nthe yoke!\nOblivious with joy,\nI jumped\nand leapt about, a bride-happy redskin,\nI felt so elated\nand light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg" - } - } - } - }, - "theodore-maynard": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Theodore Maynard", - "birth": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Maynard", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 20 - }, - "poems": { - "the-ascetic": { - "title": "“The Ascetic”", - "body": "A wild wind blows from out the angry sky\nAnd all the clouds are tossed like thistle-down\nAbove the groaning branches of the trees;\nFor on this steel-cold night the earth is stirred\nTo shake away its rottenness; the leaves\nAre shed like secret unremembered sins\nIn the great scourge of the great love of God …\n\nEre I was learned in the ways of love\nI looked for it in green and pleasant lands,\nIn apple orchards and the poppy fields,\nAnd peered among the silences of woods,\nAnd meditated the shy notes of birds\nBut found it not.\n\n Oh, many a goodly joy\nOf grace and gentle beauty came to me\nOn many a clear and cleansing night of stars.\nBut when I sat among my happy friends\n(Singing their songs and drinking of their ale,\nWarming my limbs before their kindly hearth)\nMy loneliness would seize me like a pain,\nA hunger strong and alien as death.\n\nNo comfort stays with such a man as I,\nNo resting place amid the dew and dusk,\nWhose head is filled with perilous enterprise\nThe endless quest of my wild fruitless love.\n\nBut these can tell how they have heard His voice,\nHave seen His face in pure untroubled sleep,\nOr when the twilight gathered on the hills\nOr when the moon shone out beyond the sea!\n\nHave _I_ not seen them? Yet I pilgrimage\nIn desolation seeking after peace,\nLearning how hard a thing it is to love.\nThere is a love that men find easily,\nFamiliar as the latch upon the door,\nDear as the curling smoke above the thatch--\nBut I have loved unto the uttermost\nAnd know love in the desperate abyss,\nIn dereliction and in blasphemy!\nAnd fly from God to find him, fill my eyes\nWith road-dust and with tears and starry hopes,\nEre I may search out Love unsearchable,\nEternal Truth and Goodness infinite,\nAnd the ineffable Beauty that is God.\n\nEmpty of scorn and ceasing not to praise\nThe meanest stick and stone upon the earth,\nI strive unto the stark Reality,\nThe Absolute grasped roundly in my hands.\nBitter and pitiless it is to love,\nTo feel the darkness gather round the soul,\nLove’s abnegation for the sake of love,\nTo see my Templed symbols’ slow decay\nBecome of every ravenous weed the food,\nWhere bats beat hideous wings about the arch\nAnd ruined roof, where ghosts of tragic kings\nAnd sleek ecclesiastics come and go\nUpon the shattered pavements of my creed.\n\nYet Mercy at the last shall lead me in,\nThe Bride immaculate and mystical\nTenderly guide my wayward feet to peace,\nAnd show me love the likeness of a Man,\nThe Slave obedient unto death, the Lamb\nSlain from the first foundations of the world,\nThe Word made flesh, the tender new-born Child\nThat is the end of all my heart’s desire.\n\nThen shall my spirit, naked of its hopes,\nStripped of its love unto the very bone,\nSink simply into Love’s embrace and be\nMade consummate of all its burning bliss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "august", - "day": 26 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 26 - } - } - }, - "at-the-crib": { - "title": "“At the Crib”", - "body": "Again the royalties are shed,\nDisdiademed the kingly head,\nHe lies again--ah, very small!--\nAmong the cattle in the stall,\nOr in His slender mother’s arms\nIs snuggled up from baby harms.\n\nThe Tower of Ivory leans down\nFrom Paradise’s topmost crown;\nThe House of Gold on earth takes root;\nFrom Jesse comes a saving shoot,\nFor Mary gives (O manifold\nHer courtesies!) that we may hold\nOur little Lord’s poor fragile hands\nAnd feet, the guerdon of all lands.\n\nNo fool need fail to enter in\nThe guarded Heaven we strive to win,\nOr miss upon a casual street\nThe fiery impress of His feet,\nBut touch with every stone and sod\nThe extended fingers of our God,\nAnd see in twigs of the stiff hedgerows,\nOr in the woods where quiet grows\nAmong the naked Winter trees,\nA thousand times these mysteries:\nThe branching arms with Christly fruit,\nThe thorns which bruise His head and foot.\n\nNo more with silver shrilly blown\nHe treads a conqueror, but, flown\nWith swift and silent whitening wings,\nHe comes enwrapped in baby things.\nOur God adventures everywhere\nBeneath the cool and Christmas air,\nAnd setteth still His candid star\nWhere Mary and her baby are!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-building-of-the-city": { - "title": "“The Building of the City”", - "body": "I, John, who once was called by Him in jest\n Boanerges, the thunder’s son,\nWho lay in tenderness upon His breast--\n Now that my days are done,\n\nAnd a great gathering glory fills my sight,\n Would tell my children e’er I go\nOf Him I saw with head and hair as white\n As white wool--white as snow.\n\nThe face before which heaven and earth did flee,\n The burnished feet, the eyes of flame,\nThe seven stars bright with awful mystery,\n And the Ineffable Name!\n\nYet I who saw the four dread horsemen ride,\n The vials of the wrath of God,\nBeheld a greater thing: the Lamb’s pure Bride,\n The golden floors she trod.\n\nHow Babylon, Babylon was overthrown,\n And how Euphrates flowed with blood--\nAh, but His mercy through the wide world sown,\n The tree with healing bud!\n\nI heard, among the hosts of Paradise,\n The glad new song that never tires,\nA Lamb as it had been slain in sacrifice\n Enthroned amid the choirs.\n\nAfter the utmost woes have taken toll,\n And ravens plucked the eyes of kings,\nGod’s own strange peace shall come upon the soul\n On gentle, dove-like wings.\n\nThe Dragon cast into the voidless night,\n God’s city cometh from above,\nBuilt by the sword of Michael and his might,\n But founded in God’s love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_apostle" - } - } - }, - "carrion": { - "title": "“Carrion”", - "body": "The guns are silent for an hour; the sounds\n Of war forget their doom; the work is done--\nStrong men, uncounted corpses heaped in mounds,\n Are rotting in the sun.\n\nFoul carrion--souls till yesterday!--are these\n With piteous faces in the bloodied mire;\nBut where are now their generous charities?\n Their laughter, their desire?\n\nIn each rent breast, each crushed and shattered skull\n Lived joy and sorrow, tenderness and pain,\nHope, ardours, passions brave and beautiful\n Among these thousands slain!\n\nA little time ago they heard the call\n Of mating birds in thicket and in brake;\nThey wondering saw night’s jewelled curtain fall\n And all the pale stars wake …\n\nBodies most marvellously fashioned, stark,\n Strewn broadcast out upon the trampled sod--\nThese temples of the Holy Ghost--O hark!--\n These images of God!\n\nFlesh, as the Word became in Bethlehem,\n Houses to hold their Sacramental Lord:\nSwiftly and terribly to harvest them\n Swept the relentless sword!\n\nHappy if in your dying you can give\n Some symbol of the Eternal Sacrificed,\nSome pardon to the hearts of those who live--\n Dying the death of Christ!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "january", - "day": 6 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "christmas-on-crusade": { - "title": "“Christmas on Crusade”", - "body": "Here shall we bivouac beneath the stars;\n Gather the remnant of our chivalry\nAbout the crackling fires, and nurse our scars,\n And speak no more as fools must, bitterly.\n\nThe roads familiar to His feet we trod;\n We saw the lonely hills whereon He wept,\nPrayed, agonised--dear God of very God!--\n And watched the whole world while the whole world slept.\n\nWe speak no more in anger; Christian men\n Our armies rolled upon you, wave and wave:\nBut crooked words and swords, O Saracen,\n Can only hold what they have given--a grave!\n\nWe know Him, know that gibbet whence was torn\n The pardon that a felon spoke on sin:\nThere is more life in His dead crown of thorn\n Than in your sweeping horsemen, Saladin!\n\nWe speak no more in anger, we will ride\n Homeless to our own homes. His bruised head\nHad never resting place. Each Christmas-tide\n Blossoms the thorn and we are comforted.\n\nYea, of the sacred cradle of our creed\n We are despoiled; the kindly tavern door\nIs shut against us in our utmost need--\n We know the awful patience of the poor.\n\nWe speak no more in anger, for we share\n His homelessness. We will forget your scorn.\nThe bells are ringing in the Christmas air;\n God homeless in our homeless homes is born.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-fool": { - "title": "“The Fool”", - "body": "A shout of laughter and of scorn,\n A million jeering lips and eyes--\nAnd in the sight of all men born\n The wildest of earth’s madmen dies!\n\nWhose trust was put in empty words\n To-day is numbered with the dead;\nTo-morrow crows and evil birds\n Shall pluck those strange eyes from his head!\n\nThe fellows of this country clown\n Are scattered (fool beyond belief!),\nAll blown away like thistledown,\n Except a harlot and a thief.\n\nAnd shall he shatter fates with _these_?\n (He that would neither strive nor cry)\nOr thunder through the Seven Seas?\n Or shake the stars down from the sky?\n\nHave mercy and humility\n Become unconquerable swords,\nThat Caiaphas must tremblingly\n Kneel with the world’s imperial lords\nBefore this crazy carpenter--\n This body writhing on a rod--\nAnd worship in that bloody hair\n The dreadful foolishness of God?\n\nA shout of laughter and of scorn,\n A million jeering lips and eyes--\nAnd in the sight of all men born\n The wildest of earth’s madmen dies!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-they-shall-possess-the-earth": { - "title": "“For They Shall Possess the Earth”", - "body": "You who were beauty’s worshipper,\n Her ardent lover, in this place\n You have seen Beauty face to face;\nAnd known the wistful eyes of her,\nAnd kissed the hands of Poverty,\nAnd praised her tattered bravery.\n\nYou shall be humble, give your days\n To silence and simplicity;\n And solitude shall come to be\nThe goal of all your winding ways;\nWhen pride and youthful pomp of words\nFly far away like startled birds.\n\nPossessing nothing, you shall know\n The heart of all things in the earth,\n Their secret agonies and mirth,\nThe awful innocence of snow,\nThe sadness of November leaves,\nThe joy of fields of girded sheaves.\n\nA shelter from the driving rain\n Your high renouncement of desire;\n Food it shall be and wine and fire;\nAnd Peace shall enter once again\nAs quietly as dreams in sleep\nThe hidden trysting-place you keep.\n\nYou shall grow humble as the grass,\n And patient as each slow, dumb beast;\n And as their fellow--yea the least--\nYield stoat and hedgehog room to pass;\nAnd learn the ignorance of men\nBefore the robin and the wren.\n\nThe things so terrible and sweet\n You strove to say in accents harsh,\n The frogs are croaking on the marsh,\nThe crickets chirping at your feet--\nOh, they can teach you unafraid\nThe meaning of the songs you made.\n\nTill clothed in white humilities,\n Each happening that doth befall,\n Each thought of yours be musical,\nAs wind is musical in the trees,\nWhen strong as sun and clean as dew\nYour old dead songs come back to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-great-wind": { - "title": "“A Great Wind”", - "body": "A great wind blows through the pine trees,\n A clean salt wind from sea,\nA loud wind full of all healing\n Blows kindly but boisterously;\nOh, a good wind blows through the pine trees\n And the heart and mind of me!\n\nA wind stirs the long grass lightly\n And the dear young flowers of May,\nAnd blows in the English meadows\n The breath of a Summer’s day--\nBut this wind rings with honour\n And is wet with the cold sea spray.\n\nThere are straits where the tall ships founder\n And no live thing may draw breath,\nWhere men look at splendid, angry skies\n And hear what the thunder saith:\nWhere men look their last at glory\n And bravely drink of death.\n\nThere is much afoot this evening\n In these pine woods by the sea,\nAnd no branch shall endure until morning\n That is rotten on the tree--\nNor any decayed thing endure in my soul\n When God’s wind blows through me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-holy-spring": { - "title": "“The Holy Spring”", - "body": "The radiant feet of Christ now lead\n The dancing sunny hours,\nThe ancient Earth is young again\nWith growing grass and warm white rain\n And hedgerows full of flowers.\n\nThe lilac and laburnum show\n The glory of their bud,\nAnd scattered on each hawthorn spray\nThe snow-white and the crimson may--\n The may as red as blood.\n\nThe bluebells in the deep dim woods\n Like fallen heavens lie,\nAnd daffodils and daffodils\nUpon a thousand little hills\n Are waving to the sky.\n\nThe corn imprisoned in the mould\n Has burst its wintry tomb,\nAnd on each burdened orchard tree\nWhich stood an austere calvary\n The apple blossom bloom.\n\nThe kiss of Christ has brought to life\n The marvel of the sod.\nOh, joy has rent its chrysalis\nTo flash its jewelled wings, and is\nA dream of beauty and of bliss--\n The loveliness of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "in-domo-johannis": { - "title": "“In Domo Johannis”", - "body": "Here rest the thin worn hands which fondled Him,\n The trembling lips which magnified the Lord,\nWho looked upon His handmaid, the young, slim\n Mary at her meek tasks, and here the sword\nWithin the soul of her whose anguished eyes\n Gazed at the stars which watch Gethsemane,\nAnd saw the sun fail in the stricken skies.\n In these dim rooms she guards the treasury\nOf her white memories--the strange, sweet face\n More marred than any man’s, the tender, fain\nAnd eager words, the wistful human grace,\n The mysteries of glory, joy and pain,\nAnd that hope tremulous, half-sob, half-song,\nRinging through night--“How long, O Lord, how long?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "visitation" - } - } - }, - "the-joy-of-the-world": { - "title": "“The Joy of the World”", - "body": "For your joy do the long grasses rustle, the tree-tops stir\nWhere the wind moves eagerly through the pine and the fir;\nAlert for your coming the woods and the meadows all wait;\nThe buttercups grow and the turtle calls to his mate.\n\nAnd God for your Clothing fashioned in patience the sun,\nA cloak wrought of glory and fire where dreadful dyes run,\nSaffron and Crimson and sapphire and gold, as is meet;\nAnd stars to be set on your head and stars under your feet.\n\nFor you, His most lovely of daughters, the mighty God bowed\nFrom heaven to give you your dowry of sunset and cloud;\nAnd splendid in light and in worship were Gabriel’s wings,\nWhen he breathed in your bosom the hope of impossible things.\n\nSudden and dear was the secret he whispered to you,\nOf one who should quietly fall to the earth with the dew;\nAs dew that at night in the valleys distils upon fleece,\nWith no shattering trump did He come but in terrible peace.\n\nIn your hands that are sweeter than honey, in all the wide earth\nGod laid the desire of the nations, their home and their mirth,\nAnd gave to your merciful keeping man’s joy and man’s rest,\nAnd under incredible skies a babe at your breast.\n\nAnd though the stars wane and the royal deep colours should fade,\nYet still shall endure in the heart and the lips of a Maid,\nThe sweep of the archangel’s pinions--the humble accord--\nThe song--the dim stable--the night--and the birth of the Lord!\n\nFor your joy do the long grasses rustle, the tree-tops stir\nWhere the wind moves eagerly through the pine and the fir;\nAlert for your coming the woods and the meadows all wait;\nThe buttercups grow and the turtle calls to his mate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "the-mystic": { - "title": "“The Mystic”", - "body": "When all my long and weary work is done\n(Toiling both soon and late, by candle-light,\nSewing and sewing while my eyes can see)\nI lay my glasses by and watch the walls--\nThe plaster off in patches, stained with smoke--\nMelt as a hoary mist and flee away.\nThen through the splendour of the evening skies,\nAlong its star-lit paths, past pearl-white clouds\nI hasten till I reach the region where\nGod’s holy city like a virgin keeps\nIts spotless tryst, forever night and day.\n I do not linger here, but take my way\nTo Him who sits among the Seraphim;\nAnd He who knows I am a poor old wife,\nWith naught of wit or wealth that I can bring,\nAnd that my hands are hardened by my toil--\nSees that ’tis I that need Him most of all.\nYea, God will have the music hushed (for I\nAm growing somewhat deaf) and we will talk\nOf many things, as friend may talk with friend.\n\nAh, I have looked, and in the dear Lord’s face\n(More lined with care than any earthly man’s)\nSeen that He suffers too, and understands\nHow hard and late I work to keep the wolf\nOutside my door, and bring my children up\nTo serve Him always, and to keep them clean\nIn body, heart and mind …\n\n At the sun’s call,\nWorking with all my strength from early dawn,\nThrough the long day, and then by candle-light\nSewing on buttons while my eyes can see,\nI know the glory of God’s gracious face,\nAnd at His touch my weary hands grow strong,\nHearing His voice my heart is glad and gay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nocturne": { - "title": "“Nocturne”", - "body": "When evening hangs her lamp above the hill\n And calls her children to her waiting hearth,\n Where pain is shed away and love and wrath,\nAnd every tired head lies white and still--\n\nDear heart, will you not light a lamp for me,\n And gather up the meaning of the lands,\n Silent and luminous within your hands,\nWhere peace abides and mirth and mystery?\n\nThat I may sit with you beside the fire,\n And ponder on the thing no man may guess,\n Your soul’s great majesty and gentleness,\nUntil the last sad tongue of flame expire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916, - "month": "december", - "day": 21 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "palm-sunday": { - "title": "“Palm Sunday”", - "body": "The grey hairs of Caiaphas\n Shall know the truth to-day,\nFor kingly, riding on an ass,\n The Truth has come his way.\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)\n\nCaiaphas waxes eloquent\n On tittle and on jot,\nBut when they cry “Hosanna!”\n Caiaphas answers not.\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)\n\nIn the temple of Caiaphas\n Stand two gold seraphim--\nThey do not worship Christ nor shout\n As the grey stones shout for Him.\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)\n\nThe vestments of Caiaphas\n With gold and silver shone--\nThey would get soiled if he cast them down\n For the ass to walk upon.\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)\n\nThe religion of Caiaphas\n Is very spick and span,\nIt does not love the ill-bred mob,\n The homespun Son of Man!\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)\n\nThe dark soul of Caiaphas\n Is full of sin and pride;\nIt does not know the splendour\n Or the triumph of that ride!\n\n (_A thornbush grows upon the hill,\n And Golgotha is empty still!_)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "pride": { - "title": "“Pride”", - "body": "Who having known through night a great star falling\n With half the host of heaven in its wake,\nAnd o’er chaotic seas a dread voice calling,\n And a new purple dawn of presage break,\n\nCan hope to conquer thee, proud Son of Morning,\n Arrayed in mighty lusts of heart and eyes,\nWith blood-red rubies set for thine adorning\n And sorceries wherein men’s souls grow wise?\n\nWho shall withstand the onslaught of thy chariot,\n Who ride to battle with thy gorgeous kings?\nDost thou not count the silver to Iscariot,\n And Tyrian scarlet and the marvellous rings?\n\nBut ivory limbs and the flung festal roses,\n The maddening music and the Chian wine,\nAre overpast when one glad heart discloses\n A pride more strange and terrible than thine!\n\nThat looked unsatisfied upon thy splendour,\n And turned, all shaken with his love, away\nTo one dear face that holds him true and tender\n Until the trumpets of the Judgment Day.\n\nA pride that binds him till the last fierce ember\n Shall fade from pride’s tall roaring pyre in hell;\nThe gentleness and grace he shall remember,\n The flower she gave, the love that she did tell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-return": { - "title": "“The Return”", - "body": "Beyond these hills where sinks the sun in amber,\n Imperial in purple, gold and blood,\nI keep the garden walks where roses clamber,\n Set in still rows with shrub and flower and bud.\n\nAfter the clash of all the swords that sunder,\n After the headstrong pride of youth that fails,\nAfter the shattered heavens and the thunder\n Remain the summer woods and nightingales!\n\nSo when the fever has died down that urges\n My lips to utterance of whirling words,\nWhich, blown among the winds and stormy surges,\n Skim the wild sea-waves like the wild sea-birds.\n\nSo when has ceased the tumult and the riot,\n A man may rest his soul a little space,\nAnd seek your solitary eyes in quiet,\n And all the gracious calmness of your face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-for-the-fifth-of-october": { - "title": "“Sonnet for the Fifth of October”", - "body": "If I had ridden horses in the lists,\n Fought wars, gone pilgrimage to fabled lands,\nSeen Pharaoh’s drinking cups of amethysts,\n Held dead Queens’ secret jewels in my hands--\nI would have laid my triumphs at your feet,\n And worn with no ignoble pride my scars …\nBut I can only offer you, my sweet,\n The songs I made on many a night of stars.\n\nYet have I worshipped honour, loving you;\n Your graciousness and gentle courtesy,\nWith ringing and romantic trumpets blew\n A mighty music through the heart of me,--\nA joy as cleansing as the wind that fills\nThe open spaces on the sunny hills.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 5 - } - } - }, - "three-triolets": { - "title": "“Three Triolets”", - "body": "# I. _Of an improbable story_\n\nI heard a story from an oak\n As I was walking in the wood--\nI, of the stupid human-folk,\nI heard a story from an oak.\nThough larches into laughter broke\n I hardly think I understood.\nI heard a story from an oak\nAs I was walking in the wood.\n\n\n# II. _Of deplorable sentiments_\n\nI wouldn’t sell my noble thirst\n For half-a-dozen bags of gold;\nI’d like to drink until I burst.\nI wouldn’t sell my noble thirst\nFor lucre filthy and accurst--\n Such treasures _can’t_ be bought and sold!\nI wouldn’t sell my noble thirst\nFor half-a-dozen bags of gold.\n\n\n# III. _Of love and laughter_\n\nYou scattered joy about my way\n And filled my lips with love and laughter\nIn white and yellow fields of May\nYou scattered joy about my way.\nThough Winter come with skies of grey\n And grisly death come stalking after,\nYou scattered joy about my way\n And filled my lips with love and laughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "to-any-saint": { - "title": "“To Any Saint”", - "body": "Before the choirs of angels burst to song,\n In night and loneliness your way you trod--\nO valiant heart, O weary feet and strong,\n There are no easy by-paths unto God.\n\nDarkness there was, thick darkness all around;\n Nor spoken word, nor hand to touch you knew,\nBut One who walked the self-same stony ground\n And shared your dereliction there with you.\n\nO valiant heart! O fixed, undaunted will!\n While all the heavens hung like brass above,\nYou faltered not, but steadfast journeyed still\n Upon the road of sainthood to your Love.\n\nAnd was not it reward exceeding great\n To kiss at last with passionate lips His side,\nHis hands, His feet? O pomp! O regal state!\n O crown of life He gives unto His bride!\n\nLovers there are with roses chapleted,\n But more than theirs is your Lord’s loveliness;\nYour Love is crowned with thorns upon His head,\n And pain and sorrow woven is His dress.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "to-the-dead": { - "title": "“To the Dead”", - "body": "Now lays the king his crown and sceptre down,\n Her gown of taffeta the lovely bride,\nThe knight his sword, his cap and bells the clown,\n The poet all his verse’s pomp and pride--\nThe eloquent, the beautiful, the brave\nDescend reluctant to the straight, cold grave.\n\nNo more shall shine for them the glorious rose,\n Or sunsets stain with red and awful gold,\nNight shall no more for them her stars disclose,\n Or day the grandeur of the Downs unfold,\nOr those eyes dull in death watch solemnly\nThe regal splendour of the Sussex sea.\n\nFor them the ringing surges are in vain;\n They wake not at the cry of waking bird;\nThe sun, the holy hill, the fruitful rain,\n The winds have called them and they have not stirred;\nThe woods are widowed of your eager tread,\nO dear and desolate and dungeoned dead!\n\nYet you shall rest awhile in English earth,\n And ripen many a pleasant English field\nThrough the green Summer to the Autumn’s mirth\n And flower unconsciously upon the weald--\nUntil that last angelic word be said,\nAnd the shut graves deliver up their dead!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-mcauley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James McAuley", - "birth": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1976 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McAuley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "Lord, it is time. The fruitful summer yields;\nThe shadows fall across the figured dial,\nThe winds are loosed upon the harvest fields.\nSee that these last fruits swell upon the vine;\nGrant them as yet a southern day or two\nThen press them to fulfilment, and pursue\nThe last of sweetness in the heavy wine.\nWho now is homeless shall not build this year.\nHe shall be solitary and long alone;\nShall wake, and read, and write long letters home,\nAnd on deserted pavements here and there\nShall wander restless, as the leaves are blown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "in-a-late-hour": { - "title": "“In a Late Hour”", - "body": "Though all men should desert you\nMy faith shall not grow less,\nBut keep that single virtue\nOf simple thankfulness.\nPursuit had closed around me,\nTerrors had pressed me low;\nYou sought me, and you found me,\nAnd I will not let you go.\nThe hearts of men grow colder,\nThe final things draw near,\nForms vanish, kingdoms moulder,\nThe Antirealm is here;\nWhose order is derangement:\nClose-driven, yet alone,\nMen reach the last estrangement--\nThe sense of nature gone.\nThough the stars run distracted,\nAnd from wounds deep rancours flow,\nWhile the mystery is enacted\nI will not let you go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-tuesday-in-summer": { - "title": "“One Tuesday in Summer”", - "body": "That sultry afternoon the world went strange.\nUnder a violet and leaden bruise\nThe air was filled with sinister yellow light;\nTrees, houses, grass took on unnatural hues.\nThunder rolled near. The intensity grew and grew\nLike doom itself with lightnings on its face.\nAnd Mr Pitt, the grocer’s order-man,\nWho made his call on Tuesdays at our place,\nSaid to my mother, looking at the sky,\n“You’d think the ending of the world had come.”\nA leathern little man, with bicycle-clips\nAround his ankles, doing our weekly sum,\nHe too looked strange in that uncanny light;\nAs in the Bible ordinary men\nTurn out to be angelic messengers,\nPronouncing the Lord’s judgments why and when.\nI watched the scurry of the small black ants\nThat sensed the storm. What Mr Pitt had said\nI didn’t quite believe, or disbelieve;\nBut still the words had got into my head,\nFor nothing less seemed worthy of the scene.\nThe darkening imminence hung on and on,\nTill suddenly, with lightning-stroke and rain,\nApocalypse exploded, and was gone.\nBy nightfall things had their familiar look.\nBut I had seen the world stand in dismay\nUnder the aspect of another meaning\nThat rain or time would hardly wash away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "tuesday", - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "winter-nightfall": { - "title": "“Winter Nightfall”", - "body": "Snow falls on the darkening boughs,\nEvening bell rings through the shade;\nFor many guests the table’s laid,\nWell-appointed is the house.\nTravellers come from field and fold\nBy dark pathways to the gate;\nThe Tree of Grace has blossomed late,\nTurning earth’s cool sap to gold.\nHard with pain the stony sill;\nIndoors on the table shine\nWith pure brightness bread and wine;\nEnter, wanderer, take your fill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "wistaria": { - "title": "“Wistaria”", - "body": "Does that wistaria vine still break in flower\nLike grape-clusters transformed to lilac light\nFor bees to hover in? It had a power,\nThen, to absorb all feelings into sight.\nAnd the mute aching sweetness of its scent\nStored up the quotient of long afternoons\nWhere time stretched forward, empty of event,\nDrifting-with bells, pagodas, pale balloons--\nShapes that changed back to flowers at a touch.\nThe soul must feed on something for its dreams\nIn those brick suburbs, and there wasn’t much:\nIt can make do with little, so it seems.\nIts formal home had crossed flags at the back\nAnd reverent doubt up front. In equipoise\nBetween the brass cross and the Union Jack,\nIt could still quiver to the cheerful noise\nThat called upon all things to render praise.\nOf all things, I liked best that tough old vine\nRoping our side fence, offering my days\nClusters of hope that stirred the sense like wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-mccrae": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John McCrae", - "birth": { - "year": 1872 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCrae", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "anarchy": { - "title": "“Anarchy”", - "body": "I saw a city filled with lust and shame,\nWhere men, like wolves, slunk through the grim half-light;\nAnd sudden, in the midst of it, there came\nOne who spoke boldly for the cause of Right.\n\nAnd speaking, fell before that brutish race\nLike some poor wren that shrieking eagles tear,\nWhile brute Dishonour, with her bloodless face\nStood by and smote his lips that moved in prayer.\n\n“Speak not of God! In centuries that word\nHath not been uttered! Our own king are we.”\nAnd God stretched forth his finger as He heard\nAnd o’er it cast a thousand leagues of sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1897 - } - } - }, - "the-anxious-dead": { - "title": "“The Anxious Dead”", - "body": "O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear\nAbove their heads the legions pressing on:\n(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,\nAnd died not knowing how the day had gone.)\n\nO flashing muzzles, pause, and let them see\nThe coming dawn that streaks the sky afar;\nThen let your mighty chorus witness be\nTo them, and Caesar, that we still make war.\n\nTell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,\nThat we have sworn, and will not turn aside,\nThat we will onward till we win or fall,\nThat we will keep the faith for which they died.\n\nBid them be patient, and some day, anon,\nThey shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep;\nShall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn,\nAnd in content may turn them to their sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "the-dead-master": { - "title": "“The Dead Master”", - "body": "Amid earth’s vagrant noises, he caught the note sublime:\nTo-day around him surges from the silences of Time\nA flood of nobler music, like a river deep and broad,\nFit song for heroes gathered in the banquet-hall of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "the-dying-of-pere-pierre": { - "title": "“The Dying of Pere Pierre”", - "body": "_“… with two other priests; the same night he died, and was buried by the shores of the lake that bears his name.”_\n --Chronicle.\n\n“Nay, grieve not that ye can no honour give\nTo these poor bones that presently must be\nBut carrion; since I have sought to live\nUpon God’s earth, as He hath guided me,\nI shall not lack! Where would ye have me lie?\nHigh heaven is higher than cathedral nave:\nDo men paint chancels fairer than the sky?”\nBeside the darkened lake they made his grave,\nBelow the altar of the hills; and night\nSwung incense clouds of mist in creeping lines\nThat twisted through the tree-trunks, where the light\nGroped through the arches of the silent pines:\nAnd he, beside the lonely path he trod,\nLay, tombed in splendour, in the House of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eventide": { - "title": "“Eventide”", - "body": "The day is past and the toilers cease;\nThe land grows dim ’mid the shadows grey,\nAnd hearts are glad, for the dark brings peace\n At the close of day.\n\nEach weary toiler, with lingering pace,\nAs he homeward turns, with the long day done,\nLooks out to the west, with the light on his face\n Of the setting sun.\n\nYet some see not (with their sin-dimmed eyes)\nThe promise of rest in the fading light;\nBut the clouds loom dark in the angry skies\n At the fall of night.\n\nAnd some see only a golden sky\nWhere the elms their welcoming arms stretch wide\nTo the calling rooks, as they homeward fly\n At the eventide.\n\nIt speaks of peace that comes after strife,\nOf the rest He sends to the hearts He tried,\nOf the calm that follows the stormiest life--\n God’s eventide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-hope-of-my-heart": { - "title": "“The Hope of My Heart”", - "body": "_“Delicta juventutis et ignorantius ejus, \nquoesumus ne memineris, Domine.”_\n\nI left, to earth, a little maiden fair,\nWith locks of gold, and eyes that shamed the light;\nI prayed that God might have her in His care\n And sight.\n\nEarth’s love was false; her voice, a siren’s song;\n(Sweet mother-earth was but a lying name)\nThe path she showed was but the path of wrong\n And shame.\n\n“Cast her not out!” I cry. God’s kind words come--\n“Her future is with Me, as was her past;\nIt shall be My good will to bring her home\n At last.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - } - } - }, - "in-due-season": { - "title": "“In Due Season”", - "body": "If night should come and find me at my toil,\nWhen all Life’s day I had, tho’ faintly, wrought,\nAnd shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil\nWere all my labour: Shall I count it naught\n\nIf only one poor gleaner, weak of hand,\nShall pick a scanty sheaf where I have sown?\n“Nay, for of thee the Master doth demand\nThy work: the harvest rests with Him alone.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1897 - } - } - }, - "in-flanders-fields": { - "title": "“In Flanders Fields”", - "body": "In Flanders fields the poppies blow\nBetween the crosses, row on row,\nThat mark our place; and in the sky\nThe larks, still bravely singing, fly\nScarce heard amid the guns below.\n\nWe are the Dead. Short days ago\nWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,\nLoved and were loved, and now we lie,\n In Flanders fields.\n\nTake up our quarrel with the foe:\nTo you from failing hands we throw\nThe torch; be yours to hold it high.\nIf ye break faith with us who die\nWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow\n In Flanders fields.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "mine-host": { - "title": "“Mine Host”", - "body": "There stands a hostel by a travelled way;\nLife is the road and Death the worthy host;\nEach guest he greets, nor ever lacks to say,\n“How have ye fared?” They answer him, the most,\n“This lodging place is other than we sought;\nWe had intended farther, but the gloom\nCame on apace, and found us ere we thought:\nYet will we lodge. Thou hast abundant room.”\n\nWithin sit haggard men that speak no word,\nNo fire gleams their cheerful welcome shed;\nNo voice of fellowship or strife is heard\nBut silence of a multitude of dead.\n“Naught can I offer ye,” quoth Death, “but rest!”\nAnd to his chamber leads each tired guest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1897 - } - } - }, - "the-night-cometh": { - "title": "“The Night Cometh”", - "body": "Cometh the night. The wind falls low,\nThe trees swing slowly to and fro:\nAround the church the headstones grey\nCluster, like children strayed away\nBut found again, and folded so.\n\nNo chiding look doth she bestow:\nIf she is glad, they cannot know;\nIf ill or well they spend their day,\n Cometh the night.\n\nSinging or sad, intent they go;\nThey do not see the shadows grow;\n“There yet is time,” they lightly say,\n“Before our work aside we lay”;\nTheir task is but half-done, and lo!\n Cometh the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "the-oldest-drama": { - "title": "“The Oldest Drama”", - "body": " _“It fell on a day, that he went out to his father to the reapers.\n And he said unto his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad,\n Carry him to his mother. And … he sat on her knees till noon,\n and then died. And she went up, and laid him on the bed… .\n And shut the door upon him and went out.”_\n\nImmortal story that no mother’s heart\nEv’n yet can read, nor feel the biting pain\nThat rent her soul! Immortal not by art\nWhich makes a long past sorrow sting again\n\nLike grief of yesterday: but since it said\nIn simplest word the truth which all may see,\nWhere any mother sobs above her dead\nAnd plays anew the silent tragedy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "penance": { - "title": "“Penance”", - "body": "My lover died a century ago,\nHer dear heart stricken by my sland’rous breath,\nWherefore the Gods forbade that I should know\n The peace of death.\n\nMen pass my grave, and say, “’Twere well to sleep,\nLike such an one, amid the uncaring dead!”\nHow should they know the vigils that I keep,\n The tears I shed?\n\nUpon the grave, I count with lifeless breath,\nEach night, each year, the flowers that bloom and die,\nDeeming the leaves, that fall to dreamless death,\n More blest than I.\n\n’Twas just last year--I heard two lovers pass\nSo near, I caught the tender words he said:\nTo-night the rain-drenched breezes sway the grass\n Above his head.\n\nThat night full envious of his life was I,\nThat youth and love should stand at his behest;\nTo-night, I envy him, that he should lie\n At utter rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1896 - } - } - }, - "the-pilgrims": { - "title": "“The Pilgrims”", - "body": "An uphill path, sun-gleams between the showers,\nWhere every beam that broke the leaden sky\nLit other hills with fairer ways than ours;\nSome clustered graves where half our memories lie;\nAnd one grim Shadow creeping ever nigh:\n And this was Life.\n\nWherein we did another’s burden seek,\nThe tired feet we helped upon the road,\nThe hand we gave the weary and the weak,\nThe miles we lightened one another’s load,\nWhen, faint to falling, onward yet we strode:\n This too was Life.\n\nTill, at the upland, as we turned to go\nAmid fair meadows, dusky in the night,\nThe mists fell back upon the road below;\nBroke on our tired eyes the western light;\nThe very graves were for a moment bright:\n And this was Death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "recompense": { - "title": "“Recompense”", - "body": "I saw two sowers in Life’s field at morn,\nTo whom came one in angel guise and said,\n“Is it for labour that a man is born?\nLo: I am Ease. Come ye and eat my bread!”\nThen gladly one forsook his task undone\nAnd with the Tempter went his slothful way,\nThe other toiled until the setting sun\nWith stealing shadows blurred the dusty day.\n\nEre harvest time, upon earth’s peaceful breast\nEach laid him down among the unreaping dead.\n“Labour hath other recompense than rest,\nElse were the toiler like the fool,” I said;\n“God meteth him not less, but rather more\nBecause he sowed and others reaped his store.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1896 - } - } - }, - "the-shadow-of-the-cross": { - "title": "“The Shadow of the Cross”", - "body": "At the drowsy dusk when the shadows creep\nFrom the golden west, where the sunbeams sleep,\n\nAn angel mused: “Is there good or ill\nIn the mad world’s heart, since on Calvary’s hill\n\n’Round the cross a mid-day twilight fell\nThat darkened earth and o’ershadowed hell?”\n\nThrough the streets of a city the angel sped;\nLike an open scroll men’s hearts he read.\n\nIn a monarch’s ear his courtiers lied\nAnd humble faces hid hearts of pride.\n\nMen’s hate waxed hot, and their hearts grew cold,\nAs they haggled and fought for the lust of gold.\n\nDespairing, he cried, “After all these years\nIs there naught but hatred and strife and tears?”\n\nHe found two waifs in an attic bare;\n--A single crust was their meagre fare--\n\nOne strove to quiet the other’s cries,\nAnd the love-light dawned in her famished eyes\n\nAs she kissed the child with a motherly air:\n“I don’t need mine, you can have my share.”\n\nThen the angel knew that the earthly cross\nAnd the sorrow and shame were not wholly loss.\n\nAt dawn, when hushed was earth’s busy hum\nAnd men looked not for their Christ to come,\n\nFrom the attic poor to the palace grand,\nThe King and the beggar went hand in hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "friday" - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-comfort": { - "title": "“A Song of Comfort”", - "body": "_“Sleep, weary ones, while ye may--\nSleep, oh, sleep!”_\n --Eugene Field.\n\nThro’ May time blossoms, with whisper low,\nThe soft wind sang to the dead below:\n“Think not with regret on the Springtime’s song\nAnd the task ye left while your hands were strong.\nThe song would have ceased when the Spring was past,\nAnd the task that was joyous be weary at last.”\n\nTo the winter sky when the nights were long\nThe tree-tops tossed with a ceaseless song:\n“Do ye think with regret on the sunny days\nAnd the path ye left, with its untrod ways?\nThe sun might sink in a storm cloud’s frown\nAnd the path grow rough when the night came down.”\n\nIn the grey twilight of the autumn eves,\nIt sighed as it sang through the dying leaves:\n“Ye think with regret that the world was bright,\nThat your path was short and your task was light;\nThe path, though short, was perhaps the best\nAnd the toil was sweet, that it led to rest.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "then-and-now": { - "title": "“Then and Now”", - "body": "Beneath her window in the fragrant night\nI half forget how truant years have flown\nSince I looked up to see her chamber-light,\nOr catch, perchance, her slender shadow thrown\nUpon the casement; but the nodding leaves\nSweep lazily across the unlit pane,\nAnd to and fro beneath the shadowy eaves,\nLike restless birds, the breath of coming rain\nCreeps, lilac-laden, up the village street\nWhen all is still, as if the very trees\nWere listening for the coming of her feet\nThat come no more; yet, lest I weep, the breeze\nSings some forgotten song of those old years\nUntil my heart grows far too glad for tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-unconquered-dead": { - "title": "“The Unconquered Dead”", - "body": "_“… defeated, with great loss.”_\n\nNot we the conquered! Not to us the blame\nOf them that flee, of them that basely yield;\nNor ours the shout of victory, the fame\nOf them that vanquish in a stricken field.\n\nThat day of battle in the dusty heat\nWe lay and heard the bullets swish and sing\nLike scythes amid the over-ripened wheat,\nAnd we the harvest of their garnering.\n\nSome yielded, No, not we! Not we, we swear\nBy these our wounds; this trench upon the hill\nWhere all the shell-strewn earth is seamed and bare,\nWas ours to keep; and lo! we have it still.\n\nWe might have yielded, even we, but death\nCame for our helper; like a sudden flood\nThe crashing darkness fell; our painful breath\nWe drew with gasps amid the choking blood.\n\nThe roar fell faint and farther off, and soon\nSank to a foolish humming in our ears,\nLike crickets in the long, hot afternoon\nAmong the wheat fields of the olden years.\n\nBefore our eyes a boundless wall of red\nShot through by sudden streaks of jagged pain!\nThen a slow-gathering darkness overhead\nAnd rest came on us like a quiet rain.\n\nNot we the conquered! Not to us the shame,\nWho hold our earthen ramparts, nor shall cease\nTo hold them ever; victors we, who came\nIn that fierce moment to our honoured peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "the-warrior": { - "title": "“The Warrior”", - "body": "He wrought in poverty, the dull grey days,\nBut with the night his little lamp-lit room\nWas bright with battle flame, or through a haze\nOf smoke that stung his eyes he heard the boom\nOf Bluecher’s guns; he shared Almeida’s scars,\nAnd from the close-packed deck, about to die,\nLooked up and saw the “Birkenhead”’s tall spars\nWeave wavering lines across the Southern sky:\n\nOr in the stifling ’tween decks, row on row,\nAt Aboukir, saw how the dead men lay;\nCharged with the fiercest in Busaco’s strife,\nBrave dreams are his--the flick’ring lamp burns low--\nYet couraged for the battles of the day\nHe goes to stand full face to face with life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-mcintyre": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James McIntyre", - "birth": { - "year": 1828 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1906 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish+canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McIntyre_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "canadian", - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "hints-to-cheese-makers": { - "title": "“Hints to Cheese Makers”", - "body": "All those who quality do prize\nMust study color, taste and size\nAnd keep their dishes clean and sweet,\nAnd all things round their factories neat,\nFor dairymen insist that these\nAre all important points in cheese.\n\nGrant has here a famous work\nDevoted to the cause of pork.\nFor dairymen find that it doth pay\nTo fatten pigs upon the whey,\nFor there is money raising grease\nAs well as in the making cheese.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "claude-mckay": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Claude McKay", - "birth": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1948 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "jamaican+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇯🇲 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "jamaican" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-winter": { - "title": "“After the Winter”", - "body": "Some day, when trees have shed their leaves\n And against the morning’s white\nThe shivering birds beneath the eaves\n Have sheltered for the night,\nWe’ll turn our faces southward, love,\n Toward the summer isle\nWhere bamboos spire the shafted grove\n And wide-mouthed orchids smile.\n\nAnd we will seek the quiet hill\n Where towers the cotton tree,\nAnd leaps the laughing crystal rill,\n And works the droning bee.\nAnd we will build a cottage there\n Beside an open glade,\nWith black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,\n And ferns that never fade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "all-night": { - "title": "“All Night”", - "body": "All night, through the eternity of night,\nPain was my potion though I could not feel.\nDeep in my humbled heart you ground your heel,\nTill I was reft of even my inner light,\nTill reason from my mind had taken flight,\nAnd all my world went whirling in a reel.\nAnd all my swarthy strength turned cold like steel,\nA passive mass beneath your puny might.\nLast night I gave you triumph over me,\nSo I should be myself as once before,\nI marveled at your shallow mystery,\nAnd haunted hungrily your temple door.\nI gave you sum and substance to be free,\nOh, you shall never triumph any more!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "america": { - "title": "“America”", - "body": "Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,\nAnd sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,\nStealing my breath of life, I will confess\nI love this cultured hell that tests my youth.\nHer vigor flows like tides into my blood,\nGiving me strength erect against her hate,\nHer bigness sweeps my being like a flood.\nYet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,\nI stand within her walls with not a shred\nOf terror, malice, not a word of jeer.\nDarkly I gaze into the days ahead,\nAnd see her might and granite wonders there,\nBeneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,\nLike priceless treasures sinking in the sand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "december-1919": { - "title": "“December, 1919”", - "body": "Last night I heard your voice, mother,\nThe words you sang to me\nWhen I, a little barefoot boy,\nKnelt down against your knee.\n\nAnd tears gushed from my heart, mother,\nAnd passed beyond its wall,\nBut though the fountain reached my throat\nThe drops refused to fall.\n\n’Tis ten years since you died, mother,\nJust ten dark years of pain,\nAnd oh, I only wish that I\nCould weep just once again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "futility": { - "title": "“Futility”", - "body": "Oh, I have tried to laugh the pain away,\nLet new flames brush my love-springs like a feather.\nBut the old fever seizes me to-day,\nAs sickness grips a soul in wretched weather.\nI have given up myself to every urge,\nWith not a care of precious powers spent,\nHave bared my body to the strangest scourge,\nTo soothe and deaden my heart’s unhealing rent.\nBut you have torn a nerve out of my frame,\nA gut that no physician can replace,\nAnd reft my life of happiness and aim.\nOh what new purpose shall I now embrace?\nWhat substance hold, what lovely form pursue,\nWhen my thought burns through everything to you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-do-not-fear": { - "title": "“I Do Not Fear”", - "body": "I do not fear to face the fact and say,\nHow darkly-dull my living hours have grown,\nMy wounded heart sinks heavier than stone,\nBecause I loved you longer than a day!\nI do not shame to turn myself away\nFrom beckoning flowers beautifully blown,\nTo mourn your vivid memory alone\nIn mountain fastnesses austerely gray.\nThe mists will shroud me on the utter height,\nThe salty, brimming waters of my breast\nWill mingle with the fresh dews of the night\nTo bathe my spirit hankering to rest.\nBut after sleep I’ll wake with greater might,\nOnce more to venture on the eternal quest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-know-my-soul": { - "title": "“I Know My Soul”", - "body": "I plucked my soul out of its secret place,\nAnd held it to the mirror of my eye,\nTo see it like a star against the sky,\nA twitching body quivering in space,\nA spark of passion shining on my face.\nAnd I explored it to determine why\nThis awful key to my infinity\nConspires to rob me of sweet joy and grace.\nAnd if the sign may not be fully read,\nIf I can comprehend but not control,\nI need not gloom my days with futile dread,\nBecause I see a part and not the whole.\nContemplating the strange, I’m comforted\nBy this narcotic thought: I know my soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "joy-in-the-woods": { - "title": "“Joy in the Woods”", - "body": "There is joy in the woods just now,\n The leaves are whispers of song,\nAnd the birds make mirth on the bough\n And music the whole day long,\nAnd God! to dwell in the town\n In these springlike summer days,\nOn my brow an unfading frown\n And hate in my heart always--\n\nA machine out of gear, aye, tired,\nYet forced to go on--for I’m hired.\n\nJust forced to go on through fear,\n For every day I must eat\nAnd find ugly clothes to wear,\n And bad shoes to hurt my feet\nAnd a shelter for work-drugged sleep!\n A mere drudge! but what can one do?\nA man that’s a man cannot weep!\n Suicide? A quitter? Oh, no!\n\nBut a slave should never grow tired,\nWhom the masters have kindly hired.\n\nBut oh! for the woods, the flowers\n Of natural, sweet perfume,\nThe heartening, summer showers\n And the smiling shrubs in bloom,\nDust-free, dew-tinted at morn,\n The fresh and life-giving air,\nThe billowing waves of corn\n And the birds’ notes rich and clear:--\n\nFor a man-machine toil-tired\nMay crave beauty too--though he’s hired.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "on-broadway": { - "title": "“On Broadway”", - "body": "About me young careless feet\nLinger along the garish street;\nAbove, a hundred shouting signs\nShed down their bright fantastic glow\nUpon the merry crowd and lines\nOf moving carriages below.\nOh wonderful is Broadway--only\nMy heart, my heart is lonely.\nDesire naked, linked with Passion,\nGoes trutting by in brazen fashion;\nFrom playhouse, cabaret and inn\nThe rainbow lights of Broadway blaze\nAll gay without, all glad within;\nAs in a dream I stand and gaze\nAt Broadway, shining Broadway--only\nMy heart, my heart is lonely.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-morn-in-new-hampshire": { - "title": "“Summer Morn in New Hampshire”", - "body": "All yesterday it poured, and all night long\nI could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat\nUpon the shingled roof like a weird song,\nUpon the grass like running children’s feet.\nAnd down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,\nLike a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,\nSlid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,\nAnd nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.\n\nBut lo, there was a miracle at dawn!\nThe still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,\nThe sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,\nThe songsters twittered in the rustling trees.\nAnd all things were transfigured in the day,\nBut me whom radiant beauty could not move;\nFor you, more wonderful, were far away,\nAnd I was blind with hunger for your love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-one-coming-north": { - "title": "“To One Coming North”", - "body": "At first you’ll joy to see the playful snow,\n Like white moths trembling on the tropic air,\nOr waters of the hills that softly flow\n Gracefully falling down a shining stair.\n\nAnd when the fields and streets are covered white\n And the wind-worried void is chilly, raw,\nOr underneath a spell of heat and light\n The cheerless frozen spots begin to thaw,\n\nLike me you’ll long for home, where birds’ glad song\n Means flowering lanes and leas and spaces dry,\nAnd tender thoughts and feelings fine and strong,\n Beneath a vivid silver-flecked blue sky.\n\nBut oh! more than the changeless southern isles,\n When Spring has shed upon the earth her charm,\nYou’ll love the Northland wreathed in golden smiles\n By the miraculous sun turned glad and warm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "mechthild-of-magdeburg": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mechthild of Magdeburg", - "birth": { - "year": 1207, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1290, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechthild_of_Magdeburg", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "the-desert-has-many-teachings": { - "title": "“The Desert has Many Teachings”", - "body": "In the desert,\nTurn toward emptiness,\nFleeing the self.\nStand alone,\nAsk no one’s help,\nAnd your being will quiet,\nFree from the bondage of things.\n\nThose who cling to the world,\nEndeavor to free them;\nThose who are free, praise.\nCare for the sick,\nBut live alone,\nHappy to drink from the waters of sorrow,\nTo kindle Love’s fire\nWith the twigs of a simple life.\nThus you will live in the desert", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "god-speaks-to-the-soul": { - "title": "“God Speaks to the Soul”", - "body": "> _God speaks to the soul:_\n\nAnd God said to the soul:\nI desired you before the world began.\nI desire you now\nAs you desire me.\nAnd where the desires of two come together\nThere love is perfected.\n\n\n> _The soul speaks to God:_\n\nLord, you are my lover,\nMy longing,\nMy flowing stream,\nMy sun,\nAnd I am your reflection.\n\n\n> _God answers the soul:_\n\nIt is my nature that makes me love you often,\nFor I am love itself.\n\nIt is my longing that makes my love you intensely,\nFor I yearn to be loved from the heart.\n\nIt is my eternity that makes me love you long,\nFor I have no end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "gods-absence": { - "title": "“God’s Absence”", - "body": "Ah blessed absence of God,\nHow lovingly I am bound to you!\nYou strengthen my will in its pain\nAnd make dear to me\nThe long hard wait in my poor body.\nThe nearer I come to you,\nThe more wonderfully and abundantly\nGod comes upon me.\nIn pride, alas, I can easily lose you,\nBut in the depths of pure humility, O Lord,\nI cannot fall away from you.\nFor the deeper I fall, the sweeter you taste.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "i-cannot-dance": { - "title": "“I cannot dance …”", - "body": "I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me.\nIf you want me to leap with abandon,\nYou must intone the song.\nThen I shall leap into love,\nFrom love into knowledge,\nFrom knowledge into enjoyment,\nAnd from enjoyment beyond all human sensations.\nThere I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "if-i-was-a-learned-man": { - "title": "“If I was a Learned Man”", - "body": "I was warned against writing this book.\nPeople said:\nIf one did not watch out,\nIt could be burned.\nSo I did as I used to do as a child.\nWhen I was sad, I always had to pray.\nI bowed to my Lover and said: “Alas, Lord,\nNow I am saddened all because of your honor.\nIf I am going to receive no comfort from you now,\nThen you led me astray,\nBecause you are the one who told me to write it.”\n\nAt once God revealed himself to my joyless soul, held this book in his right hand, and said:\n\n“My dear one, do not be overly troubled,\nNo one can burn the truth …\nThe words symbolize my marvelous Godhead.\nIt flows continuously\nInto your soul from my divine mouth.\nThe sound of the words is a sign of my living spirit\nAnd through it achieves genuine truth.\nNow examine all these words--\nHow admirably do they proclaim my personal secrets!\nSo have no doubts about yourself.”\n\n“Ah, Lord, if I were a learned religious man,\nAnd if you had performed this unique miracle using him,\nYou would receive everlasting honor for it.\nBut how is one supposed to believe\nThat you have built a golden house on filthy ooze …\nLord, earthly wisdom will not be able to find you there.”\n\n“… One finds many a professor learned in scripture who actually is a fool in my eyes.\nAnd I’ll tell you something else:\nIt is a great honor for me with regard to them, and it very much strengthens Holy Christianity\nThat the unlearned tongue, aided by my Holy Spirit, teaches the learned tongue.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "of-all-that-god-has-shown-me": { - "title": "“Of all that God has shown me …”", - "body": "Of all that God has shown me\nI can speak just the smallest word,\nNor more than a honey bee\nTakes on his foot\nFrom an overspilling jar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jane Hirshfield" - } - } - } - }, - "herman-melville": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Herman Melville", - "birth": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "in-the-prison-pen": { - "title": "“In the Prison Pen”", - "body": "Listless he eyes the palisades\n And sentries in the glare;\n’Tis barren as a pelican-beach--\n But his world is ended there.\n\nNothing to do; and vacant hands\n Bring on the idiot-pain;\nHe tries to think--to recollect,\n But the blur is on his brain.\n\nAround him swarm the plaining ghosts\n Like those on Virgil’s shore--\nA wilderness of faces dim,\n And pale ones gashed and hoar.\n\nA smiting sun. No shed, no tree;\n He totters to his lair--\nA den that sick hands dug in earth\n Ere famine wasted there,\n\nOr, dropping in his place, he swoons,\n Walled in by throngs that press,\nTill forth from the throngs they bear him dead--\n Dead in his meagerness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "malvern-hill": { - "title": "“Malvern Hill”", - "body": "Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill\n In prime of morn and May,\nRecall ye how McClellan’s men\n Here stood at bay?\nWhile deep within yon forest dim\n Our rigid comrades lay--\nSome with the cartridge in their mouth,\nOthers with fixed arms lifted South--\n Invoking so\nThe cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe!\n\nThe spires of Richmond, late beheld\n Through rifts in musket-haze,\nWere closed from view in clouds of dust\n On leaf-walled ways,\nWhere streamed our wagons in caravan;\n And the Seven Nights and Days\nOf march and fast, retreat and fight,\nPinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight--\n Does the elm wood\nRecall the haggard beards of blood?\n\nThe battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed\n We followed (it never fell!)--\nIn silence husbanded our strength--\n Received their yell;\nTill on this slope we patient turned\n With cannon ordered well;\nReverse we proved was not defeat;\nBut ah, the sod what thousands meet!--\n Does Malvern Wood\nBethink itself, and muse and brood?\n\n _We elms of Malvern Hill\n Remember every thing;\n But sap the twig will fill;\n Wag the world how it will,\n Leaves must be green in Spring._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "the-martyr": { - "title": "“The Martyr”", - "body": "Good Friday was the day\n Of the prodigy and crime,\nWhen they killed him in his pity,\n When they killed him in his prime\nOf clemency and calm--\n When with yearning he was filled\n To redeem the evil-willed,\nAnd, though conqueror, be kind;\n But they killed him in his kindness,\n In their madness and their blindness,\nAnd they killed him from behind.\n\n _There is sobbing of the strong,\n And a pall upon the land;\n But the People in their weeping\n Bare the iron hand:\n Beware the People weeping\n When they bare the iron hand._\n\nHe lieth in his blood--\n The father in his face;\nThey have killed him, the Forgiver--\n The Avenger takes his place,\nThe Avenger wisely stern,\n Who in righteousness shall do\n What heavens call him to,\nAnd the parricides remand;\n For they killed him in his kindness,\n In their madness and their blindness.\nAnd his blood is on their hand.\n\n _There is sobbing of the strong,\n And a pall upon the land;\n But the People in their weeping\n Bare the iron hand:\n Beware the People weeping\n When they bare the iron hand._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "misgivings": { - "title": "“Misgivings”", - "body": "When ocean-clouds over inland hills\nSweep storming in late autumn brown,\nAnd horror the sodden valley fills,\nAnd the spire falls crashing in the town,\nI muse upon my country’s ills--\nThe tempest bursting from the waste of Time\nOn the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.\n\nNature’s dark side is heeded now--\n(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)--\nA child may read the moody brow\nOf yon black mountain lone.\nWith shouts the torrents down the gorges go,\nAnd storms are formed behind the storm we feel:\nThe hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "monody": { - "title": "“Monody”", - "body": "To have known him, to have loved him\nAfter loneness long;\nAnd then to be estranged in life,\nAnd neither in the wrong;\nAnd now for death to set his seal--\nEase me, a little ease, my song!\nBy wintry hills his hermit-mound\nThe sheeted snow-drifts drape,\nAnd houseless there the snow-bird flits\nBeneath the fir-trees’ crape:\nGlazed now with ice the cloistral vine\nThat hid the shyest grape.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dmitry-merezhkovsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dmitry Merezhkovsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Merezhkovsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn-in-a-summer-garden": { - "title": "“Autumn in a Summer Garden”", - "body": "On a soft and foggy path,\nRustling with autumn leaves,\nWearing the smile of young life,\nA child picks a strange bouquet.\n\nThe October night gets closer,\nAnd the dying bouquet gets brighter,\nAnd the lively eyes feast\nOn the exuberant hue of wilted leaves …\n\nThe more inconsolable the pale eve,\nThe merrier the child’s laughter,\nAkin to the song of a spring bird\nIn the cold dusk of the path.\n\nIts blissful season\nFinds delight in withering.\nTo it, the fall of leaves is happiness,\nAnd death only a game.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Edmund Grinbaldt", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "children-of-night": { - "title": "“Children of Night”", - "body": "Riveting our eyes\nOn the blanching east,\nChildren of sorrow, children of night,\nWe wait, to see if our prophet shall come.\nWe are scenting out the unseen,\nAnd, with hope in our hearts,\nDying, we grieve\nOver uncreated worlds.\nOur speech is daring,\nBut condemned to die\nAre the too early precursors\nOf a too tardy spring.\nResurrections of the buried\nAnd the rooster’s song\nIn the middle of the deep night,\nMorning’s cold--they are us.\nWe are the steps above the abyss,\nChildren of murk, awaiting the sun:\nOnce we see the light, as shadows,\nWe shall perish in its rays.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Albert C. Todd", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "christ-has-risen": { - "title": "“Christ has risen”", - "body": "“Christ has risen”--they chant in the temple,\nBut I feel sad … my soul is silent;\nThe world is full of blood and tears,\nAnd this hymn in front of the altars\nSounds so insulting.\n\nIf He were among us and could see,\nWhat our glorious age has achieved,\nHow brothers have learned to hate each other,\nHow humans are disgraced,\n\nAnd if here, in this luxurious temple,\nHe heard, “Christ is risen,”\nHow bitter would be the tears He would shed\nIn front of the crowd!\n\nOh brethren, let it come to pass\nThat in this world there would not be any masters or slaves,\nThe groans and curses would fall silent,\nAnd so would the clatter of swords, and the ringing of shackles,--\n\nOh, then, and only then, as a hymn of freedom,\nLet it thunder: “Christ has risen!”\nAnd all the peoples will answer us:\n“Christ has risen indeed!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "i-love-or-i-dont--despair-comes-easily-to-me": { - "title": "“I love or I don’t--despair comes easily to me …”", - "body": "I love or I don’t--despair comes easily to me:\nThough I may never be yours,\nNonetheless there’s such tenderness at times\nIn your eyes, as though I am loved.\n\nNot by me you’ll live, not by me you’ll suffer,\nAnd I will pass like the shadow of clouds;\nBut you will never forget me,\nAnd my distant call will not die out in you.\n\nWe dreamt of mysterious joy,\nAnd we knew in the dream that it was a dream\nBut nevertheless there’s agonizing sweetness\nFor you even in this, that I’m not he.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Albert C. Todd", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - } - } - }, - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "The sick, tired ice,\nThe sick and slushy snow …\nAnd all is flowing, flowing …\nHow blithesome is the vernal run\nOf mighty turbid waters!\nAnd cries the hoary snow,\nAnd dies the ice.\nThe air is full of bliss,\nAnd the bell is singing.\nFrom the arrows of spring will fall\nThe prison of free rivers,\nThe stronghold of grim winters--\nThe sick and darkened ice,\nThe tired, slushy snow …\nAnd the bell is singing\nThat my God is forever alive,\nThat Death itself shall die!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Edmund Grinbaldt", - "date": { - "year": 1894, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "holiday": "laetare_sunday" - } - } - }, - "quoth-nature": { - "title": "“Quoth nature …”", - "body": "Quoth nature unto me in tones of stately scorning:\n“Begone, and break not in upon my harmony!\nI weary of thy tears; mar not with anguished mourning\nThe calm wherewith my azure nights encompass me.”\n\n“All have I given thee,--life, youth and freedom given,\nBut thou in senseless feud hast flung it all away.\nNature hast thou with overweening murmurs riven,\nThou hast forgot thy mother,--go, I speak thee nay.”\n\n“Or dost thou rate as naught in heaven the starry lustre,\nAnd in the brooding woods the dusk where nothing speaks,\n…\nAnd all the rugged beauty on the cloudy peaks?”\n\n“All have I given thee,--this world is wonder-gifted,\nYet couldst thou not be happy, even as all the rest,\nHappy as woodland beast, and swallow, nether-lifted,\nAnd bud that sleeps amid its silvery dew-clad nest.”\n\n“By thy bewilderment the joy of life thou slayest,\nBegone, I loathe thee, full of weak and sickly dole …\nThou, with thy probing mind and haughtiness of soul,\nThy happiness without me seek, as best thou mayest.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Selver", - "date": { - "year": 1887 - } - } - }, - "the-eventide-fondled-the-earth-in-farewell": { - "title": "“The eventide fondled the earth in farewell …”", - "body": "The eventide fondled the earth in farewell,\nAnd in its suspense not a leaf dared to sway;\nThe creak of a cart far away rose and fell,\nStars marshalled aquiver in silent array.\n\nClear-blue is the sky,--deep and strange is its guise;\nBut look not upon it with glances that crave,\nBut seek not therein the revealment you prize,--\nClear-blue is the sky, but as mute as the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Selver", - "date": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-merton": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Merton", - "birth": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 91 - }, - "poems": { - "1941": { - "title": "“1941”", - "body": "The white, the silent stars\nDrive their wheeling ring,\nCrane down out of the tall black air\nTo hear the swanworld sing.\n\nBut the long, deep knife is in,\n(O bitter, speechless earth)\nThroat grows tight, voice thin,\nBlood gets no regrowth,\n\nAs night devours our days,\nDeath puts out our eyes,\nTowns dry up and fare like tongues\nBut no voice prophesies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "advent": { - "title": "“Advent”", - "body": "Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,\nSkies, and be perfect!\nFly vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,\nAnd disappear.\nYou moon, be slow to go down,\nThis is your full!\n\nThe four white roads make off in silence\nTowards the four parts of the starry universe.\nTime falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.\nWe have become more humble than the rocks,\nMore wakeful than the patient hills.\n\nCharm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent, holy spheres,\nWhile minds, as meek as beasts,\nStay close at home in the sweet hay;\nAnd intellects are quicter than the flocks that feed by starlight.\n\nOh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys,\nYou skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,\nToward the planets’ stately setting,\n\nOh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "advice-to-a-young-prophet": { - "title": "“Advice to a Young Prophet”", - "body": "Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers\nEat insects. Here private lunatics\nYell and skip in a very dry country.\n\nOr where some haywire monument\nSome badfaced daddy of fear\nCommands an unintelligent rite.\n\nTo dance on the unlucky mountain,\nTo dance they go, and shake the sin\nOut of their feet and hands,\n\nFrenzied until the sudden night\nFalls very quiet, and magic sin\nCreeps, secret, back again.\n\nBadlands echo with omens of ruin:\nSeven are very satisfied, regaining possession:\n(Bring a little mescaline, you’ll get along!)\n\nThere’s something in your bones,\nThere’s someone dirty in your critical skin,\nThere’s a tradition in your cruel misdirected finger\nWhich you must obey, and scribble in the hot sand:\n\n“Let everybody come and attend\nWhere lights and airs are fixed\nTo teach and entertain. O watch the sandy people\nHopping in the naked bull’s-eye,\n\nShake the wildness out of their limbs,\nTry to make peace like John in skins\nElijah in the timid air\nor Anthony in tombs:\n\nPluck the imaginary trigger, brothers.\nShoot the devil: he’ll be back again!”\n\nAmerica needs these fatal friends\nOf God and country, to grovel in mystical ashes,\nPretty big prophets whose words don’t burn,\nFighting the strenuous imago all day long.\n\nOnly these lunatics, (O happy chance)\nOnly these are sent. Only this anaemic thunder\nGrumbles on the salt flats, in rainless night:\n\nO go home, brother, go home!\nThe devil’s back again,\nAnd magic Hell is swallowing flies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "and-the-children-of-birmingham": { - "title": "“And the Children of Birmingham”", - "body": "And the children of Birmingham\nWalked into the story\nOf Grandma’s pointed teeth\n(“Better to love you with”)\nReasonable citizens\nRose to exhort them all:\n“Return at once to schools of friendship.\nBuy in stores of love and law.”\n(And tales were told\nOf man’s best friend, the Law.)\n\nAnd the children of Birmingham\nWalked in the shadow Of Grandma’s devil\nSmack up against\nThe singing wall.\nFire and water\nPoured over everyone:\n“Hymns were extreme,\nSo there could be no pardon!”\n\nAnd old Grandma\nBegan the lesson\nOf everybody’s skin,\nEverybody’s fun:\n“Liberty may bite\nAn irresponsible race\nForever singing,”\nGrandma said,\n“Forever making love:\nLook at all the children!”\n\n(And tales were told\nOf man’s best friend, the Law.)\n\nAnd the children of Birmingham\nWalked into the fury Of Grandma’s hug:\nHer friendly cells\n(“Better to love you with.”)\nHer friendly officers\nAnd “dooms of love.”\n\nLaws had a very long day\nAnd all were weary.\n\nBut what the children did that time\nGave their town\nA name to be remembered!\n\n(And tales were told\nOf man’s best friend, the Law.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-annunciation": { - "title": "“The Annunciation”", - "body": "Ashes of paper, ashes of a world\nWandering, when fire is done:\nWe argue with the drops of rain!\n\nUntil one comes Who walks unseen\nEven in elements we have destroyed.\nDeeper than any nerve\nHe enters flesh and bone.\nPlanting His truth, He puts our substance on.\nAir, earth, and rain\nRework the frame that fire has ruined.\nWhat was dead is waiting for His Flame.\nSparks of His Spirit spend their seeds, and hide\nTo grow like irises, born before summertime.\nThese blue thinas bud in Israel.\n\nThe girl prays by the bare wall\nBetween the lamp and the chair.\n(Framed with an angel in our galleries\nShe has a richer painted room, sometimes a crown.\nYet seven pillars of obscurity\nBuild her to Wisdom’s house, and Ark, and Tower.\nShe is the Secret of another Testament\nShe owns their manna in her jar.)\n\nFifteen years old--\nThe flowers printed on her dress\nCease moving in the middle of her prayer\nWhen God, Who sends the messenger,\nMeets His messenger in her Heart.\nHer answer, between breath and breath,\nWrings from her innocence our Sacrament!\nIn her white body God becomes our Bread.\n\nIt is her tenderness\nHeats the dead world like David on his bed.\nTimes that were too soon criminal\nAnd never wanted to be normal\nEvade the beast that has pursued\nYou, me and Adam out of Eden’s wood.\nSuddenly we find ourselves assembled\nCured and recollected under several green trees.\n\nHer prudence wrestled with the Dove\nTo hide us in His cloud of steel and silver:\nThese are the mysteries of her Son.\nAnd here my heart, a purchased outlaw,\nPrays in her possession\nUntil her Jesus makes my heart\nSmile like a flower in her blameless hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "ash-wednesday": { - "title": "“Ash Wednesday”", - "body": "The naked traveller,\nStretching, against the iron dawn, the bowstrings of his eyes,\nStarves on the mad sierra.\n\nBut the sleepers,\nPrisoners in a lovely world of weeds,\nMake a small, red cry,\nAnd change their dreams.\n\nProud as the mane of the whinnying air,\nYet humble as the flakes of water\nOr the chips of the stone sun, the traveller\nIs nailed to the hill by the light of March’s razor;\n\nAnd when the desert barks, in a rage of love\nFor the noon of the eclipse,\nHe lies with his throat cut, in a frozen crater.\n\nThen the sleepers,\nPrisoners of a moonward power of tides,\nSlain by the stillness of their own reflections,\nSit up, in their graves, with a white cry,\nAnd die of terror at the traveller’s murder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "at-this-precise-moment-of-history": { - "title": "“At This Precise Moment of History”", - "body": "1.\n\nAt this precise moment of history\nWith Goody-two-shoes running for Congress\nWe are testing supersonic engines\nTo keep God safe in the cherry tree.\nWhen I said so in this space last Thursday\nI meant what I said: power struggles.\n\n\n2.\n\nYou would never dream of such corn. The colonials in sandalwood like running wide open and available for protection. You can throw them away without a refund.\n\n3.\n\nDr. Hanfstaengel who was not called Putzi except by those who did not know him is taped in the national archives. J. Edgar Hoover he ought to know\nAnd does know.\n\nBut calls Dr. Hanfstaengel Putzi nevertheless\nSomewhere on tape in the\nArchives.\n\nHe (Dr. H.) is not a silly man.\nHe left in disgust\nAbout the same time Shirley Temple\nSat on Roosevelt’s knee\nAn accomplished pianist\nA remembered personality.\nHe (Dr. H.) began to teach\nImmortal anecdotes\nTo his mother a Queen Bee\nIn the American colony.\n\n\n4.\n\nWhat is your attitude toward historical subjects?\n--Perhaps it’s their size!\n\n\n5.\n\nWhen I said this in space you would never believe\nCorn Colonel was so expatriated.\n--If you think you know,\nTake this wheel\nAnd become standard.\n\n\n6.\n\nShe is my only living mother\nThis bee of the bloody arts\nBandaging victims of Saturday’s dance\nLike a veritable sphinx\nIn a totally new combination.\n\n\n7.\n\nThe Queen Mother is an enduring vignette at an early age.\nNow she ought to be kept in submersible decompression chambers\n\nFor a while.\n\n\n8.\n\nWhat is your attitude toward historical subjects\nLike Queen Colonies?\n--They are permanently fortified\nFor shape retention.\n\n\n9.\n\nSolid shades\nSeven zippered pockets\nClose to my old place\nWaiting by the road\nBig disk brakes\nSpinoff\nZoom\nLong lights stabbing at the\nTwo together piggyback\nIn a stark sports roadster\n\nRegretting his previous outburst\nAl loads his Cadillac\nWith lovenests.\n\n\n10.\n\nShe is my only living investment\nShe examines the housing industry\nCounts 3.5 million postwar children\nTurning twenty-one\nAnd draws her own conclusion\nIn the commercial fishing field.\n\n\n11.\n\nVoice of little sexy ventriloquist mignonne:\n“Well I think all of us are agreed and sincerely I myself believe that honest people on both sides have got it all on tape. Governor Reagan thinks that nuclear wampums are a last resort that ought not to be resorted.” (But little mignonne went right to the point with: “We have a commitment to fulfill and we better do it quick.” No dupe she!)\nAll historians die of the same events at least twice.\n\n\n13.\n\nI feel that I ought to open this case with an apology. Dr. H. certainly has a beautiful voice. He is not a silly man. He is misunderstood even by Presidents.\n\n\n14.\n\nYou people are criticizing the Church but what are you going to put in her place? Sometime sit down with a pencil and paper and ask yourself what you’ve got that the Church hasn’t.\n\n\n15.\n\nNothing to add\nBut the big voice of a detective\nUsing the wrong first names\nIn national archives.\n\n\n16.\n\nShe sat in shocking pink with an industrial zipper specially designed for sitting on the knees of presidents in broad daylight. She spoke the president’s mind. “We have a last resort to be resorted and we better do it quick.” He wondered at what he had just said.\n\n\n17.\n\nIt was all like running wideopen in a loose gown\nWithout slippers\nAt least someplace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "aubade-harlem": { - "title": "“Aubade: Harlem”", - "body": "Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,\nThe lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,\nCrucify, against the fearful light,\nThe ragged dresses of the little children.\nSoon, in the sterile jungles of the waterpipes and ladders,\nThe bleeding sun, a bird of prey, will terrify the poor,\nThese will forget the unbelievable moon.\n\nBut in the cells of whiter buildings,\nWhere the glass dawn is brighter than the knives of surgeons,\nPaler than alcohol or ether, shinier than money,\nThe white men’s wives, like Pilate’s,\nCry in the peril of their frozen dreams:\n\n“Daylight has driven iron spikes,\nInto the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet:\nFour flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.”\n\nAlong the white halls of the clinics and the hospitals\nPilate evaporates with a cry:\nThey have cut down two hundred Judases,\nHanged by the neck in the opera houses and the museum.\n\nAcross the cages of the keyless aviaries,\nThe lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,\nCrucify, against the fearful light,\nThe ragged dresses of the little children.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1948 - } - } - }, - "aubade-the-city": { - "title": "“Aubade: The City”", - "body": "Now that the clouds have come like cattle\nTo the cold waters of the city’s river,\nAll the windows turn their scandalized expression\nToward the tide’s tin dazzle,\n\nAnd question, with their weak-eyed stare,\nThe riotous sun.\n\nFrom several places at a time\nCries of defiance,\nAs delicate as frost, as sharp as glass,\nRise from the porcelain buildings\nAnd break in the blue sky.\n\nThen, falling swiftly from the air,\nThe fragments of this fragile indignation\nRing on the echoing streets\nNo louder than a shower of pins.\n\nBut suddenly the bridges’ choiring cables\nJangle gently in the wind\nAnd play like quiet piano-strings.\n\nAll down the faces of the buildings\nWindows begin to close\nLike figures in a long division.\n\nThose whose eyes all night have simulated sleep,\nSuddenly stare, from where they lie, like wolves,\nTied in the tangle of the bedding,\n\nAnd listen for the waking blood\nTo flood the apprehensive silence of their flesh.\nThey fear the heart that now lies quenched may quicken,\nAnd start to romp against the rib,\nSoft and insistent as a secret bell.\n\nThey also fear the light will grow\nInto the windows of their hiding places, like a tree\nOf tropical flowers\nAnd put them, one by one, to flight.\n\nThen life will have to begin.\nPieces of paper, lying in the streets,\nWill start up, in the twisting wind,\nAnd fly like idiot birds before the faces of the crowds.\nAnd in the roaring buildings\nElevator doors will have begun\nTo clash like sabres.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "biography": { - "title": "“Biography”", - "body": "Oh read the verses of the loaded scourges,\nAnd what is written in their terrible remarks:\n“The Blood runs down the walls of Cambridge town,\nAs useless as the waters of the narrow rive--\nWhile pub and alley gamble for His vesture.”\n\nAlthough my life is written on Christ’s Body like a map,\nThe nails have printed in those open hands\nMore than the abstract names of sins,\nMore than the countries and the towns,\nThe names of streets, the numbers of the houses,\nThe record of the days and nights,\nWhen I have murdered Him in every square and street.\n\nLance and thorn, and scourge and nail\nHave more than made His Flesh my chronicle.\nMy journeys more than bite His bleeding feet.\n\nChrist, from my cradle, I had known You everywhere,\nAnd even though I sinned, I walked in You, and knew You were my world:\nYou were my France and England, My seas and my America:\nYou were my life and air, and yet I would not own You.\n\nOh, when I loved You, even while I hated You,\nLoving and yet refusing You in all the glories of Your universe\n\nIt was Your living Flesh I tore and trampled, not the air and earth:\nNot that You feel us, in created things,\nBut knowing You, in them, made every sin a sacrilege;\nAnd every act of greed became a desecration,\nSpoiled and dishonored You as in Your Eucharist.\n\nAnd yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime,\nAnd as each blow was paid with Blood,\nYou paid me also each great sin with greater graces.\nFor even as I killed You,\nYou made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company,\nStealing my sins into Your dying life,\nRobbing me even of my death.\n\nWhere, on what cross my agony will come\nI do not ask You:\nFor it is written and accomplished here,\nOn every Crucifix, on every altar.\nIt is my narrative that drowns and is forgotten\nIn Your five open Jordans,\nYour voice that cries my: _“Consummatum est.”_\n\nIf on Your Cross Your life and death and mine are one,\nLove teaches me to read, in You, the rest of a new history.\nI trace my days back to another childhood,\nExchanging, as I go,\nNew York and Cuba for Your Galilee,\nAnd Cambridge for Your Nazareth,\nUntil I come again to my beginning,\nAnd find a manger, star and straw,\nA pair of animals, some simple men,\nAnd thus I learn that I was born,\nNow not in France, but Bethlehem.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "birdcage-walk": { - "title": "“Birdcage Walk”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOne royal afternoon\nWhen I was young and easily surprised\nBy uncles coming from the park\nAt the command of nurses and of guards,\n\nI wondered, over trees and ponds,\nAt the sorry, rude walls\nAnd the white windows of the apartments.\n\n“These,” said my uncle, “are the tallest houses.”\n\n\n# II.\n\nYes, in the spring of my joy\nWhen I was visibly affected by a gaitered bishop,\nLarge and unsteady in the flagged yard,\nGuards, dogs and blackbirds fled on every hand.\n\n“He is an old one,” said uncle,\n“The gaiters are real.”\n\n\n# III.\n\nRippled, fistfed windows of your\nDun high houses! Then\nCome cages made of pretty willows\nWhere they put the palace girls!\nGreen ducks wade slowly from the marble water.\nOne swan reproves a saucy daughter.\n\nI consider my own true pond,\nLook for the beginning and the end.\nI lead the bishop down lanes and islands.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nYes, in the windows of my first existence\nBefore my yawns became seasons,\nWhen nurses and uncles were sure,\nChinese fowl fought the frosty water\nStartled by this old pontifex.\n\n“No bridge” (He smiled\nBetween the budding branches),\n“No crossing to the cage\nOf the paradise bird!”\n\nAstounded by the sermons in the leaves\nI cried, “No! No! The stars have higher houses!”\n\nKicking the robins and ganders\nFrom the floor of his insular world\nThe magic bishop leaned his blessing on the children.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThat was the bold day when\nMoved by the unexpected summons\nI opened all the palace aviaries\nAs by a king’s representative\nI was appointed fowler.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - } - } - }, - "the-blessed-virgin-mary-compared-to-a-window": { - "title": "“The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window”", - "body": "Because my will is simple as a window\nAnd knows no pride of original birth,\nIt is my life to die, like glass, by light:\nSlain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.\n\nBecause my love is simple as a window\nAnd knows no shame of original dust,\nI longed all night, (when I was visible) for dawn my death:\nWhen I would marry day, my Holy Spirit:\nAnd die by transsubstantiation into light.\n\nFor light, my lover, steals my life in secret.\nI vanish into day, and leave no shadow\nBut the geometry of my cross,\nWhose frame and structure are the strength\nBy which I die, but only to the earth,\nAnd am uplifted to the sky my life.\n\nWhen I became the substance of my lover,\n(Being obedient, sinless glass)\nI love all things that need my lover’s life,\nAnd live to give my newborn Morning to your quiet rooms,\n--Your rooms, that would be tombs,\nOr vaults of night, and death, and terror,\nFill with the clarity of living Heaven,\nShine with the rays of God’s Jerusalem:\nO shine, bright Sions!\n\nBecause I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit,\nThe sun rejoices in your jail, my kneeling Christian,\n(Where even now you weep and grin\nTo learn, from my simplicity, the strength of faith).\n\nTherefore do not be troubled at the judgements of the thunder,\nStay still and pray, still stay, my other son,\nAnd do not fear the armies and black ramparts\nOf the advancing and retreating rains:\nI’ll let no lightning kill your room’s white order.\n\nAlthough it is the day’s last hour,\nLook with no fear:\nFor the torn storm lets in, at the world’s rim,\nThree streaming rays as straight as Jacob’s ladder:\n\nAnd you shall see the sun, my Son, my Substance,\nCome to convince the world of the day’s end, and of the night,\nSmile to the lovers of the day in smiles of blood;\nFor though my love, He’ll be their Brother,\nMy light--the Lamb of their Apocalypse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "cana": { - "title": "“Cana”", - "body": "Once when our eyes were clean as noon, our rooms\nFilled with the joys of Cana’s feast:\nFor Jesus came, and His disciples, and His Mother,\nAnd after them the singers\nAnd some men with violins.\n\nOnce when our minds were Galilees,\nAnd clean as skies our faces,\nOur simple rooms were charmed with sun.\n\nOur thoughts went in and out in whiter coats than\nGod’s disciples’,\nIn Cana’s crowded rooms, at Cana’s tables.\n\nNor did we seem to fear the wine would fail:\nFor ready, in a row, to fill with water and a miracle,\nWe saw our earthen vessels, waiting empty.\nWhat wine those humble waterjars foretell!\n\nWine for the ones who, bended to the dirty earth,\nHave feared, since lovely Eden, the sun’s fire,\nYet hardly mumble, in their dusty mouths, one prayer.\n\nWine for old Adam, digging in the briars!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-candlemas-procession": { - "title": "“The Candlemas Procession”", - "body": "Lumen\nAd revelationem gentium.\n\nLook kindly, Jesus, where we come,\nNew Simeons, to kindle,\nEach at Your infant sacrifice his own life’s candle.\n\nAnd when Your flame turns into many tongues,\nSee how the One is multiplied, among us, hundreds!\nAnd goes among the humble, and consoles our sinful kindred.\n\nIt is for this we come,\nAnd, kneeling, each receive one flame:\nAd revelationem gentium.\n\nOur lives, like candles, spell this simple symbol:\nWeep like our bodily life, sweet work of bees,\nSweeten the world, with your slow sacrifice.\nAnd this shall be our praise:\nThat by our glad expense, our Father’s will\nBurned and consumed us for a parable.\n\nNor burn we now with brown and smoky flames, but bright\nUntil our sacrifice is done,\n(By which not we, but You are known)\nAnd then, returning to our Father, one by one,\nGive back our lives like wise and waxen lights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "candlemas" - } - } - }, - "canticle-for-the-blessed-virgin": { - "title": "“Canticle for the Blessed Virgin”", - "body": "Die, Boreas,\nAnd drown your ruins in the gaudy sea,\nDecember, clash your cymbals once again\nAnd put them away.\nThe crops come thronging from the ground.\nThe land is green with strength.\nThe harvests sing like confidence\nIn the ascetic earth.\nLet there be no more patience\nWith your iron music, death:\nStand, continents, and wear the spring your crown!\n\nThe ox-eyed land,\nThe muted lakes,\nThe cloudy groves that praise you,\nLady, with their blooms,\nFuse and destroy their lights\nAnd burn them into gold for you, great Virgin,\nCoining your honor in the glorious sun.\n\nThe skies speed up to meet you, and the seas\nSwim you the silver of their crests.\nIf you delay to come, we’ll see the meteors, by night,\nSkimming before your way,\nLighting the time of death’s dismay\nIn lights as lithe as animals.\nAnd God will blaze your pathway with the incandescent stars.\n\nBut oh! Queen of all grace and counsel,\nCause of our joy, Oh Clement Virgin, come:\nShow us those eyes as chaste as lightning,\nKinder than June and true as Scripture.\nHeal with your looks the poisons of the universe,\nAnd claim your Son’s regenerate world!\n\nBecause your Christ disposed Orion and Andromeda\nAnd ordered the clean spheres,\nAnd interplayed the chiming suns to be your toy,\n\nCharm you with antiphon and psalmody\nAnd canticle, and countersong;\n\nBecause your Christ\nFired the fair stars with argent for your raiment,\nAnd charged the sinner’s tears\nWith clean repentent lights--\n(As on the day you found me in the dens of libraries\nAnd crushed the jeweled head of heresy)--\nHe gave you every one of the redeemed to be your dowry\nAnd angels for your crown.\n\nCome from the compass quarter where the thunder sleeps\nAnd let the pity of those eyes\nRout all the armies of our million dangers\nHere where we lie in siege:\nFor you unlock the treasures of the bleeding Wood.\nYou hold the Mass-keys, and the locks of Calvary,\nAnd All-grace springs in the founts of your demand.\n\nLady, whose smiles are full of counsel and theology,\nNever have you withheld those seas of light\nWhose surf confounds the keenest eye.\nGrace me to be the soldier of your Scotus,\nArming my actions with the news\nOf your Immaculate command.\n\nYou, who have saved me from the ones about to break me\nOn the iron wheels of sin,\n\nAnd brought me from the torturer\nWith all the florins of the Parasceve:\nIf Christ will burn me clean\nOf my red-handed perjuries,\nWin me His Blood again, and blazon me His priest.\n\nBut if my hands that one time wore the stench of death\nAre too unworthy of the Liturgy\nThat speaks our deathless Pasch in veils of Bread,\nMake me, until my death, His priest in secret\nOffering Mass in all-day’s sacrifice.\n\nTeach me to take all grace\nAnd spring it into blades of act,\nGrow spears and sheaves of charity,\nWhile each new instant (new eternity),\nFlowering with clean and individual circumstance,\nSpeaks me the whisper of His consecrating Spirit.\nThen will obedience bring forth new Incarnations\nShining to God with the features of His Christ.\n\nTower, stars, and oh! You sun in Aries,\nShatter a way for her through the embattled weather,\nUntil the hills\nTidy their fields, and fill them full of flowers\nFor those Annunciations:\n\nAnd hell shall melt his onsets\nFaster than January’s brawling clouds\nDoomed by the music of her chariot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "carol": { - "title": "“Carol”", - "body": "Flocks feed by darkness with a noise of whispers,\nIn the dry grass of pastures,\nAnd lull the solemn night with their weak bells.\n\nThe little towns upon the rocky hills\nLook down as meek as children:\nBecause they have seen come this holy time.\n\nGod’s glory, now, is kindled gentler than low candlelight\nUnder the rafters of a barn:\nEternal Peace is sleeping in the hay,\nAnd Wisdom’s born in secret in a straw-roofed stable.\n\nAnd O! Make holy music in the stars, you happy angels.\nYou shepherds, gather on the hill.\nLook up, you timid flocks, where the three kings\nAre coming through the wintry trees;\n\nWhile we unnumbered children of the wicked centuries\nCome after with our penances and prayers,\nAnd lay them down in the sweet-smelling hay\nBeside the wise men’s golden jars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "chant-to-be-used-in-processions-around-a-site-with-furnaces": { - "title": "“Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with Furnaces”", - "body": "How we made them sleep and purified them\n\nHow we perfectly cleaned up the people and worked a big heater\n\nI was the commander I made improvements and installed a guaranteed system taking account of human weakness I purified and I remained decent\n\nHow I commanded\n\nI made cleaning appointments and then I made the travellers sleep and after that I made soap\n\nI was born into a Catholic family but as these people were not going to need a priest I did not become a priest I installed a perfectly good machine it gave satisfaction to many\n\nWhen trains arrived the soiled passengers received appointments for fun in the bathroom they did not guess\n\nIt was a very big bathroom for two thousand people it awaited arrival and they arrived safely\n\nThere would be an orchestra of merry widows not all the time much art\n\nIf they arrived at all they would be given a greeting card to send home taken care of with good jobs wishing you would come to our joke\n\nAnother improvement I made was I built the chambers for two thousand invitations at a time the naked votaries were disinfected with Zyklon B\n\nChildren of tender age were always invited by reason of their youth they were unable to work they were marked out for play\n\nThey were washed like the others and more than the others\n\nVery frequently women would hide their children in the piles of clothing but of course when we came to find them we would send the children into the chamber to be bathed\n\nHow often I commanded and made improvements and sealed the door on top there were flowers the men came with crystals I guaranteed the crystal parlor\n\nI guaranteed the chamber and it was sealed you could see through portholes\n\nThey waited for the shower it was not hot water that came through vents though efficient winds gave full satisfaction portholes showed this\n\nThe satisfied all ran together to the doors awaiting arrival it was guaranteed they made ends meet\n\nHow could I tell by their cries that love came to a full stop I found the ones I had made clean after about a half hour\n\nJewish male inmates then worked up nice they had rubber boots in return for adequate food I could not guess their appetite\n\nThose at the door were taken apart out of a fully stopped love by rubber male inmates strategic hair and teeth being used later for defense\n\nThen the males removed all clean love rings and made away with happy gold\n\nHow I commanded and made soap 12 lbs fat 10 quarts water 8 oz to a lb of caustic soda but it was hard to find any fat\n\nA big new firm promoted steel forks operating on a cylinder they got the contract and with faultless workmanship delivered very fast goods\n\n“For transporting the customers we suggest using light carts on wheels a drawing is submitted”\n\n“We acknowledge four steady furnaces and an emergency guarantee”\n\n“I am a big new commander operating on a cylinder elevate the purified materials boil for 2 to 3 hours and then cool”\n\nFor putting them into a test fragrance I suggested an express elevator operated by the latest cylinder it was guaranteed\n\nTheir love was fully stopped by our perfected ovens but the love rings were salvaged\n\nThanks to the satisfaction of male inmates operating the heaters without need of compensation our guests were warmed\n\nAll the while I had obeyed perfectly\n\nSo I was hanged in a commanding position with a full view of the site plant and grounds\n\nYou smile at my career but you would do as I did if you knew yourself and dared\n\nIn my day we worked hard we saw what we did our self-sacrifice was conscientious and complete our work was faultless and detailed\n\nDo not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-christmas-card": { - "title": "“A Christmas Card”", - "body": "When the white stars talk together like sisters\nAnd when the winter hills\nRaise their grand semblance in the freezing night,\nSomewhere one window\nBleeds like the brown eye of an open force.\n\nHills, stars,\nWhite stars that stand above the eastern stable.\n\nLook down and offer Him.\nThe dim adoring light of your belief.\nWhose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.\n\nShall not this Child\n(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)\nConquer the winter of our hateful century?\n\nAnd when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,\nLo, with what rapiers\nThose two loves fence and flame their brillancy!\n\nHere in this straw lie planned the fires\nThat will melt all our sufferings:\nHe is our Lamb, our holocaust!\n\nAnd one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,\nStamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,\nAnd one by one kneel down to look upon their Life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "the-dark-morning": { - "title": "“The Dark Morning”", - "body": "This is the black day when\nFog rides the ugly air:\nWater wades among the buildings\nTo the prisoner’s curled ear.\n\nThen rain, in thin sentences,\nSlakes him like danger,\nWhose heart is his Germany\nFevered with anger.\n\nThis is the dark day when\nLocks let the enemy in\nThrough all the coiling passages of\n(Curled ear) my prison!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1942, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Where are the merchants and the money-lenders\nWhose love sang in the wires between the seaports and the\ninland granaries?\n\nIs the old trader any safer than the sailor sent to drown\nCrossing the world‘s end in a wooden schooner?\nWhere are the generals who sacked the sunny cities\nAnd burned the cattle and the grain?\nOr is the politician any safer in his offices\nThan a soldier shot in the eye?\n\nTake time to tremble lest you come without reflection\nTo feel the furious mercies of my friendship,\n(Says death) because I come as quick as intuition.\n\nCliffs of your hangovers were never half so dizzy as my\ninfinite abyss:\nFlesh cannot wrestle with the waters that ire in the earth,\nNor spirit rest in icy clay!\n\nMore than the momentary night of faith, to the lost dead,\nShall be their never-ending midnight:\n\nYet all my power is conquered by a child’s “Hail Mary”\nAnd all my night forever lightened by one waxen candle!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dirge": { - "title": "“A Dirge”", - "body": "Some one who hears the bugle neigh will know\nHow cold it is, when sentries die by starlight.\n\nBut none who love to hear the hammering drum\nWill look, when the betrayer\nLaughs in the desert like a broken monument,\nRinging his tongue in the red bell of his head,\nGesturing like a flag.\n\nThe air that quivered after the earthquake\n(When God died like a thief)\nStill plays the ancient forums like pianos;\nThe treacherous wind, lover of the demented,\nWill harp forever in the haunted temples.\n\nWhat speeches do the birds make\nWith their beaks, to the desolate dead?\nAnd yet we love those carsick amphitheaters,\n\nNor hear our messenger come home from hell\nWith hands shot full of blood.\n\nNo one who loves the fleering fife, will feel\nThe light of morning stab his flesh,\n\nBut some who hear the trumpet’s raving, in the ruined sky,\nWill dread the burnished helmet of the sun\nWhose anger goes before the King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1942, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "dry-places": { - "title": "“Dry Places”", - "body": "No cars go by\nWhere dogs are barking at the desert.\nYet it is not twenty years since many lamps\nShed their juices in this one time town\nAnd stores grew big lights, like oranges and pears.\n\nNow not one lame miner\nSits on the rotten verandah,\nWorks in the irons where\nJudas’ shadow dwells.\nYet I could hew a city\nFrom the side of their hill.\n\nO deep stone covert where the dusk\nIs full of lighted beasts\nAnd the mad stars preach wars without end:\nWhose bushes and grasses live without water,\n\nThere the skinny father of hate rolls in his dust\nAnd if the wind should shift one leaf\nThe dead jump up and bark for their ghosts:\nTheir dry bones want our penniless souls.\n\nBones, go back to your baskets.\nGet your fingers out of my clean skin.\nRest in your rainless death until your own souls\nCome back in the appointed way and sort you out from your remains.\n\nWe who are still alive will wring a few green blades\nFrom the floor of this valley\nThough ploughs abhor your metal and your clay.\nRather than starve with you in rocks without oasis,\n\nWe will get up and work your loam\nUntil some prayer or some lean sentence\nBleeds like the quickest root they ever cut.\n\nFor we cannot forget the legend of the world’s child-hood\nOr the track to the dogwood valley\nAnd Adam our Father’s old grass farm\nWherein they gave the animals names\nAnd knew Christ was promised first without scars\nWhen all God’s larks called out to Him\nIn their wild orchard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "duns-scotus": { - "title": "“Duns Scotus”", - "body": "Striking like lightning to the quick of the real world\nScotus has mined all ranges to their deepest veins:\nBut where, oh, on what blazing mountain of theology\nAnd in what Sinai’s furnace\nDid God refine the gold?\n\nWho ruled those arguments in their triumphant order\nAnd armed them with their strict celestial light?\nSee the lance-lightning, blade-gliter, banner-progress\nAs love advances, company by company\nIn sunlit teams his clean embattled reasons,\n\nUntil the firmament, with high heavenly marvel\nViews in our crystal souls her blue embodiment,\nUnfurls a thousand flags above our heads--\nIt is the music of Our Lady’s army!\n\nFor Scotus is her theologian,\nNor has there ever been a braver chivalry than his precision.\nHis thoughts are skies of cloudless peace\nBright as the vesture of her grand aurora\nFilled with the rising Christ.\n\nBut we, a weak, suspicious generation,\nLoving emotion, hating prayer,\nWe are not worthy of his wisdom.\nCreeping like beasts between the mountain‘s feet\nWe look for laws in the Arabian dust.\nWe have no notion of his freedom\n\nWhose acts despise the chains of choice and passion.\nWe have no love for his beautitude\nWhose act renounces motion:\nWhose love flies home forever\nAs silver as felicity,\nWorking and quiet in the dancelight of an everlasting arrow.\n\nLady, the image of whose heaven\nSings in the might of Scotus’ reasoning:\nThere is no line of his that has not blazed your glory in the schools,\nThough in dark words, without romance,\nCalling us to swear you our liege.\n\nLanguage was far too puny for his great theology:\nBut, oh! His thought strode through those words\nBright as the conquering Christ\nBetween the clouds His enemies:\nAnd in the clearing storm and Sinai’s dying thunder\nScotus comes out, and shakes his golden locks\nAnd sings like the African sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "blessed_john_duns_scotus" - } - } - }, - "earthquake": { - "title": "“Earthquake”", - "body": "Go tell the earth to shake\nAnd tell the thunder\nTo wake the sky\nAnd tear the clouds apart.\nTell my people to come out\nAnd wonder\nWhere the old world is gone,\nFor a new world is born,\nAnd all my people\nShall be one.\n\nSo tell the earth to shake.\nWith marching feet\nOf messengers of peace,\nProclaim my law of love\nTo every nation,\nEvery race.\n\nFor the old wrongs are over,\nThe old days are done;\nA new world is rising\nWhere my people shall be one.\n\nFor the old world is ended,\nThe old sky is torn\nApart. A new day is born:\nThey hate no more,\nThey do not go to war any more.\nMy people shall be one.\n\nAnd say:\nThe old wrongs are over,\nThe old ways are done;\nThere shall be no more hate\nAnd no oppression.\nThe old wrongs are gone,\nMy people shall be one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "east-with-ibn-battuta": { - "title": "“East with Ibn Battuta”", - "body": "1. _Cairo 1326_\n\nCloisters (khanqahs) of Darvishes\nBuilt by aristocrats\nHave silver rings on their doors\nThe mystics sit down to eat\nEach from his private bowl\nEach drinks\nFrom his own cup\nThey are given\nChanges of clothing\nAnd a monthly allowance\nOn Thursday nights\nThey are given sugar\nSoap and oil\nFor their lamps\nAnd the price of a bath.\n\nIn the great cemetery\nThey build chambers\nPavilions\nHire singers\nTo chant the Koran\nDay and night among the tombs\nWith pleasant voices.\n\nConvent at Dayr at-Tin:\nA piece of the Prophet’s\nWooden basin with the pencil\nWith which he applied kohl\nThe awl\nWith which he sewed his sandals\nBought by the founder\nFor a hundred thousand dirhams.\n\n\n2. _Syria_\n\nMa’arra and Sarmín: towns\nOf abominable Shi’ites\nWho hate the Ten Companions\nAnd every person called Omar\n\nIn Sarmín (where scented soap\nIs made and exported\nTo Damascus and Cairo)\nThese heretics so hate the Ten\nThey will not even say “Ten”\nTheir brokers at auctions\nWhen they come to “ten”\nSay “Nine-plus-one”\n\nOne day a faithful Turk\nAt one of their markets\nHeard the broker call “Nine-plus-one”\nHe went for him with a club, shouting\n“You bastard, say TEN!”\n\n“Ten with a club”\nWept the broker.\n\n\n3. _The Nusayris_\n\nThese heretics hate all true believers and when ordered by the Sultan\nTo build mosques build them far from their homes\nKeep asses and cattle in them let them fall into disrepair.\n\nIf a true believer coming from another country\nStops in a ruined mosque and sings the call to prayer\nThe infidels say: “Stop braying,\nWe will bring you a little hay.”\n\nOnce a stranger came to the Nusayris and told them he was the Mahdi\nHe promised to divide Syria among them\nGiving each one a city or a town.\nHe gave them olive leaves and said:\n“These will bring you success. These leaves\nAre warrants of your appointment.”\n\nThey went forth into city and town\nAnd when arrested, each said to the Governor:\n“The Imám al-Mahdi has come. He has given me this town!”\n\nThe Governor would then reply: “Show me your warrant”\n\nEach one then produced his olive leaves\nAnd was flogged.\n\nSo the stranger told the heretics to fight:\n“Go with myrtle rods,” he said\n“Instead of swords. The rods\nWill turn to swords at the moment of battle.”\n\nThey entered a town on Friday when the men were at the mosque.\nThey raped the women and the Muslims\nCame running out with swords\nAnd cut them to pieces.\n\nNews was sent to the capital by carrier pigeon. The Governor\nMoved out with an army. Twenty thousand heretics\nWere slaughtered. The rest hid in the mountains.\nThey offered one dinar per head if they were spared.\nThis news went by pigeon to the Sultan\nWho said: “Kill them.”\n\nBut the General\nSaid these people could be useful\nWorking on the land\nAnd their lives were spared.\n\n\n4. _Mecca_\n\n“The Meccans are very elegant and clean in their dress, and most of them wear white garments, which you always see fresh and snowy. They use a great deal of perfume and kohl and make free use of toothpicks of green arák-wood.”\n\n“The Meccan women are extraordinarily beautiful and very pious and modest. They too make great use of perfumes to such a degree that they will spend the night hungry in order to buy perfumes with the price of their food.”\n\n“They visit the mosque every Thursday night, wearing their finest apparel; and the whole sanctuary is saturated with the smell of their perfume. When one of these women goes away the odour of the perfume clings to the place after she has gone.”\n\n\n5. _Isfahan_\n\nIn Isfahan the fair\nSurrounded by orchards\n(Apricots and quinces\nPears and melons)\nThe people out-do one another\nIn banquets\n“In the preparation for which\nThey display all their resources”\nOne corporation entertained another with viands\nCooked over candles\n“The guests returned the invitation\nAnd cooked their viands with silk.”\n\n\n6. _Delhi_\n\nIn the Sultan’s apartments\nI saw a Júgí\nSitting in midair\nI fell in a faint\nThey had to give me a drink\nTo revive me\n\nAnd there he was\nStill sitting in midair\nHis companion\nTook a sandal from a bag\nBeat it on the ground\nTil it rose in the air\nAll by itself and poised\nOver the floating one\nAnd it began hitting him\nOn the back of the neck\nUntil he floated down\nAnd landed.\n\n“I would tell them to do something else,”\nSaid the Sultan, “If I did not fear\nFor your reason.”\n\n\n7. _Calicut_\n\nChinese vessels at anchor in the harbor\nOne of the largest in the world. Malabar\nCoast of ginger pepper spice\nFour decks with cabins saloons\nMerchants of Canton Sumatra\nCeylon stay locked in cabins\nWith wives and slave girls\nSailors bring their boys to sea\nCultivate salads and ginger\nIn wooden vats\n\nIn Calicut I missed my boat\nTo China and my slave\nGirls were all stolen by the King\nOf Sumatra and my companions\nWere scattered over China\nSumatra and Bengal\n\nWhen I saw what had happened\nI sailed for the Maldives\nWhere all the inhabitants\nAre Muslims\n\nLive on red fish lightly cooked\nOr smoked in palmleaf baskets\nIt tastes like mutton\n\nThese natives wear no pants\nOnly aprons\nBathe twice a day\nUse sandalwood and do not fight\nTheir armor is prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "an-elegy-for-five-old-ladies": { - "title": "“An Elegy for Five Old Ladies”", - "body": "(Newton, Mass., April 20: Five women ranging in age from 80 to 96 drowned this afternoon when a driverless car rolled across a rest home lawn and sank in Crystal Lake … the new york times)\n\nLet us forget that it is spring and celebrate the riderless will of five victims.\nOld companions are sitting silent in the home. Five of their number have suddenly gone too far; as if waifs,\nAs if orphans were to swim without license. Their ride was not lucky. It took them very far out of bounds.\nMrs. Watson said she saw them all go at three-forty-five. Their bell had rung too loud and too late.\nIt was a season when water is too cold for anyone, and is especially icy for an old person.\nThe brazen sedan was not to be trusted. The wheels went too well for one short and straight journey. It was the last: the doors did not open.\nDimly and too late they saw themselves on a very wicked lawn. May God have mercy on their recreation!\nLet us accordingly pay homage to five now legendary persons, the very chaste daughters of one unlucky ride.\nLet the perversity of a machine become our common study, while I name loudly five loyal spouses of death!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "elegy-for-the-monastery-barn": { - "title": "“Elegy for the Monastery Barn”", - "body": "As though an aged person were to wear\nToo gay a dress\nAnd walk about the neighborhood\nAnnouncing the hour of her death,\n\nSo now, one summer day’s end,\nAt suppertime, when wheels are still,\nThe long barn suddenly puts on the traitor, beauty,\nAnd hails us with a dangerous cry,\nFor: “Look!” she calls to the country,\n“Look how fast I dress myself in fire!”\n\nHad we half guessed how long her spacious shadows\nHarbored a woman’s vanity\nWe would be less surprised to see her now\nSo loved, and so attended, and so feared.\n\nShe, in whose airless heart\nWe burst our veins to fill her full of hay,\nNow stands apart.\nShe will not have us near her. Terribly,\nSweet Christ, how terribly her beauty burns us now!\n\nAnd yet she has another legacy,\nMore delicate, to leave us, and more rare.\n\nWho knew her solitude?\nWho heard the peace downstairs\nWhile flames ran whispering among the rafters?\nWho felt the silence, there,\nThe long, hushed gallery\nClean and resigned and waiting for the fire?\n\nLook! They have all come back to speak their summary:\nFifty invisible cattle, the past years\nAssume their solemn places one by one.\nThis is the little minute of their destiny.\nHere is their meaning found. Here is their end.\n\nLaved in the flame as in a Sacrament\nThe brilliant walls are holy\nIn their first-last hour of joy.\n\nFly from within the barn! Fly from the silence\nOf this creature sanctified by fire!\nLet no man stay inside to look upon the Lord!\nLet no man wait within and see the Holy\nOne sitting in the presence of disaster\nThinking upon this barn His gentle doom!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-evening-of-the-visitation": { - "title": "“The Evening of the Visitation”", - "body": "Go, roads, to the four quarters of our quiet distance,\nWhile you, full moon, wise queen,\nBegin your evening journey to the hills of heaven,\nAnd travel no less stately in the summer sky\nThan Mary, going to the house of Zachary.\n\nThe woods are silent with the sleep of doves,\nThe valleys with the sleep of streams,\nAnd all our barns are happy with peace of cattle gone to rest.\nStill wakeful, in the fields, the shocks of wheat\nPreach and say prayers:\nYou sheaves, make all your evensongs as sweet as ours,\nWhose summer world, all ready for the granary and barn,\nSeems to have seen, this day,\nInto the secret of the Lord’s Nativity.\n\nNow at the fall of night, you shocks,\nStill bend your heads like kind and humble kings\nThe way you did this golden morning when you saw God’s\nMother passing,\nWhile all our windows fill and sweeten\nWith the mild vespers of the hay and barley.\n\nYou moon and rising stars, pour on our barns and houses\nYour gentle benedictions.\nRemind us how our Mother, with far subtler and more holy\ninfluence,\nBlesses our rooves and eaves,\nOur shutters, lattices and sills,\nOur doors, and floors, and stairs, and rooms, and bedrooms,\nSmiling by night upon her sleeping children:\nO gentle Mary! Our lovely Mother in heaven!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "visitation" - } - } - }, - "evening": { - "title": "“Evening”", - "body": "Now the lone world is streaky as a wall of marble\nWith veins of clear and frozen snow.\nThere is no bird song there, no hare’s track\nNo badger working in the russet grass:\nAll the bare fields are silent as eternity.\n\nAnd the whole herd is home in the long barn.\nThe brothers come, with hoods about their faces,\nFollowing their plumes of breath\nLugging the gleaming buckets one by one.\n\nThis was a day when shovels would have struck\nFull flakes of fire out of the land like rock:\nAnd ground cries out like iron beneath our boots\n\nWhen all the monks come in with eyes as clean as the cold sky\nAnd axes under their arms,\nStill paying out Ave Marias\nWith rosaries between their bleeding fingers.\n\nWe shake the chips out of our robes outside the door\nAnd go to hide in cowls as deep as clouds,\nBowing our shoulders in the church’s shadow, lean and whipped,\nTo wait upon your Vespers, Mother of God!\n\nAnd we have eyes no more for the dark pillars or the freezing windows,\nEars for the rumorous cloister or the chimes of time above our heads:\nFor we are sunken in the summer of our adoration,\nAnd plunge, down, down into the fathoms of our secret joy\nThat swims with indefinable fire.\nAnd we will never see the copper sunset\nLinger a moment, like an echo, on the frozen hill\nThen suddenly die an hour before the Angelus.\n\nFor we have found our Christ, our August\nHere in the zero days before Lent--\nWe are already binding up our sheaves of harvest\nBeating the lazy liturgy, going up with exultation\nEven on the eve of our Ash Wednesday,\nAnd entering our blazing heaven by the doors of the Assumption!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "mardi_gras" - } - } - }, - "fable-for-a-war": { - "title": "“Fable for a War”", - "body": "The old Roman sow\nBears a new litter now\nTo fatten for a while\nOn the same imperial swill.\nThe cannibal wolf will dig\nAnd root out Spanish bones beside the pig.\n\nGermany has reared\nA rare ugly bird\nTo screech a sour song\nIn the German tongue:\nTell me if there be\nA sparrowhawk for such birds as he?\n\nThe parrots lift their beaks\nAnd fill the air with shrieks.\nAmbassador is sent\nFrom the parrots’ parliament:\n“Oh see how fine I fly\nAnd nibble crackers got in Germany.”\n\nEurope is a feast\nFor every bloody beast:\nJackals will grow fat\nOn the bones after that.\nBut in the end of all\nNone but the crows can sing the funeral.\n\nGermany has reared\nA rare ugly bird,\nBut crows ate Roman pig\nBefore this bird was egg.\nAnd in the end of all\nCrows will come back and sing the funeral.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fall": { - "title": "“The Fall”", - "body": "There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there\nYou do not enter except without a story.\n\nTo enter there is to become unnameable.\n\nWhoever is there is homeless for he has no door and no identity with which to go out and to come in.\n\nWhoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn:\nNo disguise will avail him anything\n\nSuch a one is neither lost nor found.\n\nBut he who has an address is lost.\n\nThey fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!\n\nThey find themselves in streets. They are licensed\nTo proceed from place to place\nThey now know their own names\nThey can name several friends and know\nTheir own telephones must some time ring.\n\nIf all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing:\nIf all cities explode and fly away in dust\nYet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and number for everyone.\n\nThere is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes:\nSuch security can business buy!\n\nWho would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?\nYet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.\nThey bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing:\nThis is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-flight-into-egypt": { - "title": "“The Flight into Egypt”", - "body": "Through every precinct of the wintry city\nSquadroned iron resounds upon the streets;\nHerod’s police\nMake shudder the dark steps of the tenements\nAt the business about to be done.\n\nNeither look back upon Thy starry country,\nNor hear what rumors crowd across the dark\nWhere blood runs down those holy walls,\nNor frame a childish blessing with Thy hand\nTowards that fiery spiral of exulting souls!\n\nGo, Child of God, upon the singing desert,\nWhere, with eyes of flame,\nThe roaming lion keeps thy road from harm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "follow-my-ways-and-i-will-lead-you": { - "title": "“Follow My Ways and I Will Lead You”", - "body": "Follow my ways and I will lead you\nTo golden-haired suns,\nLogos and music, blameless joys,\nInnocent of questions\nAnd beyond answers.\nFor I, Solitude, am thine own Self:\nI, Nothingness, am thy All.\nI, Silence, am thy Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-m-on-a-cold-grey-morning": { - "title": "“For M. on a Cold Grey Morning”", - "body": "A grey good morning and rain\nAnd melting snow\nFar from any help\nOr love, I am warmer\nAt least wanting you.\n\nSorry in the grey\nWeather without lights\nFar from any other center\nI nurse one inner lamp\nOur common need\nWhich is our common presence\n\nIt burns alone\nAnd still\nIn the wet dark and for us,\nLighting a dry place in me\nI do not know\nBecause it is myself\nLove’s inner cell\nWhere I am glad to be a prisoner\nSince I am prisoner with you.\n\nWhile you come back to life in distant rain\nLooking perhaps at the dark river\nWith blurred eyes\nStill full of dreams\nAnd think of me in my hills,\nYou wake in me, darling.\n\nWe are nearer than we know\nLove has another\nPlace of its own\nNearer to you than hill or city:\nNearer than your own mirror\nYou wake in another room\nAnd the bed where you slept\nIs a nest in my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "for-my-brother": { - "title": "“For My Brother”", - "body": "_Reported missing in action, 1943_\n\nSweet brother, if I do not sleep\nMy eyes are flowers for your tomb;\nAnd if I cannot eat my bread,\nMy fasts shall live like willows where you died.\nIf in the heat I find no water for my thirst,\nMy thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.\n\nWhere, in what desolate and smokey country,\nLies your poor body, lost and dead?\nAnd in what landscape of disaster\nHas your unhappy spirit lost its road?\n\nCome, in my labor find a resting place\nAnd in my sorrows lay your head,\nOr rather take my life and blood\nAnd buy yourself a better bed--\nOr take my breath and take my death\nAnd buy yourself a better rest.\n\nWhen all the men of war are shot\nAnd flags have fallen into dust,\nYour cross and mine shall tell men still\nChrist died on each, for both of us.\n\nFor in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,\nAnd Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:\nThe money of Whose tears shall fall\nInto your weak and friendless hand,\nAnd buy you back to your own land:\nThe silence of Whose tears shall fall\nLike bells upon your alien tomb.\nHear them and come: they call you home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "fragment": { - "title": "“Fragment”", - "body": "When we are alone\nWithin the inner wood\nBeyond the trackless ways\nIn elemental sleep\n\nThough evening towns begin to burn\nAs copper as chrysanthemums\nAnd the far cities flower\nTwined in a map of incandescent wires\nNo voice from those abounding lights\nReddens the darkness of our rendezvous.\n\nNo radio has arrows that can find us\nWinged after us with aimless jealousy into the night, our screen.\n\nIn the night of my penniless Genesis\nThe worlds are all too old:\nAnd cities that enchanted me\nDie like the clouds, the children of the sea.\n\nFor no one finds us anymore, Beloved,\nCradled in the sounding night, the new creation\nThat you have made for us alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-legend-of-st-clement": { - "title": "“From the Legend of St. Clement”", - "body": "I have seen the sun\nSpilling its copper petals on the Black Sea\nBy the base of the prisoners’ cliff\nWhere, from the acts of martyrs,\nTall poems grow up like buildings.\n\nDeep in the wall of the wounded mountain\n(Where seas no longer frown)\nThe songs of the martyrs come up like cities or buildings.\nTheir chains shine with hymns\nAnd their hands cut down the giant blocks of stone.\n\nPoetry, psalms\nFlower with a huge architecture\nRaising their grandeur on the gashed cape.\nWords of God blaze like a disaster\nIn the windows of their prophetic cathedral.\nBut the sighs of the deep multitude\nGrow out of the mountain’s heart as clean as vines.\n\nO martyrs! O tremendous prisoners!\nBurying your murder in this marble hill!\nThe Lamb shall soon stand\nWhite as a shout against the sky:\nHis feet shall soon strike rainbows from the rock.\nThe cliffs give up their buried streams.\nThrow down the chains of your wrists, prisoners!\nDrink, and swim!\n\nThe winds have carried your last sentences\nAcross Ukraine.\nYour poetry shall grow in distant places.\nAsia, Greece, Egypt, England know your name.\nYour hymns shall stand like vineyards\nAnd swing with fruit in other worlds, in other centuries.\n\nAnd your ecstasy shall make shade,\nFoliage for summers unforeseen\nTo cover travellers in continents you have not known\nWhen the temples have fallen,\nThe theaters cemented in your blood have long ago fallen.\n\nYour joy echoes across the carved ridge\nPlays across mountains\nStands like fleets or islands\nSailing the seas to Greece\nAnd after twenty times one hundred\nYears of repercussion\nYour waters shatter the land at my feet with seas forever young.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1949, - "month": "february" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_clement" - } - } - }, - "hagia-sofia": { - "title": "“Hagia Sofia”", - "body": "# I. _Dawn. The Hour of Lauds._\n\nThere is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.\n\nI am awakened, I am born again at the voice of this, my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.\n\nLet us suppose I am a man lying asleep in a hospital. I am indeed this man lying asleep. It is July the second, the Feast of Our Lady’s Visitation. A Feast of Wisdom.\n\nAt five-thirty in the morning I am dreaming in a very quiet room when a soft voice awakens me from my dream. I am like all mankind awakening from all the dreams that ever were dreamed in all the nights of the world. It is like the One Christ awakening in all the separate selves that ever were separate and isolated and alone in all the lands of the earth. It is like all minds coming back together into awareness from all distractions, cross-purposes and confusions, into unity of love. It is like the first morning of the world (when Adam, at the sweet voice of Wisdom awoke from nonentity and knew her), and like the Last Morning of the world when all the fragments of Adam will return from death at the voice of Hagia Sophia, and will know where they stand.\n\nSuch is the awakening of one man, one morning, at the voice of a nurse in the hospital. Awakening out of languor and darkness, out of helplessness, out of sleep, newly confronting reality and finding it to be gentleness.\n\nIt is like being awakened by Eve. It is like being awakened by the Blessed Virgin. It is like coming forth from primordial nothingness and standing in clarity, in Paradise.\n\nIn the cool hand of the nurse there is the touch of all life, the touch of Spirit.\n\nThus Wisdom cries out to all who will hear (Sapientia clamitat in plateis) and she cries out particularly to the little, to the ignorant and the helpless.\n\nWho is more little, who is more poor than the helpless man who lies asleep in his bed without awareness and without defense? Who is more trusting than he who must entrust himself each night to sleep? What is the reward of his trust? Gentleness comes to him when he is most helpless and awakens him, refreshed, beginning to be made whole. Love takes him by the hand, and opens to him the doors of another life, another day.\n\n(But he who has defended himself, fought for himself in sickness, planned for himself, guarded himself, loved himself alone and watched over his own life all night, is killed at last by exhaustion. For him there is no newness. Everything is stale and old.)\n\nWhen the helpless one awakens strong as the voice of mercy, it is as if Life his Sister, as if the Blessed Virgin, (his own flesh, his own sister), as if Nature made wise by God’s Art and Incarnation were to stand over him and invite him with unutterable sweetness to be awake and to live. This is what it means to recognize Hagia Sophia.\n\n\n# II. _Early Morning. The Hour of Prime._\n\nO blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere!\n\nWe do not hear the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine.\n\nWe do not hear mercy, or yielding love, or non-resistance, or non-reprisal. In her there are no reasons and no answers. Yet she is the candor of God’s light, the expression of His simplicity.\n\nWe do not hear the uncomplaining pardon that bows down the innocent visages of flowers to the dewy earth. We do not see the Child who is prisoner in all the people, and who says nothing. She smiles, for though they have bound her, she cannot be a prisoner. Not that she is strong, or clever, but simply that she does not understand imprisonment.\n\nThe helpless one, abandoned to sweet sleep, him the gentle one will awake: Sophia.\n\nAll that is sweet in her tenderness will speak to him on all sides in everything, without ceasing, and he will never be the same again. He will have awakened not to conquest and dark pleasure but to the impeccable pure simplicity of One consciousness in all and through all: one Wisdom, one Child, one Meaning, one Sister.\n\nThe stars rejoice in their setting, and in the rising of the Sun. The heavenly lights rejoice in the going forth of one man to make a new world in the morning, because he has come out of the confused primordial dark night into consciousness. He has expressed the clear silence of Sophia in his own heart. He has become eternal.\n\n\n# III. _High Morning. The Hour of Tierce._\n\nThe Sun burns in the sky like the Face of God, but we do not know his countenance as terrible. His light is diffused in the air and the light of God is diffused by Hagia Sophia.\n\nWe do not see the Blinding One in black emptiness. He speaks to us gently in ten thousand things, in which His light is one fullness and one Wisdom. Thus He shines not on them but from within them. Such is the loving-kindness of Wisdom.\n\nAll the perfections of created things are also in God; and therefore He is at once Father and Mother. As Father He stands in solitary might surrounded by darkness. As Mother His shining is diffused, embracing all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light. The Diffuse Shining of God is Hagia Sophia. We call her His “glory.” In Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and as love.\n\n(When the recluses of fourteenth-century England heard their Church Bells and looked out upon the wolds and fens under a kind sky, they spoke in their hearts to “Jesus our Mother.” It was Sophia that had awakened in their childlike hearts.)\n\nPerhaps in a certain very primitive aspect Sophia is the unknown, the dark, the nameless Ousia. Perhaps she is even the Divine Nature, One in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And perhaps she is in infinite light unmanifest, not even waiting to be known as Light. This I do not know. Out of the silence Light is spoken. We do not hear it or see it until it is spoken.\n\nIn the Nameless Beginning, without Beginning, was the Light. We have not seen this Beginning. I do not know where she is, in this Beginning. I do not speak of her as a Beginning, but as a manifestation.\n\nNow the Wisdom of God, Sophia, comes forth, reaching from “end to end mightily.” She wills to be also the unseen pivot of all nature, the center and significance of all the light that is in all and for all. That which is poorest and humblest, that which is most hidden in all things is nevertheless most obvious in them, and quite manifest, for it is their own self that stands before us, naked and without care.\n\nSophia, the feminine child, is playing in the world, obvious and unseen, playing at all times before the Creator. Her delights are to be with the children of men. She is their sister. The core of life that exists in all things is tenderness, mercy, virginity the Light, the Life considered as passive, as received, as given, as taken, as inexhaustibly renewed by the Gift of God. Sophia is Gift, is Spirit, Donum Dei. She is God-given and God Himself as Gift. God as all, and God reduced to Nothing: inexhaustible nothingness. Exinanivit semetipsum. Humility as the source of unfailing light.\n\nHagia Sophia in all things is the Divine Light reflected in them, considered as a spontaneous participation, as their invitation to the Wedding Feast.\n\nSophia is God’s sharing of Himself with creatures. His outporing, and the Love by which He is given, and known, held and loved.\n\nShe is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight. In her they prosper. In her they glorigy God. In her they rejoice to reflect Him. In her they are united with him. She is the union between them. She is the Love that unites them. She is life as communion, life as thanksgiving, life as praise, life as festival, life as glory.\n\nBecause she receives perfectly there is in her no stain. She is love without blemish, and gratitude without self-complacency. All things praise her by being themselves and by sharing in the Wedding Feast. She is the Bride and the Feast and the Wedding.\n\nThe feminine principle in the world is the inexhaustible source of creative realizations of the Father’s glory. She is His manifestation in radiant splendor! But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.\n\nSophia is the mercy of God in us. She is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace. She is the inexhaustible fountain of kindness, and would almost seem to be, in herself, all mercy. So she does in us a greater work than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of pardon, the work of transformation from brightness to brightness tamquam a Domini Spiritu. She is in us the yielding and tender counterpart of the power, justice and creative dynamism of the Father.\n\n\n# IV. _Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina._\n\nNow the Blessed Virgin Mary is the one created being\nwho enacts and shows forth in her life all that is hidden in Sophia.\nBecause of this she can be said to be a personal manifestation\nof Sophia, Who in God is Ousia rather than Person.\n\nNatura in Mary becomes pure Mother. In her, Natura\nis as she was from the origin from her divine birth. In Mary Natura\nis all wise and is manifested as an all-prudent, all-loving, all-pure person:\nnot a Creator, and not a Redeemer, but perfect Creature, perfectly\nRedeemed, the fruit of all God’s great power, the perfect expression\nof wisdom in mercy.\n\nIt is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness\nof what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown\nwhich is His Human Nature. Thus her consent opens the door of created\nnature, of time, of history, to the Word of God.\n\nGod enters into His creation. Through her wise answer, through her obedient\nunderstanding, through the sweet yielding consent of Sophia, God enters\nwithout publicity into the city of rapacious men.\n\nShe crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with\nwhat is greater than glory: the one thing greater than\nglory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.\n\nShe sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth\nas poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible\nmercy, to die for us on the Cross.\n\nThe shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep.\nNight embraces the silent half of the earth. A vagrant, a destitute\nwanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A\nhomeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without\nidentifications, without even a number, a frail expendable exile\nlies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and\nentrusts Himself to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "the-holy-childs-song": { - "title": "“The Holy Child’s Song”", - "body": "When midnight occupied the porches of the Poet’s reason\nSweeter than any bird\nHe heard the Holy Child.\n\n_“When My kind Father, kinder than the sun,\nWith looks and smiles bends down\nAnd utters My bodily life,\nMy flesh, obeying, praises Heaven like a smiling cloud.\nThen I become the laughter of the watercourses.\nI am the gay wheat fields, the serious hills:\nI fill the sky with words of light, and My incarnate songs\nFly in and out the branches of My childish voice\nLike thrushes in a tree.”\n\n_“And when My Mother, pretty as a church,\nTakes Me upon her lap, I laugh with love,\nLoving to live in her flesh, which is My house and full of light!\n(Because the sky My Spirit enters in at all the windows)\nO, then what songs and what incarnate joys\nDance in the brightest rays of My childish voice!”_\n\n_“In winter when the birds put down their flutes\nAnd wind plays sharper than a fife upon the icy rain,\nI sit in this crib,\nAnd laugh like fire, and clap My golden hands:\nTo view my friends the timid beasts-\nTheir great brown flanks, muzzles and milky breath!”_\n\n_“Therefore come, shepherds, from your rocky hill,\nAnd bend about My crib in wonder and adore My joy.\nMy glances are as good as wine.\nThe little rivers of My smile\nWill wash away all ruins from your eyes,\nAs I lift up My hands,\nAs white as blackthorn blossoms,\nAnd charm and kiss you with My seven sacraments.”_\n\n_“This seeming winter is your spring\nWhen skies put off their armor:\nBecause My Heart already holds\nThe secret mortal wound,\nBy which I shall transform all deserts into garden-ground:\nAnd there the peaceful trees,\nAll day say credos, being full of leaves--\nAnd I will come and be your noon-day sun,\nAnd make your shadows palaces of moving light:\nAnd you will show Me your flowers.”_\n\nWhen the midnight occupied the porches of the Poet’s reason\nSweeter than any bird\nHe heard the Holy Child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "how-to-enter-a-big-city": { - "title": "“How to Enter a Big City”", - "body": "# I.\n\nSwing by starwhite bones and\nLights tick in the middle.\nBlue and white steel\nBlack and white\nPeople hurrying along the wall.\n“Here you are, bury my dead bones.”\n\nCurve behind the sun again\nTowers full of ice. Rich\nGlass houses, “Here,\nHave a little of my blood,\nRich people!”\n\nWheat in towers. Meat on ice.\nCattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.\nBaseball between these sudden tracks.\nYell past the red street--\nHave you any water to drink, City?\nRich glass buildings, give us milk!\nGive us coffee! Give us rum!\n\nThere are huge clouds all over the sky.\nRiver smells of gasoline.\nCars after cars after cars, and then\nA little yellow street goes by without a murmur.\n\nThere came a man\n(“Those are radios, that were his eyes”)\nWho offered to sell us his bones.\n\nSwing by starwhite buildings and\nLights come to life with a sound\nOf bugs under the dead rib.\n\nMiles of it. Still the same city.\n\n\n# II.\n\nDo you know where you are going?\nDo you know whom you must meet?\n\nFortune, perhaps, or good news\nOr the doctor, or the ladies\nIn the long bookstore,\nThe angry man in the milkbar\nThe drunkard under the clock.\nFortune, perhaps, or wonder\nOr, perhaps, death.\n\nIn any case, our tracks\nAre aimed at a working horizon.\nThe buildings, turning twice about the sun,\nSettle in their respective positions.\nCentered in its own incurable discontent, the City\nConsents to be recognized.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThen people come out into the light of afternoon,\nCovered all over with black powder,\nAnd begin to attack one another with statements\nOr to ignore one another with horror.\nCustoms have not changed.\nYoung men full of coffee and\nOld women with medicine under their skin\nAre all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.\n\nEverywhere there is optimism without love\nAnd pessimism without understanding,\nThey who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts\nCannot agree to be at peace\nWith their own images, shadowing them in windows\nFrom store to store.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nUntil the lights come on with a swagger of frauds\nAnd savage ferns,\nThe brown-eyed daughters of ravens,\nSing in the lucky doors\nWhile night comes down the street like the millennium\nWrapping the houses in dark feathers\nSoothing the town with a sign\nHealing the strong wings of sunstroke.\nThen the wind of an easy river wipes the flies\nOff my Kentucky collarbone.\n\nThe claws of the treacherous stars\nRenegade drums of wood\nEndure the heavenward protest.\nTheir music heaves and hides.\nRain and foam and oil\nMake sabbaths for our wounds.\n(Come, come, let all come home!)\nThe summer sighs, and runs.\nMy broken bird is under the whole town,\nMy cross is for the gypsies I am leaving\nAnd there are real fountains under the floor.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBranches baptize our faces with silver\nWhere the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.\nWinds at last possess our empty country\nThere, there under the moon\nIn parabolas of milk and iron\nThe ghosts of historical men\n(Figures of sorrow and dust)\nWeep along the hills like turpentine.\nAnd seas of flowering tobacco\nSurround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-hymn-of-not-much-praise-for-new-york": { - "title": "“A Hymn of Not Much Praise for New York”", - "body": "When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight,\nAnd when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials,\nAnd when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street,\nIn all the dizzy buildings,\nThe elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages,\nThen the children of the city,\nLeaving the monkey-houses of their office-buildings and apartments,\nWith the greatest difficulty open their mouths, and sing:\n“Queen among the cities of the Earth: New York!\nRich as a cake, common as a doughnut,\nExpensive as a fur and crazy as cocaine,\nWe love to hear you shake\nYour big face like a shining bank\nLetting the mad world know you’re full of dimes!”\n\n“This is your night to make maraccas out of all that metal money\nParis is in the prison-house, and London dies of cancer.\nThis is the time for you to whirl,\nQueen of our hopped-up peace,\nAnd let the excitement of your somewhat crippled congas\nSupersede the waltzes of more shining\nCapitals that have been bombed.”\n\n“Meanwhile we, your children,\nWeeping in our seasick zoo of windows while you dance,\nWill gobble aspirins,\nAnd try to keep our cage from caving in.\nAll the while our minds will fill with these petitions,\nFlowering quietly in between our gongs of pulse.\nThese will have to serve as prayers:”\n\n“‘O lock us in the safe jails of thy movies!\nConfine us to the semiprivate wards and white asylums\nOf the unbearable cocktail parties, O New York!\nSentence us for life to the penitentiaries of thy bars and nightclubs,\nAnd leave us stupefied forever by the blue, objective lights\nThat fill the pale infirmaries of thy restaurants,\nAnd the clinics of thy schools and offices,\nAnd the operating-rooms of thy dance-halls.”\n\n“‘But never give us any explanations, even when we ask,\nWhy all our food tastes of iodoform,\nAnd even the freshest flowers smell of funerals.\nNo, never let us look about us long enough to wonder\nWhich of the rich men, shivering in the overheated office,\nAnd which of the poor men, sleeping face-down on the _Daily Mirror_,\nAre still alive, and which are dead.’”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "in-silence": { - "title": "“In Silence”", - "body": "Be still.\nListen to the stones of the wall.\nBe silent, they try\nto speak your\n\nname.\nListen\nto the living walls.\n\nWho are you?\nWho\nare you? Whose\nsilence are you?\n\nWho (be quiet)\nare you (as these stones\nare quiet). Do not\nthink of what you are\nstill less of\nwhat you may one day be.\n\nRather\nbe what you are (but who?)\nbe the unthinkable one\nyou do not know.\n\nO be still, while\nyou are still alive,\nand all things live around you\n\nspeaking (I do not hear)\nto your own being,\nspeaking by the unknown\nthat is in you and in themselves.\n\n“I will try, like them\nto be my own silence:\nand this is difficult. The whole\nworld is secretly on fire. The stones\nburn, even the stones they burn me.\nHow can a man be still or\nlisten to all things burning?\nHow can he dare to sit with them\nwhen all their silence is on fire?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "iphigenia-politics": { - "title": "“Iphigenia: Politics”", - "body": "The stairs lead to the room as bleak as glass\nWhere fancy turns the statues.\nThe empty chairs are dreaming of a protocol,\nThe tables, of a treaty;\nAnd the world has become a museum.\n\n(The girl is gone,\nFled from the broken altar by the beach,\nFrom the unholy sacrifice when calms became a trade-wind.)\n\nThe palaces stare out from their uncurtained trouble,\nAnd windows weep in the weak sun.\nThe women fear the empty upper rooms\nMore than the streets as grey as guns\nOr the swordlight of the wide unfriendly esplanade.\n\nThoughts turn to salt among those shrouded chairs\nWhere, with knives no crueller than pens, or promises,\nTook place the painless slaying of the leader’s daughter.\n\nO, humbler than the truth she bowed her head,\nAnd scarcely seemed, to us, to die.\nBut after she was killed she fled, alive, like a surprise,\nOut of the glass world, to Diana’s Tauris.\n\nThen wind cheered like a hero in the tackle of the standing ships\nAnd hurled them bravely on the swords and lances of the wintry sea--\nWhile wisdom turned to salt upon the broken piers.\n\nThis is the way the ministers have killed the truth, our daughter,\nSteps lead back into the rooms we fear to enter;\nOur minds are bleaker than the hall of mirrors:\n\nAnd the world has become a museum.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "kingfisher": { - "title": "“Kingfisher”", - "body": "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;\nAs tumbled over rim in roundy wells\nStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s\nBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;\nEach mortal thing does one thing and the same:\nDeals out that being indoors each one dwells;\nSelves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,\nCrying What I do is me: for that I came.\nI say more: the just man justices;\nKeeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;\nActs in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is--\nChrist. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,\nLovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his\nTo the Father through the features of men’s faces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "la-comparsa-en-oriente": { - "title": "“La Comparsa En Oriente”", - "body": "Drums of the early evening wake\nThe mountain full of ore, and the canebrake.\nUp at Cobre tall tambores call\nOne who rings gangarias with a nail,\nOne with feathers for sleeves,\nOne whose arms are birds,\nOne with a mouth full of great fires\nAnd lights instead of words.\n\nOne with a tobacco leaf hat\nRings his drum like a bell,\nAnd brings the saints of heaven, with claves,\nDown from the starlit hill;\nA black angel beats an ass’s jaw\nAnd (tick tick) a white the claves\nWhile the sodality of the blessed virgin\nFollow after, carrying flowers.\n\nFive angels beating bongos,\nSeven saints ringing their bells,\nWear coats made out of paper money\nAnd shoes made out of shells.\nThey clatter like a box of nickels,\nHolding candle towers, on fire:\nThey whirl these as solemn as wise men,\nPaper temples in the air.\n\nLights fly like birds behind the cane\nAnd shot flies after, but in gourds,\nWhen the comparsa goes off to the plains\nWith fires in her mouth, but now words:\nFor ten angels ring gangarias\n\nWhen the comparsa goes away\nWith all the mountain people and pilgrims\nDancing down to Camaguey.\n\nThe pray for us, Mother of Jesus,\nCaridad, Merced,\nQueen of Cobre and of the three towers\nThat watch over Camaguey:\nThe ten angels are playing gangarias\nAnd the comparsa goes away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "marymas" - } - } - }, - "la-salette": { - "title": "“La Salette”", - "body": "It is a hundred years since your shy feet\nVentured to stand upon the pasture grass of the high\nAlps,\n\nComing no deeper in our smoky atmosphere\nThan these blue skies, the mountain eyes\nOf the two shepherd children, young as flowers,\nBorn to be dazzled by no mortal snow.\n\nLady, it is a hundred years\nSince those fair, terrible tears\nReproved, with their amazing grief\nAll the proud candor of those altitudes:\nCrowning the flowers at your feet\nWith diamonds, that seized upon, transfigured into\nnails of light\nThe rays of the mountain sun!-\n\nAnd by their news,\n(Which came with cowbells to the evening village\nAnd to the world with church-bells\nAfter not too many days,)\nAnd by their news\nWe thought the walls of all hard hearts\nHad broken down, and given in,\nPoured out their dirty garrisons of sin,\nAnd washed the streets with our own blood, if need be--\n--Only to have them clean!\n\nAnd though we did not understand\nThe weight and import of so great a sorrow,\nWe never thought so soon to have seen\nThe loss of its undying memory,\nPassing from the black world without a word,\nWithout a funeral!\nFor while our teeth were battling in the meat of\nmiracles and favors,\nYour words, your prophecies, were all forgotten!\n\nNow, one by one,\nThe things you said\nHave come to be fulfilled.\n\nJohn, in the might of his Apocalypse, could not foretell\nHalf of the story of our monstrous century,\nIn which the arm of your inexorable Son,\nBound, by His Truth, to disavow your intercession\nFor this wolf-world, this craven zoo,\nHas bombed the doors of hell clean off their hinges,\nAnd burst the cage of antichrist,\nAnd roused, with His first two great thunderbolts,\nThe chariots of Armageddon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_la_salette" - } - } - }, - "the-landfall": { - "title": "“The Landfall”", - "body": "We are beyond the ways of the far ships\nHere in this coral port,\nFarther than the ways of fliers,\nBecause our destinies have suddenly transported us\nBeyond the brim of the enamel world.\n\nO Mariner, what is the name of this uncharted Land?\nOn these clean shores shall stand what sinless voyager,\nWhat angel breathe the music of this atmosphere?\n\nLook where the thin flamingoes\nBurning upon the purple shallows with their rare, pale flames,\nStand silent as our thought, although the birds in the high rock\nRinse our new senses with no mortal note,\nWhat are these wings whose silks amaze the traveller?\n\nThe flowering palms charm all the strand\nWith their supernal scent.\nThe oleander and the wild hibiscus paint\nThe land with blood, and unknown blooms\nOpen to us the Gospel of their five wild wounds.\n\nAnd the deep ferns sing this epithalame:\n“Go up, go up! this desert is the door of heaven!\nAnd it shall prove your frail soul’s miracle!\nClimb the safe mountain,\n\nDisarm your labored flesh, and taste the treasure of these silences\nIn the high coral hermitage,\nWhile the clean winds bemuse you in the clefted rock;\nOr find you there some leafy Crusoe-castle: dwell in trees!\n\nTake down the fagons of the blue and crimson fruits\nAnd reap the everlasting wheat that no man’s hand has sown,\nAnd strike the rock that runs with waters strong as wine\nTo fill you with their fortitude:\nBecause this island is your Christ, your might, your fort, your paradise.\n\nAnd lo! dumb time’s grey, smoky argosies\nWill never anchor in this emerald harbor\nOr find this world of amber,\nSpoil the fair music of the silver sea\n\nOr foul these chiming amethysts:\nNor comes there any serpent near this isle trenched in deep ocean\nAnd walled with innocent, flowering vines.\n\nBut from beyond the cotton clouds,\nBetween those lovely, white cathedrals full of sun,\nThe angels study beauty with their steps\nAnd tread like notes of music down the beamy air\nTo gain this new world’s virgin shore:\nWhile from the ocean’s jeweled floor\nThe long-lost divers, rising one by one,\nSmile and throw down their dripping fortunes on the sand,\n\nAnd sing us the strange tale\nOf the drowned king (our nature), his return!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "landscape-wheatfields": { - "title": "“Landscape: Wheatfields”", - "body": "Frown there like Cressy or like Agincourt,\nYou fierce and bearded shocks and sheaves\nAnd shake your grain-spears,\nAnd know no tremor in your vigilant\nYour stern array, my summer chevaliers!\n\nAlthough the wagons,\n(Hear how the battle of those wheels,\nWorrying the loose wood with their momentary thunder\nLeaves us to guess some trestle, there, behind the sycamores.)\nAlthough the empty wagons come,\n\nRise up, like kings out of the pages of a chronicle\nAnd cry your courage in your golden beards;\nFor now the summer-time is half-way done,\nGliding to a dramatic crisis\nSure as the deep waters to the sedentary mill.\n\nArise like kings and prophets from the pages of an\nancient Bible,\nAnd blind us with the burnish of your message in our June:\nThen raise your hands and bless us\nAn depart, like old Melchisedech, and find your\nproper Salem.\n\nThe slow hours crowd upon us.\nOur days slide evenly toward the term of all our liturgy,\nAnd all our weeks are after Pentecost.\n\nSummer divides his garrisons,\nSurrenders up his strongest forts,\nStrikes all his russet banners one by one.\nAnd while these ancient men of war\nCasting us in the teeth with the reproof of their surrender\n(By which their fruitfulness is all fulfilled,)\nThrow down their arms.\n\nFace we the day when we go up to stake our graces\nAgainst unconquerable God:\nTry, with our trivial increase, in that time of harvest\nTo stem the army of His attributes!\n\nOh pray us full of marrow, Queen of Heaven,\nFor those mills, His truth, our glory!\nCrown us with alleluias on that day of fight!\n\n(Light falls as fair as lyres, beamy between the branches,\nPlays like an angel on the mill-dam, where the lazy stream\nSuddenly turns to clouds of song and rain,)\nOh pray us, Lady, full of faith and graces,\nArm us with fruits against that contest and comparison,\nArm us with ripeness for the wagons of our Christ!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "lammas" - } - } - }, - "landscape": { - "title": "“Landscape”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nA Personage is seen\nLeaning upon a cushion\nPrinted with cornflowers.\n\nA Child appears\nHolding up a pencil.\n\n“This is a picture\n(Says the Child to the Personage)\nOf the vortex.”\n\n“Draw it your own way,”\nSays the Personage.\n\n(Music is heard\nPure in the island windows,\nSea-music on the Child’s\nInterminable shore, his coral home.)\n\nBehind a blue mountain\nCovered with chickenfoot trees,\nThe molten sun appears,\nA heavy, painted flower.\n\nA Personage is seen\nLeaning upon the mountain\nWith the sun in one hand\nAnd a pencil in the other.\n\n“This is a picture\n(Says the Personage to the Child)\nOf the beginning of the world.”\n\n“Or of its end!” cries the Child\nHiding himself in the cushions.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nA Woman appears\nLeaning upon the Child’s shoulder.\nHe looks up again.\n\n“This is my Mother\n(Says the Child to the Personage)\nOlder than the moon.”\n\n(Grecian horses are heard\nReturning from the foam\nOf the pure island’s windows,\nAnd the Child’s horizons.)\n\n“My Mother is a world\n(Says the Child to the Personage)\nPrinted with gillyflowers.”\n\n“Paint her your own way”\n(Says the Personage to the Child).\nAnd, lifting up his pencil,\nHe crosses out the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lent-in-a-year-of-war": { - "title": "“Lent in a Year of War”", - "body": "One of you is a major, made of cord and catskin,\nBut never dreams his eyes may come to life and thread\nThe needle-light of famine in a waterglass.\nOne of you is the paper Jack of Sprites And will not cast his sentinel voice\nSpiraling up the dark ears of the wind\nWhere the prisoner’s yell is lost.\n\n“What if it was our thumbs put out the sun\nWhen the Lance and Cross made their mistake?\nYou’ll never rob us our Eden of drumskin shelters,\nYou, with the bite of John the Baptist’s halter,\nGetting away in the basket of Paul,\nLoving the answer of death, the mother of Lent!”\n\nThus, in the evening of their sinless murders,\nJack and the Major, sifting the stars for a sign\nSee the north-south horizon parting like a string!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-messenger-from-the-horizon": { - "title": "“A Messenger from the Horizon”", - "body": "Look, a naked runner\nA messenger,\nFollowing the wind\nFrom budding hills.\n\nBy sweet sunstroke\nWounded and signed,\n(He is therefore sacred)\nSilence is his way.\n\nRain is his own\nMost private weather.\nAmazement is his star.\n\nO stranger, Our early hope\nFlies fast by,\nA mute comet, an empty sun.\nAdam is his name!\n\nO primeval angel\nVirgin brother of astonishment,\nBorn of one word, one bare\nInquisitive diamond.\n\nO blessed,\nInvulnerable cry,\nO unplanned Saturday,\nO lucky father!\n\nCome without warning\nA friend of hurricanes,\nLightning in your bones!\nWe will open to you\nThe sun-door, the noble eye!\n\nOpen to rain, to somersaulting air,\nTo everything that swims,\nTo skies that wake,\nFlare and applaud.\n\n(It is too late, he flies the other way\nWrapping his honesty in rain.)\n\nPardon all runners,\nAll speechless, alien winds,\nAll mad waters.\n\nPardon their impulses,\nTheir wild attitudes,\nTheir young flights, their reticence.\n\nWhen a message has no clothes on\nHow can it be spoken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-messenger": { - "title": "“The Messenger”", - "body": "There is some sentry at the rim of winter\nFed with the speech the wind makes\nIn the grand belfries of the sleepless timber.\nHe understands the lasting strife of tears, And the way the world is strung;\nHe waits to warn all life with the tongue of March’s bugle,\nOf the coming of the warrior sun.\n\nWhen spring has garrisonned up her army of water, A million grasses leave their tents, and stand in rows To see their invincible brother.\nMending the winter’s ruins with their laughter, The flowers go out to their undestructive wars.\nWalk in the woods and be witnesses, You, the best of these poor children.\nWhen Gabriel hit the bright shore of the world,\nYours were the eyes saw some\nStar-sandalled stranger walk like lightning down the air,\nThe morning the Mother of God\nLoved and dreaded the message of an angel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "the-night-train": { - "title": "“The Night Train”", - "body": "In the unreason of a rainy midnight\nFrance blooms along the windows\nOf my sleepy bathysphere,\nAnd runs to seed, in a luxuriance of curious lights.\n\nEscape is drawn straight through my dream\nAnd shines to Paris, clean as a violin string,\nWhile springtides of commotion,\n(The third-class pianos of the Orient Express)\nFill up the hollow barrels of my ears.\n\nCities that stood, by day, as gay as lancers\nAre lost, in the night, like old men dying.\nAt a point where polished rails branch off forever,\nThe steel laments, like crazy mothers.\nWe wake, and weep the deaths of the cathedrals\nThat we have never seen,\nBecause we hear the jugulars of the country\nFly in the wind, and vanish with a cry.\n\nAt once the diplomats start up, as white as bread.\nBuckle the careless cases of their minds,\nThat just fell open in the sleepers,\nAnd lock them under pillows:\n\nFor, by the rockets of imaginary sieges\nThey see to read big, terrible print,\nEach in the other’s face,\nThat spells the undecoded names\nOf the assassins they will recognize too late:\nThe ones that seem to be secret police,\nNow all in place, all armed, in the obvious ambush!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1942, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "night-flowering-cactus": { - "title": "“Night-Flowering Cactus”", - "body": "I know my time, which is obscure, silent and brief\nFor I am present without warning one night only.\n\nWhen sun rises on the brass valleys I become serpent.\n\nThough I show my true self only in the dark and to no man\n(For I appear by day as serpent)\nI belong neither to night nor day.\n\nSun and city never see my deep white bell\nOr know my timeless moment of void:\nThere is no reply to my munificence.\n\nWhen I come I lift my sudden Eucharist\nOut of the earth’s unfathomable joy\nClean and total I obey the world’s body\nI am intricate and whole, not art but wrought passion\nExcellent deep pleasure of essential waters\nHoliness of form and mineral mirth:\n\nI am the extreme purity of virginal thirst.\n\nI neither show my truth nor conceal it\nMy innocence is described dimly\nOnly by divine gift\nAs a white cavern without explanation.\n\nHe who sees my purity\nDares not speak of it.\nWhen I open once for all my impeccable bell\nNo one questions my silence:\nThe all-knowing bird of night flies out of my mouth.\n\nHave you seen it? Then though my mirth has quickly ended\nYou live forever in its echo:\nYou will never be the same again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "no-room-at-the-inn": { - "title": "“No Room At the Inn”", - "body": "Into this world, this demented inn\nin which there is absolutely no room for him at all,\nChrist comes uninvited.\n\nBut because he cannot be at home in it,\nbecause he is out of place in it,\nand yet he must be in it,\nHis place is with the others for whom\nthere is no room.\n\nHis place is with those who do not belong,\nwho are rejected by power, because\nthey are regarded as weak,\nthose who are discredited,\nwho are denied status of persons,\nwho are tortured, bombed and exterminated.\n\nWith those for whom there is no room,\nChrist is present in this world.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Raids on the Unspeakable", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "notes-for-a-new-liturgy": { - "title": "“Notes for a New Liturgy”", - "body": "There’s a big Zulu runs our congregation\nA woe doctor cherubim chaser\nPuts his finger on the chief witch\nHas a mind to deter foes\nIs by the Star Archangel shown a surprise\nWrites his letters in vision mentions his B.A.\nFrom many a college\nHas a fan to scatter flies\nReceives a penetrating look\nFrom an imaginary visitant in white\nKnows all the meanings at once\nKnows he is in heaven in rectangles\nOf invented saints\nFlaming with new degrees and orders every day\n\n“I dreamt this Church I dreamt\nSeven precious mitres over my head\nMy word is final.”\n\n“I now General Overseer Concession Registrar\nOf rains and weather Committeeman\nFor Pepsi-Cola all over the islands\nFlail of incontinent clergy\nWave my highstrung certificate in times of change\nDon’t you need a Defender with a medical guarantee?”\n\n“You think that I am only a clown-healer from the out-district?\nHold this black bag while I lay hands on children\nSteady my followers with magic curios”\n\n“When I sleep I watch you with eyes in my feet\nLast night I dreamt of four beds\nI must marry again must go get\nAnother angel-nun\nCome holy deaconess we’ll ride\nBarefoot in yellow busses to Jordan River\nWearing emblems of the common vow.”\n\n“Subleaders keep telling the message\nLike it was new\nConfirming my charism as Prime-Mover in Management\nI shall continue in office as President\nFor all time until the earth melt\nAs all Full-Leaders stand over you wearing their watches\nMoulding you by government of thought\nAnd I return a while to the Origin\nRuling through a female medium from an obscure place:”\n\n“HOLD THIS MITRE WHILE I STRANGLE CHICKENS\nAND THROW THEM IN THE AIR\nCOVERING THE SACRED STONE WITH BLOODY FEATHERS\n(And surround the altar\nWith lie detectors.”)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "now-you-are-all-here-you-might-as-well-know": { - "title": "“Now you are all here you might as well know …”", - "body": "1. Now you are all here you might as well know this is America we do what we like.\n\n2. Be spontaneous it is the right way.\n\n3. Mothers you have met before still defy comprehension.\n\n4. Our scene is foggy we are asking you to clarify.\n\n5. Explains geomoetry of life. Where? At Catholic Worker.\n\n6. Very glad you came. With our mouths full of cornflakes we were expecting an emergency.\n\n7. Cynics declare you are in Greece.\n\n8. Better get back quick before the place is all used up.\n\n9. The night court: the mumbling judge: confused.\n\n10. Well-wishers are there to meet you head on.\n\n11. For the journal: soldiers, harbingers of change.\n\n12. You came just in time, the score is even.\n\n13. None of the machines has yet been broken.\n\n14. Come on we know you have seen Popes.\n\n15. People have been a little self-conscious around here in the emergency.\n\n16. Who cares what the cynics declare. But you have been in Greece.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "the-oracle": { - "title": "“The Oracle”", - "body": "The girls with eyes of wicks of lights,\nThin as the rushes, and as many,\nMake in their minds uncertain shapes of music,\nAnd slyly string their phony harps with twine.\n\nThe girls with eyes of drops of water,\nThin as the fires, and as frightened,\nBring pennies and their empty zodiacs.\nHorses, loose on a plain, drum\nThe secret dance their thought does now!\n\nCome up and light your harmless questions.\nBurn them to the Brazen Face,\nAnd wait, in terror, for the Brazen Voice.\n\n“You girls with eyes of wicks of lights,\nShake me: I ring like a bank.\nI shout like the assembly: ‘Go, be presidents!’\nYou shall all marry rectangles!”\n\n“But you with eyes of drops of water,\nPunch my brass eyes with your little fists;\nI am a box, my voice is only electric.\nSo keep your pennies for the poor;\nSew, in your houses, and cry.”\n\nBut already, down the far, fast ladders of light\nThe stern, astounding angel\nStarts with a truer message,\nCarrying a lily.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pastoral": { - "title": "“Pastoral”", - "body": "Earth’s amniotic atmosphere\n(Wherein winged clouds arch over us)\nCleaves to the turning globe like flesh\nTo feed and light and cover us.\n\nAbove the building stands the flesh,\nBlue, translucent and electric,\nWherein birds fly and glide and sing,\nBeasts move, trees grow: all geocentric.\n\nAir mantles us and binds us in\nAnd carries words about the bone\n(If air is flesh, then earth is bone;\nAnd neither, thus, will live alone.)\nCoordinating earth and air,\nWe line the ground, and plant the seeds,\nAnd tend the plants, and graze the beasts;\nAnd wander with them here and there\nWith sounds and gesture, words and prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-peril": { - "title": "“The Peril”", - "body": "When anger comes to the coast of our desolate country\nAnd the sky is the color of armor,\nWe listen, in the silence of the cliffs and bays as still as steel,\nFor the cry that terrifies the sentinel.\nAnd if it sound, oh! suddener than Java dancers\nFace us all the swords we fear.\nWell, we have arms: we will put them to trial.\n\nBut even as we wait, in hiding, for the unknown signal,\nIt is the Bridegroom comes like lightning where we never looked!\nHis eyes are angels, armed in smiles of fire.\nHis Word puts out the spark of every other sun\nFaster than sunlight ever hid the cities\nOf the fire-crowded universe!\nHow shall I stand such light, being dim as my fear?\n\nRob me, and make me poor enough to bear my priceless ransom;\nLock me and dower me in the gifts and jails of tribulation:\nStab me and save me with the five lights of Your Crucifixion!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "place-names": { - "title": "“Place Names”", - "body": "Jair son of Manasseh went and seized the encampments\nAnd called them the Encampments of Jair\nNobah went and seized Kenath\nWith its outlying villages\nAnd called it Nobah\nAfter himself.\n --Numbers 32: 41-42\n\n\n1827\n\nD’Entrecasteaux enters the bay\nLooks it over\nLeaves it with name of his ship:\n“Astrolabe Bay.”\n\n\n1871-1883\n\nBaron Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay\n(Tibud Maclay)\nComes and goes\nExploring\nRecording the language\nAs a reward for hospitality\nLeaves the coast with\nHis own name:\n“Maclay Coast”\n\nTo further honor\nThe place where he landed\nHe called it “Constantine Harbour”\n(Grand Duke Constantine\nPresident of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society\nHad paid for the trip.)\n\n\n1878\n\nAustralian gold-prospectors\nPut in at Bongu\nIn the good ship Dove\nBut leave at once\nForgetting to name the place\n“Dove Harbor”\nBut there is a “Dove Point”\nA hundred miles up the coast.\n\n\n1884\n\nHerr Finsch\nRepresenting the Neu Guinea Kompagnie\nHoists the German flag\nOver “Bismarck (naturally)\nArchipelago” “Kaiser\n(Of course) Wilhelmsland”\nAnd last but not least\n“Finschhafen.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poem": { - "title": "“Poem”", - "body": "Thief and gambler, in the mind’s Algiers,\nBicker for a division, in a veil of shade.\nStillness explodes into a cloud of battlecocks.\nKnife, with a bright tooth, bites the hiding heart.\nDeath caws, like copper, in the throat,\nAnd the dry gambler’s dying like a daw.\n\nThe thief’s a flying shadow:\nSlants up the wall with pockets full of coin,\nAnd, in the wide sky, disappears.\n\nBut where the sun bullbellows in the mind’s Sahara,\nHis money shines on the waterless earth;\nAnd in his sky of thoughts, his old desires\nFly back as black as carrion birds,\nAnd gradual death begins to ring,\nLike gongs, the sunstruck canyon’s quiet stones,\n\nUntil the nameless traveler learns in terror\nHis lidless eyes are open targets--\nWhere sudden night flings in her quiet spear.\n\nHe hears ring shut the clangorous gates of day,\nAnd sees eternity hang open like a pit.\n\nMeanwhile, the distant kites become companions,\nLoving him for what was once his flesh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-practical-program-for-monks": { - "title": "“A Practical Program for Monks”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nEach one shall sit at table with his own cup and spoon, and with his own repentance. Each one’s own business shall be his most important affair, and provide his own remedies.\nThey have neglected bowl and plate.\nHave you a wooden fork?\nYes, each monk has a wooden fork as well as a potato.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nEach one shall wipe away tears with his own saint, when three bells hold in store a hot afternoon. Each one is supposed to mind his own heart, with its conscience, night and morning.\nAnother turn on the wheel: ho hum! And observe the Abbot!\nTime to go to bed in a straw blanket.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nPlenty of bread for everyone between prayers and the psalter: will you recite another?\nMerci, and Miserere.\nAlways mind both the clock and the Abbot until eternity.\nMiserere.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nDetails of the Rule are all liquid and solid. What canon was the first to announce regimentation before us? Mind the step on the way down!\nYes, I dare say you are right, Father. I believe you; I believe you.\nI believe it is easier when they have ice water and even a lemon.\nEach one can sit at table with his own lemon, and mind his own conscience.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nCan we agree that the part about the lemon is regular?\nIn any case, it is better to have sheep than peacocks, and cows rather than a chained leopard says Modest, in one of his proverbs.\nThe monastery, being owner of a communal rowboat, is the antechamber of heaven.\nSurely that ought to be enough.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nEach one can have some rain after Vespers on a hot afternoon, but ne quid nimis, or the purpose of the Order will be forgotten.\nWe shall send you hyacinths and a sweet millennium.\nEverything the monastery provides is very pleasant to see and to sell for nothing.\nWhat is baked smells fine. There is a sign of God on every leaf that nobody sees in the garden. The fruit trees are there on purpose, even when no one is looking. Just put the apples in the basket.\nIn Kentucky there is also room for a little cheese.\nEach one shall fold his own napkin, and neglect the others.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nRain is always very silent in the night, under such gentle cathedrals.\nYes, I have taken care of the lamp, Miserere.\nHave you a patron saint, and an angel?\nThank you. Even though the nights are never dangerous, I have one of everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "proverbs": { - "title": "“Proverbs”", - "body": "1. I will tell you what you can do ask me if you do not understand what I just said\n\n2. One thing you can do be a manufacturer make appliances\n\n3. Be a Man-u-fac-tu-rer\n\n4. Make appliances sell them for a high price\n\n5. I will tell you about industry make appliances\n\n6. Make appliances that move\n\n7. Ask me if you do not understand what is move\n\n8. First get the facts\n\n9. Where to apply? Ask industry\n\n10. Do not expect to get by without Mr. and Mrs. Consumer\n\n11. Man-u-fic-tion\n\n12. I am wondering if you got the idea be a manu\n\n13. MAKE FALSE GODS\n\n14. Apply mind energy they will move\n\n15. Mention one of the others see what happens\n\n16. Now apply that to our problem\n\n17. Try not to understand\n\n18. Be a mounte-fictioner\n\n19. Surpass all others in price and profit\n\n20. Assail the public with lies\n\n21. Home-spun-facts-are-more-fun repeat this\n\n22. Prevent spreading on garments\n\n23. Breathe more than others\n\n24. Supply movement and traction\n\n25. Our epidemix will exceed\n\n26. A homemade appliance: no honorable mention\n\n27. Now you can refer to garments and spread out\n\n28. But there are still more facts\n\n29. For excitement: say whose epidemic may be next\n\n30. Apply this to the facts and see what happens\n\n31. Wear dermal gloves in bed\n\n32. Here is an appliance that will terrorize mothers\n\n33. And fight the impossible\n\n34. Man-u-fac-ture: wear it on your head\n\n35. Beat it here come the mothers", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-psalm": { - "title": "“A Psalm”", - "body": "When psalms surprise me with their music\nAnd antiphons turn to rum\nThe Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.\n\nAnd from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder\nOpens a heaven of naked air.\n\nNew eyes awaken.\nI send Love’s name into the world with wings\nAnd songs grow up around me like a jungle.\nChoirs of all creatures sing the tunes\nYour Spirit played in Eden.\nZebras and antelopes and birds of paradise\nShine on the face of the abyss\nAnd I am drunk with the great wilderness\nOf the sixth day in Genesis.\n\nBut sound is never half so fair\nAs when that music turns to air\nAnd the universe dies of excellence.\n\nSun, moon and stars\nFall from their heavenly towers.\nJoys walk no longer down the blue world’s shore.\n\nThough fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,\nAll fear another wind, another thunder:\nThen one more voice\nSnuffs all their flares in one gust.\n\nAnd I go forth with no more wine and no more stars\nAnd no more buds and no more Eden\nAnd no more animals and no more sea:\n\nWhile God sings by himself in acres of night\nAnd walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quickening-of-john-the-baptist": { - "title": "“The Quickening of John the Baptist”", - "body": "_On the Contemplative Vocation_\n\nWhy do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,\nFrom the sands and the lavender water?\nWhy do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,\nThe yellow fishing boats, the farms,\nThe winesmelling yards and low cellars\nOr the oilpress, and the women by the well?\nWhy do you fly those markets,\nThose suburban gardens,\nThe trumpets of the jealous lilies,\nLeaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?\n\nYou have trusted no town\nWith the news behind your eyes.\nYou have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas\nAnd turned toward the stone mountain\nTo the treeless places.\nVirgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?\n\nThe day Our Lady, full of Christ,\nEntered the dooryard of her relative\nDid not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves like gold?\nDid not her eyes as grey as doves\nAlight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon\nmiraculous Elizabeth?\n\nHer salutation\nSings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:\nAnd the unborn saint John\nWakes in his mother’s body,\nBounds with the echoes of discovery.\n\nSing in your cell, small anchorite!\nHow did you see her in the eyeless dark?\nWhat secret syllable\nWoke your young faith to the mad truth\nThat an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?\nOh burning joy!\n\nWhat seas of life were planted by that voice!\nWith what new sense\nDid your wise heart receive her Sacrament,\nAnd know her cloistered Christ?\n\nYou need no eloquence, wild bairn,\nExulting in your hermitage.\nYour ecstasy is your apostolate,\nFor whom to kick is contemplata tradere.\nYour joy is the vocation of Mother Church’s hidden children--\nThose who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;\nThe speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,\nThe quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of\ncontemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.\n\nNight is our diocese and silence is our ministry\nPoverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.\nBeyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air\nSeeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.\nWe are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners\nWith hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:\nWaiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,\nPlanted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.\n\nBut in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos\nFlying the prosperous world\nAppears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,\nThen, like the wise, wild baby,\nThe unborn John who could not see a thing\nWe wake and know the Virgin Presence\nReceive her Christ into our night\nWith stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.\n\nCooled in the flame of God’s dark fire\nWashed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame\nWe burn like eagles in His invincible awareness\nAnd bound and bounce with happiness,\nLeap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,\nOur contemplation, our anticipated heaven\nTill Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "visitation" - } - } - }, - "rahabs-house": { - "title": "“Rahab’s House”", - "body": "Now the lean children of the God of armies\n(Their feet command the quaking earth.)\nRise in the desert, and divide old Jordan\nTo crown this city with a ring of drums.\n(But see this signal, like a crimson scar\nBleeding on Rahab’s window-sill,\nSpelling her safety with the red of our Redemption.)\n\nThe trumpets scare the valley with their sudden anger,\nAnd thunderheads lean down to understand the\nnodding ark,\nWhile Joshua’s friend, the frowning sun,\nRises to burn the drunken houses with his look.\n(But far more red upon the wall\nIs Rahab’s rescue than his scarlet threat.)\n\nThe clarions bind the bastions with their silver treble,\nShiver the city with their golden shout:\n(Wells dry up, and stars fly back, The eyes of Jericho go out,)\nThe drums around the reeling ark\nShatter the ramparts with a ring of thunder.\n\nThe kings that sat\nOn gilded chairs,\nThe princes and the great\nAre dead.\nOnly a harlot and her fearful kindred\nFly like sparrows from that sudden grin of fire.\n\nIt is the flowers that will one day rise from Rahab’s earth,\nThat have redeemed them from the hell of Jericho.\n\nA rod will grow\nFrom Jesse’s tree,\nAmong her sons, the lords of Bethlehem,\nAnd flower into Paradise.\n\nLook at the gentle irises admiring one another by\nthe water,\nUnder the leafy shadows of the Virgin’s mercy, And all the\nprimroses and laughing flags\nBowing before Our Lady Mary in the Eden of her intercession,\nAnd praising her, because they see the generations\nFly like a hundred thousand swallows into heaven,\nOut of the jaws of Jerich,\nBecause it was the Son of God\nWhose crimson signal wounded Rahab’s wall,\nUttered our rescue in a figure of His Blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-regret": { - "title": "“The Regret”", - "body": "When cold November sits among the reeds like an unlucky fisher\nAnd ducks drum up as sudden as the wind\nOur of rushy river,\nWe slowly come, robbed of our rod and gun,\nWalking amid the stricken cages of the trees.\n\nThe stormy weeks have all gone home like drunken hunters,\nLeaving the gates of the grey world wide open to December.\n\nBut now there is no speech of branches in these broken jails.\nAcorns lie over the earth, no less neglected\nThan our unrecognizable regret:\nAnd here we stand as senseless as the oaks,\nAs dumb as elms.\n\nAnd though we seem as grave as jailers, yet we did not come to wonder\nWho picked the locks of the past days, and stole our summer.\n(We are no longer listeners for curious saws, and secret keys!)\n\nWe are indifferent to seasons, And stand like hills, deaf.\nAnd never hear the last of the escaping year\nGo ducking through the bended branches like a leaf.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "saint-jason": { - "title": "“Saint Jason”", - "body": "This is the night the false Saint Jason\nWakes in fear from his cannibal sleep,\nAnd drenches the edges of his eyes\nWith his tears’ iron overflow;\n\nFor the flying scream of his dead woman\nOpened the stitches of his skin,\nAnd Jason bounced in the burly wind\nLike a man of sack and string.\n\n“What do you want, in the windows of your wound\nWhere Judas’ money shines\nBy daggers’ waterlight?”\n\n“--I want the martyrs’ eyes, as tight as shells,\nIn death’s pretended sleep.”\n\n“What does it mean sunlight weeps in your door\nLike an abandoned child?”\n\n“--It means the heavyhanded storm,\nWhirling and ploughing the wet woods,\nHas filled with terrible speech\nThe stone doors of my feast:\n\nThe feast of the false Saint Jason’s first communion.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "saint-paul": { - "title": "“Saint Paul”", - "body": "When I was Saul, and sat among the cloaks,\nMy eyes were stones, I saw no sight of heaven,\nOpen to take the spirit of the twisting Stephen.\nWhen I was Saul, and sat among the rocks,\nI locked my eyes, and made my brain my tomb,\nSealed with what boulders rolled across my reason!\n\nWhen I was Saul and walked upon the blazing desert\nMy road was quiet as a trap.\nI feared what word would split high noon with light\nAnd lock my life, and try to drive me mad:\nAnd thus I saw the Voice that struck me dead.\nTie up my breath, and wind me in white sheets of anguish,\nAnd lay me in my three days’ sepulchre\nUntil I find my Easter in a vision.\n\nOh Christ! Give back my life, go, cross Damascus,\nFind out my Ananias in that other room:\nCommand him, as you do, in this my dream;\nHe knows my locks, and owns my ransom,\nWaits for Your word to take his keys and come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "conversion_of_saint_paul" - } - } - }, - "the-secret": { - "title": "“The Secret”", - "body": "Since I am\nSomebody’s dream,\nI have a good life.\n\nSometimes I go away in my sailboat on a cloud\nand take a quiet little trip.\n\nI have a secret\nwhich I have learned how to read inside myself;\nif I told it to you,\nit would make you laugh.\n\nMy heart is naked\nand no one can put clothes on it,\nand nothing can be put on\nthat will not immediately fall off.\n\nMy secret is ignorant,\nit doesn’t sing songs,\nno lie,\nit has nothing to tell you.\n\nMy two eyes\nare maps of the planet--\nI see everything\nand nothing upsets me.\n\nJust now\nI was in China\nand saw there a great piece of happiness\nthat belonged to one man.\n\nAnd I have been to the center of the earth,\nwhere there is no suffering.\n\nIf on your loneliest nights,\nI visit other planets\nand the most secret stars of all,\n\nbesides being no one,\nknow that I am you\nand everybody.\n\nBut if I go away\nwithout giving you a name to remember me with,\nhow will I find\nthe right dream to return to?\n\nYou won’t have to mark down\non your calendar that I am coming back;\ndon’t bother to write me into your notebooks.\nI will be around\nwhen you aren’t thinking about me,\n\nwithout hair or a neck,\nwithout a nose and cheeks\nno reputation--\nthere won’t be anything.\n\nI am a bird\nwhich God made.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "seneca": { - "title": "“Seneca”", - "body": "When the torch is taken\nAnd the room is dark\nThe mute wife\nKnowing Seneca’s ways\nListens to night\nTo rumors\nAll around the house\nWhile her wise\nLord promenades\nWithin his own temple\nMaster and censor\nOverseeing\nHis own ways\nWith his philosophical\nsconce\nPolicing the streets\nOf this secret Rome\nWhile the wife\nSilent as a sea\nPolicing nothing\nWaits in darkness\nFor the Night Bird’s\nInscrutable cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1964, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "sincerity": { - "title": "“Sincerity”", - "body": "_Omnis homo mendax_\n\nAs for the liar, fear him less\nThan one who thinks himself sincere\nWho, having deceived himself,\nCan deceive you with a good conscience.\n\nOne who doubts his own truth\nMay mistrust another less:\n\nKnowing, in his own heart,\nThat all men are liars\nHe will be less outraged\nWhen he is deceived by another.\n\nSo, too, will he sooner believe\nIn the sincerity of God.\n\nThe sincerity of God! Who never justifies\nHis actions to men! Who makes no bargains\nWith any other sincerity, because He knows\nThere is no other! Who does what He pleases\nAnd never protests His innocence!\n\nWhich of us can stand the sincerity of God?\n\nWhich of us can bear a Lord\nWho is neither guilty nor innocent\n(Who cannot be innocent because He cannot\nbe guilty)?\n\nWhat has our sincerity to do with His\nWhose truth is no approval of our truth\nAnd is not judged by anyone,\nEven by Himself?\n\n(Yet if I think myself sincere\nI will approve the purity of God\nConvinced that my own purity\nIs approved by Him)\n\nSo, when the Lord speaks, we go to sleep\nOr turn quickly to some congenial business\nSince, as every liar knows,\nNo man can bear such sincerity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "song-for-nobody": { - "title": "“Song for Nobody”", - "body": "A yellow flower\n(Light and spirit)\nSings by itself\nFor nobody.\n\nA golden spirit\n(Light and emptiness)\nSings without a word\nBy itself.\n\nLet no one touch this gentle sun\nIn whose dark eye\nSomeone is awake.\n\n(No light, no gold, no name, no color\nAnd no thought:\nO, wide awake!)\n\nA golden heaven\nSings by itself\nA song to nobody.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "song-for-our-lady-of-cobre": { - "title": "“Song for Our Lady of Cobre”", - "body": "The white girls lift their heads like trees,\nThe black girls go\nReflected like flamingoes in the street.\n\nThe white girls sing as shrill as water,\nThe black girls talk as quiet as clay.\nThe white girls open their arms like clouds,\nThe black girls close their eyes like wings:\nAngels bow down like bells,\nAngels look up like toys,\n\nBecause the heavenly stars\nStand in a ring:\nAnd all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,\nGet up and fly away like birds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "marymas" - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-traveller": { - "title": "“The Song of the Traveller”", - "body": "How light the heavy world becomes, when with transparent waters\nAll the shy elms and wakeful appletrees are dressed!\nHow the sun shouts, and spins his wheel of flame\nAnd shoots the whole land full of diamonds\nEnriching every flower’s watery vesture with his praise,\nO green spring mornings when we hear creation singing!\n\nThe stones between our steps are radium and platinum\nWhen, on this sacred day, sweet Christ, we climb Your hill;\nAnd all the hours, our steps,\nPray us our way to the high top with silent music from the clouds\nAs each new bench-mark builds us to a quieter altitude,\nPromising those holy heights where the low world will die.\n\nShall we look back out of this airy treasury\nAnd spill the plenty that we have already in our hands\nTo view you, cities full of sorcery,\nAnd count the regiments deployed on your grey plain\nWhere you lie boiling in your smoky wars?\n\nFor lo! the music of your treachery\nStill plagues us with a sullen rumor in this sinless sun,\nAnd your coarse voice still reaches us.\nSandpapering the silence of our atmosphere.\nShall we turn back to hear those far, far fragile trumpets play?\n\nLet us but lean one moment to the witchery of your thin clarions\nAnd all our flowery mountain will be tattered with a coat of weeds;\nAnd the bright sun, our friend, turning to a prodigious enemy,\nWill burn our way with curses,\nHardening our hesitation, in that instant, to a solid weight,\n\nTo bake us white as monuments, like Mistress Lot,\nSaltpillars planted on the stony road from Sodom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "The bottom of the sea has come\nAnd builded in my noiseless room\nThe fishes’ and the mermaids’ home,\n\nWhose it is most, most hell to be\nOut of the heavy-hanging sea\nAnd in the thin, thin changeable air\n\nOr unroom sleep some other where;\nBut play their coral violins\nWhere waters most lock music in:\n\nThe bottom of my room, the sea.\nFull of voiceless curtaindeep\nThere mermaid somnambules come sleep\nWhere fluted half-lights show the way,\n\nAnd there, there lost orchestras play\nAnd down the many quarterlights come\nTo the dim mirth of my aquadrome:\nThe bottom of my sea, the room.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "the-sowing-of-meanings": { - "title": "“The Sowing of Meanings”", - "body": "See the high birds! Is theirs the song\nThat dies among the wood-light\nWounding the listener with such bright arrows?\nOr do they play in wheeling silences\nDefining in the perfect sky\nThe bounds of (here below) our solitude,\n\nWhere spring has generated lights of green\nTo glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?\nPonds full of sky and stillnesses\nWhat heavy summer songs still sleep\nUnder the tawny rushes at your brim?\n\nMore than a season will be born here, nature,\nIn your world of gravid mirrors!\nThe quiet air awaits one note,\nOne light, one ray and it will be the angels’ spring:\nOne flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then\nAsperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!\n\nFor, like a grain of fire\nSmouldering in the heart of every living essence\nGod plants His undivided power--\nBuries His thought too vast for worlds\nIn seed and root and blade and flower,\n\nUntil, in the amazing light of April,\nSurcharging the religious silence of the spring,\nCreation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret\nToo terrible to bear.\n\nThen every way we look, lo! rocks and trees\nPastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament\nAnd our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,\nWhile the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,\nBears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.\n\nAnd then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,\nThe deep united threeness printed in our being,\nShot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within,\nAnd plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,\nDives after, and discovers flame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "st-malachy": { - "title": "“St. Malachy”", - "body": "In November, in the days to remember the dead\nWhen air smells cold as earth,\nSt. Malachy, who is very old, gets up,\nParts the thin curtain of trees and dawns upon our land.\n\nHis coat is filled with drops of rain, and he is bearded\nWith all the seas of Poseidon.\n(Is it a crozier, or a trident in his hand?)\nHe weeps against the gothic window, and the empty\ncloister\nMourns like an ocean shell.\n\nTwo bells in the steeple\nTalk faintly to the old stranger\nAnd the tower considers his waters.\n“I have been sent to see my festival,” (his cavern speaksl)\n“For I am the saint of the day.\nShall I shake the drops from my locks and stand in your\ntransept,\nOr, leaving you, rest in the silence of my history?”\n\nSo the bells rang and we opened the antiphoners\nAnd the wrens and larks flew up out of the pages.\nOur thoughts became lambs. Our hearts swam like seas.\nOne monk believed that we should sing to him\nSome stone-age hymn\nOr something in the giant language.\nSo we played to him in the plainsong of the giant Gregory\nAnd oceans of Scripture sang upon bony Eire.\n\nThen the last salvage of flowers\n(Fostered under glass after the gardens foundered)\nHeld up their little lanterns on Malachy’s altar\nTo peer into his wooden eyes before the Mass began.\n\nRain sighed down the sides of the stone church.\nStorms sailed by all day in battle fleets.\nAt five o’clock, when we tried to see the sun, the speechless\nvisitor\nSighed and arose and shook the humus from his feet\nAnd with his trident stirred our trees\nAnd left down-wood, shaking some drops upon the ground.\n\nThus copper flames fall, tongues of fire fall\nThe leaves in hundreds fall upon his passing\nWhile night sends down her dreadnought darkness\nUpon this spurious Pentecost.\n\nAnd the Melchisedec of our year’s end\nWho came without a parent, leaves without a trace,\nAnd rain comes rattling down upon our forest\nLike the doors of a country jail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_malachy" - } - } - }, - "stranger": { - "title": "“Stranger”", - "body": "When no one listens\nTo the quiet trees\nWhen no one notices\nThe sun in the pool.\n\nWhere no one feels\nThe first drop of rain\nOr sees the last star\n\nOr hails the first morning\nOf a giant world\nWhere peace begins\nAnd rages end:\n\nOne bird sits still\nWatching the work of God:\nOne turning leaf,\nTwo falling blossoms,\nTen circles upon the pond.\n\nOne cloud upon the hillside,\nTwo shadows in the valley\nAnd the light strikes home.\nNow dawn commands the capture\nOf the tallest fortune,\nThe surrender\nOf no less marvelous prize!\n\nCloser and clearer\nThan any wordy master,\nThou inward Stranger\nWhom I have never seen,\n\nDeeper and cleaner\nThan the clamorous ocean,\nSeize up my silence\nHold me in Thy Hand!\n\nNow act is waste\nAnd suffering undone\nLaws become prodigals\nLimits are torn down\nFor envy has no property\nAnd passion is none.\n\nLook, the vast Light stands still\nOur cleanest Light is One!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-strife-between-the-poet-and-ambition": { - "title": "“The Strife between the Poet and Ambition”", - "body": "Money and fame break in the room\nAnd find the poet all alone.\nThey lock the door, so he won’t run,\nAnd turn the radio full-on\nAnd beat the poor dope like a drum.\n\n\n“Better sing your snatch of song\nBefore that ostrich voice is dumb,\nBetter hit your share of gong\nBefore the sounding brass is mum:\nTomorrow, tomorrow Death will come\nAnd find you sitting dumb and senseless\nWith your epics unbegun,\nAnd take away your pens and pencils--\n\n\nThere’ll be no sculptures on your tomb\nAnd other bards will occupy\nYour seven-fifty sitting room.”\n\n\n“Pardon, sirs, my penny face\nBowed to your dollar presences,\nCurtsying to Famous Verse,\nFlattering wealth with smiles and smirks,\nChoking down my hopeless tears!\nFor someone stole my crate of birds,\nAnd busted up the music box\nIn which I kept my market flocks\nOf bull-ideas and mental bears\nAnd my poetic pocketfox,\nMy case of literary deers,\nMy eagle-vans to bat the airs!\nThey broke the cages and let go\nMy aviary of metric birds,\nAnd all the diction in my zoo\nWas let out by the amateurs!\nThe fishpond of my Friday words\nIs fished out by the days and years.\nMy whole menagerie of verse\nIs ruined by these sly monsieurs!”\n\n\nThe days and years run down the beach\nAnd throw his ideas in the air\nAnd wind his similes up to pitch\nAnd bat his verses out of reach.\nHe mopes along the empty shore\nWith gullcries in his windfilled ear.\nThe hours and minutes, playing catch\nWith every image they can snatch,\nBat his metaphors to the birds\nAnd cheer him with these bullying words:\n“Better sing your snatch of song\nBefore that ostrich voice is dumb:\nBetter whack your share of gong\nBefore the sounding brass is mum:\nTomorrow, tomorrow Death will come\nAnd find your epics unbegun:\nThere’ll be no statues on your tomb,\nAnd other bards will occupy\nYour seven-fifty sitting room!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "there-has-to-be-a-jail-where-ladies-go": { - "title": "“There Has to Be a Jail Where Ladies Go”", - "body": "There has to be a jail where ladies go\nWhen they are poor, without nice things, and with their hair down.\nWhen their beauty is taken from them, when their hearts are broken\nThere is a jail where they must go.\n\nThere has to be a jail for ladies, says the Government,\nWhen they are ugly because they are wrong.\nIt is good for them to stay there a long time\nUntil the wrong is forgotten.\n\nWhen no one wants to kiss them any more,\nOr only wants to kiss them for money\nAnd take their beauty away\nIt is right for the wrong to be unheard of for a long time\nUntil the ladies are not remembered.\n\nBut I remember one favorite song,\nAnd you ladies may not have forgotten:\n“Poor broken blossom, poor faded flower,” says my song.\n\nPoor ladies, you are jailed roses:\nWhen you speak you curse, when you curse\nGod and Hell are rusted together in one red voice\nComing as sweet as dust out of a little hollow heart.\nIs there no child, then, in that empty heart?\n\nPoor ladies, if you ever sang\nI would be brown notes and sad, from understanding too much\nNo amount of soapsy sudsy supersuds will make you\nDainty again and not guilty\nUntil the very end, when you are all forgotten.\nThere is a jail, where guilt is not forgotten.\n\nNot many days, or many years of that stale wall, that smell of disinfectant\nTrying, without wanting, to kill your sin\nCan make you innocent again:\nSo I come with this sad song\nI love you, dusty and sore,\nI love you, unhappy ones.\n\nYou are jailed buttercups, you are small field flowers,\nTo me your voice is not brown\nNor is God rusted together with Hell.\nTell me, darlings, can God be in Hell?\nYou may curse; but He makes your dry voice turn to butter\n(Though for the policeman it is still brown)\nGod becomes your heart’s prisoner, He will laugh at judges.\nHe will laugh at the jail.\nHe will make me write this song.\n\nKeep me in your pocket if you have one. Keep me in your heart if you have no pocket.\nIt is not right for your sorrow to be unknown forever.\nTherefore I come with these voices:\nPoor ladies, do not despair--\nGod will come to your window with skylarks\nAnd pluck each year like a white rose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-immaculate-virgin-on-a-winter-night": { - "title": "“To the Immaculate Virgin, on a Winter Night”", - "body": "Lady, the night is falling and the dark\nSteals all the blood from the scarred west.\nThe stars come out and freeze my heart\nWith drops of untouchable music, frail as ice\nAnd bitter as the new year’s cross.\n\nWhere in the world has any voice\nPrayed to you, Lady, for the peace that’s in your power?\nIn a day of blood and many beatings\nI see the governments rise up, behind the steel horizon,\nAnd take their weapons and begin to kill.\n\nWhere in the world has any city trusted you?\nOut where the soldiers camp the guns begin to thump\nAnd another winter time comes down\nTo seal our years in ice.\nThe last train cries out\nAnd runs in terror from this farmer’s valley\nWhere all the little birds are dead.\n\nThe roads are white, the fields are mute\nThere are no voices in the wood\nAnd trees make gallows up against the sharp-eyed stars.\nOh where will Christ be killed again\nIn the land of these dead men?\n\nLady, the night has got us by the heart\nAnd the whole world is tumbling down.\nWords turn to ice in my dry throat\nPraying for a land without prayer,\n\nWalking to you on water all winter\nIn a year that wants more war.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "the-trappist-abbey-matins": { - "title": "“The Trappist Abbey: Matins”", - "body": "When the full fields begin to smell of sunrise\nAnd the valleys sing in their sleep,\nThe pilgrim moon pours over the solemn darkness\nHer waterfalls of silence,\nAnd then departs, up the long avenue of trees.\n\nThe stars hide, in the glade, their light, like tears,\nAnd tremble where some train runs, lost,\nBaying in eastward mysteries of distance,\nWhere fire flares, somewhere, over a sink of cities.\n\nNow kindle in the windows of this ladyhouse, my soul,\nYour childish, clear awakeness:\nBurn in the country night\nYour wise and sleepless lamp.\nPor, from the frowning tower, the windy belfry,\nSudden the bells come, bridegrooms,\nAnd fill the echoing dark with love and fear.\n\nWake in the windows of Gethsemani, my soul, my sister,\nFor the past years, with smokey torches, come,\nBringing betrayal from the burning world\nAnd bloodying the glade with pitch flame.\n\nWake in the cloisters of the lonely night, my soul, my sister,\nWhere the apostles gather, who were, one time, scattered,\nAnd mourn God’s blood in the place of His betrayal,\nAnd weep with Peter at the triple cock-crow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "when-in-the-soul-of-the-serene-disciple": { - "title": "“When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple”", - "body": "When in the soul of the serene disciple\nWith no more Fathers to imitate\nPoverty is a success,\nIt is a small thing to say the roof is gone:\nHe has not even a house.\n\nStars, as well as friends,\nAre angry with the noble ruin.\nSaints depart in several directions.\n\nBe still:\nThere is no longer any need of comment.\nIt was a lucky wind\nThat blew away his halo with his cares,\nA lucky sea that drowned his reputation.\n\nHere you will find\nNeither a proverb nor a memorandum.\nThere are no ways,\nNo methods to admire\nWhere poverty is no achievement.\nHis God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.\n\nWhat choice remains?\nWell, to be ordinary is not a choice:\nIt is the usual freedom\nOf men without visions.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-the-dim-light": { - "title": "“When the Dim Light”", - "body": "When the dim light, at Lauds, comes strike her window,\nBellsong falls out of Heaven with a sound of glass.\n\nPrayers fly in the mind like larks,\nThoughts hide in the height like hawks:\nAnd while the country churches tell their blessings to the\ndistance,\nHer slow words move\n(Like summer winds the wheat) her innocent love:\nDesires glitter in her mind\nLike morning stars:\n\nUntil her name is suddenly spoken\nLike a meteor falling.\n\nShe can no longer hear shrill day\nSing in the east,\nNor see the lovely woods begin to toss their manes.\nThe rivers have begun to sing.\nThe little clouds shine in the sky like girls:\nShe has no eyes to see their faces.\n\nSpeech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought\nlike diamonds,\nRides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.\n\nAnd is brought home like harvests,\nHid in her house, and stored\nLike the sweet summer’s riches in our peaceful barns.\n\nBut in the world of March outside her dwelling,\nThe farmers and the planters\nFear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor,\nWhere, on the brown, bare furrows,\nThe winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "the-widow-of-naim": { - "title": "“The Widow of Naim”", - "body": "The men that cut their graves in the grey rocks\nGo down more slowly than the sun upon their dusty country:\nWhite as the wall, the weepers leave the town,\nTo be the friends of grief, and follow\nTo the new tomb a widow’s sorrow.\n\nThe men with hands as hard as rope,\n(Some smell of harvests, some of nets,) the strangers,\nCome up the hill more slowly than the seasons of the year.\n\n“Why do you walk in funerals, you men of Naim,\nWhy go you down to graves, with eyes like winters,\nAnd your cold faces clean as cliffs?\nSee how we come, our brows are full of sun,\nOur smiles are fairer than the wheat and hay,\nOur eyes are saner than the sea.\nLay down your burden at our four-roads’ crossing,\nAnd learn a wonder from the Christ, our Traveller.”\n\n (Oh, you will say that those old times\n Are all dried up like water,\n Since the great God went walking on a road to Naim,\n How many hundred years has slept again in death\n That widow’s son, after the marvel of his miracle:\n He did not rise for long, and sleeps forever.\n And what of the men of the town?\n What have the desert winds done to the dust\n Of the poor weepers, and the widow’s friends?)\n\nThe men that cut their graves in the grey rocks\nSpoke to the sons of God upon the four cross roads:\n“Men of Genesareth, who climb our hill as slow as spring or summer,\nChrist is your Master, and we see His eyes are Jordans,\nHis hands and feet are wounded, and His words are wine.\nHe has let death baptize the one who stirs and wakens\nIn the bier we carry,\nThat we may read the Cross and Easter in this rising,\nAnd learn the endless heaven\nPromised to all the widow-Church’s risen children.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "wind-and-a-bobwhite": { - "title": "“Wind and a Bobwhite”", - "body": "Wind and a bobwhite\nAnd the afternoon sun.\n\nBy ceasing to question the sun\nI have become light,\n\nBird and wind.\n\nMy leaves sing.\n\nI am earth, earth\n\nAll these lighted things\nGrow from my heart.\n\nA tall, spare pine\nStands like the initial of my first\nName when I had one.\n\nWhen I had a spirit,\nWhen I was on fire\nWhen this valley was\nMade out of fresh air\nYou spoke my name\nIn naming Your silence:\nO sweet, irrational worship!\n\nI am earth, earth\n\nMy heart’s love\nBursts with hay and flowers.\nI am a lake of blue air\nIn which my own appointed place\nField and valley\nStand reflected.\n\nI am earth, earth\n\nOut of my grass heart\nRises the bobwhite.\n\nOut of my nameless weeds\nHis foolish worship.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-winters-night": { - "title": "“The Winter’s Night”", - "body": "When, in the dark, the frost cracks on the window\nThe children awaken, and whisper.\nOne says the moonlight grated like a skate\nAcross the freezing river.\nAnother hears the starlight breaking like a knifeblade\nUpon the silent, steelbright pond.\nThey say the trees are stiller than the frozen water\nFrom waiting for a shouting light, a heavenly message.\nYet it is far from Christmas, when a star\nSang in the pane, as brittle as their innocence!\nFor now the light of early Lent Glitters upon the icy step--\n“We have wept letters to our patron saints,\n(The children say) yet slept before they ended.”\n\nOh, is there in this night no sound of strings, of singers?\nNone coming from the wedding, no, nor Bridegroom’s messenger?\n(The sleepy virgins stir, and trim their lamps.)\nThe moonlight rings upon the ice as sudden as a footstep;\nStarlight clinks upon the dooryard stone, too like a latch,\nAnd the children are, again, awake,\nAnd all call out in whispers to their guardian angels.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "with-the-world-in-my-bloodstream": { - "title": "“With the World in My Bloodstream”", - "body": "I lie on my hospital bed\nWater runs inside the walls\nAnd the musical machinery\nAll around overhead\nPlays upon my metal system\nMy invented back bone\nLends to the universal tone\nA flat impersonal song\nAll the planes in my mind\nSing to my worried blood\nTo my jet streams\nI swim in the world’s genius\nThe spring’s plasm\nI wonder who the hell I am.\n\nThe world’s machinery\nExpands in the walls\nOf the hot musical building\nMade in maybe twenty-four\nAnd my lost childhood remains\nOne of the city’s living cells\nThanks to this city\nI am still living\nBut whose life lies here\nAnd whose invented music sings?\n\nAll the freights in the night\nSwing my dark technical bed\nAll around overhead\nAnd wake the questions in my blood\nMy jet streams fly far above\nBut my low gash is no good\nHere below earth and bone\nBleeding in a numbered bed\nThough all my veins run\nWith Christ and with the stars’ plasm.\n\nAncestors and Indians\nZen Masters and Saints\nParade in the incredible hotel\nAnd dark-eyed Negro mercy bends\nAnd uncertain fibers of the will\nToward recovery and home.\nWhat recovery and what Home?\nI have no more sweet home\nI doubt the bed here and the road there\nAnd WKLO I most abhor\nMy head is rotten with the town’s song.\n\nHere below stars and light\nAnd the Chicago plane\nSlides up the rainy straits of night\nWhile in my maze I walk and sweat\nWandering in the low bone system\nOr searching the impossible ceiling\nFor the question and the meaning\nTill the machine rolls in again\nI grow hungry for invented air\nAnd for the technical community of men\nFor my lost Zen breathing\nFor the unmarried fancy\nAnd the wild gift I made in those days\nFor all the compromising answers\nAll the gambles and blue rhythms\nOf individual despair.\n\nSo the world’s logic runs\nUp and down the doubting walls\nWhile the frights and the planes\nSwing my sleep out the window\nAll around, overhead\nIn doubt and technical heat\nIn oxygen and jet streams\nIn the world’s enormous space\nAnd in man’s enormous want\nUntil the want itself is gone\nNameless bloodless and alone\nThe Cross comes and Eckhart’s scandal\nThe Holy Supper and the precise wrong\nAnd the accurate little spark\nIn emptiness in the jet stream\nOnly the spark can understand\nAll that burns flies upward\nWhere the rainy jets have gone\nA sign of needs and possible homes\nAn invented back bone\nA dull song of oxygen\nA lost spark in Eckhart’s Castle.\nWorld’s plasm and world’s cell\nI bleed myself awake and well\n\nOnly the spark is now true\nDancing in the empty room\nAll around overhead\nWhile the frail body of Christ\nSweats in a technical bed\nI am Christ’s lost cell\nHis childhood and desert age\nHis descent into hell.\nLove without need and without name\nBleeds in the empty problem\nAnd the spark without identity\nCircles the empty ceiling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "w-s-merwin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "W. S. Merwin", - "birth": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2019 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 74 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-alphabets": { - "title": "“After the Alphabets”", - "body": "I am trying to decipher the language of insects\nthey are the tongues of the future\ntheir vocabularies describe buildings as food\nthey can instruct of dark water and the veins of trees\nthey can convey what they do not know\nand what is known at a distance\nand what nobody knows\nthey have terms for making music with the legs\nthey can recount changing in a sleep like death\nthey can sing with wings\nthe speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without horizons\nthey are wholly articulate\nthey are never important they are everything", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "after-the-spring": { - "title": "“After the Spring”", - "body": "The first hay is in and all at once\nin the silent evening summer has come\nknowing the place wholly the green skin\nof its hidden slopes where the shadows will\nnever reach so far again and a few\ngray hairs motionless high in the late\nsunlight tell of rain before morning\nand of finding the daybreak under green\nwater with no shadows but all still the same\nstill known still the known faces of summer\nfaces of water turning into themselves\nchanging without a word into themselves", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "air": { - "title": "“Air”", - "body": "Naturally it is night.\nUnder the overturned lute with its\nOne string I am going my way\nWhich has a strange sound.\n\nThis way the dust, that way the dust.\nI listen to both sides\nBut I keep right on.\nI remember the leaves sitting in judgment\nAnd then winter.\n\nI remember the rain with its bundle of roads.\nThe rain taking all its roads.\nNowhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "among-the-eyes": { - "title": "“Among the Eyes”", - "body": "The blind guides have come for us\nWe summoned them thinking to save ourselves\n\nThese are the terms\nNothing is forgiven nothing is remembered\n\nAnd order they tell us was never ours", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "animals-from-mountains": { - "title": "“Animals from Mountains”", - "body": "When I was small and stayed quiet\nsome animals came\nnew ones each time\nand waited there near me\nand all night they were eating the black\n\nthey knew me they knew me\nnobody saw them\nI watched how they watched me\nthey waited right there\nnobody heard them talking laughing\nlaughing\nLaugh they told me nobody will hear\n\nand we went out one time\nonto one mountain\nall the way and nobody knew we went\nwe went together we sounded like chewing\nthe next day the mountain was gone\n\nwe went out onto two mountains\nwe made no noise\nno more noise than smoke\nnobody saw us far away\nthe next day those mountains were almost gone\n\nwe went out\nonto my dead grandmother’s mountain\nthere an old wind lives\nthat’s never been away\nit lives on and on there alone\nbut the mountain’s gone\nand some of us\nnever came back all the way", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-dream-of-burial": { - "title": "“Another Dream of Burial”", - "body": "Sometimes it is a walled garden\nwith the stone over the entrance\nbroken and inside it a few\nsilent dried-up weeds or it may\nbe a long pool perfectly still\nwith the clear water revealing\nno color but that of the gray\nstone around it and once there was\nin a painting of a landscape\none torn place imperfectly mended\nthat showed the darkness under it\nbut still I have set nothing down\nand turned and walked away from it\ninto the whole world the whole world", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "any-time": { - "title": "“Any Time”", - "body": "How long ago the day is\nwhen at last I look at it\nwith the time it has taken\nto be there still in it\nnow in the transparent light\nwith the flight in the voices\nthe beginning in the leaves\neverything I remember\nand before it before me\npresent at the speed of light\nin the distance that I am\nwho keep reaching out to it\nseeing all the time faster\nwhere it has never stirred from\nbefore there is anything\nthe darkness thinking the light", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "When we have gone the stone will stop singing\n\nApril April\nSinks through the sand of names\n\nDays to come\nWith no stars hidden in them\n\nYou that can wait being there\n\nYou that lose nothing\nKnow nothing", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-asians-dying": { - "title": "“The Asians Dying”", - "body": "When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains\nThe ash the great walker follows the possessors\nForever\nNothing they will come to is real\nNor for long\nOver the watercourses\nLike ducks in the time of the ducks\nThe ghosts of the villages trail in the sky\nMaking a new twilight\n\nRain falls into the open eyes of the dead\nAgain again with its pointless sound\nWhen the moon finds them they are the color of everything\n\nThe nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed\nThe dead go away like bruises\nThe blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands\nPain the horizon\nRemains\nOverhead the seasons rock\nThey are paper bells\nCalling to nothing living\n\nThe possessors move everywhere under Death their star\nLike columns of smoke they advance into the shadows\nLike thin flames with no light\nThey with no past\nAnd fire their only future", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ballad-of-john-cable-and-three-gentlemen": { - "title": "“Ballad of John Cable and Three Gentlemen”", - "body": "He that had come that morning,\nOne after the other,\nOver seven hills,\nEach of a new color,\n\nCame now by the last tree,\nBy the red-colored valley,\nTo a gray river\nWide as the sea.\n\nThere at the shingle\nA listing wherry\nAwash with dark water;\nWhat should it carry?\n\nThere on the shelving,\nThree dark gentlemen.\nMight they direct him?\nThree gentlemen.\n\n“Cable, friend John, John Cable,”\nWhen they saw him they said,\n“Come and be company\nAs far as the far side.”\n\n“Come follow the feet,” they said,\n“Of your family,\nOf your old father\nThat came already this way.”\n\nBut Cable said, “First I must go\nOnce to my sister again;\nWhat will she do come spring\nAnd no man on her garden?\n\nShe will say ‘Weeds are alive\nFrom here to the Stream of Friday;\nI grieve for my brother’s plowing,’\nThen break and cry.”\n\n“Lose no sleep,” they said, “for that fallow:\nShe will say before summer,\n‘I can get me a daylong man,\nDo better than a brother.’”\n\nCable said, “I think of my wife:\nDearly she needs consoling;\nI must go back for a little\nFor fear she die of grieving.”\n\n“Cable,” they said, “John Cable,\nAsk no such wild favor;\nStill, if you fear she die soon,\nThe boat might wait for her.”\n\nBut Cable said, “I remember:\nOut of charity let me\nGo shore up my poorly mother,\nCries all afternoon.”\n\nThey said, “She is old and far,\nFar and rheumy with years,\nAnd, if you like, we shall take\nNo note of her tears.”\n\nBut Cable said, “I am neither\nYour hired man nor maid,\nYour dog nor shadow\nNor your ape to be led.”\n\nHe said, “I must go back:\nOnce I heard someone say\nThat the hollow Stream of Friday\nIs a rank place to lie;\n\nAnd this word, now I remember,\nMakes me sorry: have you\nThought of my own body\nI was always good to?\n\nThe frame that was my devotion\nAnd my blessing was,\nThe straight bole whose limbs\nWere long as stories--\n\nNow, poor thing, left in the dirt\nBy the Stream of Friday\nMight not remember me\nHalf tenderly.”\n\nThey let him nurse no worry;\nThey said, “We give you our word:\nPoor thing is made of patience;\nWill not say a word.”\n\n“Cable, friend John, John Cable,”\nAfter this they said,\n“Come with no company\nTo the far side.\n\nTo a populous place,\nA dense city\nThat shall not be changed\nBefore much sorrow dry.”\n\nOver shaking water\nToward the feet of his father,\nLeaving the hills’ color\nAnd his poorly mother\n\nAnd his wife at grieving\nAnd his sister’s fallow\nAnd his body lying\nIn the rank hollow,\n\nNow Cable is carried\nOn the dark river;\nNor even a shadow\nFollowed him over.\n\nOn the wide river\nGray as the sea\nFlags of white water\nAre his company.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "bear": { - "title": "“Bear”", - "body": "And in the northmost of the world’s whiteness, pacing slowly\nFar and small in those spaces, white like a shadow\nOf white, over that blank plain of silence without\nEnd, those plateaus of solitude, he moves: further\nIn the secret of whiteness than ever the high-honking faint\nBlack ravels of wild geese fly wavering at the end\nOf winter; further in silence than the last\nBlack tracery of unvisited forests that stand bleak\nAnd tall like white-bound navies, hulls sunk in the virgin\nHush, where the sky is the sheen of a wide shell, and the creaking\nOf their empty rigging gives weight to the stillness; and further\nIn solitude than all charactery of shadows\nThe figured world casts in its turning, the pads of his white\nFeet, wandering, fill their own shadows. Below him, far\nOn the grilled globe of the middle earth the furrowed\nFields of men know husbandry and harvest; and there\nAre the stern gods on their gray hills, the audacious\nProws of vessels tempting the goddess-natured sea,\nAnd the falling of rain, air’s softnesses, and there is company there,\nVariety and houses, coupling and colours; and\nThe fires are warm there, the water flows, and the other\nBeasts and their seasons revolve their patient\nCaravan; but that is in a different dream. And beyond\nthe green-altering\nTundra and the stiff sea, indeed before these, he slouches\nBeyond maps, before maps, in a region\nWith not so much conformation, no: on the dim\nComb of the world, that place\nThat the maps make white for that they have not found it,\nAnd white it is, in the yellowish green whiteness\nOf its long dusk: the flatness vanishing\nUnder the bursts and whirls of its misted horizon; even\nThe years have not yet come to pass, but all\nDrifts lost where yet no finding is. Yet all\nConjunction is bloodless, thin as the still air: the abstract\nMeeting of lines projected from elsewhere, degrees\nOf the rank world’s longitude, rhumbs of stars; but though they join\nAlways under his shifting feet, there is\nNo narrowness engendered there, but only\nThe beginnings of distance; and all directions join,\nAre lost in his shadow beneath him, and direction\nBecomes merely the way he walks, shambling: he the one\nHill on this level pallor, the single floe", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "before-that": { - "title": "“Before That”", - "body": "It was never there and already it’s vanishing\n\nCity unhealthy pale with pictures of\nCemeteries sifting on its windows\nIts planets with wind in their eyes searching among\nThe crosses again\nAt night\nIn dark clothes\n\nIt was never there\n\nPapers news from the desert\nMoving on or\nKip in go their\nVoices\n\nThe river flowing past its other shore\nPast the No Names the windows washed at night\nAnd who is my\nName for\n\nIn my pocket\nSlowly the photographs becoming saints\nNever there\n\nI put out my hand and the dark falls through it\nFollowing a fag\n\nGutters made in my time rounded with\nThe wounded in mind\nThe streets roped off for the affectionate\n\nWill do for the\nMutilated\n\nIf I\nLie down in the street and that smoke comes out of me\n\nWho\nWas it\n\nIt was a night like this that the ashes were made\n\nBefore that\nWas always the fire", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "before-a-departure-in-spring": { - "title": "“Before a Departure in Spring”", - "body": "Once more it is April with the first light sifting\nthrough the young leaves heavy with dew making the colors\nremember who they are the new pink of the cinnamon tree\nthe gilded lichens of the bamboo the shadowed bronze\nof the kamani and the blue day opening\nas the sunlight descends through it all like the return\nof a spirit touching without touch and unable\nto believe it is here and here again and awake\nreaching out in silence into the cool breath\nof the garden just risen from darkness and days of rain\nit is only a moment the birds fly through it calling\nto each other and are gone with their few notes and the flash\nof their flight that had vanished before ever we knew it\nwe watch without touching any of it and we\ncan tell ourselves only that this is April this is the morning\nthis never happened before and we both remember it", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-bird": { - "title": "“The Bird”", - "body": "Might it be like this then to come back descending\nthrough the gray sheeted hour when it is said that dreams\nare to be believed the moment when the ghosts go home\nwith the last stars still on far below in a silence\nthat deepens like water a sinking softly toward them\nto find a once-familiar capital half dissolved\nlike a winter its faces piled in their own wreckage\nand over them unfinished towers of empty\nmirrors risen framed in air then beside pewter rivers\nunder black nests in the naked poplars arriving\nat the first hesitations of spring the thin leaves\nshivering and the lights in them and at cold April with trees\nall in white its mullein wool opening on thawed banks\ncowslips and mustard in the morning russet cows on green slope\nrunning clouds behind hands of willows the song of the wren\nand both recognizing and being recognized with doubting\nbelief neither stranger nor true inhabitant\nneither knowing nor not knowing coming at last\nto the door in sunlight and seeing as through glasses far\naway the old claims the longings to stay and to leave\nthe new heights of the trees the children grown tall and polite\nthe animal absences and scarcely touching anything\nholding it after all as uncertainly\nas the white blossoms were held that have been blown down\nmost of them in one night or this empty half\nof a bird’s egg flung out of the bare flailing branches", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "bread-and-butter": { - "title": "“Bread and Butter”", - "body": "I keep finding this letter\nTo the gods of abandon,\nTearing it up: Sirs,\nHaving lived in your shrines\nI know what I owe you--\n\nI don’t, did I ever? With both hands\nI’ve forgotten, I keep\nHaving forgotten. I’ll have no such shrines here.\nI will not bow in the middle of the room\nTo the statue of nothing\nWith the flies turning around it.\nOn these four walls I am the writing.\n\nWhy would I start such a letter?\nThink of today, think of tomorrow.\nToday on the tip of my tongue,\nToday with my eyes,\nTomorrow the vision,\nTomorrow\n\nIn the broken window\nThe broken boats will come in,\nThe life boats\nWaving their severed hands,\n\nAnd I will love as I ought to\nSince the beginning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bread-at-midnight": { - "title": "“Bread at Midnight”", - "body": "The judges have chains in their sleeves\nTo get where they are they have\nStudied many flies\nThey drag their voices up a long hill\nAnnouncing It is over\n\nWell now that it is over\nI remember my homeland the mountains of chaff\n\nAnd hands hands deaf as starfish fetching\nThe bread still frozen\nTo the tables", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "bread": { - "title": "“Bread”", - "body": "Each face in the street is a slice of bread\nwandering on\nsearching\n\nsomewhere in the light the true hunger\nappears to be passing them by\nthey clutch\n\nhave they forgotten the pale caves\nthey dreamed of hiding in\ntheir own caves\nfull of the waiting of their footprints\nhung with the hollow marks of their groping\nfull of their sleep and their hiding\n\nhave they forgotten the ragged tunnels\nthey dreamed of following in out of the light\nto hear step after step\n\nthe heart of bread\nto be sustained by its dark breath\nand emerge\n\nto find themselves alone\nbefore a wheat field\nraising its radiance to the moon", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-burnt-child": { - "title": "“The Burnt Child”", - "body": "Matches among other things that were not allowed\nnever would be\nlying high in a cool blue box\nthat opened in other hands and there they all were\nbodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns\nwhite sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring\nfire after fire gone before\n\nI could hear the scratch and flare\nwhen they were over\nand catch the smell of the striking\nI knew what the match would feel like\nlighting\nwhen I was very young\n\na fire engine came and parked\nin the shadow of the big poplar tree\non Fourth Street one night\nkeeping its engine running\npumping oxygen to the old woman\nin the basement\nwhen she died the red lights went on burning", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-dark": { - "title": "“By Dark”", - "body": "When it is time I follow the black dog\ninto the darkness that is the mind of day\n\nI can see nothing there but the black dog\nthe dog I know going ahead of me\n\nnot looking back oh it is the black dog\nI trust now in my turn after the years\n\nwhen I had all the trust of the black dog\nthrough an age of brightness and through shadow\n\non into the blindness of the black dog\nwhere the rooms of the dark were already known\n\nand had no fear in them for the black dog\nleading me carefully up the blind stairs", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-day-and-by-night": { - "title": "“By Day and by Night”", - "body": "Shadow, index of the sun,\nWho knows him as you know him,\nWho have never turned to look at him since the beginning?\n\nIn the court of his brilliance\nYou set up his absence like a camp.\nAnd his fire only confirms you. And his death is your freedom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "calling-late": { - "title": "“Calling Late”", - "body": "Oh white lemurs who invented the dance\nthis is the time afterward\ncan you hear me\nwho invented the story\n\npart of the story\n\noh blind lemurs who invented the morning\nwho touched the day\nwho held it aloft when it was early\nwho taught it to fly\ncan you hear the story\n\ncan you see now\n\noh shining lemurs who invented the beginning\nwho brought it along with you all the way\nthrowing it high up catching it never letting it fall\nthrowing it ahead throwing it far overhead\nleaping up to it climbing into it\n\ngoing to sleep in it shutting your eyes\nwith it safe inside them\nare you listening\n\nto the story\nit has no beginning", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "camel": { - "title": "“Camel”", - "body": "Remember that we are dust. It is said\nThat this place of our passage is prone to mirages:\nThat the waves of the drifting desert, the heat-daft\nAir playing like water-light, the horizon\nSwirling slow as a shadow and laying up\nTo itself all their unearthly shiftings,\nOr simply the salt tides working\nOf need or desire, out of some fold\nOf their flowing raise often visions\nAs of white cities like walled clouds, agleam\nOn their hills, so clear that you can see the tiered\nBuildings glint still in the rocking daylight,\nOr again of trees even whose shadows\nSeem green and to breathe, or merely of pools\nOf simple water on that same dry surge borne,\nThat will ride nearer, nearer, like elusive\nAphrodite; and these are nothing\nBut the playing of the heated light teasing\nLike pain over this dust. In truth, it may\nBe nothing but ourselves, this that is\nAll about us for our eves to see: this dust\nThat we cannot see beyond. Remember\nThat we are dust, dust and a little breath,\nAs the sand dervishes the wind lifts\nWhirling and sends over the sea-shaped dunes;\nAs does their dancing, we wind between breathless\nDust and breathless dust, and our passage\nEven as theirs, may be no more\nThan a casual sport of the air gliding\nTo no depth over the delusive surface\nOf our breathless selves. But speaking of virtues\nWe think of water; moving, we think\nOf arrival as of water, of virtue\nAs the means of arrival. And we have named\nFor water him who is visibly\nOur practice of virtue, beast of our motion,\nCalling him “Ship of the Desert.” Who rolls\nWhen he walks; whose going also\nHas strangely the gait of a cradle. He too is dust,\nYet not as we, save as that figure\nOf what our faring is, for his breath is speechless,\nHis back that bears us has a wave’s shape\nDrawn by a child; or hill’s lurching\nAs he strides; when he runs, his shadow\nOver the rippling dust is a wind’s\nShudder across modelled bay-water,\nCurved gust across grain-field, or storm silvering\nFast as some hastening angel over\nHillsides of olive trees, darkness\nOf rain-cloud chasing the sunlight\nOn carved hills, or wave-crest over\nFar reef flung, its main strength still racing\nFor shore. Even as these\nIt would seem our progress is, in itself bearing\nIts own sustenance for long waste-wending;\nA power that may be, in event of all\nArrival failing, other resources\nParched, our water of desperation; that is not\nOurselves; whose capacities may not be\nArrived at even by prayer, patient study\nAnd deprivation, yet whose presence we have known\nTo affect us so that even in places of water,\nOf pleasure, repose, abode, when we had thought\nTo escape the sense of it, it will sometimes break\nFrom where it was tethered and find us out,\nIntruding its ungainly ill-smelling head\nOver our shoulders. A creature that can shut\nBoth eyes and nostrils against the lash\nOf dust risen suddenly savage. That if not\nDrained at last dry as a white bone,\nExhausted beyond sense, or buried\nIn the capricious cruelty of\nIts own condition, can sense more surely than we\nOver the dust-driven horizon the green\nPlaces where the roots grope trusting\nDown into the dark breathlessness, the trees\nSway and give shade, dew falls early,\nStones drip in the mossed shadow, and the motes\nSeem to dance to a falling cadence\nThat mortal ears might apprehend. Catching, as we,\nAt phantoms, breaking into a dangerous\nRocking-horse sprint at false visions, nevertheless\nWhen we are despairing, drawn it would seem\nBy deceptions only, working to wean\nOur minds from arrival, staring vacantly\nAt the tormented air, while the enraged sun\nCareens in white circles about a sky\nThe blood-orange of an eyelid, he can with no warning\nLift the furred neck swinging there\nLike a winter serpent, flare divining nostrils,\nEven from far off smell the true water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "the-causeway": { - "title": "“The Causeway”", - "body": "This is the bridge where at dusk they hear voices\nfar out in the meres and marshes or they say they hear voices\n\nthe bridge shakes and no one else is crossing at this hour\nsomewhere along here is where they hear voices\n\nthis is the only bridge though it keeps changing\nfrom which some always say they hear voices\n\nthe sounds pronounce an older utterance out of the shadows\nsometimes stifled sometimes carried from clear voices\n\nwhat can be recognized in the archaic syllables\nfrightens many and tells others not to fear voices\n\ntravellers crossing the bridge have forgotten where they were going\nin a passage between the remote and the near voices\n\nthere is a tale by now of a bridge a long time before this one\nalready old before the speech of our day and the mere voices\n\nwhen the Goths were leaving their last kingdom in Scythia\nthey could feel the bridge shaking under their voices\n\nthe bank and the first spans are soon lost to sight\nthere seemed no end to the horses carts people and all their voices\n\nin the mists at dusk the whole bridge sank under them\ninto the meres and marshes leaving nothing but their voices\n\nthey are still speaking the language of their last kingdom\nthat no one remembers who now hears their voices\n\nwhatever translates from those rags of sound\npersuades some who hear them that they are familiar voices\n\ngrandparents never seen ancestors in their childhoods\nnow along the present bridge they sound like dear voices\n\nsome may have spoken in my own name in an earlier language\nwhen last they drew breath in the kingdom of their voices", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ceremony-after-an-amputation": { - "title": "“Ceremony after an Amputation”", - "body": "Spirits of the place who were here before I saw it\nto whom I have made such offerings as I have known how to make\nwanting from the first to approach you with recognition\nbringing for your swept ridge trees lining the wind with seedlings\nthat have grown now to become these long wings in chorus\nwhere the birds assemble and settle their flying lives\nyou have taught me without meaning and have lifted me up\nwithout talk or promise and again and again reappeared to me\nunmistakable and changing and unpronounceable as a face\n\ndust of the time a day in late spring after the silk of rain\nhad fallen softly through the night and after the green morning\nthe afternoon floating brushed with gold and then the sounds\nof machines erupting across the valley and elbowing up the slopes\npushing themselves forward to occupy you to be more of you\nwho remain the untouched silence through which they are passing\nI try to hear you remembering that we are not separate\nto find you who cannot be lost or elsewhere or incomplete\n\nnature of the solitary machine coming into the story\nfrom the minds that conceived you and the hands that first conjured up\nthe phantom of you in fine lines on the drawing board\nyou for whom function is all the good that exists\nyou to whom I have come with nothing but purpose\na purpose of my own as though it was something we shared\nyou that were pried from the earth without anyone\nconsulting you and were carried off burned beaten metamorphosed\naccording to plans and lives to which you owed nothing\nlet us be at peace with each other let peace be what is between us\nand you now single vanished part of my left hand bit of bone finger end index\n\nwho began with me in the dark that was already my mother\nyou who touched whatever I could touch of the beginning\nand were how I touched and who remembered the sense of it\nwhen I thought I had forgotten it you in whom it waited\nunder your only map of one untrodden mountain\nyou who did as well as we could through all the hours at the piano\nand who helped undo the bras and found our way to the treasure\n\nand who held the fruit and the pages and knew how to button\nmy right cuff and to wash my left ear and had taken in\nheart beats of birds and beloved faces and hair by day and by night\nfur of dogs ears of horses tongues and the latches of doors\nso that I still feel them clearly long after they are gone\nand water beside the boat one evening of an ancient summer\nand the vibration of a string over which the bow was moving\nas though the sound of the note were still playing\nand the hand of my wife found in the shallows of waking\n\nyou who in a flicker of my inattention\nsignalled to me once only my error telling me\nof the sudden blow from the side so that I looked down\nto see not you any longer but instead a mouth\nfull of blood calling after you who had already gone gone\ngone ahead into what I cannot know or reach or touch\nleaving in your place only the cloud of pain rising\ninto the day filling the light possessing every sound\nbecoming the single color and taste and direction\n\nyet as the pain recedes and the moment of it\nyou remain with me even in the missing of you\nsmall boat moving before me on the current under the daylight\nwhatever you had touched and had known and took with you\nis with me now as you are when you are already there\nunseen part of me reminding me warning me\npointing to what I cannot see never letting me forget\nyou are my own speaking only to me going with me\nall the rest of the way telling me what is still here", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "december-night": { - "title": "“December Night”", - "body": "The cold slope is standing in darkness\nBut the south of the trees is dry to the touch\n\nThe heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers\nI came to watch these\nWhite plants older at night\nThe oldest\nCome first to the ruins\n\nAnd I hear magpies kept awake by the moon\nThe water flows through its\nOwn fingers without end\n\nTonight once more\nI find a single prayer and it is not for men", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "despair": { - "title": "“Despair”", - "body": "Some lit theirs at both ends.\nSome clutched theirs as a blind man does his cane.\nSome sucked theirs like the only orange.\nSome packed clean shirts and a few socks in theirs.\nSome spent their lives looking for theirs and they were wearing it all the time.\nSome neglected theirs but the roots found a way.\nSome buried theirs. The stones tell when and where.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "distant-morning": { - "title": "“Distant Morning”", - "body": "We were a time of our own the redstart reappeared\non the handle of the fork left alone for that moment\nupright in the damp earth the shriek of the black kite\nfloated high over the river as the day warmed\nthe weasel slipped like a trick of light through the ivy\nthere was one wryneck pretending to be a shadow\non the trunk of a dead plum tree while the far figures\nof daylight crossed the dark crystal of its eye\nthe tawny owl clenched itself in its oak hearing the paper\ntrumpet and rapid knocking that told where the nuthatch\nprospected and the gray adder gathered itself\non its gray stone with the ringing of a cricket suspended\naround it the nightwalkers slept curled in their houses\nthe hedgehogs in the deep brush the badgers and foxes\nin their home ground the bats in the high crevices\nnone of it could be held or denied or summoned back\nnone of it would be given its meaning later", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "divinities": { - "title": "“Divinities”", - "body": "Having crowded once onto the threshold of mortality\nAnd not been chosen\nThere is no freedom such as theirs\nThat have no beginning\n\nThe air itself is their memory\nA domain they cannot inhabit\nBut from which they are never absent\n\n_What are you_ they say _that simply exist_\nAnd the heavens and the earth bow to them\nLooking up from their choices\nPerishing\n\nAll day and all night\nEverything that is mistaken worships them\nEven the dead sing them an unending hymn", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-end-in-spring": { - "title": "“An End in Spring”", - "body": "It is carried beyond itself a little way\nAnd covered with a sky of old bedding\n\nThe compatriots stupid as their tables\nGo on eating their packages\nSelling gloves to the clocks\nDoing alright\n\nCeasing to exist it becomes a deity\n\nIt is with the others that are not there\nThe centuries are named for them the names\nDo not come down to us\n\nOn the way to them the words\nDie", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "end-of-a-day": { - "title": "“End of a Day”", - "body": "In the long evening of April through the cool light\nBayle’s two sheep dogs sail down the lane like magpies\nfor the flock a moment before he appears near the oaks\na stub of a man rolling as he approaches\nsmiling and smiling and his dogs are afraid of him\nwe stand among the radiant stones looking out over\ngreen lucent wheat and earth combed red under bare walnut limbs\nbees hanging late in cowslips and lingering bird cherry\nstumps and brush that were the grove of hazel trees\nwhere the land turns above the draped slopes and the valley\nfilled with its one sunbeam and we exchange a few questions\nas though nothing were different but he has bulldozed the upland\npastures and the shepherds’ huts into piles of rubble\nand has his sheep fenced in everyone’s meadows now\nthe smell of box and damp leaves drifts from the woods where a blackbird\nis warning of nightfall Bayle has plans to demolish\nthe ancient walls of the lane and level it wide\nso that trucks can go all the way down to where the lambs\nwith perhaps two weeks to live are waiting for him at the wire\nhe hurries toward them while the sun sinks and the hour\nturns chill as iron and in the oaks the first nightingales\nof the year kindle their unapproachable voices", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "entry": { - "title": "“Entry”", - "body": "When it seems that the world is made of a single\n summer as it always has been and that the gray leaves\nwill hang that same way without moving over the empty\n road until the end while the wheat continues to stand\nin its sleep with no dreams shining boundless into\n the hovering day along the stopped film of the river\nwhen the doors facing south have turned to stone every one\n and the parched syllable of cicadas joined with the hum\nof fields hangs still in the light and from shuttered\n windows voices sift like the settling of dust\nall at once the blank sky will be half dark with the black\n cloud welling from which a cold wind rolls and the first\nthunder splits all around to build upon its own\n deafening echoes then suddenly the light will be only\nthe weight of rain cascading shot through with lightning\n at that time if you are away from home and can stumble\nto any house they will let you in to a dark room\n when it closes behind you at the heart of the roar\nyou will see as through water an unknown face but you\n will hear not a sound it makes and behind it you will see others\nlooking up from around a table in that silence\n knowing nothing about you except why you are there", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "esther": { - "title": "“Esther”", - "body": "Tomorrow they will come for you\nold female word from the corner\nlucidity\nmotionless in the dark\nthey will take you out to be\nbared elsewhere\nopened before it is May\n\nthere is no one else here\nthe door wide to the blinding\nspring\nthe wind one of the family\nlike a cold hen\nmute about the kitchen\nthe rest away busy the shirts waiting\nfor the iron\nthe calendar ticking\n\ntomorrow\nthe animals will keep away\nwe do not believe in\nhappening\nthe sunlight will always lie there\neven tonight even tomorrow night\nit was always there\nbut you go back to another time\nit is said\nas though there is one\n\nIf tomorrow is really\nnot today\nhow can one believe in anything\nas vou say\nhands holding each other in\npaper bags older than they are\neyes cut out of your dress hung\nto dry\nburst package to be\ncarried past the toys out\nin the bright dirt\npast the shadows waving\nringing their bells raising\ntheir instruments\nwhatever is brought back as you know\nis not all\n\nbut if you get\nlater to a place with a blackened wall\nand two sticks held together\nby a little smoke\nmaybe they would let you sit by it\nin the day\nstaring\nand you could announce what he is doing\nthe animal their sky", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "far-company": { - "title": "“Far Company”", - "body": "At times now from some margin of the day\nI can hear birds of another country\nnot the whole song but a brief phrase of it\nout of a music that I may have heard\nonce in a moment I appear to have\nforgotten for the most part that full day\nno sight of which I can remember now\nthough it must have been where my eyes were then\nthat knew it as the present while I thought\nof somewhere else without noticing that\nsinging when it was there and still went on\nwhether or not I noticed now it falls\nsilent when I listen and leaves the day\nand flies before it to be heard again\nsomewhere ahead when I have forgotten", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "for-the-anniversary-of-my-death": { - "title": "“For the Anniversary of My Death”", - "body": "Every year without knowing it I have passed the day\nWhen the last fires will wave to me\nAnd the silence will set out\nTireless traveller\nLike the beam of a lightless star\n\nThen I will no longer\nFind myself in life as in a strange garment\nSurprised at the earth\nAnd the love of one woman\nAnd the shamelessness of men\nAs today writing after three days of rain\nHearing the wren sing and the falling cease\nAnd bowing not knowing to what", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fox-sleep": { - "title": "“Fox Sleep”", - "body": "On a road through the mountains with a friend many years ago\nI came to a curve on a slope where a clear stream\nflowed down flashing across dark rocks through its own\nechoes that could neither be caught nor forgotten\nit was the turning of autumn and already\nthe mornings were cold with ragged clouds in the hollows\nlong after sunrise but the pasture sagging like a roof\nthe glassy water and flickering yellow leaves\nin the few poplars and knotted plum trees were held up\nin a handful of sunlight that made the slates on the silent\nmill by the stream glisten white above their ruin\nand a few relics of the life before had been arranged\nin front of the open mill house to wait\npale in the daylight out on the open mountain\nafter whatever they had been made for was over\nthe dew was drying on them and there were few who took that road\nwho might buy one of them and take it away somewhere\nto be unusual to be the only one\nto become unknown a wooden bed stood there on rocks\na cradle the color of dust a cracked oil jar iron pots\nwooden wheels iron wheels stone wheels the tall box of a clock\nand among them a ring of white stone the size of an\nembrace set into another of the same size\nan iron spike rising from the ring where the wooden\nhandle had fitted that turned it in its days as a hand mill\nyou could see if you looked closely that the top ring\nthat turned in the other had been carved long before in the form\nof a fox lying nose in tail seeming to be\nasleep the features worn almost away where it\nhad gone around and around grinding grain and salt\nto go into the dark and to go on and remember\n\nWhat I thought I had left I kept finding again\nbut when I went looking for what I thought I remembered\nas anyone could have foretold it was not there\nwhen I went away looking for what I had to do\nI found that I was living where I was a stranger\nbut when I retraced my steps the familiar vision\nturned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places\nand the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me\nto be where I had been at home called by name and answering\ngetting ready to go away and going away\n\nEvery time they assembled and he spoke to them\nabout waking there was an old man who stood listening\nand left before the others until one day the old man stayed\nand Who are you he asked the old man\nand the old man answered I am not a man\nmany lives ago I stood where you are standing\nand they assembled in front of me and I spoke to them\nabout waking until one day one of them asked me\nWhen someone has wakened to what is really there\nis that person free of the chain of consequences\nand I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox\nand I have been a fox for five hundred lives\nand now I have come to ask you to say what will\nfree me from the body of a fox please tell me\nwhen someone has wakened to what is really there\nis that person free of the chain of consequences\nand this time the answer was That person sees it as it is\nthen the old man said Thank you for waking me\nyou have set me free of the body of the fox\nwhich you will find on the other side of the mountain\nI ask you to bury it please as one of your own\nthat evening he announced a funeral service\nfor one of them but they said nobody has died\nthen he led them to the other side of the mountain\nand a cave where they found a fox’s body\nand he told them the story and they buried the fox\nas one of them but later one of them asked\nwhat if he had given the right answer every time\n\nOnce again I was there and once again I was leaving\nand again it seemed as though nothing had changed\neven while it was all changing but this time\nwas a time of ending this time the long marriage was over\nthe orbits were flying apart it was autumn again\nsunlight tawny in the fields where the shadows\neach day grew longer and the still afternoons\nripened the distance until the sun went down\nacross the valley and the full moon rose out of the trees\nit was the time of year when I was born and that evening\nI went to see friends for the last time and I came back\nafter midnight along the road white with the moon\nI was crossing the bars of shadow and seeing ahead of me\nthe wide silent valley full of silver light\nand there just at the corner of the land that I had\ncome back to so many times and now was leaving\nat the foot of the wall built of pale stone I saw the body\nstretched in the grass and it was a fox a vixen\njust dead with no sign of how it had come to happen\nno blood the long fur warm in the dewy grass\nnothing broken or lost or torn or unfinished\nI carried her home to bury her in the garden\nin the morning of the clear autumn that she had left\nand to stand afterward in the turning daylight\n\nThere are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags\nof dried irises knuckled into the hollows\nof moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall\nthe ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran\nthe light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree\nover the lane by the house chimney there is the roof\nand the window looking out over the garden\nsummer and winter there is the field below the house\nthere is the broad valley far below them all with the curves\nof the river a strand of sky threaded through it\nand the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke\nand there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall\nthe line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing\nthat has come back when I had thought it was forgotten", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "good-people": { - "title": "“Good People”", - "body": "From the kindness of my parents\nI suppose it was that I held\nthat belief about suffering\n\nimagining that if only\nit could come to the attention\nof any person with normal\nfeelings certainly anyone\nliterate who might have gone\n\nto college they would comprehend\npain when it went on before them\nand would do something about it\nwhenever they saw it happen\nin the time of pain the present\nthey would try to stop the bleeding\nfor example with their own hands\n\nbut it escapes their attention\nor there may be reasons for it\nthe victims under the blankets\nthe meat counters the maimed children\nthe animals the animals\nstaring from the end of the world", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "green-fields": { - "title": "“Green Fields”", - "body": "By this part of the century few are left who believe\nin the animals for they are not there in the carved parts\nof them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks\nare sounds of shadows that possess no future\nthere is still game for the pleasure of killing\nand there are pets for the children but the lives that followed\ncourses of their own other than ours and older\nhave been migrating before us some are already\nfar on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks\nand point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence\nPeter who had lived on from another time and country\nand who had seen so many things set out and vanish\nstill believed in heaven and said he had never once\ndoubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days\nof the horses he had not doubted it in the worst\ntimes of the Great War and afterward and he had come\nto what he took to be a kind of earthly\nmodel of it as he wandered south in his sixties\nby that time speaking the language well enough\nfor them to make him out he took the smallest roads\ninto a world he thought was a thing of the past\nwith wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors\nworking together scything the morning meadows\nturning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in\nby milking time husbandry and abundance\nall the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous\nin the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained\nfor the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see\nuntil the winter when he could no longer fork\nthe earth in his garden and then he gave away\nhis house land everything and committed himself\nto a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered\nfor some time surrounded by those who had lost\nthe use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me\nthat the wall by his bed opened almost every day\nand he saw what was really there and it was eternal life\nas he recognized at once when he saw the gardens\nhe had made and the green fields where he had been\na child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close\nand around him again were the last days of the world", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-highway": { - "title": "“The Highway”", - "body": "It seems too enormous just for a man to be\nWalking on. As if it and the empty day\nWere all there is. And a little dog trotting\nIn time with the heat waves, away down\nNear the horizon, seeming never to get\nAny further. The sun and everything\nAre stuck in the same places, and the ditch\nIs the same all the time, full of every kind\nOf bone, while the empty air keeps humming\nThat sound it has memorized of things going\nPast. And the signs with huge heads and starved\nBodies, dancing suggestive dances in\nThe heat without moving from where they stand,\nAnd the others big as houses, all promise\nBut with nothing inside and only one wall,\nTell of other places where you can eat\nAnd drink and get a bath and lie on a bed\nListening to music, and be safe. If you\nLook around you see it is just the same\nThe other way, going back. Maybe hope\nWas never anything but feet, and wherever\nIt heads for it must get there burning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hummingbird": { - "title": "“The Hummingbird”", - "body": "There was a city hidden in the forest\nand there was a house in the city\nand in it a girl who was so beautiful\nthat her mother never let her out of sight\n\none day one of the servant girls went down\nto the fountain to bring back some water\nand when she came there she saw the hummingbird\nand she stood still with a spell holding her\n\nsince she stayed away so long the mother\nsent another servant girl who came there\nand saw the hummingbird and she stood still\nthe same way with the same spell holding her\n\nthen the mother sent another servant girl\nwho saw the hummingbird and stayed there\nand at that the mother went too and saw\nthe hummingbird and at the sight of its\n\nfeathers and its flight the same spell took her\nand she stood still until finally the girl\nherself decided to go to the fountain\nand see what was keeping them and when she\n\ncame there the hummingbird flew to her\nand tapped her on the forehead with his beak\nand changed her into a hummingbird\nand they both flew off into the forest", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hydra": { - "title": "“The Hydra”", - "body": "No no the dead have no brothers\n\nThe Hydra calls me but I am used to it\nIt calls me Everybody\nBut I know my name and do not answer\n\nAnd you the dead\nYou know your names as I do not\nBut at moments you have just finished speaking\n\nThe snow stirs in its wrappings\nEvery season comes from a new place\n\nLike your voice with its resemblances\n\nA long time ago the lightning was practising\nSomething I thought was easy\n\nI was young and the dead were in other\nAges\nAs the grass had its own language\n\nNow I forget where the difference falls\n\nOne thing about the living sometimes a piece of us\nCan stop dying for a moment\nBut you the dead\n\nOnce you go into those names you go on you never\nHesitate\nYou go on", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-live-up-here": { - "title": "“I Live up Here”", - "body": "I live up here\nAnd a little bit to the left\nAnd I go down only\n\nFor the accidents and then\nNever a moment too soon\n\nJust the same it’s a life it’s plenty\n\nThe stairs the petals she loves me\nEvery time\nNothing has changed\n\nOh down there down there\nEvery time\nThe glass knights lie by their gloves of blood\n\nIn the pans of the scales the helmets\nBrim over with water\nIt’s perfectly fair\n\nThe pavements are dealt out the dice\nEvery moment arrive somewhere\n\nYou can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs\nTheir bells stalling\nAnd then silence comes with the plate and I\nGive what I can\n\nFeeling _It’s worth it_\n\nFor I see\nWhat my votes the mice are accomplishing\nAnd I know I’m free\n\nThis is how I live\nUp here and simply\n\nOthers do otherwise\nMaybe", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "identity": { - "title": "“Identity”", - "body": "When Hans Hofmann became a hedgehog\nsomewhere in a Germany that has\nvanished with its forests and hedgerows\nShakespeare would have been a young actor\nstarting out in a country that was\nonly a word to Hans who had learned\nfrom those who had painted animals\nonly from hearing tales about them\nwithout ever setting eyes on them\nor from corpses with the lingering\nlight mute and deathly still forever\nheld fast in the fur or the feathers\nhanging or lying on a table\nand he had learned from others who had\narranged the corpses of animals\nas though they were still alive in full\nflight or on their way but this hedgehog\nwas there in the same life as his own\nlooking around at him with his brush\nof camel hair and his stretched parchment\nof sheepskin as he turned to each sharp\nparticular quill and every black\nwhisker on the long live snout and those\nflat clawed feet made only for trundling\nand for feeling along the dark undersides\nof stones and as Hans took them in he\nturned into the Hans that we would see", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-island-in-the-harbor": { - "title": "“An Island in the Harbor”", - "body": "My own country my countrymen the exchanges\nYes this is the place\n\nThe flag of the blank wall the birds of money\n\nPrisoners in the watch towers\nAnd the motto\n _The hopes of others our\n Guardians_\n\nEven here\nSpring passes looking for the cradles\n\nThe beating on the bars of the cages\nIs caught and parcelled out to the bells\n\nIt is twelve the prisoners’ own hour\n\nThe mouse bones in the plaster\nPrepare for the resurrection", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "it-is-march": { - "title": "“It is March”", - "body": "It is March and black dust falls out of the books\nSoon I will be gone\nThe tall spirit who lodged here has\nLeft already\nOn the avenues the colorless thread lies under\nOld prices\n\nWhen you look back there is always the past\nEven when it has vanished\nBut when you look forward\nWith your dirty knuckles and the wingless\nBird on your shoulder\nWhat can you write\n\nThe bitterness is still rising in the old mines\nThe fist is coming out of the egg\nThe thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses\n\nAt a certain height\nThe tails of the kites for a moment are\nCovered with footsteps\n\nWhatever I have to do has not yet begun", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "january": { - "title": "“January”", - "body": "So after weeks of rain\nat night the winter stars\nthat much farther in heaven\nwithout our having seen them\nin far light are still forming\nthe heavy elements\nthat when the stars are gone\nfly up as dust finer\nby many times than a hair\nand recognize each other\nin the dark travelling\nat great speed and becoming\nour bodies in our time\nlooking up after rain\nin the cold night together", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "the-last-one": { - "title": "“The Last One”", - "body": "Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.\nEverywhere was theirs because they thought so.\nThey with two leaves they whom the birds despise.\nIn the middle of stones they made up their minds.\nThey started to cut.\n\nWell they cut everything because why not.\nEverything was theirs because they thought so\nIt fell into its shadows and they took both away.\nSome to have some for burning.\n\nWell cutting everything they came to the water.\nThey came to the end of the day there was one left standing.\nThey would cut it tomorrow they went away.\nThe night gathered in the last branches.\nThe shadow of the night gathered in the shadow on the water.\nThe night and the shadow put on the same head\nAnd it said Now.\n\nWell in the morning they cut the last one.\nLike the others the last one fell into its shadow.\nIt fell into its shadow on the water.\nThey took it away its shadow stayed on the water.\n\nWell they shrugged they started trying to get the shadow away.\nThey cut right to the ground the shadow stayed whole.\nThey laid boards on it the shadow came out on top.\nThey shone lights on it the shadow got blacker and clearer.\nThey exploded the water the shadow rocked.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-love-of-october": { - "title": "“The Love of October”", - "body": "A child looking at ruins grows younger\nbut cold\nand wants to wake to a new name\nI have been younger in October\nthan in all the months of spring\nwalnut and may leaves the color\nof shoulders at the end of summer\na month that has been to the mountain\nand become light there\nthe long grass lies pointing uphill\neven in death for a reason\nthat none of us knows\nand the wren laughs in the early shade now\ncome again shining glance in your good time\nnaked air late morning\nmy love is for lightness\nof touch foot feather\nthe day is yet one more yellow leaf\nand without turning I kiss the light\nby an old well on the last of the month\ngathering wild rose hips\nin the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "mercy": { - "title": "“Mercy”", - "body": "Even the hunters, who smile to cock\nThe deadly choice in their minds, and like\nTo carry it by loving custom lightly,\nLooking for something to kill, even\nThe hunters sometimes it overtakes\nOver the half-killed quarry. Do not look\nIn their eyes, they will tell you, there are questions\nThat cannot be put out with knives. Sooner\nOr later, just the same, the eyes are there\nAsking out of the bird broken\nOn wires, out of the crushed rabbit", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mountain-town": { - "title": "“Mountain Town”", - "body": "My memory the invisible buffalo\nLumbers through the vacant street\nConsidering the fences their\n\nSorrows\n\nAnd the lightning died in its\nMine ob it must be\nSome time back its name\nIs written everywhere in faded\nDust\n\nOne of its\nGloves wheels on the sky over\nThe blind movie\nAnd the station where the white train still\nAttends\n\nA bell that I hung onto as long as I could\nIs about to arrive and start ringing", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-nails": { - "title": "“The Nails”", - "body": "I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall\nLike a calendar in one color.\nI wear a torn place on my sleeve.\nIt isn’t as simple as that.\n\nBetween no place of mine and no place of yours\nYou’d have thought I’d know the way by now\nJust from thinking it over.\nOh I know\nI’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning\nLike a mirror on a string,\nExcept it’s hardly credible how\nIt all keeps changing.\nLoss has a wider choice of directions\nThan the other thing.\n\nAs if I had a system\nI shuffle among the lies\nTurning them over, if only\nI could be sure what I’d lost.\nI uncover my footprints, I\nPoke them till the eyes open.\nThey don’t recall what it looked like.\nWhen was I using it last?\nWas it like a ring or a light\nOr the autumn pond\nWhich chokes and glitters but\nGrows colder?\nIt could be all in the mind. Anyway\nNothing seems to bring it back to me.\n\nAnd I’ve been to see\nYour hands as trees borne away on a flood,\nThe same film over and over,\nAnd an old one at that, shattering its account\nTo the last of the digits, and nothing\nAnd the blank end.\n\nThe lightning has shown me the scars of the future.\n\nI’ve had a long look at someone\nAlone like a key in a lock\nWithout what it takes to turn.\n\nIt isn’t as simple as that.\n\nWinter will think back to your lit harvest\nFor which there is no help, and the seed\nOf eloquence will open its wings\nWhen you are gone.\nBut at this moment\nWhen the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye\nAnd my only\nChance is bleeding from me,\nWhen my one chance is bleeding,\nFor speaking either truth or comfort\nI have no more tongue than a wound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-night-fragrance": { - "title": "“A Night Fragrance”", - "body": "Now I am old enough to remember\npeople speaking of immortality\nas though it were something known to exist\na tangible substance that might be acquired\nto be used perhaps in the kitchen\nevery day in whatever was made there\nforever after and they applied the word\nto literature and the names of things\nnames of persons and the naming of other\nthings for them and no doubt they repeated\nthat word with some element of belief\nwhen they named a genus of somewhat more than\na hundred species of tropical trees and shrubs\nsome with flowers most fragrant at night\nfor James Theodore Tabernaemontanus\nof Heidelberg physician and botanist\nhighly regarded in his day over\nfour centuries ago immortality\nmight be like that with the scattered species\ncontinuing their various evolutions\nthe flowers opening by day or night\nwith no knowledge of bearing a name\nof anyone and their fragrance if it\nreminds at all not reminding of him", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "oak-time": { - "title": "“Oak Time”", - "body": "Storms in absence like the ages before I was anywhere\nand out in the shred of forest through the seasons\na few oaks have fallen towering ancients elders\nthe last of elders standing there while the wars drained away\nand slow-dancing with the ice when time had not discovered them\nin a scrap of what had been their seamless fabric these late ones\nare lying shrouded already in eglantine and brambles\nbird-cherry nettles and the tangled ivy\nthat prophesies disappearance and had already\ncrept into the shadows they made when they held up their lives\nand the nightingales sang here even in the daytime\nand cowbells echoed through the long twilight of summer\nthe ivy knew the way oh the knowing ivy\nthat was never wrong how few now the birds seem to be\nno animals are led out any longer from the barns\nafter the milking to spend the night pastured here\nthey are all gone from the village Edouard is gone\nwho walked out before them to the end of his days\nkeeping an eye on the walnuts still green along the road\nwhen the owl was safe in these oaks and in the night\nI could hear the fox that would bark here bark and be gone", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-other-tree": { - "title": "“The Other Tree”", - "body": "It seems that the odour that the dark makes\nWhen the night uncovers its cold, is a green thing.\nI have seen the turning light rustle like leaves\nAnd at sundown the birds sink like seeds falling.\n\nLike folded seeds falling from no bough we can see\nBut out of the veined air and the light’s failing.\nSometimes I have felt there was, not shadow\nBut a dry branch, above my shoulder growing.\n\nAll day growing, and not shadow, and with no wind diverted.\nI have not thought of the birds resting there. I think of them circling\nAll day in the rocking light, till they are shaken down\nTo curl blind like kernels, and cluster, like the fruit of sleeping.\n\nIn the same cold sleeping as the night’s foliate\nTropism. But I think how the dark’s flowering\nWould open to no singing that we know, how its fruit,\nLike the night’s green odour, would taste of nothing.\n\nWith that taste of nothing which sometimes at noon\nWhich we say resembles a perfect flower, the thirsting\nTongue will dream of, dry in its dark vault,\nAs of a thing forbidden, lusting and leching.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-present": { - "title": "“The Present”", - "body": "The walls join hands and\nIt is tomorrow:\nThe birds clucking to the horses, the horses\nDoing the numbers for the hell of it,\nThe numbers playing the calendars,\nThe saints marching in,\nIt seems only yesterday,\nwhen what I keep saying to myself is\nTake a leaf from the fire, open\nYour hand, see\nWhere you are going,\nWhen what I am trying to find is\nThe beginning,\nIn the ashes,\nA wing, when what we are looking for\nIn each other\nIs each other,\nThe stars at noon,\nWhile the light worships its blind god.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "returning-season": { - "title": "“Returning Season”", - "body": "When the spring sun finds the village now it is empty\n but from the beginning this was the afterlife\nit was not so apparent a generation gone\n these were still roofs under which the names were born\nthat came home winter evenings before all the wars to sleep\n through freezing nights when the dogs curled low in the cow barns\nand sheep nudged their rank clouds in the dark as one\n now only wagons sleep there and stalled plows\nand machine skeletons rusting around stopped notes\n of far-off bells in a cold longer than winter’s\nthey will not be wanted again nor wake into any life\n when the recesses from a better world begin\nthe year goes on turning and the barns remain without breath\n and now after sundown a city bulb keeps an eye on the village\nuntil past midnight but the owls sweep by the low eaves\n and over black gardens in the light of finished stars", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "shadow-hand": { - "title": "“Shadow Hand”", - "body": "Duporte the roofer that calm voice\nthose sure hands gentling weathered tiles\ninto new generations or\nhalf of him rising through a roof\nlike some sea spirit from a wave\nto turn shaped slates into fish scales\nthat would swim in the rain Duporte\nwho seemed to smooth arguments by\nlistening and whom they sent for\nwhen a bone was broken or when\nthey had a pig to kill because\nof the way he did it only\nyesterday after all these years\nI learned that he had suddenly\ngone blind while still in his sixties\nand died soon after that while I\nwas away and I never knew\nand it seemed as though it had just\nhappened and it had not been long\nsince we stood in the road talking\nabout owls nesting in chimneys\nin the dark in empty houses", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shore-birds": { - "title": "“Shore Birds”", - "body": "While I think of them they are growing rare\nafter the distances they have followed\nall the way to the end for the first time\ntracing a memory they did not have\nuntil they set out to remember it\nat an hour when all at once it was late\nand newly silent and the white had turned\nwhite around them then they rose in their choir\non a single note each of them alone\nbetween the pull of the moon and the hummed\nundertone of the earth below them\nthe glass curtains kept falling around them\nas they flew in search of their place before\nthey were anywhere and storms winnowed them\nthey flew among the places with towers\nand passed the tower lights where some vanished\nwith their long legs for wading in shadow\nothers were caught and stayed in the countries\nof the nets and in the lands of lime twigs\nsome fastened and after the countries of\nguns at first light fewer of them than I\nremember would be here to recognize\nthe light of late summer when they found it\nplaying with darkness along the wet sand", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "sire": { - "title": "“Sire”", - "body": "Here comes the shadow not looking where it is going,\nAnd the whole night will fall; it is time.\nHere comes the little wind which the hour\nDrags with it everywhere like an empty wagon through leaves.\nHere comes my ignorance shuffling after them\nAsking them what they are doing.\n\nStanding still, I can hear my footsteps\nCome up behind me and go on\nAhead of me and come up behind me and\nWith different keys clinking in the pockets,\nAnd still I do not move. Here comes\nThe white-haired thistle seed stumbling past through the branches\nLike a paper lantern carried by a blind man.\nI believe it is the lost wisdom of my grandfather\nWhose ways were his own and who died before I could ask.\n\nForerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot,\nLittle dry death, future,\nYour indirections are as strange to me\nAs my own. I know so little that anything\nYou might tell me would be a revelation.\n\nSir, I would like to say,\nIt is hard to think of the good woman\nPresenting you with children, like cakes,\nGranting you the eye of her needle,\nStanding in doorways, flinging after you\nLittle endearments, like rocks, or her silence\nLike a whole Sunday of bells. Instead, tell me:\nWhich of my many incomprehensions\nDid you bequeath me, and where did they take you? Standing\nIn the shoes of indecision, I hear them\nCome up behind me and go on ahead of me\nWearing boots, on crutches, barefoot, they could never\nGet together on any door-sill or destination--\nThe one with the assortment of smiles, the one\nJailed in himself like a forest, the one who comes\nBack at evening drunk with despair and turns\nInto the wrong night as though he owned it--oh small\nDeaf disappearance in the dusk, in which of their shoes\nWill I find myself tomorrow?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "some-last-questions": { - "title": "“Some Last Questions”", - "body": "What is the head\n a. Ash\n\nWhat are the eyes\n a. The wells have fallen in and have\n Inhabitants\n\nWhat are the feet\n a. Thumbs left after the auction\n\nNo what are the feet\n a. Under them the impossible road is moving\n Down which the broken necked mice push\n Balls of blood with their noses\n\nWhat is the tongue\n a. The black coat that fell off the wall\n With sleeves trying to say something\n\nWhat are the hands\n a. Paid\n\nNo what are the hands\n a. Climbing back down the museum wall\n To their ancestors the extinct shrews that will\n Have left a message\n\nWhat is the silence\n a. As though it had a right to more\n\nWho are the compatriots\n a. They make the stars of bone", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-speed-of-light": { - "title": "“The Speed of Light”", - "body": "So gradual in those summers was the going\nof the age it seemed that the long days setting out\nwhen the stars faded over the mountains were not\nleaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew\nglittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning\nopening into the sky was something of ours\nto have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch\nand the air we could not hold had come to be there all the time\nfor us and would never be gone and that the axle\nwe did not hear was not turning when the ancient car\ncoughed in the roofer’s barn and rolled out echoing\nfirst thing into the lane and the only tractor\nin the village rumbled and went into its rusty\nmutterings before heading out of its lean-to\ninto the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree\nwe did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparks\nof their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow\nwheel that was turning and turning us taking us\nall away as one with the tires of the baker’s van\nwhere the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendars\ncoming and going all at once we did not hear\nthe rim of the hour in whatever we were saying\nor touching all day we thought it was there and would stay\nit was only as the afternoon lengthened on its\ndial and the shadows reached out farther and farther\nfrom everything that we began to listen for what\nmight be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing\nthe village at sundown calling their animals home\nand then the bats after dark and the silence on its road", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "st-vincents": { - "title": "“St. Vincent’s”", - "body": "Thinking of rain clouds that rose over the city\non the first day of the year\n\nin the same month\nI consider that I have lived daily and with\n\neyes open and ears to hear\nthese years across from St Vincent’s Hospital\nabove whose roof those clouds rose\n\nits bricks by day a French red under\ncross facing south\nblown-up neo-classic facades the tall\ndark openings between columns at\nthe dawn of history\nexploded into many windows\nin a mortised face\n\ninside it the ambulances have unloaded\nafter sirens’ howling nearer through traffic on\nSeventh Avenue long\nago I learned not to hear them\neven when the sirens stop\n\nthey turn to back in\nfew passers-by stay to look\nand neither do I\n\nat night two long blue\nwindows and one short one on the top floor\nburn all night\nmany nights when most of the others are out\non what floor do they have\nanything\n\nI have seen the building drift moonlit through geraniums\nlate at night when trucks were few\nmoon just past the full\nupper windows parts of the sky\nas long as I looked\nI watched it at Christmas and New Year\nearly in the morning I have seen the nurses ray out through\narterial streets\nin the evening have noticed internes blocks away\non doorsteps one foot in the door\n\nI have come upon the men in gloves taking out\nthe garbage at all hours\npiling up mountains of\nplastic bags white strata with green intermingled and\nblack\nI have seen one pile\ncatch fire and studied the cloud\nat the ends of the jets of the hoses\nthe fire engines as near as that\nred beacons and\nmachine-throb heard by the whole body\nI have noticed molded containers stacked outside\na delivery entrance on Twelfth Street\nwhether meals from a meal factory made up with those\nmummified for long journeys by plane\nor specimens for laboratory\nexamination sealed at the prescribed temperatures\neither way closed delivery\n\nand approached faces staring from above\ncrutches or tubular clamps\nout for tentative walks\nhave paused for turtling wheel-chairs\nheard visitors talking in wind on each corner\nwhile the lights changed and\nhot dogs were handed over at the curb\nin the middle of afternoon\nmustard ketchup onions and relish\nand police smelling of ether and laundry\nwere going back\n\nand I have known them all less than the papers of our days\nsmoke rises from the chimneys do they have an incinerator\nwhat for\nhow warm do they believe they have to maintain the air\nin there\nseveral of the windows appear\nto be made of tin\nbut it may be the light reflected\n\nI have imagined bees coming and going\non those sills though I have never seen them\n\nwho was St Vincent", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "star": { - "title": "“Star”", - "body": "All the way north on the train the sun\nfollowed me followed me without moving\nstill the sun of that other morning\nwhen we had gone over Come on over\nmen at the screen door said to my father\nYou have to see this it’s an ape bring\nthe little boy bring the boy along\n\nso he brought me along to the field\nof dry grass hissing behind the houses\nin the heat that morning and there was\nnothing else back there but the empty day\nabove the grass waving as far away\nas I could see and the sight burned my eyes\nwhite birds were flying off beyond us\n\nand a raised floor of boards like a house\nwith no house on it part way out there\nwas shining by itself a color\nof shadow and the voices of the men\nwere smaller in the field as we walked on\nsomething was standing out there on the floor\nthe men kept saying Come on over\n\nit’s on a chain and my father said\nto me Don’t get too close I saw it was\nstaring down at each of our faces\none after the other as though it might\ncatch sight of something in one of them\nthat it remembered I stood watching its eyes\nas they turned away from each of us", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thanks": { - "title": "“Thanks”", - "body": "Listen\nwith the night falling we are saying thank you\nwe are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings\nwe are running out of the glass rooms\nwith our mouths full of food to look at the sky\nand say thank you\nwe are standing by the water thanking it\nstanding by the windows looking out\nin our directions\n\nback from a series of hospitals back from a mugging\nafter funerals we are saying thank you\nafter the news of the dead\nwhether or not we knew them we are saying thank you\n\nover telephones we are saying thank you\nin doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators\nremembering wars and the police at the door\nand the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you\nin the banks we are saying thank you\nin the faces of the officials and the rich\nand of all who will never change\nwe go on saying thank you thank you\n\nwith the animals dying around us\ntaking our feelings we are saying thank you\nwith the forests falling faster than the minutes\nof our lives we are saying thank you\nwith the words going out like cells of a brain\nwith the cities growing over us\nwe are saying thank you faster and faster\nwith nobody listening we are saying thank you\nthank you we are saying and waving\ndark though it is", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-lingering-regrets": { - "title": "“To Lingering Regrets”", - "body": "Without wanting to\nI have come slowly\nto admit that I know\nwho you are one by one\noh lovely and mournful\nwith downcast eyes\nappearing to me as\nyou are turning away\nto stand silent and late\nin a remembered light\ntouched with amber\nas the sun is going\nfrom a day that it brought\nyou come to me again\nand again to wait\nas beautiful as ever\nat the edge of the light\nyou have not changed at all\nas far as I can tell\nand you learn nothing from me\nwho do not talk with you\nbut see you waiting there\nwithout once moving toward you\noh forever hopeful\nand forever young\nyou are the foolish virgins\nwith no oil for your lamps\nand no one else to lead you\nwhere you want to go", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-luck": { - "title": "“To Luck”", - "body": "In the cards and at the bend in the road\nwe never saw you\nin the womb and in the crossfire\nin the numbers\nwhatever you had your hand in\nwhich was everything\nwe were told never to put\nour faith in you\nto bow to you humbly after all\nbecause in the end there was nothing\nelse we could do\nbut not to believe in you\n\nstill we might coax you with pebbles\nkept warm in the hand\nor coins or the relics\nof vanished animals\nobservances rituals\nnot binding upon you\nwho make no promises\nwe might do such things only\nnot to neglect you\nand risk your disfavor\noh you who are never the same\nwho are secret as the day when it comes\nyou whom we explain\nas often as we can\nwithout understanding", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-ancient-order-of-legs": { - "title": "“To the Ancient Order of Legs”", - "body": "Barefoot all the way\nfrom the embryo\nand the drifting sands\nwhere the prints washed away\nuntold lives ago\nyou were born to be\none of a number\nupholding a larger\ncompany on one\nside or the other\nalways in the infantry\nand singular though\nat first you were many\nbalancing alternately\nunable to see\nwhere you were going\nclimbing along yourself\nby the numbers in\na pace of your own\nand stepping into\nnew talents positions\nmemberships bringing\nthe count down to\neight and four and two\ncoming in turn to be\nless dispensable\nhalf solitary painful\nsurviving ancestor\nheir to the distances\nsustain the limbs of friends\nyou that have borne the world\nthis far in us all walk on\nlight on your feet as\nthe days walk through the days", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-consolations-of-philosophy": { - "title": "“To the Consolations of Philosophy”", - "body": "Thank you but\nnot just at the moment\n\nI know you will say\nI have said that before\nI know you have been\nthere all along somewhere\nin another time zone\n\nI studied once\nthose beautiful instructions\nwhen I was young and\nfar from here\nthey seemed distant then\nthey seem distant now\nfrom everything I remember\n\nI hope they stayed with you\nwhen the noose started to tighten\nand you could say no more\nand after wisdom\nand the days of iron\nthe eyes started from your head\n\nI know the words\nmust have been set down\npartly for yourself\nunjustly condemned after\na good life\n\nI know the design\nof the world is beyond\nour comprehension\nthank you\nbut grief is selfish and in\nthe present when\nthe stars do not seem to move\nI was not listening\n\nI know it is not\nsensible to expect\nfortune to grant her\ngifts forever\nI know", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-light-of-september": { - "title": "“To the Light of September”", - "body": "When you are already here\nyou appear to be only\na name that tells of you\nwhether you are present or not\n\nand for now it seems as though\nyou are still summer\nstill the high familiar\nendless summer\nyet with a glint\nof bronze in the chill mornings\nand the late yellow petals\nof the mullein fluttering\non the stalks that lean\nover their broken\nshadows across the cracked ground\n\nbut they all know\nthat you have come\nthe seed heads of the sage\nthe whispering birds\nwith nowhere to hide you\nto keep you for later\n\nyou\nwho fly with them\n\nyou who are neither\nbefore nor after\nyou who arrive\nwith blue plums\nthat have fallen through the night\n\nperfect in the dew", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "to-the-new-year": { - "title": "“To the New Year”", - "body": "With what stillness at last\nyou appear in the valley\nyour first sunlight reaching down\nto touch the tips of a few\nhigh leaves that do not stir\nas though they had not noticed\nand did not know you at all\nthen the voice of a dove calls\nfrom far away in itself\nto the hush of the morning\n\nso this is the sound of you\nhere and now whether or not\nanyone hears it this is\nwhere we have come with our age\nour knowledge such as it is\nand our hopes such as they are\ninvisible before us\nuntouched and still possible", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "vixen": { - "title": "“Vixen”", - "body": "Comet of stillness princess of what is over\n high note held without trembling without voice without sound\naura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets\n of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences\nnever caught in words warden of where the river went\n touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished\nwindow onto the hidden place and the other time\n at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting\nin the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born\n you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me\nyou are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you\n even now you are unharmed even now perfect\nas you have always been now when your light paws are running\n on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you\nwhen I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer\n when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars\nfrom the creeds of difference and the contradictions\n that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications\nas long as it lasted until something that we were\n had ended when you are no longer anything\nlet me catch sight of you again going over the wall\n and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures\nguttering on a screen let my words find their own\n places in the silence after the animals", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-way-to-the-river": { - "title": "“The Way to the River”", - "body": "The way to the river leads past the names of\nAsh the sleeves the wreaths of hinges\nThrough the song of the bandage vendor\n\nI lay your name by my voice\nAs I go\n\nThe way to the river leads past the late\nDoors and the games of the children born looking backwards\nThey play that they are broken glass\nThe numbers wait in the halls and the clouds\nCall\nFrom windows\nThey play that they are old they are putting the horizon\nInto baskets they are escaping they are\nHiding\n\nI step over the sleepers the fires the calendars\nMy voice turns to you\n\nI go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow\nWindows gallery\nOf invisible presidents the same motion in them all\nIn a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing\nSort of poker with somebody’s\n\nOld snapshots game I don’t understand they lose\nThe rivers one\nAfter the other I begin to know where I am\nI am home\n\nBe here the flies from the house of the mapmaker\nWalk on our letters I can tell\nAnd the days hang medals between us\nI have lit our room with a glove of yours be\nHere I turn\nTo your name and the hour remembers\nIts one word\nNow\n\nBe here what can we\nDo for the dead the footsteps full of money\nI offer you what I have my\nPoverty\n\nTo the city of wires I have brought home a handful\nOf water I walk slowly\nIn front of me they are building the empty\nAges I see them reflected not for long\nBe here I am no longer ashamed of time it is too brief its hands\nHave no names\nI have passed it I know\n\n _Oh Necessity you with the face you with\n All the faces_\n\nThis is written on the back of everything\n\nBut we\nWill read it together", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-you-go-away": { - "title": "“When You Go Away”", - "body": "When you go away the wind clicks around to the north\nThe painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls\nShowing the black walls\nThe clock goes back to striking the same hour\nThat has no place in the years\n\nAnd at night wrapped in the bed of ashes\nIn one breath I wake\nIt is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth\nI remember that I am falling\nThat I am the reason\nAnd that my words are the garment of what I shall never be\nLike the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "whenever-i-go-there": { - "title": "“Whenever I Go There”", - "body": "Whenever I go there everything is changed\n\nThe stamps on the bandages the titles\nOf the professors of water\n\nThe portrait of Glare the reasons for\nThe white mourning\n\nIn new rocks new insects are sitting\nWith the lights off\nAnd once more I remember that the beginning\n\nIs broken\n\nNo wonder the addresses are torn\n\nTo which I make my way eating the silence of animals\nOffering snow to the darkness\n\nToday belongs to few and tomorrow to no one", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "yesterday": { - "title": "“Yesterday”", - "body": "My friend says I was not a good son\nyou understand\nI say yes I understand\n\nhe says I did not go\nto see my parents very often you know\nand I say yes I know\n\neven when I was living in the same city he says\nmaybe I would go there once\na month or maybe even less\nI say oh yes\n\nhe says the last time I went to see my father\nI say the last time I saw my father\n\nhe says the last time I saw my father\nhe was asking me about my life\nhow I was making out and he\nwent into the next room\nto get something to give me\n\noh I say\nfeeling again the cold\nof my father’s hand the last time\n\nhe says and my father turned\nin the doorway and saw me\nlook at my wristwatch and he\nsaid you know I would like you to stay\nand talk with me\n\noh yes I say\n\nbut if you are busy he said\nI don’t want you to feel that you\nhave to\njust because I’m here\n\nI say nothing\n\nhe says my father\nsaid maybe\nyou have important work you are doing\nor maybe you should be seeing\nsomebody I don’t want to keep you\n\nI look out the window\nmy friend is older than I am\nhe says and I told my father it was so\nand I got up and left him then\nyou know\n\nthough there was nowhere I had to go\nand nothing I had to do", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alice-meynell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alice Meynell", - "birth": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Meynell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "i-am-the-way": { - "title": "“I Am the Way”", - "body": "Thou art the Way.\nHadst Thou been nothing but the goal,\nI cannot say\nIf Thou hadst ever met my soul.\n\nI cannot see--\nI, child of process--if there lies\nAn end for me,\nFull of repose, full of replies.\n\nI’ll not reproach\nThe way that goes, my feet that stir.\nAccess, approach,\nArt Thou, time, way, and wayfarer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-autumn": { - "title": "“In Autumn”", - "body": "The leaves are many under my feet,\nAnd drift one way.\nTheir scent of death is weary and sweet.\nA flight of them is in the grey\nWhere sky and forest meet.\n\nThe low winds moan for sad sweet years;\nThe birds sing all for pain,\nOf a common thing, to weary ears,--\nOnly a summer’s fate of rain,\nAnd a woman’s fate of tears.\n\nI walk to love and life alone\nOver these mournful places,\nAcross the summer overthrown,\nThe dead joys of these silent faces,\nTo claim my own.\n\nI know his heart has beat to bright\nSweet loves gone by;\nI know the leaves that die to-night\nOnce budded to the sky;\nAnd I shall die from his delight.\n\nO leaves, so quietly ending now,\nYou heard the cuckoos sing.\nAnd I will grow upon my bough\nIf only for a spring,\nAnd fall when the rain is on my brow.\n\nO tell me, tell me ere you die,\nIs it worth the pain?\nYou bloomed so fair, you waved so high;\nNow that the sad days wane,\nAre you repenting where you lie?\n\nI lie amongst you, and I kiss\nYour fragrance mouldering.\nO dead delights, is it such bliss,\nThat tuneful Spring?\nIs love so sweet, that comes to this?\n\nKiss me again as I kiss you;\nKiss me again;\nFor all your tuneful nights of dew,\nIn this your time of rain,\nFor all your kisses when Spring was new.\n\nYou will not, broken hearts; let be.\nI pass across your death\nTo a golden summer you shall not see,\nAnd in your dying breath\nThere is no benison for me.\n\nThere is an autumn yet to wane,\nThere are leaves yet to fall,\nWhich, when I kiss, may kiss again,\nAnd, pitied, pity me all for all,\nAnd love me in mist and rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "in-february": { - "title": "“In February”", - "body": "Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,\nUnseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,\nAnd folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;\nA poet’s face asleep in this grey morn.\nNow in the midst of the old world forlorn\nA mystic child is set in these still hours.\nI keep this time, even before the flowers,\nSacred to all the young and the unborn.\n\nTo all the miles and miles of unsprung wheat,\nAnd to the Spring waiting beyond the portal,\nAnd to the future of my own young art,\nAnd, among all these things, to you, my sweet,\nMy friend, to your calm face and the immortal\nChild tarrying all your life-time in your heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "my-heart-shall-be-thy-garden": { - "title": "“My Heart Shall Be Thy Garden”", - "body": "My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,\nInto thy garden; thine be happy hours\nAmong my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,\nFrom root to crowning petal, thine alone.\nThine is the place from where the seeds are sown\nUp to the sky inclosed, with all its showers.\nBut ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowers\nTo keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.\n\nFor as these come and go, and quit our pine\nTo follow the sweet season, or, new-corners,\nSing one song only from our alder-trees,\nMy heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine.\nFlit to the silent world and other summers,\nWith wings that dip beyond the silver seas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "renouncement": { - "title": "“Renouncement”", - "body": "I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,\nI shun the love that lurks in all delight--\nThe love of thee--and in the blue heaven’s height,\nAnd in the dearest passage of a song.\nOh, just beyond the sweetest thoughts that throng\nThis breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;\nBut it must never, never come in sight;\nI must stop short of thee the whole day long.\nBut when sleep comes to close each difficult day,\nWhen night gives pause to the long watch I keep,\nAnd all my bonds I needs must loose apart,\nMust doff my will as raiment laid away,--\nWith the first dream that comes with the first sleep\nI run, I run, I am gather’d to thy heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "your-own-fair-youth": { - "title": "“Your Own Fair Youth”", - "body": "Your own fair youth, you care so little for it--\nSmiling toward Heaven, you would not stay the advances\nOf time and change upon your hapiest fancies.\nI keep your golden hour, and will restore it.\nIf ever, in time to come, you would explore it--\nYour old self, whose thoughts went like last year’s pansies,\nLook unto me; no mirror keeps its glances;\nIn my unfailing praises now I store it.\n\nTo guard all joys of yours from Time’s estranging,\nI shall then be a treasury where your gay,\nHappy, and pensive past unaltered is.\nI shall then be a garden charmed from changing,\nIn which your June has never passed away.\nWalk there awhile among my memories.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "michelangelo": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Michelangelo", - "birth": { - "year": 1475 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1564 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 45 - }, - "poems": { - "ah-tell-me-love-had-she-a-heart-as-kind": { - "title": "“Ah tell me, Love, had she a heart as kind …”", - "body": "Ah tell me, Love, had she a heart as kind\nAs beauty that her feature doth partake,\nCould there be found the wretch so dull and blind,\nThat would not choose himself from self to take,\nAnd give to her? Yet even if she grew\nMy loving friend, what more could I bestow,\nWhen in her coldness, while she seems my foe,\nI love her better than I else could do?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "all-nature-urgently-doth-me-advise": { - "title": "“All Nature urgently doth me advise, …”", - "body": "All Nature urgently doth me advise,\nImplore, compel, to follow thee, and cling\nTo my sole blessed thing.\nLove, who doth other loveliness despise,\nTo make me seek salvation only here,\nDoth in my heart destroy\nDesire of other joy,\nAnd only measure of delight allow\nIn beauty semblant to thine eye and brow;\nYet being no longer near\nTo you, clear eyes, its light hath ceased to shine,\nFor only where you dwell is heaven of mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "as-oft-as-i-am-free-to-nourish-faith": { - "title": "“As oft as I am free to nourish faith …”", - "body": "As oft as I am free to nourish faith\nThat in my love may lie my happiness,\nWith wisdom old and word of soberness\nHumility reproveth me, and saith:\n“What canst thou hope within the vivid sun,\nSave be consumed, and find no Phœnix-birth?”\nIn vain; for helping hand is nothing worth\nTo rescue life that fain would be undone.\nI hear her warn, my peril understand,\nYet inwardly discern a heart concealed,\nThat tortureth the more, the more I yield;\nBetween two Deaths my lady seems to stand,\nOne mystical, one hateful to espy;\nIrresolute, both soul and body die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "for-silver-or-for-gold": { - "title": "“For silver or for gold …”", - "body": "For silver or for gold,\nAfter in fire these have been made to flow,\nDoth wait the empty mould,\nThat shattered, will the lovely image show;\nThrough passion-ardor, so\nMy vacancy I store\nWith the divine unbounded loveliness\nOf her whom I adore,\nThe soul and essence of my fragileness,\nWhose beauty doth inpour,\nAnd occupy by passages so strait,\nThat broken I must be to liberate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "from-heaven-he-came-and-clothed-in-mortal-clay": { - "title": "“From heaven he came, and clothed in mortal clay …”", - "body": "From heaven he came, and clothed in mortal clay,\nTraversed the vengeful and the chastening woes,\nLiving, again toward height eternal rose,\nFor us to win the light of saving day;\nResplendent star, whose undeservèd ray\nMade glory in the nest where I had birth;\nWhose recompense not all a stainèd earth,\nBut Thou his Maker, Thou alone couldst pay.\nDante I mean, and that unfair return\nEndured from a community ingrate,\nThat only to the just awardeth scorn;\nWould I were he! To equal fortune born,\nFor his pure virtue, for his exile stern,\nI would resign earth’s happiest estate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "how-came-to-pass-that-i-am-mine-no-more": { - "title": "“How came to pass that I am mine no more? …”", - "body": "How came to pass that I am mine no more?\nAh me!\nWho took myself from me\nTo draw more close to me\nThan ever I could be,\nMore dearly mine, than I myself before?\nAh me!\nHow reached he to the heart\nTouching no outward part?\nWho prithee may Love be,\nThat entered at the eyes,\nAnd if in breathèd sighs\nHe go abroad, increaseth inwardly?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "how-lady-can-the-mind-of-man-allow": { - "title": "“How, lady, can the mind of man allow, …”", - "body": "How, lady, can the mind of man allow,\nWhat lapse of many ages hath made known,\nThat image shapen of pure mountain stone\nOutlive the life that did with life endow?\nBefore effect the very cause doth bow,\nAnd Art is crowned in Nature’s deep despair.\nI know, and prove it, carving form so fair,\nThat Time and Death admire, and break their vow.\nPower, therefore, I possess, to grant us twain\nEstate, in color, or in marble cold,\nThat spent a thousand summers, shall remain\nThe face of either, and all eyes behold\nHow thou wert beautiful, and gaze on me,\nWeary, yet justified in loving thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "however-worship-worthy-and-complete": { - "title": "“However worship-worthy and complete …”", - "body": "However worship-worthy and complete\nBe deemed a work that many lovers know,\nMay live the man who doth not find it so,\nDeriving bitter from the lauded sweet.\nTaste is so rare, a thing so isolate,\nThat from the multitude it must recede,\nAlone upon internal joy to feed;\nWherefore in self retired, and passionate,\nI see what vieweth not the outer eye,\nCold to the soul and heedless of her sigh.\nThe world is blind, and from its praises vain\nHe learneth most who freest doth remain,\nSuffers, and hath a lesson in his pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "i-deemed-when-erst-upon-my-prospect-shone": { - "title": "“I deemed when erst upon my prospect shone …”", - "body": "I deemed when erst upon my prospect shone\nThe mateless splendor of thy beauty’s day,\nThat as an eagle seeks the sun alone,\nI might have rested only on a ray.\nWith lapse of time, mine error have I known,\nFor who would soar in angels’ company,\nOn stony ground his idle seed hath sown,\nLost words in air, and thought in deity.\nIf near at hand, I may not well abide\nThy brilliancy that overcometh sight,\nAnd far, appear to leave consoling light,\nAh, what shall I become? what friend, what guide,\nWill render aid, or plead my cause with thee,\nIf either thou consum’st or grievest me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "i-feel-myself-more-precious-than-of-yore": { - "title": "“I feel myself more precious than of yore …”", - "body": "I feel myself more precious than of yore,\nNow that my life thy signature doth show,\nAs gem inscribed with its intaglio\nExcelleth pebble it appeared before,\nOr writ or painted page is valued more\nThan idle leaf discarded carelessly;\nSo I, the target of thine archery,\nGrow proud of marks I need not to deplore.\nSigned with thy seal, in confidence I dwell,\nAs one who journeyeth in woundless mail,\nOr hath his way protected by a spell;\nO’er fire and flood I equally prevail,\nDo works of healing by the signet’s might,\nPoison allay, and yield the blind their sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "i-know-not-if-it-be-the-longed-for-light": { - "title": "“I know not if it be the longed-for light …”", - "body": "I know not if it be the longed-for light\nOf its Creator, that the soul doth feel,\nOr long-retentive Memory reveal\nSome creature-beauty, dwelling inly bright;\nOr if a history, a dream, I keep\nTo eyes apparent, treasured in the heart,\nWhereof fermenteth some uneasy part,\nThat now, perchance, inclineth me to weep;\nI long, I seek, and find not any guide,\nNor whither, of myself have wit to know,\nYet vague perceive a presence point the way;\nSuch life I lead since thee my looks espied,\nFrom bitter change to sweet, from aye to no;\nI think, thine eyes lent that enkindling ray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-any-beauteous-thing": { - "title": "“If any beauteous thing …”", - "body": "If any beauteous thing\nCan human hope exalt to God on high,\nFor one who hath the vision made as I,\nAlone my lady may like comfort bring;\nWherefore it is not strange,\nIf from the rest I range\nTo love her, to pursue and supplicate;\n’Tis Nature’s law, not mine,\nThat bids the soul incline\nToward eyes reminding of its first estate,\nWhereby it hath recourse\nTo its own end and source,\nThe primal Love, that her with beauty storeth;\nHe loves the vassal, who the lord adoreth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-eyes-avail-heart-passion-to-declare": { - "title": "“If eyes avail heart-passion to declare …”", - "body": "If eyes avail heart-passion to declare,\nMy love requires no more explicit sign,\nFor eloquent enow are looks of mine,\nO dear my mistress, to convey my prayer.\nPerchance, more credulous than I believe,\nThou seest how purely doth my passion burn,\nAnd now art ready toward desire to turn,\nAs he who asketh mercy must receive.\nIf so befall, on that thrice happy day\nLet course of time be suddenly complete,\nThe sun give over his primeval race;\nThat through no merit of my own, I may\nHenceforth forever, my desirèd sweet\nIn these unworthy, eager arms embrace!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-habit-of-the-eyes-engender-ease": { - "title": "“If habit of the eyes engender ease, …”", - "body": "If habit of the eyes engender ease,\nFaint Reason on her way\nFeareth to go astray,\nLest inwardly she taketh\nFor beauty fair, what beauty quite forsaketh.\nLady, it doth appear\nThat ease and custom have not made you dear,\nFor that my looks are foreign to your own,\nToward whose confìne my wishes dare not soar;\nI was inflamèd in a breath alone;\nYour feature I have gazed on once, no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-happy-heart-make-beautiful-the-face": { - "title": "“If happy heart make beautiful the face …”", - "body": "If happy heart make beautiful the face,\nBut sad heart foul; and for a lady’s sake\nBe born the cause that such effect doth make,\nHow hath she courage for refusing grace\nTo me, whose birth-star bright\nAccordeth the clear sight\nThat rightly chooseth between fair and fair?\nSure she who hath my mind\nProves to herself unkind,\nMy feature if she render full of care;\nFor if in likeness shown\nA painter leaves his own,\nSmall loveliness can wait\nOn labor of a hand disconsolate.\nThen let her please to favor mine estate,\nThat I may paint blithe heart and smiling eye;\nShe will grow fair, and not unlovely I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-my-rude-hammer-lend-enduring-stone": { - "title": "“If my rude hammer lend enduring stone …”", - "body": "If my rude hammer lend enduring stone\nSimilitude of life, being swayed and plied\nBy arm of one who doth its labor guide,\nIt moveth with a motion not its own;\nBut that on high, which lieth by God’s throne,\nItself, and all beside makes beautiful;\nAnd if no tool be wrought without a tool,\nThe rest are fashioned by its power alone.\nAs falls a blow with greater force and heat\nThe further it descends, for forging mine,\nThe lifted hammer high as heaven flew;\nWherefore mine own will never be complete\nUnless perfected from the forge divine,\nFor that which shaped it earth may not renew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-one-chaste-love-one-sacred-piety": { - "title": "“If one chaste love, one sacred piety …”", - "body": "If one chaste love, one sacred piety,\nOne fortune sharèd ’twixt two lovers so,\nThat either’s care from heart to heart may flow,\nImpelled by one desire, one energy;\nIf bodies both are by one soul controlled,\nThat wingèd bears them up to heaven’s gate;\nIf love, with one essay, doth penetrate\nAnd burn two bosoms with one shaft of gold;\nIf living each in other, self forgot,\nOne liking, one felicity, awake\nOne will to move toward one desirèd lot;\nIf thousand ties as holy, fail to make\nA thousandth part; the consecrated knot,\nShall pride, and pride alone, avail to break?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "if-that-she-own-a-feature-passing-fair": { - "title": "“If that she own a feature passing fair, …”", - "body": "If that she own a feature passing fair,\nWhile void of happy liking live the rest,\nOught I affection toward the whole to bear,\nFor sake of beauty by the one possessed?\nThe lovely part, distrest,\nMy praise doth deprecate,\nAnd sue to Reason for her sisters’ sake,\nThat also they be cherished, and forgiven\nFor fault they did not mean. Then Love, irate,\nWho thinketh but on pain that they have given,\nSaith, in his court there lieth no appeal.\nYet Heaven willeth fondness that I feel,\nWhen toward her imperfection merciful,\nTime maketh her, for me, all beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "in-alpine-stone-and-pure": { - "title": "“In alpine stone and pure …”", - "body": "In alpine stone and pure\nIf art may bid endure\nHer countenance as long as summers flow;\nWhat period should heaven on her bestow,\nIts own creation, radiant and free,\nFor others, as for me?\nAnd yet is she with fading life endued.\nMy Fortune then in her best foot is lame,\nIf Death the substance, Life the semblance claim.\nOn whom devolves the feud?\nOn Nature’s self, if of her sons alone\nThe work survive, and Time despoil her own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "in-mountain-marble-white": { - "title": "“In mountain-marble white …”", - "body": "In mountain-marble white,\nDoth hide a statue bright,\nThat waxeth ever while the rock doth wane;\nE’en so from flesh-control\nThe timid trembling soul\nMine inward fair would liberate in vain.\nLady, I look to thee\nAlone to set me free,\nFor in myself doth will nor power remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "love-be-my-teacher": { - "title": "“Love, be my teacher …”", - "body": "“Love, be my teacher, of thy courtesy;\nThe beauty, whither my regards aspire,\nDoth it exist? Or is what I admire\nMade beautiful by force of fantasy?\nThou, Love, must know, who in her company\nArrivest oft to vex me with desire,\nAlthough I would not choose to quench the fire,\nAbate its glow, nor part with any sigh.”\n\n“The beauty thou hast seen from her did shine,\nAnd meet thy mortal vision; but its ray\nAscended to the soul, a better place;\nThere seemed she lovely, for a thing divine\nHath joy of its own image; in this way\nCame beauty thou beholdest in her face.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "mine-eyes-beheld-no-perishable-thing": { - "title": "“Mine eyes beheld no perishable thing, …”", - "body": "Mine eyes beheld no perishable thing,\nWhen holy peace I found in orbs of thine,\nAnd inwardly obtained a hope divine,\nA joy my kindred soul enamoring.\nUnless create God’s equal, to receive\nEquality with Him, she might depend\nOn shows external; because these deceive,\nToward universal form she doth transcend.\nLife cannot sate its wishes with decay,\nNor yet Eternity commandment take\nFrom years wherein we wither and grow chill;\n’Tis lust hath energy the soul to slay,\nNot love, that fain would the beloved make\nPerfect on earth, in heaven, more perfect still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "my-glances-pleased-with-everything-thats-fair": { - "title": "“My glances pleased with everything that’s fair …”", - "body": "My glances pleased with everything that’s fair,\nMy soul inclined toward her celestial gain,\nDevoid of power high heaven to attain,\nCan find no way, save only gazing there.\nStars loftiest above\nA radiancy lend,\nBidding desire ascend;\nThat light is here named Love.\nNor gentle heart hath any other friend\nTo fortify, enamor, and advise,\nThan countenance with star-resembling eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "my-love-doth-use-no-dwelling-in-the-heart": { - "title": "“My love doth use no dwelling in the heart …”", - "body": "My love doth use no dwelling in the heart,\nBut maketh mansion only in the soul;\nFie entereth not where sinful hopes control,\nWhere error and mortality have part.\nFrom source in God commanded to depart,\nMyself He made the eye, the lustre, thee;\nI cannot choose but His eternal see,\nIn what, alas! is thy decaying part.\nNo more may fire be sundered from its heat,\nThan my desire from that celestial Fair\nWhence thine derives, wherewith it doth compare;\nMy soul, enkindled, maketh her retreat\nTo primal home, where love did first arise,\nThe Paradise secluded in thine eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "my-strong-imagination-cannot-make": { - "title": "“My strong imagination cannot make …”", - "body": "My strong imagination cannot make\nFrom solid earth or air of reverie,\nThe form of beauty, that my will can take\nTo be its shield and armor against thee.\nAbandoned, I decline, till everything\nDoth vanish, that I am and I possess;\nThe thought that haply I may suffer less,\nDestroyeth me beyond all suffering.\nNo hope of safety, when to turn and flee\nWill only speed an enemy’s career;\nThe slower from the fleeter cannot stray;\nYet Love consoleth and caresseth me,\nDeclaring that my toil may yet be dear;\nA thing so costly is not thrown away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "not-death-alone-but-his-indwelling-dread": { - "title": "“Not Death alone, but his indwelling dread …”", - "body": "Not Death alone, but his indwelling dread\nDoth succor and set free\nFrom sway of one unjust as cherishèd,\nWho constantly doth make assault on me;\nAs oft as flameth with unwonted force\nThe fire that folds me, I have no resource\nSave keep his image central in the heart;\nWhere Death abides, Love hath not any part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "o-night-o-season-in-thy-darkness-sweet": { - "title": "“O Night, O season in thy darkness sweet …”", - "body": "O Night, O season in thy darkness sweet\n(For every toil falls peaceful to its close),\nHe deemeth well who laudeth thy repose,\nAnd who exalteth, payeth homage meet.\nThy dewy shade, with quiet falling slow,\nDivides the fret of never-pausing thought;\nFrom deep of being to the summit brought,\nIn dream thou guidst me where I hope to go.\nShadow of Death, the safe protecting gate\nBarred by the soul against her hunter Grief,\nOf human woe the final, only cure;\nThe fever of the blood dost thou abate,\nDry lingering tears, give weariness relief,\nAnd anger steal from him who liveth pure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "o-blessed-spirits-who-in-worlds-release": { - "title": "“O blessed spirits, who in world’s release …”", - "body": "“O blessed spirits, who in world’s release\nAre recompensed for tears it could not pay,\nTell me if Love wage war on you alway,\nOr Death hath yonder made his quarrel cease?”\n“Our everlasting peace,\nAll time beyond, here loveth unacquaint\nWith mortal lovers’ sorrow and complaint.”\n“Then sad it is for me\nTo linger, as you see,\nLoving and serving where my heart doth faint.\nIf Heaven be lovers’ friend,\nAnd Earth their anguish lend,\nNeed I live long? The thought doth cause me fear;\nTo wistful lover minutes years appear.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "o-love-thou-art-divine": { - "title": "“O love, thou art divine …”", - "body": "“O love, thou art divine,\nA god to work thy will;\nPrithee, for me fulfil\nAll I would do for thee, if deity were mine.”\n\n“He were no friend of thine,\nWho hope of lofty beauty should bestow\nOn one who presently must life forego;\nCome put thee in my place,\nThy idle prayer retrace;\nWilt thou implore a gain,\nThat granted, only would enlarge the pain?\nDeath hath a sober face;\nIf even the unhappy find him rude,\nHow stern to one arrived at full beatitude?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "o-spirit-nobly-born-wherein-we-see": { - "title": "“O spirit nobly born, wherein we see …”", - "body": "O spirit nobly born, wherein we see\nThrough all thy members innocent and dear,\nAs if reflected in a mirror clear,\nWhat Heaven and Nature can make life to be;\nO spirit gentle, where by faith we know\nIndwell what doth thy countenance declare,\nLove, Mercy, and Compassion, things so rare,\nThat never beauty hath combined them so;\nThe love to charm, the beauty to retain,\nThe tenderness, the pity, to uphold\nBy glances mild the soul that doubteth grace;\nWhat mortal law, what custom doth ordain,\nWhat doom unmerciful to young or old,\nThat Death may not forgive so fair a face?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "one-day-to-rise-toward-height-where-it-began": { - "title": "“One day to rise toward height where it began, …”", - "body": "One day to rise toward height where it began,\nThe form immortal to thine earthly cell,\nAn angel of compassion, came to dwell\nWith balm and healing for the mind of man.\nSuch life it is that doth thy life endear,\nAnd not thy face serene, its envelope;\nIn shadows that decline and disappear,\nImmortal Love cannot repose his hope.\n’Tis true of all things marvellous and fair,\nWhere Nature taketh forethought, and the sky\nIs bountiful in their nativity;\nGod’s grace doth nowhere else so far prevail\nAs where it shineth through a body’s veil;\nAnd that I love, for He is mirrored there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "some-deed-or-form-of-our-humanity": { - "title": "“Some deed or form of our humanity …”", - "body": "Some deed or form of our humanity\nWhen genius hath conceived of art divine,\nHer primal birth, an incomplete design,\nIs shaped in stuff of humble quality.\nMore late, in living marble’s purity\nThe chisel keepeth promise to the full;\nReborn is the idea so beautiful,\nThat it belongeth to eternity.\nSo me did Nature make the model rude,\nThe model of myself, a better thing\nBy nobleness of thine to be renewed;\nIf thy compassion, its work cherishing,\nEnlarge, and pare; mine ardor unsubdued\nAwaiteth at thy hand what chastening!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "that-womanhood-more-tender-and-less-cold": { - "title": "“That womanhood more tender and less cold …”", - "body": "That womanhood more tender and less cold\nBe clothed with beauty equal and the same,\nI pray that heaven may from thee reclaim\nHer gifts, that hourly perish and grow old,\nOf thy serene and radiant face remould\nA gentle heavenly form, and Love assign\nThe task to store a heart more mild than thine\nWith mercies sweet and charities untold.\nMy sighs let him preserve, from every place\nMy fallen wasted tears unite again,\nAnd on the friend of this new fair bestow.\nThus may befall, that he who sues for grace\nCompassion shall awaken by my pain,\nAnd love that I have lost be garnered so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "though-true-it-be-that-charity-divine": { - "title": "“Though true it be, that Charity divine …”", - "body": "Though true it be, that Charity divine\nShow mirrored in yon lovely face of thine,\nYet, lady, moves the distant hope so slow,\nThat from thy beauty I lack power to go;\nThe pilgrim soul, that would with thee delay,\nFinds rough and stern the strait and narrow way.\nMy time I therefore part,\nTo eyes give day, and darkness to the heart,\nTo last the water, and to first the fire,\nNo interval, toward heaven to aspire.\nA destiny of birth\nEnchained me to the earth\nIn grant of thee, save mercy of the sky\nPlease to descend, and lift my heart on high;\nHeart will not love what looks cannot espy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "thoughts-of-a-man-nay-of-a-god-alone": { - "title": "“Thoughts of a man, nay of a god alone, …”", - "body": "Thoughts of a man, nay of a god alone,\nHer lips of woman render eloquent;\nWhence I, who listen purely with content,\nMay nevermore depart and be mine own.\nSince she my life hath taken,\nAnd self have I forsaken,\nI pity self that I was wont to be.\nFrom wavering will astray\nHer fair face maketh free,\nTill other beauty death appears to me.\nThou, who dost souls convey\nTo Paradise through chastening fire and wave,\nLest I to self return, dear lady, save!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "thy-lucent-crowned-beauty-to-attain": { - "title": "“Thy lucent-crownèd beauty to attain …”", - "body": "Thy lucent-crownèd beauty to attain\nUpon a narrow and laborious way,\nThe pilgrim vainly maketh his essay,\nSave thy humility his feet forestall;\nThe path aspireth while the strength doth wane,\nAnd midway on the road I pant and fall.\nAlthough thy loveliness celestiäl\nBe heaven’s thing, yet aye it doth delight\nThe heart inclined toward stranger of the height;\nWherefore thy sweetness full to comprehend,\nI long to have thee stoop, and condescend\nAs low as I, of the idea content,\nIf thy disdain severe and prescient\nItself forgive for sinfulness of mine,\nTo love thee lowly, and to hate divine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "thy-sweetness-had-no-need-of-cord-or-chain": { - "title": "“Thy sweetness had no need of cord or chain …”", - "body": "Thy sweetness had no need of cord or chain\nIts prisoner to bind;\nToo well I bear in mind,\nHow I was conquered by a glance alone;\nThe heart subdued by many an ancient pain\nHath lost the fortitude it erst did own.\nYet who hath ever known,\nThat wakened by a look, in time so brief,\nA withered tree should kindle and bear leaf?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "when-phoebus-hath-no-mind-to-strain-and-press": { - "title": "“When Phœbus hath no mind to strain and press …”", - "body": "When Phœbus hath no mind to strain and press\nOur chilly sphere in his embraces bright,\nHis negligence the multitude call Night,\nA name of absence, till he glow again.\nSo impotent is she, so weak and vain,\nThat kindle up a torch, its petty light\nDoth work her death; and frame she hath so slight,\nThat flashing of a flint will rend in twain.\nIf Night in her own self be anything,\nCall her the daughter of the Earth and Sun,\nThe last creating, first receiving shade.\nBe what she may, how glorify a thing\nWidowed, dim-eyed, so easily undone,\nThat glowworm’s lantern turneth her afraid?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "who-theeward-draws-me-spite-my-striving-vain": { - "title": "“Who theeward draws me, spite my striving vain? …”", - "body": "Who theeward draws me, spite my striving vain?\nAh woe is me!\nAm I at once imprisonèd and free?\nIf thou dost chain me without any chain,\nAnd handless, armless, all my life embrace,\nWho shall defend me from thy lovely face?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "with-thy-clear-eyes-i-view-a-radiance-fair": { - "title": "“With thy clear eyes I view a radiance fair …”", - "body": "With thy clear eyes I view a radiance fair,\nBefore to my blind vision quite unknown;\nI carry with thy feet a weight, mine own,\nOf halting steps, were never free to bear;\nUpon thy wings I soar to heaven, and there\nBy thy swift genius are its glories shown;\nI pale and redden at thy choice alone,\nGrow chill in sunlight, warm in frosty air.\nThy will is evermore my sole desire,\nWithin thy heart conceived each wish of mine,\nMy accents framèd purely of thy breath;\nLike to the moon am I, that hath no fire,\nBut only is beheld in heaven to shine\nAccording as the sun illumineth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "year-after-year-essay-beyond-essay": { - "title": "“Year after year, essay beyond essay …”", - "body": "Year after year, essay beyond essay,\nSeeking, the lessoned maker doth arrive\nAt the idea, he leaveth aye alive\nIn alpine marble, though his life be flown;\nFor only in the twilight of his day\nHe reacheth what is noble and his own.\nThus Nature, long astray\nFrom age to age, from face to fairer face,\nHath finally achieved thy perfect grace,\nWhen she herself is old, and near her end.\nTherein I find to dwell\nA fear, that with thy loveliness doth blend,\nAnd my desire toward passion strange compel;\nI cannot think or tell,\nIf sweet or painful be thy beauty bright,\nThe worlds conclusion, or my love-delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "the-blossom-twined-garland-of-her-hair": { - "title": "“The blossom-twinèd garland of her hair …”", - "body": "The blossom-twinèd garland of her hair\nDelighteth so to crown her sunny tress,\nThat flowers one before the other press\nTo be the first to kiss that forehead fair;\nHer gown all day puts on a blithesome air,\nClingeth, then floweth free for happiness;\nHer meshèd net rejoiceth to caress\nThe cheek whereby it lies, and nestle there;\nMore fortunate, her golden-pointed lace\nTaketh her breathing in as close a hold\nAs if it cherished what it may enfold;\nAnd simple zone that doth her waist embrace\nSeemeth to plead: “Here give me leave to stay!”\nWhat would my arms do, if they had their way?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "the-chief-of-artists-can-imagine-nought": { - "title": "“The chief of artists can imagine nought …”", - "body": "The chief of artists can imagine nought,\nOther than form that hideth in a stone,\nBelow its surface veilèd; here alone\nArriveth hand, obedient to his thought.\nSo, fair and noble lady, e’en in thee,\nThe good I seek, the evil that I fly,\nRemain enveloped; whence reluctant, I\nCreate my aspiration’s contrary.\nIt is not love, ’tis not thy beauty fair,\nUngentle pride, thy fortune ruling so,\nNor destiny of mine, that hath to bear\nThe censure, if my genius faint and low,\nWhile Death and Pity both thou dost conceal,\nThough passionèd, can only Death reveal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "a-pilgrim-seeking-my-salvation-still": { - "title": "“A pilgrim seeking my salvation still …”", - "body": "A pilgrim seeking my salvation still,\nFrom foot to foot I change,\nAs wearily I range\nQuite indeterminate ’twixt good and ill,\nA stumbling farer-by,\nWho, viewless of the sky,\nDoth lose his way and wander at his will.\nThe white and vacant leaf\nInscribe with word of thine;\nLet love and pity come to my relief,\nAnd liberate my soul\nFrom dark and doubt-control\nFor petty period that yet is mine.\nLady, I ask thy saintliness divine,\nIf heaven on high a lower seat provide\nFor shamefast sin, than virtue satisfied?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - }, - "tis-burdensome-however-it-be-sweet": { - "title": "“’Tis burdensome, however it be sweet …”", - "body": "’Tis burdensome, however it be sweet,\nThe friendly boon that doth oblige the friend;\nMy liberty, thy courtesy to meet,\nWorse than if robbed, doth with true love contend.\nThe soul of friendship is equality;\nIf friend more freely than his fellow give,\nAriseth rivalry;\nThe first excelleth, last doth not forgive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "William Wells Newell" - } - } - } - }, - "adam-mickiewicz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Adam Mickiewicz", - "birth": { - "year": 1798 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Mickiewicz", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "the-akkerman-steppe": { - "title": "“The Akkerman Steppe”", - "body": "I launch myself across the dry and open narrows,\nMy carriage plunging into green as if a ketch,\nFloundering through the meadow flowers in the stretch.\nI pass an archipelago of coral yarrows.\n\nIt’s dusk now, not a road in sight, nor ancient barrows.\nI look up at the sky and look for stars to catch.\nThere distant clouds glint--there tomorrow starts to etch;\nThe Dnieper glimmers; Akkerman’s lamp shines and harrows.\n\nI stand in stillness, hear the migratory cranes,\nTheir necks and wings beyond the reach of preying hawks;\nHear where the sooty copper glides across the plains,\n\nWhere on its underside a viper writhes through stalks.\nAmid the hush I lean my ears down grassy lanes\nAnd listen for a voice from home. Nobody talks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-calm-of-the-sea": { - "title": "“The Calm of the Sea”", - "body": "The flag on the pavilion barely stirs,\nThe water quivers gently in the sun\nLike some young promised maiden dreaming on,\nHalf-waking, of the joy that shall be hers,\nThe sails upon the masts’ bare cylinders\nAre furled like banners when the war is done;\nThe ship rocks, chained on waters halcyon,\nWith idle sailors, laughing passengers.\nO sea, among thy happy creatures, deep\nBelow, a polyp slumbers through the storm,\nIts long arms ever lifted, poised to dart.\nO thought, the hydra, memory, asleep\nThrough evil days, in peace will lift its form\nAnd plunge its talons in thy quiet heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-great-improvisation": { - "title": "“The Great Improvisation”", - "body": "… Listen to me, God, and you, Nature!\nHere is music that is worthy of you, songs that are worthy of you.\nI am master!\nMaster, I stretch out my hands!\nI stretch them to the sky, I place my fingers on the stars.\nThey are my musical glasses, my armonica.\nNow swiftly, now slowly\nMy spirit turns the stars.\nMillions on millions of tones resound,\nIt is I who called them forth, I know them all;\nI combine them, I separate them, I reunite them,\nI weave them into rainbows, into chords, into strophes,\nI scatter them in sounds and in ribbons of fire.\n\nI raised my hands,\nI held them high above the ridge of the world,\nAnd the wheels of the armonica suddenly ceased to whirl.\nI sing alone, I hear my songs\nLong lingering like the breath of the wind,\nThey blow through all mankind,\nThey moan like pain,\nThey roar like the storm.\nTonelessly, the centuries accompany them; each sound resounds and burns,\nIs in my ear, is in my eye,\nAs when the wind blows over the waves,\nIn its whistlings I hear its flight\nAnd see it in its coat of cloud.\n\nThese songs are worthy of God, of Nature!\nThis is a mighty song, a creator-song.\nThis song is force and power,\nThis song is immortality!\nI feel immortality, I create immortality,\nAnd you, God, what more could you do?\nSee how I draw my thoughts out of myself,\nI incarnate them,\nThey scatter across the skies,\nThey whirl, they sing, they shine,\nAlready far away, I feel them still,\nStill feel their charm,\nI feel their roundness in my hand,\nI sense their movements in my mind:\nI love you, my poetic children!\nMy thoughts! My stars!\nMy feelings! My storms!\nAmong you I am like a father in the midst of his family,\nAll of you are mine.\n\n… Not from Eden’s tree have I drawn this power--\nFrom the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil--\nNot from books or tales that are told,\nNot from the solution of problems,\nOr the practice of magic.\nCreator I was born:\nI have drawn my powers from the source\nFrom which you drew yours:\nYou did not search for your powers--you have them;\nYou do not fear to lose them and neither do I!\nWas it you who gave me,\nOr did I, like you, have to seize it,\nThis piercing and powerful eye:\nWhen I raise my eyes toward the track of the clouds,\nAnd hear the birds flying south on almost invisible wings,\nSuddenly, only by willing, I hold them as in a net with my eyes;\nThe flock gives a cry of distress, but, till I release them,\nYour winds cannot move them.\nIf I gaze at a comet with all the strength of my soul,\nIt cannot stir from the spot while my eyes are upon it", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-pilgrim": { - "title": "“The Pilgrim”", - "body": "A rich and lovely country wide unrolled,\nA fair face by me, heavens where white clouds sail,\nWhy does my heart forever still bewail\nFar-distant lands, more distant days of old?\nLitwa! your roaring forests sang more bold\nThan Salhir maid, Baydary nightingale;\nI’d rather walk your marshes than this vale\nOf mulberries, and pineapples of gold.\nHere are new pleasures, and I am so far!\nWhy must I always sigh distractedly\nFor her I loved when first my morning star\nArose? In that dear house I may not see,\nWhere yet the tokens of her lover are,\nDoes she still walk my ways and think of me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-romantic": { - "title": "“The Romantic”", - "body": "“Silly girl, listen!”\nBut she doesn’t listen\nWhile the village roofs glisten,\nBright in the sun.\n“Silly girl, what do you do there,\nAs if there were someone to view there,\nA face to gaze on and greet there,\nA live form warmly to meet there,\nWhen there is no one, none, do you hear?”\nBut she doesn’t hear.\n\nLike a dead stone\nShe stands there alone,\nStaring ahead of her, peering around\nFor something that has to be found\nTill, suddenly spying it,\nShe touches it, clutches it,\nLaughing and crying.\n\nIs it you, my Johnny, my true love, my dear?\nI knew you would never forget me,\nEven in death! Come with me, let me\nShow you the way now!\nHold your breath, though,\nAnd tiptoe lest stepmother hear!\n\nWhat can she hear? They have made him\nA grave, two years ago laid him\nAway with the dead.\nSave me, Mother of God! I’m afraid.\nBut why? Why should I flee you now?\nWhat do I dread?\nNot Johnny! My Johnny won’t hurt me.\nIt is my Johnny! I see you now,\nYour eyes, your white shirt.\n\nBut it’s pale as linen you are,\nCold as winter you are!\nLet my lips take the cold from you,\nKiss the chill o f the mould from you.\n\nDearest love, let me die with you,\nIn the deep earth lie with you,\nFor this world is dark and dreary,\nI am lonely and weary!\n\nAlone among the unkind ones\nWho mock at my vision,\nMy tears their derision,\nSeeing nothing, the blind ones!\n\nDear God! A cock is crowing,\nWhitely glimmers the dawn.\nJohnny! Where are you going?\nDon’t leave me! I am forlorn!\n\nSo, caressing, talking aloud to her\nLover, she stumbles and falls,\nAnd her cry of anguish calls\nA pitying crowd to her.\n\n“Cross yourselves! It is, surely,\nHer Johnny come back from the grave:\nWhile he lived, he loved her entirely.\nMay God his soul now save!”\n\nHearing what they are saying,\nI, too, start praying.\n\n“The girl is out of her senses!”\nShouts a man with a learned air,\n“My eye and my lenses\nKnow there’s nothing there.\n\nGhosts are a myth\nOf ale-wife and blacksmith.\nClodhoppers! This is treason\nAgainst King Reason!”\n\n“Yet the girl loves,” I reply diffidently,\n“And the people believe reverently:\nFaith and love are more discerning\nThan lenses or learning.\n\nYou know the dead truths, not the living,\nThe world of things, not the world of loving.\nWhere does any miracle start?\nCold eye, look in your heart!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-ruins": { - "title": "“The Ruins”", - "body": "These castles heaped in shattered piles once graced\nAnd guarded you, Crimea, thankless land!\nToday like giant skulls set high they stand\nAnd shelter reptiles, or men more debased.\nUpon that tower a coat of arms is traced,\nAnd letters, some dead hero’s name, whose hand\nScourged armies. Now he sleeps forgotten and\nThe grapevine holds him, like a worm, embraced.\nHere Greeks have chiseled Attic ornament,\nItalians cast the Mongols into chains\nAnd pilgrims chanted slowly, Mecca bent:\nToday the black-winged vulture only reigns\nAs in a city, dead and pestilent,\nWhere mourning banners flutter to the plains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-storm": { - "title": "“The Storm”", - "body": "The rudder breaks, the sails are ripped, the roar\nOf waters mingles with the ominous sound\nOf pumps and panic voices; all around\nTorn ropes. The sun sets red, we hope no more--\nThe tempest howls in triumph; from the shore\nWhere wet cliffs rising tier on tier surround\nThe ocean chaos, death advances, bound\nTo carry ramparts broken long before,\nOne man has swooned, one wrings his hands, one sinks\nUpon his friends, embracing them. Some say\na prayer to death that it may pass them by.\nOne traveller sits apart and sadly thinks:\n“Happy the man who faints or who can pray\nOr has a friend to whom to say goodbye.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-three-brothers-budrys": { - "title": "“The Three Brothers Budrys”", - "body": "Doughty Budrys the old, Lithuanian bold,\nHe has summoned his lusty sons three.\n“Your chargers stand idle, now saddle and bridle\nAnd out with your broadswords,” quoth he.\n\n“For with trumpets’ loud braying in Wilno they’re saying\nThat our crmies set forth to three goals;\nGallant Olgierd takes Russia and Kiejstut takes Prussia\nAnd Scirgiell--our neighbours the Poles,\n\nStout of heart and of hand, go, fight for your land\nWith the gods of your fathers to guide you;\nThough I mount not this year, yet my rede ye shall hear:\nYe are three and three roads ye shall ride you.\n\nBy Lake Ilmen’s broad shores where fair Novgorod lowers\nOne shall follow ’neath Olgierd’s device:\nThere are sables’ black tails there are silvery veils,\nThere are coins shining brightly like ice,\n\nWith Kiejstut’s hordes ample the next son shall trample\nThat dog’s breed, the Knights of the Cross;\nThere he amber thick-strown, vestments diamond-sown,\nAnd brocades al a marvellous gloss,\n\nIn the barren, stripped land beyond Niemen’s wide strand\nWhere goes Skirgiell, the third son shall ride;\nOnly buckler and sword will he get as reward,\nBut from there he shall bring him his bride.\n\nFor ’tis Poland the world over that’s the land lor a lover:\nAll the maids are like kittens at play;\nFaces whiter than milk, lashes soft as black silk,\nAnd their eyes--like the star-shine are they!\n\nFifty years are now sped and my bride is long dead,\nThe bright Pole I brought home from a raid:\nAnd yet still when I stand and gaze out toward that land,\nI remenber the face of that maid.”\n\nSo he ends and they turn, he has blessed them their journey:\nThey’ve armed them, they’ve mounted and fled:\nFall and winter both pass, never word comes, alas,\nAnd old Budrys had thought his sons dead.\n\nThrough the high-piling drift comes a youth riding swift,\n’Neath his mantle rich booty doth hide:\n“Ah, a Novgorod kettle full of silver-bright metal!”\n--“Nay, my father, a Polish bride!”\n\nThrough the high-piling drift comes a youth riding swill,\n’Neath his mantle rich booty doth hide:\n“Ah, amber, my son, in the German land won!”\n--“Nay, my father, a Polish bride!”\n\nThrough the high-piling drift rides the third. Ah, his gift,\n’Tis the pride of the west and the east!\nBut while yet it is hidden, old Budrys has bidden\nHis guests to the third wedding feast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "twardowskis-wife": { - "title": "“Twardowski’s Wife”", - "body": "Eating, drinking, smoking, laughter,\nReverly and wild to-do--\nThey shake the inn from floor to rafter\nWith huzzahing and halloo.\n\nThere Twardowski heads the table,\nArms akimbo, pasha-wise, And he shouts,\n“Show what you’re able”\nJokes and tricks and terrifies.\n\nRound a soldier playing bully,\nScolding, shoving lustily,\nHums his sword-blade--and a woolly\nRabbit in his place they see!\n\nAt a lawyer sitting drinking\nQuietly his bowl of grog\nHe has set his wallat clinking--\nAnd the lawyer is a dog!\n\nTo a tailor’s forehead clapping\nThree long tubes, he smacks his nose\nThrice, and at his sudden tapping,\nOut the Danzig vodka flows.\n\nHe had drained his cup already\nWhen the tankard gave a hum\nAnd a clank. “The devil!” said he,\n“Well, my friend, why have you come?”\n\nIn the cup a little devil\nOf a bob-tailed German brand,\nGreeted all the guests, most civil,\nBowing, prancing, hat in hand.\n\nThen from out the tankard jumping\nTo the flow, two ells he grows:\nClaws like hawk’s, a hooked nose, clumping\nOn one hen’s foot, so he goes.\n\n“Ah, Twardowski, brother, greeting!”\nSays he boldly, at his ease:\n“Did you not expect this meeting?\nI am Mephistopheles.\n\nOn Bald Mountain not so lately\nYou bequeathed to me your soul.\nWrote your name down accurately\nOn a bull’s hide for a scroll.\n\nAll my friends were at your orders:\nYou, when two years’ time had flown,\nWere to come to Rome. My warders\nThen should take you for their own.\n\nSeven years you’ve spent tormenting\nHell with magic, nor do you\nPlan your journey yet, frequenting\nInns, although your bond is due.\n\nVengeance, though you count upon her\nBeing late, at last strikes home,\nAnd I now arrest Your Honor--\nFor this inn is named The Rome.”\n\nAt this dictum so acerbum\nTwardowski fled, but as he ran\nThe devil cought him. “Where’s your verbum\nNobile,” he said, “my man?”\n\nWhat was to be done? A moment\nTill he forfeited his head!\nSwiftly then Twardowski reckoned\nOn a scheme to serve his stead.\n\n“Read, Mepfiisto, the condition\nOf the contract on your scroll;\nWhen the time of my perdition\nComes and you demand my soul,\n\nI am still to have one little\nRight: to set a threefold task:\nYou must do each jot and tittle\nOf whatever I may ask.\n\nSee the tavern sign, a stallion\nPainted on a canvas ground:\nLet me jump on the rapscallion,\nBreak away, and gallop round.\n\nTwist a whip of sand, moreover,\nFor me, and upon the brink\nOf the wood build me a cover\nWhere I may find food and drink.\n\nMake the walls of nutshells matching\nThe Carpathians in height;\nOut of Jews’ beards make the thatching\nAnd pack popy seed on tight.\n\nLook, here is a nail for measure,\nOne inch through, three inches long:\nWith three spikes, such is my pleasure\nNail each seed down, stout and strong.”\n\nJumping high for joy, Mephisto\nWaters, feeds and grooms the horse;\nTurns a whip of sand, and presto!\nIt stands ready for the course.\n\nThen Twardowski mounts the racer,\nMakes it trot and caracole;\nAnd the building was no facer--\nThere it stood, complete and whole!\n\n“Well, you’ve won that bout, Sir Devil!\nHere’s the second; do your best!\nJump in holy water, level\nWith your neck; the bowl’s been biest.”\n\nCoughing, spitting, ever faster\nSweats the devil at this check:\nBut the servant minds the master,\nPlunges in up Co his neck.\n\nOut he flew as if projected\nFrom a sling, and, snorting wrath,\nScreamed: “Now you’re our own elected!\nBrr! But what a vapour bath!”\n\n--“One more task before you get me--\nEven magic has an end--\nHere’s Madame Twardowski: Let me\nIntroduce my little friend.\n\nFor a year I’ll make my dwelling\nWith Beelzebub. Above\nYou shall pass the year in spelling\nMe as husband with my love.\n\nSwear her love and recognition\nAnd obedience unalloyed;\nFail in only one condition,\nAnd our contract’s null and void.”\n\nOne ear to Twardowski bending,\nOne eye on his wife, but more\nFeigning than in fact attending,\nSatan seeks to reach the door.\n\nWhile Twardowski taunts and teases\nAnd attempts to bar his way,\nThrough the keyhole, out he squeezes\nAnd is running yet, they say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "uncertainty": { - "title": "“Uncertainty”", - "body": "While I don’t see you, I don’t shed a tear\nI never lose my senses when you’re near,\nBut, with our meetings few and far between\nThere’s something missing, waiting to be seen.\nIs there a name for what I’m thinking of?\nAre we just friends? Or should I call this love?\n\nAs soon as we have said our last good-byes,\nYour image never floats before my eyes;\nBut more than once, when you have been long gone,\nI seemed to feel your presence linger on.\nI wonder then what I’ve been thinking of.\nAre we just friends? Or should I call this love?\n\nWhen I’m downcast, I never seek relief\nBy pouring out my heart in tales of grief;\nYet, as I wander aimlessly, once more\nI somehow end up knocking at your door;\nWhat brought me here? What am I thinking of?\nAre we just friends? Or should I call this love?\n\nI’d give my life to keep you sound and well,\nTo make you smile, I would descend to hell;\nBut though I’d climb the mountains, swim the seas\nI do not look to be your health and peace:\nAgain I ask, what am I thinking of?\nAre we just friends? or should I call this love?\n\nAnd when you place your hand upon my palm,\nI am enveloped in a blissful calm,\nPrefiguring some final, gentle rest;\nBut still my heart beats loudly in my breast\nAs if to ask: what are you thinking of?\nAre you two friends? or will you call this love?\n\nNot bardic spirit seized my mortal tongue\nWhen I thought of you and composed this song;\nBut still, I can’t help wondering sometimes:\nWhere did these notions come from, and these rhymes?\nIn heaven’s name, what I was dreaming of?\nAnd what had inspired me? Friendship or love?", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - } - } - }, - "edna-st-vincent-millay": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edna St. Vincent Millay", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 102 - }, - "poems": { - "afternoon-on-a-hill": { - "title": "“Afternoon on a Hill”", - "body": "I will be the gladdest thing\nUnder the sun!\nI will touch a hundred flowers\nAnd not pick one.\n\nI will look at cliffs and clouds\nWith quiet eyes\nWatch the wind bow down the grass\nAnd the grass rise.\n\nAnd when lights begin to show\nUp from the town\nI will mark which must be mine\nAnd then start down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "alms": { - "title": "“Alms”", - "body": "My heart is what it was before,\nA house where people come and go;\nBut it is winter with your love,\nThe sashes are beset with snow.\n\nI light the lamp and lay the cloth,\nI blow the coals to blaze again;\nBut it is winter with your love,\nThe frost is thick upon the pane …\n\nI know a winter when it comes:\nThe leaves are listless on the boughs;\nI watched your love a little while,\nAnd brought my plants into the house.\n\nI water them and turn them south,\nI snap the dead brown from the stem;\nBut it is winter with your love,\nI only tend and water them.\n\nThere was a time I stood and watched\nThe small, ill-natured sparrows’ fray;\nI loved the beggar that I fed,\nI cared for what he had to say,\n\nI stood and watched him out of sight:\nToday I reach around the door\nAnd set a bowl upon the step;\nMy heart is what it was before,\n\nBut it is winter with your love;\nI scatter crumbs upon the sill,\nAnd close the window,--and the birds\nMay take or leave them, as they will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-ancient-gesture": { - "title": "“An Ancient Gesture”", - "body": "I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:\nPenelope did this too.\nAnd more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day\nAnd undoing it all through the night;\nYour arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;\nAnd along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,\nAnd your husband has been gone, and you don’t know where, for years.\nSuddenly you burst into tears;\nThere is simply nothing else to do.\n\nAnd I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:\nThis is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,\nIn the very best tradition, classic, Greek;\nUlysses did this too.\nBut only as a gesture,--a gesture which implied\nTo the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.\nHe learned it from Penelope\nPenelope, who really cried.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "and-you-as-well-must-die-beloved-dust": { - "title": "“And you as well must die, beloved dust …”", - "body": "And you as well must die, beloved dust,\nAnd all your beauty stand you in no stead;\nThis flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,\nThis body of flame and steel, before the gust\nOf Death, or under his autumnal frost,\nShall be as any leaf, be no less dead\nThan the first leaf that fell,--this wonder fled.\nAltered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.\nNor shall my love avail you in your hour.\nIn spite of all my love, you will arise\nUpon that day and wander down the air\nObscurely as the unattended flower,\nIt mattering not how beautiful you were,\nOr how beloved above all else that dies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-anguish": { - "title": "“The Anguish”", - "body": "I would to God I were quenched and fed\nAs in my youth\nFrom the flask of song, and the good bread\nOf beauty richer than truth.\n\nThe anguish of the world is on my tongue.\nMy bowl is filled to the brim with it; there is more than I can eat.\nHappy are the toothless old and the toothless young,\nThat cannot rend this meat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "as-to-some-lovely-temple-tenantless": { - "title": "“As to some lovely temple, tenantless …”", - "body": "As to some lovely temple, tenantless\nLong since, that once was sweet with shivering brass,\nKnowing well its altars ruined and the grass\nGrown up between the stones, yet from excess\nOf grief hard driven, or great loneliness,\nThe worshiper returns, and those who pass\nMarvel him crying on a name that was,--\nSo is it now with me in my distress.\nYour body was a temple to Delight;\nCold are its ashes whence the breath is fled,\nYet here one time your spirit was wont to move;\nHere might I hope to find you day or night,\nAnd here I come to look for you, my love,\nEven now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "ashes-of-life": { - "title": "“Ashes of Life”", - "body": "Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;\nEat I must and sleep I will--and would that night were here!\nBut ah!--to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!\nWould that it were day again!--with twilight near!\n\nLove has gone and left me and I don’t know what to do;\nThis or that or what you will is all the same to me;\nBut all the things that I begin I leave before I’m through--\nThere’s little use in anything as far as I can see.\n\nLove has gone and left me--and the neighbours knock and borrow\nAnd life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse--\nAnd to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow\nThere’s this little street and this little house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "assault": { - "title": "“Assault”", - "body": "I had forgotten how the frogs must sound\nAfter a year of silence, else I think\nI should not so have ventured forth alone\nAt dusk upon this unfrequented road.\n\nI am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk\nBetween me and the crying of the frogs?\nOh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,\nThat am a timid woman, on her way\nFrom one house to another!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "autumn-daybreak": { - "title": "“Autumn Daybreak”", - "body": "Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud\nAt dawn, a fortnight overdue,\nJostling the doors, and tearing through\nMy bedroom to rejoin the cloud,\nI know--for I can hear the hiss\nAnd scrape of leaves along the floor--\nHow may boughs, lashed bare by this,\nWill rake the cluttered sky once more.\nTardy, and somewhat south of east,\nThe sun will rise at length, made known\nMore by the meagre light increased\nThan by a disk in splendour shown;\nWhen, having but to turn my head,\nThrough the stripped maple I shall see,\nBleak and remembered, patched with red,\nThe hill all summer hid from me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-the-harp-weaver": { - "title": "“The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”", - "body": "“Son,” said my mother,\nWhen I was knee-high,\n“you’ve need of clothes to cover you,\nand not a rag have I.”\n\n“There’s nothing in the house\nTo make a boy breeches,\nNor shears to cut a cloth with,\nNor thread to take stitches.”\n\n“There’s nothing in the house\nBut a loaf-end of rye,\nAnd a harp with a woman’s head\nNobody will buy,”\nAnd she began to cry.\n\nThat was in the early fall.\nWhen came the late fall,\n“Son,” she said, “the sight of you\nMakes your mother’s blood crawl,--”\n\n“Little skinny shoulder-blades\nSticking through your clothes!\nAnd where you’ll get a jacket from\nGod above knows.”\n\n“It’s lucky for me, lad,\nYour daddy’s in the ground,\nAnd can’t see the way I let\nHis son go around!”\nAnd she made a queer sound.\n\nThat was in the late fall.\nWhen the winter came,\nI’d not a pair of breeches\nNor a shirt to my name.\n\nI couldn’t go to school,\nOr out of doors to play.\nAnd all the other little boys\nPassed our way.\n\n“Son,” said my mother,\n“Come, climb into my lap,\nAnd I’ll chafe your little bones\nWhile you take a nap.”\n\nAnd, oh, but we were silly\nFor half and hour or more,\nMe with my long legs,\nDragging on the floor,\n\nA-rock-rock-rocking\nTo a mother-goose rhyme!\nOh, but we were happy\nFor half an hour’s time!\n\nBut there was I, a great boy,\nAnd what would folks say\nTo hear my mother singing me\nTo sleep all day,\nIn such a daft way?\n\nMen say the winter\nWas bad that year;\nFuel was scarce,\nAnd food was dear.\n\nA wind with a wolf’s head\nHowled about our door,\nAnd we burned up the chairs\nAnd sat upon the floor.\n\nAll that was left us\nWas a chair we couldn’t break,\nAnd the harp with a woman’s head\nNobody would take,\nFor song or pity’s sake.\n\nThe night before Christmas\nI cried with cold,\nI cried myself to sleep\nLike a two-year old.\n\nAnd in the deep night\nI felt my mother rise,\nAnd stare down upon me\nWith love in her eyes.\n\nI saw my mother sitting\nOn the one good chair,\nA light falling on her\nFrom I couldn’t tell where.\n\nLooking nineteen,\nAnd not a day older,\nAnd the harp with a woman’s head\nLeaned against her shoulder.\n\nHer thin fingers, moving\nIn the thin, tall strings,\nWere weav-weav-weaving\nWonderful things.\n\nMany bright threads,\nFrom where I couldn’t see,\nWere running through the harp-strings\nRapidly,\n\nAnd gold threads whistling\nThrough my mother’s hand.\nI saw the web grow,\nAnd the pattern expand.\n\nShe wove a child’s jacket,\nAnd when it was done\nShe laid it on the floor\nAnd wove another one.\n\nShe wove a red cloak\nSo regal to see,\n“She’s made it for a king’s son,”\nI said, “and not for me.”\nBut I knew it was for me.\n\nShe wove a pair of breeches\nQuicker than that!\nShe wove a pair of boots\nAnd a little cocked hat.\n\nShe wove a pair of mittens,\nShw wove a little blouse,\nShe wove all night\nIn the still, cold house.\n\nShe sang as she worked,\nAnd the harp-strings spoke;\nHer voice never faltered,\nAnd the thread never broke,\nAnd when I awoke,--\n\nThere sat my mother\nWith the harp against her shoulder,\nLooking nineteeen,\nAnd not a day older,\n\nA smile about her lips,\nAnd a light about her head,\nAnd her hands in the harp-strings\nFrozen dead.\n\nAnd piled beside her\nAnd toppling to the skies,\nWere the clothes of a king’s son,\nJust my size.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "being-young-and-green": { - "title": "“Being Young and Green”", - "body": "Being Young and Green, I said in love’s despite:\nNever in the world will I to living wight\nGive over, air my mind\nTo anyone,\nHang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind\nTo be shredded and faded--\n\nOh, me, invaded\nAnd sacked by the wind and the sun!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-betrothal": { - "title": "“The Betrothal”", - "body": "Oh, come, my lad, or go, my lad,\nAnd love me if you like.\nI shall not hear the door shut\nNor the knocker strike.\n\nOh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts,\nAnd wed me if you will.\nI’d make a man a good wife,\nSensible and still.\n\nAnd why should I be cold, my lad,\nAnd why should you repine,\nBecause I love a dark head\nThat never will be mine?\n\nI might as well be easing you\nAs lie alone in bed\nAnd waste the night in wanting\nA cruel dark head.\n\nYou might as well be calling yours\nWhat never will be his,\nAnd one of us be happy.\nThere’s few enough as is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-blue-flag-in-the-bog": { - "title": "“The Blue-Flag in the Bog”", - "body": "God had called us, and we came;\nOur loved Earth to ashes left;\nHeaven was a neighbor’s house,\nOpen to us, bereft.\n\nGay the lights of Heaven showed,\nAnd ’twas God who walked ahead;\nYet I wept along the road,\nWanting my own house instead.\n\nWept unseen, unheeded cried,\n“All you things my eyes have kissed,\nFare you well! We meet no more,\nLovely, lovely tattered mist!\n\nWeary wings that rise and fall\nAll day long above the fire!”--\nRed with heat was every wall,\nRough with heat was every wire--\n\n“Fare you well, you little winds\nThat the flying embers chase!\nFare you well, you shuddering day,\nWith your hands before your face!\n\nAnd, ah, blackened by strange blight,\nOr to a false sun unfurled,\nNow forevermore goodbye,\nAll the gardens in the world!\n\nOn the windless hills of Heaven,\nThat I have no wish to see,\nWhite, eternal lilies stand,\nBy a lake of ebony.\n\nBut the Earth forevermore\nIs a place where nothing grows,--\nDawn will come, and no bud break;\nEvening, and no blossom close.\n\nSpring will come, and wander slow\nOver an indifferent land,\nStand beside an empty creek,\nHold a dead seed in her hand.”\n\nGod had called us, and we came,\nBut the blessed road I trod\nWas a bitter road to me,\nAnd at heart I questioned God.\n\n“Though in Heaven,” I said, “be all\nThat the heart would most desire,\nHeld Earth naught save souls of sinners\nWorth the saving from a fire?\n\nWithered grass,--the wasted growing!\nAimless ache of laden boughs!”\nLittle things God had forgotten\nCalled me, from my burning house.\n\n“Though in Heaven,” I said, “be all\nThat the eye could ask to see,\nAll the things I ever knew\nAre this blaze in back of me.”\n\n“Though in Heaven,” I said, “be all\nThat the ear could think to lack,\nAll the things I ever knew\nAre this roaring at my back.”\n\nIt was God who walked ahead,\nLike a shepherd to the fold;\nIn his footsteps fared the weak,\nAnd the weary and the old,\n\nGlad enough of gladness over,\nReady for the peace to be,--\nBut a thing God had forgotten\nWas the growing bones of me.\n\nAnd I drew a bit apart,\nAnd I lagged a bit behind,\nAnd I thought on Peace Eternal,\nLest He look into my mind:\n\nAnd I gazed upon the sky,\nAnd I thought of Heavenly Rest,--\nAnd I slipped away like water\nThrough the fingers of the blest!\n\nAll their eyes were fixed on Glory,\nNot a glance brushed over me;\n“Alleluia! Alleluia!”\nUp the road,--and I was free.\n\nAnd my heart rose like a freshet,\nAnd it swept me on before,\nGiddy as a whirling stick,\nTill I felt the earth once more.\n\nAll the earth was charred and black,\nFire had swept from pole to pole;\nAnd the bottom of the sea\nWas as brittle as a bowl;\n\nAnd the timbered mountain-top\nWas as naked as a skull,--\nNothing left, nothing left,\nOf the Earth so beautiful!\n\n“Earth,” I said, “how can I leave you?”\n“You are all I have,” I said;\n“What is left to take my mind up,\nLiving always, and you dead?”\n\n“Speak!” I said, “Oh, tell me something!\nMake a sign that I can see!\nFor a keepsake! To keep always!\nQuick!--before God misses me!”\n\nAnd I listened for a voice;--\nBut my heart was all I heard;\nNot a screech-owl, not a loon,\nNot a tree-toad said a word.\n\nAnd I waited for a sign;--\nCoals and cinders, nothing more;\nAnd a little cloud of smoke\nFloating on a valley floor.\n\nAnd I peered into the smoke\nTill it rotted, like a fog:--\nThere, encompassed round by fire,\nStood a blue-flag in a bog!\n\nLittle flames came wading out,\nStraining, straining towards its stem,\nBut it was so blue and tall\nThat it scorned to think of them!\n\nRed and thirsty were their tongues,\nAs the tongues of wolves must be,\nBut it was so blue and tall--\nOh, I laughed, I cried, to see!\n\nAll my heart became a tear,\nAll my soul became a tower,\nNever loved I anything\nAs I loved that tall blue flower!\n\nIt was all the little boats\nThat had ever sailed the sea,\nIt was all the little books\nThat had gone to school with me;\n\nOn its roots like iron claws\nRearing up so blue and tall,--\nIt was all the gallant Earth\nWith its back against a wall!\n\nIn a breath, ere I had breathed,--\nOh, I laughed, I cried, to see!--\nI was kneeling at its side,\nAnd it leaned its head on me!\n\nCrumbling stones and sliding sand\nIs the road to Heaven now;\nIcy at my straining knees\nDrags the awful under-tow;\n\nSoon but stepping-stones of dust\nWill the road to Heaven be,--\nFather, Son and Holy Ghost,\nReach a hand and rescue me!\n\n“There--there, my blue-flag flower;\nHush--hush--go to sleep;\nThat is only God you hear,\nCounting up His folded sheep!\n\nLullabye--lullabye--\nThat is only God that calls,\nMissing me, seeking me,\nEre the road to nothing falls!\n\nHe will set His mighty feet\nFirmly on the sliding sand;\nLike a little frightened bird\nI will creep into His hand;\n\nI will tell Him all my grief,\nI will tell Him all my sin;\nHe will give me half His robe\nFor a cloak to wrap you in.\n\nLullabye--lullabye--”\nRocks the burnt-out planet free!--\nFather, Son and Holy Ghost,\nReach a hand and rescue me!\n\nAh, the voice of love at last!\nLo, at last the face of light!\nAnd the whole of His white robe\nFor a cloak against the night!\n\nAnd upon my heart asleep\nAll the things I ever knew!--\n“Holds Heaven not some cranny, Lord,\nFor a flower so tall and blue?”\n\nAll’s well and all’s well!\nGay the lights of Heaven show!\nIn some moist and Heavenly place\nWe will set it out to grow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "bluebeard": { - "title": "“Bluebeard”", - "body": "This door you might not open, and you did;\nSo enter now, and see for what slight thing\nYou are betrayed … Here is no treasure hid\nNo cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring\nThe sought-for truth, no heads of women slain\nFor greed like yours, no writhings of distress\nBut only what you see … Look yet again--\nAn empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless\nYet this alone out of my life I kept\nUnto myself, lest any know me quite;\nAnd you did so profane me when you crept\nUnto the threshold of this room to-night\nThat I must never more behold your face.\nThis now is yours. I seek another place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "burial": { - "title": "“Burial”", - "body": "Mine is a body that should die at sea!\nAnd have for a grave, instead of a grave\nSix feet deep and the length of me,\nAll the water that is under the wave!\nAnd terrible fishes to seize my flesh,\nSuch as a living man might fear,\nAnd eat me while I am firm and fresh,--\nNot wait till I’ve been dead for a year!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "cherish-you-then-the-hope-i-shall-forget": { - "title": "“Cherish you then the hope I shall forget …”", - "body": "Cherish you then the hope I shall forget\nAt length, my lord, Pieria?--put away\nFor your so passing sake, this mouth of clay\nThese mortal bones against my body set,\nFor all the puny fever and frail sweat\nOf human love,--renounce for these, I say,\nThe Singing Mountain’s memory, and betray\nThe silent lyre that hangs upon me yet?\nAh, but indeed, some day shall you awake,\nRather, from dreams of me, that at your side\nSo many nights, a lover and a bride,\nBut stern in my soul’s chastity, have lain,\nTo walk the world forever for my sake,\nAnd in each chamber find me gone again!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "city-trees": { - "title": "“City Trees”", - "body": "The trees along this city street\nSave for the traffic and the trains\nWould make a sound as thin and sweet\nAs trees in country lanes.\n\nAnd people standing in their shade\nOut of a shower undoubtedly\nWould hear such music as is made\nUpon a country tree.\n\nOh little leaves that are so dumb\nAgainst the shrieking city air\nI watch you when the wind has come--\nI know what sound is there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "conscientious-objector": { - "title": "“Conscientious Objector”", - "body": "I shall die, but\nthat is all that I shall do for Death.\nI hear him leading his horse out of the stall;\nI hear the clatter on the barn-floor.\nHe is in haste; he has business in Cuba,\nbusiness in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.\nBut I will not hold the bridle\nwhile he clinches the girth.\nAnd he may mount by himself:\nI will not give him a leg up.\n\nThough he flick my shoulders with his whip,\nI will not tell him which way the fox ran.\nWith his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where\nthe black boy hides in the swamp.\nI shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;\nI am not on his pay-roll.\n\nI will not tell him the whereabout of my friends\nnor of my enemies either.\nThough he promise me much,\nI will not map him the route to any man’s door.\nAm I a spy in the land of the living,\nthat I should deliver men to Death?\nBrother, the password and the plans of our city\nare safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "daphne": { - "title": "“Daphne”", - "body": "Why do you follow me?--\nAny moment I can be\nNothing but a laurel-tree.\n\nAny moment of the chase\nI can leave you in my place\nA pink bough for your embrace.\n\nYet if over hill and hollow\nStill it is your will to follow,\nI am off;--to heel, Apollo!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-autumn": { - "title": "“The Death of Autumn”", - "body": "When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,\nAnd feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind\nLike aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned\nOf half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,\nStripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,\nBlackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--\nThen leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes\nMy heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,\nAnd will be born again,--but ah, to see\nBeauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!\nOh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "departure": { - "title": "“Departure”", - "body": "It’s little I care what path I take,\nAnd where it leads it’s little I care;\nBut out of this house, lest my heart break,\nI must go, and off somewhere.\n\nIt’s little I know what’s in my heart,\nWhat’s in my mind it’s little I know,\nBut there’s that in me must up and start,\nAnd it’s little I care where my feet go.\n\nI wish I could walk for a day and a night,\nAnd find me at dawn in a desolate place\nWith never the rut of a road in sight,\nNor the roof of a house, nor the eyes of a face.\n\nI wish I could walk till my blood should spout,\nAnd drop me, never to stir again,\nOn a shore that is wide, for the tide is out,\nAnd the weedy rocks are bare to the rain.\n\nBut dump or dock, where the path I take\nBrings up, it’s little enough I care:\nAnd it’s little I’d mind the fuss they’ll make,\nHuddled dead in a ditch somewhere.\n\n“Is something the matter, dear,” she said,\n“That you sit at your work so silently?”\n“No, mother, no, ’twas a knot in my thread.\nThere goes the kettle, I’ll make the tea.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dirge-without-music": { - "title": "“Dirge without Music”", - "body": "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.\nSo it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:\nInto the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned\nWith lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.\n\nLovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.\nBe one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.\nA fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,\nA formula, a phrase remains,--but the best is lost.\n\nThe answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,--\nThey are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled\nIs the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.\nMore precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.\n\nDown, down, down into the darkness of the grave\nGently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;\nQuietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.\nI know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dream": { - "title": "“The Dream”", - "body": "Love, if I weep it will not matter,\nAnd if you laugh I shall not care;\nFoolish am I to think about it,\nBut it is good to feel you there.\n\nLove, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,--\nWhite and awful the moonlight reached\nOver the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,\nThere was a shutter loose,--it screeched!\n\nSwung in the wind,--and no wind blowing!--\nI was afraid, and turned to you,\nPut out my hand to you for comfort,--\nAnd you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,\n\nUnder my hand the moonlight lay!\nLove, if you laugh I shall not care,\nBut if I weep it will not matter,--\nAh, it is good to feel you there!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "ebb": { - "title": "“Ebb”", - "body": "I know what my heart is like\n Since your love died:\nIt is like a hollow ledge\nHolding a little pool\n Left there by the tide,\n A little tepid pool,\nDrying inward from the edge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "eel-grass": { - "title": "“Eel-Grass”", - "body": "No matter what I say,\nAll that I really love\nIs the rain that flattens on the bay,\nAnd the eel-grass in the cove;\nThe jingle-shells that lie and bleach\nAt the tide-line, and the trace\nOf higher tides along the beach:\nNothing in this place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "elaine": { - "title": "“Elaine”", - "body": "Oh come again to Astolat!\nI will not ask you to be kind.\nAnd you may go when you will go\nAnd I will stay behind.\n\nI will not say how dear you are\nOr ask you if you hold me dear\nOr trouble you with things for you\nThe way I did last year.\n\nSo still the orchard Lancelot\nSo very still the lake shall be\nYou could not guess--though you should guess--\nWhat is become of me.\n\nSo wide shall be the garden-walk\nThe garden-seat so very wide\nYou needs must think--if you should think--\nThe lily maid had died.\n\nSave that a little way away\nI’d watch you for a little while\nTo see you speak the way you speak\nAnd smile--if you should smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "elegy-before-death": { - "title": "“Elegy before Death”", - "body": "There will be rose and rhododendron\nWhen you are dead and under ground;\nStill will be heard from white syringas\nHeavy with bees, a sunny sound;\n\nStill will the tamaracks be raining\nAfter the rain has ceased, and still\nWill there be robins in the stubble,\nBrown sheep upon the warm green hill.\n\nSpring will not ail nor autumn falter;\nNothing will know that you are gone,\nSaving alone some sullen plough-land\nNone but yourself sets foot upon;\n\nSaving the may-weed and the pig-weed\nNothing will know that you are dead,--\nThese, and perhaps a useless wagon\nStanding beside some tumbled shed.\n\nOh, there will pass with your great passing\nLittle of beauty not your own,--\nOnly the light from common water,\nOnly the grace from simple stone!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "Let them bury your big eyes\nIn the secret earth securely,\nYour thin fingers, and your fair,\nSoft, indefinite-colored hair,--\nAll of these in some way, surely,\nFrom the secret earth shall rise;\nNot for these I sit and stare,\nBroken and bereft completely;\nYour young flesh that sat so neatly\nOn your little bones will sweetly\nBlossom in the air.\n\nBut your voice,--never the rushing\nOf a river underground,\nNot the rising of the wind\nIn the trees before the rain,\nNot the woodcock’s watery call,\nNot the note the white-throat utters,\nNot the feet of children pushing\nYellow leaves along the gutters\nIn the blue and bitter fall,\nShall content my musing mind\nFor the beauty of that sound\nThat in no new way at all\nEver will be heard again.\n\nSweetly through the sappy stalk\nOf the vigorous weed,\nHolding all it held before,\nCherished by the faithful sun,\nOn and on eternally\nShall your altered fluid run,\nBud and bloom and go to seed;\nBut your singing days are done;\nBut the music of your talk\nNever shall the chemistry\nOf the secret earth restore.\nAll your lovely words are spoken.\nOnce the ivory box is broken,\nBeats the golden bird no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "euclid-alone-has-looked-on-beauty-bare": { - "title": "“Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare …”", - "body": "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.\nLet all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,\nAnd lay them prone upon the earth and cease\nTo ponder on themselves, the while they stare\nAt nothing, intricately drawn nowhere\nIn shapes of shifting lineage; let geese\nGabble and hiss, but heroes seek release\nFrom dusty bondage into luminous air.\nO blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,\nWhen first the shaft into his vision shone\nOf light anatomized! Euclid alone\nHas looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they\nWho, though once only and then but far away,\nHave heard her massive sandal set on stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "exiled": { - "title": "“Exiled”", - "body": "Searching my heart for its true sorrow,\nThis is the thing I find to be:\nThat I am weary of words and people,\nSick of the city, wanting the sea;\n\nWanting the sticky, salty sweetness\nOf the strong wind and shattered spray;\nWanting the loud sound and the soft sound\nOf the big surf that breaks all day.\n\nAlways before about my dooryard,\nMarking the reach of the winter sea,\nRooted in sand and dragging drift-wood,\nStraggled the purple wild sweet-pea;\n\nAlways I climbed the wave at morning,\nShook the sand from my shoes at night,\nThat now am caught beneath great buildings,\nStricken with noise, confused with light.\n\nIf I could hear the green piles groaning\nUnder the windy wooden piers,\nSee once again the bobbing barrels,\nAnd the black sticks that fence the weirs,\n\nIf I could see the weedy mussels\nCrusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,\nHear once again the hungry crying\nOverhead, of the wheeling gulls,\n\nFeel once again the shanty straining\nUnder the turning of the tide,\nFear once again the rising freshet,\nDread the bell in the fog outside,--\n\nI should be happy,--that was happy\nAll day long on the coast of Maine!\nI have a need to hold and handle\nShells and anchors and ships again!\n\nI should be happy, that am happy\nNever at all since I came here.\nI am too long away from water.\nI have a need of water near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "the-fawn": { - "title": "“The Fawn”", - "body": "There it was I saw what I shall never forget\nAnd never retrieve.\nMonstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe,\nHe lay, yet there he lay,\nAsleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft small ebony hoves,\nThe child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.\n\nSurely his mother had never said, “Lie here\nTill I return,” so spotty and plain to see\nOn the green moss lay he.\nHis eyes had opened; he considered me.\n\nI would have given more than I care to say\nTo thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend\nOne moment only of that forest day:\n\nMight I have had the acceptance, not the love\nOf those clear eyes;\nMight I have been for him in the bough above\nOr the root beneath his forest bed,\nA part of the forest, seen without surprise.\n\nWas it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he depart\nThat jerked him to his jointy knees,\nAnd sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling\nOn his new legs, between the stems of the white trees?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "feast": { - "title": "“Feast”", - "body": "I drank at every vine.\n The last was like the first.\nI came upon no wine\n So wonderful as thirst.\n\nI gnawed at every root.\n I ate of every plant.\nI came upon no fruit\n So wonderful as want.\n\nFeed the grape and bean\n To the vintner and monger;\nI will lie down lean\n With my thirst and my hunger.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "first-fig": { - "title": "“First Fig”", - "body": "My candle burns at both ends;\nIt will not last the night;\nBut ah my foes and oh my friends--\nIt gives a lovely light!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-fledgling": { - "title": "“The Fledgling”", - "body": "So, art thou feahered, art thou flown,\nThou naked thing?--and canst alone\nUpon the unsolid summer air\nSustain thyself, and prosper there?\nShall no more with anxious note\nAdvise thee through the happy day,\nThrusting the worm into thy throat,\nBearing thine excrement away?\nAlas, I think I see thee yet,\nPerched on the windy parapet,\nDefer thy flight a moment still\nTo clean thy wing with careful bill.\nAnd thou are feathered, thou art flown;\nAnd hast a project of thine own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "fountain": { - "title": "“Fountain”", - "body": "I know I might have lived in such a way\nAs to have suffered only pain:\nLoving not man nor dog;\nNot money, even; feeling\nToothache perhaps, but never more than an hour away\nFrom skill and novocaine;\nMaking no contacts, dealing with life through Agents, drinking one cocktail, betting two dollars, wearing raincoats in the rain.\nBetrayed at length by no one but the fog\nWhispering to the wing of the plane.\n\n“Fountain,” I have cried to that unbubbling well, “I will not drink of thy water!” Yet I thirst\nFor a mouthful of--not to swallow, only to rinse my mouth in--peace.\nAnd while the eyes of the past condemn,\nThe eyes of the present narrow into assignation. And--worst--\nThe young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed; I shall get no help from them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gods-world": { - "title": "“God’s World”", - "body": "O world I cannot hold thee close enough!\nThy winds thy wide grey skies!\nThy mists that roll and rise!\nThy woods this autumn day that ache and sag\nAnd all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag\nTo crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!\nWorld World I cannot get thee close enough!\n\nLong have I known a glory in it all\nBut never knew I this;\nHere such a passion is\nAs stretcheth me apart--Lord I do fear\nThou’st made the world too beautiful this year;\nMy soul is all but out of me--let fall\nNo burning leaf; prithee let no bird call.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "hearing-your-words-and-not-a-word-among-them": { - "title": "“Hearing your words, and not a word among them …”", - "body": "Hearing your words, and not a word among them\nTuned to my liking, on a salty day\nWhen inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them\nHissing to leeward like a ton of spray,\nI thought how off Matinicus the tide\nCame pounding in, came running though the Gut,\nWhile from the Rock the warning whistle cried,\nAnd children whimpered and the doors blew shut;\nThere in the autumn when the men go forth,\nWith slapping skirts the island women stand\nIn gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,\nWith dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:\nThe wind of their endurance, driving south,\nFlattened your words against your speaking mouth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "here-is-a-wound-that-never-will-heal": { - "title": "“Here is a Wound that Never Will Heal”", - "body": "Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,\nBeing wrought not of a dearness and a death,\nBut of a love turned ashes and the breath\nGone out of beauty; never again will grow\nThe grass on that scarred acre, though I sow\nYoung seed there yearly and the sky bequeath\nIts friendly weathers down, far Underneath\nShall be such bitterness of an old woe.\nThat April should be shattered by a gust,\nThat August should be levelled by a rain,\nI can endure, and that the lifted dust\nOf man should settle to the earth again;\nBut that a dream can die, will be a thrust\nBetween my ribs forever of hot pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-dreamed-i-moved-among-the-elysian-fields": { - "title": "“I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields”", - "body": "I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields,\nIn converse with sweet women long since dead;\nAnd out of blossoms which that meadow yields\nI wove a garland for your living head.\nDanai, that was the vessel for a day\nOf golden Jove, I saw, and at her side,\nWhom Jove the Bull desired and bore away,\nEuropa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride.\nAll these were mortal women, yet all these\nAbove the ground had had a god for guest;\nFreely I walked beside them and at ease,\nAddressing them, by them again addressed,\nAnd marvelled nothing, for remembering you,\nWherefore I was among them well I knew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-know-i-am-but-summer-to-your-heart": { - "title": "“I know I am but summer to your heart”", - "body": "I know I am but summer to your heart,\nAnd not the full four seasons of the year;\nAnd you must welcome from another part\nSuch noble moods as are not mine, my dear.\nNo gracious weight of golden fruits to sell\nHave I, nor any wise and wintry thing;\nAnd I have loved you all too long and well\nTo carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.\nWherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,\nI must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,\nThat you may hail anew the bird and rose\nWhen I come back to you, as summer comes.\nElse will you seek, at some not distant time,\nEven your summer in another clime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-know-the-face-of-falsehood-and-her-tongue": { - "title": "“I know the face of Falsehood and her Tongue …”", - "body": "I know the face of Falsehood and her Tongue\nHoneyed with unction, Plausible with guile,\nAre dear to men, whom count me not among,\nThat owe their daily credit to her smile;\nSuch have been succoured out of great distress\nBy her contriving, if accounts be true:\nTheir deference now above the board, I guess,\nDishcharges what beneath the board is due.\nAs for myself, I’d liefer lack her aid\nThan eat her presence; let this building fall:\nBut let me never lift my latch, afraid\nTo hear her simpering accents in the hall,\nNor force an entrance past mephitic airs\nOf stale patchoulie hanging on my stairs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-shall-forget-you-presently-my-dear": { - "title": "“I shall forget you presently, my dear …”", - "body": "I shall forget you presently, my dear,\nSo make the most of this, your little day,\nYour little month, your little half a year,\nEre I forget, or die, or move away,\nAnd we are done forever; by and by\nI shall forget you, as I said, but now,\nIf you entreat me with your loveliest lie\nI will protest you with my favorite vow.\nI would indeed that love were longer-lived,\nAnd vows were not so brittle as they are,\nBut so it is, and nature has contrived\nTo struggle on without a break thus far,\nWhether or not we find what we are seeking\nIs idle, biologically speaking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-think-i-should-have-loved-you-presently": { - "title": "“I think I should have loved you presently …”", - "body": "I think I should have loved you presently,\nAnd given in earnest words I flung in jest;\nAnd lifted honest eyes for you to see,\nAnd caught your hand against my cheek and breast;\nAnd all my pretty follies flung aside\nThat won you to me, and beneath your gaze,\nNaked of reticence and shorn of pride,\nSpread like a chart my little wicked ways.\nI, that had been to you, had you remained,\nBut one more waking from a recurrent dream,\nCherish no less the certain stakes I gained,\nAnd walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,\nA ghost in marble of a girl you knew\nWho would have loved you in a day or two.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "if-still-your-orchards-bear": { - "title": "“If Still Your Orchards Bear”", - "body": "Brother, that breathe the August air\nTen thousand years from now,\nAnd smell--if still your orchards bear\nTart apples on the bough--\n\nThe early windfall under the tree,\nAnd see the red fruit shine,\nI cannot think your thoughts will be\nMuch different from mine.\n\nShould at that moment the full moon\nStep forth upon the hill,\nAnd memories hard to bear at noon,\nBy moonlight harder still,\nForm in the shadow of the trees,--\nThings that you could not spare\nAnd live, or so you thought, yet these\nAll gone, and you still there,\n\nA man no longer what he was,\nNor yet the thing he’d planned,\nThe chilly apple from the grass\nWarmed by your living hand--\n\nI think you will have need of tears;\nI think they will not flow;\nSupposing in ten thousand years\nMen ache, as they do now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "indifference": { - "title": "“Indifference”", - "body": "I said,--for Love was laggard, O, Love was slow to come,--\n“I’ll hear his step and know his step when I am warm in bed;\nBut I’ll never leave my pillow, though there be some\nAs would let him in--and take him in with tears!” I said.\nI lay,--for Love was laggard, O, he came not until dawn,--\nI lay and listened for his step and could not get to sleep;\nAnd he found me at my window with my big cloak on,\nAll sorry with the tears some folks might weep!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "inland": { - "title": "“Inland”", - "body": "People that build their houses inland,\nPeople that buy a plot of ground\nShaped like a house, and build a house there,\nFar from the sea-board, far from the sound\n\nOf water sucking the hollow ledges,\nTons of water striking the shore,--\nWhat do they long for, as I long for\nOne salt smell of the sea once more?\n\nPeople the waves have not awakened,\nSpanking the boats at the harbour’s head,\nWhat do they long for, as I long for,--\nStarting up in my inland bed,\n\nBeating the narrow walls, and finding\nNeither a window nor a door,\nScreaming to God for death by drowning,--\nOne salt taste of the sea once more?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "intention-to-escape-from-him": { - "title": "“Intention to Escape from Him”", - "body": "I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial\nPurposes, work hard at that.\nI think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in\nAmerica but wherever they sing.\n(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:\nIs the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might\ndeflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,\nTurgid and yellow, srong to overflow its banks in spring,\ncarrying away bridges\nA bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear\nnarrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast--\nDig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "interim": { - "title": "“Interim”", - "body": "The room is full of you!--As I came in\nAnd closed the door behind me, all at once\nA something in the air, intangible,\nYet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!--\n\nSharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed\nEach other room’s dear personality.\nThe heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,--\nThe very essence, hush-distilled, of Death--\nHas strangled that habitual breath of home\nWhose expiration leaves all houses dead;\nAnd wheresoe’er I look is hideous change.\nSave here. Here ’twas as if a weed-choked gate\nHad opened at my touch, and I had stepped\nInto some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,\nSweet garden of a thousand years ago\nAnd suddenly thought, “I have been here before!”\n\nYou are not here. I know that you are gone,\nAnd will not ever enter here again.\nAnd yet it seems to me, if I should speak,\nYour silent step must wake across the hall;\nIf I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes\nWould kiss me from the door.--So short a time\nTo teach my life its transposition to\nThis difficult and unaccustomed key!--\nThe room is as you left it; your last touch--\nA thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself\nAs saintly--hallows now each simple thing;\nHallows and glorifies, and glows between\nThe dust’s grey fingers like a shielded light.\n\nThere is your book, just as you laid it down,\nFace to the table,--I cannot believe\nThat you are gone!--Just then it seemed to me\nYou must be here. I almost laughed to think\nHow like reality the dream had been;\nYet knew before I laughed, and so was still.\nThat book, outspread, just as you laid it down!\nPerhaps you thought, “I wonder what comes next,\nAnd whether this or this will be the end”;\nSo rose, and left it, thinking to return.\n\nPerhaps that chair, when you arose and passed\nOut of the room, rocked silently a while\nEre it again was still. When you were gone\nForever from the room, perhaps that chair,\nStirred by your movement, rocked a little while,\nSilently, to and fro …\n\nAnd here are the last words your fingers wrote,\nScrawled in broad characters across a page\nIn this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,\nGuiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.\nHere with a looping knot you crossed a “t,”\nAnd here another like it, just beyond\nThese two eccentric “e’s.” You were so small,\nAnd wrote so brave a hand! How strange it seems\nThat of all words these are the words you chose!\nAnd yet a simple choice; you did not know\nYou would not write again. If you had known--\nBut then, it does not matter,--and indeed\nIf you had known there was so little time\nYou would have dropped your pen and come to me\nAnd this page would be empty, and some phrase\nOther than this would hold my wonder now.\nYet, since you could not know, and it befell\nThat these are the last words your fingers wrote,\nThere is a dignity some might not see\nIn this, “I picked the first sweet-pea to-day.”\nTo-day! Was there an opening bud beside it\nYou left until to-morrow?--O my love,\nThe things that withered,--and you came not back\nThat day you filled this circle of my arms\nThat now is empty. (O my empty life!)\nThat day--that day you picked the first sweet-pea,--\nAnd brought it in to show me! I recall\nWith terrible distinctness how the smell\nOf your cool gardens drifted in with you.\nI know, you held it up for me to see\nAnd flushed because I looked not at the flower,\nBut at your face; and when behind my look\nYou saw such unmistakable intent\nYou laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.\n(You were the fairest thing God ever made,\nI think.) And then your hands above my heart\nDrew down its stem into a fastening,\nAnd while your head was bent I kissed your hair.\nI wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!\nSomehow I cannot seem to see them still.\nSomehow I cannot seem to see the dust\nIn your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven\nWhen earth can be so sweet?--If only God\nHad let us love,--and show the world the way!\nStrange cancellings must ink th’ eternal books\nWhen love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!\nThat first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.\nIt seems to me I laid it down somewhere,\nAnd yet,--I am not sure. I am not sure,\nEven, if it was white or pink; for then\n’Twas much like any other flower to me\nSave that it was the first. I did not know\nThen, that it was the last. If I had known--\nBut then, it does not matter. Strange how few,\nAfter all’s said and done, the things that are\nOf moment. Few indeed! When I can make\nOf ten small words a rope to hang the world!\n“I had you and I have you now no more.”\nThere, there it dangles,--where’s the little truth\nThat can for long keep footing under that\nWhen its slack syllables tighten to a thought?\nHere, let me write it down! I wish to see\nJust how a thing like that will look on paper!\n\n“I had you and I have you now no more.”\n\nO little words, how can you run so straight\nAcross the page, beneath the weight you bear?\nHow can you fall apart, whom such a theme\nHas bound together, and hereafter aid\nIn trivial expression, that have been\nSo hideously dignified?--Would God\nThat tearing you apart would tear the thread\nI strung you on! Would God--O God, my mind\nStretches asunder on this merciless rack\nOf imagery! O, let me sleep a while!\nWould I could sleep, and wake to find me back\nIn that sweet summer afternoon with you.\nSummer? Tis summer still by the calendar!\nHow easily could God, if He so willed,\nSet back the world a little turn or two!\nCorrect its griefs, and bring its joys again!\n\nWe were so wholly one I had not thought\nThat we could die apart. I had not thought\nThat I could move,--and you be stiff and still!\nThat I could speak,--and you perforce be dumb!\nI think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof\nIn some firm fabric, woven in and out;\nYour golden filaments in fair design\nAcross my duller fibre. And to-day\nThe shining strip is rent; the exquisite\nFine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart\nAches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled\nIn the damp earth with you. I have been tom\nIn two, and suffer for the rest of me.\nWhat is my life to me? And what am I\nTo life,--a ship whose star has guttered out?\nA Fear that in the deep night starts awake\nPerpetually, to find its senses strained\nAgainst the taut strings of the quivering air,\nAwaiting the return of some dread chord?\n\nDark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;\nAll else were contrast,--save that contrast’s wall\nIs down, and all opposed things flow together\nInto a vast monotony, where night\nAnd day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,\nAre synonyms. What now--what now to me\nAre all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers\nThat clutter up the world? You were my song!\nNow, let discord scream! You were my flower!\nNow let the world grow weeds! For I shall not\nPlant things above your grave--(the common balm\nOf the conventional woe for its own wound!)\nAmid sensations rendered negative\nBy your elimination stands to-day,\nCertain, unmixed, the element of grief;\nI sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth\nWith travesties of suffering, nor seek\nTo effigy its incorporeal bulk\nIn little wry-faced images of woe.\n\nI cannot call you back; and I desire\nNo utterance of my immaterial voice.\nI cannot even turn my face this way\nOr that, and say, “My face is turned to you”;\nI know not where you are, I do not know\nIf Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,\nBody and soul, you into earth again;\nBut this I know:--not for one second’s space\nShall I insult my sight with visionings\nSuch as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed\nBeholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.\nLet the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!\nMy sorrow shall be dumb!\n\n--What do I say?\nGod! God!--God pity me! Am I gone mad\nThat I should spit upon a rosary?\nAm I become so shrunken? Would to God\nI too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch\nMakes temporal the most enduring grief;\nThough it must walk a while, as is its wont,\nWith wild lamenting! Would I too might weep\nWhere weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths\nFor its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is\nThat keeps the world alive. If all at once\nFaith were to slacken,--that unconscious faith\nWhich must, I know, yet be the corner-stone\nOf all believing,--birds now flying fearless\nAcross would drop in terror to the earth;\nFishes would drown; and the all-governing reins\nWould tangle in the frantic hands of God\nAnd the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!\n\nO God, I see it now, and my sick brain\nStaggers and swoons! How often over me\nFlashes this breathlessness of sudden sight\nIn which I see the universe unrolled\nBefore me like a scroll and read thereon\nChaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl\nDizzily round and round and round and round,\nLike tops across a table, gathering speed\nWith every spin, to waver on the edge\nOne instant--looking over--and the next\nTo shudder and lurch forward out of sight--\n\nAh, I am worn out--I am wearied out--\nIt is too much--I am but flesh and blood,\nAnd I must sleep. Though you were dead again,\nI am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "into-the-golden-vessel-of-great-song": { - "title": "“Into the golden vessel of great song …”", - "body": "Into the golden vessel of great song\nLet us pour all our passion; breast to breast\nLet other lovers lie, in love and rest;\nNot we,--articulate, so, but with the tongue\nOf all the world: the churning blood, the long\nShuddering quiet, the desperate hot palms pressed\nSharply together upon the escaping guest,\nThe common soul, unguarded, and grown strong.\nLonging alone is singer to the lute;\nLet still on nettles in the open sigh\nThe minstrel, that in slumber is as mute\nAs any man, and love be far and high,\nThat else forsakes the topmost branch, a fruit\nFound on the ground by every passer-by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "journey": { - "title": "“Journey”", - "body": "Ah could I lay me down in this long grass\nAnd close my eyes and let the quiet wind\nBlow over me--I am so tired so tired\nOf passing pleasant places! All my life\nFollowing Care along the dusty road\nHave I looked back at loveliness and sighed;\nYet at my hand an unrelenting hand\nTugged ever and I passed. All my life long\nOver my shoulder have I looked at peace\nAnd now I fain would lie in this long grass\nAnd close my eyes.\nYet onward!\nCat-birds call\nThrough the long afternoon and creeks at dusk\nAre guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry\nDrawing the twilight close about their throats.\nOnly my heart makes answer. Eager vines\nGo up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees\nPause in their dance and break the ring for me;\nDim shady wood-roads redolent of fern\nAnd bayberry that through sweet bevies thread\nOf round-faced roses pink and petulant\nLook back and beckon ere they disappear.\nOnly my heart only my heart responds.\nYet ah my path is sweet on either side\nAll through the dragging day--sharp underfoot\nAnd hot and like dead mist the dry dust hangs--\nBut far oh far as passionate eye can reach\nAnd long ah long as rapturous eye can cling\nThe world is mine: blue hill still silver lake\nBroad field bright flower and the long white road\nA gateless garden and an open path:\nMy feet to follow and my heart to hold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "justice-denied-in-massachusetts": { - "title": "“Justice Denied in Massachusetts”", - "body": "Let us abandon then our gardens and go home\nAnd sit in the sitting-room\nShall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?\nSour to the fruitful seed\nIs the cold earth under this cloud,\nFostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;\nWe have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.\n\nLet us go home, and sit in the sitting room.\nNot in our day\nShall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,\nBeneficent upon us\nOut of the glittering bay,\nAnd the warm winds be blown inward from the sea\nMoving the blades of corn\nWith a peaceful sound.\n\nForlorn, forlorn,\nStands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.\nAnd the petals drop to the ground,\nLeaving the tree unfruited.\nThe sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted--\nWe shall not feel it again.\nWe shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.\n\nWhat from the splendid dead\nWe have inherited--\nFurrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued--\nSee now the slug and the mildew plunder.\nEvil does overwhelm\nThe larkspur and the corn;\nWe have seen them go under.\n\nLet us sit here, sit still,\nHere in the sitting-room until we die;\nAt the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;\nLeaving to our children’s children the beautiful doorway,\nAnd this elm,\nAnd a blighted earth to till\nWith a broken hoe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "lament": { - "title": "“Lament”", - "body": "Listen, children:\nYour father is dead.\nFrom his old coats\nI’ll make you little jackets;\nI’ll make you little trousers\nFrom his old pants.\nThere’ll be in his pockets\nThings he used to put there,\nKeys and pennies\nCovered with tobacco;\nDan shall have the pennies\nTo save in his bank;\nAnne shall have the keys\nTo make a pretty noise with.\nLife must go on,\nAnd the dead be forgotten;\nLife must go on,\nThough good men die;\nAnne, eat your breakfast;\nDan, take your medicine;\nLife must go on;\nI forget just why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "the-leaf-and-the-tree": { - "title": "“The Leaf and the Tree”", - "body": "When will you learn, myself, to be\na dying leaf on a living tree?\nBudding, swelling, growing strong,\nWearing green, but not for long,\nDrawing sustenance from air,\nThat other leaves, and you not there,\nMay bud, and at the autumn’s call\nWearing russet, ready to fall?\nHas not this trunk a deed to do\nUnguessed by small and tremulous you?\nShall not these branches in the end\nTo wisdom and the truth ascend?\nAnd the great lightning plunging by\nLook sidewise with a golden eye\nTo glimpse a tree so tall and proud\nIt sheds its leaves upon a cloud?\n\nHere, I think, is the heart’s grief:\nThe tree, no mightier than the leaf,\nMakes firm its root and spreads it crown\nAnd stands; but in the end comes down.\nThat airy top no boy could climb\n\nIs trodden in a little time\nBy cattle on their way to drink.\nThe fluttering thoughts a leaf can think,\nThat hears the wind and waits its turn,\nHave taught it all a tree can learn.\nTime can make soft that iron wood.\nThe tallest trunk that ever stood,\nIn time, without a dream to keep,\nCrawls in beside the root to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "let-you-not-say-of-me-when-i-am-old": { - "title": "“Let you not say of me when I am old …”", - "body": "Let you not say of me when I am old,\nIn pretty worship of my withered hands\nForgetting who I am, and how the sands\nOf such a life as mine run red and gold\nEven to the ultimate sifting dust, “Behold,\nHere walketh passionless age!”--for there expands\nA curious superstition in these lands,\nAnd by its leave some weightless tales are told.\n\nIn me no lenten wicks watch out the night;\nI am the booth where Folly holds her fair;\nImpious no less in ruin than in strength,\nWhen I lie crumbled to the earth at length,\nLet you not say, “Upon this reverend site\nThe righteous groaned and beat their breasts in prayer.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "lines-written-in-recapitulation": { - "title": "“Lines Written in Recapitulation”", - "body": "I could not bring this splendid world nor any trading beast\nIn charge of it, to defer, no, not to give ear, not in the least\nAppearance, to my handsome prophecies, which here I ponder and put by.\n\nI am left simpler, less encumbered, by the consciousness\nthat I shall by no pebble in my dirty sling\navail To slay one purple giant four feet high and distribute arms\namong his tall attendants, who spit at his name\nwhen spitting on the ground:\nThey will be found one day Prone where they fell, or dead sitting\n--and pock-marked wall\nSupporting the beautiful back straight as an oak\nbefore it is old.\n\nI have learned to fail. And I have had my say.\nYet shall I sing until my voice crack\n(this being my leisure, this my holiday)\nThat man was a special thing, and no commodity,\na thing improper to be sold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-little-ghost": { - "title": "“The Little Ghost”", - "body": "I knew her for a little ghost\nThat in my garden walked;\nThe wall is high--higher than most--\nAnd the green gate was locked.\n\nAnd yet I did not think of that\nTill after she was gone--\nI knew her by the broad white hat,\nAll ruffled, she had on.\n\nBy the dear ruffles round her feet,\nBy her small hands that hung\nIn their lace mitts, austere and sweet,\nHer gown’s white folds among.\n\nI watched to see if she would stay,\nWhat she would do--and oh!\nShe looked as if she liked the way\nI let my garden grow!\n\nShe bent above my favourite mint\nWith conscious garden grace,\nShe smiled and smiled--there was no hint\nOf sadness in her face.\n\nShe held her gown on either side\nTo let her slippers show,\nAnd up the walk she went with pride,\nThe way great ladies go.\n\nAnd where the wall is built in new\nAnd is of ivy bare\nShe paused--then opened and passed through\nA gate that once was there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "love-is-not-all": { - "title": "“Love is Not All”", - "body": "Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink\nNor slumber nor a roof against the rain;\nNor yet a floating spar to men that sink\nAnd rise and sink and rise and sink again;\nLove can not fill the thickened lung with breath,\nNor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;\nYet many a man is making friends with death\nEven as I speak, for lack of love alone.\nIt well may be that in a difficult hour,\nPinned down by pain and moaning for release,\nOr nagged by want past resolution’s power,\nI might be driven to sell your love for peace,\nOr trade the memory of this night for food.\nIt well may be. I do not think I would.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "low-tide": { - "title": "“Low-Tide”", - "body": "These wet rocks where the tide has been,\nBarnacled white and weeded brown\nAnd slimed beneath to a beautiful green,\nThese wet rocks where the tide went down\nWill show again when the tide is high\nFaint and perilous, far from shore,\nNo place to dream, but a place to die,--\nThe bottom of the sea once more.\nThere was a child that wandered through\nA giant’s empty house all day,--\nHouse full of wonderful things and new,\nBut no fit place for a child to play.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "menses": { - "title": "“Menses”", - "body": "(He speaks, but to himself, being aware how it is with her)\nThink not I have not heard.\nWell-fanged the double word\nAnd well-directed flew.\n\nI felt it. Down my side\nInnocent as oil I see the ugly venom slide:\nPoison enough to stiffen us both, and all our friends;\nBut I am not pierced, so there the mischief ends.\n\nThere is more to be said: I see it coiling;\nThe impact will be pain.\nYet coil; yet strike again.\nYou cannot riddle the stout mail I wove\nLong since, of wit and love.\n\nAs for my answer … stupid in the sun\nHe lies, his fangs drawn:\nI will not war with you.\n\nYou know how wild you are. You are willing to be turned\nTo other matters; you would be grateful, even.\nYou watch me shyly. I (for I have learned\nMore things than one in our few years together)\nChafe at the churlish wind, the unseasonable weather.\n\n“Unseasonable?” you cry, with harsher scorn\nThan the theme warrants; “Every year it is the same!\n‘Unseasonable!’ they whine, these stupid peasants!--and never since they were born\nHave they known a spring less wintry! Lord, the shame,\nThe crying shame of seeing a man no wiser than the beasts he feeds--\nHis skull as empty as a shell!”\n\n(“Go to. You are unwell.”)\n\nSuch is my thought, but such are not my words.\n“What is the name,” I ask, “of those big birds\nWith yellow breast and low and heavy flight,\nThat make such mournful whistling?”\n\n“Meadowlarks,” you answer primly, not a little cheered.\n“Some people shoot them.” Suddenly your eyes are wet\nAnd your chin trembles. On my breast you lean,\nAnd sob most pitifullly for all the lovely things that are not and have been.\n\n“How silly I am!--and I know how silly I am!”\nYou say; “You are very patient. You are very kind.\nI shall be better soon. Just Heaven consign and damn\nTo tedious Hell this body with its muddy feet in my mind!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mindful-of-you-the-sodden-earth-in-spring": { - "title": "“Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring”", - "body": "Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,\nAnd all the flowers that in the springtime grow,\nAnd dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow\nRising of the round moon, all throats that sing\nThe summer through, and each departing wing,\nAnd all the nests that the bared branches show,\nAnd all winds that in any weather blow,\nAnd all the storms that the four seasons bring.\n\nYou go no more on your exultant feet\nUp paths that only mist and morning knew,\nOr watch the wind, or listen to the beat\nOf a bird’s wings too high in air to view,--\nBut you were something more than young and sweet\nAnd fair,--and the long year remembers you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "mist-in-the-valley": { - "title": "“Mist in the Valley”", - "body": "These hills, to hurt me more,\nThat am hurt already enough,--\nHaving left the sea behind,\nHaving turned suddenly and left the shore\nThat I had loved beyond all words, even a song’s words, to convey,\n\nAnd built me a house on upland acres,\nSweet with the pinxter, bright and rough\nWith the rusty blackbird long before the winter’s done,\nBut smelling never of bayberry hot in the sun,\nNor ever loud with the pounding of the long white breakers,--\n\nThese hills, beneath the October moon,\nSit in the valley white with mist\nLike islands in a quiet bay,\n\nJut out from shore into the mist,\nWooded with poplar dark as pine,\nLike points of land into a quiet bay.\n\n(Just in the way\nThe harbour met the bay)\n\nStricken too sore for tears,\nI stand, remembering the Islands and the sea’s lost sound--\nLife at its best no longer than the sand-peep’s cry,\nAnd I two years, two years,\nTilling an upland ground!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "modern-declaration": { - "title": "“Modern Declaration”", - "body": "I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having wavered\nIn these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these loves;\nNever when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of these loves;\nNever when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink\nJeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers of their alert enemies; declare\n\nThat I shall love you always.\nNo matter what party is in power;\nNo matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied interests wins the war;\nShall love you always.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "never-never-may-the-fruit-be-plucked-from-the-bough": { - "title": "“Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough …”", - "body": "Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough\nAnd gathered into barrels.\nHe that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.\nThough the branches bend like reeds,\nThough the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,\nHe that would eat of love may bear away with him\nOnly what his belly can hold,\nNothing in the apron,\nNothing in the pockets.\nNever, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough\nAnd harvested in barrels.\nThe winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,\nIn an orchard soft with rot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "night-is-my-sister": { - "title": "“Night is My Sister”", - "body": "Night is my sister, and how deep in love,\nHow drowned in love and weedily washed ashore,\nThere to be fretted by the drag and shove\nAt the tide’s edge, I lie--these things and more:\nWhose arm alone between me and the sand,\nWhose voice alone, whose pitiful breath brought near,\nCould thaw these nostrils and unlock this hand,\nShe could advise you, should you care to hear.\nSmall chance, however, in a storm so black,\nA man will leave his friendly fire and snug\nFor a drowned woman’s sake, and bring her back\nTo drip and scatter shells upon the rug.\nNo one but Night, with tears on her dark face,\nWatches beside me in this windy place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-even-my-pride-shall-suffer-much": { - "title": "“Not even my pride shall suffer much …”", - "body": "Not even my pride shall suffer much;\nNot even my pride at all, maybe,\nIf this ill-timed, intemperate clutch\nBe loosed by you and not by me,\nWill suffer; I have been so true\nA vestal to that only pride\nWet wood cannot extinguish, nor\nSand, nor its embers scattered, for,\nSee all these years, it has not died.\n\nAnd if indeed, as I dare think,\nYou cannot push this patient flame,\nBy any breath your lungs could store,\nEven for a moment to the floor\nTo crawl there, even for a moment crawl,\nWhat can you mix for me to drink\nThat shall deflect me? What you do\nIs either malice, crude defense\nOf ego, or indifference:\nI know these things as well as you;\nYou do not dazzle me at all--\n\nSome love, and some simplicity,\nMight well have been the death of me--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-in-this-chamber-only-at-my-birth": { - "title": "“Not in this chamber only at my birth …”", - "body": "Not in this chamber only at my birth--\nWhen the long hours of that mysterious night\nWere over, and the morning was in sight--\nI cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth\nI have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;\nAnd never shall one room contain me quite\nWho in so many rooms first saw the light,\nChild of all mothers, native of the earth.\n\nSo is no warmth for me at any fire\nTo-day, when the world’s fire has burned so low;\nI kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,\nAt that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,\nAnd straighten back in weariness, and long\nTo gather up my little gods and go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "not-with-libations-but-with-shouts-and-laughter": { - "title": "“Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter …”", - "body": "Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter\nWe drenched the altars of Love’s sacred grove,\nShaking to earth green fruits, impatient after\nThe launching of the colored moths of Love.\nLove’s proper myrtle and his mother’s zone\nWe bound about our irreligious brows,\nAnd fettered him with garlands of our own,\nAnd spread a banquet in his frugal house.\nNot yet the god has spoken; but I fear\nThough we should break our bodies in his flame,\nAnd pour our blood upon his altar, here\nHenceforward is a grove without a name,\nA pasture to the shaggy goats of Pan,\nWhence flee forever a woman and a man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "ode-to-silence": { - "title": "“Ode to Silence”", - "body": "Aye, but she?\nYour other sister and my other soul\nGrave Silence, lovelier\nThan the three loveliest maidens, what of her?\nClio, not you,\nNot you, Calliope,\nNor all your wanton line,\nNot Beauty’s perfect self shall comfort me\nFor Silence once departed,\nFor her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,\nWhom evermore I follow wistfully,\nWandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through;\nThalia, not you,\nNot you, Melpomene,\nNot your incomparable feet, O thin Terpsichore, I seek in this great hall,\nBut one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all.\nI seek her from afar,\nI come from temples where her altars are,\nFrom groves that bear her name,\nNoisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame,\nAnd cymbals struck on high and strident faces\nObstreperous in her praise\nThey neither love nor know,\nA goddess of gone days,\nDeparted long ago,\nAbandoning the invaded shrines and fanes\nOf her old sanctuary,\nA deity obscure and legendary,\nOf whom there now remains,\nFor sages to decipher and priests to garble,\nOnly and for a little while her letters wedged in marble,\nWhich even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases,\nAnd the inarticulate snow,\nLeaving at last of her least signs and traces\nNone whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places.\n“She will love well,” I said,\n“If love be of that heart inhabiter,\nThe flowers of the dead;\nThe red anemone that with no sound\nMoves in the wind, and from another wound\nThat sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth,\nThat blossoms underground,\nAnd sallow poppies, will be dear to her.\nAnd will not Silence know\nIn the black shade of what obsidian steep\nStiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep?\n(Seed which Demeter’s daughter bore from home,\nUptorn by desperate fingers long ago,\nReluctant even as she,\nUndone Persephone,\nAnd even as she set out again to grow\nIn twilight, in perdition’s lean and inauspicious loam).\nShe will love well,” I said,\n“The flowers of the dead;\nWhere dark Persephone the winter round,\nUncomforted for home, uncomforted,\nLacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily,\nWith sullen pupils focussed on a dream,\nStares on the stagnant stream\nThat moats the unequivocable battlements of Hell,\nThere, there will she be found,\nShe that is Beauty veiled from men and Music in a swound.”\n\n“I long for Silence as they long for breath\nWhose helpless nostrils drink the bitter sea;\nWhat thing can be\nSo stout, what so redoubtable, in Death\nWhat fury, what considerable rage, if only she,\nUpon whose icy breast,\nUnquestioned, uncaressed,\nOne time I lay,\nAnd whom always I lack,\nEven to this day,\nBeing by no means from that frigid bosom weaned away,\nIf only she therewith be given me back?”\nI sought her down that dolorous labyrinth,\nWherein no shaft of sunlight ever fell,\nAnd in among the bloodless everywhere\nI sought her, but the air,\nBreathed many times and spent,\nWas fretful with a whispering discontent,\nAnd questioning me, importuning me to tell\nSome slightest tidings of the light of day they know no more,\nPlucking my sleeve, the eager shades were with me where I went.\nI paused at every grievous door,\nAnd harked a moment, holding up my hand,--and for a space\nA hush was on them, while they watched my face;\nAnd then they fell a-whispering as before;\nSo that I smiled at them and left them, seeing she was not there.\nI sought her, too,\nAmong the upper gods, although I knew\nShe was not like to be where feasting is,\nNor near to Heaven’s lord,\nBeing a thing abhorred\nAnd shunned of him, although a child of his,\n(Not yours, not yours; to you she owes not breath,\nMother of Song, being sown of Zeus upon a dream of Death).\nFearing to pass unvisited some place\nAnd later learn, too late, how all the while,\nWith her still face,\nShe had been standing there and seen me pass, without a smile,\nI sought her even to the sagging board whereat\nThe stout immortals sat;\nBut such a laughter shook the mighty hall\nNo one could hear me say:\nHad she been seen upon the Hill that day?\nAnd no one knew at all\nHow long I stood, or when at last I sighed and went away.\n\nThere is a garden lying in a lull\nBetween the mountains and the mountainous sea,\nI know not where, but which a dream diurnal\nPaints on my lids a moment till the hull\nBe lifted from the kernel\nAnd Slumber fed to me.\nYour foot-print is not there, Mnemosene,\nThough it would seem a ruined place and after\nYour lichenous heart, being full\nOf broken columns, caryatides\nThrown to the earth and fallen forward on their jointless knees,\nAnd urns funereal altered into dust\nMinuter than the ashes of the dead,\nAnd Psyche’s lamp out of the earth up-thrust,\nDripping itself in marble wax on what was once the bed\nOf Love, and his young body asleep, but now is dust instead.\n\nThere twists the bitter-sweet, the white wisteria Fastens its fingers in the strangling wall,\nAnd the wide crannies quicken with bright weeds;\nThere dumbly like a worm all day the still white orchid feeds;\nBut never an echo of your daughters’ laughter\nIs there, nor any sign of you at all\nSwells fungous from the rotten bough, grey mother of Pieria!\n\nOnly her shadow once upon a stone\nI saw,--and, lo, the shadow and the garden, too, were gone.\n\nI tell you you have done her body an ill,\nYou chatterers, you noisy crew!\nShe is not anywhere!\nI sought her in deep Hell;\nAnd through the world as well;\nI thought of Heaven and I sought her there;\nAbove nor under ground\nIs Silence to be found,\nThat was the very warp and woof of you,\nLovely before your songs began and after they were through!\nOh, say if on this hill\nSomewhere your sister’s body lies in death,\nSo I may follow there, and make a wreath\nOf my locked hands, that on her quiet breast\nShall lie till age has withered them!\n\n(Ah, sweetly from the rest\nI see\nTurn and consider me\nCompassionate Euterpe!)\n“There is a gate beyond the gate of Death,\nBeyond the gate of everlasting Life,\nBeyond the gates of Heaven and Hell,” she saith,\n“Whereon but to believe is horror!\nWhereon to meditate engendereth\nEven in deathless spirits such as I\nA tumult in the breath,\nA chilling of the inexhaustible blood\nEven in my veins that never will be dry,\nAnd in the austere, divine monotony\nThat is my being, the madness of an unaccustomed mood.\n\nThis is her province whom you lack and seek;\nAnd seek her not elsewhere.\nHell is a thoroughfare\nFor pilgrims,--Herakles,\nAnd he that loved Euridice too well,\nHave walked therein; and many more than these;\nAnd witnessed the desire and the despair\nOf souls that passed reluctantly and sicken for the air;\nYou, too, have entered Hell,\nAnd issued thence; but thence whereof I speak\nNone has returned;--for thither fury brings\nOnly the driven ghosts of them that flee before all things.\nOblivion is the name of this abode: and she is there.”\n\nOh, radiant Song! Oh, gracious Memory!\nBe long upon this height\nI shall not climb again!\nI know the way you mean,--the little night,\nAnd the long empty day,--never to see\nAgain the angry light,\nOr hear the hungry noises cry my brain!\nAh, but she,\nYour other sister and my other soul,\nShe shall again be mine;\nAnd I shall drink her from a silver bowl,\nA chilly thin green wine,\nNot bitter to the taste,\nNot sweet,\nNot of your press, oh, restless, clamorous nine,--\nTo foam beneath the frantic hoofs of mirth--\nBut savoring faintly of the acid earth,\nAnd trod by pensive feet\nFrom perfect clusters ripened without haste\nOut of the urgent heat\nIn some clear glimmering vaulted twilight under the odorous vine\n\nLift up your lyres! Sing on!\nBut as for me, I seek your sister whither she is gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "oh-my-beloved-have-you-thought-of-this": { - "title": "“Oh, my beloved, have you thought of this”", - "body": "Oh, my beloved, have you thought of this:\nHow in the years to come unscrupulous Time,\nMore cruel than Death, will tear you from my kiss,\nAnd make you old, and leave me in my prime?\nHow you and I, who scale together yet\nA little while the sweet, immortal height\nNo pilgrim may remember or forget,\nAs sure as the world turns, some granite night\nShall lie awake and know the gracious flame\nGone out forever on the mutual stone;\nAnd call to mind that on the day you came\nI was a child, and you a hero grown?--\nAnd the night pass, and the strange morning break\nUpon our anguish for each other’s sake!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "once-more-into-my-arid-days-like-dew": { - "title": "“Once more into my arid days like dew …”", - "body": "Once more into my arid days like dew,\nLike wind from an oasis, or the sound\nOf cold sweet water bubbling underground,\nA treacherous messenger, the thought of you\nComes to destroy me; once more I renew\nFirm faith in your abundance, whom I found\nLong since to be but just one other mound\nOf sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.\nAnd once again, and wiser in no wise,\nI chase your colored phantom on the air,\nAnd sob and curse and fall and weep and rise\nAnd stumble pitifully on to where,\nMiserable and lost, with stinging eyes,\nOnce more I clasp,--and there is nothing there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "only-until-this-cigarette-is-ended": { - "title": "“Only until This Cigarette is Ended”", - "body": "Only until this cigarette is ended,\nA little moment at the end of all,\nWhile on the floor the quiet ashes fall,\nAnd in the firelight to a lance extended,\nBizarrely with the jazzing music blended,\nThe broken shadow dances on the wall,\nI will permit my memory to recall\nThe vision of you, by all my dreams attended.\nAnd then adieu,--farewell!--the dream is done.\nYours is a face of which I can forget\nThe color and the features, every one,\nThe words not ever, and the smiles not yet;\nBut in your day this moment is the sun\nUpon a hill, after the sun has set.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pastoral": { - "title": "“Pastoral”", - "body": "If it were only still!--\nWith far away the shrill\nCrying of a cock;\nOr the shaken bell\nFrom a cow’s throat\nMoving through the bushes;\nOr the soft shock\nOf wizened apples falling\nFrom an old tree\nIn a forgotten orchard\nUpon the hilly rock!\n\nOh grey hill\nWhere the grazing herd\nLicks the purple blossom\nCrops the spiky weed!\nOh stony pasture\nWhere the tall mullein\nStands up so sturdy\nOn its little seed!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-philosopher": { - "title": "“The Philosopher”", - "body": "And what are you that, wanting you,\nI should be kept awake\nAs many nights as there are days\nWith weeping for your sake?\n\nAnd what are you that, missing you,\nAs many days as crawl\nI should be listening to the wind\nAnd looking at the wall?\n\nI know a man that’s a braver man\nAnd twenty men as kind,\nAnd what are you, that you should be\nThe one man in my mind?\n\nYet women’s ways are witless ways,\nAs any sage will tell,--\nAnd what am I, that I should love\nSo wisely and so well?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "pity-me-not": { - "title": "“Pity Me Not”", - "body": "Pity me not because the light of day\nAt close of day no longer walks the sky;\nPity me not for beauties passed away\nFrom field and thicket as the the year goes by;\nPity me not the waning of the moon,\nNor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,\nNor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,\nAnd you no longer look with love on me.\nThis have I known always: Love is no more\nThan the wide blossom which the wind assails,\nThan the great tide that treads the shifting shore,\nStrewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales:\nPity me that the heart is slow to learn\nWhat the swift mind beholds at ever turn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "recuerdo": { - "title": "“Recuerdo”", - "body": "We were very tired, we were very merry\nWe had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.\nIt was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable\nBut we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,\nWe lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;\nAnd the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.\n\nWe were very tired, we were very merry\nWe had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;\nAnd you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,\nFrom a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;\nAnd the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,\nAnd the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.\n\nWe were very tired, we were very merry,\nWe had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.\nWe hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,\nAnd bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;\nAnd she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,\nAnd we gave her all our money but our subway fares.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "renascence": { - "title": "“Renascence”", - "body": "All I could see from where I stood\nWas three long mountains and a wood;\nI turned and looked another way\nAnd saw three islands in a bay.\nSo with my eyes I traced the line\nOf the horizon thin and fine\nStraight around till I was come\nBack to where I’d started from\nAnd all I saw from where I stood\nWas three long mountains and a wood.\nOver these things I could not see:\nThese were the things that bounded me;\nAnd I could touch them with my hand\nAlmost I thought from where I stand.\nAnd all at once things seemed so small\nMy breath came short and scarce at all.\nBut sure the sky is big I said;\nMiles and miles above my head;\nSo here upon my back I’ll lie\nAnd look my fill into the sky.\nAnd so I looked and after all\nThe sky was not so very tall.\nThe sky I said must somewhere stop\nAnd--sure enough!--I see the top!\nThe sky I thought is not so grand;\nI ’most could touch it with my hand!\nAnd reaching up my hand to try\nI screamed to feel it touch the sky.\n\nI screamed and--lo!--Infinity\nCame down and settled over me;\nForced back my scream into my chest\nBent back my arm upon my breast\nAnd pressing of the Undefined\nThe definition on my mind\nHeld up before my eyes a glass\nThrough which my shrinking sight did pass\nUntil it seemed I must behold\nImmensity made manifold;\nWhispered to me a word whose sound\nDeafened the air for worlds around\nAnd brought unmuffled to my ears\nThe gossiping of friendly spheres\nThe creaking of the tented sky\nThe ticking of Eternity.\nI saw and heard and knew at last\nThe How and Why of all things past\nAnd present and for evermore.\nThe Universe cleft to the core\nLay open to my probing sense\nThat sick’ning I would fain pluck thence\nBut could not--nay! But needs must suck\nAt the great wound and could not pluck\nMy lips away till I had drawn\nAll venom out.--Ah fearful pawn!\nFor my omniscience paid I toll\nIn infinite remorse of soul.\nAll sin was of my sinning all\nAtoning mine and mine the gall\nOf all regret. Mine was the weight\nOf every brooded wrong the hate\nThat stood behind each envious thrust\nMine every greed mine every lust.\nAnd all the while for every grief\nEach suffering I craved relief\nWith individual desire--\nCraved all in vain! And felt fierce fire\nAbout a thousand people crawl;\nPerished with each--then mourned for all!\nA man was starving in Capri;\nHe moved his eyes and looked at me;\nI felt his gaze I heard his moan\nAnd knew his hunger as my own.\nI saw at sea a great fog bank\nBetween two ships that struck and sank;\nA thousand screams the heavens smote;\nAnd every scream tore through my throat.\nNo hurt I did not feel no death\nThat was not mine; mine each last breath\nThat crying met an answering cry\nFrom the compassion that was I.\nAll suffering mine and mine its rod;\nMine pity like the pity of God.\nAh awful weight! Infinity\nPressed down upon the finite Me!\nMy anguished spirit like a bird\nBeating against my lips I heard;\nYet lay the weight so close about\nThere was no room for it without.\nAnd so beneath the weight lay I\nAnd suffered death but could not die.\n\nLong had I lain thus craving death\nWhen quietly the earth beneath\nGave way and inch by inch so great\nAt last had grown the crushing weight\nInto the earth I sank till I\nFull six feet under ground did lie\nAnd sank no more--there is no weight\nCan follow here however great.\nFrom off my breast I felt it roll\nAnd as it went my tortured soul\nBurst forth and fled in such a gust\nThat all about me swirled the dust.\nDeep in the earth I rested now;\nCool is its hand upon the brow\nAnd soft its breast beneath the head\nOf one who is so gladly dead.\nAnd all at once and over all\nThe pitying rain began to fall;\nI lay and heard each pattering hoof\nUpon my lowly thatchèd roof\nAnd seemed to love the sound far more\nThan ever I had done before.\nFor rain it hath a friendly sound\nTo one who’s six feet under ground;\nAnd scarce the friendly voice or face:\nA grave is such a quiet place.\n\nThe rain I said is kind to come\nAnd speak to me in my new home.\nI would I were alive again\nTo kiss the fingers of the rain\nTo drink into my eyes the shine\nOf every slanting silver line\nTo catch the freshened fragrant breeze\nFrom drenched and dripping apple-trees.\nFor soon the shower will be done\nAnd then the broad face of the sun\nWill laugh above the rain-soaked earth\nUntil the world with answering mirth\nShakes joyously and each round drop\nRolls twinkling from its grass-blade top.\nHow can I bear it buried here\nWhile overhead the sky grows clear\nAnd blue again after the storm?\nO multi-coloured multiform\nBeloved beauty over me\nThat I shall never never see\nAgain! Spring-silver autumn-gold\nThat I shall never more behold!\nSleeping your myriad magics through\nClose-sepulchred away from you!\nO God I cried give me new birth\nAnd put me back upon the earth!\nUpset each cloud’s gigantic gourd\nAnd let the heavy rain down-poured\nIn one big torrent set me free\nWashing my grave away from me!\n\nI ceased; and through the breathless hush\nThat answered me the far-off rush\nOf herald wings came whispering\nLike music down the vibrant string\nOf my ascending prayer and--crash!\nBefore the wild wind’s whistling lash\nThe startled storm-clouds reared on high\nAnd plunged in terror down the sky\nAnd the big rain in one black wave\nFell from the sky and struck my grave.\nI know not how such things can be;\nI only know there came to me\nA fragrance such as never clings\nTo aught save happy living things;\nA sound as of some joyous elf\nSinging sweet songs to please himself\nAnd through and over everything\nA sense of glad awakening.\nThe grass a-tiptoe at my ear\nWhispering to me I could hear;\nI felt the rain’s cool finger-tips\nBrushed tenderly across my lips\nLaid gently on my sealèd sight\nAnd all at once the heavy night\nFell from my eyes and I could see--\nA drenched and dripping apple-tree\nA last long line of silver rain\nA sky grown clear and blue again.\nAnd as I looked a quickening gust\nOf wind blew up to me and thrust\nInto my face a miracle\nOf orchard-breath and with the smell--\nI know not how such things can be!--\nI breathed my soul back into me.\n\nAh! Up then from the ground sprang I\nAnd hailed the earth with such a cry\nAs is not heard save from a man\nWho has been dead and lives again.\nAbout the trees my arms I wound;\nLike one gone mad I hugged the ground;\nI raised my quivering arms on high;\nI laughed and laughed into the sky\nTill at my throat a strangling sob\nCaught fiercely and a great heart-throb\nSent instant tears into my eyes;\nO God I cried no dark disguise\nCan e’er hereafter hide from me\nThy radiant identity!\nThou canst not move across the grass\nBut my quick eyes will see Thee pass\nNor speak however silently\nBut my hushed voice will answer Thee.\nI know the path that tells Thy way\nThrough the cool eve of every day;\nGod I can push the grass apart\nAnd lay my finger on Thy heart!\n\nThe world stands out on either side\nNo wider than the heart is wide;\nAbove the world is stretched the sky--\nNo higher than the soul is high.\nThe heart can push the sea and land\nFarther away on either hand;\nThe soul can split the sky in two\nAnd let the face of God shine through.\nBut East and West will pinch the heart\nThat cannot keep them pushed apart;\nAnd he whose soul is flat--the sky\nWill cave in on him by and by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "song-of-a-second-april": { - "title": "“Song of a Second April”", - "body": "April this year not otherwise\nThan April of a year ago\nIs full of whispers full of sighs\nOf dazzling mud and dingy snow;\nHepaticas that pleased you so\nAre here again and butterflies.\n\nThere rings a hammering all day\nAnd shingles lie about the doors;\nIn orchards near and far away\nThe grey woodpecker taps and bores;\nAnd men are merry at their chores\nAnd children earnest at their play.\n\nThe larger streams run still and deep\nNoisy and swift the small brooks run\nAmong the mullein stalks the sheep\nGo up the hillside in the sun\nPensively--only you are gone\nYou that alone I cared to keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "sorrow": { - "title": "“Sorrow”", - "body": "Sorrow like a ceaseless rain\nBeats upon my heart.\nPeople twist and scream in pain,--\nDawn will find them still again;\nThis has neither wax nor wane,\nNeither stop nor start.\n\nPeople dress and go to town;\nI sit in my chair.\nAll my thoughts are slow and brown:\nStanding up or sitting down\nLittle matters, or what gown\nOr what shoes I wear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "souvenir": { - "title": "“Souvenir”", - "body": "Just a rainy day or two\nIn a windy tower,\nThat was all I had of you--\nSaving half an hour.\n\nMarred by greeting passing groups\nIn a cinder walk,\nNear some naked blackberry hoops\nDim with purple chalk.\nI remember three or four\nThings you said in spite,\nAnd an ugly coat you wore,\nPlaided black and white.\n\nJust a rainy day or two\nAnd a bitter word.\nWhy do I remember you\nAs a singing bird?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-spring-and-the-fall": { - "title": "“The Spring and the Fall”", - "body": "In the spring of the year, in the spring of the year,\nI walked the road beside my dear.\nThe trees were black where the bark was wet.\nI see them yet, in the spring of the year.\nHe broke me a bough of the blossoming peach\nThat was out of the way and hard to reach.\n\nIn the fall of the year, in the fall of the year,\nI walked the road beside my dear.\nThe rooks went up with a raucous trill.\nI hear them still, in the fall of the year.\nHe laughed at all I dared to praise,\nAnd broke my heart, in little ways.\n\nYear be springing or year be falling,\nThe bark will drip and the birds be calling.\nThere’s much that’s fine to see and hear\nIn the spring of a year, in the fall of a year.\n’Tis not love’s going hurt my days.\nBut that it went in little ways.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "To what purpose April do you return again?\nBeauty is not enough.\nYou can no longer quiet me with the redness\nOf little leaves opening stickily.\nI know what I know.\nThe sun is hot on my neck as I observe\nThe spikes of the crocus.\nThe smell of the earth is good.\nIt is apparent that there is no death.\nBut what does that signify?\nNot only under ground are the brains of men\nEaten by maggots.\nLife in itself\nIs nothing\nAn empty cup a flight of uncarpeted stairs.\nIt is not enough that yearly down this hill\nApril\nComes like an idiot babbling and strewing flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-suicide": { - "title": "“The Suicide”", - "body": "“Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!\nThou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!\nAnd all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,\nI have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly\nThat I might eat again, and met thy sneers\nWith deprecations, and thy blows with tears,--\nAye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,\nAs if spent passion were a holiday!\nAnd now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow\nOf tardy kindness can avail thee now\nWith me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;\nLonely I came, and I depart alone,\nAnd know not where nor unto whom I go;\nBut that thou canst not follow me I know.”\n\nThus I to Life, and ceased; but through my brain\nMy thought ran still, until I spake again:\n\n“Ah, but I go not as I came,--no trace\nIs mine to bear away of that old grace\nI brought! I have been heated in thy fires,\nBent by thy hands, fashioned to thy desires,\nThy mark is on me! I am not the same\nNor ever more shall be, as when I came.\nAshes am I of all that once I seemed.\nIn me all’s sunk that leapt, and all that dreamed\nIs wakeful for alarm,--oh, shame to thee,\nFor the ill change that thou hast wrought in me,\nWho laugh no more nor lift my throat to sing\nAh, Life, I would have been a pleasant thing\nTo have about the house when I was grown\nIf thou hadst left my little joys alone!\nI asked of thee no favor save this one:\nThat thou wouldst leave me playing in the sun!\nAnd this thou didst deny, calling my name\nInsistently, until I rose and came.\nI saw the sun no more.--It were not well\nSo long on these unpleasant thoughts to dwell,\nNeed I arise to-morrow and renew\nAgain my hated tasks, but I am through\nWith all things save my thoughts and this one night,\nSo that in truth I seem already quite\nFree, and remote from thee,--I feel no haste\nAnd no reluctance to depart; I taste\nMerely, with thoughtful mien, an unknown draught,\nThat in a little while I shall have quaffed.”\n\nThus I to Life, and ceased, and slightly smiled,\nLooking at nothing; and my thin dreams filed\nBefore me one by one till once again\nI set new words unto an old refrain:\n\n“Treasures thou hast that never have been mine!\nWarm lights in many a secret chamber shine\nOf thy gaunt house, and gusts of song have blown\nLike blossoms out to me that sat alone!\nAnd I have waited well for thee to show\nIf any share were mine,--and now I go\nNothing I leave, and if I naught attain\nI shall but come into mine own again!”\n\nThus I to Life, and ceased, and spake no more,\nBut turning, straightway, sought a certain door\nIn the rear wall. Heavy it was, and low\nAnd dark,--a way by which none e’er would go\nThat other exit had, and never knock\nWas heard thereat,--bearing a curious lock\nSome chance had shown me fashioned faultily,\nWhereof Life held content the useless key,\nAnd great coarse hinges, thick and rough with rust,\nWhose sudden voice across a silence must,\nI knew, be harsh and horrible to hear,--\nA strange door, ugly like a dwarf.--So near\nI came I felt upon my feet the chill\nOf acid wind creeping across the sill.\nSo stood longtime, till over me at last\nCame weariness, and all things other passed\nTo make it room; the still night drifted deep\nLike snow about me, and I longed for sleep.\n\nBut, suddenly, marking the morning hour,\nBayed the deep-throated bell within the tower!\nStartled, I raised my head,--and with a shout\nLaid hold upon the latch,--and was without.\n\nAh, long-forgotten, well-remembered road,\nLeading me back unto my old abode,\nMy father’s house! There in the night I came,\nAnd found them feasting, and all things the same\nAs they had been before. A splendour hung\nUpon the walls, and such sweet songs were sung\nAs, echoing out of very long ago,\nHad called me from the house of Life, I know.\nSo fair their raiment shone I looked in shame\nOn the unlovely garb in which I came;\nThen straightway at my hesitancy mocked:\n“It is my father’s house!” I said and knocked;\nAnd the door opened. To the shining crowd\nTattered and dark I entered, like a cloud,\nSeeing no face but his; to him I crept,\nAnd “Father!” I cried, and clasped his knees, and wept.\n\nAh, days of joy that followed! All alone\nI wandered through the house. My own, my own,\nMy own to touch, my own to taste and smell,\nAll I had lacked so long and loved so well!\nNone shook me out of sleep, nor hushed my song,\nNor called me in from the sunlight all day long.\n\nI know not when the wonder came to me\nOf what my father’s business might be,\nAnd whither fared and on what errands bent\nThe tall and gracious messengers he sent.\nYet one day with no song from dawn till night\nWondering, I sat, and watched them out of sight.\nAnd the next day I called; and on the third\nAsked them if I might go,--but no one heard.\nThen, sick with longing, I arose at last\nAnd went unto my father,--in that vast\nChamber wherein he for so many years\nHas sat, surrounded by his charts and spheres.\n“Father,” I said, “Father, I cannot play\nThe harp that thou didst give me, and all day\nI sit in idleness, while to and fro\nAbout me thy serene, grave servants go;\nAnd I am weary of my lonely ease.\nBetter a perilous journey overseas\nAway from thee, than this, the life I lead,\nTo sit all day in the sunshine like a weed\nThat grows to naught,--I love thee more than they\nWho serve thee most; yet serve thee in no way.\nFather, I beg of thee a little task\nTo dignify my days,--’tis all I ask\nForever, but forever, this denied,\nI perish.” “Child,” my father’s voice replied,\n“All things thy fancy hath desired of me\nThou hast received. I have prepared for thee\nWithin my house a spacious chamber, where\nAre delicate things to handle and to wear,\nAnd all these things are thine. Dost thou love song?\nMy minstrels shall attend thee all day long.\nOr sigh for flowers? My fairest gardens stand\nOpen as fields to thee on every hand.\nAnd all thy days this word shall hold the same:\nNo pleasure shalt thou lack that thou shalt name.\nBut as for tasks--” he smiled, and shook his head;\n“Thou hadst thy task, and laidst it by,” he said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "sweet-love": { - "title": "“Sweet Love”", - "body": "Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart\nI took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,\nAnd lie disheveled in the grass apart,\nA sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,\nWhile rainy evening drips to misty night,\nAnd misty night to cloudy morning clears,\nAnd clouds disperse across the gathering light,\nAnd birds grow noisy, and the sun appears\nHad I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,\nHow sharp an anguish even at the best,\nWhen all’s requited and the future sworn,\nThe happy Hour can leave within the breast,\nI had not so come running at the call\nOf one whoe loves me little, if at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tavern": { - "title": "“Tavern”", - "body": "I’ll keep a little tavern\nBelow the high hill’s crest\nWherein all grey-eyed people\nMay sit them down and rest.\n\nThere shall be plates a-plenty\nAnd mugs to melt the chill\nOf all the grey-eyed people\nWho happen up the hill.\n\nThere sound will sleep the traveller\nAnd dream his journey’s end\nBut I will rouse at midnight\nThe falling fire to tend.\n\nAye ’tis a curious fancy--\nBut all the good I know\nWas taught me out of two grey eyes\nA long time ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "think-not-not-for-a-moment-let-your-mind": { - "title": "“Think not, not for a moment let your mind …”", - "body": "Think not, not for a moment let your mind,\nWearied with thinking, doze upon the thought\nThat the work’s done and the long day behind,\nAnd beauty, since ’tis paid for, can be bought.\nIf in the moonlight from the silent bough\nSuddenly with precision speak your name\nThe nightingale, be not assured that now\nHis wing is limed and his wild virtue tame.\nBeauty beyond all feathers that have flown\nIs free; you shall not hood her to your wrist,\nNor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own\nIn an fashion; beauty billed and kissed\nIs not your turtle; tread her like a dove\nShe loves you not; she never heard of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-songs-from-the-lamp-and-the-bell": { - "title": "“Three Songs from the Lamp and the Bell”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOh, little rose tree, bloom!\nSummer is nearly over.\nThe dahlias bleed, and the phlox is seed.\nNothing’s left of the clover.\nAnd the path of the poppy no one knows.\nI would blossom if I were a rose.\n\nSummer, for all your guile,\nWill brown in a week to Autumn,\nAnd launched leaves throw a shadow below\nOver the brook’s clear bottom,--\nAnd the chariest bud the year can boast\nBe brought to bloom by the chastening frost.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBeat me a crown of bluer metal;\n Fret it with stones of a foreign style:\nThe heart grows weary after a little\n Of what it loved for a little while.\n\nWeave me a robe of richer fibre;\n Pattern its web with a rare device.\nGive away to the child of a neighbor\n This gold gown I was glad in twice.\n\nBut buy me a singer to sing one song--\n Song about nothing--song about sheep--\nOver and over, all day long;\n\n\n# III.\n\nRain comes down\nAnd hushes the town.\nAnd where is the voice that I heard crying?\n\nSnow settles\nOver the nettles.\nWhere is the voice that I heard crying?\n\nSand at last\nOn the drifting mast.\nAnd where is the voice that I heard crying?\n\nEarth now\nOn the busy brow.\nAnd where is the voice that I heard crying?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "three-songs-of-shattering": { - "title": "“Three Songs of Shattering”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe first rose on my rose-tree\nBudded, bloomed, and shattered,\nDuring sad days when to me\nNothing mattered.\n\nGrief of grief has drained me clean;\nStill it seems a pity\nNo one saw,--it must have been\nVery pretty.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLet the little birds sing;\nLet the little lambs play;\nSpring is here; and so ’tis spring;--\nBut not in the old way!\n\nI recall a place\nWhere a plum-tree grew;\nThere you lifted up your face,\nAnd blossoms covered you.\n\nIf the little birds sing,\nAnd the little lambs play,\nSpring is here; and so ’tis spring--\nBut not in the old way!\n\n\n# III.\n\nAll the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!\nEre spring was going--ah, spring is gone!\nAnd there comes no summer to the like of you and me,--\nBlossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.\n\nAll the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,\nBrowned at the edges, turned in a day;\nAnd I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,\nAnd weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "thursday": { - "title": "“Thursday”", - "body": "And if I loved you Wednesday,\n Well, what is that to you?\nI do not love you Thursday--\n So much is true.\n\nAnd why you come complaining\n Is more than I can see.\nI loved you Wednesday,--yes--but what\n Is that to me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "thursday" - } - } - }, - "time-does-not-bring-relief": { - "title": "“Time does not bring relief …”", - "body": "Time does not bring relief; you all have lied\nWho told me time would ease me of my pain!\nI miss him in the weeping of the rain;\nI want him at the shrinking of the tide;\nThe old snows melt from every mountain-side,\nAnd last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;\nBut last year’s bitter loving must remain\nHeaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide\n\nThere are a hundred places where I fear\nTo go,--so with his memory they brim\nAnd entering with relief some quiet place\nWhere never fell his foot or shone his face\nI say, “There is no memory of him here!”\nAnd so stand stricken, so remembering him!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "travel": { - "title": "“Travel”", - "body": "The railroad track is miles away,\nAnd the day is loud with voices speaking,\nYet there isn’t a train goes by all day\nBut I hear its whistle shrieking.\n\nAll night there isn’t a train goes by,\nThough the night is still for sleep and dreaming,\nBut I see its cinders red on the sky,\nAnd hear its engine steaming.\n\nMy heart is warm with friends I make,\nAnd better friends I’ll not be knowing;\nYet there isn’t a train I’d rather take,\nNo matter where it’s going.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "two-sonnets-in-memory": { - "title": "“Two Sonnets in Memory”", - "body": "As men have loved their lovers in times past\nAnd sung their wit, their virtue and their grace,\nSo have we loved sweet Justice to the last,\nThat now lies here in an unseemly place.\nThe child will quit the cradle and grow wise\nAnd stare on beauty till his senses drown;\nYet shall be seen no more by mortal eyes\nSuch beauty as here walked and here went down.\nLike birds that hear the winter crying plain\nHer courtiers leave to seek the clement south;\nMany have praised her, we alone remain\nTo break a fist against the lying mouth\nOf any man who says this was not so:\nThough she be dead now, as indeed we know.\n\nWhere can the heart be hidden in the ground\nAnd be at peace, and be at peace forever,\nUnder the world, untroubled by the sound\nOf mortal tears, that cease from pouring never?\nWell for the heart, by stern compassion harried,\nIf death be deeper than the churchmen say,--\nGone from this world indeed what’s graveward carried,\nAnd laid to rest indeed what’s laid away.\nAnguish enough while yet the indignant breather\nHave blood to spurt upon the oppressor’s hand;\nWho would eternal be, and hang in ether\nA stuffless ghost above his struggling land,\nRetching in vain to render up the groan\nThat is not there, being aching dust’s alone?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "underground-system": { - "title": "“Underground System”", - "body": "Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of the world--it is thin.\nMoles are at work beneath us; they have tunneled the sub-soil\nWith separate chambers; which at an appointed knock\nCould be as one, could intersect and interlock. We walk on the skin\nOf life. No toil\nOf rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation of crops, no irrigation of the land,\nWill coax the limp and flattened grain to stand\nOn that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled root’s of our nation.\nEase has demoralized us, nearly so, we know\nNothing of the rigours of winter: The house has a roof against--the car a top against--the snow.\nAll will be well, we say, it is a bit, like the rising of the sun,\nFor our country to prosper; who can prevail against us?\nNo one.\nThe house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are rotting, and hall upon hall\nThe moles have built their palace beneath us, we have not far to fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-visit-to-the-asylum": { - "title": "“A Visit to the Asylum”", - "body": "Once from a big, big building,\nWhen I was small, small,\nThe queer folk in the windows\nWould smile at me and call.\n\nAnd in the hard wee gardens\nSuch pleasant men would hoe:\n“Sir, may we touch the little girl’s hair!”--\nIt was so red, you know.\n\nThey cut me coloured asters\nWith shears so sharp and neat,\nThey brought me grapes and plums and pears\nAnd pretty cakes to eat.\n\nAnd out of all the windows,\nNo matter where we went,\nThe merriest eyes would follow me\nAnd make me compliment.\n\nThere were a thousand windows,\nAll latticed up and down.\nAnd up to all the windows,\nWhen we went back to town,\n\nThe queer folk put their faces,\nAs gentle as could be;\n“Come again, little girl!” they called, and I\nCalled back, “You come see me!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "weeds": { - "title": "“Weeds”", - "body": "White with daisies and red with sorrel\nAnd empty, empty under the sky!--\nLife is a quest and love a quarrel--\nHere is a place for me to lie.\n\nDaisies spring from damned seeds,\nAnd this red fire that here I see\nIs a worthless crop of crimson weeds,\nCursed by farmers thriftily.\n\nBut here, unhated for an hour,\nThe sorrel runs in ragged flame,\nThe daisy stands, a bastard flower,\nLike flowers that bear an honest name.\n\nAnd here a while, where no wind brings\nThe baying of a pack athirst,\nMay sleep the sleep of blessed things,\nThe blood too bright, the brow accurst.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "well-i-have-lost-you": { - "title": "“Well, I Have Lost You”", - "body": "Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;\nIn my own way, and with my full consent.\nSay what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely\nWent to their deaths more proud than this one went.\nSome nights of apprehension and hot weeping\nI will confess; but that’s permitted me;\nDay dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping\nRubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.\nIf I had loved you less or played you slyly\nI might have held you for a summer more,\nBut at the cost of words I value highly,\nAnd no such summer as the one before.\nShould I outlive this anguish--and men do--\nI shall have only good to say of you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed": { - "title": "“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”", - "body": "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,\nI have forgotten, and what arms have lain\nUnder my head till morning; but the rain\nIs full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh\nUpon the glass and listen for reply,\nAnd in my heart there stirs a quiet pain\nFor unremembered lads that not again\nWill turn to me at midnight with a cry.\nThus in winter stands the lonely tree,\nNor knows what birds have vanished one by one,\nYet knows its boughs more silent than before:\nI cannot say what loves have come and gone,\nI only know that summer sang in me\nA little while, that in me sings no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "when-i-too-long-have-looked-upon-your-face": { - "title": "“When I too long have looked upon your face …”", - "body": "When I too long have looked upon your face,\nWherein for me a brightness unobscured\nSave by the mists of brightness has its place,\nAnd terrible beauty not to be endured,\nI turn away reluctant from your light,\nAnd stand irresolute, a mind undone,\nA silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight\nFrom having looked too long upon the sun.\nThen is my daily life a narrow room\nIn which a little while, uncertainly,\nSurrounded by impenetrable gloom,\nAmong familiar things grown strange to me\nMaking my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,\nTill I become accustomed to the dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "when-the-year-grows-old": { - "title": "“When the Year Grows Old”", - "body": "I cannot but remember\nWhen the year grows old--\nOctober--November--\nHow she disliked the cold!\n\nShe used to watch the swallows\nGo down across the sky,\nAnd turn from the window\nWith a little sharp sigh.\n\nAnd often when the brown leaves\nWere brittle on the ground,\nAnd the wind in the chimney\nMade a melancholy sound,\n\nShe had a look about her\nThat I wish I could forget--\nThe look of a scared thing\nSitting in a net!\n\nOh, beautiful at nightfall\nThe soft spitting snow!\nAnd beautiful the bare boughs\nRubbing to and fro!\n\nBut the roaring of the fire,\nAnd the warmth of fur,\nAnd the boiling of the kettle\nWere beautiful to her!\n\nI cannot but remember\nWhen the year grows old--\nOctober--November--\nHow she disliked the cold!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "witch-wife": { - "title": "“Witch-Wife”", - "body": "She is neither pink nor pale,\n And she never will be all mine;\nShe learned her hands in a fairy-tale,\n And her mouth on a valentine.\n\nShe has more hair than she needs;\n In the sun ’tis a woe to me!\nAnd her voice is a string of colored beads,\n Or steps leading into the sea.\n\nShe loves me all that she can,\n And her ways to my ways resign;\nBut she was not made for any man,\n And she never will be all mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "women-have-loved-before-as-i-love-now": { - "title": "“Women Have Loved before as I Love Now”", - "body": "Women have loved before as I love now;\nAt least, in lively chronicles of the past--\nOf Irish waters by a Cornish prow\nOr Trojan waters by a Spartan mast\nMuch to their cost invaded--here and there,\nHunting the amorous line, skimming the rest,\nI find some woman bearing as I bear\nLove like a burning city in the breast.\nI think however that of all alive\nI only in such utter, ancient way\nDo suffer love; in me alone survive\nThe unregenerate passions of a day\nWhen treacherous queens, with death upon the tread,\nHeedless and willful, took their knights to bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wood-road": { - "title": "“The Wood Road”", - "body": "If I were to walk this way\nHand in hand with Grief,\nI should mark that maple-spray\nComing into leaf.\nI should note how the old burrs\nRot upon the ground.\nYes, though Grief should know me hers\nWhile the world goes round,\nIt could not if truth be said\nThis was lost on me:\nA rock-maple showing red,\nBurrs beneath a tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "wraith": { - "title": "“Wraith”", - "body": "“Thin Rain, whom are you haunting,\nThat you haunt my door?”\n--Surely it is not I she’s wanting;\nSomeone living here before--\n“Nobody’s in the house but me:\nYou may come in if you like and see.”\n\nThin as thread, with exquisite fingers,--\nHave you seen her, any of you?--\nGrey shawl, and leaning on the wind,\nAnd the garden showing through?\n\nGlimmering eyes,--and silent, mostly,\nSort of a whisper, sort of a purr,\nAsking something, asking it over,\nIf you get a sound from her.--\n\nEver see her, any of you?--\nStrangest thing I’ve ever known,--\nEvery night since I moved in,\nAnd I came to be alone.\n\n“Thin Rain, hush with your knocking!\nYou may not come in!\nThis is I that you hear rocking;\nNobody’s with me, nor has been!”\n\nCurious, how she tried the window,--\nOdd, the way she tries the door,--\nWonder just what sort of people\nCould have had this house before …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - } - } - }, - "spike-milligan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Spike Milligan", - "birth": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2002 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Milligan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-lion": { - "title": "“The Lion”", - "body": "If you’re attacked by a Lion\nFind fresh underpants to try on\nLay on the ground quite still\nPretend you are very ill\nKeep like that day after day\nPerhaps the lion will go away", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-his-blindness": { - "title": "“On His Blindness”", - "body": "A young spring-tender girl\ncombed her joyous hair\n“You are very ugly” said the mirror.\nBut,\non her lips hung\na smile of dove-secret loveliness,\nfor only that morning had not\nthe blind boy said,\n“You are beautiful”?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "a-a-milne": { - "metadata": { - "name": "A. A. Milne", - "birth": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Milne", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "spring-morning": { - "title": "“Spring Morning”", - "body": "Where am I going? I don’t quite know.\nDown to the stream where the king-cups grow--\nUp on the hill where the pine-trees blow--\nAnywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.\n\nWhere am I going? The clouds sail by,\nLittle ones, baby ones, over the sky.\nWhere am I going? The shadows pass,\nLittle ones, baby ones, over the grass.\n\nIf you were a cloud, and sailed up there,\nYou’d sail on water as blue as air,\nAnd you’d see me here in the fields and say:\n“Doesn’t the sky look green today?”\n\nWhere am I going? The high rooks call:\n“It’s awful fun to be born at all.”\nWhere am I going? The ring-doves coo:\n“We do have beautiful things to do.”\n\nIf you were a bird, and lived on high,\nYou’d lean on the wind when the wind came by,\nYou’d say to the wind when it took you away:\n“That’s where I wanted to go today!”\n\nWhere am I going? I don’t quite know.\nWhat does it matter where people go?\nDown to the wood where the blue-bells grow--\nAnywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-three-foxes": { - "title": "“The Three Foxes”", - "body": "Once upon a time there were three little foxes\nWho didn’t wear stockings, and they didn’t wear sockses,\nBut they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses,\nAnd they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.\n\nAnd they lived in forest in three little houses,\nAnd they didn’t wear coats, and they didn’t wear trousies.\nThey ran through the woods on their little bare tootsies,\nAnd they played “Touch Last” with a family of mouses.\n\nThey didn’t go shopping in the High Street shopses,\nBut caught what they wanted in the woods and copses.\nThey all went fishing, and they caught three wormses,\nThey went out hunting, and they caught three wopses.\n\nThey wen to a Fair, and they all won prizes--\nTree plum-puddingses and three mince-pieses.\nThey rode on elephants and swang on swingses,\nAnd hit three coco-nuts at coco-nut shieses.\n\nThat’s all I know of three little foxes\nWho kept their handkerchiefs in three little boxes.\nThey lived in the forest in three little houses,\nBut they didn’t wear coats and they didn’t wear trousies,\nAnd they didn’t wear stockings and they didn’t wear sockses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "czeslaw-milosz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Czesław Miłosz", - "birth": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2004 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇵🇱 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czesław_Miłosz", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 70 - }, - "poems": { - "account": { - "title": "“Account”", - "body": "The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.\n\nSome would be devoted to acting against consciousness,\nLike the flight of a moth which, had it known,\nWould have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.\n\nOthers would deal with ways to silence anxiety,\nThe little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.\n\nI would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,\nThe time when I was among their adherents\nWho strut victoriously, unsuspecting.\n\nBut all of them would have one subject, desire,\nIf only my own--but no, not at all; alas,\nI was driven because I wanted to be like others.\nI was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.\n\nThe history of my stupidity will not be written.\nFor one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass & Robert Pinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1980 - }, - "location": "Berkeley" - } - }, - "and-the-city-stood-in-its-brightness": { - "title": "“And the city stood in its brightness …”", - "body": "And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,\nAnd life was running out, Ruteboeuf’s or Villon’s,\nDescendants already born were dancing their dances,\nWomen looked in their mirrors, made from a new metal,\nWhat was it all for, if I cannot speak?\nShe stood above me, head like the earth on its axis,\nMy ashes were laid in a can under the bistro counter,\n\nAnd the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,\nTo my home in the display case of a granite museum\nBeside eyelash mascara, alabaster vials, and menstruation girdles of an Egyptian princess,\nThere was only a sun forged out of gold plate,\nOn darkening parquetry the creep of unhurried steps,\n\nAnd the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,\nMy face covered with a coat though now no one was left\nOf those who could have remembered my debts never paid,\nMy shames not forever, base deeds to be forgiven.\nAnd the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1974 - } - } - }, - "and-yet-the-books": { - "title": "“And yet the books …”", - "body": "And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,\nThat appeared once, still wet\nAs shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,\nAnd, touched, coddled, began to live\nIn spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,\nTribes on the march, planets in motion.\n“We are,” they said, even as their pages\nWere being torn out, or a buzzing flame\nLicked away their letters. So much more durable\nThan we are, whose frail warmth\nCools down with memory, disperses, perishes.\nI imagine the earth when I am no more:\nNothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,\nWomen’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.\nYet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,\nDerived from people, but also from radiance, heights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "annalena": { - "title": "“Annalena”", - "body": "It happened that sometimes I kissed in mirrors the reflection of my face, since the hands, face and tears of Annalena had caressed it, it seemed to me divinely beautiful as if suffused with heavenly sweetness. I liked her velvet wetness, long voyages in the delta her legs. A striving upstream toward her beating heart through more and more savage currents saturated with the light of hops and bindweed. And our vehemence and triumphant laughter and our hasty dressing in the middle of the night to walk on the stone stairs of the upper city. Our breath held in amazement and silence, porosity of worn-out stones and the great door of the cathedral. Over the gate of the rectory fragments of brick among weeds, in darkness the touch of a rough buttressed wall. And later our looking from the bridge down to the orchard, when under the moon every tree is separate on its kneeler, and from the secret interior of dimmed poplars the echo carries the sound of a water turbine. To whom do we tell what happened on this earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up and will stay so? Always in doubt whether it was we who were there, she and I, or just anonymous lovers on the enameled tablets of a fairy-land …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ars-poetica": { - "title": "“Ars Poetica?”", - "body": "I have always aspired to a more spacious form\nthat would be free from the claims of poetry or prose\nand would let us understand each other without exposing\nthe author or reader to sublime agonies.\n\nIn the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:\na thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,\nso we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out\nand stood in the light, lashing his tail.\n\nThat’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,\nthough it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.\nIt’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,\nwhen so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.\n\nWhat reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,\nwho behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,\nand who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,\nwork at changing his destiny for their convenience?\n\nIt’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today,\nand so you may think that I am only joking\nor that I’ve devised just one more means\nof praising Art with the help of irony.\n\nThere was a time when only wise books were read,\nhelping us to bear our pain and misery.\nThis, after all, is not quite the same\nas leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.\n\nAnd yet the world is different from what it seems to be\nand we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.\nPeople therefore preserve silent integrity,\nthus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.\n\nThe purpose of poetry is to remind us\nhow difficult it is to remain just one person,\nfor our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,\nand invisible guests come in and out at will.\n\nWhat I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry,\nas poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,\nunder unbearable duress and only with the hope\nthat good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1974 - } - } - }, - "artificer": { - "title": "“Artificer”", - "body": "Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,\nmachines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk\ncanvases, and he stops under the sky\n\nand raises toward it his joined clenched fists.\n\nBelievers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that shines,\n\nbut those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.\n\nHe cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into motley halves;\npensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:\nthrobs of pianos, children’s cries, the thud of a head banging against the floor.\nThis is the only landscape able to make him feel.\n\nHe wonders at his brother’s skill shaped like an egg,\nevery day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,\nthen one day he plants a big load of dynamite\nand is surprised that afterward everything sprouts up in the explosion.\nAgape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:\nglobes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.\nThey turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.\nWhile below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose, flutters,\nand a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2002 - } - } - }, - "at-a-certain-age": { - "title": "“At a Certain Age”", - "body": "We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.\nWhite clouds refused to accept them, and the wind\nWas too busy visiting sea after sea.\nWe did not succeed in interesting the animals.\nDogs, disappointed, expected an order,\nA cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.\nA person seemingly very close\nDid not care to hear of things long past.\nConversations with friends over vodka or coffee\nOught not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.\nIt would be humiliating to pay by the hour\nA man with a diploma, just for listening.\nChurches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?\nThat we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble\nYet later in our place an ugly toad\nHalf-opens its thick eyelid\nAnd one sees clearly: “That’s me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-the-peonies": { - "title": "“By The Peonies”", - "body": "The peonies bloom, white and pink.\nAnd inside each, as in a fragrant bowl,\nA swarm of tiny beetles have their conversation,\nFor the flower is given to them as their home.\n\nMother stands by the peony bed,\nReaches for one bloom, opens its petals,\nAnd looks for a long time into peony lands,\nWhere one short instant equals a whole year.\n\nThen lets the flower go. And what she thinks\nShe repeats aloud to the children and herself.\nThe wind sways the green leaves gently\nAnd speckles of light flick across their faces.\n\nThe charms of the ordinariness soothe the threat of anxiety.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "campo-de-fiori": { - "title": "“Campo de’ Fiori”", - "body": "In Rome on the Campo de’ Fiori\nbaskets of olives and lemons,\ncobbles spattered with wine\nand the wreckage of flowers.\nVendors cover the trestles\nwith rose-pink fish;\narmfuls of dark grapes\nheaped on peach-down.\n\nOn this same square\nthey burned Giordano Bruno.\nHenchmen kindled the pyre\nclose-pressed by the mob.\nBefore the flames had died\nthe taverns were full again,\nbaskets of olives and lemons\nagain on the vendors’ shoulders.\n\nI thought of the Campo dei Fiori\nin Warsaw by the sky-carousel\none clear spring evening\nto the strains of a carnival tune.\nThe bright melody drowned\nthe salvos from the ghetto wall,\nand couples were flying\nhigh in the cloudless sky.\n\nAt times wind from the burning\nwould drift dark kites along\nand riders on the carousel\ncaught petals in midair.\nThat same hot wind\nblew open the skirts of the girls\nand the crowds were laughing\non that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.\n\nSomeone will read as moral\nthat the people of Rome or Warsaw\nhaggle, laugh, make love\nas they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.\nSomeone else will read\nof the passing of things human,\nof the oblivion\nborn before the flames have died.\n\nBut that day I thought only\nof the loneliness of the dying,\nof how, when Giordano\nclimbed to his burning\nhe could not find\nin any human tongue\nwords for mankind,\nmankind who live on.\n\nAlready they were back at their wine\nor peddled their white starfish,\nbaskets of olives and lemons\nthey had shouldered to the fair,\nand he already distanced\nas if centuries had passed\nwhile they paused just a moment\nfor his flying in the fire.\n\nThose dying here, the lonely\nforgotten by the world,\nour tongue becomes for them\nthe language of an ancient planet.\nUntil, when all is legend\nand many years have passed,\non a new Campo de’ Fiori\nrage will kindle at a poet’s word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "David Brooks & Louis Iribarne", - "date": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "location": "Warsaw", - "context": { - "season": "spring", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "child-of-europe": { - "title": "“Child Of Europe”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWe, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.\nWho in May admire trees flowering\nAre better than those who perished.\n\nWe, who taste of exotic dishes,\nAnd enjoy fully the delights of love,\nAre better than those who were buried.\n\nWe, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires\nOn which the winds of endless autumns howled,\nWe, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in paroxysms of pain.\nWe, saved by our own cunning and knowledge.\n\nBy sending others to the more exposed positions\nUrging them loudly to fight on\nOurselves withdrawing in certainty of the cause lost.\n\nHaving the choice of our own death and that of a friend\nWe chose his, coldly thinking: Let it be done quickly.\n\nWe sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread\nKnowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before.\n\nAs befits human beings, we explored good and evil.\nOur malignant wisdom has no like on this planet.\n\nAccept it as proven that we are better than they,\nThe gullible, hot-blooded weaklings, careless with their lives.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nTreasure your legacy of skills, child of Europe.\nInheritor of Gothic cathedrals, of baroque churches.\nOf synagogues filled with the wailing of a wronged people.\nSuccessor of Descartes, Spinoza, inheritor of the word “honor,”\nPosthumous child of Leonidas\nTreasure the skills acquired in the hour of terror.\n\nYou have a clever mind which sees instantly\nThe good and bad of any situation.\nYou have an elegant, skeptical mind which enjoys pleasures\nQuite unknown to primitive races.\n\nGuided by this mind you cannot fail to see\nThe soundness of the advice we give you:\nLet the sweetness of day fill your lungs\nFor this we have strict but wise rules.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThere can be no question of force triumphant\nWe live in the age of victorious justice.\n\nDo not mention force, or you will be accused\nOf upholding fallen doctrines in secret.\n\nHe who has power, has it by historical logic.\nRespectfully bow to that logic.\n\nLet your lips, proposing a hypothesis\nNot know about the hand faking the experiment.\n\nLet your hand, faking the experiment\nNo know about the lips proposing a hypothesis.\n\nLearn to predict a fire with unerring precision\nThen burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nGrow your tree of falsehood from a single grain of truth.\nDo not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.\n\nLet your lie be even more logical than the truth itself\nSo the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.\n\nAfter the Day of the Lie gather in select circles\nShaking with laughter when our real deeds are mentioned.\n\nDispensing flattery called: perspicacious thinking.\nDispensing flattery called: a great talent.\n\nWe, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism.\nWe, whose cunning is not unlike despair.\n\nA new, humorless generation is now arising\nIt takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nLet your words speak not through their meanings\nBut through them against whom they are used.\n\nFashion your weapon from ambiguous words.\nConsign clear words to lexical limbo.\n\nJudge no words before the clerks have checked\nIn their card index by whom they were spoken.\n\nThe voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.\nThe passionless cannot change history.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nLove no country: countries soon disappear\nLove no city: cities are soon rubble.\n\nThrow away keepsakes, or from your desk\nA choking, poisonous fume will exude.\n\nDo not love people: people soon perish.\nOr they are wronged and call for your help.\n\nDo not gaze into the pools of the past.\nTheir corroded surface will mirror\nA face different from the one you expected.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nHe who invokes history is always secure.\nThe dead will not rise to witness against him.\n\nYou can accuse them of any deeds you like.\nTheir reply will always be silence.\n\nTheir empty faces swim out of the deep dark.\nYou can fill them with any feature desired.\n\nProud of dominion over people long vanished,\nChange the past into your own, better likeness.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nThe laughter born of the love of truth\nIs now the laughter of the enemies of the people.\n\nGone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock.\nThe sensible monarch with false courtly phrases.\n\nStern as befits the servants of a cause,\nWe will permit ourselves sycophantic humor.\n\nTight-lipped, guided by reasons only\nCautiously let us step into the era of the unchained fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "christopher-robin": { - "title": "“Christopher Robin”", - "body": "I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed, and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.\nOwl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. “Old bear,” he answered. “I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called in for an afternoon snack.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "city-without-a-name": { - "title": "“City without a Name”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWho will honor the city without a name\nIf so many are dead and others pan gold\nOr sell arms in faraway countries?\n\nWhat shepherd’s horn swathed in the bark of birch\nWill sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent--\nVagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge?\n\nThis spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole,\n--In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains--\nI heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees.\n\nThe current carried an echo and the timber of rafts.\nA man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief\nPushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar.\n\nIn the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac,\nKontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile\nFor despite Metternich all was not yet lost.\n\nAnd on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway\nJewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted\nStanding on a cuirassier’s helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nIn Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo,\nAbout a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student’s Ball\nIn the city from which no voice could reach me.\nMinerals did not sound the last trumpet.\nThere was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava.\n\nIn Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed.\nDefend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood.\nFrom the futility of solid rock, no wisdom.\n\nIn Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky.\nThe prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true.\nIn a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem\nOf someone who had lived next door, entitled “An Hour of Thought.”\n\nI looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man\nWithin three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nWith flutes, with torches\nAnd a drum, boom, boom,\nLook, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row.\nHe walks arm in arm with his young lady,\nAnd over them swallows fly.\n\nThey carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves\nAnd bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes,\nAs they came closer and closer, down Castle Street.\nAnd then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud\nOver the Humanities Student Club,\nDivision of Creative Writing.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nBooks, we have written a whole library of them.\nLands, we have visited a great many of them.\nBattles, we have lost a number of them.\nTill we are no more, we and our Maryla.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nUnderstanding and pity,\nWe value them highly.\nWhat else?\n\nBeauty and kisses,\nFame and its prizes,\nWho cares?\n\nDoctors and lawyers,\nWell-turned-out majors,\nSix feet of earth.\n\nRings, furs, and lashes,\nGlances at Masses,\nRest in peace.\n\nSweet twin breasts, good night.\nSleep through to the light,\nWithout spiders.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThe sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge\nAnd kindles fire on landscapes “made from nature”:\nThe Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana;\nThe Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village.\nThe valets had already brought in Theban candelabra\nAnd pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly,\nWhile, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves,\nI saw that all the eyes were fixed on me.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nWhen I got rid of grieving\nAnd the glory I was seeking,\nWhich I had no business doing,\n\nI was carried by dragons\nOver countries, bays, and mountains,\nBy fate, or by what happens.\n\nOh yes, I wanted to be me.\nI toasted mirrors weepily\nAnd learned my own stupidity.\n\nFrom nails, mucous membrane,\nLungs, liver, bowels, and spleen\nWhose house is made? Mine.\n\nSo what else is new?\nI am not my own friend.\nTime cuts me in two.\n\nMonuments covered with snow,\nAccept my gift. I wandered;\nAnd where, I don’t know.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nAbsent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp.\nThus the feast of Insubstantiality.\nUnder a gathering of clouds anywhere.\nIn a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo.\nNo density. No harness of stone.\nEven the _Summa_ thins into straw and smoke.\nAnd the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed\nSounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nLight, universal, and yet it keeps changing.\nFor I love the light too, perhaps the light only.\nYet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me.\nSo when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level\nIn the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen,\nLate in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps\nRot under the firs and the hounds’ barking echoes,\nAnd jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nUnexpressed, untold.\nBut how?\nThe shortness of life,\nthe years quicker and quicker,\nnot remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn.\nRetinues of homespun velveteen skirts,\ngiggles above a railing, pigtails askew,\nsittings on chamberpots upstairs\nwhen the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch\njust before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter.\nFemale humanity,\nchildren’s snots, legs spread apart,\nsnarled hair, the milk boiling over,\nstench, shit frozen into clods.\nAnd those centuries,\nconceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night\ninstead of playing something like a game of chess\nor dancing an intellectual ballet.\nAnd palisades,\nand pregnant sheep,\nand pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters,\nand cows cured by incantations.\n\n\n# 11.\n\nNot the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river.\nSmall whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts.\nSo we trudged through the slush of melting snow\nTo buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie.\n\nA fortune-teller hawking: “Your destiny, your planets.”\nAnd a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine.\nAnother, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking,\nBy the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nWhy should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of\na forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me?\nLike blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert\nseven centuries ago.\n\nWhere ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone\nit would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one.\n\nWhat evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering?\n\nIt stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is\nlacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us.\n\nPerhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles\ninside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever\nlived.\n\nThey trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets\nfrom Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray\nhair.\n\nHere there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the\nday are simultaneous.\n\nAt dawn shit-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees\nat the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags.\n\nRattling their wheels, “Courier” and “Speedy” move against the current\nto Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread-\neagled by his oars.\n\nAt St. Peter and Paul’s the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile\nover a nun who has indecent thoughts.\n\nBearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the counter, instructing her\ntwelve shopgirls.\n\nAnd all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric,\npreparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem.\n\nBlack and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the\ncathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the\nhalf-charred oak logs in the hearth.\n\nCarrying her servant’s-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in\nmourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the\nRomers’ house in Bakszta Street.\n\nHow it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not\nto be melted by the breath of these brief lives.\n\nAnd what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open\nmy eyes once more on a useless end of the world?\n\nI was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without\nstopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.\n\nBut the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were\nall that one was permitted to know and take away.\n\nThe Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro-\ncious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.\n\nAnd the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,\nthere was not less bitterness but more.\n\nIf I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is\ntransformed, at last, into harmony.\n\nLike a _Noble Jan Dęboróg_ in the Straszun’s secondhand-book shop, I am\nput to rest forever between two familiar names.\n\nThe castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still\na hardly audible--is it Mozart’s _Requiem_?--music.\n\nIn the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not\nto find the desired word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Pinsky & Renata Gorczynski", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "location": "Berkeley", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "conversation-with-jeanne": { - "title": "“Conversation with Jeanne”", - "body": "Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.\nSo many words, so much paper, who can stand it.\nI told you the truth about my distancing myself.\nI’ve stopped worrying about my misshapen life.\nIt was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.\n\nFor over thirty years we have been waging our dispute\nAs we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.\nWe flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,\nAnd I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.\n\nWe submerge in foam at the line of the surf,\nWe swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,\nWith little windmills of palms.\nAnd I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,\nThat I do not demand enough from myself,\nAs I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,\nThat my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.\n\nI roll on a wave and look at white clouds.\n\nYou are right, Jeanne, I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul.\nSome are called, others manage as well as they can.\nI accept it, what has befallen me is just.\nI don’t pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.\nUntranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,\nIn things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:\nNakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,\nHibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring\nWith my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,\nRum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids\nIn a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.\n\nDeath, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,\nWe suffered and this poor earth was not enough.\nThe purple-black earth of vegetable gardens\nWill be here, either looked at or not.\nThe sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.\nGrowing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dedication": { - "title": "“Dedication”", - "body": "You whom I could not save\nListen to me.\nTry to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.\nI swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.\nI speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.\n\nWhat strengthened me, for you was lethal.\nYou mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,\nInspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;\nBlind force with accomplished shape.\n\nHere is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge\nGoing into white fog. Here is a broken city;\nAnd the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave\nWhen I am talking with you.\n\nWhat is poetry which does not save\nNations or people?\nA connivance with official lies,\nA song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,\nReadings for sophomore girls.\nThat I wanted good poetry without knowing it,\nThat I discovered, late, its salutary aim,\nIn this and only this I find salvation.\n\nThey used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds\nTo feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.\nI put this book here for you, who once lived\nSo that you should visit us no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "location": "Warsaw" - } - }, - "the-dining-room": { - "title": "“The Dining Room”", - "body": "A room with low windows, with brown shades,\nWhere a Danzig clock keeps silent in the corner;\nA low leather sofa; and right above it\nThe sculpted heads of two smiling devils;\nAnd a copper pan shows its gleaming paunch.\n\nOn the wall a painting that depicts winter.\nA crowd of people skate on ice\nBetween the trees, smoke comes from a chimney,\nAnd crows fly in an overcast sky.\n\nNearby a second clock. A bird sits inside.\nIt pops out squawking and calls three times.\nAnd it has barely finished its third and last call\nWhen mother ladles out soup from a hot tureen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "earth-again": { - "title": "“Earth Again”", - "body": "They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.\nThe lure of waters. The lure of fruits.\nLure of two breasts and the long hair of a maiden.\nIn rouge, in vermillion, in that color of ponds\nFound only in the Green Lakes near Wilno.\nAn ungraspable multitudes swarm, come together\nIn the crinkles of tree bark, in the telescope’s eye,\nFor an endless wedding,\nFor the kindling of eyes, for a sweet dance\nIn the elements of air, sea, earth, and subterranean caves,\nSo that for a short moment there is no death\nAnd time does not unreel like a skein of yarn\nThrown into an abyss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "encounter": { - "title": "“Encounter”", - "body": "We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.\nA red wing rose in the darkness.\n\nAnd suddenly a hare ran across the road.\nOne of us pointed to it with his hand.\n\nThat was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,\nNot the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.\n\nO my love, where are they, where are they going\nThe flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.\nI ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Lillian Vallee", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "location": "Wilno", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "faith": { - "title": "“Faith”", - "body": "Faith is in you whenever you look\nAt a dewdropp or a floating leaf\nAnd know that they are because they have to be.\nEven if you close your eyes and dream up things\nThe world will remain as it has always been\nAnd the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.\n\nYou have faith also when you hurt your foot\nAgainst a sharp rock and you know\nThat rocks are there to hurt our feet.\nSee the long shadow that is cast by the tree?\nWe and trees throw shadows on the earth.\nWhat has no shadow has no strength to live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "father-explains": { - "title": "“Father Explains”", - "body": "“There where that ray touches the plain\nAnd the shadows escape as if they really ran,\nWarsaw stands, open from all sides,\nA city not very old but quite famous.”\n\n“Farther, where strings of rain hang from a little cloud,\nUnder the hills with an acacia grove\nIs Prague. Above it, a marvelous castle\nShored against a slope in accordance with old rules.”\n\n“What divides this land with white foam\nIs the Alps. The black means fir forests.\nBeyond them, bathing in the yellow sun\nItaly lies, like a deep-blue dish.”\n\n“Among the many fine cities that are there\nYou will recognize Rome, Christendom’s capital,\nBy those round roofs on the church\nCalled the Basilica of Saint Peter.”\n\n“And there, to the north, beyond a bay,\nWhere a level bluish mist moves in waves,\nParis tries to keep pace with its tower\nAnd reins in its herd of bridges.”\n\n“Also other cities accompany Paris,\nThey are adorned with glass, arrayed in iron,\nBut for today that would be too much,\nI’ll tell the rest another time.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-felicitous-life": { - "title": "“A Felicitous Life”", - "body": "His old age fell on years of abundant harvest.\nThere were no earthquakes, droughts or floods.\nIt seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy,\nStars waxed strong and the sun increased its might.\nEven in remote provinces no war was waged.\nGenerations grew up friendly to fellow men.\nThe rational nature of man was not a subject of derision.\n\nIt was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed.\nHe was envious and ashamed of his doubt,\nContent that his lacerated memory would vanish with him.\n\nTwo days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts.\nSmoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years.\nLava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns.\nAnd war began with a battle on the islands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "forget": { - "title": "“Forget”", - "body": "Forget the suffering\nYou caused others.\nForget the suffering\nOthers caused you.\nThe waters run and run,\nSprings sparkle and are done,\nYou walk the earth you are forgetting.\n\nSometimes you hear a distant refrain.\nWhat does it mean, you ask, who is singing?\nA childlike sun grows warm.\nA grandson and a great-grandson are born.\nYou are led by the hand once again.\n\nThe names of the rivers remain with you.\nHow endless those rivers seem!\nYour fields lie fallow,\nThe city towers are not as they were.\nYou stand at the threshold mute.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gift": { - "title": "“Gift”", - "body": "A day so happy.\nFog lifted early I worked in the garden.\nHummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.\nThere was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.\nI knew no man worth my envying him.\nWhatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.\nTo think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.\nIn my body I felt no pain.\nOn straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-hall": { - "title": "“A Hall”", - "body": "The road led straight to the temple.\nNotre Dame, though not Gothic at all.\nThe huge doors were closed. I chose one on the side,\nNot to the main building-to its left wing,\nThe one in green copper, worn into gaps below.\nI pushed. Then it was revealed:\nAn astonishing large hall, in warm light.\nGreat statues of sitting women-goddesses,\nIn draped robes, marked it with a rhythm.\nColor embraced me like the interior of a purple-brown flower\nOf unheard-of size. I walked, liberated\nFrom worries, pangs of conscience, and fears.\nI knew I was there as one day I would be.\nI woke up serene, thinking that this dream\nAnswers my question, often asked:\nHow is it when one passes the last threshold?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hope": { - "title": "“Hope”", - "body": "Hope is with you when you believe\nThe earth is not a dream but living flesh,\nthat sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,\nThat all thing you have ever seen here\nAre like a garden looked at from a gate.\n\nYou cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.\nCould we but look more clearly and wisely\nWe might discover somewhere in the garden\nA strange new flower and an unnamed star.\n\nSome people say that we should not trust our eyes,\nThat there is nothing, just a seeming,\nThere are the ones who have no hope.\nThey think the moment we turn away,\nThe world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,\nAs if snatched up by the hand of thieves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-hour": { - "title": "“An Hour”", - "body": "Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees,\nFrom afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices\nAnd the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me.\nBefore the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning\nThey waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals,\nSo that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "how-it-was": { - "title": "“How It Was”", - "body": "Stalking a deer I wandered deep into the mountains and from there I saw.\n\nOr perhaps it was for some other reason that I rose above the setting sun.\n\nAbove the hills of blackwood and a slab of ocean and the steps of a glacier, carmine-colored in the dusk.\n\nI saw absence; the mighty power of counter-fulfillment; the penalty of a promise lost forever.\n\nIf, in tepees of plywood, tire shreds, and grimy sheet iron, ancient inhabitants of this land shook their rattles, it was all in vain.\n\nNo eagle-creator circled in the air from which the thunderbolt of its glory had been cast out.\n\nProtective spirits hid themselves in subterranean beds of bubbling ore, jolting the surface from time to time so that the fabric of freeways was bursting asunder.\n\nGod the Father didn’t walk about any longer tending the new shoots of a cedar, no longer did man hear his rushing spirit.\n\nHis son did not know his sonship and turned his eyes away when passing by a neon cross flat as a movie screen showing a striptease.\n\nThis time it was really the end of the Old and the New Testament.\n\nNo one implored, everyone picked up a nodule of agate or diorite to whisper in loneliness: I cannot live any longer.\n\nBearded messengers in bead necklaces founded clandestine communes in imperial cities and in ports overseas.\n\nBut none of them announced the birth of a child-savior.\n\nSoldiers from expeditions sent to punish nations would go disguised and masked to take part in forbidden rites, not looking for any hope.\n\nThey inhaled smoke soothing all memory and, rocking from side to side, shared with each other a word of nameless union.\n\nCarved in black wood the Wheel of Eternal Return stood before the tents of wandering monastic orders.\n\nAnd those who longed for the Kingdom took refuge like me in the mountains to become the last heirs of a dishonored myth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-sleep-a-lot": { - "title": "“I Sleep a Lot”", - "body": "I sleep a lot and read St. Thomas Aquinas\nOr The Death of God (that’s a Protestant book).\nTo the right the bay as if molten tin,\nBeyond the bay, city, beyond the city, ocean,\nBeyond the ocean, ocean, till Japan.\nTo the left dry hills with white grass,\nBeyond the hills an irrigated valley where rice is grown,\nBeyond the valley, mountains and Ponderosa pines,\nBeyond the mountains, desert and sheep.\n\nWhen I couldn’t do without alcohol, I drove myself on alcohol,\nWhen I couldn’t do without cigarettes and coffee, I drove myself\nOn cigarettes and coffee.\nI was courageous. Industrious. Nearly a model of virtue.\nBut that is good for nothing.\n\nI feel a pain.\nnot here. Even I don’t know.\nmany islands and continents,\nwords, bazaars, wooden flutes,\nOr too much drinking to the mirror, without beauty,\nThough one was to be a kind of archangel\nOr a Saint George, over there, on St. George Street.\nPlease, Doctor,\nNot here. No,\nMaybe it’s too\nUnpronounced\n\nPlease, Medicine Man, I feel a pain.\nI always believed in spells and incantations.\nSure, women have only one, Catholic, soul,\nBut we have two. When you start to dance\nYou visit remote pueblos in your sleep\nAnd even lands you have never seen.\nPut on, I beg you, charms made of feathers,\nNow it’s time to help one of your own.\nI have read many books but I don’t believe them.\nWhen it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.\n\nI remember those crosses with chiseled suns and moons\nAnd wizards, how they worked during an outbreak of typhus.\nSend your second soul beyond the mountains, beyond time.\nTell me what you saw, I will wait.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-black-despair": { - "title": "“In Black Despair”", - "body": "In grayish doubt and black despair,\nI drafted hymns to the earth and the air,\npretending to joy, although I lacked it.\nThe age had made lament redundant.\n\nSo here’s the question--who can answer it--\nWas he a brave man or a hypocrite?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-warsaw": { - "title": "“In Warsaw”", - "body": "What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins\nOf St. John’s Cathedral this sunny\nDay in spring?\n\nWhat are you thinking here, where the wind\nBlowing from the Vistula scatters\nThe red dust of the rubble?\n\nYou swore never to be\nA ritual mourner.\nYou swore never to touch\nThe deep wounds of your nation\nSo you would not make them holy\nWith the accursed holiness that pursues\nDescendants for many centuries.\n\nBut the lament of Antigone\nSearching for her brother\nIs indeed beyond the power\nOf endurance. And the heart\nIs a stone in which is enclosed,\nLike an insect, the dark love\nOf a most unhappy land.\nI did not want to love so.\nThat was not my design.\nI did not want to pity so.\nThat was not my design.\nMy pen is lighter\nThan a hummingbird’s feather. This burden\nIs too much for it to bear.\nHow can I live in this country\nWhere the foot knocks against\nThe unburied bones of kin?\n\nI hear voices, see smiles. I cannot\nWrite anything; five hands\nSeize my pen and order me to write\nThe story of their lives and deaths.\nWas I born to become\na ritual mourner?\nI want to sing of festivities,\nThe greenwood into which Shakespeare\nOften took me. Leave\nTo poets a moment of happiness,\nOtherwise your world will perish.\n\nIt’s madness to live without joy\nAnd to repeat to the dead\nWhose part was to be gladness\nOf action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts\nOnly the two salvaged words:\nTruth and justice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "incantation": { - "title": "“Incantation”", - "body": "Human reason is beautiful and invincible.\nNo bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,\nNo sentence of banishment can prevail against it.\nIt establishes the universal ideas in language,\nAnd guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice\nWith capital letters, lie and oppression with small.\nIt puts what should be above things as they are,\nIs an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.\nIt does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,\nGiving us the estate of the world to manage.\nIt saves austere and transparent phrases\nFrom the filthy discord of tortured words.\nIt says that everything is new under the sun,\nOpens the congealed fist of the past.\nBeautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia\nAnd poetry, her ally in the service of the good.\nAs late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,\nThe news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.\nTheir friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.\nTheir enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-was-winter": { - "title": "“It Was Winter”", - "body": "Winter came as it does in this valley.\nAfter eight dry months rain fell\nAnd the mountains, straw-colored, turned green for a while.\nIn the canyons where gray laurels\nGraft their stony roots to granite,\nStreams must have filled the dried-up creek beds.\nOcean winds churned the eucalyptus trees,\nAnd under clouds torn by a crystal of towers\nPrickly lights were glowing on the docks.\n\nThis is not a place where you sit under a café awning\nOn a marble piazza, watching the crowd,\nOr play the flute at a window over a narrow street\nWhile children’s sandals clatter in the vaulted entryway.\n\nThey heard of a land, empty and vast,\nBordered by mountains. So they went, leaving behind crosses\nOf thorny wood and traces of campfires.\nAs it happened, they spent winter in the snow of a mountain pass,\nAnd drew lots and boiled the bones of their companions;\nAnd so afterward a hot valley where indigo could be grown\nSeemed beautiful to them. And beyond, where fog\nHeaved into shoreline coves, the ocean labored.\n\nSleep: rocks and capes will lie down inside you,\nWar councils of motionless animals in a barren place,\nBasilicas of reptiles, a frothy whiteness.\nSleep on your coat, while your horse nibbles grass\nAnd an eagle gauges a precipice.\n\nWhen you wake up, you will have the parts of the world.\nWest, an empty conch of water and air.\nEast, always behind you, the voided memory of snow-covered fir.\nAnd extending from your outspread arms\nNothing but bronze grasses, north and south.\n\nWe are poor people, much afflicted.\nWe camped under various stars,\nWhere you dip water with a cup from a muddy river\nAnd slice your bread with a pocketknife.\nThis is the place; accepted, not chosen.\nWe remembered that there were streets and houses where we came from,\nSo there had to be houses here, a saddler’s signboard,\nA small veranda with a chair. But empty, a country where\nThe thunder beneath the rippled skin of the earth,\nThe breaking waves, a patrol of pelicans, nullified us.\nAs if our vases, brought here from another shore,\nWere the dug-up spearheads of some lost tribe\nWho fed on lizards and acorn flour.\n\nAnd here I am walking the eternal earth.\nTiny, leaning on a stick.\nI pass a volcanic park, lie down at a spring,\nNot knowing how to express what is always and everywhere:\nThe earth I cling to is so solid\nUnder my breast and belly that I feel grateful\nFor every pebble, and I don’t know whether\nIt is my pulse or the earth’s that I hear,\nWhen the hems of invisible silk vestments pass over me,\nHands, wherever they have been, touch my arm,\nOr small laughter, once, long ago over wine,\nWith lanterns in the magnolias, for my house is huge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "lake": { - "title": "“Lake”", - "body": "Maidenly lake, fathomless lake,\nStay as you were once, overgrown with rushes,\nIdling with a reflected cloud, for my sake\nWhom your shore no longer touches.\n\nYour girl was always real to me.\nHer bones lie in a city by the sea.\nEverything occurs too normally.\nA unique love simply wears away.\n\nGirl, hey, girl, we repose in an abyss.\nThe base of a skull, a rib, a pelvis,\nIs it you? me? We are more than this.\nNo clock counts hours and years for us.\n\nHow could a creature, ephemeral, eternal,\nMeasure for me necessity and fate?\nYou are locked with me in a letter-crystal.\nNo matter that you’re not a living maid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "late-ripeness": { - "title": "“Late Ripeness”", - "body": "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,\nI felt a door opening in me and I entered\nthe clarity of early morning.\n\nOne after another my former lives were departing,\nlike ships, together with their sorrow.\n\nAnd the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas\nassigned to my brush came closer,\nready now to be described better than they were before.\n\nI was not separated from people,\ngrief and pity joined us.\nWe forget--I kept saying--that we are all children of the King.\n\nFor where we come from there is no division\ninto Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.\n\nWe were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part\nof the gift we received for our long journey.\n\nMoments from yesterday and from centuries ago--\na sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror\nof polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel\nstaving its hull against a reef--they dwell in us,\nwaiting for a fulfillment.\n\nI knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,\nas are all men and women living at the same time,\nwhether they are aware of it or not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass", - "date": { - "year": 2004 - } - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "Love means to learn to look at yourself\nThe way one looks at distant things\nFor you are only one thing among many.\nAnd whoever sees that way heals his heart,\nWithout knowing it, from various ills--\nA bird and a tree say to him: Friend.\n\nThen he wants to use himself and things\nSo that they stand in the glow of ripeness.\nIt doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:\nWho serves best doesn’t always understand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-magic-mountain": { - "title": "“A Magic Mountain”", - "body": "I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years ago or three.\nThe same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before.\nSoon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive,\nSaid that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed,\nFor here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.\n\n“I kept dreaming of snow and birch forests.\nWhere so little changes you hardly notice how time goes by.\nThis is, you will see, a magic mountain.”\n\nBudberg: a familiar name in my childhood.\nThey were prominent in our region,\nThis Russian family, descendants of German Balts.\nI read none of his works, too specialized.\nAnd Chen, I have heard, was an exquisite poet,\nWhich I must take on faith, for he wrote in Chinese.\n\nSultry Octobers, cool Julys, trees blossom in February.\nHere the nuptial flight of hummingbirds does not forecast spring.\nOnly the faithful maple sheds its leaves every year.\nFor no reason, its ancestors simply learned it that way.\n\nI sensed Budberg was right and I rebelled.\nSo I won’t have power, won’t save the world?\nFame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown?\nDid I then train myself, myself the Unique,\nTo compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze,\nTo listen to the foghorns blaring down below?\n\nUntil it passed. What passed? Life.\nNow I am not ashamed of my defeat.\nOne murky island with its barking seals\nOr a parched desert is enough\nTo make us say: yes, _oui, si._\n“Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.”\nEndurance comes only from enduring.\nWith a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope,\nAnd climbed it and it held me.\n\nWhat a procession! _Quelles délices!_\nWhat caps and hooded gowns!\nMost respected Professor Budberg,\nMost distinguished Professor Chen,\nWrong Honorable Professor Milosz\nWho wrote poems in some unheard-of tongue.\nWho will count them anyway. And here sunlight.\nSo that the flames of their tall candles fade.\nAnd how many generations of hummingbirds keep them company\nAs they walk on. Across the magic mountain.\nAnd the fog from the ocean is cool, for once again it is July.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Lillian Vallee", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - }, - "location": "Berkeley", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "magpiety": { - "title": "“Magpiety”", - "body": "The same and not quite the same, I walked through oak forests\nAmazed that my Muse, Mnemosyne,\nHas in no way diminished my amazement.\nA magpie was screeching and I said: Magpiety?\nWhat is magpiety? I shall never achieve\nA magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight\nThat always renews just when coming down,\nAnd so I shall never comprehend magpiety.\nIf however magpiety does not exist\nMy nature does not exist either.\nWho would have guessed that, centuries later,\nI would invent the question of universals?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1974 - } - } - }, - "meaning": { - "title": "“Meaning”", - "body": "When I die, I will see the lining of the world.\nThe other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.\nThe true meaning, ready to be decoded.\nWhat never added up will add Up,\nWhat was incomprehensible will be comprehended.\n--And if there is no lining to the world?\nIf a thrush on a branch is not a sign,\nBut just a thrush on the branch? If night and day\nMake no sense following each other?\nAnd on this earth there is nothing except this earth?\n--Even if that is so, there will remain\nA word wakened by lips that perish,\nA tireless messenger who runs and runs\nThrough interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,\nAnd calls out, protests, screams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "metareality-of-the-virtual-mind": { - "title": "“Metareality of the Virtual Mind”", - "body": "Always moving, always changing\nElectronic cars on the information highway.\nIdeas without thought, speech without meaning\nWords that aren’t words, yet are understood.\nPeople, places, things, plans and ambitions\nEverywhere but nowhere\nThe stuff that dreams are made of.\nRaw emotion, ebbing and flowing, coming and going\nPixellated passion\nSubliminal seduction.\nViolence spreading, pure rage emerging\nA day in the life of a virtual warfighter.\nPeople who aren’t, identity shifts\nPhantoms dancing on the silver screen.\nPeople talking, nobody listening\nCrackpots preaching to the imaginary masses.\nSociety shaping, culture emerging\nNumbers instead of names\nPorts without rivers\nPages without books\nServers bearing digital sustinance\nMen become Gods of the Wired.\nAlways connected, never away\nThe ultimate addiction\nThe power of Information.\nProposals and porgress\nArguments and arrangements\nConversations spreading at the speed of creation.\nPersonalities and mentalities\nReason and religion\nthe hard-wired mind needs to upgrade.\nIn the age of information\nOn the streets paved in silicon\nThe virtual has become the second reality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2008, - "month": "march", - "day": 18 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 18 - } - } - }, - "my-faithful-mother-tongue": { - "title": "“My Faithful Mother Tongue”", - "body": "Faithful mother tongue,\nI have been serving you.\nEvery night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors\nso you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch\nas preserved in my memory.\n\nThis lasted many years.\nYou were my native land; I lacked any other.\nI believed that you would also be a messenger\nbetween me and some good people\neven if they were few, twenty, ten\nor not born, as yet.\n\nNow, I confess my doubt.\nThere are moments when it seems to me I have squandered my life.\nFor you are a tongue of the debased,\nof the unreasonable, hating themselves\neven more than they hate other nations,\na tongue of informers,\na tongue of the confused,\nill with their own innocence.\n\nBut without you, who am I?\nOnly a scholar in a distant country,\na success, without fears and humiliations.\nYes, who am I without you?\nJust a philosopher, like everyone else.\n\nI understand, this is meant as my education:\nthe glory of individuality is taken away,\nFortune spreads a red carpet\nbefore the sinner in a morality play\nwhile on the linen backdropp a magic lantern throws\nimages of human and divine torture.\n\nFaithful mother tongue,\nperhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.\nSo I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors\nbright and pure if possible,\nfor what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "natura": { - "title": "“Natura”", - "body": "The garden of Nature opens.\nThe grass at the threshold is green.\nAnd an almond tree begins to bloom.\n\nSunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii!\nValeat numen triplex Jehovae!\nIgnis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus,\nSalvete!--says the entering guest.\n\nAriel lives in the palace of an apple tree,\nBut will not appear, vibrating like a wasp’s wing,\nAnd Mephistopheles, disguised as an abbot\nOf the Dominicans or the Franciscans,\nWill not descend from a mulberry bush\nOnto a pentagram drawn in the black loam of the path.\n\nBut a rhododendron walks among the rocks\nShod in leathery leaves and ringing a pink bell.\nA hummingbird, a child’s top in the air,\nHovers in one spot, the beating heart of motion.\nImpaled on the nail of a black thorn, a grasshopper\nLeaks brown fluid from its twitching snout.\nAnd what can he do, the phantom-in-chief,\nAs he’s been called, more than a magician,\nThe Socrates of snails, as he’s been called,\nMusician of pears, arbiter of orioles, man?\nIn sculptures and canvases our individuality\nManages to survive. In Nature it perishes.\nLet him accompany the coffin of the woodsman\nPushed from a cliff by a mountain demon,\nThe he-goat with its jutting curl of horn.\nLet him visit the graveyard of the whalers\nWho drove spears into the flesh of leviathan\nAnd looked for the secret in guts and blubber.\nThe thrashing subsided, quieted to waves.\nLet him unroll the textbooks of alchemists\nWho almost found the cipher, thus the scepter.\nThen passed away without hands, eyes, or elixir.\n\nHere there is sun. And whoever, as a child,\nBelieved he could break the repeatable pattern\nOf things, if only he understood the pattern,\nIs cast down, rots in the skin of others,\nLooks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly,\nInexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art.\n\nTo keep the oars from squeaking in their locks,\nHe binds them with a handkerchief. The dark\nHad rushed east from the Rocky Mountains\nAnd settled in the forests of the continent:\nSky full of embers reflected in a cloud,\nFlight of herons, trees above a marsh,\nThe dry stalks in water, livid, black. My boat\nDivides the aerial utopias of the mosquitoes\nWhich rebuild their glowing castles instantly.\nA water lily sinks, fizzing, under the boat’s bow.\n\nNow it is night only. The water is ash-gray.\nPlay, music, but inaudibly! I wait an hour\nIn the silence, senses tuned to a beaver’s lodge.\nThen suddenly, a crease in the water, a beast’s\nblack moon, rounded, ploughing up quickly\nfrom the pond-dark, from the bubbling methanes.\nI am not immaterial and never will be.\nMy scent in the air, my animal smell,\nSpreads, rainbow-like, scares the beaver:\nA sudden splat.\n\nI remained where I was\nIn the high, soft coffer of the night’s velvet,\nMastering what had come to my senses:\nHow the four-toed paws worked, how the hair\nShook off water in the muddy tunnel.\nIt does not know time, hasn’t heard of death,\nIs submitted to me because I know I’ll die.\n\nI remember everything. That wedding in Basel,\nA touch to the strings of a viola and fruit\nIn silver bowls. As was the custom in Savoy,\nAn overturned cup for three pairs of lips,\nAnd the wine spilled. The flames of the candles\nWavery and frail in a breeze from the Rhine.\nHer fingers, bones shining through the skin,\nFelt out the hooks and clasps of the silk\nAnd the dress opened like a nutshell,\nFell from the turned graininess of the belly.\nA chain for the neck rustled without epoch,\nIn pits where the arms of various creeds\nMingle with bird cries and the red hair of caesars.\n\nPerhaps this is only my own love speaking\nBeyond the seventh river. Grit of subjectivity,\nObsession, bar the way to it.\nUntil a window shutter, dogs in the cold garden,\nThe whistle of a train, an owl in the firs\nAre spared the distortions of memory.\nAnd the grass says: how it was I don’t know.\n\nSplash of a beaver in the American night.\nThe memory grows larger than my life.\nA tin plate, dropped on the irregular red bricks\nOf a floor, rattles tinnily forever.\nBelinda of the big foot, Julia, Thaïs,\nThe tufts of their sex shadowed by ribbon.\n\nPeace to the princesses under the tamarisks.\nDesert winds beat against their painted eyelids.\nBefore the body was wrapped in bandelettes,\nBefore wheat fell asleep in the tomb,\nBefore stone fell silent, and there was only pity.\n\nYesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk.\nCrushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt.\nWe are both the snake and the wheel.\nThere are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable\nTruth of being, here, at the edge of lasting\nand not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect,\nTime lifted above time by time.\n\nBefore the butterfly and its color, he, numb,\nFormless, feels his fear, he, unattainable.\nFor what is a butterfly without Julia and Thaïs?\nAnd what is Julia without a butterfly’s down\nIn her eyes, her hair, the smooth grain of her belly?\nThe kingdom, you say. We do not belong to it,\nAnd still, in the same instant, we belong.\nFor how long will a nonsensical Poland\nWhere poets write of their emotions as if\nThey had a contract of limited liability\nSuffice? I want not poetry, but a new diction,\nBecause only it might allow us to express\nA new tenderness and save us from a law\nThat is not our law, from necessity\nWhich is not ours, even if we take its name.\n\nFrom broken armor, from eyes stricken\nBy the command of time and taken back\nInto the jurisdiction of mold and fermentation,\nWe draw our hope. Yes, to gather in an image\nThe furriness of the beaver, the smell of rushes,\nAnd the wrinkles of a hand holding a pitcher\nFrom which wine trickles. Why cry out\nThat a sense of history destroys our substance\nIf it, precisely, is offered to our powers,\nA muse of our gray-haired father, Herodotus,\nAs our arm and our instrument, though\nIt is not easy to use it, to strengthen it\nSo that, like a plumb with a pure gold center,\nIt will serve again to rescue human beings.\n\nWith such reflections I pushed a rowboat,\nIn the middle of the continent, through tangled stalks,\nIn my mind an image of the waves of two oceans\nAnd the slow rocking of a guard-ship’s lantern.\nAware that at this moment I--and not only I--\nKeep, as in a seed, the unnamed future.\nAnd then a rhythmic appeal composed itself,\nAlien to the moth with its whirring of silk:\n\nO City, O Society, O Capital,\nWe have seen your steaming entrails.\nYou will no longer be what you have been.\nYour songs no longer gratify our hearts.\n\nSteel, cement, lime, law, ordinance,\nWe have worshipped you too long,\nYou were for us a goal and a defense,\nOurs was your glory and your shame.\n\nAnd where was the covenant broken?\nWas it in the fires of war, the incandescent sky?\nOr at twilight, as the towers fly past, when one looked\nFrom the train across a desert of tracks\n\nTo a window out past the maneuvering locomotives\nWhere a girl examines her narrow, moody face\nIn a mirror and ties a ribbon to her hair\nPierced by the sparks of curling papers?\n\nThose walls of yours are shadows of walls,\nAnd your light disappeared forever.\nNot the world’s monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own\nStands beneath the sun in an altered space.\n\nFrom stucco and mirrors, glass and paintings,\nTearing aside curtains of silver and cotton,\nComes man, naked and mortal,\nReady for truth, for speech, for wings.\n\nLament, Republic! Fall to your knees!\nThe loudspeaker’s spell is discontinued.\nListen! You can hear the clocks ticking.\nYour death approaches by his hand.\n\nAn oar over my shoulder, I walked from the woods.\nA porcupine scolded from the fork of a tree,\nA horned owl, not changed by the century,\nNot changed by place or time, looked down.\nBubo maximus, from the work of Linnaeus.\n\nAmerica for me has the pelt of a raccoon,\nIts eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars.\nA chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark\nWhere ivy and vines tangle in the red soil\nAt the roots of an arcade of tulip trees.\nAmerica’s wings are the color of a cardinal,\nIts beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills\nFrom a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air.\nIts line is the wavy body of a water moccasin\nCrossing a river with a grass-like motion,\nA rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles,\nCoiling under the bloom of a yucca plant.\n\nAmerica is for me the illustrated version\nOf childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood,\nTold in the evening to the spinning wheel’s hum.\nAnd a violin, shivvying up a square dance,\nPlays the fiddles of Lithuania or Flanders.\nMy dancing partner’s name is Birute Swenson.\nShe married a Swede, but was born in Kaunas.\nThen from the night window a moth flies in\nAs big as the joined palms of the hands,\nWith a hue like the transparency of emeralds.\n\nWhy not establish a home in the neon heat\nOf Nature? Is it not enough, the labor of autumn,\nOf winter and spring and withering summer?\nYou will hear not one word spoken of the court\nof Sigismund Augustus on the banks of the Delaware River.\nThe Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is not needed.\nHerodotus will repose on his shelf, uncut.\nAnd the rose only, a sexual symbol,\nSymbol of love and superterrestrial beauty,\nWill open a chasm deeper than your knowledge.\nAbout it we find a song in a dream:\n\nInside the rose\nAre houses of gold,\nblack isobars, streams of cold.\nDawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps\nAnd evening streams down to the bays of the sea.\n\nIf anyone dies inside the rose,\nThey carry him down the purple-red road\nIn a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds.\nThey light up the petals of grottoes with torches.\nThey bury him there where color begins,\nAt the source of the sighing,\nInside the rose.\n\nLet names of months mean only what they mean.\nLet the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none\nOf them, or the tread of young rebels marching.\nWe might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir,\nPreserved like a fan in a garret. Why not\nSit down at a rough country table and compose\nAn ode in the old manner, as in the old times\nChasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "normalization": { - "title": "“Normalization”", - "body": "This happened long ago, before the onset\nof universal genetic correctness.\n\nBoys and girls would stand naked before mirrors\nstudying the defects of their structure.\n\nNose too long, ears like burdocks,\nsunken chin just like a mongoloid.\n\nBreasts too small, too large, lopsided shoulders,\npenis too short, hips too broad or else too narrow.\n\nAnd just an inch or two taller!\n\nSuch was the house they inhabited for life.\n\nHiding, feigning, concealing defects.\n\nBut somehow they still had to find a partner.\n\nFollowing incomprehensible tastes--airy creatures\npaired with potbellies, skin and bones enamored of salt pork.\n\nThey had a saying then: “Even monsters\nhave their mates.” So perhaps they learned to tolerate their partners’\nflaws, trusting that theirs would be forgiven in turn.\n\nNow every genetic error meets with such\ndisgust that crowds might spit on them and stone them.\n\nAs happened in the city of K., where the town council\nvoted to exile a girl\n\nSo thickset and squat\nthat no stylish dress could ever suit her,\n\nBut let’s not yearn for the days of prenormalization.\nJust think of the torments, the anxieties, the sweat,\nthe wiles needed to entice, in spite of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh", - "date": { - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "not-mine": { - "title": "“Not Mine”", - "body": "All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine\nAnd to know such pretending is disgraceful.\nBut what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed\nAnd started to prophesy. No one would hear me.\nTheir screens and microphones are not for that.\nOthers like me wander the streets\nAnd talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,\nOr on pavements in alleys. For there aren’t enough prisons\nTo lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet.\nThey won’t get me now.\nTo feast with the chosen--that I do well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass" - } - }, - "on-angels": { - "title": "“On Angels”", - "body": "All was taken away from you: white dresses,\nwings, even existence.\nYet I believe you,\nmessengers.\n\nThere, where the world is turned inside out,\na heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,\nyou stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.\n\nShorts is your stay here:\nnow and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,\nin a melody repeated by a bird,\nor in the smell of apples at close of day\nwhen the light makes the orchards magic.\n\nThey say somebody has invented you\nbut to me this does not sound convincing\nfor the humans invented themselves as well.\n\nThe voice--no doubt it is a valid proof,\nas it can belong only to radiant creatures,\nweightless and winged (after all, why not?),\ngirdled with the lightening.\n\nI have heard that voice many a time when asleep\nand, what is strange, I understood more or less\nan order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:\n\nday draw near\nanother one\ndo what you can.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-pilgrimage": { - "title": "“On Pilgrimage”", - "body": "May the smell of thyme and lavender accompany us on our journey\nTo a province that does not know how lucky it is\nFor it was, among all the hidden corners of the earth,\nThe only one chosen and visited.\n\nWe tended toward the Place but no signs led there.\nTill it revealed itself in a pastoral valley\nBetween mountains that look older than memory,\nBy a narrow river humming at the grotto.\n\nMay the taste of wine and roast meat stay with us\nAs it did when we used to feast in the clearings,\nSearching, not finding, gathering rumors,\nAlways comforted by the brightness of the day.\n\nMay the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks\nRemind us of everything we have lost,\nFor we have seen on our way and fallen in love\nWith the world that will pass in a twinkling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-prayer": { - "title": "“On Prayer”", - "body": "You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.\nAll I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge\nAnd walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,\nAbove landscapes the color of ripe gold\nTransformed by a magic stopping of the sun.\nThat bridge leads to the shore of Reversal\nWhere everything is just the opposite and the word ‘is’\nUnveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.\nNotice: I say we; there, every one, separately,\nFeels compassion for others entangled in the flesh\nAnd knows that if there is no other shore\nWe will walk that aerial bridge all the same.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-more-contradiction": { - "title": "“One More Contradiction”", - "body": "Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?\nI was a guest in a house under white clouds\nWhere rivers flow and grasses renew themselves.\nSo what if I were called, if I was hardly aware.\nThe next time early I would search for wisdom.\nI would not pretend I could be just like the others:\nOnly evil and suffering come from that.\nRenouncing, I would choose the fate of obedience.\nI would suppress my wolf’s eye and greedy throat.\nA resident of some cloister floating in the air\nWith a view on the cities glowing below,\nOr onto a stream, a bridge and old cedars,\nI would give myself to one task only.\nWhich then, however, could not be accomplished", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-poem-for-the-end-of-the-century": { - "title": "“A Poem for the End of the Century”", - "body": "When everything was fine\nAnd the notion of sin had vanished\nAnd the earth was ready\nIn universal peace\nTo consume and rejoice\nWithout creeds and utopias,\n\nI, for unknown reasons,\nSurrounded by the books\nOf prophets and theologians,\nOf philosophers, poets,\nSearched for an answer,\nScowling, grimacing,\nWaking up at night, muttering at dawn.\n\nWhat oppressed me so much\nWas a bit shameful.\nTalking of it aloud\nWould show neither tact nor prudence.\nIt might even seem an outrage\nAgainst the health of mankind.\n\nAlas, my memory\nDoes not want to leave me\nAnd in it, live beings\nEach with its own pain,\nEach with its own dying,\nIts own trepidation.\n\nWhy then innocence\nOn paradisal beaches,\nAn impeccable sky\nOver the church of hygiene?\nIs it because that\nWas long ago?\n\nTo a saintly man\n--So goes an Arab tale--\nGod said somewhat maliciously:\n“Had I revealed to people\nHow great a sinner you are,\nThey could not praise you.”\n\n“And I,” answered the pious one,\n“Had I unveiled to them\nHow merciful you are,\nThey would not care for you.”\n\nTo whom should I turn\nWith that affair so dark\nOf pain and also guilt\nIn the structure of the world,\nIf either here below\nOr over there on high\nNo power can abolish\nThe cause and the effect?\n\nDon’t think, don’t remember\nThe death on the cross,\nThough everyday He dies,\nThe only one, all-loving,\nWho without any need\nConsented and allowed\nTo exist all that is,\nIncluding nails of torture.\n\nTotally enigmatic.\nImpossibly intricate.\nBetter to stop speech here.\nThis language is not for people.\nBlessed be jubilation.\nVintages and harvests.\nEven if not everyone\nIs granted serenity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "a-poor-christian-looks-at-the-ghetto": { - "title": "“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”", - "body": "Bees build around red liver,\nAnts build around black bone.\nIt has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,\nIt has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam\nOf gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals.\nPoof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls\nEngulfs animal and human hair.\n\nBees build around the honeycomb of lungs,\nAnts build around white bone.\nTorn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,\nFiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.\nThe roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.\nNow there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,\nWith one leafless tree.\n\nSlowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,\nWith a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.\nHe touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,\nHe distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,\nThe ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum.\nBees build around a red trace.\nAnts build around the place left by my body.\n\nI am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.\nHe has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch\nWho has sat much in the light of candles\nReading the great book of the species.\n\nWhat will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,\nWaiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?\nMy broken body will deliver me to his sight\nAnd he will count me among the helpers of death:\nThe uncircumcised.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "preface": { - "title": "“Preface”", - "body": "First, plain speech in the mother tongue.\nHearing it, you should be able to see\nApple trees, a river, the bend of a road,\nAs if in a flash of summer lightning.\n\nAnd it should contain more than images.\nIt has been lured by singsong,\nA daydream, melody. Defenseless,\nIt was bypassed by the sharp, dry world.\n\nYou often ask yourself why you feel shame\nWhenever you look through a book of poetry.\nAs if the author, for reasons unclear to you,\nAddressed the worse side of your nature,\nPushing aside thought, cheating thought.\n\nSeasoned with jokes, clowning, satire,\nPoetry still knows how to please.\nThen its excellence is much admired.\nBut the grave combats where life is at stake\nAre fought in prose. It was not always so.\n\nAnd our regret has remained unconfessed.\nNovels and essays serve but will not last.\nOne clear stanza can take more weight\nThan a whole wagon of elaborate prose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "raja-rao": { - "title": "“Raja Rao”", - "body": "Raja, I wish I knew\nthe cause of that malady.\nFor years I could not accept\nthe place I was in.\nI felt I should be somewhere else.\n\nA city, trees, human voices\nlacked the quality of presence.\nI would live by the hope of moving on.\n\nSomewhere else there was a city of real presence,\nof real trees and voices and friendship and love.\n\nLink, if you wish, my peculiar case\n(on the border of schizophrenia)\nto the messianic hope\nof my civilization.\n\nIll at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,\nin the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.\nBuilding in my mind a permanent polis\nforever deprived of aimless bustle.\n\nI learned at last to say: this is my home,\nhere, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,\non the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,\nin a great republic, moderately corrupt.\n\nRaja, this did not cure me\nof my guilt and shame.\nA shame of failing to be\nwhat I should have been.\n\nThe image of myself\ngrows gigantic on the wall\nand against it\nmy miserable shadow.\n\nThat’s how I came to believe\nin Original Sin\nwhich is nothing but the first\nvictory of the ego.\n\nTormented by my ego, deluded by it\nI give you, as you see, a ready argument.\n\nI hear you saying that liberation is possible\nand that Socratic wisdom\nis identical with your guru’s.\n\nNo, Raja, I must start from what I am.\nI am those monsters which visit my dreams\nand reveal to me my hidden essence.\n\nIf I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever\nthat man is a healthy creature.\n\nGreece had to lose, her pure consciousness\nhad to make our agony only more acute.\n\nWe needed God loving us in our weakness\nand not in the glory of beatitude.\n\nNo help, Raja, my part is agony,\nstruggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,\nprayer for the Kingdom\nand reading Pascal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rising-of-the-sun": { - "title": "“The Rising of the Sun”", - "body": "I did not expect to live in such an unusual moment.\nWhen the God of thunders and of rocky heights,\nThe Lord of hosts, Kyrios Sabaoth,\nWould humble people to the quick,\nAllowing them to act whatever way they wished,\nLeaving to them conclusions, saying nothing.\nIt was a spectacle that was indeed unlike\nThe agelong cycle of royal tragedies.\nRoads on concrete pillars, cities of glass and cast iron,\nAirfields larger than tribal dominions\nSuddenly ran short of their essence and disintegrated\nNot in a dream but really, for, subtracted from themselves,\nThey could only hold on as do things which should not last.\nOut of trees, field stones, even lemons on the table,\nMateriality escaped and their spectrum\nProved to be a void, a haze on a film.\nDispossessed of its objects, space was swarming.\nEverywhere was nowhere and nowhere, everywhere.\nLetters in books turned silver-pale, wobbled, and faded\nThe hand was not able to trace the palm sign, the river sign, or the sign of ibis.\nA hullabaloo of many tongues proclaimed the mortality of the language.\nA complaint was forbidden as it complained to itself.\nPeople, afflicted with an incomprehensible distress,\nWere throwing off their clothes on the piazzas so that nakedness might call\nFor judgment.\nBut in vain they were longing after horror, pity, and anger.\nNeither work nor leisure\nWas justified,\nNor the face, nor the hair nor the loins\nNor any existence", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "road-side-dog": { - "title": "“Road-Side Dog”", - "body": "I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands where swirls of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their rein, and wait until, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor house in it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its end. I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night--I don’t know where it came from--in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-road": { - "title": "“The Road”", - "body": "Here where you see a green valley\nAnd a road half-covered with grass,\nThrough an oak wood beginning to bloom\nChildren are returning home from school.\n\nIn a pencil case that opens sideways\nCrayons rattle among crumbs of a roll\nAnd a copper penny saved by every child\nTo greet the first spring cuckoo.\n\nSister’s beret and brother’s cap\nBob in the bushy underbrush,\nA screeching jay hops in the branches\nAnd long clouds float over the trees.\n\nA red roof is already visible at the bend.\nIn front of the house father, leaning on a hoe,\nBows down, touches the unfolded leaves,\nAnd from his flower bed inspects the whole region.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sarajevo": { - "title": "“Sarajevo”", - "body": "Now that a revolution really is needed, those who were fervent are quite cool.\nWhile a country murdered and raped calls for help from the Europe which it had trusted, they yawn.\nWhile statesmen choose villainy and no voice is raised to call it by name.\nThe rebellion of the young who called for a new earth was a sham, and that generation has written the verdict on itself.\nListening with indifference to the cries of those who perish because they are after all just barbarians killing each other.\nAnd the lives of the well-fed are worth more than the lives of the starving.\nIt is revealed now that their Europe since the beginning has been a deception, for its faith and its foundation is nothingness.\nAnd nothingness, as the prophets keep saying, brings forth only nothingness, and they will be led once again like cattle to slaughter.\nLet them tremble and at the last moment comprehend that the word Sarajevo will from now on mean the destruction of their sons and the debasement of their daughters.\nThey prepare it by repeating: “We at least are safe,” unaware that what will strike them ripens in themselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-song-on-the-end-of-the-world": { - "title": "“A Song on the End of the World”", - "body": "On the day the world ends\nA bee circles a clover,\nA fisherman mends a glimmering net.\nHappy porpoises jump in the sea,\nBy the rainspout young sparrows are playing\nAnd the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.\n\nOn the day the world ends\nWomen walk through the fields under their umbrellas,\nA drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,\nVegetable peddlers shout in the street\nAnd a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,\nThe voice of a violin lasts in the air\nAnd leads into a starry night.\n\nAnd those who expected lightning and thunder\nAre disappointed.\nAnd those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps\nDo not believe it is happening now.\nAs long as the sun and the moon are above,\nAs long as the bumblebee visits a rose,\nAs long as rosy infants are born\nNo one believes it is happening now.\n\nOnly a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet\nYet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,\nRepeats while he binds his tomatoes:\nThere will be no other end of the world,\nThere will be no other end of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Anthony Miłosz", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - }, - "location": "Warsaw", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "state-of-a-couple": { - "title": "“State of a Couple”", - "body": "Your hand, my wonder, is now icy cold.\nThe purest light of the celestial dome\nhas burned me through. And now we are\nas two still plams lying in darlmess,\nas two black banks of a frozen stream\nin the chasm of the world.\n\nOur hair combed back is carved in wood,\nthe moon walks over our ebony shoulders.\nA distant cockcrow, the night goes by, silent.\nRich is the rime of love, withered the dowry.\n\nWhere are you, living in what depths of time,\nlove, stepping down into what waters,\nnow, when the frost of our voiceless lips\ndoes not fend off the divine fires?\n\nIn a forest of clouds, of fcam, and of silver\nwe live, caressing lands under our\nAnd we are wielding the might of a dark scepter\nto earn oblivion.\n\nMy love, your breast cut through by a clinel\nknows nothing anymore of what it was.\nOf clouds at dawn, of angers at daybreak,\nof shallows in springtime it has no remembrance.\n\nAnd you have led me, as once an angel led\nTobias, onto the rusty mashes of Lombardy.\nBut a day came when a sign frightened you,\na stinma of golden measure.\n\nWith a scream, with inunobile fear in your thin hands\nyou fell into a pit that ashes lie over,\nwhere neither northern firs nor Italian yews\ncould protect our andent bed of lovers.\n\nWhat was it. what is it, what will it be\nwe filled the world with our cry and calling.\nThe dawn is back, the red moon set,\ndo we know now? In a heavy ship\n\nA helmman comes, throws a silken rope\nand binds w tightly to eaah other,\nthen he pours on friends, once enemies,\na handful of snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-study-of-loneliness": { - "title": "“A Study of Loneliness”", - "body": "A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?\nA one-man crew of a fortress in the sand?\nWhoever he was. At dawn he saw furrowed mountains\nThe color of ashes, above the melting darkness,\nSaturated with violet, breaking into fluid rouge,\nTill they stood, immense, in the orange light.\nDay after day. And, before he noticed, year after year.\nFor whom, he thought, that splendor? For me alone?\nYet it will be here long after I perish.\nWhat is it in the eye of a lizard? Or when seen by a migrant bird?\nIf I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?\nAnd he knew there was no use crying out, for none of them would save him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-task": { - "title": "“A Task”", - "body": "In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life\nOnly if I brought myself to make a public confession\nRevealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:\nWe were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons\nBut pure and generous words were forbidden\nUnder so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one\nConsidered himself as a lost man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "theodicy": { - "title": "“Theodicy”", - "body": "No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.\nDesire will not save the morality of God.\nIf he created beings able to choose between good and evil,\nAnd they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,\nNevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,\nWhich would find its explanation only by assuming\nThe existence of an archetypal Paradise\nAnd a pre-human downfall so grave\nThat the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass", - "date": { - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "this-only": { - "title": "“This Only”", - "body": "A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.\nA voyager arrives, a map leads him there.\nOr perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,\nWhen snow first fell, riding this way\nHe felt joy, strong, without reason,\nJoy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm\nOf shifting trees, of a bird in flight,\nOf a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.\nHe returns years later, has no demands.\nHe wants only one, most precious thing:\nTo see, purely and simply, without name,\nWithout expectations, fears, or hopes,\nAt the edge where there is no I or not-I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "to-mrs-professor-in-defense-of-my-cats-honor": { - "title": "“To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor”", - "body": "My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger\nSleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer,\nUnaware that you insult his tribe.\n\nCats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole.\nYou are wrong, though: it’s not out of cruelty.\nThey simply like a thing that moves.\n\nFor, after all, we know that only consciousness\nCan for a moment move into the Other,\nEmpathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.\n\nAnd such as cats are, all of Nature is.\nIndifferent, alas, to the good and the evil.\nQuite a problem for us, I am afraid.\n\nNatural history has its museums,\nBut why should our children learn about monsters,\nAn earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?\n\nNature devouring, nature devoured,\nButchery day and night smoking with blood.\nand who created it? Was it the good Lord?\n\nYes, undoubtedly, they are innocent,\nSpiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.\nWe are the only ones who say: cruelty.\n\nOur consciousness and our conscience\nAlone in the pale anthill of galaxies\nPut their hope in a humane God.\n\nWho cannot but feel and think,\nWho is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,\nFor we are, as he told us, similar to Him.\n\nYet if it is so, the He takes pity\nOn every mauled mouse, every wounded bird.\nThen the universe ofr him is like a Crucifixion.\n\nSuch is the outcome of your attack on the cat:\nA theological, Augustinian grimace,\nWhich makes difficult our walking on this earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Hass" - } - }, - "unde-malum": { - "title": "“Unde Malum”", - "body": "Where does evil come from?\nIt comes\nfrom man\nalways from man\nonly from man\n--Tadeusz Rozewicz\nAlas, dear Tadeusz,\ngood nature and wicked man\nare romantic inventions\nyou show us this way\nthe depth of your optimism\nso let man exterminate\nhis own species\nthe innocent sunrise will illuminate\na liberated flora and fauna\nwhere oak forests reclaim\nthe postindustrial wasteland\nand the blood of a deer\ntorn asunder by a pack of wolves\nis not seen by anyone\na hawk falls upon a hare\nwithout witness\nevil disappears from the world\nand consciousness with it\nOf course, dear Tadeusz,\nevil (and good) comes from man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "veni-creator": { - "title": "“Veni Creator”", - "body": "Come, Holy Spirit,\nbending or not bending the grasses,\nappearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,\nat hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow\ncovers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.\nI am only a man: I need visible signs.\nI tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.\nMany a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church\nlifts its hand, only once, just once, for me.\nBut I understand that signs must be human,\ntherefore call one man, anywhere on earth,\nnot me--after all I have some decency--\nand allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Robert Pinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "location": "Berkeley", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "what-does-it-mean": { - "title": "“What Does It Mean”", - "body": "It does not know it glitters\nIt does not know it flies\nIt does not know it is this not that.\n\nAnd, more and more often, agape,\nWith my Gauloise dying out,\nOver a glass of red wine,\nI muse on the meaning of being this not that.\n\nJust as long ago, when I was twenty,\nBut then there was a hope I would be everything,\nPerhaps even a butterfly or a thrush, by magic.\nNow I see dusty district roads\nAnd a town where the postmaster gets drunk every day\nMelancholy with remaining identical to himself.\n\nIf only the stars contained me.\nIf only everything kept happening in such a way\nThat the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.\nWere I at least not contradictory. Alas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "where-the-sun-rises-and-where-it-sets": { - "title": "“Where the Sun Rises and Where It Sets”", - "body": "Once, when returning from far Transylvania\nThrough mountain forests, rocks, and Carpathian ridges,\nHalting by a ford at the close of day\n(My companions had sent me ahead to look\nFor passage), I let my horse graze\nAnd out of the saddlebag took the Holy Scripture;\nThe light was so gracious, murmur of streams so sweet,\nThat reading Paul’s epistles, and seeing the first star,\nI was soon lulled into a profound sleep.\n\nA young man in ornate Greek raiment\nTouched my arm and I heard his voice:\n‘Your time, O mortals, hastens by like water,\nI have descended and known its absyss.\nIt was I, whom cruel Paul chastised in Corinth\nFor having stolen my father’s wife,\nAnd by his order I was to be excluded\nFrom the table at which we shared our meals.\nSince then I have not been in gatherings of the saints,\nAnd for many years I was led by the sinful love\nOf a poor plaything given to temptation,\nAnd so we doomed ourselves to eternal ruin.\nBut my Lord and my God, whom I knew not,\nTore me from the ashes with his lightning,\nIn his eyes your truths count for nothing,\nHis mercy saves all living flesh.’\n\nAwake under a huge starry sky,\nHaving received help unhoped for,\nAbsolved of care about our platry life,\nI wiped my eyes wet with tears.\n\nNo, I have never been to Transylvania.\nI have never brought messages from there to my church.\nBut I could have.\nThis is an exercise in style.\nThe pluperfect tense\nOf countries imperfective.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "window": { - "title": "“Window”", - "body": "I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree translucent in brightness.\n\nAnd when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit stood there.\n\nMany years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened in my sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter": { - "title": "“Winter”", - "body": "The pungent smells of a California winter,\nGrayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.\nI add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.\n\n“In Ilawa,” the news item said, “at age 70\nDied Aleksander Rymkiewicz, poet.”\n\nHe was the youngest in our group. I patronized him slightly,\nJust as I patronized others for their inferior minds\nThough they had many virtues I couldn’t touch.\n\nAnd so I am here, approaching the end\nOf the century and of my life. Proud of my strength\nYet embarrassed by the clearness of the view.\n\nAvant-gardes mixed with blood.\nThe ashes of inconceivable arts.\nAn omnium-gatherum of chaos.\n\nI passed judgment on that. Though marked myself.\nThis hasn’t been the age for the righteous and the decent.\nI know what it means to beget monsters\nAnd to recognize in them myself.\n\nYou, moon, You, Aleksander, fire of cedar logs.\nWaters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.\nNot important whether the generations hold us in memory.\nGreat was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world.\n\nAnd now I am ready to keep running\nWhen the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death.\nI already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest\nWhere, beyond every essence, a new essence waits.\n\nYou, music of my late years, I am called\nBy a sound and a color which are more and more perfect.\n\nDo not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.\nBe young forever, seasons of the earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "woe": { - "title": "“Woe!”", - "body": "It is true, our tribe is similar to the bees,\nIt gathers honey of wisdom, carries it, stores it in honeycombs.\nI am able to roam for hours\nThrough the labyrinth of the main library, floor to floor.\nBut yesterday, looking for the words of masters and prophets,\nI wandered into high regions\nThat are visited by practically no one.\nI would open a book and could decipher nothing.\nFor letters faded and disappeared from the pages.\nWoe! I exclaimed-so it comes to this?\nWhere are you, venerable ones, with your beards and wigs,\nYour nights spent by a candle, griefs of your wives?\nSo a message saving the world is silenced forever?\nAt your home it was the day of making preserves.\nAnd your dog, sleeping by the fire, would wake up,\nYawn, and look at you, as if knowing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "you-who-wronged": { - "title": "“You Who Wronged”", - "body": "You who wronged a simple man\nBursting into laughter at the crime,\nAnd kept a pack of fools around you\nTo mix good and evil, to blur the line,\n\nThough everyone bowed down before you,\nSaying virtue and wisdom lit your way,\nStriking gold medals in your honor,\nGlad to have survived another day,\n\nDo not feel safe. The poet remembers.\nYou can kill one, but another is born.\nThe words are written down, the deed, the date.\n\nAnd you’d have done better with a winter dawn,\nA rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "translator": "Richard Lourie", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "location": "Washington, DC", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "you-whose-name": { - "title": "“You Whose Name”", - "body": "You whose name is aggressor and devourer.\nPutrid and sultry, in fermentation.\nYou mash into pulp sages and prophets,\nCriminals and heroes, indifferently.\nMy vocativus is useless.\nYou do not hear me, though I address you,\nYet I want to speak, for I am against you.\nSo what if you gulp me, I am not yours.\nYou overcome me with exhaustion and fever.\nYou blur my thought, which protests,\nYou roll over me, dull unconscious power.\nThe one who will overcome you is swift, armed:\nMind, spirit, maker, renewer.\nHe jousts with you in depths and on high,\nEquestrian, winged, lofty, silver-scaled.\nI have served him in the investiture of forms.\nIt’s not my concern what he will do with me.\n\nA retinue advances in the sunlight by the lakes.\nFrom white villages Easter bells resound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-milton": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Milton", - "birth": { - "year": 1608 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1674 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "at-a-solemn-music": { - "title": "“At a Solemn Music”", - "body": "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav’ns joy,\nSphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers,\nWed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ\nDead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce,\nAnd to our high-rais’d phantasie present,\nThat undisturbèd Song of pure content,\nAy sung before the saphire-colour’d throne\nTo him that sits theron\nWith Saintly shout, and solemn Jubily,\nWhere the bright Seraphim in burning row\nTheir loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,\nAnd the Cherubick host in thousand quires\nTouch their immortal Harps of golden wires,\nWith those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms,\nHymns devout and holy Psalms\nSinging everlastingly;\nThat we on Earth with undiscording voice\nMay rightly answer that melodious noise;\nAs once we did, till disproportion’d sin\nJarr’d against natures chime, and with harsh din\nBroke the fair musick that all creatures made\nTo their great Lord, whose love their motion sway’d\nIn perfect Diapason, whilst they stood\nIn first obedience, and their state of good.\nO may we soon again renew that Song\nAnd keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long\nTo his celestial consort us unite,\nTo live with him, and sing in endles morn of light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-soon-hath-time": { - "title": "“How Soon Hath Time”", - "body": "How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,\nStol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!\nMy hasting days fly on with full career,\nBut my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.\nPerhaps my semblance might deceive the truth\nThat I to manhood am arriv’d so near;\nAnd inward ripeness doth much less appear,\nThat some more timely-happy spirits endu’th.\nYet be it less or more, or soon or slow,\nIt shall be still in strictest measure ev’n\nTo that same lot, however mean or high,\nToward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n:\nAll is, if I have grace to use it so\nAs ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hymn": { - "title": "“The Hymn”", - "body": "# I.\n\n It was the winter wild,\n While the heaven-born child\n All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;\n Nature in awe to him\n Had doffed her gaudy trim,\n With her great Master so to sympathize.\n It was no season then for her\nTo wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.\n\n\n# II.\n\n Only with speeches fair\n She woos the gentle air\n To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,\n And on her naked shame,\n Pollute with sinful blame,\n The saintly veil of maiden-white to throw,\n Confounded, that her Maker’s eyes\nShould look so near upon her foul deformities.\n\n\n# III.\n\n But he, her fears to cease,\n Sent down the meek-eyed Peace;\n She, crowned with olive-green, came softly sliding\n Down through the turning sphere,\n His ready harbinger,\n With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing;\n And, waving wide her myrtle wand,\nShe strikes an universal peace through sea and land.\n\n\n# IV.\n\n No war or battle’s sound\n Was heard the world around;\n The idle spear and shield were high up hung;\n The hooked chariot stood,\n Unstained with hostile blood;\n The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;\n And kings sat still with awful eye,\nAs if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.\n\n\n# V.\n\n But peaceful was the night,\n Wherein the Prince of Light\n His reign of peace upon the earth began.\n The winds, with wonder whist,\n Smoothly the waters kissed,\n Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,\n Who now hath quite forgot to rave,\nWhile birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.\n\n\n# VI.\n\n The stars, with deep amaze,\n Stand fixed in steadfast gaze,\n Bending one way their precious influence,\n And will not take their flight,\n For all the morning-light,\n Or Lucifer that often warned them thence;\n But in their glimmering orbs did glow,\nUntil their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.\n\n\n# VII.\n\n And, though the shady gloom\n Had given day her room,\n The sun himself withheld his wonted speed;\n And hid his head for shame,\n As his inferior flame\n The new-enlightened world no more should need;\n He saw a greater sun appear\nThan his bright throne or burning axletree could bear.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\n The shepherds on the lawn,\n Or ere the point of dawn,\n Sat simply chatting in a rustic row;\n Full little thought they than\n That the mighty Pan\n Was kindly come to live with them below.\n Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,\nWas all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.\n\n\n# IX.\n\n When such music sweet\n Their hearts and ears did greet,\n As never was by mortal finger strook;\n Divinely-warbled voice\n Answering the stringed noise,\n As all their souls in blissful rapture took.\n The air, such pleasure loth to lose,\nWith thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.\n\n\n# X.\n\n Nature, that heard such sound,\n Beneath the hollow round\n Of Cynthia’s seat, the airy region thrilling,\n Now was almost won\n To think her part was done,\n And that her reign had here its last fulfilling.\n She knew such harmony alone\nCould hold all Heaven and Earth in happier union.\n\n\n# XI.\n\n At last surrounds their sight\n A globe of circular light,\n That with long beams the shame-faced Night arrayed.\n The helmed Cherubim,\n And sworded Seraphim,\n Are seen, in glittering ranks with wings displayed,\n Harping, in loud and solemn quire,\nWith unexpressive notes to Heaven’s new-born Heir.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nSuch music--as ’tis said--\nBefore was never made,\nBut when of old the Sons of Morning sung;\nWhile the Creator great\nHis constellations set,\nAnd the well-balanced World on hinges hung,\nAnd cast the dark foundations deep,\nAnd bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nRing out, ye crystal spheres!\nOnce bless our human ears,\n--If ye have power to touch our senses so--\nAnd let your silver-chime\nMove in melodious time,\nAnd let the base of heaven’s deep organ blow;\nAnd with your ninefold harmony\nMake up full consort to the angelic symphony.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nFor if such holy song\nEnwrap our fancy long,\nTime will run back, and fetch the Age of Gold;\nAnd speckled Vanity\nWill sicken soon and die,\nAnd leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould;\nAnd Hell itself will pass away,\nAnd leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.\n\n\n# XV.\n\nYea Truth and Justice then\nWill down return to men,\nOrbed in a rainbow, and like glories wearing;\nMercy will sit between,\nThroned in celestial sheen,\nWith radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;\nAnd Heaven, as at some festival,\nWill open wide the gates of her high palace-hall.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nBut wisest Fate says No,\nThis must not yet be so,\nThe Babe lies yet in smiling infancy,\nThat, on the bitter cross,\nMust redeem our loss;\nSo both himself and us to glorify:\nYet first, to those ychained in sleep,\nThe wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep.\n\n\n# XVII.\n\nWith such a horrid clang\nAs on Mount Sinai rang,\nWhile the red fire and smouldering clouds outbrake,\nThe aged earth aghast,\nWith terror of that blast,\nShall from the surface to the centre shake;\nWhen, at the world’s last session,\nThe dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\nAnd then at last our bliss\nFull and perfect is,\nBut now begins; for from this happy day\nThe Old Dragon under ground,\nIn straiter limits bound,\nNot half so far casts his usurped sway,\nAnd, wroth to see his kingdom fail,\nSwinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.\n\n\n# XIX.\n\nThe oracles are dumb,\nNo voice or hideous hum\nRuns through the arched roof in words deceiving.\nApollo from his shrine\nCan no more divine,\nWith hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.\nNo nightly trance, or breathed spell,\nInspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.\n\n\n# XX.\n\nThe lonely mountains o’er,\nAnd the resounding shore,\nA voice of weeping heard and loud lament;\nFrom haunted spring, and dale\nEdged with poplar pale,\nThe parting Genius is with sighing sent;\nWith flower-inwoven tresses torn\nThe Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.\n\n\n# XXI.\n\nIn consecrated earth,\nAnd on the holy hearth,\nThe Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;\nIn urns and altars round,\nA drear and dying sound\nAffrights the Flamens at their service quaint;\nAnd the chill marble seems to sweat,\nWhile each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.\n\n\n# XXII.\n\nPeor and Baälim\nForsake their temples dim,\nWith that twice battered god of Palestine;\nAnd mooned Ashtaroth,\nHeaven’s queen and mother both,\nNow sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine;\nThe Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;\nIn vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.\n\n\n# XXIII.\n\nAnd sullen Moloch, fled,\nHath left in shadows dread\nHis burning idol all of blackest hue;\nIn vain with cymbals’ ring\nThey call the grisly king,\nIn dismal dance about the furnace blue;\nThe brutish gods of Nile as fast,\nIsis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.\n\n\n# XXIV.\n\nNor is Osiris seen\nIn Memphian grove or green,\nTrampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud;\nNor can he be at rest\nWithin his sacred chest,\nNought but profoundest hell can be his shroud;\nIn vain, with timbrelled anthems dark,\nThe sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipped ark.\n\n\n# XXV.\n\nHe feels, from Juda’s land,\nThe dreaded Infant’s hand,\nThe rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;\nNor all the gods beside\nLonger dare abide,\nNor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine.\nOur Babe, to shew his Godhead true,\nCan in his swaddling-bands control the damned crew.\n\n\n# XXVI.\n\nSo when the sun in bed,\nCurtained with cloudy red,\nPillows his chin upon an orient wave,\nThe flocking shadows pale\nTroop to the infernal jail,\nEach fettered ghost slips to his several grave,\nAnd the yellow-skirted fayes\nFly after the Night steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze.\n\n\n# XXVII.\n\nBut see! the Virgin blest\nHath laid her Babe to rest,\nTime is our tedious song should here have ending;\nHeaven’s youngest-teemed star\nHath fixed her polished car,\nHer sleeping Lord with handmaid-lamp attending;\nAnd all about the courtly stable\nBright-harnessed angels sit in order serviceable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "lycidas": { - "title": "“Lycidas”", - "body": "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more\nYe myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,\nI come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,\nAnd with forc’d fingers rude\nShatter your leaves before the mellowing year.\nBitter constraint and sad occasion dear\nCompels me to disturb your season due;\nFor Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,\nYoung Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.\nWho would not sing for Lycidas? he knew\nHimself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.\nHe must not float upon his wat’ry bier\nUnwept, and welter to the parching wind,\nWithout the meed of some melodious tear.\n\nBegin then, Sisters of the sacred well\nThat from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;\nBegin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.\nHence with denial vain and coy excuse!\nSo may some gentle muse\nWith lucky words favour my destin’d urn,\nAnd as he passes turn\nAnd bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!\n\nFor we were nurs’d upon the self-same hill,\nFed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;\nTogether both, ere the high lawns appear’d\nUnder the opening eyelids of the morn,\nWe drove afield, and both together heard\nWhat time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,\nBatt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,\nOft till the star that rose at ev’ning bright\nToward heav’n’s descent had slop’d his westering wheel.\nMeanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,\nTemper’d to th’oaten flute;\nRough Satyrs danc’d, and Fauns with clov’n heel,\nFrom the glad sound would not be absent long;\nAnd old Damaetas lov’d to hear our song.\n\nBut O the heavy change now thou art gone,\nNow thou art gone, and never must return!\nThee, Shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,\nWith wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown,\nAnd all their echoes mourn.\nThe willows and the hazel copses green\nShall now no more be seen\nFanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.\nAs killing as the canker to the rose,\nOr taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,\nOr frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear\nWhen first the white thorn blows:\nSuch, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear.\n\nWhere were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep\nClos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?\nFor neither were ye playing on the steep\nWhere your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,\nNor on the shaggy top of Mona high,\nNor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.\nAy me! I fondly dream\nHad ye bin there’--for what could that have done?\nWhat could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,\nThe Muse herself, for her enchanting son,\nWhom universal nature did lament,\nWhen by the rout that made the hideous roar\nHis gory visage down the stream was sent,\nDown the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?\n\nAlas! what boots it with incessant care\nTo tend the homely, slighted shepherd’s trade,\nAnd strictly meditate the thankless Muse?\nWere it not better done, as others use,\nTo sport with Amaryllis in the shade,\nOr with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?\nFame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise\n(That last infirmity of noble mind)\nTo scorn delights and live laborious days;\nBut the fair guerdon when we hope to find,\nAnd think to burst out into sudden blaze,\nComes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,\nAnd slits the thin-spun life. “But not the praise,”\nPhoebus replied, and touch’d my trembling ears;\n“Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,\nNor in the glistering foil\nSet off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies,\nBut lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes\nAnd perfect witness of all-judging Jove;\nAs he pronounces lastly on each deed,\nOf so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed.”\n\nO fountain Arethuse, and thou honour’d flood,\nSmooth-sliding Mincius, crown’d with vocal reeds,\nThat strain I heard was of a higher mood.\nBut now my oat proceeds,\nAnd listens to the Herald of the Sea,\nThat came in Neptune’s plea.\nHe ask’d the waves, and ask’d the felon winds,\n“What hard mishap hath doom’d this gentle swain?”\nAnd question’d every gust of rugged wings\nThat blows from off each beaked promontory.\nThey knew not of his story;\nAnd sage Hippotades their answer brings,\nThat not a blast was from his dungeon stray’d;\nThe air was calm, and on the level brine\nSleek Panope with all her sisters play’d.\nIt was that fatal and perfidious bark,\nBuilt in th’eclipse, and rigg’d with curses dark,\nThat sunk so low that sacred head of thine.\n\nNext Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,\nHis mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,\nInwrought with figures dim, and on the edge\nLike to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.\n“Ah! who hath reft,” quoth he, “my dearest pledge?”\nLast came, and last did go,\nThe Pilot of the Galilean lake;\nTwo massy keys he bore of metals twain\n(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).\nHe shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake:\n“How well could I have spar’d for thee, young swain,\nEnow of such as for their bellies’ sake\nCreep and intrude, and climb into the fold?\nOf other care they little reck’ning make\nThan how to scramble at the shearers’ feast\nAnd shove away the worthy bidden guest.\nBlind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold\nA sheep-hook, or have learn’d aught else the least\nThat to the faithful herdman’s art belongs!\nWhat recks it them? What need they? They are sped;\nAnd when they list their lean and flashy songs\nGrate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,\nThe hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,\nBut, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,\nRot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;\nBesides what the grim wolf with privy paw\nDaily devours apace, and nothing said,\nBut that two-handed engine at the door\nStands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”\n\nReturn, Alpheus: the dread voice is past\nThat shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,\nAnd call the vales and bid them hither cast\nTheir bells and flow’rets of a thousand hues.\nYe valleys low, where the mild whispers use\nOf shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,\nOn whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,\nThrow hither all your quaint enamel’d eyes,\nThat on the green turf suck the honied showers\nAnd purple all the ground with vernal flowers.\nBring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,\nThe tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,\nThe white pink, and the pansy freak’d with jet,\nThe glowing violet,\nThe musk-rose, and the well attir’d woodbine,\nWith cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,\nAnd every flower that sad embroidery wears;\nBid amaranthus all his beauty shed,\nAnd daffadillies fill their cups with tears,\nTo strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.\nFor so to interpose a little ease,\nLet our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.\nAy me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas\nWash far away, where’er thy bones are hurl’d;\nWhether beyond the stormy Hebrides,\nWhere thou perhaps under the whelming tide\nVisit’st the bottom of the monstrous world,\nOr whether thou, to our moist vows denied,\nSleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old,\nWhere the great vision of the guarded mount\nLooks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold:\nLook homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth;\nAnd, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.\n\nWeep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,\nFor Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,\nSunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor;\nSo sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,\nAnd yet anon repairs his drooping head,\nAnd tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore\nFlames in the forehead of the morning sky:\nSo Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high\nThrough the dear might of him that walk’d the waves;\nWhere, other groves and other streams along,\nWith nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,\nAnd hears the unexpressive nuptial song,\nIn the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.\nThere entertain him all the Saints above,\nIn solemn troops, and sweet societies,\nThat sing, and singing in their glory move,\nAnd wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.\nNow, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:\nHenceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,\nIn thy large recompense, and shalt be good\nTo all that wander in that perilous flood.\n\nThus sang the uncouth swain to th’oaks and rills,\nWhile the still morn went out with sandals gray;\nHe touch’d the tender stops of various quills,\nWith eager thought warbling his Doric lay;\nAnd now the sun had stretch’d out all the hills,\nAnd now was dropp’d into the western bay;\nAt last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:\nTo-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lallegro": { - "title": "“L’allegro”", - "body": "Hence, loathed Melancholy!\nOf Cerberus and blackest Midnight born,\nIn Stygian cave forlorn,\n’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.\nFind out some uncouth cell,\nWhere brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,\nAnd the night-raven sings;\nThere, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks\nAs ragged as thy locks,\nIn dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.\nBut come, thou Goddess fair and free,\nIn Heaven yclept Euphrosynè,\nAnd by men, heart-easing Mirth;\nWhom lovely Venus, at a birth\nWith two sister Graces more,\nTo ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;\nOr whether, as some sager sing,\nThe frolic wind that breathes the spring,\nZephyr, with Aurora playing,\nAs he met her once a-maying,\nThere, on beds of violets blue,\nAnd fresh-blown roses washed in dew,\nFilled her with thee, a daughter fair,\nSo buxom, blithe, and debonair.\nHaste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee\nJest, and youthful Jollity,\nQuips, and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,\nNods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles--\nSuch as hang on Hebe’s cheek,\nAnd love to live in dimple sleek;\nSport, that wrinkled Care derides,\nAnd Laughter, holding both his sides:\nCome, and trip it as you go\nOn the light fantastic toe;\nAnd in thy right hand lead with thee\nThe mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty;\nAnd, if I give thee honour due,\nMirth, admit me of thy crew\nTo live with her and live with thee,\nIn unreproved pleasures free;\nTo hear the lark begin his flight,\nAnd singing startle the dull night\nFrom his watch-tower in the skies,\nTill the dappled dawn doth rise;\nThen to come, in spite of sorrow,\nAnd at my window bid good-morrow,\nThrough the sweet-briar, or the vine,\nOr the twisted eglantine;\nWhile the cock, with lively din,\nScatters the rear of darkness thin,\nAnd, to the stack or the barn-door,\nStoutly struts his dames before:\nOft listening how the hounds and horn\nCheerly rouse the slumbering Morn,\nFrom the side of some hoar hill,\nThrough the high wood echoing shrill.\nSometime walking, not unseen,\nBy hedgerow elms, on hillocks green,\nRight against the eastern gate,\nWhere the great Sun begins his state,\nRobed in flames and amber light,\nThe clouds in thousand liveries dight;\nWhile the ploughman, near at hand,\nWhistles o’er the furrowed land,\nAnd the milkmaid singeth blithe,\nAnd the mower whets his scythe,\nAnd every shepherd tells his tale,\nUnder the hawthorn in the dale.\nStraight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,\nWhilst the landscape round it measures;\nRusset lawns, and fallows gray,\nWhere the nibbling flocks do stray,\nMountains on whose barren breast\nThe labouring clouds do often rest,\nMeadows trim with daisies pied,\nShallow brooks, and rivers wide,\nTowers and battlements it sees,\nBosomed high in tufted trees,\nWhere perhaps some Beauty lies,\nThe Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.\nHard by a cottage-chimney smokes\nFrom betwixt two aged oaks,\nWhere Corydon and Thyrsis, met,\nAre at their savoury dinner set\nOf herbs and other country messes,\nWhich the neat-handed Phillis dresses;\nAnd then in haste her bower she leaves,\nWith Thestylis to bind the sheaves;\nOr, if the earlier season lead,\nTo the tanned haycock in the mead.\nSometimes, with secure delight,\nThe upland hamlets will invite,\nWhen the merry bells ring round,\nAnd the jocund rebecks sound,\nTo many a youth and many a maid,\nDancing in the chequered shade,\nAnd young and old come forth to play\nOn a sunshine holiday,\nTill the live-long daylight fail;\nThen to the spicy nut-brown ale,\nWith stories told of many a feat,\nHow faery Mab the junkets eat;\nShe was pinched and pulled, she said;\nAnd he, by Friar’s lantern led,\nTells how the drudging goblin sweat,\nTo earn his cream-bowl duly set,\nWhen in one night, ere glimpse of morn,\nHis shadowy flail hath threshed the corn\nThat ten day-labourers could not end;\nThen lies him down, the lubber-fiend,\nAnd, stretched out all the chimney’s length,\nBasks at the fire his hairy strength,\nAnd crop-full out of doors he flings,\nEre the first cock his matin rings.\nThus done the tales, to bed they creep,\nBy whispering winds soon lulled asleep.\nTowered cities please us then,\nAnd the busy hum of men,\nWhere throngs of knights and barons bold,\nIn weeds of peace, high triumphs hold,\nWith store of ladies, whose bright eyes\nRain influence, and judge the prize\nOf wit or arms, while both contend\nTo win her grace, whom all commend.\nThere let Hymen oft appear\nIn saffron robe, with taper clear,\nAnd pomp, and feast, and revelry,\nWith mask and antique pageantry;\nSuch sights as youthful poets dream,\nOn summer-eves by haunted stream.\nThen to the well-trod stage anon,\nIf Jonson’s learned sock be on,\nOr sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,\nWarble his native wood-notes wild.\nAnd ever, against eating cares,\nLap me in soft Lydian airs,\nMarried to immortal verse,\nSuch as the meeting soul may pierce,\nIn notes with many a winding bout\nOf linked sweetness long drawn out,\nWith wanton heed and giddy cunning\nThe melting voice through mazes running\nUntwisting all the chains that tie\nThe hidden soul of harmony;\nThat Orpheus’ self may heave his head,\nFrom golden slumber on a bed\nOf heaped Elysian flowers, and hear\nSuch strains as would have won the ear\nOf Pluto, to have quite set free\nHis half-regained Eurydicè.\nThese delights if thou canst give,\nMirth, with thee I mean to live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-his-blindness": { - "title": "“On His Blindness”", - "body": "When I consider how my light is spent\nEre half my days, in this dark world and wide,\nAnd that one talent, which is death to hide,\nLodged with me useless, though my soul more bent\nTo serve therewith my Maker, and present\nMy true account, lest He, returning, chide;\n“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”\nI fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent\nThat murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need\nEither man’s work or his own gifts. Who best\nBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state\nIs kingly. Thousands, at his bidding, speed\nAnd post o’er land and ocean, without rest;\nThey also serve who only stand and wait.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-late-massacre-in-piedmont": { - "title": "“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”", - "body": "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones\nLie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,\nEv’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,\nWhen all our fathers worshipp’d stocks and stones;\nForget not: in thy book record their groans\nWho were thy sheep and in their ancient fold\nSlain by the bloody Piemontese that roll’d\nMother with infant down the rocks. Their moans\nThe vales redoubl’d to the hills, and they\nTo Heav’n. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow\nO’er all th’ Italian fields where still doth sway\nThe triple tyrant; that from these may grow\nA hundred-fold, who having learnt thy way\nEarly may fly the Babylonian woe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-morning-of-christs-nativity": { - "title": "“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThis is the month, and this the happy morn,\nWherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King,\nOf wedded Maid and Virgin-Mother born,\nOur great redemption from above did bring;\nFor so the holy sages once did sing,\nThat he our deadly forfeit should release,\nAnd with his Father work us a perpetual peace.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThat glorious form, that light unsufferable,\nAnd that far-beaming blaze of majesty,\nWherewith he wont at Heaven’s high council-table\nTo sit the midst of Trinal Unity,\nHe laid aside; and, here with us to be,\nForsook the courts of everlasting day,\nAnd chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.\n\n\n# III.\n\nSay, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein\nAfford a present to the Infant God?\nHast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,\nTo welcome him to this his new abode,\nNow, while the heaven, by the Sun’s team untrod,\nHath took no print of the approaching light,\nAnd all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nSee how from far upon the eastern road\nThe star-led wizards haste with odours sweet!\nOh! run, prevent them with thy humble ode,\nAnd lay it lowly at his blessed feet;\nHave thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,\nAnd join thy voice unto the angel quire,\nFrom out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "when-i-consider-how-my-light-is-spent": { - "title": "“When I Consider How My Light is Spent”", - "body": "When I consider how my light is spent,\nEre half my days, in this dark world and wide,\nAnd that one Talent which is death to hide\nLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent\nTo serve therewith my Maker, and present\nMy true account, lest he returning chide;\n“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”\nI fondly ask. But patience, to prevent\nThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need\nEither man’s work or his own gifts; who best\nBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state\nIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed\nAnd post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:\nThey also serve who only stand and wait.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "mirabai": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mirabai", - "birth": { - "year": 1498, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1598, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "indian", - "language": "hindi", - "flag": "🇮🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabai", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "indian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "its-true-i-went-to-the-market": { - "title": "“It’s True I Went To The Market”", - "body": "My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.\nYou claim by night, I claim by day.\nActually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.\nYou say I gave too much; I say too little.\nActually, I put him on a scale before I bought him.\nWhat I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.\nMirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.\nBe with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hindi", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - } - } - }, - "gabriela-mistral": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gabriela Mistral", - "birth": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chilean", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇨🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriela_Mistral", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chilean" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "i-am-not-alone": { - "title": "“I Am Not Alone”", - "body": "The night, it is deserted\nfrom the mountains to the sea.\nBut I, the one who rocks you,\nI am not alone!\n\nThe sky, it is deserted\nfor the moon falls to the sea.\nBut I, the one who holds you,\nI am not alone!\n\nThe world, it is deserted.\nAll flesh is sad you see.\nBut I, the one who hugs you,\nI am not alone!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-sad-mother": { - "title": "“The Sad Mother”", - "body": "Sleep, sleep, my beloved,\nwithout worry, without fear,\nalthough my soul does not sleep,\nalthough I do not rest.\n\nSleep, sleep, and in the night\nmay your whispers be softer\nthan a leaf of grass,\nor the silken fleece of lambs.\n\nMay my flesh slumber in you,\nmy worry, my trembling.\nIn you, may my eyes close\nand my heart sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "song-of-death": { - "title": "“Song of Death”", - "body": "Old Woman Census-taker,\nDeath the Trickster,\nwhen you’re going along,\ndon’t you meet my baby.\n\nSniffing at newborns,\nsmelling for the milk,\nfind salt, find cornmeal,\ndon’t find my milk.\n\nAnti-Mother of the world,\nPeople-Collector--\non the beaches and byways,\ndon’t meet that child.\n\nThe name he was baptized,\nthat flower he grows with,\nforget it, Rememberer.\nLose it, Death.\n\nLet wind and salt and sand\ndrive you crazy, mix you up\nso you can’t tell\nEast from West,\n\nor mother from child,\nlike fish in the sea.\nAnd on the day, at the hour,\nfind only me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "those-who-do-not-dance": { - "title": "“Those Who Do Not Dance”", - "body": "A crippled child\nSaid, “How shall I dance?”\nLet your heart dance\nWe said.\n\nThen the invalid said:\n“How shall I sing?”\nLet your heart sing\nWe said\n\nThen spoke the poor dead thistle,\n“But I, how shall I dance?”\nLet your heart fly to the wind\nWe said.\n\nThen God spoke from above\n“How shall I descend from the blue?”\nCome dance for us here in the light\nWe said.\n\nAll the valley is dancing\nTogether under the sun,\nAnd the heart of him who joins us not\nIs turned to dust, to dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "to-see-him-again": { - "title": "“To See Him Again”", - "body": "Never, never again?\nNot on nights filled with quivering stars,\nor during dawn’s maiden brightness\nor afternoons of sacrifice?\n\nOr at the edge of a pale path\nthat encircles the farmlands,\nor upon the rim of a trembling fountain,\nwhitened by a shimmering moon?\n\nOr beneath the forest’s\nluxuriant, raveled tresses\nwhere, calling his name,\nI was overtaken by the night?\nNot in the grotto that returns\nthe echo of my cry?\n\nOh no. To see him again--\nit would not matter where--\nin heaven’s deadwater\nor inside the boiling vortex,\nunder serene moons or in bloodless fright!\n\nTo be with him …\nevery springtime and winter,\nunited in one anguished knot\naround his bloody neck!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - } - } - }, - "harriet-monroe": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Harriet Monroe", - "birth": { - "year": 1860 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Monroe", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-message-of-the-wind": { - "title": "“The Message Of The Wind”", - "body": "The wind comes riding down from heaven.\nHo! wind of heaven, what do you bring?\nCool for the dawn, dew for the even,\nAnd every sweetest thing.\nO wind of heaven, from pink clouds driven,\nWhat do you bring to me?\nThe low call of thy love who waits\nUnder the willow tree,\nWhose boat upon the water waits\nFor me, for thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "eugenio-montale": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Eugenio Montale", - "birth": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1981 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenio_Montale", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "at-last-with-a-gesture": { - "title": "“At last, with a gesture …”", - "body": "At last, with a gesture, the last shreds of your tobacco\nare extinguished in the glass\ndish; towards the ceiling\na slow spiral of smoke rises\nthat the bishops and knights on the chessboard\ngaze at stupefied; and new smoke-rings\nfollow, more mobile than the rings\non your fingers.\nThe mirage that freed towers\nand bridges in the sky is gone\nat the first breath; an unseen window\nopens and the smoke stirs. Down there\nanother herd moves; a storm\nof men who cannot comprehend your incense;\nthat of this board, of which you alone\ncan make sense.\nFor a time I doubted if even you perhaps\nwere ignorant of the game played out\non its squares, now a cloud at your door:\nthe madness of death is not eased at so slight\na cost; though the gleam in your eyes is subdued\nit demands other fires, as well as the dense\ncloud that the household gods foment\naround you, when they aid you.\nToday, I know what you want; the hoarse bell\nof the Martinella rings out and frightens\nthe ivory shapes with the spectral\nlight of snowfall. But he resists\nand wins the prize of the watchful solitary\nwho, with you, can pit those steely eyes\nof yours against the burning-glass\nthat blinds pawns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "between-the-thud-of-chestnuts": { - "title": "“Between the thud of chestnuts …”", - "body": "Between the thud of chestnuts\nand the roar of the torrent,\nwhose voices unite\nthe heart wavers.\nPrecocious winter that the north wind\nsets shaking. I advance\non the verge that the dawn\nof day dissolves in ice.\nMarbled, branched …\nand as one I shake down\nscrolled leaves, arrows\ninto the ditch.\nThe raw ultimate\npasses in the fog\nof its own breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "even-a-flying-feather-can-sketch": { - "title": "“Even a flying feather can sketch …”", - "body": "Even a flying feather can sketch\nyour figure, or a ray of light playing hide and seek\namong tables and chairs, the signal\nfrom a child’s mirror, or the rooftops. Round the circuit\nof walls trails of mist lengthen the spires\nof the poplars, and down below on its perch\nthe knife-grinder’s parrot ruffles its plumage. Then\nsultry night in the little squares, footsteps, and always\nthe toilsome effort to sink so as to rise again equal\nto centuries, moments, to nightmares that cannot\nrecover the light of your eyes in the incandescent\ncave--and still the same cries and the endless\nplaint on the veranda,\nif the sudden blow falls that reddens\nyour throat and breaks your wings, O perilous\nherald of dawn,\nand the cloisters and hospitals wake\nto a laceration of trumpets …", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "evil-ive-often-encountered-in-life": { - "title": "“Evil I’ve often encountered in life …”", - "body": "Evil I’ve often encountered in life;\nit was the strangled rivulet gurgling,\nit was the shrivelling of parched\nleaves, it was the horse falling heavily.\nGood I have not known; except the wonder\nthat reveals divine Indifference;\nit was the statue in the somnolence\nof noon, and the cloud, and the hawk flying high.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "happiness-is-achieved-for-you-walking": { - "title": "“Happiness is achieved for you, walking …”", - "body": "Happiness is achieved for you, walking\nthus, on the edge of a knife blade.\nTo our eyes you are a wavering gleam,\nafoot, tense ice that fractures;\nso who loves you most cannot touch you.\nIf you come upon spirits invaded\nwith sadness and brighten them, your morning\nis sweet and troubled like the nests on high.\nBut nothing compensates for the cry of the child\nwhose ball is in flight among the houses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1925 - } - } - }, - "i-free-your-brow-of-all-the-ice": { - "title": "“I free your brow of all the ice …”", - "body": "I free your brow of all the ice\nyou have gathered traversing the high\nclouds; your feathers lacerated\nby cyclones, you woke to lightning jolts.\n\nNoon: the medlar in the square extends\nits dark shadow, a cold sun hangs\nin the sky; and the other shadows lurking\nin the alley do not know you are here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-recall-your-smile": { - "title": "“I recall your smile …”", - "body": "I recall your smile, and for me it is limpid water\nwitnessed by chance among the stones of a riverbed.\nslight mirror in which you see an ivy and its inflorescence,\nand over all the embrace of a serene white sky.\nThis is my recollection; I cannot say, O distant one,\nif an ingenuous spirit is freely expressed in your face,\ntruly you are a wanderer whom the world’s ills exhaust,\nand who carry your suffering with you like a talisman.\nBut this I may say; that your thoughtful portrait\ndrowns anxious inspiration in a wave of calm;\nand your aspect insinuates itself in grey memory\npure as the crown of a youthful palm-tree …", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "maybe-one-morning-walking-in-dry-glassy-air": { - "title": "“Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air …”", - "body": "Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air,\nI’ll turn and see the miracle occur:\nnothing at my back, the void\nbehind me, with a drunkard’s terror.\n\nThen, as if on a screen, trees houses hills\nwill suddenly collect for the usual illusion.\nBut it will be too late, and I’ll walk on silent\namong the men who don’t look back, with my secret.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Jonathan Galassi" - } - }, - "this-that-glimmers-at-night": { - "title": "“This, that glimmers at night …”", - "body": "This, that glimmers at night\nin the shell of my mind\nmother-of-pearl snail-track,\nor ground glass powder,\nis not a lamp in some church or office,\ntended by clerical\nred, or black.\nI have only this rainbow glow\nto leave as testimony\nof a faith contested\nof a hope that burned more slowly\nthan an iron-hard log on the fire.\nKeep its face-powder in your compact,\nwhen with every light extinguished\nthe wild dance becomes infernal,\nand shadowy Lucifer lands on some prow\non the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine,\nbeating his bitumen wings half-\nlopped by fatigue, to tell you; this is the hour.\nIt’s not an heirloom, a lucky charm\nto withstand the force of the monsoon\nbeating on the spider-web of memory,\nbut a story can only survive as ashes,\nand persistence is only extinction.\nIt will be a sign, for certain; whoever sees it,\ncannot fail to find you there.\nEveryone knows their own: the pride was\nnot escape, the humility not\nmeanness, the tenuous spark struck\nthere no spurt of a spent match.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "to-rest-in-the-shade": { - "title": "“To rest in the shade …”", - "body": "To rest in the shade, pale and thoughtful,\nby a sun-hot garden wall\nlistening among thorns and brushwood\nto the cry of blackbirds, the hiss of snakes.\nIn cracks in the soil or amongst the vetch\nto spy on the files of red ants\nnow scattering now intertwining\nat the top of miniscule mountains.\nTo observe among the leaves the distant\nquivering scales of the sea,\nwhile the tremulous cries rise\nfrom cicadas on the naked hills.\nAnd walking in the dazzling sun\nto feel with a saddened wonder\nhow all of life and its travails\nis in this following a wall\ntopped by bright shards of glass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-bad-weathers-firecrackers": { - "title": "“The bad weather’s firecrackers …”", - "body": "The bad weather’s firecrackers\nwill become a murmur of hives in late evening.\nThere’s woodworm in the beams\nand an odour of melon oozes\nfrom the floor. The soft\nsmoke that ascends the valley\nof elves and mushrooms to the transparent cone\nof the summit fogs the windows,\nand I write to you from here, from this table,\nfrom this honeyed cell\nof a sphere hurled through space,\nand the covered cage, the grate\nwhere chestnuts explode, the veins\nof saltpetre and mould, are the frame\nfrom which I will burst. Life\nthat renders you legendary falls short\nif it contains you! The bright background\nreveals your icon. Outside it rains\nAnd you can follow the fragile architecture\nblackened by carbon and time,\nthe square courtyards with the deepest of wells\nat their centre; you can follow\nthe veiled flight of nocturnal\nbirds, and in the depths of the ravine the glow\nof the galaxy, that belt of every torment.\nBut the step that resonates in the darkness\nis of one who goes solitary and sees nothing\nexcept this descent of arches, shadows and angles.\nThe stars are embroidered too thinly,\nthe eye of the campanile shuts at two o’clock.\nthe vines too are an ascent\nof darkness and their scent bitter regret.\nReturn tomorrow, colder still, north wind,\nshatter the ancient fingers of sandstone,\nscatter the missals in the attics,\nand let all be slow tranquility, a domain, a prison\nof feeling without despair. Return more fiercely\nnorth wind that makes our chains dear to us,\nand seals up the seeds of the possible!\nThe streets are too narrow, the black donkeys\nthat jog along in files strike sparks,\nfrom the hidden peak magnesium flares reply …\n… has this Christian quarrel nothing\nbut words of shadow and lament\nto bring me? Less than whatever\nthe mill-race stole from you that inters\nsweetness in its closure of cement.\nA grindstone, an old trunk,\nthe world’s ultimate limits. A heap\nof straw is scattered: and woodworms emerge\nto link my wakefulness to your deep\nsleep that greets them, The porcupine\nsips at a thread of mercy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-baroque-convent": { - "title": "“The baroque convent …”", - "body": "The baroque convent\nof biscuit and foam\nhid a glimpse of sluggish water\nand tables already set, scattered here and there\nwith leaves and ginger.\nA swimmer emerged, dripping,\nin a cloud of midges,\nasked about our journey,\nspoke at length about his own, over the border.\n\nHe pointed to the bridge opposite, crossed\n(he informed us) with a single coin as toll.\n\nWith a wave of his hand, he sank,\nwas at one with the current …\nAnd into his place,\nfrom a shed, there leapt our herald,\na dachshund barking joyously,\nsole fraternal voice in the sticky heat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-form-of-the-carob-tree-that-looms": { - "title": "“The form of the carob tree that looms …”", - "body": "The form of the carob tree that looms\nnaked against the somnolent blue,\nthe sound of voices, the process\nof silver fingers over the doorsteps,\nthe feather that gets entangled, on the jetty\na trampling of feet that dies away,\nand the felucca already falling back in flight\nits abandoned sail in tatters.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-journey-ends-here": { - "title": "“The journey ends here …”", - "body": "The journey ends here:\nin the petty cares that divide\nthe spirit that no longer utters a cry.\nNow the minutes are equal and fixed\nlike the rhythm of the pump’s wheel.\nA rotation: a spouting of rumbling water.\nAnother: more water, sometimes a creak.\nThe journey ends on this beach\nthat slow regular tides attempt.\nThe sea reveals nothing but idle vapours\nthe vigorous murmurs of shells\nconceive; and rarely among the tranquil\nmutations of islands of migrating air\nCorsica’s ridge or Capri appears.\nYou ask if all things vanish\nin this little mist of memories;\nif in this torpid hour, or in the sigh\nof breakers every destiny completes.\nI would say to you, no; the hour\napproaches when you will pass beyond time;\nperhaps only those who so wish become infinite,\nand you may do so, who knows, not I.\nI think for most it may be no salvation,\nbut some subvert every design,\nmake every crossing, discover what they desire.\nFirst I would grant your crossing yourself,\nthat way of escape\nuncertain as foam or a wrinkle\nin the risen fields of the sea.\nI grant you my miserly hope as well.\nAt daylight, weary, I cannot increase it:\nmy offer as pledge of the fate you evade.\nThe path ends with the brave\nwhom the tide gnaws with its ebb and flow.\nYour heart close to me that hears me not\nalready sets sail perhaps for eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-repertoire-of-memory-is-worn": { - "title": "“The repertoire of memory is worn …”", - "body": "The repertoire of memory is worn: a leather suitcase\nthat has borne the labels from too many hotels.\nNow there remains some sticker I dare not\nunpeel. We must think of the porters,\nthe doorman at night, the taxi-drivers.\nThe repertoire of your memory\nhas shown me you yourself before you left.\nThere were names of various countries, dates\nand sojourns and at the end a blank white page,\nbut with rows of dots … as if to suggest,\nif it were possible: “to be continued”.\nThe repertoire of our memory cannot be imagined\nas cut in two thus by a knife. It’s a single sheet with traces\nof stamps, abrasions, and a few spots of blood,\nIt was no passport, not even a testimonial.\nTo be of service, even to hope, would have still meant life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - } - } - }, - "the-white-cloud-of-maddened-moths-swirls": { - "title": "“The white cloud of maddened moths swirls …”", - "body": "The white cloud of maddened moths swirls\nthickly round the pale lamps and over the parapets,\nspreading a sheet on the ground that crackles\nlike sugar underfoot; now imminent summer liberates\nthe ice of night trapped\nin the secret caves of the dead season,\nin the gardens that stretch from Maiano here to Arno’s shores.\nLately, on the Corso, an infernal messenger passed in flight\nthrough cheering admirers; a mystic gulf, open\nand decked with crosses, took and swallowed the bait;\nthe shops are shuttered, poor\nand harmless though even those are armed\nwith cannon and toys of war,\nthe butcher has locked his grille, who wreathed\nthe heads of dead goats with berries,\nthe ritual of mild executioners who still do not realise blood\nhas been transmuted into the foul tangle of crushed wings\nof insects on the embankments, and water continues\nto gnaw the banks, and no one is innocent.\nAll for nothing then?--And the Roman candles,\non Saint John’s Day, that slowly bleached\nthe horizon, and the pledges and long goodbyes\nintense as a baptism in gloomy expectation\nof the horde (yet a comet scored the dripping air\non the ice and shores of your coasts,\nthe angels Tobias saw, the seven, the future\narriving) and the sunflower born\nfrom your hands--all burned and desiccated\nin this pollen that shrills like fire\nwith the sharpness of icy sleet …\nOh, the wounded\nspring is still festive though frozen\nin death, this death! Your fate, Clizia,\nis still cherished above, you\nwho preserve a love unaltered though altered\npure in what the blind sun might bring you,\ndazed by the Highest, and destroyed\nin Him, for all. Perhaps the sirens, the tolling bells,\nthat greeted the monsters in their stormy\nevening are already confounded\nwith a sound loosed from heaven, descending, in victory--\nwith the breath of a dawn that rises tomorrow\nfor all, white but without those dreadful\nwings, over the scorched shores of the south …", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_baptist" - } - } - } - } - }, - "marianne-moore": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Marianne Moore", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Moore", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 21 - }, - "poems": { - "baseball-and-writing": { - "title": "“Baseball and Writing”", - "body": "Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting\nand baseball is like writing.\nYou can never tell with either\nhow it will go\nor what you will do;\ngenerating excitement--\na fever in the victim--\npitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.\nVictim in what category?\nOwlman watching from the press box?\nTo whom does it apply?\nWho is excited?Might it be I?\n\nIt’s a pitcher’s battle all the way--a duel--\na catcher’s, as, with cruel\npuma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly\nback to plate.(His spring\nde-winged a bat swing.)\nThey have that killer instinct;\nyet Elston--whose catching\narm has hurt them all with the bat--\nwhen questioned, says, unenviously,\n“I’m very satisfied.We won.”\nShorn of the batting crown, says, “We”;\nrobbed by a technicality.\n\nWhen three players on a side play three positions\nand modify conditions,\nthe massive run need not be everything.\n“Going, going …” “Is\nit? Roger Maris\nhas it, running fast. You will\nnever see a finer catch.Well …”\n“Mickey, leaping like the devil”--why\ngild it, although deer sounds better--\nsnares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,\none-handing the souvenir-to-be\nmeant to be caught by you or me.\n\nAssign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;\nhe could handle any missile.\nHe is no feather. “Strike! … Strike two!”\nFouled back. A blur.\nIt’s gone. You would infer\nthat the bat had eyes.\nHe put the wood to that one.\nPraised, Skowron says, “Thanks, Mel.\nI think I helped a little bit.”\nAll business, each, and modesty.\nBlanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.\nIn that galaxy of nine, say which\nwon the pennant? Each. It was he.\n\nThose two magnificent saves from the knee-throws\nby Boyer, finesses in twos--\nlike Whitey’s three kinds of pitch and pre-\ndiagnosis\nwith pick-off psychosis.\nPitching is a large subject.\nYour arm, too true at first, can learn to\ncatch your corners--even trouble\nMickey Mantle.(“Grazed a Yankee!\nMy baby pitcher, Montejo!”\nWith some pedagogy,\nyou’ll be tough, premature prodigy.)\n\nThey crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.Trying\nindeed!The secret implying:\n“I can stand here, bat held steady.”\nOne may suit him;\nnone has hit him.\nImponderables smite him.\nMuscle kinks, infections, spike wounds\nrequire food, rest, respite from ruffians.(Drat it!\nCelebrity costs privacy!)\nCow’s milk, “tiger’s milk,” soy milk, carrot juice,\nbrewer’s yeast (high-potency--\nconcentrates presage victory)\n\nsped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--\ndeadly in a pinch.And “Yes,\nit’s work; I want you to bear down,\nbut enjoy it\nwhile you’re doing it.”\nMr. Houk and Mr. Sain,\nif you have a rummage sale,\ndon’t sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.\nStudded with stars in belt and crown,\nthe Stadium is an adastrium.\nO flashing Orion,\nyour stars are muscled like the lion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "critics-and-connoisseurs": { - "title": "“Critics and Connoisseurs”", - "body": "There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious\nfastidiousness. Certain Ming\nproducts, imperial floor coverings of coach-\nwheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something\nthat I like better--a\nmere childish attempt to make an imperfectly bal-\nlasted animal stand up,\nsimilar determination to make a pup\neat his meat from the plate.\n\nI remember a swan under the willows of Oxford,\nwith flamingo-colored, maple-\nleaflike feet. It reconnoitered like a battle-\nship. Disbelief and conscious fastidiousness were\ningredients in its\ndisinclination to move. Finally its hardihood was\nnot proof against its\nproclivity to more fully appreciate such bits\nof food as the stream\n\nbore counter to it; it made away with what I gave it\nto eat. I have seen this swan and\nI have seen you; I have seen ambition without\nunderstanding it in a variety of forms. Happening to stand\nby an ant-hill, I have\nseen a fastidious ant carrying a stick north, south,\neast, west, till it turned on\nitself, struck out from the flower bed into the lawn,\nand returned to the point\n\nFrom which it had started. Then abandoning the stick as\nuseless and overtaxing its\njaws with a particle of whitewash--pill-like but\nheavy--it again went throught the same course of procedure.\nWhat is\nthere in being able\nto say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of\nself-defense;\nin proving that one has had the experience\nof carrying a stick?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fish": { - "title": "“The Fish”", - "body": "wade\nthrough black jade.\nOf the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps\nadjusting the ash-heaps;\nopening and shutting itself like\n\nan\ninjured fan.\nThe barnacles which encrust the side\nof the wave, cannot hide\nthere for the submerged shafts of the\n\nsun,\nsplit like spun\nglass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness\ninto the crevices--\nin and out, illuminating\n\nthe\nturquoise sea\nof bodies. The water drives a wedge\nof iron through the iron edge\nof the cliff; whereupon the stars,\n\npink\nrice-grains, ink-\nbespattered jelly fish, crabs like green\nlilies, and submarine\ntoadstools, slide each on the other.\n\nAll\nexternal\nmarks of abuse are present on this\ndefiant edifice--\nall the physical features of\n\nac-\ncident--lack\nof cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and\nhatchet strokes, these things stand\nout on it; the chasm-side is\n\ndead.\nRepeated\nevidence has proved that it can live\non what can not revive\nits youth. The sea grows old in it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "george-moore": { - "title": "“George Moore”", - "body": "In speaking of ‘aspiration,’\nFrom the recesses of a pen more dolorous than blackness itself,\nWere you presenting us with one more form of imperturbable\nFrench drollery,\nOr was it self directed banter?\nHabitual ennui\nTook from you, your invisible, hot helmet of anaemia--\nWhile you were filling your “little glass” from the decanter\nOf a transparent-murky, would-be-truthful “hobohemia”--\nAnd then facetiously\nWent off with it? Your soul’s supplanter,\nThe spirit of good narrative, flatters you, convinced that in reporting briefly\nOne choice incident, you have known beauty other than that of stys, on\nWhich to fix your admiration.\n\n_So far as the future is concerned,\n“Shall not one say, with the Russian philosopher,\n‘How is one to know what one doesn’t know?’”\nSo far as the present is concerned,_\n\nIf external action is effete\nAnd rhyme is outmoded,\nI shall revert to you,\nHabakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded\nInto doing, by XY, who was speaking of unrhymed verse.\nThis man said--I think that I repeat\nHis identical words:\n“Hebrew poetry is\nProse with a sort of heightened consciousness. ‘Ecstacy affords\nThe occasion and expediency determines the form.’”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-graveyard": { - "title": "“A Graveyard”", - "body": "Man looking into the sea,\ntaking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to yourself,\nit is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,\nbut you cannot stand in the middle of this;\nthe sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.\nThe firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top,\nreserved as their contours, saying nothing;\nrepression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;\nthe sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.\nThere are others besides you who have worn that look--\nwhose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them\nfor their bones have not lasted:\nmen lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,\nand row quickly away--the blades of the oars\nmoving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death.\nThe wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--beautiful under networks of foam,\nand fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;\nthe birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore--\nthe tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them;\nand the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys,\nadvances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink--\nin which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-grave": { - "title": "“A Grave”", - "body": "Man looking into the sea,\ntaking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to it yourself,\nit is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,\nbut you cannot stand in the middle of this;\nthe sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.\nThe firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey--foot at the top,\nreserved as their contours, saying nothing;\nrepression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;\nthe sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.\nThere are others besides you who have worn that look--\nwhose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them\nfor their bones have not lasted:\nmen lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,\nand row quickly away-the blades of the oars\nmoving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death.\nThe wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--\nbeautiful under networks of foam,\nand fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;\nthe birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore--\nthe tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them;\nand the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell-bouys,\nadvances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink--\nin which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-made-this-screen": { - "title": "“He Made This Screen”", - "body": "not of silver nor of coral,\nbut of weatherbeaten laurel.\n\nHere, he introduced a sea\nuniform like tapestry;\n\nhere, a fig-tree; there, a face;\nthere, a dragon circling space--\n\ndesignating here, a bower;\nthere, a pointed passion-flower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-digesteth-harde-yron": { - "title": "“He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’”", - "body": "Although the aepyornis\nor roc that lived in Madagascar, and\nthe moa are extinct,\nthe camel-sparrow, linked\nwith them in size--the large sparrow\nXenophon saw walking by a stream--was and is\na symbol of justice.\n\nThis bird watches his chicks with\na maternal concentration-and he’s\nbeen mothering the eggs\nat night six weeks--his legs\ntheir only weapon of defense.\nHe is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard\nas a hoof; the leopard\n\nis not more suspicious.How\ncould he, prized for plumes and eggs and young\nused even as a riding-beast, respect men\nhiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand\nmaking the neck move as if alive\nand from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches\n\nmight be decoyed and killed!Yes, this is he\nwhose plume was anciently\nthe plume of justice; he\nwhose comic duckling head on its\ngreat neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness\nwhen he stands guard,\n\nin S-like foragings as he is\npreening the down on his leaden-skinned back.\nThe egg piously shown\nas Leda’s very own\nfrom which Castor and Pollux hatched,\nwas an ostrich-egg.And what could have been more fit\nfor the Chinese lawn it\n\ngrazed on as a gift to an\nemperor who admired strange birds, than this\none, who builds his mud-made\nnest in dust yet will wade\nin lake or sea till only the head shows.\n\nSix hundred ostrich-brains served\nat one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent\nand desert spear, jewel-\ngorgeous ugly egg-shell\ngoblets, eight pairs of ostriches\nin harness, dramatize a meaning\nalways missed by the externalist.\n\nThe power of the visible\nis the invisible; as even where\nno tree of freedom grows,\nso-called brute courage knows.\nHeroism is exhausting, yet\nit contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare\nthe harmless solitaire\n\nor great auk in its grandeur;\nunsolicitude having swallowed up\nall giant birds but an alert gargantuan\nlittle-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird.\nThis one remaining rebel\nis the sparrow-camel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-jelly-fish": { - "title": "“A Jelly-Fish”", - "body": "Visible, invisible,\nA fluctuating charm,\nAn amber-colored amethyst\nInhabits it; your arm\nApproaches, and\nIt opens and\nIt closes;\nYou have meant\nTo catch it,\nAnd it shrivels;\nYou abandon\nYour intent--\nIt opens, and it\nCloses and you\nReach for it--\nThe blue\nSurrounding it\nGrows cloudy, and\nIt floats away\nFrom you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "marriage": { - "title": "“Marriage”", - "body": "This institution,\nperhaps one should say enterprise\nout of respect for which\none says one need not change one’s mind\nabout a thing one has believed in,\nrequiring public promises\nof one’s intention\nto fulfill a private obligation:\nI wonder what Adam and Eve\nthink of it by this time,\nthis firegilt steel\nalive with goldenness;\nhow bright it shows--\n“of circular traditions and impostures,\ncommitting many spoils,”\nrequiring all one’s criminal ingenuity\nto avoid!\nPsychology which explains everything\nexplains nothing\nand we are still in doubt.\nEve: beautiful woman--\nI have seen her\nwhen she was so handsome\nshe gave me a start,\nable to write simultaneously\nin three languages--\nEnglish, German and French\nand talk in the meantime;\nequally positive in demanding a commotion\nand in stipulating quiet:\n“I should like to be alone;”\nto which the visitor replies,\n“I should like to be alone;\nwhy not be alone together?”\nBelow the incandescent stars\nbelow the incandescent fruit,\nthe strange experience of beauty;\nits existence is too much;\nit tears one to pieces\nand each fresh wave of consciousness\nis poison.\n“See her, see her in this common world,”\nthe central flaw\nin that first crystal-fine experiment,\nthis amalgamation which can never be more\nthan an interesting possibility,\ndescribing it\nas “that strange paradise\nunlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings,\nthe choicest piece of my life:\nthe heart rising\nin its estate of peace\nas a boat rises\nwith the rising of the water;”\nconstrained in speaking of the serpent--\nthat shed snakeskin in the history of politeness\nnot to be returned to again--\nthat invaluable accident\nexonerating Adam.\nAnd he has beauty also;\nit’s distressing--the O thou\nto whom, from whom,\nwithout whom nothing--Adam;\n“something feline,\nsomething colubrine”--how true!\na crouching mythological monster\nin that Persian miniature of emerald mines,\nraw silk--ivory white, snow white,\noyster white and six others--\nthat paddock full of leopards and giraffes--\nlong lemonyellow bodies\nsown with trapezoids of blue.\nAlive with words,\nvibrating like a cymbal\ntouched before it has been struck,\nhe has prophesied correctly--\nthe industrious waterfall,\n“the speedy stream\nwhich violently bears all before it,\nat one time silent as the air\nand now as powerful as the wind.”\n“Treading chasms\non the uncertain footing of a spear,”\nforgetting that there is in woman\na quality of mind\nwhich is an instinctive manifestation\nis unsafe,\nhe goes on speaking\nin a formal, customary strain\nof ‘past states’, the present state,\nseals, promises,\nthe evil one suffered,\nthe good one enjoys,\nhell, heaven,\neverything convenient\nto promote one’s joy.\nThere is in him a state of mind\nby force of which,\nperceiving what it was not\nintended that he should,\n“he experiences a solemn joy\nin seeing that he has become an idol.”\nPlagued by the nightingale\nin the new leaves,\nwith its silence--\nnot its silence but its silences,\nhe says of it:\n“It clothes me with a shirt of fire.”\n“He dares not clap his hands\nto make it go on\nlest it should fly off;\nif he does nothing, it will sleep;\nif he cries out, it will not understand.”\nUnnerved by the nightingale\nand dazzled by the apple,\nimpelled by “the illusion of a fire\neffectual to extinguish fire,”\ncompared with which\nthe shining of the earth\nis but deformity--a fire\n“as high as deep as bright as broad\nas long as life itself,”\nhe stumbles over marriage,\n“a very trivial object indeed”\nto have destroyed the attitude\nin which he stood--\nthe ease of the philosopher\nunfathered by a woman.\nUnhelpful Hymen!\n“a kind of overgrown cupid”\nreduced to insignificance\nby the mechanical advertising\nparading as involuntary comment,\nby that experiment of Adam’s\nwith ways out but no way in--\nthe ritual of marriage,\naugmenting all its lavishness;\nits fiddle-head ferns,\nlotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries,\nits hippopotamus--\nnose and mouth combined\nin one magnificent hopper,\n“the crested screamer--\nthat huge bird almost a lizard,”\nits snake and the potent apple.\nHe tells us\nthat “for love\nthat will gaze an eagle blind,\nthat is like a Hercules\nclimbing the trees\nin the garden of the Hesperides,\nfrom forty-five to seventy\nis the best age,”\ncommending it\nas a fine art, as an experiment,\na duty or as merely recreation.\nOne must not call him ruffian\nnor friction a calamity--\nthe fight to be affectionate:\n“no truth can be fully known\nuntil it has been tried\nby the tooth of disputation.”\nThe blue panther with black eyes,\nthe basalt panther with blue eyes,\nentirely graceful--\none must give them the path--\nthe black obsidian Diana\nwho “darkeneth her countenance\nas a bear doth,\ncausing her husband to sigh,”\nthe spiked hand\nthat has an affection for one\nand proves it to the bone,\nimpatient to assure you\nthat impatience is the mark of independence\nnot of bondage.\n“Married people often look that way”--\n“seldom and cold, up and down,\nmixed and malarial\nwith a good day and bad.”\n“When do we feed?”\nWe occidentals are so unemotional,\nwe quarrel as we feed;\none’s self is quite lost,\nthe irony preserved\nin “the Ahasuerus tête à tête banquet”\nwith its “good monster, lead the way,”\nwith little laughter\nand munificence of humor\nin that quixotic atmosphere of frankness\nin which “Four o’clock does not exist\nbut at five o’clock\nthe ladies in their imperious humility\nare ready to receive you”;\nin which experience attests\nthat men have power\nand sometimes one is made to feel it.\nHe says, “what monarch would not blush\nto have a wife\nwith hair like a shaving-brush?\nThe fact of woman\nis not ‘the sound of the flute\nbut every poison.’”\nShe says, “‘Men are monopolists\nof stars, garters, buttons\nand other shining baubles’--\nunfit to be the guardians\nof another person’s happiness.”\nHe says, “These mummies\nmust be handled carefully--\n‘the crumbs from a lion’s meal,\na couple of shins and the bit of an ear’;\nturn to the letter M\nand you will find\nthat ‘a wife is a coffin,’\nthat severe object\nwith the pleasing geometry\nstipulating space and not people,\nrefusing to be buried\nand uniquely disappointing,\nrevengefully wrought in the attitude\nof an adoring child\nto a distinguished parent.”\nShe says, “This butterfly,\nthis waterfly, this nomad\nthat has ‘proposed\nto settle on my hand for life.’--\nWhat can one do with it?\nThere must have been more time\nin Shakespeare’s day\nto sit and watch a play.\nYou know so many artists are fools.”\nHe says, “You know so many fools\nwho are not artists.”\nThe fact forgot\nthat “some have merely rights\nwhile some have obligations,”\nhe loves himself so much,\nhe can permit himself\nno rival in that love.\nShe loves herself so much,\nshe cannot see herself enough--\na statuette of ivory on ivory,\nthe logical last touch\nto an expansive splendor\nearned as wages for work done:\none is not rich but poor\nwhen one can always seem so right.\nWhat can one do for them--\nthese savages\ncondemned to disaffect\nall those who are not visionaries\nalert to undertake the silly task\nof making people noble?\nThis model of petrine fidelity\nwho “leaves her peaceful husband\nonly because she has seen enough of him”--\nthat orator reminding you,\n“I am yours to command.”\n“Everything to do with love is mystery;\nit is more than a day’s work\nto investigate this science.”\nOne sees that it is rare--\nthat striking grasp of opposites\nopposed each to the other, not to unity,\nwhich in cycloid inclusiveness\nhas dwarfed the demonstration\nof Columbus with the egg--\na triumph of simplicity--\nthat charitive Euroclydon\nof frightening disinterestedness\nwhich the world hates,\nadmitting:\n\n“I am such a cow,\nif I had a sorrow,\nI should feel it a long time;\nI am not one of those\nwho have a great sorrow\nin the morning\nand a great joy at noon;”\nwhich says: “I have encountered it\namong those unpretentious\nprotegès of wisdom,\nwhere seeming to parade\nas the debater and the Roman,\nthe statesmanship\nof an archaic Daniel Webster\npersists to their simplicity of temper\nas the essence of the matter:\n\n‘Liberty and union\nnow and forever;’\n\nthe book on the writing-table;\nthe hand in the breast-pocket.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mind-is-an-enchanting-thing": { - "title": "“The Mind is an Enchanting Thing”", - "body": "is an enchanted thing\nlike the glaze on a\nkatydid-wing\nsubdivided by sun\ntill the nettings are legion.\nLike Gieseking playing Scarlatti;\n\nlike the apteryx-awl\nas a beak, or the\nkiwi’s rain-shawl\nof haired feathers, the mind\nfeeling its way as though blind,\nwalks along with its eyes on the ground.\n\nIt has memory’s ear\nthat can hear without\nhaving to hear.\nLike the gyroscope’s fall,\ntruly unequivocal\nbecause trued by regnant certainty,\n\nit is a power of\nstrong enchantment. It\nis like the dove-\nneck animated by\nsun; it is memory’s eye;\nit’s conscientious inconsistency.\n\nIt tears off the veil, tears\nthe temptation, the\nmist the heart wears,\nfrom its eyes--if the heart\nhas a face; it takes apart\ndejection. It’s fire in the dove-neck’s\n\niridescence; in the\ninconsistencies\nof Scarlatti.\nUnconfusion submits\nits confusion to proof; it’s\nnot a Herod’s oath that cannot change.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nevertheless": { - "title": "“Nevertheless”", - "body": "you’ve seen a strawberry\nthat’s had a struggle; yet\nwas, where the fragments met,\n\na hedgehog or a star-\nfish for the multitude\nof seeds. What better food\n\nthan apple seeds--the fruit\nwithin the fruit--locked in\nlike counter-curved twin\n\nhazelnuts? Frost that kills\nthe little rubber-plant-\nleaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can’t\n\nharm the roots; they still grow\nin frozen ground. Once where\nthere was a prickley-pear--\n\nleaf clinging to a barbed wire,\na root shot down to grow\nin earth two feet below;\n\nas carrots from mandrakes\nor a ram’s-horn root some-\ntimes. Victory won’t come\n\nto me unless I go\nto it; a grape tendril\nties a knot in knots till\n\nknotted thirty times--so\nthe bound twig that’s under-\ngone and over-gone, can’t stir.\n\nThe weak overcomes its\nmenace, the strong over-\ncomes itself. What is there\n\nlike fortitude! What sap\nwent through that little thread\nto make the cherry red!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "no-swan-so-fine": { - "title": "“No Swan so Fine”", - "body": "“No water so still as the\ndead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,\nwith swart blind look askance\nand gondoliering legs, so fine\nas the chinz china one with fawn-\nbrown eyes and toothed gold\ncollar on to show whose bird it was.\n\nLodged in the Louis Fifteenth\ncandelabrum-tree of cockscomb-\ntinted buttons, dahlias,\nsea-urchins, and everlastings,\nit perches on the branching foam\nof polished sculptured\nflowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-pangolin": { - "title": "“The Pangolin”", - "body": "Another armored animal--scale\n lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they\nform the uninterrupted central\n tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard,\nthe night miniature artist engineer is,\n yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica--\n impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.\n Armor seems extra. But for him,\n the closing ear-ridge--\n or bare ear lacking even this small\n eminence and similarly safe\n\ncontracting nose and eye apertures\n impenetrably closable, are not; a true ant-eater,\nnot cockroach eater, who endures\n exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night,\nreturning before sunrise, stepping in the moonlight,\n on the moonlight peculiarly, that the outside\n edges of his hands may bear the weight and save the claws\n for digging. Serpentined about\n the tree, he draws\n away from danger unpugnaciously,\n with no sound but a harmless hiss; keeping\n\nthe fragile grace of the Thomas-\n of-Leighton Buzzard Westminster Abbey wrought-iron vine, or\nrolls himself into a ball that has\n power to defy all effort to unroll it; strongly intailed, neat\nhead for core, on neck not breaking off, with curled-in-feet.\n Nevertheless he has sting-proof scales; and nest\n of rocks closed with earth from inside, which can thus darken.\n Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast\n each with a splendor\n which man in all his vileness cannot\n set aside; each with an excellence!\n\n“Fearfull yet to be feared,” the armored\n ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but\nengulfs what he can, the flattened sword-\n edged leafpoints on the tail and artichoke set leg- and body-plates\nquivering violently when it retaliates\n and swarms on him. Compact like the furled fringed frill\n on the hat-brim of Gargallo’s hollow iron head of a\n matador, he will drop and will\n then walk away\n unhurt, although if unintruded on,\n he cautiously works down the tree, helped\n\nby his tail. The giant-pangolin-\n tail, graceful tool, as a prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like\nan elephant’s trunkwith special skin,\n is not lost on this ant- and stone-swallowing uninjurable\n artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable\n whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done\n so. Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between\n dusk and day they have not unchain-like machine-like\n form and frictionless creep of a thing\n made graceful by adversities, con-\n\nversities. To explain grace requires\n a curious hand. If that which is at all were not forever,\nwhy would those who graced the spires\n with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious\n low stone seats--a monk and monk and monk--between the thus\n ingenious roof supports, have slaved to confuse\n grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt,\n the cure for sins, a graceful use\n of what are yet\n approved stone mullions branching out across\n the perpendiculars? A sailboat\n\nwas the first machine. Pangolins, made\n for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,\non four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,\n with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving\n to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having,\n needing to choose wisely how to use his strength;\n a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs,\n like the ant; spidering a length\n of web from bluffs\n above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked\n like the pangolin; capsizing in\n\ndisheartenment. Bedizened or stark\n naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing-\nmasters to this world, griffons a dark\n “Like does not like like that is abnoxious”; and writes error with four\n r’s. Among animals, one has sense of humor.\n Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Unignorant,\n modest and unemotional, and all emotion,\n he has everlasting vigor,\n power to grow,\n though there are few creatures who can make one\n breathe faster and make one erecter.\n Not afraid of anything is he,\n and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle\nat every step. Consistent with the\n formula--warm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairs--\n that\n is a mammal; there he sits on his own habitat,\n serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always\n curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly\n done,\n says to the alternating blaze,\n “Again the sun!\n anew each day; and new and new and new,\n that comes into and steadies my soul.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peter": { - "title": "“Peter”", - "body": "Strong and slippery,\nbuilt for the midnight grass-party\nconfronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away--\nthe detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding\nto the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds\nor katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units\nin each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth\nto droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills.\nHe lets himself be flattened out by gravity,\nas seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun,\ncompelled when extended, to lie stationary.\nSleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as well as one can for oneself,\nsleep--epitome of what is to him the end of life.\nDemonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick\non the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake.\nOne need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head\nand alligator-eyes are not party to the joke.\nLifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel\nor set up on the forearm like a mouse;\nhis eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s width,\nare flickeringly exhibited, then covered up.\nMay be? I should have said might have been;\nwhen he has been got the better of in a dream--\nas in a fight with nature or with cats, we all know it.\nProfound sleep is not with him a fixed illusion.\nSpringing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries\nwhen taken in hand, he is himself again;\nto sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair\nwould be unprofitable--human. What is the good of hypocrisy?\nit is permissible to choose one’s employment,\nto abandon the nail, or roly-poly,\nwhen it shows signs of being no longer a pleasure,\nto score the nearby magazine with a double line of strokes.\nHe can talk but insolently says nothing. What of it?\nWhen one is frank, one’s very presence is a compliment.\nIt is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness,\nthat he does not regard the published fact as a surrender.\nAs for the disposition invariably to affront,\nan animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them.\nThe eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident.\nTo leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue.\nTo tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way\nin your perturbation--this is life;\nto do less would be nothing but dishonesty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "rosemary": { - "title": "“Rosemary”", - "body": "Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary--\nVenus and Love, her son, to speak plainly--\nborn of the sea supposedly,\nat Christmas each, in company,\nbraids a garland of festivity.\nNot always rosemary--\n\nsince the flight to Egypt, blooming indifferently.\nWith lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,\nits flowers--white originally--\nturned blue. The herb of memory,\nimitating the blue robe of Mary,\nis not too legendary\n\nto flower both as symbol and as pungency.\nSpringing from stones beside the sea,\nthe height of Christ when he was thirty-three,\nit feeds on dew and to the bee\n“hath a dumb language”; is in reality\na kind of Christmas tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "silence": { - "title": "“Silence”", - "body": "My father used to say,\n“Superior people never make long visits,\nhave to be shown Longfellow’s grave\nnor the glass flowers at Harvard.\nSelf reliant like the cat--\nthat takes its prey to privacy,\nthe mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth--\nthey sometimes enjoy solitude,\nand can be robbed of speech\nby speech which has delighted them.\nThe deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;\nnot in silence, but restraint.”\nNor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”\nInns are not residences.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spensers-ireland": { - "title": "“Spenser’s Ireland”", - "body": "has not altered;--\na place as kind as it is green,\nthe greenest place I’ve never seen.\nEvery name is a tune.\nDenunciations do not affect\nthe culprit; nor blows, but it\nis torture to him to not be spoken to.\nThey’re natural,--\nthe coat, like Venus’\nmantle lined with stars,\nbuttoned close at the neck,--the sleeves new from disuse.\n\nIf in Ireland\nthey play the harp backward at need,\nand gather at midday the seed\nof the fern, eluding\ntheir “giants all covered with iron,” might\nthere be fern seed for unlearn-\ning obduracy and for reinstating\nthe enchantment?\nHindered characters\nseldom have mothers\nin Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.\n\nIt was Irish;\na match not a marriage was made\nwhen my great great grandmother’d said\nwith native genius for\ndisunion, “Although your suitor be\nperfection, one objection\nis enough; he is not\nIrish.” Outwitting\nthe fairies, befriending the furies,\nwhoever again\nand again says, “I’ll never give in,” never sees\n\nthat you’re not free\nuntil you’ve been made captive by\nsupreme belief,--credulity\nyou say?When large dainty\nfingers tremblingly divide the wings\nof the fly for mid-July\nwith a needle and wrap it with peacock-tail,\nor tie wool and\nbuzzard’s wing, their pride,\nlike the enchanter’s\nis in care, not madness.Concurring hands divide\n\nflax for damask\nthat when bleached by Irish weather\nhas the silvered chamois-leather\nwater-tightness of a\nskin.Twisted torcs and gold new-moon-shaped\nlunulae aren’t jewelry\nlike the purple-coral fuchsia-tree’s.Eire--\nthe guillemot\nso neat and the hen\nof the heath and the\nlinnet spinet-sweet-bespeak relentlessness?Then\n\nthey are to me\nlike enchanted Earl Gerald who\nchanged himself into a stag, to\na great green-eyed cat of\nthe mountain.Discommodity makes\nthem invisible; they’ve dis-\nappeared.The Irish say your trouble is their\ntrouble and your\njoy their joy?I wish\nI could believe it;\nI am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-steeple-jack": { - "title": "“The Steeple-Jack”", - "body": "Dürer would have seen a reason for living\nin a town like this, with eight stranded whales\nto look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house\non a fine day, from water etched\nwith waves as formal as the scales\non a fish.\n\nOne by one in two’s and three’s, the seagulls keep\nflying back and forth over the town clock,\nor sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings--\nrising steadily with a slight\nquiver of the body--or flock\nmewing where\n\na sea the purple of the peacock’s neck is\npaled to greenish azure as Dürer changed\nthe pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea\ngray. You can see a twenty-five-\npound lobster; and fish nets arranged\nto dry. The\n\nwhirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt\nmarsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the\nstar on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so\nmuch confusion. Disguised by what\nmight seem the opposite, the sea-\nside flowers and\n\ntrees are favored by the fog so that you have\nthe tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine,\nfox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has\nspots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,\nor moon-vines trained on fishing-twine\nat the back door;\n\ncat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,\nstriped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies--\nyellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts--toad-plant,\npetunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue\nones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.\nThe climate\n\nis not right for the banyan, frangipani, or\njack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent\nlife. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;\nbut here they’ve cats, not cobras, to\nkeep down the rats. The diffident\nlittle newt\n\nwith white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-\nout bands lives here; yet there is nothing that\nambition can buy or take away. The college student\nnamed Ambrose sits on the hillside\nwith his not-native books and hat\nand sees boats\n\nat sea progress white and rigid as if in\na groove. Liking an elegance of which\nthe sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique\nsugar-bowl shaped summer-house of\ninterlacing slats, and the pitch\nof the church\n\nspire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets\ndown a rope as a spider spins a thread;\nhe might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a\nsign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack,\nin black and white; and one in red\nand white says\n\nDanger. The church portico has four fluted\ncolumns, each a single piece of stone, made\nmodester by white-wash. Theis would be a fit haven for\nwaifs, children, animals, prisoners,\nand presidents who have repaid\nsin-driven\n\nsenators by not thinking about them. The\nplace has a school-house, a post-office in a\nstore, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on\nthe stocks. The hero, the student,\nthe steeple-jack, each in his way,\nis at home.\n\nIt could not be dangerous to be living\nin a town like this, of simple people,\nwho have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church\nwhile he is gilding the solid-\npointed star, which on a steeple\nstands for hope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-chameleon": { - "title": "“To a Chameleon”", - "body": "Hid by the august foliage and fruit of the grape-vine\ntwine\nyour anatomy\nround the pruned and polished stem,\nChameleon.\nFire laid upon\nan emerald as long as\nthe Dark King’s massy\none,\ncould not snap the spectrum up for food as you have done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "to-a-steam-roller": { - "title": "“To a Steam Roller”", - "body": "The illustration\nis nothing to you without the application.\nYou lack half wit. You crush all the particles down\ninto close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them.\n\nSparkling chips of rock\nare crushed down to the level of the parent block.\nWere not ‘impersonal judgment in aesthetic\nmatters, a metaphysical impossibility,’ you\n\nmight fairly achieve\nIt. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive\nof one’s attending upon you, but to question\nthe congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "merrell-moore": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Merrell Moore", - "birth": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Moore", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "deaconing-is-an-honorable-persuasion": { - "title": "“Deaconing is an Honorable Persuasion”", - "body": "He was a cynic and he said to me,\n“I have never bought a basket of strawberries\nIn which the fruit got larger as you dug down.”\n\nWhereas old Gran chimed in, who was listening,\n“They called that deaconing where I came from,\nLeading the bigger ones up to the front\nAs a deacon does in church, with the congregation.”\n\nBut I suppose it is only natural\nTo put the bigger strawberries on top.\nIt’s the same idea that the people mean\nWho say: “It’s merely putting your best foot forward.”\n\nWhy should a farmer hide his larger berries\nUnder the small ones; it’s like Diamond Jim\nAnd what he said one time when someone said:\n“Mr. Brady tell me, why you wear all those diamonds?”\n\nAnd he replied (this may be apochryphal)\nFor he was said to be a plain blunt man:\n“Well, I notice that them as has ’em wears ’em.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fidelitas": { - "title": "“Fidelitas”", - "body": "I feel sure that inexorable laws\nControl events for which we know no cause.\n\nI am certain that infinite gain\nAccrues out of the suffering of pain.\n\nI believe that the road that has no end\nLeads to the mansion of a certain friend.\n\nI think that the last boundary of space\nIs only near a very radiant face.\n\nI am convinced that echoes of the word\nFill the silence when naught else is heard.\n\nDawn must be more than the herald light\nOf a golden orb, though inexpressibly bright.\n\nThe universe must cancel everything\nNot in dominion to the invisible king.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leave-the-telling-of-jokes": { - "title": "“Leave the Telling of Jokes”", - "body": "Leave the telling of jokes to the tellers of jokes,\nAnd tales of seduction to men whose lechery\nHas granted them more of virtue than yours has;\nAnd leave the lonely club-room and the smoke\nOf idle cigars to those who love to smell\nThe sulphur fumes that blow from out their hell.\n\nAnd come (I can show you the rock whereoff one fell\nWhose strong attractions made the masses weak,\nMasses who were strong, too strong to break\nApart at the tread of a god’s advancing foot,\nToo strong to relinquish grasp upon the root\nOf evil in their cities)--come with me\nTo where a sermon has becalmed the sea\nAnd listen with me to the dark emphatic rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-morris": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Morris", - "birth": { - "year": 1834 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "the-defence-of-guenevere": { - "title": "“The Defence of Guenevere”", - "body": "But, knowing now that they would have her speak,\nShe threw her wet hair backward from her brow,\nHer hand close to her mouth touching her cheek,\n\nAs though she had had there a shameful blow,\nAnd feeling it shameful to feel ought but shame\nAll through her heart, yet felt her cheek burned so,\n\nShe must a little touch it; like one lame\nShe walked away from Gauwaine, with her head\nStill lifted up; and on her cheek of flame\n\nThe tears dried quick; she stopped at last and said:\nO knights and lords, it seems but little skill\nTo talk of well-known things past now and dead.\n\nGod wot I ought to say, I have done ill,\nAnd pray you all forgiveness heartily!\nBecause you must be right, such great lords; still\n\nListen, suppose your time were come to die,\nAnd you were quite alone and very weak;\nYea, laid a dying while very mightily\n\nThe wind was ruffling up the narrow streak\nOf river through your broad lands running well:\nSuppose a hush should come, then some one speak:\n\n“One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,\nNow choose one cloth for ever; which they be,\nI will not tell you, you must somehow tell\n\nOf your own strength and mightiness; here, see!”\nYea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,\nAt foot of your familiar bed to see\n\nA great God’s angel standing, with such dyes,\nNot known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,\nHeld out two ways, light from the inner skies\n\nShowing him well, and making his commands\nSeem to be God’s commands, moreover, too,\nHolding within his hands the cloths on wands;\n\nAnd one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,\nWavy and long, and one cut short and red;\nNo man could tell the better of the two.\n\nAfter a shivering half-hour you said:\n“God help! heaven’s colour, the blue;” and he said, “hell”\nPerhaps you then would roll upon your bed,\n\nAnd cry to all good men that loved you well,\n“Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known”\nLauncelot went away, then I could tell,\n\nLike wisest man how all things would be, moan,\nAnd roll and hurt myself, and long to die,\nAnd yet fear much to die for what was sown.\n\nNevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie,\nWhatever may have happened through these years,\nGod knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.\n\nHer voice was low at first, being full of tears,\nBut as it cleared, it grew full loud and shrill,\nGrowing a windy shriek in all men’s ears,\n\nA ringing in their startled brains, until\nShe said that Gauwaine lied, then her voice sunk,\nAnd her great eyes began again to fill,\n\nThough still she stood right up, and never shrunk,\nBut spoke on bravely, glorious lady fair!\nWhatever tears her full lips may have drunk,\n\nShe stood, and seemed to think, and wrung her hair,\nSpoke out at last with no more trace of shame,\nWith passionate twisting of her body there:\n\nIt chanced upon a day that Launcelot came\nTo dwell at Arthur’s court: at Christmas-time\nThis happened; when the heralds sung his name,\n\nSon of King Ban of Benwick, seemed to chime\nAlong with all the bells that rang that day,\nO’er the white roofs, with little change of rhyme.\n\nChristmas and whitened winter passed away,\nAnd over me the April sunshine came,\nMade very awful with black hail-clouds, yea\n\nAnd in the Summer I grew white with flame,\nAnd bowed my head down: Autumn, and the sick\nSure knowledge things would never be the same,\n\nHowever often Spring might be most thick\nOf blossoms and buds, smote on me, and I grew\nCareless of most things, let the clock tick, tick,\n\nTo my unhappy pulse, that beat right through\nMy eager body; while I laughed out loud,\nAnd let my lips curl up at false or true,\n\nSeemed cold and shallow without any cloud.\nBehold my judges, then the cloths were brought;\nWhile I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd,\n\nBelonging to the time ere I was bought\nBy Arthur’s great name and his little love;\nMust I give up for ever then, I thought,\n\nThat which I deemed would ever round me move\nGlorifying all things; for a little word,\nScarce ever meant at all, must I now prove\n\nStone-cold for ever? Pray you, does the Lord\nWill that all folks should be quite happy and good?\nI love God now a little, if this cord\n\nWere broken, once for all what striving could\nMake me love anything in earth or heaven?\nSo day by day it grew, as if one should\n\nSlip slowly down some path worn smooth and even,\nDown to a cool sea on a summer day;\nYet still in slipping there was some small leaven\n\nOf stretched hands catching small stones by the way,\nUntil one surely reached the sea at last,\nAnd felt strange new joy as the worn head lay\n\nBack, with the hair like sea-weed; yea all past\nSweat of the forehead, dryness of the lips,\nWashed utterly out by the dear waves o’ercast,\n\nIn the lone sea, far off from any ships!\nDo I not know now of a day in Spring?\nNo minute of that wild day ever slips\n\nFrom out my memory; I hear thrushes sing,\nAnd wheresoever I may be, straightway\nThoughts of it all come up with most fresh sting:\n\nI was half mad with beauty on that day,\nAnd went without my ladies all alone,\nIn a quiet garden walled round every way;\n\nI was right joyful of that wall of stone,\nThat shut the flowers and trees up with the sky,\nAnd trebled all the beauty: to the bone,\n\nYea right through to my heart, grown very shy\nWith weary thoughts, it pierced, and made me glad;\nExceedingly glad, and I knew verily,\n\nA little thing just then had made me mad;\nI dared not think, as I was wont to do,\nSometimes, upon my beauty; If I had\n\nHeld out my long hand up against the blue,\nAnd, looking on the tenderly darken’d fingers,\nThought that by rights one ought to see quite through,\n\nThere, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers,\nRound by the edges; what should I have done,\nIf this had joined with yellow spotted singers,\n\nAnd startling green drawn upward by the sun?\nBut shouting, loosed out, see now! all my hair,\nAnd trancedly stood watching the west wind run\n\nWith faintest half-heard breathing sound; why there\nI lose my head e’en now in doing this;\nBut shortly listen: In that garden fair\n\nCame Launcelot walking; this is true, the kiss\nWherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,\nI scarce dare talk of the remember’d bliss,\n\nWhen both our mouths went wandering in one way,\nAnd aching sorely, met among the leaves;\nOur hands being left behind strained far away.\n\nNever within a yard of my bright sleeves\nHad Launcelot come before: and now, so nigh!\nAfter that day why is it Guenevere grieves?\n\nNevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie,\nWhatever happened on through all those years,\nGod knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.\n\nBeing such a lady could I weep these tears\nIf this were true? A great queen such as I\nHaving sinn’d this way, straight her conscience sears;\n\nAnd afterwards she liveth hatefully,\nSlaying and poisoning, certes never weeps:\nGauwaine be friends now, speak me lovingly.\n\nDo I not see how God’s dear pity creeps\nAll through your frame, and trembles in your mouth?\nRemember in what grave your mother sleeps,\n\nBuried in some place far down in the south,\nMen are forgetting as I speak to you;\nBy her head sever’d in that awful drouth\n\nOf pity that drew Agravaine’s fell blow,\nI pray your pity! let me not scream out\nFor ever after, when the shrill winds blow\n\nThrough half your castle-locks! let me not shout\nFor ever after in the winter night\nWhen you ride out alone! in battle-rout\n\nLet not my rusting tears make your sword light!\nAh! God of mercy, how he turns away!\nSo, ever must I dress me to the fight,\n\nSo: let God’s justice work! Gauwaine, I say,\nSee me hew down your proofs: yea all men know\nEven as you said how Mellyagraunce one day,\n\nOne bitter day in _la Fausse Garde_, for so\nAll good knights held it after, saw:\nYea, sirs, by cursed unknightly outrage; though\n\nYou, Gauwaine, held his word without a flaw,\nThis Mellyagraunce saw blood upon my bed:\nWhose blood then pray you? is there any law\n\nTo make a queen say why some spots of red\nLie on her coverlet? or will you say:\nYour hands are white, lady, as when you wed,\n\nWhere did you bleed? and must I stammer out, Nay,\nI blush indeed, fair lord, only to rend\nMy sleeve up to my shoulder, where there lay\n\nA knife-point last night: so must I defend\nThe honour of the Lady Guenevere?\nNot so, fair lords, even if the world should end\n\nThis very day, and you were judges here\nInstead of God. Did you see Mellyagraunce\nWhen Launcelot stood by him? what white fear\n\nCurdled his blood, and how his teeth did dance,\nHis side sink in? as my knight cried and said:\nSlayer of unarm’d men, here is a chance!\n\nSetter of traps, I pray you guard your head,\nBy God I am so glad to fight with you,\nStripper of ladies, that my hand feels lead\n\nFor driving weight; hurrah now! draw and do,\nFor all my wounds are moving in my breast,\nAnd I am getting mad with waiting so.\n\nHe struck his hands together o’er the beast,\nWho fell down flat, and grovell’d at his feet,\nAnd groan’d at being slain so young: At least,\n\nMy knight said, rise you, sir, who are so fleet\nAt catching ladies, half-arm’d will I fight,\nMy left side all uncovered! then I weet,\n\nUp sprang Sir Mellyagraunce with great delight\nUpon his knave’s face; not until just then\nDid I quite hate him, as I saw my knight\n\nAlong the lists look to my stake and pen\nWith such a joyous smile, it made me sigh\nFrom agony beneath my waist-chain, when\n\nThe fight began, and to me they drew nigh;\nEver Sir Launcelot kept him on the right,\nAnd traversed warily, and ever high\n\nAnd fast leapt caitiff’s sword, until my knight\nSudden threw up his sword to his left hand,\nCaught it, and swung it; that was all the fight,\n\nExcept a spout of blood on the hot land;\nFor it was hottest summer; and I know\nI wonder’d how the fire, while I should stand,\n\nAnd burn, against the heat, would quiver so,\nYards above my head; thus these matters went;\nWhich things were only warnings of the woe\n\nThat fell on me. Yet Mellyagraunce was shent,\nFor Mellyagraunce had fought against the Lord;\nTherefore, my lords, take heed lest you be blent\n\nWith all this wickedness; say no rash word\nAgainst me, being so beautiful; my eyes,\nWept all away to grey, may bring some sword\n\nTo drown you in your blood; see my breast rise,\nLike waves of purple sea, as here I stand;\nAnd how my arms are moved in wonderful wise,\n\nYea also at my full heart’s strong command,\nSee through my long throat how the words go up\nIn ripples to my mouth; how in my hand\n\nThe shadow lies like wine within a cup\nOf marvellously colour’d gold; yea now\nThis little wind is rising, look you up,\n\nAnd wonder how the light is falling so\nWithin my moving tresses: will you dare,\nWhen you have looked a little on my brow,\n\nTo say this thing is vile? or will you care\nFor any plausible lies of cunning woof,\nWhen you can see my face with no lie there\n\nFor ever? am I not a gracious proof:\nBut in your chamber Launcelot was found:\nIs there a good knight then would stand aloof,\n\nWhen a queen says with gentle queenly sound:\nO true as steel come now and talk with me,\nI love to see your step upon the ground\n\nUnwavering, also well I love to see\nThat gracious smile light up your face, and hear\nYour wonderful words, that all mean verily\n\nThe thing they seem to mean: good friend, so dear\nTo me in everything, come here to-night,\nOr else the hours will pass most dull and drear;\n\nIf you come not, I fear this time I might\nGet thinking over much of times gone by,\nWhen I was young, and green hope was in sight:\n\nFor no man cares now to know why I sigh;\nAnd no man comes to sing me pleasant songs,\nNor any brings me the sweet flowers that lie\n\nSo thick in the gardens; therefore one so longs\nTo see you, Launcelot; that we may be\nLike children once again, free from all wrongs\n\nJust for one night. Did he not come to me?\nWhat thing could keep true Launcelot away\nIf I said, Come? there was one less than three\n\nIn my quiet room that night, and we were gay;\nTill sudden I rose up, weak, pale, and sick,\nBecause a bawling broke our dream up, yea\n\nI looked at Launcelot’s face and could not speak,\nFor he looked helpless too, for a little while;\nThen I remember how I tried to shriek,\n\nAnd could not, but fell down; from tile to tile\nThe stones they threw up rattled o’er my head\nAnd made me dizzier; till within a while\n\nMy maids were all about me, and my head\nOn Launcelot’s breast was being soothed away\nFrom its white chattering, until Launcelot said:\n\nBy God! I will not tell you more to-day,\nJudge any way you will: what matters it?\nYou know quite well the story of that fray,\n\nHow Launcelot still’d their bawling, the mad fit\nThat caught up Gauwaine: all, all, verily,\nBut just that which would save me; these things flit.\n\nNevertheless you, O Sir Gauwaine, lie,\nWhatever may have happen’d these long years,\nGod knows I speak truth, saying that you lie!\n\nAll I have said is truth, by Christ’s dear tears.\nShe would not speak another word, but stood\nTurn’d sideways; listening, like a man who hears\n\nHis brother’s trumpet sounding through the wood\nOf his foes’ lances. She lean’d eagerly,\nAnd gave a slight spring sometimes, as she could\n\nAt last hear something really; joyfully\nHer cheek grew crimson, as the headlong speed\nOf the roan charger drew all men to see,\nThe knight who came was Launcelot at good need.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-haystack-in-the-floods": { - "title": "“The Haystack in the Floods”", - "body": "Had she come all the way for this,\nTo part at last without a kiss?\nYea, had she borne the dirt and rain\nThat her own eyes might see him slain\nBeside the haystack in the floods?\n\nAlong the dripping leafless woods,\nThe stirrup touching either shoe,\nShe rode astride as troopers do;\nWith kirtle kilted to her knee,\nTo which the mud splash’d wretchedly;\nAnd the wet dripp’d from every tree\nUpon her head and heavy hair,\nAnd on her eyelids broad and fair;\nThe tears and rain ran down her face.\nBy fits and starts they rode apace,\nAnd very often was his place\nFar off from her; he had to ride\nAhead, to see what might betide\nWhen the roads cross’d; and sometimes, when\nThere rose a murmuring from his men,\nHad to turn back with promises.\nAh me! she had but little ease;\nAnd often for pure doubt and dread\nShe sobb’d, made giddy in the head\nBy the swift riding; while, for cold,\nHer slender fingers scarce could hold\nThe wet reins; yea, and scarcely, too,\nShe felt the foot within her shoe\nAgainst the stirrup: all for this,\nTo part at last without a kiss\nBeside the haystack in the floods.\n\nFor when they near’d that old soak’d hay,\nThey saw across the only way\nThat Judas, Godmar, and the three\nRed running lions dismally\nGrinn’d from his pennon, under which\nIn one straight line along the ditch,\nThey counted thirty heads.\n\n So then,\nWhile Robert turn’d round to his men,\nShe saw at once the wretched end,\nAnd, stooping down, tried hard to rend\nHer coif the wrong way from her head,\nAnd hid her eyes; while Robert said:\nNay, love, ’tis scarcely two to one,\nAt Poictiers where we made them run\nSo fast: why, sweet my love, good cheer,\nThe Gascon frontier is so near,\nNought after this.\n\n But: O! she said,\nMy God! my God! I have to tread\nThe long way back without you; then\nThe court at Paris; those six men;\nThe gratings of the Chatelet;\nThe swift Seine on some rainy day\nLike this, and people standing by,\nAnd laughing, while my weak hands try\nTo recollect how strong men swim.\nAll this, or else a life with him,\nFor which I should be damned at last,\nWould God that this next hour were past!\n\nHe answer’d not, but cried his cry,\nSt. George for Marny! cheerily;\nAnd laid his hand upon her rein.\nAlas! no man of all his train\nGave back that cheery cry again;\nAnd, while for rage his thumb beat fast\nUpon his sword-hilt, some one cast\nAbout his neck a kerchief long,\nAnd bound him.\n\n Then they went along\nTo Godmar; who said: Now, Jehane,\nYour lover’s life is on the wane\nSo fast, that, if this very hour\nYou yield not as my paramour,\nHe will not see the rain leave off:\nNay, keep your tongue from gibe and scoff\nSir Robert, or I slay you now.\n\nShe laid her hand upon her brow,\nThen gazed upon the palm, as though\nShe thought her forehead bled, and: No!\nShe said, and turn’d her head away,\nAs there were nothing else to say,\nAnd everything were settled: red\nGrew Godmar’s face from chin to head:\nJehane, on yonder hill there stands\nMy castle, guarding well my lands;\nWhat hinders me from taking you,\nAnd doing that I list to do\nTo your fair wilful body, while\nYour knight lies dead?\n\n A wicked smile\nWrinkled her face, her lips grew thin,\nA long way out she thrust her chin:\nYou know that I should strangle you\nWhile you were sleeping; or bite through\nYour throat, by God’s help: ah! she said,\nLord Jesus, pity your poor maid!\nFor in such wise they hem me in,\nI cannot choose but sin and sin,\nWhatever happens: yet I think\nThey could not make me eat or drink,\nAnd so should I just reach my rest.\nNay, if you do not my behest,\nO Jehane! though I love you well,\nSaid Godmar, would I fail to tell\nAll that I know? Foul lies, she said.\nEh? lies, my Jehane? by God’s head,\nAt Paris folks would deem them true!\nDo you know, Jehane, they cry for you:\nJehane the brown! Jehane the brown!\nGive us Jehane to burn or drown!\nEh! gag me Robert! Sweet my friend,\nThis were indeed a piteous end\nFor those long fingers, and long feet,\nAnd long neck, and smooth shoulders sweet;\nAn end that few men would forget\nThat saw it. So, an hour yet:\nConsider, Jehane, which to take\nOf life or death!\n\n So, scarce awake,\nDismounting, did she leave that place,\nAnd totter some yards: with her face\nTurn’d upward to the sky she lay,\nHer head on a wet heap of hay,\nAnd fell asleep: and while she slept,\nAnd did not dream, the minutes crept\nRound to the twelve again; but she,\nBeing waked at last, sigh’d quietly,\nAnd strangely childlike came, and said:\nI will not. Straightway Godmar’s head,\nAs though it hung on strong wires, turn’d\nMost sharply round, and his face burn’d.\n\nFor Robert, both his eyes were dry,\nHe could not weep, but gloomily\nHe seem’d to watch the rain; yea, too,\nHis lips were firm; he tried once more\nTo touch her lips; she reached out, sore\nAnd vain desire so tortured them,\nThe poor grey lips, and now the hem\nOf his sleeve brush’d them.\n\n With a start\nUp Godmar rose, thrust them apart;\nFrom Robert’s throat he loosed the bands\nOf silk and mail; with empty hands\nHeld out, she stood and gazed, and saw,\nThe long bright blade without a flaw\nGlide out from Godmar’s sheath, his hand\nIn Robert’s hair; she saw him bend\nBack Robert’s head; she saw him send\nThe thin steel down; the blow told well,\nRight backward the knight Robert fell,\nAnd moaned as dogs do, being half dead,\nUnwitting, as I deem: so then\nGodmar turn’d grinning to his men,\nWho ran, some five or six, and beat\nHis head to pieces at their feet.\n\nThen Godmar turn’d again and said:\nSo, Jehane, the first fitte is read!\nTake note, my lady, that your way\nLies backward to the Chatelet!\nShe shook her head and gazed awhile\nAt her cold hands with a rueful smile,\nAs though this thing had made her mad.\n\nThis was the parting that they had\nBeside the haystack in the floods.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "loves-gleaning-tide": { - "title": "“Love’s Gleaning-Tide”", - "body": "Draw not away thy hands, my love,\nWith wind alone the branches move,\nAnd though the leaves be scant above\nThe Autumn shall not shame us.\n\nSay; Let the world wax cold and drear,\nWhat is the worst of all the year\nBut life, and what can hurt us, dear,\nOr death, and who shall blame us?\n\nAh, when the summer comes again\nHow shall we say, we sowed in vain?\nThe root was joy, the stem was pain,\nThe ear a nameless blending.\n\nThe root is dead and gone, my love,\nThe stem’s a rod our truth to prove;\nThe ear is stored for nought to move\nTill heaven and earth have ending.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "loves-reward": { - "title": "“Love’s Reward”", - "body": "It was a knight of the southern land\nRode forth upon the way\nWhen the birds sang sweet on either hand\nAbout the middle of the May.\n\nBut when he came to the lily-close,\nThereby so fair a maiden stood,\nThat neither the lily nor the rose\nSeemed any longer fair nor good.\n\n“All hail, thou rose and lily-bough!\nWhat dost thou weeping here,\nFor the days of May are sweet enow,\nAnd the nights of May are dear?”\n\n“Well may I weep and make my moan.\nWho am bond and captive here;\nWell may I weep who lie alone,\nThough May be waxen dear.”\n\n“And is there none shall ransom thee?\nMayst thou no borrow find?”\n“Nay, what man may my borrow be,\nWhen all my wealth is left behind?”\n\n“Perchance some ring is left with thee,\nSome belt that did thy body bind?”\n“Nay, no man may my borrow be,\nMy rings and belt are left behind.”\n\n“The shoes that the May-blooms kissed on thee\nMight yet be things to some men’s mind.”\n“Nay, no man may my borrow be,\nMy golden shoes are left behind.”\n\n“The milk-white sark that covered thee\nA dear-bought token some should find.”\n“Nay, no man may my borrow be,\nMy silken sark is left behind.”\n\n“The kiss of thy mouth and the love of thee\nBetter than world’s wealth should I find.”\n“Nay, thou mayst not my borrow be,\nFor all my love is left behind.”\n\n“A year agone come Midsummer-night\nI woke by the Northern sea;\nI lay and dreamed of my delight\nTill love no more would let me be.”\n\n“Seaward I went by night and cloud\nTo hear the white swans sing;\nBut though they sang both clear and loud,\nI hearkened a sweeter thing.”\n\n“O sweet and sweet as none may tell\nWas the speech so close ’twixt lip and lip:\nBut fast, unseen, the black oars fell\nThat drave to shore the rover’s ship.”\n\n“My love lay bloody on the strand\nEre stars were waxen wan:\nNaught lacketh graves the Northern land\nIf to-day it lack a lovelier man.”\n\n“I sat and wept beside the mast\nWhen the stars were gone away.\nNaught lacketh the Northland joy gone past\nIf it lack the night and day.”\n\n“Is there no place in any land\nWhere thou wouldst rather be than here?”\n“Yea, a lone grave on a cold sea-strand\nMy heart for a little holdeth dear.”\n\n“Of all the deeds that women do\nIs there none shall bring thee some delight?”\n“To lie down and die where lay we two\nUpon Midsummer night.”\n\n“I will bring thee there where thou wouldst be,\nA borrow shalt thou find.”\n“Wherewith shall I reward it thee\nFor wealth and good-hap left behind?”\n\n“A kiss from lips that love not me,\nA good-night somewhat kind;\nA narrow house to share with thee\nWhen we leave the world behind.”\n\nThey have taken ship and sailed away\nAcross the Southland main;\nThey have sailed by hills were green and gay,\nA land of goods and gain.\n\nThey have sailed by sea-cliffs stark and white\nAnd hillsides fair enow;\nThey have sailed by lands of little night\nWhere great the groves did grow.\n\nThey have sailed by islands in the sea\nThat the clouds lay thick about;\nAnd into a main where few ships be\nAmidst of dread and doubt.\n\nWith broken mast and battered side\nThey drave amidst the tempest’s heart;\nBut why should death to these betide\nWhom love did hold so well apart?\n\nThe flood it drave them toward the strand,\nThe ebb it drew them fro;\nThe swallowing seas that tore the land\nCast them ashore and let them go.\n\n“Is this the land? is this the land,\nWhere life and I must part a-twain?”\n“Yea, this is e’en the sea-washed strand\nThat made me yoke-fellow of pain.”\n\n“The strand is this, the sea is this,\nThe grey bent and the mountains grey;\nBut no mound here his grave-mound is;\nWhere have they borne my love away?”\n\n“What man is this with shield and spear\nComes riding down the bent to us?\nA goodly man forsooth he were\nBut for his visage piteous.”\n\n“Ghost of my love, so kind of yore,\nArt thou not somewhat gladder grown\nTo feel my feet upon this shore?\nO love, thou shalt not long be lone.”\n\n“Ghost of my love, each day I come\nTo see where God first wrought us wrong:\nNow kind thou com’st to call me home.\nBe sure I shall not tarry long.”\n\n“Come here, my love; come here for rest,\nSo sore as my body longs for thee!\nMy heart shall beat against thy breast,\nAs arms of thine shall comfort me.”\n\n“Love, let thy lips depart no more\nFrom those same eyes they once did kiss,\nThe very bosom wounded sore\nWhen sorrow clave the heart of bliss!”\n\nO was it day, or was it night,\nAs there they told their love again?\nThe high-tide of the sun’s delight,\nOr whirl of wind and drift of rain?\n\n“Speak sweet, my love, of how it fell,\nAnd how thou cam’st across the sea,\nAnd what kind heart hath served thee well,\nAnd who thy borrow there might be?”\n\nNaught but the wind and sea made moan\nAs hastily she turned her round;\nFrom light clouds wept the morn alone,\nNot the dead corpse upon the ground.\n\n“O look, my love, for here is he\nWho once of all the world was kind,\nAnd led my sad heart o’er the sea!\nAnd now must he be left behind.”\n\nShe kissed his lips that yet did smile,\nShe kissed his eyes that were not sad:\n“O thou who sorrow didst beguile,\nAnd now wouldst have me wholly glad!”\n\n“A little gift is this,” she said,\n“Thou once hadst deemed great gift enow;\nYet surely shalt thou rest thine head\nWhere I one day shall lie alow.”\n\n“There shalt thou wake to think of me,\nAnd by thy face my face shall find;\nAnd I shall then thy borrow be\nWhen all the world is left behind.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "meeting-in-winter": { - "title": "“Meeting in Winter”", - "body": "Winter in the world it is,\nRound about the unhoped kiss\nWhose dream I long have sorrowed o’er;\nRound about the longing sore,\nThat the touch of thee shall turn\nInto joy too deep to burn.\n\nRound thine eyes and round thy mouth\nPasseth no murmur of the south,\nWhen my lips a little while\nLeave thy quivering tender smile,\nAs we twain, hand holding hand,\nOnce again together stand.\n\nSweet is that, as all is sweet;\nFor the white drift shalt thou meet,\nKind and cold-cheeked and mine own,\nWrapped about with deep-furred gown\nIn the broad-wheeled chariot:\nThen the north shall spare us not;\nThe wide-reaching waste of snow\nWilder, lonelier yet shall grow\nAs the reddened sun falls down.\nBut the warders of the town,\nWhen they flash the torches out\nO’er the snow amid their doubt,\nAnd their eyes at last behold\nThy red-litten hair of gold;\nShall they open, or in fear\nCry, “Alas! what cometh here?\nWhence hath come this Heavenly One\nTo tell of all the world undone?”\n\nThey shall open, and we shall see\nThe long street litten scantily\nBy the long stream of light before\nThe guest-hall’s half-open door;\nAnd our horses’ bells shall cease\nAs we reach the place of peace;\nThou shalt tremble, as at last\nThe worn threshold is o’er-past,\nAnd the fire-light blindeth thee:\nTrembling shalt thou cling to me\nAs the sleepy merchants stare\nAt thy cold hands slim and fair\nThy soft eyes and happy lips\nWorth all lading of their ships.\n\nO my love, how sweet and sweet\nThat first kissing of thy feet,\nWhen the fire is sunk alow,\nAnd the hall made empty now\nGroweth solemn, dim and vast!\nO my love, the night shall last\nLonger than men tell thereof\nLaden with our lonely love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "our-hands-have-met": { - "title": "“Our Hands Have Met”", - "body": "Our hands have met, our lips have met\nOur souls--who knows when the wind blows\nHow light souls drift mid longings set,\nIf thou forget’st, can I forget\nThe time that was not long ago?\n\nThou wert not silent then, but told\nSweet secrets dear--I drew so near\nThy shamefaced cheeks grown overbold,\nThat scarce thine eyes might I behold!\nAh was it then so long ago!\n\nTrembled my lips and thou wouldst turn\nBut hadst no heart to draw apart,\nBeneath my lips thy cheek did burn--\nYet no rebuke that I might learn;\nYea kind looks still, not long ago.\n\nWilt thou be glad upon the day\nWhen unto me this love shall be\nAn idle fancy passed away,\nAnd we shall meet and smile and say\n“O wasted sighs of long ago!”\n\nWilt thou rejoice that thou hast set\nCold words, dull shows ’twixt hearts drawn close,\nThat cold at heart I live on yet,\nForgetting still that I forget\nThe priceless days of long ago?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-dawn": { - "title": "“Summer Dawn”", - "body": "Pray but one prayer for me ’twixt thy closed lips,\nThink but one thought of me up in the stars.\nThe summer night waneth, the morning light slips,\nFaint and grey ’twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars,\nThat are patiently waiting there for the dawn:\nPatient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold\nWaits to float through them along with the sun.\nFar out in the meadows, above the young corn,\nThe heavy elms wait, and restless and cold\nThe uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;\nThrough the long twilight they pray for the dawn,\nRound the lone house in the midst of the corn.\nSpeak but one word to me over the corn,\nOver the tender, bow’d locks of the corn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "edwin-muir": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edwin Muir", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Muir", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 44 - }, - "poems": { - "abraham": { - "title": "“Abraham”", - "body": "The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham\nThrough waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture\nLed his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks\nWith the meandering art of wavering water\nThat seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.\nHe came, rested and prospered, and went on,\nScattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,\nAnd over each one its own particular sky,\nNot the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,\nThat went with him but when he rested changed.\nHis mind was full of names\nLearned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,\nAnd all that was theirs one day he would inherit.\nHe died content and full of years, though still\nThe Promise had not come, and left his bones,\nFar from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-castle": { - "title": "“The Castle”", - "body": "All through that summer at ease we lay,\nAnd daily from the turret wall\nWe watched the mowers in the hay\nAnd the enemy half a mile away\nThey seemed no threat to us at all.\n\nFor what, we thought, had we to fear\nWith our arms and provender, load on load,\nOur towering battlements, tier on tier,\nAnd friendly allies drawing near\nOn every leafy summer road.\n\nOur gates were strong, our walls were thick,\nSo smooth and high, no man could win\nA foothold there, no clever trick\nCould take us, have us dead or quick.\nOnly a bird could have got in.\n\nWhat could they offer us for bait?\nOur captain was brave and we were true …\nThere was a little private gate,\nA little wicked wicket gate.\nThe wizened warder let them through.\n\nOh then our maze of tunneled stone\nGrew thin and treacherous as air.\nThe cause was lost without a groan,\nThe famous citadel overthrown,\nAnd all its secret galleries bare.\n\nHow can this shameful tale be told?\nI will maintain until my death\nWe could do nothing, being sold;\nOur only enemy was gold,\nAnd we had no arms to fight it with.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-combat": { - "title": "“The Combat”", - "body": "It was not meant for human eyes,\nThat combat on the shabby patch\nOf clods and trampled turf that lies\nSomewhere beneath the sodden skies\nFor eye of toad or adder to catch.\n\nAnd having seen it I accuse\nThe crested animal in his pride,\nArrayed in all the royal hues\nWhich hide the claws he well can use\nTo tear the heart out of the side.\n\nBody of leopard, eagle’s head\nAnd whetted beak, and lion’s mane,\nAnd frost-grey hedge of feathers spread\nBehind--he seemed of all things bred.\nI shall not see his like again.\n\nAs for his enemy there came in\nA soft round beast as brown as clay;\nAll rent and patched his wretched skin;\nA battered bag he might have been,\nSome old used thing to throw away.\n\nYet he awaited face to face\nThe furious beast and the swift attack.\nSoon over and done. That was no place\nOr time for chivalry or for grace.\nThe fury had him on his back.\n\nAnd two small paws like hands flew out\nTo right and left as the trees stood by.\nOne would have said beyond a doubt\nThat was the very end of the bout,\nBut that the creature would not die.\n\nFor ere the death-stroke he was gone,\nWrithed, whirled, into his den,\nSafe somehow there. The fight was done,\nAnd he had lost who had all but won.\nBut oh his deadly fury then.\n\nA while the place lay blank, forlorn,\nDrowsing as in relief from pain.\nThe cricket chirped, the grating thorn\nStirred, and a little sound was born.\nThe champions took their posts again.\n\nAnd all began. The stealthy paw\nSlashed out and in. Could nothing save\nThese rags and tatters from the claw?\nNothing. And yet I never saw\nA beast so helpless and so brave.\n\nAnd now, while the trees stand watching, still\nThe unequal battle rages there.\nThe killing beast that cannot kill\nSwells and swells in his fury till\nYou’d almost think it was despair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dreamt-of-place": { - "title": "“The Dreamt-of Place”", - "body": "I saw two towering birds cleaving the air\nAnd thought they were Paolo and Francesca\nLeading the lost, whose wings like silver billows\nRippled the azure sky from shore to shore,\nThey were so many. The nightmare god was gone\nWho roofed their pain, the ghastly glen lay open,\nThe hissing lake was still, the fiends were fled,\nAnd only some few headless, footless mists\nCrawled out and in the iron-hearted caves.\nLike light’s unearthly eyes the lost looked down,\nAnd heaven was filled and moving. Every height\nOn earth was thronged and all that was stared upward.\nI thought, This is the reconciliation,\nThis is the day after the Last Day,\nThe lost world lies dreaming within its coils,\nGrass grows upon the surly sides of Hell,\nTime has caught Time and holds it fast for ever.\nAnd then I thought, Where is the knife, the butcher,\nThe victim? Are they all here in their places?\nHid in this harmony? But there was no answer.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-dying-child": { - "title": "“The Dying Child”", - "body": "Unfriendly friendly universe,\nI pack your stars into my purse,\nAnd bid you so farewell.\nThat I can leave you, quite go out,\nGo out, go out beyond all doubt,\nMy father says, is the miracle.\n\nYou are so great, and I so small:\nI am nothing, you are all:\nBeing nothing, I can take this way.\nOh I need neither rise nor fall,\nFor when I do not move at all\nI shall be out of all your day.\n\nIt’s said some memory will remain\nIn the other place, grass in the rain,\nLight on the land, sun on the sea,\nA flitting grace, a phantom face,\nBut the world is out. There is not place\nWhere it and its ghost can ever be.\n\nFather, father, I dread this air\nBlown from the far side of despair\nThe cold cold corner. What house, what hold,\nWhat hand is there? I look and see\nNothing-filled eternity,\nAnd the great round world grows weak and old.\n\nHold my hand, oh hold it fast--\nI am changing!--until at last\nMy hand in yours no more will change,\nThough yours change on. You here, I there,\nSo hand in hand, twin-leafed despair--\nI did not know death was so strange.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-enchanted-knight": { - "title": "“The Enchanted Knight”", - "body": "Lulled by La Belle Dame Sans Merci he lies\n In the bare wood below the blackening hill.\nThe plough drives nearer now, the shadow flies\n Past him across the plain, but he lies still.\n\nLong since the rust its gardens here has planned,\n Flowering his armour like an autumn field.\nFrom his sharp breast-plate to his iron hand\n A spider’s web is stretched, a phantom shield.\n\nWhen footsteps pound the turf beside his ear\n Armies pass through his dream in endless line,\nAnd one by one his ancient friends appear;\n They pass all day, but he can make no sign.\n\nWhen a bird cries within the silent grove\n The long-lost voice goes by, he makes to rise\nAnd follow, but his cold limbs never move,\n And on the turf unstirred his shadow lies.\n\nBut if a withered leaf should drift\n Across his face and rest, the dread drops start\nChill on his forehead. Now he tries to lift\n The insulting weight that stays and breaks his heart.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-fall": { - "title": "“The Fall”", - "body": "What shape had I before the Fall?\n What hills and rivers did I seek?\nWhat were my thoughts then? And of what\n Forgotten histories did I speak\n\nTo my companions? Did our eyes\n From their foredestined watching-place\nSee Heaven and Earth one land, and range\n Therein through all of Time and Space?\n\nDid I see Chaos and the Word,\n The suppliant Dust, the moving Hand,\nMyself, the Many and the One,\n The dead, the living Land?\n\nThat height cannot be scaled again.\n My fall was like the fall that burst\nOld Lear’s heart on the summer sward.\n Where I lie now I stood at first.\n\nThe ancient pain returns anew.\n Where was I ere I came to man?\nWhat shape among the shapes that once\n Agelong through endless Eden ran?\n\nDid I see there the dragon brood\n By streams their emerald scales unfold,\nWhile from their amber eyeballs fell\n Soft-rayed the rustling gold?\n\nIt must be that one time I walked\n By rivers where the dragon drinks;\nBut this side Eden’s wall I meet\n On every twisting road the Sphinx\n\nWhose head is like a wooden prow\n That forward leaning dizzily\nOver the seas of whitened worlds\n Has passed and nothing found to see,\n\nWhose breast, a flashing ploughshare, once\n Cut the rich furrows wrinkled in\nVenusberg’s sultry underworld\n And busy trampled fields of sin,\n\nWhose salt-white brow like crusted fire\n Smiles ever, whose cheeks are red as blood,\nWhose dolphin back is flowered yet\n With wrack that swam upon the Flood.\n\nSince then in antique attitudes\n I swing the bright two-handed sword\nAnd strike and strike the marble brow,\n Wide-eyed and watchful as a bird,\n\nSmite hard between the basilisk eyes,\n And carve the snaky dolphin side,\nUntil the coils are cloven in two\n And free the glittering pinions glide.\n\nLike quicksilver the scales slip down,\n Upon the air the spirit flies,\nAnd so I build me Heaven and Hell\n To buy my bartered Paradise.\n\nWhile from a legendary height\n I see a shadowy figure fall,\nAnd not far off another beats\n With his bare hands on Eden’s wall.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-fathers": { - "title": "“The Fathers”", - "body": "Our fathers all were poor,\nPoorer our fathers’ fathers;\nBeyond, we dare not look.\nWe, the sons, keep store\nOf tarnished gold that gathers\nAround us from the night,\nRecord it in this book\nThat, when the line is drawn,\nCredit and creditor gone,\nColumn and figure flown,\nWill open into light.\n\nArchaic fevers shake\nOur healthy flesh and blood\nPlumped in the passing day\nAnd fed with pleasant food.\nThe fathers’ anger and ache\nWill not, will not away\nAnd leave the living alone,\nBut on our careless brows\nFaintly their furrows engrave\nLike veinings in a stone,\nBreathe in the sunny house\nNightmare of blackened bone,\nCellar and choking cave.\n\nPanics and furies fly\nThrough our unhurried veins,\nHeavenly lights and rains\nPurify heart and eye,\nPast agonies purify\nAnd lay the sullen dust.\nThe angers will not away.\nWe hold our fathers’ trust,\nWrong, riches, sorrow and all\nUntil they topple and fall,\nAnd fallen let in the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-finder-found": { - "title": "“The Finder Found”", - "body": "Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek\nStill in the slowly darkening searching-ground,\nCatch sight some ordinary month or week\nOf that rare prize you hardly thought you sought--\nThe gatherer gathered and the finder found,\nThe buyer who would buy all himself well bought--\nAnd perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,\nAnd there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-good-man-in-hell": { - "title": "“The Good Man in Hell”", - "body": "If a good man were ever housed in Hell\nBy needful error of the qualities,\nPerhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,\nOr speak the truth only a stranger sees,\n\nWould he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,\nFill half eternity with cries and tears,\nOr watch beside Hell’s little wicket gate\nIn patience for the first ten thousand years,\n\nFeeling the curse climb slowly to his throat\nThat, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill,\nForcing his praying tongue to run by rote,\nEternity entire before him still?\n\nWould he at last, grown faithful in his station,\nKindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,\nAnd sow among the damned doubts of damnation,\nSince here someone could live, and live well?\n\nOne doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,\nOpen such a gate, and Eden could enter in,\nHell be a place like any other place,\nAnd love and hate and life and death begin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-grove": { - "title": "“The Grove”", - "body": "There was no road at all to that high place\nBut through the smothering grove,\nWhere as we went the shadows wove\nAdulterous shapes of animal hate and love,\nThe idol crowded nightmare Space,\nWood beyond wood, tree behind tree,\nAnd every tree an empty face\nGashed by the zigzag lightning mark\nThe first great Luciferian animal\nScored on clay and leaf and bark.\nThis was, we knew, the heraldic ground,\nAnd therefore now we heard our footsteps fall\nWith the true legendary sound,\nLike secret trampling behind a wall,\nAs if they were saying: To be, to be.\n\nAnd oh, the silence, the drugged thicket dozing\nDeep in its dream of fear,\nThe ring closing\nAnd coming near,\nThe well-bred self-sufficient animals\nWith clean rank pelts and proud and fetid breath,\nScreaming their arrogant calls,\nTheir moonstone eyes set straight at life and death.\nDid we see or dream it? And the jungle cities--\nFor there were cities there and civilizations,\nDeep in the forest; powers and dominations\nLike shapes created by dreaming animals,\nProud animal’s dreams uplifted high,\nBooted and saddled on the animal’s back\nAnd staring with the arrogant animal’s eye:\nThe golden dukes, the silver earls, and gleaming black\nThe curetting knights sitting their curetting steeds,\nThe sweet silk-tunicked eunuchs singing ditties,\nSwaying like wandering weeds,\nThe scarlet cardinals,\nAnd lions high in the air on the banner’s field,\nCrowns, sceptres, spears and stars and moons of blood,\nAnd sylvan wars in bronze within the shield,\nAll quartered in the wide world’s wood.\nThe smothering grove where there was place for pities.\n\nWe trod the maze like horses in a mill\nAnd then passed through it\nAs in a dream of the will.\nHow could it be? There was the stifling grove,\nYet here was light; what wonder led us to it?\nHow could the blind road go\nTo climb the crag and top the towering hill\nAnd all that splendor spread? We only know\nThere was no road except the smothering grove.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hill": { - "title": "“The Hill”", - "body": "And turning north around the hill,\nThe flat sea like an adder curled,\nAnd a flat rock amid the sea\nThat gazes towards the ugly town,\nAnd on the sands, flat and brown,\nA thousand naked bodies hurled\nLike an army overthrown.\n\nAnd turning south around the hill,\nFields flowering in the curling waves,\nAnd shooting from the white sea-walls\nLike a thousand waterfalls,\nRapturous divers never still.\nMotion and gladness. O this hill\nWas made to show these cliffs and caves.\n\nSo he thought. But he has never\nStood again upon that hill.\nHe lives far inland by a river\nThat somewhere else divides these lands,\nBut where or how he does not know,\nOr where the countless pathways go\nThat turn and turn to reach the sea\nOn this or that side of the hill,\nOr if, arriving, he will be\nWith the bright divers never still,\nOr on the sad dishonoured sands.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-horses": { - "title": "“The Horses”", - "body": "Barely a twelvemonth after\nThe seven days war that put the world to sleep,\nLate in the evening the strange horses came.\nBy then we had made our covenant with silence,\nBut in the first few days it was so still\nWe listened to our breathing and were afraid.\nOn the second day\nThe radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.\nOn the third day a warship passed us, heading north,\nDead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day\nA plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter\nNothing. The radios dumb;\nAnd still they stand in corners of our kitchens,\nAnd stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms\nAll over the world. But now if they should speak,\nIf on a sudden they should speak again,\nIf on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,\nWe would not listen, we would not let it bring\nThat old bad world that swallowed its children quick\nAt one great gulp. We would not have it again.\nSometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,\nCurled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,\nAnd then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.\nThe tractors lie about our fields; at evening\nThey look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.\nWe leave them where they are and let them rust:\n“They’ll molder away and be like other loam.”\nWe make our oxen drag our rusty plows,\nLong laid aside. We have gone back\nFar past our fathers’ land.\nAnd then, that evening\nLate in the summer the strange horses came.\nWe heard a distant tapping on the road,\nA deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again\nAnd at the corner changed to hollow thunder.\nWe saw the heads\nLike a wild wave charging and were afraid.\nWe had sold our horses in our fathers’ time\nTo buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us\nAs fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.\nOr illustrations in a book of knights.\nWe did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,\nStubborn and shy, as if they had been sent\nBy an old command to find our whereabouts\nAnd that long-lost archaic companionship.\nIn the first moment we had never a thought\nThat they were creatures to be owned and used.\nAmong them were some half a dozen colts\nDropped in some wilderness of the broken world,\nYet new as if they had come from their own Eden.\nSince then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,\nBut that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.\nOur life is changed; their coming our beginning.", - "metadata": { - "source": "One Foot in Eden", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "holderlins-journey": { - "title": "“Hölderlin’s Journey”", - "body": "When Hölderlin started from Bordeaux\n He was not mad but lost in mind,\nFor time and space had fled away\n With her he had to find.\n\n“The morning bells rang over France\n From tower to tower. At noon I came\nInto a maze of little hills,\n Head-high and every hill the same.”\n\n“A little world of emerald hills,\n And at their heart a faint bell tolled;\nWedding or burial, who could say?\n For death, unseen, is bold.”\n\n“Too small to climb, too tall to show\n More than themselves, the hills lay round.\nNearer to her, or farther? They\n Might have stretched to the world’s bound.”\n\n“A shallow candour was their all,\n And the mean riddle, How to tally\nReality with such appearance,\n When in the nearest valley”\n\n“Perhaps already she I sought,\n She, sought and seeker, had gone by,\nAnd each of us in turn was trapped\n By simple treachery.”\n\n“The evening brought a field, a wood.\n I left behind the hills of lies,\nAnd watched beside a mouldering gate\n A deer with its rock-crystal eyes.”\n\n“On either pillar of the gate\n A deer’s head watched within the stone.\nThe living deer with quiet look\n Seemed to be gazing on”\n\n“Its pictured death--and suddenly\n I knew, Diotima was dead,\nAs if a single thought had sprung\n From the cold and the living head.”\n\n“That image held me and I saw\n All moving things so still and sad,\nBut till I came into the mountains\n I know I was not mad.”\n\n“What made the change? The hills and towers\n Stood otherwise than they should stand,\nAnd without fear the lawless roads\n Ran wrong through all the land.”\n\n“Upon the swarming towns of iron\n The bells hailed down their iron peals,\nAbove the iron bells the swallows\n Glided on iron wheels.”\n\n“And there I watched in one confounded\n The living and the unliving head.\nWhy should it be? For now I know\n Diotima was dead”\n\n“Before I left the starting place;\n Empty the course, the garland gone,\nAnd all that race as motionless\n As these two heads of stone.”\n\nSo Hölderlin mused for thirty years\n On a green hill by Tübingen,\nDragging in pain a broken mind\n And giving thanks to God and men.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "ibsen": { - "title": "“Ibsen”", - "body": "Sollness climbs the dwindling tower\n And all the hills fall flat.\nHilda Wandel down below\n Now is no bigger than her hat.\n\nSollness steps into the air.\n All Norway lies below him, Brand\nFrowning on the rusty heath,\n Peer’s half-witted fairyland,\n\nNora stumbling from a door,\n Hedda burning a book,\nDoctor Stockman fishing up\n Bacilli from the brook,\n\nRebecca circling in the weir,\n The Rat Wife whipping round a wall;\nThe Pillars of Society\n Fall thundering with his fall.\n\nAnd flashing by his house he sees it\n Split from earth to sky,\nAnd his wife and children sitting\n Naked to every passer-by.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "in-love-for-long": { - "title": "“In Love for Long”", - "body": "I’ve been in love for long\nWith what I cannot tell\nAnd will contrive a song\nFor the intangible\nThat has no mould or shape,\nFrom which there’s no escape.\n\nIt is not even a name,\nYet is all constancy;\nTried or untried, the same,\nIt cannot part from me;\nA breath, yet as still\nAs the established hill.\n\nIt is not any thing,\nAnd yet all being is;\nBeing, being, being,\nIts burden and its bliss.\nHow can I ever prove\nWhat it is I love?\n\nThis happy happy love\nIs sieged with crying sorrows,\nCrushed beneath and above\nBetween todays and morrows;\nA little paradise\nHeld in the world’s vice.\n\nAnd there it is content\nAnd careless as a child,\nAnd in imprisonment\nFlourishes sweet and wild;\nIn wrong, beyond wrong,\nAll the world’s day long.\n\nThis love a moment known\nFor what I do not know\nAnd in a moment gone\nIs like the happy doe\nThat keeps its perfect laws\nBetween the tiger’s paws\nAnd vindicates its cause.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Voyage", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "the-incarnate-one": { - "title": "“The Incarnate One”", - "body": "The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream,\nAnd Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae.\nI think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd’s dream,\nChrist, man and creature in their inner day.\nHow could our race betray\nThe Image, and the Incarnate One unmake\nWho chose this form and fashion for our sake?\n\nThe Word made flesh here is made word again\nA word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.\nSee there King Calvin with his iron pen,\nAnd God three angry letters in a book,\nAnd there the logical hook\nOn which the Mystery is impaled and bent\nInto an ideological argument.\n\nThere’s better gospel in man’s natural tongue,\nAnd truer sight was theirs outside the Law\nWho saw the far side of the Cross among\nThe archaic peoples in their ancient awe,\nIn ignorant wonder saw\nThe wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside,\nNot knowing that there a God suffered and died.\n\nThe fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,\nPagan and Christian man alike will fall,\nThe auguries say, the white and black and brown,\nThe merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all\nInvisibly will fall:\nAbstract calamity, save for those who can\nBuild their cold empire on the abstract man.\n\nA soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown\nFar out to sea and lost. Yet I know well\nThe bloodless word will battle for its own\nInvisibly in brain and nerve and cell.\nThe generations tell\nTheir personal tale: the One has far to go\nPast the mirages and the murdering snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "judas": { - "title": "“Judas”", - "body": "Judas Iscariot drearily\nWheeling round the deadly tree:\nAdders sleep\nAwake and keep\nTheir watch, encircling scale to scale\nThe tree of bale.\nFrom whose cleft fastnesses glare out\nBasilisks furnace-eyed,\nWithin whose shade like matted hair,\nAbout, about,\nPronged hornets cruise and glide,\nSting, sting the glassy air.\n\nAnd all around the labouring ground is torn;\nHoof and horn\nThrice-deep their hieroglyphs have lined,\nLead in and in his mind,\nAnd wind him in a maze forlorn.\nJudas, awake and pass\nDryfoot the charmed morass,\nBreak the bright fence of glass,\nLift up your eyes!\nAsleep in light great-limbed Judaea lies;\nDark wood and sunny hill\nWill let you where you will,\nAnd by some road perhaps young Judas waits,\nNot found yet by his twelve doom-bearing mates.\n\n_O that all time had stopped then, had rolled back\nA little way, let Judas out again!\nI saw Him stand in the Garden, by the snare\nThe dove-eyed Decoy. Had I taken my life\nJust then it would have been in time. O that\nI had stumbled and fallen then, died suddenly!\nI stumbled and did not fall; the vast earth turned,\nThen stopped awry, half-way, all mad and strange,\nThe ponderous heavens heeled over, stars, rocks, soldiers,\nThe very roots run wrong, locked wrong forever!\nNow Time beats on, all changed, and yet the same._\n\nJudas Iscariot wearily,\nWheeling round the darkening tree:\nNow winds the sting\nDeeper,\nNow the faint fairy death-bells ring,\nNow the mind’s surly keeper\nMakes the thirty death-coins spin,\nWinding Judas in:\n_With such thin-edged unearthly sound\nAs ours the stones cry from the ground:\nThe little stones that cut the feet\nOf travellers going up the hill,\nOf sad and merry, lame and fleet,\nAnd cannot show\nCompassion though\nTheir little arrows striking make\nWith such mean war some heart to break\nThat thought to die undaunted on the hill._\n\nNow all the air is still.\n\n_He chose, and I was chosen. No one knew Him._\n\nJudas Iscariot by the tree.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-late-swallow": { - "title": "“The Late Swallow”", - "body": "Leave, leave your well-loved nest,\nLate swallow, and fly away.\nHere is no rest\nFor hollowing heart and wearying wing.\nYour comrades all have flown\nTo seek their southern paradise\nAcross the great earth’s downward sloping side,\nAnd you are alone.\nWhy should you cling\nStill to the swiftly ageing narrowing day?\nPrepare;\nShake your pinions long untried\nThat now must bear you there where you would be\nThrough all the heavens of ice;\nTill falling down the homing air\nYou light and perch upon the radiant tree.", - "metadata": { - "source": "One Foot in Eden", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "mary-stuart": { - "title": "“Mary Stuart”", - "body": "My brother Jamie lost me all,\nFell cleverly to make me fall,\nAnd with a sure reluctant hand\nStole my life and took my land.\n\nIt was jealousy of the womb\nThat let me in and shut him out,\nHonesty, kingship, all shut out,\nWhile I enjoyed the royal room.\n\nMy father was his, but not my mother,\nWe were, yet were not, sister, brother,\nTo reach my mother he had to strike\nMe down and leap that deadly dyke.\n\nOver the wall I watched him move\nAt ease through all the guarded grove,\nThen hack, and hack, and hack it down,\nUntil that ruin was his own.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "merlin": { - "title": "“Merlin”", - "body": "O Merlin in your crystal cave\nDeep in the diamond of the day,\nWill there ever be a singer\nWhose music will smooth away\nThe furrow drawn by Adam’s finger\nAcross the meadow and the wave?\nOr a runner who’ll outrun\nMan’s long shadow driving on,\nBreak through the gate of memory\nAnd hang the apple on the tree?\nWill your magic ever show\nThe sleeping bride shut in her bower,\nThe day wreathed in its mound of snow\nAnd Time locked in his tower?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-mountains": { - "title": "“The Mountains”", - "body": "The days have closed behind my back\n Since I came into these hills.\nNow memory is a single field\n One peasant tills and tills.\n\nSo far away, if I should turn\n I know I could not find\nThat place again. These mountains make\n The backward gaze half-blind,\n\nYet sharp my sight till it can catch\n The ranges rising clear\nFar in futurity’s high-walled land;\n But I am rooted here.\n\nAnd do not know where lies my way,\n Backward or forward. If I could\nI’d leap Time’s bound or turn and hide\n From Time in my ancestral wood.\n\nDouble delusion! Here I’m held\n By the mystery of the rock,\nMust watch in a perpetual dream\n The horizon’s gates unlock and lock,\n\nSee on the harvest fields of Time\n The mountains heaped like sheaves,\nAnd the valleys opening out\n Like a volume’s turning leaves,\n\nDreaming of a peak whose height\n Will show me every hill,\nA single mountain on whose side\n Life blooms for ever and is still.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-mythical-journey": { - "title": "“The Mythical Journey”", - "body": "First in the North. The black sea-tangle beaches,\nBrine-bitter stillness, tablet strewn morass,\nTall women against the sky with heads covered,\nThe witch’s house below the black-toothed mountain,\nWave-echo in the roofless chapel,\nThe twice-dead castle on the swamp-green mound,\nDarkness at noon-day, wheel of fire at midnight,\nThe level sun and the wild shooting shadows.\n\nHow long ago? Then sailing up to summer\nOver the edge of the world. Black hill of water,\nRivers of running gold. The sun! The sun!\nThen the free summer isles.\nBut the ship hastened on and brought him to\nThe towering walls of life and the great kingdom.\n\nWhere long he wandered seeking that which sought him\nThrough all the little hills and shallow valleys.\nOne whose form and features,\nRace and speech he knew not, shapeless, tongueless,\nKnown to him only by the impotent heart,\nAnd whether at all on earth the place of meeting,\nBeyond all knowledge. Only the little hills,\nHead-high, and the winding valleys,\nTurning, returning, till there grew a pattern,\nAnd it was held. And there stood each in his station\nWith the hills between them. And that was the meaning.\n\nThough sometimes through the wandering light and shadow\nHe thought he saw it a moment as he watched\nThe red deer walking by the riverside\nAt evening, when the bells were ringing,\nAnd the bright stream leapt silent from the mountain\nFar in the sunset. But as he looked, nothing\nWas there but lights and shadows.\n\n And then the vision\nOf the conclusion without fulfilment.\nThe plain of glass and in the crystal grave\nThat which he had sought, that which had sought him,\nGlittering in death. And all the dead scattered\nLike fallen stars, clustered like leaves hanging\nFrom the sad boughs of the mountainous tree of Adam\nPlanted far down in Eden. And on the hills\nThe gods reclined and conversed with each other\nFrom summit to summit.\n\n Conclusion\nWithout fulfilment. Thence the dream rose upward,\nThe living dream sprung from the dying vision,\nOverarching all. Beneath its branches\nHe builds in faith and doubt his shaking house.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-place-of-light-and-darkness": { - "title": "“The Place of Light and Darkness”", - "body": "Walking on the harvest hills of Night\nTime’s elder brother, the great husbandman,\nGoes on his ancient round. His massive lantern,\nSimpler than the first fashion, lights the rows\nOf stooks that lean like little golden graves\nOr tasselled barges foundering low\nIn the black stream.\n He sees that all is ready,\nThe trees all stripped, the orchards bare, the nests\nEmpty. All things grown\nHomeless and whole. He sees the hills of grain,\nA day all yellow and red, flowers, fruit, and corn.\nThe soft hair harvest-golden in darkness.\nChildren playing\nIn the late night-black day of Time. He sees\nThe lover standing by the trysting-tree\nWho’ll never find his love till all are gathered\nIn light or darkness. The unnumbered living\nNumbered and bound and sheaved.\n\n O could that day\nBreak on this side of Time!\n\n A wind shakes\nThe loaded sheaves, the feathery tomb bursts open,\nAnd yellow hair is poured along the ground\nFrom the bent neck of Time. The woods cry:\n_This is the resurrection._\n\nO little judgment days lost in the dark,\nSeen by the bat and screech-owl!\n He goes on,\nBearing within his ocean-heart the jewel,\nThe day all yellow and red wherein a sun\nShines on the endless harvest lands of Time.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "poem": { - "title": "“Poem”", - "body": "O I have seen the heaven of good deeds spread\nWith its own sky above it\nA length away\nMy whole day,\nYet have not crossed from the ungathered dead.\nI could have leapt straight from the womb to bliss\nAnd never lost it after,\nBeen cradled, baptized, bred in that which is\nAnd never known this frontier laughter,\nBut that I hate this place so much,\nAnd hating love it,\nAnd that my weakness is such\nThat it must clutch\nAll weakness to it and can never release\nThe bound and battling hands,\nThe one hand bound, the other smiting\nThe fellow-foe it’s tied to, fighting\nWeakness with weakness, rending, righting\nThe torn and incorruptible bands\nThat bind all these united and disunited lands\nWhile there lies my predestined power and ease,\nThere, in those natural fields, life-fostering seas.\n\nIf I could be more weak\nThan weakness’ self, if I could break\nThis static clinch with a mere blank, with nothing,\nIf I could take\nMemory and longing\nUp by the roots and cast them behind my back,\nIf I could stop this endless ringing and singing\nThat keeps my fingers flying in hate and love,\nIf I could cut off,\nIf I could unmake\nWhat I was made to make:\n\nBut that I then should lose\nMy loss,\nMy kingdom’s crown,\nAnd to great Nothing toss\nMy last left jewel down,\nThe light that long before me was,\nThe land I did not own,\nThe choice I could not choose.\nFor once I played upon that other hill,\nAnd from that house I come.\nThere is a line around it still,\nAnd all inside is home.\nOnce there I pored on every stone and tree\nIn a long dream through the unsetting day,\nAnd looking up could nothing see\nBut the right way on every way.\nAnd lost it after,\nNo foot knows where,\nTo find this mourning air,\nCommemorative laughter,\nThe mask, the doom\nWritten backwards,\nThe illegible tomb\nPointing backwards,\nThe reverse side\nWhere strength is weakness,\nThe body, pride,\nThe soul, a sickness.\nYet from that missing heaven outspread,\nForgotten and unforgotten,\nBegotten and unbegotten,\nHere all I read.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-private-place": { - "title": "“The Private Place”", - "body": "This stranger holding me from head to toe,\nThis deaf usurper I shall never know,\nWho lives in household quiet in my unrest,\nAnd of my troubles weaves his tranquil nest,\nWho never smiles or frowns or bows his head,\nAnd while I rage is insolent as the dead,\nComposed, indifferent, thankless, faithful, he\nIs my firm ally and sole enemy.\n\nCome then, take up the cleansing blade once more\nThat drives all difference out. The fabled shore\nSees us again. Now the predestined fight,\nThe ancestral stroke, the opening gash of light:\nSide by side myself by myself slain,\nThe wakening stir, the eyes loaded with gain\nOf ocean darkness, the rising hand in hand,\nI with myself at one, the changed land,\nMy home, my country! But this precious seal\nWill slowly crumble, the thief Time will steal\nSoft-footed bit by bit this boundless treasure\nHeld in four hands. I shall regain my measure,\nMy old measure again, shrink to a room, a shelf\nWhere decently I lay away myself,\nBecome the anxious warder, groan and fret\nMy thankless service to this martinet\nWho sleeps and sleeps and rules. I hold this life\nOnly in strife and the aftertaste of strife\nWith this dull champion and thick-witted king.\nBut at one word he’ll jump into the ring.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-recurrence": { - "title": "“The Recurrence”", - "body": "All things return, Nietzsche said,\nThe ancient wheel revolves again,\nRise, take up your numbered fate;\nThe cradle and the bridal bed,\nLife and the coffin wait.\nAll has been that ever can be\nAnd this sole eternity\nCannot alter, cannot add\nOne to your delights and tears,\nOr a million million years\nTear the nightmare from the mad.\n\nHave no fear then. You will miss\nAchievement by the selfsame inch,\nWhen the great occasion comes\nAnd they watch you you will finch,\nLose the moment, be for bliss\nA footlength short. All done before.\nLove’s agonies, victory’s drums\nWill not huddle the Cross away,\nPlanted on its future hill\nThe secret on the appointed day\nWill be made known, the ship once more\nHit against the waiting rock\nOr come safely to the shore,\nCareless under the deadly tree\nThe victim drowse, the urgent warning\nCome too late, the dagger strike,\nStrike and strike through eternity,\nAnd world’s hence the prison clock\nWill toll on execution morning,\nWhat is ill be always ill,\nWretches die behind a dike,\nAnd the happy be happy still.\n\nBut the heart makes reply:\nThis is only what the eye\nFrom its tower on the turning field\nSees and sees and cannot tell why,\nQuarterings on the turning shield,\nThe great non-stop heraldic show.\nAnd the heart and the mind know,\nWhat has been can never return,\nWhat is not will surely be\nIn the changed unchanging reign,\nElse the Actor on the Tree\nWould loll at ease, miming pain,\nAnd counterfeit mortality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-road": { - "title": "“The Road”", - "body": "There is a road that turning always\n Cuts off the country of Again.\nArchers stand there on every side\n And as it runs Time’s deer is slain,\n And lies where it has lain.\n\nThat busy clock shows never an hour.\n All flies and all in flight must tarry.\nThe hunter shoots the empty air\n Far on before the quarry,\n Which falls though nothing’s there to parry.\n\nThe lion couching in the centre\n With mountain head and sunset brow\nRolls down the everlasting slope\n Bones picked an age ago,\n And the bones rise up and go.\n\nThere the beginning finds the end\n Before beginning ever can be,\nAnd the great runner never leaves\n The starting and the finishing tree,\n The budding and the fading tree.\n\nThere the ship sailing safe in harbour\n Long since in many a sea was drowned.\nThe treasure burning in her hold\n So near will never be found,\n Sunk past all sound.\n\nThere a man on a summer evening\n Reclines at ease upon his tomb\nAnd is his mortal effigy.\n And there within the womb,\n The cell of doom,\n\nThe ancestral deed is thought and done,\n And in a million Edens fall\nA million Adams drowned in darkness,\n For small is great and great is small,\n And a blind seed all.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "scotlands-winter": { - "title": "“Scotland’s Winter”", - "body": "Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,\nThe sun looks from the hill\nHelmed in his winter casket,\nAnd sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.\nThe water at the mill\nSounds more hoarse and dull.\nThe miller’s daughter walking by\nWith frozen fingers soldered to her basket\nSeems to be knocking\nUpon a hundred leagues of floor\nWith her light heels, and mocking\nPercy and Douglas dead,\nAnd Bruce on his burial bed,\nWhere he lies white as may\nWith wars and leprosy,\nAnd all the kings before\nThis land was kingless,\nAnd all the singers before\nThis land was songless,\nThis land that with its dead and living waits the Judgement Day.\nBut they, the powerless dead,\nListening can hear no more\nThan a hard tapping on the floor\nA little overhead\nOf common heels that do not know\nWhence they come or where they go\nAnd are content\nWith their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-solitary-place": { - "title": "“The Solitary Place”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO I shall miss\nWith one small breath these centuries\nOf harvest-home uncounted!\nI have known\nThe mead, the bread,\nAnd the mounds of grain\nAs half my riches. But the fields will change,\nAnd their harvest would be strange\nIf I could return. I should know again\nOnly the lint-white stubble plain\nFrom which the summer-painted birds have flown\nA year’s life on.\n\nBut I can never\nSee with these eyes the double-threaded river\nThat runs through life and death and death and life,\nWeaving one scene. Which I and not I\nBlindfold have crossed, I and not I\nWill cross again, my face, my feet, my hands\nGleaned from lost lands\nTo be sown again.\n\nO certain prophecy,\nAnd faithful tragedy,\nFurnished with scenery of sorrow and strife,\nThe Cross and the Flood\nAnd Babel’s towers\nAnd Abel’s blood\nAnd Eden’s bowers,\nWhere I and not I\nLived and questioned and made reply:\nNone else to ask or make reply.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIf there is none else to ask or reply\nBut I and not I,\nAnd when I stretch out my hand my hand comes towards me\nTo pull me across to me and back to me,\nIf my own mind, questioning, answers me\nAnd there is no other answer to me,\nIf all that I see,\nWoman and man and beast and rock and sky,\nIs a flat image shut behind an eye,\nAnd only my thoughts can meet me or pass me or follow me,\nO then I am alone,\nI, many and many in one,\nA lost player upon a hill\nOn a sad evening when the world is still,\nThe house empty, brother and sister gone\nBeyond the reach of sight, or sound of any cry,\nInto the bastion of the mind, behind the shutter of the eye.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-stationary-journey": { - "title": "“The Stationary Journey”", - "body": "Here at my earthly station set,\n The revolutions of the year\nBear me bound and only let\n This astronomic world appear.\n\nYet if I could reverse my course\n Through ever-deepening yesterday,\nRetrace the path that led me here,\n Could I find a different way?\n\nI would see eld’s frosted hair\n Burn black again and passion rage\nOn to its source and die away\n At last in childhood’s tranquil age.\n\nCharlemagne’s death-palsied hand\n Would move once more and never rest,\nUntil by deadlier weakness bound\n It lay against his mother’s breast.\n\nSaint Augustine gives back his soul\n To stumble in the endless maze,\nAfter Jesus Venus stands\n In the full centre of his gaze,\n\nWhile still from death to life to naught\n Gods, dynasties, and nations flit;\nThough for a while among the sand\n Unchanged the changing Pharaohs sit.\n\nFast the horizons empty. Now\n Nothing’s to see but wastes and rocks,\nAnd on the thinning Asian plains\n A few wild shepherds with their flocks …\n\nSo, back or forward, still we strike\n Through Time and touch its dreaded goal.\nEternity’s the fatal flaw\n Through which run out world, life and soul.\n\nAnd there in transmutation’s blank\n No mortal mind has ever read,\nOr told what soul and shape are, there,\n Blue wave, red rose, and Caesar’s head.\n\nFor there Immortal Being in\n Solidity more pure than stone\nSleeps through the circle, pillar, arch,\n Spiral, cone, and pentagon.\n\nTo the mind’s eternity I turn,\n With leaf, fruit, blossom on the spray,\nSee the dead world grow green within\n Imagination’s one long day.\n\nThere while outstretched upon the Tree\n Christ looks across Jerusalem’s towers,\nAdam and Eve unfallen yet\n Sleep side by side within their bowers.\n\nThere while fast in the Roman snare\n The Carthaginian thinks of home,\nA boy carefree in Carthage streets,\n Hannibal fights a little Rome,\n\nDavid and Homer tune their harps,\n Gaza is up, sprung from its wreck,\nSamson goes free, Delilah’s shears\n Join his strong ringlets to his neck.\n\nA dream! the astronomic years\n Patrolled by stars and planets bring\nTime led in chains from post to post\n Of the all-conquering Zodiac ring.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-sufficient-place": { - "title": "“The Sufficient Place”", - "body": "See, all the silver roads wind in, lead in\nTo this still place like evening. See, they come\nLike messengers bearing gifts to this little house,\nAnd this great hill worn down to a patient mound,\nAnd these tall trees whose motionless branches bear\nAn aeon’s summer foliage, leaves so thick\nThey seem to have robbed a world of shade, and kept\nNo room for all these birds that line the boughs\nWith heavier riches, leaf and bird and leaf.\nWithin the doorway stand\nTwo figures, Man and Woman, simple and clear\nAs a child’s first images. Their manners are\nSuch as were known before the earliest fashion\nTaught the Heavens guile. The room inside is like\nA thought that needed thus much space to write on,\nThus much, no more. Here all’s sufficient. None\nThat comes complains, and all the world comes here,\nComes, and goes out again, and comes again.\nThis is the Pattern, these the Prototypes,\nSufficient, strong, and peaceful. All outside\nFrom end to end of the world is tumult. Yet\nThese roads do not turn in here but writhe on\nRound the wild earth for ever. If a man\nShould chance to find this place three times in Time\nHis eyes are changed and make a summer silence\nAmid the tumult, seeing the roads wind in\nTo their still home, the house and the leaves and birds.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "then": { - "title": "“Then”", - "body": "There were no men and women then at all\nBut the flesh lying alone,\nAnd angry shadows fighting on a wall\nWhich now and then sent out a groan\nStifled in lime and stone,\nAnd sweated now and then like tortured wood\nBig drops that looked yet did not look like blood.\n\nAnd yet as each drop came a shadow faded\nAnd left the wall\nThere was a lull\nUntil another in its shadow arrayed it,\nCame, fought and left a blood-mark on the wall.\nAnd that was all; the blood was all.\n\nIf women had been there they might have wept\nFor the poor blood, unowned, unwanted,\nBlank as forgotten script.\nThe wall was haunted\nBy mute maternal presences whose sighing\nFluttered the fighting shadows and shook the wall\nAs if that fury of death itself were dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-threefold-place": { - "title": "“The Threefold Place”", - "body": "This is the place. The autumn field is bare,\n The row lies half-cut all the afternoon,\nThe birds are hiding in the woods, the air\n Dreams fitfully outworn with waiting. Soon\n\nOut of the russet woods in amber mail\n Heroes come walking through the yellow sheaves,\nWalk on and meet. And then a silent gale\n Scatters them on the field like autumn leaves.\n\nYet not a feathered stalk has stirred, and all\n Is still again, but for the birds that call\nOn every warrior’s head and breast and shield.\n Sweet cries and horror on the field.\n\nOne field. I look again and there are three:\n One where the heroes fell to rest,\nOne where birds make of iron limbs a tree,\n Helms for a nest,\n And one where grain stands up like armies drest.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "to-the-old-gods": { - "title": "“To the Old Gods”", - "body": "Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long\nThrough time and never found eternity,\nFettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,\n\nYou should have fled our ever-dying song,\nThe mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.\nThey have forgotten, yet you linger still.\n\nGoddess of caverned breast and channeled brow,\nAnd cheeks slow hollowed by millennial tears,\nForests of autumns fading in your eyes,\n\nEternity marvels at your counted years\nAnd kingdoms lost in time, and wonders how\nThere could be thoughts so bountiful and wise\n\nAs yours beneath the ever-breaking bough,\nAnd vast compassion curving like the skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-town-betrayed": { - "title": "“The Town Betrayed”", - "body": "Our homes are eaten out by Time,\n Our lawns strewn with our listless sons,\nOur harlot daughters lean and watch\n The ships crammed down with shells and guns.\n\nLike painted prows far out they lean:\n A world behind, a world before.\nThe leaves are covering up our hills,\n Neptune has locked the shore.\n\nOur yellow harvests lie forlorn\n And there we wander like the blind,\nReturning from the golden field\n With famine in our mind.\n\nFar inland now the glittering swords\n In order rise, in order fall,\nIn order on the dubious field\n The dubious trumpets call.\n\nYet here there is no word, no sign\n But quiet murder in the street.\nOur leaf-light lives are spared or taken\n By men obsessed and neat.\n\nWe stand beside our windows, see\n In order dark disorder come,\nAnd prentice killers duped by Death\n Bring and not know our doom.\n\nOur cattle wander at their will.\n To-day a horse pranced proudly by.\nThe dogs run wild. Vultures and kites\n Wait in the towers for us to die.\n\nAt evening on the parapet\n We sit and watch the sun go down,\nReading the landscape of the dead,\n The sea, the hills, the town.\n\nThere our ancestral ghosts are gathered.\n Fierce Agamemnon’s form I see,\nWatching as if his tents were Time\n And Troy Eternity.\n\nWe must take order, bar our gates,\n Fight off these phantoms. Inland now\nAchilles, Siegfried, Lancelot\n Have sworn to bring us low.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "tristrams-journey": { - "title": "“Tristram’s Journey”", - "body": "He strode across the room and flung\n The letter down: “You need not tell\nYour treachery, harlot!” He was gone\n Ere Iseult fainting fell.\n\nHe rode out from Tintagel gate,\n He heard his charger slowly pace,\nAnd ever hung a cloud of gnats\n Three feet before his face.\n\nAt a wood’s border he turned round\n And saw the distant castle side,\nIseult looking towards the wood,\n Mark’s window gaping wide.\n\nHe turned again and slowly rode\n Into the forest’s flickering shade,\nAnd now as sunk in waters green\n Were armour, helm, and blade.\n\nFirst he awoke with night around\n And heard the wind, and woke again\nAt noon within a ring of hills,\n At sunset on a plain.\n\nAnd hill and plain and wood and tower\n Passed on and on and turning came\nBack to him, tower and wood and hill,\n Now different, now the same.\n\nThere was a castle on a lake.\n The castle doubled in the mere\nConfused him, his uncertain eye\n Wavered from there to here.\n\nA window in the wall had held\n Iseult upon a summer day,\nWhile he and Palomide below\n Circled in furious fray.\n\nBut now he searched the towers, the sward,\n And struggled something to recall,\nA stone, a shadow. Blank the lake,\n And empty every wall.\n\nHe left his horse, left sword and mail,\n And went into the woods and tore\nThe branches from the clashing trees\n Until his rage was o’er.\n\nAnd now he wandered on the hills\n In peace. Among the shepherd’s flocks\nOften he lay so long, he seemed\n One of the quiet rocks.\n\nThe shepherds called and made him run\n Like a tame cur to round the sheep.\nAt night he lay among the dogs\n Beside a well to sleep.\n\nAnd he forgot Iseult and all.\n Dagonet once and two came by\nLike tall escutcheoned animals\n With antlers towering high.\n\nHe snapped their spears, rove off their helms,\n And beat them with his hands and sent\nThem onward with a bitter heart,\n But knew not where they went.\n\nThey came to Mark and told him how\n A madman ruled the hinds and kept\nThe wandering sheep. Mark haled him to\n Tintagel while he slept.\n\nHe woke and saw King Mark at chess\n And Iseult with her maids at play,\nThe arras where the scarlet knights\n And ladies stood all day.\n\nNone knew him. In the garden once\n Iseult walked in the afternoon,\nHer hound leapt up and licked his face,\n Iseult fell in a swoon.\n\nThere as he leaned the misted grass\n Cleared blade by blade below his face,\nThe round walls hardened as he looked,\n And he was in his place.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-trophy": { - "title": "“The Trophy”", - "body": "The wise king dowered with blessings on his throne,\nThe rebel raising the flag in the market place,\nHaunt me like figures on an ancient stone\nThe ponderous light of history beats upon,\nOr the enigma of a single face\nHanded unguessed, unread, from father to son,\nAs if it dreamt within itself alone.\n\nRegent and rebel clash in horror and blood\nHere on the blindfold battlefield. But there,\nMotionless in the grove of evil and good,\nThey grow together and their roots are twined\nIn deep confederacy far from the air,\nSharing the secret trophy each with other;\nAnd king and rebel are like brother and brother,\nOr father and son, co-princes of one mind,\nIrreconcilables, their treaty signed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "troy-ii": { - "title": "“Troy II”", - "body": "I’ve often wandered in the fields of Troy\nBeneath the walls, seen Paris as a boy\nBefore youth made him vicious. Hector’s smile\nAnd untried lion-look can still beguile\nMy heart of peace. That was before the fall,\nWhen high still stood Troy’s many-tunnelled wall.\nNow I am shackled to a Grecian dolt,\nPragmatic, race-proud as a pampered colt.\nAll here is strange to me, the country kings,\nThis cold aspiring race, the mountain-rings\nOn every side. They are like toppling snow-wreaths\nHeaped on Troy’s hearth. Yet still an ember breathes\nBelow to breed its crop of yearly ills,\nThe flowering trees on the unreal hills.\nThese bring Troy back. And when along the stone\nThe lizard flickers, thirty years I’m thrown\nAt odds and stand again where once I stood,\nAnd see Troy’s towers burn like a winter wood.\nFor then into their country all in flame,\nFrom their uncounted caves the lizards came\nAnd looked and melted in a glaze of fire,\nWhile all the wall rustled and sang with ire\nAs heat ate all. I saw calamity\nIn action there, and it will always be\nBefore me in the lizard on the stone.\n But in my heart a deeper spite has grown,\nThis, that they would not arm us, and preferred\nTroy’s ruin lest a slave should snatch a sword\nAnd fight even at their side. Yet in that fall\nThey lost no more than we who lost our all.\nTroy was our breath, our soul, and all our wit,\nWho did not own it but were owned by it.\nWe must have fought for Troy. We were its hands,\nAnd not like them mere houses, flocks, and lands.\nWe were the Trojans; they at best could swell\nA pompous or a bloody spectacle.\nAnd so we watched with dogs outside the ring\nHeroes fall cheap as meat, king slaughtering king\nLike fatted cattle. Yet they did not guess\nHow our thoughts wantoned with their wantonness.\nThey were too high for that; they guessed too late,\nWhen full had grown our knowledge and our hate.\nAnd then they thought, with arms as strong as theirs,\nWe too might make a din with swords and spears,\nAnd while they feared the Greeks they feared us most,\nAnd ancient Troy was lost and we were lost.\n\nNow an old man--why should that one regret,\nWhen all else has grown tranquil, shake me yet?\nOf all my life I know one thing, I know,\nBefore I was a slave, long, long ago,\nI lost a sword in a forgotten fight,\nAnd ever since my arm has been too light\nFor this dense world, and shall grow lighter still.\nYet through that rage shines Troy’s untroubled hill,\nAnd many a tumbled wall and vanished tree\nRemains, as if in spite, a happy memory.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "troy-i": { - "title": "“Troy I”", - "body": "He all that time among the sewers of Troy\nScouring for scraps. A man so venerable\nHe might have been Priam’s self, but Priam was dead,\nTroy taken. His arms grew meagre as a boy’s,\nAnd all that flourished in that hollow famine\nWas his long, white, round beard. Oh, sturdily\nHe swung his staff and sent the bold rats skipping\nAcross the scurfy hills and worm-wet valleys,\nCrying: “Achilles, Ajax, turn and fight!\nStop, cowards!” Till his cries, dazed and confounded,\nFlew back at him with: “Coward, turn and fight!”\nAnd the wild Greeks yelled round him.\nYet he withstood them, a brave, mad old man,\nAnd fought the rats for Troy. The light was rat-grey,\nThe hills and dells, the common drain, his Simois,\nRat-grey. Mysterious shadows fell\nAffrighting him whenever a cloud offended\nThe sun up in the other world. The rat-hordes,\nMoving, were grey dust shifting in grey dust.\nProud history has such sackends. He was taken\nAt last by some chance robber seeking treasure\nUnder Troy’s riven roots. Dragged to the surface.\nAnd there he saw Troy like a burial ground\nWith tumbled walls for tombs, the smooth sward wrinkled\nAs Time’s last wave had long since passed that way,\nThe sky, the sea, Mount Ida and the islands,\nNo sail from edge to edge, the Greeks clean gone.\nThey stretched him on a rock and wrenched his limbs,\nAsking: “Where is the treasure?” till he died.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-unattained-place": { - "title": "“The Unattained Place”", - "body": "We have seen the world of good deeds spread\nWith its own sky above it\nA length away\nOur whole day,\nYet have not crossed from our false kindred.\nWe could have leapt straight from the womb to bliss\nAnd never lost it after,\nBeen cradled, baptized, bred in that which is\nAnd never known this frontier laughter,\nBut that we hate this place so much,\nAnd hating love it,\nAnd that our weakness is such\nThat it must clutch\nAll weakness to it and can never release\nThe bound and battling hands,\nThe one hand bound, the other fighting\nThe fellow-foe it’s tied to, righting\nWeakness with weakness, rending, reuniting\nThe torn and incorruptible bands\nThat bind all these united and disunited lands,--\nWhile there lies our predestined power and ease,\nThere, in those natural fields, life-fostering seas.\n\nIf we could be more weak\nThan weakness’ self, if we could break\nThis static hold with a mere blank, with nothing,\nIf we could take\nMemory and thought and longing\nUp by the roots and cast them behind our back,\nIf we could stop this ceaseless ringing and singing\nThat keeps our fingers flying in hate and love,\nIf we could cut off,\nIf we could unmake\nWhat we were made to make:\n\nBut that we then should lose\nOur loss,\nOur kingdom’s crown,\nAnd to great Nothing toss\nOur last left jewel down,\nThe light that long before us was,\nThe land we did not own,\nThe choice we could not choose.\nFor once we played upon that other hill,\nAnd from that house we come.\nThere is a line around it still\nAnd all inside is home.\nOnce there we pored on every stone and tree\nIn a long dream through the unsetting day,\nAnd looking up could nothing see\nBut the right way on every way.\nAnd lost it after,\nNo foot knows where,\nTo find this mourning air,\nCommemorative laughter,\nThe mask, the doom\nWritten backwards,\nThe illegible tomb\nPointing backwards,\nThe reverse side\nWhere strength is weakness,\nThe body, pride,\nThe soul, a sickness.\n\nYet from that missing heaven outspread\nHere all we read.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-unfamiliar-place": { - "title": "“The Unfamiliar Place”", - "body": "I do not know this place,\nThough here for long I have run\nMy changing race\nIn the moon and the sun,\nWithin this wooded glade\nFar up the mountainside\nWhere Christ and Caesar died\nAnd the first man was made.\n\nI have seen this turning light\nFor many a day.\nI have not been away\nEven in dreams of the night.\nIn the unnumbered names\nMy fathers gave these things\nI seek a kingdom lost,\nSleeping with folded wings.\nI have questioned many a ghost\nFar inland in my dreams,\nEnquired of fears and shames\nThe dark and winding way\nTo the day within my day.\n\nAnd aloft I have stood\nAnd given my eyes their fill,\nHave watched the bad and the good\nGo up and down the hill,\nThe peasants on the plain\nPloughing the fields red,\nThe roads running alone,\nThe ambush in the wood,\nThe victim walking on,\nThe misery-blackened door\nThat never will open again,\nThe tumblers at the fair,\nThe watchers on the stair,\nCradle and bridal-bed,\nThe living and the dead\nScattered on every shore.\n\nAll this I have seen\nTwice over, there and here,\nKnocking at dead men’s gates\nTo ask the living way,\nAnd viewing this upper scene.\nBut I am balked by fear\nAnd what my lips say\nTo drown the voice of fear.\nThe earthly day waits.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - }, - "the-way": { - "title": "“The Way”", - "body": "Friend, I have lost the way.\n_The way leads on._\nIs there another way?\n_The way is one._\nI must retrace the track.\n_It’s lost and gone._\nBack, I must travel back!\n_None goes there, none._\nThen I’ll make here my place,\n_(The road leads on),_\nStand still and set my face,\n_(The road leaps on),_\nStay here, for ever stay.\n_None stays here, none._\nI cannot find the way.\n_The way leads on._\nOh places I have passed!\n_That journey’s done._\nAnd what will come at last?\n_The road leads on._", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Labyrinth", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - } - } - }, - "the-original-place": { - "title": "“The original place”", - "body": "_This is your native land.\nBy ancient inheritance\nYour lives are free, though a hand\nStrange to you set you here,\nOrdained this liberty\nAnd gave you hope and fear\nAnd the turning maze of chance._\n\nTo weave our tale of Time\nRhyme is knit to rhyme\nSo close, it’s like a proof\nThat nothing else can be\nBut this one tapestry\nWhere gleams under the woof\nA giant Fate half-grown,\nImprisoned and its own.\n\n_To your unquestioned rule\nNo bound is set. You were\nMade for this work alone.\nThis is your native air.\nYou could not leave these fields.\nAnd when Time is grown\nBeneath your countless hands\nThey say this kingdom shall\nBe stable and beautiful._\n\nBut at its centre stands\nA stronghold never taken,\nStormed at hourly in vain,\nHeld by a force unknown\nThat neither answers nor yields.\nThere our arms are shaken,\nThere the hero was slain\nThat bleeds upon our shields.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Journeys and Places", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - } - } - } - } - }, - "herta-muller": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Herta Müller", - "birth": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "romanian+german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇷🇴 🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herta_Müller", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german", - "romanian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "colour-grey": { - "title": "“Colour Grey”", - "body": "1.\n\nI grow time, beans, the colour gray\nAnd stitch the shadows of a dying day\nThey make a woman, rather a girl\nLost in the ocean like a grain of pearl\nThe swans of Coole fly over me\nWill they rest for a while by me!\nMaybe it’s my turn now.\nDeep in the frost where my eyes shall never go\nThe leopard will print his paw\nAnd with a sudden leap break free\nAll the chimes of poetry\nMaybe it’s my turn now.\nThe rough beast was never born\nThough we devised a cage for his morn\nMaybe it’s my turn now.\nI have a tale to tell I shall also ring the bell\nWhen you start believing\nWhen you start hearing\nMaybe it’s my turn now.\n\n\n2.\n\nThese days I don’t think of you\nBut after the soot covers me\nI begin to wonder where those\nEvenings have gone, those wanderings\nIn the spacious lawns of enchantment\nThat smacked of no design, though\nWe were bent on making a sense\nThe early birds get their worms\nI lie in the tireless ticking of my old watch\nCounting the bits of frozen blood,\nListening to the worms\nThat are in all of us\nThen I begin to crawl towards the womb\nThat threw me off a long way back\nAnd look for the dark, the black hole\nTo suck me up.\n\n\n3.\n\nI was nice to him\nHe was nice to me\nOnly\nOur doors, our windows\nKept closed\nLest we smell each other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Roger Woodhouse" - } - } - } - }, - "les-murray": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Les Murray", - "birth": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2019 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Murray_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "aurora-prone": { - "title": "“Aurora Prone”", - "body": "The lemon sunlight poured out far between things\ninhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,\nflies are for later heat.\nEvery tree’s an auburn giant with a dazzled face\nand the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.\nTwilights broaden away from our feet too\nas rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.\nEverything widens with distance, in this perspective.\nThe dog’s paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity\nand dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.\nBright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans\nthen rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened\ninto a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow\nfor the great bald radiance never seen in dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-dream-of-wearing-shorts-forever": { - "title": "“The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”", - "body": "To go home and wear shorts forever\nin the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,\nadding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,\n\nto camp out along the river bends\nfor good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,\na fishing line and matches,\n\nor there where the hills are all down, below the plain,\nto sit around in shorts at evening\non the plank verandah;\n\nIf the cardinal points of costume\nare Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,\nwhere are shorts in this compass?\n\nThey are never Robes\nas other bareleg outfits have been:\nthe toga, the kilt, the lava-lava\nthe Mahatma’s cotton dhoti;\n\narchbishops and field marshals\nat their ceremonies never wear shorts.\nThe very word\nmeans underpants in North America.\n\nShorts can be Tat,\nLand-Rovering bush-environmental tat,\nsocio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,\nsolidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi,\n\nlikewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties\nand the further humid, modelling negligee\nof the Kingdom of Flaunt,\nthat unchallenged aristocracy.\n\nMore plainly climatic, shorts\nare farmers’ rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;\nare sailors’ and branch bankers’ rig,\nthe crisp golfing style\nof our youngest male National Costume.\n\nMost loosely, they are Scunge,\nancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants\nworn with a former shirt,\nfeet, beach sand, hair\nand a paucity of signals.\n\nScunge, which is real negligee\nhousework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,\nis holiday, is freedom from ambition.\nScunge makes you invisible\nto the world and yourself.\n\nThe entropy of costume,\nscunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures\nand help you notice it less.\n\nTo be or to become\nis a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter\nwith its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,\nreading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.\n\nSatisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,\nthe wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness\nall fall within the scunge ambit\nwearing board shorts of similar;\nit is a kind of weightlessness.\n\nUnlike public nakedness, which in Westerners\nis deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,\nartless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,\n\nshorts and their plain like\nare an angelic nudity,\nspirituality with pockets!\nA double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!\n\nIdeal for getting served last\nin shops of the temperate zone\nthey are also ideal for going home, into space,\ninto time, to farm the mind’s Sabine acres\nfor product and subsistence.\n\nNow that everyone who yearned to wear long pants\nhas essentially achieved them,\nlong pants, which have themselves been underwear\nrepeatedly, and underground more than once,\nit is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,\n\nto moderate grim vigour\nwith the knobble of bare knees,\nto cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,\nslapping flies with a book on solar wind\nor a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,\n\nto be walking meditatively\namong green timber, through the grassy forest\ntowards a calm sea\nand looking across to more of that great island\nand the further tropics.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flowering-eucalypt-in-autumn": { - "title": "“Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn”", - "body": "That slim creek out of the sky\nthe dried-blood western gum tree\nis all stir in its high reaches:\n\nits strung haze-blue foliage is dancing\npoints down in breezy mobs, swapping\npace and place in an all-over sway\n\nretarded en masse by crimson blossom.\nBees still at work up there tack\naround their exploded furry likeness\n\nand the lawn underneath’s a napped rug\nof eyelash drift, of blooms flared\nlike a sneeze in a redhaired nostril,\n\nminute urns, pinch-sized rockets\nknocked down by winds, by night-creaking\nfig-squirting bats, or the daily\n\nparrot gang with green pocketknife wings.\nBristling food tough delicate\nraucous life, each flower comes\n\nas a spray in its own turned vase,\na taut starbust, honeyed model\nof the tree’s fragrance crisping in your head.\n\nWhen the japanese plum tree\nwas shedding in spring, we speculated\nthere among the drizzling petals\n\nwhat kind of exquisitely precious\nartistic bloom might be gendered\nin a pure ethereal compost\n\nof petals potted as they fell.\nFrom unpetalled gun-debris\nwe know what is grown continually,\n\na tower of fabulous swish tatters,\na map hoisted upright, a crusted\nriverbed with up-country show towns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-meaning-of-existence": { - "title": "“The Meaning of Existence”", - "body": "Everything except language\nknows the meaning of existence.\nTrees, planets, rivers, time\nknow nothing else. They express it\nmoment by moment as the universe.\nEven this fool of a body\nlives it in part, and would\nhave full dignity within it\nbut for the ignorant freedom\nof my talking mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-borders": { - "title": "“On the Borders”", - "body": "We’re driving across tableland\nsomewhere in the world;\nit is almost bare of trees.\n\nUpland near void of features\nalways moves me, but not to thought;\nit lets me rest from thinking.\n\nI feel no need to interpret it\nas if it were art. Too much\nof poetry is criticism now.\n\nThat hawk, clinging to\nthe eaves of the wind, beating\nits third wing, its tail\n\nisn’t mine to sell. And here is\nmore like the space that needs\nto exist around an image.\n\nThis cloud-roof country reminds me\nof the character of people\nwho first encountered roses in soap.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "performance": { - "title": "“Performance”", - "body": "I starred that night, I shone:\nI was footwork and firework in one,\n\na rocket that wriggled up and shot\ndarkness with a parasol of brilliants\nand a peewee descant on a flung bit;\nI was blusters of glitter-bombs expanding\nto mantle and aurora from a crown,\nI was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,\npara-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,\nloose gold off fierce toeholds of white,\na finale red-tongued as a haka leap:\nthat too was a butt of all right!\n\nAs usual after any triumph, I was\nof course, inconsolable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "predawn-in-health": { - "title": "“Predawn in Health”", - "body": "The stars are filtering through a tree\noutside in the moon’s silent era.\n\nReality is moving layer over layer\nlike crystal spheres now called laws.\n\nThe future is right behind your head;\njust over all horizons is the past.\n\nThe soul sits looking at its offer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-quality-of-sprawl": { - "title": "“The Quality of Sprawl”", - "body": "Sprawl is the quality\nof the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce\ninto a farm utility truck, and sprawl\nis what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts\nto buy the vehicle back and repair its image.\n\nSprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,\nor driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.\nIt is the rococo of being your own still centre.\nIt is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:\nthat’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.\nNor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.\n\nSprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.\nSprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised\nnor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn\nwith mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That’s Style.\nSprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen\nor anyway the fourteenth.\n\nSprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch\nbisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chain saw.\nNot harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,\nthough it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort\nat a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.\nKnowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.\n\nSprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first\nlines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.\nI have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.\nTurner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament\ncomes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl--\nexcept he didn’t fire them.\n\nSprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people\n(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it.\nSome decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander\ndividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.\nIf he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.\n\nSprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray\nasleep in his neighbours’ best bed in spurs and oilskins,\nbut not having thrown up:\nsprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house\nreinvented the Festoon. Rather\nit’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,\nNo Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,\non the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.\nAn image of my country. And would thatit were more so.\n\nNo, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.\nSprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.\nReprimanded and dismissed,\nit listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail\nof possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.\nBeing roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek\nAnd thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "vladimir-nabokov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vladimir Nabokov", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1977 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian+american", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "the-encounter": { - "title": "“The Encounter”", - "body": "Longing, and mystery, and delight …\nas if from the swaying blackness\nof some slow-motion masquerade\nonto the dim bridge you came.\n\nAnd night flowed, and silent there floated\ninto its satin streams\nthat black mask’s wolf-like profile\nand those tender lips of yours.\n\nAnd under the chestnuts, along the canal\nyou passed, luring me askance.\nWhat did my heart discern in you,\nhow did you move me so?\n\nIn your momentary tenderness,\nor in the changing contour of your shoulders,\ndid I experience a dim sketch\nof other--irrevocable--encounters?\n\nPerhaps romantic pity\nled you to understand\nwhat had set trembling that arrow\nnow piercing through my verse?\n\nI know nothing. Strangely\nthe verse vibrates, and in it, an arrow …\nPerhaps you, still nameless, were\nthe genuine, the awaited one?\n\nBut sorrow not yet quite cried out\nperturbed our starry hour.\nInto the night returned the double fissure\nof your eyes, eyes not yet illumed.\n\nFor long? For ever? Far off\nI wander, and strain to hear\nthe movement of the stars above our encounter\nand what if you are to be my fate …\n\nLonging, and mystery, and delight,\nand like a distant supplication …\nMy heart must travel on.\nBut if you are to be my fate …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "lilith": { - "title": "“Lilith”", - "body": "I died. Aeolus tugged and blown\nAt trees and shutters with his heat.\nI walked on down the dusty street\nFauns walked beside me. In each faun,\nI made out Pan. I contemplated:\n“This must be heaven, I have made it …”\n\nFrom sunlight hiding, shinning softly\nwith russet armpits, standing bare,\na girl was looking from the doorway,\nwith water-lilies in her hair.\nShe stood so slender, and so free,\nher nipples--rosy,--I recalled\none day in spring, when I, enthralled,\nsat, hidden by an alder-tree,\nand watched in silence, closely prying,\nthe town miller’s younger daughter,\nas she emerged out of the water,--\nbetween her legs, a beard was drying.\n\nAnd now, in yesterday’s attire,\nwhich I had worn when I was killed,\nI, with a playboy’s lustful smile,\napproached my Lilith with a thrill.\nAcross the shoulder, with a distant\ngreen eye she gazed,--at once, on me,\nthe cloak caught fire,--in an instant\nit turned to ash. And I could see,\nnot far away, a Greek divan stood,\nand tables full of wine and food,\nand then a wall, with paint splattered.\nWith two cold fingers, lacking shame,\nthe child took me by the flame:\n“Come over here,”--she softly uttered.\nWithout effort or compulsion,\nbut slowly, to extend delight\nshe spread, like wings, in just one motion\nher knees right there before my sight.\nWith those seductive shinning eyes!\nshe seemed so cheerful and so ardent,\nwhen with a frenzied bang of thighs\nI broke into the unforgotten.\nOur vessels locked. Together linked,\ninside of her, I started sliding\nalready, in a growing sting,\nsuch wondrous bliss began alighting,--\nand suddenly she pushed away,\nran back, and closed her legs in haste,\npicked up some veil on the way\nand put it up around her waist\nand full of strength, stuck in-between--\nso close to pleasure,--I, dismaying,\nrushed toward her, and started swaying\nfrom heated winds. “Oh, let me in,”--\nI yelled to her and grew aware\nthat I was on the street once more\nand nasty, bleating children there\nwere staring at my mace in awe.\n“Oh, let me in,”--goat-legged mass\nwould gather ’round me. “At last,\nor I’ll go crazy!” I still yelled.\nThe door was silent. And I, grieving,\nbefore the public, spilled my semen\nand understood, that this was hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "my-friend-im-really-just-sorry": { - "title": "“My Friend, I’m Really Just Sorry”", - "body": "My friend, I’m really just sorry\nabout who, in secret blindness,\npassing all length of the green alley,\njust can not notice on leaves\nthe striking network of the streaks\nand points of the tubercles\nor even the serrated tracks\nfrom saws of the blue-horned slugs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "date": { - "year": 1920, - "month": "january", - "day": 2 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "ode-to-a-model": { - "title": "“Ode to a Model”", - "body": "I have followed you, model,\nin magazine ads through all seasons,\nfrom dead leaf on the sod\nto red leaf on the breeze,\n\nfrom your lily-white armpit\nto the tip of your butterfly eyelash,\ncharming and pitiful,\nsilly and stylish.\n\nOr in kneesocks and tartan\nstanding there like some fabulous symbol,\nparted feet pointed outward\n--pedal form of akimbo.\n\nOn a lawn, in a parody\nof Spring and its cherry-tree,\nnear a vase and a parapet,\nvirgin practising archery.\n\nBallerina, black-masked,\nnear a parapet of alabaster.\n“Can one”--somebody asked--\n“rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”\n\nCan one picture a blackbird\nas the negative of a small firebird?\nCan a record, run backward,\nturn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?\n\nCan one marry a model?\nKill your past, make you real, raise a family,\nby removing you bodily\nfrom back numbers of Sham?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-swift": { - "title": "“The Swift”", - "body": "At twilight, we stood by the pier\nI said, “See that swift in the sky?\nAs long as you live, will you ever\nForget how it whirled in its flight?”\n\nYou said: “I’ll remember forever!”\nAnd then we both burst into tears,\nAnd love, like a wounded bird cried …\nAt twilight, right there by the pier\n\nForever, until we both die …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Olga Dumer" - } - }, - "what-does-my-heart-indeed-just-need": { - "title": "“What does my heart indeed just need …”", - "body": "What does my heart indeed just need\nto be happy? So not a lot …\nI like animals, trees, God,\nA beam--at noon, darkness--at night.\n\nAnd on the edge of outside\nI’ll say: where was affliction?\nI sang, and if I ever cried--\nso only with tears of admiration.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "date": { - "year": 1919, - "month": "march", - "day": 5 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 5 - } - } - }, - "the-fog-of-nighttime-sleep": { - "title": "“The fog of nighttime sleep …”", - "body": "The fog of nighttime sleep, the dusty plaque of languor,\nI wash them off by gently-gold heavy sponge,\nWhich’s full of swollen foam soap in all over,\nThe fragrant thick and very charming storage.\n\nIt’s lightly bluish, in the pool of milk-white water,\nWhich‘s slightly visible, but stirring vapor,\nAnd I place me with all my grateful body\nIn its calm heat and gentle flavor.\n\nAnd afterwards, enjoying that silky care,\nI often like the icy moisture to obtain\nMy blades to pour one moment and there\nBy fluffy sheets I need me to entwine.\n\nThen while my skin is slightly dry I drape it\nWith cool and light textile fabric of own,\nWith songs of struggle, searching for a feat,\nIt’s fair to say, that both ready--body and soul.\n\nSo every little thing we--children, poets,\nAre always able to apply into a miracle,\nAnd in the usual we heavenly signs guess\nAnd our any touch, make color it …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Galina Devyatkina", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - } - } - }, - "sarojini-naidu": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sarojini Naidu", - "birth": { - "year": 1879 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "indian", - "language": "hindi", - "flag": "🇮🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarojini_Naidu", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "indian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "an-indian-love-song": { - "title": "“An Indian Love Song”", - "body": "> _He:_\n\nLift up the veils that darken the delicate moon\nof thy glory and grace,\nWithhold not, O love, from the night\nof my longing the joy of thy luminous face,\nGive me a spear of the scented keora\nguarding thy pinioned curls,\nOr a silken thread from the fringes\nthat trouble the dream of thy glimmering pearls;\nFaint grows my soul with thy tresses’ perfume\nand the song of thy anklets’ caprice,\nRevive me, I pray, with the magical nectar\nthat dwells in the flower of thy kiss.\n\n\n> _She:_\n\nHow shall I yield to the voice of thy pleading,\nhow shall I grant thy prayer,\nOr give thee a rose-red silken tassel,\na scented leaf from my hair?\nOr fling in the flame of thy heart’s desire the veils that cover my face,\nProfane the law of my father’s creed for a foe\nof my father’s race?\nThy kinsmen have broken our sacred altars and slaughtered our sacred kine,\nThe feud of old faiths and the blood of old battles sever thy people and mine.\n\n\n> _He:_\n\nWhat are the sins of my race, Beloved,\nwhat are my people to thee?\nAnd what are thy shrines, and kine and kindred,\nwhat are thy gods to me?\nLove recks not of feuds and bitter follies,\nof stranger, comrade or kin,\nAlike in his ear sound the temple bells\nand the cry of the muezzin.\nFor Love shall cancel the ancient wrong\nand conquer the ancient rage,\nRedeem with his tears the memoried sorrow\nthat sullied a bygone age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hindi" - } - }, - "village-song": { - "title": "“Village Song”", - "body": "Honey, child, honey, child, whither are you going?\nWould you cast your jewels all to the breezes blowing?\nWould you leave the mother who on golden grain has fed you?\nWould you grieve the lover who is riding forth to wed you?\n\nMother mine, to the wild forest I am going,\nWhere upon the champa boughs the champa buds are blowing;\nTo the köil-haunted river-isles where lotus lilies glisten,\nThe voices of the fairy folk are calling me: O listen!\n\nHoney, child, honey, child, the world is full of pleasure,\nOf bridal-songs and cradle-songs and sandal-scented leisure.\nYour bridal robes are in the loom, silver and saffron glowing,\nYour bridal cakes are on the hearth: O whither are you going?\n\nThe bridal-songs and cradle-songs have cadences of sorrow,\nThe laughter of the sun to-day, the wind of death to-morrow.\nFar sweeter sound the forest-notes where forest-streams are falling;\nO mother mine, I cannot stay, the fairy-folk are calling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hindi" - } - } - } - }, - "ogden-nash": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ogden Nash", - "birth": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1971 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_Nash", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 87 - }, - "poems": { - "adventures-of-isabel": { - "title": "“Adventures of Isabel”", - "body": "Isabel met an enormous bear,\nIsabel, Isabel, didn’t care;\nThe bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,\nThe bear’s big mouth was cruel and cavernous.\nThe bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,\nHow do, Isabel, now I’ll eat you!\nIsabel, Isabel, didn’t worry.\nIsabel didn’t scream or scurry.\nShe washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,\nThen Isabel quietly ate the bear up.\nOnce in a night as black as pitch\nIsabel met a wicked old witch.\nthe witch’s face was cross and wrinkled,\nThe witch’s gums with teeth were sprinkled.\nHo, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,\nI’ll turn you into an ugly toad!\nIsabel, Isabel, didn’t worry,\nIsabel didn’t scream or scurry,\nShe showed no rage and she showed no rancor,\nBut she turned the witch into milk and drank her.\nIsabel met a hideous giant,\nIsabel continued self reliant.\nThe giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,\nHe had one eye in the middle of his forhead.\nGood morning, Isabel, the giant said,\nI’ll grind your bones to make my bread.\nIsabel, Isabel, didn’t worry,\nIsabel didn’t scream or scurry.\nShe nibled the zwieback that she always fed off,\nAnd when it was gone, she cut the giant’s head off.\nIsabel met a troublesome doctor,\nHe punched and he poked till he really shocked her.\nThe doctor’s talk was of coughs and chills\nAnd the doctor’s satchel bulged with pills.\nThe doctor said unto Isabel,\nSwallow this, it will make you well.\nIsabel, Isabel, didn’t worry,\nIsabel didn’t scream or scurry.\nShe took those pills from the pill concocter,\nAnd Isabel calmly cured the doctor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ant": { - "title": "“The Ant”", - "body": "The ant has made herself illustrious\nBy constant industry industrious.\nSo what? Would you be calm and placid\nIf you were full of formic acid?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bankers-are-just-like-anyone-else-except-richer": { - "title": "“Bankers Are Just Like Anyone Else, except Richer”", - "body": "This is a song to celebrate banks,\nBecause they are full of money and you go into them and all you hear is clinks and clanks,\nOr maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,\nWhich is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills.\nMost bankers dwell in marble halls,\nWhich they get to dwell in because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals,\nAnd particularly because they all observe one rule which woe betides the banker who fails to heed it,\nWhich is you must never lend any money to anybody unless they don’t need it.\nI know you, you cautious conservative banks!\nIf people are worried about their rent it is your duty to deny them the loan of one nickel, yes, even one copper engraving of the martyred son of the late Nancy Hanks;\nYes, if they request fifty dollars to pay for a baby you must look at them like Tarzan looking at an uppity ape in the jungle,\nAnd tell them what do they think a bank is, anyhow, they had better go get the money from their wife’s aunt or ungle.\nBut suppose people come in and they have a million and they want another million to pile on top of it,\nWhy, you brim with the milk of human kindness and you urge them to accept every drop of it,\nAnd you lend them the million so then they have two million and this gives them the idea that they would be better off with four,\nSo they already have two million as security so you have no hesitation in lending them two more,\nAnd all the vice-presidents nod their heads in rhythm,\nAnd the only question asked is do the borrowers want the money sent or do they want to take it withm.\nBecause I think they deserve our appreciation and thanks, the jackasses who go around saying that health and happiness are everything and money isn’t essential,\nBecause as soon as they have to borrow some unimportant money to maintain their health and happiness they starve to death so they can’t go around any more sneering at good old money, which is nothing short of providential.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bargain": { - "title": "“The Bargain”", - "body": "As I was going to St. Ives\nI met a man with seven lives;\nSeven lives,\nIn seven sacks,\nLike seven beeves\nOn seven racks.\nThese seven lives\nHe offered to sell,\nBut which was best\nHe couldn’t tell.\nHe swore with any\nI’d be happy forever;\nI bought all seven\nAnd thought I was clever,\nBut his parting words\nI can’t forget:\nForever\nIsn’t over yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "biological-reflection": { - "title": "“Biological Reflection”", - "body": "A girl whose cheeks are covered with paint\nHas an advantage with me over one whose ain’t.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-canary": { - "title": "“The Canary”", - "body": "The song of canaries\nNever varies,\nAnd when they’re moulting,\nThey’re pretty revolting", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-catsup-bottle": { - "title": "“The Catsup Bottle”", - "body": "First a little\nThen a lottle", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-caution-for-everybody": { - "title": "“A Caution for Everybody”", - "body": "Consider the auk;\nBecoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.\nConsider man, who may well become extinct\nBecause he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "celery": { - "title": "“Celery”", - "body": "Celery, raw\nDevelops the jaw,\nBut celery, stewed,\nIs more quietly chewed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-centipede": { - "title": "“The Centipede”", - "body": "I objurgate the centipede,\nA bug we do not really need.\nAt sleepy-time he beats a path\nStraight to the bedroom or the bath.\nYou always wallop where he’s not,\nOr, if he is, he makes a spot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "childrens-party": { - "title": "“Children’s Party”", - "body": "May I join you in the doghouse, Rover?\nI wish to retire till the party’s over.\nSince three o’clock I’ve done my best\nTo entertain each tiny guest.\nMy conscience now I’ve left behind me,\nAnd if they want me, let them find me.\nI blew their bubbles, I sailed their boats,\nI kept them from each other’s throats.\nI told them tales of magic lands,\nI took them out to wash their hands.\nI sorted their rubbers and tied their laces,\nI wiped their noses and dried their faces.\nOf similarities there’s lots\nTwixt tiny tots and Hottentots.\nI’ve earned repose to heal the ravages\nOf these angelic-looking savages.\nOh, progeny playing by itself\nIs a lonely little elf,\nBut progeny in roistering batches\nWould drive St. Francis from here to Natchez.\nShunned are the games a parent proposes,\nThey prefer to squirt each other with hoses,\nTheir playmates are their natural foemen\nAnd they like to poke each other’s abdomen.\nTheir joy needs another woe’s to cushion it,\nSay a puddle, and someone littler to push in it.\nThey observe with glee the ballistic results\nOf ice cream with spoons for catapults,\nAnd inform the assembly with tears and glares\nThat everyone’s presents are better than theirs.\nOh, little women and little men,\nSomeday I hope to love you again,\nBut not till after the party’s over,\nSo give me the key to the doghouse, Rover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-clean-plater": { - "title": "“The Clean Plater”", - "body": "Some singers sing of ladies’ eyes,\nAnd some of ladies lips,\nRefined ones praise their ladylike ways,\nAnd course ones hymn their hips.\nThe Oxford Book of English Verse\nIs lush with lyrics tender;\nA poet, I guess, is more or less\nPreoccupied with gender.\nYet I, though custom call me crude,\nPrefer to sing in praise of food.\nFood,\nYes, food,\nJust any old kind of food.\nPheasant is pleasant, of course,\nAnd terrapin, too, is tasty,\nLobster I freely endorse,\nIn pate or patty or pasty.\nBut there’s nothing the matter with butter,\nAnd nothing the matter with jam,\nAnd the warmest greetings I utter\nTo the ham and the yam and the clam.\nFor they’re food,\nAll food,\nAnd I think very fondly of food.\nThrough I’m broody at times\nWhen bothered by rhymes,\nI brood\nOn food.\nSome painters paint the sapphire sea,\nAnd some the gathering storm.\nOthers portray young lambs at play,\nBut most, the female form.\n’Twas trite in that primeval dawn\nWhen painting got its start,\nThat a lady with her garments on\nIs Life, but is she Art?\nBy undraped nymphs\nI am not wooed;\nI’d rather painters painted food.\nFood,\nJust food,\nJust any old kind of food.\nGo purloin a sirloin, my pet,\nIf you’d win a devotion incredible;\nAnd asparagus tips vinaigrette,\nOr anything else that is edible.\nBring salad or sausage or scrapple,\nA berry or even a beet.\nBring an oyster, an egg, or an apple,\nAs long as it’s something to eat.\nIf it’s food,\nIt’s food;\nNever mind what kind of food.\nWhen I ponder my mind\nI consistently find\nIt is glued\nOn food.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "columbus": { - "title": "“Columbus”", - "body": "Once upon a time there was an Italian,\nAnd some people thought he was a rapscallion,\nBut he wasn’t offended,\nBecause other people thought he was splendid,\nAnd he said the world was round,\nAnd everybody made an uncomplimentary sound,\nBut he went and tried to borrow some money from Ferdinand\nBut Ferdinand said America was a bird in the bush and he’d rather have a berdinand,\nBut Columbus’ brain was fertile, it wasn’t arid,\nAnd he remembered that Ferdinand was married,\nAnd he thought, there is no wife like a misunderstood one,\nBecause if her husband thinks something is a terrible idea she is bound to think it a good one,\nSo he perfumed his handkerchief with bay rum and citronella,\nAnd he went to see Isabella,\nAnd he looked wonderful but he had never felt sillier,\nAnd she said, I can’t place the face but the aroma is familiar,\nAnd Columbus didn’t say a word,\nAll he said was, I am Columbus, the fifteenth-century Admiral Byrd,\nAnd, just as he thought, her disposition was very malleable,\nAnd she said, Here are my jewels, and she wasn’t penurious like Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, she wasn’t referring to her children, no, she was referring to her jewels, which were very very valuable,\nSo Columbus said, Somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it,\nAnd he discovered America and they put him in jail for it,\nAnd the fetters gave him welts,\nAnd they named America after somebody else,\nSo the sad fate of Columbus ought to be pointed out to every child and every voter,\nBecause it has a very important moral, which is, Don’t be a discoverer, be a promoter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "columbus_day" - } - } - }, - "come-on-in-the-senility-is-fine": { - "title": "“Come on In, the Senility is Fine”", - "body": "People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa,\nBut you don’t have to live forever to become a grampa.\nThe entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild,\nYou only have to live until your child has a child.\nFrom that point on you start looking both ways over your shoulder,\nBecause sometimes you feel thirty years younger and sometimes thirty years older.\nNow you begin to realize who it was that reached the height of imbecility,\nIt was whoever said that grandparents have all the fun and none of the responsibility.\nThis is the most enticing spiderwebs of a tarradiddle ever spun,\nBecause everybody would love to have a baby around who was no responsibility and lots of fun,\nBut I can think of no one but a mooncalf or a gaby\nWho would trust their own child to raise a baby.\nSo you have to personally superintend your grandchild from diapers to pants and from bottle to spoon,\nBecause you know that your own child hasn’t sense enough to come in out of a typhoon.\nYou don’t have to live forever to become a grampa, but if you do want to live forever,\nDon’t try to be clever;\nIf you wish to reach the end of the trail with an uncut throat,\nDon’t go around saying Quote I don’t mind being a grampa but I hate being married to a gramma Unquote.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "common-cold": { - "title": "“Common Cold”", - "body": "Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!\nYou shall not sneer at me.\nPick up your hat and stethoscope,\nGo wash your mouth with laundry soap;\nI contemplate a joy exquisite\nI’m not paying you for your visit.\nI did not call you to be told\nMy malady is a common cold.\n\nBy pounding brow and swollen lip;\nBy fever’s hot and scaly grip;\nBy those two red redundant eyes\nThat weep like woeful April skies;\nBy racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;\nBy handkerchief after handkerchief;\nThis cold you wave away as naught\nIs the damnedest cold man ever caught!\n\nGive ear, you scientific fossil!\nHere is the genuine Cold Colossal;\nThe Cold of which researchers dream,\nThe Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.\nThis honored system humbly holds\nThe Super-cold to end all colds;\nThe Cold Crusading for Democracy;\nThe Führer of the Streptococcracy.\n\nBacilli swarm within my portals\nSuch as were ne’er conceived by mortals,\nBut bred by scientists wise and hoary\nIn some Olympic laboratory;\nBacteria as large as mice,\nWith feet of fire and heads of ice\nWho never interrupt for slumber\nTheir stamping elephantine rumba.\n\nA common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!\nAh, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;\nDon Juan was a budding gallant,\nAnd Shakespeare’s plays show signs of talent;\nThe Arctic winter is fairly coolish,\nAnd your diagnosis is fairly foolish.\nOh what a derision history holds\nFor the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "common-sense": { - "title": "“Common Sense”", - "body": "Why did the Lord give us agility\nIf not to evade responsibility?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cow": { - "title": "“The Cow”", - "body": "The cow is of the bovine ilk;\nOne end is moo, the other, milk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dog": { - "title": "“The Dog”", - "body": "The truth I do not stretch or shove\nWhen I state that the dog is full of love.\nI’ve also found, by actual test,\nA wet dog is the lovingest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-drink-with-something-in-it": { - "title": "“A Drink with Something in It”", - "body": "There is something about a Martini,\nA tingle remarkably pleasant;\nA yellow, a mellow Martini;\nI wish I had one at present.\nThere is something about a Martini,\nEre the dining and dancing begin,\nAnd to tell you the truth,\nIt is not the vermouth--\nI think that perhaps it’s the gin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-duck": { - "title": "“The Duck”", - "body": "Behold the duck.\nIt does not cluck.\nA cluck it lacks.\nIt quacks.\nIt is specially fond\nOf a puddle or pond.\nWhen it dines or sups,\nIt bottoms ups.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-eel": { - "title": "“The Eel”", - "body": "I don’t mind eels\nExcept as meals.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "everybody-tells-me-everything": { - "title": "“Everybody Tells Me Everything”", - "body": "I find it very difficult to enthuse\nOver the current news.\nJust when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,\nAnd that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fleas": { - "title": "“Fleas”", - "body": "Adam\nHad ’em", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fly": { - "title": "“The Fly”", - "body": "The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,\nAnd then forgot to tell us why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "further-reflections-on-parsley": { - "title": "“Further Reflections on Parsley”", - "body": "Parsley\nIs gharsley.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-germ": { - "title": "“The Germ”", - "body": "A mighty creature is the germ,\nThough smaller than the pachyderm.\nHis customary dwelling place\nIs deep within the human race.\nHis childish pride he often pleases\nBy giving people strange diseases.\nDo you, my poppet, feel infirm?\nYou probably contain a germ.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "good-bye-now-or-pardon-my-gauntlet": { - "title": "“Good-Bye now or Pardon My Gauntlet”", - "body": "Bring down the moon for genteel Janet;\nShe’s too refined for this gross planet.\nShe wears garments and you wear clothes,\nYou buy stockings, she purchases hose.\nShe say That is correct, and you say Yes,\nAnd she disrobes and you undress.\nConfronted by a mouse or moose,\nYou turn green, she turns chartroose.\nHer speech is new-minted, freshly quarried;\nShe has a fore-head, you have a forehead.\nNor snake nor slowworm draweth nigh her;\nYou go to bed, she doth retire.\nTo Janet, births are blessed events,\nAnd odors that you smell she scents.\nReplete she feels, when her food is yummy,\nNot in the stomach but the tummy.\nIf urged some novel step to show,\nYou say Like this, she says Like so.\nHer dear ones don’t die, but pass away;\nBeneath her formal is lonjeray.\nOf refinement she’s a fount, or fountess,\nAnd that is why she’s now a countess.\nShe was asking for the little girls’ room\nAnd a flunky though she said the earl’s room.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "goody-for-our-side-and-your-side-too": { - "title": "“Goody for Our Side and Your Side Too”", - "body": "Foreigners are people somewhere else,\nNatives are people at home;\nIf the place you’re at\nIs your habitat,\nYou’re a foreigner, say in Rome.\nBut the scales of Justice balance true,\nAnd tit leads into tat,\nSo the man who’s at home\nWhen he stays in Rome\nIs abroad when he’s where you’re at.\n\nWhen we leave the limits of the land in which\nOur birth certificates sat us,\nIt does not mean\nJust a change of scene,\nBut also a change of status.\nThe Frenchman with his fetching beard,\nThe Scot with his kilt and sporran,\nOne moment he\nMay a native be,\nAnd the next may find him foreign.\n\nThere’s many a difference quickly found\nBetween the different races,\nBut the only essential\nDifferential\nIs living different places.\nYet such is the pride of prideful man,\nFrom Austrians to Australians,\nThat wherever he is,\nHe regards as his,\nAnd the natives there, as aliens.\n\nOh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends,\nThe foreigner tells the native,\nAnd we’ll work together for our common ends\nLike a preposition and a dative.\nIf our common ends seem mostly mine,\nWhy not, you ignorant foreigner?\nAnd the native replies\nContrariwise;\nAnd hence, my dears, the coroner.\n\nSo mind your manners when a native, please,\nAnd doubly when you visit\nAnd between us all\nA rapport may fall\nEcstatically exquisite.\nOne simple thought, if you have it pat,\nWill eliminate the coroner:\nYou may be a native in your habitat,\nBut to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hippopotamus": { - "title": "“The Hippopotamus”", - "body": "Behold the hippopotamus!\nWe laugh at how he looks to us,\nAnd yet in moments dank and grim,\nI wonder how we look to him.\n\nPeace, peace, thou hippopotamus!\nWe really look all right to us,\nAs you no doubt delight the eye\nOf other hippopotami.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hunter": { - "title": "“The Hunter”", - "body": "The hunter crouches in his blind\n’Neath camouflage of every kind,\nAnd conjures up a quacking noise\nTo lend allure to his decoys.\nThis grown-up man, with pluck and luck,\nis hoping to outwit a duck.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-do-i-will-i-have": { - "title": "“I Do, I Will, I Have”", - "body": "How wise I am to have instructed the butler to instruct the first footman to instruct the second footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;\nI am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.\nJust as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,\nI know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.\nMoreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,\nI am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other never forgetsam,\nAnd he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate or drown,\nAnd she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the windowsill, it’s raining in, and he replies Oh they’re all right, it’s only raining straight down.\nThat is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,\nBecause it’s the only known example of the happy meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force.\nSo I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable,\nBecause I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-he-were-alive-today-mayhap-mr-morgan-would-sit-on-the-midgets-lap": { - "title": "“If He Were Alive Today, Mayhap, Mr. Morgan Would Sit on the Midget’s Lap”", - "body": "“Beep-beep.\nBANKERS TRUST AUTOMOBILE LOAN\nYou’ll find a banker at Bankers Trust”\nAdvertisement in N.Y. Times\n\nWhen comes my second childhood,\nAs to all men it must,\nI want to be a banker\nLike the banker at Bankers Trust.\nI wouldn’t ask to be president\nOr even assistant veep,\nI’d only ask for a kiddie car\nAnd permission to go beep-beep.\n\nThe banker at Chase Manhattan,\nHe bids a polite Good-day;\nThe banker at Immigrant Savings\nCries Scusi! and Olé!\nBut I’d be a sleek Ferrari\nOr perhaps a joggly jeep,\nAnd scooting around at Bankers Trust,\nBeep-beep, I’d go, beep-beep.\n\nThe trolley car used to say clang-clang\nAnd the choo-choo said toot-toot,\nBut the beep of the banker at Bankers Trust\nIs every bit as cute.\nMiaow, says the cuddly kitten,\nBaa, says the woolly sheep,\nOink, says the piggy-wiggy,\nAnd the banker says beep-beep.\n\nSo I want to play at Bankers Trust\nLike a hippety-hoppety bunny,\nAnd best of all, oh best of all,\nWith really truly money.\nNow grown-ups dear, it’s nightie-night\nUntil my dream comes true,\nAnd I bid you a happy boop-a-doop\nAnd a big beep-beep adieu.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "introspective-reflection": { - "title": "“Introspective Reflection”", - "body": "I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance\nWere it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-jellyfish": { - "title": "“The Jellyfish”", - "body": "Who wants my jellyfish?\nI’m not sellyfish!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-joyous-malingerer": { - "title": "“The Joyous Malingerer”", - "body": "Who is the happy husband? Why, indeed,\n’Tis he who’s useless in the time of need;\nWho, asked to unclasp a bracelet or a neckless,\nContrives to be utterly futile, fumbling, feckless,\nOr when a zipper nips his loved one’s back\nCannot restore the zipper to its track.\nAnother time, not wishing to be flayed,\nShe will not use him as a lady’s maid.\n\nStove-wise he’s the perpetual backward learner\nWho can’t turn on or off the proper burner.\nIf faced with washing up he never gripes,\nBut simply drops more dishes than he wipes.\nShe finds his absence preferable to his aid,\nAnd thus all mealtime chores doth he evade.\n\nHe can, attempting to replace a fuse,\nBlack out the coast from Boston to Newport News,\nOr, hanging pictures, be the rookie wizard\nWho fills the parlor with a plaster blizzard.\nHe’ll not again be called to competition\nWith decorator or with electrician.\n\nAt last it dawns upon his patient spouse\nHe’s better at his desk than round the house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "just-keep-quiet-and-nobody-will-notice": { - "title": "“Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice”", - "body": "There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,\nWhich is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.\nI don’t mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,\nBecause I think that is sort of sweet;\nNo, I object to one kind of apology alone,\nWhich is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.\nYou go to their house for a meal,\nAnd they apologize because the anchovies aren’t caviar or the partridge is veal;\nThey apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,\nAnd they apologize publicly for their wife’s housekeeping or their husband’s jests;\nIf they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn’t by Scott,\nAnd if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;\nThey contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,\nBut if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.\nI dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,\nI shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,\nBecause you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,\nAnd when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,\nAnd what particularly bores me with them,\nIs that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,\nSo I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,\nWhich is don’t spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-indited-with-all-the-depravity-of-poverty": { - "title": "“Lines Indited with All the Depravity of Poverty”", - "body": "One way to be very happy is to be very rich\nFor then you can buy orchids by the quire and bacon by the flitch.\nAnd yet at the same time People don’t mind if you only tip them a dime,\nBecause it’s very funny\nBut somehow if you’re rich enough you can get away with spending water like money\nWhile if you’re not rich you can spend in one evening your salary for the year\nAnd everybody will just stand around and jeer.\nIf you are rich you don’t have to think twice about buying a judge or a horse,\nOr a lower instead of an upper, or a new suit, or a divorce,\nAnd you never have to say When,\nAnd you can sleep every morning until nine or ten,\nAll of which\nExplains why I should like very, very much to be very, very rich.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-written-to-console-those-ladies": { - "title": "“Lines Written to Console Those Ladies”", - "body": "A girl who is bespectacled\nDon’t even get her nectaled\nBut safety pins and bassinets\nAwait the girl who fascinets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-on-facing-forty": { - "title": "“Lines on Facing Forty”", - "body": "I have a bone to pick with Fate.\nCome here and tell me, girlie,\nDo you think my mind is maturing late,\nOr simply rotted early?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-to-be-embroidered-on-a-bib": { - "title": "“Lines to Be Embroidered on a Bib”", - "body": "So Thomas Edison\nNever drank his medicine;\nSo Blackstone and Hoyle\nRefused cod-liver oil;\nSo Sir Thomas Malory\nNever heard of a calory;\nSo the Earl of Lennox\nMurdered Rizzio without the aid of vitamins or calisthenox;\nSo Socrates and Plato\nAte dessert without finishing their potato;\nSo spinach was too spinachy\nFor Leonardo da Vinaci;\nWell, it’s all immaterial,\nSo eat your nice cereal,\nAnd if you want to name your ration,\nFirst go get a reputation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lion": { - "title": "“The Lion”", - "body": "Oh, weep for Mr. and Mrs. Bryan!\nHe was eaten by a lion;\nFollowing which, the lion’s lioness\nUp and swallowed Bryan’s Bryaness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "look-what-you-did-christopher": { - "title": "“Look What You Did, Christopher!”", - "body": "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,\nSomeone sailed the ocean blue.\nSomebody borrowed the fare in Spain\nFor a business trip on the bounding main,\nAnd to prove to the people, by actual test,\nYou could get to the East by sailing West.\nSomebody said, Sail on! Sail on!\nAnd studied China and China’s lingo,\nAnd cried from the bow, There’s China now!\nAnd promptly bumped into San Domingo.\nSomebody murmured, Oh dear, oh dear!\nI’ve discovered the Western Hemisphere.\n\nAnd that, you may think, my friends, was that.\nBut it wasn’t. Not by a fireman’s hat.\nWell enough wasn’t left alone,\nAnd Columbus was only a cornerstone.\nThere came the Spaniards,\nThere came the Greeks,\nThere came the Pilgrims in leather breeks.\nThere came the Dutch,\nAnd the Poles and Swedes,\nThe Persians, too,\nAnd perhaps the Medes,\nThe Letts, the Lapps, and the Lithuanians,\nRegal Russians, and ripe Roumanians.\nThere came the French\nAnd there came the Finns,\nAnd the Japanese\nWith their formal grins.\nThe Tartars came,\nAnd the Terrible Turks--\nIn a word, humanity shot the works.\nAnd the country that should have been Cathay\nDecided to be\nThe U.S.A.\n\nAnd that, you may think, my friends, was that.\nBut it wasn’t. Not by a fireman’s hat.\nChristopher C. was the cornerstone,\nAnd well enough wasn’t left alone.\nFor those who followed\nWhen he was through,\nThey burned to discover something, too.\nSomebody, bored with rural scenery,\nWent to work and invented machinery,\nWhile a couple of other mental giants\nGot together\nAnd thought up Science.\nPlatinum blondes\n(They were once peroxide),\nPeruvian bonds\nAnd carbon monoxide,\nTax evaders\nAnd Vitamin A,\nVice crusaders,\nAnd tattletale gray--\nThese, with many another phobia,\nWe owe to that famous Twelfth of Octobia.\nO misery, misery, mumble and moan!\nSomeone invented the telephone,\nAnd interrupted a nation’s slumbers,\nRinging wrong but similar numbers.\nSomeone devised the silver screen\nAnd the intimate Hollywood magazine,\nAnd life is a Hades\nOf clicking cameras,\nAnd foreign ladies\nBehaving amorous.\nGags have erased\nAmusing dialog,\nAs gas has replaced\nThe crackling firelog.\nAll that glitters is sold as gold,\nAnd our daily diet grows odder and odder,\nAnd breakfast foods are dusty and cold--\nIt’s a wise child\nThat knows its fodder.\nSomeone invented the automobile,\nAnd good Americans took the wheel\nTo view American rivers and rills\nAnd justly famous forests and hills--\nBut someone equally enterprising\nHad invented billboard advertising.\nYou linger at home\nIn dark despair,\nAnd wistfully try the electric air.\nYou hope against hope for a quiz imperial,\nAnd what do they give you?\nA doctor serial.\nOh, Columbus was only a cornerstone,\nAnd well enough wasn’t left alone,\nFor the Inquisition was less tyrannical\nThan the iron rules of an age mechanical,\nWhich, because of an error in ’92,\nAre clamped like corsets on me and you,\nWhile Children of Nature we’d be today\nIf San Domingo\nHad been Cathay.\n\nAnd that, you may think, my friends, is that.\nBut it isn’t--not by a fireman’s hat.\nThe American people,\nWith grins jocose,\nAlways survive the fatal dose.\nAnd though our systems are slightly wobbly,\nWe’ll fool the doctor this time, probly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "columbus_day" - } - } - }, - "more-about-people": { - "title": "“More about People”", - "body": "When people aren’t asking questions\nThey’re making suggestions\nAnd when they’re not doing one of those\nThey’re either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes\nAnd then as if that weren’t enough to annoy you\nThey employ you.\nAnybody at leisure\nIncurs everybody’s displeasure.\nIt seems to be very irking\nTo people at work to see other people not working,\nSo they tell you that work is wonderful medicine,\nJust look at Firestone and Ford and Edison,\nAnd they lecture you till they’re out of breath or something\nAnd then if you don’t succumb they starve you to death or something.\nAll of which results in a nasty quirk:\nThat if you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "morning-prayer": { - "title": "“Morning Prayer”", - "body": "Now another day is breaking,\nSleep was sweet and so is waking.\nDear Lord, I promised you last night\nNever again to sulk or fight.\nSuch vows are easier to keep\nWhen a child is sound asleep.\nToday, O Lord, for your dear sake,\nI’ll try to keep them when awake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-dream": { - "title": "“My Dream”", - "body": "This is my dream,\nIt is my own dream,\nI dreamt it.\nI dreamt that my hair was kempt.\nThen I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "no-doctors-today-thank-you": { - "title": "“No Doctor’s Today, Thank You”", - "body": "They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful, well, today I feel euphorian,\nToday I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetitite of a Victorian.\nYes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,\nToday I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle any swashes?\nThis is my euphorian day,\nI will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run away.\nI will tame me a caribou\nAnd bedeck it with marabou.\nI will pen me my memoirs.\nAh youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!\nI wasn’t much of a hand for the boudoirs,\nI was generally to be found where the food was.\nDoes anybody want any flotsam?\nI’ve gotsam.\nDoes anybody want any jetsam?\nI can getsam.\nI can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer,\nI can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer.\nI can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the laces because\nI am wearing moccasins,\nAnd I practically know the difference between serums and antitoccasins.\nKind people, don’t think me purse-proud, don’t set me down as vainglorious,\nI’m just a little euphorious.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "no-you-be-a-lone-eagle": { - "title": "“No, You Be a Lone Eagle”", - "body": "I find it very hard to be fair-minded\nAbout people who go around being air-minded.\nI just can’t see any fun\nIn soaring up up up into the sun\nWhen the chances are still a fresh cool orchid to a paper geranium\nThat you’ll unsoar down down down onto your (to you) invaluable cranium.\nI know the constant refrain\nAbout how safer up in God’s trafficless heaven than in an automobile or a train\nBut …\nMy God, have you ever taken a good look at a strut?\nThen that one about how you’re in Boston before you can say antidisestablishmentarianism\nSo that preferring to take five hours by rail is a pernicious example of antiquarianism.\nAt least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing in the South Station\nAnd not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of aviation.\nThen, despite the assurance that aeroplanes are terribly comfortable I notice that when you are railroading or automobiling\nYou don’t have to take a paper bag along just in case of a funny feeling.\nIt seems to me that no kind of depravity\nBrings such speedy retribution as ignoring the law of gravity.\nTherefore nobody could possibly indict me for perjury\nWhen I swear that I wish the Wright brothers had gone in for silver fox farming or tree surgery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-octopus": { - "title": "“The Octopus”", - "body": "Tell me, O Octopus, I begs\nIs those things arms, or is they legs?\nI marvel at thee, Octopus;\nIf I were thou, I’d call me Us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-ode-to-a-goldfish": { - "title": "“An Ode to a Goldfish”", - "body": "O wet pet", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "oh-to-be-odd": { - "title": "“Oh to Be Odd!”", - "body": "Hypochondriacs\nSpend the winter at the bottom of Florida and the summer on top of the Adirondriacs.\nYou go to Paris and live on champagne wine and cognac\nIf you’re dipsomognac.\nIf you’re a manic-depressive\nYou don’t go anywhere where you won’t be cheered up, and people say “there, there!” if your bills are excessive.\nBut you stick around and work day and night and night and day with your nose to the sawmill.\nIf you’re nawmill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-dr-valentine-to-his-son": { - "title": "“Old Dr. Valentine to His Son”", - "body": "Your hopeless patients will live,\nYour healthy patients will die.\nI have only this word to give:\nWonder, and find out why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-men": { - "title": "“Old Men”", - "body": "People expect old men to die,\nThey do not really mourn old men.\nOld men are different. People look\nAt them with eyes that wonder when …\nPeople watch with unshocked eyes;\nBut the old men know when an old man dies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-from-one-leaves-two": { - "title": "“One from One Leaves Two”", - "body": "Higgledy piggledy, my black hen,\nShe lays eggs for gentlemen.\nGentlemen come every day\nTo count what my black hen doth lay.\nIf perchance she lays too many,\nThey fine my hen a pretty penny;\nIf perchance she fails to lay,\nThe gentlemen a bonus pay.\n\nMumbledy pumbledy, my red cow,\nShe’s cooperating now.\nAt first she didn’t understand\nThat milk production must be planned;\nShe didn’t understand at first\nShe either had to plan or burst,\nBut now the government reports\nShe’s giving pints instead of quarts.\n\nFiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors,\nThey are giggling at their labors.\nFirst they plant the tiny seed,\nThen they water, then they weed,\nThen they hoe and prune and lop,\nThey they raise a record crop,\nThen they laugh their sides asunder,\nAnd plow the whole caboodle under.\n\nAbracadabra, thus we learn\nThe more you create, the less you earn.\nThe less you earn, the more you’re given,\nThe less you lead, the more you’re driven,\nThe more destroyed, the more they feed,\nThe more you pay, the more they need,\nThe more you earn, the less you keep,\nAnd now I lay me down to sleep.\nI pray the Lord my soul to take\nIf the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ostrich": { - "title": "“The Ostrich”", - "body": "The ostrich roams the great Sahara.\nIts mouth is wide, its neck is narra.\nIt has such long and lofty legs,\nI’m glad it sits to lay its eggs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-panther": { - "title": "“The Panther”", - "body": "The panther is like a leopard,\nExcept it hasn’t been peppered.\nShould you behold a panther crouch,\nPrepare to say Ouch.\nBetter yet, if called by a panther,\nDon’t anther.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peekabo-i-almost-see-you": { - "title": "“Peekabo, I Almost See You”", - "body": "Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,\nBut there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,\nAnd your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,\nAnd of all your friends he is the joculist,\nSo over his facetiousness let us skim,\nOnly noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,\nAnd you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do.\nYou need two.\nOne for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and\nKeats’s “Endymion” with,\nAnd the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with.\nSo you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,\nAnd then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are.\nEnough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,\nI prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-people-upstairs": { - "title": "“The People Upstairs”", - "body": "The people upstairs all practise ballet\nTheir living room is a bowling alley\nTheir bedroom is full of conducted tours.\nTheir radio is louder than yours,\nThey celebrate week-ends all the week.\nWhen they take a shower, your ceilings leak.\nThey try to get their parties to mix\nBy supplying their guests with Pogo sticks,\nAnd when their fun at last abates,\nThey go to the bathroom on roller skates.\nI might love the people upstairs more\nIf only they lived on another floor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pig": { - "title": "“The Pig”", - "body": "The pig, if I am not mistaken,\nSupplies us sausage, ham and bacon,\nLet others say his heart is big--\nI call it stupid of the pig.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-prematurely-old-man": { - "title": "“Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man”", - "body": "It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,\nThat all sin is divided into two parts.\nOne kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,\nAnd it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,\nAnd the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,\nAnd it consists of not having done something you shuddha.\nI might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as, in a way, against each other we are pitting them,\nAnd that is, don’t bother your head about the sins of commission because however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn’t be committing them.\nIt is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,\nThat lays eggs under your skin.\nThe way you really get painfully bitten\nIs by the insurance you haven’t taken out and the checks you haven’t added up the stubs of and the appointments you haven’t kept and the bills you haven’t paid and the letters you haven’t written.\nAlso, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,\nNamely, it isn’t as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every time you neglected to do your duty;\nYou didn’t get a wicked forbidden thrill\nEvery time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;\nYou didn’t slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,\nLet’s all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.\nNo, you never get any fun\nOut of things you haven’t done,\nBut they are the things that I do not like to be amid,\nBecause the suitable things you didn’t do give you a lot more trouble than the unsuitable things you did.\nThe moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,\nWell, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pretty-halcyon-days": { - "title": "“Pretty Halcyon Days”", - "body": "How pleasant to sit on the beach,\nOn the beach, on the sand, in the sun,\nWith ocean galore within reach,\nAnd nothing at all to be done!\nNo letters to answer,\nNo bills to be burned,\nNo work to be shirked,\nNo cash to be earned,\nIt is pleasant to sit on the beach\nWith nothing at all to be done!\n\nHow pleasant to look at the ocean,\nDemocratic and damp; indiscriminate;\nIt fills me with noble emotion\nTo think I am able to swim in it.\nTo lave in the wave,\nMajestic and chilly,\nTomorrow I crave;\nBut today it is silly.\nIt is pleasant to look at the ocean;\nTomorrow, perhaps, I shall swim in it.\n\nHow pleasant to gaze at the sailors\nAs their sailboats they manfully sail\nWith the vigor of vikings and whalers\nIn the days of the vikings and whale.\nThey sport on the brink\nOf the shad and the shark;\nIf it’s windy, they sink;\nIf it isn’t, they park.\nIt is pleasant to gaze at the sailors,\nTo gaze without having to sail.\n\nHow pleasant the salt anesthetic\nOf the air and the sand and the sun;\nLeave the earth to the strong and athletic,\nAnd the sea to adventure upon.\nBut the sun and the sand\nNo contractor can copy;\nWe lie in the land\nOf the lotus and poppy;\nWe vegetate, calm and aesthetic,\nOn the beach, on the sand, in the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-purist": { - "title": "“The Purist”", - "body": "I give you now Professor Twist,\nA conscientious scientist,\nTrustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!”\nAnd sent him off to distant jungles.\nCamped on a tropic riverside,\nOne day he missed his loving bride.\nShe had, the guide informed him later,\nBeen eaten by an alligator.\nProfessor Twist could not but smile.\n“You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflection-on-babies": { - "title": "“Reflection on Babies”", - "body": "A bit of talcum\nIs always walcum.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflection-on-caution": { - "title": "“Reflection on Caution”", - "body": "Affection is a noble quality;\nIt leads to generosity and jollity.\nBut it also leads to breach of promise\nIf you go around lavishing it on red-hot momise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflection-on-ingenuity": { - "title": "“Reflection on Ingenuity”", - "body": "Here’s a good rule of thumb:\nToo clever is dumb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflection-on-the-fallibility-of-nemesis": { - "title": "“Reflection on the Fallibility of Nemesis”", - "body": "He who is ridden by a conscience\nWorries about a lot of nonscience;\nHe without benefit of scruples\nHis fun and income soon quadruples.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reflections-on-ice-breaking": { - "title": "“Reflections on Ice-Breaking”", - "body": "Candy\nIs dandy\nBut liquor\nIs quicker", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rhinoceros": { - "title": "“The Rhinoceros”", - "body": "The rhino is a homely beast,\nFor human eyes he’s not a feast.\nFarwell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,\nI’ll stare at something less prepoceros.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-romantic-age": { - "title": "“The Romantic Age”", - "body": "This one is entering her teens,\nRipe for sentimental scenes,\nHas picked a gangling unripe male,\nSees herself in bridal veil,\nPresses lips and tosses head,\nDeclares she’s not too young to wed,\nInforms you pertly you forget\nRomeo and Juliet.\nDo not argue, do not shout;\nRemind her how that one turned out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-shrimp": { - "title": "“The Shrimp”", - "body": "A shrimp who sought his lady shrimp\nCould catch no glimpse\nNot even a glimp.\nAt times, translucence\nIs rather a nuisance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sniffle": { - "title": "“The Sniffle”", - "body": "In spite of her sniffle\nIsabel’s chiffle.\nSome girls with a sniffle\nWould be weepy and tiffle;\nThey would look awful,\nLike a rained-on waffle,\nBut Isabel’s chiffle\nIn spite of her sniffle.\nHer nose is more red\nWith a cold in her head,\nBut then, to be sure,\nHer eyes are bluer.\nSome girls with a snuffle,\nTheir tempers are uffle.\nBut when Isabel’s snivelly\nShe’s snivelly civilly,\nAnd when she’s snuffly\nShe’s perfectly luffly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "so-does-everybody-else-only-not-so-much": { - "title": "“So Does Everybody Else, only Not so Much”", - "body": "O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge,\nFor I wish to be purged of an urge.\nIt is an irksome urge, compounded of nettles and glue,\nAnd it is turning all my friends back into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into view.\nIt is an indication that my mental buttery is butterless and my mental larder lardless,\nAnd it consists not of “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” but of “I know you’ve heard this one because I told it to you myself, but I’m going to tell it to you again regardless,”\nYes I fear I am living beyond my mental means.\nWhen I realize that it is not only anecdotes that I reiterate but what is far worse, summaries of radio programs and descriptions of caroons in newspapers and magazines.\nI want to resist but I cannot resist recounting the bright sayins of celebrities that everybody already is familiar with every word of;\nI want to refrain but cannot refrain from telling the same audience on two successive evenings the same little snatches of domestic gossip about people I used to know that they have never heard of.\nWhen I remember some titlating episode of my childhood I figure that if it’s worth narrating once it’s worth narrating twice, in spite of lackluster eyes and dropping jaws,\nAnd indeed I have now worked my way backward from titllating episodes in my own childhood to titillating episodes in the childhood of my parents or even my parents-in-laws,\nAnd what really turns my corpuscles to ice,\nI carry around clippings and read them to people twice.\nAnd I know what I am doing while I am doing it and I don’t want to do it but I can’t help doing it and I am just another Ancient Mariner,\nAnd the prospects for my future social life couldn’t possibly be barrener. Did I tell you that the prospects for my future social life couldn’t be barrener?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "soliloquy-in-circles": { - "title": "“Soliloquy in Circles”", - "body": "Being a father\nIs quite a bother.\n\nYou are as free as air\nWith time to spare,\n\nYou’re a fiscal rocket\nWith change in your pocket,\n\nAnd then one morn\nA child is born.\n\nYour life has been runcible,\nIrresponsible,\n\nLike an arrow or javelin\nYou’ve been constantly travelin’.\n\nBut mostly, I daresay,\nWithout a chaise percée,\n\nTo which by comparison\nNothing’s embarison.\n\nBut all children matures,\nMaybe even yours.\n\nYou improve them mentally\nAnd straighten them dentally,\n\nThey grow tall as a lancer\nAnd ask questions you can’t answer,\n\nAnd supply you with data\nAbout how everybody else wears lipstick sooner and stays up later,\n\nAnd if they are popular,\nThe phone they monopular.\n\nThey scorn the dominion\nOf their parent’s opinion,\n\nThey’re no longer corralable\nOnce they find that you’re fallible\n\nBut after you’ve raised them and educated them and gowned them,\nThey just take their little fingers and wrap you around them.\n\nBeing a father Is quite a bother,\nBut I like it, rather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-solitary-huntsman": { - "title": "“The Solitary Huntsman”", - "body": "The solitary huntsman\nNo coat of pink doth wear,\nBut midnight black from cap to spur\nUpon his midnight mare.\nHe drones a tuneless jingle\nIn lieu of tally-ho:\n“I’ll catch a fox\nAnd put him in a box\nAnd never let him go.”\n\nThe solitary huntsman,\nHe follows silent hounds.\nNo horn proclaims his joyless sport,\nAnd never a hoofbeat sounds.\nHis hundred hounds, his thousands,\nTheir master’s will they know:\nTo catch a fox\nAnd put him in a box\nAnd never let him go.\n\nFor all the fox’s doubling\nThey track him to his den.\nThe chase may fill a morning,\nOr threescore years and ten.\nThe huntsman never sated\nScreaks to his saddlebow,\n“I’ll catch another fox\nAnd put him in a box\nAnd never let him go.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-to-be-sung-by-the-father-of-infant-female-children": { - "title": "“Song to Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children”", - "body": "My heart leaps up when I behold\nA rainbow in the sky;\nContrariwise, my blood runs cold\nWhen little boys go by.\nFor little boys as little boys,\nNo special hate I carry,\nBut now and then they grow to men,\nAnd when they do, they marry.\nNo matter how they tarry,\nEventually they marry.\nAnd, swine among the pearls,\nThey marry little girls.\n\nOh, somewhere, somewhere, an infant plays,\nWith parents who feed and clothe him.\nTheir lips are sticky with pride and praise,\nBut I have begun to loathe him.\nYes, I loathe with loathing shameless\nThis child who to me is nameless.\nThis bachelor child in his carriage\nGives never a thought to marriage,\nBut a person can hardly say knife\nBefore he will hunt him a wife.\n\nI never see an infant (male),\nA-sleeping in the sun,\nWithout I turn a trifle pale\nAnd think is he the one?\nOh, first he’ll want to crop his curls,\nAnd then he’ll want a pony,\nAnd then he’ll think of pretty girls,\nAnd holy matrimony.\nA cat without a mouse\nIs he without a spouse.\n\nOh, somewhere he bubbles bubbles of milk,\nAnd quietly sucks his thumbs.\nHis cheeks are roses painted on silk,\nAnd his teeth are tucked in his gums.\nBut alas the teeth will begin to grow,\nAnd the bubbles will cease to bubble;\nGiven a score of years or so,\nThe roses will turn to stubble.\nHe’ll sell a bond, or he’ll write a book,\nAnd his eyes will get that acquisitive look,\nAnd raging and ravenous for the kill,\nHe’ll boldly ask for the hand of Jill.\nThis infant whose middle\nIs diapered still\nWill want to marry My daughter Jill.\n\nOh sweet be his slumber and moist his middle!\nMy dreams, I fear, are infanticiddle.\nA fig for embryo Lohengrins!\nI’ll open all his safety pins,\nI’ll pepper his powder, and salt his bottle,\nAnd give him readings from Aristotle.\nSand for his spinach I’ll gladly bring,\nAnd Tabasco sauce for his teething ring.\nThen perhaps he’ll struggle though fire and water\nTo marry somebody else’s daughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-comes-to-murray-hill": { - "title": "“Spring Comes to Murray Hill”", - "body": "I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue\nAnd say to myself You have a responsible job havenue?\nWhy then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?\nIf you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral,\nIf you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist,\nAnd you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,\nWhy then should this flocculent lassitude be incurable?\nKansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kansas City needn’t always be Missourible.\nUp up my soul! This inaction is abominable.\nPerhaps it is the result of disturbances abdominable.\nThe pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620 when they landed on a stone hummock.\nMaybe if they were here now they would settle my stomach.\nOh, if I only had the wings of a bird\nInstead of being confined on Madison Avenue I could soar in a jiffy to Second or Third.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-sunset-years-of-samuel-shy": { - "title": "“The Sunset Years of Samuel Shy”", - "body": "Master I may be,\nBut not of my fate.\nNow come the kisses, too many too late.\nTell me, O Parcae,\nFor fain would I know,\nWhere were these kisses three decades ago?\nGirls there were plenty,\nMint julep girls, beer girls,\nGay younger married and headstrong career girls,\nThe girls of my friends\nAnd the wives of my friends,\nSome smugly settled and some at loose ends,\nSad girls, serene girls,\nGirls breathless and turbulent,\nDebs cosmopolitan, matrons suburbulent,\nAll of them amiable,\nAll of them cordial,\nInnocent rousers of instincts primordial,\nBut even though health and wealth\nHadn’t yet missed me,\nNone of them,\nNot even Jenny,\nOnce kissed me.\n\nThese very same girls\nWho with me have grown older\nNow freely relax with a head on my shoulder,\nAnd now come the kisses,\nA flood in full spate,\nThe meaningless kisses, too many too late.\nThey kiss me hello,\nThey kiss me goodbye,\nShould I offer a light, there’s a kiss for reply.\nThey kiss me at weddings,\nThey kiss me at wakes,\nThe drop of a hat is less than it takes.\nThey kiss me at cocktails,\nThey kiss me at bridge,\nIt’s all automatic, like slapping a midge.\nThe sound of their kisses\nIs loud in my ears\nLike the locusts that swarm every seventeen years.\n\nI’m arthritic, dyspeptic,\nPotentially ulcery,\nAnd weary of kisses by custom compulsory.\nShould my dear ones commit me\nAs senile demential,\nIt’s from kisses perfunctory, inconsequential.\nAnswer, O Parcae,\nFor fain would I know,\nWhere were these kisses three decades ago?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-tale-of-the-thirteenth-floor": { - "title": "“A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor”", - "body": "The hands of the clock were reaching high\nIn an old midtown hotel;\nI name no name, but its sordid fame\nIs table talk in hell.\nI name no name, but hell’s own flame\nIllumes the lobby garish,\nA gilded snare just off Times Square\nFor the maidens of the parish.\n\nThe revolving door swept the grimy floor\nLike a crinoline grotesque,\nAnd a lowly bum from an ancient slum\nCrept furtively past the desk.\nHis footsteps sift into the lift\nAs a knife in the sheath is slipped,\nStealthy and swift into the lift\nAs a vampire into a crypt.\n\nOld Maxie, the elevator boy,\nWas reading an ode by Shelley,\nBut he dropped the ode as it were a toad\nWhen the gun jammed into his belly.\nThere came a whisper as soft as mud\nIn the bed of an old canal:\n“Take me up to the suite of Pinball Pete,\nThe rat who betrayed my gal.”\n\nThe lift doth rise with groans and sighs\nLike a duchess for the waltz,\nThen in middle shaft, like a duchess daft,\nIt changes its mind and halts.\nThe bum bites lip as the landlocked ship\nDoth neither fall nor rise,\nBut Maxie the elevator boy\nRegards him with burning eyes.\n“First, to explore the thirteenth floor,”\nSays Maxie, “would be wise.”\n\nQuoth the bum, “There is moss on your double cross,\nI have been this way before,\nI have cased the joint at every point,\nAnd there is no thirteenth floor.\nThe architect he skipped direct\nFrom twelve unto fourteen,\nThere is twelve below and fourteen above,\nAnd nothing in between,\nFor the vermin who dwell in this hotel\nCould never abide thirteen.”\n\nSaid Max, “Thirteen, that floor obscene,\nIs hidden from human sight;\nBut once a year it doth appear,\nOn this Walpurgis Night.\nEre you peril your soul in murderer’s role,\nHeed those who sinned of yore;\nThe path they trod led away from God,\nAnd onto the thirteenth floor,\nWhere those they slew, a grisly crew,\nReproach them forevermore.”\n\n“We are higher than twelve and below fourteen,”\nSaid Maxie to the bum,\n“And the sickening draft that taints the shaft\nIs a whiff of kingdom come.\nThe sickening draft that taints the shaft\nBlows through the devil’s door!”\nAnd he squashed the latch like a fungus patch,\nAnd revealed the thirteenth floor.\n\nIt was cheap cigars like lurid scars\nThat glowed in the rancid gloom,\nThe murk was a-boil with fusel oil\nAnd the reek of stale perfume.\nAnd round and round there dragged and wound\nA loathsome conga chain,\nThe square and the hep in slow lock step,\nThe slayer and the slain.\n(For the souls of the victims ascend on high,\nBut their bodies below remain.)\n\nThe clean souls fly to their home in the sky,\nBut their bodies remain below\nTo pursue the Cain who each has slain\nAnd harry him to and fro.\nWhen life is extinct each corpse is linked\nTo its gibbering murderer,\nAs a chicken is bound with wire around\nThe neck of a killer cur.\n\nHandcuffed to Hate come Doctor Waite\n(He tastes the poison now),\nAnd Ruth and Judd and a head of blood\nWith horns upon its brow.\nUp sashays Nan with her feathery fan\nFrom Floradora bright;\nShe never hung for Caesar Young\nBut she’s dancing with him tonight.\n\nHere’s the bulging hip and the foam-flecked lip\nOf the mad dog, Vincent Coll,\nAnd over there that ill-met pair,\nBecker and Rosenthal,\nHere’s Legs and Dutch and a dozen such\nOf braggart bullies and brutes,\nAnd each one bends ’neath the weight of friends\nWho are wearing concrete suits.\n\nNow the damned make way for the double-damned\nWho emerge with shuffling pace\nFrom the nightmare zone of persons unknown,\nWith neither name nor face.\nAnd poor Dot King to one doth cling,\nJoined in a ghastly jig,\nWhile Elwell doth jape at a goblin shape\nAnd tickle it with his wig.\n\nSee Rothstein pass like breath on a glass,\nThe original Black Sox kid;\nHe riffles the pack, riding piggyback\nOn the killer whose name he hid.\nAnd smeared like brine on a slavering swine,\nStarr Faithful, once so fair,\nDrawn from the sea to her debauchee,\nWith the salt sand in her hair.\n\nAnd still they come, and from the bum\nThe icy sweat doth spray;\nHis white lips scream as in a dream,\n“For God’s sake, let’s away!\nIf ever I meet with Pinball Pete\nI will not seek his gore,\nLest a treadmill grim I must trudge with him\nOn the hideous thirteenth floor.”\n\n“For you I rejoice,” said Maxie’s voice,\n“And I bid you go in peace,\nBut I am late for a dancing date\nThat nevermore will cease.\nSo remember, friend, as your way you wend,\nThat it would have happened to you,\nBut I turned the heat on Pinball Pete;\nYou see--I had a daughter, too!”\n\nThe bum reached out and he tried to shout,\nBut the door in his face was slammed,\nAnd silent as stone he rode down alone\nFrom the floor of the double-damned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "the-termite": { - "title": "“The Termite”", - "body": "Some primal termite knocked on wood\nAnd tasted it, and found it good!\nAnd that is why your Cousin May\nFell through the parlor floor today.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tin-wedding-whistle": { - "title": "“Tin Wedding Whistle”", - "body": "Though you know it anyhow\nListen to me, darling, now,\nProving what I need not prove\nHow I know I love you, love.\nNear and far, near and far,\nI am happy where you are;\nLikewise I have never larnt\nHow to be it where you aren’t.\nFar and wide, far and wide,\nI can walk with you beside;\nFurthermore, I tell you what,\nI sit and sulk where you are not.\nVisitors remark my frown\nWhere you’re upstairs and I am down,\nYes, and I’m afraid I pout\nWhen I’m indoors and you are out;\nBut how contentedly I view\nAny room containing you.\nIn fact I care not where you be,\nJust as long as it’s with me.\nIn all your absences I glimpse\nFire and flood and trolls and imps.\nIs your train a minute slothful?\nI goad the stationmaster wrothful.\nWhen with friends to bridge you drive\nI never know if you’re alive,\nAnd when you linger late in shops\nI long to telephone the cops.\nYet how worth the waiting for,\nTo see you coming through the door.\nSomehow, I can be complacent\nNever but with you adjacent.\nNear and far, near and far,\nI am happy where you are;\nLikewise I have never larnt\nHow to be it where you aren’t.\nThen grudge me not my fond endeavor,\nTo hold you in my sight forever;\nLet none, not even you, disparage\nSuch a valid reason for a marriage.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-my-valentine": { - "title": "“To My Valentine”", - "body": "More than a catbird hates a cat,\nOr a criminal hates a clue,\nOr the Axis hates the United States,\nThat’s how much I love you.\n\nI love you more than a duck can swim,\nAnd more than a grapefruit squirts,\nI love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,\nAnd more than a toothache hurts.\n\nAs a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,\nOr a juggler hates a shove,\nAs a hostess detests unexpected guests,\nThat’s how much you I love.\n\nI love you more than a wasp can sting,\nAnd more than the subway jerks,\nI love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,\nAnd more than a hangnail irks.\n\nI swear to you by the stars above,\nAnd below, if such there be,\nAs the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,\nThat’s how you’re loved by me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "the-turtle": { - "title": "“The Turtle”", - "body": "The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks\nWhich practically conceal its sex.\nI think it clever of the turtle\nIn such a fix to be so fertile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "very-like-a-whale": { - "title": "“Very Like a Whale”", - "body": "One thing that literature would be greatly the better for\nWould be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and metaphor.\nAuthors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,\nCan’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.\nWhat does it mean when we are told\nThat that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?\nIn the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience\nTo know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians.\nHowever, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity.\nWe’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.\nNow then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,\nJust what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wold on the fold?\nIn heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things.\nBut I don’t imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.\nNo, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;\nDid he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?\nFrankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,\nWas that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.\nBut that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,\nWith the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.\nThat’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;\nThey’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,\nAnd they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.\nOh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,\nAnd after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly\nWhat I mean by too much metaphor and simile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wasp": { - "title": "“The Wasp”", - "body": "The wasp and all his numerous family\nI look upon as a major calamity.\nHe throws open his nest with prodigality,\nBut I distrust his waspitality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-almost-every-woman-knows-sooner-or-later": { - "title": "“What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner or Later”", - "body": "Husbands are things that wives have to get used to putting up with.\nAnd with whom they breakfast with and sup with.\nThey interfere with the discipline of nurseries,\nAnd forget anniversaries,\nAnd when they have been particularly remiss\nThey think they can cure everything with a great big kiss,\nAnd when you tell them about something awful they have done they just look unbearably patient and smile a superior smile,\nAnd think, Oh she’ll get over it after a while.\nAnd they always drink cocktails faster than they can assimilate them,\nAnd if you look in their direction they act as if they were martyrs and you were trying to sacrifice, or immolate them,\nAnd when it’s a question of walking five miles to play golf they are very energetic but if it’s doing anything useful around the house they are very lethargic,\nAnd then they tell you that women are unreasonable and don’t know anything about logic,\nAnd they never want to get up or go to bed at the same time as you do,\nAnd when you perform some simple common or garden rite like putting cold cream on your face or applying a touch of lipstick they seem to think that you are up to some kind of black magic like a priestess of Voodoo.\nAnd they are brave and calm and cool and collected about the ailments of the person they have promised to honor and cherish,\nBut the minute they get a sniffle or a stomachache of their own, why you’d think they were about to perish,\nAnd when you are alone with them they ignore all the minor courtesies and as for airs and graces, they uttlerly lack them,\nBut when there are a lot of people around they hand you so many chairs and ashtrays and sandwiches and butter you with such bowings and scrapings that you want to smack them.\nHusbands are indeed an irritating form of life,\nAnd yet through some quirk of Providence most of them are really very deeply ensconced in the affection of their wife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "will-consider-situation": { - "title": "“Will Consider Situation”", - "body": "There here are words of radical advice for a young man looking for a job;\nYoung man, be a snob.\nYes, if you are in search of arguments against starting at the bottom,\nWhy I’ve gottem.\nLet the personnel managers differ;\nIt’s obvious that you will get on faster at the top than at the bottom because there are more people at the bottom than at the top so naturally the competition at the bottom is stiffer.\nIf you need any further proof that my theory works\nWell, nobody can deny that presidents get paid more than vice-presidents and vice-presidents get paid more than clerks.\nStop looking at me quizzically;\nI want to add that you will never achieve fortune in a job that makes you uncomfortable physically.\nWhen anybody tells you that hard jobs are better for you than soft jobs be sure to repeat this text to them,\nPostmen tramp around all day through rain and snow just to deliver other people’s in cozy air-conditioned offices checks to them.\nYou don’t need to interpret tea leaves stuck in a cup\nTo understand that people who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.\nAnother thing about having a comfortable job is you not only accommodate more treasure;\nYou get more leisure.\nSo that when you find you have worked so comfortably that your waistline is a menace,\nYou correct it with golf or tennis.\nWhereas is in an uncomfortable job like piano-moving or stevedoring you indulge,\nYou have no time to exercise, you just continue to bulge.\nTo sum it up, young man, there is every reason to refuse a job that will make heavy demands on you corporally or manually,\nAnd the only intelligent way to start your career is to accept a sitting position paying at least twenty-five thousand dollars annually.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-complaint": { - "title": "“Winter Complaint”", - "body": "Now when I have a cold\nI am careful with my cold,\nI consult a physician\nAnd I do as I am told.\nI muffle up my torso\nIn woolly woolly garb,\nAnd I quaff great flagons\nOf sodium bicarb.\nI munch on aspirin,\nI lunch on water,\nAnd I wouldn’t dream of osculating\nAnybody’s daughter,\nAnd to anybody’s son\nI wouldn’t say howdy,\nFor I am a sufferer\nMagna cum laude.\nI don’t like germs,\nBut I’ll keep the germs I’ve got.\nWill I take a chance of spreading them?\nDefinitely not.\nI sneeze out the window\nAnd I cough up the flue,\nAnd I live like a hermit\nTill the germs get through.\nAnd because I’m considerate,\nBecause I’m wary,\nI am treated by my friends\nLike Typhoid Mary.\n\nNow when you have a cold\nYou are careless with your cold,\nYou are cocky as a gangster\nWho has just been paroled.\nYou ignore your physician,\nYou eat steaks and oxtails,\nYou stuff yourself with starches,\nYou drink lots of cocktails,\nAnd you claim that gargling\nIs a time of waste,\nAnd you won’t take soda\nFor you don’t like the taste,\nAnd you prowl around parties\nFull of selfish bliss,\nAnd greet your hostess\nWith a genial kiss.\nYou convert yourself\nInto a deadly missle,\nYou exhale Hello’s\nLike a steamboat wistle.\nYou sneeze in the subway\nAnd you cough at dances,\nAnd let everybody else\nTake their own good chances.\nYou’re a bronchial boor,\nA bacterial blighter,\nAnd you get more invitations\nThan a gossip writer.\n\nYes, your throat is froggy,\nAnd your eyes are swimmy,\nAnd you hand is clammy,\nAnd you nose is brimmy,\nBut you woo my girls\nAnd their hearts you jimmy\nWhile I sit here\nWith the cold you gimmy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-word-to-husbands": { - "title": "“A Word to Husbands”", - "body": "To keep your marriage brimming,\nWith love in the loving cup,\nWhenever you’re wrong admit it;\nWhenever you’re right shut up.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "nikolay-nekrasov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolay Nekrasov", - "birth": { - "year": 1821 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "i-shall-soon-fall-prey-to-rot": { - "title": "“I shall soon fall prey to rot …”", - "body": "I shall soon fall prey to rot.\nThough it’s hard to die, it’s good to die;\nI shall ask for no one’s pity,\nAnd there’s no one who would pity me.\n\nWith my lyre I won no glory\nFor my noble family name;\nAnd I die as distant from my people\nAs the day that I began to live.\n\nTies of friendship, unions of the heart--\nAll are broken: from my youth,\nFate has sent me foes implacable,\nWhile my friends all perished in the struggle.\n\nTheir prophetic songs were left unfinished,\nThey fell victim to misfortune, were betrayed\nIn the bloom of life; and now their portraits watch me\nFrom the walls, reproachfully.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "M. Denner & I. Kutik & A. Wachtel", - "date": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "You’re unhappy, sick at heart:\nOh, I know it--here such sickness isn’t rare.\nNature can but mirror\nThe surrounding poverty.\n\nAll is ever drear and dismal,\nPastures, fields, and meadows,\nWet and drowsy jackdaws\nResting on the peaked haystacks;\n\nHere’s a drunken peasant driving\nHis collapsing nag\nInto far-off blueish mists,\nSuch a gloomy sky … It makes one weep!\n\nThe rich city is no better, though:\nThe same storm clouds race across the sky;\nIt’s hard on the nerves--steel shovels\nScraping, screeching as they clean the streets\n\nWork’s beginning everywhere;\nFrom the fire tower an alarm goes up;\nA condemned man’s brought outside\nWhere the executioners already wait.\n\nAt the break of day a prostitute is hurrying\nHome from someone’s bed;\nOfficers inside a hired carriage\nLeave the city--there will be a duel.\n\nShopkeepers have roused themselves\nAnd they rush to sit behind their counters:\nAll day long they need to swindle\nIf they want to eat their fill at night.\n\nListen! Cannon fire from the fortress!\nThere’s a flood endangering the capital …\nSomeone’s died: Upon a scarlet cushion\nLies a first-class Anna decoration.\n\nNow a yardman beats a thief--he got him!\nGeese are driven out to slaughter;\nFrom an upper floor the crackle\nOf a shot--another suicide …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "M. Denner & I. Kutik & A. Wachtel", - "date": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "howard-nemerov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Howard Nemerov", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Nemerov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "a-prayer": { - "title": "“A Prayer”", - "body": "For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,\nWho rarely bothered coming home to die\nBut simply stayed away out there\nIn the clean war, the war in the air.\n\nSeldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales\nOf hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,\nBut stayed up there in the relative wind,\nShades fading in the mind,\n\nWho had no graves but only epitaphs\nWhere never so many spoke for never so few:\nPer ardua, said the partisans of Mars,\nPer aspera, to the stars.\n\nThat was the good war, the war we won\nAs if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.\nWith the help of the losers we left out there\nIn the air, in the empty air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - } - } - }, - "pablo-neruda": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Pablo Neruda", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chilean", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇨🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chilean" - ], - "n_poems": 54 - }, - "poems": { - "always": { - "title": "“Always”", - "body": "I am not jealous\nof what came before me.\n\nCome with a man\non your shoulders,\ncome with a hundred men in your hair,\ncome with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,\ncome like a river\nfull of drowned men\nwhich flows down to the wild sea,\nto the eternal surf, to Time!\n\nBring them all\nto where I am waiting for you;\nwe shall always be alone,\nwe shall always be you and I\nalone on earth\nto start our life!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "cats-dream": { - "title": "“Cat’s Dream”", - "body": "How neatly a cat sleeps,\nSleeps with its paws and its posture,\nSleeps with its wicked claws,\nAnd with its unfeeling blood,\nSleeps with ALL the rings a series\nOf burnt circles which have formed\nThe odd geology of its sand-colored tail.\n\nI should like to sleep like a cat,\nWith all the fur of time,\nWith a tongue rough as flint,\nWith the dry sex of fire and\nAfter speaking to no one,\nStretch myself over the world,\nOver roofs and landscapes,\nWith a passionate desire\nTo hunt the rats in my dreams.\n\nI have seen how the cat asleep\nWould undulate, how the night flowed\nThrough it like dark water and at times,\nIt was going to fall or possibly\nPlunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.\n\nSometimes it grew so much in sleep\nLike a tiger’s great-grandfather,\nAnd would leap in the darkness over\nRooftops, clouds and volcanoes.\n\nSleep, sleep cat of the night with\nEpiscopal ceremony and your stone-carved moustache.\nTake care of all our dreams\nControl the obscurity\nOf our slumbering prowess\nWith your relentless HEART\nAnd the great ruff of your tail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-chosen-ones": { - "title": "“The Chosen Ones”", - "body": "And we, the dead, arrayed in time,\nscattered in arrogantly practical cemeteries\nor fallen into the charnel houses of poor Bolivians,\nwe, the dead of 1925, ’26, ’33,\n1940, 1918, nineteen hundred and five,\nthousands of nineteen hundreds, in short,\nhow goes it with us who died\nbefore this foolish millennium?\n\nI, Pedro of the High Plains, Pedro of the Seeds, Pedro Nobody,\ndidn’t I have the right to the millennium and the resurrection?\nI want to see the resurrected so I can spit in their faces,\nthe future generations about to be killed\nin airplanes, railroads, wars of hatred,\nthose who barely had time to be born\nand present arms to the new age\nand who will end up dismembered,\nrotting away in the midst of revelry and wine!\nI, a dead man, want to leave my grave--and why not?\n\nWhy should those who died before their time be forgotten?\nEveryone’s invited to the party!\nIt’s one more year, one more century, with the dead and the living,\nand the balance sheets must be heeded, not only to lay out the life,\nbut also the withered flowers, the rotted wreaths, and the silence,\nbecause silence has a right to the beauty and we, death’s delegates,\nwe want to be there for a single flowering moment\nwhen the gates of future glory are opened.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "clenched-soul": { - "title": "“Clenched Soul”", - "body": "We have lost even this twilight.\nNo one saw us this evening hand in hand\nwhile the blue night dropped on the world.\n\nI have seen from my window\nthe fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.\n\nSometimes a piece of sun\nburned like a coin in my hand.\n\nI remembered you with my soul clenched\nin that sadness of mine that you know.\n\nWhere were you then?\nWho else was there?\nSaying what?\nWhy will the whole of love come on me suddenly\nwhen I am sad and feel you are far away?\n\nThe book fell that always closed at twilight\nand my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.\n\nAlways, always you recede through the evenings\ntoward the twilight erasing statues.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "come-with-me-i-said-and-no-one-knew": { - "title": "“Come with Me, I Said, and No One Knew”", - "body": "Come with me, I said, and no one knew\nwhere, or how my pain throbbed,\nno carnations or barcaroles for me,\nonly a wound that love had opened.\n\nI said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,\nand no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth\nor the blood that rose into the silence.\nO Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!\n\nThat is why when I heard your voice repeat\nCome with me, it was as if you had let loose\nthe grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine\n\nthe geysers flooding from deep in its vault:\nin my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,\nof blood and carnations, of rock and scald.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-dictators": { - "title": "“The Dictators”", - "body": "An odor stayed on in the canefields:\nCarrion, blood, and a nausea\nOf harrowing petals.\nBetween coconut palms lay the graves, in their stilled\nStrangulation, their festering surfeit of bones.\nA finical satrap conversed\nWith wineglasses, collars, and piping.\nIn the palace, all flashed like a clockdial.\nThe gloved laugh redoubled, a moment\nSpanning the passageways, meeting\nThe newly-killed voices and the buried blue mouths. Out of sight,\nLament was perpetual, and fell, like the plant and its pollen,\nForcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves.\nAnd bludgeon by bludgeon on the terrible waters,\nScale over scale in the bog,\nThe snout filled with silence and slime\nAnd vendetta was born.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "discoverers": { - "title": "“Discoverers”", - "body": "From the north Almagro brought his wrinkled lightning,\nand over the territory, amid explosion and twilight,\nhe bent day and night as over a chart.\nShadow of thorns, shadow of thistle and wax\nthe Spaniard united with his dry figure,\nwatching the wounded strategies of earth.\nNight, snow and sand make the form\nof my slim fatherland,\nall silence is in its long line,\nall foam emerges from its marine beard,\nall coal fills it with mysterious kisses.\nLike an ember, gold burns in its fingers\nand silver illumines, like a green moon,\nits hardened shadow of grave planet.\nThe Spaniard seated near the rose, one day,\nnear the oil, near the wine, near the old sky,\ncould not conceive this spot of angry stone\nrising from the dung of the marine eagle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-dog-has-died": { - "title": "“A Dog Has Died”", - "body": "My dog has died.\nI buried him in the garden\nnext to a rusted old machine.\n\nSome day I’ll join him right there,\nbut now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,\nhis bad manners and his cold nose,\nand I, the materialist, who never believed\nin any promised heaven in the sky\nfor any human being,\nI believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.\nYes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom\nwhere my dog waits for my arrival\nwaving his fan-like tail in friendship.\n\nAi, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,\nof having lost a companion\nwho was never servile.\nHis friendship for me, like that of a porcupine\nwithholding its authority,\nwas the friendship of a star, aloof,\nwith no more intimacy than was called for,\nwith no exaggerations:\nhe never climbed all over my clothes\nfilling me full of his hair or his mange,\nhe never rubbed up against my knee\nlike other dogs obsessed with sex.\n\nNo, my dog used to gaze at me,\npaying me the attention I need,\nthe attention required\nto make a vain person like me understand\nthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,\nbut, with those eyes so much purer than mine,\nhe’d keep on gazing at me\nwith a look that reserved for me alone\nall his sweet and shaggy life,\nalways near me, never troubling me,\nand asking nothing.\n\nAi, how many times have I envied his tail\nas we walked together on the shores of the sea\nin the lonely winter of Isla Negra\nwhere the wintering birds filled the sky\nand my hairy dog was jumping about\nfull of the voltage of the sea’s movement:\nmy wandering dog, sniffing away\nwith his golden tail held high,\nface to face with the ocean’s spray.\n\nJoyful, joyful, joyful,\nas only dogs know how to be happy\nwith only the autonomy\nof their shameless spirit.\n\nThere are no good-byes for my dog who has died,\nand we don’t now and never did lie to each other.\n\nSo now he’s gone and I buried him,\nand that’s all there is to it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "dont-go-far-off-not-even-for-a-day": { - "title": "“Don’t Go Far Off, Not even for a Day”", - "body": "Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because--\nbecause--I don’t know how to say it: a day is long\nand I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station\nwhen the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.\n\nDon’t leave me, even for an hour, because\nthen the little drops of anguish will all run together,\nthe smoke that roams looking for a home will drift\ninto me, choking my lost heart.\n\nOh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;\nmay your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.\nDon’t leave me for a second, my dearest,\n\nbecause in that moment you’ll have gone so far\nI’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,\nWill you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "drunk-as-drunk": { - "title": "“Drunk as Drunk”", - "body": "Drunk as drunk on turpentine\nFrom your open kisses,\nYour wet body wedged\nBetween my wet body and the strake\nOf our boat that is made of flowers,\nFeasted, we guide it--our fingers\nLike tallows adorned with yellow metal--\nOver the sky’s hot rim,\nThe day’s last breath in our sails.\n\nPinned by the sun between solstice\nAnd equinox, drowsy and tangled together\nWe drifted for months and woke\nWith the bitter taste of land on our lips,\nEyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime\nAnd the sound of a rope\nLowering a bucket down its well. Then,\nWe came by night to the Fortunate Isles,\nAnd lay like fish\nUnder the net of our kisses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "enigmas": { - "title": "“Enigmas”", - "body": "You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?\nI reply, the ocean knows this.\nYou say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?\nI tell you it is waiting for time, like you.\nYou ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?\nStudy, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.\nYou question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing\nhow the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.\nYou enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,\nwhich tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?\nOr you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture\nof the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?\nYou want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?\nThe armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?\nThe hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out\nin the deep places like a thread in the water?\n\nI want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes\nis endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,\nand among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal\nhard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light\nand untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall\nfrom a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.\n\nI am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead\nof human eyes, dead in those darknesses,\nof fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes\non the timid globe of an orange.\n\nI walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,\nand in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,\nthe only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "every-day-you-play": { - "title": "“Every Day You Play”", - "body": "You are here. Oh, you do not run away.\nYou will answer me to the last cry.\nCurl round me as though you were frightened.\nEven so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes.\n\nNow, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,\nand even your breasts smell of it.\nWhile the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies\nI love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.\n\nHow you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,\nmy savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.\nSo many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,\nand over our heads the gray light unwinds in turning fans.\n\nMy words rained over you, stroking you.\nA long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.\nUntil I even believe that you own the universe.\nI will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,\ndark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.\nI want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "fantom-of-the-freighter": { - "title": "“Fantom of the Freighter”", - "body": "Distance in flight above pipes of foam,\nSalt in ritual waves and regular ranks,\nAnd an odor and murmur of old ship,\nOf rotted wood and damaged ironwork,\nAnd tired machines that howl and weep\nPushing the prow and kicking the sides,\nMumbling lamentations, swallowing and swallowing distances,\nMaking a noise of sour waters over the sour waters,\nMoving the old ship over the old waters.\n\nInner storeholds, crepuscular tunnels\nVisited by intermittent daylight of the harbors:\nBags, bags heaped up by a somber god\nLike grey animals, rounded and eyeless,\nWith gentle grey ears,\nAnd worthy stomachs full of wheat or copra,\nSensitive bellies of pregnant women,\nMeanly dressed in grey, patiently\nWaiting in the shadow of a dolorous cinema.\n\nSuddenly the waters outside\nAre heard passing, running like an opaque horse,\nWith a noise of horses’ hooves in the water,\nRapid, submerging themselves once more in the waters.\nThen there is nothing but time in the cabins,\nTime in the miserable solitary diningroom,\nMotionless and visible like a great sorrow.\n\nOdor of leather and cloth thickly worn out,\nAnd onions and oil and yet more,\nOdor of something floating in the corners of the ship,\nOdor of something nameless,\nThat comes down the stairs like a wave of air,\nAnd traverses the corridors with its nonexistent body,\nAnd looks on with eyes preserved by death,\n\nIt looks on with its colorless eyes that are sightless,\nSlow, and it passes trembling without substance or shadow,\nSounds wrinkle it, things go through it,\nIts transparency makes the dirty chairs glisten\nWho is this fantom without a fantom’s body,\nWith its steps light as nocturnal dust\nAnd its voice that only objects preserve?\n\nThe furnishings travel full of its silent being\nLike little ships within the old ship,\nFreighted with its vague and disintegrated being:\nThe wardrobes, the green tablecovers,\nThe color of the curtains and the floor,\nEverything has suffered the slow emptiness of its hands\nAnd things have been worn out by its breath.\n\nIt slips and slides, it descends, transparent,\nAir within cold air that flows over the ship,\nIt leans on the railings with its hidden hands\nAnd looks at the bitter sea which flees behind the ship.\nOnly the waters repel its influence,\nIts odor and color of forgotten fantom\nAnd cool and deep they unfold their dance\nLike lives of fire, like blood or perfume,\nThey surge, new and strong, united and reunited.\n\nThe waters, without wearing out, without custom or time,\nGreen with quantity, skillful and cold,\nTouch the black stomach of the ship and wash its material,\nIts injured sides, its iron wrinkles,\nThe living waters gnaw the hull of the ship,\nTraveling with broad banners of foam\nAnd their teeth of salt flying in drops.\n\nThe fantom looks at the sea with its eyeless face:\nThe circle of day, the coughing of the ship, a bird\nIn the rounded and lonely equation of space;\nAnd it descends anew into the life of the ship,\nFalling upon the wood and dead time,\nGliding into black kitchens and cabins,\nSlow with air and atmosphere and desolate space.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "finale": { - "title": "“Finale”", - "body": "Matilde, years or days\nsleeping, feverish,\nhere or there,\ngazing off,\ntwisting my spine,\nbleeding true blood,\nperhaps I awaken\nor am lost, sleeping:\nhospital beds, foreign windows,\nwhite uniforms of the silent walkers,\nthe clumsiness of feet.\n\nAnd then, these journeys\nand my sea of renewal:\nyour head on the pillow,\nyour hands floating\nin the light, in my light,\nover my earth.\n\nIt was beautiful to live\nwhen you lived!\n\nThe world is bluer and of the earth\nat night, when I sleep\nenormous, within your small hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "gentleman-alone": { - "title": "“Gentleman Alone”", - "body": "The young maricones and the horny muchachas,\nThe big fat widows delirious from insomnia,\nThe young wives thirty hours’ pregnant,\nAnd the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,\nLike a collar of palpitating sexual oysters\nSurround my solitary home,\nEnemies of my soul,\nConspirators in pajamas\nWho exchange deep kisses for passwords.\nRadiant summer brings out the lovers\nIn melancholy regiments,\nFat and thin and happy and sad couples;\nUnder the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,\nThere is a continual life of pants and panties,\nA hum from the fondling of silk stockings,\nAnd women’s breasts that glisten like eyes.\nThe salary man, after a while,\nAfter the week’s tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,\nHas decisively fucked his neighbor,\nAnd now takes her to the miserable movies,\nWhere the heroes are horses or passionate princes,\nAnd he caresses her legs covered with sweet down\nWith his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.\nThe night of the hunter and the night of the husband\nCome together like bed sheets and bury me,\nAnd the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,\nAnd the animals mount each other openly,\nAnd the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,\nAnd cousins play strange games with cousins,\nAnd doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,\nAnd the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,\nPays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,\nAnd to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly\nOn beds big and tall as ships:\nSo, eternally,\nThis twisted and breathing forest crushes me\nWith gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth\nAnd black roots like fingernails and shoes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "horseman-in-rain": { - "title": "“Horseman in Rain”", - "body": "Primordial waters: clover and oat striving, water-walls,\nA meshing of cords in the net of the night,\nIn the barbarous weave of the damp, dropping water,\nA rending of water-drops, lamenting successions,\nDiagonal rage, cutting heaven.\nSteeped in aromas, smashing the water, interposing\nThe roan of their gloss, like a foliage, between boulder and water,\nThe horses gallop in water,\nTheir vapor attending, in a lunatic milk,\nA stampede of doves that hardens, like water.\nNot day, but a cistern\nOf obdurate weather, green agitations,\nWhere hooves join a landscape of haste\nWith the lapse of the rain and the bestial aroma of horses.\nBlankets and pommels, clustering cloak-furs,\nSeedfalls of darkness\nAblaze on the haunches of brimstone\nThat beat the considering jungle.\n\nBeyond and beyond and beyond\nAnd beyond and beyond and beyond and beyoooooond:\nThe horsemen demolish the rain, the horsemen\nPass under the bittering hazelnut, the rain\nWeaves unperishing wheat in a shimmer of lustres.\nHere is water’s effulgence, confusion of lightning,\nTo spill on the leaf, here, from the noise of the gallop,\nThe water goes wounded to earth, without flight.\nThe bridle reins dampen: branch-covered archways,\nFootfalls of footfalls, an herbage of darkness\nIn splintering starshapes, moonlike, icelike, a cyclone of horses\nRiddled with points like an icicle prism\nAnd born out of furor, the innocent fingers brim over,\nThe apple encompassing terror\nAnd the terrible banners of empire, are smitten.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "i-do-not-love-you-except-because-i-love-you": { - "title": "“I Do Not Love You except Because I Love You”", - "body": "I do not love you except because I love you;\nI go from loving to not loving you,\nFrom waiting to not waiting for you\nMy heart moves from cold to fire.\n\nI love you only because it’s you the one I love;\nI hate you deeply, and hating you\nBend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you\nIs that I do not see you but love you blindly.\n\nMaybe January light will consume\nMy heart with its cruel\nRay, stealing my key to true calm.\n\nIn this part of the story I am the one who\nDies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,\nBecause I love you, Love, in fire and blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "i-like-for-you-to-be-still": { - "title": "“I Like for You to Be Still”", - "body": "I like for you to be still\nIt is as though you are absent\nAnd you hear me from far away\nAnd my voice does not touch you\nIt seems as though your eyes had flown away\nAnd it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth\nAs all things are filled with my soul\nYou emerge from the things\nFilled with my soul\nYou are like my soul\nA butterfly of dream\nAnd you are like the word: Melancholy\n\nI like for you to be still\nAnd you seem far away\nIt sounds as though you are lamenting\nA butterfly cooing like a dove\nAnd you hear me from far away\nAnd my voice does not reach you\nLet me come to be still in your silence\nAnd let me talk to you with your silence\nThat is bright as a lamp\nSimple, as a ring\nYou are like the night\nWith its stillness and constellations\nYour silence is that of a star\nAs remote and candid\n\nI like for you to be still\nIt is as though you are absent\nDistant and full of sorrow\nSo you would’ve died\nOne word then, One smile is enough\nAnd I’m happy;\nHappy that it’s not true", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "if-you-forget-me": { - "title": "“If You Forget Me”", - "body": "I want you to know\none thing.\n\nYou know how this is:\nif I look\nat the crystal moon, at the red branch\nof the slow autumn at my window,\nif I touch\nnear the fire\nthe impalpable ash\nor the wrinkled body of the log,\neverything carries me to you,\nas if everything that exists,\naromas, light, metals,\nwere little boats\nthat sail\ntoward those isles of yours that wait for me.\n\nWell, now,\nif little by little you stop loving me\nI shall stop loving you little by little.\n\nIf suddenly\nyou forget me\ndo not look for me,\nfor I shall already have forgotten you.\n\nIf you think it long and mad,\nthe wind of banners\nthat passes through my life,\nand you decide\nto leave me at the shore\nof the heart where I have roots,\nremember\nthat on that day,\nat that hour,\nI shall lift my arms\nand my roots will set off\nto seek another land.\n\nBut\nif each day,\neach hour,\nyou feel that you are destined for me\nwith implacable sweetness,\nif each day a flower\nclimbs up to your lips to seek me,\nah my love, ah my own,\nin me all that fire is repeated,\nin me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,\nmy love feeds on your love, beloved,\nand as long as you live it will be in your arms\nwithout leaving mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "leaning-into-the-afternoons": { - "title": "“Leaning into the Afternoons”", - "body": "Leaning into the afternoons,\nI cast my sad nets towards your oceanic eyes.\nThere, in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames;\nIts arms turning like a drowning man’s.\nI send out red signals across your absent eyes\nThat wave like the sea, or the beach by a lighthouse.\nYou keep only darkness my distant female;\nFrom your regard sometimes, the coast of dread emerges.\n\nLeaning into the afternoons,\nI fling my sad nets to that sea that is thrashed\nBy your oceanic eyes.\nThe birds of night peck at the first stars\nThat flash like my soul when I love you.\nThe night, gallops on its shadowy mare\nShedding blue tassels over the land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "leviathan": { - "title": "“Leviathan”", - "body": "Night of the brute, antarctic outlander,\nNearing or passing me--an ice-field\nDisplacing the darkness--one day\nI shall enter your walls, I shall rear\nOn the sunken marine of your winter, your armory.\n\nSouthward, there crackled a holocaust, black\nWith your planet’s expulsion, the domains\nOf your silence that moved in the algae\nAnd jostled the lump of the ages.\n\nThen, form was, alone, was magnitude\nSealed by a world’s agitation, wherein glided\nYour leather pre-eminence, mistrusting\nThe gifts of its nature: tenderness, power.\n\nArk of our passion, inflaming\nA hummock of dark, as with torches,\nWhen your blind blood was quickened\nAn epoch of ocean still slept in its gardens,\nAnd in an immensity the disfiguring moon\nDivided its track with a magnet of phosphor.\nLife sputtered,\nThe mother-medusa, blue in the flame,\nA tempest of multiple wombs,\nAnd increase grew whole in its purity\nLike the pompano’s pulse in the sea.\n\nAmong waters, your congress\nOf mastheads and spars was disposed\nAnd your power of inviolate night\nWas shed on the roots in a deluge.\nPast expectancy’s islands, your continent\nFled; dereliction and terror\nMade the loneliness tremble.\nEven so, terror mounted the globes\nOf the glacial moon, terror entered your flesh\nAnd struck at your solitude, the asylums\nOf dread where your lamp lay extinguished.\nWith you was the night, a tempestuous slime\nThat held you like pitch and enveloped you\nWhile your tail’s hurricano\nSpun the ice of a slumbering galaxy.\n\nO enormously wounded onel Fiery fountainhead,\nLashing a ruin of thunders,\nOn the harpoon’s periphery, stained\nIn the blood-bath, bleeding your virtue away,\nThe repose and the calm of the animal conduct you,\nA cyclone of fracturing crescents,\nTo the black boats of blubber\nAnd the creatures of rancor and plague.\n\nGreat mold among crystals, dead\nOn a pole of the moon, heaven itself is encompassed,\nPandemonium’s cloud, and laments there,\nAnd covers all ocean with blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-light-wraps-you": { - "title": "“The Light Wraps You”", - "body": "The light wraps you in its mortal flame.\nAbstracted pale mourner, standing that way\nagainst the old propellers of the twighlight\nthat revolves around you.\n\nSpeechless, my friend,\nalone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead\nand filled with the lives of fire,\npure heir of the ruined day.\n\nA bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.\nThe great roots of night\ngrow suddenly from your soul,\nand the things that hide in you come out again\nso that a blue and palled people\nyour newly born, takes nourishment.\n\nOh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave\nof the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:\nrise, lead and possess a creation\nso rich in life that its flowers perish\nand it is full of sadness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "What’s wrong with you, with us,\nwhat’s happening to us?\nAh our love is a harsh cord\nthat binds us wounding us\nand if we want\nto leave our wound,\nto separate,\nit makes a new knot for us and condemns us\nto drain our blood and burn together.\n\nWhat’s wrong with you? I look at you\nand I find nothing in you but two eyes\nlike all eyes, a mouth\nlost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,\na body just like those that have slipped\nbeneath my body without leaving any memory.\n\nAnd how empty you went through the world\nlike a wheat-colored jar\nwithout air, without sound, without substance!\nI vainly sought in you\ndepth for my arms\nthat dig, without cease, beneath the earth:\nbeneath your skin, beneath your eyes,\nnothing,\nbeneath your double breast scarcely\nraised\na current of crystalline order\nthat does not know why it flows singing.\nWhy, why, why,\nmy love, why?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "magellanic-penguin": { - "title": "“Magellanic Penguin”", - "body": "Neither clown nor child nor black\nnor white but verticle\nand a questioning innocence\ndressed in night and snow:\nThe mother smiles at the sailor,\nthe fisherman at the astronaunt,\nbut the child child does not smile\nwhen he looks at the bird child,\nand from the disorderly ocean\nthe immaculate passenger\nemerges in snowy mourning.\n\nI was without doubt the child bird\nthere in the cold archipelagoes\nwhen it looked at me with its eyes,\nwith its ancient ocean eyes:\nit had neither arms nor wings\nbut hard little oars\non its sides:\nit was as old as the salt;\nthe age of moving water,\nand it looked at me from its age:\nsince then I know I do not exist;\nI am a worm in the sand.\n\nthe reasons for my respect\nremained in the sand:\nthe religious bird\ndid not need to fly,\ndid not need to sing,\nand through its form was visible\nits wild soul bled salt:\nas if a vein from the bitter sea\nhad been broken.\n\nPenguin, static traveler,\ndeliberate priest of the cold,\nI salute your vertical salt\nand envy your plumed pride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-men": { - "title": "“The Men”", - "body": "I’m Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere,\nfrom Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro,\nfrom Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla,\nI’m the poor devil from the poor Third World,\nI’m the third-class passenger installed, good God!\nin the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains,\nconcealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy.\n\nI’ve arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get?\nWith what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with\nthe three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves\nover my very own zero, my own non-existence?\nPity that brave heart awaiting its call\nor the man enfolded by warmer love,\nnothing’s left today except my flimsy skeleton,\nmy eyes unhinged, confronting the era’s beginning.\n\nThe era’s beginning: are these ruined shacks,\nthese poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters,\nthis cloddish insecurity of my poor families,\nis all this the day? the century’s beginning, the golden door?\n\nWell, enough said, I, at least, discreet,\nas in office, patched and pensive,\nI proclaim the redundancy of the inaugural:\nI’ve arrived here with all my baggage,\nbad luck and worse jobs,\nmisery always waiting with open arms,\nthe mobilization of people piled up on top of each other,\nand the manifold geography of hunger.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "Naked you are simple as one of your hands;\nSmooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.\nYou’ve moon-lines, apple pathways\nNaked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.\n\nNaked you are blue as a night in Cuba;\nYou’ve vines and stars in your hair.\nNaked you are spacious and yellow\nAs summer in a golden church.\n\nNaked you are tiny as one of your nails;\nCurved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born\nAnd you withdraw to the underground world.\n\nAs if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;\nYour clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,\nAnd becomes a naked hand again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "nothing-but-death": { - "title": "“Nothing but Death”", - "body": "There are cemeteries that are lonely,\ngraves full of bones that do not make a sound,\nthe heart moving through a tunnel,\nin it darkness, darkness, darkness,\nlike a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,\nas though we were drowning inside our hearts,\nas though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.\n\nAnd there are corpses,\nfeet made of cold and sticky clay,\ndeath is inside the bones,\nlike a barking where there are no dogs,\ncoming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,\ngrowing in the damp air like tears of rain.\n\nSometimes I see alone\ncoffins under sail,\nembarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,\nwith bakers who are as white as angels,\nand pensive young girls married to notary publics,\ncaskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,\nthe river of dark purple,\nmoving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,\nfilled by the sound of death which is silence.\n\nDeath arrives among all that sound\nlike a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,\ncomes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it,\ncomes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat.\nNevertheless its steps can be heard\nand its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.\n\nI’m not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,\nbut it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,\nof violets that are at home in the earth,\nbecause the face of death is green,\nand the look death gives is green,\nwith the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf\nand the somber color of embittered winter.\n\nBut death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,\nlapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,\ndeath is inside the broom,\nthe broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,\nit is the needle of death looking for thread.\n\nDeath is inside the folding cots:\nit spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,\nin the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:\nit blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,\nand the beds go sailing toward a port\nwhere death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-conger-chowder": { - "title": "“Ode to Conger Chowder”", - "body": "In the storm-tossed\nChilean\nsea\nlives the rosy conger,\ngiant eel\nof snowy flesh.\nAnd in Chilean\nstewpots,\nalong the coast,\nwas born the chowder,\nthick and succulent,\na boon to man.\nYou bring the conger, skinned,\nto the kitchen\n(its mottled skin slips off\nlike a glove,\nleaving the\ngrape of the sea\nexposed to the world),\nnaked,\nthe tender eel\nglistens,\nprepared\nto serve our appetites.\nNow\nyou take\ngarlic,\nfirst, caress\nthat precious\nivory,\nsmell\nits irate fragrance,\nthen\nblend the minced garlic\nwith onion\nand tomato\nuntil the onion\nis the color of gold.\nMeanwhile steam\nour regal\nocean prawns,\nand when\nthey are\ntender,\nwhen the savor is\nset in a sauce\ncombining the liquors\nof the ocean\nand the clear water\nreleased from the light of the onion,\nthen\nyou add the eel\nthat it may be immersed in glory,\nthat it may steep in the oils\nof the pot,\nshrink and be saturated.\nNow all that remains is to\ndrop a dollop of cream\ninto the concoction,\na heavy rose,\nthen slowly\ndeliver\nthe treasure to the flame,\nuntil in the chowder\nare warmed\nthe essences of Chile,\nand to the table\ncome, newly wed,\nthe savors\nof land and sea,\nthat in this dish\nyou may know heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-maize": { - "title": "“Ode to Maize”", - "body": "America, from a grain\nof maize you grew\nto crown\nwith spacious lands\nthe ocean foam.\nA grain of maize was your geography.\nFrom the grain\na green lance rose,\nwas covered with gold,\nto grace the heights\nof Peru with its yellow tassels.\n\nBut, poet, let\nhistory rest in its shroud;\npraise with your lyre\nthe grain in its granaries:\nsing to the simple maize in the kitchen.\n\nFirst, a fine beard\nfluttered in the field\nabove the tender teeth\nof the young ear.\nThen the husks parted\nand fruitfulness burst its veils\nof pale papyrus\nthat grains of laughter\nmight fall upon the earth.\nTo the stone,\nin your journey,\nyou returned.\nNot to the terrible stone,\nthe bloody\ntriangle of Mexican death,\nbut to the grinding stone,\nsacred\nstone of your kitchens.\nThere, milk and matter,\nstrength-giving, nutritious\ncornmeal pulp,\nyou were worked and patted\nby the wondrous hands\nof dark-skinned women.\n\nWherever you fall, maize,\nwhether into the\nsplendid pot of partridge, or among\ncountry beans, you light up\nthe meal and lend it\nyour virginal flavor.\n\nOh, to bite into\nthe steaming ear beside the sea\nof distant song and deepest waltz.\nTo boil you\nas your aroma\nspreads through\nblue sierras.\n\nBut is there\nno end\nto your treasure?\n\nIn chalky, barren lands\nbordered\nby the sea, along\nthe rocky Chilean coast,\nat times\nonly your radiance\nreaches the empty\ntable of the miner.\n\nYour light, your cornmeal, your hope\npervades America’s solitudes,\nand to hunger\nyour lances\nare enemy legions.\n\nWithin your husks,\nlike gentle kernels,\nour sober provincial\nchildren’s hearts were nurtured,\nuntil life began\nto shuck us from the ear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-salt": { - "title": "“Ode to Salt”", - "body": "This salt\nin the saltcellar\nI once saw in the salt mines.\nI know\nyou won’t\nbelieve me,\nbut\nit sings,\nsalt sings, the skin\nof the salt mines\nsings\nwith a mouth smothered\nby the earth.\nI shivered in those solitudes\nwhen I heard\nthe voice of\nthe salt\nin the desert.\nNear Antofagasta\nthe nitrous\npampa\nresounds:\na broken\nvoice,\na mournful\nsong.\n\nIn its caves\nthe salt moans, mountain\nof buried light,\ntranslucent cathedral,\ncrystal of the sea, oblivion\nof the waves.\n\nAnd then on every table\nin the world,\nsalt,\nwe see your piquant\npowder\nsprinkling\nvital light\nupon\nour food. Preserver\nof the ancient\nholds of ships,\ndiscoverer\non\nthe high seas,\nearliest\nsailor\nof the unknown, shifting\nbyways of the foam.\nDust of the sea, in you\nthe tongue receives a kiss\nfrom ocean night:\ntaste imparts to every seasoned\ndish your ocean essence;\nthe smallest,\nminiature\nwave from the saltcellar\nreveals to us\nmore than domestic whiteness;\nin it, we taste infinitude.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-tomatoes": { - "title": "“Ode to Tomatoes”", - "body": "The street\nfilled with tomatoes,\nmidday,\nsummer,\nlight is\nhalved\nlike\na\ntomato,\nits juice\nruns\nthrough the streets.\n\nIn December,\nunabated,\nthe tomato\ninvades\nthe kitchen,\nit enters at lunchtime,\ntakes\nits ease\non countertops,\namong glasses,\nbutter dishes,\nblue saltcellars.\n\nIt sheds\nits own light,\nbenign majesty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-wine": { - "title": "“Ode to Wine”", - "body": "Day-colored wine,\nnight-colored wine,\nwine with purple feet\nor wine with topaz blood,\nwine,\nstarry child\nof earth,\nwine, smooth\nas a golden sword,\nsoft\nas lascivious velvet,\nwine, spiral-seashelled\nand full of wonder,\namorous,\nmarine;\nnever has one goblet contained you,\none song, one man,\nyou are choral, gregarious,\nat the least, you must be shared.\nAt times\nyou feed on mortal\nmemories;\nyour wave carries us\nfrom tomb to tomb,\nstonecutter of icy sepulchers,\nand we weep\ntransitory tears;\nyour\nglorious\nspring dress\nis different,\nblood rises through the shoots,\nwind incites the day,\nnothing is left\nof your immutable soul.\nWine\nstirs the spring, happiness\nbursts through the earth like a plant,\nwalls crumble,\nand rocky cliffs,\nchasms close,\nas song is born.\nA jug of wine, and thou beside me\nin the wilderness,\nsang the ancient poet.\nLet the wine pitcher\nadd to the kiss of love its own.\n\nMy darling, suddenly\nthe line of your hip\nbecomes the brimming curve\nof the wine goblet,\nyour breast is the grape cluster,\nyour nipples are the grapes,\nthe gleam of spirits lights your hair,\nand your navel is a chaste seal\nstamped on the vessel of your belly,\nyour love an inexhaustible\ncascade of wine,\nlight that illuminates my senses,\nthe earthly splendor of life.\n\nBut you are more than love,\nthe fiery kiss,\nthe heat of fire,\nmore than the wine of life;\nyou are\nthe community of man,\ntranslucency,\nchorus of discipline,\nabundance of flowers.\nI like on the table,\nwhen we’re speaking,\nthe light of a bottle\nof intelligent wine.\nDrink it,\nand remember in every\ndrop of gold,\nin every topaz glass,\nin every purple ladle,\nthat autumn labored\nto fill the vessel with wine;\nand in the ritual of his office,\nlet the simple man remember\nto think of the soil and of his duty,\nto propagate the canticle of the wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-a-chestnut-on-the-ground": { - "title": "“Ode to a Chestnut on the Ground”", - "body": "From bristly foliage\nyou fell\ncomplete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,\nas perfect\nas a violin newly\nborn of the treetops,\nthat falling\noffers its sealed-in gifts,\nthe hidden sweetness\nthat grew in secret\namid birds and leaves,\na model of form,\nkin to wood and flour,\nan oval instrument\nthat holds within it\nintact delight, an edible rose.\nIn the heights you abandoned\nthe sea-urchin burr\nthat parted its spines\nin the light of the chestnut tree;\nthrough that slit\nyou glimpsed the world,\nbirds\nbursting with syllables,\nstarry\ndew\nbelow,\nthe heads of boys\nand girls,\ngrasses stirring restlessly,\nsmoke rising, rising.\nYou made your decision,\nchestnut, and leaped to earth,\nburnished and ready,\nfirm and smooth\nas the small breasts\nof the islands of America.\nYou fell,\nyou struck\nthe ground,\nbut\nnothing happened,\nthe grass\nstill stirred, the old\nchestnut sighed with the mouths\nof a forest of trees,\na red leaf of autumn fell,\nresolutely, the hours marched on\nacross the earth.\nBecause you are\nonly\na seed,\nchestnut tree, autumn, earth,\nwater, heights, silence\nprepared the germ,\nthe floury density,\nthe maternal eyelids\nthat buried will again\nopen toward the heights\nthe simple majesty of foliage,\nthe dark damp plan\nof new roots,\nthe ancient but new dimensions\nof another chestnut tree in the earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-a-large-tuna-in-the-market": { - "title": "“Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market”", - "body": "Here,\namong the market vegetables,\nthis torpedo\nfrom the ocean\ndepths,\na missile\nthat swam,\nnow\nlying in front of me\ndead.\n\nSurrounded\nby the earth’s green froth\n--these lettuces,\nbunches of carrots--\nonly you\nlived through\nthe sea’s truth, survived\nthe unknown, the\nunfathomable\ndarkness, the depths\nof the sea,\nthe great\nabyss,\n_le grand abîme,_\nonly you:\nvarnished\nblack-pitched\nwitness\nto that deepest night.\n\nOnly you:\ndark bullet\nbarreled\nfrom the depths,\ncarrying\nonly\nyour\none wound,\nbut resurgent,\nalways renewed,\nlocked into the current,\nfins fletched\nlike wings\nin the torrent,\nin the coursing\nof\nthe\nunderwater\ndark,\nlike a grieving arrow,\nsea-javelin, a nerveless\noiled harpoon.\n\nDead\nin front of me,\ncatafalqued king\nof my own ocean;\nonce\nsappy as a sprung fir\nin the green turmoil,\nonce seed\nto sea-quake,\ntidal wave, now\nsimply\ndead remains;\nin the whole market\nyours\nwas the only shape left\nwith purpose or direction\nin this\njumbled ruin\nof nature;\nyou are\na solitary man of war\namong these frail vegetables,\nyour flanks and prow\nblack\nand slippery\nas if you were still\na well-oiled ship of the wind,\nthe only\ntrue\nmachine\nof the sea: unflawed,\nundefiled,\nnavigating now\nthe waters of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-the-artichoke": { - "title": "“Ode to the Artichoke”", - "body": "The artichoke\nWith a tender heart\nDressed up like a warrior,\nStanding at attention, it built\nA small helmet\nUnder its scales\nIt remained\nUnshakeable,\nBy its side\nThe crazy vegetables\nUncurled\nTheir tendrills and leaf-crowns,\nThrobbing bulbs,\nIn the sub-soil\nThe carrot\nWith its red mustaches\nWas sleeping,\nThe grapevine\nHung out to dry its branches\nThrough which the wine will rise,\nThe cabbage\nDedicated itself\nTo trying on skirts,\nThe oregano\nTo perfuming the world,\nAnd the sweet\nArtichoke\nThere in the garden,\nDressed like a warrior,\nBurnished\nLike a proud\nPomegrante.\nAnd one day\nSide by side\nIn big wicker baskets\nWalking through the market\nTo realize their dream\nThe artichoke army\nIn formation.\nNever was it so military\nLike on parade.\nThe men\nIn their white shirts\nAmong the vegetables\nWere\nThe Marshals\nOf the artichokes\nLines in close order\nCommand voices,\nAnd the bang\nOf a falling box.\n\nBut\nThen\nMaria\nComes\nWith her basket\nShe chooses\nAn artichoke,\nShe’s not afraid of it.\nShe examines it, she observes it\nUp against the light like it was an egg,\nShe buys it,\nShe mixes it up\nIn her handbag\nWith a pair of shoes\nWith a cabbage head and a\nBottle\nOf vinegar\nUntil\nShe enters the kitchen\nAnd submerges it in a pot.\n\nThus ends\nIn peace\nThis career\nOf the armed vegetable\nWhich is called an artichoke,\nThen\nScale by scale,\nWe strip off\nThe delicacy\nAnd eat\nThe peaceful mush\nOf its green heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-the-lemon": { - "title": "“Ode to the Lemon”", - "body": "From blossoms\nreleased\nby the moonlight,\nfrom an\naroma of exasperated\nlove,\nsteeped in fragrance,\nyellowness\ndrifted from the lemon tree,\nand from its plantarium\nlemons descended to the earth.\n\nTender yield!\nThe coasts,\nthe markets glowed\nwith light, with\nunrefined gold;\nwe opened\ntwo halves\nof a miracle,\ncongealed acid\ntrickled\nfrom the hemispheres\nof a star,\nthe most intense liqueur\nof nature,\nunique, vivid,\nconcentrated,\nborn of the cool, fresh\nlemon,\nof its fragrant house,\nits acid, secret symmetry.\n\nKnives\nsliced a small\ncathedral\nin the lemon,\nthe concealed apse, opened,\nrevealed acid stained glass,\ndrops\noozed topaz,\naltars,\ncool architecture.\n\nSo, when you hold\nthe hemisphere\nof a cut lemon\nabove your plate,\nyou spill\na universe of gold,\na\nyellow goblet\nof miracles,\na fragrant nipple\nof the earth’s breast,\na ray of light that was made fruit,\nthe minute fire of a planet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "ode-to-the-onion": { - "title": "“Ode to the Onion”", - "body": "Onion,\nluminous flask,\nyour beauty formed\npetal by petal,\ncrystal scales expanded you\nand in the secrecy of the dark earth\nyour belly grew round with dew.\nUnder the earth\nthe miracle\nhappened\nand when your clumsy\ngreen stem appeared,\nand your leaves were born\nlike swords\nin the garden,\nthe earth heaped up her power\nshowing your naked transparency,\nand as the remote sea\nin lifting the breasts of Aphrodite\nduplicating the magnolia,\nso did the earth\nmake you,\nonion\nclear as a planet\nand destined\nto shine,\nconstant constellation,\nround rose of water,\nupon\nthe table\nof the poor.\n\nYou make us cry without hurting us.\nI have praised everything that exists,\nbut to me, onion, you are\nmore beautiful than a bird\nof dazzling feathers,\nheavenly globe, platinum goblet,\nunmoving dance\nof the snowy anemone\n\nand the fragrance of the earth lives\nin your crystalline nature.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "open-sea": { - "title": "“Open Sea”", - "body": "If, to my hands, from its havocs and bounties,\nThe Sea might appoint me a ferment, a portion, a fruit,\nI would speak for that concord of distance, perspectives of steel,\nEvenings and airs of alerted extension\nYour power, like a language of whiteness, O Ocean,\nThe spoilure and rending of columns,\nInto innocent essence brought low.\n\nNot yet that ultimate wave in the weight of its brine,\nSmashing on seacoast, conducing\nThe peace of the sand that encircles a world.\nBut power and volume concenter,\nCapacity ranges the waters,\nUnmoved, in the flowing aloneness, in a surfeit of lives:\nTime, it may be, or the goblet of motion’s entirety,\nUpgathered and brimless with death; original singlehood,\nVisceral greens\nIn a charring totality.\n\nThe drowned arm, uplifting,\nCarries the kiss of the salt in a droplet. From the torsoes of men,\nA humid perfume on the beaches,\nThe soaked flower, retained;\nYour power in a semblance of squandering force,\nUndiminished, returned in a semblance of calm.\n\nThe wave, giving way\nIn a bow of identity, explosion of feathers,\nA trifle of spindrift, expends itself headlong\nAnd returns to its cause, unconsumed.\n\nAnd vigor recovers its origin.\nNo more than a ruined excess you surrender, O Sea,\nWho unhusk what the cargo rejects,\nWhatever mobility frees from abundance\nOr the cluster of being dissevers.\n\nFarther than sea-surge your form is extended.\n\nArdent and ordered, like a gesture of breathing\nOn breast and its vesture, out of isolate being,\nBorne up into tissue of light,\nYour meadows arise on the billow\nAnd the flesh of a planet is bared.\n\nSubstance of selfhood overflows into being.\nThe crescent of silence is brimmed.\n\nHere is no crater’s dismemberment,\nIn the cup of the headlands,\nOr pinnacle’s emptiness, vestiges, scars,\nPatrolling an air’s mutilation:\nThe goblet is shaken with salt and with honey,\nCreation’s abysm of waters,\nAnd nothing is lacking, O Sea!\n\nFor the petals of ocean contend with a planet’s pulsation.\nThe undersea granaries tremble.\nHazard is hung on the smooth of a wave--\nA swarming and swimming of schools\nAnd only the mesh of the netcord, ascending,\nDraws up a fish-scale’s extinction of lightning\nOne wounded gradation of distance,\nIn the crystal’s accomplished perfection.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "partys-end": { - "title": "“Party’s End”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe first rains are here: it is raining today over March\nand the swallows that dance in the downpour;\nwe have the ocean again on our table,\nall is as the wave wills,\nand will surely be so again: all\n\nis as it was: but I, one day made invisible,\nwill relinquish all power of return\nin my arms, hands, feet, eyes, my human discernment,\ntrapped by a shadow’s finality.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAmong the revellers met at the feast,\nsome move toward the shadows again, this one or that,\nas the power that unites us disposes: later,\nwords, mouths, and roads go their separate ways,\nbut the errand is always the same: each presses on\ntoward the nothingness into which the divided are drawn.\n\n\n# III.\n\nParty’s end … Isla Negra soaks under the rains:\nit rains on a tempest of emptiness, on the spray,\non the pole’s coruscations exploding in salt;\nall ebbs and delays, leaving only a glare on the sea.\nWhere are we going? asks the drowning redundance of things.\nWhat am I? the seaweed inquires, silent till now,\nand is answered in wave after wave after wave:\none rhythm creates and destroys and continues:\ntruth lies in the bitter mobility.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThose uninhabited poems, between heaven and autumn,\npoems without people, transportation expenses:\nfor a moment, let no living creature enter my verses,\nno trace of a man on the sand’s empty reaches,\nno footprints, dead papers, distinguishing marks\nof the traveler-only\nthe fog’s exaltation, the color of March, the sea-bird’s\ndelirium, salt petrels, pelicans, pigeons,\nthe infinite\nchill in the air,\nshown once, before meditation and dreaming begin,\nbefore time’s uses resume, extending themselves in the night,\nan ocean of solitude given for only a moment,\nmouth pressing mouth in a month of humidity, a soiled\nsummer’s anguish, while I watch how the crystal expands,\nhow the rock climbs its pitiless silence,\nhow the ocean destroys itself without marring its energy.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWe live out our lifetimes asking: How much?\nseeing How much? in the eyes of our mothers and fathers,\ntheir mouths and their hands: this and that\nfor How much? How much for the earth, for a kilo of bread,\nfor the windfall of grapes, for the shoes on our feet.\nHow much, mister, how much does it take, slipping\ninto our smiles for a moment, cocksure,\nwhile our fathers in patches and hand-me-downs, certain\nof nothing, entered the warehouses as one enters a terrible temple.\nLater, much farther away, nothing has changed.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIt displeases the esthete to edify: the poem with a moral\nthat went out of fashion when the poem taught the man\nhow to live like a man, leaving behind its violet\ncachet in the soul. I speak of the whithers and wherefores\nas I choose--from the throne to the oil-slick\nthat bloodies the world, asking\nHow much? while the grains of my anger grow greater\nwith my How many? syllables speaking all the world’s languages:\nyes, I speak, I speak on; and will be, if need be, a cracked violin\nor a troubador wracked by the truth and the doubt of the world.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThe brutal imperative, as the blood in a wound may be brutal\nor the gathering chill in the wind is made bearable\nfor all our discomfiture, makes warriors of us, gives us the stance\nand inflection of fighters; but still, with unspeakable tenderness,\nthe table, the spoon, and the chair call out to us:\nin the thick of the battle we wait for the cry of the crockery.\nBut backward is nowhere! Having settled our loyalties,\nnothing can lower the balances\nbut the weight of our reason bearing down on us one way,\nand the path we broke open with our common enlightenment:\nmen move back and forth on our bridge of commitment.\nThat is the unprepossessing pride of our lifetime,\nand its organized splendor.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nParty’s end.\nThis is the rainy season,\nwith the underground rivers of Chile on the move\ndrilling delicate troughs of volcanoes,\npiercing the quartz and the gold, moving the silences.\nThis is the mighty arcana of water barely known to us here;\nthough we speak of the sea and name it by name: Cape Horn:\nthe stain of mortality never mars its dominion,\nwe can never implant our transactions,\nthe mines, motors, flags of our species.\nOpen-ended, the water shakes itself free:\nit moves while it cleanses and cleanses:\nit cleanses the stone and the sand, our wounds and utensils.\nIt is never used up, like the bleeding away of the fire,\nit does not turn to cinder and ash.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nNight and the water are one; it washes the sky,\nenters our dreams with the immediate burst of its presence,\nnight\ndoggedly there, interrupted and starry,\nalone\nas it sweeps off the leavings\nof every dead day\nwith the snowy\ndevice of its heraldry over us,\nand under us,\nbetween us,\nthe net with the knots of its cordage: shadow and dream.\nWater or dream, truth’s nakedness,\nshadow and stone-\nwe are these and continue to be:\nour nocturnes say nothing of light,\nwe drink the pure darkness:\nour lot is to stand by the stones\nof the oven;\nwhen we bent toward the bread with our paddles,\nwe drew out the darkness\nand were broken\ninto\nour lives:\nit was night that divided us,\ngave us its wisdom by halves\ntill we walked\nwithout faltering, pierced\nby the light of the stars.\n\n\n# X.\n\nThose threshed out of life, the dead with the delicate faces,\nwhom we cherished, who burned\nin the firmament in a multiple silence\nand rippled the wheat with their dying:\nthe seemingly dead bore off a part of ourselves,\nleft us poised by a thread, aware of their menace,\nwhile the wheat was flailed finer and funer\nand the cycle of living resumed.\n\nAll at once, the most preciously dead\nare gone from our table. We wait\nwithout ever quite waiting, as one waits for the dead,\nwhile she whom we cherished comes closer,\nbehind every chair, and will not take her place at the table.\nOr unhappy Alberto, dead with his fiddle there,\nthe fathers caved in on the grandfathers.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nLet us build an expendable day\nwithout winding the hours, counting\nonly the salient clarity--that day\nof all days that came bearing oranges.\nThe columns close on the niggling particulars,\nleaving their chewed scrap of paper\nspinning off in the sand,\ndevoured by the winters.\nNot a leaf in the forest\nsurvives our recall, though its scent\nand vibration stay in the memory:\nin that forest I put forth my foliage\nand carry its sigh in my veins\nwith no thought for the hour or the day.\nThe years and the numbers betray us:\nmonth follows month in the vast of the tunnel,\nOctober and April clash like two lunatic stones,\nthe apples rain into one basket,\nthe silvery catch in one net,\nwhile night with a rapier’s precision\ncuts through day’s splendor--the day\nthat is ours if we are there to retrieve it tomorrow.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nWhite spindrift, March on the Island, I see\nwave work against wave and splinter the whiteness,\nthe ungratified cup of the ocean brimming over,\nthe immovable sky slowly\nlengthen and part with the flight of pontifical birds.\nWe come upon yellow,\nthe month changes its color, the beard\nof the watery autumn grows long:\nbut my name remains Pablo,\nI am just as I was,\nwith my doubts, with my debts,\nwith my loves,\n\nhaving a whole sea to myself with its\npersonnel moving the waves,\npummeled by storms that blow me\ntoward Cloudcuckooland:\nI come and I go with the sea and the countries it grazes, I know\nthe thorn’s languages,\nthe bite of the obdurate fish,\nthe chill of the latitudes,\nthe blood on the coral, the taciturn\nnight of the whale.\nI have pushed past the deltas, from country to country,\nthe unbearable wastes of the world,\nand never found peace. I have always come back.\nWhat can I say without roots?\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nWhat can I say without touching my palms to the land?\nTo whom shall I turn but the rain?\nI have never set foot in the countries I lived in,\nevery port was a port of return:\nI have no postcards, no keepsakes of hair\nfrom important cathedrals: I have built what I could\nout of natural stone, like a native, open-handed,\nI have worked with my reason, unreason, my caprices,\nmy fury, and poise: hour after hour\nI have touched the domains of the lion\nand the turbulent tower of bee:\nhaving seen what there was to be seen,\nhaving handled the clay and the loam, the spray and the rock,\nwith those who remember my footprints and words,\nthe tendrils of plants whose kisses remain on my mouth,\nI say: “Here is my place,” stripping myself down in the light\nand dropping my hands in the sea,\nuntil all is transparent again\nthere under the earth, and my sleep can be tranquil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-poet": { - "title": "“The Poet”", - "body": "That time, when I moved among happenings,\nIn the midst of my mournful devotions, that time\nWhen I cherished a leaflet of quartz,\nAt gaze, in a lifetime’s vocation.\nI ranged in the markets of avarice\nWhere goodness is bought for a price, breathed the insensate\nMiasmas of envy, the inhuman\nContention of masks and existences.\nI endured in the bog-dweller’s element; the lily\nThat breaks on the water in a sudden\nDisturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me.\nWhatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected,\nOr sheered toward the fang of the pit.\nSo my poems took being, in travail\nRetrieved from the thorn, like a penance,\nWrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude;\nOr I parted, for burial,\nThe secretest fower in immodesty’s garden.\nEstranged to myself, like shadow on water\nThat moves through a corridor’s fathoms,\nI sped through the exile of each man’s existence,\nThis way and that, and so, to habitual loathing;\nFor I saw that their being was this: to encompass\nOne half of existence’s fulness, like fishes\nIn an alien margin of ocean. And there,\nIn immensity’s mire, I encountered their death:\nDeath grazing the barriers,\nDeath opening roadways and doorways.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "sexual-water": { - "title": "“Sexual Water”", - "body": "Rolling in solitary drops,\nin gouts like teeth,\nin thick gobs of marmalade and blood,\nrolling in drops,\nthe water pours down,\nin gouts like a blade,\na lacerating river of glass,\nit pours down, gnawing,\nhammering the axle of symmetry, soldering the soul’s brazings,\nsmashing abandoned objects, drenching what is dark.\n\nIt is merely a gasp, damper than weeping,\na liquid, a sweat, an oil without a name,\na motion of stabbing,\nshaping, thickening,\nthe water pours down\nin sluggish drops\nto its sea, to its juiceless ocean,\nto its wave without water.\n\nI see a summer stretched out, and a death-rattle growing from a barn,\nwine-cellars, locusts,\ncrowds of people, palpitations,\nhomes, little girls\nsleeping with hands on their hearts,\ndreaming of bandits, burnings,\nI see boats,\nI see trees of spinal cords, hackling like angry cats,\nI see blood, daggers and women’s stockings, and men’s hair,\nI see bedsteads, I see corridors where a virgin cries out,\nI see blankets and pipe-organs and hotels.\n\nI see private dreams,\nI let in the lagging days,\nand the beginnings, too, and the memories, too;\nlike an eyelid horribly pried up,\nI stand watching.\n\nAnd, further, there is this sound:\na red uproar of bones,\na cleaving together of flesh,\nand legs, yellow as spikes of corn, splicing.\nI listen between the crackling of kisses,\nI listen, flailed between pantings and wailings.\nI stand watching, hearing,\nwith half of my soul on the sea and with half of my soul on the earth,\nand with the two halves of my soul I watch the world.\n\nAnd even if I clap my eyes shut and dam my heart, thoroughly,\nI see a soft water wash down,\nin soft drops.\nIt is like a hurricane of gelatin,\na cascade of sperms and jellyfish.\nI see a clotted rainbow, flowing.\nI see its waters moving across my bones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "soldier-asleep": { - "title": "“Soldier Asleep”", - "body": "Derelict there in the leafy encirclement,\nthe soldier arrived. His weariness struck at him then,\nand he fell in the leaves and lianas\nat the foot of that Providence, the plumed and omnipotent God\nalone with His universe, still\nwarm from the jungles.\nGodhead looked long\nat the warrior outlandishly born from the sea-water:\nstared long at those eyes, at the blood-clabbered beard\nand the sword, the black scintillation\nof armor, the weariness weighing\nlike haze on the head\nof the bloody young man.\nHow many zones\nin the darkness, till the God of the Feathers\ncould be born and entwine on the wood\nand the roseate stone, the web of his volumel\nWhat a chaos of lunatic water,\nnocturnal ferocity, what ravening\ntroughs for the light, unregenerate yet, what\ncrazed fermentation of lives and destructions, what bran\nof fertility, before the decorum could come:\nthe orders of plants and of clans,\nthe cut stone disposed on the stone,\nthe smoke of the ritual lamps,\nsoil firm for the stance of a man,\ndisposition of tribes\nand tribunes of terrestrial gods!\n\nAll the flakes of the rock shook:\nit felt the descent of the Terror\nlike a swarming of insects,\nand massing the might of its properties,\nsent rain to the roots,\nconferred with the motions of earth\nstill unmoved and obscure in the stone\nof its cosmic investiture,\nunable to stir in a fang or a claw,\na river, a temblor,\na meteor’s hiss\nthrough the pit of its emperies:\nand remained in that place, like a silence, a stone immobility.\nwhile Beltrán of Córdoba slept on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "a-song-of-despair": { - "title": "“A Song of Despair”", - "body": "The memory of you emerges from the night around me.\nThe river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.\n\nDeserted like the dwarves at dawn.\nIt is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!\n\nCold flower heads are raining over my heart.\nOh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.\n\nIn you the wars and the flights accumulated.\nFrom you the wings of the song birds rose.\n\nYou swallowed everything, like distance.\nLike the sea, like time. In you everything sank!\n\nIt was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.\nThe hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.\n\nPilot’s dread, fury of blind driver,\nturbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!\n\nIn the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.\nLost discoverer, in you everything sank!\n\nYou girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,\nsadness stunned you, in you everything sank!\n\nI made the wall of shadow draw back,\nbeyond desire and act, I walked on.\n\nOh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,\nI summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.\n\nLike a jar you housed infinite tenderness.\nand the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.\n\nThere was the black solitude of the islands,\nand there, woman of love, your arms took me in.\n\nThere was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.\nThere were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.\n\nAh woman, I do not know how you could contain me\nin the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!\n\nHow terrible and brief my desire was to you!\nHow difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.\n\nCemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,\nstill the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.\n\nOh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,\noh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.\n\nOh the mad coupling of hope and force\nin which we merged and despaired.\n\nAnd the tenderness, light as water and as flour.\nAnd the word scarcely begun on the lips.\n\nThis was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,\nand in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!\n\nOh pit of debris, everything fell into you,\nwhat sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!\n\nFrom billow to billow you still called and sang.\nStanding like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.\n\nYou still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.\nOh pit of debris, open and bitter well.\n\nPale blind diver, luckless slinger,\nlost discoverer, in you everything sank!\n\nIt is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour\nwhich the night fastens to all the timetables.\n\nThe rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.\nCold stars heave up, black birds migrate.\n\nDeserted like the wharves at dawn.\nOnly tremulous shadow twists in my hands.\n\nOh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.\n\nIt is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,\nor arrow of carnations that propagate fire:\nI love you as one loves certain obscure things,\nsecretly, between the shadow and the soul.\n\nI love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries\nthe light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,\nand thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose\nfrom the earth lives dimly in my body.\n\nI love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,\nI love you directly without problems or pride:\nI love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,\nexcept in this form in which I am not nor are you,\nso close that your hand upon my chest is mine,\nso close that your eyes close with my dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "thinking-tangling-shadows": { - "title": "“Thinking, Tangling Shadows”", - "body": "Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.\nYou are far away too, oh farther than anyone.\nThinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,\nburying lamps.\n\nBelfry of fogs, how far away, up there!\nStifling laments, milling shadowy hopes,\ntaciturn miller,\nnight falls on you face downward, far from the city.\n\nYour presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.\nI think, I explore great tracts of my life before you.\nMy life before anyone, my harsh life.\nThe shout facing the sea, among the rocks,\nrunning free, mad, in the sea-spray.\nThe sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea.\nHeadlong, violent, stretched towards the sky.\n\nYou, woman, what were you there, what ray, what vane\nof that immense fan? You were as far as you are now.\nFire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses.\nBurn, burn, flame up, sparkle in trees of light.\n\nIt collapses, crackling. Fire. Fire.\nAnd my soul dances, seared with curls of fire.\nWho calls? What silence peopled with echoes?\nHour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.\nHour that is mine from among them all!\nMegaphone in which the wind passes singing.\nSuch a passion of weeping tied to my body.\n\nShaking of all the roots,\nattack of all the waves!\nMy soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.\n\nThinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude.\n\nWho are you, who are you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "tonight-i-can-write-the-saddest-lines": { - "title": "“Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”", - "body": "Tonight I can write the saddest lines.\n\nWrite, for example, “The night is shattered\nand the blue stars shiver in the distance.”\n\nThe night wind revolves in the sky and sings.\n\nTonight I can write the saddest lines.\nI loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.\n\nThrough nights like this one I held her in my arms\nI kissed her again and again under the endless sky.\n\nShe loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.\nHow could one not have loved her great still eyes.\n\nTonight I can write the saddest lines.\nTo think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.\n\nTo hear the immense night, still more immense without her.\nAnd the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.\n\nWhat does it matter that my love could not keep her.\nThe night is shattered and she is not with me.\n\nThis is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.\nMy soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.\n\nMy sight searches for her as though to go to her.\nMy heart looks for her, and she is not with me.\n\nThe same night whitening the same trees.\nWe, of that time, are no longer the same.\n\nI no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.\nMy voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.\n\nAnother’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.\nHer voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.\n\nI no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.\nLove is so short, forgetting is so long.\n\nBecause through nights like this one I held her in my arms\nmy sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.\n\nThough this be the last pain that she makes me suffer\nand these the last verses that I write for her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "tower-of-light": { - "title": "“Tower of Light”", - "body": "O tower of light, sad beauty\nthat magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,\ncalcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry\nof the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife\nof the Oceanian wind, O separate rose\nfrom the long stem of the trampled bush\nthat the depths, converted into archipelago,\nO natural star, green diadem,\nalone in your lonesome dynasty,\nstill unattainable, elusive, desolate\nlike one drop, like one grape, like the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "walking-around": { - "title": "“Walking Around”", - "body": "It so happens I am sick of being a man.\nAnd it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses\ndried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt\nsteering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.\n\nThe smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.\nThe only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.\nThe only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,\nno more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.\n\nIt so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails\nand my hair and my shadow.\nIt so happens I am sick of being a man.\n\nStill it would be marvelous\nto terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,\nor kill a nun with a blow on the ear.\nIt would be great\nto go through the streets with a green knife\nletting out yells until I died of the cold.\n\nI don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,\ninsecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,\ngoing on down, into the moist guts of the earth,\ntaking in and thinking, eating every day.\n\nI don’t want so much misery.\nI don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,\nalone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,\nhalf frozen, dying of grief.\n\nThat’s why Monday, when it sees me coming\nwith my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,\nand it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,\nand leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.\n\nAnd it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,\ninto hospitals where the bones fly out the window,\ninto shoeshops that smell like vinegar,\nand certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.\n\nThere are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines\nhanging over the doors of houses that I hate,\nand there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,\nthere are mirrors\nthat ought to have wept from shame and terror,\nthere are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.\n\nI stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,\nmy rage, forgetting everything,\nI walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,\nand courtyards with washing hanging from the line:\nunderwear, towels and shirts from which slow\ndirty tears are falling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "weekday": "monday" - } - } - }, - "the-white-mans-burden": { - "title": "“The White Man’s Burden”", - "body": "Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig\nand lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:\nmaybe it was the voice of the rain crying,\na cracked bell, or a torn heart.\n\nSomething from far off it seemed\ndeep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,\na shout muffled by huge autumns,\nby the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.\n\nWakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig\nsang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance\nclimbed up through my conscious mind\n\nas if suddenly the roots I had left behind\ncried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood--\nand I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "white-thighs": { - "title": "“White Thighs”", - "body": "White thighs, hillocks of whiteness, oh woman’s body,\nyou resemble the world in your attitude of surrender\nMy peasant’s body savagely excavates you\nand makes the child leap from the earth’s depth,\n\nI was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,\nand into me entered the night’s heavy invasion.\nTo outlive me I framed you like an arm at the forge,\nlike an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.\n\nBut falls the hour of vengeance and I love you.\nBody of flesh and moss and firm covetous milk.\nOh the cups of your chest, oh eyes of absencel\nOh roses of the pubis! Oh slow sad voice!\n\nOh body of my woman, I shall persist in your gracefulness.\nMy thirst, my desire unlimited, my uncertain road.\nDark watercourses where eternal thirst follows,\nand weariness follows, and infinite sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "widowers-tango": { - "title": "“Widower’s Tango”", - "body": "Oh Maligna, by this time you must have found the letter, wept with rage,\nand insulted the memory of my mother,\ncalling her rotten bitch and mother of curs,\nand you must have drunk your afternoon tea, all by yourself, alone,\ngazing at my old shoes, empty now for ever,\nand you can’t remember my sicknesses, my nightly dreams, my meals.\nwithout cursing me aloud as though I were still there\nfussing about the tropics, the Coringhi coolies,\nthe poisonous fevers that did me so much harm,\nand the frightful English, whom I detest still.\n\nMaligna, here’s the truth: what a huge night! what a solitary earth!\nI’ve gone back again to the lonely bedrooms,\nI can throw my trousers and shirts upon the floor;\nthere are no clothes-hangers in my room, no pictures of anybody on the walls.\nHow much of the darkness in my soul would I give to regain you,\nand how threatening seem to me now the names of the months,\nto eating cold meals in cafés, and once more,\nand how lugubrious a drum-sound the name of winter has!\n\nLater you will find buried near the coconut tree\nthe knife that I hid for fear that you’d kill me,\nand now, suddenly, I should like to smell its kitchen steel\nused to the weight of your hand and the lustre of your foot:\nbeneath the earth’s damp, among the deaf roots,\nthe poor thing would know, of all human languages, only your name,\nand the thick earth does not comprehend your name\ncomposed of impenetrable heavenly substances.\n\nJust as it troubles me to think of the clear day of your legs\nstretched out like arrested and hard solar waters,\nand the swallow that sleeping and fying lives in your eyes,\nand the dog of madness that you house in your heart,\nso also I perceive the deaths existing between us from now on,\nand the air I breathe bears ashes and destruction,\nthe long, lonely space that encircles me for ever.\n\nI would give this wind from the giant sea for your hoarse breathing\nheard in the long nights without admixture of oblivion,\ncombining with the atmosphere like a whip with the hide of a horse.\nAnd to hear the sound of you, in darkness, at the back of the house,\nlike one decanting a delicate, tremulous, silvery, reluctant honey,\nhow many times over would I give this chorus of shadow that is mine,\nand the noise of useless swords that clash in my heart,\nand the dove of blood perching solitary upon my forehead\ninvoking things gone, beings gone,\nsubstances strangely inseparable and lost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "you-are-the-daughter-of-the-sea": { - "title": "“You Are the Daughter of the Sea”", - "body": "You are the daughter of the sea, oregano’s first cousin.\nSwimmer, your body is pure as the water;\ncook, your blood is quick as the soil.\nEverything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.\n\nYour eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;\nyour hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;\nyou know the deep essence of water and the earth,\nconjoined in you like a formula for clay.\n\nNaiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,\nthey will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.\nThis is how you become everything that lives.\n\nAnd so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms\nthat push back the shadows so that you can rest--\nvegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "your-feet": { - "title": "“Your Feet”", - "body": "When I cannot look at your face\nI look at your feet.\nYour feet of arched bone,\nyour hard little feet.\nI know that they support you,\nand that your sweet weight\nrises upon them.\nYour waist and your breasts,\nthe doubled purple\nof your nipples,\nthe sockets of your eyes\nthat have just flown away,\nyour wide fruit mouth,\nyour red tresses,\nmy little tower.\nBut I love your feet\nonly because they walked\nupon the earth and upon\nthe wind and upon the waters,\nuntil they found me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "tis-the-morrow-full-of-storm": { - "title": "“’tis the Morrow Full of Storm”", - "body": "’Tis the morrow full of storm\nin the heart of summer.\n\nThe wandering hands of the wind shake the clouds\nlike white handkerchiefs waved in farewell.\n\nInnumerable heart of the wind\nfluttering over our silence of love.\n\nHumming through the trees, heavenly music,\nlike a tongue full of songs and wars.\n\nWind that lifts the fallen leaves in robbery\nand turns the palpitating flight of the birds.\n\nWind that throws them down in foamless waves\nand weightless shapes, and falling flames.\n\nTheir volume of kisses breaks and goes under\nfought at the gate of the summer wind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-henry-newman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint John Henry Newman", - "birth": { - "year": 1801 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "dreams": { - "title": "“Dreams”", - "body": "Oh! miserable power\nTo dreams allow’d, to raise the guilty past,\nAnd back awhile the illumined spirit to cast\nOn its youth’s twilight hour;\nIn mockery guiling it to act again\nThe revel or the scoff in Satan’s frantic train!\n\nNay, hush thee, angry heart!\nAn Angel’s grief ill fits a penitent;\nWelcome the thorn--it is divinely sent,\nAnd with its wholesome smart\nShall pierce thee in thy virtue’s palmy home,\nAnd warn thee what thou art, and whence thy\nwealth has come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_henry_newman" - } - } - }, - "the-elements": { - "title": "“The Elements”", - "body": "Man is permitted much\nTo scan and learn\nIn Nature’s frame;\nTill he well-nigh can tame\nBrute mischiefs, and can touch\nInvisible things, and turn\nAll warring ills to purposes of good.\nThus, as a god below,\nHe can control,\nAnd harmonize, what seems amiss to flow\nAs sever’d from the whole\nAnd dimly understood.\n\nBut o’er the elements\nOne Hand alone,\nOne Hand has sway.\nWhat influence day by day\nIn straiter belt prevents\nThe impious Ocean, thrown\nAlternate o’er the ever-sounding shore?\nOr who has eye to trace\nHow the Plague came?\nForerun the doublings of the Tempest’s race?\nOr the Air’s weight and flame\nOn a set scale explore?\n\nThus God has will’d\nThat man, when fully skill’d,\nStill gropes in twilight dim;\nEncompass’d all his hours\nBy fearfullest powers\nInflexible to him.\nThat so he may discern\nHis feebleness,\nAnd e’en for earth’s success\nTo Him in wisdom turn,\nWho holds for us the keys of either home,\nEarth and the world to come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_henry_newman" - } - } - }, - "flowers-without-fruit": { - "title": "“Flowers Without Fruit”", - "body": "Prune thou thy words; the thoughts control\nThat o’er thee swell and throng;--\nThey will condense within thy soul,\nAnd change to purpose strong.\n\nBut he who lets his feelings run\nIn soft luxurious flow,\nShrinks when hard service must be done,\nAnd faints at every woe.\n\nFaith’s meanest deed more favor bears,\nWhere hearts and wills are weighed,\nThan brightest transports, choicest prayers,\nWhich bloom their hour, and fade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "hymn-to-matins": { - "title": "“Hymn To Matins”", - "body": "TODAY the Blessed Three in One\nBegan the earth and skies;\nToday a Conqueror, God the Son,\nDid from the grave arise;\nWe too will wake, and, in despite\nOf sloth and languor, all unite,\nAs Psalmists bid, through the dim night,\nWaiting with wistful eyes.\n\nSo may He hear, and heed each vow\nAnd prayer to Him addrest;\nAnd grant an instant cleansing now,\nA future glorious rest.\nSo may He plentifully shower,\nOn all who hymn His love and power,\nIn this most still and sacred hour,\nHis sweetest gifts and best.\n\nFather of purity and light!\nThy presence if we win,\n’Twill shield us from the deeds of night,\nThe burning darts of sin;\nLest aught defiled or dissolute\nRelax our bodies or imbrute,\nAnd fires eternal be the fruit\nOf fire now lit within.\n\nFix in our hearts, Redeemer dear,\nThe ever-gushing spring\nOf grace to cleanse, of life to cheer\nSouls sick and sorrowing.\nThee, bounteous Father, we entreat,\nAnd Only Son, awful and sweet,\nAnd life-creating Paraclete,\nThe everlasting King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "hymn-to-lauds": { - "title": "“Hymn to Lauds”", - "body": "Framer of the earth and sky,\nRuler of the day and night,\nWith a glad variety,\nTempering all, and making light;\n\nGleams upon our dark path flinging,\nCutting short each night begun,\nHark! for chanticleer is singing,\nHark! he chides the lingering sun.\n\nAnd the morning star replies,\nAnd lets loose the imprison’d day;\nAnd the godless bandit flies\nFrom his haunt and from his prey.\n\nShrill it sounds, the storm relenting\nSoothes the weary seaman’s ears;\nOnce it wrought a great repenting,\nIn that flood of Peter’s tears.\n\nRouse we; let the blithesome cry\nOf that bird our hearts awaken;\nChide the slumberers as they lie,\nAnd arrest the sin-o’ertaken.\n\nHope and health are in his strain,\nTo the fearful and the ailing;\nMurder sheathes his blade profane,\nFaith revives when faith was failing.\n\nJesu, Master! when we sin,\nTurn on us Thy healing face;\nIt will melt the offence within\nInto penitential grace:\n\nBeam on our bewilder’d mind,\nTill its dreamy shadows flee;\nStones cry out where Thou hast shined,\nJesu! musical with Thee.\n\nTo the Father and the Son,\nAnd the Spirit, who in Heaven\nEver witness, Three and One,\nPraise on Earth be ever given.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "paraphrase-of-isaiah-chapter-64": { - "title": "“Paraphrase of Isaiah, Chapter 64”", - "body": "O that Thou wouldest rend the breadth of sky,\nThat veils Thy presence from the sons of men!\nO that, as erst Thou camest from on high\nSudden in strength, Thou so would’st come again!\nTrack’d out by judgments was Thy fiery path,\nOcean and mountain withering in Thy wrath!\n\nThen would Thy name--the Just, the Merciful--\nStrange dubious attributes to human mind,\nAppal Thy foes; and, kings, who spurn Thy rule,\nThen, then would quake to hopeless doom consign’d.\nSee, the stout bows, and totters the secure,\nWhile pleasure’s bondsman hides his head impure!\n\nCome down! for then shall from its seven bright springs\nTo him who thirsts the draught of life be given;\nEye hath not seen, ear hath not heard the things\nWhich He hath purposed for the heirs of heaven,--\nA God of love, guiding with gracious ray\nEach meek rejoicing pilgrim on his way.\n\nYea, though we err, and Thine averted face\nRebukes the folly in Thine Israel done,\nWill not that hour of chastisement give place\nTo beams, the pledge of an eternal sun?\nYes for His counsels to the end endure;\nWe shall be saved, our rest abideth sure.\n\nLord, Lord! our sins … our sins … unclean are we,\nGross and corrupt; our seeming-virtuous deeds\nAre but abominate; all, dead to Thee,\nShrivel, like leaves when summer’s green recedes;\nWhile, like the autumn blast, our lusts arise,\nAnd sweep their prey where the fell serpent lies.\n\nNone, there is none to plead with God in prayer\nBracing his laggart spirit to the work\nOf intercession; conscience-sprung despair,\nSin-loving still, doth in each bosom lurk.\nGuilt calls Thee to avenge;--Thy risen ire\nSears like a brand, we gaze and we expire.\n\nBut now, O Lord, our Father! we are Thine,\nDesign and fashion; senseless while we lay,\nThou, as the potter, with a Hand Divine,\nDidst mould Thy vessels of the sluggish clay.\nMark not our guilt, Thy word of wrath recall,\nwe are Thine by price, Thy people all!\n\nAlas for Zion! ’tis a waste;--the fair,\nThe holy place in flames;--where once our sires\nKindled the sacrifice of praise and prayer,\nFar other brightness gleams from Gentile fires.\nLow lies our pride;--and wilt Thou self-deny\nThy rescuing arm unvex’d amid thine Israel’s cry?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_henry_newman" - } - } - }, - "the-pillar-of-the-cloud": { - "title": "“The Pillar of the Cloud”", - "body": "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on!\nThe night is dark, and I am far from home,--lead thou me on!\nKeep thou my feet; I do not ask to see\nThe distant scene,--one step enough for me.\n\nI was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on:\nI loved to choose and see my path, but now lead thou me on!\nI loved the garish days, and, spite of fears,\nPride ruled my will: remember not past years.\n\nSo long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on;\nO’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone;\nAnd with the morn those angel faces smile\nWhich I have loved long since, and lost awhile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_henry_newman" - } - } - }, - "sensitiveness": { - "title": "“Sensitiveness”", - "body": "Time was I shrank from what was right,\nFrom fear of what was wrong;\nI would not brave the sacred fight\nBecause the foe was strong.\n\nBut now I cast that finer sense\nAnd sorer shame aside;\nSuch dread of sin was indolence,\nSuch aim at heaven was pride.\n\nSo when my Saviour calls I rise,\nAnd calmly do my best;\nLeaving to Him, with silent eyes\nOf hope and fear, the rest.\n\nI step, I mount, where He has led;\nMen count my haltings o’er;\nI know them; yet, though self I dread,\nI love His precept more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-thanksgiving": { - "title": "“A Thanksgiving”", - "body": "Lord, in this dust Thy sovereign voice\nFirst quicken’d love divine;\nI am all Thine,--Thy care and choice,\nMy very praise is Thine.\n\nI praise Thee, while Thy providence\nIn childhood frail I trace,\nFor blessings given, ere dawning sense\nCould seek or scan Thy grace;\n\nBlessings in boyhood’s marvelling hour,\nBright dreams, and fancyings strange;\nBlessings, when reason’s awful power\nGave thought a bolder range;\n\nBlessings of friends, which to my door\nUnask’d, unhoped, have come;\nAnd, choicer still, a countless store\nOf eager smiles at home.\n\nYet, Lord, in memory’s fondest place\nI shrine those seasons sad,\nWhen, looking up, I saw Thy face\nIn kind austereness clad.\n\nI would not miss one sigh or tear,\nHeart-pang, or throbbing brow;\nSweet was the chastisement severe,\nAnd sweet its memory now.\n\nYes! let the fragrant scars abide,\nLove-tokens in Thy stead,\nFaint shadows of the spear-pierced side\nAnd thorn-encompass’d head.\n\nAnd such Thy tender force be still,\nWhen self would swerve or stray,\nShaping to truth the froward will\nAlong Thy narrow way.\n\nDeny me wealth; far, far remove\nThe lure of power or name;\nHope thrives in straits, in weakness love,\nAnd faith in this world’s shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "the-trance-of-time": { - "title": "“The Trance of Time”", - "body": "_Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,\nAtque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum\nSubjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!_\n\nIn childhood, when with eager eyes\nThe season-measured year I view’d,\nAll garb’d in fairy guise,\nPledged constancy of good.\n\nSpring sang of heaven; the summer flowers\nBade me gaze on, and did not fade;\nEven suns o’er autumn’s bowers\nHeard my strong wish, and stay’d.\n\nThey came and went, the short-lived four;\nYet, as their varying dance they wove,\nTo my young heart each bore\nIts own sure claim of love.\n\nFar different now;--the whirling year\nVainly my dizzy eyes pursue;\nAnd its fair tints appear\nAll blent in one dusk hue.\n\nWhy dwell on rich autumnal lights,\nSpring-time, or winter’s social ring?\nLong days are fire-side nights,\nBrown autumn is fresh spring.\n\nThen what this world to thee, my heart?\nIts gifts nor feed thee nor can bless.\nThou hast no owner’s part\nIn all its fleetingness.\n\nThe flame, the storm, the quaking ground,\nEarth’s joy, earth’s terror, nought is thine,\nThou must but hear the sound\nOf the still voice divine.\n\nO priceless art! O princely state!\nE’en while by sense of change opprest,\nWithin to antedate\nHeaven’s Age of fearless rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_henry_newman" - } - } - }, - "a-voice-from-afar": { - "title": "“A Voice from Afar”", - "body": " Weep not for me;--\nBe blithe as wont, nor tinge with gloom\nThe stream of love that circles home,\n Light hearts and free!\nJoy in the gifts Heaven’s bounty lends;\nNor miss my face, dear friends!\n\n I still am near;--\nWatching the smiles I prized on earth,\nYour converse mild, your blameless mirth;\n Now too I hear\nOf whisper’d sounds the tale complete,\nLow prayers, and musings sweet.\n\n A sea before\nThe Throne is spread;--its pure still glass\nPictures all earth-scenes as they pass.\n We, on its shore,\nShare, in the bosom of our rest,\nGod’s knowledge, and are blest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alfred-noyes": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alfred Noyes", - "birth": { - "year": 1880 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noyes", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "art-the-herald": { - "title": "“Art, the Herald”", - "body": "_“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”_\n\nBeyond; beyond; and yet again beyond!\nWhat went ye out to seek, oh foolish-fond?\nIs not the heart of all things here and now?\nIs not the circle infinite, and the centre\nEverywhere, if ye would but hear and enter?\nCome; the porch bends and the great pillars bow.\n\nCome; come and see the secret of the sun;\nThe sorrow that holds the warring worlds in one;\nThe pain that holds Eternity in an hour;\nOne God in every seed self-sacrificed,\nOne star-eyed, star-crowned universal Christ,\nRe-crucified in every wayside flower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_the_baptist" - } - } - }, - "at-dawn": { - "title": "“At Dawn”", - "body": "O Hesper-Phosphor, far away\n Shining, the first, the last white star,\nHear’st thou the strange, the ghostly cry,\nThat moan of an ancient agony\nFrom purple forest to golden sky\n Shivering over the breathless bay?\nIt is not the wind that wakes with the day;\n For see, the gulls that wheel and call,\n Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar,\nCatching the sun-dawn on their wings,\n Like snow-flakes or like rose-leaves fall,\nFlutter and fall in airy rings;\n And drift, like lilies ruffling into blossom\n Upon a golden lake’s unwrinkled bosom.\n\nAre not the forest’s deep-lashed fringes wet\nWith tears? Is not the voice of all regret\n Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart?\nShe too, she too, has loved and lost; and we--\nWe that remember our lost Arcady,\nHave we not known, we too,\nThe primal greenwood’s arch of blue,\nThe radiant clouds at sunrise curled\nAround the brows of the golden world;\nThe marble temples, washed with dew,\nTo which with rosy limbs aflame\nThe violet-eyed Thalassian came,\nCame pitiless, only to display\nHow soon the youthful splendour dies away;\n Came, only to depart\nLaughing across the gray-grown bitter sea?\nFor each man’s life is earth’s epitome,\nAnd though the years bring more than aught they take,\nYet might his heart and hers well break\nRemembering how one prayer must still be vain,\n How one fair hope is dead,\n One passion quenched, one glory fled,\nWith those first loves that never come again.\n\nHow many, how many generations,\n Have heard that sigh in the dawn,\nWhen the dark earth yearns to the unforgotten nations\n And the old loves withdrawn,\nOld loves, old lovers, wonderful and unnumbered\n As waves on the wine-dark sea,\n’Neath the tall white towers of Troy and the temples that slumbered;\n In Thessaly?\n\nFrom the beautiful palaces, from the miraculous portals,\n The swift white feet are flown!\nThey were taintless of dust, the proud, the peerless Immortals\n As they sped to their loftier throne!\nPerchance they are there, earth dreams, on the shores of Hesper,\n Her rosy-bosomed Hours,\nListening the wild fresh forest’s enchanted whisper,\n Crowned with its new strange flowers;\nListening the great new ocean’s triumphant thunder\n On the stainless unknown shore,\nWhile that perilous queen of the world’s delight and wonder\n Comes white from the foam once more.\n\nWhen the mists divide with the dawn o’er those glittering waters,\n Do they gaze over unoared seas--\nNaiad and nymph and the woodland’s rose-crowned daughters\n And the Oceanides?\nDo they sing together, perchance, in that diamond splendour,\n That world of dawn and dew,\nWith eyelids twitching to tears and with eyes grown tender,\n The sweet old songs they knew,\nThe songs of Greece? Ah, with harp-strings mute do they falter\n As the earth like a small star pales?\nWhen the heroes launch their ship by the smoking altar\n Does a memory lure their sails?\nFar, far away, do their hearts resume the story\n That never on earth was told,\nWhen all those urgent oars on the waste of glory\n Cast up its gold?\n\n _Are not the forest fringes wet\n With tears? Is not the voice of all regret\n Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart?\n She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though\n She turned last night in disdain\n Away from the sunset-embers,\n From her soul she can never depart;\n She can never depart from her pain.\n Vainly she strives to forget;\n Beautiful in her woe,\n She awakes in the dawn and remembers._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-barrel-organ": { - "title": "“The Barrel-Organ”", - "body": "There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nAnd the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet\n And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;\nAnd it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain\n That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;\nAnd they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again\n In the Symphony that rules the day and night.\n\nAnd now it’s marching onward through the realms of old romance\n And trolling out a fond familiar tune,\nAnd now it’s roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,\n And now it’s prattling softly to the moon,\nAnd all around the organ there’s a sea without a shore\n Of human joys and wonders and regrets;\nTo remember and to recompense the music evermore\n For what the cold machinery forgets …\n\n Yes; as the music changes,\n Like a prismatic glass,\n It takes the light and ranges\n Through all the moods that pass;\n Dissects the common carnival\n Of passions and regrets,\n And gives the world a glimpse of all\n The colours it forgets.\n\n And there _La Traviata_ sighs\n Another sadder song;\n And there _Il Trovatore_ cries\n A tale of deeper wrong;\n And bolder knights to battle go\n With sword and shield and lance,\n Than ever here on earth below\n Have whirled into--a dance!--\n\nGo down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;\n Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)\nAnd you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;\n Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)\n\nThe cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,\n The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)\nAnd there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze of sky\n The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London.\n\nThe Dorian nightingale is rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there\n At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)\nThe linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo\n And golden-eyed _tu-whit, tu-whoo_, of owls that ogle London.\n\nFor Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard\n At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London!)\nAnd when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out\n You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorussing for London:--\n\n_Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;\n Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)\nAnd you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;\n Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)_\n\nAnd then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street,\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nAnd in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet\nMaking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat,\nAnd a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they’ll never meet,\nThrough the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat,\n In the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nVerdi, Verdi, when you wrote _Il Trovatore_ did you dream\n Of the city when the sun sinks low,\nOf the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured stream\nOn the Picadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem\nTo be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam\nAs _A che la morte_ parodies the world’s eternal theme\n And pulses with the sunset-glow.\n\nThere’s a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nThere’s a portly man of business with a balance of his own,\nThere’s a clerk and there’s a butcher of a soft reposeful tone.\nAnd they’re all of them returning to the heavens they have known:\nThey are crammed and jammed in busses and--they’re each of them alone\n In the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nThere’s a very modish woman and her smile is very bland\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nAnd her hansom jingles onward, but her little jewelled hand\nIs clenched a little tighter and she cannot understand\nWhat she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,\nFor the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,\n In the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nThere’s a rowing man that listens, and his heart is crying out\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nFor the barge, the eight, the Isis, and the coach’s whoop and shout,\nFor the minute-gun, the counting and the long dishevelled rout,\nFor the howl along the tow-path and a fate that’s still in doubt,\nFor a roughened oar to handle and a race to think about\n In the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nThere’s a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nAnd his hand begins to tremble and his face to smoulder red,\nAs he sees a loafer watching him and--there he turns his head\nAnd stares into the sunset where his April love is fled,\nFor he hears her softly singing, and his lonely soul is led\n Through the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nThere’s an old and haggard demi-rep, it’s ringing in her ears,\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nWith the wild and empty sorrow of the love that blights and sears,\nOh, and if she hurries onward, then be sure, be sure she hears,\nHears and bears the bitter burden of the unforgotten years,\nAnd her laugh’s a little harsher and her eyes are brimmed with tears\n For the land where the dead dreams go.\n\nThere’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street\n In the City as the sun sinks low;\nThough the music’s only Verdi there’s a world to make it sweet\nJust as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet\nMellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand feet\nAre marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat\n In the land where the dead dreams go.\n\n So it’s Jeremiah, Jeremiah,\n What have you to say\n When you meet the garland girls\n Tripping on their way?\n\n All around my gala hat\n I wear a wreath of roses\n (A long and lonely year it is\n I’ve waited for the May!)\n If any one should ask you,\n The reason why I wear it is--\n My own love, my true love,\n Is coming home to-day.\n\n And it’s buy a bunch of violets for the lady\n _(It’s lilac-time in London; It’s lilac-time in London!)_\n Buy a bunch of violets for the lady\n While the sky burns blue above:\n\n On the other side the street you’ll find it shady\n _(It’s lilac-time in London! It’s lilac-time in London!)_\n But buy a bunch of violets for the lady,\n And tell her she’s your own true love.\n\nThere’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street\n In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow;\nAnd the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet\nAnd enriched it with the harmonies that make a song complete\nIn the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet,\n As it dies into the sunset-glow;\nAnd it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain\n That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light,\nAnd they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again\n In the Symphony that rules the day and night.\n\n And there, as the music changes,\n The song runs round again.\n Once more it turns and ranges\n Through all its joy and pain,\n Dissects the common carnival\n Of passions and regrets;\n And the wheeling world remembers all\n The wheeling song forgets.\n\n Once more _La Traviata_ sighs\n Another sadder song:\n Once more _Il Trovatore_ cries\n A tale of deeper wrong;\n Once more the knights to battle go\n With sword and shield and lance\n Till once, once more, the shattered foe\n Has whirled into--_a dance!_\n\n_Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac time;\n Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)\nAnd you shall wander hand and hand with love in summer’s wonderland;\n Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!)_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-empire-builders": { - "title": "“The Empire Builders”", - "body": "Who are the Empire-builders? They\nWhose desperate arrogance demands\nA self-reflecting power to sway\nA hundred little selfless lands?\nLord God of battles, ere we bow\nTo these and to their soulless lust,\nLet fall Thy thunders on us now\nAnd strike us equal to the dust.\n\nBefore the stars in heaven were made\nOur great Commander led us forth;\nAnd now the embattled lines are laid\nTo East, to West, to South, to North;\nAccording as of old He planned\nWe take our station in the field,\nNor dare to dream we understand\nThe splendour of the swords we wield.\n\nWe know not what the Soul intends\nThat lives and moves behind our deeds;\nWe wheel and march to glorious ends\nBeyond the common soldier’s needs:\nAnd some are raised to high rewards,\nAnd some by regiments are hurled\nTo die upon the opposing swords\nAnd sleep--forgotten by the world.\n\nAnd not where navies churn the foam,\nNor called to fields of fierce emprize,\nIn many a country cottage-home\nThe Empire-builder lives and dies:\nOr through the roaring streets he goes\nA lean and weary City slave,\nThe conqueror of a thousand foes\nWho walks, unheeded, to his grave.\n\nLeaders unknown of hopes forlorn\nGo past us in the daily mart,\nWith many a shadowy crown of thorn\nAnd many a kingly broken heart:\nThough England’s banner overhead\nEver the secret signal flew,\nWe only see its Cross is red\nAs children see the skies are blue.\n\nFor all are Empire-builders here,\nWhose hearts are true to heaven and home\nAnd, year by slow revolving year,\nFulfil the duties as they come;\nSo simple seems the task, and yet\nMany for this are crucified;\nAy, and their brother-men forget\nThe simple wounds in palm and side.\n\nBut he that to his home is true,\nWhere’er the tides of power may flow,\nHas built a kingdom great and new\nWhich Time nor Fate shall overthrow\nThese are the Empire-builders, these\nAnnex where none shall say them nay\nBeyond the world’s uncharted seas\nRealms that can never pass away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-highwayman": { - "title": "“The Highwayman”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.\nThe moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.\nThe road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,\nAnd the highwayman came riding--\n Riding--riding--\nThe highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.\n\nHe’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,\nA coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.\nThey fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.\nAnd he rode with a jewelled twinkle,\n His pistol butts a-twinkle,\nHis rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.\n\nOver the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.\nHe tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.\nHe whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there\nBut the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,\n Bess, the landlord’s daughter,\nPlaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.\n\nAnd dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked\nWhere Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.\nHis eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,\nBut he loved the landlord’s daughter,\n The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.\nDumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say--\n\n“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,\nBut I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;\nYet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,\nThen look for me by moonlight,\n Watch for me by moonlight,\nI’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”\n\nHe rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,\nBut she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand\nAs the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;\nAnd he kissed its waves in the moonlight,\n (O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)\nThen he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHe did not come in the dawning. He did not come at noon;\nAnd out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,\nWhen the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,\nA red-coat troop came marching--\n Marching--marching--\nKing George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.\n\nThey said no word to the landlord. They drank his ale instead.\nBut they gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed.\nTwo of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!\nThere was death at every window;\n And hell at one dark window;\nFor Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.\n\nThey had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest.\nThey had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!\n“Now, keep good watch!” and they kissed her. She heard the doomed man say--\n_Look for me by moonlight;\n Watch for me by moonlight;\nI’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!_\n\nShe twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!\nShe writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!\nThey stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years\nTill, now, on the stroke of midnight,\n Cold, on the stroke of midnight,\nThe tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!\n\nThe tip of one finger touched it. She strove no more for the rest.\nUp, she stood up to attention, with the muzzle beneath her breast.\nShe would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;\nFor the road lay bare in the moonlight;\n Blank and bare in the moonlight;\nAnd the blood of her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love’s refrain.\n\n_Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot!_ Had they heard it? The horsehoofs ringing clear;\n_Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot,_ in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?\nDown the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,\nThe highwayman came riding--\n Riding--riding--\nThe red coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still.\n\n_Tlot-tlot,_ in the frosty silence! _Tlot-tlot,_ in the echoing night!\nNearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.\nHer eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,\nThen her finger moved in the moonlight,\n Her musket shattered the moonlight,\nShattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him--with her death.\n\nHe turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood\nBowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!\nNot till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear\nHow Bess, the landlord’s daughter,\n The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,\nHad watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.\n\nBack, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,\nWith the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.\nBlood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;\nWhen they shot him down on the highway,\n Down like a dog on the highway,\nAnd he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.\n\n\n_And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,\nWhen the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,\nWhen the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,\nA highwayman comes riding--\n Riding--riding--\nA highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.\n\nOver the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.\nHe taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.\nHe whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there\nBut the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,\n Bess, the landlord’s daughter,\nPlaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-hill-flowers": { - "title": "“The Hill-Flowers”", - "body": "_“I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.”_\n\n# I.\n\n_Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,\nEre I waken in the city--Life, thy dawn makes all things new!\nAnd up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,\nUp a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!_\n\nMoving through the dew, moving through the dew,\nO mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,\nBy the little path I know, with the sea far below,\nAnd above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;\n\nAs of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung\nAnd the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung\nFrom the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,\nAnd the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss that ne’er could cloy,\n\nFrom their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,\nWith a song to God the Giver, o’er that waste of wild perfume;\nBlowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,\nWhile the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,\n\nSo, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream, I rise,\nAnd I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.\nLife, thy dawn makes all things new! Hills of Youth, come to you,\nMoving through the dew, moving through the dew.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMoving through the dew, moving through the dew,\nFloats a brother’s face to meet me! Is it you? Is it you?\nFor the night I leave behind keeps these dazzled eyes still, blind!\nBut oh, the little hill-flowers, their scent is wise and kind;\n\nAnd I shall not lose the way from the darkness to the day,\nWhite dust can cling as their scent clings to memory for aye;\nAnd the least link in the chain can recall the whole again,\nAnd heaven at last resume its far-flung harvests, grain by grain.\n\nTo the hill-flowers clings my dust, and tho’ eyeless Death may thrust\nAll else into the darkness, in their heaven I put my trust;\nAnd a dawn shall bid me climb to the little spread of thyme\nWhere first I heard the ripple of the fountain-heads of rhyme.\n\nAnd a fir-wood that I know, from dawn to sunset-glow,\nShall whisper to a lonely sea, that swings far, far below.\nDeath, thy dawn makes all things new. Hills of Youth, I come to you,\nMoving through the dew, moving through the dew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "immortal-sails": { - "title": "“Immortal Sails”", - "body": "Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold,\n And ransack heaven before our moment fails.\nNow, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,\n We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.\n\nIt is not time that makes eternity.\n Love and an hour may quite out-span the years,\nAnd give us more to hear and more to see\n Than life can wash away with all its tears.\n\nDear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky\n Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this;\nBut we shall ride the lightning ere we die\n And seize our brief infinitude of bliss,\n\nWith time to spare for all that heaven can tell,\nWhile eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-litany-of-war": { - "title": "“The Litany of War”", - "body": "Sandalphon, whose white wings to heaven upbear\n The weight of human prayer,\nStood silent in the still eternal Light\n Of God, one dreadful night.\nHis wings were clogged with blood and foul with mire,\n His body seared with fire.\n“Hast thou no word for Me?” the Master said.\n The angel sank his head:\n\n“Word from the nations of the East and West,”\n He moaned, “that blood is best.\nThe patriot prayers of either half of earth,\n Hear Thou, and judge their worth.\nOut of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear,\n First, the first nation’s prayer:\n‘_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword\n Destroy our enemies, Lord!_’”\n\n“Pure as the first, as passionate in trust\n That their own cause is just;\nPuppets as fond in those dark hands of greed;\n As fervent in their creed;\nAs blindly moved, as utterly betrayed,\n As urgent for Thine aid;\nOut of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear\n The second nation’s prayer:\n‘_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword\n Destroy our enemies, Lord._’”\n\n“Over their slaughtered children, one great cry\n From either enemy!\nFrom either host, thigh-deep in filth and shame,\n One prayer, one and the same;\nOut of the obscene seas of slaughter, hear,\n From East and West, one prayer:\n‘_O God, deliver Thy people. Let Thy sword\n Destroy our enemies, Lord._’”\n\nThen, on the Cross of His creative pain,\n God bowed His head again.\nThen, East and West, over all seas and lands,\n Out-stretched His piercèd hands.\n“And yet,” Sandalphon whispered, “men deny\n The Eternal Calvary.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mystic": { - "title": "“The Mystic”", - "body": "With wounds out-reddening every moon-washed rose\nKing Love went thro’ earth’s garden-close!\nFrom that first gate of birth in the golden gloom,\nI traced Him. Thorns had frayed His garment’s hem,\nAy, and His flesh! I marked, I followed them\nDown to that threshold of--the tomb?\n\nAnd there Love vanished, yet I entered! Night\nAnd Doubt mocked at the dwindling light:\nStrange claw-like hands flung me their shadowy hate.\nI clomb the dreadful stairways of desire\nBetween a thousand eyes and wings of fire\nAnd knocked upon the second Gate.\n\nThe second Gate! When, like a warrior helmed,\nIn battle on battle overwhelmed,\nMy soul lay stabbed by all the swords of sense,\nBlinded and stunned by stars and flowers and trees,\nDid I not struggle to my bended knees\nAnd wrestle with Omnipotence?\n\nDid earth not flee before me, when the breath\nOf worship smote her with strange death,\nWithered her gilded garment, broke her sword,\nShattered her graven images and smote\nAll her light sorrows thro’ the breast and throat\nWhose death-cry crowned me God and Lord?\n\nYea, God and Lord! Had tears not purged my sight?\nI saw the myriad gates of Light\nOpening and shutting in each way-side flower,\nAnd like a warder in the gleam of each,\nDeath, whispering in some strange eternal speech\nTo every passing hour.\n\nThe second Gate? Was I not born to pass\nA million? Though the skies be brass\nAnd the earth iron, shall I not win thro’ all?\nShall I who made the infinite heavens my mark\nShrink from this first wild horror of the dark,\nThese formless gulfs, these glooms that crawl?\n\nNever was mine that easy faithless hope\nWhich makes all life one flowery slope\nTo heaven! Mine be the vast assaults of doom,\nTrumpets, defeats, red anguish, age-long strife,\nTen million deaths, ten million gates to life,\nThe insurgent heart that bursts the tomb.\n\nVain, vain, unutterably vain are all\nThe sights and sounds that sink and fall,\nThe words and symbols of this fleeting breath:\nShall I not drown the finite in the Whole,\nCast off this body and complete my soul\nThro’ deaths beyond this gate of death?\n\nIt will not open! Through the bars I see\nThe glory and the mystery\nWind upward ever! The earth-dawn breaks! I bleed\nWith beating here for entrance. Hark, O hark,\nLove, Love, return and give me the great Dark,\nWhich is the Light of Life indeed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "niobe": { - "title": "“Niobe”", - "body": "How like the sky she bends above her child,\nOne with the great horizon of her pain!\nNo sob from our low seas where woe runs wild,\nNo weeping cloud, no momentary rain,\nCan mar the heaven-high visage of her grief,\nThat frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb.\nShe stoops in pity above the labouring earth,\nKnowing how fond, how brief\nIs all its hope, past, present, and to come,\nShe stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth.\n\nThrough that fair face the whole dark universe\nSpeaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro’ one white flower;\nAnd all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse\nThe gods, but cannot die before their hour,\nFind utterance in her beauty. That fair head\nBows over all earth’s graves. It was her cry\nMen heard in Rama when the twisted ways\nWith children’s blood ran red.\nHer silence towers to Silences on high;\nAnd, in her face, the whole earth’s anguish prays.\n\nIt is the pity, the pity of human love\nThat strains her face, upturned to meet the doom,\nAnd her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove\nFrozen upon its nest, ne’er to resume\nIts happy breathing o’er the golden brace\nThat she must shield till death. Death, death alone\nCan break the anguished horror of that spell.\nThe sorrow on her face\nIs sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone;\nShe knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell.\n\nAh, yet, her woman’s love, so vast, so tender,\nHer woman’s body, hurt by every dart,\nBraving the thunder, still, still hide the slender\nSoft frightened child beneath her mighty heart.\nShe is all one mute immortal cry, one brief\nInfinite pang of such victorious pain\nThat she transcends the heavens and bows them down!\nThe majesty of grief\nIs hers, and her dominion must remain\nEternal. Grief alone can wear that crown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-meeting-house": { - "title": "“The Old Meeting House”", - "body": "Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn.\nThose wise old elms could hear no cry\nOf all that distant agony--\nOnly the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.\n\nThe blue jay, perched upon that bronze, with bright unweeting eye\nCould never read the names that signed\nThe noblest charter of mankind;\nBut all of them were names we knew beneath our English skies.\n\nAnd on the low gray headstones, with their crumbling weather-stains,\n--Though cardinal birds, like drops of blood,\nFlickered across the haunted wood,--\nThe names you’d see were names that woke like flowers in English lanes\n\nJohn Applegate was fast asleep; and Temperance Olden, too.\nAnd David Worth had quite forgot\nIf Hannah’s lips were red or not;\nAnd Prudence veiled her eyes at last, as Prudence ought to do.\n\nAnd when, across that patch of heaven, that small blue leaf-edged space\nAt times, a droning airplane went,\nNo flicker of astonishment\nCould lift the heavy eyelids on one gossip’s upturned face.\n\nFor William Speakman could not tell--so thick the grasses grow--\nIf that strange humming in the sky\nMeant that the Judgment Day were nigh,\nOr if ’twere but the summer bees that blundered to and fro.\n\nAnd then, across the breathless wood, a Bell began to sound,\nThe only Bell that wakes the dead,\nAnd Stockton Signer raised his head,\nAnd called to all the deacons in the ancient burial-ground.\n\n“The Bell, the Bell is ringing! Give me back my rusty sword.\nThough I thought the wars were done,\nThough I thought our peace was won,\nYet I signed the Declaration, and the dead must keep their word.”\n\n“There’s only one great ghost I know could make that ’larum ring.\nIt’s the captain that we knew\nIn the ancient buff and blue,\nIt’s our Englishman, George Washington, who fought the German king!”\n\nSo the sunset saw them mustering beneath their brooding boughs,\nAncient shadows of our sires,\nKindling with the ancient fires,\nWhile the old cracked Bell to southward shook the shadowy meeting house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-old-sceptic": { - "title": "“The Old Sceptic”", - "body": "I am weary of disbelieving: why should I wound my love\nTo pleasure a sophist’s pride in a graven image of truth?\nI will go back to my home, with the clouds and the stars above,\nAnd the heaven I used to know, and the God of my buried youth.\n\nI will go back to the home where of old in my boyish pride\nI pierced my father’s heart with a murmur of unbelief.\nHe only looked in my face as I spoke, but his mute eyes cried\nNight after night in my dreams; and he died in grief, in grief.\n\nBooks? I have read the books, the books that we write ourselves,\nExtolling our love of an abstract truth and our pride of debate:\nI will go back to the love of the cotter who sings as he delves,\nTo that childish infinite love and the God above fact and date.\n\nTo that ignorant infinite God who colours the meaningless flowers,\nTo that lawless infinite Poet who crowns the law with the crime;\nTo the Weaver who covers the world with a garment of wonderful hours,\nAnd holds in His hand like threads the tales and the truths of time.\n\nIs the faith of the cotter so simple and narrow as this? Ah, well,\nIt is hardly so narrow as yours who daub and plaster with dyes\nThe shining mirrors of heaven, the shadowy mirrors of hell,\nAnd blot out the dark deep vision, if it seem to be framed with lies.\n\nNo faith I hurl against you, no fact to freeze your sneers.\nOnly the doubt you taught me to weld in the fires of youth\nLeaps to my hand like the flaming sword of nineteen hundred years,\nThe sword of the high God’s answer, _O Pilate, what is truth?_\n\nYour laughter has killed more hearts than ever were pierced with swords,\nEver you daub new mirrors and turn the old to the wall;\nAnd more than blood is lost in the weary battle of words;\nFor creeds are many; but God is One, and contains them all.\n\nAh, why should we strive or cry? Surely the end is close!\nHold by your little truths: deem your triumph complete!\nBut nothing is true or false in the infinite heart of the rose;\nAnd the earth is a little dust that clings to our travelling feet.\n\nI will go back to my home and look at the wayside flowers,\nAnd hear from the wayside cabins the kind old hymns again,\nWhere Christ holds out His arms in the quiet evening hours,\nAnd the light of the chapel porches broods on the peaceful lane.\n\nAnd there I shall hear men praying the deep old foolish prayers,\nAnd there I shall see, once more, the fond old faith confessed,\nAnd the strange old light on their faces who hear as a blind man hears,--\n_Come unto Me, ye weary, and I will give you rest._\n\nI will go back and believe in the deep old foolish tales,\nAnd pray the simple prayers that I learned at my mother’s knee,\nWhere the Sabbath tolls its peace thro’ the breathless mountain-vales,\nAnd the sunset’s evening hymn hallows the listening sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-western-front": { - "title": "“On the Western Front”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI found a dreadful acre of the dead,\nMarked with the only sign on earth that saves.\nThe wings of death were hurrying overhead,\nThe loose earth shook on those unquiet graves;\n\nFor the deep gun-pits, with quick stabs of flame,\nMade their own thunders of the sunlit air;\nYet, as I read the crosses, name by name,\nRank after rank, it seemed that peace was there;\n\nSunlight and peace, a peace too deep for thought,\nThe peace of tides that underlie our strife,\nThe peace with which the moving heavens are fraught,\nThe peace that is our everlasting life.\n\nThe loose earth shook. The very hills were stirred.\nThe silence of the dead was all I heard.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWe, who lie here, have nothing more to pray.\nTo all your praises we are deaf and blind.\nWe may not ever know if you betray\nOur hope, to make earth better for mankind.\n\nOnly our silence, in the night, shall grow\nMore silent, as the stars grow in the sky;\nAnd, while you deck our graves, you shall not know\nHow many scornful legions pass you by.\n\nFor we have heard you say (when we were living)\nThat some small dream of good would “cost too much.”\nBut when the foe struck, we have watched you giving,\nAnd seen you move the mountains with one touch.\n\nWhat can be done, we know. But, have no fear!\nIf you fail now, we shall not see or hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-optimist": { - "title": "“The Optimist”", - "body": "Teach me to live and to forgive\nThe death that all must die\nWho pass in slumber through this heaven\nOf earth and sea and sky;\nWho live by grace of Time and Space\nAt which their peace is priced;\nAnd cast their lots upon the robe\nThat wraps the cosmic Christ;\n\nWho cannot see the world-wide Tree\nWhere Love lies bleeding still;\nThis universal cross of God\nOur star-crowned Igdrasil.\n\nTeach me to live; I do not ask\nFor length of earthly days,\nOr that my heaven-appointed task\nShould fall in pleasant ways;\n\nIf in this hour of warmth and light\nThe last great knell were knolled;\nIf Death should close mine eyes to-night\nAnd all the tale be told;\n\nWhile I have lips to speak or sing\nAnd power to draw this breath,\nShall I not praise my Lord and King\nAbove all else, for death?\n\nWhen on a golden eve he drove\nHis keenest sorrow deep\nDeep in my heart, and called it love;\nI did not wince or weep.\n\nA wild Hosanna shook the world\nAnd wakened all the sky,\nAs through a white and burning light\nHer passionate face went by.\n\nWhen on a golden dawn he called\nMy best beloved away,\nI did not shrink or stand appalled\nBefore the hopeless day.\n\nThe joy of that triumphant dearth\nAnd anguish cannot die;\nThe joy that casts aside this earth\nFor immortality.\n\nI would not change one word of doom\nUpon the dreadful scroll,\nThat gave her body to the tomb\nAnd freed her fettered soul.\n\nFor now each idle breeze can bring\nThe kiss I never seek;\nThe nightingale has heard her sing,\nThe rose caressed her cheek.\n\nAnd every pang of every grief\nThat ruled my soul an hour,\nHas given new splendours to the leaf,\nNew glories to the flower;\n\nAnd melting earth into the heaven\nWhose inmost heart is pain,\nHas drawn the veils apart and given\nHer soul to mine again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-origin-of-life": { - "title": "“The Origin of Life”", - "body": "# I.\n\n_In the beginning?_--Slowly grope we back\n Along the narrowing track,\nBack to the deserts of the world’s pale prime,\n The mire, the clay, the slime;\nAnd then … what then? Surely to something less;\n Back, back, to Nothingness!\n\n\n# II.\n\nYou dare not halt upon that dwindling way!\n There is no gulf to stay\nYour footsteps to the last. Go back you must!\n Far, far below the dust,\nDescend, descend! Grade by dissolving grade,\n We follow, unafraid!\nDissolve, dissolve this moving world of men\n Into thin air--and then?\n\n\n# III.\n\nO pioneers, O warriors of the Light,\n In that abysmal night,\nWill you have courage, then, to rise and tell\n Earth of this miracle?\nWill you have courage, then, to bow the head,\n And say, when all is said--\n\n“Out of this Nothingness arose our thought!\n This blank abysmal Nought\nWoke, and brought forth that lighted City street,\n Those towers, that armoured fleet?” …\n\n\n# IV.\n\nWhen you have seen those vacant primal skies\n Beyond the centuries.\nWatched the pale mists across their darkness flow,\n As in a lantern-show,\nWeaving, by merest “chance,” out of thin air,\n Pageants of praise and prayer;\nWatched the great hills like clouds arise and set,\n And one--named Olivet;\nWhen you have seen, as a shadow passing away,\n One child clasp hands and pray;\nWhen you have seen emerge from that dark mire\n One martyr, ringed with fire;\nOr, from that Nothingness, by special grace,\n One woman’s love-lit face, …\n\n\n# V.\n\nWill you have courage, then, to front that law\n (From which your sophists draw\nTheir only right to flout one human creed)\n That nothing can proceed--\nNot even thought, not even love--from less\n Than its own nothingness?\nThe law is yours! But dare you waive your pride,\n And kneel where you denied?\nThe law is yours! Dare you re-kindle, then,\n One faith for faithless men,\nAnd say you found, on that dark road you trod,\n _In the beginning--GOD_?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "When that I loved a maiden\nMy heaven was in her eyes,\nAnd when they bent above me\nI knew no deeper skies;\nBut when her heart forsook me\nMy spirit broke its bars,\nFor grief beyond the sunset\nAnd love beyond the stars.\n\nWhen that I loved a maiden\nShe seemed the world to me:\nNow is my soul the universe,\nMy dreams the sky and sea:\nThere is no heaven above me,\nNo glory binds or bars\nMy grief beyond the sunset,\nMy love beyond the stars.\n\nWhen that I loved a maiden\nI worshipped where she trod;\nBut, when she clove my heart, the cleft\nSet free the imprisoned god:\nThen was I king of all the world,\nMy soul had burst its bars,\nFor grief beyond the sunset\nAnd love beyond the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "frank-ohara": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Frank O’Hara", - "birth": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_O’Hara", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "animals": { - "title": "“Animals”", - "body": "Have you forgotten what we were like then\nwhen we were still first rate\nand the day came fat with an apple in its mouth\n\nit’s no use worrying about Time\nbut we did have a few tricks up our sleeves\nand turned some sharp corners\n\nthe whole pasture looked like our meal\nwe didn’t need speedometers\nwe could manage cocktails out of ice and water\n\nI wouldn’t want to be faster\nor greener than now if you were with me O you\nwere the best of all my days", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - } - } - }, - "ann-arbor-variations": { - "title": "“Ann Arbor Variations”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWet heat drifts through the afternoon\nlike a campus dog, a fraternity ghost\nwaiting to stay home from football games.\nThe arches are empty clear to the sky.\n\nExcept for the leaves: those lashes of our\nthinking and dreaming and drinking sight.\nThe spherical radiance, the Old English\nlook, the sum of our being, “hath perced\n\nto the roote” all our springs and falls\nand now rolls over our limpness, a daily\ndragon. We lose our health in a love\nof color, drown in a fountain of myriads,\n\nas simply as children. It is too hot,\nour birth was given up to screaming. Our\nlife on these street lawns seems silent.\nThe leaves chatter their comparisons\n\nto the wind and the sky fills up\nbefore we are out of bed. O infinite\nour siestas! adobe effigies in a land\nthat is sick of us and our tanned flesh.\n\nThe wind blows towards us particularly\nthe sobbing of our dear friends on both\ncoasts. We are sick of living and afraid\nthat death will not be by water, o sea.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAlong the walks and shaded ways\npregnant women look snidely at children.\nTwo weeks ago they were told, in these\n\nselfsame pools of trefoil, “the market\nfor emeralds is collapsing,” “chlorophyll\nshines in your eyes,” “the sea’s misery\n\nis progenitor of the dark moss which hides\non the north side of trees and cries.”\nWhat do they think of slim kids now?\n\nand how, when the summer’s gong of day\nand night slithers towards their sweat\nand towards the nest of their arms\n\nand thighs, do they feel about children\nwhose hides are pearly with days of swimming?\nDo they mistake these fresh drops for tears?\n\nThe wind works over these women constantly!\ntrying, perhaps, to curdle their milk\nor make their spring unseasonably fearful,\n\nseason they face with dread and bright eyes,\nThe leaves, wrinkled or shiny like apples,\nwave women courage and sigh, a void temperature.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThe alternatives of summer do not remove\nus from this place. The fainting into skies\nfrom a diving board, the express train to\nDetroit’s damp bars, the excess of affection\non the couch near an open window or a Bauhaus\nfire escape, the lazy regions of stars, all\nare strangers. Like Mayakovsky read on steps\nof cool marble, or Yeats danced in a theatre\nof polite music. The classroon day of dozing\nand grammar, the partial eclipse of the head\nin the row in front of the head of poplars,\nsweet Syrinx! last out the summer in a stay\nof iron. Workmen loiter before urinals, stare\nout windows at girders tightly strapped to clouds.\nAnd in the morning we whimper as we cook\nan egg, so far from fluttering sands and azure!\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThe violent No! of the sun\nburns the forehead of hills.\nSand fleas arrive from Salt Lake\nand most of the theatres close.\n\nThe leaves roll into cigars, or\nit seems our eyes stick together\nin sleep. O forest, o brook of\nspice, o cool gaze of strangers!\n\nthe city tumbles towards autumn\nin a convulsion of tourists\nand teachers. We dance in the dark,\nforget the anger of what we blame\n\non the day. Children toss and murmur\nas a rumba blankets their trees and\nbeckons their stars closer, older, now.\nWe move o’er the world, being so much here.\n\nIt’s as if Poseidon left off counting\nhis waters for a moment! In the fields\nthe silence is music like the moon.\nThe bullfrogs sleep in their hairy caves.\n\nacross the avenue a trefoil lamp\nof the streets tosses luckily.\nThe leaves, finally, love us! and\nmoonrise! we die upon the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "as-planned": { - "title": "“As Planned”", - "body": "After the first glass of vodka\nyou can accept just about anything\nof life even your own mysteriousness\nyou think it is nice that a box\nof matches is purple and brown and is called\nLa Petite and comes from Sweden\nfor they are words that you know and that\nis all you know words not their feelings\nor what they mean and you write because\nyou know them not because you understand them\nbecause you don’t you are stupid and lazy\nand will never be great but you do\nwhat you know because what else is there?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "call-me": { - "title": "“Call Me”", - "body": "The eager note on my door said “Call me,\ncall when you get in!” so I quickly threw\na few tangerines into my overnight bag,\nstraightened my eyelids and shoulders, and\n\nheaded straight for the door. It was autumn\nby the time I got around the corner, oh all\nunwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but\nthe leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!\n\nFunny, I thought, that the lights are on this late\nand the hall door open; still up at this hour, a\nchampion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!\nfor shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was\n\nthere in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that\nran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few\nhosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest\nonly casually invited, and that several months ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-city-winter": { - "title": "“A City Winter”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nI understand the boredom of the clerks\nfatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes\na frightful nausea gumming up the works\nthat once was thought aggression in disguise.\nDo you remember? then how lightly dead\nseemed the moon when over factories\nit languid slid like a barrage of lead\nabove the heart, the fierce inventories\nof desire. Now women wander our dreams\ncarrying money and to our sleep’s shame\nour hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes\nnor languorous white horses nor ill fame,\nbut clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky\nwhere tow’rs are sinking in their common eye.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nMy ship is flung upon the gutter’s wrist\nand cries for help of storm to violate\nthat flesh your curiosity too late\nhas flushed. The stem your garter tongue would twist\nhas sunk upon the waveless bosom’s mist,\nthigh of the city, apparition, hate,\nand the tower whose doves have, delicate,\nfled into my blood where they are not kissed.\n\nYou have left me to the sewer’s meanwhile,\nand I have answered the sea’s open wish\nto love me as a bonfire’s watchful hand\nguards red the shore and guards the hairy strand,\nour most elegant lascivious bile,\nmy ship sinking beneath the gutter’s fish.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nHow can I then, my dearest winter lay,\ndisgorge the tasty worm that eats me up\nfalling onto the stem of a highway\nwhose ardent rainbow is the spoon’s flat cup\nand in the vilest of blue suited force\nenamored of the heated needle’s arm\nfinds the ministrant an own tongue’s remorse\nso near the blood and still so far from harm,\nthus to be eaten up and gobbled down\nvolcanoes of speedometers, the strike\nthat heats the iris into flame and flow’rs\nthe panting chalice so a turning pike:\nyou are not how the gods refused to die,\nand I am scarred forever neath the eye.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nWhat are my eyes? if they must feed me, rank\nwith forgetting, in the jealous forest\nof lustrous blows, so luminously blank\nthrough smoke and in the light. All faint, at rest,\nyet I am racing towards the fear that kills\nthem off, friends and lovers, hast’ning through tears\nlike alcohol high in the throat of hills\nand hills of night, alluring! their black cheers\nfalling upon my ears like nails. And there\nthe bars grow thick with onanists and camps\nand bivouacs of bears with clubs, are fair\nwith their blows, deal death beneath purple lamps\nand to me! I run! closer always move,\ncrying my name in fields of dead I love.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nI plunge deep within this frozen lake\nwhose mirrored fastnesses fill up my heart,\nwhere tears drift from frivolity to art\nall white and slobbering, and by mistake\nare the sky. I’m no whale to cruise apart\nin fields impassive of my stench, my sake,\nmy sign to crushing seas that fall like fake\npillars to crash! to sow as wake my heart\n\nand don’t be niggardly. The snow drifts low\nand yet neglects to cover me, and I\ndance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.\nHow like a queen, to seek with jealous eye\nthe face that flees you, hidden city, white\nswan. There’s no art to free me, blinded so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-day-lady-died": { - "title": "“The Day Lady Died”", - "body": "It is 12:20 in New York a Friday\nthree days after Bastille day, yes\nit is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine\nbecause I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton\nat 7:15 and then go straight to dinner\nand I don’t know the people who will feed me\n\nI walk up the muggy street beginning to sun\nand have a hamburger and a malted and buy\nan ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets\nin Ghana are doing these days\n\n I go on to the bank\nand Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)\ndoesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life\nand in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine\nfor Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do\nthink of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or\nBrendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres\nof Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine\nafter practically going to sleep with quandariness\n\nand for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE\nLiquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and\nthen I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue\nand the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and\ncasually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton\nof Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it\n\nand I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of\nleaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT\nwhile she whispered a song along the keyboard\nto Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 17, - "weekday": "friday" - } - } - }, - "is-it-dirty": { - "title": "“Is It Dirty”", - "body": "Is it dirty\ndoes it look dirty\nthat’s what you think of in the city\n\ndoes it just seem dirty\nthat’s what you think of in the city\nyou don’t refuse to breathe do you\n\nsomeone comes along with a very bad character\nhe seems attractive. is he really. yes. very\nhe’s attractive as his character is bad. is it. yes\n\nthat’s what you think of in the city\nrun your finger along your no-moss mind\nthat’s not a thought that’s soot\n\nand you take a lot of dirt off someone\nis the character less bad. no. it improves constantly\nyou don’t refuse to breathe do you", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-for-the-fortune-cookies": { - "title": "“Lines for the Fortune Cookies”", - "body": "I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.\n\nJust as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you--even bigger.\n\nYou will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello.\n\nYou will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.\n\nYou will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.\n\nIn the beginning there was YOU--there will always be YOU, I guess.\n\nYou will write a great play and it will run for three performances.\n\nPlease phone The Village Voice immediately: they want to interview you.\n\nRoger L. Stevens and Kermit Bloomgarden have their eyes on you.\n\nRelax a little; one of your most celebrated nervous tics will be your undoing.\n\nYour first volume of poetry will be published as soon as you finish it.\n\nYou may be a hit uptown, but downtown you’re legendary!\n\nYour walk has a musical quality which will bring you fame and fortune.\n\nYou will eat cake.\n\nWho do you think you are, anyway? Jo Van Fleet?\n\nYou think your life is like Pirandello, but it’s really like O’Neill.\n\nA few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows? Maybe something will happen.\n\nThat’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.\n\nI realize you’ve lived in France, but that doesn’t mean you know EVERYTHING!\n\nYou should wear white more often--it becomes you.\n\nThe next person to speak to you will have a very intriquing proposal to make.\n\nA lot of people in this room wish they were you.\n\nHave you been to Mike Goldberg’s show? Al Leslie’s? Lee Krasner’s?\n\nAt times, your disinterestedness may seem insincere, to strangers.\n\nNow that the election’s over, what are you going to do with yourself?\n\nYou are a prisoner in a croissant factory and you love it.\n\nYou eat meat. Why do you eat meat?\n\nBeyond the horizon there is a vale of gloom.\n\nYou too could be Premier of France, if only … if only …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mayakovsky": { - "title": "“Mayakovsky”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nMy heart’s aflutter!\nI am standing in the bath tub\ncrying. Mother, mother\nwho am I? If he\nwill just come back once\nand kiss me on the face\nhis coarse hair brush\nmy temple, it’s throbbing!\n\nthen I can put on my clothes\nI guess, and walk the streets.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI love you. I love you,\nbut I’m turning to my verses\nand my heart is closing\nlike a fist.\n\nWords! be\nsick as I am sick, swoon,\nroll back your eyes, a pool,\n\nand I’ll stare down\nat my wounded beauty\nwhich at best is only a talent\nfor poetry.\n\nCannot please, cannot charm or win\nwhat a poet!\nand the clear water is thick\n\nwith bloody blows on its head.\nI embrace a cloud,\nbut when I soared\nit rained.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThat’s funny! there’s blood on my chest\noh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks\nwhat a funny place to rupture!\nand now it is raining on the ailanthus\nas I step out onto the window ledge\nthe tracks below me are smoky and\nglistening with a passion for running\nI leap into the leaves, green like the sea\n\n\n# 4.\n\nNow I am quietly waiting for\nthe catastrophe of my personality\nto seem beautiful again,\nand interesting, and modern.\n\nThe country is grey and\nbrown and white in trees,\nsnows and skies of laughter\nalways diminishing, less funny\nnot just darker, not just grey.\n\nIt may be the coldest day of\nthe year, what does he think of\nthat? I mean, what do I? And if I do,\nperhaps I am myself again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "meditations-in-an-emergency": { - "title": "“Meditations in an Emergency”", - "body": "Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?\n\nEach time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.\n\nWhy should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?\n\nI am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.\n\nEven trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.\n\nHowever, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally _regret_ life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.\n\nMy eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has _their_ anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.\n\nNow there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)\n\nSt. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that holds you in the bosom of another and I’m always springing forth from it like the lotus--the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.\n\nDestroy yourself, if you don’t know!\n\nIt is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.\n\n“Fanny Brown is run away--scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this exploit a little too.--Poor silly Cecchina! or F.B. as we used to call her.--I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.”--Mrs. Thrale\n\nI’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "melancholy-breakfast": { - "title": "“Melancholy Breakfast”", - "body": "Melancholy breakfast\nblue overhead blue underneath\n\nthe silent egg thinks\nand the toaster’s electrical\near waits\n\nthe stars are in\n“that cloud is hid”\n\nthe elements of disbelief are\nvery strong in the morning", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "I’ve got to tell you\nhow I love you always\nI think of it on grey\nmornings with death\n\nin my mouth the tea\nis never hot enough\nthen and the cigarette\ndry the maroon robe\n\nchills me I need you\nand look out the window\nat the noiseless snow\n\nAt night on the dock\nthe buses glow like\nclouds and I am lonely\nthinking of flutes\n\nI miss you always\nwhen I go to the beach\nthe sand is wet with\ntears that seem mine\n\nalthough I never weep\nand hold you in my\nheart with a very real\nhumor you’d be proud of\n\nthe parking lot is\ncrowded and I stand\nrattling my keys the car\nis empty as a bicycle\n\nwhat are you doing now\nwhere did you eat your\nlunch and were there\nlots of anchovies it\n\nis difficult to think\nof you without me in\nthe sentence you depress\nme when you are alone\n\nLast night the stars\nwere numerous and today\nsnow is their calling\ncard I’ll not be cordial\n\nthere is nothing that\ndistracts me music is\nonly a crossword puzzle\ndo you know how it is\n\nwhen you are the only\npassenger if there is a\nplace further from me\nI beg you do not go", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian\npausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,\nthat angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf’s\nand I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.\nClose to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.\nI have in my hands only 35¢, it’s so meaningless to eat!\nand gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves\nlike the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you\nto have lavender lips under the leaves of the world, I must tighten my belt.\nIt’s like a locomotive on the march, the season of distress and clarity\nand my door is open to the evenings of midwinter’s\nlightly falling snow over the newspapers.\nClasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet\nof early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.\nAs they’re putting up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue\nI shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,\nput to some use before all those coloured lights come on!\n\nBut no more fountains and no more rain, and the stores stay open terribly late.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "sleeping-on-the-wing": { - "title": "“Sleeping on the Wing”", - "body": "Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,\nas in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!\nO for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”\nthat one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,\nveering upward from the pavement as a pigeon\ndoes when a car honks or a door slams, the door\nof dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves\nand beautiful lies all in different languages.\n\nFear drops away too, like the cement, and you\nare over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is\nwho? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,\nwas it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity\nand your position in respect to human love. But\nhere is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.\nOnce you are helpless, you are free, can you believe\nthat? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?\nto travel always over some impersonal vastness,\nto be out of, forever, neither in nor for!\n\nThe eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind\nand the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.\nThe world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!\nand was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping\ntoo. Those features etched in the ice of someone\nloved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space\nand speed, your hand alone could have done this.\nCuriosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,\nor sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,\nyou relinquish all that you have made your own,\nthe kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake\nand breathe your warmth in this beloved image\nwhether it’s dead or merely disappearing,\nas space is disappearing and your singularity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab\nwhich is typical\nand not just of modern life\n\nmud clambers up the trellis of my nerves\nmust lovers of Eros end up with Venus\nmuss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you\n\nhow I hate disease, it’s like worrying\nthat comes true\nand it simply must not be able to happen\n\nin a world where you are possible\nmy love\nnothing can go wrong for us, tell me", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "steps": { - "title": "“Steps”", - "body": "How funny you are today New York\nlike Ginger Rogers in Swingtime\nand St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left\n\nhere I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days\n(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still\naccepts me foolish and free\nall I want is a room up there\nand you in it\nand even the traffic halt so thick is a way\nfor people to rub up against each other\nand when their surgical appliances lock\nthey stay together\nfor the rest of the day (what a day)\nI go by to check a slide and I say\nthat painting’s not so blue\n\nwhere’s Lana Turner\nshe’s out eating\nand Garbo’s backstage at the Met\neveryone’s taking their coat off\nso they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers\nand the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes\nin little bags\nwho are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y\nwhy not\nthe Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won\nand in a sense we’re all winning\nwe’re alive\n\nthe apartment was vacated by a gay couple\nwho moved to the country for fun\nthey moved a day too soon\neven the stabbings are helping the population explosion\nthough in the wrong country\nand all those liars have left the UN\nthe Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest\nnot that we need liquor (we just like it)\n\nand the little box is out on the sidewalk\nnext to the delicatessen\nso the old man can sit on it and drink beer\nand get knocked off it by his wife later in the day\nwhile the sun is still shining\n\noh god it’s wonderful\nto get out of bed\nand drink too much coffee\nand smoke too many cigarettes\nand love you so much", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-the-harbormaster": { - "title": "“To the Harbormaster”", - "body": "I wanted to be sure to reach you;\nthough my ship was on the way it got caught\nin some moorings. I am always tying up\nand then deciding to depart. In storms and\nat sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide\naround my fathomless arms, I am unable\nto understand the forms of my vanity\nor I am hard alee with my Polish rudder\nin my hand and the sun sinking. To\nyou I offer my hull and the tattered cordage\nof my will. The terrible channels where\nthe wind drives me against the brown lips\nof the reeds are not all behind me. Yet\nI trust the sanity of my vessel; and\nif it sinks it may well be in answer\nto the reasoning of the eternal voices,\nthe waves which have kept me from reaching you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "today": { - "title": "“Today”", - "body": "Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!\nYou really are beautiful! Pearls,\nharmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all\nthe stuff they’ve always talked about\n\nstill makes a poem a surprise!\nThese things are with us every day\neven on beachheads and biers. They\ndo have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - } - } - }, - "why-i-am-not-a-painter": { - "title": "“Why I Am Not a Painter”", - "body": "I am not a painter, I am a poet.\nWhy? I think I would rather be\na painter, but I am not. Well,\n\nfor instance, Mike Goldberg\nis starting a painting. I drop in.\n“Sit down and have a drink” he\nsays. I drink; we drink. I look\nup. “You have SARDINES in it.”\n“Yes, it needed something there.”\n“Oh.” I go and the days go by\nand I drop in again. The painting\nis going on, and I go, and the days\ngo by. I drop in. The painting is\nfinished. “Where’s SARDINES?”\nAll that’s left is just\nletters, “It was too much,” Mike says.\n\nBut me? One day I am thinking of\na color: orange. I write a line\nabout orange. Pretty soon it is a\nwhole page of words, not lines.\nThen another page. There should be\nso much more, not of orange, of\nwords, of how terrible orange is\nand life. Days go by. It is even in\nprose, I am a real poet. My poem\nis finished and I haven’t mentioned\norange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call\nit ORANGES. And one day in a gallery\nI see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "irina-odoyevtseva": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Irina Odoyevtseva", - "birth": { - "year": 1895, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Odoyevtseva", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "ground-glass": { - "title": "“Ground Glass”", - "body": "A soldier came back home one day\nacounting all he’d won:\n“We’re sure to eat our fill tonight--\nus and the little ones!”\n\n“There’s seven grand! A real day’s haul!\nI’ve had some luck I’d say!\nInto the daily salt I mixed\nsome fine ground glass today.”\n\n“Dear God! Dear God!” his wife cried out\n“You killer! Akh! You beast!\nThat’s worse than robbery, you know,\nthey’ll die by morn at least!”\n\n“We’re born to die!” the soldier said,\n“I do not wish them ill!\nGo light a candle at the church\nthis evening, if you will.”\n\nHe ate, then went to “Paradise”--\nhis pub’s name formerly.\nHe talked of communism awhile\nand drank Soviet tea.\n\nBack at home he soon slept fast,\naround him all was still.\nTill midnight when a raven cried\nbeneath the windowsill.\n\n“Oh, woe to us!” his wife sighed deep:\n“There’s trouble on the way!\nA raven never caws at night\nfor nothing, so they say!”\n\nBut soon the second rooster crowed,\nthe soldier, foul of mood,\nrefused to go to “Paradise”:\nto clients he was rude.\n\n’Twas midnight at the soldier’s home,\nand all was dark once more,\nthe knock of wings from carrion crows\nwas heard outside his door.\n\nThey jumped and squawked upon the roof,\nhis kiddies soon awoke,\nhis wife sighed heavily all night\nwhile he slept like an oak.\n\nAt dawn he rose, before them all,\nhis mood was foul once more.\nHis wife forgiveness for him begged,\nher brow against the floor.\n\n“Why don’t you visit your hometown\na day or two!” said he.\n“I’m sick to hell of that damned glass--\n’twill be the death of me!”\n\nHe soon wound up his gramophone\nand sat down very near.\nAlas! He heard a funeral knell\nthat made him shake with fear.\n\nA ragged team of seven mares\ndraw seven coffins past.\nA teary choir of women sing:\n“Repose with God at last!”\n\n“Who are you mourning, Konstantin?”\n“My Masha dear!” he cried.\n“I went to a party Thursday night,\nby Friday morn she’d died!”\n\n“Our Foma died, and so did Klim,\nand Kolya’s son-in-law.\nA stranger illness in my life\nI swear I never saw!”\n\nA waning moon was on the rise,\nthe soldier went to bed.\nA double bed, all cold and firm,\na coffin for the dead!\n\nAt once appeared a corvine priest\n(or did he dream it all?).\nBehind him seven ravens held\naloft a lone, glass pall.\n\nThey entered, stood along the wall,\nthe darkness weighed a ton.\n“Begone, you demons! I won’t sell\nground glass to anyone!”\n\nToo late! The moan died on his lips,\ntill seven croaked the priest.\nInto the bier on raven wings\nwas rendered the deceased.\n\nAway they took him to the place\nwhere seven asp trees grow,\nfed by the long-dead waters from\na quagmire far below.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Bradley Jordan", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - } - } - }, - "he-had-said-goodbye-my-darling": { - "title": "“He had said, Goodbye, my darling …”", - "body": "He had said, “Goodbye, my darling. Maybe\nI won’t come back--ever. Time will tell.”\nAnd I walked off down the lane, not knowing\nIf this was the Summer Park--or Hell.\n\nSilent. Empty. And the gate is, fastened.\nBut why should I now ever go home?\nStumbling like a blind man, by the black trees,\nSomebody in white begins to roam.\n\nShe comes closer … till she stands beside me\nIt s a statue, bright in the moonglow.\nShe looks at me with her white eyes staring,\nAnd she asks me in a voice turned low:\n\n“What do you think of our trading places?\nIf a heart is stone, it doesn’t ache.\nYou will become stone; I’ll be the live one.\nStand there. Here’s my bow and shield. So take.”\n\n“All right,” I say--in a good agreement.\n“Here’s my coat and shoes; they’re just your size.”\nThen the statue turns her head to kiss me;\nI see the white pupils of her eyes.\n\nThen I notice my lips stop their moving.\nMy heart’s warm beat doesn’t sound at all.\nShield in hand and bow behind my shoulders,\nI’m standing on a white pedestal.\n\nMorning … and the early shuffle of the milkmaids.\nChildren and officials hurry … Add\nRain and weak wind, and the streetcars ringing\nAll the usual world of Petrograd.\n\nLord! … O Lord, I realize thin instant:\nI can’t stop loving my love, my man.\nAll in vain I turned into a statue;\nStone can last longer than one’s heart can.\n\nAnd she’s leaving now--in my red-checkered\nCoat--and humming a melodic strain,\nWhile I still stand here--frozen and naked\nIn the dismal, pelting, autumn rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "how-nice-to-walk-the-quay-at-night": { - "title": "“How nice to walk the quay at night …”", - "body": "How nice to walk the quay at night! No fuss.\nWe stroll and we are silent, both of us.\n\nWe see the Seine, a tree, and there’s the rising stone\nOf a cathedral, and clouds …\n We’ll postpone\n\nOur talking till tomorrow, later, aye.\nTill day after tomorrow,\n till we die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vladimir Markov & Merrill Sparks", - "date": { - "year": 1951 - } - } - }, - "under-an-electric-lamp": { - "title": "“Under an electric lamp …”", - "body": "Under an electric lamp\nWith a hysterical smile\nand head in the pillow.\n\nA bird brought down by a gunshot,\nNo, this is only a dream,\nA bad dream …\n\nCasino and Nice\nAnd starry firmament.\nAnd yet she is proud\nof her riches and herself\nAnd her bitter destiny,\nShe is so strange,\n\nSo pretty and drunk--\nAnd the glass is broken into shards.\n--Are you from distant lands?\nDo you want to love?\nDo you want to live\nOn this small planet\nIn sadness and warmth?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Maria Rubins", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-olson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Olson", - "birth": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1970 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Olson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "as-the-dead-prey-upon-us": { - "title": "“As the Dead Prey upon Us”", - "body": "As the dead prey upon us,\nthey are the dead in ourselves,\nawake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you,\ndisentangle the nets of being!\n\nI pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused.\nI thought the tires looked as though they only needed air.\nBut suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires\nwere masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together\n\nas were the dead souls in the living room, gathered\nabout my mother, some of them taking care to pass\nbeneath the beam of the movie projector, some record\nplaying on the victrola, and all of them\ndesperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell\n\nI turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it,\nthere?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor\npoor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations\nof brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard\ndisplays, the dead roaming from one to another\nas bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed\nto mere equipments\n\n my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep\nwhen I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker\nunder the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had\n\nI found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her\nthe throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death\nas other like suited and dressed people did in life\n\nO the dead!\n\n and the Indian woman and I\n enabled the blue deer\n to walk\n\n and the blue deer talked,\n in the next room,\n a Negro talk\n\n it was like walking a jackass,\n and its talk\n was the pressing gabber of gammers\n of old women\n\n and we helped walk it around the room\n because it was seeking socks\n or shoes for its hooves\n now that it was acquiring\n\n human possibilities\n\nIn the five hindrances men and angels\nstay caught in the net, in the immense nets\nwhich spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets\nwhich hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels\nand the demons\nand men\ngo up and down\n\n Walk the jackass\n Hear the victrola\n Let the automobile\n be tucked into a corner of the white fence\n when it is a white chair. Purity\n\nis only an instant of being, the trammels\n\nrecur\n\nIn the five hindrances, perfection\nis hidden\n I shall get\n to the place\n 10 minutes late.\n\n It will be 20 minutes\n of 9. And I don’t know,\n\n without the car,\n\n how I shall get there\n\nO peace, my mother, I do not know\nhow differently I could have done\nwhat I did or did not do.\n\n That you are back each week\n that you fall asleep\n with your face to the right\n\n that you are present there\n when I come in as you were\n when you were alive\n\n that you are as solid, and your flesh\n is as I knew it, that you have the company\n I am used to your having\n\n but o, that you all find it\n such a cheapness!\n\no peace, mother, for the mammothness\nof the comings and goings\nof the ladders of life\n\nThe nets we are entangled in. Awake,\nmy soul, let the power into the last wrinkle\nof being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires\nbe left upon the earth. Let even your mother\ngo. Let there be only paradise\n\nThe desperateness is, that the instant\nwhich is also paradise (paradise\nis happiness) dissolves\ninto the next instant, and power\nflows to meet the next occurrence\n\n Is it any wonder\n my mother comes back?\n Do not that throng\n rightly seek the room\n where they might expect\n happiness? They did not complain\n of life, they obviously wanted\n the movie, each other, merely to pass\n among each other there,\n where the real is, even to the display cards,\n to be out of hell\n\n The poverty\n of hell\n\nO souls, in life and in death,\nmake, even as you sleep, even in sleep\nknow what wind\neven under the crankcase of the ugly automobile\nlifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods,\nequipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman,\nthe filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’\nthe heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room\nlifts the sodden nets\n\n and they disappear as ghosts do,\n as spider webs, nothing\n before the hand of man\n\n The vent! You must have the vent,\n or you shall die. Which means\n never to die, the ghastliness\n\n of going, and forever\n coming back, returning\n to the instants which were not lived\n\n O mother, this I could not have done,\n I could not have lived what you didn’t,\n I am myself netted in my own being\n\n I want to die. I want to make that instant, too,\n perfect\n\n O my soul, slip\n the cog\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe death in life (death itself)\nis endless, eternity\nis the false cause\n\nThe knot is other wise, each topological corner\npresents itself, and no sword\ncuts it, each knot is itself its fire\n\neach knot of which the net is made\nis for the hands to untake\nthe knot’s making. And touch alone\ncan turn the knot into its own flame\n\n (o mother, if you had once touched me\n\n o mother, if I had once touched you)\n\nThe car did not burn. Its underside\nwas not presented to me\na grotesque corpse. The old man\n\nmerely removed it as I looked up at it,\nand put it in a corner of the picket fence\nlike was it my mother’s white dog?\n\nor a child’s chair\n\n The woman,\n playing on the grass,\n with her son (the woman next door)\n\n was angry with me whatever it was\n slipped across the playpen or whatever\n she had out there on the grass\n\n And I was quite flip in reply\n that anyone who used plastic\n had to expect things to skid\n\n and break, that I couldn’t worry\n that her son might have been hurt\n by whatever it was I sent skidding\n\n down on them.\n\n It was just then I went into my house\n and to my utter astonishment\n found my mother sitting there\n\n as she always had sat, as must she always\n forever sit there her head lolling\n into sleep? Awake, awake my mother\n\n what wind will lift you too\n forever from the tawdriness,\n make you rich as all those souls\n\n crave crave crave\n\n to be rich?\n\nThey are right. We must have\nwhat we want. We cannot afford\nnot to. We have only one course:\n\nthe nets which entangle us are flames\n\n O souls, burn\n alive, burn now\n\n that you may forever\n have peace, have\n\n what you crave\n\n O souls,\n go into everything,\n let not one knot pass\n through your fingers\n\n let not any they tell you\n you must sleep as the net\n comes through your authentic hands\n\n What passes\n is what is, what shall be, what has\n been, what hell and heaven is\n is earth to be rent, to shoot you\n through the screen of flame which each knot\n hides as all knots are a wall ready\n to be shot open by you\n\n the nets of being\n are only eternal if you sleep as your hands\n ought to be busy. Method, method\n\n I too call on you to come\n to the aid of all men, to women most\n who know most, to woman to tell\n men to awake. Awake, men,\n awake\n\nI ask my mother\nto sleep. I ask her\nto stay in the chair.\nMy chair\nis in the corner of the fence.\nShe sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer\nneed not trouble either of us.\n\nAnd if she sits in happiness the souls\nwho trouble her and me\nwill also rest. The automobile\n\nhas been hauled away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-kingfishers": { - "title": "“The Kingfishers”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWhat does not change / is the will to change\n\nHe woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He\nremembered only one thing, the birds, how\nwhen he came in, he had gone around the rooms\nand got them back in their cage, the green one first,\nshe with the bad leg, and then the blue,\nthe one they had hoped was a male\n\nOtherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat.\nHe had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat,\nI do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter,\nhe was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself\nin some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers!\nwho cares\nfor their feathers\nnow?”\n\nHis last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone,\nceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched\nthey did not so much hear, or pay attention, they\nwondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened,\nhe repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought\n“The pool the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth why\ndid the export stop?”\n\nIt was then he left\n\n\n# 2.\n\nI thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said\nla lumiere\n but the kingfisher\nde l’aurore\n but the kingfisher flew west\nest devant nous!\n he got the color of his breast\n from the heat of the setting sun!\n\nThe features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit)\nthe bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings\nwhere the color is, short and round, the tail\ninconspicuous.\n\nBut not these things were the factors. Not the birds.\nThe legends are\nlegends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher\nwill not indicate a favoring wind,\nor avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting,\nstill the waters, with the new year, for seven days.\nIt is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters.\nIt nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There,\nsix or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones\nnot on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds.\n\n On these rejectamenta\n(as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born.\nAnd, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes\n a dripping, fetid mass\n\nMao concluded:\n nous devons\n nous lever\n et agir!\n\n\n# 3.\n\nWhen the attentions change / the jungle\nleaps in\n even the stones are split\n they rive\n\nOr,\nenter\nthat other conqueror we more naturally recognize\nhe so resembles ourselves\n\nBut the E\ncut so rudely on that oldest stone\nsounded otherwise,\nwas differently heard\n\nas, in another time, were treasures used:\n\n(and, later, much later, a fine ear thought\na scarlet coat)\n\n“of green feathers feet, beaks and eyes\nof gold”\n\n“animals likewise,\nresembling snails”\n\n“a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots,\nand worked with tufts of leaves, weight\n3800 ounces”\n\n“last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills\ngold, the feet\ngold, the two birds perched on two reeds”\n\n“gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds,\none yellow, the other\nwhite.”\n\n “And from each reed hung\n seven feathered tassels.”\n\nIn this instance, the priests\n(in dark cotton robes, and dirty,\ntheir disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly\nover their shoulders)\nrush in among the people, calling on them\nto protect their gods\n\nAnd all now is war\nwhere so lately there was peace,\nand the sweet brotherhood, the use\nof tilled fields.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nNot one death but many,\nnot accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is\nthe law\n\n Into the same river no man steps twice\n When fire dies air dies\n No one remains, nor is, one\n\nAround an appearance, one common model, we grow up\nmany. Else how is it,\nif we remain the same,\nwe take pleasure now\nin what we did not take pleasure before? love\ncontrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use\nother words, feel other passions, have\nnor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue\nthe same?\n To be in different states without a change\n is not a possibility\n\nWe can be precise. The factors are\nin the animal and / or the machine the factors are\ncommunication and / or control, both involve\nthe message. And what is the message? The message is\na discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time\n\nis the birth of the air, is\nthe birth of water, is\na state between\nthe origin and\nthe end, between\nbirth and the beginning of\nanother fetid nest\n\nis change, presents\nno more than itself\n\nAnd the too strong grasping of it,\nwhen it is pressed together and condensed,\nloses it\n\nThis very thing you are\n\n\n II\n\n They buried their dead in a sitting posture\n serpent cane razor ray of the sun\n\n And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying\n “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!”\n with her face to the west\n\n Where the bones are found, in each personal heap\n with what each enjoyed, there is always\n the Mongolian louse\n\nThe light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet\nin the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness\nwhich covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough\n\n as long as it was necessary for him, my guide\n to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose\n\nso you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look\n\nand, considering the dryness of the place\n the long absence of an adequate race\n\n (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other\n tore the eastern idols down, toppled\n the temple walls, which, says the excuser\n were black from human gore)\n\nhear\nhear, where the dry blood talks\n where the old appetite walks\n\n la piu saporita et migliore\n che si possa truovar al mondo\n\nwhere it hides, look\nin the eye how it runs\nin the flesh / chalk\n\n but under these petals\n in the emptiness\n regard the light, contemplate\n the flower\n\nwhence it arose\n\n with what violence benevolence is bought\n what cost in gesture justice brings\n what wrongs domestic rights involve\n what stalks\n this silence\n\n what pudor pejorocracy affronts\n how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot\n what breeds where dirtiness is law\n what crawls\n below\n\n\n III\n\n I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage.\n And of course, no Roman:\n he can take no risk that matters,\n the risk of beauty least of all.\n\n But I have my kin, if for no other reason than\n (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and,\n given my freedom, I’d be a cad\n if I didn’t. Which is most true.\n\n It works out this way, despite the disadvantage.\n I offer, in explanation, a quote:\n si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères\n que pour la terre et les pierres.\n\n Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age)\n this is also true: if I have any taste\n it is only because I have interested myself\n in what was slain in the sun\n\n I pose you your question:\n\n shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?\n\n I hunt among stones", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-librarian": { - "title": "“The Librarian”", - "body": "The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,\nthe shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which\n(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.\n\nIn this night I moved on the territory with combinations\n(new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader,\nmy father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.\n\nMy thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,\nthere should be materials here for Maximus, when, then,\nI saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)\n\nbefore. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf-\nhouse) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago\ncame back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,\n\nI didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via\nhimself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years.\nBut never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.\n\nHis previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I\nfound him intimate with my former wife: this boy\nwas now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!\n\n\n Black space,\n old fish-house.\n Motions\n of ghosts.\n I,\n dogging\n his steps.\n He\n (not my father,\n by name himself\n with his face\n twisted\n at birth)\n possessed of knowledge\n pretentious\n giving me\n what in the instant\n I knew better of.\n\n But the somber\n place, the flooring\n crude like a wharf’s\n and a barn’s\n space\n\n\nI was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter\nwas there--that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I\nhadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was\n\nhere. That she was there (in the Promised Land--the Cut!)\nBut there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews\nwere in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party\n\nI was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped\naround. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort.\nThe Fort was in East Gloucester--old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library\n\nwas. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang\nwas beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth\nof fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking\n\ndown. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops\ntailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern\n\n The places still\n half-dark, mud,\n coal dust.\n\n There is no light\n east\n of the Bridge\n\n Only on the headland\n toward the harbor\n from Cressy’s\n\n have I seen it (once\n when my daughter ran\n out on a spit of sand\n\n isn’t even there.) Where\n is Bristow? when does I-A\n get me home? I am caught\n\n in Gloucester. (What’s buried\n behind Lufkin’s\n Diner? Who is\n\n Frank Moore?)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-oppenheim": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Oppenheim", - "birth": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Oppenheim", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "bread-and-roses": { - "title": "“Bread and Roses”", - "body": "As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,\nA million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray\nAre touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,\nFor the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”\n\nAs we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men--\nFor they are women’s children and we mother them again.\nOur lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes--\nHearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!\n\nAs we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead\nGo crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;\nSmall art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew--\nYes, bread we fight for--but we fight for Roses, too.\n\nAs we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days--\nThe rising of the women means the rising of the race--\nNo more the drudge and idler--ten that toil where one reposes--\nBut sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "immoral": { - "title": "“Immoral”", - "body": "I keep walking around myself, mouth open with amazement:\nFor by all the ethical rules of life, I ought to be solemn and sad,\nBut, look you, I am bursting with joy.\n\nI scold myself:\nI say: Boy, your work has gone to pot:\nYou have scarcely enough money to last out the week:\nAnd think of your responsibilities!\nWhereupon, my heart bubbles over,\nI puff on my pipe, and think how solemnly the world goes by my window,\nAnd how childish people are, wrinkling their foreheads over groceres and rent.\n\nFor here jets life fresh and stinging in the vivid air:\nThe winds laugh to the jovial Earth:\nThe day is keen with Autumn’s fine flavor of having done the year’s work.\nEarth, in her festival, calls her children to the crimson revels.\nThe trees are a drunken riot: the sunshine is dazzling …\n\nYes, I ought, I suppose, to be saddened and tragic:\nBut joy drops from me like ripe apples.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-runner-in-the-skies": { - "title": "“The Runner in the Skies”", - "body": "Who is the runner in the skies,\nWith her blowing scarf of stars,\nAnd our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her blossoming heart?\nHer feet are on the winds, where space is deep,\nHer eyes are nebulous and veiled,\nShe hurries through the night to a far lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-slave": { - "title": "“The Slave”", - "body": "They set the slave free, striking off his chains …\nThen he was as much of a slave as ever.\n\nHe was still chained to servility,\nHe was still manacled to indolence and sloth,\nHe was still bound by fear and superstition,\nBy ignorance, suspicion, and savagery …\nHis slavery was not in the chains,\nBut in himself …\n\nThey can only set free men free …\nAnd there is no need of that:\nFree men set themselves free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "tasting-the-earth": { - "title": "“Tasting the Earth”", - "body": "In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.\nAs I lay on my couch in the muffled night, and the rain lashed my window,\nAnd my forsaken heart would give me no rest, no pause and no peace,\nThough I turned my face far from the wailing of my bereavement …\nThen I said: I will eat of this sorrow to its last shred,\nI will take it unto me utterly,\nI will see if I be not strong enough to contain it …\nWhat do I fear? Discomfort?\nHow can it hurt me, this bitterness?\n\nThe miracle, then!\nTurning toward it, and giving up to it,\nI found it deeper than my own self …\nO dark great mother-globe so close beneath me …\nIt was she with her inexhaustible grief,\nAges of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,\nAnd moan of the forsaken seas,\nIt was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,\nIt was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man …\nIt was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,\n\nCry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,\nAnd ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,\nAnd the dreams that have no waking …\n\nMy heart became her ancient heart:\nOn the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:\nWisdom-giving and sombre with the unremitting love of ages …\n\nThere was dank soil in my mouth,\nAnd bitter sea on my lips,\nIn a dark hour, tasting the Earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "where-love-once-was": { - "title": "“Where Love once Was”", - "body": "Where love once was, let there be no hate:\nThough they that went as one by night and day\nGo now alone,\nWhere love once was, let there be no hate.\nThe seeds we planted together\nCame to rich harvest,\nAnd our hearts are as bins brimming with the golden plenty:\nInto our loneliness we carry granaries of old love …\n\nAnd though the time has come when we cannot sow our acres together,\nAnd our souls need diverse fields,\nAnd a tilling apart,\nLet us go separate ways with a blessing each for each,\nAnd gentle parting,\nAnd let there be no hate,\nWhere love once was.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ovid": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ovid", - "birth": { - "year": -43 - }, - "death": { - "year": 17, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "roman", - "language": "latin", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "roman" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "disappointment": { - "title": "“Disappointment”", - "body": "But oh, I suppose she was ugly; she wasn’t elegant;\nI hadn’t yearned for her often in my prayers.\nYet holding her I was limp, and nothing happened at all:\nI just lay there, a disgraceful load for her bed.\nI wanted it, she did too; and yet no pleasure came\nfrom the part of my sluggish loins that should bring joy.\nThe girl entwined her ivory arms around my neck\n(her arms were whiter than the Sithonian snows) ,\nand gave me greedy kisses, thrusting her fluttering tongue,\nand laid her eager thigh against my thigh,\nand whispering fond words, called me the lord of her heart\nand everything else that lovers murmur in joy.\nAnd yet, as if chill hemlock were smeared upon my body,\nmy numb limbs would not act out my desire.\nI lay there like a log, a fraud, a worthless weight;\nmy body might as well have been a shadow.\nWhat will my age be like, if old age ever comes,\nwhen even my youth cannot fulfill its role?\nAh, I’m ashamed of my years. I’m young and a man: so what?\nI was neither young nor a man in my girlfriend’s eyes.\nShe rose like the sacred priestess who tends the undying flame,\nor a sister who’s chastely lain at a dear brother’s side.\nBut not long ago blonde Chlide twice, fair Pitho three times,\nand Libas three times I enjoyed without a pause.\nCorinna, as I recall, required my services\nnine times in one short night--and I obliged!\nHas some Thessalian potion made my body limp,\ninjuring me with noxious spells and herbs?\nDid some witch hex my name scratched on crimson wax\nand stab right through the liver with slender pins?\nBy spells the grain is blighted and withers to worthless weeds;\nby blighting spells the founts run out of water.\nEnchantment strips the oaks of acorns, vines of grapes,\nand makes fruit fall to earth from unstirred boughs.\nSuch magic arts could also sap my virile powers.\nPerhaps they brought this weakness on my thighs,\nand shame at what happened, too; shame made it all the worse:\nthat was the second reason for my collapse.\nYet what a girl I looked at and touched--but nothing more!\nI clung to her as closely as her gown.\nHer touch could make the Pylian sage feel young again,\nand make Tithonus friskier than his years.\nThis girl fell to my lot, but no man fell to hers.\nWhat will I ask for now in future prayers?\nI believe the mighty gods must rue the gift they gave,\nsince I have treated it so shabbily.\nSurely, I wanted entry: well, she let me in.\nKisses: I got them. To lie at her side: There I was.\nWhat good was such great luck--to gain a powerless throne?\nWhat did I have, except a miser’s gold?\nI was like the teller of secrets, thirsty at the stream,\nlooking at fruits forever beyond his grasp.\nWhoever rose at dawn from the bed of a tender girl\nin a state fit to approach the sacred gods?\nI suppose she wasn’t willing, she didn’t waste her best\ncaresses on me, try everything to excite me!\nThat girl could have aroused tough oak and hardest steel\nand lifeless boulders with her blandishments.\nShe surely was a girl to rouse all living men,\nbut then I was not alive, no longer a man.\nWhat pleasure could a deaf man take in Phemius’ song\nor painted pictures bring poor Thamyras?\nBut what joys I envisioned in my private mind,\nwhat ways did I position and portray!\nAnd yet my body lay as if untimely dead,\na shameful sight, limper than yesterday’s rose.\nNow, look! When it’s not needed, it’s vigorous and strong;\nnow it asks for action and for battle.\nLie down, there--shame on you!--most wretched part of me.\nThese promises of yours took me before.\nYou trick your master, you made me be caught unarmed,\nso that I suffered a great and sorry loss.\nYet this same part my girl did not disdain to take\nin hand, fondling it with a gentle motion.\nBut when she saw no skill she had could make it rise\nand that it lay without a sign of life,\n“You’re mocking me,” she said. “You’re crazy! Who asked you\nto lie down in my bed if you don’t want to?\nYou’ve come here cursed with woolen threads by some Aeaean\nwitch, or worn out by some other love.”\nAnd straightway she jumped up, clad in a flowing gown\n(beautiful, as she rushed barefoot off) ,\nand, lest her maids should know that she had not been touched,\nbegan to wash, concealing the disgrace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Jon Corelis" - } - }, - "duplicity": { - "title": "“Duplicity”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThen must I always bear your endless accusations?\nThey all prove false, but still I have to fight them.\nIf I happen to glance at the marble theater’s topmost row,\nyou pick some girl in the crowd to moan about;\nor if a beautiful woman looks at me wordlessly,\nyou charge she’s using lovers’ wordless signs.\nIf I compliment a girl, you try to tear out my hair;\nif I criticize one, you think I’ve got something to hide.\nIf I look well, I love no one--not even you;\nif I’m pale, you say that I’m pining for someone else.\nI wish I really had committed some such sin:\npunishment hurts less when you deserve it;\nbut as it is, your wild indictments at every turn\nthemselves forbid your wrath to have much weight.\nThink of the little long-eared donkey’s wretched lot:\ncontinual beatings only make him stubborn.\nNow look, here’s another charge: Cypassis, your coiffeuse,\nis cast at me for defiling her mistress’s bed!\nThe gods forbid that I, even if I yearned to sin,\nshould find delight in a slave-girl’s lowly lot!\nWhat man, being free, would want a servile liaison,\nor wish to embrace a body the whip has scarred?\nAnd furthermore, the girl’s your personal beautician,\nand valued by you because of her skillful hands.\nIs it likely that I’d approach such a trusted serving-maid?\nWhat would I get, but rejection and exposure?\nBy Venus and by the bow of her swift boy I swear,\nyou’ll never find me guilty of that crime.\n\n\n# II.\n\nCypassis, expert at dressing the hair in a thousand ways\n(but you ought to arrange the tresses of goddesses only)\nyou that I’ve found quite polished in stolen ecstasy,\nfit for your mistress’s service, but fitter for mine,\nwhoever was it that told of our bodies joining together?\nWhere did Corinna learn of our affair?\nCould I have blushed? Or slipped by a single word to give\nsome sign that has betrayed our furtive joys?\nAnd what of it, if I argued that nobody could transgress\nwith a servant, except for a man who was out of his mind\nThe Thessalian burned with passion for lovely Briseis, a servant;\nthe Mycenean leader loved Apollo’s slave.\nI’m no greater man than Achilles, or the scion of Tantalus.\nHow can what’s fine for kings be foul for me?\nAnd yet, when your mistress turned her glowering eyes on you,\nI saw a deep blush spread all over your face.\nBut how much more possessed I was, if you recall,\nI swore my faith by Venus’s great godhead!\n(You, goddess, bid, I pray, the warm Southwind to blow\nthose innocent lies across the Carpathian sea.)\nNow give me a sweet return for the favor I did you then,\nby bedding with me, you dusky Cypassis, today.\nDon’t shake your head, you ingrate, pretending you’re still afraid:\nyou can please one of your masters, and that’s enough.\nIf you’re silly enough to refuse, I’ll confess all that we’ve done,\nmaking myself the betrayer of my own crime,\nand I’ll tell your mistress how often we met, Cypassis, and where,\nand how many times we did it, and how many ways!", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Jon Corelis" - } - }, - "love-in-the-afternoon": { - "title": "“Love in the Afternoon”", - "body": "It was very hot. The day had gone just past its noon.\nI’d stretched out on a couch to take a nap.\nOne of the window-shutters was open, one was closed.\nThe light was like you’d see deep in the woods,\nor like the glow of dusk when Phoebus leaves the sky,\nor when night pales, and day has not yet dawned,\n--a perfect light for girls with too much modesty,\nwhere anxious Shame can hope to hide away.\nWhen, look! here comes Corinna in a loose ungirded gown,\nher parted hair framing her gleaming throat,\nlike lovely Semiramis entering her boudoir,\nor fabled Lais, loved by many men.\nI tore her gown off--not that it mattered, being so sheer,\nand yet she fought to keep that sheer gown on;\nbut since she fought with no great wish for victory,\nshe lost, betraying herself to the enemy.\nAnd as she stood before me, her garment all thrown off,\nI saw a body perfect in every inch:\nWhat shoulders, what fine arms I looked on--and embraced!\nWhat lovely breasts, begging to be caressed!\nHow smooth and flat a belly under a compact waist!\nAnd the side view--what a long and youthful thigh!\nBut why go into details? Each point deserved its praise.\nI clasped her naked body close to mine.\nYou can fill in the rest. We both lay there, worn out.\nMay all my afternoons turn out this well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "loves-victim": { - "title": "“Love’s Victim”", - "body": "How to say what it’s like, how hard my mattress\nseems, and the sheets won’t stay on the bed,\nand the sleepless nights, so long to endure,\ntossing with every weary bone of my body in pain?\nBut, I think, if desire were attacking me I’d feel it.\nSurely he’s crept in and skilfully hurt me with secret art.\nThat’s it: a slender arrow sticks fast in my heart,\nand cruel Love lives there, in my conquered breast.\nShall I give in: to go down fighting might bank the fires?\nI give in! The burden that’s carried with grace is lighter.\nI’ve seen the torch that’s swung about grow brighter\nand the still one, on the contrary, quenched.\nThe oxen that shirk when first seized for the yoke\nget more lashes than those that are used to the plough.\nThe hot steed’s mouth is bruised from the harsh curb,\nthe one that’s been in harness, feels reins less.\nLove oppresses reluctant lovers more harshly and insolently\nthan those who acknowledge they’ll bear his slavery.\nLook I confess! Cupid, I’m your latest prize:\nstretching out conquered arms towards your justice.\nWar’s not the thing--I come seeking peace:\nno glory for you in conquering unarmed men.\nWreathe your hair with myrtle, yoke your mother’s doves:\nYour stepfather Mars himself will lend you a chariot,\nand it’s fitting you go, the people acclaiming your triumph,\nwith you skilfully handling the yoked birds.\nleading captive youths and captive girls:\nthat procession will be a magnificent triumph.\nI myself, fresh prize, will just now have received my wound\nand my captive mind will display its new chains.\nYou’ll lead Conscience, hands twisted behind her back,\nand Shame, and whoever Love’s sect includes.\nAll will fear you: stretching their arms towards you\nthe crowd will cry ‘hurrah for the triumph!\nYou’ll have your flattering followers Delusion and Passion,\nthe continual crew that follows at your side.\nWith these troops you overcome men and gods:\ntake away their advantage and you’re naked.\nProudly, your mother will applaud your triumph\nfrom high Olympus, and scatter roses over your head\nYou, with jewelled wings, jewels spangling your hair,\nwill ride in a golden chariot, yourself all golden.\nAnd then, if I know you, you’ll inflame not a few:\nand also, passing by you’ll deal out many wounds.\nYou can’t, even if you wish, suspend your arrows:\nyour fiery flames scorch your neighbours.\nSuch was Bacchus in the conquered land by Ganges:\nyou drawn by birds, he by tigers.\nSo since I will be part of your sacred triumph,\nvictorious one, spend your powers frugally on me now!\nLook at Caesar’s similar fortunes of war--\nwhat he conquers, he protects with his power.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin" - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "Already over the sea from her old spouse she comes,\nthe blonde goddess whose frosty wheels bring day.\nWhy do you hurry, Aurora? Hold off, so may the birds\nshed ritual blood each year for Memnon’s shade.\nNow it’s good to lie in my mistress’s tender arms;\nif ever, now it’s good to feel her near.\nNow drowsiness is richest, the morning air is cool,\nand birds sing shrilly from their tender throats.\nWhy do you hurry, dreaded by men and dreaded by girls?\nDraw back your dewy reins with your crimson hand.\nThe sailor marks the stars more clearly before you rise,\nnot raoming aimlessly across the sea;\nthe traveller, though weary, arises when you come,\nand the soldier sets his savage hand to arms;\nyou’re first to see the farmers wield their heavy hoes\nand to call slow oxen under the curving yoke;\nyou rob boys of their sleep and give them over to schools,\nwhere tender hands must bear the savage switch;\nand you send reckless fools to pledge themselves in court,\nwhere they take ruinous losses through one word;\nthe lawyer and the pleader take no delight in you,\nfor each must rise and wrangle with new torts;\nand you ensure that women’s chores are never done,\ncalling the spinner’s hands back to her wool.\nAll this I’d bear; but who would bear that girls must rise\nat dawn, unless himself he has no girl?\nHow many times I’ve wished Night would not yield to you,\nthe stars not fade and flee before your face!\nHow many times I’ve wished the wind would smash your wheels,\nyour steeds would stumble on a cloud and fall!\nJealous, why do you hurry? If your son is black,\nit’s since his mother’s heart is that same color.\nHow I wish Tithonus could still tell tales of you:\nno goddess would be more disgraced in heaven.\nSince he is endless eons old, you rise and flee\nat dawn to the chariot the old man hates,\nbut if some Cephalus were lying in your arms,\nyou’d cry out, “O run slowly, steeds of night!”\nWhy should this lover pay, if your husband withers with age?\nWas I the matchmaker who brought him to you?\nRemember how much sleep was given to her loved youth\nby Luna--and she’s beautiful as you.\nThe father of gods himself, to see you all the less,\njoined two nights into one for his desires.\nI’d finished my complaint. You could tell she’d heard: she blushed;\nand yet the day rose at its usual time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "latin", - "translator": "Jon Corelis" - } - } - } - }, - "wilfred-owen": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wilfred Owen", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "anthem-for-doomed-youth": { - "title": "“Anthem for Doomed Youth”", - "body": "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?\n Only the monstrous anger of the guns.\n Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle\nCan patter out their hasty orisons.\nNo mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells\nNor any voice of mourning save the choirs--\nThe shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;\nAnd bugles calling for them from sad shires.\n\nWhat candles may be held to speed them all?\n Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes\nShall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.\n The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;\nTheir flowers the tenderness of patient minds\nAnd each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "apologia-pro-poemate-meo": { - "title": "“Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”", - "body": "I too saw God through mud--\n The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.\n War brought more glory to their eyes than blood\n And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.\n\nMerry it was to laugh there--\n Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.\n For power was on us as we slashed bones bare\n Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.\n\nI too have dropped off fear--\n Behind the barrage dead as my platoon\n And sailed my spirit surging light and clear\n Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;\n\nAnd witnessed exultation--\n Faces that used to curse me scowl for scowl\n Shine and lift up with passion of oblation\n Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.\n\nI have made fellowships--\n Untold of happy lovers in old song.\n For love is not the binding of fair lips\n With the soft silk of eyes that look and long\n\nBy Joy whose ribbon slips--\n But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;\n Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;\n Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.\n\nI have perceived much beauty\n In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;\n Heard music in the silentness of duty;\n Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.\n\nNevertheless except you share\n With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell\n Whose world is but the trembling of a flare\n And heaven but as the highway for a shell\n\nYou shall not hear their mirth:\n You shall not come to think them well content\n By any jest of mine. These men are worth\n Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "disabled": { - "title": "“Disabled”", - "body": "He sat in a wheeled chair waiting for dark\nAnd shivered in his ghastly suit of grey\nLegless sewn short at elbow. Through the park\nVoices of boys rang saddening like a hymn\nVoices of play and pleasure after day\nTill gathering sleep had mothered them from him.\n\nAbout this time Town used to swing so gay\nWhen glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees\nAnd girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim\n--In the old times before he threw away his knees.\nNow he will never feel again how slim\nGirls’ waists are or how warm their subtle hands\nAll of them touch him like some queer disease.\n\nThere was an artist silly for his face\nFor it was younger than his youth last year.\nNow he is old; his back will never brace;\nHe’s lost his colour very far from here\nPoured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry\nAnd half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race\nAnd leap of purple spurted from his thigh.\nOne time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg\nAfter the matches carried shoulder-high.\nIt was after football when he’d drunk a peg\nHe thought he’d better join. He wonders why …\nSomeone had said he’d look a god in kilts.\n\nThat’s why; and maybe too to please his Meg\nAye that was it to please the giddy jilts\nHe asked to join. He didn’t have to beg;\nSmiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years.\nGermans he scarcely thought of; and no fears\nOf Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts\nFor daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;\nAnd care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;\nEsprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.\nAnd soon he was drafted out with drums and cheers.\n\nSome cheered him home but not as crowds cheer Goal.\nOnly a solemn man who brought him fruits\nThanked him; and then inquired about his soul.\nNow he will spend a few sick years in Institutes\nAnd do what things the rules consider wise\nAnd take whatever pity they may dole.\nTo-night he noticed how the women’s eyes\nPassed from him to the strong men that were whole.\nHow cold and late it is! Why don’t they come\nAnd put him into bed? Why don’t they come?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "exposure": { - "title": "“Exposure”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOur brains ache in the merciless iced east winds that knife us …\nWearied we keep awake because the night is silent …\nLow drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient …\nWorried by silence sentries whisper curious nervous\n But nothing happens.\n\nWatching we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.\nLike twitching agonies of men among its brambles.\nNorthward incessantly the flickering gunnery rumbles\nFar off like a dull rumour of some other war.\n What are we doing here?\n\nThe poignant misery of dawn begins to grow …\nWe only know war lasts rain soaks and clouds sag stormy.\nDawn massing in the east her melancholy army\nAttacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray\n But nothing happens.\n\nSudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.\nLess deadly than the air that shudders black with snow\nWith sidelong flowing flakes that flock pause and renew\nWe watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance\n But nothing happens.\n\n\n# II.\n\nPale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces--\nWe cringe in holes back on forgotten dreams and stare snow-dazed\nDeep into grassier ditches. So we drowse sun-dozed\nLittered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.\n Is it that we are dying?\n\nSlowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed\nWith crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;\nFor hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;\nShutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed--\n We turn back to our dying.\n\nSince we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;\nNor ever suns smile true on child or field or fruit.\nFor God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;\nTherefore not loath we lie out here; therefore were born\n For love of God seems dying.\n\nTo-night His frost will fasten on this mud and us\nShrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.\nThe burying-party picks and shovels in their shaking grasp\nPause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice\n But nothing happens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "futility": { - "title": "“Futility”", - "body": "Move him into the sun--\nGently its touch awoke him once\nAt home whispering of fields unsown.\nAlways it woke him even in France\nUntil this morning and this snow.\nIf anything might rouse him now\nThe kind old sun will know.\n\nThink how it wakes the seeds--\nWoke once the clays of a cold star.\nAre limbs so dear-achieved are sides\nFull-nerved--still warm--too hard to stir?\nWas it for this the clay grew tall?\n--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil\nTo break earth’s sleep at all?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "greater-love": { - "title": "“Greater Love”", - "body": "Red lips are not so red\n As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.\nKindness of wooed and wooer\nSeems shame to their love pure.\nO Love your eyes lose lure\n When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!\n\nYour slender attitude\n Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed\nRolling and rolling there\nWhere God seems not to care;\nTill the fierce Love they bear\n Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.\n\nYour voice sings not so soft--\n Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft--\nYour dear voice is not dear\nGentle and evening clear\nAs theirs whom none now hear\n Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.\n\nHeart you were never hot\n Nor large nor full like hearts made great with shot;\nAnd though your hand be pale\nPaler are all which trail\nYour cross through flame and hail:\n Weep you may weep for you may touch them not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "insensibility": { - "title": "“Insensibility”", - "body": "Happy are men who yet before they are killed\nCan let their veins run cold.\nWhom no compassion fleers\nOr makes their feet\nSore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.\nThe front line withers\nBut they are troops who fade not flowers\nFor poets’ tearful fooling:\nMen gaps for filling\nLosses who might have fought\nLonger; but no one bothers.\n\nAnd some cease feeling\nEven themselves or for themselves.\nDullness best solves\nThe tease and doubt of shelling\nAnd Chance’s strange arithmetic\nComes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.\nThey keep no check on Armies’ decimation.\n\nHappy are these who lose imagination:\nThey have enough to carry with ammunition.\nTheir spirit drags no pack.\nTheir old wounds save with cold can not more ache.\nHaving seen all things red\nTheir eyes are rid\nOf the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.\nAnd terror’s first constriction over\nTheir hearts remain small drawn.\nTheir senses in some scorching cautery of battle\nNow long since ironed\nCan laugh among the dying unconcerned.\n\nHappy the soldier home with not a notion\nHow somewhere every dawn some men attack\nAnd many sighs are drained.\nHappy the lad whose mind was never trained:\nHis days are worth forgetting more than not.\nHe sings along the march\nWhich we march taciturn because of dusk\nThe long forlorn relentless trend\nFrom larger day to huger night.\n\nWe wise who with a thought besmirch\nBlood over all our soul\nHow should we see our task\nBut through his blunt and lashless eyes?\nAlive he is not vital overmuch;\nDying not mortal overmuch;\nNor sad nor proud\nNor curious at all.\nHe cannot tell\nOld men’s placidity from his.\n\nBut cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns\nThat they should be as stones.\nWretched are they and mean\nWith paucity that never was simplicity.\nBy choice they made themselves immune\nTo pity and whatever mourns in man\nBefore the last sea and the hapless stars;\nWhatever mourns when many leave these shores;\nWhatever shares\nThe eternal reciprocity of tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mental-cases": { - "title": "“Mental Cases”", - "body": "Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?\nWherefore rock they purgatorial shadows\nDrooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish\nBaring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?\nStroke on stroke of pain--but what slow panic\nGouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?\nEver from their hair and through their hand palms\nMisery swelters. Surely we have perished\nSleeping and walk hell; but who these hellish?\n\n--These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.\nMemory fingers in their hair of murders\nMultitudinous murders they once witnessed.\nWading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander\nTreading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.\nAlways they must see these things and hear them\nBatter of guns and shatter of flying muscles\nCarnage incomparable and human squander\nRucked too thick for these men’s extrication.\n\nTherefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented\nBack into their brains because on their sense\nSunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;\nDawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh\n--Thus their heads wear this hilarious hideous\nAwful falseness of set-smiling corpses.\n--Thus their hands are plucking at each other;\nPicking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;\nSnatching after us who smote them brother\nPawing us who dealt them war and madness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-send-off": { - "title": "“The Send-Off”", - "body": "Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way\nTo the siding-shed\nAnd lined the train with faces grimly gay.\n\nTheir breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray\nAs men’s are dead.\n\nDull porters watched them and a casual tramp\nStood staring hard\nSorry to miss them from the upland camp.\nThen unmoved signals nodded and a lamp\nWinked to the guard.\n\nSo secretly like wrongs hushed-up they went.\nThey were not ours:\nWe never heard to which front these were sent.\n\nNor there if they yet mock what women meant\nWho gave them flowers.\n\nShall they return to beatings of great bells\nIn wild trainloads?\nA few a few too few for drums and yells\nMay creep back silent to still village wells\nUp half-known roads.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-show": { - "title": "“The Show”", - "body": "My soul looked down from a vague height with Death\nAs unremembering how I rose or why\nAnd saw a sad land weak with sweats of dearth\nGray cratered like the moon with hollow woe\nAnd fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.\n\nAcross its beard that horror of harsh wire\nThere moved thin caterpillars slowly uncoiled.\nIt seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs\nOf ditches where they writhed and shrivelled killed.\n\nBy them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped\nRound myriad warts that might be little hills.\n\nFrom gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept\nAnd vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.\n\n(And smell came up from those foul openings\nAs out of mouths or deep wounds deepening.)\n\nOn dithering feet upgathered more and more\nBrown strings towards strings of gray with bristling spines\nAll migrants from green fields intent on mire.\n\nThose that were gray of more abundant spawns\nRamped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.\n\nI saw their bitten backs curve loop and straighten\nI watched those agonies curl lift and flatten.\n\nWhereat in terror what that sight might mean\nI reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.\n\nAnd Death fell with me like a deepening moan.\nAnd He picking a manner of worm which half had hid\nIts bruises in the earth but crawled no further\nShowed me its feet the feet of many men\nAnd the fresh-severed head of it my head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-offensive": { - "title": "“Spring Offensive”", - "body": "Halted against the shade of a last hill\nThey fed and lying easy were at ease\nAnd finding comfortable chests and knees\nCarelessly slept. But many there stood still\nTo face the stark blank sky beyond the ridge\nKnowing their feet had come to the end of the world.\n\nMarvelling they stood and watched the long grass swirled\nBy the May breeze murmurous with wasp and midge\nFor though the summer oozed into their veins\nLike the injected drug for their bones’ pains\nSharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass\nFearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.\n\nHour after hour they ponder the warm field--\nAnd the far valley behind where the buttercups\nHad blessed with gold their slow boots coming up\nWhere even the little brambles would not yield\nBut clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;\nThey breathe like trees unstirred.\n\nTill like a cold gust thrilled the little word\nAt which each body and its soul begird\nAnd tighten them for battle. No alarms\nOf bugles no high flags no clamorous haste--\nOnly a lift and flare of eyes that faced\nThe sun like a friend with whom their love is done.\nO larger shone that smile against the sun--\nMightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.\n\nSo soon they topped the hill and raced together\nOver an open stretch of herb and heather\nExposed. And instantly the whole sky burned\nWith fury against them; and soft sudden cups\nOpened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes\nChasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.\n\nOf them who running on that last high place\nLeapt to swift unseen bullets or went up\nOn the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge\nOr plunged and fell away past this world’s verge\nSome say God caught them even before they fell.\n\nBut what say such as from existence’ brink\nVentured but drave too swift to sink.\nThe few who rushed in the body to enter hell\nAnd there out-fiending all its fiends and flames\nWith superhuman inhumanities\nLong-famous glories immemorial shames--\nAnd crawling slowly back have by degrees\nRegained cool peaceful air in wonder--\nWhy speak they not of comrades that went under?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "strange-meeting": { - "title": "“Strange Meeting”", - "body": "It seemed that out of the battle I escaped\nDown some profound dull tunnel long since scooped\nThrough granites which Titanic wars had groined.\nYet also there encumbered sleepers groaned\nToo fast in thought or death to be bestirred.\nThen as I probed them one sprang up and stared\nWith piteous recognition in fixed eyes\nLifting distressful hands as if to bless.\nAnd by his smile I knew that sullen hall;\nWith a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;\nYet no blood reached there from the upper ground\nAnd no guns thumped or down the flues made moan.\n“Strange friend” I said “Here is no cause to mourn.”\n“None” said the other “Save the undone years\nThe hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours\nWas my life also; I went hunting wild\nAfter the wildest beauty in the world\nWhich lies not calm in eyes or braided hair\nBut mocks the steady running of the hour\nAnd if it grieves grieves richlier than here.\nFor by my glee might many men have laughed\nAnd of my weeping something has been left\nWhich must die now. I mean the truth untold\nThe pity of war the pity war distilled.\nNow men will go content with what we spoiled.\nOr discontent boil bloody and be spilled.\nThey will be swift with swiftness of the tigress\nNone will break ranks though nations trek from progress.\nCourage was mine and I had mystery;\nWisdom was mine and I had mastery;\nTo miss the march of this retreating world\nInto vain citadels that are not walled.\nThen when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels\nI would go up and wash them from sweet wells\nEven with truths that lie too deep for taint.\nI would have poured my spirit without stint\nBut not through wounds; not on the cess of war.\nForeheads of men have bled where no wounds were.\nI am the enemy you killed my friend.\nI knew you in this dark; for so you frowned\nYesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.\nI parried; but my hands were loath and cold.\nLet us sleep now …”\n\nEarth’s wheels run oiled with blood. Forget we that.\nLet us lie down and dig ourselves in thought.\nBeauty is yours and you have mastery\nWisdom is mine and I have mystery.\nWe two will stay behind and keep our troth.\nLet us forego men’s minds that are brute’s natures\nLet us not sup the blood which some say nurtures\nBe we not swift with swiftness of the tigress.\nLet us break ranks from those who trek from progress.\nMiss we the march of this retreating world\nInto old citadels that are not walled.\nLet us lie out and hold the open truth.\nThen when their blood hath clogged the chariot wheels\nWe will go up and wash them from deep wells.\nWhat though we sink from men as pitchers falling\nMany shall raise us up to be their filling\nEven from wells we sunk too deep for war\nEven as One who bled where no wounds were.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-terre": { - "title": "“A Terre”", - "body": "_(Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.)_\n\nSit on the bed; I’m blind and three parts shell\nBe careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.\nBoth arms have mutinied against me--brutes.\nMy fingers fidget like ten idle brats.\n\nI tried to peg out soldierly--no use!\nOne dies of war like any old disease.\nThis bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.\nI have my medals?--Discs to make eyes close.\nMy glorious ribbons?--Ripped from my own back\nIn scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)\n\nA short life and a merry one my brick!\nWe used to say we’d hate to live dead old--\nYet now … I’d willingly be puffy bald\nAnd patriotic. Buffers catch from boys\nAt least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose\nLittle I’d ever teach a son but hitting\nShooting war hunting all the arts of hurting.\nWell that’s what I learnt--that and making money.\nYour fifty years ahead seem none too many?\nTell me how long I’ve got? God! For one year\nTo help myself to nothing more than air!\nOne Spring! Is one too good to spare too long?\nSpring wind would work its own way to my lung\nAnd grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.\nMy servant’s lamed but listen how he shouts!\nWhen I’m lugged out he’ll still be good for that.\nHere in this mummy-case you know I’ve thought\nHow well I might have swept his floors for ever\nI’d ask no night off when the bustle’s over\nEnjoying so the dirt. Who’s prejudiced\nAgainst a grimed hand when his own’s quite dust\nLess live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn\nLess warm than dust that mixes with arms’ tan?\nI’d love to be a sweep now black as Town\nYes or a muckman. Must I be his load?\n\nO Life Life let me breathe--a dug-out rat!\nNot worse than ours the existences rats lead--\nNosing along at night down some safe vat\nThey find a shell-proof home before they rot.\nDead men may envy living mites in cheese\nOr good germs even. Microbes have their joys\nAnd subdivide and never come to death\nCertainly flowers have the easiest time on earth.\n“I shall be one with nature herb and stone.”\nShelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned;\nThe dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.\n“Pushing up daisies” is their creed you know.\nTo grain then go my fat to buds my sap\nFor all the usefulness there is in soap.\nD’you think the Boche will ever stew man-soup?\nSome day no doubt if …\n\nFriend be very sure\nI shall be better off with plants that share\nMore peaceably the meadow and the shower.\nSoft rains will touch me--as they could touch once\nAnd nothing but the sun shall make me ware.\nYour guns may crash around me. I’ll not hear;\nOr if I wince I shall not know I wince.\nDon’t take my soul’s poor comfort for your jest.\nSoldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds\nBut here the thing’s best left at home with friends.\n\nMy soul’s a little grief grappling your chest\nTo climb your throat on sobs; easily chased\nOn other sighs and wiped by fresher winds.\n\nCarry my crying spirit till it’s weaned\nTo do without what blood remained these wounds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "dorothy-parker": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dorothy Parker", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "a-dream-lies-dead": { - "title": "“A Dream Lies Dead”", - "body": "A dream lies dead here. May you softly go\nBefore this place, and turn away your eyes,\nNor seek to know the look of that which dies\nImportuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,\nBut, for a little, let your step be slow.\nAnd, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise\nWith words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.\nA dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:\n\nWhenever one drifted petal leaves the tree--\nThough white of bloom as it had been before\nAnd proudly waitful of fecundity--\nOne little loveliness can be no more;\nAnd so must Beauty bow her imperfect head\nBecause a dream has joined the wistful dead!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "interior": { - "title": "“Interior”", - "body": "Her mind lives in a quiet room,\nA narrow room, and tall,\nWith pretty lamps to quench the gloom\nAnd mottoes on the wall.\n\nHer mind lives tidily, apart\nFrom cold and noise and pain,\nAnd bolts the door against her heart,\nOut wailing in the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-red-dress": { - "title": "“The Red Dress”", - "body": "I always saw, I always said\nIf I were grown and free,\nI’d have a gown of reddest red\nAs fine as you could see,\n\nTo wear out walking, sleek and slow,\nUpon a Summer day,\nAnd there’d be one to see me so\nAnd flip the world away.\n\nAnd he would be a gallant one,\nWith stars behind his eyes,\nAnd hair like metal in the sun,\nAnd lips too warm for lies.\n\nI always saw us, gay and good,\nHigh honored in the town.\nNow I am grown to womanhood …\nI have the silly gown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "symptom-recital": { - "title": "“Symptom Recital”", - "body": "I do not like my state of mind;\nI’m bitter, querulous, unkind.\nI hate my legs, I hate my hands,\nI do not yearn for lovelier lands.\nI dread the dawn’s recurrent light;\nI hate to go to bed at night.\nI snoot at simple, earnest folk.\nI cannot take the gentlest joke.\nI find no peace in paint or type.\nMy world is but a lot of tripe.\nI’m disillusioned, empty-breasted.\nFor what I think, I’d be arrested.\nI am not sick, I am not well.\nMy quondam dreams are shot to hell.\nMy soul is crushed, my spirit sore;\nI do not like me any more.\nI cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.\nI ponder on the narrow house.\nI shudder at the thought of men …\nI’m due to fall in love again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "boris-pasternak": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Boris Pasternak", - "birth": { - "year": 1890 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 59 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-interlude": { - "title": "“After the Interlude”", - "body": "Three months ago, it all had started.\nThe early blizzards swept by, rushing\nOver our fields and yards unguarded\nWith some unmanageable passion.\n\nI then made up my mind at once,\nAs though a hermit on vocation,\nI’d write of winter and perchance,\nI would complete my spring collection.\n\nBut trivialities, like mounts, arose,\nLike snow-banks, standing in my way,\nAnd all my plans, it seemed, were lost,\nAs winter passed on, day by day.\n\nI, then, perceived and got to know\nWhy on this foul and stormy night,\nShe pierced the darkness with the snow\nAnd from the garden, peeked inside.\n\nShe sighed and whispered to me tensely,\n“Please hurry!”--pale from the cold.\nBut I was sharpening my pencil\nAnd awkwardly, dismissed her call.\n\nAnd while one early morning, I,\nBehind the desk, delayed each sentence,\nThe winter came … and passed me by\nWith some unrecognized resemblance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "august": { - "title": "“August”", - "body": "As promised and without deception,\nThe sun passed through in early morning\nIn a slanting saffron stripe\nFrom the curtain to the sofa.\n\nIt covered with burning ochre\nThe neighboring woods, village houses,\nMy bed, the wet pillow\nAnd the strip of wall behind the bookshelf.\n\nI remembered for what reason\nThe pillow was slightly damp.\nI dreamed that you were coming to my wake,\nOne after another through the woods.\n\nYou were coming in a crowd, in ones and twos,\nSuddenly, someone remembered that it was\nAugust sixth by the old calendar,\nThe Transfiguration of Christ.\n\nUsually, a light without fire\nPours this day from Mt. Tabor\nAnd autumn, clear as an omen,\nCompels the gaze of all.\n\nAnd you walked through the scant, beggarly\nNaked trembling alder grove\nInto the ginger-red cemetery woods,\nBurning like glazed ginger bread.\n\nA solemn sky verged\nUpon its silent heights,\nAnd distance called out\nIn drawling rooster voices.\n\nIn the woods, among the gravestones\nDeath stood like a government surveyor,\nLooking at my dead face\nTo dig my grave to measure.\n\nAll sensed the presence\nOf someone’s calm voice nearby.\nIt was my old prophetic voice\nThat rang, untouched by decay:\n\n“Farewell to the azure of Transfiguration\nAnd the gold of the Second coming.\nSoothe the woe of my fatal hour\nWith a woman’s parting caress.\n\nFarewell to the trackless years!\nLet’s say goodbye, o, woman who hurls\nA challenge to the abyss of humiliation.\nI am your battlefield.\n\nFarewell to you unfurled wing-span,\nFree, persistent flight,\nThe world’s image, captured in a word,\nCreative work, and miracle-working.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard McKane", - "context": { - "holiday": "transfiguration" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "I have let my household disperse,\nMy dear ones have long been apart,\nAnd a familiar loneliness\nFills all of nature and all my heart.\n\nHere I am with you in the lodge.\nNo one walks through the woods these days.\nAs in the old song, undergrowth\nHas almost hidden the forest ways.\n\nForlornly, the timber walls\nLook down on the two of us here.\nWe did not promise to leap obstacles,\nWe shall fall at last in the clear.\n\nWe shall sit down from one till three,\nYou with embroidery, I deep\nIn a book, and at dawn shall not see\nWhen we kiss each other to sleep.\n\nMore richly and more recklessly,\nLeaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,\nFill yesterday’s cup of bitterness\nWith the sadness of today.\n\nImpulse, enchantment, beauty!\nLet’s dissolve in September wind\nAnd enter the rustle of autumn!\nBe still, or go out of your mind!\n\nAs the coppice lets slip its leaves,\nYou let your dress slip rustling down\nAnd throw yourself into my arms\nIn your silk-tasselled dressing gown.\n\nYou are my joy on the brink\nOf disaster, when life becomes\nA plague, and beauty is daring,\nAnd draws us into each other’s arms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter France & Jon Stallworthy", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "bad-days": { - "title": "“Bad Days”", - "body": "When Passion week started and Jesus\nCame down to the city, that day\nHosannahs burst out at his entry\nAnd palm leaves were strewn in his way.\n\nBut days grow more stern and more stormy.\nNo love can men’s hardness unbend;\nTheir brows are contemptuously frowning,\nAnd now comes the postscript, the end.\n\nGrey, leaden and heavy, the heavens\nWere pressing on treetops and roofs.\nThe Pharisees, fawning like foxes,\nWere secretly searching for proofs.\n\nThe lords of the Temple let scoundrels\nPass judgement, and those who at first\nHad fervently followed and hailed him,\nNow all just as zealously cursed.\n\nThe crowd on the neighbouring sector\nWas looking inside through the gate.\nThey jostled, intent on the outcome,\nBewildered and willing to wait.\n\nAnd whispers and rumours were creeping,\nRepeating the dominant theme.\nThe flight into Egypt, his childhood\nAlready seemed faint as a dream.\n\nAnd Jesus remembered the desert,\nThe days in the wilderness spent,\nThe tempting with power by Satan,\nThat lofty, majestic descent.\n\nHe thought of the wedding at Cana,\nThe feast and the miracles; and\nHow once he had walked on the waters\nThrough mist to a boat, as on land;\n\nThe beggarly crowd in a hovel,\nThe cellar to which he was led;\nHow, started, the candle-flame guttered,\nWhen Lazarus rose from the dead …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "black-spring": { - "title": "“Black Spring”", - "body": "Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,\nOf February, in sobs and ink,\nWrite poems, while the slush in thunder\nIs burning in the black of spring.\n\nThrough clanking wheels, through church bells ringing\nA hired cab will take you where\nThe town has ended, where the showers\nAre louder still than ink and tears.\n\nWhere rooks, like charred pears, from the branches\nIn thousands break away, and sweep\nInto the melting snow, instilling\nDry sadness into eyes that weep.\n\nBeneath--the earth is black in puddles,\nThe wind with croaking screeches throbs,\nAnd--the more randomly, the surer\nPoems are forming out of sobs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lydia Pasternak Slater", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "the-breakup": { - "title": "“The Breakup”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nO two-tongued angel, on my grief a hundred\nproof no less I should have got you drunk.\nBut I’m not one, whatever pain the lies encouraged\nfrom the start, to claim a tooth for a tooth.\nAnd now the clever, festering doom!\n\nOh, no, betraying angel, it’s not fatal,\nnot this suffering, this rash of the heart.\nBut why at parting shower me with such a rain\nof blows to the body? Why this pointless\nhurricane of kisses? Why, your mockery\nsupreme, kill me in everybody’s sight?\n\n# 2.\n\nO shame, how overwhelming you can be!\nYet at this breaking-up how many dreams persist.\nWere I no more than a jumbled heap\nof brows and eyes and lips, cheeks, shoulders, wrists,\n\nfor my grief so strong, forever young,\nat the order of my verse, its ruthless march,\nI wrould submit to those and, leading them\nin battle, storm your citadel, O monstrous shame.\n\n# 3.\n\nAll my thoughts I now distract from you,\nif not at parties, drinking wine, then in heaven!\nSurely one day. as the landlord’s next door bell\nis ringing, for someone that door will open.\n\nI’ll rush in on them in tinkling December, say,\nthe door pushed wide--and here I am, far as the hall!\n“Where’ve you come from? What’s being said?\nTell us the news, the latest scandal from the city.”\n\nIs all my grief mistaken?\nWill it mutter later, “She mirrored her exactly,”\nas, gathering myself for a leap past forty feet,\nI burst out crying, “Is it really you?”\n\nAnd the public squares, will they spare me?\nAh, if you could only know what pain I feel\nwhen, at least a hundred times a day, the streets,\namazed, confront me with their counterfeits of you.\n\n# 4.\n\nGo ahead, try to stop me, try to put out\nthis fiery fit of sorrow, soaring\nlike mercury in a barometer.\nStop me from raving about you. Don’t be ashamed,\nwe are alone. Turn out the lights, turn them\nout, and douse my fire with fire.\n\n# 5.\n\nLike combers twine this cloudburst of cold elbows,\nlike lilies, silken-stalwart, helpless palms.\nSound the triumph! Break loose! Set to! In this wild race\nthe woods are roaring, choked on the echo of Calydonian hunts,\nwhere Acteon pursued Atalanta like a doe to the clearing,\nwhere in endless azure, hissing past the horses’ ears,\nthey kissed and kissed to the uproarious baying of the chase,\ncaressed among the shrillest horns and crackling trees,\nthe clattering hoofs and claws.\nLike those break loose, break loose, rush into the woods!\n\n# 6.\n\nSo you’re disappointed? You think we should\npart with a swan song for requiem,\nwith a show of sorrow, tears showering\nfrom your eyes dilated, trying their victorious power?\n\nAs if during mass the frescoes, shaken by what’s playing\non Johann Sebastian’s lips, were to tumble from the arches!\nFrom this night on in everything my hatred discovers\na dragging on and on that ought to have a whip.\n\nIn the dark, instantly, without a thought\nmy hatred decides that it is time\nto plough it all up. that suicide’s folly\nslow, too slow, the speed of a snail.\n\n# 7.\n\nMy love, my angel, just as in that night\nflying from Bergen to the Pole, the wild geese\nswooping, a snowstorm of warmest down, I swear,\nO Sweet, my will’s not crossed when I urge you.\nDearest, please forget and go to sleep.\n\nWhen like a Norwegian whaler’s wreck, to its stock ice-jammed,\na winter s apparition, rigid past its masts, I soar,\nfluttered in your eyes’ aurora borealis, sleep, don’t cry:\nall before your wedding day will heal, my dear.\n\nWhen like the North itself beyond the outmost settlements,\nhidden from the arctic and its ice floe wide awake,\nrinsing the eyes of blinded seals with midnight’s rim,\nI say--don’t rub your eyes, sleep, forget--it’s all nonsense.\n\n# 8.\n\nMy table’s not so wide that, pressing my chest\nagainst its board, I cannot crook my elbow\nround the edge of anguish, those straits\nof countless miles, quarried by “Farewell.”\n\n(It’s night there now) Ah, to have your cloudy hair\n(They’ve gone to sleep) the kingdom of your shoulders!\n(All lights are out) I d return them in the morning,\nand the porch would greet them with a nodding branch.\n\nO shield me. not with flakes, but with your hands,\npain’s ten sufficient fingers, the spikes\nof winter stars, like the placards of delay\nposted on trains northbound into blizzards!\n\n# 9.\n\nThe trembling piano licks foam from its lips.\nThis delirium, tossing, will strike you down.\nYou murmur. “Dearest!” “No!” I cry back. “Never\nin the midst of music!” And yet how could we be closer\n\nthan in the twilight here, the score like a diary,\npage after page, year after year, tossed on the fire.\nO wondrous memories that, luring us still,\nastonish the spirit! But you are free.\n\nI shan’t keep you. Go on. Give yourself to others.\nLeave at once. Werther’s already had his day.\nBut now the air itself reeks death:\nopening a window is like opening a vein.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Theodore Weiss", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - } - } - }, - "change": { - "title": "“Change”", - "body": "I once was drawn towards the poor--\nAnd not with gaze of condescension,\nFor it was only really there\nThat life went on without pretension.\n\nAlthough some noble clans I knew\nAnd public of sophistication,\nThe parasitic I’d eschew,\nBefriended those of wastrel’s station.\n\nTo waken friendship then I sought\nWith those I met from ranks of toiler,\nFor which I earned from them their thought\nThat I belonged amidst the squalor.\n\nI didn’t need fine words to feel,\nWas real, and earthy and quite certain--\nA simple cellar was my deal,\nAn attic home without a curtain.\n\nAnd I have rotted since that time,\nCorruption of the age afflicted\nMidst bourgeois-optimistic climb,\nMy grief by shame has been convicted.\n\nI’ve long been faithless to all those\nWhom I was bound to by trust’s duty\nI’ve lost the human path I chose\nWith all who spurn such simple beauty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - } - } - }, - "confession": { - "title": "“Confession”", - "body": "Life returned with a cause--the way\nSome strange chance once interrupted it.\nJust as on that distant summer day,\nI am standing in the same old street.\n\nPeople are the same, and people’s worries,\nAnd the sunset’s still a fireball,\nJust the way death’s night once in a hurry\nNailed it to the ancient mansion’s wall.\n\nWomen, in the same cheap clothes attired,\nAre still wearing down their shoes at night.\nAfterwards, against the roofing iron\nThey are by the garrets crucified.\n\nHere is one of them. She looks so weary\nAs she steps across the threshold, and\nRising from the basement, drab and dreary,\nWalks across the courtyard on a slant.\n\nAnd again I’m ready with excuses,\nAnd again it’s all the same to me.\nAnd the neighbour in the backyard pauses,\nThen goes out of sight, and leaves us be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "dont-cry": { - "title": "“Don’t cry …”", - "body": "Don’t cry. Don’t tense your swollen lips,\nDon’t pack them into creases.\nYou’ll irritate those dried up bits\nOf scabs from vernal fevers.\n\nWithdraw you hand, don’t touch my chest,\nWe’re cables under voltage.\nTo one another, by some chance\nWe may be thrown by fortune.\n\nThe years will pass and you shall wed,\nYou will forget this love then.\nTo be a woman,--a great step.\nTo drive insane,--a talent.\n\nUnder the spell of female hands,\nThe spell of shoulders, backs, and necks,\nAs you can see, I’ve lost my sense,\nBewitched by their divine effects.\n\nNo matter how the night might bind,--\nIts dismal ring just cannot match\nThe force to leave it all behind\nAnd passion tempts me to detach.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1947 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-dream": { - "title": "“A Dream”", - "body": "I had a dream of autumn in a half-lit window,\nMy friends and you in their comic play,\nFrom sky as a falcon, gained a victim,\nDescended my heart just on your hand.\n\nBut time went, going older and mute,\nAnd making a silver patina on frames,\nThe garden dawn poured the glass\nWith the bloody tears of september.\n\nBut time went, going older. Lax as the ice,\nThe silk of the arm-chairs crackled,\nAnd suddenly, loud, you stopped silent,\nAnd dream, as a bell ring, had clammed.\n\nI woke up. Dark as the autumn was sunrise,\nAnd wind was carrying rain in a pile\nOf the running straws, as after the cart,\nA row of birches was racing far in the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyudmila Purgina", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "during-the-holy-week": { - "title": "“During the Holy Week”", - "body": "The shades of night are still around.\nSo early is the world that stars\nAre still too numerous to count\nAs each as bright as day came out,\nAnd if the Earth could be allowed,\nThrough Easter she would sleep, no doubt,\nTo readings from the Book of Psalms.\n\nThe shades of night are still around.\nSuch is the early world that still\nThe city square spreads out unbound\nLike an eternity unwound,\nAnd till the dawn and warmth rebound,\nThere’s a millennium to fill.\n\nThe Earth is still stark naked ground;\nNo hint at night of an attire\nTo swing the temple bells and sound\nA footloose backup for the choir.\n\nAnd from the Holy Thursday on,\nUntil the very Easter Eve,\nThe waters drill the banks head-on\nAnd never cease to whirl and weave.\n\nIt is the Passion of Our Lord.\nThe woods, disrobed, in disarray,\nStand silent like a pine cohort\nOf worshippers in need to pray.\n\nIn town, across a tighter space,\nThe naked trees appear to perch\nAs if in conclave as they gaze\nThrough grated windows of the church.\n\nAnd their eyes with fright dilate.\nThey feel a sense of deep unrest.\nThe gardens venture through the grate;\nThe ancient ways of Earth are swayed;\nThey lay Almighty God to rest.\n\nThey see a light by Holy Gate,\nA corporal and candles wait,\nAnd tearful faces of the crowd.\nAt once Procession of the Cross\nComes out behind a holy shroud.\nAnd lest their paths might oddly cross,\nTwo birches move to yield some ground.\n\nAround the yard the faithful tread.\nThen back they march in solemn praise\nAnd bring, as through the porch they’re led,\nThe chat of spring and springtime scent,\nThe air that tastes of holy bread\nWith flavors of the vernal craze.\n\nAnd March flings snowflakes left and right\nAt cripples gathered on the site,\nAs if a man had stepped outside,\nBrought out a shrine and opened wide\nAnd shared till there was nothing left.\n\nAt dusk, the chanting comes out soft:\nThey’ve wept to their hearts’ content,\nYet songs and psalms will still have got\nTo streetlights by an empty lot\nBut won’t be heard around the bend.\n\nThe midnight hushes all at length.\nThe beast and flesh have sensed the quirk\nOf spring and know that with her breath\nThere’ll be a way to conquer death\nBy Resurrection put to work.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yuri Menis", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday", - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-earth": { - "title": "“The Earth”", - "body": "Spring bursts violently\ninto Moscow houses.\nMoths flutter about\ncrawl on summer hats,\nand furs hide secretly.\n\nPots of wallflowers and stock\nstand, in the window, just,\nof wooden second storeys,\nthe rooms breathe liberty,\nthe smell of attics is dust.\n\nThe street is friends\nwith the bleary glass,\nand white night and sunset\nat one, by the river, pass.\n\nIn the passage you’ll know\nwhat’s going on below\nand April’s casual flow\nof words with drops of thaw.\nIt’s a thousand stories veiled\nin a human sadness,\nand twilight along the fence\ngrows chill with the tale.\n\nOutside, or snug at home\nthe same fire and hesitation:\neverywhere air’s unsure.\nThe same cut willow twigs,\nthe same white swell of buds,\nat crossroads, windows above,\nin streets, and workshop-doors.\n\nThen why does the far horizon weep\nin mist, and the soil smell bitter?\nAfter all, it’s my calling, surely,\nto see no distance is lonely,\nand past the town boundary,\nto see that earth doesn’t suffer.\n\nThat’s why in early spring\nwe meet, my friends and I,\nand our evenings are--farewell documents,\nour gatherings are--testaments,\nso the secret stream of suffering\nmay warm the cold of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter France & Jon Stallworthy", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "encounter-with-love": { - "title": "“Encounter with Love”", - "body": "The roads pile up with snow.\nThe roofs have snow galore.\nPerhaps, to stretch I’ll go--\nYou stand outside the door.\n\nAlone. In autumn wear.\nNo hat, no rubber shoes.\nYou feign you do not care--\nYour mouth, though, snowflakes chews.\n\nThe trees and fences steer\nAway into the dark.\nAlone you stand so near\nAs snowfall fills the park.\n\nAnd off your shawl some snow\nDrips down into the cuff.\nYour hair is all aglow\nWith dewdrops hanging tough.\n\nA lock of fairest hair\nIlluminates your face,\nThe figure, shawl and--there,\nThis coat you wear with grace.\n\nYour lashes, too, are wet;\nYour eyes betray unease,\nAnd all of you seems made\nOf one unbroken piece.\n\nAs if an iron pin\nHad dipped in dye in part\nAnd etched you from within\nAcross my throbbing heart.\n\nYour features born contrite\nHad grabbed my heart for good,\nAnd hence I do not mind\nThe world that’s cruel and crude.\n\nAnd hence this snowy night\nThat’s doubled for our sake,\nAnd there is no divide\nBetween us I can make.\n\nBut who are we, from where,\nIf all those years galore\nLeft nothing but hot air,\nYet we are here no more?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yuri Menis", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "eve": { - "title": "“Eve”", - "body": "On shore the trees stand looking on\nWhile midday casts the clouds on bet\nInto the meditative pond\nFor want of any other net.\n\nAnd like a net the sky sinks in\nThe pensively expectant waters\nAnd into it the bathers swim,\nFathers, mothers, sons and daughters.\n\nThen half a dozen girls come out\nWithout a stir among the shoots\nAnd rivulets of water spout\nAs they wring out their bathing suits.\n\nAnd, firing the imagination,\nThe coils of fabric coil and twist\nAs though the serpent of temptation\nHad really marked them for its nest.\n\nO woman, on your looks I dote,\nBut have no mental blanks to fill;\nYou’re like the stricture in a throat\nSeized by an unexpected thrill.\n\nYou seem created as a draft,\nA stanza from another sequence,\nAs if indeed the handicraft\nOf somebody who knew no equals,\n\nMade of my rib while asleep I lay,\nYou broke the clasping arms apart,\nThe very image of dismay,\nA spasm that grips and wrings man’s heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "fairy-tale": { - "title": "“Fairy Tale”", - "body": "Once upon a time,\nSomewhere far away,\nRiding through the steppe,\nA horseman made his way.\n\nThrough the dust, he saw,\nWhile he sped to fight,\nA forest was emerging\nDreary, dark and wide.\n\nHis soul cried out in worry,\nAnd his heart would race:\nTighten up your saddle,\nFear the watering-place.\n\nBut he didn’t listen,\nAnd only gaining speed,\nStraight onto the mound\nHe would lead his steed.\n\nTurning from the barrow,\nTo an barren vale,\nPast the higher ground,\nStraight across the dale.\n\nDown into the furrow\nHe took his horse apace\nWhere the trail led him\nTo a watering-place.\n\nHeedless of the warning,\nQuick to move, he took\nHis horse to drink the water\nFrom the hidden brook.\n\nNear the shallow water,\nWhere he made his way,\nSulfur flames illumined\nThe entrance to a cave.\n\nIn the crimson smoke\nThat shrouded everything,\nWith a distant calling\nThe forest seemed to ring\n\nStraight across the ravine,\nStartled and appalled,\nThe rider walked his horse\nTo the haunting call.\n\nAs he neared, a dragon\nSuddenly appeared.\nThe rider saw its tail\nAnd tightly gripped his spear.\n\nThe dragon breathed out fire\nWith a blinding light,\nThrice around a maiden\nWinding his spine.\n\nThe body of the dragon,\nBending like a whip,\nHeld the maiden’s shoulder\nWith a solid grip.\n\nA beautiful, young maiden,\nBy that county’s customs,\nWas given to the monster\nAs a form of ransom.\n\nThe village folk surrendered\nThis beauty with high hopes\nTo satisfy the serpent\nAnd to protect their homes.\n\nThe monster squeezed her arms\nAnd coiling her throat,\nHe left the victim feeling\nHopeless and distraught.\n\nThe rider, with a prayer,\nGazing at the sky,\nReady for the battle,\nHeld his spear up high.\n\nEyelids tightly shut.\nSummits. Clouded spheres.\nWaters. Fords and rivers.\nCenturies and years.\n\nThe wounded rider lies.\nHis body barely moves.\nThe loyal horse is trampling\nThe dragon with its hooves.\n\nThe dragon’s body’s fallen\nBy the watering-place.\nThe rider is a confounded.\nThe maiden’s in a daze.\n\nThe midday sky is shinning,\nAs azure clouds unfurl.\nWho is she? A princess?\nOr just a peasant girl?\n\nNow, in joyous happiness\nThe soul can’t cease to weep,\nAnd now, unable to resist,\nThe body falls asleep.\n\nNow, his health’s returning\nNow, he’s weak once more.\nFrom the loss of blood,\nHe’s feeling weak and sore.\n\nBut their hearts are beating.\nFirst one, then the other\nComing back to life\nAnd falling back in slumber.\n\nEyelids tightly shut.\nSummits. Clouded spheres.\nWaters. Fords and rivers.\nCenturies and years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "false-alarm": { - "title": "“False Alarm”", - "body": "Old pails and tubs all over\nThe place; from the onset\nThe day is wet and awkward,\nIt drizzles at sunset,\n\nAnd gulping down tears\nThe darkness gives a sigh,\nAt miles away one hears\nSteam train’s lonesome cry,\n\nAn early dusk comes down,\nA sudden blackness falls,\nSmall things are breaking down\nAs always in the fall.\n\nAt midday anguish pierces\nAnd fills the autumn vale\nBy coming from a distance\nA weeper’s howl and wail.\n\nWhen from across the river\nIt’s wafted to my place,\nI see the death and shiver,\nI see it face to face.\n\nI watch it from my cottage\nEach fall, this one again,--\nMy slowly approaching\nInevitable end.\n\nSee: winter swept the barrier\nAnd there, in plain daylight,\nThrough yellow leaves of terror\nIs staring at my life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Natasha Gotskaya", - "date": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "first-frost": { - "title": "“First Frost”", - "body": "Cold morning: the sun blurs,\nPillar of smoky fire.\nAnd I’m indistinct too\nLike a dirty snapshot.\n\nTill it gets through the murk,\nShines on the grassy pond\nThe trees see me poorly\nAcross from the far bank;\n\nA passer-by, recognised\nLate, as he’s plunged in haze.\nFrost wraps gooseflesh, the air\nIs false as thickest rouge.\n\nYou go by paths with rime\nLike matting. The earth breathes\nPotato-stalks, and grows\nCold, unbelievably cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Conquest", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "from-early-dawn-the-thirtieth-of-april": { - "title": "“From Early Dawn the Thirtieth of April”", - "body": "From early dawn the thirtieth of April\nIs given up to children of the town,\nAnd caught in trying on the festive necklace,\nBy dusk it only just is settling down.\n\nLike heaps of squashy berries under muslin\nThe town emerges out of crimson gauze.\nAlong the streets the boulevards are dragging\nTheir twilight with them, like a rank of dwarves.\n\nThe evening world is always eve and blossom,\nBut this one with a sprouting of its own\nFrom May-day anniversaries will flower\nOne day into a commune fully blown.\n\nFor long it will remain a day of shifting,\nPre-festive cleaning, fanciful decor,\nAs once it used to be with Whitsun birches\nOr pan-Athenian fires long before.\n\nJust so they will go on, conveying actors\nTo their assembly points; beat sand; just so\nPull up towards illuminated ledges\nThe plywood boards, the crimson calico.\n\nJust so in threes the sailors briskly walking\nWill skirt the grass in gardens and in parks,\nThe moon at nightfall sink into the pavements\nLike a dead city or a burnt-out hearth.\n\nBut with each year more splendid and more spreading\nThe taut beginning of the rose will bloom,\nMore clearly grow in health and sense of honour,\nSincerity more visibly will loom.\n\nThe living folksongs, customs and traditions\nWill ever spreading, many-petalled lay\nTheir scent on fields and industries and meadows\nFrom early buddings on the first of May,\n\nUntil the full fermented risen spirit\nOf ripened years will shoot up, like the smell\nOf humid centifolia. It will have to\nReveal itself, it cannot help but tell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "garden": { - "title": "“Garden”", - "body": "The drowsy garden scatters insects\nBronze as the ash from braziers blown.\nLevel with me and with my candle,\nHang flowering worlds, their leaves full-grown.\n\nAs into some unheard-of dogma\nI move across into this night,\nWhere a worn poplar age has grizzled\nScreens the moon’s strip of fallow light,\n\nWhere the pond lies, an open secret,\nWhere apple-bloom is surf and sigh,\nAnd where the garden, a lake-dwelling,\nHolds out in front of it the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "gentleness": { - "title": "“Gentleness”", - "body": "With blinding brilliance\nThe evening dawns at seven.\nFrom streets toward awnings\nDarkness marches apace.\nPeople--they are manikins;\nOnly lust and sadness lead\nThem across the universe\nFeeling their way by touch.\nThe heart under the palm\nBetrays with its shuddering\nTension of chase and escape,\nGlimmers of fright and flight.\nFeelings take to liberty\nAnd freedom with ill-ease,\nTearing just like a horse\nAt the bit of its mouthpiece.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "gethsemane": { - "title": "“Gethsemane”", - "body": "The distant stars were shining overhead.\nTheir light was cast upon the curving road.\nThe road was laid around Mount Olivet.\nThe Kedron brook was flowing down below.\n\nThe meadow was cut off right in the middle\nAnd there, the Milky Way came into sight.\nThe grayish olives in their silver glitter\nWould try to climb the sky into the night.\n\nThere was a garden. Slowly, He approached\nAnd leaving His disciples by the wall,\nHe said to them, “Wait here for Me. Keep watch.\nI sense a fatal torment in My soul.”\n\nHe turned away without exasperation,\nAs though from what was borrowed in the past,\nFrom both, supremacy and domination,\nAnd now, He was a mortal, just like us.\n\nThe widespread darkness now appeared to beckon\nInto oblivion, into the barren space.\nThe vastness of the universe was vacant,\nThe Garden was the only living place.\n\nAnd looking at these chasms in the sky,\nSo empty, limitless, He felt a sudden dread.\nSo that the cup of death would pass Him by\nHe begged His Father, wet with blood and sweat.\n\nWith prayer softening the deadly languor,\nHe slowly headed back and saw, appalled,\nAs His disciples, with exhaustion anchored,\nWere sleeping on the grass beside the wall.\n\nHe woke them up in rage: “Almighty deemed\nYou worthy of My presence,--you offend Him.\nThe hour of the Son of Man is here.\nInto the hands of sinners, He’ll surrender.”\n\nJust as He said this, out of nowhere, stormed\nA mob of slaves, and wanderers assembled.\nLights, swords and Judas walking to the front,--\nA traitor’s kiss upon his lips still trembled.\n\nAnd Peter gripped his heavy sword. Unsettled,\nHe cut off someone’s ear in the discord.\nHe hears: “This clash can’t be resolved with metal!\nGood man, I say to you, put down your sword.\n\nOh, do you think My Father wouldn’t send\nThe winged legion to protect Me here?\nThey’d never touch a hair upon My head,--\nWithout a trace, My foes would disappear.\n\nKnow that the book of life has reached that page,\nMore valuable than all the blessings sent.\nWhat’s written in the book cannot be changed,\nThen let it all come true, I say. Amen.\n\nYou see, My time has reached the final hour.\nContinuing, it may alight in gloom.\nThus, in the name of His majestic power,\nAccepting agony, I’ll step into the tomb.\n\nI’ll step into the tomb soon overburdened,\nAnd on the third day, I’ll ascent. into my sight,\nAs though in a procession for my verdict,\nThe centuries will flow out of the night…”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "the-girl": { - "title": "“The Girl”", - "body": "_By a cliff a golden cloud once lingered;\nOn his breast it slept …_\n\nFrom the swing, from the garden, helter-skelter,\nA twig runs up to the glass.\nEnormous, close, with a drop of emerald\nAt the tip of the cluster cast.\n\nThe garden is clouded, lost in confusion,\nIn staggering, teeming fuss.\nThe dear one, as big as the garden, a sister\nBy nature--a second glass!\n\nBut then this twig is brought in a tumbler\nAnd put by the looking-glass;\nWhich wonders:--Who is it that blurs my vision,\nFrom the dull, from the prison-class?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lydia Pasternak Slater", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "hamlet": { - "title": "“Hamlet”", - "body": "The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.\nI am trying, standing in the door,\nTo discover in the distant echoes\nWhat the coming years may hold in store.\n\nThe nocturnal darkness with a thousand\nBinoculars is focused onto me.\nTake away this cup, O Abba Father,\nEverything is possible to Thee.\n\nI am fond of this Thy stubborn project,\nAnd to play my part I am content.\nBut another drama is in progress,\nAnd, this once, O let me be exempt.\n\nBut the plan of action is determined,\nAnd the end irrevocably sealed.\nI am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:\nLife is not a walk across a field.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lydia Pasternak Slater", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - } - } - }, - "illness": { - "title": "“Illness”", - "body": "At dusk you appear, a schoolgirl still,\na schoolgirl. Winter. The sunset a woodsman hacking\nin the forest of hours. I lie back to wait for dusk.\nAt once were hallooing; back and forth we call.\n\nBut the night! A torture chamber, bustling hell.\nCome--if anything could bring you!--see for yourself.\nNight’s your flitting away, your engagement, wedding,\nlast proceedings of a hangman’s court against me.\n\nDo you remember that life, the flakes like doves\nin flock thrusting their breasts against the howling\nand, the tempest swirling them, fiendishly\ndashed to the pavements?\n\nYou ran across the street, winds billowing under us,\na flying carpet--sleds, cries, crystals headlong!\nFor life, inspired by the blizzard, gushed\nlike blood into a crimson cloud.\n\nDo you remember that moment, the hawkers,\nthe tents, the jostling crowd, the coins a puppy’s\nmoist nose? Those bells, encumbered by snow,\ndo you remember their grumbling before the holidays?\n\nAlas. love. I must summon it all.\nWhat can replace you? Pills? Patent medicines?\nFrightened by my bottomless insomnia, sweat-soaked,\nI look sideways from my pillow as with a horse’s eye.\n\nAt dusk you appear, still taking exams.\nIt’s recess: robins flutter, headaches, textbooks.\nBut at night how they clamor for thirst, how glaring\ntheir eyes, the aspirins, the medicine bottles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Theodore Weiss", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-the-hospital": { - "title": "“In the Hospital”", - "body": "They stood almost blocking the pavement and stores,\nAs if scanning the wares in a show window’s glare;\nThe stretcher slid though past the ambulance doors,\nThe medics jumped in; they drove into the square.\n\nAnd passing by sidewalks, by courtyards and gapers,\nThrough tumult and chaos of streets in the night,\nThe rescue squad’s headlights massaged the soft vapors,\nDove into opaqueness devoid of all light.\n\nPolicemen and faces, a bleak alleyway\nFlashed by all agleam as the vehicle sped;\nClutching an atropine phial and a spray,\nThe EMT tech scanned the roof overhead.\n\nRain fell as they bore him to ER reception,\nWhere a querulous drain dripped and slurred.\nLine after line in his dim apperception,\nOn forms for admittance the scribbled words blurred.\n\nThey gave him a cot by the entryway rooms,\nFor the wing was jam-packed with the ill.\nAn iodine reek blew about noxious fumes;\nA breeze from the street touched the window and sill.\n\nOne smidgen of garden, a portion of sky\nWere posed in the window-frame square.\nThe just-arrived patient trained keen avid eye\nOn ward floors and white coats and stair.\n\nBut the soft reverie of his mind unattended\nWas jolted by inquiries the duty nurse made.\nHer head-shaking mien and her glum look portended:\nA sad end to this mess you’re not apt to evade.\n\nThen he gazed out with gratitude flooding his soul\nAt the wall that was gleaming beyond window’s frame.\nOn that wall, as if sparks from bituminous coal,\nDid the lights of the city their message declaim.\n\nIn sunset’s reflection a far gate glowed red,\nThe blaze of a maple tree smoldered, and now\nA long gnarly branch of that tree tossed its head,\nThen sent to the sick man a low farewell bow.\n\n“O Lord” (thought the patient), “how perfect thy ways,\nThy people, and walls and the scope of thy breath;\nThe beds and the parquet, the warmth of thy gaze,\nAnd the black of the city on the night of my death.”\n\n“A sleeping-draught dosage I’ve taken for rest,\nAnd I clutch at my handkerchief, weep;\nO God, all the tears of emotions distressed\nAre blinding my eyes while thy soft face I seek.”\n\n“Faint glimmers on walls make the air radiate,\nIllumining beds and the ward tossed adrift;\nHow sweet is the thought that my self and my fate,\nAll my heartbeats and days are Thy own precious gift.”\n\n“As I fade into death in this hospital bed\nI can sense Thy warm touch while life lingers;\nLike a filigreed ring, with a promise unsaid,\nBlessed hands hold me tight in smooth fingers.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "U. R. Bowie", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - } - } - }, - "in-the-woods": { - "title": "“In the Woods”", - "body": "A lilac heat sickened the meadow;\nhigh in the wood, a cathedral’s sharp, nicked groins.\nNo skeleton obstructed the bodies--\nall was ours, obsequious wax in our fingers …\n\nSuch, the dream: you do not sleep,\nyou only dream you thirst for sleep,\nthat someone elsewhere thirsts for sleep--\ntwo black suns singe his eyelashes.\n\nSunbeams shower and ebb to the flow of iridescent beetles.\nThe dragonfly’s mica whirs on your cheek.\nThe wood fills with meticulous scintillations--\na dial under the clockmaker’s tweezers.\n\nIt seemed we slept to the tick of figures;\nin the acid, amber ether,\nthey set up nicely tested clocks.\nshifted, regulated them to a soprano hair for the heat.\n\nThey shifted them here and there, and snipped at the wheels.\nDay declined on the blue clock-face;\nthey scattered shadows, drilled a void--\nthe darkness was a mast derricked upright.\n\nIt seems a green and brown happiness flits beyond us;\nsleep smothers the woods;\nno elegiacs on the clock’s ticking--\nsleep, it seems, is all this couple is up to.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Lowell", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "indian-summer": { - "title": "“Indian Summer”", - "body": "Leaves of currant feel woven and prickly.\nLaughs inside and the clinking of glass;\nThey are peppering, shredding, and pickling,\nAdding cloves to the mixture, perchance.\n\nAnd the forest, a banterer, hassles\nTo deflect all that noise and takes aim\nAt the hilltop where sun-beaten hazels\nMay seem singed by a campfire flame.\n\nHere the footpath descends to a gully;\nHere one feels for a withered old snag\nAnd for Autumn the Ragman who glumly\nSweeps up into it crumbs he can bag.\n\nAnd one feels for creation that’s simpler\nThan some sages have stubbornly said,\nFor the birches that languish and whimper,\nAnd for all that must come to an end.\n\nWhy blink dumbly--you do know at bottom\nWhat’s ahead has been scorched by the droughts,\nAnd the heavy white smog of the autumn\nWeaves a cobweb to sneak in the house.\n\nThere’s a pass through the fence, for that matter,\nThat could lead to the woods, but so far--\nLaughs inside and a good kitchen chatter;\nLikewise, chatter and laughs from afar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yuri Menis", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "insomnia": { - "title": "“Insomnia”", - "body": "What tune is it? It’s dark. Getting on to three.\nAgain, apparently, I’m not to close my eyes.\nThe village herdsman will crack his whip at dawn.\nCold air will blow in at the window Which overlooks the yard.\nAnd I’m alone.\nNot true. With all\nThe penetrating wave of your white self\nYou’re here with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "George Reavey", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "july": { - "title": "“July”", - "body": "A phantom roams through the house.\nThere are footsteps in upstairs rooms.\nAll day, shades flit through the attic.\nThrough the house a goblin roams.\n\nHe loafs about, gets in the way,\nHe interferes and causes trouble,\nCreeps up to the bed in a dressing gown,\nAnd pulls the cloth off the table.\n\nHe does not wipe his feet at the door,\nBut whirls in with the draft, unseen,\nAnd hurls the curtain to the ceiling\nLike a prima ballerina.\n\nWho can this irritating oaf,\nThis ghost, this phantom be?\nOf course, it is our summer guest,\nOur visitor on the spree.\n\nFor all his little holiday\nWe let him have the whole house.\nJuly with his tempestuous air\nHas rented rooms from us.\n\nJuly, who brings in thistledown\nAnd burs that cling to his clothes;\nJuly, who treats all windows as doors,\nAnd sprinkles his talk with oaths.\n\nUntidy urchin of the steppe,\nSmelling of lime-trees, grass and rye,\nBeet-tops, and fragrant fennel,\nMeadowsweet breath of July.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter France & Jon Stallworthy", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "lets-scatter-our-words": { - "title": "“Let’s scatter our words …”", - "body": "_My friend, you will ask, who ordains\nthat the speech of a blessed fool should burn?_\n\nLet’s scatter our words\nAs the garden scatters amber zest,\nAbsentmindedly and generously\nBit by bit by bit.\n\nLet’s not discuss\nWhy the leaves are patterned\nSo formally\nWith ruby and lemon.\n\nWho welled up with needles\nAnd gushed through the slats,\nThe floodgate blinds,\nOnto the music books in the shelf.\n\nWho dyed the outdoor mat\nWith rowan berries\nLike a canvas of diaphanous,\nTrembling italics.\n\nYou will ask, who ordains\nThat August should be great,\nFor whom is nothing too small,\nWho is absorbed with etching\n\nA maple leaf\nAnd who, from the time of Ecclesiastes,\nHasn’t quit his post\nHewing alabaster?\n\nYou will ask, who ordains\nThat the September lips\nOf asters and dahlias should suffer?\nThat the fine leaves of broom\nShould waft from greying caryatids\nOnto the damp flagstones\nOf autumn hospitals?\n\nYou will ask, who ordains?\n--The all-powerful God of details,\nThe all-powerful God of love,\nOf Jagailos and Jadwigas.\n\nI don’t know if the dark riddle\nOf the tomb has been solved;\nBut life, like autumn\nSilence, is in the details.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "like-a-braziers-bronze-cinders": { - "title": "“Like a brazier’s bronze cinders …”", - "body": "Like a brazier’s bronze cinders,\nthe sleepy garden’s beetles flowing.\nLevel with me, and my candle,\na flowering world is hanging.\n\nAs if into unprecedented faith,\nI cross into this night,\nwhere the poplar’s beaten grey\nveils the moon’s rim from sight.\n\nWhere the pond’s an open secret,\nwhere apple-trees whisper of waves,\nwhere the garden hanging on piles,\nholds the sky before its face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "magdalene": { - "title": "“Magdalene”", - "body": "# I.\n\nEach night my demon drops right in\nTo take more payback for the past.\nThe memories of ugly sin\nReturn and gnaw my tortured heart:\nThose days, a slave to man’s worst whim,\nI’d been a frenzied outcast,\nAnd only streets dared take me in.\n\nWith minutes left, to my chagrin,\nA deathly silence soon ensues.\nAnd yet, before away they spin,\nI’ll break my life of long misuse\nIn front of you, at life’s last rim,\nAs if an alabaster cruse.\n\nOh I would be a sorry sight,\nMy Teacher, Savior, my Fate,\nBut for eternity each night\nAwaiting by the tableside,\nAs well as my next caller might,\nEnsnared in cobwebs of my trade.\n\nBut what is sin--explain to me,\nAnd death, and hell, and sulfur flame,\nIf anyone can plainly see\nThat like an offshoot of a tree,\nI’m one with you in boundless pain.\n\nWhen I, Oh Jesus, prop your feet\nAgainst my lap, I’m all consumed\nBy grief and, swooning, learn the need\nTo hug the canted cross… I’ve leaned\nClose to your body and entreat:\nLord, let me help you be entombed.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHaving festive cleanup at its summit\nMakes for too much bustle--I retreat\nAnd with fragrant ointment from a bucket\nI anoint your holiest of feet.\n\nFeeling round, I cannot find the sandals\nAnd keep crying, blinded to the scene,\nAs my stranded hair in matted tangles\nDrapes my eyes like an impervious screen.\n\nAnd I press your feet against me blindly,\nBathe them, Christ, in tears I have let loose,\nWrap them with a string of beads contritely,\nDrop my hair on top like a burnoose.\n\nI can see the future with precision,\nSuch as if you’d stopped the time in flight.\nAnd I now possess prophetic vision\nThat can match the sybils’ vatic sight.\n\nAs the temple veil descends tomorrow,\nWe will huddle tightly on the side,\nAnd the Earth will sway beneath in sorrow,\nTaking pity on me--hope it might.\n\nThen the guards will turn at someone’s beckon,\nLeading back their horses in a swarm,\nAnd the cross will madly dash to heaven,\nLike a twister born amid a storm.\n\nI will sprawl beneath the cross in frenzy,\nBite my lip, be ravaged by the loss.\nYou will spread your arms for far too many\nFrom the ends of that departing cross.\n\nBut for whom is so much utter vastness,\nSo much hurt and might the world bestows?\nDoes it have the souls and lives to match this?\nDoes it have the rivers, towns, and groves?\n\nSuch three days until then will have happened,\nPushed me down such emptiness and dearth\nThat within that terrifying fragment\nI will lift myself to a rebirth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yuri Menis", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "The sultry sun heats to the seventh sweat.\nThe ravine rages in the frenzy, senseless.\nAs though a cowgirl working in the stead,--\nThe spring is busy, and its chores are endless.\n\nOut in the light, the snow-banks slowly slump,\nTheir bloodless, twig-like veins turn paler still.\nAnd from the farmhouse, life is smoking up,\nThe tines of pitchforks breathe with zest and zeal.\n\nThese nights. These days. These days and nights!\nThe thud of droplets in midday, the spatter\nOf dripping icicles,--what wonderful delight!\nTo hear the sleepless brook’s relentless chatter!\n\nThe cow-stead and the stable,--open everything!\nGray pigeons peck the oats out of the snow,\nAnd from the all-creating and enabling,--\nFrom fresh manure, fresh air begins to flow …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "may-life-be-always-fresh-as-this": { - "title": "“May life be always fresh as this”", - "body": "Dawn shakes the candle, shoots a flame\nTo light the wren and does not miss.\nI search my memories and proclaim:\n“May life be always fresh as this!”\n\nLike a shot dawn rang through the night.\nBang-bang it went. In swooning flight\nThe wads of bullets flame and hiss.\nMay life be always fresh as this.\n\nThe breeze is at the door again.\nAt night he shivered, wanted us.\nHe froze when daybreak came with rain.\nMay life be always fresh as this.\n\nHe is astonishingly queer.\nWhy rudely past the gateman press?\nOf course he saw “No entrance here”\nMay life be always fresh as this.\n\nStill with a handkerchief to shake,\nWhile mistress still, chase all about,--\nWhile yet our darkness does not break.\nWhile yet the flames have not gone out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "mephistopheles": { - "title": "“Mephistopheles”", - "body": "Every Sunday they left a circus of dust behind them,\nas they poured out on the turnpike in stately, overcrowded carriages,\nand the showers found nobody at home,\nand trampled through the bedroom windows.\n\nIt was a custom at these staid Sunday dinners\nto serve courses of rain instead of roastbeef;\non the baroque sideboard, by the Sunday silver,\nthe wind cut corners like a boy on a new bicycle.\n\nUpstairs, the curtain rods whirled, untouched;\nthe curtains roared in salvos to the ceiling.\nOutside the burghers kept losing themselves,\nthey showed up chewing straws by cowponds.\n\nEarlier, when a long cortege of carriages\napproached the city wall,\nthe horses would shy\nfrom the shadows of the Weimar gallows.\n\nThe devil in blood-red stockings with rose rosettes\ndanced along the sunset-watered road--\nhe was as red\nas a boiling lobster.\n\nOne snort of indignation\nwould have ripped the lid of heaven\nfrom the skyline’s low vegetation;\nthe devils ribbons fluttered and danced.\n\nThe carriages swam through his eyes like road signs;\nhe scarcely lifted a finger in greeting.\nHe rolled on his heels, he trembled with laughter,\nhe sidled off hugging Faust, his pupil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Lowell", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "my-trees-its-for-your-stunning-eye": { - "title": "“My trees, it’s for your stunning eye …”", - "body": "My trees, it’s for your stunning eyes,\nBecause of your amazing presence\nThat, for the very first of times,\nI live on Earth and see your essence.\n\nI often think: perhaps, the Lord,\nWhen looking for the color, found\nAnd took it from inside my heart\nAnd dipped His brush to paint your crowns.\n\nIf there’s a friend among my class\nAs intimate as you, my tree-friends,\nHe has the simple grace of grass,\nUncommonness of heights and greenness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Natasha Gotskaya", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "not-like-other-people-not-every-week": { - "title": "“Not like other people, not every week …”", - "body": "Not like other people, not every week,\nNot all the time, in a century but twice,\nI prayed to you: please intelligibly\nReiterate the words of creation.\n\nUnbearable to you are the admixtures\nOf intimacies and people’s slavishness.\nHow could you possibly make me happy?\nWith what would you consume the earth’s salt?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "parting": { - "title": "“Parting”", - "body": "A man is standing in the hall\nHis house not recognizing.\nHer sudden leaving was a flight,\nHerself, maybe, surprising.\n\nThe chaos reigning in the room\nHe does not try to master.\nHis tears and headache hide in gloom\nThe extent of his disaster.\n\nHis ears are ringing all day long\nAs though he has been drinking.\nAnd why is it that all the time\nOf waves he keeps on thinking?\n\nWhen frosty window-panes blank out\nThe world of light and motion,\nDespair and grief are doubly like\nThe desert of the ocean.\n\nShe was as dear to him, as close\nIn all her ways and features,\nAs is the seashore to the wave,\nThe ocean to the beaches.\n\nAs over rushes, after storm\nThe swell of water surges,\nInto the deepness of his soul\nHer memory submerges.\n\nIn years of strife, in times which were\nUnthinkable to live in,\nUpon a wave of destiny\nTo him she had been driven,\n\nThrough countless obstacles, and past\nAll dangers never-ended,\nThe wave had carried, carried her,\nTill close to him she’d landed.\n\nAnd now, so suddenly, she’d left.\nWhat power overrode them?\nThe parting will destroy them both,\nThe grief bone-deep corrode them.\n\nHe looks around him. On the floor\nIn frantic haste she’d scattered\nThe contents of the cupboard, scraps\nOf stuff, her sewing patterns.\n\nHe wanders through deserted rooms\nAnd tidies up for hours;\nTill darkness falls he folds away\nHer things into the drawers;\n\nAnd pricks his finger on a pin\nIn her unfinished sewing,\nAnd sees the whole of her again,\nAnd silent tears come flowing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lydia Pasternak Slater", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - } - } - }, - "pine-trees": { - "title": "“Pine Trees”", - "body": "In grass, among wild balsam,\nDog-dasies and lilies, we lie,\nOur arms thrown back behind us,\nOur faces turned to the sky.\n\nThe grass in the pine-wood ride\nIs impenetrably thick.\nWe look at each other and shift\nA shoulder-blade or a cheek.\n\nAnd there, for a time immortal,\nWe are numbered among the trees\nAnd liberated from aches,\nDisease, and the last disease.\n\nWith deliberate monotony,\nLike blue oil from green eaves,\nThe sky pours down on the ground,\nDappling and staining our sleeves.\n\nWe share the repose of the pines\nTo the ant’s accompaniment,\nInhaling the soporific\nIncense-and-lemon scent.\n\nSo fiercely the fiery trunks\nLeap up against the blue,\nAnd under our resting heads\nSo long our hands rest too,\n\nSo broad our field of vision,\nSo docile all things on all sides,\nThat somewhere beyond the trunks\nI imagine the surge of tides.\n\nThere waves are higher than branches,\nAnd collapsing against the shore\nThey hurl down a hail of shrimps\nFrom the ocean’s turbulent floor.\n\nAnd at evening, the sunset floats\nOn corks behind a trawler\nAnd, shimmering with fish oil\nAnd amber mist, grows smaller.\n\nTwilight descends and slowly\nThe moon hides all trace of day\nBeneath the black magic of water,\nBeneath the white magic of spray.\n\nAnd waves grow louder and higher\nAnd the crowd at the floating café\nSurrounds the pillar whose poster\nIs a blur from far away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Peter France & Jon Stallworthy", - "date": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "snow-is-falling": { - "title": "“Snow is falling”", - "body": "Snow is falling: snow is falling.\nGeranium flowers reach\nfor the blizzard’s small white stars\npast the window’s edge.\n\nSnow is falling, all is lost,\nthe whole world’s streaming past:\nthe flight of steps on the back stairs,\nthe corner where roads cross.\n\nSnow is falling: snow is falling,\nnot snowflakes stealing down,\nSky parachutes to earth instead,\nin his worn dressing gown.\n\nAs if he’s playing hide-and-seek,\nacross the upper landings,\na mad thing, slowly sneaks,\nSky creeps down from the attic.\n\nIt’s all because life won’t wait,\nbefore you know, it’s Christmas here.\nAnd look, in a minute,\nsuddenly it’s New Year.\n\nSnow is falling, deeper--deeper.\nMaybe, with that same stride\nin that same tempo,\nwith that same languor,\nTime’s going by?\n\nYear after year, perhaps,\npassing, as snow’s falling,\nlike words in a poem?\nSnow’s falling: snow’s falling.\nSnow is falling, all is lost--\nthe whitened passers-by,\nleaves’ startled showing,\nthe corners where roads cross.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "soul": { - "title": "“Soul”", - "body": "My mournful soul, you, sorrowing\nFor all my friends around,\nYou have become the burial vault\nOf all those hounded down.\n\nDevoting to their memory\nA verse, embalming them,\nIn torment, broken, lovingly\nLamenting over them,\n\nIn this our mean and selfish time,\nFor conscience and for quest\nYou stand--a columbarium\nTo lay their souls to rest.\n\nThe sum of all their agonies\nHas bowed you to the ground.\nYou smell of dust, of death’s decay,\nOf morgue and burial mound.\n\nMy beggarly, dejected soul,\nYou heard and saw your fill;\nRemembered all and mixed it well,\nAnd ground it like a mill.\n\nContinue pounding and compound\nAll that I witnessed here\nTo graveyard compost, as you did\nFor almost forty years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "sparrow-hills": { - "title": "“Sparrow Hills”", - "body": "A breast kissed wet, as though under a shower!\nBut summer streams do not flow forever,\nAnd we cannot stay on here night after night,\nRaising dust to the accordion’s low drone.\n\nI’ve heard about old age--a frightening prediction!\nNo crashing wave will lift its hands to the stars.\nImagine: they say there is no face in the fields,\nno heart in the pond and, in the forest, no God.\n\nLet your soul break free! The day bubbles like surf.\nIt’s the noontime of the world. Where are your eyes?\nLook: high in the treetops, thought is a simmering mix\nOf woodpeckers, pine cones, heat, needles and clouds.\n\nHere the track of the city trolley ends.\nMachines are barred; pine trees will have to do.\nFrom here on, it’s Sunday--a parting of branches,\nA dash through the meadow and a slide on the grass.\n\nWeaving our steps with sunlight and Whitsunday,\nThe woods insist the world is always like this.\nThe trees believe it; the meadow understands;\nIt pours down from the sky across our laps.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "spring-shower": { - "title": "“Spring Shower”", - "body": "Winked to the birdcherry, gulped amid tears,\nSplashed over carriages’ varnish, trees’ tremble.\nFull moon. The musicians are picking their way\nTo the theatre. More and more people assemble.\n\nPuddles on stone. Like a throat overfilled\nWith tears are the roses, deep with wet scalding\nDiamonds. Showers of gladness thrill,\nEyelashes, stormclouds, and roses enfolding.\n\nThe moon for the first time is casting in plaster\nAn epic poem uncast till today:\nThe cordons, the flutter of dresses, the speaker\nAnd people enraptured and carried away.\n\nWhose is the heart whose whole blood shot to glory\nDrained from the cheeks? We are held in his grip.\nThe hands of Kerensky are squeezing together\nInto a bunch our aortas and lips.\n\nThis is not night, not rain, not a chorus\nOf tearing acclaim for him, swelled to a roar--\nThis is the blinding leap to the Forum\nFrom catacombs wanting an exit before.\n\nIt is not roses, not Ups, not the roaring\nCrowd--it’s the surf on Theatre Square,\nMarking the end of the long sleep of Europe,\nProud of her own reawakening here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Spring, coming in from street, where poplars\nstand amazed, the distance is scared, the houses\nafraid to fall down, the air blue, like a sack\nof clothes carried by a patient leaving a hospital.\n\nWhere the evening is empty, an interrupted tale,\nleft abandoned by a star without continuation\nto the incomprehension of a thousand noisy eyes\nof the homeless and those bereft of expression.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "star-of-the-nativity": { - "title": "“Star of the Nativity”", - "body": "Winter had set in.\nWind blew in from the steppe\nand the child was cold in a dark den\non the slope of a hill.\n\nHe was kept warm by an ox’s breath.\nOther beasts also\nstood in the cave.\nAbove the manger floated a warm haze.\n\nAfter shaking bits of straw and millet\nfrom their thick furs,\nherdsmen gazed sleepily\ninto the midnight distance from a cliff.\n\nFar off lay a snowfield and churchyard,\nfences and headstones,\na plank in a snowdrift,\nand a sky full of stars above the graves.\n\nNearby, unknown until that night,\nmore timid than a candle\nin a watchman’s window,\na star glimmered on the road to Bethlehem.\n\nIt flared up like a dry hayrick, apart\nfrom God and heaven,\nlike an arson’s gleam,\nlike a farm and threshing-floor in flames.\n\nThe new star hung like a blazing stack\nof hay and straw\nat the heart of a world\nunsettled by its very presence.\n\nThe blaze glowed red above the world,\nsignifying something,\nand three stargazers\nraced toward the call of unprecedented fires.\n\nBehind them, camels bore lavish gifts,\nand donkeys in harnesses, each more stunted\nthan the next, trod slowly down the mountain.\n\nAnd all that was yet to come rose up\nin a strange vision of future times:\nall the dreams and thoughts of centuries,\nall worlds, all galleries and museums,\nall antics of fairies, all sorcerers’ spells,\nall Christmas trees and childhood fancies,\nall garlands and flickers of lighted candles,\nall the splendor of bright-colored tinsel…\n(the wind blew ever fiercer from the steppe)\n…and all the apples, the shining ornaments.\n\nPart of a pond lay hidden by alders,\nbut part could clearly be seen from the cliff\nthrough rooks’ high nests and crowns of trees.\nThe herdsmen distinctly saw how donkeys\nand camels were passing along the water.\n\n“Let’s go with the others to witness this miracle,”\nthey said, wrapping themselves in their sheepskins.\n\nShuffling through snow had made them hot.\nAcross the meadow, like sheets of isinglass,\nsets of bare tracks led behind a shack.\nBy blazing starlight, sheepdogs growled\nat the tracks, as they would at flared-up embers.\n\nThat frosty night was like a fairy tale:\nsomeone new would always materialize\non a windswept ridge and join their ranks.\nThe tired dogs, glancing around in fear,\nhuddled together and waited for the worst.\n\nAlong the same road, through the same place,\nangels walked in the thick of the crowd.\nTheir unearthliness had made them invisible,\nyet every step they took left a footprint.\n\nHordes of travelers gathered at the rock face.\nDay was breaking. Cedar trunks emerged.\n\n“And who are you?” Mary asked.\n\n“We are the herdsmen’s tribe and heaven’s envoys.\nWe have come to exalt you with our praise.”\n\n“You cannot all come in.\nSome must wait here.”\n\nAmid the early morning haze, gray as ash,\nshepherds and camel-drivers stamped about,\nthose on foot cursed those on horseback,\nand, at the hand-dug watering trough,\ncamels bellowed and donkeys kicked each other.\n\nDay was breaking. The dawn swept the last\nof the stars from the sky like cinders.\nAnd among the innumerable crowd, only\nthe magi did Mary let into the cave.\n\nHe slept, radiant in his oaken manger\nlike a moonbeam in a tree trunk’s hollow.\nHis sheepskin blanket had been exchanged\nfor donkeys’ lips and oxen’s nostrils.\n\nThe magi stood in the barn-like shadows,\nwhispering yet barely conversing in words.\nSomebody reached out a hand in the dark\nto move one of them to the left of the manger,\nand he glanced at the door: the star, he noticed,\nlike one more guest, was watching the Virgin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Jamie Olson", - "date": { - "year": 1947 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "storm-wind": { - "title": "“Storm-wind”", - "body": "I am finished, but you live on.\nAnd the wind, crying and moaning,\nrocks the house and the clearing,\nnot each pine alone,\nbut all the trees together,\nwith the vast distance, whole,\nlike the hulls of vessels,\nmoored in a bay, storm-blown.\nAnd it shakes them not from mischief,\nand not with an aimless tone,\nbut to find, for you, from its grief,\nthe words of a cradle-song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "sultry-night": { - "title": "“Sultry Night”", - "body": "It drizzled, but not even grasses\nWould bend within the bag of storm;\nDust only gulped its rain in pellets,\nThe iron roof--in powder form.\n\nThe village did not hope for healing.\nDeep as a swoon the poppies yearned\nAmong the rye in inflammation,\nAnd God in fever tossed and turned.\n\nIn all the sleepless, universal,\nThe damp and orphaned latitude,\nThe signs and moans, their posts deserting,\nFled with the whirlwind in pursuit.\n\nBehind them ran blind slanting raindrops\nHard on their heels, and by the fence\nThe wind and dripping branches argued--\nMy heart stood still--at my expense.\n\nI felt this dreadful garden chatter\nWould last forever, since the street\nWould also notice me, and mutter\nWith bushes, rain and window shutter.\n\nNo way to challenge my defeat--\nThey’d argue, talk me off my feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lydia Pasternak Slater", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "summer-day": { - "title": "“Summer Day”", - "body": "With us in springtime, until dawn,\nIn orchards blazing bonfires flame\n--As pagan altars may have shone\nWhen fertile rites received acclaim.\n\nThe virgin soil is dried and baked,\nAnd steaming vapors from it swarm,\nAnd all the earth is fire-caked\nAs are in winter stove-beds warm.\n\nWhen toiling and in earth engrossed,\nMy shirt I strip and throw away,\nWith scorching sun my back is glossed\nAnd baked like some big lump of clay.\n\nAnd standing where the heat’s most hot,\nAnd with my eyes half in a daze,\nFrom head to foot, upon this spot,\nI’m covered with a coat of glaze.\n\nBut when the night invades my room,\nAnd I peep through the windows dimmed,\nAs jugs are filled, so with the bloom\nOf lilac, moisture, I am brimmed.\n\nIt washes off the outer shell\nOf walls’ cooled evening face,\nAnd offers it to any girl,\nBorn here and native of this place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "Athirst for insects, butterflies.\nAnd stains we long had waited,\nAnd round us both were memories\nOf heat, mint, honey plaited.\n\nNo clocks chimed, but the flail rang clear\nFrom dawn to dusk and planted\nIts dreams of stings into the air.\nThe weather was enchanted.\n\nStrolled sunset to its heart’s content,\nThey yielded to cicadas\nAnd stars and trees its government\nOf gardens and of larders.\n\nThe moon in absence, out of sight.\nNot shade but baulks was throwing.\nAnd softly, softly the shy night\nFrom cloud to cloud was flowing.\n\nFrom dream more than from roof, and more\nForgetful than faint-hearted.\nSoft rain was shuffling at the door\nAnd smell of wine-corks spurted.\n\nSo smelt the dust. So smelt the grass\nAnd if we chanced to heed them.\nSmell from the gentry’s teaching was\nOf brotherhood and freedom.\n\nThe councils met in villages;\nWeren’t you with those that held them?\nBright with wood-sorrel hung the days,\nAnd smell of wine-corks filled them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "therell-be-no-one-in-the-house": { - "title": "“There’ll be no one in the house …”", - "body": "There’ll be no one in the house,\nSave for twilight. All alone,\nThe winter day will be aroused\nFrom the curtains left undrawn.\n\nOnly clusters, wet and white,\nFlashing where the wind propels,\nOnly roofs and snow,--besides\nRoofs and snow,--nobody else.\n\nFrost, again, will shade the windows,\nAnd again, they’ll reappear--\nWorries of the prior winter,\nAnd the sadness of last year.\n\nAnd the guilt, that’s yet unpardoned,\nWill be piercing and sustained,\nAnd the fire’s growing hunger\nWill press on the window pane.\n\nSuddenly, disturbed and vexed,\nCurtains will proceed to tremble.\nMarking silence with your steps,\nLike the future, you will enter.\n\nYou’ll appear all of the sudden,\nWearing something plain and white,\nSomething of the very cotton\nUsed to knit the flakes outside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "to-a-friend": { - "title": "“To a Friend”", - "body": "Come, don’t I know that, stumbling against shadows,\nDarkness could never have arrived at light?\nDo I rate happy hundreds over millions\nOf happy men? Am I a monster quite?\n\nIsn’t the Five-Year-Plan a yardstick for me,\nIts rise and fall my own? But I don’t quiz\nIn asking: What shall I do with my thorax\nAnd with what’s slower than inertia is?\n\nThe great Soviet gives to the highest passions\nIn these brave days each one its rightful place,\nYet vainly leaves one vacant for the poet.\nWhen that’s not empty, look for danger’s face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "unapproachable": { - "title": "“Unapproachable”", - "body": "Unapproachable, usually shy,\nYou are now like fire, all burning\nLet me lock your unusual sight\nIn the poem of love I am saying.\n\nLook, how perfectly changed with the lamp\nIs the hovel, and wall, even window\nOur figures are covered with shade\nWhich is gentle like night in the meadow.\n\nYou are sitting, your legs on the ottoman,\nAs the Turks used to sit on the sofa,\nJust the same, is it darkness or light\nYou are looking as if you are so far.\n\nYou are dreaming and stringing the beads\nIt’s a handful that’s rolled on the dress,\nAnd your smile is today very sad\nAnd your talk and your mood are depressed.\n\nLove--the word looks too vulgar today,\nI will think of another alias.\nThe whole world, all the words just for you\nI’ll rename to ruin the barriers.\n\nCan appearance sullen of yours\nShow feelings so deeply are laying\nAnd the light of your beautiful heart,\nAnd the grief that your eyes are containing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Elena Krendel", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "we-were-in-georgia": { - "title": "“We Were in Georgia”", - "body": "We were in Georgia. You can get this land\nIf hell is multiplied by paradise,\nBare indigence by tenderness, and if\nA hothouse serves as pedestal for ice.\n\nAnd then you’ll know what subtle doses of\nSuccess and labor, duty, mountain air\nMake the right mixture with the earth and sky\nFor man to be the way we found him there.\n\nSo that he grew, in famine and defeat\nAnd bondage, to this stature, without fault,\nBecoming thus a model and a mold,\nSomething as stable and as plain as salt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-weeping-garden": { - "title": "“The Weeping Garden”", - "body": "It’s terrible!--all drip and listening.\nWhether, as ever, it’s loneliness,\nsplashing a branch, like lace, on the window,\nor whether perhaps there’s a witness.\n\nChoked there beneath its swollen\nburden--earth’s nostrils, and audibly,\nlike August, far off in the distance,\nmidnight, ripening slow with the fields.\n\nNo sound. No one’s in hiding.\nConfirming its pure desolation,\nit returns to its game--slipping\nfrom roof, to gutter, slides on.\n\nI’ll moisten my lips, listening:\nwhether, as ever, I’m loneliness,\nand ready maybe for weeping,\nor whether perhaps there’s a witness.\n\nBut, silence. No leaves trembling.\nNothing to see: sobs, and cries\nbeing swallowed, slippers splashing,\nbetween them, tears and sighs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "wet-paint": { - "title": "“Wet Paint”", - "body": "I should have seen the sign: “Fresh paint,”\nBut useless to advise\nThe careless soul, and memory’s stained\nWith cheeks, calves, hands, lips, eyes.\n\nMore than all failure, all success,\nI loved you, for your skill\nIn whitening the yellowed world\nAs white cosmetics will.\n\nListen, my dark, my friend: by God,\nAll will grow white somehow,\nWhiter than madness or lamp shades\nOr bandage on a brow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "wild-vines": { - "title": "“Wild Vines”", - "body": "Beneath a willow entwined with ivy,\nwe look for shelter from the bad weather;\none raincoat covers both our shoulders--\nmy fingers rustle like the wild vine around your breasts.\n\nI am wrong. The rain’s stopped.\nNot ivy, but the hair of Dionysus\nhangs from these willows. What am I to do?\nThrow the raincoat under us!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Lowell", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "winter-night": { - "title": "“Winter Night”", - "body": "Snow, snow the whole world over,\nSweeping it, end to end.\nThe candle burned on the table,\nthe candle burned.\n\nLike a crowd of summer midges\nflying to the flame,\ndroves of snowflakes swarmed\nagainst the window pane.\n\nSnow-blasts moulded circles,\narrows on the glass.\nThe candle burned on the table,\nthe candle burned.\n\nAgainst the ceiling’s brightness\ndark shadows falling,\ncrossed ankles, crossed wrists,\ndestinies crossing.\n\nAnd two shoes dropped\nwith a thud to the floor,\nand waxen tears dropped\nfrom candle to dress.\n\nAnd in the grey-white, snowy\ndarkness, all was lost.\nThe candle burned on the table,\nthe candle burned.\n\nA draught from the corner\nblew: temptation’s heat\nraised, like an angel,\na crucifix of wings.\n\nSnow all through February,\nand time and again\nthe candle burned on the table,\nthe candle burned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "the-highest-sickness": { - "title": "“The highest sickness”", - "body": "The shifting riddle glitters,\nthe siege goes on, days go on,\nthe months and years go by.\nOne lovely day, the messengers,\npanting and falling off their feet,\ncame bearing news: the fort had fallen.\nThey believe and don’t believe, set fires,\nblow up the vaults, seek the points of entry,\nthey come and go--the days go by.\nThe months and years go by.\nThe years go by--in shadow.\nIt’s the rebirth of the Trojan epic.\nThey believe and don’t believe, set fires,\nagitate and wait for the break;\nthey falter, go blind--the days go by--\nand the walls of the fort fall apart.\n\nI grow more and more ashamed every day\nthat in an age of shadows\nthe highest sickness escapes censure\nand goes by the name of song.\nIs Sodom the proper name for song\nlearned by ear the hard way,\nthen hurled out of hooks\nonly to be skewered by spears and bayonets?\nHell is paved with good intentions.\nThe current notion is\nthat by paving your poems with them\nyour sins will be forgiven.\nSuch gossip rips the ears of silence\non its way back from the war,\nand these devastating days have shown\nhow taut our hearing’s strung.\n\nIn those turbulent days everyone\nwas infected with a passion for rumors,\nand lice made winter twitch\nlike the ears of spooked horses,\nand all night snowy ears\nrustled quietly in darkness\nwhile we tossed fairy tales back and forth,\nreclining on peppermint cushions.\nIn Spring the upholstery\nof theater boxes was seized with trembling.\nPoverty-stricken February\ngroaned, coughed blood,\nand tiptoed off to whisper\ninto the ears of boxcars\nabout this and that,\nrailroad ties and tracks,\nthe thaw, and babbled on, of troops\nfoot-slogging home from the front.\nYou sleep, waiting for death,\nbut the narrator doesn’t care.\nIn the ladles of thawed galoshes\nthe cloth lice will swallow the lie\ntied to the truth without\nceasing to twitch their ears.\nAlthough the dawn thistle\nkept on chasing its shadow\nand in the same motion\nmade the hour linger;\nalthough, as before, the dirt road\ndragged the wheels over soft white sand\nand spun them onto harder ground\nalongside signs and landmarks;\nalthough the autumn sky was cloudy,\nand the forest appeared distant,\nand the twilight was cold and hazy;\nanyway, it was all a forgery.\nAnd the sleep of the stunned earth\nwas convulsive, like labor pains,\nlike death, like the silence\nof cemeteries, like that unique quiet\nthat blankets the horizon,\nshudders, and beats its brains\nto remember: Hold on, prompt me,\nwhat did I want to say?\n\nAlthough, as before, the ceiling,\ninstalled to support a new cell,\nlugged the second story to the third\nand dragged the fifth to the sixth\nsuggesting by this shift that everything\nwas as it used to be--\nand anyway, it was all a forgery;\nand through the network of water pipes\nrushed the hollow reverberation\nof a dark age; the stench\nof laurel and soybean,\nsmoldering in the flames of newspapers\neven more indigestible than these lines,\nrises into air like a pillar\nas though muttering to itself: Hold on, prompt me,\nwhat did I want to eat?\n\nAnd crept like a famished tapeworm\nfrom the second floor to the third,\nand stole from the fifth to the sixth.\nIt gloried in callousness and regression,\ndeclared tenderness illegal.\nWhat could be done? All sound\ndrowned in the roar of torn skies.\nThe roar passed the railroad platform\nthen vanished beyond the water tower\nand drifted to the end of the forest,\nwhere the hills broke out in rashes,\nwhere snowdrifts\npumped through the pines,\nand the blinded tracks itched\nand rubbed against the blizzard.\n\nAnd against the backdrop of blazing legends,\nthe idiot, the hero, the intellectual\nburned in decrees and posters\nfor the glory of a dark force,\nthat carried them with a grin\naround blind corners, if not\nfor heroic acts, then because two and two\nwon’t add up to a hundred in a day.\nAnd at the rear of blazing legends,\nthe idealist-intellectuals\nwrote and printed posters\non the joys of their twilight.\n\nHuddled in sheepskin, the serf\nlooked back at the darkening north\nwhere snow gave all it had\nto ward off death by twilight.\nThe railroad station glistened\nlike a pipe organ in mirrored ice,\nand groaned with opened eyes.\nAnd its wild beauty quarreled\nwith an empty Conservatory\nshut down for holiday repairs.\nThe insidiously silent typhus\ngripped our knees, and dreamt\nand shuddered as he listened\nand heard the stagnant gushing\nof monotonous remorse.\nThe typhus knew all the gaps in the organ\nand gathered dust in the seams\nof the bellows’ burlap shirts.\nHis well-tuned ears implored\nthe fog, the ice, and the puddles\nsplattered over the earth\nto keep their silence out of the rain.\n\nWe were the music of ice.\nI mean my own crowd--we pledged\nto quit this stage together,\nand I will quit--someday.\nThere is no room left for shame.\nI wasn’t put on this earth\nto gaze three ways into men’s eyes.\nMore insidious than this song\nis the double-crossing word “enemy.”\nI am a guest, and guests all over\nthe world are the highest sickness.\nI wanted to be like everyone else,\nbut our glorious age\nis stronger than my grief\nand tries to mimic me.\n\nWe were the music of cups,\ngone to sip tea in the dark\nof deaf forests, oblique habits,\nand secrets flattering to no one.\nFrosts crackled. Pails hung.\nJackdaws soared and the frostbitten year\nwas ashamed to show up at the gates.\nWe were the music of thought\nand sought to sweep the stairs,\nbut as the cold froze,\nice blurred the passage.\n\nYet I witnessed the Ninth Congress\nof the Soviets1 and, in the raw twilights,\nran from place to place in the city,\ncursing life, cursing the cobblestones,\nand on the second day, the fabled\nday of celebration, went\nto the theater in a frantic mood\nwith a pass to the orchestra pit.\nWhile walking soberly on somber rails\nI glanced around: the entire countryside\nwas a smoldering ash heap,\nstubbornly refusing to rise\noff the railway ties.\nThe Karelian question2 stared\nfrom every poster and raised\nthe question in the eyes of anemic birches.\nThick snow ribboned the crossbars\nof telegraph poles and in the fabric\nof branches the winter day was shutting down,\nnot of its own accord, but in response\nto a command. At that instant,\nlike a moral in a fairy tale,\nthe story of the Congress was revealed:\ntelling again how the fever of genius\nis stronger and whiter than cement.\n(Whoever didn’t help push that pushcart\nshould suffer it in the future.)\nHow suddenly, at the end of a week,\nthe walls of a Citadel arose\nin the blinded eyes of the creator,\nor at least a dwarfish fort.3\n\nThe new feeds the rows of ages,\nbut its golden pie, wolfed down\nbefore tradition can steep the sauce,\nsticks in your throat.\nNow, from a certain distance\nthe trivial details blur,\nthe stereotypical speeches are forgotten.\nTime levels the details\nwhere trivia once prevailed.\nThe farce was not prescribed\nto cure my trials and tribulations.\nAnd yet I have no memory of how\nthe voting went so smoothly.\nI’ve managed to exorcise that day,\nwhen, from the bottom of the sea,4\nthrough a yawning Japanese abyss,\na telegram was able to distinguish\n(what a scholarly deep-sea diver!)\nclasses of octopi from the working classes.\nBut those fire-breathing mountains\nwere beyond the range of its concern.\nThere were countless dumber things to do\nthan classifying Pompeii.\nFor a long time I knew by heart\nthat scandalous telegram\nwe sent the victims of the tragedy\nto soften the roar of Fujiyama\nwith more pabulum from our Trade Unions.\n\nWake up, poet, show your pass.\nYou can’t yawn at a time like this.\nMsta, Ladoga, Sheksna, Lovat.5\nLeap from box seats over the chairs into the pit.\nOnce again from Proclamation Hall,6\nthrough the door that opened southward,\nPeter the Great’s arctic blizzard\nfanned past the lamps.\nAgain the frigate went broadside.\nAgain gulping tidal waves\nthe child of treason and deceit\ndoesn’t recognize its country.\nEverything was drowsing, while\nfrom under the Tsar’s train,\nwith a wild shout,\nhunters’ packs scattered over the ice.\nTradition hid its stature\nbehind the railroad structure,\nunder the railroad bridge.\nThe pullman cars and the veiled\ntwo-headed eagles lingered\nin a black field where the earth\nheaved with the odor of March.\nAt Porkovo, a watery tarpaulin\nbillowed for a hundred nautical miles;\nthe gunpowder factory yawned\nover the long Baltic shore.\n\nAnd the two-headed eagle slowed down,\nand circled the Pskov region\nwhere the ring of anonymous rebellion\nwas tightening.\nIf only they could find a road\nnot marked on maps!\nBut the stock of railroad ties\nchecked on maps was melting fast.\nStill meticulous in crisis\nthey stoked with only the choicest cloth.\nStreams gamboled along the tracks;\nthe future sank in the mud.\nThe circle shrank, the pines thinned out--\ntwo suns met in the window:\none rising over Tosno;\nthe other sinking over Dno.7\n\nHow should I finish my fragment?8\nI remember his turn of phrase\nthat struck at me with a white flame\nlike a whiplash of lightning bolts.\nThe audience rose and with squinting eyes\nscanned the far table\nwhen he grew onto the platform,\ngrew before he reached the stage.\nHe slithered invisibly\nthrough rows of obstacles\nlike a ball of storm\nbolting into a smokeless room.\nThe roar of ovations broke over us\nlike relief, like the explosion\nof a nucleus that has to explode\nin a ring of hurdles and supports.\nAnd he opened his mouth. “We are here\nto remember … the monuments …” What in that moment\ncame to exemplify only him?\n\nHe was--like the thrust of a rapier.\nChasing the stream of his talk\nhe thumbed his vest, planted his heel,\nand hammered his point home.\nHe could have been talking about axle grease\nbut the taut bow of his body\nexuded that naked essence\nwhich tore through the layers of husks.\nBut his naked guttural tones\npunctured our ears with truths\nimplied by the blood of fables:\nhe was their sound reflection.\nEnvious with the envy of ages,\njealous with their singular jealousy,\nhe lorded over their thoughts\nand because of that--over their country.\n\nWhen I saw him there on the stage\nI dwelled endlessly, to no end,\non his authority and right\nto strive from the first person.\n\nFrom the rows of generations\nsomeone steps to the front.\nA genius, bearing the promise of thaws, enters\nand revenges his departure with terror.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Mark Rudman & Bohdan Boychuk", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "a-life-of-fame-is-crude-ambition": { - "title": "“A life of fame is crude ambition …”", - "body": "A life of fame is crude ambition,\nIt’s not what elevates and lifts.\nNo need to archive each revision,\nAnd tremble over manuscripts.\n\nThe goal of art is one’s self-giving,\nAnd not the racket of success.\nTo be a fable with no meaning\nRetold by all is shamefulness.\n\nDon’t imitate--imposture’s tasteless,--\nBut learn to live, so, after all,\nYou’ll draw the love from open spaces\nAnd overhear the future’s call.\n\nAnd leave omissions to be captured\nIn destiny, not text, and strive\nTo mark across the margins chapters\nAnd scenes from an entire life.\n\nAnd dip your body, let it graze\nObscurity and hide your tracks,\nLike countrysides hide in the haze,\nWhere everything appears pitch-black.\n\nLet others trail you to the finish,\nIn step, wherever you have passed.\nBut you, yourself, must not distinguish\nDefeats and victories amassed.\n\nSave face, persistently and wholly,\nAnd never deviate or bend,\nBut be alive, alive and only,\nAlive and only to the end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "banjo-paterson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Banjo Paterson", - "birth": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo_Paterson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "as-long-as-your-eyes-are-blue": { - "title": "“As Long as Your Eyes Are Blue”", - "body": "Wilt thou love me, sweet, when my hair is grey\nAnd my cheeks shall have lost their hue?\nWhen the charms of youth shall have passed away,\nWill your love as of old prove true?\n\nFor the looks may change, and the heart may range,\nAnd the love be no longer fond;\nWilt thou love with truth in the years of youth\nAnd away to the years beyond?\n\nOh, I love you, sweet, for your locks of brown\nAnd the blush on your cheek that lies--\nBut I love you most for the kindly heart\nThat I see in your sweet blue eyes.\n\nFor the eyes are signs of the soul within,\nOf the heart that is leal and true,\nAnd mine own sweetheart, I shall love you still,\nJust as long as your eyes are blue.\n\nFor the locks may bleach, and the cheeks of peach\nMay be reft of their golden hue;\nBut mine own sweetheart, I shall love you still,\nJust as long as your eyes are blue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "clancy-of-the-overflow": { - "title": "“Clancy of the Overflow”", - "body": "I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better\nKnowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,\nHe was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,\nJust “on spec,” addressed as follows, “Clancy, of The Overflow”.\n\nAnd an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,\n(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)\nTwas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:\n“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”\n\nIn my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy\nGone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the Western drovers go;\nAs the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,\nFor the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.\n\nAnd the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him\nIn the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,\nAnd he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,\nAnd at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.\n\nI am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy\nRay of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,\nAnd the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city\nThrough the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all\n\nAnd in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle\nOf the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,\nAnd the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,\nComes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.\n\nAnd the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me\nAs they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,\nWith their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,\nFor townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.\n\nAnd I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,\nLike to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,\nWhile he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal--\nBut I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of “The Overflow”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-man-from-snowy-river": { - "title": "“The Man from Snowy River”", - "body": "There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around\nThat the colt from Old Regret had got away,\nAnd had joined the wild bush horses--he was worth a thousand pound,\nSo all the cracks had gathered to the fray.\nAll the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far\nHad mustered at the homestead overnight,\nFor the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,\nAnd the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.\n\nThere was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,\nThe old man with his hair as white as snow;\nBut few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up--\nHe would go wherever horse and man could go.\nAnd Clancy of the Overflow came down to lend a hand,\nNo better horseman ever held the reins;\nFor never horse could throw him while the saddle girths would stand,\nHe learnt to ride while droving on the plains.\n\nAnd one was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast;\nHe was something like a racehorse undersized,\nWith a touch of Timor pony--three parts thoroughbred at least--\nAnd such as are by mountain horsemen prized.\nHe was hard and tough and wiry--just the sort that won’t say die--\nThere was courage in his quick impatient tread;\nAnd he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye,\nAnd the proud and lofty carriage of his head.\n\nBut still so slight and weedy, one would doubt his power to stay,\nAnd the old man said, “That horse will never do\nFor a long and tiring gallop--lad, you’d better stop away,\nThose hills are far too rough for such as you.”\nSo he waited sad and wistful--only Clancy stood his friend--\n“I think we ought to let him come,” he said;\n“I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end,\nFor both his horse and he are mountain bred.”\n\n“He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,\nWhere the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,\nWhere a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,\nThe man that holds his own is good enough.\nAnd the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,\nWhere the river runs those giant hills between;\nI have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,\nBut nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.”\n\nSo he went; they found the horses by the big mimosa clump,\nThey raced away towards the mountain’s brow,\nAnd the old man gave his orders, “Boys, go at them from the jump,\nNo use to try for fancy riding now.\nAnd, Clancy, you must wheel them, try and wheel them to the right.\nRide boldly, lad, and never fear the spills,\nFor never yet was rider that could keep the mob in sight,\nIf once they gain the shelter of those hills.”\n\nSo Clancy rode to wheel them--he was racing on the wing\nWhere the best and boldest riders take their place,\nAnd he raced his stockhorse past them, and he made the ranges ring\nWith the stockwhip, as he met them face to face.\nThen they halted for a moment, while he swung the dreaded lash,\nBut they saw their well-loved mountain full in view,\nAnd they charged beneath the stockwhip with a sharp and sudden dash,\nAnd off into the mountain scrub they flew.\n\nThen fast the horsemen followed, where the gorges deep and black\nResounded to the thunder of their tread,\nAnd the stockwhips woke the echoes, and they fiercely answered back\nFrom cliffs and crags that beetled overhead.\nAnd upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way,\nWhere Mountain Ash and Kurrajong grew wide;\nAnd the old man muttered fiercely, “We may bid the mob good day,\nNo man can hold them down the other side.”\n\nWhen they reached the mountain’s summit, even Clancy took a pull--\nIt well might make the boldest hold their breath;\nThe wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full\nOf wombat holes, and any slip was death.\nBut the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head,\nAnd he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer,\nAnd he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed,\nWhile the others stood and watched in very fear.\n\nHe sent the flint-stones flying, but the pony kept his feet,\nHe cleared the fallen timbers in his stride,\nAnd the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat--\nIt was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.\nThrough the stringy barks and saplings, on the rough and broken ground,\nDown the hillside at a racing pace he went;\nAnd he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound,\nAt the bottom of that terrible descent.\n\nHe was right among the horses as they climbed the farther hill\nAnd the watchers on the mountain standing mute,\nSaw him ply the stockwhip fiercely; he was right among them still,\nAs he raced across the clearing in pursuit.\nThen they lost him for a moment, where two mountain gullies met\nIn the ranges--but a final glimpse reveals\nOn a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet,\nWith the man from Snowy River at their heels.\n\nAnd he ran them single-handed till their sides were white with foam.\nHe followed like a bloodhound on their track,\nTill they halted cowed and beaten, then he turned their heads for home,\nAnd alone and unassisted brought them back.\nBut his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,\nHe was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur;\nBut his pluck was still undaunted, and his courage fiery hot,\nFor never yet was mountain horse a cur.\n\nAnd down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise\nTheir torn and rugged battlements on high,\nWhere the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze\nAt midnight in the cold and frosty sky,\nAnd where around the Overflow the reed-beds sweep and sway\nTo the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,\nThe man from Snowy River is a household word today,\nAnd the stockmen tell the story of his ride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waltzing-matilda": { - "title": "“Waltzing Matilda”", - "body": "Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabong,\nUnder the shade of a Coolabah tree;\nAnd he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling\n“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”\n\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\nWaltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag--\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\n\nDown came a jumbuck to drink at the waterhole,\nUp jumped the swagman and grabbed him in glee;\nAnd he sang as he stowed him away in his tucker-bag,\n“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.”\n\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\nWaltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag--\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\n\nDown came the squatter a-riding his thoroughbred;\nDown came policemen--one, two, and three.\n“Whose is the jumbuck you’ve got in the tucker-bag?\nYou’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with we.”\n\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\nWaltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag--\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\n\nBut the swagman, he up and he jumped in the waterhole,\nDrowning himself by the Coolabah tree;\nAnd his ghost may be heard as it sings in the billabong\n“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”\n\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.\nWaltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag.\nWho’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "coventry-patmore": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Coventry Patmore", - "birth": { - "year": 1823 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Patmore", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "departure": { - "title": "“Departure”", - "body": "It was not like your great and gracious ways!\nDo you, that have naught other to lament,\nNever, my Love, repent\nOf how, that July afternoon,\nYou went,\nWith sudden, unintelligible phrase,\nAnd frighten’d eye,\nUpon your journey of so many days\nWithout a single kiss, or a good-bye?\nI knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;\nAnd so we sate, within the low sun’s rays,\nYou whispering to me, for your voice was weak,\nYour harrowing praise.\nWell, it was well\nTo hear you such things speak,\nAnd I could tell\nWhat made your eyes a growing gloom of love,\nAs a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.\nAnd it was like your great and gracious ways\nTo turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,\nLifting the luminous, pathetic lash\nTo let the laughter flash,\nWhilst I drew near,\nBecause you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.\nBut all at once to leave me at the last,\nMore at the wonder than the loss aghast,\nWith huddled, unintelligible phrase,\nAnd frighten’d eye,\nAnd go your journey of all days\nWith not one kiss, or a good-bye,\nAnd the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d:\n’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "faint-yet-pursuing": { - "title": "“Faint Yet Pursuing”", - "body": "Heroic Good, target for which the young\nDream in their dreams that every bow is strung,\nAnd, missing, sigh\nUnfruitful, or as disbelievers die,\nThee having miss’d, I will not so revolt,\nBut lowlier shoot my bolt,\nAnd lowlier still, if still I may not reach,\nAnd my proud stomach teach\nThat less than highest is good, and may be high.\nAnd even walk in life’s uneven way,\nThough to have dreamt of flight and not to fly\nBe strange and sad,\nIs not a boon that’s given to all who pray.\nIf this I had\nI’d envy none!\nNay, trod I straight for one\nYear, month or week,\nShould Heaven withdraw, and Satan me amerce\nOf power and joy, still would I seek\nAnother victory with a like reverse;\nBecause the good of victory does not die,\nAs dies the failure’s curse,\nAnd what we have to gain\nIs, not one battle, but a weary life’s campaign.\nYet meaner lot being sent\nShould more than me content;\nYea, if I lie\nAmong vile shards, though born for silver wings,\nIn the strong flight and feathers gold\nOf whatsoever heavenward mounts and sings\nI must by admiration so comply\nThat there I should my own delight behold.\nYea, though I sin each day times seven,\nAnd dare not lift the fearfullest eyes to Heaven,\nThanks must I give\nBecause that seven times are not eight or nine,\nAnd that my darkness is all mine,\nAnd that I live\nWithin this oak-shade one more minute even,\nHearing the winds their Maker magnify.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "loves-reality": { - "title": "“Love’s Reality”", - "body": "I walk, I trust, with open eyes;\nI’ve travelled half my worldly course;\nAnd in the way behind me lies\nMuch vanity and some remorse;\nI’ve lived to feel how pride may part\nSpirits, tho’ matched like hand and glove;\nI’ve blushed for love’s abode, the heart;\nBut have not disbelieved in love;\nNor unto love, sole mortal thing\nOr worth immortal, done the wrong\nTo count it, with the rest that sing,\nUnworthy of a serious song;\nAnd love is my reward: for now,\nWhen most of dead’ning time complain,\nThe myrtle blooms upon my brow,\nIts odour quickens all my brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-toys": { - "title": "“The Toys”", - "body": "My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes\nAnd moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,\nHaving my law the seventh time disobey’d,\nI struck him, and dismiss’d\nWith hard words and unkiss’d,\nHis Mother, who was patient, being dead.\nThen, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,\nI visited his bed,\nBut found him slumbering deep,\nWith darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet\nFrom his late sobbing wet.\nAnd I, with moan,\nKissing away his tears, left others of my own;\nFor, on a table drawn beside his head,\nHe had put, within his reach,\nA box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,\nA piece of glass abraded by the beach\nAnd six or seven shells,\nA bottle with bluebells\nAnd two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,\nTo comfort his sad heart.\nSo when that night I pray’d\nTo God, I wept, and said:\nAh, when at last we lie with tranced breath,\nNot vexing Thee in death,\nAnd Thou rememberest of what toys\nWe made our joys,\nHow weakly understood\nThy great commanded good,\nThen, fatherly not less\nThan I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,\nThou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,\n“I will be sorry for their childishness.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "octavio-paz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Octavio Paz", - "birth": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1998 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "mexican", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇲🇽", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavio_Paz", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "mexican" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "in-her-splendor-islanded": { - "title": "“In her splendor islanded …”", - "body": "In her splendor islanded\nThis woman burning like a charm of jewels\nAn army terrifying and asleep\nThis woman lying within the night\nLike clear water lying on closed eyes\nIn a tree’s shadow\nA waterfall halted halfway in its flight\nA rapid narrow river suddenly frozen\nAt the foot of a great and seamless rock\nAt the foot of a mountain\nShe is lake-water in April as she lies\nIn her depths binding poplar and eucalyptus\nFishes or stars burning between her thighs\nShadow of birds scarcely hiding her sex\nHer breasts two still villages under a peaceful sky\nThis woman lying here like a white stone\nLike water in the moon in a dead crater\nNot a sound in the night not moss nor sand\nOnly the slow budding of my words\nAt the ear of water at the ear of flesh\nUnhurried running\nAnd clear memorial\nHere is the moment burning and returned\nDrowning itself in itself and never consumed", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Muriel Rukeyser", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-street": { - "title": "“The Street”", - "body": "Here is a long and silent street.\nI walk in blackness and I stumble and fall\nand rise, and I walk blind, my feet\ntrampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.\nSomeone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:\nif I slow down, he slows;\nif I run, he runs\nI turn:\nnobody.\n\nEverything dark and doorless,\nonly my steps aware of me,\nI turning and turning among these corners\nwhich lead forever to the street\nwhere nobody waits for, nobody follows me,\nwhere I pursue a man who stumbles\nand rises and says when he sees me:\nnobody.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Muriel Rukeyser" - } - } - } - }, - "charles-peguy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Péguy", - "birth": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Péguy", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "freedom": { - "title": "“Freedom”", - "body": "_God speaks:_\n\nWhen you love someone, you love him as he is.\nI alone am perfect.\nIt is probably for that reason\nThat I know what perfection is\nAnd that I demand less perfection of those poor people.\nI know how difficult it is.\nAnd how often, when they are struggling in their trials,\nHow often do I wish and am I tempted to put my hand under their stomachs\nIn order to hold them up with my big hand\nJust like a father teaching his son how to swim\nIn the current of the river\nAnd who is divided between two ways of thinking.\nFor on the one hand, if he holds him up all the time and if he holds him too much,\nThe child will depend on this and will never learn how to swim.\nBut if he doesn’t hold him up just at the right moment\nThat child is bound to swallow more water than is healthy for him.\nIn the same way, when I teach them how to swim amid their trials\nI too am divided by two ways of thinking.\nBecause if I am always holding them up, if I hold them up too often,\nThey will never learn how to swim by themselves.\nBut if I don’t hold them up just at the right moment,\nPerhaps those poor children will swallow more water than is healthy for them.\nSuch is the difficulty, and it is a great one.\nAnd such is the doubleness itself, the two faces of the problem.\nOn the one hand, they must work out their salvation for themselves. That is the rule.\nIt allows of no exception. Otherwise it would not be interesting. They would not be men.\nNow I want them to be manly, to be men, and to win by themselves\nTheir spurs of knighthood.\nOn the other hand, they must not swallow more water than is healthy for them,\nHaving made a dive into the ingratitude of sin.\nSuch is the mystery of man’s freedom, says God,\nAnd the mystery of my government towards him and towards his freedom.\nIf I hold him up too much, he is no longer free\nAnd if I don’t hold him up sufficiently, I am endangering his salvation.\nTwo goods in a sense almost equally precious.\nFor salvation is of infinite price.\nBut what kind of salvation would a salvation be that was not free?\nWhat would you call it?\nWe want that salvation to be acquired by himself,\nHimself, man. To be procured by himself.\nTo come, in a sense, from himself. Such is the secret,\nSuch is the mystery of man’s freedom.\nSuch is the price we set on man’s freedom.\nBecause I myself am free, says God, and I have created man in my own image and likeness.\nSuch is the mystery, such the secret, such the price\nOf all freedom.\nThat freedom of that creature is the most beautiful reflection in this world\nOf the Creator’s freedom. That is why we are so attached to it,\nAnd set a proper price on it.\nA salvation that was not free, that was not, that did not come from a free man could in no wise be attractive to us. What would it amount to?\nWhat would it mean?\nWhat interest would such a salvation have to offer?\nA beatitude of slaves, a salvation of slaves, a slavish beatitude, how do you expect me to interested in that kind of thing? Does one care to be loved by slaves?\nIf it were only a matter of proving my might, my might has no need of those slaves, my might is well enough known, it is sufficiently known that I am the Almighty.\nMy might is manifest enough in all matter and in all events.\nMy might is manifest enough in the sands of the sea and in the stars of heaven.\nIt is not questioned, it is known, it is manifest enough in inanimate creation.\nIt is manifest enough in the government,\nIn the very event that is man.\nBut in my creation which is endued with life, says God, I wanted something more.\nInfinitely better. Infinitely more. For I wanted that freedom.\nI created that very freedom. There are several degrees to my throne.\nWhen you once have known what it is to be loved freely, submission no longer has any taste.\nAll the prostrations in the world\nAre not worth the beautiful upright attitude of a free man as he kneels. All the submission, all the dejection in the world\nAre not equal in value to the soaring up point,\nThe beautiful straight soaring up of one single invocation\nFrom a love that is free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "a-little-hope": { - "title": "“A Little Hope”", - "body": "I am, God says, Master of three virtues.\n\nFaith is a faithful spouse.\nCharity is a mother burning with devotion.\nBut hope is a very small girl.\nI am, God says, Master of three virtues.\nCharity is she who extends herself over the centuries.\nBut my little hope\nis the one who each morning\nsays Good Day to us.\n\nI am, God says, Master of three virtues.\n\nFaith it is who keeps watch down the ages;\nCharity it is who keeps watch down the ages.\nBut little hope it is\nwho goes to bed every evening,\nand who gets up each morning,\nhaving slept soundly through the night.\n\nI am, God says, the Master of Three Virtues.\n\nFaith is a soldier, a captain who defends a fortress.\nA town belonging to the King,\nOn the marches of Gascony, on the marches of Lorraine.\nCharity is a doctor, a Little Sister of the poor,\nWho nurses the sick, who nurses the wounded,\nThe poor subjects of the King,\nOn the marches of Gascony, on the marches of Lorraine.\nBut it is my little hope\nWho says good-day to the poor man and the orphan.\n\nI am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.\n\nFaith is a church, a cathedral rooted in the soil of France\nCharity is a hospital, an alms-house which gathers up wretchedness of the world.\nBut without hope it would be nothing but a cemetery.\n\nI am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.\n\nIt is Faith who watches through centuries of centuries.\nIt is Charity who watches through centuries of centuries.\nBut it is my little hope\nwho lies down every evening\nand gets up every morning\nand really has very good nights.\n\nI am, God says, the Lord of that virtue.\n\nIt is my little hope\nwho goes to sleep every evening,\nin her child’s bed,\nafter having said a good prayer,\nand who wakes every morning and gets up\nand says her prayers with new attention.\n\nI am, God says, Lord of the Three Virtues.\n\nFaith is a great tree, an oak rooted in the heart of France,\nAnd under the wings of that tree,\nCharity, my daughter Charity shelters all the distress of the world.\nAnd my little hope is only that little promise of a bud which shows itself at the very beginning of April.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "the-passion-of-our-lady": { - "title": "“The Passion of Our Lady”", - "body": "For the past three days she had been wandering, and following.\nShe followed the people.\nShe followed the events.\nShe seemed to be following a funeral.\nBut it was a living man’s funeral.--\nShe followed like a follower.\nLike a servant.\nLike a weeper at a Roman funeral.--\nAs if it had been her only occupation.\nTo weep.--\nThat is what he had done to his mother.\nSince the day when he had begun his mission.--\nYou saw her everywhere.\nWith the people and a little apart from the people.\nUnder the porticoes, under the arcades, in drafty places.\nIn the temples, in the palaces.\nIn the streets.\nIn the yards and in the back-yards.\nAnd she had also gone up to Calvary.\nShe too had climbed up Calvary.\nA very steep hill.\nAnd she did not even feel that she was walking.\nShe did not even feel that her feet were carrying her.--\nShe too had gone up her Calvary.\nShe too had gone up and up\nIn the general confusion, lagging a little behind …\nShe wept and wept under a big linen veil.\nA big blue veil …\nA little faded.--\n\n\nShe wept as it will never be granted to a woman to weep.\nAs it will never be asked\nOf a woman to weep on this earth.\nNever at any time.--\nWhat was very strange was that everyone respected her.\nPeople greatly respect the parents of the condemned.\nThey even said: Poor woman.\nAnd at the same time they struck at her son.\nBecause man is like that.--\nThe world is like that.\nMen are what they are and you never can change them.\nShe did not know that, on the contrary, he had come to change man.\nThat he had come to change the world.\nShe followed and wept.\nEverybody respected her.\nEverybody pitied her.\nThey said: Poor woman.\nBecause they weren’t perhaps really bad.\nThey weren’t bad at heart.\nThey fulfilled the Scriptures.--\nThey honored, respected and admired her grief.\nThey didn’t make her go away, they pushed her back only a little with special attentions\nBecause she was the mother of the condemned.\nThey thought: It’s the family of the condemned.\nThey even said so in a low voice.\nThey said it among themselves\nWith a secret admiration.--\nShe followed and wept, and didn’t understand very well.\nBut she understood quite well that the government was against her boy.\nAnd that is a very bad business.--\nShe understood that all the governments were together against her boy.\nThe government of the Jews and the government of the Romans.\nThe government of judges and the government of priests.\nThe government of soldiers and the government of parsons.\nHe could never get out of it.\nCertainly not.--\nWhat was strange was that all derision was heaped on him.\nNot on her at all.--\nThere was only respect for her.\nFor her grief.--\nThey didn’t insult her.\nOn the contrary.\nPeople even refrained from looking at her too much.\nAll the more to respect her.\nSo she too had gone up.\nGone up with everybody else.\nUp to the very top of the hill.\nWithout even being aware of it.\nHer legs had carried her and she did not even know it.\nShe too had made the Way of the Cross.\nThe fourteen stations of the Way of the Cross.\nWere there fourteen stations?\nWere there really fourteen stations?--\nShe didn’t know for sure.\nShe couldn’t remember.\nYet she had not missed one.\nShe was sure of that.\nBut you can always make a mistake.\nIn moments like that your head swims.\nEverybody was against him.\nEverybody wanted him to die.\nIt is strange.\nPeople who are not usually together.\nThe government and the people.\nThat was awful luck.\nWhen you have someone for you and someone against you, sometimes you can get out of it.\nYou can scramble out of it.\nBut he wouldn’t.\nCertainly he wouldn’t.\nWhen you have everyone against you.\nBut what had he done to everyone?\n\nI’ll tell you.\nHe had saved the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "prayer-of-confidence": { - "title": "“Prayer of Confidence”", - "body": "When we sit down at the cross formed by two ways\nAnd must choose regret along with remorse\nAnd dual fate forces us to pick one course\nAnd the keystone of two arches fixes our gaze,\n\nYou alone, mistress of the secret, attest\nTo the downward slope where one road goes.\nYou know the other path that our steps chose,\nAs one chooses the cedar for a chest.\n\nAnd not through virtue, which we don’t possess.\nAnd not for duty, which we do not love.\nBut, as carpenters find the center of\nA board, to seek the center of wretchedness,\n\nAnd to approach the axis of distress,\nAnd for the dumb need to feel the whole curse,\nAnd to do whats harder and to suffer worse,\nAnd to take the blow in all its fulness.\n\nThrough that sleight-of-hand, that very artfulness,\nWhich will never make us happy anymore,\nLet us, o queen, at least preserve our honor,\nAnd along with it our simple tenderness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "the-surrender-of-sleep": { - "title": "“The Surrender of Sleep”", - "body": "# I.\n\nChildren don’t even think about being tired.\nThey run like little puppies. They make the trip twenty times.\nAnd, consequently, twenty times more than they needed to.\nWhat does it matter to them. They know well that at night\n(But they don’t even think about it)\nThey will fall asleep\nIn their bed or even at the table\nAnd that sleep is the end of everything.\nThis is their secret, that is the secret to being indefatigable.\nIndefatigable as children.\nIndefatigable like the child Hope.\nAnd always to start over again in the morning.\nChildren can’t walk, but they really know how to run.\nThe child doesn’t even think, doesn’t know that he’ll sleep at night.\nThat he’ll fall asleep at night. And yet it’s this sleep\nAlways at hand, always available, always present,\nAlways underneath, in full reserve,\nThat of yesterday, and that of tomorrow, like good food for one’s being,\nLike a strengthening of being, like a reservoir of being,\nThat’s inexhaustible. Always there.\nThat of this morning and that of this evening\nThat strengthens his legs.\nThe sleep from before, the sleep from after\nIt’s this same bottomless sleep\nAs continuous as being itself\nWhich passes from night to night, from one night to the next, which continues from one night to the next\nBy passing over the days\nLeaving the days as days, like so many holes.\nIt’s in this same sleep that children bury their whole being\nWhich maintains, which creates for them every day new legs,\nTheir brand new legs.\nAnd also that which is in their new legs: new souls.\nTheir new souls, their fresh souls.\nFresh in the morning, fresh at noon, fresh in the evening.\nFresh like the roses of France.\nTheir souls with the undrooping collars. This is the secret to being indefatigable.\nJust sleep. Why don’t people make use of it.\nI’ve given this secret to everyone, says God, I haven’t sold it.\nHe who sleeps well, lives well. He who sleeps, prays.\n(He who works, prays too. But there’s time for everything. Both for sleep and for work.\nWork and sleep are like two brothers. And they get on very well together.\nAnd sleep leads to work just like work leads to sleep.\nHe who works well sleeps well, he who sleeps well works well.)\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere must be, says God, some relationship,\nThere must be something going on\nBetween the kingdom of France and this little Hope.\nThere’s some secret there. They work too well together. And yet they tell me\nThat, there are men who don’t sleep.\nI don’t like the man who doesn’t sleep, says God.\nSleep is the friend of man.\nSleep is the friend of God.\nSleep may be my most beautiful creation.\nAnd I too rested on the seventh day.\nHe whose heart is pure, sleeps. And he who sleeps has a pure heart.\nThis is the great secret to being as indefatigable as a child.\nTo have that strength in your legs that a child has.\nThose new legs, those new souls\nAnd to start over every morning, always new,\nLike the young, like the new\nHope. Yes, they tell me that there are men\nWho work well and who sleep poorly.\nWho don’t sleep. What a lack of confidence in me.\nIt’s almost worse than if they worked poorly but slept well.\nThan if they worked but didn’t sleep, because sloth\nIs no worse a sin than anxiety\nIn fact, it’s even a less serious than anxiety\nAnd than despair and than a lack of confidence in me.\nI’m not talking, says God, about those men\nWho don’t work and who don’t sleep.\nThose men are sinners, it goes without saying. They get what they had\ncoming to them. Great sinners. All they have to do is work.\nI’m talking about those who work and who don’t sleep.\nI pity them. I’m talking about those who work, and who thus\nIn doing this are following my commandment, poor children.\nAnd who, on the other hand, don’t have the courage, don’t have the confidence, don’t sleep.\nI pity them. I hold it against them. A bit. They don’t trust me.\nAs a child lays innocently in his mother’s arms, thus do they not lay.\nInnocently in the arms of my Providence.\nThey have the courage to work. They don’t have the courage to do nothing.\nThey possess the virtue of work. They don’t possess the virtue of doing nothing.\nOf relaxing. Of resting. Of sleeping.\nUnhappy people, they don’t know what’s good.\nThey look after their affairs well during the day.\nBut they don’t want to give them to me to look after during the night.\nAs if I weren’t capable of looking after them for one night.\nHe who doesn’t sleep is unfaithful to Hope.\nAnd that’s the greatest infidelity.\nBecause it’s an infidelity to the greatest Faith.\nPoor children, they manage their affairs wisely during the day.\nBut, come nightfall, they can’t resolve\nThey can’t resign themselves to entrust their affairs to my wisdom\nThey can’t allow me to govern their affairs for the space of one night.\nTo take over the management and government of their affairs.\nAs if I weren’t capable, I suppose, of looking after them a bit.\nOf watching over them.\nOf managing and governing and all the rest.\nI manage plenty of other affairs, poor people, I govern creation, surely that’s more difficult.\nMaybe you could, without much loss, leave your affairs in my hands, wise men.\nSurely I am as wise as you are.\nPerhaps you could hand them over to me for the space of a night.\nWhile you sleep\nAt least\nAnd maybe tomorrow morning you won’t find them too badly damaged.\nMaybe tomorrow morning they won’t be any worse off.\nI’m probably still capable of guiding them a bit.\nI’m talking of those who work\nAnd who in this follow my commandment.\nAnd who don’t sleep, and who in this\nReject all that’s good in my creation,\nSleep, all that I have created good\nAnd who reject all the same my same commandment.\nWhat ingratitude these poor children have toward me\nTo reject such a good,\nSuch a beautiful commandment.\nThese poor children are following human wisdom.\nHuman wisdom says Never put off till tomorrow\nWhat you can do today.\nWhereas I tell you He who can put off till tomorrow\nIs he who is most pleasing to God.\nHe who sleeps like a child\nIs he, too, who sleeps like my precious Hope.\nAnd I tell you Put off till tomorrow\nThose concerns and those worries that are eating at you today\nAnd that might devour you today.\nPut off till tomorrow those sobs that choke you\nWhen you see today’s misery.\nThose sobs that rise in you and strangle you.\nPut off till tomorrow those tears that fill your eyes and cover your face.\nThat flood you. That fall down your cheeks. Those tears flowing from your eyes.\nBecause between today and tomorrow, I, God may have passed by.\nHuman wisdom says: Cursed is he who puts off till tomorrow.\nAnd I say Happy, happy is he who puts off till tomorrow.\nHappy is he who puts off. Which means Happy is he who hopes. And who sleeps.\nAnd I say on the contrary Cursed.\nCursed is he who lies awake and doesn’t trust me. What a mistrusting\nof me. Cursed is he who lies awake.\nAnd who drags.\nCursed is he who drags through the evenings and through the nights.\nThrough the eve of evening and through the fall of night.\nLike a snail’s trail across these beautiful eves.\nMy creatures.\nLike a slug’s trail across these beautiful nightfalls.\nMy creatures, my creation.\nThe thick remembrances of daily cares.\nThe burning, the gnawing.\nThe dirty tracks of our cares, the bitterness and the anxieties.\nThe sorrows.\nThe trails of slugs. Upon the flowers of my night.\nTruly I tell you that this offends\nMy precious Hope.\nWho wouldn’t want to entrust me with the supervision of his night.\nAs if I hadn’t proven myself.\nWho wouldn’t want to entrust me with the supervision of one of his nights.\nAs if I were asking for more than one.\nWho, having surrendered his affairs in poor condition when he went to bed,\nHas not found them well when he woke up.\nBecause I may have paid him a visit.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAs the sea is the reservoir of water so night is the reservoir of being.\nIt’s the time that I’ve reserved for myself. No matter what these feverish days may do.\nAs in the open sea, in the middle of the night, they bathe in the fullness of night.\nIt’s they that are scattered, it’s they that are fragmented.\nThe days are the Sporades Islands and night is the open sea\nUpon which St. Paul sailed\nAnd the border that descends from night to day\nIs always a rising border\nA steep border, and the border that rises from the day toward the night\nIs always a descending border. In the depths of night.\nO night, my finest invention, my most noble creation of all.\nMy most beautiful creature. Creature of the greatest Hope.\nYou give the most substance of Hope.\nYou are the instrument, you are the very substance and the dwelling-place of Hope.\nAnd also, (and thus), you are ultimately the creature of the greatest\nCharity.\nBecause it’s you who gently rock the whole of Creation\nInto a restoring Sleep.\nAs one lays a child in his little bed,\nAs his mother lays him down and as his mother tucks him in\nAd kisses him (She’s not afraid of waking him up.\nHe’s sleeping so soundly.)\nAs his mother tucks him in and laughs and kisses his forehead\nFor pleasure.\nAnd he too laughs, he laughs in response while sleeping.\nSo too, o night, dark-eyed mother, universal mother,\nNot only mother of children (it’s so easy)\nBut even mother of men and of women, which is so difficult,\nIt’s you, night, who put to bed the whole of Creation\nIn a bed of a few hours\n(Awaiting.) In a bed of a few hours\nImage, feeble image, and promise and prefiguration of the bed of every hour.\nAnticipated realization. Promise kept in advance\nAwaiting the bed of every hour.\nIn which I, the Father, will lay my creation.\nO Night, you are night. And all the days together\nWill never be day, they will never be anything but several days.\nScattered. The days will never be anything but flashes.\nUncertain flashes, and you, night, you are my great somber light.\nI congratulate myself for having made night. The days are isles and islands.\nThat pierce and split the sea.\nBut they have to rest in the deep sea.\nThey’re forced to.\nAnd you too, days, you’re forced to as well.\nYou have to rest in the deep night.\nAnd you, night, you are the deep sea\nUpon which St. Paul sailed, not that little lake in Galilee.\nAl the days are nothing but members\nDismembered members. It’s the days that emerge, but even so they have to be anchored in the deep water.\nIn the deep night. Night, my finest invention, it’s you who calm, it’s you who soothe, it’s you who bring rest\nTo aching limbs\nAll out of joint from the days work.\nIt’s you who calm, it’s you who soothe, it’s you who bring rest\nTo aching hearts\nTo bruised bodies, to limbs bruised from work, to hearts bruised from work\nAnd from daily cares and sorrow.\nO Night, o my daughter Night, the most religious of all my daughters\nThe most reverent.\nOf all my daughters, of all my creatures, the most abandoned into my hands.\nYou glorify me in the Sleep even more than your Brother, Day, glorifies me in Work.\nBecause in work man only glorifies me by his work.\nWhereas in sleep it is I who glorify myself by man’s surrender.\nAnd it’s more certain, and I know better how to go about it.\nNight, you are for man a more nourishing food than bread and wine.\nBecause the man who eats and drinks, if he doesn’t sleep, will not profit from his nourishment.\nAnd it will sour and upset his stomach.\nBut if he sleeps, the bread and wine will become his flesh and blood.\nFor working. For praying. For sleeping.\nNight, you alone dress wounds.\nAching hearts. All out of joint. All torn.\nO my dark-eyed daughter, of all my daughters you alone are, and can call yourself, my accomplice.\nYou are in league with me, because you and me, me through you,\nTogether we cause man to fall into the trap of my arms\nAnd we take him a bit by surprise.\nBut one takes what one can get. If anyone knows, it’s me.\nNight, you are the beautiful creation\nOf my wisdom.\nNight, o my daughter Night, o my silent daughter\nAt Rebecca’s well, at the well of the Samaritan woman\nIt’s you who draw the deepest water\nFrom the deepest well\nO night who gently rocks all creatures\nInto a restoring sleep.\nO night who bathes all wounds\nIn the only fresh water and in the only deep water\nAt Rebecca’s well, drawn from the deepest well.\nFriend of children, friend and sister to the young Hope\nO night who dresses all wounds\nAt the well of the Samaritan woman, you who draw, from the deepest well,\nThe deepest prayer.\nO night, o my daughter Night, you who know how to keep silent, o\nmy daughter of the beautiful mantle.\nYou who confer rest and forgetfulness. You how issue a healing balm,\nAnd silence, and shadow\nO my starry night, I created you first.\nYou who send to sleep, you who already enshroud in an eternal\nDarkness,\nAll of my most restless creatures,\nThe fiery steed, the industrious ant,\nAnd man, that monster of unrest.\nNight you succeed in quieting man\nThat well of unrest.\nBy himself more restless than all of creation put together.\nMan, that well of anxiety.\nJust as you quiet the water in the well.\nO my night with the glorious dress\nYou gather children and the young Hope\nInto the folds of your dress\nThough men resist you.\nO my beautiful night, I created you first.\nAnd practically before first\nO silent one, draped with veils\nYou who descend on earth as a foretaste\nYou who scatter by hand, who pour out over the earth\nAn initial peace\nForerunner of eternal peace.\nAn initial rest\nForerunner of eternal rest.\nAn initial soothing balm, an initial beatitude\nForerunner of eternal beatitude.\nYou who soothe, you who embalm, you who console.\nYou who bind wounds and injured limbs.\nYou who silence hearts, you who quiet bodies\nWho still aching hearts, aching bodies,\nWrought with pain,\nWorn-out limbs, backs broken\nWith weariness, with care, with (mortal) anxieties,\nWith sorrow,\nYou who administer balm to throats torn with bitterness\nA cooling balm\nO my noble-hearted daughter, I created you first\nPractically before first, my great-bosomed daughter\nAs I knew well what I was doing.\nSurely, I knew what I was doing.\nYou who lay the child in his mother’s arms\nThe child, brightened with a shadow of sleep\nLaughing inwardly, laughing secretly because of his confidence in his mother.\nAnd in me,\nLaughing secretly out of the corner of his serious mouth\nYou who lay the child, inwardly bursting, overflowing with innocence\nAnd with confidence\nIn the arms of his mother\nYou who used to lay the child Jesus every night\nIn the arms of the Most Holy and Immaculate one.\nYou who are the turn-sister of hope.\nO my daughter, first among all. You who even succeed,\nYou who occasionally succeed,\nYou who lay man in the arms of my Providence\nMy maternal Providence\nO my daughter, glittering and dark, I salute you\nYou who restore, you who nourish, you who give rest\nO silence of darkness\nSuch a silence reigned before the creation of anxiety.\nBefore the beginning of the reign of anxiety\nSuch a silence will reign, now a silence of light,\nWhen all this anxiety will have been consummated,\nWhen all this anxiety will have been exhausted.\nWhey they will have drawn all the water from the well.\nAfter the consummation, after the exhaustion of all this anxiety\nMan’s anxiety.\nThus, my daughter, you come early and you come late\nFor in this reign of anxiety you recall, you commemorate, you practically reestablish,\nYou practically recommence the former Serenity that existed\nWhen my spirit brooded over the waters.\nBut, my starry daughter, my daughter of the dark mantle, you are also very much ahead of your time, you are also precocious.\nFor you announce, for you represent, for you practically commence in advance, every night,\nMy great Serenity of light\nEternal.\nNight, you are holy; Night, you are great; Night, you are beautiful.\nNight of the great mantle.\nNight, I love you and I salute you and I glorify you and you are my\ngreat daughter and my creature.\nO beautiful night, night of the great mantle, my daughter of the starry mantle\nYou remind me, myself, you remind me of the great silence that existed\nBefore I had unlocked the firmament of ingratitude.\nAnd you proclaim, even to me, you herald to me the silence that will exist\nAfter the end of man’s reign, when I will have reclaimed my scepter.\nAnd sometimes I think about it ahead of time, because this man really makes a lot of noise.\nBut above all, Night, you remind me of that night.\nAnd I will remember it eternally.\nThe ninth hour had sounded. It was in the country of my people of Israel.\nIt was all over. That enormous adventure.\nFrom the sixth hour to the ninth hour there had been a darkness\ncovering the entire countryside.\nEverything was finished. Let’s not talk about it anymore. It hurts me to think about it.\nMy son’s incredible descent among men.\nInto their midst.\nWhen you think of what they made of him.\nThose thirty years that he was a carpenter among men.\nThose three years that he was a sort of preacher among men.\nA priest.\nThose three days when he fell victim to men.\nAmong men.\nThose three nights when he was dead in the midst of men.\nDead among the dead.\nThrough the centuries of centuries that he’s been a host among men.\nThis incredible adventure was finished.\nThe adventure that has tied my hands, God, for all eternity.\nThe adventure by which my Son has tied my hands.\nTying the hands of my justice eternally, untying the hands of my\nmercy for eternally.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "eve": { - "title": "“Ève”", - "body": "_Jesus speaks:_\n\nO my Mother buried beyond the first garden,\nYou no longer know of the kingdom of grace,\nFrom the basin and spring to the high starlit place,\nAnd the virgin sun that unveiled the first morning.\n\nAnd the twists and the turns of the deer and the hind\nWinding and unwinding in their friendly chase\nAnd the sprints and the leaps that eventually end\nAnd the celebration of their eternal race.\n\nAnd the honoring of their original worth\nAnd the resting of their hooves on the carpet blest,\nAnd the laying of the two beauties on the earth,\nWhich serenely welcomed their most languorous rest.\n\nAnd the rising rapture of the childlike gazelle\nLacing and unlacing his wandering trace,\nGalloping and trotting and ending his chase,\nAnd the salutation of his spirit vernal.\n\nAnd the navigation of the goat and the roe\nThe crossing and curling of their audacious road.\nAnd the sudden ascent to some immense plateau\nAnd the salutation of their spacious abode.\n\nAnd all these spinning ones and all these weaving ones\nTying and untying their knotted silk fiber,\nAmid the golden stars and wavy spiral arms,\nThe Great Bear circled all around the Little Bear.\n\nAnd these inventors and these embroiderers\nAmid winding mazes of their organic lace.\nAnd the fine surveyors from among these menders\nWere rounding the corners of a hexahedron’s face.\n\nA dawning creation without a single care\nTurning and returning to the curves of the orb.\nAnd the nut and the acorn the pome and the sorb\nUnder the teeth sweeter than the plum and the pear.\n\nYou remember no more the soft soil maternal\nIts lush breasts exciting the many rising ears,\nAnd your breed nursing from the numerous udders\nAnd a chaste nature born from a body carnal.\n\nYou remember no more the soil all sable,\nNor the silence the shade and the white grape cluster,\nNor the ocean of wheat and weight of the table,\nAnd the days of pleasure trailing one another.\n\nYou remember no more this plain in the summer,\nNor the oats and the rye and their overflowing,\nNor the vine and trellis and the flowers growing,\nAnd the days of pleasure trailing one another.\n\nYou remember no more this dirt like a wellspring,\nWhich goes dull by the dint of being nourishing;\nYou remember no more the green vine flourishing,\nAnd the amber wheat that shot up for your offspring.\n\nYou remember no more the tree red with apples\nThat bends under the weight at the harvest season;\nYou remember no more in front of your chapel\nThe youthful wheat springing right up for your children.\n\nWhat since that dread day has become the sucking slime\nWas then both a fulsome and a compliant soil;\nAnd the Lady Wisdom and great King Solomon\nWould not have divided the man from the angel.\n\nWhat since that sad day has become the broken sum\nWas obtained without a total or addition;\nLady Wisdom sitting on the Hill of Zion\nWas no angel saving man from his destruction.\n\nYou remember neither this wide sweeping grassland,\nNor the secret ravine with the sharp slopes rising,\nNor the changing canvas of deep shadows falling.\nNor the valley sides as rich as fine porcelain.\n\nYou remember no more the gold seasons crowning\nDancing the same rhythm while still keeping the rhyme;\nYou remember no more the thrill of the springtime,\nAnd the deeper sway of the cold seasons frowning.\n\nYou remember no more the bright dawning flowers\nFlowing from the summits in rich drenching showers;\nYou remember no more the depths of the arcade,\nAnd from the cypress tops the well-awarded shade.\n\nYou remember no more all the new years rising\nSinging like a choir that summits the aeon.\nYou remember no more the start of the season\nThe chaste entwining of the sisters embracing.\n\nYou remember no more the seasons well aligned\nEqual and happy at the times of the ebbing;\nYou remember no more the springtime returning\nThe seasons unfolding and straightened within time.\n\nYou remember no more the seasons returning\nSharing an equal joy in a frisson of time;\nYou remember no more the coming of springtime\nThe lithe winding of the seasons diverting.\n\nYou remember no more, one pole to the other\nThe earth rocking gently as a pretty cradle;\nAnd the harsh withdrawal and the sudden departure\nOf a young season that perished from betrayal.\n\nYou remember no more, one pole to the other\nThe earth sailing smoothly as a fine three-master;\nAnd renunciation, and the harsh departure\nOf the season that dies from the frosty weather.\n\nYou remember no more, one pole to the other,\nThe earth balanced as well as a mighty tower;\nAnd the cold diversion and the ivory pallor\nOf an old season that dies now and forever.\n\nWhat since elder days has become an endless toil\nWas then the nectar of the rich and fertile soil.\nAnd no one understood the dread ancestral woe.\nAnd no one put their hand to the crook and the hoe.\n\nWhat since elder days has become a painful death\nWas only a normal and tranquil departure.\nHappiness pressed on man with every joyful breath.\nThe embarking was like leaving a sweet harbor.\n\nHappiness flowed like some ale over a spillway,\nThe soul was a still pond of deepening silence.\nThe rising sun made a glowing golden monstrance\nAnd reverberated in a bright silver day.\n\nThe censor made vapors like a sweet-smelling balm\nAnd the red cedars were rising like barricades.\nAnd the days of rapture were growing colonnades.\nAnd all things were at rest in the grey evening calm.\n\nAnd the wide earth was but a vast altar of peace.\nAnd the ripe fruit always ready on the tall trees,\nAnd the long days were scribed on the tombs of marble\nIn all they were but a splendid serving table.\n\nAnd the wide earth was but a vast sylvan courtyard.\nAnd the fruit all piled at the bottom of the trees,\nAnd the days aligned down through the marble ages\nIn all they were but a sweet blooming orchard.\n\nAnd the wide earth was but a tone garden of herbs.\nAnd man was here at home while the pretty buds flowered,\nAnd man respected by all the beasts and their herds\nAn amicable and benevolent shepherd.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nBoth resting and leaning onto His creation.\nAnd with a love that was loyal yet paternal\nWas then nourished by its homage and libation.\n\nAnd God Himself alone holy and eternal\nHad weighed the planet on his merciful balance.\nAnd then considered with a regard paternal\nThe man of his image and of his resemblance.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nSaw the inception of a new flowering age.\nAnd the Father watching with a gaze paternal\nThe world brought together as a humble village.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nMeditated on the splitting of night and day.\nAnd he contemplated with a gaze paternal\nThe world timbered from wood into a fine chalet.\n\nAnd God Himself one youthful yet eternal\nMeasuring all kairos and the plentiful age;\nFatherly considered with a gaze paternal\nThe world circumscribed like a beautiful village.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nMade plans for going on a trip and the return.\nAnd the Father watching with a gaze paternal\nThe world gathered around like an enormous burgh.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nStarted calculating the extent of the years.\nAnd constantly watching with a gaze paternal\nThe seasons’ crown passing among the four sisters.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nSaw the beginning of the chora and kairos.\nAnd calmly looking down with a gaze paternal\nSaw the reflection of God on its countenance.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nSaw the beginning of the chora and kairos.\nAnd quietly watching with a gaze paternal,\nSaw the perfect image of God in every locus.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nSaw the beginning of kairos and the cosmos.\nFatherly considered with a gaze paternal,\nThat the world is fading and a thing that passes.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nSaw the first budding of a garden that says yes.\nThis Florist regarded with a gaze paternal\nThe blooming of a world putting on its best dress.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nMarveled at the scale of the great sprawling spaces.\nHe then considered with a gaze paternal,\nThe relaxation of a world in its paces.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nA spectator watching the games of a young age.\nLooking quietly with a gaze paternal,\nHe considered himself in man’s mirror image\n\nAnd God Himself youthful holy and eternal\nLaughed indulgently at the wishes of youth.\nPrudently He then watched with a gaze paternal,\nThe world all dressed up in its own birthday suit.\n\nAnd God Himself youthful holy and eternal\nLooked at how the children of the primal age are.\nWatching impartially with a gaze paternal\nThe world sailing along a beautiful seashore.\n\nAnd God Himself youthful holy and eternal\nCounted on his one hand the number of infants.\nCautiously he watched with a gaze paternal\nThe younger girl who was the last of the twins.\n\nAnd God Himself youthful holy and eternal\nNoticed the playing of children with their rattles.\nCautiously he watched with a gaze paternal\nLike a mother leans on the sides of two cradles.\n\nGod Himself leaning then over love eternal\nNoticed her flourish in their little dwellings.\nAnd Fatherly he saw with a love maternal\nIt doubly shared between the two beautiful twins.\n\nGod himself bending then over love solemnly\nNoticed her flourish in the two little dwellings.\nAnd Fatherly he saw the love joyfully\nBeing spoken between the two beautiful twins.\n\nGod Himself bent over the flower eternal\nWatching her blooming at the tips of the new stems.\nAnd God himself leaning on a love fraternal\nWatched her germinating in the hearts of the twins.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of the laughter of the age\nImpartially he watched with a gaze paternal\nThe world grouped together on a beautiful stage.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of the weeping of the age.\nImpartially he watched with a gaze paternal\nThe world embarking on a golden pilgrimage.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of the crying of the age.\nImpartially he watched with a gaze paternal\nThe world sailing away on an ocean voyage\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of the kissing of the day.\nImpartially he watched with a gaze paternal\nThe world raising anchor and sailing far away.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of bold and careless thinking.\nHe watched anxiously and with a gaze paternal\nThe world sailing to the threshold of a sinking.\n\nAnd God Himself holy youthful yet eternal\nWatched the beginning of the advancing of age.\nWith a look always young and always paternal\nHe saw the beginning of a world growing sage.\n\nAnd God Himself holy thoughtful and eternal\nConsidered all his work and found it a wonder.\nFrom the first diamond to the final black cinder,\nHe enveloped it all with a gaze paternal.\n\nAnd God himself holy blessed and eternal\nConsidered all his work and found it to be good\nAnd that he was perfect and there was no falsehood\nAnd it unfolded in an order paternal.\n\nAnd the creation was like a mighty tower\nThat rises high above as an immense palace.\nAnd kairos and chora provided the passage.\nAnd the days of pleasure were like a sweet bower.\n\nAnd the fidelities were strong as a tower.\nAnd kairos and chora were waiting like footmen\nAnd kairos and chora protected the deadline.\nAnd the fidelities were not a fin’amor.\n\nA God Himself holy, author and eternal\nConsidered all his work and found it a wonder.\nFrom the apple blossom to the thistle flower,\nHe enveloped everything with a gaze paternal.\n\nA God Himself holy, august and eternal\nSaw only decency and a love filial.\nAnd the world of spirit and the world temporal\nWas before his true eyes a temple lilial.\n\nA God Himself holy, father and eternal\nSaw everywhere his sons and the sons of his sons.\nAnd the fields of meslin, beside the fields of maize\nWere before his eyes as the cloth of the altar.\n\nA God Himself holy, youthful yet eternal\nSaw then the universe as a boundless legacy.\nA world without offense, a world without mercy\nDeveloping the folds of an order formal.\n\nA new God Himself one, holy and eternal\nSaw then the inception of youthful novelty.\nFatherly watching with a gaze paternal\nHe beheld the real Form of emerging beauty.\n\nA good God well-meaning, holy and eternal\nConsidered his work and then found it to be pure.\nA cultivating God, economic and real\nHe saw the rye yellow and thought it was mature.\n\nA fair statuesque God, holy and eternal\nConsidered his work and thought it was beautiful.\nFrom the first fold and to the final crucible\nThere was one asylum equal and fraternal.\n\nYou remember no more this bright coat of rapture\nThrown over the shoulders for the world’s blessedness,\nAnd this river and this flood and this genesis,\nAnd gentle submission to the rules of honor.\n\nYou remember no more this cloak of tenderness\nThrown over the whole soul and this cape of honor.\nYou no longer experienced this chaste caress\nAnd gentle submission to the rules of rapture.\n\nYou remember no more this bright coat of goodness\nThrown upon a whole world and this benevolence,\nAnd this multitude and the ancient excellence,\nAnd this cool solitude and this honest firmness.\n\nYou remember no more this satin coat of grace\nThrown upon the people and in great joyfulness\nAn entire world swollen with the same tenderness\nFrom the close-cropped surface to the final terrace.\n\nYou remember no more this august wedding feast,\nAnd the sap and the blood purer than morning dew.\nThe young soul had put on her snowy bridal dress,\nAnd the whole earth inhaled the lavender and rue.\n\nAnd the young man’s body was then very chaste\nAnd the regard of man was a fathomless pool.\nAnd the pleasure of man was then so vast\nAnd the goodness of man was like a priceless jewel.\n\nYou remember no more the innocence of earth\nThe storehouse crowded to the front of the portal.\nYou remember no more this wild breed giving birth\nAnd the meadows streaming with the immense cattle.\n\nYou remember no more the austere destiny.\nYou remember no more the revitalized earth\nYou remember no more the passion clandestine.\nYou remember no more the deeply covered earth.\n\nYou remember no more the wheat a vast blanket\nAnd the sheaves rising to assault the granaries.\nYou remember no more the tireless grapevines.\nAnd the clusters mounting to assault the basket.\n\nYou remember no more the enduring footsteps,\nAnd the harvest rising in flight like some insects.\nThe grape harvest rising to assault the baskets.\nThe shoes of the pickers left some sandy footprints.\n\nYou remember no more the yawning cistern,\nAnd the harvest rising to assault the millstone.\nYou remember no more the one wandering soul\nAnd the suspicious steps on the paths through the shoal.\n\nYou remember no more the everlasting days,\nAnd the grapes rising up to assault the vintner.\nAnd the trellis rising to assault the farmer.\nAnd the sumptuous steps on the sandy pathways.\n\nYou remember no more the involuntary corn,\nYou have known nothing but poor and futile plowing.\nYou have known nothing but poor and futile loving.\nYou have only known the dour worldly scorn.\n\nYou remember no more corn unforgettable.\nYou have known nothing but the harvested seasons.\nAnd from the hills of the dying evergreen trees\nYou saw the starting of the days implacable.\n\nYou only remember cisterns leaking,\nAnd the meager pastures and the meager plowing.\nAnd the meager measures and the meager loving.\nAnd the highest plateau of the cedars rotting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "saint-john-perse": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint-John Perse", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1975 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-John_Perse", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "anabasis": { - "title": "“Anabasis”", - "body": "We shall not dwell forever in these yellow lands, our pleasance …\nThe Summer vaster than the Empire hangs over the tables of space several terraces of climate. The huge earth rolls on its surface over-flowing its pale embers under the ashes--Sulphur colour, honey colour, colour of immortal things, the whole grassy earth-taking light from the green sponge of a lonely tree the sky draws its violet juices.\nA place of stone of quartz! Not a pure grain in the wind’s barbs. And light like oil.--From the crack of my eye to the level of the hills I join myself, I know the stones gillstained, the swarms of silence in the hives of light; and my heart gives heed to a family of crickets …\nMilk camels, gentle beneath the shears, sewn with mauve scars, let the hills march from under the facts of the harvest sky--let them march in silence over the pale incandescence of the plain; and kneeling at last, in the fantasy of dreams, there where the peoples annihilate themselves in the dead powder of earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-book": { - "title": "“The Book”", - "body": "And then what a wail in the mouth of the hearth,\na night of long rains on their march toward the city,\nstirred in your heart the obscure birth of speech:\n“… Of a luminous exile--and more distant already\nthan the storm that is rolling--how can I, O Lord,\nkeep the ways that you opened?”\n“… Will you leave me only this confusion of evening--having,\nfor so long a day, nourished me on the salt of your solitude,”\n“witness of our silences, of your shadow, and of the great blasts of your voice?”\n\n--Thus you lamented in the confusion of evening.\nBut sitting by the window opposite the stretch of wall\nacross the way, having failed to resuscitate the lost splendor,\nyou would open the Book, and letting your worn finger\nwander among the prophecies, your gaze far away,\nyou awaited the moment of departure,\nthe rising of the great wind that would suddenly tear you away,\nlike the typhoon, parting the clouds before your waiting eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "nocturne": { - "title": "“Nocturne”", - "body": "Now! they are ripe, these fruits of a jealous fate.\nFrom our dream grown, on our blood fed, and haunting the purple of our nights,\nthey are the fruits of long concern,\nthey are the fruits of long desire,\nthey were our most secret accomplices and, often verging upon avowal,\ndrew us to their ends out of the abyss of our nights …\nPraise to the first dawn, now they are ripe and beneath the purple,\nthese fruits of an imperious fate.\n--We do not find our liking here.\n\nSun of being, betrayal!\nWhere was the fraud, where was the offense?\nWhere was the fault and where the flaw, and the error, which is the error?\nShall we trace the theme back to its birth?\nShall we relive the fever and the torment? …\nMajesty of the rose, we are not among your adepts: our blood\ngoes to what is bitterer, our care to what is more severe,\nour roads are uncertain, and eep is the night out of which our gods are torn.\nDog roses and black briars populate for us the shore of shipwreck.\n\nNow they are ripening, these fruits of another shore:\n“Sun of being, shield me!”--turncoat’s words.\nAnd those who have seen him pass will say: who was that man, and which his home?\nDid he go alone at dawn to show the purple of this nights? …\nSun of being, Prince and Master? our works are scattered,\nour tasks without honor and our grain without harvest:\nthe binder of sheaves awaits, at the evening’s ebb.\n--Behold, they are dyed with our blood, these fruits of a stormy fate.\n\nAt the gait of a binder of sheaves life goes, without hatred or ransom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "My horse stopped under the tree full of doves,\nI whistle so pure that there are no promises\nto their banks that all these rivers keep.\nLiving leaves in the morning are the image of glory …\n\nAnd it is not that a man is not sad, but rising before\ndaybreak and standing cautiously in the trade of an old tree,\nleaning from the chin to the last star, he sees in the depths\nof the sky great pure things which turn to pleasure.\n\nMy horse stopped under the cooing tree, I whistle a purer whistle …\nAnd peace to those who are about to die, who have not seen this day.\nBut from my brother the poet, we had news.\nHe wrote one more very sweet thing. And some knew about it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "written-on-the-door": { - "title": "“Written on the Door”", - "body": "I have a skin the colour of mules or of red tobacco,\nI have a hat made of the pith of the elder covered with white linen.\nMy pride is that my daughter should be very-beautiful when she gives orders to the black women,\nmy joy, that she should have a very-white arm among her black hens;\nand that she should not be ashamed of my rough, hairy cheek when I come home covered with mud.\n\nAnd first I give her my whip, my gourd, and my hat.\nSmiling she forgives me my dripping face; and lifts to her face my hands, oily\nfrom testing the cacao seed and the coffee bean.\nAnd then she brings me a rustling bandanna; and my woollen robe; pure water to rinse my mouth of few words:\nand the water for my washbasin is there; and I can hear the running water in the water-cabin.\n\nA man is hard, his daughter, tender. Let her always be waiting,\nwhen he returns, on the topmost step of the white house,\nand, freeing his horse from the pressure of his knees,\nhe will forget the fever that draws all the skin of his face inward.\n\nI also love my dogs, the call of my finest horse,\nand to see at the end of the straight avenue my cat coming out of the house accompanied by the monkey …\nall things sufficient to keep me from envying the sails of the sailing ships\nwhich I see on a level with the tin roof on the sea like a sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "fernando-pessoa": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Fernando Pessoa", - "birth": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1935 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "portuguese", - "language": "portuguese", - "flag": "🇵🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "portuguese" - ], - "n_poems": 38 - }, - "poems": { - "as-she-passes": { - "title": "“As She Passes”", - "body": "When I am sitting at the window,\nThrough the panes, which the snow blurs,\nI see the lovely images, hers, as\nShe passes … passes … passes by …\n\nOver me grief has thrown its veil:--\nLess a creature in this world\nAnd one more angel in the sky.\n\nWhen I am sitting at the window,\nThrough the panes, which the snow blurs,\nI think I see the image, hers,\nThat’s not now passing … not passing by …", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "as-a-bad-orator-badly-oer-book-skilled": { - "title": "“As a bad orator, badly o’er-book-skilled …”", - "body": "As a bad orator, badly o’er-book-skilled,\nDoth overflow his purpose with made heat,\nAnd, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed\nWhat should have been an inner instinct’s feat;\nOr as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,\nLacking the subtler music in his measure,\nWith useless care labours but to be spurned,\nCourting in alien speech the Muse’s pleasure;\nI study how to love or how to hate,\nEstranged by consciousness from sentiment,\nWith a thought feeling forced to be sedate\nEven when the feeling’s nature is violent;\n As who would learn to swim without the river,\n When nearest to the trick, as far as ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "as-the-lone-frighted-user-of-a-night-road": { - "title": "“As the lone, frighted user of a night-road …”", - "body": "As the lone, frighted user of a night-road\nSuddenly turns round, nothing to detect,\nYet on his fear’s sense keepeth still the load\nOf that brink-nothing he doth but suspect;\nAnd the cold terror moves to him more near\nOf something that from nothing casts a spell,\nThat, when he moves, to fright more is not there,\nAnd’s only visible when invisible\nSo I upon the world turn round in thought,\nAnd nothing viewing do no courage take,\nBut my more terror, from no seen cause got,\nTo that felt corporate emptiness forsake,\n And draw my sense of mystery’s horror from\n Seeing no mystery’s mystery alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "as-to-a-child-i-talked-my-heart-asleep": { - "title": "“As to a child, I talked my heart asleep …”", - "body": "As to a child, I talked my heart asleep\nWith empty promise of the coming day,\nAnd it slept rather for my words made sleep\nThan from a thought of what their sense did say.\nFor did it care for sense, would it not wake\nAnd question closer to the morrow’s pleasure?\nWould it not edge nearer my words, to take\nThe promise in the meting of its measure?\nSo, if it slept, ’twas that it cared but for\nThe present sleepy use of promised joy,\nThanking the fruit but for the forecome flower\nWhich the less active senses best enjoy.\n Thus with deceit do I detain the heart\n Of which deceit’s self knows itself a part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "beauty-and-love-let-no-one-separate": { - "title": "“Beauty and love let no one separate …”", - "body": "Beauty and love let no one separate,\nWhom exact Nature did to each other fit,\nGiving to Beauty love as finishing fate\nAnd to Love beauty as true colour of it.\nLet he but friend be who the soul finds fair,\nBut let none love outside the body’s thought,\nSo the seen couple’s togetherness shall bear\nTruth to the beauty each in the other sought.\nI could but love thee out of mockery\nOf love and thee and mine own ugliness;\nTherefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee,\nThanking the Gods I long not out of place,\n Lest, like a slave that for kings’ robes doth long,\n Obtained, shall with mere wearing do them wrong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "even-as-upon-a-low-and-cloud-domed-day": { - "title": "“Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day …”", - "body": "Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,\nWhen clouds are one cloud till the horizon,\nOur thinking senses deem the sun away\nAnd say “’tis sunless” and “there is no sun”;\nAnd yet the very day they wrong truth by\nIs of the unseen sun’s effluent essence,\nThe very words do give themselves the lie,\nThe very thought of absence comes from presence:\nEven so deem we through Good of what is evil.\nHe speaks of light that speaks of absent light,\nAnd absent god, becoming present devil,\nIs still the absent god by essence’ right.\n The withdrawn cause by being withdrawn doth get\n (Being thereby cause still) the denied effect.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "good-i-have-done-my-heart-weighs-i-am-sad": { - "title": "“Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.”", - "body": "Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.\nThe outer day, void statue of lit blue,\nIs altogether outward, other, glad\nAt mere being not-I (so my aches construe).\nI, that have failed in everything, bewail\nNothing this hour but that I have bewailed,\nFor in the general fate what is’t to fail?\nWhy, fate being past for Fate, ’tis but to have failed.\nWhatever hap-or stop, what matters it,\nSith to the mattering our will bringeth nought?\nWith the higher trifling let us world our wit,\nConscious that, if we do’t, that was the lot\n The regular stars bound us to, when they stood\n Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "happy-the-maimed-the-halt-the-mad-the-blind": { - "title": "“Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind …”", - "body": "Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--\nAll who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,\nOwe no duty’s allegiance to mankind\nNor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!\nBut I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,\nBy no exterior voidness being exempt,\nMust bear accusing glances where I fail,\nFixed in the general orbit of contempt.\nFate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,\nGiving the ill, shows not as outer cause,\nMaking our mock-free will the mirror’s backing\nWhich Fate’s own acts as if in itself shows;\n And men, like children, seeing the image there,\n Take place for cause and make our will Fate bear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "he-that-goes-back-does-since-he-goes-advance": { - "title": "“He that goes back does, since he goes, advance …”", - "body": "He that goes back does, since he goes, advance,\nThough he doth not advance who goeth back,\nAnd he that seeks, though he on nothing chance,\nMay still by words be said to find a lack.\nThis paradox of having, that is nought\nIn the world’s meaning of the things it screens,\nIs yet true of the substance of pure thought\nAnd there means something by the nought it means.\nFor thinking nought does on nought being confer,\nAs giving not is acting not to give,\nAnd, to the same unbribed true thought, to err\nIs to find truth, though by its negative.\n So why call this world false, if false to be\n Be to be aught, and being aught Being to be?", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "how-can-i-think-or-edge-my-thoughts-to-action": { - "title": "“How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action …”", - "body": "How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,\nWhen the miserly press of each day’s need\nAches to a narrowness of spilled distraction\nMy soul appalled at the world’s work’s time-greed?\nHow can I pause my thoughts upon the task\nMy soul was born to think that it must do\nWhen every moment has a thought to ask\nTo fit the immediate craving of its cue?\nThe coin I’d heap for marrying my Muse\nAnd build our home i’th’ greater Time-to-be\nBecomes dissolved by needs of each day’s use\nAnd I feel beggared of infinity,\n Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven\n By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "how-many-masks-wear-we-and-undermasks": { - "title": "“How many masks wear we, and undermasks …”", - "body": "How many masks wear we, and undermasks,\nUpon our countenance of soul, and when,\nIf for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,\nKnows it the last mask off and the face plain?\nThe true mask feels no inside to the mask\nBut looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.\nWhatever consciousness begins the task\nThe task’s accepted use to sleepness ties.\nLike a child frighted by its mirrored faces,\nOur souls, that children are, being thought-losing,\nFoist otherness upon their seen grimaces\nAnd get a whole world on their forgot causing;\n And, when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking,\n Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "how-yesterday-is-long-ago": { - "title": "“How yesterday is long ago!”", - "body": "How yesterday is long ago! The past\nIs a fixed infinite distance from to-day,\nAnd bygone things, the first-lived as the last,\nIn irreparable sameness far away.\nHow the to-be is infinitely ever\nOut of the place wherein it will be Now,\nLike the seen wave yet far up in the river,\nWhich reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!\nThis thing Time is, whose being is having none,\nThe equable tyrant of our different fates,\nWho could not be bought off by a shattered sun\nOr tricked by new use of our careful dates.\n This thing Time is, that to the grave-will bear\n My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "i-know": { - "title": "“I Know”", - "body": "I know, I alone\nHow much it hurts, this heart\nWith no faith nor law\nNor melody nor thought.\n\nOnly I, only I\nAnd none of this can I say\nBecause feeling is like the sky--\nSeen, nothing in it to see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "i-am-older-than-nature-and-her-time": { - "title": "“I am older than Nature and her Time …”", - "body": "I am older than Nature and her Time\nBy all the timeless age of Consciousness,\nAnd my adult oblivion of the clime\nWhere I was born makes me not countryless.\nAy, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape\nYearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,\nWhich I cannot recall in colour or shape\nBut haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed\nAnd yet is not as light remembered,\nNor to the left or to the right conceived;\nAnd all round me tastes as if life were dead\nAnd the world made but to be disbelieved.\n Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet\n How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "i-could-not-think-of-thee-as-pieced-rot": { - "title": "“I could not think of thee as piecèd rot …”", - "body": "I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,\nYet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;\nYet thou liv’dst entire in my seeing thought\nAnd what thou wert in me had never fled.\nNay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty--\nThy ebbing smile, thy kiss’s readiness,\nAnd memory had taught my heart the duty\nTo know thee ever at that deathlessness.\nBut when I came where thou wert laid, and saw\nThe natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame,\nAnd the encroaching grass, with casual flaw,\nFraming the stone to age where was thy name,\n I knew not how to feel, nor what to be\n Towards thy fate’s material secrecy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "i-do-not-know-what-truth-the-false-untruth": { - "title": "“I do not know what truth the false untruth …”", - "body": "I do not know what truth the false untruth\nOf this sad sense of the seen world may own,\nOr if this flowered plant bears also a fruit\nUnto the true reality unknown.\nBut as the rainbow, neither earth’s nor sky’s,\nStands in the dripping freshness of lulled rain,\nA hope, not real yet not fancy’s, lies\nAthwart the moment of our ceasing pain.\nSomehow, since pain is felt yet felt as ill,\nHope hath a better warrant than being hoped;\nSince pain is felt as aught we should not feel\nMan hath a Nature’s reason for having groped,\n Since Time was Time and age and grief his measures,\n Towards a better shelter than Time’s pleasures.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "if-that-apparent-part-of-lifes-delight": { - "title": "“If that apparent part of life’s delight …”", - "body": "If that apparent part of life’s delight\nOur tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen\nBy aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,\nJoy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.\nHaply Truth’s body is no eyable being,\nAppearance even as appearance lies,\nHaply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeing\nIs the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.\nWherefrom what comes to thought’s sense of life? Nought.\nAll is either the irrational world we see\nOr some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot\nIts use for our thought’s use. Whence taketh me\n A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep\n Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "indefinite-space-which-by-co-substance-night": { - "title": "“Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night …”", - "body": "Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,\nIn one black mystery two void mysteries blends;\nThe stray stars, whose innumerable light\nRepeats one mystery till conjecture ends;\nThe stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;\nThe gulf of silence, empty even of nought;\nThought’s high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles\nBecause the string’s lost and the plan forgot:\nWhen I think on this and that here I stand,\nThe thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,\nHolding up to my thinking my thing-hand\nAnd looking at it with thought-alien eyes,\n The prayer of my wonder looketh past\n The universal darkness lone and vast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "inscriptions": { - "title": "“Inscriptions”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWe pass and dream. Earth smiles. Virtue is rare.\nAge, duty, gods weigh on our conscious bliss.\nHope for the best and for the worst prepare.\nThat sum of purposed wisdom speaks in this.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMe, Chloe, a maid, the mighty fates have given,\nWho was nought to them, to the peopled shades.\nThus the gods will. My years were but twice seven.\nI am forgotten in my distant glades.\n\n\n# III.\n\nFrom my villa on the hill I long looked down\nUpon the muttering town;\nThen one day drew (life sight-sick, dull hope shed)\nMy toga o’er my head\n(The simplest gesture being the greatest thing)\nLike a raised wing.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNot Cecrops kept my bees. My olives bore\nOil like the sun. My several herd lowed far.\nThe breathing traveller rested by my door.\nThe wet earth smells still; dead ray nostrils are.\n\n\n# V.\n\nI conquered. Far barbarians hear my name.\nMen were dice in my game,\nBut to my throw myself did lesser come:\nI threw dice, Fate the sum.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nSome were as loved, some as prizes prized.\nA natural wife to the fed man my mate,\nI was sufficient to whom I sufficed.\nI moved, slept, bore and aged without a fate.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nI put by pleasure like an alien bowl.\nStern, separate, mine, I looked towards where gods seem.\nFrom behind me the common shadow stole.\nDreaming that I slept not, I slept my dream.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nScarce five years passed ere I passed too.\nDeath came and took the child he found.\nNo god spared, or fate smiled at, so\nSmall hands, clutching so little round.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nThere is a silence where the town was old.\nGrass grows where not a memory lies below.\nWe that dined loud are sand. The tale is told.\nThe far hoofs hush. The inn’s last light doth go.\n\n\n# X.\n\nWe, that both lie here, loved. This denies us.\nMy lost hand crumbles where her breasts’ lack is.\nLove’s known, each lover is anonymous.\nWe both felt fair. Kiss, for that was our kiss.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nI for my city’s want fought far and fell.\nI could not tell\nWhat she did want, that knew she wanted me.\nHer walls be free,\nHer speech keep such as I spoke, and men die,\nThat she die not, as I.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nLife lived us, not we life. We, as bees sip,\nLooked, talked and had. Trees grow as we did last.\nWe loved the gods but as we see a ship.\nNever aware of being aware, we passed.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nThe work is done. The hammer is laid down.\nThe artisans, that built the slow-grown town,\nHave been succeeded by those who still built.\nAll this is something lack-of-something screening.\nThe thought whole has no meaning\nBut lies by Time’s wall like a pitcher spilt.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nThis covers me, that erst had the blue sky.\nThis soil treads me, that once I trod. My hand\nPut these inscriptions here, half knowing why;\nLast, and hence seeing all, of the passing band.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Jorge de Sena", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "like-a-bad-suitor-desperate-and-trembling": { - "title": "“Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling …”", - "body": "Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling\nFrom the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,\nWho with feared longing half would know, dissembling\nWith what he’d wish proved what he fears soon proving,\nI look with inner eyes afraid to look,\nYet perplexed into looking, at the worth\nThis verse may have and wonder, of my book,\nTo what thoughts shall’t in alien hearts give birth.\nBut, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes,\nYet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof,\nAnd in his mind for possible proofs gropes,\nDelaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff,\n I daily live, i’th’ fame I dream to see,\n But by my thought of others’ thought of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "like-to-a-ship-that-storms-urge-on-its-course": { - "title": "“Like to a ship that storms urge on its course …”", - "body": "Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,\nBy its own trials our soul is surer made.\nThe very things that make the voyage worse\nDo make it better; its peril is its aid.\nAnd, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart\nWithin the peril disimperilled grows;\nA port is near the more from port we part--\nThe port whereto our driven direction goes.\nIf we reap knowledge to cross-profit, this\nFrom storms we learn, when the storm’s height doth drive--\nThat the black presence of its violence is\nThe pushing promise of near far blue skies.\n Learn we but how to have the pilot-skill,\n And the storm’s very might shall mate our will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "my-love-and-not-i-is-the-egoist": { - "title": "“My love, and not I, is the egoist …”", - "body": "My love, and not I, is the egoist.\nMy love for thee loves itself more than thee;\nAy, more than me, in whom it doth exist,\nAnd makes me live that it may feed on me.\nIn the country of bridges the bridge is\nMore real than the shores it doth unsever;\nSo in our world, all of Relation, this\nIs true--that truer is Love than either lover.\nThis thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt’s door--\nIf we, seeing substance of this world, are not\nMere Intervals, God’s Absence and no more,\nHollows in real Consciousness and Thought.\n And if ’tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit,\n Why should it not be possible to Truth?", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "my-soul-is-a-stiff-pageant-man-by-man": { - "title": "“My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man …”", - "body": "My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,\nOf some Egyptian art than Egypt older,\nFound in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,\nWhere all things else to coloured dust did moulder.\nWhate’er its sense may mean, its age is twin\nTo that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,\nWhen knowledge was so great that ’twas a sin\nAnd man’s mere soul too man for its abode.\nBut when I ask what means that pageant I\nAnd would look at it suddenly, I lose\nThe sense I had of seeing it, nor can try\nAgain to look, nor hath my memory a use\n That seems recalling, save that it recalls\n An emptiness of having seen those walls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "my-weary-life-that-lives-unsatisfied": { - "title": "“My weary life, that lives unsatisfied …”", - "body": "My weary life, that lives unsatisfied\nOn the foiled off-brink of being e’er but this,\nTo whom the power to will hath been denied\nAnd the will to renounce doth also miss;\nMy sated life, with having nothing sated,\nIn the motion of moving poisèd aye,\nWithin its dreams from its own dreams abated--\nThis life let the Gods change or take away.\nFor this endless succession of empty hours,\nLike deserts after deserts, voidly one,\nDoth undermine the very dreaming powers\nAnd dull even thought’s active inaction,\n Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act\n Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "oh-to-be-idle-loving-idleness": { - "title": "“Oh to be idle loving idleness!”", - "body": "Oh to be idle loving idleness!\nBut I am idle all in hate of me;\nEver in action’s dream, in the false stress\nOf purposed action never set to be.\nLike a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair,\nMy will to act binds with excess my action,\nNot-acting coils the thought with raged despair,\nAnd acting rage doth paint despair distraction.\nLike someone sinking in a treacherous sand,\nEach gesture to deliver sinks the more;\nThe struggle avails not, and to raise no hand,\nThough but more slowly useless, we’ve no power.\n Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring,\n Repurposed for next day’s repurposing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "something-in-me-was-born-before-the-stars": { - "title": "“Something in me was born before the stars …”", - "body": "Something in me was born before the stars\nAnd saw the sun begin from far away.\nOur yellow, local day on its wont jars,\nFor it hath communed with an absolute day.\nThrough my Thought’s night, as a worn robe’s heard trail\nThat I have never seen, I drag this past\nThat saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale\nOn the lost night before it, mute and vast.\nIt dates remoter than God’s birth can reach,\nThat had no birth but the world’s coming after.\nSo the world’s to me as, after whispered speech,\nThe cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.\n That ’t has a meaning my conjecture knows,\n But that ’t has meaning’s all its meaning shows.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "thought-was-born-blind": { - "title": "“Thought was born blind …”", - "body": "Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.\nIts careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,\nStill suggests form as aught whose proper being\nMere finding touch with erring darkness drapes.\nYet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach\nThat touch is but a close and empty sense?\nHow does mere touch, self-uncontented, reach\nFor some truer sense’s whole intelligence?\nThe thing once touched, if touch be now omitted,\nStands yet in memory real and outward known,\nSo the untouching memory of touch is fitted\nWith sense of a sense whereby far things are shown\n So, by touch of untouching, wrongly aright,\n Touch’ thought of seeing sees not things but Sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "thy-words-are-torture-to-me-that-scarce-grieve-thee": { - "title": "“Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee …”", - "body": "Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--\nThat entire death shall null my entire thought;\nAnd I feel torture, not that I believe thee,\nBut that I cannot disbelieve thee not.\nShall that of me that now contains the stars\nBe by the very contained stars survived?\nThus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars\nAn all unjust Fate’s truth from being believed?\nConjecture cannot fit to the seen world\nA garment of its thought untorn or covering,\nOr with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld\nWithout itself its dead deceit discovering;\n So, all being possible, an idle thought may\n Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "we-are-born-at-sunset-and-we-die-ere-morn": { - "title": "“We are born at sunset and we die ere morn …”", - "body": "We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,\nAnd the whole darkness of the world we know,\nHow can we guess its truth, to darkness born,\nThe obscure consequence of absent glow?\nOnly the stars do teach us light. We grasp\nTheir scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray,\nAnd, though their eyes look through night’s complete mask,\nYet they speak not the features of the day.\nWhy should these small denials of the whole\nMore than the black whole the pleased eyes attract?\nWhy what it calls ‘worth’ does the captive soul\nAdd to the small and from the large detract?\n So, put of light’s love wishing it night’s stretch,\n A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "we-are-in-fate-and-fates-and-do-but-lack": { - "title": "“We are in Fate and Fate’s and do but lack …”", - "body": "We are in Fate and Fate’s and do but lack\nOutness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,\nAnd do but compel Fate aside or back\nBy Fate’s own immanence in the compelling.\nWe are too far in us from outward truth\nTo know how much we are not what we are,\nAnd live but in the heat of error’s youth,\nYet young enough its acting youth to ignore.\nThe doubleness of mind fails us, to glance\nAt our exterior presence amid things,\nSizing from otherness our countenance\nAnd seeing our puppet will’s act-acting strings.\n An unknown language speaks in us, which we\n Are at the words of, fronted from reality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "we-never-joy-enjoy-to-that-full-point": { - "title": "“We never joy enjoy to that full point …”", - "body": "We never joy enjoy to that full point\nRegret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,\nNor have the strength regret to disappoint\nRecalling not past joy’s thought, but its mien.\nYet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was\nAnd after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,\nIt must have been joy ere its joy did pass\nAnd, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.\nAlas! All this is useless, for joy’s in\nEnjoying, not in thinking of enjoying.\nIts mere thought-mirroring gainst itself doth sin,\nBy mere reflecting solid life destroying,\n Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove\n It must not think, doth further from joy move.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "when-i-do-think-my-meanest-line-shall-be": { - "title": "“When I do think my meanest line shall be …”", - "body": "When I do think my meanest line shall be\nMore in Time’s use than my creating whole,\nThat future eyes more clearly shall feel me\nIn this inked page than in my direct soul;\nWhen I conjecture put to make me seeing\nGood readers of me in some aftertime,\nThankful to some idea of my being\nThat doth not even my with gone true soul rime;\nAn anger at the essence of the world,\nThat makes this thus, or thinkable this wise,\nTakes my soul by the throat and makes it hurled\nIn nightly horrors of despaired surmise,\n And I become the mere sense of a rage\n That lacks the very words whose waste might ’suage.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "when-i-have-sense-of-what-to-sense-appears": { - "title": "“When I have sense of what to sense appears …”", - "body": "When I have sense of what to sense appears,\nSense is sense ere ’tis mine or mine in me is.\nWhen I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.\nWhen I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.\nI am part Soul part I in all I touch--\nSoul by that part I hold in common with all,\nAnd I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such\nAs I can err by it and my sense mine call.\nThe rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean,\nThat come to explain and suddenly are gone,\nLike messengers that mock the message’ mien,\nExplaining all but the explanation;\n As if we a ciphered letter’s cipher hit\n And find it in an unknown language writ.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "when-i-should-be-asleep-to-mine-own-voice": { - "title": "“When I should be asleep to mine own voice …”", - "body": "When I should be asleep to mine own voice\nIn telling thee how much thy love’s my dream,\nI find me listening to myself, the noise\nOf my words othered in my hearing them.\nYet wonder not: this is the poet’s soul.\nI could not tell thee well of how I love,\nLoved I not less by knowing it, were all\nMy self my love and no thought love to prove.\nWhat consciousness makes more by consciousness,\nIt makes less, for it makes it less itself,\nMy sense of love could not my love rich-dress\nDid it not for it spend love’s own love-pelf.\n Poet’s love’s this (as in these words I prove thee):\n I love my love for thee more than I love thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "when-in-the-widening-circle-of-rebirth": { - "title": "“When in the widening circle of rebirth …”", - "body": "When in the widening circle of rebirth\nTo a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,\nAnd try again the unremembered earth\nWith the old sadness for the immortal home,\nShall I revisit these same differing fields\nAnd cull the old new flowers with the same sense,\nThat some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,\nOf more age than my days in this pretence?\nShall I again regret strange faces lost\nOf which the present memory is forgot\nAnd but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed\nOut of the closed sea and black night of Thought?\n Were thy face one, what sweetness will’t not be,\n Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "whether-we-write-or-speak-or-do-but-look": { - "title": "“Whether we write or speak or do but look …”", - "body": "Whether we write or speak or do but look\nWe are ever unapparent. What we are\nCannot be transfused into word or book.\nOur soul from us is infinitely far.\nHowever much we give our thoughts the will\nTo be our soul and gesture it abroad,\nOur hearts are incommunicable still.\nIn what we show ourselves we are ignored.\nThe abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged\nBy any skill of thought or trick of seeming.\nUnto our very selves we are abridged\nWhen we would utter to our thought our being.\n We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,\n And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-edge-of-the-green-wave-whitely-doth-hiss": { - "title": "“The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss …”", - "body": "The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss\nUpon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.\nSurely reality cannot be this!\nSomehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!\nThe sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed\nOf outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,\nIs not something, but something interposed.\nOnly what in this is not this is real.\nIf this be to have sense, if to be awake\nBe but to see this bright, great sleep of things,\nFor the rarer potion mine own dreams I’ll take\nAnd for truth commune with imaginings,\n Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,\n This common sleep of men, the universe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-world-is-woven-all-of-dream-and-error": { - "title": "“The world is woven all of dream and error …”", - "body": "The world is woven all of dream and error\nAnd but one sureness in our truth may lie--\nThat when we hold to aught our thinking’s mirror\nWe know it not by knowing it thereby.\nFor but one side of things the mirror knows,\nAnd knows it colded from its solidness.\nA double lie its truth is; what it shows\nBy true show’s false and nowhere by true place.\nThought clouds our life’s day-sense with strangeness, yet\nNever from strangeness more than that it’s strange\nDoth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get\nBut the words’ sense from words--knowledge, truth, change.\n We know the world is false, not what is true.\n Yet we think on, knowing we ne’er shall know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - } - } - }, - "sandor-petofi": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sándor Petőfi", - "birth": { - "year": 1823 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "hungarian", - "language": "hungarian", - "flag": "🇭🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sándor_Petőfi", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "hungarian" - ], - "n_poems": 22 - }, - "poems": { - "from-the-apostle": { - "title": "From “The Apostle”", - "body": "Dark city, night.\nThe moon wanders in other regions,\nand the stars close\ntheir golden eyes.\nThe world is dark\nlike a hired conscience.\n\nOne light\nstrung\ndistant and dying\nlike the eye of a sick dream,\na last hope.\n\nAn attic,\nand someone keeps watch\nin the half worlds\nof poverty and strength.\n\nHow great this poverty.\nIt hardly fits the room\nthat is small as a swallow’s nest\nand as plain.\nThe walls are bare,\nonly mould\nand watermarks of rain\nike the wiring in homes of the rich.\nThe room is dull\nwith sighs and a musty smell.\nThe dogs of the wealthy\nhave kennels\nand die in places like this.\n\nThe pine bed and table\nwould not sell at a flea market.\nA straw chair or two:\nat the foot of the bed an old pallet;\nand at the head, a wormy chest--\ncomplete furniture.\n\nMist and light contend\nin the pale arena of the candle,\nand the figures are washed away\nlike the flicker of a dream\nin the halfdark.\nA candle deludes the eye.\nOr are those under this roof\nso pale\nso ghostly?\nA family of the poor, a family of the poor.\n\nThe mother sits on the chest\nwith her babe.\nThe unhappy child\nwhines\nsucking her dried breast.\nShe is deep in thoughts\nthat must be filled with pain,\nand like snow melting from the eaves\nher tears\nare rolling down\non the babe …\nIs she really thinking?\nTears might fall from habit,\nwithout reason, like water from stones.\n\nThe elder child\nis asleep (or is he?)\non a wall bed,\nthe straw sticking from a sack.\nSleep, little child, sleep\nand dream into your thin hands\na piece of bread,\nand your sleep will be great!\n\nThe young father\nsits by the table, his face black\nwith the darkness\nfilling the room;\nhis brow a book\nwhere the agonies of the world are written,\na picture\nwhere the poverty of millions is painted.\nBut his eyes flame\nlike two comets,\nfearing no one,\nand everyone fearing.\nHe looks\nfar and high\nuntil his eye is lost in the infinite\nlike an eagle in the clouds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "at-the-end-of-september": { - "title": "“At the End of September”", - "body": "In the valley the flowers are still blooming,\nThe poplars are still green by the windows,\nBut do you see Winter is already looming?\nThere is snow on the peak where the wind blows.\nMy young heart is freshly filled with Summer blossom,\nWhile Spring is also in full bloom in there,\nBut my dark hair is greying into Autumn\nAnd begins to show the hoarfrost of Winter.\nThe flowers wither, time runs so fast …\nCome my beloved wife, sit on my side,\nCome and put your head on my chest,\nAs you will on my mound in the graveyard.\nIf I die too soon one day, oh, tell me,\nWill you cry and spread a shroud on me in tears?\nWill a new lover make you forget me,\nAnd convince you to abandon my name with ease?\n\nWhen you throw away the veil of the widow,\nPlace it on my wooden cross as a dark banner,\nI’ll emerge from the sepulchral world below,\nTake it down with me and keep it forever,\nTo dry up the tears I shed from my sobs\nFor you who so easily forgot,\nAnd to bandage my wounded heart that still throbs\nAnd loves you even there, no matter what!", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "autumn-is-here-again": { - "title": "“Autumn is Here Again”", - "body": "Autumn is here again,\nSo pleasing to the eye,\nI like it so much,\nAlthough I don’t know why.\n\nI sit on top of the hill\nAnd look around from there,\nListening to the leaves\nFalling everywhere.\n\nThe gentle sun is shining\nDown on earth with a smile,\nLike a caring mother watching\nHer dear sleeping child.\n\nIndeed, in autumn the earth\nOnly sleeps, it goes still;\nOne can see it in its eyes,\nJust sleepy, not ill.\n\nIt took off its fancy clothes,\nIt quietly undressed\nTo dress up again in the morn,\nSo spring will be impressed.\n\nSleep beautiful nature,\nSleep until daybreak,\nHave a pleasant dream\nTo enjoy when you awake.\n\nMy fingers are quietly plucking\nThe strings of my lyre\nAnd start playing my wistful song,\nAs your lullaby.\n\nCome my love, sit next to me\nListen silently until my song\nLike the whispering wind\nGlides over the pond.\n\nWhen you kiss me and your lips\nTouch me, watch out, be tender,\nDon’t wake up kind nature\nFrom her dream-filled slumber.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "farewell-to-celibacy": { - "title": "“Farewell to Celibacy”", - "body": "I leave you now, my oldest friend\nCelibacy, I must say farewell.\nYou were my comrade for twenty-five years,\nI can’t go without goodbye, I know it well.\n\nDon’t be mad at me, who, even though your\nFollower, will leave you suddenly,\nI shared my adolescence with you,\nI want my manhood only for me.\n\nI loved you, perhaps like nobody else,\nWhen you warned me, I obeyed.\nI went wherever the banner of\nRomantic adventures you swayed.\n\nYou took me far away to many places;\nI got tired, now I need a rest.\nMy bed will be my lover’s two arms\nAnd my white pillow will be her two soft breasts.\n\nMy young pals are smiling,\nA sneer going from lip to lip\nAnd they pass me by showing pity …\nSour grapes, I say, isn’t it?\n\nIndeed I am very deplorable,\nReally worthy of all the compassion,\nBecause I cannot roam night after night\nFilthier than filthy taverns, with passion.\n\nI am not allowed to love more than one,\nThe one who also loves only me.\nNot like their fantastic lovers\nWho loved many hundreds easily.\n\nFarewell my friend, Celibacy!\nYou can be angry or you can laugh,\nI am now turning my back on you\nThe pleasures you gave me were more than enough.\n\nGet new followers with your colorful banner\nSomewhere else,--me, you can forget.\nAll I need now is a white banner\nAnd that will be my young wife’s bonnet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "how-many-drops-has-the-ocean-sea": { - "title": "“How Many Drops Has the Ocean Sea?”", - "body": "How many drops has the ocean sea?\nCan you count the stars?\nIn human heads how many hairs can there be?\nAnd sins within human hearts?", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Peter Zollman" - } - }, - "i-dreamed-something-beautiful": { - "title": "“I Dreamed Something Beautiful”", - "body": "I dreamed something beautiful,\nI dreamed and woke up suddenly.\nWhy did you wake me up so soon?\nWhy did you have to bother me?\nHappiness in my life is not real,\nAt least in my dream it does appear.\nWhy did you have to disturb?\nOh my dear God, oh my dear God,\nWhy am I not allowed\nTo dream of pleasure in this world?\nYou told me that you don’t love me\nBut I could not believe it.\nDon’t tell me again, don’t tell me.\nWithout saying I know you mean it.\nAnd when I am aware that my face\nIn your heart has no more place:\nStay or leave? You want me close,\nPerhaps only to please your eyes\nWatching how I agonize\nFrom the torment that you cause.\nOh, girl, you are so cruel,\nJust let me get away.\nWe have to part forever\nAnd go on our own way.\nI would fly from you like dust\nWhen there is wind, fly it must\nTo places man can never see\nBut I cannot move this boulder,\nMy sadness, that is on my shoulder\nAnd weighs on me so heavily.\nPoor me, I say goodbye to you,\nAwful words I have to say.\nWhy don’t they die on my lips\nAs they come out, right away?\nI cannot just yet say goodbye,\nLet me hold your hand for a while,\nYour hand that destroyed my happiness\nAnd tore my future apart,\nForever breaking my heart,\nTo cover it with tears and kisses.\nMy tears or my kisses, which is\nBurning your hand more intensely?\nBoth tears and kisses can become hot\nAnd burn your hand immensely,\nBecause they both came to life\nTogether with my fervent love\nIn my burning heart, to ascend\nFrom this glowing, hot volcano,\nLike pious pilgrims who well know\nThat they will die on your hand.\nThere is only one thing I ask,\nDon’t fear, it is not that you love me,\nOnly a little solace that\nYou will keep me in your memory.\nHow long will I stay in there?\nHow long will you remember?\nIf only until you can find\nSomeone whose heart throbs for you\nAnd loves you as much as I do,\nThen I’ll stay forever in your mind!\nBut I do not wish that you\nShould not find somebody true\nLike me. If I would have that wish,\nI would not really love you.\nI want you to live happily,\nPick some leaves from any tree,\nPick those with a fresh fragrance,\nWeave together young green leaves,\nThen, when old, toss out the dry wreath\nThat once was my remembrance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "i-love-you-my-darling": { - "title": "“I Love You My Darling”", - "body": "I love you my darling,\nI love your slim body,\nYour ivory forehead,\nYour hair like ebony,\nYour sparkling dark eyes\nAnd your rosy cheeks,\nYour tender, soft hands\nAnd your sweet, full lips.\nI love your soul\nThat can fly so high\nAnd the mountain-lake depth\nOf your warm heart.\nI love you when you’re smiling\nBecause you are glad,\nOr with tears in your eyes\nBecause you are sad.\nI love your virtues\nShining so bright\nAnd also your faults\nThat are never in sight.\nI love you my darling,\nI love you truly\nAs much as one can love,\nDeeply, strongly, fully.\nYou are everything,\nThere’s no life without you,\nYou enmesh all my thoughts\nSteadfast, through and through.\nYou are all my feelings\nAwake or asleep,\nYou are always present\nIn my every heart beat.\nI would relinquish\nAll the glory for you\nAnd, if you wanted,\nRegain it all anew.\nI have no wish\nAnd no will either\nBecause what you want\nIs also my desire.\nNo sacrifice is too small\nOf any measure\nIf it would give you\nEven a small pleasure.\nIf you would lose something\nSmall but it would cause pain\nIt would hurt me as well,\nI would feel the same.\nI love you my darling,\nI love you even more,\nI love you like no one\nHas loved you before.\nI love you my darling\nSo that it could kill me.\nI am all in one\nWho can love you dearly:\nHusband. son and father\nOr your older brother,\nI am all those and,\nMost of all, your lover.\nAt the same time\nYou are also my life,\nMother, daughter, sister,\nLover and my wife!\nI love you with my heart,\nI love you with my soul,\nI love you with dreamy,\nCrazy love and more! …\nAnd if one deserves\nA praise or a prize\nFor all what I said,\nThose of any size,\nThe praise and the prize\nWhatever may be,\nYou deserve it all,\nYou alone--not me.\nYou deserve it all\nBecause the love I feel\nYou made it all real!", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi" - } - }, - "i-turned-into-the-kitchen": { - "title": "“I Turned into the Kitchen”", - "body": "I turned into the kitchen with my pipe,\nBecause I wanted to put it on light …\nThat is, I would have liked to do it,\nIf my pipe would not have been lit!\nBut my pipe was nicely burning,\nThat’s not why I planned to turn in,\nI went ’cause something I noticed\nBy no means I wanted to miss!\nWhat I saw was a pretty girl\nBustling about in a flickering skirt,\nShe made fire in the oven,\nHer eyes had more fire in them!\nWe looked into each other’ eyes,\nUntil I became mesmerized,\nAll the fire in my pipe has died\nAnd started a flame in my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "if-you-are-a-man-be-a-man": { - "title": "“If You Are a Man, Be a Man”", - "body": "If you are a man, be a man\nNot a puppet, worthless, weak\nThat destiny can toss around\nFor the pleasure it may seek.\nFate is a coward bitch that yelps,\nRuns away from the brave\nWho is willing to face it,\nSo don’t capitulate!\nIf you are a man, be a man,\nMere words alone are useless.\nAction speaks far better\nThan any Demosthenes.\nBuild or destroy like a storm\nAnd be silent when you are done,\nLike the storm when it is finished\nQuietly dies down.\nIf you are a man, be a man,\nHave principles and faith,\nAdhere to them steadfast\nFor whatever it takes.\nRather give up your life\nA hundred times more\nThan deny yourself\nAnd lose your honor.\nIf you are a man, be a man,\nGuard your independence,\nDon’t ever sell it for\nAll the world’s abundance.\nDespise those who for a fat meal\nAre willing to sell themselves.\nYour slogan should always be:\n“Beggar-staff and independence!”\nIf you are a man, be a man,\nBe strong, be brave, be firm,\nThis way you can be certain\nNeither man nor fate can do you harm.\nBe an oak that, by a storm,\nMight sometimes be felled\nBut its awesome solid trunk\nThe wind could never bend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi" - } - }, - "in-the-souvenir-book-of-a-bookseller": { - "title": "“In the Souvenir Book of a Bookseller”", - "body": "Life is a bliss but first of all\nYou must work hard for this goal.\nFree of charge you won’t get it\nYou must struggle quite a bit.\nNever lose sight of honesty\n\nFor anger or a modest fee.\nTruly love your fellow men\nKeep the bridge open for them.\nYour dear homeland you should guard\nIn a pure spot of your heart\nAnd sustain your love of god\nOnce my poems sold a lot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi" - } - }, - "it-is-not-possible-to-forbid-a-flower": { - "title": "“It is Not Possible to Forbid a Flower”", - "body": "It is not possible to forbid a flower\nTo bloom in Spring when it has the power.\nLove is the flower, the girl is the Spring,\nIt blooms in Spring, it is a given thing.\nBabe, since I first saw you I couldn’t love you more,\nI became the lover of your beautiful soul.\nYour beautiful soul that tenderly smiles\nIn the mirror of your enchanting eyes.\nThere is a secret question in my heart:\nDo you love me or someone else, sweetheart?\nThese thoughts chase each other in my brain,\nLike clouds chase the sunbeam in the Autumn rain.\nOh, if I knew that your lovely rosy cheeks\nBathing in milk, wait for someone else’s kiss,\nIn this big world I would become an exile,\nOr rather desperately choose to die.\nStar of my happiness, shed on me some light\nSo that my life should not be a sad night,\nLove me, pearl of my heart, I don’t ask for more,\nAnd I ask god to give his blessings to your soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-madman": { - "title": "“The Madman”", - "body": "Why do you keep pestering me?\nCan’t you all leave me alone!\nI’ve got work to do--a lot, and quick.\nI’m plaiting the sun’s rays into a whip, a flame-whip,\na whip I’ll lash the world with!\nWhat weeping and wailing there’ll be for me to laugh at,\nas the world laughed at my weeping and wailing!\nHa ha ha!\nWhat else is life? You wail, you laugh.\nOnly death says: shh!\nBut you know I died once before.\nThose who’d drunk my wine mixed poison into my water.\nAnd then what did my killers\ndo to conceal the crime?\nI was no sooner laid out\nthan they threw themselves weeping on my body.\nI’d have enjoyed jumping up to snap off their noses, but\nno, I thought, I won’t: I’ll\nleave them their noses to appreciate\nthe rotting of my corpse, and choke on it.\nHa ha ha!\nAnd where did they bury me? Africa.\nCouldn’t have better luck,\na hyena clawed me from my grave.\nWho ever helped me more than that?\nBut I tricked even him.\nHe was ready to sink his fangs in my thigh\nand I gave him my heart instead--\nit was so bitter it killed him.\nHa ha ha!\nWell, the one who does his neighbour\na good turn ends like this. What is man?\nSome say: the root of a flower\nthat blooms in heaven.\nBut that’s not true.\nMan is a flower whose root\nis down below in hell.\nOr so a wise man told me,\nwise idiot! for he starved to death.\nCouldn’t he steal? Couldn’t he rob someone?\nHa ha ha!\nBut why laugh? Am I not a fool too?\nShouldn’t I be crying instead,\ncrying for the world’s badness?\nGod himself often does,\nwith his cloud-eyes, sorry he even created us;\nbut what use are tears in heaven?\nThey fall on the earth, on this wretched earth\nWhere people tramp them down,\nand what’s left then?\nWhat are heaven’s tears but mud?\nHa ha ha!\nOh, sky, oh, sky, old soldier sky,\nthe sun’s medal on your chest\nand the ragged clouds are your coat.\nAnd that’s how a veteran is discharged,\nwith medal and ragged clothes\nand thanks for his long service.\nHa ha ha!\nAnd do you know what it means in words\nwhen the quail says: peep-beep?\nIt means you watch out for women!\nA woman draws men into her as the sea draws rivers.\nAnd why? to engulf them.\nThe female animal is a beautiful animal,\nbeautiful and dangerous. And love--I have drunk you!--\nis a poisoned drink in a golden cup.\nOne dewdrop of you tastes sweeter\nthan a whole sea of honey,\nyet a dewdrop of you is more fatal\nthan a whole sea of poison.\nHave you seen the sea\nploughed in furrows by storm\nfor death to be sown?\nHave you seen the storm,\nthat swarthy peasant\nwith his lightning-goad under his arm?\nHa ha ha!\nWhen the fruit is ripe, it falls from the tree.\nEarth, you are a ripe fruit ready to fall.\nWell, I shall give it till tomorrow:\nno Last Judgment then, I’ll\nburrow to the centre of this world\nwith gunpowder\nand blow it all\nto smithereens … ha ha ha!", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "man": { - "title": "“Man”", - "body": "Nothing in the world is more ridiculous\nThan man, because he is so presumptuous.\nJust as if he wanted to plow the sky\nWith his nose, he always keeps it so high.\nYou think that it is the world that is faulty?\nHaughty man, after all what makes you so haughty?\n\nWhat do you think is shorter than a blink?\nYour life, my friend, is not even a wink.\nIt comes and runs away in an instant,\nIt keeps the pillow of your cradle in one hand\nWhile the cover of your coffin its other hand is holding.\nHaughty man, after all what makes you so haughty?\n\nWhat can you accomplish in a fleeting glance?\nConquer nations and people perchance?\nYou know what those are who can be conquered?\nNothing but pitifully weak and coward.\nRuling them brings only shame, not glory.\nHaughty man, after all what makes you so haughty?\n\nAnd what is the big name and glory you found?\nIt dies with you as you descend into the ground,\nOr, as a guard dog it goes to your grave\nAnd for a few centuries it will keep it safe.\nBut from famine and thirst it will perish slowly.\nHaughty man, after all what makes you so haughty?\n\nYour glory, your name how long will stay?\nThe country where you belong will also decay,\nThe place where your people have lived since who knows when\nWas once a sea and may become the same again.\nThe whole world may end up as a vast void only.\nHaughty man, after all what makes you so haughty?", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "the-moonlight-is-bathing-in-the-sea-of-the-sky": { - "title": "“The Moonlight is Bathing in the Sea of the Sky”", - "body": "The moonlight is bathing in the sea of the sky\nThe brigand is musing in the forest, with a sigh,\nThe night spread thick dew all over the grass,\nBut there are more tears in the bandit’s eyes.\n\nLeaning on the shaft of his axe he’d ponder:\n“Why did I do all those mean things, I wonder.\nMy dear mother, you always wanted me good,\nWhy did I not listen to you when I could?\n\nI became a vagabond and left my home\nI have joined robbers with whom I roam.\nI am still among them, I am still the same,\nA menace to travelers, to my utter shame.\n\nI would go home gladly and leave them behind\nBut it is too late, there is no home to find.\nMy dear mother has died and the house collapsed;\nThe gallows are standing--I am the next!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "a-plan-gone-up-in-smoke": { - "title": "“A Plan Gone up in Smoke”", - "body": "All the way home there was one thing\nI was pondering:\nThe first thing to tell my mother\nUpon my homecoming.\n\nWhat shall I say to her that is\nNice, warm and has grace?\nWhile the arms that rocked my cradle\nShe lifts for embrace.\n\nEndless row of delicious thoughts\nPile up in my head,\nTime is at a standstill\nWhile the carriage speeds ahead.\n\nI step into the small room,\nMy mother flies to me …\nAnd I cling to her lips … speechless …\nLike fruits on a tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "prophecy": { - "title": "“Prophecy”", - "body": "“You told me, mother, that our dreams\nAre drawn by a sacred hand at night,\nThe dream is a window to the future\nWhere the eyes of our soul get a sight.\n\nMother, I was dreaming something,\nWould you explain to me what it meant?\nI had wings and I was flying\nAll over, without an end.”\n\n‘My dear son, sunshine of my soul,\nHappier I could not have been,\nGod almighty will give you long life,\nThis is the joyful secret of your dream!’--\n\nAnd the child grew, his young age\nKept a flame lit in his chest,\nWhile the song, a soothing relief,\nGave his heaving heart a rest.\n\nThe youngster grabbed a lute\nAnd put his sentiments in a song\nAnd on its wings, his glowing feelings,\nLike birds, were flying all around.\n\nThe magic song flew to the sky,\nBrought the star of fame down\nAnd from its beams, around his head,\nIt weaved a shining crown.\n\nBut the fruit of the song is poison\nAnd each flower the poet takes away\nFrom his heart into his lute\nCuts his life one precious day.\n\nHis feelings caught fire that turned into hell\nAnd he became the prey of flames,\nHanging to a branch of the tree of life\nOn earth that’s how he remains.\n\nHe lies on his death-bed,\nChild of much torment\nAnd hears the faltering voice\nOf his heart-broken parent:\n\n‘Death, don’t take him from my arms;\nDon’t let my dear boy die,\nHeaven promised him a long life …\nOr our dreams only lie? …’\n\n“My dear mother, dreams are not lying,\nAlthough a winding-sheet is my cover,\nThe glorious name of your poet son\nWill survive forever and ever!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "the-shepherd-rides-on-a-donkey": { - "title": "“The Shepherd Rides on a Donkey”", - "body": "The shepherd rides in donkey-back\nThe shepherd rides in donkey-back,\nHis feet are dangling wide,\nThe guy is big, but bigger still\nHis bitterness inside.\n\nHe played his flute, he grazed his flock\nUpon the grassy hill\nWhen he was told his sweetheart girl\nWas desperately ill.\n\nHe rides his donkey in a flash\nAnd races to her bed,\nBut by the time he reached the house\nHis precious one was dead.\n\nThe lad was bitter, hoped to die,\nBut what he did instead:\nHe took a stick and struck a blow\nUpon the donkey’s head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Peter Zollman" - } - }, - "sorrow": { - "title": "“Sorrow”", - "body": "Sorrow? A great ocean.\nJoy?\nA little pearl in the ocean. Perhaps,\nBy the time I fish it up, I may break it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "W. H. Auden" - } - }, - "time": { - "title": "“Time”", - "body": "The farmer puts his field under the plow,\nThen he harrows it even.\nTime puts our features under the plow,\nBut won’t harrow them even.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Peter Zollman" - } - }, - "what-are-the-ways-of-this-mans-soul": { - "title": "“What Are the Ways of This Man’s Soul?”", - "body": "What are the ways of this man’s soul?\nWhat course has he chosen, what goal, wandering\nwhere only madmen and demigods dare or can soar?\n\nHe cast off the cares of the day\nlike a bird its shell.\nThis was a birth and a soaring.\nThe man died and a citizen was born,\none moment his family’s,\nnow the world’s.\nOne moment he mingled only with three,\nand now with millions of men.\n\nHis wings clattered\nwhere the world is a small spark\non the paper ash of night.\nAs he swished by the stars,\nthey trembled\nlike candlelight in a breath of air.\n\nHe soared and soared.\nOne star is millions and millons of miles\nfrom another,\nand still he left them swiftly behind\nlike a rider\nwho gallops by the trees of a forest.\n\nHe passed billions of stars\nand reached …\nand reached …\nnot the limit of infinity\nbut the center.\nAnd he stood before the Being\nwho governs the worlds\nwith a glance,\nwhose essence is light\nand in the radiance of whose eyes\nplanets and moons revolve around the suns.\n\nHe spoke\nbathed in protolight\nlike a swan\nin the transparence of a lake--\n“O worshipful and hallowed God!\nA speck of dust has risen\nto bow in your presence.\nI am your faithful son.\nYou sent me on a dificult course, Father,\nbut I shall not rebel.\nI adore you\nfor showing me your love.\nThe peoples of earth are wicked\nand turned from you to become slaves …\nSlavery is the parent evil,\nand the others are its children.\nMan bowing to man\nbelittles you, O God!\nYou are mocked,\nbut your glory shall be restored.\n\nYou have given me one life, Father,\nand I consecrate it to your service.\nWhat is the reward? Or is there one?\nI will not ask.\nThe worst servant will lift a finger for pay.\nI have worked\nwithout need or hope for reward,\nand I shall go on.\nI shall be rewarded\nwhen I see men as men\nwho rose from slaves,\nbecause I love them\nthough they are sinful.\nGive me light and strength, O God,\nto work for my fellow man.”\n\nHe returned to earth and the room\nwhere his cold body waited.\nThe man awoke,\na shiver passing through him.\nSweat on his brow …\nHe could hardly tell\nwhether he was awake or asleep …\nawake, because he was sleepy\nand his eyelids were heavy.\nHe rose\nand staggered\nto the straw sack.\n\nA man who walks heaven\nsleeps on the floor!\nHangmen\nby their heads on silken pillows,\nand the benefactor of the world\ncrashes on a pallet.\n\nThe candle flickered and died.\nNight dissolved\nlike a secret passing on lip to lip.\n\nThe first ray of the rising sun\nfell on the face of a sleeping man\nlike a wreath of gold, like a\nwarm kiss from the mouth of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "who-are-you-man": { - "title": "“Who Are You, Man?”", - "body": "Who is that strange creature?\nWho are you, man?\nThe raiment of your soul\nis a robe of starlight,\nbut the clothes on your body\nare rags.\nYour family hungers, and you.\nWhen there is a piece of decent bread\non your bare table, you celebrate.\nWhat you cannot gain\nfor yourself and yours,\nYou want for the wide world.\nYou are free to enter heaven,\nbut knock on a great man’s door\nand he has you driven away.\nYou while time with God,\nbut speak to a gentleman\nand he cuts you short.\nSome call you The Apostle,\nand others say you are a damned criminal.\nWho are you? Your parents,\nare they proud of you, or do they redden\nat the mention of your name?\nWere you born on sack or velvet?\n\nHere is the story,\nthe life, of this man--\nIf I were to paint it,\nI would show a brook\nwhich erupts from an unknown fastness,\ncuts across a dark, narrow canyon\nfilled with crows,\nand stumbles on endless stones,\nmoaning in eternal pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "winter-world": { - "title": "“Winter World”", - "body": "Somebody killed himself tonight\nThat is why the stormy wind blows\nAnd the plate is dancing madly\nAbove the barber shop windows.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nThe day-labourer and his wife\nWork on logs, chopping and sawing,\nTheir child wrapped in a fleecy swaddle clothe\nHas a shrilling game with the wind.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nThe soldier on his beat of sentry\nTakes long strides up and down\nWhile counting every one of his steps:\nIt does not seem to be much fun.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nThe long-legged wandering tinker,\nHis shabby cape he can hardly hold,\nHis nose is like a ripe red pepper,\nHis eyes full of tears from the cold.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nThe itinerant actor is strolling\nFrom one village to another;\nHe has no warm garment at all,\nNevertheless he is starving, no bother.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nAnd the gypsy? … his teeth chatter\nUnder the ragged tent,\nThe wind knocks, then bursts in\nWithout the gypsy’s intent.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.\nSomebody killed himself tonight,\nThat is why the stormy wind blows\nAnd the plate is dancing madly\nAbove the barber shop windows.\nWhere is happiness nowadays?\nIn a cozy, warm, friendly place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Miklós Nádasdi", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "petrarch": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Petrarch", - "birth": { - "year": 1304 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1374 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 35 - }, - "poems": { - "alone-and-pensive-near-some-desert-shore": { - "title": "“Alone, and pensive, near some desert shore …”", - "body": "Alone, and pensive, near some desert shore,\nFar from the haunts of men I love to stray,\nAnd, cautiously, my distant path explore\nWhere never human footsteps mark’d the way.\nThus from the public gaze I strive to fly,\nAnd to the winds alone my griefs impart;\nWhile in my hollow cheek and haggard eye\nAppears the fire that burns my inmost heart.\nBut ah, in vain to distant scenes I go;\nNo solitude my troubled thoughts allays.\nMethinks e’en things inanimate must know\nThe flame that on my soul in secret preys;\nWhilst Love, unconquer’d, with resistless sway\nStill hovers round my path, still meets me on my way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "J. B. Taylor", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "breeze-blowing-that-blonde-curling-hair": { - "title": "“Breeze, blowing that blonde curling hair …”", - "body": "Breeze, blowing that blonde curling hair,\nstirring it, and being softly stirred in turn,\nscattering that sweet gold about, then\ngathering it, in a lovely knot of curls again,\nyou linger around bright eyes whose loving sting\npierces me so, till I feel it and weep,\nand I wander searching for my treasure,\nlike a creature that often shies and kicks:\nnow I seem to find her, now I realise\nshe’s far away, now I’m comforted, now despair,\nnow longing for her, now truly seeing her.\nHappy air, remain here with your\nliving rays: and you, clear running stream,\nwhy can’t I exchange my path for yours?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "canzone": { - "title": "“Canzone”", - "body": "Green robes and red, purple, or brown, or gray\nNo lady ever wore,\nNor hair of gold in sunny tresses twined,\nSo beautiful as she, who spoils my mind\nOf judgment, and from freedom’s lofty path\nSo draws me with her that I may not bear\nAny less heavy yoke.\n\nAnd if indeed at times--for wisdom fails\nWhere martyrdom breeds doubt--\nThe soul should ever arm it to complain\nSuddenly from each reinless rude desire\nHer smile recalls, and razes from my heart\nEvery rash enterprise, while all disdain\nIs soften’d in her sight.\n\nFor all that I have ever borne for love,\nAnd still am doom’d to bear,\nTill she who wounded it shall heal my heart,\nRejecting homage e’en while she invites,\nBe vengeance done! but let not pride nor ire\n’Gainst my humility the lovely pass\nBy which I enter’d bar.\n\nThe hour and day wherein I oped my eyes\nOn the bright black and white,\nWhich drive me thence where eager love impell’d\nWhere of that life which now my sorrow makes\nNew roots, and she in whom our age is proud,\nWhom to behold without a tender awe\nNeeds heart of lead or wood.\n\nThe tear then from these eyes that frequent falls--\nHE thus my pale cheek bathes\nWho planted first within my fenceless flank\nLove’s shaft--diverts me not from my desire;\nAnd in just part the proper sentence falls;\nFor her my spirit sighs, and worthy she\nTo staunch its secret wounds.\n\nSpring from within me these conflicting thoughts,\nTo weary, wound myself,\nEach a sure sword against its master turn’d:\nNor do I pray her to be therefore freed,\nFor less direct to heaven all other paths,\nAnd to that glorious kingdom none can soar\nCertes in sounder bark.\n\nBenignant stars their bright companionship\nGave to the fortunate side\nWhen came that fair birth on our nether world,\nIts sole star since, who, as the laurel leaf,\nThe worth of honour fresh and fragrant keeps,\nWhere lightnings play not, nor ungrateful winds\nEver o’ersway its head.\n\nWell know I that the hope to paint in verse\nHer praises would but tire\nThe worthiest hand that e’er put forth its pen:\nWho, in all Memory’s richest cells, e’er saw\nSuch angel virtue so rare beauty shrined,\nAs in those eyes, twin symbols of all worth,\nSweet keys of my gone heart?\n\nLady, wherever shines the sun, than you\nLove has no dearer pledge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "counting-the-hours-lest-i-myself-mislead": { - "title": "“Counting the hours, lest I myself mislead …”", - "body": "Counting the hours, lest I myself mislead\nBy blind desire wherewith my heart is torn,\nE’en while I speak away the moments speed,\nTo me and pity which alike were sworn.\nWhat shade so cruel as to blight the seed\nWhence the wish’d fruitage should so soon be born?\nWhat beast within my fold has leap’d to feed?\nWhat wall is built between the hand and corn?\nAlas! I know not, but, if right I guess,\nLove to such joyful hope has only led\nTo plunge my weary life in worse distress;\nAnd I remember now what once I read,\nUntil the moment of his full release\nMan’s bliss begins not, nor his troubles cease.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "doth-any-maiden-seek-the-glorious-fame": { - "title": "“Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame …”", - "body": "Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame\nOf chastity, of strength, of courtesy?\nGaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy\nWhom all the world doth as my lady name!\nHow honor grows, and pure devotion’s flame,\nHow truth is joined with graceful dignity,\nThere thou mayst learn, and what the path may be\nTo that high heaven which doth her spirit claim;\nThere learn that speech, beyond all poet’s skill,\nAnd sacred silence, and those holy ways\nUnutterable, untold by human heart.\nBut the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill,\nThis none can learn! because its lovely rays\nAre given by God’s pure grace, and not by art.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "dreams-bore-my-fancy": { - "title": "“Dreams bore my fancy …”", - "body": "Dreams bore my fancy to that region where\nShe dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see.\n’Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be\nI looked on her, less haughty and more fair.\nShe took my hand, she said, “Within this sphere,\nIf hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me:\nI filled thy life with war’s wild agony;\nMine own day closed ere evening could appear.\nMy bliss no human thought can understand;\nI wait for thee alone, and that fair veil\nOf beauty thou dost love shall yet retain.”\nWhy was she silent then, why dropped my hand\nEre those delicious tones could quite avail\nTo bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "gentle-severity-repulses-mild": { - "title": "“Gentle severity, repulses mild …”", - "body": "Gentle severity, repulses mild,\nFull of chaste love and pity sorrowing;\nGraceful rebukes, that had the power to bring\nBack to itself a heart by dreams beguiled;\nA tender voice, whose accents undefiled\nHeld sweet restraints, all duty honoring;\nThe bloom of virtue; purity’s clear spring\nTo cleanse away base thoughts and passions wild;\nDivinest eyes to make a lover’s bliss,\nWhether to bridle in the wayward mind\nLest its wild wanderings should the pathway miss,\nOr else its griefs to soothe, its wounds to bind;\nThis sweet completeness of thy life it is\nWhich saved my soul; no other peace I find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "i-once-beheld-on-earth-celestial-graces": { - "title": "“I once beheld on earth celestial graces …”", - "body": "I once beheld on earth celestial graces\nAnd heavenly beauties scarce to mortals known,\nWhose memory yields nor joy nor grief alone,\nBut all things else in cloud and dreams effaces.\nI saw how tears had left their weary traces\nWithin those eyes that once the sun outshone,\nI heard those lips, in low and plaintive moan,\nBreathe words to stir the mountains from their places.\nLove, wisdom, courage, tenderness, and truth\nMade in their mourning strains more high and dear\nThan ever wove soft sounds for mortal ear;\nAnd heaven seemed listening in such saddest ruth\nThe very leaves upon the bough to soothe,\nSuch sweetness filled the blissful atmosphere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "in-the-sweet-season-when-my-life-was-new": { - "title": "“In the sweet season when my life was new …”", - "body": "In the sweet season when my life was new,\nWhich saw the birth, and still the being sees\nOf the fierce passion for my ill that grew,\nFain would I sing--my sorrow to appease--\nHow then I lived, in liberty, at ease,\nWhile o’er my heart held slighted Love no sway;\nAnd how, at length, by too high scorn, for aye,\nI sank his slave, and what befell me then,\nWhereby to all a warning I remain;\nAlthough my sharpest pain\nBe elsewhere written, so that many a pen\nIs tired already, and, in every vale,\nThe echo of my heavy sighs is rife,\nSome credence forcing of my anguish’d life;\nAnd, as her wont, if here my memory fail,\nBe my long martyrdom its saving plea,\nAnd the one thought which so its torment made,\nAs every feeling else to throw in shade,\nAnd make me of myself forgetful be--\nRuling life’s inmost core, its bare rind left for me.\n\nLong years and many had pass’d o’er my head,\nSince, in Love’s first assault, was dealt my wound,\nAnd from my brow its youthful air had fled,\nWhile cold and cautious thoughts my heart around\nHad made it almost adamantine ground,\nTo loosen which hard passion gave no rest:\nNo sorrow yet with tears had bathed my breast,\nNor broke my sleep: and what was not in mine\nA miracle to me in others seem’d.\nLife’s sure test death is deem’d,\nAs cloudless eve best proves the past day fine;\nAh me! the tyrant whom I sing, descried\nEre long his error, that, till then, his dart\nNot yet beneath the gown had pierced my heart,\nAnd brought a puissant lady as his guide,\n’Gainst whom of small or no avail has been\nGenius, or force, to strive or supplicate.\nThese two transform’d me to my present state,\nMaking of breathing man a laurel green,\nWhich loses not its leaves though wintry blasts be keen.\n\nWhat my amaze, when first I fully learn’d\nThe wondrous change upon my person done,\nAnd saw my thin hairs to those green leaves turn’d\n(Whence yet for them a crown I might have won);\nMy feet wherewith I stood, and moved, and run--\nThus to the soul the subject members bow--\nBecome two roots upon the shore, not now\nOf fabled Peneus, but a stream as proud,\nAnd stiffen’d to a branch my either arm!\nNor less was my alarm,\nWhen next my frame white down was seen to shroud,\nWhile, ’neath the deadly leven, shatter’d lay\nMy first green hope that soar’d, too proud, in air,\nBecause, in sooth, I knew not when nor where\nI left my latter state; but, night and day,\nWhere it was struck, alone, in tears, I went,\nStill seeking it alwhere, and in the wave;\nAnd, for its fatal fall, while able, gave\nMy tongue no respite from its one lament,\nFor the sad snowy swan both form and language lent.\n\nThus that loved wave--my mortal speech put by\nFor birdlike song--I track’d with constant feet,\nStill asking mercy with a stranger cry;\nBut ne’er in tones so tender, nor so sweet,\nKnew I my amorous sorrow to repeat,\nAs might her hard and cruel bosom melt:\nJudge, still if memory sting, what then I felt!\nBut ah! not now the past, it rather needs\nOf her my lovely and inveterate foe\nThe present power to show,\nThough such she be all language as exceeds.\nShe with a glance who rules us as her own,\nOpening my breast my heart in hand to take,\nThus said to me: “Of this no mention make.”\nI saw her then, in alter’d air, alone,\nSo that I recognised her not--O shame\nBe on my truant mind and faithless sight!\nAnd when the truth I told her in sore fright,\nShe soon resumed her old accustom’d frame,\nWhile, desperate and half dead, a hard rock mine became.\n\nAs spoke she, o’er her mien such feeling stirr’d,\nThat from the solid rock, with lively fear,\n“Haply I am not what you deem,” I heard;\nAnd then methought, “If she but help me here,\nNo life can ever weary be, or drear;\nTo make me weep, return, my banish’d Lord!”\nI know not how, but thence, the power restored,\nBlaming no other than myself, I went,\nAnd, nor alive, nor dead, the long day past.\nBut, because time flies fast,\nAnd the pen answers ill my good intent,\nFull many a thing long written in my mind\nI here omit; and only mention such\nWhereat who hears them now will marvel much.\nDeath so his hand around my vitals twined,\nNot silence from its grasp my heart could save,\nOr succour to its outraged virtue bring:\nAs speech to me was a forbidden thing,\nTo paper and to ink my griefs I gave--\nLife, not my own, is lost through you who dig my grave.\n\nI fondly thought before her eyes, at length,\nThough low and lost, some mercy to obtain;\nAnd this the hope which lent my spirit strength.\nSometimes humility o’ercomes disdain,\nSometimes inflames it to worse spite again;\nThis knew I, who so long was left in night,\nThat from such prayers had disappear’d my light;\nTill I, who sought her still, nor found, alas!\nEven her shade, nor of her feet a sign,\nOutwearied and supine,\nAs one who midway sleeps, upon the grass\nThrew me, and there, accusing the brief ray,\nOf bitter tears I loosed the prison’d flood,\nTo flow and fall, to them as seem’d it good.\nNe’er vanish’d snow before the sun away,\nAs then to melt apace it me befell,\nTill, ’neath a spreading beech a fountain swell’d;\nLong in that change my humid course I held,--\nWho ever saw from Man a true fount well?\nAnd yet, though strange it sound, things known and sure I tell.\n\nThe soul from God its nobler nature gains\n(For none save He such favour could bestow)\nAnd like our Maker its high state retains,\nTo pardon who is never tired, nor slow,\nIf but with humble heart and suppliant show,\nFor mercy for past sins to Him we bend;\nAnd if, against his wont, He seem to lend,\nAwhile, a cold ear to our earnest prayers,\n’Tis that right fear the sinner more may fill;\nFor he repents but ill\nHis old crime for another who prepares.\nThus, when my lady, while her bosom yearn’d\nWith pity, deign’d to look on me, and knew\nThat equal with my fault its penance grew,\nTo my old state and shape I soon return’d.\nBut nought there is on earth in which the wise\nMay trust, for, wearying braving her afresh,\nTo rugged stone she changed my quivering flesh.\nSo that, in their old strain, my broken cries\nIn vain ask’d death, or told her one name to deaf skies.\n\nA sad and wandering shade, I next recall,\nThrough many a distant and deserted glen,\nThat long I mourn’d my indissoluble thrall.\nAt length my malady seem’d ended, when\nI to my earthly frame return’d again,\nHaply but greater grief therein to feel;\nStill following my desire with such fond zeal\nThat once (beneath the proud sun’s fiercest blaze,\nReturning from the chase, as was my wont)\nNaked, where gush’d a font,\nMy fair and fatal tyrant met my gaze;\nI whom nought else could pleasure, paused to look,\nWhile, touch’d with shame as natural as intense,\nHerself to hide or punish my offence,\nShe o’er my face the crystal waters shook\n--I still speak true, though truth may seem a lie--\nInstantly from my proper person torn,\nA solitary stag, I felt me borne\nIn wingèd terrors the dark forest through,\nAs still of my own dogs the rushing storm I flew\nMy song! I never was that cloud of gold\nWhich once descended in such precious rain,\nEasing awhile with bliss Jove’s amorous pain;\nI was a flame, kindled by one bright eye,\nI was the bird which gladly soar’d on high,\nExalting her whose praise in song I wake;\nNor, for new fancies, knew I to forsake\nMy first fond laurel, ’neath whose welcome shade\nEver from my firm heart all meaner pleasures fade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "lady-in-your-bright-eyes": { - "title": "“Lady, in your bright eyes …”", - "body": "Lady, in your bright eyes\nSoft glancing round, I mark a holy light,\nPointing the arduous way that heavenward lies;\nAnd to my practised sight,\nFrom thence, where Love enthroned, asserts his might,\nVisibly, palpably, the soul beams forth.\nThis is the beacon guides to deeds of worth,\nAnd urges me to seek the glorious goal;\nThis bids me leave behind the vulgar throng,\nNor can the human tongue\nTell how those orbs divine o’er all my soul\nExert their sweet control,\nBoth when hoar winter’s frosts around are flung,\nAnd when the year puts on his youth again,\nJocund, as when this bosom first knew pain.\n\nOh! if in that high sphere,\nFrom whence the Eternal Ruler of the stars\nIn this excelling work declared his might,\nAll be as fair and bright,\nLoose me from forth my darksome prison here,\nThat to so glorious life the passage bars;\nThen, in the wonted tumult of my breast,\nI hail boon Nature, and the genial day\nThat gave me being, and a fate so blest,\nAnd her who bade hope beam\nUpon my soul; for till then burthensome\nWas life itself become:\nBut now, elate with touch of self-esteem,\nHigh thoughts and sweet within that heart arise,\nOf which the warders are those beauteous eyes.\n\nNo joy so exquisite\nDid Love or fickle Fortune ere devise,\nIn partial mood, for favour’d votaries,\nBut I would barter it\nFor one dear glance of those angelic eyes,\nWhence springs my peace as from its living root.\nO vivid lustre! of power absolute\nO’er all my being--source of that delight,\nBy which consumed I sink, a willing prey.\nAs fades each lesser ray\nBefore your splendour more intense and bright,\nSo to my raptured heart,\nWhen your surpassing sweetness you impart,\nNo other thought of feeling may remain\nWhere you, with Love himself, despotic reign.\n\nAll sweet emotions e’er\nBy happy lovers felt in every clime,\nTogether all, may not with mine compare,\nWhen, as from time to time,\nI catch from that dark radiance rich and deep\nA ray in which, disporting, Love is seen;\nAnd I believe that from my cradled sleep,\nBy Heaven provided this resource hath been,\n’Gainst adverse fortune, and my nature frail.\nWrong’d am I by that veil,\nAnd the fair hand which oft the light eclipse,\nThat all my bliss hath wrought;\nAnd whence the passion struggling on my lips,\nBoth day and night, to vent the breast o’erfraught,\nStill varying as I read her varying thought.\n\nFor that (with pain I find)\nNot Nature’s poor endowments may alone\nRender me worthy of a look so kind,\nI strive to raise my mind\nTo match with the exalted hopes I own,\nAnd fires, though all engrossing, pure as mine.\nIf prone to good, averse to all things base,\nContemner of what worldlings covet most,\nI may become by long self-discipline.\nHaply this humble boast\nMay win me in her fair esteem a place;\nFor sure the end and aim\nOf all my tears, my sorrowing heart’s sole claim,\nWere the soft trembling of relenting eyes,\nThe generous lover’s last, best, dearest prize.\n\nMy lay, thy sister-song is gone before.\nAnd now another in my teeming brain\nPrepares itself: whence I resume the strain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Barbarina Brand", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "late-to-arrive-my-fortunes-are-and-slow": { - "title": "“Late to arrive my fortunes are and slow …”", - "body": "Late to arrive my fortunes are and slow--\nHopes are unsure, desires ascend and swell,\nSuspense, expectancy in me rebel--\nBut swifter to depart than tigers go.\nTepid and dark shall be the cold pure snow,\nThe ocean dry, its fish on mountains dwell,\nThe sun set in the East, by that old well\nAlike whence Tigris and Euphrates flow,\nEre in this strife I peace or truce shall find,\nEre Love or Laura practise kinder ways,\nSworn friends, against me wrongfully combined.\nAfter such bitters, if some sweet allays,\nBalk’d by long fasts my palate spurns the fare,\nSole grace from them that falleth to my share.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "lust-and-dull-slumber-and-the-lazy-hours": { - "title": "“Lust and dull slumber and the lazy hours …”", - "body": "Lust and dull slumber and the lazy hours\nHave well nigh banished virtue from mankind.\nHence have man’s nature and his treacherous mind\nLeft their free course, enmeshed in sin’s soft bowers.\nThe very light of heaven hath lost its powers\nMid fading ways our loftiest dreams to find;\nMen jeer at him whose footsteps are inclined\nWhere Helicon from dewy fountains showers.\nWho seeks the laurel? who the myrtle twines?\n“Wisdom, thou goest a beggar and unclad,”\nSo scoffs the crowd, intent on worthless gain.\nFew are the hearts that prize the poet’s lines:\nYet, friend, the more I hail thy spirit glad!\nLet not the glory of thy purpose wane!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "madrigale": { - "title": "“Madrigale”", - "body": "Not Dian to her lover was more dear,\nWhen fortune ’mid the waters cold and clear,\nGave him her naked beauties all to see,\nThan seem’d the rustic ruddy nymph to me,\nWho, in yon flashing stream, the light veil laved,\nWhence Laura’s lovely tresses lately waved;\nI saw, and through me felt an amorous chill,\nThough summer burn, to tremble and to thrill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "o-joyous-blossoming-ever-blessed-flowers": { - "title": "“O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers …”", - "body": "O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!\n’Mid which my pensive queen her footstep sets;\nO plain, that hold’st her words for amulets\nAnd keep’st her footsteps in thy leafy bowers!\nO trees, with earliest green of springtime hours,\nAnd all spring’s pale and tender violets!\nO grove, so dark the proud sun only lets\nHis blithe rays gild the outskirts of thy towers!\nO pleasant country-side! O limpid stream,\nThat mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,\nAnd of their living light canst catch the beam!\nI envy thee her presence pure and dear.\nThere is no rock so senseless but I deem\nIt burns with passion that to mine is near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "o-wandering-steps-o-vague-and-busy-dreams": { - "title": "“O wandering steps! O vague and busy dreams …”", - "body": "O wandering steps! O vague and busy dreams!\nO changeless memory! O fierce desire!\nO passion strong! heart weak with its own fire;\nO eyes of mine! not eyes, but living streams;\nO laurel boughs! whose lovely garland seems\nThe sole reward that glory’s deeds require!\nO haunted life! delusion sweet and dire,\nThat all my days from slothful rest redeems;\nO beauteous face! where Love has treasured well\nHis whip and spur, the sluggish heart to move\nAt his least will; nor can it find relief.\nO souls of love and passion! if ye dwell\nYet on this earth, and ye, great Shades of Love!\nLinger, and see my passion and my grief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "o-ye-who-trace-through-scattered-verse-the-sound": { - "title": "“O ye who trace through scattered verse the sound …”", - "body": "O ye who trace through scattered verse the sound\nOf those long sighs wherewith I fed my heart\nAmid youth’s errors, when in greater part\nThat man unlike this present man was found;\nFor the mixed strain which here I do compound\nOf empty hopes and pains that vainly start,\nWhatever soul hath truly felt love’s smart,\nWith pity and with pardon will abound.\nBut now I see full well how long I earned\nAll men’s reproof; and oftentimes my soul\nLies crushed by its own grief; and it doth seem\nFor such misdeed shame is the fruitage whole,\nAnd wild repentance and the knowledge learned\nThat worldly joy is still a short, short dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "oft-by-my-faithful-mirror-i-am-told": { - "title": "“Oft by my faithful mirror I am told …”", - "body": "Oft by my faithful mirror I am told,\nAnd by my mind outworn and altered brow,\nMy earthly powers impaired and weakened now,--\n“Deceive thyself no more, for thou art old!”\nWho strives with Nature’s laws is over-bold,\nAnd Time to his commandment bids us bow.\nLike fire that waves have quenched, I calmly vow\nIn life’s long dream no more my sense to fold.\nAnd while I think, our swift existence flies,\nAnd none can live again earth’s brief career,--\nThen in my deepest heart the voice replies\nOf one who now has left this mortal sphere,\nBut walked alone through earthly destinies,\nAnd of all women is to fame most dear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "sestina": { - "title": "“Sestina”", - "body": "The overcharged air, the impending cloud,\nCompress’d together by impetuous winds,\nMust presently discharge themselves in rain;\nAlready as of crystal are the streams,\nAnd, for the fine grass late that clothed the vales,\nIs nothing now but the hoar frost and ice.\n\nAnd I, within my heart, more cold than ice,\nOf heavy thoughts have such a hovering cloud,\nAs sometimes rears itself in these our vales,\nLowly, and landlock’d against amorous winds,\nEnviron’d everywhere with stagnant streams,\nWhen falls from soft’ning heaven the smaller rain.\n\nLasts but a brief while every heavy rain;\nAnd summer melts away the snows and ice,\nWhen proudly roll th’ accumulated streams:\nNor ever hid the heavens so thick a cloud,\nWhich, overtaken by the furious winds,\nFled not from the first hills and quiet vales.\n\nBut ah! what profit me the flowering vales?\nAlike I mourn in sunshine and in rain,\nSuffering the same in warm and wintry winds;\nFor only then my lady shall want ice\nAt heart, and on her brow th’ accustom’d cloud,\nWhen dry shall be the seas, the lakes, and streams.\n\nWhile to the sea descend the mountain streams,\nAs long as wild beasts love umbrageous vales,\nO’er those bright eyes shall hang th’ unfriendly cloud\nMy own that moistens with continual rain;\nAnd in that lovely breast be harden’d ice\nWhich forces still from mine so dolorous winds.\n\nYet well ought I to pardon all the winds\nBut for the love of one, that ’mid two streams\nShut me among bright verdure and pure ice;\nSo that I pictured then in thousand vales\nThe shade wherein I was, which heat or rain\nEsteemeth not, nor sound of broken cloud.\n\nBut fled not ever cloud before the winds,\nAs I that day: nor ever streams with rain\nNor ice, when April’s sun opens the vales.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "she-ruled-in-beauty-oer-this-heart-of-mine": { - "title": "“She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine …”", - "body": "She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine,\nA noble lady in a humble home,\nAnd now her time for heavenly bliss has come,\n’Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine.\nThe soul that all its blessings must resign,\nAnd love whose light no more on earth finds room\nMight rend the rocks with pity for their doom,\nYet none their sorrows can in words enshrine;\nThey weep within my heart; no ears they find\nSave mine alone, and I am crushed with care,\nAnd naught remains to me save mournful breath.\nAssuredly but dust and shade we are;\nAssuredly desire is mad and blind;\nAssuredly its hope but ends in death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "so-wayward-now-my-will-and-so-unwise": { - "title": "“So wayward now my will, and so unwise …”", - "body": "So wayward now my will, and so unwise,\nTo follow her who turns from me in flight,\nAnd, from love’s fetters free herself and light,\nBefore my slow and shackled motion flies,\nThat less it lists, the more my sighs and cries\nWould point where passes the safe path and right,\nNor aught avails to check or to excite,\nFor Love’s own nature curb and spur defies.\nThus, when perforce the bridle he has won,\nAnd helpless at his mercy I remain,\nAgainst my will he speeds me to mine end\n’Neath yon cold laurel, whose false boughs upon\nHangs the harsh fruit, which, tasted, spreads the pain\nI sought to stay, and mars where it should mend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "so-weary-am-i-neath-the-constant-thrall": { - "title": "“So weary am I ’neath the constant thrall …”", - "body": "So weary am I ’neath the constant thrall\nOf mine own vile heart, and the false world’s taint,\nThat much I fear while on the way to faint,\nAnd in the hands of my worst foe to fall.\nWell came, ineffably, supremely kind,\nA friend to free me from the guilty bond,\nBut too soon upward flew my sight beyond,\nSo that in vain I strive his track to find;\nBut still his words stamp’d on my heart remain,\nAll ye who labour, lo! the way in me;\nCome unto me, nor let the world detain!\nOh! that to me, by grace divine, were given\nWings like a dove, then I away would flee,\nAnd be at rest, up, up from earth to heaven!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "holiday": "divine_mercy" - } - } - }, - "sweet-air-that-circlest-round-those-radiant-tresses": { - "title": "“Sweet air, that circlest round those radiant tresses …”", - "body": "Sweet air, that circlest round those radiant tresses,\nAnd floatest, mingled with them, fold on fold,\nDeliciously, and scatterest that fine gold,\nThen twinest it again, my heart’s dear jesses;\nThou lingerest on those eyes, whose beauty presses\nStings in my heart that all its life exhaust,\nTill I go wandering round my treasure lost,\nLike some scared creature whom the night distresses.\nI seem to find her now, and now perceive\nHow far away she is; now rise, now fall;\nNow what I wish, now what is true, believe.\nO happy air! since joys enrich thee all,\nRest thee; and thou, O stream too bright to grieve!\nWhy can I not float with thee at thy call?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "tears-bitter-tears-adown-my-pale-cheek-rain": { - "title": "“Tears, bitter tears adown my pale cheek rain …”", - "body": "Tears, bitter tears adown my pale cheek rain,\nBursts from mine anguish’d breast a storm of sighs,\nWhene’er on you I turn my passionate eyes,\nFor whom alone this bright world I disdain.\nTrue! to my ardent wishes and old pain\nThat mild sweet smile a peaceful balm supplies,\nRescues me from the martyr fire that tries,\nRapt and intent on you whilst I remain;\nThus in your presence--but my spirits freeze\nWhen, ushering with fond acts a warm adieu,\nMy fatal stars from life’s quench’d heaven decay.\nMy soul released at last with Love’s apt keys\nBut issues from my heart to follow you,\nNor tears itself without much thought away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "that-fire-for-ever-which-i-thought-at-rest": { - "title": "“That fire for ever which I thought at rest …”", - "body": "That fire for ever which I thought at rest,\nQuench’d in the chill blood of my ripen’d years,\nAwakes new flames and torment in my breast.\nIts sparks were never all, from what I see,\nExtinct, but merely slumbering, smoulder’d o’er;\nHaply this second error worse may be,\nFor, by the tears, which I, in torrents, pour,\nGrief, through these eyes, distill’d from my heart’s core,\nWhich holds within itself the spark and bait,\nRemains not as it was, but grows more great.\nWhat fire, save mine, had not been quench’d and kill’d\nBeneath the flood these sad eyes ceaseless shed?\nStruggling ’mid opposites--so Love has will’d--\nNow here, now there, my vain life must be led,\nFor in so many ways his snares are spread,\nWhen most I hope him from my heart expell’d\nThen most of her fair face its slave I’m held.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "those-eyes-neath-which-my-passionate-rapture-rose": { - "title": "“Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose …”", - "body": "Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose,\nThe arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile\nCould my own soul from its own self beguile,\nAnd in a separate world of dreams enclose,\nThe hair’s bright tresses, full of golden glows,\nAnd the soft lightning of the angelic smile\nThat changed this earth to some celestial isle,--\nAre now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.\nAnd yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,\nLeft dark without the light I loved in vain,\nAdrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;\nDead is the source of all my amorous strain,\nDry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,\nAnd my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "to-every-animal-that-dwells-on-earth": { - "title": "“To every animal that dwells on earth …”", - "body": "To every animal that dwells on earth,\nExcept to those which have in hate the sun,\nTheir time of labour is while lasts the day;\nBut when high heaven relumes its thousand stars,\nThis seeks his hut, and that its native wood,\nEach finds repose, at least until the dawn.\n\nBut I, when fresh and fair begins the dawn\nTo chase the lingering shades that cloak’d the earth,\nWakening the animals in every wood,\nNo truce to sorrow find while rolls the sun;\nAnd, when again I see the glistening stars,\nStill wander, weeping, wishing for the day.\n\nWhen sober evening chases the bright day,\nAnd this our darkness makes for others dawn,\nPensive I look upon the cruel stars\nWhich framed me of such pliant passionate earth,\nAnd curse the day that e’er I saw the sun,\nWhich makes me native seem of wildest wood.\n\nAnd yet methinks was ne’er in any wood,\nSo wild a denizen, by night or day,\nAs she whom thus I blame in shade and sun:\nMe night’s first sleep o’ercomes not, nor the dawn,\nFor though in mortal coil I tread the earth,\nMy firm and fond desire is from the stars.\n\nEre up to you I turn, O lustrous stars,\nOr downwards in love’s labyrinthine wood,\nLeaving my fleshly frame in mouldering earth,\nCould I but pity find in her, one day\nWould many years redeem, and to the dawn\nWith bliss enrich me from the setting sun!\n\nOh! might I be with her where sinks the sun,\nNo other eyes upon us but the stars,\nAlone, one sweet night, ended by no dawn,\nNor she again transfigured in green wood,\nTo cheat my clasping arms, as on the day,\nWhen Phoebus vainly follow’d her on earth.\n\nI shall lie low in earth, in crumbling wood.\nAnd clustering stars shall gem the noon of day,\nEre on so sweet a dawn shall rise that sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "when-all-my-mind-i-turn-to-the-one-part": { - "title": "“When all my mind I turn to the one part …”", - "body": "When all my mind I turn to the one part\nWhere sheds my lady’s face its beauteous light,\nAnd lingers in my loving thought the light\nThat burns and racks within me ev’ry part,\nI from my heart who fear that it may part,\nAnd see the near end of my single light,\nGo, as a blind man, groping without light,\nWho knows not where yet presses to depart.\nThus from the blows which ever wish me dead\nI flee, but not so swiftly that desire\nCeases to come, as is its wont, with me.\nSilent I move: for accents of the dead\nWould melt the general age: and I desire\nThat sighs and tears should only fall from me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "when-love-doth-those-sweet-eyes-to-earth-incline": { - "title": "“When love doth those sweet eyes to earth incline …”", - "body": "When Love doth those sweet eyes to earth incline,\nAnd weaves those wandering notes into a sigh\nWith his own touch, and leads a minstrelsy\nClear-voiced and pure, angelic and divine,--\nHe makes sweet havoc in this heart of mine,\nAnd to my thoughts brings transformation high,\nSo that I say, “My time has come to die,\nIf fate so blest a death for me design.”\nBut to my soul, thus steeped in joy, the sound\nBrings such a wish to keep that present heaven,\nIt holds my spirit back to earth as well.\nAnd thus I live: and thus is loosed and wound\nThe thread of life which unto me was given\nBy this sole Siren who with us doth dwell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "when-love-whose-proper-throne-is-that-sweet-face": { - "title": "“When love, whose proper throne is that sweet face …”", - "body": "When Love, whose proper throne is that sweet face,\nAt times escorts her ’mid the sisters fair,\nAs their each beauty is than hers less rare,\nSo swells in me the fond desire apace.\nI bless the hour, the season and the place,\nSo high and heavenward when my eyes could dare;\nAnd say: “My heart! in grateful memory bear\nThis lofty honour and surpassing grace:\nFrom her descends the tender truthful thought,\nWhich follow’d, bliss supreme shall thee repay,\nWho spurn’st the vanities that win the crowd:\nFrom her that gentle graceful love is caught,\nTo heaven which leads thee by the right-hand way,\nAnd crowns e’en here with hopes both pure and proud.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "who-is-resolved-to-venture-his-vain-life": { - "title": "“Who is resolved to venture his vain life …”", - "body": "Who is resolved to venture his vain life\nOn the deceitful wave and ’mid the rocks,\nAlone, unfearing death, in little bark,\nCan never be far distant from his end:\nTherefore betimes he should return to port\nWhile to the helm yet answers his true sail.\n\nThe gentle breezes to which helm and sail\nI trusted, entering on this amorous life,\nAnd hoping soon to make some better port,\nHave led me since amid a thousand rocks,\nAnd the sure causes of my mournful end\nAre not alone without, but in my bark.\n\nLong cabin’d and confined in this blind bark,\nI wander’d, looking never at the sail,\nWhich, prematurely, bore me to my end;\nTill He was pleased who brought me into life\nSo far to call me back from those sharp rocks,\nThat, distantly, at last was seen my port.\n\nAs lights at midnight seen in any port,\nSometimes from the main sea by passing bark,\nSave when their ray is lost ’mid storms or rocks;\nSo I too from above the swollen sail\nSaw the sure colours of that other life,\nAnd could not help but sigh to reach my end.\n\nNot that I yet am certain of that end,\nFor wishing with the dawn to be in port,\nIs a long voyage for so short a life:\nAnd then I fear to find me in frail bark,\nBeyond my wishes full its every sail\nWith the strong wind which drove me on those rocks.\n\nEscape I living from these doubtful rocks,\nOr if my exile have but a fair end,\nHow happy shall I be to furl my sail,\nAnd my last anchor cast in some sure port;\nBut, ah! I burn, and, as some blazing bark,\nSo hard to me to leave my wonted life.\n\nLord of my end and master of my life,\nBefore I lose my bark amid the rocks,\nDirect to a good port its harass’d sail!", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "with-weary-frame-which-painfully-i-bear": { - "title": "“With weary frame which painfully I bear …”", - "body": "With weary frame which painfully I bear,\nI look behind me at each onward pace,\nAnd then take comfort from your native air,\nWhich following fans my melancholy face;\nThe far way, my frail life, the cherish’d fair\nWhom thus I leave, as then my thoughts retrace,\nI fix my feet in silent pale despair,\nAnd on the earth my tearful eyes abase.\nAt times a doubt, too, rises on my woes,\n“How ever can this weak and wasted frame\nLive from life’s spirit and one source afar?”\nLove’s answer soon the truth forgotten shows--\n“This high pure privilege true lovers claim,\nWho from mere human feelings franchised are!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor" - } - }, - "the-holy-angels-and-the-spirits-blest": { - "title": "“The holy angels and the spirits blest …”", - "body": "The holy angels and the spirits blest,\nCelestial bands, upon that day serene\nWhen first my love went by in heavenly sheen,\nCame thronging, wondering at the gracious guest.\n“What light is here, in what new beauty drest?”\nThey said among themselves; “for none has seen\nWithin this age arrive so fair a mien\nFrom changing earth unto immortal rest.”\nAnd she, contented with her new-found bliss,\nRanks with the perfect in that upper sphere,\nYet ever and anon looks back on this,\nTo watch for me, as if for me she stayed.\nSo strive my thoughts, lest that high heaven I miss.\nI hear her call, and must not be delayed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "Thomas Wentworth Higginson" - } - }, - "the-nearer-i-approach-my-lifes-last-day": { - "title": "“The nearer I approach my life’s last day …”", - "body": "The nearer I approach my life’s last day,\nThe certain day that limits human woe,\nI better mark, in Time’s swift silent flow,\nHow the fond hopes he brought all pass’d away.\nOf love no longer--to myself I say--\nWe now may commune, for, as virgin snow,\nThe hard and heavy load we drag below\nDissolves and dies, ere rest in heaven repay.\nAnd prostrate with it must each fair hope lie\nWhich here beguiled us and betray’d so long,\nAnd joy, grief, fear and pride alike shall cease:\nAnd then too shall we see with clearer eye\nHow oft we trod in weary ways and wrong,\nAnd why so long in vain we sigh’d for peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-thread-on-which-my-weary-life-depends": { - "title": "“The thread on which my weary life depends …”", - "body": "The thread on which my weary life depends\nSo fragile is and weak,\nIf none kind succour lends,\nSoon ’neath the painful burden will it break;\nSince doom’d to take my sad farewell of her,\nIn whom begins and ends\nMy bliss, one hope, to stir\nMy sinking spirit from its black despair,\nWhispers, “Though lost awhile\nThat form so dear and fair,\nSad soul! the trial bear,\nFor thee e’en yet the sun may brightly shine,\nAnd days more happy smile,\nOnce more the lost loved treasure may be thine.”\nThis thought awhile sustains me, but again\nTo fail me and forsake in worse excess of pain.\n\nTime flies apace: the silent hours and swift\nSo urge his journey on,\nShort span to me is left\nEven to think how quick to death I run;\nScarce, in the orient heaven, yon mountain crest\nSmiles in the sun’s first ray,\nWhen, in the adverse west,\nHis long round run, we see his light decay\nSo small of life the space,\nSo frail and clogg’d with woe,\nTo mortal man below,\nThat, when I find me from that beauteous face\nThus torn by fate’s decree,\nUnable at a wish with her to be,\nSo poor the profit that old comforts give,\nI know not how I brook in such a state to live.\n\nEach place offends, save where alone I see\nThose eyes so sweet and bright,\nWhich still shall bear the key\nOf the soft thoughts I hide from other sight;\nAnd, though hard exile harder weighs on me,\nWhatever mood betide,\nI ask no theme beside,\nFor all is hateful that I since have seen.\nWhat rivers and what heights,\nWhat shores and seas between\nMe rise and those twin lights,\nWhich made the storm and blackness of my days\nOne beautiful serene,\nTo which tormented Memory still strays:\nFree as my life then pass’d from every care,\nSo hard and heavy seems my present lot to bear.\n\nAlas! self-parleying thus, I but renew\nThe warm wish in my mind,\nWhich first within it grew\nThe day I left my better half behind:\nIf by long absence love is quench’d, then who\nGuides me to the old bait,\nWhence all my sorrows date?\nWhy rather not my lips in silence seal’d?\nBy finest crystal ne’er\nWere hidden tints reveal’d\nSo faithfully and fair,\nAs my sad spirit naked lays and bare\nIts every secret part,\nAnd the wild sweetness thrilling in my heart,\nThrough eyes which, restlessly, o’erfraught with tears,\nSeek her whose sight alone with instant gladness cheers.\n\nStrange pleasure!--yet so often that within\nThe human heart to reign\nIs found--to woo and win\nEach new brief toy that men most sigh to gain:\nAnd I am one from sadness who relief\nSo draw, as if it still\nMy study were to fill\nThese eyes with softness, and this heart with grief:\nAs weighs with me in chief\nNay rather with sole force,\nThe language and the light\nOf those dear eyes to urge me on that course,\nSo where its fullest source\nLong sorrow finds, I fix my often sight,\nAnd thus my heart and eyes like sufferers be,\nWhich in love’s path have been twin pioneers to me.\n\nThe golden tresses which should make, I ween,\nThe sun with envy pine;\nAnd the sweet look serene,\nWhere love’s own rays so bright and burning shine,\nThat, ere its time, they make my strength decline,\nEach wise and truthful word,\nRare in the world, which late\nShe smiling gave, no more are seen or heard.\nBut this of all my fate\nIs hardest to endure,\nThat here I am denied\nThe gentle greeting, angel-like and pure,\nWhich still to virtue’s side\nInclined my heart with modest magic lure;\nSo that, in sooth, I nothing hope again\nOf comfort more than this, how best to bear my pain.\n\nAnd--with fit ecstacy my loss to mourn--\nThe soft hand’s snowy charm,\nThe finely-rounded arm,\nThe winning ways, by turns, that quiet scorn,\nChaste anger, proud humility adorn,\nThe fair young breast that shrined\nIntellect pure and high,\nAre now all hid the rugged Alp behind.\nMy trust were vain to try\nAnd see her ere I die,\nFor, though awhile he dare\nSuch dreams indulge, Hope ne’er can constant be,\nBut falls back in despair\nHer, whom Heaven honours, there again to see,\nWhere virtue, courtesy in her best mix,\nAnd where so oft I pray my future home to fix.\n\nMy Song! if thou shalt see,\nOur common lady in that dear retreat,\nWe both may hope that she\nWill stretch to thee her fair and fav’ring hand,\nWhence I so far am bann’d;\n--Touch, touch it not, but, reverent at her feet,\nTell her I will be there with earliest speed,\nA man of flesh and blood, or else a spirit freed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-youthful-lady-neath-a-laurel-green": { - "title": "“A youthful lady ’neath a laurel green …”", - "body": "A youthful lady ’neath a laurel green\nWas seated, fairer, colder than the snow\nOn which no sun has shone for many years:\nHer sweet speech, her bright face, and flowing hair\nSo pleased, she yet is present to my eyes,\nAnd aye must be, whatever fate prevail.\n\nThese my fond thoughts of her shall fade and fail\nWhen foliage ceases on the laurel green;\nNor calm can be my heart, nor check’d these eyes\nUntil the fire shall freeze, or burns the snow:\nEasier upon my head to count each hair\nThan, ere that day shall dawn, the parting years.\n\nBut, since time flies, and roll the rapid years,\nAnd death may, in the midst, of life, assail,\nWith full brown locks, or scant and silver hair,\nI still the shade of that sweet laurel green\nFollow, through fiercest sun and deepest snow,\nTill the last day shall close my weary eyes.\n\nOh! never sure were seen such brilliant eyes,\nIn this our age or in the older years,\nWhich mould and melt me, as the sun melts snow,\nInto a stream of tears adown the vale,\nWatering the hard roots of that laurel green,\nWhose boughs are diamonds and gold whose hair.\n\nI fear that Time my mien may change and hair,\nEre, with true pity touch’d, shall greet my eyes\nMy idol imaged in that laurel green:\nFor, unless memory err, through seven long years\nTill now, full many a shore has heard my wail,\nBy night, at noon, in summer and in snow.\n\nThus fire within, without the cold, cold snow,\nAlone, with these my thoughts and her bright hair,\nAlway and everywhere I bear my ail,\nHaply to find some mercy in the eyes\nOf unborn nations and far future years,\nIf so long flourishes our laurel green.\n\nThe gold and topaz of the sun on snow\nAre shamed by the bright hair above those eyes,\nSearing the short green of my life’s vain years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "translator": "R. G. Macgregor", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "janos-pilinszky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "János Pilinszky", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1981 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "hungarian", - "language": "hungarian", - "flag": "🇭🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/János_Pilinszky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "hungarian" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn-sketch": { - "title": "“Autumn Sketch”", - "body": "From below the alert garden\na tree ascends into space,\nthe stillness is frail and empty,\nthe meadow looks for boundaries.\n\nYour heart sinks into fear,\nand the lurking road runs away.\nthe stem of a rose with a nervous smile,\ngazes into herself:\n\nin distant dubious regions\npain is being prepared.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Michael Castro & Gábor G. Gyukics", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "dont-be-scared": { - "title": "“Don’t Be Scared”", - "body": "I could do it, but I will not do it,\nI’m planning it, raising the issue,\nI’m just playing with myself, that is all,\nI should rather cry than be brave.\n\nAlthough sometimes I’m scared, delight\nflowing toward my throat might entomb me,\nwhat if it’s only a ruminant horror,\nwhat would happen if I did it?\n\nWhat would happen if I kindled you\nin your house on a sleepy night?\nYou’d be destroyed there and those whom\nyou loved would perish with you! Die together.\n\nBefore, I would examine your room,\nI would sit there for an afternoon,\nI would inscribe in my brain where your bed sits,\nthe papers pattern on the wall,\n\nthe stairs that lead to your door,\nI want to know what will be with, and against you,\nwhere will the fire go and where\nthe rebellious room will press you in?\n\nBecause you will burn. Below in the yard\na gaping mouth opens for you,\na crying pain, a swallowing throat.\nVainly, you’ll rip through doors and windows.\n\nI’ll stand across the street and devour it all:\nthe smoke grow woolen on the firewall,\ngather itself in an inflamed bouquet and burst,\na bloody bundle beneath a narrow roof!\n\nThat hot anguish that killed me before\nnow flows over you like puss\nyou’ll be a dark, dented, numb wound,\nlike the night and my face down there.\n\nIt should be so. But nothing will happen.\nEven in hell, my faith did loosen.\nThis game gives me no consolation.\nThis point is the deepest of the night.\n\nThat I cursed you? Think what you like.\nYou don’t interest me, I’ve never loved you.\nSleep restfully, drink and eat,\nand if you understand my curses--don’t be scared", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Michael Castro & Gábor G. Gyukics" - } - }, - "fable": { - "title": "“Fable”", - "body": "Once upon a time\nthere was a lonely wolf\nlonelier than the angels.\nHe happened to come to a village.\nHe fell in love with the first house he saw.\nAlready he loved its walls\nthe caresses of its bricklayers.\nBut the windows stopped him.\nIn the room sat people.\nApart from God nobody ever\nfound them so beautiful\nas this child-like beast.\nSo at night he went into the house.\nHe stopped in the middle of the room\nand never moved from there any more.\nHe stood all through the night, with wide eyes\nand on into the morning when he was beaten to death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "fish-in-the-net": { - "title": "“Fish in the Net”", - "body": "We are tossing in a net of stars.\nFish hauled up to the beach,\ngasping in nothingness,\nmouths snapping dry void.\nWhispering, the lost element\ncalls us in vain.\nChoking among edged stones\nand pebbles, we must\nlive and die in a heap.\nOur hearts convulse,\nour writhings maim\nand suffocate our brother.\nOur cries conflict but\nnot even an echo answers.\nWe have no reason\nto fight and kill\nbut we must.\nSo we atone but our atonement\ndoes not suffice.\nNo suffering\ncan redeem our hells.\nWe are tossing in a starry net\nand at midnight\nmaybe we shall lie on the table\nof a mighty fisherman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Ted Hughes & János Csokits" - } - }, - "the-french-prisoner": { - "title": "“The French Prisoner”", - "body": "If only I could forget him, the Frenchman\nI saw outside our quarters, creeping round\nnear daybreak in that density of garden\nas if he’d almost grown into the ground.\nHe was just looking back, peering about him\nto check that he was safe here and alone:\nonce he was sure, his plunder was all his!\nWhatever chanced, he’d not be moving on.\n\nHe was already eating. He was wolfing\na pilfered turnip hidden in his rags.\nEating raw cattle feed. But he’d no sooner\nswallowed a mouthful than it made him gag;\nand the sweet food encountered on his tongue\ndelight and then disgust, as it might be\nthe unhappy and the happy, meeting in\ntheir bodies’ all-consuming ecstasy.\n\nOnly forget that body … Shoulder blades\ntrembling, and a hand all skin and bone,\nthe palm cramming his mouth in such a way\nthat it too seemed to feed in clinging on.\nAnd then the furious and desperate shame\nof organs galled with one another, forced\nto tear from one another what should bind them\ntogether in community at last.\n\nThe way his clumsy feet had been left out\nof all that gibbering bestial joy; and how\nthey stood splayed out and paralyzed beneath\nthe body’s torture and fierce rapture now.\nAnd his look too--if I could forget that!\nRetching, he went on gobbling as if driven\non and on, just to eat, no matter what,\nanything, this or that, himself even.\nWhy go on? It turned out that he’d escaped\nfrom the prison camp nearby--guards came for him.\nI wander, as I did then in that garden,\namong my garden shadows here at home.\n“If only I could forget him, the Frenchman”--\nI’m looking through my notes, I read one out,\nand from my ears, my eyes, my mouth, the seething\nmemory boils over in his shout:\n\n“I’m hungry!” And immediately I feel\nthe undying hunger which this wretched creature\nhas long since ceased to feel, for which there is\nno mitigating nourishment in nature.\nHe feeds on me. More and more hungrily!\nAnd I’m less and less sufficient, for my part.\nNow he, who would have been contented once\nwith any kind of food, demands my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "George Gömöri & Clive Wilmer" - } - }, - "knocking": { - "title": "“Knocking”", - "body": "We slept. In my dreams I was a tree,\nthen nothing, then such a child\nas knocks on a grown up’s door.\n\nMeanwhile you too were a tree. A child’s skirt.\nNot a door. Knocking. Knock.\nTogether we knocked. I no longer know\nwhether on the same door? This much is certain:\na cherub’s thrashing-about would be like this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Peter Jay" - } - }, - "man-here-is-too-little-for-love": { - "title": "“Man here is too little for love …”", - "body": "Man here is too little for love.\nEnough if grateful within\nfor this and that, in short for everything.\n\nIn fact I only know two words,\nthe two words of sin and prayer.\nOne is part of myself.\nThe other can’t be located.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - }, - "november-elysium": { - "title": "“November Elysium”", - "body": "Convalescence. You hang back, at the verge\nof the garden. Your background\na peaceful yellow wall’s monastery silence.\nA tame little wind starts out across the grass. And now,\nas if hands assuaged them with holy oils,\nyour five open wounds, your five senses\nfeel their healing and are eased.\nYou are timid, And exultant. Yes,\nwith your childishly translucent limbs,\nin the shawl and coat grown tall,\nyou are like Alyosha Karamazov.\nAnd like those gentle ones, over yonder,\nwho are like the child, yes, you are like them.\nAnd as happy too, because\nyou do not want anything any more.\nOnly to gleam like the November sun,\nand exhale fragrance, lightly, as a fir-cone.\nOnly to bask, like the blest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Ted Hughes & János Csokits", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "on-the-wall-of-a-kz-lager": { - "title": "“On the Wall of a KZ Lager”", - "body": "Where you’ve fallen, you will stay.\nIn the whole universe this one\nand only place is the sole place\nwhich you have made your very own.\n\nThe country runs away from you.\nHouse, mill, poplar--every thing\nis struggling with you here, as if\nin nothingness mutating.\n\nBut now it’s you who won’t give up.\nDid we fleece you? You’ve grown rich.\nDid we blind you? You watch us still.\nYou bear witness without speech.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "George Gömöri & Clive Wilmer" - } - }, - "once-upon-a-fine-day": { - "title": "“Once Upon a Fine Day”", - "body": "Always the discarded tin spoon,\nThe wastes of misery I have been looking for,\nhoping, that once upon a fine day\nI shall weep, and be gently readmitted\nby the old yard,\nthe ivy silence and rustle of our home.\nAlways,\nAlways, I have longed for home", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Gellért Hujbert" - } - }, - "paraphrase": { - "title": "“Paraphrase”", - "body": "As a nourishment for all,\nas it’s been written,\nI give myself as a living food,\nto the world to be eaten.\n\nBecause all who live\nmust play the hungry game,\nmight be your best lover,\nyet smears blood on your name.\n\nI toss and turn in bed\nand shudder till I start\nthinking who guzzles up\nthe beating of my heart!\n\nWhat kind of trough this bed is,\nsay, what kind of trough?\nAnd what pushed me here, what desire,\nwhat kind of gorgeous puff!\n\nHow the horde gobbles up\nmy heart that’s ceaselessly coming!\nI am living nourishment\nstammering and throbbing.\n\nI’m your living food\nalways and totally\ndigest my essence\nto understand my gluttony.\n\nBecause he who belongs to no one,\nis a morsel for every one.\nSo waste me you awful love.\nMurder me. Don’t leave me to anyone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Michael Castro & Gábor G. Gyukics" - } - }, - "van-goghs-prayer": { - "title": "“Van Gogh’s Prayer”", - "body": "A battle lost in the cornfields\nand in the sky a victory.\nBirds, the sun and birds again.\nBy night, what will be left of me?\n\nBy night, only a row of lamps,\na wall of yellow clay that shines,\nand down the garden, through the trees,\nlike candles in a row, the panes;\n\nthere I dwelt once and dwell no longer--\nI can’t live where I once lived, though\nthe roof there used to cover me.\nLord, you covered me long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "George Gömöri & Clive Wilmer" - } - }, - "what-kind-of-underground-fight": { - "title": "“What Kind of Underground Fight”", - "body": "I’ve forgotten you for days,\nI realize with shock one evening\nwhile, for a cigarette in my empty pocket,\nI’m drowsily searching.\nDid a gluttonous, gangliotic bush\nof my nervous system swallow you?\nPerhaps. Or else I’ve chocked you\nwith my two bare hands.\n\nWhatever, it’s all the same\nmurderers don’t ponder.\nHowever it happened, you are\nalready six feet under.\nWith abandoned gray hair,\nyou’re lying under the ground,\namidst my cremated cells\nin the clotted mud.\n\nThat’s what I thought then, foolishly\npondering, until tonight\nwhen a sudden force innocently\ndrifted me to your side\na dream lay me, bound me\nbeside you flat\nwe lay like poor men huddled\ntogether on a thin straw mat.\n\nLike an acrobat high in space\nstartled by his partner,\nI plunged with you\nto the hell down under\nI followed you, to my ruin,\nshivering, myself forgotten,\nnow again my conscience had taken!\n\nLike a prisoner on his last night\nembraces his jailmate\nand cries for himself\nthough they share the same fate,\nI embraced you,\nthirstily, weeping\nas we would dare to love\nboth dead and living!\n\nWas it an accident, a trap may be,\nthat I aging could see you?\nSince then I can’t find myself\nhere or there, not one clue!\nI ask myself a hundred times\nhow can you go on living while you’re dead?\nDid you burn or, like a doused basement fire,\nare you only smoldering in your ashy bed?\n\nWhat kind of underground fight\nwhat kind of blood is this\nthat in the corners of my eyes\nsince dawn today exists?\nThe confusion continuously grows\nthe passion is so cruel,\nI believed I buried you\nbut are you killing me after all?\n\nI’m frightened, I don’t know what happens\nif I dream again lures my love\nI want you, yet hastily\nthrow clods on you from above.\nIn my mouth I taste a stench\nor furtive hell:\nOh God, what do you hide and guard\nat the bottom of tomorrow’s well?", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian" - } - } - } - }, - "harold-pinter": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Harold Pinter", - "birth": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2008 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Pinter", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "after-lunch": { - "title": "“After Lunch”", - "body": "And after noon the well-dressed creatures come\nTo sniff among the dead\nAnd have their lunch\n\nAnd all the many well-dressed creatures pluck\nThe swollen avocados from the dust\nAnd stir the minestrone with stray bones\n\nAnd after lunch\nThey loll and lounge about\nDecanting claret in convenient skulls", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-may-be-ageing": { - "title": "“Death May Be Ageing”", - "body": "Death may be ageing\nBut he still has clout\nBut death disarms you\nWith his limpid light\nAnd he’s so crafty\nThat you don’t know at all\nWhere he awaits you\nTo seduce your will\nAnd to strip you naked\nAs you dress to kill\nBut death permits you\nTo arrange your hours\nWhile he sucks the honey\nFrom your lovely flowers", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lust": { - "title": "“Lust”", - "body": "There is a dark sound\nWhich grows on the hill\nYou turn from the light\nWhich lights the black wall.\nBlack shadows are running\nAcross the pink hill\nThey grin as they sweat\nThey beat the black bell.\nYou suck the wet light\nFlooding the cell\nAnd smell the lust of the lusty\nFlicking its tail.\nFor the lust of the lusty\nThrows a dark sound on the wall\nAnd the lust of the lusty\n--its sweet black will--\nIs caressing you still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "sylvia-plath": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sylvia Plath", - "birth": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 44 - }, - "poems": { - "the-applicant": { - "title": "“The Applicant”", - "body": "First, are you our sort of a person?\nDo you wear\nA glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,\nA brace or a hook,\nRubber breasts or a rubber crotch,\n\nStitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then\nHow can we give you a thing?\nStop crying.\nOpen your hand.\nEmpty? Empty. Here is a hand\n\nTo fill it and willing\nTo bring teacups and roll away headaches\nAnd do whatever you tell it.\nWill you marry it?\nIt is guaranteed\n\nTo thumb shut your eyes at the end\nAnd dissolve of sorrow.\nWe make new stock from the salt.\nI notice you are stark naked.\nHow about this suit--\n\nBlack and stiff, but not a bad fit.\nWill you marry it?\nIt is waterproof, shatterproof, proof\nAgainst fire and bombs through the roof.\nBelieve me, they’ll bury you in it.\n\nNow your head, excuse me, is empty.\nI have the ticket for that.\nCome here, sweetie, out of the closet.\nWell, what do you think of _that?_\nNaked as paper to start\n\nBut in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,\nIn fifty, gold.\nA living doll, everywhere you look.\nIt can sew, it can cook,\nIt can talk, talk, talk.\n\nIt works, there is nothing wrong with it.\nYou have a hole, it’s a poultice.\nYou have an eye, it’s an image.\nMy boy, it’s your last resort.\nWill you marry it, marry it, marry it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "ariel": { - "title": "“Ariel”", - "body": "Stasis in darkness.\nThen the substanceless blue\nPour of tor and distances.\n\nGod’s lioness,\nHow one we grow,\nPivot of heels and knees!--The furrow\n\nSplits and passes, sister to\nThe brown arc\nOf the neck I cannot catch,\n\nNigger-eye\nBerries cast dark\nHooks--\n\nBlack sweet blood mouthfuls,\nShadows.\nSomething else\n\nHauls me through air--\nThighs, hair;\nFlakes from my heels.\n\nWhite\nGodiva, I unpeel--\nDead hands, dead stringencies.\n\nAnd now I\nFoam to wheat, a glitter of seas.\nThe child’s cry\n\nMelts in the wall.\nAnd I\nAm the arrow,\n\nThe dew that flies\nSuicidal, at one with the drive\nInto the red\n\nEye, the cauldron of morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "the-babysitters": { - "title": "“The Babysitters”", - "body": "It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.\nThe sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.\nThat summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.\nWe were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,\nIn the two, huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.\nWhen the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,\nI had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,\nAnd the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes\nMatched the stripes of his socks.\n\nOr it was richness!--eleven rooms and a yacht\nWith a polished mahogany stair to let into the water\nAnd a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.\nBut I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.\nNights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red\nWith triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.\nWhen the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises\nThey left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, “for protection,”\nAnd a small Dalmation.\n\nIn your house, the main house, you were better off.\nYou had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop\nAnd a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.\nI remember you playing “Ja-Da” in a pink piqué dress\nOn the game-room piano, when the “big people” were out,\nAnd the maid smoked and shot pool under a green shaded lamp.\nThe cook had one walleye and couldn’t sleep, she was so nervous.\nOn trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies\nTill she was fired.\n\nO what has come over us, my sister!\nOn that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get\nWe lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox\nAnd rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read\nAloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.\nSo we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted--\nA gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,\nStopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing\nBut ten years dead.\n\nThe bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.\nWe picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,\nThen stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.\nWe kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.\nI see us floating there yet, inseparable--two cork dolls.\nWhat keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?\nThe shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,\nAnd from our opposite continents we wave and call.\nEverything has happened.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "blackberrying": { - "title": "“Blackberrying”", - "body": "Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,\nBlackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,\nA blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea\nSomewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries\nBig as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes\nEbon in the hedges, fat\nWith blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.\nI had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.\nThey accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.\n\nOverhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks--\nBits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.\nTheirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.\nI do not think the sea will appear at all.\nThe high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.\nI come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,\nHanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.\nThe honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.\nOne more hook, and the berries and bushes end.\n\nThe only thing to come now is the sea.\nFrom between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,\nSlapping its phantom laundry in my face.\nThese hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.\nI follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me\nTo the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock\nThat looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space\nOf white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths\nBeating and beating at an intractable metal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-colossus": { - "title": "“The Colossus”", - "body": "I shall never get you put together entirely,\nPieced, glued, and properly jointed.\nMule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles\nProceed from your great lips.\nIt’s worse than a barnyard.\n\nPerhaps you consider yourself an oracle,\nMouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.\nThirty years now I have labored\nTo dredge the silt from your throat.\nI am none the wiser.\n\nScaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol\nI crawl like an ant in mourning\nOver the weedy acres of your brow\nTo mend the immense skull plates and clear\nThe bald, white tumuli of your eyes.\n\nA blue sky out of the Oresteia\nArches above us. O father, all by yourself\nYou are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.\nI open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.\nYour fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered\n\nIn their old anarchy to the horizon-line.\nIt would take more than a lightning-stroke\nTo create such a ruin.\nNights, I squat in the cornucopia\nOf your left ear, out of the wind,\n\nCounting the red stars and those of plum-color.\nThe sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.\nMy hours are married to shadow.\nNo longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel\nOn the blank stones of the landing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - } - } - }, - "crossing-the-water": { - "title": "“Crossing the Water”", - "body": "Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.\nWhere do the black trees go that drink here?\nTheir shadows must cover Canada.\n\nA little light is filtering from the water flowers.\nTheir leaves do not wish us to hurry:\nThey are round and flat and full of dark advice.\n\nCold worlds shake from the oar.\nThe spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.\nA snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;\n\nStars open among the lilies.\nAre you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?\nThis is the silence of astounded souls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "daddy": { - "title": "“Daddy”", - "body": "You do not do, you do not do\nAny more, black shoe\nIn which I have lived like a foot\nFor thirty years, poor and white,\nBarely daring to breathe or Achoo.\n\nDaddy, I have had to kill you.\nYou died before I had time--\nMarble-heavy, a bag full of God,\nGhastly statue with one gray toe\nBig as a Frisco seal\n\nAnd a head in the freakish Atlantic\nWhere it pours bean green over blue\nIn the waters off beautiful Nauset.\nI used to pray to recover you.\nAch, du.\n\nIn the German tongue, in the Polish town\nScraped flat by the roller\nOf wars, wars, wars.\nBut the name of the town is common.\nMy Polack friend\n\nSays there are a dozen or two.\nSo I never could tell where you\nPut your foot, your root,\nI never could talk to you.\nThe tongue stuck in my jaw.\n\nIt stuck in a barb wire snare.\nIch, ich, ich, ich,\nI could hardly speak.\nI thought every German was you.\nAnd the language obscene\n\nAn engine, an engine\nChuffing me off like a Jew.\nA Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.\nI began to talk like a Jew.\nI think I may well be a Jew.\n\nThe snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna\nAre not very pure or true.\nWith my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck\nAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack\nI may be a bit of a Jew.\n\nI have always been scared of _you,_\nWith your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.\nAnd your neat mustache\nAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.\nPanzer-man, panzer-man, O You--\n\nNot God but a swastika\nSo black no sky could squeak through.\nEvery woman adores a Fascist,\nThe boot in the face, the brute\nBrute heart of a brute like you.\n\nYou stand at the blackboard, daddy,\nIn the picture I have of you,\nA cleft in your chin instead of your foot\nBut no less a devil for that, no not\nAny less the black man who\n\nBit my pretty red heart in two.\nI was ten when they buried you.\nAt twenty I tried to die\nAnd get back, back, back to you.\nI thought even the bones would do.\n\nBut they pulled me out of the sack,\nAnd they stuck me together with glue.\nAnd then I knew what to do.\nI made a model of you,\nA man in black with a Meinkampf look\n\nAnd a love of the rack and the screw.\nAnd I said I do, I do.\nSo daddy, I’m finally through.\nThe black telephone’s off at the root,\nThe voices just can’t worm through.\n\nIf I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two--\nThe vampire who said he was you\nAnd drank my blood for a year,\nSeven years, if you want to know.\nDaddy, you can lie back now.\n\nThere’s a stake in your fat black heart\nAnd the villagers never liked you.\nThey are dancing and stamping on you.\nThey always _knew_ it was you.\nDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-myth-making": { - "title": "“The Death of Myth-Making”", - "body": "Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,\nTo grind our knives and scissors:\nLantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense,\nOne courting doctors of all sorts,\nOne, housewives and shopkeepers.\n\nThe trees are lopped, the poodles trim,\nThe laborer’s nails pared level\nSince those two civil servants set\nTheir whetstone to the blunted edge\nAnd minced the muddling devil\n\nWhose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood\nScared mothers to miscarry,\nDrove the dogs to cringe and whine,\nAnd turned the farmboy’s temper wolfish,\nThe housewife’s, desultory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "dream-with-clam-diggers": { - "title": "“Dream with Clam-Diggers”", - "body": "This dream budded bright with leaves around the edges,\nIts clear air winnowed by angels; she was come\nBack to her early sea-town home\nScathed, stained after tedious pilgrimages.\n\nBarefoot, she stood, in shock of that returning,\nBeside a neighbor’s house\nWith shingles burnished as glass,\nBlinds lowered on that hot morning.\n\nNo change met her: garden terrace, all summer\nTanged by melting tar,\nSloped seaward to plunge in blue; fed by white fire,\nThe whole scene flared welcome to this roamer.\n\nHigh against heaven, gulls went wheeling soundless\nOver tidal-fats where three children played\nSilent and shining on a green rock bedded in mud,\nTheir fabulous heyday endless.\n\nWith green rock gliding, a delicate schooner\nDecked forth in cockle-shells,\nThey sailed till tide foamed round their ankles\nAnd the fair ship sank, its crew knelled home for dinner.\n\nPlucked back thus sudden to that far innocence,\nShe, in her shabby travel garb, began\nWalking eager toward water, when there, one by one,\nClam-diggers rose up out of dark slime at her offense.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "eavesdropper": { - "title": "“Eavesdropper”", - "body": "Your brother will trim my hedges!\nThey darken your house,\nNosey grower,\nMole on my shoulder,\nTo be scratched absently,\nTo bleed, if it comes to that.\nThe stain of the tropics\nStill urinous on you, a sin,\nA kind of bush-stink.\n\nYou may be local,\nBut that yellow!\nGodawful!\nYour body one\nLong nicotine-finger\nOn which I,\nWhite cigarette,\nBurn, for your inhalation,\nDriving the dull cells wild.\n\nLet me roost in you!\nMy distractions, my pallors.\nLet them start the queer alchemy\nThat melts the skin\nGrey tallow, from bone and bone.\nSo I saw your much sicker\nPredecessor wrapped up,\nA six and a half foot wedding cake.\nAnd he was not even malicious.\n\nDo not think I don’t notice your curtain--\nMidnight, four o’clock,\nLit (you are reading),\nTarting with the drafts that pass,\nLittle whore tongue,\nChenille beckoner,\nBeckoning my words in--\nThe zoo yowl, the mad soft\nMirror talk you love to catch me at.\n\nHow you jumped when I jumped on you\nArms folded, ear cocked,\nToad-yellow under the drop\nThat would not, would not drop\nIn a desert of cow people\nTrundling their udders home\nTo the electric milker, the wifey, the big blue eye\nThat watches, like God, or the sky\nThe ciphers that watch it.\n\nO yellow\nWeasel unable\nTo rearrange the bitchy starvation, the dust lust!\nI had you hooked.\nI called. You crawled out,\nA weather figure, boggling,\nChink-yellow, Belge troll,\nThe Low Church smile\nSpreading itself, bad butter.\n\nThis is what I am in for!\nYour bone plates,\nYour creaky biscuits,\nSweater sets and treachery!\nCome to tea! Come to tea!\nI shall stuff you with pillows!\nPillow after pillow of pure silence.\nFlea body!\nEyes like mice\n\nFlicking over my property,\nLevering letter flaps,\nScrutinizing the fly\nOf the man’s pants\nDead on the chair back,\nOpening the fat smiles, the eyes\nOf two babies\nTust to make sure--\nToad-stone! Sister bitch! Sweet neighbor!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "edge": { - "title": "“Edge”", - "body": "The woman is perfected.\nHer dead\n\nBody wears the smile of accomplishment,\nThe illusion of a Greek necessity\n\nFlows in the scrolls of her toga,\nHer bare\n\nFeet seem to be saying:\nWe have come so far, it is over.\n\nEach dead child coiled, a white serpent,\nOne at each little\n\nPitcher of milk, now empty.\nShe has folded\n\nThem back into her body as petals\nOf a rose close when the garden\n\nStiffens and odors bleed\nFrom the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.\n\nThe moon has nothing to be sad about,\nStaring from her hood of bone.\n\nShe is used to this sort of thing.\nHer blacks crackle and drag.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "ella-mason-and-her-eleven-cats": { - "title": "“Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats”", - "body": "Old Ella Mason keeps cats, eleven at last count,\nIn her ramshackle house off Somerset Terrace;\nPeople make queries\nOn seeing our neighbor’s cat-haunt,\nSaying: “Something’s addled in a woman who accommodates\nThat many cats.”\n\nRum and red-faced as a watermelon, her voice\nLong gone to wheeze and seed, Ella Mason\nFor no good reason\nPlays hostess to tabby, tom and increase,\nWith cream and chicken-gut feasting the palates\nOf finical cats.\n\nVillage stories go that in olden days\nElla flounced about minx-thin and haughty,\nA fashionable beauty\nSlaying the dandies with her emerald eyes;\nNow, run to fat, she’s a spinster whose door shuts\nOn all but cats.\n\nOnce we children sneaked over to spy Miss Mason\nNapping in her kitchen paved with saucers.\nOn antimacassars,\nTable-top, cupboard shelf, cats lounged brazen,\nOne gruff-timbred purr rolling from furred throats:\nSuch stentorian cats!\n\nWith poke and giggle, ready to skedaddle,\nWe peered agog through the cobwebbed door\nStraight into yellow glare\nOf guardian cats crouched round their idol,\nWhile Ella drowsed whiskered with sleek face, sly wits:\nSphinx-queen of cats.\n\n“Look! there she goes, Cat-Lady Mason!”\nWe snickered as she shambled down Somerset Terrace\nTo market for her dearies,\nMore mammoth and blowzy with every season;\n“Miss Ella’s got loony from keeping in cahoots\nWith eleven cats.”\n\nBut now turned kinder with time, we mark Miss Mason\nBlinking green-eyed and solitary\nAt girls who marry--\nDemure ones, lithe ones, needing no lesson\nThat vain jades sulk single down bridal nights,\nAccurst as wild-cats.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "elm": { - "title": "“Elm”", - "body": "I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:\nIt is what you fear.\nI do not fear it: I have been there.\n\nIs it the sea you hear in me,\nIts dissatisfactions?\nOr the voice of nothing, that was your madness?\n\nLove is a shadow.\nHow you lie and cry after it\nListen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.\n\nAll night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,\nTill your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,\nEchoing, echoing.\n\nOr shall I bring you the sound of poisons?\nThis is rain now, this big hush.\nAnd this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.\n\nI have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.\nScorched to the root\nMy red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.\n\nNow I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.\nA wind of such violence\nWill tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.\n\nThe moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me\nCruelly, being barren.\nHer radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.\n\nI let her go. I let her go\nDiminished and flat, as after radical surgery.\nHow your bad dreams possess and endow me.\n\nI am inhabited by a cry.\nNightly it flaps out\nLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.\n\nI am terrified by this dark thing\nThat sleeps in me;\nAll day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.\n\nClouds pass and disperse.\nAre those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?\nIs it for such I agitate my heart?\n\nI am incapable of more knowledge.\nWhat is this, this face\nSo murderous in its strangle of branches?--\n\nIts snaky acids hiss.\nIt petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults\nThat kill, that kill, that kill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "epitaph-for-fire-and-flower": { - "title": "“Epitaph for Fire and Flower”", - "body": "You might as well string up\nThis wave’s green peak on wire\nTo prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air\nIn quartz, as crack your skull to keep\nThese two most perishable lovers from the touch\nThat will kindle angels’ envy, scorch and drop\nTheir fond hearts charred as any match.\n\nSeek no stony camera-eye to fix\nThe passing dazzle of each face\nIn black and white, or put on ice\nMouth’s instant flare for future looks;\nStars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed,\nHowever you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks\nHived like honey in your head.\n\nNow in the crux of their vows, hang your ear\nStill as a shell: hear what an age of glass\nThese lovers prophesy to lock embrace\nSecure in museum diamond for the stare\nOf astounded generations; they wrestle\nTo conquer cinder’s kingdom in the stroke of an hour\nAnd hoard faith safe in a fossil.\n\nBut though they’d rivet sinews in rock\nAnd have every weathercock kiss hang fire\nAs if to outflame a phoenix, the moment’s spur\nDrives nimble blood too quick\nFor a wish to tether: they ride nightlong\nIn their heartbeats’ blazing wake until red cock\nPlucks bare that comet’s flowering.\n\nDawn snuffs out star’s spent wick\nEven as love’s dear fools cry evergreen,\nAnd a languor of wax congeals the vein\nNo matter how fiercely lit; staunch contracts break\nAnd recoil in the altering light: the radiant limb\nBlows ash in each lover’s eye; the ardent look\nBlackens flesh to bone and devours them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-everlasting-monday": { - "title": "“The Everlasting Monday”", - "body": "Thou shalt have an everlasting\nMonday and stand in the moon.\n\nThe moon’s man stands in his shell,\nBent under a bundle\nOf sticks. The light falls chalk and cold\nUpon our bedspread.\nHis teeth are chattering among the leprous\nPeaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.\n\nHe also against black frost\nWould pick sticks, would not rest\nUntil his own lit room outshone\nSunday’s ghost of sun;\nNow works his hell of Mondays in the moon’s ball,\nFireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "monday", - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "face-lift": { - "title": "“Face Lift”", - "body": "You bring me good news from the clinic,\nWhipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white\nMummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.\nWhen I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist\nFed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault\nBoomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.\nThen mother swam up, holding a tin basin.\nO I was sick.\n\nThey’ve changed all that. Traveling\nNude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,\nFizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,\nI roll to an anteroom where a kind man\nFists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious\nIs leaking from the funger-vents. At the count of two\nDarkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard …\nI don’t know a thing.\n\nFor five days I lie in secret,\nTapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.\nEven my best friend thinks I’m in the country.\nSkin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.\nWhen I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,\nBroody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers\nBuried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;\nI hadn’t a cat yet.\n\nNow she’s done for, the dewlapped lady\nI watched settle, line by line, in my mirror--\nOld sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.\nThey’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.\nLet her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,\nNodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.\nMother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,\nPink and smooth as a baby.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "fever-103deg": { - "title": "“Fever 103°”", - "body": "Pure? What does it mean?\nThe tongues of hell\nAre dull, dull as the triple\n\nTongues of dull, fat Cerberus\nWho wheezes at the gate. Incapable\nOf licking clean\n\nThe aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.\nThe tinder cries.\nThe indelible smell\n\nOf a snuffed candle!\nLove, love, the low smokes roll\nFrom me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright\n\nOne scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,\nSuch yellow sullen smokes\nMake their own element. They will not rise,\n\nBut trundle round the globe\nChoking the aged and the meek,\nThe weak\n\nHothouse baby in its crib,\nThe ghastly orchid\nHanging its hanging garden in the air,\n\nDevilish leopard!\nRadiation turned it white\nAnd killed it in an hour.\n\nGreasing the bodies of adulterers\nLike Hiroshima ash and eating in.\nThe sin. The sin.\n\nDarling, all night\nI have been flickering, off, on, off, on.\nThe sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.\n\nThree days. Three nights.\nLemon water, chicken\nWater, water make me retch.\n\nI am too pure for you or anyone.\nYour body\nHurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern--\n\nMy head a moon\nOf Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin\nInfinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.\n\nDoes not my heat astound you! And my light!\nAll by myself I am a huge camellia\nGlowing and coming and going, flush on flush.\n\nI think I am going up,\nI think I may rise--\nThe beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I\n\nAm a pure acetylene\nVirgin\nAttended by roses,\n\nBy kisses, by cherubim,\nBy whatever these pink things mean!\nNot you, nor him\n\nNor him, nor him\n(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)--\nTo Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962, - "month": "october", - "day": 20 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 20 - } - } - }, - "full-fathom-five": { - "title": "“Full Fathom Five”", - "body": "Old man, you surface seldom.\nThen you come in with the tide’s coming\nWhen seas wash cold, foam-\n\nCapped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,\nA dragnet, rising, falling, as waves\nCrest and trough. Miles long\n\nExtend the radial sheaves\nOf your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins\nKnotted, caught, survives\n\nThe old myth of origins\nUnimaginable. You float near\nAs keeled ice-mountains\n\nOf the north, to be steered clear\nOf, not fathomed. All obscurity\nStarts with a danger:\n\nYour dangers are many. I\nCannot look much but your form suffers\nSome strange injury\n\nAnd seems to die: so vapors\nRavel to clearness on the dawn sea.\nThe muddy rumors\n\nOf your burial move me\nTo half-believe: your reappearance\nProves rumors shallow,\n\nFor the archaic trenched lines\nOf your grained face shed time in runnels:\nAges beat like rains\n\nOn the unbeaten channels\nOf the ocean. Such sage humor and\nDurance are whirlpools\n\nTo make away with the ground--\nWork of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.\nWaist down, you may wind\n\nOne labyrinthine tangle\nTo root deep among knuckles, shinbones,\nSkulls. Inscrutable,\n\nBelow shoulders not once\nSeen by any man who kept his head,\nYou defy questions;\n\nYou defy godhood.\nI walk dry on your kingdom’s border\nExiled to no good.\n\nYour shelled bed I remember.\nFather, this thick air is murderous.\nI would breathe water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1958 - } - } - }, - "green-rock-winthrop-bay": { - "title": "“Green Rock, Winthrop Bay”", - "body": "No lame excuses can gloss over\nBarge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier.\nI should have known better.\nFifteen years between me and the bay\nProfited memory, but did away with the old scenery\nAnd patched this shoddy\nMakeshift of a view to quit\nMy promise of an idyll. The blue’s worn out:\nIt’s a niggard estate,\nInimical now. The great green rock\nWe gave good use as ship and house is black\nWith tarry muck\nAnd periwinkles, shrunk to common\nSize. The cries of scavenging gulls sound thin\nIn the traffic of planes\nFrom Logan Airport opposite.\nGulls circle gray under shadow of a steelier flight.\nLoss cancels profit.\nUnless you do this tawdry harbor\nA service and ignore it, I go a liar\nGilding what’s eyesore,\nOr must take loophole and blame time\nFor the rock’s dwarfed lump, for the drabbled scum,\nFor a churlish welcome.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "lady-lazarus": { - "title": "“Lady Lazarus”", - "body": "I have done it again.\nOne year in every ten\nI manage it--\n\nA sort of walking miracle, my skin\nBright as a Nazi lampshade,\nMy right foot\n\nA paperweight,\nMy face a featureless, fine\nJew linen.\n\nPeel off the napkin\nO my enemy.\nDo I terrify?--\n\nThe nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?\nThe sour breath\nWill vanish in a day.\n\nSoon, soon the flesh\nThe grave cave ate will be\nAt home on me\n\nAnd I a smiling woman.\nI am only thirty.\nAnd like the cat I have nine times to die.\n\nThis is Number Three.\nWhat a trash\nTo annihilate each decade.\n\nWhat a million filaments.\nThe peanut-crunching crowd\nShoves in to see\n\nThem unwrap me hand and foot--\nThe big strip tease.\nGentlemen, ladies\n\nThese are my hands\nMy knees.\nI may be skin and bone,\n\nNevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.\nThe first time it happened I was ten.\nIt was an accident.\n\nThe second time I meant\nTo last it out and not come back at all.\nI rocked shut\n\nAs a seashell.\nThey had to call and call\nAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.\n\nDying\nIs an art, like everything else.\nI do it exceptionally well.\n\nI do it so it feels like hell.\nI do it so it feels real.\nI guess you could say I’ve a call.\n\nIt’s easy enough to do it in a cell.\nIt’s easy enough to do it and stay put.\nIt’s the theatrical\n\nComeback in broad day\nTo the same place, the same face, the same brute\nAmused shout:\n\n‘A miracle!’\nThat knocks me out.\nThere is a charge\n\nFor the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge\nFor the hearing of my heart--\nIt really goes.\n\nAnd there is a charge, a very large charge\nFor a word or a touch\nOr a bit of blood\n\nOr a piece of my hair or my clothes.\nSo, so, Herr Doktor.\nSo, Herr Enemy.\n\nI am your opus,\nI am your valuable,\nThe pure gold baby\n\nThat melts to a shriek.\nI turn and burn.\nDo not think I underestimate your great concern.\n\nAsh, ash--\nYou poke and stir.\nFlesh, bone, there is nothing there--\n\nA cake of soap,\nA wedding ring,\nA gold filling.\n\nHerr God, Herr Lucifer\nBeware\nBeware.\n\nOut of the ash\nI rise with my red hair\nAnd I eat men like air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-lesson-in-vengeance": { - "title": "“A Lesson in Vengeance”", - "body": "In the dour ages\nOf drafty cells and draftier castles,\nOf dragons breathing without the frame of fables,\nSaint and king unfisted obstruction’s knuckles\nBy no miracle or majestic means,\n\nBut by such abuses\nAs smack of spite and the overscrupulous\nTwisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,\nOne white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles\nOf God’s city and Babylon’s\n\nMust wait, while here Suso’s\nHand hones his tacks and needles,\nScourging to sores his own red sluices\nFor the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles\nOf horsehair and lice his horny loins;\n\nWhile there irate Cyrus\nSquanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes\nTo rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:\nHe split it into three hundred and sixty trickles\nA girl could wade without wetting her shins.\n\nStill, latter-day sages,\nSmiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies\nNeatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,\nNever grip, as their grandsires did, that devil who chuckles\nFrom grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "love-letter": { - "title": "“Love Letter”", - "body": "Not easy to state the change you made.\nIf I’m alive now, then I was dead,\nThough, like a stone, unbothered by it,\nStaying put according to habit.\nYou didn’t just toe me an inch, no--\nNor leave me to set my small bald eye\nSkyward again, without hope, of course,\nOf apprehending blueness, or stars.\n\nThat wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake\nMasked among black rocks as a black rock\nIn the white hiatus of winter--\nLike my neighbors, taking no pleasure\nIn the million perfectly-chiseled\nCheeks alighting each moment to melt\nMy cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,\nAngels weeping over dull natures,\nBut didn’t convince me. Those tears froze.\nEach dead head had a visor of ice.\n\nAnd I slept on like a bent finger.\nThe first thing I saw was sheer air\nAnd the locked drops rising in a dew\nLimpid as spirits. Many stones lay\nDense and expressionless round about.\nI didn’t know what to make of it.\nI shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded\nTo pour myself out like a fluid\nAmong bird feet and the stems of plants.\nI wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.\n\nTree and stone glittered, without shadows.\nMy finger-length grew lucent as glass.\nI started to bud like a March twig:\nAn arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.\nFrom stone to cloud, so I ascended.\nNow I resemble a sort of god\nFloating through the air in my soul-shift\nPure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "magnolia-shoals": { - "title": "“Magnolia Shoals”", - "body": "Up here among the gull cries\nwe stroll through a maze of pale\nred-mottled relics, shells, claws\n\nas if it were summer still.\nThat season has turned its back.\nThrough the green sea gardens stall,\n\nbow, and recover their look\nof the imperishable\ngardens in an antique book\n\nor tapestries on a wall,\nleaves behind us warp and lapse.\nThe late month withers, as well.\n\nBelow us a white gull keeps\nthe weed-slicked shelf for his own,\nhustles other gulls off. Crabs\n\nrove over his field of stone;\nmussels cluster blue as grapes :\nhis beak brings the harvest in.\n\nThe watercolorist grips\nhis brush in the stringent air.\nThe horizon’s bare of ships,\n\nthe beach and the rocks are bare.\nHe paints a blizzard of gulls,\nwings drumming in the winter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "metamorphosis": { - "title": "“Metamorphosis”", - "body": "Haunched like a faun, he hooed\nfrom grove of moon-glint and fen-frost\nuntil all owls in the twigged forest\nflapped black to look and brood\non the call this man made.\n\nNo sound but a drunken coot\nlurching home along river bank;\nstars hung water-sunk, so a rank\nof double star-eyes lit\nboughs where those owls sat.\n\nAn arena of yellow eyes\nwatched the changing shape he cut,\nsaw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout\ngoat-horns; marked how god rose\nand galloped woodward in that guise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "monologue-at-3-am": { - "title": "“Monologue at 3 A.M.”", - "body": "Better that every fiber crack\nand fury make head,\nblood drenching vivid\ncouch, carpet, floor\nand the snake-figured almanac\nvouching you are\na million green counties from here,\n\nthan to sit mute, twitching so\nunder prickling stars,\nwith stare, with curse\nblackening the time\ngoodbyes were said, trains let go,\nand I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from\nmy one kingdom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - } - } - }, - "morning-song": { - "title": "“Morning Song”", - "body": "Love set you going like a fat gold watch.\nThe midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry\nTook its place among the elements.\n\nOur voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.\nIn a drafty museum, your nakedness\nShadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.\n\nI’m no more your mother\nThan the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow\nEffacement at the wind’s hand.\n\nAll night your moth-breath\nFlickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:\nA far sea moves in my ear.\n\nOne cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral\nIn my Victorian nightgown.\nYour mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square\n\nWhitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try\nYour handful of notes;\nThe clear vowels rise like balloons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - } - } - }, - "mussel-hunter-at-rock-harbor": { - "title": "“Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor”", - "body": "I came before the water--\nColorists came to get the\nGood of the Cape light that scours\nSand grit to sided crystal\nAnd buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls\nOf the three fishing smacks beached\nOn the bank of the river’s\n\nBacktracking tail. I’d come for\nFree fish-bait: the blue mussels\nClumped like bulbs at the grassroot\nMargin of the tidal pools.\nDawn tide stood dead low. I smelt\nMud stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;\nHeard a queer crusty scrabble\n\nCease, and I neared the silenced\nEdge of a cratered pool-bed.\nThe mussels hung dull blue and\nConspicuous, yet it seemed\nA sly world’s hinges had swung\nShut against me. All held still.\nThough I counted scant seconds,\n\nEnough ages lapsed to win\nConfidence of safe-conduct\nIn the wary other world\nEyeing me. Grass put forth claws,\nSmall mud knobs, nudged from under,\nDisplaced their domes as tiny\nKnights might doff their casques. The crabs\n\nInched from their pygmy burrows\nAnd from the trench-dug mud, all Camouflaged in mottled mail\nOf browns and greens. Each wore one\nClaw swollen to a shield large\nAs itself--no fiddler’s arm\nGrown Gargantuan by trade,\n\nBut grown grimly, and grimly\nBorne, for a use beyond my\nGuessing of it. Sibilant\nMass-motived hordes, they sidled\nOut in a converging stream\nToward the pool-mouth, perhaps to\nMeet the thin and sluggish thread\n\nOf sea retracing its tide--\nWay up the river-basin.\nOr to avoid me. They moved\nObliquely with a dry-wet\nSound, with a glittery wisp\nAnd trickle. Could they feel mud\nPleasurable under claws\n\nAs I could between bare toes?\nThat question ended it--I\nStood shut out, for once, for all,\nPuzzling the passage of their\nAbsolutely alien\nOrder as I might puzzle\nAt the clear tail of Halley’s\n\nComet coolly giving my\nOrbit the go-by, made known\nBy a family name it\nKnew nothing of. So the crabs\nWent about their business, which\nWasn’t fiddling, and I filled\nA big handkerchief with blue\n\nMussels. From what the crabs saw,\nIf they could see, I was one\nTwo-legged mussel-picker.\nHigh on the airy thatching\nOf the dense grasses I found\nThe husk of a fiddler-crab,\nIntact, strangely strayed above\n\nHis world of mud--green color\nAnd innards bleached out blown off\nSomewhere by much sun and wind;\nThere was no telling if he’d\nDied recluse of suicide\nOr headstrong Columbus crab.\nThe crab-face, etched and set there,\n\nGrimaced as skulls grimace: it\nHad an Oriental look,\nA samurai death mask done\nOn a tiger tooth, less for\nArt’s sake than God’s. Far from sea--\nWhere red-freckled crab-backs, claws\nAnd whole crabs, dead, their soggy\n\nBellies pallid and upturned,\nPerform their shambling waltzes\nOn the waves’ dissolving turn\nAnd return, losing themselves\nBit by bit to their friendly\nElement--this relic saved\nFace, to face the bald-faced sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "nick-and-the-candlestick": { - "title": "“Nick and the Candlestick”", - "body": "I am a miner. The light burns blue.\nWaxy stalactites\nDrip and thicken, tears\n\nThe earthen womb\nExudes from its dead boredom.\nBlack bat airs\n\nWrap me, raggy shawls,\nCold homicides.\nThey weld to me like plums.\n\nOld cave of calcium\nIcicles, old echoer.\nEven the newts are white,\n\nThose holy Joes.\nAnd the fish, the fish--\nChrist! they are panes of ice,\n\nA vice of knives,\nA piranha\nReligion, drinking\n\nIts first communion out of my live toes.\nThe candle\nGulps and recovers its small altitude,\n\nIts yellows hearten.\nO love, how did you get here?\nO embryo\n\nRemembering, even in sleep,\nYour crossed position.\nThe blood blooms clean\n\nIn you, ruby.\nThe pain\nYou wake to is not yours.\n\nLove, love,\nI have hung our cave with roses,\nWith soft rugs--\n\nThe last of Victoriana.\nLet the stars\nPlummet to their dark address,\n\nLet the mercuric\nAtoms that cripple drip\nInto the terrible well,\n\nYou are the one\nSolid the spaces lean on, envious.\nYou are the baby in the barn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - }, - "on-the-decline-of-oracles": { - "title": "“On the Decline of Oracles”", - "body": "_Inside a ruined temple the broken statue of a god spoke a mysterious language._\n --Giorgio de Chirico\n\nMy father kept a speckled conch\nBy two bronze bookends of ships in sail,\nAnd as I listened its cold teeth seethed\nWith voices of that ambiguous sea\nOld Böcklin missed, who held a shell\nTo hear the sea he could not hear.\nWhat the seashell spoke to his inner ear\nHe knew, but no peasants know.\n\nMy father died, and when he died\nHe willed his books and shell away;\nThe books burned up, sea took the shell,\nBut I, I keep the voices he\nSet in my ear, and in my eye\nThe sight of those blue, unseen waves\nFor which the ghost of Böcklin grieves.\nThe peasants feast and multiply\n\nAnd never need see what I see.\nIn the Temple of Broken Stones, above\nA worn curtain, rears the white head\nOf a god or madman. Nobody knows\nWhich, or dares ask. From him I have\nTomorrow’s gossip and doldrums. So much\nIs vision good for: like a persistent stitch\nIn the side, it nags, is tedious.\n\nStraddling a stool in the third-floor window-\nBooth of the Alexandra House\nOver Petty Cury, I regard\nWith some fatigue the smoky rooms\nOf the restaurant opposite; see impose\nItself on the cook at the steaming stove\nA picture of what’s going to happen. I’ve\nTo wait it out. It will come. It comes:\n\nThree barely-known men are coming up\nA stair: this veils both stove and cook.\nOne is pale, with orange hair;\nBehind glasses the second’s eyes are blurred;\nThe third walks leaning on a stick\nAnd smiling. These trivial images\nInvade the cloistral eye like pages\nFrom a gross comic strip, and toward\n\nThe happening of this happening\nThe earth turns now. In half an hour\nI shall go down the shabby stair and meet,\nComing up, those three. Worth\nLess than present, past--this future.\nWorthless such vision to eyes gone dull\nThat once descried Troy’s towers fall,\nSaw evil break out of the north.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959, - "month": "september" - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "on-the-difficulty-of-conjuring-up-a-dryad": { - "title": "“On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad”", - "body": "Ravening through the persistent bric-a-brac\nOf blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,\nPostage stamps, stacked books’ clamor and yawp,\nNeighborhood cockcrow--all nature’s prodigal backtalk,\nThe vaunting mind\nSnubs impromptu spiels of wind\nAnd wrestles to impose\nIts own order on what is.\n\n“With my fantasy alone,” brags the importunate head,\nArrogant among rook-tongued spaces,\nSheep greens, finned falls, “I shall compose a Crisis\nTo stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad\nTrout, cock, ram,\nThat bulk so calm\nOn my jealous stare,\nSelf-sufficient as they are.”\n\nBut no hocus-pocus of green angels\nDamasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;\n“My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,\nAnd that damn scrupulous tree won’t practise wiles\nTo beguile sight:\nE.g., by cant of light\nConcoct a Daphne;\nMy tree stays tree.”\n\n“However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk\nTo my sweet will, no luminous shape\nSteps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,\nTo hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank\nSpurns such fiction\nAs nymphs; cold vision\nWill have no counterfeit\nPalmed off on it.”\n\n“No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,\nStar-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches\nMy jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,\nAnd the affluent air go studded with seed,\nWhile this beggared brain\nHatches no fortune,\nBut from leaf, from grass,\nThieves what it has.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "poppies-in-october": { - "title": "“Poppies in October”", - "body": "Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.\nNor the woman in the ambulance\nWhose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly--\n\nA gift, a love gift\nUtterly unasked for\nBy a sky\n\nPalely and flamily\nIgniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes\nDulled to a halt under bowlers.\n\nOh my God, what am I\nThat these late mouths should cry open\nIn a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "purdah": { - "title": "“Purdah”", - "body": "Jade--\nStone of the side,\nThe agonized\n\nSide of a green Adam, I\nSmile, cross-legged,\nEnigmatical,\n\nShifting my clarities.\nSo valuable!\nHow the sun polishes this shoulder!\n\nAnd should\nThe moon, my\nIndefatigable cousin\n\nRise, with her cancerous pallors,\nDragging trees--\nLittle bushy polyps,\n\nLittle nets,\nMy visibilities hide.\nI gleam like a mirror.\n\nAt this facet the bridegroom arrives.\nLord of the mirrors!\nIt is himself he guides\n\nIn among these silk\nScreens, these rustling appurtenances.\nI breathe, and the mouth\n\nVeil stirs its curtain.\nMy eye\nVeil is\n\nA concatenation of rainbows.\nI am his.\nEven in his\n\nAbsence, I\nRevolve in my\nSheath of impossibles,\n\nPriceless and quiet\nAmong these parakeets, macaws!\nO chatterers\n\nAttendants of the eyelash!\nI shall unloose\nOne feather, like the peacock.\n\nAttendants of the lip!\nI shall unloose\nOne note\n\nShattering\nThe chandelier\nOf air that all day plies\n\nIts crystals,\nA million ignorants.\nAttendants!\n\nAttendants!\nAnd at his next step\nI shall unloose\n\nI shall unloose--\nFrom the small jeweled\nDoll he guards like a heart--\n\nThe lioness,\nThe shriek in the bath,\nThe cloak of holes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - } - } - }, - "the-snowman-on-the-moors": { - "title": "“The Snowman on the Moors”", - "body": "Stalemated their armies stood, with tottering banners:\nShe flung from a room\nStill ringing with bruit of insults and dishonors\n\nAnd in fury left him\nGlowering at the coal-fire: “Come find me”--her last taunt.\nHe did not come\n\nBut sat on, guarding his grim battlement.\nBy the doorstep\nHer winter-beheaded daisies, marrowless, gaunt,\n\nWarned her to keep\nIndoors with politic goodwill, not haste\nInto a landscape\n\nOf stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist;\nBut from the house\nShe stalked intractable as a driven ghost\n\nAcross moor snows\nPocked by rook-claw and rabbit-track: she must yet win\nHim to his knees--\n\nLet him send police and hounds to bring her in.\nNursing her rage\nThrough bare whistling heather, over stiles of black stone,\n\nTo the world’s white edge\nShe came, and called hell to subdue an unruly man\nAnd join her siege.\n\nIt was no fire-blurting fork-tailed demon\nVolcanoed hot\nFrom marble snow-heap of moor to ride that woman\n\nWith spur and knout\nDown from pride’s size: instead, a grisly-thewed\nAustere, corpse-white\n\nGiant heaved into the distance, stone-hatcheted,\nSky-high, and snow\nFloured his whirling beard, and at his tread\n\nAmbushed birds by\nDozens dropped dead in the hedges: o she felt\nNo love in his eye,\n\nWorse--saw dangling from that spike-studded belt\nLadies’ sheaved skulls:\nMournfully the dry tongues clacked their guilt:\n\n“Our wit made fools\nOf kings, unmanned kings’ sons: our masteries\nAmused court halls:\n\nFor that brag, we barnacle these iron thighs.”\nThroned in the thick\nOf a blizzard, the giant roared up with his chittering trophies.\n\nFrom brunt of axe-crack\nShe shied sideways: a white fizz! and the giant, pursuing,\nCrumbled to smoke.\n\nHumbled then, and crying,\nThe girl bent homeward, brimful of gentle talk\nAnd mild obeying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sow": { - "title": "“Sow”", - "body": "God knows how our neighbor managed to breed\nHis great sow:\nWhatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid\n\nIn the same way\nHe kept the sow: impounded from public stare,\nPrize ribbon and pig show.\n\nBut one dusk our questions commended us to a tour\nThrough his lantern-lit\nMaze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door\n\nTo gape at it:\nBehold! no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling\nWith a penny slot\n\nFor thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,\nAbout to be\nGlorified for prime flesh and golden crackling\n\nIn a parsley halo;\nNor even one of the common barnyard sows,\nMire-smirched, blowzy,\n\nMunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise--\nBloat tun of milk\nOn the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies\n\nShrilling her hulk\nTo halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast\nBrobdingnag bulk\n\nOf a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,\nFat-rutted eyes\nDream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must\n\nThus wholly engross\nThe great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight\nIn glittering guise\n\nUnhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat\nBy a grisly-bristled\nBoar: fabulous enough to straddle that sow’s heat.\n\nBut our farmer whistled,\nThen, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,\nAnd the green-copse-castled\n\nPig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,\nSlowly, grunt\nOn grunt, up in the flickering light to shape\n\nA monument\nProdigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want\nMade lean Lent\n\nOf kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,\nProceeded to swill\nThe seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "stars-over-the-dordogne": { - "title": "“Stars over the Dordogne”", - "body": "Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy\nPicket of trees whose silhouette is darker\nThan the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.\nThe woods are a well. The stars drop silently.\nThey seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.\nNor do they send up fires where they fall\nOr any signal of distress or anxiousness.\nThey are eaten immediately by the pines.\n\nWhere I am at home, only the sparsest stars\nArrive at twilight, and then after some effort.\nAnd they are wan, dulled by much traveling.\nThe smaller and more timid never arrive at all\nBut stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.\nThey are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.\nBut tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble;\nThey are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.\n\nThe Big Dipper is my only familiar.\nI miss Orion and Cassiopeia’s Chair. Maybe they are\nHanging shyly under the studded horizon\nLike a child’s too-simple mathematical problem.\nInfinite number seems to be the issue up there.\nOr else they are present, and their disguise so bright\nI am overlooking them by looking too hard\nPerhaps it is the season that is not right.\n\nAnd what if the sky here is no different,\nAnd it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?\nSuch a luxury of stars would embarrass me.\nThe few I am used to are plain and durable;\nI think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth\nOr much company, or the mildness of the south\nThey are too puritan and solitary for that--\nWhen one of them falls it leaves a space,\n\nA sense of absence in its old shining place.\nAnd where I lie now, back to my own dark star,\nI see those constellations in my head,\nUnwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.\nThere is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.\nOn this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell\nIs accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes\nAnd drink the small night chill like news of home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "strumpet-song": { - "title": "“Strumpet Song”", - "body": "With white frost gone\nand all green dreams not worth much,\nafter a lean day’s work\ntime comes round for that foul slut:\nmere bruit of her takes our street\nuntil every man,\nbe he red, pale or dark,\nveers to her slouch.\n\nMark, I cry, that mouth\nmade to do violence on,\nthat seamed face\naskew with blotch, dint, scar\nstruck by each dour year;\nstalks there not some such wild man\nas can find ruth\nto patch with brand of love this rank grimace\nwhich out from black tarn, ditch and cup\ninto my most chaste own eyes\nlooks up.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "suicide-off-egg-rock": { - "title": "“Suicide off Egg Rock”", - "body": "Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled\nOn the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,\nGas tanks, factory stacks- that landscape\nOf imperfections his bowels were part of-\nRippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.\nSun struck the water like a damnation.\nNo pit of shadow to crawl into,\nAnd his blood beating the old tattoo\nI am, I am, I am. Children\nWere squealing where combers broke and the spindrift\nRaveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.\nA mongrel working his legs to a gallop\nHustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.\n\nHe smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,\nHis body beached with the sea’s garbage,\nA machine to breathe and beat forever.\nFlies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole\nBuzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.\nThe words in his book wormed off the pages.\nEverything glittered like blank paper.\n\nEverything shrank in the sun’s corrosive\nRay but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.\nHe heard when he walked into the water\n\nThe forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "tulips": { - "title": "“Tulips”", - "body": "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.\nLook how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.\nI am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly\nAs the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.\nI am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.\nI have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses\nAnd my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.\n\nThey have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff\nLike an eye between two white lids that will not shut.\nStupid pupil, it has to take everything in.\nThe nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,\nThey pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,\nDoing things with their hands, one just the same as another,\nSo it is impossible to tell how many there are.\n\nMy body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water\nTends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.\nThey bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.\nNow I have lost myself I am sick of baggage--\nMy patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,\nMy husband and child smiling out of the family photo;\nTheir smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.\n\nI have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat\nstubbornly hanging on to my name and address.\nThey have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.\nScared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley\nI watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books\nSink out of sight, and the water went over my head.\nI am a nun now, I have never been so pure.\n\nI didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted\nTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.\nHow free it is, you have no idea how free--\nThe peacefulness is so big it dazes you,\nAnd it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.\nIt is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them\nShutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.\n\nThe tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.\nEven through the gift paper I could hear them breathe\nLightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.\nTheir redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.\nThey are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,\nUpsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,\nA dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.\n\nNobody watched me before, now I am watched.\nThe tulips turn to me, and the window behind me\nWhere once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,\nAnd I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow\nBetween the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,\nAnd I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.\nThe vivid tulips eat my oxygen.\n\nBefore they came the air was calm enough,\nComing and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.\nThen the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.\nNow the air snags and eddies round them the way a river\nSnags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.\nThey concentrate my attention, that was happy\nPlaying and resting without committing itself.\n\nThe walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.\nThe tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;\nThey are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,\nAnd I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes\nIts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.\nThe water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,\nAnd comes from a country far away as health.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "two-sisters-of-persephone": { - "title": "“Two Sisters of Persephone”", - "body": "Two girls there are: within the house\nOne sits; the other, without;\nDaylong a duet of shade and light\nPlays between these.\n\nIn her dark wainscotted room,\nThe furst works problems on\nA mathematical machine;\nDry ticks mark time\n\nAs she calculates each sum;\nAt this barren enterprise\nRat-shrewd go her squint eyes,\nRoot-pale her meager frame.\n\nBronzed as earth, the second lies,\nHearing ticks blown gold\nLike pollen on bright air; lulled\nNear a bed of poppies,\n\nShe sees how their red silk flare\nOf petalled blood\nBurns open to sun’s blade;\nOn that green altar\n\nFreely become sun’s bride, the latter\nGrows quick with seed;\nGrass-couched in her labour’s pride,\nShe bears a king. Turned bitter\n\nAnd sallow as any lemon,\nThe other, wry virgin to the last,\nGoes graveward with flesh laid waste,\nWorm-husbanded, yet no woman;\n\nInscribed above her head, these lines:\nWhile flowering, ladies, scant love not\nLest all your fruit\nBe but this black outcrop of stones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "waking-in-winter": { - "title": "“Waking in Winter”", - "body": "I can taste the tin of the sky--the real tin thing.\nWinter dawn is the color of metal,\nThe trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.\nAll night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations--\nAn assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I\nInching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green\nPoison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,\nNoiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.\n\nHow the balconies echoed! How the sun lit up\nThe skulls, the unbuckled bones facing the view!\nSpace! Space! The bed linen was giving out entirely.\nCot legs melted in terrible attitudes, and the nurses--\nEach nurse patched her soul to a wound and disappeared.\nThe deathly guests had not been satisfied\nWith the rooms, or the smiles, or the beautiful rubber plants,\nOr the sea, Hushing their peeled sense like Old Mother Morphia.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "widow": { - "title": "“Widow”", - "body": "Widow. The word consumes itself--\nBody, a sheet of newsprint on the fire\nLevitating a numb minute in the updraft\nOver the scalding, red topography\nThat will put her heart out like an only eye.\n\nWidow. The dead syllable, with its shadow\nOf an echo, exposes the panel in the wall\nBehind which the secret passage lies--stale air,\nFusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair\nThat opens at the top onto nothing at all\n\nWidow. The bitter spider sits\nAnd sits in the center of her loveless spokes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1962 - } - } - }, - "winter-trees": { - "title": "“Winter Trees”", - "body": "The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.\nOn their blotter of fog the trees\nSeem a botanical drawing.\nMemories growing, ring on ring,\nA series of weddings.\n\nKnowing neither abortions nor bitchery,\nTruer than women,\nThey seed so effortlessly!\nTasting the winds, that are footless,\nWaist-deep in history.\n\nFull of wings, otherworldliness.\nIn this, they are Ledas.\nO mother of leaves and sweetness\nWho are these pietas?\nThe shadows of ringdoves chanting, but chasing nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "wreath-for-a-bridal": { - "title": "“Wreath for a Bridal”", - "body": "What though green leaves only witness\nSuch pact as is made once only; what matter\nThat owl voice sole “yes,” while cows utter\nLow moos of approve; let sun surpliced in brightness\nStand stock still to laud these mated ones\nWhose stark act all coming double luck joins.\n\nCouched daylong in cloisters of stinging nettle\nThey lie, cut-grass assaulting each separate sense\nWith savor; coupled so, pure paragons of constance,\nThis pair seek single state from that dual battle.\nNow speak some sacrament to parry scruple\nFor wedlock wrought within love’s proper chapel.\n\nCall here with flying colors all watchful birds\nTo people the twigged aisles; lead babel tongues\nOf animals to choir: “Look what thresh of wings\nWields guard of honor over these!” Starred with words,\nLet night bless that luck-rooted mead of clover\nWhere, bedded like angels, two burn one in fever.\n\nFrom this holy day on, all pollen blown\nShall strew broadcast so rare a seed on wind\nThat every breath, thus teeming, set the land\nSprouting fruit, flowers, children most fair in legion\nTo slay spawn of dragon’s teeth: speaking this promise,\nLet flesh be knit, and each step hence go famous.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "youre": { - "title": "“You’re”", - "body": "Clownlike, happiest on your hands,\nFeet to the stars, and moon-skulled,\nGilled like a fish. A common-sense\nThumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.\nWrapped up in yourself like a spool,\nTrawling your dark as owls do.\nMute as a turnip from the Fourth\nOf July to All Fools’ Day,\nO high-riser, my little loaf.\n\nVague as fog and looked for like mail.\nFarther off than Australia.\nBent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.\nSnug as a bud and at home\nLike a sprat in a pickle jug.\nA creel of eels, all ripples.\nJumpy as a Mexican bean.\nRight, like a well-done sum.\nA clean slate, with your own face on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1960 - } - } - } - } - }, - "andrei-platonov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Andrei Platonov", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Platonov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 17 - }, - "poems": { - "bandit": { - "title": "“Bandit”", - "body": "… I fired at a door--dismounted--ran in--a smell of herbs and sorrow--lumber-room--someone lying wounded--through a kitchen--found a red-haired peasant, right hand above his head, gun in the left with blood dripping now and then (as rain drips from leaves after a downpour)--keeping dull count of this man. “Drop that gun!” I said. Muttering, the hurt man let the gun fall in the blood--pool, gazed at it. What had I to do? Isat in the armchair, waited. The man standing before me didn’t look like a bandit, nor like a rich man either. “You sit down!” He wouldn’t. “You’re a kulak?” “No. We’re the last of the locals. Kulaks aren’t fighting.” Fear gripped me as I recalled riding down village roads full of pale unhappy people. “Your right hand isn’t hurt: why didn’t you shoot me?” “I’m left-handed … They said an army’s coming. I couldn’t die alone …” My brain thundered. I caught in his words the grief of the revolution, all the alarm of the poor. “Fool,” I said to myself, “Revolution’s a force of nature. I’ve got to kill him. Grass breaks the soil just by growing. Swine!” I changed my mind and told him to go off home and he started moving backwards, staring bewitchedatmy gun (held motionless, not to scare him). So I said to him: “Please stop being frightened. Just go away …” Then he went.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "end-of-the-old": { - "title": "“End of the Old”", - "body": "Sorrow lay helpless over the town\nas when a dead mother is carried away\nand everything mourns her--fences, plants,\nthe abandoned porch, and a little boy\ncrying in a dark, extinguished world.\n\nAll of the wet and fallen strength\nof the tired sky had been quite used up\nby tall weeds for their food and rebirth,\nand the wind had come down with the rain to lie\nhidden in cramped places of grass.\n\nIn childhood there are nights like this--\nempty and stopped, when inside your chest\na dried-up narrow stream, like a rough\nworm, stretches from stomach to neck,\nmaking your heart twitch with need.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "evening": { - "title": "“Evening”", - "body": "In the world the time was like an evening\nand in the man it seemed an evening too,\na time for adulthood, a time for feeling\nregret or a happy calm.\n\nHis father, once, deep in his own life’s evening,\ntied his feet and sank under the foam,\nwanting to see the morning of the future\nbefore his time.\n\nNow another evening was beginning,\nBells thinly rang in rain and it could seem\nthe evening of that very day whose dawn lay\nin the lake.\n\nThe father’s plunge and drown in hope was over.\nInstead the son, his head bared to the rain,\nlived again the evening of the morning,\nfor that long day was gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "the-fishermans-grave": { - "title": "“The Fisherman’s Grave”", - "body": "I knew a fisherman once who fished in Lake Mutevo. He was filled with curiosity. He’d ask everyone about death: what was it? It seemed to him only the fish could know. He loved them, net for their sweet flesh but for their secret. He used to point to the face of a dead fish: “Look how wise! Why doesn’t a fish speak, and why are her eyes so blank?--It’s because she stands halfway between life and death. A calf thinks, but a fish already knows.” For years he stared at the lake and thought only how interesting death must be. “Nothing’s there, Mitya,” I’d say, “but cramped space, you won’t be able to breathe.” Yet full of impatience, one fine day, he fastened a rope around his feet and flung himself from his fishing-boat into the deep: Now Mitya never believed in death. He’d only wanted to take a look--it might be far better than village life on the shores of a lake, itmight be a new province lying beneath the sky as though at the bottom of cool water. “T’ll just go and stay there a little while,” he said. Some argued, others agreed--“Why not?” they said, “Give it a try, tell us about it when you come back.” Three days later they pulled him out and buried him by the churchyard fence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "gopner": { - "title": "“Gopner”", - "body": "“What is it I want?\nMy father wanted\nto see the Lord God with his own two eyes.\nBut me? I only\nwant some bare\nplace, well just a spare place, damn it!\nwhere, depending on my brain,\nthe whole world can be made again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "hunger": { - "title": "“Hunger”", - "body": "How hungry they were, those who travelled the steppe\nfor days and days, standing asleep, in untimetabled\ntrains that stopped in unpeopled stations for days\non end--travelling to look for food, for food,\n\nfor food, and something to drink, in that time of war,\nand often didn’t find it but died and died\nand died as they stood, like dog-bitten horses in yards,\ncollapsing comradely on to each other, while stil\n\ndreaming of--long ago--the transparent vodka,\n“God’s very air,” so pure, “like a woman’s tears,”\nsluicing the column of good food inside the body\nlike a last unconsciousness after feasting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "in-the-beginning": { - "title": "“In the Beginning”", - "body": "… but when I looked again between the lines\na man appeared, his sharp face blocked by shade,\nwho lived on nothing, slept out in the wild,\nand sought for nothing, only hoped to find\nthe invisible rotation of the earth,\nthen make a clock that worked by it.\nHe made delicate ships, dirigibles and towers\nfrom shreds of wire and scraps of roofing-iron\n\nand watched the silent companies of ants,\nso impeccably equipped--their trees were grass\nand they had warmth of life and tender streets.\nHe heard the church clock tolling through the night\nup to the singing spacious rains of dawn\nbut seldom spoke--all human speech\nwent unnoticed by him like the noise\nof forest leaves to those who live in forests.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "newcomers": { - "title": "“Newcomers”", - "body": "Shapes of people coming down\nin darkness from the ancient mound,\ntheir faces grey as a wan sky\nbefore dawn, their bare feet slow\nas though they waded through dry snow.\n\nOrphans all, they sank to the town,\nand they were so destitute they found\na tenuous happiness in possessing\nthe touch of bodies of strangers, pressing\nclose to their skin like a wife or cousin.\n\nOne man tenderly picked out fleas\nfrom the head of a stumbling man in front.\nAnother, seeing how a boy reached\nback to an itch, reached forward to scratch.\nA third kept his hand on an old man’s shoulder.\n\nSo they came down, half-blind from hunger,\npatience and pain, to the town of the future.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "old-man": { - "title": "“Old Man”", - "body": "“Spiderweb and light thin spider-corpses\nare sinking down to the floor to disintegrate\nin unrecognisable dust. Everywhere\nparticles lie scattered, shards of things\nonce cherished, once the darlings of their children,\n chipped-off scraps--perhaps of human people,\nor beetles or the nameless gnats of the earth.\n\nO if a body, though it’s dead, could remain\nwhole, we’d hold it, we’d remember it.\nInstead, winds blow and endless waters flow\nand all things break and cannot keep their shape,\nand fall to dust. Whoever dies has died\nfor nothing, nor can any of those who lived\never be found again. They are all lost.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "runner": { - "title": "“Runner”", - "body": "“Rivers flow, winds blow, a fish swims,\nyet here you sit as the light dims, half-awake,\ngrowing stiff and rusty with corrosive grief--\nShift, shift those old limbs, make them go.\nWinds will blow thought’s quake into you.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "shooting-the-bourgeois": { - "title": "“Shooting the Bourgeois”", - "body": "Quiet steam came out of the head, and, showing through hair, a damp maternal candle-wax. But the bourgeois failed to fall, he sat down on his homely bundle. “Wife, swaddle my neck,” he said, “my soul is leaking out of my throat,” and fell from the bundle to hug the earth with flung-out arms and legs as if the earth were his wife.\n\nAll the dumb bourgeois now started to drop sideways, wrenching their spines, and they lost their legs’ strength in advance of the wound so the bullet entered randomly to be overgrown with living flesh. Lying on the ground with diminished body, one begged his gunman: “Dear human being, allow me to breathe, bring me my woman to say goodbye, or else--give--quick--your hand--and stay, I’m scared.” But he didn’t wait for the hand, he grasped a burdock for help, giving up to the plant his unfinished life, and didn’t let go til need for a woman’s farewell vanished. Then his arms fell down, foregoing friendship. So, with a bullet inside him the bourgeois desires, no less than the proletarian, a comrade? Yet without a bullet there’s nothing he loves but money and goods!\n\nThus the job was done and now in the world there was no proletarian more poor than the dead. By dawn the bundles and al the corpses were tipped in a pit, and the killed men’s wives, who hadn’t yet dared to come up close but had watched the work, from every street of the town came up to that flattened place. “Weep!” the _cheká_ advised, going off to get some sleep, being quite tired out. The wives lay down on the clay clods of the smooth and traceless grave. But the night had been very cold and their grief had been grieved right through to its end and gone out of them, and the dead men’s wives could no longer weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "sleep": { - "title": "“Sleep”", - "body": "Asleep, you’re trying to remember something.\nThe trying is heavier than the thing to remember.\nWhich disappears--just when your mind\nbegins to turn. Like a bird from a wheel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "start-of-the-new": { - "title": "“Start of the New”", - "body": "A man went out and saw\nthe town of immense hope,\nopen, cool, lit\nby a grey shine from the far--\naway unrisen sun.\n\nGrass stil grew, paths\nlay intact, dawn--\nlight flourished in space,\nslowly undoing the gloom.\nHe said: “The sun will be ours!”\n\nNow sun leant into earth\ntil it ran with sap of stems,\ndamp of loam, stirred\nwith hair of the widespread steppe.\nAnd the sun burned, strained\n\nwith patience, became stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "vacancy": { - "title": "“Vacancy”", - "body": "Sad summer darkness covered\nthe frightening, vacant town.\n\nWith careful heart a man\nclosed wide gates.\n\nWhere were all the dogs?\n\nOnly ancient burdock\nand the kindly goosefoot\nlived on in the yards.\n\nEven the cows had vanished.\n\nAnd now, for the first time in centuries,\nno one was lying asleep in the houses.\n\nLife itself had renounced this place\nand gone away to die\nin the wild grass of the steppe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-wanderer": { - "title": "“The Wanderer”", - "body": "In the world are distant roads,\nA field and a quiet mother,\nProfound dark nights--\nTogether we wait for no one.\nYou will open to a wanderer at midnight,\nA friend forgotten will come in.\nYou won’t hide your secret soul,\nThe wanderer will see and understand.\nThe sky is high and quiet,\nStars are radiant with centuries.\nIn the field is neither a wind, nor a cry,\nNor a lonely white willow.\nWe will go out with the last star\nTo search for our grandfather’s truth …\nThe centuries will depart in sequence.\nAnd it’s not for us to understand even the grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Albert C. Todd", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "weeds": { - "title": "“Weeds”", - "body": "Doomed are the pitiful weeds in the millet.\nWild and dislocate--clover, melilot,\ncornflowers, prettier than pallid corn-stalks,\nsoft as the colourful eyes of sorrowful\nchildren about to perish. Pitiless\npeasant women will rip their roots out,\nbending and sweating. Yet these plants are\nbrighter with life and patience than your\nfeebler grasses. The weeders gone,\nweeds are reborn--immortal, numberless.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - }, - "worms": { - "title": "“Worms”", - "body": "He paced the sunlit yard and couldn’t stop\nthinking how human beings derive from worms,\nand worms are dreadful, simple tubes: inside them--\nstench, emptiness, darkness: nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Angela Livingstone", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - } - } - } - } - }, - "aleksey-pleshcheyev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Aleksey Pleshcheyev", - "birth": { - "year": 1825 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Pleshcheyev", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "ah-why-do-your-eyes-occasionally": { - "title": "“Ah, why do your eyes occasionally …”", - "body": "Ah, why do your eyes occasionally\nGaze at me so severely\nAnd why torture my soul with distress\nFrom your cold, unaffectionate gaze,\n\nFrom your cold, unaffectionate gaze?\n\nWithout a smile and in proud silence\nYou go like a shadow before me,\nAnd, in spirit, having concealed the suffering,\nI jealously follow after you.\n\nJealously follow after you.\n\nYou with your love brighten\nAs in spring my sad days\nCaress me, as you used to,\nDrive away my grief with affection.\n\nCaress me, as you used to,\nDrive away my grief with affection.\nWhy do your eyes occasionally\nGaze at me so severely, so severely?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Erin Franklin", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "before-thee-lies-a-broad-new-way": { - "title": "“Before thee lies a broad new way …”", - "body": "Before thee lies a broad new way.\nAccept then my greeting, not loud, but hearty:\nMay thy bosom be, as it was, warmed\nWith love of thy fellow-man, with love of the eternal truth.\n\nMayst thou not lose in the hard struggle with evil,\nAll of which at present thy soul is so full;\nAnd the life-giving lamp of faith and love\nMay the wave of life not extinguish in thee.\n\nRaising thy forehead, go with unfaltering step:\nGo, preserving in thy soul thy pure ideal,\nThe tears of the sufferers answering with a tear,\nAnd comforting those in the struggle who have lost courage.\n\nAnd if in old age, in the sorrowful hour of reflection,\nThou wilt say: “In the world I left a good footprint,\nAnd I can meet calmly the parting moment …”\nThou wilt be happy, friend: there is no other happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "B. A. Rudzinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-christ-child-and-the-hebrew-children": { - "title": "“The Christ-Child and the Hebrew Children”", - "body": "The Christ-child had a garden,\nAnd many roses He planted therein;\nHe had three times a day watered them,\nIn order to weave for Himself a garland later on.\n\nWhen those roses were in full bloom,\nHe called the Hebrew children;\nThey plucked off every flower,\nAnd the whole garden was devastated.\n\n--“How wilt Thou weave a garland for Thyself?\nIn Thy garden there are no more roses!”\n--“You forgot that the thorns\nRemained for Me,” said Christ.\n\nAnd from the thorns they wove\nA spiny garland for Him--\nAnd drops of blood, instead of roses,\nAdorned His brow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "B. A. Rudzinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1877 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "joseph-mary-plunkett": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Joseph Mary Plunkett", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Plunkett", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "heaven-in-hell": { - "title": "“Heaven in Hell”", - "body": "If the dread all-seeing stars,\nRinged Saturn and ruddy Mars\nAnd their companions all the seven,\nThat play before the lord of Heaven,\nEach blossoming nebula and all\nThe constellations, were to fall\nLow at my feet and worship me,\nEndow me with all sovranty\nOf their wide kingdom of the blue--\nYet I would not believe that you\nCould love me--If besides the nine\nEncircling legions all-divine\nShould, chanting, teach me that my worth\nOutshone the souls of men on earth\nAnd seraphs in Heaven, and as well\nThat glittering demons deep in Hell\nFled at my frown, obeyed my word--\nIf every flower and beast and bird\nIn God’s great earth and splendid sea\nShould live and love and fight, for me\nAnd my sweet singing and sad art--\nYet could I not conceive your heart\nStooping to mine, nor your wild eyes\nUnveiling their deep ecstasies,\nYour tenebrous hair sweep near my lips,\nYour eyelids bring your soul eclipse\nFor fear that I should be made blind\nBy love’s bright image in your mind.\nYou are the Standard of high Heaven,\nThe Banner brave towards which I’ve striven\nTo force my way--To seize and hold\nThe citadel of the city of gold\nI must attain the Flag of love\nBlazoned with the eternal Dove.\n\nOnce Immortality, a babe,\nPlayed with the Future’s astrolabe\nAnd marked a destiny thereon\nMore splendid than the morning sun\nLeaping to glory from the earth:\nMore wondrous than the wonder-birth\nOf the white moon from darkest rock;\nMore strange than should the sun unlock\nHis leashes and let slip the stars;\nMore desperate than the clanging wars\nTwixt Hell and Heaven; still more great\nThan any favourable fate;\nBut beyond all things beautiful,\nBeyond Mortality’s foot-rule\nOf loveliness, and little words--\nSometimes, at twilit eve, when birds\nLapse from dream-silence into song,\nSometimes when Thunder’s rolling note\nReverberates from his iron throat,\nThey speak of such high mysteries\nBut no one can interpret these--\nAll of this dim and deep design\nIf I should choose, its crown were mine\nTo win or lose by my sole hand\nAnd heart. I chose, and joined the band\nOf Heaven’s adventurers that seek\nTo climb the never-conquered peak\nIn solitude by their sole might.\nIn the dark innocence of night\nI fought unknown inhuman foes\nAnd left them in their battle-throes,\nHacked a way through them and advanced\nTo where the stars of morning danced\nIn your high honour, there I stood\nTo see you, till the morning-flood\nBurst from the sky--but your sunrise\nStriking my unaccustomed eyes\nSmote them to darkness, and I turned\nAnd stumbled towards the night. There burned\nIn heart and eyes a drunken flame\nThat sang and clamoured out your name,\nAnd woke a madness in my head.\nThe enemies I had left for dead\nSurrounded me with gibbering cries\nAnd mocked me for my blinded eyes.\nI curst them till they rose in rage\nAnd flung me down a battle-gage\nTo fight them on the floors of Hell\nWhere solely they’re assailable.\nI took the challenge straightaway\nAnd leaped--and that was yesterday\nOr was last year, but every hour\nFor weary years to break their power\nStill must I fight, but now a gleam\nOf hope comes to me like a dream,\nTo-day, though dimly, I do see,\nMy vision has come back to me.\nAnd I have learnt in deepest Hell\nI with terror-twisted eyes\nHave watched you play in Paradise,\nTortured and torn by demons seven\nHave kept my heart’s gaze fixed on Heaven,\nSave when the smoky mists of blood\nHave blinded me with their fell flood.\nMy desert heart all desolate\nLit with the mirage of your hate\nI searched, my vision held above,\nFor green oasis of your love.\nMy heart’s dry desert, hot and wide,\nBounded by flames on every side,\nSo dim and old no song can tell,\nCovers the tombs where dead kings dwell:\nNow demons dance upon their tombs,\nShut with the seals of lasting dooms,\nFor them until the world be riven\nNo hope of Hell, no fear of Heaven.\nBut I, alas! am torn between\nThe things unseen and the things seen,\nI alone of the souls I know\nIn Hell and Heaven am high and low,\nHigh in Heaven and low in Hell:\nFrom pit and peak inaccessible\nTo all but Satan and seraphim\nMy song gains power and grows more grim.\n\nOnly the straining of my vision\nToward the playing-fields elysian\nWhere you with starry comrades fling\nYour fervours over eye and wing,\nWith deep and happy subtlety\nFlavouring the wine-bag of the bee;\nThrones, principalities and powers\nShowering with Eden-flowers:\nWith Michael’s sword and Raphael’s lute\nSlaying and singing, making bruit\nOf lovely laughter with your lips\nSounding as where the honey drips\nAt reaping-time by rippling brooks\nTwining between the barley-stocks:\nOnly your shape that holds my sight,\nYour ways that fill it with delight,\nYour steps that blossom where you’ve trod,\nYour laughter like the breath of God,\nAnd all the braveries that extol\nThe living sword that is your soul:\nOnly your passion-haunted eyes\nInterpreting your mysteries:\nThese are to me and my desire\nFor pillar of cloud and pillar of fire,\nA gleam and gloom of Heaven, in Hell\nA high continuous miracle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-love-you-with-my-every-breath": { - "title": "“I Love You with My Every Breath”", - "body": "I love you with my every breath,\nI make you songs like thunder birds,\nGive you my life--you give me death\nAnd stab me with your dreadful words.\n\nYou laid my head against your heart\nLast night, my lips upon your breast\nAnd now you say that we must part\nFor fear your heart should be oppressed:\n\nYou cannot go against the world\nFor my sake only--thus your phrase,\nBut I--God’s beauty is unfurled\nIn your gold hair, and in your gaze\n\nThe wisdom of God’s bride--each soul\nThat shares his love, and yours and mine,\nTwo lovers share your aureole\nAnd one is mortal, one divine:\n\nOne came on earth that you might know\nHis love for you--that you deny,\nNow you give me this equal blow:\nOne died for you, and one will die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-saw-the-sun-at-midnight": { - "title": "“I Saw the Sun at Midnight”", - "body": "I saw the Sun at midnight, rising red,\nDeep-hued yet glowing, heavy with the stain\nOf blood-compassion, and I saw It gain\nSwiftly in size and growing till It spread\nOver the stars; the heavens bowed their head\nAs from Its heart slow dripped a crimson rain,\nThen a great tremor shook It, as of pain--\nThe night fell, moaning, as It hung there dead.\n\nO Sun, O Christ, O bleeding Heart of flame!\nThou givest Thine agony as our life’s worth,\nAnd makest it infinite, lest we have dearth\nOf rights wherewith to call upon Thy Name;\nThou pawnest Heaven as a pledge for Earth\nAnd for our glory sufferest all shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-see-his-blood-upon-the-rose": { - "title": "“I See His Blood upon the Rose”", - "body": "I see his blood upon the rose\nAnd in the stars the glory of His eyes,\nHis body gleams amid eternal snows,\nHis tears fall from the skies.\n\nI see his face in every flower;\nThe thunder and the singing of the birds\nAre but His voice--and carven by His power\nRocks are His written words.\n\nAll pathways by His feet are worn,\nHis strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,\nHis crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,\nHis cross is every tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "initiation": { - "title": "“Initiation”", - "body": "Our lips can only stammer, yet we chant\nHigh things of God. We do not hope to praise\nThe splendour and the glory of his ways,\nNor light up Heaven with our low descant:\nBut we will follow thee, his hierophant\nFilling with secret canticles the days\nTo shadow forth in symbols for their gaze\nWhat crowns and thrones await his militant.\n\nFor all his beauty showered on the earth\nIs summed in thee, O thou most perfect flower;\nHis dew has filled thy chalice, and his power\nBlows forth the fragrance of thy mystic worth:\nWhite blossom of his Tree, behold the hour!\nFear not! thy fruit is Love’s most lovely birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-splendour-of-god": { - "title": "“The Splendour of God”", - "body": "The drunken stars stagger across the sky,\nThe moon wavers and sways like a wind-blown bud,\nBeneath my feet the earth like drifting scud\nLapses and slides, wallows and shoots on high;\nImmovable things start suddenly flying by,\nThe city shakes and quavers, a city of mud\nAnd ooze--a brawling cataract is my blood\nOf molten metal and fire--like God am I.\n\nWhen God crushes his passion-fruit for our thirst\nAnd the universe totters--I have burst the grape\nOf the world, and let its powerful blood escape\nUntasted--crying whether my vision durst\nSee God’s high glory in a girl’s soft shape--\nGod! Is my worship blessed or accurst?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "edgar-allan-poe": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edgar Allan Poe", - "birth": { - "year": 1809 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 54 - }, - "poems": { - "al-aaraaf": { - "title": "“Al Aaraaf”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO! nothing earthly save the ray\n(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty’s eye,\nAs in those gardens where the day\nSprings from the gems of Circassy--\nO! nothing earthly save the thrill\nOf melody in woodland rill--\nOr (music of the passion-hearted)\nJoy’s voice so peacefully departed\nThat like the murmur in the shell,\nIts echo dwelleth and will dwell--\nO! nothing of the dross of ours--\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our Love, and deck our bowers--\nAdorn yon world afar, afar--\nThe wandering star.\n\n’Twas a sweet time for Nesace--for there\nHer world lay lolling on the golden air,\nNear four bright suns--a temporary rest--\nAn oasis in desert of the blest.\nAway away--’mid seas of rays that roll\nEmpyrean splendor o’er th’ unchained soul--\nThe soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)\nCan struggle to its destin’d eminence--\nTo distant spheres, from time to time, she rode,\nAnd late to ours, the favour’d one of God--\nBut, now, the ruler of an anchor’d realm,\nShe throws aside the sceptre--leaves the helm,\nAnd, amid incense and high spiritual hymns,\nLaves in quadruple light her angel limbs.\n\nNow happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,\nWhence sprang the “Idea of Beauty” into birth,\n(Falling in wreaths thro’ many a startled star,\nLike woman’s hair ’mid pearls, until, afar,\nIt lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),\nShe look’d into Infinity--and knelt.\nRich clouds, for canopies, about her curled--\nFit emblems of the model of her world--\nSeen but in beauty--not impeding sight--\nOf other beauty glittering thro’ the light--\nA wreath that twined each starry form around,\nAnd all the opal’d air in color bound.\n\nAll hurriedly she knelt upon a bed\nOf flowers: of lilies such as rear’d the head\nOn the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang\nSo eagerly around about to hang\nUpon the flying footsteps of--deep pride--\nOf her who lov’d a mortal--and so died.\nThe Sephalica, budding with young bees,\nUprear’d its purple stem around her knees:\nAnd gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam’d--\nInmate of highest stars, where erst it sham’d\nAll other loveliness: its honied dew\n(The fabled nectar that the heathen knew)\nDeliriously sweet, was dropp’d from Heaven,\nAnd fell on gardens of the unforgiven \nIn Trebizond--and on a sunny flower\nSo like its own above that, to this hour,\nIt still remaineth, torturing the bee\nWith madness, and unwonted reverie:\nIn Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf\nAnd blossom of the fairy plant, in grief\nDisconsolate linger--grief that hangs her head,\nRepenting follies that full long have fled,\nHeaving her white breast to the balmy air,\nLike guilty beauty, chasten’d, and more fair:\nNyctanthes too, as sacred as the light\nShe fears to perfume, perfuming the night:\nAnd Clytia pondering between many a sun,\nWhile pettish tears adown her petals run:\nAnd that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth--\nAnd died, ere scarce exalted into birth,\nBursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing \nIts way to Heaven, from garden of a king:\nAnd Valisnerian lotus thither flown\nFrom struggling with the waters of the Rhone:\nAnd thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante!\nIsola d’oro!--Fior di Levante!\nAnd the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever\nWith Indian Cupid down the holy river--\nFair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given\nTo bear the Goddess’ song, in odors, up to Heaven:\n\n“Spirit! that dwellest where,\nIn the deep sky,\nThe terrible and fair,\nIn beauty vie!\nBeyond the line of blue--\nThe boundary of the star\nWhich turneth at the view\nOf thy barrier and thy bar--\nOf the barrier overgone\nBy the comets who were cast\nFrom their pride, and from their throne\nTo be drudges till the last--\nTo be carriers of fire\n(The red fire of their heart)\nWith speed that may not tire\nAnd with pain that shall not part--\nWho livest--_that_ we know--\nIn Eternity--we feel--\nBut the shadow of whose brow\nWhat spirit shall reveal?\nTho’ the beings whom thy Nesace,\nThy messenger hath known\nHave dream’d for thy Infinity\nA model of their own--\nThy will is done, O God!\nThe star hath ridden high\nThro’ many a tempest, but she rode\nBeneath thy burning eye;\nAnd here, in thought, to thee--\nIn thought that can alone\nAscend thy empire and so be\nA partner of thy throne--\nBy winged Fantasy,\n My embassy is given,\nTill secrecy shall knowledge be\nIn the environs of Heaven.”\n\nShe ceas’d--and buried then her burning cheek\nAbash’d, amid the lilies there, to seek\nA shelter from the fervor of His eye;\nFor the stars trembled at the Deity.\nShe stirr’d not--breath’d not--for a voice was there\nHow solemnly pervading the calm air!\nA sound of silence on the startled ear\nWhich dreamy poets name “the music of the sphere.”\nOurs is a world of words: Quiet we call\n“Silence”--which is the merest word of all.\n\nAll Nature speaks, and ev’n ideal things\nFlap shadowy sounds from the visionary wings--\nBut ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high\nThe eternal voice of God is passing by,\nAnd the red winds are withering in the sky!\n“What tho’ in worlds which sightless cycles run,\nLink’d to a little system, and one sun--\nWhere all my love is folly, and the crowd\nStill think my terrors but the thunder cloud,\nThe storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath\n(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)\nWhat tho’ in worlds which own a single sun\nThe sands of time grow dimmer as they run,\nYet thine is my resplendency, so given\nTo bear my secrets thro’ the upper Heaven.\nLeave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,\nWith all thy train, athwart the moony sky--\nApart--like fire-flies in Sicilian night,\nAnd wing to other worlds another light!\nDivulge the secrets of thy embassy\nTo the proud orbs that twinkle--and so be\nTo ev’ry heart a barrier and a ban\nLest the stars totter in the guilt of man!”\n\nUp rose the maiden in the yellow night,\nThe single-mooned eve!--on earth we plight\nOur faith to one love--and one moon adore--\nThe birth-place of young Beauty had no more.\nAs sprang that yellow star from downy hours,\nUp rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,\nAnd bent o’er sheeny mountain and dim plain\nHer way--but left not yet her Therasaean reign.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHigh on a mountain of enamell’d head--\nSuch as the drowsy shepherd on his bed\nOf giant pasturage lying at his ease,\nRaising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees\nWith many a mutter’d “hope to be forgiven”\nWhat time the moon is quadrated in Heaven--\nOf rosy head, that towering far away \nInto the sunlit ether, caught the ray\nOf sunken suns at eve--at noon of night,\nWhile the moon danc’d with the fair stranger light--\nUprear’d upon such height arose a pile\nOf gorgeous columns on th’ uuburthen’d air,\nFlashing from Parian marble that twin smile\nFar down upon the wave that sparkled there,\nAnd nursled the young mountain in its lair.\nOf molten stars their pavement, such as fall\nThro’ the ebon air, besilvering the pall\nOf their own dissolution, while they die--\nAdorning then the dwellings of the sky.\nA dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,\nSat gently on these columns as a crown--\nA window of one circular diamond, there,\nLook’d out above into the purple air\nAnd rays from God shot down that meteor chain\nAnd hallow’d all the beauty twice again,\nSave when, between th’ Empyrean and that ring,\nSome eager spirit flapp’d his dusky wing.\nBut on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen\nThe dimness of this world: that grayish green\nThat Nature loves the best for Beauty’s grave\nLurk’d in each cornice, round each architrave--\nAnd every sculptured cherub thereabout\nThat from his marble dwelling peered out,\nSeem’d earthly in the shadow of his niche--\nAchaian statues in a world so rich?\nFriezes from Tadmor and Persepolis--\nFrom Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss\nOf beautiful Gomorrah! Oh, the wave \nIs now upon thee--but too late to save!\nSound loves to revel in a summer night:\nWitness the murmur of the gray twilight\nThat stole upon the ear, in Eyraco,\nOf many a wild star-gazer long ago--\nThat stealeth ever on the ear of him\nWho, musing, gazeth on the distance dim,\nAnd sees the darkness coming as a cloud--\nIs not its form--its voice--most palpable and loud?\nBut what is this?--it cometh--and it brings\nA music with it--’tis the rush of wings--\nA pause--and then a sweeping, falling strain,\nAnd Nesace is in her halls again.\nFrom the wild energy of wanton haste\nHer cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart;\nThe zone that clung around her gentle waist\nHad burst beneath the heaving of her heart.\nWithin the centre of that hall to breathe\nShe paus’d and panted, Zanthe! all beneath,\nThe fairy light that kiss’d her golden hair\nAnd long’d to rest, yet could but sparkle there!\n\nYoung flowers were whispering in melody\nTo happy flowers that night--and tree to tree;\nFountains were gushing music as they fell \nIn many a star-lit grove, or moon-light dell;\nYet silence came upon material things--\nFair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wings--\nAnd sound alone that from the spirit sprang\nBore burthen to the charm the maiden sang:\n\n“Neath blue-bell or streamer--\nOr tufted wild spray\nThat keeps, from the dreamer,\nThe moonbeam away--\nBright beings! that ponder,\nWith half-closing eyes,\nOn the stars which your wonder\nHath drawn from the skies,\nTill they glance thro’ the shade, and\nCome down to your brow\nLike--eyes of the maiden\nWho calls on you now--\nArise! from your dreaming\nIn violet bowers,\nTo duty beseeming\nThese star-litten hours--\nAnd shake from your tresses\nEncumber’d with dew\n\nThe breath of those kisses\nThat cumber them too--\n(O! how, without you, Love!\nCould angels be blest?)\nThose kisses of true love\nThat lull’d ye to rest!\nUp! shake from your wing\nEach hindering thing:\nThe dew of the night--\nIt would weigh down your flight;\nAnd true love caresses--\nO! leave them apart!\nThey are light on the tresses,\nBut lead on the heart.\n\nLigeia! Ligeia!\nMy beautiful one!\nWhose harshest idea\nWill to melody run,\nO! is it thy will\nOn the breezes to toss?\nOr, capriciously still,\nLike the lone Albatross,\nIncumbent on night\n(As she on the air)\nTo keep watch with delight\nOn the harmony there?\n\nLigeia! wherever\nThy image may be,\nNo magic shall sever\nThy music from thee.\nThou hast bound many eyes\nIn a dreamy sleep--\nBut the strains still arise\nWhich _thy_ vigilance keep--\n\nThe sound of the rain\nWhich leaps down to the flower,\nAnd dances again\nIn the rhythm of the shower--\nThe murmur that springs\nFrom the growing of grass\nAre the music of things--\nBut are modell’d, alas!\nAway, then, my dearest,\nO! hie thee away\nTo springs that lie clearest\nBeneath the moon-ray--\nTo lone lake that smiles,\nIn its dream of deep rest,\nAt the many star-isles\nThat enjewel its breast--\nWhere wild flowers, creeping,\nHave mingled their shade,\nOn its margin is sleeping\nFull many a maid--\nSome have left the cool glade, and\nHave slept with the bee--\nArouse them, my maiden,\nOn moorland and lea--\n\nGo! breathe on their slumber,\nAll softly in ear,\nThe musical number\nThey slumber’d to hear--\nFor what can awaken\nAn angel so soon\nWhose sleep hath been taken\nBeneath the cold moon,\nAs the spell which no slumber\nOf witchery may test,\nThe rhythmical number\nWhich lull’d him to rest?”\n\nSpirits in wing, and angels to the view,\nA thousand seraphs burst th’ Empyrean thro’,\nYoung dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight--\nSeraphs in all but “Knowledge,” the keen light\nThat fell, refracted, thro’ thy bounds afar,\nO death! from eye of God upon that star;\nSweet was that error--sweeter still that death--\nSweet was that error--ev’n with _us_ the breath\nOf Science dims the mirror of our joy--\nTo them ’twere the Simoom, and would destroy--\nFor what (to them) availeth it to know\nThat Truth is Falsehood--or that Bliss is Woe?\nSweet was their death--with them to die was rife\nWith the last ecstasy of satiate life--\nBeyond that death no immortality--\nBut sleep that pondereth and is not “to be”--\nAnd there--oh! may my weary spirit dwell--\nApart from Heaven’s Eternity--and yet how far from Hell!\n\nWhat guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim\nHeard not the stirring summons of that hymn?\nBut two: they fell: for heaven no grace imparts\nTo those who hear not for their beating hearts.\nA maiden-angel and her seraph-lover--\nO! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)\nWas Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?\nUnguided Love hath fallen--’mid “tears of perfect moan.”\n\nHe was a goodly spirit--he who fell:\nA wanderer by mossy-mantled well--\nA gazer on the lights that shine above--\nA dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:\nWhat wonder? for each star is eye-like there,\nAnd looks so sweetly down on Beauty’s hair--\nAnd they, and ev’ry mossy spring were holy\nTo his love-haunted heart and melancholy.\nThe night had found (to him a night of wo)\nUpon a mountain crag, young Angelo--\nBeetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,\nAnd scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.\nHere sate he with his love--his dark eye bent\nWith eagle gaze along the firmament:\nNow turn’d it upon her--but ever then \nIt trembled to the orb of EARTH again.\n\n“Ianthe, dearest, see! how dim that ray!\nHow lovely ’tis to look so far away!\nShe seemed not thus upon that autumn eve \nI left her gorgeous halls--nor mourned to leave,\nThat eve--that eve--I should remember well--\nThe sun-ray dropped, in Lemnos with a spell\nOn th’ Arabesque carving of a gilded hall\nWherein I sate, and on the draperied wall--\nAnd on my eyelids--O, the heavy light!\nHow drowsily it weighed them into night!\nOn flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran\nWith Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:\nBut O, that light!--I slumbered--Death, the while,\nStole o’er my senses in that lovely isle\nSo softly that no single silken hair\nAwoke that slept--or knew that he was there.”\n\n“The last spot of Earth’s orb I trod upon\nWas a proud temple called the Parthenon;\nMore beauty clung around her columned wall\nThen even thy glowing bosom beats withal,\nAnd when old Time my wing did disenthral\nThence sprang I--as the eagle from his tower,\nAnd years I left behind me in an hour.\nWhat time upon her airy bounds I hung,\nOne half the garden of her globe was flung\nUnrolling as a chart unto my view--\nTenantless cities of the desert too!\nIanthe, beauty crowded on me then,\nAnd half I wished to be again of men.”\n\n“My Angelo! and why of them to be?\nA brighter dwelling-place is here for thee--\nAnd greener fields than in yon world above,\nAnd woman’s loveliness--and passionate love.”\n“But list, Ianthe! when the air so soft\nFailed, as my pennoned spirit leapt aloft,\nPerhaps my brain grew dizzy--but the world \nI left so late was into chaos hurled,\nSprang from her station, on the winds apart,\nAnd rolled a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.\nMethought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar,\nAnd fell--not swiftly as I rose before,\nBut with a downward, tremulous motion thro’\nLight, brazen rays, this golden star unto!\nNor long the measure of my falling hours,\nFor nearest of all stars was thine to ours--\nDread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,\nA red Daedalion on the timid Earth.”\n\n“We came--and to thy Earth--but not to us\nBe given our lady’s bidding to discuss:\nWe came, my love; around, above, below,\nGay fire-fly of the night we come and go,\nNor ask a reason save the angel-nod\n_She_ grants to us as granted by her God--\nBut, Angelo, than thine gray Time unfurled\nNever his fairy wing o’er fairer world!\nDim was its little disk, and angel eyes\nAlone could see the phantom in the skies,\nWhen first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be\nHeadlong thitherward o’er the starry sea--\nBut when its glory swelled upon the sky,\nAs glowing Beauty’s bust beneath man’s eye,\nWe paused before the heritage of men,\nAnd thy star trembled--as doth Beauty then!”\n\nThus in discourse, the lovers whiled away\nThe night that waned and waned and brought no day.\nThey fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts\nWho hear not for the beating of their hearts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "From childhood’s hour I have not been\nAs others were--I have not seen\nAs others saw--I could not bring\nMy passions from a common spring--\nFrom the same source I have not taken\nMy sorrow--I could not awaken\nMy heart to joy at the same tone--\nAnd all I loved--_I_ loved alone--\n_Thou_--in my childhood--in the dawn\nOf a most stormy life--was drawn\nFrom every depth of good and ill\nThe mystery which binds me still--\nFrom the torrent, or the fountain--\nFrom the red cliff of the mountain--\nFrom the sun that round me roll’d\nIn its autumn tint of gold--\nFrom the lightning in the sky\nAs it passed me flying by--\nFrom the thunder and the storm--\nAnd the cloud that took the form\n(When the rest of Heaven was blue)\nOf a demon in my view.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1829, - "month": "march", - "day": 17 - }, - "location": "Baltimore", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "annabel-lee": { - "title": "“Annabel Lee”", - "body": "It was many and many a year ago,\nIn a kingdom by the sea,\nThat a maiden there lived whom you may know\nBy the name of ANNABEL LEE;\nAnd this maiden she lived with no other thought\nThan to love and be loved by me.\n\n_I_ was a child and _she_ was a child,\nIn this kingdom by the sea:\nBut we loved with a love that was more than love--\nI and my ANNABEL LEE;\nWith a love that the winged seraphs of heaven\nCoveted her and me.\n\nAnd this was the reason that, long ago,\nIn this kingdom by the sea,\nA wind blew out of a cloud, chilling\nMy beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\nSo that her highborn kinsmen came\nAnd bore her away from me,\nTo shut her up in a sepulchre\nIn this kingdom by the sea.\n\nThe angels, not half so happy in heaven,\nWent envying her and me--\nYes!--that was the reason (as all men know,\nIn this kingdom by the sea)\nThat the wind came out of the cloud by night,\nChilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.\n\nBut our love it was stronger by far than the love\nOf those who were older than we--\nOf many far wiser than we--\nAnd neither the angels in heaven above,\nNor the demons down under the sea,\nCan ever dissever my soul from the soul\nOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.\n\nFor the moon never beams without bringing me dreams\nOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\nAnd the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes\nOf the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\nAnd so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side\nOf my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,\nIn her sepulchre there by the sea--\nIn her tomb by the side of the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849 - } - } - }, - "the-bells": { - "title": "“The Bells”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHear the sledges with the bells--\nSilver bells!\nWhat a world of merriment their melody foretells!\nHow they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,\nIn their icy air of night!\nWhile the stars, that oversprinkle\nAll the heavens, seem to twinkle\nWith a crystalline delight;\nKeeping time, time, time,\nIn a sort of Runic rhyme,\nTo the tintinnabulation that so musically wells\nFrom the bells, bells, bells, bells,\nBells, bells, bells--\nFrom the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHear the mellow wedding bells,\nGolden bells!\nWhat a world of happiness their harmony foretells!\nThrough the balmy air of night\nHow they ring out their delight!\nFrom the molten golden-notes,\nAnd all in tune,\nWhat a liquid ditty floats\nTo the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats\nOn the moon!\nOh, from out the sounding cells,\nWhat a gush of euphony voluminously wells!\nHow it swells!\nHow it dwells\nOn the future! how it tells\nOf the rapture that impels\nTo the swinging and the ringing\nOf the bells, bells, bells,\nOf the bells, bells, bells, bells,\nBells, bells, bells--\nTo the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!\n\n\n# III.\n\nHear the loud alarum bells--\nBrazen bells!\nWhat a tale of terror now their turbulency tells!\nIn the startled ear of night\nHow they scream out their affright!\nToo much horrified to speak,\nThey can only shriek, shriek,\nOut of tune,\nIn a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,\nIn a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire\nLeaping higher, higher, higher,\nWith a desperate desire,\nAnd a resolute endeavor\nNow--now to sit or never,\nBy the side of the pale-faced moon.\nOh, the bells, bells, bells!\nWhat a tale their terror tells\nOf Despair!\nHow they clang, and clash, and roar!\nWhat a horror they outpour\nOn the bosom of the palpitating air!\nYet the ear it fully knows,\nBy the twanging,\nAnd the clanging,\nHow the danger ebbs and flows;\nYet the ear distinctly tells,\nIn the jangling,\nAnd the wrangling,\nHow the danger sinks and swells,\nBy the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells--\nOf the bells--\nOf the bells, bells, bells, bells,\nBells, bells, bells--\nIn the clamor and the clangor of the bells!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHear the tolling of the bells--\nIron bells!\nWhat a world of solemn thought their monody compels!\nIn the silence of the night,\nHow we shiver with affright\nAt the melancholy menace of their tone!\nFor every sound that floats\nFrom the rust within their throats\n Is a groan.\nAnd the people--ah, the people--\nThey that dwell up in the steeple.\n All alone,\nAnd who tolling, tolling, tolling,\nIn that muffled monotone,\nFeel a glory in so rolling\nOn the human heart a stone--\nThey are neither man nor woman--\nThey are neither brute nor human--\n They are Ghouls:\nAnd their king it is who tolls;\nAnd he rolls, rolls, rolls,\n Rolls\nA paean from the bells!\nAnd his merry bosom swells\nWith the paean of the bells!\nAnd he dances, and he yells;\nKeeping time, time, time,\nIn a sort of Runic rhyme,\nTo the paean of the bells--\n Of the bells:\nKeeping time, time, time,\nIn a sort of Runic rhyme,\nTo the throbbing of the bells--\nOf the bells, bells, bells--\nTo the sobbing of the bells;\nKeeping time, time, time,\nAs he knells, knells, knells,\nIn a happy Runic rhyme,\nTo the rolling of the bells--\nOf the bells, bells, bells--\nTo the tolling of the bells,\nOf the bells, bells, bells, bells,\nBells, bells, bells--\nTo the moaning and the groaning of the bells.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1848, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "bridal-ballad": { - "title": "“Bridal Ballad”", - "body": "The ring is on my hand,\nAnd the wreath is on my brow;\nSatins and jewels grand\nAre all at my command.\nAnd I am happy now.\n\nAnd my lord he loves me well;\nBut, when first he breathed his vow,\nI felt my bosom swell--\nFor the words rang as a knell,\nAnd the voice seemed _his_ who fell\nIn the battle down the dell,\nAnd who is happy now.\n\nBut he spoke to reassure me,\nAnd he kissed my pallid brow,\nWhile a reverie came o’er me,\nAnd to the churchyard bore me,\nAnd I sighed to him before me,\nThinking him dead D’Elormie,\n“Oh, I am happy now!”\n\nAnd thus the words were spoken,\nAnd thus the plighted vow,\nAnd, though my faith be broken,\nAnd, though my heart be broken,\nBehold the golden keys\nThat _proves_ me happy now!\n\nWould to God I could awaken\nFor I dream I know not how,\nAnd my soul is sorely shaken\nLest an evil step be taken,--\nLest the dead who is forsaken\nMay not be happy now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - }, - "the-city-in-the-sea": { - "title": "“The City in the Sea”", - "body": "Lo! Death has reared himself a throne \nIn a strange city lying alone\nFar down within the dim West,\nWhere the good and the bad and the worst and the best\nHave gone to their eternal rest.\nThere shrines and palaces and towers\n(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)\nResemble nothing that is ours.\nAround, by lifting winds forgot,\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\n\nNo rays from the holy Heaven come down\nOn the long night-time of that town;\nBut light from out the lurid sea\nStreams up the turrets silently--\nGleams up the pinnacles far and free--\nUp domes--up spires--up kingly halls--\nUp fanes--up Babylon-like walls--\nUp shadowy long-forgotten bowers\nOf sculptured ivy and stone flowers--\nUp many and many a marvellous shrine\nWhose wreathed friezes intertwine\nThe viol, the violet, and the vine.\n\nResignedly beneath the sky\nThe melancholy waters lie.\nSo blend the turrets and shadows there\nThat all seem pendulous in air,\nWhile from a proud tower in the town\nDeath looks gigantically down.\n\nThere open fanes and gaping graves\nYawn level with the luminous waves;\nBut not the riches there that lie \nIn each idol’s diamond eye--\nNot the gaily-jewelled dead\nTempt the waters from their bed;\nFor no ripples curl, alas!\nAlong that wilderness of glass--\nNo swellings tell that winds may be\nUpon some far-off happier sea--\nNo heavings hint that winds have been\nOn seas less hideously serene.\n\nBut lo, a stir is in the air!\nThe wave--there is a movement there!\nAs if the towers had thrust aside,\nIn slightly sinking, the dull tide--\nAs if their tops had feebly given\nA void within the filmy Heaven.\nThe waves have now a redder glow--\nThe hours are breathing faint and low--\nAnd when, amid no earthly moans,\nDown, down that town shall settle hence,\nHell, rising from a thousand thrones,\nShall do it reverence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "the-coliseum": { - "title": "“The Coliseum”", - "body": "Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary\nOf lofty contemplation left to Time\nBy buried centuries of pomp and power!\nAt length--at length--after so many days\nOf weary pilgrimage and burning thirst,\n(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie,)\nI kneel, an altered and an humble man,\nAmid thy shadows, and so drink within\nMy very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!\n\nVastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!\nSilence! and Desolation! and dim Night!\nI feel ye now--I feel ye in your strength--\nO spells more sure than e’er Judaean king\nTaught in the gardens of Gethsemane!\nO charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee\nEver drew down from out the quiet stars!\n\nHere, where a hero fell, a column falls!\nHere, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,\nA midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!\nHere, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair\nWaved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!\nHere, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,\nGlides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,\nLit by the wan light of the horned moon,\nThe swift and silent lizard of the stones!\n\nBut stay! these walls--these ivy-clad arcades--\nThese mouldering plinths--these sad and blackened shafts--\nThese vague entablatures--this crumbling frieze--\nThese shattered cornices--this wreck--this ruin--\nThese stones--alas! these gray stones--are they all--\nAll of the famed, and the colossal left\nBy the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?\n\n“Not all”--the Echoes answer me--“not all!\nProphetic sounds and loud, arise forever\nFrom us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise,\nAs melody from Memnon to the Sun.\nWe rule the hearts of mightiest men--we rule\nWith a despotic sway all giant minds.\nWe are not impotent--we pallid stones.\nNot all our power is gone--not all our fame--\nNot all the magic of our high renown--\nNot all the wonder that encircles us--\nNot all the mysteries that in us lie--\nNot all the memories that hang upon\nAnd cling around about us as a garment,\nClothing us in a robe of more than glory.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1838 - } - } - }, - "the-colloquy-of-monos-and-una": { - "title": "“The Colloquy of Monos and Una”", - "body": "_“These things are in the future.”_\n --Sophocles--_Antig._\n\n> _Una:_\n“Born again?”\n\n> _Monos:_\nYes, fairest and best beloved Una, “born again.” These were the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood, until Death itself resolved for me the secret.\n\n> _Una:_\nDeath!\n\n> _Monos:_\nHow strangely, sweet _Una_, you echo my words! I observe, too, a vacillation in your step, a joyous inquietude in your eyes. You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal.\nYes, it was of Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word which of old was wont to bring terror to all hearts, throwing a mildew upon all pleasures!\n\n> _Una:_\nAh, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss, saying unto it, “thus far, and no farther!” That earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which burned within our bosoms, how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling happy in its first upspringing that our happiness would strengthen with its strength! Alas, as it grew, so grew in our hearts the dread of that evil hour which was hurrying to separate us forever! Thus in time it became painful to love. Hate would have been mercy then.\n\n> _Monos:_\nSpeak not here of these griefs, dear Una--mine, mine forever now!\n\n> _Una:_\nBut the memory of past sorrow, is it not present joy? I have much to say yet of the things which have been. Above all, I burn to know the incidents of your own passage through the dark Valley and Shadow.\n\n> _Monos:_\nAnd when did the radiant Una ask anything of her Monos in vain? I will be minute in relating all, but at what point shall the weird narrative begin?\n\n> _Una:_\nAt what point?\n\n> _Monos:_\nYou have said.\n\n> _Una:_\nMonos, I comprehend you. In Death we have both learned the propensity of man to define the indefinable. I will not say, then, commence with the moment of life’s cessation--but commence with that sad, sad instant when, the fever having abandoned you, you sank into a breathless and motionless torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids with the passionate fingers of love.\n\n> _Monos:_\nOne word first, my Una, in regard to man’s general condition at this epoch. You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers--wise in fact, although not in the world’s esteem--had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term “improvement,” as applied to the progress of our civilization. There were periods in each of the five or six centuries immediately preceding our dissolution when arose some vigorous intellect, boldly contending for those principles whose truth appears now, to our disenfranchised reason, so utterly obvious--principles which should have taught our race to submit to the guidance of the natural laws rather than attempt their control. At long intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each advance in practical science as a retrogradation in the true utility. Occasionally the poetic intellect--that intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of all--since those truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that _analogy_ which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight--occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men--the poets--living and perishing amid the scorn of the “utilitarians”--of rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title which could have been properly applied only to the scorned--these men, the poets, pondered piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days when our wants were not more simple than our enjoyments were keen--days when _mirth_ was a word unknown, so solemnly deep-toned was happiness--holy, august, and blissful days, blue rivers ran undammed, between hills unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and unexplored. Yet these noble exceptions from the general misrule served but to strengthen it by opposition. Alas! we had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days. The great “movement”--that was the cant term--went on: a diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art--the Arts--arose supreme, and once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had elevated them to power. Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of Nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God--in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of _gradation_ so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven--wild attempts at an omniprevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil, Knowledge. Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the far-fetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our _taste_, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone--that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded--it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the which he justly regarded as an all-sufficient education for the soul! Alas for him and for it!--since both were most desperately needed, when both were most entirely forgotten or despised. Pascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly!--“_Que tout notre raisonnement se réduit à céder au sentiment;_” and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendency over the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing was not to be. Prematurely induced by intemperance of knowledge, the old age of the world drew near. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth’s records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In the history of these regions I met with a ray from the Future. The individual artificialities of the three latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied; but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be “_born again._”\nAnd now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our spirits, daily, in dreams. Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:--for man the Death-purged--for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more--for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the _material_, man.\n\n> _Una:_\nWell do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the epoch of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we believed, and as the corruption you indicate did surely warrant us in believing. Men lived; and died individually. You yourself sickened, and passed into the grave; and thither your constant Una speedily followed you. And though the century which has since elapsed, and whose conclusion brings up together once more, tortured our slumbering senses with no impatience of duration, yet my Monos, it was a century still.\n\n> _Monos:_\nSay, rather, a point in the vague infinity. Unquestionably, it was in the Earth’s dotage that I died. Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you--after some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor; and this was termed _Death_ by those who stood around me.\nWords are vague things. My condition did not deprive me of sentience. It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence of him, who, having slumbered long and profoundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in a mid-summer noon, begins to steal slowly back into consciousness, through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without being awakened by external disturbances.\nI breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses were unusually active, although eccentrically so--assuming often each other’s functions at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense. The rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of flowers--fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here blooming around us. The eye-lids, transparent and bloodless, offered no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance, the balls could not roll in their sockets--but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as _sound_--sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark in shade--curved or angular in outline. The hearing, at the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular in action--estimating real sounds with an extravagance of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted always in the highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only recognized through vision, at length, long after their removal, filled my whole being with a sensual delight immeasurable. I say with a sensual delight. _All_ my perceptions were purely sensual. The materials furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain or pleasure none at all. Thus your wild sobs floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences, and were appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth; while large and constant tears which fell upon my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone. And this was in truth the _Death_ of which these bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers--you, sweet Una, gaspingly, with loud cries.\nThey attired me for the coffin--three or four dark figures which flitted busily to and fro. As these crossed the direct line of my vision they affected me as _forms;_ but upon passing to my side their images impressed me with the idea of shrieks, groans, and, other dismal expressions of terror, of horror, or of woe. You alone, habited in a white robe, passed in all directions musically about.\nThe day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became possessed by a vague uneasiness--an anxiety such as the sleeper feels when sad real sounds fall continuously within his ear--low distant bell-tones, solemn, at long but equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams. Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous, which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought into the rooms, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound, but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous oppression was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing from the flame of each lamp (for there were many), there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone. And when now, dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched, you sat gently by my side, breathing odor from your sweet lips, and pressing them upon my brow, there arose tremulously within my bosom, and mingling with the merely physical sensations which circumstances had called forth, a something akin to sentiment itself--a feeling that, half appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and sorrow; but this feeling took no root in the pulseless heart, and seemed indeed rather a shadow than a reality, and faded quickly away, first into extreme quiescence, and then into a purely sensual pleasure as before.\nAnd now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain _that_ of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man’s abstract idea of _Time_. By the absolute equalization of this movement--or of such as this--had the cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviations from the true proportion--and these deviations were omniprevalent--affected me just as violations of abstract truth were wont on earth to affect the moral sense. Although no two of the timepieces in the chamber struck the individual seconds accurately together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the respective momentary errors of each. And this--this keen, perfect self-existing sentiment of _duration_--this sentiment existing (as man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of any succession of events--this idea--this sixth sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal eternity.\nIt was midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others had departed from the chamber of Death. They had deposited me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly; for this I knew by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains. But suddenly these strains diminished in distinctness and in volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my nostrils died away. Forms affected my vision no longer. The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull shot like that of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by total loss of the idea of contact. All of what man has termed sense was merged in the sole consciousness of entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of duration. The mortal body had been at length stricken with the hand of the deadly _Decay_.\nYet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic intuition. I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still dully felt that you sat by my side. So, too, when the noon of the second day came, I was not unconscious of those movements which displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mould upon me, and which thus left me, in blackness and corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with the worm.\nAnd here in the prison-house which has few secrets to disclose, there rolled away days and weeks and months; and the soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort, took record of its flight--without effort and without object.\nA year passed. The consciousness of _being_ had grown hourly more indistinct, and that of mere _locality_ had in great measure usurped its position. The idea of entity was becoming merged in that of _place_. The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been the body was now growing to be the body itself. At length, as often happens to the sleeper (by sleep and its world alone is _Death_ imaged)--at length, as sometimes happened on Earth to the deep slumberer, when some flitting light half startled him into awaking, yet left him half enveloped in dreams--so to me, in the strict embrace of the _Shadow_, came _that_ light which alone might have had power to startle--the light of enduring _Love_. Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp earth. Upon my mouldering bones there descended the coffin of Una. And now again all was void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many _lustra_ had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being had at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead--instead of all things, dominant and perpetual--the autocrats _Place_ and _Time._ For _that_ which _was not_--for that which had no form--for that which had no thought--for that which had no sentience--for that which was soundless, yet of which matter formed no portion--for all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1841, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-conqueror-worm": { - "title": "“The Conqueror Worm”", - "body": "Lo! ’tis a gala night\nWithin the lonesome latter years!\nAn angel throng, bewinged, bedight\nIn veils, and drowned in tears,\nSit in a theatre, to see\nA play of hopes and fears,\nWhile the orchestra breathes fitfully\nThe music of the spheres.\n\nMimes, in the form of God on high,\nMutter and mumble low,\nAnd hither and thither fly--\nMere puppets they, who come and go\nAt bidding of vast formless things\nThat shift the scenery to and fro,\nFlapping from out their Condor wings\nInvisible Wo!\n\nThat motley drama--oh, be sure\nIt shall not be forgot!\nWith its Phantom chased for evermore,\nBy a crowd that seize it not,\nThrough a circle that ever returneth in\nTo the self-same spot,\nAnd much of Madness, and more of Sin,\nAnd Horror the soul of the plot.\n\nBut see, amid the mimic rout\nA crawling shape intrude!\nA blood-red thing that writhes from out\nThe scenic solitude!\nIt writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs\nThe mimes become its food,\nAnd the angels sob at vermin fangs\nIn human gore imbued.\n\nOut--out are the lights--out all!\nAnd, over each quivering form,\nThe curtain, a funeral pall,\nComes down with the rush of a storm,\nAnd the angels, all pallid and wan,\nUprising, unveiling, affirm\nThat the play is the tragedy, “Man,”\nAnd its hero the Conqueror Worm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "the-conversation-of-eiros-and-charmion": { - "title": "“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”", - "body": "_“I will bring fire to thee.”_\n --Euripides--_Androm._\n\n> _Eiros:_\nWhy do you call me Eiros?\n\n> _Charmion:_\nSo henceforward will you always be called. You must forget, too, _my_ earthly name, and speak to me as Charmion.\n\n> _Eiros:_\nThis is indeed no dream!\n\n> _Charmion:_\nDreams are with us no more;--but of these mysteries anon. I rejoice to see you looking life-like and rational. The film of the shadow has already passed from off your eyes. Be of heart, and fear nothing. Your allotted days of stupor have expired, and to-morrow I will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.\n\n> _Eiros:_\nTrue--I feel no stupor--none at all. The wild sickness and the terrible darkness have left me, and I hear no longer that mad, rushing, horrible sound, like the “voice of many waters.” Yet my senses are bewildered, Charmion, with the keenness of their perception of _the new_.\n\n> _Charmion:_\nA few days will remove all this;--but I fully understand you, and feel for you. It is now ten earthly years since I underwent what you undergo--yet the remembrance of it hangs by me still. You have now suffered all of pain, however, which you will suffer in Aidenn.\n\n> _Eiros:_\nIn Aidenn?\n\n> _Charmion:_\nIn Aidenn.\n\n> _Eiros:_\nO God!--pity me, Charmion!--I am overburthened with the majesty of all things--of the unknown now known--of the speculative Future merged in the august and certain Present.\n\n> _Charmion:_\nGrapple not now with such thoughts. To-morrow we will speak of this. Your mind wavers, and its agitation will find relief in the exercise of simple memories. Look not around, nor forward--but back. I am burning with anxiety to hear the details of that stupendous event which threw you among us. Tell me of it. Let us converse of familiar things, in the old familiar language of the world which has so fearfully perished.\n\n> _Eiros:_\nMost fearfully, fearfully!--this is indeed no dream.\n\n> _Charmion:_\nDreams are no more. Was I much mourned, my Eiros?\n\n> _Eiros:_\nMourned, Charmion?--oh, deeply. To that last hour of all there hung a cloud of intense gloom and devout sorrow over your household.\n\n> _Charmion:_\nAnd that last hour--speak of it. Remember that, beyond the naked fact of the catastrophe itself, I know nothing. When, coming out from among mankind, I passed into Night through the Grave--at that period, if I remember aright, the calamity which overwhelmed you was utterly unanticipated. But, indeed, I knew little of the speculative philosophy of the day.\n\n_Eiros_. The individual calamity was, as you say, entirely unanticipated; but analogous misfortunes had been long a subject of discussion with astronomers. I need scarce tell you, my friend, that, even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire as having reference to the orb of the earth alone, But in regard to the immediate agency of the ruin, speculation had been at fault from that epoch in astronomical knowledge in which the comets were divested of the terrors of flame. The very moderate density of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among _them_ we should look for the agency of the threatened fiery destruction had been for many years considered an inadmissible idea. But wonders and wild fancies had been of late days strangely rife among mankind; and, although it was only with a few of the ignorant that actual apprehension prevailed, upon the announcement by astronomers of a _new_ comet, yet this announcement was generally received with I know not what of agitation and mistrust.\nThe elements of the strange orb were immediately calculated, and it was at once conceded by all observers that its path, at perihelion would bring it into very close proximity with the earth. There were two or three astronomers of secondary note who resolutely maintained that a contact was inevitable. I cannot very well express to you the effect of this intelligence upon the people. For a few short days they would not believe an assertion which their intellect, so long employed among worldly considerations, could not in any manner grasp. But the truth of a vitally important fact soon makes its way into the understanding of even the most stolid. Finally, all men saw that astronomical knowledge lies not, and they awaited the comet. Its approach was not at first seemingly rapid, nor was its appearance of very unusual character. It was of a dull red, and had little perceptible train. For seven or eight days we saw no material increase in its apparent diameter, and but a partial alteration in its color. Meantime, the ordinary affairs of men were discarded, and all interest absorbed in a growing discussion instituted by the philosophic in respect to the cometary nature. Even the grossly ignorant aroused their sluggish capacities to such considerations. The learned _now_ gave their intellect--their soul--to no such points as the allaying of fear, or to the sustenance of loved theory. They sought--they panted for right views. They groaned for perfected knowledge. _Truth_ arose in the purity of her strength and exceeding majesty, and the wise bowed down and adored.\nThat material injury to our globe or to its inhabitants would result from the apprehended contact was an opinion which hourly lost ground among the wise; and the wise were now freely permitted to rule the reason and the fancy of the crowd. It was demonstrated that the density of the comet’s _nucleus_ was far less than that of our rarest gas; and the harmless passage of a similar visitor among the satellites of Jupiter was a point strongly insisted upon, and which served greatly to allay terror. Theologists, with an earnestness fear-enkindled, dwelt upon the biblical prophecies, and expounded them to the people with a directness and simplicity of which no previous instance had been known. That the final destruction of the earth must be brought about by the agency of fire, was urged with a spirit that enforced everywhere conviction; and that the comets were of no fiery nature (as all men now knew) was a truth which relieved all, in a great measure, from the apprehension of the great calamity foretold. It is noticeable that the popular prejudices and vulgar errors in regard to pestilences and wars--errors which were wont to prevail upon every appearance of a comet--were now altogether unknown, as if by some sudden convulsive exertion reason had at once hurled superstition from her throne. The feeblest intellect had derived vigor from excessive interest.\nWhat minor evils might arise from the contact were points of elaborate question. The learned spoke of slight geological disturbances, of probable alterations in climate, and consequently in vegetation; of possible magnetic and electric influences. Many held that no visible or perceptible effect would in any manner be produced. While such discussions were going on, their subject gradually approached, growing larger in apparent diameter, and of a more brilliant lustre. Mankind grew paler as it came. All human operations were suspended.\nThere was an epoch in the course of the general sentiment when the comet had attained, at length, a size surpassing that of any previously recorded visitation. The people now, dismissing any lingering hope that the astronomers were wrong, experienced all the certainty of evil. The chimerical aspect of their terror was gone. The hearts of the stoutest of our race beat violently within their bosoms. A very few days suffered, however, to merge even such feelings in sentiments more unendurable. We could no longer apply to the strange orb any _accustomed_ thoughts. Its _historical_ attributes had disappeared. It oppressed us with a hideous _novelty_ of emotion. We saw it not as an astronomical phenomenon in the heavens, but as an incubus upon our hearts and a shadow upon our brains. It had taken, with unconceivable rapidity, the character of a gigantic mantle of rare flame, extending from horizon to horizon.\nYet a day, and men breathed with greater freedom. It was clear that we were already within the influence of the comet; yet we lived. We even felt an unusual elasticity of frame and vivacity of mind. The exceeding tenuity of the object of our dread was apparent; for all heavenly objects were plainly visible through it. Meantime, our vegetation had perceptibly altered; and we gained faith, from this predicted circumstance, in the foresight of the wise. A wild luxuriance of foliage, utterly unknown before, burst out upon every vegetable thing.\nYet another day--and the evil was not altogether upon us. It was now evident that its nucleus would first reach us. A wild change had come over all men; and the first sense of _pain_ was the wild signal for general lamentation and horror. The first sense of pain lay in a rigorous construction of the breast and lungs, and an insufferable dryness of the skin. It could not be denied that our atmosphere was radically affected; the conformation of this atmosphere and the possible modifications to which it might be subjected, were now the topics of discussion. The result of investigation sent an electric thrill of the intensest terror through the universal heart of man.\nIt had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen and seventy-nine of nitrogen in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a _total extraction of the nitrogen_? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate;--the entire fulfilment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.\nWhy need I paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of Fate. Meantime a day again passed--bearing away with it the last shadow of Hope. We gasped in the rapid modification of the air. The red blood bounded tumultuously through its strict channels. A furious delirium possessed all men; and with arms rigidly outstretched towards the threatening heavens, they trembled and shrieked aloud. But the nucleus of the destroyer was now upon us;--even here in Aidenn I shudder while I speak. Let me be brief--brief as the ruin that overwhelmed. For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then--let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God!--then, there came a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1839, - "month": "december" - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "a-dream-within-a-dream": { - "title": "“A Dream within a Dream”", - "body": "Take this kiss upon the brow!\nAnd, in parting from you now,\nThus much let me avow--\nYou are not wrong, who deem\nThat my days have been a dream:\nYet if hope has flown away \nIn a night, or in a day,\nIn a vision or in none,\nIs it therefore the less _gone_?\n_All_ that we see or seem \nIs but a dream within a dream.\n\nI stand amid the roar\nOf a surf-tormented shore,\nAnd I hold within my hand\nGrains of the golden sand--\nHow few! yet how they creep\nThrough my fingers to the deep\nWhile I weep--while I weep!\nO God! can I not grasp\nThem with a tighter clasp?\nO God! can I not save\n_One_ from the pitiless wave?\nIs _all_ that we see or seem\nBut a dream within a dream?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849, - "month": "march", - "day": 31 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "dream-land": { - "title": "“Dream-land”", - "body": "By a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only,\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have reached these lands but newly\nFrom an ultimate dim Thule--\nFrom a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,\nOut of SPACE--out of TIME.\n\nBottomless vales and boundless floods,\nAnd chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,\nWith forms that no man can discover\nFor the dews that drip all over;\nMountains toppling evermore \nInto seas without a shore;\nSeas that restlessly aspire,\nSurging, unto skies of fire;\nLakes that endlessly outspread\nTheir lone waters--lone and dead,\nTheir still waters--still and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily.\n\nBy the lakes that thus outspread\nTheir lone waters, lone and dead,--\nTheir sad waters, sad and chilly\nWith the snows of the lolling lily,--\n\nBy the mountains--near the river\nMurmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--\nBy the gray woods,--by the swamp\nWhere the toad and the newt encamp,--\nBy the dismal tarns and pools\nWhere dwell the Ghouls,--\nBy each spot the most unholy--\nIn each nook most melancholy,--\n\nThere the traveller meets aghast\nSheeted Memories of the past--\nShrouded forms that start and sigh\nAs they pass the wanderer by--\nWhite-robed forms of friends long given,\nIn agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.\n\nFor the heart whose woes are legion\n’Tis a peaceful, soothing region--\nFor the spirit that walks in shadow\n’Tis--oh, ’tis an Eldorado!\nBut the traveller, travelling through it,\nMay not--dare not openly view it;\nNever its mysteries are exposed\nTo the weak human eye unclosed;\nSo wills its King, who hath forbid\nThe uplifting of the fringed lid;\nAnd thus the sad Soul that here passes\nBeholds it but through darkened glasses.\n\nBy a route obscure and lonely,\nHaunted by ill angels only.\n\nWhere an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\nOn a black throne reigns upright,\nI have wandered home but newly\nFrom this ultimate dim Thule.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1844 - } - } - }, - "dreams": { - "title": "“Dreams”", - "body": "Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!\nMy spirit not awakening, till the beam\nOf an Eternity should bring the morrow.\nYes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,\n’Twere better than the cold reality\nOf waking life, to him whose heart must be,\nAnd hath been still, upon the lovely earth,\nA chaos of deep passion, from his birth.\nBut should it be--that dream eternally\nContinuing--as dreams have been to me \nIn my young boyhood--should it thus be given,\n’Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.\nFor I have revelled when the sun was bright \nI’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light\nAnd loveliness,--have left my very heart \nInclines of my imaginary apart\nFrom mine own home, with beings that have been\nOf mine own thought--what more could I have seen?\n’Twas once--and only once--and the wild hour\nFrom my remembrance shall not pass--some power\nOr spell had bound me--’twas the chilly wind\nCame o’er me in the night, and left behind \nIts image on my spirit--or the moon\nShone on my slumbers in her lofty noon\nToo coldly--or the stars--howe’er it was\nThat dream was that that night-wind--let it pass.\n_I have been_ happy, though in a dream.\nI have been happy--and I love the theme:\nDreams! in their vivid coloring of life\nAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife\nOf semblance with reality which brings\nTo the delirious eye, more lovely things\nOf Paradise and Love--and all my own!--\nThan young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-dream": { - "title": "“A Dream”", - "body": "In visions of the dark night\nI have dreamed of joy departed--\nBut a waking dream of life and light\nHath left me broken-hearted.\n\nAh! what is not a dream by day\nTo him whose eyes are cast\nOn things around him with a ray\nTurned back upon the past?\n\nThat holy dream--that holy dream,\nWhile all the world were chiding,\nHath cheered me as a lovely beam,\nA lonely spirit guiding.\n\nWhat though that light, thro’ storm and night,\nSo trembled from afar--\nWhat could there be more purely bright\nIn Truth’s day star?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849, - "month": "march", - "day": 31 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "eldorado": { - "title": "“Eldorado”", - "body": "Gaily bedight,\nA gallant knight,\nIn sunshine and in shadow,\nHad journeyed long,\nSinging a song,\nIn search of Eldorado.\nBut he grew old--\nThis knight so bold--\nAnd o’er his heart a shadow\nFell as he found\nNo spot of ground\nThat looked like Eldorado.\n\nAnd, as his strength\nFailed him at length,\nHe met a pilgrim shadow--\n“Shadow,” said he,\n“Where can it be--\nThis land of Eldorado?”\n\n“Over the Mountains\nOf the Moon,\nDown the Valley of the Shadow,\nRide, boldly ride,”\nThe shade replied,\n“If you seek for Eldorado!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "eulalie": { - "title": "“Eulalie”", - "body": " I dwelt alone\n In a world of moan,\n And my soul was a stagnant tide,\nTill the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride--\nTill the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.\n Ah, less--less bright\n The stars of the night\n Than the eyes of the radiant girl!\n And never a flake\n That the vapor can make\n With the moon-tints of purple and pearl,\nCan vie with the modest Eulalie’s most unregarded curl--\nCan compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie’s most humble and careless curl.\n Now Doubt--now Pain\n Come never again,\n For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,\n And all day long\n Shines, bright and strong,\n Astarté within the sky,\nWhile ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye--\nWhile ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "evening-star": { - "title": "“Evening Star”", - "body": "’Twas noontide of summer,\nAnd midtime of night,\nAnd stars, in their orbits,\nShone pale, through the light\nOf the brighter, cold moon.\n’Mid planets her slaves,\nHerself in the Heavens,\nHer beam on the waves.\n\nI gazed awhile\nOn her cold smile;\nToo cold--too cold for me--\nThere passed, as a shroud,\nA fleecy cloud,\nAnd I turned away to thee,\nProud Evening Star,\nIn thy glory afar\nAnd dearer thy beam shall be;\nFor joy to my heart\nIs the proud part\nThou bearest in Heaven at night,\nAnd more I admire\nThy distant fire,\nThan that colder, lowly light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "fairy-land": { - "title": "“Fairy-land”", - "body": "Dim vales--and shadowy floods--\nAnd cloudy-looking woods,\nWhose forms we can’t discover\nFor the tears that drip all over\nHuge moons there wax and wane--\nAgain--again--again--\nEvery moment of the night--\nForever changing places--\nAnd they put out the star-light\nWith the breath from their pale faces.\nAbout twelve by the moon-dial\nOne more filmy than the rest\n(A kind which, upon trial,\nThey have found to be the best)\nComes down--still down--and down\nWith its centre on the crown\nOf a mountain’s eminence,\nWhile its wide circumference \nIn easy drapery falls\nOver hamlets, over halls,\nWherever they may be--\nO’er the strange woods--o’er the sea--\nOver spirits on the wing--\nOver every drowsy thing--\nAnd buries them up quite \nIn a labyrinth of light--\nAnd then, how deep!--O, deep!\nIs the passion of their sleep.\nIn the morning they arise,\nAnd their moony covering \nIs soaring in the skies,\nWith the tempests as they toss,\nLike--almost any thing--\nOr a yellow Albatross.\nThey use that moon no more\nFor the same end as before--\nVidelicet a tent--\nWhich I think extravagant:\nIts atomies, however,\nInto a shower dissever,\nOf which those butterflies,\nOf Earth, who seek the skies,\nAnd so come down again\n(Never-contented thing!)\nHave brought a specimen\nUpon their quivering wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "for-annie": { - "title": "“For Annie”", - "body": "Thank Heaven! the crisis--\nThe danger is past,\nAnd the lingering illness\nIs over at last--\nAnd the fever called “Living”\nIs conquered at last.\n\nSadly, I know,\nI am shorn of my strength,\nAnd no muscle I move\nAs I lie at full length--\nBut no matter!--I feel\nI am better at length.\n\nAnd I rest so composedly,\nNow in my bed,\nThat any beholder\nMight fancy me dead--\nMight start at beholding me\nThinking me dead.\n\nThe moaning and groaning,\nThe sighing and sobbing,\nAre quieted now,\nWith that horrible throbbing\nAt heart:--ah, that horrible,\nHorrible throbbing!\n\nThe sickness--the nausea--\nThe pitiless pain--\nHave ceased, with the fever\nThat maddened my brain--\nWith the fever called “Living”\nThat burned in my brain.\n\nAnd oh! of all tortures\n_That_ torture the worst\nHas abated--the terrible\nTorture of thirst,\nFor the naphthaline river\nOf Passion accurst:--\nI have drank of a water\nThat quenches all thirst:--\n\nOf a water that flows,\nWith a lullaby sound,\nFrom a spring but a very few\nFeet under ground--\nFrom a cavern not very far\nDown under ground.\n\nAnd ah! let it never\nBe foolishly said\nThat my room it is gloomy\nAnd narrow my bed--\nFor man never slept\nIn a different bed;\nAnd, to _sleep_, you must slumber\nIn just such a bed.\n\nMy tantalized spirit\nHere blandly reposes,\nForgetting, or never\nRegretting its roses--\nIts old agitations\nOf myrtles and roses:\n\nFor now, while so quietly\nLying, it fancies\nA holier odor\nAbout it, of pansies--\nA rosemary odor,\nCommingled with pansies--\nWith rue and the beautiful\nPuritan pansies.\n\nAnd so it lies happily,\nBathing in many\nA dream of the truth\nAnd the beauty of Annie--\nDrowned in a bath\nOf the tresses of Annie.\n\nShe tenderly kissed me,\nShe fondly caressed,\nAnd then I fell gently\nTo sleep on her breast--\nDeeply to sleep\nFrom the heaven of her breast.\n\nWhen the light was extinguished,\nShe covered me warm,\nAnd she prayed to the angels\nTo keep me from harm--\nTo the queen of the angels\nTo shield me from harm.\n\nAnd I lie so composedly,\nNow in my bed\n(Knowing her love)\nThat you fancy me dead--\nAnd I rest so contentedly,\nNow in my bed,\n(With her love at my breast)\nThat you fancy me dead--\nThat you shudder to look at me.\nThinking me dead.\n\nBut my heart it is brighter\nThan all of the many\nStars in the sky,\nFor it sparkles with Annie--\nIt glows with the light\nOf the love of my Annie--\nWith the thought of the light\nOf the eyes of my Annie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849 - } - } - }, - "the-forest-reverie": { - "title": "“The Forest Reverie”", - "body": " ’Tis said that when\n The hands of men\nTamed this primeval wood,\nAnd hoary trees with groans of wo,\nLike warriors by an unknown foe,\nWere in their strength subdued,\n The virgin Earth\n Gave instant birth\nTo springs that ne’er did flow--\n That in the sun\n Did rivulets run,\nAnd all around rare flowers did blow--\n The wild rose pale\n Perfumed the gale,\nAnd the queenly lily adown the dale\n (Whom the sun and the dew\n And the winds did woo),\nWith the gourd and the grape luxuriant grew.\n\n So when in tears\n The love of years\nIs wasted like the snow,\nAnd the fine fibrils of its life\nBy the rude wrong of instant strife\nAre broken at a blow--\n Within the heart\n Do springs upstart\nOf which it doth now know,\n And strange, sweet dreams,\n Like silent streams\nThat from new fountains overflow,\n With the earlier tide\n Of rivers glide\nDeep in the heart whose hope has died--\nQuenching the fires its ashes hide,--\nIts ashes, whence will spring and grow\n Sweet flowers, ere long,--\nThe rare and radiant flowers of song!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-happiest-day": { - "title": "“The Happiest Day”", - "body": "The happiest day--the happiest hour\nMy seared and blighted heart hath known,\nThe highest hope of pride and power,\nI feel hath flown.\n\nOf power! said I? Yes! such I ween\nBut they have vanished long, alas!\nThe visions of my youth have been--\nBut let them pass.\n\nAnd pride, what have I now with thee?\nAnother brow may ev’n inherit\nThe venom thou hast poured on me--\nBe still my spirit!\n\nThe happiest day--the happiest hour\nMine eyes shall see--have ever seen\nThe brightest glance of pride and power\nI feel have been:\n\nBut were that hope of pride and power\nNow offered with the pain\nEv’n _then_ I felt--that brightest hour\nI would not live again:\n\nFor on its wing was dark alloy\nAnd as it fluttered--fell\nAn essence--powerful to destroy\nA soul that knew it well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - } - } - }, - "the-haunted-palace": { - "title": "“The Haunted Palace”", - "body": "In the greenest of our valleys\nBy good angels tenanted,\nOnce a fair and stately palace--\nRadiant palace--reared its head.\nIn the monarch Thought’s dominion--\nIt stood there!\nNever seraph spread a pinion\nOver fabric half so fair!\n\nBanners yellow, glorious, golden,\nOn its roof did float and flow,\n(This--all this--was in the olden\nTime long ago),\nAnd every gentle air that dallied,\nIn that sweet day,\nAlong the ramparts plumed and pallid,\nA winged odor went away.\n\nWanderers in that happy valley,\nThrough two luminous windows, saw\nSpirits moving musically,\nTo a lute’s well-tunëd law,\nBound about a throne where, sitting\n(Porphyrogene!)\nIn state his glory well befitting,\nThe ruler of the realm was seen.\n\nAnd all with pearl and ruby glowing\nWas the fair palace door,\nThrough which came flowing, flowing, flowing,\nAnd sparkling evermore,\nA troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty\nWas but to sing,\nIn voices of surpassing beauty,\nThe wit and wisdom of their king.\n\nBut evil things, in robes of sorrow,\nAssailed the monarch’s high estate.\n(Ah, let us mourn!--for never morrow\nShall dawn upon him desolate!)\nAnd round about his home the glory\nThat blushed and bloomed,\nIs but a dim-remembered story\nOf the old time entombed.\n\nAnd travellers, now, within that valley,\nThrough the red-litten windows see\nVast forms, that move fantastically\nTo a discordant melody,\nWhile, like a ghastly rapid river,\nThrough the pale door\nA hideous throng rush out forever\nAnd laugh--but smile no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1839, - "month": "april" - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "helen-thy-beauty-is-to-me": { - "title": "“Helen, thy beauty is to me …”", - "body": "Helen, thy beauty is to me\nLike those Nicean barks of yore,\nThat gently, o’er a perfumed sea,\nThe weary, wayworn wanderer bore\nTo his own native shore.\n\nOn desperate seas long wont to roam,\nThy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,\nThy Naiad airs have brought me home\nTo the glory that was Greece,\nTo the grandeur that was Rome.\n\nLo! in yon brilliant window niche,\nHow statue-like I see thee stand,\nThe agate lamp within thy hand!\nAh, Psyche, from the regions which\nAre Holy Land!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "hymn-to-aristogeiton-and-harmodius": { - "title": "“Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius”", - "body": "Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I’ll conceal,\nLike those champions devoted and brave,\nWhen they plunged in the tyrant their steel,\nAnd to Athens deliverance gave.\n\nBeloved heroes! your deathless souls roam\nIn the joy breathing isles of the blest;\nWhere the mighty of old have their home--\nWhere Achilles and Diomed rest.\n\nIn fresh myrtle my blade I’ll entwine,\nLike Harmodius, the gallant and good,\nWhen he made at the tutelar shrine\nA libation of Tyranny’s blood.\n\nYe deliverers of Athens from shame!\nYe avengers of Liberty’s wrongs!\nEndless ages shall cherish your fame,\nEmbalmed in their echoing songs!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hymn": { - "title": "“Hymn”", - "body": "At morn--at noon--at twilight dim--\nMaria! thou hast heard my hymn!\nIn joy and woe--in good and ill--\nMother of God, be with me still!\nWhen the Hours flew brightly by,\nAnd not a cloud obscured the sky,\nMy soul, lest it should truant be,\nThy grace did guide to thine and thee\nNow, when storms of Fate o’ercast\nDarkly my Present and my Past,\nLet my future radiant shine\nWith sweet hopes of thee and thine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "i-heed-not-that-my-earthly-lot": { - "title": "“I heed not that my earthly lot …”", - "body": "I heed not that my earthly lot\nHath--little of Earth in it--\nThat years of love have been forgot\nIn the hatred of a minute:--\nI mourn not that the desolate\nAre happier, sweet, than I,\nBut that _you_ sorrow for _my_ fate\nWho am a passer-by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - } - } - }, - "imitation": { - "title": "“Imitation”", - "body": "A dark unfathomed tide\nOf interminable pride--\nA mystery, and a dream,\nShould my early life seem;\nI say that dream was fraught\nWith a wild and waking thought\nOf beings that have been,\nWhich my spirit hath not seen,\nHad I let them pass me by,\nWith a dreaming eye!\nLet none of earth inherit\nThat vision on my spirit;\nThose thoughts I would control,\nAs a spell upon his soul:\nFor that bright hope at last\nAnd that light time have past,\nAnd my wordly rest hath gone\nWith a sigh as it passed on:\nI care not though it perish\nWith a thought I then did cherish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - } - } - }, - "in-youth-i-have-known-one": { - "title": "“In Youth I Have Known One”", - "body": "_How often we forget all time, when lone\nAdmiring Nature’s universal throne;\nHer woods--her wilds--her mountains--the intense\nReply of Hers to Our intelligence!_\n\nIn youth I have known one with whom the Earth\nIn secret communing held--as he with it,\nIn daylight, and in beauty, from his birth:\nWhose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit\nFrom the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth\nA passionate light such for his spirit was fit--\nAnd yet that spirit knew--not in the hour\nOf its own fervor--what had o’er it power.\n\nPerhaps it may be that my mind is wrought\nTo a ferver by the moonbeam that hangs o’er,\nBut I will half believe that wild light fraught\nWith more of sovereignty than ancient lore\nHath ever told--or is it of a thought\nThe unembodied essence, and no more\nThat with a quickening spell doth o’er us pass\nAs dew of the night-time, o’er the summer grass?\n\nDoth o’er us pass, when, as th’ expanding eye\nTo the loved object--so the tear to the lid\nWill start, which lately slept in apathy?\nAnd yet it need not be--(that object) hid\nFrom us in life--but common--which doth lie\nEach hour before us--but then only bid\nWith a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken\nT’ awake us--’Tis a symbol and a token--\n\nOf what in other worlds shall be--and given\nIn beauty by our God, to those alone\nWho otherwise would fall from life and Heaven\nDrawn by their heart’s passion, and that tone,\nThat high tone of the spirit which hath striven\nThough not with Faith--with godliness--whose throne\nWith desperate energy ’t hath beaten down;\nWearing its own deep feeling as a crown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-island-of-the-fay": { - "title": "“The Island of the Fay”", - "body": "_“Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”_\n --Servius.\n\n“_La musique_,” says Marmontel, in those ‘Contes Moraux’ which in all our translations we have insisted upon calling ‘Moral Tales,’ as if in mockery of their spirit--“_la musique est le seul des talens qui jouisse de lui-meme: tous les autres veulent des temoins_.” He here confounds the pleasure derivable from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more than any other _talent_, is that for music susceptible of complete enjoyment where there is no second party to appreciate its exercise; and it is only in common with other talents that it produces _effects_ which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the _raconteur_ has either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its expression to his national love of _point_, is doubtless the very tenable one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition in this form will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach of fallen mortality, and perhaps only one, which owes even more than does music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold that glory. To me at least the presence, not of human life only, but of life, in any other form than that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are voiceless, is a stain upon the landscape, is at war with the genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,--I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole--a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the _animalculae_ which infest the brain, a being which we in consequence regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these _animalculae_ must thus regard us.\n\nOur telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately such as within a given surface to include the greatest possible amount of matter; while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle--indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the _leading_ principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within cycle without end, yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring through self-esteem in believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul, for no more profound reason than that he does not behold it in operation.\n\nThese fancies, and such as these, have always given to my meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers and the ocean, a tinge of what the every-day world would not fail to term the fantastic. My wanderings amid such scenes have been many and far-searching, and often solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many a dim deep valley, or gazed into the reflected heaven of many a bright lake, has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed and gazed _alone._ What flippant Frenchman was it who said, in allusion to the well known work of Zimmermann, that _“la solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose”_? The epigram cannot be gainsaid; but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.\n\nIt was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarns writhing or sleeping within all, that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon it, such was the character of phantasm which it wore.\n\nOn all sides, save to the west where the sun was about sinking, arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little river which turned sharply in its course, and was thus immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east; while in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly and continuously into the valley a rich golden and crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains of the sky.\n\nAbout midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in, one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon the bosom of the stream. So blended bank and shadow there, that each seemed pendulous in air--so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely possible to say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf its crystal dominion began. My position enabled me to include in a single view both the eastern and western extremities of the islet, and I observed a singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was all one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the eye of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, erect, bright, slender, and graceful, of eastern figure and foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all, and although no airs blew from out the heavens, yet everything had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.\n\nThe other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom, here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color and mournful in form and attitude--wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes, that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not, although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shades of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream, while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.\n\nThis idea having once seized upon my fancy greatly excited it, and I lost myself forthwith in reverie. “If ever island were enchanted,” said I to myself, “this is it. This is the haunt of the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of the race. Are these green tombs theirs?--or do they yield up their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering unto God little by little their existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the death which engulfs it?”\n\nAs I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly to rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the island, bearing upon their bosom large dazzling white flakes of the bark of the sycamore, flakes which, in their multiform positions upon the water, a quick imagination might have converted into anything it pleased; while I thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering, made its way slowly into the darkness from out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude seemed indicative of joy, but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. “The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,” continued I musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year nearer unto death: for I did not fail to see that as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its blackness more black.”\n\nAnd again the boat appeared and the Fay, but about the attitude of the latter there was more of care and uncertainty and less of elastic joy. She floated again from out the light and into the gloom (which deepened momently), and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony water, and became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she made the circuit of the island (while the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and at each issuing into the light there was more sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler and far fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length, when the sun had utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for darkness fell over all things, and I beheld her magical figure no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1841, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "israfel": { - "title": "“Israfel”", - "body": "_“And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.”_\n --Koran\n\nIn Heaven a spirit doth dwell\n“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”\nNone sing so wildly well\nAs the angel Israfel,\nAnd the giddy Stars (so legends tell),\nCeasing their hymns, attend the spell\nOf his voice, all mute.\n\nTottering above\nIn her highest noon,\nThe enamoured Moon\nBlushes with love,\nWhile, to listen, the red levin\n(With the rapid Pleiads, even,\nWhich were seven),\nPauses in Heaven.\n\nAnd they say (the starry choir\nAnd the other listening things)\nThat Israfeli’s fire \nIs owing to that lyre\nBy which he sits and sings--\nThe trembling living wire\nOf those unusual strings.\n\nBut the skies that angel trod,\nWhere deep thoughts are a duty--\nWhere Love’s a grow-up God--\nWhere the Houri glances are \nImbued with all the beauty\nWhich we worship in a star.\n\nTherefore, thou art not wrong,\nIsrafeli, who despisest\nAn unimpassioned song;\nTo thee the laurels belong,\nBest bard, because the wisest!\nMerrily live and long!\n\nThe ecstasies above\nWith thy burning measures suit--\nThy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,\nWith the fervor of thy lute--\nWell may the stars be mute!\n\nYes, Heaven is thine; but this\nIs a world of sweets and sours;\nOur flowers are merely--flowers,\nAnd the shadow of thy perfect bliss\nIs the sunshine of ours.\n\nIf I could dwell\nWhere Israfel\nHath dwelt, and he where I,\nHe might not sing so wildly well\nA mortal melody,\nWhile a bolder note than this might swell\nFrom my lyre within the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1836 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-lake": { - "title": "“The Lake”", - "body": "In spring of youth it was my lot\nTo haunt of the wide world a spot\nThe which I could not love the less--\nSo lovely was the loneliness\nOf a wild lake, with black rock bound,\nAnd the tall pines that towered around.\n\nBut when the Night had thrown her pall\nUpon the spot, as upon all,\nAnd the mystic wind went by\nMurmuring in melody--\nThen--ah, then, I would awake\nTo the terror of the lone lake.\n\nYet that terror was not fright,\nBut a tremulous delight--\nA feeling not the jewelled mine\nCould teach or bribe me to define--\nNor Love--although the Love were thine.\n\nDeath was in that poisonous wave,\nAnd in its gulf a fitting grave\nFor him who thence could solace bring\nTo his lone imagining--\nWhose solitary soul could make\nAn Eden of that dim lake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - } - } - }, - "lenore": { - "title": "“Lenore”", - "body": "Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!\nLet the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river.\nAnd, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now or never more!\nSee! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!\nCome! let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung!--\nAn anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--\nA dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.\n\n“Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,\nAnd when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!\nHow _shall_ the ritual, then, be read?--the requiem how be sung\nBy you--by yours, the evil eye,--by yours, the slanderous tongue\nThat did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?”\n\n_Peccavimus;_ but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song\nGo up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!\nThe sweet Lenore hath “gone before,” with Hope, that flew beside,\nLeaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride--\nFor her, the fair and _débonnaire_, that now so lowly lies,\nThe life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes--\nThe life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes.\n\n“Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,\nBut waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!\nLet _no_ bell toll!--lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,\nShould catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.\nTo friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven--\nFrom Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven--\nFrom grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "mysterious-star": { - "title": "“Mysterious Star”", - "body": "Mysterious star!\nThou wert my dream\nAll a long summer night--\nBe now my theme!\nBy this clear stream,\nOf thee will I write;\nMeantime from afar\nBathe me in light!\n\nThy world has not the dross of ours,\nYet all the beauty--all the flowers\nThat list our love or deck our bowers \nIn dreamy gardens, where do lie\nDreamy maidens all the day;\nWhile the silver winds of Circassy\nOn violet couches faint away.\nLittle--oh! little dwells in thee\nLike unto what on earth we see:\nBeauty’s eye is here the bluest \nIn the falsest and untruest--\nOn the sweetest air doth float\nThe most sad and solemn note--\nIf with thee be broken hearts,\nJoy so peacefully departs,\nThat its echo still doth dwell,\nLike the murmur in the shell.\nThou! thy truest type of grief \nIs the gently falling leaf--\nThou! thy framing is so holy\nSorrow is not melancholy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-paean": { - "title": "“A Paean”", - "body": "How shall the burial rite be read?\nThe solemn song be sung?\nThe requiem for the loveliest dead,\nThat ever died so young?\n\nHer friends are gazing on her\nAnd on her gaudy bier,\nAnd weep!--oh! to dishonor\nDead beauty with a tear!\n\nThey loved her for her wealth--\nAnd they hated her for her pride--\nBut she grew in feeble health,\nAnd they _love_ her--that she died.\n\nThey tell me (while they speak\nOf her “costly broider’d pall”)\nThat my voice is growing weak--\nThat I should not sing at all--\n\nOr that my tone should be\nTun’d to such solemn song\nSo mournfully--so mournfully,\nThat the dead may feel no wrong.\n\nBut she is gone above\nWith young Hope at her side,\nAnd I am drunk with love\nOf the dead, who is my bride.--\n\nOf the dead--dead who lies\nAll perfum’d there,\nWith the death upon her eyes.\nAnd the life upon her hair.\n\nThus on the coffin loud and long\nI strike--the murmur sent\nThrough the gray chambers to my song,\nShall be the accompaniment.\n\nThou diedst in thy life’s June--\nBut thou didst not die too fair:\nThou didst not die too soon,\nNor with too calm an air.\n\nFrom more than friends on earth\nThy life and love are riven,\nTo join the untainted mirth\nOf more than thrones in heaven.--\n\nTherefore, to thee this night\nI will no requiem raise,\nBut waft thee on thy flight,\nWith a Paean of old days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1836 - } - } - }, - "the-power-of-words": { - "title": "“The Power of Words”", - "body": "> _Oinos:_\nPardon, Agathos, the weakness of a spirit new-fledged with immortality!\n\n> _Agathos:_\nYou have spoken nothing, my Oinos, for which pardon is to be demanded. Not even here is knowledge a thing of intuition. For wisdom, ask of the angels freely, that it may be given!\n\n> _Oinos:_\nBut in this existence I dreamed that I should be at once cognizant of all things, and thus at once happy in being cognizant of all.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nAh, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In forever knowing, we are forever blessed; but to know all, were the curse of a fiend.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nBut does not The Most High know all?\n\n> _Agathos:_\n_That_ (since he is The Most Happy) must be still the _one_ thing unknown even to HIM.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nBut, since we grow hourly in knowledge, must not _at last_ all things be known?\n\n> _Agathos:_\nLook down into the abysmal distances!--attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus--and thus--and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe?--the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity?\n\n> _Oinos:_\nI clearly perceive that the infinity of matter is no dream.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nThere are no dreams in Aidenn--but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the _sole_ purpose is to afford infinite springs at which the soul may allay the thirst _to know_ which is forever unquenchable within it--since to quench it would be to extinguish the soul’s self. Question me then, my Oinos, freely and without fear. Come! we will leave to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart’s-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nAnd now, Agathos, as we proceed, instruct me!--speak to me in the earth’s familiar tones! I understand not what you hinted to me just now of the modes or of the methods of what during mortality, we were accustomed to call Creation. Do you mean to say that the Creator is not God?\n\n> _Agathos:_\nI mean to say that the Deity does not create.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nExplain!\n\n> _Agathos:_\nIn the beginning only, he created. The seeming creatures which are now throughout the universe so perpetually springing into being can only be considered as the mediate or indirect, not as the direct or immediate results of the Divine creative power.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nAmong men, my Agathos, this idea would be considered heretical in the extreme.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nAmong the angels, my Oinos, it is seen to be simply true.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nI can comprehend you thus far--that certain operations of what we term Nature, or the natural laws, will, under certain conditions, give rise to that which has all the _appearance_ of creation. Shortly before the final overthrow of the earth, there were, I well remember, many very successful experiments in what some philosophers were weak enough to denominate the creation of animalculae.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nThe cases of which you speak were, in fact, instances of the secondary creation, and of the _only_ species of creation which has ever been since the first word spoke into existence the first law.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nAre not the starry worlds that, from the abyss of nonentity, burst hourly forth into the heavens--are not these stars, Agathos, the immediate handiwork of the King?\n\n> _Agathos:_\nLet me endeavor, my Oinos, to lead you, step by step, to the conception I intend. You are well aware that, as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result. We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and in so doing we gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth’s air, which thenceforward, _and forever_, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. This fact the mathematicians of our globe well knew. They made the special effects, indeed, wrought in the fluid by special impulses, the subject of exact calculation--so that it became easy to determine in what precise period an impulse of given extent would engirdle the orb, and impress (forever) every atom of the atmosphere circumambient. Retrograding, they found no difficulty; from a given effect, under given conditions, in determining the value of the original impulse. Now the mathematicians who saw that the results of any given impulse were absolutely endless--and who saw that a portion of these results were accurately traceable through the agency of algebraic analysis--who saw, too, the facility of the retrogradation--these men saw, at the same time, that this species of analysis itself had within itself a capacity for indefinite progress--that there were no bounds conceivable to its advancement and applicability, except within the intellect of him who advanced or applied it. But at this point our mathematicians paused.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nAnd why, Agathos, should they have proceeded?\n\n> _Agathos:_\nBecause there were some considerations of deep interest beyond. It was deducible from what they knew, that to a being of infinite understanding--one to whom the _perfection_ of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded--there could be no difficulty in tracing every impulse given the air--and the ether through the air--to the remotest consequences at any even infinitely remote epoch of time. It is indeed demonstrable that every such impulse _given the air_, must _in the end_ impress every individual thing that exists _within the universe;_--and the being of infinite understanding--the being whom we have imagined--might trace the remote undulations of the impulse--trace them upward and onward in their influences upon all particles of all matter--upward and onward forever in their modifications of old forms--or, in other words, _in their creation of new_--until he found them reflected--unimpressive _at last_--back from the throne of the Godhead. And not only could such a being do this, but at any epoch, should a given result be afforded him--should one of these numberless comets, for example, be presented to his inspection--he could have no difficulty in determining, by the analytic retrogradation, to what original impulse it was due. This power of retrogradation in its absolute fulness and perfection--this faculty of referring at _all_ epochs, _all_ effects to _all_ causes--is of course the prerogative of the Deity alone--but in every variety of degree, short of the absolute perfection, is the power itself exercised by the whole host of the Angelic Intelligences.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nBut you speak merely of impulses upon the air.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nIn speaking of the air, I referred only to the earth: but the general proposition has reference to impulses upon the ether--which, since it pervades, and alone pervades all space, is thus the great medium of _creation_.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nThen all motion, of whatever nature, creates?\n\n> _Agathos:_\nIt must: but a true philosophy has long taught that the source of all motion is thought--and the source of all thought is--\n\n> _Oinos:_\nGod.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nI have spoken to you, Oinos, as to a child, of the fair Earth which lately perished--of impulses upon the atmosphere of the earth.\n\n> _Oinos:_\nYou did.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nAnd while I thus spoke, did there not cross your mind some thought of the _physical power of words_? Is not every word an impulse on the air?\n\n> _Oinos:_\nBut why, Agathos, do you weep--and why, oh, why do your wings droop as we hover above this fair star--which is the greenest and yet most terrible of all we have encountered in our flight? Its brilliant flowers look like a fairy dream--but its fierce volcanoes like the passions of a turbulent heart.\n\n> _Agathos:_\nThey _are_!--they _are_!--This wild star--it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved--I spoke it--with a few passionate sentences--into birth. Its brilliant flowers _are_ the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes _are_ the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - }, - "the-raven": { - "title": "“The Raven”", - "body": "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,\nOver many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--\nWhile I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,\nAs of some one gently rapping--rapping at my chamber door.\n“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door--\n Only this and nothing more.”\n\nAh, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,\nAnd each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.\nEagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow\nFrom my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--\nFor the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--\n Nameless here for evermore.\n\nAnd the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain\nThrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;\nSo that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating\n“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door--\nSome late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;--\n This it is and nothing more.”\n\nPresently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,\n“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;\nBut the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,\nAnd so faintly you came tapping--tapping at my chamber door,\nThat I scarce was sure I heard you”--here I opened wide the door:--\n Darkness there and nothing more.\n\nDeep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,\nDoubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;\nBut the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,\nAnd the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”\nThis I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”\n Merely this and nothing more.\n\nBack into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,\nSoon I heard again a tapping, somewhat louder than before.\n“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;\nLet me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore--\nLet my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore;--\n ’Tis the wind and nothing more.”\n\nOpen here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,\nIn there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;\nNot the least obeisance made he: not an instant stopped or stayed he;\nBut, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--\nPerched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--\n Perched, and sat, and nothing more.\n\nThen this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,\nBy the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,\n“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,\nGhastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--\nTell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”\n Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”\n\nMuch I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,\nThough its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;\nFor we cannot help agreeing that no living human being\nEver yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door--\nBird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,\n With such name as “Nevermore.”\n\nBut the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only\nThat one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.\nNothing further then he uttered--not a feather then he fluttered--\nTill I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before--\nOn the morrow _he_ will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”\n Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”\n\nStartled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,\n“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,\nCaught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster\nFollowed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--\nTill the dirges of his Hope the melancholy burden bore\n Of ‘Never--nevermore.’”\n\nBut the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,\nStraight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;\nThen, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking\nFancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--\nWhat this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore\n Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”\n\nThis I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing\nTo the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;\nThis and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining\nOn the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,\nBut whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,\n _She_ shall press, ah, nevermore!\n\nThen, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer\nSwung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.\n“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee\nRespite--respite aad nepenthé from thy memories of Lenore!\nQuaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthé, and forget this lost Lenore!”\n Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”\n\n“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!--\nWhether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,\nDesolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--\nOn this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore--\nIs there--_is_ there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!”\n Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”\n\n“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!\nBy that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--\nTell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,\nIt shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--\nClasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”\n Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”\n\n“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting--\n“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!\nLeave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!\nLeave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!\nTake thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”\n Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”\n\nAnd the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting\nOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;\nAnd his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,\nAnd the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;\nAnd my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor\n Shall be lifted--nevermore!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "romance": { - "title": "“Romance”", - "body": "Romance, who loves to nod and sing,\nWith drowsy head and folded wing,\nAmong the green leaves as they shake\nFar down within some shadowy lake,\nTo me a painted paroquet\nHath been--a most familiar bird--\nTaught me my alphabet to say--\nTo lisp my very earliest word\nWhile in the wild wood I did lie,\nA child--with a most knowing eye.\n\nOf late, eternal Condor years\nSo shake the very Heaven on high\nWith tumult as they thunder by,\nI have no time for idle cares\nThough gazing on the unquiet sky.\nAnd when an hour with calmer wings \nIts down upon my spirit flings--\nThat little time with lyre and rhyme\nTo while away--forbidden things!\nMy heart would feel to be a crime\nUnless it trembled with the strings.\n\nSucceeding years, too wild for song,\nThen rolled like tropic storms along,\nWhere, though the garish lights that fly\nDying along the troubled sky,\nLay bare, through vistas thunder-riven,\nThe blackness of the general Heaven,\nThat very blackness yet doth fling\nLight on the lightning’s silver wing.\n\nFor being an idle boy lang syne,\nWho read Anacreon and drank wine,\nI early found Anacreon rhymes\nWere almost passionate sometimes--\nAnd by strange alchemy of brain\nHis pleasures always turned to pain--\nHis naïveté to wild desire--\nHis wit to love--his wine to fire--\nAnd so, being young and dipt in folly,\nI fell in love with melancholy.\n\nAnd used to throw my earthly rest\nAnd quiet all away in jest--\nI could not love except where Death\nWas mingling his with Beauty’s breath--\nOr Hymen, Time, and Destiny,\nWere stalking between her and me.\n\nBut _now_ my soul hath too much room--\nGone are the glory and the gloom--\nThe black hath mellow’d into gray,\nAnd all the fires are fading away.\n\nMy draught of passion hath been deep--\nI revell’d, and I now would sleep--\nAnd after drunkenness of soul\nSucceeds the glories of the bowl--\nAn idle longing night and day\nTo dream my very life away.\n\nBut dreams--of those who dream as I,\nAspiringly, are damned, and die:\nYet should I swear I mean alone,\nBy notes so very shrilly blown,\nTo break upon Time’s monotone,\nWhile yet my vapid joy and grief\nAre tintless of the yellow leaf--\nWhy not an imp the greybeard hath,\nWill shake his shadow in my path--\nAnd e’en the greybeard will o’erlook\nConnivingly my dreaming-book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - } - } - }, - "sancta-maria": { - "title": "“Sancta Maria”", - "body": "Sancta Maria! turn thine eyes--\nUpon the sinner’s sacrifice,\nOf fervent prayer and humble love,\nFrom thy holy throne above.\nAt morn; at noon; at twilight dim--\nMaria! thou hast heard my hymn!\nIn joy and woe; in good and ill--\nMother of God, be with me still!\nWhen the Hours flew brightly by,\nAnd not a cloud obscured the sky,\nMy soul, lest it should truant be,\nThy grace did guide to thine and thee;\nNow, when storms of Fate o’ercast\nDarkly my Present and my Past,\nLet my Future radiant shine\nWith sweet hopes of thee and thine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1835 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "shadow": { - "title": "“Shadow”", - "body": "Yea! though I walk through the valley of the _Shadow_.\n--_Psalm of David_\n\nYe who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.\nThe year had been a year of terror, and of feeling more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is enjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.\nOver some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets--but the boding and the memory of Evil, they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account--things material and spiritual--heaviness in the atmosphere--a sense of suffocation--anxiety--and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs--upon the household furniture--upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby--all things save only the flames of the seven iron lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way--which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon--which are madness; and drank deeply--although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead and at full length he lay, enshrouded;--the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such an interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teos. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies, where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefiled shadow--a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor God--neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of the door and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.” And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast: for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1833, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "silence-a-fable": { - "title": "“Silence: A Fable”", - "body": "The mountain pinnacles slumber; valleys, crags, and caves _are silent_.\n“LISTEN to _me_,” said the Demon, as he placed his hand upon my head. “The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zäire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.”\n“The waters of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow not onward to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river’s oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other.”\n“But there is a boundary to their realm--the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest. There, like the waves about the Hebrides, the low underwood is agitated continually. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots, strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling and loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And by the shores of the river Zäire there is neither quiet nor silence.”\n“It was night, and the rain fell; and, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall lilies, and the rain fell upon my head--and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.”\n“And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray and ghastly, and tall,--and the rock was gray. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stones; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decipher them. And I was going back into the morass when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rock and upon the characters;--and the characters were DESOLATION.”\n“And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the action of the man. And the man was tall and stately in form, and wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct--but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and in the few furrows upon his cheek, I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.”\n“And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. He looked down into the low unquiet shrubbery, and up into the tall primeval trees, and up higher at the rustling heaven, and into the crimson moon. And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;--but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.”\n“And the man turned his attention from the heaven, and looked out upon the dreary river Zäire, and upon the yellow ghastly waters, and upon the pale legions of the water-lilies. And the man listened to the sighs of the water-lilies, and to the murmur that came up from among them. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;--but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.”\n“Then I went down into the recesses of the morass, and waded afar in among the wilderness of the lilies, and called unto the hippopotami which dwelt among the fens in the recesses of the morass. And the hippopotami heard my call, and came, with the behemoth, unto the foot of the rock, and roared loudly and fearfully beneath the moon. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;--but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.”\n“Then I cursed the elements with the curse of tumult; and a frightful tempest gathered in the heaven, where before there had been no wind. And the heaven became livid with the violence of the tempest--and the rain beat upon the head of the man--and the floods of the river came down--and the river was tormented into foam--and the water-lilies shrieked within their beds--and the forest crumbled before the wind--and the thunder rolled--and the lightning fell--and the rock rocked to its foundation. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude;--but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.”\n“Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and _were still._ And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven--and the thunder died away--and the lightning did not flash--and the clouds hung motionless--and the waters sunk to their level and remained--and the trees ceased to rock--and the water-lilies sighed no more--and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed;--and the characters were SILENCE.”\n“And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were SILENCE. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.”\nNow there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi--in the iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the mighty Sea--and of the Genii that overruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore, too, in the sayings which were said by the sybils; and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona--but, as Allah liveth, that fable which the demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all! And as the Demon made an end of his story, he fell back within the cavity of the tomb and laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1837 - } - } - }, - "silence": { - "title": "“Silence”", - "body": "There are some qualities--some incorporate things,\nThat have a double life, which thus is made\nA type of that twin entity which springs\nFrom matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.\nThere is a twofold _Silence_--sea and shore--\nBody and soul. One dwells in lonely places,\nNewly with grass o’ergrown; some solemn graces,\nSome human memories and tearful lore,\nRender him terrorless: his name’s “No More.”\nHe is the corporate Silence: dread him not!\nNo power hath he of evil in himself;\nBut should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)\nBring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,\nThat haunteth the lone regions where hath trod\nNo foot of man), commend thyself to God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1840 - } - } - }, - "the-sleeper": { - "title": "“The Sleeper”", - "body": "At midnight, in the month of June,\nI stand beneath the mystic moon.\nAn opiate vapor, dewy, dim,\nExhales from out her golden rim,\nAnd, softly dripping, drop by drop,\nUpon the quiet mountain top,\nSteals drowsily and musically \nInto the universal valley.\nThe rosemary nods upon the grave;\nThe lily lolls upon the wave;\nWrapping the fog about its breast,\nThe ruin moulders into rest;\nLooking like Lethe, see! the lake\nA conscious slumber seems to take,\nAnd would not, for the world, awake.\nAll Beauty sleeps!--and lo! where lies\n(Her casement open to the skies)\nIrene, with her Destinies!\n\nOh, lady bright! can it be right--\nThis window open to the night!\nThe wanton airs, from the tree-top,\nLaughingly through the lattice-drop--\nThe bodiless airs, a wizard rout,\nFlit through thy chamber in and out,\nAnd wave the curtain canopy\nSo fitfully--so fearfully--\nAbove the closed and fringed lid\n’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,\nThat, o’er the floor and down the wall,\nLike ghosts the shadows rise and fall!\nOh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?\nWhy and what art thou dreaming here?\nSure thou art come o’er far-off seas,\nA wonder to these garden trees!\nStrange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!\nStrange, above all, thy length of tress,\nAnd this all-solemn silentness!\n\nThe lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep\nWhich is enduring, so be deep!\nHeaven have her in its sacred keep!\nThis chamber changed for one more holy,\nThis bed for one more melancholy,\nI pray to God that she may lie\nFor ever with unopened eye,\nWhile the dim sheeted ghosts go by!\n\nMy love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,\nAs it is lasting, so be deep;\nSoft may the worms about her creep!\nFar in the forest, dim and old,\nFor her may some tall vault unfold--\nSome vault that oft hath flung its black\nAnd winged panels fluttering back,\nTriumphant, o’er the crested palls,\nOf her grand family funerals--\nSome sepulchre, remote, alone,\nAgainst whose portal she hath thrown,\nIn childhood many an idle stone--\nSome tomb from out whose sounding door\nShe ne’er shall force an echo more,\nThrilling to think, poor child of sin!\nIt was the dead who groaned within.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1846 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "spirits-of-the-dead": { - "title": "“Spirits of the Dead”", - "body": "Thy soul shall find itself alone\n’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone\nNot one, of all the crowd, to pry \nInto thine hour of secrecy.\nBe silent in that solitude\nWhich is not loneliness--for then\nThe spirits of the dead who stood\nIn life before thee are again \nIn death around thee--and their will\nShall overshadow thee: be still.\nThe night--tho’ clear--shall frown--\nAnd the stars shall not look down\nFrom their high thrones in the Heaven,\nWith light like Hope to mortals given--\nBut their red orbs, without beam,\nTo thy weariness shall seem\nAs a burning and a fever\nWhich would cling to thee forever.\nNow are thoughts thou shalt not banish--\nNow are visions ne’er to vanish--\nFrom thy spirit shall they pass\nNo more--like dew-drops from the grass.\nThe breeze--the breath of God--is still--\nAnd the mist upon the hill\nShadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,\nIs a symbol and a token--\nHow it hangs upon the trees,\nA mystery of mysteries!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - } - } - }, - "tamerlane": { - "title": "“Tamerlane”", - "body": "Kind solace in a dying hour!\nSuch, father, is not (now) my theme--\nI will not madly deem that power\nOf Earth may shrive me of the sin\nUnearthly pride hath revelled in--\nI have no time to dote or dream:\nYou call it hope--that fire of fire!\nIt is but agony of desire:\nIf I _can_ hope--O God! I can--\nIts fount is holier--more divine--\nI would not call thee fool, old man,\nBut such is not a gift of thine.\n\nKnow thou the secret of a spirit\nBowed from its wild pride into shame\nO yearning heart! I did inherit\nThy withering portion with the fame,\nThe searing glory which hath shone\nAmid the Jewels of my throne,\nHalo of Hell! and with a pain\nNot Hell shall make me fear again--\nO craving heart, for the lost flowers\nAnd sunshine of my summer hours!\nThe undying voice of that dead time,\nWith its interminable chime,\nRings, in the spirit of a spell,\nUpon thy emptiness--a knell.\n\nI have not always been as now:\nThe fevered diadem on my brow I claimed and won usurpingly--\nHath not the same fierce heirdom given\nRome to the Caesar--this to me?\nThe heritage of a kingly mind,\nAnd a proud spirit which hath striven\nTriumphantly with human kind.\nOn mountain soil I first drew life:\nThe mists of the Taglay have shed\nNightly their dews upon my head,\nAnd, I believe, the winged strife\nAnd tumult of the headlong air\nHave nestled in my very hair.\n\nSo late from Heaven--that dew--it fell\n(’Mid dreams of an unholy night)\nUpon me with the touch of Hell,\nWhile the red flashing of the light\nFrom clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,\nAppeared to my half-closing eye\nThe pageantry of monarchy;\nAnd the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar\nCame hurriedly upon me, telling\nOf human battle, where my voice,\nMy own voice, silly child!--was swelling\n(O! how my spirit would rejoice,\nAnd leap within me at the cry)\nThe battle-cry of Victory!\n\nThe rain came down upon my head\nUnsheltered--and the heavy wind\nRendered me mad and deaf and blind.\nIt was but man, I thought, who shed\nLaurels upon me: and the rush--\nThe torrent of the chilly air\nGurgled within my ear the crush\nOf empires--with the captive’s prayer--\nThe hum of suitors--and the tone\nOf flattery ’round a sovereign’s throne.\n\nMy passions, from that hapless hour,\nUsurped a tyranny which men\nHave deemed since I have reached to power,\nMy innate nature--be it so:\nBut, father, there lived one who, then,\nThen--in my boyhood--when their fire\nBurned with a still intenser glow\n(For passion must, with youth, expire)\nE’en _then_ who knew this iron heart \nIn woman’s weakness had a part.\n\nI have no words--alas!--to tell\nThe loveliness of loving well!\nNor would I now attempt to trace\nThe more than beauty of a face\nWhose lineaments, upon my mind,\nAre--shadows on th’ unstable wind:\nThus I remember having dwelt\nSome page of early lore upon,\nWith loitering eye, till I have felt\nThe letters--with their meaning--melt\nTo fantasies--with none.\n\nO, she was worthy of all love!\nLove as in infancy was mine--\n’Twas such as angel minds above\nMight envy; her young heart the shrine\nOn which my every hope and thought\nWere incense--then a goodly gift,\nFor they were childish and upright--\nPure--as her young example taught:\nWhy did I leave it, and, adrift,\nTrust to the fire within, for light?\n\nWe grew in age--and love--together--\nRoaming the forest, and the wild;\nMy breast her shield in wintry weather--\nAnd, when the friendly sunshine smiled.\nAnd she would mark the opening skies,\n_I_ saw no Heaven--but in her eyes.\nYoung Love’s first lesson is the heart:\nFor ’mid that sunshine, and those smiles,\nWhen, from our little cares apart,\nAnd laughing at her girlish wiles,\nI’d throw me on her throbbing breast,\nAnd pour my spirit out in tears--\nThere was no need to speak the rest--\nNo need to quiet any fears\nOf her--who asked no reason why,\nBut turned on me her quiet eye!\n\nYet _more_ than worthy of the love\nMy spirit struggled with, and strove\nWhen, on the mountain peak, alone,\nAmbition lent it a new tone--\nI had no being--but in thee:\nThe world, and all it did contain \nIn the earth--the air--the sea--\nIts joy--its little lot of pain\nThat was new pleasure--the ideal,\nDim, vanities of dreams by night--\nAnd dimmer nothings which were real--\n(Shadows--and a more shadowy light!)\nParted upon their misty wings,\nAnd, so, confusedly, became\nThine image and--a name--a name!\nTwo separate--yet most intimate things.\n\nI was ambitious--have you known\nThe passion, father? You have not:\nA cottager, I marked a throne\nOf half the world as all my own,\nAnd murmured at such lowly lot--\nBut, just like any other dream,\nUpon the vapor of the dew\nMy own had past, did not the beam\nOf beauty which did while it thro’\nThe minute--the hour--the day--oppress\nMy mind with double loveliness.\n\nWe walked together on the crown\nOf a high mountain which looked down\nAfar from its proud natural towers\nOf rock and forest, on the hills--\nThe dwindled hills! begirt with bowers\nAnd shouting with a thousand rills.\n\nI spoke to her of power and pride,\nBut mystically--in such guise\nThat she might deem it nought beside\nThe moment’s converse; in her eyes \nI read, perhaps too carelessly--\nA mingled feeling with my own--\nThe flush on her bright cheek, to me\nSeemed to become a queenly throne\nToo well that I should let it be\nLight in the wilderness alone.\n\nI wrapped myself in grandeur then,\nAnd donned a visionary crown--\nYet it was not that Fantasy\nHad thrown her mantle over me--\nBut that, among the rabble--men,\nLion ambition is chained down--\nAnd crouches to a keeper’s hand--\nNot so in deserts where the grand--\nThe wild--the terrible conspire\nWith their own breath to fan his fire.\n\nLook ’round thee now on Samarcand!--\nIs she not queen of Earth? her pride\nAbove all cities? in her hand\nTheir destinies? in all beside\nOf glory which the world hath known\nStands she not nobly and alone?\nFalling--her veriest stepping-stone\nShall form the pedestal of a throne--\nAnd who her sovereign? Timour--he\nWhom the astonished people saw\nStriding o’er empires haughtily\nA diademed outlaw!\n\nO, human love! thou spirit given,\nOn Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!\nWhich fall’st into the soul like rain\nUpon the Siroc-withered plain,\nAnd, failing in thy power to bless,\nBut leav’st the heart a wilderness!\nIdea! which bindest life around\nWith music of so strange a sound\nAnd beauty of so wild a birth--\nFarewell! for I have won the Earth.\n\nWhen Hope, the eagle that towered, could see\nNo cliff beyond him in the sky,\nHis pinions were bent droopingly--\nAnd homeward turned his softened eye.\n’Twas sunset: When the sun will part\nThere comes a sullenness of heart\nTo him who still would look upon\nThe glory of the summer sun.\nThat soul will hate the ev’ning mist\nSo often lovely, and will list\nTo the sound of the coming darkness (known\nTo those whose spirits hearken) as one\nWho, in a dream of night, _would_ fly,\nBut _cannot_, from a danger nigh.\n\nWhat tho’ the moon--tho’ the white moon\nShed all the splendor of her noon,\n_Her_ smile is chilly--and _her_ beam,\nIn that time of dreariness, will seem\n(So like you gather in your breath)\nA portrait taken after death.\nAnd boyhood is a summer sun\nWhose waning is the dreariest one--\nFor all we live to know is known,\nAnd all we seek to keep hath flown--\nLet life, then, as the day-flower, fall\nWith the noon-day beauty--which is all.\nI reached my home--my home no more--\nFor all had flown who made it so.\nI passed from out its mossy door,\nAnd, tho’ my tread was soft and low,\nA voice came from the threshold stone\nOf one whom I had earlier known--\nO, I defy thee, Hell, to show\nOn beds of fire that burn below,\nAn humbler heart--a deeper woe.\n\nFather, I firmly do believe--\nI _know_--for Death who comes for me\nFrom regions of the blest afar,\nWhere there is nothing to deceive,\nHath left his iron gate ajar.\nAnd rays of truth you cannot see\nAre flashing thro’ Eternity--\nI do believe that Eblis hath\nA snare in every human path--\nElse how, when in the holy grove \nI wandered of the idol, Love,--\nWho daily scents his snowy wings\nWith incense of burnt-offerings\nFrom the most unpolluted things,\nWhose pleasant bowers are yet so riven\nAbove with trellised rays from Heaven\nNo mote may shun--no tiniest fly--\nThe light’ning of his eagle eye--\nHow was it that Ambition crept,\nUnseen, amid the revels there,\nTill growing bold, he laughed and leapt \nIn the tangles of Love’s very hair!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1827 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-helen": { - "title": "“To Helen”", - "body": "I saw thee once--once only--years ago:\nI must not say _how_ many--but _not_ many.\nIt was a July midnight; and from out\nA full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,\nSought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,\nThere fell a silvery-silken veil of light,\nWith quietude, and sultriness and slumber,\nUpon the upturn’d faces of a thousand\nRoses that grew in an enchanted garden,\nWhere no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat gave out, in return for the love-light,\nTheir odorous souls in an ecstatic death--\nFell on the upturn’d faces of these roses\nThat smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted\nBy thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.\n\nClad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half-reclining; while the moon\nFell on the upturn’d faces of the roses,\nAnd on thine own, upturn’d--alas, in sorrow!\n\nWas it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--\nWas it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow),\nThat bade me pause before that garden-gate,\nTo breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?\nNo footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,\nSave only thee and me--(O Heaven!--O God!\nHow my heart beats in coupling those two words!)--\nSave only thee and me. I paused--I looked--\nAnd in an instant all things disappeared.\n(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)\nThe pearly lustre of the moon went out:\nThe mossy banks and the meandering paths,\nThe happy flowers and the repining trees,\nWere seen no more: the very roses’ odors\nDied in the arms of the adoring airs.\nAll--all expired save thee--save less than thou:\nSave only the divine light in thine eyes--\nSave but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.\nI saw but them--they were the world to me.\nI saw but them--saw only them for hours--\nSaw only them until the moon went down.\nWhat wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten\nUpon those crystalline, celestial spheres!\nHow dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope!\nHow silently serene a sea of pride!\nHow daring an ambition! yet how deep--\nHow fathomless a capacity for love!\n\nBut now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,\nInto a western couch of thunder-cloud;\nAnd thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees\nDidst glide away. _Only thine eyes remained._\nThey _would not_ go--they never yet have gone.\nLighting my lonely pathway home that night,\n_They_ have not left me (as my hopes have) since.\nThey follow me--they lead me through the years.\n\nThey are my ministers--yet I their slave.\nTheir office is to illumine and enkindle--\nMy duty, _to be saved_ by their bright light,\nAnd purified in their electric fire,\nAnd sanctified in their elysian fire.\nThey fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope),\nAnd are far up in Heaven--the stars I kneel to \nIn the sad, silent watches of my night;\nWhile even in the meridian glare of day \nI see them still--two sweetly scintillant\nVenuses, unextinguished by the sun!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1848 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "to-isadore": { - "title": "“To Isadore”", - "body": "Beneath the vine-clad eaves\n Whose shadows fall before\n Thy lowly cottage door--\nUnder the lilac’s tremulous leaves--\nWithin thy snowy clasped hand\n The purple flowers it bore.\nLast eve in dreams, I saw thee stand,\nLike queenly nymph from Fairy-land--\nEnchantress of the flowery wand,\n Most beauteous Isadore!\n\nAnd when I bade the dream\n Upon thy spirit flee,\n Thy violet eyes to me\nUpturned, did overflowing seem\nWith the deep, untold delight\n Of Love’s serenity;\nThy classic brow, like lilies white\nAnd pale as the Imperial Night\nUpon her throne, with stars bedight,\n Enthralled my soul to thee!\n\nAh! ever I behold\n Thy dreamy, passionate eyes,\n Blue as the languid skies\nHung with the sunset’s fringe of gold;\nNow strangely clear thine image grows,\n And olden memories\nAre startled from their long repose\nLike shadows on the silent snows\nWhen suddenly the night-wind blows\n Where quiet moonlight lies.\n\nLike music heard in dreams\n Like strains of harps unknown,\n Of birds for ever flown,--\nAudible as the voice of streams\nThat murmur in some leafy dell,\n I hear thy gentlest tone,\nAnd Silence cometh with her spell\nLike that which on my tongue doth dwell,\nWhen tremulous in dreams I tell\n My love to thee alone!\n\nIn every valley heard\n Floating from tree to tree,\n Less beautiful to me,\nThe music of the radiant bird,\nThan artless accents such as thine\n Whose echoes never flee!\nAh! how for thy sweet voice I pine:--\nFor uttered in thy tones benign\n(Enchantress!) this rude name of mine\n Doth seem a melody!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - }, - "to-my-mother": { - "title": "“To My Mother”", - "body": "Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,\nThe angels, whispering to one another,\nCan find, among their burning terms of love,\nNone so devotional as that of “Mother,”\nTherefore by that dear name I long have called you--\nYou who are more than mother unto me,\nAnd fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you,\nIn setting my Virginia’s spirit free.\nMy mother--my own mother, who died early,\nWas but the mother of myself; but you\nAre mother to the one I loved so dearly,\nAnd thus are dearer than the mother I knew\nBy that infinity with which my wife\nWas dearer to my soul than its soul-life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "mothers_day" - } - } - }, - "to-one-in-paradise": { - "title": "“To One in Paradise”", - "body": "Thou wast that all to me, love,\nFor which my soul did pine--\nA green isle in the sea, love,\nA fountain and a shrine,\nAll wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,\nAnd all the flowers were mine.\n\nAh, dream too bright to last!\nAh, starry Hope! that didst arise\nBut to be overcast!\nA voice from out the Future cries,\n“On! on!”--but o’er the Past\n(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies\nMute, motionless, aghast!\n\nFor, alas! alas! with me\nThe light of Life is o’er!\n“No more--no more--no more”--\n(Such language holds the solemn sea\nTo the sands upon the shore)\nShall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,\nOr the stricken eagle soar!\n\nAnd all my days are trances,\nAnd all my nightly dreams\nAre where thy dark eye glances,\nAnd where thy footstep gleams--\nIn what ethereal dances,\nBy what eternal streams!\n\nAlas! for that accursed time\nThey bore thee o’er the billow,\nFrom love to titled age and crime,\nAnd an unholy pillow!\nFrom me, and from our misty clime,\nWhere weeps the silver willow!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1835 - } - } - }, - "to-science": { - "title": "“To Science”", - "body": "Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!\n Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.\nWhy preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,\n Vulture, whose wings are dull realities\nHow should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,\n Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering\nTo seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,\n Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing!\nHast thou not dragged Diana from her car?\n And driven the Hamadryad from the wood\nTo seek a shelter in some happier star?\n Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,\nThe Elfin from the green grass, and from me\nThe summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - } - } - }, - "to-the-river": { - "title": "“To the River”", - "body": "Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow\nOf crystal, wandering water,\nThou art an emblem of the glow\nOf beauty--the unhidden heart--\nThe playful maziness of art\nIn old Alberto’s daughter;\n\nBut when within thy wave she looks--\nWhich glistens then, and trembles--\nWhy, then, the prettiest of brooks\nHer worshipper resembles;\nFor in his heart, as in thy stream,\nHer image deeply lies--\nHis heart which trembles at the beam\nOf her soul-searching eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - }, - "ulalume": { - "title": "“Ulalume”", - "body": "The skies they were ashen and sober;\nThe leaves they were crisped and sere--\nThe leaves they were withering and sere;\nIt was night in the lonesome October\nOf my most immemorial year;\nIt was hard by the dim lake of Auber,\nIn the misty mid region of Weir--\nIt was down by the dank tarn of Auber,\nIn the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\nHere once, through an alley Titanic.\nOf cypress, I roamed with my Soul--\nOf cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.\nThese were days when my heart was volcanic\nAs the scoriac rivers that roll--\nAs the lavas that restlessly roll\nTheir sulphurous currents down Yaanek\nIn the ultimate climes of the pole--\nThat groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek\nIn the realms of the boreal pole.\n\nOur talk had been serious and sober,\nBut our thoughts they were palsied and sere--\nOur memories were treacherous and sere--\nFor we knew not the month was October,\nAnd we marked not the night of the year--\n(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)\nWe noted not the dim lake of Auber--\n(Though once we had journeyed down here)--\nRemembered not the dank tarn of Auber,\nNor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\nAnd now as the night was senescent\nAnd star-dials pointed to morn--\nAs the sun-dials hinted of morn--\nAt the end of our path a liquescent\nAnd nebulous lustre was born,\nOut of which a miraculous crescent\nArose with a duplicate horn--\nAstarte’s bediamonded crescent\nDistinct with its duplicate horn.\n\nAnd I said--“She is warmer than Dian:\nShe rolls through an ether of sighs--\nShe revels in a region of sighs:\nShe has seen that the tears are not dry on\nThese cheeks, where the worm never dies,\nAnd has come past the stars of the Lion\nTo point us the path to the skies--\nTo the Lethean peace of the skies--\nCome up, in despite of the Lion,\nTo shine on us with her bright eyes--\nCome up through the lair of the Lion,\nWith love in her luminous eyes.”\n\nBut Psyche, uplifting her finger,\nSaid--“Sadly this star I mistrust--\nHer pallor I strangely mistrust:--\nOh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger!\nOh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must.”\nIn terror she spoke, letting sink her\nWings till they trailed in the dust--\nIn agony sobbed, letting sink her\nPlumes till they trailed in the dust--\nTill they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.\n\nI replied--“This is nothing but dreaming:\nLet us on by this tremulous light!\nLet us bathe in this crystalline light!\nIts Sibyllic splendor is beaming\nWith Hope and in Beauty to-night:--\nSee!--it flickers up the sky through the night!\nAh, we safely may trust to its gleaming,\nAnd be sure it will lead us aright--\nWe safely may trust to a gleaming\nThat cannot but guide us aright,\nSince it flickers up to Heaven through the night.”\n\nThus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,\nAnd tempted her out of her gloom--\nAnd conquered her scruples and gloom;\nAnd we passed to the end of a vista,\nBut were stopped by the door of a tomb--\nBy the door of a legended tomb;\nAnd I said--“What is written, sweet sister,\nOn the door of this legended tomb?”\nShe replied--“Ulalume--Ulalume--\n’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”\n\nThen my heart it grew ashen and sober\nAs the leaves that were crisped and sere--\nAs the leaves that were withering and sere;\nAnd I cried--“It was surely October\nOn _this_ very night of last year\nThat I journeyed--I journeyed down here--\nThat I brought a dread burden down here!\nOn this night of all nights in the year,\nAh, what demon has tempted me here?\nWell I know, now, this dim lake of Auber--\nThis misty mid region of Weir--\nWell I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,--\nThis ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-valley-of-unrest": { - "title": "“The Valley of Unrest”", - "body": "_Once_ it smiled a silent dell\nWhere the people did not dwell;\nThey had gone unto the wars,\nTrusting to the mild-eyed stars,\nNightly, from their azure towers,\nTo keep watch above the flowers,\nIn the midst of which all day\nThe red sun-light lazily lay,\n_Now_ each visitor shall confess\nThe sad valley’s restlessness.\nNothing there is motionless--\nNothing save the airs that brood\nOver the magic solitude.\nAh, by no wind are stirred those trees\nThat palpitate like the chill seas\nAround the misty Hebrides!\nAh, by no wind those clouds are driven\nThat rustle through the unquiet Heaven\nUnceasingly, from morn till even,\nOver the violets there that lie \nIn myriad types of the human eye--\nOver the lilies that wave\nAnd weep above a nameless grave!\nThey wave:--from out their fragrant tops\nEternal dews come down in drops.\nThey weep:--from off their delicate stems\nPerennial tears descend in gems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1831 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-village-street": { - "title": "“The Village Street”", - "body": "In these rapid, restless shadows,\nOnce I walked at eventide,\nWhen a gentle, silent maiden,\nWalked in beauty at my side.\nShe alone there walked beside me\nAll in beauty, like a bride.\n\nPallidly the moon was shining\nOn the dewy meadows nigh;\nOn the silvery, silent rivers,\nOn the mountains far and high,--\nOn the ocean’s star-lit waters,\nWhere the winds a-weary die.\n\nSlowly, silently we wandered\nFrom the open cottage door,\nUnderneath the elm’s long branches\nTo the pavement bending o’er;\nUnderneath the mossy willow\nAnd the dying sycamore.\n\nWith the myriad stars in beauty\nAll bedight, the heavens were seen,\nRadiant hopes were bright around me,\nLike the light of stars serene;\nLike the mellow midnight splendor\nOf the Night’s irradiate queen.\n\nAudibly the elm-leaves whispered\nPeaceful, pleasant melodies,\nLike the distant murmured music\nOf unquiet, lovely seas;\nWhile the winds were hushed in slumber\nIn the fragrant flowers and trees.\n\nWondrous and unwonted beauty\nStill adorning all did seem,\nWhile I told my love in fables\n’Neath the willows by the stream;\nWould the heart have kept unspoken\nLove that was its rarest dream!\n\nInstantly away we wandered\nIn the shadowy twilight tide,\nShe, the silent, scornful maiden,\nWalking calmly at my side,\nWith a step serene and stately,\nAll in beauty, all in pride.\n\nVacantly I walked beside her.\nOn the earth mine eyes were cast;\nSwift and keen there came unto me\nBitter memories of the past--\nOn me, like the rain in Autumn\nOn the dead leaves, cold and fast.\n\nUnderneath the elms we parted,\nBy the lowly cottage door;\nOne brief word alone was uttered--\nNever on our lips before;\nAnd away I walked forlornly,\nBroken-hearted evermore.\n\nSlowly, silently I loitered,\nHomeward, in the night, alone;\nSudden anguish bound my spirit,\nThat my youth had never known;\nWild unrest, like that which cometh\nWhen the Night’s first dream hath flown.\n\nNow, to me the elm-leaves whisper\nMad, discordant melodies,\nAnd keen melodies like shadows\nHaunt the moaning willow trees,\nAnd the sycamores with laughter\nMock me in the nightly breeze.\n\nSad and pale the Autumn moonlight\nThrough the sighing foliage streams;\nAnd each morning, midnight shadow,\nShadow of my sorrow seems;\nStrive, O heart, forget thine idol!\nAnd, O soul, forget thy dreams!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-bowers-whereat-in-dreams-i-see": { - "title": "“The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see …”", - "body": "The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see\nThe wantonest singing birds,\n\nAre lips--and all thy melody\nOf lip-begotten words--\n\nThine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined\nThen desolately fall,\nO God! on my funereal mind\nLike starlight on a pall--\n\nThy heart--_thy_ heart!--I wake and sigh,\nAnd sleep to dream till day\nOf the truth that gold can never buy--\nOf the baubles that it may.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1845 - } - } - } - } - }, - "alexander-pope": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexander Pope", - "birth": { - "year": 1688 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1744 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "argus": { - "title": "“Argus”", - "body": "When wise Ulysses, from his native coast\nLong kept by wars, and long by tempests toss’d,\nArrived at last, poor, old, disguised, alone,\nTo all his friends, and ev’n his Queen unknown,\nChanged as he was, with age, and toils, and cares,\nFurrow’d his rev’rend face, and white his hairs,\nIn his own palace forc’d to ask his bread,\nScorn’d by those slaves his former bounty fed,\nForgot of all his own domestic crew,\nThe faithful Dog alone his rightful master knew!\n\nUnfed, unhous’d, neglected, on the clay\nLike an old servant now cashier’d, he lay;\nTouch’d with resentment of ungrateful man,\nAnd longing to behold his ancient lord again.\nHim when he saw he rose, and crawl’d to meet,\n(’Twas all he could) and fawn’d and kiss’d his feet,\nSeiz’d with dumb joy; then falling by his side,\nOwn’d his returning lord, look’d up, and died!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dying-christian-to-his-soul": { - "title": "“The Dying Christian to His Soul”", - "body": "Vital spark of heav’nly flame!\nQuit, O quit this mortal frame:\nTrembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,\nO the pain, the bliss of dying!\nCease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,\nAnd let me languish into life.\n\nHark! they whisper; angels say,\nSister Spirit, come away!\nWhat is this absorbs me quite?\nSteals my senses, shuts my sight,\nDrowns my spirits, draws my breath?\nTell me, my soul, can this be death?\n\nThe world recedes; it disappears!\nHeav’n opens on my eyes! my ears\nWith sounds seraphic ring!\nLend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!\nO Grave! where is thy victory?\nO Death! where is thy sting?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-an-essay-on-man": { - "title": "From “An Essay on Man”", - "body": "What if the foot ordain’d the dust to tread,\nOr hand to toil, aspir’d to be the head?\nWhat if the head, the eye, or ear repin’d\nTo serve mere engines to the ruling mind?\nJust as absurd for any part to claim\nTo be another, in this gen’ral frame:\nJust as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains,\nThe great directing Mind of All ordains.\n\n All are but parts of one stupendous whole,\nWhose body Nature is, and God the soul;\nThat, chang’d through all, and yet in all the same,\nGreat in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame,\nWarms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,\nGlows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,\nLives through all life, extends through all extent,\nSpreads undivided, operates unspent,\nBreathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,\nAs full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;\nAs full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,\nAs the rapt seraph that adores and burns;\nTo him no high, no low, no great, no small;\nHe fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-1": { - "title": "From “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 1”", - "body": "_“Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos;\nSedjuvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis.”_\n --Martial, Epigrams 12.84\n\nWhat dire offence from am’rous causes springs,\nWhat mighty contests rise from trivial things,\nI sing--This verse to Caryl, Muse! is due:\nThis, ev’n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:\nSlight is the subject, but not so the praise,\nIf she inspire, and he approve my lays.\nSay what strange motive, Goddess! could compel\nA well-bred lord t’ assault a gentle belle?\nO say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d,\nCould make a gentle belle reject a lord?\nIn tasks so bold, can little men engage,\nAnd in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?\n\nSol thro’ white curtains shot a tim’rous ray,\nAnd op’d those eyes that must eclipse the day;\nNow lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake,\nAnd sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake:\nThrice rung the bell, the slipper knock’d the ground,\nAnd the press’d watch return’d a silver sound.\nBelinda still her downy pillow press’d,\nHer guardian sylph prolong’d the balmy rest:\n’Twas he had summon’d to her silent bed\nThe morning dream that hover’d o’er her head;\nA youth more glitt’ring than a birthnight beau,\n(That ev’n in slumber caus’d her cheek to glow)\nSeem’d to her ear his winning lips to lay,\nAnd thus in whispers said, or seem’d to say.\n\n“Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish’d care\nOf thousand bright inhabitants of air!\nIf e’er one vision touch’d thy infant thought,\nOf all the nurse and all the priest have taught,\nOf airy elves by moonlight shadows seen,\nThe silver token, and the circled green,\nOr virgins visited by angel pow’rs,\nWith golden crowns and wreaths of heav’nly flow’rs,\nHear and believe! thy own importance know,\nNor bound thy narrow views to things below.\nSome secret truths from learned pride conceal’d,\nTo maids alone and children are reveal’d:\nWhat tho’ no credit doubting wits may give?\nThe fair and innocent shall still believe.\nKnow then, unnumber’d spirits round thee fly,\nThe light militia of the lower sky;\nThese, though unseen, are ever on theg,\nHang o’er the box, and hover round the Ring.\nThink what an equipage thou hast in air,\nAnd view with scorn two pages and a chair.\nAs now your own, our beings were of old,\nAnd once inclos’d in woman’s beauteous mould;\nThence, by a soft transition, we repair\nFrom earthly vehicles to these of air.\nThink not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,\nThat all her vanities at once are dead;\nSucceeding vanities she still regards,\nAnd tho’ she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.\nHer joy in gilded chariots, when alive,\nAnd love of ombre, after death survive.\nFor when the fair in all their pride expire,\nTo their first elements their souls retire:\nThe sprites of fiery termagants in flame\nMount up, and take a Salamander’s name.\nSoft yielding minds to water glide away,\nAnd sip with Nymphs, their elemental tea.\nThe graver prude sinks downward to a Gnome,\nIn search of mischief still on earth to roam.\nThe light coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,\nAnd sport and flutter in the fields of air.\n\nKnow further yet; whoever fair and chaste\nRejects mankind, is by some sylph embrac’d:\nFor spirits, freed from mortal laws, with ease\nAssume what sexes and what shapes they please.\nWhat guards the purity of melting maids,\nIn courtly balls, and midnight masquerades,\nSafe from the treach’rous friend, the daring spark,\nThe glance by day, the whisper in the dark,\nWhen kind occasion prompts their warm desires,\nWhen music softens, and when dancing fires?\n’Tis but their sylph, the wise celestials know,\nThough honour is the word with men below.\n\nSome nymphs there are, too conscious of their face,\nFor life predestin’d to the gnomes’ embrace.\nThese swell their prospects and exalt their pride,\nWhen offers are disdain’d, and love denied:\nThen gay ideas crowd the vacant brain,\nWhile peers, and dukes, and all their sweeping train,\nAnd garters, stars, and coronets appear,\nAnd in soft sounds ‘Your Grace’ salutes their ear.\n’Tis these that early taint the female soul,\nInstruct the eyes of young coquettes to roll,\nTeach infant cheeks a bidden blush to know,\nAnd little hearts to flutter at a beau.\n\nOft, when the world imagine women stray,\nThe Sylphs through mystic mazes guide their way,\nThro’ all the giddy circle they pursue,\nAnd old impertinence expel by new.\nWhat tender maid but must a victim fall\nTo one man’s treat, but for another’s ball?\nWhen Florio speaks, what virgin could withstand,\nIf gentle Damon did not squeeze her hand?\nWith varying vanities, from ev’ry part,\nThey shift the moving toyshop of their heart;\nWhere wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive,\nBeaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive.\nThis erring mortals levity may call,\nOh blind to truth! the Sylphs contrive it all.\n\nOf these am I, who thy protection claim,\nA watchful sprite, and Ariel is my name.\nLate, as I rang’d the crystal wilds of air,\nIn the clear mirror of thy ruling star\nI saw, alas! some dread event impend,\nEre to the main this morning sun descend,\nBut Heav’n reveals not what, or how, or where:\nWarn’d by the Sylph, oh pious maid, beware!\nThis to disclose is all thy guardian can.\nBeware of all, but most beware of man!”\n\nHe said; when Shock, who thought she slept too long,\nLeap’d up, and wak’d his mistress with his tongue.\n’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,\nThy eyes first open’d on a billet-doux;\nWounds, charms, and ardors were no sooner read,\nBut all the vision vanish’d from thy head.\n\nAnd now, unveil’d, the toilet stands display’d,\nEach silver vase in mystic order laid.\nFirst, rob’d in white, the nymph intent adores\nWith head uncover’d, the cosmetic pow’rs.\nA heav’nly image in the glass appears,\nTo that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;\nTh’ inferior priestess, at her altar’s side,\nTrembling, begins the sacred rites of pride.\nUnnumber’d treasures ope at once, and here\nThe various off’rings of the world appear;\nFrom each she nicely culls with curious toil,\nAnd decks the goddess with the glitt’ring spoil.\nThis casket India’s glowing gems unlocks,\nAnd all Arabia breathes from yonder box.\nThe tortoise here and elephant unite,\nTransform’d to combs, the speckled and the white.\nHere files of pins extend their shining rows,\nPuffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.\nNow awful beauty puts on all its arms;\nThe fair each moment rises in her charms,\nRepairs her smiles, awakens ev’ry grace,\nAnd calls forth all the wonders of her face;\nSees by degrees a purer blush arise,\nAnd keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.\nThe busy Sylphs surround their darling care;\nThese set the head, and those divide the hair,\nSome fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown;\nAnd Betty’s prais’d for labours not her own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-2": { - "title": "From “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 2”", - "body": "Not with more glories, in th’ etherial plain,\nThe sun first rises o’er the purpled main,\nThan, issuing forth, the rival of his beams\nLaunch’d on the bosom of the silver Thames.\nFair nymphs, and well-dress’d youths around her shone,\nBut ev’ry eye was fix’d on her alone.\nOn her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,\nWhich Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.\nHer lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,\nQuick as her eyes, and as unfix’d as those:\nFavours to none, to all she smiles extends;\nOft she rejects, but never once offends.\nBright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,\nAnd, like the sun, they shine on all alike.\nYet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,\nMight hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:\nIf to her share some female errors fall,\nLook on her face, and you’ll forget ’em all.\nThis nymph, to the destruction of mankind,\nNourish’d two locks, which graceful hung behind\nIn equal curls, and well conspir’d to deck\nWith shining ringlets the smooth iv’ry neck.\nLove in these labyrinths his slaves detains,\nAnd mighty hearts are held in slender chains.\nWith hairy springes we the birds betray,\nSlight lines of hair surprise the finney prey,\nFair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,\nAnd beauty draws us with a single hair.\nTh’ advent’rous baron the bright locks admir’d;\nHe saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.\nResolv’d to win, he meditates the way,\nBy force to ravish, or by fraud betray;\nFor when success a lover’s toil attends,\nFew ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.\nFor this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implor’d\nPropitious Heav’n, and ev’ry pow’r ador’d,\nBut chiefly love--to love an altar built,\nOf twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt.\nThere lay three garters, half a pair of gloves;\nAnd all the trophies of his former loves;\nWith tender billet-doux he lights the pyre,\nAnd breathes three am’rous sighs to raise the fire.\nThen prostrate falls, and begs with ardent eyes\nSoon to obtain, and long possess the prize:\nThe pow’rs gave ear, and granted half his pray’r,\nThe rest, the winds dispers’d in empty air.\n\nBut now secure the painted vessel glides,\nThe sun-beams trembling on the floating tides,\nWhile melting music steals upon the sky,\nAnd soften’d sounds along the waters die.\nSmooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,\nBelinda smil’d, and all the world was gay.\nAll but the Sylph--with careful thoughts opprest,\nTh’ impending woe sat heavy on his breast.\nHe summons strait his denizens of air;\nThe lucid squadrons round the sails repair:\nSoft o’er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe,\nThat seem’d but zephyrs to the train beneath.\nSome to the sun their insect-wings unfold,\nWaft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold.\nTransparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,\nTheir fluid bodies half dissolv’d in light,\nLoose to the wind their airy garments flew,\nThin glitt’ring textures of the filmy dew;\nDipp’d in the richest tincture of the skies,\nWhere light disports in ever-mingling dyes,\nWhile ev’ry beam new transient colours flings,\nColours that change whene’er they wave their wings.\nAmid the circle, on the gilded mast,\nSuperior by the head, was Ariel plac’d;\nHis purple pinions op’ning to the sun,\nHe rais’d his azure wand, and thus begun.\n\n“Ye Sylphs and Sylphids, to your chief give ear!\nFays, Fairies, Genii, Elves, and Daemons, hear!\nYe know the spheres and various tasks assign’d\nBy laws eternal to th’ aerial kind.\nSome in the fields of purest aether play,\nAnd bask and whiten in the blaze of day.\nSome guide the course of wand’ring orbs on high,\nOr roll the planets through the boundless sky.\nSome less refin’d, beneath the moon’s pale light\nPursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,\nOr suck the mists in grosser air below,\nOr dip their pinions in the painted bow,\nOr brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,\nOr o’er the glebe distil the kindly rain.\nOthers on earth o’er human race preside,\nWatch all their ways, and all their actions guide:\nOf these the chief the care of nations own,\nAnd guard with arms divine the British throne.”\n\n“Our humbler province is to tend the fair,\nNot a less pleasing, though less glorious care.\nTo save the powder from too rude a gale,\nNor let th’ imprison’d essences exhale,\nTo draw fresh colours from the vernal flow’rs,\nTo steal from rainbows e’er they drop in show’rs\nA brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,\nAssist their blushes, and inspire their airs;\nNay oft, in dreams, invention we bestow,\nTo change a flounce, or add a furbelow.”\n\n“This day, black omens threat the brightest fair\nThat e’er deserv’d a watchful spirit’s care;\nSome dire disaster, or by force, or slight,\nBut what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night.\nWhether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,\nOr some frail china jar receive a flaw;\nOr stain her honour, or her new brocade,\nForget her pray’rs, or miss a masquerade;\nOr lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball;\nOr whether Heav’n has doom’d that Shock must fall.\nHaste, then, ye spirits! to your charge repair:\nThe flutt’ring fan be Zephyretta’s care;\nThe drops to thee, Brillante, we consign;\nAnd, Momentilla, let the watch be thine;\nDo thou, Crispissa, tend her fav’rite lock;\nAriel himself shall be the guard of Shock.”\n“To fifty chosen Sylphs, of special note,\nWe trust th’ important charge, the petticoat:\nOft have we known that sev’n-fold fence to fail,\nThough stiff with hoops, and arm’d with ribs of whale.\nForm a strong line about the silver bound,\nAnd guard the wide circumference around.”\n“Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,\nHis post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,\nShall feel sharp vengeance soon o’ertake his sins,\nBe stopp’d in vials, or transfix’d with pins;\nOr plung’d in lakes of bitter washes lie,\nOr wedg’d whole ages in a bodkin’s eye:\nGums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,\nWhile clogg’d he beats his silken wings in vain;\nOr alum styptics with contracting pow’r\nShrink his thin essence like a rivell’d flow’r.\nOr, as Ixion fix’d, the wretch shall feel\nThe giddy motion of the whirling mill,\nIn fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,\nAnd tremble at the sea that froths below!”\nHe spoke; the spirits from the sails descend;\nSome, orb in orb, around the nymph extend,\nSome thrid the mazy ringlets of her hair,\nSome hang upon the pendants of her ear;\nWith beating hearts the dire event they wait,\nAnxious, and trembling for the birth of fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-3": { - "title": "From “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3”", - "body": "Close by those meads, for ever crown’d with flow’rs,\nWhere Thames with pride surveys his rising tow’rs,\nThere stands a structure of majestic frame,\nWhich from the neighb’ring Hampton takes its name.\nHere Britain’s statesmen oft the fall foredoom\nOf foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home;\nHere thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,\nDost sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea.\nHither the heroes and the nymphs resort,\nTo taste awhile the pleasures of a court;\nIn various talk th’ instructive hours they pass’d,\nWho gave the ball, or paid the visit last;\nOne speaks the glory of the British queen,\nAnd one describes a charming Indian screen;\nA third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;\nAt ev’ry word a reputation dies.\nSnuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,\nWith singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.\n\nMeanwhile, declining from the noon of day,\nThe sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;\nThe hungry judges soon the sentence sign,\nAnd wretches hang that jury-men may dine;\nThe merchant from th’ Exchange returns in peace,\nAnd the long labours of the toilet cease.\nBelinda now, whom thirst of fame invites,\nBurns to encounter two adventrous knights,\nAt ombre singly to decide their doom;\nAnd swells her breast with conquests yet to come.\nStraight the three bands prepare in arms to join,\nEach band the number of the sacred nine.\nSoon as she spreads her hand, th’ aerial guard\nDescend, and sit on each important card:\nFirst Ariel perch’d upon a Matadore,\nThen each, according to the rank they bore;\nFor Sylphs, yet mindful of their ancient race,\nAre, as when women, wondrous fond of place.\n\nBehold, four Kings in majesty rever’d,\nWith hoary whiskers and a forky beard;\nAnd four fair Queens whose hands sustain a flow’r,\nTh’ expressive emblem of their softer pow’r;\nFour Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band,\nCaps on their heads, and halberds in their hand;\nAnd parti-colour’d troops, a shining train,\nDraw forth to combat on the velvet plain.\n\nThe skilful nymph reviews her force with care:\n“Let Spades be trumps!” she said, and trumps they were.\n\nNow move to war her sable Matadores,\nIn show like leaders of the swarthy Moors.\nSpadillio first, unconquerable lord!\nLed off two captive trumps, and swept the board.\nAs many more Manillio forc’d to yield,\nAnd march’d a victor from the verdant field.\nHim Basto follow’d, but his fate more hard\nGain’d but one trump and one plebeian card.\nWith his broad sabre next, a chief in years,\nThe hoary Majesty of Spades appears;\nPuts forth one manly leg, to sight reveal’d;\nThe rest, his many-colour’d robe conceal’d.\nThe rebel Knave, who dares his prince engage,\nProves the just victim of his royal rage.\nEv’n mighty Pam, that kings and queens o’erthrew\nAnd mow’d down armies in the fights of loo,\nSad chance of war! now destitute of aid,\nFalls undistinguish’d by the victor Spade!\n\nThus far both armies to Belinda yield;\nNow to the baron fate inclines the field.\nHis warlike Amazon her host invades,\nTh’ imperial consort of the crown of Spades.\nThe Club’s black tyrant first her victim died,\nSpite of his haughty mien, and barb’rous pride:\nWhat boots the regal circle on his head,\nHis giant limbs, in state unwieldy spread;\nThat long behind he trails his pompous robe,\nAnd of all monarchs, only grasps the globe?\n\nThe baron now his diamonds pours apace;\nTh’ embroider’d King who shows but half his face,\nAnd his refulgent Queen, with pow’rs combin’d\nOf broken troops an easy conquest find.\nClubs, Diamonds, Hearts, in wild disorder seen,\nWith throngs promiscuous strow the level green.\nThus when dispers’d a routed army runs,\nOf Asia’s troops, and Afric’s sable sons,\nWith like confusion diff’rent nations fly,\nOf various habit, and of various dye,\nThe pierc’d battalions disunited fall.\nIn heaps on heaps; one fate o’erwhelms them all.\n\nThe Knave of Diamonds tries his wily arts,\nAnd wins (oh shameful chance!) the Queen of Hearts.\nAt this, the blood the virgin’s cheek forsook,\nA livid paleness spreads o’er all her look;\nShe sees, and trembles at th’ approaching ill,\nJust in the jaws of ruin, and codille.\nAnd now (as oft in some distemper’d state)\nOn one nice trick depends the gen’ral fate.\nAn Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen\nLurk’d in her hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen:\nHe springs to vengeance with an eager pace,\nAnd falls like thunder on the prostrate Ace.\nThe nymph exulting fills with shouts the sky;\nThe walls, the woods, and long canals reply.\n\nOh thoughtless mortals! ever blind to fate,\nToo soon dejected, and too soon elate!\nSudden, these honours shall be snatch’d away,\nAnd curs’d for ever this victorious day.\n\nFor lo! the board with cups and spoons is crown’d,\nThe berries crackle, and the mill turns round.\nOn shining altars of Japan they raise\nThe silver lamp; the fiery spirits blaze.\nFrom silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,\nWhile China’s earth receives the smoking tide.\nAt once they gratify their scent and taste,\nAnd frequent cups prolong the rich repast.\nStraight hover round the fair her airy band;\nSome, as she sipp’d, the fuming liquor fann’d,\nSome o’er her lap their careful plumes display’d,\nTrembling, and conscious of the rich brocade.\nCoffee, (which makes the politician wise,\nAnd see through all things with his half-shut eyes)\nSent up in vapours to the baron’s brain\nNew stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.\nAh cease, rash youth! desist ere ’tis too late,\nFear the just gods, and think of Scylla’s fate!\nChang’d to a bird, and sent to flit in air,\nShe dearly pays for Nisus’ injur’d hair!\n\nBut when to mischief mortals bend their will,\nHow soon they find fit instruments of ill!\nJust then, Clarissa drew with tempting grace\nA two-edg’d weapon from her shining case;\nSo ladies in romance assist their knight\nPresent the spear, and arm him for the fight.\nHe takes the gift with rev’rence, and extends\nThe little engine on his fingers’ ends;\nThis just behind Belinda’s neck he spread,\nAs o’er the fragrant steams she bends her head.\nSwift to the lock a thousand sprites repair,\nA thousand wings, by turns, blow back the hair,\nAnd thrice they twitch’d the diamond in her ear,\nThrice she look’d back, and thrice the foe drew near.\nJust in that instant, anxious Ariel sought\nThe close recesses of the virgin’s thought;\nAs on the nosegay in her breast reclin’d,\nHe watch’d th’ ideas rising in her mind,\nSudden he view’d, in spite of all her art,\nAn earthly lover lurking at her heart.\nAmaz’d, confus’d, he found his pow’r expir’d,\nResign’d to fate, and with a sigh retir’d.\n\nThe peer now spreads the glitt’ring forfex wide,\nT’ inclose the lock; now joins it, to divide.\nEv’n then, before the fatal engine clos’d,\nA wretched Sylph too fondly interpos’d;\nFate urg’d the shears, and cut the Sylph in twain,\n(But airy substance soon unites again).\nThe meeting points the sacred hair dissever\nFrom the fair head, for ever, and for ever!\n\nThen flash’d the living lightning from her eyes,\nAnd screams of horror rend th’ affrighted skies.\nNot louder shrieks to pitying Heav’n are cast,\nWhen husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last,\nOr when rich China vessels, fall’n from high,\nIn glitt’ring dust and painted fragments lie!\n\n“Let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine,”\nThe victor cried, “the glorious prize is mine!\nWhile fish in streams, or birds delight in air,\nOr in a coach and six the British fair,\nAs long at Atalantis shall be read,\nOr the small pillow grace a lady’s bed,\nWhile visits shall be paid on solemn days,\nWhen num’rous wax-lights in bright order blaze,\nWhile nymphs take treats, or assignations give,\nSo long my honour, name, and praise shall live!\nWhat time would spare, from steel receives its date,\nAnd monuments, like men, submit to fate!\nSteel could the labour of the gods destroy,\nAnd strike to dust th’ imperial tow’rs of Troy;\nSteel could the works of mortal pride confound,\nAnd hew triumphal arches to the ground.\nWhat wonder then, fair nymph! thy hairs should feel\nThe conqu’ring force of unresisted steel?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-4": { - "title": "From “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 4”", - "body": "But anxious cares the pensive nymph oppress’d,\nAnd secret passions labour’d in her breast.\nNot youthful kings in battle seiz’d alive,\nNot scornful virgins who their charms survive,\nNot ardent lovers robb’d of all their bliss,\nNot ancient ladies when refus’d a kiss,\nNot tyrants fierce that unrepenting die,\nNot Cynthia when her manteau’s pinn’d awry,\nE’er felt such rage, resentment, and despair,\nAs thou, sad virgin! for thy ravish’d hair.\n\nFor, that sad moment, when the Sylphs withdrew,\nAnd Ariel weeping from Belinda flew,\nUmbriel, a dusky, melancholy sprite,\nAs ever sullied the fair face of light,\nDown to the central earth, his proper scene,\nRepair’d to search the gloomy cave of Spleen.\n\nSwift on his sooty pinions flits the Gnome,\nAnd in a vapour reach’d the dismal dome.\nNo cheerful breeze this sullen region knows,\nThe dreaded East is all the wind that blows.\nHere, in a grotto, shelter’d close from air,\nAnd screen’d in shades from day’s detested glare,\nShe sighs for ever on her pensive bed,\nPain at her side, and Megrim at her head.\n\nTwo handmaids wait the throne: alike in place,\nBut diff’ring far in figure and in face.\nHere stood Ill Nature like an ancient maid,\nHer wrinkled form in black and white array’d;\nWith store of pray’rs, for mornings, nights, and noons,\nHer hand is fill’d; her bosom with lampoons.\n\nThere Affectation, with a sickly mien,\nShows in her cheek the roses of eighteen,\nPractis’d to lisp, and hang the head aside,\nFaints into airs, and languishes with pride,\nOn the rich quilt sinks with becoming woe,\nWrapp’d in a gown, for sickness, and for show.\nThe fair ones feel such maladies as these,\nWhen each new night-dress gives a new disease.\n\nA constant vapour o’er the palace flies;\nStrange phantoms, rising as the mists arise;\nDreadful, as hermit’s dreams in haunted shades,\nOr bright, as visions of expiring maids.\nNow glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires,\nPale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires:\nNow lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes,\nAnd crystal domes, and angels in machines.\n\nUnnumber’d throngs on ev’ry side are seen,\nOf bodies chang’d to various forms by Spleen.\nHere living teapots stand, one arm held out,\nOne bent; the handle this, and that the spout:\nA pipkin there, like Homer’s tripod walks;\nHere sighs a jar, and there a goose pie talks;\nMen prove with child, as pow’rful fancy works,\nAnd maids turn’d bottles, call aloud for corks.\n\nSafe pass’d the Gnome through this fantastic band,\nA branch of healing spleenwort in his hand.\nThen thus address’d the pow’r: “Hail, wayward Queen!\nWho rule the sex to fifty from fifteen:\nParent of vapours and of female wit,\nWho give th’ hysteric, or poetic fit,\nOn various tempers act by various ways,\nMake some take physic, others scribble plays;\nWho cause the proud their visits to delay,\nAnd send the godly in a pet to pray.\nA nymph there is, that all thy pow’r disdains,\nAnd thousands more in equal mirth maintains.\nBut oh! if e’er thy gnome could spoil a grace,\nOr raise a pimple on a beauteous face,\nLike citron waters matrons’ cheeks inflame,\nOr change complexions at a losing game;\nIf e’er with airy horns I planted heads,\nOr rumpled petticoats, or tumbled beds,\nOr caus’d suspicion when no soul was rude,\nOr discompos’d the head-dress of a prude,\nOr e’er to costive lap-dog gave disease,\nWhich not the tears of brightest eyes could ease:\nHear me, and touch Belinda with chagrin;\nThat single act gives half the world the spleen.”\n\nThe goddess with a discontented air\nSeems to reject him, though she grants his pray’r.\nA wondrous bag with both her hands she binds,\nLike that where once Ulysses held the winds;\nThere she collects the force of female lungs,\nSighs, sobs, and passions, and the war of tongues.\nA vial next she fills with fainting fears,\nSoft sorrows, melting griefs, and flowing tears.\nThe Gnome rejoicing bears her gifts away,\nSpreads his black wings, and slowly mounts to day.\n\nSunk in Thalestris’ arms the nymph he found,\nHer eyes dejected and her hair unbound.\nFull o’er their heads the swelling bag he rent,\nAnd all the Furies issu’d at the vent.\nBelinda burns with more than mortal ire,\nAnd fierce Thalestris fans the rising fire.\n“Oh wretched maid!” she spread her hands, and cried,\nWhile Hampton’s echoes, “Wretched maid!” replied,\n“Was it for this you took such constant care\nThe bodkin, comb, and essence to prepare?\nFor this your locks in paper durance bound,\nFor this with tort’ring irons wreath’d around?\nFor this with fillets strain’d your tender head,\nAnd bravely bore the double loads of lead?\nGods! shall the ravisher display your hair,\nWhile the fops envy, and the ladies stare!\nHonour forbid! at whose unrivall’d shrine\nEase, pleasure, virtue, all, our sex resign.\nMethinks already I your tears survey,\nAlready hear the horrid things they say,\nAlready see you a degraded toast,\nAnd all your honour in a whisper lost!\nHow shall I, then, your helpless fame defend?\n’Twill then be infamy to seem your friend!\nAnd shall this prize, th’ inestimable prize,\nExpos’d through crystal to the gazing eyes,\nAnd heighten’d by the diamond’s circling rays,\nOn that rapacious hand for ever blaze?\nSooner shall grass in Hyde Park Circus grow,\nAnd wits take lodgings in the sound of Bow;\nSooner let earth, air, sea, to chaos fall,\nMen, monkeys, lap-dogs, parrots, perish all!”\n\nShe said; then raging to Sir Plume repairs,\nAnd bids her beau demand the precious hairs:\n(Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain,\nAnd the nice conduct of a clouded cane)\nWith earnest eyes, and round unthinking face,\nHe first the snuffbox open’d, then the case,\nAnd thus broke out--“My Lord, why, what the devil?\nZounds! damn the lock! ’fore Gad, you must be civil!\nPlague on’t! ’tis past a jest--nay prithee, pox!\nGive her the hair”--he spoke, and rapp’d his box.\n\n“It grieves me much,” replied the peer again,\n“Who speaks so well should ever speak in vain.\nBut by this lock, this sacred lock I swear,\n(Which never more shall join its parted hair;\nWhich never more its honours shall renew,\nClipp’d from the lovely head where late it grew)\nThat while my nostrils draw the vital air,\nThis hand, which won it, shall for ever wear.”\nHe spoke, and speaking, in proud triumph spread\nThe long-contended honours of her head.\n\nBut Umbriel, hateful gnome! forbears not so;\nHe breaks the vial whence the sorrows flow.\nThen see! the nymph in beauteous grief appears,\nHer eyes half-languishing, half-drown’d in tears;\nOn her heav’d bosom hung her drooping head,\nWhich, with a sigh, she rais’d; and thus she said:\n\n“For ever curs’d be this detested day,\nWhich snatch’d my best, my fav’rite curl away!\nHappy! ah ten times happy, had I been,\nIf Hampton Court these eyes had never seen!\nYet am not I the first mistaken maid,\nBy love of courts to num’rous ills betray’d.\nOh had I rather unadmir’d remain’d\nIn some lone isle, or distant northern land;\nWhere the gilt chariot never marks the way,\nWhere none learn ombre, none e’er taste bohea!\nThere kept my charms conceal’d from mortal eye,\nLike roses, that in deserts bloom and die.\nWhat mov’d my mind with youthful lords to roam?\nOh had I stay’d, and said my pray’rs at home!\n’Twas this, the morning omens seem’d to tell,\nThrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell;\nThe tott’ring china shook without a wind,\nNay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind!\nA Sylph too warn’d me of the threats of fate,\nIn mystic visions, now believ’d too late!\nSee the poor remnants of these slighted hairs!\nMy hands shall rend what ev’n thy rapine spares:\nThese, in two sable ringlets taught to break,\nOnce gave new beauties to the snowy neck.\nThe sister-lock now sits uncouth, alone,\nAnd in its fellow’s fate foresees its own;\nUncurl’d it hangs, the fatal shears demands\nAnd tempts once more thy sacrilegious hands.\nOh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize\nHairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-rape-of-the-lock-canto-5": { - "title": "From “The Rape of the Lock: Canto 5”", - "body": "She said: the pitying audience melt in tears,\nBut Fate and Jove had stopp’d the Baron’s ears.\nIn vain Thalestris with reproach assails,\nFor who can move when fair Belinda fails?\nNot half so fix’d the Trojan could remain,\nWhile Anna begg’d and Dido rag’d in vain.\nThen grave Clarissa graceful wav’d her fan;\nSilence ensu’d, and thus the nymph began.\n“Say, why are beauties prais’d and honour’d most,\nThe wise man’s passion, and the vain man’s toast?\nWhy deck’d with all that land and sea afford,\nWhy angels call’d, and angel-like ador’d?\nWhy round our coaches crowd the white-glov’d beaux,\nWhy bows the side-box from its inmost rows?\nHow vain are all these glories, all our pains,\nUnless good sense preserve what beauty gains:\nThat men may say, when we the front-box grace:\n‘Behold the first in virtue, as in face!’\nOh! if to dance all night, and dress all day,\nCharm’d the smallpox, or chas’d old age away;\nWho would not scorn what housewife’s cares produce,\nOr who would learn one earthly thing of use?\nTo patch, nay ogle, might become a saint,\nNor could it sure be such a sin to paint.\nBut since, alas! frail beauty must decay,\nCurl’d or uncurl’d, since locks will turn to grey,\nSince painted, or not painted, all shall fade,\nAnd she who scorns a man, must die a maid;\nWhat then remains but well our pow’r to use,\nAnd keep good humour still whate’er we lose?\nAnd trust me, dear! good humour can prevail,\nWhen airs, and flights, and screams, and scolding fail.\nBeauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;\nCharms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”\n\nSo spoke the dame, but no applause ensu’d;\nBelinda frown’d, Thalestris call’d her prude.\n“To arms, to arms!” the fierce virago cries,\nAnd swift as lightning to the combat flies.\nAll side in parties, and begin th’ attack;\nFans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack;\nHeroes’ and heroines’ shouts confus’dly rise,\nAnd bass, and treble voices strike the skies.\nNo common weapons in their hands are found,\nLike gods they fight, nor dread a mortal wound.\n\nSo when bold Homer makes the gods engage,\nAnd heav’nly breasts with human passions rage;\n’Gainst Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes arms;\nAnd all Olympus rings with loud alarms.\nJove’s thunder roars, heav’n trembles all around;\nBlue Neptune storms, the bellowing deeps resound;\nEarth shakes her nodding tow’rs, the ground gives way;\nAnd the pale ghosts start at the flash of day!\n\nTriumphant Umbriel on a sconce’s height\nClapp’d his glad wings, and sate to view the fight:\nPropp’d on their bodkin spears, the sprites survey\nThe growing combat, or assist the fray.\n\nWhile through the press enrag’d Thalestris flies,\nAnd scatters death around from both her eyes,\nA beau and witling perish’d in the throng,\nOne died in metaphor, and one in song.\n“O cruel nymph! a living death I bear,”\nCried Dapperwit, and sunk beside his chair.\nA mournful glance Sir Fopling upwards cast,\n“Those eyes are made so killing”--was his last.\nThus on Maeeander’s flow’ry margin lies\nTh’ expiring swan, and as he sings he dies.\n\nWhen bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down,\nChloe stepp’d in, and kill’d him with a frown;\nShe smil’d to see the doughty hero slain,\nBut at her smile, the beau reviv’d again.\n\nNow Jove suspends his golden scales in air,\nWeighs the men’s wits against the lady’s hair;\nThe doubtful beam long nods from side to side;\nAt length the wits mount up, the hairs subside.\n\nSee, fierce Belinda on the baron flies,\nWith more than usual lightning in her eyes,\nNor fear’d the chief th’ unequal fight to try,\nWho sought no more than on his foe to die.\nBut this bold lord with manly strength endu’d,\nShe with one finger and a thumb subdu’d:\nJust where the breath of life his nostrils drew,\nA charge of snuff the wily virgin threw;\nThe Gnomes direct, to ev’ry atom just,\nThe pungent grains of titillating dust.\nSudden, with starting tears each eye o’erflows,\nAnd the high dome re-echoes to his nose.\n\n“Now meet thy fate,” incens’d Belinda cried,\nAnd drew a deadly bodkin from her side.\n(The same, his ancient personage to deck,\nHer great great grandsire wore about his neck\nIn three seal-rings; which after, melted down,\nForm’d a vast buckle for his widow’s gown:\nHer infant grandame’s whistle next it grew,\nThe bells she jingled, and the whistle blew;\nThen in a bodkin grac’d her mother’s hairs,\nWhich long she wore, and now Belinda wears.)\n\n“Boast not my fall,” he cried, “insulting foe!\nThou by some other shalt be laid as low.\nNor think, to die dejects my lofty mind;\nAll that I dread is leaving you benind!\nRather than so, ah let me still survive,\nAnd burn in Cupid’s flames--but burn alive.”\n\n“Restore the lock!” she cries; and all around\n“Restore the lock!” the vaulted roofs rebound.\nNot fierce Othello in so loud a strain\nRoar’d for the handkerchief that caus’d his pain.\nBut see how oft ambitious aims are cross’d,\nThe chiefs contend ’till all the prize is lost!\nThe lock, obtain’d with guilt, and kept with pain,\nIn ev’ry place is sought, but sought in vain:\nWith such a prize no mortal must be blest,\nSo Heav’n decrees! with Heav’n who can contest?\n\nSome thought it mounted to the lunar sphere,\nSince all things lost on earth are treasur’d there.\nThere hero’s wits are kept in pond’rous vases,\nAnd beaux’ in snuff boxes and tweezercases.\nThere broken vows and deathbed alms are found,\nAnd lovers’ hearts with ends of riband bound;\nThe courtier’s promises, and sick man’s prayers,\nThe smiles of harlots, and the tears of heirs,\nCages for gnats, and chains to yoke a flea,\nDried butterflies, and tomes of casuistry.\n\nBut trust the Muse--she saw it upward rise,\nThough mark’d by none but quick, poetic eyes:\n(So Rome’s great founder to the heav’ns withdrew,\nTo Proculus alone confess’d in view)\nA sudden star, it shot through liquid air,\nAnd drew behind a radiant trail of hair.\nNot Berenice’s locks first rose so bright,\nThe heav’ns bespangling with dishevell’d light.\nThe Sylphs behold it kindling as it flies,\nAnd pleas’d pursue its progress through the skies.\n\nThis the beau monde shall from the Mall survey,\nAnd hail with music its propitious ray.\nThis the blest lover shall for Venus take,\nAnd send up vows from Rosamonda’s lake.\nThis Partridge soon shall view in cloudless skies,\nWhen next he looks through Galileo’s eyes;\nAnd hence th’ egregious wizard shall foredoom\nThe fate of Louis, and the fall of Rome.\n\nThen cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravish’d hair,\nWhich adds new glory to the shining sphere!\nNot all the tresses that fair head can boast\nShall draw such envy as the lock you lost.\nFor, after all the murders of your eye,\nWhen, after millions slain, yourself shall die:\nWhen those fair suns shall set, as set they must,\nAnd all those tresses shall be laid in dust,\nThis lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame\nAnd ’midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-riddle-of-the-world": { - "title": "“The Riddle of the World”", - "body": "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan\nThe proper study of Mankind is Man.\nPlaced on this isthmus of a middle state,\nA Being darkly wise, and rudely great:\nWith too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,\nWith too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,\nHe hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;\nIn doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;\nIn doubt his mind and body to prefer;\nBorn but to die, and reas’ning but to err;\nWhether he thinks to little, or too much;\nChaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;\nStill by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;\nCreated half to rise and half to fall;\nGreat Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,\nSole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;\nThe glory, jest and riddle of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "solitude": { - "title": "“Solitude”", - "body": "Happy the man, whose wish and care\nA few paternal acres bound,\nContent to breathe his native air\n In his own ground.\n\nWhose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,\nWhose flocks supply him with attire;\nWhose trees in summer yield shade,\n In winter, fire.\n\nBlest, who can unconcern’dly find\nHours, days, and years, slide soft away\nIn health of body, peace of mind,\n Quiet by day.\n\nSound sleep by night; study and ease\nTogether mixed; sweet recreation,\nAnd innocence, which most does please\n With meditation.\n\nThus let me live, unseen, unknown;\nThus unlamented let me die;\nSteal from the world, and not a stone\n Tell where I lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "See what delights in sylvan scenes appear!\nDescending Gods have found Elysium here.\nIn woods bright Venus with Adonis stray’d,\nAnd chaste Diana haunts the forest shade.\nCome lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours,\nWhen swains from shearing seek their nightly bow’rs;\nWhen weary reapers quit the sultry field,\nAnd crown’d with corn, their thanks to Ceres yield.\nThis harmless grove no lurking viper hides,\nBut in my breast the serpent Love abides.\nHere bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew,\nBut your Alexis knows no sweets but you.\nOh deign to visit our forsaken seats,\nThe mossy fountains, and the green retreats!\nWhere-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,\nTrees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,\nWhere-e’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise,\nAnd all things flourish where you turn your eyes.\nOh! How I long with you to pass my days,\nInvoke the muses, and resound your praise;\nYour praise the birds shall chant in ev’ry grove,\nAnd winds shall waft it to the pow’rs above.\nBut wou’d you sing, and rival Orpheus’ strain,\nThe wond’ring forests soon shou’d dance again,\nThe moving mountains hear the pow’rful call,\nAnd headlong streams hang list’ning in their fall!\nBut see, the shepherds shun the noon-day heat,\nThe lowing herds to murm’ring brooks retreat,\nTo closer shades the panting flocks remove,\nYe Gods! And is there no relief for Love?\nBut soon the sun with milder rays descends\nTo the cool ocean, where his journey ends;\nOn me Love’s fiercer flames for every prey,\nBy night he scorches, as he burns by day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "anne-porter": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anne Porter", - "birth": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Porter", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "an-altogether-different-language": { - "title": "“An Altogether Different Language”", - "body": "There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion,\nAlready old eight hundred years ago.\nIt was abandoned and in disrepair\nBut it was called St. Mary of the Angels\nFor it was known to be the haunt of angels,\nOften at night the country people\nCould hear them singing there.\n\nWhat was it like, to listen to the angels,\nTo hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices\nPoured out on the bare stones of Little Portion\nIn hymns of joy?\nNo one has told us.\nPerhaps it needs another language\nThat we have still to learn,\nAn altogether different language.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leavetaking": { - "title": "“Leavetaking”", - "body": "Nearing the start of that mysterious last season\nWhich brings us to the close of the other four,\nI’m somewhat afraid and don’t know how to prepare\nSo I will praise you.\n\nI will praise you for the glaze on buttercups\nAnd for the pearly scent of wild fresh water\nAnd the great crossbow shapes of swans flying over\nWith that strong silken threshing sound of wings\nWhich you gave them when you made them without voices.\n\nAnd I will praise you for crickets.\nOn starry autumn nights\nWhen the earth is cooling\nTheir rusty diminutive music\nRepeated over and over\nIs the very marrow of peace.\n\nAnd I praise you for crows calling from treetops\nThe speech of my first village,\nAnd for the sparrow’s flash of song\nFlinging me in an instant\nThe joy of a child who woke\nEach morning to the freedom\nOf her mother’s unclouded love\nAnd lived in it like a country.\n\nAnd I praise you that from vacant lots\nFrom only broken glass and candy wrappers\nYou raise up the blue chicory flowers.\n\nI thank you for that secret praise\nWhich burns in every creature,\nAnd I ask you to bring us to life\nOut of every sort of death\n\nAnd teach us mercy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "noel": { - "title": "“Noel”", - "body": "When snow is shaken\nFrom the balsam trees\nAnd they’re cut down\nAnd brought into our houses\n\nWhen clustered sparks\nOf many-colored fire\nAppear at night\nIn ordinary windows\n\nWe hear and sing\nThe customary carols\n\nThey bring us ragged miracles\nAnd hay and candles\nAnd flowering weeds of poetry\nThat are loved all the more\nBecause they are so common\n\nBut there are carols\nThat carry phrases\nOf the haunting music\nOf the other world\nA music wild and dangerous\nAs a prophet’s message\n\nOr the fresh truth of children\nWho though they come to us\nFrom our own bodies\nAre altogether new\nWith their small limbs\nAnd birdlike voices\n\nThey look at us\nWith their clear eyes\nAnd ask the piercing questions\nGod alone can answer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-november-sunrise": { - "title": "“A November Sunrise”", - "body": "Wild geese are flocking and calling in pure golden air,\nGlory like that which painters long ago\nSpread as a background for some little hermit\nBeside his cave, giving his cloak away,\nOr for some martyr stretching out\nOn her expected rack.\nA few black cedars grow nearby\nAnd there’s a donkey grazing.\n\nSmall craftsmen, steeped in anonymity like bees,\nGilded their wooden panels, leaving fame to chance,\nLike the maker of this wing-flooded golden sky,\nWho forgives all our ignorance\nBoth of his nature and of his very name,\nFreely accepting our one heedless glance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "susanna": { - "title": "“Susanna”", - "body": "Nobody in the hospital\nCould tell the age\nOf the old woman who\nWas called Susanna\n\nI knew she spoke some English\nAnd that she was an immigrant\nOut of a little country\nTrampled by armies\n\nBecause she had no visitors\nI would stop by to see her\nBut she was always sleeping\n\nAll I could do\nWas to get out her comb\nAnd carefully untangle\nThe tangles in her hair\n\nOne day I was beside her\nWhen she woke up\nOpening small dark eyes\nOf a surprising clearness\n\nShe looked at me and said\nYou want to know the truth?\nI answered Yes\n\nShe said it’s something that\nMy mother told me\n\nThere’s not a single inch\nOf our whole body\nThat the Lord does not love\n\nShe then went back to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "ezra-pound": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ezra Pound", - "birth": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american+italian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸 🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 59 - }, - "poems": { - "and-the-days-are-not-full-enough": { - "title": "“And the Days Are Not Full Enough”", - "body": "And the days are not full enough\nAnd the nights are not full enough\nAnd life slips by like a field mouse\nNot shaking the grass", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "Three spirits came to me\nAnd drew me apart\nTo where the olive boughs\nLay stripped upon the ground:\n\nPale carnage beneath bright mist.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "ballad-for-gloom": { - "title": "“Ballad for Gloom”", - "body": "For God, our God is a gallant foe\nThat playeth behind the veil.\n\nI have loved my God as a child at heart\nThat seeketh deep bosoms for rest,\nI have loved my God as a maid to man--\nBut lo, this thing is best:\n\nTo love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;\nTo meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus’ pale.\n\nI have played with God for a woman,\nI have staked with my God for truth,\nI have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed--\nHis dice be not of ruth.\n\nFor I am made as a naked blade,\nBut hear ye this thing in sooth:\n\nWho loseth to God as man to man\nShall win at the turn of the game.\nI have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet\nBut the ending is the same:\nWho loseth to God as the sword blades lose\nShall win at the end of the game.\n\nFor God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.\nWhom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ballad-of-the-goodly-fere": { - "title": "“Ballad of the Goodly Fere”", - "body": "_Simon Zelotes speaking after the Crucifixion. Fere=Mate, Companion._\n\nHa’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all\nFor the priests and the gallows tree?\nAye lover he was of brawny men,\nO’ ships and the open sea.\n\nWhen they came wi’ a host to take Our Man\nHis smile was good to see,\n“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,\n“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.\n\nAye he sent us out through the crossed high spears\nAnd the scorn of his laugh rang free,\n“Why took ye not me when I walked about\nAlone in the town?” says he.\n\nOh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine\nWhen we last made company,\nNo capon priest was the Goodly Fere\nBut a man o’ men was he.\n\nI ha’ seen him drive a hundred men\nWi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,\nThat they took the high and holy house\nFor their pawn and treasury.\n\nThey’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think\nThough they write it cunningly;\nNo mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere\nBut aye loved the open sea.\n\nIf they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere\nThey are fools to the last degree.\n“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,\n“Though I go to the gallows tree.”\n\n“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,\nAnd wake the dead,” says he,\n“Ye shall see one thing to master all:\n’Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”\n\nA son of God was the Goodly Fere\nThat bade us his brothers be.\nI ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.\nI have seen him upon the tree.\n\nHe cried no cry when they drave the nails\nAnd the blood gushed hot and free,\nThe hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue\nBut never a cry cried he.\n\nI ha’ seen him cow a thousand men\nOn the hills o’ Galilee,\nThey whined as he walked out calm between,\nWi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea,\n\nLike the sea that brooks no voyaging\nWith the winds unleashed and free,\nLike the sea that he cowed at Genseret\nWi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.\n\nA master of men was the Goodly Fere,\nA mate of the wind and sea,\nIf they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere\nThey are fools eternally.\n\nI ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb\nSin’ they nailed him to the tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-bath-tub": { - "title": "“The Bath-Tub”", - "body": "As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,\nWhen the hot water gives out or goes tepid,\nSo is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,\nO my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "before-sleep": { - "title": "“Before Sleep”", - "body": "The lateral vibrations caress me,\nThey leap and caress me,\nThey work pathetically in my favour,\nThey seek my financial good.\n\nShe of the spear stands present.\nThe gods of the underworld attend me, O Annubis,\nThese are they of thy company.\nWith a pathetic solicitude they attend me;\nUndulant,\nTheir realm is the lateral courses.\n\n\nLight!\nI am up to follow thee, Pallas.\nUp and out of their caresses.\nYou were gone up as a rocket,\nBending your passages from right to left and from left to right\nIn the flat projection of a spiral.\nThe gods of drugged sleep attend me,\nWishing me well;\nI am up to follow thee, Pallas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-1": { - "title": "“Canto 1”", - "body": "And then went down to the ship,\nSet keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and\nWe set up mast and sail on that swart ship,\nBore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also\nHeavy with weeping, and winds from sternward\nBore us out onward with bellying canvas,\nCirce’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.\nThen sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,\nThus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.\nSun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,\nCame we then to the bounds of deepest water,\nTo the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities\nCovered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever\nWith glitter of sun-rays\nNor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven\nSwartest night stretched over wretched men there.\nThe ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place\nAforesaid by Circe.\nHere did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,\nAnd drawing sword from my hip\nI dug the ell-square pitkin;\nPoured we libations unto each the dead,\nFirst mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.\nThen prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;\nAs set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best\nFor sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,\nA sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.\nDark blood flowed in the fosse,\nSouls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides\nOf youths and of the old who had borne much;\nSouls stained with recent tears, girls tender,\nMen many, mauled with bronze lance heads,\nBattle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,\nThese many crowded about me; with shouting,\nPallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;\nSlaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;\nPoured ointment, cried to the gods,\nTo Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;\nUnsheathed the narrow sword,\nI sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,\nTill I should hear Tiresias.\nBut first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,\nUnburied, cast on the wide earth,\nLimbs that we left in the house of Circe,\nUnwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.\nPitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:\n“Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?\nCam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?”\n And he in heavy speech:\n“Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle.\nGoing down the long ladder unguarded,\nI fell against the buttress,\nShattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.\nBut thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,\nHeap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:\nA man of no fortune, and with a name to come.\nAnd set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.”\n\nAnd Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,\nHolding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:\n“A second time? why? man of ill star,\nFacing the sunless dead and this joyless region?\nStand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever\nFor soothsay.”\n And I stepped back,\nAnd he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus\nShalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,\nLose all companions.” And then Anticlea came.\nLie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,\nIn officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.\nAnd he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away\nAnd unto Circe.\n Venerandam,\nIn the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,\nCypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden\nGirdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids\nBearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-3": { - "title": "“Canto 3”", - "body": "I sat on the Dogana’s steps\nFor the gondolas cost too much, that year,\nAnd there were not “those girls,” there was one face,\nAnd the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti,”\nAnd the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,\nAnd peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.\n Gods float in the azure air,\nBright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.\nLight: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.\nPanisks, and from the oak, dryas,\nAnd from the apple, maelid,\nThrough all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,\nA-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,\nAnd there are gods upon them,\nAnd in the water, the almond-white swimmers,\nThe silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,\n As Poggio has remarked.\nGreen veins in the turquoise,\nOr, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.\n\nMy Cid rode up to Burgos,\nUp to the studded gate between two towers,\nBeat with his lance butt, and the child came out,\nUna niña de nueve años,\nTo the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,\nReading the writ, voce tinnula:\nThat no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz,\nOn pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike\nAnd both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,\n“And here, Myo Cid, are the seals,\nThe big seal and the writing.”\nAnd he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,\nWith no hawks left there on their perches,\nAnd no clothes there in the presses,\nAnd left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,\nThat big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers,\nTo get pay for his menie;\nBreaking his way to Valencia.\nIgnez de Castro murdered, and a wall\nHere stripped, here made to stand.\nDrear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,\nOr plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.\nSilk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-4": { - "title": "“Canto 4”", - "body": "Palace in smoky light,\nTroy but a heap of smouldering boundary-stones,\nANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!\nHear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!\nThe silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,\nDawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;\nDew-haze blurrs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.\nBeat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees,\nChoros nympharum, goat-foot with the pale foot alternate;\nCrescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,\nA black cock crows in the sea-foam;\n\nAnd by the curved carved foot of the couch,\n claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated\nSpeaking in the low drone: …\n “Ityn!\nEt ter flebiliter. Ityn, Ityn!\nAnd she went toward the window and cast her down,\n All the while, the while, swallows crying:\nItyn!”\n\n“_It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish._”\n“_It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?_”\n“_No other taste shall change this._”\n\nAnd she went toward the window,\n the slim white stone bar\nMaking a double arch;\nFirm even fingers held to the firm pale stone;\nSwung for a moment,\n and the wind out of Rhodez\nCaught in the full of her sleeve.\n… the swallows crying:\n“Ityn! Ityn!”\n\n Actaeon …\n And a valley,\nThe valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,\nThe sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,\nLike a fish-scale roof,\n Like the church-roof in Poictiers\nIf it were gold.\n Beneath it, beneath it\nNot a ray, not a slivver, not a spare disk of sunlight\nFlaking the black, soft water;\nBathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana,\nNymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air,\nShaking, air alight with the goddess\n fanning their hair in the dark,\nLifting, lifting and waffing:\nIvory dipping in silver,\n Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d\n\nIvory dipping in silver,\nNot a splotch, not a lost shatter of sunlight.\nThen Actaeon: Vidal,\nVidal. It is old Vidal speaking,\n stumbling along in the wood,\nNot a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,\n the pale hair of the goddess.\n\nThe dogs leap on Actaeon,\n “Hither, hither, Actaeon,”\nSpotted stag of the wood;\nGold, gold, a sheaf of hair,\n Thick like a wheat swath,\nBlaze, blaze in the sun,\n The dogs leap on Actaeon.\n\nStumbling, stumbling along in the wood,\nMuttering, muttering Ovid:\n “Pergusa … pool … pool … Gargaphia,\nPool, pool of Salmacis.”\n The empty armour shakes as the cygnet moves.\nThus the light rains, thus pours, _e lo soleils plovil_,\nThe liquid, and rushing crystal\n whirls up the bright brown sand.\nPly over ply, thin glitter of water;\nBrook film bearing white petals\n (“The pines of Takasago grow with pines of Isé”)\n “Behold the Tree of the Visages.”\nThe forked tips flaming as if with lotus,\n Ply over ply\nThe shallow eddying fluid\n beneath the knees of the gods.\n\nTorches melt in the glare\n Set flame of the corner cook-stall,\nBlue agate casing the sky, a sputter of resin;\nThe saffron sandal petals the narrow foot, Hymenaeus!\n Io Hymen, Io Hymenaee! Aurunculeia!\nThe scarlet flower is cast on the blanch-white stone,\nArmaracus, Hill of Urania’s Son.\n Meanwhile So-Gioku:\n“This wind, sire, is the king’s wind,\n this wind is wind of the palace\nShaking imperial water-jets.”\n And Ran-Ti, opening his collar:\n“This wind roars in the earth’s bag,\n it lays the water with rushes;”\n“No wind is the king’s wind.\n Let every cow keep her calf.”\n“This wind is held in gauze curtains …”\n “No wind is the king’s …”\n\nThe camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs,\n look down to Ecbatan of plotted streets,\n“Danae! Danae!\n What wind is the king’s?”\nSmoke hangs on the stream,\nThe peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water,\nSound drifts in the evening haze,\n The barge scrapes at the ford.\nGilt rafters above black water;\n three steps in an open field\nGray stone-posts leading nowhither.\n\nThe Spanish poppies swim in an air of glass.\nPère Henri Jacques still seeks the sennin on Rokku. Polhonac,\nAs Gyges on Thracian platter, set the feast;\nCabestan, Terreus.\n It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.\nVidal, tracked out with dogs … for glamour of Loba;\nUpon the gilded tower in Ecbatan\n Lay the god’s bride, lay ever\nWaiting the golden rain.\n Et saave!\nBut to-day, Garonne is thick like paint, beyond Dorada,\nThe worm of the Procession bores in the soup of the crowd\nThe blue thin voices against the crash of the crowd\n Et “Salve regina.”\n\nIn trellises\n Wound over with small flowers, beyond Adige\nIn the but half-used room, thin film of images,\n (by Stefano)\nAge of unbodied gods, the vitreous fragile images\nThin as the locust’s wing\nHaunting the mind … as of Guido …\nThin as the locust’s wing. The Centaur’s heel\nPlants in the earth-loam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-5": { - "title": "“Canto 5”", - "body": "Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus;\nEcbatan, the clock ticks and fades out;\nThe bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan,\nCity of patterned streets; again the vision:\nDown in the viae stradae, toga’d the crowd, and arm’d,\nRushing on populous business, and from parapets\nLooked down--I looked, and thought: at North\nWas Egypt, and the celestial Nile, blue-deep, cutting low barren land,\nOld men and camels working the water-wheels;\n Measureless seas and stars,\nIamblichus’ light, the souls ascending,\nSparks, like a partridge covey,\n From the “ciocco,” brand struck in the game,\n“Et omniformis”:\n Air, fire, the pale soft light.\nTopaz, I manage, and three sorts of blue;\n but on the barb of time.\nThe fire? always, and the vision always,\nEar dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting\nAnd fading at will. Weaving with points of gold,\nGold-yellow, saffron …\n the Roman shoe, Aurunculeia’s\nAnd come shuffling feet, and cries “Da nuces!”\n“Nuces” praise and Hymenaeus “brings the girl to her man,”\nTitter of sound about me, always\n and from Hesperus …\nHush of the older song: “Fades light from seacrest.”\n\n“And in Lydia walks with pair’d women\nPeerless among the pairs, and that once in Sardis\nIn satieties …\n Fades the light from the sea, and many things\nAre set abroad and brought to mind of thee,”\nAnd the vinestocks lie untended, new leaves come to the shoots,\nNorth wind nips on the bough, and seas in heart\nToss up chill crests,\n And the vine stocks lie untended\nAnd many things are set abroad and brought to mind\nOf thee, Atthis, unfruitful.\n The talks ran long in the night.\n\nAnd from Mauleon, fresh with a new earned grade,\nIn maze of approaching rain-steps, Poicebot--\nThe air was full of women. And Savairic Mauleon\nGave him his land and knight’s fee, and he wed the woman.\nCame lust of travel on him, of _romerya_;\nAnd out of England a knight with slow-lifting eyelids\n_Lei fassa furar a del_, put glamour upon her …\n And left her an eight months gone.\n Came lust of woman upon him,\nPoicebot, now on North road from Spain\n(Sea-change, a grey in the water)\n And in small house by town’s edge\nFound a woman, changed and familiar face,\nHard night, and parting at morning.\n And Pieire won the singing,\nSong or land on the throw, Pieire de Maensac,\n and was dreitz hom\nAnd had De Tierci’s wife and with the war they made,\nTroy in Auvergnat.\n\nWhile Menelaus piled up the church at port\nHe kept Tyndarida. Dauphin stood with de Maensac.\nJohn Borgia is bathed at last.\n (Clock-tick pierces the vision)\nTiber, dark with the cloak, wet cat, gleaming in patches.\nClick of the hooves, through garbage,\nClutching the greasy stone. “And the cloak floated”\nSlander is up betimes.\n But Varchi of Florence,\nSteeped in a different year, and pondering Brutus,\nThen\n SIGA MAL AUTHIS DEUTERON!\n“Dog-eye!!” (to Alessandro)\n “Whether for Love of Florence,” Varchi leaves it,\nSaying, “I saw the man, came up with him at Venice,\nI, one wanting the facts,\nAnd no mean labour.\n Or for a privy spite?”\n Good Varchi leaves it,\nBut: “I saw the man. _Se pia?_\n_O empia?_ For Lorenzaccio had thought of stroke in the open\nBut uncertain (for the Duke went never unguarded) …\nAnd would have thrown him from wall\nYet feared this might not end him, or lest Alessandro\nKnow not by whom death came,\nO si credesse\nIf when the foot slipped, when death came upon him,\nLest cousin Duke Alessandro think he had fallen alone\nNo friend to aid him in falling.”\n _Caina attende._\nAs beneath my feet a lake, was ice in seeming.\n\nAnd all of this, runs Varchi, dreamed out before hand\nIn Perugia, caught in the star-maze by Del Carmine,\nCast on a natal paper, set with an exegesis, told,\nAll told to Alessandro, told thrice over,\nWho held his death for a doom.\nIn abuleia.\n But Don Lorenzino\n“Whether for love of Florence … but:\n O si morisse, credesse caduto da se.”\n SIGA, SIGA!\nThe wet cloak floats on the surface,\nSchiavoni, caught on the wood-barge,\nGives out the afterbirth, Giovanni Borgia\nTrails out no more at night, where Barabello\nProds the Pope’s elephant, and gets no crown, where Mozarello\nTakes the Calabrian roadway, and for ending\nIs smothered beneath a mule,\n a poet’s ending,\nDown a stale well-hole, oh a poet’s ending. “Sanazarro\nAlone out of all the court was faithful to him”\nFor the gossip of Naples’ trouble drifts to North,\nFracastor (lightning was midwife) Cotta, and Ser D’Alviano,\nAl poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra,\nTalk the talks out with Navighero,\nBurner of yearly Martials,\n (The slavelet is mourned in vain)\nAnd the next comer\n says “were nine wounds,\nFour men, white horse with a double rider,”\nThe hooves clink and slick on the cobbles …\nSchiavoni … the cloak floats on the water,\n“Sink the thing,” splash wakes Schiavoni;\nTiber catching the nap, the moonlit velvet,\nWet cat, gleaming in patches.\n “Se pia,” Varchi,\n“O empia, ma risoluto\nE terribile deliberazione”\n Both sayings run in the wind,\nMa si morisse!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-6": { - "title": "“Canto 6”", - "body": "“The tale of thy deeds Odysseus!” and Tolosan\nGround rents, sold by Guillaume, ninth duke of Aquitaine;\nTill Louis is wed with Eleanor; the wheel …\n(“Conrad, the wheel turns and in the end turns ill”)\nAnd Acre and boy’s love … for her uncle was\nCommandant at Acre, she was pleased with him;\nAnd Louis, French King, was jealous of days unshared\nThis pair had had together in years gone;\nAnd he drives on for Zion, as “God wills”\nTo find, in six weeks time, the Queen’s scarf is\nTwisted a-top the casque of Saladin.\n“For Sandbrueil’s ransom.” But the pouch-mouths add,\n“She went out hunting, and the palm-tufts\nGive shade above mottled columns, and she rode back late,\nLate, latish, yet perhaps it was not too late.”\nThen France again, and to be rid of her\nTo brush his antlers: Poictiers, Aquitaine!\nAnd Adelaide Castilla wears the crown.\nEleanor down water-butt, dethroned, debased, unqueen’d.\n Unqueen’d five rare long months,\nAnd face sand-red, pitch gait, Harry Plantagenet,\nThe sputter in place of speech,\nBut King, about to be, King Louis! takes a queen.\n“E quand lo reis Louis lo entendit\n mout er fasché”\nAnd yet Gisors, in six years thence,\nWas Marguerite’s. And Harry _joven_\nIn pledge for all his life and life of all his heirs\nShall have Gisors and Vexis and Neauphal, Neufchastel;\nBut if no issue, Gisors shall revert\nAnd Vexis and Neufchastel and Neauphal to the French crown.\n “_Si tuit li dol el plor el marrimen\nDel mon_ were set together they would seem but light\nAgainst the death of the young English King,\nHarry the Young is dead and all men mourn, a song,\nMourn all good courtiers, fighters, cantadors.”\nAnd still Old Harry keeps grip on Gisors\nAnd Neufchastel and Neauphal and Vexis;\nAnd two years war, and never two years go by\n but come new forays, and “The wheel\nTurns, Conrad, turns, and in the end toward ill.”\nAnd Richard and Alix span the gap, Gisors,\nAnd Eleanor and Richard face the King,\nFor the fourth family time Plantagenet\nFaces his dam and whelps, … and holds Gisors,\nNow Alix’ dowry, against Philippe-Auguste\n(Louis’ by Adelaide, wood-lost, then crowned at Etampe)\nAnd never two years sans war.\n And Zion still\nBleating away to Eastward, the lost lamb,\nDamned city (was only Frederic knew\nThe true worth of, and patched with Malek Kamel\nThe sane and sensible peace to bait the world\nAnd set all camps disgruntled with all leaders.\n“Damn’d atheists!” alike Mahomet growls,\nAnd Christ grutches more sullen for Sicilian sense\nThan does Mahound on Malek.)\n The bright coat\nIs more to the era, and in Messina’s beach-way\nDes Barres and Richard split the reed-lances\nAnd the coat is torn.\n (Moving in heavy air: Henry and Saladin.)\n(The serpent coils in the crowd.)\nThe letters run: Tancred to Richard:\n\n That the French King is\n More against thee, than is his will to me\n Good and in faith; and moves against your safety.\n\nRichard to Tancred:\n\n That our pact stands firm,\n And, for these slanders, that I think you lie.\n\nProofs, and in writing:\n\n And if Bourgogne say they were not\n Deliver’d by hand and his,\n Let him move sword against me and my word.\n\nRichard to Philip: silence, with a tone.\n\nRichard to Flanders: the subjoined and precedent.\n\nPhilip a silence; and then, “Lies and turned lies\nFor that he will fail Alix\nAffianced, and Sister to Ourself.”\nRichard: “My father’s bed-piece! A Plantagenet\nMewls on the covers, with a nose like his, already.”\n\nThen:\n\n In the Name\n Of Father and of Son Triune and Indivisible\n Philip of France by Goddes Grace\n To all men presents that our noble brother\n Richard of England engaged by mutual oath (a sacred covenant applicable to both)\n Need _not_ wed Alix but whomso he choose\n We cede him Gisors Neauphal and Vexis\n And to the heirs male of his house\n Cahors and Querci Richard’s the abbeys ours\n Of Figeac and Souillac St. Gilles left still in peace\n Alix returns to France.\n Made in Messina in\n The year 1190 of the Incarnation of the Word.\n\nReed lances broken, a cloak torn by Des Barres\nDo turn King Richard from the holy wars.\n And “God aid Conrad\nFor man’s aid comes slow,” Aye tarries upon the road,\nEn Bertrans cantat.\n\n And before all this\nBy Correze, Malemort\nA young man walks, at church with galleried porch\nBy river-marsh, pacing,\nHe was come from Ventadorn; and Eleanor turning on thirty years,\nDomna jauzionda, and he says to her\n “My lady of Ventadorn\nIs shut by Eblis in, and will not hawk nor hunt\nNor get her free in the air,\n nor watch fish rise to bait\nNor the glare-wing’d flies alight in the creek’s edge\nSave in my absence, Madame.\n ‘_Que la lauzeta mover_,’\nSend word, I ask you, to Eblis,\n you have seen that maker\nAnd finder of songs, so far afield as this\nThat he may free her,\n who sheds such light in the air.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-7": { - "title": "“Canto 7”", - "body": "Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate)\n‘Ελανδρος and Ελέπτολις, and poor old Homer\nblind, blind as a bat,\nEar, ear for the sea-surge--; rattle of old men’s voices;\nAnd then the phantom Rome, marble narrow for seats\n “Si pulvis nullus …”\nIn chatter above the circus, “Nullum excute tamen.”\nThen: file and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes;\nScene--for the battle only,--but still scene,\nPennons and standards y cavals armatz,\nNot mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,\nTo Dante’s “ciocco,” the brand struck in the game.\nUn peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.\nContre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,\nUn vieux piano, et sous le baromètre …\nThe old men’s voices--beneath the columns of false marble,\nAnd the walls tinted discreet, the modish, darkish green-blue,\nDiscreeter gilding, and the panelled wood\nNot present, but suggested, for the leasehold is\nTouched with an imprecision … about three squares;\nThe house a shade too solid, and the art\nA shade off action, paintings a shade too thick.\nAnd the great domed head, _con gli occhi onesti e tardi_\nMoves before me, phantom with weighted motion,\n_Grave incessu_, drinking the tone of things,\nAnd the old voice lifts itself\n weaving an endless sentence.\nWe also made ghostly visits, and the stair\nThat knew us, found us again on the turn of it,\nKnocking at empty rooms, seeking a buried beauty;\nAnd the sun-tanned gracious and well-formed fingers\nLift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle\nTwists for the knocker’s fall; no voice to answer.\nA strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.\nSceptic against all this one seeks the living,\nStubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers\nBrushed out a seven year since, of no effect.\nDamn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,\nFlimsy and damned partition.\n Ione, dead the long year,\nMy lintel, and Liu Ch’e’s lintel.\nTime blacked out with the rubber.\n The Elysée carries a name on\nAnd the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;\nLow ceiling and the Erard and silver,\nThese are in “time.” Four chairs, the bow-front dresser,\nThe pannier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.\n “Beer-bottle on the statue’s pediment!\nThat, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,\nContemporary.” And the passion endures.\nAgainst their action, aromas; rooms, against chronicles.\nSmaragdos, chrysolitos, De Gama wore striped pants in Africa\nAnd “Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops,”\n\nLe vieux commode en acajou:\n beer bottles of various strata.\nBut is she as dead as Tyro? In seven years?\nΈλέναυς, έλανδρος, έλέπτολις,\nThe sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles,\nEleanor!\n The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;\nLamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,\n And all that day\nNicea moved before me\nAnd the cold gray air troubled her not\nFor all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,\nAnd the long slender feet lit on the curb’s marge\nAnd her moving height went before me,\n We alone having being.\n\nAnd all that day, another day:\n Thin husks I had known as men,\nDry casques of departed locusts\n speaking a shell of speech …\nPropped between chairs and table …\nWords like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being,\n A dryness calling for death.\nAnother day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,\n“Toc” sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,\nAnd beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness;\n The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,\nBrown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,\nDry professorial talk …\n now stilling the ill beat music,\nHouse expulsed by this house, but not extinguished.\n Square even shoulders and the satin skin,\nGone cheeks of the dancing woman,\n Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out\nIt is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,\nA petrification of air.\n The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself.\nThe young men, never!\n Only the husk of talk.\nO voi che siete in piccioletta barca,\nDido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus\nLies heavy in my arms, dead weight\n Drowning with tears, new Eros,\nAnd the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;\nFlame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,\nYet drinks the thirst from our lips,\n solid as echo,\nPassion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blurr;\nBut Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears\n For dead Sicheus.\nLife to make mock of motion:\nFor the husks, before me, move,\n The words rattle: shells given out by shells.\n\nThe live man, out of lands and prisons,\n shakes the dry pods,\nProbes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques\nBend to the tawdry table,\nLift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,\nAnd make sound like the sound of voices.\n Lorenzaccio\nBeing more live than they, more full of flames and voices.\nMa si morisse!\n Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.\nAnd the tall indifference moves,\n a more living shell,\nDrift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact,\nO Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,\n Eternal watcher of things,\nOf things, of men, of passions.\n Eyes floating in dry, dark air;\nE biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even side-fall of hair\nThe stiff, still features.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canto-14": { - "title": "“Canto 14”", - "body": "Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto;\nThe stench of wet coal, politicians\n… e and … n, their wrists bound to\n their ankles,\nStanding bare bum,\nFaces smeared on their rumps,\n wide eye on flat buttock,\nBush hanging for beard,\n Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,\nAddressing the multitudes in the ooze,\n newts, water-slugs, water-maggots,\nAnd with them … r,\n a scrupulously clean table-napkin\nTucked under his penis,\n and … m\nWho disliked colioquial language,\nstiff-starched, but soiled, collars\n circumscribing his legs,\nThe pimply and hairy skin\n pushing over the collar’s edge,\nProfiteers drinking blood sweetened with sh-t,\nAnd behind them … f and the financiers\n lashing them with steel wires.\n\nAnd the betrayers of language\n … n and the press gang\nAnd those who had lied for hire;\nthe perverts, the perverters of language,\n the perverts, who have set money-lust\nBefore the pleasures of the senses;\n\nhowling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,\n the clatter of presses,\nthe blowing of dry dust and stray paper,\nfretor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges,\ndung, last cess-pool of the universe,\nmysterium, acid of sulphur,\nthe pusillanimous, raging;\nplunging jewels in mud,\n and howling to find them unstained;\nsadic mothers driving their daughters to bed with decrepitude,\nsows eating their litters,\nand here the placard ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ,\n and here: THE PERSONNEL CHANGES,\n\nmelting like dirty wax,\n decayed candles, the bums sinking lower,\nfaces submerged under hams,\nAnd in the ooze under them,\nreversed, foot-palm to foot-palm,\n hand-palm to hand-palm, the agents provocateurs\nThe murderers of Pearse and MacDonagh,\n Captain H. the chief torturer;\nThe petrified turd that was Verres,\n bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria!\nblack-beetles, burrowing into the sh-t,\nThe soil a decrepitude, the ooze full of morsels,\nlost contours, erosions.\n\n Above the hell-rot\nthe great arse-hole,\n broken with piles,\nhanging stalactites,\n greasy as sky over Westminster,\nthe invisible, many English,\n the place lacking in interest,\nlast squalor, utter decrepitude,\nthe vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk,\n waving the Christian symbols,\n… frigging a tin penny whistle,\nFlies carrying news, harpies dripping sh-t through the air.\n\nThe slough of unamiable liars,\n bog of stupidities,\nmalevolent stupidities, and stupidities,\nthe soil living pus, full of vermin,\ndead maggots begetting live maggots,\n slum owners,\nusurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authori\npets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,\nobscuring the texts with philology,\n hiding them under their persons,\nthe air without refuge of silence,\n the drift of lice, teething,\nand above it the mouthing of orators,\n the arse-belching of preachers.\n And Invidia,\nthe corruptio, fretor, fungus,\nliquid animals, melted ossifications,\nslow rot, fretid combustion,\n chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy\n… m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,\nmonopolists, obstructors of knowledge.\n obstructors of distribution.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "the-choice": { - "title": "“The Choice”", - "body": "It is true that you say the gods are more use to you than fairies,\nBut for all that I have seen you on a high, white, noble horse,\nLike some strange queen in a story.\n\nIt is odd that you should be covered with long robes and trailing tendrils and flowers;\nIt is odd that you should be changing your face and resembling some other woman to plague me;\nIt is odd that you should be hiding yourself in the cloud of beautiful women, who do not concern me.\n\nAnd I, who follow every seed-leaf upon the wind!\nThey will say that I deserve this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "coda": { - "title": "“Coda”", - "body": "O my songs,\nWhy do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces,\nWill you find your lost dead among them?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "come-my-cantilations": { - "title": "“Come My Cantilations”", - "body": "Come my cantilations,\nLet us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them,\nHot sun, clear water, fresh wind,\nLet me be free of pavements,\nLet me be free of the printers.\nLet come beautiful people\nWearing raw silk of good colour,\nLet come the graceful speakers,\nLet come the ready of wit,\nLet come the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting.\nWe speak of burnished lakes,\nAnd of dry air, as clear as metal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1914 - } - } - }, - "commission": { - "title": "“Commission”", - "body": "Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,\nGo also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,\nBear to them my contempt for their oppressors.\nGo as a great wave of cool water,\nBear my contempt of oppressors.\n\nSpeak against unconscious oppression,\nSpeak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,\nSpeak against bonds.\n\nGo to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,\nGo to the women in suburbs.\n\nGo to the hideously wedded,\nGo to them whose failure is concealed,\nGo to the unluckily mated,\nGo to the bought wife,\nGo to the woman entailed.\n\nGo to those who have delicate lust,\nGo to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,\nGo like a blight upon the dulness of the world;\nGo with your edge against this,\nStrengthen the subtle cords,\nBring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.\n\nGo in a friendly manner,\nGo with an open speech.\nBe eager to find new evils and new good,\nBe against all forms of oppression.\nGo to those who are thickened with middle age,\nTo those who have lost their interest.\n\nGo to the adolescent who are smothered in family--\nOh how hideous it is\nTo see three generations of one house gathered together!\nIt is like an old tree with shoots,\nAnd with some branches rotted and falling.\n\nGo out and defy opinion,\nGo against this vegetable bondage of the blood.\nSpeak for the free kinship of the mind and spirit.\nGo, against all forms of oppression.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-condolence": { - "title": "“The Condolence”", - "body": "O my fellow sufferers, songs of my youth,\nA lot of asses praise you because you are “virile,”\nWe, you, I! We are “Red Bloods”!\nImagine it, my fellow sufferers--\nOur maleness lifts us out of the ruck.\nWho’d have foreseen it?\n\nO my fellow sufferers, we went out under the trees,\nWe were in especial bored with male stupidity.\nWe went forth gathering delicate thoughts,\nOur “_fantastikon_” delighted to serve us.\nWe were not exasperated with women,\nfor the female is ductile.\n\nAnd now vou hear what is said to us:\nWe are compared to that sort of person\nWho wanders about announcing his sex\nAs if he had just discovered it.\nLet us leave this matter, my songs,\nand return to that which concerns", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dance-figure": { - "title": "“Dance Figure”", - "body": "_For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee_\n\nDark eyed,\nO woman of my dreams,\nIvory sandaled,\nThere is none like thee among the dancers,\nNone with swift feet.\n\nI have not found thee in the tents,\nIn the broken darkness.\nI have not found thee at the well-head\nAmong the women with pitchers.\n\nThine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;\nThy face as a river with lights.\n\nWhite as an almond are thy shoulders;\nAs new almonds stripped from the husk.\nThey guard thee not with eunuchs;\nNot with bars of copper.\nGilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.\nA brown robe, with threads of gold woven in patterns, hast thou gathered about thee,\nO Nathat-Ikanaie, “Tree-at-the-river”.\n\nAs a rillet among the sedge are thy hands upon me;\nThy fingers a frosted stream.\n\nThy maidens are white like pebbles;\nTheir music about thee!\n\nThere is none like thee among the dancers;\nNone with swift feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "envoi": { - "title": "“Envoi”", - "body": "Go, dumb-born book,\nTell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;\nHadst thou but song\nAs thou hast subjects known,\nThen were there cause in thee that should condone\nEven my faults that heavy upon me lie\nAnd build her glories their longevity.\n\nTell her that sheds\nSuch treasure in the air,\nReeking naught else but that her graces give\nLife to the moment,\nI would bid them live\nAs roses might, in magic amber laid,\nRed overwrought with orange and all made\nOne substance and one colour\nBraving time.\n\nTell her that goes\nWith song upon her lips\nBut sings not out the song, nor knows\nThe maker of it, some other mouth,\nMay be as fair as hers,\nMight, in new ages, gain her worshippers,\nWhen our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,\nSiftings on siftings in oblivion,\nTill change hath broken down\nAll things save Beauty alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ezra-on-the-strike": { - "title": "“Ezra on the Strike”", - "body": "Wal, Thanksgivin’ do be comin’ round.\nWith the price of turkeys on the bound,\nAnd coal, by gum! Thet were just found,\n Is surely gettin’ cheaper.\n\nThe winds will soon begin to howl,\nAnd winter, in its yearly growl,\nAcross the medders begin to prowl,\n And Jack Frost gettin’ deeper.\n\nBy shucks! It seems to me,\nThat you I orter be\nThankful, that our Ted could see\n A way to operate it.\n\nI sez to Mandy, sure, sez I,\nI’ll bet thet air patch o’ rye\nThet he’ll squash ’em by-and-by,\n And he did, by cricket!\n\nNo use talkin’, he’s the man--\nOne of the best thet ever ran,\nFer didn’t I turn Republican\n One o’ the fust?\n\nI ’lowed as how he’d beat the rest,\nBut old Si Perkins, he hemmed and guessed,\nAnd sed as how it wuzn’t best\n To meddle with the trust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "the-fish-and-the-shadow": { - "title": "“The Fish and the Shadow”", - "body": "The salmon-trout drifts in the stream,\nThe soul of the salmon-trout floats over the stream\nLike a little wafer of light.\nThe salmon moves in the sun-shot, bright, shallow sea.\n\nAs light as the shadow of the fish that falls through the water,\nShe came into the large room by the stair.\nYawning a little she came with the sleep still upon her.\n\n“I’m just from bed. The sleep is still in my eyes.\nCome. I have had a long dream.”\n\nAnd I: “That wood?\nAnd two springs have passed!”\n\n“Not so far--no, not so far now.\nThere is a place--but no one else knows it--\nA field in a valley …\n qu’ieu sui avinen\nleu lo sai.”\n\nShe must speak of the time\nOf Arnaut de Mareuil, I thought, “qu’ieu sui avinen.”\n\nLight as the shadow of the fish\nThat falls through the pale green water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-triumph-of-the-arts": { - "title": "“For the Triumph of the Arts”", - "body": "And what are the Arts?\nThe Protagonist, “The Truths that speak\nwith Beauty for a tongue.”\n\nAnd (to the protagonist) who art thou?\n“Write me then Mammon\nhis arch enemy.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fragments": { - "title": "“Fragments”", - "body": "O tender-heartedness right bitter grown\nBecause they knew thee not in all the world\nNor would, that gentleness thou hast to give.\n\nAnd are chevaliers in the court of Him\nWho reigneth ever where the stars grow dim\nBeyond our sight.\n\nMarble smooth by flowing waters grown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "francesca": { - "title": "“Francesca”", - "body": "You came in out of the night\nAnd there were flowers in your hands,\nNow you will come out of a confusion of people,\nOut of a turmoil of speech about you.\n\nI who have seen you amid the primal things\nWas angry when they spoke your name\nIn ordinary places.\nI would that the cool waves might flow over my mind,\nAnd that the world should dry as a dead leaf,\nOr as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,\nSo that I might find you again,\nAlone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "further-instructions": { - "title": "“Further Instructions”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO helpless few in my country,\nO remnant enslaved!\n\nArtists broken against her,\nA-stray, lost in the villages,\nMistrusted, spoken-against,\n\nLovers of beauty, starved,\nThwarted with systems,\nHelpless against the control;\n\nYou who can not wear yourselves out\nBy persisting to successes,\nYou who can only speak,\nWho can not steel yourselves into reiteration;\n\nYou of the finer sense,\nBroken against false knowledge,\nYou who can know at first hand,\nHated, shut in, mistrusted:\n\nTake thought.\nI have weathered the storm,\nI have beaten out my exile.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe little Millwins attend the Russian Ballet.\nThe mauve and greenish souls of the little Millwins\nWere seen lying along the upper seats\nLike so many unused boas.\nThe turbulent and undisciplined host of art students-\nThe rigorous deputation from “Slade”\nWas before them.\nWith arms exalted, with fore-arms\nCrossed in great futuristic X’s, the art students\nExulted, they beheld the splendors of Cleopatra.\nAnd the little Millwins beheld these things;\nWith their large and anemic eyes they looked out upon\nthis configuration.\nLet us therefore mention the fact,\nFor it seems to us worthy of record.\n\n\n# III.\n\nCome, my songs, let us express our baser passions.\nLet us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the future.\nYou are very idle, my songs,\nI fear you will come to a bad end.\nYou stand about the streets, You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,\nYou do next to nothing at all.\n\nYou do not even express our inner nobilitys,\nYou will come to a very bad end.\n\nAnd I? I have gone half-cracked.\nI have talked to you so much that I almost see you about me,\nInsolent little beasts! Shameless! Devoid of clothing!\n\nBut you, newest song of the lot,\nYou are not old enough to have done much mischief.\nI will get you a green coat out of China\nWith dragons worked upon it.\nI will get you the scarlet silk trousers\nFrom the statue of the infant Christ at Santa Maria Novella;\nLest they say we are lacking in taste,\nOr that there is no caste in this family.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "En robe de parade. Samain\n\nLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wall\nShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,\nAnd she is dying piece-meal\nOf a sort of emotional anaemia.\n\nAnd round about there is a rabble\nOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.\nThey shall inherit the earth.\n\nIn her is the end of breeding.\nHer boredom is exquisite and excessive.\nShe would like some one to speak to her,\nAnd is almost afraid that I\nTwill commit that indiscretion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-garret": { - "title": "“The Garret”", - "body": "Come let us pity those who are better off than we are.\nCome, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends,\nAnd we have friends and no butlers.\nCome let us pity the married and the unmarried.\n\nDawn enters with little feet like a gilded Pavlova,\nAnd I am near my desire.\nNor has life in it aught better\nThan this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-gipsy": { - "title": "“The Gipsy”", - "body": "_“Est-ce que vous avez vu des autres--des camarades--avec des singes ou des ours?”_\n A stray gipsy--A. D. 1912\n\nThat was the top of the walk, when he said:\n“Have you seen any others, any of our lot,\nWith apes or bears?”--A brown upstanding fellow\nNot like the half-castes, up on the wet road near Clermont.\nThe wind came, and the rain,\nAnd mist clotted about the trees in the valley,\nAnd I’d the long ways behind me, gray Arles and Biaucaire,\nAnd he said, “Have you seen any of our lot?”\n\nI’d seen a lot of his lot … ever since Rhodez,\nComing down from the fair of St. John,\nWith caravans, but never an ape or a bear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-girl": { - "title": "“A Girl”", - "body": "The tree has entered my hands,\nThe sap has ascended my arms,\nThe tree has grown in my breast--\nDownward,\nThe branches grow out of me, like arms.\n\nTree you are,\nMoss you are,\nYou are violets with wind above them.\nA child--so high--you are,\nAnd all this is folly to the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "i-wait": { - "title": "“I Wait”", - "body": "As some pale-lidded ghost that calls\nI wait secure until that other goes\nLeaving thee free for thy high self of old,\nUpon which soul then free, will mine beget\nSuch mighty fantasies as we before\nBade stand effulgent and rejoice the world.\n\nI wait secure and waiting know I not\nA bite of anger at thy littleness, nor even envy\nOf that other one that bindeth thee\nWithin the close-hewn shroud of womanhood.\n\nBeing at peace with God and all his stars\nWhy should I quail the stings of nettle Time\nOr fret the hour. Are there canals less green\nOr do the mottled colors of reflexion\nLess dew their waters with mild harmony?\nIs there less merriment and life withall\nAmid this hoard of half-tamed brats\nThat rollick o’er the well-curb, while one crowned\nIn mock of finery doth lead the rout\nHalf-scared at all the new-found pomp\nAtop of him? A Czar in very soul\nAnd if they mock the world in this their spot\nIs not their jest as near to wisdom as are we?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-against-form": { - "title": "“I against Form”", - "body": "Whether my Lady will to hear of me\nThe unrimed speech wherein the heart is heard,\nOr whether she prefer to the perfumed word\nAnd powdered cheek of masking irony?\nDecorous dance steps ape simplicity,\nThe well-groomed sonnet is to truth preferred;\nLet us be all things so we’re not absurd,\nDabble with forms and damn the verity.\nBardlets and bardkins, I do bite my thumb.\nCorset the muse and “directoire” her grace,\nMarcel the elf-looks of _sa chevelure_,\nEnamel Melpomene’s too sun-kissed face\nAnd then to have your fame forged doubly sure\nLet taste rule all and bid the heart be dumb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-immorality": { - "title": "“An Immorality”", - "body": "Sing we for love and idleness,\nNaught else is worth the having.\n\nThough I have been in many a land,\nThere is naught else in living.\n\nAnd I would rather have my sweet,\nThough rose-leaves die of grieving,\n\nThan do high deeds in Hungary\nTo pass all men’s believing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-durance": { - "title": "“In Durance”", - "body": "I am homesick after mine own kind,\nOh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,\nBut I am homesick after mine own kind.\n\n“These sell our pictures! Oh well,\nThey reach me not, touch me some edge or that,\nBut reach me not and all my life’s become\nOne flame, that reaches not beyond\nMy heart’s own hearth,\nOr hides among the ashes there for thee.”\n“Thee?” Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first\nOut of mine own soul-kin,\nFor I am homesick after mine own kind\nAnd ordinary people touch me not.\n And I am homesick\nAfter mine own kind that know, and feel\nAnd have some breath for beauty and the arts.\n\nAye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit\nAnd have none about me save in the shadows\nWhen come they, surging of power, “DAEMON,”\n“Quasi KALOUN.” S.T. says Beauty is most that, a “calling to the soul.”\nWell then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my soul,\nThey that come mewards, bearing old magic.\n\nBut for all that, I am homesick after mine own kind\nAnd would meet kindred even as I am,\nFlesh-shrouded bearing the secret.\n“All they that with strange sadness”\nHave the earth in mockery, and are kind to all,\nMy fellows, aye I know the glory\nOf th’ unbounded ones, but ye, that hide\nAs I hide most the while\nAnd burst forth to the windows only whiles or whiles\nFor love, or hope, or beauty or for power,\nThen smoulder, with the lids half closed\nAnd are untouched by echoes of the world.\nOh ye, my fellows: with the seas between us some be,\nPurple and sapphire for the silver shafts\nOf sun and spray all shattered at the bows;\nAnd some the hills hold off,\nThe little hills to east of us, though here we\nHave damp and plain to be our shutting in.\n\nAnd yet my soul sings “Up!” and we are one.\nYea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all my kin\nTo whom my breast and arms are ever warm,\nFor that I love ye as the wind the trees\nThat holds their blossoms and their leaves in cure\nAnd calls the utmost singing from the boughs\nThat ’thout him, save the aspen, were as dumb\nStill shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of how\n“Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies …”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-old-age-of-the-soul": { - "title": "“In the Old Age of the Soul”", - "body": "I do not choose to dream; there cometh on me\nSome strange old lust for deeds.\nAs to the nerveless hand of some old warrior\nThe sword-hilt or the war-worn wonted helmet\nBrings momentary life and long-fled cunning,\nSo to my soul grown old--\nGrown old with many a jousting, many a foray,\nGrown old with many a hither-coming and hence-going--\nTill now they send him dreams and no more deed;\nSo doth he flame again with might for action,\nForgetful of the council of elders,\nForgetful that who rules doth no more battle,\nForgetful that such might no more cleaves to him\nSo doth he flame again toward valiant doing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "invern": { - "title": "“Invern”", - "body": "Earth’s winter cometh\nAnd I being part of all\nAnd sith the spirit of all moveth in me\nI must needs bear earth’s winter\nDrawn cold and grey with hours\nAnd joying in a momentary sun,\nLo I am withered with waiting till my spring cometh!\nOr crouch covetous of warmth\nO’er scant-logged ingle blaze,\nMust take cramped joy in tomed Longinus\nThat, read I him first time\nThe woods agleam with summer\nOr mid desirous winds of spring,\nHad set me singing spheres\nOr made heart to wander forth among warm roses\nOr curl in grass next neath a kindly moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "ione-dead-the-long-year": { - "title": "“Ione, Dead the Long Year”", - "body": "Empty are the ways,\nEmpty are the ways of this land\nAnd the flowers\n Bend over with heavy heads.\nThey bend in vain.\nEmpty are the ways of this land\n Where Ione\nWalked once, and now does not walk\nBut seems like a person just gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "ladies": { - "title": "“Ladies”", - "body": "_Agathas_\n\nFour and forty lovers had Agathas in the old days,\nAll of whom she refused;\n\nAnd now she turns to me seeking love,\nAnd her hair also is turning.\n\n\n_Young Lady_\n\nI have fed your lar with poppies,\nI have adored you for three full years;\nAnd now you grumble because your dress does not fit\nAnd because I happen to say so.\n\n\n_Lesbia Illa_\n\nMemnon, Memnon, that lady\nWho used to walk about amongst us\nWith such gracious uncertainty,\nIs now wedded\nTo a British householder.\n_Lugete, Veneres! Lugete, Cupidinesque!_\n\n\n_Passing_\n\nFlawless as Aphrodite,\nThoroughly beautiful,\nBrainless,\nThe faint odor of your patchouli,\nFaint, almost, as the lines of cruelty about your chin,\nAssails me, and concerns me almost as little.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-logical-conclusion": { - "title": "“The Logical Conclusion”", - "body": "When earth’s last thesis is copied\nFrom the theses that went before,\nWhen idea from fact has departed\nAnd bare-boned factlets shall bore,\nWhen all joy shall have fled from study\nAnd scholarship reign supreme;\nWhen truth shall “baaa” on the hill crests\nAnd no one shall dare to dream;\n\nWhen all the good poems have been buried\nWith comment annoted in full\nAnd art shall bow down in homage\nTo scholarship’s zinc-plated bull,\nWhen there shall be nothing to research\nBut the notes of annoted notes,\nAnd Baalam’s ass shall inquire\nThe price of imported oats;\n\nThen no one shall tell him the answer\nFor each shall know the one fact\nThat lies in the special ass-ignment\nFrom which he is making his tract.\nSo the ass shall sigh uninstructed\nWhile each in his separate book\nShall grind for the love of grinding\nAnd only the devil shall look.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "masks": { - "title": "“Masks”", - "body": "These tales of old disguisings, are they not\nStrange myths of souls that found themselves among\nUnwonted folk that spake an hostile tongue,\nSome soul from all the rest who’d not forgot\nThe star-span acres of a former lot\nWhere boundless mid the clouds his course he swung,\nOr carnate with his elder brothers sung\nEre ballad-makers lisped of Camelot?\n\nOld singers half-forgetful of their tunes,\nOld painters color-blind come back once more,\nOld poets skill-less in the wind-heart runes,\nOld wizards lacking in their wonder-lore:\n\nAll they that with strange sadness in their eyes\nPonder in silence o’er earth’s queynt devyse?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meditatio": { - "title": "“Meditatio”", - "body": "When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs\nI am compelled to conclude\nThat man is the superior animal.\n\nWhen I consider the curious habits of man\nI confess, my friend, I am puzzled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "middle-aged": { - "title": "“Middle-Aged”", - "body": "“’Tis but a vague, invarious delight.\nAs gold that rains about some buried king.\n\nAs the fine flakes,\nWhen tourists frolicking\nStamp on his roof or in the glazing light\nTry photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes\nAnd start to inspect some further pyramid;\n\nAs the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath\nTheir transitory step and merriment,\nDrifts through the air, and the sarcophagus\nGains yet another crust\nOf useless riches for the occupant,\nSo I, the fires that lit once dreams\nNow over and spent,\nLie dead within four walls\nAnd so now love\nRains down and so enriches some stiff case,\nAnd strews a mind with precious metaphors,\n\nAnd so the space\nOf my still consciousness\nIs full of gilded snow,\n\nThe which, no cat has eyes enough\nTo see the brightness of.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-needle": { - "title": "“The Needle”", - "body": "Come, or the stellar tide will slip away.\nEastward avoid the hour of its decline,\nNow! for the needle trembles in my soul!\n\nHere have we had the vantage, the good hour.\nHere we have had our day, your day and mine.\nCome now, before this power\nThat bears us up, shall turn against the pole.\n\nMock not the flood of stars, the thing’s to be.\nO Love, come now, this land turns evil slowly.\nThe waves bore in, soon will they bear away.\n\nThe treasure is ours, make we fast land with it.\nMove we and take the tide, with its next favour,\nAbide\nUnder some neutral force\nUntil this course turneth aside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nicotine": { - "title": "“Nicotine”", - "body": "_Hymn to the Dope_\n\nGoddess of the murmuring courts,\nNicotine, my Nicotine,\nHouri of the mystic sports,\ntrailing-robed in gabardine,\nGliding where the breath hath glided,\nHidden sylph of filmy veils,\nTruth behind the dream is veiléd\nE’en as thou art, smiling ever, ever gliding,\nWraith of wraiths, dim lights dividing\nPurple, grey, and shadow green\nGoddess, Dream-grace, Nicotine.\n\nGoddess of the shadow’s lights,\nNicotine, my Nicotine,\nSome would set old Earth to rights,\nThou I none such ween.\nVeils of shade our dream dividing,\nHouris dancing, intergliding,\nWraith of wraiths and dream of faces,\nSilent guardian of the old unhallowed places,\nUtter symbol of all old sweet druidings,\nMem’ry of witched wold and green,\nNicotine, my Nicotine:\n\nNeath the shadows of thy weaving\nDreams that need no undeceiving,\nLoves that longer hold me not,\nDreams I dream not any more,\nFragrance of old sweet forgotten places,\nSmiles of dream-lit, flit-by faces\nAll as perfume Arab-sweet\nDeck the high road to thy feet\n\nAs were Godiva’s coming fated\nAnd all the April’s blush belated\nWere lain before her, carpeting\nThe stones of Coventry with spring,\nSo thou my mist-enwreathéd queen,\nNicotine, white Nicotine,\nRiding engloried in they hair\nMak’st by-road of our dreams\nThy thorough-fare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-plunge": { - "title": "“The Plunge”", - "body": "I would bathe myself in strangeness:\nThese comforts heaped upon me, smother me!\nI burn, I scald so for the new,\nNew friends, new faces,\nPlaces!\nOh to be out of this,\nThis that is all I wanted\n--save the new.\n\nAnd you,\nLove, you the much, the more desired!\nDo I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,\nAll mire, mist, all fog,\nAll ways of traffic?\nYou, I wold have flow over me like water,\nOh, but far out of this!\nGrass, and low fields, and hills,\nAnd sun,\nOh, sun enough!\nOut, and alone, among some\nAlien people!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "portrait-dune-femme": { - "title": "“Portrait D’une Femme”", - "body": "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,\nLondon has swept about you this score years\nAnd bright ships left you this or that in fee:\nIdeas, old gossip, oddments of all things,\nStrange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.\nGreat minds have sought you--lacking someone else.\nYou have been second always. Tragical?\nNo. You preferred it to the usual thing:\nOne dull man, dulling and uxorious,\nOne average mind--with one thought less, each year.\nOh, you are patient, I have seen you sit\nHours, where something might have floated up.\nAnd now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.\nYou are a person of some interest, one comes to you\nAnd takes strange gain away:\nTrophies fished up; some curious suggestion;\nFact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,\nPregnant with mandrakes, or with something else\nThat might prove useful and yet never proves,\nThat never fits a corner or shows use,\nOr finds its hour upon the loom of days:\nThe tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;\nIdols and ambergris and rare inlays,\nThese are your riches, your great store; and yet\nFor all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,\nStrange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:\nIn the slow float of differing light and deep,\nNo! there is nothing! In the whole and all,\nNothing that’s quite your own.\n Yet this is you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-return": { - "title": "“The Return”", - "body": "See, they return; ah, see the tentative\nMovements, and the slow feet,\nThe trouble in the pace and the uncertain\nWavering!\n\nSee, they return, one, and by one,\nWith fear, as half-awakened;\nAs if the snow should hesitate\nAnd murmur in the wind,\nand half turn back;\nThese were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”\ninviolable.\n\nGods of the wingèd shoe!\nWith them the silver hounds,\nsniffing the trace of air!\n\nHaie! Haie!\nThese were the swift to harry;\nThese the keen-scented;\nThese were the souls of blood.\n\nSlow on the leash,\npallid the leash-men!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913 - } - } - }, - "the-river-merchants-wife": { - "title": "“The River-Merchant’s Wife”", - "body": "While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead\nI played about the front gate, pulling flowers.\nYou came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,\nYou walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.\nAnd we went on living in the village of Chōkan:\nTwo small people, without dislike or suspicion.\n\nAt fourteen I married My Lord you.\nI never laughed, being bashful.\nLowering my head, I looked at the wall.\nCalled to, a thousand times, I never looked back.\n\nAt fifteen I stopped scowling,\nI desired my dust to be mingled with yours\nForever and forever, and forever.\nWhy should I climb the look out?\n\nAt sixteen you departed\nYou went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,\nAnd you have been gone five months.\nThe monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.\n\nYou dragged your feet when you went out.\nBy the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,\nToo deep to clear them away!\nThe leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.\nThe paired butterflies are already yellow with August\nOver the grass in the West garden;\nThey hurt me.\nI grow older.\nIf you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,\nPlease let me know beforehand,\nAnd I will come out to meet you\nAs far as Chō-fū-Sa.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "salutation": { - "title": "“Salutation”", - "body": "O generation of the thoroughly smug\n and thoroughly uncomfortable,\nI have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,\nI have seen them with untidy families,\nI have seen their smiles full of teeth\n and heard ungainly laughter.\nAnd I am happier than you are,\nAnd they were happier than I am;\nAnd the fish swim in the lake\n and do not even own clothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sea-of-glass": { - "title": "“The Sea of Glass”", - "body": "I looked and saw a sea\nroofed over with rainbows,\nIn the midst of each\ntwo lovers met and departed;\nThen the sky was full of faces\nwith gold glories behind them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917 - } - } - }, - "the-seafarer": { - "title": "“The Seafarer”", - "body": "May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,\nJourney’s jargon, how I in harsh days\nHardship endured oft.\nBitter breast-cares have I abided,\nKnown on my keel many a care’s hold,\nAnd dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent\nNarrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head\nWhile she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,\nMy feet were by frost benumbed.\nChill its chains are; chafing sighs\nHew my heart round and hunger begot\nMere-weary mood. Lest man know not\nThat he on dry land loveliest liveth,\nList how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,\nWeathered the winter, wretched outcast\nDeprived of my kinsmen;\nHung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,\nThere I heard naught save the harsh sea\nAnd ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,\nDid for my games the gannet’s clamour,\nSea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,\nThe mews’ singing all my mead-drink.\nStorms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern\nIn icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed\nWith spray on his pinion.\nNot any protector\nMay make merry man faring needy.\nThis he little believes, who aye in winsome life\nAbides ’mid burghers some heavy business,\nWealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft\nMust bide above brine.\nNeareth nightshade, snoweth from north,\nFrost froze the land, hail fell on earth then\nCorn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now\nThe heart’s thought that I on high streams\nThe salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.\nMoaneth alway my mind’s lust\nThat I fare forth, that I afar hence\nSeek out a foreign fastness.\nFor this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,\nNot though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;\nNor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful\nBut shall have his sorrow for sea-fare\nWhatever his lord will.\nHe hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having\nNor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight\nNor any whit else save the wave’s slash,\nYet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.\nBosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,\nFields to fairness, land fares brisker,\nAll this admonisheth man eager of mood,\nThe heart turns to travel so that he then thinks\nOn flood-ways to be far departing.\nCuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,\nHe singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,\nThe bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not--\nHe the prosperous man--what some perform\nWhere wandering them widest draweth.\nSo that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,\nMy mood ’mid the mere-flood,\nOver the whale’s acre, would wander wide.\nOn earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,\nEager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,\nWhets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,\nO’er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow\nMy lord deems to me this dead life\nOn loan and on land, I believe not\nThat any earth-weal eternal standeth\nSave there be somewhat calamitous\nThat, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.\nDisease or oldness or sword-hate\nBeats out the breath from doom-gripped body.\nAnd for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after--\nLaud of the living, boasteth some last word,\nThat he will work ere he pass onward,\nFrame on the fair earth ’gainst foes his malice,\nDaring ado, …\nSo that all men shall honour him after\nAnd his laud beyond them remain ’mid the English,\nAye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,\nDelight mid the doughty.\nDays little durable,\nAnd all arrogance of earthen riches,\nThere come now no kings nor Caesars\nNor gold-giving lords like those gone.\nHowe’er in mirth most magnified,\nWhoe’er lived in life most lordliest,\nDrear all this excellence, delights undurable!\nWaneth the watch, but the world holdeth.\nTomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.\nEarthly glory ageth and seareth.\nNo man at all going the earth’s gait,\nBut age fares against him, his face paleth,\nGrey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,\nLordly men are to earth o’ergiven,\nNor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,\nNor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,\nNor stir hand nor think in mid heart,\nAnd though he strew the grave with gold,\nHis born brothers, their buried bodies\nBe an unlikely treasure hoard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sestina-altaforte": { - "title": "“Sestina: Altaforte”", - "body": "Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.\n Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a\n stirrer-up of strife.\n Eccovi!\n Judge ye!\n Have I dug him up again?\nThe scene in at his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur.\n“The Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).\n\n# I.\n\nDamn it all! all this our South stinks peace.\nYou whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!\nI have no life save when the swords clash.\nBut ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing\nAnd the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,\nThen howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn hot summer have I great rejoicing\nWhen the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,\nAnd the lightnings from black heav’n flash crimson,\nAnd the fierce thunders roar me their music\nAnd the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,\nAnd through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!\nAnd the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,\nSpiked breast to spiked breast opposing!\nBetter one hour’s stour than a year’s peace\nWith fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!\nBah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.\nAnd I watch his spears through the dark clash\nAnd it fills all my heart with rejoicing\nAnd pries wide my mouth with fast music\nWhen I see him so scorn and defy peace,\nHis lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe man who fears war and squats opposing\nMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimson\nBut is fit only to rot in womanish peace\nFar from where worth’s won and the swords clash\nFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;\nYea, I fill all the air with my music.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nPapiols, Papiols, to the music!\nThere’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,\nNo cry like the battle’s rejoicing\nWhen our elbows and swords drip the crimson\nAnd our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.\nMay God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAnd let the music of the swords make them crimson!\nHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!\nHell blot black for always the thought “Peace!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - } - } - }, - "sestina": { - "title": "“Sestina”", - "body": "# I.\n\nDamn it all! All this our South stinks peace.\nYou whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!\nI have no life save when the swords clash.\nBut ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing\nAnd the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,\nThen howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn hot summer have I great rejoicing\nWhen the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,\nAnd the lightnings from black heav’n flash crimson,\nAnd the fierce thunders roar me their music\nAnd the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,\nAnd through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!\nAnd the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,\nSpiked breast to spiked breast opposing!\nBetter one hour’s stour than a year’s peace\nWith fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!\nBah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.\nAnd I watch his spears through the dark clash\nAnd it fills all my heart with rejoicing\nAnd pries wide my mouth with fast music\nWhen I see him so scorn and defy peace,\nHis lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe man who fears war and squats opposing\nMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimson\nBut is fit only to rot in womanish peace\nFar from where worth’s won and the swords clash\nFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;\nYea, I fill all the air with my music.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nPapiols, Papiols, to the music!\nThere’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,\nNo cry like the battle’s rejoicing\nWhen our elbows and swords drip the crimson\nAnd our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.\nMay God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”\n\n\n# VII.\n\nAnd let the music of the swords make them crimson!\nHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!\nHell blot black for alway the thought “Peace!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-bowmen-of-shu": { - "title": "“Song of the Bowmen of Shu”", - "body": "Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots\nAnd saying: When shall we get back to our country?\nHere we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen,\nWe have no comfort because of these Mongols.\nWe grub the soft fern-shoots,\nWhen anyone says “Return,” the others are full of sorrow.\nSorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.\nOur defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return.\nWe grub the old fern-stalks.\nWe say: Will we be let to go back in October?\nThere is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.\nOur sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.\nWhat flower has come into blossom?\nWhose chariot? The General’s.\nHorses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.\nWe have no rest, three battles a month.\nBy heaven, his horses are tired.\nThe generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.\nThe horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fishskin.\nThe enemy is swift, we must be careful.\nWhen we set out, the willows were drooping with spring,\nWe come back in the snow,\nWe go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,\nOur mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Love thou thy dream\nAll base love scorning,\nLove thou the wind\nAnd here take warning\nThat dreams alone can truly be,\nFor ’tis in dream I come to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-spring": { - "title": "“The Spring”", - "body": "Cydonian spring with her attendant train,\nMaelids and water-girls,\nStepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,\nThroughout this sylvan place\nSpreads the bright tips,\nAnd every vine-stock is\nClad in new brilliancies.\n\nAnd wild desire\nFalls like black lightning.\nO bewildered heart,\nThough every branch have back what last year lost,\nShe, who moved here amid the cyclamen,\nMoves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "tenzone": { - "title": "“Tenzone”", - "body": "Will people accept them?\n (i.e. these songs)\nAs a timorous wench from a centaur\n (or a centurian),\nAlready they flee, howling in terror.\nWill they be touched with the truth?\n Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.\nI beg you, my friendly critics,\nDo not set about to procure me an audience.\n\nI mate with my free kind upon the crags;\n the hidden recesses\nHave heard the echo of my heels.\n in the cool light,\n in the darkness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tree": { - "title": "“The Tree”", - "body": "I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,\nKnowing the truth of things unseen before;\nOf Daphne and the laurel bow\nAnd that god-feasting couple old\nthat grew elm-oak amid the wold.\n’Twas not until the gods had been\nKindly entreated, and been brought within\nUnto the hearth of their heart’s home\nThat they might do this wonder thing;\nNathless I have been a tree amid the wood\nAnd many a new thing understood\nThat was rank folly to my head before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-virginal": { - "title": "“A Virginal”", - "body": "No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.\nI will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,\nFor my surrounding air hath a new lightness;\nSlight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly\nAnd left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;\nAs with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.\nOh, I have picked up magic in her nearness\nTo sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.\nNo, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,\nSoft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.\nGreen come the shoots, aye April in the branches,\nAs winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,\nHath of the trees a likeness of the savour:\nAs white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jessica-powers": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jessica Powers", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1988 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Powers", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "celestial-bird": { - "title": "“Celestial Bird”", - "body": "O sweet and luminous Bird,\nHaving once renounced Your call, lovely and shy\nI shall hunger for the finished word.\nAcross the windy sky\n\nOf all voiced longing and all music heard.\nI spread my net for Your bewildering wings,\nBut wings are wiser than the swiftest hands.\nWhere a bird sings\n\nI hold my heart, in fear that it would break.\nI called you through the grief of whip-poor-wills,\nI watched you on the avenues that make\nA radiant city on the western hills.\n\nYet since I knew you not, I sought in vain.\nI called You beauty for its fleet white sound\nBut now in my illumined heart\nI can release the hound\n\nOf love upon whose bruising lease I strain.\nOh, he will grasp You where you skim the sod,\nnor would Your breast, for love is soft as death,\nSwifter than beauty is, and strong as God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "the-dead": { - "title": "“The Dead”", - "body": "The dead are always talking in their strange way,\nAt night when the winds are still, and dew grass glistens\nThey are saying things that none should ever say,\nAnd cursed is he who stands at their door and listens.\n\nAlways they meet in a manner strange to see:\nThe crazy, the dead, and the myriad yet unborn.\nAnd their words are cold as winds from eternity,\nAnd their eyes are wise, and their faces all forlorn.\n\nThe dead are filling the young unborn with talk\nOf wisdom dug from the mines of bitter years;\nThey are frightening crazy folk with thoughts that walk\nIn the cold and dark, and nameless twisting fears.\n\nI often join them when the lights are done,\nAnd they see the weight of years on my foolish head;\nWhen I am silent they think I’m a crazy one,\nBut when I talk they know that I am dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dreams-of-you": { - "title": "“Dreams of You”", - "body": "My dreams of you are like the fallen leaves,\ncolored with brilliance, nomad rustling things,\ntossed by winds of olden memories--\nthey prate of golden summertimes and springs.\n\nWhen skies were gray you flung them all away--\nbut I, who loved them, hoard such gifts as these.\nBy day I revel in their golden lights;\nat night they whisper tender sympathies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-a-lover-of-nature": { - "title": "“For a Lover of Nature”", - "body": "Your Valley trails its beauty through your poems,\nthe kindly woods, the majestic river.\nEarth is your god-or goddess, you declare,\nmindful of what good time must one day give her\nof all you have. Water and rocks and trees\nhold primal words born out of genesis.\n\nBut love is older than these.\n\nYou lay your hands upon the permanence\nof green-embroidered land and miss the truth\nthat you are trusting your immortal spirit\nto earth’s sad inexperience and youth.\nCenturies made this soil; this rock was lifted\nout of the aeons; time could never trace\na path to water’s birth or air’s inception,\nand so, you say, these be your godly grace.\nEarth was swept into being with the light--\ndear earth, you argue, who will soon be winning\nyour flesh and bones by a most ancient right.\n\nBut Love hath no beginning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-kingdom-of-god": { - "title": "“The Kingdom of God”", - "body": "Not towards the stars, O beautiful naked runner,\nnot on the hills of the moon after a wild white deer,\nseek not to discover afar the unspeakable wisdom,-\nthe quarry is here.\n\nBeauty holds court within,--\na slim young virgin in a dim shadowy place.\nMusic is only the echo of her voice,\nand earth is only a mirror for her face.\n\nNot in the quiet arms, O sorrowful lover;\nO fugitive, not in the dark on a pillow of breast;\nhunt not under the lighted leaves for God,--\nhere is the sacred Guest.\n\nThere is a Tenant here.\nCome home, roamer of earth, to this room and find\na timeless Heart under your own heart beating,\na Bird of beauty singing under your mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "petenwell-rock": { - "title": "“Petenwell Rock”", - "body": "I never shall forget the first gay night\nI came for dancing here;\nout of a long black road there bloomed this bright\nportion of revel, near\na tall pine-wreathed rock, as certain as a wall.\n\nOut of the night suddenly lights had mellowed\nto warm young gold glistening against a hall\nwhere dancers swayed like songs, and music bellowed\nits anger against grief, and laughter flying\nfell on my ears like sounded waterfall.\n\nBut overhead the whip-poor-wills were crying,\ncrowding all loneliness into one cry,\nand a great rock maintained a wise old silence\nlifting its strength into the starlight sky.\n\nO silver loneliness!\nO golden laughter!\nO grief that only loneliness should last!\nMadness will die, and youth will hurry after;\ninto some shadowed past\ndancers will bow like dust, laughter will crumble,\nwhile still beneath the silver of the moon\nfor loveliness and joy that died too soon\nthese plaintive birds will cry,\nand this tall rock will watch with calm indifference.\nholding itself aloof against the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-valley-of-the-cattails": { - "title": "“The Valley of the Cattails”", - "body": "My valley is a woman unconsoled.\nHer bluffs are amethyst, color of grief,\nHer tamarack swamps are sad.\nThere was no dark tale that she was not told,\nThere is no sorrow that she has not had.\nShe has no mood of mirth, however brief.\n\nToo long I praised her dolors in the words\nOf the dark ones, her trees,\nAnd of the whippoorwills, her sacred birds.\nHer tragedy is more intense than these.\n\nThe reeds that lift from every marsh and pond\nMore plainly speak of her spirit’s poverty;\nHere should the waters dance, or flowers be.\n\nReeds are true symbols of so weak a mother\nWho from the primer of her own dark fears\nTeaches her young the alphabet of tears\nAs if caroling earth possessed no other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "adelia-prado": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Adélia Prado", - "birth": { - "year": 1935 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "brazilian", - "language": "portuguese", - "flag": "🇧🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adélia_Prado", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "brazilian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-dictator-in-prison": { - "title": "“The Dictator in Prison”", - "body": "The dictator is writing poetry,\npoor fellow,\npoor us for saying\npoor fellow,\nsince he, too, has a memory\nto conjure orange trees,\nlittle bowls of pudding,\nlaughter and pleasant conversation--\na paradise of lowly delights.\nThe impatiens have barely opened\nand the bees are already busy among them,\nturning the day perfect.\nLet’s not ridicule the bloodthirsty man\nwho, under the eyes of the guards,\npours his desire--equal to anyone’s--\ninto a notebook:\nI want to be happy, I want an elastic body,\nI want a horse, a sword and a good war!\nThe dictator is devout,\nhe observes his canonic hours\nlike the monks in the choir,\nand dozes over the Koran.\nI who live outside the walls\ntremble for the fate\nof a man who pounded the ground\nwith his iron boot.\nLet no one interrupt the outcast’s prayer\nor ridicule his verses.\nGod’s mercy is strange,\nits mystery crushing.\nFor some unfathomable reason\nI am not the prisoner.\nMy compassion is too large\nto be my own.\nHe who invented hearts\nloves this poor wretch with mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese", - "translator": "Ellen Doré Watson" - } - }, - "plain-love": { - "title": "“Plain Love”", - "body": "I just want plain love.\nWith plain love they don’t look at each other.\nOnce found, like faith,\nthere’s an end to theologizing.\nTough as old boots, plain love is scrawny, sex-mad,\nand has as many children as you can imagine.\nIt makes up for not speaking by doing.\nIt plants three-coloured kisses all around the house,\npurple and white longings,\nboth the simple and the intense.\nPlain love is good because it doesn’t grow old.\nIt concentrates on the essential, what glitters in its eyes is what is:\nI am man you are woman.\nPlain love has no illusions,\nwhat it does have is hope:\nI want that plain love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "portuguese" - } - } - } - }, - "jacques-prevert": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jacques Prévert", - "birth": { - "year": 1898 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1993 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Prévert", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "alicante": { - "title": "“Alicante”", - "body": "An orange on the table\nyour dress on the rug\nand you in my bed\nsweet present of the present\ncool of night\nwarmth of my life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "the-dunce": { - "title": "“The Dunce”", - "body": "He says no with his head\nbut he says yes with his heart\nhe says yes to what he loves\nhe says no to the teacher\nhe stands\nhe is questioned\nand all the problems are posed\nsudden laughter seizes him\nand he erases all\nthe words and figures\nnames and dates\nsentences and snares\nand despite the teacher’s threats\nto the jeers of infant prodigies\nwith chalk of every colour\non the blackboard of misfortune\nhe draws the face of happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "for-you-my-love": { - "title": "“For You My Love”", - "body": "I went to the market, where they sell birds\nand I bought some birds\nfor you my love\n\nI went to the market, where they sell flowers\nand I bought some flowers\nfor you my love\nI went to the market, where they sell chains\n\nand I bought some chains\nheavy chains\nfor you my love\n\nAnd then I went to the slave market\nand I looked for you\nbut I did not find you there my love", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "its-like-that": { - "title": "“It’s Like That”", - "body": "A sailor has left the sea\nhis ship has left the port\nthe king has left the queen\nand a miser has left his gold\nit’s like that\n\nA widow has left her grief\na crazy woman has left the madhouse\nand your smile has left my lips\nit’s like that\n\nYou will leave me\nyou will leave me\nyou will leave me\nyou will come back to me\nyou will marry me\nyou will marry me\nThe knife marries the wound\nthe rainbow marries the rain\nthe smile marries the tears\nthe caress marries the frown\nit’s like that\n\nAnd fire marries ice\nand death marries life\nand life marries love\nYou will marry me\nyou will marry me\nyou will marry me", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "paris-at-night": { - "title": "“Paris At Night”", - "body": "Three matches one by one struck in the night\nThe first to see your face in its entirety\nThe second to see your eyes\nThe last to see your mouth\nAnd the darkness all around to remind me of all these\nAs I hold you in my arms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "song-of-the-jailer": { - "title": "“Song of the Jailer”", - "body": "Where are you going handsome jailer\nWith that key that’s touched with blood\nI am going to free the one I love\nIf there’s still time\nShe whom I’ve imprisoned\nTenderly and cruelly\nIn my most secret desire\nIn my deepest torment\nIn falsehoods of the future\nIn stupidities of vows\nI want to free her\nI want her to be free\nAnd even to forget me\nAnd even to go off\nAnd even to come back\nAnd even to love me again\nAnd love me again\nOr love another\nIf another pleases her\nAnd if I stay alone\nAnd she gone off\nI will only keep\nI will always keep\nIn my two hollowed hands\nTo the end of all my days\nThe softness of her breasts moulded by love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "this-love": { - "title": "“This Love”", - "body": "This love\nSo violent\nSo fragile\nSo tender\nSo hopeless\nThis love\nAs beautiful as the day\nAnd as wretched as the weather\nWhen the weather is wretched\n\nThis love\nSo real\nThis love\nSo beautiful\nSo happy\nSo joyous\nAnd so ridiculous\nTrembling with fear\nLike a child in the dark\nAnd so sure of itself\nLike a tranquil man in the quiet of the night\nThis love\nWhich made others afraid\nWhich made them gossip\nWhich drained the colour from their cheeks\nThis love\nWatched for\nBecause we watched for them\nSnared, wounded, trampled, finished, denied, forgotten\nBecause we snared, wounded, trampled, finished, denied, forgot it\n\nThis love\nEntire\nStill so alive\nShining\nThis is yours\nThis is mine\nThis love\nWhich is always new\nAnd which never changes\nReal like a plant\nQuivering like a bird\nWarm and as alive as the summer\nWe can both\nGo and come back\nWe can forget\nAnd fall asleep\nAnd wake up\nTo suffer old age\nFall asleep again\nTo dream to death\nAwake\nTo smile and laugh\nYoung again\nOur love endures\nObstinate as a mule\nAs alive as the desire\nAs cruel as the memory\nAs stupid as the regret\nAs tender as the memory\nAs cold as marble\nAs beautiful as the day\nAs delicate as an infant\nIt watches us\nSmiling\nAnd speaks to us\nWithout saying a word\nAnd I\nI listen to it\nTrembling\nAnd I cry\nI cry for you\nI cry for myself\nAnd I beg you\nFor yourself\nFor me\nAnd for all those who love\nAnd who are loved\nYes\nI cry to it\nFor you\nFor me\nAnd for all the others\nI do not know\nStay there\nThere where you are\nThere where you were before\nStay there\nDon’t move\nDon’t go away\nWe who are loved\nWe have forgotten you\nDo not forget us\nWe had only you on this earth\nDo not let us grow cold\nFurther and further away every day\nIt doesn’t matter where\nGive us a sign of life\nIn a nook in the woods\nIn the forest of memory\nSuddenly arise\nTake us by the hand\nAnd save us", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti" - } - }, - "the-wonders-of-life": { - "title": "“The Wonders of Life”", - "body": "In the teeth of a trap\nThe paw of a white fox\nAnd on the snow, blood\nThe blood of the white fox\nAnd in the snow, tracks\nThe tracks of the white fox\nWho escaped on three legs\nAs the sun was setting\nA rabbit between his teeth\nStill alive", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lawrence Ferlinghetti", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "may-probyn": { - "metadata": { - "name": "May Probyn", - "birth": { - "year": 1856 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Probyn", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "adrift": { - "title": "“Adrift”", - "body": "Ever the waterlily rocked\nUpon the rocking stream,\nWhere the little clouds, reflected, flocked\nAnd steered across her dream,\nAnd ever she sighed, “Why must I stay\nIn the river’s bend from day to day?\nOh, were I free to sail away,\nWhere the seas with wonder teem!”\n\n“I know that I am fair,” she said,\n“I watch it in the wave,\nAt anchor here in the river-bed,\nThat holds me like a grave.\nWhat good is the sun’s gold light to me--\nOr what good a living thing to be,\nWhen none draws ever nigh to see\nThe beauty that I have!”\n\nThe bird in the alder farther flew,\nAt the ending of his song;\nThe rat plunged in where the rushes grew,\nAnd paddled his way along;\nThe wind in the osiers stirred and sighed\nThat the current was swift, and the world was wide--\nAnd “away! and away!” the ripples cried,\nAnd the river tide ran strong.\n\nWas she happier when the stars were born,\nAnd the bird sat mute in the tree?\nWhen she rocked and swayed, with her cables torn,\nAnd felt that she was free?\nWhen the banks slid backward on either hand--\nFor the rat had gnawed through her anchor strand,\nAnd the wind had kissed her away from land,\nAnd was kissing her out to sea.\n\nThe river mouth was broad and black,\nWith currents countercrossed,\nWhere the foam churned white in the eddy’s track,\nAnd the scattered stars were lost.\nNo glimpse she saw of either bank,\nBut a waste of weed. that heaved and sank,\nWhere from gulf to gulf she reeled and shrank,\nAnd from wave to wave she tossed.\n\nThe Sun uprose through a glory spread,\nAnd climbed by a cloudy stair,\nAnd “What is the thing, O Sea!” he said,\n“Your breakers are tumbling there?”\n“That?” said the Sea, “with the muddied face,\nAnd the cup all tattered and, reft of grace?\nA flower, they say, from some inland place,\nThat once on a time was fair!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "is-it-nothing-to-you": { - "title": "“Is It Nothing to You?”", - "body": "We were playing on the green together,\nMy sweetheart and I--\nOh! so heedless in the gay June weather,\nWhen the word went forth that we must die.\nOh! so merrily the balls of amber\nAnd of ivory tossed we to the sky,\nWhile the word went forth in the King’s chamber,\nThat we both must die.\n\nOh! so idly, straying through the pleasaunce,\nPlucked we here and there\nFruit and bud, while in the royal presence\nThe King’s son was casting from his hair\nGlory of the wreathen gold that crowned it,\nAnd, ungirdling all his garments fair,\nFlinging by the jewelled clasp that bound it,\nWith his feet made bare,\n\nDown the myrtled stairway of the palace,\nAshes on his head,\nCame he, through the rose and citron alleys,\nIn rough sark of sackcloth habited,\nAnd in a hempen halter--oh! we jested,\nLightly, and we laughed as he was led\nTo the torture, while the bloom we breasted\nWhere the grapes grew red.\n\nOh! so sweet the birds, when he was dying,\nPiped to her and me--\nIs no room this glad June day for sighing--\nHe is dead, and she and I go free!\nWhen the sun shall set on all our pleasure\nWe will mourn him--What, so you decree\nWe are heartless--Nay, but in what measure\nDo you more than we?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-model": { - "title": "“The Model”", - "body": "Not three years since--and now he asks my name!\nNot know me?--God! am I so changed, so changed?\n\nNow that I stay to seek it, how it stares\nOut of this scrap of wretched looking-glass,\nJust big enough to hold my face, no more.\n’Twas in this same, small, ragged bit of glass\nI looked, when first I wore the little pearls\nHe gave me for my ears, three Easters back--\nPoor little paltry things enough they are!\nBut then, they seemed almost too beautiful\nTo wear in such a weekday world as mine.\n\nStill looking for it--yes, I understand,\nI see the reason why he sent to-day,\nAnd fetched me, having passed me in the street.\nHerodias is his picture, and my face\nWill make her all he wants. Strange luck he has!\n(I’ve heard him say it fifty times before)\nUnfailingly just finds the face he needs.\nTis hard to see in this unlighted place,\nWith but one guttering wick--yet, even here,\nIt only wants the shoulder-slipping garb,\nThe great gold serpents coiled about the throat,\nAnd writhing up the large, round, naked arm--\nIt only wants the hair, cloud-falling--so!\nAnd, lo, Herodias gleams there in the glass!\n’Tis but to drop the chin into the palm,\nThrust both a little forward--thus! as though\nInviting hatred from a world contemned,\nAnd there she sits, the beautiful, bad thing,\nWith superciliously defiant eyes,\nAnd stealthy smile beneath the half-dropped lids,\nCruel as panther crouching for the spring.\nAdd but the whiteness of a bosom bared,\nLarge jewelled hoops for earrings--cast away\nThese clumsy shoes, and bind about with gold\nThe sleek, ripe-rounded ankles--and enough!\n’Tis she, just as he paints her--nothing lacks--\nHalf animal, half fiend--not old, not young--\nSteeped to the brows in splendid shamelessness.\n\nCurse on this draught that takes the candle flame!\n’Twill flicker out for end of all its flare--\nAnd if I hold it up, for better view,\nThe roof will be on fire, it slopes so low.\nWho’d choose the garret for their dwelling place?\nOven in the summer, ice-hole in the frost,\nRain dripping through, and rats for company,\nHalf a day’s climb to reach it--Once, indeed,\nTo be so high seemed but the nearer heaven!\nAnd there was one that mounted--was it I?--\nThe steep, uneven stair, three steps at once,\nSweet singing like some soul in Paradise.\nAnd violet scents would linger in the air--\nA little jar, set here upon the shelf,\nWeighting the place with breath as fine and faint\nAs when the incense cloud goes floating up\nAmong the fretted aisles, and in the hush\nThe Host is lifted, and the organ dies.\nPerhaps he gave the violets--I forget!\nHe gave me many things, in idleness,\nAs one might give a child. Here, too, at nights,\nIf you were pleasure-loving, you could lean\nBoth arms upon the sill, and see beneath\nThe lamps all twinkling, twinkling through the town,\nAnd hear the half articulate music sound\nFrom off the boulevard and the gaslit trees,\nWhile out of heaven the great white stars looked down,\nAnd trembled where they hung--the whole night through\nOne felt them shine athwart the uncurtained pane,\nLike friends of old, and turned, and dreamed anew;\nAnd in the morning, long before the light,\nHow loud the swallows cheeped beneath the eaves,\nUntil their twitter drove the dreams apart,\nAnd waking seemed mere joy of being alive!\nBut that was long ago! three years ago!\nI was young, then, and he was painting me\nAs Mary Maiden, grave and innocent,\nSitting untroubled at a spinning-wheel,\nWith sunset flaming through a pane behind,\nAnd groups of lilies, and a garden plot,\nBefore the angel came.\n\nAnd now, to-day,\nHe looked, looked twice and thrice--and asked my name!\n\nHe stirred as though the dead had come to life--\nHe thought of his Maid-Mother first, I know,\nAnd would not credit, and “Thank God,” he said,\n--Thick muttered in his throat, but I could hear--\n“Thank God I never loved her!” And I laughed--\nHerodias must have laughed that very laugh!\nFull-eyed I faced him, as he turned about,\nAnd cried between his teeth, “You think I loved?\nNot I! not I! Never so near I came,\nBut at the last, a look was in your eyes\nThat said no man could love you and be blest,\nAnd on the brink I stayed--for that, thank God!”\nThen up I sprang--“Pity, in sooth,” I said--\nMore hiss than speech it sounded to myself,\nAs though a snake had spat into his face--\n“Pity, in sooth, to have squandered, all in vain,\nSuch love as yours, most perfect man of love!”\nThe mesh of silk, wherein his subtle hand\nHad wound me, half across the room I flung,\nAnd snatched my old, dim, faded cloak again,\nAnd dragged its hood above my storm of hair--\n“One thing alone Herodias lacked,” I said,\n“She should have smitten, herself, with her own palm,\nThe scorner, the rebuker”--and stepped close,\nAnd lifted up my slim, unfolded hand,\nAnd struck him, slightly, swiftly, in the face,\nAnd nodded him farewell, and went, or ere\nThe outraged red could spring into his cheek.\n\nSo now, belike, he will not brook again\nThat I should sit to him; or if he do,\nBelike I shall not go. To me all’s one,\nHis loathing or his loving--yet, sometimes,\nI think that had he loved me in those days,\nNever so little, only for one hour,\nTo-day, perhaps, I were not all I am--\nPerhaps Herodias had not worn my face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "uncertainties": { - "title": "“Uncertainties”", - "body": "Pink linen bonnet,\nPink cotton gown;\nRoses printed on it,\nHands burnt brown.\nOh! blithe were all the piping birds, and the golden-belted bees,\nAnd blithe sang she on the doorstep, with her apron full of peas.\n\nSound of scythe and mowing,\nWhere buttercups grew tall;\nSound of red kine lowing,\nAnd early milkmaid’s call.\nSweet she sang on the doorstep, with the young peas in her lap,\nAnd he came whistling up the lane, with the ribbons in his cap.\n\n“You called me a bad penny\nThat wouldn’t be sent away--\nBut here’s goodbye to you, Jenny,\nFor many and many a day.\nThere’s talk of cannon and killing--\nNay, never turn so white!\nAnd I’ve taken the king’s shilling--\nI took it last night.”\nOh1 merry, merry piped the thrushes up in the cherry tree,\nBut dumb she sat on the doorstep, and out through the gate went he.\n\nScent of hay and summer;\nRed evening sky;\nNoise of fife and drummer;\nMen marching by.\nThe hay will be carried presently, and the cherries gathered all,\nAnd the corn stand yellow in the shocks, and the leaves begin to fall.\n\nPerhaps some evening after,\nWith no more song of thrush,\nThe lads will cease their laughter,\nAnd the maids their chatter hush;\nAnd word of blood and battle\nWill mix with the sound of the flail,\nAnd lowing of the cattle,\nAnd clink of the milking pail;\nAnd one will read half fearful\nA list of names aloud;\nAnd a few will stagger tearful\nOut of the little crowd;\nAnd she, perhaps, half doubting,\nHalf knowing why she came,\nWill stand among them, pouting,\nAnd hear, perhaps, his name\nWill weep, perhaps, a little, as she wanders up the lane,\nAnd wish one summer morning were all to do again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "yesterday": { - "title": "“Yesterday”", - "body": "’Twas yesterday he went away\nAnd all my life is still to live!\nOne was my lover, one my friend\nWhat other answer could I give?\nHe told me “women should obey\nLove was no love that would not bend”\nHe left me nothing more to say\n’Twas yesterday--but yesterday.\n\nWe walked beside the uncut hay\nHe drew me close--he held my hand;\nI whispered it was his mistake;\nHe said I did not understand.\nHe laid commands--I gave him nay\nAnd then I thought my heart would break;\nNot all my tears could make him stay\n’Twas yesterday--but yesterday!\n\nCan love be love that leads astray?\nForswear the friend of all my life?\nOr else, he said--and bade me choose--\nHe would not have me for a wife.\nHe did not urge, nor plead, nor pray\nHe left me nothing more to lose,\nNo gleam of hope, no faintest ray.\nMy skies have lost their sunny blues,\nAnd changed to chill and winter grey;\nAnd yet but now they shone so gay,\nBut now we walked beside the may,\nAnd heard the thrushes’ roundelay--\nDear God! ’twas only yesterday.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "adelaide-anne-procter": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Adelaide Anne Procter", - "birth": { - "year": 1825 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Anne_Procter", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "doubting-heart": { - "title": "“Doubting Heart”", - "body": "Where are the swallows fled?\n Frozen and dead,\nPerchance, upon some bleak and stormy shore.\n O doubting heart!\n Far over purple seas\n They wait, in sunny ease,\n The balmy southern breeze,\nTo bring them to their northern homes once more.\n\nWhy must the flowers die?\n Prison’d they lie\nIn the cold tomb, heedless of tears or rain.\n O doubting heart!\n They only sleep below\n The soft white ermine snow,\n While winter winds shall blow,\nTo breathe and smile upon you soon again.\n\nThe sun has hid its rays\n These many days;\nWill dreary hours never leave the earth?\n O doubting heart!\n The stormy clouds on high\n Veil the same sunny sky,\n That soon (for spring is nigh)\nShall wake the summer into golden mirth.\n\nFair hope is dead, and light\n Is quench’d in night.\nWhat sound can break the silence of despair?\n O doubting heart!\n Thy sky is overcast,\n Yet stars shall rise at last,\n Brighter for darkness past,\nAnd angels’ silver voices stir the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "fidelis": { - "title": "“Fidelis”", - "body": "You have taken back the promise\nThat you spoke so long ago;\nTaken back the heart you gave me--\nI must even let it go.\nWhere Love once has breathed, Pride dieth,\nSo I struggled, but in vain,\nFirst to keep the links together,\nThen to piece the broken chain.\n\nBut it might not be--so freely\nAll your friendship I restore,\nAnd the heart that I had taken\nAs my own forevermore.\nNo shade of reproach shall touch you,\nDread no more a claim from me--\nBut I will not have you fancy\nThat I count myself as free.\n\nI am bound by the old promise;\nWhat can break that golden chain?\nNot even the words that you have spoken,\nOr the sharpness of my pain:\nDo you think, because you fail me\nAnd draw back your hand today,\nThat from out the heart I gave you\nMy strong love can fade away?\n\nIt will live. No eyes may see it;\nIn my soul it will lie deep,\nHidden from all; but I shall feel it\nOften stirring in its sleep.\nSo remember that the friendship\nWhich you now think poor and vain,\nWill endure in hope and patience,\nTill you ask for it again.\n\nPerhaps in some long twilight hour,\nLike those we have known of old,\nWhen past shadows gather round you,\nAnd your present friends grow cold,\nYou may stretch your hands out towards me--\nAhl You will--I know not when--\nI shall nurse my love and keep it\nFaithfully, for you, till then.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "sully-prudhomme": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sully Prudhomme", - "birth": { - "year": 1839 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sully_Prudhomme", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "cradles": { - "title": "“Cradles”", - "body": "Along the quay, the great ships,\nthat ride the swell in silence,\ntake no notice of the cradles.\nthat the hands of the women rock.\n\nBut the day of farewells will come,\nwhen the women must weep,\nand curious men are tempted\ntowards the horizons that lure them!\n\nAnd that day the great ships,\nsailing away from the diminishing port,\nfeel their bulk held back\nby the spirits of the distant cradles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "in-this-world": { - "title": "“In This World”", - "body": "In this world all the flow’rs wither,\nThe sweet songs of the birds are brief;\nI dream of summers that will last\nAlways!\n\nIn this world the lips touch but lightly,\nAnd no taste of sweetness remains;\nI dream of a kiss that will last\nAlways.\n\nIn this world ev’ry man is mourning\nHis lost friendship or his lost love;\nI dream of fond lovers abiding\nAlways!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "never-to-see-or-hear-her": { - "title": "“Never to See or Hear Her”", - "body": "Never to see or hear her,\nnever to name her aloud,\nbut faithfully always to wait for her\nand love her.\n\nTo open my arms and, tired of waiting,\nto close them on nothing,\nbut still always to stretch them out to her\nand to love her.\n\nTo only be able to stretch them out to her,\nand then to be consumed in tears,\nbut always to shed these tears,\nalways to love her.\n\nNever to see or hear her,\nnever to name her aloud,\nbut with a love that grows ever more tender,\nalways to love her. Always!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "dun-karm-psaila": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dun Karm Psaila", - "birth": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "maltese", - "language": "maltese", - "flag": "🇲🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun_Karm_Psaila", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "maltese" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "an-evening-hymn": { - "title": "“An Evening Hymn”", - "body": "See how the night approaches,\nBoding a time of rest;\nHeaven is decked in crimson\nSun’s setting in the west.\nStars will soon make their entrance\nFilling, up high, the skies,\nSoon will the living slumber,\nAll noise is hushed, and dies.\n\n_You, Lord, indwell the daybreak,\nAn endless morn you fill,\nYet we know night. So keep us,\nMake our hearts whole and still._\n\nSee how the day is ended,\nLayers of work and rest,\nShattered, at times, by sorrow,\nSometimes with pleasure blest.\nFather so rich in mercy,\nAll things come from your trove,\nYou wish to see creation\nEnthralled with but your love.\n\n_You, Lord, indwell the daybreak,\nAn endless morn you fill,\nYet we know night. So keep us,\nMake our hearts whole and still._\n\nSustain and clothe the needy,\nStand by them, Lord, today,\nComfort them, who are weeping,\nThe tired, with rest, repay.\nBeckon the sinner, gently,\nWho wronged you and his kin,\nLet none lie down in anguish\nA fear of doom within.\n\n_You, Lord, indwell the daybreak,\nAn endless morn you fill,\nYet we know night. So keep us,\nMake our hearts whole and still._", - "metadata": { - "language": "maltese", - "translator": "René M. Micallef" - } - }, - "in-front-of-the-image-of-our-lady": { - "title": "“In Front of the Image of Our Lady”", - "body": "So beautiful I was when I saw you once\nIn a dream, in the happiness of my youth;\nI was asleep alone in a small, secluded bed,\nAnd you came down from heaven and sat down with me.\n\nGood morning, sunrise, together,\nThey are not as sweet as roses on your cheeks;\nExceed all the glare of the heavens, o Blessed,\nThe resin shone from your eyeballs.\n\nA rose that blooms in the dawn of May\nYou look like a smile on your face, tender,\nAt the time you are with me, my dear boy,\nThe great Redeemer, who suffered and died for us.\n\nHis eyes are broken in a sleepy, restful sleep\nJesus on your chest his little head,\nFrom your heart to your heart the goodness of heaven rejoices …\nWith you the angels with reverence look on with envy.\n\nBlessed be the hand that drew you!\nShe stole the stars, the beauty of the garden roses,\nAnd with all your liberty, O full of gratitude,\nQueen of Heaven, sweet Madonna.\n\nI was so beautiful, I remember very well,\nWhen in the dream of childhood I saw you;\nOf your eyes, of your mouth was this sweetness;\nAnd I’m in love with my mother’s name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "maltese", - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "to-my-canary": { - "title": "“To My Canary”", - "body": "What was it that made us meet in this house so peaceful?\nYou probably do not know, yellow bird;\nNor do you know, when I go out\nFor work in the morning, the door I close behind me,\nThe keys I lock it, and I start to walk,\nAnd not a single breath is heard, until\nI turn the keys again and I come in.\nIt’s better you do not know; that way no part\nIn my life will you take, and between the days and nights\nYou will live your life without any sorrows.\n\nAs the light begins to shimmer, I see you awake,\nBird of yellow hue, and your little head\nComes out from under your wings where you shelter it\nFrom the night, when the sun sets and you go silent\nAnd prepare to sleep. Hastily you rest your chest\nOn the rod near the other and clean yourself,\nGo down to nibble some seeds and instantly in the sweetness\nOf your voice, you begin to play inside my ears\nWhich is soothed all the more. Fiddling and jumping\nBetween a melody and another, you grab your thin nails,\non the metal that holds you as you come and go\nUp to your rod without tiring. The pace\nOf your chest and wings, the look, the melody,\nShow that everything about you is tranquility and strength.\nWith pristine innocence you look at me\nWhen I come close to know you. You recognize me,\nUnderstand me too well; and for that you like me,\nWithout showing any arrogance, I open the door\nOf your cage to give you food and water\nAnd with a full shout, as if you want to praise me\nAs a favour for thinking of you, you sing to me\nWhen I close the door and I hang your cage again\nIn that part of the house where the cold cannot hurt you\nAnd only a little sunlight visits you. Futelessly I approach,\nSometimes quiet on the tip of my toes\nTo catch you asleep or idle from your rising\nTo your setting sun, no rest and no\nFatigue can get to you. What a splendid life,\nLiving without thinking what has gone by, and what\nJealousies and fights are going on outside your house!\n\nBut I’m not jealous of you, yellow bird,\nEven though I like your life. Higher\nThan the life of this world is my hope.\nI know that a lot of times the bread I eat\nIs wet with tears, and instead of the word,\nSometimes without my wanting, a sob comes out,\nFor where I planted the rose bloomed in masses\nThorns and petals, and whom with his pure love\nCould console me, ended in the grave before me.\nBut I know the tears planted in the world\nSpring happiness in the heavens, and after this\nDream we call life, comes\nThe resurrection from death into the light of eternity.\n\nSuch life we live then, yellow bird:\nYou, tranquil in yourself and with my love;\nI, with the hope that God planted in my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "maltese" - } - } - } - }, - "psalms": { - "metadata": { - "name": "", - "birth": null, - "death": null, - "gender": "", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "", - "language": "", - "flag": "", - "link": "", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [], - "n_poems": 150 - }, - "poems": { - "psalm-1": { - "title": "Psalm 1", - "body": "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the wicked,\nNor standeth in the way of sinners,\nNor sitteth in the seat of scoffers:\nBut his delight is in the law of Jehovah;\nAnd on his law doth he meditate day and night.\nAnd he shall be like a tree planted by the streams of water,\nThat bringeth forth its fruit in its season,\nWhose leaf also doth not wither;\nAnd whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.\nThe wicked are not so,\nBut are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.\nTherefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment,\nNor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.\nFor Jehovah knoweth the way of the righteous;\nBut the way of the wicked shall perish.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-2": { - "title": "Psalm 2", - "body": "Why do the nations rage,\nAnd the peoples meditate a vain thing?\nThe kings of the earth set themselves,\nAnd the rulers take counsel together,\nAgainst Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying,\nLet us break their bonds asunder,\nAnd cast away their cords from us.\nHe that sitteth in the heavens will laugh:\nThe Lord will have them in derision.\nThen will he speak unto them in his wrath,\nAnd vex them in his sore displeasure:\nYet I have set my king\nUpon my holy hill of Zion.\nI will tell of the decree:\nJehovah said unto me, Thou art my son;\nThis day have I begotten thee.\nAsk of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance,\nAnd the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.\nThou shalt break them with a rod of iron;\nThou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.\nNow therefore be wise, O ye kings:\nBe instructed, ye judges of the earth.\nServe Jehovah with fear,\nAnd rejoice with trembling.\nKiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way,\nFor his wrath will soon be kindled.\nBlessed are all they that take refuge in him.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-3": { - "title": "Psalm 3", - "body": "_A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son._\n\nJehovah, how are mine adversaries increased!\nMany are they that rise up against me.\nMany there are that say of my soul,\nThere is no help for him in God.\n\nSelah\n\nBut thou, O Jehovah, art a shield about me;\nMy glory and the lifter up of my head.\nI cry unto Jehovah with my voice,\nAnd he answereth me out of his holy hill.\n\nSelah\n\nI laid me down and slept;\nI awaked; for Jehovah sustaineth me.\nI will not be afraid of ten thousands of the people\nThat have set themselves against me round about.\nArise, O Jehovah; save me, O my God:\nFor thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone;\nThou hast broken the teeth of the wicked.\nSalvation belongeth unto Jehovah:\nThy blessing be upon thy people.\n\nSelah", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-4": { - "title": "Psalm 4", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. A Psalm of David._\n\nAnswer me when I call, O God of my righteousness;\nThou hast set me at large when I was in distress:\nHave mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.\nO ye sons of men, how long shall my glory be turned into dishonor?\nHow long will ye love vanity, and seek after falsehood?\n\nSelah\n\nBut know that Jehovah hath set apart for himself him that is godly:\nJehovah will hear when I call unto him.\nStand in awe, and sin not:\nCommune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.\n\nSelah\n\nOffer the sacrifices of righteousness,\nAnd put your trust in Jehovah.\nMany there are that say, Who will show us any good?\nJehovah, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.\nThou hast put gladness in my heart,\nMore than they have when their grain and their new wine are increased.\nIn peace will I both lay me down and sleep;\nFor thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-5": { - "title": "Psalm 5", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; with the Nehiloth. A Psalm of David._\n\nGive ear to my words, O Jehovah,\nConsider my meditation.\nHearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God;\nFor unto thee do I pray.\nO Jehovah, in the morning shalt thou hear my voice;\nIn the morning will I order my prayer unto thee, and will keep watch.\nFor thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness:\nEvil shall not sojourn with thee.\nThe arrogant shall not stand in thy sight:\nThou hatest all workers of iniquity.\nThou wilt destroy them that speak lies:\nJehovah abhorreth the blood-thirsty and deceitful man.\nBut as for me, in the abundance of thy lovingkindness will I come into thy house:\nIn thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple.\nLead me, O Jehovah, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies;\nMake thy way straight before my face.\nFor there is no faithfulness in their mouth;\nTheir inward part is very wickedness;\nTheir throat is an open sepulchre;\nThey flatter with their tongue.\nHold them guilty, O God;\nLet them fall by their own counsels;\nThrust them out in the multitude of their transgressions;\nFor they have rebelled against thee.\nBut let all those that take refuge in thee rejoice,\nLet them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them:\nLet them also that love thy name be joyful in thee.\nFor thou wilt bless the righteous;\nO Jehovah, thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-6": { - "title": "Psalm 6", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments, set to the Sheminith. A Psalm of David._\n\nO Jehovah, rebuke me not in thine anger,\nNeither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.\nHave mercy upon me, O Jehovah; for I am withered away:\nO Jehovah, heal me; for my bones are troubled.\nMy soul also is sore troubled:\nAnd thou, O Jehovah, how long?\nReturn, O Jehovah, deliver my soul:\nSave me for thy lovingkindness’ sake.\nFor in death there is no remembrance of thee:\nIn Sheol who shall give thee thanks?\nI am weary with my groaning;\nEvery night make I my bed to swim;\nI water my couch with my tears.\nMine eye wasteth away because of grief;\nIt waxeth old because of all mine adversaries.\nDepart from me, all ye workers of iniquity;\nFor Jehovah hath heard the voice of my weeping.\nJehovah hath heard my supplication;\nJehovah will receive my prayer.\nAll mine enemies shall be put to shame and sore troubled:\nThey shall turn back, they shall be put to shame suddenly.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-7": { - "title": "Psalm 7", - "body": "_Shiggaion of David, which he sang unto Jehova, concerning the words of Cush a Benjamite._\n\nO Jehovah my God, in thee do I take refuge:\nSave me from all them that pursue me, and deliver me,\nLest they tear my soul like a lion,\nRending it in pieces, while there is none to deliver.\nO Jehovah my God, if I have done this;\nIf there be iniquity in my hands;\nIf I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me;\n(Yea, I have delivered him that without cause was mine adversary;)\nLet the enemy pursue my soul, and overtake it;\nYea, let him tread my life down to the earth,\nAnd lay my glory in the dust.\n\nSelah\n\nArise, O Jehovah, in thine anger;\nLift up thyself against the rage of mine adversaries,\nAnd awake for me; thou hast commanded judgment.\nAnd let the congregation of the peoples compass thee about;\nAnd over them return thou on high.\nJehovah ministereth judgment to the peoples:\nJudge me, O Jehovah, according to my righteousness, and to mine integrity that is in me.\nO let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish thou the righteous:\nFor the righteous God trieth the minds and hearts.\nMy shield is with God,\nWho saveth the upright in heart.\nGod is a righteous judge,\nYea, a God that hath indignation every day.\nIf a man turn not, he will whet his sword;\nHe hath bent his bow, and made it ready.\nHe hath also prepared for him the instruments of death;\nHe maketh his arrows fiery shafts.\nBehold, he travaileth with iniquity;\nYea, he hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood.\nHe hath made a pit, and digged it,\nAnd is fallen into the ditch which he made.\nHis mischief shall return upon his own head,\nAnd his violence shall come down upon his own pate.\nI will give thanks unto Jehovah according to his righteousness,\nAnd will sing praise to the name of Jehovah Most High.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-8": { - "title": "Psalm 8", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to the Gittith. A Psalm of David._\n\nO Jehovah, our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth,\nWho hast set thy glory upon the heavens!\nOut of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength,\nBecause of thine adversaries,\nThat thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.\nWhen I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,\nThe moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;\nWhat is man, that thou art mindful of him?\nAnd the son of man, that thou visitest him?\nFor thou hast made him but little lower than God,\nAnd crownest him with glory and honor.\nThou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands;\nThou hast put all things under his feet:\nAll sheep and oxen,\nYea, and the beasts of the field,\nThe birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,\nWhatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.\nO Jehovah, our Lord,\nHow excellent is thy name in all the earth!", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-9": { - "title": "Psalm 9", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Muthlabben. A Psalm of David._\n\nI will give thanks unto Jehovah with my whole heart;\nI will show forth all thy marvellous works.\nI will be glad and exult in thee;\nI will sing praise to thy name, O thou Most High.\nWhen mine enemies turn back,\nThey stumble and perish at thy presence.\nFor thou hast maintained my right and my cause;\nThou sittest in the throne judging righteously.\nThou hast rebuked the nations, thou hast destroyed the wicked;\nThou hast blotted out their name for ever and ever.\nThe enemy are come to an end, they are desolate for ever;\nAnd the cities which thou hast overthrown,\nThe very remembrance of them is perished.\nBut Jehovah sitteth as king for ever:\nHe hath prepared his throne for judgment;\nAnd he will judge the world in righteousness,\nHe will minister judgment to the peoples in uprightness.\nJehovah also will be a high tower for the oppressed,\nA high tower in times of trouble;\nAnd they that know thy name will put their trust in thee;\nFor thou, Jehovah, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.\nSing praises to Jehovah, who dwelleth in Zion:\nDeclare among the people his doings.\nFor he that maketh inquisition for blood remembereth them;\nHe forgetteth not the cry of the poor.\nHave mercy upon me, O Jehovah;\nBehold my affliction which I suffer of them that hate me,\nThou that liftest me up from the gates of death;\nThat I may show forth all thy praise.\nIn the gates of the daughter of Zion\nI will rejoice in thy salvation.\nThe nations are sunk down in the pit that they made:\nIn the net which they hid is their own foot taken.\nJehovah hath made himself known, he hath executed judgment:\nThe wicked is snared in the work of his own hands.\n\nHiggaion. Selah\n\nThe wicked shall be turned back unto Sheol,\nEven all the nations that forget God.\nFor the needy shall not alway be forgotten,\nNor the expectation of the poor perish for ever.\nArise, O Jehovah; let not man prevail:\nLet the nations be judged in thy sight.\nPut them in fear, O Jehovah:\nLet the nations know themselves to be but men.\n\nSelah", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-10": { - "title": "Psalm 10", - "body": "Why standest thou afar off, O Jehovah?\nWhy hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?\nIn the pride of the wicked the poor is hotly pursued;\nLet them be taken in the devices that they have conceived.\nFor the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire,\nAnd the covetous renounceth, yea, contemneth Jehovah.\nThe wicked, in the pride of his countenance, saith, He will not require it.\nAll his thoughts are, There is no God.\nHis ways are firm at all times;\nThy judgments are far above out of his sight:\nAs for all his adversaries, he puffeth at them.\nHe saith in his heart, I shall not be moved;\nTo all generations I shall not be in adversity.\nHis mouth is full of cursing and deceit and oppression:\nUnder his tongue is mischief and iniquity.\nHe sitteth in the lurking-places of the villages;\nIn the secret places doth he murder the innocent;\nHis eyes are privily set against the helpless.\nHe lurketh in secret as a lion in his covert;\nHe lieth in wait to catch the poor:\nHe doth catch the poor, when he draweth him in his net.\nHe croucheth, he boweth down,\nAnd the helpless fall by his strong ones.\nHe saith in his heart, God hath forgotten;\nHe hideth his face; he will never see it.\nArise, O Jehovah; O God, lift up thy hand:\nForget not the poor.\nWherefore doth the wicked contemn God,\nAnd say in his heart, Thou wilt not require it?\nThou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand:\nThe helpless committeth himself unto thee;\nThou hast been the helper of the fatherless.\nBreak thou the arm of the wicked;\nAnd as for the evil man, seek out his wickedness till thou find none.\nJehovah is King for ever and ever:\nThe nations are perished out of his land.\nJehovah, thou hast heard the desire of the meek:\nThou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear;\nTo judge the fatherless and the oppressed,\nThat man who is of the earth may be terrible no more.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-11": { - "title": "Psalm 11", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nIn Jehovah do I take refuge:\nHow say ye to my soul,\nFlee as a bird to your mountain;\nFor, lo, the wicked bend the bow,\nThey make ready their arrow upon the string,\nThat they may shoot in darkness at the upright in heart;\nIf the foundations be destroyed,\nWhat can the righteous do?\nJehovah is in his holy temple;\nJehovah, his throne is in heaven;\nHis eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men.\nJehovah trieth the righteous;\nBut the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.\nUpon the wicked he will rain snares;\nFire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.\nFor Jehovah is righteous; he loveth righteousness:\nThe upright shall behold his face.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-12": { - "title": "Psalm 12", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to the Sheminith. A Psalm of David._\n\nHelp, Jehovah; for the godly man ceaseth;\nFor the faithful fail from among the children of men.\nThey speak falsehood every one with his neighbor:\nWith flattering lip, and with a double heart, do they speak.\nJehovah will cut off all flattering lips,\nThe tongue that speaketh great things;\nWho have said, With our tongue will we prevail;\nOur lips are our own: who is lord over us?\nBecause of the oppression of the poor, because of the sighing of the needy,\nNow will I arise, saith Jehovah;\nI will set him in the safety he panteth for.\nThe words of Jehovah are pure words;\nAs silver tried in a furnace on the earth,\nPurified seven times.\nThou wilt keep them, O Jehovah,\nThou wilt preserve them from this generation for ever.\nThe wicked walk on every side,\nWhen vileness is exalted among the sons of men.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-13": { - "title": "Psalm 13", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nHow long, O Jehovah? wilt thou forget me for ever?\nHow long wilt thou hide thy face from me?\nHow long shall I take counsel in my soul,\nHaving sorrow in my heart all the day?\nHow long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?\nConsider and answer me, O Jehovah my God:\nLighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;\nLest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him;\nLest mine adversaries rejoice when I am moved.\nBut I have trusted in thy lovingkindness;\nMy heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.\nI will sing unto Jehovah,\nBecause he hath dealt bountifully with me.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-14": { - "title": "Psalm 14", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nThe fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.\nThey are corrupt, they have done abominable works;\nThere is none that doeth good.\nJehovah looked down from heaven upon the children of men,\nTo see if there were any that did understand,\nThat did seek after God.\nThey are all gone aside; they are together become filthy;\nThere is none that doeth good, no, not one.\nHave all the workers of iniquity no knowledge,\nWho eat up my people as they eat bread,\nAnd call not upon Jehovah?\nThere were they in great fear;\nFor God is in the generation of the righteous.\nYe put to shame the counsel of the poor,\nBecause Jehovah is his refuge.\nOh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!\nWhen Jehovah bringeth back the captivity of his people,\nThen shall Jacob rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-15": { - "title": "Psalm 15", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle?\nWho shall dwell in thy holy hill?\nHe that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness,\nAnd speaketh truth in his heart;\nHe that slandereth not with his tongue,\nNor doeth evil to his friend,\nNor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor;\nIn whose eyes a reprobate is despised,\nBut who honoreth them that fear Jehovah;\nHe that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not;\nHe that putteth not out his money to interest,\nNor taketh reward against the innocent.\nHe that doeth these things shall never be moved.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-16": { - "title": "Psalm 16", - "body": "_Michtam of David._\n\nPreserve me, O God; for in thee do I take refuge.\nO my soul, thou hast said unto Jehovah, Thou art my Lord:\nI have no good beyond thee.\nAs for the saints that are in the earth,\nThey are the excellent in whom is all my delight.\nTheir sorrows shall be multiplied that give gifts for another god:\nTheir drink-offerings of blood will I not offer,\nNor take their names upon my lips.\nJehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup:\nThou maintainest my lot.\nThe lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;\nYea, I have a goodly heritage.\nI will bless Jehovah, who hath given me counsel;\nYea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons.\nI have set Jehovah always before me:\nBecause he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.\nTherefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth;\nMy flesh also shall dwell in safety.\nFor thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol;\nNeither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption.\nThou wilt show me the path of life:\nIn thy presence is fulness of joy;\nIn thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-17": { - "title": "Psalm 17", - "body": "_A Prayer of David._\n\nHear the right, O Jehovah, attend unto my cry;\nGive ear unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips.\nLet my sentence come forth from thy presence;\nLet thine eyes look upon equity.\nThou hast proved my heart; thou hast visited me in the night;\nThou hast tried me, and findest nothing;\nI am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress.\nAs for the works of men, by the word of thy lips\nI have kept me from the ways of the violent.\nMy steps have held fast to thy paths,\nMy feet have not slipped.\nI have called upon thee, for thou wilt answer me, O God:\nIncline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech.\nShow thy marvellous lovingkindness,\nO thou that savest by thy right hand them that take refuge in thee\nFrom those that rise up against them.\nKeep me as the apple of the eye;\nHide me under the shadow of thy wings,\nFrom the wicked that oppress me,\nMy deadly enemies, that compass me about.\nThey are inclosed in their own fat:\nWith their mouth they speak proudly.\nThey have now compassed us in our steps;\nThey set their eyes to cast us down to the earth.\nHe is like a lion that is greedy of his prey,\nAnd as it were a young lion lurking in secret places.\nArise, O Jehovah,\nConfront him, cast him down:\nDeliver my soul from the wicked by thy sword;\nFrom men by thy hand, O Jehovah,\nFrom men of the world, whose portion is in this life,\nAnd whose belly thou fillest with thy treasure:\nThey are satisfied with children,\nAnd leave the rest of their substance to their babes.\nAs for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness;\nI shall be satisfied, when I awake, with beholding thy form.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-18": { - "title": "Psalm 18", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David the servant of Jehovah, who spake unto Jehovah the words of this song in the day that Jehovah delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul: and he said,_\n\nI love thee, O Jehovah, my strength.\nJehovah is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer;\nMy God, my rock, in whom I will take refuge;\nMy shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower.\nI will call upon Jehovah, who is worthy to be praised:\nSo shall I be saved from mine enemies.\nThe cords of death compassed me,\nAnd the floods of ungodliness made me afraid.\nThe cords of Sheol were round about me;\nThe snares of death came upon me.\nIn my distress I called upon Jehovah,\nAnd cried unto my God:\nHe heard my voice out of his temple,\nAnd my cry before him came into his ears.\nThen the earth shook and trembled;\nThe foundations also of the mountains quaked\nAnd were shaken, because he was wroth.\nThere went up a smoke out of his nostrils,\nAnd fire out of his mouth devoured:\nCoals were kindled by it.\nHe bowed the heavens also, and came down;\nAnd thick darkness was under his feet.\nAnd he rode upon a cherub, and did fly;\nYea, he soared upon the wings of the wind.\nHe made darkness his hiding-place, his pavilion round about him,\nDarkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies.\nAt the brightness before him his thick clouds passed,\nHailstones and coals of fire.\nJehovah also thundered in the heavens,\nAnd the Most High uttered his voice,\nHailstones and coals of fire.\nAnd he sent out his arrows, and scattered them;\nYea, lightnings manifold, and discomfited them.\nThen the channels of waters appeared,\nAnd the foundations of the world were laid bare,\nAt thy rebuke, O Jehovah,\nAt the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.\nHe sent from on high, he took me;\nHe drew me out of many waters.\nHe delivered me from my strong enemy,\nAnd from them that hated me; for they were too mighty for me.\nThey came upon me in the day of my calamity;\nBut Jehovah was my stay.\nHe brought me forth also into a large place;\nHe delivered me, because he delighted in me.\nJehovah hath rewarded me according to my righteousness;\nAccording to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.\nFor I have kept the ways of Jehovah,\nAnd have not wickedly departed from my God.\nFor all his ordinances were before me,\nAnd I put not away his statutes from me.\nI was also perfect with him,\nAnd I kept myself from mine iniquity.\nTherefore hath Jehovah recompensed me according to my righteousness,\nAccording to the cleanness of my hands in his eyesight.\nWith the merciful thou wilt show thyself merciful;\nWith the perfect man thou wilt show thyself perfect;\nWith the pure thou wilt show thyself pure;\nAnd with the perverse thou wilt show thyself froward.\nFor thou wilt save the afflicted people;\nBut the haughty eyes thou wilt bring down.\nFor thou wilt light my lamp:\nJehovah my God will lighten my darkness.\nFor by thee I run upon a troop;\nAnd by my God do I leap over a wall.\nAs for God, his way is perfect:\nThe word of Jehovah is tried;\nHe is a shield unto all them that take refuge in him.\nFor who is God, save Jehovah?\nAnd who is a rock, besides our God,\nThe God that girdeth me with strength,\nAnd maketh my way perfect?\nHe maketh my feet like hinds’ feet:\nAnd setteth me upon my high places.\nHe teacheth my hands to war;\nSo that mine arms do bend a bow of brass.\nThou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation;\nAnd thy right hand hath holden me up,\nAnd thy gentleness hath made me great.\nThou hast enlarged my steps under me,\nAnd my feet have not slipped.\nI will pursue mine enemies, and overtake them;\nNeither will I turn again till they are consumed.\nI will smite them through, so that they shall not be able to rise:\nThey shall fall under my feet.\nFor thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle:\nThou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me.\nThou hast also made mine enemies turn their backs unto me,\nThat I might cut off them that hate me.\nThey cried, but there was none to save;\nEven unto Jehovah, but he answered them not.\nThen did I beat them small as the dust before the wind;\nI did cast them out as the mire of the streets.\nThou hast delivered me from the strivings of the people;\nThou hast made me the head of the nations:\nA people whom I have not known shall serve me.\nAs soon as they hear of me they shall obey me;\nThe foreigners shall submit themselves unto me.\nThe foreigners shall fade away,\nAnd shall come trembling out of their close places.\nJehovah liveth; and blessed be my rock;\nAnd exalted be the God of my salvation,\nEven the God that executeth vengeance for me,\nAnd subdueth peoples under me.\nHe rescueth me from mine enemies;\nYea, thou liftest me up above them that rise up against me;\nThou deliverest me from the violent man.\nTherefore I will give thanks unto thee, O Jehovah, among the nations,\nAnd will sing praises unto thy name.\nGreat deliverance giveth he to his king,\nAnd showeth lovingkindness to his anointed,\nTo David and to his seed, for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-19": { - "title": "Psalm 19", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nThe heavens declare the glory of God;\nAnd the firmament showeth his handiwork.\nDay unto day uttereth speech,\nAnd night unto night showeth knowledge.\nThere is no speech nor language;\nTheir voice is not heard.\nTheir line is gone out through all the earth,\nAnd their words to the end of the world.\nIn them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,\nWhich is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,\nAnd rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course.\nHis going forth is from the end of the heavens,\nAnd his circuit unto the ends of it;\nAnd there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.\n\nThe law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul:\nThe testimony of Jehovah is sure, making wise the simple.\nThe precepts of Jehovah are right, rejoicing the heart:\nThe commandment of Jehovah is pure, enlightening the eyes.\nThe fear of Jehovah is clean, enduring for ever:\nThe ordinances of Jehovah are true, and righteous altogether.\nMore to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold;\nSweeter also than honey and the droppings of the honeycomb.\nMoreover by them is thy servant warned:\nIn keeping them there is great reward.\nWho can discern his errors?\nClear thou me from hidden faults.\nKeep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins;\nLet them not have dominion over me:\nThen shall I be upright,\nAnd I shall be clear from great transgression.\nLet the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart\nBe acceptable in thy sight,\nO Jehovah, my rock, and my redeemer.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-20": { - "title": "Psalm 20", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah answer thee in the day of trouble;\nThe name of the God of Jacob set thee up on high;\nSend thee help from the sanctuary,\nAnd strengthen thee out of Zion;\nRemember all thy offerings,\nAnd accept thy burnt-sacrifice;\n\nSelah\n\nGrant thee thy heart’s desire,\nAnd fulfil all thy counsel.\nWe will triumph in thy salvation,\nAnd in the name of our God we will set up our banners:\nJehovah fulfil all thy petitions.\nNow know I that Jehovah saveth his anointed;\nHe will answer him from his holy heaven\nWith the saving strength of his right hand.\nSome trust in chariots, and some in horses;\nBut we will make mention of the name of Jehovah our God.\nThey are bowed down and fallen;\nBut we are risen, and stand upright.\nSave, Jehovah:\nLet the King answer us when we call.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-21": { - "title": "Psalm 21", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nThe king shall joy in thy strength, O Jehovah;\nAnd in thy salvation how greatly shall he rejoice!\nThou hast given him his heart’s desire,\nAnd hast not withholden the request of his lips.\n\nSelah\n\nFor thou meetest him with the blessings of goodness:\nThou settest a crown of fine gold on his head.\nHe asked life of thee, thou gavest it him,\nEven length of days for ever and ever.\nHis glory is great in thy salvation:\nHonor and majesty dost thou lay upon him.\nFor thou makest him most blessed for ever:\nThou makest him glad with joy in thy presence.\nFor the king trusteth in Jehovah;\nAnd through the lovingkindness of the Most High he shall not be moved.\nThy hand will find out all thine enemies;\nThy right hand will find out those that hate thee.\nThou wilt make them as a fiery furnace in the time of thine anger:\nJehovah will swallow them up in his wrath,\nAnd the fire shall devour them.\nTheir fruit wilt thou destroy from the earth,\nAnd their seed from among the children of men.\nFor they intended evil against thee;\nThey conceived a device which they are not able to perform.\nFor thou wilt make them turn their back;\nThou wilt make ready with thy bowstrings against their face.\nBe thou exalted, O Jehovah, in thy strength:\nSo will we sing and praise thy power.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-22": { - "title": "Psalm 22", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Aijaleth hash-Shahar. A Psalm of David._\n\nMy God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?\nWhy art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?\nO my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou answerest not;\nAnd in the night season, and am not silent.\nBut thou art holy,\nO thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.\nOur fathers trusted in thee:\nThey trusted, and thou didst deliver them.\nThey cried unto thee, and were delivered:\nThey trusted in thee, and were not put to shame.\nBut I am a worm, and no man;\nA reproach of men, and despised of the people.\nAll they that see me laugh me to scorn:\nThey shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,\nCommit thyself unto Jehovah;\nLet him deliver him:\nLet him rescue him, seeing he delighteth in him.\nBut thou art he that took me out of the womb;\nThou didst make me trust when I was upon my mother’s breasts.\nI was cast upon thee from the womb;\nThou art my God since my mother bare me.\nBe not far from me; for trouble is near;\nFor there is none to help.\nMany bulls have compassed me;\nStrong bulls of Bashan have beset me round.\nThey gape upon me with their mouth,\nAs a ravening and a roaring lion.\nI am poured out like water,\nAnd all my bones are out of joint:\nMy heart is like wax;\nIt is melted within me.\nMy strength is dried up like a potsherd;\nAnd my tongue cleaveth to my jaws;\nAnd thou hast brought me into the dust of death.\nFor dogs have compassed me:\nA company of evil-doers have inclosed me;\nThey pierced my hands and my feet.\nI may count all my bones;\nThey look and stare upon me.\nThey part my garments among them,\nAnd upon my vesture do they cast lots.\nBut be not thou far off, O Jehovah:\nO thou my succor, haste thee to help me.\nDeliver my soul from the sword,\nMy darling from the power of the dog.\nSave me from the lion’s mouth;\nYea, from the horns of the wild-oxen thou hast answered me.\n\nI will declare thy name unto my brethren:\nIn the midst of the assembly will I praise thee.\nYe that fear Jehovah, praise him;\nAll ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him;\nAnd stand in awe of him, all ye the seed of Israel.\nFor he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;\nNeither hath he hid his face from him;\nBut when he cried unto him, he heard.\nOf thee cometh my praise in the great assembly:\nI will pay my vows before them that fear him.\nThe meek shall eat and be satisfied;\nThey shall praise Jehovah that seek after him:\nLet your heart live for ever.\nAll the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto Jehovah;\nAnd all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.\nFor the kingdom is Jehovah’s;\nAnd he is the ruler over the nations.\nAll the fat ones of the earth shall eat and worship:\nAll they that go down to the dust shall bow before him,\nEven he that cannot keep his soul alive.\nA seed shall serve him;\nIt shall be told of the Lord unto the next generation.\nThey shall come and shall declare his righteousness\nUnto a people that shall be born, that he hath done it.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-23": { - "title": "Psalm 23", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah is my shepherd; I shall not want.\nHe maketh me to lie down in green pastures;\nHe leadeth me beside still waters.\nHe restoreth my soul:\nHe guideth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.\nYea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,\nI will fear no evil; for thou art with me;\nThy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.\nThou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:\nThou hast anointed my head with oil;\nMy cup runneth over.\nSurely goodness and lovingkindness shall follow me all the days of my life;\nAnd I shall dwell in the house of Jehovah for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-24": { - "title": "Psalm 24", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nThe earth is Jehovah’s, and the fulness thereof;\nThe world, and they that dwell therein.\nFor he hath founded it upon the seas,\nAnd established it upon the floods.\nWho shall ascend into the hill of Jehovah?\nAnd who shall stand in his holy place?\nHe that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;\nWho hath not lifted up his soul unto falsehood,\nAnd hath not sworn deceitfully.\nHe shall receive a blessing from Jehovah,\nAnd righteousness from the God of his salvation.\nThis is the generation of them that seek after him,\nThat seek thy face, even Jacob.\n\nSelah\n\nLift up your heads, O ye gates;\nAnd be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors:\nAnd the King of glory will come in.\nWho is the King of glory?\nJehovah strong and mighty,\nJehovah mighty in battle.\nLift up your heads, O ye gates;\nYea, lift them up, ye everlasting doors:\nAnd the King of glory will come in.\nWho is this King of glory?\nJehovah of hosts,\nHe is the King of glory.\n\nSelah", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-25": { - "title": "Psalm 25", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nUnto thee, O Jehovah, do I lift up my soul.\nO my God, in thee have I trusted,\nLet me not be put to shame;\nLet not mine enemies triumph over me.\nYea, none that wait for thee shall be put to shame:\nThey shall be put to shame that deal treacherously without cause.\nShow me thy ways, O Jehovah;\nTeach me thy paths.\nGuide me in thy truth, and teach me;\nFor thou art the God of my salvation;\nFor thee do I wait all the day.\nRemember, O Jehovah, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindness;\nFor they have been ever of old.\nRemember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions:\nAccording to thy lovingkindness remember thou me,\nFor thy goodness’ sake, O Jehovah.\nGood and upright is Jehovah:\nTherefore will he instruct sinners in the way.\nThe meek will he guide in justice;\nAnd the meek will he teach his way.\nAll the paths of Jehovah are lovingkindness and truth\nUnto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.\nFor thy name’s sake, O Jehovah,\nPardon mine iniquity, for it is great.\nWhat man is he that feareth Jehovah?\nHim shall he instruct in the way that he shall choose.\nHis soul shall dwell at ease;\nAnd his seed shall inherit the land.\nThe friendship of Jehovah is with them that fear him;\nAnd he will show them his covenant.\nMine eyes are ever toward Jehovah;\nFor he will pluck my feet out of the net.\nTurn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me;\nFor I am desolate and afflicted.\nThe troubles of my heart are enlarged:\nOh bring thou me out of my distresses.\nConsider mine affliction and my travail;\nAnd forgive all my sins.\nConsider mine enemies, for they are many;\nAnd they hate me with cruel hatred.\nOh keep my soul, and deliver me:\nLet me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in thee.\nLet integrity and uprightness preserve me,\nFor I wait for thee.\nRedeem Israel, O God,\nOut all of his troubles.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-26": { - "title": "Psalm 26", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJudge me, O Jehovah, for I have walked in mine integrity:\nI have trusted also in Jehovah without wavering.\nExamine me, O Jehovah, and prove me;\nTry my heart and my mind.\nFor thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes;\nAnd I have walked in thy truth.\nI have not sat with men of falsehood;\nNeither will I go in with dissemblers.\nI hate the assembly of evil-doers,\nAnd will not sit with the wicked.\nI will wash my hands in innocency:\nSo will I compass thine altar, O Jehovah;\nThat I may make the voice of thanksgiving to be heard,\nAnd tell of all thy wondrous works.\nJehovah, I love the habitation of thy house,\nAnd the place where thy glory dwelleth.\nGather not my soul with sinners,\nNor my life with men of blood;\nIn whose hands is wickedness,\nAnd their right hand is full of bribes.\nBut as for me, I will walk in mine integrity:\nRedeem me, and be merciful unto me.\nMy foot standeth in an even place:\nIn the congregations will I bless Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-27": { - "title": "Psalm 27", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah is my light and my salvation;\nWhom shall I fear?\nJehovah is the strength of my life;\nOf whom shall I be afraid?\nWhen evil-doers came upon me to eat up my flesh,\nEven mine adversaries and my foes, they stumbled and fell.\nThough a host should encamp against me,\nMy heart shall not fear:\nThough war should rise against me,\nEven then will I be confident.\nOne thing have I asked of Jehovah, that will I seek after;\nThat I may dwell in the house of Jehovah all the days of my life,\nTo behold the beauty of Jehovah,\nAnd to inquire in his temple.\nFor in the day of trouble he will keep me secretly in his pavilion:\nIn the covert of his tabernacle will he hide me;\nHe will lift me up upon a rock.\nAnd now shall my head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me.\nAnd I will offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy;\nI will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto Jehovah.\n\nHear, O Jehovah, when I cry with my voice:\nHave mercy also upon me, and answer me.\nWhen thou saidst, Seek ye my face;\nMy heart said unto thee,\nThy face, Jehovah, will I seek.\nHide not thy face from me;\nPut not thy servant away in anger:\nThou hast been my help;\nCast me not off, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.\nWhen my father and my mother forsake me,\nThen Jehovah will take me up.\nTeach me thy way, O Jehovah;\nAnd lead me in a plain path,\nBecause of mine enemies.\nDeliver me not over unto the will of mine adversaries:\nFor false witnesses are risen up against me,\nAnd such as breathe out cruelty.\nI had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of Jehovah\nIn the land of the living.\nWait for Jehovah:\nBe strong, and let thy heart take courage;\nYea, wait thou for Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-28": { - "title": "Psalm 28", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nUnto thee, O Jehovah, will I call:\nMy rock, be not thou deaf unto me;\nLest, if thou be silent unto me,\nI become like them that go down into the pit.\nHear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee,\nWhen I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle.\nDraw me not away with the wicked,\nAnd with the workers of iniquity;\nThat speak peace with their neighbors,\nBut mischief is in their hearts.\nGive them according to their work, and according to the wickedness of their doings:\nGive them after the operation of their hands;\nRender to them their desert.\nBecause they regard not the works of Jehovah,\nNor the operation of his hands,\nHe will break them down and not build them up.\n\nBlessed be Jehovah,\nBecause he hath heard the voice of my supplications.\nJehovah is my strength and my shield;\nMy heart hath trusted in him, and I am helped:\nTherefore my heart greatly rejoiceth;\nAnd with my song will I praise him.\nJehovah is their strength,\nAnd he is a stronghold of salvation to his anointed.\nSave thy people, and bless thine inheritance:\nBe their shepherd also, and bear them up for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-29": { - "title": "Psalm 29", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nAscribe unto Jehovah, O ye sons of the mighty,\nAscribe unto Jehovah glory and strength.\nAscribe unto Jehovah the glory due unto his name;\nWorship Jehovah in holy array.\nThe voice of Jehovah is upon the waters:\nThe God of glory thundereth,\nEven Jehovah upon many waters.\nThe voice of Jehovah is powerful;\nThe voice of Jehovah is full of majesty.\nThe voice of Jehovah breaketh the cedars;\nYea, Jehovah breaketh in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.\nHe maketh them also to skip like a calf;\nLebanon and Sirion like a young wild-ox.\nThe voice of Jehovah cleaveth the flames of fire.\nThe voice of Jehovah shaketh the wilderness;\nJehovah shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh.\nThe voice of Jehovah maketh the hinds to calve,\nAnd strippeth the forests bare:\nAnd in his temple everything saith, Glory.\nJehovah sat as King at the Flood;\nYea, Jehovah sitteth as King for ever.\nJehovah will give strength unto his people;\nJehovah will bless his people with peace.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-30": { - "title": "Psalm 30", - "body": "_A Psalm; a Song at the Dedication of the House. A Psalm of David._\n\nI will extol thee, O Jehovah; for thou hast raised me up,\nAnd hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.\nO Jehovah my God,\nI cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.\nO Jehovah, thou hast brought up my soul from Sheol;\nThou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.\nSing praise unto Jehovah, O ye saints of his,\nAnd give thanks to his holy memorial name.\nFor his anger is but for a moment;\nHis favor is for a life-time:\nWeeping may tarry for the night,\nBut joy cometh in the morning.\nAs for me, I said in my prosperity,\nI shall never be moved.\nThou, Jehovah, of thy favor hadst made my mountain to stand strong:\nThou didst hide thy face; I was troubled.\nI cried to thee, O Jehovah;\nAnd unto Jehovah I made supplication:\nWhat profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?\nShall the dust praise thee? shall it declare thy truth?\nHear, O Jehovah, and have mercy upon me:\nJehovah, be thou my helper.\nThou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing;\nThou hast loosed my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;\nTo the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent.\nO Jehovah my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-31": { - "title": "Psalm 31", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nIn thee, O Jehovah, do I take refuge;\nLet me never be put to shame:\nDeliver me in thy righteousness.\nBow down thine ear unto me; deliver me speedily:\nBe thou to me a strong rock,\nA house of defence to save me.\nFor thou art my rock and my fortress;\nTherefore for thy name’s sake lead me and guide me.\nPluck me out of the net that they have laid privily for me;\nFor thou art my stronghold.\nInto thy hand I commend my spirit:\nThou hast redeemed me, O Jehovah, thou God of truth.\nI hate them that regard lying vanities;\nBut I trust in Jehovah.\nI will be glad and rejoice in thy lovingkindness;\nFor thou hast seen my affliction:\nThou hast known my soul in adversities;\nAnd thou hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy;\nThou hast set my feet in a large place.\nHave mercy upon me, O Jehovah, for I am in distress:\nMine eye wasteth away with grief, yea, my soul and my body.\nFor my life is spent with sorrow,\nAnd my years with sighing:\nMy strength faileth because of mine iniquity,\nAnd my bones are wasted away.\nBecause of all mine adversaries I am become a reproach,\nYea, unto my neighbors exceedingly,\nAnd a fear to mine acquaintance:\nThey that did see me without fled from me.\nI am forgotten as a dead man out of mind:\nI am like a broken vessel.\nFor I have heard the defaming of many,\nTerror on every side:\nWhile they took counsel together against me,\nThey devised to take away my life.\nBut I trusted in thee, O Jehovah:\nI said, Thou art my God.\nMy times are in thy hand:\nDeliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.\nMake thy face to shine upon thy servant:\nSave me in thy lovingkindness.\nLet me not be put to shame, O Jehovah; for I have called upon thee:\nLet the wicked be put to shame, let them be silent in Sheol.\nLet the lying lips be dumb,\nWhich speak against the righteous insolently,\nWith pride and contempt.\nOh how great is thy goodness,\nWhich thou hast laid up for them that fear thee,\nWhich thou hast wrought for them that take refuge in thee,\nBefore the sons of men!\nIn the covert of thy presence wilt thou hide them from the plottings of man:\nThou wilt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.\nBlessed be Jehovah;\nFor he hath showed me his marvellous lovingkindness in a strong city.\nAs for me, I said in my haste,\nI am cut off from before thine eyes:\nNevertheless thou heardest the voice of my supplications\nWhen I cried unto thee.\nOh love Jehovah, all ye his saints:\nJehovah preserveth the faithful,\nAnd plentifully rewardeth him that dealeth proudly.\nBe strong, and let your heart take courage,\nAll ye that hope in Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-32": { - "title": "Psalm 32", - "body": "_A Psalm of David. Maschil._\n\nBlessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,\nWhose sin is covered.\nBlessed is the man unto whom Jehovah imputeth not iniquity,\nAnd in whose spirit there is no guile.\nWhen I kept silence, my bones wasted away\nThrough my groaning all the day long.\nFor day and night thy hand was heavy upon me:\nMy moisture was changed as with the drought of summer.\n\nSelah\n\nI acknowledged my sin unto thee,\nAnd mine iniquity did I not hide:\nI said, I will confess my transgressions unto Jehovah;\nAnd thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.\n\nSelah\n\nFor this let every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found:\nSurely when the great waters overflow they shall not reach unto him.\nThou art my hiding-place; thou wilt preserve me from trouble;\nThou wilt compass me about with songs of deliverance.\n\nSelah\n\nI will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go:\nI will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.\nBe ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding;\nWhose trappings must be bit and bridle to hold them in,\nElse they will not come near unto thee.\nMany sorrows shall be to the wicked;\nBut he that trusteth in Jehovah, lovingkindness shall compass him about.\nBe glad in Jehovah, and rejoice, ye righteous;\nAnd shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-33": { - "title": "Psalm 33", - "body": "Rejoice in Jehovah, O ye righteous:\nPraise is comely for the upright.\nGive thanks unto Jehovah with the harp:\nSing praises unto him with the psaltery of ten strings.\nSing unto him a new song;\nPlay skilfully with a loud noise.\nFor the word of Jehovah is right;\nAnd all his work is done in faithfulness.\nHe loveth righteousness and justice:\nThe earth is full of the lovingkindness of Jehovah.\nBy the word of Jehovah were the heavens made,\nAnd all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.\nHe gathereth the waters of the sea together as a heap:\nHe layeth up the deeps in store-houses.\nLet all the earth fear Jehovah:\nLet all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.\nFor he spake, and it was done;\nHe commanded, and it stood fast.\nJehovah bringeth the counsel of the nations to nought;\nHe maketh the thoughts of the peoples to be of no effect.\nThe counsel of Jehovah standeth fast for ever,\nThe thoughts of his heart to all generations.\nBlessed is the nation whose God is Jehovah,\nThe people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.\nJehovah looketh from heaven;\nHe beholdeth all the sons of men;\nFrom the place of his habitation he looketh forth\nUpon all the inhabitants of the earth,\nHe that fashioneth the hearts of them all,\nThat considereth all their works.\nThere is no king saved by the multitude of a host:\nA mighty man is not delivered by great strength.\nA horse is a vain thing for safety;\nNeither doth he deliver any by his great power.\nBehold, the eye of Jehovah is upon them that fear him,\nUpon them that hope in his lovingkindness;\nTo deliver their soul from death,\nAnd to keep them alive in famine.\nOur soul hath waited for Jehovah:\nHe is our help and our shield.\nFor our heart shall rejoice in him,\nBecause we have trusted in his holy name.\nLet thy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, be upon us,\nAccording as we have hoped in thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-34": { - "title": "Psalm 34", - "body": "_A Psalm of David; when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he departed._\n\nI will bless Jehovah at all times:\nHis praise shall continually be in my mouth.\nMy soul shall make her boast in Jehovah:\nThe meek shall hear thereof, and be glad.\nOh magnify Jehovah with me,\nAnd let us exalt his name together.\nI sought Jehovah, and he answered me,\nAnd delivered me from all my fears.\nThey looked unto him, and were radiant;\nAnd their faces shall never be confounded.\nThis poor man cried, and Jehovah heard him,\nAnd saved him out of all his troubles.\nThe angel of Jehovah encampeth round about them that fear him,\nAnd delivereth them. Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good:\nBlessed is the man that taketh refuge in him.\nOh fear Jehovah, ye his saints;\nFor there is no want to them that fear him.\nThe young lions do lack, and suffer hunger;\nBut they that seek Jehovah shall not want any good thing.\nCome, ye children, hearken unto me:\nI will teach you the fear of Jehovah.\nWhat man is he that desireth life,\nAnd loveth many days, that he may see good?\nKeep thy tongue from evil,\nAnd thy lips from speaking guile.\nDepart from evil, and do good;\nSeek peace, and pursue it.\nThe eyes of Jehovah are toward the righteous,\nAnd his ears are open unto their cry.\nThe face of Jehovah is against them that do evil,\nTo cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.\nThe righteous cried, and Jehovah heard,\nAnd delivered them out of all their troubles.\nJehovah is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart,\nAnd saveth such as are of a contrite spirit.\nMany are the afflictions of the righteous;\nBut Jehovah delivereth him out of them all.\nHe keepeth all his bones:\nNot one of them is broken.\nEvil shall slay the wicked;\nAnd they that hate the righteous shall be condemned.\nJehovah redeemeth the soul of his servants;\nAnd none of them that take refuge in him shall be condemned.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-35": { - "title": "Psalm 35", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nStrive thou, O Jehovah, with them that strive with me:\nFight thou against them that fight against me.\nTake hold of shield and buckler,\nAnd stand up for my help.\nDraw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that pursue me:\nSay unto my soul, I am thy salvation.\nLet them be put to shame and brought to dishonor that seek after my soul:\nLet them be turned back and confounded that devise my hurt.\nLet them be as chaff before the wind,\nAnd the angel of Jehovah driving them on.\nLet their way be dark and slippery,\nAnd the angel of Jehovah pursuing them.\nFor without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit;\nWithout cause have they digged a pit for my soul.\nLet destruction come upon him unawares;\nAnd let his net that he hath hid catch himself:\nWith destruction let him fall therein.\nAnd my soul shall be joyful in Jehovah:\nIt shall rejoice in his salvation.\nAll my bones shall say, Jehovah, who is like unto thee,\nWho deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him,\nYea, the poor and the needy from him that robbeth him?\nUnrighteous witnesses rise up;\nThey ask me of things that I know not.\nThey reward me evil for good,\nTo the bereaving of my soul.\nBut as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth:\nI afflicted my soul with fasting;\nAnd my prayer returned into mine own bosom.\nI behaved myself as though it had been my friend or my brother:\nI bowed down mourning, as one that bewaileth his mother.\nBut in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together:\nThe abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not;\nThey did tear me, and ceased not:\nLike the profane mockers in feasts,\nThey gnashed upon me with their teeth.\nLord, how long wilt thou look on?\nRescue my soul from their destructions,\nMy darling from the lions.\nI will give thee thanks in the great assembly:\nI will praise thee among much people.\nLet not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me;\nNeither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.\nFor they speak not peace;\nBut they devise deceitful words against them that are quiet in the land.\nYea, they opened their mouth wide against me;\nThey said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it.\nThou hast seen it, O Jehovah; keep not silence:\nO Lord, be not far from me.\nStir up thyself, and awake to the justice due unto me,\nEven unto my cause, my God and my Lord.\nJudge me, O Jehovah my God, according to thy righteousness;\nAnd let them not rejoice over me.\nLet them not say in their heart, Aha, so would we have it:\nLet them not say, We have swallowed him up.\nLet them be put to shame and confounded together that rejoice at my hurt:\nLet them be clothed with shame and dishonor that magnify themselves against me.\nLet them shout for joy, and be glad, that favor my righteous cause:\nYea, let them say continually, Jehovah be magnified,\nWho hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant.\nAnd my tongue shall talk of thy righteousness\nAnd of thy praise all the day long.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-36": { - "title": "Psalm 36", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David the servant of Jehovah._\n\nThe transgression of the wicked saith within my heart,\nThere is no fear of God before his eyes.\nFor he flattereth himself in his own eyes,\nThat his iniquity will not be found out and be hated.\nThe words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit:\nHe hath ceased to be wise and to do good.\nHe deviseth iniquity upon his bed;\nHe setteth himself in a way that is not good;\nHe abhorreth not evil.\n\nThy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, is in the heavens;\nThy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies.\nThy righteousness is like the mountains of God;\nThy judgments are a great deep:\nO Jehovah, thou preservest man and beast.\nHow precious is thy lovingkindness, O God!\nAnd the children of men take refuge under the shadow of thy wings.\nThey shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house;\nAnd thou wilt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.\nFor with thee is the fountain of life:\nIn thy light shall we see light.\nOh continue thy lovingkindness unto them that know thee,\nAnd thy righteousness to the upright in heart.\nLet not the foot of pride come against me,\nAnd let not the hand of the wicked drive me away.\nThere are the workers of iniquity fallen:\nThey are thrust down, and shall not be able to rise.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-37": { - "title": "Psalm 37", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nFret not thyself because of evil-doers,\nNeither be thou envious against them that work unrighteousness.\nFor they shall soon be cut down like the grass,\nAnd wither as the green herb.\nTrust in Jehovah, and do good;\nDwell in the land, and feed on his faithfulness.\nDelight thyself also in Jehovah;\nAnd he will give thee the desires of thy heart.\nCommit thy way unto Jehovah;\nTrust also in him, and he will bring it to pass.\nAnd he will make thy righteousness to go forth as the light,\nAnd thy justice as the noon-day.\nRest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him:\nFret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way,\nBecause of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.\nCease from anger, and forsake wrath:\nFret not thyself, it tendeth only to evil-doing.\nFor evil-doers shall be cut off;\nBut those that wait for Jehovah, they shall inherit the land.\nFor yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be:\nYea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and he shall not be.\nBut the meek shall inherit the land,\nAnd shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.\nThe wicked plotteth against the just,\nAnd gnasheth upon him with his teeth.\nThe Lord will laugh at him;\nFor he seeth that his day is coming.\nThe wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow,\nTo cast down the poor and needy,\nTo slay such as are upright in the way.\nTheir sword shall enter into their own heart,\nAnd their bows shall be broken.\nBetter is a little that the righteous hath\nThan the abundance of many wicked.\nFor the arms of the wicked shall be broken;\nBut Jehovah upholdeth the righteous.\nJehovah knoweth the days of the perfect;\nAnd their inheritance shall be for ever.\nThey shall not be put to shame in the time of evil;\nAnd in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.\nBut the wicked shall perish,\nAnd the enemies of Jehovah shall be as the fat of lambs:\nThey shall consume;\nIn smoke shall they consume away.\nThe wicked borroweth, and payeth not again;\nBut the righteous dealeth graciously, and giveth.\nFor such as are blessed of him shall inherit the land;\nAnd they that are cursed of him shall be cut off.\nA man’s goings are established of Jehovah;\nAnd he delighteth in his way.\nThough he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down;\nFor Jehovah upholdeth him with his hand.\nI have been young, and now am old;\nYet have I not seen the righteous forsaken,\nNor his seed begging bread.\nAll the day long he dealeth graciously, and lendeth;\nAnd his seed is blessed.\nDepart from evil, and do good;\nAnd dwell for evermore.\nFor Jehovah loveth justice,\nAnd forsaketh not his saints;\nThey are preserved for ever:\nBut the seed of the wicked shall be cut off.\nThe righteous shall inherit the land,\nAnd dwell therein for ever.\nThe mouth of the righteous talketh of wisdom,\nAnd his tongue speaketh justice.\nThe law of his God is in his heart;\nNone of his steps shall slide.\nThe wicked watcheth the righteous,\nAnd seeketh to slay him.\nJehovah will not leave him in his hand,\nNor condemn him when he is judged.\nWait for Jehovah, and keep his way,\nAnd he will exalt thee to inherit the land:\nWhen the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it.\nI have seen the wicked in great power,\nAnd spreading himself like a green tree in its native soil.\nBut one passed by, and, lo, he was not:\nYea, I sought him, but he could not be found.\nMark the perfect man, and behold the upright;\nFor there is a happy end to the man of peace.\nAs for transgressors, they shall be destroyed together;\nThe end of the wicked shall be cut off.\nBut the salvation of the righteous is of Jehovah;\nHe is their stronghold in the time of trouble.\nAnd Jehovah helpeth them, and rescueth them;\nHe rescueth them from the wicked, and saveth them,\nBecause they have taken refuge in him.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-38": { - "title": "Psalm 38", - "body": "_A Psalm of David, to bring to remembrance._\n\nO Jehovah, rebuke me not in thy wrath;\nNeither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.\nFor thine arrows stick fast in me,\nAnd thy hand presseth me sore.\nThere is no soundness in my flesh because of thine indignation;\nNeither is there any health in my bones because of my sin.\nFor mine iniquities are gone over my head:\nAs a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.\nMy wounds are loathsome and corrupt,\nBecause of my foolishness.\nI am pained and bowed down greatly;\nI go mourning all the day long.\nFor my loins are filled with burning;\nAnd there is no soundness in my flesh.\nI am faint and sore bruised:\nI have groaned by reason of the disquietness of my heart.\nLord, all my desire is before thee;\nAnd my groaning is not hid from thee.\nMy heart throbbeth, my strength faileth me:\nAs for the light of mine eyes, it also is gone from me.\nMy lovers and my friends stand aloof from my plague;\nAnd my kinsmen stand afar off.\nThey also that seek after my life lay snares for me;\nAnd they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things,\nAnd meditate deceits all the day long.\nBut I, as a deaf man, hear not;\nAnd I am as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth.\nYea, I am as a man that heareth not,\nAnd in whose mouth are no reproofs.\nFor in thee, O Jehovah, do I hope:\nThou wilt answer, O Lord my God.\nFor I said, Lest they rejoice over me:\nWhen my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me.\nFor I am ready to fall,\nAnd my sorrow is continually before me.\nFor I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin.\nBut mine enemies are lively, and are strong;\nAnd they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied.\nThey also that render evil for good\nAre adversaries unto me, because I follow the thing that is good.\nForsake me not, O Jehovah:\nO my God, be not far from me.\nMake haste to help me,\nO Lord, my salvation.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-39": { - "title": "Psalm 39", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician, Jeduthun. A Psalm of David._\n\nI said, I will take heed to my ways,\nThat I sin not with my tongue:\nI will keep my mouth with a bridle,\nWhile the wicked is before me.\nI was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good;\nAnd my sorrow was stirred.\nMy heart was hot within me;\nWhile I was musing the fire burned:\nThen spake I with my tongue:\nJehovah, make me to know mine end,\nAnd the measure of my days, what it is;\nLet me know how frail I am.\nBehold, thou hast made my days as handbreadths;\nAnd my life-time is as nothing before thee:\nSurely every man at his best estate is altogether vanity.\n\nSelah\n\nSurely every man walketh in a vain show;\nSurely they are disquieted in vain:\nHe heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.\nAnd now, Lord, what wait I for?\nMy hope is in thee.\nDeliver me from all my transgressions:\nMake me not the reproach of the foolish.\nI was dumb, I opened not my mouth;\nBecause thou didst it.\nRemove thy stroke away from me:\nI am consumed by the blow of thy hand.\nWhen thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity,\nThou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth:\nSurely every man is vanity.\n\nSelah\n\nHear my prayer, O Jehovah, and give ear unto my cry;\nHold not thy peace at my tears:\nFor I am a stranger with thee,\nA sojourner, as all my fathers were.\nOh spare me, that I may recover strength,\nBefore I go hence, and be no more.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-40": { - "title": "Psalm 40", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nI waited patiently for Jehovah;\nAnd he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.\nHe brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay;\nAnd he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.\nAnd he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God:\nMany shall see it, and fear,\nAnd shall trust in Jehovah.\nBlessed is the man that maketh Jehovah his trust,\nAnd respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.\nMany, O Jehovah my God, are the wonderful works which thou hast done,\nAnd thy thoughts which are to us-ward;\nThey cannot be set in order unto thee;\nIf I would declare and speak of them,\nThey are more than can be numbered.\nSacrifice and offering thou hast no delight in;\nMine ears hast thou opened:\nBurnt-offering and sin-offering hast thou not required.\nThen said I, Lo, I am come;\nIn the roll of the book it is written of me:\nI delight to do thy will, O my God;\nYea, thy law is within my heart.\nI have proclaimed glad tidings of righteousness in the great assembly;\nLo, I will not refrain my lips,\nO Jehovah, thou knowest.\nI have not hid thy righteousness within my heart;\nI have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation;\nI have not concealed thy lovingkindness and thy truth from the great assembly.\nWithhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O Jehovah;\nLet thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me.\nFor innumerable evils have compassed me about;\nMine iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to look up;\nThey are more than the hairs of my head;\nAnd my heart hath failed me.\nBe pleased, O Jehovah, to deliver me:\nMake haste to help me, O Jehovah.\nLet them be put to shame and confounded together\nThat seek after my soul to destroy it:\nLet them be turned backward and brought to dishonor\nThat delight in my hurt.\nLet them be desolate by reason of their shame\nThat say unto me, Aha, aha.\nLet all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee:\nLet such as love thy salvation say continually,\nJehovah be magnified.\nBut I am poor and needy;\nYet the Lord thinketh upon me:\nThou art my help and my deliverer;\nMake no tarrying, O my God.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-41": { - "title": "Psalm 41", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nBlessed is he that considereth the poor:\nJehovah will deliver him in the day of evil.\nJehovah will preserve him, and keep him alive,\nAnd he shall be blessed upon the earth;\nAnd deliver not thou him unto the will of his enemies.\nJehovah will support him upon the couch of languishing:\nThou makest all his bed in his sickness.\nI said, O Jehovah, have mercy upon me:\nHeal my soul; for I have sinned against thee.\nMine enemies speak evil against me, saying,\nWhen will he die, and his name perish?\nAnd if he come to see me, he speaketh falsehood;\nHis heart gathereth iniquity to itself:\nWhen he goeth abroad, he telleth it.\nAll that hate me whisper together against me;\nAgainst me do they devise my hurt.\nAn evil disease, say they, cleaveth fast unto him;\nAnd now that he lieth he shall rise up no more.\nYea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted,\nWho did eat of my bread,\nHath lifted up his heel against me.\nBut thou, O Jehovah, have mercy upon me, and raise me up,\nThat I may requite them.\nBy this I know that thou delightest in me,\nBecause mine enemy doth not triumph over me.\nAnd as for me, thou upholdest me in mine integrity,\nAnd settest me before thy face for ever.\nBlessed be Jehovah, the God of Israel,\nFrom everlasting and to everlasting.\nAmen, and Amen.\n\nBook II", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-42": { - "title": "Psalm 42", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. Maschil of the sons of Korah._\n\nAs the hart panteth after the water brooks,\nSo panteth my soul after thee, O God.\nMy soul thirsteth for God, for the living God:\nWhen shall I come and appear before God?\nMy tears have been my food day and night,\nWhile they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?\nThese things I remember, and pour out my soul within me,\nHow I went with the throng, and led them to the house of God,\nWith the voice of joy and praise, a multitude keeping holyday.\nWhy art thou cast down, O my soul?\nAnd why art thou disquieted within me?\nHope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him\nFor the help of his countenance.\n\nO my God, my soul is cast down within me:\nTherefore do I remember thee from the land of the Jordan,\nAnd the Hermons, from the hill Mizar.\nDeep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterfalls:\nAll thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.\nYet Jehovah will command his lovingkindness in the day-time;\nAnd in the night his song shall be with me,\nEven a prayer unto the God of my life.\nI will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me?\nWhy go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?\nAs with a sword in my bones, mine adversaries reproach me,\nWhile they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?\nWhy art thou cast down, O my soul?\nAnd why art thou disquieted within me?\nHope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him,\nWho is the help of my countenance, and my God.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-43": { - "title": "Psalm 43", - "body": "Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation:\nOh deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.\nFor thou art the God of my strength; why hast thou cast me off?\nWhy go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?\nOh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me:\nLet them bring me unto thy holy hill,\nAnd to thy tabernacles.\nThen will I go unto the altar of God,\nUnto God my exceeding joy;\nAnd upon the harp will I praise thee, O God, my God.\nWhy art thou cast down, O my soul?\nAnd why art thou disquieted within me?\nHope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him,\nWho is the help of my countenance, and my God.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-44": { - "title": "Psalm 44", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. Maschil._\n\nWe have heard with our ears, O God,\nOur fathers have told us,\nWhat work thou didst in their days,\nIn the days of old.\nThou didst drive out the nations with thy hand;\nBut them thou didst plant:\nThou didst afflict the peoples;\nBut them thou didst spread abroad.\nFor they gat not the land in possession by their own sword,\nNeither did their own arm save them;\nBut thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance,\nBecause thou wast favorable unto them.\nThou art my King, O God:\nCommand deliverance for Jacob.\nThrough thee will we push down our adversaries:\nThrough thy name will we tread them under that rise up against us.\nFor I will not trust in my bow,\nNeither shall my sword save me.\nBut thou hast saved us from our adversaries,\nAnd hast put them to shame that hate us.\nIn God have we made our boast all the day long,\nAnd we will give thanks unto thy name for ever.\n\nSelah\n\nBut now thou hast cast us off, and brought us to dishonor,\nAnd goest not forth with our hosts.\nThou makest us to turn back from the adversary;\nAnd they that hate us take spoil for themselves.\nThou hast made us like sheep appointed for food,\nAnd hast scattered us among the nations.\nThou sellest thy people for nought,\nAnd hast not increased thy wealth by their price.\nThou makest us a reproach to our neighbors,\nA scoffing and a derision to them that are round about us.\nThou makest us a byword among the nations,\nA shaking of the head among the peoples.\nAll the day long is my dishonor before me,\nAnd the shame of my face hath covered me,\nFor the voice of him that reproacheth and blasphemeth,\nBy reason of the enemy and the avenger.\nAll this is come upon us;\nYet have we not forgotten thee,\nNeither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant.\nOur heart is not turned back,\nNeither have our steps declined from thy way,\nThat thou hast sore broken us in the place of jackals,\nAnd covered us with the shadow of death.\nIf we have forgotten the name of our God,\nOr spread forth our hands to a strange god;\nWill not God search this out?\nFor he knoweth the secrets of the heart.\nYea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long;\nWe are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.\nAwake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?\nArise, cast us not off for ever.\nWherefore hidest thou thy face,\nAnd forgettest our affliction and our oppression?\nFor our soul is bowed down to the dust:\nOur body cleaveth unto the earth.\nRise up for our help,\nAnd redeem us for thy lovingkindness’ sake.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-45": { - "title": "Psalm 45", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Shoshannim. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. Maschil. A Song of loves._\n\nMy heart overfloweth with a goodly matter;\nI speak the things which I have made touching the king:\nMy tongue is the pen of a ready writer.\nThou art fairer than the children of men;\nGrace is poured into thy lips:\nTherefore God hath blessed thee for ever.\nGird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one,\nThy glory and thy majesty.\nAnd in thy majesty ride on prosperously,\nBecause of truth and meekness and righteousness:\nAnd thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.\nThine arrows are sharp;\nThe peoples fall under thee;\nThey are in the heart of the king’s enemies.\nThy throne, O God, is for ever and ever:\nA sceptre of equity is the sceptre of thy kingdom.\nThou hast loved righteousness, and hated wickedness:\nTherefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee\nWith the oil of gladness above thy fellows.\nAll thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia;\nOut of ivory palaces stringed instruments have made thee glad.\nKings’ daughters are among thy honorable women:\nAt thy right hand doth stand the queen in gold of Ophir.\nHearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear;\nForget also thine own people, and thy father’s house:\nSo will the king desire thy beauty;\nFor he is thy lord; and reverence thou him.\nAnd the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift;\nThe rich among the people shall entreat thy favor.\nThe king’s daughter within the palace is all glorious:\nHer clothing is inwrought with gold.\nShe shall be led unto the king in broidered work:\nThe virgins her companions that follow her\nShall be brought unto thee.\nWith gladness and rejoicing shall they be led:\nThey shall enter into the king’s palace.\nInstead of thy fathers shall be thy children,\nWhom thou shalt make princes in all the earth.\nI will make thy name to be remembered in all generations:\nTherefore shall the peoples give thee thanks for ever and ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-46": { - "title": "Psalm 46", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of the sons of Korah; set to Alamoth. A Song._\n\nGod is our refuge and strength,\nA very present help in trouble.\nTherefore will we not fear, though the earth do change,\nAnd though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas;\nThough the waters thereof roar and be troubled,\nThough the mountains tremble with the swelling thereof.\n\nSelah\n\nThere is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God,\nThe holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High.\nGod is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved:\nGod will help her, and that right early.\n\nThe nations raged, the kingdoms were moved:\nHe uttered his voice, the earth melted.\nJehovah of hosts is with us;\nThe God of Jacob is our refuge.\n\nSelah\n\nCome, behold the works of Jehovah,\nWhat desolations he hath made in the earth.\nHe maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;\nHe breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;\nHe burneth the chariots in the fire.\nBe still, and know that I am God:\nI will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.\nJehovah of hosts is with us;\nThe God of Jacob is our refuge.\n\nSelah", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-47": { - "title": "Psalm 47", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of the sons of Korah._\n\nOh clap your hands, all ye peoples;\nShout unto God with the voice of triumph.\nFor Jehovah Most High is terrible;\nHe is a great King over all the earth.\nHe subdueth peoples under us,\nAnd nations under our feet.\nHe chooseth our inheritance for us,\nThe glory of Jacob whom he loved.\n\nSelah\n\nGod is gone up with a shout,\nJehovah with the sound of a trumpet.\nSing praise to God, sing praises:\nSing praises unto our King, sing praises.\nFor God is the King of all the earth:\nSing ye praises with understanding.\nGod reigneth over the nations:\nGod sitteth upon his holy throne.\nThe princes of the peoples are gathered together\nTo be the people of the God of Abraham:\nFor the shields of the earth belong unto God;\nHe is greatly exalted.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-48": { - "title": "Psalm 48", - "body": "_A Song; a Psalm of the sons of Korah._\n\nGreat is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised,\nIn the city of our God, in his holy mountain.\nBeautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth,\nIs mount Zion, on the sides of the north,\nThe city of the great King.\nGod hath made himself known in her palaces for a refuge.\nFor, lo, the kings assembled themselves,\nThey passed by together.\nThey saw it, then were they amazed;\nThey were dismayed, they hasted away.\nTrembling took hold of them there,\nPain, as of a woman in travail.\nWith the east wind\nThou breakest the ships of Tarshish.\nAs we have heard, so have we seen\nIn the city of Jehovah of hosts, in the city of our God:\nGod will establish it for ever.\n\nSelah\n\nWe have thought on thy lovingkindness, O God,\nIn the midst of thy temple.\nAs is thy name, O God,\nSo is thy praise unto the ends of the earth:\nThy right hand is full of righteousness.\nLet mount Zion be glad,\nLet the daughters of Judah rejoice,\nBecause of thy judgments.\nWalk about Zion, and go round about her;\nNumber the towers thereof;\nMark ye well her bulwarks;\nConsider her palaces:\nThat ye may tell it to the generation following.\nFor this God is our God for ever and ever:\nHe will be our guide even unto death.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-49": { - "title": "Psalm 49", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of the sons of Korah._\n\nHear this, all ye peoples;\nGive ear, all ye inhabitants of the world,\nBoth low and high,\nRich and poor together.\nMy mouth shall speak wisdom;\nAnd the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding.\nI will incline mine ear to a parable:\nI will open my dark saying upon the harp.\nWherefore should I fear in the days of evil,\nWhen iniquity at my heels compasseth me about?\nThey that trust in their wealth,\nAnd boast themselves in the multitude of their riches;\nNone of them can by any means redeem his brother,\nNor give to God a ransom for him;\n(For the redemption of their life is costly,\nAnd it faileth for ever;)\nThat he should still live alway,\nThat he should not see corruption.\nFor he shall see it. Wise men die;\nThe fool and the brutish alike perish,\nAnd leave their wealth to others.\nTheir inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever,\nAnd their dwelling-places to all generations;\nThey call their lands after their own names.\nBut man being in honor abideth not:\nHe is like the beasts that perish.\nThis their way is their folly:\nYet after them men approve their sayings.\n\nSelah\n\nThey are appointed as a flock for Sheol;\nDeath shall be their shepherd;\nAnd the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning;\nAnd their beauty shall be for Sheol to consume,\nThat there be no habitation for it.\nBut God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol;\nFor he will receive me.\n\nSelah\n\nBe not thou afraid when one is made rich,\nWhen the glory of his house is increased.\nFor when he dieth he shall carry nothing away;\nHis glory shall not descend after him.\nThough while he lived he blessed his soul\n(And men praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself,)\nHe shall go to the generation of his fathers;\nThey shall never see the light.\nMan that is in honor, and understandeth not,\nIs like the beasts that perish.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-50": { - "title": "Psalm 50", - "body": "_A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nThe Mighty One, God, Jehovah, hath spoken,\nAnd called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.\nOut of Zion, the perfection of beauty,\nGod hath shined forth.\nOur God cometh, and doth not keep silence:\nA fire devoureth before him,\nAnd it is very tempestuous round about him.\nHe calleth to the heavens above,\nAnd to the earth, that he may judge his people:\nGather my saints together unto me,\nThose that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.\nAnd the heavens shall declare his righteousness;\nFor God is judge himself.\n\nSelah\n\nHear, O my people, and I will speak;\nO Israel, and I will testify unto thee:\nI am God, even thy God.\nI will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices;\nAnd thy burnt-offerings are continually before me.\nI will take no bullock out of thy house,\nNor he-goats out of thy folds.\nFor every beast of the forest is mine,\nAnd the cattle upon a thousand hills.\nI know all the birds of the mountains;\nAnd the wild beasts of the field are mine.\nIf I were hungry, I would not tell thee;\nFor the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.\nWill I eat the flesh of bulls,\nOr drink the blood of goats?\nOffer unto God the sacrifice of thanksgiving;\nAnd pay thy vows unto the Most High:\nAnd call upon me in the day of trouble;\nI will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.\n\nBut unto the wicked God saith,\nWhat hast thou to do to declare my statutes,\nAnd that thou hast taken my covenant in thy mouth,\nSeeing thou hatest instruction,\nAnd castest my words behind thee?\nWhen thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him,\nAnd hast been partaker with adulterers.\nThou givest thy mouth to evil,\nAnd thy tongue frameth deceit.\nThou sittest and speakest against thy brother;\nThou slanderest thine own mother’s son.\nThese things hast thou done, and I kept silence;\nThou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself:\nBut I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes.\nNow consider this, ye that forget God,\nLest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver:\nWhoso offereth the sacrifice of thanksgiving glorifieth me;\nAnd to him that ordereth his way aright\nWill I show the salvation of God.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-51": { - "title": "Psalm 51", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David; when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba._\n\nHave mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:\nAccording to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.\nWash me thoroughly from mine iniquity,\nAnd cleanse me from my sin.\nFor I know my transgressions;\nAnd my sin is ever before me.\nAgainst thee, thee only, have I sinned,\nAnd done that which is evil in thy sight;\nThat thou mayest be justified when thou speakest,\nAnd be clear when thou judgest.\nBehold, I was brought forth in iniquity;\nAnd in sin did my mother conceive me. 51:6\nBehold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts;\nAnd in the hidden part thou wilt make me to know wisdom.\nPurify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean:\nWash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.\nMake me to hear joy and gladness,\nThat the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.\nHide thy face from my sins,\nAnd blot out all mine iniquities.\nCreate in me a clean heart, O God;\nAnd renew a right spirit within me.\nCast me not away from thy presence;\nAnd take not thy holy Spirit from me.\nRestore unto me the joy of thy salvation;\nAnd uphold me with a willing spirit.\nThen will I teach transgressors thy ways;\nAnd sinners shall be converted unto thee.\nDeliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation;\nAnd my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.\nO Lord, open thou my lips;\nAnd my mouth shall show forth thy praise.\nFor thou delightest not in sacrifice; else would I give it:\nThou hast no pleasure in burnt-offering.\nThe sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:\nA broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.\nDo good in thy good pleasure unto Zion:\nBuild thou the walls of Jerusalem.\nThen will thou delight in the sacrifices of righteousness,\nIn burnt-offering and in whole burnt-offering:\nThen will they offer bullocks upon thine altar.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-52": { - "title": "Psalm 52", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. Maschil of David; when Doeg the Edomite came and told Saul, and said unto him, David is come to the house of Abimelech._\n\nWhy boastest thou thyself in mischief, O mighty man?\nThe lovingkindness of God endureth continually.\nThy tongue deviseth very wickedness,\nLike a sharp razor, working deceitfully.\nThou lovest evil more than good,\nAnd lying rather than to speak righteousness.\n\nSelah\n\nThou lovest all devouring words,\nthou deceitful tongue.\nGod will likewise destroy thee for ever;\nHe will take thee up, and pluck thee out of thy tent,\nAnd root thee out of the land of the living.\n\nSelah\n\nThe righteous also shall see it, and fear,\nAnd shall laugh at him, saying,\nLo, this is the man that made not God his strength,\nBut trusted in the abundance of his riches,\nAnd strengthened himself in his wickedness.\nBut as for me, I am like a green olive-tree in the house of God:\nI trust in the lovingkindness of God for ever and ever.\nI will give thee thanks for ever, because thou hast done it;\nAnd I will hope in thy name, for it is good, in the presence of thy saints.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-53": { - "title": "Psalm 53", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Mahalath. Maschil of David._\n\nThe fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.\nCorrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity;\nThere is none that doeth good.\nGod looked down from heaven upon the children of men,\nTo see if there were any that did understand,\nThat did seek after God.\nEvery one of them is gone back; they are together become filthy;\nThere is none that doeth good, no, not one.\nHave the workers of iniquity no knowledge,\nWho eat up my people as they eat bread,\nAnd call not upon God?\nThere were they in great fear, where no fear was;\nFor God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee:\nThou hast put them to shame, because of God hath rejected them.\nOh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!\nWhen God bringeth back the captivity of his people,\nThen shall Jacob rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-54": { - "title": "Psalm 54", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. Maschil of David; when the Ziphites came and said to Saul, Doth not David hide himself with us?_\n\nSave me, O God, by thy name,\nAnd judge me in thy might.\nHear my prayer, O God;\nGive ear to the words of my mouth.\nFor strangers are risen up against me,\nAnd violent men have sought after my soul:\nThey have not set God before them.\n\nSelah\n\nBehold, God is my helper:\nThe Lord is of them that uphold my soul.\nHe will requite the evil unto mine enemies:\nDestroy thou them in thy truth.\nWith a freewill-offering will I sacrifice unto thee:\nI will give thanks unto thy name, O Jehovah, for it is good.\nFor he hath delivered me out of all trouble;\nAnd mine eye hath seen my desire upon mine enemies.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-55": { - "title": "Psalm 55", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. Maschil of David._\n\nGive ear to my prayer, O God;\nAnd hide not thyself from my supplication.\nAttend unto me, and answer me:\nI am restless in my complaint, and moan,\nBecause of the voice of the enemy,\nBecause of the oppression of the wicked;\nFor they cast iniquity upon me,\nAnd in anger they persecute me.\nMy heart is sore pained within me:\nAnd the terrors of death are fallen upon me.\nFearfulness and trembling are come upon me,\nAnd horror hath overwhelmed me.\nAnd I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!\nThen would I fly away, and be at rest.\nLo, then would I wander far off,\nI would lodge in the wilderness.\n\nSelah\n\nI would haste me to a shelter\nFrom the stormy wind and tempest.\nDestroy, O Lord, and divide their tongue;\nFor I have seen violence and strife in the city.\nDay and night they go about it upon the walls thereof:\nIniquity also and mischief are in the midst of it.\nWickedness is in the midst thereof:\nOppression and guile depart not from its streets.\nFor it was not an enemy that reproached me;\nThen I could have borne it:\nNeither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me;\nThen I would have hid myself from him:\nBut it was thou, a man mine equal,\nMy companion, and my familiar friend.\nWe took sweet counsel together;\nWe walked in the house of God with the throng.\nLet death come suddenly upon them,\nLet them go down alive into Sheol;\nFor wickedness is in their dwelling, in the midst of them.\nAs for me, I will call upon God;\nAnd Jehovah will save me.\nEvening, and morning, and at noonday, will I complain, and moan;\nAnd he will hear my voice.\nHe hath redeemed my soul in peace from the battle that was against me;\nFor they were many that strove with me.\nGod will hear, and answer them,\nEven he that abideth of old,\n\nSelah\n\nThe men who have no changes,\nAnd who fear not God.\nHe hath put forth his hands against such as were at peace with him:\nHe hath profaned his covenant.\nHis mouth was smooth as butter,\nBut his heart was war:\nHis words were softer than oil,\nYet were they drawn swords.\nCast thy burden upon Jehovah, and he will sustain thee:\nHe will never suffer the righteous to be moved.\nBut thou, O God, wilt bring them down into the pit of destruction:\nBloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half their days;\nBut I will trust in thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-56": { - "title": "Psalm 56", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Jonath elem rehokim. A Psalm of David. Michtam: when the Philistines took him in Gath._\n\nBe merciful unto me, O God; for man would swallow me up:\nAll the day long he fighting oppresseth me.\nMine enemies would swallow me up all the day long;\nFor they are many that fight proudly against me.\nWhat time I am afraid,\nI will put my trust in thee.\nIn God (I will praise his word),\nIn God have I put my trust, I will not be afraid;\nWhat can flesh do unto me?\nAll the day long they wrest my words:\nAll their thoughts are against me for evil.\nThey gather themselves together, they hide themselves,\nThey mark my steps,\nEven as they have waited for my soul.\nShall they escape by iniquity?\nIn anger cast down the peoples, O God.\nThou numberest my wanderings:\nPut thou my tears into thy bottle;\nAre they not in thy book?\nThen shall mine enemies turn back in the day that I call:\nThis I know, that God is for me.\nIn God (I will praise his word),\nIn Jehovah (I will praise his word),\nIn God have I put my trust, I will not be afraid;\nWhat can man do unto me?\nThy vows are upon me, O God:\nI will render thank-offerings unto thee.\nFor thou hast delivered my soul from death:\nHast thou not delivered my feet from falling,\nThat I may walk before God\nIn the light of the living?", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-57": { - "title": "Psalm 57", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Al-tash-heth. A Psalm of David. Michtam; when he fled from Saul, in the cave._\n\nBe merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me;\nFor my soul taketh refuge in thee:\nYea, in the shadow of thy wings will I take refuge,\nUntil these calamities be overpast.\nI will cry unto God Most High,\nUnto God that performeth all things for me.\nHe will send from heaven, and save me,\nWhen he that would swallow me up reproacheth;\n\nSelah\n\nGod will send forth his lovingkindness and his truth.\nMy soul is among lions;\nI lie among them that are set on fire,\nEven the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows,\nAnd their tongue a sharp sword.\nBe thou exalted, O God, above the heavens;\nLet thy glory be above all the earth.\nThey have prepared a net for my steps;\nMy soul is bowed down:\nThey have digged a pit before me;\nThey are fallen into the midst thereof themselves.\n\nSelah\n\nMy heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed:\nI will sing, yea, I will sing praises.\nAwake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp:\nI myself will awake right early.\nI will give thanks unto thee, O Lord, among the peoples:\nI will sing praises unto thee among the nations.\nFor thy lovingkindness is great unto the heavens,\nAnd thy truth unto the skies.\nBe thou exalted, O God, above the heavens;\nLet thy glory be above all the earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-58": { - "title": "Psalm 58", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Al-tashheth. A Psalm of David. Michtam._\n\nDo ye indeed in silence speak righteousness?\nDo ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men?\nNay, in heart ye work wickedness;\nYe weigh out the violence of your hands in the earth.\nThe wicked are estranged from the womb:\nThey go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.\nTheir poison is like the poison of a serpent:\nThey are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear,\nWhich hearkeneth not to the voice of charmers,\nCharming never so wisely.\nBreak their teeth, O God, in their mouth:\nBreak out the great teeth of the young lions, O Jehovah.\nLet them melt away as water that runneth apace:\nWhen he aimeth his arrows, let them be as though they were cut off.\nLet them be as a snail which melteth and passeth away,\nLike the untimely birth of a woman, that hath not seen the sun.\nBefore your pots can feel the thorns,\nHe will take them away with a whirlwind, the green and the burning alike.\nThe righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance:\nHe shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked;\nSo that men shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous:\nVerily there is a God that judgeth in the earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-59": { - "title": "Psalm 59", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Al-tashheth. A Psalm of David. Michtam; when Saul sent, and they watched the house to kill him._\n\nDeliver me from mine enemies, O my God:\nSet me on high from them that rise up against me.\nDeliver me from the workers of iniquity,\nAnd save me from the bloodthirsty men.\nFor, lo, they lie in wait for my soul;\nThe mighty gather themselves together against me:\nNot for my transgression, nor for my sin, O Jehovah.\nThey run and prepare themselves without my fault:\nAwake thou to help me, and behold.\nEven thou, O Jehovah God of hosts, the God of Israel,\nArise to visit all the nations:\nBe not merciful to any wicked transgressors.\n\nSelah\n\nThey return at evening, they howl like a dog,\nAnd go round about the city.\nBehold, they belch out with their mouth;\nSwords are in their lips:\nFor who, say they, doth hear?\nBut thou, O Jehovah, wilt laugh at them;\nThou wilt have all the nations in derision.\nBecause of his strength I will give heed unto thee;\nFor God is my high tower.\nMy God with his lovingkindness will meet me:\nGod will let me see my desire upon mine enemies.\nSlay them not, lest my people forget:\nScatter them by thy power, and bring them down,\nO Lord our shield.\nFor the sin of their mouth, and the words of their lips,\nLet them even be taken in their pride,\nAnd for cursing and lying which they speak.\nConsume them in wrath, consume them, so that they shall be no more:\nAnd let them know that God ruleth in Jacob,\nUnto the ends of the earth.\n\nSelah\n\nAnd at evening let them return, let them howl like a dog,\nAnd go round about the city.\nThey shall wander up and down for food,\nAnd tarry all night if they be not satisfied.\nBut I will sing of thy strength;\nYea, I will sing aloud of thy lovingkindness in the morning:\nFor thou hast been my high tower,\nAnd a refuge in the day of my distress.\nUnto thee, O my strength, will I sing praises:\nFor God is my high tower, the God of my mercy.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-60": { - "title": "Psalm 60", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Shushan Eduth. Michtam of David, to teach; and when he strove with Aram-naharaim and with Aram-zobah, and Joab returned, and smote of Edom in the Valley of Salt twelve thousand._\n\nO God thou hast cast us off, thou hast broken us down;\nThou hast been angry; oh restore us again.\nThou hast made the land to tremble; thou hast rent it:\nHeal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh.\nThou hast showed thy people hard things:\nThou hast made us to drink the wine of staggering.\nThou hast given a banner to them that fear thee,\nThat it may be displayed because of the truth.\n\nSelah\n\nThat thy beloved may be delivered,\nSave with thy right hand, and answer us.\n\nGod hath spoken in his holiness: I will exult;\nI will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.\nGilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine;\nEphraim also is the defence of my head;\nJudah is my sceptre.\nMoab is my washpot;\nUpon Edom will I cast my shoe:\nPhilistia, shout thou because of me.\nWho will bring me into the strong city?\nWho hath led me unto Edom?\nHast not thou, O God, cast us off?\nAnd thou goest not forth, O God, with our hosts.\nGive us help against the adversary;\nFor vain is the help of man.\nThrough God we shall do valiantly;\nFor he it is that will tread down our adversaries.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-61": { - "title": "Psalm 61", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on a stringed instrument. A Psalm of David._\n\nHear my cry, O God;\nAttend unto my prayer.\nFrom the end of the earth will I call unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed:\nLead me to the rock that is higher than I.\nFor thou hast been a refuge for me,\nA strong tower from the enemy.\nI will dwell in thy tabernacle for ever:\nI will take refuge in the covert of thy wings.\n\nSelah\n\nFor thou, O God, hast heard my vows:\nThou hast given me the heritage of those that fear thy name.\nThou wilt prolong the king’s life;\nHis years shall be as many generations.\nHe shall abide before God for ever:\nOh prepare lovingkindness and truth, that they may preserve him.\nSo will I sing praise unto thy name for ever,\nThat I may daily perform my vows.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-62": { - "title": "Psalm 62", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; after the manner of Jeduthan. A Psalm of David._\n\nMy soul waiteth in silence for God only:\nFrom him cometh my salvation.\nHe only is my rock and my salvation:\nHe is my high tower; I shall not be greatly moved.\nHow long will ye set upon a man,\nThat ye may slay him, all of you,\nLike a leaning wall, like a tottering fence?\nThey only consult to thrust him down from his dignity;\nThey delight in lies;\nThey bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly.\n\nSelah\n\nMy soul, wait thou in silence for God only;\nFor my expectation is from him.\nHe only is my rock and my salvation:\nHe is my high tower; I shall not be moved.\nWith God is my salvation and my glory:\nThe rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God.\nTrust in him at all times, ye people;\nPour out your heart before him:\nGod is a refuge for us.\n\nSelah\n\nSurely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie:\nIn the balances they will go up;\nThey are together lighter than vanity.\nTrust not in oppression,\nAnd become not vain in robbery:\nIf riches increase, set not your heart thereon.\nGod hath spoken once,\nTwice have I heard this,\nThat power belongeth unto God.\nAlso unto thee, O Lord, belongeth lovingkindness;\nFor thou renderest to every man according to his work.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-63": { - "title": "Psalm 63", - "body": "_A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah._\n\nO God, thou art my God; earnestly will I seek thee:\nMy soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee,\nIn a dry and weary land, where no water is.\nSo have I looked upon thee in the sanctuary,\nTo see thy power and thy glory.\nBecause thy lovingkindness is better than life,\nMy lips shall praise thee.\nSo will I bless thee while I live:\nI will lift up my hands in thy name.\nMy soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness;\nAnd my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips;\nWhen I remember thee upon my bed,\nAnd meditate on thee in the night-watches.\nFor thou hast been my help,\nAnd in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.\nMy soul followeth hard after thee:\nThy right hand upholdeth me.\nBut those that seek my soul, to destroy it,\nShall go into the lower parts of the earth.\nThey shall be given over to the power of the sword:\nThey shall be a portion for foxes.\nBut the king shall rejoice in God:\nEvery one that sweareth by him shall glory;\nFor the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-64": { - "title": "Psalm 64", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nHear my voice, O God, in my complaint:\nPreserve my life from fear of the enemy.\nHide me from the secret counsel of evil-doers,\nFrom the tumult of the workers of iniquity;\nWho have whet their tongue like a sword,\nAnd have aimed their arrows, even bitter words,\nThat they may shoot in secret places at the perfect:\nSuddenly do they shoot at him, and fear not.\nThey encourage themselves in an evil purpose;\nThey commune of laying snares privily;\nThey say, Who will see them?\nThey search out iniquities;\nWe have accomplished, say they, a diligent search:\nAnd the inward thought and the heart of every one is deep.\nBut God will shoot at them;\nWith an arrow suddenly shall they be wounded.\nSo they shall be made to stumble, their own tongue being against them:\nAll that see them shall wag the head.\nAnd all men shall fear;\nAnd they shall declare the work of God,\nAnd shall wisely consider of his doing.\nThe righteous shall be glad in Jehovah, and shall take refuge in him;\nAnd all the upright in heart shall glory.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-65": { - "title": "Psalm 65", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm. A song of David._\n\nPraise waiteth for thee, O God, in Zion;\nAnd unto thee shall the vow be performed.\nO thou that hearest prayer,\nUnto thee shall all flesh come.\nIniquities prevail against me:\nAs for our transgressions, thou wilt forgive them.\nBlessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee,\nThat he may dwell in thy courts:\nWe shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house,\nThy holy temple.\nBy terrible things thou wilt answer us in righteousness,\nOh God of our salvation,\nThou that art the confidence of all the ends of the earth,\nAnd of them that are afar off upon the sea:\nWho by his strength setteth fast the mountains,\nBeing girded about with might;\nWho stilleth the roaring of the seas,\nThe roaring of their waves,\nAnd the tumult of the peoples.\nThey also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy tokens:\nThou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.\nThou visitest the earth, and waterest it,\nThou greatly enrichest it;\nThe river of God is full of water:\nThou providest them grain, when thou hast so prepared the earth.\nThou waterest its furrows abundantly;\nThou settlest the ridges thereof:\nThou makest it soft with showers;\nThou blessest the springing thereof.\nThou crownest the year with thy goodness;\nAnd thy paths drop fatness.\nThey drop upon the pastures of the wilderness;\nAnd the hills are girded with joy.\nThe pastures are clothed with flocks;\nThe valleys also are covered over with grain;\nThey shout for joy, they also sing.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-66": { - "title": "Psalm 66", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A song, a Psalm._\n\nMake a joyful noise unto God, all the earth:\nSing forth the glory of his name:\nMake his praise glorious.\nSay unto God, How terrible are thy works!\nThrough the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.\nAll the earth shall worship thee,\nAnd shall sing unto thee;\nThey shall sing to thy name.\n\nSelah\n\nCome, and see the works of God;\nHe is terrible in his doing toward the children of men.\nHe turned the sea into dry land;\nThey went through the river on foot:\nThere did we rejoice in him.\nHe ruleth by his might for ever;\nHis eyes observe the nations:\nLet not the rebellious exalt themselves.\n\nSelah\n\nOh bless our God, ye peoples,\nAnd make the voice of his praise to be heard;\nWho holdeth our soul in life,\nAnd suffereth not our feet to be moved.\nFor thou, O God, hast proved us:\nThou hast tried us, as silver is tried.\nThou broughtest us into the net;\nThou layedst a sore burden upon our loins.\nThou didst cause men to ride over our heads;\nWe went through fire and through water;\nBut thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place.\nI will come into thy house with burnt-offerings;\nI will pay thee my vows,\nWhich my lips uttered,\nAnd my mouth spake, when I was in distress.\nI will offer unto thee burnt-offerings of fatlings,\nWith the incense of rams;\nI will offer bullocks with goats.\n\nSelah\n\nCome, and hear, all ye that fear God,\nAnd I will declare what he hath done for my soul.\nI cried unto him with my mouth,\nAnd he was extolled with my tongue.\nIf I regard iniquity in my heart,\nThe Lord will not hear:\nBut verily God hath heard;\nHe hath attended to the voice of my prayer.\nBlessed be God,\nWho hath not turned away my prayer,\nNor his lovingkindness from me.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-67": { - "title": "Psalm 67", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. A Psalm, a song._\n\nGod be merciful unto us, and bless us,\nAnd cause his face to shine upon us;\n\nSelah\n\nThat thy way may be known upon earth,\nThy salvation among all nations.\nLet the peoples praise thee, O God;\nLet all the peoples praise thee.\nOh let the nations be glad and sing for joy;\nFor thou wilt judge the peoples with equity,\nAnd govern the nations upon earth.\n\nSelah\n\nLet the peoples praise thee, O God;\nLet all the peoples praise thee.\nThe earth hath yielded its increase:\nGod, even our own God, will bless us.\nGod will bless us;\nAnd all the ends of the earth shall fear him.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-68": { - "title": "Psalm 68", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; A Psalm of David, a song._\n\nLet God arise, let his enemies be scattered;\nLet them also that hate him flee before him.\nAs smoke is driven away, so drive them away:\nAs wax melteth before the fire,\nSo let the wicked perish at the presence of God.\nBut let the righteous be glad; let them exult before God:\nYea, let them rejoice with gladness.\nSing unto God, sing praises to his name:\nCast up a highway for him that rideth through the deserts;\nHis name is Jehovah; and exult ye before him.\nA father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows,\nIs God in his holy habitation.\nGod setteth the solitary in families:\nHe bringeth out the prisoners into prosperity;\nBut the rebellious dwell in a parched land.\n\nO God, when thou wentest forth before thy people,\nWhen thou didst march through the wilderness;\n\nSelah\n\nThe earth trembled,\nThe heavens also dropped rain at the presence of God:\nYon Sinai trembled at the presence of God, the God of Israel.\nThou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain,\nThou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary.\nThy congregation dwelt therein:\nThou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor.\nThe Lord giveth the word:\nThe women that publish the tidings are a great host.\nKings of armies flee, they flee;\nAnd she that tarrieth at home divideth the spoil.\nWhen ye lie among the sheepfolds,\nIt is as the wings of a dove covered with silver,\nAnd her pinions with yellow gold.\nWhen the Almighty scattered kings therein,\nIt was as when it snoweth in Zalmon.\nA mountain of God is the mountain of Bashan;\nA high mountain is the mountain of Bashan.\nWhy look ye askance, ye high mountains,\nAt the mountain which God hath desired for his abode?\nYea, Jehovah will dwell in it for ever.\nThe chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands upon thousands;\nThe Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the sanctuary.\nThou hast ascended on high, thou hast led away captives;\nThou hast received gifts among men,\nYea, among the rebellious also, that Jehovah God might dwell with them.\nBlessed be the Lord, who daily beareth our burden,\nEven the God who is our salvation.\n\nSelah\n\nGod is unto us a God of deliverances;\nAnd unto Jehovah the Lord belongeth escape from death.\nBut God will smite through the head of his enemies,\nThe hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his guiltiness.\nThe Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan,\nI will bring them again from the depths of the sea;\nThat thou mayest crush them, dipping thy foot in blood,\nThat the tongue of thy dogs may have its portion from thine enemies.\nThey have seen thy goings, O God,\nEven the goings of my God, my King, into the sanctuary.\nThe singers went before, the minstrels followed after,\nIn the midst of the damsels playing with timbrels.\nBless ye God in the congregations,\nEven the Lord, ye that are of the fountain of Israel.\nThere is little Benjamin their ruler,\nThe princes of Judah and their council,\nThe princes of Zebulun, the princes of Naphtali.\nThy God hath commanded thy strength:\nStrengthen, O God, that which thou hast wrought for us.\nBecause of thy temple at Jerusalem\nKings shall bring presents unto thee.\nRebuke the wild beast of the reeds,\nThe multitude of the bulls, with the calves of the peoples,\nTrampling under foot the pieces of silver:\nHe hath scattered the peoples that delight in war.\nPrinces shall come out of Egypt;\nEthiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God.\nSing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth;\nOh sing praises unto the Lord;\n\nSelah\n\nTo him that rideth upon the heaven of heavens, which are of old;\nLo, he uttereth his voice, a mighty voice.\nAscribe ye strength unto God:\nHis excellency is over Israel,\nAnd his strength is in the skies.\nO God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places:\nThe God of Israel, he giveth strength and power unto his people.\nBlessed be God.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-69": { - "title": "Psalm 69", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Shoshanim. A Psalm of David._\n\nSave me, O God;\nFor the waters are come in unto my soul.\nI sink in deep mire, where there is no standing:\nI am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.\nI am weary with my crying; my throat is dried:\nMine eyes fail while I wait for my God.\nThey that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head:\nThey that would cut me off, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty:\nThat which I took not away I have to restore.\nO God, thou knowest my foolishness;\nAnd my sins are not hid from thee.\nLet not them that wait for thee be put to shame through me, O Lord Jehovah of hosts:\nLet not those that seek thee be brought to dishonor through me, O God of Israel.\nBecause for thy sake I have borne reproach;\nShame hath covered my face.\nI am become a stranger unto my brethren,\nAnd an alien unto my mother’s children.\nFor the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up;\nAnd the reproaches of them that reproach thee are fallen upon me.\nWhen I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting,\nThat was to my reproach.\nWhen I made sackcloth my clothing,\nI became a byword unto them.\nThey that sit in the gate talk of me;\nAnd I am the song of the drunkards.\nBut as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Jehovah, in an acceptable time:\nO God, in the abundance of thy lovingkindness,\nAnswer me in the truth of thy salvation.\nDeliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink:\nLet me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.\nLet not the waterflood overwhelm me,\nNeither let the deep shallow me up;\nAnd let not the pit shut its mouth upon me.\nAnswer me, O Jehovah; for thy lovingkindness is good:\nAccording to the multitude of thy tender mercies turn thou unto me.\nAnd hide not thy face from thy servant;\nFor I am in distress; answer me speedily.\nDraw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it:\nRansom me because of mine enemies.\nThou knowest my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonor:\nMine adversaries are all before thee.\nReproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness:\nAnd I looked for some to take pity, but there was none;\nAnd for comforters, but I found none.\nThey gave me also gall for my food;\nAnd in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.\nLet their table before them become a snare;\nAnd when they are in peace, let it become a trap.\nLet their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see;\nAnd make their loins continually to shake.\nPour out thine indignation upon them,\nAnd let the fierceness of thine anger overtake them.\nLet their habitation be desolate;\nLet none dwell in their tents.\nFor they persecute him whom thou hast smitten;\nAnd they tell of the sorrow of those whom thou hast wounded.\nAdd iniquity unto their iniquity;\nAnd let them not come into thy righteousness.\nLet them be blotted out of the book of life,\nAnd not be written with the righteous.\nBut I am poor and sorrowful:\nLet thy salvation, O God, set me up on high.\nI will praise the name of God with a song,\nAnd will magnify him with thanksgiving.\nAnd it will please Jehovah better than an ox,\nOr a bullock that hath horns and hoofs.\nThe meek have seen it, and are glad:\nYe that seek after God, let your heart live.\nFor Jehovah heareth the needy,\nAnd despiseth not his prisoners.\nLet heaven and earth praise him,\nThe seas, and everything that moveth therein.\nFor God will save Zion, and build the cities of Judah;\nAnd they shall abide there, and have it in possession.\nThe seed also of his servants shall inherit it;\nAnd they that love his name shall dwell therein.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-70": { - "title": "Psalm 70", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David; to bring to remembrance._\n\nMake haste, O God, to deliver me;\nMake haste to help me, O Jehovah.\nLet them be put to shame and confounded\nThat seek after my soul:\nLet them be turned backward and brought to dishonor\nThat delight in my hurt.\nLet them be turned back by reason of their shame\nThat say, Aha, aha.\nLet all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee;\nAnd let such as love thy salvation say continually,\nLet God be magnified.\nBut I am poor and needy;\nMake haste unto me, O God:\nThou art my help and my deliverer;\nO Jehovah, make no tarrying.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-71": { - "title": "Psalm 71", - "body": "In thee, O Jehovah, do I take refuge:\nLet me never be put to shame.\nDeliver me in thy righteousness, and rescue me:\nBow down thine ear unto me, and save me.\nBe thou to me a rock of habitation, whereunto I may continually resort:\nThou hast given commandment to save me;\nFor thou art my rock and my fortress.\nRescue me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked,\nOut of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man.\nFor thou art my hope, O Lord Jehovah:\nThou art my trust from my youth.\nBy thee have I been holden up from the womb;\nThou art he that took me out of my mother’s bowels:\nMy praise shall be continually of thee.\nI am as a wonder unto many;\nBut thou art my strong refuge.\nMy mouth shall be filled with thy praise,\nAnd with thy honor all the day.\nCast me not off in the time of old age;\nForsake me not when my strength faileth.\nFor mine enemies speak concerning me;\nAnd they that watch for my soul take counsel together,\nSaying, God hath forsaken him:\nPursue and take him; for there is none to deliver.\nO God, be not far from me;\nO my God, make haste to help me.\nLet them be put to shame and consumed that are adversaries to my soul;\nLet them be covered with reproach and dishonor that seek my hurt.\nBut I will hope continually,\nAnd will praise thee yet more and more.\nMy mouth shall tell of thy righteousness,\nAnd of thy salvation all the day;\nFor I know not the numbers thereof.\nI will come with the mighty acts of the Lord Jehovah:\nI will make mention of thy righteousness, even of thine only.\nO God, thou hast taught me from my youth;\nAnd hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works.\nYea, even when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not,\nUntil I have declared thy strength unto the next generation,\nThy might to every one that is to come.\nThy righteousness also, O God, is very high;\nThou who hast done great things, O God, who is like unto thee?\nThou, who hast showed us many and sore troubles,\nWilt quicken us again,\nAnd wilt bring us up again from the depths of the earth.\nIncrease thou my greatness,\nAnd turn again and comfort me.\nI will also praise thee with the psaltery,\nEven thy truth, O my God:\nUnto thee will I sing praises with the harp,\nO thou Holy One of Israel.\nMy lips shall shout for joy when I sing praises unto thee;\nAnd my soul, which thou hast redeemed.\nMy tongue also shall talk of thy righteousness all the day long;\nFor they are put to shame, for they are confounded, that seek my hurt.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-72": { - "title": "Psalm 72", - "body": "_A Psalm of Solomon._\n\nGive the king thy judgments, O God,\nAnd thy righteousness unto the king’s son.\nHe will judge thy people with righteousness,\nAnd thy poor with justice.\nThe mountains shall bring peace to the people,\nAnd the hills, in righteousness.\nHe will judge the poor of the people,\nHe will save the children of the needy,\nAnd will break in pieces the oppressor.\nThey shall fear thee while the sun endureth,\nAnd so long as the moon, throughout all generations.\nHe will come down like rain upon the mown grass,\nAs showers that water the earth.\nIn his days shall the righteous flourish,\nAnd abundance of peace, till the moon be no more.\nHe shall have dominion also from sea to sea,\nAnd from the River unto the ends of the earth.\nThey that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him;\nAnd his enemies shall lick the dust.\nThe kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall render tribute:\nThe kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.\nYea, all kings shall fall down before him;\nAll nations shall serve him.\nFor he will deliver the needy when he crieth,\nAnd the poor, that hath no helper.\nHe will have pity on the poor and needy,\nAnd the souls of the needy he will save.\nHe will redeem their soul from oppression and violence;\nAnd precious will their blood be in his sight:\nAnd they shall live; and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba:\nAnd men shall pray for him continually;\nThey shall bless him all the day long.\nThere shall be abundance of grain in the earth upon the top of the mountains;\nThe fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon:\nAnd they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.\nHis name shall endure for ever;\nHis name shall be continued as long as the sun:\nAnd men shall be blessed in him;\nAll nations shall call him happy.\n\nBlessed be Jehovah God, the God of Israel,\nWho only doeth wondrous things:\nAnd blessed be his glorious name for ever;\nAnd let the whole earth be filled with his glory.\nAmen, and Amen.\nThe prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.\n\nBOOK III", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-73": { - "title": "Psalm 73", - "body": "_A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nSurely God is good to Israel,\nEven to such as are pure in heart.\nBut as for me, my feet were almost gone;\nMy steps had well nigh slipped.\nFor I was envious at the arrogant,\nWhen I saw the prosperity of the wicked.\nFor there are no pangs in their death;\nBut their strength is firm.\nThey are not in trouble as other men;\nNeither are they plagued like other men.\nTherefore pride is as a chain about their neck;\nViolence covereth them as a garment.\nTheir eyes stand out with fatness:\nThey have more than heart could wish.\nThey scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression:\nThey speak loftily.\nThey have set their mouth in the heavens,\nAnd their tongue walketh through the earth.\nTherefore his people return hither:\nAnd waters of a full cup are drained by them.\nAnd they say, How doth God know?\nAnd is there knowledge in the Most High?\nBehold, these are the wicked;\nAnd, being alway at ease, they increase in riches.\nSurely in vain have I cleansed my heart,\nAnd washed my hands in innocency;\nFor all the day long have I been plagued,\nAnd chastened every morning.\nIf I had said, I will speak thus;\nBehold, I had dealt treacherously with the generation of thy children.\nWhen I thought how I might know this,\nIt was too painful for me;\nUntil I went into the sanctuary of God,\nAnd considered their latter end.\nSurely thou settest them in slippery places:\nThou castest them down to destruction.\nHow are they become a desolation in a moment!\nThey are utterly consumed with terrors.\nAs a dream when one awaketh,\nSo, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou wilt despise their image.\nFor my soul was grieved,\nAnd I was pricked in my heart:\nSo brutish was I, and ignorant;\nI was as a beast before thee.\nNevertheless I am continually with thee:\nThou hast holden my right hand.\nThou wilt guide me with thy counsel,\nAnd afterward receive me to glory.\nWhom have I in heaven but thee?\nAnd there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee.\nMy flesh and my heart faileth;\nBut God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.\nFor, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish:\nThou hast destroyed all them that play the harlot, departing from thee.\nBut it is good for me to draw near unto God:\nI have made the Lord Jehovah my refuge,\nThat I may tell of all thy works.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-74": { - "title": "Psalm 74", - "body": "_Maschil of Asaph._\n\nO God, why hast thou cast us off for ever?\nWhy doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?\nRemember thy congregation, which thou hast gotten of old,\nWhich thou hast redeemed to be the tribe of thine inheritance;\nAnd mount Zion, wherein thou hast dwelt.\nLift up thy feet unto the perpetual ruins,\nAll the evil that the enemy hath done in the sanctuary.\nThine adversaries have roared in the midst of thine assembly;\nThey have set up their ensigns for signs.\nThey seemed as men that lifted up\nAxes upon a thicket of trees.\nAnd now all the carved work thereof\nThey break down with hatchet and hammers.\nThey have set thy sanctuary on fire;\nThey have profaned the dwelling-place of thy name by casting it to the ground.\nThey said in their heart, Let us make havoc of them altogether:\nThey have burned up all the synagogues of God in the land.\nWe see not our signs:\nThere is no more any prophet;\nNeither is there among us any that knoweth how long.\nHow long, O God, shall the adversary reproach?\nShall the enemy blaspheme thy name for ever?\nWhy drawest thou back thy hand, even thy right hand?\nPluck it out of thy bosom and consume them.\n\nYet God is my King of old,\nWorking salvation in the midst of the earth.\nThou didst divide the sea by thy strength:\nThou brakest the heads of the sea-monsters in the waters.\nThou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces;\nThou gavest him to be food to the people inhabiting the wilderness.\nThou didst cleave fountain and flood:\nThou driedst up mighty rivers.\nThe day is thine, the night also is thine:\nThou hast prepared the light and the sun.\nThou hast set all the borders of the earth:\nThou hast made summer and winter.\nRemember this, that the enemy hath reproached, O Jehovah,\nAnd that a foolish people hath blasphemed thy name.\nOh deliver not the soul of thy turtle-dove unto the wild beast:\nForget not the life of thy poor for ever.\nHave respect unto the covenant;\nFor the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of violence.\nOh let not the oppressed return ashamed:\nLet the poor and needy praise thy name.\nArise, O God, plead thine own cause:\nRemember how the foolish man reproacheth thee all the day.\nForget not the voice of thine adversaries:\nThe tumult of those that rise up against thee ascendeth continually.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-75": { - "title": "Psalm 75", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to Al-tash-heth. A Psalm of Asaph; a song._\n\nWe give thanks unto thee, O God;\nWe give thanks, for thy name is near:\nMen tell of thy wondrous works.\nWhen I shall find the set time, I will judge uprightly.\nThe earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved:\nI have set up the pillars of it.\n\nSelah\n\nI said unto the arrogant, Deal not arrogantly;\nAnd to the wicked, Lift not up the horn:\nLift not up your horn on high;\nSpeak not with a stiff neck.\nFor neither from the east, nor from the west,\nNor yet from the south, cometh lifting up.\nBut God is the judge:\nHe putteth down one, and lifteth up another.\nFor in the hand of Jehovah there is a cup, and the wine foameth;\nIt is full of mixture, and he poureth out of the same:\nSurely the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall drain them, and drink them.\nBut I will declare for ever,\nI will sing praises to the God of Jacob.\nAll the horns of the wicked also will I cut off;\nBut the horns of the righteous shall be lifted up.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-76": { - "title": "Psalm 76", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; on stringed instruments. A Psalm of Asaph, a song._\n\nIn Judah is God known:\nHis name is great in Israel.\nIn Salem also is his tabernacle,\nAnd his dwelling-place in Zion.\nThere he brake the arrows of the bow;\nThe shield, and the sword, and the battle.\n\nSelah\n\nGlorious art thou and excellent,\nFrom the mountains of prey.\nThe stouthearted are made a spoil,\nThey have slept their sleep;\nAnd none of the men of might have found their hands.\nAt thy rebuke, O God of Jacob,\nBoth chariot and horse are cast into a deep sleep.\nThou, even thou, art to be feared;\nAnd who may stand in thy sight when once thou art angry?\nThou didst cause sentence to be heard from heaven;\nThe earth feared, and was still,\nWhen God arose to judgment,\nTo save all the meek of the earth.\n\nSelah\n\nSurely the wrath of man shall praise thee:\nThe residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee.\nVow, and pay unto Jehovah your God:\nLet all that are round about him bring presents unto him that ought to be feared.\nHe will cut off the spirit of princes:\nHe is terrible to the kings of the earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-77": { - "title": "Psalm 77", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; after the manner of Jeduthan. A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nI will cry unto God with my voice,\nEven unto God with my voice; and he will give ear unto me.\nIn the day of my trouble I sought the Lord:\nMy hand was stretched out in the night, and slacked not;\nMy soul refused to be comforted.\nI remember God, and am disquieted:\nI complain, and my spirit is overwhelmed.\n\nSelah\n\nThou holdest mine eyes watching:\nI am so troubled that I cannot speak.\nI have considered the days of old,\nThe years of ancient times.\nI call to remembrance my song in the night:\nI commune with mine own heart;\nAnd my spirit maketh diligent search.\nWill the Lord cast off for ever?\nAnd will he be favorable no more?\nIs his lovingkindness clean gone for ever?\nDoth his promise fail for evermore?\nHath God forgotten to be gracious?\nHath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?\n\nSelah\n\nAnd I said, This is my infirmity;\nBut I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High.\nI will make mention of the deeds of Jehovah;\nFor I will remember thy wonders of old.\nI will meditate also upon all thy work,\nAnd muse on thy doings.\nThy way, O God, is in the sanctuary:\nWho is a great god like unto God?\nThou art the God that doest wonders:\nThou hast made known thy strength among the peoples.\nThou hast with thine arm redeemed thy people,\nThe sons of Jacob and Joseph.\n\nSelah\n\nThe waters saw thee, O God;\nThe waters saw thee, they were afraid:\nThe depths also trembled.\nThe clouds poured out water;\nThe skies sent out a sound:\nThine arrows also went abroad.\nThe voice of thy thunder was in the whirlwind;\nThe lightnings lightened the world:\nThe earth trembled and shook.\nThy way was in the sea,\nAnd thy paths in the great waters,\nAnd thy footsteps were not known.\nThou leddest thy people like a flock,\nBy the hand of Moses and Aaron.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-78": { - "title": "Psalm 78", - "body": "_Maschil of Asaph._\n\nGive ear, O my people, to my law:\nIncline your ears to the words of my mouth.\nI will open my mouth in a parable;\nI will utter dark sayings of old,\nWhich we have heard and known,\nAnd our fathers have told us.\nWe will not hide them from their children,\nTelling to the generation to come the praises of Jehovah,\nAnd his strength, and his wondrous works that he hath done.\nFor he established a testimony in Jacob,\nAnd appointed a law in Israel,\nWhich he commanded our fathers,\nThat they should make them known to their children;\nThat the generation to come might know them, even the children that should be born;\nWho should arise and tell them to their children,\nThat they might set their hope in God,\nAnd not forget the works of God,\nBut keep his commandments,\nAnd might not be as their fathers,\nA stubborn and rebellious generation,\nA generation that set not their heart aright,\nAnd whose spirit was not stedfast with God.\nThe children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows,\nTurned back in the day of battle.\nThey kept not the covenant of God,\nAnd refused to walk in his law;\nAnd they forgat his doings,\nAnd his wondrous works that he had showed them.\nMarvellous things did he in the sight of their fathers,\nIn the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.\nHe clave the sea, and caused them to pass through;\nAnd he made the waters to stand as a heap.\nIn the day-time also he led them with a cloud,\nAnd all the night with a light of fire.\nHe clave rocks in the wilderness,\nAnd gave them drink abundantly as out of the depths.\nHe brought streams also out of the rock,\nAnd caused waters to run down like rivers.\nYet went they on still to sin against him,\nTo rebel against the Most High in the desert.\nAnd they tempted God in their heart\nBy asking food according to their desire.\nYea, they spake against God;\nThey said, Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?\nBehold, he smote the rock, so that waters gushed out,\nAnd streams overflowed;\nCan he give bread also?\nWill he provide flesh for his people?\nTherefore Jehovah heard, and was wroth;\nAnd a fire was kindled against Jacob,\nAnd anger also went up against Israel;\nBecause they believed not in God,\nAnd trusted not in his salvation.\nYet he commanded the skies above,\nAnd opened the doors of heaven;\nAnd he rained down manna upon them to eat,\nAnd gave them food from heaven.\nMan did eat the bread of the mighty:\nHe sent them food to the full.\nHe caused the east wind to blow in the heavens;\nAnd by his power he guided the south wind.\nHe rained flesh also upon them as the dust,\nAnd winged birds as the sand of the seas:\nAnd he let it fall in the midst of their camp,\nRound about their habitations.\nSo they did eat, and were well filled;\nAnd he gave them their own desire.\nThey were not estranged from that which they desired,\nTheir food was yet in their mouths,\nWhen the anger of God went up against them,\nAnd slew of the fattest of them,\nAnd smote down the young men of Israel.\nFor all this they sinned still,\nAnd believed not in his wondrous works.\nTherefore their days did he consume in vanity,\nAnd their years in terror.\nWhen he slew them, then they inquired after him;\nAnd they returned and sought God earnestly.\nAnd they remembered that God was their rock,\nAnd the Most High God their redeemer.\nBut they flattered him with their mouth,\nAnd lied unto him with their tongue.\nFor their heart was not right with him,\nNeither were they faithful in his covenant.\nBut he, being merciful, forgave their iniquity, and destroyed them not:\nYea, many a time turned he his anger away,\nAnd did not stir up all his wrath.\nAnd he remembered that they were but flesh,\nA wind that passeth away, and cometh not again.\nHow oft did they rebel against him in the wilderness,\nAnd grieve him in the desert!\nAnd they turned again and tempted God,\nAnd provoked the Holy One of Israel.\nThey remember not his hand,\nNor the day when he redeemed them from the adversary;\nHow he set his signs in Egypt,\nAnd his wonders in the field of Zoan,\nAnd turned their rivers into blood,\nAnd their streams, so that they could not drink.\nHe sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them;\nAnd frogs, which destroyed them.\nHe gave also their increase unto the caterpillar,\nAnd their labor unto the locust.\nHe destroyed their vines with hail,\nAnd their sycomore-trees with frost.\nHe gave over their cattle also to the hail,\nAnd their flocks to hot thunderbolts.\nHe cast upon them the fierceness of his anger,\nWrath, and indignation, and trouble,\nA band of angels of evil.\nHe made a path for his anger;\nHe spared not their soul from death,\nBut gave their life over to the pestilence,\nAnd smote all the first-born in Egypt,\nThe chief of their strength in the tents of Ham.\nBut he led forth his own people like sheep,\nAnd guided them in the wilderness like a flock.\nAnd he led them safely, so that they feared not;\nBut the sea overwhelmed their enemies.\nAnd he brought them to the border of his sanctuary,\nTo this mountain, which his right hand had gotten.\nHe drove out the nations also before them,\nAnd allotted them for an inheritance by line,\nAnd made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents.\nYet they tempted and rebelled against the Most High God,\nAnd kept not his testimonies;\nBut turned back, and dealt treacherously like their fathers:\nThey were turned aside like a deceitful bow.\nFor they provoked him to anger with their high places,\nAnd moved him to jealousy with their graven images.\nWhen God heard this, he was wroth,\nAnd greatly abhorred Israel;\nSo that he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh,\nThe tent which he placed among men;\nAnd delivered his strength into captivity,\nAnd his glory into the adversary’s hand.\nHe gave his people over also unto the sword,\nAnd was wroth with his inheritance.\nFire devoured their young men;\nAnd their virgins had no marriage-song.\nTheir priests fell by the sword;\nAnd their widows made no lamentation.\nThen the Lord awaked as one out of sleep,\nLike a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.\nAnd he smote his adversaries backward:\nHe put them to a perpetual reproach.\nMoreover he refused the tent of Joseph,\nAnd chose not the tribe of Ephraim,\nBut chose the tribe of Judah,\nThe mount Zion which he loved.\nAnd he built his sanctuary like the heights,\nLike the earth which he hath established for ever.\nHe chose David also his servant,\nAnd took him from the sheepfolds:\nFrom following the ewes that have their young he brought him,\nTo be the shepherd of Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.\nSo he was their shepherd according to the integrity of his heart,\nAnd guided them by the skilfulness of his hands.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-79": { - "title": "Psalm 79", - "body": "_A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nO God, the nations are come into thine inheritance;\nThy holy temple have they defiled;\nThey have laid Jerusalem in heaps.\nThe dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be food unto the birds of the heavens,\nThe flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth.\nTheir blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem;\nAnd there was none to bury them.\nWe are become a reproach to our neighbors,\nA scoffing and derision to them that are round about us.\nHow long, O Jehovah? wilt thou be angry for ever?\nShall thy jealousy burn like fire?\nPour out thy wrath upon the nations that know thee not,\nAnd upon the kingdoms that call not upon thy name.\nFor they have devoured Jacob,\nAnd laid waste his habitation.\nRemember not against us the iniquities of our forefathers:\nLet thy tender mercies speedily meet us;\nFor we are brought very low.\nHelp us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name;\nAnd deliver us, and forgive our sins, for thy name’s sake.\nWherefore should the nations say, Where is their God?\nLet the avenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed\nBe known among the nations in our sight.\nLet the sighing of the prisoner come before thee:\nAccording to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to death;\nAnd render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom\nTheir reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord.\nSo we thy people and sheep of thy pasture\nWill give thee thanks for ever:\nWe will show forth thy praise to all generations.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-80": { - "title": "Psalm 80", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician, set to Shoshanim Eduth … A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nGive ear, O Shepherd of Israel,\nThou that leadest Joseph like a flock;\nThou that sittest above the cherubim, shine forth.\nBefore Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up thy might,\nAnd come to save us.\nTurn us again, O God;\nAnd cause thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.\nO Jehovah God of hosts,\nHow long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people?\nThou hast fed them with the bread of tears,\nAnd given them tears to drink in large measure.\nThou makest us a strife unto our neighbors;\nAnd our enemies laugh among themselves.\nTurn us again, O God of hosts;\nAnd cause thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.\n\nThou broughtest a vine out of Egypt:\nThou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst it.\nThou preparedst room before it,\nAnd it took deep root, and filled the land.\nThe mountains were covered with the shadow of it,\nAnd the boughs thereof were like cedars of God.\nIt sent out its branches unto the sea,\nAnd its shoots unto the River.\nWhy hast thou broken down its walls,\nSo that all they that pass by the way do pluck it?\nThe boar out of the wood doth ravage it,\nAnd the wild beasts of the field feed on it.\nTurn again, we beseech thee, O God of hosts:\nLook down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine,\nAnd the stock which thy right hand planted,\nAnd the branch that thou madest strong for thyself.\nIt is burned with fire, it is cut down:\nThey perish at the rebuke of thy countenance.\nLet thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand,\nUpon the son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself.\nSo shall we not go back from thee:\nQuicken thou us, and we will call upon thy name.\nTurn us again, O Jehovah God of hosts;\nCause thy face to shine, and we shall be saved.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-81": { - "title": "Psalm 81", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to the Gittith. A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nSing aloud unto God our strength:\nMake a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob.\nRaise a song, and bring hither the timbrel,\nThe pleasant harp with the psaltery.\nBlow the trumpet at the new moon,\nAt the full moon, on our feast-day.\nFor it is a statute for Israel,\nAn ordinance of the God of Jacob.\nHe appointed it in Joseph for a testimony,\nWhen he went out over the land of Egypt,\nWhere I heard a language that I knew not.\nI removed his shoulder from the burden:\nHis hands were freed from the basket.\nThou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee;\nI answered thee in the secret place of thunder;\nI proved thee at the waters of Meribah.\n\nSelah\n\nHear, O my people, and I will testify unto thee:\nO Israel, if thou wouldest hearken unto me!\nThere shall no strange god be in thee;\nNeither shalt thou worship any foreign god.\nI am Jehovah thy God,\nWho brought thee up out of the land of Egypt:\nOpen thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.\nBut my people hearkened not to my voice;\nAnd Israel would none of me.\nSo I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart,\nThat they might walk in their own counsels.\nOh that my people would hearken unto me,\nThat Israel would walk in my ways!\nI would soon subdue their enemies,\nAnd turn my hand against their adversaries.\nThe haters of Jehovah should submit themselves unto him:\nBut their time should endure for ever.\nHe would feed them also with the finest of the wheat;\nAnd with honey out of the rock would I satisfy thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-82": { - "title": "Psalm 82", - "body": "_A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nGod standeth in the congregation of God;\nHe judgeth among the gods.\nHow long will ye judge unjustly,\nAnd respect the persons of the wicked?\n\nSelah\n\nJudge the poor and fatherless:\nDo justice to the afflicted and destitute.\nRescue the poor and needy:\nDeliver them out of the hand of the wicked.\nThey know not, neither do they understand;\nThey walk to and fro in darkness:\nAll the foundations of the earth are shaken.\nI said, Ye are gods,\nAnd all of you sons of the Most High.\nNevertheless ye shall die like men,\nAnd fall like one of the princes.\nArise, O God, judge the earth;\nFor thou shalt inherit all the nations.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-83": { - "title": "Psalm 83", - "body": "_A song. A Psalm of Asaph._\n\nO God, keep not thou silence:\nHold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.\nFor, lo, thine enemies make a tumult;\nAnd they that hate thee have lifted up the head.\nThy take crafty counsel against thy people,\nAnd consult together against thy hidden ones.\nThey have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation;\nThat the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.\nFor they have consulted together with one consent;\nAgainst thee do they make a covenant:\nThe tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites;\nMoab, and the Hagarenes;\nGebal, and Ammon, and Amalek;\nPhilistia with the inhabitants of Tyre:\nAssyria also is joined with them;\nThey have helped the children of Lot.\n\nSelah\n\nDo thou unto them as unto Midian,\nAs to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the river Kishon;\nWho perished at Endor,\nWho became as dung for the earth.\nMake their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb;\nYea, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna;\nWho said, Let us take to ourselves in possession\nThe habitations of God.\nO my God, make them like the whirling dust;\nAs stubble before the wind.\nAs the fire that burneth the forest,\nAnd as the flame that setteth the mountains on fire,\nSo pursue them with thy tempest,\nAnd terrify them with thy storm.\nFill their faces with confusion,\nThat they may seek thy name, O Jehovah.\nLet them be put to shame and dismayed for ever;\nYea, let them be confounded and perish;\nThat they may know that thou alone, whose name is Jehovah,\nArt the Most High over all the earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-84": { - "title": "Psalm 84", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician; set to the Gittith. A Psalm of the sons of Korah._\n\nHow amiable are thy tabernacles,\nO Jehovah of hosts!\nMy soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of Jehovah;\nMy heart and my flesh cry out unto the living God.\nYea, the sparrow hath found her a house,\nAnd the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young,\nEven thine altars, O Jehovah of hosts,\nMy King, and my God.\nBlessed are they that dwell in thy house:\nThey will be still praising thee.\n\nSelah\n\nBlessed is the man whose strength is in thee;\nIn whose heart are the highways to Zion.\nPassing through the valley of Weeping they make it a place of springs;\nYea, the early rain covereth it with blessings.\nThey go from strength to strength;\nEvery one of them appeareth before God in Zion.\nO Jehovah God of hosts, hear my prayer;\nGive ear, O God of Jacob.\n\nSelah\n\nBehold, O God our shield,\nAnd look upon the face of thine anointed.\nFor a day in thy courts is better than a thousand.\nI had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,\nThan to dwell in the tents of wickedness.\nFor Jehovah God is a sun and a shield:\nJehovah will give grace and glory;\nNo good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.\nO Jehovah of hosts,\nBlessed is the man that trusteth in thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-85": { - "title": "Psalm 85", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of the sons of Korah._\n\nJehovah, thou hast been favorable unto thy land;\nThou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob.\nThou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people;\nThou hast covered all their sin.\n\nSelah\n\nThou hast taken away all thy wrath;\nThou hast turned thyself from the fierceness of thine anger.\nTurn us, O God of our salvation,\nAnd cause thine indignation toward us to cease.\nWilt thou be angry with us for ever?\nWilt thou draw out thine anger to all generations?\nWilt thou not quicken us again,\nThat thy people may rejoice in thee?\nShow us thy lovingkindness, O Jehovah,\nAnd grant us thy salvation.\nI will hear what God Jehovah will speak;\nFor he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints:\nBut let them not turn again to folly.\nSurely his salvation is nigh them that fear him,\nThat glory may dwell in our land.\nMercy and truth are met together;\nRighteousness and peace have kissed each other.\nTruth springeth out of the earth;\nAnd righteousness hath looked down from heaven.\nYea, Jehovah will give that which is good;\nAnd our land shall yield its increase.\nRighteousness shall go before him,\nAnd shall make his footsteps a way to walk in.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-86": { - "title": "Psalm 86", - "body": "_A Prayer of David_\n\nBow down thine ear, O Jehovah, and answer me;\nFor I am poor and needy.\nPreserve my soul; for I am godly:\nO thou my God, save thy servant that trusteth in thee.\nBe merciful unto me, O Lord;\nFor unto thee do I cry all the day long.\nRejoice the soul of thy servant;\nFor unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.\nFor thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive,\nAnd abundant in lovingkindness unto all them that call upon thee.\nGive ear, O Jehovah, unto my prayer;\nAnd hearken unto the voice of my supplications.\nIn the day of my trouble I will call upon thee;\nFor thou wilt answer me.\nThere is none like unto thee among the gods, O Lord;\nNeither are there any works like unto thy works.\nAll nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord;\nAnd they shall glorify thy name.\nFor thou art great, and doest wondrous things:\nThou art God alone.\nTeach me thy way, O Jehovah; I will walk in thy truth:\nUnite my heart to fear thy name.\nI will praise thee, O Lord my God, with my whole heart;\nAnd I will glorify thy name for evermore.\nFor great is thy lovingkindness toward me;\nAnd thou hast delivered my soul from the lowest Sheol.\nO God, the proud are risen up against me,\nAnd a company of violent men have sought after my soul,\nAnd have not set thee before them.\nBut thou, O Lord, art a God merciful and gracious,\nSlow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness and truth.\nOh turn unto me, and have mercy upon me;\nGive thy strength unto thy servant,\nAnd save the son of thy handmaid.\nShow me a token for good,\nThat they who hate me may see it, and be put to shame,\nBecause thou, Jehovah, hast helped me, and comforted me.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-87": { - "title": "Psalm 87", - "body": "_A Psalm of the sons of Korah; a Song._\n\nHis foundation is in the holy mountains.\nJehovah loveth the gates of Zion\nMore than all the dwellings of Jacob.\nGlorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.\n\nSelah\n\nI will make mention of Rahab and Babylon as among them that know me:\nBehold, Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia:\nThis one was born there.\nYea, of Zion it shall be said, This one and that one was born in her;\nAnd the Most High himself will establish her.\nJehovah will count, when he writeth up the peoples,\nThis one was born there.\n\nSelah\n\nThey that sing as well as they that dance shall say,\nAll my fountains are in thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-88": { - "title": "Psalm 88", - "body": "_A Song, a Psalm of the sons of Korah; for the Chief Musician; set to Mahalath Leannoth. Maschil of Heman the Ezrahite._\n\nO Jehovah, the God of my salvation,\nI have cried day and night before thee.\nLet my prayer enter into thy presence;\nIncline thine ear unto my cry.\nFor my soul is full of troubles,\nAnd my life draweth nigh unto Sheol.\nI am reckoned with them that go down into the pit;\nI am as a man that hath no help,\nCast off among the dead,\nLike the slain that lie in the grave,\nWhom thou rememberest no more,\nAnd they are cut off from thy hand.\nThou hast laid me in the lowest pit,\nIn dark places, in the deeps.\nThy wrath lieth hard upon me,\nAnd thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.\n\nSelah\n\nThou hast put mine acquaintance far from me;\nThou hast made me an abomination unto them:\nI am shut up, and I cannot come forth.\nMine eye wasteth away by reason of affliction:\nI have called daily upon thee, O Jehovah;\nI have spread forth my hands unto thee.\nWilt thou show wonders to the dead?\nShall they that are deceased arise and praise thee?\n\nSelah\n\nShall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave?\nOr thy faithfulness in Destruction?\nShall thy wonders be known in the dark?\nAnd thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?\nBut unto thee, O Jehovah, have I cried;\nAnd in the morning shall my prayer come before thee.\nJehovah, why castest thou off my soul?\nWhy hidest thou thy face from me?\nI am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up:\nWhile I suffer thy terrors I am distracted.\nThy fierce wrath is gone over me;\nThy terrors have cut me off.\nThey came round about me like water all the day long;\nThey compassed me about together.\nLover and friend hast thou put far from me,\nAnd mine acquaintance into darkness.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-89": { - "title": "Psalm 89", - "body": "_Maschil of Ethan the Ezrahite._\n\nI will sing of the lovingkindness of Jehovah for ever:\nWith my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.\nFor I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever;\nThy faithfulness wilt thou establish in the very heavens.\nI have made a covenant with my chosen,\nI have sworn unto David my servant:\nThy seed will I establish for ever,\nAnd build up thy throne to all generations.\n\nSelah\n\nAnd the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O Jehovah;\nThy faithfulness also in the assembly of the holy ones.\nFor who in the skies can be compared unto Jehovah?\nWho among the sons of the mighty is like unto Jehovah,\nA God very terrible in the council of the holy ones,\nAnd to be feared above all them that are round about him?\nO Jehovah God of hosts,\nWho is a mighty one, like unto thee, O Jehovah?\nAnd thy faithfulness is round about thee.\nThou rulest the pride of the sea:\nWhen the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them.\nThou hast broken Rahab in pieces, as one that is slain;\nThou hast scattered thine enemies with the arm of thy strength.\nThe heavens are thine, the earth also is thine:\nThe world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.\nThe north and the south, thou hast created them:\nTabor and Hermon rejoice in thy name.\nThou hast a mighty arm;\nStrong is thy hand, and high is thy right hand.\nRighteousness and justice are the foundation of thy throne:\nLovingkindness and truth go before thy face.\nBlessed is the people that know the joyful sound:\nThey walk, O Jehovah, in the light of thy countenance.\nIn thy name do they rejoice all the day;\nAnd in thy righteousness are they exalted.\nFor thou art the glory of their strength;\nAnd in thy favor our horn shall be exalted.\nFor our shield belongeth unto Jehovah;\nAnd our king to the Holy One of Israel.\n\nThen thou spakest in vision to thy saints,\nAnd saidst, I have laid help upon one that is mighty;\nI have exalted one chosen out of the people.\nI have found David my servant;\nWith my holy oil have I anointed him:\nWith whom my hand shall be established;\nMine arm also shall strengthen him.\nThe enemy shall not exact from him,\nNor the son of wickedness afflict him.\nAnd I will beat down his adversaries before him,\nAnd smite them that hate him.\nBut my faithfulness and my lovingkindness shall be with him;\nAnd in my name shall his horn be exalted.\nI will set his hand also on the sea,\nAnd his right hand on the rivers.\nHe shall cry unto me, Thou art my Father,\nMy God, and the rock of my salvation.\nI also will make him my first-born,\nThe highest of the kings of the earth.\nMy lovingkindness will I keep for him for evermore;\nAnd my covenant shall stand fast with him.\nHis seed also will I make to endure for ever,\nAnd his throne as the days of heaven.\nIf his children forsake my law,\nAnd walk not in mine ordinances;\nIf they break my statutes,\nAnd keep not my commandments;\nThen will I visit their transgression with the rod,\nAnd their iniquity with stripes.\nBut my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him,\nNor suffer my faithfulness to fail.\nMy covenant will I not break,\nNor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.\nOnce have I sworn by my holiness:\nI will not lie unto David:\nHis seed shall endure for ever,\nAnd his throne as the sun before me.\nIt shall be established for ever as the moon,\nAnd as the faithful witness in the sky.\n\nSelah\n\nBut thou hast cast off and rejected,\nThou hast been wroth with thine anointed.\nThou hast abhorred the covenant of thy servant:\nThou hast profaned his crown by casting it to the ground.\nThou hast broken down all his hedges;\nThou hast brought his strongholds to ruin.\nAll that pass by the way rob him:\nHe is become a reproach to his neighbors.\nThou hast exalted the right hand of his adversaries;\nThou hast made all his enemies to rejoice.\nYea, thou turnest back the edge of his sword,\nAnd hast not made him to stand in the battle.\nThou hast made his brightness to cease,\nAnd cast his throne down to the ground.\nThe days of his youth hast thou shortened:\nThou hast covered him with shame.\n\nSelah\n\nHow long, O Jehovah? wilt thou hide thyself for ever?\nHow long shall thy wrath burn like fire?\nOh remember how short my time is:\nFor what vanity hast thou created all the children of men!\nWhat man is he that shall live and not see death,\nThat shall deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?\n\nSelah\n\nLord, where are thy former lovingkindnesses,\nWhich thou swarest unto David in thy faithfulness?\nRemember, Lord, the reproach of thy servants;\nHow I do bear in my bosom the reproach of all the mighty peoples,\nWherewith thine enemies have reproached, O Jehovah,\nWherewith they have reproached the footsteps of thine anointed.\nBlessed be Jehovah for evermore.\nAmen, and Amen.\n\nBOOK IV", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-90": { - "title": "Psalm 90", - "body": "_A Prayer of Moses the man of God._\n\nLord, thou hast been our dwelling-place\nIn all generations.\nBefore the mountains were brought forth,\nOr ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world,\nEven from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.\nThou turnest man to destruction,\nAnd sayest, Return, ye children of men.\nFor a thousand years in thy sight\nAre but as yesterday when it is past,\nAnd as a watch in the night.\nThou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep:\nIn the morning they are like grass which groweth up.\nIn the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up;\nIn the evening it is cut down, and withereth.\nFor we are consumed in thine anger,\nAnd in thy wrath are we troubled.\nThou hast set our iniquities before thee,\nOur secret sins in the light of thy countenance.\nFor all our days are passed away in thy wrath:\nWe bring our years to an end as a sigh.\nThe days of our years are threescore years and ten,\nOr even by reason of strength fourscore years;\nYet is their pride but labor and sorrow;\nFor it is soon gone, and we fly away.\nWho knoweth the power of thine anger,\nAnd thy wrath according to the fear that is due unto thee?\nSo teach us to number our days,\nThat we may get us a heart of wisdom.\nReturn, O Jehovah; how long?\nAnd let it repent thee concerning thy servants.\nOh satisfy us in the morning with thy lovingkindness,\nThat we may rejoice and be glad all our days.\nMake us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us,\nAnd the years wherein we have seen evil.\nLet thy work appear unto thy servants,\nAnd thy glory upon their children.\nAnd let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;\nAnd establish thou the work of our hands upon us;\nYea, the work of our hands establish thou it.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-91": { - "title": "Psalm 91", - "body": "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High\nShall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.\nI will say of Jehovah, He is my refuge and my fortress;\nMy God, in whom I trust.\nFor he will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler,\nAnd from the deadly pestilence.\nHe will cover thee with his pinions,\nAnd under his wings shalt thou take refuge:\nHis truth is a shield and a buckler.\nThou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,\nNor for the arrow that flieth by day;\nFor the pestilence that walketh in darkness,\nNor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.\nA thousand shall fall at thy side,\nAnd ten thousand at thy right hand;\nBut it shall not come nigh thee.\nOnly with thine eyes shalt thou behold,\nAnd see the reward of the wicked.\nFor thou, O Jehovah, art my refuge!\nThou hast made the Most High thy habitation;\nThere shall no evil befall thee,\nNeither shall any plague come nigh thy tent.\nFor he will give his angels charge over thee,\nTo keep thee in all thy ways.\nThey shall bear thee up in their hands,\nLest thou dash thy foot against a stone.\nThou shalt tread upon the lion and adder:\nThe young lion and the serpent shalt thou trample under foot.\nBecause he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him:\nI will set him on high, because he hath known my name.\nHe shall call upon me, and I will answer him;\nI will be with him in trouble:\nI will deliver him, and honor him.\nWith long life will I satisfy him,\nAnd show him my salvation.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-92": { - "title": "Psalm 92", - "body": "_A Psalm, a Song for the sabbath day._\n\nIt is a good thing to give thanks unto Jehovah,\nAnd to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High;\nTo show forth thy lovingkindness in the morning,\nAnd thy faithfulness every night,\nWith an instrument of ten strings, and with the psaltery;\nWith a solemn sound upon the harp.\nFor thou, Jehovah, hast made me glad through thy work:\nI will triumph in the works of thy hands.\nHow great are thy works, O Jehovah!\nThy thoughts are very deep.\nA brutish man knoweth not;\nNeither doth a fool understand this:\nWhen the wicked spring as the grass,\nAnd when all the workers of iniquity do flourish;\nIt is that they shall be destroyed for ever.\nBut thou, O Jehovah, art on high for evermore.\nFor, lo, thine enemies, O Jehovah,\nFor, lo, thine enemies shall perish;\nAll the workers of iniquity shall be scattered.\nBut my horn hast thou exalted like the horn of the wild-ox:\nI am anointed with fresh oil.\nMine eye also hath seen my desire on mine enemies,\nMine ears have heard my desire of the evil-doers that rise up against me.\nThe righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree:\nHe shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.\nThey are planted in the house of Jehovah;\nThey shall flourish in the courts of our God.\nThey shall still bring forth fruit in old age;\nThey shall be full of sap and green:\nTo show that Jehovah is upright;\nHe is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-93": { - "title": "Psalm 93", - "body": "Jehovah reigneth; he is clothed with majesty;\nJehovah is clothed with strength; he hath girded himself therewith:\nThe world also is established, that it cannot be moved.\nThy throne is established of old:\nThou art from everlasting.\nThe floods have lifted up, O Jehovah,\nThe floods have lifted up their voice;\nThe floods lift up their waves.\nAbove the voices of many waters,\nThe mighty breakers of the sea,\nJehovah on high is mighty.\nThy testimonies are very sure:\nHoliness becometh thy house,\nO Jehovah, for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-94": { - "title": "Psalm 94", - "body": "O Jehovah, thou God to whom vengeance belongeth,\nThou God to whom vengeance belongeth, shine forth.\nLift up thyself, thou judge of the earth:\nRender to the proud their desert.\nJehovah, how long shall the wicked,\nHow long shall the wicked triumph?\nThey prate, they speak arrogantly:\nAll the workers of iniquity boast themselves.\nThey break in pieces thy people, O Jehovah,\nAnd afflict thy heritage.\nThey slay the widow and the sojourner,\nAnd murder the fatherless.\nAnd they say, Jehovah will not see,\nNeither will the God of Jacob consider.\nConsider, ye brutish among the people;\nAnd ye fools, when will ye be wise?\nHe that planted the ear, shall he not hear?\nHe that formed the eye, shall he not see?\nHe that chastiseth the nations, shall not he correct,\nEven he that teacheth man knowledge?\nJehovah knoweth the thoughts of man,\nThat they are vanity.\nBlessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Jehovah,\nAnd teachest out of thy law;\nThat thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity,\nUntil the pit be digged for the wicked.\nFor Jehovah will not cast off his people,\nNeither will he forsake his inheritance.\nFor judgment shall return unto righteousness;\nAnd all the upright in heart shall follow it.\nWho will rise up for me against the evil-doers?\nWho will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?\nUnless Jehovah had been my help,\nMy soul had soon dwelt in silence.\nWhen I said, My foot slippeth;\nThy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, held me up.\nIn the multitude of my thoughts within me Thy comforts delight my soul.\nShall the throne of wickedness have fellowship with thee,\nWhich frameth mischief by statute?\nThey gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous,\nAnd condemn the innocent blood.\nBut Jehovah hath been my high tower,\nAnd my God the rock of my refuge.\nAnd he hath brought upon them their own iniquity,\nAnd will cut them off in their own wickedness;\nJehovah our God will cut them off.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-95": { - "title": "Psalm 95", - "body": "Oh come, let us sing unto Jehovah;\nLet us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.\nLet us come before his presence with thanksgiving;\nLet us make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.\nFor Jehovah is a great God,\nAnd a great King above all gods.\nIn his hand are the deep places of the earth;\nThe heights of the mountains are his also.\nThe sea is his, and he made it;\nAnd his hands formed the dry land.\nOh come, let us worship and bow down;\nLet us kneel before Jehovah our Maker:\nFor he is our God,\nAnd we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.\nTo-day, oh that ye would hear his voice!\nHarden not your heart, as at Meribah,\nAs in the day of Massah in the wilderness;\nWhen your fathers tempted me,\nProved me, and saw my work.\nForty years long was I grieved with that generation,\nAnd said, It is a people that do err in their heart,\nAnd they have not known my ways:\nWherefore I sware in my wrath,\nThat they should not enter into my rest.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-96": { - "title": "Psalm 96", - "body": "Oh sing unto Jehovah a new song:\nSing unto Jehovah, all the earth.\nSing unto Jehovah, bless his name;\nShow forth his salvation from day to day.\nDeclare his glory among the nations,\nHis marvellous works among all the peoples.\nFor great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised:\nHe is to be feared above all gods.\nFor all the gods of the peoples are idols;\nBut Jehovah made the heavens.\nHonor and majesty are before him:\nStrength and beauty are in his sanctuary.\nAscribe unto Jehovah, ye kindreds of the peoples,\nAscribe unto Jehovah glory and strength.\nAscribe unto Jehovah the glory due unto his name:\nBring an offering, and come into his courts.\nOh worship Jehovah in holy array:\nTremble before him, all the earth.\nSay among the nations, Jehovah reigneth:\nThe world also is established that it cannot be moved:\nHe will judge the peoples with equity.\nLet the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;\nLet the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;\nLet the field exult, and all that is therein;\nThen shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy\nBefore Jehovah; for he cometh,\nFor he cometh to judge the earth:\nHe will judge the world with righteousness,\nAnd the peoples with his truth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-97": { - "title": "Psalm 97", - "body": "Jehovah reigneth; let the earth rejoice;\nLet the multitude of isles be glad.\nClouds and darkness are round about him:\nRighteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.\nA fire goeth before him,\nAnd burneth up his adversaries round about.\nHis lightnings lightened the world:\nThe earth saw, and trembled.\nThe mountains melted like wax at the presence of Jehovah,\nAt the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.\nThe heavens declare his righteousness,\nAnd all the peoples have seen his glory.\nLet all them be put to shame that serve graven images,\nThat boast themselves of idols:\nWorship him, all ye gods.\nZion heard and was glad,\nAnd the daughters of Judah rejoiced,\nBecause of thy judgments, O Jehovah.\nFor thou, Jehovah, art most high above all the earth:\nThou art exalted far above all gods.\nO ye that love Jehovah, hate evil:\nHe preserveth the souls of his saints;\nHe delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.\nLight is sown for the righteous,\nAnd gladness for the upright in heart.\nBe glad in Jehovah, ye righteous;\nAnd give thanks to his holy memorial name.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-98": { - "title": "Psalm 98", - "body": "_A Psalm._\n\nOh sing unto Jehovah a new song;\nFor he hath done marvellous things:\nHis right hand, and his holy arm, hath wrought salvation for him.\nJehovah hath made known his salvation:\nHis righteousness hath he openly showed in the sight of the nations.\nHe hath remembered his lovingkindness and his faithfulness toward the house of Israel:\nAll the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.\nMake a joyful noise unto Jehovah, all the earth:\nBreak forth and sing for joy, yea, sing praises.\nSing praises unto Jehovah with the harp;\nWith the harp and the voice of melody.\nWith trumpets and sound of cornet\nMake a joyful noise before the King, Jehovah.\nLet the sea roar, and the fulness thereof;\nThe world, and they that dwell therein;\nLet the floods clap their hands;\nLet the hills sing for joy together\nBefore Jehovah; for he cometh to judge the earth:\nHe will judge the world with righteousness,\nAnd the peoples with equity.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-99": { - "title": "Psalm 99", - "body": "Jehovah reigneth; let the peoples tremble:\nHe sitteth above the cherubim; let the earth be moved.\nJehovah is great in Zion;\nAnd he is high above all the peoples.\nLet them praise thy great and terrible name:\nHoly is he.\nThe king’s strength also loveth justice;\nThou dost establish equity;\nThou executest justice and righteousness in Jacob.\nExalt ye Jehovah our God,\nAnd worship at his footstool:\nHoly is he.\n\nMoses and Aaron among his priests,\nAnd Samuel among them that call upon his name;\nThey called upon Jehovah, and he answered them.\nHe spake unto them in the pillar of cloud:\nThey kept his testimonies,\nAnd the statute that he gave them.\nThou answeredst them, O Jehovah our God:\nThou wast a God that forgavest them,\nThough thou tookest vengeance of their doings.\nExalt ye Jehovah our God,\nAnd worship at his holy hill;\nFor Jehovah our God is holy.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-100": { - "title": "Psalm 100", - "body": "_A Psalm of thanksgiving._\n\nMake a joyful noise unto Jehovah, all ye lands.\nServe Jehovah with gladness:\nCome before his presence with singing.\nKnow ye that Jehovah, he is God:\nIt is he that hath made us, and we are his;\nWe are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.\nEnter into his gates with thanksgiving,\nAnd into his courts with praise:\nGive thanks unto him, and bless his name.\nFor Jehovah is good; his lovingkindness endureth for ever,\nAnd his faithfulness unto all generations.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-101": { - "title": "Psalm 101", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nI will sing of lovingkindness and justice:\nUnto thee, O Jehovah, will I sing praises.\nI will behave myself wisely in a perfect way:\nOh when wilt thou come unto me?\nI will walk within my house with a perfect heart.\nI will set no base thing before mine eyes:\nI hate the work of them that turn aside;\nIt shall not cleave unto me.\nA perverse heart shall depart from me:\nI will know no evil thing.\nWhoso privily slandereth his neighbor, him will I destroy:\nHim that hath a high look and a proud heart will I not suffer.\nMine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me:\nHe that walketh in a perfect way, he shall minister unto me.\nHe that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house:\nHe that speaketh falsehood shall not be established before mine eyes.\nMorning by morning will I destroy all the wicked of the land;\nTo cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-102": { - "title": "Psalm 102", - "body": "_A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before Jehovah._\n\nHear my prayer, O Jehovah,\nAnd let my cry come unto thee.\nHide not thy face from me in the day of my distress:\nIncline thine ear unto me;\nIn the day when I call answer me speedily.\nFor my days consume away like smoke,\nAnd my bones are burned as a firebrand.\nMy heart is smitten like grass, and withered;\nFor I forget to eat my bread.\nBy reason of the voice of my groaning\nMy bones cleave to my flesh.\nI am like a pelican of the wilderness;\nI am become as an owl of the waste places.\nI watch, and am become like a sparrow\nThat is alone upon the house-top.\nMine enemies reproach me all the day;\nThey that are mad against me do curse by me.\nFor I have eaten ashes like bread,\nAnd mingled my drink with weeping,\nBecause of thine indignation and thy wrath:\nFor thou hast taken me up, and cast me away.\nMy days are like a shadow that declineth;\nAnd I am withered like grass.\n\nBut thou, O Jehovah, wilt abide for ever;\nAnd thy memorial name unto all generations.\nThou wilt arise, and have mercy upon Zion;\nFor it is time to have pity upon her,\nYea, the set time is come.\nFor thy servants take pleasure in her stones,\nAnd have pity upon her dust.\nSo the nations shall fear the name of Jehovah,\nAnd all the kings of the earth thy glory.\nFor Jehovah hath built up Zion;\nHe hath appeared in his glory.\nHe hath regarded the prayer of the destitute,\nAnd hath not despised their prayer.\nThis shall be written for the generation to come;\nAnd a people which shall be created shall praise Jehovah.\nFor he hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary;\nFrom heaven did Jehovah behold the earth;\nTo hear the sighing of the prisoner;\nTo loose those that are appointed to death;\nThat men may declare the name of Jehovah in Zion,\nAnd his praise in Jerusalem;\nWhen the peoples are gathered together,\nAnd the kingdoms, to serve Jehovah.\n\nHe weakened my strength in the way;\nHe shortened my days.\nI said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days:\nThy years are throughout all generations.\nOf old didst thou lay the foundation of the earth;\nAnd the heavens are the work of thy hands.\nThey shall perish, but thou shalt endure;\nYea, all of them shall wax old like a garment;\nAs a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:\nBut thou art the same,\nAnd thy years shall have no end.\nThe children of thy servants shall continue,\nAnd their seed shall be established before thee.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-103": { - "title": "Psalm 103", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nBless Jehovah, O my soul;\nAnd all that is within me, bless his holy name.\nBless Jehovah, O my soul,\nAnd forget not all his benefits:\nWho forgiveth all thine iniquities;\nWho healeth all thy diseases;\nWho redeemeth thy life from destruction;\nWho crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;\nWho satisfieth thy desire with good things,\nSo that thy youth is renewed like the eagle.\nJehovah executeth righteous acts,\nAnd judgments for all that are oppressed.\nHe made known his ways unto Moses,\nHis doings unto the children of Israel.\nJehovah is merciful and gracious,\nSlow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness.\nHe will not always chide;\nNeither will he keep his anger for ever.\nHe hath not dealt with us after our sins,\nNor rewarded us after our iniquities.\nFor as the heavens are high above the earth,\nSo great is his lovingkindness toward them that fear him.\nAs far as the east is from the west,\nSo far hath he removed our transgressions from us.\nLike as a father pitieth his children,\nSo Jehovah pitieth them that fear him.\nFor he knoweth our frame;\nHe remembereth that we are dust.\nAs for man, his days are as grass;\nAs a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.\nFor the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;\nAnd the place thereof shall know it no more.\nBut the lovingkindness of Jehovah is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him,\nAnd his righteousness unto children’s children;\nTo such as keep his covenant,\nAnd to those that remember his precepts to do them.\nJehovah hath established his throne in the heavens;\nAnd his kingdom ruleth over all.\nBless Jehovah, ye his angels,\nThat are mighty in strength, that fulfil his word,\nHearkening unto the voice of his word.\nBless Jehovah, all ye his hosts,\nYe ministers of his, that do his pleasure.\nBless Jehovah, all ye his works,\nIn all places of his dominion:\nBless Jehovah, O my soul.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-104": { - "title": "Psalm 104", - "body": "Bless Jehovah, O my soul.\nO Jehovah my God, thou art very great;\nThou art clothed with honor and majesty:\nWho coverest thyself with light as with a garment;\nWho stretchest out the heavens like a curtain;\nWho layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters;\nWho maketh the clouds his chariot;\nWho walketh upon the wings of the wind;\nWho maketh winds his messengers;\nFlames of fire his ministers;\nWho laid the foundations of the earth,\nThat it should not be moved for ever.\nThou coveredst it with the deep as with a vesture;\nThe waters stood above the mountains.\nAt thy rebuke they fled;\nAt the voice of thy thunder they hasted away\n(The mountains rose, the valleys sank down)\nUnto the place which thou hadst founded for them.\nThou hast set a bound that they may not pass over;\nThat they turn not again to cover the earth.\nHe sendeth forth springs into the valleys;\nThey run among the mountains;\nThey give drink to every beast of the field;\nThe wild asses quench their thirst.\nBy them the birds of the heavens have their habitation;\nThey sing among the branches.\nHe watereth the mountains from his chambers:\nThe earth is filled with the fruit of thy works.\nHe causeth the grass to grow for the cattle,\nAnd herb for the service of man;\nThat he may bring forth food out of the earth,\nAnd wine that maketh glad the heart of man,\nAnd oil to make his face to shine,\nAnd bread that strengtheneth man’s heart.\nThe trees of Jehovah are filled with moisture,\nThe cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted;\nWhere the birds make their nests:\nAs for the stork, the fir-trees are her house.\nThe high mountains are for the wild goats;\nThe rocks are a refuge for the conies.\nHe appointed the moon for seasons:\nThe sun knoweth his going down.\nThou makest darkness, and it is night,\nWherein all the beasts of the forest creep forth.\nThe young lions roar after their prey,\nAnd seek their food from God.\nThe sun ariseth, they get them away,\nAnd lay them down in their dens.\nMan goeth forth unto his work\nAnd to his labor until the evening.\nO Jehovah, how manifold are thy works!\nIn wisdom hast thou made them all:\nThe earth is full of thy riches.\nYonder is the sea, great and wide,\nWherein are things creeping innumerable,\nBoth small and great beasts.\nThere go the ships;\nThere is leviathan, whom thou hast formed to play therein.\nThese wait all for thee,\nThat thou mayest give them their food in due season.\nThou givest unto them, they gather;\nThou openest thy hand, they are satisfied with good.\nThou hidest thy face, they are troubled;\nThou takest away their breath, they die,\nAnd return to their dust.\nThou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created;\nAnd thou renewest the face of the ground.\nLet the glory of Jehovah endure for ever;\nLet Jehovah rejoice in his works:\nWho looketh on the earth, and it trembleth;\nHe toucheth the mountains, and they smoke.\nI will sing unto Jehovah as long as I live:\nI will sing praise to my God while I have any being.\nLet thy meditation be sweet unto him:\nI will rejoice in Jehovah.\nLet sinners be consumed out of the earth.\nAnd let the wicked be no more.\nBless Jehovah, O my soul.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-105": { - "title": "Psalm 105", - "body": "Oh give thanks unto Jehovah, call upon his name;\nMake known among the peoples his doings.\nSing unto him, sing praises unto him;\nTalk ye of all his marvelous works.\nGlory ye in his holy name:\nLet the heart of them rejoice that seek Jehovah.\nSeek ye Jehovah and his strength;\nSeek his face evermore.\nRemember his marvellous works that he hath done,\nHis wonders, and the judgments of his mouth,\nO ye seed of Abraham his servant,\nYe children of Jacob, his chosen ones.\nHe is Jehovah our God:\nHis judgments are in all the earth.\nHe hath remembered his covenant for ever,\nThe word which he commanded to a thousand generations,\nThe covenant which he made with Abraham,\nAnd his oath unto Isaac,\nAnd confirmed the same unto Jacob for a statute,\nTo Israel for an everlasting covenant,\nSaying, Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan,\nThe lot of your inheritance;\nWhen they were but a few men in number,\nYea, very few, and sojourners in it.\nAnd they went about from nation to nation,\nFrom one kingdom to another people.\nHe suffered no man to do them wrong;\nYea, he reproved kings for their sakes,\nSaying, Touch not mine anointed ones,\nAnd do my prophets no harm.\nAnd he called for a famine upon the land;\nHe brake the whole staff of bread.\nHe sent a man before them;\nJoseph was sold for a servant:\nHis feet they hurt with fetters:\nHe was laid in chains of iron,\nUntil the time that his word came to pass,\nThe word of Jehovah tried him.\nThe king sent and loosed him;\nEven the ruler of peoples, and let him go free.\nHe made him lord of his house,\nAnd ruler of all his substance;\nTo bind his princes at his pleasure,\nAnd teach his elders wisdom.\nIsrael also came into Egypt;\nAnd Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.\nAnd he increased his people greatly,\nAnd made them stronger than their adversaries.\nHe turned their heart to hate his people,\nTo deal subtly with his servants.\nHe sent Moses his servant,\nAnd Aaron whom he had chosen.\nThey set among them his signs,\nAnd wonders in the land of Ham.\nHe sent darkness, and made it dark;\nAnd they rebelled not against his words.\nHe turned their waters into blood,\nAnd slew their fish.\nTheir land swarmed with frogs In the chambers of their kings.\nHe spake, and there came swarms of flies,\nAnd lice in all their borders.\nHe gave them hail for rain,\nAnd flaming fire in their land.\nHe smote their vines also and their fig-trees,\nAnd brake the trees of their borders.\nHe spake, and the locust came,\nAnd the grasshopper, and that without number,\nAnd did eat up every herb in their land,\nAnd did eat up the fruit of their ground.\nHe smote also all the first-born in their land,\nThe chief of all their strength.\nAnd he brought them forth with silver and gold;\nAnd there was not one feeble person among his tribes.\nEgypt was glad when they departed;\nFor the fear of them had fallen upon them.\nHe spread a cloud for a covering,\nAnd fire to give light in the night.\nThey asked, and he brought quails,\nAnd satisfied them with the bread of heaven.\nHe opened the rock, and waters gushed out;\nThey ran in the dry places like a river.\nFor he remembered his holy word,\nAnd Abraham his servant.\nAnd he brought forth his people with joy,\nAnd his chosen with singing.\nAnd he gave them the lands of the nations;\nAnd they took the labor of the peoples in possession:\nThat they might keep his statutes,\nAnd observe his laws.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-106": { - "title": "Psalm 106", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nOh give thanks unto Jehovah; for he is good;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth forever.\nWho can utter the mighty acts of Jehovah,\nOr show forth all his praise?\nBlessed are they that keep justice,\nAnd he that doeth righteousness at all times.\nRemember me, O Jehovah, with the favor that thou bearest unto thy people;\nOh visit me with thy salvation,\nThat I may see the prosperity of thy chosen,\nThat I may rejoice in the gladness of thy nation,\nThat I may glory with thine inheritance.\n\nWe have sinned with our fathers,\nWe have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly.\nOur fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt;\nThey remembered not the multitude of thy lovingkindnesses,\nBut were rebellious at the sea, even at the Red Sea.\nNevertheless he saved them for his name’s sake,\nThat he might make his mighty power to be known.\nHe rebuked the Red Sea also, and it was dried up:\nSo he led them through the depths, as through a wilderness.\nAnd he saved them from the hand of him that hated them,\nAnd redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.\nAnd the waters covered their adversaries;\nThere was not one of them left.\nThen believed they his words;\nThey sang his praise.\nThey soon forgat his works;\nThey waited not for his counsel,\nBut lusted exceedingly in the wilderness,\nAnd tempted God in the desert.\nAnd he gave them their request,\nBut sent leanness into their soul.\nThey envied Moses also in the camp,\nAnd Aaron the saint of Jehovah.\nThe earth opened and swallowed up Dathan,\nAnd covered the company of Abiram.\nAnd a fire was kindled in their company;\nThe flame burned up the wicked.\nThey made a calf in Horeb,\nAnd worshipped a molten image.\nThus they changed their glory\nFor the likeness of an ox that eateth grass.\nThey forgat God their Saviour,\nWho had done great things in Egypt,\nWondrous works in the land of Ham,\nAnd terrible things by the Red Sea.\nTherefore he said that he would destroy them,\nHad not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach,\nTo turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.\nYea, they despised the pleasant land,\nThey believed not his word,\nBut murmured in their tents,\nAnd hearkened not unto the voice of Jehovah.\nTherefore he sware unto them,\nThat he would overthrow them in the wilderness,\nAnd that he would overthrow their seed among the nations,\nAnd scatter them in the lands.\nThey joined themselves also unto Baal-peor,\nAnd ate the sacrifices of the dead.\nThus they provoked him to anger with their doings;\nAnd the plague brake in upon them.\nThen stood up Phinehas, and executed judgment;\nAnd so the plague was stayed.\nAnd that was reckoned unto him for righteousness,\nUnto all generations for evermore.\nThey angered him also at the waters of Meribah,\nSo that it went ill with Moses for their sakes;\nBecause they were rebellious against his spirit,\nAnd he spake unadvisedly with his lips.\nThey did not destroy the peoples,\nAs Jehovah commanded them,\nBut mingled themselves with the nations,\nAnd learned their works,\nAnd served their idols,\nWhich became a snare unto them.\nYea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto demons,\nAnd shed innocent blood,\nEven the blood of their sons and of their daughters,\nWhom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan;\nAnd the land was polluted with blood.\nThus were they defiled with their works,\nAnd played the harlot in their doings.\nTherefore was the wrath of Jehovah kindled against his people,\nAnd he abhorred his inheritance.\nAnd he gave them into the hand of the nations;\nAnd they that hated them ruled over them.\nTheir enemies also oppressed them,\nAnd they were brought into subjection under their hand.\nMany times did he deliver them;\nBut they were rebellious in their counsel,\nAnd were brought low in their iniquity.\nNevertheless he regarded their distress,\nWhen he heard their cry:\nAnd he remembered for them his covenant,\nAnd repented according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses.\nHe made them also to be pitied\nOf all those that carried them captive.\nSave us, O Jehovah our God,\nAnd gather us from among the nations,\nTo give thanks unto thy holy name,\nAnd to triumph in thy praise.\nBlessed be Jehovah, the God of Israel,\nFrom everlasting even to everlasting.\nAnd let all the people say, Amen.\nPraise ye Jehovah.\n\nBOOK V", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-107": { - "title": "Psalm 107", - "body": "O give thanks unto Jehovah;\nFor he is good;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nLet the redeemed of Jehovah say so,\nWhom he hath redeemed from the hand of the adversary,\nAnd gathered out of the lands,\nFrom the east and from the west,\nFrom the north and from the south.\nThey wandered in the wilderness in a desert way;\nThey found no city of habitation.\nHungry and thirsty,\nTheir soul fainted in them.\nThen they cried unto Jehovah in their trouble,\nAnd he delivered them out of their distresses,\nHe led them also by a straight way,\nThat they might go to a city of habitation.\nOh that men would praise Jehovah for his lovingkindness,\nAnd for his wonderful works to the children of men!\nFor he satisfieth the longing soul,\nAnd the hungry soul he filleth with good.\n\nSuch as sat in darkness and in the shadow of death,\nBeing bound in affliction and iron,\nBecause they rebelled against the words of God,\nAnd contemned the counsel of the Most High:\nTherefore he brought down their heart with labor;\nThey fell down, and there was none to help.\nThen they cried unto Jehovah in their trouble,\nAnd he saved them out of their distresses.\nHe brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death,\nAnd brake their bonds in sunder.\nOh that men would praise Jehovah for his lovingkindness,\nAnd for his wonderful works to the children of men!\nFor he hath broken the gates of brass,\nAnd cut the bars of iron in sunder.\n\nFools because of their transgression,\nAnd because of their iniquities, are afflicted.\nTheir soul abhorreth all manner of food;\nAnd they draw near unto the gates of death.\nThen they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble,\nAnd he saveth them out of their distresses.\nHe sendeth his word, and healeth them,\nAnd delivereth them from their destructions.\nOh that men would praise Jehovah for his lovingkindness,\nAnd for his wonderful works to the children of men!\nAnd let them offer the sacrifices of thanksgiving,\nAnd declare his works with singing.\n\nThey that go down to the sea in ships,\nThat do business in great waters;\nThese see the works of Jehovah,\nAnd his wonders in the deep.\nFor he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind,\nWhich lifteth up the waves thereof.\nThey mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths:\nTheir soul melteth away because of trouble.\nThey reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man,\nAnd are at their wits’ end.\nThen they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble,\nAnd he bringeth them out of their distresses.\nHe maketh the storm a calm,\nSo that the waves thereof are still.\nThen are they glad because they are quiet;\nSo he bringeth them unto their desired haven.\nOh that men would praise Jehovah for his lovingkindness,\nAnd for his wonderful works to the children of men!\nLet them exalt him also in the assembly of the people,\nAnd praise him in the seat of the elders.\n\nHe turneth rivers into a wilderness,\nAnd watersprings into a thirsty ground;\nA fruitful land into a salt desert,\nFor the wickedness of them that dwell therein.\nHe turneth a wilderness into a pool of water,\nAnd a dry land into watersprings.\nAnd there he maketh the hungry to dwell,\nThat they may prepare a city of habitation,\nAnd sow fields, and plant vineyards,\nAnd get them fruits of increase.\nHe blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly;\nAnd he suffereth not their cattle to decrease.\nAgain, they are diminished and bowed down\nThrough oppression, trouble, and sorrow.\nHe poureth contempt upon princes,\nAnd causeth them to wander in the waste, where there is no way.\nYet setteth he the needy on high from affliction,\nAnd maketh him families like a flock.\nThe upright shall see it, and be glad;\nAnd all iniquity shall stop her mouth.\nWhoso is wise will give heed to these things;\nAnd they will consider the lovingkindnesses of Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-108": { - "title": "Psalm 108", - "body": "_A Song, A Psalm of David._\n\nMy heart is fixed, O God; I will sing, yea,\nI will sing praises, even with my glory.\nAwake, psaltery and harp:\nI myself will awake right early.\nI will give thanks unto thee, O Jehovah, among the peoples;\nAnd I will sing praises unto thee among the nations.\nFor thy lovingkindness is great above the heavens;\nAnd thy truth reacheth unto the skies.\nBe thou exalted, O God, above the heavens,\nAnd thy glory above all the earth.\nThat thy beloved may be delivered,\nSave with thy right hand, and answer us.\nGod hath spoken in his holiness: I will exult;\nI will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.\nGilead is mine; Manasseh is mine;\nEphraim also is the defence of my head;\nJudah is my sceptre.\nMoab is my washpot;\nUpon Edom will I cast my shoe;\nOver Philistia will I shout.\nWho will bring me into the fortified city?\nWho hath led me unto Edom?\nHast not thou cast us off, O God?\nAnd thou goest not forth, O God, with our hosts.\nGive us help against the adversary;\nFor vain is the help of man.\nThrough God we shall do valiantly:\nFor he it is that will tread down our adversaries.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-109": { - "title": "Psalm 109", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nHold not thy peace, O God of my praise;\nFor the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of deceit have they opened against me:\nThey have spoken unto me with a lying tongue.\nThey have compassed me about also with words of hatred,\nAnd fought against me without a cause.\nFor my love they are my adversaries:\nBut I give myself unto prayer.\nAnd they have rewarded me evil for good,\nAnd hatred for my love.\nSet thou a wicked man over him;\nAnd let an adversary stand at his right hand.\nWhen he is judged, let him come forth guilty;\nAnd let his prayer be turned into sin.\nLet his days be few;\nAnd let another take his office.\nLet his children be fatherless,\nAnd his wife a widow.\nLet his children be vagabonds, and beg;\nAnd let them seek their bread out of their desolate places.\nLet the extortioner catch all that he hath;\nAnd let strangers make spoil of his labor.\nLet there be none to extend kindness unto him;\nNeither let there be any to have pity on his fatherless children.\nLet his posterity be cut off;\nIn the generation following let their name be blotted out.\nLet the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with Jehovah;\nAnd let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.\nLet them be before Jehovah continually,\nThat he may cut off the memory of them from the earth;\nBecause he remembered not to show kindness,\nBut persecuted the poor and needy man,\nAnd the broken in heart, to slay them.\nYea, he loved cursing, and it came unto him;\nAnd he delighted not in blessing, and it was far from him.\nHe clothed himself also with cursing as with his garment,\nAnd it came into his inward parts like water,\nAnd like oil into his bones.\nLet it be unto him as the raiment wherewith he covereth himself,\nAnd for the girdle wherewith he is girded continually.\nThis is the reward of mine adversaries from Jehovah,\nAnd of them that speak evil against my soul.\nBut deal thou with me, O Jehovah the Lord, for thy name’s sake:\nBecause thy lovingkindness is good, deliver thou me;\nFor I am poor and needy,\nAnd my heart is wounded within me.\nI am gone like the shadow when it declineth:\nI am tossed up and down as the locust.\nMy knees are weak through fasting;\nAnd my flesh faileth of fatness.\nI am become also a reproach unto them:\nWhen they see me, they shake their head.\nHelp me, O Jehovah my God;\nOh save me according to thy lovingkindness:\nThat they may know that this is thy hand;\nThat thou, Jehovah, hast done it.\nLet them curse, but bless thou:\nWhen they arise, they shall be put to shame,\nBut thy servant shall rejoice.\nLet mine adversaries be clothed with dishonor,\nAnd let them cover themselves with their own shame as with a robe.\nI will give great thanks unto Jehovah with my mouth;\nYea, I will praise him among the multitude.\nFor he will stand at the right hand of the needy,\nTo save him from them that judge his soul.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-110": { - "title": "Psalm 110", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah saith unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand,\nUntil I make thine enemies thy footstool.\nJehovah will send forth the rod of thy strength out of Zion:\nRule thou in the midst of thine enemies.\nThy people offer themselves willingly\nIn the day of thy power, in holy array:\nOut of the womb of the morning\nThou hast the dew of thy youth.\nJehovah hath sworn, and will not repent:\nThou art a priest for ever\nAfter the order of Melchizedek.\nThe Lord at thy right hand\nWill strike through kings in the day of his wrath.\nHe will judge among the nations,\nHe will fill the places with dead bodies;\nHe will strike through the head in many countries.\nHe will drink of the brook in the way:\nTherefore will he lift up the head.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-111": { - "title": "Psalm 111", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nI will give thanks unto Jehovah with my whole heart,\nIn the council of the upright, and in the congregation.\nThe works of Jehovah are great,\nSought out of all them that have pleasure therein.\nHis work is honor and majesty;\nAnd his righteousness endureth for ever.\nHe hath made his wonderful works to be remembered:\nJehovah is gracious and merciful.\nHe hath given food unto them that fear him:\nHe will ever be mindful of his covenant.\nHe hath showed his people the power of his works,\nIn giving them the heritage of the nations.\nThe works of his hands are truth and justice;\nAll his precepts are sure.\nThey are established for ever and ever;\nThey are done in truth and uprightness.\nHe hath sent redemption unto his people;\nHe hath commanded his covenant for ever:\nHoly and reverend is his name.\nThe fear of Jehovah is the beginning of wisdom;\nA good understanding have all they that do his commandments:\nHis praise endureth for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-112": { - "title": "Psalm 112", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nBlessed is the man that feareth Jehovah,\nThat delighteth greatly in his commandments.\nHis seed shall be mighty upon earth:\nThe generation of the upright shall be blessed.\nWealth and riches are in his house;\nAnd his righteousness endureth for ever.\nUnto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness:\nHe is gracious, and merciful, and righteous.\nWell is it with the man that dealeth graciously and lendeth;\nHe shall maintain his cause in judgment.\nFor he shall never be moved;\nThe righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.\nHe shall not be afraid of evil tidings:\nHis heart is fixed, trusting in Jehovah.\nHis heart is established, he shall not be afraid,\nUntil he see his desire upon his adversaries.\nHe hath dispersed, he hath given to the needy;\nHis righteousness endureth for ever:\nHis horn shall be exalted with honor.\nThe wicked shall see it, and be grieved;\nHe shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away:\nThe desire of the wicked shall perish.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-113": { - "title": "Psalm 113", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nPraise, O ye servants of Jehovah,\nPraise the name of Jehovah.\nBlessed be the name of Jehovah\nFrom this time forth and for evermore.\nFrom the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same\nJehovah’s name is to be praised.\nJehovah is high above all nations,\nAnd his glory above the heavens.\nWho is like unto Jehovah our God,\nThat hath his seat on high,\nThat humbleth himself to behold\nThe things that are in heaven and in the earth?\nHe raiseth up the poor out of the dust,\nAnd lifteth up the needy from the dunghill;\nThat he may set him with princes,\nEven with the princes of his people.\nHe maketh the barren woman to keep house,\nAnd to be a joyful mother of children.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-114": { - "title": "Psalm 114", - "body": "When Israel went forth out of Egypt,\nThe house of Jacob from a people of strange language;\nJudah became his sanctuary,\nIsrael his dominion.\nThe sea saw it, and fled;\nThe Jordan was driven back.\nThe mountains skipped like rams,\nThe little hills like lambs.\nWhat aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleest?\nThou Jordan, that thou turnest back?\nYe mountains, that ye skip like rams;\nYe little hills, like lambs?\nTremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord,\nAt the presence of the God of Jacob,\nWho turned the rock into a pool of water,\nThe flint into a fountain of waters.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-115": { - "title": "Psalm 115", - "body": "Not unto us, O Jehovah, not unto us,\nBut unto thy name give glory,\nFor thy lovingkindness, and for thy truth’s sake.\nWherefore should the nations say,\nWhere is now their God?\nBut our God is in the heavens:\nHe hath done whatsoever he pleased.\nTheir idols are silver and gold,\nThe work of men’s hands.\nThey have mouths, but they speak not;\nEyes have they, but they see not;\nThey have ears, but they hear not;\nNoses have they, but they smell not;\nThey have hands, but they handle not;\nFeet have they, but they walk not;\nNeither speak they through their throat.\nThey that make them shall be like unto them;\nYea, every one that trusteth in them.\nO Israel, trust thou in Jehovah:\nHe is their help and their shield.\nO house of Aaron, trust ye in Jehovah:\nHe is their help and their shield.\nYe that fear Jehovah, trust in Jehovah:\nHe is their help and their shield.\nJehovah hath been mindful of us; he will bless us:\nHe will bless the house of Israel;\nHe will bless the house of Aaron.\nHe will bless them that fear Jehovah,\nBoth small and great.\nJehovah increase you more and more,\nYou and your children.\nBlessed are ye of Jehovah,\nWho made heaven and earth.\nThe heavens are the heavens of Jehovah;\nBut the earth hath he given to the children of men.\nThe dead praise not Jehovah,\nNeither any that go down into silence;\nBut we will bless Jehovah\nFrom this time forth and for evermore.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-116": { - "title": "Psalm 116", - "body": "I love Jehovah, because he heareth\nMy voice and my supplications.\nBecause he hath inclined his ear unto me,\nTherefore will I call upon him as long as I live.\nThe cords of death compassed me,\nAnd the pains of Sheol gat hold upon me:\nI found trouble and sorrow.\nThen called I upon the name of Jehovah:\nO Jehovah, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.\nGracious is Jehovah, and righteous;\nYea, our God is merciful.\nJehovah preserveth the simple:\nI was brought low, and he saved me.\nReturn unto thy rest, O my soul;\nFor Jehovah hath dealt bountifully with thee.\nFor thou hast delivered my soul from death,\nMine eyes from tears,\nAnd my feet from falling.\nI will walk before Jehovah\nIn the land of the living.\nI believe, for I will speak:\nI was greatly afflicted:\nI said in my haste,\nAll men are liars.\nWhat shall I render unto Jehovah\nFor all his benefits toward me?\nI will take the cup of salvation,\nAnd call upon the name of Jehovah.\nI will pay my vows unto Jehovah,\nYea, in the presence of all his people.\nPrecious in the sight of Jehovah\nIs the death of his saints.\nO Jehovah, truly I am thy servant:\nI am thy servant, the son of thy handmaid;\nThou hast loosed my bonds.\nI will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving,\nAnd will call upon the name of Jehovah.\nI will pay my vows unto Jehovah,\nYea, in the presence of all his people,\nIn the courts of Jehovah’s house,\nIn the midst of thee, O Jerusalem.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-117": { - "title": "Psalm 117", - "body": "O praise Jehovah, all ye nations;\nLaud him, all ye peoples.\nFor his lovingkindness is great toward us;\nAnd the truth of Jehovah endureth for ever.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-118": { - "title": "Psalm 118", - "body": "Oh give thanks unto Jehovah; for he is good;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nLet Israel now say,\nThat his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nLet the house of Aaron now say,\nThat his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nLet them now that fear Jehovah say,\nThat his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nOut of my distress I called upon Jehovah:\nJehovah answered me and set me in a large place.\nJehovah is on my side; I will not fear:\nWhat can man do unto me?\nJehovah is on my side among them that help me:\nTherefore shall I see my desire upon them that hate me.\nIt is better to take refuge in Jehovah\nThan to put confidence in man.\nIt is better to take refuge in Jehovah\nThan to put confidence in princes.\nAll nations compassed me about:\nIn the name of Jehovah I will cut them off.\nThey compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about:\nIn the name of Jehovah I will cut them off.\nThey compassed me about like bees;\nThey are quenched as the fire of thorns:\nIn the name of Jehovah I will cut them off.\nThou didst thrust sore at me that I might fall;\nBut Jehovah helped me.\nJehovah is my strength and song;\nAnd he is become my salvation.\nThe voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tents of the righteous:\nThe right hand of Jehovah doeth valiantly.\nThe right hand of Jehovah is exalted:\nThe right hand of Jehovah doeth valiantly.\nI shall not die, but live,\nAnd declare the works of Jehovah.\nJehovah hath chastened me sore;\nBut he hath not given me over unto death.\nOpen to me the gates of righteousness:\nI will enter into them, I will give thanks unto Jehovah.\nThis is the gate of Jehovah;\nThe righteous shall enter into it.\nI will give thanks unto thee; for thou hast answered me,\nAnd art become my salvation.\nThe stone which the builders rejected Is become the head of the corner.\nThis is Jehovah’s doing;\nIt is marvellous in our eyes.\nThis is the day which Jehovah hath made;\nWe will rejoice and be glad in it.\nSave now, we beseech thee, O Jehovah:\nO Jehovah, we beseech thee, send now prosperity.\nBlessed be he that cometh in the name of Jehovah:\nWe have blessed you out of the house of Jehovah.\nJehovah is God, and he hath given us light:\nBind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.\nThou art my God, and I will give thanks unto thee:\nThou art my God, I will exalt thee.\nOh give thanks unto Jehovah; for he is good;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-119": { - "title": "Psalm 119", - "body": "ALEPH.\n\nBlessed are they that are perfect in the way,\nWho walk in the law of Jehovah.\nBlessed are they that keep his testimonies,\nThat seek him with the whole heart.\nYea, they do no unrighteousness;\nThey walk in his ways.\nThou hast commanded us thy precepts,\nThat we should observe them diligently.\nOh that my ways were established\nTo observe thy statutes!\nThen shall I not be put to shame,\nWhen I have respect unto all thy commandments.\nI will give thanks unto thee with uprightness of heart,\nWhen I learn thy righteous judgments.\nI will observe thy statutes:\nOh forsake me not utterly.\n\nBETH.\n\nWherewith shall a young man cleanse his way?\nBy taking heed thereto according to thy word.\nWith my whole heart have I sought thee:\nOh let me not wander from thy commandments.\nThy word have I laid up in my heart,\nThat I might not sin against thee.\nBlessed art thou, O Jehovah:\nTeach me thy statutes.\nWith my lips have I declared\nAll the ordinances of thy mouth.\nI have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies,\nAs much as in all riches.\nI will meditate on thy precepts,\nAnd have respect unto thy ways.\nI will delight myself in thy statutes:\nI will not forget thy word.\n\nGIMEL.\n\nDeal bountifully with thy servant, that I may live;\nSo will I observe thy word.\nOpen thou mine eyes, that I may behold\nWondrous things out of thy law.\nI am a sojourner in the earth:\nHide not thy commandments from me.\nMy soul breaketh for the longing\nThat it hath unto thine ordinances at all times.\nThou hast rebuked the proud that are cursed,\nThat do wander from thy commandments.\nTake away from me reproach and contempt;\nFor I have kept thy testimonies.\nPrinces also sat and talked against me;\nBut thy servant did meditate on thy statutes.\nThy testimonies also are my delight\nAnd my counsellors.\n\nDALETH.\n\nMy soul cleaveth unto the dust:\nQuicken thou me according to thy word.\nI declared my ways, and thou answeredst me:\nTeach me thy statutes.\nMake me to understand the way of thy precepts:\nSo shall I meditate on thy wondrous works.\nMy soul melteth for heaviness:\nStrengthen thou me according unto thy word.\nRemove from me the way of falsehood;\nAnd grant me thy law graciously.\nI have chosen the way of faithfulness:\nThine ordinances have I set before me.\nI cleave unto thy testimonies:\nO Jehovah, put me not to shame.\nI will run the way of thy commandments,\nWhen thou shalt enlarge my heart.\n\nHE.\n\nTeach me, O Jehovah, the way of thy statutes;\nAnd I shall keep it unto the end.\nGive me understanding, and I shall keep thy law;\nYea, I shall observe it with my whole heart.\nMake me to go in the path of thy commandments;\nFor therein do I delight.\nIncline my heart unto thy testimonies,\nAnd not to covetousness.\nTurn away mine eyes from beholding vanity,\nAnd quicken me in thy ways.\nConfirm unto thy servant thy word,\nWhich is in order unto the fear of thee.\nTurn away my reproach whereof I am afraid;\nFor thine ordinances are good.\nBehold, I have longed after thy precepts:\nQuicken me in thy righteousness.\n\nVAV.\n\nLet thy lovingkindnesses also come unto me, O Jehovah,\nEven thy salvation, according to thy word.\nSo shall I have an answer for him that reproacheth me;\nFor I trust in thy word.\nAnd take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth;\nFor I have hoped in thine ordinances.\nSo shall I observe thy law continually\nFor ever and ever.\nAnd I shall walk at liberty;\nFor I have sought thy precepts.\nI will also speak of thy testimonies before kings,\nAnd shall not be put to shame.\nAnd I will delight myself in thy commandments,\nWhich I have loved.\nI will lift up my hands also unto thy commandments, which I have loved;\nAnd I will meditate on thy statutes.\n\nZAYIN.\n\nRemember the word unto thy servant,\nBecause thou hast made me to hope.\nThis is my comfort in my affliction;\nFor thy word hath quickened me.\nThe proud have had me greatly in derision:\nYet have I not swerved from thy law.\nI have remembered thine ordinances of old, O Jehovah,\nAnd have comforted myself.\nHot indignation hath taken hold upon me,\nBecause of the wicked that forsake thy law.\nThy statutes have been my songs\nIn the house of my pilgrimage.\nI have remembered thy name, O Jehovah, in the night,\nAnd have observed thy law.\nThis I have had,\nBecause I have kept thy precepts.\nHHETH.\nJehovah is my portion:\nI have said that I would observe thy words.\nI entreated thy favor with my whole heart:\nBe merciful unto me according to thy word.\nI thought on my ways,\nAnd turned my feet unto thy testimonies.\nI made haste, and delayed not,\nTo observe thy commandments.\nThe cords of the wicked have wrapped me round;\nBut I have not forgotten thy law.\nAt midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee\nBecause of thy righteous ordinances.\nI am a companion of all them that fear thee,\nAnd of them that observe thy precepts.\nThe earth, O Jehovah, is full of thy lovingkindness:\nTeach me thy statutes.\nTETH.\nThou hast dealt well with thy servant,\nO Jehovah, according unto thy word.\nTeach me good judgment and knowledge;\nFor I have believed in thy commandments.\nBefore I was afflicted I went astray;\nBut now I observe thy word.\nThou art good, and doest good;\nTeach me thy statutes.\nThe proud have forged a lie against me:\nWith my whole heart will I keep thy precepts.\nTheir heart is as fat as grease;\nBut I delight in thy law.\nIt is good for me that I have been afflicted;\nThat I may learn thy statutes.\nThe law of thy mouth is better unto me\nThan thousands of gold and silver.\nYODH.\nThy hands have made me and fashioned me:\nGive me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.\nThey that fear thee shall see me and be glad,\nBecause I have hoped in thy word.\nI know, O Jehovah, that thy judgments are righteous,\nAnd that in faithfulness thou hast afflicted me.\nLet, I pray thee, thy lovingkindness be for my comfort,\nAccording to thy word unto thy servant.\nLet thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live;\nFor thy law is my delight.\nLet the proud be put to shame;\nFor they have overthrown me wrongfully:\nBut I will meditate on thy precepts.\nLet those that fear thee turn unto me;\nAnd they shall know thy testimonies.\nLet my heart be perfect in thy statutes,\nThat I be not put to shame.\nKAPH.\nMy soul fainteth for thy salvation;\nBut I hope in thy word.\nMine eyes fail for thy word,\nWhile I say, When wilt thou comfort me?\nFor I am become like a wine-skin in the smoke;\nYet do I not forget thy statutes.\nHow many are the days of thy servant?\nWhen wilt thou execute judgment on them that persecute me?\nThe proud have digged pits for me,\nWho are not according to thy law.\nAll thy commandments are faithful:\nThey persecute me wrongfully; help thou me.\nThey had almost consumed me upon earth;\nBut I forsook not thy precepts.\nQuicken me after thy lovingkindness;\nSo shall I observe the testimony of thy mouth.\nLAMEDH.\nFor ever, O Jehovah,\nThy word is settled in heaven.\nThy faithfulness is unto all generations:\nThou hast established the earth, and it abideth.\nThey abide this day according to thine ordinances;\nFor all things are thy servants.\nUnless thy law had been my delight,\nI should then have perished in mine affliction.\nI will never forget thy precepts;\nFor with them thou hast quickened me.\nI am thine, save me;\nFor I have sought thy precepts.\nThe wicked have waited for me, to destroy me;\nBut I will consider thy testimonies.\nMEM.\nI have seen an end of all perfection;\nBut thy commandment is exceeding broad.\nOh how love I thy law!\nIt is my meditation all the day.\nThy commandments make me wiser than mine enemies;\nFor they are ever with me.\nI have more understanding than all my teachers;\nFor thy testimonies are my meditation.\nI understand more than the aged,\nBecause I have kept thy precepts.\nI have refrained my feet from every evil way,\nThat I might observe thy word.\nI have not turned aside from thine ordinances;\nFor thou hast taught me.\nHow sweet are thy words unto my taste!\nYea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!\nThrough thy precepts I get understanding:\nTherefore I hate every false way.\nNUN.\nThy word is a lamp unto my feet,\nAnd light unto my path.\nI have sworn, and have confirmed it,\nThat I will observe thy righteous ordinances.\nI am afflicted very much:\nQuicken me, O Jehovah, according unto thy word.\nAccept, I beseech thee, the freewill-offerings of my mouth, O Jehovah,\nAnd teach me thine ordinances.\nMy soul is continually in my hand;\nYet do I not forget thy law.\nThe wicked have laid a snare for me;\nYet have I not gone astray from thy precepts.\nThy testimonies have I taken as a heritage for ever;\nFor they are the rejoicing of my heart.\nI have inclined my heart to perform thy statutes\nFor ever, even unto the end.\nSAMEKH.\nI hate them that are of a double mind;\nBut thy law do I love.\nThou art my hiding-place and my shield:\nI hope in thy word.\nDepart from me, ye evil-doers,\nThat I may keep the commandments of my God.\nUphold me according unto thy word, that I may live;\nAnd let me not be ashamed of my hope.\nHold thou me up, and I shall be safe,\nAnd shall have respect unto thy statutes continually.\nThou hast set at nought all them that err from thy statutes;\nFor their deceit is falsehood.\nThou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross:\nTherefore I love thy testimonies.\nMy flesh trembleth for fear of thee;\nAnd I am afraid of thy judgments.\nAYIN.\nI have done justice and righteousness:\nLeave me not to mine oppressors.\nBe surety for thy servant for good:\nLet not the proud oppress me.\nMine eyes fail for thy salvation,\nAnd for thy righteous word.\nDeal with thy servant according unto thy lovingkindness,\nAnd teach me thy statutes.\nI am thy servant; give me understanding,\nThat I may know thy testimonies.\nIt is time for Jehovah to work;\nFor they have made void thy law.\nTherefore I love thy commandments\nAbove gold, yea, above fine gold.\nTherefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right;\nAnd I hate every false way.\nPE.\nThy testimonies are wonderful;\nTherefore doth my soul keep them.\nThe opening of thy words giveth light;\nIt giveth understanding unto the simple.\nI opened wide my mouth, and panted;\nFor I longed for thy commandments.\nTurn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me,\nAs thou usest to do unto those that love thy name.\nEstablish my footsteps in thy word;\nAnd let not any iniquity have dominion over me.\nRedeem me from the oppression of man:\nSo will I observe thy precepts.\nMake thy face to shine upon thy servant;\nAnd teach me thy statutes.\nStreams of water run down mine eyes,\nBecause they observe not thy law.\nTSADHE.\nRighteous art thou, O Jehovah,\nAnd upright are thy judgments.\nThou hast commanded thy testimonies in righteousness\nAnd very faithfulness.\nMy zeal hath consumed me,\nBecause mine adversaries have forgotten thy words.\nThy word is very pure;\nTherefore thy servant loveth it.\nI am small and despised;\nYet do I not forget thy precepts.\nThy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness,\nAnd thy law is truth.\nTrouble and anguish have taken hold on me;\nYet thy commandments are my delight.\nThy testimonies are righteous for ever:\nGive me understanding, and I shall live.\nQOPH.\nI have called with my whole heart; answer me, O Jehovah:\nI will keep thy statutes.\nI have called unto thee; save me,\nAnd I shall observe thy testimonies.\nI anticipated the dawning of the morning, and cried:\nI hoped in thy words.\nMine eyes anticipated the night-watches,\nThat I might meditate on thy word.\nHear my voice according unto thy lovingkindness:\nQuicken me, O Jehovah, according to thine ordinances.\nThey draw nigh that follow after wickedness;\nThey are far from thy law.\nThou art nigh, O Jehovah;\nAnd all thy commandments are truth.\nOf old have I known from thy testimonies,\nThat thou hast founded them for ever.\nRESH.\nConsider mine affliction, and deliver me;\nFor I do not forget thy law.\nPlead thou my cause, and redeem me:\nQuicken me according to thy word.\nSalvation is far from the wicked;\nFor they seek not thy statutes.\nGreat are thy tender mercies, O Jehovah:\nQuicken me according to thine ordinances.\nMany are my persecutors and mine adversaries;\nYet have I not swerved from thy testimonies.\nI beheld the treacherous, and was grieved,\nBecause they observe not thy word.\nConsider how I love thy precepts:\nQuicken me, O Jehovah, according to thy lovingkindness.\nThe sum of thy word is truth;\nAnd every one of thy righteous ordinances endureth for ever.\nSHIN.\nPrinces have persecuted me without a cause;\nBut my heart standeth in awe of thy words.\nI rejoice at thy word,\nAs one that findeth great spoil.\nI hate and abhor falsehood;\nBut thy law do I love.\nSeven times a day do I praise thee,\nBecause of thy righteous ordinances.\nGreat peace have they that love thy law;\nAnd they have no occasion of stumbling.\nI have hoped for thy salvation, O Jehovah,\nAnd have done thy commandments.\nMy soul hath observed thy testimonies;\nAnd I love them exceedingly.\nI have observed thy precepts and thy testimonies;\nFor all my ways are before thee.\nTAV.\nLet my cry come near before thee, O Jehovah:\nGive me understanding according to thy word.\nLet my supplication come before thee:\nDeliver me according to thy word.\nLet my lips utter praise;\nFor thou teachest me thy statutes.\nLet my tongue sing of thy word;\nFor all thy commandments are righteousness.\nLet thy hand be ready to help me;\nFor I have chosen thy precepts.\nI have longed for thy salvation, O Jehovah;\nAnd thy law is my delight.\nLet my soul live, and it shall praise thee;\nAnd let thine ordinances help me.\nI have gone astray like a lost sheep;\nSeek thy servant;\nFor I do not forget thy commandments.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-120": { - "title": "Psalm 120", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nIn my distress I cried unto Jehovah,\nAnd he answered me.\nDeliver my soul, O Jehovah, from lying lips,\nAnd from a deceitful tongue.\nWhat shall be given unto thee, and what shall be done more unto thee,\nThou deceitful tongue?\nSharp arrows of the mighty,\nWith coals of juniper.\nWoe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech,\nThat I dwell among the tents of Kedar!\nMy soul hath long had her dwelling\nWith him that hateth peace.\nI am for peace:\nBut when I speak, they are for war.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-121": { - "title": "Psalm 121", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nI will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:\nFrom whence shall my help come?\nMy help cometh from Jehovah,\nWho made heaven and earth.\nHe will not suffer thy foot to be moved:\nHe that keepeth thee will not slumber.\nBehold, he that keepeth Israel\nWill neither slumber nor sleep.\nJehovah is thy keeper:\nJehovah is thy shade upon thy right hand.\nThe sun shall not smite thee by day,\nNor the moon by night.\nJehovah will keep thee from all evil;\nHe will keep thy soul.\nJehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in\nFrom this time forth and for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-122": { - "title": "Psalm 122", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents; of David._\n\nI was glad when they said unto me,\nLet us go unto the house of Jehovah.\nOur feet are standing\nWithin thy gates, O Jerusalem,\nJerusalem, that art builded\nAs a city that is compact together;\nWhither the tribes go up, even the tribes of Jehovah,\nFor an ordinance for Israel,\nTo give thanks unto the name of Jehovah.\nFor there are set thrones for judgment,\nThe thrones of the house of David.\nPray for the peace of Jerusalem:\nThey shall prosper that love thee.\nPeace be within thy walls,\nAnd prosperity within thy palaces.\nFor my brethren and companions’ sakes,\nI will now say, Peace be within thee.\nFor the sake of the house of Jehovah our God\nI will seek thy good.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-123": { - "title": "Psalm 123", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nUnto thee do I lift up mine eyes,\nO thou that sittest in the heavens.\nBehold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their master,\nAs the eyes of a maid unto the hand of her mistress;\nSo our eyes look unto Jehovah our God,\nUntil he have mercy upon us.\nHave mercy upon us, O Jehovah, have mercy upon us;\nFor we are exceedingly filled with contempt.\nOur soul is exceedingly filled\nWith the scoffing of those that are at ease,\nAnd with the contempt of the proud.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-124": { - "title": "Psalm 124", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents; of David._\n\nIf it had not been Jehovah who was on our side,\nLet Israel now say,\nIf it had not been Jehovah who was on our side,\nWhen men rose up against us;\nThen they had swallowed us up alive,\nWhen their wrath was kindled against us;\nThen the waters had overwhelmed us,\nThe stream had gone over our soul;\nThen the proud waters had gone over our soul.\nBlessed be Jehovah,\nWho hath not given us as a prey to their teeth.\nOur soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers:\nThe snare is broken, and we are escaped.\nOur help is in the name of Jehovah,\nWho made heaven and earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-125": { - "title": "Psalm 125", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nThey that trust in Jehovah\nAre as mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abideth for ever.\nAs the mountains are round about Jerusalem,\nSo Jehovah is round about his people\nFrom this time forth and for evermore.\nFor the sceptre of wickedness shall not rest upon the lot of the righteous;\nThat the righteous put not forth their hands unto iniquity.\nDo good, O Jehovah, unto those that are good,\nAnd to them that are upright in their hearts.\nBut as for such as turn aside unto their crooked ways,\nJehovah will lead them forth with the workers of iniquity.\nPeace be upon Israel.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-126": { - "title": "Psalm 126", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nWhen Jehovah brought back those that returned to Zion,\nWe were like unto them that dream.\nThen was our mouth filled with laughter,\nAnd our tongue with singing:\nThen said they among the nations,\nJehovah hath done great things for them.\nJehovah hath done great things for us,\nWhereof we are glad.\nTurn again our captivity, O Jehovah,\nAs the streams in the South.\nThey that sow in tears shall reap in joy.\nHe that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing seed for sowing,\nShall doubtless come again with joy, bringing his sheaves with him.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-127": { - "title": "Psalm 127", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents; of Solomon._\n\nExcept Jehovah build the house,\nThey labor in vain that build it:\nExcept Jehovah keep the city,\nThe watchman waketh but in vain.\nIt is vain for you to rise up early,\nTo take rest late,\nTo eat the bread of toil;\nFor so he giveth unto his beloved sleep.\nLo, children are a heritage of Jehovah;\nAnd the fruit of the womb is his reward.\nAs arrows in the hand of a mighty man,\nSo are the children of youth.\nHappy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:\nThey shall not be put to shame,\nWhen they speak with their enemies in the gate.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-128": { - "title": "Psalm 128", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nBlessed is every one that feareth Jehovah,\nThat walketh in his ways.\nFor thou shalt eat the labor of thy hands:\nHappy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.\nThy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,\nIn the innermost parts of thy house;\nThy children like olive plants,\nRound about thy table.\nBehold, thus shall the man be blessed\nThat feareth Jehovah.\nJehovah bless thee out of Zion:\nAnd see thou the good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life.\nYea, see thou thy children’s children.\nPeace be upon Israel.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-129": { - "title": "Psalm 129", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nMany a time have they afflicted me from my youth up,\nLet Israel now say,\nMany a time have they afflicted me from my youth up:\nYet they have not prevailed against me.\nThe plowers plowed upon my back;\nThey made long their furrows.\nJehovah is righteous:\nHe hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked.\nLet them be put to shame and turned backward,\nAll they that hate Zion.\nLet them be as the grass upon the housetops,\nWhich withereth before it groweth up;\nWherewith the reaper filleth not his hand,\nNor he that bindeth sheaves his bosom.\nNeither do they that go by say,\nThe blessing of Jehovah be upon you;\nWe bless you in the name of Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-130": { - "title": "Psalm 130", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nOut of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Jehovah.\nLord, hear my voice:\nLet thine ears be attentive\nTo the voice of my supplications.\nIf thou, Jehovah, shouldest mark iniquities,\nO Lord, who could stand?\nBut there is forgiveness with thee,\nThat thou mayest be feared.\nI wait for Jehovah, my soul doth wait,\nAnd in his word do I hope.\nMy soul waiteth for the Lord\nMore than watchmen wait for the morning;\nYea, more than watchmen for the morning.\nO Israel, hope in Jehovah;\nFor with Jehovah there is lovingkindness,\nAnd with him is plenteous redemption.\nAnd he will redeem Israel\nFrom all his iniquities.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-131": { - "title": "Psalm 131", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents; of David._\n\nJehovah, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty;\nNeither do I exercise myself in great matters,\nOr in things too wonderful for me.\nSurely I have stilled and quieted my soul;\nLike a weaned child with his mother,\nLike a weaned child is my soul within me.\nO Israel, hope in Jehovah\nFrom this time forth and for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-132": { - "title": "Psalm 132", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nJehovah, remember for David\nAll his affliction;\nHow he sware unto Jehovah,\nAnd vowed unto the Mighty One of Jacob:\nSurely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house,\nNor go up into my bed;\nI will not give sleep to mine eyes,\nOr slumber to mine eyelids;\nUntil I find out a place for Jehovah,\nA tabernacle for the Mighty One of Jacob.\nLo, we heard of it in Ephrathah:\nWe found it in the field of the wood.\nWe will go into his tabernacles;\nWe will worship at his footstool.\nArise, O Jehovah, into thy resting-place;\nThou, and the ark of thy strength.\nLet thy priest be clothed with righteousness;\nAnd let thy saints shout for joy.\nFor thy servant David’s sake\nTurn not away the face of thine anointed.\nJehovah hath sworn unto David in truth;\nHe will not turn from it:\nOf the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne.\nIf thy children will keep my covenant\nAnd my testimony that I shall teach them,\nTheir children also shall sit upon thy throne for evermore.\nFor Jehovah hath chosen Zion;\nHe hath desired it for his habitation.\nThis is my resting-place for ever:\nHere will I dwell; for I have desired it.\nI will abundantly bless her provision:\nI will satisfy her poor with bread.\nHer priests also will I clothe with salvation;\nAnd her saints shall shout aloud for joy.\nThere will I make the horn of David to bud:\nI have ordained a lamp for mine anointed.\nHis enemies will I clothe with shame;\nBut upon himself shall his crown flourish.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-133": { - "title": "Psalm 133", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents; of David._\n\nBehold, how good and how pleasant it is\nFor brethren to dwell together in unity!\nIt is like the precious oil upon the head,\nThat ran down upon the beard,\nEven Aaron’s beard;\nThat came down upon the skirt of his garments;\nLike the dew of Hermon,\nThat cometh down upon the mountains of Zion:\nFor there Jehovah commanded the blessing,\nEven life for evermore.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-134": { - "title": "Psalm 134", - "body": "_A Song of Ascents._\n\nBehold, bless ye Jehovah, all ye servants of Jehovah,\nThat by night stand in the house of Jehovah.\nLift up your hands to the sanctuary,\nAnd bless ye Jehovah.\nJehovah bless thee out of Zion;\nEven he that made heaven and earth.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-135": { - "title": "Psalm 135", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nPraise ye the name of Jehovah;\nPraise him, O ye servants of Jehovah,\nYe that stand in the house of Jehovah,\nIn the courts of the house of our God.\nPraise ye Jehovah; for Jehovah is good:\nSing praises unto his name; for it is pleasant.\nFor Jehovah hath chosen Jacob unto himself,\nAnd Israel for his own possession.\nFor I know that Jehovah is great,\nAnd that our Lord is above all gods.\nWhatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done,\nIn heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps;\nWho causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth;\nWho maketh lightnings for the rain;\nWho bringeth forth the wind out of his treasuries;\nWho smote the first-born of Egypt,\nBoth of man and beast;\nWho sent signs and wonders into the midst of thee, O Egypt,\nUpon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants;\nWho smote many nations,\nAnd slew mighty kings,\nSihon king of the Amorites,\nAnd Og king of Bashan,\nAnd all the kingdoms of Canaan,\nAnd gave their land for a heritage,\nA heritage unto Israel his people.\nThy name, O Jehovah, endureth for ever;\nThy memorial name, O Jehovah, throughout all generations.\nFor Jehovah will judge his people,\nAnd repent himself concerning his servants.\nThe idols of the nations are silver and gold,\nThe work of men’s hands.\nThey have mouths, but they speak not;\nEyes have they, but they see not;\nThey have ears, but they hear not;\nNeither is there any breath in their mouths.\nThey that make them shall be like unto them;\nYea, every one that trusteth in them.\nO house of Israel, bless ye Jehovah:\nO house of Aaron, bless ye Jehovah:\nO house of Levi, bless ye Jehovah:\nYe that fear Jehovah, bless ye Jehovah.\nBlessed be Jehovah out of Zion,\nWho dwelleth at Jerusalem.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-136": { - "title": "Psalm 136", - "body": "Oh give thanks unto Jehovah; for he is good;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nOh give thanks unto the God of gods;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nOh give thanks unto the Lord of lords;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him who alone doeth great wonders;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that by understanding made the heavens;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that spread forth the earth above the waters;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that made great lights;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nThe sun to rule by day;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nThe moon and stars to rule by night;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that smote Egypt in their first-born;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nAnd brought out Israel from among them;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nWith a strong hand, and with an outstretched arm;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that divided the Red Sea in sunder;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nAnd made Israel to pass through the midst of it;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nBut overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that led his people through the wilderness;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nTo him that smote great kings;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nAnd slew famous kings;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nSihon king of the Amorites;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth forever;\nAnd Og king of Bashan;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nAnd gave their land for a heritage;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nEven a heritage unto Israel his servant;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nWho remembered us in our low estate;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever;\nAnd hath delivered us from our adversaries;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever:\nWho giveth food to all flesh;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.\nOh give thanks unto the God of heaven;\nFor his lovingkindness endureth for ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-137": { - "title": "Psalm 137", - "body": "By the rivers of Babylon,\nThere we sat down, yea, we wept,\nWhen we remembered Zion.\nUpon the willows in the midst thereof We hanged up our harps.\nFor there they that led us captive required of us songs,\nAnd they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,\nSing us one of the songs of Zion.\nHow shall we sing Jehovah’s song\nIn a foreign land?\nIf I forget thee, O Jerusalem,\nLet my right hand forget her skill.\nLet my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,\nIf I remember thee not;\nIf I prefer not Jerusalem\nAbove my chief joy.\nRemember, O Jehovah, against the children of Edom\nThe day of Jerusalem;\nWho said, Rase it, rase it,\nEven to the foundation thereof.\nO daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed,\nHappy shall he be, that rewardeth thee\nAs thou hast served us.\nHappy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones\nAgainst the rock.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-138": { - "title": "Psalm 138", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nI will give thee thanks with my whole heart:\nBefore the gods will I sing praises unto thee.\nI will worship toward thy holy temple,\nAnd give thanks unto thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth:\nFor thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.\nIn the day that I called thou answeredst me,\nThou didst encourage me with strength in my soul.\nAll the kings of the earth shall give thee thanks, O Jehovah,\nFor they have heard the words of thy mouth.\nYea, they shall sing of the ways of Jehovah;\nFor great is the glory of Jehovah.\nFor though Jehovah is high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly;\nBut the haughty he knoweth from afar.\nThough I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me;\nThou wilt stretch forth thy hand against the wrath of mine enemies,\nAnd thy right hand will save me.\nJehovah will perfect that which concerneth me:\nThy lovingkindness, O Jehovah, endureth for ever;\nForsake not the works of thine own hands.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-139": { - "title": "Psalm 139", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nO Jehovah, thou hast searched me, and known me.\nThou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising;\nThou understandest my thought afar off.\nThou searchest out my path and my lying down,\nAnd art acquainted with all my ways.\nFor there is not a word in my tongue,\nBut, lo, O Jehovah, thou knowest it altogether.\nThou hast beset me behind and before,\nAnd laid thy hand upon me.\nSuch knowledge is too wonderful for me;\nIt is high, I cannot attain unto it.\nWhither shall I go from thy Spirit?\nOr whither shall I flee from thy presence?\nIf I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:\nIf I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.\nIf I take the wings of the morning,\nAnd dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;\nEven there shall thy hand lead me,\nAnd thy right hand shall hold me.\nIf I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me,\nAnd the light about me shall be night;\nEven the darkness hideth not from thee,\nBut the night shineth as the day:\nThe darkness and the light are both alike to thee.\nFor thou didst form my inward parts:\nThou didst cover me in my mother’s womb.\nI will give thanks unto thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:\nWonderful are thy works;\nAnd that my soul knoweth right well.\nMy frame was not hidden from thee,\nWhen I was made in secret,\nAnd curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.\nThine eyes did see mine unformed substance;\nAnd in thy book they were all written,\nEven the days that were ordained for me,\nWhen as yet there was none of them.\nHow precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!\nHow great is the sum of them!\nIf I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:\nWhen I awake, I am still with thee.\nSurely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God:\nDepart from me therefore, ye bloodthirsty men.\nFor they speak against thee wickedly,\nAnd thine enemies take thy name in vain.\nDo not I hate them, O Jehovah, that hate thee?\nAnd am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?\nI hate them with perfect hatred:\nThey are become mine enemies.\nSearch me, O God, and know my heart:\nTry me, and know my thoughts;\nAnd see if there be any wicked way in me,\nAnd lead me in the way everlasting.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-140": { - "title": "Psalm 140", - "body": "_For the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David._\n\nDeliver me, O Jehovah, from the evil man;\nPreserve me from the violent man:\nWho devise mischiefs in their heart;\nContinually do they gather themselves together for war.\nThey have sharpened their tongue like a serpent;\nAdders’ poison is under their lips.\n\nSelah\n\nKeep me, O Jehovah, from the hands of the wicked;\nPreserve me from the violent man:\nWho have purposed to thrust aside my steps.\nThe proud have hid a snare for me, and cords;\nThey have spread a net by the wayside;\nThey have set gins for me.\n\nSelah\n\nI said unto Jehovah, Thou art my God:\nGive ear unto the voice of my supplications, O Jehovah.\nO Jehovah the Lord, the strength of my salvation,\nThou hast covered my head in the day of battle.\nGrant not, O Jehovah, the desires of the wicked;\nFurther not his evil device, lest they exalt themselves.\n\nSelah\n\nAs for the head of those that compass me about,\nLet the mischief of their own lips cover them.\nLet burning coals fall upon them:\nLet them be cast into the fire,\nInto deep pits, whence they shall not rise.\nAn evil speaker shall not be established in the earth:\nEvil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him.\nI know that Jehovah will maintain the cause of the afflicted,\nAnd justice for the needy.\nSurely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name:\nThe upright shall dwell in thy presence.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-141": { - "title": "Psalm 141", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nJehovah, I have called upon thee; make haste unto me:\nGive ear unto my voice, when I call unto thee.\nLet my prayer be set forth as incense before thee;\nThe lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.\nSet a watch, O Jehovah, before my mouth;\nKeep the door of my lips.\nIncline not my heart to any evil thing,\nTo practise deeds of wickedness\nWith men that work iniquity:\nAnd let me not eat of their dainties.\nLet the righteous smite me, it shall be a kindness;\nAnd let him reprove me, it shall be as oil upon the head;\nLet not my head refuse it:\nFor even in their wickedness shall my prayer continue.\nTheir judges are thrown down by the sides of the rock;\nAnd they shall hear my words; for they are sweet.\nAs when one ploweth and cleaveth the earth,\nOur bones are scattered at the mouth of Sheol.\nFor mine eyes are unto thee, O Jehovah the Lord:\nIn thee do I take refuge; leave not my soul destitute.\nKeep me from the snare which they have laid for me,\nAnd from the gins of the workers of iniquity.\nLet the wicked fall into their own nets,\nWhilst that I withal escape.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-142": { - "title": "Psalm 142", - "body": "_Maschil of David, when he was in the cave; a Prayer._\n\nI cry with my voice unto Jehovah;\nWith my voice unto Jehovah do I make supplication.\nI pour out my complaint before him;\nI show before him my trouble.\nWhen my spirit was overwhelmed within me,\nThou knewest my path.\nIn the way wherein I walk\nHave they hidden a snare for me.\nLook on my right hand, and see;\nFor there is no man that knoweth me:\nRefuge hath failed me;\nNo man careth for my soul.\nI cried unto thee, O Jehovah;\nI said, Thou art my refuge,\nMy portion in the land of the living.\nAttend unto my cry;\nFor I am brought very low:\nDeliver me from my persecutors;\nFor they are stronger than I.\nBring my soul out of prison,\nThat I may give thanks unto thy name:\nThe righteous shall compass me about;\nFor thou wilt deal bountifully with me.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-143": { - "title": "Psalm 143", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nHear my prayer, O Jehovah; give ear to my supplications:\nIn thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness.\nAnd enter not into judgment with thy servant;\nFor in thy sight no man living is righteous.\nFor the enemy hath persecuted my soul;\nHe hath smitten my life down to the ground:\nHe hath made me to dwell in dark places, as those that have been long dead.\nTherefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me;\nMy heart within me is desolate.\nI remember the days of old;\nI meditate on all thy doings;\nI muse on the work of thy hands.\nI spread forth my hands unto thee:\nMy soul thirsteth after thee, as a weary land.\n\nSelah\n\nMake haste to answer me, O Jehovah; my spirit faileth:\nHide not thy face from me,\nLest I become like them that go down into the pit.\nCause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning;\nFor in thee do I trust:\nCause me to know the way wherein I should walk;\nFor I lift up my soul unto thee.\nDeliver me, O Jehovah, from mine enemies:\nI flee unto thee to hide me.\nTeach me to do thy will;\nFor thou art my God:\nThy Spirit is good;\nLead me in the land of uprightness.\nQuicken me, O Jehovah, for thy name’s sake:\nIn thy righteousness bring my soul out of trouble.\nAnd in thy lovingkindness cut off mine enemies,\nAnd destroy all them that afflict my soul;\nFor I am thy servant.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-144": { - "title": "Psalm 144", - "body": "_A Psalm of David._\n\nBlessed be Jehovah my rock,\nWho teacheth my hands to war,\nAnd my fingers to fight:\nMy lovingkindness, and my fortress,\nMy high tower, and my deliverer;\nMy shield, and he in whom I take refuge;\nWho subdueth my people under me.\nJehovah, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him?\nOr the son of man, that thou makest account of him?\nMan is like to vanity:\nHis days are as a shadow that passeth away.\nBow thy heavens, O Jehovah, and come down:\nTouch the mountains, and they shall smoke.\nCast forth lightning, and scatter them;\nSend out thine arrows, and discomfit them.\nStretch forth thy hand from above;\nRescue me, and deliver me out of great waters,\nOut of the hand of aliens;\nWhose mouth speaketh deceit,\nAnd whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.\nI will sing a new song unto thee, O God:\nUpon a psaltery of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee.\nThou art he that giveth salvation unto kings;\nWho rescueth David his servant from the hurtful sword.\nRescue me, and deliver me out of the hand of aliens,\nWhose mouth speaketh deceit,\nAnd whose right hand is a right hand of falsehood.\nWhen our sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth,\nAnd our daughters as corner-stones hewn after the fashion of a palace;\nWhen our garners are full, affording all manner of store,\nAnd our sheep bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our fields;\nWhen our oxen are well laden;\nWhen there is no breaking in, and no going forth,\nAnd no outcry in our streets:\nHappy is the people that is in such a case;\nYea, happy is the people whose God is Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-145": { - "title": "Psalm 145", - "body": "_A Psalm of praise; of David._\n\nI will extol thee, my God, O King;\nAnd I will bless thy name for ever and ever.\nEvery day will I bless thee;\nAnd I will praise thy name for ever and ever.\nGreat is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised;\nAnd his greatness is unsearchable.\nOne generation shall laud thy works to another,\nAnd shall declare thy mighty acts.\nOf the glorious majesty of thine honor,\nAnd of thy wondrous works, will I meditate.\nAnd men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts;\nAnd I will declare thy greatness.\nThey shall utter the memory of thy great goodness,\nAnd shall sing of thy righteousness.\nJehovah is gracious, and merciful;\nSlow to anger, and of great lovingkindness.\nJehovah is good to all;\nAnd his tender mercies are over all his works.\nAll thy works shall give thanks unto thee, O Jehovah;\nAnd thy saints shall bless thee.\nThey shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom,\nAnd talk of thy power;\nTo make known to the sons of men his mighty acts,\nAnd the glory of the majesty of his kingdom.\nThy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,\nAnd thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.\nJehovah upholdeth all that fall,\nAnd raiseth up all those that are bowed down.\nThe eyes of all wait for thee;\nAnd thou givest them their food in due season.\nThou openest thy hand,\nAnd satisfiest the desire of every living thing.\nJehovah is righteous in all his ways,\nAnd gracious in all his works.\nJehovah is nigh unto all them that call upon him,\nTo all that call upon him in truth.\nHe will fulfil the desire of them that fear him;\nHe also will hear their cry and will save them.\nJehovah preserveth all them that love him;\nBut all the wicked will he destroy.\nMy mouth shall speak the praise of Jehovah;\nAnd let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and ever.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-146": { - "title": "Psalm 146", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nPraise Jehovah, O my soul.\nWhile I live will I praise Jehovah:\nI will sing praises unto my God while I have any being.\nPut not your trust in princes,\nNor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.\nHis breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth;\nIn that very day his thoughts perish.\nHappy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help,\nWhose hope is in Jehovah his God:\nWho made heaven and earth,\nThe sea, and all that in them is;\nWho keepeth truth for ever;\nWho executeth justice for the oppressed;\nWho giveth food to the hungry.\nJehovah looseth the prisoners;\nJehovah openeth the eyes of the blind;\nJehovah raiseth up them that are bowed down;\nJehovah loveth the righteous;\nJehovah preserveth the sojourners;\nHe upholdeth the fatherless and widow;\nBut the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.\nJehovah will reign for ever,\nThy God, O Zion, unto all generations.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-147": { - "title": "Psalm 147", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah;\nFor it is good to sing praises unto our God;\nFor it is pleasant, and praise is comely.\nJehovah doth build up Jerusalem;\nHe gathereth together the outcasts of Israel.\nHe healeth the broken in heart,\nAnd bindeth up their wounds.\nHe counteth the number of the stars;\nHe calleth them all by their names.\nGreat is our Lord, and mighty in power;\nHis understanding is infinite.\nJehovah upholdeth the meek:\nHe bringeth the wicked down to the ground.\nSing unto Jehovah with thanksgiving;\nSing praises upon the harp unto our God,\nWho covereth the heavens with clouds,\nWho prepareth rain for the earth,\nWho maketh grass to grow upon the mountains.\nHe giveth to the beast his food,\nAnd to the young ravens which cry.\nHe delighteth not in the strength of the horse:\nHe taketh no pleasure in the legs of a man.\nJehovah taketh pleasure in them that fear him,\nIn those that hope in his lovingkindness.\nPraise Jehovah, O Jerusalem;\nPraise thy God, O Zion.\nFor he hath strengthened the bars of thy gates;\nHe hath blessed thy children within thee.\nHe maketh peace in thy borders;\nHe filleth thee with the finest of the wheat.\nHe sendeth out his commandment upon earth;\nHis word runneth very swiftly.\nHe giveth snow like wool;\nHe scattereth the hoar-frost like ashes.\nHe casteth forth his ice like morsels:\nWho can stand before his cold?\nHe sendeth out his word, and melteth them:\nHe causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow.\nHe showeth his word unto Jacob,\nHis statutes and his ordinances unto Israel.\nHe hath not dealt so with any nation;\nAnd as for his ordinances, they have not known them.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-148": { - "title": "Psalm 148", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nPraise ye Jehovah from the heavens:\nPraise him in the heights.\nPraise ye him, all his angels:\nPraise ye him, all his host.\nPraise ye him, sun and moon:\nPraise him, all ye stars of light.\nPraise him, ye heavens of heavens,\nAnd ye waters that are above the heavens.\nLet them praise the name of Jehovah;\nFor he commanded, and they were created.\nHe hath also established them for ever and ever:\nHe hath made a decree which shall not pass away.\nPraise Jehovah from the earth,\nYe sea-monsters, and all deeps.\nFire and hail, snow and vapor;\nStormy wind, fulfilling his word;\nMountains and all hills;\nFruitful trees and all cedars;\nBeasts and all cattle;\nCreeping things and flying birds;\nKings of the earth and all peoples;\nPrinces and all judges of the earth;\nBoth young men and virgins;\nOld men and children:\nLet them praise the name of Jehovah;\nFor his name alone is exalted;\nHis glory is above the earth and the heavens.\nAnd he hath lifted up the horn of his people,\nThe praise of all his saints;\nEven of the children of Israel, a people near unto him.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-149": { - "title": "Psalm 149", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nSing unto Jehovah a new song,\nAnd his praise in the assembly of the saints.\nLet Israel rejoice in him that made him:\nLet the children of Zion be joyful in their King.\nLet them praise his name in the dance:\nLet them sing praises unto him with timbrel and harp.\nFor Jehovah taketh pleasure in his people:\nHe will beautify the meek with salvation.\nLet the saints exult in glory:\nLet them sing for joy upon their beds.\nLet the high praises of God be in their mouth,\nAnd a two-edged sword in their hand;\nTo execute vengeance upon the nations,\nAnd punishments upon the peoples;\nTo bind their kings with chains,\nAnd their nobles with fetters of iron;\nTo execute upon them the judgment written:\nThis honor have all his saints.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - }, - "psalm-150": { - "title": "Psalm 150", - "body": "Praise ye Jehovah.\nPraise God in his sanctuary:\nPraise him in the firmament of his power.\nPraise him for his mighty acts:\nPraise him according to his excellent greatness.\nPraise him with trumpet sound:\nPraise him with psaltery and harp.\nPraise him with timbrel and dance:\nPraise him with stringed instruments and pipe.\nPraise him with loud cymbals:\nPraise him with high sounding cymbals.\nLet everything that hath breath praise Jehovah.\nPraise ye Jehovah.", - "metadata": {} - } - } - }, - "alexander-pushkin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexander Pushkin", - "birth": { - "year": 1799 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1837 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 59 - }, - "poems": { - "the-angel": { - "title": "“The Angel”", - "body": "At the gates of Eden a tender angel\nWith drooping head was shining;\nA demon gloomy and rebellious\nOver hell’s abyss was flying.\n\nThe Spirit of Denial the Spirit of Doubt\nThe Spirit of Purity espied;\nAnd a tender warmth unwittingly\nNow first to know it learned he.\n\nAdieu he spake thee I saw:\nNot in vain hast thou shone before me;\nNot all in the world have I hated\nNot all in the world have I scorned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "arion": { - "title": "“Arion”", - "body": "A lot of us were on the bark:\nSome framed a sail for windy weather,\nThe others strongly and together\nMoved oars. In silence sunk,\nKeeping a rudder, strong and clever,\nThe skipper drove the heavy skiff;\nAnd I--with careless belief--\nI sang for sailors … But the stiff\nWhirl smashed at once the waters’ favor …\nAll dead--the captain and his guard!--\nBut I, the enigmatic bard,\nWas thrown to the shore alone.\nI sing the former anthems, yet,\nAnd dry my mantle, torn and wet,\nIn beams of sun under a stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-awaking": { - "title": "“The Awaking”", - "body": "Ye dreams ye dreams\nWhere is your sweetness?\nWhere thou where thou\nO joy of night?\nDisappeared has it\nThe joyous dream;\nAnd solitary\nIn darkness deep\nI awaken.\nRound my bed\nIs silent night.\nAt once are cooled\nAt once are fled\nAll in a crowd\nThe dreams of Love--\nStill with longing\nThe soul is filled\nAnd grasps of sleep\nThe memory.\nO Love O Love\nO hear my prayer:\nAgain send me\nThose visions thine\nAnd on the morrow\nRaptured anew\nLet me die\nWithout awaking!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-bard": { - "title": "“The Bard”", - "body": "Have ye heard in the woods the nightly voice\nOf the bard of love of the bard of his grief?\nWhen the fields in the morning hour were still\nThe flute’s sad sound and simple\n Have ye heard?\n\nHave ye met in the desert darkness of the forest\nThe bard of love the bard of his grief?\nWas it a track of tears was it a smile\nOr a quiet glance filled with melancholy\n Have ye met?\n\nHave ye sighed listening to the calm voice\nOf the bard of love of the bard of grief?\nWhen in the woods the youth ye saw\nAnd met the glance of his dulled eyes\n Have ye sighed?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-birdlet": { - "title": "“The Birdlet”", - "body": "God’s birdlet knows\nNor care nor toil;\nNor weaves it painfully\nAn everlasting nest.\nThro’ the long night on the twig it slumbers;\nWhen rises the red sun\nBirdie listens to the voice of God\nAnd it starts and it sings.\nWhen Spring Nature’s Beauty\nAnd the burning summer have passed\nAnd the fog and the rain\nBy the late fall are brought\nMen are wearied men are grieved\nBut birdie flies into distant lands\nInto warm climes beyond the blue sea:\nFlies away until the spring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-black-shawl": { - "title": "“The Black Shawl”", - "body": "I gaze demented on the black shawl\nAnd my cold soul is torn by grief.\n\nWhen young I was and full of trust\nI passionately loved a young Greek girl.\n\nThe charming maid she fondled me\nBut soon I lived the black day to see.\n\nOnce as were gathered my jolly guests\nA detested Jew knocked at my door.\n\nThou art feasting (he whispered) with friends\nBut betrayed thou art by thy Greek maid.\n\nMoneys I gave him and curses\nAnd called my servant the faithful.\n\nWe went: I flew on the wings of my steed;\nAnd tender mercy was silent in me.\n\nHer threshold no sooner I espied\nDark grew my eyes and my strength departed.\n\nThe distant chamber I enter alone\nAn Armenian embraces my faithless maid.\n\nDarkness around me; flashed the dagger;\nTo interrupt his kiss the wretch had no time.\n\nAnd long I trampled the headless corpse--\nAnd silent and pale at the maid I stared.\n\nI remember her prayers her flowing blood\nBut perished the girl and with her my love.\n\nThe shawl I took from the head now dead\nAnd wiped in silence the bleeding steel.\n\nWhen came the darkness of eve my serf\nThrew their bodies into the Danube’s billows--\n\nSince then I kiss no charming eyes\nSince then I know no cheerful days.\n\nI gaze demented on the black shawl\nAnd my cold soul is torn by grief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "bound-for-your-distant-home": { - "title": "“Bound for Your Distant Home”", - "body": "Bound for your distant home\nyou were leaving alien lands.\nIn an hour as sad as I’ve known\nI wept over your hands.\nMy hands were numb and cold,\nstill trying to restrain\nyou, whom my hurt told\nnever to end this pain.\n\nBut you snatched your lips away\nfrom our bitterest kiss.\nYou invoked another place\nthan the dismal exile of this.\nYou said, “When we meet again,\nin the shadow of olive-trees,\nwe shall kiss, in a love without pain,\nunder cloudless infinities.”\n\nBut there, alas, where the sky\nshines with blue radiance,\nwhere olive-tree shadows lie\non the waters glittering dance,\nyour beauty, your suffering,\nare lost in eternity.\nBut the sweet kiss of our meeting …\nI wait for it: you owe it me …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-burnt-letter": { - "title": "“The Burnt Letter”", - "body": "Good-bye love-letter good-bye! ’T is her command …\nHow long I waited how long my hand\nTo the fire my joys to yield was loath! …\nBut eno’ the hour has come: burn letter of my love!\nI am ready: listens more my soul to nought.\nNow the greedy flame thy sheets shall lick …\nA minute! … they crackle they blaze … a light smoke\nCurls and is lost with prayer mine.\nNow the finger’s faithful imprint losing\nBurns the melted wax … O Heavens!\nDone it is! curled in are the dark sheets;\nUpon their ashes light the lines adored\nAre gleaming … My breast is heavy. Ashes dear\nIn my sorrowful lot but poor consolation\nRemain for aye with me on my weary breast …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-cloud": { - "title": "“The Cloud”", - "body": "O last cloud of the scattered storm\nAlone thou sailest along the azure clear;\nAlone thou bringest the shadow sombre\nAlone thou marrest the joyful day.\n\nThou but recently had’st encircled the sky\nWhen sternly the lightning was winding about thee;\nThou gavest forth mysterious thunder\nWith rain hast watered the parched earth.\n\nEnough! Hie thyself: thy time hath passed:\nEarth is refreshed; the storm hath fled;\nAnd the breeze fondling the trees’ leaves\nForth thee chases from the quieted heavens!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "confession": { - "title": "“Confession”", - "body": "I love you--though it makes me beat,\nThough vain it seems, and melancholy--\nYet to this shameless, hapless folly\nI’ll be confessing at your feet.\nIt ill becomes me: that I’m older,\nTime I should be more sensible …\nAnd yet the frivolous disorder\nFills every jitter of my soul.\nSay you’ll be gone--I’m jaded, yawning;\nYou’re back--I’m sad, I suffer through--\nYet how can I be clear, from owning,\nMy angel, all my care for you!\nWhen off the stairs your weightless footfall,\nYour dress’s rustle, reaches me,\nYour voice, as maidenly, as youthful--\nI lose my senses instantly.\nYou smile at me--I’m glad, immensely;\nIgnore me--and I’m sad, again;\nYour pallid hand will recompense me\nFor the whole day of utter pain.\nWhen you’re embroidering, or setting\nYour eye on something fair, or letting\nYour hair amuse you--I’m beguiled;\nIn silence, reddening, all forgetting\nI watch you like a spellbound child.\nBut then how wretched my existence,\nHow desolate my jealous pain,\nWhen you set out into the distance\nTo wander in the cold and rain;\nAnd then your solitary grievings,\nOr, in the corner, twosome talks,\nOr twosome piano in the evenings,\nOr twosome trips, or twosome walks …\nAlina! just a little mercy--\nI dare not even mention love:\nFor sins I have been guilty of,\nMy angel, of your care unworthy …\nBut feign it! All can be achieved\nBy that absorbing gaze, believe me …\nOh, it takes little to deceive me--\nI cannot wait to be deceived!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-cossak": { - "title": "“The Cossak”", - "body": "Once at midnight hour\nDarkness thro’ and fog\nQuiet by the river\nRode a Cossak brave.\n\nBlack his cap upon his ear\nDust-covered is his coat\nBy his knee the pistols hang\nAnd nigh the ground his sword.\n\nThe faithful steed rein not feeling\nIs walking slowly on\n(Long its mane is and is waving)\nEver further it keeps on.\n\nNow before him two--three huts:\nBroken is the fence;\nTo the village here the road\nTo the forest there.\n\n“Not in forest maid is found”\nDennis thinks the brave.\n“To their chambers went the maids;\nAre gone for the night.”\n\nThe son of Don he pulls the rein\nAnd the spur he strikes:\nLike an arrow rushed the steed--\nTo the huts he turned.\n\nIn the clouds the distant sky\nWas silvering the moon;\nA Beauty-Maid in melancholy\nBy the window sits.\n\nEspies the brave the Beauty-Maid\nBeats his heart within:\nGently steed to left to left--\nUnder the window now is he.\n\n“Darker growing is the night\nAnd hidden is the moon;\nQuick my darling do come out\nWater give my steed.”\n\n“No not unto a man so young;\nRight fearful’t is to go;\nFearful’t is my house to leave\nAnd water give thy steed.”\n\n“Have no fear O Beauty-Maid\nAnd friendship close with me”--\n“Brings danger night to Beauty-Maids”\n“Fear me not O joy of mine!”\n\n“Trust me dear thy fear is vain\nAway with terror groundless!\nTime thou losest precious\nFear not O my darling!”\n\n“Mount my steed; with thee I will\nTo distant regions gallop;\nBlest with me be thou shalt\nHeaven with mate is everywhere.”\n\nAnd the maid? Over she bends\nHer fear is overcome\nBashfully to ride consents\nAnd the Cossak happy is.\n\nOff they dart away they fly;\nAre loving one another.\nFaithful he for two brief weeks\nForsook her on the third.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "death-thoughts": { - "title": "“Death-Thoughts”", - "body": "Whether I roam along the noisy streets\nWhether I enter the peopled temple\nWhether I sit by thoughtless youth\nHaunt my thoughts me everywhere.\n\nI say Swiftly go the years by:\nHowever great our number now\nMust all descend the eternal vaults--\nAlready struck has some one’s hour.\n\nAnd if I gaze upon the lonely oak\nI think: the patriarch of the woods\nWill survive my passing age\nAs he survived my father’s age.\n\nAnd if a tender babe I fondle\nAlready I mutter Fare thee well!\nI yield my place to thee. For me\n’T is time to decay to bloom for thee\n\nEvery year thus every day\nWith death my thought I join\nOf coming death the day\nI seek among them to divine.\n\nWhere will Fortune send me death?\nIn battle? In wanderings or on the waves\nOr shall the valley neighboring\nReceive my chilled dust?\n\nBut tho’ the unfeeling body\nCan everywhere alike decay\nStill I my birthland nigh\nWould have my body lie.\n\nLet near the entrance to my grave\nCheerful youth be in play engaged\nAnd let indifferent creation\nWith beauty shine there eternally.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "despair": { - "title": "“Despair”", - "body": "Dear my friend we are now parted\nMy soul’s asleep; I grieve in silence.\nGleams the day behind the mountain blue\nOr rises the night with moon autumnal--\nStill thee I seek my far off friend\nThee alone remember I everywhere\nThee alone in restless sleep I see.\nPauses my mind unwittingly thee I call;\nListens mine ear then thy voice I hear.\n\nAnd thou my lyre my despair dost share\nOf sick my soul companion thou!\nHollow is and sad the sound of thy string\nGrief’s sound alone hast not forgot …\nFaithful lyre with me grieve thou!\nLet thine easy note and careless\nSing of love mine and despair\nAnd while listening to thy singing\nMay thoughtfully the maidens sigh!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "devils": { - "title": "“Devils”", - "body": "Storm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;\nFlying snow is set alight\nBy the moon whose form they cover;\nBlurred the heavens, blurred the night.\nOn and on our coach advances,\nLittle bell goes din-din-din …\nRound are vast, unknown expanses;\nTerror, terror is within.\n\n--Faster, coachman! “Can’t, sir, sorry:\nHorses, sir, are nearly dead.\nI am blinded, all is blurry,\nAll snowed up; can’t see ahead.\nSir, I tell you on the level:\nWe have strayed, we’ve lost the trail.\nWhat can WE do, when a devil\nDrives us, whirls us round the vale?”\n\n“There, look, there he’s playing, jolly!\nHuffing, puffing in my course;\nThere, you see, into the gully\nPushing the hysteric horse;\nNow in front of me his figure\nLooms up as a queer mile-mark--\nComing closer, growing bigger,\nSparking, melting in the dark.”\n\nStorm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;\nFlying snow is set alight\nBy the moon whose form they cover;\nBlurred the heavens, blurred the night.\nWe can’t whirl so any longer!\nSuddenly, the bell has ceased,\nHorses halted … --Hey, what’s wrong there?\n“Who can tell!--a stump? a beast? …”\n\nBlizzard’s raging, blizzard’s crying,\nHorses panting, seized by fear;\nFar away his shape is flying;\nStill in haze the eyeballs glare;\nHorses pull us back in motion,\nLittle bell goes din-din-din …\nI behold a strange commotion:\nEvil spirits gather in--\n\nSundry, ugly devils, whirling\nIn the moonlight’s milky haze:\nSwaying, flittering and swirling\nLike the leaves in autumn days …\nWhat a crowd! Where are they carried?\nWhat’s the plaintive song I hear?\nIs a goblin being buried,\nOr a sorceress married there?\n\nStorm-clouds hurtle, storm-clouds hover;\nFlying snow is set alight\nBy the moon whose form they cover;\nBlurred the heavens, blurred the night.\nSwarms of devils come to rally,\nHurtle in the boundless height;\nHowling fills the whitening valley,\nPlaintive screeching rends my heart …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-dream": { - "title": "“The Dream”", - "body": "Not long ago, in a charming dream,\nI saw myself--a king with crown’s treasure;\nI was in love with you, it seemed,\nAnd heart was beating with a pleasure.\nI sang my passion’s song by your enchanting knees.\nWhy, dreams, you didn’t prolong my happiness forever?\nBut gods deprived me not of whole their favor:\nI only lost the kingdom of my dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-drowned-man": { - "title": "“The Drowned Man”", - "body": "Children running into izba,\nCalling father, dripping sweat:\n“Daddy, daddy! come--there is a\nDeadman caught inside our net.”\n“Fancy, fancy fabrication …”\nGrumbled off their weary Pa,\n“Have these imps imagination!\nDeadman, really! ya-ha-ha …”\n\n“Well … the court may come to bother--\nWhat’ll I say before the judge?\nHey you brats, go have your mother\nBring my coat; I better trudge …\nShow me, where?”--“Right there, Dad, farther!”\nOn the sand where netting ropes\nLay spread out, the peasant father\nSaw the veritable corpse.\n\nBadly mangled, ugly, frightening,\nBlue and swollen on each side …\nHas he fished in storm and lightning,\nOr committed suicide?\nCould this be a careless drunkard,\nOr a mermaid-seeking monk,\nOr a merchandizer, conquered\nBy some bandits, robbed and sunk?\n\nTo the peasant, what’s it matter!\nQuick: he grabs the dead man’s hair,\nDrags his body to the water,\nLooks around: nobody’s there:\nGood … relieved of the concern he\nShoves his paddle at a loss,\nWhile the stiff resumes his journey\nDown the stream for grave and cross.\n\nLong the dead man as one living\nRocked on waves amid the foam …\nSurly as he watched him leaving,\nSoon our peasant headed home.\n“Come you pups! let’s go, don’t scatter.\nEach of you will get his bun.\nBut remember: just you chatter--\nAnd I’ll whip you, every one.”\n\nDark and stormy it was turning.\nHigh the river ran in gloom.\nNow the torch has finished burning\nIn the peasant’s smoky room.\nKids asleep, the wife aslumber,\nHe lies listening to the rain …\nBang! he hears a sudden comer\nKnocking on the window-pane.\n\n“What the …”--“Let me in there, master!”\n“Damn, you found the time to roam!\nWell, what is it, your disaster?\nLet you in? It’s dark at home,\nDark and crowded … What a pest you are!\nWhere’d I put you in my cot …”\nSlowly, with a lazy gesture,\nHe lifts up the pane and--what?\n\nThrough the clouds, the moon was showing …\nWell? the naked man was there,\nDown his hair the water flowing,\nWide his eyes, unmoved the stare;\nNumb the dreadful-looking body,\nArms were hanging feeble, thin;\nCrabs and cancers, black and bloody,\nSucked into the swollen skin.\n\nAs the peasant slammed the shutter\n(Recognized his visitant)\nHorror-struck he could but mutter\n“Blast you!” and began to pant.\nHe was shuddering, awful chaos\nAll night through stirred in his brain,\nWhile the knocking shook the house\nBy the gates and at the pane.\n\nPeople tell a dreadful rumor:\nEvery year the peasant, say,\nWaiting in the worst of humor\nFor his visitor that day;\nAs the rainstorm is increasing,\nNightfall brings a hurricane--\nAnd the drowned man knocks, unceasing,\nBy the gates and at the pane.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-drowned": { - "title": "“The Drowned”", - "body": "Into the hut the children run\nIn haste they called their father:\n“Papa papa oh our nets\nOut a corpse have dragged.”\n“Ye lie ye lie ye little devils”\nUpon them father grumbled.\n“I declare those wicked brats!\nCorpse now too have they must!”\n\n“Down will come the court ‘Give answer!’\nAnd for an age no rest from it.\nBut what to do? Heigh wife there\nMy coat give me must get there somehow …\nNow where’s the corpse?”--“Here papa here!”\nAnd in truth along the river\nWhere is spread the moistened net\nUpon the sand is seen the corpse.\n\nDisfigured terribly the corpse is\nIs blue and all is swollen.\nIs it a hapless sorrower\nWho ruined has his sinful soul\nOr by the waves a fisher taken\nOr some fellow drunkard\nOr by robbers stripped perchance\nTrader some unbusinesslike?\n\nTo the peasant what is this?\nAbout he looks and hastens …\nSeizes he the body drowned\nBy the feet to water drags it\nAnd from the shore the winding\nOff he pushes it with oar\nDownward ’gain floats the corpse\nAnd grave and cross still is seeking.\n\nAnd long the dead among the waves\nAs if living swinging floated;\nWith his eyes the peasant him\nHomeward going followed.\n“Ye little dogs now follow me\nEach of you a cake shall have;\nBut look ye out and hold your tongues!\nElse a thrashing shall ye have.”\n\nAt night the wind to blow began\nFull of waves became the river;\nOut the light was already going\nIn the peasant’s smoky hut.\nThe children sleep; the mother slumbers.\nOn the oven husband lies.\nHowls the storm; a sudden knocking\nHe hears of some one at the window.\n\n“Who’s there?”--“Ope the door I say!”\n“Time eno’; what is the matter?\nWherefore comes tramp at night?\nBy the devil art hither brought!\nWherefore with you should I bother?\nCrowded my house and dark is.”\nSo saying he with lazy hand\nOpen throws the window.\n\nRolls the moon from behind the clouds--\nAnd now? A naked man before him stands;\nFrom his beard a stream is flowing\nHis glance is fixed and is open.\nAll about him is frightful dumbness\nAnd his hands are dropped down;\nAnd to the puffed-out swollen body\nBlack crabs are fastened.\n\nThe peasant quickly shuts the window;\nHe recognized his naked guest\nIs terror-struck. “May you burst!”\nOut he whispered and trembled.\nIn great confusion now his thoughts are\nAnd all night he shakes in fever;\nAnd till the morrow still the knocking\n’S heard on the window and at the gates.\n\nReport there was among the people:\nSaying since then every year\nWaiting is the hapless peasant\nFor his guest on the appointed day.\nIn the morning the weather changes\nAnd at night the storm arrives\nAnd the dead man is ever knocking\nBy the window and at the gates.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "Happy who to himself confess\nHis passion dares without terror;\nHappy who in fate uncertain\nBy modest hope is fondled;\nHappy who by foggy moonbeams\nIs led to midnight joyful\nAnd with faithful key who gently\nThe door unlocks of his beloved.\n\nBut for me in sad my life\nNo joy there is of secret pleasure;\nHope’s early flower faded is\nBy struggle withered is life’s flower.\nYouth away flies melancholy\nAnd droop with me life’s roses;\nBut by Love tho’ long forgot\nForget Love’s tears I cannot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "an-elegy": { - "title": "“An Elegy”", - "body": "The senseless years’ extinguished mirth and laughter\nOppress me like some hazy morning-after.\nBut sadness of days past, as alcohol--\nThe more it age, the stronger grip the soul.\nMy course is dull. The future’s troubled ocean\nForebodes me toil, misfortune and commotion.\n\nBut no, my friends, I do not wish to leave;\nI’d rather live, to ponder and to grieve--\nAnd I shall have my share of delectation\nAmid all care, distress and agitation:\nTime and again I’ll savor harmony,\nMelt into tears about some fantasy,\nAnd on my sad decline, to ease affliction,\nMay love yet show her smile of valediction.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-flower": { - "title": "“The Flower”", - "body": "A flower--shrivelled, bare of fragrance,\nForgotten on a page--I see,\nAnd instantly my soul awakens,\nFilled with an aimless reverie:\n\nWhen did it bloom? the last spring? earlier?\nHow long? Where was it plucked? By whom?\nBy foreign hands? or by familiar?\nAnd why put here, as in a tomb?\n\nTo mark a tender meeting by it?\nA parting with a precious one?\nOr just a walk, alone and quiet,\nIn forests’ shade? in meadows’ sun?\n\nIs she alive? Is he still with her?\nWhere is their haven at this hour?\nOr did they both already wither,\nLike this unfathomable flower?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-gypsies": { - "title": "“The Gypsies”", - "body": "Over the wooded banks\nIn the hour of evening quiet\nUnder the tents are song and bustle\nAnd the fires are scattered.\n\nThee I greet O happy race!\nI recognize thy blazes\nI myself at other times\nThese tents would have followed.\n\nWith the early rays to-morrow\nShall disappear your freedom’s trace\nGo you will--but not with you\nLonger go shall the bard of you.\n\nHe alas the changing lodgings\nAnd the pranks of days of yore\nHas forgot for rural comforts\nAnd for the quiet of a home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "home-sickness": { - "title": "“Home-Sickness”", - "body": "Mayhap not long am destined I\nIn exile peaceful to remain\nOf dear days of yore to sigh\nAnd rustic muse in quiet\nWith spirit calm to follow.\n\nBut even far in foreign land\nIn thought forever roam I shall\nAround Trimountain mine:\nBy meadows river by its hills\nBy garden linden nigh the house.\n\nThus when darkens day the clear\nAlone from depths of grave\nSpirit home-longing\nInto the native hall flies\nTo espy the loved ones with tender glance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "i-loved-you": { - "title": "“I Loved You”", - "body": "I loved you, and I probably still do,\nAnd for a while the feeling may remain …\nBut let my love no longer trouble you,\nI do not wish to cause you any pain.\nI loved you; and the hopelessness I knew,\nThe jealousy, the shyness--though in vain--\nMade up a love so tender and so true\nAs may God grant you to be loved again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "imitation": { - "title": "“Imitation”", - "body": "I saw the Death, and she was seating\nBy quiet entrance at my own home,\nI saw the doors were opened in my tomb,\nAnd there, and there my hope was a-flitting\nI’ll die, and traces of my past\nIn days of future will be never sighted,\nLook of my eyes will never be delighted\nBy dear look, in my existence last.\n\nFarewell the somber world, where, precipice above,\nMy gloomy road was a-streaming,\nWhere life for me was never cheering,\nWhere I was loving, having not to love!\nThe dazzling heavens’ azure curtain,\nBeloved hills, the brook’s enchanting dance,\nYou, mourn--the inspiration’s chance,\nYou, peaceful shades of wilderness, uncertain,\nAnd all--farewell, farewell at once.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "in-an-album": { - "title": "“In an Album”", - "body": "The name of me what is it to thee\nDie it shall like the grievous sound\nOf wave playing on distant shore\nAs sound of night in forest dark.\n\nUpon the sheet of memory\nIts traces dead leave it shall\nInscriptions-like of grave-yard\nIn some foreign tongue.\n\nWhat is in it? Long ago forgotten\nIn tumultuous waves and fresh\nTo thy soul not give it shall\nPure memories and tender.\n\nBut on sad days in calmness\nDo pronounce it sadly;\nSay then: I do remember thee--\nOn earth one heart is where yet I live!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "insanity": { - "title": "“Insanity”", - "body": "God grant I grow not insane:\nNo better the stick and beggar’s bag:\nNo better toil and hunger bear.\n\nNot that I upon my reason\nSuch value place; not that I\nWould fain not lose it.\n\nIf freedom to me they would leave\nHow I would lasciviously\n For the gloomy forest rush!\n\nIn hot delirium I would sing\nAnd unconscious would remain\nWith ravings wondrous and chaotic.\n\nAnd listen would I to the waves\nAnd gaze I would full of bliss\n Into the empty heavens.\n\nAnd free and strong then would I be\nLike a storm the fields updigging\n Forest-trees uprooting.\n\nBut here’s the trouble: if crazy once\nA fright thou art like pestilence\n And locked up now shalt thou be.\n\nTo a chain thee fool they’ll fasten\nAnd through the gate a circus beast\nThee to nettle the people come.\n\nAnd at night not hear shall I\nClear the voice of nightingale\n Nor the forest’s hollow sound\n\nBut cries alone of companions mine\nAnd the scolding guards of night\n And a whizzing of chains a ringing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "inspiring-love": { - "title": "“Inspiring Love”", - "body": "The moment wondrous I remember\nThou before me didst appear\nLike a flashing apparition\nLike a spirit of beauty pure.\n\n’Mid sorrows of hopeless grief\n’Mid tumults of noiseful bustle\nRang long to me thy tender voice\nCame dreams to me of thy lovely features.\n\nWent by the years. The storm’s rebellious rush\nThe former dreams had scattered\nAnd I forgot thy tender voice\nI forgot thy heavenly features.\n\nIn the desert in prison’s darkness\nQuietly my days were dragging;\nNo reverence nor inspiration\nNor tears nor life nor love.\n\nBut at last awakes my soul:\nAnd again didst thou appear:\nLike a flashing apparition\nLike a spirit of beauty pure.\n\nAnd enraptured beats my heart\nAnd risen are for it again\nBoth reverence and inspiration\nAnd life and tears and love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "invocation": { - "title": "“Invocation”", - "body": "Oh if true it is that by night\nWhen resting are the living\nAnd from the sky the rays of moon\nAlong the stones of church-yard glide;\nO if true it is that emptied then\nAre the quiet graves\nI call thy shade I wait my Lila\nCome hither come hither my friend to me!\n\nAppear O shade of my beloved\nAs thou before our parting wert:\nPale cold like a wintry day\nDisfigured by thy struggle of death\nCome like unto a distant star\nOr like a fearful apparition\n’T is all the same: Come hither come hither\n\nAnd I call thee not in order\nTo reproach him whose wickedness\nMy friend hath slain.\nNor to fathom the grave’s mysteries\nNor because at times I’m worn\nWith gnawing doubt … but I sadly\nWish to say that still I love thee\nThat wholly thine I am: hither come O hither!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-invocation": { - "title": "“An Invocation”", - "body": "O if it’s true that in the night,\nWhen rest the living in their havens\nAnd liquid rays of lunar light\nGlide down on tombstones from the heavens,\nO if it’s true that still and bare\nAre then the graves until aurora--\nI call the shade, I wait for Laura:\nTo me, my friend, appear, appear!\n\nBeloved shadow, come to me\nAs at our parting--wintry, ashen\nIn your last minutes’ agony;\nEmerge in any form or fashion:\nA distant star across the sphere,\nA gentle sound, a puff of air or\nThe most appalling wraith of terror,\nI care not how: appear, appear! …\n\nI call you--not to speak my scorn\nOf people whose ill-fated malice\nHas killed my friend, and not to learn\nThe secrets of the nether-palace,\nAnd not because a doubt may tear\nMy heart at times … but as I suffer,\nI want to say that still I love her,\nThat still I’m yours: appear, appear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "loves-debt": { - "title": "“Love’s Debt”", - "body": "For the shores of thy distant home\nThou hast forsaken the foreign land;\nIn a memorable sad hour\nI before thee cried long.\nTho’ cold my hands were growing\nThee back to hold they tried;\nAnd begged of thee my parting groan\nThe gnawing weariness not to break.\n\nBut from my bitter kisses thou\nThy lips away hast torn;\nFrom the land of exile dreary\nCalling me to another land.\nThou saidst: on the day of meeting\nBeneath a sky forever blue\nOlives’ shade beneath love’s kisses\nAgain my friend we shall unite.\n\nBut where alas! the vaults of sky\nShining are with glimmer blue\nWhere ’neath the rocks the waters slumber--\nWith last sleep art sleeping thou.\nAnd beauty thine and sufferings\nIn the urnal grave have disappeared--\nBut the kiss of meeting is also gone …\nBut still I wait: thou art my debtor! …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "morpheus": { - "title": "“Morpheus”", - "body": "Oh, Morpheus, give me joy till morning\nFor my forever painful love:\nJust blow out candles’ burning\nAnd let my dreams in blessing move.\nLet from my soul disappear\nThe separation’s sharp rebuke!\nAnd let me see that dear look,\nAnd let me hear voice that dear.\nAnd when will vanish dark of night\nAnd you will free my eyes at leaving,\nOh, if my heart would have a right\nTo lose its love till dark of evening!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "my-demon": { - "title": "“My Demon”", - "body": "In those days when new to me were\nOf existence all impressions:--\nThe maiden’s glances the forests’ whisper\nThe song of nightingale at night;\nWhen the sentiments elevated\nOf Freedom glory and of love\nAnd of art the inspiration\nStirred deeply so my blood:--\nMy hopeful hours and joyful\nWith melancholy sudden dark’ning\nA certain evil spirit then\nBegan in secret me to visit.\nGrievous were our meetings\nHis smile and his wonderful glance\nHis speeches these so stinging\nCold poison poured into my soul.\nProvidence with slander\nInexhaustible he tempted;\nOf Beauty as a dream he spake\nAnd inspiration he despised;\nNor love nor freedom trusted he\nOn life with scorn he looked--\nAnd nought in all nature\nTo bless he ever wished.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "my-muse": { - "title": "“My Muse”", - "body": "In the days of my youth she was fond of me\nAnd the seven-stemmed flute she handed me.\nTo me with smile she listened; and already gently\nAlong the openings echoing of the woods\nWas playing I with fingers tender:\nBoth hymns solemn god-inspired\nAnd peaceful song of Phrygian shepherd.\nFrom morn till night in oak’s dumb shadow\nTo the strange maid’s teaching intent I listened;\nAnd with sparing reward me gladdening\nTossing back her curls from her forehead dear\nFrom my hands the flute herself she took.\nNow filled the wood was with breath divine\nAnd the heart with holy enchantment filled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-name": { - "title": "“The Name”", - "body": "What is my name to you? ’T will die:\na wave that has but rolled to reach\nwith a lone splash a distant beach;\nor in the timbered night a cry …\n\n’T will leave a lifeless trace among\nnames on your tablets: the design\nof an entangled gravestone line\nin an unfathomable tongue.\n\nWhat is it then? A long-dead past,\nlost in the rush of madder dreams,\nupon your soul it will not cast\nMnemosyne’s pure tender beams.\n\nBut if some sorrow comes to you,\nutter my name with sighs, and tell\nthe silence: “Memory is true--\nthere beats a heart wherein I dwell.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-nightingale": { - "title": "“The Nightingale”", - "body": "In silent gardens in the spring in the darkness of the night\nSings above the rose from the east the nightingale;\nBut dear rose neither feeling has nor listens it\nBut under its lover’s hymn waveth it and slumbers.\n\nDost thou not sing thus to beauty cold?\nReflect O bard whither art thou striding?\nShe neither listens nor the bard she feels.\nThou gazest? Bloom she does; thou callest?--\n Answer none she gives!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-night": { - "title": "“The Night”", - "body": "My voice that is for you the languid one, and gentle,\nDisturbs the velvet of the dark night’s mantle,\nBy my bedside, a candle, my sad guard,\nBurns, and my poems ripple and merge in flood--\nAnd run the streams of love, run, full of you alone,\nAnd in the dark, your eyes shine like the precious stones,\nAnd smile to me, and hear I the voice:\nMy friend, my sweetest friend … I love … I’m yours … I’m yours!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-north-wind": { - "title": "“The North Wind”", - "body": "Why O wrathful north wind thou\nThe marshy shrub dost downward bend?\nWhy thus in the distant sky-vault\nWrathfully the cloud dost chase?\n\nThe black clouds but recently\nHad spread the whole heavens o’er\nThe oak on hill top but recently\nIn beauty wondrous itself was priding.\n\nThou hast risen and up hast played\nWith terror resounded and with splendor--\nAnd away are driven the stormy clouds;\nDown is hurled the mighty oak.\n\nLet now then the sun’s clear face\nWith joy henceforth ever shine\nWith the clouds now the zephyr play\nAnd the bush in quiet sway.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "o-sing-fair-lady-when-with-me": { - "title": "“O Sing, Fair Lady, when with Me”", - "body": "O sing, fair lady, when with me\nSad songs of Georgia no more:\nThey bring into my memory\nAnother life, a distant shore.\n\nYour beautiful, your cruel tune\nBrings to my memory, alas,\nThe steppe, the night--and with the moon\nLines of a far, unhappy lass.\n\nForgetting at the sight of you\nThat shadow fateful, shadow dear,\nI hear you singing--and anew\nI picture it before me, here.\n\nO sing, fair lady, when with me\nSad songs of Georgia no more:\nThey bring into my memory\nAnother life, a distant shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-outcast": { - "title": "“The Outcast”", - "body": "On a rainy autumn evening\nInto desert places went a maid;\nAnd the secret fruit of unhappy love\nIn her trembling hands she held.\nAll was still: the hills and the woods\nAsleep in the darkness of the night.\nAnd her searching glances\nIn terror about she cast.\n\nAnd on this babe the innocent\nHer glance she paused with a sigh:\nAsleep thou art my child my grief.\nThou knowest not my sadness.\nThine eyes will ope and tho’ with longing\nTo my breast shalt no more cling.\nNo kiss for thee to-morrow\nFrom thine unhappy mother.\n\nBeckon in vain for her thou wilt\nMy everlasting shame my guilt!\nMe forget thou shalt for aye\nBut thee forget shall not I.\nShelter thou shalt receive from strangers\nWho’ll say: Thou art none of ours!\nThou wilt ask Where are my parents?\nBut for thee no kin is found!\n\nHapless one! With heart filled with sorrow\nLonely amid thy mates\nThy spirit sullen to the end\nThou shalt behold fondling mothers.\nA lonely wanderer everywhere\nCursing thy fate at all times\nThou the bitter reproach shalt hear …\nForgive me oh forgive me then!\n\nAsleep! let me then O hapless one\nTo my bosom press thee once for all.\nA law unjust and terrible\nThee and me to sorrow dooms.\nWhile the years have not yet chased\nThe guiltless joy of thy days\nSleep my darling let no griefs bitter\nMar thy childhood’s quiet life!\n\nBut lo! behind the woods near by\nThe moon brings a hut to light.\nForlorn pale and trembling\nTo the doors nigh she came.\nShe stooped and gently laid she down\nThe babe on the threshold strange.\nIn terror away her eyes she turned\nAnd in the dark night disappeared.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-presentiment": { - "title": "“A Presentiment”", - "body": "The clouds again are o’er me\nHave gathered in the stillness;\nAgain me with misfortune\nEnvious fate now threatens.\nWill I keep my defiance?\nWill I bring against her\nThe firmness and patience\nOf my youthful pride?\n\nWearied by a stormy life\nI await the storm fretless\nPerhaps once more safe again\nA harbor shall I find …\nBut I feel the parting nigh\nUnavoidable fearful hour\nTo press thy hand for the last time\nI haste to thee my angel.\n\nAngel gentle angel calm\nGently tell me: fare thee well.\nBe thou grieved: thy tender gaze\nEither drop or to me raise.\nThe memory of thee now shall\nTo my soul replace\nThe strength the pride and the hope\nThe daring of my former days!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-prophet": { - "title": "“The Prophet”", - "body": "Tormented by the thirst for the spirit\nI was dragging myself in a sombre desert\nAnd a six-winged seraph appeared\nUnto me on the parting of the roads.\nWith fingers as light as a dream\nMine eyes he touched:\nAnd mine eyes opened wise\nLike the eyes of a frightened eagle;\nHe touched mine ears\nAnd they filled with din and ringing.\nAnd I heard the trembling of the heavens\nAnd the flight of the angel’s wings\nAnd the creeping of the polyps in the sea\nAnd the growth of the vine in the valley.\nAnd he took hold of my lips\nAnd out he tore my sinful tongue\nWith its empty and false speech.\nAnd the fang of the wise serpent\nBetween my terrified lips he placed\nWith bloody hand.\nAnd ope he cut with sword my breast\nAnd out he took my trembling heart\nAnd a coal with flaming blaze\nInto the opened breast he shoved.\nLike a corpse I lay in the desert.\nAnd the voice of God unto me called:\nArise O prophet and listen and guide.\nBe thou filled with my will\nAnd going over land and sea\nFire with the word the hearts of men!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "regret": { - "title": "“Regret”", - "body": "Not ye regret I of spring my years\nIn dreams gone by of hopeless love;\nNot ye regret I O mysteries of nights.\nBy songstress passionate celebrated;\n\nNot ye regret I O my faithless friends\nNor crowns of feasts nor cups of circle\nNor ye regret I O traitresses young--\nTo pleasures melancholy stranger am I.\n\nBut where are ye O moments tender\nOf young my hopes of heartfelt peace?\nThe former heat and grace of inspiration?\nCome again O ye of spring my years!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "remembrance": { - "title": "“Remembrance”", - "body": "When the loud day for men who sow and reap\nGrows still, and on the silence of the town\nThe unsubstantial veils of night and sleep,\nThe meed of the day’s labour, settle down,\nThen for me in the stillness of the night\nThe wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,\nAnd in the idle darkness comes the bite\nOf all the burning serpents of remorse;\nDreams seethe; and fretful infelicities\nAre swarming in my over-burdened soul,\nAnd Memory before my wakeful eyes\nWith noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.\nThen, as with loathing I peruse the years,\nI tremble, and I curse my natal day,\nWail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,\nBut cannot wash the woeful script away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "reminiscence": { - "title": "“Reminiscence”", - "body": "When noisy day to mortals quiet grows\nAnd upon the city’s silent walls\nNight’s shadow half-transparent lies\nAnd Sleep of daily toils reward--\nThen for me are dragging in the silence\nOf wearying wakefulness the hours.\nIn the sloth of night more scorching burn\nMy heart’s serpents’ gnawing fangs;\nBoil my thoughts; my soul with grief oppressed\nFull of reveries sad is thronged.\nBefore me memory in silence\nIts lengthy roll unfolds.\nAnd with disgust my life I reading\nTremble I and curse it.\nBitterly I moan and bitterly my tears I shed\nBut wash away the lines of grief I cannot.\n\nIn laziness in senseless feasts\nIn the craziness of ruinous license\nIn thraldom poverty and homeless deserts\nMy wasted years there I behold.\nOf friends again I hear the treacherous greeting\nGames amid of love and wine.\nTo the heart again insults brings\nIrrepressible the cold world.\nNo joy for me--and calmly before me\nOf visions young two now rise:\nTwo tender shades two angels me\nGiven by fate in the days of yore.\nBut both have wings and flaming swords\nAnd they watch-- … and both are vengeant\nAnd both to me speak with death tongue\nOf Eternity’s mysteries and of the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "resurrection": { - "title": "“Resurrection”", - "body": "With sleepy brush the barbarian artist\nThe master’s painting blackens;\nAnd thoughtlessly his wicked drawing\nOver it he is daubing.\n\nBut in years the foreign colors\nPeal off an aged layer:\nThe work of genius is ’gain before us\nWith former beauty out it comes.\n\nThus my failings vanish too\nFrom my wearied soul\nAnd again within it visions rise\nOf my early purer days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-roussalka": { - "title": "“The Roussalka”", - "body": "By a lake once in forest darkness\nA monk his soul was saving\nEver in stern occupation\nOf prayer fast and labor.\nAlready with slackened shovel\nThe aged man his grave was digging\nAnd only for death in peace and quiet\nTo his saintly patrons prayed he.\n\nOnce in summer at the threshold\nOf his drooping little hut\nTo God was praying the hermit.\nDarker grew the forest.\nOver the lake was rising fog.\nAnd in the clouds the reddish moon\nWas gently rolling along the sky.\nUpon the waters the hermit gazed.\n\nHe looks and fears and knows not why\nHimself he cannot understand …\nNow he sees: the waves are seething\nAnd suddenly again are quiet …\n\nSuddenly … as light as shade of night\nAs white as early snow of hills\nOut cometh a woman naked\nAnd on the shore herself she seats.\n\nUpon the aged monk she gazes\nAnd she combs her moistened tresses--\nThe holy monk with terror trembles\nUpon her charms still he gazes;\nWith her hand to him she beckons\nAnd her head she’s quickly nodding …\nAnd suddenly like a falling star\nThe dreamy wave she vanished under.\n\nThe sober monk all night he slept not\nAnd all day he prayed not\nThe shadow unwittingly before him\nOf the wondrous maid he ever sees.\nAgain the forest is clad in darkness\nAlong the clouds the moon is sailing.\nAgain the maid above the water\nPale and splendent there she sits.\n\nGaze her eyes nods her head\nThrows kisses and she’s sporting\nThe wave she sprinkles and she frolics;\nChild-like weeping now and laughing;\n\nSobbing tender--the monk she calls:\nMonk O monk to me to me!\nInto the waves transparent she dashes;\nAnd again is all in silence deep.\n\nBut on the third day the roused hermit\nThe enchanted shores nigh sitting was\nAnd the beautiful maid he awaited.\nUpon the trees were falling shades …\nNight at last by dawn was chased--\nAnd nowhere monk could be found\nHis beard alone the gray one\nIn the water the boys could see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-singer": { - "title": "“The Singer”", - "body": "Did you attend? He sang by grove ripe--\nThe bard of love, the singer of his mourning.\nWhen fields were silent by the early morning,\nTo sad and simple sounds of a pipe\nDid you attend?\n\nDid you behold in dark of forest leaf\nThe bard of love, the singer of his sadness?\nThe trace of tears, the smile, the utter paleness,\nThe quiet look, full of eternal grief,\nDid you behold?\n\nThen did you sigh when hearing how cries\nThe bard of love, the singer of his dole?\nWhen in the woods you saw the young man, sole,\nAnd met the look of his extinguished eyes,\nThen did you sigh?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "solitude": { - "title": "“Solitude”", - "body": "He’s blessed, who lives in peace, that’s distant\nFrom the ignorant fobs with calls,\nWho can provide his every instance\nWith dreams, or labors, or recalls;\nTo whom the fate sends friends in score,\nWho hides himself by Savior’s back\nFrom bashful fools, which lull and bore,\nAnd from the impudent ones, which wake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "spanish-love-song": { - "title": "“Spanish Love-Song”", - "body": " Evening Zephyr\n Waves the ether.\n Murmurs\n Rushes\n The Guadalquivir.\n\nNow the golden moon has risen\nQuiet … Tshoo … guitar’s now heard …\nNow the Spanish girl young\nO’er the balcony has leaned.\n\n Evening Zephyr\n Waves the ether.\n Murmurs\n Rushes\n The Guadalquivir.\n\nDrop thy mantle angel gentle\nAnd appear as fair as day!\nThro’ the iron balustrade\nPut thy wondrous tender foot!\n\n Evening Zephyr\n Waves the ether.\n Murmurs\n Rushes\n The Guadalquivir.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-talisman": { - "title": "“The Talisman”", - "body": "Where the sea forever dances\nOver lonely cliff and dune,\nWhere sweet twilight’s vapor glances\nIn a warmer-glowing moon,\nWhere with the seraglio’s graces\nDaylong toys the Mussulman,\nAn enchantress ’mid embraces\nHanded me a talisman.\n\n’Mid embraces I was bidden:\n“Guard this talisman of mine:\nIn it secret power is hidden!\nLove himself has made it thine.\nNeither death nor ills nor aging,\nMy beloved, does it ban,\nNor in gales and tempest raging\nCan avail my talisman.”\n\n“Never will it help thee gather\nTreasures of the Orient coast,\nNeither to thy harness tether\nCaptives of the Prophet’s host;\nNor in sadness will it lead thee\nTo a friendly bosom, nor\nFrom this alien southland speed thee\nTo the native northern shore.”\n\n“But whenever eyes designing\nCast on thee a sudden spell,\nIn the darkness lips entwining\nLove thee not, but kiss too well:\nShield thee, love, from evil preying,\nFrom new heart-wounds--that it can,\nFrom forgetting, from betraying\nGuards thee this my talisman.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "tempest": { - "title": "“Tempest”", - "body": "You saw perched on a cliff a maid,\nHer raiment white above the breakers,\nWhen the mad sea reared up and played\nIts whips of spray on coastal acres\nAnd now and then the lightnings flush,\nAnd purple gleams upon her hover,\nAnd fluttering up in swirling rush,\nThe wind rides in her airy cover?\nFair is the sea in gales arrayed,\nThe heavens drained of blue and flashing,\nBut fairer on her cliff the maid\nThan storms and skies and breakers crashing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-upas-tree": { - "title": "“The Upas Tree”", - "body": "Deep in the desert’s misery,\nfar in the fury of the sand,\nthere stands the awesome Upas Tree\nlone watchman of a lifeless land.\n\nThe wilderness, a world of thirst,\nin wrath engendered it and filled\nits every root, every accursed\ngrey leafstalk with a sap that killed.\n\nDissolving in the midday sun\nthe poison oozes through its bark,\nand freezing when the day is done\ngleams thick and gem-like in the dark.\n\nNo bird flies near, no tiger creeps;\nalone the whirlwind, wild and black,\nassails the tree of death and sweeps\naway with death upon its back.\n\nAnd though some roving cloud may stain\nwith glancing drops those leaden leaves,\nthe dripping of a poisoned rain\nis all the burning sand receives.\n\nBut man sent man with one proud look\ntowards the tree, and he was gone,\nthe humble one, and there he took\nthe poison and returned at dawn.\n\nHe brought the deadly gum; with it\nhe brought some leaves, a withered bough,\nwhile rivulets of icy sweat\nran slowly down his livid brow.\n\nHe came, he fell upon a mat,\nand reaping a poor slave’s reward,\ndied near the painted hut where sat\nhis now unconquerable lord.\n\nThe king, he soaked his arrows true\nin poison, and beyond the plains\ndispatched those messengers and slew\nhis neighbors in their own domains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-water-nymph": { - "title": "“The Water-Nymph”", - "body": "In lakeside leafy groves, a friar\nEscaped all worries; there he passed\nHis summer days in constant prayer,\nDeep studies and eternal fast.\nAlready with a humble shovel\nThe elder dug himself a grave--\nAs, calling saints to bless his hovel,\nDeath--nothing other--did he crave.\n\nSo once, upon a falling night, he\nWas bowing by his wilted shack\nWith meekest prayer to the Almighty.\nThe grove was turning slowly black;\nAbove the lake a mist was lifting;\nThrough milky clouds across the sky\nThe ruddy moon was softly drifting,\nWhen water drew the friar’s eye …\n\nHe’s looking puzzled, full of trouble,\nOf fear he cannot quite explain,\nHe sees the waves begin to bubble\nAnd suddenly grow calm again.\nThen--white as first snow in the highlands,\nLight-footed as nocturnal shade,\nThere comes ashore, and sits in silence\nUpon the bank, a naked maid.\n\nShe eyes the monk and brushes gently\nHer hair, and water off her arms.\nHe shakes with fear and looks intently\nAt her, and at her lovely charms.\nWith eager hand she waves and beckons,\nNods quickly, smiles as from afar\nAnd shoots, within two flashing seconds,\nInto still water like a star.\n\nThe glum old man slept not an instant;\nAll day, not even once he prayed:\nBefore his eyes still hung and glistened\nThe wondrous, the relentless shade …\nThe grove puts on its gown of nightfall;\nThe moon walks on the cloudy floor;\nAnd there’s the maiden--pale, delightful,\nReclining on the spellbound shore.\n\nShe looks at him, her hair she brushes,\nBlows airy kisses, gestures wild,\nPlays with the waves--caresses, splashes--\nNow laughs, now whimpers like a child,\nMoans tenderly, calls louder, louder …\n“Come, monk, come, monk! To me, to me! …”\nThen--disappears in limpid water,\nAnd all is silent instantly …\n\nOn the third day the zealous hermit\nWas sitting by the shore, in love,\nAwaiting the delightful mermaid,\nAs shade was covering the grove …\nDark ceded to the sun’s emergence;\nOur monk had wholly disappeared--\nBefore a crowd of local urchins,\nWhile fishing, found his hoary beard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "what-does-my-name-mean-to-you": { - "title": "“What Does My Name Mean to You?”", - "body": "What means my name to you? … T’will die\nAs does the melancholy murmur\nOf distant waves or, of a summer,\nThe forest’s hushed nocturnal sigh.\n\nFound on a fading album page,\nDim will it seem and enigmatic,\nLike words traced on a tomb, a relic\nOf some long dead and vanished age.\n\nWhat’s in my name? … Long since forgot,\nErased by new, tempestuous passion,\nof tenderness ’twill leave you not\nThe lingering and sweet impression.\n\nBut in an hour of agony,\nPray, speak it, and recall my image,\nAnd say, “He still remembers me,\nHis heart alone still pays me homage.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "winter-evening": { - "title": "“Winter Evening”", - "body": "The storm the sky with darkness covers\nThe snowy whirlings twisting;\nLike a beast wild now is howling\nLike an infant now is crying;\nOver the aged roof now sudden\nIn the straw it rustling is;\nLike a traveller now belated\nFor entrance at our window knocking.\n\nWith melancholy and with darkness\nOur little aged hut is filled\nWhy in silence then thou sittest\nBy the window wife old mine?\nOr by the howling storms art\nWearied thou O companion mine?\nOr perchance art slumbering\nBy the rustling spindle soothed?\n\nLet us drink O kindly friend\nOf my poverty and youth\nAway with grief--where is the cup?\nJoy it shall bring to our heart.\n\nA song now sing me how the bird\nBeyond the sea in quiet lived;\nA song now sing me how the maiden\nIn the morning for water went.\n\nThe storm the sky with darkness covers\nThe snowy whirlings twisting;\nLike a beast wild now is howling\nLike an infant now is crying.\nLet us drink O kindly friend\nOf my poverty and youth\nAway with grief--where is the cup\nJoy it shall bring to our heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "winter-morning": { - "title": "“Winter Morning”", - "body": "Frost and sun--the day is wondrous!\nThou still art slumbering charming friend.\n’Tis time O Beauty to awaken:\nOpe thine eyes now in sweetness closed\nTo meet the Northern Dawn of Morning\nThyself a north-star do thou appear!\n\nLast night remember the storm scolded\nAnd darkness floated in the clouded sky;\nLike a yellow clouded spot\nThro’ the clouds the moon was gleaming--\nAnd melancholy thou wert sitting--\nBut now … thro’ the window cast a look:\n\nStretched beneath the heavens blue\nCarpet-like magnificent\nIn the sun the snow is sparkling;\nDark alone is the wood transparent\nAnd thro’ the hoar gleams green the fir\nAnd under the ice the rivulet sparkles.\n\nEntire is lighted with diamond splendor\nThy chamber … with merry crackle\nThe wood is crackling in the oven.\nTo meditation invites the sofa.\nBut know you? In the sleigh not order why\nThe brownish mare to harness?\n\nOver the morning snow we gliding\nTrust we shall my friend ourselves\nTo the speed of impatient steed;\nVisit we shall the fields forsaken\nThe woods dense but recently\nAnd the banks so dear to me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-winter-road": { - "title": "“The Winter-Road”", - "body": "Breaking thro’ the waving fogs\nForth the moon is coming\nAnd on the gloomy acres\nShe gloomy light is shedding.\n\nAlong the wintry cheerless road\nFlies the rapid troika\nThe little bell monotonous\nWearily is tinkling.\n\nA certain homefulness is heard\nIn the driver’s lengthy lays:\nNow light-hearted carelessness\nNow low-spirited sadness.\n\nNeither light nor a dark hut …\nOnly snow and silence …\nStriped mileposts are alone\nThe travellers who meet us.\n\nSad I feel and weary … On the morrow Nina\nTo my beloved I returning\nForget myself shall by the fire\nAnd scarce eno’ at her shall gaze.\n\nLoudly of my watch the spring\nIts measured circle is completing\nAnd us the parter of the wearied\nMidnight not shall separate.\n\nSad I’m Nina; my journey’s weary;\nSlumbering now my driver is quiet\nThe little bell is monotonous\nAnd darkened now is the moon’s face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-wish": { - "title": "“The Wish”", - "body": "I shed my tears; my tears--my consolation;\nAnd I am silent; my murmur is dead,\nMy soul, sunk in a depression’s shade,\nHides in its depths the bitter exultation.\nI don’t deplore my passing dream of life--\nVanish in dark, the empty apparition!\nI care only for my love’s infliction,\nAnd let me die, but only die in love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - }, - "the-wondrous-moment-of-our-meeting": { - "title": "“The Wondrous Moment of Our Meeting”", - "body": "The wondrous moment of our meeting …\nStill I remember you appear\nBefore me like a vision fleeting,\nA beauty’s angel pure and clear.\n\nIn hopeless ennui surrounding\nThe worldly bustle, to my ear\nFor long your tender voice kept sounding,\nFor long in dreams came features dear.\n\nTime passed. Unruly storms confounded\nOld dreams, and I from year to year\nForgot how tender you had sounded,\nYour heavenly features once so dear.\n\nMy backwoods days dragged slow and quiet--\nDull fence around, dark vault above--\nDevoid of God and uninspired,\nDevoid of tears, of fire, of love.\n\nSleep from my soul began retreating,\nAnd here you once again appear\nBefore me like a vision fleeting,\nA beauty’s angel pure and clear.\n\nIn ecstasy my heart is beating,\nOld joys for it anew revive;\nInspired and God-filled, it is greeting\nThe fire, and tears, and love alive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Ivan Panin" - } - } - } - }, - "francis-quarles": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Francis Quarles", - "birth": { - "year": 1592 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1644 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Quarles", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "delight-in-god-only": { - "title": "“Delight In God Only”", - "body": "I love (and have some cause to love) the earth;\nShe is my Maker’s creature, therefore good:\nShe is my mother, for she gave me birth;\nShe is my tender nurse; she gives me food;\nBut what’s a creature, Lord, compared with Thee?\nOr what’s my mother, or my nurse to me?\n\nI love the air; her dainty fruits refresh\nMy drooping soul, and to new sweets invite me;\nHer shrill-mouth’d choirs sustain me with their flesh.\nAnd with their polyphonian notes delight me:\nBut what’s the air, or all the sweets that she\nCan bless my soul withal, compared to Thee?\n\nI love the sea; she is my fellow-creature,\nMy careful purveyor; she provides me store;\nShe walls me round; she makes my diet greater;\nShe wafts my treasure from a foreign shore:\nBut, Lord of oceans, when compared with Thee,\nWhat is the ocean, or her wealth to me?\n\nTo heaven’s high city I direct my journey,\nWhose spangled suburbs entertain mine eye;\nMine eye, by contemplation’s great attorney,\nTranscends the crystal pavement of the sky.\nBut what is heaven, great God, compared to Thee?\nWithout Thy presence, heaven’s no heaven to me.\n\nWithout Thy presence, earth gives no reflection:\nWithout Thy presence, sea affords no treasure;\nWithout Thy presence, air’s a rank infection;\nWithout Thy presence, heaven itself no pleasure:\nIf not possess’d, if not enjoyed in Thee,\nWhat’s earth, or sea, or air, or heaven to me?\n\nThe highest honours that the world can boast,\nAre subjects far too low for my desire;\nIts brightest gleams of glory are, at most,\nBut dying sparkles of Thy living fire:\nThe brightest flames that earth can kindle, be\nBut nightly glowworms, if compared to Thee.\n\nWithout Thy presence, wealth is bags of cares;\nWisdom, but folly; joy, disquiet, sadness;\nFriendship is treason, and delights are snares;\nPleasures, but pain; and mirth, but pleasing madness:\nWithout Thee, Lord, things be not what they be,\nNor have their being when compared with Thee.\n\nIn having all things, and not Thee, what have I?\nNot having Thee, what have my labours got?\nLet me enjoy but Thee, what have my labours got?\nAnd having Thee alone, what have I not?\nI wish nor sea nor land; nor would I be\nPossess’d of heaven, heaven unpossess’d of Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-good-night": { - "title": "“A Good-Night”", - "body": "Close now thine eyes and rest secure;\nThy soul is safe enough, thy body sure;\n He that loves thee, He that keeps\nAnd guards thee, never slumbers, never sleeps.\nThe smiling conscience in a sleeping breast\n Has only peace, has only rest;\n The music and the mirth of kings\n Are all but very discords, when she sings;\n Then close thine eyes and rest secure;\nNo sleep so sweet as thine, no rest so sure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hos-ego-versiculos": { - "title": "“Hos Ego Versiculos”", - "body": "Like to the damaske rose you see,\nOr like the blossome on the tree,\nOr like the daintie flower of May,\nOr like the Morning to the day,\nOr like the Sunne, or like the shade,\nOr like the Gourd which Jonas had;\nEven such is man whose thred is spun,\nDrawn out and cut, and so is done.\n\nThe Rose withers, the blossome blasteth,\nThe flowre fades, the morning hasteth:\nThe Sunne sets, the shadow flies,\nThe Gourd consumes, and man he dies.\n\nLike to the blaze of fond delight;\nOr like a morning cleare and bright;\nOr like a frost, or like a showre;\nOr like the pride of Babel’s Tower;\n\nOr like the houre that guides the time;\nOr like to beauty in her prime;\nEven such is man, whose glory lends\nHis life a blaze or two, and ends.\n\nDelights vanish; the morne o’ercasteth,\nThe frost breaks, the shower hasteth;\nThe Tower falls, the hower spends;\nThe beauty fades, and man’s life ends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-beloved-is-mine-and-i-am-his": { - "title": "“My Beloved Is Mine, And I Am His”", - "body": "Ev’n like two little bank-dividing brooks,\n That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,\nAnd having rang’d and search’d a thousand nooks,\n Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,\n Where in a greater current they conjoyn:\nSo I my best-beloved’s am; so he is mine.\n\nEv’n so we met; and after long pursuit,\n Ev’n so we joyn’d; we both became entire;\nNo need for either to renew a suit,\n For I was flax and he was flames of fire:\n Our firm-united souls did more than twine;\nSo I my best-beloved’s am; so he is mine.\n\nIf all those glitt’ring Monarchs that command\n The servile quarters of this earthly ball,\nShould tender, in exchange, their shares of land,\n I would not change my fortunes for them all:\n Their wealth is but a counter to my coin:\nThe world’s but theirs; but my beloved’s mine.\n\nNay more; If the fair Thespian Ladies all\n Should heap together their diviner treasure:\nThat treasure should be deem’d a price too small\n To buy a minutes lease of half my pleasure.\n ’Tis not the sacred wealth of all the nine\nCan buy my heart from him, or his, from being mine.\n\nNor Time, nor Place, nor Chance, nor Death can bow\n My least desires unto the least remove;\nHe’s firmly mine by oath; I his by vow;\n He’s mine by faith; and I am his by love;\n He’s mine by water; I am his by wine;\nThus I my best-beloved’s am; thus he is mine.\n\nHe is my Altar; I his Holy Place,\n I am his guest; and he, my living food;\nI’m his by penitence; he mine by grace;\n I’m his by purchase; he is mine by blood;\n He’s my supporting elm; and I his vine:\nThus I my best-beloved’s am; thus he is mine.\n\nHe gives me wealth, I give him all my vows:\n I give him songs; he gives me length of dayes.\nWith wreaths of grace he crowns my conqu’ring brows:\n And I his Temples with a crown of Praise,\n Which he accepts as an ev’rlasting signe,\nThat I my best-beloved’s am; that he is mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-world": { - "title": "“On the World”", - "body": "The world’s an Inn; and I her guest.\nI eat; I drink; I take my rest.\nMy hostess, nature, does deny me\nNothing, wherewith she can supply me;\nWhere, having stayed a while, I pay\nHer lavish bills, and go my way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-shortness-of-life": { - "title": "“The Shortness Of Life”", - "body": "And what’s a life? A weary pilgrimage,\nWhose glory in one day doth fill the stage\nWith childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.\n\nAnd what’s a life? The flourishing array\nOf the proud summer-meadow, which to-day\nWears her green plush, and is to-morrow hay.\n\nRead on this dial, how the shades devour\nMy short-lived winter’s day! hour eats up the hour;\nAlas! the total’s but from eight to four.\n\nBehold these lilies, which Thy hands have made\nFair copies of my life, and open laid\nTo view, how soon they droop, how soon they fade!\n\nShade not that dial, night will blind too soon;\nMy nonaged day already points to noon;\nHow simple is my suit! how small my boon!\n\nNor do I beg this slender inch to wile\nThe time away, or falsely to beguile\nMy thoughts with joy: here’s nothing worth a smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-dost-thou-shade-thy-lovely-face": { - "title": "“Why dost thou shade thy lovely face?”", - "body": "Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? Oh, why\nDoes that eclipsing hand so long deny\nThe sunshine of thy soul-enliv’ning eye?\nWithout that light, what light remains in me?\nThou art my life, my way, my light; in thee\nI live, I move, and by thy beams I see.\nThou art mv life; if thou but turn away\nMy life’s a thousand deaths: thou art my way;\nWithout thee, Lord, I travel not, but stray.\nMy light thou art; without thy glorious sight\nMine eyes are darken’d with perpetual night.\nMy God, thou art my way, my life, my light.\nThou art my way; I wander if thou fly:\nThou art my light; if hid, how blind am I!\nThou art my life; if thou withdraw, I die.\nMine eyes are blind and dark, I cannot see;\nTo whom or whither should my darkness flee,\nBut to the light? and who’s that light but thee?\nMy path is lost, my wand’ring steps do stray;\nI cannot safely go, nor safely stay;\nWhom should I seek but thee, my path, my way?\nOh, I am dead: to whom shall I, poor I,\nRepair? to whom shall my sad ashes fly,\nBut life? and where is life but in thine eye?\nAnd yet thou turn’st away thy face, and fly’st me;\nAnd yet I sue for grace, and thou deny’st me;\nSpeak, art thou angry, Lord, or only try’st me?\nUnscreen those heavenly lamps, or tell me why\nThou shad’st thy face; perhaps thou think’st no eye\nCan view those flames, and not drop down and die.\nIf that be all, shine forth, and draw thee nigher;\nLet me behold and die, for my desire\nIs phoenix-like to perish in that fire.\nDeath-conquer’d Laz’rus was redeem’d by thee;\nIf I am dead, Lord, set death’s prisoner free;\nAm I more spent, or stink I worse than he?\nIf my puff’d life be out, give leave to tine\nMy shameless snuff at that bright lamp of thine;\nOh, what’s thy light the less for lighting mine?\nIf I have lost my path, great Shepherd, say,\nShall I still wander in a doubtful way?\nLord, shall a lamb of Israel’s sheep-fold stray?\nThou art the pilgrim’s path, the blind man’s eye,\nThe dead man’s life; on thee my hopes rely;\nIf thou remove, I err, I grope, I die.\nDisclose thy sunbeams; close thy wings, and stay;\nSee, see how I am blind, and dead, and stray,\nO thou, that art my light, my life, my way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "salvatore-quasimodo": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Salvatore Quasimodo", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Quasimodo", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "enemy-of-death": { - "title": "“Enemy of Death”", - "body": "You should not have\nripped out your image\ntaken from us, from the world,\na portion of beauty.\nWhat can we do\nwe enemies of death,\nbent to your feet of rose,\nyour breast of violet?\nNot a word, not a scrap\nof your last day, a No\nto earth’s things, a No\nto our dull human record.\nThe sad moon in summer,\nthe dragging anchor, took\nyour dreams, hills, trees,\nlight, waters, darkness,\nnot dim thoughts but truths,\nsevered from the mind\nthat suddenly decided,\ntime and all future evil.\nNow you are shut\nbehind heavy doors\nenemy of death.\n\nWho cries?\nYou have blown out beauty\nwith a breath, torn her,\ndealt her the death-wound,\nwithout a tear\nfor her insensate shadow’s\nspreading over us.\nDestroyed solitude,\nand beauty, failed.\nYou have signalled\ninto the dark,\ninscribed your name in air,\nyour No\nto everything that crowds here\nand beyond the wind.\nI know what you were\nlooking for in your new dress.\nI understand the unanswered question.\nNeither for you nor us, a reply.\nOh, flowers and moss,\nOh, enemy of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "imitation-of-joy": { - "title": "“Imitation of Joy”", - "body": "Where the trees render\nthe evening yet more abandoned,\nhow indolently\nyour last footstep vanishes\nthat appears with the flower\nof the lime, and insists on its fate.\nYou search for reason in affection,\nyou experience silence in life.\nAnother outcome reveals to me\nmirrored time. It grieves\nlike death, beauty now\nflashes like lightning in other faces.\nI have lost every innocence,\neven in this voice that survives\nto imitate joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "nostalgia-and-regret": { - "title": "“Nostalgia and Regret”", - "body": "Now the day breaks\nnight is done and the moon\nslowly dissolved in serene air\nsets in the canals.\nSeptember is so alive in this country\nof plains, the meadows are green\nas in the southern valleys in spring.\nI have left my companions,\nI have hidden my heart behind ancient walls,\nto be alone, to remember.\nSince you are further off than the moon,\nnow the day breaks\nand the horses’ hooves beat on the stones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "suddenly-its-evening": { - "title": "“Suddenly it’s Evening”", - "body": "Everyone is alone at the heart of the earth,\npierced by a ray of sunshine;\nand suddenly it’s evening.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - }, - "wind-at-tindari": { - "title": "“Wind at Tindari”", - "body": "Tindari, I know you\nmild between broad hills, overhanging the waters\nof the god’s sweet islands.\nToday, you confront me\nand penetrate my heart.\n\nI climb airy peaks, precipices,\nfollowing the wind in the pines,\nand the crowd of them, lightly accompanying me,\nfly off into the air,\nwave of love and sound,\nand you take me to you,\nyou from whom I wrongly gathered\nevil, and fear of shadow, silence\n--refuge of sweetness, once certain--\nand death of spirit.\n\nIt is unknown to you, that country\nwhere each day I go deep\nto nourish secret syllables:\na different light bares you, behind the windows\nclothed in night,\nand another joy than mine\nrests on your breast.\n\nExile is harsh\nand the search, for harmony, ending in you,\nchanges today\nto a precocious anxiousness for death,\nand every love is a shield against sadness,\na silent stair in the gloom,\nwhere you station me\nto break my bitter bread.\n\nReturn, serene Tindari,\nstir me, sweet friend,\nto raise myself to the sky from the rock,\nso that I might shape fear, for those who do not know\nwhat deep wind has searched me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian" - } - } - } - }, - "miklos-radnoti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Miklós Radnóti", - "birth": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1944 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "hungarian", - "language": "hungarian", - "flag": "🇭🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miklós_Radnóti", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "hungarian" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "and-so-will-i-wonder": { - "title": "“And so Will I Wonder?”", - "body": "I lived, but then in living I was feeble in life and\nalways knew that they would bury me here in the end,\nthat year piles upon year, clod on clod, stone on stone,\nthat the body swells and in the cool, maggot-\ninfested darkness, the naked bone will shiver.\nThat above, scuttling time is rummaging through my poems\nand that I will sink deeper into the ground.\nAll this I knew. But tell me, the work--did that live on?", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Gina Gönczi" - } - }, - "foamy-sky": { - "title": "“Foamy Sky”", - "body": "The moon sways in a foamy sky.\nHow strange that I’m alive. A bland,\nefficient death searches this age\nand they turn white on whom it lays its hand.\n\nSometimes the year looks round and shrieks,\nlooks round and faints away.\nWhat kind of autumn lies in wait,\nwhat winter dulled with agony to grey?\n\nThe forest bled, and every hour\nin that revolving time bled too.\nThe wind was scrawling numbers, huge,\nand darkening in the unsettled snow.\n\nI have seen certain things, such things\nthat now the air feels dense as earth.\nA rustling tepid silence holds\nme fast, as in that time before my birth.\n\nI come to a standstill by this trunk.\nIt stirs its thick leaves angrily,\nreaches a branch down--for my neck?\nNow I am neither weak nor cowardly,\n\njust tired. Unmoving. And the branch\nsearches my hair, terrified, mute:\nsuch things one must forget, but I\nhave never yet been able to forget.\n\nFoam gushes forth upon the moon.\nA dark green venom streaks the sky.\nI roll myself a cigarette,\nam slowly, carefully, I live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Zsuzsanna Ozsvath & Frederick Turner", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "letter-to-my-wife": { - "title": "“Letter to My Wife”", - "body": "Beneath, the nether worlds, deep, still, and mute.\nSilence howls in my ears, and I cry out.\nNo answer could come back, it is so far\nfrom that sad Serbia swooned into war.\nAnd you’re so distant. But my heart redeems\nyour voice all day, entangled in my dreams.\nSo I am still, while close about me sough\nthe great cold ferns, that slowly stir and bow.\n\nWhen I’ll see you, I don’t know. You whose calm\nis as the weight and sureness of a psalm,\nwhose beauty’s like the shadow and the light,\nwhom I could find if I were blind and mute,\nhide in the landscape now, and from within\nleap to my eye, as if cast by my brain.\nYou were real once; now you have fallen in\nto that deep well of teenage dreams again.\n\nJealous interrogations: tell me; speak.\nDo you still love me? will you on that peak\nof my past youth become my future wife?\n--But now I fall awake to real life\nand know that’s what you are: wife, friend of years,\n--just far away. Beyond three wild frontiers.\nAnd Fall comes. Will it also leave with me?\nKisses are sharper in the memory.\n\nDaylight and miracles seemed different things.\nAbove, the echelons of bombers’ wings:\nskies once amazing blue with your eyes’ glow\nare darkened now. Tight with desire to blow,\nthe bombs must fall. I live in spite of these,\na prisoner. All of my fantasies\nI measure out. And I will find you still;\nfor you I’ve walked the full length of the soul,\n\nthe highways of countries!--on coals of fire,\nif needs must, in the falling of the pyre,\nif all I have is magic, I’ll come back;\nI’ll stick as fast as bark upon an oak!\nAnd now that calm, whose habit is a power\nand weapon to the savage, in the hour\nof fate and danger, falls as cool and true\nas does a wave: the sober two times two.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Zsuzsanna Ozsvath & Frederick Turner" - } - }, - "sky-with-clouds": { - "title": "“Sky with Clouds”", - "body": "You’re crazy. You fall down,\nstand up and walk again,\nyour ankles and your knees move\nbut you start again\nas if you had wings.\nThe ditch calls you, but it’s no use\nyou’re afraid to stay,\nand if someone asks why,\nmaybe you turn around and say\nthat a woman and a sane death\na better death wait for you.\nBut you’re crazy.\nFor a long time\nonly the burned wind spins\nabove the houses at home,\nWalls lie on their backs,\nplum trees are broken\nand the angry night\nis thick with fear.\nOh if I could believe\nthat everything valuble\nis not only inside me now\nthat there’s still home to go back to.\nIf only there were! And just as before\nbees drone peacefully\non the cool veranda,\nplum preserves turn cold\nand over sleepy gardens\nquietly, the end of summer bathes in the sun.\nAmong the leaves the fruit\nswing naked\nand in front of the rust-brown hedge\nblond Fanny waits for me,\nthe morning writes\nslow shadows--\nAll this could happen\nThe moon is so round today!\nDon’t walk past me, friend.\nYell, and I’ll stand up again!", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "war-diary": { - "title": "“War Diary”", - "body": "1. _Monday Evening_\n\nYou see, now fear often fingers your heart,\nand at times the world seems only distant news;\nthe old trees guard your childhood for you\nas an ever more ancient memory.\n\nBetween suspicious mornings and foreboding nights\nyou have lived half your life among wars,\nand now once more, order is glinting toward you\non the raised points of bayonets.\n\nIn dreams sometimes the landscape still rises before you,\nthe home of your poetry, where the scent of freedom\nwafts over the meadows, and in the morning when you wake,\nyou carry the scent with you.\n\nRarely, when you are working, you half-sit, frightened\nat your desk. And it’s as if you were living in soft mud;\nyour hand, adorned with a pen, moves heavily\nand ever more gravely.\n\nThe world is turning into another war--a hungry cloud\ngobbles the sky’s mild blue, and as it darkens,\nyour young wife puts her arms around you,\nand weeps.\n\n\n2. _Tuesday Evening_\n\nNow I sleep peacefully\nand slowly go about my work--\ngas, airplanes, bombs are poised against me,\nI can neither be afraid, nor cry;\nso I live hard, like the road builders\namong the cold mountains,\n\nwho, if their flimsy house\ncrumbles over them with age,\nput up a new one, and meanwhile\nsleep deeply on fragrant wood shavings,\nand in the morning, splash their faces\nin the cold and shining streams.\n\nI live high up, and peer around:\nit is getting darker.\nAs when from a ship’s prow\nat the flash of lightning\nthe watchman cries out, thinking he sees land,\nso I believe in the land also--and still I cry out life!\nwith a whitened voice.\n\nAnd the sound of my voice brightens\nand is carried far away\nwith a cool star and a cool evening wind.\n\n\n3. _Weary Afternoon_\n\nA dying wasp flies in at the window,\nmy dreaming wife talks in her sleep,\nand the hems of the browning clouds\nare blown to fringes by a gentle breeze.\n\nWhat can I talk about? Winter is coming, and war is coming;\nsoon I will lie broken, seen by no one;\nworm-ridden earth will fill my mouth and eyes\nand roots will pierce through my body.\n\nOh, gently rocking afternoon, give me peace--\nI will lie down too, and work later.\nThe light of your sun is already hanging on the hedges,\nand yonder the evening comes across the hills.\n\nThey have killed a cloud, its blood is falling on the sky;\nbelow, on the stems of the glowing leaves\nsit wine-scented yellow berries.\n\n\n4. _Evening Approaches_\n\nAcross the slick sky the sun is climbing down,\nand the evening is coming early along the road.\nIts coming is watched in vain by the sharp-eyed moon--\nlittle puffs of mist are gathering.\n\nThe hedgerow is wakening, it catches at a weary wanderer;\nthe evening is spinning among the tree branches\nand humming louder and louder, while these lines build up\nand lean on one another.\n\nA frightened squirrel springs into my quiet room,\nand here a six-footed iambic couplet scampers by.\nFrom the wall to the window, a brown moment--\nand it’s gone without a trace.\n\nThe fleeting peace disappears with it. Silent\nworms crawl over the far fields\nand slowly chew to pieces the endless\nrows of the reclining dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "hungarian", - "translator": "Lucy Helen Boling" - } - } - } - }, - "john-crowe-ransom": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Crowe Ransom", - "birth": { - "year": 1888 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1974 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crowe_Ransom", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 40 - }, - "poems": { - "an-american-addresses-philomela": { - "title": "“An American Addresses Philomela”", - "body": "Procne, Philomela, and Itylus,\nYour names are liquid, your improbable tale\nIs recited in the classic numbers of the nightingale.\nAh, but our numbers are not felicitous,\nIt goes not liquidly for us!\n\nPerched on a Roman ilex and duly apostrophised,\nThe nightingale descanted unto Ovid;\nShe has even appeared to the Teutons, the swilled and gravid;\nAt Fontainebleau it may be the bird was gallicised;\nNever was she baptised.\n\nTo England came Philomela with her strain,\nFleeing the hawk her husband; querulous ghost,\nShe wanders when he sits heavy on his roost,\nUtters herself in the original again,\nThe untranslatable refrain.\n\nNot to these shores she came, this other Thrace,\nEnviron barbarous to the royal Attic;\nHow could her delicate dirge run democratic,\nDelivered in a cloudless boundless public place\nTo a hypermuscular race?\n\nI pernoctated with the Oxford students once,\nAnd in the quadrangles, in the cloisters, on the Cher,\nPrecociously knocked at antique doors ajar,\nFatuously touched the hems of the Hierophants,\nSick of my dissonance;\n\nI went out to Bagley Wood, I climbed the hill,\nEven the moon had slanted off in a twinkling,\nI heard the sepulchral owl and a few bells tinkling,\nThere was no more villainous day to unfulfill,\nThe diuturnity was still;\n\nUp from the darkest wood where Philomela sat,\nHer fairy numbers issued; what then ailed me?\nMy ears are called capacious, but they failed me,\nHer classics registered a little flat!\nI rose, and venomously spat.\n\nPhilomela, Philomela, lover of song,\nI have despaired of thee and am unworthy,\nMy scene is prose, this people and I are earthy;\nUnto more beautiful, persistently more young\nThy fabulous provinces belong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "april-treason": { - "title": "“April Treason”", - "body": "So he took her as anointed\nIn the part he had appointed,\nShe was lips for smiling faintly,\nEyes to look and level quaintly,\nLength of limb and splendors of the bust\nWhich he honored as he must.\n\nQueen of women playing model,\nPure of brow but brain not idle,\nSitting in her silence meetly,\nLet her adjective be stately;\nSo he thought his art would manage right\nIn the honest Northern light.\n\nBut he fashioned it too coldly,\nApril broke-and-entered boldly,\nThinking how to suit the season’s\nOdor, savor, heats and treasons:\nPainter! do not stoop and play the host\nLest the man come uppermost.\n\nYet he knew that he was altered\nWhen the perfect woman faltered,\nLanguish in her softly speaking,\nAnguish, even, in her looking:\nAll the art had fled his fingertips\nSo he bent and kissed her lips.\n\nHe and Venus took their pleasure,\nThen he turned upon his treasure,\nTook and trampled it with loathing,\nFlung it over cliffs to nothing;\nGlittering in the sunlight while it fell\nLike a lovely shattered shell.\n\nStrict the silence that came onward\nAs they trod the foothill downward,\nOne more mocking noon of April,\nMischief always is in April;\nStill she touched his fingers cold as ice\nAnd recited, “It was nice.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "april": { - "title": "“April”", - "body": "Savor of love is thick on the April air,\nThe blunted boughs dispose their lacy bloom,\nAnd many sorry steeds dismissed to pasture\nToss their old forelocks, flourish heavy heels.\nWhere is there any unpersuaded poet\nSo angry still against the wrongs of winter\nWhich caused the dainty earth to droop and die,\nSo vengeant for his vine and summer song,\nAs to decline the good releasing thaw?\nPoets have temperature and follow seasons,\nAnd covenants go out at equinox.\n\nThe champions! For Heaven, riding high\nAbove the icy death, considered truly;\n“My agate icy work, I thought it fair;\nYet I have lacked that pretty lift of praise\nThat mounted once from these emaciate minstrels.\nThey will not sing, and duty drops away\nAnd I must turn and make a soft amend!”\nAt once he showered April down, until\nThe bleak twigs bloom again; and soon, I swear,\nHe shall receive his praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-bachelor": { - "title": "“The Bachelor”", - "body": "The wind went cold as the day went old,\nAnd I went very sad,\nTill I saw something by the road\nThat brought me round and glad.\n\nThe keen wind nipped me northerly\nAnd bent me back almost,\nAnd I was the worst discouraged man\nAbroad on any boast,\n\nThe road was rocks and wilderness\nAnd never a sign of a town,\nIt tapered up a wicked hill,\nI tried to curse it down,\n\nBut like an undefeated man\nI mounted, slow and hard:\nAnd round the top was a little house\nWith a woman in the yard.\n\nShe was a housewife in her yard,\nTending her husband’s place;\nThe broom was busy in her hand,\nThe goodness in her face.\n\nShe brushed the yard, she brushed the step,\nShe made the leaves to spin,\nTidying up her husband’s place\nOutside as well as in.\n\nI knew no woman and no house\nAnd night was just ahead;\nYet I went cheerful down the hill\nRested and warmed and fed.\n\nFor some man had a woman there\nTo keep his board and bed;\n“I have seen women by these bad roads,\nThank God for that,” I said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "bells-for-john-whitesides-daughter": { - "title": "“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”", - "body": "There was such speed in her little body,\nAnd such lightness in her footfall,\nIt is no wonder her brown study\nAstonishes us all.\n\nHer wars were bruited in our high window.\nWe looked among orchard trees and beyond\nWhere she took arms against her shadow,\nOr harried unto the pond\n\nThe lazy geese, like a snow cloud\nDripping their snow on the green grass,\nTricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,\nWho cried in goose, Alas,\n\nFor the tireless heart within the little\nLady with rod that made them rise\nFrom their noon apple-dreams and scuttle\nGoose-fashion under the skies!\n\nBut now go the bells, and we are ready,\nIn one house we are sternly stopped\nTo say we are vexed at her brown study,\nLying so primly propped.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "blue-girls": { - "title": "“Blue Girls”", - "body": "Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward\nUnder the towers of your seminary,\nGo listen to your teachers old and contrary\nWithout believing a word.\n\nTie the white fillets then about your hair\nAnd think no more of what will come to pass\nThan bluebirds that go walking on the grass\nAnd chattering on the air.\n\nPractice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;\nAnd I will cry with my loud lips and publish\nBeauty which all our power shall never establish,\nIt is so frail.\n\nFor I could tell you a story which is true;\nI know a woman with a terrible tongue,\nBlear eyes fallen from blue,\nAll her perfections tarnished--yet it is not long\nSince she was lovelier than any of you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-the-riverside": { - "title": "“By the Riverside”", - "body": "A great green spread of meadow land,\n(Must rest his weight on an ample base),\nA secret water moving on,\nA clean blue air for his breathing-space,\nA pair of willows bending down\nIn double witness to his grace,\nAnd on the rock his sinner sprawls\nAnd looks the Strong One face to face.\n\nThe sinner’s mocking tongue is dry,\nWonder is on that mighty jeerer,\nHe loves, and he never loved before,\nHe wants the glowing sky no nearer,\nHe likes the willows to be two,\nHe would not have the water clearer,\nHe thinks that God is perfect once:\nHeaven, rejoice! a new God-fearer.\n\nAnd now each quiet thing awakes\nAnd dances madly, wavers, dips;\nThese are God’s motions on the air,\nHis Pulse for the sinner’s finger-tips,\nHis arrows shot across the blue,\nHis love-words dropping from his lips,\nAnd who ever heard such whisperings,\nWho ever saw such fellowships?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "captain-carpenter": { - "title": "“Captain Carpenter”", - "body": "Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime\nPut on his pistols and went riding out\nBut had got wellnigh nowhere at that time\nTill he fell in with ladies in a rout.\n\nIt was a pretty lady and all her train\nThat played with him so sweetly but before\nAn hour she’d taken a sword with all her main\nAnd twined him of his nose for evermore.\n\nCaptain Carpenter mounted up one day\nAnd rode straightway into a stranger rogue\nThat looked unchristian but be that as may\nThe Captain did not wait upon prologue.\n\nBut drew upon him out of his great heart\nThe other swung against him with a club\nAnd cracked his two legs at the shinny part\nAnd let him roll and stick like any tub.\n\nCaptain Carpenter rode many a time\nFrom male and female took he sundry harms\nHe met the wife of Satan crying “I’m\nThe she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms.”\n\nTheir strokes and counters whistled in the wind\nI wish he had delivered half his blows\nBut where she should have made off like a hind\nThe bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.\n\nAnd Captain Carpenter parted with his ears\nTo a black devil that used him in this wise\nO Jesus ere his threescore and ten years\nAnother had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.\n\nCaptain Carpenter got up on his roan\nAnd sallied from the gate in hell’s despite\nI heard him asking in the grimmest tone\nIf any enemy yet there was to fight?\n\nTo any adversary it is fame\nIf he risk to be wounded by my tongue\nOr burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame\nSuch are the perils he is cast among.\n\nBut if he can he has a pretty choice\nFrom an anatomy with little to lose\nWhether he cut my tongue and take my voice\nOr whether it be my round red heart he choose.\n\nIt was the neatest knave that ever was seen\nStepping in perfume from his lady’s bower\nWho at this word put in his merry mien\nAnd fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.\n\nI would not knock old fellows in the dust\nBut there lay Captain Carpenter on his back\nHis weapons were the old heart in his bust\nAnd a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.\n\nThe rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind.\nHe wished to get his trophy and depart\nWith gentle apology and touch refined\nHe pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.\n\nGod’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now,\nI thought him Sirs an honest gentleman\nCitizen husband soldier and scholar enow\nLet jangling kites eat of him if they can.\n\nBut God’s deep curses follow after those\nThat shore him of his goodly nose and ears\nHis legs and strong arms at the two elbows\nAnd eyes that had not watered seventy years.\n\nThe curse of hell upon the sleek upstart\nThat got the Captain finally on his back\nAnd took the red red vitals of his heart\nAnd made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-christian": { - "title": "“The Christian”", - "body": "I heard a story of a sailing man.\nHe was a surly sort of mariner,\nHe used to swear at all the seven seas,\nAnd rode them dauntless up and down the earth.\n\nBut when he sickened of the windy wash,\nHe took to wife a proper village woman\nAnd put her in a precious little house;\nAnd there he weathered many winter seasons,\nKnocking the ashes neatly from his pipe\nUpon the tended hearth.\n\nAnd only when he went upon the moors,\nAnd felt the sting and censure of the winds,\nAnd tasted of the salt blown in from sea,\nThen only would he curse the marriage morning,\nAnd swear he’d not go skulking back again\nTo sit that hearth like any broken ass\nWhose running time was over.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-christmas-colloquy": { - "title": "“A Christmas Colloquy”", - "body": "The country farmer has his joys\nOf little city girls and boys\nWhen brother Thomas brings his brood\nOf motherless brats in Christmas mood\nTo try our country air and food.\nAnd O what splendid pies and cakes\nTheir pleased and pretty grandma makes!\nAnd O what squeals and stomach-aches!\n\nPoor Thomas shepherds him a flock\nOf city souls as hard as rock,\nAnd though they will not fill his larder\nHe only preaches Christ the harder.\nBut Ann, though seven years my niece,\nIs still a pagan little piece,\nAnd as she often hints to me\nShe hates the sound of piety.\nFair Inez is my ancient setter\nWho lies by the fire when we will let her:\nAlas, this amiable dog\nHeard all the bitter dialogue\nThat passed between my niece and brother\nMisunderstanding one another.\n\n\n> _Ann:_\n\nFather, what will there be for me\nTo-morrow on the Christmas tree?\nHave you told Santa what to bring,\nMy pony, my doll, and everything?\n\n\n> _Thomas:_\n\nMy daughter, Santa will know best\nWhat to bring you, and what the rest.\nBut father and his little girl\nAnd everybody in the world\nShould dwell to-night on higher things,\nFor hark! the herald angel sings,\nAnd in a manger poor and lowly\nLies little Jesus, high and holy.\n\n\n> _Ann:_\n\nFather, don’t talk of little Jesus,\nYou’re only doing it to tease us,\nIt isn’t nearly time for bed,\nAnd I want to know what Santa said.\n\n\n> _Thomas:_\n\nJesus is better than any toys\nFor little sinning girls and boys,\nFor Jesus saves, but sin destroys.\n\nAnd O, it gives him sad surprise,\nThere must be tears in Jesus’ eyes,\nWhen little girls with bad behavior\nForget to own their Lord and Savior.\n\n\n> _Ann:_\n\nI didn’t, you know it isn’t true!\nI say my prayers, I always do,\nI know about Jesus very well,\nAnd God the Father, Heaven, and Hell.\nO please don’t say it any more,\nYou’ve said it so many times before,\nBut tell me all about Santa instead,\nAnd about the horns on his reindeer’s head,\nAnd what he will bring me on his sled.\n\n\n> _Thomas:_\n\nThis night he was born on earth for us,\nAnd can my daughter mock him thus,\nAnd care more for her worldly pleasures\nThan Jesus’ love and heavenly treasures?\nFor Jesus didn’t like to be\nSo crowned with thorns and nailed to tree,\nBut there was a sinful world to free,\nAnd out he went to Gethsemane--\n\n\n> _Ann:_\n\nAnd left the twelve and went apart--\nO father, I know it off by heart,\nPlease, father, please don’t finish it out,\nThere’s so much else to talk about!\nI ask about Santa, and there you go,\nAnd now you’re spoiling my Christmas so,\nAnd you are the wickedest man I know!\n\n\nDisgraceful scenes require the curtain,\nBut lest the moral be uncertain,\nI briefly bring the good report\nThat valiant Thomas held the fort,\nAnd wicked Ann was quite defeated,\nIn vain denied, in vain entreated,\nIn vain she wailed, in vain she wept,\nAnd said a briny prayer, and slept.\nWhile Inez, who had been perplexed\nTo see good kinsfolk so much vexed,\nWhen peace descended on the twain,\nLay down beside the fire again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-cloak-model": { - "title": "“The Cloak Model”", - "body": "“My son,” the stranger thus began,\nAnd drew me to the window side,\n“Now here are beauties better than\nYou ever have dreamed, or ever can.\nBut yet beware!” he cried.\n\nA tidy citizen was he\nAlthough a dismal daffy one.\n“See this one pose and pout for me\nAnd march around magnificently.\nBut I’m immune, my son.”\n\n“Observe how ripe the lady’s lips,\nHow Titianesque the mop of hair,\nAnd where the great white shoulder dips\nBeneath its gauzy half-eclipse,\nYou well may stare and stare.”\n\n“When I was young I said as you\nAre saying in your sapphic youth,”\n\n“That ah! such lips were certain cue,\nAnd look! her bosom’s rhythm too,\nIt signified her truth;”\n\n“Her broad brow meant intelligence\nAnd something better than a bone,\nHer body’s curves were spirit’s tents,\nHer fresh young skin was innocence\nInstead of meat that shone.”\n\n“I wish the moralists would thresh\n(Indeed the thing is very droll)\nGod’s oldest joke, forever fresh:\nThe fact that in the finest flesh\nThere isn’t any soul.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "conrad-in-twilight": { - "title": "“Conrad in Twilight”", - "body": "Conrad, Conrad, aren’t you old\nTo sit so late in your mouldy garden?\nAnd I think Conrad knows it well,\nNursing his knees, too rheumy and cold\nTo warm the wraith of a Forest of Arden.\n\nNeuralgia in the back of his neck,\nHis lungs filling with such miasma,\nHis feet dipping in leafage and muck:\nConrad! you’ve forgotten asthma.\n\nConrad’s house has thick red walls,\nThe log on Conrad’s hearth is blazing,\nSlippers and pipe and tea are served,\nButter and toast are meant for pleasing!\nStill Conrad’s back is not uncurved\nAnd here’s an autumn on him, teasing.\n\nAutumn days in our section\nAre the most used-up thing on earth\n(Or in the waters under the earth)\nHaving no more color nor predilection\nThan cornstalks too wet for the fire,\nA ribbon rotting on the byre,\nA man’s face as weathered as straw\nBy the summer’s flare and winter’s flaw.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "darkness": { - "title": "“Darkness”", - "body": "When hurrying home on a rainy night\nAnd hearing tree-tops rubbed and tossed,\nAnd seeing never a friendly star\nAnd feeling your way when paths are crossed:\nStop fast and turn three times around\nAnd try the logic of the lost.\n\nWhere is the heavenly light you dreamed?\nWhere is your hearth and glowing ash?\nWhere is your love by the mellow moon?\nHere is not even a lightning-flash,\nAnd in a place no worse than this\nLost men shall wail and teeth shall gnash.\n\nLightning is quick and perilous,\nThe dawn comes on too slow and pale,\nYour love brings only a yellow lamp,\nYet of these lights one shall avail:\nThe dark shall break for one of these,\nI’ve never known this thing to fail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dead-boy": { - "title": "“Dead Boy”", - "body": "The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,\nA green bough from Virginia’s aged tree,\nAnd none of the county kin like the transaction,\nNor some of the world of outer dark, like me.\n\nA boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,\nA black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,\nA sword beneath his mother’s heart--yet never\nWoman bewept her babe as this is weeping.\n\nA pig with a pasty face, so I had said,\nSquealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense\nWith a noble house. But the little man quite dead,\nI see the forbears’ antique lineaments.\n\nThe elder men have strode by the box of death\nTo the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round\nThe bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!\nTheir hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.\n\nHe was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;\nThe first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;\nBut this was the old tree’s late branch wrenched away,\nGrieving the sapless limbs, the short and shaken.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dumb-bells": { - "title": "“Dumb-Bells”", - "body": "Dumb-bells left, dumb-bells right,\nSwing them hard, grip them tight!\nThirty fat men of the town\nMust sweat their filthy paunches down.\nDripping sweat and pumping blood\nThey try to make themselves like God.\n\nOne and two, three and four,\nCleave the air and smite the floor!\nFive and six, seven and eight,\nLegs apart, shoulders straight!\nThirty fat men grunt and puff,\nThirty bellies plead, Enough!\n\nDumb-bells up, dumb-bells down,\nDumb-bells front, dumb-bells ground!\nThirty’s God has just the girth\nTo pull the levers of the earth,\nThey made him sinewy and lean\nAnd washed him glittering white and clean.\n\nDumb-bells in, dumb-bells out,\nCount by fours and face about!\nPut by dumb-bells for to-day,\nWash the stinking sweat away\nAnd go out clean. But come again;\nWorship’s every night at ten.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "emily-hardcastle-spinster": { - "title": "“Emily Hardcastle, Spinster”", - "body": "We shall come tomorrow morning, who were not to have her love,\nWe shall bring no face of envy but a gift of praise and lilies\nTo the stately ceremonial we are not the heroes of.\n\nLet the sisters now attend her, who are red-eyed, who are wroth;\nThey were younger, she was finer, for they wearied of the waiting\nAnd they married them to merchants, being unbelievers both.\n\nI was dapper when I dangled in my pepper-and-salt;\nWe were only local beauties, and we beautifully trusted\nIf the proud one had to tarry, one would have her by default.\n\nBut right across the threshold has her grizzled Baron come;\nLet them robe her, Bride and Princess, who’ll go down a leafy archway\nAnd seal her to the Stranger for his castle in the gloom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-equilibrists": { - "title": "“The Equilibrists”", - "body": "Full of her long white arms and milky skin\nHe had a thousand times remembered sin.\nAlone in the press of people traveled he,\nMinding her jacinth, and myrrh, and ivory.\n\nMouth he remembered: the quaint orifice\nFrom which came heat that flamed upon the kiss,\nTill cold words came down spiral from the head.\nGrey doves from the officious tower illsped.\n\nBody: it was a white field ready for love,\nOn her body’s field, with the gaunt tower above,\nThe lilies grew, beseeching him to take,\nIf he would pluck and wear them, bruise and break.\n\nEyes talking: Never mind the cruel words,\nEmbrace my flowers, but not embrace the swords.\nBut what they said, the doves came straightway flying\nAnd unsaid: Honor, Honor, they came crying.\n\nImportunate her doves. Too pure, too wise,\nClambering on his shoulder, saying, Arise,\nLeave me now, and never let us meet,\nEternal distance now command thy feet.\n\nPredicament indeed, which thus discovers\nHonor among thieves, Honor between lovers.\nO such a little word is Honor, they feel!\nBut the grey word is between them cold as steel.\n\nAt length I saw these lovers fully were come\nInto their torture of equilibrium;\nDreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet\nThey were bound each to each, and they did not forget.\n\nAnd rigid as two painful stars, and twirled\nAbout the clustered night their prison world,\nThey burned with fierce love always to come near,\nBut honor beat them back and kept them clear.\n\nAh, the strict lovers, they are ruined now!\nI cried in anger. But with puddled brow\nDevising for those gibbeted and brave\nCame I descanting: Man, what would you have?\n\nFor spin your period out, and draw your breath,\nA kinder saeculum begins with Death.\nWould you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?\nOr take your bodies honorless to Hell?\n\nIn Heaven you have heard no marriage is,\nNo white flesh tinder to your lecheries,\nYour male and female tissue sweetly shaped\nSublimed away, and furious blood escaped.\n\nGreat lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones\nInfatuate of the flesh upon the bones;\nStuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,\nThe pieces kiss again, no end to this.\n\nBut still I watched them spinning, orbited nice.\nTheir flames were not more radiant than their ice.\nI dug in the quiet earth and wrought the tomb\nAnd made these lines to memorize their doom:--\n\n\n_Epitaph:_\n\nEquilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;\nClose, but untouching in each other’s sight;\nMouldered the lips arid ashy the tall skull.\nLet them lie perilous and beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "four-roses": { - "title": "“Four Roses”", - "body": "Four sisters sitting in one house,\nI said, these roses on a stem\nWith bosoms bare. But wayfaring\nI went and ravished one of them.\n\nSo one was taken. But the three,\nThey spread their petals just the same,\nThey turned no decent pale for grief,\nThey drew no fragrance back for shame.\n\nThe canker is on roses too!\nI cried, and lifted up the rod\nAnd scourged them bleeding to the ground.\nAll, all are sinners unto God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "friendship": { - "title": "“Friendship”", - "body": "I viewed him well, the visible fat fool,\nAnd yet I took him in; for I contended,\nFriends are not sent in order of our choosing,\nThey come unsuited like the gifts of God.\nI would not do a perfidy to friendship,\nI let him past the private inner gate\nAnd made him be at home among my treasures\nLike my true friend.\n\nNow I am ground with a grim torture daily\nThat I have been befriended by a fool.\nHe forages at will upon my garden,\nHe noses all its pretty secrets out,\nAnd still the fool finds nothing to his liking.\nMeeting a modest velveteen affair,\nPeevish he hangs his sad and silly head:\n“Alas! such unsubstantial gaudy goods!”\nThus he meets pansies; meeting zinnias,\nHe nearly faints at such a rioting:\n“Alas! what fruit will these red wantons bear?”\n\nAnd not a perfume spills upon the air\nBut his malicious nose suspects a poison,\nAs he goes browsing like an ancient ass,\nAn old distempered ass.\n\nI’d almost rather be a friendless man\nAnd have my house my own. The prying fool\nAsks me the queerest idiotic questions:\n“O friend, is this the harvest of your hands?\nHow will you stand before the lord of harvests?\nThese are the gardens of your idleness;\nWhere is the vineyard, friend?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "grace": { - "title": "“Grace”", - "body": "Who is it beams the merriest\nAt killing a man, the laughing one?\nYou are the one I nominate,\nGod of the rivers of Babylon.\n\nA hundred times I’ve taken the mules\nAnd started early through the lane,\nAnd come to the broken gate and looked,\nAnd there my partner was again,\nSitting on top of a sorrel horse\nAnd picking the burrs from its matted mane,\nSaying he thought he’d help me work\nThat field of corn before the rain;\nAnd I never spoke of the dollar a day,\nIt’s no use causing hired men pain,\nBut slipped it into his hand at dark\nWhile he undid the coupling chain;\nAnd whistled a gospel tune, and knew\nHe’d join in strong on the refrain.\n\nFor I would pitch the treble high,\n“Down at the cross where my Savior died,”\nAnd then he rolled along the bass,\n“There did I bury my sin and pride.”\n\nSinful pride of a hired man!\nOut of a hired woman born!\nI’m thinking now how he was saved\nOne day while plowing in the corn.\nWe plowed that steamy morning through,\nI with the mule whose side was torn,\nAnd keeping an eye on the mule I saw\nThat the sun looked high and the man looked worn;\nI would take him home to dinner with me,\nAnd there! my father’s dinner horn.\n\nThe sun blazed after dinner so\nWe sat a while by the maple trees,\nThinking of mother’s pickles and pies\nAnd smoking a friendly pipe at ease.\nI broached a point of piety,\nFor pious men are quick to tease:\nWas it really true John dipped his crowd\nDown in the muddy Jordan’s lees?\n\nAnd couldn’t the Baptists backslide too\nIf only they went on Methodist sprees?\nAnd finally back to the field we went,\nThe corn was well above my knees,\nThe weeds were more than ankle high,\nAnd dangerous customers were these.\nWe went to work in the heat again,\nI hoped we’d get a bit of breeze\nAnd thought the hired man was used\nTo God’s most blazing cruelties.\n\nSundays, the hired man would pray\nTo live in the sunshine of his face;\nNow here was answer come complete,\nRather an overdose of grace!\n\nHe fell in the furrow, an honest place\nAnd an easy place for a man to fall.\nHis horse went marching blindly on\nIn a beautiful dream of a great fat stall.\nAnd God shone on in merry mood,\nFor it was a foolish kind of sprawl,\nAnd I found a hulk of heaving meat\nThat wouldn’t answer me at all\nAnd a fresh breeze made the young corn dance\nTo a bright green, glorious carnival.\n\nAnd really, is it not a gift\nTo smile and be divinely gay,\nTo rise above a circumstance\nAnd smile distressing scenes away?\n\nBut this was a thing that I had said,\nI was so forward and untamed:\n“I will not worship wickedness\nThough it be God’s--I am ashamed!\nFor all his mercies God be thanked\nBut for his tyrannies be blamed!\nHe shall not have my love alone,\nWith loathing too his name is named.”\n\nI caught him up with all my strength\nAnd with a silly stumbling tread\nI dragged him over the soft brown dirt\nAnd dumped him down beside the shed.\n\nI thought of the prayers the fool had prayed\nTo his God, and I was seeing red,\nWhen all of a sudden he gave a heave\nAnd then with shuddering--vomited!\nAnd God, who had just received full thanks\nFor all his kindly daily bread,\n\nNow called it back again--perhaps\nTo see that his birds of the air were fed.\nNot mother’s dainty dinner now,\nA rather horrible mess instead,\nYet all of it God required of him\nBefore the fool was duly dead.\n\nEven of deaths there is a choice,\nI’ve seen you give a good one, God,\nBut he in his vomit laid him down,\nDenied the decency of blood.\n\nIf silence from the dead, I swore,\nThere shall be cursing from the quick!\nBut I began to vomit too,\nCursing and vomit ever so thick;\nThe dead lay down, and I did too,\nTwo ashy idiots: take your pick!\nA little lower than angels he made us,\n(Hear his excellent rhetoric),\nA credit we were to him, half of us dead,\nThe other half of us lying sick.\n\nThe little clouds came Sunday-dressed\nTo do a holy reverence,\nThe young corn smelled its sweetest too,\nAnd made him goodly frankincense,\nThe thrushes offered music up,\nChoired in the wood beyond the fence.\n\nAnd while his praises filled the earth\nA solitary crow sailed by,\nAnd while the whole creation sang\nHe cawed--not knowing how to sigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ingrate": { - "title": "“The Ingrate”", - "body": "By night we looked across my field,\nThe tasseled corn was fine to see,\nThe moon was yellow on the rows\nAnd seemed so wonderful to me,\nThat with an old provincial pride\nI praised my moonlit Tennessee,\nAnd thought my poor befriended man\nWould never dare to disagree.\n\nHe was a frosty Russian man\nAnd wore a bushy Russian beard;\nHe had two furtive faded eyes\nThat some old horror once had seared;\nI wondered if they ever would\nForget the horrors they had feared;\nYet when I praised my pleasant field\nThis stupid fellow almost jeered.\n\n“Your moon shines very well, my friend,\nYour fields are good enough, I know;\nAt home our fields in the winter-time\nWere always white, and shining so!\nOur nights went beautiful like day,\nAnd bitter cold our winds would blow;\nAnd I remember how it looked,\nDear God, my country of the snow!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "janet-walking": { - "title": "“Janet Walking”", - "body": "Beautifully Janet slept\nTill it was deeply morning. She woke then\nAnd thought about her dainty-feathered hen,\nTo see how it had kept.\n\nOne kiss she gave her mother,\nOnly a small one gave she to her daddy\nWho would have kissed each curl of his shining baby;\nNo kiss at all for her brother.\n\n“Old Chucky, Old Chucky!” she cried,\nRunning across the world upon the grass\nTo Chucky’s house, and listening. But alas,\nHer Chucky had died.\n\nIt was a transmogrifying bee\nCame droning down on Chucky’s old bald head\nAnd sat and put the poison. It scarcely bled,\nBut how exceedingly\n\nAnd purply did the knot\nSwell with the venom and communicate\nIts rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight\nBut Chucky did not.\n\nSo there was Janet\nKneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen\n(Translated far beyond the daughters of men)\nTo rise and walk upon it.\n\nAnd weeping fast as she had breath\nJanet implored us, “Wake her from her sleep!”\nAnd would not be instructed in how deep\nWas the forgetful kingdom of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lover": { - "title": "“The Lover”", - "body": "I sat in a friendly company\nAnd wagged my wicked tongue so well,\nMy friends were listening close to hear\nThe wickedest tales that I could tell.\nFor many a fond youth waits, I said,\nOn many a worthless damozel;\nBut every trusting fool shall learn\nTo wish them heartily in hell.\n\nAnd when your name was spoken too,\nI did not change, I did not start,\nAnd when they only praised and loved,\nI still could play my secret part,\nCursing and lies upon my tongue,\nAnd songs and shouting in my heart.\n\nBut when you came and looked at me,\nYou tried my poor pretence too much.\nO love, do you know the secret now\nOf one who would not tell nor touch?\nMust I confess before the pack\nOf babblers, idiots, and such?\n\nDo they not hear the burst of bells,\nPealing at every step you make?\nAre not their eyelids winking too,\nFeeling your sudden brightness break?\nO too much glory shut with us!\nO walls too narrow and opaque!\nO come into the night with me\nAnd let me speak, for Jesus’ sake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "men": { - "title": "“Men”", - "body": "“How many goodly creatures are there here!”\nMiranda doted on the sight of seamen,\nThe very casual adventurers\nWho took a flood as quickly as a calm,\nAnd kept their blue eyes blue to any weather.\nThis was the famous manliness of men;\nAnd when she saw it on the dirty strangers,\nShe clapped her pretty hands in sudden joy:\n“O brave new world!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "miriam-tazewell": { - "title": "“Miriam Tazewell”", - "body": "When Miriam Tazewell heard the tempest bursting\nAnd his wrathy whips across the sky drawn crackling\nShe stuffed her ears for fright like a young thing\nAnd with heart full of the flowers took to weeping.\n\nBut the earth shook dry his old back in good season,\nHe had weathered storms that drenched him deep as this one,\nAnd the sun, Miriam, ascended to his dominion,\nThe storm was withered against his empyrean.\n\nAfter the storm she went forth with skirts kilted\nTo see in the hot sun her lawn deflowered,\nHer tulip, iris, peony strung and pelted,\nPots of geranium spilled and the stalks naked.\n\nThe spring transpired in that year with no flowers\nBut the regular stars went busily on their courses,\nSuppers and cards were calendared, and some bridals,\nAnd the birds demurely sang in the bitten poplars.\n\nTo Miriam Tazewell the whole world was villain,\nThe principle of the beast was low and masculine,\nAnd not to unstop her own storm and be maudlin,\nFor weeks she went untidy, she went sullen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "morning": { - "title": "“Morning”", - "body": "The skies were jaded, while the famous sun\nSlack of his office to confute the fogs\nLay sick abed; but I, inured to duty,\nSat for my food. Three hours each day we souls,\nWho might be angels but are fastened down\nWith bodies, most infuriating freight,\nSit fattening these frames and skeletons\nWith filthy food, which they must cast away\nBefore they feed again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "necrological": { - "title": "“Necrological”", - "body": "The friar had said his paternosters duly\nAnd scourged his limbs, and afterwards would have slept;\nBut with much riddling his head became unruly,\nHe arose, from the quiet monastery he crept.\n\nDawn lightened the place where the battle had been won.\nThe people were dead--it is easy he thought to die--\nThese dead remained, but the living were all gone,\nGone with the wailing trumps of victory.\n\nThe dead men wore no raiment against the air,\nBartholomew’s men had spoiled them where they fell;\nIn defeat the heroes’ bodies were whitely bare,\nThe field was white like meads of asphodel.\n\nNot all were white; some gory and fabulous\nWhom the sword had pierced and then the grey wolf eaten;\nBut the brother reasoned that heroes’ flesh was thus.\nFlesh fails, and the postured bones lie weather-beaten.\n\nThe lords of chivalry lay prone and shattered.\nThe gentle and the bodyguard of yeomen;\nBartholomew’s stroke went home--but little it mattered,\nBartholomew went to be stricken of other foemen.\n\nBeneath the blue ogive of the firmament\nWas a dead warrior, clutching whose mighty knees\nWas a leman, who with her flame had warmed his tent,\nFor him enduring all men’s pleasantries.\n\nClose by the sable stream that purged the plain\nLay the white stallion and his rider thrown,\nThe great beast had spilled there his little brain,\nAnd the little groin of the knight was spilled by a stone.\n\nThe youth possessed him then of a crooked blade\nDeep in the belly of a lugubrious wight;\nHe fingered it well, and it was cunningly made;\nBut strange apparatus was if for a Carmelite.\n\nThen he sat upon a hill and bowed his head\nAs under a riddle, and in deep surmise\nSo still that he likened himself unto those dead\nWhom the kites of Heaven solicited with sweet cries.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "noonday-grace": { - "title": "“Noonday Grace”", - "body": "My good old father tucked his head,\n(His face the color of gingerbread)\nOver the table my mother had spread,\nAnd folded his leathery hands and said:\n\n“We thank thee, Lord, for this thy grace,\nAnd all thy bounties to the race;\nTurn not away from us thy face\nTill we come to our final resting-place.”\n\nThese were the words of the old elect,\nOr others to the same effect.\n\nI love my father’s piety,\nI know he’s grateful as can be,\nA man that’s nearly seventy\nAnd past his taste for cookery.\nBut I am not so old as he,\nAnd when I see in front of me\nThings that I like uncommonly,\n\n(Cornfield beans my specialty,\nWhen every pod spills two or three),\nThen I forget the thou and thee\nAnd pray with total fervency:\n\nThank you, good Lord, for dinner-time!\nGladly I come from the sweat and grime\nTo play in your Christian pantomime.\n\nI wash the black dust from my face,\nI sit again in a Christian’s place,\nI hear the ancient Christian’s grace.\n\nMy thanks for clean fresh napkin first,\nWith faint red stain where the fruit-jar burst.\n\nThanks for a platter with kind blue roses,\nFor mother’s centerpiece and posies,\nA touch of art right under our noses.\n\nMother, I’ll thank you for tumbler now\nOf morning’s milk from our Jersey cow.\n\nAnd father, thanks for a generous yam,\nAnd a helping of home-cured country ham,\n(He knows how fond of it I am.)\n\nFor none can cure them as can he,\nAnd he won’t tell his recipe,\nBut God was behind it, it seems to me.\n\nThank God who made the garden grow,\nWho took upon himself to know\nThat we loved vegetables so.\nI served his plan with rake and hoe,\nAnd mother, boiling, baking, slow\nTo her favorite tune of Old Black Joe,\nPredestined many an age ago.\n\nPearly corn still on the cob,\nMy teeth are aching for that job.\n\nTomatoes, one would fill a dish,\nPotatoes, mealy as one could wish.\n\nCornfield beans and cucumbers,\nAnd yellow yams for sweeteners.\n\nPickles between for stepping-stones,\nAnd plenty of cornmeal bread in pones.\n\nSunday the preacher droned a lot\nAbout a certain whether or not:\n\nIs God the universal friend,\nAnd if men pray can he attend\nTo each man’s individual end?\n\nThey pray for individual things,\nGive thanks for little happenings,\nBut isn’t his sweep of mighty wings\nMeant more for businesses of kings\nThan pulling small men’s petty strings?\n\nHe’s infinite, and all of that,\nThe setting sun his habitat,\nThe heavens they hold by his fiat,\nThe glorious year that God begat;\nAnd what is creeping man to that,\nO preacher, valiant democrat?\n\n“The greatest of all, his sympathy,\nHis kindness, reaching down to me.”\n\nLike mother, he finds it his greatest joy\nTo have big dinners for his boy.\n\nShe understands him like a book,\nIn fact, he helps my mother cook,\nAnd slips to the dining-room door to look;\n\nAnd when we are at our noon-day meal,\nHe laughs to think how fine we feel.\n\nAn extra fork is by my plate,\nI nearly noticed it too late!\n\nMother, you’re keeping a secret back!\nI see the pie-pan through the crack,\nIncrusted thick in gold and black.\n\nThere’s no telling what that secret pair\nHave cooked for me in the kitchen there,\n\nThere’s no telling what that pie can be,\nBut tell me that it’s blackberry!\n\nAs long as I keep topside the sod,\nI’ll love you always, mother and God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "There’s a patch of trees at the edge of the field,\nAnd a brown little house that is kept so warm,\nAnd a woman waiting by the hearth\nWho still keeps most of a woman’s charm.\n\nShe traffics in her woman’s goods\nAnd is my woman of affairs.\nYet not so fast, my moral men,\nNovember’s most poetic airs\nAre heavy with old lovers’ tales,\nHow hearths are holy with their prayers,\nHow women give their fragrance up\nAnd give their love to the man that dares.\nNow who goes heedless hearing that?\nAt last we trade, we laissez-faires.\n\nO moralizers, it is hard\nWhen I am not a candidate\nFor holy wedlock’s offices,\nThat mother has picked me out a mate,\n\nAnd couldn’t have made a sorrier choice\nThan that same Smiley’s daughter Kate,\nWho prays for the sinners of the town\nAnd never comes to meeting late,\nWho sings soprano in the choir\nAnd swallows Christian doctrine straight.\nOf all the girls deliver me\nFrom the girl you haven’t the heart to hate!\nPiety: O what a hideous thing!\nAnd thirty-odd pounds she’s underweight.\n\nThe winds of late November droop\n(Poor little failures) very low,\nAs up and down the farm they pass,\nPass up and down, and to and fro,\nAnd look for a home they are not to find,\nFor they were homeless years ago …\n\nBut years ago I knew a girl,\nBeautiful, fit for a Grand Vizier’s,\nA girl with laughing on her lips\nAnd in her eyes the quickest tears,\nAnd low of speech, as when one finds\nA mother cooing to her dears.\nI took the note into my heart,\nAnd so did other cavaliers.\n\nIf God had heard my prayer then,\nThe good folk couldn’t point and say\nAs mother says they’re pointing now:\nBehold, one stands in the sinners’ way!\nThe stiffest sceptic bends his neck\nAnd stands on no more vain parley\nIf such as she would have him come,\nWorship with her in the Baptist way,\nAccept the fables as he can,\nA Jewish God, a Passion Play;\nAnd such a lover never comes\nTo fondling dirty drabs for pay.\nBut God had another man for her,\nHe cannot answer all that pray.\n\nNovember winds are weak and cold,\nThey lie at last beneath the blue\nAnd sleep in the fields as cold as they.\nI know but one good thing to do,\nSo hearken, all ye mutineers:\nEvery man to his rendezvous!\n\nMy woman waits by the hearth, I say,\nAnd what is a scarlet woman to you?\nHer sins are scarlet if you will,\nHer lips are hardly of that hue,\n\nAnd many a time I’ve seen her sit\nBeside the hearth an hour or two,\nAnd set the pot upon the fire\nAnd wait until she’s spoken to.\nA hateful owl is roosting near\nWho mocks my woman, Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,\nBut the pot sings back just as shrill as it can,\nAnd the angry fire-log crashes through;\nAnd there the woman waits and I,\nponder the ways of God--and rue!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "ones-who-reject-christ": { - "title": "“Ones Who Reject Christ”", - "body": "There’s farmers and there’s farmers,\nThere’s many a field and field,\nBut none of the farmers round about\nCan haul such harvest-wagons out\nAs I from an acre’s yield.\n\nThere’s plenty and plenty of farmers\nThat leave the ground by the fence,\nThinking it’s nice if a patch of roses\nShould scratch out the hay and tickle their noses\nWith nice little wild-rose scents.\n\nI’m not like other farmers,\nI make my farming pay;\nI never go in for sentiment,\nAnd seeing that roses yield no rent\nI cut the stuff away.\n\nA very good thing for farmers\nIf they would learn my way;\nFor crops are all that a good field grows,\nAnd nothing is worse than a sniff of rose\nIn the good strong smell of hay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "painted-head": { - "title": "“Painted Head”", - "body": "By dark severance the apparition head\nSmiles from the air a capital on no\nColumn or a Platonic perhaps head\nOn a canvas sky depending from nothing;\n\nStirs up an old illusion of grandeur\nBy tickling the instinct of heads to be\nAbsolute and to try decapitation\nAnd to play truant from the body bush;\n\nBut too happy and beautiful for those sorts\nOf head (homekeeping heads are happiest)\nDiscovers maybe thirty unwidowed years\nOf not dishonoring the faithful stem;\n\nIs nameless and has authored for the evil\nHistorian headhunters neither book\nNor state and is therefore distinct from tart\nHeads with crowns and guilty gallery heads;\n\nWherefore the extravagant device of art\nUnhousing by abstraction this once head\nWas capital irony by a loving hand\nThat knew the no treason of a head like this;\n\nMakes repentance in an unlovely head\nFor having vinegarly traduced the flesh\nTill, the hurt flesh recusing, the hard egg\nIs shrunken to its own deathlike surface;\n\nAnd an image thus. The body bears the head\n(So hardly one they terribly are two)\nFeeds and obeys and unto please what end?\nNot to the glory of tyrant head but to\n\nThe estate of body. Beauty is of body.\nThe flesh contouring shallowly on a head\nIs a rock-garden needing body’s love\nAnd best bodiness to colorify\n\nThe big blue birds sitting and sea-shell cats\nAnd caves, and on the iron acropolis\nTo spread the hyacinthine hair and rear\nThe olive garden for the nightingales.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "piazza-piece": { - "title": "“Piazza Piece”", - "body": "--I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying\nTo make you hear. Your ears are soft and small\nAnd listen to an old man not at all,\nThey want the young men’s whispering and sighing.\nBut see the roses on your trellis dying\nAnd hear the spectral singing of the moon;\nFor I must have my lovely lady soon,\nI am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.\n\n--I am a lady young in beauty waiting\nUntil my truelove comes, and then we kiss.\nBut what grey man among the vines is this\nWhose words are dry and faint as in a dream?\nBack from my trellis, Sir, before I scream!\nI am a lady young in beauty waiting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "prayer": { - "title": "“Prayer”", - "body": "She would not keep at home, the foolish woman,\nShe would not mind her precious girls and boys,\nShe had to go, for it was Sunday morning,\nDown the hot road and to the barren pew\nAnd there abuse her superannuate knees\nTo make a prayer.\n\nShe had a huge petition on her bosom--\nA heavy weight for such a lean old thing--\nHer youngest boy made merry in the village\nAnd had not entered into the communion;\nAnd having labored with him long for nothing\nShe meant to ask of God to save him yet.\nThank God she asked that favor!\n\nThe manner of it echoes still in Heaven.\nBefore she dared to utter her desire\nThe strange old woman made approach to God\nWith many a low obeisance and abasement,\nAs having done so many things she ought not,\n\nAnd left undone so many things she ought,\nAnd being altogether very wicked;\nShe testified she had not kept his temple,\nWhich was her heart, all swept and white and ready;\nShe testified it--O the shameless woman,\nThe spotless housekeeper!\n\nNow God sat beaming on his burnished throne\nAnd swept creation with appraising eye,\nFinding, I fear, not all was free from blemish,\nYet keeping his magnificent composure;\nBut wearing certain necessary airs,\nTo suit with such incumbency of court,\nHe still at heart was quite a gentleman;\nFor when he saw that aged lady drooping\nAnd wearying her bones with genuflections\nFor her unworthiness, he fell ashamed\nTo think how hard it went with holy women\nTo ease their poor predicaments by prayer:\nThere on his heaven, and heard of all the hosts,\nHe groaned, he made a mighty face so wry\nThat several seraphin forgot their harping\nAnd scolded thus: “O what a wicked woman,\nTo shrew his splendid features out of shape!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "prelude-to-an-evening": { - "title": "“Prelude to an Evening”", - "body": "Do not enforce the tired wolf\nDragging his infected wound homeward\nTo sit tonight with the warm children\nNaming the pretty kings of France.\n\nThe images of the invaded mind\nBeing as the monsters in the dreams\nOf your most brief enchanted headful,\nSuppose a miracle of confusion:\n\nThat dreamed and undreamt become each other\nAnd mix the night and day of your mind;\nAnd it does not matter your twice crying\nFrom mouth unbeautied against the pillow\n\nTo avert the gun of the same old soldier;\nFor cry, cock-crow, or the iron bell\nCan crack the sleep-sense of outrage,\nAnnihilate phantoms who were nothing.\n\nBut now, by our perverse supposal,\nThere is a drift of fog on your mornings;\nYou in your peignoir, dainty at your orange cup,\nFeel poising round the sunny room\n\nInvisible evil, deprived and bold.\nAll day the clock will metronome\nYour gallant fear; the needles clicking,\nThe heels detonating the stair’s cavern\n\nFreshening the water in the blue bowls\nFor the buck berries, with not all your love,\nYou shall he listening for the low wind,\nThe warning sibilance of pines.\n\nYou like a waning moon, and I accusing\nOur too banded Eumenides,\nWhile you pronounce Noes wanderingly\nAnd smooth the heads of the hungry children.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "resurrection": { - "title": "“Resurrection”", - "body": "Long, long before men die I sometimes read\nTheir stoic backs as plain as graveyard stones,\nAn epitaph of poor dead men indeed.\nI never pass those old and crooked bones,\nRidden far down with burden and with age,\nStopping the headlong highway till they lean\nAside in honor of my equipage,\nBut I am sick and shamed that Heaven has been\nSo clumsy with the inelastic clay!\n“What pretty piece of hope then have you spun,\nMy old defeated traveler,” I say,\n“That keeps you marching on? For I have none.\nI have looked often and I have not found\nOld men bowed low who ever rose up sound.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "roses": { - "title": "“Roses”", - "body": "I entered dutiful, God knows,\nThe room in which I was to sit\nWith dreary unbelieving books.\nIt was surprising, I suppose,\nTo find such happy change in it:\nThere stood a most celestial rose\nAnd looked the flower that my love looks\nWho, where she turns her smiling face\nMakes heavy earth a hopeful place.\n\nI blessed the heart that wished me well\nWhen I had been bereft of much,\nAnd brought such word of beauty back.\nI went like one escaping hell\nTo drink its fragrance and to touch,\nAnd stroked, O ludicrous to tell!\nA horrid thing of bric-a-brac,\nA make-believe, a mockery,\nAnd nothing that a rose should be.\n\nRed real roses keep a thorn,\nAnd save their loveliness a while\nAnd in their perfect date unfold.\nBut you, beyond all women born,\nHave spent so easily your smile,\nThat I am not the less forlorn\nNor these ironic walls less cold,\nBecause it smiles, the chilly rose,\nAs you are smiling, I suppose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "street-light": { - "title": "“Street Light”", - "body": "The shine of many city streets\nConfuses any countryman;\nIt flickers here and flashes there,\nIt goes as soon as it began,\nIt beckons many ways at once\nFor him to follow if he can.\n\nUnder the lamp a woman stands,\nThe lamps are shining equal well,\nBut in her eyes are other lights,\nAnd lights plus other lights will tell:\nHe loves the brightness of that street\nWhich is the shining street to hell.\n\nThere’s light enough, and strong enough,\nTo lighten every pleasant park;\nI’m sorry lights are held so cheap,\nI’d rather there were not a spark\nThan choose those shining ways for joy\nAnd have them lead me into dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sunset": { - "title": "“Sunset”", - "body": "I know you are not cruel,\nAnd you would not willingly hurt anything in the world.\nThere is kindness in your eyes,\nThere could not very well be more of it in eyes\nAlready brimful of the sky.\nI thought you would some day begin to love me,\nBut now I doubt it badly;\nIt is no man-rival I am afraid of,\nIt is God.\n\nThe meadows are very wide and green,\nAnd the big field of wheat is solid gold,\nOr a little darker than gold.\nTwo people never sat like us by a fence of cedar rails\nOn a still evening\nAnd looked at such fat fields.\nTo me it is beautiful enough,\nI am stirred,\n\nI say grand and wonderful, and grow adjectival,\nBut to you\nIt is God.\n\nCropping the clover are several spotted cows.\nThey too are kind and gentle,\nAnd they stop and look round at me now and then\nAs if they would say:\n“How good of you to come to see us!\nPlease pardon us if we seem indifferent,\nBut we have not much time to talk with you now,\nAnd really nothing to say.”\nThen they make their bow,\nStill kind and calm,\nAnd go their way again\nTowards the sunset.\nI suppose they are going to God.\n\nYour eyes are not regarding me,\nNor the four-leaf clovers I picked for you,\n(With a prayer and a gentle squeeze for each of them),\nNor are they fretting over dress, and shoes,\nAnd image in the little glass,\nRestlessly,\nLike the eyes of other girls.\n\nYou are looking away over yonder\nTo where the crooked rail-fence gets to the top\nOf the yellow hill\nAnd drops out of sight\nInto space.\nIs that infinity that catches it?\nAnd do you catch it too in your thoughts?\nI know that look;\nI have not seen it on another girl;\nAnd it terrifies me,\nFor I cannot tell what it means,\nBut I think\nIt has something to do with God.\n\nWe are a mile from home,\nAnd soon it will be getting dark,\nAnd the big farm-bell will be ringing out for supper.\nWe had better start for the house.\nRover!\nO here he is, waiting.\nHe has chased the rabbits and run after the birds\nA thousand miles or so,\nAnd now he is hungry and tired.\nBut he is a southern gentleman\n\nAnd will not whimper once\nThough you kept him waiting forever.\nHe knows his mistress’ eyes as well as I,\nAnd when to be silent and respectful.\nI will try to be as patient as Rover,\nAnd we will be comrades and wait,\nUnquestioningly,\nTill this lady we love\nAnd her strange eyes\nCome home from God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-swimmer": { - "title": "“The Swimmer”", - "body": "In dog-days plowmen quit their toil,\nAnd frog-ponds in the meadow boil,\nAnd grasses on the upland broil,\nAnd all the coiling things uncoil,\nAnd eggs and meats and Christians spoil.\n\nA mile away the valley breaks\n(So all good valleys do) and makes\nA cool green water for hot heads’ sakes,\nAnd sundry sullen dog-days’ aches.\n\nThe swimmer’s body is white and clean,\nIt is washed by a water of deepest green\nThe color of leaves in a starlight scene,\nAnd it is as white as the stars between.\n\nBut the swimmer’s soul is a thing possessed,\nHis soul is naked as his breast,\nRemembers not its east and west,\nAnd ponders this way, I have guessed:\n\nI have no home in the cruel heat\nOn alien soil that blisters feet.\nThis water is my native seat,\nAnd more than ever cool and sweet,\nSo long by forfeiture escheat.\n\nO my forgiving element!\nI gash you to my heart’s content\nAnd never need be penitent,\nSo light you float me when breath is spent\nAnd close again where my rude way went.\n\nAnd now you close above my head,\nAnd I lie low in a soft green bed\nThat dog-days never have visited.\n“By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread:”\nThe garden’s curse is at last unsaid\n\nWhat do I need of senses five?\nWhy eat, or drink, or sweat, or wive?\nWhat do we strive for when we strive?\nWhat do we live for when alive?\n\nAnd what if I do not rise again,\nNever to goad a heated brain\nTo hotter excesses of joy and pain?\n\nWhy should it be against the grain\nTo lie so cold and still and sane?\n\nWater-bugs play shimmer-shimmer,\nNaked body’s just a glimmer,\nWatch ticks every second grimmer:\nCome to the top, O wicked swimmer!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "winter-remembered": { - "title": "“Winter Remembered”", - "body": "Two evils, monstrous either one apart,\nPossessed me, and were long and loath at going:\nA cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,\nAnd in the wood the furious winter blowing.\n\nThink not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,\nAnd past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,\nI glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,\nFar from my cause, my proper heat and center.\n\nBetter to walk forth in the frozen air\nAnd wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing;\nBecause my heart would throb less painful there,\nBeing caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.\n\nAnd where I walked, the murderous winter blast\nWould have this body bowed, these eyeballs streaming,\nAnd though I think this heart’s blood froze not fast\nIt ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming.\n\nDear love, these fingers that had known your touch,\nAnd tied our separate forces first together,\nWere ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,\nTen frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "daniil-rathaus": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Daniil Rathaus", - "birth": { - "year": 1868 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ратгауз,_Даниил_Максимович", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "do-not-light-the-candles": { - "title": "“Do not light the candles …”", - "body": "Do not light the candles, in the darkness of the fragrant night\nIt is a delight for me to sit alone with you,\nJust look--the stars, the eyes of the far-off heavens,\nSend down on us their kindly greeting, flickering in the heights.\n\nDo not light the candles, as their light will bring down on us\nThe familiar melancholy of futile vanity,\nRadiant sleep will disappear and happiness will flee …\nDo not light the candles, do not drive away our dreams! …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Philip Ross Bullock", - "date": { - "year": 1893 - } - } - }, - "we-sat-together-by-the-sleepy-river": { - "title": "“We sat together by the sleepy river …”", - "body": "We sat together by the sleepy river.\nThe fishermen rowed home, singing their quiet songs.\nThe golden rays of the sun were dying out across the river …\nAnd still I said nothing to you.\n\nThe thunder rolled in the distance … A storm moved in …\nA tear rolled down your eyelashes …\nAnd I fell at our feet, sobbing madly …\nAnd I said nothing to you, nothing at all.\n\nAnd now, again, as before, I’m alone,\nI no longer expect anything from the years to come …\nIn my heart, the cry of life fell silent long ago …\nOh why did I say nothing to you!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Philip Ross Bullock", - "date": { - "year": 1893 - } - } - } - } - }, - "irina-ratushinskaya": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Irina Ratushinskaya", - "birth": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2017 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Ratushinskaya", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-sparrows-of-butyrka": { - "title": "“The Sparrows of Butyrka”", - "body": "Now even the snow has grown sad--\nLet overwhelmed reason go,\nAnd let’s smoke our cigarettes through the air-vent,\nLet’s at least set the smoke free.\nA sparrow flies up--\nAnd looks at us with a searching eye:\n“Share your crust with me!”\nAnd in honourable fashion you share it with him.\nThe sparrows-- they know\nWho to ask for bread.\nEven though there’s a double grille on the windows--\nAnd only a crumb can get through.\nWhat do they care\nWhether you were on trial or not?\nIf you’ve fed them, you’re OK.\nThe real trial lies ahead.\nYou can’t entice a sparrow--\nKindness and talents are no use.\nHe won’t knock\nAt the urban double-glazing.\nTo understand birds\nYou have to be a convict.\nAnd if you share your bread,\nIt means your time is done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "David McDuff", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "pierre-reverdy": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Pierre Reverdy", - "birth": { - "year": 1889 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1960 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Reverdy", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "afternoon": { - "title": "“Afternoon”", - "body": "In the morning that comes up behind the roof, in the shelter of the bridge, in the corner of the cypresses that rise above the wall, a rooster has crowed. In the bell tower that rips the air with its shining point, the notes ring out and already the morning din can be heard in the street; the only street that goes from the river to the mountain dividing the woods. One looks for some other words but the ideas are always just as dark, just as simple and singularly painful. There is hardly more than the eyes, the open air, the grass and the water in the distance with, around every bend, a well or a cool basin. In the right-hand corner the last house with a larger head at the window. The trees are extremely alive and all those familiar companions walk along the demolished wall that is crushed into the thorns with bursts of laughter. Above the ravine the din augments, swells, and if the car passes on the upper road one no longer knows if it is the flowers or the little bells that are chiming. Under the blazing sun, when the landscape is on fire, the traveler crosses the stream on a very narrow bridge, before a dark hole where the trees line the water that falls asleep in the afternoon. And, against the trembling background of the woods, the motionless man.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Painted Stars ", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lydia Davis", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "clock": { - "title": "“Clock”", - "body": "In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.\nThe white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon--the hands are without shelter--as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Sun on the Ceiling", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Lydia Davis", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "dry-weather": { - "title": "“Dry Weather”", - "body": "A wild flame blazes at the gate of the woods\nRooted down in the depths of memory\nDown unknown paths and the gully below\nThe hole dug in the sky where the beasts go to drink\nThere is but one fresher moment in the season\nwhen the freckles fade\non the anxious face of the wanderer\nalways driven away rejected\nby time overwhelming\nRocks long for rain\nFurrows long too\nAnd the tired man turns back to the dark night\nThe lighted way resembles a whirlwind\nA gust of warm words which want to speak\nAll the birds in the sky seek out their prayer\nThe trees are driven to folly\nEverything lost in reality\nEverything too far for the captive hand\nSeam of gold\nseam of light\nSummer’s final glimpse", - "metadata": { - "source": "Sources of the Wind", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Sam Gordon", - "date": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "for-the-moment": { - "title": "“For the Moment”", - "body": "Life is simple and gay\nThe bright sun rings with a quiet sound\nThe sound of the bells has quieted down\nThis morning the light hits it all\nThe footlights of my head are lit again\nAnd the room I live in is finally bright\n\nJust one beam is enough\nJust one burst of laughter\nMy joy that shakes the house\nRestrains those wanting to die\nBy the notes of its song\n\nI sing off-key\nAh it’s funny\nMy mouth open to every breeze\nSpews mad notes everywhere\nThat emerge I don’t know how\nTo fly toward other ears\n\nListen I’m not crazy\nI laugh at the bottom of the stairs\nBefore the wide-open door\nIn the sunlight scattered\nOn the wall among green vines\nAnd my arms are held out toward you\n\nIt’s today I love you", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Kenneth Rexroth", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-heart-divided": { - "title": "“A Heart Divided”", - "body": "He so spares himself\nHe so fears the coverings\nThe sky’s blue coverlet\nAnd pillows of cloud\nHe is ill-clothed by his faith\nHe is so afraid of steps that go awry\nAnd streets chipped in the ice\nHe is too tiny for winter\nHe so fears the cold\nHe is transparent in his mirror\nHe is so hazy he loses himself\nTime rolls him under its waves\nAt moments his blood flows the wrong way\nAnd his tears stain the linen\nHis hand gathers green trees\nAnd nosegays of seaweed from the strand\nHis faith is a thorn bush\nHis hands bleed against his heart\nHis eyes have lost their glow\nAnd his feet trail over the sea\nLike the dead arms of devil-fish\nHe is lost in the universe\nHe stumbles against cities\nAgainst himself and his own failings\nThen pray that the Lord\nErase even the memory\nOf this man from His mind", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sinister-dawn": { - "title": "“Sinister Dawn”", - "body": "I have regained the island\nThe archipelago of words unbound\nThe cruelest sense of stolen gestures\nIn the shadows where fear conceals itself\nBehind the twitching curtain of thought\nThe sketch barely piercing the cracks\nA sliver of honey lines pursed lips\nThe groaning of the evening sky in every corner\nWhere hides an absence of any starlit love\nTurning face bound with hand checked\nDisaster of a fate coming late to bloom\nShip shattered at the edge of ice floes\nWe play word games of loser’s chess\nAnd on the salty soil baked solid by the light\nTired of hearing you eke out so many woes\nFlowers of the scorched morning\nHeart in my hands of ash\nThe desert’s rolling dunes", - "metadata": { - "source": "Song of the Dead", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Sam Gordon", - "date": { - "year": 1948 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-double-lock": { - "title": "“To Double Lock”", - "body": "I am so far from the voices\nFrom the festival’s distant murmur\nThe foaming mill wheel turns back\nThe sob of spring water ceases\nThe hour has painfully glided\nOver the moon’s great beaches\nAnd in the cramped warm spaces without a crevice\nI sleep head upon elbow\nIn the calm desert within the lamp’s circle\nTerrible time inhuman time\nHunted along muddy sidewalks\nFar from the limpid amphitheatre that declines glasses\nFar from the decanted song born of leisure\nIn a bitter tussle of laughter between the teeth\nA faded sorrow quaking at your roots\nI prefer death forgetfulness dignity\nI am so far away when I contemplate all I love", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-turning-heart": { - "title": "“The Turning Heart”", - "body": "We must not go any further\nThe jewels are set in the lyre\nDelirium’s black butterflies\nStir unthinkingly the ashes of the setting sun\n\nBarely back from bitter voyages\nAround hearts thrown to the back of windows\nOnto the foreground of prairies and pastures\nLike naked shells before the sea\n\nBarely roused by love for life\nLooks which gather around mine\nNameless faces of times gone by\nDiamonds of love floating on the dregs\n\nLooking in the depths of the sludge\nFor the moving secret in the veins of my misfortune\nI must sink a hand into the roots of my heart\nAnd my clumsy fingers shatter the vase’s edge\n\nThe blood which draws this thick curtain over your eyes\nThe unknown emotion which makes your lip quiver\nAnd this too cruel cold which drives your fever\nCrumples all the corners of the linen of your skin\n\nI love you having seen you only in the shadows\nIn the darkness of my dream where alone I can see\nI love you and you are as yet indistinct\nA mysterious form which moves through the evening\n\nFor what I love deep down is that which passes\nJust once through this two-way mirror\nWhich tears my heart and dies at the surface\nOf the closed sky before my ebbing desire", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cast Iron", - "language": "french", - "translator": "Sam Gordon", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "kenneth-rexroth": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kenneth Rexroth", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rexroth", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "runaway": { - "title": "“Runaway”", - "body": "There are sparkles of rain on the bright\nHair over your forehead;\nYour eyes are wet and your lips\nWet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.\nWhy have you stayed\nAway so long, why have you only\nCome to me late at night\nAfter walking for hours in wind and rain?\nTake off your dress and stockings;\nSit in the deep chair before the fire.\nI will warm your feet in my hands;\nI will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.\nI wish I could build a fire\nIn you that would never go out.\nI wish I could be sure that deep in you\nWas a magnet to draw you always home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "thou-shalt-not-kill": { - "title": "“Thou Shalt Not Kill”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThey are murdering all the young men.\nFor half a century now, every day,\nThey have hunted them down and killed them.\nThey are killing them now.\nAt this minute, all over the world,\nThey are killing the young men.\nThey know ten thousand ways to kill them.\nEvery year they invent new ones.\nIn the jungles of Africa,\nIn the marshes of Asia,\nIn the deserts of Asia,\nIn the slave pens of Siberia,\nIn the slums of Europe,\nIn the nightclubs of America,\nThe murderers are at work.\n\nThey are stoning Stephen,\nThey are casting him forth from every city in the world.\nUnder the Welcome sign,\nUnder the Rotary emblem,\nOn the highway in the suburbs,\nHis body lies under the hurling stones.\nHe was full of faith and power.\nHe did great wonders among the people.\nThey could not stand against his wisdom.\nThey could not bear the spirit with which he spoke.\nHe cried out in the name\nOf the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness.\nThey were cut to the heart.\nThey gnashed against him with their teeth.\nThey cried out with a loud voice.\nThey stopped their ears.\nThey ran on him with one accord.\nThey cast him out of the city and stoned him.\nThe witnesses laid down their clothes\nAt the feet of a man whose name was your name--\nYou.\n\nYou are the murderer.\nYou are killing the young men.\nYou are broiling Lawrence on his gridiron.\nWhen you demanded he divulge\nThe hidden treasures of the spirit,\nHe showed you the poor.\nYou set your heart against him.\nYou seized him and bound him with rage.\nYou roasted him on a slow fire.\nHis fat dripped and spurted in the flame.\nThe smell was sweet to your nose.\nHe cried out,\n“I am cooked on this side,\nTurn me over and eat,\nYou\nEat of my flesh.”\n\nYou are murdering the young men.\nYou are shooting Sebastian with arrows.\nHe kept the faithful steadfast under persecution.\nFirst you shot him with arrows.\nThen you beat him with rods.\nThen you threw him in a sewer.\nYou fear nothing more than courage.\nYou who turn away your eyes\nAt the bravery of the young men.\n\nYou,\nThe hyena with polished face and bow tie,\nIn the office of a billion dollar\nCorporation devoted to service;\nThe vulture dripping with carrion,\nCarefully and carelessly robed in imported tweeds,\nLecturing on the Age of Abundance;\nThe jackal in double-breasted gabardine,\nBarking by remote control,\nIn the United Nations;\nThe vampire bat seated at the couch head,\nNotebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;\nThe autonomous, ambulatory cancer,\nThe Superego in a thousand uniforms;\nYou, the finger man of behemoth,\nThe murderer of the young men.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhat happened to Robinson,\nWho used to stagger down Eighth Street,\nDizzy with solitary gin?\nWhere is Masters, who crouched in\nHis law office for ruinous decades?\nWhere is Leonard who thought he was\nA locomotive? And Lindsay,\nWise as a dove, innocent\nAs a serpent, where is he?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nWhat became of Jim Oppenheim?\nLola Ridge alone in an\nIcy furnished room? Orrick Johns,\nHopping into the surf on his\nOne leg? Elinor Wylie\nWho leaped like Kierkegaard?\nSara Teasdale, where is she?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nWhere is George Sterling, that tame fawn?\nPhelps Putnam who stole away?\nJack Wheelwright who couldn’t cross the bridge?\nDonald Evans with his cane and\nMonocle, where is he?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nJohn Gould Fletcher who could not\nUnbreak his powerful heart?\nBodenheim butchered in stinking\nSqualor? Edna Millav who took\nHer last straight whiskey? Genevieve\nWho loved so much; where is she?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nHarry who didn’t care at all?\nHart who went back to the sea?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nWhere is Sol Funaroff?\nWhat happened to Potamkin?\nIsidor Schneider? Claude McKay?\nCountee Cullen? Clarence Weinstock?\nWho animates their corpses today?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\nWhere is Ezra, that noisy man?\nWhere is Larsson whose poems were prayers?\nWhere is Charles Snider, that gentle\nBitter boy? Carnevali,\nWhat became of him?\nCarol who was so beautiful, where is she?\n Timor mortis conturbat me.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWas their end noble and tragic,\nLike the mask of a tyrant?\nLike Agamemnon’s secret golden face?\nIndeed it was not. Up all night\nIn the fo’c’sle, bemused and beaten,\nBleeding at the rectum, in his\nPocket a review by the one\nColleague he respected, “If he\nReally means what these poems\nPretend to say, he has only\nOne way out--.” Into the\nHot acrid Caribbean sun,\nInto the acrid, transparent,\nSmoky sea. Or another, lice in his\nArmpits and crotch, garbage littered\nOn the floor, gray greasy rags on\nThe bed. “I killed them because they\nWere dirty, stinking Communists.\nI should get a medal.” Again,\nAnother, Simenon foretold,\nHis end at a glance. “I dare you\nTo pull the trigger.” She shut her eyes\nAnd spilled gin over her dress.\nThe pistol wobbled in his hand.\nIt took them hours to die.\nAnother threw herself downstairs,\nAnd broke her back. It took her years.\nTwo put their heads under water\nIn the bath and filled their lungs.\nAnother threw himself under\nThe traffic of a crowded bridge.\nAnother, drunk, jumped from a\nBalcony and broke her neck.\nAnother soaked herself in\nGasoline and ran blazing\nInto the street and lived on\nIn custody. One made love\nOnly once with a beggar woman.\nHe died years later of syphilis\nOf the brain and spine. Fifteen\nYears of pain and poverty,\nWhile his mind leaked away.\nOne tried three times in twenty years\nTo drown himself. The last time\nHe succeeded. One turned on the gas\nWhen she had no more food, no more\nMoney, and only half a lung.\nOne went up to Harlem, took on\nThirty men, came home and\nCut her throat. One sat up all night\nTalking to H. L. Mencken and\nDrowned himself in the morning.\nHow many stopped writing at thirty?\nHow many went to work for Time?\nHow many died of prefrontal\nLobotomies in the Communist Party?\nHow many arc lost in the back wards\nOf provincial madhouses?\nHow many on the advice of\nTheir psychoanalysts, decided\nA business career was best after all?\nHow many are hopeless alcoholics?\nRené Crevel!\nJacques Rigaud!\nAntonin Artaud!\nMayakofsky!\nEssenin!\nRobert Desnos!\nSaint Pol Roux!\nMax Jacob!\nAll over the world\nThe same disembodied hand\nStrikes us down.\nHere is a mountain of death.\nA hill of heads like the Khans piled up.\nThe first-born of a century\nSlaughtered by Herod.\nThree generations of infants\nStuffed down the maw of Moloch.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHe is dead.\nThe bird of Rhiannon.\nHe is dead.\nIn the winter of the heart.\nHe is Dead.\nIn the canyons of death,\nThey found him dumb at last,\nIn the blizzard of lies.\nHe never spoke again.\nHe died.\nHe is dead.\nIn their antiseptic hands,\nHe is dead.\nThe little spellbinder of Cader Idris.\nHe is dead.\nThe sparrow of Cardiff.\nHe is dead.\nThe canary of Swansea.\nWho killed him?\nWho killed the bright-headed bird?\nYou did, you son of a bitch.\nYou drowned him in your cocktail brain.\nHe fell down and died in your synthetic heart.\nYou killed him,\nOppenheimer the Million-Killer,\nYou killed him,\nEinstein the Gray Eminence.\nYou killed him,\nHavanahavana, with your Nobel Prize.\nYou killed him, General,\nThrough the proper channels.\nYou strangled him, Le Mouton,\nWith your mains étendues.\nHe confessed in open court to a pince-nezed skull.\nYou shot him in the back of the head\nAs he stumbled in the last cellar.\nYou killed him,\nBenign Lady on the postage stamp.\nHe was found dead at a Liberal Weekly luncheon.\nHe was found dead on the cutting room floor.\nHe was found dead at a Time policy conference.\nHenry Luce killed him with a telegram to the Pope.\nMademoiselle strangled him with a padded brassiere.\nOld Possum sprinkled him with a tea ball.\nAfter the wolves were done, the vaticides\nCrawled off with his bowels to their classrooms and quarterlies.\nWhen the news came over the radio\nYou personally rose up shouting, “Give us Barabbas!”\nIn your lonely crowd you swept over him.\nYour custom-built brogans and your ballet slippers\nPummeled him to death in the gritty street.\nYou hit him with an album of Hindemith.\nYou stabbed him with stainless steel by Isamu Noguchi,\nHe is dead.\nHe is Dead.\nLike Ignacio the bullfighter,\nAt four o’clock in the afternoon.\nAt precisely four o’clock.\nI too do not want to hear it.\nI too do not want to know it.\nI want to run into the street,\nShouting, “Remember Vanzetti!”\nI want to pour gasoline down your chimneys.\nI want to blow up your galleries.\nI want to burn down your editorial offices.\nI want to slit the bellies of your frigid women.\nI want to sink your sailboats and launches.\nI want to strangle your children at their finger paintings.\nI want to poison your Afghans and poodles.\nHe is dead, the little drunken cherub.\nHe is dead,\nThe effulgent tub thumper.\nHe is Dead.\nThe ever living birds are not singing\nTo the head of Bran.\nThe sea birds are still\nOver Bardsey of Ten Thousand Saints.\nThe underground men are not singing\nOn their way to work.\nThere is a smell of blood\nIn the smell of the turf smoke.\nThey have struck him down,\nThe son of David ap Gwilym.\nThey have murdered him,\nThe Baby of Taliessin.\nThere he lies dead,\nBy the Iceberg of the United Nations.\nThere he lies sandbagged,\nAt the foot of the Statue of Liberty.\nThe Gulf Stream smells of blood\nAs it breaks on the sand of Iona\nAnd the blue rocks of Canarvon.\nAnd all the birds of the deep sea rise up\nOver the luxury liners and scream,\n“You killed him! You killed him.\nIn your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,\nYou son of a bitch.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vitamins-and-roughage": { - "title": "“Vitamins and Roughage”", - "body": "Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked,\nThe daughters of California\nEducate reluctant humanists;\nDrive into their skulls with tennis balls\nThe unhappy realization\nThat nature is still stronger than man.\nThe special Hellenic privilege\nOf the special intellect seeps out\nAt last in this irrigated soil.\nSweat of athletes and juice of lovers\nAre stronger than Socrates’ hemlock;\nAnd the games of scrupulous Euclid\nVanish in the gymnopaedia.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "charles-reznikoff": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Reznikoff", - "birth": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1976 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Reznikoff", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "autobiography-new-york": { - "title": "“Autobiography: New York”", - "body": "# I.\n\nIt is not to be bought for a penny\nin the candy store, nor picked\nfrom the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps,\nin the ashes on the distant lots,\namong the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds.\nIf you wish to eat fish freely,\ncucumbers and melons,\nyou should have stayed in Egypt.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI am alone--\nand glad to be alone;\nI do not like people who walk about\nso late; who walk slowly after midnight\nthrough the leaves fallen on the sidewalks.\nI do not like\nmy own face\nin the little mirrors of the slot-machines\nbefore the closed stores.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWalking along the highway,\nI smell the yellow flowers of a shrub,\nwatch the starlings on a lawn, perhaps--\nbut why are all these\nspeeding away in automobiles,\nwhere are they off to\nin such a hurry?\nThey must be going to hear wise men\nand to look at beautiful women,\nand I am just a fool\nto be loitering here alone.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI like the sound of the street--\nbut I, apart and alone,\nbeside an open window\nand behind a closed door.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWinter is here indeed; the leaves have long been swept\nfrom the winding walks; trees and ground are brown--\nall is in order.\nOnly the lamps now flourish in the park.\nWe walk about and talk;\nbut the troubles of the unsuccessful middle-aged\nare so uninteresting!\n\n\n# VI.\n\nNow it is cold: where the snow was melting\nthe walk crackles with black ice beneath my careful steps;\nand the snow is old and pitted,\nhere grey with ashes and there yellow with sand.\nThe walks lie in the cold shadow\nof houses;\npigeons and sparrows are in a hollow\nfor cold, out of the wind; but here,\nwhere the sunshine pours through a narrow street\nupon a little tree, black and naked of every leaf,\nthe sparrows are in the sun, thick upon the twigs.\nThose who in their lives braved the anger of their fellows,\nbronze statues now,\nwith outstretched arm or sword\nbrave only the weather.\n\nI find myself talking aloud\nas I walk;\nthat is bad.\nOnly Don Juan would believe\nI am in conversation with the\nsnow-covered statues;\nonly St. Francis\nthat I am talking to the sparrows\nin the naked bushes,\nto the pigeons\nin the snow.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThe ropes in the wind\nslapping the flag-pole\n(the flag has been hauled down);\nbehind the bare tree-tops\nthe lights of an aeroplane\nmoving away slowly.\n\nA star or two shining\nbetween factory chimneys;\nthe street dark and still\nbecause the street-lamp has been broken\nand it is cold and late.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nBright upon the table\nfor your birthday,\nthe burning candles will dissolve\nin rays\nand lumps of wax.\nUnlike a skull,\nthey say politely,\nThis is you!\n\n\n# IX.\n\nI am afraid\nbecause of the foolishness\nI have spoken.\nI must diet\non silence;\nstrengthen myself\nwith quiet.\n\nWhere is the wisdom\nwith which I may be medicined?\nI will walk by myself\nand cure myself\nin the sunshine and the wind.\n\n\n# X.\n\nI do not believe that David killed Goliath.\nIt must have been--\nyou will find the name in the list of David’s captains.\nBut, whoever it was, he was no fool\nwhen he took off the helmet\nand put down the sword and the spear and the shield\nand said, The weapons you have given me are good,\nbut they are not mine:\nI will fight in my own way\nwith a couple of pebbles and a sling.\n\n\n# XI.\n\n“Shall I go there?” “As you like--\nit will not matter; you are not at all important.”\nThe words stuck to me\nlike burrs. The path was hidden\nunder the fallen leaves; and here and there\nthe stream was choked. Where it forced a way\nthe ripples flashed a second.\nShe spoke unkindly but it was the truth:\nI shared the sunshine like a leaf, a ripple;\n\nthinking of this, sunned myself\nand, for the moment, was content.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nThere is nobody in the street\nof those who crowded about David\nto watch me\nas I dance before the Lord:\nalone in my unimportance\nto do as I like.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nYour angry words--each false name\nsinks into me, and is added to the heap\nbeneath. I am still the same:\nthey are no part of me, which I keep;\nbut the way I go, and over which I flow.\n\n\n# XIV._The Bridge_\n\n\nIn a cloud bones of steel.\n\n\n# XV._God and Messenger_\n\n\nThis pavement barren\nas the mountain\non which God spoke to Moses--\nsuddenly in the street\nshining against my legs\nthe bumper of a motor car.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nA beggar stretches out his hand\nto touch a fur collar, and strokes it unseen,\nstealing its warmth for his finger tips.\n\n\n# XVII.\n\nThe elevator man, working long hours\nfor little--whose work is dull and trivial--\nmust also greet each passenger\npleasantly:\nto be so heroic\nhe wears a uniform.\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\nThis subway station\nwith its electric lights, pillars of steel, arches of cement, and trains--\nquite an improvement on the caves of the cave-men;\nbut, look! on this wall\na primitive drawing.\n\n\n# XIX._Subway_\n\n\nPeople moving, people standing still, crowds\nand more crowds; a thousand and ten thousand iron girders\nas pillars;\nescape!\nBut how,\nshut up in the moving train?\nAnd upstairs, in the street,\nthe sun is shining as it shines in June.\n\n\n# XX._Poet with Whiskey Bottle and Sailor_\n\n\nThere is anguish there, certainly,\nand a commotion\nin the next room;\nshouts of\nwords and phrases that do not make sentences\nand sentences that do not make sense.\nI open the door:\nah, the hallway is crowded--\ndescendants of the three wise men,\nnow male and female,\ncome again to worship in a stable.\n\n\n# XXI.\n\nThe white cat on the lawn,\nlying in the sun against the hedge,\nlovely to look at--\nbut this stout gentleman,\nwho needs a shave badly,\nleaning in an arbor hung with purple grapes,\npurple grapes all about him,\nis unpleasant.\nAm I becoming misanthropic?\nAn atheist?\nWhy, this might be the god Bacchus!\n\n\n# XXII.\n\nThe bearded rag-picker\nseated among heaps of rags in a basement\nsings:\nIt was born that way;\nthat is the way it was born--\nthe way it came out of some body\nto stink:\nnothing will change it--\nneither pity nor kindness.\nA paralytic,\nhands trembling like water,\nlistens.\n\nBehind her\nthe sparrows cluster upon one tree\nand leave the others barren;\nand the town clock,\nthat stern accountant,\ntells us it is six,\nand would persuade us that the night is spent.\n\n\n# XXIII._Cooper Union Library_\n\n\nMen and women with open books before them--\nand never turn a page: come\nmerely for warmth\nnot light.\n\n\n# XXIV.\n\nA row of tenements, windows boarded up;\nan empty factory, windows broken;\na hillside of dead leaves, dead weeds,\nold newspapers and rusted cans.\nNow come a group\nin old clothes and broken shoes\nwho say politely,\nThe way, sir? If you don’t mind\ntell us\nthe way, please.\n\n\n# XXV.\n\nThe young fellow walks about\nwith nothing to do: he has lost his job.\n“If I ever get another, I’ll be hard!\nYou’ve got to be hard\nto get on. I’ll be hard, all right,”\nhe says bitterly. Takes out his cigarettes.\nOnly four or five left.\nLooks at me out of the corner of his eye--\na stranger he has just met; hesitates;\nand offers me a cigarette.\n\n\n# XXVI.\n\nI am always surprised to meet, after ten or twenty years,\nthose who were poor and silly\nstill poor and silly, of course, but alive--\nin spite of wars and plagues and panics,\nalive and well.\nIs it possible\nthere is a Father in Heaven,\nafter all?\n\n\n# XXVII.\n\nOn a Sunday, when the place was closed,\nI saw a plump mouse among the cakes in the window:\ndear ladies,\nwho crowd this expensive tea-room,\nyou must not think that you alone are blessed of God.\n\n\n# XXVIII.\n\nA fine fellow, trotting easily without a sound\ndown the macadam road between the woods,\nyou heard me,\nturned your pointed head,\nand we took a long look at each other,\nfox and man;\nthen, without any hurry, you went into the ferns,\nand left the road to the automobiles and me--\nto the heels and wheels of the citizens.\n\n\n# XXIX.\n\nThe sun sunks\nthrough the grey heavens--\nno brighter than the moon;\n\nfrom the tower\nin single notes\nthe winter music of the bells.\n\nA stooping Negress walking slowly\nthrough the slowly falling snow.\n\n\n# XXX.\n\nIn your warm room,\ndo not judge by that line of clothes\nbehind the wall of the warehouse--\nin the sunshine;\non other roofs\nother lines of clothes\nturn and twist;\nyes, a cold wind is blowing.\n\nThe pigeons will not rise\nfrom their roof;\nfly to the coop, find the door closed,\nand huddle on top,\nfacing east, away from the wind.\n\n\n# XXXI.\n\nThe sky is cloudy\nbut the clouds--\nas the long day ends--\nare pearl and rose;\nspring has come\nto the streets,\nspring has come to the sky.\n\nSit still\nbeside the open window\nand let the wind\nthe gentle wind,\nblow in your face;\n\nsit still\nand fold your hands--\nempty your heart of thoughts,\nyour mind of dreams.\n\n\n# XXXII._Dawn in the Park_\n\n\nThe leaves are solid\nin the gloom;\nthe ledges of rock\nin this new world are\nunsubstantial.\nThe sole inhabitants, it seems,\nare birds--\n\nuntil these two,\nhis arm about her waist.\n\n\n# XXXIII.\n\nStream that a month ago\nflowed between banks of snow\nand whose grey ripples showed\na sky as grey--\nnow the stream is seen\nclear and as green\nas are the willows on its banks,\nfor it is May:\nthis stream was turbid, grey,\nthat now is clear and green--\nfor it is May!\n\nYour hair be dyed and curled the more,\nyour dress be gayer than before--\nyour beauty had its praise,\nyour anxious eyes now ask it;\nbut your face will soon be crumpled\nlike a ball of paper tossed\nin the trash-basket,\nin the trash-basket.\n\n\n# XXXIV.\n\nHolding the stem of the\nbeauty she had\nas if it were still\na rose.\n\n\n# XXXV._Going West_\n\n\nThe train leaves New York--leaves the tunnel: yesterday’s snow\nin the corners of roofs, in the furrows of ploughed fields,\nunder the shelter of the naked trees,\non one side of roads and one bank of streams--\nwherever the morning sun did not reach it;\nturbulent streams running in twenty parallel currents;\nslopes showing on top a dark band of naked woods.\nBits of coal rain on the roof of the car,\nsmoke from the engine is blown in front of the window,\nand on the flat land beside the rails\nthe snow is blown about.\n\nNext morning, across the lots, blocks of brand-new houses;\nold wooden houses with back porches facing the tracks;\nthe railway yard widens and the ground is evenly lined with rails,\nand we are in Chicago.\nThe flat fields on either side covered with dried corn-stalks,\nbroken a little above the ground and flat on the black earth;\nice in the hollows; shaggy horses\ntrot away from the train; a colt with lifted hoof\nlooks at us; towers of steel girders, in an endless row,\ncarry wires on three pairs of arms across the fields. A beam to guide planes\nflashing in the night.\n\nAt last only the morning star is shining;\nthe plain is covered with sparse yellow grass;\na great herd of cattle--red cattle with white faces and legs--grazing.\nHills with flat tops; snow in the hollows on the steep sides;\na cement bridge with a bright new railing;\nreddish ground; above a ridge of hills\nblack mountains, sheets of snow on their sides, black mountains veined with snow.\nLow rolling hills covered with sage; neither house nor cattle. By nightfall it is snowing.\n\nThe dark ground is flat to the river--bright with dawn;\nbeyond rise the mountains blue and purple;\nthe blue of the sky becomes purple, in which a star is shining.\nThe desert is white with snow, the sage heaped with it;\nthe mountains to the north are white. The train turns\nsouth. We are among rocks;\ngrey rock and red rock; yellow rock and red rock;\ncliffs bare of any growth; walls of red rock crumbling;\na mountain covered with boulders, rocks, and stones;\nand not a living thing\nexcept a large bird\nslowly flying.\n\nThe ground beside the roadbed is green with bright grass;\nthe trees along the muddy river are bright with buds;\ntrees in the hollow have budded and are green with leaves.\nPalms in the streets of a town.\nPurple and white flowers on the desert.\nWhite sand in smooth waves.\nA gravel plain like rippling water.\nSingle lights; many lights; lights along highways, lights along streets,\nand along the streets of Los Angeles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "the-bread-has-become-moldy": { - "title": "“The Bread Has Become Moldy”", - "body": "The bread has become moldy\nand the dates blown down by the wind;\nthe iron has slipped from the helve.\nThe wool was to by dyed red\nbut the dyer dyed it black.\n\nThe dead woman has forgotten her comb\nand tube of eye-paint;\nthe dead cobbler has forgotten his knife,\nthe dead butcher his chopper,\nand the dead carpenter his adze.\n\nA goat can be driven off with a shout.\nBut where is the man to shout?\nThe bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed,\nand the beams are ready. Where is the builder?\n\nTo be buried in a linen shroud\nor in a matting of reeds--\nbut where are the dead of the Flood\nand where the dead of Nebuchadnezzar?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "depression": { - "title": "“Depression”", - "body": "So proudly she came into the subway car\nall who were not reading their newspapers saw\nthe head high and the slow tread--\ncoat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag,\nface unwashed and the grey hair uncombed;\n\nsimple soul, who so early in the morning when only the poorest go to work,\nstood up in the subway and outshouting the noise:\n“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I have a baby at home who is sick,\nand I have no money, no job;” who did not have box or cap to take coins--\nonly his hands,\nand, seeing only faces turned away,\ndid not even go down the aisle as beggars do;\n\nthe fire had burnt through the floor:\nmachines and merchandise had fallen into\nthe great hole, this zero that had sucked away so many years\nand now, seen at last, the shop itself;\nthe ceiling sloped until it almost touched the floor--a strange curve\nin the lines and oblongs of his life;\ndrops were falling\nfrom the naked beams of the floor above,\nfrom the soaked plaster, still the ceiling;\ndrops of dirty water were falling\non his clothes and hat and on his hands;\nthe thoughts of business\ngathered in his bosom like black water\nin footsteps through a swamp;\n\nwaiting for a job, she studied the dusty table at which she sat\nand the floor which had been badly swept--\nthe office-boy had left the corners dirty;\na mouse ran in and out under the radiator\nand she drew her feet away\nand her skirt about her legs, but the mouse went in and out\nabout its business; and she sat waiting for a job\nin an unfriendly world of men and mice;\n\nwalking along the drive by twos and threes,\ntalking about jobs,\njobs they might get and jobs they had had,\nnever turning to look at the trees or the river\nglistening in the sunlight or the automobiles\nthat went swiftly past them--\nin twos and threes talking about jobs;\n\nin the drizzle\nfour in a row\nclose to the curb\nthat passers-by might pass,\nthe squads stand\nwaiting for soup,\na slice of bread\nand shelter--\ngrimy clothes\ntheir uniform;\non a stoop\nstiffly across the steps\na man\nwho has fainted;\neach in that battalion\neyes him,\nbut does not move from his place,\nwell drilled in want.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-group-of-verse": { - "title": "“A Group of Verse”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAll day the pavement has been black\nWith rain, but in our warm brightly-lit\nRoom, praise God,\nI kept saying to myself,\nAnd saying not a word,\nAmen, you answered.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFrom my window I could not see the moon,\nAnd yet it was shining:\nThe yard among the houses--\nSnow upon it--\nAn oblong in the darkness.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAmong the heaps of brick and plaster lies\nA girder, itself among the rubbish.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nRooted among roofs, their smoke among the clouds,\nFactory chimneys--our cedars of Lebanon.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat are you doing in our street among the automobiles, Horse?\nHow are your cousins, the centaur and the unicorn?\n\n\n# VI.\n\nOf our visitors--I do not know which I dislike most:\nThe silent beetles or these noisy flies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "passing-the-shop-after-school": { - "title": "“Passing the Shop after School”", - "body": "Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.\nNow at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and heard their talk of that day’s worries and the next:\nlack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders again,\nfor the tenth time he said, “I’m going in with you: there’s more money in business.”\nHis father answered, “Since when do you care about money? You don’t know what kind of a life you’re going into--but you have always had your own way.”\n\nHe went out selling: in the morning he read the _Arrival of Buyers_ in _The Times_; he packed half a dozen samples into a box and went from office to office.\nOthers like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust their cards through a partition opening.\n\nWhen he ate, vexations were forgotten for a while. A quarter past eleven was the time to go down the steps to Holz’s lunch counter.\nHe would mount one of the stools. The food, steaming fragrance, just brought from the kitchen, would be dumped into the trays of the steam-table.\nHamburger steak, mashed potatoes, onions and gravy, or a knackwurst and sauerkraut; after that, a pudding with a square of sugar and butter sliding from the top and red fruit juice dripping over the saucer.\nHe was growing fat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-son-with-a-future": { - "title": "“A Son with a Future”", - "body": "When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing. He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes thunder: two clouds knock together.”\nWhen he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties. They all said that he would be a lawyer.\nAt law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he became the chum of an only son of rich people. They were said to think the world of the young lawyer.\nThe Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment. His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement.\n\nWhen a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a drug store.\nNow he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the courts and the search in law books.\nHe had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side street.\nInfluenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was half-blind.\nHe, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a lot of money doctors and druggists must be making; now is my son’s chance.”\nThey did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "laura-riding": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Laura Riding", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Riding", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "in-due-form": { - "title": "“In Due Form”", - "body": "I do not doubt you.\nI know you love me.\nIt is a fact of your indoor face,\nA true fancy of your muscularity.\nYour step is confident.\nYour look is thorough.\nYour stay-beside-me is a pillow\nTo roll over on\nAnd sleep as on my own upon.\n\nBut make me a statement\nIn due form on endless foolscap\nWitnessed before a notary\nAnd sent by post, registered,\nTo be signed for on receipt\nAnd opened under oath to believe;\nAn antique paper missing from my strong-box,\nA bond to clutch when hail tortures the chimney\nAnd lightning circles redder round the city,\nAnd your brisk step and thorough look\nAre gallant but uncircumstantial,\nAnd not mentionable in a doom-book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-simple-line": { - "title": "“The Simple Line”", - "body": "The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,\nThough the mind is meek.\nTo be aware inwardly\nof brain and beauty\nIs dark too recognizable.\nThought looking out on thought\nMakes one an eye:\nWhich it shall be, both decide.\nOne is with the mind alone,\nThe other is with other thoughts gone\nTo be seen from afar and not known.\n\nWhen openly these inmost sights\nFlash and speak fully,\nEach head at home shakes hopelessly\nOf being never ready to see self\nAnd sees a universe too soon.\nThe immense surmise swims round and round\nAnd heads grow wise\nWith their own bigness beatified\nIn cosmos, and the idiot size\nOf skulls spells Nature on the ground,\nWhile ears listening the wrong way report\nEchoes first and hear words before sounds\nBecause the mind, being quiet, seems late.\nBy ears words are copied into books,\nBy letters minds are taught self-ignorance.\nFrom mouths spring forth vocabularies\nTo the assemblage of strange objects\nGrown foreign to the faithful countryside\nOf one king, poverty,\nOf one line, humbleness.\nUnavowed and false horizons claim pride\nFor spaces in the head\nThe native head sees outside.\nThe flood of wonder rushing from the eyes\nReturns lesson by lesson.\nThe mind, shrunken of time,\nOverflows too soon.\nThe complete vision is the same\nAs when the world-wideness began\nWorlds to describe\nThe excessiveness of man.\n\nBut man’s right portion rejects\nThe surplus in the whole.\nThis much, made secret first,\nNow makes\nThe knowable, which was\nThought’s previous flesh,\nAnd gives instruction of substance to its intelligence\nAs far as flesh itself,\nAs bodies upon themselves to where\nUnderstanding is the head\nAnd the identity of breath and breathing are established\nAnd the voice opening to cry: I know,\nCloses around the entire declaration\nWith this evidence of immortality--\nThe total silence to say:\nI am dead.\n\nFor death is all ugly, all lovely,\nForbids mysteries to make\nScience of splendor, or any separate disclosing\nOf beauty to the mind out of body’s book\nThat page by page flutters a world in fragments,\nPermits no scribbling in of more\nWhere spaces are,\nOnly to look.\n\nBody as Body lies more than still.\nThe rest seems nothing and nothing is\nIf nothing need be.\nBut if need be,\nThought not divided anyway\nAnswers itself, thinking\nAll open and everything.\nDead is the mind that parted each head.\nBut now the secrets of the mind convene\nWithout pride, without pain\nTo any onlookers.\nWhat they ordain alone\nCannot be known\nThe ordinary way of eyes and ears\nBut only prophesied\nIf an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,\nDies immediately\nOf too plain beauty\nForeseen within too suddenly,\nAnd lips break open of astonishment\nUpon the living mouth and rehearse\nDeath, that seems a simple verse\nAnd, of all ways to know,\nDead or alive, easiest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "anne-ridler": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anne Ridler", - "birth": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2001 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Ridler", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "at-parting": { - "title": "“At Parting”", - "body": "Since we through war awhile must part\nSweetheart, and learn to lose\nDaily use\nOf all that satisfied our heart:\nLay up those secrets and those powers\nWherewith you pleased and cherished me these two years:\n\nNow we must draw, as plants would,\nOn tubers stored in a better season,\nOur honey and heaven;\nOnly our love can store such food.\nIs this to make a god of absence?\nA new-born monster to steal our sustenance?\n\nWe cannot quite cast out lack and pain.\nLet him remain--what he may devour\nWe can well spare:\nHe never can tap this, the true vein.\nI have no words to tell you what you were,\nBut when you are sad, think, Heaven could give no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "before-sleep": { - "title": "“Before Sleep”", - "body": "Now that you lie\nIn London afar,\nAnd may sleep longer\nThough lonelier,\nFor I shall not wake you\nWith a nightmare,\nHeaven plant such peace in us\nAs if no parting stretched between us.\n\nThe world revolves\nAnd is evil;\nGod’s image is\nWormeaten by the devil;\nMay the good angel\nHave no rival\nBy our beds, and we lie curled\nAt the sound unmoving centre of the world.\n\nIn our good nights\nWhen we were together,\nWe made, in that stillness\nWhere we loved each other,\nA new being, of both\nYet above either:\nSo, when I cannot share your sleep,\nInto this being, half yours, I creep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-a-child-expected": { - "title": "“For A Child Expected”", - "body": "Lovers whose lifted hands are candles in winter,\nWhose gentle ways like streams in the easy summer,\nLying together\nFor secret setting of a child, love what they do,\nThinking they make that candle immortal, those streams\nforever flow,\nAnd yet do better than they know.\n\nSo the first flutter of a baby felt in the womb,\nIts little signal and promise of riches to come,\nIs taken in its father’s name;\nIts life is the body of his love, like his caress,\nFirst delicate and strange, that daily use\nMakes dearer and priceless.\n\nOur baby was to be the living sign of our joy,\nRestore to each the other’s lost infancy;\nTo a painter’s pillaging eye\nPoet’s coiled hearing, add the heart we might earn\nBy the help of love; all that our passion would yield\nWe put to planning our child.\n\nThe world flowed in; whatever we liked we took:\nFor its hair, the gold curls of the November oak\nWe saw on our walk;\nSnowberries that make a Milky Way in the wood\nFor its tender hands; calm screen of the frozen flood\nFor our care of its childhood.\n\nBut the birth of a child is an uncontrollable glory;\nCat’s cradle of hopes will hold no living baby,\nLong though it lay quietly.\nAnd when our baby stirs and struggles to be born\nIt compels humility: what we began\nIs now its own.\n\nFor as the sun that shines through glass\nSo Jesus in His Mother was.\nTherefore every human creature,\nSince it shares in His nature,\nIn candle gold passion or white\nSharp star should show its own way of light.\nMay no parental dread or dream\nDarken our darling’s early beam:\nMay she grow to her right powers\nUnperturbed by passion of ours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "james-whitcomb-riley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Whitcomb Riley", - "birth": { - "year": 1849 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitcomb_Riley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-lost-thrill": { - "title": "“The Lost Thrill”", - "body": "I grow so weary, someway, of all things\nThat love and loving have vouchsafed to me,\nSince now all dreamed-of sweets of ecstasy\nAm I possessed of: The caress that clings--\nThe lips that mix with mine with murmurings\nNo language may interpret, and the free,\nUnfettered brood of kisses, hungrily\nFeasting in swarms on honeyed blossomings\nOf passion’s fullest flower--For yet I miss\nThe essence that alone makes love divine--\nThe subtle flavoring no tang of this\nWeak wine of melody may here define:--\nA something found and lost in the first kiss\nA lover ever poured through lips of mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-song-of-yesterday": { - "title": "“The Song of Yesterday”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBut yesterday\nI looked away\nO’er happy lands, where sunshine lay\nIn golden blots,\nInlaid with spots\nOf shade and wild forget-me-nots.\n\nMy head was fair\nWith flaxen hair,\nAnd fragrant breezes, faint and rare,\nAnd, warm with drouth\nFrom out the south,\nBlew all my curls across my mouth.\n\nAnd, cool and sweet,\nMy naked feet\nFound dewy pathways through the wheat;\nAnd out again\nWhere, down the lane,\nThe dust was dimpled with the rain.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut yesterday!--\nAdream, astray,\nFrom morning’s red to evening’s dray,\nO’er dales and hills\nOf daffodils\nAnd lorn sweet-fluting whippoorwills.\n\nI knew nor cares\nNor tears nor prayers--\nA mortal god, crowned unawares\nWith sunset--and\nA scepter-wand\nOf apple-blossoms in my hand!\n\nThe dewy blue\nOf twilight grew\nTo purple, with a star or two\nWhose lisping rays\nFailed in the blaze\nOf sudden fireflies through the haze.\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut yesterday\nI heard the lay\nOf summer birds, when I, as they\nWith breast and wing,\nAll quivering\nWith life and love, could only sing.\n\nMy head was leant\nWhere, with it, blent\nA maiden’s, o’er her instrument;\nWhile all the night,\nFrom vale to height,\nWas filled with echoes of delight.\n\nAnd all our dreams\nWere lit with gleams\nOf that lost land of reedy streams,\nAlong whose brim\nForever swim\nPan’s lilies, laughing up at him.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBut yesterday! …\nO blooms of May,\nAnd summer roses--where away?\nO stars above;\nAnd lips of love,\nAnd all the honeyed sweets thereof!--\n\nO lad and lass,\nAnd orchard pass,\nAnd briered lane, and daisied grass!\nO gleam and gloom,\nAnd woodland bloom,\nAnd breezy breaths of all perfume!--\n\nNo more for me\nOr mine shall be\nThy raptures--save in memory,--\nNo more--no more--\nTill through the Door\nOf Glory gleam the days of yore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-the-road": { - "title": "“A Song of the Road”", - "body": "O I will walk with you, my lad, whichever way you fare,\nYou’ll have me, too, the side o’ you, with heart as light as air;\nNo care for where the road you take’s a-leadin’ anywhere,--\nIt can but be a joyful ja’nt whilst you journey there.\nThe road you take’s the path o’ love, an’ that’s the bridth o’ two--\nAn’ I will walk with you, my lad--O I will walk with you.\n\nHo! I will walk with you, my lad,\nBe weather black or blue\nOr roadsides frost or dew, my lad--\nO I will walk with you.\n\nAye, glad, my lad, I’ll walk with you, whatever winds may blow,\nOr summer blossoms stay our steps, or blinding drifts of snow;\nThe way thay you set face an’ foot ’s the way that I will go,\nAn’ brave I’ll be, abreast o’ ye, the Saints and Angels know!\nWith loyal hand in loyal hand, an’ one heart made o’ two,\nThrough summer’s gold, or winter’s cold, It’s I will walk with you.\n\nSure, I will walk with you, my lad,\nA love ordains me to,--\nTo Heaven’s door, an’ through, my lad.\nO I will walk with you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "rainer-maria-rilke": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rainer Maria Rilke", - "birth": { - "year": 1875 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "austrian", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇦🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "austrian" - ], - "n_poems": 126 - }, - "poems": { - "adam": { - "title": "“Adam”", - "body": "High above he stands, beside the many\nsaintly figures fronting the cathedral’s\ngothic tympanum, close by the window\ncalled the rose, and looks astonished at his\n\nown deification which placed him there.\nErect and proud he smiles, and quite enjoys\nthis feat of his survival, willed by choice.\n\nAs labourer in the fields he made his start\nand through his efforts brought to full fruition\nthe garden God named Eden. But where was\nthe hidden path that led to the New Earth?\n\nGod would not listen to his endless pleas.\nInstead, He threatened him that he shall die.\nYet Adam stood his ground: Eve shall give birth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "again-and-again-however-we-know-the-landscape-of-love": { - "title": "“Again and again, however we know the landscape of love …”", - "body": "Again and again, however we know the landscape of love\nand the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,\nand the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others\nfall: again and again the two of us walk out together\nunder the ancient trees, lie down again and again\namong the flowers, face to face with the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "along-the-sun-drenched-roadside": { - "title": "“Along the sun-drenched roadside …”", - "body": "Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great\nhollow half-treetrunk, which for generations\nhas been a trough, renewing in itself\nan inch or two of rain, I satisfy\nmy thirst: taking the water’s pristine coolness\ninto my whole body through my wrists.\nDrinking would be too powerful, too clear;\nbut this unhurried gesture of restraint\nfills my whole consciousness with shining water.\n\nThus, if you came, I could be satisfied\nto let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,\nlightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-angels": { - "title": "“The Angels”", - "body": "They all have tired mouths\nAnd luminous illimitable souls;\nAnd a longing (as if for sin)\nTrembles at times through their dreams.\n\nThey all resemble one another\nIn God’s garden they are silent\nLike many many intervals\nIn His mighty melody.\n\nBut when they spread their wings\nThey awaken the winds\nThat stir as though God\nWith His far-reaching master hands\nTurned the pages of the dark book of Beginning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-apple-orchard": { - "title": "“The Apple Orchard”", - "body": "Come let us watch the sun go down\nand walk in twilight through the orchard’s green.\nDoes it not seem as if we had for long\ncollected, saved and harbored within us\nold memories? To find releases and seek\nnew hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,\nmingled with darkness coming from within,\nas we randomly voice our thoughts aloud\nwandering beneath these harvest-laden trees\nreminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches\nwhich, bent under the fully ripened fruit,\nwait patiently, trying to outlast, to\nserve another season’s hundred days of toil,\nstraining, uncomplaining, by not breaking\nbut succeeding, even though the burden\nshould at times seem almost past endurance.\nNot to falter! Not to be found wanting!\n\nThus must it be, when willingly you strive\nthroughout a long and uncomplaining life,\ncommitted to one goal: to give yourself!\nAnd silently to grow and to bear fruit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "archaic-torso-of-apollo": { - "title": "“Archaic Torso of Apollo”", - "body": "We cannot know his legendary head\nwith eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso\nis still suffused with brilliance from inside,\nlike a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,\n\ngleams in all its power. Otherwise\nthe curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could\na smile run through the placid hips and thighs\nto that dark center where procreation flared.\n\nOtherwise this stone would seem defaced\nbeneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders\nand would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:\n\nwould not, from all the borders of itself,\nburst like a star: for here there is no place\nthat does not see you. You must change your life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "as-once-the-winged-energy-of-delight": { - "title": "“As once the winged energy of delight …”", - "body": "As once the winged energy of delight\ncarried you over childhood’s dark abysses,\nnow beyond your own life build the great\narch of unimagined bridges.\n\nWonders happen if we can succeed\nin passing through the harshest danger;\nbut only in a bright and purely granted\nachievement can we realize the wonder.\n\nTo work with Things in the indescribable\nrelationship is not too hard for us;\nthe pattern grows more intricate and subtle,\nand being swept along is not enough.\n\nTake your practiced powers and stretch them out\nuntil they span the chasm between two\ncontradictions … For the god\nwants to know himself in you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "autumnal-day": { - "title": "“Autumnal Day”", - "body": "Lord! It is time. So great was Summer’s glow:\nThy shadows lay upon the dials’ faces\nAnd o’er wide spaces let thy tempests blow.\n\nCommand to ripen the last fruits of thine\nGive to them two more burning days and press\nThe last sweetness into the heavy wine.\n\nHe who has now no house will ne’er build one\nWho is alone will now remain alone;\nHe will awake will read will letters write\nThrough the long day and in the lonely night;\nAnd restless solitary he will rove\nWhere the leaves rustle wind-blown in the grove.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "The leaves fall fall as from far\nLike distant gardens withered in the heavens;\nThey fall with slow and lingering descent.\n\nAnd in the nights the heavy Earth too falls\nFrom out the stars into the Solitude.\n\nThus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall\nAnd lo! the other one:--it is the law.\nBut there is One who holds this falling\nInfinitely softly in His hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "be-ahead-of-all-parting": { - "title": "“Be ahead of all parting …”", - "body": "Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were\nbehind you, like the winter that has just gone by.\nFor among these winters there is one so endlessly winter\nthat only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.\n\nBe forever dead in Eurydice--more gladly arise\ninto the seamless life proclaimed in your song.\nHere, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,\nbe the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.\n\nBe--and yet know the great void where all things begin,\nthe infinite source of your own most intense vibration,\nso that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.\n\nTo all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb\ncreatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,\njoyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "before-summer-rain": { - "title": "“Before Summer Rain”", - "body": "Suddenly, from all the green around you,\nsomething--you don’t know what--has disappeared;\nyou feel it creeping closer to the window,\nin total silence. From the nearby wood\n\nyou hear the urgent whistling of a plover,\nreminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:\nso much solitude and passion come\nfrom that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour\n\nwill grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide\naway from us, cautiously, as though\nthey weren’t supposed to hear what we are saying.\n\nAnd reflected on the faded tapestries now;\nthe chill, uncertain sunlight of those long\nchildhood hours when you were so afraid.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "black-cat": { - "title": "“Black Cat”", - "body": "A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place\nyour sight can knock on, echoing; but here\nwithin this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze\nwill be absorbed and utterly disappear:\n\njust as a raving madman, when nothing else\ncan ease him, charges into his dark night\nhowling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels\nthe rage being taken in and pacified.\n\nShe seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen\ninto her, so that, like an audience,\nshe can look them over, menacing and sullen,\nand curl to sleep with them. But all at once\n\nas if awakened, she turns her face to yours;\nand with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,\ninside the golden amber of her eyeballs\nsuspended, like a prehistoric fly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "blank-joy": { - "title": "“Blank Joy”", - "body": "She who did not come, wasn’t she determined\nnonetheless to organize and decorate my heart?\nIf we had to exist to become the one we love,\nwhat would the heart have to create?\n\nLovely joy left blank, perhaps you are\nthe center of all my labors and my loves.\nIf I’ve wept for you so much, it’s because\nI preferred you among so many outlined joys.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-book-of-pilgrimage": { - "title": "“The Book of Pilgrimage”", - "body": "By day Thou are the Legend and the Dream\nThat like a whisper floats about all men\nThe deep and brooding stillnesses which seem\nAfter the hour has struck to close again.\n\nAnd when the day with drowsy gesture bends\nAnd sinks to sleep beneath the evening skies\nAs from each roof a tower of smoke ascends--\nSo does Thy Realm my God around me rise.\n\n\nAll those who seek Thee tempt Thee\nAnd those who find would bind Thee\nTo gesture and to form.\n\nBut I would comprehend Thee\nAs the wide Earth unfolds Thee.\nThou growest with my maturity\nThou Art in calm and storm.\n\nI ask of Thee no vanity\nTo evidence and prove Thee.\nThou Wert in eons old.\n\nPerform no miracles for me\nBut justify Thy laws to me\nWhich as the years pass by me.\nAll soundlessly unfold.\n\n\nIn a house was one who arose from the feast\nAnd went forth to wander in distant lands\nBecause there was somewhere far off in the East\nA spot which he sought where a great Church stands.\nAnd ever his children when breaking their bread\nThought of him and rose up and blessed him as dead.\n\nIn another house was the one who had died\nWho still sat at table and drank from the glass\nAnd ever within the walls did abide--\nFor out of the house he could no more pass.\nAnd his children set forth to seek for the spot\nWhere stands the great Church which he forgot.\n\n\nExtinguish my eyes I still can see you\nClose my ears I can hear your footsteps fall\nAnd without feet I still can follow you\nAnd without voice I still can to you call.\nBreak off my arms and I can embrace you\nEnfold you with my heart as with a hand.\nHold my heart my brain will take fire of you\nAs flax ignites from a lit fire-brand--\nAnd flame will sweep in a swift rushing flood\nThrough all the singing currents of my blood.\n\n\nIn the deep nights I dig for you O Treasure!\nTo seek you over the wide world I roam\nFor all abundance is but meager measure\nOf your bright beauty which is yet to come.\n\nOver the road to you the leaves are blowing\nFew follow it the way is long and steep.\nYou dwell in solitude--Oh does your glowing\nHeart in some far off valley lie asleep?\n\nMy bloody hands with digging bruised I’ve lifted\nSpread like a tree I stretch them in the air\nTo find you before day to night has drifted;\nI reach out into space to seek you there …\n\nThen as though with a swift impatient gesture\nFlashing from distant stars on sweeping wing\nYou come and over earth a magic vesture\nSteals gently as the rain falls in the spring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-book-of-poverty-and-death": { - "title": "“The Book of Poverty and Death”", - "body": "Her mouth is like the mouth of a fine bust\nThat cannot utter sound nor breathe nor kiss\nBut that had once from Life received all this\nWhich shaped its subtle curves and ever must\nFrom fullness of past knowledge dwell alone\nA thing apart a parable in stone.\n\n\nAlone Thou wanderest through space\nProfound One with the hidden face;\nThou art Poverty’s great rose\nThe eternal metamorphose\nOf gold into the light of sun.\n\nThou art the mystic homeless One;\nInto the world Thou never came\nToo mighty Thou too great to name;\nVoice of the storm Song that the wild wind sings\nThou Harp that shatters those who play Thy strings!\n\n\nA watcher of Thy spaces make me\nMake me a listener at Thy stone\nGive to me vision and then wake me\nUpon Thy oceans all alone.\nThy rivers’ courses let me follow\nWhere they leap the crags in their flight\nAnd where at dusk in caverns hollow\nThey croon to music of the night.\nSend me far into Thy barren land\nWhere the snow clouds the wild wind drives\nWhere monasteries like gray shrouds stand--\nAugust symbols of unlived lives.\nThere pilgrims climb slowly one by one\nAnd behind them a blind man goes:\nWith him I will walk till day is done\nUp the pathway that no one knows …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-book-of-a-monks-life": { - "title": "“The Book of a Monk’s Life”", - "body": "I live my life in circles that grow wide\nAnd endlessly unroll\nI may not reach the last but on I glide\nStrong pinioned toward my goal.\n\nAbout the old tower dark against the sky\nThe beat of my wings hums\nI circle about God sweep far and high\nOn through milleniums.\n\nAm I a bird that skims the clouds along\nOr am I a wild storm or a great song?\n\nMany have painted her. But there was one\nWho drew his radiant colours from the sun.\nMysteriously glowing through a background dim\nWhen he was suffering she came to him\nAnd all the heavy pain within his heart\nRose in his hands and stole into his art.\nHis canvas is the beautiful bright veil\nThrough which her sorrow shines. There where the\nTexture o’er her sad lips is closely drawn\nA trembling smile softly begins to dawn …\nThough angels with seven candles light the place\nYou cannot read the secret of her face.\n\n\nIn cassocks clad I have had many brothers\nIn southern cloisters where the laurel grows\nThey paint Madonnas like fair human mothers\nAnd I dream of young Titians and of others\nIn which the God with shining radiance glows.\n\nBut though my vigil constantly I keep\nMy God is dark--like woven texture flowing\nA hundred drinking roots all intertwined;\nI only know that from His warmth I’m growing.\nMore I know not: my roots lie hidden deep\nMy branches only are swayed by the wind.\n\n\nThou Anxious One! And dost thou then not hear\nAgainst thee all my surging senses sing?\nAbout thy face in circles drawing near\nMy thought floats like a fluttering white wing.\n\nDost thou not see before thee stands my soul\nIn silence wrapt my Springtime’s prayer to pray?\nBut when thy glance rests on me then my whole\nBeing quickens and blooms like trees in May.\n\nWhen thou art dreaming then I am thy Dream\nBut when thou art awake I am thy Will\nPotent with splendour radiant and sublime\nExpanding like far space star-lit and still\nInto the distant mystic realm of Time.\n\n\nI love my life’s dark hours\nIn which my senses quicken and grow deep\nWhile as from faint incense of faded flowers\nOr letters old I magically steep\nMyself in days gone by: again I give\nMyself unto the past:--again I live.\n\nOut of my dark hours wisdom dawns apace\nInfinite Life unrolls its boundless space …\n\nThen I am shaken as a sweeping storm\nShakes a ripe tree that grows above a grave\n‘Round whose cold clay the roots twine fast and warm--\nAnd Youth’s fair visions that glowed bright and brave\nDreams that were closely cherished and for long\nAre lost once more in sadness and in song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-boy": { - "title": "“The Boy”", - "body": "I wish I might become like one of these\nWho in the night on horses wild astride\nWith torches flaming out like loosened hair\nOn to the chase through the great swift wind ride.\nI wish to stand as on a boat and dare\nThe sweeping storm mighty like flag unrolled\nIn darkness but with helmet made of gold\nThat shimmers restlessly. And in a row\nBehind me in the dark ten men that glow\nWith helmets that are restless too like mine\nNow old and dull now clear as glass they shine.\nOne stands by me and blows a blast apace\nOn his great flashing trumpet and the sound\nShrieks through the vast black solitude around\nThrough which as through a wild mad dream we race.\nThe houses fall behind us on their knees\nBefore us bend the streets and them we gain\nThe great squares yieled to us and them we seize--\nAnd on our steeds rush like the roar of rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-bride": { - "title": "“The Bride”", - "body": "Call me Beloved! Call aloud to me!\nThy bride her vigil at the window keeps;\nThe evening wanes to dusk the dimness creeps\nDown empty alleys of the old plane-tree.\n\nO! Let thy voice enfold me close about\nOr from this dark house lonely and remote\nThrough deep blue gardens where gray shadows float\nI will pour forth my soul with hands stretched out …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "but-you-now-dear-girl": { - "title": "“But you now, dear girl …”", - "body": "But you now, dear girl, whom I loved like a flower whose name\nI didn’t know, you who so early were taken away:\nI will once more call up your image and show it to them,\nbeautiful companion of the unsubduable cry.\n\nDancer whose body filled with your hesitant fate,\npausing, as though your young flesh had been cast in bronze;\ngrieving and listening--. Then, from the high dominions,\nunearthly music fell into your altered heart.\n\nAlready possessed by shadows, with illness near,\nyour blood flowed darkly; yet, though for a moment suspicious,\nit burst out into the natural pulses of spring.\n\nAgain and again interrupted by downfall and darkness,\nearthly, it gleamed. Till, after a terrible pounding,\nit entered the inconsolably open door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "call-to-me-to-the-one-among-your-moments": { - "title": "“Call to me to the one among your moments …”", - "body": "Call to me to the one among your moments\nthat stands against you, ineluctably:\nintimate as a dog’s imploring glance\nbut, again, forever, turned away\n\nwhen you think you’ve captured it at last.\nWhat seems so far from you is most your own.\nWe are already free, and were dismissed\nwhere we thought we soon would be at home.\n\nAnxious, we keep longing for a foothold--\nwe, at times too young for what is old\nand too old for what has never been;\n\ndoing justice only where we praise,\nbecause we are the branch, the iron blade,\nand sweet danger, ripening from within.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "child-in-red": { - "title": "“Child in Red”", - "body": "Sometimes she walks through the village in her little red dress\nall absorbed in restraining herself,\nand yet, despite herself, she seems to move\naccording to the rhythm of her life to come.\n\nShe runs a bit, hesitates, stops,\nhalf-turns around …\nand, all while dreaming, shakes her head\nfor or against.\n\nThen she dances a few steps\nthat she invents and forgets,\nno doubt finding out that life\nmoves on too fast.\n\nIt’s not so much that she steps out\nof the small body enclosing her,\nbut that all she carries in herself\nfrolics and ferments.\n\nIt’s this dress that she’ll remember\nlater in a sweet surrender;\nwhen her whole life is full of risks,\nthe little red dress will always seem right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "childhood": { - "title": "“Childhood”", - "body": "It would be good to give much thought, before\nyou try to find words for something so lost,\nfor those long childhood afternoons you knew\nthat vanished so completely--and why?\n\nWe’re still reminded--: sometimes by a rain,\nbut we can no longer say what it means;\nlife was never again so filled with meeting,\nwith reunion and with passing on\n\nas back then, when nothing happened to us\nexcept what happens to things and creatures:\nwe lived their world as something human,\nand became filled to the brim with figures.\n\nAnd became as lonely as a sheperd\nand as overburdened by vast distances,\nand summoned and stirred as from far away,\nand slowly, like a long new thread,\nintroduced into that picture-sequence\nwhere now having to go on bewilders us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "come-thou-thou-last-one-whom-i-recognize": { - "title": "“Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize …”", - "body": "Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize,\nunbearable pain throughout this body’s fabric:\nas I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:\nthe wood that long resisted the advancing flames\nwhich thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig\nand burn in thee.\n\nMy gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury\nhas turned into a raging hell that is not from here.\nQuite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted\nthe tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,\nso sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,\nwhile in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.\n\nIs it still I, who there past all recognition burn?\nMemories I do not seize and bring inside.\nO life! O living! O to be outside!\nAnd I in flames. And no one here who knows me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Before us great Death stands\nOur fate held close within his quiet hands.\nWhen with proud joy we lift Life’s red wine\nTo drink deep of the mystic shining cup\nAnd ecstasy through all our being leaps--\nDeath bows his head and weeps.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "dedication-to-m": { - "title": "“Dedication to M”", - "body": "Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what\ninvisible branch. Who, who gave you the push,\nthat you swung with me into the leaves?\nHow near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying\nis the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only\ntoward the forever-too-high, all at once the possible\nnearness. Vicinities, then\nfrom an irresistibly swung-up-to place\n--already, once again, lost--the new sight, the outlook.\nAnd now: the commanded return\nback and across and into equilbrium’s arms.\nBelow, in between, hesitation, the pull of earth, the passage\nthrough the turning-point of the heavy--, past it: and the\ncatapult stretches,\nweighted with the heart’s curiosity,\nto the other side, opposite, upward.\nAgain how different, how new! How they envy each other\nat the ends of the rope, these opposite halves of pleasure.\n\nOr, shall I dare it: these quarters?--And include, since it\nwitholds itself,\nthat other half-circle, the one whose impetus pushes the\nswing?\nI’m not just imagining it, as the mirror of my here-and-now\narc. Guess nothing. It will be\nnewer someday. But from endpoint to endpoint\nof the arc that I have most dared, I already fully possess it:\noverflowings from me plunge over to it and fill it,\nstretch it apart, almost. And my own parting,\nwhen the force that pushes me someday\nstops, makes it all the more near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "dedication": { - "title": "“Dedication”", - "body": "I have great faith in all things not yet spoken.\nI want my deepest pious feelings freed.\nWhat no one yet has dared to risk and warrant\nwill be for me a challenge I must meet.\n\nIf this presumptious seems, God, may I be forgiven.\nFor what I want to say to you is this:\nmy efforts shall be like a driving force,\nquite without anger, without timidness\nas little children show their love for you.\n\nWith these outflowing, river-like, with deltas\nthat spread like arms to reach the open sea,\nwith the recurrent tides that never cease\nwill I acknowledge you, will I proclaim you\nas no one ever has before.\n\nAnd if this should be arrogance, so let me\narrogant be to justify my prayer\nthat stands so serious and so alone\nbefore your forehead, circled by the clouds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "do-you-remember-still-the-falling-stars": { - "title": "“Do you remember still the falling stars …”", - "body": "Do you remember still the falling stars\nthat like swift horses through the heavens raced\nand suddenly leaped across the hurdles\nof our wishes--do you recall? And we\ndid make so many! For there were countless numbers\nof stars: each time we looked above we were\nastounded by the swiftness of their daring play,\nwhile in our hearts we felt safe and secure\nwatching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,\nknowing somehow we had survived their fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Albert Ernest Flemming", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "early-apollo": { - "title": "“Early Apollo”", - "body": "As when at times there breaks through branches bare\nA morning vibrant with the breath of spring\nAbout this poet-head a splendour rare\nTransforms it almost to a mortal thing.\n\nThere is as yet no shadow in his glance\nToo cool his temples for the laurel’s glow;\nBut later o’er those marble brows perchance\nA rose-garden with bushes tall will grow\n\nAnd single petals one by one will fall\nO’er the still mouth and break its silent thrall\n--The mouth that trembles with a dawning smile\nAs though a song were rising there the while.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "early-spring": { - "title": "“Early Spring”", - "body": "Harshness vanished. A sudden softness\nhas replaced the meadows’ wintry grey.\nLittle rivulets of water changed\ntheir singing accents. Tendernesses,\n\nhesitantly, reach toward the earth\nfrom space, and country lanes are showing\nthese unexpected subtle risings\nthat find expression in the empty trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "encounter-in-the-chestnut-avenue": { - "title": "“Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue”", - "body": "He felt the entrance’s green darkness\nwrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak\nthat he was still accepting and arranging;\nwhen at the opposite transparent end, far off,\n\nthrough green sunlight, as through green window panes,\nwhitely a solitary shape\nflared up, long remaining distant\nand then finally, the downdriving light\nboiling over it at every step,\n\nbearing on itself a bright pulsation,\nwhich in the blond ran shyly to the back.\nBut suddenly the shade was deep,\nand nearby eyes lay gazing\n\nfrom a clear new unselfconscious face,\nwhich, as in a portrait, lived intensely\nin the instant things split off again:\nfirst there forever, and then not at all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "evening-love-song": { - "title": "“Evening Love Song”", - "body": "Ornamental clouds\ncompose an evening love song;\na road leaves evasively.\nThe new moon begins\n\na new chapter of our nights,\nof those frail nights\nwe stretch out and which mingle\nwith these black horizontals.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "evening": { - "title": "“Evening”", - "body": "The bleak fields are asleep\nMy heart alone wakes;\nThe evening in the harbour\nDown his red sails takes.\n\nNight guardian of dreams\nNow wanders through the land;\nThe moon a lily white\nBlossoms within her hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "eve": { - "title": "“Eve”", - "body": "Look how she stands, high on the steep facade\nof the cathedral, near the window-rose,\nsimply, holding in her hand the apple,\njudged for all time as the guiltless-guilty\n\nfor the growing fruit her body held\nwhich she gave birth to after parting from\nthe circle of eternities. She left\nto face the strange New Earth, so young in years.\n\nOh, how she would have loved to stay a little\nlonger in that enchanted garden, where\nthe peaceful gentle beasts grazed side by side.\n\nBut Adam was resolved to leave, to go\nout into this New Earth, and facing death\nshe followed him. God she had hardly known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "exposed-on-the-cliffs-of-the-heart": { - "title": "“Exposed on the cliffs of the heart …”", - "body": "Exposed on the cliffs of the heart.\nLook, how tiny down there,\nlook: the last village of words and, higher,\n(but how tiny) still one last\nfarmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?\nExposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground\nunder your hands. Even here, though,\nsomething can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge\nan unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.\nBut the one who knows? Ah, he began to know\nand is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.\nWhile, with their full awareness,\nmany sure-footed mountain animals pass\nor linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly\ncircling, around the peak’s pure denial.--But\nwithout a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "extinguish-thou-my-eyes": { - "title": "“Extinguish Thou my eyes …”", - "body": "Extinguish Thou my eyes: I still can see Thee,\ndeprive my ears of sound: I still can hear Thee,\nand without feet I still can come to Thee,\nand without voice I still can call to Thee.\n\nSever my arms from me, I still will hold Thee\nwith all my heart as with a single hand,\narrest my heart, my brain will keep on beating,\nand Should Thy fire at last my brain consume,\nthe flowing of my blood will carry Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "fires-reflection": { - "title": "“Fire’s Reflection”", - "body": "Perhaps it’s no more than the fire’s reflection\non some piece of gleaming furniture\nthat the child remembers so much later\nlike a revelation.\n\nAnd if in his later life, one day\nwounds him like so many others,\nit’s because he mistook some risk\nor other for a promise.\n\nLet’s not forget the music, either,\nthat soon had hauled him\ntoward absence complicated\nby an overflowing heart …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "first-elegy": { - "title": "“First Elegy”", - "body": "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’\nhierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly\npressed me against his heart, I would perish\nin the embrace of his stronger existence.\nFor beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror\nwhich we are barely able to endure and are awed\nbecause it serenely disdains to annihilate us.\nEach single angel is terrifying.\nAnd so I force myself, swallow and hold back\nthe surging call of my dark sobbing.\nOh, to whom can we turn for help?\nNot angels, not humans;\nand even the knowing animals are aware that we feel\nlittle secure and at home in our interpreted world.\nThere remains perhaps some tree on a hillside\ndaily for us to see; yesterday’s street remains for us\nstayed, moved in with us and showed no signs of leaving.\nOh, and the night, the night, when the wind\nfull of cosmic space invades our frightened faces.\nWhom would it not remain for--that longed-after,\ngently disenchanting night, painfully there for the\nsolitary heart to achieve? Is it easier for lovers?\nDon’t you know yet? Fling out of your arms the\nemptiness into the spaces we breath--perhaps the birds\nwill feel the expanded air in their more ferven flight.\n\nYes, the springtime were in need of you. Often a star\nwaited for you to espy it and sense its light.\nA wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,\nor as you walked below an open window,\na violin gave itself to your hearing.\nAll this was trust. But could you manage it?\nWere you not always distraught by expectation,\nas if all this were announcing the arrival\nof a beloved? (Where would you find a place\nto hide her, with all your great strange thoughts\ncoming and going and often staying for the night.)\nWhen longing overcomes you, sing of women in love;\nfor their famous passion is far from immortal enough.\nThose whom you almost envy, the abandoned and\ndesolate ones, whom you found so much more loving\nthan those gratified. Begin ever new again\nthe praise you cannot attain; remember:\nthe hero lives on and survives; even his downfall\nwas for him only a pretext for achieving\nhis final birth. But nature, exhausted, takes lovers\nback into itself, as if such creative forces could never be\nachieved a second time.\nHave you thought of Gaspara Stampa sufficiently:\n\nthat any girl abandoned by her lover may feel\nfrom that far intenser example of loving:\n“Ah, might I become like her!” Should not their oldest\nsufferings finally become more fruitful for us?\nIs it not time that lovingly we freed ourselves\nfrom the beloved and, quivering, endured:\nas the arrow endures the bow-string’s tension,\nand in this tense release becomes more than itself.\nFor staying is nowhere.\n\nVoices, voices. Listen my heart, as only saints\nhave listened: until the gigantic call lifted them\nclear off the ground. Yet they went on, impossibly,\nkneeling, completely unawares: so intense was\ntheir listening. Not that you could endure\nthe voice of God--far from it! But listen\nto the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message\nthat forms itself out of silence. They sweep\ntoward you now from those who died young.\nWhenever they entered a church in Rome or Naples,\ndid not their fate quietly speak to you as recently\nas the tablet did in Santa Maria Formosa?\nWhat do they want of me? to quietly remove\nthe appearance of suffered injustice that,\nat times, hinders a little their spirits from\nfreely proceeding onward.\n\nOf course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,\nto no longer use skills on had barely time to acquire;\nnot to observe roses and other things that promised\nso much in terms of a human future, no longer\nto be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;\nto even discard one’s own name as easily as a child\nabandons a broken toy.\nStrange, not to desire to continue wishing one’s wishes.\nStrange to notice all that was related, fluttering\nso loosely in space. And being dead is hard work\nand full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a\ntrace of eternity.--Yes, but the liviing make\nthe mistake of drawing too sharp a distinction.\nAngels (they say) are often unable to distinguish\nbetween moving among the living or the dead.\nThe eternal torrent whirls all ages along with it,\nthrough both realms forever, and their voices are lost in\nits thunderous roar.\n\nIn the end the early departed have no longer\nneed of us. One is gently weaned from things\nof this world as a child outgrows the need\nof its mother’s breast. But we who have need\nof those great mysteries, we for whom grief is\nso often the source of spiritual growth,\ncould we exist without them?\nIs the legend vain that tells of music’s beginning\nin the midst of the mourning for Linos?\nthe daring first sounds of song piercing\nthe barren numbness, and how in that stunned space\nan almost godlike youth suddenly left forever,\nand the emptiness felt for the first time\nthose harmonious vibrations which now enrapture\nand comfort and help us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "fourth-elegy": { - "title": "“Fourth Elegy”", - "body": "O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?\nWe are not of one mind. Are not like birds\nin unison migrating. And overtaken,\noverdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind\nand fall to earth into indifferent ponds.\nBlossoming and withering we comprehend as one.\nAnd somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,\nin their magnificence, of any weaknesss.\n\nBut we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,\nalready feel the pressure of another.\nHatred is our first response. And lovers,\nare they not forever invading one another’s\nboundaries?--although they promised space,\nhunting and homeland. Then, for a sketch\ndrawn at a moment’s impulse, a ground of contrast\nis prepared, painfully, so that we may see.\nFor they are most exact with us. We do not know\nthe contours of our feelings. We only know\nwhat shapes them from the outside.\n\nWho has not sat, afraid, before his own heart’s\ncurtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery\nof departure. Easy to understand. The well-known\ngarden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer.\nNot he! Enough! However lightly he pretends to move:\nhe is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary man\nwho enters through the kitchen when coming home.\nI will not have these half-filled human masks;\nbetter the puppet. It at least is full.\nI will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire,\nthe face that is nothing but appearance. Here out front\nI wait. Even if the lights go down and I am told:\n“There’s nothing more to come,”--even if\nthe grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting down\nfrom the deserted stage--even if not one\nof my now silent forebears sist beside me\nany longer, not a woman, not even a boy--\nhe with the brown and squinting eyes--:\nI’ll still remain. For one can always watch.\n\nAm I not right? You, to whom life would taste\nso bitter, Father, after you--for my sake--\nslipped of mine, that first muddy infusion\nof my necessity. You kept on tasting, Father,\nas I kept on growing, troubled by the aftertaste\nof my so strange a future as you kept searching\nmy unfocused gaze--you who, so often since\nyou died, have been afraid for my well-being,\nwithin my deepest hope, relinquishing that calmness,\nthe realms of equanimity such as the dead possess\nfor my so small fate--Am I not right?\n\nAnd you, my parents, am I not right? You who loved me\nfor that small beginning of my love for you\nfrom which I always shyly turned away, because\nthe distance in your features grew, changed,\neven while I loved it, into cosmic space\nwhere you no longer were …: and when I feel\ninclined to wait before the puppet stage, no,\nrather to stare at is so intensely that in the end\nto counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel\nhas to come as an actor, and begin manipulating\nthe lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform.\nAngel and puppet! Now at last there is a play!\nThen what we seperate can come together by our\nvery presence. And only then the entire cycle\nof our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion.\nAbove, beyond us, the angel plays. Look:\nmust not the dying notice how unreal, how full\nof pretense is all that we accomplish here, where\nnothing is to be itself. O hours of childhood,\nwhen behind each shape more that the past lay hidden,\nwhen that which lay before us was not the future.\n\nWe grew, of course, and sometimes were impatient\nin growing up, half for the sake of pleasing those\nwith nothing left but their own grown-upness.\nYet, when alone, we entertained ourselves\nwith what alone endures, we would stand there\nin the infinite space that spans the world and toys,\nupon a place, which from the first beginnniing\nhad been prepared to serve a pure event.\n\nWho shows a child just as it stands? Who places him\nwithin his constellation, with the measuring-rod\nof distance in his hand. Who makes his death\nfrom gray bread that grows hard,--or leaves\nit there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core\nof a sweet apple? … The minds of murderers\nare easily comprehended. But this: to contain death,\nthe whole of death, even before life has begun,\nto hold it all so gently within oneself,\nand not be angry: that is indescribable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-future": { - "title": "“The Future”", - "body": "The future: time’s excuse\nto frighten us; too vast\na project, too large a morsel\nfor the heart’s mouth.\n\nFuture, who won’t wait for you?\nEveryone is going there.\nIt suffices you to deepen\nthe absence that we are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "girls-lament": { - "title": "“Girl’s Lament”", - "body": "In the years when we were\nall children, this inclining\nto be alone so much was gentle;\nothers’ time passed fighting,\nand one had one’s faction,\none’s near, one’s far-off place,\na path, an animal, a picture.\n\nAnd I still imagined, that life\nwould always keep providing\nfor one to dwell on things within,\nAm I within myself not in what’s greatest?\nShall what’s mine no longer soothe\nand understand me as a child?\n\nSuddenly I’m as if cast out,\nand this solitude surrounds me\nas something vast and unbounded,\nwhen my feeling, standing on the hills\nof my breasts, cries out for wings\nor for an end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "greek-love-talk": { - "title": "“Greek Love-Talk”", - "body": "What I have already learned as a lover,\nI see you, beloved, learning angrily;\nthen for you it distantly departed,\nnow your destiny stands in all the stars.\n\nOver your breasts we will together contend:\nsince as glowingly shining they’ve ripened,\nso also your hands desire to touch them\nand their own pleasure superintend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "growing-blind": { - "title": "“Growing Blind”", - "body": "Among all the others there sat a guest\nWho sipped her tea as if one apart\nAnd she held her cup not quite like the rest;\nOnce she smiled so it pierced one’s heart.\n\nWhen the group of people arose at last\nAnd laughed and talked in a merry tone\nAs lingeringly through the rooms they passed\nI saw that she followed alone.\n\nTense and still like one who to sing must rise\nBefore a throng on a festal night\nShe lifted her head and her bright glad eyes\nWere like pools which reflected light.\n\nShe followed on slowly after the last\nAs though some object must be passed by\nAnd yet as if were it once but passed\nShe would no longer walk but fly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "growing-old": { - "title": "“Growing Old”", - "body": "In some summers there is so much fruit,\nthe peasants decide not to reap any more.\nNot having reaped you, oh my days,\nmy nights, have I let the slow flames\nof your lovely produce fall into ashes?\n\nMy nights, my days, you have borne so much!\nAll your branches have retained the gesture\nof that long labor you are rising from:\nmy days, my nights. Oh my rustic friends!\n\nI look for what was so good for you.\nOh my lovely, half-dead trees,\ncould some equal sweetness still\nstroke your leaves, open your calyx?\n\nAh, no more fruit! But one last time\nbloom in fruitless blossoming\nwithout planning, without reckoning,\nas useless as the powers of millenia.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-grown-up": { - "title": "“The Grown-Up”", - "body": "All this stood upon her and was the world\nand stood upon her with all its fear and grace\nas trees stand, growing straight up, imageless\nyet wholly image, like the Ark of God,\nand solemn, as if imposed upon a race.\n\nAs she endured it all: bore up under\nthe swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,\nthe inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,\nserenely as a woman carrying water\nmoves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play,\ntransfiguring and preparing for the future,\nthe first white veil descended, gliding softly\n\nover her opened face, almost opaque there,\nnever to be lifted off again, and somehow\ngiving to all her questions just one answer:\nIn you, who were a child once--in you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "heartbeat": { - "title": "“Heartbeat”", - "body": "Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart\nwhich safely exists in the center of all things?\nHis giant heartbeat is diverted in us\ninto little pulses. And his giant grief\nis, like his giant jubilation, far too\ngreat for us. And so we tear ourselves away\nfrom him time after time, remaining only\nmouths. But unexepectedly and secretly\nthe giant heartbeat enters our being,\nso that we scream--,\nand are transformed in being and in countenance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "ignorant-before-the-heavens-of-my-life": { - "title": "“Ignorant before the heavens of my life …”", - "body": "Ignorant before the heavens of my life,\nI stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness\nof the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.\nAs if I didn’t exist. Do I have any\nshare in this? Have I somehow dispensed with\ntheir pure effect? Does my blood’s ebb and flow\nchange with their changes? Let me put aside\nevery desire, every relationship\nexcept this one, so that my heart grows used to\nits farthest spaces. Better that it live\nfully aware, in the terror of its stars, than\nas if protected, soothed by what is near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "in-april": { - "title": "“In April”", - "body": "Again the woods are odorous the lark\nLifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray\nThat hung above the tree-tops veiled and dark\nWhere branches bare disclosed the empty day.\n\nAfter long rainy afternoons an hour\nComes with its shafts of golden light and flings\nThem at the windows in a radiant shower\nAnd rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.\n\nThen all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep\nBy the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;\nAnd cradled in the branches hidden deep\nIn each bright bud a slumbering silence lies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "in-the-beginning": { - "title": "“In the Beginning”", - "body": "Ever since those wondrous days of Creation\nour Lord God sleeps: we are His sleep.\nAnd He accepted this in His indulgence,\nresigned to rest among the distant stars.\n\nOur actions stopped Him from reacting,\nfor His fist-tight hand is numbed by sleep,\nand the times brought in the age of heroes\nduring which our dark hearts plundered Him.\n\nSometimes He appears as if tormented,\nand His body jerks as if plagued by pain;\nbut these spells are always outweighed by the\nnumber of His countless other worlds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "initiation": { - "title": "“Initiation”", - "body": "Whosoever thou art! Out in the evening roam\nOut from thy room thou know’st in every part\nAnd far in the dim distance leave thy home\nWhosoever thou art.\nLift thine eyes which lingering see\nThe shadows on the foot-worn threshold fall\nLift thine eyes slowly to the great dark tree\nThat stands against heaven solitary tall\nAnd thou hast visioned Life its meanings rise\nLike words that in the silence clearer grow;\nAs they unfold before thy will to know\nGently withdraw thine eyes--", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "interior-portrait": { - "title": "“Interior Portrait”", - "body": "You don’t survive in me\nbecause of memories;\nnor are you mine because\nof a lovely longing’s strength.\n\nWhat does make you present\nis the ardent detour\nthat a slow tenderness\ntraces in my blood.\n\nI do not need\nto see you appear;\nbeing born sufficed for me\nto lose you a little less.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "lady-at-a-mirror": { - "title": "“Lady at a Mirror”", - "body": "As in sleeping-drink spices\nsoftly she loosens in the liquid-clear\nmirror her fatigued demeanor;\nand she puts her smile deep inside.\n\nAnd she waits while the liquid\nrises from it; then she pours her hair\ninto the mirror, and, lifting one\nwondrous shoulder from the evening gown,\n\nshe drinks quietly from her image. She drinks\nwhat a lover would drink feeling dazed,\nsearching it, full of mistrust; and she only\n\nbeckons to her maid when at the bottom\nof her mirror she finds candles, wardrobes,\nand the cloudy dregs of a late hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "lady-on-a-balcony": { - "title": "“Lady on a Balcony”", - "body": "Suddenly she steps, wrapped into the wind,\nbrightly into brightness, as if singled out,\nwhile now the room as though cut to fit\nbehind her fills the door\n\ndarkly like the ground of cameo,\nthat lets a glimmer through at the edges;\nand you think the evening wasn’t there\nbefore she stepped out, and on the railing\n\nset forth just a little of herself,\njust her hands,--to be completely light:\nas if passed on by the rows of houses\nto the heavens, to be swayed by everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "lament": { - "title": "“Lament”", - "body": "Oh! All things are long passed away and far.\nA light is shining but the distant star\nFrom which it still comes to me has been dead\nA thousand years … In the dim phantom boat\nThat glided past some ghastly thing was said.\nA clock just struck within some house remote.\nWhich house?--I long to still my beating heart.\nBeneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray …\nOf all the stars there must be far away\nA single star which still exists apart.\nAnd I believe that I should know the one\nWhich has alone endured and which alone\nLike a white City that all space commands\nAt the ray’s end in the high heaven stands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-last-evening": { - "title": "“The Last Evening”", - "body": "And night and distant rumbling; now the army’s\ncarrier-train was moving out, to war.\nHe looked up from the harpsichord, and as\nhe went on playing, he looked across at her\n\nalmost as one might gaze into a mirror:\nso deeply was her every feature filled\nwith his young features, which bore his pain and were\nmore beautiful and seductive with each sound.\n\nThen, suddenly, the image broke apart.\nShe stood, as though distracted, near the window\nand felt the violent drum-beats of her heart.\n\nHis playing stopped. From outside, a fresh wind blew.\nAnd strangely alien on the mirror-table\nstood the black shako with its ivory skull.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-last-supper": { - "title": "“The Last Supper”", - "body": "They are assembled, astonished and disturbed\nround him, who like a sage resolved his fate,\nand now leaves those to whom he most belonged,\nleaving and passing by them like a stranger.\nThe loneliness of old comes over him\nwhich helped mature him for his deepest acts;\nnow will he once again walk through the olive grove,\nand those who love him still will flee before his sight.\n\nTo this last supper he has summoned them,\nand (like a shot that scatters birds from trees)\ntheir hands draw back from reaching for the loaves\nupon his word: they fly across to him;\nthey flutter, frightened, round the supper table\nsearching for an escape. But he is present\neverywhere like an all-pervading twilight-hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "little-tear-vase": { - "title": "“Little Tear-Vase”", - "body": "Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil\ninside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.\nI, as smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,\nhumbly hollow myself so that just a few tears can fill me.\n\nWine becomes richer, oil becomes clear, in its vessel.\nWhat happens with tears?--They made me blind in my glass,\nmade me heavy and made my curve iridescent,\nmade me brittle, and left me empty at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "loneliness": { - "title": "“Loneliness”", - "body": "Being apart and lonely is like rain.\nIt climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;\nfrom flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs\nto heaven, which is its old abode.\nAnd only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.\n\nIt rains down on us in those twittering\nhours when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,\nand when two bodies who have found nothing,\ndissapointed and depressed, roll over;\nand when two people who despise eachother\nhave to sleep together in one bed--\n\nthat is when loneliness receives the rivers …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "love-song": { - "title": "“Love Song”", - "body": "When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!\nHow shall I tune it then to other things?\nO! That some spot in darkness could be found\nThat does not vibrate whene’er your depths sound.\nBut everything that touches you and me\nWelds us as played strings sound one melody.\nWhere is the instrument whence the sounds flow?\nAnd whose the master-hand that holds the bow?\nO! Sweet song--", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "the-lovers": { - "title": "“The Lovers”", - "body": "See how in their veins all becomes spirit;\ninto each other they mature and grow.\nLike axles, their forms tremblingly orbit,\nround which it whirls, bewitching and aglow.\nThirsters, and they receive drink,\nwatchers, and see: they receive sight.\nLet them into one another sink\nso as to endure each other outright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "maiden-melancholy": { - "title": "“Maiden Melancholy”", - "body": "A young knight comes into my mind\nAs from some myth of old.\n\nHe came! You felt yourself entwined\nAs a great storm would round you wind.\nHe went! A blessing undefined\nSeemed left as when church-bells declined\nAnd left you wrapt in prayer.\nYou fain would cry aloud--but bind\nYour scarf about you and tear-blind\nWeep softly in its fold.\n\nA young knight comes into my mind\nFull armored forth to fare.\n\nHis smile was luminously kind\nLike glint of ivory enshrined\nLike a home longing undivined\nLike Christmas snows where dark ways wind\nLike sea-pearls about turquoise twined\nLike moonlight silver when combined\nWith a loved book’s rare gold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "maidens-at-confirmation": { - "title": "“Maidens at Confirmation”", - "body": "The white veiled maids to confirmation go\nThrough deep green garden paths they slowly wind;\nTheir childhood they are leaving now behind:\nThe future will be different they know.\n\nOh! Will it come? They wait--It must come soon!\nThe next long hour slowly strikes at last\nThe whole house stirs again the feast is past\nAnd sadly passes by the afternoon …\n\nLike resurrection were the garments white\nThe wreathed procession walked through trees arched wide\nInto the church as cool as silk inside\nWith long aisles of tall candles flaming bright:\nThe lights all shone like jewels rich and rare\nTo solemn eyes that watched them gleam and flare.\n\nThen through the silence the great song rose high\nUp to the vaulted dome like clouds it soared\nThen luminously gently down it poured--\nOver white veils like rain it seemed to die.\n\nThe wind through the white garments softly stirred\nAnd they grew vari-coloured in each fold\nAnd each fold hidden blossoms seemed to hold\nAnd flowers and stars and fluting notes of bird\nAnd dim quaint figures shimmering like gold\nSeemed to come forth from distant myths of old.\n\nOutside the day was one of green and blue\nWith touches of a luminous glowing red\nAcross the quiet pond the small waves sped.\nBeyond the city gardens hidden from view\nSent odors of sweet blossoms on the breeze\nAnd singing sounded through the far off trees.\n\nIt was as though garlands crowned everything\nAnd all things were touched softly by the sun;\nAnd many windows opened one by one\nAnd the light trembled on them glistening.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "maidens": { - "title": "“Maidens”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOthers must by a long dark way\nStray to the mystic bards\nOr ask some one who has heard them sing\nOr touch the magic chords.\nOnly the maidens question not\nThe bridges that lead to Dream;\nTheir luminous smiles are like strands of pearls\nOn a silver vase agleam.\n\nThe maidens’ doors of Life lead out\nWhere the song of the poet soars\nAnd out beyond to the great world--\nTo the world beyond the doors.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMaidens the poets learn from you to tell\nHow solitary and remote you are\nAs night is lighted by one high bright star\nThey draw light from the distance where you dwell.\n\nFor poet you must always maiden be\nEven though his eyes the woman in you wake\nWedding brocade your fragile wrists would break\nMysterious elusive from him flee.\n\nWithin his garden let him wait alone\nWhere benches stand expectant in the shade\nWithin the chamber where the lyre was played\nWhere he received you as the eternal One.\n\nGo! It grows dark--your voice and form no more\nHis senses seek; he now no longer sees\nA white robe fluttering under dark beech trees\nAlong the pathway where it gleamed before.\n\nHe loves the long paths where no footfalls ring\nAnd he loves much the silent chamber where\nLike a soft whisper through the quiet air\nHe hears your voice far distant vanishing.\n\nThe softly stealing echo comes again\nFrom crowds of men whom wearily he shuns;\nAnd many see you there--so his thought runs--\nAnd tenderest memories are pierced with pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "mary-virgin": { - "title": "“Mary Virgin”", - "body": "How came how came from out thy night\nMary so much light\nAnd so much gloom:\nWho was thy bridegroom?\n\nThou callest thou callest and thou hast forgot\nThat thou the same art not\nWho came to me\nIn thy Virginity.\n\nI am still so blossoming so young.\nHow shall I go on tiptoe\nFrom childhood to Annunciation\nThrough the dim twilight\nInto thy Garden.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "moving-forward": { - "title": "“Moving Forward”", - "body": "The deep parts of my life pour onward,\nas if the river shores were opening out.\nIt seems that things are more like me now,\nThat I can see farther into paintings.\nI feel closer to what language can’t reach.\nWith my senses, as with birds, I climb\ninto the windy heaven, out of the oak,\nin the ponds broken off from the sky\nmy falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "music": { - "title": "“Music”", - "body": "What play you O Boy? Through the garden it stole\nLike wandering steps like a whisper--then mute;\nWhat play you O Boy? Lo! your gypsying soul\nIs caught and held fast in the pipes of Pan’s flute.\n\nAnd what conjure you? Imprisoned is the song\nIt lingers and longs in the reeds where it lies;\nYour young life is strong but how much more strong\nIs the longing that through your music sighs.\n\nLet your flute be still and your soul float through\nWaves of sound formless as waves of the sea\nFor here your song lived and it wisely grew\nBefore it was forced into melody.\n\nIts wings beat gently its note no more calls\nIts flight has been spent by you dreaming Boy!\nNow it no longer steals over my walls--\nBut in my garden I’d woo it to joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "narcissus": { - "title": "“Narcissus”", - "body": "Encircled by her arms as by a shell,\nshe hears her being murmur,\nwhile forever he endures\nthe outrage of his too pure image …\n\nWistfully following their example,\nnature re-enters herself;\ncontemplating its own sap, the flower\nbecomes too soft, and the boulder hardens …\n\nIt’s the return of all desire that enters\ntoward all life embracing itself from afar …\nWhere does it fall? Under the dwindling\nsurface, does it hope to renew a center?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-neighbor": { - "title": "“The Neighbor”", - "body": "Strange violin, why do you follow me?\nIn how many foreign cities did you\nspeak of your lonely nights and those of mine.\nAre you being played by hundreds? Or by one?\n\nDo in all great cities men exist\nwho tormented and in deep despair\nwould have sought the river but for you?\nAnd why does your playing always reach me?\n\nWhy is it that I am always neighbor\nto those lost ones who are forced to sing\nand to say: Life is infinitely heavier\nthan the heaviness of all things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "Night. O you whose countenance, dissolved\nin deepness, hovers above my face.\nYou who are the heaviest counterweight\nto my astounding contemplation.\n\nNight, that trembles as reflected in my eyes,\nbut in itself strong;\ninexhaustible creation, dominant,\nenduring beyond the earth’s endurance;\n\nNight, full of newly created stars that leave\ntrails of fire streaming from their seams\nas they soar in inaudible adventure\nthrough interstellar space:\n\nhow, overshadowed by your all-embracing vastness,\nI appear minute!--\nYet, being one with the ever more darkening earth,\nI dare to be in you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "o-how-all-things-are-far-removed": { - "title": "“O how all things are far removed …”", - "body": "O how all things are far removed\nand long have passed away.\nI do believe the star,\nwhose light my face reflects,\nis dead and has been so\nfor many thousand years.\n\nI had a vision of a passing boat\nand heard some voices saying disquieting things.\nI heard a clock strike in some distant house …\nbut in which house? …\n\nI long to quiet my anxious heart\nand stand beneath the sky’s immensity.\nI long to pray …\nAnd one of all the stars\nmust still exist.\nI do believe that I would know\nwhich one alone\nendured,\nand which like a white city stands\nat the ray’s end shining in the heavens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "o-you-tender-ones": { - "title": "“O you tender ones …”", - "body": "O you tender ones, walk now and then\ninto the breath that blows coldly past,\nUpon your cheeks let it tremble and part;\nbehind you it will tremble together again.\n\nO you blessed ones, you who are whole,\nyou who seem the beginning of hearts,\nbows for the arrows and arrows’ targets--\ntear-bright, your lips more eternally smile.\n\nDon’t be afraid to suffer; return\nthat heaviness to the earth’s own weight;\nheavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.\n\nEven the small trees you planted as children\nhave long since become too heavy; you could not\ncarry them now. But the winds … But the spaces …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "offering": { - "title": "“Offering”", - "body": "My body glows in every vein and blooms\nTo fullest flower since I first knew thee\nMy walk unconscious pride and power assumes;\nWho art thou then--thou who awaitest me?\n\nWhen from the past I draw myself the while\nI lose old traits as leaves of autumn fall;\nI only know the radiance of thy smile\nLike the soft gleam of stars transforming all.\n\nThrough childhood’s years I wandered unaware\nOf shimmering visions my thoughts now arrests\nTo offer thee as on an altar fair\nThat’s lighted by the bright flame of thy hair\nAnd wreathéd by the blossoms of thy breasts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "on-hearing-of-a-death": { - "title": "“On Hearing of a Death”", - "body": "We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death\ndoes not deal with us. We have no reason\nto show death admiration, love or hate;\nhis mask of feigned tragic lament gives us\n\na false impression. The world’s stage is still\nfilled with roles which we play. While we worry\nthat our performances may not please,\ndeath also performs, although to no applause.\n\nBut as you left us, there broke upon this stage\na glimpse of reality, shown through the slight\nopening through which you dissapeared: green,\nevergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.\n\nWe keep on playiing, still anxious, our difficult roles\ndeclaiming, accompanied by matching gestures\nas required. But your presence so suddenly\nremoved from our midst and from our play, at times\n\novercomes us like a sense of that other\nreality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed\nand play our actual lives instead of the performance,\nforgetting altogehter the applause.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-panther": { - "title": "“The Panther”", - "body": "His weary glance from passing by the bars\nHas grown into a dazed and vacant stare;\nIt seems to him there are a thousand bars\nAnd out beyond those bars the empty air.\n\nThe pad of his strong feet that ceaseless sound\nOf supple tread behind the iron bands\nIs like a dance of strength circling around\nWhile in the circle stunned a great will stands.\n\nBut there are times the pupils of his eyes\nDilate the strong limbs stand alert apart\nTense with the flood of visions that arise\nOnly to sink and die within his heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "parting": { - "title": "“Parting”", - "body": "How I have felt that thing that’s called ‘to part’,\nand feel it still: a dark, invincible,\ncruel something by which what was joined so well\nis once more shown, held out, and torn apart.\n\nIn what defenceless gaze at that I’ve stood,\nwhich, as it, calling to me, let me go,\nstayed there, as though it were all womanhood,\nyet small and white and nothing more than, oh,\n\nwaving, now already unrelated\nto me, a sight, continuing wave,--scarce now\nexplainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough\nsome perchinig cuckoo’s hastily vacated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "piano-practice": { - "title": "“Piano Practice”", - "body": "The summer hums. The afternoon fatigues;\nshe breathed her crisp white dress distractedly\nand put into it that sharply etched etude\nher impatience for a reality\n\nthat could come: tomorrow, this evening--,\nthat perhaps was there, was just kept hidden;\nand at the window, tall and having everything,\nshe suddenly could feel the pampered park.\n\nWith that she broke off; gazed outside, locked\nher hands together; wished for a long book--\nand in a burst of anger shoved back\nthe jasmine scent. She found it sickened her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "pieta": { - "title": "“Pietà”", - "body": "Thus, Jesus, I behold your feet again\nthat were a young man’s feet when I, with fear,\nstripped them of their shoes and washed them down;\nhow they stood, entangled in my hair\nlike a white stag within a bush of brier.\n\nThus I behold your never-cherished limbs\nin this, our night of love, and not before.\nWe never lay in one another’s arms,\nand now I’ll only watch you and admire.\n\nBut, look, beloved, your poor hands are torn--\nand not by me, not love-bites of my own.\nYour heart stands wide for all to enter in:\nit should have been a door for me alone.\n\nYou’re weary, and your weary mouth has now\nno longing for my mouth, that aches for you.\nO Jesus, Jesus, when was our time? How\ncuriously we’re perishing, we two.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "the-poet": { - "title": "“The Poet”", - "body": "O hour of my muse: why do you leave me,\nWounding me by the wingbeats of your flight?\nAlone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?\nHow shall I pass my days? And how my nights?\n\nI have no one to love. I have no home.\nThere is no center to sustain my life.\nAll things to which I give myself grow rich\nand leave me spent, impoverished, alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "presaging": { - "title": "“Presaging”", - "body": "I am like a flag unfurled in space\nI scent the oncoming winds and must bend with them\nWhile the things beneath are not yet stirring\nWhile doors close gently and there is silence in the chimneys\nAnd the windows do not yet tremble and the dust is still heavy--\nThen I feel the storm and am vibrant like the sea\nAnd expand and withdraw into myself\nAnd thrust myself forth and am alone in the great storm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "rememberance": { - "title": "“Rememberance”", - "body": "And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing\nwhich would infinitely enrich your life:\nthe powerful, uniquely uncommon,\nthe awakening of dormant stones,\ndepths that would reveal you to yourself.\n\nIn the dusk you notice the book shelves\nwith their volumes in gold and in brown;\nand you think of far lands you journeyed,\nof pictures and of shimmering gowns\nworn by women you conquered and lost.\n\nAnd it comes to you all of a sudden:\nThat was it! And you arise, for you are\naware of a year in your distant past\nwith its fears and events and prayers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "remembrance": { - "title": "“Remembrance”", - "body": "Expectant and waiting you muse\nOn the great rare thing which alone\nTo enhance your life you would choose:\nThe awakening of the stone\nThe deeps where yourself you would lose.\n\nIn the dusk of the shelves embossed\nShine the volumes in gold and browns\nAnd you think of countries once crossed\nOf pictures of shimmering gowns\nOf the women that you have lost.\n\nAnd it comes to you then at last--\nAnd you rise for you are aware\nOf a year in the far off past\nWith its wonder and fear and prayer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "requiem-for-a-friend": { - "title": "“Requiem for a Friend”", - "body": "Once ritual lament would have been chanted; women would have been paid to beat their breasts and howl for you all night, when all is silent. Where can we find such customs now? So many have long since disappeared or been disowned. That’s what you had to come for: to retrieve the lament that we omitted.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "rose": { - "title": "“Rose”", - "body": "Rose, you majesty--once, to the ancients, you were\njust a calyx with the simplest of rims.\nBut for us, you are the full, the numberless flower,\nthe inexhaustible countenance.\n\nIn your wealth you seem to be wearing gown upon gown\nupon a body of nothing but light;\nyet each seperate petal is at the same time the negation\nof all clothing and the refusal of it.\n\nYour fragrance has been calling its sweetest names\nin our direction, for hundreds of years;\nsuddenly it hangs in the air like fame.\n\nEven so, we have never known what to call it; we guess …\nAnd memory is filled with it unawares\nwhich we prayed for from hours that belong to us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "sacrifice": { - "title": "“Sacrifice”", - "body": "How my body blooms from every vein\nmore fragrantly, since you appeard to me;\nlook, I walk slimmer now and straighter,\nand all you do is wait--: who are you then?\n\nLook: I feel how I’m moving away,\nhow I’m shedding my old life, leaf by leaf.\nOnly your smile spreads like sheer stars\nover you and, soon now, over me.\n\nWhatever shines through my childhood years\nstill nameless and gleaming like water,\nI will name after you at the altar,\nwhich is blazing brightly from your hair\nand braided gently with your breasts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "self-portrait": { - "title": "“Self-Portrait”", - "body": "The steadfastness of generations of nobility\nshows in the curving lines that form the eyebrows.\nAnd the blue eyes still show traces of childhood fears\nand of humility here and there, not of a servant’s,\nyet of one who serves obediantly, and of a woman.\nThe mouth formed as a mouth, large and accurate,\nnot given to long phrases, but to express\npersuasively what is right. The forehead without guile\nand favoring the shadows of quiet downward gazing.\n\nThis, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;\nnever as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,\nheld together for an enduring fulfillment,\nyet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,\nsomething serious and lasting were being planned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "sense-of-something-coming": { - "title": "“Sense of Something Coming”", - "body": "I am like a flag in the center of open space.\nI sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live\nit through.\nwhile the things of the world still do not move:\nthe doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full\nof silence,\nthe windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.\n\nI already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.\nI leap out, and fall back,\nand throw myself out, and am absolutely alone\nin the great storm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-sisters": { - "title": "“The Sisters”", - "body": "Look how the same possibilities\nunfold in their opposite demeanors,\nas though one saw different ages\npassing through two identical rooms.\n\nEach thinks that she props up the other,\nwhile resting wearily on her support;\nand they can’t make use of one another,\nfor they cause blood to rest on blood,\n\nwhen as in the former times they softly touch\nand try, along the tree-lined walks,\nto feel themselves conducted and to lead;\nah, the ways they go are not the same.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "slumber-song": { - "title": "“Slumber Song”", - "body": "Some day, if I should ever lose you,\nwill you be able then to go to sleep\nwithout me softly whispering above you\nlike night air stirring in the linden tree?\n\nWithout my waking here and watching\nand saying words as tender as eyelids\nthat come to rest weightlessly upon your breast,\nupon your sleeping limbs, upon your lips?\n\nWithout my touching you and leaving you\nalone with what is yours, like a summer garden\nthat is overflowing with masses\nof melissa and star-anise?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "solemn-hour": { - "title": "“Solemn Hour”", - "body": "Whoever now weeps somewhere in the world,\nweeps without reason in the world,\nweeps over me.\n\nWhoever now laughs somewhere in the night,\nlaughs without reason in the night,\nlaughs at me.\n\nWhoever now wanders somewhere in the world,\nwanders without reason out in the world,\nwanders toward me.\n\nWhoever now dies somewhere in the world,\ndies without reason in the world,\nlooks at me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "solitude": { - "title": "“Solitude”", - "body": "Solitude is like a rain\nThat from the sea at dusk begins to rise;\nIt floats remote across the far-off plain\nUpward into its dwelling-place the skies\nThen o’er the town it slowly sinks again.\nLike rain it softly falls at that dim hour\nWhen ghostly lanes turn toward the shadowy morn;\nWhen bodies weighed with satiate passion’s power\nSad disappointed from each other turn;\nWhen men with quiet hatred burning deep\nTogether in a common bed must sleep--\nThrough the gray phantom shadows of the dawn\nLo! Solitude floats down the river wan …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-beggar": { - "title": "“The Song of the Beggar”", - "body": "I am always going from door to door,\nwhether in rain or heat,\nand sometimes I will lay my right ear in\nthe palm of my right hand.\nAnd as I speak my voice seems strange as if\nit were alien to me,\n\nfor I’m not certain whose voice is crying:\nmine or someone else’s.\nI cry for a pittance to sustain me.\nThe poets cry for more.\n\nIn the end I conceal my entire face\nand cover both my eyes;\nthere it lies in my hands with all its weight\nand looks as if at rest,\nso no one may think I had no place where-\nupon to lay my head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-blindman": { - "title": "“The Song of the Blindman”", - "body": "I am blind, you out there--that is a curse,\nagainst one’s will, a contradiction,\na heavy daily burden.\nI lay my hand on the arm of my wife,\nmy grey hand upon her greyer grey,\nas she guides me through empty spaces.\n\nYou move about and stir, and imagine\nyour sounds differing from stone to stone.\nBut you are mistaken: I alone\nlive and suffer and complain, for\nin me is an endless crying,\nand I do not know whether it is\nmy heart that cries or my bowels.\n\nDo you recognize these songs? You never sang them,\nnot quite with this intonation.\nFor you every morning brings its new light\nwarm through your open windows.\nAnd you have the feeling from face to face\nthat tempts you to be indulgent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "song-of-the-orphan": { - "title": "“Song of the Orphan”", - "body": "I am no one and never will be anyone,\nfor I am far too small to claim to be;\nnot even later.\n\nMothers and Fathers,\ntake pity on me.\n\nI fear it will not pay to raise me:\nI shall fall victim to the mower’s scythe.\nNo one can find me useful now: I am too young,\nand tomorrow will be too late.\n\nI only have one dress,\nworn thin and faded,\nbut it will last an eternity\neven before God, perhaps.\n\nI only have this whispy hair\n(that always remained the same)\nyet once was someone’s dearest love.\n\nNow he has nothing that he loves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "song-of-the-sea": { - "title": "“Song of the Sea”", - "body": "Timeless sea breezes,\nsea-wind of the night:\nyou come for no one;\nif someone should wake,\nhe must be prepared\nhow to survive you.\n\nTimeless sea breezes,\nthat for aeons have\nblown ancient rocks,\nyou are purest space\ncoming from afar …\n\nOh, how a fruit-bearing\nfig tree feels your coming\nhigh up in the moonlight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "song-of-the-statue": { - "title": "“Song of the Statue”", - "body": "Who so loveth me that he\nWill give his precious life for me?\nI shall be set free from the stone\nIf some one drowns for me in the sea\nI shall have life life of my own--\nFor life I ache.\n\nI long for the singing blood\nThe stone is so still and cold.\nI dream of life life is good.\nWill no one love me and be bold\nAnd me awake?\n\nI weep and weep alone\nWeep always for my stone.\nWhat joy is my blood to me\nIf it ripens like red wine?\nIt cannot call back from the sea\nThe life that was given for mine\nGiven for Love’s sake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-widow": { - "title": "“The Song of the Widow”", - "body": "In the beginning life was good to me;\nit held me warm and gave me courage.\nThat this is granted all while in their youth,\nhow could I then have known of this.\nI never knew what living was--.\nBut suddenly it was just year on year,\nno more good, no more new, no more wonderful.\nLife had been torn in two right down the middle.\n\nThat was not his fault nor mine\nsince both of us had nothing but patience;\nbut death has none.\nI saw him coming (how rotten he looked),\nand I watched him as he took and took:\nand nothing was mine.\n\nWhat, then, belonged to me; was mine, my own?\nWas not even this utter wretchedness\non loan to me by fate?\nFate does not only claim your happiness,\nit also wants your pain back and your tears\nand buys the ruin as something useless, old.\n\nFate was present and acquired for a nothing\nevery expression my face is capable of,\neven to the way I walk.\nThe daily diminishing of me went on\nand after I was emptied fate gave me up\nand left me standing there, abandoned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "You, whom I do not tell that all night long\nI lie weeping,\nwhose very being makes me feel wanting\nlike a cradle.\n\nYou, who do not tell me, that you lie awake\nthinking of me:--\nwhat, if we carried all these longings within us\nwithout ever being overwhelmed by them,\nletting them pass?\n\nLook at these lovers, tormented by love,\nwhen first they begin confessing,\nhow soon they lie!\n\nYou make me feel alone. I try imagining:\none moment it is you, then it’s the soaring wind;\na fragrance comes and goes but never lasts.\nOh, within my arms I lost all whom I loved!\nOnly you remain, always reborn again.\nFor since I never held you, I hold you fast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-spanish-dancer": { - "title": "“The Spanish Dancer”", - "body": "As a lit match first flickers in the hands\nBefore it flames and darts out from all sides\nBright twitching tongues so ringed by growing bands\nOf spectators--she quivering glowing stands\nPoised tensely for the dance--then forward glides\n\nAnd suddenly becomes a flaming torch.\nHer bright hair flames her burning glances scorch\nAnd with a daring art at her command\nHer whole robe blazes like a fire-brand\nFrom which is stretched each naked arm awake\nGleaming and rattling like a frightened snake.\n\nAnd then as though the fire fainter grows\nShe gathers up the flame--again it glows\nAs with proud gesture and imperious air\nShe flings it to the earth; and it lies there\nFuriously flickering and crackling still--\nThen haughtily victorious but with sweet\nSwift smile of greeting she puts forth her will\nAnd stamps the flames out with her small firm feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "sunset": { - "title": "“Sunset”", - "body": "Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors\nwhich it passes to a row of ancient trees.\nYou look, and soon these two worlds both leave you\none part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.\n\nleaving you, not really belonging to either,\nnot so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,\nnot so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing\nthat turns to a star each night and climbs--\n\nleaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)\nyour own life, timid and standing high and growing,\nso that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,\none moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-swan": { - "title": "“The Swan”", - "body": "This laboring through what is still undone,\nas though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,\nis like the akward walking of the swan.\n\nAnd dying--to let go, no longer feel\nthe solid ground we stand on every day--\nis like anxious letting himself fall\n\ninto waters, which receive him gently\nand which, as though with reverence and joy,\ndraw back past him in streams on either side;\nwhile, infinitely silent and aware,\nin his full majesty and ever more\nindifferent, he condescends to glide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "take-me-by-the-hand": { - "title": "“Take Me by the Hand”", - "body": "Take me by the hand;\nit’s so easy for you, Angel,\nfor you are the road\neven while being immobile.\n\nYou see, I’m scared no one\nhere will look for me again;\nI couldn’t make use of\nwhatever was given,\n\nso they abandoned me.\nAt first the solitude\ncharmed me like a prelude,\nbut so much music wounded me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "telling-you-all-would-take-too-long": { - "title": "“Telling you all would take too long …”", - "body": "Telling you all would take too long.\nBesides, we read in the Bible\nhow the good is harmful\nand how misfortune is good.\n\nLet’s invite something new\nby unifying our silences;\nif, then and there, we advance,\nwe’ll know it soon enough.\n\nAnd yet towards evening,\nwhen his memory is persistent,\none belated curiousity\nstops him before the mirror.\n\nWe don’t know if he is frightened.\nBut he stays, he is engrossed,\nand, facing his reflection,\ntransports himself somewhere else.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "tenth-elegy": { - "title": "“Tenth Elegy”", - "body": "That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision\nI may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels!\nThat of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail\nto sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string!\nThat my streaming countenance may make me more resplendent\nThat my humble weeping change into blossoms.\nOh, how will you then, nights of suffering, be remembered\nwith love. Why did I not kneel more fervently, disconsolate\nsisters, more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely\nsurrender myself to your loosened hair? We, squanderers of\ngazing beyond them to judge the end of their duration.\nThey are only our winter’s foliage, our sombre evergreen,\none of the seasons of our interior year,--not only season,\nbut place, settlement, camp, soil and dwelling.\n\nHow woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,\nwhere in the false silence created from too much noise,\na thing cast out from the mold of emptiness\nswaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.\nOh, how completely an angel would stamp out their market\nof solace, bounded by the church, bought ready for use:\nas clean, disappointing and closed as a post office on Sunday.\nFarther out, though, there are always the rippling edges\nof the fair. Seasaws of freedom! High-divers and jugglers of zeal!\nAnd the shooting-gallery’s targets of bedizened happiness:\ntargets tumbling in tinny contortions whenever some better\nmarksman happens to hit one. From cheers to chance he goes\nstaggering on, as booths that can please the most curious tastes\nare drumming and bawling. For adults ony there is something\nspecial to see: how money multiplies. Anatomy made amusing!\nMoney’s organs on view! Nothing concealed! Instructive,\nand guaranteed to increase fertility! …\n\nOh, and then outside,\nbehind the farthest billboard, pasted with posters for ‘Deathless,’\nthat bitter beer tasting quite sweet to drinkers,\nif they chew fresh diversions with it …\nBehind the billboard, just in back of it, life is real.\nChildren play, and lovers hold each other,--aside,\nearnestly, in the trampled grass, and dogs respond to nature.\nThe youth continues onward; perhaps he is in love with\na young Lament … he follows her into the meadows.\nShe says: the way is long. We live out there …\n\nWhere? And the youth\nfollows. He is touched by her gentle bearing. The shoulders,\nthe neck,--perhaps she is of noble ancestry?\nYet he leaves her, turns around, looks back and waves …\nWhat could come of it? She is a Lament.\n\nOnly those who died young, in their first state of\ntimeless serenity, while they are being weaned,\nfollow her lovingly. She waits for girls\nand befriends them. Gently she shows them\nwhat she is wearing. Pearls of grief\nand the fine-spun veils of patience.--\nWith youths she walks in silence.\n\nBut there, where they live, in the valley,\nan elderly Lament responds to the youth as he asks--:\nWe were once, she says, a great race, we Laments.\nOur fathers worked the mines up there in the mountains;\nsometimes among men you will find a piece of polished\nprimeval pain, or a petrified slag from an ancient volcano.\nYes, that came from there. Once we were rich.--\n\nAnd she leads him gently through the vast landscape\nof Lamentation, shows him the columns of temples,\nthe ruins of strongholds from which long ago\nthe princes of Lament wisely governed the country.\nShows him the tall trees of tears,\nthe fields of flowering sadness,\n(the living know them only as softest foliage);\nshow him the beasts of mourning, grazing--\nand sometimes a startled bird, flying straight through\ntheir field of vision, far away traces the image of its\nsolitary cry.--\nAt evening she leads him to the graves of elders\nof the race of Lamentation, the sybils and prophets.\nWith night approaching, they move more softly,\nand soon there looms ahead, bathed in moonlight,\nthe sepulcher, that all-guarding ancient stone,\nTwin-brother to that on the Nile, the lofty Sphinx--:\nthe silent chamber’s countenance.\nThey marvel at the regal head that has, forever silent,\nlaid the features of manking upon the scales of the stars.\nHis sight, still blinded by his early death,\ncannot grasp it. But the Sphinx’s gaze\nfrightens an owl from the rim of the double-crown.\nThe bird, with slow down-strokes, brushes\nalong the cheek, that with the roundest curve,\nand faintly inscribes on the new death-born hearing,\nas though on the double page of an opened book,\nthe indescribable outline.\n\nAnd higher up, the stars. New ones. Stars\nof the land of pain. Slowly she names them:\n“There, look: the Rider, the Staff, and that\ncrowded constellation they call the the Garland of Fruit.\nThen farther up toward the Pole:\nCradle, Way, the Burning Book, Doll, Window.\nAnd in the Southern sky, pure as lines\non the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M,\nstanding for Mothers …”\n\nYet the dead youth must go on alone.\nIn silence the elder Lament brings him\nas far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:\nThe Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,\nsaying: “In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream.”\n\nThey reach the foothills of the mountain,\nand there she embraces him, weeping.\n\nAlone, he climbs the mountains of primeval pain.\nNot even his footsteps ring from this soundless fate.\n\nBut were these timeless dead to awaken an image for us,\nsee, they might be pointing to th catkins, hanging\nfrom the leafless hazels, or else they might mean\nthe rain that falls upon the dark earth in early Spring.\n\nAnd we, who always think\nof happiness as rising feel the emotion\nthat almost overwhelms us\nwhenever a happy thing falls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "this-night-agitated-by-the-growing-storm": { - "title": "“This night, agitated by the growing storm …”", - "body": "This night, agitated by the growing storm,\nhow it has suddenly expanded its dimensions,--\nthat ordinarily would have gone unnoticed,\nlike a cloth folded, and hidden in the folds of time.\n\nWhere the stars give resistance it does not stop there,\nneither does it begin within the forest’s depths,\nnor show upon the surface of my face\nnor with your appearance.\n\nThe lamps keep swaying, fully unaware:\nis our light lying?\nIs night the only reality\nthat has endured through thousands of years?", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "though-the-world-keeps-changing-its-form": { - "title": "“Though the world keeps changing its form …”", - "body": "Though the world keeps changing its form\nas fast as a cloud, still\nwhat is accomplished falls home\nto the Primeval.\n\nOver the change and the passing,\nlarger and freer,\nsoars your eternal song,\ngod with the lyre.\n\nNever has grief been possesed,\nnever has love been learned,\nand what removes us in death\n\nis not revealed.\nOnly the song through the land\nhallows and heals.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "to-lou-andreas-salome": { - "title": "“To Lou Andreas-Salome”", - "body": "I held myself too open, I forgot\nthat outside not just things exist and animals\nfully at ease in themselves, whose eyes\nreach from their lives’ roundedness no differently\nthan portraits do from frames; forgot that I\nwith all I did incessantly crammed\nlooks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.\nWho knows: perhaps eyes form in space\nand look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you\ndoes my face cease being on display, grows\ninto you and twines on darkly, endlessly,\ninto your sheltered heart.\n\nAs one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath--\nno: as one presses it against a wound\nout of which the whole of life, in a single gush,\nwants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you\nturn red from me. How could anyone express\nwhat took place between us? We made up for everything\nthere was never time for. I matured strangely\nin every impulse of unperformed youth,\nand you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.\n\nMemory won’t suffice here: from those moments\nthere must be layers of pure existence\non my being’s floor, a precipitate\nfrom that immensely overfilled solution.\n\nFor I don’t think back; all that I am\nstirs me because of you. I don’t invent you\nat sadly cooled-off places from which\nyou’ve gone away; even your not being there\nis warm with you and more real and more\nthan a privation. Longing leads out too often\ninto vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,\nfor all I know, your influence falls on me,\ngently, like moonlight on a window seat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "to-music": { - "title": "“To Music”", - "body": "Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:\nsilence of paintings. You language where all language\nends. You time\nstanding vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.\n\nFeelings for whom? O you the transformation\nof feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.\nYou stranger: music. You heart-space\ngrown out of us. The deepest space in us,\nwhich, rising above us, forces its way out,--\nholy departure:\nwhen the innermost point in us stands\noutside, as the most practiced distance, as the other\nside of the air:\npure,\nboundless,\nno longer habitable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "to-say-before-going-to-sleep": { - "title": "“To Say before Going to Sleep”", - "body": "I would like to sing someone to sleep,\nhave someone to sit by and be with.\nI would like to cradle you and softly sing,\nbe your companion while you sleep or wake.\nI would like to be the only person\nin the house who knew: the night outside was cold.\nAnd would like to listen to you\nand outside to the world and to the woods.\n\nThe clocks are striking, calling to eachother,\nand one can see right to the edge of time.\nOutside the house a strange man is afoot\nand a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.\nBeyond that there is silence.\n\nMy eyes rest upon your face wide-open;\nand they hold you gently, letting you go\nwhen something in the dark begins to move.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-tomb-of-a-young-girl": { - "title": "“The Tomb of a Young Girl”", - "body": "We still remember! The same as of yore\nAll that has happened once again must be.\nAs grows a lemon-tree upon the shore--\nIt was like that--your light small breasts you bore\nAnd his blood’s current coursed like the wild sea.\n\nThat god--who was the wanderer the slim\nDespoiler of fair women; he--the wise--\nBut sweet and glowing as your thoughts of him\nWho cast a shadow over your young limb\nWhile bending like your arched brows o’er your eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-unicorn": { - "title": "“The Unicorn”", - "body": "The saintly hermit, midway through his prayers\nstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witness\nthe unbelievable: for there before him stood\nthe legendary creature, startling white, that\nhad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.\n\nThe legs, so delicately shaped, balanced a\nbody wrought of finest ivory. And as\nhe moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.\nHigh on his forehead rose the magic horn, the sign\nof his uniqueness: a tower held upright\nby his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.\n\nThe mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, when\nopened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,\nwhiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:\nhe sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.\nHis eyes looked far beyond the saint’s enclosure,\nreflecting vistas and events long vanished,\nand closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "venetian-morning": { - "title": "“Venetian Morning”", - "body": "Windows pampered like princes always see\nwhat on occasion deigns to trouble us:\nthe city that, time and again, where a shimmer\nof sky strikes a feeling of floodtide,\n\ntakes shape without once choosing to be.\nEach new morning must first show her the opals\nshe wore yesterday, and pull rows\nof reflections out of the canal\nand remind her of the other times:\nonly then does she concede and settle in\n\nlike a nymph who received great Zeus.\nThe dangling earrings ring out at her ear;\nbut she lifts San Giorgio Maggiore\nand smiles idly into that lovely thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-voices": { - "title": "“The Voices”", - "body": "The rich and fortunate do well to keep silent,\nfor no one cares to know who and what they are.\nBut those in need must reveal themselves,\nmust say: I am blind,\nor: I’m on the verge of going blind,\nor: nothing goes well with me on earth,\nor: I have a sickly child,\nor: I have little to hold me together …\n\nAnd chances are this is not nearly enough.\n\nAnd because people try to ignore them as they\npass by them: these unfortunate ones have to sing!\n\nAnd at times one hears some excellent singing!\n\nOf course, people differ in their tastes: some would\nprefer to listen to choirs of boy-castrati.\n\nBut God himself comes often and stays long,\nwhen the castrati’s singing disturbs Him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-wait": { - "title": "“The Wait”", - "body": "It is life in slow motion,\nit’s the heart in reverse,\nit’s a hope-and-a-half:\ntoo much and too little at once.\n\nIt’s a train that suddenly\nstops with no station around,\nand we can hear the cricket,\nand, leaning out the carriage\n\ndoor, we vainly contemplate\na wind we feel that stirs\nthe blooming meadows, the meadows\nmade imaginary by this stop.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "water-lily": { - "title": "“Water Lily”", - "body": "My whole life is mine, but whoever says so\nwill deprive me, for it is infinite.\nThe ripple of water, the shade of the sky\nare mine; it is still the same, my life.\n\nNo desire opens me: I am full,\nI never close myself with refusal--\nin the rythm of my daily soul\nI do not desire--I am moved;\n\nby being moved I exert my empire,\nmaking the dreams of night real:\ninto my body at the bottom of the water\nI attract the beyonds of mirrors …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "what-survives": { - "title": "“What Survives”", - "body": "Who says that all must vanish?\nWho knows, perhaps the flight\nof the bird you wound remains,\nand perhaps flowers survive\ncaresses in us, in their ground.\n\nIt isn’t the gesture that lasts,\nbut it dresses you again in gold\narmor--from breast to knees--\nand the battle was so pure\nan Angel wears it after you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "what-birds-plunge-through-is-not-the-intimate-space": { - "title": "“What birds plunge through is not the intimate space …”", - "body": "What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,\nin which you see all Forms intensified.\n(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,\nwould disappear into that vastness.)\n\nSpace reaches from us and translates Things:\nto become the very essence of a tree,\nthrow inner space around it, from that space\nthat lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.\nIt has no limits. For the first time, shaped\nin your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "what-fields-are-as-fragrant-as-your-hands": { - "title": "“What fields are as fragrant as your hands? …”", - "body": "What fields are as fragrant as your hands?\nYou feel how external fragrance stands\nupon your stronger resistance.\nStars stand in images above.\nGive me your mouth to soften, love;\nah, your hair is all in idleness.\n\nSee, I want to surround you with yourself\nand the faded expectation lift\nfrom the edges of your eyebrows;\nI want, as with inner eyelids sheer,\nto close for you all places which appear\nby my tender caresses now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "what-will-you-do-god-when-i-die": { - "title": "“What will you do, God, when I die? …”", - "body": "What will you do, God, when I die?\nI am your jar (if cracked, I lie?)\nYour well-spring (if the well go dry?)\nI am your craft, your vesture I--\nYou lose your purport, losing me.\n\nWhen I go, your cold house will be\nEmpty of words that made it sweet.\nI am the sandals your bare feet\nWill seek and long for, wearily.\n\nYour cloak will fall from aching bones.\nYour glance, that my warm cheeks have cheered\nAs with a cushion long endeared,\nWill wonder at a loss so weird;\nAnd, when the sun has disappeared,\nLie in the lap of alien stones.\n\nWhat will you do, God? I am feared.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch & Avrahm Yarmolinsky", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "whom-will-you-cry-to-heart": { - "title": "“Whom will you cry to, heart? …”", - "body": "Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,\nyour path struggles on through incomprehensible\nmankind. All the more futile perhaps\nfor keeping to its direction,\nkeeping on toward the future,\ntoward what has been lost.\n\nOnce. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry\nof jubilation, unripe.\nBut now the whole tree of my jubilation\nis breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow\ntree of joy.\nLoveliest in my invisible\nlandscape, you that made me more known\nto the invisible angels.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-woman-who-loves": { - "title": "“The Woman Who Loves”", - "body": "Ah yes! I long for you. To you I glide\nAnd lose myself--for to you I belong.\nThe hope that hitherto I have denied\nImperious comes to me as from your side\nSerious unfaltering and swift and strong.\n\nThose times: the times when I was quite alone\nBy memories wrapt that whispered to me low\nMy silence was the quiet of a stone\nOver which rippling murmuring waters flow.\n\nBut in these weeks of the awakening Spring\nSomething within me has been freed--something\nThat in the past dark years unconscious lay\nWhich rises now within me and commands\nAnd gives my poor warm life into your hands\nWho know not what I was that Yesterday.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "woman-in-love": { - "title": "“Woman in Love”", - "body": "That is my window. Just now\nI have so softly wakened.\nI thought that I would float.\nHow far does my life reach,\nand where does the night begin\n\nI could think that everything\nwas still me all around;\ntransparent like a crystal’s\ndepths, darkened, mute.\n\nI could keep even the stars\nwithin me; so immense\nmy heart seems to me; so willingly\nit let him go again.\n\nwhom I began perhaps to love, perhaps to hold.\nLike something strange, undreamt-of,\nmy fate now gazes at me.\n\nFor what, then, am I stretched out\nbeneath this endlessness,\nexuding fragrance like a meadow,\nswayed this way and that,\n\ncalling out and frightened\nthat someone will hear the call,\nand destined to disappear\ninside some other life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "world-was-in-the-face-of-the-beloved": { - "title": "“World was in the face of the beloved …”", - "body": "World was in the face of the beloved--,\nbut suddenly it poured out and was gone:\nworld is outside, world can not be grasped.\n\nWhy didn’t I, from the full, beloved face\nas I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink\nworld, so near that I couldn’t almost taste it?\n\nAh, I drank. Insatiably I drank.\nBut I was filled up also, with too much\nworld, and, drinking, I myself ran over.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "you-who-never-arrived": { - "title": "“You Who Never Arrived”", - "body": "You who never arrived\nin my arms, Beloved, who were lost\nfrom the start,\nI don’t even know what songs\nwould please you. I have given up trying\nto recognize you in the surging wave of the next\nmoment. All the immense\nimages in me--the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,\ncities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected\nturns in the path,\nand those powerful lands that were once\npulsing with the life of the gods--\nall rise within me to mean\nyou, who forever elude me.\n\nYou, Beloved, who are all\nthe gardens I have ever gazed at,\nlonging. An open window\nin a country house--, and you almost\nstepped out, pensive, to meet me.\nStreets that I chanced upon,--\nyou had just walked down them and vanished.\nAnd sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors\nwere still dizzy with your presence and, startled,\ngave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?\nperhaps the same bird echoed through both of us\nyesterday, seperate, in the evening …", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "you-who-are-close-to-my-heart-always": { - "title": "“You who are close to my heart always …”", - "body": "You who are close to my heart always,\nI welcome you, ancient coffins of stone,\nwhich the cheerful water of Roman days\nstill flows through, like a wandering song.\n\nOr those other ones that are open wide\nlike the eyes of a happily waking shepard\n--with silence and bee-suck nettle inside,\nfrom which ecstatic butterflies flittered;\n\neverything that has been wrestled from doubt\nI welcome-the mouths that burst open after\nlong knowledge of what it is to be mute.\n\nDo we know this, my friends, or don’t we know this?\nBoth are formed by the hesitant hour\nin the deep calm of the human face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "you-you-only-exist": { - "title": "“You, you only, exist …”", - "body": "You, you only, exist.\nWe pass away, till at last,\nour passing is so immense\nthat you arise: beautiful moment,\nin all your suddenness,\narising in love, or enchanted\nin the contraction of work.\n\nTo you I belong, however time may\nwear me away. From you to you\nI go commanded. In between\nthe garland is hanging in chance; but if you\ntake it up and up and up: look:\nall becomes festival!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "the-sky-puts-on-the-darkening-blue-coat": { - "title": "“The sky puts on the darkening blue coat …”", - "body": "The sky puts on the darkening blue coat\nheld for it by a row of ancient trees;\nyou watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,\none journeying to heaven, one that falls;\n\nand leave you, not at home in either one,\nnot quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,\nnot calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises;\n\nand leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)\nyour life, with its immensity and fear,\nso that, now bounded, now immeasurable,\nit is alternately stone in you and star.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - }, - "a-tree-ascended-there": { - "title": "“A tree ascended there …”", - "body": "A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!\nOh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!\nAnd all things hushed. Yet even in that silence\na new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.\n\nCreatures of stillness crowded from the bright\nunbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;\nand it was not from any dullness, not\nfrom fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,\n\nbut from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek\nseemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been\nat most a makeshift hut to receive the music,\n\na shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,\nwith an entryway that shuddered in the wind--\nyou built a temple deep inside their hearing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Jessie Lemont" - } - } - } - }, - "arthur-rimbaud": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Arthur Rimbaud", - "birth": { - "year": 1854 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rimbaud", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "antique": { - "title": "“Antique”", - "body": "Pan’s elegant son--eyes rolling under a brow crowned with small blooms and berries, precious balls! Hollowed with brown stripes, cheeks deepen on your gleaming fangs. Your chest recalls a harp whose ringing circles up and down blond arms. Your heart beats in a belly where the double sex is sleeping. Walk out at night now moving slowly, first this thigh, this other thigh, then this left leg.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "the-drunken-boat": { - "title": "“The Drunken Boat”", - "body": "As I was going down impassive Rivers,\nI no longer felt myself guided by haulers:\nYelping redskins had taken them as targets\nAnd had nailed them naked to colored stakes.\n\nI was indifferent to all crews,\nThe bearer of Flemish wheat or English cottons\nWhen with my haulers this uproar stopped\nThe Rivers let me go where I wanted.\n\nInto the furious lashing of the tides\nMore heedless than children’s brains the other winter\nI ran! And loosened Peninsulas\nHave not undergone a more triumphant hubbub\n\nThe storm blessed my sea vigils\nLighter than a cork I danced on the waves\nThat are called eternal rollers of victims,\nTen nights, without missing the stupid eye of the lighthouses!\n\nSweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children\nThe green water penetrated my hull of fir\nAnd washed me of spots of blue wine\nAnd vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook\n\nAnd from then on I bathed in the Poem\nOf the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,\nDevouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated\nPiece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;\n\nWhere, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium\nAnd slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,\nStronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,\nThe bitter redness of love ferments!\n\nI know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts\nAnd the surf and the currents; I know the evening,\nAnd dawn as exalted as a flock of doves\nAnd at times I have seen what man thought he saw!\n\nI have seen the low sun spotted with mystic horrors,\nLighting up, with long violet clots,\nResembling actors of very ancient dramas,\nThe waves rolling far off their quivering of shutters!\n\nI have dreamed of the green night with dazzled snows\nA kiss slowly rising to the eyes of the sea,\nThe circulation of unknown saps,\nAnd the yellow and blue awakening of singing phosphorous!\n\nI followed during pregnant months the swell,\nLike hysterical cows, in its assault on the reefs,\nWithout dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys\nCould constrain the snout of the wheezing Oceans!\n\nI struck against, you know, unbelievable Floridas\nMingling with flowers panthers’ eyes and human\nSkin! Rainbows stretched like bridal reins\nUnder the horizon of the seas to greenish herds!\n\nI have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps\nWhere a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!\nAvalanches of water in the midst of a calm,\nAnd the distances cataracting toward the abyss!\n\nGlaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!\nHideous strands at the end of brown gulfs\nWhere giant serpents devoured by bedbugs\nFall down from gnarled trees with black scent!\n\nI should have liked to show children those sunfish\nOf the blue wave, the fish of gold, the singing fish.\n--Foam of flowers rocked my drifting\nAnd ineffable winds winged me at times.\n\nAt times a martyr weary of poles and zones,\nThe sea, whose sob created my gentle roll,\nBrought up to me her dark flowers with yellow suckers\nAnd I remained, like a woman on her knees …\n\nResembling an island tossing on my sides the quarrels\nAnd droppings of noisy birds with yellow eyes\nAnd I sailed on, when through my fragile ropes\nDrowned men sank backward to sleep!\n\nNow I, a boat lost in the foliage of caves,\nThrown by the storm into the birdless air\nI whose water-drunk carcass would not have been rescued\nBy the Monitors and the Hanseatic sailboats;\n\nFree, smoking, topped with violet fog,\nI who pierced the reddening sky like a wall,\nBearing, delicious jam for good poets\nLichens of sunlight and mucus of azure,\n\nWho ran, spotted with small electric moons,\nA wild plank, escorted by black seahorses,\nWhen Julys beat down with blows of cudgels\nThe ultramarine skies with burning funnels;\n\nI, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues off\nThe moaning of the Behemoths in heat and the thick Maelstroms,\nEternal spinner of the blue immobility\nI miss Europe with its ancient parapets!\n\nI have seen sidereal archipelagos! and islands\nWhose delirious skies are open to the sea-wanderer:\n--Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself,\nMillion golden birds, o future Vigor?--\n\nBut, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.\nEvery moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.\nAcrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor\nO let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!\n\nIf I want a water of Europe, it is the black\nCold puddle where in the sweet-smelling twilight\nA squatting child full of sadness releases\nA boat as fragile as a May butterfly.\n\nNo longer can I, bathed in your languor, o waves,\nFollow in the wake of the cotton boats,\nNor cross through the pride of flags and flames,\nNor swim under the terrible eyes of prison ships.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "est-elle-almee": { - "title": "“Est-Elle Almée?”", - "body": "Is she an Egyptian dancer? … In the first blue hours\nWill she destroy herself like deceased flowers.\nBefore the brilliant expanse where we feel\nThe enormously flourishing town exhale.\n\nIt’s too exquisite! It’s too exquisite! but so necessary\n--For the Fisherwoman and the song of the Corsair,\nAnd also since the last maskers believed\nIn night-feasts on the pure sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "genie": { - "title": "“Genie”", - "body": "He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still. He is affection and the future, strength and love that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky and on banners of ecstasy.\nHe is love, perfect and reinvented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine beloved for its fatal qualities. We have all experienced the terror of his yielding and of our own: O enjoyment of our health, surge of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him, he who loves us for his infinite life\nAnd we remember him and he travels … And if the Adoration goes away, resounds, its promise resounds: “Away with those superstitions, those old bodies, those couples and those ages. It’s this age that has sunk!”\nHe won’t go away, nor descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and of all that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.\nO his breaths, his heads, his racing; the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and of action.\nO fecundity of the spirit and immensity of the universe!\nHis body! The dreamed-of release, the shattering of grace crossed with new violence!\nThe sight, the sight of him! all the ancient kneeling and suffering lifted in his wake.\nHis day! the abolition of all resonant and surging suffering in more intense music.\nHis footstep! migrations more vast than ancient invasions.\nO him and us! pride more benevolent than wasted charities.\nO world! and the clear song of new misfortunes!\nHe has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "larme": { - "title": "“Larme”", - "body": "Far from birds, from herds, from village girls,\nI used to drink, squatting in some heather\nSurrounded by tender woods of hazel trees,\nIn a warm green afternoon vapour.\n\nWhat could I drink from this young Oise,\nVoiceless elms, flowerless lawn, overcast sky.\nWhat could I suck from the gourd of the _colocase_?\nSome insipid gold liqueur that makes you sweaty.\n\nAs I was, I would have made a miserable sign for a hotel.\nThen, thunderstorms altered the sky until sundown.\nIt was black country, lakes, poles,\nColumns beneath blue night, railway stations.\n\nThe water from the woods vanished over virgin sands.\nThe wind pitched icicles from the sky into the ponds …\nWell! like a diver for shells or gold,\nTo think that drinking wasn’t even on my mind!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "lives": { - "title": "“Lives”", - "body": "Oh! the huge avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple! What has happened to the brahmin who taught me the Proverbs? From then and from there I can still see even the old women! I remember silvery hours and sun near rivers, the hand of the country on my shoulder, and our caresses as we stood in the fiery fields.--A flight of red pigeons thunders around my thoughts--In exile here I had a stage on which to perform the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I might tell you about unheard-of wealth. I follow the story of the treasures you found. I see the next chapter! My wisdom is as neglected as chaos is. What is my void, compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?\n\nI am a far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love. At present, a noble from a meager countryside with a dark sky I try to feel emotion over the memory of mendicant childhood, over my apprenticeship when I arrived wearing wooden shoes, polemics, five or six widowings, and a few wild escapades when my strong head kept me from rising to the same pitch as my comrades. I don’t miss what I once possessed of divine happiness: the calm of this despondent countryside gives a new vigor to my terrible scepticism. But since this scepticism can no longer be put into effect, and since I am now given over to a new worry--I expect to become a very wicked fool.\n\nIn an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. In a wine cellar I learned history. At some night celebration, in a northern city, I met all the wives of former painters. In an old back street in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent palace, surrounded by all the Orient, I finished my long work and spent my celebrated retirement. I have invigorated my blood. I am released from my duty. I must not even think of that any longer. I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "morning-of-drunkenness": { - "title": "“Morning of Drunkenness”", - "body": "O _my_ good! O _my_ beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended--since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once--in a panicked rout of perfumes.\nLaughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.\nLittle eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.\nBehold the time of the _Assassins_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "novel": { - "title": "“Novel”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWe aren’t serious when we’re seventeen.\n--One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade,\nNoisy cafés with their shining lamps!\nWe walk under the green linden trees of the park\n\nThe lindens smell good in the good June evenings!\nAt times the air is so scented that we close our eyes.\nThe wind laden with sounds--the town isn’t far--\nHas the smell of grapevines and beer …\n\n\n# II.\n\n--There you can see a very small patch\nOf dark blue, framed by a little branch,\nPinned up by a naughty star, that melts\nIn gentle quivers, small and very white …\n\nNight in June! Seventeen years old!--We are overcome by it all\nThe sap is champagne and goes to our head …\nWe talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips\nTrembling there like a small insect …\n\n\n# III.\n\nOur wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe,\n--When, in the light of a pale street lamp,\nA girl goes by attractive and charming\nUnder the shadow of her father’s terrible collar …\n\nAnd as she finds you incredibly naïve,\nWhile clicking her little boots,\nShe turns abruptly and in a lively way …\n--Then _cavatinas_ die on your lips …\n\n\n# IV.\n\nYou are in love. Occupied until the month of August.\nYou are in love.--Your sonnets make Her laugh.\nAll your friends go off, you are ridiculous.\n--Then one evening the girl you worship deigned to write to you …!\n\n--That evening, … --you return to the bright cafés,\nYou ask for beer or lemonade …\n--We’re not serious when we are seventeen\nAnd when we have green linden trees in the park.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "phrases": { - "title": "“Phrases”", - "body": "When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes--to a beach for two faithful children--to a musical house for our clear understanding--then I shall find you.\nWhen there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury, then I am at your feet.\nWhen I have realized all your memories,--when I am the girl who can tie your hands,--then I will stifle you.\n\nWhen we are very strong, who draws back? or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.\nDress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window.\n\n--Comrade of mine, beggar girl, monstrous child! How little you care about the wretched women, and the machinations and my embarrassment. Join us with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this base despair.\n\nA dark morning in July. The taste of ashes in the air, the smell of wood sweating in the hearth, steeped flowers, the devastation of paths, drizzle over the canals in the fields, why not already playthings and incense?\n\nI stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.\n\nThe high pond is constantly streaming. What witch will rise up against the white sunset? What purple flowers are going to descend?\n\nWhile public funds disappear in brotherly celebrations, a bell of pink are rings in the clouds.\n\nArousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my night,--I lower the jets of the chandelier, throw myself on the bed, and turning toward the dark, I see you, O my daughters and queens!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "royalty": { - "title": "“Royalty”", - "body": "One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.\nIn fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "the-seekers-of-lice": { - "title": "“The Seekers of Lice”", - "body": "When the child’s forehead, full of red torments,\nImplores the white swarm of indistinct dreams,\nThere come near his bed two tall charming sisters\nWith slim fingers that have silvery nails.\n\nThey seat the child in front of a wide open\nWindow where the blue air bathes a mass of flowers\nAnd in his heavy hair where the dew falls\nMove their delicate, fearful and enticing fingers.\n\nHe listens to the singing of their apprehensive breath.\nWhich smells of long rosy plant honey\nAnd which at times a hiss interrupts, saliva\nCaught on the lip or desire for kisses.\n\nHe hears their black eyelashes beating in the perfumed\nSilence; and their gentle electric fingers\nMake in his half-drunken indolence the death of the little lice\nCrackle under their royal nails.\n\nThen the wine of Sloth rises in him,\nThe sigh of an harmonica which could bring on delirium;\nThe child feels, according to the slowness of the caresses\nSurging in him and dying continuously a desire to cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "to-a-reason": { - "title": "“To a Reason”", - "body": "A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.\nA step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.\nYou look away: the new love!\nYou look back,--the new love!\n“Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you.\n“Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you.\nArriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "vagabonds": { - "title": "“Vagabonds”", - "body": "Pitiful brother--the dreadful nights I owed him! “I’ve got no real involvement in the business. I toyed with his weakness, so--it was my fault--we wound up back in exile and enslavement.”\n\nHe saw me as a loser, a weird child; he added his own prods.\n\nI answered my satanic doctor, jeering, and made it out the window. All down a landscape crossed by unheard--of music, I spun my dreams of a nighttime wealth to come.\n\nAfter that more or less healthy pastime, I’d stretch out on a pallet. And almost every night, soon as I slept, my poor brother would rise--dry mouth and bulging eyes (the way he’d dreamt himself!)--and haul me into the room, howling his stupid dream.\n\nTruly convinced, I’d vowed to take him back to his primal state--child of the sun--and so we wandered, fed on wine from the caves and gypsy bread, me bound to find the place itself and the code.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "wakes": { - "title": "“Wakes”", - "body": "The lamps and the carpets of the wake make the noise of waves\nin the night, along the rut and around the steerage.\nThe sea of the wake, such as the breast of Amélie.\nThe tapestry, just at medium height, the wood of laces dyed\nin emerald, where the turtle-doves of the wake throw themselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - } - } - }, - "yiannis-ritsos": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Yiannis Ritsos", - "birth": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiannis_Ritsos", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 42 - }, - "poems": { - "absence": { - "title": "“Absence”", - "body": "In our hands we hold the shadow of our hands.\nThe night is kind--the others do not see us holding our shadow\nWe reinforce the night. We watch ourselves.\nSo we think better of others.\nThe sea still seeks our eyes and we are not there.\nA young girl buttons up her love in her breast\nand we look away smiling at the great distance.\nPerhaps high up, in the starlight, a skylight opens up\nthat looks out on the sea, the olive trees and the burnt houses\nWe listen to the butterfly gyrating in the glass of All Souls’ Day,\nand the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee-grinder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "achievement": { - "title": "“Achievement”", - "body": "What we had expected like the justification of our lives\nwas achieved. No trace of desire, recall or terror\nremained in the center of our cells.\nTwo hollow bodies cast on the shore of the night.\nLater as you were putting on your stockings--I looked closely at the bed,\nit was a very ancient animal turned into marble in the stance of coition\ntreading with his four dead feet into the void.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven" - } - }, - "the-architect": { - "title": "“The Architect”", - "body": "A group of young girls wearing flowery dresses\nlaugh again at the corner of a ramshackle house. The builders\nhang their trousers and their shirts on a nail of the new edifice,\nthey take the hod-carrier, the trowel, and they climb up\nthe huge, naked scaffolding as if they were climbing up to heaven. The architect\ncalculates, he remembers, he compares, he supervises,\nhe appears a bit saddened, as if his blueprint had been left half-completed,\nas if the enormous edifice will never be completed. He takes a nail\nand he himself sinks it down into the plank. The nail goes in crooked.\nThe workers laughed. He also laughed. He took off his shirt,\nsensing that in this their general laughter, his hands,\nhis blue-print and their edifice had been completed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "attenuation": { - "title": "“Attenuation”", - "body": "The women went swimming in the nude--they said they liked\nhow the water ran off between their breasts. The children\nwere irritable, they threw rocks into the sea. The old men\nwatched from behind the closed shutters. Out in the garden,\nthe dry fountain, and the faded green of the benches where\nno one ever sat; a few sparrows wandered here and there\nwith an aimless freedom. Later, the women would come home;\nthe iron gate would creak, the birds stop in their tracks as if\nsomething had been lost, something deep, abandoned. The eternal\nrivalries, the pettiness, the spite, would begin again.\nLarge, sopping towels weighed down the clothesline in the yard.\nA pair of dark glasses forgotten on the white gravel,\nnext to some wet footprints that had already begun to fade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-crane-dance": { - "title": "“The Crane Dance”", - "body": "The clew paying out through his fingers, a deftness\nthat would bring him back to her, its softness the softness\nof skin, as if drawn from herself directly, the faint\nlabial smell, guiding him up and out, as some dampness\non the air might lead a stone-blind man to the light.\n\nAsterios dead for sure, his crumpled horn, his muzzle\nthick with blood, so at Delos they stopped,\nTheseus and the young Athenians, and stepped\nup to the “altar of horns” to dance a puzzle-\ndance, its moves unreadable except to those who’d walked\nthe blank meanders of the labyrinth.\nAnd this was midday: a fierce sun, the blaze\nof their nakedness, the glitter of repetitions, a dazzle\nrising off the sea, the scents of pine and hyacinth …\n\nWell, things change: new passions, new threats, new fears.\nNew consequences, too. Nowadays, we don’t think much\nabout Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne on the beach\nat Naxos, staring out at the coming years.\nBut people still dance that dance: just common folk,\nthose criss-cross steps that no one had to teach,\nat weddings and wakes, in bars or parks,\nas if hope and heart could meet, as if they might\neven now, somehow, dance themselves out of the dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "epilogue": { - "title": "“Epilogue”", - "body": "Please cherish my memory--he said. I walked for thousand\nmiles on end without bread and without water, along rocks and through\nthorns I walked, to fetch you bread, water and roses.\nI was always faithful to beauty. With fair mind I gave out\nall my fortune. I did not keep my lot. I am poor. With a tiny lily from\nthe fields I brightened our harshest nights. Please cherish my memory.\nAnd forgive this last sorrow of mine:\nI would like--once again--to reap a ripe corn with the\nslender sickle moon. To stand at the threshold, to stare away\nand to chew with my front teeth the wheat\nadmiring and blessing this world that I leave behind,\nadmiring also Him who climbs up the hill in the\ngolden rain of a sinking sun. There is a purple square patch in his\nleft sleeve. It is not easy to see. It was this, more than anything else,\nthat I wanted to show you.\nAnd probably, more than anything else, it would be worth\nremembering me for this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "estrangement": { - "title": "“Estrangement”", - "body": "Only a flower immersed in its perfume,\na face anchored in its smile;--\n--does it exist? doesn’t it exist? lost;\nif you speak to it it will return, as if after thousands of years,\nperplexed, inept--it will not know its whereabouts, it will not know\nwhat expression to assume that will be a response.\nThere is a praying stool of stone in an old, abandoned street.\nEvery so often, at twilight, he walks down his marble stairway,\nhe gathers wild flowers from among the rocks,\nhe makes a wreath and he hangs it on his sacred image. Every so often\nsome strayaway sheep stands there as if it is praying,\nchewing slowly, stupidly, the withered wreath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "forgetfulness": { - "title": "“Forgetfulness”", - "body": "The house with the wooden staircase and the orange trees,\nfacing the azure, big mountain. The countryside gently\nwalks around inside the rooms. The two mirrors\nreflect the singing of the birds. Only\nthat in the middle of the bedroom lie abandoned\ntwo fabric slippers for the old. So,\nwhen the night falls, the dead visit the house again\nin order to collect something of theirs left behind,\na scarf, a vest, a shirt, two socks\nand then, possibly due to short memory or carelessness,\nthey take along something of ours. Next day,\nthe postman passes our door without stopping.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "the-heard-and-the-unheard": { - "title": "“The Heard and the Unheard”", - "body": "A sudden unexpected motion; the palm of his hand\nmade a fist over his wound to stanch the blood\neven though we had not heard any gun-shot,\nnor the whizz of the bullet. A little later,\nhe lowered his hand and he smiled to himself;\nbut again slowly he placed the palm of his hand\nover the same spot; he took out his wallet,\npaid the boy politely and departed.\nAnd the coffee cup cracked of itself.\nThat at least we heard very clearly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "his-lamp-at-the-break-of-day": { - "title": "“His Lamp at the Break of Day”", - "body": "Well now, good evening; here they both are again, face to face,\nhe and his lamp--he loves it, even though he seems\nindifferent and self-absorbed; and not solely\nbecause it’s useful to him, but also and especially\nbecause it insists on his caring.--Fragile relic\nof antique Greek lamps, it collects around itself\nmemories and insects conscious of the night, it wipes out\nthe wrinkles of old people, it enlarges brows,\nit magnifies the shadows of adolescent bodies, it covers up\nwith a soft glow the whiteness of empty pages\nand the hidden crimson of poems. And when,\nat dawn, its light grows dim and blends with\nthe pink of day, with the first noises\nof shutters, of push-carts, of fruit peddlers,\nit’s a palpable symbol of his own vigil, and more:\na bridge of glass that connects his eyeglass lenses with the glass of the lamp,\nthe lamp with the glass of the windows, as far as outdoors, as far as the distance and farther still--\na bridge of glass that holds him up over the city, at the heart of the city,\ncombining now, of its own free will, the night and the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "his-lamp": { - "title": "“His Lamp”", - "body": "The lamp is peaceful, serviceable; he prefers it\nto any other lighting. He adjusts his light\nto the needs of the moment, to the age-old\nunavowable desire. And always\nthis odor of kerosene, this subtle presence,\nvery unobtrusive, at night, when he returns alone\nwith so much fatigue in his limbs, so much futility\nin the texture of his coat, in the seams of the pockets,\nthat every movement seems useless, unendurable--\nonce more, to distract him, here’s the lamp--the wick,\nthe match, the flickering flame (with its shadows\non the bed, on the desk, on the walls), but especially\nthe glass cover--its fragile transparency\nwhich, in a simple and human gesture,\nonce more involves you: in saving yourself or in saving.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "honest-confrontation": { - "title": "“Honest Confrontation”", - "body": "All during the night they kept talking, getting offended, arguing,\nthey tried ardently and sincerely to discover some arrangement, a means of separation,\nthey humiliated and were humiliated, they repented,\nfor all the time lost--the senseless ones; finally they threw off their clothing,\nand they stood there, beautiful, naked, degraded and unprotected. The dawn was breaking\nfrom the housetop opposite, a flock of birds took wing,\nlike a card player finally throwing out a deck of marked cards.\nIn this way, without arguments and without assurances,\nthe day rose from the hills with the obdurate pride of the act.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "if-only-i-had-the-immortals-potion": { - "title": "“If Only I Had the Immortal’s Potion”", - "body": "If only I had the immortals’ potion if only I had\nA new soul to give you, if only you’d wake for a moment,\n\nTo see and to speak and delight in the whole of your dream\nStanding right there by your side, next to you, bursting with life.\n\nRoadways and public places, balconies, lanes in an uproar,\nyoung maidens are picking flowers to sprinkle on your hair.\n\nMy fragrant forest full of tens of thousands of roots and leaves,\nhow can I the ill-fated believe I can ever lose you?\n\nMy son, all things have vanished and abandoned me back here\nI have no eyes and cannot see, no mouth to let me speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "immobility-of-the-voyage": { - "title": "“Immobility of the Voyage”", - "body": "Enormous nocturnal steamers arrested in their lights--\nthe stewards, the porters, the automobiles, the naval guard,\nvalises made of leather, pasted with foreign stamps,\ndomestic baskets of reed or of wicker, a disconcerted goat,\nlong lingering farewells, up above by the masts.\n\nYou heard neither voice nor sob.--Is it perhaps that you did not notice?\nEverything was mute and spectral--motionless\nin movement--phantoms of other epochs and countries.\n\nThe harbor is petrified in the perpetually moving lights,\nwithin the reflections of the deep. The pier,\na prodigious pure white cube of silence\nand the voyage is neither a leave-taking nor a home-coming--an ethereal bridge\nover names that are familiar and names that are unfamiliar. And on this bridge,\ndressed in his white uniform, the youthful captain slowly paced.\n(Or was it perhaps the moon?)", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "in-the-barracks": { - "title": "“In the Barracks”", - "body": "The moon entered the barracks.\nShe ransacked the blankets of the infantry.\nShe seized a naked hand. Sleep.\nSomeone is talking in his sleep. Someone is snoring.\nA shadow gesticulates on the long wall.\nThe last trolley car has passed. All is quiet.\n\nIs it possible that all these may be dead tomorrow?\nIs it possible that they may already be dead?\n\nAn infantryman wakes up.\nHe looks around him with glassy eyes.\nA thread of blood hangs from the lips of the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven" - } - }, - "injustice": { - "title": "“Injustice”", - "body": "Night. Only a single glance. A noiseless bullet.\nThe metal shield of loneliness is riddled with holes.\nThat fragmented rotundity.\nAnd pride on her knees.\n\nBeloved night. Beloved wound.\nThe road, the sky, the stars,--exist\nthat they might sink once more. Only a single glance.\nOutside of the loneliness the great peril\nof loneliness is lying in wait--beloved peril\nto measure yourself with another and the right to be yours\nand the whole injustice of it that the other person is also right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "the-lamp-that-goes-out": { - "title": "“The Lamp that Goes Out”", - "body": "Comes the hour of immense lassitude. Dazzling forenoon,\ninsidious--it marks the end of another of his nights, it goes\nthe smooth remorse of the mirror one better, maliciously etching\ntraces around the lips and the eyes. From here on out\nwhat good are the affability of the lamp and the closing of shutters.\nInexorable awareness of the end of the sheets where the hot breath\nof a summer night cools down, where only a few ringlets\nnipped from youthful curls remain--a severed chain--\nthat self-same chain--who devised it? No,\nwhat good are memory and poetry. And yet,\nat the very last moment, before falling asleep, bending\nover the glass of the lamp\nto blow out the flame so it too will go out--he realizes\nhe’s blowing right into the crystalline ear of eternity\nan immortal word that’s his alone, his own breath, the moaning of matter.\nHow the smoke from the lamp embalms his room at dawn!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "last-hour": { - "title": "“Last Hour”", - "body": "A perfume lingered in his room, nothing but memory\nperhaps, or a whiff of the spring evening\nthrough the half-open window. He set aside\nthe things he had to take along. He covered the big mirror\nwith a sheet. At his fingertips as always\nthe feel of well-knit bodies\nand, a bit lonelier, that of his pen--nothing unexpected:\nsure-fire combination for poetry. He didn’t want\nto trick anyone. He was nearing the end. He asked\none more time: “Is it a question of gratitude or of the will\nto gratitude?” His two old man’s slippers were sticking out\nfrom under his bed. He hadn’t bothered\nto cover them again--(O no doubt long ago). Only\nas he was putting the key in the pocket of his sweater\nhe sat down on his suit-case, in the middle of the room,\nand, all alone, began to cry, measuring\nfor the first time with this much precision his own innocence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "the-legacy": { - "title": "“The Legacy”", - "body": "No doubt, the one who died was an eminent being,\nunequalled; he’s bequeathed us a much better measure\nto measure ourselves and especially to measure our neighbor:\n--so-and-so no taller than this,\ninfinitesimal, that one skimpy, and a third\nas spindle-legged as a gawk--not one\nwho doesn’t have his price: nothing, not a thing.\nNothing but ourselves making use of this measure\nfor all its worth--but what measure are you talking about?\nIt must be Nemesis, the archangel’s sword.\nBy now we’ve got it polished, able hereafter\nto sever everything head after head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "the-meaning-of-simplicity": { - "title": "“The Meaning of Simplicity”", - "body": "I hide myself behind simple objects so you may find me,\nif you do not fund me, you will fund the objects,\nyou will touch those objects my hand has touched\nthe traces of our hands will mingle.\n\nThe August moon gleams like a tin kitchen kettle\n(what I am telling you becomes like that),\nit lights the empty table and silence kneeling in the house\nsilence is always kneeling.\n\nEvery single word is an exodus\nfor a meeting, cancelled many times,\nit is a true word when it insists on the meeting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "a-minimum-delay": { - "title": "“A Minimum Delay”", - "body": "At the very last moment, when you thought it would crumble to the bottom\nthe noise of the speed of the fall transmitted it into light,\ninto a soft light, while at the same time it had the presentiment\nthat the shut-in and the asphyxiated were becoming open and free.\n\nThere, at the foot of the cliff, a broader meadow spread out,\nmusical hills, trees as if on knees bent beneath the weight of their fruit\nthe verdant light of the moss puts an adolescent fluff on the legs of the statues\nand the perilous ravines that terrified them as it fell,\nwere the attractive antinomies, the indispensable ones for the knowledge of the extent.\n\nA little patience then. A delay of only a second,\nonly as much as is needed to remove his glove or his skin,\nto squeeze more tightly the naked flesh of our hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven" - } - }, - "misunderstandings": { - "title": "“Misunderstandings”", - "body": "His equivocations, unbearable. They put us to the test,\nand he himself is burdened by them; he clearly betrays\nhis confusion, his indecision, his ignorance, his cowardice,\nhis lack of firm principles. “Words,” he says,\n“are--not really drops of blood--I’d summon to mind rather when it rains\nand the puddles of water are stained by the red station signal--\nwords, so to speak--a transfusion, an identification, unprecedented encounter, poetry.”\nThen he was silent. He was tricking us. What rain? What words? What blood?\nWho’d said that? Was it us? There’s no doubt he wants to trap us\nin his own incoherences. But he kept on looking somewhere in the distance,\nappearing generous and forbearing (like those who need others to be that way toward them)\nin a spotless shirt, a lead-gray suit, impeccable,\na chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. In spite of it all,\nwhen he left we detected on the floor where he’d been standing\na little pool of bright red, of exquisite design,\nlike a rough map of Greece, like a map of the world\nwith quite a few omissions and inaccuracies in the layout of the frontiers,\nfrontiers that were practically invisible in the uniformity of the color,\na map of the world in a school completely empty and closed, in July,\nwhere all the students have gone to the seashore for a tremendous and dazzling trip.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "moment": { - "title": "“Moment”", - "body": "An exhausted maritime district. The lamps are getting drowsy\nMiserable beer saloons in a row like poverty-stricken women\nwho wait in front of the Municipal Hospital.\nThe street is dark. They thought they would go to bed early. Suddenly\nthe beer saloons were illuminated up to the very last chairs\nby the pure white laughter of an adolescent. And directly after,\nthe vast expanse of the sea was heard, invincible, undivided.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "moonlight-sonata": { - "title": "“Moonlight Sonata”", - "body": "I know that each one of us travels to love alone,\nalone to faith and to death.\nI know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.\nLet me come with you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Peter Green & Beverly Bardsley" - } - }, - "my-star-youve-set": { - "title": "“My Star, You’ve Set”", - "body": "My star, you’ve set, fading out in the dark, all Creation has set,\nand the sun, a black ball of twine, has gathered in its bright light\n\nCrowds keep passing by and jostling me, soldiers trample on me,\nbut my own gaze never swerves and my eyes never leave you.\n\nThe misty aura of your breath I feel against my cheek;\nah, a buoyant great light’s a-float at the end of the road.\n\nThe palm of a hand bathed in light is wiping the tears from my eyes;\nah my son, the words you spoke rush into my innermost core.\n\nAnd look now; I’ve risen again, my limbs can still stand firm;\na blithe light, my brave lad; has lifted me up from the ground.\n\nNow you are shrouded in banners. My child, now go to sleep\nI’m on my way to your brothers, beaming your voice with me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims" - } - }, - "the-night-of-a-solitary": { - "title": "“The Night of a Solitary”", - "body": "How bitter is the furniture in the room of the solitary.\nThe table is an animal, frozen stiff from the cold,\nthe chair is a child that has lost its way in the snow-covered forest\nthe sofa again becomes a bare tree, felled in the courtyard by the wind.\n\nAnd yet, in a little while, in there, is achieved\na round, limpid silence like the lantern on a fishing boat\nand you completely crouched in the hollow by your bitterness,\ngaze through the water at the diaphanous, luminous deep,\nwith the crystalline, dark green crevices,\nthe unfamiliar ocean vegetation,\nand you gaze at the rose-colored, apathetic, enormous fish with their noble, wide movements,\nso long that you cannot tell if they are lying in ambush, or exploring, or sheltering themselves, or simply dreaming,\nbecause their eyes are opened so wide that they seem completely closed.\n\nAnd in the end, this has no importance whatsoever.\nIsn’t it perhaps enough that their movement is like beauty and like immobility?", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "not-unsuspecting": { - "title": "“Not Unsuspecting”", - "body": "Not that he was unsuspecting\nnor less just and sincere--\noften he had seen beyond the smile of the mirror\nall of the ineffable night and her ramifications\noften he had seen in the mirror\nnot the face but the skull.\n\nHowever the tiny reflections on the window panes again convinced him,\nthe convalescence of the furniture, the calm look of the morning\nthat made no demands, requested no control,--these thin little lines\non the floor left by the passing of the broom convinced him.\n\nThen there was a woman who smiled,\nsoftly, ardently, a fluffy smile,\nlike the blanket hanging on the window,\nheated by the sun.\n\nAnd he felt in his nostrils the presentiment of ocean freshness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven" - } - }, - "on-a-day-in-may-you-left-me": { - "title": "“On a Day in May You Left Me”", - "body": "On a day in May you left me, on that May day I lost you,\nin springtime you loved so well, my son, when you went upstairs,\n\nTo the sun-drenched roof and looked out and your eyes never had\ntheir lill of drinking in the light of the whole wide world at large.\n\nWith your manly voice so sweet and so warm, you recounted\nas many things as all the pebbles strewn along the seashore.\n\nMy son, you told me that all these wonderful things will be ours,\nbut now your light has died out, our brightness and fire are gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "on-the-subject-of-form": { - "title": "“On the Subject of Form”", - "body": "He announced: “Form is neither invented nor imposed, it’s\ncontained in its material and reveals itself every now and then\nin its impulse toward an outcome.” Commonplaces, we answered.\nabstract notions--what revelations is he talking about? He said nothing further,\nhe stuck his chin between his two hands like a word\nbetween quotes--his indistinct cigarette remained\nin his closed lips--a white dash glowing\nin place of the points of suspension which he omitted on principle\n(or perhaps unconsciously) not to draw attention to his own silence.\n\nIn that attitude, it vaguely seemed to us that he was waiting\nin a little railroad station under the shelter\nwhere for a brief instant, on a winter night,\nsome solitary travelers, with that taste they share for coal,\nfor the unlikely, for the voyage, and for the absolute\nin their secret and age-old company, meet. The smoke from the train\nwas floating, placidly, above the two horizontal beams\nof the headlights, compact and sculptural, between\ntwo departures. He put out his cigarette and left.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "posthumous": { - "title": "“Posthumous”", - "body": "Many people laid claim to him, quarreled around him,\nperhaps because of his apparel--a strange outfit,\nsolemn, imposing, yet not without a certain charm,\na certain dash, like those phantasmal clothes worn by the gods\nwhen they consorted with humans--disguised,\nand while they were transacting business in a common tongue, abruptly--we’re told--\na fold of their garment would blow outward with the breath of the infinite or the beyond.\nWell then, they quarreled. But what could he do about it? They ripped\nhis clothes and his undergarments, they even tore off his belt. He became nothing more\nthan an ordinary mortal, stripped naked, in a state of utter shame. Everybody\nabandoned him. It was at that very spot that he turned into stone. Many years later\nthey discovered there the brilliant statue--\ntall, nude, haughty, made of Pentelic marble,\nof the Eternal Ephebe Heautontimoroúmenos--that’s the name they gave him.\nThey covered him up with a large canvas and prepared\nan exceptional ceremony for the public unveiling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "pro-forma": { - "title": "“Pro Forma”", - "body": "Flowerpots lining the whitewashed stairs.\nTwo large yellow gourds on the open landing.\nThat’s all I’m going to tell you, he said. The bicycle\nresting up against the sunlit curb. Its rider\nwas inside eating. The steam from his bowl of wild greens\nclouded over the small shaving-mirror on the wall.\nThe tablecloth was covered with printed roses.\nThe real rose was indistinguishable from the rest.\nThis was done on purpose by the rose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "rainy": { - "title": "“Rainy”", - "body": "Poor music of Saturday night\ncoming from the dancing school in the neighborhood,\npoor music, frozen by the cold, by the clog-dancing shoes,\nevery time the unpainted door is flung open, it flies out on the streets,\nit shivers with the cold under the lantern on the corner,\nit casts a glance upward at a tall window, or at the night,\nand then it casts its glance down to the mud,\nit looks for something, it expects something\nas if someone is ailing and the doctor is late.\n\nPoor music. It is cold. Nobody is opening the window\nto treat you to a litle lamplight, to a few black raisins,\nto tell you: “I remember,” twenty or thirty years ago\nsome echoes of old carriages in the rain,\na vapoury landscape painted on the spectacles of a certain poet.\n\nBut the shoes are full of holes and covered with mud.\nThe young couples are hurrying down the street, they do not hear.\nSomebody has stopped, standing close against the wall. He does not hear you, no.\nHe is pasting something on the wall. Only the knife\non the table is a thought and a lustre.\n\nPoor music, if you can squeeze in,\nenter through the holey elbow of the neighborhood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday", - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "recollection": { - "title": "“Recollection”", - "body": "A warm aroma had remained on the armpits of her coat.\nHer coat on the hanger in the corridor like a drawn curtain.\nWhat was happening now, belonged to another time. The light altered the faces,\nall unfamiliar. And if someone was about to enter the house\nthat empty coat lifted its arms slowly, bitterly\nand silently it shut the door once more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "shelters": { - "title": "“Shelters”", - "body": "“Expressing oneself,” he said, “doesn’t mean saying something\nbut simply talking; and the fact of talking\nmeans exposing oneself:--how do we talk?”\nHis silence became so transparent at that moment\nthat it concealed him completely behind the curtain\nwhile he pretended to be looking out the window.\nBut--it was as if he felt our eyes on his back--\nhe turned around, allowing his face to show\nas if he were wearing a long white tunic,\nrather comical, rather unfashionable in our era,\nand it was certainly intentional (he preferred it) because he figured\nthat this way he would stave off\nour suspicion, our hostility, or our pity\nor that he was conceding us an excuse\nfor our admiration in the future (which he’d predicted).", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "suspicious-sleep": { - "title": "“Suspicious Sleep”", - "body": "Up there, at the edge of the sky, a little above the mountain,\na tiny little star shrieked out its happiness,\n--in a voice both rhythmic and dissonant\nlike that of the small vegetable dealer who shrieks out the first fruits of summer,\n--in a voice so persistent, almost to seem desolate.\nAnd you felt guilty for lacking the desire,\nthat you could not respond. At least not to have seen,\nnot to have understood. Guilty,\nnot reckoning the guilt of others. Alone by yourself you have loaded\nall responsibility on your shoulders. Then you understood\nyour utter innocence. You went into the house not to see any more,\nand dressed as you were and with your shoes on, you lay down and went to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Rae Dalven" - } - }, - "twilight": { - "title": "“Twilight”", - "body": "You’re familiar with that moment of twilight in the summer\nin the locked room; a feeble pinkish reflection\nslanted across the beams of the ceiling; and the poem\nunfinished on the table--two lines and not a jot more\nthe unkept promise of a marvelous journey,\nof a certain freedom, a certain autonomy,\na certain immortality (relative, quite naturally).\n\nOutside, in the street, already the call of the night,\nthe nimble shadows of divinities, of human beings, of bikes,\nat the hour when work places let out and the young workmen\nwith their tools, their drenched and scruffy hair,\nand their threadbare clothes all smirched with quicklime\ndisappear into the apotheosis of clouds at nightfall.\nEight brisk strokes of the clock, at the top of the stairs,\nin the hollow of the passageway--the inexorable strokes\nof an imperative hammer hidden behind the darkened\nglass--and at that exact moment the age-old sound\nof those keys about which he’s never been able to make up his mind\nwhether they’re unlocking or passing judgment.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ultimate-landing": { - "title": "“Ultimate Landing”", - "body": "It was a beautiful nocturnal adventure in a dead landscape,\na voyage almost without a where or a why--\ndiaphanous, ethereal colors, like mystic flowers without any form,\nI do not recall that we even sensed the perfume. Light of the moon\non the shivering shoulders of the statues. Certainly some statues of juveniles\nwere pacing soundlessly in the Municipal Garden, and perhaps they were feeding the swans of the lake.\n\nAfterward, I believe, the military trucks passed by, blindly, looking straight ahead of them, full of conquered infantrymen,\nand dead sergeant-majors, with eyes wide open, were driving them.\nThe noise of the motors was not heard, and this we felt\nAs something improbable and somewhat suspect; like the first lack in the nocturnal magic.\n\nEverybody became quiet, fatigued by a futile, almost pursued intensity,\nand the seconds were heard falling in the silence\nlike the dandruff on the black jacket of the dead man.\n\nThen, unexpectedly, someone banged his fist on the table.\n“What is it?” we inquired. “What was it?” Precisely that. Nothing else.\nA square of sunlight was falling on the floor. And it was day.\nIn the corner, a woman made the sight of the cross and said for no reason: “God be praised.”\nA little later, the wheels of the grocery wagon were heard,\nfamiliar, positive and useful, on a level with the house.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "whenever-you-stood-near-the-window": { - "title": "“Whenever You Stood near the Window”", - "body": "Whenever you stood near the window, your brawny shoulder-blades\nfilled up the whole entranceway, the sea and the fishermen’s boats\n\nThe house overflowed with your shadow, tall as an archangel,\nand the bright bud of the evening-star sparkled up there in your ear.\n\nOur window was the gateway for all the world, leading out\ntowards paradise, my dear night, where the stars were all in bloom.\n\nAs you stood there with your gaze fixed on the glimmering sunset,\nyou looked like a helmsman steering a ship, which was your own room.\n\nln the warm blue twilight of evening--ahoy, away--\nyou sailed me straight into the stillness of the milky way.\n\nBut now this ship has foundered, its rudder has broken down,\nand down in the depths of the ocean, I’m drifting all alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims" - } - }, - "where-did-my-boy-fly-away": { - "title": "“Where Did My Boy Fly Away?”", - "body": "Son, my flesh and blood, marrow of my bones, heart of my own heart,\nsparrow of my tiny courtyard, flower of my loneliness.\n\nWhere did my boy fly away? Where’s he gone? Where’s he leaving me?\nThe bird-cage is empty now, not a drop of water in the font.\n\nWhat ever made your dear eyes close and you are blind to my tears?\nHow are you frozen in your tracks and deaf to my bitter words?", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "without-position": { - "title": "“Without Position”", - "body": "What was wide and serious like a foot stepping down\non the first rock at a tempestuous hour, before night had actually fallen,\nand the stars had left a noise like the flasks of an army that suddenly spread over the earth,--\nthat terrified him. He let out a little cry, like a sparrow over the well.\nThe only thing he managed to hear was his own voice, he thought it was funny,\nand one moment, in his terror, the audacity of even this characteristic intoxicated him.\n\nConsider then, how the others must have been terrified. He turned back\nbefore he could get to feel gratitude\nfor the journey or for his weariness.\nAnd he found everyone’s censure justified\nand justifying too for him to be proud of his justice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek" - } - }, - "you-were-kind-and-sweet-of-temper": { - "title": "“You Were Kind and Sweet of Temper”", - "body": "You were kind and sweet of temper, all the good graces were yours,\nall the wind’s caresses, all the gillyflowers of the garden.\n\nYou were light of foot, treading as softly as a gazelle,\nwhen you stepped past our threshold it always glittered like gold\n\nI drew youth from your youth and to boot, I could even smile.\nOld age never daunted me and death I could disregard.\n\nBut now where can I hold my ground? Where can I find shelter?\nI’m stranded like a withered tree in a plain buried in snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "your-sweet-scented-lips": { - "title": "“Your Sweet Scented Lips”", - "body": "My fingers would slip through your curly hair, all through the night,\nwhile you were fast asleep and I was keeping watch by your side.\n\nYour eyebrows well shaped, as if drawn with a delicate pencil,\nseemed to sketch an arch where my gaze could nestle and be at rest.\n\nYour glistening eyes reflected the distances of the sky\nat dawn and I tried to keep a single tear from misting them.\n\nYour sweetly scented lips, whenever you spoke, made the boulders\nand blighted trees blossom and nightingales flutter their wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Amy Mims" - } - } - } - }, - "jose-rizal": { - "metadata": { - "name": "José Rizal", - "birth": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "filipino", - "language": "tagalog", - "flag": "🇵🇭", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Rizal", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "filipino" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "a-poem-that-has-no-title": { - "title": "“A Poem that Has No Title”", - "body": "To my Creator I sing\nWho did soothe me in my great loss;\nTo the Merciful and Kind\nWho in my troubles gave me repose.\n\nThou with that pow’r of thine\nSaid: Live! And with life myself I found;\nAnd shelter gave me thou\nAnd a soul impelled to the good\nLike a compass whose point to the North is bound.\n\nThou did make me descend\nFrom honorable home and respectable stock,\nAnd a homeland thou gavest me\nWithout limit, fair and rich\nThough fortune and prudence it does lack.", - "metadata": { - "language": "tagalog", - "translator": "Nick Joaquin" - } - }, - "to-the-virgin-mary": { - "title": "“To the Virgin Mary”", - "body": "Mary, sweet peace and dearest consolation\nof suffering mortal: you are the fount whence springs\nthe current of solicitude that brings\nunto our soil unceasing fecundation.\n\nFrom your abode, enthroned on heaven’s height,\nin mercy deign to hear my cry of woe\nand to the radiance of your mantle draw\nmy voice that rises with so swift a flight.\n\nYou are my mother, Mary, and shall be\nmy life, my stronghold, my defense most thorough;\nand you shall be my guide on this wild sea.\n\nIf vice pursues me madly on the morrow,\nif death harasses me with agony:\ncome to my aid and dissipate my sorrow!", - "metadata": { - "language": "tagalog", - "translator": "Nick Joaquin", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - } - } - }, - "edwin-arlington-robinson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edwin Arlington Robinson", - "birth": { - "year": 1869 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1935 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Arlington_Robinson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "discovery": { - "title": "“Discovery”", - "body": "We told of him as one who should have soared\nAnd seen for us the devastating light\nWhereof there is not either day or night,\nAnd shared with us the glamour of the Word\nThat fell once upon Amos to record\nFor men at ease in Zion, when the sight\nOf ills obscured aggrieved him and the might\nOf Hamath was a warning of the Lord.\n\nAssured somehow that he would make us wise,\nOur pleasure was to wait; and our surprise\nWas hard when we confessed the dry return\nOf his regret. For we were still to learn\nThat earth has not a school where we may go\nFor wisdom, or for more than we may know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "There is a fenceless garden overgrown\nWith buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves;\nAnd once, among the roses and the sheaves,\nThe Gardener and I were there alone.\nHe led me to the plot where I had thrown\nThe fennel of my days on wasted ground,\nAnd in that riot of sad weeds I found\nThe fruitage of a life that was my own.\n\nMy life! Ah, yes, there was my life, indeed!\nAnd there were all the lives of humankind;\nAnd they were like a book that I could read,\nWhose every leaf, miraculously signed,\nOutrolled itself from Thought’s eternal seed.\nLove-rooted in God’s garden of the mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-gift-of-god": { - "title": "“The Gift of God”", - "body": "Blessed with a joy that only she\nOf all alive shall ever know,\nShe wears a proud humility\nFor what it was that willed it so--\nThat her degree should be so great\nAmong the favoured of the Lord\nThat she may scarcely bear the weight\nOf her bewildering reward.\n\nAs one apart, immune, alone,\nOr featured for the shining ones,\nAnd like to none that she has known\nOf other women’s other sons--\nThe firm fruition of her need,\nHe shines anointed; and he blurs\nHer vision, till it seems indeed\nA sacrilege to call him hers.\n\nShe fears a little for so much\nOf what is best, and hardly dares\nTo think of him as one to touch\nWith aches, indignities, and cares;\nShe sees him rather at the goal,\nStill shining; and her dream foretells\nThe proper shining of a soul\nWhere nothing ordinary dwells.\n\nPerchance a canvass of the town\nWould find him far from flags and shouts,\nAnd leave him only the renown\nOf many smiles and many doubts;\nPerchance the crude and common tongue\nWould havoc strangely with his worth;\nBut she, with innocence unwrung,\nWould read his name around the earth.\n\nAnd others, knowing how this youth\nWould shine, if love could make him great,\nWhen caught and tortured for the truth\nWould only writhe and hesitate;\nWhile she, arranging for his days\nWhat centuries could not fulfil,\nTransmutes him with her faith and praise,\nAnd has him shining where she will.\n\nShe crowns him with her gratefulness,\nAnd says again that life is good;\nAnd should the gift of God be less\nIn him than in her motherhood,\nHis fame, though vague, will not be small\nAs upward through her dream he fares,\nHalf clouded with a crimson fall\nOf roses thrown on marble stairs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-house-on-the-hill": { - "title": "“The House on the Hill”", - "body": "They are all gone away,\nThe house is shut and still,\nThere is nothing more to say.\n\nThrough broken walls and gray\nThe winds blow bleak and shrill:\nThey are all gone away.\n\nNor is there one today\nTo speak them good or ill:\nThere is nothing more to say.\n\nWhy is it then we stray\nAround the sunken sill?\nThey are all gone away.\n\nAnd our poor fancy-play\nFor them is wasted skill:\nThere is nothing more to say.\n\nThere is ruin and decay\nIn the House on the Hill\nThey are all gone away,\nThere is nothing more to say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "late-summer": { - "title": "“Late Summer”", - "body": "Confused, he found her lavishing feminine\nGold upon clay, and found her inscrutable;\nAnd yet she smiled. Why, then, should horrors\nBe as they were, without end, her playthings?\n\nAnd why were dead years hungrily telling her\nLies of the dead, who told them again to her?\nIf now she knew, there might be kindness\nClamoring yet where a faith lay stifled.\n\nA little faith in him, and the ruinous\nPast would be for time to annihilate,\nAnd wash out, like a tide that washes\nOut of the sand what a child has drawn there.\n\nGod, what a shining handful of happiness,\nMade out of days and out of eternities,\nWere now the pulsing end of patience--\nCould he but have what a ghost had stolen!\n\nWhat was a man before him, or ten of them,\nWhile he was here alive who could answer them,\nAnd in their teeth fling confirmations\nHarder than agates against an egg-shell?\n\nBut now the man was dead, and would come again\nNever, though she might honor ineffably\nThe flimsy wraith of him she conjured\nOut of a dream with his wand of absence.\n\nAnd if the truth were now but a mummery,\nMeriting pride’s implacable irony,\nSo much the worse for pride. Moreover,\nSave her or fail, there was conscience always.\n\nMeanwhile, a few misgivings of innocence,\nImploring to be sheltered and credited,\nWere not amiss when she revealed them.\nWhether she struggled or not, he saw them.\n\nAlso, he saw that while she was hearing him\nHer eyes had more and more of the past in them;\nAnd while he told what cautious honor\nTold him was all he had best be sure of,\n\nHe wondered once or twice, inadvertently,\nWhere shifting winds were driving his argosies,\nLong anchored and as long unladen,\nOver the foam for the golden chances.\n\n“If men were not for killing so carelessly,\nAnd women were for wiser endurances,”\nHe said, “we might have yet a world here\nFitter for Truth to be seen abroad in;”\n\n“If Truth were not so strange in her nakedness,\nAnd we were less forbidden to look at it,\nWe might not have to look.” He stared then\nDown at the sand where the tide threw forward\n\nIts cold, unconquered lines, that unceasingly\nFoamed against hope, and fell. He was calm enough,\nAlthough he knew he might be silenced\nOut of all calm; and the night was coming.\n\n“I climb for you the peak of his infamy\nThat you may choose your fall if you cling to it.\nNo more for me unless you say more.\nAll you have left of a dream defends you:”\n\n“The truth may be as evil an augury\nAs it was needful now for the two of us.\nWe cannot have the dead between us.\nTell me to go, and I go.”--She pondered:\n\n“What you believe is right for the two of us\nMakes it as right that you are not one of us.\nIf this be needful truth you tell me,\nSpare me, and let me have lies hereafter.”\n\nShe gazed away where shadows were covering\nThe whole cold ocean’s healing indifference.\nNo ship was coming. When the darkness\nFell, she was there, and alone, still gazing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "monadnock-through-the-trees": { - "title": "“Monadnock through the Trees”", - "body": "Before there was in Egypt any sound\nOf those who reared a more prodigious means\nFor the self-heavy sleep of kings and queens\nThan hitherto had mocked the most renowned,--\nUnvisioned here and waiting to be found,\nAlone, amid remote and older scenes,\nYou loomed above ancestral evergreens\nBefore there were the first of us around.\n\nAnd when the last of us, if we know how,\nSee farther from ourselves than we do now,\nAssured with other sight than heretofore\nThat we have done our mortal best and worst,--\nYour calm will be the same as when the first\nAssyrians went howling south to war.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pity-of-the-leaves": { - "title": "“The Pity of the Leaves”", - "body": "Vengeful across the cold November moors,\nLoud with ancestral shame there came the bleak\nSad wind that shrieked, and answered with a shriek,\nReverberant through lonely corridors.\nThe old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,\nWords out of lips that were no more to speak--\nWords of the past that shook the old man’s cheek\nLike dead, remembered footsteps on old floors.\n\nAnd then there were the leaves that plagued him so!\nThe brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside\nSkipped with a freezing whisper. Now and then\nThey stopped, and stayed there--just to let him know\nHow dead they were; but if the old man cried,\nThey fluttered off like withered souls of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "richard-cory": { - "title": "“Richard Cory”", - "body": "Whenever Richard Cory went down town,\nWe people on the pavement looked at him:\nHe was a gentleman from sole to crown,\nClean favored, and imperially slim.\n\nAnd he was always quietly arrayed,\nAnd he was always human when he talked;\nBut still he fluttered pulses when he said,\n‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.\n\nAnd he was rich--yes, richer than a king--\nAnd admirably schooled in every grace:\nIn fine, we thought that he was everything\nTo make us wish that we were in his place.\n\nSo on we worked, and waited for the light,\nAnd went without the meat, and cursed the bread;\nAnd Richard Cory, one calm summer night,\nWent home and put a bullet through his head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "staffords-cabin": { - "title": "“Stafford’s Cabin”", - "body": "Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;\nAnd something happened here before my memory began.\nTime has made the two of them the fuel of one flame\nAnd all we have of them is now a legend and a name.\n\nAll I have to say is what an old man said to me,\nAnd that would seem to be as much as there will ever be.\n“Fifty years ago it was we found it where it sat.”--\nAnd forty years ago it was old Archibald said that.\n\n“An apple tree that’s yet alive saw something, I suppose,\nOf what it was that happened there, and what no mortal knows.\nSome one on the mountain heard far off a master shriek,\nAnd then there was a light that showed the way for men to seek.”\n\n“We found it in the morning with an iron bar behind,\nAnd there were chains around it; but no search could ever find,\nEither in the ashes that were left, or anywhere,\nA sign to tell of who or what had been with Stafford there.”\n\n“Stafford was a likely man with ideas of his own--\nThough I could never like the kind that likes to live alone;\nAnd when you met, you found his eyes were always on your shoes,\nAs if they did the talking when he asked you for the news.”\n\n“That’s all, my son. Were I to talk for half a hundred years\nI’d never clear away from there the cloud that never clears.\nWe buried what was left of it,--the bar, too, and the chains;\nAnd only for the apple tree there’s nothing that remains.”\n\nForty years ago it was I heard the old man say,\n“That’s all, my son.”--And here again I find the place to-day,\nDeserted and told only by the tree that knows the most,\nAnd overgrown with golden-rod as if there were no ghost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "theodore-roethke": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Theodore Roethke", - "birth": { - "year": 1908 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roethke", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "i-knew-a-woman": { - "title": "“I Knew a Woman”", - "body": "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,\nWhen small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;\nAh, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:\nThe shapes a bright container can contain!\nOf her choice virtues only gods should speak,\nOr English poets who grew up on Greek\n(I’d have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek).\n\nHow well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,\nShe taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;\nShe taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;\nI nibbled meekly from her proferred hand;\nShe was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,\nComing behind her for her pretty sake\n(But what prodigious mowing we did make).\n\nLove likes a gander, and adores a goose:\nHer full lips pursed, the errant notes to sieze;\nShe played it quick, she played it light and loose;\nMy eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;\nHer several parts could keep a pure repose,\nOr one hip quiver with a mobile nose\n(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).\n\nLet seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:\nI’m martyr to a motion not my own;\nWhat’s freedom for? To know eternity.\nI swear she cast a shadow white as stone.\nBut who would count eternity in days?\nThese old bones live to learn her wanton ways:\n(I measure time by how a body sways).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "moss-gathering": { - "title": "“Moss Gathering”", - "body": "To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber\nAnd lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,\nThick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,\nThe crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,\nAnd wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,--\nThat was moss-gathering.\n\nBut something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets\nOf green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:\nAnd afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,\nAs if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;\nDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,\nBy pulling off flesh from the living planet;\nAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-papas-waltz": { - "title": "“My Papa’s Waltz”", - "body": "The whiskey on your breath\nCould make a small boy dizzy;\nBut I hung on like death:\nSuch waltzing was not easy.\n\nWe romped until the pans\nSlid from the kitchen shelf;\nMy mother’s countenance\nCould not unfrown itself.\n\nThe hand that held my wrist\nWas battered on one knuckle;\nAt every step you missed\nMy right ear scraped a buckle.\n\nYou beat time on my head\nWith a palm caked hard by dirt,\nThen waltzed me off to bed\nStill clinging to your shirt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "root-cellar": { - "title": "“Root Cellar”", - "body": "Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,\nBulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,\nShoots dangled and drooped,\nLolling obscenely from mildewed crates,\nHung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.\nAnd what a congress of stinks!\nRoots ripe as old bait,\nPulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,\nLeaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.\nNothing would give up life:\nEven the dirt kept breathing a small breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "christina-rossetti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Christina Rossetti", - "birth": { - "year": 1830 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 66 - }, - "poems": { - "advent": { - "title": "“Advent”", - "body": "This Advent moon shines cold and clear\nThese Advent nights are long;\nOur lamps have burned year after year\nAnd still their flame is strong.\n“Watchman what of the night?” we cry\nHeart-sick with hope deferred:\n“No speaking signs are in the sky”\nIs still the watchman’s word.\n\nThe Porter watches at the gate\nThe servants watch within;\nThe watch is long betimes and late\nThe prize is slow to win.\n“Watchman what of the night?” but still\nHis answer sounds the same:\n“No daybreak tops the utmost hill\nNor pale our lamps of flame.”\n\nOne to another hear them speak\nThe patient virgins wise:\n“Surely He is not far to seek”--\n“All night we watch and rise.”\n“The days are evil looking back\nThe coming days are dim;\nYet count we not His promise slack\nBut watch and wait for Him.”\n\nOne with another soul with soul\nThey kindle fire from fire:\n“Friends watch us who have touched the goal.”\n“They urge us come up higher.”\n“With them shall rest our waysore feet\nWith them is built our home\nWith Christ.” “They sweet but He most sweet\nSweeter than honeycomb.”\n\nThere no more parting no more pain\nThe distant ones brought near\nThe lost so long are found again\nLong lost but longer dear:\nEye hath not seen ear hath not heard\nNor heart conceived that rest\nWith them our good things long deferred\nWith Jesus Christ our Best.\n\nWe weep because the night is long\nWe laugh for day shall rise\nWe sing a slow contented song\nAnd knock at Paradise.\nWeeping we hold Him fast Who wept\nFor us--we hold Him fast;\nAnd will not let Him go except\nHe bless us first or last.\n\nWeeping we hold Him fast to-night;\nWe will not let Him go\nTill daybreak smite our wearied sight\nAnd summer smite the snow:\nThen figs shall bud and dove with dove\nShall coo the livelong day;\nThen He shall say “Arise My love\nMy fair one come away.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "after-death": { - "title": "“After Death”", - "body": "The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept\nAnd strewn with rushes, rosemary and may\nLay thick upon the bed on which I lay,\nWhere through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.\nHe leaned above me, thinking that I slept\nAnd could not hear him; but I heard him say,\n“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away\nCame a deep silence, and I knew he wept.\nHe did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold\nThat hid my face, or take my hand in his,\nOr ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:\nHe did not love me living; but once dead\nHe pitied me; and very sweet it is\nTo know he still is warm though I am cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "all-saints": { - "title": "“All Saints”", - "body": "They are flocking from the East\nAnd the West\nThey are flocking from the North\nAnd the South\nEvery moment setting forth\nFrom realm of snake or lion\nSwamp or sand\nIce or burning;\nGreatest and least\nPalm in hand\nAnd praise in mouth\nThey are flocking up the path\nTo their rest\nUp the path that hath\nNo returning.\n\nUp the steeps of Zion\nThey are mounting\nComing coming\nThrongs beyond man’s counting;\nWith a sound\nLike innumerable bees\nSwarming humming\nWhere flowering trees\nMany-tinted\nMany-scented\nAll alike abound\nWith honey--\nWith a swell\nLike a blast upswaying unrestrainable\nFrom a shadowed dell\nTo the hill-tops sunny--\nWith a thunder\nLike the ocean when in strength\nBreadth and length\nIt sets to shore;\nMore and more\nWaves on waves redoubled pour\nLeaping flashing to the shore\n(Unlike the under\nDrain of ebb that loseth ground\nFor all its roar.)\n\nThey are thronging\nFrom the East and West\nFrom the North and South\nSaints are thronging loving longing\nTo their land\nOf rest\nPalm in hand\nAnd praise in mouth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "amor-mundi": { - "title": "“Amor Mundi”", - "body": "“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing\nOn the west wind blowing along this valley track?”\n“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,\nWe shall escape the uphill by never turning back.”\n\nSo they two went together in glowing August weather,\nThe honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;\nAnd dear she was to dote on, her swift feet seemed to float on\nThe air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight.\n\n“Oh what is that in heaven where gray cloud-flakes are seven,\nWhere blackest clouds hang riven just at the rainy skirt?”\n“Oh that’s a meteor sent us, a message dumb, portentous,\nAn undeciphered solemn signal of help or hurt.”\n\n“Oh what is that glides quickly where velvet flowers grow thickly,\nTheir scent comes rich and sickly?”--“A scaled and hooded worm.”\n“Oh what’s that in the hollow, so pale I quake to follow?”\n“Oh that’s a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.”\n\n“Turn again, O my sweetest,--turn again, false and fleetest:\nThis beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.”\n“Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting:\nThis downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "an-apple-gathering": { - "title": "“An Apple-Gathering”", - "body": "I plucked pink blossoms from mine apple tree\nAnd wore them all that evening in my hair:\nThen in due season when I went to see\nI found no apples there.\n\nWith dangling basket all along the grass\nAs I had come I went the selfsame track:\nMy neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass\nSo empty-handed back.\n\nLilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by,\nTheir heaped-up basket teazed me like a jeer;\nSweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky,\nTheir mother’s home was near.\n\nPlump Gertrude passed me with her basket full,\nA stronger hand than hers helped it along;\nA voice talked with her thro’ the shadows cool\nMore sweet to me than song.\n\nAh Willie, Willie, was my love less worth\nThan apples with their green leaves piled above?\nI counted rosiest apples on the earth\nOf far less worth than love.\n\nSo once it was with me you stooped to talk\nLaughing and listening in this very lane:\nTo think that by this way we used to walk\nWe shall not walk again!\n\nI let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos\nAnd groups; the latest said the night grew chill,\nAnd hastened: but I loitered, while the dews\nFell fast I loitered still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "ascension-day": { - "title": "“Ascension Day”", - "body": "_“A Cloud received Him out of their sight.”_\n\nWhen Christ went up to Heaven the Apostles stayed\nGazing at Heaven with souls and wills on fire\nTheir hearts on flight along the track He made\nWinged by desire.\n\nTheir silence spake: “Lord why not follow Thee?\nHome is not home without Thy Blessed Face\nLife is not life. Remember Lord and see\nLook back embrace.”\n\n“Earth is one desert waste of banishment\nLife is one long-drawn anguish of decay.\nWhere Thou wert wont to go we also went:\nWhy not today?”\n\nNevertheless a cloud cut off their gaze:\nThey tarry to build up Jerusalem\nWatching for Him while thro’ the appointed days\nHe watches them.\n\nThey do His Will and doing it rejoice\nPatiently glad to spend and to be spent:\nStill He speaks to them still they hear His Voice\nAnd are content.\n\nFor as a cloud received Him from their sight\nSo with a cloud will He return ere long:\nTherefore they stand on guard by day by night\nStrenuous and strong.\n\nThey do they dare they beyond seven times seven\nForgive they cry God’s mighty word aloud:\nYet sometimes haply lift tired eyes to Heaven--\n“Is that His cloud?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "at-home": { - "title": "“At Home”", - "body": "When I was dead, my spirit turned\nTo seek the much-frequented house:\nI passed the door, and saw my friends\nFeasting beneath green orange boughs;\nFrom hand to hand they pushed the wine,\nThey sucked the pulp of plum and peach;\nThey sang, they jested, and they laughed,\nFor each was loved of each.\n\nI listened to thier honest chat:\nSaid one: “To-morrow we shall be\nPlod plod along the featureless sands,\nAnd coasting miles and miles of sea.”\nSaid one: “Before the turn of tide\nWe will achieve the eyrie-seat.”\nSaid one: “To-morrow shall be like\nTo-day, but much more sweet.”\n\n“To-morrow,” said they, strong with hope,\nAnd dwelt upon the pleasant way:\n“To-morrow,” cried they, one and all,\nWhile no one spoke of yesterday.\nTheir life stood full at blessed noon;\nI, only I, had passed away:\n“To-morrow and to-day,” they cried;\nI was of yesterday.\n\nI shivered comfortless, but cast\nNo chill across the table-cloth;\nI, all-forgotten, shivered, sad\nTo stay, and yet to part how loth:\nI passed from the familiar room,\nI who from love had passed away,\nLike the remembrance of a guest\nThat tarrieth but a day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "before-the-paling-of-the-stars": { - "title": "“Before the Paling of the Stars”", - "body": "Before the winter morn,\nBefore the earliest cock crow,\nJesus Christ was born:\nBorn in a stable,\nCradled in a manger,\nIn the world his hands had made\nBorn a stranger.\n\nPriest and king lay fast asleep\nIn Jerusalem;\nYoung and old lay fast asleep\nIn crowded Bethlehem;\nSaint and angel, ox and ass,\nKept a watch together\nBefore the Christmas daybreak\nIn the winter weather.\n\nJesus on his mother’s breast\nIn the stable cold,\nSpotless lamb of God was he,\nShepherd of the fold:\nLet us kneel with Mary maid,\nWith Joseph bent and hoary,\nWith saint and angel, ox and ass,\nTo hail the King of Glory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "a-better-resurrection": { - "title": "“A Better Resurrection”", - "body": "I have no wit, no words, no tears;\nMy heart within me like a stone\nIs numb’d too much for hopes or fears;\nLook right, look left, I dwell alone;\nI lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief\nNo everlasting hills I see;\nMy life is in the falling leaf:\nO Jesus, quicken me.\n\nMy life is like a faded leaf,\nMy harvest dwindled to a husk:\nTruly my life is void and brief\nAnd tedious in the barren dusk;\nMy life is like a frozen thing,\nNo bud nor greenness can I see:\nYet rise it shall--the sap of Spring;\nO Jesus, rise in me.\n\nMy life is like a broken bowl,\nA broken bowl that cannot hold\nOne drop of water for my soul\nOr cordial in the searching cold;\nCast in the fire the perish’d thing;\nMelt and remould it, till it be\nA royal cup for Him, my King:\nO Jesus, drink of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "by-the-sea": { - "title": "“By the Sea”", - "body": "Why does the sea moan evermore?\nShut out from heaven it makes its moan,\nIt frets against the boundary shore;\nAll earth’s full rivers cannot fill\nThe sea, that drinking thirsteth still.\n\nSheer miracles of loveliness\nLie hid in its unlooked-on bed:\nAnemones, salt, passionless,\nBlow flower-like; just enough alive\nTo blow and multiply and thrive.\n\nShells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,\nEncrusted live things argus-eyed,\nAll fair alike, yet all unlike,\nAre born without a pang, and die\nWithout a pang, and so pass by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-candlemas-dialogue": { - "title": "“A Candlemas Dialogue”", - "body": "“Love brought Me down; and cannot love make thee\nCarol for joy to Me?\nHear cheerful robin carol from his tree\nWho owes not half to Me\nI won for thee.”\n\n“Yea Lord I hear his carol’s wordless voice;\nAnd well may he rejoice\nWho hath not heard of death’s discordant noise.\nSo might I too rejoice\nWith such a voice.”\n\n“True thou hast compassed death; but hast not thou\nThe tree of life’s own bough?\nAm I not Life and Resurrection now?\nMy Cross balm-bearing bough\nFor such as thou?”\n\n“Ah me Thy Cross!--but that seems far away;\nThy Cradle-song to-day\nI too would raise and worship Thee and pray:\nNot empty Lord to-day\nSend me away.”\n\n“If thou wilt not go empty spend thy store;\nAnd I will give thee more\nYea make thee ten times richer than before.\nGive more and give yet more\nOut of thy store.”\n\n“Because Thou givest me Thyself I will\nThy blessed word fulfil\nGive with both hands and hoard by giving still;\nThy pleasure to fulfil\nAnd work Thy Will.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "candlemas" - } - } - }, - "cobwebs": { - "title": "“Cobwebs”", - "body": "It is a land with neither night nor day,\nNor heat nor cold, nor any wind, nor rain,\nNor hills nor valleys; but one even plain\nStretches thro’ long unbroken miles away:\nWhile thro’ the sluggish air a twilight grey\nBroodeth; no moons or seasons wax and wane,\nNo ebb and flow are there among the main,\nNo bud-time no leaf-falling there for aye,\nNo ripple on the sea, no shifting sand,\nNo beat of wings to stir the stagnant space,\nAnd loveless sea: no trace of days before,\nNo guarded home, no time-worn restingplace\nNo future hope no fear forevermore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "color": { - "title": "“Color”", - "body": "What is pink? a rose is pink\nBy a fountain’s brink.\nWhat is red? a poppy’s red\nIn its barley bed.\nWhat is blue? the sky is blue\nWhere the clouds float thro’.\nWhat is white? a swan is white\nSailing in the light.\nWhat is yellow? pears are yellow,\nRich and ripe and mellow.\nWhat is green? the grass is green,\nWith small flowers between.\nWhat is violet? clouds are violet\nIn the summer twilight.\nWhat is orange? Why, an orange,\nJust an orange!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-convent-threshold": { - "title": "“The Convent Threshold”", - "body": "There’s blood between us, love, my love,\nThere’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood,\nAnd blood’s a bar I cannot pass.\nI choose the stairs that mount above,\nStair after golden sky-ward stair,\nTo city and to sea of glass.\nMy lily feet are soiled with mud,\nWith scarlet mud which tells a tale\nOf hope that was, of guilt that was,\nOf love that shall not yet avail;\nAlas, my heart, if I could bare\nMy heart, this selfsame stain is there:\nI seek the sea of glass and fire\nTo wash the spot, to burn the snare;\nLo, stairs are meant to lift us higher--\nMount with me, mount the kindled stair.\n\nYour eyes look earthward, mine look up.\nI see the far-off city grand,\nBeyond the hills a watered land,\nBeyond the gulf a gleaming strand\nOf mansions where the righteous sup;\nWho sleep at ease among their trees,\nOr wake to sing a cadenced hymn\nWith Cherubim and Seraphim;\nThey bore the Cross, they drained the cup,\nRacked, roasted, crushed, wrenched limb from limb,\nThey the offscouring of the world.\nThe heaven of starry heavens unfurled,\nThe sun before their face is dim.\nYou looking earthward, what see you?\nMilk-white, wine-flushed among the vines,\nUp and down leaping, to and fro,\nMost glad, most full, made strong with wines,\nBlooming as peaches pearled with dew,\nTheir golden windy hair afloat,\nLove-music warbling in their throat,\nYoung men and women come and go.\n\nYou linger, yet the time is short:\nFlee for your life, gird up your strength\nTo flee; the shadows stretched at length\nShow that day wanes, that night draws nigh;\nFlee to the mountain, tarry not.\nIs this a time for smile and sigh,\nFor songs among the secret trees\nWhere sudden blue birds nest and sport?\nThe time is short and yet you stay:\nTo-day, while it is called to-day,\nKneel, wrestle, knock, do violence, pray;\nTo-day is short, to-morrow nigh:\nWhy will you die? why will you die?\n\nYou sinned with me a pleasant sin:\nRepent with me, for I repent.\nWoe’s me the lore I must unlearn!\nWoe’s me that easy way we went,\nSo rugged when I would return!\nHow long until my sleep begin\nHow long shall stretch these nights and days?\nSurely, clean Angels cry, she prays;\nShe laves her soul with tedious tears:\nHow long must stretch these years and years?\n\nI turn from you my cheeks and eyes,\nMy hair which you shall see no more--\nAlas for joy that went before,\nFor joy that dies, for love that dies.\nOnly my lips still turn to you,\nMy livid lips that cry, Repent.\nO weary life, O weary Lent,\nO weary time whose stars are few.\n\nHow shall I rest in Paradise,\nOr sit on steps of heaven alone\nIf Saints and Angels spoke of love\nShould I not answer from my throne:\nHave pity upon me, ye my friends,\nFor I have heard the sound thereof:\nShould I not turn with yearning eyes,\nTurn earthwards with a pitiful pang?\nOh save me from a pang in heaven.\nBy all the gifts we took and gave,\nRepent, repent, and be forgiven:\nThis life is long, but yet it ends;\nRepent and purge your soul and save:\nNo gladder song the morning stars\nUpon their birthday morning sang\nThan Angels sing when one repents.\n\nI tell you what I dreamed last night:\nA spirit with transfigured face\nFire-footed clomb an infinite space.\nI heard his hundred pinions clang,\nHeaven-bells rejoicing rang and rang,\nHeaven-air was thrilled with subtle scents,\nWorlds spun upon their rushing cars.\nHe mounted, shrieking, “Give me light!”\nStill light was poured on him, more light;\nAngels, Archangels he outstripped,\nExulting in exceeding might,\nAnd trod the skirts of Cherubim.\nStill “Give me light,” he shrieked; and dipped\nHis thirsty face, and drank a sea,\nAthirst with thirst it could not slake.\nI saw him, drunk with knowledge, take\nFrom aching brows the aureole crown--\nHis locks writhe like a cloven snake--\nHe left his throne to grovel down\nAnd lick the dust of Seraphs’ feet;\nFor what is knowledge duly weighed?\nKnowledge is strong, but love is sweet;\nYea, all the progress he had made\nWas but to learn that all is small\nSave love, for love is all in all.\n\nI tell you what I dreamed last night:\nIt was not dark, it was not light,\nCold dews had drenched my plenteous hair\nThrough clay; you came to seek me there.\nAnd “Do you dream of me?” you said.\nMy heart was dust that used to leap\nTo you; I answered half asleep:\n“My pillow is damp, my sheets are red,\nThere’s a leaden tester to my bed;\nFind you a warmer playfellow,\nA warmer pillow for your head,\nA kinder love to love than mine.”\nYou wrung your hands, while I, like lead,\nCrushed downwards through the sodden earth;\nYou smote your hands but not in mirth,\nAnd reeled but were not drunk with wine.\n\nFor all night long I dreamed of you;\nI woke and prayed against my will,\nThen slept to dream of you again.\nAt length I rose and knelt and prayed.\nI cannot write the words I said,\nMy words were slow, my tears were few;\nBut through the dark my silence spoke\nLike thunder. When this morning broke,\nMy face was pinched, my hair was grey,\nAnd frozen blood was on the sill\nWhere stifling in my struggle I lay.\nIf now you saw me you would say:\nWhere is the face I used to love?\nAnd I would answer: Gone before;\nIt tarries veiled in paradise.\nWhen once the morning star shall rise,\nWhen earth with shadow flees away\nAnd we stand safe within the door,\nThen you shall lift the veil thereof.\nLook up, rise up: for far above\nOur palms are grown, our place is set;\nThere we shall meet as once we met,\nAnd love with old familiar love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "cousin-kate": { - "title": "“Cousin Kate”", - "body": "I was a cottage maiden\nHardened by sun and air\nContented with my cottage mates,\nNot mindful I was fair.\nWhy did a great lord find me out,\nAnd praise my flaxen hair?\nWhy did a great lord find me out,\nTo fill my heart with care?\n\nHe lured me to his palace home--\nWoe’s me for joy thereof--\nTo lead a shameless shameful life,\nHis plaything and his love.\nHe wore me like a silken knot,\nHe changed me like a glove;\nSo now I moan, an unclean thing,\nWho might have been a dove.\n\nO Lady Kate, my cousin Kate,\nYou grew more fair than I:\nHe saw you at your father’s gate,\nChose you, and cast me by.\nHe watched your steps along the lane,\nYour work among the rye;\nHe lifted you from mean estate\nTo sit with him on high.\n\nBecause you were so good and pure\nHe bound you with his ring:\nThe neighbors call you good and pure,\nCall me an outcast thing.\nEven so I sit and howl in dust,\nYou sit in gold and sing:\nNow which of us has tenderer heart?\nYou had the stronger wing.\n\nO cousin Kate, my love was true,\nYour love was writ in sand:\nIf he had fooled not me but you,\nIf you stood where I stand,\nHe’d not have won me with his love\nNor bought me with his land;\nI would have spit into his face\nAnd not have taken his hand.\n\nYet I’ve a gift you have not got,\nAnd seem not like to get:\nFor all your clothes and wedding-ring\nI’ve little doubt you fret.\nMy fair-haired son, my shame, my pride,\nCling closer, closer yet:\nYour father would give his lands for one\nTo wear his coronet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crying-my-little-one": { - "title": "“Crying, My Little One”", - "body": "Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?\nFall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:\nI must tramp on through the winter night dreary,\nWhile the snow falls on me colder and colder.\n\nYou are my one, and I have not another;\nSleep soft, my darling, my trouble and treasure;\nSleep warm and soft in the arms of your mother,\nDreaming of pretty things, dreaming of pleasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-daughter-of-eve": { - "title": "“A Daughter of Eve”", - "body": "A fool I was to sleep at noon,\nAnd wake when night is chilly\nBeneath the comfortless cold moon;\nA fool to pluck my rose too soon,\nA fool to snap my lily.\n\nMy garden-plot I have not kept;\nFaded and all-forsaken,\nI weep as I have never wept:\nOh it was summer when I slept,\nIt’s winter now I waken.\n\nTalk what you please of future spring\nAnd sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:--\nStripp’d bare of hope and everything,\nNo more to laugh, no more to sing,\nI sit alone with sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "de-profundis": { - "title": "“De Profundis”", - "body": "Oh why is heaven built so far,\nOh why is earth set so remote?\nI cannot reach the nearest star\nThat hangs afloat.\n\nI would not care to reach the moon,\nOne round monotonous of change;\nYet even she repeats her tune\nBeyond my range.\n\nI never watch the scatter’d fire\nOf stars, or sun’s far-trailing train,\nBut all my heart is one desire,\nAnd all in vain:\n\nFor I am bound with fleshly bands,\nJoy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;\nI strain my heart, I stretch my hands,\nAnd catch at hope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dirge": { - "title": "“A Dirge”", - "body": "Why were you born when the snow was falling?\nYou should have come to the cuckoo’s calling,\nOr when grapes are green in the cluster,\nOr, at least, when lithe swallows muster\nFor their far off flying\nFrom summer dying.\n\nWhy did you die when the lambs were cropping?\nYou should have died at the apples’ dropping,\nWhen the grasshopper comes to trouble,\nAnd the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,\nAnd all winds go sighing\nFor sweet things dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "dream-land": { - "title": "“Dream Land”", - "body": "Where sunless rivers weep\nTheir waves into the deep,\nShe sleeps a charmed sleep:\nAwake her not.\nLed by a single star,\nShe came from very far\nTo seek where shadows are\nHer pleasant lot.\n\nShe left the rosy morn,\nShe left the fields of corn,\nFor twilight cold and lorn\nAnd water springs.\nThrough sleep, as through a veil,\nShe sees the sky look pale,\nAnd hears the nightingale\nThat sadly sings.\n\nRest, rest, a perfect rest\nShed over brow and breast;\nHer face is toward the west,\nThe purple land.\nShe cannot see the grain\nRipening on hill and plain;\nShe cannot feel the rain\nUpon her hand.\n\nRest, rest, for evermore\nUpon a mossy shore;\nRest, rest at the heart’s core\nTill time shall cease:\nSleep that no pain shall wake;\nNight that no morn shall break\nTill joy shall overtake\nHer perfect peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "echo": { - "title": "“Echo”", - "body": "Come to me in the silence of the night;\nCome in the speaking silence of a dream;\nCome with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright\nAs sunlight on a stream;\nCome back in tears,\nO memory, hope, love of finished years.\n\nOh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,\nWhose wakening should have been in Paradise,\nWhere souls brimfull of love abide and meet;\nWhere thirsting longing eyes\nWatch the slow door\nThat opening, letting in, lets out no more.\n\nYet come to me in dreams, that I may live\nMy very life again tho’ cold in death:\nCome back to me in dreams, that I may give\nPulse for pulse, breath for breath:\nSpeak low, lean low,\nAs long ago, my love, how long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "epiphanytide": { - "title": "“Epiphanytide”", - "body": "Trembling before Thee we fall down to adore Thee,\nShamefaced and trembling we lift our eyes to Thee:\nO First and with the last! annul our ruined past,\nRebuild us to Thy glory, set us free\nFrom sin and from sorrow to fall down and worship Thee.\n\nFull of pity view us, stretch Thy sceptre to us,\nBid us live that we may give ourselves to Thee:\nO faithful Lord and True! stand up for us and do,\nMake us lovely, make us new, set us free--\nHeart and soul and spirit--to bring all and worship Thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "epiphany": { - "title": "“Epiphany”", - "body": "“Lord Babe, if Thou art He\nWe sought for patiently,\nWhere is Thy court?\nHither may prophecy and star resort;\nMen heed not their report.”--\n“Bow down and worship, righteous man:\nThis Infant of a span\nIs He man sought for since the world began!”--\n“Then, Lord, accept my gold, too base a thing\nFor Thee, of all kings King.”--\n\n“Lord Babe, despite Thy youth\nI hold Thee of a truth\nBoth Good and Great:\nBut wherefore dost Thou keep so mean a state,\nLow-lying desolate?”--\n“Bow down and worship, righteous seer:\nThe Lord our God is here\nApproachable, Who bids us all draw near.”--\n“Wherefore to Thee I offer frankincense,\nThou Sole Omnipotence.”--\n\n“But I have only brought\nMyrrh; no wise afterthought\nInstructed me\nTo gather pearls or gems, or choice to see\nCoral or ivory.”--\n“Not least thine offering proves thee wise:\nFor myrrh means sacrifice,\nAnd He that lives, this Same is He that dies.”--\n“Then here is myrrh: alas! yea, woe is me\nThat myrrh befitteth Thee.”--\n\nMyrrh, frankincense, and gold:\nAnd lo! from wintry fold\nGood-will doth bring\nA Lamb, the innocent likeness of this King\nWhom stars and seraphs sing:\nAnd lo! the bird of love, a Dove\nFlutters and coos above:\nAnd Dove and Lamb and Babe agree in love:--\nCome all mankind, come all creation hither,\nCome, worship Christ together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "fluttered-wings": { - "title": "“Fluttered Wings”", - "body": "The splendour of the kindling day,\nThe splendor of the setting sun,\nThese move my soul to wend its way,\nAnd have done\nWith all we grasp and toil amongst and say.\n\nThe paling roses of a cloud,\nThe fading bow that arches space,\nThese woo my fancy toward my shroud,\nToward the place\nOf faces veil’d, and heads discrown’d and bow’d.\n\nThe nation of the awful stars,\nThe wandering star whose blaze is brief,\nThese make me beat against the bars\nOf my grief;\nMy tedious grief, twin to the life it mars.\n\nO fretted heart toss’d to and fro,\nSo fain to flee, so fain to rest!\nAll glories that are high or low,\nEast or west,\nGrow dim to thee who art so fain to go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-sunset-to-star-rise": { - "title": "“From Sunset to Star Rise”", - "body": "Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:\nI am no summer friend, but wintry cold,\nA silly sheep benighted from the fold,\nA sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.\nTake counsel, sever from my lot your lot,\nDwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;\nLest you with me should shiver on the wold,\nAthirst and hungering on a barren spot.\nFor I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,\nI live alone, I look to die alone:\nYet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,\nGhosts of my buried years, and friends come back,\nMy heart goes sighing after swallows flown\nOn sometime summer’s unreturning track.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "from-the-antique": { - "title": "“From the Antique”", - "body": "It’s a weary life, it is, she said:\nDoubly blank in a woman’s lot:\nI wish and I wish I were a man:\nOr, better then any being, were not:\n\nWere nothing at all in all the world,\nNot a body and not a soul:\nNot so much as a grain of dust\nOr a drop of water from pole to pole.\n\nStill the world would wag on the same,\nStill the seasons go and come:\nBlossoms bloom as in days of old,\nCherries ripen and wild bees hum.\n\nNone would miss me in all the world,\nHow much less would care or weep:\nI should be nothing, while all the rest\nWould wake and weary and fall asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "goblin-market": { - "title": "“Goblin Market”", - "body": "Morning and evening\nMaids heard the goblins cry:\n“Come buy our orchard fruits\nCome buy come buy:\nApples and quinces\nLemons and oranges\nPlump unpeck’d cherries\nMelons and raspberries\nBloom-down-cheek’d peaches\nSwart-headed mulberries\nWild free-born cranberries\nCrab-apples dewberries\nPine-apples blackberries\nApricots strawberries;--\nAll ripe together\nIn summer weather--\nMorns that pass by\nFair eves that fly;\nCome buy come buy:\nOur grapes fresh from the vine\nPomegranates full and fine\nDates and sharp bullaces\nRare pears and greengages\nDamsons and bilberries\nTaste them and try:\nCurrants and gooseberries\nBright-fire-like barberries\nFigs to fill your mouth\nCitrons from the South\nSweet to tongue and sound to eye;\nCome buy come buy.”\n\nEvening by evening\nAmong the brookside rushes\nLaura bow’d her head to hear\nLizzie veil’d her blushes:\nCrouching close together\nIn the cooling weather\nWith clasping arms and cautioning lips\nWith tingling cheeks and finger tips.\n“Lie close” Laura said\nPricking up her golden head:\n“We must not look at goblin men\nWe must not buy their fruits:\nWho knows upon what soil they fed\nTheir hungry thirsty roots?”\n“Come buy” call the goblins\nHobbling down the glen.\n\n“Oh” cried Lizzie “Laura Laura\nYou should not peep at goblin men.”\nLizzie cover’d up her eyes\nCover’d close lest they should look;\nLaura rear’d her glossy head\nAnd whisper’d like the restless brook:\n“Look Lizzie look Lizzie\nDown the glen tramp little men.\nOne hauls a basket\nOne bears a plate\nOne lugs a golden dish\nOf many pounds weight.\nHow fair the vine must grow\nWhose grapes are so luscious;\nHow warm the wind must blow\nThrough those fruit bushes.”\n“No” said Lizzie “No no no;\nTheir offers should not charm us\nTheir evil gifts would harm us.”\nShe thrust a dimpled finger\nIn each ear shut eyes and ran:\nCurious Laura chose to linger\nWondering at each merchant man.\nOne had a cat’s face\nOne whisk’d a tail\nOne tramp’d at a rat’s pace\nOne crawl’d like a snail\nOne like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry\nOne like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.\nShe heard a voice like voice of doves\nCooing all together:\nThey sounded kind and full of loves\nIn the pleasant weather.\n\nLaura stretch’d her gleaming neck\nLike a rush-imbedded swan\nLike a lily from the beck\nLike a moonlit poplar branch\nLike a vessel at the launch\nWhen its last restraint is gone.\n\nBackwards up the mossy glen\nTurn’d and troop’d the goblin men\nWith their shrill repeated cry\n“Come buy come buy.”\nWhen they reach’d where Laura was\nThey stood stock still upon the moss\nLeering at each other\nBrother with queer brother;\nSignalling each other\nBrother with sly brother.\nOne set his basket down\nOne rear’d his plate;\nOne began to weave a crown\nOf tendrils leaves and rough nuts brown\n(Men sell not such in any town);\nOne heav’d the golden weight\nOf dish and fruit to offer her:\n“Come buy come buy” was still their cry.\nLaura stared but did not stir\nLong’d but had no money:\nThe whisk-tail’d merchant bade her taste\nIn tones as smooth as honey\nThe cat-faced purr’d\nThe rat-faced spoke a word\nOf welcome and the snail-paced even was heard;\nOne parrot-voiced and jolly\nCried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly;”--\nOne whistled like a bird.\n\nBut sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:\n“Good folk I have no coin;\nTo take were to purloin:\nI have no copper in my purse\nI have no silver either\nAnd all my gold is on the furze\nThat shakes in windy weather\nAbove the rusty heather.”\n“You have much gold upon your head”\nThey answer’d all together:\n“Buy from us with a golden curl.”\nShe clipp’d a precious golden lock\nShe dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl\nThen suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:\nSweeter than honey from the rock\nStronger than man-rejoicing wine\nClearer than water flow’d that juice;\nShe never tasted such before\nHow should it cloy with length of use?\nShe suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more\nFruits which that unknown orchard bore;\nShe suck’d until her lips were sore;\nThen flung the emptied rinds away\nBut gather’d up one kernel stone\nAnd knew not was it night or day\nAs she turn’d home alone.\n\nLizzie met her at the gate\nFull of wise upbraidings:\n“Dear you should not stay so late\nTwilight is not good for maidens;\nShould not loiter in the glen\nIn the haunts of goblin men.\nDo you not remember Jeanie\nHow she met them in the moonlight\nTook their gifts both choice and many\nAte their fruits and wore their flowers\nPluck’d from bowers\nWhere summer ripens at all hours?\nBut ever in the noonlight\nShe pined and pined away;\nSought them by night and day\nFound them no more but dwindled and grew grey;\nThen fell with the first snow\nWhile to this day no grass will grow\nWhere she lies low:\nI planted daisies there a year ago\nThat never blow.\nYou should not loiter so.”\n“Nay hush” said Laura:\n“Nay hush my sister:\nI ate and ate my fill\nYet my mouth waters still;\nTo-morrow night I will\nBuy more;” and kiss’d her:\n“Have done with sorrow;\nI’ll bring you plums to-morrow\nFresh on their mother twigs\nCherries worth getting;\nYou cannot think what figs\nMy teeth have met in\nWhat melons icy-cold\nPiled on a dish of gold\nToo huge for me to hold\nWhat peaches with a velvet nap\nPellucid grapes without one seed:\nOdorous indeed must be the mead\nWhereon they grow and pure the wave they drink\nWith lilies at the brink\nAnd sugar-sweet their sap.”\n\nGolden head by golden head\nLike two pigeons in one nest\nFolded in each other’s wings\nThey lay down in their curtain’d bed:\nLike two blossoms on one stem\nLike two flakes of new-fall’n snow\nLike two wands of ivory\nTipp’d with gold for awful kings.\nMoon and stars gaz’d in at them\nWind sang to them lullaby\nLumbering owls forbore to fly\nNot a bat flapp’d to and fro\nRound their rest:\nCheek to cheek and breast to breast\nLock’d together in one nest.\n\nEarly in the morning\nWhen the first cock crow’d his warning\nNeat like bees as sweet and busy\nLaura rose with Lizzie:\nFetch’d in honey milk’d the cows\nAir’d and set to rights the house\nKneaded cakes of whitest wheat\nCakes for dainty mouths to eat\nNext churn’d butter whipp’d up cream\nFed their poultry sat and sew’d;\nTalk’d as modest maidens should:\nLizzie with an open heart\nLaura in an absent dream\nOne content one sick in part;\nOne warbling for the mere bright day’s delight\nOne longing for the night.\n\nAt length slow evening came:\nThey went with pitchers to the reedy brook;\nLizzie most placid in her look\nLaura most like a leaping flame.\nThey drew the gurgling water from its deep;\nLizzie pluck’d purple and rich golden flags\nThen turning homeward said: “The sunset flushes\nThose furthest loftiest crags;\nCome Laura not another maiden lags.\nNo wilful squirrel wags\nThe beasts and birds are fast asleep.”\nBut Laura loiter’d still among the rushes\nAnd said the bank was steep.\n\nAnd said the hour was early still\nThe dew not fall’n the wind not chill;\nListening ever but not catching\nThe customary cry\n“Come buy come buy”\nWith its iterated jingle\nOf sugar-baited words:\nNot for all her watching\nOnce discerning even one goblin\nRacing whisking tumbling hobbling;\nLet alone the herds\nThat used to tramp along the glen\nIn groups or single\nOf brisk fruit-merchant men.\n\nTill Lizzie urged “O Laura come;\nI hear the fruit-call but I dare not look:\nYou should not loiter longer at this brook:\nCome with me home.\nThe stars rise the moon bends her arc\nEach glowworm winks her spark\nLet us get home before the night grows dark:\nFor clouds may gather\nThough this is summer weather\nPut out the lights and drench us through;\nThen if we lost our way what should we do?”\n\nLaura turn’d cold as stone\nTo find her sister heard that cry alone\nThat goblin cry\n“Come buy our fruits come buy.”\nMust she then buy no more such dainty fruit?\nMust she no more such succous pasture find\nGone deaf and blind?\nHer tree of life droop’d from the root:\nShe said not one word in her heart’s sore ache;\nBut peering thro’ the dimness nought discerning\nTrudg’d home her pitcher dripping all the way;\nSo crept to bed and lay\nSilent till Lizzie slept;\nThen sat up in a passionate yearning\nAnd gnash’d her teeth for baulk’d desire and wept\nAs if her heart would break.\n\nDay after day night after night\nLaura kept watch in vain\nIn sullen silence of exceeding pain.\nShe never caught again the goblin cry:\n“Come buy come buy;”--\nShe never spied the goblin men\nHawking their fruits along the glen:\nBut when the noon wax’d bright\nHer hair grew thin and grey;\nShe dwindled as the fair full moon doth turn\nTo swift decay and burn\nHer fire away.\n\nOne day remembering her kernel-stone\nShe set it by a wall that faced the south;\nDew’d it with tears hoped for a root\nWatch’d for a waxing shoot\nBut there came none;\nIt never saw the sun\nIt never felt the trickling moisture run:\nWhile with sunk eyes and faded mouth\nShe dream’d of melons as a traveller sees\nFalse waves in desert drouth\nWith shade of leaf-crown’d trees\nAnd burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.\n\nShe no more swept the house\nTended the fowls or cows\nFetch’d honey kneaded cakes of wheat\nBrought water from the brook:\nBut sat down listless in the chimney-nook\nAnd would not eat.\n\nTender Lizzie could not bear\nTo watch her sister’s cankerous care\nYet not to share.\nShe night and morning\nCaught the goblins’ cry:\n“Come buy our orchard fruits\nCome buy come buy;”--\nBeside the brook along the glen\nShe heard the tramp of goblin men\nThe yoke and stir\nPoor Laura could not hear;\nLong’d to buy fruit to comfort her\nBut fear’d to pay too dear.\nShe thought of Jeanie in her grave\nWho should have been a bride;\nBut who for joys brides hope to have\nFell sick and died\nIn her gay prime\nIn earliest winter time\nWith the first glazing rime\nWith the first snow-fall of crisp winter time.\n\nTill Laura dwindling\nSeem’d knocking at Death’s door:\nThen Lizzie weigh’d no more\nBetter and worse;\nBut put a silver penny in her purse\nKiss’d Laura cross’d the heath with clumps of furze\nAt twilight halted by the brook:\nAnd for the first time in her life\nBegan to listen and look.\n\nLaugh’d every goblin\nWhen they spied her peeping:\nCame towards her hobbling\nFlying running leaping\nPuffing and blowing\nChuckling clapping crowing\nClucking and gobbling\nMopping and mowing\nFull of airs and graces\nPulling wry faces\nDemure grimaces\nCat-like and rat-like\nRatel- and wombat-like\nSnail-paced in a hurry\nParrot-voiced and whistler\nHelter skelter hurry skurry\nChattering like magpies\nFluttering like pigeons\nGliding like fishes--\nHugg’d her and kiss’d her:\nSqueez’d and caress’d her:\nStretch’d up their dishes\nPanniers and plates:\n“Look at our apples\nRusset and dun\nBob at our cherries\nBite at our peaches\nCitrons and dates\nGrapes for the asking\nPears red with basking\nOut in the sun\nPlums on their twigs;\nPluck them and suck them\nPomegranates figs.”--\n\n“Good folk” said Lizzie\nMindful of Jeanie:\n“Give me much and many:--\nHeld out her apron\nToss’d them her penny.”\n“Nay take a seat with us\nHonour and eat with us”\nThey answer’d grinning:\n“Our feast is but beginning.\nNight yet is early\nWarm and dew-pearly\nWakeful and starry:\nSuch fruits as these\nNo man can carry:\nHalf their bloom would fly\nHalf their dew would dry\nHalf their flavour would pass by.\nSit down and feast with us\nBe welcome guest with us\nCheer you and rest with us.”--\n“Thank you” said Lizzie: “But one waits\nAt home alone for me:\nSo without further parleying\nIf you will not sell me any\nOf your fruits though much and many\nGive me back my silver penny\nI toss’d you for a fee.”--\nThey began to scratch their pates\nNo longer wagging purring\nBut visibly demurring\nGrunting and snarling.\nOne call’d her proud\nCross-grain’d uncivil;\nTheir tones wax’d loud\nTheir looks were evil.\nLashing their tails\nThey trod and hustled her\nElbow’d and jostled her\nClaw’d with their nails\nBarking mewing hissing mocking\nTore her gown and soil’d her stocking\nTwitch’d her hair out by the roots\nStamp’d upon her tender feet\nHeld her hands and squeez’d their fruits\nAgainst her mouth to make her eat.\n\nWhite and golden Lizzie stood\nLike a lily in a flood--\nLike a rock of blue-vein’d stone\nLash’d by tides obstreperously--\nLike a beacon left alone\nIn a hoary roaring sea\nSending up a golden fire--\nLike a fruit-crown’d orange-tree\nWhite with blossoms honey-sweet\nSore beset by wasp and bee--\nLike a royal virgin town\nTopp’d with gilded dome and spire\nClose beleaguer’d by a fleet\nMad to tug her standard down.\n\nOne may lead a horse to water\nTwenty cannot make him drink.\nThough the goblins cuff’d and caught her\nCoax’d and fought her\nBullied and besought her\nScratch’d her pinch’d her black as ink\nKick’d and knock’d her\nMaul’d and mock’d her\nLizzie utter’d not a word;\nWould not open lip from lip\nLest they should cram a mouthful in:\nBut laugh’d in heart to feel the drip\nOf juice that syrupp’d all her face\nAnd lodg’d in dimples of her chin\nAnd streak’d her neck which quaked like curd.\nAt last the evil people\nWorn out by her resistance\nFlung back her penny kick’d their fruit\nAlong whichever road they took\nNot leaving root or stone or shoot;\nSome writh’d into the ground\nSome div’d into the brook\nWith ring and ripple\nSome scudded on the gale without a sound\nSome vanish’d in the distance.\n\nIn a smart ache tingle\nLizzie went her way;\nKnew not was it night or day;\nSprang up the bank tore thro’ the furze\nThreaded copse and dingle\nAnd heard her penny jingle\nBouncing in her purse--\nIts bounce was music to her ear.\nShe ran and ran\nAs if she fear’d some goblin man\nDogg’d her with gibe or curse\nOr something worse:\nBut not one goblin scurried after\nNor was she prick’d by fear;\nThe kind heart made her windy-paced\nThat urged her home quite out of breath with haste\nAnd inward laughter.\n\nShe cried “Laura” up the garden\n“Did you miss me?\nCome and kiss me.\nNever mind my bruises\nHug me kiss me suck my juices\nSqueez’d from goblin fruits for you\nGoblin pulp and goblin dew.\nEat me drink me love me;\nLaura make much of me;\nFor your sake I have braved the glen\nAnd had to do with goblin merchant men.”\n\nLaura started from her chair\nFlung her arms up in the air\nClutch’d her hair:\n“Lizzie Lizzie have you tasted\nFor my sake the fruit forbidden?\nMust your light like mine be hidden\nYour young life like mine be wasted\nUndone in mine undoing\nAnd ruin’d in my ruin\nThirsty canker’d goblin-ridden?”--\nShe clung about her sister\nKiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d her:\nTears once again\nRefresh’d her shrunken eyes\nDropping like rain\nAfter long sultry drouth;\nShaking with aguish fear and pain\nShe kiss’d and kiss’d her with a hungry mouth.\n\nHer lips began to scorch\nThat juice was wormwood to her tongue\nShe loath’d the feast:\nWrithing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung\nRent all her robe and wrung\nHer hands in lamentable haste\nAnd beat her breast.\nHer locks stream’d like the torch\nBorne by a racer at full speed\nOr like the mane of horses in their flight\nOr like an eagle when she stems the light\nStraight toward the sun\nOr like a caged thing freed\nOr like a flying flag when armies run.\n\nSwift fire spread through her veins knock’d at her heart\nMet the fire smouldering there\nAnd overbore its lesser flame;\nShe gorged on bitterness without a name:\nAh! fool to choose such part\nOf soul-consuming care!\nSense fail’d in the mortal strife:\nLike the watch-tower of a town\nWhich an earthquake shatters down\nLike a lightning-stricken mast\nLike a wind-uprooted tree\nSpun about\nLike a foam-topp’d waterspout\nCast down headlong in the sea\nShe fell at last;\nPleasure past and anguish past\nIs it death or is it life?\n\nLife out of death.\nThat night long Lizzie watch’d by her\nCounted her pulse’s flagging stir\nFelt for her breath\nHeld water to her lips and cool’d her face\nWith tears and fanning leaves:\nBut when the first birds chirp’d about their eaves\nAnd early reapers plodded to the place\nOf golden sheaves\nAnd dew-wet grass\nBow’d in the morning winds so brisk to pass\nAnd new buds with new day\nOpen’d of cup-like lilies on the stream\nLaura awoke as from a dream\nLaugh’d in the innocent old way\nHugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice;\nHer gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey\nHer breath was sweet as May\nAnd light danced in her eyes.\n\nDays weeks months years\nAfterwards when both were wives\nWith children of their own;\nTheir mother-hearts beset with fears\nTheir lives bound up in tender lives;\nLaura would call the little ones\nAnd tell them of her early prime\nThose pleasant days long gone\nOf not-returning time:\nWould talk about the haunted glen\nThe wicked quaint fruit-merchant men\nTheir fruits like honey to the throat\nBut poison in the blood;\n(Men sell not such in any town):\nWould tell them how her sister stood\nIn deadly peril to do her good\nAnd win the fiery antidote:\nThen joining hands to little hands\nWould bid them cling together\n“For there is no friend like a sister\nIn calm or stormy weather;\nTo cheer one on the tedious way\nTo fetch one if one goes astray\nTo lift one if one totters down\nTo strengthen whilst one stands.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "good-friday": { - "title": "“Good Friday”", - "body": "Am I a stone and not a sheep\nThat I can stand O Christ beneath Thy Cross\nTo number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss\nAnd yet not weep?\n\nNot so those women loved\nWho with exceeding grief lamented Thee;\nNot so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;\nNot so the thief was moved;\n\nNot so the Sun and Moon\nWhich hid their faces in a starless sky\nA horror of great darkness at broad noon--\nI only I.\n\nYet give not o’er\nBut seek Thy sheep true Shepherd of the flock;\nGreater than Moses turn and look once more\nAnd smite a rock.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "i-loved-you-first": { - "title": "“I Loved You First”", - "body": "_“Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda.”_\n --Dante\n\n_“Ogni altra cosa, ogni pensier va fore, E sol ivi con voi rimansi amore.”_\n --Petrarca\n\nI loved you first: but afterwards your love\nOutsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song\nAs drowned the friendly cooings of my dove.\nWhich owes the other most? my love was long,\nAnd yours one moment seemed to wax more strong;\nI loved and guessed at you, you construed me\nAnd loved me for what might or might not be--\nNay, weights and measures do us both a wrong.\nFor verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’\nWith separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,\nFor one is both and both are one in love:\nRich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’\nBoth have the strength and both the length thereof,\nBoth of us, of the love which makes us one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-wish-i-could-remember": { - "title": "“I Wish I Could Remember”", - "body": "_Era gia l’ora che volge il desio._\n --Dante\n\n_Ricorro al tempo ch’io vi vidi prima._\n --Petrarca\n\nI wish I could remember that first day,\nFirst hour, first moment of your meeting me,\nIf bright or dim the season, it might be\nSummer or Winter for aught I can say;\nSo unrecorded did it slip away,\nSo blind was I to see and to foresee,\nSo dull to mark the budding of my tree\nThat would not blossom yet for many a May.\nIf only I could recollect it, such\nA day of days! I let it come and go\nAs traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;\nIt seemed to mean so little, meant so much;\nIf only now I could recall that touch,\nFirst touch of hand in hand--Did one but know!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "if-thou-sayest-behold-we-knew-it-not": { - "title": "“If Thou Sayest Behold We Knew It Not”", - "body": "--_Proverbs xxiv. 11 12._\n\n# I.\n\nI have done I know not what--what have I done?\nMy brother’s blood my brother’s soul doth cry:\nAnd I find no defence find no reply\nNo courage more to run this race I run\nNot knowing what I have done have left undone;\nAh me these awful unknown hours that fly\nFruitless it may be fleeting fruitless by\nRank with death-savor underneath the sun.\nFor what avails it that I did not know\nThe deed I did? what profits me the plea\nThat had I known I had not wronged him so?\nLord Jesus Christ my God him pity Thou;\nLord if it may be pity also me:\nIn judgment pity and in death and now.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThou Who hast borne all burdens bear our load\nBear Thou our load whatever load it be;\nOur guilt our shame our helpless misery\nBear Thou Who only canst O God my God.\nSeek us and find us for we cannot Thee\nOr seek or find or hold or cleave unto:\nWe cannot do or undo; Lord undo\nOur self-undoing for Thine is the key\nOf all we are not though we might have been.\nDear Lord if ever mercy moved Thy mind\nIf so be love of us can move Thee yet\nIf still the nail-prints in Thy Hands are seen\nRemember us--yea how shouldst Thou forget?\nRemember us for good and seek and find.\n\n\n# III.\n\nEach soul I might have succored may have slain\nAll souls shall face me at the last Appeal\nThat great last moment poised for woe or weal\nThat final moment for man’s bliss or bane.\nVanity of vanities yea all is vain\nWhich then will not avail or help or heal:\nDisfeatured faces worn-out knees that kneel\nWill more avail than strength or beauty then.\nLord by Thy Passion--when Thy Face was marred\nIn sight of earth and hell tumultuous\nAnd Thy heart failed in Thee like melting wax\nAnd Thy Blood dropped more precious than the nard--\nLord for Thy sake not ours supply our lacks\nFor Thine own sake not ours Christ pity us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "in-progress": { - "title": "“In Progress”", - "body": "Ten years ago it seemed impossible\nThat she should ever grow so calm as this,\nWith self-remembrance in her warmest kiss\nAnd dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.\nSlow-speaking when she had some fact to tell,\nSilent with long-unbroken silences,\nCentered in self yet not unpleased to please,\nGravely monotonous like a passing bell.\nMindful of drudging daily common things,\nPatient at pastime, patient at her work,\nWearied perhaps but strenuous certainly.\nSometimes I fancy we may one day see\nHer head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk\nAnd her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-an-artists-studio": { - "title": "“In an Artist’s Studio”", - "body": "One face looks out from all his canvases,\nOne selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:\nWe found her hidden just behind those screens,\nThat mirror gave back all her loveliness.\nA queen in opal or in ruby dress,\nA nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,\nA saint, an angel--every canvas means\nThe same one meaning, neither more or less.\nHe feeds upon her face by day and night,\nAnd she with true kind eyes looks back on him,\nFair as the moon and joyful as the light:\nNot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;\nNot as she is, but was when hope shone bright;\nNot as she is, but as she fills his dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-the-bleak-midwinter": { - "title": "“In the Bleak Midwinter”", - "body": "In the bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan\nEarth stood hard as iron water like a stone;\nSnow had fallen snow on snow snow on snow\nIn the bleak midwinter long ago.\n\nOur God Heaven cannot hold Him nor earth sustain;\nHeaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.\nIn the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed\nThe Lord God Almighty Jesus Christ.\n\nEnough for Him whom cherubim worship night and day\nBreastful of milk and a mangerful of hay;\nEnough for Him whom angels fall before\nThe ox and ass and camel which adore.\n\nAngels and archangels may have gathered there\nCherubim and seraphim thronged the air;\nBut His mother only in her maiden bliss\nWorshipped the beloved with a kiss.\n\nWhat can I give Him poor as I am?\nIf I were a shepherd I would bring a lamb;\nIf I were a Wise Man I would do my part;\nYet what I can I give Him: give my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "in-the-willow-shade": { - "title": "“In the Willow Shade”", - "body": "I sat beneath a willow tree,\nWhere water falls and calls;\nWhile fancies upon fancies solaced me,\nSome true, and some were false.\n\nWho set their heart upon a hope\nThat never comes to pass,\nDroop in the end like fading heliotrope\nThe sun’s wan looking-glass.\n\nWho set their will upon a whim\nClung to through good and ill,\nAre wrecked alike whether they sink or swim,\nOr hit or miss their will.\n\nAll things are vain that wax and wane,\nFor which we waste our breath;\nLove only doth not wane and is not vain,\nLove only outlives death.\n\nA singing lark rose toward the sky,\nCircling he sang amain;\nHe sang, a speck scarce visible sky-high,\nAnd then he sank again.\n\nA second like a sunlit spark\nFlashed singing up his track;\nBut never overtook that foremost lark,\nAnd songless fluttered back.\n\nA hovering melody of birds\nHaunted the air above;\nThey clearly sang contentment without words,\nAnd youth and joy and love.\n\nO silvery weeping willow tree\nWith all leaves shivering,\nHave you no purpose but to shadow me\nBeside this rippled spring?\n\nOn this first fleeting day of Spring,\nFor Winter is gone by,\nAnd every bird on every quivering wing\nFloats in a sunny sky;\n\nOn this first Summer-like soft day,\nWhile sunshine steeps the air,\nAnd every cloud has gat itself away,\nAnd birds sing everywhere.\n\nHave you no purpose in the world\nBut thus to shadow me\nWith all your tender drooping twigs unfurled,\nO weeping willow tree?\n\nWith all your tremulous leaves outspread\nBetwixt me and the sun,\nWhile here I loiter on a mossy bed\nWith half my work undone;\n\nMy work undone, that should be done\nAt once with all my might;\nFor after the long day and lingering sun\nComes the unworking night.\n\nThis day is lapsing on its way,\nIs lapsing out of sight;\nAnd after all the chances of the day\nComes the resourceless night.\n\nThe weeping willow shook its head\nAnd stretched its shadow long;\nThe west grew crimson, the sun smoldered red,\nThe birds forbore a song.\n\nSlow wind sighed through the willow leaves,\nThe ripple made a moan,\nThe world drooped murmuring like a thing that grieves;\nAnd then I felt alone.\n\nI rose to go, and felt the chill,\nAnd shivered as I went;\nYet shivering wondered, and I wonder still,\nWhat more that willow meant;\n\nThat silvery weeping willow tree\nWith all leaves shivering,\nWhich spent one long day overshadowing me\nBeside a spring in Spring.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "is-it-well-with-the-child": { - "title": "“Is It Well with the Child?”", - "body": "Safe where I cannot die yet,\nSafe where I hope to lie too,\nSafe from the fume and the fret;\nYou, and you,\nWhom I never forget.\nSafe from the frost and the snow,\nSafe from the storm and the sun,\nSafe where the seeds wait to grow\nOne by one,\nAnd to come back in blow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "later-life": { - "title": "“Later Life”", - "body": "Something this foggy day, a something which\nIs neither of this fog nor of today,\nHas set me dreaming of the winds that play\nPast certain cliffs, along one certain beach,\nAnd turn the topmost edge of waves to spray:\nAh pleasant pebbly strand so far away,\nSo out of reach while quite within my reach,\nAs out of reach as India or Cathay!\nI am sick of where I am and where I am not,\nI am sick of foresight and of memory,\nI am sick of all I have and all I see,\nI am sick of self, and there is nothing new;\nOh weary impatient patience of my lot!\nThus with myself: how fares it, Friends, with you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-came-down-at-christmas": { - "title": "“Love Came down at Christmas”", - "body": "Love came down at Christmas,\nLove all lovely, Love Divine,\nLove was born at Christmas,\nStar and Angels gave the sign.\n\nWorship we the Godhead,\nLove Incarnate, Love Divine,\nWorship we our Jesus,\nBut wherewith for sacred sign?\n\nLove shall be our token,\nLove be yours and love be mine,\nLove to God and all men,\nLove for plea and gift and sign.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "many-in-aftertimes-will-say-of-you": { - "title": "“Many in Aftertimes Will Say of You”", - "body": "_“Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti.”_\n --Dante\n\n_“Contando i casi della vita nostra.”_\n --Petrarca\n\nMany in aftertimes will say of you\n“He loved her”--while of me what will they say?\nNot that I loved you more than just in play,\nFor fashion’s sake as idle women do.\nEven let them prate; who know not what we knew\nOf love and parting in exceeding pain.\nOf parting hopeless here to meet again,\nHopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view.\nBut by my heart of love laid bare to you.\nMy love that you can make not void nor vain,\nLove that foregoes you but to claim anew\nBeyond this passage of the gate of death,\nI charge you at the Judgment make it plain\nMy love of you was life and not a breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "marvel-of-marvels": { - "title": "“Marvel of Marvels”", - "body": "Marvel of marvels, if I myself shall behold\nWith mine own eyes my King in His city of gold;\nWhere the least of lambs is spotless white in the fold,\nWhere the least and last of saints in spotless white is stoled,\nWhere the dimmest head beyond a moon is aureoled.\nO saints, my beloved, now mouldering to mould in the mould,\nShall I see you lift your heads, see your cerements unroll’d,\nSee with these very eyes? who now in darkness and cold\nTremble for the midnight cry, the rapture, the tale untold,--\nThe Bridegroom cometh, cometh, His Bride to enfold!\n\nCold it is, my beloved, since your funeral bell was toll’d:\nCold it is, O my King, how cold alone on the wold!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "may": { - "title": "“May”", - "body": "I cannot tell you how it was,\nBut this I know: it came to pass\nUpon a bright and sunny day\nWhen May was young; ah, pleasant May!\nAs yet the poppies were not born\nBetween the blades of tender corn;\nThe last egg had not hatched as yet,\nNor any bird foregone its mate.\n\nI cannot tell you what it was,\nBut this I know: it did but pass.\nIt passed away with sunny May,\nLike all sweet things it passed away,\nAnd left me old, and cold, and gray.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "mirage": { - "title": "“Mirage”", - "body": "The hope I dreamed of was a dream,\nWas but a dream; and now I wake,\nExceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,\nFor a dream’s sake.\n\nI hang my harp upon a tree,\nA weeping willow in a lake;\nI hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapped\nFor a dream’s sake.\n\nLie still, lie still, my breaking heart;\nMy silent heart, lie still and break:\nLife, and the world, and mine own self, are changed\nFor a dream’s sake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-secret": { - "title": "“My Secret”", - "body": "I tell my secret? No indeed not I:\nPerhaps some day who knows?\nBut not to-day; it froze and blows and snows\nAnd you’re too curious: fie!\nYou want to hear it? well:\nOnly my secret’s mine and I won’t tell.\n\nOr after all perhaps there’s none:\nSuppose there is no secret after all\nBut only just my fun.\nTo-day’s a nipping day a biting day;\nIn which one wants a shawl\nA veil a cloak and other wraps:\nI cannot ope to every one who taps\nAnd let the draughts come whistling through my hall;\nCome bounding and surrounding me\nCome buffeting astounding me\nNipping and clipping through my wraps and all.\nI wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows\nHis nose to Russian snows\nTo be pecked at by every wind that blows?\nYou would not peck? I thank you for good-will\nBelieve but leave that truth untested still.\n\nSpring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust\nMarch with its peck of dust\nNor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers\nNor even May whose flowers\nOne frost may wither through the sunless hours.\n\nPerhaps some languid summer day\nWhen drowsy birds sing less and less\nAnd golden fruit is ripening to excess\nIf there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud\nAnd the warm wind is neither still nor loud\nPerhaps my secret I may say\nOr you may guess.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "no-thank-you-john": { - "title": "“No, Thank You, John”", - "body": "I never said I loved you, John:\nWhy will you tease me, day by day,\nAnd wax a weariness to think upon\nWith always “do” and “pray”?\n\nYou know I never loved you, John;\nNo fault of mine made me your toast:\nWhy will you haunt me with a face as wan\nAs shows an hour--old ghost?\n\nI dare say Meg or Moll would take\nPity upon you, if you’d ask:\nAnd pray don’t remain single for my sake\nWho can’t perform that task.\n\nI have no heart?--Perhaps I have not;\nBut then you’re mad to take offence\nThat I don’t give you what I have not got:\nUse your common sense.\n\nLet bygones be bygones:\nDon’t call me false, who owed not to be true:\nI’d rather answer “No” to fifty Johns\nThan answer “Yes” to you.\n\nLet’s mar our pleasant days no more,\nSong-birds of passage, days of youth:\nCatch at to-day, forget the days before:\nI’ll wink at your untruth.\n\nLet us strike hands as hearty friends;\nNo more, no less: and friendship’s good:\nOnly don’t keep in view ulterior ends,\nAnd points not understood\n\nIn open treaty. Rise above\nQuibbles and shuffling off and on:\nHere’s friendship for you if you like; but love,--\nNo, thank you, John.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-and-new-year-ditties": { - "title": "“Old and New Year Ditties”", - "body": "# I.\n\nNew Year met me somewhat sad:\nOld Year leaves me tired\nStripped of favorite things I had\nBalked of much desired:\nYet farther on my road to-day\nGod willing farther on my way.\n\nNew Year coming on apace\nWhat have you to give me?\nBring you scathe or bring you grace\nFace me with an honest face;\nYou shall not deceive me:\nBe it good or ill be it what you will\nIt needs shall help me on my road\nMy rugged way to heaven please God.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWatch with me men women and children dear\nYou whom I love for whom I hope and fear\nWatch with me this last vigil of the year.\nSome hug their business some their pleasure-scheme;\nSome seize the vacant hour to sleep or dream;\nHeart locked in heart some kneel and watch apart.\n\nWatch with me blessed spirits who delight\nAll through the holy night to walk in white\nOr take your ease after the long-drawn fight.\nI know not if they watch with me: I know\nThey count this eve of resurrection slow\nAnd cry “How long?” with urgent utterance strong.\n\nWatch with me Jesus in my loneliness:\nThough others say me nay yet say Thou yes;\nThough others pass me by stop Thou to bless.\nYea Thou dost stop with me this vigil night;\nTo-night of pain to-morrow of delight:\nI Love am Thine; Thou Lord my God art mine.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPassing away saith the World passing away:\nChances beauty and youth sapped day by day:\nThy life never continueth in one stay.\nIs the eye waxen dim is the dark hair changing to gray\nThat hath won neither laurel nor bay?\nI shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:\nThou root-stricken shalt not rebuild thy decay\nOn my bosom for aye.\nThen I answered: Yea.\n\nPassing away saith my Soul passing away:\nWith its burden of fear and hope of labor and play;\nHearken what the past doth witness and say:\nRust in thy gold a moth is in thine array\nA canker is in thy bud thy leaf must decay.\nAt midnight at cock-crow at morning one certain day\nLo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:\nWatch thou and pray.\nThen I answered: Yea.\n\nPassing away saith my God passing away:\nWinter passeth after the long delay:\nNew grapes on the vine new figs on the tender spray\nTurtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.\nThough I tarry wait for Me trust Me watch and pray.\nArise come away night is past and lo it is day\nMy love My sister My spouse thou shalt hear Me say.\nThen I answered: Yea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "a-pause": { - "title": "“A Pause”", - "body": "They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,\nAnd the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;\nWhile my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.\nI did not hear the birds about the eaves,\nNor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:\nOnly my soul kept watch from day to day,\nMy thirsty soul kept watch for one away:--\nPerhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.\nAt length there came the step upon the stair,\nUpon the lock the old familiar hand:\nThen first my spirit seemed to scent the air\nOf Paradise; then first the tardy sand\nOf time ran golden; and I felt my hair\nPut on a glory, and my soul expand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-princes-progress": { - "title": "From “The Prince’s Progress”", - "body": "Too late for love, too late for joy,\nToo late, too late!\nYou loiter’d on the road too long,\nYou trifled at the gate:\nThe enchanted dove upon her branch\nDied without a mate;\nThe enchanted princess in her tower\nSlept, died, behind the grate;\nHer heart was starving all this while\nYou made it wait.\n\nTen years ago, five years ago,\nOne year ago,\nEven then you had arrived in time,\nThough somewhat slow;\nThen you had known her living face\nWhich now you cannot know:\nThe frozen fountain would have leap’d,\nThe buds gone on to blow,\nThe warm south wind would have awaked\nTo melt the snow.\n\nIs she fair now as she lies?\nOnce she was fair;\nMeet queen for any kingly king,\nWith gold-dust on her hair.\nNow there are poppies in her locks,\nWhite poppies she must wear;\nMust wear a veil to shroud her face\nAnd the want graven there:\nOr is the hunger fed at length,\nCast off the care?\n\nWe never saw her with a smile\nOr with a frown;\nHer bed seem’d never soft to her,\nThough toss’d of down;\nShe little heeded what she wore,\nKirtle, or wreath, or gown;\nWe think her white brows often ached\nBeneath her crown,\nTill silvery hairs show’d in her locks\nThat used to be so brown.\n\nWe never heard her speak in haste:\nHer tones were sweet,\nAnd modulated just so much\nAs it was meet:\nHer heart sat silent through the noise\nAnd concourse of the street.\nThere was no hurry in her hands,\nNo hurry in her feet;\nThere was no bliss drew nigh to her,\nThat she might run to greet.\n\nYou should have wept her yesterday,\nWasting upon her bed:\nBut wherefore should you weep to-day\nThat she is dead?\nLo, we who love weep not to-day,\nBut crown her royal head.\nLet be these poppies that we strew,\nYour roses are too red:\nLet be these poppies, not for you\nCut down and spread.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-processional-of-creation": { - "title": "“A Processional of Creation”", - "body": "> _All._\n\nI All-Creation sing my song of praise\nTo God Who made me and vouchsafes my days\nAnd sends me forth by multitudinous ways.\n\n\n> _Seraph._\n\nI like my Brethren burn eternally\nWith love of Him Who is Love and loveth me;\nThe Holy Holy Holy Unity.\n\n\n> _Cherub._\n\nI with my Brethren gaze eternally\nOn Him Who is Wisdom and Who knoweth me;\nThe Holy Holy Holy Trinity.\n\n\n> _All Angels._\n\nWe rule we serve we work we store His treasure\nWhose vessels are we brimmed with strength and pleasure;\nOur joys fulfil yea overfill our measure.\n\n\n> _Heavens._\n\nWe float before the Presence Infinite\nWe cluster round the Throne in our delight\nRevolving and rejoicing in God’s sight.\n\n\n> _Firmament._\n\nI blue and beautiful and framed of air\nAt sunrise and at sunset grow most fair;\nHis glory by my glories I declare.\n\n\n> _Powers._\n\nWe Powers are powers because He makes us strong;\nWherefore we roll all rolling orbs along\nWe move all moving things and sing our song.\n\n\n> _Sun._\n\nI blaze to Him in mine engarlanding\nOf rays I flame His whole burnt-offering\nWhile as a bridegroom I rejoice and sing.\n\n\n> _Moon._\n\nI follow and am fair and do His Will;\nThrough all my changes I am faithful still\nFull-orbed or strait His mandate to fulfil.\n\n\n> _Stars._\n\nWe Star-hosts numerous innumerous\nThrong space with energy untumultuous\nAnd work His Will Whose eye beholdeth us.\n\n\n> _Galaxies and Nebulae._\n\nNo thing is far or near; and therefore we\nFloat neither far nor near; but where we be\nWeave dances round the Throne perpetually.\n\n\n> _Comets and Meteors._\n\nOur lights dart here and there whirl to and fro\nWe flash and vanish we die down and glow;\nAll doing His Will Who bids us do it so.\n\n\n> _Showers._\n\nWe give ourselves; and be we great or small\nThus are we made like Him Who giveth all\nLike Him Whose gracious pleasure bids us fall.\n\n\n> _Dews._\n\nWe give ourselves in silent secret ways\nSpending and spent in silence full of grace;\nAnd thus are made like God and show His praise.\n\n\n> _Winds._\n\nWe sift the air and winnow all the earth;\nAnd God Who poised our weights and weighs our worth\nAccepts the worship of our solemn mirth.\n\n\n> _Fire._\n\nMy power and strength are His Who fashioned me\nOrdained me image of His Jealousy\nForged me His weapon fierce exceedingly.\n\n\n> _Heat._\n\nI glow unto His glory and do good:\nI glow and bring to life both bud and brood;\nI glow and ripen harvest-crops for food.\n\n\n> _Winter and Summer._\n\nOur wealth and joys and beauties celebrate\nHis wealth of beauty Who sustains our state\nBefore Whose changelessness we alternate.\n\n\n> _Spring and Autumn._\n\nI hope--and I remember--we give place\nEither to other with contented grace\nAcceptable and lovely all our days.\n\n\n> _Frost._\n\nI make the unstable stable binding fast\nThe world of waters prone to ripple past:\nThus praise I God Whose mercies I forecast.\n\n\n> _Cold._\n\nI rouse and goad the slothful apt to nod\nI stir and urge the laggards with my rod:\nMy praise is not of men yet I praise God.\n\n\n> _Snow._\n\nMy whiteness shadoweth Him Who is most fair\nAll spotless: yea my whiteness which I wear\nExalts His Purity beyond compare.\n\n\n> _Vapors._\n\nWe darken sun and moon and blot the day\nThe good Will of our Maker to obey:\nTill to the glory of God we pass away.\n\n\n> _Night._\n\nMoon and all stars I don for diadem\nTo make me fair: I cast myself and them\nBefore His feet Who knows us gem from gem.\n\n\n> _Day._\n\nI shout before Him in my plenitude\nOf light and warmth of hope and wealth and food;\nAscribing all good to the Only Good.\n\n\n> _Light and Darkness._\n\nI am God’s dwelling-place--And also I\nMake His pavilion--Lo we bide and fly\nExulting in the Will of God Most High.\n\n\n> _Lightning and Thunder._\n\nWe indivisible flash forth His Fame\nWe thunder forth the glory of His Name\nIn harmony of resonance and flame.\n\n\n> _Clouds._\n\nSweet is our store exhaled from sea or river:\nWe wear a rainbow praising God the Giver\nBecause His mercy is for ever and ever.\n\n\n> _Earth._\n\nI rest in Him rejoicing: resting so\nAnd so rejoicing in that I am low;\nYet known of Him and following on to know.\n\n\n> _Mountains._\n\nOur heights which laud Him sink abased before\nHim higher than the highest evermore:\nGod higher than the highest we adore.\n\n\n> _Hills._\n\nWe green-tops praise Him and we fruitful heads\nWhereon the sunshine and the dew He sheds:\nWe green-tops praise Him rising from out beds.\n\n\n> _Green Things._\n\nWe all green things we blossoms bright or dim\nTrees bushes brushwood corn and grasses slim\nWe lift our many-favored lauds to Him.\n\n\n> _Rose--Lily--Violet._\n\nI praise Him on my thorn which I adorn--\nAnd I amid my world of thistle and thorn--\nAnd I within my veil where I am born.\n\n\n> _Apple--Citron--Pomegranate._\n\nWe Apple-blossom Citron Pomegranate\nWe clothed of God without our toil and fret\nWe offer fatness where His Throne is set.\n\n\n> _Vine--Cedar--Palm._\n\nI proffer Him my sweetness who am sweet--\nI bow my strength in fragrance at His feet--\nI wave myself before His Judgment Seat.\n\n\n> _Medicinal Herbs._\n\nI bring refreshment--I bring ease and calm--\nI lavish strength and healing--I am balm--\nWe work His pitiful Will and chant our psalm.\n\n\n> _A Spring._\n\nClear my pure fountain clear and pure my rill\nMy fountain and mine outflow deep and still\nI set His semblance forth and do His Will.\n\n\n> _Sea._\n\nTo-day I praise God with a sparkling face\nMy thousand thousand waves all uttering praise:\nTo-morrow I commit me to His Grace.\n\n\n> _Floods._\n\nWe spring and swell meandering to and fro\nFrom height to depth from depth to depth we flow\nWe fertilize the world and praise Him so.\n\n\n> _Whales and Sea Mammals._\n\nWe Whales and Monsters gambol in His sight\nRejoicing every day and every night\nSafe in the tender keeping of His Might.\n\n\n> _Fishes._\n\nOur fashions and our colors and our speeds\nSet forth His praise Who framed us and Who feeds\nWho knows our number and regards our needs.\n\n\n> _Birds._\n\nWinged Angels of this visible world we fly\nTo sing God’s praises in the lofty sky;\nWe scale the height to praise our Lord most High.\n\n\n> _Eagle and Dove._\n\nI the sun-gazing Eagle--I the Dove\nWith plumes of softness and a note of love--\nWe praise by divers gifts One God above.\n\n\n> _Beasts and Cattle._\n\nWe forest Beasts--We Beasts of hill or cave--\nWe border-loving Creatures of the wave--\nWe praise our King with voices deep and grave.\n\n\n> _Small Animals._\n\nGod forms us weak and small but pours out all\nWe need and notes us while we stand or fall:\nWherefore we praise Him weak and safe and small.\n\n\n> _Lamb._\n\nI praise my loving Lord Who maketh me\nHis type by harmless sweet simplicity:\nYet He the Lamb of lambs incomparably.\n\n\n> _Lion._\n\nI praise the Lion of the Royal Race\nStrongest in fight and swiftest in the chase:\nWith all my might I leap and lavish praise.\n\n\n> _All Men._\n\nAll creatures sing around us and we sing:\nWe bring our own selves as our offering\nOur very selves we render to our King.\n\n\n> _Israel._\n\nFlock of our Shepherd’s pasture and His fold\nPurchased and well-beloved from days of old\nWe tell His praise which still remains untold.\n\n\n> _Priests._\n\nWe free-will Shepherds tend His sheep and feed;\nWe follow Him while caring for their need;\nWe follow praising Him and them we lead.\n\n\n> _Servants of God._\n\nWe love God for He loves us; we are free\nIn serving Him who serve Him willingly:\nAs kings we reign and praise His Majesty.\n\n\n> _Holy and Humble Persons._\n\nAll humble souls he calls and sanctifies;\nAll holy souls He calls to make them wise;\nAccepting all His free-will sacrifice.\n\n\n> _Babes._\n\nHe maketh me--And me--And me--To be\nHis blessed little ones around His knee\nWho praise Him by mere love confidingly.\n\n\n> _Women._\n\nGod makes our service love and makes our wage\nLove: so we wend on patient pilgrimage\nExtolling Him by love from age to age.\n\n\n> _Men._\n\nGod gives us power to rule: He gives us power\nTo rule ourselves and prune the exuberant flower\nOf youth and worship Him hour after hour.\n\n\n> _Spirits and Souls--_\n\nLo in the hidden world we chant our chant\nTo Him Who fills us that we nothing want\nTo Him Whose bounty leaves our craving scant.\n\n\n> _of Babes--_\n\nWith milky mouths we praise God from the breast\nCalled home betimes to rest the perfect rest\nBy love and joy fufilling His behest.\n\n\n> _of Women--_\n\nWe praise His Will which made us what He would\nHis Will which fashioned us and called us good\nHis Will our plenary beatitude.\n\n> _of Men._\n\nWe praise His Will Who bore with us so long\nWho out of weakness wrought us swift and strong\nChampions of right and putters-down of wrong.\n\n\n> _All._\n\nLet everything that hath or hath not breath\nLet days and endless days let life and death\nPraise God praise God praise God His creature saith.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "promises-like-pie-crust": { - "title": "“Promises Like Pie-Crust”", - "body": "Promise me no promises,\nSo will I not promise you:\nKeep we both our liberties,\nNever false and never true:\nLet us hold the die uncast,\nFree to come as free to go:\nFor I cannot know your past,\nAnd of mine what can you know?\n\nYou, so warm, may once have been\nWarmer towards another one:\nI, so cold, may once have seen\nSunlight, once have felt the sun:\nWho shall show us if it was\nThus indeed in time of old?\nFades the image from the glass,\nAnd the fortune is not told.\n\nIf you promised, you might grieve\nFor lost liberty again:\nIf I promised, I believe\nI should fret to break the chain.\nLet us be the friends we were,\nNothing more but nothing less:\nMany thrive on frugal fare\nWho would perish of excess.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "remember": { - "title": "“Remember”", - "body": "Remember me when I am gone away\nGone far away into the silent land;\nWhen you can no more hold me by the hand\nNor I half turn to go yet turning stay.\nRemember me when no more day by day\nYou tell me of our future that you planned:\nOnly remember me; you understand\nIt will be late to counsel then or pray.\nYet if you should forget me for a while\nAnd afterwards remember do not grieve:\nFor if the darkness and corruption leave\nA vestige of the thoughts that once I had\nBetter by far you should forget and smile\nThan that you should remember and be sad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "she-sat-and-sang-alway": { - "title": "“She Sat and Sang Alway”", - "body": "She sat and sang alway\nBy the green margin of a stream,\nWatching the fishes leap and play\nBeneath the glad sunbeam.\n\nI sat and wept alway\nBeneath the moon’s most shadowy beam,\nWatching the blossoms of the May\nWeep leaves into the stream.\n\nI wept for memory;\nShe sang for hope that is so fair:\nMy tears were swallowed by the sea;\nHer songs died on the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "shut-out": { - "title": "“Shut Out”", - "body": "The door was shut. I looked between\nIts iron bars; and saw it lie\nMy garden mine beneath the sky\nPied with all flowers bedewed and green:\n\nFrom bough to bough the song-birds crossed\nFrom flower to flower the moths and bees;\nWith all its nests and stately trees\nIt had been mine and it was lost.\n\nA shadowless spirit kept the gate\nBlank and unchanging like the grave.\nI peering through said: “Let me have\nSome buds to cheer my outcast state.”\n\nHe answered not. “Or give me then\nBut one small twig from shrub or tree;\nAnd bid my home remember me\nUntil I come to it again.”\n\nThe spirit was silent; but he took\nMortar and stone to build a wall;\nHe left no loophole great or small\nThrough which my straining eyes might look:\n\nSo now I sit here quite alone\nBlinded with tears; nor grieve for that\nFor naught is left worth looking at\nSince my delightful land is gone.\n\nA violet bed is budding near\nWherein a lark has made her nest:\nAnd good they are but not the best;\nAnd dear they are but not so dear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "silent-noon": { - "title": "“Silent Noon”", - "body": "Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,--\nThe finger-points look through like rosy blooms:\nYour eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms\n’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.\nAll round our nest, far as the eye can pass,\nAre golden kingcup-fields with silver edge\nWhere the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.\n’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.\n\nDeep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly\nHangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:--\nSo this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.\nOh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,\nThis close-companioned inarticulate hour\nWhen twofold silence was the song of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sleeping-at-last": { - "title": "“Sleeping at Last”", - "body": "Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,\nSleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,\nCold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover,\nSleeping at last.\n\nNo more a tired heart downcast or overcast,\nNo more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,\nSleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.\n\nFast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover\nCannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.\nUnder the purple thyme and the purple clover\nSleeping at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "somewhere-or-other": { - "title": "“Somewhere or Other”", - "body": "Somewhere or other there must surely be\nThe face not seen, the voice not heard,\nThe heart that not yet--never yet--ah me!\nMade answer to my word.\n\nSomewhere or other, may be near or far;\nPast land and sea, clean out of sight;\nBeyond the wandering moon, beyond the star\nThat tracks her night by night.\n\nSomewhere or other, may be far or near;\nWith just a wall, a hedge, between;\nWith just the last leaves of the dying year\nFallen on a turf grown green.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-quiet": { - "title": "“Spring Quiet”", - "body": "Gone were but the Winter,\nCome were but the Spring,\nI would go to a covert\nWhere the birds sing;\n\nWhere in the whitethorn\nSingeth a thrush,\nAnd a robin sings\nIn the holly-bush.\n\nFull of fresh scents\nAre the budding boughs\nArching high over\nA cool green house:\n\nFull of sweet scents,\nAnd whispering air\nWhich sayeth softly:\n“We spread no snare;”\n\n“Here dwell in safety,\nHere dwell alone,\nWith a clear stream\nAnd a mossy stone.”\n\n“Here the sun shineth\nMost shadily;\nHere is heard an echo\nOf the far sea,\nThough far off it be.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-thread-of-life": { - "title": "“The Thread of Life”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe irresponsive silence of the land,\nThe irresponsive sounding of the sea,\nSpeak both one message of one sense to me:--\nAloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand\nThou too aloof bound with the flawless band\nOf inner solitude; we bind not thee;\nBut who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?\nWhat heart shall touch thy heart? what hand thy hand?--\nAnd I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,\nAnd sometimes I remember days of old\nWhen fellowship seemed not so far to seek\nAnd all the world and I seemed much less cold,\nAnd at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,\nAnd hope felt strong and life itself not weak.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThus am I mine own prison. Everything\nAround me free and sunny and at ease:\nOr if in shadow, in a shade of trees\nWhich the sun kisses, where the gay birds sing\nAnd where all winds make various murmuring;\nWhere bees are found, with honey for the bees;\nWhere sounds are music, and where silences\nAre music of an unlike fashioning.\nThen gaze I at the merrymaking crew,\nAnd smile a moment and a moment sigh\nThinking: Why can I not rejoice with you?\nBut soon I put the foolish fancy by:\nI am not what I have nor what I do;\nBut what I was I am, I am even I.\n\n\n# III.\n\nTherefore myself is that one only thing\nI hold to use or waste, to keep or give;\nMy sole possession every day I live,\nAnd still mine own despite Time’s winnowing.\nEver mine own, while moons and seasons bring\nFrom crudeness ripeness mellow and sanitive;\nEver mine own, till Death shall ply his sieve;\nAnd still mine own, when saints break grave and sing.\nAnd this myself as king unto my King\nI give, to Him Who gave Himself for me;\nWho gives Himself to me, and bids me sing\nA sweet new song of His redeemed set free;\nhe bids me sing: O death, where is thy sting?\nAnd sing: O grave, where is thy victory?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-three-enemies": { - "title": "“The Three Enemies”", - "body": "> _The Flesh_\n\n“Sweet thou art pale.”\n“More pale to see\nChrist hung upon the cruel tree\nAnd bore His Father’s wrath for me.”\n\n“Sweet thou art sad.”\n“Beneath a rod\nMore heavy Christ for my sake trod\nThe winepress of the wrath of God.”\n\n“Sweet thou art weary.”\n“Not so Christ:\nWhose mighty love of me sufficed\nFor Strength Salvation Eucharist.”\n\n“Sweet thou art footsore.”\n“If I bleed\nHis feet have bled: yea in my need\nHis Heart once bled for mine indeed.”\n\n\n> _The World_\n\n“Sweet thou art young.”\n“So He was young\nWho for my sake in silence hung\nUpon the Cross with Passion wrung.”\n\n“Look thou art fair.”\n“He was more fair\nThan men Who deigned for me to wear\nA visage marred beyond compare.”\n\n“And thou hast riches.”\n“Daily bread:\nAll else is His; Who living dead\nFor me lacked where to lay His Head.”\n\n“And life is sweet.”\n“It was not so\nTo Him Whose Cup did overflow\nWith mine unutterable woe.”\n\n\n> _The Devil_\n\n“Thou drinkest deep.”\n“When Christ would sup\nHe drained the dregs from out my cup:\nSo how should I be lifted up?”\n\n“Thou shalt win Glory.”\n“In the skies\nLord Jesus cover up mine eyes\nLest they should look on vanities.”\n\n“Thou shalt have Knowledge.”\n“Helpless dust\nIn Thee O Lord I put my trust:\nAnswer Thou for me Wise and Just.”\n\n“And Might.”\n“Get thee behind me. Lord\nWho hast redeemed and not abhorred\nMy soul O keep it by Thy Word.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-triad": { - "title": "“A Triad”", - "body": "Three sang of love together: one with lips\nCrimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,\nFlushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;\nAnd one there sang who soft and smooth as snow\nBloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;\nAnd one was blue with famine after love,\nWho like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low\nThe burden of what those were singing of.\nOne shamed herself in love; one temperately\nGrew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;\nOne famished died for love. Thus two of three\nTook death for love and won him after strife;\nOne droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:\nAll on the threshold, yet all short of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "twice": { - "title": "“Twice”", - "body": "I took my heart in my hand\n(O my love O my love)\nI said: Let me fall or stand\nLet me live or die\nBut this once hear me speak\n(O my love O my love);\nYet a woman’s words are weak:\nYou should speak not I.\n\nYou took my heart in your hand\nWith a friendly smile\nWith a critical eye you scanned\nThen set it down\nAnd said: It is still unripe\nBetter wait awhile;\nWait while the skylarks pipe\nTill the corn grows brown.\n\nAs you set it down it broke--\nBroke but I did not wince;\nI smiled at the speech you spoke\nAt your judgment that I heard:\nBut I have not often smiled\nSince then nor questioned since\nNor cared for corn-flowers wild\nNor sung with the singing bird.\n\nI take my heart in my hand\nO my God O my God\nMy broken heart in my hand:\nThou hast seen judge Thou.\nMy hope was written on sand\nO my God O my God;\nNow let Thy judgment stand--\nYea judge me now.\n\nThis contemned of a man\nThis marred one heedless day\nThis heart take Thou to scan\nBoth within and without:\nRefine with fire its gold\nPurge Thou its dross away--\nYea hold it in Thy hold\nWhence none can pluck it out.\n\nI take my heart in my hand--\nI shall not die but live--\nBefore Thy face I stand;\nI for Thou callest such:\nAll that I have I bring\nAll that I am I give\nSmile Thou and I shall sing\nBut shall not question much.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "uphill": { - "title": "“Uphill”", - "body": "Does the road wind up-hill all the way?\nYes, to the very end.\nWill the day’s journey take the whole long day?\nFrom morn to night, my friend.\n\nBut is there for the night a resting-place?\nA roof for when the slow dark hours begin.\nMay not the darkness hide it from my face?\nYou cannot miss that inn.\n\nShall I meet other wayfarers at night?\nThose who have gone before.\nThen must I knock, or call when just in sight?\nThey will not keep you standing at that door.\n\nShall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?\nOf labour you shall find the sum.\nWill there be beds for me and all who seek?\nYea, beds for all who come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "we-lack-yet-cannot-fix-upon-the-lack": { - "title": "“We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack …”", - "body": "We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack:\nNot this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly.\nWe see the things we do not yearn to see\nAround us: and what see we glancing back?\nLost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack,\nHopes that were never ours yet seem’d to be,\nFor which we steer’d on life’s salt stormy sea\nBraving the sunstroke and the frozen pack.\nIf thus to look behind is all in vain,\nAnd all in vain to look to left or right,\nWhy face we not our future once again,\nLaunching with hardier hearts across the main,\nStraining dim eyes to catch the invisible sight,\nAnd strong to bear ourselves in patient pain?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "what-would-i-give": { - "title": "“What Would I Give”", - "body": "What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through,\nInstead of this heart of stone ice-cold whatever I do!\nHard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all.\n\nWhat would I give for words, if only words would come!\nBut now in its misery my spirit has fallen dumb.\nO merry friends, go your own way, I have never a word to say.\n\nWhat would I give for tears! Not smiles but scalding tears,\nTo wash the black mark clean, and to thaw the frost of years,\nTo wash the stain ingrain, and to make me clean again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "when-i-am-dead-my-dearest": { - "title": "“When I Am Dead My Dearest”", - "body": "When I am dead my dearest\nSing no sad songs for me;\nPlant thou no roses at my head\nNor shady cypress-tree:\nBe the green grass above me\nWith showers and dewdrops wet;\nAnd if thou wilt remember\nAnd if thou wilt forget.\n\nI shall not see the shadows\nI shall not feel the rain;\nI shall not hear the nightingale\nSing on as if in pain:\nAnd dreaming through the twilight\nThat doth not rise nor set\nHaply I may remember\nAnd haply may forget.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "who-has-seen-the-wind": { - "title": "“Who Has Seen the Wind?”", - "body": "Who has seen the wind?\nNeither I nor you:\nBut when the leaves hang trembling,\nThe wind is passing through.\n\nWho has seen the wind?\nNeither you nor I:\nBut when the trees bow down their heads,\nThe wind is passing by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "who-shall-deliver-me": { - "title": "“Who Shall Deliver Me?”", - "body": "God strengthen me to bear myself;\nThat heaviest weight of all to bear,\nInalienable weight of care.\n\nAll others are outside myself;\nI lock my door and bar them out\nThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.\n\nI lock my door upon myself,\nAnd bar them out; but who shall wall\nSelf from myself, most loathed of all?\n\nIf I could once lay down myself,\nAnd start self-purged upon the race\nThat all must run! Death runs apace.\n\nIf I could set aside myself,\nAnd start with lightened heart upon\nThe road by all men overgone!\n\nGod harden me against myself,\nThis coward with pathetic voice\nWho craves for ease and rest and joys\n\nMyself, arch-traitor to myself;\nMy hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,\nMy clog whatever road I go.\n\nYet One there is can curb myself,\nCan roll the strangling load from me\nBreak off the yoke and set me free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dante-gabriel-rossetti": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dante Gabriel Rossetti", - "birth": { - "year": 1828 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1882 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "the-cloud-confines": { - "title": "“The Cloud Confines”", - "body": "The day is dark and the night\nTo him that would search their heart;\nNo lips of cloud that will part\nNor morning song in the light:\nOnly, gazing alone,\nTo him wild shadows are shown,\nDeep under deep unknown\nAnd height above unknown height.\nStill we say as we go,\n“Strange to think by the way,\nWhatever there is to know,\nThat shall we know one day.”\n\nThe Past is over and fled;\nNam’d new, we name it the old;\nThereof some tale hath been told,\nBut no word comes from the dead;\nWhether at all they be,\nOr whether as bond or free,\nOr whether they too were we,\nOr by what spell they have sped.\nStill we say as we go,\n“Strange to think by the way,\nWhatever there is to know,\nThat shall we know one day.”\n\nWhat of the heart of hate\nThat beats in thy breast, O Time?\nRed strife from the furthest prime,\nAnd anguish of fierce debate;\nWar that shatters her slain,\nAnd peace that grinds them as grain,\nAnd eyes fix’d ever in vain\nOn the pitiless eyes of Fate.\nStill we say as we go,\n“Strange to think by the way,\nWhatever there is to know,\nThat shall we know one day.”\n\nWhat of the heart of love\nThat bleeds in thy breast, O Man?i\nThy kisses snatch’d ’neath the ban\nOf fangs that mock them above;\nThy bells prolong’d unto knells,\nThy hope that a breath dispels,\nThy bitter forlorn farewells\nAnd the empty echoes thereof?\nStill we say as we go,\n“Strange to think by the way,\nWhatever there is to know,\nThat shall we know one day.”\n\nThe sky leans dumb on the sea,\nAweary with all its wings;\nAnd oh! the song the sea sings\nIs dark everlastingly.\nOur past is clean forgot,\nOur present is and is not,\nOur future’s a seal’d seedplot,\nAnd what betwixt them are we?i\nWe who say as we go,\n“Strange to think by the way,\nWhatever there is to know,\nThat shall we know one day.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-heart-of-the-night": { - "title": "“The Heart of the Night”", - "body": "From child to youth; from youth to arduous man;\nFrom lethargy to fever of the heart;\nFrom faithful life to dream-dower’d days apart;\nFrom trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;--\nThus much of change in one swift cycle ran\nTill now. Alas, the soul!--how soon must she\nAccept her primal immortality,--\nThe flesh resume its dust whence it began?\n\nO Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!\nO Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late,\nEven yet renew this soul with duteous breath:\nThat when the peace is garner’d in from strife,\nThe work retriev’d, the will regenerate,\nThis soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hearts-haven": { - "title": "“Heart’s Haven”", - "body": "Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,\nCowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,--\nWith still tears showering and averted face,\nInexplicably fill’d with faint alarms:\nAnd oft from mine own spirit’s hurtling harms\nI crave the refuge of her deep embrace,--\nAgainst all ills the fortified strong place\nAnd sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.\n\nAnd Love, our light at night and shade at noon,\nLulls us to rest with songs, and turns away\nAll shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.\nLike the moon’s growth, his face gleams through his tune;\nAnd as soft waters warble to the moon,\nOur answering spirits chime one roundelay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-honeysuckle": { - "title": "“The Honeysuckle”", - "body": "I plucked a honeysuckle where\nThe hedge on high is quick with thorn,\nAnd climbing for the prize, was torn,\nAnd fouled my feet in quag-water;\nAnd by the thorns and by the wind\nThe blossom that I took was thinn’d,\nAnd yet I found it sweet and fair.\nThence to a richer growth I came,\nWhere, nursed in mellow intercourse,\nThe honeysuckles sprang by scores,\nNot harried like my single stem,\nAll virgin lamps of scent and dew.\nSo from my hand that first I threw,\nYet plucked not any more of them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "insomnia": { - "title": "“Insomnia”", - "body": "Thin are the night-skirts left behind\nBy daybreak hours that onward creep,\nAnd thin, alas! the shred of sleep\nThat wavers with the spirit’s wind:\nBut in half-dreams that shift and roll\nAnd still remember and forget,\nMy soul this hour has drawn your soul\nA little nearer yet.\n\nOur lives, most dear, are never near,\nOur thoughts are never far apart,\nThough all that draws us heart to heart\nSeems fainter now and now more clear.\nTo-night Love claims his full control,\nAnd with desire and with regret\nMy soul this hour has drawn your soul\nA little nearer yet.\n\nIs there a home where heavy earth\nMelts to bright air that breathes no pain,\nWhere water leaves no thirst again\nAnd springing fire is Love’s new birth?\nIf faith long bound to one true goal\nMay there at length its hope beget,\nMy soul that hour shall draw your soul\nFor ever nearer yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-last-confession": { - "title": "“A Last Confession”", - "body": "Our Lombard country-girls along the coast\nWear daggers in their garters: for they know\nThat they might hate another girl to death\nOr meet a German lover. Such a knife\nI bought her, with a hilt of horn and pearl.\nFather, you cannot know of all my thoughts\nThat day in going to meet her,--that last day\nFor the last time, she said;--of all the love\nAnd all the hopeless hope that she might change\nAnd go back with me. Ah! and everywhere,\nAt places we both knew along the road,\nSome fresh shape of herself as once she was\nGrew present at my side; until it seemed--\nSo close they gathered round me--they would all\nBe with me when I reached the spot at last,\nTo plead my cause with her against herself\nSo changed. O Father, if you knew all this\nYou cannot know, then you would know too, Father,\nAnd only then, if God can pardon me.\nWhat can be told I’ll tell, if you will hear.\nI passed a village-fair upon my road,\nAnd thought, being empty-handed, I would take\nSome little present: such might prove, I said,\nEither a pledge between us, or (God help me!)\nA parting gift. And there it was I bought\nThe knife I spoke of, such as women wear.\nThat day, some three hours afterwards, I found\nFor certain, it must be a parting gift.\nAnd, standing silent now at last, I looked\nInto her scornful face; and heard the sea\nStill trying hard to din into my ears\nSome speech it knew which still might change her heart,\nIf only it could make me understand.\nOne moment thus. Another, and her face\nSeemed further off than the last line of sea,\nSo that I thought, if now she were to speak\nI could not hear her. Then again I knew\nAll, as we stood together on the sand\nAt Iglio, in the first thin shade o’ the hills.\n“Take it,” I said, and held it out to her,\nWhile the hilt glanced within my trembling hold;\n“Take it and keep it for my sake,” I said.\nHer neck unbent not, neither did her eyes\nMove, nor her foot left beating of the sand;\nOnly she put it by from her and laughed.\nFather, you hear my speech and not her laugh;\nBut God heard that. Will God remember all?\nIt was another laugh than the sweet sound\nWhich rose from her sweet childish heart, that day\nEleven years before, when first I found her\nAlone upon the hill-side; and her curls\nShook down in the warm grass as she looked up\nOut of her curls in my eyes bent to hers.\nShe might have served a painter to pourtray\nThat heavenly child which in the latter days\nShall walk between the lion and the lamb.\nI had been for nights in hiding, worn and sick\nAnd hardly fed; and so her words at first\nSeemed fiftul like the talking of the trees\nAnd voices in the air that knew my name.\nAnd I remember that I sat me down\nUpon the slope with her, and thought the world\nMust be all over or had never been,\nWe seemed there so alone. And soon she told me\nHer parents both were gone away from her.\nI thought perhaps she meant that they had died;\nBut when I asked her this, she looked again\nInto my face and said that yestereve\nThey kissed her long, and wept and made her weep,\nAnd gave her all the bread they had with them,\nAnd then had gone together up the hill\nWhere we were sitting now, and had walked on\nInto the great red light; “and so,” she said,\n“I have come up here too; and when this evening\nThey step out of the light as they stepped in,\nI shall be here to kiss them.” And she laughed.\nThen I bethought me suddenly of the famine;\nAnd how the church-steps throughout all the town,\nWhen last I had been there a month ago,\nSwarmed with starved folk; and how the bread was weighed\nBy Austrians armed; and women that I knew\nFor wives and mothers walked the public street,\nSaying aloud that if their husbands feared\nTo snatch the children’s food, themselves would stay\nTill they had earned it there. So then this child\nWas piteous to me; for all told me then\nHer parents must have left her to God’s chance,\nTo man’s or to the Church’s charity,\nBecause of the great famine, rather than\nTo watch her growing thin between their knees.\nWith that, God took my mother’s voice and spoke,\nAnd sights and sounds came back and things long since,\nAnd all my childhood found me on the hills;\nAnd so I took her with me.\nI was young.\nScarce man then, Father: but the cause which gave\nThe wounds I die of now had brought me then\nSome wounds already; and I lived alone,\nAs any hiding hunted man must live.\nIt was no easy thing to keep a child\nIn safety; for herself it was not safe,\nAnd doubled my own danger: but I knew\nThat God would help me.\nYet a little while\nPardon me, Father, if I pause. I think\nI have been speaking to you of some matters\nThere was no need to speak of, have I not?\nYou do not know how clearly those things stood\nWithin my mind, which I have spoken of,\nNor how they strove for utterance. Life all past\nIs like the sky when the sun sets in it,\nClearest where furthest off.\nI told you how\nShe scorned my parting gift and laughed. And yet\nA woman’s laugh’s another thing sometimes:\nI think they laugh in Heaven. I know last night\nI dreamed I saw into the garden of God,\nWhere women walked whose painted images\nI have seen with candles round them in the church.\nThey bent this way and that, one to another,\nPlaying: and over the long golden hair\nOf each there floated like a ring of fire\nWhich when she stooped stooped with her, and when she rose\nRose with her. Then a breeze flew in among them,\nAs if a window had been opened in heaven\nFor God to give His blessing from, before\nThis world of ours should set; (for in my dream\nI thought our world was setting, and the sun\nFlared, a spent taper; ) and beneath that gust\nThe rings of light quivered like forest-leaves.\nThen all the blessed maidens who were there\nStood up together, as it were a voice\nThat called them; and they threw their tresses back,\nAnd smote their palms, and all laughed up at once,\nFor the strong heavenly joy they had in them\nTo hear God bless the world. Wherewith I woke:\nAnd looking round, I saw as usual\nThat she was standing there with her long locks\nPressed to her side; and her laugh ended theirs.\nFor always when I see her now, she laughs.\nAnd yet her childish laughter haunts me too,\nThe life of this dead terror; as in days\nWhen she, a child, dwelt with me. I must tell\nSomething of those days yet before the end.\nI brought her from the city--one such day\nWhen she was still a merry loving child,--\nThe earliest gift I mind my giving her;\nA little image of a flying Love\nMade of our coloured glass-ware, in his hands\nA dart of gilded metal and a torch.\nAnd him she kissed and me, and fain would know\nWhy were his poor eyes blindfold, why the wings\nAnd why the arrow. What I knew I told\nOf Venus and of Cupid,--strange old tales.\nAnd when she heard that he could rule the loves\nOf men and women, still she shook her head\nAnd wondered; and, “Nay, nay,” she murmured still,\n“So strong, and he a younger child than I!”\nAnd then she’d have me fix him on the wall\nFronting her little bed; and then again\nShe needs must fix him there herself, because\nI gave him to her and she loved him so,\nAnd he should make her love me better yet,\nIf women loved the more, the more they grew.\nBut the fit place upon the wall was high\nFor her, and so I held her in my arms:\nAnd each time that the heavy pruning-hook\nI gave her for a hammer slipped away\nAs it would often, still she laughed and laughed\nAnd kissed and kissed me. But amid her mirth,\nJust as she hung the image on the nail,\nIt slipped and all its fragments strewed the ground:\nAnd as it fell she screamed, for in her hand\nThe dart had entered deeply and drawn blood.\nAnd so her laughter turned to tears: and “Oh!”\nI said, the while I bandaged the small hand,--\n“That I should be the first to make you bleed,\nWho love and love and love you!”--kissing still\nThe fingers till I got her safe to bed.\nAnd still she sobbed,--“not for the pain at all,”\nShe said, “but for the Love, the poor good Love\nYou gave me.” So she cried herself to sleep.\nAnother later thing comes back to me.\n’Twas in those hardest foulest days of all,\nWhen still from his shut palace, sitting clean\nAbove the splash of blood, old Metternich\n(May his soul die, and never-dying worms\nFeast on its pain for ever! ) used to thin\nHis year’s doomed hundreds daintily, each month\nThirties and fifties. This time, as I think,\nWas when his thrift forbad the poor to take\nThat evil brackish salt which the dry rocks\nKeep all through winter when the sea draws in.\nThe first I heard of it was a chance shot\nIn the street here and there, and on the stones\nA stumbling clatter as of horse hemmed round.\nThen, when she saw me hurry out of doors,\nMy gun slung at my shoulder and my knife\nStuck in my girdle, she smoothed down my hair\nAnd laughed to see me look so brave, and leaped\nUp to my neck and kissed me. She was still\nA child; and yet that kiss was on my lips\nSo hot all day where the smoke shut us in.\nFor now, being always with her, the first love\nI had--the father’s, brother’s love--was changed,\nI think, in somewise; like a holy thought\nWhich is a prayer before one knows of it.\nThe first time I perceived this, I remember,\nWas once when after hunting I came home\nWeary, and she brought food and fruit for me,\nAnd sat down at my feet upon the floor\nLeaning against my side. But when I felt\nHer sweet head reach from that low seat of hers\nSo high as to be laid upon my heart,\nI turned and looked upon my darling there\nAnd marked for the first time how tall she was;\nAnd my heart beat with so much violence\nUnder her cheek, I thought she could not choose\nBut wonder at it soon and ask me why;\nAnd so I bade her rise and eat with me.\nAnd when, remembering all and counting back\nThe time, I made out fourteen years for her\nAnd told her so, she gazed at me with eyes\nAs of the sky and sea on a grey day,\nAnd drew her long hands through her hair, and asked me\nIf she was not a woman; and then laughed:\nAnd as she stooped in laughing, I could see\nBeneath the growing throat the breasts half-globed\nLike folded lilies deepset in the stream.\nYes, let me think of her as then; for so\nHer image, Father, is not like the sights\nWhich come when you are gone. She had a mouth\nMade to bring death to life,--the underlip\nSucked in, as if it strove to kiss itself.\nHer face was pearly pale, as when one stoops\nOver wan water; and the dark crisped hair\nAnd the hair’s shadow made it paler still:--\nDeep-serried locks, the dimness of the cloud\nWhere the moon’s gaze is set in eddying gloom.\nHer body bore her neck as the tree’s stem\nBears the top branch; and as the branch sustains\nThe flower of the year’s pride, her high neck bore\nThat face made wonderful with night and day.\nHer voice was swift, yet ever the last words\nFell lingeringly; and rounded finger-tips\nShe had, that clung a little where they touched\nAnd then were gone o’ the instant. Her great eyes,\nThat sometimes turned half dizzily beneath\nThe passionate lids, as faint, when she would speak,\nHad also in them hidden springs of mirth,\nWhich under the dark lashes evermore\nShook to her laugh, as when a bird flies low\nBetween the water and the willow-leaves,\nAnd the shade quivers till he wins the light.\nI was a moody comrade to her then,\nFor all the love I bore her. Italy,\nThe weeping desolate mother, long has claimed\nHer sons’ strong arms to lean on, and their hands\nTo lop the poisonous thicket from her path,\nCleaving her way to light. And from her need\nHad grown the fashion of my whole poor life\nWhich I was proud to yield her, as my father\nHad yielded his. And this had come to be\nA game to play, a love to clasp, a hate\nTo wreak, all things together that a man\nNeeds for his blood to ripen; till at times\nAll else seemed shadows, and I wondered still\nTo see such life pass muster and be deemed\nTime’s bodily substance. In those hours, no doubt,\nTo the young girl my eyes were like my soul,--\nDark wells of death-in-life that yearned for day.\nSig.\nAnd though she ruled me always, I remember\nThat once when I was thus and she still kept\nLeaping about the place and laughing, I\nDid almost chide her; whereupon she knelt\nAnd putting her two hands into my breast\nSang me a song. Are these tears in my eyes?\n’Tis long since I have wept for anything.\nI thought that song forgotten out of mind;\nAnd now, just as I spoke of it, it came\nAll back. It is but a rude thing, ill rhymed,\nSuch as a blind man chaunts and his dog hears\nHolding the platter, when the children run\nTo merrier sport and leave him. Thus it goes:--\nLa bella donna\nPiangendo disse:\n“Come son fisse\nLe stelle in cielo!\nQuel fiato anelo\nDello stanco sole,\nQuanto m’ assonna!\nE la luna, macchiata\nCome uno specchio\nLogoro e vecchio,--\nFaccia affannata,\nChe cosa vuole?”\n“Chè stelle, luna, e sole,\nCiascun m’ annoja\nE m’ annojano insieme;\nNon me ne preme\nNè ci prendo gioja.\nE veramente,\nChe le spalle sien franche\nE la braccia bianche.”\nShe wept, sweet lady,\nAnd said in weeping:\n“What spell is keeping\nThe stars so steady?\nWhy does the power\nOf the sun’s noon-hour\nTo sleep so move me?\nAnd the moon in heaven,\nStained where she passes\nAs a worn-out glass is,--\nWearily driven,\nWhy walks she above me?”\n“Stars, moon, and sun too,\nI’m tired of either\nAnd all together!\nWhom speak they unto\nThat I should listen?\nFor very surely,\nThough my arms and shoulders\nDazzle beholders,\nAnd my eyes glisten,\nAll’s nothing purely!\nWhat are words said for\nAt all about them,\nIf he they are made for\nCan do without them?”\nShe laughed, sweet lady,\nAnd said in laughing:\n“His hand clings half in\nMy own already!\nOh! do you love me?\nOh! speak of passion\nIn no new fashion,\nNo loud inveighings,\nBut the old sayings\nYou once said of me.”\n“You said: ‘As summer,\nThrough boughs grown brittle,\nComes back a little\nEre frosts benumb her,--\nSo bring’st thou to me\nAll leaves and flowers,\nThough autumn’s gloomy\nTo-day in the bowers.’”\n“Oh! does he love me,\nWhen my voice teaches\nThe very speeches\nHe then spoke of me?\nAlas! what flavour\nStill with me lingers?”\n(But she laughed as my kisses\nGlowed in her fingers\nWith love’s old blisses.)\n“Oh! what one favour\nRemains to woo him,\nWhose whole poor savour\nBelongs not to him?”\n“E il seno caldo e tondo,\nNon mi fa niente.\nChe cosa al mondo\nPosso più far di questi\nSe non piacciono a te, come dicesti?”\nLa donna rise\nE riprese ridendo:--\n“Questa mano che prendo\nÈ dunque mia?\nTu m’ ami dunque?\nDimmelo ancora,\nNon in modo qualunque,\nMa le parole\nBelle e precise\nChe dicesti pria.\n‘Siccome suole\nLa state talora\n(Dicesti) un qualche istante\nTornare innanzi inverno,\nCosì tu fai ch’ io scerno\nLe foglie tutte quante,\nBen ch’ io certo tenessi\nPer passato l’ autunno.’”\n“Eccolo il mio alunno!\nIo debbo insegnargli\nQuei cari detti istessi\nCh’ ei mi disse una volta!\nOimè! Che cosa dargli,”\n(Ma ridea piano piano\nDei baci in sulla mano,)\n“Ch’ ei non m’abbia da lungo tempo tolta?”\nThat I should sing upon this bed!--with you\nTo listen, and such words still left to say!\nYet was it I that sang? The voice seemed hers,\nAs on the very day she sang to me;\nWhen, having done, she took out of my hand\nSomething that I had played with all the while\nAnd laid it down beyond my reach; and so\nTurning my face round till it fronted hers,--\n“Weeping or laughing, which was best?” she said.\nBut these are foolish tales. How should I show\nThe heart that glowed then with love’s heat, each day\nMore and more brightly?--when for long years now\nThe very flame that flew about the heart,\nAnd gave it fiery wings, has come to be\nThe lapping blaze of hell’s environment\nWhose tongues all bid the molten heart despair.\nYet one more thing comes back on me to-night\nWhich I may tell you: for it bore my soul\nDread firstlings of the brood that rend it now.\nIt chanced that in our last year’s wanderings\nWe dwelt at Monza, far away from home,\nIf home we had: and in the Duomo there\nI sometimes entered with her when she prayed.\nAn image of Our Lady stands there, wrought\nIn marble by some great Italian hand\nIn the great days when she and Italy\nSat on one throne together: and to her\nAnd to none else my loved one told her heart.\nShe was a woman then; and as she knelt,--\nHer sweet brow in the sweet brow’s shadow there,--\nThey seemed two kindred forms whereby our land\n(Whose work still serves the world for miracle)\nMade manifest herself in womanhood.\nFather, the day I speak of was the first\nFor weeks that I had borne her company\nInto the Duomo; and those weeks had been\nMuch troubled, for then first the glimpses came\nOf some impenetrable restlessness\nGrowing in her to make her changed and cold.\nAnd as we entered there that day, I bent\nMy eyes on the fair Image, and I said\nWithin my heart, “Oh turn her heart to me!”\nAnd so I left her to her prayers, and went\nTo gaze upon the pride of Monza’s shrine,\nWhere in the sacristy the light still falls\nUpon the Iron Crown of Italy,\nOn whose crowned heads the day has closed, nor yet\nThe daybreak gilds another head to crown.\nBut coming back, I wondered when I saw\nThat the sweet Lady of her prayers now stood\nAlone without her; until further off,\nBefore some new Madonna gaily decked,\nTinselled and gewgawed, a slight German toy,\nI saw her kneel, still praying. At my step\nShe rose, and side by side we left the church.\nI was much moved, and sharply questioned her\nOf her transferred devotion; but she seemed\nStubborn and heedless; till she lightly laughed\nAnd said: “The old Madonna? Aye indeed,\nShe had my old thoughts,--this one has my new.”\nThen silent to the soul I held my way:\nAnd from the fountains of the public place\nUnto the pigeon-haunted pinnacles,\nBright wings and water winnowed the bright air;\nAnd stately with her laugh’s subsiding smile\nShe went, with clear-swayed waist and towering neck\nAnd hands held light before her; and the face\nWhich long had made a day in my life’s night\nWas night in day to me; as all men’s eyes\nTurned on her beauty, and she seemed to tread\nBeyond my heart to the world made for her.\nAh there! my wounds will snatch my sense again:\nThe pain comes billowing on like a full cloud\nOf thunder, and the flash that breaks from it\nLeaves my brain burning. That’s the wound he gave,\nThe Austrian whose white coat I still made match\nWith his white face, only the two grew red\nAs suits his trade. The devil makes them wear\nWhite for a livery, that the blood may show\nBraver that brings them to him. So he looks\nSheer o’er the field and knows his own at once.\nGive me a draught of water in that cup;\nMy voice feels thick; perhaps you do not hear;\nBut you must hear. If you mistake my words\nAnd so absolve me, I am sure the blessing\nWill burn my soul. If you mistake my words\nAnd so absolve me, Father, the great sin\nIs yours, not mine: mark this: your soul shall burn\nWith mine for it. I have seen pictures where\nSouls burned with Latin shriekings in their mouths:\nShall my end be as theirs? Nay, but I know\n’Tis you shall shriek in Latin. Some bell rings,\nRings through my brain: it strikes the hour in hell.\nYou see I cannot, Father; I have tried,\nBut cannot, as you see. These twenty times\nBeginning, I have come to the same point\nAnd stopped. Beyond, there are but broken words\nWhich will not let you understand my tale.\nIt is that then we have her with us here,\nAs when she wrung her hair out in my dream\nTo-night, till all the darkness reeked of it.\nHer hair is always wet, for she has kept\nIts tresses wrapped about her side for years;\nAnd when she wrung them round over the floor,\nI heard the blood between her fingers hiss;\nSo that I sat up in my bed and screamed\nOnce and again; and once to once, she laughed.\nLook that you turn not now,--she’s at your back:\nGather your robe up, Father, and keep close,\nOr she’ll sit down on it and send you mad.\nAt Iglio in the first thin shade o’ the hills\nThe sand is black and red. The black was black\nWhen what was spilt that day sank into it,\nAnd the red scarcely darkened. There I stood\nThis night with her, and saw the sand the same.\nWhat would you have me tell you? Father, father,\nHow shall I make you know? You have not known\nThe dreadful soul of woman, who one day\nForgets the old and takes the new to heart,\nForgets what man remembers, and therewith\nForgets the man. Nor can I clearly tell\nHow the change happened between her and me.\nHer eyes looked on me from an emptied heart\nWhen most my heart was full of her; and still\nIn every corner of myself I sought\nTo find what service failed her; and no less\nThan in the good time past, there all was hers.\nWhat do you love? Your Heaven? Conceive it spread\nFor one first year of all eternity\nAll round you with all joys and gifts of God;\nAnd then when most your soul is blent with it\nAnd all yields song together,--then it stands\nO’ the sudden like a pool that once gave back\nYour image, but now drowns it and is clear\nAgain,--or like a sun bewitched, that burns\nYour shadow from you, and still shines in sight.\nHow could you bear it? Would you not cry out,\nAmong those eyes grown blind to you, those ears\nThat hear no more your voice you hear the same,--\n“God! what is left but hell for company,\nBut hell, hell, hell?”--until the name so breathed\nWhirled with hot wind and sucked you down in fire?\nEven so I stood the day her empty heart\nLeft her place empty in our home, while yet\nI knew not why she went nor where she went\nNor how to reach her: so I stood the day\nWhen to my prayers at last one sight of her\nWas granted, and I looked on heaven made pale\nWith scorn, and heard heaven mock me in that laugh.\nO sweet, long sweet! Was that some ghost of you,\nEven as your ghost that haunts me now,--twin shapes\nOf fear and hatred? May I find you yet\nMine when death wakes? Ah! be it even in flame,\nWe may have sweetness yet, if you but say\nAs once in childish sorrow: “Not my pain,\nMy pain was nothing: oh your poor poor love,\nYour broken love!”\nMy Father, have I not\nYet told you the last things of that last day\nOn which I went to meet her by the sea?\nO God, O God! but I must tell you all.\nMidway upon my journey, when I stopped\nTo buy the dagger at the village fair,\nI saw two cursed rats about the place\nI knew for spies--blood-sellers both. That day\nWas not yet over; for three hours to come\nI prized my life: and so I looked around\nFor safety. A poor painted mountebank\nWas playing tricks and shouting in a crowd.\nI knew he must have heard my name, so I\nPushed past and whispered to him who I was,\nAnd of my danger. Straight he hustled me\nInto his booth, as it were in the trick,\nAnd brought me out next minute with my face\nAll smeared in patches and a zany’s gown;\nAnd there I handed him his cups and balls\nAnd swung the sand-bags round to clear the ring\nFor half an hour. The spies came once and looked;\nAnd while they stopped, and made all sights and sounds\nSharp to my startled senses, I remember\nA woman laughed above me. I looked up\nAnd saw where a brown-shouldered harlot leaned\nHalf through a tavern window thick with vine.\nSome man had come behind her in the room\nAnd caught her by her arms, and she had turned\nWith that coarse empty laugh on him, as now\nHe munched her neck with kisses, while the vine\nCrawled in her back.\nAnd three hours afterwards,\nWhen she that I had run all risks to meet\nLaughed as I told you, my life burned to death\nWithin me, for I thought it like the laugh\nHeard at the fair. She had not left me long;\nBut all she might have changed to, or might change to,\n(I know nought since--she never speaks a word--)\nSeemed in that laugh. Have I not told you yet,\nNot told you all this time what happened, Father,\nWhen I had offered her the little knife,\nAnd bade her keep it for my sake that loved her,\nAnd she had laughed? Have I not told you yet?\n“Take it,” I said to her the second time,\n“Take it and keep it.” And then came a fire\nThat burnt my hand; and then the fire was blood,\nAnd sea and sky were blood and fire, and all\nThe day was one red blindness; till it seemed,\nWithin the whirling brain’s eclipse, that she\nOr I or all things bled or burned to death.\nAnd then I found her laid against my feet\nAnd knew that I had stabbed her, and saw still\nHer look in falling. For she took the knife\nDeep in her heart, even as I bade her then,\nAnd fell; and her stiff bodice scooped the sand\nInto her bosom.\nAnd she keeps it, see,\nDo you not see she keeps it?--there, beneath\nWet fingers and wet tresses, in her heart.\nFor look you, when she stirs her hand, it shows\nThe little hilt of horn and pearl,--even such\nA dagger as our women of the coast\nTwist in their garters.\nFather, I have done:\nAnd from her side now she unwinds the thick\nDark hair; all round her side it is wet through,\nBut, like the sand at Iglio, does not change.\nNow you may see the dagger clearly. Father,\nI have told all: tell me at once what hope\nCan reach me still. For now she draws it out\nSlowly, and only smiles as yet: look, Father,\nShe scarcely smiles: but I shall hear her laugh\nSoon, when she shows the crimson steel to God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-orchard-pit": { - "title": "“The Orchard-Pit”", - "body": "Piled deep below the screening apple-branch\nThey lie with bitter apples in their hands:\nAnd some are only ancient bones that blanch,\nAnd some had ships that last year’s wind did launch,\nAnd some were yesterday the lords of lands.\n\nIn the soft dell, among the apple-trees,\nHigh up above the hidden pit she stands,\nAnd there for ever sings, who gave to these,\nThat lie below, her magic hour of ease,\nAnd those her apples holden in their hands.\n\nThis in my dreams is shown me; and her hair\nCrosses my lips and draws my burning breath;\nHer song spreads golden wings upon the air,\nLife’s eyes are gleaming from her forehead fair,\nAnd from her breasts the ravishing eyes of Death.\n\nMen say to me that sleep hath many dreams,\nYet I knew never but this dream alone:\nThere, from a dried-up channel, once the stream’s,\nThe glen slopes up; even such in sleep it seems\nAs to my waking sight the place well known.\n\nMy love I call her, and she loves me well:\nBut I love her as in the maelstrom’s cup\nThe whirled stone loves the leaf inseparable\nThat clings to it round all the circling swell,\nAnd that the same last eddy swallows up.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "silent-noon": { - "title": "“Silent Noon”", - "body": "Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,--\nThe finger-points look through like rosy blooms:\nYour eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms\n’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.\nAll round our nest, far as the eye can pass,\nAre golden kingcup fields with silver edge\nWhere the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.\n’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.\n\nDeep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly\nHangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:--\nSo this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.\nOh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,\nThis close-companioned inarticulate hour\nWhen twofold silence was the song of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sudden-light": { - "title": "“Sudden Light”", - "body": "I have been here before,\nBut when or how I cannot tell:\nI know the grass beyond the door,\nThe sweet keen smell,\nThe sighing sound, the lights around the shore.\n\nYou have been mine before,--\nHow long ago I may not know:\nBut just when at that swallow’s soar\nYour neck turn’d so,\nSome veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.\n\nHas this been thus before?\nAnd shall not thus time’s eddying flight\nStill with our lives our love restore\nIn death’s despite,\nAnd day and night yield one delight once more?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "through-death-to-love": { - "title": "“Through Death to Love”", - "body": "Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee\nFrom winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,--\nLike multiform circumfluence manifold\nOf night’s flood-tide,--like terrors that agree\nOf hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,--\nEven such, within some glass dimm’d by our breath,\nOur hearts discern wild images of Death,\nShadows and shoals that edge eternity.\n\nHowbeit athwart Death’s imminent shade doth soar\nOne Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove\nSweeter to glide around, to brood above.\nTell me, my heart,--what angel-greeted door\nOr threshold of wing-winnow’d threshing-floor\nHath guest fire-fledg’d as thine, whose lord is Love?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-woodspurge": { - "title": "“The Woodspurge”", - "body": "The wind flapp’d loose, the wind was still,\nShaken out dead from tree and hill:\nI had walk’d on at the wind’s will,--\nI sat now, for the wind was still.\n\nBetween my knees my forehead was,--\nMy lips, drawn in, said not Alas!\nMy hair was over in the grass,\nMy naked ears heard the day pass.\n\nMy eyes, wide open, had the run\nOf some ten weeds to fix upon;\nAmong those few, out of the sun,\nThe woodspurge flower’d, three cups in one.\n\nFrom perfect grief there need not be\nWisdom or even memory:\nOne thing then learnt remains to me,--\nThe woodspurge has a cup of three.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "nikolay-rubtsov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolay Rubtsov", - "birth": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1971 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Rubtsov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "from-the-poplars-leaves-have-flown-away": { - "title": "“From the poplars leaves have flown away …”", - "body": "From the poplars leaves have flown away,\nInescapability repeated.\nDo not cry for leaves in any way,\nCry for love and tenderness frostbitten.\n\nLet the poplars now naked stand.\nDo not curse the noisy storms of snow.\nNobody is to blame, my friend,\nThat off poplars all dead leaves have flown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Lyubov Kalmykova", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "i-am-going-to-ride-my-bicycle-long-long": { - "title": "“I am going to ride my bicycle long-long …”", - "body": "I am going to ride my bicycle long-long,\nI’ll gather flowers in the colorful field,\nShe isn’t mine but yet my love is strong,\nShe’ll have to know surely what I feel.\n\nThen I’ll say her:--You love another guy,\nBut look at the flowers--they are all for you.\nBy this bouquet I only say ‘goodbye’,\nRemember me--it is all you can do.\n\nShe’ll take them all. Once meeting me tonight,\nWhen a blue fog is spreading everywhere,\nShe won’t turn her apathetic eyes,\nShe even won’t smile, but I won’t care.\n\nI am going to ride my bicycle far-long,\nI’ll gather flowers in the colorful field,\nShe isn’t mine but yet my love is strong,\nShe’ll have to know surely what I feel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Eugene Ratkov", - "date": { - "year": 1965 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-winter-song": { - "title": "“A winter song”", - "body": "This here village is still full of light,\nDon’t you dare to predict me more pain!\nWinter skies are all gleaming with stars\nThat so gently adorn it again.\n\nSolemnly shining, dreamily shining,\nMeadow’s soft murmur is heard …\nSomehow my painful most memories\nStarting to loosen their hold!\n\nOdd village girl stands there smiling,\nMe … I feel I’m drunk with wine!\nAll that was aching is dying down,\nSkies up above are divine!\n\nSomeone keeps saying no voice survives,\nMust one rejoice storm had won?\nWho there is set on convincing me,\nAll I still hoped for is gone?\n\nThis here village is still full of light,\nDon’t you dare to predict me more pain!\nWinter skies are all gleaming with stars\nThat so gently adorn it again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anonymous", - "date": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "rumi": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rumi", - "birth": { - "year": 1207 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1273 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "persian", - "language": "persian", - "flag": "", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "persian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "because-i-cannot-sleep": { - "title": "“Because I Cannot Sleep”", - "body": "Because I cannot sleep\nI make music at night.\nI am troubled by the one\nwhose face has the color of spring flowers.\nI have neither sleep nor patience,\nneither a good reputation nor disgrace.\nA thousand robes of wisdom are gone.\nAll my good manners have moved a thousand miles away.\nThe heart and the mind are left angry with each other.\nThe stars and the moon are envious of each other.\nBecause of this alienation the physical universe\nis getting tighter and tighter.\nThe moon says, “How long will I remain\nsuspended without a sun?”\nWithout Love’s jewel inside of me,\nlet the bazaar of my existence be destroyed stone by stone.\nO Love, You who have been called by a thousand names,\nYou who know how to pour the wine\ninto the chalice of the body,\nYou who give culture to a thousand cultures,\nYou who are faceless but have a thousand faces,\nO Love, You who shape the faces\nof Turks, Europeans, and Zanzibaris,\ngive me a glass from Your bottle,\nor a handful of being from Your Branch.\nRemove the cork once more.\nThen we’ll see a thousand chiefs prostrate themselves,\nand a circle of ecstatic troubadours will play.\nThen the addict will be freed of craving.\nand will be resurrected,\nand stand in awe till Judgement Day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "persian" - } - }, - "the-breeze-at-dawn": { - "title": "“The Breeze at Dawn”", - "body": "The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.\nDon’t go back to sleep.\n\nYou must ask for what you really want.\nDon’t go back to sleep.\n\nPeople are going back and forth across the doorsill\nwhere the two worlds touch.\n\nThe door is round and open.\nDon’t go back to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "persian" - } - }, - "did-i-not-say-to-you": { - "title": "“Did I Not Say to You”", - "body": "Did I not say to you, “Go not there, for I am your friend; in this\nmirage of annihilation I am the fountain of life?”\n\nEven though in anger you depart a hundred thousand years\nfrom me, in the end you will come to me, for I am your goal.\n\nDid I not say to you, “Be not content with worldly forms, for I\nam the fashioner of the tabernacle of your contentment?”\n\nDid I not say to you, “I am the sea and you are a single fish;\ngo not to dry land, for I am your crystal sea?”\n\nDid I not say to you, “Go not like birds to the snare; come, for\nI am the power of flight and your wings and feet?”\n\nDid I not say to you, “They will waylay you and make you\ncold, for I am the fire and warmth and heat of your desire?”\n\nDid I not say to you, “They will implant in you ugly qualities\nso that you will forget that I am the source of purity to you?”\n\nDid I not say to you, “Do not say from what direction the servant’s\naffairs come into order?” I am the Creator without directions.\n\nIf you are the lamp of the heart, know where the road is to the house;\nand if you are godlike of attribute, know that I am your Master.", - "metadata": { - "language": "persian" - } - }, - "tonight-is-the-night": { - "title": "“Tonight is the night …”", - "body": "Tonight\n is the night\nIt’s the creation of that land of eternity\nIt’s not an ordinary night,\n it’s a wedding of those who seek God.\nTonight, the bride and groom\n speak in one tongue.\nTonight, the bridal chamber\n is looking particularly well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "persian", - "translator": "Shahram Shiva" - } - } - } - }, - "pedro-salinas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Pedro Salinas", - "birth": { - "year": 1891 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Salinas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "deaths": { - "title": "“Deaths”", - "body": "First I forgot you in your voice.\nIf you were talking to me now,\nhere by my side,\nI would ask, “Who’s there?”\n\nThen your step became unfamiliar.\nIf a shadow--even one of flesh\nand blood--escapes in the wind,\nI can’t tell if it’s you.\n\nYou shed your leaves slowly\nin the face of one winter: your smile,\nyour eyes, the color of your clothing, the size\nof your shoes.\n\nMore leaves:\nyour flesh, your body fell away,\nuntil all that was left was your name: seven letters.\nAnd you went on living,\ndying, hanging on\nto those letters with body and soul.\nYour skeleton, the remains of it,\nyour voice, your laughter, those seven letters.\nAnd then your body alone uttered them.\nYour name slipped away from me.\nNow those seven letters drift unattached,\nunknown to each other.\nAdvertisements go by on streetcars; your letters\nlight up the night with their colors,\nthey travel on envelopes spelling out\nother names.\n\nYou will wander there,\ndissolved, undone, irretrievable,\nin the name that was you,\nrisen up\nto some crazy heaven,\nsome abstract glory in the alphabet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "David Lee Garrison", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "david-samoylov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "David Samoylov", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Samoylov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "in-the-country": { - "title": "“In the Country”", - "body": "That scent of hair clean and light,\nSweet smell of skin so fresh and clear,\nThe kiss in eyelids, in the eyes,\nAll wet and salty with the tears.\n\nAnd clouds, high over the leaves,\nAre curling all day long above us.\nYour sleeping hands, your sleeping eaves,\nYour sleeping forehead, sleeping brows.\n\n _Don’t hurry, Bard of Parting, please!\n We’ll soon take leave without whining.\n Do not untwist the arms entwining,\n Don’t tear away the lips from lips._\n\n _Don’t tear away the lips from lips,\n Do not untwist the arms entwining.\n We’ll soon take leave without whining.\n Don’t hurry, Bard of Parting, please!_\n\nYou see, the clouds curl all day\nAbove the grove, as fluffy hair.\nA cuckoo’s crying far away,\nIt counts days, it counts years.\n\nDo not cuckoo, the bird, don’t lie,--\nDon’t count days--we live by instants …\nOh, Bard of Parting, wait awhile,--\nWe’ll drift apart, we’ll soon get distant.\n\n _Don’t hurry, Bard of Parting, please!\n We’ll soon take leave without whining.\n Do not untwist the arms entwining,\n Don’t tear away the lips from lips._\n\n _Don’t tear away the lips from lips,\n Do not untwist the arms entwining.\n We’ll soon take leave without whining.\n Don’t hurry, Bard of Parting, please!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Natasha Gotskaya", - "date": { - "year": 1985 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "old-don-juan": { - "title": "“Old Don Juan”", - "body": "[_Shabby room in the inn._]\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nCurse! Endless drumming!\nDreadful nights of nothing in a\nWretched dwelling! Catalina!\n\n> _Catalina:_\n[_Enters._]\nComing!\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nAt last! Your gentle\nGaze falls on the truly loving!\nDraw some closer to the candle.\nLet my suffering have merit!\nHold my hand and …\n\n> _Catalina:_\nQuit it! How unbecoming\nOf your age.\n[_Proceeds to exit._]\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nShe flees my torment!\nEve incarne, wicked gender!\nRather choosing youthful servant,\nGladly ready to befriend her.\nEvenings spent with boring infants,\nLeaving passion unrequited!\nWhat’s the body’s purpose if its\nFreshness has forever withered?\nMirror, hide this disappointment!\nWrinkled skin, teeth’s rare count!\nHair no longer fragrant!\n\n[_Drops the mirror to the ground._]\nStubbornness to leave arena\nBattles our feeble conscience.\nEvery Helen, every Venus\nLeave us for seductive servants.\nNo substance can be soothing,\nOnly youth enraptured matters\nFor a whore of highest schooling,\nOr a slut, derived from masses.\nAging--what an inhibition!\nI have been reduced to torpor\nBy the rotten contradiction\nOf the content and its cover …\nJoys of living should be youthful\nEven if you in the process\nAre unkind, uncouth, untruthful.\nAging--that’s the worst of tortures!\nVengeful Lord, in your destruction\nDon’t punish twice but rather\nCrush the longing for seduction,\nTake away the drives for pleasure!\nLusty serenades! Erotic\nUrges by the moonlight dancing!\nWhy have you become despotic\nOn the verge of slow passing?\nThus, my ties with wicked gender\nMark an end. Thus ends an era!\nCatalina! Catalina!\n\n[_Enters Skull of the Commander_]\n\n> _Skull:_\nWell, greetings, Caballero!\nDecades lost, without water,\nLight and heat--just sand and ashes.\n\n> _Don Juan:_\n[_Retreats in horror._]\nHoly Mary! Goodness gracious!\nName yourself!\n\n> _Skull:_\nThink of Anna …\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nWhich one of Annas?\nOf Toledo? Of Grenada?\nOr perhaps the one who echoes\nTo this day the song of ardor?\nWeeks of mirth, indeed, they happened.\nI remember us! Together!\nWell, and how is she at present--\nOr … I should not raise the matter.\nAm I right that once her spouse\nFell a victim to misfortune?\nSkull, is that what you are broaching?\nI am fully at your service.\n\n> _Skull:_\nLet Higher Institution\nGuilt to vile creatures render.\nYou have faced the retribution\nThrough demise of youthful splendor.\nI, Old Skull of the Commander,\nCame to gloat, for from this moment\nWe shall lie together under\nSame graveyard, forever dormant.\nWe shall lie together under\nSame graveyard, same gravely features.\nI, Old Skull of the Commander,\nYou, Old Skull of Vile Creature.\n\n> _Don Juan:_\n[_With laughter_]\nRather?\nVengeful for an old affair?\nEither you adore to pamper?\nOr intend to truly scare?\nScare not! I’ve known reason\nWith demise at close distance.\nWhile today age yearns to weaken\nFleeting grasp on my existence.\n\n> _Skull:_\nThe touch of death--contrast it\nto pursuits of whore’s embraces.\nYour life passed, devoid of spirit.\nFilled instead with earthly pleasures.\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nIn earthy pleasures\nPassed my life, and mighty precious\nShall become a sleeping blanket.\nWhat remorse cannot encounter,\nAn oblivion surrounds.\n\n> _Skull:_\nIt’s time. The midnight’s thunder.\nMoles and worms are making rounds.\n\n> _Don Juan:_\nDivinely given,\nFlesh and charm have been exhausted.\nLead the way, o morbid villain,\nHave your foe remotely hosted,\nServing justice to your mission.\nBut do tell me, Skull, what cometh\nAt that juncture, beyond numbness,\nBeyond silence.\n\n> _Skull:_\nWhat cometh?\nDarkness, sealed from will and vision …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alexander Weizman", - "date": { - "year": 1976 - } - } - } - } - }, - "carl-sandburg": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Carl Sandburg", - "birth": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sandburg", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 113 - }, - "poems": { - "a-e-f": { - "title": "“A. E. F.”", - "body": "There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,\nThe rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.\nA spider will make a silver string nest in the\ndarkest, warmest corner of it.\nThe trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty.\nAnd no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.\nForefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it.\nIt will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things.\nThey will tell the spider: Go on, you’re doing good work.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Smoke and Steel", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "the-abracadabra-boys": { - "title": "“The Abracadabra Boys”", - "body": "The abracadabra boys--have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?\nHave they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.\nThey know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.\nThey give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.”\nDo they have fun? Sure--their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are--only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are.\nPointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "accomplished-facts": { - "title": "“Accomplished Facts”", - "body": "Every year Emily Dickinson sent one friend\nthe first arbutus bud in her garden.\n\nIn a last will and testament Andrew Jackson\nremembered a friend with the gift of George\nWashington’s pocket spy-glass.\n\nNapoleon too, in a last testament, mentioned a silver\nwatch taken from the bedroom of Frederick the Great,\nand passed along this trophy to a particular friend.\n\nO. Henry took a blood carnation from his coat lapel\nand handed it to a country girl starting work in a\nbean bazaar, and scribbled: “Peach blossoms may or\nmay not stay pink in city dust.”\n\nSo it goes. Some things we buy, some not.\nTom Jefferson was proud of his radishes and Abe Lincoln\nblacked his own boots, and Bismarck called Berlin a wilderness of brick and newspapers.\n\nSo it goes. There are accomplished facts.\nRide, ride, ride on in the great new blimps--\nCross unheard-of oceans, circle the planet.\nWhen you come back we may sit by five hollyhocks.\nWe might listen to boys fighting for marbles.\nThe grasshopper will look good to us.\n\nSo it goes …", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "adelaide-crapsey": { - "title": "“Adelaide Crapsey”", - "body": "Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of\nbrown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,\nI read your heart in a book.\n\nAnd your mouth of blue pansy--I know somewhere I have\nseen it rain-shattered.\n\nAnd I have seen a woman with her head Ang between her\nnaked knees, and her head held there listening to the\nsea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.\n\nAnd the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:\n_Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,\nLet me sing longer,\nOnly a little longer._\n\nAnd the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling\nnew shapes on the beach sand.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "alice-corbin-is-gone": { - "title": "“Alice Corbin is Gone”", - "body": "Alice Corbin is gone\nand the Indians tell us where.\n She trusted the Indians\n and they kept a trust in her\nShe took a four-line Indian song\n and put it into English.\nYou can sing it over and over and\n no harm done:\n\nThe wind is carrying me round the sky;\nThe wind is carrying me round the sky.\n My body is here in the valley--\nThe wind is carrying me round the sky.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "alix": { - "title": "“Alix”", - "body": "The mare Alix breaks the world’s trotting record one day.\nI see her heels flash down the dust of an Illinois race\ntrack on a summer afternoon. I see the timekeepers\nput their heads together over stop-watches, and call\nto the grand stand a split second is clipped off the old\nworld’s record and a new world’s record fixed.\n\nI see the mare Alix led away by men in undershirts and\nstreaked faces. Dripping Alix in foam of white on\nthe harness and shafts. And the men in undershirts\nkiss her ears and rub her nose, and tie blankets on\nher, and take her away to have the sweat sponged.\n\nI see the grand stand jammed with prairie people yelling\nthemselves hoarse. Almost the grand stand and the\ncrowd of thousands are one pair of legs and one voice\nstanding up and yelling hurrah.\n\nI see the driver of Alix and the owner smothered in a fury\nof handshakes, a mob of caresses. I see the wives of\nthe driver and owner smothered in a crush of white\nsummer dresses and parasols.\n\nHours later, at sundown, gray dew creeping on the sod and sheds, I see Alix again:\n_Dark, shining-velvet Alix,\nNight-sky Alix in a gray blanket,\nLed back and forth by a nigger.\nVelvet and night-eyed Alix\nWith slim legs of steel._\n\nAnd I want to rub my nose against the nose of the mare Alix.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "Naked I stood on the soft shingle of sand where the sea swept my legs with salt and wet.\nAlone I walked under the arch of night where stars fluttered between treetops in the wind.\nAnd a long memory it is I have how the sea and the night were kind.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "among-the-red-guns": { - "title": "“Among the Red Guns”", - "body": "_After waking at dawn one morning when the wind sang low among dry leaves in an elm_\n\nAmong the red guns,\nIn the hearts of soldiers\nRunning free blood\nIn the long, long campaign:\n Dreams go on.\n\nAmong the leather saddles,\nIn the heads of soldiers\nHeavy in the wracks and kills\nOf all straight fighting:\n Dreams go on.\n\nAmong the hot muzzles,\nIn the hands of soldiers\nBrought from flesh--folds of women--\nSoft amid the blood and crying\nIn all your hearts and heads\nAmong the guns and saddles and muzzles:\n\n Dreams,\nDreams go on,\nOut of the dead on their backs,\nBroken and no use any more:\nDreams of the way and the end go on.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "and-so-to-day": { - "title": "“And so To-Day”", - "body": "And so to-day--they lay him away--\nthe boy nobody knows the name of--\nthe buck private--the unknown soldier--\nthe doughboy who dug under and died\nwhen they told him to--that’s him.\n\nDown Pennsylvania Avenue to-day the riders go,\nmen and boys riding horses, roses in their teeth,\nstems of roses, rose leaf stalks, rose dark leaves--\nthe line of the green ends in a red rose flash.\n\nSkeleton men and boys riding skeleton horses,\nthe rib bones shine, the rib bones curve,\nshine with savage, elegant curves--\na jawbone runs with a long white slant,\na skull dome runs with a long white arch,\nbone triangles click and rattle,\nelbows, ankles, white line slants--\nshining in the sun, past the White House,\npast the Treasury Building, Army and Navy Buildings,\non to the mystic white Capitol Dome--\nso they go down Pennsylvania Avenue to-day,\nskeleton men and boys riding skeleton horses,\nstems of roses in their teeth,\nrose dark leaves at their white jaw slants--\nand a horse laugh question nickers and whinnies,\nmoans with a whistle out of horse head teeth:\nwhy? who? where?\n\n (“The big fish--eat the little fish--\n the little fish--eat the shrimps--\n and the shrimps--eat mud,”--\n said a cadaverous man--with a black umbrella--\n spotted with white polka dots--with a missing\n ear--with a missing foot and arms--\n with a missing sheath of muscles\n singing to the silver sashes of the sun.)\n\nAnd so to-day--they lay him away--\nthe boy nobody knows the name of--\nthe buck private--the unknown soldier--\nthe doughboy who dug under and died\nwhen they told him to--that’s him.\n\nIf he picked himself and said, “I am ready to die,”\nif he gave his name and said, “My country, take me,”\nthen the baskets of roses to-day are for the Boy,\nthe flowers, the songs, the steamboat whistles,\nthe proclamations of the honorable orators,\nthey are all for the Boy--that’s him.\n\nIf the government of the Republic picked him saying,\n“You are wanted, your country takes you”--\nif the Republic put a stethoscope to his heart\nand looked at his teeth and tested his eyes and said,\n“You are a citizen of the Republic and a sound\nanimal in all parts and functions--the Republic takes you”--\nthen to-day the baskets of flowers are all for the Republic,\nthe roses, the songs, the steamboat whistles,\nthe proclamations of the honorable orators--\nthey are all for the Republic.\n\nAnd so to-day--they lay him away--\nand an understanding goes--his long sleep shall be\nunder arms and arches near the Capitol Dome--\nthere is an authorization--he shall have tomb companions--\nthe martyred presidents of the Republic--\nthe buck private--the unknown soldier--that’s him.\n\nThe man who was war commander of the armies of the Republic\nrides down Pennsylvania Avenue--\nThe man who is peace commander of the armies of the Republic\nrides down Pennsylvania Avenue--\nfor the sake of the Boy, for the sake of the Republic.\n\n (And the hoofs of the skeleton horses\n all drum soft on the asphalt footing--\n so soft is the drumming, so soft the roll call\n of the grinning sergeants calling the roll call--\n so soft is it all--a camera man murmurs, “Moonshine.”)\n\nLook--who salutes the coffin--\nlays a wreath of remembrance\non the box where a buck private\nsleeps a clean dry sleep at last--\nlook--it is the highest ranking general\nof the officers of the armies of the Republic.\n\n (Among pigeon corners of the Congressional Library--they\n file documents quietly, casually, all in a day’s work--\n this human document, the buck private nobody knows the\n name of--they file away in granite and steel--with music\n and roses, salutes, proclamations of the honorable\n orators.)\n\nAcross the country, between two ocean shore lines,\nwhere cities cling to rail and water routes,\nthere people and horses stop in their foot tracks,\ncars and wagons stop in their wheel tracks--\nfaces at street crossings shine with a silence\nof eggs laid in a row on a pantry shelf--\namong the ways and paths of the flow of the Republic\nfaces come to a standstill, sixty clockticks count--\nin the name of the Boy, in the name of the Republic.\n\n (A million faces a thousand miles from Pennsylvania Avenue\n stay frozen with a look, a clocktick, a moment--\n skeleton riders on skeleton horses--the nickering high horse laugh,\n the whinny and the howl up Pennsylvania Avenue:\n who? why? where?)\n\n (So people far from the asphalt footing of Pennsylvania\n Avenue look, wonder, mumble--the riding white-jaw\n phantoms ride hi-eeee, hi-eeee, hi-yi, hi-yi, hi-eeee--\n the proclamations of the honorable orators mix with the\n top-sergeants whistling the roll call.)\n\nIf when the clockticks counted sixty,\nwhen the heartbeats of the Republic\ncame to a stop for a minute,\nif the Boy had happened to sit up,\nhappening to sit up as Lazarus sat up, in the story,\nthen the first shivering language to drip off his mouth\nmight have come as, “Thank God,” or “Am I dreaming?”\nor “What the hell” or “When do we eat?”\nor “Kill ’em, kill ’em, the …”\nor “Was that … a rat … ran over my face?”\nor “For Christ’s sake, gimme water, gimme water,”\nor “Blub blub, bloo bloo …”\nor any bubbles of shell shock gibberish\nfrom the gashes of No Man’s Land.\n\nMaybe some buddy knows,\nsome sister, mother, sweetheart,\nmaybe some girl who sat with him once\nwhen a two-horn silver moon\nslid on the peak of a house-roof gable,\nand promises lived in the air of the night,\nwhen the air was filled with promises,\nwhen any little slip-shoe lovey\ncould pick a promise out of the air.\n\n “Feed it to ’em,\n they lap it up,\n bull … bull … bull,”\nSaid a movie news reel camera man,\nSaid a Washington newspaper correspondent,\nSaid a baggage handler lugging a trunk,\nSaid a two-a-day vaudeville juggler,\nSaid a hanky-pank selling jumping-jacks.\n“Hokum--they lap it up,” said the bunch.\n\nAnd a tall scar-face ball player,\nPlayed out as a ball player,\nMade a speech of his own for the hero boy,\nSent an earful of his own to the dead buck private:\n “It’s all safe now, buddy,\n Safe when you say yes,\n Safe for the yes-men.”\n\nHe was a tall scar-face battler\nWith his face in a newspaper\nReading want ads, reading jokes,\nReading love, murder, politics,\nJumping from jokes back to the want ads,\nReading the want ads first and last,\nThe letters of the word JOB, “J-O-B,”\nBurnt like a shot of bootleg booze\nIn the bones of his head--\nIn the wish of his scar-face eyes.\n\nThe honorable orators,\nAlways the honorable orators,\nButtoning the buttons on their prinz alberts,\nPronouncing the syllables “sac-ri-fice,”\nJuggling those bitter salt-soaked syllables--\nDo they ever gag with hot ashes in their mouths?\nDo their tongues ever shrivel with a pain of fire\nAcross those simple syllables “sac-ri-fice”?\n\n(There was one orator people far off saw.\nHe had on a gunnysack shirt over his bones,\nAnd he lifted an elbow socket over his head,\nAnd he lifted a skinny signal finger.\nAnd he had nothing to say, nothing easy--\nHe mentioned ten million men, mentioned them as having gone west, mentioned them as shoving up the daisies.\nWe could write it all on a postage stamp, what he said.\nHe said it and quit and faded away,\nA gunnysack shirt on his bones.)\n\n Stars of the night sky,\n did you see that phantom fadeout,\n did you see those phantom riders,\n skeleton riders on skeleton horses,\n stems of roses in their teeth,\n rose leaves red on white-jaw slants,\n grinning along on Pennsylvania Avenue,\n the top-sergeants calling roll calls--\n did their horses nicker a horse laugh?\n did the ghosts of the boney battalions\n move out and on, up the Potomac, over on the Ohio\n and out to the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Red River,\n and down to the Rio Grande, and on to the Yazoo,\n over to the Chattahoochee and up to the Rappahannock?\n did you see ’em, stars of the night sky?\n\n And so to-day--they lay him away--\n the boy nobody knows the name of--\n they lay him away in granite and steel--\n with music and roses--under a flag--\n under a sky of promises.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "arithmetic": { - "title": "“Arithmetic”", - "body": "Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.\nArithmetic tell you how many you lose or win if you know how many you had before you lost or won.\nArithmetic is seven eleven all good children go to heaven--or five six bundle of sticks.\nArithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.\nArithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky--or the answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again and see how it comes out this time.\nIf you take a number and double it and double it again and then double it a few more times, the number gets bigger and bigger and goes higher and higher and only arithmetic can tell you what the number is when you decide to quit doubling.\nArithmetic is where you have to multiply--and you carry the multiplication table in your head and hope you won’t lose it.\nIf you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad, and you eat one and a striped zebra with streaks all over him eats the other, how many animal crackers will you have if somebody offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say Nay nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?\nIf you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "ashurnatsirpal-the-third": { - "title": "“Ashurnatsirpal the Third”", - "body": "Three walls around the town of Tela when I came.\nThey expected everything of those walls; nobody in the town came out to kiss my feet.\n\nI knocked the walls down, killed three thousand soldiers,\nTook away cattle and sheep, took all the loot in sight,\nAnd burned special captives.\n\nSome of the soldiers--I cut off hands and feet.\nOthers--I cut off nose, ears, fingers.\nSome--I put out the eyes.\nI made a pyramid of heads.\nI strung heads on trees circling the town.\n\nWhen I got through with it\nThere wasn’t much left of the town of Tela.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "at-a-window": { - "title": "“At a Window”", - "body": "Give me hunger,\nO you gods that sit and give\nThe world its orders.\nGive me hunger, pain and want,\nShut me out with shame and failure\nFrom your doors of gold and fame,\nGive me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!\n\nBut leave me a little love,\nA voice to speak to me in the day end,\nA hand to touch me in the dark room\nBreaking the long loneliness.\nIn the dusk of day-shapes\nBlurring the sunset,\nOne little wandering, western star\nThrust out from the changing shores of shadow.\nLet me go to the window,\nWatch there the day-shapes of dusk\nAnd wait and know the coming\nOf a little love.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "autumn-movement": { - "title": "“Autumn Movement”", - "body": "I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.\nThe field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.\nThe northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "baby-face": { - "title": "“Baby Face”", - "body": "White Moon comes in on a baby face.\nThe shafts across her bed are flimmering.\n\nOut on the land White Moon shines,\nShines and glimmers against gnarled shadows,\nAll silver to slow twisted shadows\nFalling across the long road that runs from the house.\n\nKeep a little of your beauty\nAnd some of your flimmering silver\nFor her by the window to-night\nWhere vou come in, White Moon.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "back-yard": { - "title": "“Back Yard”", - "body": "Shine on, O moon of summer.\nShine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,\nAll silver under your rain to-night.\n\nAn Italian boy is sending songs to you tonight from an accordion.\n\nA Polish boy is out with his best girl;\nThey marry next month;\ntonight they are throwing you kisses.\n\nAn old man next door is dreaming over a sheen\nThat sits in a cherry tree in his back yard.\n\nThe clocks say I must go--\nI stay here sitting on the back porch\ndrinking white thoughts you rain down.\n\nShine on, O moon,\nShake out more and more silver changes.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "bas-relief": { - "title": "“Bas-Relief”", - "body": "Five geese deploy mysteriously.\nOnward proudly with flagstaffs,\nHearses with silver bugles,\nBushels of plum-blossoms dropping\nFor ten mystic web-feet--\nEach his own drum-major,\nEach charged with the honor\nOf the ancient goose nation,\nEach with a nose-length surpassing\nThe nose-lengths of rival nations.\nSomberly, slowly, unimpeachably,\nFive geese deploy mysteriously.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Smoke and Steel", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "be-ready": { - "title": "“Be Ready”", - "body": "Be land ready\nfor you shall go back to land.\n\nBe sea ready\nfor you have been nine-tenths water\nand the salt taste shall cling to your mouth.\n\nBe sky ready\nfor air, air, has been so needful to you--\nyou shall go back, back to the sky.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "bilbea": { - "title": "“Bilbea”", - "body": "Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.\nI saw nothing of you anywhere.\nI was at the old place and the other girls were there,\nBut no Bilbea.\n\nHave you gone to another house? or city?\nWhy don’t you write?\nI was sorry. I walked home half-sick.\n\nTell me how it goes.\nSend me some kind of a letter.\nAnd take care of yourself.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "boy-and-father": { - "title": "“Boy and Father”", - "body": "The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.\nThe leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn.\nAlexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.\n\n The rain beats on the windows\n And the raindrops run down the window glass\n And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding.\n\nThe boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history, Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged.\nThe boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom.\n\nBuffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas snuggling close to New Mexico,\nThese creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County.\nAlexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes.\n\nOnly once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say ‘my first wife’ so-and-so and such-and-such.\nA few times softly the father has told Alexander, ‘Your mother … was a beautiful woman … but we won’t talk about her.’\nAlways Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father mention ‘my first wife’ or ‘Alexander’s mother.’\n\nAlexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar, and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life.\nThese two come into Alexander’s head blurry and grey while the rain beats on the windows and the raindrops run down the window glass and the raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding.\nThese and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or sun unless there is a God?\n\nSo from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the buffaloes and blizzards of Texas and on to his mother and to God, so the blurry grey rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, maybe ten, keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "bringers": { - "title": "“Bringers”", - "body": "Cover me over\nIn dusk and dust and dreams.\n\nCover me over\nAnd leave me alone.\n\nCover me over,\nYou tireless, great.\n\nHear me and cover me,\nBringers of dusk and dust and dreams.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "broken-sonnet": { - "title": "“Broken Sonnet”", - "body": "May the weather next week be good to us.\nThe strong fighting birds, so often ugly,\nJab the songsters and bleed them\nAnd send them away; the wranglers rule,\nThe fast breeders, the winter sparrows,\nThe crows. The weeds, the quack grass,\nThe tough wire-grass, they have it all\nTheir way. May the weather next week\nBe good to us.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "bronzes": { - "title": "“Bronzes”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park\nShrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going somewhere to keep apppointment for dinner and matineés and buying and selling\nThough in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling\nOn the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by\n I have seen the general dare the combers come closer\nAnd make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.\nLincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.\nA lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "broom": { - "title": "“Broom”", - "body": "Tomorrow waits with a big broom.\nPray now for once.\n\nThree things are better than any other.\nSilence. Low laughter. Sleep.\nHow much am I offered?\nCan I get any bids? Will anybody sell?\n\nTomorrow waits with a big broom.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "buffalo-dusk": { - "title": "“Buffalo Dusk”", - "body": "The buffaloes are gone.\nAnd those who saw the buffaloes are gone.\nThose who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,\nThose who saw the buffaloes are gone.\nAnd the buffaloes are gone.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "california-city-landscape": { - "title": "“California City Landscape”", - "body": "On a mountain-side the real estate agents\nPut up signs marking the city lots to be sold there.\nA man whose father and mother were Irish\nRan a goat farm half-way down the mountain;\nHe drove a covered wagon years ago,\nUnderstood how to handle a rifle,\nShot grouse, buffalo, Indians, in a single year,\nAnd now was raising goats around a shanty.\nDown at the foot of the mountain\nTwo Japanese families had flower farms.\nA man and woman were in rows of sweet peas\nPicking the pink and white flowers\nTo put in baskets and take to the Los Angeles market.\nThey were clean as what they handled\nThere in the morning sun, the big people and the baby-faces.\nAcross the road, high on another mountain,\nStood a house saying, “I am it,” a commanding house.\nThere was the home of a motion picture director\nFamous for lavish whore-house interiors,\nClothes ransacked from the latest designs for women\nIn the combats of “male against female.”\nThe mountain, the scenery, the layout of the landscape,\nAnd the peace of the morning sun as it happened,\nThe miles of houses pocketed in the valley beyond--\nIt was all worth looking at, worth wondering about,\nHow long it might last, how young it might be.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "calls": { - "title": "“Calls”", - "body": "Because I have called to you\nas the fame flamingo calls,\nor the want of a spotted hawk\nis called--because in the dusk\nthe warblers shoot the running\nwaters of short songs to the\nhomecoming warblers--because\nthe cry here is wing to wing\nand song to song--I am waiting,\nwaiting with the flame flamingo,\nthe spotted hawk, the running water\nwarbler--waiting for you.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "chicago-poet": { - "title": "“Chicago Poet”", - "body": "I saluted a nobody.\nI saw him in a looking-glass.\nHe smiled-so did I.\nHe crumpled the skin on his forehead,\nfrowning--so did I.\nEverything I did he did.\nI said,\n“Hello, I know you.”\nAnd I was a liar to sav so.\n\nAh, this looking-glass man!\nLiar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,\nSoldier, dusty drinker of dust--\nAh! he will go with me\nDown the dark stairway\nWhen nobody else is looking,\nWhen everybody else is gone.\n\nHe locks his elbow in mine.\nI lose all-but not him.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "chicago": { - "title": "“Chicago”", - "body": "Hog Butcher for the World,\n Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,\n Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;\n Stormy, husky, brawling,\n City of the Big Shoulders:\n\nThey tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.\nAnd they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.\nAnd they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.\nAnd having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:\nCome and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.\nFlinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;\nFierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,\n Bareheaded,\n Shoveling,\n Wrecking,\n Planning,\n Building, breaking, rebuilding,\nUnder the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,\nUnder the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,\nLaughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,\nBragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,\nLaughing!\nLaughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "child": { - "title": "“Child”", - "body": "The young child, Christ, is straight and wise\nAnd asks questions of the old men, questions\nFound under running water for all children\nAnd found under shadows thrown on still waters\nBy tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled.\nFound to the eyes of children alone, untold,\nSinging a low song in the loneliness.\nAnd the young child, Christ, goes on asking\nAnd the old men answer nothing and only know love\nFor the young child. Christ, straight and wise.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "chromo": { - "title": "“Chromo”", - "body": "This old river town saw the\nEarly steamboats.\nThe line of wharf and houses\nIs a faded chromo.\nIt is bleached and bitten standing\nTo steady sunrises.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "cool-tombs": { - "title": "“Cool Tombs”", - "body": "When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin … in the dust, in the cool tombs.\n\nAnd Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes … in the dust, in the cool tombs.\n\nPocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? … in the dust, in the cool tombs?\n\nTake any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers are losers … tell me if any get more than the lovers … in the dust … in the cool tombs.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "days": { - "title": "“Days”", - "body": "I will keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger.\nI will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with.\nI will stab you between the ribs of the left side with a great love worth remembering.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "door": { - "title": "“Door”", - "body": "An open door says, “Come in.”\nA shut door says, “Who are you?”\nShadows and ghosts go through shut doors.\nIf a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it?\nIf a door is open and you want it open, why shut it?\nDoors forget but only doors know what it is doors forget.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-dream-girl": { - "title": "“A Dream Girl”", - "body": "You will come one day in a waver of love,\nTender as dew, impetuous as rain,\nThe tan of the sun will be on your skin,\nThe purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,\nYou will pose with a hill-flower grace.\n\nYou will come, with your slim, expressive arms,\nA poise of the head no sculptor has caught\nAnd nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,\nYour face in pass-and-repass of moods\nAs many as skies in delicate change\nOf cloud and blue and flimmering sun.\n\nYet,\nYou may not come, O girl of a dream,\nWe may but pass as the world goes by\nAnd take from a look of eyes into eyes,\nA film of hope and a memoried day.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "early-moon": { - "title": "“Early Moon”", - "body": "The baby moon, a canoe, a silver papoose canoe, sails and sails in the Indian west.\nA ring of silver foxes, a mist of silver foxes, sit and sit around the Indian moon.\n\nOne yellow star for a runner, and rows of blue stars for more runners, keep a line of watchers.\nO foxes, baby moon, runners, you are the panel of memory, fire-white writing to-night of the Red Man’s dreams.\nWho squats, legs crossed and arms folded, matching its look against the moon-face, the star-faces, of the West?\nWho are the Mississippi Valley ghosts, of copper foreheads, riding wiry ponies in the night?--no bridles, love-arms on the pony necks, riding in the night a long old trail?\nWhy do they always come back when the silver foxes sit around the early moon, a silver papoose, in the Indian west?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "evening-waterfall": { - "title": "“Evening Waterfall”", - "body": "What was the name you called me?--\nAnd why did you go so soon?\n\nThe crows lift their caw on the wind,\nAnd the wind changed and was lonely.\n\nThe warblers cry their sleepy-songs\nAcross the valley gloaming,\nAcross the cattle-horns of early stars.\n\nfeathers and people in the crotch of a treetop\nThrow an evening waterfall of sleepy-songs.\n\nWhat was the name you called me?--\nAnd why did you go so soon?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "falltime": { - "title": "“Falltime”", - "body": "Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,\nCanada-thistle blue and Aimmering larkspur blue,\nTomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts,\nShining five and six in a row on a wooden fence,\nWhy do you keep wishes shining on your faces all day long,\nWishes like women with half-forgotten lovers going to new cities?\nWhat is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, crying down on the north wind in September--acres of birds spotting the air going south?\n\nIs there something finished? And some new beginning on the way?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "a-father-to-his-son": { - "title": "“A Father to His Son”", - "body": "A father sees his son nearing manhood.\nWhat shall he tell that son?\n“Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.”\nAnd this might stand him for the storms\nand serve him for humdrum monotony\nand guide him among sudden betrayals\nand tighten him for slack moments.\n“Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.”\nAnd this too might serve him.\nBrutes have been gentled where lashes failed.\nThe growth of a frail flower in a path up\nhas sometimes shattered and split a rock.\nA tough will counts. So does desire.\nSo does a rich soft wanting.\nWithout rich wanting nothing arrives.\nTell him too much money has killed men\nand left them dead years before burial:\nthe quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs\nhas twisted good enough men\nsometimes into dry thwarted worms.\nTell him time as a stuff can be wasted.\nTell him to be a fool every so often\nand to have no shame over having been a fool\nyet learning something out of every folly\nhoping to repeat none of the cheap follies\nthus arriving at intimate understanding\nof a world numbering many fools.\nTell him to be alone often and get at himself\nand above all tell himself no lies about himself\nwhatever the white lies and protective fronts\nhe may use against other people.\nTell him solitude is creative if he is strong\nand the final decisions are made in silent rooms.\nTell him to be different from other people\nif it comes natural and easy being different.\nLet him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.\nLet him seek deep for where he is born natural.\nThen he may understand Shakespeare\nand the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,\nMichael Faraday and free imaginations\nBringing changes into a world resenting change.\nHe will be lonely enough\nto have time for the work\nhe knows as his own.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "feather-lights": { - "title": "“Feather Lights”", - "body": "Macabre and golden the moon opened a slant of light.\n\nA triangle for an oriole to stand and sing, “Take me home.”\n\nA layer of thin white gold feathers for a child queen of gypsies.\n\nSo the moon opened a slant of light and let it go.\n\nSo the lonesome dogs, the fog moon, the pearl mist, came back.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "a-fence": { - "title": "“A Fence”", - "body": "Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence.\nThe palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.\nAs a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play.\nPassing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "fire-logs": { - "title": "“Fire-Logs”", - "body": "Nancy Hanks dreams by the fire;\nDreams, and the logs sputter,\nAnd the yellow tongues climb.\nRed lines lick their way in flickers.\n\nOh, sputter, logs. Oh, dream, Nancy.\nTime now for a beautiful child.\nTime now for a tall man to come.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "fog": { - "title": "“Fog”", - "body": "The fog comes\non little cat feet.\n\nIt sits looking\nover harbor and city\non silent haunches\nand then moves on.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-four-brothers": { - "title": "“The Four Brothers”", - "body": "Make war songs out of these;\nMake chants that repeat and weave.\nMake rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;\nMake slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.\nMake a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,\n Going along,\n Going along,\nOn the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad--\nThe boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.\n\nCowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;\nBallplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;\n\nA million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.”\nThis the sun looks on between two seaboards,\nIn the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.\n\nI heard one say,\n“I am ready to be killed.”\nI heard another say,\n“I am ready to be killed.”\nO sunburned clear-eved boys!\nI stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,\nYou--and the flag!\nAnd my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat\nWhen you go by,\nYou on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, “I am ready to be killed.”\n\nThey are hunting death,\nDeath for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.\nThey are after a Hohenzollern head:\nThere is no man-hunt of men remembered like this.\n\nThe four big brothers are out to kill.\nFrance, Russia, Britain, America--\nThe four republics are sworn brothers to kill the kaiser.\n\nYes, this is the great man-hunt;\nAnd the sun has never seen till now\nSuch a line of toothed and tusked man-killers,\nIn the blue of the upper sky,\n\nIn the green of the undersea,\nIn the red of winter dawns.\nEating to kill,\nSleeping to kill,\nAsked by their mothers to kill,\nWished by four-fifths of the world to kill--\nTo cut the kaiser’s throat,\nTo hack the kaisel’s head,\nTo hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet.\n\nAnd is it nothing else than this?\nThree times ten million men thirsting the blood\nOf a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?\nThree times ten million men asking the blood\nOf a child born with his head wrong-shaped,\nThe blood of rotted kings in his veins?\nIf this were all, O God,\nI would go to the far timbers\nAnd look on the grey wolves\nTearing the throats of moose:\nI would ask a wilder drunk of blood.\n\nLook! It is four brothers in joined hands together.\n The people of bleeding France,\n The people of bleeding Russia,\n The people of Britain, the people of America--\nThese are the four brothers, these are the four republics.\n\nAt first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of someone taunting;\nNow I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the sea-combers in storm.\nI say now, by God, only fighters today will save the world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley Forge in Christmas snow.\nOn the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull of Shakespere, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and running life poured out by the mothers of the world,\nBy the God of morning glories climbing blue the doors of quiet homes, by the God of tall hollyhocks laughing glad to children in peaceful valleys, by the God of new mothers wishing peace to sit at windows nursing babies,\nI swear only reckless men, ready to throw away their lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to a single pur. pose imperturbable and undaunted, men with the primitive guts of rebellion,\nOnly fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor’s sorrow on their brows and labor’s terrible pride in their blood, men with souls asking danger-only these will save and keep the four big brothers.\n\nGood-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,\nGood-night to the kaiser.\nThe breakdown and the fade-away begins.\nThe shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.\n\nOne finger is raised that counts the czar,\nThe ghost who beckoned men who come no more--\nThe czar gone to the winds on God’s great dustpan,\nThe czar a pinch of nothing,\nThe last of the gibbering Romanoffs.\n\nOut and good-night--\nThe ghosts of the summer palaces\nAnd the ghosts of the winter palaces!\nOut and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, the kaisers.\n\nAnother finger will speak,\nAnd the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,\nThe kaiser will go onto God’s great dustpan--\nThe last of the gibbering Hohenzollerns.\nLook! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom and a dustpan,\nGod knows a finger will speak and count them out.\n\nIt is written in the stars;\nIt is spoken on the walls;\nIt clicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless;\nIt mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents;\nIt sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla Walla to Mesopotamia:\nOut and good-night.\n\nThe millions slow in khaki,\nThe millions learning _Turkey in the Straw_ and _John Brown’s Body_,\nThe millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettysburg, Chickamauga and Spottsylvania Court House,\nThe millions dreaming of the morningstar of Appomattox,\nThe millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes and prows:\n There is a hammering, drumming hell to come\n The killing gangs are on the way.\n\nGod takes one year for a job.\nGod takes ten years or a million.\nGod knows when a doom is written.\nGod knows this job will be done and the words spoken:\nOut and good-night.\n The red tubes will run,\n And the great price be paid,\n And the homes empty,\n And the wives wishing,\n And the mothers wishing.\nThere is only one way now, only the way of the red tubes and the great price.\n\n Well …\nMaybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,\nAnd the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.\nMaybe the mothers of the world,\nAnd the life that pours from their torsal folds--\nMaybe it’s all a lie sworn by liars,\nAnd a God with a cackling laughter says:\n“I, the Almighty God,\nI have made all this,\nI have made it for kaisers, czars and kings.”\n\nThree times ten million men say: No.\nThree times ten million men sav:\n God is a God of the People.\nAnd the God who made the world\n And fixed the morning sun,\n And flung the evening stars,\n And shaped the baby hands of life,\nThis is the God of the Four Brothers;\nThis is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;\nThis is the God of the people of Britain and America.\n\nThe graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are ten times a million.\nThe stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.\nThe crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.\n\nCows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night.\nThe death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hacking lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and squeeze scarlet drain day by day--the storm of it is hell.\nBut look! child! the storm is blowing for a clean air.\n\nLook! the four brothers march\nAnd hurl their big shoulders\nAnd swear the job shall be done.\n\nOut of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of earth,\nOut of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,\nOut of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.\nThe four brothers shall be five and more.\n\nUnder the chimneys of the winter time the children of the world shall sing new songs.\nAmong the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the world shall sing new sleepy-time songs.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "garden-wireless": { - "title": "“Garden Wireless”", - "body": "How many feet ran with sunlight, water and air?\n\nWhat little devils shaken of laughter, cramming their little ribs with chuckles,\n\nFixed this lone red tulip, a woman’s mouth of passion kisses, a nun’s mouth of sweet thinking, here topping a straight line of green, a pillar stem?\n\nWho hurled this bomb of red caresses?--nodding balloon-film shooting its wireless every fraction of a second these June days:\n\n _Love me before I die;\n Love me--love me now._", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "gargoyle": { - "title": "“Gargoyle”", - "body": "I saw a mouth jeering. A smile of melted red iron ran over it. Its laugh was full of nails rattling. It was a child’s dream of a mouth.\nA fist hit the mouth: knuckles of gun-metal driven by an electric wrist and shoulder. It was a child’s dream of an arm.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "government": { - "title": "“Government”", - "body": "The Government--I heard about the Government and I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at it when I saw it.\nThen I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to the callaboose. It was the Government in action.\nI saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw this was the Government, doing things.\nI saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of workingmen who were trying to get other workingmen to stay away from a shop where there was a strike on. Government in action.\n\nEverywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of men, that Government has blood and bones, it is many mouths whispering into many ears, sending telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying “yes” and “no.”\n\nGovernment dies as the men who form it die and are laid away in their graves and the new Government that comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood, ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all, money paid and money taken, and money covered up and spoken of with hushed voices.\nA Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive as any human sinner carrying a load of germs, traditions and corpuscles handed down from fathers and mothers away back.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "graceland": { - "title": "“Graceland”", - "body": "Tomb of a millionaire,\nA multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,\nPlace of the dead where they spend every year\nThe usury of twenty-five thousand dollars\nFor upkeep and flowers\nTo keep fresh the memory of the dead.\nThe merchant prince gone to dust\nCommanded in his written will\nOver the signed name of his last testament\nTwenty-five thousand dollars be set aside\nFor roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,\nFor perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance\nAround his last long home.\n\n(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.\nIn the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables\nDrinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.\nIn a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for\nsix dollars a week wages\nAnd when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the\nnewspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "grass": { - "title": "“Grass”", - "body": "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.\nShovel them under and let me work--\n\n I am the grass; I cover all.\n\nAnd pile them high at Gettysburg\nAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.\nShovel them under and let me work.\nTwo years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:\n\n What place is this?\n Where are we now?\n\n I am the grass.\n Let me work.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-great-hunt": { - "title": "“The Great Hunt”", - "body": "I can not tell you now;\nWhen the wind’s drive and whirl\nBlow me along no longer,\nAnd the wind’s a whisper at last--\nMaybe I’ll tell you then--some other time.\n\nWhen the rose’s flash to the sunset\nReels to the wrack and the twist,\nAnd the rose is a red bygone,\nWhen the face I love is going\nAnd the gate to the end shall clang,\nAnd it’s no use to beckon or say, “So long”--\nMaybe I’ll tell you then--some other time.\n\nI never knew any more beautiful than you:\nI have hunted you under my thoughts,\nI have broken down under the wind\nAnd into the roses looking for you.\nI shall never find any greater than you.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "gypsy": { - "title": "“Gypsy”", - "body": "In a hole-in-a-wall on Halsted Street sits a gypsy woman,\nIn a garish, gas-lit rendezvous, in a humpback higgling hole-in-a-wall.\n\nThe left hand is a tattler; stars and oaths and alphabets\nCommit themselves and tell happenings gone, happenings to come, pathways of honest people, hypocrites.\n\n“Long pointed fingers mean imagination; a star on the third finger says a black shadow walks near.”\nCross the gypsy’s hand with fifty cents, and she takes your left hand and reads how you shall be happy in love, or not, and whether you die rich, or not.\nSigns outside the hole-in-a-wall say so, misspell the promises, scrawl the superior gypsy mysteries.\n\nA red shawl on her shoulders falls with a fringe hem to a green skirt.\nChains of yellow beads sweep from her neck to her tawny hands.\nFifty springtimes must have kissed her mouth holding a calabash pipe.\n\nShe pulls slow contemplative puffs of smoke. She is a shape for ghosts of contemplation to sit around and ask why something cheap as happiness is here; and more besides than plain happiness, chapped lips, rough eyes, red shawl, gypsy perfection of offhand insolence.\nShe is thinking about somebody and something--the same as Whistler’s mother sat and thought about somebody and something.\n\nIn a hole-in-a-wall on Halted Street are stars, oaths, alphabets.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-hammer": { - "title": "“The Hammer”", - "body": "I have seen\nThe old gods go\nAnd the new gods come.\n\nDay by day\nAnd year by year\nThe idols fall\nAnd the idols rise.\n\nToday\nI worship the hammer.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "happiness": { - "title": "“Happiness”", - "body": "I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.\nAnd I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.\nThey all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them\nAnd then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river\nAnd I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-harbor": { - "title": "“The Harbor”", - "body": "Passing through huddled and ugly walls,\nBy doorways where women haggard\nLooked from their hunger-deep eyes,\nHaunted with shadows of hunger-hands,\nOut from the huddled and ugly walls,\nI came sudden, at the city’s edge,\nOn a blue burst of lake,\nLong lake waves breaking under the sun\nOn a spray-flung curve of shore;\nAnd a fluttering storm of gulls,\nMasses of great gray wings\nAnd flying white bellies\nVeering and wheeling free in the open.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "harmonica-humdrums": { - "title": "“Harmonica Humdrums”", - "body": "And so the days pass\nand so we drift and dawdle.\nBright stood the mountains,\nbrighter loomed the sea\nAnd so the nights go\nAnd so we flash and fade.\nGreen lay the hills,\ngreener a river evening.\nStones wore gray lichen\nand trees a morn mist.\nAnd so the gold be gone\nand so the harm be ashes.\nFirst moved the moonrise.\nLater dropped the moondown.\nHandy shoved the dawn.\nHandydandy shone the sun.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "harrison-street-court": { - "title": "“Harrison Street Court”", - "body": "I heard a woman’s lips\nSpeaking to a companion\nSay these words:\n\n“A woman what hustles\nNever keeps nothin’\nFor all her hustlin’.\nSomebody always gets\nWhat she goes on the street for.\nIf it ain’t a pimp\nIt’s a bull what gets it.\nI been hustlin’ now\nTill I ain’t much good any more.\nI got nothin’ to show for it.\nSome man got it all,\nEvery night’s hustlin’ I ever did.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "how-much": { - "title": "“How Much?”", - "body": "How much do you love me, a million bushels?\nOh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.\n\nAnd tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?\nTomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.\n\nAnd is this your heart arithmetic?\nThis is the way the wind measures the weather.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "i-am-the-people-the-mob": { - "title": "“I Am the People, the Mob”", - "body": "I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.\nDo you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?\nI am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.\nI am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.\nI am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.\nSometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.\nWhen I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.\nThe mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "impossible-iambics": { - "title": "“Impossible Iambics”", - "body": "He saw a fire dancer take two flambeaus\nAnd do red shadows with her shoulders.\nAnd he met two fools looking on and saying\nHorsefeathers horsefeathers, and he said\nI must bethink myself, I must throw seven\nEleven, O God am I a two-spot or what am\nI? a who or a what or a which am I?\n And the next day it rained,\n the next day was something\n else again.\n\nWell, hibiscus, what would you?\nThe fambeau dancer did it,\n she and the red shadows she threw.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "in-tall-grass": { - "title": "“In Tall Grass”", - "body": "Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner--a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.\n\nAnd I ask no better a winding sheet over the earth and under the sun.\n\nLet the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "iron": { - "title": "“Iron”", - "body": "Guns,\nLong, steel guns,\nPointed from the war ships\nIn the name of the war god.\nStraight, shining, polished guns,\nClambered over with jackies in white blouses,\nGlory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,\nLaughing lithe jackies in white blouses,\nSitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.\n\nShovels,\nBroad, iron shovels,\nScooping out oblong vaults,\nLoosening turf and leveling sod.\n\nI ask you\nTo witness--\nThe shovel is brother to the gun.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "jan-kubelik": { - "title": "“Jan Kubelik”", - "body": "Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air.\n(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect learning to suck milk.)\n\nYour bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild.\n(All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the hills with their lovers.)", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "jazz-fantasia": { - "title": "“Jazz Fantasia”", - "body": "Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,\nSob on the long cool winding saxophones.\nGo to it, O jazzmen.\n\nSling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans,\nLet your trombones ooze,\nAnd go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.\n\nMoan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops,\nMoan soft like you wanted somebody terrible,\nCry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop,\nBang-bang! you jazzmen,\nBang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans--\nMake two people fight on the top of a stairway\nAnd scratch each other’s eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.\n\nCan the rough stuff …\nNow a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river\nWith a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo …\nAnd the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars …\nA red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills …\nGo to it, O jazzmen.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "joy": { - "title": "“Joy”", - "body": "Let a joy keep you.\nReach out your hands\nAnd take it when it runs by,\nAs the Apache dancer\nClutches his woman.\nI have seen them\nLive long and laugh loud,\nSent on singing, singing,\nSmashed to the heart\nUnder the ribs\nWith a terrible love.\nJoy always,\nJoy everywhere--\nLet joy kill you!\nKeep away from the little deaths.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "jungheimers": { - "title": "“Jungheimer’s”", - "body": "In western fields of corn and northern timber lands,\n They talk about me, a saloon with a soul,\n The soft red lights, the long curving bar,\n The leather seats and dim corners,\n Tall brass spittoons, a nigger cutting ham,\nAnd the painting of a woman half-dressed thrown reckless across a bed after a night of booze and riots.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "killers": { - "title": "“Killers”", - "body": "I am singing to you\nSoft as a man with a dead child speaks;\nHard as a man in handcuffs,\nHeld where he can not move:\n\nUnder the sun\nAre sixteen million men,\nChosen for shining teeth,\nSharp eyes, hard legs,\nAnd a running of young warm blood in their wrists.\n\nAnd a red juice runs on the green grass;\nAnd a red juice soaks the dark soil\nAnd the sixteen million are killing and killing … and killing.\n\nI never forget them day or night:\nThey beat on my head for memory of them;\nThey pound on my heart and I cry back to them,\nTo their homes and women, dreams and games.\n\nI wake in the night and smell the trenches,\nAnd hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--\nSixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:\nSome of them long sleepers for always,\nSome of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,\nFixed in the drag of the world’s heartbreak,\nEating and drinking, toiling … on a long job of killing.\n\nSixteen million men.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "kin": { - "title": "“Kin”", - "body": "Brother, I am fire\nSurging under the ocean floor.\nI shall never meet you, brother--\nNot for years, anyhow;\nMaybe thousands of years, brother.\nThen I will warm you,\nHold you close, wrap you in circles,\nUse you and change you--\nMaybe thousands of years, brother.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "languages": { - "title": "“Languages”", - "body": "There are no handles upon a language\nWhereby men take hold of it\nAnd mark it with signs for its remembrance.\nIt is a river, this language,\nOnce in a thousand years\nBreaking a new course\nChanging its way to the ocean.\nIt is mountain effluvia\nMoving to valleys\nAnd from nation to nation\nCrossing borders and mixing.\nLanguages die like rivers.\nWords wrapped round your tongue today\nAnd broken to shape of thought\nBetween your teeth and lips speaking\nNow and today\nShall be faded hieroglyphics\nTen thousand years from now.\nSing--and singing--remember\nYour song dies and changes\nAnd is not here to-morrow\nAny more than the wind\nBlowing ten thousand years ago.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-law-says": { - "title": "“The Law Says”", - "body": "The law says you and I belong to each other, George.\nThe law says you are mine and I am yours, George.\nAnd there are a million miles of white snowstorms, a million furnaces of hell,\nBetween the chair where you sit and the chair where I sit.\nThe law says two strangers shall eat breakfast together after nights on the horn of an Arctic moon.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "li-po-and-lao-tse-come-to-nebraska": { - "title": "“Li Po and Lao Tse Come to Nebraska”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nMake a daily memo of your eggs.\nGive up something you love to get something better to love.\nThrow away your last hope rather than undersell.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nLoosen a sprig of cherry blossom and see how it smells.\nBreak off a line of lilacs long as your arm.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nStage your fat steers for the butcher’s eye\nStand at a hog-tight fence and count your hams,\nReckon on the sagging corn-fed flanks.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-long-shadow-of-lincoln": { - "title": "“The Long Shadow of Lincoln”", - "body": "_We can succeed only by concert … The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves … December 1, 1862._\n --The President’s Message to Congress.\n\nBe sad, be cool, be kind,\nremembering those now dreamdust\nhallowed in the ruts and gullies,\nsolemn bones under the smooth blue sea,\nfaces warblown in a falling rain.\n\nBe a brother, if so can be,\nto those beyond battle fatigue\neach in his own corner of earth\n or forty fathoms undersea\n beyond all boom of guns,\n beyond any bong of a great bell,\n each with a bosom and number,\n each with a pack of secrets,\neach with a personal dream and doorway\nand over them now the long endless winds\n with the low healing song of time,\n the hush and sleep murmur of time.\n\nMake your wit a guard and cover.\nSing low, sing high, sing wide.\nLet your laughter come free\nremembering looking toward peace:\n“We must disenthrall ourselves.”\n\nBe a brother, if so can be,\nto those thrown forward\nfor taking hardwon lines,\nfor holding hardwon points\n and their reward so-so,\nlittle they care to talk about,\ntheir pay held in a mute calm,\nhighspot memories going unspoken,\nwhat they did being past words,\nwhat they took being hardwon.\n Be sad, be kind, be cool.\n Weep if you must\n And weep open and shameless\n before these altars.\n\nThere are wounds past words.\nThere are cripples less broken\nthan many who walk whole.\n There are dead youths\n with wrists of silence\n who keep a vast music\n under their shut lips,\nwhat they did being past words,\ntheir dreams like their deaths\nbeyond any smooth and easy telling,\nhaving given till no more to give.\n\n There is dust alive\nwith dreams of The Republic,\nwith dreams of the Family of Man\nflung wide on a shrinking globe\n with old timetables,\n old maps, old guide-posts\n torn into shreds,\n shot into tatters\n burnt in a firewind,\n lost in the shambles,\n faded in rubble and ashes.\n\n There is dust alive.\nOut of a granite tomb,\nOut of a bronze sarcophagus,\nLoose from the stone and copper\nSteps a whitesmoke ghost\nLifting an authoritative hand\nIn the name of dreams worth dying for,\nIn the name of men whose dust breathes\n of those dreams so worth dying for,\nwhat they did being past words,\nbeyond all smooth and easy telling.\n\nBe sad, be kind, be cool,\nremembering, under God, a dreamdust\nhallowed in the ruts and gullies,\nsolemn bones under the smooth blue sea,\nfaces warblown in a falling rain.\n\nSing low, sing high, sing wide.\nMake your wit a guard and cover.\nLet your laughter come free\nlike a help and a brace of comfort.\n\n The earth laughs, the sun laughs\nover every wise harvest of man,\nover man looking toward peace\nby the light of the hard old teaching:\n “We must disenthrall ourselves.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "presidents_day" - } - } - }, - "losers": { - "title": "“Losers”", - "body": "If I should pass the tomb of Jonah\nI would stop there and sit for awhile;\nBecause I was swallowed one time deep in the dark\nAnd came out alive after all.\n\nIf I pass the burial spot of Nero\nI shall say to the wind, “Well, well!”\nI who have fiddled in a world on fire,\nI who have done so many stunts not worth doing.\n\nI am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.\nI want to shake his ghost-hand and say,\n“Neither of us died very early, did we?”\n\nAnd the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar--\nWhen I arrive there I shall tell the wind:\n“You ate grass; I have eaten crow--\nWho is better off now or next year?”\n\nJack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,\nThere too I could sit down and stop for awhile.\nI think I could tell their headstones:\n“God, let me remember all good losers.”\n\nI could ask people to throw ashes on their heads\nIn the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods.\nWalking into the drumfires, calling his men,\n“Come on, you--! Do you want to live forever?”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "lost": { - "title": "“Lost”", - "body": "Desolate and lone\nAll night long on the lake \nWhere fog trails and mist creeps, \nThe whistle of a boat \nCalls and cries unendingly, \nLike some lost child \nIn tears and trouble \nHunting the harbor’s breast \nAnd the harbor’s eyes.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "masses": { - "title": "“Masses”", - "body": "Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed;\nOn the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I stood silent;\nUnder the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.\nGreat men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting their children--these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.\nAnd then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night--and all broken, humble ruins of nations.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "medley": { - "title": "“Medley”", - "body": "Ignorance came in stones of gold;\nThe ignorant slept while the hangmen\nHanged the keepers of the lights\nOf sweet stars: such were the apothegms,\nOffhand offerings of mule-drivers\nEating sandwiches of rye bread,\nSalami and onions.\n\n“Too Many Books,” we always called him;\nA landscape of masterpieces and old favorites\nFished with their titles for his eyes\nIn the upstairs and downstairs rooms\nOf his house. Whenever he passed\nThe old-time bar-room where Pete Morehouse\nShot the chief of police, where\nThe sponge squads shot two bootleggers,\nHe always remembered the verse story,\nThe Face on the Bar-room Floor--\nThe tramp on a winter night,\nSaddened and warmed with whiskey,\nTelling of a woman he wanted\nAnd a woman who wanted him,\nHow whiskey wrecked it all;\nTaking a piece of chalk,\nPicturing her face on the bar-room floor,\nFixing the lines of her face\nWhile he told the story,\nThen gasping and falling with finished heartbeats,\nDead.\n\nAnd whenever he passed over the bridge at night\nAnd took the look up the river to smaller bridges,\nBarge lights, and looming shores,\nHe always thought of Edgar Allan Poe,\nWith a load of hootch in him,\nGoing to a party of respectable people\nWho called for a speech,\nWho listened to Poe recite the Lord’s Prayer,\nCorrectly, word for word, yet with lush, unmistakable\nIntonations, so haunting the dinner-party people\nAll excused themselves to each other.\n\nWhenever Too Many Books\nPassed over the town bridge in the gloaming,\nHe thought of Poe breaking up that party\nOf respectable people. Such was Too Many Books--\nWe called him that.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "mill-doors": { - "title": "“Mill-Doors”", - "body": "You never come back. \nI say good--by when I see you going in the doors, \nThe hopeless open doors that call and wait \nAnd take you then for--how many cents a day? \nHow many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers? \n\nI say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,\nIn the dark, in the silence, day by day,\nAnd all the blood of you drop by drop,\nAnd you are old before you are young.\nYou never come back.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "momus": { - "title": "“Momus”", - "body": "Momus is the name men give your face,\nThe brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle\nFinding a way mid mist on a shoreland,\nWhere gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray Against horizons purple, silent.\n\nYes, Momus,\nMen have flung your face in bronze\nTo gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.\nThey were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,\nGave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;\nAll your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones\nThrown over and through with a smile that forever wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone into dreams, by God.\n\nI wonder, Momus,\nWhether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter\nOn men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history.\nA droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze,\nYou give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent;\nGranite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,\nCareless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women\nSwarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears,\nAnd blood drops of undiminishing war.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "monotone": { - "title": "“Monotone”", - "body": "The monotone of the rain is beautiful,\nAnd the sudden rise and slow relapse\nOf the long multitudinous rain.\nThe sun on the hills is beautiful,\nOr a captured sunset sea-flung,\nBannered with fire and gold.\nA face I know is beautiful--\nWith fire and gold of sky and sea,\nAnd the peace of long warm rain.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "moon-riders": { - "title": "“Moon-Riders”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhat have I saved out of a morning?\nThe earliest of the morning came with moon-mist\nAnd the travel of a moon-spilt purple:\nBars, horse-shoes, Texas long-horns,\nLinked in night silver,\nLinked under leaves in moonlit silver,\nLinked in rags and patches\nOut of the ice-houses of the morning moon.\nYes, this was the earliest--\nBefore the cowpunchers on the eastern rims\nBegan riding into the sun,\nRiding the roan mustangs of morning,\nRoping the mavericks after the latest stars.\nWhat have I saved out of a morning?\nWas there a child face I saw once\nSmiling up a stairway of the morning moon?\n\n\n# II.\n\n“It is time for work,” said a man in the morning.\nHe opened the faces of the clocks, saw their works,\nSaw the wheels oiled and fitted, running smooth.\n“It is time to begin a day’s work,” he said again,\nWatching a bullfinch hop on the rain-worn boards\nOf a beaten fence counting its bitter winters.\nThe clinging feet of the bullfinch and the flash\nOf its flying feathers as it fipped away\nTook his eyes away from the clocks--his flying eyes.\nHe walked over, stood in front of the clocks again,\nAnd said, “I’m sorry; I apologize forty ways.”\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe morning paper lay bundled,\nLike a spear in a museum,\nAcross the broken sleeping-room\nOf a moon-sheet spider.\nThe spinning work of the morning spider’s feet\nLeft off where the morning paper’s pages lay\nIn the shine of the web in the summer-dew grass.\nThe man opened the morning paper: saw the first page,\nThe back page, the inside pages, the editorials;\nSaw the world go by, eating, stealing, fighting;\nSaw the headlines, date-lines, funnies, ads,\nThe marching movies of the workmen going to work, the workmen striking,\nThe workmen asking jobs--five million pairs of eyes look for a boss and say, “Take me”:\nPeople eating with too much to eat, people eating with nothing in sight to eat tomorrow, eating as though eating belongs where people belong.\n\n“Hustle, you hustlers, while the hustling’s good,”\nSaid the man, turning the morning paper’s pages,\nTurning among headlines, date-lines, funnies, ads.\n“Hustlers carrying the banner,” said the man,\nDropping the paper and beginning to hunt the city;\nHunting the alleys, boulevards, back-door by-ways;\nHunting till he found a blind horse dying alone,\nTelling the horse, “Two legs or four legs--it’s all the same with a work plug.”\n\nA hayfield mist of evening saw him\nWatching the moon-riders lose the moon\nFor new shooting-stars. He asked,\n“Christ, what have I saved out of a morning?”\nHe called up a stairway of the morning moon\nAnd he remembered a child face smiling up that same stairway.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "mr-attila": { - "title": "“Mr. Attila”", - "body": "They made a myth of you, professor,\n you of the gentle voice,\n the books, the specs,\n the furitive rabbit manners\n in the mortar-board cap\n and the medieval gown.\n\nThey didn’t think it, eh professor?\nOn account of you’re so absent-minded,\nyou bumping into the tree and saying,\n“Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,”\npassing on again blank and absent-minded.\n\nNow it’s “Mr. Attila, how do you do?”\nDo you pack wallops of wholesale death?\nAre you the practical dynamic son-of-a-gun?\nHave you come through with a few abstractions?\nIs it you Mr. Attila we hear saying,\n“I beg your pardon but we believe we have made some degree of progress on the residual qualities of the atom”?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-naked-stranger": { - "title": "“The Naked Stranger”", - "body": "It is five months off.\nKnit, stitch, and hemstitch:\nSheets, bags, towels, these are the offerings.\nWhen he is older, or she is a big girl,\nThere may be flowers or ribbons or money\nFor birthday offerings. Now, however,\nWe must remember it is a naked stranger\nComing to us; and the sheath of the arrival\nIs so soft we must be ready, and soft too.\n\nKnit, stitch, hemstitch, it is only five months.\n\nIt would be easy to pick a lucky star for this baby\nIf a choice of two stars lay before our eyes--\nOne a pearl-gold star and one pearl-silver--\nAnd the offer of a chance to pick a lucky star.\n\nWhen the high hour comes\nLet there be a light furry of snow,\nA little zigzag of white spots\nAgainst the gray roofs.\nThe snow-born all understand this as a luck-wish.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "the-next-child-waits": { - "title": "“The Next Child Waits”", - "body": "I know the city waits … the next child waits … there is a great singing Mother.\n\nOur earth of a turning ball--who set it swinging? A great Nobody? Who put the People down on the wire-grass wilderness? A great Nobody?\n\nI have listened to the tides of the sea trying to spell the word. I have walked under tall trees and heard winter winds trying to write the high sign of it. I have felt the magnet pull of it under the shoes of my feet in the dirt of a prairie road.\n\nI know the city waits … the next child waits … there is a great singing Mother.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "night-bells": { - "title": "“Night Bells”", - "body": "Two bells six bells\ntwo bells six bells\non a blue pavilion\nOut across a smooth blue pavilion\nAnd between each bell\nOne clear cry of a woman\n“Lord God you made the night\ntoo long too long.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "night-movement": { - "title": "“Night Movement”", - "body": "In the night, when the sea-winds take the city in their arms,\nAnd cool the loud streets that kept their dust noon and afternoon:\nIn the night, when the sea-birds call to the lights of the city,\nThe lights that cut on the skyline their name of a city;\nIn the night, when the trains and wagons start from a long way off\nFor the city where the people ask bread and want letters;\nIn the night the city lives too--the day is not all.\nIn the night there are dancers dancing and singers singing,\nAnd the sailors and soldiers look for numbers on doors.\nIn the night the sea-winds take the city in their arms.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "number-man": { - "title": "“Number Man”", - "body": "_for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach_\n\nHe was born to wonder about numbers.\n\nHe balanced fives against tens\nand made them sleep together\nand love each other.\n\nHe took sixes and sevens\nand set them wrangling and fighting\nover raw bones.\n\nHe woke up twos and fours\nout of baby sleep\nand touched them back to sleep.\n\nHe managed eights and nines,\ngave them prophet beards,\nmarched them into mists and mountains.\n\nHe added all the numbers he knew,\nmultiplied them by new-found numbers\nand called it a prayer of Numbers.\n\nFor each of a million cipher silences\nhe dug up a mate number\nfor a candle light in the dark.\n\nHe knew love numbers, luck numbers,\nhow the sea and the stars\nare made and held by numbers.\n\nHe died from the wonder of numbering.\nHe said good-by as if good-by is a number.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "old-fashioned-requited-love": { - "title": "“Old-Fashioned Requited Love”", - "body": "I have ransacked the encyclopedias,\nAnd slid my fingers among topics and titles,\nLooking for you.\n\nAnd the answer comes slow.\nThere seems to be no answer.\n\nI shall ask the next banana peddler the who and why of it.\n\nOr--the iceman with his iron tongs gripping a clear cube in summer sunlight--maybe he will know.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-a-flimmering-floom-you-shall-ride": { - "title": "“On a Flimmering Floom You Shall Ride”", - "body": "_Summary and footnote of and on\nthe testimony of the poet\nMacLeish under oath before a\nCongressional examining committee\npressing him to divulge the.\nportents and meanings of his poems._\n\nNobody noogers the shaff of a sloo.\nNobody slimbers a wench with a winch\nNor higgles armed each with a niggle\nand each the Aimdrat of a smee,\neach the inbiddy hum of a smoo.\n\nThen slong me dorst with the flagdarsh.\nThen creep me deep with the crawbright.\nLet idle winds ploodaddle the dorshes.\nAnd you in the gold of the gloaming\nYou shall be sloam with the hoolriffs.\n\nOn a flimmering floom you shall ride.\nThey shall tell you bedish and desist.\nOn a flimmering floom you shall ride.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "our-prayer-of-thanks": { - "title": "“Our Prayer of Thanks”", - "body": "God,\nFor the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,\nOur prayer of thanks.\n\nGod,\nFor the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,\nOur prayer of thanks.\n\nGod,\nFor the sunset and the stars, the women and their white arms that hold us,\nOur prayer of thanks.\n\nGod,\nIf you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,\nGod, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,\nOur prayer of thanks.\n\nGod,\nThe game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last,\nOur prayer of thanks.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "people-who-must": { - "title": "“People Who Must”", - "body": "I put my easel on the roof of a skyscraper.\nI painted a long while and called it a day’s work.\nThe people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cop’s whistle never let up all afternoon.\nThey were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way--\nThose people on the go or at a standstill;\nAnd the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass,\nWhere the black tides ran around him\nAnd he kept the street. I painted a long while\nAnd called it a day’s work.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Smoke and Steel", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "from-the-people-yes": { - "title": "From “The People, Yes”", - "body": "Lincoln?\nHe was a mystery in smoke and flags\nSaying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,\nYes to the paradoxes of democracy,\nYes to the hopes of government\nOf the people by the people for the people,\nNo to debauchery of the public mind,\nNo to personal malice nursed and fed,\nYes to the Constitution when a help,\nNo to the Constitution when a hindrance\nYes to man as a struggler amid illusions,\nEach man fated to answer for himself:\nWhich of the faiths and illusions of mankind\nMust I choose for my own sustaining light\nTo bring me beyond the present wilderness?\n\n Lincoln? Was he a poet?\n And did he write verses?\n“I have not willingly planted a thorn\n in any man’s bosom.”\n“I shall do nothing through malice: what\n I deal with is too vast for malice.”\n\nDeath was in the air.\nSo was birth.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "presidents_day" - } - } - }, - "personality": { - "title": "“Personality”", - "body": "You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.\nYou have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb.\nYou go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the world’s honors, but when you come back home the print of the one thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.\nOut of the whirling womb of time come millions of men\nand their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers’ throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.\nSomewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the inside story of this.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "places": { - "title": "“Places”", - "body": "Roses and gold\nFor you today,\nAnd the flash of flying flags.\nI will have\nAshes,\nDust in my hair,\nCrushes of hoofs.\n\nYour name\nFills the mouth\nOf rich man and poor.\nWomen bring\nArmfuls of flowers\nAnd throw on you.\n\nI go hungry\nDown in dreams\nAnd loneliness,\nAcross the rain\nTo slashed hills\nWhere men wait and hope for me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-poor": { - "title": "“The Poor”", - "body": "Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed;\nOn the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I stool silent;\nUnder the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.\nGreat men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting their children--these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.\nAnd then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night--and all broken, humble ruins of nations.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "potomac-town-in-february": { - "title": "“Potomac Town in February”", - "body": "The bridge says:\nCome across, try me; see how good I am.\nThe big rock in the river says:\nLook at me; learn how to stand up.\nThe white water says:\nI go on; around, under, over, I go on.\nA kneeling, scraggly pine says:\nI am here yet; they nearly got me last year.\nA sliver of moon slides by on a high wind calling:\nI know why; I’ll see you to-morrow;\nI’ll tell you everything to-morrow.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Smoke and Steel", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "prarie-waters-by-night": { - "title": "“Prarie Waters by Night”", - "body": "Chatter of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water--sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.\nAnd the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, in a choir chanting new psalms.\nIt is too much for the long willows when low laughter of a red moon comes down; and the willows drowse and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "prarie": { - "title": "“Prarie”", - "body": "I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.\n\nHere the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.\nHere between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.\nHere the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.\nHere I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water. 5\n\nThe prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.\n\n After the sunburn of the day\n handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,\n after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,\n the pearl-gray haystacks\n in the gloaming\n are cool prayers\n to the harvest hands.\n\nIn the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.\nOn the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.\n\nI am here when the cities are gone.\nI am here before the cities come.\nI nourished the lonely men on horses.\nI will keep the laughing men who ride iron.\nI am dust of men.\n\nThe running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.\nYou came in wagons, making streets and schools,\nKin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,\nSinging _Yankee Doodle_, _Old Dan Tucker_, _Turkey in the Straw_,\nYou in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl,\nYou at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,\nI am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother\nTo the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,\nThe singing women and their sons a thousand years ago\nMarching single file the timber and the plain.\n\nI hold the dust of these amid changing stars.\nI last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like,\nWhile new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.\nI fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.\nAppomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,\nI who have seen the red births and the red deaths\nOf sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.\n\nHave you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?\nHave you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?\n\n Rivers cut a path on flat lands.\n The mountains stand up.\n The salt oceans press in\n And push on the coast lines.\n The sun, the wind, bring rain\n And I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle:\n A love-letter pledge to come again.\n\n Towns on the Soo Line,\n Towns on the Big Muddy,\n Laugh at each other for cubs\n And tease as children.\n\nOmaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.\nTowns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up.\n\nOut of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke--out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise--out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples--\nHere I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.\nOut of log houses and stumps--canoes stripped from tree-sides--flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims--in the years when the red and the white men met--the houses and streets rose.\n\nA thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.\n\nIn an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.\n\nTo a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.\nI say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.\n\nWhat brothers these in the dark?\nWhat eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon?\nThese chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties\nWhen the coal boats plow by on the river--\nThe hunched shoulders of the grain elevators--\nThe flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills\nAnd the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off\nPlaying their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:\n what brothers these\n in the dark\n of a thousand years?\n\nA headlight searches a snowstorm.\nA funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.\n\nIn the morning hours, in the dawn,\nThe sun puts out the stars of the sky\nAnd the headlight of the Limited train.\n\nThe fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.\nA boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.\n\nThe horses fathom a snow to their knees.\nSnow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.\nThe Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.\n\nKeep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,\n O farmerman.\n Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs\n Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.\n Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.\n Hack them with cleavers.\n Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.\n\nA wagonload of radishes on a summer morning.\nSprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls.\nThe farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.\nThe farmer’s daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.\n\nOn the left-and right-hand side of the road, Marching corn--\nI saw it knee high weeks ago--now it is head high--tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears.\n\nI am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.\nThey are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.\nThey are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.\nThey are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.\nThey are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.\n\nThe cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.\nThere is no let-up to the wind.\nBlue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.\n\nFalltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o’clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.\nThe land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches--among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain--they keep old things that never grow old.\n\nThe frost loosens corn husks.\nThe Sun, the rain, the wind\n loosen corn husks.\nThe men and women are helpers.\nThey are all cornhuskers together.\nI see them late in the western evening\n in a smoke-red dust.\n\nThe phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,\nThe phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib,\nThe phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall,\nThese phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights.\n“The shapes that are gone are here,” said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.\n\nLook at six eggs\nIn a mockingbird’s nest.\n\nListen to six mockingbirds\nFlinging follies of O-be-joyful\nOver the marshes and uplands.\n\nLook at songs\nHidden in eggs.\n\nWhen the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God’s Heaven.\nWhen the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.\nWhen the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.\n\nSpring slips back with a girl face calling always: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”\n\nO prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting--your lover comes--your child comes--the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.\nO prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back--\nThere is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.\n\nO prairie mother, I am one of your boys.\nI have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.\nHere I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.\n\nI speak of new cities and new people.\nI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.\nI tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,\n a sun dropped in the west.\nI tell you there is nothing in the world\n only an ocean of to-morrows,\n a sky of to-morrows.\n\nI am a brother of the cornhuskers who say\n at sundown:\n To-morrow is a day.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "prayers-of-steel": { - "title": "“Prayers of Steel”", - "body": "Lay me on an anvil, O God.\nBeat me and hammer me into a crowbar.\nLet me pry loose old walls.\nLet me lift and loosen old foundations.\n\nLay me on an anvil, O God.\nBeat me and hammer me into a steel spike.\nDrive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.\nTake red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.\nLet me be the great nail holding a skyscraper\nthrough blue nights into white stars.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-road-and-the-end": { - "title": "“The Road and the End”", - "body": "I shall foot it\nDown the roadway in the dusk,\nWhere shapes of hunger wander\nAnd the fugitives of pain go by.\nI shall foot it\nIn the silence of the morning,\nSee the night slur into dawn,\nHear the slow great winds arise\nWhere tall trees flank the way\nAnd shoulder toward the sky.\n\nThe broken boulders by the road\nShall not commemorate my ruin.\nRegret shall be the gravel under foot.\nI shall watch for\nSlim birds swift of wing\nThat go where wind and ranks of thunder\nDrive the wild processionals of rain.\n\nThe dust of the traveled road\nShall touch my hands and face.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-sea-wash": { - "title": "“The Sea-Wash”", - "body": "The sea-wash never ends.\nThe sea-wash repeats, repeats.\nOnly old songs? Is that all the sea knows?\n Only the old strong songs?\n Is that all?\nThe sea-wash repeats, repeats.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "selling-spiel": { - "title": "“Selling Spiel”", - "body": "This blanket is a tough weave, sir.\nThose blood spots were woven into it by design.\nThe yarns were chosen from sheep and goats tried by zero weather, blizzards, undiminishing wind and hard usage.\nYou will not wear out this blanket in your lifetime, sir, nor mine\nThe weaving was done slowly; they took their time, sir; they were stubborn about the materials; just one of those accidental-looking blood spots took ten years, sir.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "sketch": { - "title": "“Sketch”", - "body": "The shadows of the ships\nRock on the crest\nIn the low blue lustre\nOf the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.\n\nA long brown bar at the dip of the sky\nPuts an arm of sand in the span of salt.\n\nThe lucid and endless wrinkles\nDraw in, lapse and withdraw.\nWavelets crumble and white spent bubbles\nWash on the floor of the beach.\n\nRocking on the crest\nIn the low blue lustre\nAre the shadows of the ships.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "smoke-and-steel": { - "title": "“Smoke and Steel”", - "body": "Smoke of the fields in spring is one,\nSmoke of the leaves in autumn another.\nSmoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,\nThey all go up in a line with a smokestack,\nOr they twist … in the slow twist … of the wind.\n\nIf the north wind comes they run to the south.\nIf the west wind comes they run to the east.\nBy this sign\nall smokes\nknow each other.\nSmoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn,\nSmoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue,\nBy the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”\n\nHunted and hissed from the center\nDeep down long ago when God made us over,\nDeep down are the cinders we came from--\nYou and I and our heads of smoke.\n\nSome of the smokes God dropped on the job\nCross on the sky and count our years\nAnd sing in the secrets of our numbers;\nSing their dawns and sing their evenings,\nSing an old log-fire song:\n\nYou may put the damper up,\nYou may put the damper down,\nThe smoke goes up the chimney just the same.\n\nSmoke of a city sunset skyline,\nSmoke of a country dusk horizon--\nThey cross on the sky and count our years.\n\nSmoke of a brick-red dust\nWinds on a spiral\nOut of the stacks\nFor a hidden and glimpsing moon.\nThis, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,\nThis is the slang of coal and steel.\nThe day-gang hands it to the night-gang,\nThe night-gang hands it back.\n\nStammer at the slang of this--\nLet us understand half of it.\nIn the rolling mills and sheet mills,\nIn the harr and boom of the blast fires,\nThe smoke changes its shadow\nAnd men change their shadow;\nA nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.\n\nA bar of steel--it is only\nSmoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.\nA runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else,\nAnd left--smoke and the blood of a man\nAnd the finished steel, chilled and blue.\n\nSo fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,\nAnd the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,\nA rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;\nAnd always dark in the heart and through it,\nSmoke and the blood of a man.\nPittsburg, Youngstown, Gary--they make their steel with men.\n\nIn the blood of men and the ink of chimneys\nThe smoke nights write their oaths:\nSmoke into steel and blood into steel;\nHomestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men.\nSmoke and blood is the mix of steel.\n\nThe birdmen drone\nin the blue; it is steel\na motor sings and zooms.\n\nSteel barb-wire around The Works.\nSteel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.\nSteel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.\nThe runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel.\nFire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped:\nLiners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.\n\nFinders in the dark, you Steve with a dinner bucket, you Steve clumping in the dusk on the sidewalks with an evening paper for the woman and kids, you Steve with your head wondering where we all end up--\nFinders in the dark, Steve: I hook my arm in cinder sleeves; we go down the street together; it is all the same to us; you Steve and the rest of us end on the same stars; we all wear a hat in hell together, in hell or heaven.\n\nSmoke nights now, Steve.\nSmoke, smoke, lost in the sieves of yesterday;\nDumped again to the scoops and hooks today.\nSmoke like the clocks and whistles, always.\nSmoke nights now.\nTo-morrow something else.\n\nLuck moons come and go:\nFive men swim in a pot of red steel.\nTheir bones are kneaded into the bread of steel:\nTheir bones are knocked into coils and anvils\nAnd the sucking plungers of sea-fighting turbines.\nLook for them in the woven frame of a wireless station.\nSo ghosts hide in steel like heavy-armed men in mirrors.\nPeepers, skulkers--they shadow-dance in laughing tombs.\nThey are always there and they never answer.\n\nOne of them said: “I like my job, the company is good to me, America is a wonderful country.”\nOne: “Jesus, my bones ache; the company is a liar; this is a free country, like hell.”\nOne: “I got a girl, a peach; we save up and go on a farm and raise pigs and be the boss ourselves.”\nAnd the others were roughneck singers a long ways from home.\nLook for them back of a steel vault door.\n\nThey laugh at the cost.\nThey lift the birdmen into the blue.\nIt is steel a motor sings and zooms.\n\nIn the subway plugs and drums,\nIn the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel,\nUnder dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders,\nThey shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.\n\nThe ovens light a red dome.\nSpools of fire wind and wind.\nQuadrangles of crimson sputter.\nThe lashes of dying maroon let down.\nFire and wind wash out the slag.\nForever the slag gets washed in fire and wind.\nThe anthem learned by the steel is:\nDo this or go hungry.\nLook for our rust on a plow.\nListen to us in a threshing-engine razz.\nLook at our job in the running wagon wheat.\n\nFire and wind wash at the slag.\nBox-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors--\nOh, the sleeping slag from the mountains, the slag-heavy pig-iron will go down many roads.\nMen will stab and shoot with it, and make butter and tunnel rivers, and mow hay in swaths, and slit hogs and skin beeves, and steer airplanes across North America, Europe, Asia, round the world.\n\nHacked from a hard rock country, broken and baked in mills and smelters, the rusty dust waits\nTill the clean hard weave of its atoms cripples and blunts the drills chewing a hole in it.\nThe steel of its plinths and flanges is reckoned, O God, in one-millionth of an inch.\n\nOnce when I saw the curves of fire, the rough scarf women dancing,\nDancing out of the flues and smoke-stacks--flying hair of fire, flying feet upside down;\nBuckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;\nSparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;\nEars and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermillion balloons;\nI saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke;\nAnd in the screens the great sisters of night and cool stars, sitting women arranging their hair,\nWaiting in the sky, waiting with slow easy eyes, waiting and half-murmuring:\n“Since you know all\nand I know nothing,\ntell me what I dreamed last night.”\n\nPearl cobwebs in the windy rain,\nin only a flicker of wind,\nare caught and lost and never known again.\n\nA pool of moonshine comes and waits,\nbut never waits long: the wind picks up\nloose gold like this and is gone.\n\nA bar of steel sleeps and looks slant-eyed\non the pearl cobwebs, the pools of moonshine;\nsleeps slant-eyed a million years,\nsleeps with a coat of rust, a vest of moths,\na shirt of gathering sod and loam.\n\nThe wind never bothers … a bar of steel.\nThe wind picks only … pearl cobwebs … pools of moonshine.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Smoke and Steel", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "summer-stars": { - "title": "“Summer Stars”", - "body": "Bend low again, night of summer stars.\nSo near you are, sky of summer stars,\nSo near, a long arm man can pick off stars,\nPick off what he wants in the sky bowl,\nSo near you are, summer stars,\nSo near, strumming, strumming,\nSo lazy and hum-strumming.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "theme-in-yellow": { - "title": "“Theme in Yellow”", - "body": "I spot the hills\nWith yellow balls in autumn.\nI light the prairie cornfields\nOrange and tawny gold clusters\nAnd I am called pumpkins.\nOn the last of October\nWhen dusk is fallen\nChildren join hands\nAnd circle round me\nSinging ghost songs\nAnd love to the harvest moon;\nI am a jack-o’-lantern\nWith terrible teeth\nAnd the children know\nI am fooling.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "they-will-say": { - "title": "“They Will Say”", - "body": "Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:\nYou took little children away from the sun and the dew,\nAnd the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky\nAnd the reckless rain; you put them between walls\nTo work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,\nTo eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted\nFor a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "trafficker": { - "title": "“Trafficker”", - "body": "Among the shadows where two streets cross, \nA woman lurks in the dark and waits \nTo move on when a policeman heaves in view. \nSmiling a broken smile from a face \nPainted over haggard bones and desperate eyes, \nAll night she offers passers-by what they will \nOf her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone, \nAnd no takers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "upstream": { - "title": "“Upstream”", - "body": "The strong men keep coming on.\nThey go down shot, hanged, sick, broken.\nThey live on, fighting, singing, lucky as plungers.\n\nThe strong men … they keep coming on.\nThe strong mothers pulling them from a dark sea, a great prairie, a long mountain.\n\nCall hallelujah, call amen, call deep thanks.\nThe strong men keep coming on.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "village-in-late-summer": { - "title": "“Village in Late Summer”", - "body": "Lips half-willing in a doorway.\nLips half-singing at a window.\nEyes half-dreaming in the walls.\nFeet half-dancing in a kitchen.\nEven the clocks half-yawn the hours\nAnd the farmers make half-answers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "waiting": { - "title": "“Waiting”", - "body": "Today I will let the old boat stand\nWhere the sweep of the harbor tide comes in\nTo the pulse of a far, deep-steady sway.\nAnd I will rest and dream and sit on the deck\n Watching the world go by\nAnd take my pay for many hard days gone I remember.\n\nI will choose what clouds I like\nIn the great white fleets that wander the blue\nAs I lie on my back or loaf at the rail.\nAnd I will listen as the veering winds kiss me and fold me\nAnd put on my brow the touch of the world’s great will.\n\nDaybreak will hear the heart of the boat beat,\nEngine throb and piston play\nIn the quiver and leap at call of life.\nTo-morrow we move in the gaps and heights\nOn changing floors of unlevel seas\nAnd no man shall stop us and no man follow\nFor ours is the quest of an unknown shore\nAnd we are husky and lusty and shouting-gay.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "who-am-i": { - "title": "“Who Am I?”", - "body": "My head knocks against the stars.\nMy feet are on the hilltops.\nMy finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.\nDown in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.\nI have been to hell and back many times.\nI know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.\nI dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.\nI know the passionate seizure of beauty\nAnd the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”\n\nMy name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "wilderness-man": { - "title": "“Wilderness Man”", - "body": "Whiskers a wren could nest in.\nCheekbones with an inlay of sun tan.\nShrewd eyes … ox shoulders …\nHe passed us in the rain tonight\nAmong the ragtags of South State Street\nAnd he had a big red umbrella keeping off the rain\nAnd a gunny sack under his left arm.\n\nI could understand the old wilderness man\nAnd the wish of his heart for a spot of red\nIn the mass of dark umbrellas\nAnd I don’t care what he had in the gunny sack.\nKittens, pups, bread scraps--I don’t care.\nBut why did he rush along like a city-broke newspaper delivery horse?\nWhy did he walk furiously like a messenger boy after a tip or detectives going to make a raid?\n\nI saw the smut of the city on the wilderness.\n\nI said here’s a wolf turned alley dog.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-windflower": { - "title": "“The Windflower”", - "body": "This flower is repeated\nout of old winds, out of\nold times.\n\nThe wind repeats these, it\nmust have these, over and\nover again.\n\nOh, windflowers so fresh,\nOh, beautiful leaves, here\nnow again.\n\n The domes over\n fall to pieces.\n The stones under\n fall to pieces.\n Rain and ice\n wreck the works.\nThe wind keeps, the windflowers\n keep, the leaves last,\nThe wind young and strong lets\n these last longer than stones.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-windy-city": { - "title": "“The Windy City”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nThe lean hands of wagon men\nput out pointing fingers here,\npicked this crossway, put it on a map,\nset up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns,\nfound a hitching place for the pony express,\nmade a hitching place for the iron horse,\nthe one-eyed horse with the fire-spiThead,\nfound a homelike spot and said, “Make a home,”\nsaw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttling\npeople, shunting cars, shaping the junk of\nthe earth to a new city.\n\nThe hands of men took hold and tugged\nAnd the breaths of men went into the junk\nAnd the junk stood up into skyscrapers and asked:\nWho am I? Am I a city? And if I am what is my name?\nAnd once while the time whistles blew and blew again\nThe men answered: Long ago we gave you a name,\nLong ago we laughed and said: You? Your name is Chicago.\n\nEarly the red men gave a name to a river,\nthe place of the skunk,\nthe river of the wild onion smell,\nShee-caw-go.\n\nOut of the payday songs of steam shovels,\nOut of the wages of structural iron rivets,\nThe living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name,\nTell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land:\nI am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men,\nlaughing men, a child, a belonging.\n\nSo between the Great Lakes,\nThe Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,\nThe living lighted skyscrapers stand,\nSpotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow,\nstreamers of smoke and silver,\nparallelograms of night-gray watchmen,\nSinging a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nHow should the wind songs of a windy city go?\nSinging in a high wind the dirty chatter gets blown\naway on the wind--the clean shovel,\nthe clean pickax,\nlasts.\n\nIt is easy for a child to get breakfast and pack off\nto school with a pair of roller skates,\nbuns for lunch, and a geography.\nRiding through a tunnel under a river running backward,\nto school to listen … how the Pottawatomies …\nand the Blackhawks … ran on moccasins …\nbetween Kaskaskia, Peoria, Kankakee, and Chicago.\n\nIt is easy to sit listening to a boy babbling\nof the Pottawatomie moccasins in Illinois,\nhow now the roofs and smokestacks cover miles\nwhere the deerfoot left its writing\nand the foxpaw put its initials\nin the snow … for the early moccasins … to read.\n\nIt is easy for the respectable taxpayers to sit in the\nstreetcars and read the papers, faces of burglars,\nthe prison escapes, the hunger strikes, the cost of\nliving, the price of dying, the shop gate battles of\nstrikers and strikebreakers, the strikers killing\nscabs and the police killing strikers--the strongest,\nthe strongest, always the strongest.\n\nIt is easy to listen to the haberdasher customers hand each other their\neasy chatter--it is easy to die\nalive--to register a living thumbprint and be dead\nfrom the neck up.\nAnd there are sidewalks polished with the footfalls of\nundertakers’ stiffs, greased mannikins, wearing up-to-\nthe-minute sox, lifting heels across doorsills,\nshoving their faces ahead of them--dead from the\nneck up--proud of their sox--their sox are the last\nword--dead from the neck up--it is easy.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nLash yourself to the bastion of a bridge\nand listen while the black cataracts of people go by,\nbaggage, bundles, balloons,\nlisten while they jazz the classics:\n\n“Since when did you kiss yourself in\nAnd who do you think you are?\nCome across, kick in, loosen up.\nWhere do you get that chatter?”\n\n“Beat up the short-change artists.\nThey never did nothin’ for you.\nHow do you get that way?\nTell me and I’ll tell the world.\nI’ll say so, I’ll say it is.”\n\n“You’re trying to crab my act.\nYou poor fish, you mackerel,\nYou ain’t got the sense God\nGave an oyster--it’s raining--\nWhat you want is an umbrella.”\n\n“Hush baby--\nI don’t know a thing.\nI don’t know a thing.\nHush baby.”\n\n“Hush baby,\nIt ain’t how old you are,\nIt’s how old you look.\nIt ain’t what you got,\nIt’s what you can get away with.”\n\n“Bring home the bacon.\nPut it over, shoot it across.\nSend ‘em to the cleaners.\nWhat we want is results, re-sults\nAnd damn the consequences.\nSh … sh …\nYou can fix anything\nIf you got the right fixers.”\n\n“Kid each other, you cheap skates.\nTell each other you’re all to the mustard--\nYou’re the gravy.”\n\n“Tell ‘em, honey.\nAin’t it the truth, sweetheart?\nWatch your step.\nYou said it.\nYou said a mouthful.\nWe’re all a lot of damn fourflushers.”\n\n“Hush baby!\nShoot it,\nShoot it all!\nCoo coo, coo coo”--\nThis is one song of Chicago.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIt is easy to come here a stranger and show the whole works, write a book, fix it all up--it is easy to come and go away a muddle-headed pig, a bum and a bag of wind.\n\nGo to it and remember this city fished from its depths a text: “independent as a hog on ice.”\n\nVenice is a dream of soft waters, Vienna and Bagdad recollections of dark spears and wild turbans; Paris is a thought in Monet gray on scabbards, fabrics, façades; London is a fact in a fog filled with the moaning of transatlantic whistles; Berlin sits amid white scrubbed quadrangles and torn arithmetics and testaments; Moscow brandishes a flag and repeats a dance figure of a man who walks like a bear.\nChicago fished from its depths a text: Independent as a hog on ice.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nForgive us if the monotonous houses go mile on mile\nAlong monotonous streets out to the prairies--\nIf the faces of the houses mumble hard words\nAt the streets--and the street voices only say:\n“Dust and a bitter wind shall come.”\nForgive us if the lumber porches and doorsteps\nSnarl at each other--\nAnd the brick chimneys cough in a close-up of\nEach other’s faces--\nAnd the ramshackle stairways watch each other\nAs thieves watch--\nAnd dooryard lilacs near a malleable iron works\nLong ago languished\nIn a short whispering purple.\n\nAnd if the alley ash cans\nTell the garbage-wagon drivers\nThe children play the alley is Heaven\nAnd the streets of Heaven shine\nWith a grand dazzle of stones of gold\nAnd there are no policemen in Heaven--\nLet the rag-tags have it their way.\n\nAnd if the geraniums\nIn the tin cans of the window sills\nAsk questions not worth answering--\nAnd if a boy and a girl hunt the sun\nWith a sieve for sifting smoke--\nLet it pass--let the answer be--\n“Dust and a bitter wind shall come.”\nForgive us if the jazz timebeats\nOf these clumsy mass shadows\nMoan in saxophone undertones,\nAnd the footsteps of the jungle,\nThe fang cry, the rip claw hiss,\nThe sneak-up and the still watch,\nThe slant of the slit eyes waiting--\nIf these bother respectable people\nwith the right crimp in their napkins\nreading breakfast menu cards--\nforgive us--let it pass--let be.\n\nIf cripples sit on their stumps\nAnd joke with the newsies bawling,\n“Many lives lost! many lives lost!\nTer-ri-ble ac-ci-dent! many lives lost!”--\nIf again twelve men let a woman go,\n“He done me wrong; I shot him”--\nOr the blood of a child’s head\nSpatters on the hub of a motor truck--\nOr a 44-gat cracks and lets the skylights\nInto one more bank messenger--\nOr if boys steal coal in a railroad yard\nAnd run with humped gunnysacks\nWhile a bull picks off one of the kids\nAnd the kid wriggles with an ear in cinders\nAnd a mother comes to carry home\nA bundle, a limp bundle,\nTo have his face washed, for the last time,\nForgive us if it happens--and happens again--\nAnd happens again.\n\nForgive the jazz timebeat\nof clumsy mass shadows,\nfootsteps of the jungle,\nthe fang cry, the rip claw hiss,\nthe slant of the slit eyes waiting.\n\nForgive us if we work so hard\nAnd the muscles bunch clumsy on us\nAnd we never know why we work so hard--\nIf the big houses with little families\nAnd the little houses with big families\nSneer at each other’s bars of misunderstanding;\nPity us when we shackle and kill each other\nAnd believe at first we understand\nAnd later say we wonder why.\n\nTake home the monotonous patter\nOf the elevated railroad guard in the rush hours:\n“Watch your step. Watch your step. Watch your step.”\nOr write on a pocket pad what a pauper said\nTo a patch of purple asters at a whitewashed wall:\n“Let every man be his own Jesus--that’s enough.”\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThe wheelbarrows grin, the shovels and the mortar hoist an exploit.\nThe stone shanks of the Monadnock, the Transportation, the People’s Gas Building, stand up and scrape at the sky.\n\nThe wheelbarrows sing, the bevels and the blueprints whisper.\nThe library building named after Crerar, naked as a stock farm silo, light as a single eagle feather, stripped like an airplane propeller, takes a path up.\nTwo cool new rivets say, “Maybe it is morning,”\n“God knows.”\n\nPut the city up; tear the city down;\nput it up again; let us find a city.\nLet us remember the little violet-eyed\nman who gave all, praying, “Dig and\ndream, dream and hammer, till your\ncity comes.”\n\nEvery day the people sleep and the city dies;\nevery day the people shake loose, awake and\nbuild the city again.\n\nThe city is a tool chest opened every day,\na time clock punched every morning,\na shop door, bunkers and overalls\ncounting every day.\n\nThe city is a balloon and a bubble plaything\nshot to the sky every evening, whistled in\na ragtime jig down the sunset.\n\nThe city is made, forgotten, and made again,\ntrucks hauling it away haul it back\nsteered by drivers whistling ragtime\nagainst the sunsets.\n\nEvery day the people get up and carry the city,\ncarry the bunkers and balloons of the city,\nlift it and put it down.\n\n“I will die as many times\nas you make me over again,\nsays the city to the people,\nI am the woman, the home, the family,\nI get breakfast and pay the rent;\nI telephone the doctor, the milkman, the undertaker;\nI fix the streets\nfor your first and your last ride--\nCome clean with me, come clean or dirty,\nI am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers;\nI remember all you forget.\nI will die as many times\nas you make me over again.”\n\nUnder the foundations,\nOver the roofs,\nThe bevels and the blueprints talk it over.\nThe wind of the lake shore waits and wanders.\nThe heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles.\nThe winkers of the morning stars count out cities\nAnd forget the numbers.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nAt the white clock-tower\nlighted in night purples\nover the boulevard link bridge\nonly the blind get by without acknowledgments.\n\nThe passers-by, factory punch-clock numbers,\nhotel girls out for the air, teameoes,\ncoal passers, taxi drivers, window washers,\npaperhangers, floorwalkers, bill collectors,\nburglar alarm salesmen, massage students,\nmanicure girls, chiropodists, bath rubbers,\nbooze runners, hat cleaners, armhole basters,\ndelicatessen clerks, shovel stiffs, work plugs--\nThey all pass over the bridge, they all look up\nat the white clock-tower\nlighted in night purples\nover the boulevard link bridge--\nAnd sometimes one says, “Well, we hand it to ‘em.”\n\nMention proud things, catalogue them.\nThe jack-knife bridge opening, the ore boats,\nthe wheat barges passing through.\nThree overland trains arriving the same hour,\none from Memphis and the cotton belt,\none from Omaha and the corn belt,\none from Duluth, the lumberjack and the iron range.\nMention a carload of shorthorns taken off the valleys of Wyoming last week, arriving yesterday, knocked in the head, stripped, quartered, hung in ice boxes today, mention the daily melodrama of this humdrum, rhythms of heads, hides, heels, hoofs hung up.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nIt is wisdom to think the people are the city.\nIt is wisdom to think the city would fall to pieces\nand die and be dust in the wind.\nIf the people of the city all move away and leave no people at all to watch and keep the city.\n\nIt is wisdom to think no city stood here at all until the working men, the laughing men, came.\n\nIt is wisdom to think tomorrow new working men, new laughing men, may come and put up a new city--\nLiving lighted skyscrapers and a night lingo of lanterns testify tomorrow shall have its own say-so.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nNight gathers itself into a ball of dark yarn.\nNight loosens the ball and it spreads.\nThe lookouts from the shores of Lake Michigan\nfind night follows day, and ping! ping! across\nsheet gray the boat lights put their signals.\nNight lets the dark yarn unravel, Night speaks and the yarns change to fog and blue strands.\n\nThe lookouts turn to the city.\nThe canyons swarm with red sand lights\nof the sunset.\nThe atoms drop and sift, blues cross over,\nyellows plunge.\nMixed light shafts stack their bayonets,\npledge with crossed handles.\nSo, when the canyons swarm, it is then the\nlookouts speak\nOf the high spots over a street … mountain language\nOf skyscrapers in dusk, the Railway Exchange,\nThe People’s Gas, the Monadnock, the Transportation,\nGone to the gloaming.\n\nThe river turns in a half circle.\nThe Goose Island bridges curve\nover the river curve.\nThen the river panorama\nperforms for the bridge,\ndots … lights … dots … lights,\nsixes and sevens of dots and lights,\na lingo of lanterns and searchlights,\ncircling sprays of gray and yellow.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nA man came as a witness saying:\n“I listened to the Great Lakes\nAnd I listened to the Grand Prairie,\nAnd they had little to say to each other,\nA whisper or so in a thousand years.\n‘Some of the cities are big,’ said one.\n‘And some not so big,’ said another,\n‘And sometimes the cities are all gone,’\nSaid a black knob bluff to a light green sea.”\n\nWinds of the Windy City, come out of the prairie,\nall the way from Medicine Hat.\nCome out of the inland sea blue water, come where\nthey nickname a city for you.\n\nCorn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,\ncome off the whisper of the silk hangers,\nthe lap of the flat spear leaves.\n\nBlue water wind in summer, come off the blue miles\nof lake, carry your inland sea blue fingers,\ncarry us cool, carry your blue to our homes.\n\nWhite spring winds, come off the bag wool clouds,\ncome off the running melted snow, come white\nas the arms of snow-born children.\n\nGray fighting winter winds, come along on the tear--\ning blizzard tails, the snouts of the hungry\nhunting storms, come fighting gray in winter.\n\nWinds of the Windy City,\nWinds of corn and sea blue,\nSpring wind white and fighting winter gray,\nCome home here--they nickname a city for you.\n\nThe wind of the lake shore waits and wanders.\nThe heave of the shore wind hunches the sand piles.\nThe winkers of the morning stars count out cities\nAnd forget the numbers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Chicago Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-year": { - "title": "“The Year”", - "body": "# I.\n\nA storm of white petals,\nBuds throwing open baby fists\nInto hands of broad flowers.\n\n\n# II.\n\nRed roses running upward,\nClambering to the clutches of life\nSoaked in crimson.\n\n\n# III.\n\nRabbles of tattered leaves\nHolding golden flimsy hopes\nAgainst the tramplings\nInto the pits and gullies.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHoarfrost and silence:\nOnly the muffling\nOf winds dark and lonesome--\nGreat lullabies to the long sleepers.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Cornhuskers", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - } - } - }, - "george-santayana": { - "metadata": { - "name": "George Santayana", - "birth": { - "year": 1863 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1952 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇪🇸 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 11 - }, - "poems": { - "as-in-the-midst-of-battle-there-is-room": { - "title": "“As in the midst of battle there is room …”", - "body": "As in the midst of battle there is room\nFor thoughts of love, and in foul sin for mirth;\nAs gossips whisper of a trinket’s worth\nSpied by the death-bed’s flickering candle-gloom;\nAs in the crevices of Caesar’s tomb\nThe sweet herbs flourish on a little earth:\nSo in this great disaster of our birth\nWe can be happy, and forget our doom.\nFor morning, with a ray of tenderest joy\nGilding the iron heaven, hides the truth,\nAnd evening gently woos us to employ\nOur grief in idle catches. Such is youth;\nTill from that summer’s trance we wake, to find\nDespair before us, vanity behind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "calm-was-the-sea-to-which-your-course-you-kept": { - "title": "“Calm was the sea to which your course you kept …”", - "body": "Calm was the sea to which your course you kept,\nOh, how much calmer than all southern seas!\nMany your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze\nWafted from mothers that of old have wept.\nAll souls of children taken as they slept\nAre your companions, partners of your ease,\nAnd the green souls of all these autumn trees\nAre with you through the silent spaces swept.\nYour virgin body gave its gentle breath\nUntainted to the gods. Why should we grieve,\nBut that we merit not your holy death?\nWe shall not loiter long, your friends and I;\nLiving you made it goodlier to live,\nDead you will make it easier to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "cape-cod": { - "title": "“Cape Cod”", - "body": "The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,\nThe wide reach of bay and the long sky line,--\nO, I am sick for home!\n\nThe salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,\nAnd the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,--\nWhen will the good ship come?\n\nThe wretched stumps all charred and burned,\nAnd the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,--\nWhy is the world so old?\n\nThe lapping wave, and the broad gray sky\nWhere the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,\nWhere are the dead untold?\n\nThe thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,\nThe huge stranded hulk and the floating log,\nSorrow with life began!\n\nAnd among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,\nO the wind, and the wind, for evermore!\nWhat will become of man?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-would-i-might-forget-than-i-am-i": { - "title": "“I Would I Might Forget than I Am I”", - "body": "I would I might forget that I am I,\nAnd break the heavy chain that binds me fast,\nWhose links about myself my deeds have cast.\nWhat in the body’s tomb doth buried lie\nIs boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,\nLord of the future, guardian of the past,\nAnd soon must forth, to know his own at last.\nIn his large life to live, I fain would die.\nHappy the dumb beast, hungering for food,\nBut calling not his suffering his own;\nBlessèd the angel, gazing on all good,\nBut knowing not he sits upon a throne;\nWretched the mortal, pondering his mood,\nAnd doomed to know his aching heart alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-my-deep-heart-these-chimes-would-still-have-rung": { - "title": "“In my deep heart these chimes would still have rung …”", - "body": "In my deep heart these chimes would still have rung\nTo toll your passing, had you not been dead;\nFor time a sadder mask than death may spread\nOver the face that ever should be young.\nThe bough that falls with all its trophies hung\nFalls not too soon, but lays its flower-crowned head\nMost royal in the dust, with no leaf shed\nUnhallowed or unchiselled or unsung.\nAnd though the after world will never hear\nThe happy name of one so gently true,\nNor chronicles write large this fatal year,\nYet we who loved you, though we be but few,\nKeep you in whatsoe’er is good, and rear\nIn our weak virtues monuments to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "midnight": { - "title": "“Midnight”", - "body": "The dank earth reeks with three days’ rain,\nThe phantom trees are dark and still,\nAbove the darkness and the hill\nThe tardy moon shines out again.\nO heavy lethargy of pain!\nO shadows of forgotten ill!\n\nMy parrot lips, when I was young,\nTo prove and to disprove were bold.\nThe mighty world has tied my tongue,\nAnd in dull custom growing old\nI leave the burning truth untold\nAnd the heart’s anguish all unsung.\n\nYouth dies in man’s benumbed soul,\nMaid bows to woman’s broken life,\nA thousand leagues of silence roll\nBetween the husband and the wife.\nThe spirit faints with inward strife\nAnd lonely gazing at the pole.\n\nBut how should reptiles pine for wings\nOr a parched desert know its dearth?\nImmortal is the soul that sings\nThe sorrow of her mortal birth.\nO cruel beauty of the earth!\nO love’s unutterable stings!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "my-heart-rebels-against-my-generation": { - "title": "“My heart rebels against my generation …”", - "body": "My heart rebels against my generation,\nThat talks of freedom and is slave to riches,\nAnd, toiling ’neath each day’s ignoble burden,\nBoasts of the morrow.\n\nNo space for noonday rest or midnight watches,\nNo purest joy of breathing under heaven!\nWretched themselves, they heap, to make them happy,\nMany possessions.\n\nBut thou, O silent Mother, wise, immortal,\nTo whom our toil is laughter,--take, divine one,\nThis vanity away, and to thy lover\nGive what is needful:--\n\nA staunch heart, nobly calm, averse to evil,\nThe windy sky for breath, the sea, the mountain,\nA well-born, gentle friend, his spirit’s brother,\nEver beside him.\n\nWhat would you gain, ye seekers, with your striving,\nOr what vast Babel raise you on your shoulders?\nYou multiply distresses, and your children\nSurely will curse you.\n\nO leave them rather friendlier gods, and fairer\nOrchards and temples, and a freer bosom!\nWhat better comfort have we, or what other\nProfit in living,\n\nThan to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature,\nAwhile upon her bounty and her beauty,\nAnd hand her torch of gladness to the ages\nFollowing after?\n\nShe hath not made us, like her other children,\nMerely for peopling of her spacious kingdoms,\nBeasts of the wild, or insects of the summer,\nBreeding and dying,\n\nBut also that we might, half knowing, worship\nThe deathless beauty of her guiding vision,\nAnd learn to love, in all things mortal, only\nWhat is eternal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "slowly-the-black-earth-gains-upon-the-yellow": { - "title": "“Slowly the black earth gains upon the yellow …”", - "body": "Slowly the black earth gains upon the yellow,\nAnd the caked hill-side is ribbed soft with furrows.\nTurn now again, with voice and staff, my ploughman,\nGuiding thy oxen.\n\nLift the great ploughshare, clear the stones and brambles,\nPlant it the deeper, with thy foot upon it,\nUprooting all the flowering weeds that bring not\nFood to thy children.\n\nPatience is good for man and beast, and labour\nHardens to sorrow and the frost of winter.\nTurn then again, in the brave hope of harvest,\nSinging to heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "there-may-be-chaos-still-around-the-world": { - "title": "“There may be chaos still around the world …”", - "body": "There may be chaos still around the world,\nThis little world that in my thinking lies;\nFor mine own bosom is the paradise\nWhere all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.\nWithin my nature’s shell I slumber curled,\nUnmindful of the changing outer skies,\nWhere now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,\nOr some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.\nI heed them not; or if the subtle night\nHaunt me with deities I never saw,\nI soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw\nTo hide their myriad faces from my sight.\nThey threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe\nA happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "with-you-a-part-of-me-hath-passed-away": { - "title": "“With you a part of me hath passed away …”", - "body": "With you a part of me hath passed away;\nFor in the peopled forest of my mind\nA tree made leafless by this wintry wind\nShall never don again its green array.\nChapel and fireside, country road and bay,\nHave something of their friendliness resigned;\nAnother, if I would, I could not find,\nAnd I am grown much older in a day.\nBut yet I treasure in my memory\nYour gift of charity, your mellow ease,\nAnd the dear honour of your amity;\nFor these once mine, my life is rich with these.\nAnd I scarce know which part may greater be,--\nWhat I keep of you, or you rob of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "your-bark-lies-anchored-in-the-peaceful-bight": { - "title": "“Your bark lies anchored in the peaceful bight …”", - "body": "Your bark lies anchored in the peaceful bight\nUntil a kinder wind unfurl her sail;\nYour docile spirit, wingèd by this gale,\nHath at the dawning fled into the light.\nAnd I half know why heaven deemed it right\nYour youth, and this my joy in youth, should fail;\nGod hath them still, for ever they avail,\nEternity hath borrowed that delight.\nFor long ago I taught my thoughts to run\nWhere all the great things live that lived of yore,\nAnd in eternal quiet float and soar;\nThere all my loves are gathered into one,\nWhere change is not, nor parting any more,\nNor revolution of the moon and sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "sappho": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sappho", - "birth": { - "year": -630, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": -570, - "circa": true - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 17 - }, - "poems": { - "bridal-song": { - "title": "“Bridal Song”", - "body": "Bride, that goest to the bridal chamber\nIn the dove-drawn car of Aphrodite,\n By a band of dimpled\n Loves surrounded;\n\nBride, of maidens all the fairest image\nMitylene treasures of the Goddess,\n Rosy-ankled Graces\n Are thy playmates;\n\nBride, O fair and lovely, thy companions\nAre the gracious hours that onward passing\n For thy gladsome footsteps\n Scatter garlands.\n\nBride, that blushing like the sweetest apple\nOn the very branch’s end, so strangely\n Overlooked, ungathered\n By the gleaners;\n\nBride, that like the apple that was never\nOverlooked but out of reach so plainly,\n Only one thy rarest\n Fruit may gather;\n\nBride, that into womanhood has ripened\nFor the harvest of the bridegroom only,\n He alone shall taste thy\n Hoarded sweetness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Death is an evil; so the Gods decree,\nSo they have judged, and such must rightly be\nOur mortal view; for they who dwell on high\nHad never lived, had it been good to die.\n\nAnd so the poet’s house should never know\nOf tears and lamentations any show;\nSuch things befit not us who deathless sing\nOf love and beauty, gladness and the spring.\n\nNo hint of grief should mar the features of\nOur dreams of endless beauty, lasting love;\nFor they reflect the joy inviolate,\nEternal calm that fronts whatever fate.\n\nClëis, my darling, grieve no more, I pray!\nLet wandering winds thy sorrow bear away,\nAnd all our care; my daughter, let thy smile\nShine through thy tears and gladden me the while.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "eros": { - "title": "“Eros”", - "body": "From the gnarled branches of the apple trees\nThe heavy petals, lifted by the breeze,\nFluttered on puffs of odor fine and fell\nIn the clear water of the garden well;\n\nAnd some a bolder zephyr blew in sport\nAcross the marble reaches of my court,\nAnd some by sudden gusts were wafted wide\nToward sea and city, down the mountain side.\n\nLesbos seemed Paphos, isled in rosy glow,\nGreen olive hills, the violet vale below;\nThe air was azure fire and o’er the blue\nStill sea the doves of Aphrodite flew.\n\nMy dreaming eyes saw Eros from afar\nComing from heaven in his mother’s car,\nIn purple tunic clad; and at my heart\nThe God-was aiming his relentless dart.\n\nHe whom fair Aphrodite called her son,\nShe, the adored, she, the imperial One;\nHe passed as winds that shake the soul, as pains\nSweet to the heart, as fire that warms the veins;\n\nHe passed and left my limbs dissolved in dew,\nRelaxed and faint, with passion quivered through;\nExhausted with spent thrills of dread delight,\nA sudden darkness rushing on my sight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ever-maiden": { - "title": "“Ever Maiden”", - "body": "I shall be ever maiden,\nEver the little child,\nIn my passionate quest for the lovely,\nBy earth’s glad wonder beguiled.\n\nI shall be ever maiden,\nStanding in soul apart,\nFor the Gods give the secret of beauty\nAlone to the virgin heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara" - } - }, - "the-first-kiss": { - "title": "“The First Kiss”", - "body": "And down I set the cushion\nUpon the couch that she,\nRelaxed supine upon it,\nMight give her lips to me.\n\nAs some enamored priestess\nAt Aphrodite’s shrine,\nEntranced I bent above her\nWith sense of the divine.\n\nShe had, by nature nubile,\nIn years a child, no hint\nOf any secret knowledge\nOf passion’s least intent.\n\nHer mouth for immolation\nWas ripe, and mine the art;\nAnd one long kiss of passion\nDeflowered her virgin heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara" - } - }, - "the-garden-of-the-nynphs": { - "title": "“The Garden of the Nynphs”", - "body": "All around through the apple boughs in blossom\nMurmur cool the breezes of early summer,\nAnd from leaves that quiver above me gently\n Slumber is shaken;\n\nGlades of poppies swoon in the drowsy languor,\nDreaming roses bend, and the oleanders\nBask and nod to drone of bees in the silent\n Fervor of noontide;\n\nMyrtle coverts hedging the open vista,\nDear to nightly frolic of Nymph and Satyr,\nYield a mossy bed for the brown and weary\n Limbs of the shepherd.\n\nEcho ever wafts through the drooping frondage,\nCeaseless silver murmur of water falling\nIn the grotto cool of the Nymphs, the sacred\n Haunt of Immortals;\n\nDown the sides of rocks that are gray and lichened\nTrickle tiny rills, whose expectant tinkle\nDrips with gurgle hushed in the clear glimmering\n Depths of the basin.\n\nFair on royal couches of leaves recumbent,\nInterspersed with languor of waxen lilies,\nLotus flowers empurple the pool whose edge is\n Cushioned with mosses;\n\nHere recline the Nymphs at the hour of twilight,\nBack in shadows dim of the cave, their golden\nSea-green eyes half lidded, up to their supple\n Waists in the water.\n\nSheltered once by ferns I espied them binding\nTresses long, the tint of lilac and orange;\nJust beyond the shimmer of light their bodies\n Roseate glistened;\n\nDeftly, then, they girdled their loins with garlands,\nLinked with leaves luxuriant limb and shoulder;\nOn their breasts they bruised the red blood of roses\n Fresh from the garden.\n\nShe of orange hair was the Nymph Euxanthis,\nAnd the lilac-tressed were Iphis and Io;\nHow they laughed, relating at length their ease in\n Evading the Satyr.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "gnomics": { - "title": "“Gnomics”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMy ways are quiet, none may find\nMy temper of malignant kind;\nFor one should check the words that start\nWhen anger spreads within the heart.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWho from my hands what I can spare\nOf gifts accept the largest share,\nThose are the very ones who boast\nNo gratitude and wrong me most.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHe who in face and form is fair\nMust needs be good, the Gods declare;\nBut he whose thought and act are right\nWill soon be equal fair to sight.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBeauty of youth is but the flower\nOf spring, whose pleasure lasts an hour;\nWhile worth that knows no mortal doom\nIs like the amaranthine bloom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "if-death-be-good": { - "title": "“If Death Be Good”", - "body": "If death be good,\nWhy do the gods not die?\nIf life be ill,\nWhy do the gods still live?\nIf love be naught,\nWhy do the gods still love?\nIf love be all,\nWhat should men do but love?", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Bliss Carman" - } - }, - "lament-for-adonis": { - "title": "“Lament for Adonis”", - "body": "Ah, for Adonis!\nSee, he is dying,\nDelicate, lovely,\nSlender Adonis.\n\nAh, for Adonis!\nWeep, O ye maidens,\nBeating your bosoms,\nRending your tunics.\n\nO Cytherea,\nHasten, for never\nLoved thou another\nAs thy Adonis.\n\nSee, on the rosy\nCheek with its dimple,\nBlushing no longer,\nThanatos’ shadow.\n\nSave him, O Goddess!\nThou, the beguiler,\nAll-powerful, holy,\nStay the dread evil.\n\nAh, for Adonis!\nNo more at vintage\nTime will he come with\nBloom of the meadows.\n\nAh, for Adonis!\nSee, he is dying,\nFading as flowers\nWith the lost summer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "leto-and-niobe": { - "title": "“Leto and Niobe”", - "body": "Leto and Niobe were friends full dear,\nThe Goddess’ heart and woman’s heart were one\nIn that maternal love that men revere,\nLove that endures when other loves are done.\n\nBut Niobe with all a mother’s pride,\nArtless and foolish, would not be denied;\nAnd boasted that her children were more fair\nThan Leto’s lovely children of the air.\n\nThe proud Olympians vowed revenge for this,\nIrate Apollo, angered Artemis;\nThey slew her children, heedless of her moan,\nAnd with the last her heart was turned to stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "maidenhood": { - "title": "“Maidenhood”", - "body": "Do I long for maidenhood?\nDo I long for days\nWhen upon the mountain slope\nI would stand and gaze\nOver the Aegean’s blue\nMelting into mist,\nEre with love my virgin lips\nCercolas had kissed?\n\nMaidenhood, O maidenhood,\nWhither hast thou flown?\n_To a land beyond the sea\nThou hast never known._\nMaidenhood, O maidenhood,\nWilt return to me?\n_Never will my bloom again\nGive its grace to thee._\n\nNow the autumn skies are low,\nYouth and summer sped;\nShepherd hills are far away,\nCercolas is dead.\nMitylene’s marble courts\nEcho with my name;--\nMaidenhood, we never dreamed,\nLong ago of fame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-aphrodite": { - "title": "“Ode to Aphrodite”", - "body": "Aphrodite, subtle of soul and deathless,\nDaughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee\nNeither with care, dread Mistress, nor with anguish,\n Slay thou my spirit!\n\nBut in pity hasten, come now if ever\nFrom afar of old when my voice implored thee,\nThou hast deigned to listen, leaving the golden\n House of thy father\n\nWith thy chariot yoked; and with doves that drew thee,\nFair and fleet around the dark earth from heaven,\nDipping vibrant wings down he azure distance,\n Through the mid-ether;\n\nVery swift they came; and thou, gracious Vision,\nLeaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,\nLeaned to me and asked, “What misfortune threatened?\n Why I had called thee?”\n\n“What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,\nWhom its wild desire would persuade to passion?\nWhat disdainful charms, madly worshipped, slight thee?\n Who wrongs thee, Sappho?”\n\n“She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow,\nShe that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,\nShe that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,\n Love thee, the loth one!”\n\nCome to me now thus, Goddess, and release me\nFrom distress and pain; and all my distracted\nHeart would seek, do thou, once again fulfilling,\n Still be my ally!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara" - } - }, - "ode-to-atthis": { - "title": "“Ode to Atthis”", - "body": "I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago,\nWhen the great oleanders were in flower\nIn the broad herded meadows full of sun.\nAnd we would often at the fall of dusk\nWander together by the silver stream,\nWhen the soft grass-heads were all wet with dew\nAnd purple-misted in the fading light.\nAnd joy I knew and sorrow at thy voice,\nAnd the superb magnificence of love,--\nThe loneliness that saddens solitude,\nAnd the sweet speech that makes it durable,--\nThe bitter longing and the keen desire,\nThe sweet companionship through quiet days\nIn the slow ample beauty of the world,\nAnd the unutterable glad release\nWithin the temple of the holy night.\nO Atthis, how I loved thee long ago\nIn that fair perished summer by the sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Bliss Carman", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "one-girl": { - "title": "“One Girl”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLike the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,\nAtop on the topmost twig,--which the pluckers forgot, somehow,--\nForget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLike the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,\nWhich the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,\nUntil the purple blossom is trodden in the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara" - } - }, - "passion": { - "title": "“Passion”", - "body": "Now Love shakes my soul, a mighty\n Wind from the high mountain falling\n Full on the oaks of the forest;\n\nNow, limb-relaxing, it masters\n My life and implacable thrills me,\n Rending with anguish and rapture.\n\nNow my heart, paining my bosom,\n Pants with desire as a maenad\n Mad for the orgiac revel.\n\nNow under my skin run subtle\n Arrows of flame, and my body\n Quivers with surge of emotion.\n\nNow long importunate yearnings\n Vanquish with surfeit my reason;\n Fainting my senses forsake me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara" - } - }, - "persephone": { - "title": "“Persephone”", - "body": "I saw a tender maiden plucking flowers\nOnce, long ago, in the bright morning hours;\nAnd then from heaven I saw a sudden cloud\nFall swift and dark, and heard her cry aloud.\n\nAgain I looked, but from my open door\nMy anxious eyes espied the maid no more;\nThe cloud had vanished, bearing her away\nTo underlands beyond the smiling day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-stricken-flower": { - "title": "“The Stricken Flower”", - "body": "Think not to ever look as once of yore,\nAtthis, upon my love; for thou no more\nWilt find intact upon its stem the flower\nThy guile left slain and bleeding in that hour.\n\nSo ruthless shepherds crush beneath their feet\nThe hill flower blooming in the summer heat;\nThe hyacinth whose purple heart is found\nLeft bruised and dead, to darken on the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "John Myers O’Hara", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "siegfried-sassoon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Siegfried Sassoon", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1967 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 37 - }, - "poems": { - "absolution": { - "title": "“Absolution”", - "body": "The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes\nTill beauty shines in all that we can see.\nWar is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,\nAnd, fighting for our freedom, we are free.\n\nHorror of wounds and anger at the foe,\nAnd loss of things desired; all these must pass.\nWe are the happy legion, for we know\nTime’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass.\n\nThere was an hour when we were loth to part\nFrom life we longed to share no less than others.\nNow, having claimed this heritage of heart,\nWhat need we more, my comrades and my brothers?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "aftermath": { - "title": "“Aftermath”", - "body": "_Have you forgotten yet?_\nFor the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,\nLike traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways:\nAnd the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow\nLike clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,\nTaking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.\n_But the past is just the same,--and War’s a bloody game …\nHave you forgotten yet?\nLook down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget._\n\nDo you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,--\nThe nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?\nDo you remember the rats; and the stench\nOf corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,--\nAnd dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?\nDo you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”\n\nDo you remember that hour of din before the attack,--\nAnd the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then\nAs you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?\nDo you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back\nWith dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey\nMasks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?\n\n_Have you forgotten yet?\nLook up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "alone": { - "title": "“Alone”", - "body": "I’ve listened: and all the sounds I heard\nWere music,--wind, and stream, and bird.\nWith youth who sang from hill to hill\nI’ve listened: my heart is hungry still.\n\nI’ve looked: the morning world was green;\nBright roofs and towers of town I’ve seen;\nAnd stars, wheeling through wingless night.\nI’ve looked: and my soul yet longs for light.\n\nI’ve thought: but in my sense survives\nOnly the impulse of those lives\nThat were my making. Hear me say\n‘I’ve thought!’--and darkness hides my day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "atrocities": { - "title": "“Atrocities”", - "body": "You told me, in your drunken-boasting mood,\nHow once you butchered prisoners. That was good!\nI’m sure you felt no pity while they stood\nPatient and cowed and scared, as prisoners should.\n\nHow did you do them in? Come, don’t be shy:\nYou know I love to hear how Germans die,\nDownstairs in dug-outs. “Camerad!” they cry;\nThen squeal like stoats when bombs begin to fly.\n\nAnd you? I know your record. You went sick\nWhen orders looked unwholesome: then, with trick\nAnd lie, you wangled home. And here you are,\nStill talking big and boozing in a bar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "attack": { - "title": "“Attack”", - "body": "At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun\nIn the wild purple of the glowering sun,\nSmouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud\nThe menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,\nTanks creep and topple forward to the wire.\nThe barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed\nWith bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,\nMen jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.\nLines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,\nThey leave their trenches, going over the top,\nWhile time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,\nAnd hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,\nFlounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves\nThe bronzed battalions of the stricken wood\nIn whose lament I hear a voice that grieves\nFor battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud\nOf outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves\nScattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown\nAlong the westering furnace flaring red.\nO martyred youth and manhood overthrown,\nThe burden of your wrongs is on my head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "before-the-battle": { - "title": "“Before the Battle”", - "body": "Music of whispering trees\nHushed by the broad-winged breeze\nWhere shaken water gleams;\nAnd evening radiance falling\nWith reedy bird-notes calling.\nO bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.\n\nI have no need to pray\nThat fear may pass away;\nI scorn the growl and rumble of the fight\nThat summons me from cool\nSilence of marsh and pool,\nAnd yellow lilies islanded in light.\nO river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "break-of-day": { - "title": "“Break of Day”", - "body": "There seemed a smell of autumn in the air\nAt the bleak end of night; he shivered there\nIn a dank, musty dug-out where he lay,\nLegs wrapped in sand-bags,--lumps of chalk and clay\nSpattering his face. Dry-mouthed, he thought, “To-day\nWe start the damned attack; and, Lord knows why,\nZero’s at nine; how bloody if I’m done in\nUnder the freedom of that morning sky!”\nAnd then he coughed and dozed, cursing the din.\n\nWas it the ghost of autumn in that smell\nOf underground, or God’s blank heart grown kind,\nThat sent a happy dream to him in hell?--\nWhere men are crushed like clods, and crawl to find\nSome crater for their wretchedness; who lie\nIn outcast immolation, doomed to die\nFar from clean things or any hope of cheer,\nCowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims\nAnd roars into their heads, and they can hear\nOld childish talk, and tags of foolish hymns.\n\nHe sniffs the chilly air; (his dreaming starts).\nHe’s riding in a dusty Sussex lane\nIn quiet September; slowly night departs;\nAnd he’s a living soul, absolved from pain.\nBeyond the brambled fences where he goes\nAre glimmering fields with harvest piled in sheaves,\nAnd tree-tops dark against the stars grown pale;\nThen, clear and shrill, a distant farm-cock crows;\nAnd there’s a wall of mist along the vale\nWhere willows shake their watery-sounding leaves.\nHe gazes on it all, and scarce believes\nThat earth is telling its old peaceful tale;\nHe thanks the blessed world that he was born …\nThen, far away, a lonely note of the horn.\n\nThey’re drawing the Big Wood! Unlatch the gate,\nAnd set Golumpus going on the grass:\n_He_ knows the corner where it’s best to wait\nAnd hear the crashing woodland chorus pass;\nThe corner where old foxes make their track\nTo the Long Spinney; that’s the place to be.\nThe bracken shakes below an ivied tree,\nAnd then a cub looks out; and “Tally-o-back!”\nHe bawls, and swings his thong with volleying crack,--\nAll the clean thrill of autumn in his blood,\nAnd hunting surging through him like a flood\nIn joyous welcome from the untroubled past;\nWhile the war drifts away, forgotten at last.\n\nNow a red, sleepy sun above the rim\nOf twilight stares along the quiet weald,\nAnd the kind, simple country shines revealed\nIn solitudes of peace, no longer dim.\nThe old horse lifts his face and thanks the light,\nThen stretches down his head to crop the green.\nAll things that he has loved are in his sight;\nThe places where his happiness has been\nAre in his eyes, his heart, and they are good.\n\n * * * * *\n\nHark! there’s the horn: they’re drawing the Big Wood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "the-death-bed": { - "title": "“The Death-Bed”", - "body": "He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped\nRound him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;\nAqueous like floating rays of amber light,\nSoaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.\nSilence and safety; and his mortal shore\nLipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.\n\nSomeone was holding water to his mouth.\nHe swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped\nThrough crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot\nThe opiate throb and ache that was his wound.\nWater--calm, sliding green above the weir.\nWater--a sky-lit alley for his boat,\nBird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers\nAnd shaken hues of summer; drifting down,\nHe dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.\n\nNight, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,\nBlowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.\nNight. He was blind; he could not see the stars\nGlinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;\nQueer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,\nFlickered and faded in his drowning eyes.\n\nRain--he could hear it rustling through the dark;\nFragrance and passionless music woven as one;\nWarm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers\nThat soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps\nBehind the thunder, but a trickling peace,\nGently and slowly washing life away.\n\nHe stirred, shifting his body; then the pain\nLeapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore\nHis groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.\nBut someone was beside him; soon he lay\nShuddering because that evil thing had passed.\nAnd death, who’d stepped toward him, paused and stared.\n\nLight many lamps and gather round his bed.\nLend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.\nSpeak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.\nHe’s young; he hated War; how should he die\nWhen cruel old campaigners win safe through?\n\nBut death replied: “I choose him.” So he went,\nAnd there was silence in the summer night;\nSilence and safety; and the veils of sleep.\nThen, far away, the thudding of the guns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "does-it-matter": { - "title": "“Does It Matter?”", - "body": "Does it matter?--losing your legs?\nFor people will always be kind,\nAnd you need not show that you mind\nWhen the others come in after football\nTo gobble their muffins and eggs.\n\nDoes it matter?--losing your sight?\nThere’s such splendid work for the blind;\nAnd people will always be kind,\nAs you sit on the terrace remembering\nAnd turning your face to the light.\n\nDo they matter?--those dreams from the pit?\nYou can drink and forget and be glad,\nAnd people won’t say that you’re mad;\nFor they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country,\nAnd no one will worry a bit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dreamers": { - "title": "“Dreamers”", - "body": "Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land,\nDrawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.\nIn the great hour of destiny they stand,\nEach with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.\nSoldiers are sworn to action; they must win\nSome flaming, fatal climax with their lives.\nSoldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin\nThey think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.\n\nI see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,\nAnd in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,\nDreaming of things they did with balls and bats,\nAnd mocked by hopeless longing to regain\nBank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,\nAnd going to the office in the train.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dream": { - "title": "“The Dream”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMoonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent\nOf summer gardens; these can bring you all\nThose dreams that in the starlit silence fall:\nSweet songs are full of odours. While I went\nLast night in drizzling dusk along a lane,\nI passed a squalid farm; from byre and midden\nCame the rank smell that brought me once again\nA dream of war that in the past was hidden.\n\n\n# II.\n\nUp a disconsolate straggling village street\nI saw the tired troops trudge: I heard their feet.\nThe cheery Q.M.S. was there to meet\nAnd guide our Company in … I watched them stumble.\nInto some crazy hovel, too beat to grumble;\nSaw them file inward, slipping from their backs\nRifles, equipment, packs.\n\nOn filthy straw they sit in the gloom, each face\nBowed to patched, sodden boots they must unlace,\nWhile the wind chills their sweat through chinks and cracks.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI’m looking at their blistered feet; young Jones\nStares up at me, mud-splashed and white and jaded;\nOut of his eyes the morning light has faded.\nOld soldiers with three winters in their bones\nPuff their damp Woodbines, whistle, stretch their toes\n_They_ can still grin at me, for each of ’em knows\nThat I’m as tired as they are … Can they guess\nThe secret burden that is always mine?--\nPride in their courage; pity for their distress;\nAnd burning bitterness\nThat I must take them to the accursèd Line.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI cannot hear their voices, but I see\nDim candles in the barn: they gulp their tea,\nAnd soon they’ll sleep like logs. Ten miles away\nThe battle winks and thuds in blundering strife.\nAnd I must lead them nearer, day by day,\nTo the foul beast of war that bludgeons life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-dug-out": { - "title": "“The Dug-Out”", - "body": "Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,\nAnd one arm bent across your sullen, cold,\nExhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,\nDeep-shadowed from the candle’s guttering gold;\nAnd you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;\nDrowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head …\nYou are too young to fall asleep for ever;\nAnd when you sleep you remind me of the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "everyone-sang": { - "title": "“Everyone Sang”", - "body": "Everyone suddenly burst out singing;\nAnd I was filled with such delight\nAs prisoned birds must find in freedom\nWinging wildly across the white\nOrchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.\n\nEveryone’s voice was suddenly lifted,\nAnd beauty came like the setting sun.\nMy heart was shaken with tears and horror\nDrifted away … O but every one\nWas a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "the-hero": { - "title": "“The Hero”", - "body": "“Jack fell as he’d have wished,” the mother said,\nAnd folded up the letter that she’d read.\n“The Colonel writes so nicely.” Something broke\nIn the tired voice that quavered to a choke.\nShe half looked up. “We mothers are so proud\nOf our dead soldiers.” Then her face was bowed.\n\nQuietly the Brother Officer went out.\nHe’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies\nThat she would nourish all her days, no doubt\nFor while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes\nHad shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,\nBecause he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.\n\nHe thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,\nHad panicked down the trench that night the mine\nWent up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried\nTo get sent home, and how, at last, he died,\nBlown to small bits. And no one seemed to care\nExcept that lonely woman with white hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "how-to-die": { - "title": "“How to Die”", - "body": "Dark clouds are smouldering into red\nWhile down the craters morning burns.\nThe dying soldier shifts his head\nTo watch the glory that returns;\nHe lifts his fingers toward the skies\nWhere holy brightness breaks in flame;\nRadiance reflected in his eyes,\nAnd on his lips a whispered name.\n\nYou’d think, to hear some people talk,\nThat lads go West with sobs and curses,\nAnd sullen faces white as chalk,\nHankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.\nBut they’ve been taught the way to do it\nLike Christian soldiers; not with haste\nAnd shuddering groans; but passing through it\nWith due regard for decent taste.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-stood-with-the-dead": { - "title": "“I Stood with the Dead”", - "body": "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:\nWhen dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.\nAnd my slow heart said, “You must kill; you must kill:\nSoldier, soldier, morning is red.”\n\nOn the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace\nI stared for a while through the thin cold rain …\n“O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face,\nAnd your eyes are blurred and sick like the plain.”\n\nI stood with the Dead … They were dead; they were dead;\nMy heart and my head beat a march of dismay;\nAnd gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns …\n“Fall in!” I shouted; “Fall in for your pay!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-imperfect-lover": { - "title": "“The Imperfect Lover”", - "body": "I never asked you to be perfect--did I?--\nThough often I’ve called you sweet, in the invasion\nOf mastering love. I never prayed that you\nMight stand, unsoiled, angelic and inhuman,\nPointing the way toward Sainthood like a sign-post.\n\nOh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy.\nWe found the little kingdom of our passion\nThat all can share who walk the road of lovers.\nIn wild and secret happiness we stumbled;\nAnd gods and demons clamoured in our senses.\n\nBut I’ve grown thoughtful now. And you have lost\nYour early-morning freshness of surprise\nAt being so utterly mine: you’ve learned to fear\nThe gloomy, stricken places in my soul,\nAnd the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.\n\nYou made me glad; and I can still return\nTo you, the haven of my lonely pride:\nBut I am sworn to murder those illusions\nThat blossom from desire with desperate beauty:\nAnd there shall be no falsehood in our failure;\nSince, if we loved like beasts, the thing is done,\nAnd I’ll not hide it, though our heaven be hell.\n\nYou dream long liturgies of our devotion.\nYet, in my heart, I dread our love’s destruction.\nBut, should you grow to hate me, I would ask\nNo mercy of your mood: I’d have you stand\nAnd look me in the eyes, and laugh, and smite me.\n\nThen I should know, at least, that truth endured,\nThough love had died of wounds. And you could leave me\nUnvanquished in my atmosphere of devils.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-an-underground-dressing-station": { - "title": "“In an Underground Dressing Station”", - "body": "Quietly they set their burden down: he tried\nTo grin; moaned; moved his head from side to side.\nHe gripped the stretcher; stiffened; glared; and screamed,\n“O put my leg down, doctor, do!” (He’d got\nA bullet in his ankle; and he’d been shot\nHorribly through the guts.) The surgeon seemed\nSo kind and gentle, saying, above that crying,\n“You _must_ keep still, my lad.” But he was dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-pink": { - "title": "“In the Pink”", - "body": "So Davies wrote: “This leaves me in the pink.”\nThen scrawled his name: “Your loving sweetheart, Willie.”\nWith crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink\nOf rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly,\nFor once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.\nWinter was passing; soon the year would mend.\n\nHe couldn’t sleep that night. Stiff in the dark\nHe groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,\nWhen he’d go out as cheerful as a lark\nIn his best suit to wander arm-in-arm\nWith brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear\nThe simple, silly things she liked to hear.\n\nAnd then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge\nUp to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.\nFive miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,\nAnd everything but wretchedness forgotten.\nTo-night he’s in the pink; but soon he’ll die.\nAnd still the war goes on; _he_ don’t know why.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "lamentations": { - "title": "“Lamentations”", - "body": "I found him in the guard-room at the Base.\nFrom the blind darkness I had heard his crying\nAnd blundered in. With puzzled, patient face\nA sergeant watched him; it was no good trying\nTo stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.\nAnd, all because his brother had gone west,\nRaved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief\nMoaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling\nHalf-naked on the floor. In my belief\nSuch men have lost all patriotic feeling.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-last-meeting": { - "title": "“The Last Meeting”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBecause the night was falling warm and still\nUpon a golden day at April’s end,\nI thought; I will go up the hill once more\nTo find the face of him that I have lost,\nAnd speak with him before his ghost has flown\nFar from the earth that might not keep him long.\n\nSo down the road I went, pausing to see\nHow slow the dusk drew on, and how the folk\nLoitered about their doorways, well-content\nWith the fine weather and the waxing year.\nThe miller’s house, that glimmered with grey walls,\nTurned me aside; and for a while I leaned\nAlong the tottering rail beside the bridge\nTo watch the dripping mill-wheel green with damp.\nThe miller peered at me with shadowed eyes\nAnd pallid face: I could not hear his voice\nFor sound of the weir’s plunging. He was old.\nHis days went round with the unhurrying wheel.\n\nMoving along the street, each side I saw\nThe humble, kindly folk in lamp-lit rooms;\nChildren at table; simple, homely wives;\nStrong, grizzled men; and soldiers back from war,\nScaring the gaping elders with loud talk.\n\nSoon all the jumbled roofs were down the hill,\nAnd I was turning up the grassy lane\nThat goes to the big, empty house that stands\nAbove the town, half-hid by towering trees.\nI looked below and saw the glinting lights:\nI heard the treble cries of bustling life,\nAnd mirth, and scolding; and the grind of wheels.\nAn engine whistled, piercing-shrill, and called\nHigh echoes from the sombre slopes afar;\nThen a long line of trucks began to move.\n\nIt was quite still; the columned chestnuts stood\nDark in their noble canopies of leaves.\nI thought: “A little longer I’ll delay,\nAnd then he’ll be more glad to hear my feet,\nAnd with low laughter ask me why I’m late.\nThe place will be too dim to show his eyes,\nBut he will loom above me like a tree,\nWith lifted arms and body tall and strong.”\n\nThere stood the empty house; a ghostly hulk\nBecalmed and huge, massed in the mantling dark,\nAs builders left it when quick-shattering war\nLeapt upon France and called her men to fight.\nLightly along the terraces I trod,\nCrunching the rubble till I found the door\nThat gaped in twilight, framing inward gloom.\nAn owl flew out from under the high eaves\nTo vanish secretly among the firs,\nWhere lofty boughs netted the gleam of stars.\nI stumbled in; the dusty floors were strewn\nWith cumbering piles of planks and props and beams;\nTall windows gapped the walls; the place was free\nTo every searching gust and jousting gale;\nBut now they slept; I was afraid to speak,\nAnd heavily the shadows crowded in.\n\nI called him, once; then listened: nothing moved:\nOnly my thumping heart beat out the time.\nWhispering his name, I groped from room to room.\n\nQuite empty was that house; it could not hold\nHis human ghost, remembered in the love\nThat strove in vain to be companioned still.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBlindly I sought the woods that I had known\nSo beautiful with morning when I came\nAmazed with spring that wove the hazel twigs\nWith misty raiment of awakening green.\nI found a holy dimness, and the peace\nOf sanctuary, austerely built of trees,\nAnd wonder stooping from the tranquil sky.\n\nAh! but there was no need to call his name.\nHe was beside me now, as swift as light.\nI knew him crushed to earth in scentless flowers,\nAnd lifted in the rapture of dark pines.\n“For now,” he said, “my spirit has more eyes\nThan heaven has stars; and they are lit by love.\nMy body is the magic of the world,\nAnd dawn and sunset flame with my spilt blood.\nMy breath is the great wind, and I am filled\nWith molten power and surge of the bright waves\nThat chant my doom along the ocean’s edge.”\n\n“Look in the faces of the flowers and find\nThe innocence that shrives me; stoop to the stream\nThat you may share the wisdom of my peace.\nFor talking water travels undismayed.\nThe luminous willows lean to it with tales\nOf the young earth; and swallows dip their wings\nWhere showering hawthorn strews the lanes of light.”\n\n“I can remember summer in one thought\nOf wind-swept green, and deeps of melting blue,\nAnd scent of limes in bloom; and I can hear\nDistinct the early mower in the grass,\nWhetting his blade along some morn of June.”\n\n“For I was born to the round world’s delight,\nAnd knowledge of enfolding motherhood,\nWhose tenderness, that shines through constant toil,\nGathers the naked children to her knees.\nIn death I can remember how she came\nTo kiss me while I slept; still I can share\nThe glee of childhood; and the fleeting gloom\nWhen all my flowers were washed with rain of tears.”\n\n“I triumph in the choruses of birds,\nBursting like April buds in gyres of song.\nMy meditations are the blaze of noon\nOn silent woods, where glory burns the leaves.\nI have shared breathless vigils; I have slaked\nThe thirst of my desires in bounteous rain\nPouring and splashing downward through the dark.\nLoud storm has roused me with its winking glare,\nAnd voice of doom that crackles overhead.\nI have been tired and watchful, craving rest,\nTill the slow-footed hours have touched my brows\nAnd laid me on the breast of sundering sleep.”\n\n\n# III.\n\nI know that he is lost among the stars,\nAnd may return no more but in their light.\nThough his hushed voice may call me in the stir\nOf whispering trees, I shall not understand.\nMen may not speak with stillness; and the joy\nOf brooks that leap and tumble down green hills\nIs faster than their feet; and all their thoughts\nCan win no meaning from the talk of birds.\n\nMy heart is fooled with fancies, being wise;\nFor fancy is the gleaming of wet flowers\nWhen the hid sun looks forth with golden stare.\nThus, when I find new loveliness to praise,\nAnd things long-known shine out in sudden grace,\nThen will I think: “He moves before me now.”\nSo he will never come but in delight,\nAnd, as it was in life, his name shall be\nWonder awaking in a summer dawn,\nAnd youth, that dying, touched my lips to song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "memory": { - "title": "“Memory”", - "body": "When I was young my heart and head were light,\nAnd I was gay and feckless as a colt\nOut in the fields, with morning in the may,\nWind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.\nO thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free\nAnd all the paths led on from hawthorn-time\nAcross the carolling meadows into June.\n\nBut now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit\nBurning my dreams away beside the fire:\nFor death has made me wise and bitter and strong;\nAnd I am rich in all that I have lost.\nO starshine on the fields of long-ago,\nBring me the darkness and the nightingale;\nDim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,\nAnd silence; and the faces of my friends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-rear-guard": { - "title": "“The Rear-Guard”", - "body": "Groping along the tunnel, step by step,\nHe winked his prying torch with patching glare\nFrom side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.\n\nTins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,\nA mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;\nAnd he, exploring fifty feet below\nThe rosy gloom of battle overhead.\nTripping, he grapped the wall; saw someone lie\nHumped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,\nAnd stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.\n“I’m looking for headquarters.” No reply.\n“God blast your neck!” (For days he’d had no sleep.)\n“Get up and guide me through this stinking place.”\nSavage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,\nAnd flashed his beam across the livid face\nTerribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore\nAgony dying hard ten days before;\nAnd fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.\nAlone he staggered on until he found\nDawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair\nTo the dazed, muttering creatures underground\nWho hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.\nAt last, with sweat of horror in his hair,\nHe climbed through darkness to the twilight air,\nUnloading hell behind him step by step.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-redeemer": { - "title": "“The Redeemer”", - "body": "Darkness: the rain sluiced down; the mire was deep;\nIt was past twelve on a mid-winter night,\nWhen peaceful folk in beds lay snug asleep:\nThere, with much work to do before the light,\nWe lugged our clay-sucked boots as best we might\nAlong the trench; sometimes a bullet sang,\nAnd droning shells burst with a hollow bang;\nWe were soaked, chilled and wretched, every one.\nDarkness: the distant wink of a huge gun.\n\nI turned in the black ditch, loathing the storm;\nA rocket fizzed and burned with blanching flare,\nAnd lit the face of what had been a form\nFloundering in mirk. He stood before me there;\nI say that he was Christ; stiff in the glare,\nAnd leaning forward from his burdening task,\nBoth arms supporting it; his eyes on mine\nStared from the woeful head that seemed a mask\nOf mortal pain in Hell’s unholy shine.\n\nNo thorny crown, only a woollen cap\nHe wore--an English soldier, white and strong,\nWho loved his time like any simple chap,\nGood days of work and sport and homely song;\nNow he has learned that nights are very long,\nAnd dawn a watching of the windowed sky.\nBut to the end, unjudging, he’ll endure\nHorror and pain, not uncontent to die\nThat Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.\n\nHe faced me, reeling in his weariness,\nShouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.\nI say that he was Christ, who wrought to bless\nAll groping things with freedom bright as air,\nAnd with His mercy washed and made them fair.\nThen the flame sank, and all grew black as pitch,\nWhile we began to struggle along the ditch;\nAnd some one flung his burden in the muck,\nMumbling: “O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "repression-of-war-experience": { - "title": "“Repression of War Experience”", - "body": "Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;\nWhat silly beggars they are to blunder in\nAnd scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame--\nNo, no, not that,--it’s bad to think of war,\nWhen thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;\nAnd it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad\nUnless they lose control of ugly thoughts\nThat drive them out to jabber among the trees.\n\nNow light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.\nDraw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,\nAnd you’re as right as rain … Why won’t it rain? …\n\nI wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night,\nWith bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,\nAnd make the roses hang their dripping heads.\nBooks; what a jolly company they are,\nStanding so quiet and patient on their shelves,\nDressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,\nAnd every kind of colour. Which will you read?\nCome on; O do read something; they’re so wise.\nI tell you all the wisdom of the world\nIs waiting for you on those shelves; and yet\nYou sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,\nAnd listen to the silence: on the ceiling\nThere’s one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;\nAnd in the breathless air outside the house\nThe garden waits for something that delays.\nThere must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,--\nNot people killed in battle,--they’re in France,--\nBut horrible shapes in shrouds--old men who died\nSlow, natural deaths,--old men with ugly souls,\nWho wore their bodies out with nasty sins.\n\nYou’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;\nYou’d never think there was a bloody war on! …\nO yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns.\nHark! Thud, thud, thud,--quite soft … they never cease--\nThose whispering guns--O Christ, I want to go out\nAnd screech at them to stop--I’m going crazy;\nI’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-road": { - "title": "“The Road”", - "body": "The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass\nAnd halt, but never see them; yet they’re here--\nA patient crowd along the sodden grass,\nSilent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear.\nThe road goes crawling up a long hillside,\nAll ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs\nOf battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died\nAre stretched big-bellied horses with stiff legs;\nAnd dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight,\nStare up at caverned darkness winking white.\n\nYou in the bomb-scorched kilt, poor sprawling Jock,\nYou tottered here and fell, and stumbled on,\nHalf dazed for want of sleep. No dream could mock\nYour reeling brain with comforts lost and gone.\nYou did not feel her arms about your knees,\nHer blind caress, her lips upon your head:\nToo tired for thoughts of home and love and ease,\nThe road would serve you well enough for bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "stand-to": { - "title": "“Stand-To”", - "body": "I’d been on duty from two till four.\nI went and stared at the dug-out door.\nDown in the frowst I heard them snore.\n“Stand-to!” Somebody grunted and swore.\n\nDawn was misty; the skies were still;\n Larks were singing, discordant, shrill;\n _They_ seemed happy; but _I_ felt ill.\n\nDeep in water I splashed my way\nUp the trench to our bogged front line.\nRain had fallen the whole damned night.\nO Jesus, send me a wound to-day,\nAnd I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,\nAnd get my bloody old sins washed white!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "suicide-in-trenches": { - "title": "“Suicide in Trenches”", - "body": "I knew a simple soldier boy\nWho grinned at life in empty joy,\nSlept soundly through the lonesome dark,\nAnd whistled early with the lark.\n\nIn winter trenches, cowed and glum\nWith crumps and lice and lack of rum,\nHe put a bullet through his brain.\nNo one spoke of him again.\n\nYou smug-faced crowds with kindling eye\nWho cheer when soldier lads march by,\nSneak home and pray you’ll never know\nThe hell where youth and laughter go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "survivors": { - "title": "“Survivors”", - "body": "No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain\nHave caused their stammering, disconnected talk.\nOf course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’--\nThese boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.\nThey’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed\nSubjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--\nTheir dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud\nOf glorious war that shatter’d all their pride …\nMen who went out to battle, grim and glad;\nChildren, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thrushes": { - "title": "“Thrushes”", - "body": "Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,\nWhose voices make the emptiness of light\nA windy palace. Quavering from the brim\nOf dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,\nThey clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing\nScornful of man, and from his toils aloof\nWhose heart’s a haunted woodland whispering;\nWhose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;\nWho hears the cry of God in everything,\nAnd storms the gate of nothingness for proof.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-any-dead-officer": { - "title": "“To Any Dead Officer”", - "body": "Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say,\nBecause I’d like to know that you’re all right.\nTell me, have you found everlasting day,\nOr been sucked in by everlasting night?\nFor when I shut my eyes your face shows plain;\nI hear you make some cheery old remark--\nI can rebuild you in my brain,\nThough you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark.\n\nYou hated tours of trenches; you were proud\nOf nothing more than having good years to spend;\nLonged to get home and join the careless crowd\nOf chaps who work in peace with Time for friend.\nThat’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire:\nNo earthly chance can send you crawling back;\nYou’ve finished with machine-gun fire--\nKnocked over in a hopeless dud-attack.\n\nSomehow I always thought you’d get done in,\nBecause you were so desperate keen to live:\nYou were all out to try and save your skin,\nWell knowing how much the world had got to give.\nYou joked at shells and talked the usual ‘shop,’\nStuck to your dirty job and did it fine:\nWith ‘Jesus Christ! when will it stop?\nThree years … It’s hell unless we break their line.’\n\nSo when they told me you’d been left for dead\nI wouldn’t believe them, feeling it must be true.\nNext week the bloody Roll of Honour said\n‘Wounded and missing’--(That’s the thing to do\nWhen lads are left in shell-holes dying slow,\nWith nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache,\nMoaning for water till they know\nIt’s night, and then it’s not worth while to wake!)\n\nGood-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,\nAnd tell Him that our Politicians swear\nThey won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod\nUnder the Heel of England … Are you there? …\nYes … and the War won’t end for at least two years;\nBut we’ve got stacks of men … I’m blind with tears,\nStaring into the dark. Cheerio!\nI wish they’d killed you in a decent show.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "trench-duty": { - "title": "“Trench Duty”", - "body": "Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,\nOut in the trench with three hours’ watch to take,\nI blunder through the splashing mirk; and then\nHear the gruff muttering voices of the men\nCrouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.\nHark! There’s the big bombardment on our right\nRumbling and bumping; and the dark’s a glare\nOf flickering horror in the sectors where\nWe raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,\nOr crawling on their bellies through the wire.\n“What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?”\nFive minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:\nWhy did he do it? … Starlight overhead--\nBlank stars. I’m wide-awake; and some chap’s dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-troops": { - "title": "“The Troops”", - "body": "Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom\nShudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals\nDisconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots\nAnd turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky\nHaggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down\nThe stale despair of night, must now renew\nTheir desolation in the truce of dawn,\nMurdering the livid hours that grope for peace.\n\nYet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,\nCan grin through storms of death and find a gap\nIn the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.\nThey march from safety, and the bird-sung joy\nOf grass-green thickets, to the land where all\nIs ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky\nThat hastens over them where they endure\nSad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,\nAnd foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.\n\nO my brave brown companions, when your souls\nFlock silently away, and the eyeless dead\nShame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,\nDeath will stand grieving in that field of war\nSince your unvanquished hardihood is spent.\nAnd through some mooned Valhalla there will pass\nBattalions and battalions, scarred from hell;\nThe unreturning army that was youth;\nThe legions who have suffered and are dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "wirers": { - "title": "“Wirers”", - "body": "“Pass it along, the wiring party’s going out”--\nAnd yawning sentries mumble, “Wirers going out.”\nUnravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud,\nThey toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood.\n\nThe Boche sends up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there,\nStock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts\nStride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare\nOf snags and tangles. Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts\nGleams desolate along the sky, night’s misery ended.\n\nYoung Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away,\nMoaning at every lurch; no doubt he’ll die to-day.\nBut _we_ can say the front-line wire’s been safely mended.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wonderment": { - "title": "“Wonderment”", - "body": "Then a wind blew;\nAnd he who had forgot he moved\nLonely amid the green and silver morning weather,\nSuddenly grew\nAware of clouds and trees\nGleaming and white and shafted, shaken together\nAnd blown to music by the ruffling breeze.\n\nLike flush of wings\nThe moment passed: he stood\nDazzled with blossom in the swaying wood;\nThen he remembered how, through all swift things,\nThis mortal scene stands built of memories,--\nShaped by the wise\nWho gazed in breathing wonderment,\nAnd left us their brave eyes\nTo light the ways they went.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-working-party": { - "title": "“A Working Party”", - "body": "Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,\nSliding and poising, groping with his boots;\nSometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls\nWith hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.\nHe couldn’t see the man who walked in front;\nOnly he heard the drum and rattle of feet\nStepping along the trench-boards,--often splashing\nWretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.\n\nVoices would grunt, “Keep to your right,--make way!”\nWhen squeezing past the men from the front-line:\nWhite faces peered, puffing a point of red;\nCandles and braziers glinted through the chinks\nAnd curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom\nSwallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore\nBecause a sagging wire had caught his neck.\nA flare went up; the shining whiteness spread\nAnd flickered upward, showing nimble rats,\nAnd mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain;\nThen the slow, silver moment died in dark.\n\nThe wind came posting by with chilly gusts\nAnd buffeting at corners, piping thin\nAnd dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots\nWould split and crack and sing along the night,\nAnd shells came calmly through the drizzling air\nTo burst with hollow bang below the hill.\n\nThree hours ago he stumbled up the trench;\nNow he will never walk that road again:\nHe must be carried back, a jolting lump\nBeyond all need of tenderness and care;\nA nine-stone corpse with nothing more to do.\n\nHe was a young man with a meagre wife\nAnd two pale children in a Midland town;\nHe showed the photograph to all his mates;\nAnd they considered him a decent chap\nWho did his work and hadn’t much to say,\nAnd always laughed at other people’s jokes\nBecause he hadn’t any of his own.\n\nThat night, when he was busy at his job\nOf piling bags along the parapet,\nHe thought how slow time went, stamping his feet,\nAnd blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold.\n\nHe thought of getting back by half-past twelve,\nAnd tot of rum to send him warm to sleep\nIn draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes\nOf coke, and full of snoring, weary men.\n\nHe pushed another bag along the top,\nCraning his body outward; then a flare\nGave one white glimpse of No Man’s Land and wire;\nAnd as he dropped his head the instant split\nHis startled life with lead, and all went out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dorothy-l-sayers": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dorothy L. Sayers", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L._Sayers", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "carol": { - "title": "“Carol”", - "body": "O know you how Queen Mary sits\nIn heaven’s highest bowers,\nTall lilies in her garden-beds,\nSet round with gilly-flowers?\n\nAnd know you how Queen Mary sits\nWith rings upon her hands,\nWhile the seven blessed Virgins bind\nHer hair in golden bands?\n\nAnd when the Lord will comfort her\nFor her seven swords of pain,\nHe comes to stand beside her knee,\nA little child again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "christ-walks-the-world-again": { - "title": "“Christ Walks the World Again”", - "body": "_--This is the heir; come let us kill him._\n\n_--Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved?_\n\nChrist walks the world again, His lute upon His back,\nHis red robe rent to tatters, His riches gone to rack,\nThe wind that wakes the morning blows His hair about His face,\nHis hands and feet are ragged with the ragged briar’s embrace,\nFor the hunt is up behind Him and His sword is at His side, …\nChrist the bonny outlaw walks the whole world wide,\nSinging: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me,\nLie among the bracken and break the barley bread?\nWe will see new suns arise in golden, far-off skies,\nFor the Son of God and Woman hath not where to lay His head.”\n\nChrist walks the world again, a prince of fairy-tale,\nHe roams, a rascal fiddler, over mountain and down dale,\nCast forth to seek His fortune in a bitter world and grim,\nFor the stepsons of His Father’s house would steal His bride from Him;\nThey have weirded Him to wander till He bring within His hands\nThe water of eternal youth from black-enchanted lands,\n\nSinging: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me,\nOr sleep on silken cushions in the bower of wicked men?\nFor if we walk together through the wet and windy weather,\nWhen I ride back home triumphant, you will ride beside Me then.”\n\nChrist walks the world again, new-bound on high emprise,\nWith music in His golden mouth and laughter in His eyes;\nThe primrose springs before Him as He treads the dusty way,\nHis singer’s crown of thorns has burst in blossom like the may,\nHe heedeth not the morrow and He never looks behind,\nSinging: “Glory to the open skies and peace to all mankind.”\n\nSinging: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me?\nWas never man lived longer for the hoarding of his breath;\nHere be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain …\nIf we perish in the seeking … why, how small a thing is death!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-elder-knight": { - "title": "“The Elder Knight”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI HAVE met you foot to foot, I have fought you face to face,\nI have held my own against you and lost no inch of place,\nAnd you shall never see\nHow you have broken me.\n\nYou sheathed your sword in the dawn, and you smiled with careless eyes,\nSaying “Merrily struck, my son, I think you may have your prize.”\nNor saw how each hard breath\nWas painfully snatched from death.\n\nI held my head like a rock; I offered to joust again,\nThough I shook, and my palsied hand could hardly cling to the rein;\nDid you curse my insolence\nAnd over-confidence?\n\nYou have ridden, lusty and fresh, to the morrow’s tournament;\nI am buffeted, beaten, sick at the heart and spent.--\nYet, as God my speed be\nI will fight you again if need be.\n\n\n# II.\n\nA white cloud running under the moon\nAnd three stars over the poplar-trees,\nNight deepens into her lambent noon;\nGod holds the world between His knees;\nYesterday it was washed with the rain,\nBut now it is clean and clear again.\n\nYour hands were strong to buffet me,\nBut, when my plume was in the dust,\nMost kind for comfort verily;\nSuccess rides blown with restless lust;\nHerein is all the peace of heaven:\nTo know we have failed and are forgiven.\n\nThe brown, rain-scented garden beds\nAre waiting for the next year’s roses;\nThe poplars wag mysterious heads,\nFor the pleasant secret each discloses\nTo his neighbour, makes them nod, and nod--\nSo safe is the world on the knees of God.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI have the road before me; never again\nWill I be angry at the practised thrust\nThat flicked my fingers from the lordly rein\nTo scratch and scrabble among the rolling dust.\n\nI never will be angry--though your spear\nBit through the pauldron, shattered the camail,\nBefore I crossed a steed, through many a year\nBattle on battle taught you how to fail.\n\nCan you remember how the morning star\nWinked through the chapel window, when the day\nCalled you from vigil to delights of war\nWith such loud jollity, you could not pray?\n\nPray now, Lord Lancelot; your hands are hard\nWith the rough hilts; great power is in your eyes,\nGreat confidence; you are not newly scarred,\nAnd conquer gravely now without surprise.\n\nPray now, my master; you have still the joy\nOf work done perfectly; remember not\nThe dizzying bliss that smote you when, a boy,\nYou faced some better man, Lord Lancelot.\n\nPray now--and look not on my radiant face,\nBreaking victorious from the bloody grips--\nToo young to speak in quiet prayer or praise\nFor the strong laughter bubbling to my lips.\n\nAngry? because I scarce know how to stand,\nGasping and reeling against the gates of death,\nWhile, with the shaft yet whole within your hand,\nYou smile at me with undisordered breath?\n\nNot I--not I that have the dawn and dew,\nWind, and the golden shore, and silver foam--\nI that here pass and bid good-bye to you--\nFor I ride forward--you are going home.\n\nTruly I am your debtor for this hour\nOf rough and tumble--debtor for some good tricks\nOf tourney-craft;--yet see how, flower on flower,\nThe hedgerows blossom! How the perfumes mix\n\nOf field and forest!--I must hasten on--\nThe clover scent blows like a flag unfurled:\nWhen you are dead, or aged and alone,\nI shall be foremost knight in all the world--\n\nMy world, not yours, beneath the morning’s gold,\nMy hazardous world, where skies and seas are blue;\nHere is my hand. Maybe, when I am old,\nI shall remember you, and pray for you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-gates-of-paradise": { - "title": "“The Gates of Paradise”", - "body": "_From the grave-bed and the winding sheet\nIs a long way for dead feet,\nA dark road for dead eyes,\nThat leads to the gates of Paradise._\n\nWhen Judas’ soul went through the night,\nTo knock on Hades gate,\nHis way was over the whin-pricked moor,\nAnd the noise of the wind was great.\n\nHe had no lantern to his feet,\nNor candle in his hand,\nSuch as God gives to every man\nThat dies at the time planned.\n\nThe angels sit in highest Heaven\nAnd trim the lamps of God,\nAnd all day long make lights for those\nThat travel death’s dim road.\n\nAnd when the cross is on thy breast,\nThe chrism on thine eyes,\nThy angel will bear down thy light\nOut of the starry skies\nAnd thou therewith shalt walk by night\nSafely to Paradise.\n\nBut whoso doth so deadly sin\nTo cast his life away,\nFinding his lamp not lit betimes\nWalks through the midnight grey.\n\nFor a long night and half a day\nDid Judas walk alone\nThrough the utter dark, for in that place\nIs neither sun nor moon.\n\nFor a long night and half a day\nDid Judas vainly seek\nTo reach the gates of Paradise,\nThe salt tears on his cheek.\n\nWith that he saw a candle gleam\nBorne by a hasty man,\nAnd Judas caught him by the cloak\nSo swiftly as he ran.\n\n“O let me walk with thee, kind friend--\nI grope, I fail, I fall,\nI have no lamp nor candle-light\nAnd the night is over all.”\n\n“Full gladly, so thou make good speed,\nI run to keep the tryst,\nThat was given to me at the gates of Hell,\nBy sweet King Jesus Christ.”\n\n“I am the thief whom God forgave,\nOn Calvary’s bitter tree,\nFor ‘To-night,’ He said, ‘thou shalt rest thine head\nIn Paradise, with Me.’”\n\n“And I am the man that sinned such a sin\nAs the world remembers not,\nThat sold for a price the Lord of Life--\nJudas Iscariot.”\n\n“Now God forbid, thou damnèd wretch,\nThat ever this should be,\nThat I should tryst with Jesus Christ,\nIn the company of thee.”\n\nThe first robber went his way,\nAnd Judas walked alone,\nMirk, mirk was the black midnight,\nThe heavy wind made moan.\n\nRight so there came a second man\nWas walking by the road:\n“O brother, let me share thy light\nAs far as Hell’s abode.”\n\n“Now well I fear, my brother dear,\nThou never wilt walk with me--\nI am that thief which railed on Christ\nAll on His bitter tree.”\n\n“I cast shame on King Jesus then,\nWearing His painful crown,\nAnd scorn upon His Royal Head,\nWhence the pale sweat dripped down.”\n\n“O rudd-red were the five blest wounds\nWhere nails and spear went in,\nA thousand, thousand years of Purgatory fire\nNever can cleanse my sin.”\n\n“Why never, I ween,” said Judas then\n“Did two such sinners meet;\nI sold King Christ to the bloody Jews\nThat pierced His Hands and Feet.”\n\n“Art thou that man,” quoth the robber,\n“Most cursed under skies?\nGod do so to me if I go with thee\nTo the gates of Paradise!”\n\nThe second robber went his way,\nAnd Judas walked alone,\nTill he was aware of a grey man,\nThat sat upon a stone,\nAnd the lamp he had in his right hand\nShone brighter than the moon.\n\n“Come hither, come hither, thou darkling man,\nAnd bear me company,\nThis lamp I hold will give us light,\nEnough for thee and me.”\n\nJudas walks with the grey-clad man,\nAnd fear is in his heart:\n“Speak yet again, thou man in grey\nAnd tell me what thou art.”\n\n“I bought a burden of deadly sin,\nAnd needs must pay the price,\nI bear it hither in my hand\nTo the gates of Paradise.”\n\n“Sin cannot lie upon thy heart\nSo heavy as on mine.”\n“Nay, sinner, whosoe’er thou art,\n’Tis a heavier load than thine.”\nHe hath not askèd Judas’ name,\nAnd Judas makes no sign.\n\n“If sin is heavy on thy heart,\nAnd I must bear its weight,\nIt is fit that we should go together\nTo tryst at Hades gate.”\n\nJudas walked with the grey-clad man\nAnd feared to tell his name,\nHe clasped his hand in the barren land,\nBright burned the lanthorn’s flame,\nBrotherliwise and hand in hand,\nTo Paradise they came.\n\nSatan looked out from Hades gate,\nHis hand upon the key,\n“Good souls, before I let you in,\nFirst tell me who ye be.”\n\n“We be two men that died of late\nAnd come to keep Hell’s tryst,\nThis is Judas Iscariot,\nAnd I am Jesus Christ.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "harvest": { - "title": "“Harvest”", - "body": "As we walked through the merry, merry meads,\nAll in the month of May,\n’Twas you that wore the gown of green,\nAnd I the gown of grey;\nFor you I wept, for you I sighed,\nFor you I very nearly died--\nHey, fol the diddle diddle day,\nHey, fol the dero day.\n\nBut now as we come harvesting\nWhen the leaves are growing old,\nIt’s you that wear the gown of grey\nAnd I the gown of gold,\nFor me you weep, for me you sigh,\nFor me I think that you will die--\nHey, fol the diddle diddle day,\nHey, fol the dero day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "here-then-at-home": { - "title": "“Here, Then, at Home”", - "body": "Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,\nFolding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;\nHere in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,\nHere the sun stands and knows not east nor west,\nHere no tide runs; we have come, last and best,\nFrom the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,\nTo that still centre where the spinning world\nSleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.\n\nLay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,\nPoised on the perilous point, in no lax bed\nMay sleep, as tension at the verberant core\nOf music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,\nStaggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,\nAnd, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-contemplation-of-sudden-death": { - "title": "“In Contemplation of Sudden Death”", - "body": "Lord, if this night my journey end,\nI thank Thee first for many a friend,\nThe sturdy and unquestioned piers\nThat run beneath my bridge of years.\n\nAnd next, for all the love I gave\nTo things and men this side the grave,\nWisely or not, since I can prove\nThere always is much good in love.\n\nNext, for the power thou gavest me\nTo view the whole world mirthfully,\nFor laughter, paraclete of pain,\nLike April suns across the rain.\n\nAlso that, being not too wise\nTo do things foolish in men’s eyes,\nI gained experience by this,\nAnd saw life somewhat as it is.\n\nNext, for the joy of labour done\nAnd burdens shouldered in the sun;\nNor less, for shame of labour lost,\nAnd meekness born of a barren boast.\n\nFor every fair and useless thing\nThat bids men pause from labouring\nTo look and find the larkspur blue\nAnd marigolds of a different hue;\n\nFor eyes to see and ears to hear,\nFor tongue to speak and thews to bear,\nFor hands to handle, feet to go,\nFor life, I give Thee thanks also.\n\nFor all things merry, quaint and strange,\nFor sound and silence, strength, and change,\nAnd last, for death, which only gives\nValue to every thing that lives;\n\nFor these, good Lord that madest me,\nI praise Thy name; since, verily,\nI of my joy have had no dearth\nThough this night were my last on earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-last-song": { - "title": "“The Last Song”", - "body": "The roadways of the blessed land\nAre set with poplar trees,\nAnd when we ride beneath the morn\nThe glad ears of the bearded corn\nAre brushed against our knees.\n\nLook long. To-morrow we shall stand\nThronged in the dreadful street,\nAnd bloody hands of men o’erborne\nWill clutch us by the feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "matter-of-brittany": { - "title": "“Matter of Brittany”", - "body": "Draw to the fire, and let us weave a web\nOf sounds and splendours intertwined--\nOf warriors riding two by two\nIn silken surcoats stitched with blue,\nTo seek and strive the whole world through\nFor a scarlet fruit with silver rind;\nOf unsteered ships that drift for miles on miles\nAmid the creeks of myriad magic isles\nOver enchanted seas, that leave at ebb\nA beach of glittering gold behind.\n\nHark! how the rain is rippling over the roofs\nAnd knocking hard on the window-pane!\nIt rattles down the gutter-spout\nAnd beats the laurel-leaves about;\nSo let us tell of a kempy stout\nWith bells upon his bridle-rein--\nHow, as he rode beneath the chattering boughs,\nHe clashed the iron visor over his brows,\nHearing upon his heel the hurried hoofs\nOf Breunor, Breuse or Agravaine.\n\nOf names like dusky jewels wedged in gold\nThe tale shall cherish goodly store,\nOf Lionel and Lamorak\nAnd of Sir Lancelot du Lak,\nAnd him that bore upon his back\nArms for the Lady Lyonor;\nPersant, Perimones and Pertolepe,\nAnd Arthur laid in Avalon asleep,\nDinas and Dinadan and Bors the bold,\nAnd many a mighty warrior more.\n\nAnd grimly crouched in every woodland way\nA dragon with his emerald eyes\nShall sit and blink on passing knights;\nIn the deep dells, old eremites,\nVictors once of a thousand fights,\nShall sing their masses at sunrise;\nAnd weary men shall stumble unaware\nOn damsels dancing in a garden fair,\nAnd there, like Meraugis of Portlesguez,\nDance, cheated of their memories.\n\nTo towns where we shall feast at Pentecost,\nCarlion or Kynke Kenadon,\nEach day shall come a faery dame,\nOr else a giant with eyes of flame\nShall bid to the beheading game\nKnights that the king sets store upon;\nAnd some shall find, at hour of day’s decline,\nThe house beside the fountain and the pine,\nAnd learning much of marvel from their host,\nShall hasten greatly to begone.\n\nSome, by the help of charmèd steeds shall--just--\nLeap through the whirling barriers\nThat guard about the pleasant bower\nWhere every moment is an hour,\nAnd with an elfin paramour\nDrowse and dream for a hundred years,\nBut setting foot again on Middle Earth,\nOr tasting wheaten bread in hour of dearth,\nShall crumble to a little cloud of dust\nBlown by the wind across the furze.\n\nOr sometimes through the arches of the wood\nThe sad Good Friday bells will ring\nLoud in the ear of Percivale,\nThrough many a year of ban and bale\nYet questing after the Sangraal\nFor comfort of the Fisher King;\nAnd suddenly across a vault of stars\nShall drive a network of enchanted spars,\nAnd Lancelot and Galahad the good\nBehold the ship of hallowing.\n\nAnd first of all I’ll tell the tale to you,\nAnd you shall tell the next to me:\nHow gentle Enid made complaint\nWhile riding with her lord Geraint,\nOr how the merry Irish Saint\nWent ever westward oversea;\nWhile your dim shadow moving on the wall\nMight be Sir Tristram’s, as he harped in hall\nBefore Iseult of Ireland, always true,\nOr white Iseult of Brittany.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "pipes": { - "title": "“Pipes”", - "body": "I sat beside the river\nwhen the summer sun was bright,\nAnd blew brave music\nas loudly as I might,\nOn the sweet, hollow Pan-pipes--\nthey were my delight.\n\nOn the bare, black mountain\nwhere the storm had stripped the ground,\nI breathed a broken melody\nquite softly; and I found\nThat all my pipes were shattered\nwith the shrillness of the sound.\n\nGod keep the river\nand God keep the reeds--\nI am for the City\nfull of men’s deeds,\nTo build a great organ\nfor my new needs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "rondel": { - "title": "“Rondel”", - "body": "To-morrow, yes, those songs will break my heart,\nBut I am only very glad to-night,\nThrilling with fear and labour and delight\nTo go thus gaily robed and play my part;\n\nJoy goes up with a shout--quick laughters dart\nBetween the choruses that ring and smite--\nTo-morrow, yes, those songs will break my heart,\nBut I am only very glad to-night;\n\nGlad of the music and the jocund art\nThat flings us all together; very bright\nThrough the warm darkness streams the candle-light,\nMore mirthfully our farewell songs upstart.\nTo-morrow, yes--those songs will break my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "symbol": { - "title": "“Symbol”", - "body": "I found him in the church-yard,\nMy brother who had died,\nWith white lilies above him,\nAnd a hemlock by his side.\n\nMen plant the lilies\nIn token of God’s grace,\nBut the green and deadly hemlock,\nHe grows in his own place.\n\nWith the sick lily-odour\nI was all faint within,\nIt was like a sweet and a seemly lie\nTo cover the reek of sin.\n\nAnd truth goes trim and decent\nIn a rich man’s funeral,\nBut rich men will turn rotten,\nAnd so shall we all.\n\nNow the sour smell of the hemlock\nIs honest on the breath,\nIt is like the after-taste of sin,\nAnd the foretaste of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - } - } - }, - "the-three-kings": { - "title": "“The Three Kings”", - "body": "The first king was very young,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nWith doleful ballads on his tongue,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nHe came bearing a branch of myrrh\nThan which no gall is bitterer,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\n_Gifts for a baby King, O_.\n\nThe second king was a man in prime,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nThe solemn priest of a solemn time,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nWith eyes downcast and reverent feet\nHe brought his incense sad and sweet,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\n_Gifts for a baby King, O_.\n\nThe third king was very old,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nBoth his hands were full of gold,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\nMany a gaud and glittering toy,\nBaubles brave for a baby boy,\n_O balow, balow la lay_,\n_Gifts for a baby King, O_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gjertrud-schnackenberg": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gjertrud Schnackenberg", - "birth": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gjertrud_Schnackenberg", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "advent-calendar": { - "title": "“Advent Calendar”", - "body": "Bethlehem in Germany,\nGlitter on the sloping roofs,\nBreadcrumbs on the windowsills,\nCandles in the Christmas trees,\nHearths with pairs of empty shoes:\nPanels of Nativity\nOpen paper scenes where doors\nOpen into other scenes,\nSome recounted, some foretold.\nBlizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold\nGleam from small interiors,\nPicture-boxes in the stars\nOpen up like cupboard doors\nIn a cabinet Jesus built.\n\nSouthern German villagers,\nPeasants in the mica frost,\nSee the comet streaming down,\nHeavenly faces, each alone,\nFaces lifted, startled, lost,\nAs if lightning lit the town.\n\nSitting in an upstairs window\nPatiently the village scholar\nRaises his nearsighted face,\nInterrupted by the star.\nLeft and right his hands lie stricken\nUseless on his heavy book.\nWhen I lift the paper door\nIn the ceiling of his study\nOne canary-angel glimmers,\nFlitting in the candelabra,\nPeers and quizzes him: Rabbi,\nWhat are the spheres surmounted by?\nBut his lips are motionless.\nChild, what are you asking for?\nLook, he gazes past the roofs,\nGazes where the bitter North,\nStretched across the empty place,\nOpens door by door by door.\n\nThis is childhood’s shrunken door.\nWhen I touch the glittering crumbs,\nWhen I cry to be admitted,\nNo one answers, no one comes.\n\nAnd the tailor’s needle flashes\nIn midair with thread pulled tight,\nStitching a baptismal gown.\nBut the gown, the seventh door,\nTurns up an interior\nHidden from the tailor’s eyes:\nBaby presents like the boxes\nAngels hold on streets and stairways,\nWooden soldier, wooden sword,\nChocolate coins in crinkled gold,\nHints of something bought and sold,\nHints of murder in the stars.\nBaby’s gown is sown with glitter\nSpread across the tailor’s lap.\nUp above his painted ceiling\nBaby mouse’s skeleton\nCrumbles in the mouse’s trap.\n\nLeaning from the cliff of heaven,\nIndicating whom he weeps for,\nJoseph lifts his lamp above\nThe infant like a candle-crown.\nLet my fingers touch the silence\nWhere the infant’s father cries.\nGive me entrance to the village\nFrom my childhood where the doorways\nOpen pictures in the skies.\nBut when all the doors are open,\nNo one sees that I’ve returned.\nWhen I cry to be admitted,\nNo one answers, no one comes.\nClinging to my fingers only\nPain, like glitter bits adhering,\nWhen I touch the shining crumbs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "nightfishing": { - "title": "“Nightfishing”", - "body": "The kitchen’s old-fashioned planter’s clock portrays\nA smiling moon as it dips down below\nTwo hemispheres, stars numberless as days,\nAnd peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow\nUnder that happy sky; but, though the sands\nOf time put on this vegetable disguise,\nThe clock covers its face with long, thin hands.\nAnother smiling moon begins to rise.\n\nWe drift in the small rowboat an hour before\nMorning begins, the lake weeds grown so long\nThey touch the surface, tangling in an oar.\nYou’ve brought coffee, cigars, and me along.\nYou sit still as a monument in a hall,\nWatching for trout. A bat slices the air\nNear us, I shriek, you look at me, that’s all,\nOne long sobering look, a smile everywhere\nBut on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.\nYou turn back to the lake, chuckle, and clamp\nYour teeth on your cigar. We watch the black\nWater together. Our tennis shoes are damp.\nSomething moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.\nHere, for the first time ever, I see how,\nJust as a fish lurks deep in water weeds,\nA thought of death will lurk deep down, will show\nOne eye, then quietly disappear in you.\nIts time to go. Above the hills I see\nThe faint moon slowly dipping out of view,\n_Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Serenity,\nOcean of Storms_ … You start to row, the boat\nSkimming the lake where light begins to spread\nYou stop the oars, mid-air. We twirl and float.\n\nI’m in the kitchen. You are three days dead.\nA smiling moon rises on fertile ground,\nWhite stars and vegetables. The sky is blue.\nClock hands sweep by it all, they twirl around,\nPushing me, oarless, from the shore of you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "supernatural-love": { - "title": "“Supernatural Love”", - "body": "My father at the dictionary-stand\nTouches the page to fully understand\nThe lamplit answer, tilting in his hand\n\nHis slowly scanning magnifying lens,\nA blurry, glistening circle he suspends\nAbove the word “Carnation.” Then he bends\n\nSo near his eyes are magnified and blurred,\nOne finger on the miniature word,\nAs if he touched a single key and heard\n\nA distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,\n“The obligation due to every thing\nThat’s smaller than the universe.” I bring\n\nMy sewing needle close enough that I\nCan watch my father through the needle’s eye,\nAs through a lens ground for a butterfly\n\nWho peers down flower-hallways toward a room\nShadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom\nWhere, as a scholar bends above a tomb\n\nTo read what’s buried there, he bends to pore\nOver the Latin blossom. I am four,\nI spill my pins and needles on the floor\n\nTrying to stitch “Beloved” X by X.\nMy dangerous, bright needle’s point connects\nMyself illiterate to this perfect text\n\nI cannot read. My father puzzles why\nIt is my habit to identify\nCarnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I\n\nCan give no explanation but “Because.”\nWord-roots blossom in speechless messages\nThe way the thread behind my sampler does\n\nWhere following each X I awkward move\nMy needle through the word whose root is love.\nHe reads, “A pink variety of Clove,\n\n_Carnatio,_ the Latin, meaning flesh.”\nAs if the bud’s essential oils brush\nChrist’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh\n\nOdor carnations have floats up to me,\nA drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,\nThe stems squeak in my scissors, _Child, it’s me,_\n\nHe turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud:\n“The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.”\nThen twice, as if he hasn’t understood,\n\nHe reads, “From French, for _clou,_ meaning a nail.”\nHe gazes, motionless. “Meaning a nail.”\nThe incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,\n\nI twist my threads like stems into a knot\nAnd smooth “Beloved,” but my needle caught\nWithin the threads, _Thy blood so dearly bought,_\n\nThe needle strikes my finger to the bone.\nI lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn,\nThe flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,\n\nI lift my hand in startled agony\nAnd call upon his name, “Daddy daddy”--\nMy father’s hand touches the injury\n\nAs lightly as he touched the page before,\nWhere incarnation bloomed from roots that bore\nThe flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "delmore-schwartz": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Delmore Schwartz", - "birth": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmore_Schwartz", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 38 - }, - "poems": { - "all-night-all-night": { - "title": "“All Night, All Night”", - "body": "_“I have been one acquainted with the night”_ --Robert Frost\n\n\nRode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird\nFlew parallel with a singular will. In daydream’s moods and attitudes\nThe other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read,\nWaiting, and waiting for place to be displaced\nOn the exact track of safety or the rack of accident.\n\nLooked out at the night, unable to distinguish\nLights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights\nNumb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still\nAs the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle,\nForward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar--\n\nThe bored center of this vision and condition looked and looked\nDown through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking\nThe seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well\nOf the great darkness under the slick glitter,\nAnd he was only one among eight million riders and readers.\n\nAnd all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum\nOf the long determined passage passed through him\nBy his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train\nLike a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh--\nThe silent or passive night, pressing and impressing\nThe patients’ foreheads with a tightening-like image\nOf the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light\nPiercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence\nInto a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession.\n\nA bored child went to get a cup of water,\nAnd crushed the cup because the water too was\nBoring and merely boredom’s struggle.\nThe child, returning, looked over the shoulder\nOf a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder.\nA fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops\nDrip down the fleece of many dinners.\n\nAnd the bird flew parallel and parallel flew\nThe black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified,\nAt regular intervals, post after post\nOf thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees.\n\nAnd then the bird cried as if to all of us:\n\n _O your life, your lonely life\n What have you ever done with it,\n And done with the great gift of consciousness?\n What will you ever do with your life before death’s knife\n Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?_\n\nAs I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,\nFalls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast\nDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,\nAn endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:\n\nThis is the way that night passes by, this\nIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "america-america": { - "title": "“America, America!”", - "body": "I am a poet of the Hudson River and the heights above it, the lights, the stars, and the bridges\nI am also by self-appointment the laureate of the Atlantic--of the peoples’ hearts, crossing it to new America.\n\nI am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope, acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage in steerage, strange and estranged\nHence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.\n\nFor I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city) and the cemetery (in the city)\nAnd rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the heart and mind\nThis is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.\n\nIt is true but only partly true that a city is a “tyranny of numbers”\n(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and metaphysical self\nAfter the first two World Wars of the 20th century)\n\n--This is the city self, looking from window to lighted window\nWhen the squares and checks of faintly yellow light\nShine at night, upon a huge dim board and slab-like tombs,\nHiding many lives. It is the city consciousness\nWhich sees and says: more: more and more: always more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "at-this-moment-of-time": { - "title": "“At This Moment of Time”", - "body": "Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear\nThe Ace of Spades. They fear\nLoves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,\nSweet with decision. And they distrust\nThe fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,\nThen the colored lights, rising.\nTentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume\nGreedily Caesar at the prow returning,\nLocked in the stone of his act and office.\nWhile the brass band brightly bursts over the water\nThey stand in the crowd lining the shore\nAware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes\nAre haunted by water\n\nDisturb me, compel me. It is not true\nThat “no man is happy,” but that is not\nThe sense which guides you. If we are\nUnfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),\nYou are exact. You tug my sleeve\nBefore I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,\nAnd I remember that we who move\nAre moved by clouds that darken midnight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-the-children-of-the-czar": { - "title": "“The Ballad of the Children of the Czar”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nThe children of the Czar\nPlayed with a bouncing ball\n\nIn the May morning, in the Czar’s garden,\nTossing it back and forth.\n\nIt fell among the flowerbeds\nOr fled to the north gate.\n\nA daylight moon hung up\nIn the Western sky, bald white.\n\nLike Papa’s face, said Sister,\nHurling the white ball forth.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nWhile I ate a baked potato\nSix thousand miles apart,\n\nIn Brooklyn, in 1916,\nAged two, irrational.\n\nWhen Franklin D. Roosevelt\nWas an Arrow Collar ad.\n\nO Nicholas! Alas! Alas!\nMy grandfather coughed in your army,\n\nHid in a wine-stinking barrel,\nFor three days in Bucharest\n\nThen left for America\nTo become a king himself.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nI am my father’s father,\nYou are your children’s guilt.\n\nIn history’s pity and terror\nThe child is Aeneas again;\n\nTroy is in the nursery,\nThe rocking horse is on fire.\n\nChild labor! The child must carry\nHis fathers on his back.\n\nBut seeing that so much is past\nAnd that history has no ruth\n\nFor the individual,\nWho drinks tea, who catches cold,\n\nLet anger be general:\nI hate an abstract thing.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nBrother and sister bounced\nThe bounding, unbroken ball,\n\nThe shattering sun fell down\nLike swords upon their play,\n\nMoving eastward among the stars\nToward February and October.\n\nBut the Maywind brushed their cheeks\nLike a mother watching sleep,\n\nAnd if for a moment they fight\nOver the bouncing ball\n\nAnd sister pinches brother\nAnd brother kicks her shins,\n\nWell! The heart of man in known:\nIt is a cactus bloom.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThe ground on which the ball bounces\nIs another bouncing ball.\n\nThe wheeling, whirling world\nMakes no will glad.\n\nSpinning in its spotlight darkness,\nIt is too big for their hands.\n\nA pitiless, purposeless Thing,\nArbitrary, and unspent,\n\nMade for no play, for no children,\nBut chasing only itself.\n\nThe innocent are overtaken,\nThey are not innocent.\n\nThey are their father’s fathers,\nThe past is inevitable.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nNow, in another October\nOf this tragic star,\n\nI see my second year,\nI eat my baked potato.\n\nIt is my buttered world,\nBut, poked by my unlearned hand,\n\nIt falls from the highchair down\nAnd I begin to howl\n\nAnd I see the ball roll under\nThe iron gate which is locked.\n\nSister is screaming, brother is howling,\nThe ball has evaded their will.\n\nEven a bouncing ball\nIs uncontrollable,\n\nAnd is under the garden wall.\nI am overtaken by terror\n\nThinking of my father’s fathers,\nAnd of my own will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "by-circumstances-fed": { - "title": "“By Circumstances Fed”", - "body": "By circumstances fed\nWhich divide attention\nAmong the living and the dead,\nUnder the blooms of the blossoming sun,\nThe gaze which is a tower towers\nDay and night, hour by hour,\nCritical of all and of one,\nDissatisfied with every flower\nWith all that’s been done or undone,\nConverting every feature\nInto its own and unknown nature;\nSo, once in the drugstore,\nAmid all the poppy, salve and ointment,\nI suddenly saw, estranged there,\nBeyond all disappointment,\nMy own face in the mirror.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "calmly-we-walk-through-this-aprils-day": { - "title": "“Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day”", - "body": "Calmly we walk through this April’s day,\nMetropolitan poetry here and there,\nIn the park sit pauper and rentier,\nThe screaming children, the motor-car\nFugitive about us, running away,\nBetween the worker and the millionaire\nNumber provides all distances,\nIt is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,\nMany great dears are taken away,\nWhat will become of you and me\n(This is the school in which we learn …)\nBesides the photo and the memory?\n( … that time is the fire in which we burn.)\n\n(This is the school in which we learn …)\nWhat is the self amid this blaze?\nWhat am I now that I was then\nWhich I shall suffer and act again,\nThe theodicy I wrote in my high school days\nRestored all life from infancy,\nThe children shouting are bright as they run\n(This is the school in which they learn …)\nRavished entirely in their passing play!\n( … that time is the fire in which they burn.)\n\nAvid its rush, that reeling blaze!\nWhere is my father and Eleanor?\nNot where are they now, dead seven years,\nBut what they were then?\nNo more? No more?\nFrom Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,\nBert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume\nNot where they are now (where are they now?)\nBut what they were then, both beautiful;\n\nEach minute bursts in the burning room,\nThe great globe reels in the solar fire,\nSpinning the trivial and unique away.\n(How all things flash! How all things flare!)\nWhat am I now that I was then?\nMay memory restore again and again\nThe smallest color of the smallest day:\nTime is the school in which we learn,\nTime is the fire in which we burn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "cambridge-spring-1937": { - "title": "“Cambridge, Spring 1937”", - "body": "At last the air fragrant, the bird’s bubbling whistle\nSuccinct in the unknown unsettled trees:\nO little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges\nAnd milltown New England; at last the wind soft,\nThe sky unmoving, and the dead look\nOf factory windows separate, at last,\nFrom windows gray and wet: for now the sunlight\nThrashes its wet shellac on brickwalk and gutter,\nWhite splinters streak midmorning and doorstep,\nWinter passes as the lighted streetcar\nMoves at midnight, one scene of the past,\nDroll and unreal, stiff, stilted and hooded.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-choir-and-music-of-solitude-and-silence": { - "title": "“The Choir and Music of Solitude and Silence”", - "body": "Silence is a great blue bell\nSwinging and ringing, tinkling and singing,\nIn measure’s pleasure, and in the supple symmetry of the soaring of the immense intense wings glinting against\nAll the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden\nSave for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their singing.\nAnd this is the first meaning of the famous saying,\nThe stars sang. They are the white birds of silence\nAnd the meaning of the difficult famous saying that the sons and daughters of morning sang,\nMeant and means that they were and they are the children of God and morning,\nDelighting in the lights of becoming and the houses of being,\nTaking pleasure in measure and excess, in listening as in seeing.\n\nLove is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage.\nCourage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.\n\nSo that when the great blue bell of silence is stilled and stopped or broken\nBy the babel and chaos of desire unrequited, irritated and frustrated,\nWhen the heart has opened and when the heart has spoken\nNot of the purity and symmetry of gratification, but action of insatiable distraction’s dissatisfaction,\n\nThen the heart says, in all its blindness and faltering emptiness:\nThere is no God. Because I am hope. And hope must be fed.\nAnd then the great blue bell of silence is deafened, dumbed, and has become the tomb of the living dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "concerning-the-synthetic-unity-of-apperception": { - "title": "“Concerning the Synthetic Unity of Apperception”", - "body": "“Trash, trash!” the king my uncle said,\n“The spirit’s smoke and weak as smoke ascends.\nSit in the sun and not among the dead,\nEat oranges! Pish tosh! the car attends.”\n\n“All ghosts came back. they do not like it there,\nNo silky water and no big brown bear,”\n\n“No beer and no siestas up above.”\n“Uncle,” I said, “I’m lonely. What is love?”\n\nThis drove him quite insane. Now he must knit\nTime and apperception, bit by tiny bit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dream-of-whitman-paraphrased": { - "title": "“A Dream of Whitman Paraphrased”", - "body": "Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore\nOr near the bank of a woodland lake\nTwenty-eight girls and all of them comely\nWorthy of Mack Sennett’s camera and Florenz Ziegfield’s\nFoolish Follies.\n\nThey splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness\nOf their youth and beauty\nIn the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of awareness\nHeightened, intensified and softened\nBy the soft and the silk of the waters\nBlooded made ready by the energy set afire by the nakedness of the body,\n\nElectrified: deified: undenied.\n\nA young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance.\nHe lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars.\nHe is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains\nBeholding them.\nWhich girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful?\nThey are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance.\nFor if poverty darkens discrimination and makes perception too vivid,\nThe gold of wealth is also a form of blindness.\nFor has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America …\n\nWhat he has said is not entirely relevant,\nThat a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.\n\nWhere is he going?\nIs he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them?\nThey did not see him although he saw them and was there among them.\nHe saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious\nOf him or conscious of men in complete depravation:\nThis is his enchantment and impoverishment\nAs he possesses them in gaze only.\n\n… He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness\nThe warmth surrounding him crackled\nHeld in by the mansard roof mansion\nHe glimpsed the shadowy light on last year’s brittle leaves fallen,\nLooked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death,\nWinter’s mourning and the May’s renewal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "faithful-to-your-commands-o-consciousness": { - "title": "“Faithful to Your Commands, O Consciousness”", - "body": "Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o\nBeating wings, I studied\nthe roses and the muses of reality,\nthe deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing morning,\nand all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which begin by promising\nEverything and more than everything, and then suddenly,\nAt the height of noon seem to rise to the peak or dune-like moon of no return\nSo that everything is or seems to have become nothing, or of no genuine importance:\nAnd it is not that the departure of hope or its sleep has made it inconceivable\nThat anything should be or should have been important:\nIt is the belief that hope itself was not, from the beginning,\nbefore believing, the most important of all beliefs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "far-rockaway": { - "title": "“Far Rockaway”", - "body": "_“the cure of souls.”_ --Henry James\n\n\nThe radiant soda of the seashore fashions\nFun, foam and freedom. The sea laves\nThe Shaven sand. And the light sways forward\nOn self-destroying waves.\n\nThe rigor of the weekday is cast aside with shoes,\nWith business suits and traffic’s motion;\nThe lolling man lies with the passionate sun,\nOr is drunken in the ocean.\n\nA socialist health take should of the adult,\nHe is stripped of his class in the bathing-suit,\nHe returns to the children digging at summer,\nA melon-like fruit.\n\nO glittering and rocking and bursting and blue\n--Eternities of sea and sky shadow no pleasure:\nTime unheard moves and the heart of man is eaten\nConsummately at leisure.\n\nThe novelist tangential on the boardwalk overhead\nSeeks his cure of souls in his own anxious gaze.\n“Here,” he says, “With whom?” he asks, “This?” he questions,\n“What tedium, what blaze?”\n\n“What satisfaction, fruit? What transit, heaven?\nCriminal? justified? arrived at what June?”\nThat nervous conscience amid the concessions\nIs haunting, haunted moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "the-first-night-of-fall-and-falling-rain": { - "title": "“The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain”", - "body": "The common rain had come again\nSlanting and colorless, pale and anonymous,\nFainting falling in the first evening\nOf the first perception of the actual fall,\nThe long and late light had slowly gathered up\nA sooty wood of clouded sky, dim and distant more and more\nUntil, at dusk, the very sense of selfhood waned,\nA weakening nothing halted, diminished or denied or set aside,\nNeither tea, nor, after an hour, whiskey,\nIce and then a pleasant glow, a burning,\nAnd the first leaping wood fire\nSince a cold night in May, too long ago to be more than\nMerely a cold and vivid memory.\nStaring, empty, and without thought\nBeyond the rising mists of the emotion of causeless sadness,\nHow suddenly all consciousness leaped in spontaneous gladness,\nKnowing without thinking how the falling rain (outside, all over)\nIn slow sustained consistent vibration all over outside\nTapping window, streaking roof,\nrunning down runnel and drain\nWaking a sense, once more, of all that lived outside of us,\nBeyond emotion, for beyond the swollen\ndistorted shadows and lights\nOf the toy town and the vanity fair\nof waking consciousness!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "for-the-one-who-would-not-take-his-life-in-his-hands": { - "title": "“For the One Who Would Not Take His Life in His Hands”", - "body": "Athlete, virtuoso,\nTraining for happiness,\nBend arm and knee, and seek\nThe body’s sharp distress,\nFor pain is pleasure’s cost,\nDenial is route\nTo speech before the millions\nOr personal with the flute.\n\nThe ape and great Achilles,\nHeavy with their fate,\nBatter doors down, strike\nSmall children at the gate,\nDriven by love to this,\nAs knock-kneed Hegel said,\nTo seek with a sword their peace,\nThat the child may be taken away\nFrom the hurly-burly and fed.\n\nLadies and Gentlemen, said\nThe curious Socrates,\nI have asked, What is this life\nBut a childermass,\nAs Abraham recognized,\nA working with the knife\nAt animal, maid and stone\nUntil we have cut down\nAll but the soul alone:\nThrough hate we guard our love,\nAnd its distinction’s known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-one-who-would-take-mans-life-in-his-hands": { - "title": "“For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands”", - "body": "Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword,\nThrew it down, became a lamb.\nSwift spat upon the species, but\nTook two women to his heart.\nSamson who was strong as death\nPaid his strength to kiss a slut.\nOthello that stiff warrior\nWas broken by a woman’s heart.\nTroy burned for a sea-tax, also for\nPossession of a charming whore.\nWhat do all examples show?\nWhat must the finished murderer know?\n\nYou cannot sit on bayonets,\nNor can you eat among the dead.\nWhen all are killed, you are alone,\nA vacuum comes where hate has fed.\nMurder’s fruit is silent stone,\nThe gun increases poverty.\nWith what do these examples shine?\nThe soldier turned to girls and wine.\nLove is the tact of every good,\nThe only warmth, the only peace.\n\n“What have I said?” asked Socrates.\n“Affirmed extremes, cried yes and no,\nTaken all parts, denied myself,\nPraised the caress, extolled the blow,\nSoldier and lover quite deranged\nUntil their motions are exchanged.\n--What do all examples show?\nWhat can any actor know?\nThe contradiction in every act,\nThe infinite task of the human heart.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-knows-all-there-is-to-know": { - "title": "“He Knows All There is to Know”", - "body": "Whose wood this is I think I know:\nHe made it sacred long ago:\nHe will expect me, far or near\nTo watch that wood immense with snow.\n\nThat famous horse must feel great fear\nNow that his noble rider’s no longer here:\nHe gives his harness bells to rhyme\n--Perhaps he will be back, in time?\n\nAll woulds were promises he kept\nThroughout the night when others slept:\nNow that he knows all that he did not know,\nHis wood is holy, and full of snow,\nand all the beauty he made holy long long ago\nIn Boston, London, Washington,\nAnd once by the Pacific and once in Moscow:\nand now, and now\nupon the fabulous blue river ever\nor singing from a great white bough\n\nAnd wherever America is, now as before,\nand now as long, long ago\nHe sleeps and wakes forever more!\n\n“O what a metaphysical victory\nThe first day and night of death must be!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me": { - "title": "“The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me”", - "body": "_“the withness of the body”_ --Whitehead\n\nThe heavy bear who goes with me,\nA manifold honey to smear his face,\nClumsy and lumbering here and there,\nThe central ton of every place,\nThe hungry beating brutish one\nIn love with candy, anger, and sleep,\nCrazy factotum, dishevelling all,\nClimbs the building, kicks the football,\nBoxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.\n\nBreathing at my side, that heavy animal,\nThat heavy bear who sleeps with me,\nHowls in his sleep for a world of sugar,\nA sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,\nHowls in his sleep because the tight-rope\nTrembles and shows the darkness beneath.\n--The strutting show-off is terrified,\nDressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,\nTrembles to think that his quivering meat\nMust finally wince to nothing at all.\n\nThat inescapable animal walks with me,\nHas followed me since the black womb held,\nMoves where I move, distorting my gesture,\nA caricature, a swollen shadow,\nA stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,\nPerplexes and affronts with his own darkness,\nThe secret life of belly and bone,\nOpaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,\nStretches to embrace the very dear\nWith whom I would walk without him near,\nTouches her grossly, although a word\nWould bare my heart and make me clear,\nStumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed\nDragging me with him in his mouthing care,\nAmid the hundred million of his kind,\nthe scrimmage of appetite everywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-morning-when-it-was-raining": { - "title": "“In the Morning, when It Was Raining”", - "body": "In the morning, when it was raining,\nThen the birds were hectic and loudy;\nThrough all the reign is fall’s entertaining;\nTheir singing was erratic and full of disorder:\nThey did not remember the summer blue\nOr the orange of June. They did not think at all\nOf the great red and bursting ball\nOf the kingly sun’s terror and tempest, blazing,\nOnce the slanting rain threw over all\nThe colorless curtains of the ceaseless spontaneous fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "in-the-naked-bed-in-platos-cave": { - "title": "“In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave”", - "body": "In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave,\nReflected headlights slowly slid the wall,\nCarpenters hammered under the shaded window,\nWind troubled the window curtains all night long,\nA fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,\nTheir freights covered, as usual.\nThe ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram\nSlid slowly forth.\nHearing the milkman’s clop,\nhis striving up the stair, the bottle’s chink,\nI rose from bed, lit a cigarette,\nAnd walked to the window. The stony street\nDisplayed the stillness in which buildings stand,\nThe street-lamp’s vigil and the horse’s patience.\nThe winter sky’s pure capital\nTurned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.\n\nStrangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose\nFilm grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves’ waterfalls,\nSounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.\nA car coughed, starting. Morning softly\nMelting the air, lifted the half-covered chair\nFrom underseas, kindled the looking-glass,\nDistinguished the dresser and the white wall.\nThe bird called tentatively, whistled, called,\nBubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet\nWith sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,\nO son of man, the ignorant night, the travail\nOf early morning, the mystery of the beginning\nAgain and again,\nwhile history is unforgiven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-slight-ripple-the-mind-perceives-the-heart": { - "title": "“In the Slight Ripple, the Mind Perceives the Heart”", - "body": "In the slight ripple, the fishes dart\nLike fingers, centrifugal, like wishes\nWanton. And pleasures rise as the eyes fall\nThrough the lucid water. The small pebble,\nThe clear clay bottom, the white shell\nAre apparent, though superficial.\nWho would ask more of the August afternoon?\nWho would dig mines and follow shadows?\n“I would,” answers bored Heart, “Lounger, rise”\n(Underlip trembling, face white with stony anger),\n“The old error, the thought of sitting still,\nThe senses drinking, by the summer river,\nOn the tended lawn, below the traffic,\nAs if time would pause, and afternoon stay.\nNo, night comes soon,\nWith its cold mountains, with desolation,\nunless Love build its city.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "late-autumn-in-venice": { - "title": "“Late Autumn in Venice”", - "body": "The city floats no longer like a bait\nTo hook the nimble darting summer days.\nThe glazed and brittle palaces pulsate and radiate\nAnd glitter. Summer’s garden sways,\nA heap of marionettes hanging down and dangled,\nLeaves tired, torn, turned upside down and strangled:\nUntil from forest depths, from bony leafless trees\nA will wakens: the admiral, lolling long at ease,\nHas been commanded, overnight--suddenly--:\nIn the first dawn, all galleys put to sea!\nWaking then in autumn chill, amid the harbor medley,\nThe fragrance of pitch, pennants aloft, the butt\nOf oars, all sails unfurled, the fleet\nAwaits the great wind, radiant and deadly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "news-of-the-gold-world-of-may": { - "title": "“News of the Gold World of May”", - "body": "News of the Gold World of May in Holland Michigan:\n“Wooden shoes will clatter again\non freshly scrubbed streets--”\n\nThe tulip will arise and reign again from awnings and windows\nof all colors and forms\nits vine, verve and valentine curves\n\nupon the city streets, the public grounds\nand private lawns\n(wherever it is conceivable\nthat a bulb might take root\nand the two lips, softly curved, come up\npossessed by the skilled love and will of a ballerina.)\n\nThe citizens will dance in folk dances.\nThey will thump, they will pump,\nthudding and shoving\nelbow and thigh,\nbumping and laughing, like barrels and bells.\n\nVast fields of tulips in full bloom,\nthe reproduction of a miniature Dutch village,\npart of a gigantic flower show.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "o-city-city": { - "title": "“O City, City”", - "body": "To live between terms, to live where death\nhas his loud picture in the subway ride,\nBeing amid six million souls, their breath\nAn empty song suppressed on every side,\nWhere the sliding auto’s catastrophe\nIs a gust past the curb, where numb and high\nThe office building rises to its tyranny,\nIs our anguished diminution until we die.\n\nWhence, if ever, shall come the actuality\nOf a voice speaking the mind’s knowing,\nThe sunlight bright on the green windowshade,\nAnd the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,\nEase, warmth, light, the utter showing,\nWhen in the white bed all things are made.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-love-sweet-animal": { - "title": "“O Love, Sweet Animal”", - "body": "O Love, dark animal,\nWith your strangeness go\nLike any freak or clown:\nAppease tee child in her\nBecause she is alone\nMany years ago\nTerrified by a look\nWhich was not meant for her.\nBrush your heavy fur\nAgainst her, long and slow\nStare at her like a book,\nHer interests being such\nNo one can look too much.\nTell her how you know\nNothing can be taken\nWhich has not been given:\nFor you time is forgiven:\nInformed by hell and heaven\nYou are not mistaken", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "out-of-the-watercolored-window-when-you-look": { - "title": "“Out of the Watercolored Window, when You Look”", - "body": "When from the watercolored window idly you look\nEach is but and clear to see, not steep:\nSo does the neat print in an actual book\nMarching as if to true conclusion, reap\nThe illimitable blue immensely overhead,\nThe night of the living and the day of the dead.\n\nI drive in an auto all night long to reach\nThe apple which has sewed the sunlight up:\nMy simple self is nothing but the speech\nPleading for the overflow of that great cup,\nThe darkened body, the mind still as a frieze:\nAll else is merely means as complex as disease!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "parlez-vous-francais": { - "title": "“Parlez-Vous Francais?”", - "body": "Caesar, the amplifier voice, announces\nCrime and reparation. In the barber shop\nRecumbent men attend, while absently\nThe barber doffs the naked face with cream.\nCaesar proposes, Caesar promises\nPride, justice, and the sun\nBrilliant and strong on everyone,\nSpeeding one hundred miles an hour across the land:\nCaesar declares the will. The barber firmly\nPlanes the stubble with a steady hand,\nWhile all in barber chairs reclining,\nIn wet white faces, fully understand\nGood and evil, who is Gentile, weakness and command.\n\nAnd now who enters quietly? Who is this one\nShy, pale, and quite abstracted? Who is he?\nIt is the writer merely, with a three-day beard,\nHis tiredness not evident. He wears no tie.\nAnd now he hears his enemy and trembles,\nResolving, speaks: “Ecoutez! La plupart des hommes\nVivent des vies de desespoir silenciuex,\nVictimes des intentions innombrables. Et ca\nCet homme sait bien. Les mots de cette voix sont\nDes songes et des mensonges. Il prend choix,\nIl prend la volonte, il porte la fin d’ete.\nLa guerre. Ecoutez-moi! Il porte la mort.”\nHe stands there speaking and they laugh to hear\nRage and excitement from the foreigner.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "phoenix-lyrics": { - "title": "“Phoenix Lyrics”", - "body": "# I.\n\nIf nature is life, nature is death:\nIt is winter as it is spring:\nConfusion is variety, variety\nAnd confusion in everything\nMake experience the true conclusion\nOf all desire and opulence,\nAll satisfaction and poverty.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhen a hundred years had passed nature seemed to man a clock\nAnother century sank away and nature seemed a jungle in a rock\nAnd now that nature has become a ticking and hidden bomb how we must mock\nNewton, Democritus, the Deity\nThe heart’s ingenuity and the mind’s infinite uncontrollable insatiable curiosity.\n\n# III.\n\nPurple black cloud at sunset: it is late August\nand the light begins to look cold, and as we look,\nlisten and look, we hear the first drums of autumn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "prothalamion": { - "title": "“Prothalamion”", - "body": "_“little soul, little flirting,\nlittle perverse one\nwhere are you off to now?\nlittle wan one, firm one\nlittle exposed one …\nand never make fun of me again.”_\n\n\nNow I must betray myself.\nThe feast of bondage and unity is near,\nAnd none engaged in that great piety\nWhen each bows to the other, kneels, and takes\nHand in hand, glance and glance, care and care,\nNone may wear masks or enigmatic clothes,\nFor weakness blinds the wounded face enough.\nIn sense, see my shocking nakedness.\n\nI gave a girl an apple when five years old,\nSaying, Will you be sorry when I am gone?\nRavenous for such courtesies, my name\nIs fed like a raving fire, insatiate still.\nBut do not be afraid.\nFor I forget myself. I do indeed\nBefore each genuine beauty, and I will\nForget myself before your unknown heart.\n\nI will forget the speech my mother made\nIn a restaurant, trapping my father there\nAt dinner with his whore. Her spoken rage\nStruck down the child of seven years\nWith shame for all three, with pity for\nThe helpless harried waiter, with anger for\nThe diners gazing, avid, and contempt\nAnd great disgust for every human being.\nI will remember this. My mother’s rhetoric\nHas charmed my various tongue, but now I know\nLove’s metric seeks a rhyme more pure and sure.\n\nFor thus it is that I betray myself,\nPassing the terror of childhood at second hand\nThrough nervous, learned fingertips.\nAt thirteen when a little girl died,\nI walked for three weeks neither alive nor dead,\nAnd could not understand and still cannot\nThe adult blind to the nearness of the dead,\nOr carefully ignorant of their own death.\n--This sense could shadow all the time’s curving fruits,\nBut we will taste of them the whole night long,\nForgetting no twelfth night, no fete of June,\nBut in the daylight knowing our nothingness.\n\nLet Freud and Marx be wedding guests indeed!\nLet them mark out masks that face us there,\nFor of all anguish, weakness, loss and failure,\nNo form is cruel as self-deception, none\nShows day-by-day a bad dream long lived\nAnd unbroken like the lies\nWe tell each other because we are rich or poor.\nThough from the general guilt not free\nWe can keep honor by being poor.\n\nThe waste, the evil, the abomination\nIs interrupted. the perfect stars persist\nSmall in the guilty night, and Mozart shows\nThe irreducible incorruptible good\nRisen past birth and death, though he is dead.\nHope, like a face reflected on the windowpane,\nRemote and dim, fosters a myth or dream,\nAnd in that dream, I speak, I summon all\nWho are our friends somehow and thus I say:\n\n“Bid the jewellers come with monocles,\nExclaiming, Pure! Intrinsic! Final!\nSummon the children eating ice cream\nTo speak the chill thrill of immediacy.\nCall for the acrobats who tumble\nThe ecstasy of the somersault.\nBid the self-sufficient stars be piercing\nIn the sublime and inexhaustible blue.”\n\n“Bring a mathematician, there is much to count,\nThe unending continuum of my attention:\nInfinity will hurry his multiplied voice!\nBring the poised impeccable diver,\nSummon the skater, precise in figure,\nHe knows the peril of circumstance,\nThe risk of movement and the hard ground.\nSummon the florist! And the tobacconist!\nAll who have known a plant-like beauty:\nSummon the charming bird for ignorant song.”\n\n“You, Athena, with your tired beauty,\nWill you give me away? For you must come\nIn a bathing suit with that white owl\nWhom, as I walk, I will hold in my hand.\nYou too, Crusoe, to utter the emotion\nOf finding Friday, no longer alone;\nYou too, Chaplin, muse of the curbstone,\nMummer of hope, you understand!”\n\nBut this is fantastic and pitiful,\nAnd no one comes, none will, we are alone,\nAnd what is possible is my own voice,\nSpeaking its wish, despite its lasting fear;\nSpeaking of its hope, its promise and its fear,\nThe voice drunk with itself and rapt in fear,\nExaggeration, braggadocio,\nRhetoric and hope, and always fear:\n\n“For fifty-six or for a thousand years,\nI will live with you and be your friend,\nAnd what your body and what your spirit bears\nI will like my own body cure and tend.\nBut you are heavy and my body’s weight\nIs great and heavy: when I carry you\nI lift upon my back time like a fate\nNear as my heart, dark when I marry you.”\n“The voice’s promise is easy, and hope\nIs drunk, and wanton, and unwilled;\nIn time’s quicksilver, where our desires grope,\nThe dream is warped or monstrously fulfilled,\nIn this sense, listen, listen, and draw near:\nLove is inexhaustible and full of fear.”\n\nThis life is endless and my eyes are tired,\nSo that, again and again, I touch a chair,\nOr go to the window, press my face\nAgainst it, hoping with substantial touch,\nColorful sight, or turning things to gain once more\nThe look of actuality, the certainty\nOf those who run down stairs and drive a car.\nThen let us be each other’s truth, let us\nAffirm the other’s self, and be\nThe other’s audience, the other’s state,\nEach to the other his sonorous fame.\n\nNow you will be afraid, when, waking up,\nBefore familiar morning, by my mute side\nWan and abandoned then, when, waking up,\nYou see the lion or lamb upon my face\nOr see the daemon breathing heavily\nHis sense of ignorance, his wish to die,\nFor I am nothing because my circus self\nDivides its love a million times.\n\nI am the octopus in love with God,\nFor thus is my desire inconclusible,\nUntil my mind, deranged in swimming tubes,\nIssues its own darkness, clutching seas\n--O God of my perfect ignorance,\nBring the New Year to my only sister soon,\nTake from me strength and power to bless her head,\nGive her the magnitude of secular trust,\nUntil she turns to me in her troubled sleep,\nSeeing me in my wish, free from self-wrongs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "remember-midsummer": { - "title": "“Remember Midsummer”", - "body": "Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white roses\nAnd of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch\nThree snails hanging with infinite delicacy\n--Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented\nAnd self-delighted as any ballerina, just as in the orchard,\nNear the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses\nDrunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears\nWhich had fallen: swollen and disfigured.\nFor now it is wholly autumn: in the late\nAfternoon as I walked toward the ridge where the hills begin,\nThere is a whir, a thrashing in the bush, and a startled pheasant, flying out and up,\nSuddenly astonished me, breaking the waking dream.\n\nLast night\nSnatches of sleep, streaked by dreams and half dreams\n--So that, aloft in the dim sky, for almost an hour,\nA sausage balloon--chalk-white and lifeless looking--floated motionless\nUntil, at midnight, I went to New Bedlam and saw what I feared the most--I heard nothing, but it had all happened several times elsewhere.\n\nNow, in the cold glittering morning, shining at the window,\nThe pears hang, yellowed and over-ripe, sodden brown in erratic places, all bunched and dangling,\nLike a small choir of bagpipes, silent and waiting. And I rise now,\nGo to the window and gaze at the fallen or falling country\n--And see!--the fields are pencilled light brown or are the dark brownness of the last autumn\n--So much has shrunken to straight brown lines, thin as the bare thin trees,\nSave where the cornstalks, white bones of the lost forever dead,\nShrivelled and fallen, but shrill-voiced when the wind whistles,\nAre scattered like the long abandoned hopes and ambitions\nOf an adolescence which, for a very long time, has been merely\nA recurrent target and taunt of the inescapable mockery of memory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "saint-revolutionist": { - "title": "“Saint, Revolutionist”", - "body": "Saint, revolutionist,\nGod and sage know well,\nThat there is a place\nWhere that much-rung bell,\nThe well-beloved body,\nAnd its sensitive face\nMust be sacrificed.\n\nThere is, it seems, in this\nA something meaningless,\nHanging without support\nAnd yet too dear to touch,\nThat life should seek its end\nWhere no will can descend,\nFacing a gun to see\nLong actuality.\n\nWhat is this that is\nThe good of nothingness,\nThe death of Socrates\nAnd that strange man on the cross\nSeeking out all loss?\nFor men love life until\nIt shames both face and will.\n\nNeither in hell nor heaven\nIs the answer given,\nBoth are a servant’s pay:\nBut they wish to know\nhow far the will can go,\nLest their infinite play\nAnd their desires be\nShadow and mockery.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sin-of-hamlet": { - "title": "“The Sin of Hamlet”", - "body": "The horns in the harbor booming, vaguely,\nFog, forgotten, yesterday, conclusion,\nNostalgic, noising dim sorrow, calling\nTo sleep is it? I think so, and childhood,\nNot the door opened and the stair descended,\nThe voice answered, the choice announced, the\nTrigger touched in the sharp declaration!\n\nAnd when it comes, escape is small; the door\nCreaks; the worms of fear spread veins; the furtive\nFugitive, looking backward, sees his\nGhost in the mirror, his shameful eyes, his mouth diseased.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "someone-is-harshly-coughing-as-before": { - "title": "“Someone is Harshly Coughing as Before”", - "body": "Someone is harshly coughing on the next floor,\nSudden excitement catching the flesh of his throat:\nWho is the sick one?\nWho will knock at the door,\nAsk what is wrong and sweetly pay attention,\nThe shy withdrawal of the sensitive face\nEmbarrassing both, but double shame is tender\n--We will mind our ignorant business, keep our place.\n\nBut it is God, who has caught cold again,\nWandering helplessly in the world once more,\nNow he is phthisic, and he is, poor Keats\n(Pardon, O Father, unknowable Dear, this word,\nOnly the cartoon is lucid, only the curse is heard),\nLonging for Eden, afraid of the coming war.\n\nThe past, a giant shadow like the twilight,\nThe moving street on which the autos slide,\nThe buildings’ heights, like broken teeth,\nRepeat necessity on every side,\nThe age requires death and is not denied,\nHe has come as a young man to be hanged once more!\n\nAnother exile bare his complex care,\n(When smoke in silence curves from every fallen side)\nPity and Peace return, padding the broken floor\nWith heavy feet. Their linen hands will hide\nIn the stupid opiate the exhausted war.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Spring has returned! Everything has returned!\nThe earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes\nPoems, so many poems … Look, she has learned\nSo many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!\n\nTeacher was strict. We delighted in the white\nOf the old man’s beard, bright like the snow’s:\nNow we may ask which names are wrong, or right\nFor “blue,” for “apple,” for “ripe.” She knows, she knows!\n\nLucky earth, let out of school, now you must play\nHide-and-seek with all the children every day:\nYou must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!\n\nThe happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things\nYou taught her: the word for “hope,” and for “believe,”\nAre still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "tired-and-unhappy-you-think-of-houses": { - "title": "“Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses”", - "body": "Tired and unhappy, you think of houses\nSoft-carpeted and warm in the December evening,\nWhile snow’s white pieces fall past the window,\nAnd the orange firelight leaps.\n A young girl sings\nThat song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death;\nHer elders watch, nodding their happiness\nTo see time fresh again in her self-conscious eyes:\nThe servants bring in the coffee, the children go to bed,\nElder and younger yawn and go to bed,\nThe coals fade and glow, rose and ashen,\nIt is time to shake yourself! and break this\nBanal dream, and turn your head\nWhere the underground is charged, where the weight\nOf the lean building is seen,\nWhere close in the subway rush, anonymous\nIn the audience, well-dressed or mean,\nSo many surround you, ringing your fate,\nCaught in an anger exact as a machine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "two-lyrics-from-kilroys-carnival": { - "title": "“Two Lyrics from Kilroy’s Carnival”", - "body": "“--Kiss me there where pride is glittering\nKiss me where I am ripened and round fruit\nKiss me wherever, however, I am supple, bare and flare\n(Let the bell be rung as long as I am young: let ring and fly like a great bronze wing!)”\n\n“--I’ll kiss you wherever you think you are poor,\nWherever you shudder, feeling striped or barred,\nBecause you think you are bloodless, skinny or marred: Until, until your gaze has been stilled--\nUntil you are shamed again no more!\nI’ll kiss you until your body and soul the mind in the body being fulfilled--\nSuspend their dread and civil war!”\n\n\n# II. _Song_\n\nUnder the yellow sea\nWho comes and looks with me\nFor the daughters of music, the fountains of poetry?\nBoth have soared forth from the unending waters\nWhere all things still are seeds and far from flowers\nAnd since they remain chained to the sea’s powers\nMay wilt to nonentity or loll and arise to comedy\nOr thrown into mere accident through irrelevant incident\nDissipate all identity ceaselessly fragmented by the ocean’s immense and intense, irresistible and insistent action,\nBe scattered like the sand is, purposely and relentlessly,\nLiving in the summer resorts of the dead endlessly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "words-for-a-trumpet-chorale-celebrating-the-autumn": { - "title": "“Words for a Trumpet Chorale Celebrating the Autumn”", - "body": "_“The trumpet is a brilliant instrument.”_ --Dietrich Buxtehude\n\n\nCome and come forth and come up from the cup of\nYour dumbness, stunned and numb, come with\nThe statues and believed in,\nThinking this is nothing, deceived.\n\n _Come to the summer and sun,\n Come see upon that height, and that sum\n In the seedtime of the winter’s absolute,\n How yearly the phoenix inhabits the fruit.\n Behold, above all, how the tall ball\n Called the body is but a drum, but a bell\n Summoning the soul\n To rise from the catacomb of sleep and fear\n To the blaze and death of summer,_\n\nRising from the lithe forms of the pure\nFurs of the rising flames, slender and supple,\nWhich are the consummation of the blaze of fall and of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "you-my-photographer": { - "title": "“You, My Photographer”", - "body": "You, my photographer, you, most aware,\nWho climbed to the bridge when the iceberg struck,\nClimbed with your camera when the ship’s hull broke,\nAnd lighted your flashes and, standing passionate there,\nWound the camera in the sudden burst’s flare,\nShot the screaming women, and turned and took\nPictures of the iceberg (as the ship’s deck shook)\nDreaming like the moon in the night’s black air!\n\nYou, tiptoe on the rail to film a child!\nThe nude old woman swimming in the sea\nLooked up from the dark water to watch you there;\nBelow, near the ballroom where the band still toiled,\nThe frightened, in their lifebelts, watched you bitterly--\nYou hypocrite! My brother! We are a pair!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-young-child-and-his-pregnant-mother": { - "title": "“A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother”", - "body": "At four years Nature is mountainous,\nMysterious, and submarine. Even\n\nA city child knows this, hearing the subway’s\nRumor underground. Between the grate,\n\nDropping his penny, he learned out all loss,\nThe irretrievable cent of fate,\n\nAnd now this newest of the mysteries,\nConfronts his honest and his studious eyes--\n\nHis mother much too fat and absentminded,\nGazing past his face, careless of him,\n\nHis fume, his charm, his bedtime, and warm milk,\nAs soon the night will be too dark, the spring\n\nToo late, desire strange, and time too fast,\nThis estrangement is a gradual thing\n\n(His mother once so svelte, so often sick!\nTowering father did this: what a trick!)\n\nExplained to cautiously, containing fear,\nAnother being’s being, becoming dear:\n\nAll men are enemies: thus even brothers\nCan separate each other from their mothers!\n\nNo better example than this unborn brother\nShall teach him of his exile from his mother,\n\nMeasured by his distance from the sky,\nSpoken in two vowels,\nI am I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "gil-scott-heron": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gil Scott-Heron", - "birth": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-bottle": { - "title": "“The Bottle”", - "body": "See that black boy over there, runnin’ scared\nhis ol’ man’s in a bottle.\nHe done quit his 9 to 5 to drink full time\nso now he’s livin’ in the bottle.\nSee that Black boy over there, runnin’ scared\nhis ol’ man got a problem\nPawned off damn near everything, his ol’\nwoman’s weddin’ ring for a bottle.\nAnd don’t you think it’s a crime\nwhen time after time, people in the bottle.\n\nSee that sista, sho wuz fine before she\nstarted drinkin’ wine\nfrom the bottle.\nSaid her ol’ man committed a crime\nand he’s doin’ time,\nso now she’s in the bottle.\nShe’s out there on the avenue, all by herself\nsho’ needs help from the bottle.\nPreacherman tried to help her out,\nshe cussed him out and hit him in the head with a bottle.\nAnd don’t you think it’s a crime\nwhen time after time, people in the bottle.\n\nSee that gent in the wrinkled suit\nhe done damn near blown his cool\nto the bottle\nHe wuz a doctor helpin’ young girls along\nif they wuzn’t too far gone to have problems.\nBut defenders of the dollar eagle\nSaid “What you doin’, Doc, it ain’t legal,”\nand now he’s in the bottle.\nNow we watch him everyday tryin’ to\nchase the pigeons away\nfrom the bottle.\nAnd don’t you think it’s a crime\nwhen time after time, people in the bottle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-in-america": { - "title": "“Winter in America”", - "body": "From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims\nAnd to the buffalo who once ruled the plains\nLike the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds\nLooking for the rain\nLooking for the rain\n\nJust like the cities staggered on the coastline\nLiving in a nation that just can’t stand much more\nLike the forest buried beneath the highway\nNever had a chance to grow\nNever had a chance to grow\n\nAnd now it’s winter\nWinter in America\nYes and all of the healers have been killed\nOr sent away, yeah\nBut the people know, the people know\nIt’s winter\nWinter in America\nAnd ain’t nobody fighting\n’Cause nobody knows what to say\nSave your soul, Lord knows\nFrom Winter in America\n\nThe Constitution\nA noble piece of paper\nWith free society\nStruggled but it died in vain\nAnd now Democracy is ragtime on the corner\nHoping for some rain\nLooks like it’s hoping\nHoping for some rain\n\nAnd I see the robins\nPerched in barren treetops\nWatching last-ditch racists marching across the floor\nBut just like the peace sign that vanished in our dreams\nNever had a chance to grow\nNever had a chance to grow\n\nAnd now it’s winter\nIt’s winter in America\nAnd all of the healers have been killed\nOr been betrayed\nYeah, but the people know, people know\nIt’s winter, Lord knows\nIt’s winter in America\nAnd ain’t nobody fighting\nCause nobody knows what to save\nSave your souls\nFrom Winter in America\n\nAnd now it’s winter\nWinter in America\nAnd all of the healers done been killed or sent away\nYeah, and the people know, people know\nIt’s winter\nWinter in America\nAnd ain’t nobody fighting\nCause nobody knows what to save\nAnd ain’t nobody fighting\nCause nobody knows, nobody knows\nAnd ain’t nobody fighting\nCause nobody knows what to save", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "walter-scott": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Walter Scott", - "birth": { - "year": 1771 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1832 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "funeral-hymn": { - "title": "“Funeral Hymn”", - "body": "Dust unto dust,\nTo this all must;\nThe tenant hath resign’d\nThe faded form To waste and worm--\nCorruption claims her kind.\n\nThrough paths unknown\nThy soul hath flown,\nTo seek the realms of woe,\nWhere fiery pain\nShall purge the stain\nOf actions done below.\n\nIn that sad place,\nBy Mary’s grace,\nBrief may thy dwelling be\nTill prayers and alms,\nAnd holy psalms,\nShall set the captive free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "hellvellyn": { - "title": "“Hellvellyn”", - "body": "I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Hellvellyn,\nLakes and mountains beneath me gleamed misty and wide;\nAll was still, save by fits, when the eagle was yelling,\nAnd starting around me the echoes replied.\nOn the right, Striding-edge round the Red-tarn was bending,\nAnd Catchedicam its left verge was defending,\nOne huge nameless rock in the front was ascending,\nWhen I marked the sad spot where the wanderer had died.\n\nDark green was that spot ’mid the brown mountain heather,\nWhere the Pilgrim of Nature lay stretched in decay,\nLike the corpse of an outcast abandoned to weather,\nTill the mountain winds wasted the tenantless clay.\nNor yet quite deserted, though lonely extended,\nFor, faithful in death, his mute favourite attended,\nThe much-loved remains of her master defended,\nAnd chased the hill-fox and the raven away.\n\nHow long didst thou think that his silence was slumber?\nWhen the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start?\nHow many long days and long weeks didst thou number,\nEre he faded before thee, the friend of thy heart?\nAnd, oh! was it meet, that--no requiem read o’er him--\nNo mother to weep, and no friend to deplore him,\nAnd thou, little guardian, alone stretched before him\nUnhonoured the Pilgrim from life should depart?\n\nWhen a prince to the fate of the peasant has yielded,\nThe tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall;\nWith scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded,\nAnd pages stand mute by the canopied pall:\nThrough the courts, at deep midnight, the torches are gleaming;\nIn the proudly-arched chapel the banners are beaming,\nFar adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming,\nLamenting a chief of the people should fall.\n\nBut meeter for thee, gentle lover of nature,\nTo lay down thy head like the meek mountain lamb,\nWhen, wildered, he drops from some cliff huge in stature,\nAnd draws his last sob by the side of his dam.\nAnd more stately thy couch by this desert lake lying,\nThy obsequies sung by the gray plover flying,\nWith one faithful friend but to witness thy dying,\nIn the arms of Hellvellyn and Catchedicam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "hunters-song": { - "title": "“Hunter’s Song”", - "body": "The toils are pitched, and the stakes are set,\nEver sing merrily, merrily;\nThe bows they bend, and the knives they whet,\nHunters live so cheerily.\n\nIt was a stag, a stag of ten,\nBearing its branches sturdily;\nHe came silently down the glen,\nEver sing hardily, hardily.\n\nIt was there he met with a wounded doe,\nShe was bleeding deathfully;\nShe warned him of the toils below,\nO so faithfully, faithfully!\n\nHe had an eye, and he could heed,\nEver sing so warily, warily;\nHe had a foot, and he could speed--\nHunters watch so narrowly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lochinvar": { - "title": "“Lochinvar”", - "body": "O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,\nThrough all the wide Border his steed was the best;\nAnd save his good broadsword, he weapons had none,\nHe rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.\nSo faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,\nThere never was knight like the young Lochinvar.\n\nHe staid not for brake, and he stopp’d not for stone,\nHe swam the Eske river where ford there was none;\nBut ere he alighted at Netherby gate,\nThe bride had consented, the gallant came late:\nFor a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,\nWas to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.\n\nSo boldly he entered the Netherby Hall,\nAmong bride’s-men, and kinsmen, and brothers, and all:\nThen spoke the bride’s father, his hand on his sword,\n(For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word,)\n“O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,\nOr to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?”--\n\n“I long woo’d your daughter, my suit you denied;--\nLove swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide--\nAnd now am I come, with this lost love of mine,\nTo lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.\nThere are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,\nThat would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.”\n\nThe bride kiss’d the goblet; the knight took it up,\nHe quaff’d off the wine, and he threw down the cup.\nShe look’d down to blush, and she look’d up to sigh,\nWith a smile on her lips, and a tear in her eye.\nHe took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,--\n“Now tread we a measure!” said young Lochinvar.\n\nSo stately his form, and so lovely her face,\nThat never a hall such a galliard did grace;\nWhile her mother did fret, and her father did fume,\nAnd the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume;\nAnd the bride-maidens whisper’d, “’Twere better by far\nTo have match’d our fair cousin with young Lochinvar.”\n\nOne touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,\nWhen they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near;\nSo light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,\nSo light to the saddle before her he sprung!\n“She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;\nThey’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.\n\nThere was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;\nFosters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran:\nThere was racing and chasing, on Cannobie Lee,\nBut the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.\nSo daring in love, and so dauntless in war,\nHave ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love": { - "title": "“Love”", - "body": "In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed;\nIn war, he mounts the warrior’s steed;\nIn halls, in gay attire is seen;\nIn hamlets, dances on the green.\nLove rules the court, the camp, the grove,\nAnd men below and saints above;\nFor love is heaven, and heaven is love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - } - } - }, - "giorgos-seferis": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Giorgos Seferis", - "birth": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1971 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgos_Seferis", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "the-companions-in-hades": { - "title": "“The Companions in Hades”", - "body": "_fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;\nbut he deprived them of the day of their return._\n --Odyssey\n\nSince we still had some hardtack\nhow stupid of us\nto go ashore and eat\nthe Sun’s slow cattle,\n\nfor each was a castle\nyou’d have to battle\nforty years, till you’d become\na hero and a star!\n\nOn the earth’s back we hungered,\nbut when we’d eaten well\nwe fell to these lower regions\nmindless and satisfied.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "denial": { - "title": "“Denial”", - "body": "On the secret seashore\nwhite like a pigeon\nwe thirsted at noon;\nbut the water was brackish.\n\nOn the golden sand\nwe wrote her name;\nbut the sea-breeze blew\nand the writing vanished.\n\nWith what spirit, what heart,\nwhat desire and passion\nwe lived our life: a mistake!\nSo we changed our life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "epiphany": { - "title": "“Epiphany”", - "body": "The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’s waning\nthe great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels\nthe jar that refused to go dry at the end of day\nand the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair\ngolden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran.\n\nI’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling\namong yellow trees in driving rain\non silent slopes loaded with beech leaves,\nno fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark.\nI’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line\na scar at your knee, perhaps they exist\non the sand of the past summer perhaps\nthey remain there where the north wind blew as I hear\nan alien voice around the frozen lake.\nThe faces I see do not ask questions nor does the woman\nbent as she walks giving her child the breast.\nI climb the mountains; dark ravines; the snow-covered\nplain, into the distance stretches the snow-covered plain, they ask nothing\nneither time shut up in dumb chapels nor\nhands outstretched to beg, nor the roads.\nI’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence\nI no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers\nlike the breathing of the cypress tree that night\nlike the human voice of the night sea on pebbles\nlike the memory of your voice saying “happiness”.\n\nI close my eyes looking for the secret meeting-place of the waters\nunder the ice the sea’s smile, the closed wells\ngroping with my veins for those veins that escape me\nthere where the water-lilies end and that man\nwho walks blindly across the snows of silence.\nI’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you\nheavy drops on green leaves, on your face\nin the empty garden, drops in the motionless reservoir\nstriking a swan dead in its white wings\nliving trees and your eyes riveted.\n\nThis road has no end, has no relief, however hard you try\nto recall your childhood years, those who left, those\nlost in sleep, in the graves of the sea,\nhowever much you ask bodies you’ve loved to stoop\nunder the harsh branches of the plane trees there\nwhere a ray of the sun, naked, stood still\nand a dog leapt and your heart shuddered,\nthe road has no relief; I’ve kept a rein on my life.\n\nThe snow and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "erotikos-logos": { - "title": "“Erotikos Logos”", - "body": "# I.\n\nRose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us\nyet you bent like the secret about to be released\nand the command you chose to give us was beautiful\nand your smile was like a ready sword.\n\nThe ascent of your cycle livened creation\nfrom your thorn emerged the way’s thought\nour impulse dawned naked to possess you\nthe world was easy: a simple pulsation.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores\nthe darkness of the depths is forgotten in the surf;\nthe corals of memory suddenly shine purple …\nO do not stir … listen to hear its light\n\nmotion … you touched the tree with the apples\nthe hand reached out, the thread points the way and guides you …\nO dark shivering in the roots and the leaves\nif it were but you who would bring the forgotten dawn!\n\nMay lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation\nmay days open mature, the embrace of the heavens,\nmay those eyes alone shine in the glare\nthe pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute.\n\nWas it night that shut its eyes? Ashes remain,\nas from the string of a bow a choked hum remains,\nash and dizziness on the black shore\nand dense fluttering imprisoned in surmise.\n\nRose of the wind, you knew but took us unknowing\nat a time when thought was building bridges\nso that fingers would knit and two fates pass by\nand spill into the low and rested light.\n\n\n# III.\n\nO dark shivering in the roots and the leaves!\nCome forth sleepless form in the gathering silence\nraise your head from your cupped hands\nso that your will be done and you tell me again\n\nthe words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace;\nand let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend\nand flood us with your lavish hair\nfrom the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart.\n\nYou lowered your eyes and you had the smile\nthat masters of another time humbly painted.\nForgotten reading from an ancient gospel,\nyour words breathed and your voice was gentle:\n\n“The passing of time is soft and unworldly\nand pain floats lightly in my soul\ndawn breaks in the heavens, the dream remains afloat\nand it’s as if scented shrubs were passing.”\n\n“With my eyes’ startling, with my body’s blush\na flock of doves awakens and descends\ntheir low, circling flight entangles me\nthe stars are a human touch on my breast.”\n\n“I hear, as in a sea shell, the distant\nadverse and confused lament of the world\nbut these are moments only, they disappear,\nand the two-branched thought of my desire reigns alone.”\n\n“It seemed I’d risen naked in a vanished recollection\nwhen you came, strange and familiar, my beloved\nto grant me, bending, the boundless deliverance\nI was seeking from the wind’s quick sistrum …”\n\nThe broken sunset declined and was gone\nand it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky.\nYou lowered your eyes. The moon’s thorn blossomed\nand you became afraid of the mountain’s shadows.\n\n_… In the mirror how our love diminishes\nin sleep the dreams, school of oblivion\nin the depths of time, how the heart contracts\nand vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace …_\n\n\n# IV.\n\nTwo serpents, beautiful, apart, tentacles of separation\ncrawl and search, in the night of the trees,\nfor a secret love in hidden bowers;\nsleepless they search, they neither drink nor eat.\n\nCircling, twisting, their insatiable intent\nspins, multiplies, turns, spreads rings on the body\nwhich the laws of the starry dome silently govern,\nstirring its hot, irrepressible frenzy.\n\nThe forest stands as a shivering pillar for night\nand the silence is a silver cup where moments fall\nechoes distinct, whole, a careful chisel\nsustained by carved lines …\n\nThe statue suddenly dawns. But the bodies have vanished\nin the sea in the wind in the sun in the rain.\nSo the beauties nature grants us are born\nbut who knows if a soul hasn’t died in the world.\n\nThe parted serpents must have circled in fantasy\n(the forest shimmers with birds, shoots, blossoms)\ntheir wavy searching still remains,\nlike the turnings of the cycle that bring sorrow.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhere is the double-edged day that had changed everything?\nWon’t there be a navigable river for us?\nWon’t there be a sky to drop refreshing dew\nfor the soul benumbed and nourished by the lotus?\n\nOn the stone of patience we wait for the miracle\nthat opens the heavens and makes all things possible\nwe wait for the angel as in the age-old drama\nat the moment when the open roses of twilight\n\ndisappear … Red rose of the wind and of fate,\nyou remained in memory only, a heavy rhythm\nrose of the night, you passed, undulating purple\nundulation of the sea … The world is simple.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley" - } - }, - "interval-of-joy": { - "title": "“Interval of Joy”", - "body": "We were happy all that morning\nΟ God how happy.\nFirst the stones the leaves and the flowers shone\nand then the sun\na huge sun all thorns but so very high in the heavens.\nΑ Nymph was gathering our cares and hanging them on the trees\na forest of Judas trees.\nCupids and satyrs were singing and playing\nand rosy limbs could be glimpsed amid black laurel\nthe flesh of young children.\nWe were happy all that morning;\nthe abyss was a closed well\non which the tender foot of a young faun stamped\ndo you remember its laughter: how happy we were!\nAnd then clouds rain and the damp earth;\nyou stopped laughing when you reclined in the hut,\nand opened your large eyes and gazed\non the archangel wielding a fiery sword\n\n“Ι cannot explain it,” you said, “Ι cannot explain it,”\nΙ find people impossible to understand\nhowever much they may play with colors\nthey are all black.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "just-a-little-more": { - "title": "“Just a Little More”", - "body": "Just a little more\nAnd we shall see the almond trees in blossom\nThe marbles shining in the sun\nThe sea, the curling waves.\nJust a little more\nLet us rise just a little higher.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-last-day": { - "title": "“The Last Day”", - "body": "The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision;\na light wind was blowing. “Not a north-easter, the sirocco,” someone said.\nA few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea\ngrey with shining pools.\nThe soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle.\n“Not a north-easter, the sirocco,” was the only decision heard.\nAnd yet we knew that by the following dawn\nnothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side\nnor the memory that we were once men,\nnothing at all by the following dawn.\n\n“This wind reminds me of spring,” said my friend\nas she walked beside me gazing into the distance, “the spring\nthat came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea.\nSo unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?”\n\nA funeral march meandered through the thin rain.\n\nHow does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it.\nAnd for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles\nfrom the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis.\nYet death is something that happens: how does a man die?\nYet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else\nand this game is life.\n\nThe light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything.\nThe following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands,\nand our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries.\nMy friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song:\n“In spring, in summer, slaves …”\nOne recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans.\nA couple passed, talking:\n“I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home,\nlet’s go home and turn on the light.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "letter-of-mathios-paskalis": { - "title": "“Letter of Mathios Paskalis”", - "body": "The skyscrapers of New York will never know the coolness that comes down on Kifisia\nbut when I see the two cypress trees above your familiar church\nwith the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone\nthen I recall the two chimneys behind the cedars I used to like so much when I was abroad.\n\nAll through March rheumatism wracked your lovely loins and in summer you went to Aidipsos.\nGod! what a struggle it is for life to keep going, as though it were a swollen river passing through the eye of a needle.\nHeavy heat till nightfall, the stars discharging midges, I myself drinking bitter lemonades and still remaining thirsty;\nMoon and movies, phantoms and the suffocating pestiferous harbour.\n\nVerina, life has ruined us, along with the Attic skies and the intellectuals clambering up their own heads\nand the landscapes reduced by drought and hunger to posing\nlike young men selling their souls in order to wear a monocle\nlike young girls--sunflowers swallowing their heads so as to become lilies.\n\nThe days go by slowly; my own days circulate among the clocks dragging the second hand in tow.\nRemember how we used to twist breathless through the alleys so as not to be gutted by the headlights of cars.\nThe idea of the world abroad enveloped us and closed us in like a net\nand we left with a sharp knife hidden within us and you said “Harmodios and Aristogeiton”.\n\nVerina, lower your head so that I can see you, though even if I were to see you I’d want to look beyond.\nWhat’s a man’s value? What does he want and how will he justify his existence at the Second Coming?\nAh, to find myself on a derelict ship lost in the Pacific Ocean alone with the sea and the wind\nalone and without a wireless or strength to fight the elements.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "mythistorema": { - "title": "“Mythistorema”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe angel--\nthree years we waited for him, attention riveted,\nclosely scanning\nthe pines the shore the stars.\nOne with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel\nwe were searching to find once more the first seed\nso that the age-old drama could begin again.\n\nWe returned to our homes broken,\nlimbs incapable, mouths cracked\nby the tastes of rust and brine.\nwhen we woke we traveled towards the north, strangers\nplunged into mist by the immaculate wings of swans that wounded us.\nOn winter nights the strong wind from the east maddened us,\nin the summers we were lost in the agony of days that couldn’t die.\n\nWe brought back\nthese carved reliefs of a humble art.\n\n\n# II.\n\nStill one more well inside a cave.\nIt used to be easy for us to draw up idols and ornaments\nto please those friends who still remained loyal to us.\n\nThe ropes have broken; only the grooves on the well’s lip\nremind us of our past happiness:\nthe fingers on the rim, as the poet put it.\nThe fingers feel the coolness of the stone a little,\nThen the body’s fever prevails over it\nand the cave stakes its soul and loses it\nevery moment, full of silence, without a drop of water.\n\n\n# III.\n\n_Remember the baths where you were murdered_\n\nI woke with this marble head in my hands;\nit exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down.\nIt was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream\nso our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.\n\nI look at the eyes: neither open nor closed\nI speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak\nI hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin.\nThat’s all I’m able to do.\n\nMy hands disappear and come towards me\nmutilated.\n\n\n# IV.\n\n_Argonauts_\n\nAnd a soul\nif it is to know itself\nmust look\ninto its own soul:\nthe stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.\n\nThey were good, the companions, they didn’t complain\nabout the work or the thirst or the frost,\nthey had the bearing of trees and waves\nthat accept the wind and the rain\naccept the night and the sun\nwithout changing in the midst of change.\nThey were fine, whole days\nthey sweated at the oars with lowered eyes\nbreathing in rhythm\nand their blood reddened a submissive skin.\nSometimes they sang, with lowered eyes\nas we were passing the deserted island with the Barbary figs\nto the west, beyond the cape of the dogs\nthat bark.\nIf it is to know itself, they said\nit must look into its own soul, they said\nand the oar’s struck the sea’s gold\nin the sunset.\nWe went past many capes many islands the sea\nleading to another sea, gulls and seals.\nSometimes disconsolate women wept\nlamenting their lost children\nand others frantic sought Alexander the Great\nand glories buried in the depths of Asia.\n\nWe moored on shores full of night-scenes,\nthe birds singing, with waters that left on the hands\nthe memory of a great happiness.\nBut the voyages did not end.\nTheir souls became one with the oars and the oarlocks\nwith the solemn face of the prow\nwith the rudder’s wake\nwith the water that shattered their image.\nThe companions died one by one,\nwith lowered eyes. Their oars\nmark the place where they sleep on the shore.\n\nNo one remembers them. Justice\n\n\n# V.\n\nWe didn’t know them\ndeep down it was hope that said\nwe’d known them since early childhood.\nWe saw them perhaps twice and then they took to the ships:\ncargoes of coal, cargoes of grain, and our friends\nlost beyond the ocean forever.\nDawn finds us beside the tired lamp\ndrawing on paper, awkwardly, painfully,\nships mermaids or sea shells;\nat dusk we go down to the river\nbecause it shows us the way to the sea;\nand we spend the nights in cellars that smell of tar.\n\nOur friends have left us\nperhaps we never saw them, perhaps\nwe met them when sleep\nstill brought us close to the breathing wave\nperhaps we search for them because we search for the other life,\nbeyond the statues.\n\n\n# VI.\n\n_M.R._\n\nThe garden with its fountains in the rain\nyou will see only from behind the clouded glass\nof the low window. Your room\nwill be lit only by the flames from the fireplace\nand sometimes the distant lightning will reveal\nthe wrinkles on your forehead, my old Friend.\n\nThe garden with the fountains that in your hands\nwas a rhythm of the other life, beyond the broken\nstatues and the tragic columns\nand a dance among the oleanders\nnear the new quarries--\nmisty glass will have cut it off from your life.\nYou won’t breathe; earth and the sap of the trees\nwill spring from your memory to strike\nthis window struck by rain\nfrom the outside world.\n\n\n# VII.\n\n_South wind_\n\nWestward the sea merges with a mountain range.\nFrom our left the south wind blows and drives us mad,\nthe kind of wind that strips bones of their flesh.\nOur house among pines and carobs.\nLarge windows. Large tables\nfor writing you the letters we’ve been writing\nso many months now, dropping them\ninto the space between us in order to fill it up.\n\nStar of dawn, when you lowered your eyes\nour hours were sweeter than oil\non a wound, more joyful than cold water\nto the palate, more peaceful than a swan’s wings.\nYou held our life in the palm of your hand.\nAfter the bitter bread of exile,\nat night if we remain in front of the white wall\nyour voice approaches us like the hope of fire;\nand again this wind hones\na razor against our nerves.\n\nEach of us writes you the same thing\nand each falls silent in the other’s presence,\nwatching, each of us, the same world separately\nthe light and darkness on the mountain range\nand you.\nWho will lift this sorrow from our hearts?\nYesterday evening a heavy rain and again today\nthe covered sky burdens us. Our thoughts--\nlike the pine needles of yesterday’s downpour\nbunched up and useless in front of our doorway--\nwould build a collapsing tower.\n\nAmong these decimated villages\non this promontory, open to the south wind\nwith the mountain range in front of us hiding you,\nwho will appraise for us the sentence to oblivion?\nWho will accept our offering, at this close of autumn?\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nWhat are they after, our souls, travelling\non the decks of decayed ships\ncrowded in with sallow women and crying babies\nunable to forget themselves either with the flying fish\nor with the stars that the masts point our at their tips;\ngrated by gramophone records\ncommitted to non-existent pilgrimages unwillingly\nmurmuring broken thoughts from foreign languages.\n\nWhat are they after, our souls, travelling\non rotten brine-soaked timbers\nfrom harbour to harbour?\n\nShifting broken stones, breathing in\nthe pine’s coolness with greater difficulty each day,\nswimming in the waters of this sea\nand of that sea,\nwithout the sense of touch\nwithout men\nin a country that is no longer ours\nnor yours.\n\nWe knew that the islands were beautiful\nsomewhere round about here where we grope,\nslightly lower down or slightly higher up,\na tiny space.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nThe harbour is old, I can’t wait any longer\nfor the friend who left the island with the pine trees\nfor the friend who left the island with the plane trees\nfor the friend who left for the open sea.\nI stroke the rusted cannons, I stroke the oars\nso that my body may revive and decide.\nThe sails give off only the smell\nof salt from the other storm.\n\nIf I chose to remain alone, what I longed for\nwas solitude, not this kind of waiting,\nmy soul shattered on the horizon,\nthese lines, these colours, this silence.\n\nThe night’s stars take me back to Odysseus,\nto his anticipation of the dead among the asphodels.\nWhen we moored here we hoped to find among the asphodels\nthe gorge that knew the wounded Adonis.\n\n\n# X.\n\nOur country is closed in, all mountains\nthat day and night have the low sky as their roof.\nWe have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs,\nonly a few cisterns--and these empty--that echo, and that we worship.\nA stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness\nthe same as our love, the same as our bodies.\nWe find it strange that once we were able to build\nour houses, huts and sheep-folds.\nAnd our marriages, the cool coronals and the fingers,\nbecome enigmas inexplicable to our soul.\nHow were our children born, how did they grow strong?\n\nOur country is closed in. The two black Symplegades\nclose it in. When we go down\nto the harbours on Sunday to breathe freely\nwe see, lit in the sunset,\nthe broken planks from voyages that never ended,\nbodies that no longer know how to love.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nSometimes your blood froze like the moon\nin the limitless night your blood\nspread its white wings over\nthe black rocks, the shapes of trees and houses,\nwith a little light from our childhood years.\n\n\n# XII.\n\n_Bottle in the sea_\n\nThree rocks, a few burnt pines, a lone chapel\nand farther above\nthe same landscape repeated starts again:\nthree rocks in the shape of a gateway, rusted,\na few burnt pines, black and yellow,\nand a square hut buried in whitewash;\nand still farther above, many times over,\nthe same landscape recurs level after level\nto the horizon, to the twilit sky.\n\nHere we moored the ship to splice the broken oars,\nto drink water and to sleep.\nThe sea that embittered us is deep and unexplored\nand unfolds a boundless calm.\nHere among the pebbles we found a coin\nand threw dice for it.\nThe youngest won it and disappeared.\n\nWe put to sea again with our broken oars.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\n_Hydra_\n\nDolphins banners and the sound of cannons.\nThe sea once so bitter to your soul\nbore the many-coloured and glittering ships\nit swayed, rolled and tossed them, all blue with white wings,\nonce so bitter to your soul\nnow full of colours in the sun.\n\nWhite sails and sunlight and wet oars\nstruck with a rhythm of drums on stilled waves.\n\nYour eyes, watching, would be beautiful,\nyour arms, reaching out, would glow,\nyour lips would come alive, as they used to,\nat such a miracle:\nthat’s what you were looking for\n what were you looking for in front of ashes\nor in the rain in the fog in the wind\neven when the lights were growing dim\nand the city was sinking and on the stone pavement\nthe Nazarene showed you his heart,\nwhat were you looking for? why don’t you come? what were you looking for?\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nThree red pigeons in the light\ninscribing our fate in the light\nwith colours and gestures of people\nwe once loved.\n\n\n# XV.\n\n_Quid πλατανων opacissimus_\n\nSleep wrapped you in green leaves like a tree\nyou breathed like a tree in the quiet light\nin the limpid spring I looked at your face:\neyelids closed, eyelashes brushing the water.\nIn the soft grass my fingers found your fingers\nI held your pulse a moment\nand felt elsewhere your heart’s pain.\n\nUnder the plane tree, near the water, among laurel\nsleep moved you and scattered you\naround me, near me, without my being able to touch the whole of you--\none as you were with your silence;\nseeing your shadow grow and diminish,\nlose itself in the other shadows, in the other\nworld that let you go yet held you back.\n\nThe life that they gave us to live, we lived.\nPity those who wait with such patience\nlost in the black laurel under the heavy plane trees\nand those, alone, who speak to cisterns and wells\nand drown in the voice’s circles.\nPity the companion who shared our privation and our sweat\nand plunged into the sun like a crow beyond the ruins,\nwithout hope of enjoying our reward.\n\nGive us, outside sleep, serenity.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\n_The name is Orestes_\n\nOn the track, once more on the track, on the track,\nhow many times around, how many blood-stained laps, how many black\nrows; the people who watch me,\nwho watched me when, in the chariot,\nI raised my hand glorious, and they roared triumphantly.\n\nThe froth of the horses strikes me, when will the horses tire?\nThe axle creaks, the axle burns, when will the axle burst into flame?\nWhen will the reins break, when will the hooves\ntread flush on the ground\non the soft grass, among the poppies\nwhere, in the spring, you picked a daisy.\nThey were lovely, your eyes, but you didn’t know where to look\nnor did I know where to look, I, without a country,\nI who go on struggling here, how many times around?\nand I feel my knees give way over the axle\nover the wheels, over the wild track\nknees buckle easily when the gods so will it,\nno one can escape, what use is strength, you can’t\nescape the sea that cradled you and that you search for\nat this time of trial, with the horses panting,\nwith the reeds that used to sing in autumn to the Lydian mode\nthe sea you cannot find no matter how you run\nno matter how you circle past the black, bored Eumenides,\nunforgiven.\n\n\n# XVII.\n\n_Astyanax_\n\nNow that you are leaving, take the boy with you as well,\nthe boy who saw the light under the plane tree,\none day when trumpets resounded and weapons shone\nand the sweating horses\nbent to the trough to touch with wet nostrils\nthe green surface of the water.\n\nThe olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers\nthe rocks with the wisdom of our fathers\nand our brother’s blood alive on the earth\nwere a vital joy, a rich pattern\nfor the souls who knew their prayer.\n\nNow that you are leaving, now that the day of payment\ndawns, now that no one knows\nwhom he will kill and how he will die,\ntake with you the boy who saw the light\nunder the leaves of that plane tree\nand teach him to study the trees.\n\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\nI regret having let a broad river slip through my fingers\nwithout drinking a single drop.\nNow I’m sinking into the stone.\nA small pine tree in the red soil\nis all the company I have.\nWhatever I loved vanished with the houses\nthat were new last summer\nand crumbled in the winds of autumn.\n\n\n# XIX.\n\nEven if the wind blows it doesn’t cool us\nand the shade is meagre under the cypress trees\nand all around slopes ascending to the mountains;\n\nthey’re a burden for us\nthe friends who no longer know how to die.\n\n\n# XX.\n\nIn my breast the wound opens again\nwhen the stars descend and become kin to my body\nwhen silence falls under the footsteps of men.\n\nThese stones sinking into time, how far will they drag me with them?\nThe sea, the sea, who will be able to drain it dry?\nI see the hands beckon each drawn to the vulture and the hawk\nbound as I am to the rock that suffering has made mine,\nI see the trees breathing the black serenity of the dead\nand then the smiles, so static, of the statues.\n\n\n# XXI.\n\nWe who set out on this pilgrimage\nlooked at the broken statues\nbecame distracted and said that life is not so easily lost\nthat death has unexplored paths\nand its own particular justice;\n\nthat while we, still upright on our feet, are dying,\naffiliated in stone\nunited in hardness and weakness,\nthe ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again\nand smile in a strange silence.\n\n\n# XXII.\n\nSo very much having passed before our eyes\nthat even our eyes saw nothing, but beyond\nand behind was memory like the white sheet one night in an enclosure\nwhere we saw strange visions, even stranger than you,\npass by and vanish into the motionless foliage of a pepper tree;\n\nhaving known this fate of ours so well\nwandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years\nsearching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes\ntrying to remember dates and heroic deeds:\nwill we be able?\n\nhaving been bound and scattered,\nhaving struggled, as they said, with non-existent difficulties\nlost, then finding again a road full of blind regiments\nsinking in marshes and in the lake of Marathon,\nwill we be able to die as we should?\n\n\n# XXIII.\n\nA little farther\nwe will see the almond trees blossoming\nthe marble gleaming in the sun\nthe sea breaking into waves\n\na little farther,\nlet us rise a little higher.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nHere end the works of the sea, the works of love.\nThose who will some day live here where we end--\nshould the blood happen to darken in their memory and overflow--\nlet them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels,\nlet them turn the heads of the victims towards Erebus:\n\nWe who had nothing will school them in serenity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "date": { - "year": 1995 - } - } - }, - "an-old-man-on-the-river-bank": { - "title": "“An Old Man on the River Bank”", - "body": "And yet we should consider how we go forward.\nTo feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move\nnor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole\nwhen scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls.\n\nAnd yet we should consider towards what we go forward,\nnot as our pain would have it, and our hungry children\nand the chasm between us and the companions calling from the opposite shore;\nnor as the bluish light whispers it in an improvised hospital,\nthe pharmaceutic glimmer on the pillow of the youth operated on at noon;\nbut it should be in some other way, I would say like\nthe long river that emerges from the great lakes enclosed deep in Africa,\nthat was once a god and then became a road and a benefactor, a judge and a delta;\nthat is never the same, as the ancient wise men taught,\nand yet always remains the same body, the same bed, and the same Sign,\nthe same orientation.\n\nI want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.\nBecause we’ve loaded even our song with so much music that it’s slowly sinking\nand we’ve decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold\nand it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail.\n\nIf pain is human we are not human beings merely to suffer pain;\nthat’s why I think so much these days about the great river,\nthis meaning that moves forward among herbs and greenery\nand beasts that graze and drink, men who sow and harvest,\ngreat tombs even and small habitations of the dead.\nThis current that goes its way and that is not so different from the blood of men,\nfrom the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts,\nwithout the daily tremor for trivialities or even for important things;\nwhen they look straight ahead like the traveller who is used to gauging his way by the stars,\nnot like us, the other day, gazing at the enclosed garden of a sleepy Arab house,\nbehind the lattices the cool garden changing shape, growing larger and smaller,\nwe too changing, as we gazed, the shape of our desire and our hearts,\nat noon’s precipitation, we the patient dough of a world that throws us out and kneads us,\ncaught in the embroidered nets of a life that was as it should be and then became dust and sank into the sands\nleaving behind it only that vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard" - } - }, - "our-sun": { - "title": "“Our Sun”", - "body": "This sun was mine and yours; we shared it.\nWho’s suffering behind the golden silk, who’s dying?\nA woman beating her dry breasts cried out: “Cowards,\nthey’ve taken my children and torn them to shreds, you’ve killed them\ngazing at the fire-flies at dusk with a strange look,\nlost in blind thought.”\nThe blood was drying on a hand that a tree made green,\na warrior was asleep clutching the lance that cast light against his side.\n\nIt was ours, this sun, we saw nothing behind the gold embroidery\nthen the messengers came, dirty and breathless,\nstuttering unintelligible words\ntwenty days and nights on the barren earth with thorns only\ntwenty days and nights feeling the bellies of the horses bleeding\nand not a moment’s break to drink the rain-water.\nYou told them to rest first and then to speak, the light had dazzled you.\nThey died saying “We don’t have time,” touching some rays of the sun.\nYou’d forgotten that no one rests.\n\nA woman howled “Cowards,” like a dog in the night.\nOnce she would have been beautiful like you\nwith wet mouth, veins alive beneath the skin,\nwith love.\n\nThis sun was ours; you kept all of it, you wouldn’t follow me.\nAnd it was then I found out about those things behind the gold and the silk:\nwe don’t have time. The messengers were right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "thrush": { - "title": "“Thrush”", - "body": "# I. _The house near the sea_\n\nThe houses I had they took away from me. The times\nhappened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;\nsometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,\nsometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting\nwas good in my time, many felt the pellet;\nthe rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.\n\nDon’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark\nor the little wagtail\ninscribing figures with his tail in the light;\nI don’t know much about houses\nI know they have their own nature, nothing else.\nNew at first, like babies\nwho play in gardens with the tassels of the sun,\nthey embroider coloured shutters and shining doors\nover the day.\nWhen the architect’s finished, they change,\nthey frown or smile or even grow resentful\nwith those who stayed behind, with those who went away\nwith others who’d come back if they could\nor others who disappeared, now that the world’s become\nan endless hotel.\n\nI don’t know much about houses,\nI remember their joy and their sorrow\nsometimes, when I stop to think;\n again\nsometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms\nwith a single iron bed and nothing of my own,\nwatching the evening spider, I imagine\nthat someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up\nin white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels,\nand around him venerable ladies,\ngrey hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly,\nthat he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me;\nor that a woman--eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted,\nreturning from southern ports,\nSmyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria,\nfrom cities closed like hot shutters,\nwith perfume of golden fruit and herbs--\nclimbs the stairs without seeing\nthose who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs.\n\nHouses, you know, grow resentful easily when you strip them bare.\n\n\n# II. _Sensual Elpenor_\n\nI saw him yesterday standing by the door\nbelow my window; it was about\nseven o’clock; there was a woman with him.\nHe had the look of Elpenor just before he fell\nand smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk.\nHe was speaking fast, and she\nwas gazing absently towards the gramophones;\nnow and then she cut him short to say a word\nand then would glance impatiently\ntowards where they were frying fish: like a cat.\nHe muttered with a dead cigarette-butt between his lips:\n\n--“Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight\nthe statues sometimes bend like reeds\nin the midst of ripe fruit--the statues;\nand the flame becomes a cool oleander,\nthe flame that burns one, I mean.”\n\n--“It’s just the light … shadows of the night.”\n\n--“Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate,\na dark breast, and filled you with stars,\ncleaving time.\n And yet the statues\nbend sometimes, dividing desire in two,\nlike a peach; and the flame\nbecomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob,\nthen a cool leaf carried off by the wind;\nthey bend; they become light with a human weight.\nYou don’t forget it.”\n\n--“The statues are in the museum.”\n\n--“No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it?\nI mean with their broken limbs,\nwith their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize\nyet know.\n It’s as though\nin the last days of your youth you loved\na woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid,\nas you held her naked at noon,\nof the memory aroused by your embrace;\nwere afraid the kiss might betray you\nto other beds now of the past\nwhich nevertheless could haunt you\nso easily, so easily, and bring to life\nimages in the mirror, bodies once alive:\ntheir sensuality.\n It’s as though\nreturning home from some foreign country you happen to open\nan old trunk that’s been locked up a long time\nand find the tatters of clothes you used to wear\non happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights,\nmirrored, now becoming dim,\nand all that remains is the perfume of the absence\nof a young form.\n Really, those statues are not\nthe fragments. You yourself are the relic;\nthey haunt you with a strange virginity\nat home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated,\nin the unconfessed terror of sleep;\nthey speak of things you wish didn’t exist\nor would happen years after your death,\nand that’s difficult because …”\n\n--“The statues are in the museum.\nGood night.”\n\n--“… because the statues are no longer\nfragments. We are. The statues bend lightly … Good night.”\n\nAt this point they separated. He took\nthe road leading uphill toward the North\nand she moved on towards the light-flooded beach\nwhere the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio:\n\nThe radio\n\n--“Sails puffed out by the wind\nare all that stay in the mind.\nPerfume of silence and pine\nwill soon be an anodyne\nnow that the sailor’s set sail,\nflycatcher, catfish and wagtail.\nO woman whose touch is dumb,\nhear the wind’s requiem.”\n\n“Drained is the golden keg\nthe sun’s become a rag\nround a middle-aged woman’s neck\nwho coughs and coughs without break;\nfor the summer that’s gone she sighs,\nfor the gold on her shoulders, her thighs.\nO woman, O sightless thing,\nHear the blind man sing.”\n\n“Close the shutters: the day recedes;\nmake flutes from yesteryear’s reeds\nand don’t open, knock how they may:\nthey shout but have nothing to say.\nTake cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily,\nanemones out of the sea;\nO woman whose wits are lost,\nlisten, the water’s ghost …”\n\n--“Athens. The public has heard\nthe news with alarm; it is feared\na crisis is near. The prime\nminister declared: ‘There is no more time …’\nTake cyclamen … needles of pine …\nthe lily … needles of pine …\nO woman …\n--… is overwhelmingly stronger.\nThe war …”\n Soulmonger.\n\n\n# III. _The wreck ‘Thrush’_\n\n“This wood that cooled my forehead\nat times when noon burned my veins\nwill flower in other hands. Take it. I’m giving it to you;\nlook, it’s wood from a lemon tree …”\n I heard the voice\nas I was gazing at the sea trying to make out\na ship they’d sunk there years ago;\nit was called ‘Thrush’, a small wreck; the masts,\nbroken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles,\nor the memory of dreams, marking the hull:\nvague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster\nextinguished in the water. Calm spread all around.\n\nAnd gradually, in turn, other voices followed,\nwhispers thin and thirsty\nemerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side;\nyou might say they were asking to drink a drop of blood;\nfamiliar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other.\nAnd then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it\nfalling into the heart of day,\nquietly, as though motionless:\n“And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you.\nYour law will be my law; how can I go\nwandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone.\nI prefer death.\nWhose path is for the better only God knows.”\n\nCountries of the sun yet you cannot face the sun.\nCountries of men yet you cannot face man.\n\n The light\n\nAs the years go by\nthe judges who condemn you grow in number;\nas the years go by and you converse with fewer voices,\nyou see the sun with different eyes:\nyou know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you\nthe delirium of flesh, the lovely dance\nthat ends in nakedness.\nIt’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway,\nyou suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine,\neyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes:\nyou gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness.\nThe Doric chiton\nthat swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it\nis a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness.\nAnd those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms\nstruck the obstinate marathon runner\nand he saw the track sail in blood,\nthe world empty like the moon,\nthe gardens of victory wither:\nyou see them in the sun, behind the sun.\nAnd the boys who dived from the bowsprits\ngo like spindles twisting still,\nnaked bodies plunging into black light\nwith a coin between the teeth, swimming still,\nwhile the sun with golden needles sews\nsails and wet wood and colours of the sea;\neven now they’re going down obliquely\ntoward the pebbles on the sea floor,\nwhite oil-flasks.\n\nLight, angelic and black,\nlaughter of waves on the sea’s highways\ntear-stained laughter,\nthe old suppliant sees you\nas he moves to cross the invisible fields--\nlight mirrored in his blood,\nthe blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices.\nDay, angelic and black;\nthe brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner\nemerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops.\nSing little Antigone, sing, O sing …\nI’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love;\nadorn your hair with the sun’s thorns,\ndark girl;\nthe heart of the Scorpion has set,\nthe tyrant in man has fled,\nand all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae,\nhurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess:\nwhoever has never loved will love,\nin the light;\n and you find yourself\nin a large house with many windows open\nrunning from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first,\nbecause the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds\nthe sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south\nyour eyes will empty of the light of day\nthe way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "date": { - "year": 1946, - "month": "october", - "day": 31 - }, - "location": "Poros", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "a-word-for-summer": { - "title": "“A Word for Summer”", - "body": "We have returned again to autumn; summer\nlike a notebook that has tired us with writing remains\nfull of erasures, abstract scribblings\non the margins and question marks; we have returned\nto the season of eyes that gaze\nin a mirror beneath the electric light,\nlips compressed and the people strangers,\nto rooms, to roads under the pepper trees\nwhile the headlights of motorcars kill\nthousands of pallid masks.\nWe have returned; we always set out to return\nto solitude, a handful of earth in our empty palms.\n\nAnd yet I have once loved Syngros Avenue\nthe double rocking of the wide road\nthat would leave us miraculously by the sea,\nthe everlasting sea, to be cleansed of our sins;\nI have loved a few unknown persons\nsuddenly met at the day’s ending\ntalking to themselves like captains of sunken armadas,\na sign that the world is wide.\nAnd yet I have loved these very roads, these columns;\nno matter if I was born on the other shore near\nrushes and reeds, islands\nwhere there were wells in the sand that a rower\nmight quench his thirst, no matter if I was born\nby the sea which I wind and unwind in my fingers\nwhen I am weary--I no longer know where I was born.\n\nThere still remains the yellow distillate, summer,\nand your hands touching medusae on the water,\nyour eyes suddenly unveiled, the first\neyes of the world, and caverns of the sea;\nbare feet on the red earth.\nThere still remains the blond enmarbled youth, summer,\na little salt dried up in the hollow of a rock\na few red pine-needles after the rain\nscattered about like tattered fishing nets.\n\nI do not understand these faces, I do not understand them;\nsometimes they imitate death and then again\nthey shine with the lowly life of the glowworm\nwith an effort at once restrained and desperate\ncompressed between two wrinkles\non two soiled coffee-house tables;\nthey kill one another, they decrease,\nthey stick like postage-stamps to the windowpanes,\nfaces of the other tribe.\n\nWe walked together, we shared bread and sleep\nwe tasted the same bitterness of parting\nwe built our houses with whatever stones we had\nwe took to the ships, we left our native land, we returned\nwe found our women waiting for us\nbut they recognized us with difficulty, no one knows us.\nAnd our comrades put on the statues, put on the bare\nand empty chairs of autumn, and our comrades\nslew their own faces. I do not understand them.\nThere still remains the yellow distillate, summer,\nwaves of sand receding as far as the last circle\na rhythm of drums pitiless and endless\nblood-shut eyes sinking in the sun\nhands with the manner of birds cutting the sky\nsaluting the ranks of the dead that stand at attention\nlost to a degree I cannot control and which commands me;\nyour hands touching the untrammeled wave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Edmund Keeley", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jaroslav-seifert": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Jaroslav Seifert", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1986 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "czech", - "language": "czech", - "flag": "🇨🇿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Seifert", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "czech" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "chaplet-of-sage": { - "title": "“Chaplet of Sage”", - "body": "Noon was approaching and the quiet\nwas cut by the buzzing of flies\nas though with a diamond.\nWe were lying in the grass by the Sßzava,\ndrinking Chablis\nchilled in a forest spring.\n\nOnce at Konopiste Castle\nI was allowed to view\nan ancient dagger on display.\nOnly in the wound did a secret sprig\nrelease a triple blade.\nPoems are sometimes like that.\nNot many of them perhaps\nbut it is difficult to extract them from the wound.\n\nA poet often is like a lover.\nHe easily forgets\nhis one-time whispered promise of gentleness\nand the most fragile gracefulness\nhe treats with brutal gesture.\n\nHe has the right to rape.\nUnder the banner of beauty\nor that of terror.\nOr under the banner of both.\nIndeed it is his mission.\n\nEvents themselves hand him\na ready pen\nthat with its tip he may indelibly tattoo\nhis message.\nNot on the skin of the breast\nbut straight into the muscle\nwhich throbs with blood.\nBut rose and heart are not just love,\nnor a ship a voyage or adventure,\nnor a knife murder,\nnor an anchor fidelity unto death.\n\nThese foolish symbols lie.\nLife has long outgrown them.\nReality is totally different\nand a lot worse still.\n\nAnd so the poet drunk with life\nshould spew out all bitterness,\nanger and despair\nrather than let his song become a tinkling bell\non a sheep’s neck.\n\nWhen we had drunk our fill\nand rose from the flattened grass,\na bunch of naked children on the bank\nhopped into the river below us.\nAnd one of the young girls,\nthe one who on her straw-blonde hair\nwore a chaplet of wet sage,\nclimbed up on a large rock\nto stretch out on its sun-warmed surface.\n\nI was taken aback:\n Good Lord,\nshe’s no longer a child!", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "dance-of-girls-chemises": { - "title": "“Dance of Girls’ Chemises”", - "body": "A dozen girls’ chemises\ndrying on a line,\nfloral lace at the breast\nlike rose windows in a Gothic cathedral.\n\nLord,\nshield Thou me from all evil.\n\nA dozen girls’ chemises,\nthat’s love,\ninnocent girls’ games on a sunlit lawn,\nthe thirteenth, a man’s shirt,\nthat’s marriage,\nending in adultery and a pistol shot.\n\nThe wind that’s streaming through the chemises,\nthat’s love,\nour earth embraced by its sweet breezes:\na dozen airy bodies.\n\nThose dozen girls made of light air\nare dancing on the green lawn,\ngently the wind is modelling their bodies,\nbreasts, hips, a dimple on the belly there--\nopen fast, oh my eyes.\n\nNot wishing to disturb their dance\nI softly slipped under the chemises’ knees,\nand when any of them fell\nI greedily inhaled it through my teeth\nand bit its breast.\n\nLove,\nwhich we inhale and feed on,\ndisenchanted,\nlove that our dreams are keyed on,\nlove,\nthat dogs our rise and fall:\nnothing\nyet the sum of all.\n\nIn our all-electric age\nnightclubs not christenings are the rage\nand love is pumped into our tyres.\nMy sinful Magdalen, don’t cry:\nRomantic love has spent its fires.\nFaith, motorbikes, and hope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "fragment-of-a-letter": { - "title": "“Fragment of a Letter”", - "body": "All night rain lashed the windows.\nI couldn’t go to sleep.\nSo I switched on the light\nand wrote a letter.\n\nIf love could fly,\nas of course it can’t,\nand didn’t so often stay close to the ground,\nit would be delightful to be enveloped\nin its breeze.\n\nBut like infuriated bees\njealous kisses swarm down upon\nthe sweetness of the female body\nand an impatient hand grasps\nwhatever it can reach,\nand desire does not flag.\nEven death might be without terror\nat the moment of exultation.\n\nBut who has ever calculated\nhow much love goes\ninto one pair of open arms!\n\nLetters to women\nI always sent by pigeon post.\nMy conscience is clear.\nI never entrusted them to sparrowhawks\nor goshawks.\n\nUnder my pen the verses dance no longer\nand like a tear in the corner of an eye\nthe word hangs back.\nAnd all my life, at its end,\nis now only a fast journey on a train:\n\nI’m standing by the window of the carriage\nand day after day\nspeeds back into yesterday\nto join the black mists of sorrow.\nAt times I helplessly catch hold\nof the emergency brake.\n\nPerhaps I shall once more catch sight\nof a woman’s smile,\ntrapped like a torn-off flower\non the lashes of her eyes.\nPerhaps I may still be allowed\nto send those eyes at least one kiss\nbefore they’re lost to me in the dark.\n\nPerhaps once more I shall even see\na slender ankle\nchiselled like a gem\nout of warm tenderness,\nso that I might once more\nhalf choke with longing.\n\nHow much is there that man must leave behind\nas the train inexorably approaches\nLethe Station\nwith its plantations of shimmering asphodels\namidst whose perfume everything is forgotten.\nIncluding human love.\n\nThat is the final stop:\nthe train goes no further.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "i-saw-nothing-at-that-moment": { - "title": "“I saw nothing at that moment …”", - "body": "I saw nothing at that moment,\n nothing but strangers’ backs,\nheads under their hats craning.\nThe street was crowded.\n\nI’d have liked to scramble up that blank wall\nby my fingernails,\n the way addicts of ether try to do,\nbut just then my hand was seized\n by a woman’s hand,\nI took a few steps\nand before me opened those depths\nwe call the heavens.\n\nThe spires of the Cathedral down on the horizon\n looked as if cut out\nfrom matte silver foil,\nbut high above them the stars were drowning.\n\nThere it is! See it now?\n Yes, I see it!\nIn trails of sparks which would not die out\nthe star was vanishing without return.\n\nIt was a spring night, sweet and mild,\n after mid-May,\nthe balmy air was laden with perfumes\nand I inhaled it\n together with the stardust.\n\nOnce when in summer I had tried to smell\n --and only furtively--\nthe scent of some tall lilies\n--they used to sell them in our market-place\nin kitchen jugs--\npeople would laugh at me.\nFor on my face was golden pollen", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "lost-paradise": { - "title": "“Lost Paradise”", - "body": "The Old Jewish Cemetery\nis one great bouquet of grey stone\non which time has trodden.\nI was drifting among the graves,\nthinking of my mother.\nShe used to read the Bible.\n\nThe letters in two columns\nwelled up before her eyes\nlike blood from a wound.\nThe lamp guttered and smoked\nand Mother put on her glasses.\nAt times she had to blow it out\nand with her hairpin straighten\nthe glowing wick.\n\nBut when she closed her tired eyes\nshe dreamed of Paradise\nbefore God had garrisoned it\nwith armed cherubim.\nOften she fell asleep and the Book\nslipped from her lap.\n\nI was still young\nwhen I discovered in the Old Testament\nthose fascinating verses about love\nand eagerly searched for\nthe passages on incest.\nThen I did not yet suspect\nhow much tenderness is hidden in the names\nof Old Testament women.\n\nAdah is Ornament and Orpah\nis a Hind,\nNaamah is the Sweetness\nand Nikol is the Little Brook.\n\nAbigail is the Fount of Delight.\nBut if I recall how helplessly I watched\nas they dragged off the Jews,\neven the crying children,\nI still shudder with horror\nand a chill runs down my spine.\n\nJemima is the Dove and Tamar\nthe Palm Tree.\nTirzah is Grace\nand Zilpah a Dewdrop.\nMy God, how beautiful this is.\n\nWe were living in hell\nyet no one dared to strike a weapon\nfrom the murderers’ hands.\nAs if within our hearts we did not have\na spark of humanity!\n\nThe name Jecholiah means\nThe Lord is Mighty.\nAnd yet their frowning God\ngazed over the barbed wire\nand did not move a finger--\n\nDelilah is the Delicate, Rachel\nthe Ewe Lamb,\nDeborah the Bee\nand Esther the Bright Star.\n\nI’d just returned from the cemetery\nwhen the June evening, with its scents,\nrested on the windows.\nBut from the silent distance now and then\ncame thunder of a future war.\nThere is no time without murder.\n\nI almost forgot:\nRhoda is the Rose.\nAnd this flower perhaps is the only thing\nthat’s left us on earth\nfrom the Paradise that was.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "lovers-those-evening-pilgrims": { - "title": "“Lovers, those evening pilgrims …”", - "body": "Lovers, those evening pilgrims,\nwalk from darkness into darkness\n to an empty bench\nand wake the birds.\n\nOnly the rats, which nest with the swan\non the pond’s bank under the willow branches,\nsometimes alarm them.\n\nKeyholes are glittering in the sky,\nand when a cloud covers them\nsomebody’s hand is on the door-knob\nand the eye, which had hoped to see a mystery,\ngazes in vain.\n\n--I wouldn’t mind opening that door,\nexcept I don’t know which,\nand then I fear what I might find.\n\nBy now that pair were falling down together\nin a close embrace,\nand in that state of weightlessness\nwere reeling in spasms of wonderment.\n\nThe mists are dancing, wearing wreaths\nof daisies, bird droppings, and rust\n their swirling cloaks\nstill red from the extinguished evening sky.\n\nBut those two, lips to lips,\nare still beyond this world,\n beyond the door of heaven.\n\n--When you start falling, hold to me tight\nand hang on to your scarf!", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "once-only": { - "title": "“Once only …”", - "body": "Once only did I see\nthe sun so blood-red.\n And never again.\nIt sank ominously towards the horizon\nand it seemed as if\nsomeone had kicked apart the gates of hell.\nI asked at the observatory\nand now I know why.\n\nHell we all know, it’s everywhere\nand walks upon two legs.\n But paradise?\nIt may well be that paradise is only\na smile\n we have long waited for,\nand lips\n whispering our name.\nAnd then that brief vertiginous moment\nwhen we’re allowed to forget\nthat hell exists.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "our-lady-of-zizkov": { - "title": "“Our Lady of Žižkov”", - "body": "When May arrived at last,\nand spring\nsoiled its flowery rays\non the roofs of the tenements,\nmy mother would sink to her knees\nin the church of St Procopius\nand pray to the Holy Virgin.\nIn May she felt closest to her.\n\nHuddled before the altar\nshe resembled a bundle of cast-off clothes\nleft behind by someone.\n--It’s you I’m praying for, ungrateful boy!\nBut I smiled inwardly.\n\nI enjoyed Latin at school.\nWe were reading Virgil,\nand in my head echoed the rhythms\nof the Roman poets.\nI also started writing poetry.\nI walked along and sang.\nSoftly and badly.\n\nI hated mathematics.\nWhenever we had to write an essay\nI was terrified\nand during the night would toss\nfrom side to side.\n\nSometimes I thought of praying\nbut soon rejected the idea. It would be shameful\nto ask Heaven for help.\nUntil one day I came to know\nwhat terror was.\nTerrifying terror.\n\nI remembered my mother’s faith\nand calculatingly I thought:\nJust suppose!\nSoon I was walking up the cold stone steps\nto the Žižkov church,\nto the altar decked with lilies.\nBut their smell turned bitter on my tongue\nlike the milky sap\nof dandelions.\n\nHurriedly I asked the Virgin\nto have mercy!\nTo have mercy and intercede\nso that the girl I loved,\nwho was barely eighteen\nand was walking about in deep despair,\nnot eating and not sleeping,\nunhappy and in tears,\nand would rather die,\nshould not, for Heaven’s sake, be pregnant.\n\nThe statue of the Virgin gazed\nstolidly into my eyes.\n\nBut a few days later the flowers\non the altar smelled\nsweet as before.\n\nAnd once more I felt on my lips\nthe taste of happy kisses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "place-of-pilgrimage": { - "title": "“Place of Pilgrimage”", - "body": "After a long journey we awoke\nin the cathedral’s cloisters, where men slept\non the bare floor.\nThere were no buses in those days,\nonly trams and the train,\nand on a pilgrimage one went on foot.\n\nWe were awakened by bells. They boomed\nfrom square-set towers.\nUnder their clangour trembled not only the church\nbut the dew on the stalks\nas though somewhere quite close above our heads\nelephants were trampling on the clouds\nin a morning dance.\n\nA few yards from us the women were dressing.\nThus did I catch a glimpse\nfor only a second or two\nof the nakedness of female bodies\nas hands raised skirts above heads.\n\nBut at that moment someone clamped\nhis hand upon my mouth\nso that I could not even let out my breath.\nAnd I groped for the wall.\n\nA moment later all were kneeling\nbefore the golden reliquary\nhailing each other with their songs.\nI sang with them.\nBut I was hailing something different,\nyes and a thousand times,\ngripped by first knowledge.\nThe singing quickly bore my head away\nout of the church.\nIn the Bible the Evangelist Luke\nwrites in his gospel,\nChapter One, Verse Twenty-six\nthe following:\n\nAnd the winged messenger flew in by the window\ninto the virgin’s chamber\nsoftly as the barn-owl flies by night,\nand hovered in the air before the maiden\na foot above the ground,\nimperceptibly beating his wings.\nHe spoke in Hebrew about David’s throne.\n\nShe dropped her eyes in surprise\nand whispered: Amen\nand her nut-brown hair\nfell from her forehead onto her prie-dieu.\n\nNow I know how at that fateful moment\nwomen act\nto whom an angel has announced nothing.\n\nThey first shriek with delight,\nthen they sob\nand mercilessly dig their nails\ninto man’s flesh.\nAnd as they close their womb\nand tense their muscles\na heart in tumult hurls wild words\nup to their lips.\n\nI was beginning to get ready for life\nand headed wherever\nthe world was most exciting.\nI well recall the rattle of rosaries\nat fairground stalls\nlike rain on a tin roof,\nand the girls, as they strolled among the stalls,\nnervously clutching their scarves,\nliberally cast their sparkling eyes\nin all directions,\nand their lips launched on the empty air\nthe flavour of kisses to come.\n\nLife is a hard and agonizing flight\nof migratory birds\nto regions where you are alone.\nAnd whence there’s no return.\nAnd all that you have left behind,\nthe pain, the sorrows, all your disappointments\nseem easier to bear\nthan is this loneliness,\nwhere there is no consolation\nto bring a little comfort to\nyour tear-stained soul.\n\nWhat use to me are those sweet sultanas!\nGood thing that at the rifle booth I won\na bright-red paper rose!\nI kept it a long time\nand still it smelled of carbide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "the-plague-column": { - "title": "“The Plague Column”", - "body": "To the four corners of the earth they turn:\nthe four demobilized knights of the heavenly host.\nAnd the four corners of the earth\nare barred\nbehind four heavy locks.\n\nDown the sunny path the ancient shadow\nof the column staggers\nfrom the hour of Shackles\nto the hour of Dance.\nFrom the hour of the Rose\nto the hour of the Dragon’s Claw.\nFrom the hour of Smiles\nto the hour of Wrath.\n\nFrom the hour of Hope\nto the hour of Never,\nwhence it is just a short step\nto the hour of Despair,\nto Death’s turnstile.\n\nOur lives run\nlike fingers over sandpaper,\ndays, weeks, years, centuries.\nAnd there were times when we spent\nlong years in tears.\nI still walk around the column\nwhere so often I waited,\nlistening to the water gurgling\nfrom apocalyptic mouths,\nalways astonished\nat the water’s flirtatiousness\nas it splintered on the basin’s surface\nuntil the Column’s shadow fell across your face.\n\nThat was the hour of the Rose.\n\nYou there, young lad, do me a favour: climb\nup on the fountain and read out to me\nthe words the four Evangelists are writing\non their stone pages.\n\nThe Evangelist Matthew is first.\n And which of us from pure joy\n can add to his life’s span\n one cubit?\n\nAnd what does Mark, the second, write?\n Is a candle bought\n to be put under a bushel\n and not to be set on a candlestick?\n\nAnd the Evangelist Luke?\n The light of the body is in the eye.\n But where many bodies are\n thither will many eagles be gathered\n together.\n\nAnd lastly, John, the favourite of the Lord,\nwhat does he write?\nHe has his book shut on his lap.\nThen open it, boy. If needs be\nwith your teeth.\nI was christened on the edge of Olsany\nin the plague chapel of Saint Roch.\n\nWhen bubonic plague was raging in Prague\nthey laid the dead around the chapel.\nBody upon body, in layers.\nTheir bones, over the years, grew into\nrough-stacked pyres\nwhich blazed\nin the quicklime whirlwind of clay.\n\nFor a long time I would visit\nthese mournful places,\nbut I did not forsake the sweetness of life.\n\nI felt happy in the warmth of human breath\nand when I roamed among people\nI tried to catch the perfume of women’s hair.\n\nOn the steps of the Olsany taverns\nI used to crouch at night to hear\nthe coffin-bearers and grave-diggers\nsinging their rowdy songs.\n\nBut that was long ago\nthe taverns have fallen silent,\nthe grave-diggers in the end\nburied each other.\n\nWhen spring came within reach,\nwith feather and lute,\nI’d walk around the lawn with the Japanese cherries\non the south side of the chapel\nand, bewitched by their aging splendour,\nthink about girls\nsilently undressing at night.\nI did not know their names\nbut one of them,\nwhen sleep would not come,\ntapped softly on my window.\n\nAnd who was it that wrote\nthose poems on my pillow?\n\nSometimes I would stand by the wooden bell tower.\nThe bell was tolled\nwhenever they lifted up a corpse in the chapel.\nIt too is silent now.\n\nI gazed on the neo-classical statuary\nin the Mal Strana cemetery.\nThe statues were still grieving over their dead\nfrom whom they’d had to part.\nLeaving, they walked slowly\nwith the smile of their ancient beauty.\n\nAnd there were among them not only women\nbut also soldiers with helmets, and armed\nunless I’m mistaken.\n\nI haven’t been here for a long time.\n\nDon’t let them dupe you\nthat the plague’s at an end:\nI’ve seen too many coffins hauled\nthrough this dark gateway,\nwhich is not the only one.\n\nThe plague still rages and it seems that the doctors\nare giving different names to the disease\nto avoid a panic.\nYet it is still the same old death\nand nothing else,\nand it is so contagious\nno one alive can escape it.\n\nWhenever I have looked out of my window,\nemaciated horses have been drawing that ill-boding cart\nwith a gaunt coffin.\nOnly, those bells aren’t tolled so often now,\ncrosses no longer painted on front doors,\njuniper twigs no longer burnt for fumigation.\n\nIn the Julian Fields\nwe’d sometimes lie at nightfall,\nas Brno was sinking into the darkness,\nand in the branches of the Svitava\nthe frogs began their plaint.\n\nOnce a young gipsy sat down beside us.\nHer blouse was half unbuttoned\nand she read our hands.\nTo Halas she said:\n You won’t live to be fifty.\nTo Artus Chernfk:\n You’ll live till just after that.\nI didn’t want her to tell my fortune,\nI was afraid.\n\nShe seized my hand\nand angrily exclaimed:\n You’ll live a long time!\nIt sounded like a threat.\n\nThe many rondels and songs I wrote!\nThere was a war all over the world\nand all over the world\nwas grief.\nAnd yet I whispered into jewelled ears\nverses of love.\nIt makes me feel ashamed.\nBut no, not really.\nA wreath of sonnets I laid upon\nthe curves of your lap as you fell asleep.\nIt was more beautiful than the laurel wreaths\nof speedway winners.\n\nBut suddenly we met\nat the steps of the fountain,\nwe each went somewhere else, at another time\nand by another path.\n\nFor a long time I felt\nI kept seeing your legs,\nsometimes I even heard your laughter\nbut it wasn’t you.\nAnd finally I even saw your eyes.\nBut only once.\n\nMy skin thrice dabbed with a swab\nsoaked in iodine\nwas golden brown,\nthe colour of the skin of dancing girls\nin Indian temples.\nI stared fixedly at the ceiling\nto see them better\nand the flower-decked procession\nmoved round the temple.\n\nOne of them, the one in the middle\nwith the blackest eyes,\nsmiled at me.\nGod,\nwhat foolishness is racing through my head\nas I lie on the operating table\nwith drugs in my blood.\n\nAnd now they’ve lit the lamp above me,\nthe surgeon brings his scalpel down\nand firmly makes a long incision.\nBecause I came round quickly\nI firmly closed my eyes again.\nEven so I caught a glimpse\nof female eyes above a sterile mask\njust long enough for me to smile.\nHallo, beautiful eyes.\n\nBy now they had ligatures around my blood vessels\nand hooks opening up my wounds\nto let the surgeon separate\nthe paravertebral muscles\nand expose the spines and arches.\nI uttered a soft moan.\n\nI was lying on my side,\nmy hands tied at the wrists\nbut with my palms free:\nthese a nurse was holding in her lap\nup by my head.\nI firmly gripped her thigh\nand fiercely pressed it to me\nas a diver clutches a slim amphora\nstreaking up to the surface.\n\nJust then the pentothol began to flow\ninto my veins\nand all went black before me.\nThere was a darkness as at the end of the world\nand I remember no more.\n\nDear nurse, you got a few bruises.\nI’m very sorry.\nBut in my mind I say:\n A pity\nI couldn’t bring this alluring booty\nup with me from the darkness\ninto the light and\nbefore my eyes.\n\nThe worst is over now,\nI tell myself: I’m old.\nThe worst is yet to come:\nI’m still alive.\nIf you really must know:\nI have been happy.\n\nSometimes a whole day, sometimes whole hours,\nsometimes just a few minutes.\n\nAll my life I have been faithful to love.\nAnd if a woman’s hands are more than wings\nwhat then are her legs?\nHow I enjoyed testing their strength.\nThat soft strength in their grip.\nLet those knees then crush my head!\n\nIf I closed my eyes in this embrace\nI would not be so drunk\nand there wouldn’t be that feverish drumming\nin my temples.\nBut why should I close them?\n\nWith open eyes\nI have walked through this land.\nIt’s beautiful--but you know that.\nIt has meant more to me perhaps than all my loves,\nand her embrace has lasted all my life.\nWhen I was hungry\nI fed almost daily\non the words of her songs.\n\nThose who have left\nhastily fled to distant lands,\nmust realize it by now:\nthe world is terrible.\nThey do not love and are not loved.\nWe at least love.\nSo let her knees then crush\nmy head!\n\nHere is an accurate catalogue of guided missiles.\n\nSurface-to-air\nSurface-to-surface\nSurface-to-sea\nAir-to-air\nAir-to-surface\nAir-to-sea\nSea-to-air\nSea-to-sea\nSea-to-surface\n\nHush, city, I can’t make out the whispering of the weir.\nAnd people go about, quite unsuspecting\nthat above their heads fly\nfiery kisses\ndelivered by hand from window to window.\n\nMouth-to-eye\nMouth-to-face\nMouth-to-mouth\nAnd so on\n\nUntil a hand at night pulls down a blind\nand hides the target.\n\nOn the narrow horizon of home\nbetween sewing box\nand slippers with swansdown pompoms\nher belly’s hot moon\nis quickly waxing.\n\nAlready she counts the days of the lark\nthough the sparrows are still pecking poppyseed\nbehind frost-etched flowers.\nIn the wild-thyme nest\nsomeone’s already winding up the spring\nof the tiny heart\nso it should go accurately\nall life long.\n\nWhat’s all this talk of grey hair\nand wisdom?\nWhen the bush of life burns down\nexperience is worthless.\nIndeed it always is.\n\nAfter the hailstorm of graves\nthe column was thrust up high\nand four old poets\nleaned back on it\nto write on the books pages\ntheir bestsellers.\n\nThe basin now is empty,\nlittered with cigarette stubs,\nand the sun only hesitantly uncovers\nthe grief of the stones pushed aside.\nA place perhaps for begging.\n\nBut to cast my life away just like that\nfor nothing at all--that\nI won’t do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "a-song-at-the-end": { - "title": "“A Song at the End”", - "body": "Listen: about little Hendele.\nShe came back to me yesterday\nand she was twenty-four already.\nAnd as graceful as Shulamite.\n\nShe wore an ash-gray squirrel fur\nand a pert little cap\nand round her neck she’d tied a scarf\nthe colour of pale smoke.\n\nHendele, how well this suits you!\nI thought that you were dead\nand meanwhile you have grown more beautiful.\nI am glad you’ve come!\n\nHow wrong you are, dear friend!\nI’ve been dead twenty years,\nand very well you know it.\nI’ve only come to meet you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "struggle-with-the-angel": { - "title": "“Struggle with the Angel”", - "body": "God knows who first thought up\nthat gloomy image\nand spoke of the dead\nas living shades\nstraying about amongst us.\n\nAnd yet those shades are really here--\nyou can’t miss them.\nOver the years I’ve gathered around me\na numerous cluster.\nBut it is I amidst them all\nwho is straying.\n\nThey’re dark\nand their muteness keeps time\nwith my muteness\nwhen the evening’s closing in\nand I’m alone.\nNow and again they stay my writing hand\nwhen I’m not right,\nand blow away an evil thought\nthat’s painful.\n\nSome of them are so dim\nand faded\nI’m losing sight of them in the distance.\nOne of the shades, however, is rose-red\nand weeps.\nIn every person’s life\nthere comes a moment\nwhen everything suddenly goes black before his eyes\nand he longs passionately to take in his hands\na smiling head.\nHis heart wants to be tied\nto another heart,\neven by deep stitches,\nwhile his lips desire nothing more\nthan to touch down on the spots where\nthe midnight raven settled on Pallas Athene\nwhen uninvited it flew in to visit\na melancholy poet.\n\nIt is called love.\nAll right,\nperhaps that’s what it is!\nBut only rarely does it last for long,\nlet alone unto death\nas in the case of swans.\nOften loves succeed each other\nlike suits of cards in your hand.\n\nSometimes it’s just a tremor of delight,\nmore often long and bitter pain.\nAt other times all sighs and tears.\nAnd sometimes even boredom.\nThat’s the saddest kind.\n\nSome time in the past I saw a rose-red shade.\nIt stood by the entrance to a house\nfacing Prague’s railway station,\neternally swathed in smoke.\n\nWe used to sit there by the window.\nI held her delicate hands\nand talked of love.\nI’m good at that!\nShe’s long been dead.\nThe red lights were winking\ndown by the track.\n\nAs soon as the wind sprang up a little\nit blew away the grey veil\nand the rails glistened\nlike the strings of some monstrous piano.\nAt times you could also hear the whistle of steam\nand the puffing of engines\nas they carried off people’s wretched longings\nfrom the grimy platforms\nto all possible destinations.\nSometimes they also carried away the dead\nreturning to their homes\nand to their cemeteries.\n\nNow I know why it hurts so\nto tear hand from hand,\nlips from lips,\nwhen the stitches tear\nand the guard slams shut\nthe last carriage door.\n\nLove’s an eternal struggle with the angel.\nFrom dawn to night.\nWithout mercy.\nThe opponent is often stronger.\nBut woe to him\nwho doesn’t realize\nthat his angel has no wings\nand will not bless.", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers" - } - }, - "the-year-1934": { - "title": "“The Year 1934”", - "body": "The happiness of youth\nis pleasant to remember.\nOnly the river doesn’t age.\nThe windmill has collapsed,\ncapricious winds\nare whistling, unconcerned.\n\nA touching wayside cross remains.\nA cornflower wreath like a nest without birds\nupon Christ’s shoulder,\nand a frog blaspheming in the sedge.\n\nHave mercy upon us!\nA bitter time has come\nto the banks of sweet rivers,\ntwo years the factories have stood empty\nand children learn the language of hunger\nat their mothers’ knees.\n\nAnd still their laughter rings\nunder the willow sadly silent\nin its silver.\n\nMay they give us a happier old age\nthan the childhood we’re giving them!", - "metadata": { - "language": "czech", - "translator": "Ewald Osers", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - } - } - }, - "ilya-selvinsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ilya Selvinsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Selvinsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "sebastopol": { - "title": "“Sebastopol”", - "body": "I was in prison in that town,\nMy cell was four by three. Still\nI could hear the sea through the bars,\nAnd I was happy.\n Every day at noon\nA cannon sounded over the town.\nFrom early morning, barely awake\nI was waiting for its thunder.\nAnd was as glad as if the booming clock\nWas a present for me.\n When the chief,\nNot so much a Wrangel man as a tsarist,\nLieutenant Colonel Ivanov of the infantry,\nAllowed me to be indulged with a book,\nAnd I, in love with Blok’s mist and shadows,\nWas sent … a telephone directory--I\nTook no offense at all. On the contrary!\nWith an amused expression, I read: “Sobakin.\n Sobakin-Sobakovsky,\n Sobachevky,\n Sobashnikov”\n and simply, “Sobaka”--\nAnd I was happy for nineteen days.\nLater I got out and saw the beach,\nAnd in the distance a three-decked schooner,\nAnd behind her a dinghy.\n My amusement\nDid not fade in the least. I thought\nThat if this thing dropped anchor,\nI would swim to its captain\nAnd would sail then to Constantinople\nOr somewhere else … But the schooner\nMelted into the blue of the sea.\n\nAll the same, I was blissfully serene:\nActually, there’s no sense regretting\nThe transience of happiness! It was already a blessing\nThat I was happy. And there seemed\nNo reason for it, so much the better;\nAs things are, happiness\n was mine in vain.\n\nSo I loafed about, rolling like a brig,\nAlong Count’s Dock and past the bronze\nNakhimov, and past the vistas\nOf the eleven-month-old battle,\nAnd past the little house where in the window\nSat a large-headed, stumpy,\nTame raven with blue eyes.\n\nYes, I was happy! Of course, I was happy.\nMadly happy. Nineteen years old\nAnd not a penny. All I had then\nWas a smile. That was all my wealth.\n\nDo you like girls, tanned\nDarker than their gingery hair?\nWith eyes filled out with the sea’s distances?\nWith shoulders wider than their hips, eh? Furthermore,\nLips turning up just a little, like a child’s?\nOne such walked toward me.\nThat is, not so much toward me. But anyway, we walked.\nHow my heart thumped … Now she is passing.\nNo, she can’t be allowed\nTo get away …\n “Excuse me!”\nShe stopped:\n “Yes?”\n She looked.\nQuick, I must think of something!\n She waited.\nOh, hell! What can I say to her?\n“I … You see … I … Sorry, but …”\n\nAnd suddenly she gave me\nA really warm look,\nAnd thrusting her hand into a little pink pocket\nOn the white skirt (that was the fashion then),\nHanded me a “Kerenka.” So that was it!\nShe’s taken me for a beggar … Fine thing!\nI ran after her:\n “Stop!\nReally, I’m not … How dare you!\nTake it back, I beg you--take it back!\nIt’s just I like you, and I …”\nAnd suddenly I started sobbing. I’d just realized\nThat all my prison happiness\nWas simply trying to hold down the horror.\n Ah!\nWhy was I doing this? Far easier\nTo give way to the feeling. The cannon’s salvo …\nAnd this book … a telephone directory.\n\nBut the girl took me by the arm,\nAnd, thrusting bystanders aside, led me off\nInto some gateway. Two hands\nLay on my shoulders: “There there, darling!\nI didn’t mean to upset you, darling.\nStop crying, darling, stop it …”\nShe whispered, breathing hard,\nProbably becoming a little inebriated in the half-dark\nWith her own whispering and that word,\nSo bewitching, so sweet,\nSo enticing, which, perhaps,\nShe’d never had occasion to use before,\nThat loveliest, most lyrical word: “Darling.”\nI was in prison in that town.\nI was nineteen!\n And today\nAgain I am walking over blackened corpses\nOn the Balaklava-Sebastopol Road,\nWhere our cavalry division has passed.\n\nOn this vacant piece of land was the prison,\nThere. Turn right. I walk\nToward the steep-rising lane, as if someone\nWere directing my footsteps. Why?\nDebris … Craters … Smoldering ruins.\nAnd suddenly, in the middle of the gray, burnt-out place,\nSome iron gates,\nOpening onto a blue emptiness.\nI recognize them at once. Yes, yes!\n It is they.\n\nAnd then for some reason, I look around,\nAs sometimes one does,\nSensing someone’s gaze:\nAcross the road, in the little room, overgrown\nWith lilac, burdock and couch grass,\nIn the window frame, thrown out by an explosion,\nThat same, tame, big-headed\nCentenarian raven with the blue eyes.\n\nAh, what a poem that was! For the world\nThe unconquerable city of Sebastopol\nIs history. A museum town.\nAn encyclopedia of names and dates.\nBut for me … For my heart …\nFor my whole soul … No, I could not live\nAt peace, if this town\nHad remained in enemy hands.\n Nowhere in the world\n\nWill I find just this lane,\nWith its slope from heaven to sea,\nFrom light blue to dark blue--crooked,\nSlightly drunk, hobbling,\nWhere once I sobbed, growing tipsy\nOn the irrepressible whispering of love …\nThis was the very lane!\n And at once I understood\nThat poetry and the homeland are the same,\nThat the homeland too is a book\nWhich one writes for oneself,\nWith the sacred pen of memory,\nCutting out the prose, the tedious passages,\nAnd leaving sun and love.\n\nRaven, do you recall my girl?\nHow I would like to burst out sobbing now!\nBut it’s no longer possible. I am old.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "a-rabbit-made-strong-by-decree": { - "title": "“A rabbit made strong by decree”", - "body": "The Lion once gathered the beastly throng.\nAnd he decreed, without a stuttering habit,\nThat from now on the one most strong\n Would be simply--the Rabbit.\nThe little Rabbit went into the wood,\nAnd there was dancing, there was singing there!\nBut from where a birch tree stood Climbed down a Bear.\n“Get out of my way,” the Rabbit squeaked, “You dummy!\n Don’t you see who’s coming?”\nThe Bear guffawed (“How ludicrous and grim!”)\nHe whacked the bunny in the midst of laughter\nAnd not one spot was left of him\n --Not even any fur thereafter.\nBut from an oak the Owl raised up a fuss\nWith its prophetic voice, “You’ll rue this blunder.\n The Rabbit was the strongest among us,\n According to the Lion’s law we’re under.\nHe told us when we met, the wood’s aristocracy.”\n\nAnd here the Bear began to cry--repeating\n“O heaven, how could I know about the Rabbit? See,\n I wasn’t at the meeting.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Merrill Sparks & Vladimir Markov", - "date": { - "year": 1936 - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-w-service": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert W. Service", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british+canadian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧 🇨🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Service", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "british", - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 84 - }, - "poems": { - "": { - "title": "“?”", - "body": "If you had the choice of two women to wed,\n(Though of course the idea is quite absurd)\nAnd the first from her heels to her dainty head\nWas charming in every sense of the word:\nAnd yet in the past (I grieve to state),\nShe never had been exactly “straight”.\n\nAnd the second--she was beyond all cavil,\nA model of virtue, I must confess;\nAnd yet, alas! she was dull as the devil,\nAnd rather a dowd in the way of dress;\nThough what she was lacking in wit and beauty,\nShe more than made up for in “sense of duty”.\n\nNow, suppose you must wed, and make no blunder,\nAnd either would love you, and let you win her--\nWhich of the two would you choose, I wonder,\nThe stolid saint or the sparkling sinner?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "ambition": { - "title": "“Ambition”", - "body": "They brought the mighty chief to town;\nThey showed him strange, unwonted sights;\nYet as he wandered up and down,\nHe seemed to scorn their vain delights.\nHis face was grim, his eye lacked fire,\nAs one who mourns a glory dead;\nAnd when they sought his heart’s desire:\n“Me like’um tooth same gold,” he said.\n\nA dental place they quickly found.\nHe neither moaned nor moved his head.\nThey pulled his teeth so white and sound;\nThey put in teeth of gold instead.\nOh, never saw I man so gay!\nHis very being seemed to swell:\n“Ha! ha!” he cried, “Now Injun say\nMe heap big chief, _ME LOOK LIKE HELL_.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "at-thirty-five": { - "title": "“At Thirty-Five”", - "body": "Three score and ten, the psalmist saith,\nAnd half my course is well-nigh run;\nI’ve had my flout at dusty death,\nI’ve had my whack of feast and fun.\nI’ve mocked at those who prate and preach;\nI’ve laughed with any man alive;\nBut now with sobered heart I reach\nThe Great Divide of Thirty-five.\n\nAnd looking back I must confess\nI’ve little cause to feel elate.\nI’ve played the mummer more or less;\nI fumbled fortune, flouted fate.\nI’ve vastly dreamed and little done;\nI’ve idly watched my brothers strive:\nOh, I have loitered in the sun\nBy primrose paths to Thirty-five!\n\nAnd those who matched me in the race,\nWell, some are out and trampled down;\nThe others jog with sober pace;\nYet one wins delicate renown.\nO midnight feast and famished dawn!\nO gay, hard life, with hope alive!\nO golden youth, forever gone,\nHow sweet you seem at Thirty-five!\n\nEach of our lives is just a book\nAs absolute as Holy Writ;\nWe humbly read, and may not look\nAhead, nor change one word of it.\nAnd here are joys and here are pains;\nAnd here we fail and here we thrive;\nO wondrous volume! what remains\nWhen we reach chapter Thirty-five?\n\nThe very best, I dare to hope,\nEre Fate writes Finis to the tome;\nA wiser head, a wider scope,\nAnd for the gipsy heart, a home;\nA songful home, with loved ones near,\nWith joy, with sunshine all alive:\nWatch me grow younger every year--\nOld Age! thy name is Thirty-five!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-atavist": { - "title": "“The Atavist”", - "body": "What are you doing here, Tom Thorne, on the white top-knot o’ the world,\nWhere the wind has the cut of a naked knife and the stars are rapier keen?\nHugging a smudgy willow fire, deep in a lynx robe curled,\nYou that’s a lord’s own son, Tom Thorne--what does your madness mean?\n\nGo home, go home to your clubs, Tom Thorne! home to your evening dress!\nHome to your place of power and pride, and the feast that waits for you!\nWhy do you linger all alone in the splendid emptiness,\nScouring the Land of the Little Sticks on the trail of the caribou?\n\nWhy did you fall off the Earth, Tom Thorne, out of our social ken?\nWhat did your deep damnation prove? What was your dark despair?\nOh with the width of a world between, and years to the count of ten,\nIf they cut out your heart to-night, Tom Thorne,\n_HER_ name would be graven there!\n\nAnd you fled afar for the thing called Peace,\nand you thought you would find it here,\nIn the purple tundras vastly spread, and the mountains whitely piled;\nIt’s a weary quest and a dreary quest, but I think that the end is near;\nFor they say that the Lord has hidden it in the secret heart of the Wild.\n\nAnd you know that heart as few men know, and your eyes are fey and deep,\nWith a “something lost” come welling back from the raw, red dawn of life:\nWith woe and pain have you greatly lain, till out of abysmal sleep\nThe soul of the Stone Age leaps in you, alert for the ancient strife.\n\nAnd if you came to our feast again, with its pomp and glee and glow,\nI think you would sit stone-still, Tom Thorne, and see in a daze of dream,\nA mad sun goading to frenzied flame the glittering gems of the snow,\nAnd a monster musk-ox bulking black against the blood-red gleam.\n\nI think you would see berg-battling shores, and stammer and halt and stare,\nWith a sudden sense of the frozen void, serene and vast and still;\nAnd the aching gleam and the hush of dream,\nand the track of a great white bear,\nAnd the primal lust that surged in you as you sprang to make your kill.\n\nI think you would hear the bull-moose call, and the glutted river roar;\nAnd spy the hosts of the caribou shadow the shining plain;\nAnd feel the pulse of the Silences, and stand elate once more\nOn the verge of the yawning vastitudes that call to you in vain.\n\nFor I think you are one with the stars and the sun,\nand the wind and the wave and the dew;\nAnd the peaks untrod that yearn to God, and the valleys undefiled;\nMen soar with wings, and they bridle kings, but what is it all to you,\nWise in the ways of the wilderness, and strong with the strength of the Wild?\n\nYou have spent your life, you have waged your strife\nwhere never we play a part;\nYou have held the throne of the Great Unknown, you have ruled a kingdom vast:\n . . . . .\n_BUT TO-NIGHT THERE’S A STRANGE, NEW TRAIL FOR YOU, AND YOU GO, O WEARY HEART!\nTO THE PEACE AND REST OF THE GREAT UNGUESSED …\nAT LAST, TOM THORNE, AT LAST._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "athabaska-dick": { - "title": "“Athabaska Dick”", - "body": "When the boys come out from Lac Labiche in the lure of the early Spring,\nTo take the pay of the “Hudson’s Bay”, as their fathers did before,\nThey are all a-glee for the jamboree, and they make the Landing ring\nWith a whoop and a whirl, and a “Grab your girl”,\nand a rip and a skip and a roar.\nFor the spree of Spring is a sacred thing, and the boys must have their fun;\nPacker and tracker and half-breed Cree, from the boat to the bar they leap;\nAnd then when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done,\nThe boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep.\nAnd oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry,\nand sorry are they and sick:\nYet there’s none so cursed with a lime-kiln thirst as that Athabaska Dick.\n\nHe was long and slim and lean of limb, but strong as a stripling bear;\nAnd by the right of his skill and might he guided the Long Brigade.\nAll water-wise were his laughing eyes, and he steered with a careless care,\nAnd he shunned the shock of foam and rock, till they came to the Big Cascade.\nAnd here they must make the long portage, and the boys sweat in the sun;\nAnd they heft and pack, and they haul and track, and each must do his trick;\nBut their thoughts are far in the Landing bar,\nwhere the founts of nectar run:\nAnd no man thinks of such gorgeous drinks as that Athabaska Dick.\n\n’Twas the close of day and his long boat lay just over the Big Cascade,\nWhen there came to him one Jack-pot Jim, with a wild light in his eye;\nAnd he softly laughed, and he led Dick aft, all eager, yet half afraid,\nAnd snugly stowed in his coat he showed a pilfered flask of “rye”.\nAnd in haste he slipped, or in fear he tripped,\nbut--Dick in warning roared--\nAnd there rang a yell, and it befell that Jim was overboard.\n\nOh, I heard a splash, and quick as a flash I knew he could not swim.\nI saw him whirl in the river swirl, and thresh his arms about.\nIn a queer, strained way I heard Dick say: “I’m going after him,”\nThrow off his coat, leap down the boat--and then I gave a shout:\n“Boys, grab him, quick! You’re crazy, Dick! Far better one than two!\nHell, man! You know you’ve got no show! It’s sure and certain death …”\nAnd there we hung, and there we clung, with beef and brawn and thew,\nAnd sinews cracked and joints were racked, and panting came our breath;\nAnd there we swayed and there we prayed, till strength and hope were spent--\nThen Dick, he threw us off like rats, and after Jim he went.\n\nWith mighty urge amid the surge of river-rage he leapt,\nAnd gripped his mate and desperate he fought to gain the shore;\nWith teeth a-gleam he bucked the stream, yet swift and sure he swept\nTo meet the mighty cataract that waited all a-roar.\nAnd there we stood like carven wood, our faces sickly white,\nAnd watched him as he beat the foam, and inch by inch he lost;\nAnd nearer, nearer drew the fall, and fiercer grew the fight,\nTill on the very cascade crest a last farewell he tossed.\nThen down and down and down they plunged into that pit of dread;\nAnd mad we tore along the shore to claim our bitter dead.\n\nAnd from that hell of frenzied foam, that crashed and fumed and boiled,\nTwo little bodies bubbled up, and they were heedless then;\nAnd oh, they lay like senseless clay! and bitter hard we toiled,\nYet never, never gleam of hope, and we were weary men.\nAnd moments mounted into hours, and black was our despair;\nAnd faint were we, and we were fain to give them up as dead,\nWhen suddenly I thrilled with hope: “Back, boys! and give him air;\nI feel the flutter of his heart …” And, as the word I said,\nDick gave a sigh, and gazed around, and saw our breathless band;\nAnd saw the sky’s blue floor above, all strewn with golden fleece;\nAnd saw his comrade Jack-pot Jim, and touched him with his hand:\nAnd then there came into his eyes a look of perfect peace.\nAnd as there, at his very feet, the thwarted river raved,\nI heard him murmur low and deep:\n “Thank God! the _WHISKEY’s_ saved.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-baldness-of-chewed-ear": { - "title": "“The Baldness of Chewed-Ear”", - "body": "When Chewed-ear Jenkins got hitched up to Guinneyveer McGee,\nHis flowin’ locks, ye recollect, wuz frivolous an’ free;\nBut in old Hymen’s jack-pot, it’s a most amazin’ thing,\nThem flowin’ locks jest disappeared like snow-balls in the Spring;\nJest seemed to wilt an’ fade away like dead leaves in the Fall,\nAn’ left old Chewed-ear balder than a white-washed cannon ball.\n\nNow Missis Chewed-ear Jenkins, that wuz Guinneyveer McGee,\nWuz jest about as fine a draw as ever made a pair;\nBut when the boys got joshin’ an’ suggested it was she\nThat must be inflooenshul for the old man’s slump in hair--\nWhy! Missis Chewed-ear Jenkins jest went clean up in the air.\n\n“To demonstrate,” sez she that night, “the lovin’ wife I am,\nI’ve bought a dozen bottles of Bink’s Anty-Dandruff Balm.\n’Twill make yer hair jest sprout an’ curl like squash-vines in the sun,\nAn’ I’m propose to sling it on till every drop is done.”\nThat hit old Chewed-ear’s funny side, so he lays back an’ hollers:\n“The day you raise a hair, old girl, you’ll git a thousand dollars.”\n\nNow, whether ’twas the prize or not ’tis mighty hard to say,\nBut Chewed-ear didn’t seem to have much comfort from that day.\nWith bottles of that dandruff dope she followed at his heels,\nAn’ sprinkled an’ massaged him even when he ate his meals.\nShe waked him from his beauty sleep with tender, lovin’ care,\nAn’ rubbed an’ scrubbed assiduous, yet never sign of hair.\n\nWell, naturally all the boys soon tumbled to the joke,\nAn’ at the Wow-wow’s Social ’twas Cold-deck Davis spoke:\n“The little woman’s working mighty hard on Chewed-ear’s crown;\nLet’s give her for a three-fifth’s share a hundred dollars down.\nWe stand to make five hundred clear--boys, drink in whiskey straight:\n’The Chewed-ear Jenkins Hirsute Propagation Syndicate’.”\n\nThe boys wuz on, an’ soon chipped in the necessary dust;\nThey primed up a committy to negotiate the deal;\nThen Missis Jenkins yielded, bein’ rather in disgust,\nAn’ all wuz signed an’ witnessed, an’ invested with a seal.\nThey rounded up old Chewed-ear, an’ they broke it what they’d done;\nAllowed they’d bought an interest in his chance of raisin’ hair;\nThey yanked his hat off anxiouslike, opinin’ one by one\nTheir magnifyin’ glasses showed fine prospects everywhere.\nThey bought Hairlene, an’ Thatchem, an’ Jay’s Capillery Juice,\nAn’ Seven Something Sisters, an’ Macassar an’ Bay Rum,\nAn’ everyone insisted on his speshul right to sluice\nHis speshul line of lotion onto Chewed-ear’s cranium.\nThey only got the merrier the more the old man roared,\nAn’ shares in “Jenkins Hirsute” went sky-highin’ on the board.\n\nThe Syndicate wuz hopeful that they’d demonstrate the pay,\nAn’ Missis Jenkins laboured in her perseverin’ way.\nThe boys discussed on “surface rights”, an’ “out-crops” an’ so on,\nAn’ planned to have it “crown” surveyed, an’ blue prints of it drawn.\nThey ran a base line, sluiced an’ yelled, an’ everyone wuz glad,\nExcept the balance of the property, an’ he wuz “mad”.\n“It gives me pain,” he interjects, “to squash yer glowin’ dream,\nBut you wuz fools when you got in on this here ’Hirsute’ scheme.\nYou’ll never raise a hair on me,” when lo! that very night,\nPreparin’ to retire he got a most onpleasant fright:\nFor on that shinin’ dome of his, so prominently bare,\nHe felt the baby outcrop of a second growth of hair.\n\nA thousand dollars! Sufferin’ Caesar! Well, it must be saved!\nHe grabbed his razor recklesslike, an’ shaved an’ shaved an’ shaved.\nAn’ when his head was smooth again he gives a mighty sigh,\nAn’ sneaks away, an’ buys some Hair Destroyer on the sly.\nSo there wuz Missis Jenkins with “Restorer” wagin’ fight,\nAn’ Chewed-ear with “Destroyer” circumventin’ her at night.\nThe battle wuz a mighty one; his nerves wuz on the strain,\nAn’ yet in spite of all he did that hair began to gain.\n\nThe situation grew intense, so quietly one day,\nHe gave his share-holders the slip, an’ made his get-a-way.\nJest like a criminal he skipped, an’ aimed to defalcate\nThe Chewed-ear Jenkins Hirsute Propagation Syndicate.\nHis guilty secret burned him, an’ he sought the city’s din:\n“I’ve got to get a wig,” sez he, “to cover up my sin.\nIt’s growin’, growin’ night an’ day; it’s most amazin’ hair”;\nAn’ when he looked at it that night, he shuddered with despair.\nHe shuddered an’ suppressed a cry at what his optics seen--\nFor on my word of honour, boys, that hair wuz growin’ _GREEN_.\n\nAt first he guessed he’d get some dye, an’ try to dye it black;\nAn’ then he saw ’twas Nemmysis wuz layin’ on his track.\nHe must jest face the music, an’ confess the thing he done,\nAn’ pay the boys an’ Guinneyveer the money they had won.\nAn’ then there came a big idee--it thrilled him like a shock:\nWhy not control the Syndicate by buyin’ up the Stock?\n\nAn’ so next day he hurried back with smoothly shaven pate,\nAn’ for a hundred dollars he bought up the Syndicate.\n’Twas mighty frenzied finance an’ the boys set up a roar,\nBut “Hirsutes” from the market wuz withdrawn for evermore.\nAn’ to this day in Nuggetsville they tell the tale how slick\nThe Syndicate sold out too soon, and Chewed-ear turned the trick.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "barb-wire-bill": { - "title": "“Barb-Wire Bill”", - "body": "At dawn of day the white land lay all gruesome-like and grim,\nWhen Bill Mc’Gee he says to me: “We’ve _GOT_ to do it, Jim.\nWe’ve got to make Fort Liard quick. I know the river’s bad,\nBut, oh! the little woman’s sick … why! don’t you savvy, lad?”\nAnd me! Well, yes, I must confess it wasn’t hard to see\nTheir little family group of two would soon be one of three.\nAnd so I answered, careless-like: “Why, Bill! you don’t suppose\nI’m scared of that there ’babbling brook’? Whatever you say--goes.”\n\nA real live man was Barb-wire Bill, with insides copper-lined;\nFor “barb-wire” was the brand of “hooch” to which he most inclined.\nThey knew him far; his igloos are on Kittiegazuit strand.\nThey knew him well, the tribes who dwell within the Barren Land.\nFrom Koyokuk to Kuskoquim his fame was everywhere;\nAnd he did love, all life above, that little Julie Claire,\nThe lithe, white slave-girl he had bought for seven hundred skins,\nAnd taken to his wickiup to make his moccasins.\n\nWe crawled down to the river bank and feeble folk were we,\nThat Julie Claire from God-knows-where, and Barb-wire Bill and me.\nFrom shore to shore we heard the roar the heaving ice-floes make,\nAnd loud we laughed, and launched our raft, and followed in their wake.\nThe river swept and seethed and leapt, and caught us in its stride;\nAnd on we hurled amid a world that crashed on every side.\nWith sullen din the banks caved in; the shore-ice lanced the stream;\nThe naked floes like spooks arose, all jiggling and agleam.\nBlack anchor-ice of strange device shot upward from its bed,\nAs night and day we cleft our way, and arrow-like we sped.\n\nBut “Faster still!” cried Barb-wire Bill, and looked the live-long day\nIn dull despair at Julie Claire, as white like death she lay.\nAnd sometimes he would seem to pray and sometimes seem to curse,\nAnd bent above, with eyes of love, yet ever she grew worse.\nAnd as we plunged and leapt and lunged, her face was plucked with pain,\nAnd I could feel his nerves of steel a-quiver at the strain.\nAnd in the night he gripped me tight as I lay fast asleep:\n“The river’s kicking like a steer … run out the forward sweep!\nThat’s Hell-gate Canyon right ahead; I know of old its roar,\nAnd … I’ll be damned! _THE ICE IS JAMMED!_ We’ve _GOT_ to make the shore.”\n\nWith one wild leap I gripped the sweep. The night was black as sin.\nThe float-ice crashed and ripped and smashed, and stunned us with its din.\nAnd near and near, and clear and clear I heard the canyon boom;\nAnd swift and strong we swept along to meet our awful doom.\nAnd as with dread I glimpsed ahead the death that waited there,\nMy only thought was of the girl, the little Julie Claire;\nAnd so, like demon mad with fear, I panted at the oar,\nAnd foot by foot, and inch by inch, we worked the raft ashore.\n\nThe bank was staked with grinding ice, and as we scraped and crashed,\nI only knew one thing to do, and through my mind it flashed:\nYet while I groped to find the rope, I heard Bill’s savage cry:\n“That’s my job, lad! It’s me that jumps. I’ll snub this raft or die!”\nI saw him leap, I saw him creep, I saw him gain the land;\nI saw him crawl, I saw him fall, then run with rope in hand.\nAnd then the darkness gulped him up, and down we dashed once more,\nAnd nearer, nearer drew the jam, and thunder-like its roar.\n\nOh God! all’s lost … from Julie Claire there came a wail of pain,\nAnd then--the rope grew sudden taut, and quivered at the strain;\nIt slacked and slipped, it whined and gripped, and oh, I held my breath!\nAnd there we hung and there we swung right in the jaws of death.\n\nA little strand of hempen rope, and how I watched it there,\nWith all around a hell of sound, and darkness and despair;\nA little strand of hempen rope, I watched it all alone,\nAnd somewhere in the dark behind I heard a woman moan;\nAnd somewhere in the dark ahead I heard a man cry out,\nThen silence, silence, silence fell, and mocked my hollow shout.\nAnd yet once more from out the shore I heard that cry of pain,\nA moan of mortal agony, then all was still again.\n\nThat night was hell with all the frills, and when the dawn broke dim,\nI saw a lean and level land, but never sign of him.\nI saw a flat and frozen shore of hideous device,\nI saw a long-drawn strand of rope that vanished through the ice.\nAnd on that treeless, rockless shore I found my partner--dead.\nNo place was there to snub the raft, so--_HE HAD SERVED INSTEAD_;\nAnd with the rope lashed round his waist, in last defiant fight,\nHe’d thrown himself beneath the ice, that closed and gripped him tight;\nAnd there he’d held us back from death, as fast in death he lay …\nSay, boys! I’m not the pious brand, but--I just tried to pray.\nAnd then I looked to Julie Claire, and sore abashed was I,\nFor from the robes that covered her, _I--HEARD--A--BABY--CRY_ …\n\nThus was Love conqueror of death, and life for life was given;\nAnd though no saint on earth, d’ye think--\nBill’s squared hisself with Heaven?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-blind-and-the-dead": { - "title": "“The Blind and the Dead”", - "body": "She lay like a saint on her copper couch;\nLike an angel asleep she lay,\nIn the stare of the ghoulish folks that slouch\nPast the Dead and sneak away.\n\nThen came old Jules of the sightless gaze,\nWho begged in the streets for bread.\nEach day he had come for a year of days,\nAnd groped his way to the Dead.\n\n“What’s the Devil’s Harvest to-day?” he cried;\n“A wanton with eyes of blue!\nI’ve known too many a such,” he sighed;\n“Maybe I know this … mon Dieu!”\n\nHe raised the head of the heedless Dead;\nHe fingered the frozen face …\nThen a deathly spell on the watchers fell--\nGod! it was still, that place!\n\nHe raised the head of the careless Dead;\nHe fumbled a vagrant curl;\nAnd then with his sightless smile he said:\n“It’s only my little girl.”\n\n“Dear, my dear, did they hurt you so!\nCome to your daddy’s heart …”\nAye, and he held so tight, you know,\nThey were hard to force apart.\n\nNo! Paris isn’t always gay;\nAnd the morgue has its stories too:\nYou are a writer of tales, you say--\nThen there is a tale for you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-call-of-the-wild": { - "title": "“The Call of the Wild”", - "body": "Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,\nSet pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,\nBig mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,\nBlack canyons where the rapids rip and roar?\nHave you swept the visioned valley\nwith the green stream streaking through it,\nSearched the Vastness for a something you have lost?\nHave you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;\nHear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.\n\nHave you wandered in the wilderness, the sagebrush desolation,\nThe bunch-grass levels where the cattle graze?\nHave you whistled bits of rag-time at the end of all creation,\nAnd learned to know the desert’s little ways?\nHave you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o’er the ranges,\nHave you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through?\nHave you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes?\nThen listen to the Wild--it’s calling you.\n\nHave you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver?\n(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies.)\nHave you broken trail on snowshoes? mushed your huskies up the river,\nDared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?\nHave you marked the map’s void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races,\nFelt the savage strength of brute in every thew?\nAnd though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses?\nThen hearken to the Wild--it’s wanting you.\n\nHave you suffered, starved and triumphed,\ngroveled down, yet grasped at glory,\nGrown bigger in the bigness of the whole?\n“Done things” just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,\nSeeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?\nHave you seen God in His splendors, heard the text that nature renders?\n(You’ll never hear it in the family pew.)\nThe simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--\nThen listen to the Wild--it’s calling you.\n\nThey have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,\nThey have soaked you in convention through and through;\nThey have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching--\nBut can’t you hear the Wild?--it’s calling you.\nLet us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;\nLet us journey to a lonely land I know.\nThere’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,\nAnd the Wild is calling, calling … let us go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "cheer": { - "title": "“Cheer”", - "body": "It’s a mighty good world, so it is, dear lass,\nWhen even the worst is said.\nThere’s a smile and a tear, a sigh and a cheer,\nBut better be living than dead;\nA joy and a pain, a loss and a gain;\nThere’s honey and may be some gall:\nYet still I declare, foul weather or fair,\nIt’s a mighty good world after all.\n\nFor look, lass! at night when I break from the fight,\nMy Kingdom’s awaiting for me;\nThere’s comfort and rest, and the warmth of your breast,\nAnd little ones climbing my knee.\nThere’s fire-light and song--Oh, the world may be wrong!\nIts empires may topple and fall:\nMy home is my care--if gladness be there,\nIt’s a mighty good world after all.\n\nO heart of pure gold! I have made you a fold,\nIt’s sheltered, sun-fondled and warm.\nO little ones, rest! I have fashioned a nest;\nSleep on! you are safe from the storm.\nFor there’s no foe like fear, and there’s no friend like cheer,\nAnd sunshine will flash at our call;\nSo crown Love as King, and let us all sing--\n“It’s a mighty good world after all.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "comfort": { - "title": "“Comfort”", - "body": "Say! You’ve struck a heap of trouble--\nBust in business, lost your wife;\nNo one cares a cent about you,\nYou don’t care a cent for life;\nHard luck has of hope bereft you,\nHealth is failing, wish you’d die--\nWhy, you’ve still the sunshine left you\nAnd the big, blue sky.\n\nSky so blue it makes you wonder\nIf it’s heaven shining through;\nEarth so smiling ’way out yonder,\nSun so bright it dazzles you;\nBirds a-singing, flowers a-flinging\nAll their fragrance on the breeze;\nDancing shadows, green, still meadows--\nDon’t you mope, you’ve still got these.\n\nThese, and none can take them from you;\nThese, and none can weigh their worth.\nWhat! you’re tired and broke and beaten?--\nWhy, you’re rich--you’ve got the earth!\nYes, if you’re a tramp in tatters,\nWhile the blue sky bends above\nYou’ve got nearly all that matters--\nYou’ve got God, and God is love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-cow-juice-cure": { - "title": "“The Cow-Juice Cure”", - "body": "The clover was in blossom, an’ the year was at the June,\nWhen Flap-jack Billy hit the town, likewise O’Flynn’s saloon.\nThe frost was on the fodder an’ the wind was growin’ keen,\nWhen Billy got to seein’ snakes in Sullivan’s shebeen.\n\nThen in meandered Deep-hole Dan, once comrade of the cup:\n“Oh Billy, for the love of Mike, why don’t ye sober up?\nI’ve got the gorgus recipay, ’tis smooth an’ slick as silk--\nJest quit yer strangle-holt on hooch, an’ irrigate with milk.\nLackteeal flooid is the lubrication you require;\nYer nervus frame-up’s like a bunch of snarled piano wire.\nYou want to get it coated up with addypose tishoo,\nSo’s it will work elastic-like, an’ milk’s the dope for you.”\n\nWell, Billy was complyable, an’ in a month it’s strange,\nThat cow-juice seemed to oppyrate a most amazin’ change.\n“Call up the water-wagon, Dan, an’ book my seat,” sez he.\n“’Tis mighty queer,” sez Deep-hole Dan, “’twas just the same with me.”\nThey shanghaied little Tim O’Shane, they cached him safe away,\nAn’ though he objurgated some, they “cured” him night an’ day;\nAn’ pretty soon there came the change amazin’ to explain:\n“I’ll never take another drink,” sez Timothy O’Shane.\nThey tried it out on Spike Muldoon, that toper of renown;\nThey put it over Grouch McGraw, the terror of the town.\nThey roped in “tanks” from far and near, an’ every test was sure,\nAn’ like a flame there ran the fame of Deep-hole’s Cow-juice Cure.\n\n“It’s mighty queer,” sez Deep-hole Dan, “I’m puzzled through and through;\nIt’s only milk from Riley’s ranch, no other milk will do.”\nAn’ it jest happened on that night with no predictive plan,\nHe left some milk from Riley’s ranch a-settin’ in a pan;\nAn’ picture his amazement when he poured that milk next day--\nThere in the bottom of the pan a dozen “colours” lay.\n\n“Well, what d’ye know ’bout that,” sez Dan; “Gosh ding my dasted eyes,\nWe’ve been an’ had the Gold Cure, Bill, an’ none of us was wise.\nThe milk’s free-millin’ that’s a cinch; there’s colours everywhere.\nNow, let us figger this thing out--how does the dust git there?\n’Gold from the grass-roots down’, they say--why, Bill! we’ve got it cold--\nThem cows what nibbles up the grass, jest nibbles up the gold.\nWe’re blasted, bloomin’ millionaires; dissemble an’ lie low:\nWe’ll follow them gold-bearin’ cows, an’ prospect where they go.”\n\nAn’ so it came to pass, fer weeks them miners might be found\nA-sneakin’ round on Riley’s ranch, an’ snipin’ at the ground;\nTill even Riley stops an’ stares, an’ presently allows:\n“Them boys appear to take a mighty interest in cows.”\nAn’ night an’ day they shadowed each auriferous bovine,\nAn’ panned the grass-roots on their trail, yet nivver gold they seen.\nAn’ all that season, secret-like, they worked an’ nothin’ found;\nAn’ there was colours in the milk, but none was in the ground.\nAn’ mighty desperate was they, an’ down upon their luck,\nWhen sudden, inspirationlike, the source of it they struck.\nAn’ where d’ye think they traced it to? it grieves my heart to tell--\nIn the black sand at the bottom of that wicked milkman’s _WELL_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee": { - "title": "“The Cremation of Sam McGee”", - "body": "_There are strange things done in the midnight sun\n By the men who moil for gold;\nThe Arctic trails have their secret tales\n That would make your blood run cold;\nThe Northern Lights have seen queer sights,\n But the queerest they ever did see\nWas that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge\n I cremated Sam McGee._\n\nNow Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.\nWhy he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.\nHe was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;\nThough he’d often say in his homely way that he’d “sooner live in hell”.\n\nOn a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.\nTalk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.\nIf our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;\nIt wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.\n\nAnd that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,\nAnd the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,\nHe turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;\nAnd if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”\n\nWell, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no;\nthen he says with a sort of moan:\n“It’s the cursed cold, and it’s got right hold\ntill I’m chilled clean through to the bone.\nYet ’tain’t being dead--it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;\nSo I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”\n\nA pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;\nAnd we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.\nHe crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;\nAnd before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.\n\nThere wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,\nWith a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;\nIt was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:\n“You may tax your brawn and brains,\nBut you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”\n\nNow a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.\nIn the days to come, though my lips were dumb,\nin my heart how I cursed that load.\nIn the long, long night, by the lone firelight,\nwhile the huskies, round in a ring,\nHowled out their woes to the homeless snows--\nO God! how I loathed the thing.\n\nAnd every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;\nAnd on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;\nThe trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;\nAnd I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.\n\nTill I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;\nIt was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May”.\nAnd I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;\nThen “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”\n\nSome planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;\nSome coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;\nThe flames just soared, and the furnace roared--\nsuch a blaze you seldom see;\nAnd I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.\n\nThen I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;\nAnd the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.\nIt was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled\ndown my cheeks, and I don’t know why;\nAnd the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.\n\nI do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;\nBut the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;\nI was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.\nI guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”; …\nthen the door I opened wide.\n\nAnd there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;\nAnd he wore a smile you could see a mile,\nand he said: “Please close that door.\nIt’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm--\nSince I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee,\nit’s the first time I’ve been warm.”\n\n_There are strange things done in the midnight sun\n By the men who moil for gold;\nThe Arctic trails have their secret tales\n That would make your blood run cold;\nThe Northern Lights have seen queer sights,\n But the queerest they ever did see\nWas that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge\n I cremated Sam McGee._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "death-in-the-arctic": { - "title": "“Death in the Arctic”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI took the clock down from the shelf;\n“At eight,” said I, “I shoot myself.”\nIt lacked a _MINUTE_ of the hour,\nAnd as I waited all a-cower,\nA skinful of black, boding pain,\nBits of my life came back again …\n\n _“Mother, there’s nothing more to eat--\n Why don’t you go out on the street?\n Always you sit and cry and cry;\n Here at my play I wonder why.\n Mother, when you dress up at night,\n Red are your cheeks, your eyes are bright;\n Twining a ribband in your hair,\n Kissing good-bye you go down-stair.\n Then I’m as lonely as can be.\n Oh, how I wish you were with me!\n Yet when you go out on the street,\n Mother, there’s always lots to eat …”_\n\n\n# II.\n\nFor days the igloo has been dark;\nBut now the rag wick sends a spark\nThat glitters in the icy air,\nAnd wakes frost sapphires everywhere;\nBright, bitter flames, that adder-like\nDart here and there, yet fear to strike\nThe gruesome gloom wherein _THEY_ lie,\nMy comrades, oh, so keen to die!\nAnd I, the last--well, here I wait\nThe clock to strike the hour of eight …\n\n _“Boy, it is bitter to be hurled\n Nameless and naked on the world;\n Frozen by night and starved by day,\n Curses and kicks and clouts your pay.\n But you must fight! Boy, look on me!\n Anarch of all earth-misery;\n Beggar and tramp and shameless sot;\n Emblem of ill, in rags that rot.\n Would you be foul and base as I?\n Oh, it is better far to die!\n Swear to me now you’ll fight and fight,\n Boy, or I’ll kill you here to-night …”_\n\n\n# III.\n\nCurse this silence soft and black!\nSting, little light, the shadows back!\nDance, little flame, with freakish glee!\nTwinkle with brilliant mockery!\nGlitter on ice-robed roof and floor!\nJewel the bear-skin of the door!\nGleam in my beard, illume my breath,\nBlanch the clock face that times my death!\nBut do not pierce that murk so deep,\nWhere in their sleeping-bags they sleep!\nBut do not linger where they lie,\nThey who had all the luck to die! …\n\n _“There is nothing more to say;\n Let us part and go our way.\n Since it seems we can’t agree,\n I will go across the sea.\n Proud of heart and strong am I;\n Not for woman will I sigh;\n Hold my head up gay and glad:\n You can find another lad …”_\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAbove the igloo piteous flies\nOur frayed flag to the frozen skies.\nOh, would you know how earth can be\nA hell--go north of Eighty-three!\nGo, scan the snows day after day,\nAnd hope for help, and pray and pray;\nHave seal-hide and sea-lice to eat;\nMelt water with your body’s heat;\nSleep all the fell, black winter through\nBeside the dear, dead men you knew.\n(The walrus blubber flares and gleams--\nO God! how long a minute seems!) …\n\n _“Mary, many a day has passed,\n Since that morn of hot-head youth.\n Come I back at last, at last,\n Crushed with knowing of the truth;\n How through bitter, barren years\n You loved me, and me alone;\n Waited, wearied, wept your tears--\n Oh, could I atone, atone,\n I would pay a million-fold!\n Pay you for the love you gave.\n Mary, look down as of old--\n I am kneeling by your grave.” …_\n\n\n# V.\n\nOlaf, the Blonde, was first to go;\nBitten his eyes were by the snow;\nSightless and sealed his eyes of blue,\nSo that he died before I knew.\nHere in those poor weak arms he died:\n“Wolves will not get you, lad,” I lied;\n“For I will watch till Spring come round;\nSlumber you shall beneath the ground.”\nOh, how I lied! I scarce can wait:\nStrike, little clock, the hour of eight! …\n\n _“Comrade, can you blame me quite?\n The horror of the long, long night\n Is on me, and I’ve borne with pain\n So long, and hoped for help in vain.\n So frail am I, and blind and dazed;\n With scurvy sick, with silence crazed.\n Beneath the Arctic’s heel of hate,\n Avid for Death I wait, I wait.\n Oh if I falter, fail to fight,\n Can you, dear comrade, blame me quite?” …_\n\n\n# VI.\n\nBig Eric gave up months ago.\nBut seldom do men suffer so.\nHis feet sloughed off, his fingers died,\nHis hands shrunk up and mummified.\nI had to feed him like a child;\nYet he was valiant, joked and smiled,\nTalked of his wife and little one\n(Thanks be to God that I have none),\nPassed in the night without a moan,\nPassed, and I’m here, alone, alone …\n\n _“I’ve got to kill you, Dick.\n Your life for mine, you know.\n Better to do it quick,\n A swift and sudden blow.\n See! here’s my hand to lick;\n A hug before you go--\n God! but it makes me sick:\n Old dog, I love you so.\n Forgive, forgive me, Dick--\n A swift and sudden blow …”_\n\n\n# VII.\n\nOften I start up in the dark,\nThinking the sound of bells to hear.\nOften I wake from sleep: “Oh, hark!\nHelp … it is coming … near and near.”\nBlindly I reel toward the door;\nThere the snow billows bleak and bare;\nBlindly I seek my den once more,\nSilence and darkness and despair.\nOh, it is all a dreadful dream!\nScurvy and cold and death and dearth;\nI will awake to warmth and gleam,\nSilvery seas and greening earth.\nLife is a dream, its wakening,\nDeath, gentle shadow of God’s wing …\n\n _“Tick, little clock, my life away!\n Even a second seems a day.\n Even a minute seems a year,\n Peopled with ghosts, that press and peer\n Into my face so charnel white,\n Lit by the devilish, dancing light.\n Tick, little clock! mete out my fate:\n Tortured and tense I wait, I wait …”_\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nOh, I have sworn! the hour is nigh:\nWhen it strikes eight, I die, I die.\nRaise up the gun--it stings my brow--\nWhen it strikes eight … all ready … _NOW_--\n\n * * * * *\n\nDown from my hand the weapon dropped;\nWildly I stared …\n _THE CLOCK HAD STOPPED._\n\n\n# IX.\n\nPhantoms and fears and ghosts have gone.\nPeace seems to nestle in my brain.\nLo! the clock stopped, I’m living on;\nHeart-sick I was, and less than sane.\nYet do I scorn the thing I planned,\nHearing a voice: “O coward, fight!”\nThen the clock stopped … whose was the hand?\nMaybe ’twas God’s--ah well, all’s right.\nHeap on me darkness, fold on fold!\nPain! wrench and rack me! What care I?\nLeap on me, hunger, thirst and cold!\nI will await my time to die;\nLooking to Heaven that shines above;\nLooking to God, and love … and love.\n\n\n# X.\n\nHark! what is that? Bells, dogs again!\nIs it a dream? I sob and cry.\nSee! the door opens, fur-clad men\nRush to my rescue; frail am I;\nFeeble and dying, dazed and glad.\nThere is the pistol where it dropped.\n“Boys, it was hard--but I’m not mad …\nLook at the clock--it stopped, it stopped.\nCarry me out. The heavens smile.\nSee! there’s an arch of gold above.\nNow, let me rest a little while--\n_LOOKING TO GOD AND LOVE … AND LOVE …”_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-dreamer": { - "title": "“The Dreamer”", - "body": "The lone man gazed and gazed upon his gold,\nHis sweat, his blood, the wage of weary days;\nBut now how sweet, how doubly sweet to hold\nAll gay and gleamy to the campfire blaze.\nThe evening sky was sinister and cold;\nThe willows shivered, wanly lay the snow;\nThe uncommiserating land, so old,\nSo worn, so grey, so niggard in its woe,\nPeered through its ragged shroud. The lone man sighed,\nPoured back the gaudy dust into its poke,\nGazed at the seething river listless-eyed,\nLoaded his corn-cob pipe as if to smoke;\nThen crushed with weariness and hardship crept\nInto his ragged robe, and swiftly slept.\n\n . . . . .\n\nHour after hour went by; a shadow slipped\nFrom vasts of shadow to the camp-fire flame;\nGripping a rifle with a deadly aim,\nA gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes …\n\n * * * * *\n\nThe sleeper dreamed, and lo! this was his dream:\nHe rode a streaming horse across a moor.\nSudden ’mid pit-black night a lightning gleam\nShowed him a way-side inn, forlorn and poor.\nA sullen host unbarred the creaking door,\nAnd led him to a dim and dreary room;\nWherein he sat and poked the fire a-roar,\nSo that weird shadows jigged athwart the gloom.\nHe ordered wine. ’Od’s blood! but he was tired.\nWhat matter! Charles was crushed and George was King;\nHis party high in power; how he aspired!\nRed guineas packed his purse, too tight to ring.\nThe fire-light gleamed upon his silken hose,\nHis silver buckles and his powdered wig.\nWhat ho! more wine! He drank, he slowly rose.\nWhat made the shadows dance that madcap jig?\nHe clutched the candle, steered his way to bed,\nAnd in a trice was sleeping like the dead.\n\n . . . . .\n\nAcross the room there crept, so shadow soft,\nHis sullen host, with naked knife a-gleam,\n(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.) …\nAnd as he lay, the sleeper dreamed a dream.\n\n * * * * *\n\n’Twas in a ruder land, a wilder day.\nA rival princeling sat upon his throne,\nWithin a dungeon, dark and foul he lay,\nWith chains that bit and festered to the bone.\nThey haled him harshly to a vaulted room,\nWhere One gazed on him with malignant eye;\nAnd in that devil-face he read his doom,\nKnowing that ere the dawn-light he must die.\nWell, he was sorrow-glutted; let them bring\nTheir prize assassins to the bloody work.\nHis kingdom lost, yet would he die a King,\nFearless and proud, as when he faced the Turk.\nAh God! the glory of that great Crusade!\nThe bannered pomp, the gleam, the splendid urge!\nThe crash of reeking combat, blade to blade!\nThe reeling ranks, blood-avid and a-surge!\nFor long he thought; then feeling o’er him creep\nVast weariness, he fell into a sleep.\n\n . . . . .\n\nThe cell door opened; soft the headsman came,\nWithin his hand a mighty axe a-gleam,\n(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes,) …\nAnd as he lay, the sleeper dreamed a dream.\n\n * * * * *\n\n’Twas in a land unkempt of life’s red dawn;\nWhere in his sanded cave he dwelt alone;\nSleeping by day, or sometimes worked upon\nHis flint-head arrows and his knives of stone;\nBy night stole forth and slew the savage boar,\nSo that he loomed a hunter of loud fame,\nAnd many a skin of wolf and wild-cat wore,\nAnd counted many a flint-head to his name;\nWherefore he walked the envy of the band,\nHated and feared, but matchless in his skill.\nTill lo! one night deep in that shaggy land,\nHe tracked a yearling bear and made his kill;\nThen over-worn he rested by a stream,\nAnd sank into a sleep too deep for dream.\n\n . . . . .\n\nHunting his food a rival caveman crept\nThrough those dark woods, and marked him where he lay;\nCowered and crawled upon him as he slept,\nPoising a mighty stone aloft to slay--\n(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.) …\n\n * * * * *\n\nThe great stone crashed. The Dreamer shrieked and woke,\nAnd saw, fear-blinded, in his dripping cell,\nA gaunt and hairy man, who with one stroke\nSwung a great ax of steel that flashed and fell …\n\nSo that he woke amid his bedroom gloom,\nAnd saw, hair-poised, a naked, thirsting knife,\nA gaunt and hairy man with eyes of doom--\nAnd then the blade plunged down to drink his life …\nSo that he woke, wrenched back his robe, and looked,\nAnd saw beside his dying fire upstart\nA gaunt and hairy man with finger crooked--\nA rifle rang, a bullet searched his heart …\n\n * * * * *\n\nThe morning sky was sinister and cold.\nGrotesque the Dreamer sprawled, and did not rise.\nFor long and long there gazed upon some gold\n_A GAUNT AND HAIRY MAN WITH WOLFISH EYES_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "dreams-are-best": { - "title": "“Dreams Are Best”", - "body": "I just think that dreams are best,\nJust to sit and fancy things;\nGive your gold no acid test,\nTry not how your silver rings;\nFancy women pure and good,\nFancy men upright and true:\nFortressed in your solitude,\nLet Life be a dream to you.\n\nFor I think that Thought is all;\nTruth’s a minion of the mind;\nLove’s ideal comes at call;\nAs ye seek so shall ye find.\nBut ye must not seek too far;\nThings are never what they seem:\nLet a star be just a star,\nAnd a woman--just a dream.\n\nO you Dreamers, proud and pure,\nYou have gleaned the sweet of life!\nGolden truths that shall endure\nOver pain and doubt and strife.\nI would rather be a fool\nLiving in my Paradise,\nThan the leader of a school,\nSadly sane and weary wise.\n\nO you Cynics with your sneers,\nFallen brains and hearts of brass,\nTweak me by my foolish ears,\nWrite me down a simple ass!\nI’ll believe the real “you”\nIs the “you” without a taint;\nI’ll believe each woman too,\nBut a slightly damaged saint.\n\nYes, I’ll smoke my cigarette,\nVestured in my garb of dreams,\nAnd I’ll borrow no regret;\nAll is gold that golden gleams.\nSo I’ll charm my solitude\nWith the faith that Life is blest,\nBrave and noble, bright and good, …\nOh, I think that dreams are best!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "fighting-mac": { - "title": "“Fighting Mac”", - "body": "_A Life Tragedy._\n\nA pistol shot rings round and round the world;\nIn pitiful defeat a warrior lies.\nA last defiance to dark Death is hurled,\nA last wild challenge shocks the sunlit skies.\nAlone he falls, with wide, wan, woeful eyes:\nEyes that could smile at death--could not face shame.\n\nAlone, alone he paced his narrow room,\nIn the bright sunshine of that Paris day;\nSaw in his thought the awful hand of doom;\nSaw in his dream his glory pass away;\nTried in his heart, his weary heart, to pray:\n“O God! who made me, give me strength to face\nThe spectre of this bitter, black disgrace.”\n\n* * * * *\n\nThe burn brawls darkly down the shaggy glen;\nThe bee-kissed heather blooms around the door;\nHe sees himself a barefoot boy again,\nBending o’er page of legendary lore.\nHe hears the pibroch, grips the red claymore,\nRuns with the Fiery Cross, a clansman true,\nSworn kinsman of Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu.\n\nEating his heart out with a wild desire,\nOne day, behind his counter trim and neat,\nHe hears a sound that sets his brain afire--\nThe Highlanders are marching down the street.\nOh, how the pipes shrill out, the mad drums beat!\n“On to the gates of Hell, my Gordons gay!”\nHe flings his hated yardstick away.\n\nHe sees the sullen pass, high-crowned with snow,\nWhere Afghans cower with eyes of gleaming hate.\nHe hurls himself against the hidden foe.\nThey try to rally--ah, too late, too late!\nAgain, defenseless, with fierce eyes that wait\nFor death, he stands, like baited bull at bay,\nAnd flouts the Boers, that mad Majuba day.\n\nHe sees again the murderous Soudan,\nBlood-slaked and rapine-swept. He seems to stand\nUpon the gory plain of Omdurman.\nThen Magersfontein, and supreme command\nOver his Highlanders. To shake his hand\nA King is proud, and princes call him friend.\nAnd glory crowns his life--and now the end,\n\nThe awful end. His eyes are dark with doom;\nHe hears the shrapnel shrieking overhead;\nHe sees the ravaged ranks, the flame-stabbed gloom.\nOh, to have fallen!--the battle-field his bed,\nWith Wauchope and his glorious brother-dead.\nWhy was he saved for this, for this? And now\nHe raises the revolver to his brow.\n\n* * * * *\n\nIn many a Highland home, framed with rude art,\nYou’ll find his portrait, rough-hewn, stern and square;\nIt’s graven in the Fuyam fellah’s heart;\nThe Ghurka reads it at his evening prayer;\nThe raw lands know it, where the fierce suns glare;\nThe Dervish fears it. Honor to his name\nWho holds aloft the shield of England’s fame.\n\nMourn for our hero, men of Northern race!\nWe do not know his sin; we only know\nHis sword was keen. He laughed death in the face,\nAnd struck, for Empire’s sake, a giant blow.\nHis arm was strong. Ah! well they learnt, the foe\nThe echo of his deeds is ringing yet--\nWill ring for aye. All else … let us forget.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-ghosts": { - "title": "“The Ghosts”", - "body": "Smith, great writer of stories, drank; found it immortalised his pen;\nFused in his brain-pan, else a blank, heavens of glory now and then;\nGave him the magical genius touch; God-given power to gouge out, fling\nFlat in your face a soul-thought--Bing!\nTwiddle your heart-strings in his clutch.\n“Bah!” said Smith, “let my body lie stripped to the buff in swinish shame,\nIf I can blaze in the radiant sky out of adoring stars my name.\nSober am I nonentitized; drunk am I more than half a god.\nWell, let the flesh be sacrificed; spirit shall speak and shame the clod.\nWho would not gladly, gladly give Life to do one thing that will live?”\n\nSmith had a friend, we’ll call him Brown;\ndearer than brothers were those two.\nWhen in the wassail Smith would drown,\nBrown would rescue and pull him through.\nWhen Brown was needful Smith would lend; so it fell as the years went by,\nEach on the other would depend: then at the last Smith came to die.\n\nThere Brown sat in the sick man’s room, still as a stone in his despair;\nSmith bent on him his eyes of doom, shook back his lion mane of hair;\nSaid: “Is there one in my chosen line, writer of forthright tales my peer?\nLook in that little desk of mine; there is a package, bring it here.\nStory of stories, gem of all; essence and triumph, key and clue;\nTale of a loving woman’s fall; soul swept hell-ward, and God! it’s true.\nI was the man--Oh, yes, I’ve paid, paid with mighty and mordant pain.\nLook! here’s the masterpiece I’ve made out of my sin, my manhood slain.\nArt supreme! yet the world would stare, know my mistress and blaze my shame.\nI have a wife and daughter--there! take it and thrust it in the flame.”\n\nBrown answered: “Master, you have dipped\npen in your heart, your phrases sear.\nRuthless, unflinching, you have stripped naked your soul and set it here.\nHave I not loved you well and true? See! between us the shadows drift;\nThis bit of blood and tears means You--oh, let me have it, a parting gift.\nSacred I’ll hold it, a trust divine; sacred your honour, her dark despair;\nNever shall it see printed line: here, by the living God I swear.”\nBrown on a Bible laid his hand; Smith, great writer of stories, sighed:\n“Comrade, I trust you, and understand. Keep my secret!” And so he died.\n\nSmith was buried--up soared his sales; lured you his books in every store;\nExquisite, whimsy, heart-wrung tales; men devoured them and craved for more.\nSo when it slyly got about Brown had a posthumous manuscript,\nJones, the publisher, sought him out, into his pocket deep he dipped.\n“A thousand dollars?” Brown shook his head.\n“The story is not for sale,” he said.\n\nJones went away, then others came. Tempted and taunted, Brown was true.\nGuarded at friendship’s shrine the fame\nof the unpublished story grew and grew.\nIt’s a long, long lane that has no end,\nbut some lanes end in the Potter’s field;\nSmith to Brown had been more than friend: patron, protector, spur and shield.\nPoor, loving-wistful, dreamy Brown, long and lean, with a smile askew,\nFriendless he wandered up and down, gaunt as a wolf, as hungry too.\nBrown with his lilt of saucy rhyme, Brown with his tilt of tender mirth\nGarretless in the gloom and grime, singing his glad, mad songs of earth:\nSo at last with a faith divine, down and down to the Hunger-line.\n\nThere as he stood in a woeful plight,\ntears a-freeze on his sharp cheek-bones,\nWho should chance to behold his plight,\nbut the publisher, the plethoric Jones;\nPeered at him for a little while, held out a bill: “_NOW_, will you sell?”\nBrown scanned it with his twisted smile:\n“A thousand dollars! you go to hell!”\n\nBrown enrolled in the homeless host, sleeping anywhere, anywhen;\nSuffered, strove, became a ghost, slave of the lamp for other men;\nFor What’s-his-name and So-and-so in the abyss his soul he stripped,\nYet in his want, his worst of woe, held he fast to the manuscript.\nThen one day as he chewed his pen, half in hunger and half despair,\nCreaked the door of his garret den; Dick, his brother, was standing there.\nDown on the pallet bed he sank, ashen his face, his voice a wail:\n“Save me, brother! I’ve robbed the bank; to-morrow it’s ruin, capture, gaol.\nYet there’s a chance: I could to-day pay back the money, save our name;\nYou have a manuscript, they say,\nworth a thousand--think, man! the shame …”\nBrown with his heart pain-pierced the while,\nwith his stern, starved face, and his lips stone-pale,\nShuddered and smiled his twisted smile: “Brother, I guess you go to gaol.”\n\nWhile poor Brown in the leer of dawn wrestled with God for the sacred fire,\nCame there a woman weak and wan, out of the mob, the murk, the mire;\nFrail as a reed, a fellow ghost, weary with woe, with sorrowing;\nTwo pale souls in the legion lost; lo! Love bent with a tender wing,\nTaught them a joy so deep, so true,\nit seemed that the whole-world fabric shook,\nThrilled and dissolved in radiant dew; then Brown made him a golden book,\nFull of the faith that Life is good, that the earth is a dream divinely fair,\nLauding his gem of womanhood in many a lyric rich and rare;\nTook it to Jones, who shook his head: “I will consider it,” he said.\n\nWhile he considered, Brown’s wife lay clutched in the tentacles of pain;\nThen came the doctor, grave and grey; spoke of decline, of nervous strain;\nHinted Egypt, the South of France--Brown with terror was tiger-gripped.\nWhere was the money? What the chance? Pitiful God! … the manuscript!\nA thousand dollars! his only hope!\nhe gazed and gazed at the garret wall …\nReached at last for the envelope, turned to his wife and told her all.\nTold of his friend, his promise true; told like his very heart would break:\n“Oh, my dearest! what shall I do? shall I not sell it for your sake?”\nGhostlike she lay, as still as doom; turned to the wall her weary head;\nIcy-cold in the pallid gloom, silent as death … at last she said:\n“Do! my husband? Keep your vow! Guard his secret and let me die …\nOh, my dear, I must tell you now--_THE WOMAN HE LOVED AND WRONGED WAS I_;\nDarling! I haven’t long to live: I never told you--forgive, forgive!”\n\nFor a long, long time Brown did not speak;\nsat bleak-browed in the wretched room;\nSlowly a tear stole down his cheek,\nand he kissed her hand in the dismal gloom.\nTo break his oath, to brand her shame;\nhis well-loved friend, his worshipped wife;\nTo keep his vow, to save her name, yet at the cost of what? Her life!\nA moment’s space did he hesitate, a moment of pain and dread and doubt,\nThen he broke the seals, and, stern as fate,\nunfolded the sheets and spread them out …\nOn his knees by her side he limply sank,\npeering amazed--_EACH PAGE WAS BLANK_.\n\n(For oh, the supremest of our art are the stories we do not dare to tell,\nLocked in the silence of the heart,\nfor the awful records of Heav’n and Hell.)\n\nYet those two in the silence there, seemed less weariful than before.\nHark! a step on the garret stair, a postman knocks at the flimsy door.\n“Registered letter!” Brown thrills with fear;\nopens, and reads, then bends above:\n“Glorious tidings! Egypt, dear! The book is accepted--life and love.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "good-bye-little-cabin": { - "title": "“Good-Bye, Little Cabin”", - "body": "O dear little cabin, I’ve loved you so long,\nAnd now I must bid you good-bye!\nI’ve filled you with laughter, I’ve thrilled you with song,\nAnd sometimes I’ve wished I could cry.\nYour walls they have witnessed a weariful fight,\nAnd rung to a won Waterloo:\nBut oh, in my triumph I’m dreary to-night--\nGood-bye, little cabin, to you!\n\nYour roof is bewhiskered, your floor is a-slant,\nYour walls seem to sag and to swing;\nI’m trying to find just your faults, but I can’t--\nYou poor, tired, heart-broken old thing!\nI’ve seen when you’ve been the best friend that I had,\nYour light like a gem on the snow;\nYou’re sort of a part of me--Gee! but I’m sad;\nI hate, little cabin, to go.\n\nBelow your cracked window red raspberries climb;\nA hornet’s nest hangs from a beam;\nYour rafters are scribbled with adage and rhyme,\nAnd dimmed with tobacco and dream.\n“Each day has its laugh”, and “Don’t worry, just work”.\nSuch mottoes reproachfully shine.\nOld calendars dangle--what memories lurk\nAbout you, dear cabin of mine!\n\nI hear the world-call and the clang of the fight;\nI hear the hoarse cry of my kind;\nYet well do I know, as I quit you to-night,\nIt’s Youth that I’m leaving behind.\nAnd often I’ll think of you, empty and black,\nMoose antlers nailed over your door:\nOh, if I should perish my ghost will come back\nTo dwell in you, cabin, once more!\n\nHow cold, still and lonely, how weary you seem!\nA last wistful look and I’ll go.\nOh, will you remember the lad with his dream!\nThe lad that you comforted so.\nThe shadows enfold you, it’s drawing to-night;\nThe evening star needles the sky:\nAnd huh! but it’s stinging and stabbing my sight--\nGod bless you, old cabin, good-bye!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-gramaphone-at-fond-du-lac": { - "title": "“The Gramaphone at Fond-Du-Lac”", - "body": "Now Eddie Malone got a swell grammyfone to draw all the trade to his store;\nAn’ sez he: “Come along for a season of song,\nwhich the like ye had niver before.”\nThen Dogrib, an’ Slave, an’ Yellow-knife brave, an’ Cree in his dinky canoe,\nConfluated near, to see an’ to hear Ed’s grammyfone make its dayboo.\n\nThen Ed turned the crank, an’ there on the bank\nthey squatted like bumps on a log.\nFor acres around there wasn’t a sound, not even the howl of a dog.\nWhen out of the horn there sudden was born such a marvellous elegant tone;\nAn’ then like a spell on that auddyence fell\nthe voice of its first grammyfone.\n\n“_BAD MEDICINE!_” cried Old Tom, the One-eyed,\nan’ made for to jump in the lake;\nBut no one gave heed to his little stampede,\nso he guessed he had made a mistake.\nThen Roll-in-the-Mud, a chief of the blood, observed in choice Chippewayan:\n“You’ve brought us canned beef, an’ it’s now my belief\nthat this here’s a case of ’_CANNED MAN’_.”\n\nWell, though I’m not strong on the Dago in song,\nthat sure got me goin’ for fair.\nThere was Crusoe an’ Scotty, an’ Ma’am Shoeman Hank,\nan’ Melber an’ Bonchy was there.\n’Twas silver an’ gold, an’ sweetness untold\nto hear all them big guinneys sing;\nAn’ thick all around an’ inhalin’ the sound, them Indians formed in a ring.\n\nSo solemn they sat, an’ they smoked an’ they spat,\nbut their eyes sort o’ glistened an’ shone;\nYet niver a word of approvin’ occurred till that guy Harry Lauder came on.\nThen hunter of moose, an’ squaw an’ papoose\njest laughed till their stummicks was sore;\nSix times Eddie set back that record an’ yet\nthey hollered an’ hollered for more.\n\nI’ll never forget that frame-up, you bet; them caverns of sunset agleam;\nThem still peaks aglow, them shadders below,\nan’ the lake like a petrified dream;\nThe teepees that stood by the edge of the wood;\nthe evenin’ star blinkin’ alone;\nThe peace an’ the rest, an’ final an’ best, the music of Ed’s grammyfone.\n\nThen sudden an’ clear there rang on my ear a song mighty simple an’ old;\nHeart-hungry an’ high it thrilled to the sky,\nall about “silver threads in the gold”.\n’Twas tender to tears, an’ it brung back the years,\nthe mem’ries that hallow an’ yearn;\n’Twas home-love an’ joy, ’twas the thought of my boy …\nan’ right there I vowed I’d return.\n\nBig Four-finger Jack was right at my back, an’ I saw with a kind o’ surprise,\nHe gazed at the lake with a heartful of ache,\nan’ the tears irrigated his eyes.\nAn’ sez he: “Cuss me, pard! but that there hits me hard;\nI’ve a mother does nuthin’ but wait.\nShe’s turned eighty-three, an’ she’s only got me,\nan’ I’m scared it’ll soon be too late.”\n\n * * * * *\n\nOn Fond-du-lac’s shore I’m hearin’ once more\nthat blessed old grammyfone play.\nThe summer’s all gone, an’ I’m still livin’ on\nin the same old haphazardous way.\nOh, I cut out the booze, an’ with muscles an’ thews\nI corralled all the coin to go back;\nBut it wasn’t to be: he’d a mother, you see,\nso I--_SLIPPED IT TO FOUR-FINGER JACK._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "grin": { - "title": "“Grin”", - "body": "If you’re up against a bruiser and you’re getting knocked about--\n Grin.\nIf you’re feeling pretty groggy, and you’re licked beyond a doubt--\n Grin.\nDon’t let him see you’re funking, let him know with every clout,\nThough your face is battered to a pulp, your blooming heart is stout;\nJust stand upon your pins until the beggar knocks you out--\n And grin.\nThis life’s a bally battle, and the same advice holds true\n Of grin.\nIf you’re up against it badly, then it’s only one on you,\n So grin.\nIf the future’s black as thunder, don’t let people see you’re blue;\nJust cultivate a cast-iron smile of joy the whole day through;\nIf they call you “Little Sunshine”, wish that _THEY’D_ no troubles, too--\n You may--grin.\nRise up in the morning with the will that, smooth or rough,\n You’ll grin.\nSink to sleep at midnight, and although you’re feeling tough,\n Yet grin.\nThere’s nothing gained by whining, and you’re not that kind of stuff;\nYou’re a fighter from away back, and you _WON’T_ take a rebuff;\nYour trouble is that you don’t know when you have had enough--\n Don’t give in.\nIf Fate should down you, just get up and take another cuff;\nYou may bank on it that there is no philosophy like bluff,\n And grin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-harpy": { - "title": "“The Harpy”", - "body": "There was a woman, and she was wise; woefully wise was she;\nShe was old, so old, yet her years all told were but a score and three;\nAnd she knew by heart, from finish to start, the Book of Iniquity.\n\nThere is no hope for such as I on earth, nor yet in Heaven;\nUnloved I live, unloved I die, unpitied, unforgiven;\nA loathed jade, I ply my trade, unhallowed and unshriven.\n\nI paint my cheeks, for they are white, and cheeks of chalk men hate;\nMine eyes with wine I make them shine, that man may seek and sate;\nWith overhead a lamp of red I sit me down and wait\n\nUntil they come, the nightly scum, with drunken eyes aflame;\nYour sweethearts, sons, ye scornful ones--’tis I who know their shame.\nThe gods, ye see, are brutes to me--and so I play my game.\n\nFor life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan;\nAnd Woman in a bitter world must do the best she can--\nMust yield the stroke, and bear the yoke, and serve the will of man;\n\nMust serve his need and ever feed the flame of his desire,\nThough be she loved for love alone, or be she loved for hire;\nFor every man since life began is tainted with the mire.\n\nAnd though you know he love you so and set you on love’s throne;\nYet let your eyes but mock his sighs, and let your heart be stone,\nLest you be left (as I was left) attainted and alone.\n\nFrom love’s close kiss to hell’s abyss is one sheer flight, I trow,\nAnd wedding ring and bridal bell are will-o’-wisps of woe,\nAnd ’tis not wise to love too well, and this all women know.\n\nWherefore, the wolf-pack having gorged upon the lamb, their prey,\nWith siren smile and serpent guile I make the wolf-pack pay--\nWith velvet paws and flensing claws, a tigress roused to slay.\n\nOne who in youth sought truest truth and found a devil’s lies;\nA symbol of the sin of man, a human sacrifice.\nYet shall I blame on man the shame? Could it be otherwise?\n\nWas I not born to walk in scorn where others walk in pride?\nThe Maker marred, and, evil-starred, I drift upon His tide;\nAnd He alone shall judge His own, so I His judgment bide.\n\nFate has written a tragedy; its name is “The Human Heart”.\nThe Theatre is the House of Life, Woman the mummer’s part;\nThe Devil enters the prompter’s box and the play is ready to start.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-headliner-and-the-breadliner": { - "title": "“The Headliner and the Breadliner”", - "body": "Moko, the Educated Ape is here,\nThe pet of vaudeville, so the posters say,\nAnd every night the gaping people pay\nTo see him in his panoply appear;\nTo see him pad his paunch with dainty cheer,\nPuff his perfecto, swill champagne, and sway\nJust like a gentleman, yet all in play,\nThen bow himself off stage with brutish leer.\n\nAnd as to-night, with noble knowledge crammed,\nI ’mid this human compost take my place,\nI, once a poet, now so dead and damned,\nThe woeful tears half freezing on my face:\n“O God!” I cry, “let me but take his shape,\nMoko’s, the Blest, the Educated Ape.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-heart-of-the-sourdough": { - "title": "“The Heart of the Sourdough”", - "body": "There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon,\nThere where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,\nAnd the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.\n\nThere where the livid tundras keep their tryst with the tranquil snows;\nThere where the silences are spawned, and the light of hell-fire flows\nInto the bowl of the midnight sky, violet, amber and rose.\n\nThere where the rapids churn and roar, and the ice-floes bellowing run;\nWhere the tortured, twisted rivers of blood rush to the setting sun--\nI’ve packed my kit and I’m going, boys, ere another day is done.\n\n* * * * *\n\nI knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings;\nIt’s the olden lure, it’s the golden lure,\nit’s the lure of the timeless things,\nAnd to-night, oh, God of the trails untrod,\nhow it whines in my heart-strings!\n\nI’m sick to death of your well-groomed gods, your make believe and your show;\nI long for a whiff of bacon and beans, a snug shakedown in the snow;\nA trail to break, and a life at stake, and another bout with the foe.\n\nWith the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life,\nthe Wild that would crush and rend,\nI have clinched and closed with the naked North,\nI have learned to defy and defend;\nShoulder to shoulder we have fought it out--\nyet the Wild must win in the end.\n\nI have flouted the Wild. I have followed its lure,\nfearless, familiar, alone;\nBy all that the battle means and makes I claim that land for mine own;\nYet the Wild must win, and a day will come when I shall be overthrown.\n\nThen when as wolf-dogs fight we’ve fought, the lean wolf-land and I;\nFought and bled till the snows are red under the reeling sky;\nEven as lean wolf-dog goes down will I go down and die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "heart-o-the-north": { - "title": "“Heart o’ the North”", - "body": "And when I come to the dim trail-end,\nI who have been Life’s rover,\nThis is all I would ask, my friend,\nOver and over and over:\n\nA little space on a stony hill\nWith never another near me,\nSky o’ the North that’s vast and still,\nWith a single star to cheer me;\n\nStar that gleams on a moss-grey stone\nGraven by those who love me--\nThere would I lie alone, alone,\nWith a single pine above me;\n\nPine that the north wind whinneys through--\nOh, I have been Life’s lover!\nBut there I’d lie and listen to\nEternity passing over.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "her-letter": { - "title": "“Her Letter”", - "body": "“I’m taking pen in hand this night, and hard it is for me;\nMy poor old fingers tremble so, my hand is stiff and slow,\nAnd even with my glasses on I’m troubled sore to see …\nYou’d little know your mother, boy; you’d little, little know.\nYou mind how brisk and bright I was, how straight and trim and smart;\n’Tis weariful I am the now, and bent and frail and grey.\nI’m waiting at the road’s end, lad; and all that’s in my heart,\nIs just to see my boy again before I’m called away.”\n\n“Oh well I mind the sorry day you crossed the gurly sea;\n’Twas like the heart was torn from me, a waeful wife was I.\nYou said that you’d be home again in two years, maybe three;\nBut nigh a score of years have gone, and still the years go by.\nI know it’s cruel hard for you, you’ve bairnies of your own;\nI know the siller’s hard to win, and folks have used you ill:\nBut oh, think of your mother, lad, that’s waiting by her lone!\nAnd even if you canna come--_JUST WRITE AND SAY YOU WILL_.”\n\n“Aye, even though there’s little hope, just promise that you’ll try.\nIt’s weary, weary waiting, lad; just say you’ll come next year.\nI’m thinking there will be no ’next’; I’m thinking soon I’ll lie\nWith all the ones I’ve laid away … but oh, the hope will cheer!\nYou know you’re all that’s left to me, and we are seas apart;\nBut if you’ll only _SAY_ you’ll come, then will I hope and pray.\nI’m waiting by the grave-side, lad; and all that’s in my heart\nIs just to see my boy again before I’m called away.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "home-and-love": { - "title": "“Home and Love”", - "body": "Just Home and Love! the words are small\nFour little letters unto each;\nAnd yet you will not find in all\nThe wide and gracious range of speech\nTwo more so tenderly complete:\nWhen angels talk in Heaven above,\nI’m sure they have no words more sweet\n Than Home and Love.\n\nJust Home and Love! it’s hard to guess\nWhich of the two were best to gain;\nHome without Love is bitterness;\nLove without Home is often pain.\nNo! each alone will seldom do;\nSomehow they travel hand and glove:\nIf you win one you must have two,\n Both Home and Love.\n\nAnd if you’ve both, well then I’m sure\nYou ought to sing the whole day long;\nIt doesn’t matter if you’re poor\nWith these to make divine your song.\nAnd so I praisefully repeat,\nWhen angels talk in Heaven above,\nThere are no words more simply sweet\n Than Home and Love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-idealist": { - "title": "“The Idealist”", - "body": "Oh you who have daring deeds to tell!\nAnd you who have felt Ambition’s spell!\nHave you heard of the louse who longed to dwell\nIn the golden hair of a queen?\nHe sighed all day and he sighed all night,\nAnd no one could understand it quite,\nFor the head of a slut is a louse’s delight,\nBut he pined for the head of a queen.\n\nSo he left his kinsfolk in merry play,\nAnd off by his lonesome he stole away,\nFrom the home of his youth so bright and gay,\nAnd gloriously unclean.\nAnd at last he came to the palace gate,\nAnd he made his way in a manner straight\n(For a louse may go where a man must wait)\nTo the tiring-room of the queen.\n\nThe queen she spake to her tiring-maid:\n“There’s something the matter, I’m afraid.\nTo-night ere for sleep my hair ye braid,\nJust see what may be seen.”\nAnd lo, when they combed that shining hair\nThey found him alone in his glory there,\nAnd he cried: “I die, but I do not care,\nFor I’ve lived in the head of a queen!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "im-scared-of-it-all": { - "title": "“I’m Scared of it All”", - "body": "I’m scared of it all, God’s truth! so I am;\nIt’s too big and brutal for me.\nMy nerve’s on the raw and I don’t give a damn\nFor all the “hoorah” that I see.\nI’m pinned between subway and overhead train,\nWhere automobillies swoop down:\nOh, I want to go back to the timber again--\nI’m scared of the terrible town.\n\nI want to go back to my lean, ashen plains;\nMy rivers that flash into foam;\nMy ultimate valleys where solitude reigns;\nMy trail from Fort Churchill to Nome.\nMy forests packed full of mysterious gloom,\nMy ice-fields agrind and aglare:\nThe city is deadfalled with danger and doom--\nI know that I’m safer up there.\n\nI watch the wan faces that flash in the street;\nAll kinds and all classes I see.\nYet never a one in the million I meet,\nHas the smile of a comrade for me.\nJust jaded and panting like dogs in a pack;\nJust tensed and intent on the goal:\nO God! but I’m lonesome--I wish I was back,\nUp there in the land of the Pole.\n\nI wish I was back on the Hunger Plateaus,\nAnd seeking the lost caribou;\nI wish I was up where the Coppermine flows\nTo the kick of my little canoe.\nI’d like to be far on some weariful shore,\nIn the Land of the Blizzard and Bear;\nOh, I wish I was snug in the Arctic once more,\nFor I know I am safer up there!\n\nI prowl in the canyons of dismal unrest;\nI cringe--I’m so weak and so small.\nI can’t get my bearings, I’m crushed and oppressed\nWith the haste and the waste of it all.\nThe slaves and the madman, the lust and the sweat,\nThe fear in the faces I see;\nThe getting, the spending, the fever, the fret--\nIt’s too bleeding cruel for me.\n\nI feel it’s all wrong, but I can’t tell you why--\nThe palace, the hovel next door;\nThe insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,\nThe crush and the rush and the roar.\nI’m trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;\nI cower in the crash and the glare;\nOh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,\nFor I know that it’s safer up there!\n\nI’m scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear\nThe voice of my solitudes call!\nWe’re nothing but brute with a little veneer,\nAnd nature is best after all.\nThere’s tumult and terror abroad in the street;\nThere’s menace and doom in the air;\nI’ve got to get back to my thousand-mile beat;\nThe trail where the cougar and silver-tip meet;\nThe snows and the camp-fire, with wolves at my feet;\n Good-bye, for it’s safer up there.\n\n _To be forming good habits up there;\n To be starving on rabbits up there;\n In your hunger and woe,\n Though it’s sixty below,\n Oh, I know that it’s safer up there!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-junior-god": { - "title": "“The Junior God”", - "body": "The Junior God looked from his place\nIn the conning towers of heaven,\nAnd he saw the world through the span of space\nLike a giant golf-ball driven.\nAnd because he was bored, as some gods are,\nWith high celestial mirth,\nHe clutched the reins of a shooting star,\nAnd he steered it down to earth.\n\nThe Junior God, ’mid leaf and bud,\nPassed on with a weary air,\nTill lo! he came to a pool of mud,\nAnd some hogs were rolling there.\nThen in he plunged with gleeful cries,\nAnd down he lay supine;\nFor they had no mud in paradise,\nAnd they likewise had no swine.\n\nThe Junior God forgot himself;\nHe squelched mud through his toes;\nWith the careless joy of a wanton boy\nHis reckless laughter rose.\nTill, tired at last, in a brook close by,\nHe washed off every stain;\nThen softly up to the radiant sky\nHe rose, a god again.\n\nThe Junior God now heads the roll\nIn the list of heaven’s peers;\nHe sits in the House of High Control,\nAnd he regulates the spheres.\nYet does he wonder, do you suppose,\nIf, even in gods divine,\nThe best and wisest may not be those\nWho have wallowed awhile with the swine?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "just-think": { - "title": "“Just Think!”", - "body": "Just think! some night the stars will gleam\nUpon a cold, grey stone,\nAnd trace a name with silver beam,\nAnd lo! ’twill be your own.\n\nThat night is speeding on to greet\nYour epitaphic rhyme.\nYour life is but a little beat\nWithin the heart of Time.\n\nA little gain, a little pain,\nA laugh, lest you may moan;\nA little blame, a little fame,\nA star-gleam on a stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-land-god-forgot": { - "title": "“The Land God Forgot”", - "body": "The lonely sunsets flare forlorn\nDown valleys dreadly desolate;\nThe lordly mountains soar in scorn\nAs still as death, as stern as fate.\n\n _The lonely sunsets flame and die;\n The giant valleys gulp the night;\n The monster mountains scrape the sky,\n Where eager stars are diamond-bright._\n\nSo gaunt against the gibbous moon,\nPiercing the silence velvet-piled,\nA lone wolf howls his ancient rune--\nThe fell arch-spirit of the Wild.\n\n _O outcast land! O leper land!\n Let the lone wolf-cry all express\n The hate insensate of thy hand,\n Thy heart’s abysmal loneliness._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-land-of-beyond": { - "title": "“The Land of Beyond”", - "body": "Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond,\nThat dreams at the gates of the day?\nAlluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,\nAnd ever so far away;\nAlluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls,\nAnd ye of the trail overfond,\nWith saddle and pack, by paddle and track,\nLet’s go to the Land of Beyond!\n\nHave ever you stood where the silences brood,\nAnd vast the horizons begin,\nAt the dawn of the day to behold far away\nThe goal you would strive for and win?\nYet ah! in the night when you gain to the height,\nWith the vast pool of heaven star-spawned,\nAfar and agleam, like a valley of dream,\nStill mocks you a Land of Beyond.\n\nThank God! there is always a Land of Beyond\nFor us who are true to the trail;\nA vision to seek, a beckoning peak,\nA farness that never will fail;\nA pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,\nA manhood that irks at a bond,\nAnd try how we will, unattainable still,\nBehold it, our Land of Beyond!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-law-of-the-yukon": { - "title": "“The Law of the Yukon”", - "body": "This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:\n“Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane--\nStrong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;\nSend me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;\nSwift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,\nSired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.\nSend me the best of your breeding, lend me your chosen ones;\nThem will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;\nThem will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat;\nBut the others--the misfits, the failures--I trample under my feet.\nDissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,\nYe would send me the spawn of your gutters--Go! take back your spawn again.”\n\n“Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;\nFrom my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day;\nHugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come,\nTill he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept--the scum.\nThe pallid pimp of the dead-line, the enervate of the pen,\nOne by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was--Men.\nOne by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;\nOne by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.\nDrowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,\nRotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;\nBurst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,\nLashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;”\n\n“Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,\nFrozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;\nFeatureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,\nLeft for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white;\nGnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair,\nCrooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer;\nGoing outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam,\nWriting a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home;\nLost like a louse in the burning … or else in the tented town\nSeeking a drunkard’s solace, sinking and sinking down;\nSteeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world,\nLost ’mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled;\nIn the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,\nIts gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare;\nCrimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies,\nIn the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.\nPlague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive,\nCrushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive.”\n\n“But the others, the men of my mettle, the men who would ’stablish my fame\nUnto its ultimate issue, winning me honor, not shame;\nSearching my uttermost valleys, fighting each step as they go,\nShooting the wrath of my rapids, scaling my ramparts of snow;\nRipping the guts of my mountains, looting the beds of my creeks,\nThem will I take to my bosom, and speak as a mother speaks.\nI am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;\nSteeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.\nLong have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst,\nMonstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first;\nVisioning camp-fires at twilight, sad with a longing forlorn,\nFeeling my womb o’er-pregnant with the seed of cities unborn.\nWild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway,\nAnd I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;\nAnd I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,\nBut by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child;\nDesperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or defeat,\nThem will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat.”\n\n“Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and wearily wise,\nWith the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes;\nDreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day,\nWhen men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away;\nMaking a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave--\nTill I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path\nand I stamp them into a grave.\nDreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,\nOf children born in my borders of radiant motherhood,\nOf cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,\nAs I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world.”\n\nThis is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;\nThat surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.\nDissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,\nThis is the Will of the Yukon,--Lo, how she makes it plain!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "little-moccasins": { - "title": "“Little Moccasins”", - "body": "Come out, O Little Moccasins, and frolic on the snow!\nCome out, O tiny beaded feet, and twinkle in the light!\nI’ll play the old Red River reel, you used to love it so:\nAwake, O Little Moccasins, and dance for me to-night!\n\nYour hair was all a gleamy gold, your eyes a corn-flower blue;\nYour cheeks were pink as tinted shells, you stepped light as a fawn;\nYour mouth was like a coral bud, with seed pearls peeping through;\nAs gladdening as Spring you were, as radiant as dawn.\n\nCome out, O Little Moccasins! I’ll play so soft and low,\nThe songs you loved, the old heart-songs that in my mem’ry ring;\nO child, I want to hear you now beside the campfire glow!\nWith all your heart a-throbbing in the simple words you sing.\n\nFor there was only you and I, and you were all to me;\nAnd round us were the barren lands, but little did we fear;\nOf all God’s happy, happy folks the happiest were we …\n(Oh, call her, poor old fiddle mine, and maybe she will hear!)\n\nYour mother was a half-breed Cree, but you were white all through;\nAnd I, your father was--but well, that’s neither here nor there;\nI only know, my little Queen, that all my world was you,\nAnd now that world can end to-night, and I will never care.\n\nFor there’s a tiny wooden cross that pricks up through the snow:\n(Poor Little Moccasins! you’re tired, and so you lie at rest.)\nAnd there’s a grey-haired, weary man beside the campfire glow:\n(O fiddle mine! the tears to-night are drumming on your breast.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-little-old-log-cabin": { - "title": "“The Little Old Log Cabin”", - "body": "When a man gits on his uppers in a hard-pan sort of town,\nAn’ he ain’t got nothin’ comin’ an’ he can’t afford ter eat,\nAn’ he’s in a fix for lodgin’ an’ he wanders up an’ down,\nAn’ you’d fancy he’d been boozin’, he’s so locoed ’bout the feet;\nWhen he’s feelin’ sneakin’ sorry an’ his belt is hangin’ slack,\nAn’ his face is peaked an’ gray-like an’ his heart gits down an’ whines,\nThen he’s apt ter git a-thinkin’ an’ a-wishin’ he was back\nIn the little ol’ log cabin in the shadder of the pines.\n\nWhen he’s on the blazin’ desert an’ his canteen’s sprung a leak,\nAn’ he’s all alone an’ crazy an’ he’s crawlin’ like a snail,\nAn’ his tongue’s so black an’ swollen that it hurts him fer to speak,\nAn’ he gouges down fer water an’ the raven’s on his trail;\nWhen he’s done with care and cursin’ an’ he feels more like to cry,\nAn’ he sees ol’ Death a-grinnin’ an’ he thinks upon his crimes,\nThen he’s like ter hev’ a vision, as he settles down ter die,\nOf the little ol’ log cabin an’ the roses an’ the vines.\n\nOh, the little ol’ log cabin, it’s a solemn shinin’ mark,\nWhen a feller gits ter sinnin’ an’ a-goin’ ter the wall,\nAn’ folks don’t understand him an’ he’s gropin’ in the dark,\nAn’ he’s sick of bein’ cursed at an’ he’s longin’ fer his call!\nWhen the sun of life’s a-sinkin’ you can see it ’way above,\nOn the hill from out the shadder in a glory ’gin the sky,\nAn’ your mother’s voice is callin’, an’ her arms are stretched in love,\nAn’ somehow you’re glad you’re goin’, an’ you ain’t a-scared to die;\nWhen you’ll be like a kid again an’ nestle to her breast,\nAn’ never leave its shelter, an’ forget, an’ love, an’ rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-logger": { - "title": "“The Logger”", - "body": "In the moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight,\nI am sitting by the camp-fire’s fading cheer;\nOh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill,\nAnd the breakers in the bay are moaning drear.\nThe toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed,\nAnd I alone a weary vigil keep;\nIn the sightless, sullen sky I can hear the night-hawk cry,\nAnd the frogs in frenzied chorus from the creek.\n\nAnd somehow the embers’ glow brings me back the long ago,\nThe days of merry laughter and light song;\nWhen I sped the hours away with the gayest of the gay\nIn the giddy whirl of fashion’s festal throng.\nOh, I ran a grilling race and I little recked the pace,\nFor the lust of youth ran riot in my blood;\nBut at last I made a stand in this God-forsaken land\nOf the pine-tree and the mountain and the flood.\n\nAnd now I’ve got to stay, with an overdraft to pay,\nFor pleasure in the past with future pain;\nAnd I’m not the chap to whine, for if the chance were mine\nI know I’d choose the old life once again.\nWith its woman’s eyes a-shine, and its flood of golden wine;\nIts fever and its frolic and its fun;\nThe old life with its din, its laughter and its sin--\nAnd chuck me in the gutter when it’s done.\n\nAh, well! it’s past and gone, and the memory is wan,\nThat conjures up each old familiar face;\nAnd here by fortune hurled, I am dead to all the world,\nAnd I’ve learned to lose my pride and keep my place.\nMy ways are hard and rough, and my arms are strong and tough,\nAnd I hew the dizzy pine till darkness falls;\nAnd sometimes I take a dive, just to keep my heart alive,\nAmong the gay saloons and dancing halls.\n\nIn the distant, dinful town just a little drink to drown\nThe cares that crowd and canker in my brain;\nJust a little joy to still set my pulses all a-thrill,\nThen back to brutish labour once again.\nAnd things will go on so until one day I shall know\nThat Death has got me cinched beyond a doubt;\nThen I’ll crawl away from sight, and morosely in the night\nMy weary, wasted life will peter out.\n\nThen the boys will gather round, and they’ll launch me in the ground,\nAnd pile the stones the timber wolf to foil;\nAnd the moaning pine will wave overhead a nameless grave,\nWhere the black snake in the sunshine loves to coil.\nAnd they’ll leave me there alone, and perhaps with softened tone\nSpeak of me sometimes in the camp-fire’s glow,\nAs a played-out, broken chum, who has gone to Kingdom Come,\nAnd who went the pace in England long ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-lone-trail": { - "title": "“The Lone Trail”", - "body": "_Ye who know the Lone Trail fain would follow it,\nThough it lead to glory or the darkness of the pit.\nYe who take the Lone Trail, bid your love good-by;\nThe Lone Trail, the Lone Trail follow till you die._\n\nThe trails of the world be countless, and most of the trails be tried;\nYou tread on the heels of the many, till you come where the ways divide;\nAnd one lies safe in the sunlight, and the other is dreary and wan,\nYet you look aslant at the Lone Trail, and the Lone Trail lures you on.\nAnd somehow you’re sick of the highway, with its noise and its easy needs,\nAnd you seek the risk of the by-way, and you reck not where it leads.\nAnd sometimes it leads to the desert, and the tongue swells out of the mouth,\nAnd you stagger blind to the mirage, to die in the mocking drouth.\nAnd sometimes it leads to the mountain, to the light of the lone camp-fire,\nAnd you gnaw your belt in the anguish of hunger-goaded desire.\nAnd sometimes it leads to the Southland, to the swamp where the orchid glows,\nAnd you rave to your grave with the fever,\nand they rob the corpse for its clothes.\nAnd sometimes it leads to the Northland, and the scurvy softens your bones,\nAnd your flesh dints in like putty, and you spit out your teeth like stones.\nAnd sometimes it leads to a coral reef in the wash of a weedy sea,\nAnd you sit and stare at the empty glare where the gulls wait greedily.\nAnd sometimes it leads to an Arctic trail,\nand the snows where your torn feet freeze,\nAnd you whittle away the useless clay, and crawl on your hands and knees.\nOften it leads to the dead-pit; always it leads to pain;\nBy the bones of your brothers ye know it, but oh, to follow you’re fain.\nBy your bones they will follow behind you,\ntill the ways of the world are made plain.\n\n_Bid good-by to sweetheart, bid good-by to friend;\nThe Lone Trail, the Lone Trail follow to the end.\nTarry not, and fear not, chosen of the true;\nLover of the Lone Trail, the Lone Trail waits for you._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-lost-master": { - "title": "“The Lost Master”", - "body": "“And when I come to die,” he said,\n“Ye shall not lay me out in state,\nNor leave your laurels at my head,\nNor cause your men of speech orate;\nNo monument your gift shall be,\nNo column in the Hall of Fame;\nBut just this line ye grave for me:\n ’He played the game.’”\n\nSo when his glorious task was done,\nIt was not of his fame we thought;\nIt was not of his battles won,\nBut of the pride with which he fought;\nBut of his zest, his ringing laugh,\nHis trenchant scorn of praise or blame:\nAnd so we graved his epitaph,\n “He played the game.”\n\nAnd so we, too, in humbler ways\nWent forth to fight the fight anew,\nAnd heeding neither blame nor praise,\nWe held the course he set us true.\nAnd we, too, find the fighting sweet;\nAnd we, too, fight for fighting’s sake;\nAnd though we go down in defeat,\nAnd though our stormy hearts may break,\nWe will not do our Master shame:\nWe’ll play the game, please God,\n We’ll play the game.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-low-down-white": { - "title": "“The Low-Down White”", - "body": "This is the pay-day up at the mines, when the bearded brutes come down;\nThere’s money to burn in the streets to-night,\nso I’ve sent my klooch to town,\nWith a haggard face and a ribband of red entwined in her hair of brown.\n\nAnd I know at the dawn she’ll come reeling home\nwith the bottles, one, two, three--\nOne for herself, to drown her shame, and two big bottles for me,\nTo make me forget the thing I am and the man I used to be.\n\nTo make me forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place;\nTo make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady’s face,\nWhere even the squalid Siwash now holds me a black disgrace.\n\nOh, I have guarded my secret well! And who would dream as I speak\nIn a tribal tongue like a rogue unhung, ’mid the ranch-house filth and reek,\nI could roll to bed with a Latin phrase and rise with a verse of Greek?\n\nYet I was a senior prizeman once, and the pride of a college eight;\nCalled to the bar--my friends were true!\nbut they could not keep me straight;\nThen came the divorce, and I went abroad and “died” on the River Plate.\n\nBut I’m not dead yet; though with half a lung there isn’t time to spare,\nAnd I hope that the year will see me out, and, thank God, no one will care--\nSave maybe the little slim Siwash girl with the rose of shame in her hair.\n\nShe will come with the dawn, and the dawn is near; I can see its evil glow,\nLike a corpse-light seen through a frosty pane in a night of want and woe;\nAnd yonder she comes by the bleak bull-pines,\nswift staggering through the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-lunger": { - "title": "“The Lunger”", - "body": "Jack would laugh an’ joke all day;\nNever saw a lad so gay;\nSingin’ like a medder lark,\nLoaded to the Plimsoll mark\nWith God’s sunshine was that boy;\nHad a strangle-holt on Joy.\nHeld his head ’way up in air,\nLeft no callin’ cards on Care;\nBreezy, buoyant, brave and true;\nSent his sunshine out to you;\nCheerfulest when clouds was black--\n Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!\n\nSittin’ in my shack alone\nI could hear him in his own,\nSingin’ far into the night,\nTill it didn’t seem just right\nOne man should corral the fun,\nLive his life so in the sun;\nDidn’t seem quite natural\nNot to have a grouch at all;\nNot a trouble, not a lack--\n Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!\n\nHe was plumbful of good cheer\nTill he struck that low-down year;\nGot so thin, so little to him,\nYou could most see day-light through him.\nNever was his eye so bright,\nNever was his cheek so white.\nSeemed as if somethin’ was wrong,\nSort o’ quaver in his song.\nSame old smile, same hearty voice:\n“Bless you, boys! let’s all rejoice!”\nBut old Doctor shook his head:\n“Half a lung,” was all he said.\nYet that half was surely right,\nFor I heard him every night,\nSingin’, singin’ in his shack--\n Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!\n\nThen one day a letter came\nEndin’ with a female name;\nSeemed to get him in the neck,\nSort o’ pile-driver effect;\nPaled his lip and plucked his breath,\nLeft him starin’ still as death.\nSomethin’ had gone awful wrong,\nYet that night he sang his song.\nOh, but it was good to hear!\nFor there clutched my heart a fear,\nSo that I quaked listenin’\nEvery night to hear him sing.\nBut each day he laughed with me,\nAn’ his smile was full of glee.\nNothin’ seemed to set him back--\n Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!\n\nThen one night the singin’ stopped …\nSeemed as if my heart just flopped;\nFor I’d learned to love the boy\nWith his gilt-edged line of joy,\nWith his glorious gift of bluff,\nWith his splendid fightin’ stuff.\nSing on, lad, and play the game!\nO dear God! … no singin’ came,\nBut there surged to me instead--\nSilence, silence, deep and dread;\nTill I shuddered, tried to pray,\nSaid: “He’s maybe gone away.”\n\nOh, yes, he had gone away,\nGone forever and a day.\nBut he’d left behind him there,\nIn his cabin, pinched and bare,\nHis poor body, skin and bone,\nHis sharp face, cold as a stone.\nAn’ his stiffened fingers pressed\nSomethin’ bright upon his breast:\nLocket with a silken curl,\nPoor, sweet portrait of a girl.\nYet I reckon at the last\nHow defiant-like he passed;\nFor there sat upon his lips\nSmile that death could not eclipse;\nAn’ within his eyes lived still\nJoy that dyin’ could not kill.\n\nAn’ now when the nights are long,\nHow I miss his cheery song!\nHow I sigh an’ wish him back!\n Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-lure-of-little-voices": { - "title": "“The Lure of Little Voices”", - "body": "There’s a cry from out the loneliness--oh, listen, Honey, listen!\nDo you hear it, do you fear it, you’re a-holding of me so?\nYou’re a-sobbing in your sleep, dear, and your lashes, how they glisten--\nDo you hear the Little Voices all a-begging me to go?\n\nAll a-begging me to leave you. Day and night they’re pleading, praying,\nOn the North-wind, on the West-wind, from the peak and from the plain;\nNight and day they never leave me--do you know what they are saying?\n“He was ours before you got him, and we want him once again.”\n\nYes, they’re wanting me, they’re haunting me, the awful lonely places;\nThey’re whining and they’re whimpering as if each had a soul;\nThey’re calling from the wilderness, the vast and God-like spaces,\nThe stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole.\n\nThey miss my little camp-fires, ever brightly, bravely gleaming\nIn the womb of desolation, where was never man before;\nAs comradeless I sought them, lion-hearted, loving, dreaming,\nAnd they hailed me as a comrade, and they loved me evermore.\n\nAnd now they’re all a-crying, and it’s no use me denying;\nThe spell of them is on me and I’m helpless as a child;\nMy heart is aching, aching, but I hear them, sleeping, waking;\nIt’s the Lure of Little Voices, it’s the mandate of the Wild.\n\nI’m afraid to tell you, Honey, I can take no bitter leaving;\nBut softly in the sleep-time from your love I’ll steal away.\nOh, it’s cruel, dearie, cruel, and it’s God knows how I’m grieving;\nBut His loneliness is calling, and He knows I must obey.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "lenvoi": { - "title": "“L’Envoi”", - "body": "You who have lived in the land,\nYou who have trusted the trail,\nYou who are strong to withstand,\nYou who are swift to assail:\n _Songs have I sung to beguile,\n Vintage of desperate years,\n Hard as a harlot’s smile,\n Bitter as unshed tears._\n\nLittle of joy or mirth,\nLittle of ease I sing;\nSagas of men of earth\nHumanly suffering,\n _Such as you all have done;\n Savagely faring forth,\n Sons of the midnight sun,\n Argonauts of the North._\n\nFar in the land God forgot\nGlimmers the lure of your trail;\nStill in your lust are you taught\nEven to win is to fail.\n _Still you must follow and fight\n Under the vampire wing;\n There in the long, long night\n Hoping and vanquishing._\n\nHusbandman of the Wild,\nReaping a barren gain;\nScourged by desire, reconciled\nUnto disaster and pain;\n _These, my songs, are for you,\n You who are seared with the brand.\n God knows I have tried to be true;\n Please God you will understand._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-man-who-knew": { - "title": "“The Man Who Knew”", - "body": "The Dreamer visioned Life as it might be,\nAnd from his dream forthright a picture grew,\nA painting all the people thronged to see,\nAnd joyed therein--till came the Man Who Knew,\nSaying: “’Tis bad! Why do ye gape, ye fools!\nHe painteth not according to the schools.”\n\nThe Dreamer probed Life’s mystery of woe,\nAnd in a book he sought to give the clue;\nThe people read, and saw that it was so,\nAnd read again--then came the Man Who Knew,\nSaying: “Ye witless ones! this book is vile:\nIt hath not got the rudiments of style.”\n\nLove smote the Dreamer’s lips, and silver clear\nHe sang a song so sweet, so tender true,\nThat all the market-place was thrilled to hear,\nAnd listened rapt--till came the Man Who Knew,\nSaying: “His technique’s wrong; he singeth ill.\nWaste not your time.” The singer’s voice was still.\n\nAnd then the people roused as if from sleep,\nCrying: “What care we if it be not Art!\nHath he not charmed us, made us laugh and weep?\nCome, let us crown him where he sits apart.”\nThen, with his picture spurned, his book unread,\nHis song unsung, they found their Dreamer--_DEAD_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-march-of-the-dead": { - "title": "“The March of the Dead”", - "body": "The cruel war was over--oh, the triumph was so sweet!\nWe watched the troops returning, through our tears;\nThere was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet glittering street,\nAnd you scarce could hear the music for the cheers.\nAnd you scarce could see the house-tops for the flags that flew between;\nThe bells were pealing madly to the sky;\nAnd everyone was shouting for the Soldiers of the Queen,\nAnd the glory of an age was passing by.\n\nAnd then there came a shadow, swift and sudden, dark and drear;\nThe bells were silent, not an echo stirred.\nThe flags were drooping sullenly, the men forgot to cheer;\nWe waited, and we never spoke a word.\nThe sky grew darker, darker, till from out the gloomy rack\nThere came a voice that checked the heart with dread:\n“Tear down, tear down your bunting now, and hang up sable black;\nThey are coming--it’s the Army of the Dead.”\n\nThey were coming, they were coming, gaunt and ghastly, sad and slow;\nThey were coming, all the crimson wrecks of pride;\nWith faces seared, and cheeks red smeared, and haunting eyes of woe,\nAnd clotted holes the khaki couldn’t hide.\nOh, the clammy brow of anguish! the livid, foam-flecked lips!\nThe reeling ranks of ruin swept along!\nThe limb that trailed, the hand that failed, the bloody finger tips!\nAnd oh, the dreary rhythm of their song!\n\n“They left us on the veldt-side, but we felt we couldn’t stop\nOn this, our England’s crowning festal day;\nWe’re the men of Magersfontein, we’re the men of Spion Kop,\nColenso--we’re the men who had to pay.\nWe’re the men who paid the blood-price. Shall the grave be all our gain?\nYou owe us. Long and heavy is the score.\nThen cheer us for our glory now, and cheer us for our pain,\nAnd cheer us as ye never cheered before.”\n\nThe folks were white and stricken, and each tongue seemed weighted with lead;\nEach heart was clutched in hollow hand of ice;\nAnd every eye was staring at the horror of the dead,\nThe pity of the men who paid the price.\nThey were come, were come to mock us, in the first flush of our peace;\nThrough writhing lips their teeth were all agleam;\nThey were coming in their thousands--oh, would they never cease!\nI closed my eyes, and then--it was a dream.\n\nThere was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet gleaming street;\nThe town was mad; a man was like a boy.\nA thousand flags were flaming where the sky and city meet;\nA thousand bells were thundering the joy.\nThere was music, mirth and sunshine; but some eyes shone with regret;\nAnd while we stun with cheers our homing braves,\nO God, in Thy great mercy, let us nevermore forget\nThe graves they left behind, the bitter graves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-men-that-dont-fit-in": { - "title": "“The Men That Don’t Fit In”", - "body": "There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,\nA race that can’t stay still;\nSo they break the hearts of kith and kin,\nAnd they roam the world at will.\nThey range the field and they rove the flood,\nAnd they climb the mountain’s crest;\nTheirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,\nAnd they don’t know how to rest.\n\nIf they just went straight they might go far;\nThey are strong and brave and true;\nBut they’re always tired of the things that are,\nAnd they want the strange and new.\nThey say: “Could I find my proper groove,\nWhat a deep mark I would make!”\nSo they chop and change, and each fresh move\nIs only a fresh mistake.\n\nAnd each forgets, as he strips and runs\nWith a brilliant, fitful pace,\nIt’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones\nWho win in the lifelong race.\nAnd each forgets that his youth has fled,\nForgets that his prime is past,\nTill he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,\nIn the glare of the truth at last.\n\nHe has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;\nHe has just done things by half.\nLife’s been a jolly good joke on him,\nAnd now is the time to laugh.\nHa, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;\nHe was never meant to win;\nHe’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;\nHe’s a man who won’t fit in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-mother": { - "title": "“The Mother”", - "body": "There will be a singing in your heart,\nThere will be a rapture in your eyes;\nYou will be a woman set apart,\nYou will be so wonderful and wise.\nYou will sleep, and when from dreams you start,\nAs of one that wakes in Paradise,\nThere will be a singing in your heart,\nThere will be a rapture in your eyes.\n\nThere will be a moaning in your heart,\nThere will be an anguish in your eyes;\nYou will see your dearest ones depart,\nYou will hear their quivering good-byes.\nYours will be the heart-ache and the smart,\nTears that scald and lonely sacrifice;\nThere will be a moaning in your heart,\nThere will be an anguish in your eyes.\n\nThere will come a glory in your eyes,\nThere will come a peace within your heart;\nSitting ’neath the quiet evening skies,\nTime will dry the tear and dull the smart.\nYou will know that you have played your part;\nYours shall be the love that never dies:\nYou, with Heaven’s peace within your heart,\nYou, with God’s own glory in your eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "mothers_day" - } - } - }, - "the-mountain-and-the-lake": { - "title": "“The Mountain and the Lake”", - "body": "I know a mountain thrilling to the stars,\nPeerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow;\nGlimpsing the golden dawn o’er coral bars,\nFlaunting the vanisht sunset’s garnet glow;\nProudly patrician, passionless, serene;\nSoaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break;\nVirgin and vestal--Oh, a very Queen!\nAnd at her feet there dreams a quiet lake.\n\nMy lake adores my mountain--well I know,\nFor I have watched it from its dawn-dream start,\nStilling its mirror to her splendid snow,\nFraming her image in its trembling heart;\nGlassing her graciousness of greening wood,\nKissing her throne, melodiously mad,\nThrilling responsive to her every mood,\nGloomed with her sadness, gay when she is glad.\n\nMy lake has dreamed and loved since time was born;\nWill love and dream till time shall cease to be;\nGazing to Her in worship half forlorn,\nWho looks towards the stars and will not see--\nMy peerless mountain, splendid in her scorn …\nAlas! poor little lake! Alas! poor me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "music-in-the-bush": { - "title": "“Music in the Bush”", - "body": "O’er the dark pines she sees the silver moon,\nAnd in the west, all tremulous, a star;\nAnd soothing sweet she hears the mellow tune\nOf cow-bells jangled in the fields afar.\n\nQuite listless, for her daily stent is done,\nShe stands, sad exile, at her rose-wreathed door,\nAnd sends her love eternal with the sun\nThat goes to gild the land she’ll see no more.\n\nThe grave, gaunt pines imprison her sad gaze,\nAll still the sky and darkling drearily;\nShe feels the chilly breath of dear, dead days\nCome sifting through the alders eerily.\n\nOh, how the roses riot in their bloom!\nThe curtains stir as with an ancient pain;\nHer old piano gleams from out the gloom\nAnd waits and waits her tender touch in vain.\n\nBut now her hands like moonlight brush the keys\nWith velvet grace--melodious delight;\nAnd now a sad refrain from over seas\nGoes sobbing on the bosom of the night;\n\nAnd now she sings. (O! singer in the gloom,\nVoicing a sorrow we can ne’er express,\nHere in the Farness where we few have room\nUnshamed to show our love and tenderness,\n\nOur hearts will echo, till they beat no more,\nThat song of sadness and of motherland;\nAnd, stretched in deathless love to England’s shore,\nSome day she’ll hearken and she’ll understand.)\n\nA prima-donna in the shining past,\nBut now a mother growing old and gray,\nShe thinks of how she held a people fast\nIn thrall, and gleaned the triumphs of a day.\n\nShe sees a sea of faces like a dream;\nShe sees herself a queen of song once more;\nShe sees lips part in rapture, eyes agleam;\nShe sings as never once she sang before.\n\nShe sings a wild, sweet song that throbs with pain,\nThe added pain of life that transcends art--\nA song of home, a deep, celestial strain,\nThe glorious swan-song of a dying heart.\n\nA lame tramp comes along the railway track,\nA grizzled dog whose day is nearly done;\nHe passes, pauses, then comes slowly back\nAnd listens there--an audience of one.\n\nShe sings--her golden voice is passion-fraught,\nAs when she charmed a thousand eager ears;\nHe listens trembling, and she knows it not,\nAnd down his hollow cheeks roll bitter tears.\n\nShe ceases and is still, as if to pray;\nThere is no sound, the stars are all alight--\nOnly a wretch who stumbles on his way,\nOnly a vagrant sobbing in the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "my-madonna": { - "title": "“My Madonna”", - "body": "I haled me a woman from the street,\nShameless, but, oh, so fair!\nI bade her sit in the model’s seat\nAnd I painted her sitting there.\n\nI hid all trace of her heart unclean;\nI painted a babe at her breast;\nI painted her as she might have been\nIf the Worst had been the Best.\n\nShe laughed at my picture and went away.\nThen came, with a knowing nod,\nA connoisseur, and I heard him say;\n“’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”\n\nSo I painted a halo round her hair,\nAnd I sold her and took my fee,\nAnd she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,\nWhere you and all may see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "new-years-eve": { - "title": "“New Year’s Eve”", - "body": "It’s cruel cold on the water-front, silent and dark and drear;\nOnly the black tide weltering, only the hissing snow;\nAnd I, alone, like a storm-tossed wreck, on this night of the glad New Year,\nShuffling along in the icy wind, ghastly and gaunt and slow.\n\nThey’re playing a tune in McGuffy’s saloon,\nand it’s cheery and bright in there\n(God! but I’m weak--since the bitter dawn, and never a bite of food);\nI’ll just go over and slip inside--I mustn’t give way to despair--\nPerhaps I can bum a little booze if the boys are feeling good.\n\nThey’ll jeer at me, and they’ll sneer at me,\nand they’ll call me a whiskey soak;\n(“Have a drink? Well, thankee kindly, sir, I don’t mind if I do.”)\nA drivelling, dirty, gin-joint fiend, the butt of the bar-room joke;\nSunk and sodden and hopeless--“Another? Well, here’s to you!”\n\nMcGuffy is showing a bunch of the boys how Bob Fitzsimmons hit;\nThe barman is talking of Tammany Hall, and why the ward boss got fired.\nI’ll just sneak into a corner and they’ll let me alone a bit;\nThe room is reeling round and round …\nO God! but I’m tired, I’m tired …\n\n* * * * *\n\nRoses she wore on her breast that night. Oh, but their scent was sweet!\nAlone we sat on the balcony, and the fan-palms arched above;\nThe witching strain of a waltz by Strauss came up to our cool retreat,\nAnd I prisoned her little hand in mine, and I whispered my plea of love.\n\nThen sudden the laughter died on her lips, and lowly she bent her head;\nAnd oh, there came in the deep, dark eyes a look that was heaven to see;\nAnd the moments went, and I waited there, and never a word was said,\nAnd she plucked from her bosom a rose of red and shyly gave it to me.\n\nThen the music swelled to a crash of joy, and the lights blazed up like day,\nAnd I held her fast to my throbbing heart, and I kissed her bonny brow.\n“She is mine, she is mine for evermore!” the violins seemed to say,\nAnd the bells were ringing the New Year in--O God! I can hear them now.\n\nDon’t you remember that long, last waltz, with its sobbing, sad refrain?\nDon’t you remember that last good-by, and the dear eyes dim with tears?\nDon’t you remember that golden dream, with never a hint of pain,\nOf lives that would blend like an angel-song\nin the bliss of the coming years?\n\nOh, what have I lost! What have I lost! Ethel, forgive, forgive!\nThe red, red rose is faded now, and it’s fifty years ago.\n’Twere better to die a thousand deaths than live each day as I live!\nI have sinned, I have sunk to the lowest depths--\nbut oh, I have suffered so!\n\nHark! Oh, hark! I can hear the bells! … Look! I can see her there,\nFair as a dream … but it fades … And now--\nI can hear the dreadful hum\nOf the crowded court … See! the Judge looks down …\n_NOT GUILTY_, my Lord, I swear …\nThe bells--I can hear the bells again! … Ethel, I come, I come! …\n\n* * * * *\n\n“Rouse up, old man, it’s twelve o’clock. You can’t sleep here, you know.\nSay! ain’t you got no sentiment? Lift up your muddled head;\nHave a drink to the glad New Year, a drop before you go--\nYou darned old dirty hobo … My God! Here, boys! He’s _DEAD!_”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-nostomaniac": { - "title": "“The Nostomaniac”", - "body": " _On the ragged edge of the world I’ll roam,\n And the home of the wolf shall be my home,\n And a bunch of bones on the boundless snows\n The end of my trail … who knows, who knows!_\n\nI’m dreaming to-night in the fire-glow, alone in my study tower,\nMy books battalioned around me, my Kipling flat on my knee;\nBut I’m not in the mood for reading, I haven’t moved for an hour;\nBody and brain I’m weary, weary the heart of me;\nWeary of crushing a longing it’s little I understand,\nFor I thought that my trail was ended, I thought I had earned my rest;\nBut oh, it’s stronger than life is, the call of the hearthless land!\nAnd I turn to the North in my trouble, as a child to the mother-breast.\n\nHere in my den it’s quiet; the sea-wind taps on the pane;\nThere’s comfort and ease and plenty, the smile of the South is sweet.\nAll that a man might long for, fight for and seek in vain,\nPictures and books and music, pleasure my last retreat.\nPeace! I thought I had gained it, I swore that my tale was told;\nBy my hair that is grey I swore it, by my eyes that are slow to see;\nYet what does it all avail me? to-night, to-night as of old,\nOut of the dark I hear it--the Northland calling to me.\n\nAnd I’m daring a rampageous river that runs the devil knows where;\nMy hand is athrill on the paddle, the birch-bark bounds like a bird.\nHark to the rumble of rapids! Here in my morris chair\nEager and tense I’m straining--isn’t it most absurd?\nNow in the churn and the lather, foam that hisses and stings,\nLeap I, keyed for the struggle, fury and fume and roar;\nRocks are spitting like hell-cats--Oh, it’s a sport for kings,\nLife on a twist of the paddle … there’s my “Kim” on the floor.\n\nHow I thrill and I vision! Then my camp of a night;\nRed and gold of the fire-glow, net afloat in the stream;\nScent of the pines and silence, little “pal” pipe alight,\nBody a-purr with pleasure, sleep untroubled of dream:\nBanquet of paystreak bacon! moment of joy divine,\nWhen the bannock is hot and gluey, and the teapot’s nearing the boil!\nNever was wolf so hungry, stomach cleaving to spine …\nHa! there’s my servant calling, says that dinner will spoil.\n\nWhat do I want with dinner? Can I eat any more?\nCan I sleep as I used to? … Oh, I abhor this life!\nGive me the Great Uncertain, the Barren Land for a floor,\nThe Milky Way for a roof-beam, splendour and space and strife:\nSomething to fight and die for--the limpid Lake of the Bear,\nThe Empire of Empty Bellies, the dunes where the Dogribs dwell;\nBig things, real things, live things … here on my morris chair\nHow I ache for the Northland! “Dinner and servants”--Hell!!\n\nAm I too old, I wonder? Can I take one trip more?\nGo to the granite-ribbed valleys, flooded with sunset wine,\nPeaks that pierce the aurora, rivers I must explore,\nLakes of a thousand islands, millioning hordes of the Pine?\nDo they not miss me, I wonder, valley and peak and plain?\nWhispering each to the other: “Many a moon has passed …\nWhere has he gone, our lover? Will he come back again?\nStar with his fires our tundra, leave us his bones at last?”\n\nYes, I’ll go back to the Northland, back to the way of the bear,\nBack to the muskeg and mountain, back to the ice-leaguered sea.\nOld am I! what does it matter? Nothing I would not dare;\nGive me a trail to conquer--Oh, it is “meat” to me!\nI will go back to the Northland, feeble and blind and lame;\nSup with the sunny-eyed Husky, eat moose-nose with the Cree;\nPlay with the Yellow-knife bastards, boasting my blood and my name:\nI will go back to the Northland, for the Northland is calling to me.\n\nThen give to me paddle and whiplash, and give to me tumpline and gun;\nGive to me salt and tobacco, flour and a gunny of tea;\nTake me up over the Circle, under the flamboyant sun;\nTurn me foot-loose like a savage--that is the finish of me.\nI know the trail I am seeking, it’s up by the Lake of the Bear;\nIt’s down by the Arctic Barrens, it’s over to Hudson’s Bay;\nMaybe I’ll get there,--maybe: death is set by a hair …\nHark! it’s the Northland calling! now must I go away …\n\n _Go to the Wild that waits for me;\n Go where the moose and the musk-ox be;\n Go to the wolf and the secret snows;\n Go to my fate … who knows, who knows!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-parsons-son": { - "title": "“The Parson’s Son”", - "body": "_This is the song of the parson’s son, as he squats in his shack alone,\nOn the wild, weird nights, when the Northern Lights\n shoot up from the frozen zone,\nAnd it’s sixty below, and couched in the snow the hungry huskies moan:_\n\n“I’m one of the Arctic brotherhood, I’m an old-time pioneer.\nI came with the first--O God! how I’ve cursed\nthis Yukon--but still I’m here.\nI’ve sweated athirst in its summer heat, I’ve frozen and starved in its cold;\nI’ve followed my dreams by its thousand streams,\nI’ve toiled and moiled for its gold.”\n\n“Look at my eyes--been snow-blind twice; look where my foot’s half gone;\nAnd that gruesome scar on my left cheek,\nwhere the frost-fiend bit to the bone.\nEach one a brand of this devil’s land,\nwhere I’ve played and I’ve lost the game,\nA broken wreck with a craze for ‘hooch’, and never a cent to my name.”\n\n“This mining is only a gamble; the worst is as good as the best;\nI was in with the bunch and I might have come out right on top with the rest;\nWith Cormack, Ladue and Macdonald--O God! but it’s hell to think\nOf the thousands and thousands I’ve squandered on cards and women and drink.”\n\n“In the early days we were just a few, and we hunted and fished around,\nNor dreamt by our lonely camp-fires of the wealth that lay under the ground.\nWe traded in skins and whiskey, and I’ve often slept under the shade\nOf that lone birch tree on Bonanza, where the first big find was made.”\n\n“We were just like a great big family, and every man had his squaw,\nAnd we lived such a wild, free, fearless life beyond the pale of the law;\nTill sudden there came a whisper, and it maddened us every man,\nAnd I got in on Bonanza before the big rush began.”\n\n“Oh, those Dawson days, and the sin and the blaze,\nand the town all open wide!\n(If God made me in His likeness, sure He let the devil inside.)\nBut we all were mad, both the good and the bad, and as for the women, well--\nNo spot on the map in so short a space has hustled more souls to hell.”\n\n“Money was just like dirt there, easy to get and to spend.\nI was all caked in on a dance-hall jade, but she shook me in the end.\nIt put me queer, and for near a year I never drew sober breath,\nTill I found myself in the bughouse ward with a claim staked out on death.”\n\n“Twenty years in the Yukon, struggling along its creeks;\nRoaming its giant valleys, scaling its god-like peaks;\nBathed in its fiery sunsets, fighting its fiendish cold--\nTwenty years in the Yukon … twenty years--and I’m old.”\n\n“Old and weak, but no matter, there’s ‘hooch’ in the bottle still.\nI’ll hitch up the dogs to-morrow, and mush down the trail to Bill.\nIt’s so long dark, and I’m lonesome--I’ll just lay down on the bed;\nTo-morrow I’ll go … to-morrow … I guess I’ll play on the red.”\n\n“… Come, Kit, your pony is saddled.\nI’m waiting, dear, in the court …\n… Minnie, you devil, I’ll kill you\nif you skip with that flossy sport …\n… How much does it go to the pan, Bill? …\nplay up, School, and play the game …\n… Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name …”\n\n_This was the song of the parson’s son, as he lay in his bunk alone,\nEre the fire went out and the cold crept in,\n and his blue lips ceased to moan,\nAnd the hunger-maddened malamutes had torn him flesh from bone._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-passing-of-the-year": { - "title": "“The Passing of the Year”", - "body": "My glass is filled, my pipe is lit,\nMy den is all a cosy glow;\nAnd snug before the fire I sit,\nAnd wait to _FEEL_ the old year go.\nI dedicate to solemn thought\nAmid my too-unthinking days,\nThis sober moment, sadly fraught\nWith much of blame, with little praise.\n\nOld Year! upon the Stage of Time\nYou stand to bow your last adieu;\nA moment, and the prompter’s chime\nWill ring the curtain down on you.\nYour mien is sad, your step is slow;\nYou falter as a Sage in pain;\nYet turn, Old Year, before you go,\nAnd face your audience again.\n\nThat sphinx-like face, remote, austere,\nLet us all read, whate’er the cost:\nO Maiden! why that bitter tear?\nIs it for dear one you have lost?\nIs it for fond illusion gone?\nFor trusted lover proved untrue?\nO sweet girl-face, so sad, so wan\nWhat hath the Old Year meant to you?\n\nAnd you, O neighbour on my right\nSo sleek, so prosperously clad!\nWhat see you in that aged wight\nThat makes your smile so gay and glad?\nWhat opportunity unmissed?\nWhat golden gain, what pride of place?\nWhat splendid hope? O Optimist!\nWhat read you in that withered face?\n\nAnd You, deep shrinking in the gloom,\nWhat find you in that filmy gaze?\nWhat menace of a tragic doom?\nWhat dark, condemning yesterdays?\nWhat urge to crime, what evil done?\nWhat cold, confronting shape of fear?\nO haggard, haunted, hidden One\nWhat see you in the dying year?\n\nAnd so from face to face I flit,\nThe countless eyes that stare and stare;\nSome are with approbation lit,\nAnd some are shadowed with despair.\nSome show a smile and some a frown;\nSome joy and hope, some pain and woe:\nEnough! Oh, ring the curtain down!\nOld weary year! it’s time to go.\n\nMy pipe is out, my glass is dry;\nMy fire is almost ashes too;\nBut once again, before you go,\nAnd I prepare to meet the New:\nOld Year! a parting word that’s true,\nFor we’ve been comrades, you and I--\n_I THANK GOD FOR EACH DAY OF YOU_;\nThere! bless you now! Old Year, good-bye!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-pines": { - "title": "“The Pines”", - "body": "We sleep in the sleep of ages, the bleak, barbarian pines;\nThe gray moss drapes us like sages, and closer we lock our lines,\nAnd deeper we clutch through the gelid gloom where never a sunbeam shines.\n\nOn the flanks of the storm-gored ridges are our black battalions massed;\nWe surge in a host to the sullen coast, and we sing in the ocean blast;\nFrom empire of sea to empire of snow we grip our empire fast.\n\nTo the niggard lands were we driven, ’twixt desert and floes are we penned;\nTo us was the Northland given, ours to stronghold and defend;\nOurs till the world be riven in the crash of the utter end;\n\nOurs from the bleak beginning, through the aeons of death-like sleep;\nOurs from the shock when the naked rock was hurled from the hissing deep;\nOurs through the twilight ages of weary glacier creep.\n\nWind of the East, Wind of the West, wandering to and fro,\nChant your songs in our topmost boughs, that the sons of men may know\nThe peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be last to go!\n\nWe pillar the halls of perfumed gloom; we plume where the eagles soar;\nThe North-wind swoops from the brooding Pole,\nand our ancients crash and roar;\nBut where one falls from the crumbling walls shoots up a hardy score.\n\nWe spring from the gloom of the canyon’s womb; in the valley’s lap we lie;\nFrom the white foam-fringe, where the breakers cringe\nto the peaks that tusk the sky,\nWe climb, and we peer in the crag-locked mere that gleams like a golden eye.\n\nGain to the verge of the hog-back ridge where the vision ranges free:\nPines and pines and the shadow of pines as far as the eye can see;\nA steadfast legion of stalwart knights in dominant empery.\n\nSun, moon and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand,\nEven as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand,\nSentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "prelude": { - "title": "“Prelude”", - "body": "_I sing no idle songs of dalliance days,\nNo dreams Elysian inspire my rhyming;\nI have no Celia to enchant my lays,\nNo pipes of Pan have set my heart to chiming.\nI am no wordsmith dripping gems divine\nInto the golden chalice of a sonnet;\nIf love songs witch you, close this book of mine,\n Waste no time on it._\n\n_Yet bring I to my work an eager joy,\nA lusty love of life and all things human;\nStill in me leaps the wonder of the boy,\nA pride in man, a deathless faith in woman.\nStill red blood calls, still rings the valiant fray;\nAdventure beacons through the summer gloaming:\nOh long and long and long will be the day\n Ere I come homing!_\n\n_This earth is ours to love: lute, brush and pen,\nThey are but tongues to tell of life sincerely;\nThe thaumaturgic Day, the might of men,\nO God of Scribes, grant us to grave them clearly!\nGrant heart that homes in heart, then all is well.\nHoney is honey-sweet, howe’er the hiving.\nEach to his work, his wage at evening bell\n The strength of striving._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "premonition": { - "title": "“Premonition”", - "body": "’Twas a year ago and the moon was bright\n(Oh, I remember so well, so well);\nI walked with my love in a sea of light,\nAnd the voice of my sweet was a silver bell.\nAnd sudden the moon grew strangely dull,\nAnd sudden my love had taken wing;\nI looked on the face of a grinning skull,\nI strained to my heart a ghastly thing.\n\n’Twas but fantasy, for my love lay still\nIn my arms, with her tender eyes aglow,\nAnd she wondered why my lips were chill,\nWhy I was silent and kissed her so.\nA year has gone and the moon is bright,\nA gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe;\nI sit by a new-made grave to-night,\nAnd my heart is broken--it’s strange, you know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "quatrains": { - "title": "“Quatrains”", - "body": "One said: Thy life is thine to make or mar,\nTo flicker feebly, or to soar, a star;\nIt lies with thee--the choice is thine, is thine,\nTo hit the ties or drive thy auto-car.\n\nI answered Her: The choice is mine--ah, no!\nWe all were made or marred long, long ago.\nThe parts are written; hear the super wail:\n“Who is stage-managing this cosmic show?”\n\nBlind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance,\nLife is a fiddler, and we all must dance.\nFrom gloom where mocks that will-o’-wisp, Free-will\nI heard a voice cry: “Say, give us a chance.”\n\nChance! Oh, there is no chance! The scene is set.\nUp with the curtain! Man, the marionette,\nResumes his part. The gods will work the wires.\nThey’ve got it all down fine, you bet, you bet!\n\nIt’s all decreed--the mighty earthquake crash,\nThe countless constellations’ wheel and flash;\nThe rise and fall of empires, war’s red tide;\nThe composition of your dinner hash.\n\nThere’s no haphazard in this world of ours.\nCause and effect are grim, relentless powers.\nThey rule the world. (A king was shot last night;\nLast night I held the joker and both bowers.)\n\nFrom out the mesh of fate our heads we thrust.\nWe can’t do what we would, but what we must.\nHeredity has got us in a cinch--\n(Consoling thought when you’ve been on a “bust”.)\n\nHark to the song where spheral voices blend:\n“There’s no beginning, never will be end.”\nIt makes us nutty; hang the astral chimes!\nThe tables spread; come, let us dine, my friend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-quitter": { - "title": "“The Quitter”", - "body": "When you’re lost in the Wild, and you’re scared as a child,\nAnd Death looks you bang in the eye,\nAnd you’re sore as a boil, it’s according to Hoyle\nTo cock your revolver and … die.\nBut the Code of a Man says: “Fight all you can,”\nAnd self-dissolution is barred.\nIn hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow …\nIt’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.\n\n“You’re sick of the game!” Well, now, that’s a shame.\nYou’re young and you’re brave and you’re bright.\n“You’ve had a raw deal!” I know--but don’t squeal,\nBuck up, do your damnedest, and fight.\nIt’s the plugging away that will win you the day,\nSo don’t be a piker, old pard!\nJust draw on your grit; it’s so easy to quit:\nIt’s the keeping-your-chin-up that’s hard.\n\nIt’s easy to cry that you’re beaten--and die;\nIt’s easy to crawfish and crawl;\nBut to fight and to fight when hope’s out of sight--\nWhy, that’s the best game of them all!\nAnd though you come out of each gruelling bout,\nAll broken and beaten and scarred,\nJust have one more try--it’s dead easy to die,\nIt’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-reckoning": { - "title": "“The Reckoning”", - "body": "It’s fine to have a blow-out in a fancy restaurant,\nWith terrapin and canvas-back and all the wine you want;\nTo enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass,\nSmoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass.\nIt’s bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,\nBut it’s quite another matter when you\n Pay the bill.\n\nIt’s great to go out every night on fun or pleasure bent;\nTo wear your glad rags always and to never save a cent;\nTo drift along regardless, have a good time every trip;\nTo hit the high spots sometimes, and to let your chances slip;\nTo know you’re acting foolish, yet to go on fooling still,\nTill Nature calls a show-down, and you\n Pay the bill.\n\nTime has got a little bill--get wise while yet you may,\nFor the debit side’s increasing in a most alarming way;\nThe things you had no right to do, the things you should have done,\nThey’re all put down; it’s up to you to pay for every one.\nSo eat, drink and be merry, have a good time if you will,\nBut God help you when the time comes, and you\n Foot the bill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-return": { - "title": "“The Return”", - "body": "They turned him loose; he bowed his head,\nA felon, bent and grey.\nHis face was even as the Dead,\nHe had no word to say.\n\nHe sought the home of his old love,\nTo look on her once more;\nAnd where her roses breathed above,\nHe cowered beside the door.\n\nShe sat there in the shining room;\nHer hair was silver grey.\nHe stared and stared from out the gloom;\nHe turned to go away.\n\nHer roses rustled overhead.\nShe saw, with sudden start.\n“I knew that you would come,” she said,\nAnd held him to her heart.\n\nHer face was rapt and angel-sweet;\nShe touched his hair of grey;\n . . . . .\n_BUT HE, SOB-SHAKEN, AT HER FEET,\nCOULD ONLY PRAY AND PRAY_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-rhyme-of-the-remittance-man": { - "title": "“The Rhyme of the Remittance Man”", - "body": "There’s a four-pronged buck a-swinging in the shadow of my cabin,\nAnd it roamed the velvet valley till to-day;\nBut I tracked it by the river, and I trailed it in the cover,\nAnd I killed it on the mountain miles away.\nNow I’ve had my lazy supper, and the level sun is gleaming\nOn the water where the silver salmon play;\nAnd I light my little corn-cob, and I linger, softly dreaming,\nIn the twilight, of a land that’s far away.\n\nFar away, so faint and far, is flaming London, fevered Paris,\nThat I fancy I have gained another star;\nFar away the din and hurry, far away the sin and worry,\nFar away--God knows they cannot be too far.\nGilded galley-slaves of Mammon--how my purse-proud brothers taunt me!\nI might have been as well-to-do as they\nHad I clutched like them my chances,\nlearned their wisdom, crushed my fancies,\nStarved my soul and gone to business every day.\n\nWell, the cherry bends with blossom and the vivid grass is springing,\nAnd the star-like lily nestles in the green;\nAnd the frogs their joys are singing, and my heart in tune is ringing,\nAnd it doesn’t matter what I might have been.\nWhile above the scented pine-gloom, piling heights of golden glory,\nThe sun-god paints his canvas in the west,\nI can couch me deep in clover, I can listen to the story\nOf the lazy, lapping water--it is best.\n\nWhile the trout leaps in the river, and the blue grouse thrills the cover,\nAnd the frozen snow betrays the panther’s track,\nAnd the robin greets the dayspring with the rapture of a lover,\nI am happy, and I’ll nevermore go back.\nFor I know I’d just be longing for the little old log cabin,\nWith the morning-glory clinging to the door,\nTill I loathed the city places, cursed the care on all the faces,\nTurned my back on lazar London evermore.\n\nSo send me far from Lombard Street, and write me down a failure;\nPut a little in my purse and leave me free.\nSay: “He turned from Fortune’s offering to follow up a pale lure,\nHe is one of us no longer--let him be.”\nI am one of you no longer; by the trails my feet have broken,\nThe dizzy peaks I’ve scaled, the camp-fire’s glow;\nBy the lonely seas I’ve sailed in--yea, the final word is spoken,\nI am signed and sealed to nature. Be it so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-rhyme-of-the-restless-ones": { - "title": "“The Rhyme of the Restless Ones”", - "body": "We couldn’t sit and study for the law;\nThe stagnation of a bank we couldn’t stand;\nFor our riot blood was surging, and we didn’t need much urging\nTo excitements and excesses that are banned.\nSo we took to wine and drink and other things,\nAnd the devil in us struggled to be free;\nTill our friends rose up in wrath, and they pointed out the path,\nAnd they paid our debts and packed us o’er the sea.\n\nOh, they shook us off and shipped us o’er the foam,\nTo the larger lands that lure a man to roam;\nAnd we took the chance they gave\nOf a far and foreign grave,\nAnd we bade good-by for evermore to home.\n\nAnd some of us are climbing on the peak,\nAnd some of us are camping on the plain;\nBy pine and palm you’ll find us, with never claim to bind us,\nBy track and trail you’ll meet us once again.\n\nWe are the fated serfs to freedom--sky and sea;\nWe have failed where slummy cities overflow;\nBut the stranger ways of earth know our pride and know our worth,\nAnd we go into the dark as fighters go.\n\nYes, we go into the night as brave men go,\nThough our faces they be often streaked with woe;\nYet we’re hard as cats to kill,\nAnd our hearts are reckless still,\nAnd we’ve danced with death a dozen times or so.\n\nAnd you’ll find us in Alaska after gold,\nAnd you’ll find us herding cattle in the South.\nWe like strong drink and fun, and, when the race is run,\nWe often die with curses in our mouth.\nWe are wild as colts unbroke, but never mean.\nOf our sins we’ve shoulders broad to bear the blame;\nBut we’ll never stay in town and we’ll never settle down,\nAnd we’ll never have an object or an aim.\n\nNo, there’s that in us that time can never tame;\nAnd life will always seem a careless game;\nAnd they’d better far forget--\nThose who say they love us yet--\nForget, blot out with bitterness our name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "a-rolling-stone": { - "title": "“A Rolling Stone”", - "body": " _There’s sunshine in the heart of me,\n My blood sings in the breeze;\n The mountains are a part of me,\n I’m fellow to the trees.\n My golden youth I’m squandering,\n Sun-libertine am I;\n A-wandering, a-wandering,\n Until the day I die._\n\nI was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,\nAnd I roomed in the cool of a cave;\nI have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,\nThe fret and the sweat of a slave:\nFor far over all that folks hold worth,\nThere lives and there leaps in me\nA love of the lowly things of earth,\nAnd a passion to be free.\n\nTo pitch my tent with no prosy plan,\nTo range and to change at will;\nTo mock at the mastership of man,\nTo seek Adventure’s thrill.\nCarefree to be, as a bird that sings;\nTo go my own sweet way;\nTo reck not at all what may befall,\nBut to live and to love each day.\n\nTo make my body a temple pure\nWherein I dwell serene;\nTo care for the things that shall endure,\nThe simple, sweet and clean.\nTo oust out envy and hate and rage,\nTo breathe with no alarm;\nFor Nature shall be my anchorage,\nAnd none shall do me harm.\n\nTo shun all lures that debauch the soul,\nThe orgied rites of the rich;\nTo eat my crust as a rover must\nWith the rough-neck down in the ditch.\nTo trudge by his side whate’er betide;\nTo share his fire at night;\nTo call him friend to the long trail-end,\nAnd to read his heart aright.\n\nTo scorn all strife, and to view all life\nWith the curious eyes of a child;\nFrom the plangent sea to the prairie,\nFrom the slum to the heart of the Wild.\nFrom the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,\nFrom the vast to the greatly small;\nFor I know that the whole for good is planned,\nAnd I want to see it all.\n\nTo see it all, the wide world-way,\nFrom the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;\nWith never a one to say me nay,\nAnd none to cramp my soul.\nIn belly-pinch I will pay the price,\nBut God! let me be free;\nFor once I know in the long ago,\nThey made a slave of me.\n\nIn a flannel shirt from earth’s clean dirt,\nHere, pal, is my calloused hand!\nOh, I love each day as a rover may,\nNor seek to understand.\nTo _ENJOY_ is good enough for me;\nThe gipsy of God am I;\nThen here’s a hail to each flaring dawn!\nAnd here’s a cheer to the night that’s gone!\nAnd may I go a-roaming on\nUntil the day I die!\n\n _Then every star shall sing to me\n Its song of liberty;\n And every morn shall bring to me\n Its mandate to be free.\n In every throbbing vein of me\n I’ll feel the vast Earth-call;\n O body, heart and brain of me\n Praise Him who made it all!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-rover": { - "title": "“The Rover”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOh, how good it is to be\nFoot-loose and heart-free!\nJust my dog and pipe and I, underneath the vast sky;\nTrail to try and goal to win, white road and cool inn;\nFields to lure a lad afar, clear spring and still star;\nLilting feet that never tire, green dingle, fagot fire;\nNone to hurry, none to hold, heather hill and hushed fold;\nNature like a picture book, laughing leaf and bright brook;\nEvery day a jewel bright, set serenely in the night;\nEvery night a holy shrine, radiant for a day divine.\n\nWeathered cheek and kindly eye, let the wanderer go by.\nWoman-love and wistful heart, let the gipsy one depart.\nFor the farness and the road are his glory and his goad.\nOh, the lilt of youth and Spring! Eyes laugh and lips sing.\n Yea, but it is good to be\n Foot-loose and heart-free!\n\n\n# II.\n\nYet how good it is to come\nHome at last, home, home!\nOn the clover swings the bee, overhead’s the hale tree;\nSky of turquoise gleams through, yonder glints the lake’s blue.\nIn a hammock let’s swing, weary of wandering;\nTired of wild, uncertain lands, strange faces, faint hands.\n\nHas the wondrous world gone cold? Am I growing old, old?\nGrey and weary … let me dream, glide on the tranquil stream.\nOh, what joyous days I’ve had, full, fervid, gay, glad!\nYet there comes a subtile change, let the stripling rove, range.\nFrom sweet roving comes sweet rest, after all, home’s best.\nAnd if there’s a little bit of woman-love with it,\nI will count my life content, God-blest and well spent …\n _Oh but it is good to be\n Foot-loose and heart-free!\n Yet how good it is to come\n Home at last, home, home!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-scribes-prayer": { - "title": "“The Scribe’s Prayer”", - "body": "When from my fumbling hand the tired pen falls,\nAnd in the twilight weary droops my head;\nWhile to my quiet heart a still voice calls,\nCalls me to join my kindred of the Dead:\nGrant that I may, O Lord, ere rest be mine,\nWrite to Thy praise one radiant, ringing line.\n\nFor all of worth that in this clay abides,\nThe leaping rapture and the ardent flame,\nThe hope, the high resolve, the faith that guides:\nAll, all is Thine, and liveth in Thy name:\nLord, have I dallied with the sacred fire!\nLord, have I trailed Thy glory in the mire!\n\nE’en as a toper from the dram-shop reeling,\nSees in his garret’s blackness, dazzling fair,\nAll that he might have been, and, heart-sick, kneeling,\nSobs in the passion of a vast despair:\nSo my ideal self haunts me alway--\nWhen the accounting comes, how shall I pay?\n\nFor in the dark I grope, nor understand;\nAnd in my heart fight selfishness and sin:\nYet, Lord, I do not seek Thy helping hand;\nRather let me my own salvation win:\nLet me through strife and penitential pain\nOnward and upward to the heights attain.\n\nYea, let me live my life, its meaning seek;\nBear myself fitly in the ringing fight;\nStrive to be strong that I may aid the weak;\nDare to be true--O God! the Light, the Light!\nCometh the Dark so soon. I’ve mocked Thy Word;\nYet do I know Thy Love: have mercy, Lord …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-shooting-of-dan-mcgrew": { - "title": "“The Shooting of Dan McGrew”", - "body": "A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;\nThe kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;\nBack of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,\nAnd watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.\n\nWhen out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,\nThere stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.\nHe looked like a man with a foot in the grave\nand scarcely the strength of a louse,\nYet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar,\nand he called for drinks for the house.\nThere was none could place the stranger’s face,\nthough we searched ourselves for a clue;\nBut we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.\n\nThere’s men that somehow just grip your eyes,\nand hold them hard like a spell;\nAnd such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;\nWith a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,\nAs he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.\nThen I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he’d do,\nAnd I turned my head--and there watching him\nwas the lady that’s known as Lou.\n\nHis eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,\nTill at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.\nThe rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,\nSo the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.\nIn a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;\nThen he clutched the keys with his talon hands\n--my God! but that man could play.\n\nWere you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,\nAnd the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could _HEAR_;\nWith only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,\nA half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;\nWhile high overhead, green, yellow and red,\nthe North Lights swept in bars?--\nThen you’ve a haunch what the music meant …\nhunger and night and the stars.\n\nAnd hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,\nBut the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;\nFor a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;\nBut oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman’s love--\nA woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true--\n(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge,--\nthe lady that’s known as Lou.)\n\nThen on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;\nBut you felt that your life had been looted clean\nof all that it once held dear;\nThat someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;\nThat your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.\n’Twas the crowning cry of a heart’s despair,\nand it thrilled you through and through--\n“I guess I’ll make it a spread misere,” said Dangerous Dan McGrew.\n\nThe music almost died away … then it burst like a pent-up flood;\nAnd it seemed to say, “Repay, repay,” and my eyes were blind with blood.\nThe thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,\nAnd the lust awoke to kill, to kill …\nthen the music stopped with a crash,\nAnd the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;\nIn a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;\nThen his lips went in in a kind of grin,\nand he spoke, and his voice was calm,\nAnd “Boys,” says he, “you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;\nBut I want to state, and my words are straight,\nand I’ll bet my poke they’re true,\nThat one of you is a hound of hell … and that one is Dan McGrew.”\n\nThen I ducked my head, and the lights went out,\nand two guns blazed in the dark,\nAnd a woman screamed, and the lights went up,\nand two men lay stiff and stark.\nPitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,\nWhile the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast\nof the lady that’s known as Lou.\n\nThese are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.\nThey say that the stranger was crazed with “hooch”,\nand I’m not denying it’s so.\nI’m not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two--\nThe woman that kissed him and--pinched his poke--\nwas the lady that’s known as Lou.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-soldier-of-fortune": { - "title": "“The Soldier of Fortune”", - "body": "“Deny your God!” they ringed me with their spears;\nBlood-crazed were they, and reeking from the strife;\nHell-hot their hate, and venom-fanged their sneers,\nAnd one man spat on me and nursed a knife.\nAnd there was I, sore wounded and alone,\nI, the last living of my slaughtered band.\nOh sinister the sky, and cold as stone!\nIn one red laugh of horror reeled the land.\nAnd dazed and desperate I faced their spears,\nAnd like a flame out-leaped that naked knife,\nAnd like a serpent stung their bitter jeers:\n“Deny your God, and we will give you life.”\n\nDeny my God! Oh life was very sweet!\nAnd it is hard in youth and hope to die;\nAnd there my comrades dear lay at my feet,\nAnd in that blear of blood soon must I lie.\nAnd yet … I almost laughed--it seemed so odd,\nFor long and long had I not vainly tried\nTo reason out and body forth my God,\nAnd prayed for light, and doubted--and _DENIED_:\nDenied the Being I could not conceive,\nDenied a life-to-be beyond the grave …\nAnd now they ask me, who do not believe,\nJust to deny, to voice my doubt, to save\nThis life of mine that sings so in the sun,\nThe bloom of youth yet red upon my cheek,\nMy only life!--O fools! ’tis easy done,\nI will deny … and yet I do not speak.\n\n“Deny your God!” their spears are all agleam,\nAnd I can see their eyes with blood-lust shine;\nTheir snarling voices shrill into a scream,\nAnd, mad to slay, they quiver for the sign.\nDeny my God! yes, I could do it well;\nYet if I did, what of my race, my name?\nHow they would spit on me, these dogs of hell!\nSpurn me, and put on me the brand of shame.\nA white man’s honour! what of that, I say?\nShall these black curs cry “Coward” in my face?\nThey who would perish for their gods of clay--\nShall I defile my country and my race?\nMy country! what’s my country to me now?\nSoldier of Fortune, free and far I roam;\nAll men are brothers in my heart, I vow;\nThe wide and wondrous world is all my home.\nMy country! reverent of her splendid Dead,\nHer heroes proud, her martyrs pierced with pain:\nFor me her puissant blood was vainly shed;\nFor me her drums of battle beat in vain,\nAnd free I fare, half-heedless of her fate:\nNo faith, no flag I owe--then why not seek\nThis last loop-hole of life? Why hesitate?\nI will deny … and yet I do not speak.\n\n“Deny your God!” their spears are poised on high,\nAnd tense and terrible they wait the word;\nAnd dark and darker glooms the dreary sky,\nAnd in that hush of horror no thing stirred.\nThen, through the ringing terror and sheer hate\nLeaped there a vision to me--Oh, how far!\nA face, Her face … through all my stormy fate\nA joy, a strength, a glory and a star.\nBeneath the pines, where lonely camp-fires gleam,\nIn seas forlorn, amid the deserts drear,\nHow I had gladdened to that face of dream!\nAnd never, never had it seemed so dear.\nO silken hair that veils the sunny brow!\nO eyes of grey, so tender and so true!\nO lips of smiling sweetness! must I now\nFor ever and for ever go from you?\nAh, yes, I must … for if I do this thing,\nHow can I look into your face again?\nKnowing you think me more than half a king,\nI with my craven heart, my honour slain.\n\nNo! no! my mind’s made up. I gaze above,\nInto that sky insensate as a stone;\nNot for my creed, my country, but my Love\nWill I stand up and meet my death alone.\nThen though it be to utter dark I sink,\nThe God that dwells in me is not denied;\n“Best” triumphs over “Beast”,--and so I think\nHumanity itself is glorified …\n\n“And now, my butchers, I embrace my fate.\nCome! let my heart’s blood slake the thirsty sod.\nCurst be the life you offer! Glut your hate!\nStrike! Strike, you dogs! I’ll _NOT_ deny my God.”\n\nI saw the spears that seemed a-leap to slay,\nAll quiver earthward at the headman’s nod;\nAnd in a daze of dream I heard him say:\n“Go, set him free who serves so well his God!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-success": { - "title": "“A Song of Success”", - "body": "Ho! we were strong, we were swift, we were brave.\nYouth was a challenge, and Life was a fight.\nAll that was best in us gladly we gave,\nSprang from the rally, and leapt for the height.\nSmiling is Love in a foam of Spring flowers:\nHarden our hearts to him--on let us press!\nOh, what a triumph and pride shall be ours!\nSee where it beacons, the star of success!\n\nCares seem to crowd on us--so much to do;\nNew fields to conquer, and time’s on the wing.\nGrey hairs are showing, a wrinkle or two;\nSomehow our footstep is losing its spring.\nPleasure’s forsaken us, Love ceased to smile;\nYouth has been funeralled; Age travels fast.\nSometimes we wonder: is it worth while?\nThere! we have gained to the summit at last.\n\nAye, we have triumphed! Now must we haste,\nRevel in victory … why! what is wrong?\nLife’s choicest vintage is flat to the taste--\nAre we too late? Have we laboured too long?\nWealth, power, fame we hold … ah! but the truth:\nWould we not give this vain glory of ours\nFor one mad, glad year of glorious youth,\nLife in the Springtide, and Love in the flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-camp-fire": { - "title": "“The Song of the Camp-Fire”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHeed me, feed me, I am hungry, I am red-tongued with desire;\nBoughs of balsam, slabs of cedar, gummy fagots of the pine,\nHeap them on me, let me hug them to my eager heart of fire,\nRoaring, soaring up to heaven as a symbol and a sign.\nBring me knots of sunny maple, silver birch and tamarack;\nLeaping, sweeping, I will lap them with my ardent wings of flame;\nI will kindle them to glory, I will beat the darkness back;\nStreaming, gleaming, I will goad them to my glory and my fame.\nBring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight;\nStrips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold;\nWith my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night,\nThey will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold.\nLet me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas;\nRoaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands;\nI will mock the marly heavens, lamp the purple prairies,\nI will flaunt my deathless banners down the far, unhouseled lands.\nIn the vast and vaulted pine-gloom where the pillared forests frown,\nBy the sullen, bestial rivers running where God only knows,\nOn the starlit coral beaches when the combers thunder down,\nIn the death-spell of the barrens, in the shudder of the snows;\nIn a blazing belt of triumph from the palm-leaf to the pine,\nAs a symbol of defiance lo! the wilderness I span;\nAnd my beacons burn exultant as an everlasting sign\nOf unending domination, of the mastery of Man;\nI, the Life, the fierce Uplifter, I that weaned him from the mire;\nI, the angel and the devil, I, the tyrant and the slave;\nI, the Spirit of the Struggle; I, the mighty God of Fire;\nI, the Maker and Destroyer; I, the Giver and the Grave.\n\n\n# II.\n\nGather round me, boy and grey-beard, frontiersman of every kind.\nFew are you, and far and lonely, yet an army forms behind:\nBy your camp-fires shall they know you, ashes scattered to the wind.\n\nPeer into my heart of solace, break your bannock at my blaze;\nSmoking, stretched in lazy shelter, build your castles as you gaze;\nOr, it may be, deep in dreaming, think of dim, unhappy days.\n\nLet my warmth and glow caress you, for your trails are grim and hard;\nLet my arms of comfort press you, hunger-hewn and battle-scarred:\nO my lovers! how I bless you with your lives so madly marred!\n\nFor you seek the silent spaces, and their secret lore you glean:\nFor you win the savage races, and the brutish Wild you wean;\nAnd I gladden desert places, where camp-fire has never been.\n\nFrom the Pole unto the Tropics is there trail ye have not dared?\nAnd because you hold death lightly, so by death shall you be spared,\n(As the sages of the ages in their pages have declared).\n\nOn the roaring Arkilinik in a leaky bark canoe;\nUp the cloud of Mount McKinley, where the avalanche leaps through;\nIn the furnace of Death Valley, when the mirage glimmers blue.\n\nNow a smudge of wiry willows on the weary Kuskoquim;\nNow a flare of gummy pine-knots where Vancouver’s scaur is grim;\nNow a gleam of sunny ceiba, when the Cuban beaches dim.\n\nAlways, always God’s Great Open: lo! I burn with keener light\nIn the corridors of silence, in the vestibules of night;\n’Mid the ferns and grasses gleaming, was there ever gem so bright?\n\nNot for weaklings, not for women, like my brother of the hearth;\nRing your songs of wrath around me, I was made for manful mirth,\nIn the lusty, gusty greatness, on the bald spots of the earth.\n\nMen, my masters! men, my lovers! ye have fought and ye have bled;\nGather round my ruddy embers, softly glowing is my bed;\nBy my heart of solace dreaming, rest ye and be comforted!\n\n\n# III.\n\nI am dying, O my masters! by my fitful flame ye sleep;\nMy purple plumes of glory droop forlorn.\nGrey ashes choke and cloak me, and above the pines there creep\nThe stealthy silver moccasins of morn.\nThere comes a countless army, it’s the Legion of the Light;\nIt tramps in gleaming triumph round the world;\nAnd before its jewelled lances all the shadows of the night\nBack in to abysmal darknesses are hurled.\n\nLeap to life again, my lovers! ye must toil and never tire;\nThe day of daring, doing, brightens clear,\nWhen the bed of spicy cedar and the jovial camp-fire\nMust only be a memory of cheer.\nThere is hope and golden promise in the vast portentous dawn;\nThere is glamour in the glad, effluent sky:\nGo and leave me; I will dream of you and love you when you’re gone;\nI have served you, O my masters! let me die.\n\nA little heap of ashes, grey and sodden by the rain,\nWind-scattered, blurred and blotted by the snow:\nLet that be all to tell of me, and glorious again,\nYe things of greening gladness, leap and glow!\nA black scar in the sunshine by the palm-leaf or the pine,\nBlind to the night and dead to all desire;\nYet oh, of life and uplift what a symbol and a sign!\nYet oh, of power and conquest what a destiny is mine!\nA little heap of ashes--Yea! a miracle divine,\nThe foot-print of a god, all-radiant Fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-wage-slave": { - "title": "“The Song of the Wage-Slave”", - "body": "When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,\nI hope that it won’t be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.\nAnd I hope that it won’t be heaven, with some of the parsons I’ve met--\nAll I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget.\nLook at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands;\nMaster, I’ve done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands--\nWrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich;\nI’ve done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch.\nI have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk;\nThreescore years of labor--Thine be the long day’s work.\nAnd now, Big Master, I’m broken and bent and twisted and scarred,\nBut I’ve held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou will not judge me hard.\nThou knowest my sins are many, and often I’ve played the fool--\nWhiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil’s tool.\nI was just like a child with money; I flung it away with a curse,\nFeasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot’s purse;\nThen back to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine,\nI, the worker of workers, everything in my line.\nEverything hard but headwork (I’d no more brains than a kid),\nA brute with brute strength to labor, doing as I was bid;\nLiving in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life;\nNever knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife.\nA brute with brute strength to labor, and they were so far above--\nYet I’d gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love.\nI, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild--\nYet how I’d ha’ treasured a woman, and the sweet, warm kiss of a child!\nWell, ’tis Thy world, and Thou knowest. I blaspheme and my ways be rude;\nBut I’ve lived my life as I found it, and I’ve done my best to be good;\nI, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,\nSweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes;\nHurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams;\nDown in the ditch building o’er me palaces fairer than dreams;\nBoring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen,\nResolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men.\nMaster, I’ve filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands;\nNot by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.\nMaster, I’ve done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,\nAnd the long, long shift is over … Master, I’ve earned it--Rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-spell-of-the-yukon": { - "title": "“The Spell of the Yukon”", - "body": "I wanted the gold, and I sought it,\nI scrabbled and mucked like a slave.\nWas it famine or scurvy--I fought it;\nI hurled my youth into a grave.\nI wanted the gold, and I got it--\nCame out with a fortune last fall,--\nYet somehow life’s not what I thought it,\nAnd somehow the gold isn’t all.\n\nNo! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)\nIt’s the cussedest land that I know,\nFrom the big, dizzy mountains that screen it\nTo the deep, deathlike valleys below.\nSome say God was tired when He made it;\nSome say it’s a fine land to shun;\nMaybe; but there’s some as would trade it\nFor no land on earth--and I’m one.\n\nYou come to get rich (damned good reason);\nYou feel like an exile at first;\nYou hate it like hell for a season,\nAnd then you are worse than the worst.\nIt grips you like some kinds of sinning;\nIt twists you from foe to a friend;\nIt seems it’s been since the beginning;\nIt seems it will be to the end.\n\nI’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow\nThat’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;\nI’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow\nIn crimson and gold, and grow dim,\nTill the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,\nAnd the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;\nAnd I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,\nWith the peace o’ the world piled on top.\n\nThe summer--no sweeter was ever;\nThe sunshiny woods all athrill;\nThe grayling aleap in the river,\nThe bighorn asleep on the hill.\nThe strong life that never knows harness;\nThe wilds where the caribou call;\nThe freshness, the freedom, the farness--\nO God! how I’m stuck on it all.\n\nThe winter! the brightness that blinds you,\nThe white land locked tight as a drum,\nThe cold fear that follows and finds you,\nThe silence that bludgeons you dumb.\nThe snows that are older than history,\nThe woods where the weird shadows slant;\nThe stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,\nI’ve bade ’em good-by--but I can’t.\n\nThere’s a land where the mountains are nameless,\nAnd the rivers all run God knows where;\nThere are lives that are erring and aimless,\nAnd deaths that just hang by a hair;\nThere are hardships that nobody reckons;\nThere are valleys unpeopled and still;\nThere’s a land--oh, it beckons and beckons,\nAnd I want to go back--and I will.\n\nThey’re making my money diminish;\nI’m sick of the taste of champagne.\nThank God! when I’m skinned to a finish\nI’ll pike to the Yukon again.\nI’ll fight--and you bet it’s no sham-fight;\nIt’s hell!--but I’ve been there before;\nAnd it’s better than this by a damsite--\nSo me for the Yukon once more.\n\nThere’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;\nIt’s luring me on as of old;\nYet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting\nSo much as just finding the gold.\nIt’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,\nIt’s the forests where silence has lease;\nIt’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,\nIt’s the stillness that fills me with peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-squaw-man": { - "title": "“The Squaw Man”", - "body": "The cow-moose comes to water, and the beaver’s overbold,\nThe net is in the eddy of the stream;\nThe teepee stars the vivid sward with russet, red and gold,\nAnd in the velvet gloom the fire’s a-gleam.\nThe night is ripe with quiet, rich with incense of the pine;\nFrom sanctuary lake I hear the loon;\nThe peaks are bright against the blue, and drenched with sunset wine,\nAnd like a silver bubble is the moon.\n\nCloud-high I climbed but yesterday; a hundred miles around\nI looked to see a rival fire a-gleam.\nAs in a crystal lens it lay, a land without a bound,\nAll lure, and virgin vastitude, and dream.\nThe great sky soared exultantly, the great earth bared its breast,\nAll river-veined and patterned with the pine;\nThe heedless hordes of caribou were streaming to the West,\nA land of lustrous mystery--and mine.\n\nYea, mine to frame my Odyssey: Oh, little do they know\nMy conquest and the kingdom that I keep!\nThe meadows of the musk-ox, where the laughing grasses grow,\nThe rivers where the careless conies leap.\nBeyond the silent Circle, where white men are fierce and few,\nI lord it, and I mock at man-made law;\nLike a flame upon the water is my little light canoe,\nAnd yonder in the fireglow is my squaw.\n\nA squaw man! yes, that’s what I am; sneer at me if you will.\nI’ve gone the grilling pace that cannot last;\nWith bawdry, bridge and brandy--Oh, I’ve drank enough to kill\nA dozen such as you, but that is past.\nI’ve swung round to my senses, found the place where I belong;\nThe City made a madman out of me;\nBut here beyond the Circle, where there’s neither right or wrong,\nI leap from life’s straight-jacket, and I’m free.\n\nYet ever in the far forlorn, by trails of lone desire;\nYet ever in the dawn’s white leer of hate;\nYet ever by the dripping kill, beside the drowsy fire,\nThere comes the fierce heart-hunger for a mate.\nThere comes the mad blood-clamour for a woman’s clinging hand,\nLove-humid eyes, the velvet of a breast;\nAnd so I sought the Bonnet-plumes, and chose from out the band\nThe girl I thought the sweetest and the best.\n\nO wistful women I have loved before my dark disgrace!\nO women fair and rare in my home land!\nDear ladies, if I saw you now I’d turn away my face,\nThen crawl to kiss your foot-prints in the sand!\nAnd yet--that day the rifle jammed--a wounded moose at bay--\nA roar, a charge … I faced it with my knife:\nA shot from out the willow-scrub, and there the monster lay …\nYes, little Laughing Eyes, you saved my life.\n\nThe man must have the woman, and we’re all brutes more or less,\nSince first the male ape shinned the family tree;\nAnd yet I think I love her with a husband’s tenderness,\nAnd yet I know that she would die for me.\nOh, if I left you, Laughing Eyes, and nevermore came back,\nGod help you, girl! I know what you would do …\nI see the lake wan in the moon, and from the shadow black,\nThere drifts a little, _EMPTY_ birch canoe.\n\nWe’re here beyond the Circle, where there’s never wrong nor right;\nWe aren’t spliced according to the law;\nBut by the gods I hail you on this hushed and holy night\nAs the mother of my children, and my squaw.\nI see your little slender face set in the firelight glow;\nI pray that I may never make it sad;\nI hear you croon a baby song, all slumber-soft and low--\nGod bless you, little Laughing Eyes! I’m glad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "sunshine": { - "title": "“Sunshine”", - "body": "# I.\n\nFlat as a drum-head stretch the haggard snows;\nThe mighty skies are palisades of light;\nThe stars are blurred; the silence grows and grows;\nVaster and vaster vaults the icy night.\nHere in my sleeping-bag I cower and pray:\n“Silence and night, have pity! stoop and slay.”\n\nI have not slept for many, many days.\nI close my eyes with weariness--that’s all.\nI still have strength to feed the drift-wood blaze,\nThat flickers weirdly on the icy wall.\nI still have strength to pray: “God rest her soul,\nHere in the awful shadow of the Pole.”\n\nThere in the cabin’s alcove low she lies,\nStill candles gleaming at her head and feet;\nAll snow-drop white, ash-cold, with closed eyes,\nLips smiling, hands at rest--O God, how sweet!\nHow all unutterably sweet she seems …\nNot dead, not dead indeed--she dreams, she dreams.\n\n\n# II.\n\n“Sunshine”, I called her, and she brought, I vow,\nGod’s blessed sunshine to this life of mine.\nI was a rover, of the breed who plough\nLife’s furrow in a far-flung, lonely line;\nThe wilderness my home, my fortune cast\nIn a wild land of dearth, barbaric, vast.\n\nWhen did I see her first? Long had I lain\nGroping my way to life through fevered gloom.\nSudden the cloud of darkness left my brain;\nA velvet bar of sunshine pierced the room,\nAnd in that mellow glory aureoled\nShe stood, she stood, all golden in its gold.\n\nSunshine! O miracle! the earth grew glad;\nRadiant each blade of grass, each living thing.\nWhat a huge strength, high hope, proud will I had!\nAll the wide world with rapture seemed to ring.\nWould she but wed me? _YES_: then fared we forth\nInto the vast, unvintageable North.\n\n\n# III.\n\n_In Muskrat Land the conies leap,\nThe wavies linger in their flight;\nThe jewelled, snakelike rivers creep;\nThe sun, sad rogue, is out all night;\nThe great wood bison paws the sand,\nIn Muskrat Land, in Muskrat Land._\n\n_In Muskrat Land dim streams divide\nThe tundras belted by the sky.\nHow sweet in slim canoe to glide,\nAnd dream, and let the world go by!\nBuild gay camp-fires on greening strand!\nIn Muskrat Land, in Muskrat Land._\n\n\n# IV.\n\nAnd so we dreamed and drifted, she and I;\nAnd how she loved that free, unfathomed life!\nThere in the peach-bloom of the midnight sky,\nThe silence welded us, true man and wife.\nThen North and North invincibly we pressed\nBeyond the Circle, to the world’s white crest.\n\nAnd on the wind-flailed Arctic waste we stayed,\nDwelt with the Huskies by the Polar sea.\nFur had they, white fox, marten, mink to trade,\nAnd we had food-stuff, bacon, flour and tea.\nSo we made snug, chummed up with all the band:\nSudden the Winter swooped on Husky Land.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat was that ill so sinister and dread,\nSmiting the tribe with sickness to the bone?\nSo that we waked one morn to find them fled;\nSo that we stood and stared, alone, alone.\nBravely she smiled and looked into my eyes;\nLaughed at their troubled, stern, foreboding pain;\nGaily she mocked the menace of the skies,\nTurned to our cheery cabin once again,\nSaying: “’Twill soon be over, dearest one,\nThe long, long night: then O the sun, the sun!”\n\n\n# VI.\n\n_God made a heart of gold, of gold,\nShining and sweet and true;\nGave it a home of fairest mould,\nBlest it, and called it--You._\n\n_God gave the rose its grace of glow,\nAnd the lark its radiant glee;\nBut, better than all, I know, I know\nGod gave you, Heart, to me._\n\n\n# VII.\n\nShe was all sunshine in those dubious days;\nOur cabin beaconed with defiant light;\nWe chattered by the friendly drift-wood blaze;\nCloser and closer cowered the hag-like night.\nA wolf-howl would have been a welcome sound,\nAnd there was none in all that stricken land;\nYet with such silence, darkness, death around,\nLearned we to love as few can understand.\nSpirit with spirit fused, and soul with soul,\nThere in the sullen shadow of the Pole.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nWhat was that haunting horror of the night?\nBrave was she; buoyant, full of sunny cheer.\nWhy was her face so small, so strangely white?\nThen did I turn from her, heart-sick with fear;\nSought in my agony the outcast snows;\nPrayed in my pain to that insensate sky;\nGrovelled and sobbed and cursed, and then arose:\n“Sunshine! O heart of gold! to die! to die!”\n\n\n# IX.\n\nShe died on Christmas day--it seems so sad\nThat one you love should die on Christmas day.\nHead-bowed I knelt by her; O God! I had\nNo tears to shed, no moan, no prayer to pray.\nI heard her whisper: “Call me, will you, dear?\nThey say Death parts, but I won’t go away.\nI will be with you in the cabin here;\nOh I will plead with God to let me stay!\nStay till the Night is gone, till Spring is nigh,\nTill sunshine comes … be brave … I’m tired … good-bye …”\n\n\n# X.\n\nFor weeks, for months I have not seen the sun;\nThe minatory dawns are leprous pale;\nThe felon days malinger one by one;\nHow like a dream Life is! how vain! how stale!\nI, too, am faint; that vampire-like disease\nHas fallen on me; weak and cold am I,\nHugging a tiny fire in fear I freeze:\nThe cabin must be cold, and so I try\nTo bear the frost, the frost that fights decay,\nThe frost that keeps her beautiful alway.\n\n\n# XI.\n\n_She lies within an icy vault;\nIt glitters like a cave of salt.\nAll marble-pure and angel-sweet\nWith candles at her head and feet,\nUnder an ermine robe she lies.\nI kiss her hands, I kiss her eyes:\n“Come back, come back, O Love, I pray,\nInto this house, this house of clay!\nAnswer my kisses soft and warm;\nNestle again within my arm.\nCome! for I know that you are near;\nOpen your eyes and look, my dear.\nJust for a moment break the mesh;\nBack from the spirit leap to flesh.\nWeary I wait; the night is black;\nLove of my life, come back, come back!”_\n\n\n# XII.\n\nLast night maybe I was a little mad,\nFor as I prayed despairful by her side,\nSuch a strange, antic visioning I had:\nLo! it did seem _HER EYES WERE OPEN WIDE_.\nSurely I must have dreamed! I stared once more …\nNo, ’twas a candle’s trick, a shadow cast.\nThere were her lashes locking as before.\n(Oh, but it filled me with a joy so vast!)\nNo, ’twas a freak, a fancy of the brain,\n(Oh, but to-night I’ll try again, again!)\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nIt was no dream; now do I know that Love\nLeapt from the starry battlements of Death;\nFor in my vigil as I bent above,\nCalling her name with eager, burning breath,\nSudden there came a change: again I saw\nThe radiance of the rose-leaf stain her cheek;\nRivers of rapture thrilled in sunny thaw;\nCleft were her coral lips as if to speak;\nCurved were her tender arms as if to cling;\nOpen the flower-like eyes of lucent blue,\nLooking at me with love so pitying\nThat I could fancy Heaven shining through.\n“Sunshine,” I faltered, “stay with me, oh, stay!”\nYet ere I finished, in a moment’s flight,\nThere in her angel purity she lay--\nAh! but I know she’ll come again to-night.\n_EVEN AS RADIANT SWORD LEAPS FROM THE SHEATH,\nSOUL FROM THE BODY LEAPS--WE CALL IT DEATH_.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nEven as this line I write,\nDo I know that she is near;\nHappy am I, every night\nComes she back to bid me cheer;\nKissing her, I hold her fast;\nWin her into life at last.\n\nDid I dream that yesterday\nOn yon mountain ridge a glow\nSoft as moonstone paled away,\nLeaving less forlorn the snow?\nCould it be the sun? Oh, fain\nWould I see the sun again!\n\nOh, to see a coral dawn\nGladden to a crocus glow!\nDay’s a spectre dim and wan,\nDancing on the furtive snow;\nNight’s a cloud upon my brain:\nOh, to see the sun again!\n\nYou who find us in this place,\nHave you pity in your breast;\nLet us in our last embrace,\nUnder earth sun-hallowed rest.\nNight’s a claw upon my brain:\nOh, to see the sun again!\n\n\n# XV.\n\nThe Sun! at last the Sun! I write these lines,\nHere on my knees, with feeble, fumbling hand.\nLook! in yon mountain cleft a radiance shines,\nGleam of a primrose--see it thrill, expand,\nGrow glorious. Dear God be praised! it streams\nInto the cabin in a gush of gold.\nLook! there she stands, the angel of my dreams,\nAll in the radiant shimmer aureoled;\nFirst as I saw her from my bed of pain;\nFirst as I loved her when the darkness passed.\nNow do I know that Life is not in vain;\nNow do I know God cares, at last, at last!\nLight outlives dark, joy grief, and Love’s the sum:\nHeart of my heart! Sunshine! I come … I come …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-three-voices": { - "title": "“The Three Voices”", - "body": "The waves have a story to tell me,\nAs I lie on the lonely beach;\nChanting aloft in the pine-tops,\nThe wind has a lesson to teach;\nBut the stars sing an anthem of glory\nI cannot put into speech.\n\nThe waves tell of ocean spaces,\nOf hearts that are wild and brave,\nOf populous city places,\nOf desolate shores they lave,\nOf men who sally in quest of gold\nTo sink in an ocean grave.\n\nThe wind is a mighty roamer;\nHe bids me keep me free,\nClean from the taint of the gold-lust,\nHardy and pure as he;\nCling with my love to nature,\nAs a child to the mother-knee.\n\nBut the stars throng out in their glory,\nAnd they sing of the God in man;\nThey sing of the Mighty Master,\nOf the loom his fingers span,\nWhere a star or a soul is a part of the whole,\nAnd weft in the wondrous plan.\n\nHere by the camp-fire’s flicker,\nDeep in my blanket curled,\nI long for the peace of the pine-gloom,\nWhen the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,\nAnd the wind and the wave are silent,\nAnd world is singing to world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "to-sunnydale": { - "title": "“To Sunnydale”", - "body": "There lies the trail to Sunnydale,\nAmid the lure of laughter.\nOh, how can we unhappy be\nBeneath its leafy rafter!\nEach perfect hour is like a flower,\nEach day is like a posy.\nHow can you say the skies are grey?\nYou’re wrong, my friend, they’re rosy.\n\nWith right good will let’s climb the hill,\nAnd leave behind all sorrow.\nOh, we’ll be gay! a bright to-day\nWill make a bright to-morrow.\nOh, we’ll be strong! the way is long\nThat never has a turning;\nThe hill is high, but there’s the sky,\nAnd how the West is burning!\n\nAnd if through chance of circumstance\nWe have to go bare-foot, sir,\nWe’ll not repine--a friend of mine\nHas got no feet to boot, sir.\nThis Happiness a habit is,\nAnd Life is what we make it:\nSee! there’s the trail to Sunnydale!\nUp, friend! and let us take it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-tramps": { - "title": "“The Tramps”", - "body": "Can you recall, dear comrade, when we tramped God’s land together,\nAnd we sang the old, old Earth-song, for our youth was very sweet;\nWhen we drank and fought and lusted, as we mocked at tie and tether,\nAlong the road to Anywhere, the wide world at our feet--\n\nAlong the road to Anywhere, when each day had its story;\nWhen time was yet our vassal, and life’s jest was still unstale;\nWhen peace unfathomed filled our hearts as, bathed in amber glory,\nAlong the road to Anywhere we watched the sunsets pale?\n\nAlas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster;\nThere’s hunger, want, and weariness, yet O we loved it so!\nAs on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master,\nAnd no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe,\nWe tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere,\nThe tragic road to Anywhere, such dear, dim years ago.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-trappers-christmas-eve": { - "title": "“The Trapper’s Christmas Eve”", - "body": "It’s mighty lonesome-like and drear.\nAbove the Wild the moon rides high,\nAnd shows up sharp and needle-clear\nThe emptiness of earth and sky;\nNo happy homes with love a-glow;\nNo Santa Claus to make believe:\nJust snow and snow, and then more snow;\nIt’s Christmas Eve, it’s Christmas Eve.\n\nAnd here am I where all things end,\nAnd Undesirables are hurled;\nA poor old man without a friend,\nForgot and dead to all the world;\nClean out of sight and out of mind …\nWell, maybe it is better so;\nWe all in life our level find,\nAnd mine, I guess, is pretty low.\n\nYet as I sit with pipe alight\nBeside the cabin-fire, it’s queer\nThis mind of mine must take to-night\nThe backward trail of fifty year.\nThe school-house and the Christmas tree;\nThe children with their cheeks a-glow;\nTwo bright blue eyes that smile on me …\nJust half a century ago.\n\nAgain (it’s maybe forty years),\nWith faith and trust almost divine,\nThese same blue eyes, abrim with tears,\nThrough depths of love look into mine.\nA parting, tender, soft and low,\nWith arms that cling and lips that cleave …\nAh me! it’s all so long ago,\nYet seems so sweet this Christmas Eve.\n\nJust thirty years ago, again …\nWe say a bitter, _LAST_ good-bye;\nOur lips are white with wrath and pain;\nOur little children cling and cry.\nWhose was the fault? it matters not,\nFor man and woman both deceive;\nIt’s buried now and all forgot,\nForgiven, too, this Christmas Eve.\n\nAnd she (God pity me) is dead;\nOur children men and women grown.\nI like to think that they are wed,\nWith little children of their own,\nThat crowd around their Christmas tree …\nI would not ever have them grieve,\nOr shed a single tear for me,\nTo mar their joy this Christmas Eve.\n\nStripped to the buff and gaunt and still\nLies all the land in grim distress.\nLike lost soul wailing, long and shrill,\nA wolf-howl cleaves the emptiness.\nThen hushed as Death is everything.\nThe moon rides haggard and forlorn …\n“O hark the herald angels sing!”\nGod bless all men--it’s Christmas morn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "unforgotten": { - "title": "“Unforgotten”", - "body": "I know a garden where the lilies gleam,\nAnd one who lingers in the sunshine there;\nShe is than white-stoled lily far more fair,\nAnd oh, her eyes are heaven-lit with dream!\n\nI know a garret, cold and dark and drear,\nAnd one who toils and toils with tireless pen,\nUntil his brave, sad eyes grow weary--then\nHe seeks the stars, pale, silent as a seer.\n\nAnd ah, it’s strange; for, desolate and dim,\nBetween these two there rolls an ocean wide;\nYet he is in the garden by her side\nAnd she is in the garret there with him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-wanderlust": { - "title": "“The Wanderlust”", - "body": "The Wanderlust has lured me to the seven lonely seas,\nHas dumped me on the tailing-piles of dearth;\nThe Wanderlust has haled me from the morris chairs of ease,\nHas hurled me to the ends of all the earth.\nHow bitterly I’ve cursed it, oh, the Painted Desert knows,\nThe wraithlike heights that hug the pallid plain,\nThe all-but-fluid silence,--yet the longing grows and grows,\nAnd I’ve got to glut the Wanderlust again.\n\n_Soldier, sailor, in what a plight I’ve been!\nTinker, tailor, oh what a sight I’ve seen!\nAnd I’m hitting the trail in the morning, boys,\nAnd you won’t see my heels for dust;\nFor it’s “all day” with you\nWhen you answer the cue\n Of the Wan-der-lust._\n\nThe Wanderlust has got me … by the belly-aching fire,\nBy the fever and the freezing and the pain;\nBy the darkness that just drowns you, by the wail of home desire,\nI’ve tried to break the spell of it--in vain.\nLife might have been a feast for me, now there are only crumbs;\nIn rags and tatters, beggar-wise I sit;\nYet there’s no rest or peace for me, imperious it drums,\nThe Wanderlust, and I must follow it.\n\n_Highway, by-way, many a mile I’ve done;\nRare way, fair way, many a height I’ve won;\nBut I’m pulling my freight in the morning, boys,\nAnd it’s over the hills or bust;\nFor there’s never a cure\nWhen you list to the lure\n Of the Wan-der-lust._\n\nThe Wanderlust has taught me … it has whispered to my heart\nThings all you stay-at-homes will never know.\nThe white man and the savage are but three short days apart,\nThree days of cursing, crawling, doubt and woe.\nThen it’s down to chewing muclucs, to the water you can _EAT_,\nTo fish you bolt with nose held in your hand.\nWhen you get right down to cases, it’s King’s Grub that rules the races,\nAnd the Wanderlust will help you understand.\n\n_Haunting, taunting, that is the spell of it;\nMocking, baulking, that is the hell of it;\nBut I’ll shoulder my pack in the morning, boys,\nAnd I’m going because I must;\nFor it’s so-long to all\nWhen you answer the call\n Of the Wan-der-lust._\n\nThe Wanderlust has blest me … in a ragged blanket curled,\nI’ve watched the gulf of Heaven foam with stars;\nI’ve walked with eyes wide open to the wonder of the world,\nI’ve seen God’s flood of glory burst its bars.\nI’ve seen the gold a-blinding in the riffles of the sky,\nTill I fancied me a bloated plutocrat;\nBut I’m freedom’s happy bond-slave, and I will be till I die,\nAnd I’ve got to thank the Wanderlust for that.\n\n_Wild heart, child heart, all of the world your home.\nGlad heart, mad heart, what can you do but roam?\nOh, I’ll beat it once more in the morning, boys,\nWith a pinch of tea and a crust;\nFor you cannot deny\nWhen you hark to the cry\n Of the Wan-der-lust._\n\nThe Wanderlust will claim me at the finish for its own.\nI’ll turn my back on men and face the Pole.\nBeyond the Arctic outposts I will venture all alone;\nSome Never-never Land will be my goal.\nThank God! there’s none will miss me, for I’ve been a bird of flight;\nAnd in my moccasins I’ll take my call;\nFor the Wanderlust has ruled me,\nAnd the Wanderlust has schooled me,\nAnd I’m ready for the darkest trail of all.\n\n_Grim land, dim land, oh, how the vastness calls!\nFar land, star land, oh, how the stillness falls!\nFor you never can tell if it’s heaven or hell,\nAnd I’m taking the trail on trust;\nBut I haven’t a doubt\nThat my soul will leap out\n On its Wan-der-lust._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "while-the-bannock-bakes": { - "title": "“While the Bannock Bakes”", - "body": "Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;\nI’ve got to watch the bannock bake--how restful is the air!\nYou’d little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,\nThough where I don’t exactly know, and don’t precisely care.\nThe man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;\nThe river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;\nThe midnight sunshine brims yon cleft--we think it’s the Divide;\nWe’ll get there in a month, maybe, or maybe in a year.\n\nIt doesn’t matter, does it, pal? We’re of that breed of men\nWith whom the world of wine and cards and women disagree;\nYour trouble was a roofless game of poker now and then,\nAnd “raising up my elbow”, that’s what got away with me.\nWe’re merely “Undesirables”, artistic more or less;\nMy horny hands are Chopin-wise; you quote your Browning well;\nAnd yet we’re fooling round for gold in this damned wilderness:\nThe joke is, if we found it, we would both go straight to hell.\n\nWell, maybe we won’t find it--and at least we’ve got the “life”.\nWe’re both as brown as berries, and could wrestle with a bear:\n(That bannock’s raising nicely, pal; just jab it with your knife.)\nFine specimens of manhood they would reckon us out there.\nIt’s the tracking and the packing and the poling in the sun;\nIt’s the sleeping in the open, it’s the rugged, unfaked food;\nIt’s the snow-shoe and the paddle, and the campfire and the gun,\nAnd when I think of what I was, I know that it is good.\n\nJust think of how we’ve poled all day up this strange little stream;\nSince life began no eye of man has seen this place before;\nHow fearless all the wild things are! the banks with goose-grass gleam,\nAnd there’s a bronzy musk-rat sitting sniffing at his door.\nA mother duck with brood of ten comes squattering along;\nThe tawny, white-winged ptarmigan are flying all about;\nAnd in that swirly, golden pool, a restless, gleaming throng,\nThe trout are waiting till we condescend to take them out.\n\nAh, yes, it’s good! I’ll bet that there’s no doctor like the Wild:\n(Just turn that bannock over there; it’s getting nicely brown.)\nI might be in my grave by now, forgotten and reviled,\nOr rotting like a sickly cur in some far, foreign town.\nI might be that vile thing I was,--it all seems like a dream;\nI owed a man a grudge one time that only life could pay;\nAnd yet it’s half-forgotten now--how petty these things seem!\n(But that’s “another story”, pal; I’ll tell it you some day.)\n\nHow strange two “irresponsibles” should chum away up here!\nBut round the Arctic Circle friends are few and far between.\nWe’ve shared the same camp-fire and tent for nigh on seven year,\nAnd never had a word that wasn’t cheering and serene.\nWe’ve halved the toil and split the spoil, and borne each other’s packs;\nBy all the Wild’s freemasonry we’re brothers, tried and true;\nWe’ve swept on danger side by side, and fought it back to back,\nAnd you would die for me, old pal, and I would die for you.\n\nNow there was that time I got lost in Rory Bory Land,\n(How quick the blizzards sweep on one across that Polar sea!)\nYou formed a rescue crew of One, and saw a frozen hand\nThat stuck out of a drift of snow--and, partner, it was Me.\nBut I got even, did I not, that day the paddle broke?\nWhite water on the Coppermine--a rock--a split canoe--\nTwo fellows struggling in the foam (one couldn’t swim a stroke):\nA half-drowned man I dragged ashore … and partner, it was You.\n\n * * * * *\n\nIn Rory Borealis Land the winter’s long and black.\nThe silence seems a solid thing, shot through with wolfish woe;\nAnd rowelled by the eager stars the skies vault vastly back,\nAnd man seems but a little mite on that weird-lit plateau.\nNo thing to do but smoke and yarn of wild and misspent lives,\nBeside the camp-fire there we sat--what tales you told to me\nOf love and hate, and chance and fate, and temporary wives!\nIn Rory Borealis Land, beside the Arctic Sea.\n\nOne yarn you told me in those days I can remember still;\nIt seemed as if I visioned it, so sharp you sketched it in;\nBellona was the name, I think; a coast town in Brazil,\nWhere nobody did anything but serenade and sin.\nI saw it all--the jewelled sea, the golden scythe of sand,\nThe stately pillars of the palms, the feathery bamboo,\nThe red-roofed houses and the swart, sun-dominated land,\nThe people ever children, and the heavens ever blue.\n\nYou told me of that girl of yours, that blossom of old Spain,\nAll glamour, grace and witchery, all passion, verve and glow.\nHow maddening she must have been! You made me see her plain,\nThere by our little camp-fire, in the silence and the snow.\nYou loved her and she loved you. She’d a husband, too, I think,\nA doctor chap, you told me, whom she treated like a dog,\nA white man living on the beach, a hopeless slave to drink--\n(Just turn that bannock over there, that’s propped against the log.)\n\nThat story seemed to strike me, pal--it happens every day:\nYou had to go away awhile, then somehow it befell\nThe doctor chap discovered, gave her up, and disappeared;\nYou came back, tired of her in time … there’s nothing more to tell.\nHist! see those willows silvering where swamp and river meet!\nJust reach me up my rifle quick; that’s Mister Moose, I know--\nThere now, _I’VE GOT HIM DEAD TO RIGHTS_ … but hell! we’ve lots to eat\nI don’t believe in taking life--we’ll let the beggar go.\n\nHeigh ho! I’m tired; the bannock’s cooked; it’s time we both turned in.\nThe morning mist is coral-kissed, the morning sky is gold.\nThe camp-fire’s a confessional--what funny yarns we spin!\nIt sort of made me think a bit, that story that you told.\nThe fig-leaf belt and Rory Bory are such odd extremes,\nYet after all how very small this old world seems to be …\nYes, that was quite a yarn, old pal, and yet to me it seems\nYou missed the point: the point is that\nthe “doctor chap” … was _ME_ …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-woman-and-the-angel": { - "title": "“The Woman and the Angel”", - "body": "An angel was tired of heaven, as he lounged in the golden street;\nHis halo was tilted sideways, and his harp lay mute at his feet;\nSo the Master stooped in His pity, and gave him a pass to go,\nFor the space of a moon, to the earth-world, to mix with the men below.\n\nHe doffed his celestial garments, scarce waiting to lay them straight;\nHe bade good by to Peter, who stood by the golden gate;\nThe sexless singers of heaven chanted a fond farewell,\nAnd the imps looked up as they pattered on the red-hot flags of hell.\n\nNever was seen such an angel--eyes of heavenly blue,\nFeatures that shamed Apollo, hair of a golden hue;\nThe women simply adored him; his lips were like Cupid’s bow;\nBut he never ventured to use them--and so they voted him slow.\n\nTill at last there came One Woman, a marvel of loveliness,\nAnd she whispered to him: “Do you love me?”\nAnd he answered that woman, “Yes.”\nAnd she said: “Put your arms around me, and kiss me, and hold me--so--”\nBut fiercely he drew back, saying: “This thing is wrong, and I know.”\n\nThen sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled:\n“You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.\nWe have outlived the old standards; we have burst, like an over-tight thong,\nThe ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.”\n\nThen the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His side,\nFor oh, the woman was wondrous, and oh, the angel was tried!\nAnd deep in his hell sang the Devil, and this was the strain of his song:\n“The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - } - } - }, - "the-worlds-all-right": { - "title": "“The World’s All Right”", - "body": " _Be honest, kindly, simple, true;\n Seek good in all, scorn but pretence;\n Whatever sorrow come to you,\n Believe in Life’s Beneficence!_\n\nThe World’s all right; serene I sit,\nAnd cease to puzzle over it.\nThere’s much that’s mighty strange, no doubt;\nBut Nature knows what she’s about;\nAnd in a million years or so\nWe’ll know more than to-day we know.\nOld Evolution’s under way--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nCould things be other than they are?\nAll’s in its place, from mote to star.\nThe thistledown that flits and flies\nCould drift no hair-breadth otherwise.\nWhat is, must be; with rhythmic laws\nAll Nature chimes, Effect and Cause.\nThe sand-grain and the sun obey--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nJust try to get the Cosmic touch,\nThe sense that “you” don’t matter much.\nA million stars are in the sky;\nA million planets plunge and die;\nA million million men are sped;\nA million million wait ahead.\nEach plays his part and has his day--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nJust try to get the Chemic view:\nA million million lives made “you”.\nIn lives a million you will be\nImmortal down Eternity;\nImmortal on this earth to range,\nWith never death, but ever change.\nYou always were, and will be aye--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nBe glad! And do not blindly grope\nFor Truth that lies beyond our scope:\nA sober plot informeth all\nOf Life’s uproarious carnival.\nYour day is such a little one,\nA gnat that lives from sun to sun;\nYet gnat and you have parts to play--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nAnd though it’s written from the start,\nJust act your best your little part.\nJust be as happy as you can,\nAnd serve your kind, and die--a man.\nJust live the good that in you lies,\nAnd seek no guerdon of the skies;\nJust make your Heaven here, to-day--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nRemember! in Creation’s swing\nThe Race and not the man’s the thing.\nThere’s battle, murder, sudden death,\nAnd pestilence, with poisoned breath.\nYet quick forgotten are such woes;\nOn, on the stream of Being flows.\nTruth, Beauty, Love uphold their sway--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.\n\nThe World’s all right; serene I sit,\nAnd joy that I am part of it;\nAnd put my trust in Nature’s plan,\nAnd try to aid her all I can;\nContent to pass, if in my place\nI’ve served the uplift of the Race.\nTruth! Beauty! Love! O Radiant Day--\n What ho! the World’s all right, I say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1912 - } - } - }, - "the-younger-son": { - "title": "“The Younger Son”", - "body": "If you leave the gloom of London and you seek a glowing land,\nWhere all except the flag is strange and new,\nThere’s a bronzed and stalwart fellow who will grip you by the hand,\nAnd greet you with a welcome warm and true;\nFor he’s your younger brother, the one you sent away\nBecause there wasn’t room for him at home;\nAnd now he’s quite contented, and he’s glad he didn’t stay,\nAnd he’s building Britain’s greatness o’er the foam.\n\nWhen the giant herd is moving at the rising of the sun,\nAnd the prairie is lit with rose and gold,\nAnd the camp is all abustle, and the busy day’s begun,\nHe leaps into the saddle sure and bold.\nThrough the round of heat and hurry, through the racket and the rout,\nHe rattles at a pace that nothing mars;\nAnd when the night-winds whisper and camp-fires flicker out,\nHe is sleeping like a child beneath the stars.\n\nWhen the wattle-blooms are drooping in the sombre she-oak glade,\nAnd the breathless land is lying in a swoon,\nHe leaves his work a moment, leaning lightly on his spade,\nAnd he hears the bell-bird chime the Austral noon.\nThe parrakeets are silent in the gum-tree by the creek;\nThe ferny grove is sunshine-steeped and still;\nBut the dew will gem the myrtle in the twilight ere he seek\nHis little lonely cabin on the hill.\n\nAround the purple, vine-clad slope the argent river dreams;\nThe roses almost hide the house from view;\nA snow-peak of the Winterberg in crimson splendor gleams;\nThe shadow deepens down on the karroo.\nHe seeks the lily-scented dusk beneath the orange tree;\nHis pipe in silence glows and fades and glows;\nAnd then two little maids come out and climb upon his knee,\nAnd one is like the lily, one the rose.\n\nHe sees his white sheep dapple o’er the green New Zealand plain,\nAnd where Vancouver’s shaggy ramparts frown,\nWhen the sunlight threads the pine-gloom he is fighting might and main\nTo clinch the rivets of an Empire down.\nYou will find him toiling, toiling, in the south or in the west,\nA child of nature, fearless, frank, and free;\nAnd the warmest heart that beats for you is beating in his breast,\nAnd he sends you loyal greeting o’er the sea.\n\nYou’ve a brother in the army, you’ve another in the Church;\nOne of you is a diplomatic swell;\nYou’ve had the pick of everything and left him in the lurch,\nAnd yet I think he’s doing very well.\nI’m sure his life is happy, and he doesn’t envy yours;\nI know he loves the land his pluck has won;\nAnd I fancy in the years unborn, while England’s fame endures,\nShe will come to bless with pride--The Younger Son.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dr-seuss": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dr. Seuss", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "how-did-it-get-so-late-so-soon": { - "title": "“How did it get so late so soon …”", - "body": "How did it get so late so soon?\nIt’s night before it’s afternoon.\nDecember is here before it’s June.\nMy goodness how the time has flewn.\nHow did it get so late so soon?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "oh-the-places-youll-go": { - "title": "“Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”", - "body": "You have brains in your head.\nYou have feet in your shoes.\nYou can steer yourself in any direction you choose.\nYou’re on your own.\nAnd you know what you know.\nYou are the guy who’ll decide where to go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1990 - } - } - }, - "too-many-daves": { - "title": "“Too Many Daves”", - "body": "Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave\nHad twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?\nWell, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do.\nYou see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!\nCome into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one.\nAll twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!\nThis makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’\nAs you can imagine, with so many Daves.\nAnd often she wishes that, when they were born,\nShe had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn\nAnd one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.\nAnd one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.\nAnd one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.\nAnd one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.\nAnother one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.\nAnother one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face.\nAnd one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff.\nOne Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.\nAnd one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed.\nAnd one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed.\nAnd one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt\nAnd one of them Oliver Boliver Butt\nAnd one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate …\nBut she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1953 - } - } - }, - "troubles": { - "title": "“Troubles”", - "body": "I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.\nSome come from ahead and some come from behind.\nBut I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see.\nNow my troubles are going to have troubles with me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1965 - } - } - }, - "waiting": { - "title": "“Waiting”", - "body": "Waiting for a train to go\nor a bus to come, or a plane to go\nor the mail to come, or the rain to go\nor the phone to ring, or the snow to snow\nor waiting around for a Yes or a No\nor waiting for their hair to grow.\nEveryone is just waiting.\n\nWaiting for the fish to bite\nor waiting for wind to fly a kite\nor waiting around for Friday night\nor waiting, perhaps, for their uncle Jake\nor a pot to boil, or a Better Break\nor a string of pearls, or a pair of pants\nor a wig with curls, or Another Chance.\nEveryone is just waiting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1990 - } - } - } - } - }, - "anne-sexton": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Anne Sexton", - "birth": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1974 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "as-it-was-written": { - "title": "“As It Was Written”", - "body": "Earth, earth,\nriding your merry-go-round\ntoward extinction,\nright to the roots,\nthickening the oceans like gravy,\nfestering in your caves,\nyou are becoming a latrine.\nYour trees are twisted chairs.\nYour flowers moan at their mirrors,\nand cry for a sun that doesn’t wear a mask.\n\nYour clouds wear white,\ntrying to become nuns\nand say novenas to the sky.\nThe sky is yellow with its jaundice,\nand its veins spill into the rivers\nwhere the fish kneel down\nto swallow hair and goat’s eyes.\n\nAll in all, I’d say,\nthe world is strangling.\nAnd I, in my bed each night,\nlisten to my twenty shoes\nconverse about it.\nAnd the moon,\nunder its dark hood,\nfalls out of the sky each night,\nwith its hungry red mouth\nto suck at my scars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fury-of-overshoes": { - "title": "“The Fury of Overshoes”", - "body": "They sit in a row\noutside the kindergarten,\nblack, red, brown, all\nwith those brass buckles.\nRemember when you couldn’t\nbuckle your own\novershoe\nor tie your own\novershoe\nor tie your own shoe\nor cut your own meat\nand the tears\nrunning down like mud\nbecause you fell off your\ntricycle?\nRemember, big fish,\nwhen you couldn’t swim\nand simply slipped under\nlike a stone frog?\nThe world wasn’t\nyours.\nIt belonged to\nthe big people.\nUnder your bed\nsat the wolf\nand he made a shadow\nwhen cars passed by\nat night.\nThey made you give up\nyour nightlight\nand your teddy\nand your thumb.\nOh overshoes,\ndon’t you\nremember me,\npushing you up and down\nin the winter snow?\nOh thumb,\nI want a drink,\nit is dark,\nwhere are the big people,\nwhen will I get there,\ntaking giant steps\nall day,\neach day\nand thinking\nnothing of it?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ringing-the-bells": { - "title": "“Ringing the Bells”", - "body": "And this is the way they ring\nthe bells in Bedlam\nand this is the bell-lady\nwho comes each Tuesday morning\nto give us a music lesson\nand because the attendants make you go\nand because we mind by instinct,\nlike bees caught in the wrong hive,\nwe are the circle of crazy ladies\nwho sit in the lounge of the mental house\nand smile at the smiling woman\nwho passes us each a bell,\nwho points at my hand\nthat holds my bell, E flat,\nand this is the gray dress next to me\nwho grumbles as if it were special\nto be old, to be old,\nand this is the small hunched squirrel girl\non the other side of me\nwho picks at the hairs over her lip,\nwho picks at the hairs over her lip all day,\nand this is how the bells really sound,\nas untroubled and clean\nas a workable kitchen,\nand this is always my bell responding\nto my hand that responds to the lady\nwho points at me, E flat;\nand although we are not better for it,\nthey tell you to go. And you do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "tuesday" - } - } - }, - "rowing": { - "title": "“Rowing”", - "body": "A story, a story!\n(Let it go. Let it come.)\nI was stamped out like a Plymouth fender\ninto this world.\nFirst came the crib\nwith it’s glacial bars.\nThen dolls\nand the devotion to their plastic mouths.\nThen there was school,\nthe little straight rows of chairs,\nblotting my name over and over,\nbut undersea all the time,\na stranger whose elbows wouldn’t work.\nThen there was life\nwith it’s cruel houses\nand people who seldom touched--\nthough touch is all--\nbut I grew,\nlike a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,\nand then there were many strange apparitions,\nthe nagging rain, the sun turning into poison\nand all of that, saws working through my heart,\nbut I grew, I grew,\nand God was there like an island I had not rowed to,\nstill ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,\nand I grew, I grew,\nI wore rubies and bought tomatoes\nand now, in my middle age,\nabout nineteen in the head I’d say,\nI am rowing, I am rowing\nthough the oarlocks stick and are rusty\nand the sea blinks and rolls\nlike a worried eyeball,\nbut I am rowing, I am rowing,\nthough the wind pushes me back\nand I know that that island will not be perfect,\nit will have the flaws of life,\nthe absurdities of the dinner table,\nbut there will be a door\nand I will open it\nand I will get rid of the rat inside of me,\nthe gnawing pestilential rat.\nGod will take it with his two hands\nand embrace it.\n\nAs the African says:\nThis is my tale which I have told,\nif it be sweet, if it be not sweet,\ntake somewhere else and let some return to me.\nThis story ends with me still rowing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-shakespeare": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Shakespeare", - "birth": { - "year": 1564 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1616 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 160 - }, - "poems": { - "blow-blow-thou-winter-wind": { - "title": "“Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind”", - "body": "Blow, blow, thou winter wind,\n Thou art not so unkind\n As man’s ingratitude;\n Thy tooth is not so keen,\nBecause thou art not seen,\n Although thy breath be rude.\n_Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:\nMost friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:\n Then, heigh-ho, the holly!\n This life is most jolly._\n\n Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,\n That dost not bite so nigh\n As benefits forgot:\n Though thou the waters warp,\n Thy sting is not so sharp\n As friend remembered not.\n_Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly …_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "o-mistress-mine-where-are-you-roaming": { - "title": "“O Mistress Mine, Where Are You Roaming?”", - "body": "O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?\nO stay and hear, your true love’s coming,\n That can sing both high and low.\nTrip no further pretty sweeting.\nJourneys end in lovers’ meeting,\n Every wise man’s son doth know.\n\nWhat is love, ’tis not hereafter,\nPresent mirth, hath present laughter:\n What’s to come, is still unsure.\nIn delay there lies no plenty,\nThen come kiss me sweet and twenty:\n Youth’s a stuff will not endure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sigh-no-more-ladies-sigh-no-more": { - "title": "“Sigh No More, Ladies, Sigh No More”", - "body": "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.\n Men were deceivers ever,\nOne foot in sea, and one on shore,\n To one thing constant never.\nThen sigh not so, but let them go,\n And be you blithe and bonny,\nConverting all your sounds of woe\n Into hey nonny, nonny.\n\nSing no more ditties, sing no more\n Of dumps so dull and heavy.\nThe fraud of men was ever so\n Since summer first was leafy.\nThen sigh not so, but let them go,\n And be you blithe and bonny,\nConverting all your sounds of woe\n Into hey, nonny, nonny.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-1": { - "title": "“Sonnet 1”", - "body": "From fairest creatures we desire increase,\nThat thereby beauty’s rose might never die,\nBut as the riper should by time decease,\nHis tender heir might bear his memory:\nBut thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,\nFeed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,\nMaking a famine where abundance lies,\nThy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:\nThou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,\nAnd only herald to the gaudy spring,\nWithin thine own bud buriest thy content,\nAnd tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:\nPity the world, or else this glutton be,\nTo eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-2": { - "title": "“Sonnet 2”", - "body": "When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,\nAnd dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,\nThy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,\nWill be a tattered weed of small worth held:\nThen being asked, where all thy beauty lies,\nWhere all the treasure of thy lusty days;\nTo say within thine own deep sunken eyes,\nWere an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.\nHow much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,\nIf thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine\nShall sum my count, and make my old excuse”\nProving his beauty by succession thine.\nThis were to be new made when thou art old,\nAnd see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-3": { - "title": "“Sonnet 3”", - "body": "Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,\nNow is the time that face should form another,\nWhose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,\nThou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.\nFor where is she so fair whose uneared womb\nDisdains the tillage of thy husbandry?\nOr who is he so fond will be the tomb,\nOf his self-love to stop posterity?\nThou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee\nCalls back the lovely April of her prime,\nSo thou through windows of thine age shalt see,\nDespite of wrinkles this thy golden time.\nBut if thou live remembered not to be,\nDie single and thine image dies with thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-4": { - "title": "“Sonnet 4”", - "body": "Unthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend,\nUpon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?\nNature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,\nAnd being frank she lends to those are free:\nThen beauteous niggard why dost thou abuse,\nThe bounteous largess given thee to give?\nProfitless usurer why dost thou use\nSo great a sum of sums yet canst not live?\nFor having traffic with thy self alone,\nThou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive,\nThen how when nature calls thee to be gone,\nWhat acceptable audit canst thou leave?\nThy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,\nWhich used lives th’ executor to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-5": { - "title": "“Sonnet 5”", - "body": "Those hours that with gentle work did frame\nThe lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell\nWill play the tyrants to the very same,\nAnd that unfair which fairly doth excel:\nFor never-resting time leads summer on\nTo hideous winter and confounds him there,\nSap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,\nBeauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:\nThen were not summer’s distillation left\nA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,\nBeauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,\nNor it nor no remembrance what it was.\nBut flowers distilled though they with winter meet,\nLeese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-6": { - "title": "“Sonnet 6”", - "body": "Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,\nIn thee thy summer ere thou be distilled:\nMake sweet some vial; treasure thou some place,\nWith beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed:\nThat use is not forbidden usury,\nWhich happies those that pay the willing loan;\nThat’s for thy self to breed another thee,\nOr ten times happier be it ten for one,\nTen times thy self were happier than thou art,\nIf ten of thine ten times refigured thee:\nThen what could death do if thou shouldst depart,\nLeaving thee living in posterity?\nBe not self-willed for thou art much too fair,\nTo be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-7": { - "title": "“Sonnet 7”", - "body": "Lo in the orient when the gracious light\nLifts up his burning head, each under eye\nDoth homage to his new-appearing sight,\nServing with looks his sacred majesty,\nAnd having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,\nResembling strong youth in his middle age,\nYet mortal looks adore his beauty still,\nAttending on his golden pilgrimage:\nBut when from highmost pitch with weary car,\nLike feeble age he reeleth from the day,\nThe eyes (fore duteous) now converted are\nFrom his low tract and look another way:\nSo thou, thy self out-going in thy noon:\nUnlooked on diest unless thou get a son.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-8": { - "title": "“Sonnet 8”", - "body": "Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?\nSweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:\nWhy lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,\nOr else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?\nIf the true concord of well-tuned sounds,\nBy unions married do offend thine ear,\nThey do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds\nIn singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear:\nMark how one string sweet husband to another,\nStrikes each in each by mutual ordering;\nResembling sire, and child, and happy mother,\nWho all in one, one pleasing note do sing:\nWhose speechless song being many, seeming one,\nSings this to thee, “Thou single wilt prove none”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-9": { - "title": "“Sonnet 9”", - "body": "Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,\nThat thou consum’st thy self in single life?\nAh, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,\nThe world will wail thee like a makeless wife,\nThe world will be thy widow and still weep,\nThat thou no form of thee hast left behind,\nWhen every private widow well may keep,\nBy children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:\nLook what an unthrift in the world doth spend\nShifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;\nBut beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,\nAnd kept unused the user so destroys it:\nNo love toward others in that bosom sits\nThat on himself such murd’rous shame commits.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-10": { - "title": "“Sonnet 10”", - "body": "For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any\nWho for thy self art so unprovident.\nGrant if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,\nBut that thou none lov’st is most evident:\nFor thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate,\nThat ’gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,\nSeeking that beauteous roof to ruinate\nWhich to repair should be thy chief desire:\nO change thy thought, that I may change my mind,\nShall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?\nBe as thy presence is gracious and kind,\nOr to thy self at least kind-hearted prove,\nMake thee another self for love of me,\nThat beauty still may live in thine or thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-11": { - "title": "“Sonnet 11”", - "body": "As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou grow’st,\nIn one of thine, from that which thou departest,\nAnd that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st,\nThou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest,\nHerein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase,\nWithout this folly, age, and cold decay,\nIf all were minded so, the times should cease,\nAnd threescore year would make the world away:\nLet those whom nature hath not made for store,\nHarsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:\nLook whom she best endowed, she gave thee more;\nWhich bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:\nShe carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby,\nThou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-12": { - "title": "“Sonnet 12”", - "body": "When I do count the clock that tells the time,\nAnd see the brave day sunk in hideous night,\nWhen I behold the violet past prime,\nAnd sable curls all silvered o’er with white:\nWhen lofty trees I see barren of leaves,\nWhich erst from heat did canopy the herd\nAnd summer’s green all girded up in sheaves\nBorne on the bier with white and bristly beard:\nThen of thy beauty do I question make\nThat thou among the wastes of time must go,\nSince sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,\nAnd die as fast as they see others grow,\nAnd nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence\nSave breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-13": { - "title": "“Sonnet 13”", - "body": "O that you were your self, but love you are\nNo longer yours, than you your self here live,\nAgainst this coming end you should prepare,\nAnd your sweet semblance to some other give.\nSo should that beauty which you hold in lease\nFind no determination, then you were\nYour self again after your self’s decease,\nWhen your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.\nWho lets so fair a house fall to decay,\nWhich husbandry in honour might uphold,\nAgainst the stormy gusts of winter’s day\nAnd barren rage of death’s eternal cold?\nO none but unthrifts, dear my love you know,\nYou had a father, let your son say so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-14": { - "title": "“Sonnet 14”", - "body": "Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,\nAnd yet methinks I have astronomy,\nBut not to tell of good, or evil luck,\nOf plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality,\nNor can I fortune to brief minutes tell;\nPointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,\nOr say with princes if it shall go well\nBy oft predict that I in heaven find.\nBut from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,\nAnd constant stars in them I read such art\nAs truth and beauty shall together thrive\nIf from thy self, to store thou wouldst convert:\nOr else of thee this I prognosticate,\nThy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-15": { - "title": "“Sonnet 15”", - "body": "When I consider every thing that grows\nHolds in perfection but a little moment.\nThat this huge stage presenteth nought but shows\nWhereon the stars in secret influence comment.\nWhen I perceive that men as plants increase,\nCheered and checked even by the self-same sky:\nVaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,\nAnd wear their brave state out of memory.\nThen the conceit of this inconstant stay,\nSets you most rich in youth before my sight,\nWhere wasteful time debateth with decay\nTo change your day of youth to sullied night,\nAnd all in war with Time for love of you,\nAs he takes from you, I engraft you new.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-16": { - "title": "“Sonnet 16”", - "body": "But wherefore do not you a mightier way\nMake war upon this bloody tyrant Time?\nAnd fortify your self in your decay\nWith means more blessed than my barren rhyme?\nNow stand you on the top of happy hours,\nAnd many maiden gardens yet unset,\nWith virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,\nMuch liker than your painted counterfeit:\nSo should the lines of life that life repair\nWhich this (Time’s pencil) or my pupil pen\nNeither in inward worth nor outward fair\nCan make you live your self in eyes of men.\nTo give away your self, keeps your self still,\nAnd you must live drawn by your own sweet skill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-17": { - "title": "“Sonnet 17”", - "body": "Who will believe my verse in time to come\nIf it were filled with your most high deserts?\nThough yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb\nWhich hides your life, and shows not half your parts:\nIf I could write the beauty of your eyes,\nAnd in fresh numbers number all your graces,\nThe age to come would say this poet lies,\nSuch heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.\nSo should my papers (yellowed with their age)\nBe scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,\nAnd your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,\nAnd stretched metre of an antique song.\nBut were some child of yours alive that time,\nYou should live twice in it, and in my rhyme.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-18": { - "title": "“Sonnet 18”", - "body": "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?\nThou art more lovely and more temperate:\nRough winds do shake the darling buds of May,\nAnd summer’s lease hath all too short a date:\nSometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,\nAnd often is his gold complexion dimmed,\nAnd every fair from fair sometime declines,\nBy chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:\nBut thy eternal summer shall not fade,\nNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,\nNor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,\nWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,\nSo long as men can breathe or eyes can see,\nSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-19": { - "title": "“Sonnet 19”", - "body": "Devouring Time blunt thou the lion’s paws,\nAnd make the earth devour her own sweet brood,\nPluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,\nAnd burn the long-lived phoenix, in her blood,\nMake glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,\nAnd do whate’er thou wilt swift-footed Time\nTo the wide world and all her fading sweets:\nBut I forbid thee one most heinous crime,\nO carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,\nNor draw no lines there with thine antique pen,\nHim in thy course untainted do allow,\nFor beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.\nYet do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,\nMy love shall in my verse ever live young.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-20": { - "title": "“Sonnet 20”", - "body": "A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,\nHast thou the master mistress of my passion,\nA woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted\nWith shifting change as is false women’s fashion,\nAn eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling:\nGilding the object whereupon it gazeth,\nA man in hue all hues in his controlling,\nWhich steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.\nAnd for a woman wert thou first created,\nTill nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,\nAnd by addition me of thee defeated,\nBy adding one thing to my purpose nothing.\nBut since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,\nMine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-21": { - "title": "“Sonnet 21”", - "body": "So is it not with me as with that muse,\nStirred by a painted beauty to his verse,\nWho heaven it self for ornament doth use,\nAnd every fair with his fair doth rehearse,\nMaking a couplement of proud compare\nWith sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems:\nWith April’s first-born flowers and all things rare,\nThat heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.\nO let me true in love but truly write,\nAnd then believe me, my love is as fair,\nAs any mother’s child, though not so bright\nAs those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air:\nLet them say more that like of hearsay well,\nI will not praise that purpose not to sell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-22": { - "title": "“Sonnet 22”", - "body": "My glass shall not persuade me I am old,\nSo long as youth and thou are of one date,\nBut when in thee time’s furrows I behold,\nThen look I death my days should expiate.\nFor all that beauty that doth cover thee,\nIs but the seemly raiment of my heart,\nWhich in thy breast doth live, as thine in me,\nHow can I then be elder than thou art?\nO therefore love be of thyself so wary,\nAs I not for my self, but for thee will,\nBearing thy heart which I will keep so chary\nAs tender nurse her babe from faring ill.\nPresume not on thy heart when mine is slain,\nThou gav’st me thine not to give back again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-23": { - "title": "“Sonnet 23”", - "body": "As an unperfect actor on the stage,\nWho with his fear is put beside his part,\nOr some fierce thing replete with too much rage,\nWhose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;\nSo I for fear of trust, forget to say,\nThe perfect ceremony of love’s rite,\nAnd in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,\nO’ercharged with burthen of mine own love’s might:\nO let my looks be then the eloquence,\nAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast,\nWho plead for love, and look for recompense,\nMore than that tongue that more hath more expressed.\nO learn to read what silent love hath writ,\nTo hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-24": { - "title": "“Sonnet 24”", - "body": "Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled,\nThy beauty’s form in table of my heart,\nMy body is the frame wherein ’tis held,\nAnd perspective it is best painter’s art.\nFor through the painter must you see his skill,\nTo find where your true image pictured lies,\nWhich in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,\nThat hath his windows glazed with thine eyes:\nNow see what good turns eyes for eyes have done,\nMine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me\nAre windows to my breast, where-through the sun\nDelights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;\nYet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,\nThey draw but what they see, know not the heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-25": { - "title": "“Sonnet 25”", - "body": "Let those who are in favour with their stars,\nOf public honour and proud titles boast,\nWhilst I whom fortune of such triumph bars\nUnlooked for joy in that I honour most;\nGreat princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread,\nBut as the marigold at the sun’s eye,\nAnd in themselves their pride lies buried,\nFor at a frown they in their glory die.\nThe painful warrior famoused for fight,\nAfter a thousand victories once foiled,\nIs from the book of honour razed quite,\nAnd all the rest forgot for which he toiled:\nThen happy I that love and am beloved\nWhere I may not remove nor be removed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-26": { - "title": "“Sonnet 26”", - "body": "Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage\nThy merit hath my duty strongly knit;\nTo thee I send this written embassage\nTo witness duty, not to show my wit.\nDuty so great, which wit so poor as mine\nMay make seem bare, in wanting words to show it;\nBut that I hope some good conceit of thine\nIn thy soul’s thought (all naked) will bestow it:\nTill whatsoever star that guides my moving,\nPoints on me graciously with fair aspect,\nAnd puts apparel on my tattered loving,\nTo show me worthy of thy sweet respect,\nThen may I dare to boast how I do love thee,\nTill then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-27": { - "title": "“Sonnet 27”", - "body": "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,\nThe dear respose for limbs with travel tired,\nBut then begins a journey in my head\nTo work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.\nFor then my thoughts (from far where I abide)\nIntend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,\nAnd keep my drooping eyelids open wide,\nLooking on darkness which the blind do see.\nSave that my soul’s imaginary sight\nPresents thy shadow to my sightless view,\nWhich like a jewel (hung in ghastly night)\nMakes black night beauteous, and her old face new.\nLo thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,\nFor thee, and for my self, no quiet find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-28": { - "title": "“Sonnet 28”", - "body": "How can I then return in happy plight\nThat am debarred the benefit of rest?\nWhen day’s oppression is not eased by night,\nBut day by night and night by day oppressed.\nAnd each (though enemies to either’s reign)\nDo in consent shake hands to torture me,\nThe one by toil, the other to complain\nHow far I toil, still farther off from thee.\nI tell the day to please him thou art bright,\nAnd dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven:\nSo flatter I the swart-complexioned night,\nWhen sparkling stars twire not thou gild’st the even.\nBut day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,\nAnd night doth nightly make grief’s length seem stronger", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-29": { - "title": "“Sonnet 29”", - "body": "When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,\nI all alone beweep my outcast state,\nAnd trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,\nAnd look upon my self and curse my fate,\nWishing me like to one more rich in hope,\nFeatured like him, like him with friends possessed,\nDesiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,\nWith what I most enjoy contented least,\nYet in these thoughts my self almost despising,\nHaply I think on thee, and then my state,\n(Like to the lark at break of day arising\nFrom sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate,\nFor thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,\nThat then I scorn to change my state with kings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-30": { - "title": "“Sonnet 30”", - "body": "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,\nI summon up remembrance of things past,\nI sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,\nAnd with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:\nThen can I drown an eye (unused to flow)\nFor precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,\nAnd weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,\nAnd moan th’ expense of many a vanished sight.\nThen can I grieve at grievances foregone,\nAnd heavily from woe to woe tell o’er\nThe sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,\nWhich I new pay as if not paid before.\nBut if the while I think on thee (dear friend)\nAll losses are restored, and sorrows end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-31": { - "title": "“Sonnet 31”", - "body": "Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,\nWhich I by lacking have supposed dead,\nAnd there reigns love and all love’s loving parts,\nAnd all those friends which I thought buried.\nHow many a holy and obsequious tear\nHath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,\nAs interest of the dead, which now appear,\nBut things removed that hidden in thee lie.\nThou art the grave where buried love doth live,\nHung with the trophies of my lovers gone,\nWho all their parts of me to thee did give,\nThat due of many, now is thine alone.\nTheir images I loved, I view in thee,\nAnd thou (all they) hast all the all of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-32": { - "title": "“Sonnet 32”", - "body": "If thou survive my well-contented day,\nWhen that churl death my bones with dust shall cover\nAnd shalt by fortune once more re-survey\nThese poor rude lines of thy deceased lover:\nCompare them with the bett’ring of the time,\nAnd though they be outstripped by every pen,\nReserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,\nExceeded by the height of happier men.\nO then vouchsafe me but this loving thought,\n“Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,\nA dearer birth than this his love had brought\nTo march in ranks of better equipage:\nBut since he died and poets better prove,\nTheirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-33": { - "title": "“Sonnet 33”", - "body": "Full many a glorious morning have I seen,\nFlatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,\nKissing with golden face the meadows green;\nGilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy:\nAnon permit the basest clouds to ride,\nWith ugly rack on his celestial face,\nAnd from the forlorn world his visage hide\nStealing unseen to west with this disgrace:\nEven so my sun one early morn did shine,\nWith all triumphant splendour on my brow,\nBut out alack, he was but one hour mine,\nThe region cloud hath masked him from me now.\nYet him for this, my love no whit disdaineth,\nSuns of the world may stain, when heaven’s sun staineth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-34": { - "title": "“Sonnet 34”", - "body": "Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,\nAnd make me travel forth without my cloak,\nTo let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,\nHiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?\n’Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,\nTo dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,\nFor no man well of such a salve can speak,\nThat heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:\nNor can thy shame give physic to my grief,\nThough thou repent, yet I have still the loss,\nTh’ offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief\nTo him that bears the strong offence’s cross.\nAh but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,\nAnd they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-35": { - "title": "“Sonnet 35”", - "body": "No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,\nRoses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,\nClouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,\nAnd loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.\nAll men make faults, and even I in this,\nAuthorizing thy trespass with compare,\nMy self corrupting salving thy amiss,\nExcusing thy sins more than thy sins are:\nFor to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,\nThy adverse party is thy advocate,\nAnd ’gainst my self a lawful plea commence:\nSuch civil war is in my love and hate,\nThat I an accessary needs must be,\nTo that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-36": { - "title": "“Sonnet 36”", - "body": "Let me confess that we two must be twain,\nAlthough our undivided loves are one:\nSo shall those blots that do with me remain,\nWithout thy help, by me be borne alone.\nIn our two loves there is but one respect,\nThough in our lives a separable spite,\nWhich though it alter not love’s sole effect,\nYet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.\nI may not evermore acknowledge thee,\nLest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,\nNor thou with public kindness honour me,\nUnless thou take that honour from thy name:\nBut do not so, I love thee in such sort,\nAs thou being mine, mine is thy good report.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-37": { - "title": "“Sonnet 37”", - "body": "As a decrepit father takes delight,\nTo see his active child do deeds of youth,\nSo I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite\nTake all my comfort of thy worth and truth.\nFor whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,\nOr any of these all, or all, or more\nEntitled in thy parts, do crowned sit,\nI make my love engrafted to this store:\nSo then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,\nWhilst that this shadow doth such substance give,\nThat I in thy abundance am sufficed,\nAnd by a part of all thy glory live:\nLook what is best, that best I wish in thee,\nThis wish I have, then ten times happy me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-38": { - "title": "“Sonnet 38”", - "body": "How can my muse want subject to invent\nWhile thou dost breathe that pour’st into my verse,\nThine own sweet argument, too excellent,\nFor every vulgar paper to rehearse?\nO give thy self the thanks if aught in me,\nWorthy perusal stand against thy sight,\nFor who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,\nWhen thou thy self dost give invention light?\nBe thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth\nThan those old nine which rhymers invocate,\nAnd he that calls on thee, let him bring forth\nEternal numbers to outlive long date.\nIf my slight muse do please these curious days,\nThe pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-39": { - "title": "“Sonnet 39”", - "body": "O how thy worth with manners may I sing,\nWhen thou art all the better part of me?\nWhat can mine own praise to mine own self bring:\nAnd what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?\nEven for this, let us divided live,\nAnd our dear love lose name of single one,\nThat by this separation I may give:\nThat due to thee which thou deserv’st alone:\nO absence what a torment wouldst thou prove,\nWere it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave,\nTo entertain the time with thoughts of love,\nWhich time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive.\nAnd that thou teachest how to make one twain,\nBy praising him here who doth hence remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-40": { - "title": "“Sonnet 40”", - "body": "Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all,\nWhat hast thou then more than thou hadst before?\nNo love, my love, that thou mayst true love call,\nAll mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:\nThen if for my love, thou my love receivest,\nI cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest,\nBut yet be blamed, if thou thy self deceivest\nBy wilful taste of what thy self refusest.\nI do forgive thy robbery gentle thief\nAlthough thou steal thee all my poverty:\nAnd yet love knows it is a greater grief\nTo bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury.\nLascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,\nKill me with spites yet we must not be foes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-41": { - "title": "“Sonnet 41”", - "body": "Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,\nWhen I am sometime absent from thy heart,\nThy beauty, and thy years full well befits,\nFor still temptation follows where thou art.\nGentle thou art, and therefore to be won,\nBeauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed.\nAnd when a woman woos, what woman’s son,\nWill sourly leave her till he have prevailed?\nAy me, but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,\nAnd chide thy beauty, and thy straying youth,\nWho lead thee in their riot even there\nWhere thou art forced to break a twofold truth:\nHers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,\nThine by thy beauty being false to me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-42": { - "title": "“Sonnet 42”", - "body": "That thou hast her it is not all my grief,\nAnd yet it may be said I loved her dearly,\nThat she hath thee is of my wailing chief,\nA loss in love that touches me more nearly.\nLoving offenders thus I will excuse ye,\nThou dost love her, because thou know’st I love her,\nAnd for my sake even so doth she abuse me,\nSuff’ring my friend for my sake to approve her.\nIf I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,\nAnd losing her, my friend hath found that loss,\nBoth find each other, and I lose both twain,\nAnd both for my sake lay on me this cross,\nBut here’s the joy, my friend and I are one,\nSweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-43": { - "title": "“Sonnet 43”", - "body": "When most I wink then do mine eyes best see,\nFor all the day they view things unrespected,\nBut when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,\nAnd darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.\nThen thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright\nHow would thy shadow’s form, form happy show,\nTo the clear day with thy much clearer light,\nWhen to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!\nHow would (I say) mine eyes be blessed made,\nBy looking on thee in the living day,\nWhen in dead night thy fair imperfect shade,\nThrough heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!\nAll days are nights to see till I see thee,\nAnd nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-44": { - "title": "“Sonnet 44”", - "body": "If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,\nInjurious distance should not stop my way,\nFor then despite of space I would be brought,\nFrom limits far remote, where thou dost stay,\nNo matter then although my foot did stand\nUpon the farthest earth removed from thee,\nFor nimble thought can jump both sea and land,\nAs soon as think the place where he would be.\nBut ah, thought kills me that I am not thought\nTo leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,\nBut that so much of earth and water wrought,\nI must attend, time’s leisure with my moan.\nReceiving nought by elements so slow,\nBut heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-45": { - "title": "“Sonnet 45”", - "body": "The other two, slight air, and purging fire,\nAre both with thee, wherever I abide,\nThe first my thought, the other my desire,\nThese present-absent with swift motion slide.\nFor when these quicker elements are gone\nIn tender embassy of love to thee,\nMy life being made of four, with two alone,\nSinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy.\nUntil life’s composition be recured,\nBy those swift messengers returned from thee,\nWho even but now come back again assured,\nOf thy fair health, recounting it to me.\nThis told, I joy, but then no longer glad,\nI send them back again and straight grow sad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-46": { - "title": "“Sonnet 46”", - "body": "Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,\nHow to divide the conquest of thy sight,\nMine eye, my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,\nMy heart, mine eye the freedom of that right,\nMy heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,\n(A closet never pierced with crystal eyes)\nBut the defendant doth that plea deny,\nAnd says in him thy fair appearance lies.\nTo side this title is impanelled\nA quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,\nAnd by their verdict is determined\nThe clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part.\nAs thus, mine eye’s due is thy outward part,\nAnd my heart’s right, thy inward love of heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-47": { - "title": "“Sonnet 47”", - "body": "Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,\nAnd each doth good turns now unto the other,\nWhen that mine eye is famished for a look,\nOr heart in love with sighs himself doth smother;\nWith my love’s picture then my eye doth feast,\nAnd to the painted banquet bids my heart:\nAnother time mine eye is my heart’s guest,\nAnd in his thoughts of love doth share a part.\nSo either by thy picture or my love,\nThy self away, art present still with me,\nFor thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,\nAnd I am still with them, and they with thee.\nOr if they sleep, thy picture in my sight\nAwakes my heart, to heart’s and eye’s delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-48": { - "title": "“Sonnet 48”", - "body": "How careful was I when I took my way,\nEach trifle under truest bars to thrust,\nThat to my use it might unused stay\nFrom hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!\nBut thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,\nMost worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,\nThou best of dearest, and mine only care,\nArt left the prey of every vulgar thief.\nThee have I not locked up in any chest,\nSave where thou art not, though I feel thou art,\nWithin the gentle closure of my breast,\nFrom whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part,\nAnd even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,\nFor truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-49": { - "title": "“Sonnet 49”", - "body": "Against that time (if ever that time come)\nWhen I shall see thee frown on my defects,\nWhen as thy love hath cast his utmost sum,\nCalled to that audit by advised respects,\nAgainst that time when thou shalt strangely pass,\nAnd scarcely greet me with that sun thine eye,\nWhen love converted from the thing it was\nShall reasons find of settled gravity;\nAgainst that time do I ensconce me here\nWithin the knowledge of mine own desert,\nAnd this my hand, against my self uprear,\nTo guard the lawful reasons on thy part,\nTo leave poor me, thou hast the strength of laws,\nSince why to love, I can allege no cause.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-50": { - "title": "“Sonnet 50”", - "body": "How heavy do I journey on the way,\nWhen what I seek (my weary travel’s end)\nDoth teach that case and that repose to say\n“Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.”\nThe beast that bears me, tired with my woe,\nPlods dully on, to bear that weight in me,\nAs if by some instinct the wretch did know\nHis rider loved not speed being made from thee:\nThe bloody spur cannot provoke him on,\nThat sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,\nWhich heavily he answers with a groan,\nMore sharp to me than spurring to his side,\nFor that same groan doth put this in my mind,\nMy grief lies onward and my joy behind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-51": { - "title": "“Sonnet 51”", - "body": "Thus can my love excuse the slow offence,\nOf my dull bearer, when from thee I speed,\nFrom where thou art, why should I haste me thence?\nTill I return of posting is no need.\nO what excuse will my poor beast then find,\nWhen swift extremity can seem but slow?\nThen should I spur though mounted on the wind,\nIn winged speed no motion shall I know,\nThen can no horse with my desire keep pace,\nTherefore desire (of perfect’st love being made)\nShall neigh (no dull flesh) in his fiery race,\nBut love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade,\nSince from thee going, he went wilful-slow,\nTowards thee I’ll run, and give him leave to go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-52": { - "title": "“Sonnet 52”", - "body": "So am I as the rich whose blessed key,\nCan bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,\nThe which he will not every hour survey,\nFor blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.\nTherefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,\nSince seldom coming in that long year set,\nLike stones of worth they thinly placed are,\nOr captain jewels in the carcanet.\nSo is the time that keeps you as my chest\nOr as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,\nTo make some special instant special-blest,\nBy new unfolding his imprisoned pride.\nBlessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,\nBeing had to triumph, being lacked to hope.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-53": { - "title": "“Sonnet 53”", - "body": "What is your substance, whereof are you made,\nThat millions of strange shadows on you tend?\nSince every one, hath every one, one shade,\nAnd you but one, can every shadow lend:\nDescribe Adonis and the counterfeit,\nIs poorly imitated after you,\nOn Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,\nAnd you in Grecian tires are painted new:\nSpeak of the spring, and foison of the year,\nThe one doth shadow of your beauty show,\nThe other as your bounty doth appear,\nAnd you in every blessed shape we know.\nIn all external grace you have some part,\nBut you like none, none you for constant heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-54": { - "title": "“Sonnet 54”", - "body": "O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,\nBy that sweet ornament which truth doth give!\nThe rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem\nFor that sweet odour, which doth in it live:\nThe canker blooms have full as deep a dye,\nAs the perfumed tincture of the roses,\nHang on such thorns, and play as wantonly,\nWhen summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:\nBut for their virtue only is their show,\nThey live unwooed, and unrespected fade,\nDie to themselves. Sweet roses do not so,\nOf their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:\nAnd so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,\nWhen that shall vade, by verse distills your truth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-55": { - "title": "“Sonnet 55”", - "body": "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments\nOf princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,\nBut you shall shine more bright in these contents\nThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.\nWhen wasteful war shall statues overturn,\nAnd broils root out the work of masonry,\nNor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn:\nThe living record of your memory.\n’Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity\nShall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room,\nEven in the eyes of all posterity\nThat wear this world out to the ending doom.\nSo till the judgment that your self arise,\nYou live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-56": { - "title": "“Sonnet 56”", - "body": "Sweet love renew thy force, be it not said\nThy edge should blunter be than appetite,\nWhich but to-day by feeding is allayed,\nTo-morrow sharpened in his former might.\nSo love be thou, although to-day thou fill\nThy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fulness,\nTo-morrow see again, and do not kill\nThe spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness:\nLet this sad interim like the ocean be\nWhich parts the shore, where two contracted new,\nCome daily to the banks, that when they see:\nReturn of love, more blest may be the view.\nOr call it winter, which being full of care,\nMakes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-57": { - "title": "“Sonnet 57”", - "body": "Being your slave what should I do but tend,\nUpon the hours, and times of your desire?\nI have no precious time at all to spend;\nNor services to do till you require.\nNor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,\nWhilst I (my sovereign) watch the clock for you,\nNor think the bitterness of absence sour,\nWhen you have bid your servant once adieu.\nNor dare I question with my jealous thought,\nWhere you may be, or your affairs suppose,\nBut like a sad slave stay and think of nought\nSave where you are, how happy you make those.\nSo true a fool is love, that in your will,\n(Though you do any thing) he thinks no ill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-58": { - "title": "“Sonnet 58”", - "body": "That god forbid, that made me first your slave,\nI should in thought control your times of pleasure,\nOr at your hand th’ account of hours to crave,\nBeing your vassal bound to stay your leisure.\nO let me suffer (being at your beck)\nTh’ imprisoned absence of your liberty,\nAnd patience tame to sufferance bide each check,\nWithout accusing you of injury.\nBe where you list, your charter is so strong,\nThat you your self may privilage your time\nTo what you will, to you it doth belong,\nYour self to pardon of self-doing crime.\nI am to wait, though waiting so be hell,\nNot blame your pleasure be it ill or well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-59": { - "title": "“Sonnet 59”", - "body": "If there be nothing new, but that which is,\nHath been before, how are our brains beguiled,\nWhich labouring for invention bear amis\nThe second burthen of a former child!\nO that record could with a backward look,\nEven of five hundred courses of the sun,\nShow me your image in some antique book,\nSince mind at first in character was done.\nThat I might see what the old world could say,\nTo this composed wonder of your frame,\nWhether we are mended, or whether better they,\nOr whether revolution be the same.\nO sure I am the wits of former days,\nTo subjects worse have given admiring praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-60": { - "title": "“Sonnet 60”", - "body": "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,\nSo do our minutes hasten to their end,\nEach changing place with that which goes before,\nIn sequent toil all forwards do contend.\nNativity once in the main of light,\nCrawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,\nCrooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,\nAnd Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.\nTime doth transfix the flourish set on youth,\nAnd delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,\nFeeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,\nAnd nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.\nAnd yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand\nPraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-61": { - "title": "“Sonnet 61”", - "body": "Is it thy will, thy image should keep open\nMy heavy eyelids to the weary night?\nDost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,\nWhile shadows like to thee do mock my sight?\nIs it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee\nSo far from home into my deeds to pry,\nTo find out shames and idle hours in me,\nThe scope and tenure of thy jealousy?\nO no, thy love though much, is not so great,\nIt is my love that keeps mine eye awake,\nMine own true love that doth my rest defeat,\nTo play the watchman ever for thy sake.\nFor thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,\nFrom me far off, with others all too near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-62": { - "title": "“Sonnet 62”", - "body": "Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,\nAnd all my soul, and all my every part;\nAnd for this sin there is no remedy,\nIt is so grounded inward in my heart.\nMethinks no face so gracious is as mine,\nNo shape so true, no truth of such account,\nAnd for my self mine own worth do define,\nAs I all other in all worths surmount.\nBut when my glass shows me my self indeed\nbeated and chopt with tanned antiquity,\nMine own self-love quite contrary I read:\nSelf, so self-loving were iniquity.\n’Tis thee (my self) that for my self I praise,\nPainting my age with beauty of thy days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-63": { - "title": "“Sonnet 63”", - "body": "Against my love shall be as I am now\nWith Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn,\nWhen hours have drained his blood and filled his brow\nWith lines and wrinkles, when his youthful morn\nHath travelled on to age’s steepy night,\nAnd all those beauties whereof now he’s king\nAre vanishing, or vanished out of sight,\nStealing away the treasure of his spring:\nFor such a time do I now fortify\nAgainst confounding age’s cruel knife,\nThat he shall never cut from memory\nMy sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life.\nHis beauty shall in these black lines be seen,\nAnd they shall live, and he in them still green.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-64": { - "title": "“Sonnet 64”", - "body": "When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced\nThe rich-proud cost of outworn buried age,\nWhen sometime lofty towers I see down-rased,\nAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage.\nWhen I have seen the hungry ocean gain\nAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,\nAnd the firm soil win of the watery main,\nIncreasing store with loss, and loss with store.\nWhen I have seen such interchange of State,\nOr state it self confounded, to decay,\nRuin hath taught me thus to ruminate\nThat Time will come and take my love away.\nThis thought is as a death which cannot choose\nBut weep to have, that which it fears to lose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-65": { - "title": "“Sonnet 65”", - "body": "Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,\nBut sad mortality o’ersways their power,\nHow with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,\nWhose action is no stronger than a flower?\nO how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,\nAgainst the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,\nWhen rocks impregnable are not so stout,\nNor gates of steel so strong but time decays?\nO fearful meditation, where alack,\nShall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?\nOr what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,\nOr who his spoil of beauty can forbid?\nO none, unless this miracle have might,\nThat in black ink my love may still shine bright.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-66": { - "title": "“Sonnet 66”", - "body": "Tired with all these for restful death I cry,\nAs to behold desert a beggar born,\nAnd needy nothing trimmed in jollity,\nAnd purest faith unhappily forsworn,\nAnd gilded honour shamefully misplaced,\nAnd maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,\nAnd right perfection wrongfully disgraced,\nAnd strength by limping sway disabled\nAnd art made tongue-tied by authority,\nAnd folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,\nAnd simple truth miscalled simplicity,\nAnd captive good attending captain ill.\nTired with all these, from these would I be gone,\nSave that to die, I leave my love alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-67": { - "title": "“Sonnet 67”", - "body": "Ah wherefore with infection should he live,\nAnd with his presence grace impiety,\nThat sin by him advantage should achieve,\nAnd lace it self with his society?\nWhy should false painting imitate his cheek,\nAnd steal dead seeming of his living hue?\nWhy should poor beauty indirectly seek,\nRoses of shadow, since his rose is true?\nWhy should he live, now nature bankrupt is,\nBeggared of blood to blush through lively veins,\nFor she hath no exchequer now but his,\nAnd proud of many, lives upon his gains?\nO him she stores, to show what wealth she had,\nIn days long since, before these last so bad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-68": { - "title": "“Sonnet 68”", - "body": "Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,\nWhen beauty lived and died as flowers do now,\nBefore these bastard signs of fair were born,\nOr durst inhabit on a living brow:\nBefore the golden tresses of the dead,\nThe right of sepulchres, were shorn away,\nTo live a second life on second head,\nEre beauty’s dead fleece made another gay:\nIn him those holy antique hours are seen,\nWithout all ornament, it self and true,\nMaking no summer of another’s green,\nRobbing no old to dress his beauty new,\nAnd him as for a map doth Nature store,\nTo show false Art what beauty was of yore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-69": { - "title": "“Sonnet 69”", - "body": "Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view,\nWant nothing that the thought of hearts can mend:\nAll tongues (the voice of souls) give thee that due,\nUttering bare truth, even so as foes commend.\nThy outward thus with outward praise is crowned,\nBut those same tongues that give thee so thine own,\nIn other accents do this praise confound\nBy seeing farther than the eye hath shown.\nThey look into the beauty of thy mind,\nAnd that in guess they measure by thy deeds,\nThen churls their thoughts (although their eyes were kind)\nTo thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds:\nBut why thy odour matcheth not thy show,\nThe soil is this, that thou dost common grow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-70": { - "title": "“Sonnet 70”", - "body": "That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,\nFor slander’s mark was ever yet the fair,\nThe ornament of beauty is suspect,\nA crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air.\nSo thou be good, slander doth but approve,\nThy worth the greater being wooed of time,\nFor canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,\nAnd thou present’st a pure unstained prime.\nThou hast passed by the ambush of young days,\nEither not assailed, or victor being charged,\nYet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,\nTo tie up envy, evermore enlarged,\nIf some suspect of ill masked not thy show,\nThen thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-71": { - "title": "“Sonnet 71”", - "body": "No longer mourn for me when I am dead,\nThan you shall hear the surly sullen bell\nGive warning to the world that I am fled\nFrom this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:\nNay if you read this line, remember not,\nThe hand that writ it, for I love you so,\nThat I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,\nIf thinking on me then should make you woe.\nO if (I say) you look upon this verse,\nWhen I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,\nDo not so much as my poor name rehearse;\nBut let your love even with my life decay.\nLest the wise world should look into your moan,\nAnd mock you with me after I am gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-72": { - "title": "“Sonnet 72”", - "body": "O lest the world should task you to recite,\nWhat merit lived in me that you should love\nAfter my death (dear love) forget me quite,\nFor you in me can nothing worthy prove.\nUnless you would devise some virtuous lie,\nTo do more for me than mine own desert,\nAnd hang more praise upon deceased I,\nThan niggard truth would willingly impart:\nO lest your true love may seem false in this,\nThat you for love speak well of me untrue,\nMy name be buried where my body is,\nAnd live no more to shame nor me, nor you.\nFor I am shamed by that which I bring forth,\nAnd so should you, to love things nothing worth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-73": { - "title": "“Sonnet 73”", - "body": "That time of year thou mayst in me behold,\nWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang\nUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,\nBare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.\nIn me thou seest the twilight of such day,\nAs after sunset fadeth in the west,\nWhich by and by black night doth take away,\nDeath’s second self that seals up all in rest.\nIn me thou seest the glowing of such fire,\nThat on the ashes of his youth doth lie,\nAs the death-bed, whereon it must expire,\nConsumed with that which it was nourished by.\nThis thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,\nTo love that well, which thou must leave ere long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-74": { - "title": "“Sonnet 74”", - "body": "But be contented when that fell arrest,\nWithout all bail shall carry me away,\nMy life hath in this line some interest,\nWhich for memorial still with thee shall stay.\nWhen thou reviewest this, thou dost review,\nThe very part was consecrate to thee,\nThe earth can have but earth, which is his due,\nMy spirit is thine the better part of me,\nSo then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,\nThe prey of worms, my body being dead,\nThe coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,\nToo base of thee to be remembered,\nThe worth of that, is that which it contains,\nAnd that is this, and this with thee remains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-75": { - "title": "“Sonnet 75”", - "body": "So are you to my thoughts as food to life,\nOr as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground;\nAnd for the peace of you I hold such strife\nAs ’twixt a miser and his wealth is found.\nNow proud as an enjoyer, and anon\nDoubting the filching age will steal his treasure,\nNow counting best to be with you alone,\nThen bettered that the world may see my pleasure,\nSometime all full with feasting on your sight,\nAnd by and by clean starved for a look,\nPossessing or pursuing no delight\nSave what is had, or must from you be took.\nThus do I pine and surfeit day by day,\nOr gluttoning on all, or all away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-76": { - "title": "“Sonnet 76”", - "body": "Why is my verse so barren of new pride?\nSo far from variation or quick change?\nWhy with the time do I not glance aside\nTo new-found methods, and to compounds strange?\nWhy write I still all one, ever the same,\nAnd keep invention in a noted weed,\nThat every word doth almost tell my name,\nShowing their birth, and where they did proceed?\nO know sweet love I always write of you,\nAnd you and love are still my argument:\nSo all my best is dressing old words new,\nSpending again what is already spent:\nFor as the sun is daily new and old,\nSo is my love still telling what is told.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-77": { - "title": "“Sonnet 77”", - "body": "Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,\nThy dial how thy precious minutes waste,\nThese vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,\nAnd of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.\nThe wrinkles which thy glass will truly show,\nOf mouthed graves will give thee memory,\nThou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know,\nTime’s thievish progress to eternity.\nLook what thy memory cannot contain,\nCommit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find\nThose children nursed, delivered from thy brain,\nTo take a new acquaintance of thy mind.\nThese offices, so oft as thou wilt look,\nShall profit thee, and much enrich thy book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-78": { - "title": "“Sonnet 78”", - "body": "So oft have I invoked thee for my muse,\nAnd found such fair assistance in my verse,\nAs every alien pen hath got my use,\nAnd under thee their poesy disperse.\nThine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing,\nAnd heavy ignorance aloft to fly,\nHave added feathers to the learned’s wing,\nAnd given grace a double majesty.\nYet be most proud of that which I compile,\nWhose influence is thine, and born of thee,\nIn others’ works thou dost but mend the style,\nAnd arts with thy sweet graces graced be.\nBut thou art all my art, and dost advance\nAs high as learning, my rude ignorance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-79": { - "title": "“Sonnet 79”", - "body": "Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,\nMy verse alone had all thy gentle grace,\nBut now my gracious numbers are decayed,\nAnd my sick muse doth give an other place.\nI grant (sweet love) thy lovely argument\nDeserves the travail of a worthier pen,\nYet what of thee thy poet doth invent,\nHe robs thee of, and pays it thee again,\nHe lends thee virtue, and he stole that word,\nFrom thy behaviour, beauty doth he give\nAnd found it in thy cheek: he can afford\nNo praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.\nThen thank him not for that which he doth say,\nSince what he owes thee, thou thy self dost pay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-80": { - "title": "“Sonnet 80”", - "body": "O how I faint when I of you do write,\nKnowing a better spirit doth use your name,\nAnd in the praise thereof spends all his might,\nTo make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.\nBut since your worth (wide as the ocean is)\nThe humble as the proudest sail doth bear,\nMy saucy bark (inferior far to his)\nOn your broad main doth wilfully appear.\nYour shallowest help will hold me up afloat,\nWhilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride,\nOr (being wrecked) I am a worthless boat,\nHe of tall building, and of goodly pride.\nThen if he thrive and I be cast away,\nThe worst was this, my love was my decay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-81": { - "title": "“Sonnet 81”", - "body": "Or I shall live your epitaph to make,\nOr you survive when I in earth am rotten,\nFrom hence your memory death cannot take,\nAlthough in me each part will be forgotten.\nYour name from hence immortal life shall have,\nThough I (once gone) to all the world must die,\nThe earth can yield me but a common grave,\nWhen you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie,\nYour monument shall be my gentle verse,\nWhich eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,\nAnd tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,\nWhen all the breathers of this world are dead,\nYou still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)\nWhere breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-82": { - "title": "“Sonnet 82”", - "body": "I grant thou wert not married to my muse,\nAnd therefore mayst without attaint o’erlook\nThe dedicated words which writers use\nOf their fair subject, blessing every book.\nThou art as fair in knowledge as in hue,\nFinding thy worth a limit past my praise,\nAnd therefore art enforced to seek anew,\nSome fresher stamp of the time-bettering days.\nAnd do so love, yet when they have devised,\nWhat strained touches rhetoric can lend,\nThou truly fair, wert truly sympathized,\nIn true plain words, by thy true-telling friend.\nAnd their gross painting might be better used,\nWhere cheeks need blood, in thee it is abused.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-83": { - "title": "“Sonnet 83”", - "body": "I never saw that you did painting need,\nAnd therefore to your fair no painting set,\nI found (or thought I found) you did exceed,\nThat barren tender of a poet’s debt:\nAnd therefore have I slept in your report,\nThat you your self being extant well might show,\nHow far a modern quill doth come too short,\nSpeaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.\nThis silence for my sin you did impute,\nWhich shall be most my glory being dumb,\nFor I impair not beauty being mute,\nWhen others would give life, and bring a tomb.\nThere lives more life in one of your fair eyes,\nThan both your poets can in praise devise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-84": { - "title": "“Sonnet 84”", - "body": "Who is it that says most, which can say more,\nThan this rich praise, that you alone, are you?\nIn whose confine immured is the store,\nWhich should example where your equal grew.\nLean penury within that pen doth dwell,\nThat to his subject lends not some small glory,\nBut he that writes of you, if he can tell,\nThat you are you, so dignifies his story.\nLet him but copy what in you is writ,\nNot making worse what nature made so clear,\nAnd such a counterpart shall fame his wit,\nMaking his style admired every where.\nYou to your beauteous blessings add a curse,\nBeing fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-85": { - "title": "“Sonnet 85”", - "body": "My tongue-tied muse in manners holds her still,\nWhile comments of your praise richly compiled,\nReserve their character with golden quill,\nAnd precious phrase by all the Muses filed.\nI think good thoughts, whilst other write good words,\nAnd like unlettered clerk still cry Amen,\nTo every hymn that able spirit affords,\nIn polished form of well refined pen.\nHearing you praised, I say ’tis so, ’tis true,\nAnd to the most of praise add something more,\nBut that is in my thought, whose love to you\n(Though words come hindmost) holds his rank before,\nThen others, for the breath of words respect,\nMe for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-86": { - "title": "“Sonnet 86”", - "body": "Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,\nBound for the prize of (all too precious) you,\nThat did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,\nMaking their tomb the womb wherein they grew?\nWas it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,\nAbove a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?\nNo, neither he, nor his compeers by night\nGiving him aid, my verse astonished.\nHe nor that affable familiar ghost\nWhich nightly gulls him with intelligence,\nAs victors of my silence cannot boast,\nI was not sick of any fear from thence.\nBut when your countenance filled up his line,\nThen lacked I matter, that enfeebled mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-87": { - "title": "“Sonnet 87”", - "body": "Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,\nAnd like enough thou know’st thy estimate,\nThe charter of thy worth gives thee releasing:\nMy bonds in thee are all determinate.\nFor how do I hold thee but by thy granting,\nAnd for that riches where is my deserving?\nThe cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,\nAnd so my patent back again is swerving.\nThy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,\nOr me to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking,\nSo thy great gift upon misprision growing,\nComes home again, on better judgement making.\nThus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,\nIn sleep a king, but waking no such matter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-88": { - "title": "“Sonnet 88”", - "body": "When thou shalt be disposed to set me light,\nAnd place my merit in the eye of scorn,\nUpon thy side, against my self I’ll fight,\nAnd prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn:\nWith mine own weakness being best acquainted,\nUpon thy part I can set down a story\nOf faults concealed, wherein I am attainted:\nThat thou in losing me, shalt win much glory:\nAnd I by this will be a gainer too,\nFor bending all my loving thoughts on thee,\nThe injuries that to my self I do,\nDoing thee vantage, double-vantage me.\nSuch is my love, to thee I so belong,\nThat for thy right, my self will bear all wrong.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-89": { - "title": "“Sonnet 89”", - "body": "Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,\nAnd I will comment upon that offence,\nSpeak of my lameness, and I straight will halt:\nAgainst thy reasons making no defence.\nThou canst not (love) disgrace me half so ill,\nTo set a form upon desired change,\nAs I’ll my self disgrace, knowing thy will,\nI will acquaintance strangle and look strange:\nBe absent from thy walks and in my tongue,\nThy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,\nLest I (too much profane) should do it wrong:\nAnd haply of our old acquaintance tell.\nFor thee, against my self I’ll vow debate,\nFor I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-90": { - "title": "“Sonnet 90”", - "body": "Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now,\nNow while the world is bent my deeds to cross,\njoin with the spite of fortune, make me bow,\nAnd do not drop in for an after-loss:\nAh do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow,\nCome in the rearward of a conquered woe,\nGive not a windy night a rainy morrow,\nTo linger out a purposed overthrow.\nIf thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,\nWhen other petty griefs have done their spite,\nBut in the onset come, so shall I taste\nAt first the very worst of fortune’s might.\nAnd other strains of woe, which now seem woe,\nCompared with loss of thee, will not seem so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-91": { - "title": "“Sonnet 91”", - "body": "Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,\nSome in their wealth, some in their body’s force,\nSome in their garments though new-fangled ill:\nSome in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse.\nAnd every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,\nWherein it finds a joy above the rest,\nBut these particulars are not my measure,\nAll these I better in one general best.\nThy love is better than high birth to me,\nRicher than wealth, prouder than garments’ costs,\nOf more delight than hawks and horses be:\nAnd having thee, of all men’s pride I boast.\nWretched in this alone, that thou mayst take,\nAll this away, and me most wretchcd make.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-92": { - "title": "“Sonnet 92”", - "body": "But do thy worst to steal thy self away,\nFor term of life thou art assured mine,\nAnd life no longer than thy love will stay,\nFor it depends upon that love of thine.\nThen need I not to fear the worst of wrongs,\nWhen in the least of them my life hath end,\nI see, a better state to me belongs\nThan that, which on thy humour doth depend.\nThou canst not vex me with inconstant mind,\nSince that my life on thy revolt doth lie,\nO what a happy title do I find,\nHappy to have thy love, happy to die!\nBut what’s so blessed-fair that fears no blot?\nThou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-93": { - "title": "“Sonnet 93”", - "body": "So shall I live, supposing thou art true,\nLike a deceived husband, so love’s face,\nMay still seem love to me, though altered new:\nThy looks with me, thy heart in other place.\nFor there can live no hatred in thine eye,\nTherefore in that I cannot know thy change,\nIn many’s looks, the false heart’s history\nIs writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange.\nBut heaven in thy creation did decree,\nThat in thy face sweet love should ever dwell,\nWhate’er thy thoughts, or thy heart’s workings be,\nThy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.\nHow like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,\nIf thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-94": { - "title": "“Sonnet 94”", - "body": "They that have power to hurt, and will do none,\nThat do not do the thing, they most do show,\nWho moving others, are themselves as stone,\nUnmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:\nThey rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,\nAnd husband nature’s riches from expense,\nTibey are the lords and owners of their faces,\nOthers, but stewards of their excellence:\nThe summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,\nThough to it self, it only live and die,\nBut if that flower with base infection meet,\nThe basest weed outbraves his dignity:\nFor sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds,\nLilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-95": { - "title": "“Sonnet 95”", - "body": "How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,\nWhich like a canker in the fragrant rose,\nDoth spot the beauty of thy budding name!\nO in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!\nThat tongue that tells the story of thy days,\n(Making lascivious comments on thy sport)\nCannot dispraise, but in a kind of praise,\nNaming thy name, blesses an ill report.\nO what a mansion have those vices got,\nWhich for their habitation chose out thee,\nWhere beauty’s veil doth cover every blot,\nAnd all things turns to fair, that eyes can see!\nTake heed (dear heart) of this large privilege,\nThe hardest knife ill-used doth lose his edge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-96": { - "title": "“Sonnet 96”", - "body": "Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness,\nSome say thy grace is youth and gentle sport,\nBoth grace and faults are loved of more and less:\nThou mak’st faults graces, that to thee resort:\nAs on the finger of a throned queen,\nThe basest jewel will be well esteemed:\nSo are those errors that in thee are seen,\nTo truths translated, and for true things deemed.\nHow many lambs might the stern wolf betray,\nIf like a lamb he could his looks translate!\nHow many gazers mightst thou lead away,\nif thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!\nBut do not so, I love thee in such sort,\nAs thou being mine, mine is thy good report.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-97": { - "title": "“Sonnet 97”", - "body": "How like a winter hath my absence been\nFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!\nWhat freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!\nWhat old December’s bareness everywhere!\nAnd yet this time removed was summer’s time,\nThe teeming autumn big with rich increase,\nBearing the wanton burden of the prime,\nLike widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:\nYet this abundant issue seemed to me\nBut hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit,\nFor summer and his pleasures wait on thee,\nAnd thou away, the very birds are mute.\nOr if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,\nThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-98": { - "title": "“Sonnet 98”", - "body": "From you have I been absent in the spring,\nWhen proud-pied April (dressed in all his trim)\nHath put a spirit of youth in every thing:\nThat heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.\nYet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell\nOf different flowers in odour and in hue,\nCould make me any summer’s story tell:\nOr from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:\nNor did I wonder at the lily’s white,\nNor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,\nThey were but sweet, but figures of delight:\nDrawn after you, you pattern of all those.\nYet seemed it winter still, and you away,\nAs with your shadow I with these did play.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-99": { - "title": "“Sonnet 99”", - "body": "The forward violet thus did I chide,\nSweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,\nIf not from my love’s breath? The purple pride\nWhich on thy soft check for complexion dwells,\nIn my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed.\nThe lily I condemned for thy hand,\nAnd buds of marjoram had stol’n thy hair,\nThe roses fearfully on thorns did stand,\nOne blushing shame, another white despair:\nA third nor red, nor white, had stol’n of both,\nAnd to his robbery had annexed thy breath,\nBut for his theft in pride of all his growth\nA vengeful canker eat him up to death.\nMore flowers I noted, yet I none could see,\nBut sweet, or colour it had stol’n from thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-100": { - "title": "“Sonnet 100”", - "body": "Where art thou Muse that thou forget’st so long,\nTo speak of that which gives thee all thy might?\nSpend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,\nDarkening thy power to lend base subjects light?\nReturn forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,\nIn gentle numbers time so idly spent,\nSing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,\nAnd gives thy pen both skill and argument.\nRise resty Muse, my love’s sweet face survey,\nIf time have any wrinkle graven there,\nIf any, be a satire to decay,\nAnd make time’s spoils despised everywhere.\nGive my love fame faster than Time wastes life,\nSo thou prevent’st his scythe, and crooked knife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-101": { - "title": "“Sonnet 101”", - "body": "O truant Muse what shall be thy amends,\nFor thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?\nBoth truth and beauty on my love depends:\nSo dost thou too, and therein dignified:\nMake answer Muse, wilt thou not haply say,\n“Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed,\nBeauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay:\nBut best is best, if never intermixed”?\nBecause he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?\nExcuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee,\nTo make him much outlive a gilded tomb:\nAnd to be praised of ages yet to be.\nThen do thy office Muse, I teach thee how,\nTo make him seem long hence, as he shows now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-102": { - "title": "“Sonnet 102”", - "body": "My love is strengthened though more weak in seeming,\nI love not less, though less the show appear,\nThat love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming,\nThe owner’s tongue doth publish every where.\nOur love was new, and then but in the spring,\nWhen I was wont to greet it with my lays,\nAs Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,\nAnd stops her pipe in growth of riper days:\nNot that the summer is less pleasant now\nThan when her mournful hymns did hush the night,\nBut that wild music burthens every bough,\nAnd sweets grown common lose their dear delight.\nTherefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue:\nBecause I would not dull you with my song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-103": { - "title": "“Sonnet 103”", - "body": "Alack what poverty my muse brings forth,\nThat having such a scope to show her pride,\nThe argument all bare is of more worth\nThan when it hath my added praise beside.\nO blame me not if I no more can write!\nLook in your glass and there appears a face,\nThat over-goes my blunt invention quite,\nDulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.\nWere it not sinful then striving to mend,\nTo mar the subject that before was well?\nFor to no other pass my verses tend,\nThan of your graces and your gifts to tell.\nAnd more, much more than in my verse can sit,\nYour own glass shows you, when you look in it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-104": { - "title": "“Sonnet 104”", - "body": "To me fair friend you never can be old,\nFor as you were when first your eye I eyed,\nSuch seems your beauty still: three winters cold,\nHave from the forests shook three summers’ pride,\nThree beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned,\nIn process of the seasons have I seen,\nThree April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,\nSince first I saw you fresh which yet are green.\nAh yet doth beauty like a dial hand,\nSteal from his figure, and no pace perceived,\nSo your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand\nHath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.\nFor fear of which, hear this thou age unbred,\nEre you were born was beauty’s summer dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-105": { - "title": "“Sonnet 105”", - "body": "Let not my love be called idolatry,\nNor my beloved as an idol show,\nSince all alike my songs and praises be\nTo one, of one, still such, and ever so.\nKind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,\nStill constant in a wondrous excellence,\nTherefore my verse to constancy confined,\nOne thing expressing, leaves out difference.\nFair, kind, and true, is all my argument,\nFair, kind, and true, varying to other words,\nAnd in this change is my invention spent,\nThree themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.\nFair, kind, and true, have often lived alone.\nWhich three till now, never kept seat in one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-106": { - "title": "“Sonnet 106”", - "body": "When in the chronicle of wasted time,\nI see descriptions of the fairest wights,\nAnd beauty making beautiful old rhyme,\nIn praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,\nThen in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,\nOf hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,\nI see their antique pen would have expressed,\nEven such a beauty as you master now.\nSo all their praises are but prophecies\nOf this our time, all you prefiguring,\nAnd for they looked but with divining eyes,\nThey had not skill enough your worth to sing:\nFor we which now behold these present days,\nHave eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-107": { - "title": "“Sonnet 107”", - "body": "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul,\nOf the wide world, dreaming on things to come,\nCan yet the lease of my true love control,\nSupposed as forfeit to a confined doom.\nThe mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,\nAnd the sad augurs mock their own presage,\nIncertainties now crown themselves assured,\nAnd peace proclaims olives of endless age.\nNow with the drops of this most balmy time,\nMy love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,\nSince spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,\nWhile he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes.\nAnd thou in this shalt find thy monument,\nWhen tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-108": { - "title": "“Sonnet 108”", - "body": "What’s in the brain that ink may character,\nWhich hath not figured to thee my true spirit,\nWhat’s new to speak, what now to register,\nThat may express my love, or thy dear merit?\nNothing sweet boy, but yet like prayers divine,\nI must each day say o’er the very same,\nCounting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,\nEven as when first I hallowed thy fair name.\nSo that eternal love in love’s fresh case,\nWeighs not the dust and injury of age,\nNor gives to necessary wrinkles place,\nBut makes antiquity for aye his page,\nFinding the first conceit of love there bred,\nWhere time and outward form would show it dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-109": { - "title": "“Sonnet 109”", - "body": "O never say that I was false of heart,\nThough absence seemed my flame to qualify,\nAs easy might I from my self depart,\nAs from my soul which in thy breast doth lie:\nThat is my home of love, if I have ranged,\nLike him that travels I return again,\nJust to the time, not with the time exchanged,\nSo that my self bring water for my stain,\nNever believe though in my nature reigned,\nAll frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,\nThat it could so preposterously be stained,\nTo leave for nothing all thy sum of good:\nFor nothing this wide universe I call,\nSave thou my rose, in it thou art my all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-110": { - "title": "“Sonnet 110”", - "body": "Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there,\nAnd made my self a motley to the view,\nGored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,\nMade old offences of affections new.\nMost true it is, that I have looked on truth\nAskance and strangely: but by all above,\nThese blenches gave my heart another youth,\nAnd worse essays proved thee my best of love.\nNow all is done, have what shall have no end,\nMine appetite I never more will grind\nOn newer proof, to try an older friend,\nA god in love, to whom I am confined.\nThen give me welcome, next my heaven the best,\nEven to thy pure and most most loving breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-111": { - "title": "“Sonnet 111”", - "body": "O for my sake do you with Fortune chide,\nThe guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,\nThat did not better for my life provide,\nThan public means which public manners breeds.\nThence comes it that my name receives a brand,\nAnd almost thence my nature is subdued\nTo what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:\nPity me then, and wish I were renewed,\nWhilst like a willing patient I will drink,\nPotions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection,\nNo bitterness that I will bitter think,\nNor double penance to correct correction.\nPity me then dear friend, and I assure ye,\nEven that your pity is enough to cure me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-112": { - "title": "“Sonnet 112”", - "body": "Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill,\nWhich vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow,\nFor what care I who calls me well or ill,\nSo you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?\nYou are my all the world, and I must strive,\nTo know my shames and praises from your tongue,\nNone else to me, nor I to none alive,\nThat my steeled sense or changes right or wrong.\nIn so profound abysm I throw all care\nOf others’ voices, that my adder’s sense,\nTo critic and to flatterer stopped are:\nMark how with my neglect I do dispense.\nYou are so strongly in my purpose bred,\nThat all the world besides methinks are dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-113": { - "title": "“Sonnet 113”", - "body": "Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,\nAnd that which governs me to go about,\nDoth part his function, and is partly blind,\nSeems seeing, but effectually is out:\nFor it no form delivers to the heart\nOf bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch,\nOf his quick objects hath the mind no part,\nNor his own vision holds what it doth catch:\nFor if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,\nThe most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,\nThe mountain, or the sea, the day, or night:\nThe crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.\nIncapable of more, replete with you,\nMy most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-114": { - "title": "“Sonnet 114”", - "body": "Or whether doth my mind being crowned with you\nDrink up the monarch’s plague this flattery?\nOr whether shall I say mine eye saith true,\nAnd that your love taught it this alchemy?\nTo make of monsters, and things indigest,\nSuch cherubins as your sweet self resemble,\nCreating every bad a perfect best\nAs fast as objects to his beams assemble:\nO ’tis the first, ’tis flattery in my seeing,\nAnd my great mind most kingly drinks it up,\nMine eye well knows what with his gust is ’greeing,\nAnd to his palate doth prepare the cup.\nIf it be poisoned, ’tis the lesser sin,\nThat mine eye loves it and doth first begin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-115": { - "title": "“Sonnet 115”", - "body": "Those lines that I before have writ do lie,\nEven those that said I could not love you dearer,\nYet then my judgment knew no reason why,\nMy most full flame should afterwards burn clearer,\nBut reckoning time, whose millioned accidents\nCreep in ’twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,\nTan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents,\nDivert strong minds to the course of alt’ring things:\nAlas why fearing of time’s tyranny,\nMight I not then say “Now I love you best,”\nWhen I was certain o’er incertainty,\nCrowning the present, doubting of the rest?\nLove is a babe, then might I not say so\nTo give full growth to that which still doth grow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-116": { - "title": "“Sonnet 116”", - "body": "Let me not to the marriage of true minds\nAdmit impediments, love is not love\nWhich alters when it alteration finds,\nOr bends with the remover to remove.\nO no, it is an ever-fixed mark\nThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;\nIt is the star to every wand’ring bark,\nWhose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.\nLove’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks\nWithin his bending sickle’s compass come,\nLove alters not with his brief hours and weeks,\nBut bears it out even to the edge of doom:\nIf this be error and upon me proved,\nI never writ, nor no man ever loved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-117": { - "title": "“Sonnet 117”", - "body": "Accuse me thus, that I have scanted all,\nWherein I should your great deserts repay,\nForgot upon your dearest love to call,\nWhereto all bonds do tie me day by day,\nThat I have frequent been with unknown minds,\nAnd given to time your own dear-purchased right,\nThat I have hoisted sail to all the winds\nWhich should transport me farthest from your sight.\nBook both my wilfulness and errors down,\nAnd on just proof surmise, accumulate,\nBring me within the level of your frown,\nBut shoot not at me in your wakened hate:\nSince my appeal says I did strive to prove\nThe constancy and virtue of your love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-118": { - "title": "“Sonnet 118”", - "body": "Like as to make our appetite more keen\nWith eager compounds we our palate urge,\nAs to prevent our maladies unseen,\nWe sicken to shun sickness when we purge.\nEven so being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness,\nTo bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;\nAnd sick of welfare found a kind of meetness,\nTo be diseased ere that there was true needing.\nThus policy in love t’ anticipate\nThe ills that were not, grew to faults assured,\nAnd brought to medicine a healthful state\nWhich rank of goodness would by ill be cured.\nBut thence I learn and find the lesson true,\nDrugs poison him that so feil sick of you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-119": { - "title": "“Sonnet 119”", - "body": "What potions have I drunk of Siren tears\nDistilled from limbecks foul as hell within,\nApplying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,\nStill losing when I saw my self to win!\nWhat wretched errors hath my heart committed,\nWhilst it hath thought it self so blessed never!\nHow have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted\nIn the distraction of this madding fever!\nO benefit of ill, now I find true\nThat better is, by evil still made better.\nAnd ruined love when it is built anew\nGrows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.\nSo I return rebuked to my content,\nAnd gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-120": { - "title": "“Sonnet 120”", - "body": "That you were once unkind befriends me now,\nAnd for that sorrow, which I then did feel,\nNeeds must I under my transgression bow,\nUnless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.\nFor if you were by my unkindness shaken\nAs I by yours, y’have passed a hell of time,\nAnd I a tyrant have no leisure taken\nTo weigh how once I suffered in your crime.\nO that our night of woe might have remembered\nMy deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,\nAnd soon to you, as you to me then tendered\nThe humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!\nBut that your trespass now becomes a fee,\nMine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-121": { - "title": "“Sonnet 121”", - "body": "’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,\nWhen not to be, receives reproach of being,\nAnd the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed,\nNot by our feeling, but by others’ seeing.\nFor why should others’ false adulterate eyes\nGive salutation to my sportive blood?\nOr on my frailties why are frailer spies,\nWhich in their wills count bad what I think good?\nNo, I am that I am, and they that level\nAt my abuses, reckon up their own,\nI may be straight though they themselves be bevel;\nBy their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown\nUnless this general evil they maintain,\nAll men are bad and in their badness reign.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-122": { - "title": "“Sonnet 122”", - "body": "Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain\nFull charactered with lasting memory,\nWhich shall above that idle rank remain\nBeyond all date even to eternity.\nOr at the least, so long as brain and heart\nHave faculty by nature to subsist,\nTill each to razed oblivion yield his part\nOf thee, thy record never can be missed:\nThat poor retention could not so much hold,\nNor need I tallies thy dear love to score,\nTherefore to give them from me was I bold,\nTo trust those tables that receive thee more:\nTo keep an adjunct to remember thee\nWere to import forgetfulness in me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-123": { - "title": "“Sonnet 123”", - "body": "No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change,\nThy pyramids built up with newer might\nTo me are nothing novel, nothing strange,\nThey are but dressings Of a former sight:\nOur dates are brief, and therefore we admire,\nWhat thou dost foist upon us that is old,\nAnd rather make them born to our desire,\nThan think that we before have heard them told:\nThy registers and thee I both defy,\nNot wond’ring at the present, nor the past,\nFor thy records, and what we see doth lie,\nMade more or less by thy continual haste:\nThis I do vow and this shall ever be,\nI will be true despite thy scythe and thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-124": { - "title": "“Sonnet 124”", - "body": "If my dear love were but the child of state,\nIt might for Fortune’s bastard be unfathered,\nAs subject to time’s love or to time’s hate,\nWeeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.\nNo it was builded far from accident,\nIt suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls\nUnder the blow of thralled discontent,\nWhereto th’ inviting time our fashion calls:\nIt fears not policy that heretic,\nWhich works on leases of short-numbered hours,\nBut all alone stands hugely politic,\nThat it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.\nTo this I witness call the fools of time,\nWhich die for goodness, who have lived for crime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-125": { - "title": "“Sonnet 125”", - "body": "Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy,\nWith my extern the outward honouring,\nOr laid great bases for eternity,\nWhich proves more short than waste or ruining?\nHave I not seen dwellers on form and favour\nLose all, and more by paying too much rent\nFor compound sweet; forgoing simple savour,\nPitiful thrivers in their gazing spent?\nNo, let me be obsequious in thy heart,\nAnd take thou my oblation, poor but free,\nWhich is not mixed with seconds, knows no art,\nBut mutual render, only me for thee.\nHence, thou suborned informer, a true soul\nWhen most impeached, stands least in thy control.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-126": { - "title": "“Sonnet 126”", - "body": "O thou my lovely boy who in thy power,\nDost hold Time’s fickle glass his fickle hour:\nWho hast by waning grown, and therein show’st,\nThy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st.\nIf Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack)\nAs thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,\nShe keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill\nMay time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.\nYet fear her O thou minion of her pleasure,\nShe may detain, but not still keep her treasure!\nHer audit (though delayed) answered must be,\nAnd her quietus is to render thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-127": { - "title": "“Sonnet 127”", - "body": "In the old age black was not counted fair,\nOr if it were it bore not beauty’s name:\nBut now is black beauty’s successive heir,\nAnd beauty slandered with a bastard shame,\nFor since each hand hath put on nature’s power,\nFairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,\nSweet beauty hath no name no holy bower,\nBut is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.\nTherefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,\nHer eyes so suited, and they mourners seem,\nAt such who not born fair no beauty lack,\nSlandering creation with a false esteem,\nYet so they mourn becoming of their woe,\nThat every tongue says beauty should look so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-128": { - "title": "“Sonnet 128”", - "body": "How oft when thou, my music, music play’st,\nUpon that blessed wood whose motion sounds\nWith thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st\nThe wiry concord that mine ear confounds,\nDo I envy those jacks that nimble leap,\nTo kiss the tender inward of thy hand,\nWhilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,\nAt the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand.\nTo be so tickled they would change their state\nAnd situation with those dancing chips,\nO’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,\nMaking dead wood more blest than living lips,\nSince saucy jacks so happy are in this,\nGive them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-129": { - "title": "“Sonnet 129”", - "body": "Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame\nIs lust in action, and till action, lust\nIs perjured, murd’rous, bloody full of blame,\nSavage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,\nEnjoyed no sooner but despised straight,\nPast reason hunted, and no sooner had\nPast reason hated as a swallowed bait,\nOn purpose laid to make the taker mad.\nMad in pursuit and in possession so,\nHad, having, and in quest, to have extreme,\nA bliss in proof and proved, a very woe,\nBefore a joy proposed behind a dream.\nAll this the world well knows yet none knows well,\nTo shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-130": { - "title": "“Sonnet 130”", - "body": "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,\nCoral is far more red, than her lips red,\nIf snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:\nIf hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:\nI have seen roses damasked, red and white,\nBut no such roses see I in her cheeks,\nAnd in some perfumes is there more delight,\nThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.\nI love to hear her speak, yet well I know,\nThat music hath a far more pleasing sound:\nI grant I never saw a goddess go,\nMy mistress when she walks treads on the ground.\nAnd yet by heaven I think my love as rare,\nAs any she belied with false compare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-131": { - "title": "“Sonnet 131”", - "body": "Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,\nAs those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;\nFor well thou know’st to my dear doting heart\nThou art the fairest and most precious jewel.\nYet in good faith some say that thee behold,\nThy face hath not the power to make love groan;\nTo say they err, I dare not be so bold,\nAlthough I swear it to my self alone.\nAnd to be sure that is not false I swear,\nA thousand groans but thinking on thy face,\nOne on another’s neck do witness bear\nThy black is fairest in my judgment’s place.\nIn nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,\nAnd thence this slander as I think proceeds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-132": { - "title": "“Sonnet 132”", - "body": "Thine eyes I love, and they as pitying me,\nKnowing thy heart torment me with disdain,\nHave put on black, and loving mourners be,\nLooking with pretty ruth upon my pain.\nAnd truly not the morning sun of heaven\nBetter becomes the grey cheeks of the east,\nNor that full star that ushers in the even\nDoth half that glory to the sober west\nAs those two mourning eyes become thy face:\nO let it then as well beseem thy heart\nTo mourn for me since mourning doth thee grace,\nAnd suit thy pity like in every part.\nThen will I swear beauty herself is black,\nAnd all they foul that thy complexion lack.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-133": { - "title": "“Sonnet 133”", - "body": "Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan\nFor that deep wound it gives my friend and me;\nIs’t not enough to torture me alone,\nBut slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?\nMe from my self thy cruel eye hath taken,\nAnd my next self thou harder hast engrossed,\nOf him, my self, and thee I am forsaken,\nA torment thrice three-fold thus to be crossed:\nPrison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,\nBut then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail,\nWhoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard,\nThou canst not then use rigour in my gaol.\nAnd yet thou wilt, for I being pent in thee,\nPerforce am thine and all that is in me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-134": { - "title": "“Sonnet 134”", - "body": "So now I have confessed that he is thine,\nAnd I my self am mortgaged to thy will,\nMy self I’ll forfeit, so that other mine,\nThou wilt restore to be my comfort still:\nBut thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,\nFor thou art covetous, and he is kind,\nHe learned but surety-like to write for me,\nUnder that bond that him as fist doth bind.\nThe statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,\nThou usurer that put’st forth all to use,\nAnd sue a friend, came debtor for my sake,\nSo him I lose through my unkind abuse.\nHim have I lost, thou hast both him and me,\nHe pays the whole, and yet am I not free.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-135": { - "title": "“Sonnet 135”", - "body": "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will,\nAnd ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in over-plus,\nMore than enough am I that vex thee still,\nTo thy sweet will making addition thus.\nWilt thou whose will is large and spacious,\nNot once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?\nShall will in others seem right gracious,\nAnd in my will no fair acceptance shine?\nThe sea all water, yet receives rain still,\nAnd in abundance addeth to his store,\nSo thou being rich in will add to thy will\nOne will of mine to make thy large will more.\nLet no unkind, no fair beseechers kill,\nThink all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-136": { - "title": "“Sonnet 136”", - "body": "If thy soul check thee that I come so near,\nSwear to thy blind soul that I was thy ‘Will’,\nAnd will thy soul knows is admitted there,\nThus far for love, my love-suit sweet fulfil.\n‘Will’, will fulfil the treasure of thy love,\nAy, fill it full with wills, and my will one,\nIn things of great receipt with case we prove,\nAmong a number one is reckoned none.\nThen in the number let me pass untold,\nThough in thy store’s account I one must be,\nFor nothing hold me, so it please thee hold,\nThat nothing me, a something sweet to thee.\nMake but my name thy love, and love that still,\nAnd then thou lov’st me for my name is Will.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-137": { - "title": "“Sonnet 137”", - "body": "Thou blind fool Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,\nThat they behold and see not what they see?\nThey know what beauty is, see where it lies,\nYet what the best is, take the worst to be.\nIf eyes corrupt by over-partial looks,\nBe anchored in the bay where all men ride,\nWhy of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,\nWhereto the judgment of my heart is tied?\nWhy should my heart think that a several plot,\nWhich my heart knows the wide world’s common place?\nOr mine eyes seeing this, say this is not\nTo put fair truth upon so foul a face?\nIn things right true my heart and eyes have erred,\nAnd to this false plague are they now transferred.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-138": { - "title": "“Sonnet 138”", - "body": "When my love swears that she is made of truth,\nI do believe her though I know she lies,\nThat she might think me some untutored youth,\nUnlearned in the world’s false subtleties.\nThus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,\nAlthough she knows my days are past the best,\nSimply I credit her false-speaking tongue,\nOn both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:\nBut wherefore says she not she is unjust?\nAnd wherefore say not I that I am old?\nO love’s best habit is in seeming trust,\nAnd age in love, loves not to have years told.\nTherefore I lie with her, and she with me,\nAnd in our faults by lies we flattered be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-139": { - "title": "“Sonnet 139”", - "body": "O call not me to justify the wrong,\nThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart,\nWound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue,\nUse power with power, and slay me not by art,\nTell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,\nDear heart forbear to glance thine eye aside,\nWhat need’st thou wound with cunning when thy might\nIs more than my o’erpressed defence can bide?\nLet me excuse thee, ah my love well knows,\nHer pretty looks have been mine enemies,\nAnd therefore from my face she turns my foes,\nThat they elsewhere might dart their injuries:\nYet do not so, but since I am near slain,\nKill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-140": { - "title": "“Sonnet 140”", - "body": "Be wise as thou art cruel, do not press\nMy tongue-tied patience with too much disdain:\nLest sorrow lend me words and words express,\nThe manner of my pity-wanting pain.\nIf I might teach thee wit better it were,\nThough not to love, yet love to tell me so,\nAs testy sick men when their deaths be near,\nNo news but health from their physicians know.\nFor if I should despair I should grow mad,\nAnd in my madness might speak ill of thee,\nNow this ill-wresting world is grown so bad,\nMad slanderers by mad ears believed be.\nThat I may not be so, nor thou belied,\nBear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-141": { - "title": "“Sonnet 141”", - "body": "In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,\nFor they in thee a thousand errors note,\nBut ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,\nWho in despite of view is pleased to dote.\nNor are mine cars with thy tongue’s tune delighted,\nNor tender feeling to base touches prone,\nNor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited\nTo any sensual feast with thee alone:\nBut my five wits, nor my five senses can\nDissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,\nWho leaves unswayed the likeness of a man,\nThy proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch to be:\nOnly my plague thus far I count my gain,\nThat she that makes me sin, awards me pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-142": { - "title": "“Sonnet 142”", - "body": "Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,\nHate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving,\nO but with mine, compare thou thine own state,\nAnd thou shalt find it merits not reproving,\nOr if it do, not from those lips of thine,\nThat have profaned their scarlet ornaments,\nAnd sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine,\nRobbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents.\nBe it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those,\nWhom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee,\nRoot pity in thy heart that when it grows,\nThy pity may deserve to pitied be.\nIf thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,\nBy self-example mayst thou be denied.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-143": { - "title": "“Sonnet 143”", - "body": "Lo as a careful huswife runs to catch,\nOne of her feathered creatures broke away,\nSets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch\nIn pursuit of the thing she would have stay:\nWhilst her neglected child holds her in chase,\nCries to catch her whose busy care is bent,\nTo follow that which flies before her face:\nNot prizing her poor infant’s discontent;\nSo run’st thou after that which flies from thee,\nWhilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind,\nBut if thou catch thy hope turn back to me:\nAnd play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind.\nSo will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will,\nIf thou turn back and my loud crying still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-144": { - "title": "“Sonnet 144”", - "body": "Two loves I have of comfort and despair,\nWhich like two spirits do suggest me still,\nThe better angel is a man right fair:\nThe worser spirit a woman coloured ill.\nTo win me soon to hell my female evil,\nTempteth my better angel from my side,\nAnd would corrupt my saint to be a devil:\nWooing his purity with her foul pride.\nAnd whether that my angel be turned fiend,\nSuspect I may, yet not directly tell,\nBut being both from me both to each friend,\nI guess one angel in another’s hell.\nYet this shall I ne’er know but live in doubt,\nTill my bad angel fire my good one out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-145": { - "title": "“Sonnet 145”", - "body": "Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,\nBreathed forth the sound that said “I hate,”\nTo me that languished for her sake:\nBut when she saw my woeful state,\nStraight in her heart did mercy come,\nChiding that tongue that ever sweet,\nWas used in giving gentle doom:\nAnd taught it thus anew to greet:\n“I hate” she altered with an end,\nThat followed it as gentle day,\nDoth follow night who like a fiend\nFrom heaven to hell is flown away.\n“I hate,” from hate away she threw,\nAnd saved my life saying “not you”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-146": { - "title": "“Sonnet 146”", - "body": "Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth,\nMy sinful earth these rebel powers array,\nWhy dost thou pine within and suffer dearth\nPainting thy outward walls so costly gay?\nWhy so large cost having so short a lease,\nDost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?\nShall worms inheritors of this excess\nEat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?\nThen soul live thou upon thy servant’s loss,\nAnd let that pine to aggravate thy store;\nBuy terms divine in selling hours of dross;\nWithin be fed, without be rich no more,\nSo shall thou feed on death, that feeds on men,\nAnd death once dead, there’s no more dying then.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-147": { - "title": "“Sonnet 147”", - "body": "My love is as a fever longing still,\nFor that which longer nurseth the disease,\nFeeding on that which doth preserve the ill,\nTh’ uncertain sickly appetite to please:\nMy reason the physician to my love,\nAngry that his prescriptions are not kept\nHath left me, and I desperate now approve,\nDesire is death, which physic did except.\nPast cure I am, now reason is past care,\nAnd frantic-mad with evermore unrest,\nMy thoughts and my discourse as mad men’s are,\nAt random from the truth vainly expressed.\nFor I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,\nWho art as black as hell, as dark as night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-148": { - "title": "“Sonnet 148”", - "body": "O me! what eyes hath love put in my head,\nWhich have no correspondence with true sight,\nOr if they have, where is my judgment fled,\nThat censures falsely what they see aright?\nIf that be fair whereon my false eyes dote,\nWhat means the world to say it is not so?\nIf it be not, then love doth well denote,\nLove’s eye is not so true as all men’s: no,\nHow can it? O how can love’s eye be true,\nThat is so vexed with watching and with tears?\nNo marvel then though I mistake my view,\nThe sun it self sees not, till heaven clears.\nO cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,\nLest eyes well-seeing thy foul faults should find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-149": { - "title": "“Sonnet 149”", - "body": "Canst thou O cruel, say I love thee not,\nWhen I against my self with thee partake?\nDo I not think on thee when I forgot\nAm of my self, all-tyrant, for thy sake?\nWho hateth thee that I do call my friend,\nOn whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon,\nNay if thou lour’st on me do I not spend\nRevenge upon my self with present moan?\nWhat merit do I in my self respect,\nThat is so proud thy service to despise,\nWhen all my best doth worship thy defect,\nCommanded by the motion of thine eyes?\nBut love hate on for now I know thy mind,\nThose that can see thou lov’st, and I am blind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-150": { - "title": "“Sonnet 150”", - "body": "O from what power hast thou this powerful might,\nWith insufficiency my heart to sway,\nTo make me give the lie to my true sight,\nAnd swear that brightness doth not grace the day?\nWhence hast thou this becoming of things ill,\nThat in the very refuse of thy deeds,\nThere is such strength and warrantise of skill,\nThat in my mind thy worst all best exceeds?\nWho taught thee how to make me love thee more,\nThe more I hear and see just cause of hate?\nO though I love what others do abhor,\nWith others thou shouldst not abhor my state.\nIf thy unworthiness raised love in me,\nMore worthy I to be beloved of thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-151": { - "title": "“Sonnet 151”", - "body": "Love is too young to know what conscience is,\nYet who knows not conscience is born of love?\nThen gentle cheater urge not my amiss,\nLest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove.\nFor thou betraying me, I do betray\nMy nobler part to my gross body’s treason,\nMy soul doth tell my body that he may,\nTriumph in love, flesh stays no farther reason,\nBut rising at thy name doth point out thee,\nAs his triumphant prize, proud of this pride,\nHe is contented thy poor drudge to be,\nTo stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.\nNo want of conscience hold it that I call,\nHer love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-152": { - "title": "“Sonnet 152”", - "body": "In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn,\nBut thou art twice forsworn to me love swearing,\nIn act thy bed-vow broke and new faith torn,\nIn vowing new hate after new love bearing:\nBut why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,\nWhen I break twenty? I am perjured most,\nFor all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee:\nAnd all my honest faith in thee is lost.\nFor I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness:\nOaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy,\nAnd to enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness,\nOr made them swear against the thing they see.\nFor I have sworn thee fair: more perjured I,\nTo swear against the truth so foul a be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-153": { - "title": "“Sonnet 153”", - "body": "Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep,\nA maid of Dian’s this advantage found,\nAnd his love-kindling fire did quickly steep\nIn a cold valley-fountain of that ground:\nWhich borrowed from this holy fire of Love,\nA dateless lively heat still to endure,\nAnd grew a seeting bath which yet men prove,\nAgainst strange maladies a sovereign cure:\nBut at my mistress’ eye Love’s brand new-fired,\nThe boy for trial needs would touch my breast,\nI sick withal the help of bath desired,\nAnd thither hied a sad distempered guest.\nBut found no cure, the bath for my help lies,\nWhere Cupid got new fire; my mistress’ eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "sonnet-154": { - "title": "“Sonnet 154”", - "body": "The little Love-god lying once asleep,\nLaid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,\nWhilst many nymphs that vowed chaste life to keep,\nCame tripping by, but in her maiden hand,\nThe fairest votary took up that fire,\nWhich many legions of true hearts had warmed,\nAnd so the general of hot desire,\nWas sleeping by a virgin hand disarmed.\nThis brand she quenched in a cool well by,\nWhich from Love’s fire took heat perpetual,\nGrowing a bath and healthful remedy,\nFor men discased, but I my mistress’ thrall,\nCame there for cure and this by that I prove,\nLove’s fire heats water, water cools not love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1609 - } - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "When daisies pied and violets blue\n And lady-smocks all silver-white\nAnd cuckoo-buds of yellow hue\n Do paint the meadows with delight,\nThe cuckoo then, on every tree,\nMocks married men; for thus sings he,\n Cuckoo;\nCuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear,\nUnpleasing to a married ear!\n\nWhen shepherds pipe on oaten straws,\n And merry larks are plowmen’s clocks,\nWhen turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,\n And maidens bleach their summer smocks,\nThe cuckoo then, on every tree,\nMocks married men; for thus sings he,\n Cuckoo;\nCuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear,\nUnpleasing to a married ear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "take-oh-take-those-lips-away": { - "title": "“Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away”", - "body": "Take, oh take those lips away,\n That so sweetly were forsworn,\nAnd those eyes: the breake of day,\n Lights that do mislead the Morn;\nBut my kisses bring again, bring again,\nSeals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "under-the-greenwood-tree": { - "title": "“Under the Greenwood Tree”", - "body": "Under the greenwood tree\nWho loves to lie with me,\nAnd turn his merry note\nUnto the sweet bird’s throat,\nCome hither, come hither, come hither:\n Here shall he see\n No enemy\nBut winter and rough weather.\n\nWho doth ambition shun\nAnd loves to live i’ the sun,\nSeeking the food he eats,\nAnd pleased with what he gets,\nCome hither, come hither, come hither:\n Here shall he see\n No enemy\nBut winter and rough weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "varlam-shalamov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Varlam Shalamov", - "birth": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "alive-not-by-bread-alone": { - "title": "“Alive not by bread alone …”", - "body": "Alive not by bread alone,\n I dip a crust of sky,\nin the morning chill,\n in the stream flowing by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "all-that-is-human-slips-away": { - "title": "“All that is human slips away …”", - "body": "All that is human slips away;\neverything was mere husk.\nAll that is left, indivisible,\nis birdsong and dusk.\nA sharp scent of warm mint,\nthe river’s far-off noise;\nall equal, and equally light--\nall my losses and joys.\nSlowly, with its warm towel\nthe wind dries my face;\nmoths immolate themselves\nin the campfire’s flames.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "and-so-i-keep-going": { - "title": "“And so I keep going …”", - "body": "And so I keep going;\ndeath remains close;\nI carry my life\nin a blue envelope.\n\nThe letter’s been ready\never since autumn:\njust one little word--\nit couldn’t be shorter.\n\nBut I still don’t know\nwhere I should send it;\nif I had the address,\nmy life might have ended.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "i-believe": { - "title": "“I believe”", - "body": "Off once more to the post:\nwill I find your letter?\nMy mind races all night\nand daytime’s no better.\n\nI believe, I believe in omens,\nin dreams and spiders.\nI have confidence in skis,\nin slim boats on rivers.\n\nI have faith in diesel engines,\nin their roars and growls,\nin the wings of carrier pigeons\nin tall ships with white sails.\n\nI place my trust in steamers\nand in the strength of trains;\nI have even dreamed of\nthe right weather for planes.\n\nI believe in reindeer sledges,\nin the worth of a compass\nand a frost-stiffened map\nwhen there is no path;\n\nin teams of huskies,\nin daredevil coachmen,\nin tortoise indolence\nand the snail’s composure.\n\nI believe in the powers\nof that wish-granting pike\nin my thinning blood …\nI believe in my own endurance;\nand in your love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-raise-my-glass-to-a-road-in-the-forest": { - "title": "“I raise my glass to a road in the forest …”", - "body": "I raise my glass to a road in the forest\nTo those who fall on their way\nTo those who can’t drag themselves farther\nBut are forced to drag on.\n\nTo their bluish hard lips\nTo their identical faces\nTo their torn, frost-covered coats\nTo their hands without gloves\n\nTo the water they sip, from an old tin can\nTo the scurvy which sticks to their teeth.\nTo the teeth of fattened gray dogs\nWhich awake them in the morning\n\nTo the sullen sun,\nWhich regards them without interest\nTo the snow-white tombstones,\nThe work of clever snowstorms\n\nTo the ration of raw, sticky bread\nSwallowed quickly\nTo the pale, too high sky\nTo the Ayan-Yuryakh River!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anne Applebaum & Galya Vinogradova", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-thought-they-would-make-us-the-heroes": { - "title": "“I thought they would make us the heroes …”", - "body": "I thought they would make us the heroes\nof cantantas, posters, books of all kinds;\nthat hats would be flung in the air\nand streets go out of their minds.\n\nWe had returned.\nWe were unbowed.\nWe had stayed true.\n\nBut the city had thoughts of its own;\nit just muttered a word or two.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1961 - } - } - }, - "i-went-out-in-the-clear-air": { - "title": "“I went out in the clear air …”", - "body": "I went out in the clear air\nand raised my eyes to the heavens\nto understand our stars\nand their January brilliance.\n\nI found the key to the riddle;\nI grasped the heiroglyph’s secret;\nI carried into our own tongue\nthe work of the star-poet.\n\nI recorded all this on a stump,\non frozen bark,\nsince I had no paper with me\nin that January dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "memory-has-veiled-much-evil": { - "title": "“Memory has veiled much evil …”", - "body": "Memory has veiled\n much evil;\nher long lies leave nothing\n to believe.\n\nThere may be no cities\n or green gardens;\nonly fields of ice\n and salty oceans.\n\nThe world may be pure snow,\n a starry road;\njust northern forest\n in the mind of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1952 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "roncesvalles": { - "title": "“Roncesvalles”", - "body": "I was captivated straight away,\ntired of the lies all around me,\nby that proud, tragic tale\nof a warrior’s death in the mountains.\n\nAnd it may have been Roland’s horn\nthat called me, like Charlemagne,\nto a silent pass where the boldest\nof many bold fighters lay slain.\n\nI saw a sword lying shattered\nafter long combat with stone--\na witness to forgotten battles\nrecorded by stone alone.\n\nAnd those bitter splinters of steel\nhave dazzled me many a time.\nThat tale of helpless defeat\ncan’t help but overwhelm.\n\nI have held that horn to my lips\nand tried more than once to blow,\nbut I cannot call up the power\nof that ballad from long ago.\n\nThere may be some skill I’m lacking--\nor else I’m not bold enough\nto blow in my shy anguish\non Roland’s rust-eaten horn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robert Chandler", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - } - } - } - } - }, - "karl-shapiro": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Karl Shapiro", - "birth": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2000 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Shapiro", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "auto-wreck": { - "title": "“Auto Wreck”", - "body": "Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating,\nAnd down the dark one ruby flare\nPulsing out red light like an artery,\nThe ambulance at top speed floating down\nPast beacons and illuminated clocks\nWings in a heavy curve, dips down,\nAnd brakes speed, entering the crowd.\nThe doors leap open, emptying light;\nStretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted\nAnd stowed into the little hospital.\nThen the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once.\nAnd the ambulance with its terrible cargo\nRocking, slightly rocking, moves away,\nAs the doors, an afterthought, are closed.\n\nWe are deranged, walking among the cops\nWho sweep glass and are large and composed.\nOne is still making notes under the light.\nOne with a bucket douches ponds of blood\nInto the street and gutter.\nOne hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,\nEmpty husks of locusts, to iron poles.\n\nOur throats were tight as tourniquets,\nOur feet were bound with splints, but now,\nLike convalescents intimate and gauche,\nWe speak through sickly smiles and warn\nWith the stubborn saw of common sense,\nThe grim joke and the banal resolution.\nThe traffic moves around with care,\nBut we remain, touching a wound\nThat opens to our richest horror.\nAlready old, the question _Who shall die?_\nBecomes unspoken _Who is innocent?_\n\nFor death in war is done by hands;\nSuicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;\nAnd cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.\nBut this invites the occult mind,\nCancels our physics with a sneer,\nAnd spatters all we knew of denouement\nAcross the expedient and wicked stones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-garden-in-chicago": { - "title": "“A Garden in Chicago”", - "body": "In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,\nI lay in a garden of such dusky green\nIt seemed the dregs of the imagination.\nHedged round by elegant spears of iron fence\nMy face became a moon to absent suns.\nA low heat beat upon my reading face;\nThere rose no roses in that gritty place\nBut blue-gray lilacs hung their tassels out.\nHard zinnias and ugly marigolds\nAnd one sweet statue of a child stood by.\n\nA gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard,\nMaking me think I was a bird of prose;\nFor overhead, bagged in a golden cloud,\nThere hung the fatted souls of animals,\nWile at my eyes bright dots of butterflies\nTurned off and on like distant neon signs.\n\nAssuming that this garden still exists,\nOne ancient lady patrols the zinnias\n(She looks like George Washington crossing the Delaware),\nThe janitor wanders to the iron rail,\nThe traffic mounts bombastically out there,\nAnd across the street in a pitch-black bar\nWith midnight mirrors, the professional\nTakes her first whiskey of the afternoon--\n\nAh! It is like a breath of country air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "going-to-school": { - "title": "“Going to School”", - "body": "What shall I teach in the vivid afternoon\nWith the sun warming the blackboard and a slip\nOf cloud catching my eye?\nOnly the cones and sections of the moon.\nOut of some flaking page of scholarship,\nOnly some foolish heresy\nTo counteract the authority of prose.\nThe ink runs freely and the dry chalk flows\nInto the silent night of seven slates\nWhere I create the universe as if\nIt grew out of some old rabbinic glyph\nOr hung upon the necessity of Yeats.\n\nO dry imaginations, drink this dust\nThat grays the room and powders my coat sleeve,\nFor in this shaft of light\nI dance upon the intellectual crust\nOf our own age and hold this make-believe\nLike holy-work before your sight.\nThis is the list of books that time has burned,\nThese are the lines that only poets have learned,\nThe frame of dreams, the symbols that dilate;\nYet when I turn from this dark exercise\nI meet your bright and world-considering eyes\nThat build and build and never can create.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-an-atheist-who-says-his-prayers": { - "title": "“I Am an Atheist Who Says His Prayers”", - "body": "I am an atheist who says his prayers.\nI am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.\nI am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.\nI stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.\nI drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.\nA physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.\nI am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.\nI uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.\nI am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me.\nI am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance.\nI am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever.\nI love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair.\nI take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars.\nWithout compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip!\nThe homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror.\nPitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel!\nWherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey.\nHow beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side.\nFor the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-leg": { - "title": "“The Leg”", - "body": "Among the iodoform, in twilight sleep,\n_What have I lost?_ he first inquires,\nPeers in the middle distance where a pain,\nGhost of a nurse, hastily moves, and day,\nHer blinding presence pressing in his eyes\nAnd now his ears. They are handling him\nWith rubber hands. He wants to get up.\n\nOne day beside some flowers near his nose\nHe will be thinking, _When will I look at it?_\nAnd pain, still in the middle distance, will reply,\n_At what?_ and he will know it’s gone,\nO where! and begin to tremble and cry.\nHe will begin to cry as a child cries\nWhose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.\n\nLater, as if deliberately, his fingers\nBegin to explore the stump. He learns a shape\nThat is comfortable and tucked in like a sock.\nThis has a sense of humor, this can despise\nThe finest surgical limb, the dignity of limping,\nThe nonsense of wheel-chairs. Now he smiles to the wall:\nThe amputation becomes an acquisition.\n\nFor the leg is wondering where he is (all is not lost)\nAnd surely he has a duty to the leg;\nHe is its injury, the leg is his orphan,\nHe must cultivate the mind of the leg,\nPray for the part that is missing, pray for peace\nIn the image of man, pray, pray for its safety,\nAnd after a little it will die quietly.\n\nThe body, what is it, Father, but a sign\nTo love the force that grows us, to give back\nWhat in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?\nKnead, knead the substance of our understanding\nWhich must be beautiful in flesh to walk,\nThat if Thou take me angrily in hand\nAnd hurl me to the shark, I shall not die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "october-1": { - "title": "“October 1”", - "body": "That season when the leaf deserts the bole\nAnd half-dead see-saws through the October air\nFalling face-downward on the walks to print\nThe decalcomania of its little soul--\nHardly has the milkman’s sleepy horse\nOn wooden shoes echoed across the blocks\nWhen with its back jaws open like a dredge\nThe van comes lumbering up the curb to someone’s door and knocks.\n\nAnd four black genii muscular and shy\nHolding their shy caps enter the first room\nWhere someone hurriedly surrenders up\nThe thickset chair, the mirror half awry,\nThen to their burdens stoop without a sound.\nOne with his bare hands rends apart the bed,\nOne stuffs the china-barrel with stale print,\nTwo bear the sofa toward the door with dark funereal tread.\n\nThe corner lamp, the safety eye of night,\nEnveloped in the sun blinks and goes blind\nAnd soon the early risers pick their way\nThrough kitchenware and pillows bolt upright.\nThe bureau on the sidewalk with bare back\nAnd wrinkling veneer is most disgraced,\nThe sketch of Paris suffers in the wind;\nOnly the bike, its nose against the wall, does not show haste.\n\nTwo hours--the movers mop their necks and look,\nFiling through dust and echoes back and forth.\nThe halls are hollow and all the floors are cleared\nBare to the last board, to the most secret nook;\nBut on the street a small chaos survives\nThat slowly now the leviathan ingests,\nAnd schoolboys and stenographers stare at\nThe truck, the house, the husband in his hat who stands and rests.\n\nHe turns with miserable expectant face\nAnd for the last time enters. On the wall\nA picture-stain spreads from the nail-hole down.\nEach object live and dead has left its trace.\nHe leaves his key; but as he quickly goes\nThis question comes behind: Did someone die?\nIs someone rich or poor, better or worse?\nWhat shall uproot a house and bring this care into his eye?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 1 - } - } - }, - "psalm-151": { - "title": "“Psalm 151”", - "body": "Are You looking for us? We are here.\nHave You been gathering fowers, Elohim?\nWe are Your flowers, we have always been.\nWhen will You leave us alone?\nWe are in America.\nWe have been here three hundred years.\nAnd what new altar will You deck us with?\n\nWhom are You following, Pillar of Fire?\nWhat barn do You seek shelter in?\nAt whose gate do You whimper\nIn this great Palestine?\nWhose wages do You take in this New World?\nBut Israel shall take what it shall take,\nMaking us ready for your hungry Hand!\n\nImmigrant God, You follow me;\nYou go with me, You are a distant tree;\nYou are the beast that lows in my heart’s gates;\nYou are the dog that follows at my heel;\nYou are the table on which I lean;\nYou are the plate from which I eat.\n\nShepherd of the flocks of praise,\nYouth of all youth, ancient of days,\nFollow us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "scyros": { - "title": "“Scyros”", - "body": "_snuffle and snif and handkerchief_\n\nThe doctor punched my vein\nThe captain called me Cain\nUpon my belly sat the sow of fear\nWith coins on either eye\nThe President came by\nAnd whispered to the lords what none could hear\n\nHigh over where the storm\nStood steadfast cruciform\nThe golden eagle sank in wounded wheels\nWhite negroes laughing still\nCrept fiercely on Brazil\nTurning the navies upward on their keels\n\nNow one by one the trees\nStripped to their naked knees\nTo dance upon the heaps of shrunken dead\nThe roof of England fell\nGreat Paris tolled her bell\nAnd China staunched her milk and wept for bread\n\nNo island singly lay\nBut lost its name that day\nThe Ainu dived across the plunging sands\nFrom dawn to dawn to dawn\nKing George’s birds came on\nStrafing the tulips from his children’s hands\n\nThus in the classic sea\nSoutheast from Thessaly\nThe dynamited mermen washed ashore\nAnd tritons dressed in steel\nTrolled heads with rod and reel\nAnd dredged potatoes from the Aegean floor\n\nHot is the sky and green\nWhere Germans have been seen\nThe moon leaks metal on the Atlantic fields\nPink boys in birthday shrouds\nLoop lightly through the clouds\nOr coast the peaks of Finland on their shields\n\nThat prophet year by year\nLay still but could not hear\nWhere scholars tapped to find his new remains\nGog and Magog ate pork\nIn vertical New York\nAnd war began next Monday on the Danes", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sunday-new-guinea": { - "title": "“Sunday: New Guinea”", - "body": "The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,\nThe band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,\nFrom every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,\nEach to his kind of service comes to worship Him.\n\nOur faces washed, our hearts in the right place,\nWe kneel or stand or listen from our tents;\nHalf-naked natives with their kind of grace\nMove down the road with balanced staffs like mendicants.\n\nAnd over the hill the guns bang like a door\nAnd planes repeat their mission in the heights.\nThe jungle outmaneuvers creeping war\nAnd crawls within the circle of our sacred rites.\n\nI long for our disheveled Sundays home,\nBreakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes,\nTalk without reference, and palindromes,\nSleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous _Times_.\n\nI long for lounging in the afternoons\nOf clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind,\nBooks and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons,\nAnd your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "university": { - "title": "“University”", - "body": "To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew\nIs the curriculum. In mid-September\nThe entering boys, identified by hats,\nWander in a maze of mannered brick\nWhere boxwood and magnolia brood\nAnd columns with imperious stance\nLike rows of ante-bellum girls\nEye them, outlanders.\n\nIn whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace,\nUnder the arch, and lofty banister,\nEquals shake hands, unequals blankly pass;\nThe exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet”\nAnd visitors on tiptoe leave\nFor the raw North, the unfinished West,\nAs the young, detecting an advantage,\nPractice a face.\n\nWhere, on their separate hill, the colleges,\nLike manor houses of an older law,\nGaze down embankments on a land in fee,\nThe Deans, dry spinsters over family plate,\nRing out the English name like coin,\nHumor the snob and lure the lout.\nWithin the precincts of this world\nPoise is a club.\n\nBut on the neighboring range, misty and high,\nThe past is absolute: some luckless race\nDull with inbreeding and conformity\nWears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad\nFor charity or jail. The scholar\nSanctions their obsolete disease;\nThe gentleman revolts with shame\nAt his ancestor.\n\nAnd the true nobleman, once a democrat,\nSleeps on his private mountain. He was one\nWhose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad;\nThis school he held his art and epitaph.\nBut now it takes from him his name,\nFalls open like a dishonest look,\nAnd shows us, rotted and endowed,\nIts senile pleasure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "vacation": { - "title": "“Vacation”", - "body": "Goldness and whiteness of woman, like a Grand Rapids bed or a Sunday paper of brides. The bride coated with power stands in the strongest light at last. She is clean.--The sculptor sets his jaw and drives to the junkyard. There he can breathe.\nLove on the deathbed, love deeper than sunset. The Bros. are coming. What! is it nothing but that? Is love nothing but that? Battle of Waterloo, nothing but that? Fraulein, allumeuse? Or to end a sentence with a preposition?\nSix cases of bourbon returned to the caterer and the flowers divided. Hymen hymenace.\nMan with the lamp, hands of ferro-concrete, vellum of hand, the skin as soft as kid. Big black flashlight, size of a horsecock, mother’s gift. Night silent as hand writing, night with two cats on long thin ropes. The leather coat of early night on the great wet lakes. Woman, homo normalis!\nConsider also their baths, their bows, their brown blood, their pots, their stenches, out of which the greatest of sonnet cycles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waitress": { - "title": "“Waitress”", - "body": "Whoever with the compasses of his eyes\nIs plotting the voyage of your steady shape\nAs you come laden through the room and back\nAnd rounding your even bottom like a Cape\nCrooks his first finger, whistles through his lip\nTill you arrive, all motion, like a ship,\n\nHe is my friend--consider his dark pangs\nAnd love of Niger, naked indigence,\nDance him the menu of a poem and squirm\nDeep in the juke-box jungle, green and dense.\nSurely he files his teeth, punctures his nose,\nCarves out the god and takes off all his clothes.\n\nFor once, the token on the table’s edge\nSufficing, proudly and with hair unpinned\nYou mounted the blueplate, stretched out and grinned\nLike Christmas fish and turkey pink and skinned,\nEyes on the half-shell, loin with parsley stuck,\nThigh bones and ribs and little toes to suck.\n\nI speak to you, ports of the northern myth,\nThis dame is carved and eaten. One by one,\nGod knows what hour, her different parts go home,\nLastly her pants, and day or night is done;\nBut on the restaurant the sign of fear\nReddens and blazes--“English spoken here.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "winter-in-california": { - "title": "“Winter in California”", - "body": "It is winter in California, and outside\nIs like the interior of a florist shop:\nA chilled and moisture-laden crop\nOf pink camellias lines the path; and what\nRare roses for a banquet or a bride,\nSo multitudinous that they seem a glut!\n\nA line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn\nFrom the rosebushes to the ivy bed;\nAn arsenic compound is distributed\nFor them. The gardener will rake up the shells\nAnd leave in a corner of the patio\nThe little mound of empty shells, like skulls.\n\nBy noon the fog is burnt off by the sun\nAnd the world’s immensest sky opens a page\nFor the exercise of a future age;\nNow jet planes draw straight lines, parabolas,\nAnd x’s, which the wind, before they’re done,\nErases leisurely or pulls to fuzz.\n\nIt is winter in the valley of the vine.\nThe vineyards crucified on stakes suggest\nWar cemeteries, but the fruit is pressed,\nThe redwood vats are brimming in the shed,\nAnd on the sidings stand tank cars of wine,\nFor which bright juice a billion grapes have bled.\n\nAnd skiers from the snow line driving home\nDescend through almond orchards, olive farms.\nFig tree and palm tree--everything that warms\nThe imagination of the wintertime.\nIf the walls were older one would think of Rome:\nIf the land were stonier one would think of Spain.\n\nBut this land grows the oldest living things,\nTrees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world,\nTrees whose new leaves are only just unfurled.\nBeautiful they are not; they oppress the heart\nWith gigantism and with immortal wings;\nAnd yet one feels the sumptuousness of this dirt.\n\nIt is raining in California, a straight rain\nCleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,\nFilling the gardens till the gardens flow,\nShining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,\nWaxing the dark camellia leaves more green,\nFlooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "percy-bysshe-shelley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Percy Bysshe Shelley", - "birth": { - "year": 1792 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 41 - }, - "poems": { - "from-adonais": { - "title": "From “Adonais”", - "body": "Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise,\nThe grave, the city, and the wilderness;\nAnd where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,\nAnd flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress\nThe bones of Desolation’s nakedness\nPass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead\nThy footsteps to a slope of green access\nWhere, like an infant’s smile, over the dead\nA light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;\n\nAnd gray walls moulder round, on which dull Time\nFeeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;\nAnd one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,\nPavilioning the dust of him who planned\nThis refuge for his memory, doth stand\nLike flame transformed to marble; and beneath,\nA field is spread, on which a newer band\nHave pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,\nWelcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.\n\nHere pause: these graves are all too young as yet\nTo have outgrown the sorrow which consigned\nIts charge to each; and if the seal is set,\nHere, on one fountain of a mourning mind,\nBreak it not thou! too surely shalt thou find\nThine own well full, if thou returnest home,\nOf tears and gall. From the world’s bitter wind\nSeek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.\nWhat Adonais is, why fear we to become?\n\nThe One remains, the many change and pass;\nHeaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;\nLife, like a dome of many-coloured glass,\nStains the white radiance of Eternity,\nUntil Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,\nIf thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!\nFollow where all is fled!--Rome’s azure sky,\nFlowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak\nThe glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,\nThe bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,\nAnd the Year\nOn the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,\nIs lying.\nCome, Months, come away,\nFrom November to May,\nIn your saddest array;\nFollow the bier\nOf the dead cold Year,\nAnd like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.\n\nThe chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,\nThe rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling\nFor the Year;\nThe blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone\nTo his dwelling.\nCome, Months, come away;\nPut on white, black and gray;\nLet your light sisters play--\nYe, follow the bier\nOf the dead cold Year,\nAnd make her grave green with tear on tear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "bereavement": { - "title": "“Bereavement”", - "body": "How stern are the woes of the desolate mourner\nAs he bends in still grief o’er the hallowed bier,\nAs enanguished he turns from the laugh of the scorner,\nAnd drops to perfection’s remembrance a tear;\nWhen floods of despair down his pale cheeks are streaming,\nWhen no blissful hope on his bosom is beaming,\nOr, if lulled for a while, soon he starts from his dreaming,\nAnd finds torn the soft ties to affection so dear.\nAh, when shall day dawn on the night of the grave,\nOr summer succeed to the winter of death?\nRest awhle, hapless victim! and Heaven will save\nThe spirit that hath faded away with the breath.\nEternity points, in its amaranth bower\nWhere no clouds of fate o’er the sweet prospect lour,\nUnspeakable pleasure, of goodness the dower,\nWhen woe fades away like the mist of the heath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "the-cloud": { - "title": "“The Cloud”", - "body": "I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,\nFrom the seas and the streams;\nI bear light shade for the leaves when laid\nIn their noonday dreams.\nFrom my wings are shaken the dews that waken\nThe sweet buds every one,\nWhen rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,\nAs she dances about the sun.\nI wield the flail of the lashing hail,\nAnd whiten the green plains under,\nAnd then again I dissolve it in rain,\nAnd laugh as I pass in thunder.\n\nI sift the snow on the mountains below,\nAnd their great pines groan aghast;\nAnd all the night ’tis my pillow white,\nWhile I sleep in the arms of the blast.\nSublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,\nLightning, my pilot, sits;\nIn a cavern under is fettered the thunder,\nIt struggles and howls at fits;\n\nOver earth and ocean, with gentle motion,\nThis pilot is guiding me,\nLured by the love of the genii that move\nIn the depths of the purple sea;\nOver the rills, and the crags, and the hills,\nOver the lakes and the plains,\nWherever he dream, under mountain or stream,\nThe Spirit he loves remains;\nAnd I all the while bask in Heaven’s blue smile,\nWhilst he is dissolving in rains.\n\nThe sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,\nAnd his burning plumes outspread,\nLeaps on the back of my sailing rack,\nWhen the morning star shines dead;\nAs on the jag of a mountain crag,\nWhich an earthquake rocks and swings,\nAn eagle alit one moment may sit\nIn the light of its golden wings.\nAnd when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,\nIts ardors of rest and of love,\n\nAnd the crimson pall of eve may fall\nFrom the depth of Heaven above,\nWith wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,\nAs still as a brooding dove.\nThat orbed maiden with white fire laden,\nWhom mortals call the Moon,\nGlides glimmering o’er my fleece-like floor,\nBy the midnight breezes strewn;\nAnd wherever the beat of her unseen feet,\nWhich only the angels hear,\nMay have broken the woof of my tent’s thin roof,\nThe stars peep behind her and peer;\nAnd I laugh to see them whirl and flee,\nLike a swarm of golden bees,\nWhen I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,\nTill the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,\nLike strips of the sky fallen through me on high,\nAre each paved with the moon and these.\n\nI bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,\nAnd the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl;\nThe volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim\nWhen the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.\nFrom cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,\nOver a torrent sea,\nSunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,--\nThe mountains its columns be.\nThe triumphal arch through which I march\nWith hurricane, fire, and snow,\nWhen the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,\nIs the million-colored bow;\nThe sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,\nWhile the moist Earth was laughing below.\n\nI am the daughter of Earth and Water,\nAnd the nursling of the Sky;\nI pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;\nI change, but I cannot die.\nFor after the rain when with never a stain\nThe pavilion of Heaven is bare,\nAnd the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams\nBuild up the blue dome of air,\nI silently laugh at my own cenotaph,\nAnd out of the caverns of rain,\nLike a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,\nI arise and unbuild it again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1820, - "month": "july", - "day": 12 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "day": 12 - } - } - }, - "from-epipsychidion": { - "title": "From “Epipsychidion”", - "body": "Emily,\nA ship is floating in the harbour now,\nA wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;\nThere is a path on the sea’s azure floor,\nNo keel has ever plough’d that path before;\nThe halcyons brood around the foamless isles;\nThe treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;\nThe merry mariners are bold and free:\nSay, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?\nOur bark is as an albatross, whose nest\nIs a far Eden of the purple East;\nAnd we between her wings will sit, while Night,\nAnd Day, and Storm, and Calm, pursue their flight,\nOur ministers, along the boundless Sea,\nTreading each other’s heels, unheededly.\nIt is an isle under Ionian skies,\nBeautiful as a wreck of Paradise,\nAnd, for the harbours are not safe and good,\nThis land would have remain’d a solitude\nBut for some pastoral people native there,\nWho from the Elysian, clear, and golden air\nDraw the last spirit of the age of gold,\nSimple and spirited; innocent and bold.\nThe blue Aegean girds this chosen home,\nWith ever-changing sound and light and foam,\nKissing the sifted sands, and caverns hoar;\nAnd all the winds wandering along the shore\nUndulate with the undulating tide:\nThere are thick woods where sylvan forms abide;\nAnd many a fountain, rivulet and pond,\nAs clear as elemental diamond,\nOr serene morning air; and far beyond,\nThe mossy tracks made by the goats and deer\n(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year)\nPierce into glades, caverns and bowers, and halls\nBuilt round with ivy, which the waterfalls\nIllumining, with sound that never fails\nAccompany the noonday nightingales;\nAnd all the place is peopled with sweet airs;\nThe light clear element which the isle wears\nIs heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,\nWhich floats like mist laden with unseen showers,\nAnd falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;\nAnd from the moss violets and jonquils peep\nAnd dart their arrowy odour through the brain\nTill you might faint with that delicious pain.\nAnd every motion, odour, beam and tone,\nWith that deep music is in unison:\nWhich is a soul within the soul--they seem\nLike echoes of an antenatal dream.\nIt is an isle ’twixt Heaven, Air, Earth and Sea,\nCradled and hung in clear tranquillity;\nBright as that wandering Eden Lucifer,\nWash’d by the soft blue Oceans of young air.\nIt is a favour’d place. Famine or Blight,\nPestilence, War and Earthquake, never light\nUpon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they\nSail onward far upon their fatal way:\nThe wingèd storms, chanting their thunder-psalm\nTo other lands, leave azure chasms of calm\nOver this isle, or weep themselves in dew,\nFrom which its fields and woods ever renew\nTheir green and golden immortality.\nAnd from the sea there rise, and from the sky\nThere fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright,\nVeil after veil, each hiding some delight,\nWhich Sun or Moon or zephyr draw aside,\nTill the isle’s beauty, like a naked bride\nGlowing at once with love and loveliness,\nBlushes and trembles at its own excess:\nYet, like a buried lamp, a Soul no less\nBurns in the heart of this delicious isle,\nAn atom of th’ Eternal, whose own smile\nUnfolds itself, and may be felt not seen\nO’er the gray rocks, blue waves and forests green,\nFilling their bare and void interstices.\nBut the chief marvel of the wilderness\nIs a lone dwelling, built by whom or how\nNone of the rustic island-people know:\n’Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height\nIt overtops the woods; but, for delight,\nSome wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime\nHad been invented, in the world’s young prime,\nRear’d it, a wonder of that simple time,\nAn envy of the isles, a pleasure-house\nMade sacred to his sister and his spouse.\nIt scarce seems now a wreck of human art,\nBut, as it were, Titanic; in the heart\nOf Earth having assum’d its form, then grown\nOut of the mountains, from the living stone,\nLifting itself in caverns light and high:\nFor all the antique and learned imagery\nHas been eras’d, and in the place of it\nThe ivy and the wild-vine interknit\nThe volumes of their many-twining stems;\nParasite flowers illume with dewy gems\nThe lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky\nPeeps through their winter-woof of tracery\nWith moonlight patches, or star atoms keen,\nOr fragments of the day’s intense serene;\nWorking mosaic on their Parian floors.\nAnd, day and night, aloof, from the high towers\nAnd terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem\nTo sleep in one another’s arms, and dream\nOf waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we\nRead in their smiles, and call reality.\n\nThis isle and house are mine, and I have vow’d\nThee to be lady of the solitude.\nAnd I have fitted up some chambers there\nLooking towards the golden Eastern air,\nAnd level with the living winds, which flow\nLike waves above the living waves below.\nI have sent books and music there, and all\nThose instruments with which high Spirits call\nThe future from its cradle, and the past\nOut of its grave, and make the present last\nIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,\nFolded within their own eternity.\nOur simple life wants little, and true taste\nHires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste\nThe scene it would adorn, and therefore still,\nNature with all her children haunts the hill.\nThe ring-dove, in the embowering ivy, yet\nKeeps up her love-lament, and the owls flit\nRound the evening tower, and the young stars glance\nBetween the quick bats in their twilight dance;\nThe spotted deer bask in the fresh moonlight\nBefore our gate, and the slow, silent night\nIs measur’d by the pants of their calm sleep.\nBe this our home in life, and when years heap\nTheir wither’d hours, like leaves, on our decay,\nLet us become the overhanging day,\nThe living soul of this Elysian isle,\nConscious, inseparable, one. Meanwhile\nWe two will rise, and sit, and walk together,\nUnder the roof of blue Ionian weather,\nAnd wander in the meadows, or ascend\nThe mossy mountains, where the blue heavens bend\nWith lightest winds, to touch their paramour;\nOr linger, where the pebble-paven shore,\nUnder the quick, faint kisses of the sea,\nTrembles and sparkles as with ecstasy--\nPossessing and possess’d by all that is\nWithin that calm circumference of bliss,\nAnd by each other, till to love and live\nBe one: or, at the noontide hour, arrive\nWhere some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep\nThe moonlight of the expir’d night asleep,\nThrough which the awaken’d day can never peep;\nA veil for our seclusion, close as night’s,\nWhere secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights;\nSleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain\nWhose drops quench kisses till they burn again.\nAnd we will talk, until thought’s melody\nBecome too sweet for utterance, and it die\nIn words, to live again in looks, which dart\nWith thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,\nHarmonizing silence without a sound.\nOur breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,\nAnd our veins beat together; and our lips\nWith other eloquence than words, eclipse\nThe soul that burns between them, and the wells\nWhich boil under our being’s inmost cells,\nThe fountains of our deepest life, shall be\nConfus’d in Passion’s golden purity,\nAs mountain-springs under the morning sun.\nWe shall become the same, we shall be one\nSpirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?\nOne passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,\nTill like two meteors of expanding flame,\nThose spheres instinct with it become the same,\nTouch, mingle, are transfigur’d; ever still\nBurning, yet ever inconsumable:\nIn one another’s substance finding food,\nLike flames too pure and light and unimbu’d\nTo nourish their bright lives with baser prey,\nWhich point to Heaven and cannot pass away:\nOne hope within two wills, one will beneath\nTwo overshadowing minds, one life, one death,\nOne Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,\nAnd one annihilation. Woe is me!\nThe winged words on which my soul would pierce\nInto the height of Love’s rare Universe,\nAre chains of lead around its flight of fire--\nI pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1821 - } - } - }, - "the-flower-that-smiles-to-day": { - "title": "“The Flower that Smiles To-Day”", - "body": "The flower that smiles to-day\nTo-morrow dies;\nAll that we wish to stay\nTempts and then flies.\nWhat is this world’s delight?\nLightning that mocks the night,\nBrief even as bright.\n\nVirtue, how frail it is!\nFriendship how rare!\nLove, how it sells poor bliss\nFor proud despair!\nBut we, though soon they fall,\nSurvive their joy, and all\nWhich ours we call.\n\nWhilst skies are blue and bright,\nWhilst flowers are gay,\nWhilst eyes that change ere night\nMake glad the day;\nWhilst yet the calm hours creep,\nDream thou--and from thy sleep\nThen wake to weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-the-arabic-an-imitation": { - "title": "“From the Arabic, an Imitation”", - "body": "My faint spirit was sitting in the light\nOf thy looks, my love;\nIt panted for thee like the hind at noon\nFor the brooks, my love.\nThy barb, whose hoofs outspeed the tempest’s flight,\nBore thee far from me;\nMy heart, for my weak feet were weary soon,\nDid companion thee.\n\nAh! fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,\nOr the death they bear,\nThe heart which tender thought clothes like a dove\nWith the wings of care;\nIn the battle, in the darkness, in the need,\nShall mine cling to thee,\nNor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,\nIt may bring to thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "good-night": { - "title": "“Good-Night”", - "body": "Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill\nWhich severs those it should unite;\nLet us remain together still,\nThen it will be good night.\n\nHow can I call the lone night good,\nThough thy sweet wishes wing its flight?\nBe it not said, thought, understood--\nThen it will be--good night.\n\nTo hearts which near each other move\nFrom evening close to morning light,\nThe night is good; because, my love,\nThey never say good-night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819 - } - } - }, - "hymn-of-pan": { - "title": "“Hymn of Pan”", - "body": "From the forests and highlands\nWe come, we come;\nFrom the river-girt islands,\nWhere loud waves are dumb\nListening to my sweet pipings.\nThe wind in the reeds and the rushes,\nThe bees on the bells of thyme,\nThe birds on the myrtle-bushes,\nThe cicale above in the lime,\nAnd the lizards below in the grass,\nWere as silent as ever old Tmolus was,\nListening to my sweet pipings.\n\nLiquid Peneus was flowing,\nAnd all dark Temple lay\nIn Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing\nThe light of the dying day,\nSpeeded by my sweet pipings.\nThe Sileni and Sylvans and fauns,\nAnd the Nymphs of the woods and wave\nTo the edge of the moist river-lawns,\nAnd the brink of the dewy caves,\nAnd all that did then attend and follow,\nWere silent with love,--as you now, Apollo,\nWith envy of my sweet pipings.\n\nI sang of the dancing stars,\nI sang of the dedal earth,\nAnd of heaven, and the Giant wars,\nAnd love, and death, and birth.\nAnd then I changed my pipings,--\nSinging how down the vale of Maenalus\nI pursued a maiden, and clasped a reed:\nGods and men, we are all deluded thus;\nIt breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed.\nAll wept--as I think both ye now would,\nIf envy or age had not frozen your blood--\nAt the sorrow of my sweet pipings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "indian-serenade": { - "title": "“Indian Serenade”", - "body": "I arise from dreams of thee\nIn the first sweet sleep of night,\nWhen the winds are breathing low,\nAnd the stars are shining bright:\nI arise from dreams of thee,\nAnd a spirit in my feet\nHath led me--who knows how?\nTo thy chamber window, Sweet!\n\nThe wandering airs they faint\nOn the dark, the silent stream--\nThe Champak odours fail\nLike sweet thoughts in a dream;\nThe Nightingale’s complaint,\nIt dies upon her heart;--\nAs I must on thine,\nOh, belovèd as thou art!\n\nOh lift me from the grass!\nI die! I faint! I fail!\nLet thy love in kisses rain\nOn my lips and eyelids pale.\nMy cheek is cold and white, alas!\nMy heart beats loud and fast;--\nOh! press it to thine own again,\nWhere it will break at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "the-indian-serenade": { - "title": "“The Indian Serenade”", - "body": "I arise from dreams of thee\nIn the first sweet sleep of night,\nWhen the winds are breathing low,\nAnd the stars are shining bright:\nI arise from dreams of thee,\nAnd a spirit in my feet\nHath led me--who knows how?\nTo thy chamber window, Sweet!\n\nThe wandering airs they faint\nOn the dark, the silent stream--\nThe Champak odours fail\nLike sweet thoughts in a dream;\nThe Nightingale’s complaint,\nIt dies upon her heart;--\nAs I must on thine,\nOh, belovèd as thou art!\n\nOh lift me from the grass!\nI die! I faint! I fail!\nLet thy love in kisses rain\nOn my lips and eyelids pale.\nMy cheek is cold and white, alas!\nMy heart beats loud and fast;--\nOh! press it to thine own again,\nWhere it will break at last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-invitation": { - "title": "“The Invitation”", - "body": "Best and brightest, come away,\nFairer far than this fair day,\nWhich, like thee, to those in sorrow\nComes to bid a sweet good-morrow\nTo the rough year just awake\nIn its cradle on the brake.\nThe brightest hour of unborn Spring\nThrough the Winter wandering,\nFound, it seems, the halcyon morn\nTo hoar February born;\nBending from Heaven, in azure mirth,\nIt kissed the forehead of the earth,\nAnd smiled upon the silent sea,\nAnd bade the frozen streams be free,\nAnd waked to music all their fountains,\nAnd breathed upon the frozen mountains,\nAnd like a prophetess of May\nStrewed flowers upon the barren way,\nMaking the wintry world appear\nLike one on whom thou smilest, dear.\n\nAway, away, from men and towns,\nTo the wild wood and the downs--\nTo the silent wilderness\nWhere the soul need not repress\nIts music, lest it should not find\nAn echo in another’s mind,\nWhile the touch of Nature’s art\nHarmonizes heart to heart.\n\nRadiant Sister of the Day\nAwake! arise! and come away!\nTo the wild woods and the plains,\nTo the pools where winter rains\nImage all their roof of leaves,\nWhere the pine its garland weaves\nOf sapless green, and ivy dun,\nRound stems that never kiss the sun,\nWhere the lawns and pastures be\nAnd the sandhills of the sea,\nWhere the melting hoar-frost wets\nThe daisy-star that never sets,\nAnd wind-flowers and violets\nWhich yet join not scent to hue\nCrown the pale year weak and new;\nWhen the night is left behind\nIn the deep east, dim and blind,\nAnd the blue noon is over us,\nAnd the multitudinous\nBillows murmur at our feet,\nWhere the earth and ocean meet,\nAnd all things seem only one\nIn the universal Sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "from-julian-and-maddalo": { - "title": "From “Julian and Maddalo”", - "body": "I rode one evening with Count Maddalo\nUpon the bank of land which breaks the flow\nOf Adria towards Venice: a bare strand\nOf hillocks, heap’d from ever-shifting sand,\nMatted with thistles and amphibious weeds,\nSuch as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,\nIs this; an uninhabited sea-side,\nWhich the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,\nAbandons; and no other object breaks\nThe waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes\nBroken and unrepair’d, and the tide makes\nA narrow space of level sand thereon,\nWhere ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.\nThis ride was my delight. I love all waste\nAnd solitary places; where we taste\nThe pleasure of believing what we see\nIs boundless, as we wish our souls to be:\nAnd such was this wide ocean, and this shore\nMore barren than its billows; and yet more\nThan all, with a remember’d friend I love\nTo ride as then I rode; for the winds drove\nThe living spray along the sunny air\nInto our faces; the blue heavens were bare,\nStripp’d to their depths by the awakening north;\nAnd, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth\nHarmonizing with solitude, and sent\nInto our hearts aëreal merriment.\nSo, as we rode, we talk’d; and the swift thought,\nWinging itself with laughter, linger’d not,\nBut flew from brain to brain--such glee was ours,\nCharg’d with light memories of remember’d hours,\nNone slow enough for sadness: till we came\nHomeward, which always makes the spirit tame.\nThis day had been cheerful but cold, and now\nThe sun was sinking, and the wind also.\nOur talk grew somewhat serious, as may be\nTalk interrupted with such raillery\nAs mocks itself, because it cannot scorn\nThe thoughts it would extinguish: ’twas forlorn,\nYet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell,\nThe devils held within the dales of Hell\nConcerning God, freewill and destiny:\nOf all that earth has been or yet may be,\nAll that vain men imagine or believe,\nOr hope can paint or suffering may achieve,\nWe descanted, and I (for ever still\nIs it not wise to make the best of ill?)\nArgu’d against despondency, but pride\nMade my companion take the darker side.\nThe sense that he was greater than his kind\nHad struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind\nBy gazing on its own exceeding light.\nMeanwhile the sun paus’d ere it should alight,\nOver the horizon of the mountains--Oh,\nHow beautiful is sunset, when the glow\nOf Heaven descends upon a land like thee,\nThou Paradise of exiles, Italy!\nThy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers\nOf cities they encircle! It was ours\nTo stand on thee, beholding it: and then,\nJust where we had dismounted, the Count’s men\nWere waiting for us with the gondola.\nAs those who pause on some delightful way\nThough bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood\nLooking upon the evening, and the flood\nWhich lay between the city and the shore,\nPav’d with the image of the sky … The hoar\nAnd aëry Alps towards the North appear’d\nThrough mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark rear’d\nBetween the East and West; and half the sky\nWas roof’d with clouds of rich emblazonry\nDark purple at the zenith, which still grew\nDown the steep West into a wondrous hue\nBrighter than burning gold, even to the rent\nWhere the swift sun yet paus’d in his descent\nAmong the many-folded hills: they were\nThose famous Euganean hills, which bear,\nAs seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,\nThe likeness of a clump of peakèd isles--\nAnd then--as if the Earth and Sea had been\nDissolv’d into one lake of fire, were seen\nThose mountains towering as from waves of flame\nAround the vaporous sun, from which there came\nThe inmost purple spirit of light, and made\nTheir very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”\nSaid my companion, “I will show you soon\nA better station”--so, o’er the lagune\nWe glided; and from that funereal bark\nI lean’d, and saw the city, and could mark\nHow from their many isles, in evening’s gleam,\nIts temples and its palaces did seem\nLike fabrics of enchantment pil’d to Heaven.\nI was about to speak, when--“We are even\nNow at the point I meant,” said Maddalo,\nAnd bade the gondolieri cease to row.\n“Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well\nIf you hear not a deep and heavy bell.”\nI look’d, and saw between us and the sun\nA building on an island; such a one\nAs age to age might add, for uses vile,\nA windowless, deform’d and dreary pile;\nAnd on the top an open tower, where hung\nA bell, which in the radiance sway’d and swung;\nWe could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:\nThe broad sun sunk behind it, and it toll’d\nIn strong and black relief. “What we behold\nShall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,”\nSaid Maddalo, “and ever at this hour\nThose who may cross the water, hear that bell\nWhich calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,\nTo vespers.” “As much skill as need to pray\nIn thanks or hope for their dark lot have they\nTo their stern Maker,” I replied. “O ho!\nYou talk as in years past,” said Maddalo.\n“’Tis strange men change not. You were ever still\nAmong Christ’s flock a perilous infidel,\nA wolf for the meek lambs--if you can’t swim\nBeware of Providence.” I look’d on him,\nBut the gay smile had faded in his eye.\n“And such,” he cried, “is our mortality,\nAnd this must be the emblem and the sign\nOf what should be eternal and divine!\nAnd like that black and dreary bell, the soul,\nHung in a heaven-illumin’d tower, must toll\nOur thoughts and our desires to meet below\nRound the rent heart and pray--as madmen do\nFor what? they know not--till the night of death,\nAs sunset that strange vision, severeth\nOur memory from itself, and us from all\nWe sought and yet were baffled.” I recall\nThe sense of what he said, although I mar\nThe force of his expressions. The broad star\nOf day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill,\nAnd the black bell became invisible,\nAnd the red tower look’d gray, and all between\nThe churches, ships and palaces were seen\nHuddled in gloom;--into the purple sea\nThe orange hues of heaven sunk silently.\nWe hardly spoke, and soon the gondola\nConvey’d me to my lodgings by the way.\n\nThe following morn was rainy, cold and dim:\nEre Maddalo arose, I call’d on him,\nAnd whilst I waited with his child I play’d;\nA lovelier toy sweet Nature never made,\nA serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being,\nGraceful without design and unforeseeing,\nWith eyes--Oh speak not of her eyes!--which seem\nTwin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam\nWith such deep meaning, as we never see\nBut in the human countenance: with me\nShe was a special favourite: I had nurs’d\nHer fine and feeble limbs when she came first\nTo this bleak world; and she yet seem’d to know\nOn second sight her ancient playfellow,\nLess chang’d than she was by six months or so;\nFor after her first shyness was worn out\nWe sate there, rolling billiard balls about,\nWhen the Count enter’d. Salutations past--\n“The word you spoke last night might well have cast\nA darkness on my spirit--if man be\nThe passive thing you say, I should not see\nMuch harm in the religions and old saws\n(Though I may never own such leaden laws)\nWhich break a teachless nature to the yoke:\nMine is another faith”--thus much I spoke\nAnd noting he replied not, added: “See\nThis lovely child, blithe, innocent and free;\nShe spends a happy time with little care,\nWhile we to such sick thoughts subjected are\nAs came on you last night. It is our will\nThat thus enchains us to permitted ill.\nWe might be otherwise. We might be all\nWe dream of happy, high, majestical.\nWhere is the love, beauty, and truth we seek\nBut in our mind? and if we were not weak\nShould we be less in deed than in desire?”\n“Ay, if we were not weak--and we aspire\nHow vainly to be strong!” said Maddalo:\n“You talk Utopia.” “It remains to know,”\nI then rejoin’d, “and those who try may find\nHow strong the chains are which our spirit bind;\nBrittle perchance as straw … We are assur’d\nMuch may be conquer’d, much may be endur’d,\nOf what degrades and crushes us. We know\nThat we have power over ourselves to do\nAnd suffer--what, we know not till we try;\nBut something nobler than to live and die:\nSo taught those kings of old philosophy\nWho reign’d, before Religion made men blind;\nAnd those who suffer with their suffering kind\nYet feel their faith, religion.” “My dear friend,”\nSaid Maddalo, “my judgement will not bend\nTo your opinion, though I think you might\nMake such a system refutation-tight\nAs far as words go. I knew one like you\nWho to this city came some months ago,\nWith whom I argu’d in this sort, and he\nIs now gone mad--and so he answer’d me--\nPoor fellow! but if you would like to go\nWe’ll visit him, and his wild talk will show\nHow vain are such aspiring theories.”\n“I hope to prove the induction otherwise,\nAnd that a want of that true theory, still,\nWhich seeks a ‘soul of goodness’ in things ill\nOr in himself or others, has thus bow’d\nHis being. There are some by nature proud,\nWho patient in all else demand but this--\nTo love and be belov’d with gentleness;\nAnd being scorn’d, what wonder if they die\nSome living death? this is not destiny\nBut man’s own wilful ill.”\n\nAs thus I spoke\nServants announc’d the gondola, and we\nThrough the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea\nSail’d to the island where the madhouse stands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "a-lament": { - "title": "“A Lament”", - "body": "O world! O life! O time!\nOn whose last steps I climb,\nTrembling at that where I had stood before;\nWhen will return the glory of your prime?\nNo more--Oh, never more!\n\nOut of the day and night\nA joy has taken flight;\nFresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,\nMove my faint heart with grief, but with delight\nNo more--Oh, never more!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "lift-not-the-painted-veil-which-those-who-live": { - "title": "“Lift not the painted veil which those who live …”", - "body": "Lift not the painted veil which those who live\nCall Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,\nAnd it but mimic all we would believe\nWith colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear\nAnd Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave\nTheir shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.\nI knew one who had lifted it--he sought,\nFor his lost heart was tender, things to love,\nBut found them not, alas! nor was there aught\nThe world contains, the which he could approve.\nThrough the unheeding many he did move,\nA splendour among shadows, a bright blot\nUpon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove\nFor truth, and like the Preacher found it not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "lines-written-in-the-bay-of-lerici": { - "title": "“Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici”", - "body": "She left me at the silent time\nWhen the moon had ceas’d to climb\nThe azure path of Heaven’s steep,\nAnd like an albatross asleep,\nBalanc’d on her wings of light,\nHover’d in the purple night,\nEre she sought her ocean nest\nIn the chambers of the West.\nShe left me, and I stay’d alone\nThinking over every tone\nWhich, though silent to the ear,\nThe enchanted heart could hear,\nLike notes which die when born, but still\nHaunt the echoes of the hill;\nAnd feeling ever--oh, too much!--\nThe soft vibration of her touch,\nAs if her gentle hand, even now,\nLightly trembled on my brow;\nAnd thus, although she absent were,\nMemory gave me all of her\nThat even Fancy dares to claim:\nHer presence had made weak and tame\nAll passions, and I lived alone\nIn the time which is our own;\nThe past and future were forgot,\nAs they had been, and would be, not.\nBut soon, the guardian angel gone,\nThe daemon reassum’d his throne\nIn my faint heart. I dare not speak\nMy thoughts, but thus disturb’d and weak\nI sat and saw the vessels glide\nOver the ocean bright and wide,\nLike spirit-winged chariots sent\nO’er some serenest element\nFor ministrations strange and far,\nAs if to some Elysian star\nSailed for drink to medicine\nSuch sweet and bitter pain as mine.\nAnd the wind that wing’d their flight\nFrom the land came fresh and light,\nAnd the scent of winged flowers,\nAnd the coolness of the hours\nOf dew, and sweet warmth left by day,\nWere scatter’d o’er the twinkling bay.\nAnd the fisher with his lamp\nAnd spear about the low rocks damp\nCrept, and struck the fish which came\nTo worship the delusive flame.\nToo happy they, whose pleasure sought\nExtinguishes all sense and thought\nOf the regret that pleasure leaves,\nDestroying life alone, not peace!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines": { - "title": "“Lines”", - "body": "When the lamp is shatter’d,\nThe light in the dust lies dead;\nWhen the cloud is scatter’d,\nThe rainbow’s glory is shed;\nWhen the lute is broken,\nSweet tones are remember’d not\nWhen the lips have spoken,\nLoved accents are soon forgot.\n\nAs music and splendour\nSurvive not the lamp and the lute,\nThe heart’s echoes render\nNo song when the spirit is mute--\nNo song but sad dirges,\nLike the wind through a ruin’d cell,\nOr the mournful surges\nThat ring the dead seaman’s knell.\n\nWhen hearts have once mingled,\nLove first leaves the well-built nest;\nThe weak one is singled\nTo endure what it once possest.\nO Love, who bewailest\nThe frailty of all things here,\nWhy choose you the frailest\nFor your cradle, your home, and your bier?\n\nIts passions will rock thee,\nAs the storms rock the ravens on high:\nBright reason will mock thee,\nLike the sun from a wintry sky.\nFrom thy nest every rafter\nWill rot, and thine eagle home\nLeave thee naked to laughter,\nWhen leaves fall and cold winds come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "loves-philosophy": { - "title": "“Love’s Philosophy”", - "body": "The fountains mingle with the river\nAnd the rivers with the ocean,\nThe winds of heaven mix for ever\nWith a sweet emotion;\nNothing in the world is single;\nAll things by a law divine\nIn one spirit meet and mingle.\nWhy not I with thine?--\n\nSee the mountains kiss high heaven\nAnd the waves clasp one another;\nNo sister-flower would be forgiven\nIf it disdained its brother;\nAnd the sunlight clasps the earth\nAnd the moonbeams kiss the sea:\nWhat is all this sweet work worth\nIf thou kiss not me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819 - } - } - }, - "mont-blanc": { - "title": "“Mont Blanc”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe everlasting universe of things\nFlows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,\nNow dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--\nNow lending splendour, where from secret springs\nThe source of human thought its tribute brings\nOf waters--with a sound but half its own,\nSuch as a feeble brook will oft assume,\nIn the wild woods, among the mountains lone,\nWhere waterfalls around it leap for ever,\nWhere woods and winds contend, and a vast river\nOver its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine--\nThou many-colour’d, many-voiced vale,\nOver whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail\nFast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,\nWhere Power in likeness of the Arve comes down\nFrom the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,\nBursting through these dark mountains like the flame\nOf lightning through the tempest;--thou dost lie,\nThy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,\nChildren of elder time, in whose devotion\nThe chainless winds still come and ever came\nTo drink their odours, and their mighty swinging\nTo hear--an old and solemn harmony;\nThine earthly rainbows stretch’d across the sweep\nOf the aethereal waterfall, whose veil\nRobes some unsculptur’d image; the strange sleep\nWhich when the voices of the desert fail\nWraps all in its own deep eternity;\nThy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,\nA loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;\nThou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,\nThou art the path of that unresting sound--\nDizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee\nI seem as in a trance sublime and strange\nTo muse on my own separate fantasy,\nMy own, my human mind, which passively\nNow renders and receives fast influencings,\nHolding an unremitting interchange\nWith the clear universe of things around;\nOne legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings\nNow float above thy darkness, and now rest\nWhere that or thou art no unbidden guest,\nIn the still cave of the witch Poesy,\nSeeking among the shadows that pass by\nGhosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,\nSome phantom, some faint image; till the breast\nFrom which they fled recalls them, thou art there!\n\n\n# III.\n\nSome say that gleams of a remoter world\nVisit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,\nAnd that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber\nOf those who wake and live.--I look on high;\nHas some unknown omnipotence unfurl’d\nThe veil of life and death? or do I lie\nIn dream, and does the mightier world of sleep\nSpread far around and inaccessibly\nIts circles? For the very spirit fails,\nDriven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep\nThat vanishes among the viewless gales!\nFar, far above, piercing the infinite sky,\nMont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;\nIts subject mountains their unearthly forms\nPile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between\nOf frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,\nBlue as the overhanging heaven, that spread\nAnd wind among the accumulated steeps;\nA desert peopled by the storms alone,\nSave when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,\nAnd the wolf tracks her there--how hideously\nIts shapes are heap’d around! rude, bare, and high,\nGhastly, and scarr’d, and riven.--Is this the scene\nWhere the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young\nRuin? Were these their toys? or did a sea\nOf fire envelop once this silent snow?\nNone can reply--all seems eternal now.\nThe wilderness has a mysterious tongue\nWhich teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,\nSo solemn, so serene, that man may be,\nBut for such faith, with Nature reconcil’d;\nThou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal\nLarge codes of fraud and woe; not understood\nBy all, but which the wise, and great, and good\nInterpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,\nOcean, and all the living things that dwell\nWithin the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,\nEarthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,\nThe torpor of the year when feeble dreams\nVisit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep\nHolds every future leaf and flower; the bound\nWith which from that detested trance they leap;\nThe works and ways of man, their death and birth,\nAnd that of him and all that his may be;\nAll things that move and breathe with toil and sound\nAre born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.\nPower dwells apart in its tranquillity,\nRemote, serene, and inaccessible:\nAnd this, the naked countenance of earth,\nOn which I gaze, even these primeval mountains\nTeach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep\nLike snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,\nSlow rolling on; there, many a precipice\nFrost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power\nHave pil’d: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,\nA city of death, distinct with many a tower\nAnd wall impregnable of beaming ice.\nYet not a city, but a flood of ruin\nIs there, that from the boundaries of the sky\nRolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing\nIts destin’d path, or in the mangled soil\nBranchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down\nFrom yon remotest waste, have overthrown\nThe limits of the dead and living world,\nNever to be reclaim’d. The dwelling-place\nOf insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;\nTheir food and their retreat for ever gone,\nSo much of life and joy is lost. The race\nOf man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling\nVanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,\nAnd their place is not known. Below, vast caves\nShine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,\nWhich from those secret chasms in tumult welling\nMeet in the vale, and one majestic River,\nThe breath and blood of distant lands, for ever\nRolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,\nBreathes its swift vapours to the circling air.\n\n\n# V.\n\nMont Blanc yet gleams on high:--the power is there,\nThe still and solemn power of many sights,\nAnd many sounds, and much of life and death.\nIn the calm darkness of the moonless nights,\nIn the lone glare of day, the snows descend\nUpon that Mountain; none beholds them there,\nNor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,\nOr the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend\nSilently there, and heap the snow with breath\nRapid and strong, but silently! Its home\nThe voiceless lightning in these solitudes\nKeeps innocently, and like vapour broods\nOver the snow. The secret Strength of things\nWhich governs thought, and to the infinite dome\nOf Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!\nAnd what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,\nIf to the human mind’s imaginings\nSilence and solitude were vacancy?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1816 - } - } - }, - "music-when-soft-voices-die": { - "title": "“Music when Soft Voices Die”", - "body": "Music, when soft voices die,\nVibrates in the memory--\nOdours, when sweet violets sicken,\nLive within the sense they quicken.\n\nRose leaves, when the rose is dead,\nAre heaped for the belovèd’s bed;\nAnd so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,\nLove itself shall slumber on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1821 - } - } - }, - "mutability": { - "title": "“Mutability”", - "body": "We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;\nHow restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,\nStreaking the darkness radiantly!--yet soon\nNight closes round, and they are lost for ever:\n\nOr like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings\nGive various response to each varying blast,\nTo whose frail frame no second motion brings\nOne mood or modulation like the last.\n\nWe rest.--A dream has power to poison sleep;\nWe rise.--One wandering thought pollutes the day;\nWe feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;\nEmbrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:\n\nIt is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,\nThe path of its departure still is free:\nMan’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;\nNought may endure but Mutablilty.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1816 - } - } - }, - "night": { - "title": "“Night”", - "body": "Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,\n Spirit of Night!\nOut of the misty eastern cave,--\nWhere, all the long and lone daylight,\nThou wovest dreams of joy and fear\nWhich make thee terrible and dear,--\n Swift be thy flight!\n\nWrap thy form in a mantle grey,\n Star-inwrought!\nBlind with thine hair the eyes of Day;\nKiss her until she be wearied out.\nThen wander o’er city and sea and land,\nTouching all with thine opiate wand--\n Come, long-sought!\n\nWhen I arose and saw the dawn,\n I sigh’d for thee;\nWhen light rode high, and the dew was gone,\nAnd noon lay heavy on flower and tree,\nAnd the weary Day turn’d to his rest,\nLingering like an unloved guest,\n I sigh’d for thee.\n\nThy brother Death came, and cried,\n ‘Wouldst thou me?’\nThy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,\nMurmur’d like a noontide bee,\n‘Shall I nestle near thy side?\nWouldst thou me?’--And I replied,\n ‘No, not thee!’\n\nDeath will come when thou art dead,\n Soon, too soon--\nSleep will come when thou art fled.\nOf neither would I ask the boon\nI ask of thee, beloved Night--\nSwift be thine approaching flight,\n Come soon, soon!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1821 - } - } - }, - "ode-to-the-west-wind": { - "title": "“Ode to the West Wind”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,\nThou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead\nAre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,\n\nYellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,\nPestilence-stricken multitudes: 0 thou,\nWho chariotest to their dark wintry bed\n\nThe wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,\nEach like a corpse within its grave, until\nThine azure sister of the Spring shall blow\n\nHer clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill\n(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)\nWith living hues and odours plain and hill:\n\nWild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;\nDestroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!\n\n\n# II.\n\nThou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,\nLoose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,\nShook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,\n\nAngels of rain and lightning: there are spread\nOn the blue surface of thine airy surge,\nLike the bright hair uplifted from the head\n\nOf some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge\nOf the horizon to the zenith’s height,\nThe locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge\n\nOf the dying year, to which this closing night\nWill be the dome of a vast sepulchre\nVaulted with all thy congregated might\n\nOf vapours, from whose solid atmosphere\nBlack rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!\n\n\n# III.\n\nThou who didst waken from his summer dreams\nThe blue Mediterranean, where he lay,\nLulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,\n\nBeside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,\nAnd saw in sleep old palaces and towers\nQuivering within the wave’s intenser day,\n\nAll overgrown with azure moss and flowers\nSo sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou\nFor whose path the Atlantic’s level powers\n\nCleave themselves into chasms, while far below\nThe sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear\nThe sapless foliage of the ocean, know\n\nThy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,\nAnd tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIf I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;\nIf I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;\nA wave to pant beneath thy power, and share\n\nThe impulse of thy strength, only less free\nThan thou, O Uncontrollable! If even\nI were as in my boyhood, and could be\n\nThe comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,\nAs then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed\nScarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven\n\nAs thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.\nOh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!\nI fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!\n\nA heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed\nOne too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.\n\n\n# V.\n\nMake me thy lyre, even as the forest is:\nWhat if my leaves are falling like its own!\nThe tumult of thy mighty harmonies\n\nWill take from both a deep, autumnal tone,\nSweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,\nMy spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!\n\nDrive my dead thoughts over the universe\nLike withered leaves to quicken a new birth!\nAnd, by the incantation of this verse,\n\nScatter, as from an unextinguished hearth\nAshes and sparks, my words among mankind!\nBe through my lips to unawakened Earth\n\nThe trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,\nIf Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1820 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "on-death": { - "title": "“On Death”", - "body": "The pale, the cold, and the moony smile\nWhich the meteor beam of a starless night\nSheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,\nEre the dawning of morn’s undoubted light,\nIs the flame of life so fickle and wan\nThat flits round our steps till their strength is gone.\n\nO man! hold thee on in courage of soul\nThrough the stormy shades of thy wordly way,\nAnd the billows of clouds that around thee roll\nShall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,\nWhere hell and heaven shall leave thee free\nTo the universe of destiny.\n\nThis world is the nurse of all we know,\nThis world is the mother of all we feel,\nAnd the coming of death is a fearful blow\nTo a brain unencompass’d by nerves of steel:\nWhen all that we know, or feel, or see,\nShall pass like an unreal mystery.\n\nThe secret things of the grave are there,\nWhere all but this frame must surely be,\nThough the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear\nNo longer will live, to hear or to see\nAll that is great and all that is strange\nIn the boundless realm of unending change.\n\nWho telleth a tale of unspeaking death?\nWho lifteth the veil of what is to come?\nWho painteth the shadows that are beneath\nThe wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?\nOr uniteth the hopes of what shall be\nWith the fears and the love for that which we see?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "on-a-dead-violet": { - "title": "“On a Dead Violet”", - "body": "The odor from the flower is gone\nWhich like thy kisses breathed on me;\nThe color from the flower is flown\nWhich glowed of thee and only thee!\n\nA shrivelled, lifeless, vacant form,\nIt lies on my abandoned breast;\nAnd mocks the heart, which yet is warm,\nWith cold and silent rest.\n\nI weep--my tears revive it not;\nI sigh--it breathes no more on me:\nIts mute and uncomplaining lot\nIs such as mine should be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "one-sung-of-thee-who-left-the-tale-untold": { - "title": "“One Sung of Thee Who Left the Tale Untold”", - "body": "One sung of thee who left the tale untold,\nLike the false dawns which perish in the bursting;\nLike empty cups of wrought and daedal gold,\nWhich mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-word-is-too-often-profaned": { - "title": "“One word is too often profaned …”", - "body": "One word is too often profaned\nFor me to profane it;\nOne feeling too falsely disdained\nFor thee to disdain it;\nOne hope is too like despair\nFor prudence to smother;\nAnd pity from thee more dear\nThan that from another.\n\nI can give not what men call love;\nBut wilt thou accept not\nThe worship the heart lifts above\nAnd the heavens reject not,--\nThe desire of the moth for the star,\nOf the night for the morrow,\nThe devotion to something afar\nFrom the sphere of our sorrow?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "ozymandias": { - "title": "“Ozymandias”", - "body": "I met a traveller from an antique land,\nWho said--“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone\nStand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,\nHalf sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,\nAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,\nTell that its sculptor well those passions read\nWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,\nThe hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;\nAnd on the pedestal, these words appear:\nMy name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;\nLook on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!\nNothing beside remains. Round the decay\nOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare\nThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1818, - "month": "january", - "day": 11 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "day": 11 - } - } - }, - "from-prometheus-unbound": { - "title": "From “Prometheus Unbound”", - "body": "My soul is an enchanted boat,\nWhich, like a sleeping swan, doth float\nUpon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;\nAnd thine doth like an angel sit\nBeside a helm conducting it,\nWhilst all the winds with melody are ringing.\nIt seems to float ever, for ever,\nUpon that many-winding river,\nBetween mountains, woods, abysses,\nA paradise of wildernesses!\nTill, like one in slumber bound,\nBorne to the ocean, I float down, around,\nInto a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:\n\nMeanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions\nIn music’s most serene dominions;\nCatching the winds that fan that happy heaven.\nAnd we sail on, away, afar,\nWithout a course, without a star,\nBut, by the instinct of sweet music driven;\nTill through Elysian garden islets\nBy thee, most beautiful of pilots,\nWhere never mortal pinnace glided,\nThe boat of my desire is guided:\nRealms where the air we breathe is love,\nWhich in the winds and on the waves doth move,\nHarmonizing this earth with what we feel above.\n\nWe have past Age’s icy caves,\nAnd Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,\nAnd Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray:\nBeyond the glassy gulfs we flee\nOf shadow-peopled Infancy,\nThrough Death and Birth, to a diviner day;\nA paradise of vaulted bowers,\nLit by downward-gazing flowers,\nAnd watery paths that wind between\nWildernesses calm and green,\nPeopled by shapes too bright to see,\nAnd rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee;\nWhich walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "the-question": { - "title": "“The Question”", - "body": "I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way,\nBare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,\nAnd gentle odours led my steps astray,\nMixed with a sound of waters murmuring\nAlong a shelving bank of turf, which lay\nUnder a copse, and hardly dared to fling\nIts green arms round the bosom of the stream,\nBut kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.\n\nThere grew pied wind-flowers and violets,\nDaisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,\nThe constellated flower that never sets;\nFaint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth\nThe sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets--\nLike a child, half in tenderness and mirth--\nIts mother’s face with Heaven’s collected tears,\nWhen the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.\n\nAnd in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,\nGreen cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may,\nAnd cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine\nWas the bright dew, yet drained not by the day;\nAnd wild roses, and ivy serpentine,\nWith its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;\nAnd flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,\nFairer than any wakened eyes behold.\n\nAnd nearer to the river’s trembling edge\nThere grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white,\nAnd starry river buds among the sedge,\nAnd floating water-lilies, broad and bright,\nWhich lit the oak that overhung the hedge\nWith moonlight beams of their own watery light;\nAnd bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green\nAs soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.\n\nMethought that of these visionary flowers\nI made a nosegay, bound in such a way\nThat the same hues, which in their natural bowers\nWere mingled or opposed, the like array\nKept these imprisoned children of the Hours\nWithin my hand,--and then, elate and gay,\nI hastened to the spot whence I had come,\nThat I might there present it!--Oh! to whom?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1816 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "rarely-rarely-comest-thou": { - "title": "“Rarely, rarely, comest thou …”", - "body": "Rarely, rarely, comest thou,\nSpirit of Delight!\nWherefore hast thou left me now\nMany a day and night?\nMany a weary night and day\n’Tis since thou are fled away.\n\nHow shall ever one like me\nWin thee back again?\nWith the joyous and the free\nThou wilt scoff at pain.\nSpirit false! thou hast forgot\nAll but those who need thee not.\n\nAs a lizard with the shade\nOf a trembling leaf,\nThou with sorrow art dismay’d;\nEven the sighs of grief\nReproach thee, that thou art not near,\nAnd reproach thou wilt not hear.\n\nLet me set my mournful ditty\nTo a merry measure;\nThou wilt never come for pity,\nThou wilt come for pleasure;\nPity then will cut away\nThose cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.\n\nI love all that thou lovest,\nSpirit of Delight!\nThe fresh Earth in new leaves dress’d,\nAnd the starry night;\nAutumn evening, and the morn\nWhen the golden mists are born.\n\nI love snow, and all the forms\nOf the radiant frost;\nI love waves, and winds, and storms,\nEverything almost\nWhich is Nature’s, and may be\nUntainted by man’s misery.\n\nI love tranquil solitude,\nAnd such society\nAs is quiet, wise, and good;\nBetween thee and me\nWhat difference? but thou dost possess\nThe things I seek, not love them less.\n\nI love Love--though he has wings,\nAnd like light can flee,\nBut above all other things,\nSpirit, I love thee--\nThou art love and life! Oh come,\nMake once more my heart thy home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "remorse": { - "title": "“Remorse”", - "body": "Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon,\nRapid clouds have drunk the last pale beam of even:\nAway! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,\nAnd profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.\nPause not! the time is past! Every voice cries, ‘Away!’\nTempt not with one last tear thy friend’s ungentle mood:\nThy lover’s eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:\nDuty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.\n\nAway, away! to thy sad and silent home;\nPour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;\nWatch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,\nAnd complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth.\nThe leaves of wasted autumn woods shall float around thine head,\nThe blooms of dewy Spring shall gleam beneath thy feet:\nBut thy soul or this world must fade in the frost that binds the dead,\nEre midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace, may\nmeet.\n\nThe cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,\nFor the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep;\nSome respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;\nWhatever moves or toils or grieves hath its appointed sleep.\nThou in the grave shalt rest:--yet, till the phantoms flee,\nWhich that house and heath and garden made dear to thee erewhile,\nThy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free\nFrom the music of two voices, and the light of one sweet smile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "stanzas-written-in-dejection-near-naples": { - "title": "“Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples”", - "body": "The sun is warm, the sky is clear,\nThe waves are dancing fast and bright,\nBlue isles and snowy mountains wear\nThe purple noon’s transparent might,\nThe breath of the moist earth is light,\nAround its unexpanded buds;\nLike many a voice of one delight,\nThe winds, the birds, the ocean floods,\nThe City’s voice itself, is soft like Solitude’s.\n\nI see the Deep’s untrampled floor\nWith green and purple seaweeds strown;\nI see the waves upon the shore,\nLike light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:\nI sit upon the sands alone,--\nThe lightning of the noontide ocean\nIs flashing round me, and a tone\nArises from its measured motion,\nHow sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.\n\nAlas! I have nor hope nor health,\nNor peace within nor calm around,\nNor that content surpassing wealth\nThe sage in meditation found,\nAnd walked with inward glory crowned--\nNor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.\nOthers I see whom these surround--\nSmiling they live, and call life pleasure;\nTo me that cup has been dealt in another measure.\n\nYet now despair itself is mild,\nEven as the winds and waters are;\nI could lie down like a tired child,\nAnd weep away the life of care\nWhich I have borne and yet must bear,\nTill death like sleep might steal on me,\nAnd I might feel in the warm air\nMy cheek grow cold, and hear the sea\nBreathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.\n\nSome might lament that I were cold,\nAs I, when this sweet day is gone,\nWhich my lost heart, too soon grown old,\nInsults with this untimely moan;\nThey might lament--for I am one\nWhom men love not,--and yet regret,\nUnlike this day, which, when the sun\nShall on its stainless glory set,\nWill linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-summer-evening-churchyard": { - "title": "“A Summer Evening Churchyard”", - "body": "The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere\nEach vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray,\nAnd pallid Evening twines its beaming hair\nIn duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day:\nSilence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,\nCreep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.\n\nThey breathe their spells towards the departing day,\nEncompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;\nLight, sound, and motion, own the potent sway,\nResponding to the charm with its own mystery.\nThe winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass\nKnows not their gentle motions as they pass.\n\nThou too, aerial pile, whose pinnacles\nPoint from one shrine like pyramids of fire,\nObey’st I in silence their sweet solemn spells,\nClothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire,\nAround whose lessening and invisible height\nGather among the stars the clouds of night.\n\nThe dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:\nAnd, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,\nHalf sense half thought, among the darkness stirs,\nBreathed from their wormy beds all living things around,\nAnd, mingling with the still night and mute sky,\nIts awful hush is felt inaudibly.\n\nThus solemnized and softened, death is mild\nAnd terrorless as this serenest night.\nHere could I hope, like some enquiring child\nSporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight\nSweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep\nThat loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1815 - }, - "location": "Lechlade", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "time-long-past": { - "title": "“Time Long Past”", - "body": "Like the ghost of a dear friend dead\nIs Time long past.\nA tone which is now forever fled,\nA hope which is now forever past,\nA love so sweet it could not last,\nWas Time long past.\n\nThere were sweet dreams in the night\nOf Time long past:\nAnd, was it sadness or delight,\nEach day a shadow onward cast\nWhich made us wish it yet might last--\nThat Time long past.\n\nThere is regret, almost remorse,\nFor Time long past.\n’Tis like a child’s belovèd corse\nA father watches, till at last\nBeauty is like remembrance, cast\nFrom Time long past.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1819 - } - } - }, - "time": { - "title": "“Time”", - "body": "Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,\nOcean of Time, whose waters of deep woe\nAre brackish with the salt of human tears!\nThou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow\nClaspest the limits of mortality,\nAnd sick of prey, yet howling on for more,\nVomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;\nTreacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,\nWho shall put forth on thee,\nUnfathomable Sea?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "to-jane": { - "title": "“To Jane”", - "body": "The keen stars were twinkling,\nAnd the fair moon was rising among them,\nDear Jane.\nThe guitar was tinkling,\nBut the notes were not sweet till you sung them\nAgain.\n\nAs the moon’s soft splendour\nO’er the faint cold starlight of Heaven\nIs thrown,\nSo your voice most tender\nTo the strings without soul had then given\nIts own.\n\nThe stars will awaken,\nThough the moon sleep a full hour later\nTo-night;\nNo leaf will be shaken\nWhilst the dews of your melody scatter\nDelight.\n\nThough the sound overpowers,\nSing again, with your dear voice revealing\nA tone\nOf some world far from ours,\nWhere music and moonlight and feeling\nAre one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "to-a-lady-with-a-guitar": { - "title": "“To a Lady, with a Guitar”", - "body": "Ariel to Miranda:--Take\nThis slave of music, for the sake\nOf him who is the slave of thee;\nAnd teach it all the harmony\nIn which thou canst, and only thou,\nMake the delighted spirit glow,\nTill joy denies itself again\nAnd, too intense, is turned to pain.\nFor by permission and command\nOf thine own Prince Ferdinand,\nPoor Ariel sends this silent token\nOf more than ever can be spoken;\nYour guardian spirit, Ariel, who\nFrom life to life must still pursue\nYour happiness, for thus alone\nCan Ariel ever find his own.\nFrom Prospero’s enchanted cell,\nAs the mighty verses tell,\nTo the throne of Naples he\nLit you o’er the trackless sea,\nFlitting on, your prow before,\nLike a living meteor.\nWhen you die, the silent Moon\nIn her interlunar swoon\nIs not sadder in her cell\nThan deserted Ariel.\nWhen you live again on earth,\nLike an unseen Star of birth\nAriel guides you o’er the sea\nOf life from your nativity.\nMany changes have been run\nSince Ferdinand and you begun\nYour course of love, and Ariel still\nHas tracked your steps and served your will.\nNow in humbler, happier lot,\nThis is all remembered not;\nAnd now, alas! the poor sprite is\nImprisoned for some fault of his\nIn a body like a grave--\nFrom you he only dares to crave,\nFor his service and his sorrow,\nA smile today, a song tomorrow.\n\nThe artist who this idol wrought\nTo echo all harmonious thought,\nFelled a tree, while on the steep\nThe woods were in their winter sleep,\nRocked in that repose divine\nOn the wind-swept Apennine;\nAnd dreaming, some of Autumn past,\nAnd some of Spring approaching fast,\nAnd some of April buds and showers,\nAnd some of songs in July bowers,\nAnd all of love; and so this tree,--\nO that such our death may be!--\nDied in sleep, and felt no pain,\nTo live in happier form again:\nFrom which, beneath Heaven’s fairest star,\nThe artist wrought this loved Guitar;\nAnd taught it justly to reply\nTo all who question skilfully\nIn language gentle as thine own;\nWhispering in enamoured tone\nSweet oracles of woods and dells,\nAnd summer winds in sylvan cells;\n--For it had learnt all harmonies\nOf the plains and of the skies,\nOf the forests and the mountains,\nAnd the many-voiced fountains;\nThe clearest echoes of the hills,\nThe softest notes of falling rills,\nThe melodies of birds and bees,\nThe murmuring of summer seas,\nAnd pattering rain, and breathing dew,\nAnd airs of evening; and it knew\nThat seldom-heard mysterious sound\nWhich, driven on its diurnal round,\nAs it floats through boundless day,\nOur world enkindles on its way:\n--All this it knows, but will not tell\nTo those who cannot question well\nThe Spirit that inhabits it;\nIt talks according to the wit\nOf its companions; and no more\nIs heard than has been felt before\nBy those who tempt it to betray\nThese secrets of an elder day.\nBut, sweetly as its answers will\nFlatter hands of perfect skill,\nIt keeps its highest holiest tone\nFor one beloved Friend alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-the-moon": { - "title": "“To the Moon”", - "body": "And, like a dying lady lean and pale,\nWho totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,\nOut of her chamber, led by the insane\nAnd feeble wanderings of her fading brain,\nThe moon arose up in the murky east,\nA white and shapeless mass.\n\nArt thou pale for weariness\nOf climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,\nWandering companionless\nAmong the stars that have a different birth,\nAnd ever changing, like a joyless eye\nThat finds no object worth its constancy?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "the-waning-moon": { - "title": "“The Waning Moon”", - "body": "And like a dying lady, lean and pale,\nWho totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,\nOut of her chamber, led by the insane\nAnd feeble wanderings of her fading brain,\nThe moon arose up in the murky east,\nA white and shapeless mass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - } - } - }, - "a-widow-bird-sat-mourning-for-her-love": { - "title": "“A Widow Bird Sat Mourning for Her Love”", - "body": "A widow bird sat mourning for her Love\nUpon a wintry bough;\nThe frozen wind crept on above,\nThe freezing stream below.\n\nThere was no leaf upon the forest bare,\nNo flower upon the ground,\nAnd little motion in the air\nExcept the mill-wheel’s sound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1822 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "taras-shevchenko": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Taras Shevchenko", - "birth": { - "year": 1814 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "ukrainian", - "language": "ukrainian", - "flag": "🇺🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "ukrainian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "perebendya": { - "title": "“Perebendya”", - "body": "Old Perebendya, minstrel blind,\nIs known both near and far.\nHe wanders all the country ’round\nAnd plays on his kobza.\nThe people know the man who plays,\nThey listen and are glad,\nBecause he chases gloom away,\nThough he himself is sad.\nNo matter what the weather holds,\nHis days and nights he spends\nWithout a shelter out-of-doors;\nMisfortune dogs his steps,\nAnd mocks his head with silver thatched,\nBut he no longer heeds;\nHe seats himself beside a hedge\nAnd sings, “Oh rustling leaves!”\nAnd singing, how he’s all alone\nHe thinks and bows his head,\nAs melancholy sears his soul,\nAlone beside the hedge.\n\nThat’s what old Perebendya’s like,\nHe’s very changeful, too:\nHe’ll sing about heroic deeds,\nThen change to comic tunes;\nTo maidens on the commons grass\nHe’ll sing of love and spring,\nAnd at the inn for merry lads\nGood rousing songs hell sing;\nFor married couples at a feast\n(Where mother-’n-law is strict)\nSuch songs as tell of women’s grief\nAnd hardship he will pick;\nAt market-place--of Lazarus,\nOr else, a mournful lay\n(So that the memory should live)\nOf how the Sich was razed.\nSo that’s what Perebendya’s like,\nCapricious in old age:\nHe’ll sing a merry song and then\nTo one of tears he’ll change.\n\nAsweeping freely o’er the steppes,\nThe wind blows from afar.\nUpon a mound the minstrel sits\nAnd plays on his kobza.\nThe boundless steppes, blue as the sea,\nReach out on every side;\nThe grave mounds also stretch away\nTill they are lost to sight.\n\nHis grey moustache and thatch of hair\nThe wind blows every way,\nThen it subsides and lends an ear To the old jminstrel’s lay,\nHis heart’s wild beat, the tears of sightless eyes …\nThen blows again …\n This is his hide-away\nAmid the steppe where nobody can spy\nAnd where his words are scattered o’er the plains\nAway from human ears, the sacred words\nPronounced in free communion with God,\nThe praises sung in homage to the Lord.\nHis thoughts the while go floating on a cloud,\nLike eagles in the blue they soar o’erhead\nTill with their wings the very sky is churned;\nThey rest upon the sun and ask where it\nRetires at night, how rises in the morn;\nThey listen as the sea its tale unfolds,\n“Why are you mute?” they ask the mountain top,\nThen back to the sky, for earth’s full of woe;\nIn all the wide, wide world there’s not a spot\nFor him who all things knows and hears and sees--\nThe secrets of the sun, and sea, and fields--\nNo one to bid him welcome with his heart.\nHe’s all alone, as is the sun alone.\nThe people know him and they let him be …\nBut if they learned how he, alone, intones\nSongs in the steppe, converses with the sea--\nThey would make sport of words that are divine,\nAnd call him mad and from their midst they’d drive\nHim off to die. “Go to the sea!” they’d say.\n\nYou’re doing right, my minstrel friend,\nYou’re doing right, I know,\nThat to the grave mound in the steppe\nTo talk and sing you go!\nKeep going there, my hearty one,\nUntil the day your heart\nFalls fast asleep, and sing your songs\nWhere you will not be heard.\nAnd that the people shouldn’t shy\nYou must indulge them, friend! …\nSo dance the way the master says--\nThe money’s his to spend.\n\nSo that’s what Perebendya’s like,\nCapricious in old age:\nHe’ll sing a wedding song and then\nTo one of grief he’ll change.", - "metadata": { - "language": "ukrainian", - "translator": "John Weir", - "date": { - "year": 1839 - } - } - } - } - }, - "philip-sidney": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Philip Sidney", - "birth": { - "year": 1554 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1586 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "it-is-most-true": { - "title": "“It is Most True”", - "body": "It is most true, that eyes are form’d to serve\nThe inward light; and that the heavenly part\nOught to be king, from whose rules who do swerve,\nRebles to Nature, strive for their own smart.\nIt is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart,\nAn image is, which for ourselves we carve:\nAnd, fools, adore in temple of hour heart,\nTill that good God make Church and churchman starve.\nTrue, that ture beauty virtue is indeed,\nWhereof this beauty can be but a shade,\nWhich elements with mortal mixture breed:\nTrue, that on earth we are but pilgrims made,\nAnd should in soul up to our country move:\nTrue, and yet true that I must Stella love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-true-love-hath-my-heart": { - "title": "“My True Love Hath My Heart”", - "body": "My true love hath my heart, and I have his,\nBy just exchange, one for the other giv’n.\nI hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;\nThere never was a better bargain driv’n.\nHis heart in me keeps me and him in one,\nMy heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;\nHe loves my heart, for once it was his own;\nI cherish his, because in me it bides.\nHis heart his wound received from my sight:\nMy heart was wounded with his wounded heart;\nFor as from me, on him his hurt did light,\nSo still me thought in me his hurt did smart:\nBoth equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:\nMy true love hath my heart and I have his.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "with-how-sad-steps": { - "title": "“With How Sad Steps”", - "body": "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!\nHow silently, and with how wan a face!\nWhat, may it be that even in heav’nly place\nThat busy archer his sharp arrows tries!\nSure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes\nCan judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case,\nI read it in thy looks; thy languish’d grace\nTo me, that feel the like, thy state descries.\nThen, ev’n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,\nIs constant love deem’d there but want of wit?\nAre beauties there as proud as here they be?\nDo they above love to be lov’d, and yet\nThose lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?\nDo they call virtue there ungratefulness?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "angelos-sikelianos": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Angelos Sikelianos", - "birth": { - "year": 1884 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1951 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "greek", - "language": "greek", - "flag": "🇬🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelos_Sikelianos", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "greek" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "agraphon": { - "title": "“Agraphon”", - "body": "Once at sunset Jesus and his disciples were on the road outside the walls of Zion when suddenly they came to where the town for years had dumped its garbage:\nCrowning the highest pile, its legs pointing at the sky, lay a dog’s bloated carcass; such a stench rose up from it that all the disciples, hands cupped over their nostrils, drew back as one man.\nBut Jesus stood there, and He gazed so closely at the carcass that one disciple called out from a distance, “Rabbi, don’t you smell that dreadful stench? How can you go on standing there?”\nJesus, His eyes fixed on the carcass, answered: “If your breath is pure, you’ll smell the same stench inside the town behind us, but Look how that dog’s teeth glitter in the sun: like hailstones, like a lily, beyond decay, a great pledge, mirror of the Eternal, but also the harsh lightning-flash, the hope of Justice!”\n“And now, Lord, I, the very least of men, stand before You, give me, as now I walk outside this Zion, as I walk through this terrible stench, one single moment of Your holy calm, so that I may also pause among this carrion and with my own eyes somewhere see deep inside me, beyond the world’s decay, like the dog’s teeth at which, Lord, that sunset You gazed in wonder: a great pledge Eternal, but also the harsh lightning-flash, the hope of Justice!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "greek", - "translator": "Gregory Jusdanis" - } - } - } - }, - "angelus-silesius": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Angelus Silesius", - "birth": { - "year": 1624, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1677 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Silesius", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "all-into-one-again": { - "title": "“All into one again”", - "body": "The All proceedeth from the One,\nAnd into One must All regress:\nIf otherwise, the All remains\nAsunder-riven manyness.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-becomes-what-he-wills": { - "title": "“God becomes what he wills”", - "body": "Eternal Spirit, God becomes\nAll that He wills to be--but still\nAbideth ever as He is,\nWithout a form, an aim, a will.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-becometh-what-he-never-was": { - "title": "“God becometh what he never was”", - "body": "Here in the midst of Time God doth become what He,\nThe Unbecome, was not in all Eternity.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-denieth-himself-to-none": { - "title": "“God denieth himself to none”", - "body": "Take, drink, all that thou wilt or canst--’tis given thee free,\nThou hast the whole of Godhead for thy Hostelry.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-is-and-liveth-not": { - "title": "“God is and liveth not”", - "body": "God is, but in God-wise. He loves and lives, ’tis true,\nBut not as I or thou or other beings do.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-is-not-grasped": { - "title": "“God is not grasped”", - "body": "God is an utter Nothingness,\nBeyond the touch of Time and Place:\nThe more thou graspest after Him,\nThe more he fleeth thy embrace.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-loveth-naught-but-himself": { - "title": "“God loveth naught but himself”", - "body": "God is so dear unto Himself,\nFolded in self so utterly,\nThat He can never cherish love\nFor anything that is not He.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-naught-and-all": { - "title": "“God naught and all”", - "body": "God is a Spirit, a Fire, a Being and a Flame,\nAnd yet again He is not one of all these same.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "god-never-exploreth-himself": { - "title": "“God never exploreth himself”", - "body": "The Thought and Deed of Deity\nAre of such richness and extent\nThat It remaineth to Itself\nAn Undiscovered Continent.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "in-the-sea-many-are-one": { - "title": "“In the sea many are one”", - "body": "A Loaf holds many grains of corn\nAnd many myriad drops the Sea:\nSo is God’s Oneness Multitude\nAnd that great Multitude are we.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "man-loveth-even-without-knowing": { - "title": "“Man loveth even without knowing”", - "body": "One only Thing I love and know not what it is:\nBecause I know it not, therefore I’ve chosen this.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "man-must-go-beyond-all-knowledge": { - "title": "“Man must go beyond all knowledge”", - "body": "What Cherubs know sufficeth not: beyond their zone\nI fain would take my flight unto where nothing’s known.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "more-known-less-understood": { - "title": "“More known less understood”", - "body": "The more thou knowest God, the more thou wilt confess\nThat what He truly is, thou knowest less and less.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "of-eternal-motion": { - "title": "“Of eternal motion”", - "body": "The secret of Eternal Motion thou wouldst learn,\nI, of Eternal Rest: which is of more concern?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "rest-is-the-highest-good": { - "title": "“Rest is the highest good”", - "body": "Rest is the highest Good. I’d keep both eyes close pressed,\nThat He might have repose, were God Himself not Rest.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "sin-troubleth-not-god": { - "title": "“Sin troubleth not god”", - "body": "God feeleth pain for sin in thee\nAs in His son,\nBut in His Self of Deity\nHe feeleth none.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "thou-must-thyself-be-sun": { - "title": "“Thou must thyself be sun”", - "body": "I must myself be Sun. I with my beams must dye\nThe all-uncoloured Sea of the whole Deity.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "through-thee-god-loseth-naught": { - "title": "“Through thee god loseth naught”", - "body": "Choose, Man, which of the twain thou wilt,\nThy self-destruction or thy peace.\nThrough thee God suffereth no loss,\nNeither through thee hath He increase.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "what-is-spoken-of-god-is-more-false-than-true": { - "title": "“What is spoken of god is more false than true”", - "body": "Since thou dost measure God by creature qualities,\nThere’s more of lie than truth in thy theologies.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "the-blame-is-thine": { - "title": "“The blame is thine”", - "body": "If gazing on the Sun endangereth thy sight,\nThe blame is in thine eyes, and not in that great Light.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "the-knower-must-become-the-known": { - "title": "“The knower must become the known”", - "body": "Naught ever can be known in God: One and Alone\nIs He. To know Him, Knower must be one with Known.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "the-rest-and-work-of-god": { - "title": "“The rest and work of god”", - "body": "Rested God never hath, nor toiled--’tis manifest,\nFor all His rest is work and all His work is rest.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - }, - "the-something-must-be-forsaken": { - "title": "“The something must be forsaken”", - "body": "If thou dost love a Something, Man,\nThou lovest naught that doth abide.\nGod is not This nor That--do thou\nLeave Somethings utterly aside.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann", - "language": "german", - "translator": "J. E. Crawford Flitch", - "date": { - "year": 1674 - } - } - } - } - }, - "shel-silverstein": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Shel Silverstein", - "birth": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1999 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Silverstein", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 32 - }, - "poems": { - "all-about-you": { - "title": "“All about You”", - "body": "In the Grandville greyhound station in the lightly drizzlin’ rain\nSittin’ on my suitcase goin’ quietly insane all about you babe all about you\nAll about you and then no feelin’ double dealin’ things that you do\nUh every man in Grandville says he knows you well\nBurn your ears if you could hear the stories that they tell\n\nAll about you babe all about you\nAll about you and then no feelin’ double dealin’ things that you do\n\nThey say you’re picked up every Thursday in a rich man’s limousine\nAnd some cat in San Quentin keeps on havin’ nasty dreams\n\nAll about you babe all about you\nAll about you and then no feelin’ double dealin’ things that you do\n\nAnd now the summer sun may burn my back and these tears may dim my sight\nBut before I die there’s a dirty book I’m gonna write\n\nAll about you babe all about you\nAll about you and then no feelin’ double dealin’ things that you do\n\nYeah the Grandville greyhound station\nI waited on that night tell me you ain’t gonna show\nAnd I just go on sing this silly song\nAll about you tell the world all about you\nTell ’em what you are and tell ’em what you wish yeah I’m gonna put your name in", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-anteater": { - "title": "“The Anteater”", - "body": "“A genuine anteater,”\nThe pet man told my dad.\nTurned out, it was an aunt eater,\nAnd now my uncle’s mad!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bagpipe-who-didnt-say-no": { - "title": "“The Bagpipe Who Didn’t Say No”", - "body": "It was nine o’clock at midnight\nAt a quarter after three\nWhen a turtle met a bagpipe\nOn the shoreside by the sea,\nAnd the turtle said, “My dearie,\nMay I sit with you? I’m weary.”\nAnd the bagpipe didn’t say no.\n\nSaid the turtle to the bagpipe,\n“I have walked this lonely shore,\nI have talked to waves and pebbles--\nBut I’ve never loved before.\nWill you marry me today, dear?\nIs it ‘No’ you’re going to say dear?”\nBut the bagpipe didn’t say no.\n\nSaid the turtle to his darling,\n“Please excuse me if I stare,\nBut you have the plaidest skin, dear,\nAnd you have the strangest hair.\nIf I begged you pretty please, love,\nCould I give you just one squeeze, love?”\nAnd the bagpipe didn’t say no.\n\nSaid the turtle to the bagpipe,\n“Ah, you love me. Then confess!\nLet me whisper in your dainty ear\nAnd hold you to my chest.”\nAnd he cuddled her and teased her\nAnd so lovingly he squeezed her.\nAnd the bagpipe said, “Aaooga.”\n\nSaid the turtle to the bagpipe,\n“Did you honk or bray or neigh?\nFor ‘Aaooga’ when your kissed\nIs such a heartless thing to say.\nIs it that I have offended?\nIs it that our love is ended?”\nAnd the bagpipe didn’t say no.\n\nSaid the turtle to the bagpipe,\n“Shall I leave you, darling wife?\nShall I waddle off to Woedom?\nShall I crawl out of your life?\nShall I move, depart and go, dear--\nOh, I beg you tell me ‘No’ dear!”\nBut the bagpipe didn’t say no.\n\nSo the turtle crept off crying\nAnd he ne’er came back no more,\nAnd he left the bagpipe lying\nOn that smooth and sandy shore.\nAnd some night when tide is low there,\nJust walk up and say, “Hello, there,”\nAnd politely ask the bagpipe\nIf this story’s really so.\nI assure you, darling children,\nThe bagpipe won’t say no.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-bridge": { - "title": "“The Bridge”", - "body": "This bridge will only take you halfway there\nTo those mysterious lands you long to see:\nThrough gypsy camps and swirling Arab fairs\nAnd moonlit woods where unicorns run free.\nSo come and walk awhile with me and share\nThe twisting trails and wondrous worlds I’ve known.\nBut this bridge will only take you halfway there-\nThe last few steps you’ll have to take alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "changing-of-the-seasons": { - "title": "“Changing of the Seasons”", - "body": "Oh the changing of the seasons it’s a pretty thing to see\nAnd though I find this balmy weather pleasin’\nThere’s the wind come from tomorrow and I hear it callin’ me\nAnd I’m bound for the changing of the seasons\n\nOh it’s blowin’ in Chicago and it’s snowin’ up in Maine\nAnd the Islands to the south are warm and sunny\nAnd I’ve got to feel the earth shake and I gotta feel the rain\nAnd I’ve got to know a taste of more than honey\n\nSo don’t ask me where I’m goin’ or how long I’m gonna be away\nDon’t make me give you all the hollow reasons\nI’ll think of you like summer and I might be back some day\nWhen my heart miss the changing of the seasons\n\nOh it’s blowin’ in Chicago and it’s snowin’ up in Maine\nAnd the Islands to the south are warm and sunny\nAnd I’ve got to feel the earth shake and I gotta feel the rain\nAnd I’ve got to know a taste of more than honey\n\nOh it’s nothing that you said and it ain’t nothing that you done\nAnd I wish I could explain you why I’m leavin’\nBut there’s some men need the winter and there’s some men need the sun\nAnd there’s some men need the changing of the seasons\n\nOh it’s blowin’ in Chicago and it’s snowin’ up in Maine\nAnd the Islands to the south are warm and sunny\nAnd I’ve got to feel the earth shake and I gotta feel the rain\nAnd I’ve got to know a taste of more than honey", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "crowded-tub": { - "title": "“Crowded Tub”", - "body": "There are too many kids in this tub\nThere are too many elbows to scrub\nI just washed a behind that I’m sure wasn’t mine\nThere are too many kids in this tub.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dirty-face": { - "title": "“Dirty Face”", - "body": "Where did you get such a dirty face,\nMy darling dirty-faced child?\n\nI got it from crawling along in the dirt\nAnd biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt.\nI got it from chewing the roots of a rose\nAnd digging for clams in the yard with my nose.\nI got it from peeking into a dark cave\nAnd painting myself like a Navajo brave.\nI got it from playing with coal in the bin\nAnd signing my name in cement with my chin.\nI got it from rolling around on the rug\nAnd giving the horrible dog a big hug.\nI got it from finding a lost silver mine\nAnd eating sweet blackberries right off the vine.\nI got it from ice cream and wrestling and tears\nAnd from having more fun than you’ve had in years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "falling-up": { - "title": "“Falling Up”", - "body": "I tripped on my shoelace\nAnd I fell up--\nUp to the roof tops,\nUp over the town,\nUp past the tree tops,\nUp over the mountains,\nUp where the colors\nBlend into the sounds.\nBut it got me so dizzy\nWhen I looked around,\nI got sick to my stomach\nAnd I threw down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "floobie-doobie-doo": { - "title": "“Floobie Doobie Doo”", - "body": "As I walk down to Bishop Street I met a girl who smiled so sweet\nNow she was young and pretty too\nAnd on a string she walked with a thing called the Floobie Doobie Doo\nOh the Floobie Doobie Doo now what is that it ain’t no dog and it ain’t no cat\nIt’s not the doll with eyes of blue\nI never seen such a thing as thing called the Floobie Doobie Doo\n\nIt had one tooth five purple toes sixteen elbows and a twelve-foot nose\nYou never see one in the Zoo\nI mean a thing like a thing on a string called the Floobie Doobie Doo\nI told that girl lemme take you home and maybe we can be alone hahaha\nShe said I’d love to go home with you\nBut I have to cling to my thing on the string called the Floobie Doobie Doo\n\nWell I took her home that very night we talked a while and I dimmed the light\nShe cuddled close and the next thing I knew\nJust as soon as it seen us in between us jumped the Floobie Doobie Doo\nIt stayed all night it stayed all year I never got to hold you near\nI said sweet baby I wanna cling to you\nBut she wanna cling to the thing on the string called the Floobie Doobie Doo\nOh the Floobie Doobie Doo oh now what is that\nIt ain’t no dog it ain’t no cow it ain’t no cat\nIt’s not the doll with eyes of blue\nYou just can’t swing with the thing on the string called the Floobie Doobie Doo\n\nWell she cried and cried she wiped her eye she said farewell so long goodbye\nFor though I loved you yes I do\nI can’t reveal the love that I feel for the Floobie Doobie Doo\nI never see her anymore she never knocks upon my door\nAnd every night alone and blue\nI sit and swing about a swing on a thing\nI mean I sit and think about a swing on a thing\nI mean I sit and sing about a thing on a string called the Floobie Doobie Doo oooh", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "gods-wheel": { - "title": "“God’s Wheel”", - "body": "God says to me with a kind of smile,\n“Hey how would you like to be God awhile\nAnd steer the world?”\n“Okay,” says I, “I’ll give it a try.\nWhere do I set?\nHow much do I get?\nWhat time is lunch?\nWhen can I quit?”\n“Gimme back that wheel,” says God.\n“I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-cant-touch-the-sun": { - "title": "“I Can’t Touch the Sun”", - "body": "No I can’t touch the clouds for you I’ve never reached the sun for you\nI’ve never done the things that you need done for you\nI’ve stretched as high as I can reach I guess I’m not the one for you\nCause I can’t touch the clouds or reach the sun for you\nNo I can’t reach the clouds or touch the sun\n\nNo I can’t turn back time for you and make you sweet sixteen again\nI can’t turn your barren fields to green again\nAnd I can’t sit around and talk of how might have been again\nNo I can’t turn back time and make you young again\nI can’t turn back time and make you young\n\nI can’t look inside your mind and see the things you’re hopin’ for\nI can’t help you chase the dream you’re gropin’ for\nI know your heart is open wide but I don’t know who it’s open for\nCause I can’t know your mind or chase your dreams for you\nMhm I can’t chase your dreams or know your mind\n\nSo say goodbye and don’t look back I’ve had some happy days with you\nI’m sorry but I can’t be the one who stays with you\nAnd if they ask about me you can say I was the one with you\nWho never touched the clouds or reached the sun with you\nI can’t touch the clouds or reach the sun for you\nI can’t touch the clouds or reach the sun", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-know-you-little-i-love-you-lots": { - "title": "“I Know You Little, I Love You Lots”", - "body": "I know you little, I love you lots,\nmy love for you could fill ten pots,\nfifteen buckets, sixteen cans,\nthree teacups, and four dishpans.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-search-of-cinderella": { - "title": "“In Search of Cinderella”", - "body": "From dusk to dawn,\nFrom town to town,\nWithout a single clue,\nI seek the tender, slender foot\nTo fit this crystal shoe.\nFrom dusk to dawn,\nI try it on\nEach damsel that I meet.\nAnd I still love her so, but oh,\nI’ve started hating feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ill-sing-one-song-for-you": { - "title": "“I’ll Sing One Song for You”", - "body": "I’ve sung my songs on dusty roads and dirty city sidewalks\nTo sweatin’ hard eyed brakemen, in the rail yards I rolled through\nI’ve sung in blue wall papered rooms to girls I played at lovin’\nNow Mama … I’ll sing one song for you\n\nMama let me tell you that I’ve never lost the mem’ry\nOf the tender things you told me, and the gentle things you’d do\nAnd though I’ve grown away and other arms reach out to hold me\nMama … I’ll sing one song for you\n\nYou say you’d like to have me here to help you through the winter\nBut you say it with a wistful smile like you already knew\nThat your boy’s no good at stayin’ still there’s no words that need sayin’\nAnd Mama … I’ll sing one song for you\n\nTomorrow I’ll be movin’ out on them dusty country backroads\nSome sweatin’ hard eyed brakeman may hear a tune or two\nAnd the girl in the blue wall papered room she’ll ask where I been hidin’\nAnd I’ll tell ’em I stopped and sang one song for you", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kick-it-again": { - "title": "“Kick It Again”", - "body": "So you heard there was a spark of love that I have for you\nYou come back to kill it like you always do\nYou found it weak and tremblin’ hangin’ on just by a thread\nAnd you kicked it choke it stepped on it and broke it left it half to death\n\nKick it again it’s still breathing\nKick it again I think I seen it move just a little bitty\nKick it again it’s still living\nSo kick it again and then again and then you’ll kill my love for you\n\nYou’re gonna have to do much more this time than a-make it crawl\nA cheatin’ on it doesn’t seem to work at all\nAnd it won’t do no good to try to shame it to death\nCause it’s raspin’ gaspin’ crawlin’ callin’ to you with each dying breath\n\nKick it again it’s still breathing\nKick it again I think I seen it move just a little bitty\nKick it again it’s still living\nSo kick it again and then again and then you’ll kill my love for you", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kiss-it-away": { - "title": "“Kiss It Away”", - "body": "There’s a shadow on the sun I see it risin’\nKiss it away, Kiss it away\nAnd there’s hurt down deep inside that I been hidin’\nKiss it away, Kiss it away\nAll the hard times we been through\nWe’d never mind them\nWe’d kiss ’em away, we’d just kiss ’em away\nBut now I’m lookin for the good times and I can’t find them\nGuess we kissed them away, Must have kissed them away\nKiss away I keep thinkin’ the sun will shine once more\nI’m never ready for the sudden rain\nDon’t tell me I’m wrong, ’cause I been told\nI feel so wet and cold\nCome my pain\nYou keep hopin’ things’ll change and I keep tryin’\nOne of these days, maybe one of these days\nBut there’s a coldness in the air like somethin’ dyin’\nKiss it away, Come and kiss it away", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-land-of-happy": { - "title": "“The Land of Happy”", - "body": "Have you been to the land of happy,\nWhere everyone’s happy all day,\nWhere they joke and they sing\nOf the happiest things,\nAnd everything’s jolly and gay?\nThere’s no one unhappy in Happy\nThere’s laughter and smiles galore.\nI have been to The Land of Happy--\nWhat a bore", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-light-in-the-attic": { - "title": "“A Light in the Attic”", - "body": "There’s a light on in the attic.\nThought the house is dark and shuttered,\nI can see a flickerin’ flutter,\nAnd I know what it’s about.\nThere’s a light on in the attic.\nI can see it from the outside.\nAnd I know you’re on the inside … lookin’ out.", - "metadata": { - "source": "A Light in the Attic", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1981 - } - } - }, - "lookin-for-me": { - "title": "“Lookin’ for Me”", - "body": "You may be lookin’ for me but I ain’t lookin’ for you\nI’m still lookin’ for myself and I ain’t got time to look for nobody else\nWhen I found who I am and where I am\nAnd if you come round again maybe then baby maybe then\n\nYou wanna follow me but honey can’t you see\nI don’t know where the hell I’m goin’\nHow can I know your mind when I don’t even know my own\nNow when the road gets tough or when I get enough\nOr maybe when I reach the end maybe then baby maybe then\n\nSo stick around or go away whichever one you choose\nYou ain’t got a single thing that I think I can use\nAnd you and I ain’t shared a thing that I’m afraid to lose\n\nYou say that you love me but I don’t love you\nI love someone I never seen as she lives in a place that I never been\nWhen I realize it’s all in my eyes\nJust one great big patent maybe then maybe then\nMaybe then maybe then maybe then but I won’t say when\nMaybe then baby maybe then", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mermaid": { - "title": "“Mermaid”", - "body": "Hey when I was a lad in fishing town an old man said to me\nYou can spend your life your jolly life just sailing on the sea\nNow you can search the world for pretty girls till your eyes are weak and dim\nBut don’t go swimming with the mermaid son if you don’t know how to swim\nIf you don’t know how to swim\nFor her hair is green as seaweed and her skin is blue and pale\nAnd I tell you now before you start you can love that girl with all your heart\nBut you’re just gonna love the upper part you’re not gonna like the tail\n\nSo I signed onto a whaling ship and my very first day at sea\nI seen a mermaid in the waves reaching out to me\nCome live with me in the sea said she and down on the ocean’s floor\nI’ll show you a million wonderous things you never seen before\nOh you never seen before\nSo over I jumped and she pulled me down down to her seaweed bed\nAnd the pillow made of tortoise shell she placed beneath my head\nShe fed me shrimps and caviar upon the silver dish\nFrom her head to her waist she was my taste but the bottom part was a fish\nOh her bottom part was a fish\nOh her hair were green as seaweed her eyes were blue and pale\nAnd I loved that girl with all my heart I vowed we’d never part\nBut I knew the back was not too smart cause I did not like the tail\n\nAnd then one day when I looked up I saw a sailin’ ship\nAnd I met the stare of a millionaire out on a fishing trip\nA diamond ring he tied to a string and lowered it down to the water\nAnd my love divine she went for his line and that was the way he caught her\nYes that was the way he caught her\nSo I sat and cried to the tide same to the clams and whales\nHow I missed my love her seaweed hair and the silvery shine of her scales.\nJust then her sister swam on by, and set my heart awhirl\nFor her upper part was an ugly old fish but the bottom part was girl\nYes the bottom part was girl\nYes her knees are pink and rosy and her toes are small and frail\nHer body it’s a work of art and I love that girl with all my heart\nAnd I don’t give a damn about the upper part and that’s how I end my tale", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-nap-taker": { - "title": "“The Nap-Taker”", - "body": "No--I did not take a nap--\nThe nap--took--me\noff the bed and out the window\nfar beyond the sea,\nto a land where sleepy heads\nread only comic books\nand lock their naps in iron safes\nso that they can’t get took.\n\nAnd soon as I came to that land,\nI also came to grief.\nThe people pointed at me, shouting,\n“Where’s the nap, you thief”\nThey took me to the courthouse.\nThe judge put on his cap.\nHe said, “My child, you are on trial\nfor taking someone’s nap.”\n\n“Yes, all you selfish children,\nyou think just of yourselves\nand don’t care if the nap you take\nbelongs to someone else.\nIt happens that the nap you took\nwithout a thought or care\nbelongs to Bonnie Bowlingbrook,\nwho’s sittin’ cryin’ there.”\n\n“She hasn’t slept in quite some time--\njust see her eyelids flap.\nShe’s tired drowsy--cranky too,\n’cause guess who took her nap?”\nThe jury cried, “You’re guilty, yes,\nyou’re guilty as can be.\nBut just return the nap you took\nAnd we might set you free.”\n\n“I did not take that nap,” I cried,\n“I give my solemn vow,\nand if I took it by mistake\nI do not have it now.”\n“Oh fiddle-fudge,” cried out the judge,\nyour record looks quite sour.\nLast night I see you stole a kiss,\nLast week you took a shower,\n\n“You beat your eggs, you’ve whipped your cream,\nat work you punched the clock,\nYou’ve even killed an hour or two,\nwe’ve heard you darn your socks.\nWe know you shot a basketball,\nyou’ve stolen second base,\nand we can see you’re guilty\nfrom the sleep that’s on your face.”\n\n“Go lie down on your blanket now\nand cry your guilty tears.\nI sentence you to one long nap\nfor ninety million years.\nAnd when the other children see\nthis nap that never ends,\nno child will ever dare to take\nsomebody’s nap again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-perfect-high": { - "title": "“The Perfect High”", - "body": "There once was a boy named Gimmesome Roy. He was nothing like me or you.\n’Cause laying back and getting high was all he cared to do.\nAs a kid, he sat in the cellar, sniffing airplane glue.\nAnd then he smoked bananas--which was then the thing to do.\nHe tried aspirin in Coca-Cola, breathed helium on the sly,\nAnd his life was just one endless search to find that perfect high.\nBut grass just made him want to lay back and eat chocolate-chip pizza all night,\nAnd the great things he wrote while he was stoned looked like shit in the morning light.\nAnd speed just made him rap all day, reds just laid him back,\nAnd Cocaine Rose was sweet to his nose, but the price nearly broke his back.\nHe tried PCP and THC, but they didn’t quite do the trick,\nAnd poppers nearly blew his heart and mushrooms made him sick.\nAcid made him see the light, but he couldn’t remember it long.\nAnd hashish was just a little too weak, and smack was a lot too strong,\nAnd Quaaludes made him stumble, and booze just made him cry,\nTill he heard of a cat named Baba Fats who knew of the perfect high.\n\nNow, Baba Fats was a hermit cat who lived up in Nepal,\nHigh on a craggy mountaintop, up a sheer and icy wall.\n“But hell,” says Roy, “I’m a healthy boy, and I’ll crawl or climb or fly,\nBut I’ll find that guru who’ll give me the clue as to what’s the perfect high.”\nSo out and off goes Gimmesome Roy to the land that knows no time,\nUp a trail no man could conquer to a cliff no man could climb.\nFor fourteen years he tries that cliff, then back down again he slides\nThen sits--and cries--and climbs again, pursuing the perfect high.\nHe’s grinding his teeth, he’s coughing blood, he’s aching and shaking and weak,\nAs starving and sore and bleeding and tore, he reaches the mountain peak.\nAnd his eyes blink red like a snow-blind wolf, and he snarls the snarl of a rat,\nAs there in perfect repose and wearing no clothes--sits the godlike Baba Fats.\n\n“What’s happening, Fats?” says Roy with joy, “I’ve come to state my biz.\nI hear you’re hip to the perfect trip. Please tell me what it is.\nFor you can see,” says Roy to he, “that I’m about to die,\nSo for my last ride, Fats, how can I achieve the perfect high?”\n“Well, dog my cats!” says Baba Fats. “here’s one more burnt-out soul,\nWho’s looking for some alchemist to turn his trip to gold.\nBut you won’t find it in no dealer’s stash, or on no druggist’s shelf.\nSon, if you would seek the perfect high--find it in yourself.”\n\n“Why, you jive motherfucker!” screamed Gimmesome Roy, “I’ve climbed through rain and sleet,\nI’ve lost three fingers off my hands and four toes off my feet!\nI’ve braved the lair of the polar bear and tasted the maggot’s kiss.\nNow, you tell me the high is in myself. What kind of shit is this?\nMy ears ’fore they froze off,” says Roy, “had heard all kind of crap,\nBut I didn’t climb for fourteen years to listen to that sophomore rap.\nAnd I didn’t crawl up here to hear that the high is on the natch,\nSo you tell me where the real stuff is or I’ll kill your guru ass!”\n\n“Ok, OK,” says Baba Fats, “you’re forcing it out of me.\nThere is a land beyond the sun that’s known as Zaboli.\nA wretched land of stone and sand where snakes and buzzards scream,\nAnd in this devil’s garden blooms the mystic Tzu-Tzu tree.\nAnd every ten years it blooms one flower as white as the Key West sky,\nAnd he who eats of the Tzu-Tzu flower will know the perfect high.\nFor the rush comes on like a tidal wave and it hits like the blazing sun.\nAnd the high, it lasts a lifetime and the down don’t ever come.\nBut the Zaboli land is ruled by a giant who stands twelve cubits high.\nWith eyes of red in his hundred heads, he waits for the passers-by.\nAnd you must slay the red-eyed giant, and swim the River of Slime,\nWhere the mucous beasts, they wait to feast on those who journey by.\nAnd if you survive the giant and the beasts and swim that slimy sea,\nThere’s a blood-drinking witch who sharpens her teeth as she guards that Tzu-Tzu tree.”\n“To hell with your witches and giants,” laughs Roy. “To hell with the beasts of the sea.\nAs long as the Tzu-Tzu flower blooms, some hope still blooms for me.”\nAnd with tears of joy in his snow-blind eye, Roy hands the guru a five,\nThen back down the icy mountain he crawls, pursuing that perfect high.\n\n“Well, that is that,” says Baba Fats, sitting back down on his stone,\nFacing another thousand years of talking to God alone.\n“It seems, Lord,” says Fats, “it’s always the same, old men or bright-eyed youth,\nIt’s always easier to sell them some shit than it is to give them the truth.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "picture-puzzle-piece": { - "title": "“Picture Puzzle Piece”", - "body": "One picture puzzle piece\nLyin’ on the sidewalk,\nOne picture puzzle piece\nSoakin’ in the rain.\nIt might be a button of blue\nOn the coat of the woman\nWho lived in a shoe.\nIt might be a magical bean,\nOr a fold in the red\nVelvet robe of a queen.\nIt might be the one little bite\nOf the apple her stepmother\nGave to Snow White.\nIt might be the veil of a bride\nOr a bottle with some evil genie inside.\nIt might be a small tuft of hair\nOn the big bouncy belly\nOf Bobo the Bear.\nIt might be a bit of the cloak\nOf the Witch of the West\nAs she melted to smoke.\nIt might be a shadowy trace\nOf a tear that runs down an angel’s face.\nNothing has more possibilities\nThan one old wet picture puzzle piece.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "point-of-view": { - "title": "“Point of View”", - "body": "Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless\nChristmas dinner’s dark and blue\nWhen you stop and try to see it\nFrom the turkey’s point of view.\n\nSunday dinner isn’t sunny\nEaster feasts are just bad luck\nWhen you see it from the viewpoint\nOf a chicken or a duck.\n\nOh how I once loved tuna salad\nPork and lobsters, lamb chops too\n’Til I stopped and looked at dinner\nFrom the dinner’s point of view.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shes-my-ever-lovin-machine": { - "title": "“She’s My Ever Lovin’ Machine”", - "body": "Hey boys you know once I was took in by a girl with a twinkly eye\nAnd the first time that I wasn’t lookin’ she run off with a handsomer guy oh my\nBut I’m an ingenious feller yeah as soon as my brain got uncurled\nI tiptoed right down to my cellar and I built a mechanical girl\nOh her arms are iron her legs are steel her hips are on wires attached to a wheel\nAnd her spine is a coil that I now and then oil she’s my ever-lovin’ machine\n\nShe has no trouble making her mind up for I did not give her a mind\nAnd her heart is a clock that I wind up so I know that she’ll love me in time\nOh she never complains when I stay out all night she never complains I’m not rich\nAnd each time I want her to cuddle me tight I simply turn on her switch\nOh her arms are iron her legs are steel her hips are on wires attached to a wheel\nAnd her spine is a coil that I now and then oil she’s my ever-lovin’ machine\n\nMy love is completely electric and she gives me a shock with each hug\nAnd when the romance gets too hectic I simply pull out the plug\nOh she always did what she was supposed ter right up to this evening but then\nShe had an affair with the toaster and they ran off and left me again", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "time": { - "title": "“Time”", - "body": "Ain’t the snow fallin’ just a bit deeper these days\nAren’t they building the stairs a bit steeper these days\nAnd the town’s really changin’ in so many ways time time time\n\nThe young folks they’re growin’ exceptionally tall\nAnd the newspaper print it’s becomin’ quite small\nAnd folks speak so softly you can hardly hear at all time time time\n\nThe jokes don’t seem as witty as the old jokes once were\nAnd the girls are half as pretty as I remember her\nAnd today you know in the park a young man called me sir time time time\n\nYeah I’m not quite as anxious for fame or success\nAnd my eye finds the girl in the plain quiet dress\nAnd I cling a bit longer to each warm caress time time time\n\nSo I breathe a bit heavy when I climb a hill\nWhat of it my life now is really much more fulfilled\nBut they’re tearin’ down the building that I watched them build\nTime time time time time time", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-twistable-turnable-man": { - "title": "“The Twistable Turnable Man”", - "body": "He’s the Twistable Turnable Squeezable Pullable\nStretchable Foldable Man.\nHe can crawl in your pocket or fit your locket\nOr screw himself into a twenty-volt socket,\nOr stretch himself up to the steeple or taller,\nOr squeeze himself into a thimble or smaller,\nYes he can, course he can,\nHe’s the Twistable Turnable Squeezable Pullable\nStretchable Shrinkable Man.\nAnd he lives a passable life\nWith his Squeezable Lovable Kissable Hugable\nPullable Tugable Wife.\nAnd they have two twistable kids\nWho bend up the way that they did.\nAnd they turn and they stretch\nJust as much as they can\nFor this Bendable Foldable\nDo-what-you’re-toldable\nEasily moldable\nBuy-what you’re-soldable\nWashable Mendable\nHighly Dependable\nBuyable Saleable\nAlways available\nBounceable Shakeable\nAlmost unbreakable\nTwistable Turnable Man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "weird-bird": { - "title": "“Weird Bird”", - "body": "Birds are flyin’ south for winter.\nHere’s the Weird-Bird headin’ north,\nWings a-flappin’, beak a-chatterin’,\nCold head bobbin’ back ’n’ forth.\nHe says, “It’s not that I like ice\nOr freezin’ winds and snowy ground.\nIt’s just sometimes it’s kind of nice\nTo be the only bird in town.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-whatifs": { - "title": "“The Whatifs”", - "body": "Last night, while I lay thinking here,\nsome Whatifs crawled inside my ear\nand pranced and partied all night long\nand sang their same old Whatif song:\nWhatif I’m dumb in school?\nWhatif they’ve closed the swimming pool?\nWhatif I get beat up?\nWhatif there’s poison in my cup?\nWhatif I start to cry?\nWhatif I get sick and die?\nWhatif I flunk that test?\nWhatif green hair grows on my chest?\nWhatif nobody likes me?\nWhatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?\nWhatif I don’t grow talle?\nWhatif my head starts getting smaller?\nWhatif the fish won’t bite?\nWhatif the wind tears up my kite?\nWhatif they start a war?\nWhatif my parents get divorced?\nWhatif the bus is late?\nWhatif my teeth don’t grow in straight?\nWhatif I tear my pants?\nWhatif I never learn to dance?\nEverything seems well, and then\nthe nighttime Whatifs strike again!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-she-cries": { - "title": "“When She Cries”", - "body": "No one knows my lady when she’s lonely\nNo one sees the fantasies and fears my lady hides\nThere are those who’ve shared her love and laughter\nBut no one hears my lady when she cries … but me\nNo one hears my lady when she cries\n\nAnd when she cries she makes you wanna run\nAnd chase the sun and bring it back\nTo brighten up a corner of her dark and troubled skies\nWhen she cries\n\nShe walks barefoot through the misty mornin’\nDreams of golden yesterdays reflectin’ in her eyes\nBut soon the evenin’ shadows crowd around her\nFrightening my lady till she cries … for me\nFrightening my lady, till she cries\n\nYou may have seen her lyin’ in your lamplight\nAnd if you’ve heard her whispered words, it comes as no surprise\nSo be the one she shares her secret smiles with\nBut send me back my lady when she cries … for me\nMy lady’s gonna need me when she cries", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1972 - } - } - }, - "where-the-sidewalk-ends": { - "title": "“Where the Sidewalk Ends”", - "body": "There is a place where the sidewalk ends\nand before the street begins,\nand there the grass grows soft and white,\nand there the sun burns crimson bright,\nand there the moon-bird rests from his flight\nto cool in the peppermint wind.\n\nLet us leave this place where the smoke blows black\nand the dark street winds and bends.\nPast the pits where the asphalt flowers grow\nwe shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow\nand watch where the chalk-white arrows go\nto the place where the sidewalk ends.\n\nYes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,\nand we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,\nfor the children, they mark, and the children, they know,\nthe place where the sidewalk ends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "zebra-question": { - "title": "“Zebra Question”", - "body": "I asked the zebra\nAre you black with white stripes?\nOr white with black stripes?\nAnd the zebra asked me,\nOr you good with bad habits?\nOr are you bad with good habits?\nAre you noisy with quiet times?\nOr are you quiet with noisy times?\nAre you happy with some sad days?\nOr are you sad with some happy days?\nAre you neat with some sloppy ways?\nOr are you sloppy with some neat ways?\nAnd on and on and on and on\nAnd on and on he went.\nI’ll never ask a zebra\nAbout stripes\nAgain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "charles-simic": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Simic", - "birth": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2023 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "serbian+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇷🇸 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american", - "serbian" - ], - "n_poems": 52 - }, - "poems": { - "against-winter": { - "title": "“Against Winter”", - "body": "The truth is dark under your eyelids.\nWhat are you going to do about it?\nThe birds are silent; there’s no one to ask.\nAll day long you’ll squint at the gray sky.\nWhen the wind blows you’ll shiver like straw.\n\nA meek little lamb you grew your wool\nTill they came after you with huge shears.\nFlies hovered over open mouth,\nThen they, too, flew off like the leaves,\nThe bare branches reached after them in vain.\n\nWinter coming. Like the last heroic soldier\nOf a defeated army, you’ll stay at your post,\nHead bared to the first snow flake.\nTill a neighbor comes to yell at you,\nYou’re crazier than the weather, Charlie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "all-these-mirrors": { - "title": "“All These Mirrors”", - "body": "And the one that’s got it in for you,\nMister, that keeps taunting you\nIn an old man’s morning wheeze\nEvery time you so much as glance at it,\nOr blurt something in your defense,\nLoudly, sonorously raising your chin high\nWhile it spits and chokes in reply.\nThe razor is at your throat.\nThe lines are inscribing themselves\nOn your forehead as you listen closely\nWith a poultice of tissue paper\nAlready reddening under your left eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "autumn-sky": { - "title": "“Autumn Sky”", - "body": "In my great grandmother’s time,\nAll one needed was a broom\nTo get to see places\nAnd give the geese a chase in the sky.\n\nThe stars know everything,\nSo we try to read their minds.\nAs distant as they are,\nWe choose to whisper in their presence.\n\nOh Cynthia,\nTake a clock that has lost its hands\nFor a ride.\nGet me a room at Hotel Eternity\nWhere Time likes to stop now and then.\n\nCome, lovers of dark corners,\nThe sky says,\nAnd sit in one of my dark corners.\nThere are tasty little zeroes\nIn the peanut dish tonight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "back-at-the-chicken-shack": { - "title": "“Back at the Chicken Shack”", - "body": "What I need is a seraph and a pig.\nThe pig to eat and the seraph to ask questions.\nI suffer hugely. Of all matters heavenly,\nI’m suspicious, ornery, deeply mistrustful\nAll I know is what Euclid says.\n\nWe are strolling in our Sunday rags.\nWe are tipping our hats to the Great Nothing,\nSnapping our fireman’s suspenders …\nWhen the ladies come into view\nIn their light summer dresses, carrying parasols.\nIt must be ten below zero.\nThey seem to be laughing at us.\nOne of them has fallen back and is praying.\nThe sky is the color of pitch.\nNot even one star out tonight.\n\nI think the pig knows what’s in store for him,\nYour excellency. You ought to talk to him.\nHe ought to talk to you.\nI assume you have an important message for all of us\nWhen you come. In the meantime,\nThe large butchering knife on the table\nAnd that woman praying in the galactic wind\nI sat and sat peering into the gloom,\nAnd then I remembered the mirrors,\nAll the many kinds such a big city can contain,\nDimming, dimming …\nTrying to catch one last glint of each other--\nAnd that calmed me down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-bather": { - "title": "“The Bather”", - "body": "Where the path to the lake twists out of sight,\nA puff of dust, the kind bare feet make running,\nIs what I saw in the dying light,\nNight swooping down everywhere else.\n\nA low branch heavy with leaves\nSwaying momentarily where the shade\nLay thickest, some late bather\nDisrobing right there for a quick dip--\n\n(Or my solitude playing a trick on me?)\nPinned hair coming undone, soon to float\nAs she turns on her back, letting\nThe dozy current take her as it wishes\n\nBeyond the last drooping branch\nTo where the sky opens\nBlack as the water under her white arms,\nIn the deepening night, deepening hush,\n\nThe treetops like charred paper edges,\nEven the insects oddly reclusive\nWhile I strained to hear a splash,\nOr glimpse her running back to her clothes …\n\nAnd when I did not; I just sat there.\nThe rare rush of wind in the leaves\nStill fooling me now and then,\nUntil the chill made me go in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-body": { - "title": "“The Body”", - "body": "This last continent\nStill to be discovered.\n\nMy hand is dreaming, is building\nIts ship. For crew it takes\nA pack of bones, for food\nA beer-bottle full of blood.\n\nIt knows the breath that blows north\nWith the breath from the west\nIt will sail east each night.\n\nThe scent of your body as it sleeps\nAre the land-birds sighted at sea.\n\nMy touch is on the highest mast.\nIt cries at four in the morning\nFor a lantern to be lit\nOn the rim of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-book-full-of-pictures": { - "title": "“A Book Full of Pictures”", - "body": "Father studied theology through the mail\nAnd this was exam time.\nMother knitted. I sat quietly with a book\nFull of pictures. Night fell.\nMy hands grew cold touching the faces\nOf dead kings and queens.\n\nThere was a black raincoat\nin the upstairs bedroom\nSwaying from the ceiling,\nBut what was it doing there?\nMother’s long needles made quick crosses.\nThey were black\nLike the inside of my head just then.\n\nThe pages I turned sounded like wings.\n“The soul is a bird,” he once said.\nIn my book full of pictures\nA battle raged: lances and swords\nMade a kind of wintry forest\nWith my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "charons-cosmology": { - "title": "“Charon’s Cosmology”", - "body": "With only his dim lantern\nTo tell him where he is\nAnd every time a mountain\nOf fresh corpses to load up\n\nTake them to the other side\nWhere there are plenty more\nI’d say by now he must be confused\nAs to which side is which\n\nI’d say it doesn’t matter\nNo one complains he’s got\nTheir pockets to go through\nIn one a crust of bread in another a sausage\n\nOnce in a long while a mirror\nOr a book which he throws\nOverboard into the dark river\nSwift and cold and deep", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "clouds-gathering": { - "title": "“Clouds Gathering”", - "body": "It seemed the kind of life we wanted.\nWild strawberries and cream in the morning.\nSunlight in every room.\nThe two of us walking by the sea naked.\n\nSome evenings, however, we found ourselves\nUnsure of what comes next.\nLike tragic actors in a theater on fire,\nWith birds circling over our heads,\nThe dark pines strangely still,\nEach rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.\n\nWe were back on our terrace sipping wine.\nWhy always this hint of an unhappy ending?\nClouds of almost human appearance\nGathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely\nWith the air so mild and the sea untroubled.\n\nThe night suddenly upon us, a starless night.\nYou lighting a candle, carrying it naked\nInto our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.\nThe dark pines and grasses strangely still.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "coal": { - "title": "“Coal”", - "body": "Dismembered angel\nIn whose heart the earth is still on fire,\nThe moon still has not been split-off;\nHere is the message\nYour long night announces:\n\nEverything my eye encompasses this instant:\nThis fire, the cupped-hand, this window\nWith trees and miles of snow beyond it,\nEven this thought, this poem,\nWill be compressed\nInto a lump of your sleep\nFor some other awakening.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "come-winter": { - "title": "“Come Winter”", - "body": "The mad and homeless take shelter\nAgainst the cold weather\nIn tombs of the fabulously rich,\nWhere they huddle in their rags\nAnd make themselves scarce only\n\nWhen a hearse comes along\nBringing the smell of freshly-cut roses\nAnd a drove of funkies\nWith snow on their black shoulders\nIn a hurry to lower the heavy coffin\nSo it can go to hell on Satan’s luxury\n\nTrain where they kick their shoes off,\nGourmandize and sip wines\nEven God himself never gets to sip,\nAs they pass the fires, the chilled crowds\nOf the damned lining the tracks,\nStraining to catch a glimpse of them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "concerning-my-neighbors-the-hittites": { - "title": "“Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites”", - "body": "Great are the Hittites.\nTheir ears have mice and mice have holes.\nTheir dogs bury themselves and leave the bones\nTo guard the house. A single weed holds all their storms\nUntil the spiderwebs spread over the heavens.\nThere are bits of straw in their lakes and rivers\nLooking for drowned men. When a camel won’t pass\nThrough the eye of one of their needles,\nThey tie a house to its tail. Great are the Hittites.\nTheir fathers are in cradles, their newborn make war.\nTo them lead floats, a leaf sinks. Their god is the size\nOf a mustard seed so that he can be quickly eaten.\n\nThey also piss against the wind,\nPour water in a leaky bucket.\nStrike two tears to make fire,\nAnd have tongues with bones in them,\nBones of a wolf gnawed by lambs.\n\nThey are also called mound builders,\nThey are called Asiatic horses\nThat will drink on the Rhine, they are called\nMy grandmother’s fortune-telling, they are called\nYou can’t take it to the grave with you.\n\nIt’s that hum in your left ear,\nA sigh coming from deep within you,\nA dream in which you keep falling forever,\nThe hour in which you sit up in bed\nAs though someone has shouted your name.\n\nNo one knows why the Hittites exist,\nStill, when two are whispering\nOne of them is listening.\n\nDid they catch the falling knife?\nThey caught it like a fly with closed mouths.\nDid they balance the last egg?\nThey struck the egg with a bone so it won’t howl.\nDid they wait for dead man’s shoes?\nThe shoes went in at one ear and out the other.\nDid they wipe the blood from their mousetraps?\nThey burnt the blood to warm themselves.\nAre they cold with no pockets in their shrouds?\nIf the sky falls, they shall have clouds for supper.\n\nWhat do they have for us\nTo put in our pipes and smoke?\nThey have the braid of a beautiful girl\nThat drew a team of cattle\nAnd the engraving of him who slept\nWith dogs and rose with fleas\nSearching for its trace in the sky.\n\nAnd so there are fewer and fewer of them now.\nWho wrote their name on paper\nAnd burnt the paper? Who put snake bones\nIn their pillows? Who threw nail parings\nIn their soup? Who made them walk\nUnder the ladder? Who stuck pins\nIn their snapshots?\n\nThe wart of warts and his brother evil eye.\nBone-lazy and her sister rabbit’s-foot.\nCross-your-fingers and their father dog star.\nKnock-on-wood and his mother hellfire.\n\nBecause the tail can’t wag the cow.\nBecause the woods can’t fly to the dove.\nBecause the stones haven’t said their last word.\nBecause dunghills rise and empires fall.\n\nThey are leaving behind\nAll the silver spoons\nFound inside their throats at birth,\nA hand they bit because it fed them,\n\nTwo rats from a ship that is still sinking,\nA collection of various split hairs,\nThe leaf they turned over too late.\n\nAll that salt cast over the shoulder,\nAll that bloody meat traveling under the saddles of nomads …\n\nHere comes a forest in wolf’s clothing,\nThe wise hen bows to the umbrella.\n\nWhen the bloodshot evening meets the bloodshot night,\nThey tell each other bloodshot tales.\n\nThat bare branch over them speaks louder than words.\nThe moon is worn threadbare.\n\nI repeat: lean days don’t come singly,\nIt takes all kinds to make the sun rise.\n\nThe night is each man’s castle.\nDon’t let the castle out of the bag.\n\nWind in the valley, wind in the high hills,\nPractice will make this body fit this bed.\n\nMay all roads lead\nOut of a sow’s ear\nTo what’s worth\nTwo in the bush.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "country-fair": { - "title": "“Country Fair”", - "body": "If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,\nIt doesn’t matter.\nWe did, and he mostly lay in the corner.\nAs for the extra legs,\n\nOne got used to them quickly\nAnd thought of other things.\nLike, what a cold, dark night\nTo be out at the fair.\n\nThen the keeper threw a stick\nAnd the dog went after it\nOn four legs, the other two flapping behind,\nWhich made one girl shriek with laughter.\n\nShe was drunk and so was the man\nWho kept kissing her neck.\nThe dog got the stick and looked back at us.\nAnd that was the whole show.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "empire-of-dreams": { - "title": "“Empire of Dreams”", - "body": "On the first page of my dreambook\nIt’s always evening\nIn an occupied country.\nHour before the curfew.\nA small provincial city.\nThe houses all dark.\nThe storefronts gutted.\n\nI am on a street corner\nWhere I shouldn’t be.\nAlone and coatless\nI have gone out to look\nFor a black dog who answers to my whistle.\nI have a kind of Halloween mask\nWhich I am afraid to put on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "errata": { - "title": "“Errata”", - "body": "Where it says snow\nread teeth-marks of a virgin\nWhere it says knife read\nyou passed through my bones\nlike a police-whistle\nWhere it says table read horse\nWhere it says horse read my migrant’s bundle\nApples are to remain apples\nEach time a hat appears\nthink of Isaac Newton\nreading the Old Testament\nRemove all periods\nThey are scars made by words\nI couldn’t bring myself to say\nPut a finger over each sunrise\nit will blind you otherwise\nThat damn ant is still stirring\nWill there be time left to list\nall errors to replace\nall hands guns owls plates\nall cigars ponds woods and reach\nthat beer-bottle my greatest mistake\nthe word I allowed to be written\nwhen I should have shouted\nher name", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "evening-walk": { - "title": "“Evening Walk”", - "body": "You give the appearance of listening\nTo my thoughts, o trees,\nBent over the road I am walking\nOn a late summer evening\nWhen every one of you is a steep staircase\nThe night is descending.\n\nThe leaves like my mother’s lips\nForever trembling, unable to decide,\nFor there’s a bit of wind,\nAnd it’s like hearing voices,\nOr a mouth full of muffled laughter,\nA huge dark mouth we can all fit in\nSuddenly covered by a hand.\n\nEverything quiet. Light\nOf some other evening strolling ahead,\nLong-ago evening of long dresses,\nPointy shoes, silver cigarette cases.\nHappy heart, what heavy steps you take\nAs you hurry after them in the thickening shadows.\n\nThe sky above still blue.\nThe nightbirds like children\nWho won’t come to dinner.\nLost children singing to themselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "eyes-fastened-with-pins": { - "title": "“Eyes Fastened with Pins”", - "body": "How much death works,\nNo one knows what a long\nDay he puts in. The little\nWife always alone\nIroning death’s laundry.\nThe beautiful daughters\nSetting death’s supper table.\nThe neighbors playing\nPinochle in the backyard\nOr just sitting on the steps\nDrinking beer. Death,\nMeanwhile, in a strange\nPart of town looking for\nSomeone with a bad cough,\nBut the address somehow wrong,\nEven death can’t figure it out\nAmong all the locked doors …\nAnd the rain beginning to fall.\nLong windy night ahead.\nDeath with not even a newspaper\nTo cover his head, not even\nA dime to call the one pining away,\nUndressing slowly, sleepily,\nAnd stretching naked\nOn death’s side of the bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-flies": { - "title": "“The Flies”", - "body": "Here are the baits, the hooks\nAre hidden. Pincushions,\nIs my suit ready?\nI recognize them. They were made\nOf dirt and spittle in an orphanage.\nHow they sigh, then quickly cross themselves\nWith their feet.\nI’m the cold window-pane of a house\nAbandoned for the Winter. They walk,\nSolemn, dipped in cigarette smoke,\nLike an angry word scratched in a public urinal.\nOne of them will walk over my grave--\nNot this one I kill innocently\nOr that one, inert\nOn the ear of my sleeping daughter.\n\nFor a long time I’ve been trying\nTo remember something. On my finger\nThe fly glows like a ring. The wind,\nThe first Winter one,\nHigh above the house\nIn the redwood trees.\n\nA killed fly always comes back.\nCan one suddenly wake up inside one?\nWe make flies as we think.\nOnly Saints know the exact number.\nI hailed a big black one like a taxi,\nToday, as the night was falling.\nIt took me to a room\nWhere solitude keeps its saucer of milk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "furniture-mover": { - "title": "“Furniture Mover”", - "body": "Ah the great\nthe venerable\nwhoever he is\n\nahead of me\nhuge load\nterrific backache\n\nwherever\na chair’s waiting\nmeadow\nsky\nbeckoning\n\nhe’s the one\nthat’s been\nthere\nwithout instructions\nand for no wages\n\na huge load\non his back\nand under his arm\nthus\nalways\n\nall in place\nperfect\njust as it was\nsweet home\n\nat the address\nI never even dreamed of\nthe address\nI’m already changing\n\nin a hurry\nto overtake him\nto arrive\nnot ahead\n\nbut just as\nhe sets down\nthe table\nthe bread crumbs\n\nI used to\nsay\nI was part\nof his load\n\nhigh up there\nroped safely\nwith the junk\nthe eviction notices\n\nI used to\nprophesy\nhe’ll stumble\nby and by\n\nno luck--\noh\nMr. Furniture Mover\non my knees\n\nlet me come\nfor once\nearly\nto where it’s vacant\n\nyou still\non the stairs\nwheezing\nbetween floors\n\nand me behind the door\nin the gloom\nI think I would\nlet you do\n\nwhat you must", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "green-lampshade": { - "title": "“Green Lampshade”", - "body": "All the pages of all the books\nare blank.\nIt’s a big secret.\nThe readers say nothing about it\nto each other.\n\nOn my block\nevery house is a library.\nThere are lights.\nLate into the night\nsevere women\nenforce complete silence.\n\nI’ve been reading so much\nmy eyes hurt.\nIt’s a book on astronomy,\nor perhaps a book on the architecture\nof prisons.\n\nAcross,\nthe free thinker’s taking notes\nfuriously.\nAt the exit,\nmy father’s checking out\na little volume\nthe size of a breviary.\n\nI know I’m much older than he.\nI have grey hairs,\nwear a shabby overcoat,\nwill lick my forefinger\nbefore I turn\nthe next page.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "heights-of-folly": { - "title": "“Heights Of Folly”", - "body": "O crows circling over my head and cawing!\nI admit to being, at times,\nSuddenly, and without the slightest warning,\nExceedingly happy.\n\nOn a morning otherwise sunless,\nStrolling arm in arm\nPast some gallows-shaped trees\nWith my dear Helen,\nWho is also a strange bird,\n\nWith a feeling of being summoned\nUrgently, but by a most gracious invitation\nTo breakfast on slices of watermelon\nIn the company of naked gods and goddesses\nOn a patch of last night’s snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "henry-rosseaus-bed": { - "title": "“Henry Rosseau’s Bed”", - "body": "I took my bed into the forest.\nHow peaceful, I thought,\nwhen the full moon came out.\nThe white stag nibbled my pillow,\n\nthe nightbird sang in the hand\nof the huge hairy ape.\nIt was not the bird of paradise.\nIt was a gypsy with a mandolin.\n\nI had to run naked with my bed,\nknock at the prison gate,\nask for their darkest solitary.\nThey obliged, rats and all …\n\nThe executioner’s lovely daughter\ncoming to visit on tiptoes.\nSad bread she brought, the world’s saddest.\nHer beauty bandaged my eyes.\n\nNo small feat to get that bed\nout of there on insomnia’s bicycle.\nLike a worm crossing the Brooklyn Bridge,\nI found myself in a philosopher’s kitchen.\n\nIt was cold and white as at the Pole.\nSnow kept falling into empty pots.\nI could have used a team of dogs\nto pull my bed, a queue of sleepwalkers …\n\nAt the late movies where I found myself next,\nbedded under the screen,\nthe great Egyptian-style theater empty,\none could hear the wind between stars.\n\nIn the picture, a lonely veiled woman\nclutched a handkerchief to her breast.\nAre you the gypsy, I shouted?\nAnd if so, where’s your mandolin?\n\nNo, she replied. I’m the executioner’s lovely daughter.\nI’m on my way to the Galapagos Islands.\nI need tortoise glasses to look for my love\nwho is asleep in the dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "hotel-insomnia": { - "title": "“Hotel Insomnia”", - "body": "I liked my little hole,\nIts window facing a brick wall.\nNext door there was a piano.\nA few evenings a month\na crippled old man came to play\n“My Blue Heaven.”\n\nMostly, though, it was quiet.\nEach room with its spider in heavy overcoat\nCatching his fly with a web\nOf cigarette smoke and revery.\nSo dark,\nI could not see my face in the shaving mirror.\n\nAt 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.\nThe “Gypsy” fortuneteller,\nWhose storefront is on the corner,\nGoing to pee after a night of love.\nOnce, too, the sound of a child sobbing.\nSo near it was, I thought\nFor a moment, I was sobbing myself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "house": { - "title": "“House”", - "body": "My house has grown smaller\nIt’s getting ready for a journey\nIts bristles are showing\nAnd its farmer’s boots.\n\nAlready I hear a sack being dragged toward a river,\nAlready I see a thin, barely visible track of flour.\n\nStrange,\nIt must be the whiteness\nOf those immaculate beds\nGround to powder,\n\nIt must be the table\nFrom the kitchen\nDigging a hole in the earth\nTo plant its knives.\n\nNo answer … Prow of a sunken galleon.\nIn its sailor’s heart the old house drinks to the wind.\n\nBut then some men come and say:\nIt is time to slaughter it.\nThe winter is coming.\nIts meat needs to be dried in smoke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "how-to-psalmodize": { - "title": "“How To Psalmodize”", - "body": "1. The Poet\n\nSomeone awake when others are sleeping,\nAsleep when others are awake.\nAn illiterate who signs everything with an X.\nA man about to be hanged cracking a joke.\n\n\n2. The Poem\n\nIt is a piece of meat\nCarried by a burglar\nTo distract a watchdog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-the-last-napoleonic-soldier": { - "title": "“I Am the Last Napoleonic Soldier”", - "body": "I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.\nThe Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-immortal": { - "title": "“The Immortal”", - "body": "You’re shivering my memory.\nYou went out early and coatless\nTo visit your old schoolmasters,\nThe cruel schoolmasters\nAnd their pet monkeys.\n\nYou took a wrong turn somewhere.\nYou met an army of gray days,\nA ghost army of years on the march.\nIt must have been the slop they ladled you,\nThe ditch-water they made you drink.\n\nYou found yourself again on that street,\nInside that narrow room\nWith a single dusty window.\nOutside it was snowing as in a dream\nYou were ill and in bed.\nThe whole world was absent at work.\nThe blind old woman next door\nWhose sighs and shuffles you’d welcome\nHad died mysteriously in the summer.\n\nYou had your own breath to listen to.\nYou were perfectly alone and anonymous.\nIt would have taken months for anyone\nTo begin to miss you. The chill\nMade you pull the covers up to the chin.\n\nYou remembered the lost arctic voyagers,\nThe snow erasing their footprints.\nYou had no money and no prospects in sight.\nBoth of your lungs were hurting.\nYou had no intention of lifting a finger\nTo help yourself. You were immortal.\n\nOutside the same darkening snowflake\nSeemed to be falling over and over again.\nYou studied the cracked walls,\nThe many water-stains on the ceiling\nTrying to fix in your mind each detail.\n\nTime had stopped at dusk.\nYou were shivering at the thought\nOf such great happiness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-initiate": { - "title": "“The Initiate”", - "body": "St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses\nAs he passed me on the street.\nSt. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,\nTurned her back on me.\n\n“Soulmate,” they hissed. “It’s high time.”\n\nI was a blind child, a wind-up toy …\nI was one of death’s juggling red balls\nOn a certain street corner\nWhere they peddle things out of suitcases.\n\nThe city like a huge cinema\nWith lights dimmed.\nThe performance already started.\n\nSo many blurred faces in a complicated plot.\n\nThe great secret which kept eluding me: knowing who I am …\n\nThe Redeemer and the Virgin,\nTheir eyes wide open in the empty church\nWhere the killer came to hide himself …\n\nThe new snow on the sidewalk bore footprints\nThat could have been made by bare feet.\nSome unknown penitent guiding me.\nIn truth, I didn’t know where I was going.\nMy feet were frozen,\nMy stomach growled.\n\nFour young hoods blocking my way.\nThree deadpan, one smiling crazily.\n\nI let them have my black raincoat.\n\nThinking constantly of the Divine Love\nand the Absolute had disfigured me.\nPeople mistook me for someone else.\nI heard voices after me calling out unknown names.\n“I’m searching for someone to sell my soul to,”\nThe drunk who followed me whispered,\nWhile appraising me from head to foot.\n\nAt the address I had been given.\nThe building had large X’s over its windows.\nI knocked but no one came to open.\nBy and by a black girl joined me on the steps.\nShe banged at the door till her fist hurt.\n\nHer name was Alma, a propitious sign.\nShe knew someone who solved life’s riddles\nIn a voice of an ancient Sumerian queen.\nWe had a long talk about that\nWhile shivering and stamping our wet feet.\n\nIt was necessary to stay calm, I explained,\nEven with the earth trembling,\nAnd to continue to watch oneself\nAs if one were a complete stranger.\n\nOnce in Chicago, for instance,\nI caught sight of a man in a shaving mirror\nWho had my naked shoulders and face,\nBut whose eyes terrified me!\nTwo hard staring, all-knowing eyes!\n\nAfter we parted, the night, the cold, and the endless walking\nBrought on a kind of ecstasy.\nI went as if pursued, trying to warm myself.\n\nThere was the East River; there was the Hudson.\nTheir waters shone like oil in sanctuary lamps.\n\nSomething supreme was occurring\nFor which there will never be any words.\n\nThe sky was full of racing clouds and tall buildings,\nWhirling and whirling silently.\n\nIn that whole city you could hear a pin drop.\nBelieve me.\nI thought I heard a pin drop and I went looking for it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "inner-man": { - "title": "“Inner Man”", - "body": "It isn’t the body\nThat’s a stranger.\nIt’s someone else.\n\nWe poke the same\nUgly mug\nAt the world.\nWhen I scratch\nHe scratches too.\n\nThere are women\nWho claim to have held him.\nA dog\nFollows me about.\nIt might be his.\n\nIf I’m quiet, he’s quieter.\nSo I forget him.\nYet, as I bend down\nTo tie my shoelaces,\nHe’s standing up.\n\nWe caste a single shadow.\nWhose shadow?\n\nI’d like to say:\n“He was in the beginning\nAnd he’ll be in the end,”\nBut one can’t be sure.\n\nAt night\nAs I sit\nShuffling the cards of our silence,\nI say to him:\n\n“Though you utter\nEvery one of my words,\nYou are a stranger.\nIt’s time you spoke.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mummys-curse": { - "title": "“Mummy’s Curse”", - "body": "Befriending an eccentric young woman\nThe sole resident of a secluded Victorian mansion.\nShe takes long walks in the evening rain,\nAnd so do I, with my hair full of dead leaves.\n\nIn her former life, she was an opera singer.\nShe remembers the rich Neapolitan pastries,\nPoints to a bit of fresh whipped cream\nStill left in the corner of her lower lip,\nTells me she dragged a wooden cross once\nThrough a leper town somewhere in India.\n\nI was born in Copenhagen, I confide in turn.\nMy father was a successful mortician.\nMy mother never lifted her nose out of a book.\nArthur Schopenhauer ruined our happy home.\nSince then, a day doesn’t go by without me\nSticking a loaded revolver inside my mouth.\n\nShe had walked ahead of me and had turned\nLike a lion tamer, towering with a whip in hand.\nLuckily, in that moment, the mummy sped by\nOn a bicycle carrying someone’s pizza order\nAnd cursing the mist and the potholes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mystic-life": { - "title": "“The Mystic Life”", - "body": "It’s like fishing in the dark,\nIf you ask me:\nOur thoughts are the hooks,\nOur hearts the raw bait.\n\nWe cast the line over our heads,\nPast all faith, past all believing,\nInto the starless midnight sky,\nUntil it’s lost to sight.\n\nThe line’s long unravelling\nRising in our throats like a sigh\nOf a long-day’s weariness,\nSoul-searching and revery.\n\n\nOne thought against the Supreme\nUnthinkable.\n\nHow about that?\n\nLoony-tunes, fishing in the dark\nOut of an empty sleeve\nWith a mourning band on it.\n\nThe fly and the spider on the ceiling\nLooking on, brother.\n\nIn the highest school of hide-and-seek,\n\nIn its vast classroom\nOf smoke and mirrors,\n\nWhere we are the twin dunces\nLeft standing in\nThe darkest corner.\n\nOur fates in the silence of a mouth\nOf the one\n“Who hath no image,”\n\nGlistening there\nAs if moistened by his tongue.\n\n\nIt takes a tiny nibble\nFrom time to time.\n\nDon’t you believe it.\n\nIt sends a shiver down our spines\nIn response.\n\nLike hell, it does.\n\nThere’s a door you’ve never noticed before\nLeft ajar in your room.\n\nDon’t kid yourself.\n\n\nThe song said: “Do nothing\nTill you hear from me.”\n\nYes, of course.\nIn the meantime,\n\nWear mirror-tinted\nGlasses to bed,\n\nSay in your prayers:\n\n“In that thou hast sought me,\nThou hast already found me.”\n\nThat’s what the leaves are\nAll upset about tonight.\n\n\nSolitary fishermen lining up\nLike zeros--\nTo Infinity.\n\nEach in his shade\nChewing on the bitter verb\n“To be.”\n\nThe ripple of the abyss\nClosing in on them.\n\nTherein the mystery\nAnd the pity.\n\nThe hook left dangling\nIn the Great “Nothing,”\n\nSurely snipped off\nBy XXXXXX’s own\nMoustache-trimming scissors …\n\nNevertheless, aloft,\n\nWhite shirt-tails and all--\n\nI’ll be damned!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nancy-jane": { - "title": "“Nancy Jane”", - "body": "Grandma laughing on her deathbed.\nEternity, the quiet one, listening in.\n\nLike moths around an oil lamp we were.\nLike ragdolls tucked away in the attic.\n\nIn walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers.\n(How about that?)\n\nA dark little country store full of gravedigger’s children buying candy.\n(That’s how we looked that night.)\n\nThe young men pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds.\nIt was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh.\n\nA bird called out of a tree, but received no answer.\n\nThe beauty of that last moment\nLike a red sail on the bay at sunset,\n\nOr like a wheel breaking off a car\nAnd roaming the world on its own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-couple": { - "title": "“Old Couple”", - "body": "They’re waiting to be murdered,\nOr evicted. Soon\nThey expect to have nothing to eat.\nIn the meantime, they sit.\n\nA violent pain is coming, they think.\nIt will start in the heart\nAnd climb into the mouth.\nThey’ll be carried off in stretchers, howling.\n\nTonight they watch the window\nWithout exchanging a word.\nIt has rained, and now it looks\nLike it’s going to snow a little.\n\nI see him get up to lower the shades.\nIf their window stays dark,\nI know his hand has reached hers\nJust as she was about to turn on the lights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "paradise-motel": { - "title": "“Paradise Motel”", - "body": "Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.\nI stayed in my room. The President\nSpoke of war as of a magic love potion.\nMy eyes were opened in astonishment.\nIn a mirror my face appeared to me\nLike a twice-canceled postage stamp.\n\nI lived well, but life was awful.\nthere were so many soldiers that day,\nSo many refugees crowding the roads.\nNaturally, they all vanished\nWith a touch of the hand.\nHistory licked the corners of its bloody mouth.\n\nOn the pay channel, a man and a woman\nWere trading hungry kisses and tearing off\nEach other’s clothes while I looked on\nWith the sound off and the room dark\nExcept for the screen where the color\nHad too much red in it, too much pink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "partial-explanation": { - "title": "“Partial Explanation”", - "body": "Seems like a long time\nSince the waiter took my order.\nGrimy little luncheonette,\nThe snow falling outside.\n\nSeems like it has grown darker\nSince I last heard the kitchen door\nBehind my back\nSince I last noticed\nAnyone pass on the street.\n\nA glass of ice-water\nKeeps me company\nAt this table I chose myself\nUpon entering.\n\nAnd a longing,\nIncredible longing\nTo eavesdrop\nOn the conversation\nOf cooks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-pillow": { - "title": "“The Pillow”", - "body": "Are we still travelling?\nWhiteness, you come out of a dog’s mouth\nOn a cold day. Apron,\nI lie within you like an apple.\n\nYou’ve lit up the forest. Two\nBlack winds you sell. Do you still\nGuard me from thieves\nOn the road fearsome and lonesome?\n\nTo tie my breath inside you\nInto a knot--find the way\nBack to your old scent.\nIt still hasn’t bought me a mocking bird.\n\nWe separated, sacred time.\nI stretch between two chairs. Recently,\nI started wearing blinders. One-legged,\nSince there’s no room for the other.\n\nThe dead love eggs. This is\nThat pebble tucked beneath you\nSpeaking. Bared now,\nFor those who grind their teeth in sleep\n\nTo lay down their heads.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poem-without-a-title": { - "title": "“Poem Without A Title”", - "body": "I say to the lead\nWhy did you let yourself\nBe cast into a bullet?\nHave you forgotten the alchemists?\nHave you given up hope\nIn turning into gold?\n\nNobody answers.\nLead. Bullet. With names\nSuch as these\nThe sleep is deep and long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "private-eye": { - "title": "“Private Eye”", - "body": "To find clues where there are none,\nThat’s my job now, I said to the\nDictionary on my desk. The world beyond\nMy window has grown illegible,\nAnd so has the clock on the wall.\nI may strike a match to orient myself\n\nIn the meantime, there’s the heart\nStopping hush as the building\nEmpties, the elevators stop running,\nThe grains of dust stay put.\nHours of quiescent sleuthing\nBefore the Madonna with the mop\n\nShuffles down the long corridor\nTrying doorknobs, turning mine.\nThat’s just little old me sweating\nIn the customer’s chair, I’ll say.\nKeep your nose out of it.\nI’m not closing up till he breaks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "prodigy": { - "title": "“Prodigy”", - "body": "I grew up bent over\na chessboard.\n\nI loved the word _endgame_.\n\nAll my cousins looked worried.\n\nIt was a small house\nnear a Roman graveyard.\nPlanes and tanks\nshook its windowpanes.\n\nA retired professor of astronomy\ntaught me how to play.\n\nThat must have been in 1944.\n\nIn the set we were using,\nthe paint had almost chipped off\nthe black pieces.\n\nThe white King was missing\nand had to be substituted for.\n\nI’m told but do not believe\nthat that summer I witnessed\nmen hung from telephone poles.\n\nI remember my mother\nblindfolding me a lot.\nShe had a way of tucking my head\nsuddenly under her overcoat.\n\nIn chess, too, the professor told me,\nthe masters play blindfolded,\nthe great ones on several boards\nat the same time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-prompter": { - "title": "“The Prompter”", - "body": "The one who had been whispering\nAll along in this empty theater\nAnd whose voice I just heard--\nOr imagined I did\nDistracted as I was by my own thoughts.\n\n_God have mercy on my poor soul_\nWas to be my line,\nWhich I couldn’t bring myself to say\nWith the shivers going up my spine\nLike white mice.\n\nAnd when I finally did get around to,\nThere was no response,\nA clap, someone chuckling briefly\nIs all I had hoped for\nAnd not this great sweep of nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "puppet-maker": { - "title": "“Puppet-Maker”", - "body": "In his fear of solitude, he made us.\nFearing eternity, he gave us time.\nI hear his white cane thumping\nUp and down the hall.\n\nI expect neighbors to complain, but no.\nThe little girl who sobbed\nWhen her daddy crawled into her bed\nIs quiet now.\n\nIt’s quarter to two.\nOn this street of darkened pawnshops,\nWelfare hotels and tenements,\nOne or two ragged puppets are awake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "read-your-fate": { - "title": "“Read Your Fate”", - "body": "A world’s disappearing.\nLittle street,\nYou were too narrow,\nToo much in the shade already.\n\nYou had only one dog,\nOne lone child.\nYou hid your biggest mirror,\nYour undressed lovers.\n\nSomeone carted them off\nIn an open truck.\nThey were still naked, travelling\nOn their sofa\n\nOver a darkening plain,\nSome unknown Kansas or Nebraska\nWith a storm brewing.\nThe woman opening a red umbrella\n\nIn the truck. The boy\nAnd the dog running after them,\nAs if after a rooster\nWith its head chopped off.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-something": { - "title": "“The Something”", - "body": "Here come my night thoughts\nOn crutches,\nReturning from studying the heavens.\nWhat they thought about\nStayed the same,\nStayed immense and incomprehensible.\n\nMy mother and father smile at each other\nKnowingly above the mantel.\nThe cat sleeps on, the dog\nGrowls in his sleep.\nThe stove is cold and so is the bed.\n\nNow there are only these crutches\nTo contend with.\nGo ahead and laugh, while I raise one\nWith difficulty,\nSwaying on the front porch,\nWhile pointing at something\nIn the gray distance.\n\nYou see nothing, eh?\nNeither do I, Mr. Milkman.\nI better hit you once or twice over the head\nWith this fine old prop,\nSo you don’t go off muttering\n\nI saw something!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-stray": { - "title": "“The Stray”", - "body": "One day, chasing my tail here and there,\nI stopped to catch my breath\nOn some corner in New York,\nWhile people hurried past me,\nAll determined to get somewhere,\nSave a few adrift like lost children.\n\nWhat ever became of my youth?\nI wanted to stop a stranger and ask.\n“It went into hiding,” said an old woman\nWho’d read my mind.\n“Swimming with sharks,” a drunk concurred,\nFixing me with one bloody eye.\n\nIt was summer, and then as quietly as a bird lands,\nThe sidewalks were dusted with snow\nAnd I was shivering without a coat.\nI had hopes we’d meet again, I told myself,\nHave a drink and recall the nights\nWhen we used to paint this town red.\n\nI thought you’d be in a straightjacket by now,\nYou’d say to me,\nMaking funny faces at doctors and nurses.\nInstead, here you are full of fleas,\nDodging cars and buses\nTo follow a pair of good-looking legs home.\n\n“And you, Judas,” I summed the strength to shout,\n“Will you be coming to my funeral?”\nBut he was gone already. It had gotten late in the day,\nVery late--and since there was nothing\nThat could be done about it--\nI thought I’d better toddle along myself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "suffering": { - "title": "“Suffering”", - "body": "Shall I sell it door to door?\nDirt under my fingernails.\nEar-bones out of home-made brandy.\nSpider nests from my liver.\n\nIt’s just beginning, this hump\nThat makes me take a step\nDifferently. Something bristly, growing\nIn its hiding place, evicting me\nWith a raised shovel.\n\nNaturally I tried to argue, to convince …\nThen on the sly, stuff it in a sack\nFull of rocks and drop it in a river.\nIt waited with open arms on my return.\n\nWe made love. Later, I shared\nA can of sardines with it and a cup of milk\nIt’s getting fat with drool off my spoon,\nWith spittle I aim at its face.\n\nNow I breathe only its breath\nOf dirty diapers, of lint\nThat lines the pockets, of sweat.\n\nIf I’m still awake, it’s because\nIt needs this light to read by\nThe Lives of its Saints:\nHow an old Polish woman\nSaw God as she scrubbed floors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "talking-to-little-birdies": { - "title": "“Talking To Little Birdies”", - "body": "Not a peep out of you now\nAfter the bedlam early this morning.\nAre you begging pardon of me\nHidden up there among the leaves,\nOr are your brains momentarily overtaxed?\n\nYou savvy a few things I don’t:\nThe overlooked sunflower seed worth a holler;\nThe traffic of cats in the yard;\nStrangers leaving the widow’s house,\nTieless and wearing crooked grins.\n\nOr have you got wind of the world’s news?\nSome new horror I haven’t heard about yet?\nWhich one of you was so bold as to warn me,\nOur sweet setup is in danger?\n\nKids are playing soldiers down the road,\nPointing their rifles and playing dead.\nLittle birdies, are you sneaking wary looks\nIn the thick foliage as you hear me say this?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tapestry": { - "title": "“Tapestry”", - "body": "It hangs from heaven to earth.\nThere are trees in it, cities, rivers,\nsmall pigs and moons. In one corner\nthe snow falling over a charging cavalry,\nin another women are planting rice.\n\nYou can also see:\na chicken carried off by a fox,\na naked couple on their wedding night,\na column of smoke,\nan evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.\n\nWhat is behind it?\n--Space, plenty of empty space.\n\nAnd who is talking now?\n--A man asleep under his hat.\n\nWhat happens when he wakes up?\n--He’ll go into a barbershop.\nThey’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,\nTo make him look like everyone else.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-morning": { - "title": "“This Morning”", - "body": "Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.\nI’m just sitting here mulling over\nWhat to do this dark, overcast day?\nIt was a night of the radio turned down low,\nFitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.\nI woke up lovesick and confused.\nI thought I heard Estella in the garden singing\nAnd some bird answering her,\nBut it was the rain. Dark tree tops swaying\nAnd whispering. “Come to me my desire,”\nI said. And she came to me by and by,\nHer breath smelling of mint, her tongue\nWetting my cheek, and then she vanished.\nSlowly day came, a gray streak of daylight\nTo bathe my hands and face in.\nHours passed, and then you crawled\nUnder the door, and stopped before me.\nYou visit the same tailors the mourners do,\nMr. Ant. I like the silence between us,\nThe quiet--that holy state even the rain\nKnows about. Listen to her begin to fall,\nAs if with eyes closed,\nMuting each drop in her wild-beating heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-the-white-had-to-say": { - "title": "“What The White Had To Say”", - "body": "For how could anything white be distinct\nfrom or divided from whiteness?\nMeister Eckhart\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has gone through everyone already,\nI thought of you long before you thought of me.\nEach one of you still keeps a blood-stained handkerchief\nIn which to swaddle me, but it stays empty\nAnd even the wind won’t remain in it long.\nCleverly you’ve invented name after name for me,\nMixed the riddles, garbled the proverbs,\nShook you loaded dice in a tin cup,\nBut I do not answer back even to your curses,\nFor I am nearer to you than your breath.\nOne sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof.\nA spoon brings me through the window at dawn.\nA plate shows me off to the four walls\nWhile with my tail I swing at the flies.\nBut there’s no tail and the flies are your thoughts.\nSteadily, patiently I life your arms.\nI arrange them in the posture of someone drowning,\nAnd yet the sea in which you are sinking,\nAnd even this night above it, is myself.\n\nBecause I am the bullet\nThat has baptized each one of your senses,\nPoems are made of our lusty wedding nights …\nThe joy of words as they are written.\nThe ear that got up at four in the morning\nTo hear the grass grow inside a word.\nStill, the most beautiful riddle has no answer.\nI am the emptiness that tucks you in like a mockingbird’s nest,\nThe fingernail that scratched on your sleep’s blackboard.\nTake a letter: From cloud to onion.\nSay: There was never any real choice.\nOne gaunt shadowy mother wiped our asses,\nThe same old orphanage taught us loneliness.\nStreet-organ full of blue notes,\nI am the monkey dancing to your grinding--\nAnd still you are afraid-and so,\nIt’s as if we had not budged from the beginning.\nTime slopes. We are falling head over heels\nAt the speed of night. That milk tooth\nYou left under the pillow, it’s grinning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wherein-obscurely": { - "title": "“Wherein Obscurely”", - "body": "On the road with billowing poplars,\nIn a country flat and desolate\nTo the far-off gray horizon, wherein obscurely,\nA man and a woman went on foot,\n\nEach carrying a small suitcase.\nThey were tired and had taken off\nTheir shoes and were walking on\nTheir toes, staring straight ahead.\n\nEvery time a car passed fast,\nAs they’re wont to on such a stretch of\nRoad, empty as the crow flies,\nHow quickly they were gone--\n\nThe cars, I mean, and then the drizzle\nThat brought on the early evening,\nLittle by little, and hardly a light\nAnywhere, and then not even that.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-white-room": { - "title": "“The White Room”", - "body": "The obvious is difficult\nTo prove. Many prefer\nThe hidden. I did, too.\nI listened to the trees.\n\nThey had a secret\nWhich they were about to\nMake known to me,\nAnd then didn’t.\n\nSummer came. Each tree\nOn my street had its own\nScheherazade. My nights\nWere a part of their wild\n\nStorytelling. We were\nEntering dark houses,\nMore and more dark houses\nHushed and abandoned.\n\nThere was someone with eyes closed\nOn the upper floors.\nThe thought of it, and the wonder,\nKept me sleepless.\n\nThe truth is bald and cold,\nSaid the woman\nWho always wore white.\nShe didn’t leave her room much.\n\nThe sun pointed to one or two\nThings that had survived\nThe long night intact,\nThe simplest things,\n\nDifficult in their obviousness.\nThey made no noise.\nIt was the kind of day\nPeople describe as “perfect.”\n\nGods disguising themselves\nAs black hairpins? A hand-mirror?\nA comb with a tooth missing?\nNo! That wasn’t it.\n\nJust things as they are,\nUnblinking, lying mute\nIn that bright light,\nAnd the trees waiting for the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "white": { - "title": "“White”", - "body": "What is that little black thing I see there in the white?\nWalt Whitman\n\nOne\n\nOut of poverty\nTo begin again:\n\nWith the color of the bride\nAnd that of blindness,\n\nTouch what I can\nOf the quick,\n\nSpeak and then wait,\nAs if this light\n\nWill continue to linger\nOn the threshold.\n\nAll that is near,\nI no longer give it a name.\n\nOnce a stone hard of hearing,\nOnce sharpened into a knife …\n\nNow only a chill\nSlipping through.\n\nEnough glow to kneel by and ask\nTo be tied to its tail\n\nWhen it goes marrying\nIts cousins, the stars.\n\nIs it a cloud?\nIf it’s a cloud it will move on.\n\nThe true shape of this thought,\nMigrant, waning.\n\nSomething seeks someone,\nIt bears him a gift\n\nOf himself, a bit\nOf snow to taste,\n\nGlimpse of his own nakedness\nBy which to imagine the face.\n\nOn a late afternoon of snow\nIn a dim badly-aired grocery,\n\nWhere a door has just rung\nWith a short, shrill echo,\n\nA little boy hands the old,\nHard-faced woman\n\nBending low over the counter,\nA shiny nickel for a cupcake.\n\nNow only that shine, now\nOnly that lull abides.\n\nThat your gaze\nBe merciful,\n\nSister, bride\nOf my first hopeless insomnia.\n\nKind nurse, show me\nThe place of salves.\n\nTeach me the song\nThat makes a man rise\n\nHis glass at dusk\nUntil a star dances in it.\n\nWho are you? Are you anybody\nA moonrock would recognize?\n\nThere are words I need.\nThey are not near men.\n\nI went searching.\nIs this a deathmarch?\n\nYou bend me, bend me,\nOh toward what flower!\n\nLittle-known vowel,\nNoose big for us all.\n\nAs strange as a shepherd\nIn the Arctic Circle.\n\nSomeone like Bo-peep.\nAll his sheep are white\n\nAnd he can’t get any sleep\nOver lost sheep.\n\nAnd he’s got a flute\nWhich says Bo-peep,\n\nWhich says Poor boy,\nTake care of your snow-sheep.\n\nto A.S. Hamilton\n\nThen all’s well and white,\nAnd no more than white.\n\nIllinois snowbound.\nIndiana with one bare tree.\n\nMichigan a storm-cloud.\nWisconsin empty of men.\n\nThere’s a trap on the ice\nLaid there centuries ago.\n\nThe bait is still fresh.\nThe metal glitters as the night descends.\n\nWoe, woe, it sings from the bough.\nOur Lady, etc …\n\nYou had me hoodwinked.\nI see your brand new claws.\n\nPraying, what do I betray\nBy desiring your purity?\n\nThere are old men and women,\nAll bandaged up, waiting\n\nAt the spiked, wrought-iron gate\nOf the Great Eye and Ear Infirmery.\n\nWe haven’t gone far …\nFear lives there too.\n\nFive ears of my fingertips\nAgainst the white page.\n\nWhat do you hear?\nWe hear holy nothing\n\nBlindfolding itself.\nIt touched you once, twice,\n\nAnd tore like a stitch\nOut of a new wound.\n\n\nTwo\n\nWhat are you up to son of a gun?\nI roast on my heart’s dark side.\n\nWhat do you use as a skewer sweetheart?\nI use my own crooked backbone.\n\nWhat do you salt yourself with loverboy?\nI grind the words out of my spittle.\n\nAnd how will you know when you’re done chump?\nWhen the half-moons on my fingernails set.\n\nWith what knife will you carve yourself smartass?\nThe one I hide in my tongue’s black boot.\n\nWell, you can’t call me a wrestler\nIf my own dead weight has me pinned down.\n\nWell, you can’t call me a cook\nIf the pot’s got me under its cover.\n\nWell, you can’t call me a king\nif the flies hang their hats in my mouth.\n\nWell, you can’t call me smart,\nWhen the rain’s falling my cup’s in the cupboard.\n\nNor can you call me a saint,\nIf I didn’t err, there wouldn’t be these smudges.\n\nOne has to manage as best as one can.\nThe poppies ate the sunset for supper.\n\nOne has to manage as best as one can.\nWho stole my blue thread, the one\n\nI tied around my pinky to remember?\nOne has to manage as best as one can.\n\nThe flea I was standing on, jumped.\nOne has to manage as best as one can.\n\nI think my head went out for a walk.\nOne has to manage as best as one can.\n\nThis is breath, only breath,\nThink it over midnight!\n\nA fly weighs twice as much.\nThe struck match nods as it passes,\n\nBut when I shout,\nIts true name sticks in my throat.\n\nIt has to be cold\nSo the breath turns white,\n\nAnd then mother, who’s fast enough\nTo write his life on it?\n\nA song in prison\nAnd for prisoners,\n\nMade of what the condemned\nHave hidden from the jailers.\n\nWhite--let me step aside\nSo that the future may see you,\n\nFor when this sheet is blown away,\nWhat else is left\n\nBut to set the food on the table,\nTo cut oneself a slice of bread?\n\nIn an unknown year\nOf an algebraic century,\n\nAn obscure widow\nWrapped in the colors of widowhood,\n\nMet a true-blue orphan\nOn an indeterminate street-corner.\n\nShe offered him\nA tiny sugar cube\n\nIn the hand so wizened\nAll the lines said: fate.\n\nDo you take this line\nStretching to infinity?\n\nI take this chipped tooth\nOn which to cut it in half.\n\nDo you take this circle\nBounded by a single curved line?\n\nI take this breath\nThat it cannot capture.\n\nThen you may kiss the spot\nWhere her bridal train last rustled.\n\nWinter can come now,\nThe earth narrow to a ditch--\n\nAnd the sky with its castles and stone lions\nAbove the empty plains.\n\nThe snow can fall …\nWhat other perennials would you plant,\n\nMy prodigals, my explorers\nTossing and turning in the dark\n\nFor those remote, finely honed bees,\nThe December stars?\n\nHad to get through me elsewhere.\nWoe to bone\n\nThat stood in their way.\nWoe to each morsel of flesh.\n\nWhite ants\nIn a white anthill.\n\nThe rustle of their many feet\nScurrying--tiptoing too.\n\nGravedigger ants.\nVillage-idiot ants.\n\nThis is the last summoning.\nSolitude--as in the beginning.\n\nA zero burped by a bigger zero--\nIt’s an awful licking I got.\n\nAnd fear--that dead letter office.\nAnd doubt--that Chinese shadow play.\n\nDoes anyone still say a prayer\nBefore going to bed?\n\nWhite sleeplessness.\nNo one knows its weight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "louis-simpson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louis Simpson", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2012 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "jamaican+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇯🇲 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Simpson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "jamaican" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "after-midnight": { - "title": "“After Midnight”", - "body": "The dark streets are deserted,\nWith only a drugstore glowing\nSoftly, like a sleeping body;\n\nWith one white, naked bulb\nIn the back, that shines\nOn suicides and abortions.\n\nWho lives in these dark houses?\nI am suddenly aware\nI might live here myself.\n\nThe garage man returns\nAnd puts the change in my hand,\nCounting the singles carefully.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "carentan-o-carentan": { - "title": "“Carentan O Carentan”", - "body": "Trees in the old days used to stand\nAnd shape a shady lane\nWhere lovers wandered hand in hand\nWho came from Carentan.\n\nThis was the shining green canal\nWhere we came two by two\nWalking at combat-interval.\nSuch trees we never knew.\n\nThe day was early June, the ground\nWas soft and bright with dew.\nFar away the guns did sound,\nBut here the sky was blue.\n\nThe sky was blue, but there a smoke\nHung still above the sea\nWhere the ships together spoke\nTo towns we could not see.\n\nCould you have seen us through a glass\nYou would have said a walk\nOf farmers out to turn the grass,\nEach with his own hay-fork.\n\nThe watchers in their leopard suits\nWaited till it was time,\nAnd aimed between the belt and boot\nAnd let the barrel climb.\n\nI must lie down at once, there is\nA hammer at my knee.\nAnd call it death or cowardice,\nDon’t count again on me.\n\nEverything’s all right, Mother,\nEveryone gets the same\nAt one time or another.\nIt’s all in the game.\n\nI never strolled, nor ever shall,\nDown such a leafy lane.\nI never drank in a canal,\nNor ever shall again.\n\nThere is a whistling in the leaves\nAnd it is not the wind,\nThe twigs are falling from the knives\nThat cut men to the ground.\n\nTell me, Master-Sergeant,\nThe way to turn and shoot.\nBut the Sergeant’s silent\nThat taught me how to do it.\n\nO Captain, show us quickly\nOur place upon the map.\nBut the Captain’s sickly\nAnd taking a long nap.\n\nLieutenant, what’s my duty,\nMy place in the platoon?\nHe too’s a sleeping beauty,\nCharmed by that strange tune.\n\nCarentan O Carentan\nBefore we met with you\nWe never yet had lost a man\nOr known what death could do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "from-the-laurel-tree": { - "title": "From “The Laurel Tree”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nIn the clear light that confuses everything\nOnly you, dark laurel,\nShadow my house,\n\nLifting your arms in the anguish\nOf nature at the stake.\nAnd at night, quivering with tears,\n\nYou are like the tree called Tasso’s.\nCrippled, and hooped with iron,\nIt stands on Peter’s hill.\n\nWhen the lovers prop their bicycles\nAnd sit on the high benches\nThat look across to eternity,\n\nThat tree makes their own torsion\nSeem natural. And so, they’re comforted.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nOne of the local philosophers …\nHe says, “In California\nWe have the old anarchist tradition.”\n\nWhat can he mean? Is there an anarchist tradition?\nAnd why would an anarchist want one?\nO California,\n\nIs there a tree without opinions?\nCome, let me clasp you!\nLet me feel the idea breathing.\n\nI too cry O for a life of sensations\nRather than thoughts--\n“The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall.”\n\nLike the girls in our neighborhood,\nThey’re beautiful and silent.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nAs I was digging in the back yard\nI thought of a man in China.\nA lifetime, it seemed, we gazed at each other.\n\nI could see and hear his heartbeats\nLike a spade hurling clods.\nHe pointed behind him, and I saw\n\nThat the hills were covered with armed men,\nAnd they were all on the other side\nOf the life that I held dear.\n\nHe said, “We are as various\nAs the twigs of a tree,\nBut now the tree moves as one man.\n\nIt walks. And the earth trembles\nWhen a race of slaves is leaving.”\n\n\n# 4.\n\nI said, “Yet, all these people\nWill fall down as one man\nWhen the entrails of a bomb are breathing.\n\nWhen we came down from Chosin\nCarrying the guns in dainty snow-wear\nAnd all the dead we had to,\n\nIt was a time of forgetfulness,\nLike a plucked string.\nIt was a river of darkness.\n\nWas it not so on your side, when you came\nTo the sea that was covered with ships?\nLet us speak to each other,\n\nLet the word rise, making dark strokes in the air.\nThat bird flies over the heads of the armed men.”\n\n\n# 5.\n\nOne part of the tree grows outward.\nThe other I saw when, with a light,\nI explored the cellar--shattering roots.\n\nThey had broken through the wall,\nAs though there were something in my rubbish\nThat life would have at last.\n\nI must be patient with shapes\nOf automobile fenders and ketchup bottles.\nThese things are the beginning\n\nOf things not visible to the naked eye.\nIt was so in the time of Tobit--\nThe dish glowed when the angel held it.\n\nIt is so that spiritual messengers\nDeliver their meaning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "things": { - "title": "“Things”", - "body": "A man stood in the laurel tree\nAdjusting his hands and feet to the boughs.\nHe said, “Today I was breaking stones\nOn a mountain road in Asia,\n\nWhen suddenly I had a vision\nOf mankind, like grass and flowers,\nThe same over all the earth.\nWe forgave each other; we gave ourselves\nWholly over to words.\nAnd straightway I was released\nAnd sprang through an open gate.”\n\nI said, “Into a meadow?”\n\nHe said, “I am impervious to irony.\nI thank you for the word …\nI am standing in a sunlit meadow.\nKnow that everything your senses reject\nSprings up in the spiritual world.”\n\nI said, “Our scientists have another opinion.\nThey say, you are merely phenomena.”\n\nHe said, “Over here they will be angels\nSinging, Holy holy be His Name!\nAnd also, it works in reverse.\nThings which to us in the pure state are mysterious,\nAre your simplest articles of household use--\nA chair, a dish, and meaner even than these,\nThe very latest inventions.\nMachines are the animals of the Americans--\nTell me about machines.”\n\nI said, “I have suspected\nThe Mixmaster knows more than I do,\nThe air conditioner is the better poet.\nMy right front tire is as bald as Odysseus--\nHow much it must have suffered!\nThen, as things have a third substance\nWhich is obscure to both our senses,\nLet there be a perpetual coming and going\nBetween your house and mine.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "edith-sitwell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edith Sitwell", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Sitwell", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "at-the-fair": { - "title": "“At the Fair”", - "body": "# I. _Springing Jack_\n\nGreen wooden leaves clap light away,\nSeverely practical, as they\n\nShelter the children candy-pale,\nThe chestnut-candles flicker, fail …\n\nThe showman’s face is cubed clear as\nThe shapes reflected in a glass\n\nOf water--(glog, glut, a ghost’s speech\nFumbling for space from each to each).\n\nThe fusty showman fumbles, must\nFit in a particle of dust\n\nThe universe, for fear it gain\nIts freedom from my cube of brain.\n\nYet dust bears seeds that grow to grace\nBehind my crude-striped wooden face\n\nAs I, a puppet tinsel-pink\nLeap on my springs, learn how to think--\n\nTill like the trembling golden stalk\nOf some long-petalled star, I walk\n\nThrough the dark heavens, and the dew\nFalls on my eyes and sense thrills through.\n\n\n# II. _The Ape Watches “Aunt Sally”_\n\nThe apples are an angel’s meat;\nThe shining dark leaves make clear sweet\n\nThe juice; green wooden fruits alway\nFall on these flowers as white as day--\n\n(Clear angel-face on hairy stalk:\nSoul grown from flesh, an ape’s young talk!)\n\nAnd in this green and lovely ground\nThe Fair, world-like, turns round and round\n\nAnd bumpkins throw their pence to shed\nAunt Sally’s wooden clear-striped head.--\n\nI do not care if men should throw\nRound sun and moon to make me go--\n\nAs bright as gold and silver pence …\nThey cannot drive their black shade hence!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "bells-of-gray-crystal": { - "title": "“Bells of Gray Crystal”", - "body": "Bells of gray crystal\nBreak on each bough--\nThe swans’ breath will mist all\nThe cold airs now.\nLike tall pagodas\nTwo people go,\nTrail their long codas\nOf talk through the snow.\nLonely are these\nAnd lonely and I …\nThe clouds, gray Chinese geese\nSleek through the sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "by-candlelight": { - "title": "“By Candlelight”", - "body": "Houses red as flower of bean,\nFlickering leaves and shadows lean!\nPantalone, like a parrot,\nSat and grumbled in the garret--\nSat and growled and grumbled till\nMoon upon the window-sill\nLike a red geranium\nScented his bald cranium.\nSaid Brighella, meaning well:\n“Pack your box and--go to Hell!\nHeat will cure your rheumatism!” …\nSilence crowned this optimism--\nNot a sound and not a wail:\nBut the fire (lush leafy vales)\nWatched the angry feathers fly.\nPantalone ’gan to cry--\nCould not, would not, pack his box!\nShadows (curtseying hens and cocks)\nPecking in the attic gloom\nTried to smother his tail-plume …\nTill a cockscomb candle-flame\nCrowing loudly, died: Dawn came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "by-the-lake": { - "title": "“By the Lake”", - "body": "Across the flat and the pastel snow\nTwo people go … “And do you remember\nWhen last we wandered this shore?” … “Ah no!\nFor it is cold-hearted December.”\n“Dead, the leaves that like asses’s ears hung on the trees\nWhen last we wandered and squandered joy here;\nNow Midas your husband will listen for these\nWhispers--these tears for joy’s bier.”\nAnd as they walk, they seem tall pagodas;\nAnd all the ropes let down from the cloud\nRing the hard cold bell-buds upon the trees--codas\nOf overtones, ecstasies, grown for love’s shroud", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "came-the-great-popinjay": { - "title": "“Came the Great Popinjay”", - "body": "Came the great Popinjay\nSmelling his nosegay:\nIn cages like grots\nThe birds sang gavottes.\n“Herodiade’s flea\nWas named sweet Amanda,\nShe danced like a lady\nFrom here to Uganda.\nOh, what a dance was there!\nLong-haired, the candle\nSalome-like tossed her hair\nTo a dance tune by Handel.” …\nDance they still? Then came\nCourtier Death,\nBlew out the candle flame\nWith civet breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dancers": { - "title": "“The Dancers”", - "body": "The floors are slippery with blood:\nThe world gyrates too. God is good\nThat while His wind blows out the light\nFor those who hourly die for is--\nWe still can dance each night.\n\nThe music has grown numb with death--\nBut we will suck their dying breath,\nThe whispered name they breathed to chance,\nTo swell our music, make it loud\nThat we may dance,--may dance.\n\nWe are the dull blind carrion-fly\nThat dance and batten. Though God die\nMad from the horror of the light--\nThe light is mad, too, flecked with blood,--\nWe dance, we dance, each night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eventail": { - "title": "“Eventail”", - "body": "Lovely Semiramis\nCloses her slanting eyes:\nDead is she long ago.\nFrom her fan, sliding slow,\nParrot-bright fire’s feathers,\nGilded as June weathers,\nPlumes bright and shrill as grass\nTwinkle down; as they pass\nThrough the green glooms in Hell\nFruits with a tuneful smell,\nGrapes like an emerald rain,\nWhere the full moon has lain,\nGreengages bright as grass,\nMelons as cold as glass,\nPiled on each gilded booth,\nFeel their cheeks growing smooth.\nApes in plumed head-dresses\nWhence the bright heat hisses,--\nNubian faces, sly\nPursing mouth, slanting eye,\nFeel the Arabian\nWinds floating from the fan.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "four-in-the-morning": { - "title": "“Four in the Morning”", - "body": "Cried the navy-blue ghost of Mr. Belaker\nThe allegro Negro cocktail-shaker,\n“Why did the cock crow, why am I lost,\nDown the endless road to Infinity toss’d?\nThe tropical leaves are whispering white\nAs water; I race the wind in my flight.\nThe white lace houses are carried away\nBy the tide; far out they float and sway.\nWhite is the nursemaid on the parade.\nIs she real, as she flirts with me unafraid?\nI raced through the leaves as white as water …\nGhostly, flowed over the nursemaid, caught her,\nLeft her … edging the far-off sand\nIs the foam of the sirens’ Metropole and Grand;\nAnd along the parade I am blown and lost,\nDown the endless road to Infinity toss’d.\nThe guinea-fowl-plumaged houses sleep …\nOn one, I saw the lone grass weep,\nWhere only the whimpering greyhound wind\nChased me, raced me, for what it could find.”\nAnd there in the black and furry boughs\nHow slowly, coldly, old Time grows,\nWhere the pigeons smelling of gingerbread,\nAnd the spectacled owls so deeply read,\nAnd the sweet ring-doves of curded milk\nWatch the Infanta’s gown of silk\nIn the ghost-room tall where the governante\nGesticulates lente and walks andante.\n“Madam, Princesses must be obedient;\nFor a medicine now becomes expedient--\nOf five ingredients--a diapente,”\nSaid the governante, fading lente …\nIn at the window then looked he,\nThe navy-blue ghost of Mr. Belaker,\nThe allegro Negro cocktail-shaker--\nAnd his flattened face like the moon saw she--\nRhinoceros-black (a flowing sea!).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "heart-and-mind": { - "title": "“Heart and Mind”", - "body": "Said the Lion to the Lioness--“When you are amber dust,--\nNo more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun\n(No liking but all lust)--\nRemember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,\nThe rippling of bright muscles like a sea,\nRemember the rose-prickles of bright paws\nThough the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.”\n\nSaid the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time--\n“The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun\nIs greater than all gold, more powerful\nThan the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes\nLike all that grows or leaps … so is the heart\n\nMore powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules\nOr Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:\nBut the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind\nIs but a foolish wind.”\n\nSaid the Sun to the Moon--“When you are but a lonely white crone,\nAnd I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,\nRemember only this of our hopeless love\nThat never till Time is done\nWill the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "still-falls-the-rain": { - "title": "“Still Falls the Rain”", - "body": "Still falls the Rain--\nDark as the world of man, black as our loss--\nBlind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails\nUpon the Cross.\n\nStill falls the Rain\nWith a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat\nIn the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet\n\nOn the Tomb:\nStill falls the Rain\n\nIn the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain\nNurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.\n\nStill falls the Rain\nAt the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.\nChrist that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us--\nOn Dives and on Lazarus:\nUnder the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.\n\nStill falls the Rain--\nStill falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:\nHe bears in His Heart all wounds,--those of the light that died,\nThe last faint spark\nIn the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,\nThe wounds of the baited bear--\nThe blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat\nOn his helpless flesh … the tears of the hunted hare.\n\nStill falls the Rain--\nThen--O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune--\nSee, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:\nIt flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree\n\nDeep to the dying, to the thirsting heart\nThat holds the fires of the world,--dark-smirched with pain\nAs Caesar’s laurel crown.\n\nThen sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man\nWas once a child who among beasts has lain--\n“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "tournez-tournez-bon-chevaux-de-bois": { - "title": "“Tournez, Tournez, Bon Chevaux de Bois”", - "body": "Turn, turn again,\nApe’s blood in each vein!\nThe people that pass\nSeem castles of glass,\nThe old and the good\nGiraffes of the blue wood,\nThe soldier, the nurse,\nWooden-face and a curse,\nAre shadowed with plumage\nLike birds, by the gloomage.\nBlond hair like a clown’s\nThe music floats--drowns\nThe creaking of ropes,\nThe breaking of hopes,\nThe wheezing, the old,\nLike harmoniums scold;\nGo to Babylon, Rome,\nThe brain-cells called home,\nThe grave, new Jerusalem--\nWrinkled Methusalem!\nFrom our floating hair\nDerived the first fair\nAnd queer inspiration\nOf music, the nation\nOf bright-plumed trees\nAnd harpy-shrill breeze …\n\nTurn, turn again,\nApe’s blood in each vein!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-the-goose-girl-said-about-the-dean": { - "title": "“What the Goose-Girl Said about the Dean”", - "body": "Turn again, turn again,\nGoose Clothilda, Goosie Jane.\n\nBright wooden waves of people creak\nFrom houses built with coloured straws\nOf heat; Dean Pasppus’ long nose snores\nHarsh as a hautbois, marshy-weak.\n\nThe wooden waves of people creak\nThrough the fields all water-sleek.\n\nAnd in among the straws of light\nThose bumpkin hautbois-sounds take flight.\n\nWhence he lies snoring like the moon\nClownish-white all afternoon.\n\nBeneath the trees’ arsenical\nSharp woodwind tunes; heretical--\n\nBlown like the wind’s mane\n(Creaking woodenly again).\n\nHis wandering thoughts escape like geese\nTill he, their gooseherd, sets up chase,\nAnd clouds of wool join the bright race\nFor scattered old simplicities.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-cold-december": { - "title": "“When Cold December”", - "body": "When cold December\nFroze to grisamber\nThe jangling bells on the sweet rose-trees--\nThen fading slow\nAnd furred is the snow\nAs the almond’s sweet husk--\nAnd smelling like musk.\nThe snow amygdaline\nUnder the eglantine\nWhere the bristling stars shine\nLike a gilt porcupine--\nThe snow confesses\nThe little Princesses\nOn their small chioppines\nDance under the orpines.\nSee the casuistries\nOf their slant fluttering eyes--\nGilt as the zodiac\n(Dancing Herodiac).\nOnly the snow slides\nLike gilded myrrh--\nFrom the rose-branches--hides\nRose-roots that stir.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - } - } - }, - "kenneth-slessor": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Kenneth Slessor", - "birth": { - "year": 1901 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1971 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "australian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇦🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Slessor", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "australian" - ], - "n_poems": 25 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-psychologists": { - "title": "“Advice to Psychologists”", - "body": "You spies that pierce the mind with trenches,\nFeasting your eyes through private panes,\nWho, not content with Heavenly stenches,\nInsist on taking up the drains,\nFor you I’ve only two suggestions,\nWho prowl with torches in this Bog--\nSmall good you’ll get from asking questions;\nWalk on your nostrils, like a dog.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "beach-burial": { - "title": "“Beach Burial”", - "body": "Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs\nThe convoys of dead sailors come;\nAt night they sway and wander in the waters far under,\nBut morning rolls them in the foam.\n\nBetween the sob and clubbing of gunfire\nSomeone, it seems, has time for this,\nTo pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows\nAnd tread the sand upon their nakedness;\n\nAnd each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,\nBears the last signature of men,\nWritten with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,\nThe words choke as they begin--\n\n“Unknown seaman”--the ghostly pencil\nWavers and fades, the purple drips,\nThe breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions\nAs blue as drowned men’s lips,\n\nDead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,\nWhether as ememies they fought,\nOr fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,\nEnlisted on the other front.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "a-bushranger": { - "title": "“A Bushranger”", - "body": "Jackey Jackey gallops on a horse like a swallow\nWhere the carbines bark and the blackboys hollo.\nWhen the traps give chase (may the devil take his power!)\nHe can ride ten mile in a quarter of an hour\n\nTake horse and follow, and you’ll hurt no feelings;\nHe can fly down waterfalls and jump through ceilings,\nHe can shoot off hats, for to have a bit of fun,\nWith a bulldog bigger than a buffalo-gun\n\nHoneyed and profound in his conversation\nWhen he bails up Mails on Long Tom Station,\nIn a flyaway coat with a black cravat,\nA snow-white collar and a cabbage-tree hat.\n\nFlowers in his button-hole and pearls in his pocket,\nHe comes like a ghost and he goes like a rocket\nWith a lightfoot heel on a blood-mare’s flank\nAnd a bagful of notes from the Joint Stock Bank\n\nMany pretty ladies he could witch out of marriage,\nThough he prig but a kiss in a bigwig’s carriage;\nFor the cock of an eye or the lift of his reins,\nThey would run barefoot through Patrick’s Plains.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "cannibal-street": { - "title": "“Cannibal Street”", - "body": "“Buy, who’ll buy,” the pedlar sings,\n“Bones of beggars, loins of kings,\nRibs of murder, haunch of hate,\nAnd Beauty’s head on a butcher’s plate!”\nHook by hook, on steaming stalls,\nThe hero hangs, the harlot sprawls;\nFor Helen’s flesh, in such a street,\nIs only a kind of dearer meat.\n“Buy, who’ll buy,” the pedlar begs,\n“Angel-wings and lady-legs,\nTender bits and dainty parts--\nBuy, who’ll buy my skewered hearts?”\nBuy, who’ll buy? The cleavers fall,\nThe dead men creak, the live men call,\nAnd I (God save me) bargained there,\nPaid my pennies and ate my share.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "five-bells": { - "title": "“Five Bells”", - "body": "Time that is moved by little fidget wheels\nIs not my time, the flood that does not flow.\nBetween the double and the single bell\nOf a ship’s hour, between a round of bells\nFrom the dark warship riding there below,\nI have lived many lives, and this one life\nOf Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.\n\nDeep and dissolving verticals of light\nFerry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells\nColdly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water\nPour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats\nIn the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.\n\nWhy do I think of you, dead man, why thieve\nThese profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought\nAnchored in Time? You have gone from earth,\nGone even from the meaning of a name;\nYet something’s there, yet something forms its lips\nAnd hits and cries against the ports of space,\nBeating their sides to make its fury heard.\n\nAre you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face\nIn agonies of speech on speechless panes?\nCry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!\n\nBut I hear nothing, nothing … only bells,\nFive bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.\nYour echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,\nThere’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait--\nNothing except the memory of some bones\nLong shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;\nAnd unimportant things you might have done,\nOr once I thought you did; but you forgot,\nAnd all have now forgotten--looks and words\nAnd slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,\nYour gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales\nOf Irish kings and English perfidy,\nAnd dirtier perfidy of publicans\nGroaning to God from Darlinghurst.\nFive bells.\n\nThen I saw the road, I heard the thunder\nTumble, and felt the talons of the rain\nThe night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,\nSo dark you bore no body, had no face,\nBut a sheer voice that rattled out of air\n(As now you’d cry if I could break the glass),\nA voice that spoke beside me in the bush,\nLoud for a breath or bitten off by wind,\nOf Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,\nAnd blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls\nAre brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls\nAre white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.\nBut all I heard was words that didn’t join\nSo Milton became melons, melons girls,\nAnd fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,\nAnd in each tree an Ear was bending down,\nOr something that had just run, gone behind the grass,\nWhen blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,\nThe naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,\nKnifing the dark with deathly photographs.\nThere’s not so many with so poor a purse\nOr fierce a need, must fare by night like that,\nFive miles in darkness on a country track,\nBut when you do, that’s what you think.\nFive bells.\n\nIn Melbourne, your appetite had gone,\nYour angers too; they had been leeched away\nBy the soft archery of summer rains\nAnd the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp\nThat stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,\nAnd showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,\nThe sodden ectasies of rectitude.\nI thought of what you’d written in faint ink,\nYour journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind\nWith other things you left, all without use,\nAll without meaning now, except a sign\nThat someone had been living who now was dead:\n“At Labassa. Room 6 x 8\nOn top of the tower; because of this, very dark\nAnd cold in winter. Everything has been stowed\nInto this room--500 books all shapes\nAnd colours, dealt across the floor\nAnd over sills and on the laps of chairs;\nGuns, photoes of many differant things\nAnd differant curioes that I obtained …”\n\nIn Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare\nOf penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,\nWe argued about blowing up the world,\nBut you were living backward, so each night\nYou crept a moment closer to the breast,\nAnd they were living, all of them, those frames\nAnd shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,\nAnd most your father, the old man gone blind,\nWith fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,\nThat graveyard mason whose fair monuments\nAnd tablets cut with dreams of piety\nRest on the bosoms of a thousand men\nStaked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment\nAt cargoes they had never thought to bear,\nThese funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.\n\nWhere have you gone? The tide is over you,\nThe turn of midnight water’s over you,\nAs Time is over you, and mystery,\nAnd memory, the flood that does not flow.\nYou have no suburb, like those easier dead\nIn private berths of dissolution laid--\nThe tide goes over, the waves ride over you\nAnd let their shadows down like shining hair,\nBut they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend\nLike lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;\nAnd you are only part of an Idea.\nI felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,\nThe night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,\nAnd the short agony, the longer dream,\nThe Nothing that was neither long nor short;\nBut I was bound, and could not go that way,\nBut I was blind, and could not feel your hand.\nIf I could find an answer, could only find\nYour meaning, or could say why you were here\nWho now are gone, what purpose gave you breath\nOr seized it back, might I not hear your voice?\n\nI looked out my window in the dark\nAt waves with diamond quills and combs of light\nThat arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand\nIn the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,\nAnd ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys\nTossing their fireballs wearily each to each,\nAnd tried to hear your voice, but all I heard\nWas a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal\nOf seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,\nFive bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.\nFive bells.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "five-visions-of-captain-cook": { - "title": "“Five Visions of Captain Cook”", - "body": "# I.\n\nCook was a captain of the Admiralty\nWhen sea-captains had the evil eye,\nOr should have, what with beating krakens off\nAnd casting nativities of ships;\nCook was a captain of the powder-days\nWhen captains, you might have said, if you had been\nFixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side,\nOr gaping at them up companionways,\nWere more like warlocks than a humble man--\nAnd men were humble then who gazed at them,\nPoor horn-eyed sailors, bullied by devils’ fists\nOf wind or water, or the want of both,\nChildlike and trusting, filled with eager trust--\nCook was a captain of the sailing days\nWhen sea-captains were kings like this,\nNot cold executives of company-rules\nCracking their boilers for a dividend\nOr bidding their engineers go wink\nAt bells and telegraphs, so plates would hold\nAnother pound. Those captains drove their ships\nBy their own blood, no laws of schoolbook steam,\nTill yards were sprung, and masts went overboard--\nDaemons in periwigs, doling magic out,\nWho read fair alphabets in stars\nWhere humbler men found but a mess of sparks,\nWho steered their crews by mysteries\nAnd strange, half-dreadful sortilege with books,\nUsed medicines that only gods could know\nThe sense of, but sailors drank\nIn simple faith. That was the captain\nCook was when he came to the Coral Sea\nAnd chose a passage into the dark.\n\nHow many mariners had made that choice\nPaused on the brink of mystery! “Choose now!”\nThe winds roared, blowing home, blowing home,\nOver the Coral Sea. “Choose now!” the trades\nCried once to Tasman, throwing him for choice\nTheir teeth or shoulders, and the Dutchman chose\nThe wind’s way, turning north. “Choose, Bougainville!”\nThe wind cried once, and Bougainville had heard\nThe voice of God, calling him prudently\nOut of the dead lee shore, and chose the north,\nThe wind’s way. So, too, Cook made choice,\nOver the brink, into the devil’s mouth,\nWith four months’ food, and sailors wild with dreams\nOf English beer, the smoking barns of home.\nSo Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout,\nSo men write poems in Australia.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFlowers turned to stone! Not all the botany\nOf Joseph Banks, hung pensive in a porthole,\nCould find the Latin for this loveliness,\nCould put the Barrier Reef in a glass box\nTagged by the horrid Gorgon squint\nOf horticulture. Stone turned to flowers\nIt seemed--you’d snap a crystal twig,\nOne petal even of the water-garden,\nAnd have it dying like a cherry-bough.\nThey’d sailed all day outside a coral hedge,\nAnd half the night. Cook sailed at night,\nLet there be reefs a fathom from the keel\nAnd empty charts. The sailors didn’t ask,\nNor Joseph Banks. Who cared? It was the spell\nOf Cook that lulled them, bade them turn below,\nKick off their sea-boots, puff themselves to sleep,\nThough there were more shoals outside\nThan teeth in a shark’s head. Cook snored loudest himself.\n\nOne day, a morning of light airs and calms,\nThey slid towards a reef that would have knifed\nTheir boards to mash, and murdered every man.\nSo close it sucked them, one wave shook their keel,\nThe next blew past the coral. Three officers,\nIn gilt and buttons, languidly on deck\nPointed their sextants at the sun. One yawned,\nOne held a pencil, one put eye to lens:\nThree very peaceful English mariners\nTaking their sights for longitude.\nI’ve never heard\nOf sailors aching for the longitude\nOf shipwrecks before or since. It was the spell\nOf Cook did this, the phylacteries of Cook.\nMen who ride broomsticks with a mesmerist\nMock the typhoon. So, too, it was with Cook.\n\n\n# III.\n\nTwo chronometers the captain had,\nOne by Arnold that ran like mad,\nOne by Kendal in a walnut case,\nPoor devoted creature with a hangdog face.\n\nArnold always hurried with a crazed click-click\nDancing over Greenwich like a lunatic,\nKendal panted faithfully his watch-dog beat,\nClimbing out of Yesterday with sticky little feet.\n\nArnold choked with appetite to wolf up time,\nMadly round the numerals his hands would climb,\nHis cogs rushed over and his wheels ran miles,\nDragging Captain Cook to the Sandwich Isles.\n\nBut Kendal dawdled in the tombstoned past,\nWith a sentimental prejudice to going fast,\nAnd he thought very often of a haberdasher’s door\nAnd a yellow-haired boy who would knock no more.\n\nAll through the night-time, clock talked to clock,\nIn the captain’s cabin, tock-tock-tock,\nOne ticked fast and one ticked slow,\nAnd Time went over them a hundred years ago.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nSometimes the god would fold his wings\nAnd, stone of Caesars turned to flesh,\nTalk of the most important things\nThat serious-minded midshipmen could wish,\n\nOf plantains, and the lack of rum\nOr spearing sea-cows--things like this\nThat hungry schoolboys, five days dumb,\nIn jolly-boats are wonted to discuss.\n\nWhat midshipman would pause to mourn\nThe sun that beat about his ears,\nOr curse the tide, if he could horn\nHis fists by tugging on those lumbering oars?\n\nLet rum-tanned mariners prefer\nTo hug the weather-side of yards,\n“Cats to catch mice” before they purr,\nThose were the captain’s enigmatic words.\n\nHere, in this jolly-boat they graced,\nWere food and freedom, wind and storm,\nWhile, fowling-piece across his waist,\nCook mapped the coast, with one eye cocked for game.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAfter the candles had gone out, and those\nWho listened had gone out, and a last wave\nOf chimney-haloes caked their smoky rings\nLike fish-scales on the ceiling, a Yellow Sea\nOf swimming circles, the old man,\nOld Captain-in-the-Corner, drank his rum\nWith friendly gestures to four chairs. They stood\nEmpty, still warm from haunches, with rubbed nails\nAnd leather glazed, like aged serving-men\nFeeding a king’s delight, the sticky, drugged\nSweet agony of habitual anecdotes.\nBut these, his chairs, could bear an old man’s tongue,\nSleep when he slept, be flattering when he woke,\nAnd wink to hear the same eternal name\nFrom lips new-dipped in rum.\n\n“Then Captain Cook,\nI heard him, told them they could go\nIf so they chose, but he would get them back,\nDead or alive, he’d have them,”\nThe old man screeched, half-thinking to hear “Cook!\nCook again! Cook! It’s other cooks he’ll need,\nCooks who can bake a dinner out of pence,\nThat’s what he lives on, talks on, half-a-crown\nA day, and sits there full of Cook.\nWho’d do your cooking now, I’d like to ask,\nIf someone didn’t grind her bones away?\nBut that’s the truth, six children and half-a-crown\nA day, and a man gone daft with Cook.”\n\nThat was his wife,\nElizabeth, a noble wife but brisk,\nWho lived in a present full of kitchen-fumes\nAnd had no past. He had not seen her\nFor seven years, being blind, and that of course\nWas why he’d had to strike a deal with chairs,\nNot knowing when those who chafed them had gone to sleep\nOr stolen away. Darkness and empty chairs,\nThis was the port that Alexander Home\nHad come to with his useless cutlass-wounds\nAnd tales of Cook, and half-a-crown a day--\nThis was the creek he’d run his timbers to,\nWhere grateful countrymen repaid his wounds\nAt half-a-crown a day. Too good, too good,\nThis eloquent offering of birdcages\nTo gulls, and Greenwich Hospital to Cook,\nBritannia’s mission to the sea-fowl.\n\nIt was not blindness picked his flesh away,\nNor want of sight made penny-blank the eyes\nOf Captain Home, but that he lived like this\nIn one place, and gazed elsewhere. His body moved\nIn Scotland, but his eyes were dazzle-full\nOf skies and water farther round the world--\nAir soaked with blue, so thick it dripped like snow\nOn spice-tree boughs, and water diamond-green,\nBeaches wind-glittering with crumbs of gilt,\nAnd birds more scarlet than a duchy’s seal\nThat had come whistling long ago, and far\nAway. His body had gone back,\nHere it sat drinking rum in Berwickshire,\nBut not his eyes--they were left floating there\nHalf-round the earth, blinking at beaches milked\nBy suck-mouth tides, foaming with ropes of bubbles\nAnd huge half-moons of surf. Thus it had been\nWhen Cook was carried on a sailor’s back,\nVengeance in a cocked hat, to claim his price,\nA prince in barter for a longboat.\nAnd then the trumpery springs of fate--a stone,\nA musket-shot, a round of gunpowder,\nAnd puzzled animals, killing they knew not what\nOr why, but killing … the surge of goatish flanks\nArmoured in feathers, like cruel birds:\nWild, childish faces, killing; a moment seen,\nMarines with crimson coats and puffs of smoke\nToppling face-down; and a knife of English iron,\nForged aboard ship, that had been changed for pigs,\nGiven back to Cook between the shoulder-blades.\nThere he had dropped, and the old floundering sea,\nThe old, fumbling, witless lover-enemy,\nHad taken his breath, last office of salt water.\n\nCook died. The body of Alexander Home\nFlowed round the world and back again, with eyes\nMarooned already, and came to English coasts,\nThe vague ancestral darknesses of home,\nSeeing them faintly through a glass of gold,\nDim fog-shapes, ghosted like the ribs of trees\nAgainst his blazing waters and blue air.\nBut soon they faded, and there was nothing left,\nOnly the sugar-cane and the wild granaries\nOf sand, and.palm-trees and the flying blood\nOf cardinal-birds; and putting out one hand\nTremulously in the direction of the beach,\nHe felt a chair in Scotland. And sat down.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Trio: A Book of Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - } - } - }, - "fixed-ideas": { - "title": "“Fixed Ideas”", - "body": "Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,\nLike the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,\nDeath’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,\nDry pyramids and racks of iron balls.\nLife is observed, a precipitate of pellets,\nOr grammarians freeze it into spar,\nTheir rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal\nFixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out\nIn alabaster, with horny cartilage\nAnd zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy\nBaked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture,\nBleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers;\nBut the quarries are of more use than this,\nFilled with the rolling of huge granite dice,\nIdeas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church,\nGood men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control …\n\nFrail tinkling rush\nWater-hair streaming\nPrickles and glitters\nCloudy with bristles\nRiver of thought\nSwimming the pebbles--\nUndo, loosen your bubbles!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "in-ac-with-ghosts": { - "title": "“In A/C with Ghosts”", - "body": "You can shuffle and scuffle and scold,\nYou can rattle the knockers and knobs,\nOr batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold\nTill the Deputy-Governor sobs.\nYou can sneak up a suitable plank\nIn a frantic endeavor to see--\nBut what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank\nWhen the Big Door bangs at Three?\n\nListen in the cellars, listen in the vaults,\nCan’t you hear the tellers turning somersaults?\nCan’t you hear the spectres of inspectors and directors\nDancing with the phantoms in a Dead Man’s Waltz?\nSome are ghosts of nabobs, poverty and stray bobs,\nMidas and his mistress, Mammon and his wife;\nOther ones are sentries, guarding double entries,\nLong-forgotten, double-dealing, troubled double-life.\nDown among the pass-books, money lent and spent,\nDown among the forests of the Four Per Cent.,\nWhere the ledgers meet and moulder, and the overdrafts grow older,\nAnd the phantoms shrug a shoulder when you ask ’em for the rent.\n\nThey are bogies of Grandfather’s cheques,\nThey are spectres of buried accounts,\nThey are crinoline sweethearts with pearls on their necks,\nDemanding enormous amounts.\nThey are payment for suppers and flowers,\nFor diamonds to banish a tear,\nFor sweet, pretty ladies in opulent hours …\nAnd tombstones … and bailiffs … and beer …\n\nDown in the bowels of the bank, the ledgers lie rank upon rank,\nThe debts of the ages come out of their pages,\nThe bones of old loans creak and clank--\nOh, if you could peep through the door\nTo day at a Quarter Past Four,\nYou’d find all the ghosts at their usual posts,\nAnd you wouldn’t sign cheques any more!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "an-inscription-for-dog-river": { - "title": "“An Inscription for Dog River”", - "body": "Our general was the greatest and bravest of generals.\nFor his deeds, look around you on this coast--\nHere is his name cut next to Ashur-Bani-Pal’s,\nNebuchadnezzar’s and the Roman host;\nAnd we, though our identities have been lost,\nLacking the validity of stone or metal,\nWe, too, are part of his memorial,\nHaving been put in for the cost,\nHaving bestowed on him all we had to give\nIn battles few can recollect,\nOur strength, obedience and endurance,\nOur wits, our bodies, our existence,\nEven our descendants’ right to live--\nHaving given him everything, in fact,\nExcept respect.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "last-trams": { - "title": "“Last Trams”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThat street washed with violet\nWrites like a tablet\nOf living here; that pavement\nIs the metal embodiment\nOf living here; those terraces\nFilled with dumb presences\nLobbed over mattresses,\nLusts and repentances,\nArdours and solaces,\nPassions and hatreds\nAnd love in brass bedsteads …\nLost now in emptiness\nDeep now in darkness\nNothing but nakedness,\nRails like a ribbon\nAnd sickness of carbon\nDying in distances.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThen, from the skeletons of trams,\nGazing at lighted rooms, you’ll find\nThe black and Röntgen diagrams\nOf window-plants across the blind\nThat print their knuckleduster sticks,\nTheir buds of gum, against the light\nLike negatives of candlesticks\nWhose wicks are lit by fluorite;\nAnd shapes look out, or bodies pass,\nBetween the darkness and the flare,\nBetween the curtain and the glass,\nOf men and women moving there.\nSo through the moment’s needle-eye,\nLike phantoms in the window-chink,\nTheir faces brush you as they fly,\nFixed in the shutters of a blink;\nBut whose they are, intent on what,\nWho knows? They rattle into void,\nStars of a film without a plot,\nSnippings of idiot celluloid.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "mangroves": { - "title": "“Mangroves”", - "body": "These black bush-waters, heavy with crusted boughs\nLike plumes above dead captains, wake the mind …\nUncounted kissing, unremembered vows,\nNights long forgotten, moons too dark to find,\nOr stars too cold … all quick things that have fled\nWhilst these old bubbles uprise in older stone,\nReturn like pale dead faces of children dead,\nStaring unfelt through doors for ever unknown.\n\nO silent ones that drink these timeless pools,\nEternal brothers, bending so deeply over,\nYour branches tremble above my tears again …\nAnd even my songs are stolen from some old lover\nWho cried beneath your leaves like other fools,\nWhile still they whisper “in vain …\nin vain … in vain …”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "the-nabob": { - "title": "“The Nabob”", - "body": "Coming out of India with ten thousand a year\nExchanged for flesh and temper, a dry Faust\nWhose devil barters with digestion, has he paid dear\nFor dipping his fingers in the Roc’s valley?\n\nWho knows? It’s certain that he owns a rage,\nA face like shark-skin, full of Yellow Jack,\nAnd that unreckoning tyranny of age\nThat calls for turtles’ eggs in Twickenham.\n\nSometimes, by moonlight, in a barge he’ll float\nWhilst hirelings blow their skulking flageolets,\nServed by a Rajah in a golden coat\nWith pigeon-pie … Madeira … and Madeira …\n\nOr in his Bon de Paris with silver frogs\nHe rolls puff-bellied in an equipage,\nElegant chariot, through a gulf of fogs\nTo dine on dolphin-steak with Post-Captains.\n\nWho knows? There are worse things than steak, perhaps,\nWorse things than oyster-sauces and tureens\nAnd worlds of provender like painted maps\nPricked out with ports of claret and pitchcocked eels,\n\nAnd hubbubs of billiard-matches, burnt champagne,\nBeautiful ladies “of the establishment”\nAlways in tempers, or melting out again,\nBailiffs and Burgundy and writs of judgment--\n\nThus to inhabit huge, lugubrious halls\nDamp with the steam of entrees, glazed with smoke,\nRaw drinking, greasy eating, bussing and brawls,\nDrinking and eating and bursting into bed-chambers.\n\nBut, in the end, one says farewell to them;\nAnd if he’d curse to-day--God damn your blood!--\nEven his curses I’d not altogether condemn,\nNot altogether scorn; and if phantoms ate--\n\nHickey, I’d say, sit down, pull up, set to:\nHere’s knife and fork, there’s wine, and there’s a barmaid.\nLet us submerge ourselves in onion-soup,\nAnything but this “damned profession of writing.”", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "new-magic": { - "title": "“New Magic”", - "body": "At last I know--it’s on old ivory jars,\nGlassed with old miniatures and garnered once with musk.\nI’ve seen those eyes like smouldering April stars\nAs carp might see them behind their bubbled skies\nIn pale green fishponds--they’re as green your eyes,\nAs lakes themselves, changed to green stone at dusk.\n\nAt last I know--it’s paned in a crystal hoop\nOn powder-boxes from some dead Italian girl,\nI’ve seen such eyes grow suddenly dark, and droop\nTheir small, pure lids, as if I’d pried too far\nIn finding you snared there on that ivory jar\nBy crusted motes of rose and smoky-pearl.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "the-night-ride": { - "title": "“The Night Ride”", - "body": "Gas flaring on the yellow platform; voices running up and down;\nMilk-tins in cold dented silver; half-awake I stare,\nPull up the blind, blink out--all sounds are drugged;\nthe slow blowing of passengers asleep;\nengines yawning; water in heavy drips;\nBlack, sinister travellers, lumbering up the station,\none moment in the window, hooked over bags;\nhurrying, unknown faces--boxes with strange labels--\nall groping clumsily to mysterious ends,\nout of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates,\ntheir echoes die. The dark train shakes and plunges;\nbells cry out, the night-ride starts again.\nSoon I shall look out into nothing but blackness,\npale, windy fields, the old roar and knock of the rails\nmelts in dull fury. Pull down the blind. Sleep. Sleep\nNothing but grey, rushing rivers of bush outside.\nGaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "north-country": { - "title": "“North Country”", - "body": "North Country, filled with gesturing wood,\nWith trees that fence, like archers’ volleys,\nThe flanks of hidden valleys\nWhere nothing’s left to hide\n\nBut verticals and perpendiculars,\nLike rain gone wooden, fixed in falling,\nOr fingers blindly feeling\nFor what nobody cares;\n\nOr trunks of pewter, bangled by greedy death,\nStuck with black staghorns, quietly sucking,\nAnd trees whose boughs go seeking,\nAnd tress like broken teeth\n\nWith smoky antlers broken in the sky;\nOr trunks that lie grotesquely rigid,\nLike bodies blank and wretched\nAfter a fool’s battue,\n\nAs if they’ve secret ways of dying here\nAnd secret places for their anguish\nWhen boughs at last relinquish\nTheir clench of blowing air\n\nBut this gaunt country, filled with mills and saws,\nWith butter-works and railway-stations\nAnd public institutions,\nAnd scornful rumps of cows,\n\nNorth Country, filled with gesturing wood--\nTimber’s the end it gives to branches,\nCut off in cubic inches,\nDripping red with blood.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "out-of-time": { - "title": "“Out of Time”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI saw Time flowing like a hundred yachts\nThat fly behind the daylight, foxed with air;\nOr piercing, like the quince-bright, bitter slats\nOf sun gone thrusting under Harbour’s hair.\nSo Time, the wave, enfolds me in its bed,\nOr Time, the bony knife, it runs me through.\n“Skulker, take heart,” I thought my own heart said.\n“The flood, the blade go by--Time flows, not you!”\n\nVilely, continuously, stupidly,\nTime takes me, drills me, drives through bone and vein,\nSo water bends the seaweeds in the sea,\nThe tide goes over, but the weeds remain.\n\nTime, you must cry farewell, take up the track,\nAnd leave this lovely moment at your back!\n\n\n# II.\n\nTime leaves the lovely moment at his back,\nEager to quench and ripen, kiss or kill;\nTo-morrow begs him, breathless for his lack,\nOr beauty dead entreats him to be still.\nHis fate pursues him; he must open doors,\nOr close them, for that pale and faceless host\nWithout a flag, whose agony implores\nBirth to be flesh, or funeral, to be ghost.\n\nOut of all reckoning, out of dark and light,\nOver the edges of dead Nows and Heres,\nBlindly and softly, as a mistress might,\nHe keeps appointments with a million years.\n\nI and the moment laugh, and let him go,\nLeaning against his golden undertow.\n\n\n# III.\n\nLeaning against the golden undertow,\nBackward, I saw the birds begin to climb\nwith bodies hailstone-clear, and shadows flow,\nFixed in a sweet meniscus, out of Time,\nOut of the torrent, like the fainter land\nLensed in a bubble’s ghostly camera,\nThe lighted beach, the sharp and china sand\nGlitters and waters and peninsula--\n\nThe moment’s world it was; and I was part,\nFleshless and ageless, changeless and made free.\n“Fool, would you leave this country?” cried my heart,\nBut I was taken by the suck of sea.\n\nThe gulls go down, the body dies and rots,\nAnd Time flows past them like a hundred yachts.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "pan-at-lane-cove": { - "title": "“Pan at Lane Cove”", - "body": "Scaly with poison, bright with flame,\nGreat fungi steam beside the gate,\nRun tentacles through flagstone cracks,\nOr claw beyond, where meditate\nWet poplars on a pitchy lawn.\nSome seignior of colonial fame\nHas planted here a stone-cut faun\nWhose flute juts like a frozen flame.\nO lonely faun, what songs are these\nFor skies where no Immortals hide?\nWhy finger in this dour abode\nThose Pan-pipes girdled at your side?\nYour Gods, and Hellas too, have passed,\nForsaken are the Cyclades,\nAnd surely, faun, you are the last\nTo pipe such ancient songs as these.\nYet, blow your stone-lipped flute and blow\nThose red-and-silver pipes of Pan.\nCold stars are bubbling round the moon,\nWhich, like some golden Indiaman\nDisgorged by waterspouts and blown\nThrough heaven’s archipelago,\nDrives orange bows by clouds of stone …\nBlow, blow your flute, you stone boy, blow!\nAnd, Chiron, pipe your centaurs out,\nThe night has looped a smoky scarf\nRound campanili in the town,\nAnd thrown a cloak about Clontarf.\nNow earth is ripe for Pan again,\nBarbaric ways and Paynim rout,\nAnd revels of old Samian men.\nO Chiron, pipe your centaurs out.\nThis garden by the dark Lane Cove\nShall spark before thy music dies\nWith silver sandals; all thy gods\nBe conjured from Ionian skies.\nThose poplars in a fluting-trice\nThey’ll charm into an olive-grove\nAnd dance a while in Paradise\nLike men of fire above Lane Cove.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "polarities": { - "title": "“Polarities”", - "body": "Sometimes she is like sherry, like the sun through a vessel of glass,\nLike light through an oriel window in a room of yellow wood;\nSometimes she is the colour of lions, of sand in the fire of noon,\nSometimes as bruised with shadows as the afternoon.\nSometimes she moves like rivers, sometimes like trees;\nOr tranced and fixed like South Pole silences;\nSometimes she is beauty, sometimes fury, sometimes neither,\nSometimes nothing, drained of meaning, null as water.\nSometimes, when she makes pea-soup or plays me Schumann,\nI love her one way; sometimes I love her another\nMore disturbing way when she opens her mouth in the dark;\nSometimes I like her with camellias, sometimes with a parsley-stalk,\nSometimes I like her swimming in a mirror on the wall;\nSometimes I don’t like her at all.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "snowdrops": { - "title": "“Snowdrops”", - "body": "The Snowdrop Girl in fields of snowdrops walks,\nWhiter than foam, deeper than waters flowing,\nFlakes of wild milk gone blowing,\nSnowing on cloudy stalks.\nThe Snowdrop Girl goes picking flowers of snow,\nBlossoms of darkness bubbling into dreams,\nIn a strange country, by the shadowy streams\nWhere the cruel petals of the Coke-tree grow.\n\nFrom the smoke and the fume of the backyard room,\nWhere poverty sits and gloats,\nOn runaway feet from a dirty street\nTo a field of snow she floats;\nAnd tickets to Hell have a curious smell\nAnd a dangerous crystal whiff,\nWhere men hawk Death in a snowdrops’s breath\nAt a couple of shillings a sniff.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "context": { - "month": "february" - } - } - }, - "south-country": { - "title": "“South Country”", - "body": "After the whey-faced anonymity\nOf river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,\nAfter the rubbing and the hit of brush,\nYou come to the South Country\n\nAs if the argument of trees were done,\nThe doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,\nAll ended by these clear and gliding planes\nLike an abrupt solution.\n\nAnd over the flat earth of empty farms\nThe monstrous continent of air floats back\nColoured with rotting sunlight and the black,\nBruised flesh of thunderstorms:\n\nAir arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,\nDitches and hutches, with a drench of light,\nSo huge, from such infinities of height,\nYou walk on the sky’s beach\n\nWhile even the dwindled hills are small and bare,\nAs if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,\nSomething below pushed up a knob of skull,\nFeeling its way to air.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "stars": { - "title": "“Stars”", - "body": "“These are the floating berries of the night,\nThey drop their harvest in dark alleys down,\nSoftly far down on groves of Venus, or on a little town\nForgotten at the world’s edge--and O, their light\nUnlocks all closed things, eyes and mouths, and drifts\nQuietly over kisses in a golden rain,\nDrowning their flight, till suddenly the Cyprian lifts\nHer small, white face to the moon, then hides again.”\n\n“They are the warm candles of beauty, hung in blessing on high,\nPoised like bright comrades on boughs of night above:\nThey are the link-boys of Queen Venus, running out of the sky,\nSpilling their friendly radiance on all her ways of love.”\n\n“Should the girl’s eyes be lit with swimming fire,\nO do not kiss it away, it is a star, a star!”\n\nSo cried the passionate poet to his great, romantic guitar.\nBut I was beating off the stars, gazing, not rhyming.\nI saw the bottomless, black cups of space\nBetween their clusters, and the planets climbing\nDizzily in sick airs, and desired to hide my face.\nBut I could not escape those tunnels of nothingness,\nThe cracks in the spinning Cross, nor hold my brain\nFrom rushing for ever down that terrible lane,\nInfinity’s trap-door, eternal and merciless.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "a-sunset": { - "title": "“A Sunset”", - "body": "The old Quarry, Sun, with bleeding scales,\nFlaps up the gullies, wets their crystal pebbles,\nFloating with waters of gold; darkness exhales\nBrutishly in the valley; smoke rises in bubbles;\nSuddenly we stop at the meeting of two trails.\n“Do you remember?”\n“But now everything is changed--\nTrees ringed with death, the creek with its bells clanking\nDried like white bone.” Even our voices are estranged.\nDarkness chokes the river; so nearly what I am thinking\nIt echoes, the whole thing might have been arranged!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "talbingo": { - "title": "“Talbingo”", - "body": "“Talbingo River”--as one says of bones:\n“Captain” or “Commodore” that smelt gunpowder\nIn old engagements no one quite believes\nOr understands. Talbingo had its blood\nAs they did, ran with waters huge and clear\nLopping down mountains,\nTurning crags to banks.\n\nNow it’s a sort of aching valley,\nBasalt shaggy with scales,\nA funnel of tobacco-coloured clay,\nSmoulders of puffed earth\nAnd pebbles and shell-bodied flies\nAnd water thickening to stone in pocks.\n\nThat’s what we’re like out here,\nBeds of dried-up passions.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "wild-grapes": { - "title": "“Wild Grapes”", - "body": "The old orchard, full of smoking air,\nFull of sour marsh and broken boughs, is there,\nBut kept no more by vanished Mulligans,\nOr Hartigans, long drowned in earth themselves,\nWho gave this bitter fruit their care.\n\nHere’s where the cherries grew that birds forgot,\nAnd apples bright as dogstars; now there is not\nAn apple or a cherry; only grapes,\nBut wild ones, Isabella grapes they’re called,\nSmall, pointed, black, like boughs of musket-shot.\n\nEating their flesh, half-savage with black fur.\nAcid and gipsy-sweet, I thought of her,\nIsabella, the dead girl, who has lingered on\nDefiantly when all have gone away,\nIn an old orchard where swallows never stir.\n\nIsabella grapes, outlaws of a strange bough,\nThat in their harsh sweetness remind me somehow\nOf dark hair swinging and silver pins,\nA girl half-fierce, half-melting, as these grapes,\nKissed here--or killed here--but who remembers now?", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - } - } - }, - "winter-dawn": { - "title": "“Winter Dawn”", - "body": "At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane\nA port to see--water breathing in the air,\nBoughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain,\nFloats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere,\nWhite and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone,\nDull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone,\nOne bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam,\nQuietly over the roof-tops--another window\nTouched with a crystal fire in the sun’s gullies,\nOne lonely star of the morning, where no stars gleam.\n\nFar away on the rim of this great misty cup,\nThe sun gilds the dead suburbs as he rises up,\nDiamonds the wind-cocks, makes glitter the crusted spikes\nOn moss-drowned gables. Now the tiles drip scarlet-wet,\nSwim like birds’ paving-stones, and sunlight strikes\nTheir watery mirrors with a moister rivulet,\nAcid and cold. Here lie those mummied Kings,\nMen sleeping in houses, embalmed in stony coffins,\nTill the Last Trumpet calls their galleries up,\nAnd the suburbs rise with distant murmurings.\n\nO buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there,\nI stare above your mounds of stone, lean down,\nMarooned and lonely in this bitter air,\nAnd in one moment deny your frozen town,\nRenounce your bodies--earth falls in clouds away,\nStones lose their meaning, substance is lost in clay,\nRoofs fade, and that small smoking forgotten heap,\nThe city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper,\nEmpty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended,\nA broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep.\n\nAnd the least crystal weed, shaken with frost,\nThe furred herbs of silver, the daisies round-eyed and tart,\nPainted in antic china, the smallest night-flower tossed\nLike a bright penny on the lawn, stirs more my heart,\nStrikes deeper this morning air, than mortal towers\nDried to a common blindness, fainter than flowers,\nFordone, extinguished, as the vapours break,\nAnd dead in the dawn. O Sun that kills with life,\nAnd brings to breath all silent things--O Dawn,\nWaken me with old earth, keep me awake!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Five Bells: XX Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "boris-slutsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Boris Slutsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1986 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "ukrainian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇺🇦", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Slutsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "ukrainian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "real-people-have-children": { - "title": "“Real people have children …”", - "body": "Real people have children. We only have cacti\nstanding there speechless and cold.\nThe intelligentsia, where is it rolling away to?\nLearned people, where are your sons?\n\nI have lived in an environment where there are many fewer\nnieces than aunts and uncles.\nAnd not a single Flemish painter\nwould daub on big breasts if he painted her.\n\nWhat for? Because there came a time when she\ngot finicky about wiping away infant dribblings\nher nipples have dried up forever,\nher eyes and cheeks have started getting old.\n\nThe more books, the fewer kids,\nthe more ideas, the fewer children.\nThe more wives, tastefully dressed,\nthe emptier it gets in these well-lit apartments.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Gerald S. Smith" - } - } - } - }, - "christopher-smart": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Christopher Smart", - "birth": { - "year": 1722 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1771 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Smart", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "from-jubilate-agno": { - "title": "From “Jubilate Agno”", - "body": "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.\nFor he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.\nFor at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.\nFor this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.\nFor then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.\nFor he rolls upon prank to work it in.\nFor having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.\nFor this he performs in ten degrees.\nFor first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.\nFor secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.\nFor thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.\nFor fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.\nFor fifthly he washes himself.\nFor sixthly he rolls upon wash.\nFor seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.\nFor eighthly he rubs himself against a post.\nFor ninthly he looks up for his instructions.\nFor tenthly he goes in quest of food.\nFor having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.\nFor if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.\nFor when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.\nFor one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.\nFor when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.\nFor he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.\nFor he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.\nFor he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.\nFor in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.\nFor he is of the tribe of Tiger.\nFor the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.\nFor he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.\nFor he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.\nFor he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.\nFor he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.\nFor every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.\nFor the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.\nFor every family had one cat at least in the bag.\nFor the English Cats are the best in Europe.\nFor he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.\nFor the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.\nFor he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.\nFor he is tenacious of his point.\nFor he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.\nFor he knows that God is his Saviour.\nFor there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.\nFor there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.\nFor he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.\nFor I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.\nFor the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.\nFor his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.\nFor he is docile and can learn certain things.\nFor he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.\nFor he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.\nFor he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.\nFor he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.\nFor he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.\nFor he can catch the cork and toss it again.\nFor he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.\nFor the former is afraid of detection.\nFor the latter refuses the charge.\nFor he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.\nFor he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.\nFor he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.\nFor he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.\nFor his ears are so acute that they sting again.\nFor from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.\nFor by stroking of him I have found out electricity.\nFor I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.\nFor the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.\nFor God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.\nFor, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.\nFor his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.\nFor he can tread to all the measures upon the music.\nFor he can swim for life.\nFor he can creep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "psalm": { - "title": "“Psalm”", - "body": "The shepherd Christ from heav’n arriv’d,\nMy flesh and spirit feeds;\nI shall not therefore be depriv’d\nOf all my nature needs.\n\nAs slop’d against the glist’ning beam\nThe velvet verdure swells,\nHe keeps, and leads me by the stream\nWhere consolation dwells.\n\nMy soul He shall from sin restore,\nAnd her free pow’rs awake,\nIn paths of heav’nly truth to soar,\nFor love and mercy’s sake.\n\nYea, tho’ I walk death’s gloomy vale,\nThe dread I shall disdain;\nFor Thou art with me, lest I fail,\nTo check me and sustain.\n\nThou shalt my plenteous board appoint\nBefore the braving foe;\nThine oil and wine my head anoint,\nAnd make my goblet flow.\n\nBut great still Thy love and grace\nShall all my life attend;\nAnd in Thine hallow’d dwelling place\nMy knees shall ever bend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "a-song-to-david": { - "title": "“A Song to David”", - "body": "Sublime--invention ever young,\nOf vast conception, tow’ring tongue\n To God th’ eternal theme;\nNotes from yon exaltations caught,\nUnrivall’d royalty of thought\n O’er meaner strains supreme.\n\nHis muse, bright angel of his verse,\nGives balm for all the thorns that pierce,\n For all the pangs that rage;\nBlest light still gaining on the gloom,\nThe more than Michal of his bloom,\n Th’ Abishag of his age.\n\nHe sang of God--the mighty source\nOf all things--the stupendous force\n On which all strength depends;\nFrom whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,\nAll period, power, and enterprise\n Commences, reigns, and ends.\n\nTell them, I AM, Jehovah said\nTo Moses; while earth heard in dread,\n And, smitten to the heart,\nAt once above, beneath, around,\nAll Nature, without voice or sound,\n Replied, O LORD, THOU ART.\n\nThe world, the clustering spheres, He made;\nThe glorious light, the soothing shade,\n Dale, champaign, grove, and hill;\nThe multitudinous abyss,\nWhere Secrecy remains in bliss,\n And Wisdom hides her skill.\n\nThe pillars of the Lord are seven,\nWhich stand from earth to topmost heaven;\n His Wisdom drew the plan;\nHis Word accomplish’d the design,\nFrom brightest gem to deepest mine;\n From Christ enthroned, to Man.\n\nFor Adoration all the ranks\nOf Angels yield eternal thanks,\n And David in the midst;\nWith God’s good poor, which, last and least\nIn man’s esteem, Thou to Thy feast,\n O blessèd Bridegroom, bidd’st!\n\nFor Adoration, David’s Psalms\nLift up the heart to deeds of alms;\n And he, who kneels and chants,\nPrevails his passions to control,\nFinds meat and medicine to the soul,\n Which for translation pants.\n\nFor Adoration, in the dome\nOf Christ, the sparrows find a home,\n And on His olives perch:\nThe swallow also dwells with thee,\nO man of God’s humility,\n Within his Saviour’s church.\n\nSweet is the dew that falls betimes,\nAnd drops upon the leafy limes;\n Sweet Hermon’s fragrant air:\nSweet is the lily’s silver bell,\nAnd sweet the wakeful tapers’ smell\n That watch for early prayer.\n\nSweet the young nurse, with love intense,\nWhich smiles o’er sleeping innocence;\n Sweet, when the lost arrive:\nSweet the musician’s ardour beats,\nWhile his vague mind’s in quest of sweets,\n The choicest flowers to hive.\n\nStrong is the horse upon his speed;\nStrong in pursuit the rapid glede,\n Which makes at once his game:\nStrong the tall ostrich on the ground;\nStrong through the turbulent profound\n Shoots Xiphias to his aim.\n\nStrong is the lion--like a coal\nHis eyeball,--like a bastion’s mole\n His chest against the foes:\nStrong, the gier-eagle on his sail;\nStrong against tide th’ enormous whale\n Emerges as he goes.\n\nBut stronger still, in earth and air,\nAnd in the sea, the man of prayer,\n And far beneath the tide:\nAnd in the seat to faith assign’d,\nWhere ask is have, where seek is find,\n Where knock is open wide.\n\nPrecious the penitential tear;\nAnd precious is the sigh sincere,\n Acceptable to God:\nAnd precious are the winning flowers,\nIn gladsome Israel’s feast of bowers\n Bound on the hallow’d sod.\n\nGlorious the sun in mid career;\nGlorious th’ assembled fires appear;\n Glorious the comet’s train:\nGlorious the trumpet and alarm;\nGlorious the Almighty’s stretched-out arm;\n Glorious th’ enraptured main:\n\nGlorious the northern lights astream;\nGlorious the song, when God’s the theme;\n Glorious the thunder’s roar:\nGlorious Hosanna from the den;\nGlorious the catholic Amen;\n Glorious the martyr’s gore:\n\nGlorious--more glorious--is the crown\nOf Him that brought salvation down,\n By meekness call’d thy Son:\nThou that stupendous truth believed;--\nAnd now the matchless deed’s achieved,\n Determined, dared, and done!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "clark-ashton-smith": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Clark Ashton Smith", - "birth": { - "year": 1893 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "apologia": { - "title": "“Apologia”", - "body": "O gentlest love, I have not played\nFor you upon the lute of jade;\nNor on that fabulous bassoon\nWrought from the horns of minotaurs,\nAnd set with subtly changing spars\nAnd lucid metals of the moon--\n\nThe thing my childish fingers found\nCast on a god-frequented ground,\nAnd unto whose compelling note\nSprang the brown dryad from her tree,\nAnd palest vampires came to me\nWith limbs more sweet than trodden lote.\n\nI have not made such melodies\nAs call the philtered sorceries:\nBut I will weave, some autumn day,\nA song to make your beauty mine--\nWrought not with mystical design\nAnd chords of passionate dismay.\n\nFor I will tell, with wonted words,\nA tale of two that autumn birds\nHad led beneath oblivious skies,\nWho plucked the wilding asters rare,\nAnd peered from grasses like your hair\nTo distance blue as your blue eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-hashish-eater": { - "title": "“The Hashish-Eater”", - "body": "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;\nI crown me with the million-colored sun\nOf secret worlds incredible, and take\nTheir trailing skies for vestment when I soar,\nThroned on the mounting zenith, and illume\nThe spaceward-flown horizons infinite.\nLike rampant monsters roaring for their glut,\nThe fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,\nBy jealous moons maleficently urged\nTo follow me for ever; mountains horned\nWith peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed\nWith sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,\nUsurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;\nAnd continents of serpent-shapen trees,\nWith slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,\nPursue my flight through ages spurned to fire\nBy that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,\nAnd evil kings, predominanthly armed\nWith scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon\nAre worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,\nWould stay me; and the sirens of the stars,\nWith foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,\nWould lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons\nWhere viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,\nWith antic gnomes abominably wise,\nHeave up their icy horns across my way.\nBut naught deters me from the goal ordained\nBy suns and eons and immortal wars,\nAnd sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name\nIs all the secret of forgotten glyphs\nBy sinful gods in torrid rubies writ\nFor ending of a brazen book; the goal\nWhereat my soaring ecstasy may stand\nIn amplest heavens multiplied to hold\nMy hordes of thunder-vested avatars,\nAnd Promethèan armies of my thought,\nThat brandish claspèd levins. There I call\nMy memories, intolerably clad\nIn light the peaks of paradise may wear,\nAnd lead the Armageddon of my dreams\nWhose instant shout of triumph is become\nImmensity’s own music: for their feet\nAre founded on innumerable worlds,\nRemote in alien epochs, and their arms\nUpraised, are columns potent to exalt\nWith ease ineffable the countless thrones\nOf all the gods that are or gods to be,\nAnd bear the seats of Asmodai and Set\nAbove the seventh paradise.\n\nSupreme\nIn culminant omniscience manifold,\nAnd served by senses multitudinous,\nFar-posted on the shifting walls of time,\nWith eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields\nOf utter night and chaos, I convoke\nThe Babel of their visions, and attend\nAt once their myriad witness. I behold\nIn Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell,\nWith mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,\nThe secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug\nBeneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,\nToo late, the clam of adamantine gongs\nDinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet\nHave fell the wasp-like sting of little knives\nEmbrued With slobber of the basilisk\nOr the pail Juice of wounded upas. In\nSome red Antarean garden-world, I see\nThe sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,\nAnd silver-Lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes\nOf torpid azure; whom his furtive priests\nAt moonless eve in terror seek to slay\nWith bubbling grails of sacrificial blood\nThat hide a hueless poison. And I read\nUpon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,\nThe annulling word a spiteful demon wrote\nIn gall of slain chimeras; and I know\nWhat pentacles the lunar wizards use,\nThat once allured the gulf-returning roc,\nWith ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause\nMidmost an alabaster mount; and there,\nWith boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut\nUplift by cranes a captive giant built,\nThey wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,\nAnd plucked from off his saber-taloned feet\nUranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,\nAnd amethysts from Mars. I lean to read\nWith slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,\nThe monstrous archives of a war that ran\nThrough wasted eons, and the prophecy\nOf wars renewed, which shall commemorate\nSome enmity of wivern-headed kings\nEven to the brink of time. I know the blooms\nOf bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,\nThat bloat within the creators of the moon,\nAnd in one still, selenic and fetor; and I know\nWhat clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,\nAre proffered to their gods in Uranus\nBy mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed\nOf some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,\nWhich, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,\nTook root between the burnished flags, and now\nHath mounted and become a hellish tree,\nWhose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,\nNet like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,\nAnd strain at starting pillars. I behold\nThe slowly-thronging corals that usurp\nSome harbour of a million-masted sea,\nAnd sun them on the league-long wharves of gold--\nBulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed\nAnd kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns\nThe octiremes of perished emperors,\nAnd galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed\nFrom a sea-fled haven.\n\nSwifter and stranger grow\nThe visions: now a mighty city looms,\nHewn from a hill of purest cinnabar\nTo domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged\nWith tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned\nIn shifting erubescence. But whose hands\nWere sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought\nTo semblance of prodigious blooms of old,\nNo eremite hath lingered there to say,\nAnd no man comes to learn: for long ago\nA prophet came, warning its timid king\nAgainst the plague of lichens that had crept\nAcross subverted empires, and the sand\nOf wastes that cyclopean mountains ward;\nWhich, slow and ineluctable, would come\nTo take his fiery bastions and his fanes,\nAnd quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now\nI see a host of naked gents, armed\nWith horns of behemoth and unicorn,\nWho wander, blinded by the clinging spells\nO hostile wizardry, and stagger on\nTo forests where the very leaves have eyes,\nAnd ebonies like wrathful dragons roar\nTo teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;\nWhere coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,\nFrom writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;\nWhere leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked\nThe eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled\nTo bask upon his azure-spotted spine;\nWhere hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,\nOr yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew\nWhose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then\nI watch a war of pygmies, met by night,\nWith pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,\nOn plains with no horizon, where a god\nMight lose his way for centuries; and there,\nIn wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved,\nA rout of green, enormous moons ascend,\nWith rays that like a shivering venom run\nOn inch-long swords of lizard-fang.\n\nSurveyed\nFrom this my throne, as from a central sun,\nThe pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;\nForgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold\nLike tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,\nOr suns of changeful iridescence, bring\nTheir rays about me like the colored lights\nImploring priests might lift to glorify\nThe face of some averted god; the songs\nOf mystic poets in a purple world\nAscend to me in music that is made\nFrom unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse\nOf love ineffable; the lute-players\nWhose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,\nCall forth delicious languors, never known\nSave to their golden kings; the sorcerers\nOf hooded stars inscrutable to God,\nSurrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,\nlnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies\nAnd awful transformations.\n\nIf I will\nI am at once the vision and the seer,\nAnd mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,\nAnd still abide their suzerain: I am\nThe neophyte who serves a nameless god,\nWithin whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos\nWere arks the Titan worshippers might bear,\nOr flags to pave the threshold; or I am\nThe god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds\nInto the nave where suns might congregate\nAnd veils the darkling mountain of his face\nWith fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests\nAmass their monthly hecatomb of gems\nOpals that are a camel-cumbering load,\nAnd monstrous alabraundines, won from war\nWith realms of hostile serpents; which arise,\nCombustible, in vapors many-hued\nAnd myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,\nThe king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand\nThe helm of some great barge of orichalchum,\nSailing upon an amethystine sea\nTo isles of timeless summer: for the snows\nOf Hyperborean winter, and their winds,\nSleep in his jewel-builded capital,\nNor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,\nNor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees,\nWith captive kings to urge his serried oars,\nHopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn\nHath never left the faintly sighing lote\nAnd lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare\nImpanoplied with azure diamond,\nAs hero of a quest Achernar lights,\nTo deserts filled with ever-wandering flames\nThat feed upon the sullen marl, and soar\nTo wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap\nWith tongues intolerably lengthening\nThat lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives\n(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)\nA lonely flower by a placid well,\nMidmost the flaring tumult of the flames,\nThat roar as roars a storm-possessed sea,\nImpacable for ever; and within\nThat simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies\nOne drop of an incomparable dew\nWhich heals the parchèd weariness of kings,\nAnd cures the wound of wisdom. I am page\nTo an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,\nAnd through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,\nThrough courts and colonnades and balconies\nWherein immensity itself is mazed,\nI seek the golden gorget he hath lost,\nOn which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,\nAre writ the names of his conniving stars\nAnd friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear\nLike demon tears incessant, through dark ages,\nThe drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once\nIn every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks\nInnumerably clang with such a sound\nAs brazen hammers make, by devils dinned\nOn tombs of all the dead; and nevermore\nI find the gorget, but at length I find\nA sealèd room whose nameless prisoner\nMoans with a nameless torture, and would turn\nTo hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch\nFrom that whereon they stretched him; and I find,\nProstrate upon a lotus-painted floor,\nThe loveliest of all beloved slaves\nMy emperor hath, and from her pulseless side\nA serpent rises, whiter than the root\nOf some venefic bloom in darkness grown,\nAnd gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem\nLike drops of cold, congealing poison.\n\nHark!\nWhat word was whispered in a tongue unknown,\nIn crypts of some impenetrable world?\nWhose is the dark, dethroning secrecy\nI cannot share, though I am king of suns,\nAnd king therewith of strong eternity,\nWhose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard\nMy gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads\nThe wind of ether, and the worlds are still\nTo hear the word that flees mine audience.\nIn simultaneous ruin, al my dreams\nFall like a rack of fuming vapors raised\nTo semblance by a necromant, and leave\nSpirit and sense unthinkably alone\nAbove a universe of shrouded stars\nAnd suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,\nLike witches to a Sabbath … Fear is born\nIn crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled\nReaching the floor of space, and waits for wings\nTo lift it upward like a hellish worm\nFain for the flesh of cherubim. Red orbs\nAnd eyes that gleam remotely as the stars,\nBut are not eyes of suns or galaxies,\nGather and throng to the base of darkness; flame\nBehind some black, abysmal curtain burns,\nImplacable, and fanned to whitest wrath\nBy raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,\nAnd make a brief and broken wind that moans\nAs one who rides a throbbing rack. There is\nA Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,\nWhose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth\nA note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,\nOr crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark\nFor ages, and my toiling heart-suspends\nIts clamor as within the clutch of death\nTightening with tense, hermetic rigors. Then,\nIn one enormous, million-flashing flame,\nThe stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,\nAnd beam to their responding planets; time\nIs mine once more, and armies of its dreams\nRally to that insuperable throne\nFirmed on the zenith.\n\nOnce again I seek\nThe meads of shining moly I had found\nIn some anterior vision, by a stream\nNo cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,\nA gold Narcissus, loiters evermore\nAbove his golden image. But I find\nA corpse the ebbing water will not keep,\nWith eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell|\nAnd felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers\nAbout me turn to hooded serpents, swayed\nBy flutes of devils in lascivious dance\nMeet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns\nAbove the raging Sabbath, and is wooed\nBy sarabands of witches. But I turn\nTo mountains guarding with their horns of snow\nThe source of that befoulèd rill, and seek\nA pinnacle where none but eagles climb,\nAnd they with failing pennons. But in vain\nI flee, for on that pylon of the sky\nSome curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame--\nRed fires that curl and cluster to my tread,\nTrying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now\nI see a silver python far beneath--\nVast as a river that a fiend hath witched\nAnd forced to flow reverted in its course\nTo mountains whence it issued. Rapidly\nIt winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills\nRavines and chasmal gorges, till the crags\nTotter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon\nIt hath entwined the pinnacle I keep,\nAnd gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw\nWherein Great Typhon and Enceladus\nWere orts of daily glut. But I am gone,\nFor at my call a hippogriff hath come,\nAnd firm between his thunder-beating wings\nI mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon\nAnd see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall--\nLost in the fields of nether stars--and seek\nA planet where the outwearied wings of time\nMight pause and furl for respite, or the plumes\nOf death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve\nAbove some deathless lily: for therein\nBeauty hath found an avatar of flowers--\nBlossoms that clothe it as a colored flame\nFrom peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,\nAnd turn the skies to perfume. There I find\nA lonely castle, calm, and unbeset\nSave by the purple spears of amaranth,\nAnd leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls\nOf flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,\nAnd domes like golden bubbles, and minarets\nThat take the clouds as coronal-these are mine,\nFor voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,\nAnd the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft\nTo grin a welcome. So I leave awhile\nMy hippogriff to crop the magic meads,\nAnd pass into a court the lilies hold,\nAnd tread them to a fragrance that pursues\nTo win the portico, whose columns, carved\nOf lazuli and amber, mock the palms\nOf bright Aidennic forests-capitalled\nWith fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,\nEnfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters\nOf breasts of unknown houris; and convolved\nWith vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers\nLike the dropt lids of women that endure\nSome loin-dissolving ecstasy. Through doors\nEnlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,\nI enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,\nAnd hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud,\nA chuckle sharp as crepitating ice\nUpheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned\nWho strive in Antenora. When my eyes\nUndazzle, and the cloud of color fades,\nI find me in a monster-guarded room,\nWhere marble apes with wings of griffins crowd\nOn walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts\nWherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,\nPendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,\nUsurp the shadowy interval of lamps\nThat hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple\nBorne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool\nIn fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound,\nA crackling smile around that circle runs,\nAnd all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me\nWith eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear\nThat found no name in Babel, flings me on,\nBreathless and faint with horror, to a hall\nWithin whose weary, self-reverting round,\nThe languid curtains, heavier than palls,\nUnnumerably depict a weary king\nWho fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands\nIn lakes of emerald evening, or the field\nOf dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee\nOnward, and all the shadowy curtains shake\nWith tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,\nAnd whispers of the innumerable king,\nBreathing a tale of ancient pestilence\nWhose very words are vile contagion. Then\nI reach a room where caryatids,\nCarved in the form of voluptuous Titan women,\nSurround a throne flowering ebony\nWhere creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne\nThere lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,\nTumid with all the rottenness of kings,\nOverflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold\nObscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans,\nAnd from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,\nDepending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,\nDrivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs\nDown all his length of soft and monstrous folds,\nAnd creeping among the flowers of ebony,\nLends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,\nEre the Horror ope those red and lashless slits\nOf eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn\nAnd follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,\nLined by the statues with their mighty limbs,\nEnds in golden-roofèd balcony\nSphering the flowered horizon.\n\nEre my heart\nHath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,\nI listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim,\nA mutter faint as when the far simoom,\nMounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,\nWide as the waste, those wings of torrid night\nThat shake the doom of cities from their folds,\nAnd musters in its van a thousand winds\nThat, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise,\nAnd sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,\nApproaching, mounts and loudens to the ears\nOf them that toil in fields of sesame,\nSo grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps\nAbove the gold horizon like a dawn\nOf darkness climbing zenith-ward. They come,\nThe Sabaoth of retribution, drawn\nFrom all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,\nAnd led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors\nThat owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice,\nChimera, martichoras, behemoth,\nGeryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken\nArise as might some Afrit-builded city\nConsummate in the lifting of a lash\nWith thunderous domes and sounding obelisks\nAnd towers of night and fire alternate! Wings\nOf white-hot stone along the hissing wind\nBear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts\nOf hells beyond Rutilicus; and things\nWhose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons--\nBorn from the caverns of a dying sun\nUncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed\nFrom gulfs below the horizon; octopi\nLike blazing moons with countless arms of fire,\nClimb from the seas of ever-surging flame\nThat roll and roar through planets unconsumed,\nBeating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts\nThat range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise,\nAfforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns\nAmid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne\nOn cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,\nThe shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom;\nAnd griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned\nOn-sable dragons, and the cockodrills\nThat bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;\nAnd blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,\nOn whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies\nThat move with fronts reverted from the foe,\nAnd strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes\nThe shields reflect in crystal; and eidola\nFashioned within unfathomable caves\nBy hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind\nWorm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,\nWith krakens from the ultimate abyss,\nAnd Demogorgons of the outer dark,\nArising, shout with dire multisonous clamors,\nAnd threatening me with dooms ineffable\nIn words whereat the heavens leap to flame,\nAdvance upon the enchanted palace. Falling\nFor league on league before, their shadows light\nAnd eat like fire the arnaranthine meads,\nLeaving an ashen desert. In the palace\nI hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,\nAnd all the women-shapen columns moan,\nBabbling with terror. In my tenfold fear,\nA monstrous dread unnamed in any hall,\nI rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,\nAnd in a trice the wizard palace reefs,\nAnd spring to a single tower of flame,\nGoes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown\nBeyond the world upon that fleeing wind\nI reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge,\nWhere fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall,\nSupportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,\nBeyond the scope and vision of the sun,\nTo other skies and systems.\n\nIn a world\nDeep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi\nThat soar to semblance of fantastic palms,\nI fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break\nA score of trunks to atom powder. Unharmed\nI rise, and through the illimitable woods,\nAmong the trees of flimsy opal, roam,\nAnd see their tops that clamber hour by hour\nTo touch the suns of iris. Things unseen,\nWhose charnel breath informs the tideless air\nWith spreading pools of fetor, follow me,\nElusive past the ever-changing palms;\nAnd pittering moths with wide and ashen wings\nFlit on before, and insects ember-hued,\nDescending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom\nAnd quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard\nFar off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown\nResounds at measured intervals of time,\nShaking the riper trees to dust, that falls\nIn clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me\nBeneath an irised pall.\n\nNow the palmettoes\nGrow far apart, and lessen momently\nTo shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them\nI see an empty desert, all ablaze\nWith ametrysts and rubies, and the dust\nOf garnets or carnelians. On I roam,\nTreading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me\nWith leaping waves of endless rutilance,\nWhereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom\nThrough which I wander blind as any Kobold;\nTill underfoot the grinding sands give place\nTo stone or metal, with a massive ring\nMore welcome to mine ears than golden bells\nOr tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom\nOf crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge\nOf a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,\nLevel as windless water, to the verge\nOf all the world; and through the sable plain\nA hundred streams of shattered marble run,\nAnd streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,\nLike to the ruin of all the wars of time,\nTo plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts\nAdown the gulfs eternal.\n\nSo I follow\nBetween a river of steel and a river of bronze,\nWith ripples loud and tuneless as the clash\nOf a million lutes; and come to the precipice\nFrom which they fall, and make the mighty sound\nOf a million swords that meet a million shields,\nOr din of spears and armour in the wars\nOf half the worlds and eons. Far beneath\nThey fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,\nAnd vanish like a stream of broken stars\ninto the nether darkness; nor the gods\nOf any sun, nor demons of the gulf,\nWill dare to know what everlasting sea\nIs fed thereby, and mounts forevermore\nIn one unebbing tide.\n\nWhat nimbus-cloud\nOr night of sudden and supreme eclipse,\nIs on the suns opal? At my side\nThe rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam\nThrough darkness falling as the night that falls\nFrom spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold\nBetwixt the sable desert and the suns,\nThe poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,\nFar-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold\nThrough stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,\nUpon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,\nAnd sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged\nAfter the ravin of dispeopled lands,\nAnd harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,\nHot from abominable feasts, and fain\nTo cool their beaks and talons in my blood--\nAll, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,\nWith rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,\nMakes horrent now the horizon. From the wan\nI hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill\nAs tempests in a broken fane, and roar\nOf sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells\nFrom towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud\nThey arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind\nFalls from them like the wind before the storm,\nAnd in the wind my riven garment streams\nAnd flutters in the face of all the void,\nEven as flows a flaffing spirit, lost\nOn the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows\nThe thunder of the streams of stone and bronze--\nRedoubled with the roar of torrent wings\nInseparable mingled. Scarce I keep\nMy footing in the gulfward winds of fear,\nAnd mighty thunders beating to the void\nIn sea-like waves incessant; and would flee\nWith them, and prove the nadir-founded night\nWhere fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach\nThe verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom\nTo measure with my gaze the dread descent,\nI see a tiny star within the depths--\nA light that stays me while the wings of doom\nConvene their thickening thousands: for the star\nincreases, taking to its hueless orb,\nWith all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,\nThe light as of a million million moons;\nAnd floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed\nIt grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face\nThat fills the void and fills the universe,\nAnd bloats against the limits of the world\nWith lips of flame that open …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "remembered-light": { - "title": "“Remembered Light”", - "body": "The years are a falling of snow,\nSlow, but without cessation,\nOn hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were;\nBut snow and the crawling night in which it fell\nMay be washed away in one swifter hour of flame.\nThus it was that some slant of sunset\nIn the chasms of piled cloud--\nTransient mountains that made a new horizon,\nUplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles--\nSmote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,\nTill the snows of forgetfulness were gone.\n\nClear in the vistas of memory,\nThe peaks of a world long unremembered,\nSoared further than clouds, but fell not,\nBased on hills that shook not nor melted\nWith that burden enormous, hardly to be believed.\nRent with stupendous chasms,\nFull of an umber twilight,\nI beheld that larger world.\n\nBright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine\nAbove, but low in the clefts it thickened,\nDull as with duskier tincture.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-star-treader": { - "title": "“The Star-Treader”", - "body": "# I.\n\nA voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,\nSaying, “Make haste: the webs of death and birth\nAre brushed away, and all the threads of earth\nWear to the breaking; spaceward gleams\nThine ancient pathway of the suns,\nWhose flame is part of thee;\nAnd the deep gulfs abide coevally\nWhose darkness runs\nThrough all thy spirit’s mystery.\nGo forth, and tread unharmed the blaze\nOf stars wherethrough thou camest in old days;\nPierce without fear each vast\nWhose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.\nA hand strikes off the chains of Time,\nA hand swings back the door of years;\nNow fall earth’s bonds of gladness and of tears,\nAnd opens the strait dream to space sublime”\n\n\n# II.\n\nWho rides a dream, what hand shall stay!\nWhat eye shall note or measure mete\nHis passage on a purpose fleet,\nThe thread and weaving of his way!\nIt caught me from the clasping world,\nAnd swept beyond the brink of Sense,\nMy soul was flung, and poised, and whirled\nLike to a planet chained and hurled\nWith solar lightning strong and tense.\nSwift as communicated rays\nThat leap from severed suns a gloom\nWithin whose waste no suns illume,\nThe winged dream fulfilled its ways.\nThrough years reversed and lit again\nI followed that unending chain\nWherein the suns are links of light;\nRetraced through lineal, ordered spheres\nThe twisting of the threads of years\nIn weavings wrought of noon and night;\nThrough stars and deeps I watched the dream unroll,\nThose folds that form the raiment of the soul.\n\n\n# III.\n\nEnkindling dawns of memory,\nEach sun had radiance to relume\nA sealed, disused, and darkened room\nWithin the soul’s immensity.\nTheir alien ciphers shown and lit,\nI understood what each had writ\nUpon my spirit’s scroll;\nAgain I wore mine ancient lives,\nAnd knew the freedom and the gyves\nThat formed and marked my soul.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI delved in each forgotten mind,\nThe units that had builded me,\nWhose deepnesses before were blind\nAnd formless as infinity--\nKnowing again each former world--\nFrom planet unto planet whirled\nThrough gulfs that mightily divide\nLike to an intervital sleep.\nOne world I found, where souls abide\nLike winds that rest upon a rose;\nThereto they creep\nTo loose all burden of old woes.\nAnd one there was, a garden-close\nWhose blooms are grown of ancient sin\nAnd death the sap that wells and flows:\nThe spirits weep that dwelt therein.\nAnd one I knew, where chords of pain\nWith stridors fill the Senses’ lyre;\nAnd one, where Beauty’s olden chain\nIs forged anew with stranger loveliness,\nIn flame-soft links of never-quenched desire\nAnd ineluctable duress.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhere no terrestrial dreams had trod\nMy vision entered undismayed,\nAnd Life her hidden realms displayed\nTo me as to a curious god.\nWhere colored suns of systems triplicate\nBestow on planets weird, ineffable,\nGreen light that orbs them like an outer sea,\nAnd large auroral noons that alternate\nWith skies like sunset held without abate,\nLife’s touch renewed incomprehensibly\nThe strains of mirth and grief’s harmonious spell.\nDead passions like to stars relit\nShone in the gloom of ways forgot;\nWhere crownless gods in darkness sit\nThe day was full on altars hot.\nI heard--enisled in those melodic seas--\nThe central music of the Pleiades,\nAnd to Alcyone my soul\nSwayed with the stars that own her song’s control.\nUnchallenged, glad, I trod, a revenant\nIn worlds Edenic longly lost;\nOr dwelt in spheres that sing to those,\nThrough space no light has crossed,\nDiverse as Hell’s mad antiphone uptossed\nTo Heaven’s angelic chant.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nWhat vasts the dream went out to find!\nI seemed beyond the world’s recall\nIn gulfs where darkness is a wall\nTo render strong Antares blind!\nIn unimagined spheres I found\nThe sequence of my being’s round--\nSome life where firstling meed of Song,\nThe strange imperishable leaf,\nWas placed on brows that starry Grief\nHad crowned, and. Pain anointed long;\nSome avatar where Love\nSang like the last great star at morn\nEre the pale orb of Death filled all its sky;\nSome life in fresher years unworn\nUpon a world whereof\nPeace was a robe like to the calms that lie\nOn pools aglow with latter spring:\nThere Time’s pellucid surface took\nClear image of all things, nor shook\nTill the black cleaving of Oblivion’s wing;\nSome earlier awakening\nIn pristine years, when giant strife\nOf forces darkly whirled\nFirst forged the thing called Life--\nHot from the furnace of the suns--\nUpon the anvil of a world.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThus knew I those anterior ones\nWhose lives in mine were blent;\nTill, lo! my dream, that held a night\nWhere Rigel sends no message of his might,\nWas emptied of the trodden stars,\nAnd dwindled to the sun’s extent--\nThe brain’s familiar prison-bars,\nAnd raiment of the sorrow and the mirth\nWrought by the shuttles intricate of earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-jay-smith": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Jay Smith", - "birth": { - "year": 1918 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jay_Smith", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-floor-and-the-ceiling": { - "title": "“The Floor and the Ceiling”", - "body": "Winter and summer, whatever the weather,\nThe Floor and the Ceiling were happy together\nIn a quaint little house on the outskirts of town\nWith the Floor looking up and the Ceiling looking down.\n\nThe Floor bought the Ceiling an ostrich-plumed hat,\nAnd they dined upon drippings of bacon fat,\nDiced artichoke hearts and cottage cheese\nAnd hundreds of other such delicacies.\n\nOn a screen-in porch in early spring\nThey would sit at the player piano and sing.\nWhen the Floor cried in French, “Ah, je vous adore!”\nThe Ceiling replied, “You adorable Floor!”\n\nThe years went by as the years they will,\nAnd each little thing was fine until\nOne evening, enjoying their bacon fat,\nThe Floor and the Ceiling had a terrible spat.\n\nThe Ceiling, loftily looking down,\nSaid, “You are the lowest Floor in this town!”\nThe Floor, looking up with a frightening grin,\nSaid, “Keep up your chatter, and you will cave in!”\n\nSo they went off to bed: while the Floor settled down,\nThe Ceiling packed up her gay wallflower gown;\nAnd tiptoeing out past the Chippendale chair\nAnd the gateleg table, down the stair,\n\nTook a coat from the hook and hat from the rack,\nAnd flew out the door--farewell to the Floor!--\nAnd flew out the door, and was seen no more,\nAnd flew out the door, and never came back!\n\nIn a quaint little house on the outskirts of town,\nNow the shutters go bang, and the walls tumble down;\nAnd the roses in summer run wild through the room,\nBut blooming for no one--then why should they bloom?\n\nFor what is a Floor now that brambles have grown\nOver window and woodwork and chimney of stone?\nFor what is a Floor when a Floor stands alone?\nAnd what is a Ceiling when the Ceiling has flown?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "winter-morning": { - "title": "“Winter Morning”", - "body": "All night the wind swept over the house\nAnd through our dream\nSwirling the snow up through the pines,\nRuffling the white, ice-capped clapboards,\nRattling the windows,\nRustling around and below our bed\nSo that we rode\nOver wild water\nIn a white ship breasting the waves.\nWe rode through the night\nOn green, marbled\nWater, and, half-waking, watched\nThe white, eroded peaks of icebergs\nSail past our windows;\nRode out the night in that north country,\nAnd awoke, the house buried in snow,\nPerched on a\nChill promontory, a\nGiant’s tooth\nIn the mouth of the cold valley,\nIts white tongue looped frozen around us,\nThe trunks of tall birches\nRevealing the rib cage of a whale\nStranded by a still stream;\nAnd saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,\nAs if through time,\nLight that shone\nOn a landscape of ivory,\nA harbor of bone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "w-d-snodgrass": { - "metadata": { - "name": "W. D. Snodgrass", - "birth": { - "year": 1926 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2009 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Snodgrass", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 27 - }, - "poems": { - "after-experience": { - "title": "“After Experience”", - "body": "After experience taught me that all the ordinary\nSurroundings of social life are futile and vain;\n\nI’m going to show you something very\nUgly: someday, it might save your life.\n\nSeeing that none of the things I feared contain\nIn themselves anything either good or bad\n\nWhat if you get caught without a knife;\nNothing--even a loop of piano wire;\n\nExcepting only in the effect they had\nUpon my mind, I resolved to inquire\n\nTake the first two fingers of this hand;\nFork them out--kind of a “V for Victory”--\n\nWhether there might be something whose discovery\nWould grant me supreme, unending happiness.\n\nAnd jam them into the eyes of your enemy.\nYou have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press\n\nNo virtue can be thought to have priority\nOver this endeavor to preserve one’s being.\n\nBoth fingers down around the cheekbone\nAnd setting your foot high into the chest\n\nNo man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed,\nTo live rightly, without simultaneously\n\nYou must call up every strength you own\nAnd you can rip off the whole facial mask.\n\nWishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask\nFirst, in other words, to actually exist.\n\n\nAnd you, whiner, who wastes your time\nDawdling over the remorseless earth,\nWhat evil, what unspeakable crime\nHave you made your life worth?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "april-inventory": { - "title": "“April Inventory”", - "body": "The green catalpa tree has turned\nAll white; the cherry blooms once more.\nIn one whole year I haven’t learned\nA blessed thing they pay you for.\nThe blossoms snow down in my hair;\nThe trees and I will soon be bare.\n\nThe trees have more than I to spare.\nThe sleek, expensive girls I teach,\nYounger and pinker every year,\nBloom gradually out of reach.\nThe pear tree lets its petals drop\nLike dandruff on a tabletop.\n\nThe girls have grown so young by now\nI have to nudge myself to stare.\nThis year they smile and mind me how\nMy teeth are falling with my hair.\nIn thirty years I may not get\nYounger, shrewder, or out of debt.\n\nThe tenth time, just a year ago,\nI made myself a little list\nOf all the things I’d ought to know,\nThen told my parents, analyst,\nAnd everyone who’s trusted me\nI’d be substantial, presently.\n\nI haven’t read one book about\nA book or memorized one plot.\nOr found a mind I did not doubt.\nI learned one date.And then forgot.\nAnd one by one the solid scholars\nGet the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.\n\nAnd smile above their starchy collars.\nI taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;\nOne lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.\nLacking a source-book or promotions,\nI showed one child the colors of\nA luna moth and how to love.\n\nI taught myself to name my name,\nTo bark back, loosen love and crying;\nTo ease my woman so she came,\nTo ease an old man who was dying.\nI have not learned how often I\nCan win, can love, but choose to die.\n\nI have not learned there is a lie\nLove shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;\nThat my equivocating eye\nLoves only by my body’s hunger;\nThat I have forces true to feel,\nOr that the lovely world is real.\n\nWhile scholars speak authority\nAnd wear their ulcers on their sleeves,\nMy eyes in spectacles shall see\nThese trees procure and spend their leaves.\nThere is a value underneath\nThe gold and silver in my teeth.\n\nThough trees turn bare and girls turn wives,\nWe shall afford our costly seasons;\nThere is a gentleness survives\nThat will outspeak and has its reasons.\nThere is a loveliness exists,\nPreserves us, not for specialists.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "as-a-child-sleepless": { - "title": "“As a Child, Sleepless”", - "body": "The ’possum under the owl’s claw,\nThe wet fawn huddled in the grass,\nThe soldier, hurt, in his lost trench\nClench the eyelid, clutch the breath\nTill scavengers, till _coup de grâce_,\nDeath and the lurking terror pass.\n\nVice tight each muscle lest the pent\nTendon spasm, twitch; preserve\nAll rigor, silence, so the blood\nThuds slower, fainter through the vein\nTill the chilled skin gives off no scent;\nDrain all least current from the nerve.\n\nClamp the arm tight against the head\nTo hush that whisper in the nose,\nThe click if lips slip open. Cover\nOver this face and form; disguise\nWhose body’s lying on the bed,\nEyes that still stare too wide to close.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "autumn-variations": { - "title": "“Autumn Variations”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe evening grosbeak on the lawn\nWill turn his back on us, move on\nWith his wide family and those friends\nWe thought were ours. That’s how it ends.\nIf it’s been good, be glad it’s been;\nIt won’t be. The cold shoulder’s in\nWe must make do, once summer’s done,\nWith our fair-weather friends or none.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe garden’s garter snake,\nthe warty toad in our garage\ndon’t get around these days.\nWoodchuck and rabbit sink\ninto themselves; if they\nhave some idea, who’s to say?\nThe few birds left accept\nthe mob opinions\nand the fashions: a dull\n\n\n# III.\n\nStalinist grey that will\noffend no one. The turtles\nturn tail on the pond, withdraw\nto meditate, regroup or,\njoining what’s too big to beat,\ndig down in the numb\nsecurity of clay, one\nwith their fate.\nIn spray-paint, psychedelic, gaudy,\nFall scrawls its name--a blunt and bawdy\nChallenge to the complacent wood.\nWe say: there goes the neighborhood;\nIt is not and it cannot come to good.\nSoon, flustered leaves will sag like torn\nWallpaper; solid dark walls, worn\nThrough here and there, expose a bitter\nSky while, on the bare ground, litter\nAnd stub ends pile up everywhere.\nNot even one green plant would dare\nPoke its nose out in that crude air\nOf catch-as-catch-can thievery, lust,\nCut-throat protection and sick trust.\nWhere year by year we walked together\nDetermined paths, a wilder atmosphere\nWheels in, flaunting its chains, blades and black leather.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nImperial greenery withdraws,\nflamboyant and corrupt; the leaf’s\nfar government’s lost\nfaith in its mission, that certainty\nto be despotic and\nvictorious. Now failure’s\ncertain, a certain\nmercy enters in; such as\nit is, the sun\ngets spread around, the magnanimity\nof the poor. Only some pines,\nhard-needled loyalists, cling\nto their colors and won’t change. Dark,\nunder those implacable branches,\nnothing grows.\n\n\n# V.\n\nMaple and ash in the hedgerow\nFigure the green light’s gone and go\nTo a flat brown. The white-tailed deer\nMust know what’s up; they disappear\nLike high ideals. Across the field,\nMallows and black-eyed Susans yield\nTo the solicitude of tractor\nAnd combine, like a trash compactor\nCrushing the summer’s shapes and scents-\nLeaf, stem and petal-into dense\nBlocks scattered like packed bags and crates\nAround the field while the field waits.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nSharp, black crickets\nhave got the house\nsurrounded; miners and sappers\ngnaw our siding;\nbuckwheat flies, wasps\nand spiders--spies-\nthread the cellar and the walls.\nAnd these are the deserters\nwho’ve lost the front\noutside. Put on fat;\nput on fur; the windows\nrattle. The only news\nsays we’ll know soon\nwhat sort of man you are.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nBark strips peel off the sycamore\nLike weathered clapboards. The wind’s war\nMoves up closer. Our woodlot’s floor\nFills up with wreckage like a village\nFought and recaptured. Ripe for pillage,\nBerries and haws shine down a street\nWhere the racoon and field mouse beat\nA long, inglorious retreat.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nBare bones! bare bones!\nis the wind’s suggestion\nand, one by one, leaves,\nlike bright embroidery\nrinsed in bleach or like\nwords in the brain’s skein,\nthe tree of memory,\nare gone. All sweet details\npass on in\n“the abstraction\nof old age”: skeletal\ntrunk and branchings, lacy\ntracework of each leaf,\nmedulla and the neural reach\nof those ways we once knew\nthings we forget\nunder the soft, featureless\ndemocracy of snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-campus-on-the-hill": { - "title": "“The Campus on the Hill”", - "body": "Up the reputable walks of old established trees\nThey stalk, children of the _nouveaux riches_; chimes\nOf the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing:\n“I don’t wanna play at your house;\nI don’t like you any more.”\nMy house stands opposite, on the other hill,\nAmong meadows, with the orchard fences down and falling;\nDeer come almost to the door.\nYou cannot see it, even in this clearest morning.\nWhite birds hang in the air between\nOver the garbage landfill and those homes thereto adjacent,\nHovering slowly, turning, settling down\nLike the flakes sifting imperceptibly onto the little town\nIn a waterball of glass.\nAnd yet, this morning, beyond this quiet scene,\nThe floating birds, the backyards of the poor,\nBeyond the shopping plaza, the dead canal, the hillside lying tilted in the air,\n\nTomorrow has broken out today:\nRiot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;\nAged in wrong, the empires are declining,\nAnd China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.\nWhat shall I say to the young on such a morning?--\nMind is the one salvation?--also grammar?--\nNo; my little ones lean not toward revolt. They\nAre the Whites, the vaguely furiously driven, who resist\nTheir souls with such passivity\nAs would make Quakers swear. All day, dear Lord, all day\nThey wear their godhead lightly.\nThey look out from their hill and say,\nTo themselves, “We have nowhere to go but down;\nThe great destination is to stay.”\nSurely the nations will be reasonable;\nThey look at the world--don’t they?--the world’s way?\nThe clock just now has nothing more to say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dr-joseph-goebbels": { - "title": "“Dr. Joseph Goebbels”", - "body": "_(On this date, Goebbels moved into the lowest level of the bunker, taking a room opposite Hitler’s.)_\n\nStand back, make way, you mindless scum,\nSquire Voland the Seducer’s come--\nOld Bock from Babelsberg whose tower\nFalls silent now, whose shrunken power\nFor lies or lays comes hobbling home\nInto this concrete catacomb.\n\nHere’s Runty Joe, the cunt collector\nWho grew to greatness, first erector\nOf myths and missions, fibs and fables,\nWho pulled the wool then turned the tables:\nHe piped the tunes and called the dance\nWhere shirtless countries lost their pants.\n\nGoatfooted Pan, the nation’s gander\nTo whom Pan-Germans all played pander,\nThe jovial cob-swan quick to cover\nLida Baarova, his check-list lover;\nSwellfoot the Tyrant, he could riddle\nMen’s minds away, hi-diddle-diddle.\n\nOur little Doctor, Joe the Gimp\nComes back to limpness and his limp:\nHephaistos, Vulcan the lame smith\nWhose net of lies caught one true myth:\nHis wife, the famous beauty, whored\nBy numbskull Mars, the dull warlord.\n\nWhat if I took my little fling\nAt conquest, at adventuring.\nPried the lid of Pandora’s box off--\nThere’s nothing there to bring your rocks off.\nI never saw one fucking day\nSo fine I courted it to stay.\n\nIf I got snarled in my own mesh\nOf thighs and bellies, who wants flesh?\nI never hankered after matter.\nLet Hermann swell up, grosser, fatter,\nWeighed down by medals, houses, clothing;\nThey leave me lean, secured in loathing.\n\nAs a young man, I pricked the bubble\nOf every creed; I saw that rubble\nAnd offered myself the realms of earth\nJust to say Yes. But what’s it worth?\nNo thank you, Ma’am. Behold the Ram\nOf God: I doubt, therefore I am.\n\nHere I forsake that long pricktease\nOf histories, hopes, lusts, luxuries.\nI come back to my first Ideal--\nThe vacancy that’s always real.\nI sniffed out all life’s openings:\nI loved only the holes in things.\n\nSo strip down one bare cell for this\nLay Brother of the last abyss.\nTo me, still, all abstractions smell;\nMy head and nose clear in this cell\nOf concrete, this confession booth\nWhere liars face up to blank truth.\n\nMy tongue lashed millions to the knife;\nHere, I’ll hold hands with my soiled wife.\nMy lies piped men out, hot to slaughter;\nHere, I’ll read stories to my daughter\nThen hack off all relations, choose\nOnly the Nothing you can’t lose,\n\nSend back this body, fixed in its\nInfantile paralysis.\nI was born small; I shall grow less\nTill I burst into Nothingness,\nThat slot in time where only pure\nSpirit extends, absent and sure.\n\nI am that spirit that denies,\nHigh Priest of Laymen, Prince of Lies.\nYour house is founded on my rock;\nTruth crows; now I deny my cock.\nJock of this walk, I turn down all,\nRobbing my Peter to play Paul.\n\nI give up all goods I possess\nTo build my faith on faithlessness.\nBlack Peter, I belie my Lord--\nYou’ve got to die to spread the Word.\nNow the last act; there’s no sequel.\nSoon, once more, all things shall be equal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 22 - } - } - }, - "a-flat-one": { - "title": "“A Flat One”", - "body": " Old Fritz, on this rotating bed\n For seven wasted months you lay\n Unfit to move, shrunken, gray,\n No good to yourself or anyone\nBut to be babied--changed and bathed and fed.\n At long last, that’s all done.\n\n Before each meal, twice every night,\n We set pads on your bedsores, shut\n Your catheter tube off, then brought\n The second canvas-and-black-iron\nBedframe and clamped you in between them, tight,\n Scared, so we could turn\n\n You over. We washed you, covered you,\n Cut up each bite of meat you ate;\n We watched your lean jaws masticate\n As ravenously your useless food\nAs thieves at hard labor in their chains chew\n Or insects in the wood.\n\n Such pious sacrifice to give\n You all you could demand of pain:\n Receive this haddock’s body slain\n For you, old tyrant; take this blood\nOf a tomato, shed that you might live.\n You had that costly food.\n\n You seem to be all finished, so\n We’ll plug your old recalcitrant anus\n And tie up your discouraged penis\n In a great, snow-white bow of gauze.\nWe wrap you, pin you, and cart you down below,\n Below, below, because\n\n Your credit has finally run out.\n On our steel table, trussed and carved,\n You’ll find this world’s hardworking, starved\n Teeth working in your precious skin.\nThe earth turns, in the end, by turn about\n And opens to take you in.\n\n Seven months gone down the drain; thank God\n That’s through. Throw out the four-by-fours,\n Swabsticks, the thick salve for bedsores,\n Throw out the diaper pads and drug\nContainers, pile the bedclothes in a wad,\n And rinse the cider jug\n\n Half-filled with the last urine. Then\n Empty out the cotton cans,\n Autoclave the bowls and spit pans,\n Unhook the pumps and all the red\nTubes--catheter, suction, oxygen;\n Next, wash the empty bed.\n\n --All this Dark Age machinery\n On which we had tormented you\n To life. Last, we collect the few\n Belongings: snapshots, some odd bills,\nYour mail, and half a pack of Luckies we\n Won’t light you after meals.\n\n Old man, these seven months you’ve lain\n Determined--not that you would live--\n Just to not die. No one would give\n You one chance you could ever wake\nFrom that first night, much less go well again,\n Much less go home and make\n\n Your living; how could you hope to find\n A place for yourself in all creation?--\n Pain was your only occupation.\n And pain what should content and will\nA man to give it up, nerved you to grind\n Your clenched teeth, breathing, till\n\n Your skin broke down, your calves went flat\n And your legs lost all sensation. Still,\n You took enough morphine to kill\n A strong man. Finally, nitrogen\nMustard: you could last two months after that;\n It would kill you then.\n\n Even then you wouldn’t quit.\n Old soldier, yet you must have known\n Inside the animal had grown\n Sick of the world, made up its mind\nTo stop. Your mind ground on its separate\n Way, merciless and blind,\n\n Into these last weeks when the breath\n Would only come in fits and starts\n That puffed out your sections like the parts\n Of some enormous, damaged bug.\nYou waited, not for life, not for your death,\n Just for the deadening drug\n\n That made your life seem bearable.\n You still whispered you would not die.\n Yet the nights I heard you cry\n Like a whipped child; in fierce old age\nYou whimpered, tears stood on your gun-metal\n Blue cheeks shaking with rage\n\n And terror. So much pain would fill\n Your room that when I left I’d pray\n That if I came back the next day\n I’d find you gone. You stayed for me--\nNailed to your own rapacious, stiff self-will.\n You’ve shook loose, finally.\n\n They say this was a worthwhile job\n Unless they tried it. It is mad\n To throw our good lives after bad;\n Waste time, drugs, and our minds, while strong\nMen starve. How many young men did we rob\n To keep you hanging on?\n\n I can’t think we did you much good.\n Well, when you died, none of us wept.\n You killed for us, and so we kept\n You, because we need to earn our pay.\nNo. We’d still have to help you try. We would\n Have killed for you today.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hearts-needle": { - "title": "“Heart’s Needle”", - "body": "_When he would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you ‘Daddy’--he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.”_\n_He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles._\n --After the Middle-Irish Romance, The Madness of Suibhne\n\n\n# 1.\n\nChild of my winter, born\nWhen the new fallen soldiers froze\nIn Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows,\nWhen I was torn\n\nBy love I could not still,\nBy fear that silenced my cramped mind\nTo that cold war where, lost, I could not find\nMy peace in my will,\n\nAll those days we could keep\nYour mind a landscape of new snow\nWhere the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,\nHis fields asleep\n\nIn their smooth covering, white\nAs quilts to warm the resting bed\nOf birth or pain, spotless as paper spread\nFor me to write,\n\nAnd thinks: Here lies my land\nUnmarked by agony, the lean foot\nOf the weasel tracking, the thick trapper’s boot;\nAnd I have planned\n\nMy chances to restrain\nThe torments of demented summer or\nIncrease the deepening harvest here before\nIt snows again.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nLate April and you are three; today\nWe dug your garden in the yard.\nTo curb the damage of your play,\nStrange dogs at night and the moles tunneling,\nFour slender sticks of lath stand guard\nUplifting their thin string.\n\nSo you were the first to tramp it down.\nAnd after the earth was sifted close\nYou brought your watering can to drown\nAll earth and us. But these mixed seeds are pressed\nWith light loam in their steadfast rows.\nChild, we’ve done our best.\n\nSomeone will have to weed and spread\nThe young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour\nWhen shadow falls across their bed.\nYou should try to look at them every day\nBecause when they come to full flower\nI will be away.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThe child between them on the street\nComes to a puddle, lifts his feet\nAnd hangs on their hands. They start\nAt the live weight and lurch together,\nRecoil to swing him through the weather,\nStiffen and pull apart.\n\nWe read of cold war soldiers that\nNever gained ground, gave none, but sat\nTight in their chill trenches.\nPain seeps up from some cavity\nThrough the ranked teeth in sympathy;\nThe whole jaw grinds and clenches\n\nTill something somewhere has to give.\nIt’s better the poor soldiers live\nIn someone else’s hands\nThan drop where helpless powers fall\nOn crops and barns, on towns where all\nWill burn. And no man stands.\n\nFor good, they sever and divide\nTheir won and lost land. On each side\nPrisoners are returned\nExcepting a few unknown names.\nThe peasant plods back and reclaims\nHis fields that strangers burned\n\nAnd nobody seems very pleased.\nIt’s best. Still, what must not be seized\nClenches the empty fist.\nI tugged your hand, once, when I hated\nThings less: a mere game dislocated\nThe radius of your wrist.\n\nLove’s wishbone, child, although I’ve gone\nAs men must and let you be drawn\nOff to appease another,\nIt may help that a Chinese play\nOr Solomon himself might say\nI am your real mother.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nNo one can tell you why\nthe season will not wait;\nthe night I told you I\nmust leave, you wept a fearful rate\nto stay up late.\n\nNow that it’s turning Fall,\nwe go to take our walk\namong municipal\nflowers, to steal one off its stalk,\nto try and talk.\n\nWe huff like windy giants\nscattering with our breath\ngray-headed dandelions;\nSpring is the cold wind’s aftermath.\nThe poet saith.\n\nBut the asters, too, are gray,\nghost-gray. Last night’s cold\nis sending on their way\npetunias and dwarf marigold,\nhunched sick and old.\n\nLike nerves caught in a graph,\nthe morning-glory vines\nfrost has erased by half\nstill scrawl across their rigid twines.\nLike broken lines\n\nof verses I can’t make.\nIn its unraveling loom\nwe find a flower to take,\nwith some late buds that might still bloom,\nback to your room.\n\nNight comes and the stiff dew.\nI’m told a friend’s child cried\nbecause a cricket, who\nhad minstreled every night outside\nher window, died.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nWinter again and it is snowing;\nAlthough you are still three,\nYou are already growing\nStrange to me.\n\nYou chatter about new playmates, sing\nStrange songs; you do not know\nHey ding-a-ding-a-ding\nOr where I go\n\nOr when I sang for bedtime, Fox\nWent out on a chilly night,\nBefore I went for walks\nAnd did not write;\n\nYou never mind the squalls and storms\nThat are renewed long since;\nOutside the thick snow swarms\nInto my prints\n\nAnd swirls out by warehouses, sealed,\nDark cowbarns, huddled, still,\nBeyond to the blank field,\nThe fox’s hill\n\nWhere he backtracks and sees the paw,\nGnawed off, he cannot feel;\nConceded to the jaw\nOf toothed, blue steel.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nEaster has come around\nagain; the river is rising\nover the thawed ground\nand the banksides. When you come you bring\nan egg dyed lavender.\nWe shout along our bank to hear\nour voices returning from the hills to meet us.\nWe need the landscape to repeat us.\n\nYou lived on this bank first.\nWhile nine months filled your term, we knew\nhow your lungs, immersed\nin the womb, miraculously grew\ntheir useless folds till\nthe fierce, cold air rushed in to fill\nthem out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour,\ncaught breath, and cried with your full lung power.\n\nOver the stagnant bight\nwe see the hungry bank swallow\nflaunting his free flight\nstill; we sink in mud to follow\nthe killdeer from the grass\nthat hides her nest. That March there was\nrain; the rivers rose; you could hear killdeers flying\nall night over the mudflats crying.\n\nYou bring back how the red-\nwinged blackbird shrieked, slapping frail wings,\ndiving at my head--\nI saw where her tough nest, cradled, swings\nin tall reeds that must sway\nwith the winds blowing every way.\nIf you recall much, you recall this place. You still\nlive nearby--on the opposite hill.\n\nAfter the sharp windstorm\nof July Fourth, all that summer\nthrough the gentle, warm\nafternoons, we heard great chain saws chirr\nlike iron locusts. Crews\nof roughneck boys swarmed to cut loose\nbranches wrenched in the shattering wind, to hack free\nall the torn limbs that could sap the tree.\n\nIn the debris lay\nstarlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun\nwe surprised one day\na proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.\nIn my hands she flapped so\nfearfully that I let her go.\nHer keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.\nYou bring things I’d as soon forget.\n\nYou raise into my head\na Fall night that I came once more\nto sit on your bed;\nsweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-\nhead and you wheezed for breath,\nfor help, like some child caught beneath\nits comfortable woolly blankets, drowning there.\nYour lungs caught and would not take the air.\n\nOf all things, only we\nhave power to choose that we should die;\nnothing else is free\nin this world to refuse it. Yet I,\nwho say this, could not raise\nmyself from bed how many days\nto the thieving world. Child, I have another wife,\nanother child. We try to choose our life.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nHere in the scuffled dust\nis our ground of play.\nI lift you on your swing and must\nshove you away,\nsee you return again,\ndrive you off again, then\n\nstand quiet till you come.\nYou, though you climb\nhigher, farther from me, longer,\nwill fall back to me stronger.\nBad penny, pendulum,\nyou keep my constant time\n\nto bob in blue July\nwhere fat goldfinches fly\nover the glittering, fecund\nreach of our growing lands.\nOnce more now, this second,\nI hold you in my hands.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nI thumped on you the best I could\nwhich was no use;\nyou would not tolerate your food\nuntil the sweet, fresh milk was soured\nwith lemon juice.\n\nThat puffed you up like a fine yeast.\nThe first June in your yard\nlike some squat Nero at a feast\nyou sat and chewed on white, sweet clover.\nThat is over.\n\nWhen you were old enough to walk\nwe went to feed\nthe rabbits in the park milkweed;\nsaw the paired monkeys, under lock,\nconsume each other’s salt.\n\nGoing home we watched the slow\nstars follow us down Heaven’s vault.\nYou said, let’s catch one that comes low,\npull off its skin\nand cook it for our dinner.\n\nAs absentee bread-winner,\nI seldom got you such cuisine;\nwe ate in local restaurants\nor bought what lunches we could pack\nin a brown sack\n\nwith stale, dry bread to toss for ducks\non the green-scummed lagoons,\ncrackers for porcupine and fox,\nlife-savers for the footpad coons\nto scour and rinse,\n\nsnatch after in their muddy pail\n\nand stare into their paws.\nWhen I moved next door to the jail\nI learned to fry\nomelettes and griddlecakes so I\n\ncould set you supper at my table.\nAs I built back from helplessness,\nwhen I grew able,\nthe only possible answer was\nyou had to come here less.\n\nThis Hallowe’en you come one week.\nYou masquerade\nas a vermilion, sleek,\nfat, crosseyed fox in the parade\nor, where grim jackolanterns leer,\n\ngo with your bag from door to door\nforaging for treats. How queer:\nwhen you take off your mask\nmy neighbors must forget and ask\nwhose child you are.\n\nOf course you lose your appetite,\nwhine and won’t touch your plate;\nas local law\nI set your place on an orange crate\nin your own room for days. At night\n\nyou lie asleep there on the bed\nand grate your jaw.\nAssuredly your father’s crimes\nare visited\non you. You visit me sometimes.\n\nThe time’s up. Now our pumpkin sees\nme bringing your suitcase.\nHe holds his grin;\nthe forehead shrivels, sinking in.\nYou break this year’s first crust of snow\n\noff the runningboard to eat.\nWe manage, though for days\nI crave sweets when you leave and know\nthey rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet\nfoods leave us cavities.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nI get numb and go in\nthough the dry ground will not hold\nthe few dry swirls of snow\nand it must not be very cold.\nA friend asks how you’ve been\nand I don’t know\n\nor see much right to ask.\nOr what use it could be to know.\nIn three months since you came\nthe leaves have fallen and the snow;\nyour pictures pinned above my desk\nseem much the same.\n\nSomehow I come to find\nmyself upstairs in the third floor\nmuseum’s halls,\nwalking to kill my time once more\namong the enduring and resigned\nstuffed animals,\n\nwhere, through a century’s\ncaprice, displacement and\nknown treachery between\nits wars, they hear some old command\nand in their peaceable kingdoms freeze\nto this still scene,\n\nNature Morte. Here\nby the door, its guardian,\nthe patchwork dodo stands\nwhere you and your stepsister ran\nlaughing and pointing. Here, last year,\nyou pulled my hands\n\nand had your first, worst quarrel,\nso toys were put up on your shelves.\nHere in the first glass cage\nthe little bobcats arch themselves,\nstill practicing their snarl\nof constant rage.\n\nThe bison, here, immense,\nshoves at his calf, brow to brow,\nand looks it in the eye\nto see what is it thinking now.\nI forced you to obedience;\nI don’t know why.\n\nStill the lean lioness\nbeyond them, on her jutting ledge\nof shale and desert shrub,\nstands watching always at the edge,\nstands hard and tanned and envious\nabove her cub;\n\nwith horns locked in tall heather,\ntwo great Olympian Elk stand bound,\nfixed in their lasting hate\ntill hunger brings them both to ground.\nWhom equal weakness binds together\nnone shall separate.\n\nYet separate in the ocean\nof broken ice, the white bear reels\nbeyond the leathery groups\nof scattered, drab Arctic seals\narrested here in violent motion\nlike Napoleon’s troops.\n\nOur states have stood so long\nat war, shaken with hate and dread,\nthey are paralyzed at bay;\nonce we were out of reach, we said,\nwe would grow reasonable and strong.\nSome other day.\n\nLike the cold men of Rome,\nwe have won costly fields to sow\nin salt, our only seed.\nNothing but injury will grow.\nI write you only the bitter poems\nthat you can’t read.\n\nOnan who would not breed\na child to take his brother’s bread\nand be his brother’s birth,\nrose up and left his lawful bed,\nwent out and spilled his seed\nin the cold earth.\n\nI stand by the unborn,\nby putty-colored children curled\nin jars of alcohol,\nthat waken to no other world,\nunchanging, where no eye shall mourn.\nI see the caul\n\nthat wrapped a kitten, dead.\nI see the branching, doubled throat\nof a two-headed foal;\nI see the hydrocephalic goat;\nhere is the curled and swollen head,\nthere, the burst skull;\n\nskin of a limbless calf;\na horse’s foetus, mummified;\nmounted and joined forever,\nthe Siamese twin dogs that ride\nbelly to belly, half and half,\nthat none shall sever.\n\nI walk among the growths,\nby gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts,\nby fistulas and cancers,\nwhere the malignancy man loathes\nis held suspended and persists.\nAnd I don’t know the answers.\n\nThe window’s turning white.\nThe world moves like a diseased heart\npacked with ice and snow.\nThree months now we have been apart\nless than a mile. I cannot fight\nor let you go.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nThe vicious winter finally yields\nthe green winter wheat;\nthe farmer, tired in the tired fields\nhe dare not leave, will eat.\n\nOnce more the runs come fresh; prevailing\npiglets, stout as jugs,\nharry their old sow to the railing\nto ease her swollen dugs\n\nand game colts trail the herded mares\nthat circle the pasture courses;\nour seasons bring us back once more\nlike merry-go-round horses.\n\nWith crocus mouths, perennial hungers,\ninto the park Spring comes;\nwe roast hot dogs on old coat hangers\nand feed the swan bread crumbs,\n\npay our respects to the peacocks, rabbits,\nand leathery Canada goose\nwho took, last Fall, our tame white habits\nand now will not turn loose.\n\nIn full regalia, the pheasant cocks\nmarch past their dubious hens;\nthe porcupine and the lean, red fox\ntrot around bachelor pens\n\nand the miniature painted train\nwails on its oval track:\nyou said, I’m going to Pennsylvania!\nand waved. And you’ve come back.\n\nIf I loved you, they said I’d leave\nand find my own affairs.\nWell, once again this April, we’ve\ncome around to the bears;\n\npunished and cared for, behind bars,\nthe coons on bread and water\nstretch thin black fingers after ours.\nAnd you are still my daughter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "invitation": { - "title": "“Invitation”", - "body": "Come live with me and be my last\nResource, location and resort,\nMy workday’s focus and steadfast\nDistraction to a weekend’s sport.\nCome end up with me, close my list;\nBlank my black book, block every e-mail\nFrom ex-loves whose mouths won’t be missed;\nLet nothing else alive look female.\nCome couch with me mit Freud und Lust\nAs every evening’s last connection.\nTalk to me; prove the day like Proust;\nLet what comes next rise to inspection.\nCome, let old aftermaths get lost,\nLet failures and betrayals mend,\nCancel repayments; clear the cost;\nOnce more unto the breach, dear friend.\nCome lay us down to sleep at least,\nSharing this pillow’s picture show.\nWho’s been my braintrust and best beast?\nWho else knows what I need to know?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lasting": { - "title": "“Lasting”", - "body": "“Fish oils,” my doctor snorted, “and oily fish\nare actually good for you. What’s actually wrong\nfor anyone your age are all those dishes\nwith thick sauce that we all pined for so long\nas we were young and poor. Now we can afford\nto order such things, just not to digest them;\nwe find what bills we’ve run up in the stored\nplaque and fat cells of our next stress test.”\n\nMy own last test scored in the top 10 percent\nof males in my age bracket. Which defies\nall consequences or justice--I’ve spent\nyears shackled to my desk, saved from all exercise.\nMy dentist, next: “Your teeth seem quite good\nfor someone your age, better than we’d expect\nwith so few checkups or cleanings. Teeth should\nrepay you with more grief for such neglect”--\n\nechoing how my mother always nagged,\n“Brush a full 100 strokes,” and would jam\ncod liver oil down our throats till we’d go gagging\noff to flu-filled classrooms, crammed\nwith vegetables and vitamins. By now,\nI’ve outlasted both parents whose plain food\nand firm ordinance must have endowed\nthis heart’s tough muscle--weak still in gratitude.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lifelong": { - "title": "“Lifelong”", - "body": "--_for the marriage of Charles and Lucina, Candelaria Day, Feb. 2, 1995. Terminally ill, Charles died Dec. 31, 1996._\n\nSo long as you both shall lift\nAn echo in night’s tunnel, lift\nA child from numbing pavements, lift\nA hand to hold back, to set loose, to enfold;\nSo long as you both shall leave\nProud pursuits go their own gait, leave\nThe trampling and bright trophies, leave\nYour tidemark on the mind’s strand;\nSo long as you both shall laugh\nAt sworn lies and their catch tunes, laugh\nAt all contrived, all forced growths, laugh\nFrom the peaks of occult, calm passion;\nSo long as you both shall leaf\nThrough sanctimonious parchments, leaf\nGold on a new daybook’s edges, leaf\nOut, then blossom the nerves’ branchings;\nSo long as you both shall listen\nTo the song latched in the ribs’ cage, listen\nTo breath, soft, in the next room, listen\nTo surfsound down the blood’s ways;\nSo long as you both shall love,\nSo long last; none lasts longer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 2 - } - } - }, - "lobster-in-the-window": { - "title": "“Lobster in the Window”", - "body": "First, you think they are dead.\nThen you are almost sure\nOne is beginning to stir.\nOut of the crushed ice, slow\nAs the hands of a schoolroom clock,\nHe lifts his one great claw\nAnd holds it over his head;\nNow, he is trying to walk.\n\nBut like a run-down toy;\nLike the backward crabs we boys\nSplashed after in the creek,\nTrapped in jars or a net,\nAnd then took home to keep.\nOvergrown, retarded, weak,\nHe is fumbling yet\nFrom the deep chill of his sleep\n\nAs if, in a glacial thaw,\nSome ancient thing might wake\nSore and cold and stiff\nStruggling to raise one claw\nLike a defiant fist;\nYet wavering, as if\nStarting to swell and ache\nWith that thick peg in the wrist.\n\nI should wave back, I guess.\nBut still in his permanent clench\nHe’s fallen back with the mass\nHeaped in their common trench\nWho stir, but do not look out\nThrough the rainstreaming glass,\nHear what the newsboys shout,\nOr see the raincoats pass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-locked-house": { - "title": "“A Locked House”", - "body": "As we drove back, crossing the hill,\nThe house still\nHidden in the trees, I always thought--\nA fool’s fear--that it might have caught\nFire, someone could have broken in.\nAs if things must have been\nToo good here. Still, we always found\nIt locked tight, safe and sound.\n\nI mentioned that, once, as a joke;\nNo doubt we spoke\nOf the absurdity\nTo fear some dour god’s jealousy\nOf our good fortune. From the farm\nNext door, our neighbors saw no harm\nCame to the things we cared for here.\nWhat did we have to fear?\n\nMaybe I should have thought: all\nSuch things rot, fall--\nBarns, houses, furniture.\nWe two are stronger than we were\nApart; we’ve grown\nTogether. Everything we own\nCan burn; we know what counts--some such\nIdea. We said as much.\n\nWe’d watched friends driven to betray;\nFelt that love drained away\nSome self they need.\nWe’d said love, like a growth, can feed\nOn hate we turn in and disguise;\nWe warned ourselves. That you might despise\nMe--hate all we both loved best--\nNone of us ever guessed.\n\nThe house still stands, locked, as it stood\nUntouched a good\nTwo years after you went.\nSome things passed in the settlement;\nSome things slipped away. Enough’s left\nThat I come back sometimes. The theft\nAnd vandalism were our own.\nMaybe we should have known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lying-awake": { - "title": "“Lying Awake”", - "body": "This moth caught in the room tonight\nSquirmed up, sniper-style, between\nThe rusty edges of the screen;\nThen, long as the room stayed light,\n\nLay here, content, in some cornerhole.\nNow that we’ve settled into bed\nThough, he can’t sleep. Overhead,\nhe hurls himself at the blank wall.\n\nEach night hordes of these flutterers haunt\nAnd climb my study windowpane;\nFired by reflection, their insane\nEyes gleam; they know what they want.\n\nHow do the petulant things survive?\nOut in the fields they have a place\nAnd proper work, furthering the race;\nWhy this blind fanatical drive\n\nIndoors? Why rush at every spark,\nCigar, headlamp or railway warning\nTo knock off your wings and starve by morning?\nAnd what could a moth fear in the dark\n\nCompared with what you meet inside?\nStill, he rams the fluorescent face\nOf the clock, thinks that’s another place\nOf light and families, where he’ll hide.\n\nWe’d ought to trap him in a jar,\nOr come, like the white-coats, with a net\nAnd turn him out toward living. Yet\nWe don’t; we take things as they are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "magda-goebbels": { - "title": "“Magda Goebbels”", - "body": "_(After Dr. Haase gave them shots of morphine, Magda gave each child an ampule of potassium cyanide from a spoon.)_\n\nThis is the needle that we give\nSoldiers and children when they live\nNear the front in primitive\n Conditions or real dangers;\nThis is the spoon we use to feed\nMen trapped in trouble or in need,\nWhen weakness or bad luck might lead\n Them to the hands of strangers.\n\nThis is the room where you can sleep\nYour sleep out, curled up under deep\nLayers of covering that will keep\n You safe till all harm’s past.\nThis is the bed where you can rest\nIn perfect silence, undistressed\nBy noise or nightmares, as my breast\n Once held you soft but fast.\n\nThis is the Doctor who has brought\nYour needle with your special shot\nTo quiet you; you won’t get caught\n Off guard or unprepared.\nI am your nurse who’ll comfort you;\nI nursed you, fed you till you grew\nToo big to feed; now you’re all through\n Fretting or feeling scared.\n\nThis is the glass tube that contains\nCalm that will spread down through your veins\nTo free you finally from all pains\n Of going on in error.\nThis tiny pinprick sets the germ\nInside you that fills out its term\nTill you can feel yourself grow firm\n Against all doubt, all terror.\n\nInto this spoon I break the pill\nThat stiffens the unsteady will\nAnd hardens you against the chill\n Voice of a world of lies.\nThis amber medicine implants\nSteadfastness in your blood; this grants\nImmunity from greed and chance,\n And from all compromise.\n\nThis is the serum that can cure\nWeak hearts; these pure, clear drops insure\nYou’ll face what comes and can endure\n The test; you’ll never falter.\nThis is the potion that preserves\nYou in a faith that never swerves;\nThis sets the pattern of your nerves\n Too firm for you to alter.\n\nI set this spoon between your tight\nTeeth, as I gave you your first bite;\nThis satisfies your appetite\n For other nourishment.\nTake this on your tongue; this do\nRemembering your mother who\nSo loved her Leader she stayed true\n When all the others went,\n\nWhen every friend proved false, in the\nDelirium of treachery\nOn every hand, when even He\n Had turned His face aside.\nHe shut himself in with His whore;\nThen, though I screamed outside His door,\nSaid He’d not see me anymore.\n They both took cyanide.\n\nOpen wide, now, little bird;\nI who sang you your first word\nSoothe away every sound you’ve heard\n Except your Leader’s voice.\nClose your eyes, now; take your death.\nOnce we slapped you to take breath.\nVengeance is mine, the Lord God saith\n And cancels each last choice.\n\nOnce, my first words marked out your mind;\nJust as our Leader’s phrases bind\nAll hearts to Him, building a blind\n Loyalty through the nation,\nWe shape you into a pure form.\nTrapped, our best soldiers tricked the storm,\nThe Reds: those last hours, they felt warm\n Who stood fast to their station.\n\nYou needn’t fear what your life meant;\nYou won’t curse how your hours were spent;\nYou’ll grow like your own monument\n To all things sure and good,\nFixed like a frieze in high relief\nOf granite figures that our Chief\nAccepts into His true belief,\n His true blood-brotherhood.\n\nYou’ll never bite the hand that fed you,\nWon’t turn away from those that bred you,\nComforted your nights and led you\n Into the thought of virtue;\nYou won’t be turned from your own bed;\nWon’t turn into that thing you dread;\nNo new betrayal lies ahead;\n Now no one else can hurt you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 30 - } - } - }, - "mementos-1": { - "title": "“Mementos, 1”", - "body": "Sorting out letters and piles of my old\n Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards\nThat meant something once, I happened to find\n Your picture. _That_ picture. I stopped there cold,\nLike a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard\n Who has turned up a severed hand.\n\nStill, that first second, I was glad: you stand\n Just as you stood--shy, delicate, slender,\nIn that long gown of green lace netting and daisies\n That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned\nUs all. Well, our needs were different, then,\n And our ideals came easy.\n\nThen through the war and those two long years\n Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks\nAmong dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried\n This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,\nProve it had been, that it might come back.\n That was before we got married.\n\n--Before we drained out one another’s force\n With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret\nAnd the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce\n And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,\nI put back your picture. Someday, in due course,\n I will find that it’s still there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "monet-les-nympheas": { - "title": "“Monet: Les Nymphéas”", - "body": "The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.\nO world half-known through opening, twilit lids\nBefore the vague face clenches into light;\nO universal waters like a cloud,\nLike those first clouds of half-created matter;\nO all things rising, rising like the fumes\nFrom waters falling, O forever falling;\nInfinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished,\nThe snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves\nDowndrifting age upon age through milky oceans;\nO slow downdrifting of the atoms;\nO island nebulae and O the nebulous islands\nWandering these mists like falsefires, which are true,\nBobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing\nThrough the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing\nAs we pass into the memory of women\nWho are passing. Within those depths\nWhat ravening? What devouring rage?\nHow shall our living know its ends of yielding?\nThese things have taken me as the mouth an orange--\nThat acrid sweet juice entering every cell;\nAnd I am shared out. I become these things:\nThese lilies, if these things are water lilies\nWhich are dancers growing dim across no floor;\nThese mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun;\nThis blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors;\nFluorescence into which we pass and penetrate;\nO soft as the thighs of women;\nO radiance, into which I go on dying …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "nightwatchmans-song": { - "title": "“Nightwatchman’s Song”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhat’s unseen may not exist--\nOr so those secret powers insist\n That prowl past nightfall,\nEnabled by the brain’s blacklist\n To fester out of sight,\n\nSo we streak from bad to worse,\nThrough an expanding universe\n And see no evil.\nOn my rounds like a night nurse\n Or sentry on qui vive,\n\nI make, through murkier hours, my way\nWhere the sun patrolled all day\n Toward stone-blind midnight\nTo poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray\n At what’s hushed up and hidden.\n\nLacking all leave or protocol,\nThings, one by one, hear my footfall,\n Blank out their faces,\nDodge between trees, find cracks in walls\n Or lock down offices.\n\nStill, though scuttling forces flee\nJust as far stars recede from me\n To outmost boundaries,\nI stalk through ruins and debris,\n Graveyard and underground.\n\nLed by their helmetlantern’s light\nMiners inch through anthracite;\n I’m the unblinking mole\nThat sniffs out what gets lost or might\n Slip down the world’s black hole.\n\n\n# II.\n\n(ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns)\n\nWhat’s obscene?--just our obsessed,\nIncessant itch and interest\n In things found frightful:\nIn bestial tortures, rape, incest;\n In ripe forbidden fruit\n\nDangling, lush, just out of reach;\nDim cellars nailed up under each\n Towering success,\nThe loser’s envy that will teach\n A fierce vindictiveness,\n\nThe victors’ high court that insures\nPardon for winners and procures\n Little that’s needed\nBut all we lust for. What endures?--\n Exponential greed\n\nAnd trash containers overflowing\nWith shredded memos, records showing\n What, who, when, why\n’Til there’s no sure way of knowing\n What’s clear to every eye:\n\nThe heart’s delight in hatred, runny\nAs the gold drip from combs of honey;\n The rectal intercourse\nOf power politics and money\n That slimes both goal and source.\n\nWhat’s obscured?--what’s abscessed.\nAfter inspection, I’d suggest\n It’s time we got our head\nRewired. I plan to just get pissed,\n Shitfaced and brain-dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pacemaker": { - "title": "“Pacemaker”", - "body": "# I.\n\n“One Snodgrass, two Snodgrass, three Snodgrass, four …”\n I took my own rollcall when I counted seconds;\n“One two three, Two two three, Three …,” the drum score\n Showed only long rests to the tympani’s entrance.\n\n“Oh-oh-oh leff; leff; leff-toh-righ-toh-leff,”\n The sergeant cadenced us footsore recruits;\nThe heart, poor drummer, gone lame, deaf,\n Then AWOL, gets frogmarched to the noose.\n\n\n# II.\n\nOld coots, at the Veterans’, might catch breath\n If their cheeks got slapped by a nurse’s aide,\nThen come back to life; just so, at their birth,\n Young rumps had been tendered warm accolades.\n\nThe kick-ass rude attitude, smart-assed insult,\n The acid-fueled book review just might shock\nUs back to the brawl like smelling salts,\n Might sting the lulled heart up off its blocks.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI thought I’d always favor rubato\n Or syncopation, scorning fixed rhythms;\n Thought my old heartthrobs could stand up to stress;\nBelieved one’s bloodpump should skip a few beats\n If it fell into company with sleek young women;\n Believed my own bruit could beat with the best.\n\nWrong again, Snodgrass! This new gold gadget,\n Snug as the watch on my wife’s warm wrist,\n Drives my pulsetempo near twice its old pace--\nGo, nonstop startwatch! Go, clockwork rabbit,\n Keeping this lame old dog synchronized,\n Steady, sparked up, still in the race.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-poet-ridiculed-by-hysteric-academics": { - "title": "“The Poet Ridiculed by Hysteric Academics”", - "body": "Is it, then, your opinion\nWomen are putty in your hands?\nIs this the face to launch upon\nA thousand one night stands?\n\nFirst, please, would you be so kind\nAs to define your contribution\nTo modern verse, the Western mind\nAnd human institutions?\n\nWhere, where is the long, flowing hair,\nThe velvet suit, the broad bow tie;\nWhere is the other-worldly air,\nWhere the abstracted eye?\n\nDescribe the influence on your verse\nOf Oscar Mudwarp’s mighty line,\nThe theories of Susan Schmersch\nOr the spondee’s decline.\n\nYou’ve labored to present us with\nThis mouse-sized volume; shall this equal\nThe epic glories of Joe Smith?\nHe’s just brought out a sequel.\n\nWhere are the beard, the bongo drums,\nTattered T-shirt and grubby sandals,\nAs who, released from Iowa, comes\nTo tell of wondrous scandals?\n\nHave you subversive, out of date,\nOr controversial ideas?\nAnd can you really pull your weight\nAmong such minds as these?\n\nAh, what avails the tenure race,\nAh, what the Ph.D.,\nWhen all departments have a place\nFor nincompoops like thee?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reichsmarschall-hermann-goring": { - "title": "“Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring”", - "body": "_(Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, once bragged that if one German city were bombed, they could call him “Meier.” At his Karinhall estate, he questions himself and his disgrace.)_\n\nAnd why, Herr Reichsmarschall, is Italy\nJust like schnitzel? If they’re beaten\nEither one will just get bigger.\nNeither cuts too firm a figure.\nStill, all this humble pie you’ve eaten\nLately, fills you out quite prettily.\n\nWhy then, Herr Göring, how can we\nTell you and Italy apart?\nItaly always wins through losing;\nI, just the opposite, by using\nHigh skills and cunning learned the art\nOf flat pratfalls through victory.\n\nYou’ve led our Flying Circus; how\nCould our war ace turn to a clown?\nBoth pad out over-extended fronts;\nBoth keep alive doing slick stunts\nAnd, even so, both get shot down.\nBut only one’s called “Meier” now.\n\nPray, could an old, soft football be\nMuch like a man in deep disgrace?\nThey don’t kick back; don’t even dare\nLook up--the British own the air!\nThen, stick a needle in someplace;\nPump yourself full of vacancy.\n\nTell us, dear Minister for Air,\nAre warriors, then, like a bad smell?\nNeither stays inside its borders;\nEither’s bound to follow ordures;\nThey both expand and play the swell\nThough something’s getting spoiled somewhere.\n\nThen answer one more question, which is\nAre politicians like whipped cream?\nThey both inflate themselves with gas;\nAlso they both puff up your ass\nTill you’re exposed like some bad dream\nWhere you’ve grown too big for your britches.\n\nHerr President, can’t we tell apart\nAn artful statesman and an ass?\nFat chance! One spouts out high ideals;\nOne makes low rumblings after meals.\nBut that’s the threat of leaking gas\nWhich all men fear! No; that’s a fart.\n\nLast, could you give one simple rule\nTo tell a medal from a turd?\nNo. They both come from those above you\nConveying their opinion of you.\nRight! Here’s your new medal, conferred\nFor vast achievements: April Fool!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 1 - } - } - }, - "sitting-outside": { - "title": "“Sitting Outside”", - "body": "These lawn chairs and the chaise lounge\nof bulky redwood were purchased for my father\ntwenty years ago, then plumped down in the yard\nwhere he seldom went when he could still work\nand never had stayed long. His left arm\nin a sling, then lopped off, he smoked there or slept\nwhile the weather lasted, watched what cars passed,\nread stock reports, counted pills,\nthen dozed again. I didn’t go there\nin those last weeks, sick of the delusions\nthey still maintained, their talk of plans\nfor some boat tour or a trip to the Bahamas\nonce he’d recovered. Under our willows,\nthis old set’s done well: we’ve sat with company,\nread or taken notes--although the arm rests\nget dry and splintery or wheels drop off\nso the whole frame’s weakened if it’s hauled\nacross rough ground. Of course the trees,\ntoo, may not last: leaves storm down,\nbranches crack off, the riddled bark\nseparates, then gets shed. I have a son, myself,\nwith things to be looked after. I sometimes think\nsince I’ve retired, sitting in the shade here\nand feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled\nwith a child dread you could catch somebody’s dying\nif you got too close. And you can’t be too sure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Observe the cautious toadstools\n still on the lawn today\nthough they grow over-evening;\n sun shrinks them away.\nPale and proper and rootless,\n they righteously extort\ntheir living from the living.\n I have been their sort.\n\nSee by our blocked foundation\n the cold, archaic clay,\nstiff and clinging and sterile\n as children mold at play\nor as the Lord God fashioned\n before He breathed it breath.\nThe earth we dig and carry\n for flowers, is strong in death.\n\nWoman, we are the rich\n soil, friable and humble,\nwhere all our murders rot,\n where our old deaths crumble\nand fortify my reach\n far from you, wide and free,\nthough I have set my root\n in you and am your tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sweet-beast-i-have-gone-prowling": { - "title": "“Sweet Beast, I Have Gone Prowling”", - "body": "Sweet beast, I have gone prowling,\n a proud rejected man\nwho lived along the edges\n catch as catch can;\nin darkness and in hedges\n I sang my sour tone\nand all my love was howling\n conspicuously alone.\n\nI curled and slept all day\n or nursed my bloodless wounds\nuntil the squares were silent\n where I could make my tunes\nsingular and violent.\n Then, sure as hearers came\nI crept and flinched away.\n And, girl, you’ve done the same.\n\nA stray from my own type,\n led along by blindness,\nmy love was near to spoiled\n and curdled all my kindness.\nI find no kin, no child;\n only the weasel’s ilk.\nSweet beast, cat of my own stripe,\n come and take my milk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "these-trees-stand": { - "title": "“These Trees Stand”", - "body": "These trees stand very tall under the heavens.\nWhile _they_ stand, if I walk, all stars traverse\nThis steep celestial gulf their branches chart.\nThough lovers stand at sixes and at sevens\nWhile civilizations come down with the curse,\nSnodgrass is walking through the universe.\n\nI can’t make any world go around your house.\nBut note this moon. Recall how the night nurse\nGoes ward-rounds, by the mild, reflective art\nOf focusing her flashlight on her blouse.\nYour name’s safe conduct into love or verse;\nSnodgrass is walking through the universe.\n\nYour name’s absurd, miraculous as sperm\nAnd as decisive. If you can’t coerce\nOne thing outside yourself, why you’re the poet!\nWhat irrefrangible atoms whirl, affirm\nTheir destiny and form Lucinda’s skirts!\nShe can’t make up your mind. Soon as you know it,\nYour firmament grows touchable and firm.\nIf all this world runs battlefield or worse,\nCome, let us wipe our glasses on our shirts:\nSnodgrass is walking through the universe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vuillard": { - "title": "“Vuillard”", - "body": "_(Instructions for the Visit)_\n\nAdmire, when you come here, the glimmering hair\nOf the girl; praise her pale\nComplexion. Think well of her dress\nThough that is somewhat out of fashion.\nDon’t try to take her hand, but smile for\nHer hesitant gentleness.\nSay the old woman is looking strong\nToday; such hardiness. Remark,\nPerhaps, how she has dressed herself black\nLike a priest, and wears that sufficient air\nThat does become the righteous.\nAs you approach, she will push back\nHer chair, shove away her plate\nAnd wait,\nSitting squat and direct, before\nThe red mahogany chest\nMassive as some great\nSafe; will wait,\nBy the table and her greasy plate,\nThe bone half-chewed, her wine half-drained;\nShe will wait. And fix her steady\nEyes on you--the straight stare\nOf an old politician.\nTry once to meet her eyes. But fail.\nLet your sight\nDrift--yet never as if hunting for\nThe keys (you keep imagining) hung\nBy her belt. (They are not there.)\nWatch, perhaps, that massive chest--the way\nIt tries to lean\nForward, toward her, till it seems to rest\nIts whole household’s weight\nOf linens and clothing and provisions\nAll on her stiff back.\nIt might be strapped there like the monstrous pack\nOf some enchanted pedlar. Dense, self-contained,\nLike mercury in a ball,\nShe can support this without strain,\nYet she grows smaller, wrinkling\nLike a potato, parched as dung;\nIt cramps her like a fist.\nAsk no one why the chest\nHas no knobs. Betray\nNo least suspicion\nThe necessities within\nCould vanish at her\nWill. Try not to think\nThat as she feeds, gains\nSpecific gravity,\nShe shrinks, light-\nless as the world’s\nHard core\nAnd the per-\nspective drains\nIn her.\nFinally, above all,\nYou must not ever see,\nOr let slip one hint you can see,\nOn the other side, the girl’s\nCuffs, like cordovan restraints;\nForget her bony, tentative wrist,\nThe half-fed, worrying eyes, and how\nShe backs out, bows, and tries to bow\nOut of the scene, grows too ethereal\nTo make a shape inside her dress\nAnd the dress itself is beginning already\nTo sublime itself away like a vapor\nThat merges into the empty twinkling\nOf the air and of the bright wallpaper.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "who-steals-my-good-name": { - "title": "“Who Steals My Good Name”", - "body": "_For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days_\n\nMy pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus,\nScowled, “Well, that’s the last time I say my name’s\nSnodgrass!” Just so, may that anonymous\nMexican male who prodigally claims\n\nMy clan lines, identity and the sixteen\nDigits that unlock my bank account,\nThink twice. That less than proper name’s been\nTaken by three ex-wives, each for an amount\n\nPast all you’ve squandered, each more than pleased\nTo change it back. That surname you affect\nMay have more consequence than getting teased\nBy dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives.\n\nDon’t underrate its history: one of ours played\nPiano on his prison’s weekly broadcast;\nOne got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made\nA bungle costing the World Series. My own past\n\nCould subject you to guilt by association:\nIf you write anything more than false checks,\nAbandon all hope of large press publication\nOr prizes--critics shun the name like sex\n\nWithout a condom. Whoever steals my purse\nHelps chain me to my writing desk again\nFor fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse:\nMay your pen name help send you to _your_ pen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - } - } - }, - "gary-snyder": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gary Snyder", - "birth": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "above-pate-valley": { - "title": "“Above Pate Valley”", - "body": "We finished clearing the last\nSection of trail by noon,\nHigh on the ridge-side\nTwo thousand feet above the creek\nReached the pass, went on\nBeyond the white pine groves,\nGranite shoulders, to a small\nGreen meadow watered by the snow,\nEdged with Aspen--sun\nStraight high and blazing\nBut the air was cool.\nAte a cold fried trout in the\nTrembling shadows. I spied\nA glitter, and found a flake\nBlack volcanic glass--obsidian--\nBy a flower. Hands and knees\nPushing the Bear grass, thousands\nOf arrowhead leavings over a\nHundred yards. Not one good\nHead, just razor flakes\nOn a hill snowed all but summer,\nA land of fat summer deer,\nThey came to camp. On their\nOwn trails. I followed my own\nTrail here. Picked up the cold-drill,\nPick, singlejack, and sack\nOf dynamite.\nTen thousand years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "december-at-yase": { - "title": "“December at Yase”", - "body": "You said, that October,\nIn the tall dry grass by the orchard\nWhen you chose to be free,\n“Again someday, maybe ten years.”\n\nAfter college I saw you\nOne time. You were strange,\nAnd I was obsessed with a plan.\n\nNow ten years and more have\nGone by: I’ve always known\nwhere you were--\nI might have gone to you\nHoping to win your love back.\nYou still are single.\n\nI didn’t.\nI thought I must make it alone. I\nHave done that.\n\nOnly in dream, like this dawn,\nDoes the grave, awed intensity\nOf our young love\nReturn to my mind, to my flesh.\n\nWe had what the others\nAll crave and seek for;\nWe left it behind at nineteen.\n\nI feel ancient, as though I had\nLived many lives.\n\nAnd may never now know\nIf I am a fool\nOr have done what my\nkarma demands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "i-went-into-the-maverick-bar": { - "title": "“I Went into the Maverick Bar”", - "body": "I went into the Maverick Bar\nIn Farmington, New Mexico.\nAnd drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer.\nMy long hair was tucked up under a cap\nI’d left the earring in the car.\n\nTwo cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables,\nA waitress asked us where are you from?\na country-and-western band began to play\n“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”\nAnd with the next song, a couple began to dance.\n\nThey held each other like in High School dances in the fifties;\nI recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon.\nThat short-haired joy and roughness--America--your stupidity.\nI could almost love you again.\n\nWe left--onto the freeway shoulders--under the tough old stars--\nIn the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself,\nTo the real work, to “What is to be done.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Beating asphalt into highway potholes\npickup truck we’d loaded\nroad repair stock shed & yard\na day so hot the asphalt went in soft.\npipe and steel plate tamper\ntook turns at by hand\nthen drive the truck rear wheel\na few times back and forth across the fill--\nfinish it off with bitchmo around the edge.\n\nthe foreman said let’s get a drink\n& drove through the woods and flower fields\nshovels clattering in back\ninto a black grove by a cliff\na rocked in pool\nfeeding a fern ravine\ntin can to drink\nnumbing the hand and cramping in the gut\nsurging through the fingers from below\n& dark here--\nlet’s get back to the truck\nget back on the job.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "there-are-those-who-love-to-get-dirty": { - "title": "“There are those who love to get dirty …”", - "body": "There are those who love to get dirty\nand fix things.\nThey drink coffee at dawn,\nbeer after work,\n\nAnd those who stay clean,\njust appreciate things,\nAt breakfast they have milk\nand juice at night.\n\nThere are those who do both,\nthey drink tea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "fyodor-sologub": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Fyodor Sologub", - "birth": { - "year": 1863 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Sologub", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "the-devils-swing": { - "title": "“The Devil’s Swing”", - "body": "Beneath a shaggy fir tree,\nAbove a noisy stream\nThe devil’s swing is swinging,\nPushed by his hairy hand.\n\nHe swings the swing while laughing,\nSwing high, swing low,\nSwing high, swing low,\nThe board is bent and creaking,\nThe rope is taut and chafing\nAgainst a heavy branch.\n\nThe swaying board is rushing\nWith long and drawn-out creaks;\nWith hand on hip, the devil\nIs laughing with a wheeze.\n\nI clutch, I swoon. I’m swinging.\nSwing high, swing low,\nSwing high, swing low,\nI’m clinging and I’m dangling.\nAnd from the devil trying\nTo turn my languid gaze.\n\nAbove the dusky fir tree\nThe azure sky guffaws:\n“You’re caught upon the swings, love,\nThe devil take you, swing!”\n\nBeneath the shaggy fir tree\nThe screeching throng whirls round:\n“You’re caught upon the swings, love,\nThe devil take you, swing!”\n\nThe devil will not slacken\nThe swift board’s pace, I know,\nUntil his hand unseats me\nWith a ferocious blow.\n\nUntil the jute, while twisting,\nIs frayed through till it breaks,\nUntil my ground beneath me\nTurns upward to my face.\n\nI’ll fly above the fir tree\nAnd fall flat on the ground.\nSo swing the swing, you devil,\nGo higher, higher … oh!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "April FitzLyon", - "date": { - "year": 1907, - "month": "june", - "day": 14 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june", - "day": 14 - } - } - }, - "in-this-hour": { - "title": "“In this hour …”", - "body": "In this hour when darkened skies arc by the awful thunder rent,\nIn this hour when shakes our dwelling to its very fundament,\nIn this hour when every hope and every love are in despair,\nWhen the mightiest in spirit purse the brow in restless care\nIn this hour your hearts shall rouse them higher, higher in their pride,\nVictory is theirs alone who faithful to the end abide.\nOnly theirs who trust with blindness, even though in spite of fate,\nOnly theirs who on their mother fling not grievous stones of hate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Selver", - "date": { - "year": 1915, - "month": "june", - "day": 25 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-jare": { - "title": "“The Jare”", - "body": "Inside a jar with painted flowers\nA surly servant carries wine.\nIn skies above the darkness lowers,\nThe road is rough and no stars shine.\nWith straining eyes to guide his going.\nHe peers into the darkness dim.\nLest the wine flood and overflowing\nDrip down and soak his breast for him.\n\nI also bear a jar, and filled it\nWith sufferings of long ago;\nI lulled and cunningly distilled it.\nMy poison of remembered woe.\nBy devious ways I travel bearing\nMy jar that brims with evil, lest\nSomeone should come with hands uncaring\nAnd spill it down upon my breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Cecil Maurice Bowra", - "date": { - "year": 1895, - "month": "september", - "day": 12 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september", - "day": 12 - } - } - }, - "over-the-river-the-hazes-that-flow": { - "title": "“Over the river the hazes that flow …”", - "body": "Over the river the hazes that flow\n’Neath the moon in the lonesome night,\nThey beset me with hate, and they bring me delight\nFor the stillness thereof and the woe.\n\nForgotten the beauty of day,\nAnd thro’ mist I stealthily pace,\nA track scarce beheld, in my travail I trace\nAnd I carry my lonely despair on my way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Selver", - "date": { - "year": 1895, - "month": "may", - "day": 14 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 14 - } - } - } - } - }, - "vladimir-solovyov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Vladimir Solovyov", - "birth": { - "year": 1853 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-court-of-my-empress-is-lofty-of-height": { - "title": "“The Court of My Empress is Lofty of Height”", - "body": "The court of my empress is lofty of height,\nWith seven golden pillars around.\nThe crown of my empress is sevenfold bedight,\nWith jewels unnumbered ’tis bound.\n\nAnd in the green garden, my empress’ own,\nThe roses and lilies bloom fair;\nIn the waves of a silvery streamlet is thrown\nThe flash of her brow and her hair.\n\nBut my empress ne’er harks to the whispering rill,\nOn the blossoms she turns not her gaze:\nAnd the glow of her eyes in despair has grown chill,\nAnd grief on her pondering preys.\n\nShe beholds: in a midnight domain far away,\n’Mid the chillness of hazes and snow,\nHow the gloom’s evil powers in a single affray\nHer lover of old overthrow.\n\nAnd her gem-studded crown from her brow she has torn,\nFrom her golden-wrought palace she wends;\nOf a sudden, approaching her comrade forsworn,\nBenignant, her hand she extends.\n\nAnd as o’er the dark winter young spring-tide has cast\nHis glow, she in tenderest love\nHas bent herself o’er him, and shielded him fast\nWith her glittering shelter above.\n\nAs the powers of the gloom in the dust he descries,\nHe is kindled with purest of flames;\nAnd with perishless love in her radiant eyes\nThus softly her friend she acclaims:\n\n“I know thee inconstant as waves of the sea;\nThou hast sworn to me trueness alway,--\nThine oath thou betrayed,--by betrayal of me,\nMy heart couldst thou likewise betray?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Paul Selver", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "do-you-not-see-beloved": { - "title": "“Do You Not See, Beloved?”", - "body": "Do you not see, Beloved?\nAll that about us lies\nIs but the shade, the mirrored image\nOf things not seen with eyes.\n\nDo you not hear, Beloved?\nThe sounds that to earth belong\nAre but the muffled and broken echo\nOf a noble triumph-song.\n\nDo you not feel, Beloved?\nOur joy that will not end--\nThe joy of a silent love-greeting\nThat friend bestows on friend.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "R. M. Hewitt" - } - }, - "nature": { - "title": "“Nature”", - "body": "Nature does not allow one to\nRemove the veil from her beauty,\nAnd you will not yield from her with machines\nThat which your spirit cannot fathom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale" - } - } - } - }, - "reinhard-sorge": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Reinhard Sorge", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "german", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇩🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Sorge", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "german" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "in-far-flung-circles": { - "title": "“In Far-Flung Circles”", - "body": "In far-flung circles you’ve plowed your flights\nThrough darkness and chaotic dreams, gigantic,\nThrough torments’ regions, caves of space, gigantic--\nRestless at dawn and restless in your nights …\n\nWhen your wild screams hoist you in a gyre\nOf father’s curse, and every mother’s pain;\nEternal procreation shows it’s not in vain--:\nSalvation mounts defiant from the mire …\n\nThen with your wings you’ll move that bolted gate\nWhose jawlike hinges crushed so many brains;\nYou love the longing leading to these pains,\nYou clutch it, reeling downward to your fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-southey": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Southey", - "birth": { - "year": 1774 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1843 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southey", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "after-blenheim": { - "title": "“After Blenheim”", - "body": "It was a summer evening;\nOld Kaspar’s work was done,\nAnd he before his cottage door\nWas sitting in the sun;\nAnd by him sported on the green\nHis little grandchild Wilhelmine.\n\nShe saw her brother Peterkin\nRoll something large and round,\nWhich he beside the rivulet\nIn playing there had found.\nHe came to ask what he had found,\nThat was so large, and smooth, and round.\n\nOld Kaspar took it from the boy,\nWho stood expectant by;\nAnd then the old man shook his head,\nAnd with a natural sigh,\n“’Tis some poor fellow’s skull,” said he,\n“Who fell in the great victory.”\n\n“I find them in the garden,\nFor there’s many here about;\nAnd often, when I go to plow,\nThe plowshare turns them out;\nFor many thousand men,” said he,\n“Were slain in that great victory.”\n\n“Now tell us what ’twas all about,”\nYoung Peterkin, he cries;\nAnd little Wilhelmine looks up\nWith wonder-waiting eyes;\n“Now tell us all about the war,\nAnd what they fought each other for.”\n\n“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,\n“Who put the French to rout;\nBut what they fought each other for,\nI could not well make out;\nBut everybody said,” quoth he,\n“That ’twas a famous victory.”\n\n“My father lived at Blenheim then,\nYon little stream hard by;\nThey burnt his dwelling to the ground,\nAnd he was forced to fly;\nSo with his wife and child he fled,\nNor had he where to rest his head.”\n\n“With fire and sword the country round\nWas wasted far and wide,\nAnd many a childing mother then,\nAnd new-born baby, died;\nBut things like that, you know, must be\nAt every famous victory.”\n\n“They say it was a shocking sight\nAfter the field was won;\nFor many thousand bodies here\nLay rotting in the sun;\nBut things like that, you know, must be\nAfter a famous victory.”\n\n“Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won,\nAnd our good Prince Eugene.”\n“Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!”\nSaid little Wilhelmine.\n“Nay, nay, my little girl,” quoth he;\n“It was a famous victory.”\n\n“And everybody praised the Duke\nWho this great fight did win.”\n“But what good came of it at last?”\nQuoth little Peterkin.\n“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;\n“But ’twas a famous victory.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "inchcape-rock": { - "title": "“Inchcape Rock”", - "body": "No stir in the air, no stir in the sea,\nThe Ship was still as she could be;\nHer sails from heaven received no motion,\nHer keel was steady in the ocean.\n\nWithout either sign or sound of their shock,\nThe waves flow’d over the Inchcape Rock;\nSo little they rose, so little they fell,\nThey did not move the Inchcape Bell.\n\nThe worthy Abbot of Aberbrothok\nHad placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock;\nOn a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,\nAnd over the waves its warning rung.\n\nWhen the Rock was hid by the surge’s swell,\nThe Mariners heard the warning Bell;\nAnd then they knew the perilous Rock,\nAnd blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok\n\nThe Sun in the heaven was shining gay,\nAll things were joyful on that day;\nThe sea-birds scream’d as they wheel’d round,\nAnd there was joyaunce in their sound.\n\nThe buoy of the Inchcpe Bell was seen\nA darker speck on the ocean green;\nSir Ralph the Rover walk’d his deck,\nAnd fix’d his eye on the darker speck.\n\nHe felt the cheering power of spring,\nIt made him whistle, it made him sing;\nHis heart was mirthful to excess,\nBut the Rover’s mirth was wickedness.\n\nHis eye was on the Inchcape Float;\nQuoth he, “My men, put out the boat,\nAnd row me to the Inchcape Rock,\nAnd I’ll plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok.”\n\nThe boat is lower’d, the boatmen row,\nAnd to the Inchcape Rock they go;\nSir Ralph bent over from the boat,\nAnd he cut the bell from the Inchcape Float.\n\nDown sank the Bell with a gurgling sound,\nThe bubbles rose and burst around;\nQuoth Sir Ralph, “The next who comes to the Rock,\nWon’t bless the Abbot of Aberbrothok.”\n\nSir Ralph the Rover sail’d away,\nHe scour’d the seas for many a day;\nAnd now grown rich with plunder’d store,\nHe steers his course for Scotland’s shore.\n\nSo thick a haze o’erspreads the sky,\nThey cannot see the sun on high;\nThe wind hath blown a gale all day,\nAt evening it hath died away.\n\nOn the deck the Rover takes his stand,\nSo dark it is they see no land.\nQuoth Sir Ralph, “It will be lighter soon,\nFor there is the dawn of the rising Moon.”\n\n“Canst hear,” said one, “the breakers roar?\nFor methinks we should be near the shore.”\n“Now, where we are I cannot tell,\nBut I wish we could hear the Inchcape Bell.”\n\nThey hear no sound, the swell is strong,\nThough the wind hath fallen they drift along;\nTill the vessel strikes with a shivering shock,\n“Oh Christ! It is the Inchcape Rock!”\n\nSir Ralph the Rover tore his hair,\nHe curst himself in his despair;\nThe waves rush in on every side,\nThe ship is sinking beneath the tide.\n\nBut even is his dying fear,\nOne dreadful sound could the Rover hear;\nA sound as if with the Inchcape Bell,\nThe Devil below was ringing his knell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "my-days-among-the-dead-are-past": { - "title": "“My Days among the Dead Are Past”", - "body": "My days among the Dead are past;\n Around me I behold,\nWhere’er these casual eyes are cast,\n The mighty minds of old;\nMy never-failing friends are they,\nWith whom I converse day by day.\n\nWith them I take delight in weal,\n And seek relief in woe;\nAnd while I understand and feel\n How much to them I owe,\nMy cheeks have often been bedew’d\nWith tears of thoughtful gratitude.\n\nMy thoughts are with the Dead, with them\n I live in long-past years,\nTheir virtues love, their faults condemn,\n Partake their hopes and fears,\nAnd from their lessons seek and find\nInstruction with an humble mind.\n\nMy hopes are with the Dead, anon\n My place with them will be,\nAnd I with them shall travel on\n Through all Futurity;\nYet leaving here a name, I trust,\nThat will not perish in the dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-mans-comforts": { - "title": "“The Old Man’s Comforts”", - "body": "You are old, Father William, the young man cried,\n The few locks which are left you are grey;\nYou are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,\n Now tell me the reason I pray.\n\nIn the days of my youth, Father William replied,\n I remember’d that youth would fly fast,\nAnd abused not my health and my vigour at first\n That I never might need them at last.\n\nYou are old, Father William, the young man cried,\n And pleasures with youth pass away,\nAnd yet you lament not the days that are gone,\n Now tell me the reason I pray.\n\nIn the days of my youth, Father William replied,\n I remember’d that youth could not last;\nI thought of the future whatever I did,\n That I never might grieve for the past.\n\nYou are old, Father William, the young man cried,\n And life must be hastening away;\nYou are chearful, and love to converse upon death!\n Now tell me the reason I pray.\n\nI am chearful, young man, Father William replied,\n Let the cause thy attention engage;\nIn the days of my youth I remember’d my God!\n And He hath not forgotten my age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "robert-southwell": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Southwell", - "birth": { - "year": 1561 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1595 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southwell_(priest)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "the-burning-babe": { - "title": "“The Burning Babe”", - "body": "As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,\nSurpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;\nAnd lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,\nA pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;\nWho, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed\nAs though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.\n“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,\nYet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!\n\nMy faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,\nLove is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;\nThe fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,\nThe metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,\nFor which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,\nSo will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”\n\nWith this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,\nAnd straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "a-child-my-choice": { - "title": "“A Child My Choice”", - "body": "Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child\nWhose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.\n\nI praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His;\nWhile Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.\n\nLove’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light,\nTo love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.\n\nHe mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due;\nFirst friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.\n\nThough young, yet wise; though small, yet strong; though man, yet God He is:\nAs wise, He knows; as strong, He can; as God, He loves to bless.\n\nHis knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all;\nHis birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.\n\nAlas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing;\nOut of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.\n\nAlmighty Babe, whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,\nCorrect my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "content-and-rich": { - "title": "“Content and Rich”", - "body": "I dwell in Grace’s court,\nEnriched with Virtue’s rights;\nFaith guides my wit, Love leads my will,\nHope all my mind delights.\n\nIn lowly vales I mount\nTo pleasure’s highest pitch;\nMy silly shroud true honour brings;\nMy poor estate is rich.\n\nMy conscience is my crown,\nContented thoughts my rest;\nMy heart is happy in itself;\nMy bliss is in my breast.\n\nEnough, I reckon wealth;\nThat mean, the surest lot,\nThat lies too high for base contempt,\nToo low for envy’s shot.\n\nMy wishes are but few\nAll easy to fulfil;\nI make the limits of my power\nThe bounds unto my will.\n\nI fear no care for gold;\nWell-doing is my wealth;\nMy mind to me an empire is,\nWhile grace affordeth health.\n\nI clip high-climbing thoughts,\nThe wings of swelling pride;\nTheir fall is worst that from the heigh\nOf greatest honour slide.\n\nSince sails of largest size\nThe storm doth soonest tear;\nI bear so low and small a sail\nAs freeth me from fear.\n\nI wrestle not with rage,\nWhile fury’s flame doth burn;\nIt is in vain to stop the stream\nUntil the tide doth turn.\n\nBut when the flame is out,\nAnd ebbing wrath doth end,\nI turn a late enraged foe\nInto a quiet friend.\n\nAnd, taught with often proof,\nA temper’d calm I find\nTo be most solace to itself,\nBest cure for angry mind.\n\nSpare diet is my fare,\nMy clothes more fit than fine;\nI know I feed and clothe a foe,\nThat pamper’d would repine.\n\nI envy not their hap\nWhom favour doth advance;\nI take no pleasure in their pain\nThat have less happy chance.\n\nTo rise by others’ fall\nI deem a losing gain;\nAll states with others’ ruin built,\nTo ruin run amain.\n\nNo change of fortune’s calm\nCan cast my comforts down;\nWhen fortune smiles, I smile to think\nHow quickly she will frown.\n\nAnd when, in froward mood,\nShe prov’d an angry foe;\nSmall gain I found to let her come,--\nLess loss to let her go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "look-home": { - "title": "“Look Home”", - "body": "Retired thoughts enjoy their own delights,\nAs beauty doth in self-beholding eye;\nMan’s mind a mirror is of heavenly sights,\nA brief wherein all marvels summed lie,\nOf fairest forms and sweetest shapes the store,\nMost graceful all, yet thought may grace them more.\n\nThe mind a creature is, yet can create,\nTo nature’s patterns adding higher skill;\nOf finest works with better could the state\nIf force of wit had equal power of will.\nDevice of man in working hath no end,\nWhat thought can think, another thought can mend.\n\nMan’s soul of endless beauty image is,\nDrawn by the work of endless skill and might;\nThis skillful might gave many sparks of bliss\nAnd, to discern this bliss, a native light;\nTo frame God’s image as his worths required\nHis might, his skill, his word and will conspired.\n\nAll that he had his image should present,\nAll that it should present it could afford,\nTo that he could afford his will was bent,\nHis will was followed with performing word.\nLet this suffice, by this conceive the rest,\nHe should, he could, he would, he did, the best.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "loves-garden-grief": { - "title": "“Love’s Garden Grief”", - "body": "Vain loves avaunt! infamous is your pleasure,\n Your joys deceit;\nYour jewels jests, and worthless trash your treasure,\n Fools’ common bait.\nYour palace is a prison that allureth\nTo sweet mishap, and rest that pain procureth.\n\nYour garden grief hedged in with thorns of envy\n And stakes of strife;\nYour allies error gravel’d with jealousy\n And cares of life;\nYour branches seats enwrapp’d with shades of sadness;\nYour arbours breed rough fits of raging madness.\n\nYour beds are sown with seeds of all iniquity\n And poisoning weeds,\nWhose stalks ill thoughts, whose leaves words full of vanity,\n Whose fruits misdeeds;\nWhose sap is sin, whose force and operation,\nTo banish grace, and work the soul’s damnation.\n\nYour trees are dismal plants of pining corrosives,\n Whose root is ruth,\nWhose bark is bale, whose timber stubborn fantasies,\n Whose pith untruth;\nOn which in lieu of birds whose voice delighteth,\nOf guilty conscience screeching note affrighteth.\n\nYour coolest summer gales are scalding sighings,\n Your showers are tears;\nYour sweetest smell the stench of sinful living,\n Your favours fears;\nYour gard’ner Satan, all you reap is misery,\nYour gain remorse and loss of all felicity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mans-civil-war": { - "title": "“Man’s Civil War”", - "body": "My hovering thoughts would fly to heaven\n And quiet nestle in the sky,\nFain would my ship in Virtue’s shore\n Without remove at anchor lie.\n\nBut mounting thoughts are haled down\n With heavy poise of mortal load,\nAnd blustring storms deny my ship\n In Virtue’s haven secure abode.\n\nWhen inward eye to heavenly sights\n Doth draw my longing heart’s desire,\nThe world with jesses of delights\n Would to her perch my thoughts retire,\n\nFor Fancy trains to Pleasure’s lure,\n Though Reason stiffly do repine;\nThough Wisdom woo me to the saint,\n Yet Sense would win me to the shrine.\n\nWhere Reason loathes, there Fancy loves,\n And overrules the captive will;\nFoes senses are to Virtue’s lore,\n They draw the wit their wish to fill.\n\nNeed craves consent of soul to sense,\n Yet divers bents breed civil fray;\nHard hap where halves must disagree,\n Or truce halves the whole betray!\n\nO cruel fight! where fighting friend\n With love doth kill a favoring foe,\nWhere peace with sense is war with God,\n And self-delight the seed of woe!\n\nDame Pleasure’s drugs are steeped in sin,\n Their sugared taste doth breed annoy;\nO fickle sense! beware her gin,\n Sell not thy soul to brittle joy!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-nativity-of-christ": { - "title": "“The Nativity of Christ”", - "body": "Behold the father is his daughter’s son,\nThe bird that built the nest is hatched therein,\nThe old of years an hour hath not outrun,\nEternal life to live doth now begin,\nThe Word is dumb, the mirth of heaven doth weep,\nMight feeble is, and force doth faintly creep.\n\nO dying souls, behold your living spring;\nO dazzled eyes, behold your sun of grace;\nDull ears, attend what word this Word doth bring;\nUp, heavy hearts, with joy your joy embrace.\nFrom death, from dark, from deafness, from despairs\nThis life, this light, this Word, this joy repairs.\n\nGift better than himself God doth not know;\nGift better than his God no man can see.\nThis gift doth here the giver given bestow;\nGift to this gift let each receiver be.\nGod is my gift, himself he freely gave me;\nGod’s gift am I, and none but God shall have me.\n\nMan altered was by sin from man to beast;\nBeast’s food is hay, hay is all mortal flesh.\nNow God is flesh and lies in manger pressed\nAs hay, the brutest sinner to refresh.\nO happy field wherein that fodder grew,\nWhose taste doth us from beasts to men renew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "new-heaven-new-war": { - "title": "“New Heaven, New War”", - "body": "Come to your heaven, you heavenly choirs,\nEarth hath the heaven of your desires;\nRemove your dwelling to your God,\nA stall is now his best abode;\nSith men their homage do deny,\nCome, Angels, all their fault supply.\n\nHis chilling cold doth heat require,\nCome, Seraphins, in lieu of fire;\nThis little Ark no cover hath,\nLet Cherubs’ wings his body swath;\nCome, Raphael, this Babe must eat,\nProvide our little Tobie meat.\n\nLet Gabriel be now his groom,\nThat first took up his earthly room;\nLet Michael stand in his defence,\nWhom love hath link’d to feeble sense;\nLet Graces rock when he doth cry,\nLet Angels sing his lullaby.\n\nThe same you saw in heavenly seat,\nIs he that now sucks Mary’s teat;\nAgonize your King a mortal wight,\nHis borrowed weed lets not your sight;\nCome, kiss the manger where he lies,\nThat is your bliss above the skies.\n\nThis little Babe so few days old,\nIs come to rifle Satan’s fold;\nAll hell doth at his presence quake,\nThough he himself for cold do shake;\nFor in this weak, unarmed wise,\nThe gates of hell he will surprise.\n\nWith tears he fights and wins the field,\nHis naked breast stands for a shield;\nHis battering shot are babish cries,\nHis arrows made of weeping eyes,\nHis martial ensigns cold and need,\nAnd feeble flesh his warrior’s steed.\n\nHis camp is pitched in a stall,\nHis bulwark but a broken wall;\nThe crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes,\nOf shepherds he his muster makes;\nAnd thus as sure his foe to wound,\nThe Angels’ trumps alarum sound.\n\nMy soul with Christ join thou in fight,\nStick to the tents that he hath dight;\nWithin his crib is surest ward,\nThis little Babe will be thy guard;\nIf thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,\nThen flit not from the heavenly boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "times-go-by-terms": { - "title": "“Times Go by Terms”", - "body": "The lopped tree in time may grow again,\n Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;\nThe sorriest wight may find release of pain,\n The driest soil suck in some moistening shower.\n Times go by turns, and chances change by course,\n From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.\n\nThe sea of Fortune doth not ever flow,\n She draws her favours to the lowest ebb.\nHer tides hath equal times to come and go,\n Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web.\n No joy so great but runneth to an end,\n No hap so hard but may in fine amend.\n\nNot always fall of leaf, nor ever spring,\n No endless night, yet not eternal day;\nThe saddest birds a season find to sing,\n The roughest storm a calm may soon allay.\n Thus, with succeeding turns, God tempereth all,\n That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.\n\nA chance may win that by mischance was lost;\n The net, that holds no great, takes little fish;\nIn some things all, in all things none are crossed;\n Few all they need, but none have all they wish.\n Unmeddled joys here to no man befall;\n Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-vale-of-tears": { - "title": "“A Vale of Tears”", - "body": "A vale there is, enwrapt with dreadful shades,\n Which thick of mourning pines shrouds from the sun,\nWhere hanging cliffs yield short and dumpish glades,\n And snowy flood with broken streams doth run.\n\nWhere eye-room is from rock to cloudy sky,\n From thence to dales with stony ruins strew’d,\nThen to the crushèd water’s frothy fry,\n Which tumbleth from the tops where snow is thaw’d.\n\nWhere ears of other sound can have no choice,\n But various blust’ring of the stubborn wind\nIn trees, in caves, in straits with divers noise;\n Which now doth hiss, now howl, now roar by kind.\n\nWhere waters wrestle with encount’ring stones,\n That break their streams, and turn them into foam,\nThe hollow clouds full fraught with thund’ring groans,\n With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant womb.\n\nAnd in the horror of this fearful quire\n Consists the music of this doleful place;\nAll pleasant birds from thence their tunes retire,\n Where none but heavy notes have any grace.\n\nResort there is of none but pilgrim wights,\n That pass with trembling foot and panting heart;\nWith terror cast in cold and shivering frights,\n They judge the place to terror framed by art.\n\nYet nature’s work it is, of art untouch’d,\n So strait indeed, so vast unto the eye,\nWith such disorder’d order strangely couch’d,\n And with such pleasing horror low and high,\n\nThat who it views must needs remain aghast,\n Much at the work, more at the Maker’s might;\nAnd muse how nature such a plot could cast\n Where nothing seemeth wrong, yet nothing right.\n\nA place for mated mindes, an only bower\n Where everything do soothe a dumpish mood;\nEarth lies forlorn, the cloudy sky doth lower,\n The wind here weeps, here sighs, here cries aloud.\n\nThe struggling flood between the marble groans,\n Then roaring beats upon the craggy sides;\nA little off, amidst the pebble stones,\n With bubbling streams and purling noise it glides.\n\nThe pines thick set, high grown and ever green,\n Still clothe the place with sad and mourning veil;\nHere gaping cliff, there mossy plain is seen,\n Here hope doth spring, and there again doth quail.\n\nHuge massy stones that hang by tickle stays,\n Still threaten fall, and seem to hang in fear;\nSome wither’d trees, ashamed of their decays,\n Bereft of green are forced gray coats to wear.\n\nHere crystal springs crept out of secret vein,\n Straight find some envious hole that hides their grace;\nHere searèd tufts lament the want of rain,\n There thunder-wrack gives terror to the place.\n\nAll pangs and heavy passions here may find\n A thousand motives suiting to their griefs,\nTo feed the sorrows of their troubled mind,\n And chase away dame Pleasure’s vain reliefs.\n\nTo plaining thoughts this vale a rest may be,\n To which from worldly joys they may retire;\nWhere sorrow springs from water, stone and tree;\n Where everything with mourners doth conspire.\n\nSit here, my soul, main streams of tears afloat,\n Here all thy sinful foils alone recount;\nOf solemn tunes make thou the doleful note,\n That, by thy ditties, dolour may amount.\n\nWhen echo shall repeat thy painful cries,\n Think that the very stones thy sins bewray,\nAnd now accuse thee with their sad replies,\n As heaven and earth shall in the latter day.\n\nLet former faults be fuel of thy fire,\n For grief in limbeck of thy heart to still\nThy pensive thoughts and dumps of thy desire,\n And vapour tears up to thy eyes at will.\n\nLet tears to tunes, and pains to plaints be press’d,\n And let this be the burden of thy song,--\nCome, deep remorse, possess my sinful breast;\n Delights, adieu! I harbour’d you too long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "wole-soyinka": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wole Soyinka", - "birth": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "nigerian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇳🇬", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wole_Soyinka", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "nigerian" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "i-think-it-rains": { - "title": "“I think it rains …”", - "body": "I think it rains\nThat tongues may loosen from the parch\nUncleave roof-tops of\nthe mouth, hang\nHeavy with knowledge\n\nI saw it raise\nThe sudden cloud, from ashes.\nSettling\nThey joined in a ring of\ngrey; within,\nThe circling spirit.\n\nO it must rain\nThese closures on the mind, blinding us\nIn strange despairs, teaching\nPurity of sadness.\n\nAnd how it beats\nSkeined transperencies on wings\nOf our desires, searing dark longings\nIn cruel baptisms.\n\nRain-reeds, practised in\nThe grace of yielding, yet unbending\nFrom afar, this, your conjugation with my earth\nBares crounching rocks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "stephen-spender": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Stephen Spender", - "birth": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1995 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Spender", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "daybreak": { - "title": "“Daybreak”", - "body": "At Dawn she lay with her profile at that angle\nWhich, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.\nHer hair a harp, the hand of a breeze follows\nAnd plays, against the white cloud of the pillows.\nThen, in a flush of rose, she woke, and her eyes that opened\nSwam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.\nFrom her dew of lips, the drop of one word\nFell like the first of fountains: murmured\n‘Darling’, upon my ears the song of the first bird.\n“My dream becomes my dream,” she said, “come true.\nI waken from you to my dream of you.”\nOh, my own wakened dream then dared assume\nThe audacity of her sleep. Our dreams\nPoured into each other’s arms, like streams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-think-continually": { - "title": "“I Think Continually”", - "body": "I think continually of those who were truly great.\nWho, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history\nThrough corridors of light where the hours are suns\nEndless and singing. Whose lovely ambition\nWas that their lips, still touched with fire,\nShould tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.\nAnd who hoarded from the Spring branches\nThe desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.\n\nWhat is precious is never to forget\nThe essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs\nBreaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.\nNever to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light\nNor its grave evening demand for love.\nNever to allow gradually the traffic to smother\nWith noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.\n\nNear the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields\nSee how these names are feted by the waving grass\nAnd by the streamers of white cloud\nAnd whispers of wind in the listening sky.\nThe names of those who in their lives fought for life\nWho wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.\nBorn of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun,\nAnd left the vivid air signed with their honour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-pilots-who-destroyed-germany": { - "title": "“On the Pilots Who Destroyed Germany”", - "body": "I stood on a roof top and they wove their cage\nTheir murmuring throbbing cage, in the air of blue crystal.\nI saw them gleam above the town like diamond bolts\nConjoining invisible struts of wire,\nCarrying through the sky their geometric cage\nWoven by senses delicate as a shoal of flashing fish.\n\nThey went. They left a silence in our streets below\nWhich boys gone to schoolroom leave in their playground.\nA silence of asphalt, of privet hedge, of staring wall.\nIn the glass emptied sky their diamonds had scratched\nLong curving finest whitest lines.\nThese the day soon melted into satin ribbons\nFalling over heaven’s terraces near the golden sun.\n\nOh that April morning they carried my will\nExalted expanding singing in their aeriel cage.\nThey carried my will. They dropped it on a German town.\nMy will expanded and tall buildings fell down.\n\nThen, when die ribbons faded and the sky forgot,\nAnd April was concerned with building nests and being hot\nI began to remember the lost names and faces.\n\nNow I tie the ribbons torn down from those terraces\nAround the most hidden image in my lines,\nAnd my life, which never paid the price of their wounds,\nTurns thoughts over and over like a propellor\nAssumes their guilt, honours, repents, prays for them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "a-stopwatch-and-an-ordnance-map": { - "title": "“A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map”", - "body": "A stopwatch and an ordnance map.\nAt five a man fell to the ground\nAnd the watch flew off his wrist\nLike a moon struck from the earth\nMarking a blank time that stares\nOn the tides of change beneath.\nAll under the olive trees.\nA stopwatch and an ordnance map.\nHe stayed faithfully in that place\nFrom his living comrade split\nBy dividers of the bullet\nOpening wide the distances\nOf his final loneliness.\n\nAll under the olive trees.\nA stopwatch and an ordnance map.\nAnd the bones are fixed at five\nUnder the moon’s timelessness;\nBut another who lives on\nWears within his heart forever\nSpace split open by the bullet.\nAll under the olive trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-summer-days": { - "title": "“Three Summer Days”", - "body": "On the first summer day I lay in the valley.\nAbove rocks the sky sealed my eyes with a leaf\nThe grass licked my skin. The flowers bound my nostrils\nWith scented cotton threads. The soil invited\nMy hands and feet to grow down and have roots.\nBees and grass-hoppers drummed over\nCrepitations of thirst rising from dry stones,\nAnd the ants rearranged my ceaseless thoughts\nInto different patterns for ever the same.\nThen the blue wind fell out of the air\nAnd the sun hammered down till I became of wood\nGlistening brown beginning to warp.\n\nOn the second summer day I climbed through the forest’s\nHuge tent pegged to the mountain-side by roots.\nMy direction was cancelled by that great sum of trees.\nHere darkness lay under the leaves in a war\nAgainst light, which occasionally penetrated\nSplintering spears through several interstices\nAnd dropping white clanging shields on the soil.\nSilence was stitched through with thinnest pine needles\nAnd bird songs were stifled behind a hot hedge.\nMy feet became as heavy as logs.\nI drank up all the air of the forest.\nMy mind changed to amber transfixed with dead flies.\n\nOn the third summer day I sprang from the forest\nInto the wonder of a white snow-tide.\nAlone with the sun’s wild whispering wheel,\nGrinding seeds of secret light on frozen fields,\nEvery burden fell from me, the forest from my back,\nThe valley dwindled to bewildering visions\nSeen through torn shreds of the sailing clouds.\nAbove the snowfield one rock against the sky\nShaped out of pure silence a naked tune\nLike a violin when the tune forsakes the instrument\nAnd the pure sound flies through the ears’ gate\nAnd a whole sky floods the pool of one mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ultima-ratio-regum": { - "title": "“Ultima Ratio Regum”", - "body": "The guns spell money’s ultimate reason\nIn letters of lead on the spring hillside.\nBut the boy lying dead under the olive trees\nWas too young and too silly\nTo have been notable to their important eye.\nHe was a better target for a kiss.\n\nWhen he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.\nNor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.\nHis name never appeared in the papers.\nThe world maintained its traditional wall\nRound the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,\nWhilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.\n\nO too lightly he threw down his cap\nOne day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.\nThe unflowering wall sprouted with guns,\nMachine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;\nFlags and leaves fell from hands and branches;\nThe tweed cap rotted in the nettles.\n\nConsider his life which was valueless\nIn terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.\nConsider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.\nAsk. Was so much expenditure justified\nOn the death of one so young and so silly\nLying under the olive tree, O world, O death?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "andre-spire": { - "metadata": { - "name": "André Spire", - "birth": { - "year": 1868 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1966 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Spire", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-forsaken-maiden": { - "title": "“The Forsaken Maiden”", - "body": "She climbed the mountain;\nAnd, naked,\nVaunting her body which he had refused,\nShe said:\nCloud, stay! O cloud, behold!\nAnd thou, blue gentian flowering at my feet,\nYou budding larches, bindweeds, you anemones,\nYou dying snows less lovely than my flesh\nVirgin of kisses still, not of desires,\nBehold! Behold!\nIs not my body worth the love I asked?\n\nSpring breezes mounted from the plain.\nBreezes, she said, why will you turn aside?\nYou pass, I am alone; and I am white:\nWinds drunk with pollen, seeds, and hot embraces\nWinds bitter with the scent of bodies joined,\nCome, take my burning flesh in your moist breathing;\nI loved his poor love, more I love your mighty arms …\nLess my regret is than the bliss you give!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "it-was-not-you": { - "title": "“It Was Not You”", - "body": "It was not you I was waiting for,\nAlways.\nIt was not you that I saw,\nIn the dreams of my boyhood’s days,\nAnd of my youth.\n\nIt is not you I sought\nIn bodies like a goblet wrought.\nIt is not you I saw in my dreams\nComing down the hillside, girt with beams.\n\nWe were walking on our way.\nOur paths met suddenly, one day.\nWe stretched our hands out to each other.\n\nThe days have fled,\nMy well-beloved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "lonely": { - "title": "“Lonely”", - "body": "They pity me.\n“Look at him, see,\nTaking his walking-stick, and going out. So lonely.\nHe flees us. Look at his strange eyes.\nNot even a book does he take with him. Only\nHis stick. What does he mean to do?\nIs he intent on evil? In revolt? Or fever-sick?”\n\nAlone, O beautiful white road,\nBetween your ditches full of grass and flowers,\nOver your pebbles telling tales of old,\nAlone, O forest, with the blue bark of your pines;\nAnd with your wind that parleys with your trees;\nAnd with your ants processioning that drag\nBodies of little beetles on their backs.\n\nAlone, with you, you sun-drenched fields,\nAll full of cries, and noises, and heads raised alert,\nAlone with you, flies, merlins, buzzards, kites,\nRocks, brambles, sources, crevices,\nFogs, clouds, mists, cones, peaks, precipices,\nHeat, odour, order, chaos, and disorder,\nAmong the dialogues your rival mouths\nExchange for ever!\nAlone with my stick, alone with my fatigue,\nMy dust, my throbbing temples, and my dizziness,\nAnd the proud sweat glued to my skin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "nudities": { - "title": "“Nudities”", - "body": "_“The hair is a nudity.”_\n --The Talmud\n\nYou said to me: But I will be your comrade;\nAnd visit you, but never chafe your blood;\nAnd we will pass long evenings in your room;\nThinking of our brethren they are murdering;\nAnd through the cruel universe we two\nWill seek some country which shall give them rest.\nBut I shall never see your eye-balls burning,\nNor on your temples purple veins distend,-\nI am your equal, I am not your prey.\nFor see! my clothes are chaste, and almost poor,\nYou see not even the bottom of my neck.\n\nBut I gave answer: Woman, thou art naked.\nFresh as a cup the hair is on thy neck;\nThy chignon, falling down, shakes like a breast;\nThey headbands are as lustful as a herd of goats …\nShear thy hair.\n\nWoman, thou art naked.\nThy naked hands rest on our open book;\nThy hands, the subtle ending of thy body,\nThy hands without a ring will touch mine by-and-by …\nMutilate thy hands.\n\nWoman, thou art naked.\nThy singing voice mounts from thy breast;\nThy voice, thy breath, the very warmth of thy flesh,\nSpreads itself on my body and penetrates my flesh …\nWoman, tear out thy voice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french" - } - }, - "spring": { - "title": "“Spring”", - "body": "Now hand in hand, you little maidens, walk.\nPass in the shadow of the crumbling wall.\nArch your proud bellies under rosy aprons.\nAnd let your eyes so deeply lucid tell\nYour joy at feeling flowing into your heart\nAnother loving heart that blends with yours;\nYou children faint with being hand in hand.\n\nWalk hand in hand, you languorous maidens walk.\nThe boys are turning round, and drinking in\nYour sensual petticoats that beat your heels.\nAnd, while you swing your interlacing hands,\nTell, with your warm mouths yearning each to each,\nThe first books you have read, and your first kisses.\nWalk hand in hand, you maidens, friend with friend.\n\nWalk hand in hand, you lovers loving silence.\nWalk to the sun that veils itself with willows.\nTrail your uneasy limbs by languorous banks,\nThe stream is full of dusk, your souls are heavy.\nYou silent lovers, wander hand in hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "carl-spitteler": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Carl Spitteler", - "birth": { - "year": 1845 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1924 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swiss", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇨🇭", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Spitteler", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "swiss" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-hiker": { - "title": "“The Hiker”", - "body": "Downy flakes whisper softly from the sky.\nA hiker climbs over firn and ice.\nThe snow woman follows him with treacherous steps:\n\n“Hold still, my dear, and take me with you!\nThe evening is near and the summit is far away.\nI’d be happy to play you a little song just to keep you entertained.”\n\nShe puts the green shawm on her lip,\nShe rejoiced at flowers and Lenz and Mai.\nHe listened, cheeks wet with tears,\nThen he ticked the box and drew for bass.\n\nAnd darker clouds the twilight snow.\nShe crept to his side on a cunning toe:\n“Stop! let me shine for you, you are wandering astray!\nI’ll tell you a friendly fairy tale.”\n\nA traffic light she drew from her robe:\nThe homeland shines before his eyes,\nThe hill, the garden, being a parent\nIn the blissful golden glow of youth.\n\nHe swayed. Already he shortens the measure of his steps,\nThen he ticked the box and drew for bass.\n\nAnd it storms and it rummages with storm power,\nWhite night yawns from the howling rock.\nHis will failed, his knee sank.\nThere she sat on a stone bench.\n\n“It’s comfortable here; come, sit down!\nI really know how to caress.\nAnd slumber lures you and a dream laughs at you:\nThere is room on my warm bosom.”\n\nShe looked so lovely, she nodded so sweetly,\nas if the sky wanted to open up to him.\nHe staggers towards her in a staggering run\nand fell at her feet--never got up again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-little-bells-complaint": { - "title": "“The Little Bell’s Complaint”", - "body": "The little bell once sadly\nThe organ thus addressed:\n“Your pipes’ rich store of changes\nWakes envy in my breast\nYou’ve countless ways of telling\nAll that your soul can learn;\nAnd what you learn, we feel it,\nAnd when you feel, we yearn.\nBut I, though grief and pity\nMay rend my heart in twain,\nCan only tinkle sweetly,\nAgain, and yet again.\nMy deepest self is longing\nOnce to ring out of tune.\nWho’ll teach me how to jangle?\nThat were a bitter boon!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "puberty": { - "title": "“Puberty”", - "body": "On the upland, high above the village,\nUnder hazel-branches lay the goatherd,\nCrossed his hands behind his neck for pillow,\nPulled his straw-hat farther down for sunshade.\nBut the straw-hat could not stop the golden\nTrickle of the sunbeams through its meshes.\n\nTo himself the poor boy murmured sadly\n“Oh, to catch that glitter in my fingers,\nTie it in my handkerchief and hasten\nDown into the village to the goldsmith!\nHe would surely pay a thousand dollars--\nThen I’d buy a pair of spurs, a pony,\nRide him to the manse, and knock so loudly\n(Using my new whip) that Fraulein Anna\nEagerly would run to find her mother,\nSay: ‘Dear mother, hurry to the cellar,\nBring a flask of ruby wine, the finest,\nSet a fowl to roast within the oven;\nFor a stranger soldierly and haughty\nHas arrived--he must have come to woo me.’\n\nAh, but not the bottle, nor the chicken,\nWould I touch, however fine and tender;\nNothing but herself, but Fraulein Anna!\nHer I’d set upon the pony, clasping\nBoth my arms around her, and would gallop\nAll along the street, along the village,\nUp the hill, and stop at Friedli’s hostel--\nThen we would be married in the autumn.”\n\nThus the poor boy communed with his fancies;\nThen remembering all, and sighing deeply\nThought: “The fool you are with your fool-stories!\nYou will live and you will die a goatherd,\nPenniless and barefoot and a no-one.\nAnna would not look at you an instant.”\n\nHark--the goats were bleating, at the tethers\nDragging, and in circles wildly leaping;\nAnd in single file along the footpath\nCame two fine young ladies from the city.\nAnd the first one, calling to the second,\nCried: ‘We are in luck! You see the boy there\nStretched beneath a hazel-bough? His forehead’s\nAll a mass of curls, his mouth is rosy,\nRosy too his cheeks, and soft for kissing!’\nSaying so, she ran across the meadow,\nStooped above the boy, while her companion\nCurtain-wise her petticoats extended.\nThen on the mouth and cheeks the first one kissed him--\nTen or twelve times kissed the startled youngster.\n\nAfter that they altered their arrangements;\nWhile the first assumed the part of curtain,\nShe who came the second took her kisses.\nThen they threw their arms round one another,\nDanced into the wood, and singing vanished.\n\nBut the boy lay still among the grasses,\nQualms of conscience, pangs of shame, upon him:\n“Curse thee for a faithless wanton fellow,\nFaithless to the loved, the peerless lady!\nOn thee have the lips of stranger feasted,\nSinner! And thyself hast likewise feasted!\nNever now of gracious Fraulein Anna\nCanst thou front the pure angelic beauty--\nAs the burrowing mole before the sunlight\nThou shalt flinch before that face from heaven.”\n\nBut when evening bells began to tinkle\nAnd the boy, despairing, broken-hearted,\nHomeward slunk, his goat behind him dragging,\nLo! Upon the path appeared the pastor,\nThen the pastor’s wife, and then--confound it!--\nLast of all herself, his Fraulein Anna.\nWonders never cease, though--for the pastor\nTook him by the chin, and asked him kindly\n“How’s the weather? And the Paternosters?”\nAnd the pastor’s lady stroked his lovelocks,\nAnd his Fraulein Anna very sweetly\nLooked behind, and whispered to her mother:\n“Hasn’t he grown manly and good looking?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-stafford": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Stafford", - "birth": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1993 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stafford_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 18 - }, - "poems": { - "across-kansas": { - "title": "“Across Kansas”", - "body": "My family slept those level miles\nbut like a bell rung deep till dawn\nI drove down an aisle of sound,\nnothing real but in the bell,\npast the town where I was born.\n\nOnce you cross a land like that\nyou own your face more: what the light\nstruck told a self; every rock\ndenied all the rest of the world.\nWe stopped at Sharon Springs and ate--\n\nMy state still dark, my dream too long to tell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "allegiances": { - "title": "“Allegiances”", - "body": "It is time for all the heroes to go home\nif they have any, time for all of us common ones\nto locate ourselves by the real things\nwe live by.\n\nFar to the north, or indeed in any direction,\nstrange mountains and creatures have always lurked--\nelves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:--we\nencounter them in dread and wonder,\n\nBut once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,\nfound some limit beyond the waterfall,\na season changes, and we come back, changed\nbut safe, quiet, grateful.\n\nSuppose an insane wind holds all the hills\nwhile strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears,\nwe ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love\nwhere we are, sturdy for common things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ask-me": { - "title": "“Ask Me”", - "body": "Some time when the river is ice ask me\nmistakes I have made. Ask me whether\nwhat I have done is my life. Others\nhave come in their slow way into\nmy thought, and some have tried to help\nor to hurt: ask me what difference\ntheir strongest love or hate has made.\n\nI will listen to what you say.\nYou and I can turn and look\nat the silent river and wait. We know\nthe current is there, hidden; and there\nare comings and goings from miles away\nthat hold the stillness exactly before us.\nWhat the river says, that is what I say.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "atavism": { - "title": "“Atavism”", - "body": "Sometimes in the open you look up\nwhere birds go by, or just nothing,\nand wait. A dim feeling comes\nyou were like this once, there was air,\nand quiet; it was by a lake, or\nmaybe a river you were alert\nas an otter and were suddenly born\nlike the evening star into wide\nstill worlds like this one you have found\nagain, for a moment, in the open.\n\nSomething is being told in the woods: aisles of\nshadow lead away; a branch waves;\na pencil of sunlight slowly travels its\npath. A withheld presence almost\nspeaks, but then retreats, rustles\na patch of brush. You can feel\nthe centuries ripple generations\nof wandering, discovering, being lost\nand found, eating, dying, being born.\nA walk through the forest strokes your fur,\nthe fur you no longer have. And your gaze\ndown a forest aisle is a strange, long\nplunge, dark eyes looking for home.\nFor delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers\nwider than your mind, away out over everything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-my-young-friends-who-are-afraid": { - "title": "“For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid”", - "body": "There is a country to cross you will\nfind in the corner of your eye, in\nthe quick slip of your foot--air far\ndown, a snap that might have caught.\nAnd maybe for you, for me, a high, passing\nvoice that finds its way by being\nafraid. That country is there, for us,\ncarried as it is crossed. What you fear\nwill not go away: it will take you into\nyourself and bless you and keep you.\nThat’s the world, and we all live there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "graydiggers-home": { - "title": "“Graydigger’s Home”", - "body": "Paw marks near one burrow show Graydigger\nat home, I bend low, from down there swivel\nmy head, grasstop level--the world\ngoes on forever, the mountains a bigger\nburrow, their snow like last winter. From a room\ninside the world even the strongest wind\nhas a soft sound: a new house will hide\nin the grass; footsteps are only the summer people.\n\nThe real estate agent is saying, “Utilities …\neasy payments, a view.” I see\nmy prints in the dirt. Out there\nin the wind we talk about credit, security--\nthere on the bank by Graydigger’s home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "just-thinking": { - "title": "“Just Thinking”", - "body": "Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.\nNo cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held\nfor awhile. Some dove somewhere.\n\nBeen on probation most of my life. And\nthe rest of my life been condemned. So these moments\ncount for a lot--peace, you know.\n\nLet the bucket of memory down into the well,\nbring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one\nstirring, no plans. Just being there.\n\nThis is what the whole thing is about.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-light-by-the-barn": { - "title": "“The Light by the Barn”", - "body": "The light by the barn that shines all night\npales at dawn when a little breeze comes.\n\nA little breeze comes breathing the fields\nfrom their sleep and waking the slow windmill.\n\nThe slow windmill sings the long day\nabout anguish and loss to the chickens at work.\n\nThe little breeze follows the slow windmill\nand the chickens at work till the sun goes down--\n\nThen the light by the barn again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lit-instructor": { - "title": "“Lit Instructor”", - "body": "Day after day up there beating my wings\nwith all the softness truth requires\nI feel them shrug whenever I pause:\nthey class my voice among tentative things,\n\nAnd they credit fact, force, battering.\nI dance my way toward the family of knowing,\nembracing stray error as a long-lost boy\nand bringing him home with my fluttering.\n\nEvery quick feather asserts a just claim;\nit bites like a saw into white pine.\nI communicate right; but explain to the dean--\nwell, Right has a long and intricate name.\n\nAnd the saying of it is a lonely thing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "objector": { - "title": "“Objector”", - "body": "In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon\nto ward off complicity--the ordered life\nour leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,\nour chance to live depends on such a sign\nwhile others talk and The Pentagon from the moon\nis bouncing exact commands: “Forget your faith;\nbe ready for whatever it takes to win: we face\nannihilation unless all citizens get in line.”\n\nI bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhere\nother citizens more fearfully bow\nin a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive state.\nOur signs both mean, “You hostages over there\nwill never be slaughtered by my act.” Our vows\ncross: never to kill and call it fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "remembering-mountain-men": { - "title": "“Remembering Mountain Men”", - "body": "I put my foot in cold water\nand hold it there: early mornings\nthey had to wade through broken ice\nto find the traps in the deep channel\nwith their hands, drag up the chains and\nthe drowned beaver. The slow current\nof the life below tugs at me all day.\nWhen I dream at night, they save a place for me,\nno matter how small, somewhere by the fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "returned-to-say": { - "title": "“Returned to Say”", - "body": "When I face north a lost Cree\non some new shore puts a moccasin down,\nrock in the light and noon for seeing,\nhe in a hurry and I beside him\n\nIt will be a long trip; he will be a new chief;\nwe have drunk new water from an unnamed stream;\nunder little dark trees he is to find a path\nwe both must travel because we have met.\n\nHenceforth we gesture even by waiting;\nthere is a grain of sand on his knifeblade\nso small he blows it and while his breathing\ndarkens the steel his become set\n\nAnd start a new vision: the rest of his life.\nWe will mean what he does. Back of this page\nthe path turns north. We are looking for a sign.\nOur moccasins do not mark the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-ritual-to-read-to-each-other": { - "title": "“A Ritual to Read to Each Other”", - "body": "If you don’t know the kind of person I am\nand I don’t know the kind of person you are\na pattern that others made may prevail in the world\nand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.\n\nFor there is many a small betrayal in the mind,\na shrug that lets the fragile sequence break\nsending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood\nstorming out to play through the broken dyke.\n\nAnd as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,\nbut if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,\nI call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty\nto know what occurs but not recognize the fact.\n\nAnd so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,\na remote important region in all who talk:\nthough we could fool each other, we should consider--\nlest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.\n\nFor it is important that awake people be awake,\nor a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;\nthe signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--\nshould be clear: the darkness around us is deep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "security": { - "title": "“Security”", - "body": "Tomorrow will have an island. Before night\nI always find it. Then on to the next island.\nThese places hidden in the day separate\nand come forward if you beckon.\nBut you have to know they are there before they exist.\n\nSome time there will be a tomorrow without any island.\nSo far, I haven’t let that happen, but after\nI’m gone others may become faithless and careless.\nBefore them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,\nand without any hope they will stare at the horizon.\n\nSo to you, Friend, I confide my secret:\nto be a discoverer you hold close whatever\nyou find, and after a while you decide\nwhat it is. Then, secure in where you have been,\nyou turn to the open sea and let go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thinking-for-berky": { - "title": "“Thinking for Berky”", - "body": "In the late night listening from bed\nI have joined the ambulance or the patrol\nscreaming toward some drama, the kind of end\nthat Berky must have some day, if she isn’t dead.\n\nThe wildest of all, her father and mother cruel,\nfarming out there beyond the old stone quarry\nwhere high school lovers parked their lurching cars,\nBerky learned to love in that dark school.\n\nEarly her face was turned away from home\ntoward any hardworking place; but still her soul,\nwith terrible things to do, was alive, looking out\nfor the rescue that--surely, some day--would have to come.\n\nWindiest nights, Berky, I have thought for you,\nand no matter how lucky I’ve been I’ve touched wood.\nThere are things not solved in our town though tomorrow came:\nthere are things time passing can never make come true.\n\nWe live in an occupied country, misunderstood;\njustice will take us millions of intricate moves.\nSirens will hunt down Berky, you survivors in your beds\nlistening through the night, so far and good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-life": { - "title": "“This Life”", - "body": "We would climb the highest dune,\nfrom there to gaze and come down:\nthe ocean was performing;\nwe contributed our climb.\n\nWaves leapfrogged and came\nstraight out of the storm.\nWhat should our gaze mean?\nKit waited for me to decide.\n\nStanding on such a hill,\nwhat would you tell your child?\nThat was an absolute vista.\nThose waves raced far, and cold.\n\n“How far could you swim, Daddy,\nin such a storm?”\n“As far as was needed,” I said,\nand as I talked, I swam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "traveling-through-the-dark": { - "title": "“Traveling through the Dark”", - "body": "Traveling through the dark I found a deer\ndead on the edge of the Wilson River road.\nIt is usually best to roll them into the canyon:\nthat road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.\n\nBy glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car\nand stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;\nshe had stiffened already, almost cold.\nI dragged her off; she was large in the belly.\n\nMy fingers touching her side brought me the reason--\nher side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,\nalive, still, never to be born.\nBeside that mountain road I hesitated.\n\nThe car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;\nunder the hood purred the steady engine.\nI stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;\naround our group I could hear the wilderness listen.\n\nI thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,\nthen pushed her over the edge into the river.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "waking-at-3-am": { - "title": "“Waking at 3 A.M.”", - "body": "Even in the cave of the night when you\nwake and are free and lonely,\nneglected by others, discarded, loved only\nby what doesn’t matter--even in that\nbig room no one can see,\nyou push with your eyes till forever\ncomes in its twisted figure eight\nand lies down in your head.\n\nYou think water in the river;\nyou think slower than the tide in\nthe grain of the wood; you become\na secret storehouse that saves the country,\nso open and foolish and empty.\n\nYou look over all that the darkness\nripples across. More than has ever\nbeen found comforts you. You open your\neyes in a vault that unlocks as fast\nand as far as your thought can run.\nA great snug wall goes around everything,\nhas always been there, will always\nremain. It is a good world to be\nlost in. It comforts you. It is\nall right. And you sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "gertrude-stein": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Gertrude Stein", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1946 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "america": { - "title": "“America”", - "body": "Once in English they said America. Was it English to them.\nOnce they said Belgian.\nWe like a fog.\nDo you for weather.\nAre we brave.\nAre we true.\nHave we the national colour.\nCan we stand ditches.\nCan we mean well.\nDo we talk together.\nHave we red cross.\nA great many people speak of feet.\nAnd socks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "christian-berard": { - "title": "“Christian Bérard”", - "body": "Eating is her subject.\nWhile eating is her subject.\nWhere eating is her subject.\nWithdraw whether it is eating which is her subject. Literally while she ate eating is her subject. Afterwards too and in between. This is an introduction to what she ate.\nShe ate a pigeon and a soufflé.\nThat was on one day.\nShe ate a thin ham and its sauce.\nThat was on another day.\nShe ate desserts.\nThat had been on one day.\nShe had fish grouse and little cakes that was before that day.\nShe had breaded veal and grapes that was on that day.\nAfter that she ate every day.\nVery little but very good.\nShe ate very well that day.\nWhat is the difference between steaming and roasting, she ate it cold because of Saturday.\nRemembering potatoes because of preparation for part of the day.\nThere is a difference in preparation of cray-fish which makes a change in their fish for instance.\nWhat was it besides bread.\nWhy is eating her subject.\nThere are reasons why eating is her subject.\nBecause.\nHelp Helena.\nWith whether a pound.\nEverybody who comes has been with whether we mean ours allowed.\nTea rose snuff box tea rose.\nWilled him well will till well.\nBy higher but tire by cry my tie for her.\nMeeting with with said.\nGain may be hours.\nThere there their softness.\nBy my buy high.\nBy my softness.\nThere with their willow with without out outmost lain in out.\nHas she had her tooth without a telegram.\nNothing surprises Edith. Her sister made it once for all.\nChair met alongside.\nPaved picnic with gratitude.\nHe is strong and sturdy.\nPile with a pretty boy.\nHaving tired of some one.\nTire try.\nImagine how they felt when they were invited.\nPreamble to restitution.\nTire and indifferent.\nNarratives with pistache.\nA partly boiled.\nNext sentence.\nNow or not nightly.\nA sentence it is a whether wither intended.\nA sentence text. Taxed.\nA sampler with ingredients may be unmixed with their accounts how does it look like. If in way around. Like lightning.\nApprehension is why they help to do what is in amount what is an amount.\nA sentence felt way laid.\nA sentence without a horse.\nIt is a mend that to distribute with send.\nA sentence is in a letter ladder latter.\nBirth with birth.\nIf any thinks about what is made for the sake they will manage to place taking take may.\nHow are browns.\nHow are browns.\nGot to go away.\nAnybody can be taught to love whatever whatever they like better.\nTaught of butter.\nWhatever they like better.\nUnify is to repeat alike like letter.\nTo a sentence.\nAnswer do you need what it is vulnerable.\nThere made an assay.\nWire on duck.\nPlease forget Kate.\nPlease and do forbid how very well they like it.\nPaid it forbid forfeit a renewal.\nA sentence may be near by.\nVery well in eighty.\nIf a letter with mine how are hear in all. This is to show that a letter is better. Than seen.\nA sentence is money made beautiful. Beautiful words of love. Really thought at a sentence very likely.\nHow do you do they knew.\nA sentence made absurd.\nShe is sure that he showed that he would be where a month.\nThis is the leaf safe safety.\nThis is the relief safe safely.\nA joined in compel commit comply angle of by and by with all.\nSorry to have been shaded easily by their hastened their known go in find.\nIn never indented never the less.\nAs a wedding of their knowing with which whether they could guess.\nBewildered in infancy with compliments makes their agreement strange.\nHouses have distributed in dividing with a pastime that they called whose as it.\nBent in view. With vein meant. Then at in impenetrable covered with the same that it is having sent.\nAre eight seen to be pale apples.\nA sentence is a subterfuge refuge refuse for an admirable record of their being in private admirable refuge for their being in private this in vain their collide.\nA sentence controls does play shade.\nA sentence having been hours first.\nA sentence rest he likes a sentence lest best with interest.\nInduce sentences.\nA sentence makes them for stairs for stairs do bedew.\nA sentence about nothing in a sentence about nothing that pale apples from rushing are best.\nNo powder or power or power form form fortification in vain of their verification of their very verification within with whim with a whim which is in an implanted hour.\nSuppose a sentence.\nHow are ours in glass.\nGlass makes ground glass.\nA sentence of their noun.\nHow are you in invented complimented.\nHow are you in in favourite.\nThinking of sentences in complimented.\nSentences in in complimented in thank in think in sentences in think in complimented.\nSentences should not shrink. Complimented.\nA sentence two sentences should not think complimented. Complimented.\nHow do you do if you are to to well complimented. A sentence leans to along.\nOnce when they went they made the name the same do do climbed in a great many however they are that is why without on account faired just as well as mention. Next they can come being in tears, governess a part of plums comfort with our aghast either by feel torn.\nHow can whose but dear me oh.\nDarling how is George. George is well. Violate Thomas but or must with pine and near and do and dare defy.\nHaynes is Mabel Haynes.\nWhat was what was what it was what is what is what is is what is what which is what is is it.\nAt since robbed of a pre prize sent.\nTell a title.\nWhat was it that made him be mine what was it.\nThree years lack back back made well well willows three years back.\nIt never makes it bathe a face.\nHow are how are how are how are how are heard. Weakness is said.\nJay James go in George Wilbur right with a prayed in degree.\nWe leave we form we regret.\nThat these which with agrees adjoin comes clarity in eagle quality that periodic when men calls radically readily read in mean to mention.\nWhat is ate ate in absurd.\nMathilda makes ours see.\nAn epoch is identical with usury.\nA very long hour makes them hire lain down.\nTwo tempting to them.\nFollow felt follow.\nHe loves his aigrette too with mainly did in most she could not newly instead dumb done entirely.\nAbsurd our our absurd.\nWith flight.\nTake him and think of him. He and think of him. With him think of him. With him and with think with think with think with him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "daughter": { - "title": "“Daughter”", - "body": "Why is the world at peace.\nThis may astonish you a little but when you realise how easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American painters to American millionaires you will recognize that authorities are constrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing. A South African loved books. An American was a woman and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators. But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-four-saints-in-three-acts": { - "title": "From “Four Saints in Three Acts”", - "body": "Pigeons on the grass alas.\nPigeons on the grass alas.\nShort longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.\nIf they were not pigeons what were they.\nIf they were not pigeons on the grass alas what were they. He had heard of a third and he asked about it it was a magpie in the sky. If a magpie in the sky on the sky can not cry if the pigeon on the grass alas can alas and to pass the pigeon on the grass alas and the magpie in the sky on the sky and to try and to try alas on the grass alas the pigeon on the grass the pigeon on the grass and alas. They might be very well they might be very well very well they might be.\nLet Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily Lily let Lily Lucy Lucy let Lily. Let Lucy Lily.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-between": { - "title": "“In Between”", - "body": "In between a place and candy is a narrow foot-path that shows more mounting than anything, so much really that a calling meaning a bolster measured a whole thing with that. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-light-in-the-moon": { - "title": "“A Light in the Moon”", - "body": "A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even withstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "negligible-old-star": { - "title": "“Negligible Old Star”", - "body": "Negligible old star.\nPour even.\nIt was a sad per cent.\nDoes on sun day.\nWatch or water.\nSo soon a moon or a old heavy press.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-substance-in-a-cushion": { - "title": "“A Substance in a Cushion”", - "body": "The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable.\n\nCallous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume.\n\nA cushion has that cover. Supposing you do not like to change, supposing it is very clean that there is no change in appearance, supposing that there is regularity and a costume is that any the worse than an oyster and an exchange. Come to season that is there any extreme use in feather and cotton. Is there not much more joy in a table and more chairs and very likely roundness and a place to put them.\n\nA circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel.\n\nWhat is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. The question does not come before there is a quotation. In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense. It shows what use there is in a whole piece if one uses it and it is extreme and very likely the little things could be dearer but in any case there is a bargain and if there is the best thing to do is to take it away and wear it and then be reckless be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude.\n\nLight blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable. Very likely there should not be a finer fancy present. Some increase means a calamity and this is the best preparation for three and more being together. A little calm is so ordinary and in any case there is sweetness and some of that.\n\nA seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit.\n\nA closet, a closet does not connect under the bed. The band if it is white and black, the band has a green string. A sight a whole sight and a little groan grinding makes a trimming such a sweet singing trimming and a red thing not a round thing but a white thing, a red thing and a white thing.\n\nThe disgrace is not in carelessness nor even in sewing it comes out out of the way.\n\nWhat is the sash like. The sash is not like anything mustard it is not like a same thing that has stripes, it is not even more hurt than that, it has a little top.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "susie-asado": { - "title": "“Susie Asado”", - "body": "Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.\nSusie Asado.\nSweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.\nSusie Asado.\nSusie Asado which is a told tray sure.\nA lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.\nWhen the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.\nThis is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.\nIncy is short for incubus.\nA pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.\nDrink pups.\nDrink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.\nWhat is a nail. A nail is unison.\nSweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-can-pansies-be-their-aid-or-paths": { - "title": "“Why Can Pansies Be Their Aid or Paths”", - "body": "Why can pansies be their aid or paths.\nHe said paths she had said paths\nAll like to do their best with half of the time\nA sweeter sweetener came and came in time\nTell him what happened then only to go\nHe nervous as you add only not only as they angry were\nBe kind to half the time that they shall say\nIt is undoubtedly of them for them for every one any one\nThey thought quietly that Sunday any day she might not come\nIn half a way of coining that they wish it\nLet it be only known as please which they can underrate\nThey try once to destroy once to destroy as often\nBetter have it changed to pigeons now if the room smokes\nNot only if it does but happens to happens to have the room smoke all the time.\nIn their way not in their way it can be all arranged\nNot now we are waiting.\nI have read that they wish if land is there\nLand is there if they wish land is there\nYes hardly if they wish land is there\nIt is no thought of enterprise there trying\nMight they claim as well as reclaim.\nDid she mean that she had nothing.\nWe say he and I that we do not cry\nBecause we have just seen him and called him back\nHe meant to go away\nOnce now I will tell all which they tell lightly.\nHow were we when we met.\nAll of which nobody not we know\nBut it is so. They cannot be allied\nThey can be close and chosen.\nOnce in a while they wait.\nHe likes it that there is no chance to misunderstand pansies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-work": { - "title": "From “The Work”", - "body": "Not fierce and tender but sweet.\nThis is our impression of the soldiers.\nWe call our machine Aunt Pauline.\nFasten it fat, that is us, we say Aunt Pauline.\nWhen we left Paris we had rain.\nNot snow now nor that in between.\nWe did have snow then.\nNow we are bold.\nWe are accustomed to it.\nAll the weights are measures.\nBy this we mean we know how much oil we use for the machine.\n\n\nHurrah for America.\nHere we met a Captain and take him part way.\nA day’s sun.\nIs this Miss.\nYes indeed our mat.\nWe meant by this that we were always meeting people and that it was\npleasant.\nWe can thank you.\nWe thank you.\nSoldiers of course spoke to us.\nCome together.\nCome to me there now.\nThey read on our van American Committee in aid of French wounded.\nAll of it is bit.\nBitter.\nThis is the way they say we do help.\nIn the meaning of bright.\nBright not light.\nThis comforts them when they speak to me. I often discuss America with them and what we hope to do. They listen well and say we hope so too.\nWe all do.\n\n\nThis is apropros of the birthplace of Maréchal Joffre. We visited it and we have sent postal cards of it. The committee will be pleased.\nIt is not a bother to be a soldier.\nI think kindly of that bother.\nCan you say lapse.\nThen think about it.\nIndeed it is yet.\nWe are so pleased.\nWith the flag.\nWith the flag of sets.\nSets of color.\nDo you like flags.\nBlue flags smell sweetly.\nBlue flags in a whirl.\nWe did this we had ribbon of the American flag and we cut it up and we gave each soldier one with a pin and they pinned it on and we were pleased and we received a charming letter from a telephonist at the front who heard from a friend in Perpignan that we were giving this bit of ribbon and he asked for some and we sent them and we hope that they are all living.\nThe wind blows.\nAnd the automobile goes.\nCan you guess boards.\nWood.\nNaturally we think about wind because this country of Rousillon is the windiest corner in France. Also it is a great wine country.\n\n\nThis is apropos of the fact that I always ask where they come from and then I am ashamed to say I don’t know all the Departments but I am learning them.\nIn the meantime.\nIn the meantime we are useful.\nThat is what I mean to say.\nIn the meantime can you have beds. This means that knowing the number\nof beds you begin to know the hospital.\nKindly call a brother.\nWhat is a cure.\nI speak french.\nWhat one means.\nI can call it in time.\nBy the way where are fish.\nThey all love fishing.\nIn that case are there any wonders.\nMany wonders are women.\nI could almost say that that was apropos of my cranking my machine.\nAnd men too.\nWe smile.\nIn the way sentences.\nHe does not feel as we do.\nBut he did have the coat.\nHe blushed a little.\nThis is sometimes when they can’t quite help themselves and they want to help us.\nWe do not understand the weather. That astonishes me.\nCamellias in Perpignan.\nCamellias finish when roses begin.\nThank you in smiles.\nIn this way we go on. So far we have had no troubles yet and yet we do need material.\nIt is astonishing that those who have fought so hard and so well should pick yellow irises and fish in a stream.\nAnd then a pansy.\nI did not ask for it.\nIt smells.\nA sweet smell.\nWith acacia.\nCall it locusts.\nCall it me.\nI finish by saying that the french soldier is the person we should all help.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "yet-dish": { - "title": "“Yet Dish”", - "body": "# I.\n\nPut a sun in Sunday, Sunday.\nEleven please ten hoop. Hoop.\nCousin coarse in coarse in soap.\nCousin coarse in soap sew up. soap.\nCousin coarse in sew up soap.\n\n\n# II.\n\nA lea ender stow sole lightly.\nNot a bet beggar.\nNearer a true set jump hum,\nA lamp lander so seen poor lip.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNever so round.\nA is a guess and a piece.\nA is a sweet cent sender.\nA is a kiss slow cheese.\nA is for age jet.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNew deck stairs.\nLittle in den little in dear den.\n\n\n# V.\n\nPolar pole.\nDust winder.\nCore see.\nA bale a bale o a bale.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nExtravagant new or noise peal extravagant.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nS a glass.\nRoll ups.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nPowder in wails, powder in sails, powder is all next to it is does\nwait sack rate all goals like chain in clear.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nNegligible old star.\nPour even.\nIt was a sad per cent.\nDoes on sun day.\nWatch or water.\nSo soon a moon or a old heavy press.\n\n\n# X.\n\nPearl cat or cat or pill or pour check.\nNew sit or little.\nNew sat or little not a wad yet.\nHeavy toe heavy sit on head.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nEx, ex, ex.\nBull it bull it bull it bull it.\nEx Ex Ex.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nCousin plates pour a y shawl hood hair.\nNo see eat.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nThey are getting, bad left log lope, should a court say stream, not\na dare long beat a soon port.\n\n\n# XIV.\n\nColored will he.\nCalamity.\nColored will he\nIs it a soon. Is it a soon. Is it a soon. soon. Is it a soon. soon.\n\n\n# XV.\n\nNobody’s ice.\nNobody’s ice to be knuckles.\nNobody’s nut soon.\nNobody’s seven picks.\nPicks soap stacks.\nSix in set on seven in seven told, to top.\n\n\n# XVI.\n\nA spread chin shone.\nA set spread chin shone.\n\n\n# XVII.\n\nNo people so sat.\nNot an eider.\nNot either. Not either either.\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\nNeglect, neglect use such.\nUse such a man.\nNeglect use such a man.\nSuch some here.\n\n\n# XIX.\n\nNote tie a stem bone single pair so itching.\n\n\n# XX.\n\nLittle lane in lay in a circular crest.\n\n\n# XXI.\n\nPeace while peace while toast.\nPaper eight paper eight or, paper eight ore white.\n\n\n# XXII.\n\nCoop pour.\nNever a single ham.\nCharlie. Charlie.\n\n\n# XXIII.\n\nNeglect or.\nA be wade.\nEarnest care lease.\nLeast ball sup.\n\n\n# XXIV.\n\nMeal dread.\nMeal dread so or.\nMeal dread so or bounce.\nMeal dread so or bounce two sales. Meal dread so or bounce two\nsails. Not a rice. No nor a pray seat, not a little muscle, not a\nnor noble, not a cool right more than a song in every period\nof nails and pieces pieces places of places.\n\n\n# XXV.\n\nNeat know.\nPlay in horizontal pet soap.\n\n\n# XXVI.\n\nNice pose.\nSupper bell.\nPull a rope pressed.\nColor glass.\n\n\n# XXVII.\n\nNice oil pail.\nNo gold go at.\nNice oil pail.\nNear a paper lag sought.\nWhat is an astonishing won door. A please spoon.\n\n\n# XXVIII.\n\nNice knee nick ear.\nNot a well pair in day.\nNice knee neck core.\nWhat is a skin pour in day.\n\n\n# XXIX.\n\nClimb climb max.\nHundred in wait.\nPaper cat or deliver\n\n\n# XXX.\n\nLittle drawers of center.\nNeighbor of dot light.\nShorter place to make a boom set.\nMarches to be bright.\n\n\n# XXXI.\n\nSuppose a do sat.\nSuppose a negligence.\nSuppose a cold character.\n\n\n# XXXII.\n\nSuppose a negligence.\nSuppose a sell.\nSuppose a neck tie.\n\n\n# XXXIII.\n\nSuppose a cloth cape.\nSuppose letter suppose let a paper.\nSuppose soon.\n\n\n# XXXIV.\n\nA prim a prim prize.\nA sea pin.\nA prim a prim prize\nA sea pin.\n\n\n# XXXV.\n\nWitness a way go.\nWitness a way go. Witness a way go. Wetness.\nWetness.\n\n\n# XXXVI.\n\nLessons lettuce.\nLet us peer let us polite let us pour, let us polite. Let us polite.\n\n\n# XXXVII.\n\nNeither is blessings bean.\n\n\n# XXXVIII.\n\nDew Dew Drops.\nLeaves kindly Lasts.\nDew Dew Drops.\n\n\n# XXXIX.\n\nA R. nuisance.\nNot a regular plate.\nAre, not a regular plate.\n\n\nXL.\n\nLock out sandy.\nLock out sandy boot trees.\nLock out sandy boot trees knit glass.\nLock out sandy boot trees knit glass.\n\n\nXLI.\n\nA R not new since.\nNew since.\nAre new since bows less.\n\n\nXLII.\n\nA jell cake.\nA jelly cake.\nA jelly cake.\n\n\nXLIII.\n\nPeace say ray comb pomp\nPeace say ray comb pump\nPeace say ray comb pomp\nPeace say ray comb pomp.\n\n\nXLIV.\n\nLean over not a coat low.\nLean over not a coat low by stand.\nLean over net. Lean over net a coat low hour stemmed\nLean over a coat low a great send. Lean over coat low extra extend.\n\n\nXLV.\n\nCopying Copying it in.\n\n\nXLVI.\n\nNever second scent never second scent in stand. Never second\nscent in stand box or show. Or show me sales. Or show me\nsales oak. Oak pet. Oak pet stall.\n\n\n\nXLVII.\n\nNot a mixed stick or not a mixed stick or glass. Not a mend stone\nbender, not a mend stone bender or stain.\n\n\nXLVIII.\n\nPolish polish is it a hand, polish is it a hand or all, or all poles sick,\nor all poles sick.\n\n\nXLIX.\n\nRush in rush in slice.\n\n\nL.\n\nLittle gem in little gem in an. Extra.\n\n\nLI.\n\nIn the between egg in, in the between egg or on.\n\n\nLII.\n\nLeaves of gas, leaves of get a towel louder.\n\n\nLIII.\n\nNot stretch.\n\n\nLIV.\n\nTea Fulls.\nPit it pit it little saddle pear say.\n\n\nLV.\n\nLet me see wheat air blossom.\nLet me see tea.\n\n\nLVI.\n\nNestle in glass, nestle in walk, nestle in fur a lining.\n\n\nLVII.\n\nPale eaten best seek.\nPale eaten best seek, neither has met is a glance.\n\n\nLVIII.\n\nSuppose it is a s. Suppose it is a seal. Suppose it is a recognised\nopera\n\n\nLIX.\n\nNot a sell inch, not a boil not a never seeking cellar.\n\n\nLX.\n\nLittle gem in in little gem in an. Extra.\n\n\nLXI.\n\nCatch as catch as coal up.\n\n\nLXII.\n\nNecklaces, neck laces, necklaces, neck laces.\n\n\nLXIII.\n\nLittle in in in in.\n\n\nLXIV.\n\nNext or Sunday, next or sunday check.\n\n\nLXV.\n\nWide in swim, wide in swim pansy.\n\n\nLXVI.\n\nNext to hear next to hear old boat seak, old boat seak next to hear\n\n\nLXVII.\n\nApe pail ape pail to glow.\n\n\nLXVIII.\n\nIt was in on an each tuck. It was in on an each tuck.\n\n\nLXIX.\n\nWire lean string, wire lean string excellent miss on one pepper\ncute. Open so mister soil in to close not a see wind not seat\nglass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "wallace-stevens": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wallace Stevens", - "birth": { - "year": 1879 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 78 - }, - "poems": { - "anecdote-of-the-jar": { - "title": "“Anecdote of the Jar”", - "body": "I placed a jar in Tennessee,\nAnd round it was, upon a hill.\nIt made the slovenly wilderness\nSurround that hill.\n\nThe wilderness rose up to it,\nAnd sprawled around, no longer wild.\nThe jar was round upon the ground\nAnd tall and of a port in air.\n\nIt took dominion everywhere.\nThe jar was gray and bare.\nIt did not give of bird or bush,\nLike nothing else in Tennessee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - } - } - }, - "anecdote-of-the-prince-of-peacocks": { - "title": "“Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks”", - "body": "In the moonlight\nI met Berserk,\nIn the moonlight\nOn the bushy plain.\n\nOh, sharp he was\nAs the sleepless!\n\nAnd, “Why are you red\nIn this milky blue?”\nI said.\n“Why sun-colored,\nAs if awake\nIn the midst of sleep?”\n\n“You that wander,”\nSo he said,\n“On the bushy plain,\nForget so soon.\nBut I set my traps\nIn the midst of dreams.”\n\nI knew from this\nThat the blue ground\nWas full of blocks\nAnd blocking steel.\nI knew the dread\nOf the bushy plain,\nAnd the beauty\nOf the moonlight\nFalling there,\nFalling\nAs sleep falls\nIn the innocent air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-weeping-woman": { - "title": "“Another Weeping Woman”", - "body": "Pour the unhappiness out\nFrom your too bitter heart,\nWhich grieving will not sweeten.\n\nPoison grows in this dark.\nIt is in the water of tears\nIts black blooms rise.\n\nThe magnificent cause of being--\nThe imagination, the one reality\nIn this imagined world--\n\nLeaves you\nWith him for whom no phantasy moves,\nAnd you are pierced by a death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "arcades-of-philadelphia-the-past": { - "title": "“Arcades of Philadelphia the Past”", - "body": "Only the rich remember the past,\nThe strawberries once in the Apennines,\nPhiladelphia that the spiders ate.\n\nThere they sit, holding their eyes in their hands.\nQueer, in this Vallombrosa of ears,\nThat they never hear the past. To see,\nTo hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that’s now,\nThat’s this. Do they touch the thing they see,\nFeel the wind of it, smell the dust of it?\nThey do not touch it. Sounds never rise\nOut of what they see.\nThey polish their eyes\nIn their hands. The lilacs came long after.\nBut the town and the fragrance were never one,\nThough the blue bushes bloomed--and bloom,\nStill bloom in the agate eyes, red blue,\nRed purple, never quite red itself.\nThe tongue, the fingers and the nose\nAre comic trash, the ears are dirt,\nBut the eyes are men in the palm of the hand.\n\nThis? A man must be very poor\nWith a single sense, though he smells clouds,\nOr to see the sea on Sunday, or\nTo touch a woman cadaverous,\nOf poorness as an earth, to taste\nDry seconds and insipid thirds,\nTo hear himself and not to speak.\n\nThe strawberries once in the Apennines …\nThey seem a little painted, now.\nThe mountains are scratched and used, clear fakes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-auroras-of-autumn": { - "title": "“The Auroras of Autumn”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThis is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.\nHis head is air. Beneath his tip at night\nEyes open and fix on us in every sky.\n\nOr is this another wriggling out of the egg,\nAnother image at the end of the cave,\nAnother bodiless for the body’s slough?\n\nThis is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,\nThese fields, these hills, these tinted distances,\nAnd the pines above and along and beside the sea.\n\nThis is form gulping after formlessness,\nSkin flashing to wished-for disappearances\nAnd the serpent body flashing without the skin.\n\nThis is the height emerging and its base\nThese lights may finally attain a pole\nIn the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,\n\nIn another nest, the master of the maze\nOf body and air and forms and images,\nRelentlessly in possession of happiness.\n\nThis is his poison: that we should disbelieve\nEven that. His meditations in the ferns,\nWhen he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,\n\nMade us no less as sure. We saw in his head,\nBlack beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,\nThe moving grass, the Indian in his glade.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFarewell to an idea … A cabin stands,\nDeserted, on a beach. It is white,\nAs by a custom or according to\n\nAn ancestral theme or as a consequence\nOf an infinite course. The flowers against the wall\nAre white, a little dried, a kind of mark\n\nReminding, trying to remind, of a white\nThat was different, something else, last year\nOr before, not the white of an aging afternoon,\n\nWhether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud\nOr of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.\nThe wind is blowing the sand across the floor.\n\nHere, being visible is being white,\nIs being of the solid of white, the accomplishment\nOf an extremist in an exercise …\n\nThe season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.\nThe long lines of it grow longer, emptier,\nA darkness gathers though it does not fall\n\nAnd the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.\nThe man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.\nHe observes how the north is always enlarging the change,\n\nWith its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps\nAnd gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,\nThe color of ice and fire and solitude.\n\n\n# III.\n\nFarewell to an idea … The mother’s face,\nThe purpose of the poem, fills the room.\nThey are together, here, and it is warm,\n\nWith none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.\nIt is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.\nOnly the half they can never possess remains,\n\nStill-starred. It is the mother they possess,\nWho gives transparence to their present peace.\nShe makes that gentler that can gentle be.\n\nAnd yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.\nShe gives transparence. But she has grown old.\nThe necklace is a carving not a kiss.\n\nThe soft hands are a motion not a touch.\nill crumble and the books will burn.\nThey are at ease in a shelter of the mind\n\nAnd the house is of the mind and they and time,\nTogether, all together. Boreal night\nWill look like frost as it approaches them\n\nAnd to the mother as she falls asleep\nAnd as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs\nThe windows will be lighted, not the rooms.\n\nA wind will spread its windy grandeurs round\nAnd knock like a rifle-butt against the door.\nThe wind will command them with invincible sound.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFarewell to an idea … The cancellings,\nThe negations are never final. The father sits\nIn space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,\n\nAs one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.\nHe says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes\nTo no; and in saying yes he says farewell.\n\nHe measures the velocities of change.\nHe leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly\nThan bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.\n\nBut now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.\nHe assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them\nFrom cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear\n\nIn flights of eye and ear, the highest eye\nAnd the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,\nAt evening, things that attend it until it hears\n\nThe supernatural preludes of its own,\nAt the moment when the angelic eye defines\nIts actors approaching, in company, in their masks.\n\nMaster O master seated by the fire\nAnd yet in space and motionless and yet\nOf motion the ever-brightening origin,\n\nProfound, and yet the king and yet the crown,\nLook at this present throne. What company,\nIn masks, can choir it with the naked wind?\n\n\n# V.\n\nThe mother invites humanity to her house\nAnd table. The father fetches tellers of tales\nAnd musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.\n\nThe father fetches negresses to dance,\nAmong the children, like curious ripenesses\nOf pattern in the dance’s ripening.\n\nFor these the musicians make insidious tones,\nClawing the sing-song of their instruments.\nThe children laugh and jangle a tinny time.\n\nThe father fetches pageants out of air,\nScenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods\nAnd curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.\n\nAmong these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.\nThe father fetches his unherded herds,\nOf barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves\n\nOf breath, obedient to his trumpet’s touch.\nThis then is Chatillon or as you please.\nWe stand in the tumult of a festival.\n\nWhat festival? This loud, disordered mooch?\nThese hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?\nThese musicians dubbing at a tragedy,\n\nA-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:\nThat there are no lines to speak? There is no play.\nOr, the persons act one merely by being here.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIt is a theatre floating through the clouds,\nItself a cloud, although of misted rock\nAnd mountains running like water, wave on wave,\n\nThrough waves of light. It is of cloud transformed\nTo cloud transformed again, idly, the way\nA season changes color to no end,\n\nExcept the lavishing of itself in change,\nAs light changes yellow into gold and gold\nTo its opal elements and fire’s delight,\n\nSplashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence\nAnd the solemn pleasures of magnificent space\nThe cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.\n\nThe theatre is filled with flying birds,\nWild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed\nAnd vanishing, a web in a corridor\n\nOr massive portico. A capitol,\nIt may be, is emerging or has just\nCollapsed. The denouement has to be postponed …\n\nThis is nothing until in a single man contained,\nNothing until this named thing nameless is\nAnd is destroyed. He opens the door of his house\n\nOn flames. The scholar of one candle sees\nAn Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame\nOf everything he is. And he feels afraid.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nIs there an imagination that sits enthroned\nAs grim as it is benevolent, the just\nAnd the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops\n\nTo imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,\nDoes it take its place in the north and enfold itself,\nGoat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting\n\nIn highest night? And do these heavens adorn\nAnd proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted\nBy extinguishings, even of planets as may be,\n\nEven of earth, even of sight, in snow,\nExcept as needed by way of majesty,\nIn the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?\n\nIt leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,\nExtinguishing our planets, one by one,\nLeaving, of where we were and looked, of where\n\nWe knew each other and of each other thought,\nA shivering residue, chilled and foregone,\nExcept for that crown and mystical cabala.\n\nBut it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.\nIt must change from destiny to slight caprice.\nAnd thus its jetted tragedy, its stele\n\nAnd shape and mournful making move to find\nWhat must unmake it and, at last, what can,\nSay, a flippant communication under the moon.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThere may be always a time of innocence.\nThere is never a place. Or if there is no time,\nIf it is not a thing of time, nor of place,\n\nExisting in the idea of it, alone,\nIn the sense against calamity, it is not\nLess real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,\n\nThere is or may be a time of innocence\nAs pure principle. Its nature is its end,\nThat it should be, and yet not be, a thing\n\nThat pinches the pity of the pitiful man,\nLike a book at evening beautiful but untrue,\nLike a book on rising beautiful and true.\n\n\nIt is like a thing of ether that exists\nAlmost as predicate. But it exists,\nIt exists, it is visible, it is, it is.\n\nSo, then, these lights are not a spell of light,\nA saying out of a cloud, but innocence.\nAn innocence of the earth and no false sign\n\nOr symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,\nLie down like children in this holiness,\nAs if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,\n\nAs if the innocent mother sang in the dark\nOf the room and on an accordion, half-heard,\nCreated the time and place in which we breathed …\n\n\n# IX.\n\nAnd of each other thought--in the idiom\nOf the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,\nNot of the enigma of the guilty dream.\n\nWe were as Danes in Denmark all day long\nAnd knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,\nFor whom the outlandish was another day\n\nOf the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike\nAnd that made brothers of us in a home\nIn which we fed on being brothers, fed\n\nAnd fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.\nThis drama that we live--We lay sticky with sleep.\nThis sense of the activity of fate--\n\nThe rendezvous, when she came alone,\nBy her coming became a freedom of the two,\nAn isolation which only the two could share.\n\nShall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?\nOf what disaster in this the imminence:\nBare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?\n\nThe stars are putting on their glittering belts.\nThey throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash\nLike a great shadow’s last embellishment.\n\nIt may come tomorrow in the simplest word,\nAlmost as part of innocence, almost,\nAlmost as the tenderest and the truest part.\n\n\n# X.\n\nAn unhappy people in a happy world--\nRead, rabbi, the phases of this difference.\nAn unhappy people in an unhappy world--\n\nHere are too many mirrors for misery.\nA happy people in an unhappy world--\nIt cannot be. There’s nothing there to roll\n\nOn the expressive tongue, the finding fang.\nA happy people in a happy world--\nBuffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.\n\nTurn back to where we were when we began:\nAn unhappy people in a happy world.\nNow, solemnize the secretive syllables.\n\nRead to the congregation, for today\nAnd for tomorrow, this extremity,\nThis contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,\n\nContriving balance to contrive a whole,\nThe vital, the never-failing genius,\nFulfilling his meditations, great and small.\n\nIn these unhappy he meditates a whole,\nThe full of fortune and the full of fate,\nAs if he lived all lives, that he might know,\n\nIn hall harridan, not hushful paradise,\nTo a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights\nLike a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1950 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "banal-sojourn": { - "title": "“Banal Sojourn”", - "body": "Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.\nThe sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.\nThe grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.\nMoisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.\nPardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,\nOur old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,\n“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,\nWhen radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.\nAnd so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.\nFor who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?\nAnd who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?\nOne has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "bantams-in-the-pine-woods": { - "title": "“Bantams in the Pine-Woods”", - "body": "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan\nOf tan with henna hackles, halt!\n\nDamned universal cock, as if the sun\nWas blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.\n\nFat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.\nYour world is you. I am my world.\n\nYou ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!\nBegone! An inchling bristles in these pines,\n\nBristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,\nAnd fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "bouquet-of-roses-in-sunlight": { - "title": "“Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight”", - "body": "Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,\nPink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are\nTo be anything else in the sunlight of the room,\n\nToo much as they are to be changed by metaphor,\nToo actual, things that in being real\nMake any imaginings of them lesser things.\n\nAnd yet this effect is a consequence of the way\nWe feel and, therefore, is not real, except\nIn our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,\n\nOf yellow as first color and of white,\nIn which the sense lies still, as a man lies,\nEnormous, in a completing of his truth.\n\nOur sense of these things changes and they change,\nNot as in metaphor, but in our sense\nOf them. So sense exceeds all metaphor.\n\nIt exceeds the heavy changes of the light.\nIt is like a flow of meanings with no speech\nAnd of as many meanings as of men.\n\nWe are two that use these roses as we are,\nIn seeing them. This is what makes them seem\nSo far bevond the rhetorician’s touch.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-candle-a-saint": { - "title": "“The Candle a Saint”", - "body": "Green is the night, green kindled and appareled.\nIt is she that walks among astronomers.\n\nShe strides above the rabbit and the cat,\nLike a noble figure, out of the sky,\n\nMoving among the sleepers, the men,\nThose that lie chanting _green is the night_.\n\nGreen is the night and out of madness woven,\nThe self-same madness of the astronomers\n\nAnd of him that sees, beyond the astronomers,\nThe topaz rabbit and the emerald cat,\n\nThat sees above them, that sees rise up above them,\nThe noble figure, the essential shadow,\n\nMoving and being, the image at its source,\nThe abstract, the archaic queen. Green is the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "carlos-among-the-candles": { - "title": "“Carlos among the Candles”", - "body": "_The stage is indistinguishable when the curtain rises. The room represented is semi-circular. In the center, at the back, is a large round window, covered by long curtains. There is a door at the right and one at the left. Farther forward on the stage there are two long, low, wooden tables, one at the right and one at the left. The walls and the curtains over the window are of a dark reddish-purple, with a dim pattern of antique gold.\nCarlos is an eccentric pedant of about forty. He is dressed in black. He wears close-fitting breeches and a close-fitting, tightly-buttoned, short coat with long tails. His hair is rumpled. He leaps upon the stage through the door at the right. Nothing is visible through the door. He has a long thin white lighted taper, which he holds high above his head as he moves, fantastically, over the stage, examining the room in which he finds himself.\nWhen he has completed examining the room, he tip-toes to the table at the right and lights a single candle at the edge of the table nearest the front of the stage. It is a thin black candle, not less than two feet high. All the other candles are like it. They give very little light.\nHe speaks in a lively manner, but is over-nice in sounding his words.\nAs the candle begins to burn, he steps back, regarding it. Nothing else is visible on the table._\n\n> _Carlos:_\nHow the solitude of this candle penetrates me! I light a candle in the darkness. It fills the darkness with solitude, which becomes my own. I become a part of the solitude of the candle … of the darkness flowing over the house and into it … This room … and the profound room outside … Just to go through a door, and the change … the becoming a part, instantly, of that profounder room … and equally to feel it communicating, with the same persistency, its own mood, its own influence … and there, too, to feel the lesser influences of the shapes of things, of exhalations, sounds … to feel the mood of the candle vanishing and the mood of the special night coming to take its place …\n\n[_He sighs. After a pause he pirouettes, and then continues._]\n\nI was always affected by the grand style. And yet I have been thinking neither of mountains nor of morgues … To think of this light and of myself … it is a duty … Is it because it makes me think of myself in other places in such a light … or of other people in other places in such a light? How true that is: other people in other places in such a light … If I looked in at that window and saw a single candle burning in an empty room … but if I saw a figure … If, now, I felt that there was someone outside … The vague influence … the influence that clutches … But it is not only here and now … It is in the morning … the difference between a small window and a large window … a blue window and a green window … It is in the afternoon and in the evening … in effects, so drifting, that I know myself to be incalculable, since the causes of what I am are incalculable …\n\n[_He springs toward the table, flourishing his taper. At the end farthest from the front of the stage, he discovers a second candle, which he lights. He goes back to his former position._]\n\nThe solitude dissolves … The light of two candles has a meaning different from the light of one … and an effect different from the effect of one … And the proof that that is so, is that I feel the difference … The associations have drifted a little and changed, and I have followed in this change … If I see myself in other places in such a light, it is not as I saw myself before. If I see other people in ether places in such a light, the people and places are different from the people and places I saw before. The solitude is gone. It is as if a company of two or three people had just separated, or as if the were about to gather. These candles are too far apart.\n\n[_He flourishes his taper above the table and finds a third candle in the center of it, which he lights._]\n\nAnd yet with only two candles it would have been a cold and respectable company; for the feeling of coldness and respectability persists in the presence of three, modified a little, as if a kind of stateliness had modified into a kind of elegance … How far away from the isolation of the single candle, as arrogant of the vacancy around it as three are arrogant of association … It is no longer as if a company had just separated. It is only as if it were about to gather … as if one were soon to forget the room because of the people in the room … people tempered by the lights around them, affected by the lights around them … sensible that one more candle would turn this formative elegance into formative luxury.\n\n[_He lights a fourth candle. He indulges his humor._]\n\nAnd the suggestion of luxury into the suggestion of magnificence.\n\n[_He lights a fifth candle--_]\n\nAnd the beginning of magnificence into the beginning of splendor.\n\n[_He lights a sixth candle. He sighs deeply._]\n\nIn how short a time have I been solitary, then respectable--in a company so cold as to be stately, then elegant, then conscious of luxury, even magnificence; and now I come, gradually, to the beginning of splendor. Truly, I am a modern.\n\n[_He dances around the room._]\n\nTo have changed so often and so much … or to have been changed … to have been carried by the lighting of six candles through so many lives and to have been brought among so many people … This grows more wonderful. Six candles burn like an adventure that has been completed. They are established. They are a city … six common candles … seven …\n\n[_He lights another and another, until he has lighted twelve, saying after them, in turn:_]\n\nEight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.\n\n[_Following this, he goes on tip-toe to the center of the stage, where he looks at the candles. Their brilliance has raised his spirits to the point of gaiety. He turns from the lighted table to face the dark one at the left. He holds his taper before him._]\n\nDarkness again … as if a night wind had come blowing … but too weakly to fling the cloth of darkness.\n\n[_He goes to the window, draws one of the curtains a little and peers out. He sees nothing._]\n\nI had as lief look into night as look into the dark corner of a room. Darkness expels me.\n\n[_He goes forward, holding his taper high above him, until he comes to the table at the left. He finds this covered with candles, like the table at the right, and lights them, with whimsical motions, one by one. When all the candles have been lighted, he runs to the center of the stage, holding his hands over his eyes. Then he returns to the window and flings aside the curtains. The light from the window falls on the tall stalks of flowers outside. The flowers are like hollyhocks, but they are unnaturally large, of gold and silver. He speaks excitedly._]\n\nWhere now is my solitude and the lonely figure of solitude? Where now are the two stately ones that left their coldness behind them? They have taken their bareness with them. Their coldness has followed them. Here there will be silks and fans … the movement of arms … rumors of Renoir … coiffures … hands … scorn of Debussy … communications of body to body … There will be servants, as fat as plums, bearing pineapples from the Azores … because of twenty-four candles, burning together, as if their light had dispelled a phantasm, falling on silks and fans … the movement of arms … The pulse of the crowd will beat out the shallow pulses … it will fill me.\n\n[_A strong gust of wind suddenly blows into the room, extinguishing several of the candles on the table at the left. He runs to the table at the left and looks, as if startled, at the extinguished candles. He buries his head in his arms._]\n\nThat, too, was phantasm … The night wind came into the room … The fans are invisible upon the floor.\n\n[_In a burst of feeling, he blows out all the candles that are still burning on the table at the left. He crosses the stage and stands before the table at the right. After a moment he goes slowly to the back of the stage and draws the curtains over the ivindow. He returns to the table at the right._]\n\nWhat is there in the extinguishing of light? It is like twelve wild birds flying in autumn.\n\n[_He blows out one of the candles._]\n\nIt is like an eleven-limbed oak tree, brass-colored in frost … Regret …\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like ten green sparks of a rocket, oscillating in air … The extinguishing of light … how closely regret follows it.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like the diverging angles that follow nine leaves drifting in water, and that compose themselves brilliantly on the polished surface.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like eight pears in a nude tree, flaming in twilight … The extinguishing of light is like that. The season is sorrowful. The air is cold.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like the six Pleiades, and the hidden one, that makes them seven.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like the seven Pleiades, and the hidden one, that makes them six.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nThe extinguishing of light is like the five purple palmations of cinquefoil withering … It is full of the incipiences of darkness … of desolation that rises as a feeling rises … Imagination wills the five purple palmations of cinquefoil. But in this light they have the appearance of withering … To feel and, in the midst of feeling, to imagine …\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nThe extinguishing of light is like the four posts of a cadaver, two. at its head and two at its feet, to-wit: its arms and legs.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like three peregrins, departing.\n\n[_He blows out another candle._]\n\nIt is like heaven and earth in the eye of the disbeliever.\n\n[_He blows out another candle. He dances around the room. He returns to the single candle that remains burning._]\n\nThe extinguishing of light is like that old Hesper, clapped upon by clouds.\n\n[_He stands in front of the candle, so as to obscure it._]\n\nThe spikes of his light bristle around the edge of the bulk. The spikes bristle among the clouds and behind them. There is a spot where he was bright in the sky … It remains fixed a little in the mind.\n\n[_He opens the door at the right. Outside, the night is as blue as water. He crosses the stage and opens the door at the left. Once more he flings aside the curtains. He extinguishes his taper. He looks out. He speaks with elation._]\n\nOh, ho! Here is matter beyond invention.\n\n[_He springs through the window. Curtain._]", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "certain-phenomena-of-sound": { - "title": "“Certain Phenomena of Sound”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe cricket in the telephone is still.\nA geranium withers on the window-sill.\n\nCat’s milk is dry in the saucer. Sunday song\nComes from the beating of the locust’s wings,\n\nThat do not beat by pain, but calendar,\nNor meditate the world as it goes round.\n\nSomeone has left for a ride in a balloon\nOr in a bubble examines the bubble of air.\n\nThe room is emptier than nothingness.\nYet a spider spins in the left shoe under the bed--\n\nAnd old John Rocket dozes on his pillow.\nIt is safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSo you’re home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready\nTo feast … Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it\n\nWith white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,\nAfter we’ve drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade\n\nOf the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s\nStory … The sound of that slick sonata,\n\nFinding its way from the house, makes music seem\nTo be a nature, a place in which itself\n\nIs that which produces everything else, in which\nThe Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,\n\nEngaged in the most prolific narrative,\nA sound producing the things that are spoken.\n\n\n# III.\n\nEulalia, I lounged on the hospital porch,\nOn the east, sister and nun, and opened wide\nA parasol, which I had found, against\nThe sun. The interior of a parasol,\nIt is a kind of blank in which one sees.\nSo seeing, I beheld you walking, white,\nGold-shined by sun, perceiving as I saw\nThat of that light Eulalia was the name.\nThen I, Semiramide, dark-syllabled,\nContrasting our two names, considered speech.\nYou were created of your name, the word\nIs that of which you were the personage.\nThere is no life except in the word of it.\nI write _Semiramide_ and in the script\nI am and have a being and play a part.\nYou are that white Eulalia of the name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "colloquy-with-a-polish-aunt": { - "title": "“Colloquy with a Polish Aunt”", - "body": "_Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes\nde la Pologne. Revue des Deux Mondes_\n\n> _She_\nHow is it that my saints from Voragine,\nIn their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?\n\n> _He_\nOld pantaloons, duenna of the spring!\n\n> _She_\nImagination is the will of things …\nThus, on the basis of the common drudge,\nYou dream of women, swathed in indigo,\nHolding their books toward the nearer stars,\nTo read, in secret, burning secrecies …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-comedian-as-the-letter-c": { - "title": "“The Comedian as the Letter C”", - "body": "# I. _The World without Imagination_\n\nNota: man is the intelligence of his soil,\nThe sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates\nOf snails, musician of pears, principium\nAnd lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig\nOf things, this nincompated pedagogue,\nPreceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea\nCreated, in his day, a touch of doubt.\nAn eye most apt in gelatines and jupes,\nBerries of villages, a barber’s eye,\nAn eye of land, of simple salad-beds,\nOf honest quilts, the eye of Crispin, hung\nOn porpoises, instead of apricots,\nAnd on silentious porpoises, whose snouts\nDibbled in waves that were mustachios,\nInscrutable hair in an inscrutable world.\n\nOne eats one paté, even of salt, quotha.\nIt was not so much the lost terrestrial,\nThe snug hibernal from that sea and salt,\nThat century of wind in a single puff.\nWhat counted was mythology of self,\nBlotched out beyond unblotching. Crispin,\nThe lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane,\nThe ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches, cloak\nOf China, cap of Spain, imperative haw\nOf hum, inquisitorial botanist,\nAnd general lexicographer of mute\nAnd maidenly greenhorns, now beheld himself,\nA skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass.\nWhat word split up in clickering syllables\nAnd storming under multitudinous tones\nWas name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?\nCrispin was washed away by magnitude.\nThe whole of life that still remained in him\nDwindled to one sound strumming in his ear,\nUbiquitous concussion, slap and sigh,\nPolyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.\n\nCould Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,\nThe old age of a watery realist,\nTriton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes\nOf blue and green? A wordy, watery age\nThat whispered to the sun’s compassion, made\nA convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,\nAnd on the cropping foot-ways of the moon\nLay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that\nWhich made him Triton, nothing left of him,\nExcept in faint, memorial gesturings,\nThat were like arms and shoulders in the waves,\nHere, something in the rise and fall of wind\nThat seemed hallucinating horn, and here,\nA sunken voice, both of remembering\nAnd of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.\nJust so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.\nThe valet in the tempest was annulled.\nBordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,\nAnd then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.\nCrispin, merest minuscule in the gates,\nDejected his manner to the turbulence.\nThe salt hung on his spirit like a frost,\nThe dead brine melted in him like a dew\nOf winter, until nothing of himself\nRemained, except some starker, barer self\nIn a starker, barer world, in which the sun\nWas not the sun because it never shone\nWith bland complaisance on pale parasols,\nBeetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.\nAgainst his pipping sounds a trumpet cried\nCelestial sneering boisterously. Crispin\nBecame an introspective voyager.\n\nHere was the veritable ding an sich, at last,\nCrispin confronting it, a vocable thing,\nBut with a speech belched out of hoary darks\nNoway resembling his, a visible thing,\nAnd excepting negligible Triton, free\nFrom the unavoidable shadow of himself\nThat lay elsewhere around him. Severance\nWas clear. The last distortion of romance\nForsook the insatiable egotist. The sea\nSevers not only lands but also selves.\nHere was no help before reality.\nCrispin beheld and Crispin was made new.\nThe imagination, here, could not evade,\nIn poems of plums, the strict austerity\nOf one vast, subjugating, final tone.\nThe drenching of stale lives no more fell down.\nWhat was this gaudy, gusty panoply?\nOut of what swift destruction did it spring?\nIt was caparison of mind and cloud\nAnd something given to make whole among\nThe ruses that were shattered by the large.\n\n\n\n# II. _Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan_\n\nIn Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers\nOf the Caribbean amphitheatre,\nIn spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan\nAnd jay, still to the night-bird made their plea,\nAs if raspberry tanagers in palms,\nHigh up in orange air, were barbarous.\nBut Crispin was too destitute to find\nIn any commonplace the sought-for aid.\nHe was a man made vivid by the sea,\nA man come out of luminous traversing,\nMuch trumpeted, made desperately clear,\nFresh from discoveries of tidal skies,\nTo whom oracular rockings gave no rest.\nInto a savage color he went on.\n\nHow greatly had he grown in his demesne,\nThis auditor of insects! He that saw\nThe stride of vanishing autumn in a park\nBy way of decorous melancholy; he\nThat wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,\nAs dissertation of profound delight,\nStopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes,\nFound his vicissitudes had much enlarged\nHis apprehension, made him intricate\nIn moody rucks, and difficult and strange\nIn all desires, his destitution’s mark.\nHe was in this as other freemen are,\nSonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.\nHis violence was for aggrandizement\nAnd not for stupor, such as music makes\nFor sleepers halfway waking. He perceived\nThat coolness for his heat came suddenly,\nAnd only, in the fables that he scrawled\nWith his own quill, in its indigenous dew,\nOf an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed,\nIncredible to prudes, the mint of dirt,\nGreen barbarism turning paradigm.\nCrispin foresaw a curious promenade\nOr, nobler, sensed an elemental fate,\nAnd elemental potencies and pangs,\nAnd beautiful barenesses as yet unseen,\nMaking the most of savagery of palms,\nOf moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom\nThat yuccas breed, and of the panther’s tread.\nThe fabulous and its intrinsic verse\nCame like two spirits parlaying, adorned\nIn radiance from the Atlantic coign,\nFor Crispin and his quill to catechize.\nBut they came parlaying of such an earth,\nSo thick with sides and jagged lops of green,\nSo intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled\nAmong the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns,\nScenting the jungle in their refuges,\nSo streaked with yellow, blue and green and red\nIn beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins,\nThat earth was like a jostling festival\nOf seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent,\nExpanding in the gold’s maternal warmth.\nSo much for that. The affectionate emigrant found\nA new reality in parrot-squawks.\nYet let that trifle pass. Now, as this odd\nDiscoverer walked through the harbor streets\nInspecting the cabildo, the façade\nOf the cathedral, making notes, he heard\nA rumbling, west of Mexico, it seemed,\nApproaching like a gasconade of drums.\nThe white cabildo darkened, the façade,\nAs sullen as the sky, was swallowed up\nIn swift, successive shadows, dolefully.\nThe rumbling broadened as it fell. The wind,\nTempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,\nCame bluntly thundering, more terrible\nThan the revenge of music on bassoons.\nGesticulating lightning, mystical,\nMade pallid flitter. Crispin, here, took flight.\nAn annotator has his scruples, too.\nHe knelt in the cathedral with the rest,\nThis connoisseur of elemental fate,\nAware of exquisite thought. The storm was one\nOf many proclamations of the kind,\nProclaiming something harsher than he learned\nFrom hearing signboards whimper in cold nights\nOr seeing the midsummer artifice\nOf heat upon his pane. This was the span\nOf force, the quintessential fact, the note\nOf Vulcan, that a valet seeks to own,\nThe thing that makes him envious in phrase.\n\nAnd while the torrent on the roof still droned\nHe felt the Andean breath. His mind was free\nAnd more than free, elate, intent, profound\nAnd studious of a self possessing him,\nThat was not in him in the crusty town\nFrom which he sailed. Beyond him, westward, lay\nThe mountainous ridges, purple balustrades,\nIn which the thunder, lapsing in its clap,\nLet down gigantic quavers of its voice,\nFor Crispin to vociferate again.\n\n\n# III. _Approaching Carolina_\n\nThe book of moonlight is not written yet\nNor half begun, but, when it is, leave room\nFor Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,\nWho, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage\nThrough sweating changes, never could forget\nThat wakefulness or meditating sleep,\nIn which the sulky strophes willingly\nBore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs.\nLeave room, therefore, in that unwritten book\nFor the legendary moonlight that once burned\nIn Crispin’s mind above a continent.\nAmerica was always north to him,\nA northern west or western north, but north,\nAnd thereby polar, polar-purple, chilled\nAnd lank, rising and slumping from a sea\nOf hardy foam, receding flatly, spread\nIn endless ledges, glittering, submerged\nAnd cold in a boreal mistiness of the moon.\nThe spring came there in clinking pannicles\nOf half-dissolving frost, the summer came,\nIf ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,\nBefore the winter’s vacancy returned.\nThe myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,\nWas like a glacial pink upon the air.\nThe green palmettoes in crepuscular ice\nClipped frigidly blue-black meridians,\nMorose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.\n\nHow many poems he denied himself\nIn his observant progress, lesser things\nThan the relentless contact he desired;\nHow many sea-masks he ignored; what sounds\nHe shut out from his tempering ear; what thoughts,\nLike jades affecting the sequestered bride;\nAnd what descants, he sent to banishment!\nPerhaps the Arctic moonlight really gave\nThe liaison, the blissful liaison,\nBetween himself and his environment,\nWhich was, and is, chief motive, first delight,\nFor him, and not for him alone. It seemed\nElusive, faint, more mist than moon, perverse,\nWrong as a divagation to Peking,\nTo him that postulated as his theme\nThe vulgar, as his theme and hymn and flight,\nA passionately niggling nightingale.\nMoonlight was an evasion, or, if not,\nA minor meeting, facile, delicate.\n\nThus he conceived his voyaging to be\nAn up and down between two elements,\nA fluctuating between sun and moon,\nA sally into gold and crimson forms,\nAs on this voyage, out of goblinry,\nAnd then retirement like a turning back\nAnd sinking down to the indulgences\nThat in the moonlight have their habitude.\nBut let these backward lapses, if they would,\nGrind their seductions on him, Crispin knew\nIt was a flourishing tropic he required\nFor his refreshment, an abundant zone,\nPrickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious\nYet with a harmony not rarefied\nNor fined for the inhibited instruments\nOf over-civil stops. And thus he tossed\nBetween a Carolina of old time,\nA little juvenile, an ancient whim,\nAnd the visible, circumspect presentment drawn\nFrom what he saw across his vessel’s prow.\n\nHe came. The poetic hero without palms\nOr jugglery, without regalia.\nAnd as he came he saw that it was spring,\nA time abhorrent to the nihilist\nOr searcher for the fecund minimum.\nThe moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,\nAlthough contending featly in its veils,\nIrised in dew and early fragrancies,\nWas gemmy marionette to him that sought\nA sinewy nakedness. A river bore\nThe vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,\nHe inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells\nOf dampened lumber, emanations blown\nFrom warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,\nDecays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks\nThat helped him round his rude aesthetic out.\nHe savored rankness like a sensualist.\nHe marked the marshy ground around the dock,\nThe crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,\nCurriculum for the marvellous sophomore.\nIt purified. It made him see how much\nOf what he saw he never saw at all.\nHe gripped more closely the essential prose\nAs being, in a world so falsified,\nThe one integrity for him, the one\nDiscovery still possible to make,\nTo which all poems were incident, unless\nThat prose should wear a poem’s guise at last.\n\n\n# IV. _The Idea of a Colony_\n\nNota: his soil is man’s intelligence.\nThat’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find.\nCrispin in one laconic phrase laid bare\nHis cloudy drift and planned a colony.\nExit the mental moonlight, exit lex,\nRex and principium, exit the whole\nShebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose\nMore exquisite than any tumbling verse:\nA still new continent in which to dwell.\nWhat was the purpose of his pilgrimage,\nWhatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind,\nIf not, when all is said, to drive away\nThe shadow of his fellows from the skies,\nAnd, from their stale intelligence released,\nTo make a new intelligence prevail?\nHence the reverberations in the words\nOf his first central hymns, the celebrants\nOf rankest trivia, tests of the strength\nOf his aesthetic, his philosophy,\nThe more invidious, the more desired.\nThe florist asking aid from cabbages,\nThe rich man going bare, the paladin\nAfraid, the blind man as astronomer,\nThe appointed power unwielded from disdain.\nHis western voyage ended and began.\nThe torment of fastidious thought grew slack,\nAnother, still more bellicose, came on.\nHe, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,\nAnd, being full of the caprice, inscribed\nCommingled souvenirs and prophecies.\nHe made a singular collation. Thus:\nThe natives of the rain are rainy men.\nAlthough they paint effulgent, azure lakes,\nAnd April hillsides wooded white and pink,\nTheir azure has a cloudy edge, their white\nAnd pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.\nAnd in their music showering sounds intone.\nOn what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,\nWhat Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,\nWhat pulpy dram distilled of innocence,\nThat streaking gold should speak in him\nOr bask within his images and words?\nIf these rude instances impeach themselves\nBy force of rudeness, let the principle\nBe plain. For application Crispin strove,\nAbhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute\nAs the marimba, the magnolia as rose.\n\nUpon these premises propounding, he\nProjected a colony that should extend\nTo the dusk of a whistling south below the south.\nA comprehensive island hemisphere.\nThe man in Georgia waking among pines\nShould be pine-spokesman. The responsive man,\nPlanting his pristine cores in Florida,\nShould prick thereof, not on the psaltery,\nBut on the banjo’s categorical gut,\nTuck tuck, while the flamingos flapped his bays.\nSepulchral señors, bibbing pale mescal,\nOblivious to the Aztec almanacs,\nShould make the intricate Sierra scan.\nAnd dark Brazilians in their cafés,\nMusing immaculate, pampean dits,\nShould scrawl a vigilant anthology,\nTo be their latest, lucent paramour.\nThese are the broadest instances. Crispin,\nProgenitor of such extensive scope,\nWas not indifferent to smart detail.\nThe melon should have apposite ritual,\nPerformed in verd apparel, and the peach,\nWhen its black branches came to bud, belle day,\nShould have an incantation. And again,\nWhen piled on salvers its aroma steeped\nThe summer, it should have a sacrament\nAnd celebration. Shrewd novitiates\nShould be the clerks of our experience.\n\nThese bland excursions into time to come,\nRelated in romance to backward flights,\nHowever prodigal, however proud,\nContained in their afflatus the reproach\nThat first drove Crispin to his wandering.\nHe could not be content with counterfeit,\nWith masquerade of thought, with hapless words\nThat must belie the racking masquerade,\nWith fictive flourishes that preordained\nHis passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree\nOf buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash\nMight help the blind, not him, serenely sly.\nIt irked beyond his patience. Hence it was,\nPreferring text to gloss, he humbly served\nGrotesque apprenticeship to chance event,\nA clown, perhaps, but an aspiring clown.\nThere is a monotonous babbling in our dreams\nThat makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs\nOf dreamers buried in our sleep, and not\nThe oncoming fantasies of better birth.\nThe apprentice knew these dreamers. If he dreamed\nTheir dreams, he did it in a gingerly way.\nAll dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.\nBut let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.\n\nTrinket pasticcio, flaunting skyey sheets,\nWith Crispin as the tiptoe cozener?\nNo, no: veracious page on page, exact.\n\n\n# V. _A Nice Shady Home_\n\nCrispin as hermit, pure and capable,\nDwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent\nHad kept him still the pricking realist,\nChoosing his element from droll confect\nOf was and is and shall or ought to be,\nBeyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far\nBeyond carked Yucatan, he might have come\nTo colonize his polar planterdom\nAnd jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.\nBut his emprize to that idea soon sped.\nCrispin dwelt in the land and dwelling there\nSlid from his continent by slow recess\nTo things within his actual eye, alert\nTo the difficulty of rebellious thought\nWhen the sky is blue. The blue infected will.\nIt may be that the yarrow in his fields\nSealed pensive purple under its concern.\nBut day by day, now this thing and now that\nConfined him, while it cosseted, condoned,\nLittle by little, as if the suzerain soil\nAbashed him by carouse to humble yet\nAttach. It seemed haphazard denouement.\nHe first, as realist, admitted that\nWhoever hunts a matinal continent\nMay, after all, stop short before a plum\nAnd be content and still be realist.\nThe words of things entangle and confuse.\nThe plum survives its poems. It may hang\nIn the sunshine placidly, colored by ground\nObliquities of those who pass beneath,\nHarlequined and mazily dewed and mauved\nIn bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,\nBeyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.\nSo Crispin hasped on the surviving form,\nFor him, of shall or ought to be in is.\n\nWas he to bray this in profoundest brass\nArointing his dreams with fugal requiems?\nWas he to company vastest things defunct\nWith a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?\nScrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong\nHis active force in an inactive dirge,\nWhich, let the tall musicians call and call,\nShould merely call him dead? Pronounce amen\nThrough choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?\nBecause he built a cabin who once planned\nLoquacious columns by the ructive sea?\nBecause he turned to salad-beds again?\nJovial Crispin, in calamitous crape?\nShould he lay by the personal and make\nOf his own fate an instance of all fate?\nWhat is one man among so many men?\nWhat are so many men in such a world?\nCan one man think one thing and think it long?\nCan one man be one thing and be it long?\nThe very man despising honest quilts\nLies quilted to his poll in his despite.\nFor realists, what is is what should be.\nAnd so it came, his cabin shuffled up,\nHis trees were planted, his duenna brought\nHer prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands,\nThe curtains flittered and the door was closed.\nCrispin, magister of a single room,\nLatched up the night. So deep a sound fell down\nIt was as if the solitude concealed\nAnd covered him and his congenial sleep.\nSo deep a sound fell down it grew to be\nA long soothsaying silence down and down.\nThe crickets beat their tambours in the wind,\nMarching a motionless march, custodians.\n\nIn the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,\nEach day, still curious, but in a round\nLess prickly and much more condign than that\nHe once thought necessary. Like Candide,\nYeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,\nAnd cream for the fig and silver for the cream,\nA blonde to tip the silver and to taste\nThe rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be\nAnnealed them in their cabin ribaldries!\nYet the quotidian saps philosophers\nAnd men like Crispin like them in intent,\nIf not in will, to track the knaves of thought.\nBut the quotidian composed as his,\nOf breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,\nThe tomtit and the cassia and the rose,\nAlthough the rose was not the noble thorn\nOf crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,\nComposed of evenings like cracked shutters flung\nUpon the rumpling bottomness, and nights\nIn which those frail custodians watched,\nIndifferent to the tepid summer cold,\nWhile he poured out upon the lips of her\nThat lay beside him, the quotidian\nLike this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.\nFor all it takes it gives a humped return\nExchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.\n\n\n# VI. _And Daughters with Curls_\n\nPortentous enunciation, syllable\nTo blessed syllable affined, and sound\nBubbling felicity in cantilene,\nProlific and tormenting tenderness\nOf music, as it comes to unison,\nForgather and bell boldly Crispin’s last\nDeduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur\nHis grand pronunciamento and devise.\n\nThe chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,\nHands without touch yet touching poignantly,\nLeaving no room upon his cloudy knee,\nProphetic joint, for its diviner young.\nThe return to social nature, once begun,\nAnabasis or slump, ascent or chute,\nInvolved him in midwifery so dense\nHis cabin counted as phylactery,\nThen place of vexing palankeens, then haunt\nOf children nibbling at the sugared void,\nInfants yet eminently old, then dome\nAnd halidom for the unbraided femes,\nGreen crammers of the green fruits of the world,\nBidders and biders for its ecstasies,\nTrue daughters both of Crispin and his clay.\nAll this with many mulctings of the man,\nEffective colonizer sharply stopped\nIn the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.\nBut that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs\nOf its eventual roundness, puerile tints\nOf spiced and weathery rouges, should complex\nThe stopper to indulgent fatalist\nWas unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon\nHis goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,\nShe seemed, of a country of the capuchins,\nSo delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,\nAttentive to a coronal of things\nSecret and singular. Second, upon\nA second similar counterpart, a maid\nMost sisterly to the first, not yet awake\nExcepting to the motherly footstep, but\nMarvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.\nThen third, a thing still flaxen in the light,\nA creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,\nMere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,\nAll din and gobble, blasphemously pink.\nA few years more and the vermeil capuchin\nGave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,\nThe dulcet omen fit for such a house.\nThe second sister dallying was shy\nTo fetch the one full-pinioned one himself\nOut of her botches, hot embosomer.\nThe third one gaping at the orioles\nLettered herself demurely as became\nA pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.\nThe fourth, pent now, a digit curious.\nFour daughters in a world too intricate\nIn the beginning, four blithe instruments\nOf differing struts, four voices several\nIn couch, four more personae, intimate\nAs buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue\nThat should be silver, four accustomed seeds\nHinting incredible hues, four self-same lights\nThat spread chromatics in hilarious dark,\nFour questioners and four sure answerers.\n\nCrispin concocted doctrine from the rout.\nThe world, a turnip once so readily plucked,\nSacked up and carried overseas, daubed out\nOf its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,\nAnd sown again by the stiffest realist,\nCame reproduced in purple, family font,\nThe same insoluble lump. The fatalist\nStepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,\nWithout grace or grumble. Score this anecdote\nInvented for its pith, not doctrinal\nIn form though in design, as Crispin willed,\nDisguised pronunciamento, summary,\nAutumn’s compendium, strident in itself\nBut muted, mused, and perfectly revolved\nIn those portentous accents, syllables,\nAnd sounds of music coming to accord\nUpon his law, like their inherent sphere,\nSeraphic proclamations of the pure\nDelivered with a deluging onwardness.\nOr if the music sticks, if the anecdote\nIs false, if Crispin is a profitless\nPhilosopher, beginning with green brag,\nConcluding fadedly, if as a man\nProne to distemper he abates in taste,\nFickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,\nGlozing his life with after-shining flicks,\nIlluminating, from a fancy gorged\nBy apparition, plain and common things,\nSequestering the fluster from the year,\nMaking gulped potions from obstreperous drops,\nAnd so distorting, proving what he proves\nIs nothing, what can all this matter since\nThe relation comes, benignly, to its end?\n\nSo may the relation of each man be clipped.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-common-life": { - "title": "“The Common Life”", - "body": "That’s the down-town frieze,\nPrincipally the church steeple,\nA black line beside a white line;\nAnd the stack of the electric plant,\nA black line drawn on flat air.\n\nIt is a morbid light\nIn which they stand,\nLike an electric lamp\nOn a page of Euclid.\n\nIn this light a man is a result,\nA demonstration, and a woman,\nWithout rose and without violet,\nThe shadows that are absent from Euclid,\nIs not a woman for a man.\n\nThe paper is whiter\nFor these black lines.\nIt glares beneath the webs\nOf wire, the designs of ink,\nThe planes that ought to have genius,\nThe volumes like marble ruins\nOutlined and having alphabetical\nNotations and footnotes.\n\nThe paper is whiter.\nThe men have no shadows\nAnd the women have only one side.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cuban-doctor": { - "title": "“The Cuban Doctor”", - "body": "I went to Egypt to escape\nThe Indian, but the Indian struck\nOut of his cloud and from his sky.\n\nThis was no worm bred in the moon,\nWriggling far down the phantom air,\nAnd on a comfortable sofa dreamed.\n\nThe Indian struck and disappeared\nI knew my enemy was near--I,\nDrowsing in summer’s sleepiest horn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "death-of-a-soldier": { - "title": "“Death of a Soldier”", - "body": "Life contracts and death is expected,\nAs in a season of autumn.\nThe soldier falls.\n\nHe does not become a three-days personage,\nImposing his separation,\nCalling for pomp.\n\nDeath is absolute and without memorial,\nAs in a season of autumn,\nWhen the wind stops,\n\nWhen the wind stops and, over the heavens,\nThe clouds go, nevertheless,\nIn their direction.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-dish-of-peaches-in-russia": { - "title": "“A Dish of Peaches in Russia”", - "body": "With my whole body I taste these peaches,\nI touch them and smell them. Who speaks?\n\nI absorb them as the Angevine\nAbsorbs Aniou. I see them as a lover sees,\n\nAs a young lover sees the first buds of spring\nAnd as the black Spaniard plays his guitar.\n\nWho speaks? But it must be that I,\nThat animal, that Russian, that exile, from whom\n\nThe bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at\nHeart. The peaches are large and round,\n\nAh! and red; and they have peach fuzz, ah!\nThey are full of juice and the skin is soft.\n\nThey are full of the colors of my village\nAnd of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.\n\nThe room is quiet where they are.\nThe windows are open. The sunlight fills\n\nThe curtains. Even the drifting of the curtains,\nSlight as it is, disturbs me. I did not know\n\nThat such ferocities could tear\nOne self from another, as these peaches do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "disillusionment-of-ten-oclock": { - "title": "“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”", - "body": "The houses are haunted\nBy white night-gowns.\nNone are green,\nOr purple with green rings,\nOr green with yellow rings,\nOr yellow with blue rings.\nNone of them are strange,\nWith socks of lace\nAnd beaded ceintures.\nPeople are not going\nTo dream of baboons and periwinkles.\nOnly, here and there, an old sailor,\nDrunk and asleep in his boots,\nCatches tigers\nIn red weather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1915 - } - } - }, - "the-doctor-of-geneva": { - "title": "“The Doctor of Geneva”", - "body": "The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand\nThat lay impounding the Pacific swell,\nPatted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.\n\nLacustrine man had never been assailed\nBy such long-rolling opulent cataracts,\nUnless Racine or Bossuet held the like.\n\nHe did not quail. A man so used to plumb\nThe multifarious heavens felt no awe\nBefore these visible, voluble delugings,\n\nWhich yet found means to set his simmering mind\nSpinning and hissing with oracular\nNotations of the wild, the ruinous waste,\n\nUntil the steeples of his city clanked and sprang\nIn an unburgherly apocalypse.\nThe doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "earthy-anecdote": { - "title": "“Earthy Anecdote”", - "body": "Every time the bucks went clattering,\nOver Oklahoma\nA firecat bristled in the way.\n\nWherever they went,\nThey went clattering.\nUntil they swerved,\nIn a swift, circular line,\nTo the right,\nBecause of the firecat.\n\nOr until they swerved,\nIn a swift, circular line,\nTo the left,\nBecause of the firecat.\n\nThe bucks clattered.\nThe firecat went leaping,\nTo the right, to the left,\nAnd\nBristled in the way.\n\nLater, the firecat closed his bright eyes\nAnd slept.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "the-emperor-of-ice-cream": { - "title": "“The Emperor of Ice-Cream”", - "body": "Call the roller of big cigars,\nThe muscular one, and bid him whip\nIn kitchen cups concupiscent curds.\nLet the wenches dawdle in such dress\nAs they are used to wear, and let the boys\nBring flowers in last month’s newspapers.\nLet be be finale of seem.\nThe only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.\n\nTake from the dresser of deal.\nLacking the three glass knobs, that sheet\nOn which she embroidered fantails once\nAnd spread it so as to cover her face.\nIf her horny feet protrude, they come\nTo show how cold she is, and dumb.\nLet the lamp affix its beam.\nThe only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "exposition-of-the-contents-of-a-cab": { - "title": "“Exposition of the Contents of a Cab”", - "body": "Victoria Clementina, negress,\nTook seven white dogs\nTo ride in a cab.\n\nBells of the dogs chinked.\nHarness of the horses shuffled\nLike brazen shells.\n\nOh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets\nBy the green lake-pallors,\nShe too is flesh,\n\nAnd a breech-cloth might wear,\nNetted of topaz and ruby\nAnd savage blooms;\n\nThridding the squawkiest jungle\nIn a golden sedan,\nWhite dogs at bay.\n\nWhat breech-cloth might you wear--\nExcept linen, embroidered\nBy elderly women?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fabliau-of-florida": { - "title": "“Fabliau of Florida”", - "body": "Barque of phosphor\nOn the palmy beach,\n\nMove outward into heaven,\nInto the alabasters\nAnd night blues.\n\nFoam and cloud are one.\nSultry moon-monsters\nAre dissolving.\n\nFill your black hull\nWith white moonlight.\n\nThere will never be an end\nTo this droning of the surf.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "final-soliloquy-of-the-interior-paramour": { - "title": "“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”", - "body": "Light the first light of evening, as in a room\nIn which we rest and, for small reason, think\nThe world imagined is the ultimate good.\n\nThis is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.\nIt is in that thought that we collect ourselves,\nOut of all the indifferences, into one thing:\n\nWithin a single thing, a single shawl\nWrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,\nA light, a power, the miraculous influence.\n\nHere, now, we forget each other and ourselves.\nWe feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,\nA knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.\n\nWithin its vital boundary, in the mind.\nWe say God and the imagination are one …\nHow high that highest candle lights the dark.\n\nOut of this same light, out of the central mind,\nWe make a dwelling in the evening air,\nIn which being there together is enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - } - } - }, - "frogs-eat-butterflies-snakes-eat-frogs-hogs-eat-snakes-men-eat-hogs": { - "title": "“Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.”", - "body": "It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,\nTugging at banks, until they seemed\nBland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,\n\nThat the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,\nThe breath of turgid summer, and\nHeavy with thunder’s rattapallax,\n\nThat the man who erected this cabin, planted\nThis field, and tended it awhile,\nKnew not the quirks of imagery,\n\nThat the hours of his indolent, arid days,\nGrotesque with this nosing in banks,\nThis somnolence and rattapallax,\n\nSeemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,\nAs the swine-like rivers suckled themselves\nWhile they went seaward to the sea-mouths.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "from-the-misery-of-don-joost": { - "title": "“From the Misery of Don Joost”", - "body": "I have finished my combat with the sun;\nAnd my body, the old animal,\nKnows nothing more.\n\nThe powerful seasons bred and killed,\nAnd were themselves the genii\nOf their own ends.\n\nOh, but the very self of the storm\nOf sun and slaves, breeding and death,\nThe old animal--\n\nThe senses and feeling, the very sound\nAnd sight, and all there was of the storm--\nKnows nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "good-man-bad-woman": { - "title": "“Good Man, Bad Woman”", - "body": "You say that spite avails her nothing, that\nYou rest intact in conscience and intact\nIn self, a man of longer time than days,\nOf larger company than one. Therefore,\nPure scientist, you look with nice aplomb\nAt this indifferent experience,\nDeploring sentiment. When May came last,\nAnd equally as scientist you walked\nAmong the orchards in the apple-blocks\nAnd saw the blossoms, snow-bred pink and white,\nMaking your heart of brass to intercept\nThe childish onslaughts of such innocence,\nWhy was it that you cast the brass away\nAnd bared yourself, and bared yourself in vain?\nShe can corrode your world, if never you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "gubbinal": { - "title": "“Gubbinal”", - "body": "That strange flower, the sun,\nIs just what you say.\nHave it your way.\n\nThe world is ugly,\nAnd the people are sad.\n\nThat tuft of jungle feathers,\nThat animal eye,\nIs just what you say.\n\nThat savage of fire,\nThat seed--\nHave it your way.\n\nThe world is ugly,\nAnd the people are sad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "hibiscus-on-the-sleeping-shores": { - "title": "“Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores”", - "body": "I say now, Fernando, that on that day\nThe mind roamed as a moth roams,\nAmong the blooms beyond the open sand;\n\nAnd that whatever noise the motion of the waves\nMade on the sea-weeds and the covered stones\nDisturbed not even the most idle ear.\n\nThen it was that that monstered moth\nWhich had lain folded against the blue\nAnd the colored purple of the lazy sea,\n\nAnd which had drowsed along the bony shores,\nShut to the blather that the water made,\nRose up besprent and sought the flaming red\n\nDabbled with yellow pollen--red as red\nAs the flag above the old café--\nAnd roamed there all the stupid afternoon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hymn-from-watermelon-pavilion": { - "title": "“Hymn from Watermelon Pavilion”", - "body": "You dweller in the dark cabin,\nTo whom the watermelon is always purple,\nWhose garden is wind and moon,\n\nOf the two dreams, night and day,\nWhat lover, what dreamer, would choose\nThe one obscured by sleep?\n\nHere is the plantain by your door\nAnd the best cock of red feather\nThat crew before the clocks.\n\nA feme may come, leaf-green,\nWhose coming may give revel\nBeyond revelries of sleep,\n\nYes, and the blackbird spread its tail,\nSo that the sun may speckle,\nWhile it creaks hail.\n\nYou dweller in the dark cabin,\nRise, since rising will not waken,\nAnd hail, cry hail, cry hail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-idea-of-order-at-key-west": { - "title": "“The Idea of Order at Key West”", - "body": "She sang beyond the genius of the sea.\nThe water never formed to mind or voice,\nLike a body wholly body, fluttering\nIts empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion\nMade constant cry, caused constantly a cry,\nThat was not ours although we understood,\nInhuman, of the veritable ocean.\n\nThe sea was not a mask. No more was she.\nThe song and water were not medleyed sound\nEven if what she sang was what she heard,\nSince what she sang was uttered word by word.\nIt may be that in all her phrases stirred\nThe grinding water and the gasping wind;\nBut it was she and not the sea we heard.\n\nFor she was the maker of the song she sang.\nThe ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea\nWas merely a place by which she walked to sing.\nWhose spirit is this? we said, because we knew\nIt was the spirit that we sought and knew\nThat we should ask this often as she sang.\n\nIf it was only the dark voice of the sea\nThat rose, or even colored by many waves;\nIf it was only the outer voice of sky\nAnd cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,\nHowever clear, it would have been deep air,\nThe heaving speech of air, a summer sound\nRepeated in a summer without end\nAnd sound alone. But it was more than that,\nMore even than her voice, and ours, among\nThe meaningless plungings of water and the wind,\nTheatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped\nOn high horizons, mountainous atmospheres\nOf sky and sea.\n\nIt was her voice that made\nThe sky acutest at its vanishing.\nShe measured to the hour its solitude.\nShe was the single artificer of the world\nIn which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,\nWhatever self it had, became the self\nThat was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,\nAs we beheld her striding there alone,\nKnew that there never was a world for her\nExcept the one she sang and, singing, made.\n\nRamon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,\nWhy, when the singing ended and we turned\nToward the town, tell why the glassy lights,\nThe lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,\nAs the night descended, tilting in the air,\nMastered the night and portioned out the sea,\nFixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,\nArranging, deepening, enchanting night.\n\nOh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,\nThe maker’s rage to order words of the sea,\nWords of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,\nAnd of ourselves and of our origins,\nIn ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "indian-river": { - "title": "“Indian River”", - "body": "The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks by the docks on Indian River.\nIt is the same jingle of the water among roots under the banks of the palmettoes,\nIt is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-treesout of the cedars.\nYet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-the-indigo-glass-in-the-grass": { - "title": "From “The Indigo Glass in the Grass”", - "body": "Which is real--\nThis bottle of indigo glass in the grass,\nOr the bench with the pot of geraniums, the stained mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun?\nWhich of these truly contains the world?\n\nNeither one, nor the two together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "infanta-marina": { - "title": "“Infanta Marina”", - "body": "Her terrace was the sand\nAnd the palms and the twilight.\n\nShe made of the motions of her wrist\nThe grandiose gestures\nOf her thought.\n\nThe rumpling of the plumes\nOf this creature of the evening\nCame to be sleights of sails\nOver the sea.\n\nAnd thus she roamed\nIn the roamings of her fan,\n\nPartaking of the sea,\nAnd of the evening,\nAs they flowed around\nAnd uttered their subsiding sound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "invective-against-swans": { - "title": "“Invective against Swans”", - "body": "The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks\nAnd far beyond the discords of the wind.\n\nA bronze rain from the sun descending marks\nThe death of summer, which that time endures\n\nLike one who scrawls a listless testament\nOf golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,\n\nBequeathing your white feathers to the moon\nAnd giving your bland motions to the air.\n\nBehold, already on the long parades\nThe crows anoint the statues with their dirt.\n\nAnd the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies\nBeyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "le-monocle-de-mon-oncle": { - "title": "“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”", - "body": "# I.\n\n“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,\nO sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,\nThere is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,\nLike the clashed edges of two words that kill.”\nAnd so I mocked her in magnificent measure.\nOr was it that I mocked myself alone?\nI wish that I might be a thinking stone.\nThe sea of spuming thought foists up again\nThe radiant bubble that she was. And then\nA deep up-pouring from some saltier well\nWithin me, bursts its watery syllable.\n\n\n# II.\n\nA red bird flies across the golden floor.\nIt is a red bird that seeks out his choir\nAmong the choirs of wind and wet and wing.\nA torrent will fall from him when he finds.\nShall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?\nI am a man of fortune greeting heirs;\nFor it has come that thus I greet the spring.\nThese choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.\nNo spring can follow past meridian.\nYet you persist with anecdotal bliss\nTo make believe a starry connaissance.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIs it for nothing, then, that old Chinese\nSat tittivating by their mountain pools\nOr in the Yangtse studied out their beards?\nI shall not play the flat historic scale.\nYou know how Utamaro’s beauties sought\nThe end of love in their all-speaking braids.\nYou know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.\nAlas! Have all the barbers lived in vain\nThat not one curl in nature has survived?\nWhy, without pity on these studious ghosts,\nDo you come dripping in your hair from sleep?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThis luscious and impeccable fruit of life\nFalls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.\nWhen you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,\nUntasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.\nAn apple serves as well as any skull\nTo be the book in which to read a round,\nAnd is as excellent, in that it is composed\nOf what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.\nBut it excels in this, that as the fruit\nOf love, it is a book too mad to read\nBefore one merely reads to pass the time.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIn the high west there burns a furious star.\nIt is for fiery boys that star was set\nAnd for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.\nThe measure of the intensity of love\nIs measure, also, of the verve of earth.\nFor me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke\nTicks tediously the time of one more year.\nAnd you? Remember how the crickets came\nOut of their mother grass, like little kin,\nIn the pale nights, when your first imagery\nFound inklings of your bond to all that dust.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIf men at forty will be painting lakes\nThe ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,\nThe basic slate, the universal hue.\nThere is a substance in us that prevails.\nBut in our amours amorists discern\nSuch fluctuations that their scrivening\nIs breathless to attend each quirky turn.\nWhen amorists grow bald, then amours shrink\nInto the compass and curriculum\nOf introspective exiles, lecturing.\nIt is a theme for Hyacinth alone.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThe mules that angels ride come slowly down\nThe blazing passes, from beyond the sun.\nDescensions of their tinkling bells arrive.\nThese muleteers are dainty of their way.\nMeantime, centurions guffaw and beat\nTheir shrilling tankards on the table-boards.\nThis parable, in sense, amounts to this:\nThe honey of heaven may or may not come,\nBut that of earth both comes and goes at once.\nSuppose these couriers brought amid their train\nA damsel heightened by eternal bloom.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nLike a dull scholar, I behold, in love,\nAn ancient aspect touching a new mind.\nIt comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.\nThis trivial trope reveals a way of truth.\nOur bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.\nTwo golden gourds distended on our vines,\nInto the autumn weather, splashed with frost,\nDistorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.\nWe hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,\nThe laughing sky will see the two of us\nWashed into rinds by rotting winter rains.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nIn verses wild with motion, full of din,\nLoudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure\nAs the deadly thought of men accomplishing\nTheir curious fates in war, come, celebrate\nThe faith of forty, ward of Cupido.\nMost venerable heart, the lustiest conceit\nIs not too lusty for your broadening.\nI quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything\nFor the music and manner of the paladins\nTo make oblation fit. Where shall I find\nBravura adequate to this great hymn?\n\n\n# X.\n\nThe fops of fancy in their poems leave\nMemorabilia of the mystic spouts,\nSpontaneously watering their gritty soils.\nI am a yeoman, as such fellows go.\nI know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,\nNo silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.\nBut, after all, I know a tree that bears\nA semblance to the thing I have in mind.\nIt stands gigantic, with a certain tip\nTo which all birds come sometime in their time.\nBut when they go that tip still tips the tree.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nIf sex were all, then every trembling hand\nCould make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.\nBut note the unconscionable treachery of fate,\nThat makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout\nDoleful heroics, pinching gestures forth\nFrom madness or delight, without regard\nTo that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour!\nLast night, we sat beside a pool of pink,\nClippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes,\nKeen to the point of starlight, while a frog\nBoomed from his very belly odious chords.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nA blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,\nOn sidelong wing, around and round and round.\nA white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,\nGrown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I\nObserved, when young, the nature of mankind,\nIn lordly study. Every day, I found\nMan proved a gobbet in my mincing world.\nLike a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,\nAnd still pursue, the origin and course\nOf love, but until now I never knew\nThat fluttering things have so distinct a shade.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "lo-even-as-i-passed-beside-the-booth": { - "title": "“Lo, even as I passed beside the booth …”", - "body": "Lo, even as I passed beside the booth\nOf roses, and beheld them brightly twine\nTo damask heights, taking them as a sign\nOf my own self still unconcerned with truth;\nEven as I held up in hands uncouth\nAnd drained with joy the golden-bodied wine,\nDeeming it half-unworthy, half divine,\nFrom out the sweet-rimmed goblet of my youth.\n\nEven in that pure hour I heard the tone\nOf grievous music stir in memory,\nTelling me of the time already flown\nFrom my first youth. It sounded like the rise\nOf distant echo from dead melody,\nSoft as a song heard far in Paradise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1900, - "month": "may", - "day": 10 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may", - "day": 10 - } - } - }, - "the-load-of-sugar-cane": { - "title": "“The Load of Sugar-Cane”", - "body": "The going of the glade-boat\nIs like water flowing;\n\nLike water flowing\nThrough the green saw-grass,\nUnder the rainbows;\n\nUnder the rainbows\nThat are like birds,\nTurning, bedizened,\n\nWhile the wind still whistles\nAs kildeer do,\n\nWhen they rise\nAt the red turban\nOf the boatman.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lunar-paraphrase": { - "title": "“Lunar Paraphrase”", - "body": "The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.\n\nWhen, at the wearier end of November,\nHer old light moves along the branches,\nFeebly, slowly, depending upon them;\nWhen the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,\nHumanly near, and the figure of Mary,\nTouched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter\nMade by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;\nWhen over the houses, a golden illusion\nBrings back an earlier season of quiet\nAnd quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness--\n\nThe moon is the mother of pathos and pity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-man-whose-pharynx-was-bad": { - "title": "“The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”", - "body": "The time of year has grown indifferent.\nMildew of summer and the deepening snow\nAre both alike in the routine I know.\nI am too dumbly in my being pent.\n\nThe wind attendant on the solstices\nBlows on the shutters of the metropoles,\nStirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls\nThe grand ideas of the villages.\n\nThe malady of the quotidian …\nPerhaps, if summer ever came to rest\nAnd lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed\nThrough days like oceans in obsidian\n\nHorizons full of night’s midsummer blaze;\nPerhaps, if winter once could penetrate\nThrough all its purples to the final slate,\nPersisting bleakly in an icy haze;\n\nOne might in turn become less diffident--\nOut of such mildew plucking neater mould\nAnd spouting new orations of the cold.\nOne might. One might. But time will not relent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-man-on-the-dump": { - "title": "“The Man on the Dump”", - "body": "Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.\nThe sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche\nPlaces there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is full\nOf images. Days pass like papers from a press.\nThe bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,\nAnd so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems\nOf every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,\nThe cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box\nFrom Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.\n\nThe freshness of night has been fresh a long time.\nThe freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says\nThat it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs\nMore than, less than or it puffs like this or that.\nThe green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green\nSmacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea\nOn a cocoanut--how many men have copied dew\nFor buttons, how many women have covered themselves\nWith dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads\nOf the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.\nOne grows to hate these things except on the dump.\n\nNow, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,\nMyrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),\nBetween that disgust and this, between the things\nThat are on the dump (azaleas and so on)\nAnd those that will be (azaleas and so on),\nOne feels the purifying change. One rejects\nThe trash.\n\nThat’s the moment when the moon creeps up\nTo the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time\nOne looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.\nEverything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon\n(All its images are in the dump) and you see\nAs a man (not like an image of a man),\nYou see the moon rise in the empty sky.\n\nOne sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.\nOne beats and beats for that which one believes.\nThat’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all\nBe merely oneself, as superior as the ear\nTo a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,\nPeck the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear\nSolace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,\nIs it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds\nOn the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,\nBottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur _aptest eve_:\nIs it to hear the blatter of grackles and say\n_Invisible priest_; is it to eject, to pull\nThe day to pieces and cry _stanza my stone_?\nWhere was it one first heard of the truth? The the.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-man-with-the-blue-guitar": { - "title": "From “The Man with the Blue Guitar”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe man bent over his guitar,\nA shearsman of sorts. The day was green.\n\nThey said, “You have a blue guitar,\nYou do not play things as they are.”\n\nThe man replied, “Things as they are\nAre changed upon the blue guitar.”\n\nAnd they said then, “But play, you must,\nA tune beyond us, yet ourselves,\n\nA tune upon the blue guitar\nOf things exactly as they are.”\n\n\n# II.\n\nI cannot bring a world quite round,\nAlthough I patch it as I can.\n\nI sing a hero’s head, large eye\nAnd bearded bronze, but not a man,\n\nAlthough I patch him as I can\nAnd reach through him almost to man.\n\nIf to serenade almost to man\nIs to miss, by that, things as they are,\n\nSay it is the serenade\nOf a man that plays a blue guitar.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAh, but to play man number one,\nTo drive the dagger in his heart,\n\nTo lay his brain upon the board\nAnd pick the acrid colors out,\n\nTo nail his thought across the door,\nIts wings spread wide to rain and snow,\n\nTo strike his living hi and ho,\nTo tick it, tock it, turn it true,\n\nTo bang from it a savage blue,\nJangling the metal of the strings.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nSo that’s life, then: things as they are?\nIt picks its way on the blue guitar.\n\nA million people on one string?\nAnd all their manner in the thing,\n\nAnd all their manner, right and wrong,\nAnd all their manner, weak and strong?\n\nThe feelings crazily, craftily call,\nLike a buzzing of flies in autumn air,\n\nAnd that’s life, then: things as they are,\nThis buzzing of the blue guitar.\n\n\n# V.\n\nDo not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,\nOf the torches wisping in the underground,\n\nOf the structure of vaults upon a point of light.\nThere are no shadows in our sun,\n\nDay is desire and night is sleep.\nThere are no shadows anywhere.\n\nThe earth, for us, is flat and bare.\nThere are no shadows. Poetry\n\nExceeding music must take the place\nOf empty heaven and its hymns,\n\nOurselves in poetry must take their place,\nEven in the chattering of your guitar.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nA tune beyond us as we are,\nYet nothing changed by the blue guitar;\n\nOurselves in the tune as if in space,\nYet nothing changed, except the place\n\nOf things as they are and only the place\nAs you play them, on the blue guitar,\n\nPlaced, so, beyond the compass of change,\nPerceived in a final atmosphere;\n\nFor a moment final, in the way\nThe thinking of art seems final when\n\nThe thinking of god is smoky dew.\nThe tune is space. The blue guitar\n\nBecomes the place of things as they are,\nA composing of senses of the guitar.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nIt is the sun that shares our works.\nThe moon shares nothing. It is a sea.\n\nWhen shall I come to say of the sun,\nIt is a sea; it shares nothing;\n\nThe sun no longer shares our works\nAnd the earth is alive with creeping men,\n\nMechanical beetles never quite warm?\nAnd shall I then stand in the sun, as now\n\nI stand in the moon, and call it good,\nThe immaculate, the merciful good,\n\nDetached from us, from things as they are?\nNot to be part of the sun? To stand\n\nRemote and call it merciful?\nThe strings are cold on the blue guitar.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe vivid, florid, turgid sky,\nThe drenching thunder rolling by,\n\nThe morning deluged still by night,\nThe clouds tumultuously bright\n\nAnd the feeling heavy in cold chords\nStruggling toward impassioned choirs,\n\nCrying among the clouds, enraged\nBy gold antagonists in air--\n\nI know my lazy, leaden twang\nIs like the reason in a storm;\n\nAnd yet it brings the storm to bear.\nI twang it out and leave it there.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nAnd the color, the overcast blue\nOf the air, in which the blue guitar\n\nIs a form, described but difficult,\nAnd I am merely a shadow hunched\n\nAbove the arrowy, still strings,\nThe maker of a thing yet to be made;\n\nThe color like a thought that grows\nOut of a mood, the tragic robe\n\nOf the actor, half his gesture, half\nHis speech, the dress of his meaning, silk\n\nSodden with his melancholy words,\nThe weather of his stage, himself.\n\n\n# X.\n\nRaise reddest columns. Toll a bell\nAnd clap the hollows full of tin.\n\nThrow papers in the streets, the wills\nOf the dead, majestic in their seals.\n\nAnd the beautiful trombones-behold\nThe approach of him whom none believes,\n\nWhom all believe that all believe,\nA pagan in a varnished care.\n\nRoll a drum upon the blue guitar.\nLean from the steeple. Cry aloud,\n\n“Here am I, my adversary, that\nConfront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,\n\nYet with a petty misery\nAt heart, a petty misery,\n\nEver the prelude to your end,\nThe touch that topples men and rock.”\n\n\n# XV.\n\nIs this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard\nOf destructions,” a picture of ourselves,\n\nNow, an image of our society?\nDo I sit, deformed, a naked egg,\n\nCatching at Good-bye, harvest moon,\nWithout seeing the harvest or the moon?\n\nThings as they are have been destroyed.\nHave I? Am I a man that is dead\n\nAt a table on which the food is cold?\nIs my thought a memory, not alive?\n\nIs the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood\nAnd whichever it may be, is it mine?\n\n\n# XXIII.\n\nA few final solutions, like a duet\nWith the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,\n\nAnother on earth, the one a voice\nOf ether, the other smelling of drink,\n\nThe voice of ether prevailing, the swell\nOf the undertaker’s song in the snow\n\nApostrophizing wreaths, the voice\nIn the clouds serene and final, next\n\nThe grunted breath scene and final,\nThe imagined and the real, thought\n\nAnd the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all\nConfusion solved, as in a refrain\n\nOne keeps on playing year by year,\nConcerning the nature of things as they are.\n\n\n# XXX.\n\nFrom this I shall evolve a man.\nThis is his essence: the old fantoche\n\nHanging his shawl upon the wind,\nLike something on the stage, puffed out,\n\nHis strutting studied through centuries.\nAt last, in spite of his manner, his eye\n\nA-cock at the cross-piece on a pole\nSupporting heavy cables, slung\n\nThrough Oxidia, banal suburb,\nOne-half of all its installments paid.\n\nDew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing\nFrom crusty stacks above machines.\n\nEcce, Oxidia is the seed\nDropped out of this amber-ember pod,\n\nOxidia is the soot of fire,\nOxidia is Olympia.\n\n\n# XXXI.\n\nHow long and late the pheasant sleeps,\nThe employer and employee contend,\n\nCombat, compose their droll affair.\nThe bubbling sun will bubble up,\n\nSpring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.\nThe employer and employee will hear\n\nAnd continue their affair. The shriek\nWill rack the thickets. There is no place,\n\nHere, for the lark fixed in the mind,\nIn the museum of the sky. The cock\n\nWill claw sleep. Morning is not sun,\nIt is this posture of the nerves,\n\nAs if a blunted player clutched\nThe nuances of the blue guitar.\n\nIt must be this rhapsody or none,\nThe rhapsody of things as they are.\n\n\n# XXXII.\n\nThrow away the lights, the definitions,\nAnd say of what you see in the dark\n\nThat it is this or that it is that,\nBut do not use the rotted names.\n\nHow should you walk in that space and know\nNothing of the madness of space,\n\nNothing of its jocular procreations?\nThrow the lights away. Nothing must stand\n\nBetween you and the shapes you take\nWhen the crust of shape has been destroyed.\n\nYou as you are? You are yourself.\nThe blue guitar surprises you.\n\n\n# XXXIII.\n\nThat generation’s dream, aviled\nIn the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,\n\nThat’s it, the only dream they knew,\nTime in its final block, not time\n\nTo come, a wrangling of two dreams.\nHere is the bread of time to come,\n\nHere is its actual stone. The bread\nWill be our bread, the stone will be\n\nOur bed and we shall sleep by night.\nWe shall forget by day, except\n\nThe moments when we choose to play\nThe imagined pine, the imagined jay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "metaphors-of-a-magnifico": { - "title": "“Metaphors of a Magnifico”", - "body": "Twenty men crossing a bridge,\nInto a village,\nAre twenty men crossing twenty bridges,\nInto twenty villages,\nOr one man\nCrossing a single bridge into a village.\n\nThis is old song\nThat will not declare itself …\n\nTwenty men crossing a bridge,\nInto a village,\nAre\nTwenty men crossing a bridge\nInto a village.\n\nThat will not declare itself\nYet is certain as meaning …\n\nThe boots of the men clump\nOn the boards of the bridge.\nThe first white wall of the village\nRises through fruit-trees.\nOf what was it I was thinking?\nSo the meaning escapes.\n\nThe first white wall of the village …\nThe fruit-trees …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1918 - } - } - }, - "nomad-exquisite": { - "title": "“Nomad Exquisite”", - "body": "As the immense dew of Florida\nBrings forth\nThe big-finned palm\nAnd green vine angering for life,\n\nAs the immense dew of Florida\nBrings forth hymn and hymn\nFrom the beholder,\nBeholding all these green sides\nAnd gold sides of green sides,\n\nAnd blessed mornings,\nMeet for the eye of the young alligator,\nAnd lightning colors\nSo, in me, come flinging\nForms, flames, and the flakes of flames.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - } - } - }, - "not-ideas-about-the-thing-but-the-thing-itself": { - "title": "“Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”", - "body": "At the earliest ending of winter,\nIn March, a scrawny cry from outside\nSeemed like a sound in his mind.\n\nHe knew that he heard it,\nA bird’s cry at daylight or before,\nIn the early March wind.\n\nThe sun was rising at six,\nNo longer a battered panache above snow …\nIt would have been outside.\n\nIt was not from the vast ventriloquism\nOf sleep’s faded papier mâché …\nThe sun was coming from outside.\n\nThat scrawny cry--it was\nA chorister whose C preceded the choir.\nIt was part of the colossal sun,\n\nSurrounded by its choral rings,\nStill far away. It was like\nA new knowledge of reality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "nuances-of-a-theme-by-williams": { - "title": "“Nuances of a Theme by Williams”", - "body": "_It’s a strange courage\nyou give me, ancient star:\n\nShine alone in the sunrise\ntoward which you lend no part!_\n\n\n# I.\n\nShine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,\nthat reflects neither my face nor any inner part\nof my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.\n\n\n# II.\n\nLend no part to any humanity that suffuses\nyou in its own light.\nBe not chimera of morning,\nHalf-man, half-star.\nBe not an intelligence,\nLike a widow’s bird\nOr an old horse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-hartford-in-a-purple-light": { - "title": "“Of Hartford in a Purple Light”", - "body": "A long time you have been making the trip\nFrom Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,\nBringing the lights of Norway and all that.\n\nA long time the ocean has come with you,\nShaking the water off, like a poodle,\nThat splatters incessant thousands of drops,\n\nEach drop a petty tricolor. For this,\nThe aunts in Pasadena, remembering,\nAbhor the plaster of the western horses,\n\nSouvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are\nLights masculine and lights feminine.\nWhat is this purple, this parasol,\n\nThis stage-light of the Opera?\nIt is like a region full of intonings.\nIt is Hartford seen in a purple light.\n\nA moment ago, light masculine,\nWorking, with big hands, on the town,\nArranged its heroic attitudes.\n\nBut now as in an amour of women\nPurple sets purple round. Look, Master,\nSee the river, the railroad, the cathedral\n\nWhen male light fell on the naked back\nOf the town, the river, the railroad were clear.\nNow, every muscle slops away.\n\nHi! Whisk it, poodle, flick the spray\nOf the ocean, ever-freshening,\nOn the irised hunks, the stone bouquet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-heaven-considered-as-a-tomb": { - "title": "“Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb”", - "body": "What word have you, interpreters, of men\nWho in the tomb of heaven walk by night,\nThe darkened ghosts of our old comedy?\nDo they believe they range the gusty cold,\nWith lanterns borne aloft to light the way,\nFreemen of death, about and still about\nTo find whatever it is they seek? Or does\nThat burial, pillared up each day as porte\nAnd spiritus passage into nothingness,\nForetell each night the one abysmal night,\nWhen the host shall no more wander, nor the light\nOf the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?\nMake hue among the dark comedians,\nHallo them in the topmost distances\nFor answer from their icy Elysée.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-mere-being": { - "title": "“Of Mere Being”", - "body": "The palm at the end of the mind,\nBeyond the last thought, rises\nIn the bronze decor,\n\nA gold-feathered bird\nSings in the palm, without human meaning,\nWithout human feeling, a foreign song.\n\nYou know then that it is not the reason\nThat makes us happy or unhappy.\nThe bird sings. Its feathers shine.\n\nThe palm stands on the edge of space.\nThe wind moves slowly in the branches.\nThe bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-the-manner-of-addressing-clouds": { - "title": "“Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds”", - "body": "Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,\nMeekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,\nEliciting the still sustaining pomps\nOf speech which are like music so profound\nThey seem an exaltation without sound.\nFunest philosophers and ponderers,\nTheir evocations are the speech of clouds.\nSo speech of your processionals returns\nIn the casual evocations of your tread\nAcross the stale, mysterious seasons.\nThese\nAre the music of meet resignation; these\nThe responsive, still sustaining pomps for you\nTo magnify, if in that drifting waste\nYou are to be accompanied by more\nThan mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-the-surface-of-things": { - "title": "“Of the Surface of Things”", - "body": "In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;\nBut when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills\nand a cloud.\n\nFrom my balcony, I survey the yellow air,\nReading where I have written,\n“The spring is like a belle undressing.”\n\nThe gold tree is blue.\nThe singer has pulled his cloak over his head.\nThe moon is in the folds of the cloak.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-owl-in-the-sarcophagus": { - "title": "“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”", - "body": "# I.\n\nTwo forms move among the dead, high sleep\nWho by his highness quiets them, high peace\nUpon whose shoulders even the heavens rest,\n\nTwo brothers. And a third form, she that says\nGood-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there,\nTo those that cannot say good-by themselves.\n\nThese forms are visible to the eye that needs,\nNeeds out of the whole necessity of sight.\nThe third form speaks, because the ear repeats,\n\nWithout a voice, inventions of farewell.\nThese forms are not abortive figures, rocks,\nImpenetrable symbols, motionless. They move\n\nAbout the night. They live without our light,\nIn an element not the heaviness of time,\nIn which reality is prodigy.\n\nThere sleep the brother is the father, too,\nAnd peace is cousin by a hundred names\nAnd she that in the syllable between life\n\nAnd death cries quickly, in a flash of voice,\nKeep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as\nMy memory, is the mother of us all,\n\nThe earthly mother and the mother of\nThe dead. Only the thought of those dark three\nIs dark, thought of the forms of dark desire.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere came a day, there was a day--one day\nA man walked living among the forms of thought\nTo see their lustre truly as it is\n\nAnd in harmonious prodigy to be,\nA while, conceiving his passage as into a time\nThat of itself stood still, perennial,\n\nLess time than place, less place than thought of place\nAnd, if of substance, a likeness of the earth,\nThat by resemblance twanged him through and through,\n\nReleasing an abysmal melody,\nA meeting, an emerging in the light,\nA dazzle of remembrance and of sight.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThere he saw well the foldings in the height\nOf sleep, the whiteness folded into less,\nLike many robings, as moving masses are,\n\nAs a moving mountain is, moving through day\nAnd night, colored from distances, central\nWhere luminous agitations come to rest,\n\nIn an ever-changing, calmest unity,\nThe unique composure, harshest streakings joined\nIn a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round\n\nThe giant body the meanings of its folds,\nThe weaving and the crinkling and the vex,\nAs on water of an afternoon in the wind\n\nAfter the wind has passed. Sleep realized\nWas the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,\nA diamond jubilance beyond the fire,\n\nThat gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.\nThen he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere\nOf sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThere peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged,\nHewn in their middle as the beam of leaves,\nThe prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights,\n\nStood flourishing the world. The brilliant height\nAnd hollow of him by its brilliance calmed,\nIts brightness burned the way good solace seethes.\n\nThis was peace after death, the brother of sleep,\nThe inhuman brother so much like, so near,\nYet vested in a foreign absolute,\n\nAdorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,\nAn immaculate personage in nothingness,\nWith the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,\n\nGenerations of the imagination piled\nIn the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,\nIn the weaving round the wonder of its need,\n\nAnd the first flowers upon it, an alphabet\nBy which to spell out holy doom and end,\nA bee for the remembering of happiness.\n\nPeace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind,\nDamasked in the originals of green,\nA thousand begettings of the broken bold.\n\nThis is that figure stationed at our end,\nAlways, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed\nOut of our lives to keep us in our death,\n\nTo watch us in the summer of Cyclops\nUnderground, a king as candle by our beds\nIn a robe that is our glory as he guards.\n\n\n# V.\n\nBut she that says good-by losing in self\nThe sense of self, rosed out of prestiges\nOf rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick\n\nAnd potent, an influence felt instead of seen.\nShe spoke with backward gestures of her hand.\nShe held men closely with discovery,\n\nAlmost as speed discovers, in the way\nInvisible change discovers what is changed,\nIn the way what was has ceased to be what is.\n\nIt was not her look but a knowledge that she had.\nShe was a self that knew, an inner thing,\nSubtler than look’s declaiming, although she moved\n\nWith a sad splendor, beyond artifice,\nImpassioned by the knowledge that she had,\nThere on the edges of oblivion.\n\nO exhalation, O fling without a sleeve\nAnd motion outward, reddened and resolved\nFrom sight, in the silence that follows her last word--\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThis is the mythology of modern death\nAnd these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy,\nOf their own marvel made, of pity made,\n\nCompounded and compounded, life by life,\nThese are death’s own supremest images,\nThe pure perfections of parental space,\n\nThe children of a desire that is the will,\nEven of death, the beings of the mind\nIn the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare …\n\nIt is a child that sings itself to sleep,\nThe mind, among the creatures that it makes,\nThe people, those by which it lives and dies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1947 - } - } - }, - "palace-of-the-babies": { - "title": "“Palace of the Babies”", - "body": "The disbeliever walked the moonlit place,\nOutside of gates of hammered serafin,\nObserving the moon-blotches on the walls.\n\nThe yellow rocked across the still façades,\nOr else sat spinning on the pinnacles,\nWhile he imagined humming sounds and sleep.\n\nThe walker in the moonlight walked alone,\nAnd each black window of the building balked\nHis loneliness and what was in his mind:\n\nIf in a shimmering room the babies came,\nDrawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,\nIt was because night nursed them in its fold.\n\nNight nursed not him in whose dark mind\nThe clambering wings of birds of black revolved,\nMaking harsh torment of the solitude.\n\nThe walker in the moonlight walked alone,\nAnd in his heart his disbelief lay cold.\nHis broad-brimmed hat came close upon his eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-paltry-nude-starts-on-a-spring-voyage": { - "title": "“The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage”", - "body": "But not on a shell, she starts,\nArchaic, for the sea.\nBut on the first-found weed\nShe scuds the glitters,\nNoiselessly, like one more wave.\n\nShe too is discontent\nAnd would have purple stuff upon her arms,\nTired of the salty harbors,\nEager for the brine and bellowing\nOf the high interiors of the sea.\n\nThe wind speeds her,\nBlowing upon her hands\nAnd watery back.\nShe touches the clouds, where she goes,\nIn the circle of her traverse of the sea.\n\nYet this is meagre play\nIn the scurry and water-shine,\nAs her heels foam--\nNot as when the goldener nude\nOf a later day\n\nWill go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,\nIn an intenser calm,\nScullion of fate,\nAcross the spick torrent, ceaselessly,\nUpon her irretrievable way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-peter-parasol": { - "title": "From “Peter Parasol”", - "body": "_Aux taureaux Dieu cornes donne\nEt sabots durs aux chevaux …_\n\nWhy are not women fair,\nAll, as Andromache--\nHaving, each one, most praisable\nEars, eyes, soul, skin, hair?\n\nGood God! That all beasts should have\nThe tusks of the elephant,\nOr be beautiful\nAs large, ferocious tigers are.\n\nIt is not so with women.\nI wish they were all fair,\nAnd walked in fine clothes,\nWith parasols, in the afternoon air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peter-quince-at-the-clavier": { - "title": "“Peter Quince at the Clavier”", - "body": "# I.\n\nJust as my fingers on these keys\nMake music, so the selfsame sounds\nOn my spirit make a music, too.\n\nMusic is feeling, then, not sound;\nAnd thus it is that what I feel,\nHere in this room, desiring you,\n\nThinking of your blue-shadowed silk,\nIs music. It is like the strain\nWaked in the elders by Susanna:\n\nOf a green evening, clear and warm,\nShe bathed in her still garden, while\nThe red-eyed elders, watching, felt\n\nThe basses of their beings throb\nIn witching chords, and their thin blood\nPulse pizzicati of Hosanna.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn the green water, clear and warm,\nSusanna lay.\nShe searched\nThe touch of springs,\nAnd found\nConcealed imaginings.\nShe sighed,\nFor so much melody.\n\nUpon the bank, she stood\nIn the cool\nOf spent emotions.\nShe felt, among the leaves,\nThe dew\nOf old devotions.\n\nShe walked upon the grass,\nStill quavering.\nThe winds were like her maids,\nOn timid feet,\nFetching her woven scarves,\nYet wavering.\n\nA breath upon her hand\nMuted the night.\nShe turned--\nA cymbal crashed,\nAnd roaring horns.\n\n\n# III.\n\nSoon, with a noise like tambourines,\nCame her attendant Byzantines.\n\nThey wondered why Susanna cried\nAgainst the elders by her side;\n\nAnd as they whispered, the refrain\nWas like a willow swept by rain.\n\nAnon, their lamps’ uplifted flame\nRevealed Susanna and her shame.\n\nAnd then, the simpering Byzantines\nFled, with a noise like tambourines.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nBeauty is momentary in the mind--\nThe fitful tracing of a portal;\nBut in the flesh it is immortal.\n\nThe body dies; the body’s beauty lives.\nSo evenings die, in their green going,\nA wave, interminably flowing.\nSo gardens die, their meek breath scenting\nThe cowl of winter, done repenting.\nSo maidens die, to the auroral\nCelebration of a maiden’s choral.\n\nSusanna’s music touched the bawdy strings\nOf those white elders; but, escaping,\nLeft only Death’s ironic scraping.\nNow, in its immortality, it plays\nOn the clear viol of her memory,\nAnd makes a constant sacrament of praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "phrases": { - "title": "“Phrases”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThere’s a little square in Paris,\nWaiting until we pass.\nThey sit idly there,\nThey sip the glass.\n\nThere’s a cab-horse at the corner,\nThere’s rain. The season grieves.\nIt was silver once,\nAnd green with leaves.\n\nThere’s a parrot in a window,\nWill see us on parade,\nHear the loud drums roll--\nAnd serenade.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThis was the salty taste of glory,\nThat it was not\nLike Agamemnon’s story.\nOnly, an eyeball in the mud,\nAnd Hopkins,\nFlat and pale and gory!\n\n\n# III.\n\nBut the bugles, in the night,\nWere wings that bore\nTo where our comfort was;\n\nArabesques of candle beams,\nWinding\nThrough our heavy dreams;\n\nWinds that blew\nWhere the bending iris grew;\n\nBirds of intermitted bliss,\nSinging in the night’s abyss;\n\nVines with yellow fruit,\nThat fell\nAlong the walls\nThat bordered Hell.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nDeath’s nobility again\nBeautified the simplest men.\nFallen Winkle felt the pride\nOf Agamemnon\nWhen he died.\n\nWhat could London’s\nWork and waste\nGive him--\nTo that salty, sacrificial taste?\n\nWhat could London’s\nSorrow bring--\nTo that short, triumphant sting?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-place-of-the-solitaires": { - "title": "“The Place of the Solitaires”", - "body": "Let the place of the solitaires\nBe a place of perpetual undulation.\n\nWhether it be in mid-sea\nOn the dark, green water-wheel,\nOr on the beaches,\nThere must be no cessation\nOf motion, or of the noise of motion,\nThe renewal of noise\nAnd manifold continuation;\n\nAnd, most, of the motion of thought\nAnd its restless iteration,\n\nIn the place of the solitaires,\nWhich is to be a place of perpetual undulation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-plain-sense-of-things": { - "title": "“The Plain Sense of Things”", - "body": "After the leaves have fallen, we return\nTo a plain sense of things. It is as if\nWe had come to an end of the imagination,\nInanimate in an inert savoir.\n\nIt is difficult even to choose the adjective\nFor this blank cold, this sadness without cause.\nThe great structure has become a minor house.\nNo turban walks across the lessened floors.\n\nThe greenhouse never so badly needed paint.\nThe chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.\nA fantastic effort has failed, a repetition\nIn a repetitiousness of men and flies.\n\nYet the absence of the imagination had\nItself to be imagined. The great pond,\nThe plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,\nMud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence\n\nOf a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,\nThe great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this\nHad to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,\nRequired, as a necessity requires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "ploughing-on-sunday": { - "title": "“Ploughing on Sunday”", - "body": "The white cock’s tail\nTosses in the wind.\nThe turkey-cock’s tail\nGlitters in the sun.\n\nWater in the fields.\nThe wind pours down.\nThe feathers flare\nAnd bluster in the wind.\n\nRemus, blow your horn!\nI’m ploughing on Sunday,\nPloughing North America.\nBlow your horn!\n\nTum-ti-tum,\nTi-tum-tum-tum!\nThe turkey-cock’s tail\nSpreads to the sun.\n\nThe white cock’s tail\nStreams to the moon.\nWater in the fields.\nThe wind pours down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-poem-that-took-the-place-of-a-mountain": { - "title": "“The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain”", - "body": "There it was, word for word,\nThe poem that took the place of a mountain.\n\nHe breathed its oxygen,\nEven when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.\n\nIt reminded him how he had needed\nA place to go to in his own direction,\n\nHow he had recomposed the pines,\nShifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,\n\nFor the outlook that would be right,\nWhere he would be complete in an unexplained completion:\n\nThe exact rock where his inexactnesses\nWould discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,\n\nWhere he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,\nRecognize his unique and solitary home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poetry-is-a-destructive-force": { - "title": "“Poetry is a Destructive Force”", - "body": "That’s what misery is,\nNothing to have at heart.\nIt is to have or nothing.\n\nIt is a thing to have,\nA lion, an ox in his breast,\nTo feel it breathing there.\n\nCorazón, stout dog,\nYoung ox, bow-legged bear,\nHe tastes its blood, not spit.\n\nHe is like a man\nIn the body of a violent beast.\nIts muscles are his own …\n\nThe lion sleeps in the sun.\nIts nose is on its paws.\nIt can kill a man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - } - } - }, - "a-postcard-from-the-volcano": { - "title": "“A Postcard from the Volcano”", - "body": "Children picking up our bones\nWill never know that these were once\nAs quick as foxes on the hill;\n\nAnd that in autumn, when the grapes\nMade sharp air sharper by their smell\nThese had a being, breathing frost;\n\nAnd least will guess that with our bones\nWe left much more, left what still is\nThe look of things, left what we felt\n\nAt what we saw. The spring clouds blow\nAbove the shuttered mansion-house,\nBeyond our gate and the windy sky\n\nCries out a literate despair.\nWe knew for long the mansion’s look\nAnd what we said of it became\n\nA part of what it is … Children,\nStill weaving budded aureoles,\nWill speak our speech and never know,\n\nWill say of the mansion that it seems\nAs if he that lived there left behind\nA spirit storming in blank walls,\n\nA dirty house in a gutted world,\nA tatter of shadows peaked to white,\nSmeared with the gold of the opulent sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts": { - "title": "“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”", - "body": "The difficulty to think at the end of day,\nWhen the shapeless shadow covers the sun\nAnd nothing is left except light on your fur--\n\nThere was the cat slopping its milk all day,\nFat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk\nAnd August the most peaceful month.\n\nTo be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,\nWithout that monument of cat,\nThe cat forgotten in the moon;\n\nAnd to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,\nIn which everything is meant for you\nAnd nothing need be explained;\n\nThen there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;\nAnd east rushes west and west rushes down,\nNo matter. The grass is full\n\nAnd full of yourself. The trees around are for you,\nThe whole of the wideness of night is for you,\nA self that touches all edges,\n\nYou become a self that fills the four corners of night.\nThe red cat hides away in the fur-light\nAnd there you are humped high, humped up,\n\nYou are humped higher and higher, black as stone--\nYou sit with your head like a carving in space\nAnd the little green cat is a bug in the grass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "re-statement-of-romance": { - "title": "“Re-Statement of Romance”", - "body": "The night knows nothing of the chants of night.\nIt is what it is as I am what I am:\nAnd in perceiving this I best perceive myself\n\nAnd you. Only we two may interchange\nEach in the other what each has to give.\nOnly we two are one, not you and night,\n\nNor night and I, but you and I, alone,\nSo much alone, so deeply by ourselves,\nSo far beyond the casual solitudes,\n\nThat night is only the background of our selves,\nSupremely true each to its separate self,\nIn the pale light that each upon the other throws.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1935, - "month": "march" - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-revolutionists-stop-for-orangeade": { - "title": "“The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade”", - "body": "Capitán profundo, capitán geloso,\nAsk us not to sing standing in the sun,\nHairy-backed and hump-armed,\nFlat-ribbed and big-bagged.\n\nThere is no pith in music\nExcept in something false.\n\nBellissimo, pomposo,\nSing a song of serpent-kin,\nNecks among the thousand leaves,\nTongues around the fruit.\nSing in clownish boots\nStrapped and buckled bright.\n\nWear the breeches of a mask,\nCoat half-flare and half galloon;\nWear a helmet without reason,\nTufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted.\nStart the singing in a voice\nRougher than a grinding shale.\n\nHang a feather by your eye,\nNod and look a little sly.\nThis must be the vent of pity,\nDeeper than a truer ditty\nOf the real that wrenches,\nOf the quick that’s wry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sense-of-the-sleight-of-hand-man": { - "title": "“The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand Man”", - "body": "One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths,\nOne’s tootings at the weddings of the soul\nOccur as they occur. So bluish clouds\nOccurred above the empty house and the leaves\nOf the rhododendrons rattled their gold,\nAs if some one lived there. Such foods of white\nCame bursting from the clouds. So the wind\nThrew its contorted strength around the\nCould you have said the bluejay suddenly\nWould swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays\nAround the sun. The wheel survives the myths.\nThe fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.\nTo think of a dove with an eye of grenadine\nAnd pines that are cornets, so it occurs,\nAnd a little island full of geese and stars:\nIt may be that the ignorant man, alone,\nHas any chance to mate his life with the life\nThat is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life\nThat is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-snow-man": { - "title": "“The Snow Man”", - "body": "One must have a mind of winter\nTo regard the frost and the boughs\nOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;\n\nAnd have been cold a long time\nTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,\nThe spruces rough in the distant glitter\n\nOf the January sun; and not to think\nOf any misery in the sound of the wind,\nIn the sound of a few leaves,\n\nWhich is the sound of the land\nFull of the same wind\nThat is blowing in the same bare place\n\nFor the listener, who listens in the snow,\nAnd, nothing himself, beholds\nNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "st-armorers-church-from-the-outside": { - "title": "“St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside”", - "body": "St. Armorer’s was once an immense success.\nIt rose loftily and stood massively; and to lie\nIn its church-yard, in the province of St. Armorer’s,\nFixed one for good in geranium-colored day.\n\nWhat is left has the foreign smell of plaster,\nThe closed-in smell of hay. A sumac grows\nOn the altar, growing toward the lights, inside.\nReverberations leak and lack among holes\n\nIts chapel rises from Terre Ensevelie,\nAn ember yes among its cindery noes,\nHis own: a chapel of breath, an appearance made\nFor a sign of meaning in the meaningless,\n\nNo radiance of dead blaze, but something seen\nIn a mystic eye, no sign of life but life,\nItself, the presence of the intelligible\nIn that which is created as its symbol.\n\nIt is like a new account of everything old,\nMatisse at Vence and a great deal more than that,\nA new-colored sun, say, that will soon change forms\nAnd spread hallucinations on every leaf.\n\nThe chapel rises, his own, his period,\nA civilization formed from the outward blank,\nA sacred syllable rising from sacked speech,\nThe first car out of a tunnel en voyage\n\nInto lands of ruddy-ruby fruits, achieved\nNot merely desired, for sale, and market things\nThat press, strong peasants in a peasant world,\nTheir purports to a final seriousness-\n\nFinal for him, the acceptance of such prose,\nTime’s given perfections made to seem like less\nThan the need of each generation to be itself,\nThe need to be actual and as it is.\n\nSt. Armorer’s has nothing of this present,\nThis vif, this dizzle-dazzle of being new\nAnd of becoming, for which the chapel spreads out\nIts arches in its vivid element,\n\nIn the air of newness of that element,\nIn an air of freshness, clearness, greenness, blueness,\nThat which is always beginning because it is part\nOf that which is always beginning, over and over.\n\nThe chapel underneath St. Armorer’s walls,\nStands in a light, its natural light and day,\nThe origin and keep of its health and his own\nAnd there he walks and does as he lives and likes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sunday-morning": { - "title": "“Sunday Morning”", - "body": "# I.\n\nComplacencies of the peignoir, and late\nCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,\nAnd the green freedom of a cockatoo\nUpon a rug mingle to dissipate\nThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice.\nShe dreams a little, and she feels the dark\nEncroachment of that old catastrophe,\nAs a calm darkens among water-lights.\nThe pungent oranges and bright, green wings\nSeem things in some procession of the dead,\nWinding across wide water, without sound.\nThe day is like wide water, without sound,\nStilled for the passing of her dreaming feet\nOver the seas, to silent Palestine,\nDominion of the blood and sepulchre.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhy should she give her bounty to the dead?\nWhat is divinity if it can come\nOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?\nShall she not find in comforts of the sun,\nIn pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else\nIn any balm or beauty of the earth,\nThings to be cherished like the thought of heaven?\nDivinity must live within herself:\nPassions of rain, or moods in falling snow;\nGrievings in loneliness, or unsubdued\nElations when the forest blooms; gusty\nEmotions on wet roads on autumn nights;\nAll pleasures and all pains, remembering\nThe bough of summer and the winter branch.\nThese are the measures destined for her soul.\n\n\n# III.\n\nJove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.\nNo mother suckled him, no sweet land gave\nLarge-mannered motions to his mythy mind.\nHe moved among us, as a muttering king,\nMagnificent, would move among his hinds,\nUntil our blood, commingling, virginal,\nWith heaven, brought such requital to desire\nThe very hinds discerned it, in a star.\nShall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be\nThe blood of paradise? And shall the earth\nSeem all of paradise that we shall know?\nThe sky will be much friendlier then than now,\nA part of labor and a part of pain,\nAnd next in glory to enduring love,\nNot this dividing and indifferent blue.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nShe says, “I am content when wakened birds,\nBefore they fly, test the reality\nOf misty fields, by their sweet questionings;\nBut when the birds are gone, and their warm fields\nReturn no more, where, then, is paradise?”\nThere is not any haunt of prophecy,\nNor any old chimera of the grave,\nNeither the golden underground, nor isle\nMelodious, where spirits gat them home,\nNor visionary south, nor cloudy palm\nRemote on heaven’s hill, that has endured\nAs April’s green endures; or will endure\nLike her remembrance of awakened birds,\nOr her desire for June and evening, tipped\nBy the consummation of the swallow’s wings.\n\n\n# V.\n\nShe says, “But in contentment I still feel\nThe need of some imperishable bliss.”\nDeath is the mother of beauty; hence from her,\nAlone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams\nAnd our desires. Although she strews the leaves\nOf sure obliteration on our paths,\nThe path sick sorrow took, the many paths\nWhere triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love\nWhispered a little out of tenderness,\nShe makes the willow shiver in the sun\nFor maidens who were wont to sit and gaze\nUpon the grass, relinquished to their feet.\nShe causes boys to pile new plums and pears\nOn disregarded plate. The maidens taste\nAnd stray impassioned in the littering leaves.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIs there no change of death in paradise?\nDoes ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs\nHang always heavy in that perfect sky,\nUnchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,\nWith rivers like our own that seek for seas\nThey never find, the same receding shores\nThat never touch with inarticulate pang?\nWhy set the pear upon those river-banks\nOr spice the shores with odors of the plum?\nAlas, that they should wear our colors there,\nThe silken weavings of our afternoons,\nAnd pick the strings of our insipid lutes!\nDeath is the mother of beauty, mystical,\nWithin whose burning bosom we devise\nOur earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nSupple and turbulent, a ring of men\nShall chant in orgy on a summer morn\nTheir boisterous devotion to the sun,\nNot as a god, but as a god might be,\nNaked among them, like a savage source.\nTheir chant shall be a chant of paradise,\nOut of their blood, returning to the sky;\nAnd in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,\nThe windy lake wherein their lord delights,\nThe trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,\nThat choir among themselves long afterward.\nThey shall know well the heavenly fellowship\nOf men that perish and of summer morn.\nAnd whence they came and whither they shall go\nThe dew upon their feet shall manifest.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nShe hears, upon that water without sound,\nA voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine\nIs not the porch of spirits lingering.\nIt is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”\nWe live in an old chaos of the sun,\nOr old dependency of day and night,\nOr island solitude, unsponsored, free,\nOf that wide water, inescapable.\nDeer walk upon our mountains, and the quail\nWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;\nSweet berries ripen in the wilderness;\nAnd, in the isolation of the sky,\nAt evening, casual flocks of pigeons make\nAmbiguous undulations as they sink,\nDownward to darkness, on extended wings.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "tea-at-the-palaz-of-hoon": { - "title": "“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”", - "body": "Not less because in purple I descended\nThe western day through what you called\nThe loneliest air, not less was I myself.\n\nWhat was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?\nWhat were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?\nWhat was the sea whose tide swept through me there?\n\nOut of my mind the golden ointment rained,\nAnd my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.\nI was myself the compass of that sea:\n\nI was the world in which I walked, and what I saw\nOr heard or felt came not but from myself:\nAnd there I found myself more truly and more strange.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "things-of-august": { - "title": "“Things of August”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThese locusts by day, these crickets by night\nAre the instruments on which to play\nOf an old and disused ambit of the soul\nOr of a new aspect, bright in discovery--\n\nA disused ambit of the spirit’s way,\nThe sort of thing that August crooners sing,\nBy a pure fountain, that was a ghost, and is,\nUnder the sun-slides of a sloping mountain;\n\nOr else a new aspect, say the spirit’s sex,\nIts attitudes, its answers to attitudes\nAnd the sex of its voices, as the voice of one\nMeets nakedly another’s naked voice.\n\nNothing is lost, loud locusts. No note fails.\nThese sounds are long in the living of the ear.\nThe honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses\nIs a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWe make, although inside an egg,\nVariations on the words spread sail.\n\nThe morning-glories grow in the egg.\nIt is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer\n\nAnd Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it\nAnd the hawk cats it and we say spread sail,\n\nSpread sail, we say spread white, spread way.\nThe shell is a shore. The egg of the sea\n\nAnd the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins\nAnd the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.\n\nSpread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.\nHave liberty not as the air within a grave\n\nOr down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,\nIn the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHigh poetry and low:\nExperience in perihelion\nOr in the penumbra of summer night--\n\nThe solemn sentences,\nLike interior intonations,\nThe speech of truth in its true solitude,\nA nature that is created in what it says,\nThe peace of the last intelligence;\n\nOr the same thing without desire,\nHe that in this intelligence\nMistakes it for a world of objects,\nWhich, being green and blue, appease him,\nBy chance, or happy chance, or happiness,\nAccording to his thought, in the Mediterranean\nOf the quiet of the middle of the night,\nWith the broken statues standing on the shore.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe sad smell of the lilacs--one remembered it,\nNot as the fragrance of Persephone,\nNor of a widow Dooley,\nBut as of an exhumation returned to earth,\n\nThe rich earth, of its own self made rich,\nFertile of its own leaves and days and wars,\nOf its brown wheat rapturous in the wind,\nThe nature of its women in the air,\n\nThe stern voices of its necessitous men,\nThis chorus as of those that wanted to live.\nThe sentiment of the fatal is a part\nOf filial love. Or is it the element,\n\nAn approximation of an element,\nA little thing to think of on Sunday walks,\nSomething not to be mentioned to Mrs. Dooley,\nAn arrogant dagger darting its arrogance,\n\nIn the parent’s hand, perhaps parental lover\nOne wished that there had been a season,\nLonger and later, in which the lilacs opened\nAnd spread about them a warmer, rosier odor.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWe’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi,\nLucidity of his city, joy of his nation,\nThe state of circumstance.\n\nThe thinker as reader reads what has been written\nHe wears the words he reads to look upon\nWithin his being,\n\nA crown within him of crispest diamonds,\nA reddened garment falling to his feet,\nA hand of light to turn the page,\n\nA finger with a ring to guide his eye\nFrom line to line, as we lie on the grass and listen\nTo that which has no speech,\n\nThe voluble intentions of the symbols,\nThe ghostly celebrations of the picnic,\nThe secretions of insight.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nThe world imagines for the beholder.\nHe is born the blank mechanic of the mountains,\n\nThe blank free of fields, their matin laborer.\nHe is the possessed of sense not the possessor.\n\nHe does not change the sea from crumpled tinfoil\nTo chromatic crawler. But it is changed.\n\nHe does not raise the rousing of fresh light\nOn the still, black-slatted Eastward shutters.\n\nThe woman is chosen but not by him,\nAmong the endlessly emerging accords.\n\nThe world? The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,\nFeels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?\n\nIt habituates him to the invisible,\nBy its faculty of the exceptional,\n\nThe faculty of ellipses and deviations,\nIn which he exists but never as himself.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nHe turned from the tower to the house,\nFrom the spun sky and the high and deadly view,\nTo the novels on the table,\nThe geraniums on the sill.\n\nHe could understand the things at home.\nAnd being up high had helped him when up high,\nAs if on a taller tower\nHe would be certain to see\n\nThat, in the shadowless atmosphere,\nThe knowledge of things lay round but unperceived:\nThe height was not quite proper;\nThe position was wrong.\n\nIt was curious to have to descend\nAnd, seated in the nature of his chair,\nTo feel the satisfactions\nOf that transparent air.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nWhen was it that the particles became\nThe whole man, that tempers and beliefs became\nTemper and belief and that differences lost\nDifference and were one? It had to be\nIn the presence of a solitude of the self,\nAn expanse and the abstraction of an expanse,\nA zone of time without the ticking of clocks,\nA color that moved us with forgetfulness.\n\nWhen was it that we heard the voice of union?\nWas it as we sat in the park and the archaic form\nOf a woman with a cloud on her shoulder, rose\nAgainst the trees and then against the sky\nAnd the sense of the archaic touched us at once\nIn a movement of the outlines of similarity?\n\nWe resembled one another at the sight.\nThe forgetful color of the autumn day\nWas full of these archaic forms, giants\nOf sense, evoking one thing in many men,\nEvoking an archaic space, vanishing\nIn the space, leaving an outline of the size\nOf the impersonal person, the wanderer,\nThe father, the ancestor, the bearded peer,\nThe total of human shadows bright as glass.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nA new text of the world,\nA scribble of fret and fear and fate,\nFrom a bravura of the mind,\nA courage of the eye,\n\nIn which, for all the breathings\nFrom the edge of night,\nAnd for all the white voices\nThat were rosen once,\n\nThe meanings are our own\nIt is a text that we shall be needing,\nTo be the footing of noon,\nThe pillar of midnight,\n\nThat comes from ourselves, neither from knowing\nNor not knowing, yet free from question,\nBecause we wanted it so\nAnd it had to be,\n\nA text of intelligent men\nAt the center of the unintelligible,\nAs in a hermitage, for us to think,\nWriting and reading the rigid inscription.\n\n\n# X.\n\nThe mornings grow silent, the never-tiring wonder.\nThe trees are reappearing in poverty.\n\nWithout rain, there is the sadness of rain\nAnd an air of lateness. The moon is a tricorn\n\nWaved in pale adieu. The rex Impolitor\nWill come stamping here, the ruler of less than men,\n\nIn less than nature. He is not here yet.\nHere the adult one is still banded with fulgor,\n\nIs still warm with the love with which she came,\nStill touches solemnly with what she was\n\nAnd willed. She has given too much, but not enough\nShe is exhausted and a little old.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird": { - "title": "“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAmong twenty snowy mountains,\nThe only moving thing\nWas the eye of the blackbird.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI was of three minds,\nLike a tree\nIn which there are three blackbirds.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.\nIt was a small part of the pantomime.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nA man and a woman\nAre one.\nA man and a woman and a blackbird\nAre one.\n\n\n# V.\n\nI do not know which to prefer,\nThe beauty of inflections\nOr the beauty of innuendoes,\nThe blackbird whistling\nOr just after.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIcicles filled the long window\nWith barbaric glass.\nThe shadow of the blackbird\nCrossed it, to and fro.\nThe mood\nTraced in the shadow\nAn indecipherable cause.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nO thin men of Haddam,\nWhy do you imagine golden birds?\nDo you not see how the blackbird\nWalks around the feet\nOf the women about you?\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nI know noble accents\nAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;\nBut I know, too,\nThat the blackbird is involved\nIn what I know.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nWhen the blackbird flew out of sight,\nIt marked the edge\nOf one of many circles.\n\n\n# X.\n\nAt the sight of blackbirds\nFlying in a green light,\nEven the bawds of euphony\nWould cry out sharply.\n\n\n# XI.\n\nHe rode over Connecticut\nIn a glass coach.\nOnce, a fear pierced him,\nIn that he mistook\nThe shadow of his equipage\nFor blackbirds.\n\n\n# XII.\n\nThe river is moving.\nThe blackbird must be flying.\n\n\n# XIII.\n\nIt was evening all afternoon.\nIt was snowing\nAnd it was going to snow.\nThe blackbird sat\nIn the cedar-limbs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "october" - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "three-travelers-watch-a-sunrise": { - "title": "“Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise”", - "body": "> _The characters are three Chinese, two negroes and a girl.\nThe scene represents a forest of heavy trees on a hilltop in eastern Pennsylvania. To the right is a road, obscured by bushes. It is about four o’clock of a morning in August, at the present time.\nWhen the curtain rises, the stage is dark. The limb of a tree creaks. A negro carrying a lantern passes along the road. The sound is repeated. The negro comes through the bushes, raises his lantern and looks through the trees. Discerning a dark object among the branches, he shrinks back, crosses stage, and goes out through the wood to the left. A second negro comes through the bushes to the right. He carries two large baskets, which he places on the ground just inside of the bushes. Enter three Chinese, one of whom carries a lantern. They pause on the road._\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nAll you need,\nTo find poetry,\nIs to look for it with a lantern.\n\n[_The Chinese laugh._]\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nI could find it without,\nOn an August night,\nIf I saw no more\nThan the dew on the barns.\n\n[_The Second Negro makes a sound to attract their attention. The three Chinese come through the bushes. The first is short, fat, quizzical, and of. middle age. The second is of middle height, thin and turning gray; a man of sense and sympathy. The third is a young man, intent, detached. They wear European clothes._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_Glancing at the baskets._]\nDew is water to see,\nNot water to drink:\nWe have forgotten water to drink.\nYet I am content\nJust to see sunrise again.\nI have not seen it\nSince the day we left Pekin.\nIt filled my doorway,\nLike whispering women.\n\n> _First Chinese._\nAnd I have never seen it.\nIf we have no water,\nDo find a melon for me\nIn the baskets.\n\n[_The Second Negro, who has been opening the baskets, hands the First Chinese a melon._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nIs there no spring?\n\n[_The negro takes a water bottle of red porcelain from one of the baskets and places it near the Third Chinese._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_To Third Chinese._] Your porcelain water bottle.\n\n[_One of the baskets contains costumes of silk, red, blue and green. During the following speeches, the Chinese put on these costumes, with the assistance of the negro, and seat themselves on the ground._]\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nThis fetches its own water.\n\n[_Takes the bottle and places it on the ground in the center of the stage._]\n\nI drink from it, dry as it is,\nAs you from maxims, [_To Second Chinese._]\nOr you from melons. [_To First Chinese._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nNot as I, from melons.\nBe sure of that.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nWell, it is true of maxims.\n\n[_He finds a book in the pocket of his costume, and reads from it._]\n\n“The court had known poverty and wretchedness; hu-manity had invaded its seclusion, with its suffering and its pity.”\n\n[_The limb of the tree creaks._]\n\nYes: it is true of maxims,\nJust as it is true of poets,\nOr wise men, or nobles,\nOr jade.\n\n> _First Chinese._\nDrink from wise men? From jade? Is there no spring?\n\n[_Turning to the negro, who has taken a jug from one of the baskets._]\n\nFill it and return.\n\n[_The negro removes a large candle from one of the baskets and hands it to the First Chinese; then takes the jug and the lantern and enters the trees to the left. The First Chinese lights the candle and places it on the ground near the water bottle._]\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nThere is a seclusion of porcelain\nThat humanity never invades.\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_With sarcasm._] Porcelain!\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nIt is like the seclusion of sunrise,\nBefore it shines on any house.\n\n> _First Chinese._ Pooh!\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nThis candle is the sun;\nThis bottle is earth:\nIt is an illustration\nUsed by generations of hermits.\nThe point of difference from reality\nIs this:\n\nThat, in this illustration,\nThe earth remains of one color--\nIt remains red,\nIt remains what it is.\nBut when the sun shines on the earth,\nIn reality\nIt does not shine on a thing that remains\nWhat it was yesterday.\nThe sun rises\nOn whatever the earth happens to be.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nAnd there are indeterminate moments\nBefore it rises,\n\nLike this, [_With a backward gesture._]\nBefore one can tell\nWhat the bottle is going to be--\nPorcelain, Venetian glass,\nEgyptian …\nWell, there are moments\nWhen the candle, sputtering up,\n\nFinds itself in seclusion, [_He raises the candle in the air._]\nAnd shines, perhaps, for the beauty of shining.\nThat is the seclusion of sunrise\nBefore it shines on any house. [_Replacing the candle._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Wagging his head._]\nAs abstract as\nporcelain.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nSuch seclusion knows beauty\nAs the court knew it.\nThe court woke\nIn its windless pavilions,\nAnd gazed on chosen mornings,\nAs it gazed\nOn chosen porcelain.\n\nWhat the court saw was always of the same color,\nAnd well shaped,\nAnd seen in a clear light. [_He points to the candle._]\nIt never woke to see,\nAnd never knew,\nThe flawed jars,\nThe weak colors,\nThe contorted glass.\nIt never knew\nThe poor lights. [_He opens his book significantly._]\nWhen the court knew beauty only,\nAnd in seclusion,\nIt had neither love nor wisdom.\nThese came through poverty\nAnd wretchedness,\nThrough suffering and pity. [_He pauses._]\nIt is the invasion of humanity\nThat counts.\n\n[_The limb of the tree creaks. The First Chinese turns, for a moment, in the direction of the sound._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Thoughtfully._]\nThe light of the most\ntranquil candle\nWould shudder on a bloody salver.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_With a gesture of disregard._]\nIt is the\ninvasion\nThat counts.\n\nIf it be supposed that we are three figures\nPainted on porcelain\nAs we sit here,\nThat we are painted on this very bottle,\nThe hermit of the place,\nHolding this candle to us,\nWould wonder;\nBut if it be supposed\nThat we are painted as warriors,\nThe candle would tremble in his hands;\nOr if it be supposed, for example,\nThat we are painted as three dead men,\nHe could not see the steadiest light,\nFor sorrow.\nIt would be true\nIf an emperor himself\nHeld the candle.\nHe would forget the porcelain\nFor the figures painted on it.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\n[_Shrugging his shoulders._] Let the candle\nshine for the beauty of shining.\nI dislike the invasion\nAnd long for the windless pavilions.\nAnd yet it may be true\nThat nothing is beautiful\nExcept with reference to ourselves,\nNor ugly,\n\nNor high, [_Pointing to the sky._]\nNor low. [_Pointing to the candle._]\nNo: not even sunrise.\n\nCan you play of this [_Mockingly to First Chinese._]\nFor us? [_He stands up._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Hesitatingly._] I have a song\nCalled Mistress and Maid.\nIt is of no interest to hermits\nOr emperors,\nYet it has a bearing;\nFor if we affect sunrise,\nWe affect all things.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nIt is a pity it is of women.\nSing it.\n\n[_He takes an instrument from one of the baskets and hands it to the First Chinese, who sings the following song, accompanying himself, somewhat tunelessly, on the instrument. The Third Chinese takes various things out of the basket for tea. He arranges fruit. The First Chinese watches him while he plays. The Second Chinese gazes at the ground. The sky shows the first signs of morning._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nThe mistress says, in a harsh voice,\n“He will be thinking in strange countries\nOf the white stones near my door,\nAnd I--I am tired of him.”\nShe says sharply, to her maid,\n“Sing to yourself no more.”\n\nThen the maid says, to herself,\n\n“He will be thinking in strange countries\nOf the white stones near her door;\nBut it is me he will see\nAt the window, as before.”\n\n“He will be thinking in strange countries\nOf the green gown I wore.\nHe was saying good-by to her.”\nThe maid drops her eyes and says to her mistress,\n“I shall sing to myself no more.”\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nThat affects the white stones,\nTo be sure. [_They laugh._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nAnd it affects the green gown.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nHere comes our black man.\n\n[_The Second Negro returns, somewhat agitated, with water but without his lantern. He hands the jug to the Third Chinese. The First Chinese from time to time strikes the instrument. The Third Chinese, who faces the left, peers in the direction from which the negro has come._]\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nYou have left your lantern behind you.\nIt shines, among the trees,\nLike evening Venus in a cloud-top.\n\n[_The Second Negro grins but makes no explanation. He seats himself behind the Chinese to the right._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nOr like a ripe strawberry\nAmong its leaves. [_They laugh._]\nI heard tonight\n\nThat they are searching the hill\nFor an Italian.\nHe disappeared with his neighbor’s daughter.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_Confidingly._] I am sure you heard\nThe first eloping footfall,\nAnd the drum\nOf pursuing feet.\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Amusedly._] It was not an elopement.\nThe young gentleman was seen\nTo climb the hill,\nIn the manner of a tragedian\nWho sweats.\n\nSuch things happen in the evening.\nHe was\nUn miserable.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nReach the lady quickly.\n\n[_The First Chinese strikes the instrument twice as a prelude to his narrative._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nThere are as many points of view\nFrom which to regard her\nAs there are sides to a round bottle. [_Pointing to the water bottle._]\nShe was represented to me\nAs beautiful.\n\n[_They laugh. The First Chinese strikes the instrument, and looks at the Third Chinese, who yawns._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Reciting._] She was as beautiful as a\nporcelain water bottle.\n\n[_He strikes the instrument in an insinuating manner._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\nShe was represented to me\nAs young.\n\nTherefore my song should go\nOf the color of blood.\n\n[_He strikes the instrument. The limb of the tree creaks. The First Chinese notices it and puts his hand on the knee of the Second Chinese, who is seated between him and the Third Chinese, to call attention to the sound. They are all seated so that they do not face the spot from which the sound comes. A dark object, hanging to the limb of the tree, becomes a dim silhouette. The sky grows constantly brighter. No color is to be seen until the end of the play._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_To First Chinese._] It is only a tree\nCreaking in the night wind.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\n[_Shrugging his shoulders._]\nThere would\nbe no creaking\nIn the windless pavilions.\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Resuming._] So far the lady of the present ballad\nWould have been studied\nBy the hermit and his candle\nWith much philosophy;\nAnd possibly the emperor would have cried,\n“More light!”\nBut it is a way with ballads\nThat the more pleasing they are\nThe worse end they come to;\nFor here it was also represented\nThat the lady was poor--\nThe hermit’s candle would have thrown\nAlarming shadows,\nAnd the emperor would have held\nThe porcelain in one hand …\nShe was represented as clinging\nTo that sweaty tragedian,\nAnd weeping up the hill.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_With a grimace._] It does not sound\nlike an elopement.\n\n> _First Chinese._\nIt is a doleful ballad,\nFit for keyholes.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nShall we hear more?\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nWhy not?\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nWe came for isolation,\nTo rest in sunrise.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_Raising his book slightly._] But this\nwill be a part of sunrise,\nAnd can you tell how it will end?\nVenetian,\nEgyptian,\nContorted glass …\n\n[_He turns toward the light in the sky to the right, darkening the candle with his hands._]\n\nIn the meantime, the candle shines, [_Indicating the sunrise._]\nAs you say, [_To the Third Chinese._]\nFor the beauty of shining.\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Sympathetically._] Oh! it will end badly.\nThe lady’s father\nCame clapping behind them\n\nTo the foot of the hill.\nHe came crying,\n“Anna, Anna, Anna!” [_Imitating._]\nHe was alone without her,\nJust as the young gentleman\nWas alone without her:\nThree beggars, you see,\nBegging for one another.\n\n[_The First Negro, carrying two lanterns, approaches cautiously through the trees. At the sight of him, the Second Negro, seated near the Chinese, jumps to his feet. The Chinese get up in alarm. The Second Negro goes around the Chinese toward the First Negro. All see the body of a man hanging to the limb of the tree. They gather together, keeping their eyes fixed on it. The First Negro comes out of the trees and places the lanterns on the ground. He looks at the group and then at the body._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_Moved._] The young gentleman of the ballad.\n\n> _Third Chinese._\n[_Slowly, approaching the body._] And\nthe end of the ballad.\nTake away the bushes.\n\n[_The negroes commence to pull away the bushes._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nDeath, the hermit,\nNeeds no candle\nIn his hermitage.\n\n[_The Second Chinese snuffs out the candle. The First Chinese puts out the lanterns. As the bushes are pulled away, the figure of a girl, sitting half stupefied under the tree, suddenly becomes apparent to the Second Chinese and then to the Third Chinese. They step back. The negroes move to the left. When the First Chinese sees the girl, the instrument slips from his hands and falls noisily to the ground. The girl stirs._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_To the girl._] Is that you, Anna?\n\n[_The girl starts. She raises her head, looks around slowly, leaps to her feet and screams._]\n\n> _Second Chinese._\n[_Gently._] Is that you, Anna?\n\n[_She turns quickly toward the body, looks at it fixedly and totters up the stage._]\n\n> _Anna._\n[_Bitterly._] Go.\nTell my father:\nHe is dead.\n\n[_The Second and Third Chinese support her. The First Negro whispers to the First Chinese, then takes the lanterns and goes through the opening to the road, where he disappears in the direction of the valley._]\n\n> _First Chinese._\n[_To Second Negro._] Bring us fresh water\nFrom the spring.\n\n[_The Second Negro takes the jug and enters the trees to the left. The girl comes gradually to herself. She looks at the Chinese and at the sky. She turns her back toward the body, shuddering, and does, not look at it again._]\n\n> _Anna._\nIt will soon be sunrise.\n\n> _Second Chinese._\nOne candle replaces\nAnother.\n\n[_The First Chinese walks toward the bushes to the right. He stands by the roadside, as if to attract the attention of anyone passing._]\n\n> _Anna._\n[_Simply._] When he was in his fields,\nI worked in ours--\nWore purple to see;\nAnd when I was in his garden\nI wore gold ear-rings.\nLast evening I met him on the road.\nHe asked me to walk with him\nTo the top of the hill.\nI felt the evil,\nBut he wanted nothing.\nHe hanged himself in front of me.\n\n[_She looks for support. The Second and Third Chinese help her toward the road. At the roadside, the First Chinese takes the place of the Third Chinese. The girl and the twr Chinese go through the bushes and disappear down the road. The stage is empty except for the Third Chinese. He walks slowly across the stage, pushing the instrument out of his way with his foot. It reverberates. He looks at the water bottle._]\n\n> _Third Chinese._\nOf the color of blood …\nSeclusion of porcelain …\nSeclusion of sunrise …\n\n[_He picks up the water bottle._]\nThe candle of the sun\nWill shine soon\nOn this hermit earth. [_Indicating the bottle._]\nIt will shine soon\nUpon the trees,\nAnd find a new thing [_Indicating the body._]\nPainted on this porcelain, [_Indicating the trees._]\nBut not on this. [_Indicating the bottle._]\n\n[_He places the bottle on the ground. A narrow cloud over the valley becomes red. He turns toward it, then walks to the right. He finds the book of the Second Chinese lying on the ground, picks it up and turns over the leaves._]\n\nRed is not only\nThe color of blood,\nOr [_Indicating the body._]\nOf a man’s eyes,\nOr [_Pointedly._]\nOf a girl’s.\n\nAnd as the red of the sun\nIs one thing to me\nAnd one thing to another,\nSo it is the green of one tree [_Indicating._]\nAnd the green of another,\nWhich without it would all be black.\nSunrise is multiplied,\nLike the earth on which it shines,\nBy the eyes that open on it,\nEven dead eyes,\nAs red is multiplied by the leaves of trees.\n\n[_Toward the end of this speech, the Second Negro comes from the trees to the left, without being seen. The Third Chinese, whose back is turned toward the negro, walks through the bushes to the right and disappears on the road. The negro looks around at the objects on the stage. He sees the instrument, seats himself before it and strikes it several times, listening to the sound. One or two birds twitter. A voice, urging a horse, is heard at a distance. There is the crack of a whip. The negro stands up, walks to the right and remains at the side of the road. The curtain falls slowly._]", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "to-the-one-of-fictive-music": { - "title": "“To the One of Fictive Music”", - "body": "Sister and mother and diviner love,\nAnd of the sisterhood of the living dead\nMost near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,\nAnd of the fragrant mothers the most dear\nAnd queen, and of diviner love the day\nAnd flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread\nOf cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown\nIts venom of renown, and on your head\nNo crown is simpler than the simple hair.\n\nNow of the music summoned by the birth\nThat separates us from the wind and sea,\nYet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,\nBy being so much of the things we are,\nGross effigy and simulacrum, none\nGives motion to perfection more serene\nThan yours, out of our imperfections wrought,\nMost rare, or ever of more kindred air\nIn the laborious weaving that you wear.\n\nFor so retentive of themselves are men\nThat music is intensest which proclaims\nThe near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,\nAnd of all vigils musing the obscure,\nThat apprehends the most which sees and names,\nAs in your name, an image that is sure,\nAmong the arrant spices of the sun,\nO bough and bush and scented vine, in whom\nWe give ourselves our likest issuance.\n\nYet not too like, yet not so like to be\nToo near, too clear, saving a little to endow\nOur feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs\nThe difference that heavenly pity brings.\nFor this, musician, in your girdle fixed\nBear other perfumes. On your pale head wear\nA band entwining, set with fatal stones.\nUnreal, give back to us what once you gave:\nThe imagination that we spurned and crave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-weeping-burgher": { - "title": "“The Weeping Burgher”", - "body": "It is with a strange malice\nThat I distort the world.\n\nAh! that ill humors\nShould mask as white girls.\nAnd ah! that Scaramouche\nShould have a black barouche.\n\nThe sorry verities!\nYet in excess, continual,\nThere is cure of sorrow.\n\nPermit that if as ghost I come\nAmong the people burning in me still,\nI come as belle design\nOf foppish line.\n\nAnd I, then, tortured for old speech--\nA white of wildly woven rings;\nI, weeping in a calcined heart--\nMy hands such sharp, imagined things.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wind-shifts": { - "title": "“The Wind Shifts”", - "body": "This is how the wind shifts:\nLike the thoughts of an old human,\nWho still thinks eagerly\nAnd despairingly.\nThe wind shifts like this:\nLike a human without illusions,\nWho still feels irrational things within her.\nThe wind shifts like this:\nLike humans approaching proudly,\nLike humans approaching angrily.\nThis is how the wind shifts:\nLike a human, heavy and heavy,\nWho does not care.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-house-was-quiet-and-the-world-was-calm": { - "title": "“The house was quiet and the world was calm …”", - "body": "The house was quiet and the world was calm.\nThe reader became the book; and summer night\n\nWas like the conscious being of the book.\nThe house was quiet and the world was calm.\n\nThe words were spoken as if there was no book,\nExcept that the reader leaned above the page,\n\nWanted to lean, wanted much most to be\nThe scholar to whom his book is true, to whom\n\nThe summer night is like a perfection of thought.\nThe house was quiet because it had to be.\n\nThe quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:\nThe access of perfection to the page.\n\nAnd the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,\nIn which there is no other meaning, itself\n\nIs calm, itself is summer and night, itself\nIs the reader leaning late and reading there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-louis-stevenson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Louis Stevenson", - "birth": { - "year": 1850 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "scottish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "scottish" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn-fires": { - "title": "“Autumn Fires”", - "body": "In the other gardens\nAnd all up the vale,\nFrom the autumn bonfires\nSee the smoke trail!\n\nPleasant summer over\nAnd all the summer flowers,\nThe red fire blazes,\nThe grey smoke towers.\n\nSing a song of seasons!\nSomething bright in all!\nFlowers in the summer,\nFires in the fall!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "bed-in-summer": { - "title": "“Bed in Summer”", - "body": "In winter I get up at night\nAnd dress by yellow candle-light.\nIn summer, quite the other way,\nI have to go to bed by day.\n\nI have to go to bed and see\nThe birds still hopping on the tree,\nOr hear the grown-up people’s feet\nStill going past me in the street.\n\nAnd does it not seem hard to you,\nWhen all the sky is clear and blue,\nAnd I should like so much to play,\nTo have to go to bed by day?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "come-here-is-adieu-to-the-city": { - "title": "“Come, Here is Adieu to the City”", - "body": "Come, here is adieu to the city\nAnd hurrah for the country again.\nThe broad road lies before me\nWatered with last night’s rain.\nThe timbered country woos me\nWith many a high and bough;\nAnd again in the shining fallows\nThe ploughman follows the plough.\n\nThe whole year’s sweat and study,\nAnd the whole year’s sowing time,\nComes now to the perfect harvest,\nAnd ripens now into rhyme.\nFor we that sow in the Autumn,\nWe reap our grain in the Spring,\nAnd we that go sowing and weeping\nReturn to reap and sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "requiem": { - "title": "“Requiem”", - "body": "Under the wide and starry sky,\nDig the grave and let me lie.\n Glad did I live and gladly die,\nAnd I laid me down with a will.\n\nThis be the verse you grave for me:\n_Here he lies where he longed to be;\nHome is the sailor, home from sea,\n And the hunter home from the hill._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-song": { - "title": "“Spring Song”", - "body": "The air was full of sun and birds,\nThe fresh air sparkled clearly.\nRemembrance wakened in my heart\nAnd I knew I loved her dearly.\n\nThe fallows and the leafless trees\nAnd all my spirit tingled.\nMy earliest thought of love, and Spring’s\nFirst puff of perfume mingled.\n\nIn my still heart the thoughts awoke,\nCame lone by lone together--\nSay, birds and Sun and Spring, is Love\nA mere affair of weather?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "wintertime": { - "title": "“Wintertime”", - "body": "Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,\nA frosty, fiery sleepy-head;\nBlinks but an hour or two; and then,\nA blood-red orange, sets again.\n\nBefore the stars have left the skies,\nAt morning in the dark I rise;\nAnd shivering in my nakedness,\nBy the cold candle, bathe and dress.\n\nClose by the jolly fire I sit\nTo warm my frozen bones a bit;\nOr with a reindeer-sled, explore\nThe colder countries round the door.\n\nWhen to go out, my nurse doth wrap\nMe in my comforter and cap;\nThe cold wind burns my face, and blows\nIts frosty pepper up my nose.\n\nBlack are my steps on silver sod;\nThick blows my frosty breath abroad;\nAnd tree and house, and hill and lake,\nAre frosted like a wedding-cake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - } - } - }, - "trumbull-stickney": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Trumbull Stickney", - "birth": { - "year": 1874 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumbull_Stickney", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "be-still": { - "title": "“Be Still”", - "body": "Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream\nThat over Persian roses flew to kiss\nThe curlèd lashes of Semiramis.\nTroy never was, nor green Skamander stream.\nProvence and Troubadour are merest lies\nThe glorious hair of Venice was a beam\nMade within Titian’s eye. The sunsets seem,\nThe world is very old and nothing is.\nBe still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,\nNor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,\nBut patter in the darkness of thy heart.\nThy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl\nBlind with the light of life thou ’ldst not forsake,\nAnd Error loves and nourishes thy soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-hear-a-river": { - "title": "“I Hear a River”", - "body": "I hear a river thro’ the valley wander\nWhose water runs, the song alone remaining.\nA rainbow stands and summer passes under.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-used-to-think": { - "title": "“I Used to Think”", - "body": "I used to think\nThe mind essential in the body, even\nAs stood the body essential in the mind:\nTwo inseparable things, by nature equal\nAnd similar, and in creation’s song\nHalving the total scale: it is not so.\nUnlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come\nChurned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine,\nA slab of rosewood: mangled each on each\nWith knocks and friction, or in deadly pain\nSheathing each other’s splinters: till at last\nWithout all stuff or shape they ’re jetted up\nWhere in the bluish moisture rot whate’er\nWas vomited in horror from the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-ampezzo": { - "title": "“In Ampezzo”", - "body": "Only once more and not again--the larches\nShake to the wind their echo, “Not again,”--\nWe see, below the sky that over-arches\nHeavy and blue, the plain\n\nBetween Tofana lying and Cristallo\nIn meadowy earths above the ringing stream:\nWhence interchangeably desire may follow,\nHesitant as in dream,\n\nAt sunset, south, by lilac promontories\nUnder green skies ato Italy, or forth\nBy calms of morning beyond Lavinores\nTyrolward and to north:\n\nAs now, this last of latter days, when over\nThe brownish field by peasants are undone\nSome widths of grass, some plots of mountain clover\nUnder the autumn sun,\n\nWith honey-warm perfume that risen lingers\nIn mazes of low heat, or takes the air,\nPassing delicious as a woman’s fingers\nPassing aid the hair;\n\nWhen scythes are swishing and the mower’s muscle\nSpans a repeated crescent to and fro,\nOr in dry stalks of corn the sickles rustle,\nTangle, detach and go,\n\nFar thro’ the wide blue day and greening meadow\nWhose blots of amber beaded are with sheaves,\nWhereover pallidly a cloud-shadow\nDeadens the earth and leaves:\n\nWhilst high around and near, their heads of iron\nSunken in sky whose azure overlights\nRavine and edges, stand the gray and maron\nDesolate Dolomites,--\n\nAnd older than decay from the small summit\nUnfolds a stream of pebbly wreckage down\nUnder the suns of midday, like some comet\nStruck into gravel stone.\n\nFaintly across this gold and amethystine\nSeptember, images of summer fade;\nAnd gentle dreams now freshen on the pristine\nViols, awhile unplayed,\n\nOf many a place where lovingly we wander,\nMore dearly held that quickly we forsake,--\nA pine by sullen coasts, an oleander\nReddening on the lake.\n\nAnd there, each year with more familiar motion,\nFrom many a bird and windy forestries,\nOr along shaking fringes of the ocean,\nVapours of music rise.\n\nFrom many easts the morning gives her splendour;\nThe shadows fill with colours we forget;\nRemembered tints at evening grow tender,\nTarnished with violet.\n\nLet us away! soon sheets of winter metal\nOn this discoloured mountain-land will close,\nWhile elsewhere Spring-time weaves a crimson petal,\nBuilds and perfumes a rose.\n\nAway! for her the mountain sinks in gravel.\nLet us forget the unhappy site with change,\nAnd go, if only happiness be travel\nAfter the new and strange:--\n\nUnless ’twere better to be very single,\nTo follow some diviner monotone,\nAnd in all beauties, where ourselves commingle,\nLove but a love, but one,\n\nAcross this shadowy minute of our living,\nWhat time our hearts so magically sing,\nTo meditate our fever, simply giving\nAll in a little thing?\n\nJust as here, past yon dumb and melancholy\nSameness of ruin, while the mountains ail,\nSummer and sunset-coloured autumn slowly\nDissipate down the vale;\n\nAnd all these lines along the sky that measure\nSorapis and the rocks of Mezzodi\nCrumble by foamy miles into the azure\nMediterranean sea:\n\nWhereas to-day at sunrise, under brambles,\nA league above the moss and dying pines\nI picked this little--in my hand that trembles--\nParcel of columbines.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "in-a-city-garden": { - "title": "“In a City Garden”", - "body": "How strange that here is nothing as it was!\nThe sward is young and new,\nThe sod there shapes a different mass,\nThe random trees stand other than I knew.\nNo, here the Past has left no residue,\nNo aftermath!\nBy a new path\nThe workmen homeward in the city twilight pass.\n\nYet was this willow here.\nIt hung as now its olive skeins aloft\nInto the sky, then blue and clear,--\nAnd yonder pair of poplar trees\n\nRose also, soft\nAnd sibilant in the glory of the breeze.\nIt’s early dark. One scarce distinguishes\nTheir sullen feathering in the autumn sky.\n’Tis warm and still.\nDull o’er the town the vapours lie.\nInnumerable\nAnd dodging the uncertain stare,\nThe small, shrewd lampions dot the air.\n\nMany like me\nLoiter perhaps as I in after years,\nAs looking here to see\nSome vestige of the living that was theirs,\nSome trace of yesterday,\nSomae hint or remnant, echo, clue--some thing,\nSome very little thing of what was they.\nSure such are near! Else were it not so still\nThis evening,\nSo human-still and warm and kind.\n’Tis as of many moved\nIn unison of will and mind to sing\nLow litanies to that which they had wholly loved.\nHow sweet it is\nUnder the perishable trees\nTo hear the wings of the one human soul\nFluttering up\nIn Time’s dark branches to the lucid stars.\nMore than Despair is Hope,\nAnd more than Hope is the Hope that despairs,\nAnd more than all\nIs Love that disbelieves the real years.\n\nHere in this place\nOne August morning--when the earlier crowd,\nShowmen or populace,\nFrom many a region and of curious face,\nAbroad the holiday\nQuaint in the sun with garb and gesture glowed,\nAnd, speaking grave or gay\nThe various accent of their lonely race,\nBetween the shadowy gold bazars idled away--\nShe, as a cloud\nAll sunrise-coloured and alone,\nThro’ the blue summer tremblin came to me.\nI dried her tears and here we sat us down.\nLittle by little, as tripping oversea\nOn flame-tipped waves the daylight’s long surprise\nSweeps world and heaven in one,\nSo love across our eyes\nBroke with the sun.\nHappy we walked away. The fairy sight\nUntangling shook a thousand chequered fires.\nLow under scarlet awnings rung on rung,\nCopper and bronze and azurite,\nRanged on the sagging wires\nThe trifles clinked in the red light.\nFrom beam and niche vendors in strange attires,\nSlipping dark hands along,\nUnhooked the quiet wool, the gaudy chintz,\nOr, precious where it hung,\nLong fluid jewels of auroral silk:\nAnd dryly to the sense\nTheir attars old and dusty powders clung.\nStill passed the weavers and the dyers\nMany a jar, a bowl\nTurned as of water or of milk--\nGlazen and jade and porcelain--\nFar down the shadows colouring stole.\nAs one had shook a jungle after rain\nAnd basketing the drops at random spilled\nTheir red and green, their topaz and sapphires,\nAll were here piled.--\nAnd wandering out we smiled\nTo see across the glowing noon so high,\nSo high and far,\nThe incandescent minarets and domes and spires\nLifting the fusion of the coloured choirs\nTo the sky\nSoftly--save only where\nA flag or pennant fallen slack\nShotted the dazzling air.\nI came to-day to find her, I came back\nHumble with sweet desires\nAcross this dun September atmosphere\nTo her.\nI came, I knew she was not here:\nNow let me go.\nI came, I come because I love her so.\n\nNot in the acres of the Soul\nDoes Nature drive the ploughshare of her change.\nIt is not strange\nThat here in part and whole\nThe faithful eye sees all things as before.\nFor past the newer flowers,\nAbove the recent trees and clouds come o’er,\nLove finds the other hours\nOnce more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "in-the-past": { - "title": "“In the Past”", - "body": "There lies a somnolent lake\nUnder a noiseless sky,\nWhere never the mornings break\nNor the evenings die.\n\nMad flakes of colour\nWhirl on its even face\nIridescent and streaked with pallour;\nAnd, warding the silent place,\n\nThe rocks rise sheer and gray\nFrom the sedgeless brink to the sky\nDull-lit with the light of pale half-day\nThro’ a void space and dry.\n\nAnd the hours lag dead in the air\nWith a sense of coming eternity\nTo the heart of the lonely boatman there:\nThat boatman am I,\n\nI, in my lonely boat,\nA waif on the somnolent lake,\nWatching the colours creep and float\nWith the sinuous track of a snake.\n\nNow I lean o’er the side\nAnd lazy shades in the water see,\nLapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide\nCrawled in from the living sea;\n\nAnd next I fix mine eyes,\nSo long that the heart declines,\nOn the changeless face of the open skies\nWhere no star shines;\n\nAnd now to the rocks I turn,\nTo the rocks, around\nThat lie like walls of a circling sun\nWherein lie bound\n\nThe waters that feel my powerless strength\nAnd meet my homeless oar\nLabouring over their ashen length\nNever to find a shore.\n\nBut the gleam still skims\nAt times on the somnolent lake,\nAnd a light there is that swims\nWith the whirl of a snake;\n\nAnd tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,\nAnd dayless the sky,\nThe heart is alive of the boatman there:\nThat boatman am I.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leave-him-now-quiet-by-the-way": { - "title": "“Leave Him now Quiet by the Way”", - "body": "Leave him now quiet by the way\nTo rest apart.\nI know what draws him to the dust alway\nAnd churns him in the builder’s lime:\nHe has the fright of time.\n\nI heard it knocking in his breast\nA minute since;\nHis human eyes did wince,\nHe stubborned like the massive slaughter beast\nAnd as a thing o’erwhelmed with sound\nStood bolted to the ground.\n\nLeave him, for rest alone can cure--\nIf cure there be--\nThis waif upon the sea.\nHe is of those who slanted the great door\nAnd listened--wretched little lad--\nTo what they said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "live-blindly-and-upon-the-hour": { - "title": "“Live Blindly and upon the Hour”", - "body": "Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,\nWho was the Future, died full long ago.\nKnowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,\nPoor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.\nAround thine earth sun-wingèd winds do blow\nAnd planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;\nThe rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord\nAnd the long strips of river-silver flow:\nAwake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.\nDrinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight\nAbout their fragile hairs’ aërial gold.\nThou art divine, thou livest,--as of old\nApollo springing naked to the light,\nAnd all his island shivered into flowers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "loneliness": { - "title": "“Loneliness”", - "body": "These autumn gardens, russet, gray and brown,\nThe sward with shrivelled foliage strown,\nThe shrubs and trees\nBy weary wings of sunshine overflown\nAnd timid silences,--\n\nSince first you, darling, called my spirit yours,\nSeem happy, and the gladness pours\nFrom day to day,\nAnd yester-year across this year endures\nUnto next year away.\n\nNow in these places where I used to rove\nAnd give the dropping leaves my love\nAnd weep to them,\nThey seem to fall divinely from above,\nLike to a diadem\n\nClosing in one with the disheartened flowers.\nHigh up the migrant birds in showers\nShine in the sky,\nAnd all the movement of the natural hours\nTurns into melody.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "man-stood-alone": { - "title": "“Man Stood Alone”", - "body": "And, the last day being come, Man stood alone\nEre sunrise on the world’s dismantled verge,\nAwaiting how from everywhere should urge\nThe Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none\n\nDid come,--but indistinct from every realm\nOf earth and air and water, growing more\nAnd louder, shriller, heavier, a roar\nUp the dun atmosphere did overwhelm\n\nHis ears; and as he looked affrighted round\nEvery manner of beast innumerable\nAll thro’ the shadows crying grew, until\nThe wailing was like grass upon the ground.\n\nAsudden then within his human side\nTheir anguish, since the goad he wielded first,\nAnd, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,\nDarted compressed and vital.--As he died,\n\nLow in the East now lighting gorgeously\nHe saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed\nWhich, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed\nTo pluck the sun down into the dead sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-melancholy-year-is-dead-with-rain": { - "title": "“The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain”", - "body": "The melancholy year is dead with rain.\nDrop after drop on every branch pursues.\nFrom far away beyond the drizzled flues\nA twilight saddens to the window pane.\nAnd dimly thro’ the chambers of the brain,\nFrom place to place and gently touching, moves\nMy one and irrecoverable love’s\nDear and lost shape one other time again.\nSo in the last of autumn for a day\nSummer or summer’s memory returns.\nSo in a mountain desolation burns\nSome rich belated flower, and with the gray\nSick weather, in the world of rotting ferns\nFrom out the dreadful stones it dies away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "mnemosyne": { - "title": "“Mnemosyne”", - "body": "It’s autumn in the country I remember.\nHow warm a wind blew here about the ways!\nAnd shadows on the hillside lay to slumber\nDuring the long sun-sweetened summer-days.\nIt’s cold abroad the country I remember.\nThe swallows veering skimmed the golden grain\nAt midday with a wing aslant and limber;\nAnd yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.\nIt’s empty down the country I remember.\n\nI had a sister lovely in my sight:\nHer hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;\nWe sang together in the woods at night.\n\nIt’s lonely in the country I remember.\n\nThe babble of our children fills my ears,\nAnd on our hearth I stare the perished ember\nTo flames that show all starry thro’ my tears.\n\nIt’s dark about the country I remember.\n\nThere are the mountains where I lived. The path\nIs slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,\nThe stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath.\n\nBut that I knew these places are my own,\nI’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber\nThe earth, and I to people it alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "mount-lykaion": { - "title": "“Mount Lykaion”", - "body": "Alone on Lykaion since man hath been\nStand on the height two columns, where at rest\nTwo eagles hewn of gold sit looking East\nForever; and the sun goes down between.\nFar down the mountain’s oval green\nAn order keeps the falling stones abreast.\nBelow within the chaos last and least\nA river like a curl of light is seen.\nBeyond the river lies the even sea,\nBeyond the sea another ghost of sky,--\nO God, support the sickness of my eye\nLest the far space and long antiquity\nSuck out my heart, and on this awful ground\nThe great wind kill my little shell with sound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "near-helikon": { - "title": "“Near Helikon”", - "body": "By such an all-embalming summer day\nAs sweetens now among the mountain pines\nDown to the cornland yonder and the vines,\nTo where the sky and sea are mixed in gray,\nHow do all things together take their way\nHarmonious to the harvest, bringing wines\nAnd bread and light and whatsoe’er combines\nIn the large wreath to make it round and gay.\nTo me my troubled life doth now appear\nLike scarce distinguishable summits hung\nAround the blue horizon: places where\nNot even a traveller purposeth to steer,--\nWhereof a migrant bird in passing sung,\nAnd the girl closed her window not to hear.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "on-some-shells-found-inland": { - "title": "“On Some Shells Found Inland”", - "body": "These are my murmur-laden shells that keep\nA fresh voice tho’ the years be very gray.\nThe wave that washed their lips and tuned their lay\nIs gone, gone with the faded ocean sweep,\nThe royal tide, gray ebb and sunken neap\nAnd purple midday,--gone! To this hot clay\nMust sing my shells, where yet the primal day,\nIts roar and rhythm and splendour will not sleep.\nWhat hand shall join them to their proper sea\nIf all be gone? Shall they forever feel\nGlories undone and world that cannot be?--\n’Twere mercy to stamp out this aged wrong,\nDash them to earth and crunch them with the heel\nAnd make a dust of their seraphic song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "once": { - "title": "“Once”", - "body": "That day her eyes were deep as night.\nShe had the motion of the rose,\nThe bird that veers across the light,\nThe waterfall that leaps and throws\nIts irised spindrift to the sun.\nShe seemed a wind of music passing on.\n\nAlone I saw her that one day\nStand in the window of my life.\nHer sudden hand melted away\nUnder my lips, and without strife\nI held her in my arms awhile\nAnd drew into my lips her living smile,--\n\nNow many a day ago and year!\nSince when I dream and lie awake\nIn summer nights to feel her near,\nAnd from the heavy darkness break\nGlitters, till all my spirit swims\nAnd her hand hovers on my shaking limbs.\n\nIf once again before I die\nI drank the laughter of her mouth\nAnd quenched my fever utterly,\nI say, and should it cost my youth,\n’T were well! for I no more should wait\nHammering midnight on the doors of fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-passions-that-we-fought": { - "title": "“The Passions that We Fought”", - "body": "The passions that we fought with and subdued\nNever quite die. In some maimed serpent’s coil\nThey lurk, ready to spring and vindicate\nThat power was once our torture and our lord.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "service": { - "title": "“Service”", - "body": "Chide me not, darling, that I sing\nFamiliar thoughts and metres old:\nNay, do not scold\nMy spirit’s childish uttering.\n\nI know not why ’t is that or this\nI murmur to you thus or so:\nOnly I know\nIt throbs across my silences,\n\nIt blows over my heart,--a long\nInfinite wind, again, again!\nAgain! and then\nMy life kneels down into a song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sir-say-no-more": { - "title": "“Sir, Say No More”", - "body": "Sir, say no more.\nWithin me ’t is as if\nThe green and climbing eyesight of a cat\nCrawled near my mind’s poor birds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "six-oclock": { - "title": "“Six O’Clock”", - "body": "Now burst above the city’s cold twilight\nThe piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:\nFor day is done. Along the frozen docks\nThe workmen set their ragged shirts aright.\nThro’ factory doors a stream of dingy light\nFollows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks\nTo hut and home among the snow’s gray blocks.--\nI love you, human labourers. Good-night!\nGood-night to all the blackened arms that ache!\nGood-night to every sick and sweated brow,\nTo the poor girl that strength and love forsake,\nTo the poor boy who can no more! I vow\nThe victim soon shall shudder at the stake\nAnd fall in blood: we bring him even now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "they-live-enamoured-of-the-lovely-moon": { - "title": "“They Live Enamoured of the Lovely Moon”", - "body": "They lived enamoured of the lovely moon,\nThe dawn and twilight on their gentle lake.\nThen Passion marvellously born did shake\nTheir breast and drave them into the mid-noon.\nTheir lives did shrink to one desire, and soon\nThey rose fire-eyed to follow in the wake\nOf one eternal thought,--when sudden brake\nTheir hearts. They died, in miserable swoon.\nOf all their agony not a sound was heard.\nThe glory of the Earth is more than they.\nShe asks her lovely image of the day:\nA flower grows, a million boughs are green,\nAnd over moving ocean-waves the bird\nChases his shadow and is no more seen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "tho-lack-of-laurels": { - "title": "“Tho’ Lack of Laurels”", - "body": "Tho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one\nProve you our lives abortive, shall we yet\nVaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set\nTo win the guerdon which is never won.\nWitness, a purpose never is undone.\nAnd tho’ fate drain our seas of violet\nTo gather round our lives her wide-hung net,\nMemories of hopes that are not shall atone.\nNot wholly starless is the ill-starred life,\nNot all is night in failure, and the shield\nSometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife.\nAnd here while all the lowering heaven is ringed\nWith our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field\nStands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "you-say-columbus-with-his-argosies": { - "title": "“You Say, Columbus with His Argosies”", - "body": "You say, Columbus with his argosies\nWho rash and greedy took the screaming main\nAnd vanished out before the hurricane\nInto the sunset after merchandise,\nThen under western palms with simple eyes\nTrafficked and robbed and triumphed home again:\nYou say this is the glory of the brain\nAnd human life no other use than this?\nI then do answering say to you: The line\nOf wizards and of saviours, keeping trust\nIn that which made them pensive and divine,\nPasses before us like a cloud of dust.\nWhat were they? Actors, ill and mad with wine,\nAnd all their language babble and disgust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "elizabeth-drew-stoddard": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Elizabeth Drew Stoddard", - "birth": { - "year": 1823 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Drew_Stoddard", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "No melancholy days are these!\nNot where the maple changing stands,\nNot in the shade of fluttering oaks,\nNor in the bands\n\nOf twisting vines and sturdy shrubs,\nScarlet and yellow, green and brown,\nFalling, or swinging on their stalks,\nIs Sorrow’s crown.\n\nThe sparkling fields of dewy grass,\nWoodpaths and roadsides decked with flowers,\nStarred asters and the goldenrod,\nDate Autumn’s hours.\n\nThe shining banks of snowy clouds,\nSteadfast in the aerial blue,\nThe silent, shimmering, silver sea,\nTo Joy are true.\n\nMy spirit in this happy air\nCan thus embrace the dying year,\nAnd with it wrap me in a shroud\nAs bright and clear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "before-the-mirror": { - "title": "“Before the Mirror”", - "body": "Now like the Lady of Shalott,\nI dwell within an empty room,\nAnd through the day and through the night\nI sit before an ancient loom.\n\nAnd like the Lady of Shalott\nI look into a mirror wide,\nWhere shadows come, and shadows go,\nAnd ply my shuttle as they glide.\n\nNot as she wove the yellow wool,\nUlysses’ wife, Penelope;\nBy day a queen among her maids,\nBut in the night a woman, she,\n\nWho, creeping from her lonely couch,\nUnraveled all the slender woof;\nOr, with a torch, she climbed the towers,\nTo fire the fagots on the roof!\n\nBut weaving with a steady hand\nThe shadows, whether false or true,\nI put aside a doubt which asks\n“Among these phantoms what are you?”\n\nFor not with altar, tomb, or urn,\nOr long-haired Greek with hollow shield,\nOr dark-prowed ship with banks of oars,\nOr banquet in the tented field;\n\nOr Norman knight in armor clad,\nWaiting a foe where four roads meet;\nOr hawk and hound in bosky dell,\nWhere dame and page in secret greet;\n\nOr rose and lily, bud and flower,\nMy web is broidered. Nothing bright\nIs woven here: the shadows grow\nStill darker in the mirror’s light!\n\nAnd as my web grows darker too,\nAccursed seems this empty room;\nFor still I must forever weave\nThese phantoms by this ancient loom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "christmas-comes-again": { - "title": "“Christmas Comes Again”", - "body": "Let me be merry now, ’t is time;\nThe season is at hand\nFor Christmas rhyme and Christmas chime,\nClose up, and form the band.\n\nThe winter fires still burn as bright,\nThe lamp-light is as clear,\nAnd since the dead are out of sight,\nWhat hinders Christmas cheer?\n\nWhy think or speak of that abyss\nIn which lies all my Past?\nHigh festival I need not miss,\nWhile song and jest shall last.\n\nWe’ll clink and drink on Christmas Eve,\nOur ghosts can feel no wrong;\nThey revelled ere they took their leave--\nHearken, my Soldier’s Song:\n\n“The morning air doth coldly pass,\nComrades, to the saddle spring;\nThe night more bitter cold will bring\nEre dying--ere dying.\nSweetheart, come, the parting glass;\nGlass and sabre, clash, clash, clash,\nEre dying--ere dying.\nStirrup-cup and stirrup-kiss--\nDo you hope the foe we’ll miss,\nSweetheart, for this loving kiss,\nEre dying--ere dying?”\n\nThe feasts and revels of the year\nDo ghosts remember long?\nEven in memory come they here?\nListen, my Sailor’s song:\n\n“O my hearties. yo heave ho!\nAnchor’s up in Jolly Bay--\nHey!\nPipes and swipes, hob and nob--\nHey!\nMermaid Bess and Dolphin Meg,\nPaddle over Jolly Bay--\nHey!\nTars, haul in for Christmas Day,\nFor round the ’varsal deep we go;\nNever church, never bell,\nFor to tell\nOf Christmas Day.\nYo heave ho, my hearties O!\nHaul in, mates, here we lay--\nHey!”\n\nHis sword is rusting in its sheath,\nHis flag furled on the wall;\nWe’ll twine them with a holly-wreath,\nWith green leaves cover all.\n\nSo clink and drink when falls the eve;\nBut, comrades, hide from me\nTheir graves--I would not see them heave\nBeside me, like the sea.\n\nLet not my brothers come again,\nAs men dead in their prime;\nThen hold my hands, forget my pain,\nAnd strike the Christmas chime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "Ho, wind of March, speed over sea,\nFrom mountains where the snows lie deep\nThe cruel glaciers threatening creep,\nAnd witness this, my jubilee!\n\nRoar from the surf of boreal isles,\nRoar from the hidden, jagged steeps,\nWhere the destroyer never sleeps;\nRing through the iceberg’s Gothic piles!\n\nVoyage through space with your wild train,\nHarping its shrillest, searching tone,\nOr wailing deep its ancient moan,\nAnd learn how impotent your reign.\n\nThen hover by this garden bed,\nWith all your willful power, behold,\nJust breaking from the leafy mould,\nMy little primrose lift its head!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "nameless-pain": { - "title": "“Nameless Pain”", - "body": "I should be happy with my lot:\nA wife and mother--is it not\nEnough for me to be content?\nWhat other blessing could be sent?\n\nA quiet house, and homely ways,\nThat make each day like other days;\nI only see Time’s shadow now\nDarken the hair on baby’s brow!\n\nNo world’s work ever comes to me,\nNo beggar brings his misery;\nI have no power, no healing art\nWith bruised soul or broken heart.\n\nI read the poets of the age,\n’Tis lotus-eating in a cage;\nI study Art, but Art is dead\nTo one who clamors to be fed\n\nWith milk from Nature’s rugged breast,\nWho longs for Labor’s lusty rest.\nO foolish wish! I still should pine\nIf any other lot were mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "Much have I spoken of the faded leaf;\nLong have I listened to the wailing wind,\nAnd watched it ploughing through the heavy clouds,\nFor autumn charms my melancholy mind.\n\nWhen autumn comes, the poets sing a dirge:\nThe year must perish; all the flowers are dead;\nThe sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail\nRuns in the stubble, but the lark has fled!\n\nStill, autumn ushers in the Christmas cheer,\nThe holly-berries and the ivy-tree:\nThey weave a chaplet for the Old Year’s bier,\nThese waiting mourners do not sing for me!\n\nI find sweet peace in depths of autumn woods,\nWhere grow the ragged ferns and roughened moss;\nThe naked, silent trees have taught me this,--\nThe loss of beauty is not always loss!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "one-morn-i-left-him-in-his-bed": { - "title": "“One Morn I Left Him in His Bed”", - "body": "One morn I left him in his bed;\nA moment after some one said,\n“Your child is dying--he is dead.”\n\nWe made him ready for his rest,\nFlowers in his hair, and on his breast\nHis little hands together prest.\n\nWe sailed by night across the sea;\nSo, floating from the world were we,\nApart from sympathy, we Three.\n\nThe wild sea moaned, the black clouds spread\nMoving shadows on its bed,\nBut one of us lay midship dead.\n\nI saw his coffin sliding down\nThe yellow sand in yonder town,\nWhere I put on my sorrow’s crown.\n\nAnd we returned; in this drear place\nNever to see him face to face,\nI thrust aside the living race.\n\nMothers, who mourn with me today,\nOh, understand me, when I say,\nI cannot weep, I cannot pray;\n\nI gaze upon a hidden store,\nHis books, his toys, the clothes he wore,\nAnd cry, “Once more, to me, once more!”\n\nThen take, from me, this simple verse,\nThat you may know what I rehearse--\nA grief--your and my Universe!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-summer-night": { - "title": "“A Summer Night”", - "body": "I feel the breath of the summer night,\nAromatic fire:\nThe trees, the vines, the flowers are astir\nWith tender desire.\n\nThe white moths flutter about the lamp,\nEnamoured with light;\nAnd a thousand creates softly sing\nA song to the night!\n\nBut I am alone, and how can I sing\nPraises to thee?\nCome, Night! unveil the beautiful soul\nThat waiteth for me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-wife-speaks": { - "title": "“The Wife Speaks”", - "body": "Husband, today could you and I behold\nThe sun that brought us to our bridal morn\nRising so splendid in the winter sky\n(We though fair spring returned), when we were wed;\nCould the shades vanish from these fifteen years,\nWhich stand like columns guarding the approach\nTo that great temple of the double soul\nThat is as one--would you turn back, my dear,\nAnd, for the sake of Love’s mysterious dream,\nAs old as Adam and as sweet as Eve,\nTake me, as I took you, and once more go\nTowards that goal which none of us have reached?\nContesting battles which but prove a loss,\nThe victor vanquished by the wounded one;\nTeaching each other sacrifice of self,\nTrue immolation to the marriage bond;\nLearning the joys of birth, the woe of death,\nLeaving in chaos all the hopes of life--\nHeart-broken, yet with courage pressing on\nFor fame and fortune, artists needing both?\nOr, would you rather--I will acquiesce--\nSince we must choose what is, and are grown gray,\nStay in life’s desert, watch our setting sun,\nCalm as those statues in Egyptian sands,\nHand clasping hand, with patience and with peace,\nWait for a future which contains no past?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "mark-strand": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mark Strand", - "birth": { - "year": 1934 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2014 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "canadian+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇨🇦 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Strand", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "canadian" - ], - "n_poems": 18 - }, - "poems": { - "answers": { - "title": "“Answers”", - "body": "Why did you travel?\nBecause the house was cold.\nWhy did you travel?\nBecause it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise.\nWhat did you wear?\nI wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks.\nWhat did you wear?\nI wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me warm.\nWho did you sleep with?\nI slept with a different woman each night.\nWho did you sleep with?\nI slept alone. I have always slept alone.\nWhy did you lie to me?\nI always thought I told the truth.\nWhy did you lie to me?\nBecause the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.\nWhy are you going?\nBecause nothing means much to me anymore.\nWhy are you going?\nI don’t know. I have never known.\nHow long shall I wait for you?\nDo not wait for me. I am tired and I want to lie down.\nAre you tired and do you want to lie down?\nYes, I am tired and I want to lie down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "coming-to-this": { - "title": "“Coming to This”", - "body": "We have done what we wanted.\nWe have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry\nof each other, and we have welcomed grief\nand called ruin the impossible habit to break.\n\nAnd now we are here.\nThe dinner is ready and we cannot eat.\nThe meat sits in the white lake of its dish.\nThe wine waits.\n\nComing to this\nhas its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.\nWe have no heart or saving grace,\nno place to go, no reason to remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dreadful-has-already-happened": { - "title": "“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”", - "body": "The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.\nThey moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel\nthem urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.\nHeaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.\n\nA small band is playing old fashioned marches.\nMy mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.\nMy father is kissing a woman who keeps waving\nto somebody else. There are palm trees.\n\nThe hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall\nbillowy clouds move beyond them. “Go on, Boy,”\nI hear somebody say, “Go on.”\nI keep wondering if it will rain.\n\nThe sky darkens. There is thunder.\n“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,\n“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.\nThe trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.\n\nThe baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh\nwhen I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them\nout in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.\nIt was about that time I gave up.\n\nNow, when I answer the phone, his lips\nare in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered\naround a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search\nI find his feet. He is what is left of my life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "eating-poetry": { - "title": "“Eating Poetry”", - "body": "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.\nThere is no happiness like mine.\nI have been eating poetry.\n\nThe librarian does not believe what she sees.\nHer eyes are sad\nand she walks with her hands in her dress.\n\nThe poems are gone.\nThe light is dim.\nThe dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.\n\nTheir eyeballs roll,\ntheir blond legs burn like brush.\nThe poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.\n\nShe does not understand.\nWhen I get on my knees and lick her hand,\nshe screams.\n\nI am a new man.\nI snarl at her and bark.\nI romp with joy in the bookish dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-end": { - "title": "“The End”", - "body": "Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,\nWatching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like\nWhen he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,\nOr what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.\n\nWhen the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,\nWhen the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down\nNo longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.\nWhen the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky\n\nIs no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus\nAnd cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,\nNot every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing\nWhen the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-long-sad-party": { - "title": "“From the Long Sad Party”", - "body": "Someone was saying\nsomething about shadows covering the field, about\nhow things pass, how one sleeps towards morning\nand the morning goes.\n\nSomeone was saying\nhow the wind dies down but comes back,\nhow shells are the coffins of wind\nbut the weather continues.\n\nIt was a long night\nand someone said something about the moon shedding its white\non the cold field, that there was nothing ahead\nbut more of the same.\n\nSomeone mentioned\na city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles\nagainst a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.\nWe begin to believe\n\nthe night would not end.\nSomeone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.\nThen someone said something about the planets, about the stars,\nhow small they were, how far away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "futility-in-key-west": { - "title": "“Futility in Key West”", - "body": "I was stretched out on the couch, about to doze off, when I imagined a small figure asleep on a couch identical to mine. “Wake up, little man, wake up,” I cried. “The one you’re waiting for is rising from the sea, wrapped in spume, and soon will come ashore. Beneath her feet the melancholy garden will turn bright green and the breezes will be light as babies’ breath. Wake up, before this creature of the deep is gone and everything goes blank as sleep.” How hard I try to wake the little man, how hard he sleeps. And the one who rose from the sea, her moment gone, how hard she has become--how hard those burning eyes, that burning hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "giving-myself-up": { - "title": "“Giving Myself Up”", - "body": "I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.\nI give up my tongue.\nI give up my mouth which is the contstant dream of my tongue.\nI give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.\nI give up my heart which is a burning apple.\nI give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon.\nI give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain.\nI give up my hands which are ten wishes.\nI give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway.\nI give up my legs which are lovers only at night.\nI give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood.\nI give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs.\nI give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind and I give up the ghost that lives in them.\nI give up. I give up.\nAnd you will have none of it because already I am beginning again without anything.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-for-winter": { - "title": "“Lines for Winter”", - "body": "Tell yourself\nas it gets cold and gray falls from the air\nthat you will go on\nwalking, hearing\nthe same tune no matter where\nyou find yourself--\ninside the dome of dark\nor under the cracking white\nof the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.\n\nTonight as it gets cold\ntell yourself\nwhat you know which is nothing\nbut the tune your bones play\nas you keep going. And you will be able\nfor once to lie down under the small fire\nof winter stars.\n\nAnd if it happens that you cannot\ngo on or turn back and you find yourself\nwhere you will be at the end,\ntell yourself\nin that final flowing of cold through your limbs\nthat you love what you are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-minister-of-culture-gets-his-wish": { - "title": "“The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish”", - "body": "The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing hap-pens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away--the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, “Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-mother-on-an-evening-in-late-summer": { - "title": "“My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWhen the moon appears\nand a few wind-stricken barns stand out\nin the low-domed hills\nand shine with a light\nthat is veiled and dust-filled\nand that floats upon the fields,\nmy mother, with her hair in a bun,\nher face in shadow, and the smoke\nfrom their cigarette coiling close\nto the faint yellow sheen of her dress,\nstands hear the house\nand watches the seepage of late light\ndown through the sedges\nthe last gray islands of cloud\ntaken from view, and the wind\nruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat\non the black bay.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nSoon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send\nsmall carpets of lampglow\ninto the haze and the bay\nwill begin its loud heaving\nand the pines, frayed finials\nclimbing the hill, will seem to graze\nthe dim cinders of heaven.\nAnd my mother will stare into the starlanes,\nthe endless tunnels of nothing,\nand as she gazes,\nunder the hour’s spell,\nshe will think how we yield each night\nto the soundless storms of decay\nthat tear at the folding flesh,\nand she will not know\nwhy she is here\nor what she is prisoner of\nif not the conditions of love that brought her to this.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nMy mother will go indoors\nand the fields, the bare stones\nwill drift in peace, small creatures--\nthe mouse and the swift--will sleep\nat opposite ends of the house.\nOnly the cricket will be up,\nrepeating its one shrill note\nto the rotten boards of the porch,\nto the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,\nto the sea that keeps to itself.\nWhy should my mother awake?\nThe earth is not yet a garden\nabout to be turned. The stars\nare not yet bells that ring\nat night for the lost.\nIt is much too late.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-mysterious-arrival-of-an-unusual-letter": { - "title": "“The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter”", - "body": "It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mystery-and-solitude-in-topeka": { - "title": "“Mystery and Solitude in Topeka”", - "body": "Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-poetry-handbook": { - "title": "“The New Poetry Handbook”", - "body": "1. If a man understands a poem, he shall have troubles.\n\n2. If a man lives with a poem, he shall die lonely.\n\n3. If a man lives with two poems, he shall be unfaithful to one.\n\n4. If a man conceives of a poem, he shall have one less child.\n\n5. If a man conceives of two poems, he shall have two children less.\n\n6. If a man wears a crown on his head as he writes, he shall be found out.\n\n7. If a man wears no crown on his head as he writes, he shall deceive no one but himself.\n\n8. If a man gets angry at a poem, he shall be scorned by men.\n\n9. If a man continues to be angry at a poem, he shall be scorned by women.\n\n10. If a man publicly denounces poetry, his shoes will fill with urine.\n\n11. If a man gives up poetry for power, he shall have lots of power.\n\n12. If a man brags about his poems, he shall be loved by fools.\n\n13. If a man brags about his poems and loves fools, he shall write no more.\n\n14. If a man craves attention because of his poems, he shall be like a jackass in moonlight.\n\n15. If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow, he shall have a beautiful mistress.\n\n16. If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow overly, he shall drive his mistress away.\n\n17. If a man claims the poem of another, his heart shall double in size.\n\n18. If a man lets his poems go naked, he shall fear death.\n\n19. If a man fears death, he shall be saved by his poems.\n\n20. If a man does not fear death, he may or may not be saved by his poems.\n\n21. If a man finishes a poem, he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion and be kissed by white paper.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-remains": { - "title": "“The Remains”", - "body": "I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.\nI empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.\nAt night I turn back the clocks;\nI open the family album and look at myself as a boy.\n\nWhat good does it do? The hours have done their job.\nI say my own name. I say goodbye.\nThe words follow each other downwind.\nI love my wife but send her away.\n\nMy parents rise out of their thrones\ninto the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?\nTime tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.\nI empty myself of my life and my life remains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-room": { - "title": "“The Room”", - "body": "It is an old story, the way it happens\nsometimes in winter, sometimes not.\nThe listener falls to sleep,\nthe doors to the closets of his unhappiness open\n\nand into his room the misfortunes come--\ndeath by daybreak, death by nightfall,\ntheir wooden wings bruising the air,\ntheir shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.\n\nThere is a need for surprise endings;\nthe green field where cows burn like newsprint,\nwhere the farmer sits and stares,\nwhere nothing, when it happens, is never terrible enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "so-you-say": { - "title": "“So You Say”", - "body": "It is all in the mind, you say, and has\nnothing to do with happiness. The coming of cold,\nthe coming of heat, the mind has all the time in the world.\nYou take my arm and say something will happen,\nsomething unusual for which we were always prepared,\nlike the sun arriving after a day in Asia,\nlike the moon departing after a night with us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-story-of-our-lives": { - "title": "“The Story of Our Lives”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWe are reading the story of our lives\nwhich takes place in a room.\nThe room looks out on a street.\nThere is no one there,\nno sound of anything.\nThe tress are heavy with leaves,\nthe parked cars never move.\nWe keep turning the pages, hoping for something,\nsomething like mercy or change,\na black line that would bind us\nor keep us apart.\nThe way it is, it would seem\nthe book of our lives is empty.\nThe furniture in the room is never shifted,\nand the rugs become darker each time\nour shadows pass over them.\nIt is almost as if the room were the world.\nWe sit beside each other on the couch,\nreading about the couch.\nWe say it is ideal.\nIt is ideal.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nWe are reading the story of our lives,\nas though we were in it,\nas though we had written it.\nThis comes up again and again.\nIn one of the chapters\nI lean back and push the book aside\nbecause the book says\nit is what I am doing.\nI lean back and begin to write about the book.\nI write that I wish to move beyond the book.\nBeyond my life into another life.\nI put the pen down.\nThe book says: “He put the pen down\nand turned and watched her reading\nthe part about herself falling in love.”\nThe book is more accurate than we can imagine.\nI lean back and watch you read\nabout the man across the street.\nThey built a house there,\nand one day a man walked out of it.\nYou fell in love with him\nbecause you knew that he would never visit you,\nwould never know you were waiting.\nNight after night you would say\nthat he was like me.\nI lean back and watch you grow older without me.\nSunlight falls on your silver hair.\nThe rugs, the furniture,\nseem almost imaginary now.\n“She continued to read.\nShe seemed to consider his absence\nof no special importance,\nas someone on a perfect day will consider\nthe weather a failure\nbecause it did not change his mind.”\nYou narrow your eyes.\nYou have the impulse to close the book\nwhich describes my resistance:\nhow when I lean back I imagine\nmy life without you, imagine moving\ninto another life, another book.\nIt describes your dependence on desire,\nhow the momentary disclosures\nof purpose make you afraid.\nThe book describes much more than it should.\nIt wants to divide us.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nThis morning I woke and believed\nthere was no more to to our lives\nthan the story of our lives.\nWhen you disagreed, I pointed\nto the place in the book where you disagreed.\nYou fell back to sleep and I began to read\nthose mysterious parts you used to guess at\nwhile they were being written\nand lose interest in after they became\npart of the story.\nIn one of them cold dresses of moonlight\nare draped over the chairs in a man’s room.\nHe dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost,\nwho sits in a garden and waits.\nShe believes that love is a sacrifice.\nThe part describes her death\nand she is never named,\nwhich is one of the things\nyou could not stand about her.\nA little later we learn\nthat the dreaming man lives\nin the new house across the street.\nThis morning after you fell back to sleep\nI began to turn the pages early in the book:\nit was like dreaming of childhood,\nso much seemed to vanish,\nso much seemed to come to life again.\nI did not know what to do.\nThe book said: “In those moments it was his book.\nA bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.\nHe was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,\nanxious in his own kingdom.”\n\n\n# 4.\n\nBefore you woke\nI read another part that described your absence\nand told how you sleep to reverse\nthe progress of your life.\nI was touched by my own loneliness as I read,\nknowing that what I feel is often the crude\nand unsuccessful form of a story\nthat may never be told.\n“He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,\nto see her in the refuse, the discarded\nplots of old dreams, the costumes and masks\nof unattainable states.\nIt was as if he were drawn\nirresistably to failure.”\nIt was hard to keep reading.\nI was tired and wanted to give up.\nThe book seemed aware of this.\nIt hinted at changing the subject.\nI waited for you to wake not knowing\nhow long I waited,\nand it seemed that I was no longer reading.\nI heard the wind passing\nlike a stream of sighs\nand I heard the shiver of leaves\nin the trees outside the window.\nIt would be in the book.\nEverything would be there.\nI looked at your face\nand I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth …\n\n\n# 5.\n\nIf only there were a perfect moment in the book;\nif only we could live in that moment,\nwe could being the book again\nas if we had not written it,\nas if we were not in it.\nBut the dark approaches\nto any page are too numerous\nand the escapes are too narrow.\nWe read through the day.\nEach page turning is like a candle\nmoving through the mind.\nEach moment is like a hopeless cause.\nIf only we could stop reading.\n“He never wanted to read another book\nand she kept staring into the street.\nThe cars were still there,\nthe deep shade of trees covered them.\nThe shades were drawn in the new house.\nMaybe the man who lived there,\nthe man she loved, was reading\nthe story of another life.\nShe imagine a bare parlor,\na cold fireplace, a man sitting\nwriting a letter to a woman\nwho has sacrificed her life for love.”\nIf there were a perfect moment in the book,\nit would be the last.\nThe book never discusses the causes of love.\nIt claims confusion is a necessary good.\nIt never explains. It only reveals.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThe day goes on.\nWe study what we remember.\nWe look into the mirror across the room.\nWe cannot bear to be alone.\nThe book goes on.\n“They became silent and did not know how to begin\nthe dialogue which was necessary.\nIt was words that created divisions in the first place,\nthat created loneliness.\nThey waited\nthey would turn the pages, hoping\nsomething would happen.\nThey would patch up their lives in secret:\neach defeat forgiven because it could not be tested,\neach pain rewarded because it was unreal.\nThey did nothing.”\n\n\n# 7.\n\nThe book will not survive.\nWe are the living proof of that.\nIt is dark outside, in the room it is darker.\nI hear your breathing.\nYou are asking me if I am tired,\nif I want to keep reading.\nYes, I am tired.\nYes, I want to keep reading.\nI say yes to everything.\nYou cannot hear me.\nThey sat beside each other on the couch.\nThey were the copies, the tired phantoms\nof something they had been before.\nThe attitudes they took were jaded.\nThey stared into the book\nand were horrified by their innocence,\ntheir reluctance to give up.\nThey sat beside each other on the couch.\nThey were determined to accept the truth.\nWhatever it was they would accept it.\nThe book would have to be written\nand would have to be read.\nThey are the book and they are\nnothing else.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "alexander-sumarokov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexander Sumarokov", - "birth": { - "year": 1717 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1777 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Sumarokov", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "in-vain-i-hide-my-hearts-fierce-pain": { - "title": "“In vain I hide my heart’s fierce pain …”", - "body": "In vain I hide my heart’s fierce pain,\nIn vain pretend to inner calm.\nI can’t be calm a single hour,\nI can’t no matter how I try.\nMy heart by sighs, my eyes by tears,\nreveal the secret misery.\nYou make all my efforts vain,\nyou, who stole my liberty!\n\nBringing a savage fate to me,\nyou troubled my spirit’s peace,\nyou changed my freedom to a jail,\nyou turned my delight to sorrow.\nAnd secretly, to my bitterest hurt,\nperhaps you sigh for some other woman,\nperhaps devoured by a useless passion,\nas I for you, you suffer too for her.\n\nI long to see you: when I do I’m mad,\nanxious, lest my eyes give me away:\nI’m troubled in your presence, in your absence\nI’m sad that you can’t know how I love.\nShame tries to drive desire from my heart\nwhile love in turn tries to drive out shame.\nAnd in this fierce conflict thought is clouded,\nthe heart is torn, it suffers, and it burns.\n\nSo I fling myself from torment to torment.\nI want to show my heart, ashamed to do it,\nI don’t know what I want, oh, that’s true,\nwhat I do know is I’m filled with sorrow.\nI know my mind’s held prisoner by you,\nwherever I am it conjures your dear image:\nI know, consumed by the cruellest passion,\nthere’s no way to forget you on this earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alec Vagapov" - } - }, - "my-fair-girl-dont-waist-your-time-for-nothing": { - "title": "“My fair girl, don’t waist your time for nothing …”", - "body": "My fair girl, don’t waist your time for nothing, easily,\nLove someone,--all is vanity without love,\nBe nice and good, don’t lose the charm you have,\nSo you might not regret you’ve lived a life of misery.\n\nLove while you’re young and while your heart is ardent:\nYou’ll change when youth is gone, I should presume.\nTwine wreaths while flowers in the garden bloom,\nTake walks in spring, in autumn you’ll be saddened.\n\nLook at the rosy flower, view it at the time\nWhen it has grown dim and faded, past its prime.\nLikewise, your charm will fade and disappear,\nso do not waste your time before you’ve seen your day\n\nRemember, nobody will ever look at you, my dear,\nWhen, like the rose, you fade and waste away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alec Vagapov", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "you-looked-for-me-but-now-that-time-is-gone-for-ever": { - "title": "“You looked for me but now that time is gone for ever …”", - "body": "You looked for me but now that time is gone for ever,\nAnd all the joy we shared is lost, as I can see.\nYou are unfaithful to me, and you lost my favour,\nYou’re quite different from what you used to be.\n\nMy moans and grieves are torments\nYou know how it can be.\nRecall the happy moments\nWhen you did care for me.\n\nLook at the places where you and I have dated\nThey’ll help us to recall the way it used to be.\nWhere are my joys? Where is your passion, fated?\nTheу’re gone and never ever will come back to me.\n\nAnother life is here;\nBut did I wait for it?\nGone are my life, so dear,\nMy hope, and dream, so sweet.\n\nI am unhappy to have met you, so elated,\nIt started with the painful torments that I feel,\nI was unhappy to be charmed by you and tempted\nAnd worst unhappy to adore and love you still.\n\nYou caused an inflammation\nAnd heated up my blood.\nWhy have you turned affection\nTo enmity, so hard?\n\nBut what’s the use of worrying and grieving\nWhen, having lost my freedom, my passion I retain.\nAnd what’s the use of blaming and revealing,\nYou do not love me--all my arguments are vain.\n\nYou’ve overwhelmed me, really,\nForgetting all at one:\nThe way you loved me dearly,\nThe time when we had fun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alec Vagapov" - } - } - } - }, - "algernon-charles-swinburne": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Algernon Charles Swinburne", - "birth": { - "year": 1837 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Charles_Swinburne", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 55 - }, - "poems": { - "after-death": { - "title": "“After Death”", - "body": "The four boards of the coffin lid\nHeard all the dead man did.\n\nThe first curse was in his mouth,\nMade of grave’s mould and deadly drouth.\n\nThe next curse was in his head,\nMade of God’s work discomfited.\n\nThe next curse was in his hands,\nMade out of two grave-bands.\n\nThe next curse was in his feet,\nMade out of a grave-sheet.\n\n“I had fair coins red and white,\nAnd my name was as great light;\n\nI had fair clothes green and red,\nAnd strong gold bound round my head.\n\nBut no meat comes in my mouth,\nNow I fare as the worm doth;\n\nAnd no gold binds in my hair,\nNow I fare as the blind fare.\n\nMy live thews were of great strength,\nNow am I waxen a span’s length;\n\nMy live sides were full of lust,\nNow are they dried with dust.”\n\nThe first board spake and said:\n“Is it best eating flesh or bread?”\n\nThe second answered it:\n“Is wine or honey the more sweet?”\n\nThe third board spake and said:\n“Is red gold worth a girl’s gold head?”\n\nThe fourth made answer thus:\n“All these things are as one with us.”\n\nThe dead man asked of them:\n“Is the green land stained brown with flame?\n\nHave they hewn my son for beasts to eat,\nAnd my wife’s body for beasts’ meat?\n\nHave they boiled my maid in a brass pan,\nAnd built a gallows to hang my man?”\n\nThe boards said to him:\n“This is a lewd thing that ye deem.\n\nYour wife has gotten a golden bed,\nAll the sheets are sewn with red.\n\nYour son has gotten a coat of silk,\nThe sleeves are soft as curded milk.\n\nYour maid has gotten a kirtle new,\nAll the skirt has braids of blue.\n\nYour man has gotten both ring and glove,\nWrought well for eyes to love.”\n\nThe dead man answered thus:\n“What good gift shall God give us?”\n\nThe boards answered him anon:\n“Flesh to feed hell’s worm upon.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "after-sunset": { - "title": "“After Sunset”", - "body": "_“Si quis piorum Manibus locus.”_\n\n# I.\n\nStraight from the sun’s grave in the deep clear west\nA sweet strong wind blows, glad of life: and I,\nUnder the soft keen stardawn whence the sky\nTakes life renewed, and all night’s godlike breast\nPalpitates, gradually revealed at rest\nBy growth and change of ardours felt on high,\nMake onward, till the last flame fall and die\nAnd all the world by night’s broad hand lie blest.\nHaply, meseems, as from that edge of death,\nWhereon the day lies dark, a brightening breath\nBlows more of benediction than the morn,\nSo from the graves whereon grief gazing saith\nThat half our heart of life there lies forlorn\nMay light or breath at least of hope be born.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe wind was soft before the sunset fled:\nNow, while the cloud-enshrouded corpse of day\nIs lowered along a red funereal way\nDown to the dark that knows not white from red,\nA clear sheer breeze against the night makes head,\nSerene, but sure of life as ere a ray\nSprings, or the dusk of dawn knows red from grey,\nBeing as a soul that knows not quick from dead.\nFrom far beyond the sunset, far above,\nFull toward the starry soundless east it blows\nBright as a child’s breath breathing on a rose,\nSmooth to the sense as plume of any dove;\nTill more and more as darkness grows and glows\nSilence and night seem likest life and love.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIf light of life outlive the set of sun\nThat men call death and end of all things, then\nHow should not that which life held best for men\nAnd proved most precious, though it seem undone\nBy force of death and woful victory won,\nBe first and surest of revival, when\nDeath shall bow down to life arisen again?\nSo shall the soul seen be the self-same one\nThat looked and spake with even such lips and eyes\nAs love shall doubt not then to recognise,\nAnd all bright thoughts and smiles of all time past\nRevive, transfigured, but in spirit and sense\nNone other than we knew, for evidence\nThat love’s last mortal word was not his last.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "from-anactoria": { - "title": "From “Anactoria”", - "body": "Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine,\nExcept these kisses of my lips on thine\nBrand them with immortality; but me--\nMen shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea,\nNor mix their hearts with music, nor behold\nCast forth of heaven, with feet of awful gold\nAnd plumeless wings that make the bright air blind,\nLightning, with thunder for a hound behind\nHunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown,\nBut in the light and laughter, in the moan\nAnd music, and in grasp of lip and hand\nAnd shudder of water that makes felt on land\nThe immeasurable tremor of all the sea,\nMemories shall mix and metaphors of me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "at-eleusis": { - "title": "“At Eleusis”", - "body": "Men of Eleusis, ye that with long staves\nSit in the market-houses, and speak words\nMade sweet with wisdom as the rare wine is\nThickened with honey; and ye sons of these\nWho in the glad thick streets go up and down\nFor pastime or grave traffic or mere chance;\nAnd all fair women having rings of gold\nOn hands or hair; and chiefest over these\nI name you, daughters of this man the king,\nWho dipping deep smooth pitchers of pure brass\nUnder the bubbled wells, till each round lip\nStooped with loose gurgle of waters incoming,\nFound me an old sick woman, lamed and lean,\nBeside a growth of builded olive-boughs\nWhence multiplied thick song of thick-plumed throats--\nAlso wet tears filled up my hollow hands\nBy reason of my crying into them--\nAnd pitied me; for as cold water ran\nAnd washed the pitchers full from lip to lip,\nSo washed both eyes full the strong salt of tears.\nAnd ye put water to my mouth, made sweet\nWith brown hill-berries; so in time I spoke\nAnd gathered my loose knees from under me.\nMoreover in the broad fair halls this month\nHave I found space and bountiful abode\nTo please me. I Demeter speak of this,\nWho am the mother and the mate of things:\nFor as ill men by drugs or singing words\nShut the doors inward of the narrowed womb\nLike a lock bolted with round iron through,\nThus I shut up the body and sweet mouth\nOf all soft pasture and the tender land,\nSo that no seed can enter in by it\nThough one sow thickly, nor some grain get out\nPast the hard clods men cleave and bite with steel\nTo widen the sealed lips of them for use.\nNone of you is there in the peopled street\nBut knows how all the dry-drawn furrows ache\nWith no green spot made count of in the black:\nHow the wind finds no comfortable grass\nNor is assuaged with bud nor breath of herbs;\nAnd in hot autumn when ye house the stacks,\nAll fields are helpless in the sun, all trees\nStand as a man stripped out of all but skin.\nNevertheless ye sick have help to get\nBy means and stablished ordinance of God;\nFor God is wiser than a good man is.\nBut never shall new grass be sweet in earth\nTill I get righted of my wound and wrong\nBy changing counsel of ill-minded Zeus.\nFor of all other gods is none save me\nClothed with like power to build and break the year.\nI make the lesser green begin, when spring\nTouches not earth but with one fearful foot;\nAnd as a careful gilder with grave art\nSoberly colours and completes the face,\nMouth, chin and all, of some sweet work in stone,\nI carve the shapes of grass and tender corn\nAnd colour the ripe edges and long spikes\nWith the red increase and the grace of gold,\nNo tradesman in soft wools is cunninger\nTo kill the secret of the fat white fleece\nWith stains of blue and purple wrought in it.\nThree moons were made and three moons burnt away\nWhile I held journey hither out of Crete\nComfortless, tended by grave Hecate\nWhom my wound stung with double iron point;\nFor all my face was like a cloth wrung out\nWith close and weeping wrinkles, and both lids\nSodden with salt continuance of tears.\nFor Hades and the sidelong will of Zeus\nAnd that lame wisdom that has writhen feet,\nCunning, begotten in the bed of Shame,\nThese three took evil will at me, and made\nSuch counsel that when time got wing to fly\nThis Hades out of summer and low fields\nForced the bright body of Persephone:\nOut of pure grass, where she lying down, red flowers\nMade their sharp little shadows on her sides,\nPale heat, pale colour on pale maiden flesh--\nAnd chill water slid over her reddening feet,\nKilling the throbs in their soft blood; and birds,\nPerched next her elbow and pecking at her hair,\nStretched their necks more to see her than even to sing.\nA sharp thing is it I have need to say;\nFor Hades holding both white wrists of hers\nUnloosed the girdle and with knot by knot\nBound her between his wheels upon the seat,\nBound her pure body, holiest yet and dear\nTo me and God as always, clothed about\nWith blossoms loosened as her knees went down.\nLet fall as she let go of this and this\nBy tens and twenties, tumbled to her feet,\nWhite waifs or purple of the pasturage.\nTherefore with only going up and down\nMy feet were wasted, and the gracious air,\nTo me discomfortable and dun, became\nAs weak smoke blowing in the under world.\nAnd finding in the process of ill days\nWhat part had Zeus herein, and how as mate\nHe coped with Hades, yokefellow in sin,\nI set my lips against the meat of gods\nAnd drank not neither ate or slept in heaven.\nNor in the golden greeting of their mouths\nDid ear take note of me, nor eye at all\nTrack my feet going in the ways of them.\nLike a great fire on some strait slip of land\nBetween two washing inlets of wet sea\nThat burns the grass up to each lip of beach\nAnd strengthens, waxing in the growth of wind,\nSo burnt my soul in me at heaven and earth,\nEach way a ruin and a hungry plague,\nVisible evil; nor could any night\nPut cool between mine eyelids, nor the sun\nWith competence of gold fill out my want.\nYea so my flame burnt up the grass and stones,\nShone to the salt-white edges of thin sea,\nDistempered all the gracious work, and made\nSick change, unseasonable increase of days\nAnd scant avail of seasons; for by this\nThe fair gods faint in hollow heaven: there comes\nNo taste of burnings of the twofold fat\nTo leave their palates smooth, nor in their lips\nSoft rings of smoke and weak scent wandering;\nAll cattle waste and rot, and their ill smell\nGrows alway from the lank unsavoury flesh\nThat no man slays for offering; the sea\nAnd waters moved beneath the heath and corn\nPreserve the people of fin-twinkling fish,\nAnd river-flies feed thick upon the smooth;\nBut all earth over is no man or bird\n(Except the sweet race of the kingfisher)\nThat lacks not and is wearied with much loss.\nMeantime the purple inward of the house\nWas softened with all grace of scent and sound\nIn ear and nostril perfecting my praise;\nFaint grape-flowers and cloven honey-cake\nAnd the just grain with dues of the shed salt\nMade me content: yet my hand loosened not\nIts gripe upon your harvest all year long.\nWhile I, thus woman-muffled in wan flesh\nAnd waste externals of a perished face,\nPreserved the levels of my wrath and love\nPatiently ruled; and with soft offices\nCooled the sharp noons and busied the warm nights\nIn care of this my choice, this child my choice,\nTriptolemus, the king’s selected son:\nThat this fair yearlong body, which hath grown\nStrong with strange milk upon the mortal lip\nAnd nerved with half a god, might so increase\nOutside the bulk and the bare scope of man:\nAnd waxen over large to hold within\nBase breath of yours and this impoverished air,\nI might exalt him past the flame of stars,\nThe limit and walled reach of the great world.\nTherefore my breast made common to his mouth\nImmortal savours, and the taste whereat\nTwice their hard life strains out the coloured veins\nAnd twice its brain confirms the narrow shell.\nAlso at night, unwinding cloth from cloth\nAs who unhusks an almond to the white\nAnd pastures curiously the purer taste,\nI bared the gracious limbs and the soft feet,\nUnswaddled the weak hands, and in mid ash\nLaid the sweet flesh of either feeble side,\nMore tender for impressure of some touch\nThan wax to any pen; and lit around\nFire, and made crawl the white worm-shapen flame,\nAnd leap in little angers spark by spark\nAt head at once and feet; and the faint hair\nHissed with rare sprinkles in the closer curl,\nAnd like scaled oarage of a keen thin fish\nIn sea-water, so in pure fire his feet\nStruck out, and the flame bit not in his flesh,\nBut like a kiss it curled his lip, and heat\nFluttered his eyelids; so each night I blew\nThe hot ash red to purge him to full god.\nIll is it when fear hungers in the soul\nFor painful food, and chokes thereon, being fed;\nAnd ill slant eyes interpret the straight sun,\nBut in their scope its white is wried to black:\nBy the queen Metaneira mean I this;\nFor with sick wrath upon her lips, and heart\nNarrowing with fear the spleenful passages,\nShe thought to thread this web’s fine ravel out,\nNor leave her shuttle split in combing it;\nTherefore she stole on us, and with hard sight\nPeered, and stooped close; then with pale open mouth\nAs the fire smote her in the eyes between\nCried, and the child’s laugh, sharply shortening\nAs fire doth under rain, fell off; the flame\nWrithed once all through and died, and in thick dark\nTears fell from mine on the child’s weeping eyes,\nEyes dispossessed of strong inheritance\nAnd mortal fallen anew. Who not the less\nFrom bud of beard to pale-grey flower of hair\nShall wax vinewise to a lordly vine, whose grapes\nBleed the red heavy blood of swoln soft wine,\nSubtle with sharp leaves’ intricacy, until\nFull of white years and blossom of hoary days\nI take him perfected; for whose one sake\nI am thus gracious to the least who stands\nFilleted with white wool and girt upon\nAs he whose prayer endures upon the lip\nAnd falls not waste: wherefore let sacrifice\nBurn and run red in all the wider ways;\nSeeing I have sworn by the pale temples’ band\nAnd poppied hair of gold Persephone\nSad-tressed and pleached low down about her brows,\nAnd by the sorrow in her lips, and death\nHer dumb and mournful-mouthèd minister,\nMy word for you is eased of its harsh weight\nAnd doubled with soft promise; and your king\nTriptolemus, this Celeus dead and swathed\nPurple and pale for golden burial,\nShall be your helper in my services,\nDividing earth and reaping fruits thereof\nIn fields where wait, well-girt, well-wreathen, all\nThe heavy-handed seasons all year through;\nSaving the choice of warm spear-headed grain,\nAnd stooping sharp to the slant-sided share\nAll beasts that furrow the remeasured land\nWith their bowed necks of burden equable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "august": { - "title": "“August”", - "body": "There were four apples on the bough,\nHalf gold half red, that one might know\nThe blood was ripe inside the core;\nThe colour of the leaves was more\nLike stems of yellow corn that grow\nThrough all the gold June meadow’s floor.\n\nThe warm smell of the fruit was good\nTo feed on, and the split green wood,\nWith all its bearded lips and stains\nOf mosses in the cloven veins,\nMost pleasant, if one lay or stood\nIn sunshine or in happy rains.\n\nThere were four apples on the tree,\nRed stained through gold, that all might see\nThe sun went warm from core to rind;\nThe green leaves made the summer blind\nIn that soft place they kept for me\nWith golden apples shut behind.\n\nThe leaves caught gold across the sun,\nAnd where the bluest air begun\nThirsted for song to help the heat;\nAs I to feel my lady’s feet\nDraw close before the day were done;\nBoth lips grew dry with dreams of it.\n\nIn the mute August afternoon\nThey trembled to some undertune\nOf music in the silver air;\nGreat pleasure was it to be there\nTill green turned duskier and the moon\nColoured the corn-sheaves like gold hair.\n\nThat August time it was delight\nTo watch the red moons wane to white\n’Twixt grey seamed stems of apple-trees;\nA sense of heavy harmonies\nGrew on the growth of patient night,\nMore sweet than shapen music is.\n\nBut some three hours before the moon\nThe air, still eager from the noon,\nFlagged after heat, not wholly dead;\nAgainst the stem I leant my head;\nThe colour soothed me like a tune,\nGreen leaves all round the gold and red.\n\nI lay there till the warm smell grew\nMore sharp, when flecks of yellow dew\nBetween the round ripe leaves had blurred\nThe rind with stain and wet; I heard\nA wind that blew and breathed and blew,\nToo weak to alter its one word.\n\nThe wet leaves next the gentle fruit\nFelt smoother, and the brown tree-root\nFelt the mould warmer: I too felt\n(As water feels the slow gold melt\nRight through it when the day burns mute)\nThe peace of time wherein love dwelt.\n\nThere were four apples on the tree,\nGold stained on red that all might see\nThe sweet blood filled them to the core:\nThe colour of her hair is more\nLike stems of fair faint gold, that be\nMown from the harvest’s middle floor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "autumn-and-winter": { - "title": "“Autumn and Winter”", - "body": "Three months bade wane and wax the wintering moon\nBetween two dates of death, while men were fain\nYet of the living light that all too soon\n Three months bade wane.\n\nCold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,\nSaw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune\nThat death smote silent when he smote again.\n\nFirst went my friend, in life’s mid light of noon,\nWho loved the lord of music: then the strain\nWhence earth was kindled like as heaven in June\n Three months bade wane.\n\nA herald soul before its master’s flying\nTouched by some few moons first the darkling goal\nWhere shades rose up to greet the shade, espying\n A herald soul;\n\nShades of dead lords of music, who control\nMen living by the might of men undying,\nWith strength of strains that make delight of dole.\n\nThe deep dense dust on death’s dim threshold lying\nTrembled with sense of kindling sound that stole\nThrough darkness, and the night gave ear, descrying\n A herald soul.\n\nOne went before, one after, but so fast\nThey seem gone hence together, from the shore\nWhence we now gaze: yet ere the mightier passed\n One went before;\n\nOne whose whole heart of love, being set of yore\nOn that high joy which music lends us, cast\nLight round him forth of music’s radiant store.\n\nThen went, while earth on winter glared aghast,\nThe mortal god he worshipped, through the door\nWherethrough so late, his lover to the last,\n One went before.\n\nA star had set an hour before the sun\nSank from the skies wherethrough his heart’s pulse yet\nThrills audibly: but few took heed, or none,\n A star had set.\n\nAll heaven rings back, sonorous with regret,\nThe deep dirge of the sunset: how should one\nSoft star be missed in all the concourse met?\n\nBut, O sweet single heart whose work is done,\nWhose songs are silent, how should I forget\nThat ere the sunset’s fiery goal was won\n A star had set?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "ave-atque-vale": { - "title": "“Ave Atque Vale”", - "body": "Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,\n Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?\n Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,\nOr simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,\n Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,\n Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?\nOr wilt thou rather, as on earth before,\n Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat\n And full of bitter summer, but more sweet\nTo thee than gleanings of a northern shore\n Trod by no tropic feet?\n\nFor always thee the fervid languid glories\n Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;\n Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs\nWhere the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,\n The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave\n That knows not where is that Leucadian grave\nWhich hides too deep the supreme head of song.\n Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,\n The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear\nHither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,\n Blind gods that cannot spare.\n\nThou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,\n Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:\n Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,\nBare to thy subtler eye, but for none other\n Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;\n The hidden harvest of luxurious time,\nSin without shape, and pleasure without speech;\n And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep\n Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;\nAnd with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,\n Seeing as men sow men reap.\n\nO sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,\n That were athirst for sleep and no more life\n And no more love, for peace and no more strife!\nNow the dim gods of death have in their keeping\n Spirit and body and all the springs of song,\n Is it well now where love can do no wrong,\nWhere stingless pleasure has no foam or fang\n Behind the unopening closure of her lips?\n Is it not well where soul from body slips\nAnd flesh from bone divides without a pang\n As dew from flower-bell drips?\n\nIt is enough; the end and the beginning\n Are one thing to thee, who art past the end.\n O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend,\nFor thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,\n No triumph and no labour and no lust,\n Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.\nO quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought,\n Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night\n With obscure finger silences your sight,\nNor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,\n Sleep, and have sleep for light.\n\nNow all strange hours and all strange loves are over,\n Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,\n Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet\nOf some pale Titan-woman like a lover,\n Such as thy vision here solicited,\n Under the shadow of her fair vast head,\nThe deep division of prodigious breasts,\n The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,\n The weight of awful tresses that still keep\nThe savour and shade of old-world pine-forests\n Where the wet hill-winds weep?\n\nHast thou found any likeness for thy vision?\n O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,\n Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?\nWhat of despair, of rapture, of derision,\n What of life is there, what of ill or good?\n Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood?\nDoes the dim ground grow any seed of ours,\n The faint fields quicken any terrene root,\n In low lands where the sun and moon are mute\nAnd all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers\n At all, or any fruit?\n\nAlas, but though my flying song flies after,\n O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet\n Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet,\nSome dim derision of mysterious laughter\n From the blind tongueless warders of the dead,\n Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine’s veiled head,\nSome little sound of unregarded tears\n Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,\n And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs--\nThese only, these the hearkening spirit hears,\n Sees only such things rise.\n\nThou art far too far for wings of words to follow,\n Far too far off for thought or any prayer.\n What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?\nWhat ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?\n Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,\n Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,\nOur dreams pursue our dead and do not find.\n Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,\n The low light fails us in elusive skies,\nStill the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind\n Are still the eluded eyes.\n\nNot thee, O never thee, in all time’s changes,\n Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,\n The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll\nI lay my hand on, and not death estranges\n My spirit from communion of thy song--\n These memories and these melodies that throng\nVeiled porches of a Muse funereal--\n These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold\n As though a hand were in my hand to hold,\nOr through mine ears a mourning musical\n Of many mourners rolled.\n\nI among these, I also, in such station\n As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods,\n And offering to the dead made, and their gods,\nThe old mourners had, standing to make libation,\n I stand, and to the gods and to the dead\n Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed\nOffering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,\n And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,\n And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,\nAnd lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb\n A curl of severed hair.\n\nBut by no hand nor any treason stricken,\n Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,\n The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,\nThou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken\n There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear\n Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear\nDown the opening leaves of holy poets’ pages.\n Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;\n But bending us-ward with memorial urns\nThe most high Muses that fulfil all ages\n Weep, and our God’s heart yearns.\n\nFor, sparing of his sacred strength, not often\n Among us darkling here the lord of light\n Makes manifest his music and his might\nIn hearts that open and in lips that soften\n With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.\n Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,\nAnd nourished them indeed with bitter bread;\n Yet surely from his hand thy soul’s food came,\n The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame\nWas lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed\n Who feeds our hearts with fame.\n\nTherefore he too now at thy soul’s sunsetting,\n God of all suns and songs, he too bends down\n To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown,\nAnd save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.\n Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,\n Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,\nMourns thee of many his children the last dead,\n And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs\n Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,\nAnd over thine irrevocable head\n Sheds light from the under skies.\n\nAnd one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,\n And stains with tears her changing bosom chill:\n That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,\nThat thing transformed which was the Cytherean,\n With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine\n Long since, and face no more called Erycine;\nA ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.\n Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell\n Did she, a sad and second prey, compel\nInto the footless places once more trod,\n And shadows hot from hell.\n\nAnd now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,\n No choral salutation lure to light\n A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night\nAnd love’s tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.\n There is no help for these things; none to mend\n And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,\nWill make death clear or make life durable.\n Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine\n And with wild notes about this dust of thine\nAt least I fill the place where white dreams dwell\n And wreathe an unseen shrine.\n\nSleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,\n If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;\n And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.\nOut of the mystic and the mournful garden\n Where all day through thine hands in barren braid\n Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,\nGreen buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey,\n Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,\n Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,\nShall death not bring us all as thee one day\n Among the days departed?\n\nFor thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,\n Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.\n Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,\nAnd chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,\n With sadder than the Niobean womb,\n And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.\nContent thee, howsoe’er, whose days are done;\n There lies not any troublous thing before,\n Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,\nFor whom all winds are quiet as the sun,\n All waters as the shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-babys-death": { - "title": "“A Baby’s Death”", - "body": "A little soul scarce fledged for earth\nTakes wing with heaven again for goal\nEven while we hailed as fresh from birth\n A little soul.\n\nOur thoughts ring sad as bells that toll,\nNot knowing beyond this blind world’s girth\nWhat things are writ in heaven’s full scroll.\n\nOur fruitfulness is there but dearth,\nAnd all things held in time’s control\nSeem there, perchance, ill dreams, not worth\n A little soul.\n\nThe little feet that never trod\nEarth, never strayed in field or street,\nWhat hand leads upward back to God\n The little feet?\n\nA rose in June’s most honied heat,\nWhen life makes keen the kindling sod,\nWas not so soft and warm and sweet.\n\nTheir pilgrimage’s period\nA few swift moons have seen complete\nSince mother’s hands first clasped and shod\n The little feet.\n\nThe little hands that never sought\nEarth’s prizes, worthless all as sands,\nWhat gift has death, God’s servant, brought\n The little hands?\n\nWe ask: but love’s self silent stands,\nLove, that lends eyes and wings to thought\nTo search where death’s dim heaven expands.\n\nEre this, perchance, though love know nought,\nFlowers fill them, grown in lovelier lands,\nWhere hands of guiding angels caught\n The little hands.\n\nThe little eyes that never knew\nLight other than of dawning skies,\nWhat new life now lights up anew\n The little eyes?\n\nWho knows but on their sleep may rise\nSuch light as never heaven let through\nTo lighten earth from Paradise?\n\nNo storm, we know, may change the blue\nSoft heaven that haply death descries\nNo tears, like these in ours, bedew\n The little eyes.\n\nWas life so strange, so sad the sky,\n So strait the wide world’s range,\nHe would not stay to wonder why\n Was life so strange?\n\nWas earth’s fair house a joyless grange\n Beside that house on high\nWhence Time that bore him failed to estrange?\n\nThat here at once his soul put by\n All gifts of time and change,\nAnd left us heavier hearts to sigh\n “Was life so strange?”\n\nAngel by name love called him, seeing so fair\n The sweet small frame;\nMeet to be called, if ever man’s child were,\n Angel by name.\n\nRose-bright and warm from heaven’s own heart he came,\n And might not bear\nThe cloud that covers earth’s wan face with shame.\n\nHis little light of life was all too rare\n And soft a flame:\nHeaven yearned for him till angels hailed him there\n Angel by name.\n\nThe song that smiled upon his birthday here\nWeeps on the grave that holds him undefiled\nWhose loss makes bitterer than a soundless tear\n The song that smiled.\n\nHis name crowned once the mightiest ever styled\nSovereign of arts, and angel: fate and fear\nKnew then their master, and were reconciled.\n\nBut we saw born beneath some tenderer sphere\nMichael, an angel and a little child,\nWhose loss bows down to weep upon his bier\n The song that smiled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "a-ballad-of-burdens": { - "title": "“A Ballad of Burdens”", - "body": "The burden of fair women. Vain delight,\nAnd love self-slain in some sweet shameful way,\nAnd sorrowful old age that comes by night\nAs a thief comes that has no heart by day,\nAnd change that finds fair cheeks and leaves them grey,\nAnd weariness that keeps awake for hire,\nAnd grief that says what pleasure used to say;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of bought kisses. This is sore,\nA burden without fruit in childbearing;\nBetween the nightfall and the dawn threescore,\nThreescore between the dawn and evening.\nThe shuddering in thy lips, the shuddering\nIn thy sad eyelids tremulous like fire,\nMakes love seem shameful and a wretched thing,\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of sweet speeches. Nay, kneel down,\nCover thy head, and weep; for verily\nThese market-men that buy thy white and brown\nIn the last days shall take no thought for thee.\nIn the last days like earth thy face shall be,\nYea, like sea-marsh made thick with brine and mire,\nSad with sick leavings of the sterile sea.\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of long living. Thou shalt fear\nWaking, and sleeping mourn upon thy bed;\nAnd say at night “Would God the day were here,”\nAnd say at dawn “Would God the day were dead.”\nWith weary days thou shalt be clothed and fed,\nAnd wear remorse of heart for thine attire,\nPain for thy girdle and sorrow upon thine head;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of bright colours. Thou shalt see\nGold tarnished, and the grey above the green;\nAnd as the thing thou seest thy face shall be,\nAnd no more as the thing beforetime seen.\nAnd thou shalt say of mercy “It hath been,”\nAnd living, watch the old lips and loves expire,\nAnd talking, tears shall take thy breath between;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of sad sayings. In that day\nThou shalt tell all thy days and hours, and tell\nThy times and ways and words of love, and say\nHow one was dear and one desirable,\nAnd sweet was life to hear and sweet to smell,\nBut now with lights reverse the old hours retire\nAnd the last hour is shod with fire from hell;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of four seasons. Rain in spring,\nWhite rain and wind among the tender trees;\nA summer of green sorrows gathering,\nRank autumn in a mist of miseries,\nWith sad face set towards the year, that sees\nThe charred ash drop out of the dropping pyre,\nAnd winter wan with many maladies;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of dead faces. Out of sight\nAnd out of love, beyond the reach of hands,\nChanged in the changing of the dark and light,\nThey walk and weep about the barren lands\nWhere no seed is nor any garner stands,\nWhere in short breaths the doubtful days respire,\nAnd time’s turned glass lets through the sighing sands;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.\n\nThe burden of much gladness. Life and lust\nForsake thee, and the face of thy delight;\nAnd underfoot the heavy hour strews dust,\nAnd overhead strange weathers burn and bite;\nAnd where the red was, lo the bloodless white,\nAnd where truth was, the likeness of a liar,\nAnd where day was, the likeness of the night;\nThis is the end of every man’s desire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-ballad-of-death": { - "title": "“A Ballad of Death”", - "body": "Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears,\nGirdle thyself with sighing for a girth\nUpon the sides of mirth,\nCover thy lips and eyelids, let thine ears\nBe filled with rumour of people sorrowing;\nMake thee soft raiment out of woven sighs\nUpon the flesh to cleave,\nSet pains therein and many a grievous thing,\nAnd many sorrows after each his wise\nFor armlet and for gorget and for sleeve.\n\nO Love’s lute heard about the lands of death,\nLeft hanged upon the trees that were therein;\nO Love and Time and Sin,\nThree singing mouths that mourn now underbreath,\nThree lovers, each one evil spoken of;\nO smitten lips wherethrough this voice of mine\nCame softer with her praise;\nAbide a little for our lady’s love.\nThe kisses of her mouth were more than wine,\nAnd more than peace the passage of her days.\n\nO Love, thou knowest if she were good to see.\nO Time, thou shalt not find in any land\nTill, cast out of thine hand,\nThe sunlight and the moonlight fail from thee,\nAnother woman fashioned like as this.\nO Sin, thou knowest that all thy shame in her\nWas made a goodly thing;\nYea, she caught Shame and shamed him with her kiss,\nWith her fair kiss, and lips much lovelier\nThan lips of amorous roses in late spring.\n\nBy night there stood over against my bed\nQueen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,\nBoth sides drawn fully back\nFrom brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,\nAnd temples drained of purple and full of death.\nHer curled hair had the wave of sea-water\nAnd the sea’s gold in it.\nHer eyes were as a dove’s that sickeneth.\nStrewn dust of gold she had shed over her,\nAnd pearl and purple and amber on her feet.\n\nUpon her raiment of dyed sendaline\nWere painted all the secret ways of love\nAnd covered things thereof,\nThat hold delight as grape-flowers hold their wine;\nRed mouths of maidens and red feet of doves,\nAnd brides that kept within the bride-chamber\nTheir garment of soft shame,\nAnd weeping faces of the wearied loves\nThat swoon in sleep and awake wearier,\nWith heat of lips and hair shed out like flame.\n\nThe tears that through her eyelids fell on me\nMade mine own bitter where they ran between\nAs blood had fallen therein,\nShe saying; Arise, lift up thine eyes and see\nIf any glad thing be or any good\nNow the best thing is taken forth of us;\nEven she to whom all praise\nWas as one flower in a great multitude,\nOne glorious flower of many and glorious,\nOne day found gracious among many days:\n\nEven she whose handmaiden was Love--to whom\nAt kissing times across her stateliest bed\nKings bowed themselves and shed\nPale wine, and honey with the honeycomb,\nAnd spikenard bruised for a burnt-offering;\nEven she between whose lips the kiss became\nAs fire and frankincense;\nWhose hair was as gold raiment on a king,\nWhose eyes were as the morning purged with flame,\nWhose eyelids as sweet savour issuing thence.\n\nThen I beheld, and lo on the other side\nMy lady’s likeness crowned and robed and dead.\nSweet still, but now not red,\nWas the shut mouth whereby men lived and died.\nAnd sweet, but emptied of the blood’s blue shade,\nThe great curled eyelids that withheld her eyes.\nAnd sweet, but like spoilt gold,\nThe weight of colour in her tresses weighed.\nAnd sweet, but as a vesture with new dyes,\nThe body that was clothed with love of old.\n\nAh! that my tears filled all her woven hair\nAnd all the hollow bosom of her gown--\nAh! that my tears ran down\nEven to the place where many kisses were,\nEven where her parted breast-flowers have place,\nEven where they are cloven apart--who knows not this?\nAh! the flowers cleave apart\nAnd their sweet fills the tender interspace;\nAh! the leaves grown thereof were things to kiss\nEre their fine gold was tarnished at the heart.\n\nAh! in the days when God did good to me,\nEach part about her was a righteous thing;\nHer mouth an almsgiving,\nThe glory of her garments charity,\nThe beauty of her bosom a good deed,\nIn the good days when God kept sight of us;\nLove lay upon her eyes,\nAnd on that hair whereof the world takes heed;\nAnd all her body was more virtuous\nThan souls of women fashioned otherwise.\n\nNow, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands\nAnd sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves\nRain-rotten in rank lands,\nWaste marigold and late unhappy leaves\nAnd grass that fades ere any of it be mown;\nAnd when thy bosom is filled full thereof\nSeek out Death’s face ere the light altereth,\nAnd say “My master that was thrall to Love\nIs become thrall to Death.”\nBow down before him, ballad, sigh and groan,\nBut make no sojourn in thy outgoing;\nFor haply it may be\nThat when thy feet return at evening\nDeath shall come in with thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-ballad-of-dreamland": { - "title": "“A Ballad of Dreamland”", - "body": "I hid my heart in a nest of roses,\n Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;\nIn a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,\n Under the roses I hid my heart.\n Why would it sleep not? why should it start,\nWhen never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?\n What made sleep flutter his wings and part?\nOnly the song of a secret bird.\n\nLie still, I said, for the wind’s wing closes,\n And mild leaves muffle the keen sun’s dart;\nLie still, for the wind on the warm sea dozes,\n And the wind is unquieter yet than thou art.\n Does a thought in thee still as a thorn’s wound smart?\nDoes the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?\n What bids the lids of thy sleep dispart?\nOnly the song of a secret bird.\n\nThe green land’s name that a charm encloses,\n It never was writ in the traveller’s chart,\nAnd sweet on its trees as the fruit that grows is,\n It never was sold in the merchant’s mart.\n The swallows of dreams through its dim fields dart,\nAnd sleep’s are the tunes in its tree-tops heard;\n No hound’s note wakens the wildwood hart,\nOnly the song of a secret bird.\n\n\n# _Envoi_\n\nIn the world of dreams I have chosen my part,\n To sleep for a season and hear no word\nOf true love’s truth or of light love’s art,\n Only the song of a secret bird.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1878 - } - } - }, - "a-ballad-of-life": { - "title": "“A Ballad of Life”", - "body": "I found in dreams a place of wind and flowers,\nFull of sweet trees and colour of glad grass,\nIn midst whereof there was\nA lady clothed like summer with sweet hours.\nHer beauty, fervent as a fiery moon,\nMade my blood burn and swoon\n Like a flame rained upon.\nSorrow had filled her shaken eyelids’ blue,\nAnd her mouth’s sad red heavy rose all through\n Seemed sad with glad things gone.\n\nShe held a little cithern by the strings,\nShaped heartwise, strung with subtle-coloured hair\nOf some dead lute-player\nThat in dead years had done delicious things.\nThe seven strings were named accordingly;\nThe first string charity,\n The second tenderness,\nThe rest were pleasure, sorrow, sleep, and sin,\nAnd loving-kindness, that is pity’s kin\n And is most pitiless.\n\nThere were three men with her, each garmented\nWith gold and shod with gold upon the feet;\nAnd with plucked ears of wheat\nThe first man’s hair was wound upon his head:\nHis face was red, and his mouth curled and sad;\nAll his gold garment had\n Pale stains of dust and rust.\nA riven hood was pulled across his eyes;\nThe token of him being upon this wise\n Made for a sign of Lust.\n\nThe next was Shame, with hollow heavy face\nColoured like green wood when flame kindles it.\nHe hath such feeble feet\nThey may not well endure in any place.\nHis face was full of grey old miseries,\nAnd all his blood’s increase\n Was even increase of pain.\nThe last was Fear, that is akin to Death;\nHe is Shame’s friend, and always as Shame saith\n Fear answers him again.\n\nMy soul said in me; This is marvellous,\nSeeing the air’s face is not so delicate\nNor the sun’s grace so great,\nIf sin and she be kin or amorous.\nAnd seeing where maidens served her on their knees,\nI bade one crave of these\n To know the cause thereof.\nThen Fear said: I am Pity that was dead.\nAnd Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted.\n And Lust said: I am Love.\n\nThereat her hands began a lute-playing\nAnd her sweet mouth a song in a strange tongue;\nAnd all the while she sung\nThere was no sound but long tears following\nLong tears upon men’s faces, waxen white\nWith extreme sad delight.\n But those three following men\nBecame as men raised up among the dead;\nGreat glad mouths open and fair cheeks made red\n With child’s blood come again.\n\nThen I said: Now assuredly I see\nMy lady is perfect, and transfigureth\nAll sin and sorrow and death,\nMaking them fair as her own eyelids be,\nOr lips wherein my whole soul’s life abides;\nOr as her sweet white sides\n And bosom carved to kiss.\nNow therefore, if her pity further me,\nDoubtless for her sake all my days shall be\n As righteous as she is.\n\nForth, ballad, and take roses in both arms,\nEven till the top rose touch thee in the throat\nWhere the least thornprick harms;\nAnd girdled in thy golden singing-coat,\nCome thou before my lady and say this;\nBorgia, thy gold hair’s colour burns in me,\n Thy mouth makes beat my blood in feverish rhymes;\nTherefore so many as these roses be,\n Kiss me so many times.\nThen it may be, seeing how sweet she is,\nThat she will stoop herself none otherwise\n Than a blown vine-branch doth,\nAnd kiss thee with soft laughter on thine eyes,\n Ballad, and on thy mouth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "before-dawn": { - "title": "“Before Dawn”", - "body": "Sweet life, if life were stronger,\nEarth clear of years that wrong her,\nThen two things might live longer,\nTwo sweeter things than they;\nDelight, the rootless flower,\nAnd love, the bloomless bower;\nDelight that lives an hour,\nAnd love that lives a day.\n\nFrom evensong to daytime,\nWhen April melts in Maytime,\nLove lengthens out his playtime,\nLove lessens breath by breath,\nAnd kiss by kiss grows older\nOn listless throat or shoulder\nTurned sideways now, turned colder\nThan life that dreams of death.\n\nThis one thing once worth giving\nLife gave, and seemed worth living;\nSin sweet beyond forgiving\nAnd brief beyond regret:\nTo laugh and love together\nAnd weave with foam and feather\nAnd wind and words the tether\nOur memories play with yet.\n\nAh, one thing worth beginning,\nOne thread in life worth spinning,\nAh sweet, one sin worth sinning\nWith all the whole soul’s will;\nTo lull you till one stilled you,\nTo kiss you till one killed you,\nTo feed you till one filled you,\nSweet lips, if love could fill;\n\nTo hunt sweet Love and lose him\nBetween white arms and bosom,\nBetween the bud and blossom,\nBetween your throat and chin;\nTo say of shame--what is it?\nOf virtue--we can miss it,\nOf sin--we can but kiss it,\nAnd it’s no longer sin:\n\nTo feel the strong soul, stricken\nThrough fleshly pulses, quicken\nBeneath swift sighs that thicken,\nSoft hands and lips that smite;\nLips that no love can tire,\nWith hands that sting like fire,\nWeaving the web Desire\nTo snare the bird Delight.\n\nBut love so lightly plighted,\nOur love with torch unlighted,\nPaused near us unaffrighted,\nWho found and left him free;\nNone, seeing us cloven in sunder,\nWill weep or laugh or wonder;\nLight love stands clear of thunder,\nAnd safe from winds at sea.\n\nAs, when late larks give warning\nOf dying lights and dawning,\nNight murmurs to the morning,\n“Lie still, O love, lie still;”\nAnd half her dark limbs cover\nThe white limbs of her lover,\nWith amorous plumes that hover\nAnd fervent lips that chill;\n\nAs scornful day represses\nNight’s void and vain caresses,\nAnd from her cloudier tresses\nUnwinds the gold of his,\nWith limbs from limbs dividing\nAnd breath by breath subsiding;\nFor love has no abiding,\nBut dies before the kiss;\n\nSo hath it been, so be it;\nFor who shall live and flee it?\nBut look that no man see it\nOr hear it unaware;\nLest all who love and choose him\nSee Love, and so refuse him;\nFor all who find him lose him,\nBut all have found him fair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "before-parting": { - "title": "“Before Parting”", - "body": "A month or twain to live on honeycomb\n Is pleasant; but one tires of scented time,\n Cold sweet recurrence of accepted rhyme,\nAnd that strong purple under juice and foam\nWhere the wine’s heart has burst;\nNor feel the latter kisses like the first.\n\nOnce yet, this poor one time; I will not pray\n Even to change the bitterness of it,\n The bitter taste ensuing on the sweet,\nTo make your tears fall where your soft hair lay\nAll blurred and heavy in some perfumed wise\nOver my face and eyes.\n\nAnd yet who knows what end the scythèd wheat\n Makes of its foolish poppies’ mouths of red?\n These were not sown, these are not harvested,\nThey grow a month and are cast under feet\nAnd none has care thereof,\nAs none has care of divided love.\n\nI know each shadow of your lips by rote,\n Each change of love in eyelids and eyebrows;\n The fashion of fair temples tremulous\nWith tender blood, and colour of your throat;\nI know not how love is gone out of this,\nSeeing that all was his.\n\nLove’s likeness there endures upon all these:\n But out of these one shall not gather love.\n Day hath not strength nor the night shade enough\nTo make love whole and fill his lips with ease,\nAs some bee-builded cell\nFeels at filled lips the heavy honey swell.\n\nI know not how this last month leaves your hair\n Less full of purple colour and hid spice,\n And that luxurious trouble of closed eyes\nIs mixed with meaner shadows and waste care;\nAnd love, kissed out by pleasure, seems not yet\nWorth patience to regret.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "a-cameo": { - "title": "“A Cameo”", - "body": "There was a graven image of Desire\n Painted with red blood on a ground of gold\n Passing between the young men and the old,\nAnd by him Pain, whose body shone like fire,\nAnd Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire.\n Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold,\n The insatiable Satiety kept hold,\nWalking with feet unshod that pashed the mire.\nThe senses and the sorrows and the sins,\n And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate\nTill lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture,\nFollowed like beasts with flap of wings and fins.\n Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate,\nUpon whose lock was written _Peradventure_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "a-channel-crossing": { - "title": "“A Channel Crossing”", - "body": "Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone,\nFared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone:\nSoft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour\nGleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower,\nStars fulfilled the desire of the darkling world as with music: the star-bright air\nMade the face of the sea, if aught may make the face of the sea, more fair.\nWhence came change? Was the sweet night weary of rest? What anguish awoke in the dark?\nSudden, sublime, the strong storm spake: we heard the thunders as hounds that bark.\nLovelier if aught may be lovelier than stars, we saw the lightnings exalt the sky,\nLiving and lustrous and rapturous as love that is born but to quicken and lighten and die.\nHeaven’s own heart at its highest of delight found utterance in music and semblance in fire:\nThunder on thunder exulted, rejoicing to live and to satiate the night’s desire.\n\nAnd the night was alive and anhungered of life as a tiger from toils cast free:\nAnd a rapture of rage made joyous the spirit and strength of the soul of the sea.\nAll the weight of the wind bore down on it, freighted with death for fraught:\nAnd the keen waves kindled and quickened as things transfigured or things distraught.\nAnd madness fell on them laughing and leaping; and madness came on the wind:\nAnd the might and the light and the darkness of storm were as storm in the heart of Ind.\nSuch glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten and harrow the far fierce East,\nRang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest.\nThe channel that sunders England from shores where never was man born free\nWas clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength and the wrath of a tropic sea.\nAs a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall,\nThe strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff’s wall.\nStern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, a breath,\nAnd she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at the throat of death.\nThree glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy,\nFilled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird’s heart in a boy.\nFor the central crest of the night was cloud that thundered and flamed, sublime\nAs the splendour and song of the soul everlasting that quickens the pulse of time.\nThe glory beholden of man in a vision, the music of light overheard,\nThe rapture and radiance of battle, the life that abides in the fire of a word,\nIn the midmost heaven enkindled, was manifest far on the face of the sea,\nAnd the rage in the roar of the voice of the waters was heard but when heaven breathed free.\nFar eastward, clear of the covering of cloud, the sky laughed out into light\nFrom the rims of the storm to the sea’s dark edge with flames that were flowerlike and white.\nThe leaping and luminous blossoms of live sheet lightning that laugh as they fade\nFrom the cloud’s black base to the black wave’s brim rejoiced in the light they made.\nFar westward, throned in a silent sky, where life was in lustrous tune,\nShone, sweeter and surer than morning or evening, the steadfast smile of the moon.\nThe limitless heaven that enshrined them was lovelier than dreams may behold, and deep\nAs life or as death, revealed and transfigured, may shine on the soul through sleep.\nAll glories of toil and of triumph and passion and pride that it yearns to know\nBore witness there to the soul of its likeness and kinship, above and below.\nThe joys of the lightnings, the songs of the thunders, the strong sea’s labour and rage,\nWere tokens and signs of the war that is life and is joy for the soul to wage.\nNo thought strikes deeper or higher than the heights and the depths that the night made bare,\nIllimitable, infinite, awful and joyful, alive in the summit of air--\nAir stilled and thrilled by the tempest that thundered between its reign and the sea’s,\nRebellious, rapturous, and transient as faith or as terror that bows men’s knees.\nNo love sees loftier and fairer the form of its godlike vision in dreams\nThan the world shone then, when the sky and the sea were as love for a breath’s length seems--\nOne utterly, mingled and mastering and mastered and laughing with love that subsides\nAs the glad mad night sank panting and satiate with storm, and released the tides.\nIn the dense mid channel the steam-souled ship hung hovering, assailed and withheld\nAs a soul born royal, if life or if death be against it, is thwarted and quelled.\nAs the glories of myriads of glowworms in lustrous grass on a boundless lawn\nWere the glories of flames phosphoric that made of the water a light like dawn.\nA thousand Phosphors, a thousand Hespers, awoke in the churning sea,\nAnd the swift soft hiss of them living and dying was clear as a tune could be;\nAs a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep,\nAudible alway alive in the storm, too fleet for a dream to keep:\nToo fleet, too sweet for a dream to recover and thought to remember awake:\nLight subtler and swifter than lightning, that whispers and laughs in the live storm’s wake,\nIn the wild bright wake of the storm, in the dense loud heart of the labouring hour,\nA harvest of stars by the storm’s hand reaped, each fair as a star-shaped flower.\nAnd sudden and soft as the passing of sleep is the passing of tempest seemed\nWhen the light and the sound of it sank, and the glory was gone as a dream half dreamed.\nThe glory, the terror, the passion that made of the midnight a miracle, died,\nNot slain at a stroke, nor in gradual reluctance abated of power and of pride;\nWith strong swift subsidence, awful as power that is wearied of power upon earth,\nAs a God that were wearied of power upon heaven, and were fain of a new God’s birth,\nThe might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness fell:\nAnd the sea and the sky put off them the rapture and radiance of heaven and of hell.\nThe waters, heaving and hungering at heart, made way, and were wellnigh fain,\nFor the ship that had fought them, and wrestled, and revelled in labour, to cease from her pain.\nAnd an end was made of it: only remembrance endures of the glad loud strife;\nAnd the sense that a rapture so royal may come not again in the passage of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "a-christmas-carol": { - "title": "“A Christmas Carol”", - "body": "Three damsels in the queen’s chamber,\n The queen’s mouth was most fair;\nShe spake a word of God’s mother\n As the combs went in her hair.\n Mary that is of might,\n Bring us to thy Son’s sight.\n\nThey held the gold combs out from her,\n A span’s length off her head;\nShe sang this song of God’s mother\n And of her bearing-bed.\n Mary most full of grace,\n Bring us to thy Son’s face.\n\nWhen she sat at Joseph’s hand,\n She looked against her side;\nAnd either way from the short silk band\n Her girdle was all wried.\n Mary that all good may,\n Bring us to thy Son’s way.\n\nMary had three women for her bed,\n The twain were maidens clean;\nThe first of them had white and red,\n The third had riven green.\n Mary that is so sweet,\n Bring us to thy Son’s feet.\n\nShe had three women for her hair,\n Two were gloved soft and shod;\nThe third had feet and fingers bare,\n She was the likest God.\n Mary that wieldeth land,\n Bring us to thy Son’s hand.\n\nShe had three women for her ease,\n The twain were good women:\nThe first two were the two Maries,\n The third was Magdalen.\n Mary that perfect is,\n Bring us to thy Son’s kiss.\n\nJoseph had three workmen in his stall,\n To serve him well upon;\nThe first of them were Peter and Paul,\n The third of them was John.\n Mary, God’s handmaiden,\n Bring us to thy Son’s ken.\n\n“If your child be none other man’s,\n But if it be very mine,\nThe bedstead shall be gold two spans,\n The bedfoot silver fine.”\n Mary that made God mirth,\n Bring us to thy Son’s birth.\n\n“If the child be some other man’s,\n And if it be none of mine,\nThe manger shall be straw two spans,\n Betwixen kine and kine.”\n Mary that made sin cease,\n Bring us to thy Son’s peace.\n\nChrist was born upon this wise,\n It fell on such a night,\nNeither with sounds of psalteries,\n Nor with fire for light.\n Mary that is God’s spouse,\n Bring us to thy Son’s house.\n\nThe star came out upon the east\n With a great sound and sweet:\nKings gave gold to make him feast\n And myrrh for him to eat.\n Mary, of thy sweet mood,\n Bring us to thy Son’s good.\n\nHe had two handmaids at his head,\n One handmaid at his feet;\nThe twain of them were fair and red,\n The third one was right sweet.\n Mary that is most wise,\n Bring us to thy Son’s eyes. Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-complaint-of-lisa": { - "title": "“The Complaint of Lisa”", - "body": "There is no woman living that draws breath\nSo sad as I, though all things sadden her.\nThere is not one upon life’s weariest way\nWho is weary as I am weary of all but death.\nToward whom I look as looks the sunflower\nAll day with all his whole soul toward the sun;\nWhile in the sun’s sight I make moan all day,\nAnd all night on my sleepless maiden bed\nWeep and call out on death, O Love, and thee,\nThat thou or he would take me to the dead,\nAnd know not what thing evil I have done\nThat life should lay such heavy hand on me.\n\nAlas, Love, what is this thou wouldst with me?\nWhat honour shalt thou have to quench my breath,\nOr what shall my heart broken profit thee?\nO Love, O great god Love, what have I done,\nThat thou shouldst hunger so after my death?\nMy heart is harmless as my life’s first day:\nSeek out some false fair woman, and plague her\nTill her tears even as my tears fill her bed:\nI am the least flower in thy flowery way,\nBut till my time be come that I be dead\nLet me live out my flower-time in the sun\nThough my leaves shut before the sunflower.\n\nO Love, Love, Love, the kingly sunflower!\nShall he the sun hath looked on look on me,\nThat live down here in shade, out of the sun,\nHere living in the sorrow and shadow of death?\nShall he that feeds his heart full of the day\nCare to give mine eyes light, or my lips breath?\nBecause she loves him shall my lord love her\nWho is as a worm in my lord’s kingly way?\nI shall not see him or know him alive or dead;\nBut thou, I know thee, O Love, and pray to thee\nThat in brief while my brief life-days be done,\nAnd the worm quickly make my marriage-bed.\n\nFor underground there is no sleepless bed:\nBut here since I beheld my sunflower\nThese eyes have slept not, seeing all night and day\nHis sunlike eyes, and face fronting the sun.\nWherefore if anywhere be any death,\nI would fain find and fold him fast to me,\nThat I may sleep with the world’s eldest dead,\nWith her that died seven centuries since, and her\nThat went last night down the night-wandering way.\nFor this is sleep indeed, when labour is done,\nWithout love, without dreams, and without breath,\nAnd without thought, O name unnamed! of thee.\n\nAh, but, forgetting all things, shall I thee?\nWilt thou not be as now about my bed\nThere underground as here before the sun?\nShall not thy vision vex me alive and dead,\nThy moving vision without form or breath?\nI read long since the bitter tale of her\nWho read the tale of Launcelot on a day,\nAnd died, and had no quiet after death,\nBut was moved ever along a weary way,\nLost with her love in the underworld; ah me,\nO my king, O my lordly sunflower,\nWould God to me too such a thing were done!\n\nBut if such sweet and bitter things be done,\nThen, flying from life, I shall not fly from thee.\nFor in that living world without a sun\nThy vision will lay hold upon me dead,\nAnd meet and mock me, and mar my peace in death.\nYet if being wroth God had such pity on her,\nWho was a sinner and foolish in her day,\nThat even in hell they twain should breathe one breath,\nWhy should he not in some wise pity me?\nSo if I sleep not in my soft strait bed\nI may look up and see my sunflower\nAs he the sun, in some divine strange way.\n\nO poor my heart, well knowest thou in what way\nThis sore sweet evil unto us was done.\nFor on a holy and a heavy day\nI was arisen out of my still small bed\nTo see the knights tilt, and one said to me\n“The king,” and seeing him, somewhat stopped my breath,\nAnd if the girl spake more, I heard not her,\nFor only I saw what I shall see when dead,\nA kingly flower of knights, a sunflower,\nThat shone against the sunlight like the sun,\nAnd like a fire, O heart, consuming thee,\nThe fire of love that lights the pyre of death.\n\nHowbeit I shall not die an evil death\nWho have loved in such a sad and sinless way,\nThat this my love, lord, was no shame to thee.\nSo when mine eyes are shut against the sun,\nO my soul’s sun, O the world’s sunflower,\nThou nor no man will quite despise me dead.\nAnd dying I pray with all my low last breath\nThat thy whole life may be as was that day,\nThat feast-day that made trothplight death and me,\nGiving the world light of thy great deeds done;\nAnd that fair face brightening thy bridal bed,\nThat God be good as God hath been to her.\n\nThat all things goodly and glad remain with her,\nAll things that make glad life and goodly death;\nThat as a bee sucks from a sunflower\nHoney, when summer draws delighted breath,\nHer soul may drink of thy soul in like way,\nAnd love make life a fruitful marriage-bed\nWhere day may bring forth fruits of joy to day\nAnd night to night till days and nights be dead.\nAnd as she gives light of her love to thee,\nGive thou to her the old glory of days long done;\nAnd either give some heat of light to me,\nTo warm me where I sleep without the sun.\n\nO sunflower made drunken with the sun,\nO knight whose lady’s heart draws thine to her,\nGreat king, glad lover, I have a word to thee.\nThere is a weed lives out of the sun’s way,\nHid from the heat deep in the meadow’s bed,\nThat swoons and whitens at the wind’s least breath,\nA flower star-shaped, that all a summer day\nWill gaze her soul out on the sunflower\nFor very love till twilight finds her dead.\nBut the great sunflower heeds not her poor death,\nKnows not when all her loving life is done;\nAnd so much knows my lord the king of me.\n\nAye, all day long he has no eye for me;\nWith golden eye following the golden sun\nFrom rose-coloured to purple-pillowed bed,\nFrom birthplace to the flame-lit place of death,\nFrom eastern end to western of his way.\nSo mine eye follows thee, my sunflower,\nSo the white star-flower turns and yearns to thee,\nThe sick weak weed, not well alive or dead,\nTrod underfoot if any pass by her,\nPale, without colour of summer or summer breath\nIn the shrunk shuddering petals, that have done\nNo work but love, and die before the day.\n\nBut thou, to-day, to-morrow, and every day,\nBe glad and great, O love whose love slays me.\nThy fervent flower made fruitful from the sun\nShall drop its golden seed in the world’s way,\nThat all men thereof nourished shall praise thee\nFor grain and flower and fruit of works well done;\nTill thy shed seed, O shining sunflower,\nBring forth such growth of the world’s garden-bed\nAs like the sun shall outlive age and death.\nAnd yet I would thine heart had heed of her\nWho loves thee alive; but not till she be dead.\nCome, Love, then, quickly, and take her utmost breath.\n\nSong, speak for me who am dumb as are the dead;\nFrom my sad bed of tears I send forth thee,\nTo fly all day from sun’s birth to sun’s death\nDown the sun’s way after the flying sun,\nFor love of her that gave thee wings and breath,\nEre day be done, to seek the sunflower.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "dead-love": { - "title": "“Dead Love”", - "body": "Dead love, by treason slain, lies stark,\nWhite as a dead stark-stricken dove:\nNone that pass by him pause to mark\n Dead love.\n\nHis heart, that strained and yearned and strove\nAs toward the sundawn strives the lark,\nIs cold as all the old joy thereof.\n\nDead men, re-arisen from dust, may hark\nWhen rings the trumpet blown above:\nIt will not raise from out the dark\n Dead love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "a-death-on-easter-day": { - "title": "“A Death on Easter Day”", - "body": "The strong spring sun rejoicingly may rise,\nRise and make revel, as of old men said,\nLike dancing hearts of lovers newly wed:\nA light more bright than ever bathed the skies\nDeparts for all time out of all men’s eyes.\nThe crowns that girt last night a living head\nShine only now, though deathless, on the dead:\nArt that mocks death, and Song that never dies.\nAlbeit the bright sweet mothlike wings be furled,\nHope sees, past all division and defection,\nAnd higher than swims the mist of human breath,\nThe soul most radiant once in all the world\nRequickened to regenerate resurrection\nOut of the likeness of the shadow of death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "dolores": { - "title": "“Dolores”", - "body": "Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel\nHard eyes that grow soft for an hour;\nThe heavy white limbs, and the cruel\nRed mouth like a venomous flower;\nWhen these are gone by with their glories,\nWhat shall rest of thee then, what remain,\nO mystic and sombre Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain?\n\nSeven sorrows the priests give their Virgin;\nBut thy sins, which are seventy times seven,\nSeven ages would fail thee to purge in,\nAnd then they would haunt thee in heaven:\nFierce midnights and famishing morrows,\nAnd the loves that complete and control\nAll the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows\nThat wear out the soul.\n\nO garment not golden but gilded,\nO garden where all men may dwell,\nO tower not of ivory, but builded\nBy hands that reach heaven from hell;\nO mystical rose of the mire,\nO house not of gold but of gain,\nO house of unquenchable fire,\nOur Lady of Pain!\n\nO lips full of lust and of laughter,\nCurled snakes that are fed from my breast,\nBite hard, lest remembrance come after\nAnd press with new lips where you pressed.\nFor my heart too springs up at the pressure,\nMine eyelids too moisten and burn;\nAh, feed me and fill me with pleasure,\nEre pain come in turn.\n\nIn yesterday’s reach and to-morrow’s,\nOut of sight though they lie of to-day,\nThere have been and there yet shall be sorrows\nThat smite not and bite not in play.\nThe life and the love thou despisest,\nThese hurt us indeed, and in vain,\nO wise among women, and wisest,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nWho gave thee thy wisdom? what stories\nThat stung thee, what visions that smote?\nWert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores,\nWhen desire took thee first by the throat?\nWhat bud was the shell of a blossom\nThat all men may smell to and pluck?\nWhat milk fed thee first at what bosom?\nWhat sins gave thee suck?\n\nWe shift and bedeck and bedrape us,\nThou art noble and nude and antique;\nLibitina thy mother, Priapus\nThy father, a Tuscan and Greek.\nWe play with light loves in the portal,\nAnd wince and relent and refrain;\nLoves die, and we know thee immortal,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nFruits fail and love dies and time ranges;\nThou art fed with perpetual breath,\nAnd alive after infinite changes,\nAnd fresh from the kisses of death;\nOf languors rekindled and rallied,\nOf barren delights and unclean,\nThings monstrous and fruitless, a pallid\nAnd poisonous queen.\n\nCould you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?\nMen touch them, and change in a trice\nThe lilies and languors of virtue\nFor the raptures and roses of vice;\nThose lie where thy foot on the floor is,\nThese crown and caress thee and chain,\nO splendid and sterile Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nThere are sins it may be to discover,\nThere are deeds it may be to delight.\nWhat new work wilt thou find for thy lover,\nWhat new passions for daytime or night?\nWhat spells that they know not a word of\nWhose lives are as leaves overblown?\nWhat tortures undreamt of, unheard of,\nUnwritten, unknown?\n\nAh beautiful passionate body\nThat never has ached with a heart!\nOn thy mouth though the kisses are bloody,\nThough they sting till it shudder and smart,\nMore kind than the love we adore is,\nThey hurt not the heart or the brain,\nO bitter and tender Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nAs our kisses relax and redouble,\nFrom the lips and the foam and the fangs\nShall no new sin be born for men’s trouble,\nNo dream of impossible pangs?\nWith the sweet of the sins of old ages\nWilt thou satiate thy soul as of yore?\nToo sweet is the rind, say the sages,\nToo bitter the core.\n\nHast thou told all thy secrets the last time,\nAnd bared all thy beauties to one?\nAh, where shall we go then for pastime,\nIf the worst that can be has been done?\nBut sweet as the rind was the core is;\nWe are fain of thee still, we are fain,\nO sanguine and subtle Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nBy the hunger of change and emotion,\nBy the thirst of unbearable things,\nBy despair, the twin-born of devotion,\nBy the pleasure that winces and stings,\nThe delight that consumes the desire,\nThe desire that outruns the delight,\nBy the cruelty deaf as a fire\nAnd blind as the night,\n\nBy the ravenous teeth that have smitten\nThrough the kisses that blossom and bud,\nBy the lips intertwisted and bitten\nTill the foam has a savour of blood,\nBy the pulse as it rises and falters,\nBy the hands as they slacken and strain,\nI adjure thee, respond from thine altars,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nWilt thou smile as a woman disdaining\nThe light fire in the veins of a boy?\nBut he comes to thee sad, without feigning,\nWho has wearied of sorrow and joy;\nLess careful of labour and glory\nThan the elders whose hair has uncurled;\nAnd young, but with fancies as hoary\nAnd grey as the world.\n\nI have passed from the outermost portal\nTo the shrine where a sin is a prayer;\nWhat care though the service be mortal?\nO our Lady of Torture, what care?\nAll thine the last wine that I pour is,\nThe last in the chalice we drain,\nO fierce and luxurious Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nAll thine the new wine of desire,\nThe fruit of four lips as they clung\nTill the hair and the eyelids took fire,\nThe foam of a serpentine tongue,\nThe froth of the serpents of pleasure,\nMore salt than the foam of the sea,\nNow felt as a flame, now at leisure\nAs wine shed for me.\n\nAh thy people, thy children, thy chosen,\nMarked cross from the womb and perverse!\nThey have found out the secret to cozen\nThe gods that constrain us and curse;\nThey alone, they are wise, and none other;\nGive me place, even me, in their train,\nO my sister, my spouse, and my mother,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nFor the crown of our life as it closes\nIs darkness, the fruit thereof dust;\nNo thorns go as deep as a rose’s,\nAnd love is more cruel than lust.\nTime turns the old days to derision,\nOur loves into corpses or wives;\nAnd marriage and death and division\nMake barren our lives.\n\nAnd pale from the past we draw nigh thee,\nAnd satiate with comfortless hours;\nAnd we know thee, how all men belie thee,\nAnd we gather the fruit of thy flowers;\nThe passion that slays and recovers,\nThe pangs and the kisses that rain\nOn the lips and the limbs of thy lovers,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nThe desire of thy furious embraces\nIs more than the wisdom of years,\nOn the blossom though blood lie in traces,\nThough the foliage be sodden with tears.\nFor the lords in whose keeping the door is\nThat opens on all who draw breath\nGave the cypress to love, my Dolores,\nThe myrtle to death.\n\nAnd they laughed, changing hands in the measure,\nAnd they mixed and made peace after strife;\nPain melted in tears, and was pleasure;\nDeath tingled with blood, and was life.\nLike lovers they melted and tingled,\nIn the dusk of thine innermost fane;\nIn the darkness they murmured and mingled,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nIn a twilight where virtues are vices,\nIn thy chapels, unknown of the sun,\nTo a tune that enthralls and entices,\nThey were wed, and the twain were as one.\nFor the tune from thine altar hath sounded\nSince God bade the world’s work begin,\nAnd the fume of thine incense abounded,\nTo sweeten the sin.\n\nLove listens, and paler than ashes,\nThrough his curls as the crown on them slips,\nLifts languid wet eyelids and lashes,\nAnd laughs with insatiable lips.\nThou shalt hush him with heavy caresses,\nWith music that scares the profane;\nThou shalt darken his eyes with thy tresses,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nThou shalt blind his bright eyes though he wrestle,\nThou shalt chain his light limbs though he strive;\nIn his lips all thy serpents shall nestle,\nIn his hands all thy cruelties thrive.\nIn the daytime thy voice shall go through him,\nIn his dreams he shall feel thee and ache;\nThou shalt kindle by night and subdue him\nAsleep and awake.\n\nThou shalt touch and make redder his roses\nWith juice not of fruit nor of bud;\nWhen the sense in the spirit reposes,\nThou shalt quicken the soul through the blood.\nThine, thine the one grace we implore is,\nWho would live and not languish or feign,\nO sleepless and deadly Dolores,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nDost thou dream, in a respite of slumber,\nIn a lull of the fires of thy life,\nOf the days without name, without number,\nWhen thy will stung the world into strife;\nWhen, a goddess, the pulse of thy passion\nSmote kings as they revelled in Rome;\nAnd they hailed thee re-risen, O Thalassian,\nFoam-white, from the foam?\n\nWhen thy lips had such lovers to flatter;\nWhen the city lay red from thy rods,\nAnd thine hands were as arrows to scatter\nThe children of change and their gods;\nWhen the blood of thy foemen made fervent\nA sand never moist from the main,\nAs one smote them, their lord and thy servant,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nOn sands by the storm never shaken,\nNor wet from the washing of tides;\nNor by foam of the waves overtaken,\nNor winds that the thunder bestrides;\nBut red from the print of thy paces,\nMade smooth for the world and its lords,\nRinged round with a flame of fair faces,\nAnd splendid with swords.\n\nThere the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure,\nDrew bitter and perilous breath;\nThere torments laid hold on the treasure\nOf limbs too delicious for death;\nWhen thy gardens were lit with live torches;\nWhen the world was a steed for thy rein;\nWhen the nations lay prone in thy porches,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nWhen, with flame all around him aspirant,\nStood flushed, as a harp-player stands,\nThe implacable beautiful tyrant,\nRose-crowned, having death in his hands;\nAnd a sound as the sound of loud water\nSmote far through the flight of the fires,\nAnd mixed with the lightning of slaughter\nA thunder of lyres.\n\nDost thou dream of what was and no more is,\nThe old kingdoms of earth and the kings?\nDost thou hunger for these things, Dolores,\nFor these, in a world of new things?\nBut thy bosom no fasts could emaciate,\nNo hunger compel to complain\nThose lips that no bloodshed could satiate,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nAs of old when the world’s heart was lighter,\nThrough thy garments the grace of thee glows,\nThe white wealth of thy body made whiter\nBy the blushes of amorous blows,\nAnd seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers,\nAnd branded by kisses that bruise;\nWhen all shall be gone that now lingers,\nAh, what shall we lose?\n\nThou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,\nAnd thy limbs are as melodies yet,\nAnd move to the music of passion\nWith lithe and lascivious regret.\nWhat ailed us, O gods, to desert you\nFor creeds that refuse and restrain?\nCome down and redeem us from virtue,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nAll shrines that were Vestal are flameless,\nBut the flame has not fallen from this;\nThough obscure be the god, and though nameless\nThe eyes and the hair that we kiss;\nLow fires that love sits by and forges\nFresh heads for his arrows and thine;\nHair loosened and soiled in mid orgies\nWith kisses and wine.\n\nThy skin changes country and colour,\nAnd shrivels or swells to a snake’s.\nLet it brighten and bloat and grow duller,\nWe know it, the flames and the flakes,\nRed brands on it smitten and bitten,\nRound skies where a star is a stain,\nAnd the leaves with thy litanies written,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nOn thy bosom though many a kiss be,\nThere are none such as knew it of old.\nWas it Alciphron once or Arisbe,\nMale ringlets or feminine gold,\nThat thy lips met with under the statue,\nWhence a look shot out sharp after thieves\nFrom the eyes of the garden-god at you\nAcross the fig-leaves?\n\nThen still, through dry seasons and moister,\nOne god had a wreath to his shrine;\nThen love was the pearl of his oyster,\nAnd Venus rose red out of wine.\nWe have all done amiss, choosing rather\nSuch loves as the wise gods disdain;\nIntercede for us thou with thy father,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nIn spring he had crowns of his garden,\nRed corn in the heat of the year,\nThen hoary green olives that harden\nWhen the grape-blossom freezes with fear;\nAnd milk-budded myrtles with Venus\nAnd vine-leaves with Bacchus he trod;\nAnd ye said, “We have seen, he hath seen us,\nA visible God.”\n\nWhat broke off the garlands that girt you?\nWhat sundered you spirit and clay?\nWeak sins yet alive are as virtue\nTo the strength of the sins of that day.\nFor dried is the blood of thy lover,\nIpsithilla, contracted the vein;\nCry aloud, “Will he rise and recover,\nOur Lady of Pain?”\n\nCry aloud; for the old world is broken:\nCry out; for the Phrygian is priest,\nAnd rears not the bountiful token\nAnd spreads not the fatherly feast.\nFrom the midmost of Ida, from shady\nRecesses that murmur at morn,\nThey have brought and baptized her, Our Lady,\nA goddess new-born.\n\nAnd the chaplets of old are above us,\nAnd the oyster-bed teems out of reach;\nOld poets outsing and outlove us,\nAnd Catullus makes mouths at our speech.\nWho shall kiss, in thy father’s own city,\nWith such lips as he sang with, again?\nIntercede for us all of thy pity,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nOut of Dindymus heavily laden\nHer lions draw bound and unfed\nA mother, a mortal, a maiden,\nA queen over death and the dead.\nShe is cold, and her habit is lowly,\nHer temple of branches and sods;\nMost fruitful and virginal, holy,\nA mother of gods.\n\nShe hath wasted with fire thine high places,\nShe hath hidden and marred and made sad\nThe fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces\nOf gods that were goodly and glad.\nShe slays, and her hands are not bloody;\nShe moves as a moon in the wane,\nWhite-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nThey shall pass and their places be taken,\nThe gods and the priests that are pure.\nThey shall pass, and shalt thou not be shaken?\nThey shall perish, and shalt thou endure?\nDeath laughs, breathing close and relentless\nIn the nostrils and eyelids of lust,\nWith a pinch in his fingers of scentless\nAnd delicate dust.\n\nBut the worm shall revive thee with kisses;\nThou shalt change and transmute as a god,\nAs the rod to a serpent that hisses,\nAs the serpent again to a rod.\nThy life shall not cease though thou doff it;\nThou shalt live until evil be slain,\nAnd good shall die first, said thy prophet,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nDid he lie? did he laugh? does he know it,\nNow he lies out of reach, out of breath,\nThy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,\nSin’s child by incestuous Death?\nDid he find out in fire at his waking,\nOr discern as his eyelids lost light,\nWhen the bands of the body were breaking\nAnd all came in sight?\n\nWho has known all the evil before us,\nOr the tyrannous secrets of time?\nThough we match not the dead men that bore us\nAt a song, at a kiss, at a crime--\nThough the heathen outface and outlive us,\nAnd our lives and our longings are twain--\nAh, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nWho are we that embalm and embrace thee\nWith spices and savours of song?\nWhat is time, that his children should face thee?\nWhat am I, that my lips do thee wrong?\nI could hurt thee--but pain would delight thee;\nOr caress thee--but love would repel;\nAnd the lovers whose lips would excite thee\nAre serpents in hell.\n\nWho now shall content thee as they did,\nThy lovers, when temples were built\nAnd the hair of the sacrifice braided\nAnd the blood of the sacrifice spilt,\nIn Lampsacus fervent with faces,\nIn Aphaca red from thy reign,\nWho embraced thee with awful embraces,\nOur Lady of Pain?\n\nWhere are they, Cotytto or Venus,\nAstarte or Ashtaroth, where?\nDo their hands as we touch come between us?\nIs the breath of them hot in thy hair?\nFrom their lips have thy lips taken fever,\nWith the blood of their bodies grown red?\nHast thou left upon earth a believer\nIf these men are dead?\n\nThey were purple of raiment and golden,\nFilled full of thee, fiery with wine,\nThy lovers, in haunts unbeholden,\nIn marvellous chambers of thine.\nThey are fled, and their footprints escape us,\nWho appraise thee, adore, and abstain,\nO daughter of Death and Priapus,\nOur Lady of Pain.\n\nWhat ails us to fear overmeasure,\nTo praise thee with timorous breath,\nO mistress and mother of pleasure,\nThe one thing as certain as death?\nWe shall change as the things that we cherish,\nShall fade as they faded before,\nAs foam upon water shall perish,\nAs sand upon shore.\n\nWe shall know what the darkness discovers,\nIf the grave-pit be shallow or deep;\nAnd our fathers of old, and our lovers,\nWe shall know if they sleep not or sleep.\nWe shall see whether hell be not heaven,\nFind out whether tares be not grain,\nAnd the joys of thee seventy times seven,\nOur Lady of Pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_sorrows" - } - } - }, - "dysthanatos": { - "title": "“Dysthanatos”", - "body": "_“Ad generem Cereris sine caede et vulnere pauci\nDescendunt reges, aut siccâ morte tyranni.”_\n\nBy no dry death another king goes down\nThe way of kings. Yet may no free man’s voice,\nFor stern compassion and deep awe, rejoice\nThat one sign more is given against the crown,\nThat one more head those dark red waters drown\nWhich rise round thrones whose trembling equipoise\nIs propped on sand and bloodshed and such toys\nAs human hearts that shrink at human frown.\nThe name writ red on Polish earth, the star\nThat was to outshine our England’s in the far\nEast heaven of empire--where is one that saith\nProud words now, prophesying of this White Czar?\n“In bloodless pangs few kings yield up their breath,\nFew tyrants perish by no violent death.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "erotion": { - "title": "“Erotion”", - "body": "Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet,\nO love, to lay down fear at love’s fair feet;\nShall not some fiery memory of his breath\nLie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death?\nYet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;\nLove me no more, but love my love of thee.\nLove where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I,\nOne thing I can, and one love cannot--die.\nPass from me; yet thine arms, thine eyes, thine hair,\nFeed my desire and deaden my despair.\nYet once more ere time change us, ere my cheek\nWhiten, ere hope be dumb or sorrow speak,\nYet once more ere thou hate me, one full kiss;\nKeep other hours for others, save me this.\nYea, and I will not (if it please thee) weep,\nLest thou be sad; I will but sigh, and sleep.\nSweet, does death hurt? thou canst not do me wrong:\nI shall not lack thee, as I loved thee, long.\nHast thou not given me above all that live\nJoy, and a little sorrow shalt not give?\nWhat even though fairer fingers of strange girls\nPass nestling through thy beautiful boy’s curls\nAs mine did, or those curled lithe lips of thine\nMeet theirs as these, all theirs come after mine;\nAnd though I were not, though I be not, best,\nI have loved and love thee more than all the rest.\nO love, O lover, loose or hold me fast,\nI had thee first, whoever have thee last;\nFairer or not, what need I know, what care?\nTo thy fair bud my blossom once seemed fair.\nWhy am I fair at all before thee, why\nAt all desired? seeing thou art fair, not I.\nI shall be glad of thee, O fairest head,\nAlive, alone, without thee, with thee, dead;\nI shall remember while the light lives yet,\nAnd in the night-time I shall not forget.\nThough (as thou wilt) thou leave me ere life leave,\nI will not, for thy love I will not, grieve;\nNot as they use who love not more than I,\nWho love not as I love thee though I die;\nAnd though thy lips, once mine, be oftener prest\nTo many another brow and balmier breast,\nAnd sweeter arms, or sweeter to thy mind,\nLull thee or lure, more fond thou wilt not find.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "a-forsaken-garden": { - "title": "“A Forsaken Garden”", - "body": "In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,\nAt the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,\nWalled round with rocks as an inland island,\nThe ghost of a garden fronts the sea.\nA girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses\nThe steep square slope of the blossomless bed\nWhere the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses\nNow lie dead.\n\nThe fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,\nTo the low last edge of the long lone land.\nIf a step should sound or a word be spoken,\nWould a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand?\nSo long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,\nThrough branches and briars if a man make way,\nHe shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless\nNight and day.\n\nThe dense hard passage is blind and stifled\nThat crawls by a track none turn to climb\nTo the strait waste place that the years have rifled\nOf all but the thorns that are touched not of time.\nThe thorns he spares when the rose is taken;\nThe rocks are left when he wastes the plain.\nThe wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,\nThese remain.\n\nNot a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;\nAs the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;\nFrom the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,\nCould she call, there were never a rose to reply.\nOver the meadows that blossom and wither\nRings but the note of a sea-bird’s song;\nOnly the sun and the rain come hither\nAll year long.\n\nThe sun burns sere and the rain dishevels\nOne gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.\nOnly the wind here hovers and revels\nIn a round where life seems barren as death.\nHere there was laughing of old, there was weeping,\nHaply, of lovers none ever will know,\nWhose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping\nYears ago.\n\nHeart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”\nDid he whisper? “look forth from the flowers to the sea;\nFor the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,\nAnd men that love lightly may die--but we?”\nAnd the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,\nAnd or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,\nIn the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,\nLove was dead.\n\nOr they loved their life through, and then went whither?\nAnd were one to the end--but what end who knows?\nLove deep as the sea as a rose must wither,\nAs the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose.\nShall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?\nWhat love was ever as deep as a grave?\nThey are loveless now as the grass above them\nOr the wave.\n\nAll are at one now, roses and lovers,\nNot known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.\nNot a breath of the time that has been hovers\nIn the air now soft with a summer to be.\nNot a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter\nOf the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep,\nWhen as they that are free now of weeping and laughter\nWe shall sleep.\n\nHere death may deal not again for ever;\nHere change may come not till all change end.\nFrom the graves they have made they shall rise up never,\nWho have left nought living to ravage and rend.\nEarth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,\nWhile the sun and the rain live, these shall be;\nTill a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing\nRoll the sea.\n\nTill the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,\nTill terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,\nTill the strength of the waves of the high tides humble\nThe fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,\nHere now in his triumph where all things falter,\nStretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,\nAs a god self-slain on his own strange altar,\nDeath lies dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-garden-of-proserpine": { - "title": "“The Garden of Proserpine”", - "body": "Here, where the world is quiet;\nHere, where all trouble seems\nDead winds’ and spent waves’ riot\nIn doubtful dreams of dreams;\nI watch the green field growing\nFor reaping folk and sowing,\nFor harvest-time and mowing,\nA sleepy world of streams.\n\nI am tired of tears and laughter,\nAnd men that laugh and weep;\nOf what may come hereafter\nFor men that sow to reap:\nI am weary of days and hours,\nBlown buds of barren flowers,\nDesires and dreams and powers\nAnd everything but sleep.\n\nHere life has death for neighbour,\nAnd far from eye or ear\nWan waves and wet winds labour,\nWeak ships and spirits steer;\nThey drive adrift, and whither\nThey wot not who make thither;\nBut no such winds blow hither,\nAnd no such things grow here.\n\nNo growth of moor or coppice,\nNo heather-flower or vine,\nBut bloomless buds of poppies,\nGreen grapes of Proserpine,\nPale beds of blowing rushes\nWhere no leaf blooms or blushes\nSave this whereout she crushes\nFor dead men deadly wine.\n\nPale, without name or number,\nIn fruitless fields of corn,\nThey bow themselves and slumber\nAll night till light is born;\nAnd like a soul belated,\nIn hell and heaven unmated,\nBy cloud and mist abated\nComes out of darkness morn.\n\nThough one were strong as seven,\nHe too with death shall dwell,\nNor wake with wings in heaven,\nNor weep for pains in hell;\nThough one were fair as roses,\nHis beauty clouds and closes;\nAnd well though love reposes,\nIn the end it is not well.\n\nPale, beyond porch and portal,\nCrowned with calm leaves, she stands\nWho gathers all things mortal\nWith cold immortal hands;\nHer languid lips are sweeter\nThan love’s who fears to greet her\nTo men that mix and meet her\nFrom many times and lands.\n\nShe waits for each and other,\nShe waits for all men born;\nForgets the earth her mother,\nThe life of fruits and corn;\nAnd spring and seed and swallow\nTake wing for her and follow\nWhere summer song rings hollow\nAnd flowers are put to scorn.\n\nThere go the loves that wither,\nThe old loves with wearier wings;\nAnd all dead years draw thither,\nAnd all disastrous things;\nDead dreams of days forsaken,\nBlind buds that snows have shaken,\nWild leaves that winds have taken,\nRed strays of ruined springs.\n\nWe are not sure of sorrow,\nAnd joy was never sure;\nTo-day will die to-morrow;\nTime stoops to no man’s lure;\nAnd love, grown faint and fretful,\nWith lips but half regretful\nSighs, and with eyes forgetful\nWeeps that no loves endure.\n\nFrom too much love of living,\nFrom hope and fear set free,\nWe thank with brief thanksgiving\nWhatever gods may be\nThat no life lives for ever;\nThat dead men rise up never;\nThat even the weariest river\nWinds somewhere safe to sea.\n\nThen star nor sun shall waken,\nNor any change of light:\nNor sound of waters shaken,\nNor any sound or sight:\nNor wintry leaves nor vernal,\nNor days nor things diurnal;\nOnly the sleep eternal\nIn an eternal night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "hesparia": { - "title": "“Hesparia”", - "body": "Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore is,\nFull of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy,\nAs a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region of stories,\nBlows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a boy,\nBlows from the capes of the past oversea to the bays of the present,\nFilled as with shadow of sound with the pulse of invisible feet,\nFar out to the shallows and straits of the future, by rough ways or pleasant,\nIs it thither the wind’s wings beat? is it hither to me, O my sweet?\nFor thee, in the stream of the deep tide-wind blowing in with the water,\nThee I behold as a bird borne in with the wind from the west,\nStraight from the sunset, across white waves whence rose as a daughter\nVenus thy mother, in years when the world was a water at rest.\nOut of the distance of dreams, as a dream that abides after slumber,\nStrayed from the fugitive flock of the night, when the moon overhead\nWanes in the wan waste heights of the heaven, and stars without number\nDie without sound, and are spent like lamps that are burnt by the dead,\nComes back to me, stays by me, lulls me with touch of forgotten caresses,\nOne warm dream clad about with a fire as of life that endures;\nThe delight of thy face, and the sound of thy feet, and the wind of thy tresses,\nAnd all of a man that regrets, and all of a maid that allures.\nBut thy bosom is warm for my face and profound as a manifold flower,\nThy silence as music, thy voice as an odour that fades in a flame;\nNot a dream, not a dream is the kiss of thy mouth, and the bountiful hour\nThat makes me forget what was sin, and would make me forget were it shame.\nThine eyes that are quiet, thine hands that are tender, thy lips that are loving,\nComfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a dream;\nAnd my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly toward thee, and moving\nAs the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant stream,\nFair as a rose is on earth, as a rose under water in prison,\nThat stretches and swings to the slow passionate pulse of the sea,\nClosed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a ghost rearisen,\nPale as the love that revives as a ghost rearisen in me.\nFrom the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places\nFull of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead,\nWhere the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces,\nAnd the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is red,\nCome back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and represses,\nThat cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent has eaten his fill;\nFrom the bitter delights of the dark, and the feverish, the furtive caresses\nThat murder the youth in a man or ever his heart have its will.\nThy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot weep; thou art pale as a rose is,\nPaler and sweeter than leaves that cover the blush of the bud;\nAnd the heart of the flower is compassion, and pity the core it encloses,\nPity, not love, that is born of the breath and decays with the blood.\nAs the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises her bosom,\nSo love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and burns as a flame;\nI have loved overmuch in my life; when the live bud bursts with the blossom,\nBitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof shame.\nAs a heart that its anguish divides is the green bud cloven asunder;\nAs the blood of a man self-slain is the flush of the leaves that allure;\nAnd the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, a delight and a wonder;\nAnd the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight for a man, to endure.\nToo soon did I love it, and lost love’s rose; and I cared not for glory’s:\nOnly the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were mixed in my hair.\nWas it myrtle or poppy thy garland was woven with, O my Dolores?\nWas it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, that I found in thee fair?\nFor desire is a respite from love, and the flesh not the heart is her fuel;\nShe was sweet to me once, who am fled and escaped from the rage of her reign;\nWho behold as of old time at hand as I turn, with her mouth growing cruel,\nAnd flushed as with wine with the blood of her lovers, Our Lady of Pain.\nLow down where the thicket is thicker with thorns than with leaves in the summer,\nIn the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing of tongues that I knew;\nAnd the lithe long throats of her snakes reach round her, their mouths overcome her,\nAnd her lips grow cool with their foam, made moist as a desert with dew.\nWith the thirst and the hunger of lust though her beautiful lips be so bitter,\nWith the cold foul foam of the snakes they soften and redden and smile;\nAnd her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax wide and her eyelashes glitter,\nAnd she laughs with a savour of blood in her face, and a savour of guile.\nShe laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair blows hither and hisses,\nAs a low-lit flame in a wind, back-blown till it shudder and leap;\nLet her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor her poisonous kisses,\nTo consume it alive and divide from thy bosom, Our Lady of Sleep.\nAh daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it return into prison,\nWho shall redeem it anew? but we, if thou wilt, let us fly;\nLet us take to us, now that the white skies thrill with a moon unarisen,\nSwift horses of fear or of love, take flight and depart and not die.\nThey are swifter than dreams, they are stronger than death; there is none that hath ridden,\nNone that shall ride in the dim strange ways of his life as we ride;\nBy the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, and the shore that is hidden,\nWhere life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous invisible tide;\nBy the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt pools bitter and sterile,\nBy the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and the channel of years,\nOur wild steeds press on the night, strain hard through pleasure and peril,\nLabour and listen and pant not or pause for the peril that nears;\nAnd the sound of them trampling the way cleaves night as an arrow asunder,\nAnd slow by the sand-hill and swift by the down with its glimpses of grass,\nSudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs trample and thunder,\nRings in the ear of the low blind wind of the night as we pass;\nShrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute as a maiden,\nStung into storm by the speed of our passage, and deaf where we past;\nAnd our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy but mine heavy-laden,\nAs we burn with the fire of our flight; ah love, shall we win at the last?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "our_lady_of_sorrows" - } - } - }, - "hope-and-fear": { - "title": "“Hope and Fear”", - "body": "Beneath the shadow of dawn’s aerial cope,\nWith eyes enkindled as the sun’s own sphere,\nHope from the front of youth in godlike cheer\nLooks Godward, past the shades where blind men grope\nRound the dark door that prayers nor dreams can ope,\nAnd makes for joy the very darkness dear\nThat gives her wide wings play; nor dreams that fear\nAt noon may rise and pierce the heart of hope.\nThen, when the soul leaves off to dream and yearn,\nMay truth first purge her eyesight to discern\nWhat once being known leaves time no power to appal;\nTill youth at last, ere yet youth be not, learn\nThe kind wise word that falls from years that fall--\n“Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "ilicet": { - "title": "“Ilicet”", - "body": "There is an end of joy and sorrow;\nPeace all day long, all night, all morrow,\nBut never a time to laugh or weep.\nThe end is come of pleasant places,\nThe end of tender words and faces,\nThe end of all, the poppied sleep.\n\nNo place for sound within their hearing,\nNo room to hope, no time for fearing,\nNo lips to laugh, no lids for tears.\nThe old years have run out all their measure;\nNo chance of pain, no chance of pleasure,\nNo fragment of the broken years.\n\nOutside of all the worlds and ages,\nThere where the fool is as the sage is,\nThere where the slayer is clean of blood,\nNo end, no passage, no beginning,\nThere where the sinner leaves off sinning,\nThere where the good man is not good.\n\nThere is not one thing with another,\nBut Evil saith to Good: My brother,\nMy brother, I am one with thee:\nThey shall not strive nor cry for ever:\nNo man shall choose between them: never\nShall this thing end and that thing be.\n\nWind wherein seas and stars are shaken\nShall shake them, and they shall not waken;\nNone that has lain down shall arise;\nThe stones are sealed across their places;\nOne shadow is shed on all their faces,\nOne blindness cast on all their eyes.\n\nSleep, is it sleep perchance that covers\nEach face, as each face were his lover’s?\nFarewell; as men that sleep fare well.\nThe grave’s mouth laughs unto derision\nDesire and dread and dream and vision,\nDelight of heaven and sorrow of hell.\n\nNo soul shall tell nor lip shall number\nThe names and tribes of you that slumber;\nNo memory, no memorial.\n“Thou knowest”--who shall say thou knowest?\nThere is none highest and none lowest:\nAn end, an end, an end of all.\n\nGood night, good sleep, good rest from sorrow\nTo these that shall not have good morrow;\nThe gods be gentle to all these.\nNay, if death be not, how shall they be?\nNay, is there help in heaven? it may be\nAll things and lords of things shall cease.\n\nThe stooped urn, filling, dips and flashes;\nThe bronzèd brims are deep in ashes;\nThe pale old lips of death are fed.\nShall this dust gather flesh hereafter?\nShall one shed tears or fall to laughter,\nAt sight of all these poor old dead?\n\nNay, as thou wilt; these know not of it;\nThine eyes’ strong weeping shall not profit,\nThy laughter shall not give thee ease;\nCry aloud, spare not, cease not crying,\nSigh, till thou cleave thy sides with sighing,\nThou shalt not raise up one of these.\n\nBurnt spices flash, and burnt wine hisses,\nThe breathing flame’s mouth curls and kisses\nThe small dried rows of frankincense;\nAll round the sad red blossoms smoulder,\nFlowers coloured like the fire, but colder,\nIn sign of sweet things taken hence;\n\nYea, for their sake and in death’s favour\nThings of sweet shape and of sweet savour\nWe yield them, spice and flower and wine;\nYea, costlier things than wine or spices,\nWhereof none knoweth how great the price is,\nAnd fruit that comes not of the vine.\n\nFrom boy’s pierced throat and girl’s pierced bosom\nDrips, reddening round the blood-red blossom,\nThe slow delicious bright soft blood,\nBathing the spices and the pyre,\nBathing the flowers and fallen fire,\nBathing the blossom by the bud.\n\nRoses whose lips the flame has deadened\nDrink till the lapping leaves are reddened\nAnd warm wet inner petals weep;\nThe flower whereof sick sleep gets leisure,\nBarren of balm and purple pleasure,\nFumes with no native steam of sleep.\n\nWhy will ye weep? what do ye weeping?\nFor waking folk and people sleeping,\nAnd sands that fill and sands that fall,\nThe days rose-red, the poppied hours,\nBlood, wine, and spice and fire and flowers,\nThere is one end of one and all.\n\nShall such an one lend love or borrow?\nShall these be sorry for thy sorrow?\nShall these give thanks for words or breath?\nTheir hate is as their loving-kindness;\nThe frontlet of their brows is blindness,\nThe armlet of their arms is death.\n\nLo, for no noise or light of thunder\nShall these grave-clothes be rent in sunder;\nHe that hath taken, shall he give?\nHe hath rent them: shall he bind together?\nHe hath bound them: shall he break the tether?\nHe hath slain them: shall he bid them live?\n\nA little sorrow, a little pleasure,\nFate metes us from the dusty measure\nThat holds the date of all of us;\nWe are born with travail and strong crying,\nAnd from the birth-day to the dying\nThe likeness of our life is thus.\n\nOne girds himself to serve another,\nWhose father was the dust, whose mother\nThe little dead red worm therein;\nThey find no fruit of things they cherish;\nThe goodness of a man shall perish,\nIt shall be one thing with his sin.\n\nIn deep wet ways by grey old gardens\nFed with sharp spring the sweet fruit hardens;\nThey know not what fruits wane or grow;\nRed summer burns to the utmost ember;\nThey know not, neither can remember,\nThe old years and flowers they used to know.\n\nAh, for their sakes, so trapped and taken,\nFor theirs, forgotten and forsaken,\nWatch, sleep not, gird thyself with prayer.\nNay, where the heart of wrath is broken,\nWhere long love ends as a thing spoken,\nHow shall thy crying enter there?\n\nThough the iron sides of the old world falter,\nThe likeness of them shall not alter\nFor all the rumour of periods,\nThe stars and seasons that come after,\nThe tears of latter men, the laughter\nOf the old unalterable gods.\n\nFar up above the years and nations,\nThe high gods, clothed and crowned with patience,\nEndure through days of deathlike date;\nThey bear the witness of things hidden;\nBefore their eyes all life stands chidden,\nAs they before the eyes of Fate.\n\nNot for their love shall Fate retire,\nNor they relent for our desire,\nNor the graves open for their call.\nThe end is more than joy and anguish,\nThan lives that laugh and lives that languish,\nThe poppied sleep, the end of all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "in-the-orchard": { - "title": "“In the Orchard”", - "body": "Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see;\nLet the dew-fall drench either side of me;\n Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon\nSeen sidelong like a blossom in the tree;\n And God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nThe grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie.\nKissed upon either cheek and either eye,\n I turn to thee as some green afternoon\nTurns toward sunset, and is loth to die;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nLie closer, lean your face upon my side,\nFeel where the dew fell that has hardly dried,\n Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon;\nThe pleasure lives there when the sense has died,\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nO my fair lord, I charge you leave me this:\nIt is not sweeter than a foolish kiss?\n Nay take it then, my flower, my first in June,\nMy rose, so like a tender mouth it is:\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nLove, till dawn sunder night from day with fire\nDividing my delight and my desire,\n The crescent life and love the plenilune,\nLove me though dusk begin and dark retire;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nAh, my heart fails, my blood draws back; I know,\nWhen life runs over, life is near to go;\n And with the slain of love love’s ways are strewn,\nAnd with their blood, if love will have it so;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nAh, do thy will now; slay me if thou wilt;\nThere is no building now the walls are built,\n No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn,\nNo drinking now the vine’s whole blood is spilt;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nNay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain;\nPluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain,\n Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gatherers prune,\nSlay me ere day can slay desire again;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nYea, with thy sweet lips, with thy sweet sword; yea\nTake life and all, for I will die, I say;\n Love, I gave love, is life a better boon?\nFor sweet night’s sake I will not live till day;\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.\n\nNay, I will sleep then only; nay, but go.\nAh sweet, too sweet to me, my sweet, I know\n Love, sleep, and death go to the sweet same tune;\nHold my hair fast, and kiss me through it soon.\n Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "inferiae": { - "title": "“Inferiae”", - "body": "Spring, and the light and sound of things on earth\nRequickening, all within our green sea’s girth;\nA time of passage or a time of birth\n Fourscore years since as this year, first and last.\n\nThe sun is all about the world we see,\nThe breath and strength of very spring; and we\nLive, love, and feed on our own hearts; but he\n Whose heart fed mine has passed into the past.\n\nPast, all things born with sense and blood and breath;\nThe flesh hears nought that now the spirit saith.\nIf death be like as birth and birth as death,\n The first was fair--more fair should be the last.\n\nFourscore years since, and come but one month more\nThe count were perfect of his mortal score\nWhose sail went seaward yesterday from shore\n To cross the last of many an unsailed sea.\n\nLight, love and labour up to life’s last height,\nThese three were stars unsetting in his sight;\nEven as the sun is life and heat and light\n And sets not nor is dark when dark are we.\n\nThe life, the spirit, and the work were one\nThat here--ah, who shall say, that here are done?\nNot I, that know not; father, not thy son,\n For all the darkness of the night and sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1877, - "month": "march", - "day": 5 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "an-interlude": { - "title": "“An Interlude”", - "body": "In the greenest growth of the Maytime,\nI rode where the woods were wet,\nBetween the dawn and the daytime;\nThe spring was glad that we met.\n\nThere was something the season wanted,\nThough the ways and the woods smelt sweet;\nThe breath at your lips that panted,\nThe pulse of the grass at your feet.\n\nYou came, and the sun came after,\nAnd the green grew golden above;\nAnd the flag-flowers lightened with laughter,\nAnd the meadow-sweet shook with love.\n\nYour feet in the full-grown grasses\nMoved soft as a weak wind blows;\nYou passed me as April passes,\nWith face made out of a rose.\n\nBy the stream where the stems were slender,\nYour bright foot paused at the sedge;\nIt might be to watch the tender\nLight leaves in the springtime hedge,\n\nOn boughs that the sweet month blanches\nWith flowery frost of May:\nIt might be a bird in the branches,\nIt might be a thorn in the way.\n\nI waited to watch you linger\nWith foot drawn back from the dew,\nTill a sunbeam straight like a finger\nStruck sharp through the leaves at you.\n\nAnd a bird overhead sang _Follow_,\nAnd a bird to the right sang _Here_;\nAnd the arch of the leaves was hollow,\nAnd the meaning of May was clear.\n\nI saw where the sun’s hand pointed,\nI knew what the bird’s note said;\nBy the dawn and the dewfall anointed,\nYou were queen by the gold on your head.\n\nAs the glimpse of a burnt-out ember\nRecalls a regret of the sun,\nI remember, forget, and remember\nWhat Love saw done and undone.\n\nI remember the way we parted,\nThe day and the way we met;\nYou hoped we were both broken-hearted,\nAnd knew we should both forget.\n\nAnd May with her world in flower\nSeemed still to murmur and smile\nAs you murmured and smiled for an hour;\nI saw you turn at the stile.\n\nA hand like a white wood-blossom\nYou lifted, and waved, and passed,\nWith head hung down to the bosom,\nAnd pale, as it seemed, at last.\n\nAnd the best and the worst of this is\nThat neither is most to blame\nIf you’ve forgotten my kisses\nAnd I’ve forgotten your name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "kissing-her-hair": { - "title": "“Kissing Her Hair”", - "body": "Kissing her hair I sat against her feet,\nWove and unwove it, wound and found it sweet;\nMade fast therewith her hands, drew down her eyes,\nDeep as deep flowers and dreamy like dim skies;\nWith her own tresses bound and found her fair,\n Kissing her hair.\n\nSleep were no sweeter than her face to me,\nSleep of cold sea-bloom under the cold sea;\nWhat pain could get between my face and hers?\nWhat new sweet thing would love not relish worse?\nUnless, perhaps, white death had kissed me there,\n Kissing her hair?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "a-lamentation": { - "title": "“A Lamentation”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWho hath known the ways of time\nOr trodden behind his feet?\n There is no such man among men.\nFor chance overcomes him, or crime\nChanges; for all things sweet\n In time wax bitter again.\nWho shall give sorrow enough,\nOr who the abundance of tears?\nMine eyes are heavy with love\nAnd a sword gone thorough mine ears,\n A sound like a sword and fire,\n For pity, for great desire;\nWho shall ensure me thereof,\nLest I die, being full of my fears?\n\nWho hath known the ways and the wrath,\nThe sleepless spirit, the root\n And blossom of evil will,\n The divine device of a god?\nWho shall behold it or hath?\nThe twice-tongued prophets are mute,\n The many speakers are still;\n No foot has travelled or trod,\nNo hand has meted, his path.\nMan’s fate is a blood-red fruit,\n And the mighty gods have their fill\n And relax not the rein, or the rod.\n\nYe were mighty in heart from of old,\nYe slew with the spear, and are slain.\nKeen after heat is the cold,\nSore after summer is rain,\nAnd melteth man to the bone.\nAs water he weareth away,\nAs a flower, as an hour in a day,\nFallen from laughter to moan.\nBut my spirit is shaken with fear\nLest an evil thing begin,\nNew-born, a spear for a spear,\nAnd one for another sin.\nOr ever our tears began,\nIt was known from of old and said;\nOne law for a living man,\nAnd another law for the dead.\nFor these are fearful and sad,\nVain, and things without breath;\n While he lives let a man be glad,\n For none hath joy of his death.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWho hath known the pain, the old pain of earth,\nOr all the travail of the sea,\nThe many ways and waves, the birth\nFruitless, the labour nothing worth?\nWho hath known, who knoweth, O gods? not we.\nThere is none shall say he hath seen,\nThere is none he hath known.\nThough he saith, Lo, a lord have I been,\nI have reaped and sown;\nI have seen the desire of mine eyes,\nThe beginning of love,\nThe season of kisses and sighs\nAnd the end thereof.\nI have known the ways of the sea,\nAll the perilous ways,\nStrange winds have spoken with me,\nAnd the tongues of strange days.\nI have hewn the pine for ships;\nWhere steeds run arow,\nI have seen from their bridled lips\nFoam blown as the snow.\nWith snapping of chariot-poles\nAnd with straining of oars\nI have grazed in the race the goals,\nIn the storm the shores;\nAs a greave is cleft with an arrow\nAt the joint of the knee,\nI have cleft through the sea-straits narrow\nTo the heart of the sea.\nWhen air was smitten in sunder\nI have watched on high\nThe ways of the stars and the thunder\nIn the night of the sky;\nWhere the dark brings forth light as a flower,\nAs from lips that dissever;\nOne abideth the space of an hour,\nOne endureth for ever.\nLo, what hath he seen or known,\nOf the way and the wave\nUnbeholden, unsailed on, unsown,\nFrom the breast to the grave?\n\nOr ever the stars were made, or skies,\nGrief was born, and the kinless night,\n Mother of gods without form or name.\nAnd light is born out of heaven and dies,\nAnd one day knows not another’s light,\n But night is one, and her shape the same.\n\nBut dumb the goddesses underground\nWait, and we hear not on earth if their feet\n Rise, and the night wax loud with their wings;\nDumb, without word or shadow of sound;\nAnd sift in scales and winnow as wheat\n Men’s souls, and sorrow of manifold things.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNor less of grief than ours\nThe gods wrought long ago\n To bruise men one by one;\nBut with the incessant hours\nFresh grief and greener woe\n Spring, as the sudden sun\nYear after year makes flowers;\nAnd these die down and grow,\n And the next year lacks none.\n\nAs these men sleep, have slept\nThe old heroes in time fled,\n No dream-divided sleep;\nAnd holier eyes have wept\nThan ours, when on her dead\n Gods have seen Thetis weep,\nWith heavenly hair far-swept\nBack, heavenly hands outspread\n Round what she could not keep,\n\nCould not one day withhold,\nOne night; and like as these\n White ashes of no weight,\nHeld not his urn the cold\nAshes of Heracles?\n For all things born one gate\nOpens, no gate of gold;\nOpens; and no man sees\n Beyond the gods and fate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "laus-veneris": { - "title": "“Laus Veneris”", - "body": "Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,\nKissed over close, wears yet a purple speck\nWherein the pained blood falters and goes out;\nSoft, and stung softly--fairer for a fleck.\n\nBut though my lips shut sucking on the place,\nThere is no vein at work upon her face;\nHer eyelids are so peaceable, no doubt\nDeep sleep has warmed her blood through all its ways.\n\nLo, this is she that was the world’s delight;\nThe old grey years were parcels of her might;\nThe strewings of the ways wherein she trod\nWere the twain seasons of the day and night.\n\nLo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticed\nAll lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,\nStained with blood fallen from the feet of God,\nThe feet and hands whereat our souls were priced.\n\nAlas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair.\nBut lo her wonderfully woven hair!\nAnd thou didst heal us with thy piteous kiss;\nBut see now, Lord; her mouth is lovelier.\n\nShe is right fair; what hath she done to thee?\nNay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;\nHad now thy mother such a lip--like this?\nThou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.\n\nInside the Horsel here the air is hot;\nRight little peace one hath for it, God wot;\nThe scented dusty daylight burns the air,\nAnd my heart chokes me till I hear it not.\n\nBehold, my Venus, my soul’s body, lies\nWith my love laid upon her garment-wise,\nFeeling my love in all her limbs and hair\nAnd shed between her eyelids through her eyes.\n\nShe holds my heart in her sweet open hands\nHanging asleep; hard by her head there stands,\nCrowned with gilt thorns and clothed with flesh like fire,\nLove, wan as foam blown up the salt burnt sands--\n\nHot as the brackish waifs of yellow spume\nThat shift and steam--loose clots of arid fume\nFrom the sea’s panting mouth of dry desire;\nThere stands he, like one labouring at a loom.\n\nThe warp holds fast across; and every thread\nThat makes the woof up has dry specks of red;\nAlways the shuttle cleaves clean through, and he\nWeaves with the hair of many a ruined head.\n\nLove is not glad nor sorry, as I deem;\nLabouring he dreams, and labours in the dream,\nTill when the spool is finished, lo I see\nHis web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam.\n\nNight falls like fire; the heavy lights run low,\nAnd as they drop, my blood and body so\nShake as the flame shakes, full of days and hours\nThat sleep not neither weep they as they go.\n\nAh yet would God this flesh of mine might be\nWhere air might wash and long leaves cover me,\nWhere tides of grass break into foam of flowers,\nOr where the wind’s feet shine along the sea.\n\nAh yet would God that stems and roots were bred\nOut of my weary body and my head,\nThat sleep were sealed upon me with a seal,\nAnd I were as the least of all his dead.\n\nWould God my blood were dew to feed the grass,\nMine ears made deaf and mine eyes blind as glass,\nMy body broken as a turning wheel,\nAnd my mouth stricken ere it saith Alas!\n\nAh God, that love were as a flower or flame,\nThat life were as the naming of a name,\nThat death were not more pitiful than desire,\nThat these things were not one thing and the same!\n\nBehold now, surely somewhere there is death:\nFor each man hath some space of years, he saith,\nA little space of time ere time expire,\nA little day, a little way of breath.\n\nAnd lo, between the sundawn and the sun,\nHis day’s work and his night’s work are undone;\nAnd lo, between the nightfall and the light,\nHe is not, and none knoweth of such an one.\n\nAh God, that I were as all souls that be,\nAs any herb or leaf of any tree,\nAs men that toil through hours of labouring night,\nAs bones of men under the deep sharp sea.\n\nOutside it must be winter among men;\nFor at the gold bars of the gates again\nI heard all night and all the hours of it\nThe wind’s wet wings and fingers drip with rain.\n\nKnights gather, riding sharp for cold; I know\nThe ways and woods are strangled with the snow;\nAnd with short song the maidens spin and sit\nUntil Christ’s birthnight, lily-like, arow.\n\nThe scent and shadow shed about me make\nThe very soul in all my senses ache;\nThe hot hard night is fed upon my breath,\nAnd sleep beholds me from afar awake.\n\nAlas, but surely where the hills grow deep,\nOr where the wild ways of the sea are steep,\nOr in strange places somewhere there is death,\nAnd on death’s face the scattered hair of sleep.\n\nThere lover-like with lips and limbs that meet\nThey lie, they pluck sweet fruit of life and eat;\nBut me the hot and hungry days devour,\nAnd in my mouth no fruit of theirs is sweet.\n\nNo fruit of theirs, but fruit of my desire,\nFor her love’s sake whose lips through mine respire;\nHer eyelids on her eyes like flower on flower,\nMine eyelids on mine eyes like fire on fire.\n\nSo lie we, not as sleep that lies by death,\nWith heavy kisses and with happy breath;\nNot as man lies by woman, when the bride\nLaughs low for love’s sake and the words he saith.\n\nFor she lies, laughing low with love; she lies\nAnd turns his kisses on her lips to sighs,\nTo sighing sound of lips unsatisfied,\nAnd the sweet tears are tender with her eyes.\n\nAh, not as they, but as the souls that were\nSlain in the old time, having found her fair;\nWho, sleeping with her lips upon their eyes,\nHeard sudden serpents hiss across her hair.\n\nTheir blood runs round the roots of time like rain:\nShe casts them forth and gathers them again;\nWith nerve and bone she weaves and multiplies\nExceeding pleasure out of extreme pain.\n\nHer little chambers drip with flower-like red,\nHer girdles, and the chaplets of her head,\nHer armlets and her anklets; with her feet\nShe tramples all that winepress of the dead.\n\nHer gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires,\nWith loves burnt out and unassuaged desires;\nBetween her lips the steam of them is sweet,\nThe languor in her ears of many lyres.\n\nHer beds are full of perfume and sad sound,\nHer doors are made with music, and barred round\nWith sighing and with laughter and with tears,\nWith tears whereby strong souls of men are bound.\n\nThere is the knight Adonis that was slain;\nWith flesh and blood she chains him for a chain;\nThe body and the spirit in her ears\nCry, for her lips divide him vein by vein.\n\nYea, all she slayeth; yea, every man save me;\nMe, love, thy lover that must cleave to thee\nTill the ending of the days and ways of earth,\nThe shaking of the sources of the sea.\n\nMe, most forsaken of all souls that fell;\nMe, satiated with things insatiable;\nMe, for whose sake the extreme hell makes mirth,\nYea, laughter kindles at the heart of hell.\n\nAlas thy beauty! for thy mouth’s sweet sake\nMy soul is bitter to me, my limbs quake\nAs water, as the flesh of men that weep,\nAs their heart’s vein whose heart goes nigh to break.\n\nAh God, that sleep with flower-sweet finger-tips\nWould crush the fruit of death upon my lips;\nAh God, that death would tread the grapes of sleep\nAnd wring their juice upon me as it drips.\n\nThere is no change of cheer for many days,\nBut change of chimes high up in the air, that sways\nRung by the running fingers of the wind;\nAnd singing sorrows heard on hidden ways.\n\nDay smiteth day in twain, night sundereth night,\nAnd on mine eyes the dark sits as the light;\nYea, Lord, thou knowest I know not, having sinned,\nIf heaven be clean or unclean in thy sight.\n\nYea, as if earth were sprinkled over me,\nSuch chafed harsh earth as chokes a sandy sea,\nEach pore doth yearn, and the dried blood thereof\nGasps by sick fits, my heart swims heavily,\n\nThere is a feverish famine in my veins;\nBelow her bosom, where a crushed grape stains\nThe white and blue, there my lips caught and clove\nAn hour since, and what mark of me remains?\n\nI dare not always touch her, lest the kiss\nLeave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,\nBrief bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin;\nNathless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is.\n\nSin, is it sin whereby men’s souls are thrust\nInto the pit? yet had I a good trust\nTo save my soul before it slipped therein,\nTrod under by the fire-shod feet of lust.\n\nFor if mine eyes fail and my soul takes breath,\nI look between the iron sides of death\nInto sad hell where all sweet love hath end,\nAll but the pain that never finisheth.\n\nThere are the naked faces of great kings,\nThe singing folk with all their lute-playings;\nThere when one cometh he shall have to friend\nThe grave that covets and the worm that clings.\n\nThere sit the knights that were so great of hand,\nThe ladies that were queens of fair green land,\nGrown grey and black now, brought unto the dust,\nSoiled, without raiment, clad about with sand.\n\nThere is one end for all of them; they sit\nNaked and sad, they drink the dregs of it,\nTrodden as grapes in the wine-press of lust.\nTrampled and trodden by the fiery feet.\n\nI see the marvellous mouth whereby there fell\nCities and people whom the gods loved well,\nYet for her sake on them the fire gat hold,\nAnd for their sakes on her the fire of hell.\n\nAnd softer than the Egyptian lote-leaf is,\nThe queen whose face was worth the world to kiss,\nWearing at breast a suckling snake of gold;\nAnd large pale lips of strong Semiramis,\n\nCurled like a tiger’s that curl back to feed;\nRed only where the last kiss made them bleed;\nHer hair most thick with many a carven gem,\nDeep in the mane, great-chested, like a steed.\n\nYea, with red sin the faces of them shine;\nBut in all these there was no sin like mine;\nNo, not in all the strange great sins of them\nThat made the wine-press froth and foam with wine.\n\nFor I was of Christ’s choosing, I God’s knight,\nNo blinkard heathen stumbling for scant light;\nI can well see, for all the dusty days\nGone past, the clean great time of goodly fight.\n\nI smell the breathing battle sharp with blows,\nWith shriek of shafts and snapping short of bows;\nThe fair pure sword smites out in subtle ways,\nSounds and long lights are shed between the rows\n\nOf beautiful mailed men; the edged light slips,\nMost like a snake that takes short breath and dips\nSharp from the beautifully bending head,\nWith all its gracious body lithe as lips\n\nThat curl in touching you; right in this wise\nMy sword doth, seeming fire in mine own eyes,\nLeaving all colours in them brown and red\nAnd flecked with death; then the keen breaths like sighs,\n\nThe caught-up choked dry laughters following them,\nWhen all the fighting face is grown a flame\nFor pleasure, and the pulse that stuns the ears,\nAnd the heart’s gladness of the goodly game.\n\nLet me think yet a little; I do know\nThese things were sweet, but sweet such years ago,\nTheir savour is all turned now into tears;\nYea, ten years since, where the blue ripples blow,\n\nThe blue curled eddies of the blowing Rhine,\nI felt the sharp wind shaking grass and vine\nTouch my blood too, and sting me with delight\nThrough all this waste and weary body of mine\n\nThat never feels clear air; right gladly then\nI rode alone, a great way off my men,\nAnd heard the chiming bridle smite and smite,\nAnd gave each rhyme thereof some rhyme again,\n\nTill my song shifted to that iron one;\nSeeing there rode up between me and the sun\nSome certain of my foe’s men, for his three\nWhite wolves across their painted coats did run.\n\nThe first red-bearded, with square cheeks--alack,\nI made my knave’s blood turn his beard to black;\nThe slaying of him was a joy to see:\nPerchance too, when at night he came not back,\n\nSome woman fell a-weeping, whom this thief\nWould beat when he had drunken; yet small grief\nHath any for the ridding of such knaves;\nYea, if one wept, I doubt her teen was brief.\n\nThis bitter love is sorrow in all lands,\nDraining of eyelids, wringing of drenched hands,\nSighing of hearts and filling up of graves;\nA sign across the head of the world he stands,\n\nAn one that hath a plague-mark on his brows;\nDust and spilt blood do track him to his house\nDown under earth; sweet smells of lip and cheek,\nLike a sweet snake’s breath made more poisonous\n\nWith chewing of some perfumed deadly grass,\nAre shed all round his passage if he pass,\nAnd their quenched savour leaves the whole soul weak,\nSick with keen guessing whence the perfume was.\n\nAs one who hidden in deep sedge and reeds\nSmells the rare scent made where a panther feeds,\nAnd tracking ever slotwise the warm smell\nIs snapped upon by the sweet mouth and bleeds,\n\nHis head far down the hot sweet throat of her--\nSo one tracks love, whose breath is deadlier,\nAnd lo, one springe and you are fast in hell,\nFast as the gin’s grip of a wayfarer.\n\nI think now, as the heavy hours decease\nOne after one, and bitter thoughts increase\nOne upon one, of all sweet finished things;\nThe breaking of the battle; the long peace\n\nWherein we sat clothed softly, each man’s hair\nCrowned with green leaves beneath white hoods of vair;\nThe sounds of sharp spears at great tourneyings,\nAnd noise of singing in the late sweet air.\n\nI sang of love too, knowing nought thereof;\n“Sweeter,” I said, “the little laugh of love\nThan tears out of the eyes of Magdalen,\nOr any fallen feather of the Dove.”\n\n“The broken little laugh that spoils a kiss,\nThe ache of purple pulses, and the bliss\nOf blinded eyelids that expand again--\nLove draws them open with those lips of his,”\n\n“Lips that cling hard till the kissed face has grown\nOf one same fire and colour with their own;\nThen ere one sleep, appeased with sacrifice,\nWhere his lips wounded, there his lips atone.”\n\nI sang these things long since and knew them not;\n“Lo, here is love, or there is love, God wot,\nThis man and that finds favour in his eyes,”\nI said, “but I, what guerdon have I got?”\n\n“The dust of praise that is blown everywhere\nIn all men’s faces with the common air;\nThe bay-leaf that wants chafing to be sweet\nBefore they wind it in a singer’s hair.”\n\nSo that one dawn I rode forth sorrowing;\nI had no hope but of some evil thing,\nAnd so rode slowly past the windy wheat\nAnd past the vineyard and the water-spring,\n\nUp to the Horsel. A great elder-tree\nHeld back its heaps of flowers to let me see\nThe ripe tall grass, and one that walked therein,\nNaked, with hair shed over to the knee.\n\nShe walked between the blossom and the grass;\nI knew the beauty of her, what she was,\nThe beauty of her body and her sin,\nAnd in my flesh the sin of hers, alas!\n\nAlas! for sorrow is all the end of this.\nO sad kissed mouth, how sorrowful it is!\nO breast whereat some suckling sorrow clings,\nRed with the bitter blossom of a kiss!\n\nAh, with blind lips I felt for you, and found\nAbout my neck your hands and hair enwound,\nThe hands that stifle and the hair that stings,\nI felt them fasten sharply without sound.\n\nYea, for my sin I had great store of bliss:\nRise up, make answer for me, let thy kiss\nSeal my lips hard from speaking of my sin,\nLest one go mad to hear how sweet it is.\n\nYet I waxed faint with fume of barren bowers,\nAnd murmuring of the heavy-headed hours;\nAnd let the dove’s beak fret and peck within\nMy lips in vain, and Love shed fruitless flowers.\n\nSo that God looked upon me when your hands\nWere hot about me; yea, God brake my bands\nTo save my soul alive, and I came forth\nLike a man blind and naked in strange lands\n\nThat hears men laugh and weep, and knows not whence\nNor wherefore, but is broken in his sense;\nHowbeit I met folk riding from the north\nTowards Rome, to purge them of their souls’ offence,\n\nAnd rode with them, and spake to none; the day\nStunned me like lights upon some wizard way,\nAnd ate like fire mine eyes and mine eyesight;\nSo rode I, hearing all these chant and pray,\n\nAnd marvelled; till before us rose and fell\nWhite cursed hills, like outer skirts of hell\nSeen where men’s eyes look through the day to night,\nLike a jagged shell’s lips, harsh, untunable,\n\nBlown in between by devils’ wrangling breath;\nNathless we won well past that hell and death,\nDown to the sweet land where all airs are good,\nEven unto Rome where God’s grace tarrieth.\n\nThen came each man and worshipped at his knees\nWho in the Lord God’s likeness bears the keys\nTo bind or loose, and called on Christ’s shed blood,\nAnd so the sweet-souled father gave him ease.\n\nBut when I came I fell down at his feet,\nSaying, “Father, though the Lord’s blood be right sweet,\nThe spot it takes not off the panther’s skin,\nNor shall an Ethiop’s stain be bleached with it.”\n\n“Lo, I have sinned and have spat out at God,\nWherefore his hand is heavier and his rod\nMore sharp because of mine exceeding sin,\nAnd all his raiment redder than bright blood\n\nBefore mine eyes; yea, for my sake I wot\nThe heat of hell is waxen seven times hot\nThrough my great sin.” Then spake he some sweet word,\nGiving me cheer; which thing availed me not;\n\nYea, scarce I wist if such indeed were said;\nFor when I ceased--lo, as one newly dead\nWho hears a great cry out of hell, I heard\nThe crying of his voice across my head.\n\n“Until this dry shred staff, that hath no whit\nOf leaf nor bark, bear blossom and smell sweet,\nSeek thou not any mercy in God’s sight,\nFor so long shalt thou be cast out from it.”\n\nYea, what if dried-up stems wax red and green,\nShall that thing be which is not nor has been?\nYea, what if sapless bark wax green and white,\nShall any good fruit grow upon my sin?\n\nNay, though sweet fruit were plucked of a dry tree,\nAnd though men drew sweet waters of the sea,\nThere should not grow sweet leaves on this dead stem,\nThis waste wan body and shaken soul of me.\n\nYea, though God search it warily enough,\nThere is not one sound thing in all thereof;\nThough he search all my veins through, searching them\nHe shall find nothing whole therein but love.\n\nFor I came home right heavy, with small cheer,\nAnd lo my love, mine own soul’s heart, more dear\nThan mine own soul, more beautiful than God,\nWho hath my being between the hands of her--\n\nFair still, but fair for no man saving me,\nAs when she came out of the naked sea\nMaking the foam as fire whereon she trod,\nAnd as the inner flower of fire was she.\n\nYea, she laid hold upon me, and her mouth\nClove unto mine as soul to body doth,\nAnd, laughing, made her lips luxurious;\nHer hair had smells of all the sunburnt south,\n\nStrange spice and flower, strange savour of crushed fruit,\nAnd perfume the swart kings tread underfoot\nFor pleasure when their minds wax amorous,\nCharred frankincense and grated sandal-root.\n\nAnd I forgot fear and all weary things,\nAll ended prayers and perished thanksgivings,\nFeeling her face with all her eager hair\nCleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings\n\nTo the body and to the raiment, burning them;\nAs after death I know that such-like flame\nShall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care,\nAlbeit I burn then, having felt the same?\n\nAh love, there is no better life than this;\nTo have known love, how bitter a thing it is,\nAnd afterward be cast out of God’s sight;\nYea, these that know not, shall they have such bliss\n\nHigh up in barren heaven before his face\nAs we twain in the heavy-hearted place,\nRemembering love and all the dead delight,\nAnd all that time was sweet with for a space?\n\nFor till the thunder in the trumpet be,\nSoul may divide from body, but not we\nOne from another; I hold thee with my hand,\nI let mine eyes have all their will of thee,\n\nI seal myself upon thee with my might,\nAbiding alway out of all men’s sight\nUntil God loosen over sea and land\nThe thunder of the trumpets of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-leave-taking": { - "title": "“A Leave-Taking”", - "body": "Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.\nLet us go hence together without fear;\nKeep silence now, for singing-time is over,\nAnd over all old things and all things dear.\nShe loves not you nor me as all we love her.\nYea, though we sang as angels in her ear,\nShe would not hear.\n\nLet us rise up and part; she will not know.\nLet us go seaward as the great winds go,\nFull of blown sand and foam; what help is here?\nThere is no help, for all these things are so,\nAnd all the world is bitter as a tear.\nAnd how these things are, though ye strove to show,\nShe would not know.\n\nLet us go home and hence; she will not weep.\nWe gave love many dreams and days to keep,\nFlowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow,\nSaying “If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.”\nAll is reaped now; no grass is left to mow;\nAnd we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep,\nShe would not weep.\n\nLet us go hence and rest; she will not love.\nShe shall not hear us if we sing hereof,\nNor see love’s ways, how sore they are and steep.\nCome hence, let be, lie still; it is enough.\nLove is a barren sea, bitter and deep;\nAnd though she saw all heaven in flower above,\nShe would not love.\n\nLet us give up, go down; she will not care.\nThough all the stars made gold of all the air,\nAnd the sea moving saw before it move\nOne moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair;\nThough all those waves went over us, and drove\nDeep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,\nShe would not care.\n\nLet us go hence, go hence; she will not see.\nSing all once more together; surely she,\nShe too, remembering days and words that were,\nWill turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,\nWe are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.\nNay, and though all men seeing had pity on me,\nShe would not see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-leper": { - "title": "“The Leper”", - "body": "Nothing is better, I well think,\nThan love; the hidden well-water\nIs not so delicate to drink:\nThis was well seen of me and her.\n\nI served her in a royal house;\nI served her wine and curious meat.\nFor will to kiss between her brows,\nI had no heart to sleep or eat.\n\nMere scorn God knows she had of me,\nA poor scribe, nowise great or fair,\nWho plucked his clerk’s hood back to see\nHer curled-up lips and amorous hair.\n\nI vex my head with thinking this.\nYea, though God always hated me,\nAnd hates me now that I can kiss\nHer eyes, plait up her hair to see\n\nHow she then wore it on the brows,\nYet am I glad to have her dead\nHere in this wretched wattled house\nWhere I can kiss her eyes and head.\n\nNothing is better, I well know,\nThan love; no amber in cold sea\nOr gathered berries under snow:\nThat is well seen of her and me.\n\nThree thoughts I make my pleasure of:\nFirst I take heart and think of this:\nThat knight’s gold hair she chose to love,\nHis mouth she had such will to kiss.\n\nThen I remember that sundawn\nI brought him by a privy way\nOut at her lattice, and thereon\nWhat gracious words she found to say.\n\n(Cold rushes for such little feet--\nBoth feet could lie into my hand.\nA marvel was it of my sweet\nHer upright body could so stand.)\n\n“Sweet friend, God give you thank and grace;\nNow am I clean and whole of shame,\nNor shall men burn me in the face\nFor my sweet fault that scandals them.”\n\nI tell you over word by word.\nShe, sitting edgewise on her bed,\nHolding her feet, said thus. The third,\nA sweeter thing than these, I said.\n\nGod, that makes time and ruins it\nAnd alters not, abiding God,\nChanged with disease her body sweet,\nThe body of love wherein she abode.\n\nLove is more sweet and comelier\nThan a dove’s throat strained out to sing.\nAll they spat out and cursed at her\nAnd cast her forth for a base thing.\n\nThey cursed her, seeing how God had wrought\nThis curse to plague her, a curse of his.\nFools were they surely, seeing not\nHow sweeter than all sweet she is.\n\nHe that had held her by the hair,\nWith kissing lips blinding her eyes,\nFelt her bright bosom, strained and bare,\nSigh under him, with short mad cries\n\nOut of her throat and sobbing mouth\nAnd body broken up with love,\nWith sweet hot tears his lips were loth\nHer own should taste the savour of,\n\nYea, he inside whose grasp all night\nHer fervent body leapt or lay,\nStained with sharp kisses red and white,\nFound her a plague to spurn away.\n\nI hid her in this wattled house,\nI served her water and poor bread.\nFor joy to kiss between her brows\nTime upon time I was nigh dead.\n\nBread failed; we got but well-water\nAnd gathered grass with dropping seed.\nI had such joy of kissing her,\nI had small care to sleep or feed.\n\nSometimes when service made me glad\nThe sharp tears leapt between my lids,\nFalling on her, such joy I had\nTo do the service God forbids.\n\n“I pray you let me be at peace,\nGet hence, make room for me to die.”\nShe said that: her poor lip would cease,\nPut up to mine, and turn to cry.\n\nI said, “Bethink yourself how love\nFared in us twain, what either did;\nShall I unclothe my soul thereof?\nThat I should do this, God forbid.”\n\nYea, though God hateth us, he knows\nThat hardly in a little thing\nLove faileth of the work it does\nTill it grow ripe for gathering.\n\nSix months, and now my sweet is dead\nA trouble takes me; I know not\nIf all were done well, all well said,\nNo word or tender deed forgot.\n\nToo sweet, for the least part in her,\nTo have shed life out by fragments; yet,\nCould the close mouth catch breath and stir,\nI might see something I forget.\n\nSix months, and I sit still and hold\nIn two cold palms her cold two feet.\nHer hair, half grey half ruined gold,\nThrills me and burns me in kissing it.\n\nLove bites and stings me through, to see\nHer keen face made of sunken bones.\nHer worn-off eyelids madden me,\nThat were shot through with purple once.\n\nShe said, “Be good with me; I grow\nSo tired for shame’s sake, I shall die\nIf you say nothing:” even so.\nAnd she is dead now, and shame put by.\n\nYea, and the scorn she had of me\nIn the old time, doubtless vexed her then.\nI never should have kissed her. See\nWhat fools God’s anger makes of men!\n\nShe might have loved me a little too,\nHad I been humbler for her sake.\nBut that new shame could make love new\nShe saw not--yet her shame did make.\n\nI took too much upon my love,\nHaving for such mean service done\nHer beauty and all the ways thereof,\nHer face and all the sweet thereon.\n\nYea, all this while I tended her,\nI know the old love held fast his part:\nI know the old scorn waxed heavier,\nMixed with sad wonder, in her heart.\n\nIt may be all my love went wrong--\nA scribe’s work writ awry and blurred,\nScrawled after the blind evensong--\nSpoilt music with no perfect word.\n\nBut surely I would fain have done\nAll things the best I could. Perchance\nBecause I failed, came short of one,\nShe kept at heart that other man’s.\n\nI am grown blind with all these things:\nIt may be now she hath in sight\nSome better knowledge; still there clings\nThe old question. Will not God do right?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "les-noyades": { - "title": "“Les Noyades”", - "body": "Whatever a man of the sons of men\nShall say to his heart of the lords above,\nThey have shown man verily, once and again,\nMarvellous mercies and infinite love.\n\nIn the wild fifth year of the change of things,\nWhen France was glorious and blood-red, fair\nWith dust of battle and deaths of kings,\nA queen of men, with helmeted hair,\n\nCarrier came down to the Loire and slew,\nTill all the ways and the waves waxed red:\nBound and drowned, slaying two by two,\nMaidens and young men, naked and wed.\n\nThey brought on a day to his judgment-place\nOne rough with labour and red with fight,\nAnd a lady noble by name and face,\nFaultless, a maiden, wonderful, white.\n\nShe knew not, being for shame’s sake blind,\nIf his eyes were hot on her face hard by.\nAnd the judge bade strip and ship them, and bind\nBosom to bosom, to drown and die.\n\nThe white girl winced and whitened; but he\nCaught fire, waxed bright as a great bright flame\nSeen with thunder far out on the sea,\nLaughed hard as the glad blood went and came.\n\nTwice his lips quailed with delight, then said,\n“I have but a word to you all, one word;\nBear with me; surely I am but dead”;\nAnd all they laughed and mocked him and heard.\n\n“Judge, when they open the judgment-roll,\nI will stand upright before God and pray:\n‘Lord God, have mercy on one man’s soul,\nFor his mercy was great upon earth, I say.’”\n\n“‘Lord, if I loved thee--Lord, if I served--\nIf these who darkened thy fair Son’s face\nI fought with, sparing not one, nor swerved\nA hand’s-breadth, Lord, in the perilous place--’”\n\n“‘I pray thee say to this man, O Lord,\n_Sit thou for him at my feet on a throne_.\nI will face thy wrath, though it bite as a sword,\nAnd my soul shall burn for his soul, and atone.’”\n\n“‘For, Lord, thou knowest, O God most wise,\nHow gracious on earth were his deeds towards me.\nShall this be a small thing in thine eyes,\nThat is greater in mine than the whole great sea?’”\n\n“I have loved this woman my whole life long,\nAnd even for love’s sake when have I said\n‘I love you’? when have I done you wrong,\nLiving? but now I shall have you dead.”\n\n“Yea, now, do I bid you love me, love?\nLove me or loathe, we are one not twain.\nBut God be praised in his heaven above\nFor this my pleasure and that my pain!”\n\n“For never a man, being mean like me,\nShall die like me till the whole world dies.\nI shall drown with her, laughing for love; and she\nMix with me, touching me, lips and eyes.”\n\n“Shall she not know me and see me all through,\nMe, on whose heart as a worm she trod?\nYou have given me, God requite it you,\nWhat man yet never was given of God.”\n\nO sweet one love, O my life’s delight,\nDear, though the days have divided us,\nLost beyond hope, taken far out of sight,\nNot twice in the world shall the gods do thus.\n\nHad it been so hard for my love? but I,\nThough the gods gave all that a god can give,\nI had chosen rather the gift to die,\nCease, and be glad above all that live.\n\nFor the Loire would have driven us down to the sea,\nAnd the sea would have pitched us from shoal to shoal;\nAnd I should have held you, and you held me,\nAs flesh holds flesh, and the soul the soul.\n\nCould I change you, help you to love me, sweet,\nCould I give you the love that would sweeten death,\nWe should yield, go down, locked hands and feet,\nDie, drown together, and breath catch breath;\n\nBut you would have felt my soul in a kiss,\nAnd known that once if I loved you well;\nAnd I would have given my soul for this\nTo burn for ever in burning hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "love-lies-bleeding": { - "title": "“Love Lies Bleeding”", - "body": "Love lies bleeding in the bed whereover\nRoses lean with smiling mouths or pleading:\nEarth lies laughing where the sun’s dart clove her:\n Love lies bleeding.\n\nStately shine his purple plumes, exceeding\nPride of princes: nor shall maid or lover\nFind on earth a fairer sign worth heeding.\n\nYet may love, sore wounded scarce recover\nStrength and spirit again, with life receding:\nHope and joy, wind-winged, about him hover:\n Love lies bleeding.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "love-and-sleep": { - "title": "“Love and Sleep”", - "body": "Lying asleep between the strokes of night\n I saw my love lean over my sad bed,\n Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,\nSmooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,\nToo wan for blushing and too warm for white,\n But perfect-coloured without white or red.\n And her lips opened amorously, and said--\nI wist not what, saving one word--Delight.\n\nAnd all her face was honey to my mouth,\n And all her body pasture to mine eyes;\n The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,\nThe quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,\n The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs\n And glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "march": { - "title": "“March”", - "body": "Ere frost-flower and snow-blossom faded and fell, and the splendour of winter had passed out of sight,\nThe ways of the woodlands were fairer and stranger than dreams that fulfil us in sleep with delight;\nThe breath of the mouths of the winds had hardened on tree-tops and branches that glittered and swayed\nSuch wonders and glories of blossomlike snow or of frost that outlightens all flowers till it fade\nThat the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,\nNor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,\nMarch, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.\n\nAnd now that the rage of thy rapture is satiate with revel and ravin and spoil of the snow,\nAnd the branches it brightened are broken, and shattered the tree-tops that only thy wrath could lay low,\nHow should not thy lovers rejoice in thee, leader and lord of the year that exults to be born\nSo strong in thy strength and so glad of thy gladness whose laughter puts winter and sorrow to scorn?\nThou hast shaken the snows from thy wings, and the frost on thy forehead is molten: thy lips are aglow\nAs a lover’s that kindle with kissing, and earth, with her raiment and tresses yet wasted and torn,\nTakes breath as she smiles in the grasp of thy passion to feel through her spirit the sense of thee flow.\n\nFain, fain would we see but again for an hour what the wind and the sun have dispelled and consumed,\nThose full deep swan-soft feathers of snow with whose luminous burden the branches implumed\nHung heavily, curved as a half-bent bow, and fledged not as birds are, but petalled as flowers,\nEach tree-top and branchlet a pinnacle jewelled and carved, or a fountain that shines as it showers,\nBut fixed as a fountain is fixed not, and wrought not to last till by time or by tempest entombed,\nAs a pinnacle carven and gilded of men: for the date of its doom is no more than an hour’s,\nOne hour of the sun’s when the warm wind wakes him to wither the snow-flowers that froze as they bloomed.\n\nAs the sunshine quenches the snowshine; as April subdues thee, and yields up his kingdom to May;\nSo time overcomes the regret that is born of delight as it passes in passion away,\nAnd leaves but a dream for desire to rejoice in or mourn for with tears or thanksgivings; but thou,\nBright god that art gone from us, maddest and gladdest of months, to what goal hast thou gone from us now?\nFor somewhere surely the storm of thy laughter that lightens, the beat of thy wings that play,\nMust flame as a fire through the world, and the heavens that we know not rejoice in thee: surely thy brow\nHath lost not its radiance of empire, thy spirit the joy that impelled it on quest as for prey.\n\nAre thy feet on the ways of the limitless waters, thy wings on the winds of the waste north sea?\nAre the fires of the false north dawn over heavens where summer is stormful and strong like thee\nNow bright in the sight of thine eyes? are the bastions of icebergs assailed by the blast of thy breath?\nIs it March with the wild north world when April is waning? the word that the changed year saith,\nIs it echoed to northward with rapture of passion reiterate from spirits triumphant as we\nWhose hearts were uplift at the blast of thy clarions as men’s rearisen from a sleep that was death\nAnd kindled to life that was one with the world’s and with thine? hast thou set not the whole world free?\n\nFor the breath of thy lips is freedom, and freedom’s the sense of thy spirit, the sound of thy song,\nGlad god of the north-east wind, whose heart is as high as the hands of thy kingdom are strong,\nThy kingdom whose empire is terror and joy, twin-featured and fruitful of births divine,\nDays lit with the flame of the lamps of the flowers, and nights that are drunken with dew for wine,\nAnd sleep not for joy of the stars that deepen and quicken, a denser and fierier throng,\nAnd the world that thy breath bade whiten and tremble rejoices at heart as they strengthen and shine,\nAnd earth gives thanks for the glory bequeathed her, and knows of thy reign that it wrought not wrong.\n\nThy spirit is quenched not, albeit we behold not thy face in the crown of the steep sky’s arch,\nAnd the bold first buds of the whin wax golden, and witness arise of the thorn and the larch:\nWild April, enkindled to laughter and storm by the kiss of the wildest of winds that blow,\nCalls loud on his brother for witness; his hands that were laden with blossom are sprinkled with snow,\nAnd his lips breathe winter, and laugh, and relent; and the live woods feel not the frost’s flame parch;\nFor the flame of the spring that consumes not but quickens is felt at the heart of the forest aglow,\nAnd the sparks that enkindled and fed it were strewn from the hands of the gods of the winds of March.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "a-match": { - "title": "“A Match”", - "body": "If love were what the rose is,\nAnd I were like the leaf,\nOur lives would grow together\nIn sad or singing weather,\nBlown fields or flowerful closes,\nGreen pleasure or gray grief;\nIf love were what the rose is,\nAnd I were like the leaf.\n\nIf I were what the words are,\nAnd love were like the tune,\nWith double sound and single\nDelight our lips would mingle,\nWith kisses glad as birds are\nThat get sweet rain at noon;\nIf I were what the words are,\nAnd love were like the tune.\n\nIf you were life, my darling,\nAnd I your love were death,\nWe’d shine and snow together\nEre March made sweet the weather\nWith daffodil and starling\nAnd hours of fruitful breath;\nIf you were life, my darling,\nAnd I your love were death.\n\nIf you were thrall to sorrow,\nAnd I were page to joy,\nWe’d play for lives and seasons\nWith loving looks and treasons\nAnd tears of night and morrow\nAnd laughs of maid and boy;\nIf you were thrall to sorrow,\nAnd I were page to joy.\n\nIf you were April’s lady,\nAnd I were lord in May,\nWe’d throw with leaves for hours\nAnd draw for days with flowers,\nTill day like night were shady\nAnd night were bright like day;\nIf you were April’s lady,\nAnd I were lord in May.\n\nIf you were queen of pleasure,\nAnd I were king of pain,\nWe’d hunt down love together,\nPluck out his flying-feather,\nAnd teach his feet a measure,\nAnd find his mouth a rein;\nIf you were queen of pleasure,\nAnd I were king of pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-oblation": { - "title": "“The Oblation”", - "body": "Ask nothing more of me, sweet;\n All I can give you I give.\n Heart of my heart, were it more,\nMore would be laid at your feet--\n Love that should help you to live,\n Song that should spur you to soar.\n\nAll things were nothing to give,\n Once to have sense of you more,\n Touch you and taste of you, sweet,\nThink you and breathe you and live,\n Swept of your wings as they soar,\n Trodden by chance of your feet.\n\nI that have love and no more\n Give you but love of you, sweet.\n He that hath more, let him give;\nHe that hath wings, let him soar;\n Mine is the heart at your feet\n Here, that must love you to live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "the-pilgrims": { - "title": "“The Pilgrims”", - "body": "Who is your lady of love, O ye that pass\nSinging? and is it for sorrow of that which was\n That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be?\n For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing.\n--Our lady of love by you is unbeholden;\nFor hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden\n Treasure of hair, nor face nor form; but we\n That love, we know her more fair than anything.\n\n--Is she a queen, having great gifts to give?\n--Yea, these; that whoso hath seen her shall not live\n Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,\n Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears;\nAnd when she bids die he shall surely die.\nAnd he shall leave all things under the sky\n And go forth naked under sun and rain\n And work and wait and watch out all his years.\n\n--Hath she on earth no place of habitation?\n--Age to age calling, nation answering nation,\n Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to say;\n For if she be not in the spirit of men,\nFor if in the inward soul she hath no place,\nIn vain they cry unto her, seeking her face,\n In vain their mouths make much of her; for they\n Cry with vain tongues, till the heart lives again.\n\n--O ye that follow, and have ye no repentance?\nFor on your brows is written a mortal sentence,\n An hieroglyph of sorrow, a fiery sign,\n That in your lives ye shall not pause or rest,\nNor have the sure sweet common love, nor keep\nFriends and safe days, nor joy of life nor sleep.\n --These have we not, who have one thing, the divine\n Face and clear eyes of faith and fruitful breast.\n\n--And ye shall die before your thrones be won.\n--Yea, and the changed world and the liberal sun\n Shall move and shine without us, and we lie\n Dead; but if she too move on earth and live,\nBut if the old world with all the old irons rent\nLaugh and give thanks, shall we be not content?\n Nay, we shall rather live, we shall not die,\n Life being so little and death so good to give.\n\n--And these men shall forget you.--Yea, but we\nShall be a part of the earth and the ancient sea,\n And heaven-high air august, and awful fire,\n And all things good; and no man’s heart shall beat\nBut somewhat in it of our blood once shed\nShall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead\n Blood of men slain and the old same life’s desire\n Plants in their fiery footprints our fresh feet.\n\n--But ye that might be clothed with all things pleasant,\nYe are foolish that put off the fair soft present,\n That clothe yourselves with the cold future air;\n When mother and father and tender sister and brother\nAnd the old live love that was shall be as ye,\nDust, and no fruit of loving life shall be.\n --She shall be yet who is more than all these were,\n Than sister or wife or father unto us or mother.\n\n--Is this worth life, is this, to win for wages?\nLo, the dead mouths of the awful grey-grown ages,\n The venerable, in the past that is their prison,\n In the outer darkness, in the unopening grave,\nLaugh, knowing how many as ye now say have said,\nHow many, and all are fallen, are fallen and dead:\n Shall ye dead rise, and these dead have not risen?\n --Not we but she, who is tender and swift to save.\n\n--Are ye not weary and faint not by the way,\nSeeing night by night devoured of day by day,\n Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?\n Sleepless: and ye too, when shall ye too sleep?\n--We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,\nAnd surely more than all things sleep were sweet,\n Than all things save the inexorable desire\n Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.\n\n--Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow?\nIs this so sure where all men’s hopes are hollow.\n Even this your dream, that by much tribulation\n Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight?\n--Nay, though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,\nNot therefore were the whole world’s high hope rootless;\n But man to man, nation would turn to nation,\n And the old life live, and the old great world be great.\n\n--Pass on then and pass by us and let us be,\nFor what light think ye after life to see?\n And if the world fare better will ye know?\n And if man triumph who shall seek you and say?\n--Enough of light is this for one life’s span,\nThat all men born are mortal, but not man:\n And we men bring death lives by night to sow,\n That man may reap and eat and live by day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "prelude": { - "title": "“Prelude”", - "body": "Between the green bud and the red\nYouth sat and sang by Time, and shed\n From eyes and tresses flowers and tears,\n From heart and spirit hopes and fears,\nUpon the hollow stream whose bed\n Is channelled by the foamless years;\nAnd with the white the gold-haired head\n Mixed running locks, and in Time’s ears\nYouth’s dreams hung singing, and Time’s truth\nWas half not harsh in the ears of Youth.\n\nBetween the bud and the blown flower\nYouth talked with joy and grief an hour,\n With footless joy and wingless grief\n And twin-born faith and disbelief\nWho share the seasons to devour;\n And long ere these made up their sheaf\nFelt the winds round him shake and shower\n The rose-red and the blood-red leaf,\nDelight whose germ grew never grain,\nAnd passion dyed in its own pain.\n\nThen he stood up, and trod to dust\nFear and desire, mistrust and trust,\n And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,\n And bound for sandals on his feet\nKnowledge and patience of what must\n And what things may be, in the heat\nAnd cold of years that rot and rust\n And alter; and his spirit’s meat\nWas freedom, and his staff was wrought\nOf strength, and his cloak woven of thought.\n\nFor what has he whose will sees clear\nTo do with doubt and faith and fear,\n Swift hopes and slow despondencies?\n His heart is equal with the sea’s\nAnd with the sea-wind’s, and his ear\n Is level to the speech of these,\nAnd his soul communes and takes cheer\n With the actual earth’s equalities,\nAir, light, and night, hills, winds, and streams,\nAnd seeks not strength from strengthless dreams.\n\nHis soul is even with the sun\nWhose spirit and whose eye are one,\n Who seeks not stars by day, nor light\n And heavy heat of day by night.\nHim can no God cast down, whom none\n Can lift in hope beyond the height\nOf fate and nature and things done\n By the calm rule of might and right\nThat bids men be and bear and do,\nAnd die beneath blind skies or blue.\n\nTo him the lights of even and morn\nSpeak no vain things of love or scorn,\n Fancies and passions miscreate\n By man in things dispassionate.\nNor holds he fellowship forlorn\n With souls that pray and hope and hate,\nAnd doubt they had better not been born,\n And fain would lure or scare off fate\nAnd charm their doomsman from their doom\nAnd make fear dig its own false tomb.\n\nHe builds not half of doubts and half\nOf dreams his own soul’s cenotaph,\n Whence hopes and fears with helpless eyes,\n Wrapt loose in cast-off cerecloths, rise\nAnd dance and wring their hands and laugh,\n And weep thin tears and sigh light sighs,\nAnd without living lips would quaff\n The living spring in man that lies,\nAnd drain his soul of faith and strength\nIt might have lived on a life’s length.\n\nHe hath given himself and hath not sold\nTo God for heaven or man for gold,\n Or grief for comfort that it gives,\n Or joy for grief’s restoratives.\nHe hath given himself to time, whose fold\n Shuts in the mortal flock that lives\nOn its plain pasture’s heat and cold\n And the equal year’s alternatives.\nEarth, heaven, and time, death, life, and he,\nEndure while they shall be to be.\n\n“Yet between death and life are hours\nTo flush with love and hide in flowers;\n What profit save in these?” men cry:\n “Ah, see, between soft earth and sky,\nWhat only good things here are ours!”\n They say, “what better wouldst thou try,\nWhat sweeter sing of? or what powers\n Serve, that will give thee ere thou die\nMore joy to sing and be less sad,\nMore heart to play and grow more glad?”\n\nPlay then and sing; we too have played,\nWe likewise, in that subtle shade.\n We too have twisted through our hair\n Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,\nAnd heard what mirth the Mænads made,\n Till the wind blew our garlands bare\nAnd left their roses disarrayed,\n And smote the summer with strange air,\nAnd disengirdled and discrowned\nThe limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.\n\nWe too have tracked by star-proof trees\nThe tempest of the Thyiades\n Scare the loud night on hills that hid\n The blood-feasts of the Bassarid,\nHeard their song’s iron cadences\n Fright the wolf hungering from the kid,\nOutroar the lion-throated seas,\n Outchide the north-wind if it chid,\nAnd hush the torrent-tongued ravines\nWith thunders of their tambourines.\n\nBut the fierce flute whose notes acclaim\nDim goddesses of fiery fame,\n Cymbal and clamorous kettledrum,\n Timbrels and tabrets, all are dumb\nThat turned the high chill air to flame;\n The singing tongues of fire are numb\nThat called on Cotys by her name\n Edonian, till they felt her come\nAnd maddened, and her mystic face\nLightened along the streams of Thrace.\n\nFor Pleasure slumberless and pale,\nAnd Passion with rejected veil,\n Pass, and the tempest-footed throng\n Of hours that follow them with song\nTill their feet flag and voices fail,\n And lips that were so loud so long\nLearn silence, or a wearier wail;\n So keen is change, and time so strong,\nTo weave the robes of life and rend\nAnd weave again till life have end.\n\nBut weak is change, but strengthless time,\nTo take the light from heaven, or climb\n The hills of heaven with wasting feet.\n Songs they can stop that earth found meet,\nBut the stars keep their ageless rhyme;\n Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet,\nBut the stars keep their spring sublime;\n Passions and pleasures can defeat,\nActions and agonies control,\nAnd life and death, but not the soul.\n\nBecause man’s soul is man’s God still,\nWhat wind soever waft his will\n Across the waves of day and night\n To port or shipwreck, left or right,\nBy shores and shoals of good and ill;\n And still its flame at mainmast height\nThrough the rent air that foam-flakes fill\n Sustains the indomitable light\nWhence only man hath strength to steer\nOr helm to handle without fear.\n\nSave his own soul’s light overhead,\nNone leads him, and none ever led,\n Across birth’s hidden harbour-bar,\n Past youth where shoreward shallows are,\nThrough age that drives on toward the red\n Vast void of sunset hailed from far,\nTo the equal waters of the dead;\n Save his own soul he hath no star,\nAnd sinks, except his own soul guide,\nHelmless in middle turn of tide.\n\nNo blast of air or fire of sun\nPuts out the light whereby we run\n With girded loins our lamplit race,\n And each from each takes heart of grace\nAnd spirit till his turn be done,\n And light of face from each man’s face\nIn whom the light of trust is one;\n Since only souls that keep their place\nBy their own light, and watch things roll,\nAnd stand, have light for any soul.\n\nA little time we gain from time\nTo set our seasons in some chime,\n For harsh or sweet or loud or low,\n With seasons played out long ago\nAnd souls that in their time and prime\n Took part with summer or with snow,\nLived abject lives out or sublime,\n And had their chance of seed to sow\nFor service or disservice done\nTo those days daed and this their son.\n\nA little time that we may fill\nOr with such good works or such ill\n As loose the bonds or make them strong\n Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.\nBy rose-hung river and light-foot rill\n There are who rest not; who think long\nTill they discern as from a hill\n At the sun’s hour of morning song,\nKnown of souls only, and those souls free,\nThe sacred spaces of the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-reminiscence": { - "title": "“A Reminiscence”", - "body": "The rose to the wind has yielded: all its leaves\n Lie strewn on the graveyard grass, and all their light\n And colour and fragrance leave our sense and sight\nBereft as a man whom bitter time bereaves\nOf blossom at once and hope of garnered sheaves,\n Of April at once and August. Day to night\n Calls wailing, and life to death, and depth to height,\nAnd soul upon soul of man that hears and grieves.\n\nWho knows, though he see the snow-cold blossom shed,\n If haply the heart that burned within the rose,\nThe spirit in sense, the life of life be dead?\n If haply the wind that slays with storming snows\nBe one with the wind that quickens? Bow thine head,\n O Sorrow, and commune with thine heart: who knows?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "rondel": { - "title": "“Rondel”", - "body": "These many years since we began to be,\nWhat have the gods done with us? what with me,\nWhat with my love? they have shown me fates and fears,\nHarsh springs, and fountains bitterer than the sea,\nGrief a fixed star, and joy a vane that veers,\nThese many years.\n\nWith her, my love, with her have they done well?\nBut who shall answer for her? who shall tell\nSweet things or sad, such things as no man hears?\nMay no tears fall, if no tears ever fell,\nFrom eyes more dear to me than starriest spheres\nThese many years!\n\nBut if tears ever touched, for any grief,\nThose eyelids folded like a white-rose leaf,\nDeep double shells wherethrough the eye-flower peers,\nLet them weep once more only, sweet and brief,\nBrief tears and bright, for one who gave her tears\nThese many years.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "sapphics": { - "title": "“Sapphics”", - "body": "All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,\nShed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,\nYet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron\nStood and beheld me.\n\nThen to me so lying awake a vision\nCame without sleep over the seas and touched me,\nSoftly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,\nFull of the vision,\n\nSaw the white implacable Aphrodite,\nSaw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled\nShine as fire of sunset on western waters;\nSaw the reluctant\n\nFeet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,\nLooking always, looking with necks reverted,\nBack to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder\nShone Mitylene;\n\nHeard the flying feet of the Loves behind her\nMake a sudden thunder upon the waters,\nAs the thunder flung from the strong unclosing\nWings of a great wind.\n\nSo the goddess fled from her place, with awful\nSound of feet and thunder of wings around her;\nWhile behind a clamour of singing women\nSevered the twilight.\n\nAh the singing, ah the delight, the passion!\nAll the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,\nStood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;\nFear was upon them,\n\nWhile the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.\nAh the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,\nNone endured the sound of her song for weeping;\nLaurel by laurel,\n\nFaded all their crowns; but about her forehead,\nRound her woven tresses and ashen temples\nWhite as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,\nRavaged with kisses,\n\nShone a light of fire as a crown for ever.\nYea, almost the implacable Aphrodite\nPaused, and almost wept; such a song was that song.\nYea, by her name too\n\nCalled her, saying, “Turn to me, O my Sappho;”\nYet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not\nTears for laughter darken immortal eyelids,\nHeard not about her\n\nFearful fitful wings of the doves departing,\nSaw not how the bosom of Aphrodite\nShook with weeping, saw not her shaken raiment,\nSaw not her hands wrung;\n\nSaw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten\nLutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute-strings,\nMouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen,\nFairer than all men;\n\nOnly saw the beautiful lips and fingers,\nFull of songs and kisses and little whispers,\nFull of music; only beheld among them\nSoar, as a bird soars\n\nNewly fledged, her visible song, a marvel,\nMade of perfect sound and exceeding passion,\nSweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,\nClothed with the wind’s wings.\n\nThen rejoiced she, laughing with love, and scattered\nRoses, awful roses of holy blossom;\nThen the Loves thronged sadly with hidden faces\nRound Aphrodite,\n\nThen the Muses, stricken at heart, were silent;\nYea, the gods waxed pale; such a song was that song.\nAll reluctant, all with a fresh repulsion,\nFled from before her.\n\nAll withdrew long since, and the land was barren,\nFull of fruitless women and music only.\nNow perchance, when winds are assuaged at sunset,\nLulled at the dewfall,\n\nBy the grey sea-side, unassuaged, unheard of,\nUnbeloved, unseen in the ebb of twilight,\nGhosts of outcast women return lamenting,\nPurged not in Lethe,\n\nClothed about with flame and with tears, and singing\nSongs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,\nSongs that break the heart of the earth with pity,\nHearing, to hear them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "sestina": { - "title": "“Sestina”", - "body": "I saw my soul at rest upon a day\n As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,\nAmong soft leaves that give the starlight way\n To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;\nSo that it knew as one in visions may,\n And knew not as men waking, of delight.\n\nThis was the measure of my soul’s delight;\n It had no power of joy to fly by day,\nNor part in the large lordship of the light;\n But in a secret moon-beholden way\nHad all its will of dreams and pleasant night,\n And all the love and life that sleepers may.\n\nBut such life’s triumph as men waking may\n It might not have to feed its faint delight\nBetween the stars by night and sun by day,\n Shut up with green leaves and a little light;\nBecause its way was as a lost star’s way,\n A world’s not wholly known of day or night.\n\nAll loves and dreams and sounds and gleams of night\n Made it all music that such minstrels may,\nAnd all they had they gave it of delight;\n But in the full face of the fire of day\nWhat place shall be for any starry light,\n What part of heaven in all the wide sun’s way?\n\nYet the soul woke not, sleeping by the way,\n Watched as a nursling of the large-eyed night,\nAnd sought no strength nor knowledge of the day,\n Nor closer touch conclusive of delight,\nNor mightier joy nor truer than dreamers may,\n Nor more of song than they, nor more of light.\n\nFor who sleeps once and sees the secret light\n Whereby sleep shows the soul a fairer way\nBetween the rise and rest of day and night,\n Shall care no more to fare as all men may,\nBut be his place of pain or of delight,\n There shall he dwell, beholding night as day.\n\nSong, have thy day and take thy fill of light\n Before the night be fallen across thy way;\nSing while he may, man hath no long delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1878 - } - } - }, - "songs-before-sunrise": { - "title": "“Songs before Sunrise”", - "body": "Between the wave-ridge and the strand\nI let you forth in sight of land,\n Songs that with storm-crossed wings and eyes\n Strain eastward till the darkness dies;\nLet signs and beacons fall or stand,\n And stars and balefires set and rise;\nYe, till some lordlier lyric hand\n Weave the beloved brows their crown,\n At the beloved feet lie down.\n\nO, whatsoever of life or light\nLove hath to give you, what of might\n Or heart or hope is yours to live,\n I charge you take in trust to give\nFor very love’s sake, in whose sight,\n Through poise of hours alternative\nAnd seasons plumed with light or night,\n Ye live and move and have your breath\n To sing with on the ridge of death.\n\nI charge you faint not all night through\nFor love’s sake that was breathed on you\n To be to you as wings and feet\n For travel, and as blood to heat\nAnd sense of spirit to renew\n And bloom of fragrance to keep sweet\nAnd fire of purpose to keep true\n The life, if life in such things be,\n That I would give you forth of me.\n\nOut where the breath of war may bear,\nOut in the rank moist reddened air\n That sounds and smells of death, and hath\n No light but death’s upon its path\nSeen through the black wind’s tangled hair,\n I send you past the wild time’s wrath\nTo find his face who bade you bear\n Fruit of his seed to faith and love,\n That he may take the heart thereof.\n\nBy day or night, by sea or street,\nFly till ye find and clasp his feet\n And kiss as worshippers who bring\n Too much love on their lips to sing,\nBut with hushed heads accept and greet\n The presence of some heavenlier thing\nIn the near air; so may ye meet\n His eyes, and droop not utterly\n For shame’s sake at the light you see.\n\nNot utterly struck spiritless\nFor shame’s sake and unworthiness\n Of these poor forceless hands that come\n Empty, these lips that should be dumb,\nThis love whose seal can but impress\n These weak word-offerings wearisome\nWhose blessings have not strength to bless\n Nor lightnings fire to burn up aught\n Nor smite with thunders of their thought.\n\nOne thought they have, even love; one light,\nTruth, that keeps clear the sun by night;\n One chord, of faith as of a lyre;\n One heat, of hope as of a fire;\nOne heart, one music, and one might,\n One flame, one altar, and one choir;\nAnd one man’s living head in sight\n Who said, when all time’s sea was foam,\n “Let there be Rome”--and there was Rome.\n\nAs a star set in space for token\nLike a live word of God’s mouth spoken,\n Visible sound, light audible,\n In the great darkness thick as hell\nA stanchless flame of love unsloken,\n A sign to conquer and compel,\nA law to stand in heaven unbroken\n Whereby the sun shines, and wherethrough\n Time’s eldest empires are made new;\n\nSo rose up on our generations\nThat light of the most ancient nations,\n Law, life, and light, on the world’s way,\n The very God of very day,\nThe sun-god; from their star-like stations\n Far down the night in disarray\nFled, crowned with fires of tribulations,\n The suns of sunless years, whose light\n And life and law were of the night.\n\nThe naked kingdoms quenched and stark\nDrave with their dead things down the dark,\n Helmless; their whole world, throne by throne,\n Fell, and its whole heart turned to stone,\nHopeless; their hands that touched our ark\n Withered; and lo, aloft, alone,\nOn time’s white waters man’s one bark,\n Where the red sundawn’s open eye\n Lit the soft gulf of low green sky.\n\nSo for a season piloted\nIt sailed the sunlight, and struck red\n With fire of dawn reverberate\n The wan face of incumbent fate\nThat paused half pitying overhead\n And almost had foregone the freight\nOf those dark hours the next day bred\n For shame, and almost had forsworn\n Service of night for love of morn.\n\nThen broke the whole night in one blow,\nThundering; then all hell with one throe\n Heaved, and brought forth beneath the stroke\n Death; and all dead things moved and woke\nThat the dawn’s arrows had brought low,\n At the great sound of night that broke\nThundering, and all the old world-wide woe;\n And under night’s loud-sounding dome\n Men sought her, and she was not Rome.\n\nStill with blind hands and robes blood-wet\nNight hangs on heaven, reluctant yet,\n With black blood dripping from her eyes\n On the soiled lintels of the skies,\nWith brows and lips that thirst and threat,\n Heart-sick with fear lest the sun rise,\nAnd aching with her fires that set,\n And shuddering ere dawn bursts her bars,\n Burns out with all her beaten stars.\n\nIn this black wind of war they fly\nNow, ere that hour be in the sky\n That brings back hope, and memory back,\n And light and law to lands that lack;\nThat spiritual sweet hour whereby\n The bloody-handed night and black\nShall be cast out of heaven to die;\n Kingdom by kingdom, crown by crown,\n The fires of darkness are blown down.\n\nYet heavy, grievous yet the weight\nSits on us of imperfect fate.\n From wounds of other days and deeds\n Still this day’s breathing body bleeds;\nStill kings for fear and slaves for hate\n Sow lives of men on earth like seeds\nIn the red soil they saturate;\n And we, with faces eastward set,\n Stand sightless of the morning yet.\n\nAnd many for pure sorrow’s sake\nLook back and stretch back hands to take\n Gifts of night’s giving, ease and sleep,\n Flowers of night’s grafting, strong to steep\nThe soul in dreams it will not break,\n Songs of soft hours that sigh and sweep\nIts lifted eyelids nigh to wake\n With subtle plumes and lulling breath\n That soothe its weariness to death.\n\nAnd many, called of hope and pride,\nFall ere the sunrise from our side.\n Fresh lights and rumours of fresh fames\n That shift and veer by night like flames,\nShouts and blown trumpets, ghosts that glide\n Calling, and hail them by dead names,\nFears, angers, memories, dreams divide\n Spirit from spirit, and wear out\n Strong hearts of men with hope and doubt.\n\nTill time beget and sorrow bear\nThe soul-sick eyeless child despair,\n That comes among us, mad and blind,\n With counsels of a broken mind,\nTales of times dead and woes that were,\n And, prophesying against mankind,\nShakes out the horror of her hair\n To take the sunlight with its coils\n And hold the living soul in toils.\n\nBy many ways of death and moods\nSouls pass into their servitudes.\n Their young wings weaken, plume by plume\n Drops, and their eyelids gather gloom\nAnd close against man’s frauds and feuds,\n And their tongues call they know not whom\nTo help in their vicissitudes;\n For many slaveries are, but one\n Liberty, single as the sun.\n\nOne light, one law, that burns up strife,\nAnd one sufficiency of life.\n Self-stablished, the sufficing soul\n Hears the loud wheels of changes roll,\nSees against man man bare the knife,\n Sees the world severed, and is whole;\nSees force take dowerless fraud to wife,\n And fear from fraud’s incestuous bed\n Crawl forth and smite his father dead:\n\nSees death made drunk with war, sees time\nWeave many-coloured crime with crime,\n State overthrown on ruining state,\n And dares not be disconsolate.\nOnly the soul hath feet to climb,\n Only the soul hath room to wait,\nHath brows and eyes to hold sublime\n Above all evil and all good,\n All strength and all decrepitude.\n\nShe only, she since earth began,\nThe many-minded soul of man,\n From one incognizable root\n That bears such divers-coloured fruit,\nHath ruled for blessing or for ban\n The flight of seasons and pursuit;\nShe regent, she republican,\n With wide and equal eyes and wings\n Broods on things born and dying things.\n\nEven now for love or doubt of us\nThe hour intense and hazardous\n Hangs high with pinions vibrating\n Whereto the light and darkness cling,\nDividing the dim season thus,\n And shakes from one ambiguous wing\nShadow, and one is luminous,\n And day falls from it; so the past\n Torments the future to the last.\n\nAnd we that cannot hear or see\nThe sounds and lights of liberty,\n The witness of the naked God\n That treads on burning hours unshod\nWith instant feet unwounded; we\n That can trace only where he trod\nBy fire in heaven or storm at sea,\n Not know the very present whole\n And naked nature of the soul;\n\nWe that see wars and woes and kings,\nAnd portents of enormous things,\n Empires, and agonies, and slaves,\n And whole flame of town-swallowing graves;\nThat hear the harsh hours clap sharp wings\n Above the roar of ranks like waves,\nFrom wreck to wreck as the world swings;\n Know but that men there are who see\n And hear things other far than we.\n\nBy the light sitting on their brows,\nThe fire wherewith their presence glows,\n The music falling with their feet,\n The sweet sense of a spirit sweet\nThat with their speech or motion grows\n And breathes and burns men’s hearts with heat;\nBy these signs there is none but knows\n Men who have life and grace to give,\n Men who have seen the soul and live.\n\nBy the strength sleeping in their eyes,\nThe lips whereon their sorrow lies\n Smiling, the lines of tears unshed,\n The large divine look of one dead\nThat speaks out of the breathless skies\n In silence, when the light is shed\nUpon man’s soul of memories;\n The supreme look that sets love free,\n The look of stars and of the sea;\n\nBy the strong patient godhead seen\nImplicit in their mortal mien,\n The conscience of a God held still\n And thunders ruled by their own will\nAnd fast-bound fires that might burn clean\n This worldly air that foul things fill,\nAnd the afterglow of what has been,\n That, passing, shows us without word\n What they have seen, what they have heard,\n\nBy all these keen and burning signs\nThe spirit knows them and divines.\n In bonds, in banishment, in grief,\n Scoffed at and scourged with unbelief,\nFoiled with false trusts and thwart designs,\n Stripped of green days and hopes in leaf,\nTheir mere bare body of glory shines\n Higher, and man gazing surelier sees\n What light, what comfort is of these.\n\nSo I now gazing; till the sense\nBeing set on fire of confidence\n Strains itself sunward, feels out far\n Beyond the bright and morning star,\nBeyond the extreme wave’s refluence,\n To where the fierce first sunbeams are\nWhose fire intolerant and intense\n As birthpangs whence day burns to be\n Parts breathless heaven from breathing sea.\n\nI see not, know not, and am blest,\nMaster, who know that thou knowest,\n Dear lord and leader, at whose hand\n The first days and the last days stand,\nWith scars and crowns on head and breast,\n That fought for love of the sweet land\nOr shall fight in her latter quest;\n All the days armed and girt and crowned\n Whose glories ring thy glory round.\n\nThou sawest, when all the world was blind,\nThe light that should be of mankind,\n The very day that was to be;\n And how shalt thou not sometime see\nThy city perfect to thy mind\n Stand face to living face with thee,\nAnd no miscrowned man’s head behind;\n The hearth of man, the human home,\n The central flame that shall be Rome?\n\nAs one that ere a June day rise\nMakes seaward for the dawn, and tries\n The water with delighted limbs\n That taste the sweet dark sea, and swims\nRight eastward under strengthening skies,\n And sees the gradual rippling rims\nOf waves whence day breaks blossom-wise\n Take fire ere light peer well above,\n And laughs from all his heart with love;\n\nAnd softlier swimming with raised head\nFeels the full flower of morning shed\n And fluent sunrise round him rolled\n That laps and laves his body bold\nWith fluctuant heaven in water’s stead,\n And urgent through the growing gold\nStrikes, and sees all the spray flash red,\n And his soul takes the sun, and yearns\n For joy wherewith the sea’s heart burns;\n\nSo the soul seeking through the dark\nHeavenward, a dove without an ark,\n Transcends the unnavigable sea\n Of years that wear out memory;\nSo calls, a sunward-singing lark,\n In the ear of souls that should be free;\nSo points them toward the sun for mark\n Who steer not for the stress of waves,\n And seek strange helmsmen, and are slaves.\n\nFor if the swimmer’s eastward eye\nMust see no sunrise--must put by\n The hope that lifted him and led\n Once, to have light about his head,\nTo see beneath the clear low sky\n The green foam-whitened wave wax red\nAnd all the morning’s banner fly--\n Then, as earth’s helpless hopes go down,\n Let earth’s self in the dark tides drown.\n\nYea, if no morning must behold\nMan, other than were they now cold,\n And other deeds than past deeds done,\n Nor any near or far-off sun\nSalute him risen and sunlike-souled,\n Free, boundless, fearless, perfect, one,\nLet man’s world die like worlds of old,\n And here in heaven’s sight only be\n The sole sun on the worldless sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "sundew": { - "title": "“Sundew”", - "body": "A little marsh-plant, yellow green,\nAnd pricked at lip with tender red.\nTread close, and either way you tread\nSome faint black water jets between\nLest you should bruise the curious head.\n\nA live thing maybe; who shall know?\nThe summer knows and suffers it;\nFor the cool moss is thick and sweet\nEach side, and saves the blossom so\nThat it lives out the long June heat.\n\nThe deep scent of the heather burns\nAbout it; breathless though it be,\nBow down and worship; more than we\nIs the least flower whose life returns,\nLeast weed renascent in the sea.\n\nWe are vexed and cumbered in earth’s sight\nWith wants, with many memories;\nThese see their mother what she is,\nGlad-growing, till August leave more bright\nThe apple-coloured cranberries.\n\nWind blows and bleaches the strong grass,\nBlown all one way to shelter it\nFrom trample of strayed kine, with feet\nFelt heavier than the moorhen was,\nStrayed up past patches of wild wheat.\n\nYou call it sundew: how it grows,\nIf with its colour it have breath,\nIf life taste sweet to it, if death\nPain its soft petal, no man knows:\nMan has no sight or sense that saith.\n\nMy sundew, grown of gentle days,\nIn these green miles the spring begun\nThy growth ere April had half done\nWith the soft secret of her ways\nOr June made ready for the sun.\n\nO red-lipped mouth of marsh-flower,\nI have a secret halved with thee.\nThe name that is love’s name to me\nThou knowest, and the face of her\nWho is my festival to see.\n\nThe hard sun, as thy petals knew,\nColoured the heavy moss-water:\nThou wert not worth green midsummer\nNor fit to live to August blue,\nO sundew, not remembering her.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "a-swimmers-dream": { - "title": "“A Swimmer’s Dream”", - "body": "# I.\n\nDawn is dim on the dark soft water,\n Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.\nLove’s own self was the deep sea’s daughter,\n Fair and flawless from face to feet,\nHailed of all when the world was golden,\nLoved of lovers whose names beholden\nThrill men’s eyes as with light of olden\n Days more glad than their flight was fleet.\n\nSo they sang: but for men that love her,\n Souls that hear not her word in vain,\nEarth beside her and heaven above her\n Seem but shadows that wax and wane.\nSofter than sleep’s are the sea’s caresses,\nKinder than love’s that betrays and blesses,\nBlither than spring’s when her flowerful tresses\n Shake forth sunlight and shine with rain.\n\nAll the strength of the waves that perish\n Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs,\nSighs for love of the life they cherish,\n Laughs to know that it lives and dies,\nDies for joy of its life, and lives\nThrilled with joy that its brief death gives--\nDeath whose laugh or whose breath forgives\n Change that bids it subside and rise.\n\n\n# II.\n\nHard and heavy, remote but nearing,\n Sunless hangs the severe sky’s weight,\nCloud on cloud, though the wind be veering\n Heaped on high to the sundawn’s gate.\nDawn and even and noon are one,\nVeiled with vapour and void of sun;\nNought in sight or in fancied hearing\n Now less mighty than time or fate.\n\nThe grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,\n Pale and sweet as a dream’s delight,\nAs a dream’s where darkness and light seem dimmer,\n Touched by dawn or subdued by night.\nThe dark wind, stern and sublime and sad,\nSwings the rollers to westward, clad\nWith lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer,\n Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.\n\nLight, and sleep, and delight, and wonder,\n Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud,\nFill the world of the skies whereunder\n Heaves and quivers and pants aloud\nAll the world of the waters, hoary\nNow, but clothed with its own live glory,\nThat mates the lightning and mocks the thunder\n With light more living and word more proud.\n\n\n# III.\n\nFar off westward, whither sets the sounding strife,\n Strife more sweet than peace, of shoreless waves whose glee\n Scorns the shore and loves the wind that leaves them free,\nStrange as sleep and pale as death and fair as life,\n Shifts the moonlight-coloured sunshine on the sea.\n\nToward the sunset’s goal the sunless waters crowd,\n Fast as autumn days toward winter: yet it seems\n Here that autumn wanes not, here that woods and streams\nLose not heart and change not likeness, chilled and bowed,\n Warped and wrinkled: here the days are fair as dreams.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nO russet-robed November,\n What ails thee so to smile?\nChill August, pale September,\n Endured a woful while,\nAnd fell as falls an ember\n From forth a flameless pile:\nBut golden-girt November\n Bids all she looks on smile.\n\nThe lustrous foliage, waning\n As wanes the morning moon,\nHere falling, here refraining,\n Outbraves the pride of June\nWith statelier semblance, feigning\n No fear lest death be soon:\nAs though the woods thus waning\n Should wax to meet the moon.\n\nAs though, when fields lie stricken\n By grey December’s breath,\nThese lordlier growths that sicken\n And die for fear of death\nShould feel the sense requicken\n That hears what springtide saith\nAnd thrills for love, spring-stricken\n And pierced with April’s breath.\n\nThe keen white-winged north-easter\n That stings and spurs thy sea\nDoth yet but feed and feast her\n With glowing sense of glee:\nCalm chained her, storm released her,\n And storm’s glad voice was he:\nSouth-wester or north-easter,\n Thy winds rejoice the sea.\n\n\n# V.\n\nA dream, a dream is it all--the season,\n The sky, the water, the wind, the shore?\nA day-born dream of divine unreason,\n A marvel moulded of sleep--no more?\nFor the cloudlike wave that my limbs while cleaving\nFeel as in slumber beneath them heaving\nSoothes the sense as to slumber, leaving\n Sense of nought that was known of yore.\n\nA purer passion, a lordlier leisure,\n A peace more happy than lives on land,\nFulfils with pulse of diviner pleasure\n The dreaming head and the steering hand.\nI lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow,\nThe deep soft swell of the full broad billow,\nAnd close mine eyes for delight past measure,\n And wish the wheel of the world would stand.\n\nThe wild-winged hour that we fain would capture\n Falls as from heaven that its light feet clomb,\nSo brief, so soft, and so full the rapture\n Was felt that soothed me with sense of home.\nTo sleep, to swim, and to dream, for ever--\nSuch joy the vision of man saw never;\nFor here too soon will a dark day sever\n The sea-bird’s wing from the sea-wave’s foam.\n\nA dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer\n At once and brighter than dreams that flee,\nThe moment’s joy of the seaward swimmer\n Abides, remembered as truth may be.\nNot all the joy and not all the glory\nMust fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary;\nFor there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer,\n And here to south of them swells the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-triumph-of-time": { - "title": "“The Triumph of Time”", - "body": "Before our lives divide for ever,\nWhile time is with us and hands are free,\n(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever\nHand from hand, as we stand by the sea)\nI will say no word that a man might say\nWhose whole life’s love goes down in a day;\nFor this could never have been; and never,\nThough the gods and the years relent, shall be.\n\nIs it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,\nTo think of things that are well outworn?\nOf fruitless husk and fugitive flower,\nThe dream foregone and the deed forborne?\nThough joy be done with and grief be vain,\nTime shall not sever us wholly in twain;\nEarth is not spoilt for a single shower;\nBut the rain has ruined the ungrown corn.\n\nIt will grow not again, this fruit of my heart,\nSmitten with sunbeams, ruined with rain.\nThe singing seasons divide and depart,\nWinter and summer depart in twain.\nIt will grow not again, it is ruined at root,\nThe bloodlike blossom, the dull red fruit;\nThough the heart yet sickens, the lips yet smart,\nWith sullen savour of poisonous pain.\n\nI have given no man of my fruit to eat;\nI trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.\nHad you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,\nThis wild new growth of the corn and vine,\nThis wine and bread without lees or leaven,\nWe had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,\nSouls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,\nOne splendid spirit, your soul and mine.\n\nIn the change of years, in the coil of things,\nIn the clamour and rumour of life to be,\nWe, drinking love at the furthest springs,\nCovered with love as a covering tree,\nWe had grown as gods, as the gods above,\nFilled from the heart to the lips with love,\nHeld fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings,\nO love, my love, had you loved but me!\n\nWe had stood as the sure stars stand, and moved\nAs the moon moves, loving the world; and seen\nGrief collapse as a thing disproved,\nDeath consume as a thing unclean.\nTwain halves of a perfect heart, made fast\nSoul to soul while the years fell past;\nHad you loved me once, as you have not loved;\nHad the chance been with us that has not been.\n\nI have put my days and dreams out of mind,\nDays that are over, dreams that are done.\nThough we seek life through, we shall surely find\nThere is none of them clear to us now, not one.\nBut clear are these things; the grass and the sand,\nWhere, sure as the eyes reach, ever at hand,\nWith lips wide open and face burnt blind,\nThe strong sea-daisies feast on the sun.\n\nThe low downs lean to the sea; the stream,\nOne loose thin pulseless tremulous vein,\nRapid and vivid and dumb as a dream,\nWorks downward, sick of the sun and the rain;\nNo wind is rough with the rank rare flowers;\nThe sweet sea, mother of loves and hours,\nShudders and shines as the grey winds gleam,\nTurning her smile to a fugitive pain.\n\nMother of loves that are swift to fade,\nMother of mutable winds and hours.\nA barren mother, a mother-maid,\nCold and clean as her faint salt flowers.\nI would we twain were even as she,\nLost in the night and the light of the sea,\nWhere faint sounds falter and wan beams wade,\nBreak, and are broken, and shed into showers.\n\nThe loves and hours of the life of a man,\nThey are swift and sad, being born of the sea.\nHours that rejoice and regret for a span,\nBorn with a man’s breath, mortal as he;\nLoves that are lost ere they come to birth,\nWeeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.\nI lose what I long for, save what I can,\nMy love, my love, and no love for me!\n\nIt is not much that a man can save\nOn the sands of life, in the straits of time,\nWho swims in sight of the great third wave\nThat never a swimmer shall cross or climb.\nSome waif washed up with the strays and spars\nThat ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars;\nWeed from the water, grass from a grave,\nA broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.\n\nThere will no man do for your sake, I think,\nWhat I would have done for the least word said.\nI had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,\nBroken it up for your daily bread:\nBody for body and blood for blood,\nAs the flow of the full sea risen to flood\nThat yearns and trembles before it sink,\nI had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.\n\nYea, hope at highest and all her fruit,\nAnd time at fullest and all his dower,\nI had given you surely, and life to boot,\nWere we once made one for a single hour.\nBut now, you are twain, you are cloven apart,\nFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart;\nAnd deep in one is the bitter root,\nAnd sweet for one is the lifelong flower.\n\nTo have died if you cared I should die for you, clung\nTo my life if you bade me, played my part\nAs it pleased you--these were the thoughts that stung,\nThe dreams that smote with a keener dart\nThan shafts of love or arrows of death;\nThese were but as fire is, dust, or breath,\nOr poisonous foam on the tender tongue\nOf the little snakes that eat my heart.\n\nI wish we were dead together to-day,\nLost sight of, hidden away out of sight,\nClasped and clothed in the cloven clay,\nOut of the world’s way, out of the light,\nOut of the ages of worldly weather,\nForgotten of all men altogether,\nAs the world’s first dead, taken wholly away,\nMade one with death, filled full of the night.\n\nHow we should slumber, how we should sleep,\nFar in the dark with the dreams and the dews!\nAnd dreaming, grow to each other, and weep,\nLaugh low, live softly, murmur and muse;\nYea, and it may be, struck through by the dream,\nFeel the dust quicken and quiver, and seem\nAlive as of old to the lips, and leap\nSpirit to spirit as lovers use.\n\nSick dreams and sad of a dull delight;\nFor what shall it profit when men are dead\nTo have dreamed, to have loved with the whole soul’s might,\nTo have looked for day when the day was fled?\nLet come what will, there is one thing worth,\nTo have had fair love in the life upon earth:\nTo have held love safe till the day grew night,\nWhile skies had colour and lips were red.\n\nWould I lose you now? would I take you then,\nIf I lose you now that my heart has need?\nAnd come what may after death to men,\nWhat thing worth this will the dead years breed?\nLose life, lose all; but at least I know,\nO sweet life’s love, having loved you so,\nHad I reached you on earth, I should lose not again,\nIn death nor life, nor in dream or deed.\n\nYea, I know this well: were you once sealed mine,\nMine in the blood’s beat, mine in the breath,\nMixed into me as honey in wine,\nNot time, that sayeth and gainsayeth,\nNor all strong things had severed us then;\nNot wrath of gods, nor wisdom of men,\nNor all things earthly, nor all divine,\nNor joy nor sorrow, nor life nor death.\n\nI had grown pure as the dawn and the dew,\nYou had grown strong as the sun or the sea.\nBut none shall triumph a whole life through:\nFor death is one, and the fates are three.\nAt the door of life, by the gate of breath,\nThere are worse things waiting for men than death;\nDeath could not sever my soul and you,\nAs these have severed your soul from me.\n\nYou have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you,\nLife sweet as perfume and pure as prayer.\nBut will it not one day in heaven repent you?\nWill they solace you wholly, the days that were?\nWill you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,\nMeet mine, and see where the great love is,\nAnd tremble and turn and be changed? Content you;\nThe gate is strait; I shall not be there.\n\nBut you, had you chosen, had you stretched hand,\nHad you seen good such a thing were done,\nI too might have stood with the souls that stand\nIn the sun’s sight, clothed with the light of the sun;\nBut who now on earth need care how I live?\nHave the high gods anything left to give,\nSave dust and laurels and gold and sand?\nWhich gifts are goodly; but I will none.\n\nO all fair lovers about the world,\nThere is none of you, none, that shall comfort me.\nMy thoughts are as dead things, wrecked and whirled\nRound and round in a gulf of the sea;\nAnd still, through the sound and the straining stream,\nThrough the coil and chafe, they gleam in a dream,\nThe bright fine lips so cruelly curled,\nAnd strange swift eyes where the soul sits free.\n\nFree, without pity, withheld from woe,\nIgnorant; fair as the eyes are fair.\nWould I have you change now, change at a blow,\nStartled and stricken, awake and aware?\nYea, if I could, would I have you see\nMy very love of you filling me,\nAnd know my soul to the quick, as I know\nThe likeness and look of your throat and hair?\n\nI shall not change you. Nay, though I might,\nWould I change my sweet one love with a word?\nI had rather your hair should change in a night,\nClear now as the plume of a black bright bird;\nYour face fail suddenly, cease, turn grey,\nDie as a leaf that dies in a day.\nI will keep my soul in a place out of sight,\nFar off, where the pulse of it is not heard.\n\nFar off it walks, in a bleak blown space,\nFull of the sound of the sorrow of years.\nI have woven a veil for the weeping face,\nWhose lips have drunken the wine of tears;\nI have found a way for the failing feet,\nA place for slumber and sorrow to meet;\nThere is no rumour about the place,\nNor light, nor any that sees or hears.\n\nI have hidden my soul out of sight, and said\n“Let none take pity upon thee, none\nComfort thy crying: for lo, thou art dead,\nLie still now, safe out of sight of the sun.\nHave I not built thee a grave, and wrought\nThy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought,\nWith soft spun verses and tears unshed,\nAnd sweet light visions of things undone?”\n\n“I have given thee garments and balm and myrrh,\nAnd gold, and beautiful burial things.\nBut thou, be at peace now, make no stir;\nIs not thy grave as a royal king’s?\nFret not thyself though the end were sore;\nSleep, be patient, vex me no more.\nSleep; what hast thou to do with her?\nThe eyes that weep, with the mouth that sings?”\n\nWhere the dead red leaves of the years lie rotten,\nThe cold old crimes and the deeds thrown by,\nThe misconceived and the misbegotten,\nI would find a sin to do ere I die,\nSure to dissolve and destroy me all through,\nThat would set you higher in heaven, serve you\nAnd leave you happy, when clean forgotten,\nAs a dead man out of mind, am I.\n\nYour lithe hands draw me, your face burns through me,\nI am swift to follow you, keen to see;\nBut love lacks might to redeem or undo me;\nAs I have been, I know I shall surely be;\n“What should such fellows as I do?” Nay,\nMy part were worse if I chose to play;\nFor the worst is this after all; if they knew me,\nNot a soul upon earth would pity me.\n\nAnd I play not for pity of these; but you,\nIf you saw with your soul what man am I,\nYou would praise me at least that my soul all through\nClove to you, loathing the lives that lie;\nThe souls and lips that are bought and sold,\nThe smiles of silver and kisses of gold,\nThe lapdog loves that whine as they chew,\nThe little lovers that curse and cry.\n\nThere are fairer women, I hear; that may be;\nBut I, that I love you and find you fair,\nWho are more than fair in my eyes if they be,\nDo the high gods know or the great gods care?\nThough the swords in my heart for one were seven,\nWould the iron hollow of doubtful heaven,\nThat knows not itself whether night-time or day be,\nReverberate words and a foolish prayer?\n\nI will go back to the great sweet mother,\nMother and lover of men, the sea.\nI will go down to her, I and none other,\nClose with her, kiss her and mix her with me;\nCling to her, strive with her, hold her fast:\nO fair white mother, in days long past\nBorn without sister, born without brother,\nSet free my soul as thy soul is free.\n\nO fair green-girdled mother of mine,\nSea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain,\nThy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine,\nThy large embraces are keen like pain.\nSave me and hide me with all thy waves,\nFind me one grave of thy thousand graves,\nThose pure cold populous graves of thine\nWrought without hand in a world without stain.\n\nI shall sleep, and move with the moving ships,\nChange as the winds change, veer in the tide;\nMy lips will feast on the foam of thy lips,\nI shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside;\nSleep, and not know if she be, if she were,\nFilled full with life to the eyes and hair,\nAs a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips\nWith splendid summer and perfume and pride.\n\nThis woven raiment of nights and days,\nWere it once cast off and unwound from me,\nNaked and glad would I walk in thy ways,\nAlive and aware of thy ways and thee;\nClear of the whole world, hidden at home,\nClothed with the green and crowned with the foam,\nA pulse of the life of thy straits and bays,\nA vein in the heart of the streams of the sea.\n\nFair mother, fed with the lives of men,\nThou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say.\nThou hast taken, and shalt not render again;\nThou art full of thy dead, and cold as they.\nBut death is the worst that comes of thee;\nThou art fed with our dead, O mother, O sea,\nBut when hast thou fed on our hearts? or when,\nHaving given us love, hast thou taken away?\n\nO tender-hearted, O perfect lover,\nThy lips are bitter, and sweet thine heart.\nThe hopes that hurt and the dreams that hover,\nShall they not vanish away and apart?\nBut thou, thou art sure, thou art older than earth;\nThou art strong for death and fruitful of birth;\nThy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover;\nFrom the first thou wert; in the end thou art.\n\nAnd grief shall endure not for ever, I know.\nAs things that are not shall these things be;\nWe shall live through seasons of sun and of snow,\nAnd none be grievous as this to me.\nWe shall hear, as one in a trance that hears,\nThe sound of time, the rhyme of the years;\nWrecked hope and passionate pain will grow\nAs tender things of a spring-tide sea.\n\nSea-fruit that swings in the waves that hiss,\nDrowned gold and purple and royal rings.\nAnd all time past, was it all for this?\nTimes unforgotten, and treasures of things?\nSwift years of liking and sweet long laughter,\nThat wist not well of the years thereafter\nTill love woke, smitten at heart by a kiss,\nWith lips that trembled and trailing wings?\n\nThere lived a singer in France of old\nBy the tideless dolorous midland sea.\nIn a land of sand and ruin and gold\nThere shone one woman, and none but she.\nAnd finding life for her love’s sake fail,\nBeing fain to see her, he bade set sail,\nTouched land, and saw her as life grew cold,\nAnd praised God, seeing; and so died he.\n\nDied, praising God for his gift and grace:\nFor she bowed down to him weeping, and said\n“Live”; and her tears were shed on his face\nOr ever the life in his face was shed.\nThe sharp tears fell through her hair, and stung\nOnce, and her close lips touched him and clung\nOnce, and grew one with his lips for a space;\nAnd so drew back, and the man was dead.\n\nO brother, the gods were good to you.\nSleep, and be glad while the world endures.\nBe well content as the years wear through;\nGive thanks for life, and the loves and lures;\nGive thanks for life, O brother, and death,\nFor the sweet last sound of her feet, her breath,\nFor gifts she gave you, gracious and few,\nTears and kisses, that lady of yours.\n\nRest, and be glad of the gods; but I,\nHow shall I praise them, or how take rest?\nThere is not room under all the sky\nFor me that know not of worst or best,\nDream or desire of the days before,\nSweet things or bitterness, any more.\nLove will not come to me now though I die,\nAs love came close to you, breast to breast.\n\nI shall never be friends again with roses;\nI shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong\nRelents and recoils, and climbs and closes,\nAs a wave of the sea turned back by song.\nThere are sounds where the soul’s delight takes fire,\nFace to face with its own desire;\nA delight that rebels, a desire that reposes;\nI shall hate sweet music my whole life long.\n\nThe pulse of war and passion of wonder,\nThe heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,\nThe stars that sing and the loves that thunder,\nThe music burning at heart like wine,\nAn armed archangel whose hands raise up\nAll senses mixed in the spirit’s cup\nTill flesh and spirit are molten in sunder--\nThese things are over, and no more mine.\n\nThese were a part of the playing I heard\nOnce, ere my love and my heart were at strife;\nLove that sings and hath wings as a bird,\nBalm of the wound and heft of the knife.\nFairer than earth is the sea, and sleep\nThan overwatching of eyes that weep,\nNow time has done with his one sweet word,\nThe wine and leaven of lovely life.\n\nI shall go my ways, tread out my measure,\nFill the days of my daily breath\nWith fugitive things not good to treasure,\nDo as the world doth, say as it saith;\nBut if we had loved each other--O sweet,\nHad you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,\nThe heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure\nTo feel you tread it to dust and death--\n\nAh, had I not taken my life up and given\nAll that life gives and the years let go,\nThe wine and honey, the balm and leaven,\nThe dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?\nCome life, come death, not a word be said;\nShould I lose you living, and vex you dead?\nI never shall tell you on earth; and in heaven,\nIf I cry to you then, will you hear or know?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-two-dreams": { - "title": "“The Two Dreams”", - "body": "I will that if I say a heavy thing\nYour tongues forgive me; seeing ye know that spring\nHas flecks and fits of pain to keep her sweet,\nAnd walks somewhile with winter-bitten feet.\nMoreover it sounds often well to let\nOne string, when ye play music, keep at fret\nThe whole song through; one petal that is dead\nConfirms the roses, be they white or red;\nDead sorrow is not sorrowful to hear\nAs the thick noise that breaks mid weeping were;\nThe sick sound aching in a lifted throat\nTurns to sharp silver of a perfect note;\nAnd though the rain falls often, and with rain\nLate autumn falls on the old red leaves like pain,\nI deem that God is not disquieted.\nAlso while men are fed with wine and bread,\nThey shall be fed with sorrow at his hand.\nThere grew a rose-garden in Florence land\nMore fair than many; all red summers through\nThe leaves smelt sweet and sharp of rain, and blew\nSideways with tender wind; and therein fell\nSweet sound wherewith the green waxed audible,\nAs a bird’s will to sing disturbed his throat\nAnd set the sharp wings forward like a boat\nPushed through soft water, moving his brown side\nSmooth-shapen as a maid’s, and shook with pride\nHis deep warm bosom, till the heavy sun’s\nSet face of heat stopped all the songs at once.\nThe ways were clean to walk and delicate;\nAnd when the windy white of March grew late,\nBefore the trees took heart to face the sun\nWith ravelled raiment of lean winter on,\nThe roots were thick and hot with hollow grass.\nSome roods away a lordly house there was,\nCool with broad courts and latticed passage wet\nFrom rush-flowers and lilies ripe to set,\nSown close among the strewings of the floor;\nAnd either wall of the slow corridor\nWas dim with deep device of gracious things;\nSome angel’s steady mouth and weight of wings\nShut to the side; or Peter with straight stole\nAnd beard cut black against the aureole\nThat spanned his head from nape to crown; thereby\nMary’s gold hair, thick to the girdle-tie\nWherein was bound a child with tender feet;\nOr the broad cross with blood nigh brown on it.\nWithin this house a righteous lord abode,\nSer Averardo; patient of his mood,\nAnd just of judgment; and to child he had\nA maid so sweet that her mere sight made glad\nMen sorrowing, and unbound the brows of hate;\nAnd where she came, the lips that pain made strait\nWaxed warm and wide, and from untender grew\nTender as those that sleep brings patience to.\nSuch long locks had she, that with knee to chin\nShe might have wrapped and warmed her feet therein.\nRight seldom fell her face on weeping wise;\nGold hair she had, and golden-coloured eyes,\nFilled with clear light and fire and large repose\nLike a fair hound’s; no man there is but knows\nHer face was white, and thereto she was tall;\nIn no wise lacked there any praise at all\nTo her most perfect and pure maidenhood;\nNo sin I think there was in all her blood.\nShe, where a gold grate shut the roses in,\nDwelt daily through deep summer weeks, through green\nFlushed hours of rain upon the leaves; and there\nLove made him room and space to worship her\nWith tender worship of bowed knees, and wrought\nSuch pleasure as the pained sense palates not\nFor weariness, but at one taste undoes\nThe heart of its strong sweet, is ravenous\nOf all the hidden honey; words and sense\nFail through the tune’s imperious prevalence.\nIn a poor house this lover kept apart,\nLong communing with patience next his heart\nIf love of his might move that face at all,\nTuned evenwise with colours musical;\nThen after length of days he said thus: “Love,\nFor love’s own sake and for the love thereof\nLet no harsh words untune your gracious mood;\nFor good it were, if anything be good,\nTo comfort me in this pain’s plague of mine;\nSeeing thus, how neither sleep nor bread nor wine\nSeems pleasant to me, yea no thing that is\nSeems pleasant to me; only I know this,\nLove’s ways are sharp for palms of piteous feet\nTo travel, but the end of such is sweet:\nNow do with me as seemeth you the best.”\nShe mused a little, as one holds his guest\nBy the hand musing, with her face borne down:\nThen said: “Yea, though such bitter seed be sown,\nHave no more care of all that you have said;\nSince if there is no sleep will bind your head,\nLo, I am fain to help you certainly;\nChrist knoweth, sir, if I would have you die;\nThere is no pleasure when a man is dead.”\nThereat he kissed her hands and yellow head\nAnd clipped her fair long body many times;\nI have no wit to shape in written rhymes\nA scanted tithe of this great joy they had.\nThey were too near love’s secret to be glad;\nAs whoso deems the core will surely melt\nFrom the warm fruit his lips caress, hath felt\nSome bitter kernel where the teeth shut hard:\nOr as sweet music sharpens afterward,\nBeing half disrelished both for sharp and sweet;\nAs sea-water, having killed over-heat\nIn a man’s body, chills it with faint ache;\nSo their sense, burdened only for love’s sake,\nFailed for pure love; yet so time served their wit,\nThey saved each day some gold reserves of it,\nBeing wiser in love’s riddle than such be\nWhom fragments feed with his chance charity.\nAll things felt sweet were felt sweet overmuch;\nThe rose-thorn’s prickle dangerous to touch,\nAnd flecks of fire in the thin leaf-shadows;\nToo keen the breathed honey of the rose,\nIts red too harsh a weight on feasted eyes;\nThey were so far gone in love’s histories,\nBeyond all shape and colour and mere breath,\nWhere pleasure has for kinsfolk sleep and death,\nAnd strength of soul and body waxen blind\nFor weariness, and flesh entailed with mind,\nWhen the keen edge of sense foretasteth sin.\nEven this green place the summer caught them in\nSeemed half deflowered and sick with beaten leaves\nIn their strayed eyes; these gold flower-fumèd eves\nBurnt out to make the sun’s love-offering,\nThe midnoon’s prayer, the rose’s thanksgiving,\nThe trees’ weight burdening the strengthless air,\nThe shape of her stilled eyes, her coloured hair,\nHer body’s balance from the moving feet--\nAll this, found fair, lacked yet one grain of sweet\nIt had some warm weeks back: so perisheth\nOn May’s new lip the tender April breath:\nSo those same walks the wind sowed lilies in\nAll April through, and all their latter kin\nOf languid leaves whereon the Autumn blows--\nThe dead red raiment of the last year’s rose--\nThe last year’s laurel, and the last year’s love,\nFade, and grow things that death grows weary of.\nWhat man will gather in red summer-time\nThe fruit of some obscure and hoary rhyme\nHeard last midwinter, taste the heart in it,\nMould the smooth semitones afresh, refit\nThe fair limbs ruined, flush the dead blood through\nWith colour, make all broken beauties new\nFor love’s new lesson--shall not such find pain\nWhen the marred music labouring in his brain\nFrets him with sweet sharp fragments, and lets slip\nOne word that might leave satisfied his lip--\nOne touch that might put fire in all the chords?\nThis was her pain: to miss from all sweet words\nSome taste of sound, diverse and delicate--\nSome speech the old love found out to compensate\nFor seasons of shut lips and drowsiness--\nSome grace, some word the old love found out to bless\nPassionless months and undelighted weeks.\nThe flowers had lost their summer-scented cheeks,\nTheir lips were no more sweet than daily breath:\nThe year was plagued with instances of death.\nSo fell it, these were sitting in cool grass\nWith leaves about, and many a bird there was\nWhere the green shadow thickliest impleached\nSoft fruit and writhen spray and blossom bleached\nDry in the sun or washed with rains to white:\nHer girdle was pure silk, the bosom bright\nWith purple as purple water and gold wrought in.\nOne branch had touched with dusk her lips and chin,\nMade violet of the throat, abashed with shade\nThe breast’s bright plaited work: but nothing frayed\nThe sun’s large kiss on the luxurious hair.\nHer beauty was new colour to the air\nAnd music to the silent many birds.\nLove was an-hungred for some perfect words\nTo praise her with; but only her low name\n‘Andrevuola’ came thrice, and thrice put shame\nIn her clear cheek, so fruitful with new red\nThat for pure love straightway shame’s self was dead.\nThen with lids gathered as who late had wept\nShe began saying: “I have so little slept\nMy lids drowse now against the very sun;\nYea, the brain aching with a dream begun\nBeats like a fitful blood; kiss but both brows,\nAnd you shall pluck my thoughts grown dangerous\nAlmost away.” He said thus, kissing them:\n“O sole sweet thing that God is glad to name,\nMy one gold gift, if dreams be sharp and sore\nShall not the waking time increase much more\nWith taste and sound, sweet eyesight or sweet scent?\nHas any heat too hard and insolent\nBurnt bare the tender married leaves, undone\nThe maiden grass shut under from the sun?\nWhere in this world is room enough for pain?”\nThe feverish finger of love had touched again\nHer lips with happier blood; the pain lay meek\nIn her fair face, nor altered lip nor cheek\nWith pallor or with pulse; but in her mouth\nLove thirsted as a man wayfaring doth,\nMaking it humble as weak hunger is.\nShe lay close to him, bade do this and this,\nSay that, sing thus: then almost weeping-ripe\nCrouched, then laughed low. As one that fain would wipe\nThe old record out of old things done and dead,\nShe rose, she heaved her hands up, and waxed red\nFor wilful heart and blameless fear of blame;\nSaying “Though my wits be weak, this is no shame\nFor a poor maid whom love so punisheth\nWith heats of hesitation and stopped breath\nThat with my dreams I live yet heavily\nFor pure sad heart and faith’s humility.\nNow be not wroth and I will show you this.”\n“Methought our lips upon their second kiss\nMet in this place, and a fair day we had\nAnd fair soft leaves that waxed and were not sad\nWith shaken rain or bitten through with drouth;\nWhen I, beholding ever how your mouth\nWaited for mine, the throat being fallen back,\nSaw crawl thereout a live thing flaked with black\nSpecks of brute slime and leper-coloured scale,\nA devil’s hide with foul flame-writhen grail\nFashioned where hell’s heat festers loathsomest;\nAnd that brief speech may ease me of the rest,\nThus were you slain and eaten of the thing.\nMy waked eyes felt the new day shuddering\nOn their low lids, felt the whole east so beat,\nPant with close pulse of such a plague-struck heat,\nAs if the palpitating dawn drew breath\nFor horror, breathing between life and death,\nTill the sun sprang blood-bright and violent.”\nSo finishing, her soft strength wholly spent,\nShe gazed each way, lest some brute-hoovèd thing,\nThe timeless travail of hell’s childbearing,\nShould threat upon the sudden: whereat he,\nFor relish of her tasted misery\nAnd tender little thornprick of her pain,\nLaughed with mere love. What lover among men\nBut hath his sense fed sovereignly ’twixt whiles\nWith tears and covered eyelids and sick smiles\nAnd soft disaster of a painèd face?\nWhat pain, established in so sweet a place,\nBut the plucked leaf of it smells fragrantly?\nWhat colour burning man’s wide-open eye\nBut may be pleasurably seen? what sense\nKeeps in its hot sharp extreme violence\nNo savour of sweet things? The bereaved blood\nAnd emptied flesh in their most broken mood\nFail not so wholly, famish not when thus\nPast honey keeps the starved lip covetous.\nTherefore this speech from a glad mouth began,\nBreathed in her tender hair and temples wan\nLike one prolonged kiss while the lips had breath.\n“Sleep, that abides in vassalage of death\nAnd in death’s service wears out half his age,\nHath his dreams full of deadly vassalage,\nShadow and sound of things ungracious;\nFair shallow faces, hooded bloodless brows,\nAnd mouths past kissing; yea, myself have had\nAs harsh a dream as holds your eyelids sad.”\n“This dream I tell you came three nights ago;\nIn full mid sleep I took a whim to know\nHow sweet things might be; so I turned and thought;\nBut save my dream all sweet availed me not.\nFirst came a smell of pounded spice and scent\nSuch as God ripens in some continent\nOf utmost amber in the Syrian sea;\nAnd breaths as though some costly rose could be\nSpoiled slowly, wasted by some bitter fire\nTo burn the sweet out leaf by leaf, and tire\nThe flower’s poor heart with heat and waste, to make\nStrong magic for some perfumed woman’s sake.\nThen a cool naked sense beneath my feet\nOf bud and blossom; and sound of veins that beat\nAs if a lute should play of its own heart\nAnd fearfully, not smitten of either part;\nAnd all my blood it filled with sharp and sweet\nAs gold swoln grain fills out the huskèd wheat;\nSo I rose naked from the bed, and stood\nCounting the mobile measure in my blood\nSome pleasant while, and through each limb there came\nSwift little pleasures pungent as a flame,\nFelt in the thrilling flesh and veins as much\nAs the outer curls that feel the comb’s first touch\nThrill to the roots and shiver as from fire;\nAnd blind between my dream and my desire\nI seemed to stand and held my spirit still\nLest this should cease. A child whose fingers spill\nHoney from cells forgotten of the bee\nIs less afraid to stir the hive and see\nSome wasp’s bright back inside, than I to feel\nSome finger-touch disturb the flesh like steel.\nI prayed thus; Let me catch a secret here\nSo sweet, it sharpens the sweet taste of fear\nAnd takes the mouth with edge of wine; I would\nHave here some colour and smooth shape as good\nAs those in heaven whom the chief garden hides\nWith low grape-blossom veiling their white sides\nAnd lesser tendrils that so bind and blind\nTheir eyes and feet, that if one come behind\nTo touch their hair they see not, neither fly;\nThis would I see in heaven and not die.\nSo praying, I had nigh cried out and knelt,\nSo wholly my prayer filled me: till I felt\nIn the dumb night’s warm weight of glowing gloom\nSomewhat that altered all my sleeping-room,\nAnd made it like a green low place wherein\nMaids mix to bathe: one sets her small warm chin\nAgainst a ripple, that the angry pearl\nMay flow like flame about her: the next curl\nDips in some eddy coloured of the sun\nTo wash the dust well out; another one\nHolds a straight ankle in her hand and swings\nWith lavish body sidelong, so that rings\nOf sweet fierce water, swollen and splendid, fail\nAll round her fine and floated body pale,\nSwayed flower-fashion, and her balanced side\nSwerved edgeways lets the weight of water slide,\nAs taken in some underflow of sea\nSwerves the banked gold of sea-flowers; but she\nPulls down some branch to keep her perfect head\nClear of the river: even from wall to bed,\nI tell you, was my room transfigured so.\nSweet, green and warm it was, nor could one know\nIf there were walls or leaves, or if there was\nNo bed’s green curtain, but mere gentle grass.\nThere were set also hard against the feet\nGold plates with honey and green grapes to eat,\nWith the cool water’s noise to hear in rhymes:\nAnd a wind warmed me full of furze and limes\nAnd all hot sweets the heavy summer fills\nTo the round brim of smooth cup-shapen hills.\nNext the grave walking of a woman’s feet\nMade my veins hesitate, and gracious heat\nMade thick the lids and leaden on mine eyes:\nAnd I thought ever, surely it were wise\nNot yet to see her: this may last (who knows?)\nFive minutes; the poor rose is twice a rose\nBecause it turns a face to her, the wind\nSings that way; hath this woman ever sinned,\nI wonder? as a boy with apple-rind,\nI played with pleasures, made them to my mind,\nChanged each ere tasting. When she came indeed,\nFirst her hair touched me, then I grew to feed\nOn the sense of her hand; her mouth at last\nTouched me between the cheek and lip and past\nOver my face with kisses here and there\nSown in and out across the eyes and hair.\nStill I said nothing; till she set her face\nMore close and harder on the kissing-place,\nAnd her mouth caught like a snake’s mouth, and stung\nSo faint and tenderly, the fang scarce clung\nMore than a bird’s foot: yet a wound it grew,\nA great one, let this red mark witness you\nUnder the left breast; and the stroke thereof\nSo clove my sense that I woke out of love\nAnd knew not what this dream was nor had wit;\nBut now God knows if I have skill of it.”\nHereat she laid one palm against her lips\nTo stop their trembling; as when water slips\nOut of a beak-mouthed vessel with faint noise\nAnd chuckles in the narrowed throat and cloys\nThe carven rims with murmuring, so came\nWords in her lips with no word right of them,\nA beaten speech thick and disconsolate,\nTill his smile ceasing waxed compassionate\nOf her sore fear that grew from anything--\nThe sound of the strong summer thickening\nIn heated leaves of the smooth apple-trees:\nThe day’s breath felt about the ash-branches,\nAnd noises of the noon whose weight still grew\nOn the hot heavy-headed flowers, and drew\nTheir red mouths open till the rose-heart ached;\nFor eastward all the crowding rose was slaked\nAnd soothed with shade: but westward all its growth\nSeemed to breathe hard with heat as a man doth\nWho feels his temples newly feverous.\nAnd even with such motion in her brows\nAs that man hath in whom sick days begin,\nShe turned her throat and spake, her voice being thin\nAs a sick man’s, sudden and tremulous;\n“Sweet, if this end be come indeed on us,\nLet us love more;” and held his mouth with hers.\nAs the first sound of flooded hill-waters\nIs heard by people of the meadow-grass,\nOr ever a wandering waif of ruin pass\nWith whirling stones and foam of the brown stream\nFlaked with fierce yellow: so beholding him\nShe felt before tears came her eyelids wet,\nSaw the face deadly thin where life was yet,\nHeard his throat’s harsh last moan before it clomb:\nAnd he, with close mouth passionate and dumb,\nBurned at her lips: so lay they without speech,\nEach grasping other, and the eyes of each\nFed in the other’s face: till suddenly\nHe cried out with a little broken cry\nThis word, “O help me, sweet, I am but dead.”\nAnd even so saying, the colour of fair red\nWas gone out of his face, and his blood’s beat\nFell, and stark death made sharp his upward feet\nAnd pointed hands; and without moan he died.\nPain smote her sudden in the brows and side,\nStrained her lips open and made burn her eyes:\nFor the pure sharpness of her miseries\nShe had no heart’s pain, but mere body’s wrack;\nBut at the last her beaten blood drew back\nSlowly upon her face, and her stunned brows\nSuddenly grown aware and piteous\nGathered themselves, her eyes shone, her hard breath\nCame as though one nigh dead came back from death;\nHer lips throbbed, and life trembled through her hair.\nAnd in brief while she thought to bury there\nThe dead man that her love might lie with him\nIn a sweet bed under the rose-roots dim\nAnd soft earth round the branchèd apple-trees,\nFull of hushed heat and heavy with great ease,\nAnd no man entering divide him thence.\nWherefore she bade one of her handmaidens\nTo be her help to do upon this wise.\nAnd saying so the tears out of her eyes\nFell without noise and comforted her heart:\nYea, her great pain eased of the sorest part\nBegan to soften in her sense of it.\nThere under all the little branches sweet\nThe place was shapen of his burial;\nThey shed thereon no thing funereal,\nBut coloured leaves of latter rose-blossom,\nStems of soft grass, some withered red and some\nFair and fresh-blooded; and spoil splendider\nOf marigold and great spent sunflower.\nAnd afterward she came back without word\nTo her own house; two days went, and the third\nWent, and she showed her father of this thing.\nAnd for great grief of her soul’s travailing\nHe gave consent she should endure in peace\nTill her life’s end; yea, till her time should cease,\nShe should abide in fellowship of pain.\nAnd having lived a holy year or twain\nShe died of pure waste heart and weariness.\nAnd for love’s honour in her love’s distress\nThis word was written over her tomb’s head;\n“Here dead she lieth, for whose sake Love is dead.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "wasted-love": { - "title": "“Wasted Love”", - "body": "What shall be done for sorrow\n With love whose race is run?\nWhere help is none to borrow,\n What shall be done?\n\nIn vain his hands have spun\n The web, or drawn the furrow:\nNo rest their toil hath won.\n\nHis task is all gone thorough,\n And fruit thereof is none:\nAnd who dare say to-morrow\n What shall be done?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - } - } - }, - "the-year-of-love": { - "title": "“The Year of Love”", - "body": "There were four loves that one by one,\nFollowing the seasons and the sun,\nPassed over without tears, and fell\nAway without farewell.\n\nThe first was made of gold and tears,\nThe next of aspen-leaves and fears,\nThe third of rose-boughs and rose-roots,\nThe last love of strange fruits.\n\nThese were the four loves faded. Hold\nSome minutes fast the time of gold\nWhen our lips each way clung and clove\nTo a face full of love.\n\nThe tears inside our eyelids met,\nWrung forth with kissing, and wept wet\nThe faces cleaving each to each\nWhere the blood served for speech.\n\nThe second, with low patient brows\nBound under aspen-coloured boughs\nAnd eyes made strong and grave with sleep\nAnd yet too weak to weep--\n\nThe third, with eager mouth at ease\nFed from late autumn honey, lees\nOf scarce gold left in latter cells\nWith scattered flower-smells--\n\nHair sprinkled over with spoilt sweet\nOf ruined roses, wrists and feet\nSlight-swathed, as grassy-girdled sheaves\nHold in stray poppy-leaves--\n\nThe fourth, with lips whereon has bled\nSome great pale fruit’s slow colour, shed\nFrom the rank bitter husk whence drips\nFaint blood between her lips--\n\nMade of the heat of whole great Junes\nBurning the blue dark round their moons\n(Each like a mown red marigold)\nSo hard the flame keeps hold--\n\nThese are burnt thoroughly away.\nOnly the first holds out a day\nBeyond these latter loves that were\nMade of mere heat and air.\n\nAnd now the time is winterly\nThe first love fades too: none will see,\nWhen April warms the world anew,\nThe place wherein love grew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1866 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "john-millington-synge": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Millington Synge", - "birth": { - "year": 1871 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1909 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Millington_Synge", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "epitaph": { - "title": "“Epitaph”", - "body": "A silent sinner, nights and days,\nNo human heart to him drew nigh,\nAlone he wound his wonted ways,\nAlone and little loved did die.\n\nAnd autumn Death for him did choose,\nA season dank with mists and rain,\nAnd took him, while the evening dews\nWere settling o’er the fields again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "in-may": { - "title": "“In May”", - "body": "In a nook\nThat opened south,\nYou and I\nLay mouth to mouth.\n\nA snowy gull\nAnd sooty daw\nCame and looked\nWith many a caw;\n\n“Such,” I said,\n“Are I and you,\nWhen you’ve kissed me\nBlack and blue!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - } - } - }, - "wislawa-szymborska": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wisława Szymborska", - "birth": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2012 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisława_Szymborska", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 27 - }, - "poems": { - "advertisement": { - "title": "“Advertisement”", - "body": "I’m a tranquilizer.\nI’m effective at home.\nI work in the office.\nI can take exams\non the witness stand.\nI mend broken cups with care.\nAll you have to do is take me,\nlet me melt beneath your tongue,\njust gulp me\nwith a glass of water.\n\nI know how to handle misfortune,\nhow to take bad news.\nI can minimize injustice,\nlighten up God’s absence,\nor pick the widow’s veil that suits your face.\nWhat are you waiting for--\nhave faith in my chemical compassion.\n\nYou’re still a young man/woman.\nIt’s not too late to learn how to unwind.\nWho said\nyou have to take it on the chin?\n\nLet me have your abyss.\nI’ll cushion it with sleep.\nYou’ll thank me for giving you\nfour paws to fall on.\n\nSell me your soul.\nThere are no other takers.\n\nThere is no other devil anymore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Stanisław Barańczak" - } - }, - "birthday": { - "title": "“Birthday”", - "body": "So much world all at once--how it rustles and bustles!\nMoraines and morays and morasses and mussels,\nThe flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather--\nHow to line them all up, how to put them together?\nAll the tickets and crickets and creepers and creeks!\nThe beeches and leeches alone could take weeks.\nChinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas--\nThanks do much, but all this excess of kindness could kill us.\nWhere’s the jar for this burgeoning burdock, brooks’ babble,\nRooks’ squabble, snakes’ quiggle, abundance, and trouble?\nHow to plug up the gold mines and pin down the fox,\nHow to cope with the linx, bobolinks, strptococs!\nTale dioxide: a lightweight, but mighty in deeds:\nWhat about octopodes, what about centipedes?\nI could look into prices, but don’t have the nerve:\nThese are products I just can’t afford, don’t deserve.\nIsn’t sunset a little too much for two eyes\nThat, who knows, may not open to see the sun rise?\nI am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop.\nI won’t catch what is distant: what’s too close, I’ll mix up.\nWhile trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is,\nI’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies.\nWhat a loss when you think how much effort was spent\nperfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent\nfor the one-time appearance, which is all they’re allowed,\nso aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak" - } - }, - "children-of-our-age": { - "title": "“Children of Our Age”", - "body": "We are children of our age,\nit’s a political age.\n\nAll day long, all through the night,\nall affairs--yours, ours, theirs--\nare political affairs.\n\nWhether you like it or not,\nyour genes have a political past,\nyour skin, a political cast,\nyour eyes, a political slant.\n\nWhatever you say reverberates,\nwhatever you don’t say speaks for itself.\nSo either way you’re talking politics.\n\nEven when you take to the woods,\nyou’re taking political steps\non political grounds.\n\nApolitical poems are also political,\nand above us shines a moon\nno longer purely lunar.\nTo be or not to be, that is the question.\nAnd though it troubles the digestion\nit’s a question, as always, of politics.\n\nTo acquire a political meaning\nyou don’t even have to be human.\nRaw material will do,\nor protein feed, or crude oil,\n\nor a conference table whose shape\nwas quarreled over for months;\nShould we arbitrate life and death\nat a round table or a square one?\n\nMeanwhile, people perished,\nanimals died,\nhouses burned,\nand the fields ran wild\njust as in times immemorial\nand less political.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "dreams": { - "title": "“Dreams”", - "body": "Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,\nmocking magnets, graphs, and maps--\nin a split second the dream\npiles before us mountains as stony\nas real life.\n\nAnd since mountains, then valleys, plains\nwith perfect infrastructures.\nWithout engineers, contractors, workers,\nbulldozers, diggers, or supplies--\nraging highways, instant bridges,\nthickly populated pop-up cities.\n\nWithout directors, megaphones, and cameramen--\ncrowds knowing exactly when to frighten us\nand when to vanish.\n\nWithout architects deft in their craft,\nwithout carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers--\non the path a sudden house just like a toy,\nand in it vast halls that echo with our steps\nand walls constructed out of solid air.\n\nNot just the scale, it’s also the precision--\na specific watch, an entire fly,\non the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,\na bitten apple with teeth marks.\n\nAnd we--unlike circus acrobats,\nconjurers, wizards, and hypnotists--\ncan fly unfledged,\nwe light dark tunnels with our eyes,\nwe wax eloquent in unknown tongues,\ntalking not with just anyone, but with the dead.\n\nAnd as a bonus, despite our own freedom,\nthe choices of our heart, our tastes,\nwe’re swept away\nby amorous yearnings for--\nand the alarm clock rings.\n\nSo what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,\nthe scholars of oneiric signs and omens,\nthe doctors with couches for analyses--\nif anything fits,\nit’s accidental,\nand for one reason only,\nthat in our dreamings,\nin their shadowings and gleamings,\nin their multiplings, inconceivablings,\nin their haphazardings and widescatterings\nat times even a clear-cut meaning\nmay slip through.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak" - } - }, - "drinking-wine": { - "title": "“Drinking Wine”", - "body": "He looked at me, bestowing beauty,\nand I took it for my own.\nHappy, I swallowed a star.\n\nI let him invent me\nin the image of the reflection\nin his eyes. I dance, I dance\nin an abundance of sudden wings.\n\nA table is a table, wine is wine\nin a wineglass, which is a wineglass\nand it stands standing on a table\nbut I am a phantasm,\na phantasm beyond belief,\na phantasm to the core.\n\nI tell him what he wants to hear--\n\nabout ants dying of love\nunder a dandelion’s constellation.\nI swear that sprinkled with wine\na white rose will sing.\n\nI laugh, and tilt my head\ncarefully, as if I were testing\nan invention. I dance, I dance\nin astounded skin, in the embrace\nthat creates me.\n\nEve from a rib, Venus from sea foam,\nMinerva from the head of Jove\nwere much more real.\n\nWhen he’s not looking at me,\nI search for my reflection\non the wall. All I see\nis a nail on which a painting hung.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-end-and-the-beginning": { - "title": "“The End and the Beginning”", - "body": "After every war\nsomeone has to clean up.\nThings won’t\nstraighten themselves up, after all.\n\nSomeone has to push the rubble\nto the side of the road,\nso the corpse-filled wagons\ncan pass.\n\nSomeone has to get mired\nin scum and ashes,\nsofa springs,\nsplintered glass,\nand bloody rags.\n\nSomeone has to drag in a girder\nto prop up a wall.\nSomeone has to glaze a window,\nrehang a door.\n\nPhotogenic it’s not,\nand takes years.\nAll the cameras have left\nfor another war.\n\nWe’ll need the bridges back,\nand new railway stations.\nSleeves will go ragged\nfrom rolling them up.\n\nSomeone, broom in hand,\nstill recalls the way it was.\nSomeone else listens\nand nods with unsevered head.\nBut already there are those nearby\nstarting to mill about\nwho will find it dull.\n\nFrom out of the bushes\nsometimes someone still unearths\nrusted-out arguments\nand carries them to the garbage pile.\n\nThose who knew\nwhat was going on here\nmust make way for\nthose who know little.\nAnd less than little.\nAnd finally as little as nothing.\n\nIn the grass that has overgrown\ncauses and effects,\nsomeone must be stretched out\nblade of grass in his mouth\ngazing at the clouds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Joanna Trzeciak" - } - }, - "family-album": { - "title": "“Family Album”", - "body": "No one in this family has ever died of love.\nNo food for myth and nothing magisterial.\nConsumptive Romeos? Juliets diphtherial?\nA doddering second childhood was enough.\nNo death-defying vigils, love-struck poses\nover unrequited letters strewn with tears!\nHere, in conclusion, as scheduled, appears\na portly, pince-nez’d neighbor bearing roses.\nNo suffocation-in-the-closet gaffes\nbecause the cuckold returned home too early!\nThose frills or furbelows, however flounced and whirly,\nbarred no one from the family photographs.\nNo Bosch-like hell within their souls, no wretches\nfound bleeding in the garden, shirts in stains!\n(True, some did die with bullets in their brains,\nfor other reasons, though, and on field stretchers.)\nEven this belle with rapturous coiffure\nwho may have danced till dawn--but nothing smarter--\nhemorrhaged to a better world, b i e n s u r,\nbut not to taunt or hurt y o u, slick-haired partner.\nFor others, Death was mad and monumental--\nnot for these citizens of a sepia past.\nTheir griefs turned into smiles, their days flew fast,\ntheir vanishing was due to influenza.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-few-words-on-the-soul": { - "title": "“A Few Words on the Soul”", - "body": "We have a soul at times.\nNo one’s got it non-stop,\nfor keeps.\n\nDay after day,\nyear after year\nmay pass without it.\n\nSometimes\nit will settle for awhile\nonly in childhood’s fears and raptures.\nSometimes only in astonishment\nthat we are old.\n\nIt rarely lends a hand\nin uphill tasks,\nlike moving furniture,\nor lifting luggage,\nor going miles in shoes that pinch.\n\nIt usually steps out\nwhenever meat needs chopping\nor forms have to be filled.\n\nFor every thousand conversations\nit participates in one,\nif even that,\nsince it prefers silence.\n\nJust when our body goes from ache to pain,\nit slips off-duty.\n\nIt’s picky:\nit doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,\nour hustling for a dubious advantage\nand creaky machinations make it sick.\n\nJoy and sorrow\naren’t two different feelings for it.\nIt attends us\nonly when the two are joined.\n\nWe can count on it\nwhen we’re sure of nothing\nand curious about everything.\n\nAmong the material objects\nit favors clocks with pendulums\nand mirrors, which keep on working\neven when no one is looking.\n\nIt won’t say where it comes from\nor when it’s taking off again,\nthough it’s clearly expecting such questions.\n\nWe need it\nbut apparently\nit needs us\nfor some reason too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak" - } - }, - "a-funeral": { - "title": "“A Funeral”", - "body": "“so suddenly, who would’ve expected this”\n“stress and cigarettes, I was warning him”\n“fair to middling, thanks”\n“unwrap these flowers”\n“his brother snuffed because of his ticker too, must be running in the family”\n“I’d never recognise you with your beard”\n“it’s all his fault, he was always up to some funny business”\n“the new one was to give a speech, can’t see him, though”\n“Kazek’s in Warsaw and Tadek abroad”\n“you’re the only wise one here, having an umbrella”\n“it won’t help him now that he was the most talented of them all”\n“that’s a connecting room. Baśka won’t like it”\n“he was right, true, but that’s not the reason for”\n“with door varnishing, guess how much”\n“two eggs and a spoonful of sugar”\n“none of his business, what was the point then”\n“blue and small sizes only”\n“five times and never a single answer”\n“I’ll give your that, I could’ve, but so could you”\n“so good at least she had that job”\n“I’ve no idea, must be relatives”\n“the priest, very much like Belmondo”\n“I’ve never been to this part of the cemetery”\n“I saw him in my dream last week, must’ve been a premonition”\n“pretty, that little daughter”\n“we’re all going to end up this way”\n“give mine to the widow, I’ve got to hurry to”\n“but still it sounded more solemn in Latin”\n“you can’t turn back the clock”\n“goodbye”\n“how about a beer”\n“give me a ring, we’ll have a chat”\n“number four or number twelve”\n“me, this way”\n“we, that way”.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Mikołaj Sekreck" - } - }, - "going-home": { - "title": "“Going Home”", - "body": "He came home. Said nothing.\nIt was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.\nHe lay down fully dressed.\nPulled the blanket over his head.\nTucked up his knees.\nHe’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.\nHe exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb,\nclad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.\nTomorrow he’ll give a lecture\non homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.\nFor now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-great-mans-house": { - "title": "“A Great Man’s House”", - "body": "It was written in marble in golden letters:\nhere a great man lived and worked and died.\nHe laid the gravel for these paths personally.\nThis bench--do not touch--he chiseled by himself out of stone.\nAnd--careful, three steps--we’re going inside.\n\nHe made it into the world at just the right time.\nEverything that had to pass, passed in this house.\nNot in a high rise,\nnot in square feet, furnished yet empty,\namidst unknown neighbors,\non some fifteenth floor,\nwhere it’s hard to drag school field trips.\n\nIn this room he pondered,\nin this chamber he slept,\nand over here he entertained guests.\nPortraits, an armchair, a desk, a pipe, a globe, a flute,\na worn-out rug, a sun room.\nFrom here he exchanged nods with his tailor and shoemaker\nwho custom made for him.\n\nThis is not the same as photographs in boxes,\ndried out pens in a plastic cup,\na store-bought wardrobe in a store-bought closet,\na window, from which you can see clouds better than people.\n\nHappy? Unhappy?\nThat’s not relevant here.\nHe still confided in his letters,\nwithout thinking they would be opened on their way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "hunger-camp-at-jaslo": { - "title": "“Hunger Camp at Jaslo”", - "body": "Write it. Write. In ordinary ink\non ordinary paper: they were given no food,\nthey all died of hunger. “All. How many?\nIt’s a big meadow. How much grass\nfor each one?” Write: I don’t know.\nHistory counts its skeletons in round numbers.\nA thousand and one remains a thousand,\nas though the one had never existed:\nan imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,\nan ABC never read,\nair that laughs, cries, grows,\nemptiness running down steps toward the garden,\nnobody’s place in the line.\n\nWe stand in the meadow where it became flesh,\nand the meadow is silent as a false witness.\nSunny. Green. Nearby, a forest\nwith wood for chewing and water under the bark--\nevery day a full ration of the view\nuntil you go blind. Overhead, a bird--\nthe shadow of its life-giving wings\nbrushed their lips. Their jaws opened.\nTeeth clacked against teeth.\nAt night, the sickle moon shone in the sky\nand reaped wheat for their bread.\nHands came floating from blackened icons,\nempty cups in their fingers.\nOn a spit of barbed wire,\na man was turning.\nThey sang with their mouths full of earth.\n“A lovely song of how war strikes straight\nat the heart.” Write: how silent.\n“Yes.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "i-am-too-close-for-him": { - "title": "“I Am too Close for Him”", - "body": "I am too close for him to dream about me.\nI’m not flying over him, not fleeing him\nunder the roots of trees. I am too close.\nNot with my voice sings the fish in the net.\nNot from my finger rolls the ring.\nI am too close. A large house is on fire\nwithout my calling for help. Too close\nfor a bell dangling from my hair to chime.\nToo close for me to enter as a guest\nbefore whom the walls part.\nNever again will I die so readily,\nso far beyond the flesh, so inadvertently\nas once in his dream. I am too close,\ntoo close--I hear the hiss\nand see the glittering husk of that word,\nas I lie immobilized in his embrace. He sleeps,\nmore available at this moment\nto the ticket lady of a one-lion traveling circus\nseen but once in his life\nthan to me lying beside him.\nNow a valley grows for her in him, ochre-leaved,\nclosed off by a snowy mountain\nin the azure air. I am too close\nto fall out of the sky for him. My scream\nmight only awaken him. Poor me,\nlimited to my own form,\nbut I was a birch tree, I was a lizard,\nI emerged from satins and sundials\nmy skins shimmering in different colors. I possessed\nthe grace to disappear from astonished eyes,\nand that is the rich man’s riches. I am too close,\ntoo close for him to dream about me.\nI slip my arm out from under his sleeping head.\nIt’s numb, full of imaginary pins and needles.\nAnd on the head of each, ready to be counted,\ndance the fallen angels.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "identification": { - "title": "“Identification”", - "body": "It’s good you came--she says.\nYou heard a plane crashed on Thursday?\nWell so they came to see me\nabout it.\nThe story is he was on the passenger list.\nSo what, he might have changed his mind.\nThey gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart.\nThen they showed me I don’t know who.\nAll black, burned except one hand.\nA scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring.\nI got furious, that can’t be him.\nHe wouldn’t do that to me, look like that.\nThe stores are bursting with those shirts.\nThe watch is just a regular old watch.\nAnd our names on that ring,\nthey’re only the most ordinary names.\nIt’s good you came. Sit here beside me.\nHe really was supposed to get back Thursday.\nBut we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year.\nI’ll put the kettle on for tea.\nI’ll wash my hair, then what,\ntry to wake up from all this.\nIt’s good you came, since it was cold there,\nand him just in some rubber sleeping bag,\nhim, I mean, you know, that unlucky man.\nI’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea,\nsince our names are completely ordinary.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "in-praise-of-feeling-bad-about-yourself": { - "title": "“In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself”", - "body": "The buzzard never says it is to blame.\nThe panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.\nWhen the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.\nIf snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.\n\nA jackal doesn’t understand remorse.\nLions and lice don’t waver in their course.\nWhy should they, when they know they’re right?\n\nThough hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,\nin every other way they’re light.\n\nOn this third planet of the sun\namong the signs of bestiality\na clear conscience is Number One.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "lots-wife": { - "title": "“Lot’s Wife”", - "body": "They say I looked back out of curiosity.\nBut I could have had other reasons.\nI looked back mourning my silver bowl.\nCarelessly, while tying my sandal strap.\nSo I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape\nof my husband Lot’s neck.\nFrom the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead\nhe wouldn’t so much as hesitate.\nFrom the disobedience of the meek.\nChecking for pursuers.\nStruck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.\nOur two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.\nI felt age within me. Distance.\nThe futility of wandering. Torpor.\nI looked back setting my bundle down.\nI looked back not knowing where to set my foot.\nSerpents appeared on my path,\nspiders, field mice, baby vultures.\nThey were neither good nor evil now--every living thing\nwas simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.\nI looked back in desolation.\nIn shame because we had stolen away.\nWanting to cry out, to go home.\nOr only when a sudden gust of wind\nunbound my hair and lifted up my robe.\nIt seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom\nand bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.\nI looked back in anger.\nTo savor their terrible fate.\nI looked back for all the reasons given above.\nI looked back involuntarily.\nIt was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.\nIt was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.\nA hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.\nIt was then we both glanced back.\nNo, no. I ran on,\nI crept, I flew upward\nuntil darkness fell from the heavens\nand with it scorching gravel and dead birds.\nI couldn’t breathe and spun around and around.\nAnyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.\nIt’s not inconceivable that my eyes were open.\nIt’s possible I fell facing the city.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "love-at-first-sight": { - "title": "“Love at First Sight”", - "body": "They both thought\nthat a sudden feeling had united them\nThis certainty is beautiful,\nEven more beautiful than uncertainty.\n\nThey thought they didn’t know each other,\nnothing had ever happened between them,\nThese streets, these stairs, this corridors,\nWhere they could have met so long ago?\n\nI would like to ask them,\nif they can remember--\nperhaps in a revolving door\nface to face one day?\nA “sorry” in the crowd?\n“Wrong number” on the phone?\n--but I know the answer.\nNo, they don’t remember.\n\nHow surprised they would be\nFor such a long time already\nFate has been playing with them.\n\nNot quite yet ready\nto change into destiny,\nwhich brings them nearer and yet further,\ncutting their path\nand stifling a laugh,\nescaping ever further;\nThere were sings, indications,\nundecipherable, what does in matter.\nThree years ago, perhaps\nor even last Tuesday,\nthis leaf flying\nfrom one shoulder to another?\nSomething lost and gathered.\nWho knows, perhaps a ball already\nin the bushes, in childhood?\n\nThere were handles, door bells,\nwhere, on the trace of a hand,\nanother hand was placed;\nsuitcases next to one another in the\nleft luggage.\nAnd maybe one night the same dream\nforgotten on walking;\n\nBut every beginning\nis only a continuation\nand the book of fate is\nalways open in the middle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "nothing-twice": { - "title": "“Nothing Twice”", - "body": "Nothing can ever happen twice.\nIn consequence, the sorry fact is\nthat we arrive here improvised\nand leave without the chance to practice.\n\nEven if there is no one dumber,\nif you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,\nyou can’t repeat the class in summer:\nthis course is only offered once.\n\nNo day copies yesterday,\nno two nights will teach what bliss is\nin precisely the same way,\nwith precisely the same kisses.\n\nOne day, perhaps some idle tongue\nmentions your name by accident:\nI feel as if a rose were flung\ninto the room, all hue and scent.\n\nThe next day, though you’re here with me,\nI can’t help looking at the clock:\nA rose? A rose? What could that be?\nIs it a flower or a rock?\n\nWhy do we treat the fleeting day\nwith so much needless fear and sorrow?\nIt’s in its nature not to stay:\nToday is always gone tomorrow.\n\nWith smiles and kisses, we prefer\nto seek accord beneath our star,\nalthough we’re different (we concur)\njust as two drops of water are.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "date": { - "year": 1998 - } - } - }, - "on-death-without-exaggeration": { - "title": "“On Death, without Exaggeration”", - "body": "It can’t take a joke,\nfind a star, make a bridge.\nIt knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,\nbuilding ships, or baking cakes.\n\nIn our planning for tomorrow,\nit has the final word,\nwhich is always beside the point.\n\nIt can’t even get the things done\nthat are part of its trade:\ndig a grave,\nmake a coffin,\nclean up after itself.\n\nPreoccupied with killing,\nit does the job awkwardly,\nwithout system or skill.\nAs though each of us were its first kill.\n\nOh, it has its triumphs,\nbut look at its countless defeats,\nmissed blows,\nand repeat attempts!\n\nSometimes it isn’t strong enough\nto swat a fly from the air.\nMany are the caterpillars\nthat have outcrawled it.\n\nAll those bulbs, pods,\ntentacles, fins, tracheae,\nnuptial plumage, and winter fur\nshow that it has fallen behind\nwith its halfhearted work.\n\nIll will won’t help\nand even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat\nis so far not enough.\n\nHearts beat inside eggs.\nBabies’ skeletons grow.\nSeeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves\nand sometimes even tall trees fall away.\n\nWhoever claims that it’s omnipotent\nis himself living proof\nthat it’s not.\n\nThere’s no life\nthat couldn’t be immortal\nif only for a moment.\n\nDeath\nalways arrives by that very moment too late.\n\nIn vain it tugs at the knob\nof the invisible door.\nAs far as you’ve come\ncan’t be undone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "the-onion": { - "title": "“The Onion”", - "body": "The onion, now that’s something else\nits innards don’t exist\nnothing but pure onionhood\nfills this devout onionist\noniony on the inside\nonionesque it appears\nit follows its own daimonion\nwithout our human tears\n\nour skin is just a coverup\nfor the land where none dare to go\nan internal inferno\nthe anathema of anatomy\nin an onion there’s only onion\nfrom its top to it’s toe\nonionymous monomania\nunanimous omninudity\n\nat peace, at peace\ninternally at rest\ninside it, there’s a smaller one\nof undiminished worth\nthe second holds a third one\nthe third contains a fourth\na centripetal fugue\npolypony compressed\n\nnature’s rotundest tummy\nits greatest success story\nthe onion drapes itself in it’s\nown aureoles of glory\nwe hold veins, nerves, and fat\nsecretions’ secret sections\nnot for us such idiotic\nonionoid perfections.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "plato-or-why": { - "title": "“Plato, or Why”", - "body": "For unclear reasons\nunder unknown circumstances\nIdeal Being ceased to be satisfied.\n\nIt could have gone on forever,\nhewn from darkness, forged from light,\nin its sleepy gardens above the world.\n\nWhy on earth did it start seeking thrills\nin the bad company of matter?\n\nWhat use could it have for imitators,\ninept, ill-starred,\nlacking all prospects for eternity?\n\nWisdom limping\nwith a thorn stuck in its heel?\nHarmony derailed\nby roiling waters?\nBeauty\nholding unappealing entrails\nand Good--\nwhy the shadow\nwhen it didn’t have one before?\n\nThere must have been some reason,\nhowever slight,\nbut even the Naked Truth, busy ransacking\nthe earth’s wardrobe,\nwon’t betray it.\n\nNot to mention, Plato, those appalling poets,\nlitter scattered by the breeze from under statues,\nscraps from that great Silence up on high …", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "some-people": { - "title": "“Some People”", - "body": "Some people fleeing some other people.\nIn some country under the sun\nand some clouds.\n\nThey leave behind some of their everything,\nsown fields, some chickens, dogs,\nmirrors in which fire now sees itself reflected.\n\nOn their backs are pitchers and bundles,\nthe emptier, the heavier from one day to the next.\n\nTaking place stealthily is somebody’s stopping,\nand in the commotion, somebody’s bread somebody’s snatching\nand a dead child somebody’s shaking.\n\nIn front of them some still not the right way,\nnor the bridge that should be\nover a river strangely rosy.\nAround them, some gunfire, at times closer, at times farther off,\nand, above, a plane circling somewhat.\n\nSome invisibility would come in handy,\nsome grayish stoniness,\nor even better, non-being\nfor a little or a long while.\n\nSomething else is yet to happen, only where and what?\nSomeone will head toward them, only when and who,\nin how many shapes and with what intentions?\nGiven a choice,\nmaybe he will choose not to be the enemy and\nleave them with some kind of life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-thank-you-note": { - "title": "“A Thank You Note”", - "body": "There is much I owe\nto those I do not love.\nThe relief in accepting\nthey are closer to another.\nJoy that I am not\nthe wolf to their sheep.\nMy peace be with them\nfor with them I am free,\nand this, love can neither give,\nnor know how to take.\nI don’t wait for them\nfrom window to door.\nAlmost as patient\nas a sun dial,\nI understand\nwhat love does not understand.\nI forgive\nwhat love would never have forgiven.\nBetween rendezvous and letter\nno eternity passes,\nonly a few days or weeks.\nMy trips with them always turn out well.\nConcerts are heard.\nCathedrals are toured.\nLandscapes are distinct.\nAnd when seven rivers and mountains\ncome between us,\nthey are rivers and mountains\nwell known from any map.\nIt is thanks to them\nthat I live in three dimensions,\nin a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,\nwith a shifting, thus real, horizon.\nThey don’t even know\nhow much they carry in their empty hands.\n“I don’t owe them anything,”\nlove would have said\non this open topic.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Joanna Trzeciak" - } - }, - "true-love": { - "title": "“True Love”", - "body": "True love. Is it normal\nis it serious, is it practical?\nWhat does the world get from two people\nwho exist in a world of their own?\n\nPlaced on the same pedestal for no good reason,\ndrawn randomly from millions but convinced\nit had to happen this way--in reward for what?\nFor nothing.\nThe light descends from nowhere.\nWhy on these two and not on others?\nDoesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.\nDoesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,\nand cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.\n\nLook at the happy couple.\nCouldn’t they at least try to hide it,\nfake a little depression for their friends’ sake?\nListen to them laughing--its an insult.\nThe language they use--deceptively clear.\nAnd their little celebrations, rituals,\nthe elaborate mutual routines--\nit’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!\n\nIt’s hard even to guess how far things might go\nif people start to follow their example.\nWhat could religion and poetry count on?\nWhat would be remembered? What renounced?\nWho’d want to stay within bounds?\n\nTrue love. Is it really necessary?\nTact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,\nlike a scandal in Life’s highest circles.\nPerfectly good children are born without its help.\nIt couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,\nit comes along so rarely.\n\nLet the people who never find true love\nkeep saying that there’s no such thing.\n\nTheir faith will make it easier for them to live and die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "under-one-small-star": { - "title": "“Under One Small Star”", - "body": "My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.\nMy apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.\nPlease, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.\nMay my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.\nMy apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.\nMy apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.\nForgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.\nForgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.\nI apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.\nI apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.\nPardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.\nPardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.\nAnd you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,\nyour gaze always fixed on the same point in space,\nforgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.\nMy apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.\nMy apologies to great questions for small answers.\nTruth, please don’t pay me much attention.\nDignity, please be magnanimous.\nBear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.\nSoul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.\nMy apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.\nMy apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.\nI know I won’t be justified as long as I live,\nsince I myself stand in my own way.\nDon’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,\nthen labor heavily so that they may seem light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "utopia": { - "title": "“Utopia”", - "body": "Island where all becomes clear.\nSolid ground beneath your feet.\n\nThe only roads are those that offer access.\n\nBushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.\n\nThe Tree of Valid Supposition grows here\nwith branches disentangled since time immemorial.\n\nThe Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple.\nsprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.\n\nThe thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:\nthe Valley of Obviously.\n\nIf any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.\n\nEchoes stir unsummoned\nand eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.\n\nOn the right a cave where Meaning lies.\n\nOn the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.\nTruth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.\n\nUnshakable Confidence towers over the valley.\nIts peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.\n\nFor all its charms, the island is uninhabited,\nand the faint footprints scattered on its beaches\nturn without exception to the sea.\n\nAs if all you can do here is leave\nand plunge, never to return, into the depths.\n\nInto unfathomable life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish" - } - }, - "a-word-on-statistics": { - "title": "“A Word on Statistics”", - "body": "Out of every hundred people\n\nthose who always know better:\nfifty-two.\n\nUnsure of every step:\nalmost all the rest.\n\nReady to help,\nif it doesn’t take long:\nforty-nine.\n\nAlways good,\nbecause they cannot be otherwise:\nfour--well, maybe five.\n\nAble to admire without envy:\neighteen.\n\nLed to error\nby youth (which passes):\nsixty, plus or minus.\n\nThose not to be messed with:\nforty and four.\n\nLiving in constant fear\nof someone or something:\nseventy-seven.\n\nCapable of happiness:\ntwenty-some-odd at most.\n\nHarmless alone,\nturning savage in crowds:\nmore than half, for sure.\n\nCruel\nwhen forced by circumstances:\nit’s better not to know,\nnot even approximately.\n\nWise in hindsight:\nnot many more\nthan wise in foresight.\n\nGetting nothing out of life except things:\nthirty\n(though I would like to be wrong).\n\nDoubled over in pain\nand without a flashlight in the dark:\neighty-three, sooner or later.\n\nThose who are just:\nquite a few at thirty-five.\n\nBut if it takes effort to understand:\nthree.\n\nWorthy of empathy:\nninety-nine.\n\nMortal:\none hundred out of one hundred--\na figure that has never varied yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Joanna Trzeciak" - } - } - } - }, - "galaktion-tabidze": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Galaktion Tabidze", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "georgian", - "language": "georgian", - "flag": "🇬🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaktion_Tabidze", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "georgian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "blue-horses": { - "title": "“Blue Horses”", - "body": "Like snowdrifts of mist gilded in sunset,\nthe shore was sun-lit in eternity’s realm.\nNo promise in sight, nothing to look at,\nOnly the quiet--nomadic and numb.\nOnly the quiet: the cold, rampant storm\nof eternity’s realm holding nothing but grief.\nEyes covered in ash, you lie prone in your tomb,\nlying in heaven, and still your soul grieves.\nThrough a thin forest of disfigured faces\neach barren day races: hurrying, gone.\nI’ve terrible visions of my blue stallions\nbearing your coffin, as the world looks on.\nAnd seconds race by. I am not concerned:\nthose immortal linens won’t shine with your tears.\nThe tortures that churned in you died--all illusions\nof night: a burning soul howling with prayer.\nAt wildfire’s rate, like a swift turn of fate,\nmy blue horses dart with a thunderous roar!\nThere are no bouquets, no calm reveries,\nonly your new home--this grave’s sepulcher.\nWho’ll remember your face? Who’ll speak your name?\nIf you moan, who’ll come? Who’ll hear you whisper?\nThere’s no one for solace upon those strange shores,\nwhere cryptic chimeras sleep, darkly twisted.\nNothing could block out the light from this chamber:\nfrom only dry numbers, still, desert winds rise!\nThrough a thin forest of disfigured faces\neach barren day surges then, hurrying, dies.\nIn the mist’s rampant storm, eternity’s realm,\nIn heaven or tomb, by dark curse deplored:\nat a hurricane’s rate, like a swift turn of fate,\nmy blue horses dart with a thunderous roar!", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-fields": { - "title": "“The Fields”", - "body": "Swaying, a slender figure appears\nwalking alone, sickle in hand,\nsinging a song, her voice is the pasture\nat village’s edge, where an old outpost stands.\nThe song is a soulful hymn of farewell\nsung to a row of cranes facing the sea,\nwhile the sun, like a spider is closing itself\nin the delicate criss-crossing thicket of trees.\nBut what does the soul know of slavery? Nothing!\nThe rustle and braying of sheep fill the streets:\na young village virgin and flock are returning.\nAnd the Virgin will soon return to the huts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel" - } - }, - "snow": { - "title": "“Snow”", - "body": "I am vicious with love for the indigo snow\nUntouched, as it blankets the river.\nMy mad love will undergo every woe,\nEvery wet frigid grief will endure.\nMy darling, my soul is a bottle of snow:\nI grow old, and the days faster flee.\nI have traveled my homeland only to know\nIt when it was a velvet blue sea.\nBut I am not troubled. I am winter’s kin\nAnd this is the life that I know,\nYet I will remember forever the skin\nOf your pale hands embedded in snow.\nMy darling, I still can envision your fingers,\nIn a garland of snow, humbly bent:\nA glimse of your scarf in the blue desert lingers\nDisappears, and then glimmers again.\nAnd thus my mad love for the indigo snow\nUntouched, as it blankets the river,\nIt drifts as the grieving winds pivot and flow,\nIt coats every broken blue flower.\nThe snow comes! A bright day arrives with its tiding.\nI’m covered with tired blue dreams.\nSomehow either winter or I must keep striving.\nSomehow I or the wind must remain.\nHere is a gentle game. Here is a road …\nAll alone, all alone you traverse it.\nBut I love the snow, just as I once loved\nThe sorrow your voice kept so secret.\nIt called to me then, it was so potent then:\nThe placid days, crystal and fair.\nYour hair rushing ’round in the scattering wind\nAnd leaves from the field in your hair.\nI pine for you now. How I wish you were mine!\nI’m a vagrant who longs for his home.\nNow my only companion’s a copse of white pine.\nI must face myself once more, alone.\nThe snow comes! A bright day arrives with its tiding,\nI’m covered with tired blue thoughts.\nSomehow either winter or I must keep striving!\nSomehow I or the wind must pick up!", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "uncertainty": { - "title": "“Uncertainty”", - "body": "There is inside your heart\na bitter, brutal death,\na place of deep upset\nwhere the lyre cannot breathe.\n\nOnce a boiling fire,\nnow your blood is frozen.\nAnd your eye has no tear,\nyour heart--no compassion.\n\nAnd when asked: “What occured,\nwhat does your heart yearn for?”\nHe raises his arms skyward\nyet gives to men no answer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel" - } - }, - "the-wind-blows": { - "title": "“The Wind Blows”", - "body": "Blowing wind, blowing wind, blowing wind,\nIn the breeze flying leaves night through …\nGroup of trees, troop of trees roundly swaying,\nWhere are you, where are you, where are you?\n\nFalling rain, falling snow, falling snow,\nHow to find, when to find never know!\nPure of yours image rolls tired my mind\nEveryday, every step, every time!\n\nDrizzling sky misty thoughts on the field …\nBlowing wind, blowing wind, blowing wind!", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "youre-thirteen": { - "title": "“You’re Thirteen”", - "body": "You’re thirteen and you’ve ensnared\na graying lover’s evil dreams.\nLine up thirteen bullets here:\nI’ll kill myself thirteen times.\n\nAnother thirteen years go by,\nsoon you’ll arrive at twenty-six.\nThe tallest iris gets the scythe:\ntime and poem mourn their necks.\n\nHow hastily youth slips away--\nremorseless wishes of the lion.\nAnd everything glows tenderly\nwhen Autumn sunlight’s pouring in.", - "metadata": { - "language": "georgian", - "translator": "Christopher Michel", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "rabindranath-tagore": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Rabindranath Tagore", - "birth": { - "year": 1861 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "bengali", - "language": "bengali", - "flag": "🇧🇩", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "bengali" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "endless-time": { - "title": "“Endless Time”", - "body": "Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.\nThere is none to count thy minutes.\n\nDays and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers.\nThou knowest how to wait.\n\nThy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.\n\nWe have no time to lose,\nand having no time we must scramble for a chance.\nWe are too poor to be late.\n\nAnd thus it is that time goes by\nwhile I give it to every querulous man who claims it,\nand thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.\n\nAt the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut;\nbut I find that yet there is time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "bengali" - } - }, - "one-day-in-spring": { - "title": "“One Day in Spring”", - "body": "One day in spring, a woman came\nIn my lonely woods,\nIn the lovely form of the Beloved.\nCame, to give to my songs, melodies,\nTo give to my dreams, sweetness.\nSuddenly a wild wave\nBroke over my heart’s shores\nAnd drowned all language.\nTo my lips no name came,\nShe stood beneath the tree, turned,\nGlanced at my face, made sad with pain,\nAnd with quick steps, came and sat by me.\nTaking my hands in hers, she said:\n“You do not know me, nor I you--\nI wonder how this could be?”\nI said:\n“We two shall build, a bridge for ever\nBetween two beings, each to the other unknown,\nThis eager wonder is at the heart of things.”\n\nThe cry that is in my heart is also the cry of her heart;\nThe thread with which she binds me binds her too.\nHer have I sought everywhere,\nHer have I worshipped within me,\nHidden in that worship she has sought me too.\nCrossing the wide oceans, she came to steal my heart.\nShe forgot to return, having lost her own.\nHer own charms play traitor to her,\nShe spreads her net, knowing not\nWhether she will catch or be caught.", - "metadata": { - "language": "bengali", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "waiting": { - "title": "“Waiting”", - "body": "The song I came to sing\nremains unsung to this day.\nI have spent my days in stringing\nand in unstringing my instrument.\n\nThe time has not come true,\nthe words have not been rightly set;\nonly there is the agony\nof wishing in my heart …\n\nI have not seen his face,\nnor have I listened to his voice;\nonly I have heard his gentle footsteps\nfrom the road before my house …\n\nBut the lamp has not been lit\nand I cannot ask him into my house;\nI live in the hope of meeting with him;\nbut this meeting is not yet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "bengali" - } - } - } - }, - "torquato-tasso": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Torquato Tasso", - "birth": { - "year": 1544 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1595 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "italian", - "language": "italian", - "flag": "🇮🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torquato_Tasso", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "italian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "o-you-far-colder-whiter": { - "title": "“O you, far colder, whiter …”", - "body": "O you, far colder, whiter\nThan she who makes less fair\nThe stars with shining there:\nHer purest silver cannot dim\nNor any cloud, or rain or wind,\nYour sweet brightness, lovely eyes.\nWould you but turn to me, with delight,\nI should be happy, and my life a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "once-we-were-happy": { - "title": "“Once we were happy …”", - "body": "Once we were happy, I\nLoving and beloved,\nYou loved and loving, sweetly moved.\nThen you became the enemy\nOf love, and I to disdain\nFound youthful passion change.\nDisdain demands I speak,\nDisdain, that in my breast\nKeeps the shame of my neglected offering fresh:\nAnd from your laurel\nTears the leaves, now dry, once beautiful.", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "what-weeping-or-what-dewfall": { - "title": "“What weeping, or what dewfall …”", - "body": "What weeping, or what dewfall,\nWhose then were those tears,\nFlung from night’s cloak, I saw,\nAnd the white face of the stars?\nWhy was the white moon sowing\nA pure cloud’s crystal mass\nIn the lap of fresh new grass?\nWhy were the winds heard, blowing,\nThrough the dark air, round and round,\nTill dawn, with mournful sound?\nWere they perhaps the strife\nOf your going, life of my life?", - "metadata": { - "language": "italian", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "allen-tate": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Allen Tate", - "birth": { - "year": 1899 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Tate", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "aeneas-at-washington": { - "title": "“Aeneas at Washington”", - "body": "I myself saw furious with blood\nNeoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,\nHecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam\nCut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.\nIn that extremity I bore me well,\nA true gentleman, valorous in arms,\nDistinterested and honourable. Then fled\nThat was a time when civilization\nRun by the few fell to the many, and\nCrashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:\nCold victualing I seized, I hoisted up\nThe old man my father upon my back,\nIn the smoke made by sea for a new world\nSaving little--a mind imperishable\nIf time is, a love of past things tenuous\nAs the hesitation of receding love.\n\n(To the reduction of uncitied littorals\nWe brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,\nOur hunger breeding calculation\nAnd fixed triumphs)\n\nI saw the thirsty dove\nIN the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening\nAnd tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass\nAll lying rich forever in the green sun.\nI see all things apart, the towers that men\nContrive I too contrived long, long ago.\nNow I demand little. The singular passion\nAbides its object and consumes desire\nIn the circling shadow of its appetite.\nThere was a time when the young eyes were slow,\nTheir flame steady beyond the firstling fire,\n\nI stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall\nBy the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,\nThe city my blood had built I knew no more\nWhile the screech-owl whistled his new delight\nConsecutively dark.\n\nStuck in the wet mire\nFour thousand leagues from the ninth buried city\nI thought of Troy, what we had built her for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-anabasis": { - "title": "“The Anabasis”", - "body": "_Pro domus sue utilitati matronae mortuae poeta comis alloquitur:_\n\nNoble beyond degree\nIn this democracy:\nSlight woman whose spent grace\nBanishes their visiòn\nTo the thin trackless air,\nHalt now along the stair\nAs they have seen you do\nMeridional and true,\nAnd with your nut-brown hair\nRestore locatiòn\nTo them now blinded quite\nBy the grave’s after-light,\nFor unless it be done\nThe slave heart all alone\nStrives timelessly\nTo go where you are gone;\nWhether to vaults of air\nThe imponderable nowhere,\nOr the pellucid sea-\nThe regions that are fair\nBeyond heart’s mastery.\nThey try your form to see\n(Its lineless agony)\nIn our philosophy\nWhich stops, as cold and bare\nAs headless hair,\nAs lifeless as your bones,\nObtuse as meadow stones:\nRe-corporated be!\n(They cry you in despair)\nLest we, a blind race,\nImitate mortality\nFor all our living’s pace,\nAnd drawn into the bliss\nOf your dispersèd face\nShould join, before our place,\nDeath’s long anabasis.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "brief-message": { - "title": "“Brief Message”", - "body": "This, Warren, is our trouble now:\nNot even fools could disavow\nThree centuries of piety\nGrown bare as a cottonwood tree\n(A timber seldom drawn and sawn\nAnd chiefly used to hang men on),\nSo face with calm that heritage\nAnd earn contempt before the age.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "causerie": { - "title": "“Causerie”", - "body": "“… party on the stage of the Earl Carroll Theatre on Feb. 23. At this party Joyce Hawley, a chorus-girl, bathed in the nude in a bathtub filled with alleged wine.” _New York Times._\n\nWhat are the springs of sleep? What is the motion\nOf dust in the lane that has an end in falling?\nHeroes, heroes, you auguries of passion,\nWhere are the heroes with sloops and telescopes\nWho got out of bed at four to vex the dawn?\nMen for their last quietus scanned the earth,\nAlert on the utmost foothill of the mountains;\nThey were the men who climbed the topmost screen\nOf the world, if sleep but lay beyond it,\nSworn to the portage of our confirmed sensations,\nSeeking our image in the farthest hills.\nNow bearing a useless testimony of strife\nGathered in a rumor of light, we know our end\nA packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.\nI’ve done no rape, arson, incest, no murder,\nYet cannot sleep. The petty crimes of silence\n(Wary pander to whom the truth’s chief whore)\nI have omitted; no fool can say my tongue\nReversed its fetish and made a cult of conscience.\nThis innermost disturbance is a babble,\nIt is a sign moved to my face as well\nWhere every tide of heart surges to speech\nUntil in that loquacity of visage\nOne speaks a countenance fitter for death than hell.\nAlways your features lean to one direction\nAnd by that charted distance know your doom.\nFor death is ‘morality touched with emotion,’\nThe syllable and full measure of affirmation;\nGive life the innocent crutch of quiet fools.\n\nWhere is your house, in which room stands your bed?\nWhat window discovers these insupportable dreams?\nIn a lean house spawned on baked limestone\nBlood history is the murmur of grasshoppers\nEastward of the dawn. Have you a daughter,\nDaughters are the seed of occupations,\nOf asperities, such as wills, deeds, mortgages,\nDuels, estates, statesmen, pioneers, embezzlers,\n‘Eminent Virginians,’ reminiscences, bastards,\nThe bar-sinister hushed, effaced by the porcelain tub.\nA daughter is the fruit of occupations;\nLet her not read history lest knowledge\nOf her fathers instruct her to be a petty bawd.\nVittoria was herself, the contemporary strumpet\nA plain bitch.\n\nFor miracles are faint\nAnd resurrection is our weakest clause of religion,\nI have known men in my youth who foundered on\nThis point of doctrine: John Ransom, boasting hardy\nEntelechies yet botched in the head, lacking grace;\nWarren thirsty in Kentucky, his hair in the rain, asleep;\nNone so unbaptized as Edmund Wilson the unwearied,\nThat sly parody of the devil. They lacked doctrine;\nThey waited. I, who watched out the first crisis\nWith them, wait:\nFor the incredible image. Now\nI am told that Purusha sits no more in our eyes.\nYear after year the blood of Christ will sleep\nIn the holy tree, the branches sagged without bloom\nTill the plant overflowing the stale vegetation\nIn May the creek swells with the anemone,\nThe Lord God wastes his substance towards the ocean.\nIn Christ we have lived, on the flood of Christ borne up,\nWho now is a precipitate flood of silence,\nWe a drenched wreck off an imponderable shore:\nA jagged cloud is our memory of shore\nWhereon we figure hills below ultimate ranges.\nYou cannot plot the tendency of man,\nWhither it leads is not mysterious\nIn the various grave; but whence the impulse\nTo lust for the apple of apples on Christ’s tree,\nTo desire in the eye, to penetrate your sleep,\nPerhaps to catch in unexpected leaves\nThe light incentive of your absolute suspicion?\nOver the mountains, the last barrier, you’d spill\nThese relics of your sires in a pool of sleep,\nThe sun being drained.\n\nWe have learned to require\nIn the infirm concessions of memory\nThe privilege never to hear too much.\nWhat is this conversation, now secular,\nA speech not mine yet speaking for me in\nThe heaving jelly of my tribal air?\nIt rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue;\nIt perches there for secret tutelage\nAnd gets it, of inscrutable instruction--\nWhich is a puzzle like crepuscular light\nThat has no visible source but fills the trees\nWith equal foliage, as if the upper leaf\nNo less than the under were only imminent shade.\n\nManhood like a lawyer with his formulas\nSesames his youth for innocent acquittal.\n\nThe essential wreckage of your age is different,\nThe accident the same; the Annabella\nOf proper incest, no longer incestuous:\nIn an age of abstract experience, fornication\nIs self-expression, adjunct to Christian euphoria,\nAnd whores become delinquents; delinquents, patients;\nPatients, wards of society. Whores, by that rule,\nAre precious.\n\nWas it for this that Lucius\nBecame the ass of Thessaly? For this did Kyd\nUnlock the lion of passion on the stage?\nTo litter a race of politic pimps? To glut\nThe Capitol with the progeny of thieves--\nWhere now the antique courtesy of your myths\nGoes in to sleep under a still shadow?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "february", - "day": 23 - } - } - }, - "death-of-little-boys": { - "title": "“Death of Little Boys”", - "body": "When little boys grown patient at last, weary,\nSurrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,\nThe event will rage terrific as the sea;\nTheir bodies fill a crumbling room with light.\n\nThen you will touch at the bedside, torn in two,\nGold curls now deftly intricate with gray\nAs the windowpane extends a fear to you\nFrom one peeled aster drenched with the wind all day.\n\nAnd over his chest the covers in the ultimate dream\nWill mount to the teeth, ascend the eyes, press back\nThe locks while round his sturdy belly gleam\nSuspended breaths, white spars above the wreck:\n\nTill all the guests, come in to look, turn down\nTheir palms, and delirium assails the cliff\nOf Norway where you ponder, and your little town\nReels like a sailor drunk in a rotten skiff.\n\nThe bleak sunshine shrieks its chipped music then\nOut to the milkweed amid the fields of wheat.\nThere is a calm for you where men and women\nUnroll the chill precision of moving feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ditty": { - "title": "“Ditty”", - "body": "The moon will run all consciences to cover,\nNight is now the easy peer of day;\nLittle boys no longer sight the plover\nStreaked in the sky, and cattle go\nWarily out in search of misty hay.\nLook at the blackbird, the pretty eager swallow,\nThe buzzard, and all the birds that sail\nWith the smooth essential flow\nOf time through men, who fail.\n\nFor now the moon with friendless light carouses\nOn hill and housetop, street and marketplace,\nMen will plunge, mile after mile of men,\nTo crush this lucent madness of the face,\nGo home and put their heads upon the pillow,\nTurn with whatever shift the darkness cleaves,\nTuck in their eyes, and cover\nThe flying dark with sleep like falling leaves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "edges": { - "title": "“Edges”", - "body": "I’ve often wondered why she laughed\nOn thinking why I wondered so;\nIt seemed such waste that long white hands\nShould touch my hands and let them go.\n\nAnd once when we were parting there,\nUnseen of anything but trees,\nI touched her fingers, thoughtfully,\nFor more than simple niceties.\n\nBut for some futile things unsaid\nI should say all is done for us;\nYet I have wondered how she smiled\nBeholding what was cavernous.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-eye": { - "title": "“The Eye”", - "body": "I see the horses and the sad streets\nOf my childhood in an agate eye\nRoving, under the clean sheets,\nOver a black hole in the sky.\n\nThe ill man becomes the child,\nThe evil man becomes the lover;\nThe natural man with evil roiled\nPulls down the sphereless sky for cover.\n\nI see the gray heroes and the graves\nOf my childhood in the nuclear eye-\nHorizons spent in dun caves\nSucked down into the sinking sky.\n\nThe happy child becomes the man,\nThe elegant man becomes the mind,\nThe fathered gentleman who can\nPerform quick feats of gentle kind.\n\nI see the long field and the noon\nOf my childhood in the carbolic eye,\nDissolving pupil of the moon\nSeared from the raveled hole of the sky.\n\nThe nice ladies and gentlemen,\nThe teaser and the jelly-bean\nPlay cockalorum-and-the-hen,\nWhen the cool afternoons pour green:\n\nI see the father and the cooling cup\nOf my childhood in the swallowing sky\nDown, down, until down is up\nAnd there is nothing in the eye,\n\nShut shutter of the mineral man\nWho takes the fatherless dark to bed,\nThe acid sky to the brain-pan;\nAnd calls the crows to peck his head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "homily": { - "title": "“Homily”", - "body": "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.\n\nIf your tired unspeaking head\nRivet the dark with linear sight,\nCrazed by a warlock with his curse\nDreamed up in some loquacious bed,\nAnd if the stage-dark head rehearse\nThe fifth act of the closing night,\n\nWhy, cut it off, piece after piece,\nAnd throw the tough cortex away,\nAnd when you’ve marvelled on the wars\nThat wove their interior smoke its way,\nTear out the close vermiculate crease\nWhere death crawled angrily at bay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "inside-and-outside": { - "title": "“Inside and Outside”", - "body": "# I.\n\nNow twenty-four or maybe twenty-five\nWas the woman’s age, and her white brow was sleek;\nLips parted in surprise, the flawless cheek;\nThe long brown hair coiled sullenly alive;\nHer hands, dropt in her lap, could not arrive\nAt the novel on the table, being weak;\nNor breath, expunger of the mortal streak\nOf nature, its own tenement contrive;\n\nFor look you how her body stiffly lies\nJust as she left it, unprepared to stay,\nThe posture waiting on the sleeping eyes,\nWhile the body’s life, deep as a covered well,\nInstinctive as the wind, busy as May,\nBurns out a secret passageway to hell.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere is not anything to say to those\nSpeechless, who have stood up white to the eye\nAll night-till day, harrying the game too close,\nQuarries the perils that at midnight lie\nWaiting for those who hope to mortify\nWith foolish daylight their most anxious fear,\nA bloodless and white fear that she may die\nIn the hushed room, and leave them soundless here:\n\nThere is no word that death can find to say\nDeeper than life, savager than their time.\nWhen Gabriel’s trumpet ends all life’s delay,\nWill crash the beams of firmamental woe:\nNot nature will sustain the even crime\nOf death, though death sustains all nature, so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "last-days-of-alice": { - "title": "“Last Days of Alice”", - "body": "Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,\nDeclines upon her lost and twilight age;\nAbove in the dozing leaves the grinning cat\nQuivers forever with his abstract rage:\n\nWhatever light swayed on the perilous gate\nForever sways, nor will the arching grass,\nCaught when the world clattered, undulate\nIn the deep suspension of the looking-glass.\n\nBright Alice! always pondering to gloze\nThe spoiled cruelty she had meant to say\nGazes learnedly down her airy nose\nAt nothing, nothing thinking all the day.\n\nTurned absent-minded by infinity\nShe cannot move unless her double move,\nThe All-Alice of the world’s entity\nSmashed in the anger of her hopeless love,\n\nLove for herself who, as an earthly twain,\nPouted to join her two in a sweet one;\nNo more the second lips to kiss in vain\nThe first she broke, plunged through the glass alone--\n\nAlone to the weight of impassivity,\nIncest of spirit, theorem of desire,\nWithout will as chalky cliffs by the sea\nEmpty as the bodiless flesh of fire:\n\nAll space, that heaven is a dayless night,\nA nightless day driven by perfect lust\nFor vacancy, in which her bored eyesight\nStares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.\n\n--We too back to the world shall never pass\nThrough the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd\nBeing all infinite, function depth and mass\nWithout figure, a mathematical shroud\n\nHurled at the air--blessed without sin!\nO God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,\nLet us be evil could we enter in\nYour grace, and falter on the stony path!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light": { - "title": "“Light”", - "body": "Last night I fled until I came\nTo streets where leaking casements dripped\nStale lamplight from the corpse of flame;\nA nervous window bled.\n\nThe moon swagged in the air.\nOut of the mist a girl tossed\nSpittle of song; a hoarse light\nSpattered the fog with heavy hair.\n\nDamp bells in a remote tower\nSharply released the throat of God,\nI leaned to the erect night\nDead as stiff turf in winter sod.\n\nThen with the careless energy\nOf a dream, the forward curse\nOf a cold particular eye\nIn the headlong hearse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mediterranean": { - "title": "“The Mediterranean”", - "body": "_Quen das finem, rex magne, dolorum?_\n\nWhere we went in the boat was a long bay\na slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--\nPeaked margin of antiquity’s delay,\nAnd we went there out of time’s monotone:\n\nWhere we went in the black hull no light moved\nBut a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,\nThe breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,\nThat boat drove onward like a willing slave:\n\nWhere we went in the small ship the seaweed\nParted and gave to us the murmuring shore\nAnd we made feast and in our secret need\nDevoured the very plates Aeneas bore:\n\nWhere derelict you see through the low twilight\nThe green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,\nDrop sail, and hastening to drink all night\nEat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!\n\nWhere we feasted and caroused on the sandless\nPebbles, affecting our day of piracy,\nWhat prophecy of eaten plates could landless\nWanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?\n\nWe for that time might taste the famous age\nEternal here yet hidden from our eyes\nWhen lust of power undid its stuffless rage;\nThey, in a wineskin, bore earth’s paradise.\n\nLet us lie down once more by the breathing side\nOf Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep\nAs if the Known Sea still were a month wide--\nAtlantis howls but is no longer steep!\n\nWhat country shall we conquer, what fair land\nUnman our conquest and locate our blood?\nWe’ve cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!\nNow, from the Gates of Hercules we flood\n\nWestward, westward till the barbarous brine\nWhelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,\nFat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine\nRot on the vine: in that land were we born.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "message-from-paris": { - "title": "“Message from Paris”", - "body": "_Their faces are bony and sharp but very red, despite that their ancestors nigh two hundred years have dwelt by the miasmal banks of tide-waters where malarial fever maketh men gaunt and dosing with quinine shaketh them as with a palsy._\n\n\n# I.\n\nWhat years of the other times, what centuries\nBroken, divided up, and claimed? A few\nHere and there to the taste, in vigilance\nCeaseless but now a little stale, to keep us\nFearless, not worried as the hare scurrying\nWithout memory …\n\nProvence,\nThe Renascence, the age of Pericles, each\nA broad, rich-carpeted stair to pride\nWith manhood now the cost--they’re easy to follow,\nFor the ways taken are all notorious,\nLettered, sculptured and rhymed;\nThose others, incuriously complete, lost,\nNot by poetry and statues timed,\nShattered by sunlight and the impartial sleet …\nWhat years … what centuries\n\nNow only\nThe bent eaves and the windows cracked,\nThe thin grass picked by the wind\nHeaved by the mole; the hollow pine\nThat screams in the latest storm--these,\nThese emblems of twilight have we seen at length,\nAnd the man red-faced and tall seen, leaning\nIn the day of his strength\nNot as a pine, but the stiff form\nAgainst the west pillar,\nHearing the ox-cart in the street,\nHis shadow gliding, a long nigger\nGliding at his feet.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWanderers to the east, wanderers west:\nI followed the cold northern track\nAnd the sleet sprinkled the sea;\nThe dim foam mounted the night,\nThe ship, black monster, mounted\nThe depths of night,\nThe absolute, steady sea.\n\nWith dawn came the gull to the crest\nStared at the spray, fell asleep\nOver the picked bones the white face\nOf the leaning man drowned deep,\nThe red-faced man, ceased wandering,\nNever came to the boulevards\nNor covertly spat in the sawdust,\nSunk in his collar\nShuffling the cards.\n\nThe man with the red face the stiff back\nI cannot see in the rainfall\nDown Saint-Michel by the quays,\nAt the corner the wind speaking\nDestiny, the four ways.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI cannot see you\nThe incorruptibles,\nYours was a secret fate,\nThe stiff-backed liars, the dupes;\nThe universal blue\nOf heaven rots,\nYour anger is out of date--\nWhat did you say mornings\nEvenings, what?\nThe bent eaves\nOn the cracked house\nThat ghost of a hound\nThe man red-faced and tall\nWill cast no shadow\nFrom the province of the drowned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-the-confederate-dead": { - "title": "“Ode to the Confederate Dead”", - "body": "Row after row with strict impunity\nThe headstones yield their names to the element,\nThe wind whirrs without recollection;\nIn the riven troughs the splayed leaves\nPile up, of nature the casual sacrament\nTo the seasonal eternity of death;\nThen driven by the fierce scrutiny\nOf heaven to their election in the vast breath,\nThey sough the rumour of mortality.\n\nAutumn is desolation in the plot\nOf a thousand acres where these memories grow\nFrom the inexhaustible bodies that are not\nDead, but feed the grass row after rich row.\nThink of the autumns that have come and gone!--\nAmbitious November with the humors of the year,\nWith a particular zeal for every slab,\nStaining the uncomfortable angels that rot\nOn the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:\nThe brute curiosity of an angel’s stare\nTurns you, like them, to stone,\nTransforms the heaving air\nTill plunged to a heavier world below\nYou shift your sea-space blindly\nHeaving, turning like the blind crab.\n\n _Dazed by the wind, only the wind\n The leaves flying, plunge_\n\nYou know who have waited by the wall\nThe twilight certainty of an animal,\nThose midnight restitutions of the blood\nYou know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze\nOf the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,\nThe cold pool left by the mounting flood,\nOf muted Zeno and Parmenides.\nYou who have waited for the angry resolution\nOf those desires that should be yours tomorrow,\nYou know the unimportant shrift of death\nAnd praise the vision\nAnd praise the arrogant circumstance\nOf those who fall\nRank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--\nHere by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.\n\n _Seeing, seeing only the leaves\n Flying, plunge and expire_\n\nTurn your eyes to the immoderate past,\nTurn to the inscrutable infantry rising\nDemons out of the earth they will not last.\nStonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,\nShiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.\nLost in that orient of the thick and fast\nYou will curse the setting sun.\n\n _Cursing only the leaves crying\n Like an old man in a storm_\n\nYou hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point\nWith troubled fingers to the silence which\nSmothers you, a mummy, in time.\n\n The hound bitch\nToothless and dying, in a musty cellar\nHears the wind only.\n\n Now that the salt of their blood\nStiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,\nSeals the malignant purity of the flood,\nWhat shall we who count our days and bow\nOur heads with a commemorial woe\nIn the ribboned coats of grim felicity,\nWhat shall we say of the bones, unclean,\nWhose verdurous anonymity will grow?\nThe ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes\nLost in these acres of the insane green?\nThe gray lean spiders come, they come and go;\nIn a tangle of willows without light\nThe singular screech-owl’s tight\nInvisible lyric seeds the mind\nWith the furious murmur of their chivalry.\n\n _We shall say only the leaves\n Flying, plunge and expire_\n\nWe shall say only the leaves whispering\nIn the improbable mist of nightfall\nThat flies on multiple wing:\nNight is the beginning and the end\nAnd in between the ends of distraction\nWaits mute speculation, the patient curse\nThat stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps\nFor his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.\n\nWhat shall we say who have knowledge\nCarried to the heart? Shall we take the act\nTo the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave\nIn the house? The ravenous grave?\n\n Leave now\nThe shut gate and the decomposing wall:\nThe gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,\nRiots with his tongue through the hush--\nSentinel of the grave who counts us all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "a-pauper": { - "title": "“A Pauper”", - "body": "_ … and the children’s teeth shall be set on edge._\n\nI see him old, trapped in a burly house\nCold in the angry spitting of a rain\nCome down these sixty years.\n\nWhy vehemently\nAstride the threshold do I wait, marking\nThe ice softly pendent on his broken temple?\nUpon the silence I cast the mesh of rancor\nBy which the gentler convergences of the flesh\nScatter untokened, mercilessly estopped.\n\nWhy so illegal these tears?\n\nThe years’ incertitude and\nThe dirty white fates trickling\nBlackly down the necessary years\nDefine no attitude to the present winter,\nNo mood to the cold matter.\n\n(I remember my mother, my mother,\nA stiff wind halted outside,\nIn the hard ear my country\nWas a far shore crying\nWith invisible seas)\n\nWhen tomorrow pleads the mortal decision\nSifting rankly out of time’s sieve today,\nNo words differently will be uttered\nNor stuttered, like sheep astray.\n\nA pauper in the swift denominating\nOf a bald cliff with a proper name, having words\nAs strumpets only, I cannot beat off\nInvincible modes of the sea, hearing:\n\nBe a man my son by God.\n\nHe turned again\nTo the purring jet yellowing the murder story,\nDeaf to the pathos circling in the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "red-stains": { - "title": "“Red Stains”", - "body": "In a pyloned desert where the scorpion reigns\nMy love and I plucked poppies breathing tales\nOf crimes now long asleep, whose once--red stains\nDyed stabbing men, at sea with bloody sails.\nThe golden sand drowsed. There a dog yelped loud;\nAnd in his cry rattled a hollow note\nOf deep uncanny knowledge of that crowd\nThat loved and bled in winy times remote.\nThe poppies fainted when the moon came wide;\nThe cur lay still. Our passionate review\nOf red wise folly dreamed on … She by my side\nStared at the Moon; and then I knew he knew.\n And then he smiled at _her_; to him ’twas funny--\n Her calm steel eyes, her earth--old throat of honey!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "sonnets-of-the-blood": { - "title": "“Sonnets of the Blood”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhat is this flesh and blood compounded of\nBut water seething with convulsive lime?\nThis prowling strife of cells, sharp hate and love,\nWears the long claw of flesh-devouring time.\nWe who have seen the makers of our bone\nBemused with history, then make more dust\nPausing forever, and over their dust a stone,\nWe know the chastened look of men who must\nConfess the canker gnawing the flesh flower\nAnd are made brothers by mortality;\nThat is our treason to the murderous hour--\nTo think of brothers, hard identity\nNot made of ash and lime by time undone\nNor poured out quite when the life-blood has run.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNear to me as my flesh, my flesh and blood,\nAnd more mysterious, you are my brother;\nThe light vaulting within your solitude\nNow studied burns lest you that rage should smother.\nIt is a flame obscure to mortal eyes\n(Most like the fire that warms the deepest grave,\nFor the cold grave’s the deepest of our lies)\nOf which our blood’s the long indentured slave.\nThe fire that burns most secretly in you\nDoes not expand you hidden and alone,\nFor the same blaze consumes not one, but two,\nMe also, the same true marrow and bone\nContrived and seasoned in a house of strife\nBuilt far back in the fundaments of life.\n\n\n# III.\n\nMy brother, you would never think me vain\nOr rude if I should praise your dignity.\nPerhaps I shall not.\nDignity’s the stain\nOf mortal sin that knows humility.\nLet me praise rather the hour when you were born\nSince if it’s vain ’twere only childlike so,\nI’ve heard that in the dark before that morn\nConsiderate death would barely let you go.\nBut you have lived as if to vindicate\nOnce more our slavery to circumstance\nNot by contempt of our prescriptive fate\nBut in your bearing towards its hour of chance,\nWhich is a part so humble and so proud\nYou’ll think but little of it in your shroud.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe times have changed, there is not left to us\nThe vice of privilege, the law of form--\nWho of our kin was pusillanimous\nAnd took the world so easy, so by storm?\nWhy none, unless we count it arrogance\nTo cultivate humility in pride,\nTo look but blushingly and half-askance\nOn boots and spurs that went the devil’s ride.\nThere was, remember, that Virginian\nWho took himself to be brute nature’s law\nAnd cared not what men thought him, a tall man\nWho meditated calmly what he saw\nUntil he freed his negroes, lest he be\nToo strict with nature and than they less free.\n\n\n# V.\n\nThese generations that have sealed your heart\nAgainst the neighborly and easy joy\nPrefigured you to take the quiet part\nOf the secret mind while you were still a boy,\nNay before that for it had all begun\nEven your courage to accept that fate\nIn Shenandoah and along Bull Run\nSunk in a time inimical to date,\nWherefore you’re ridden by time anxious of hours\nAs a right tackle crouched upon the line\nAwaits the snapper-back before the towers\nLike granite, risen in the fall sunshine\nAnd towering higher when as the play begins,\nHis team’s thrown back, and loses as he wins.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nOur elder brother, whom I had not seen\nThese twenty years until you brought him back\nFrom the cyclonic West where he had been\nStormed by the shaking furies in the track\nWe know so well, which is these arteries--\nYou, elder brother, I am a little strange\nTo you and you must study how to seize\nMortality, that’s potent to derange\nCorpuscles for designs that it may choose,\nOur blood is altered by the sudden death\nOf one who of all persons could not use\nLife half so well as death. Let’s look beneath\nHer life. Perhaps hers only is our rest--\nTo study this, all lifetime may be best.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nThe fire I praise was once perduring flame\nTill it snuffs with our generation, out--\nNo matter, it’s all one, it’s but a name\nNot as late honeysuckle half so stout,\nSo think upon it how the fire burns blue\nIts hottest, when the fury’s all but spent;\nThank God the fuel is low, we’ll not renew\nSuch length of flame into our firmament;\nThink too the rooftree crackles and will fall\nOn us, who saw the sacred fury’s height\nSeated in her great chair with the black shawl\nFrom head to feet, burning with motherly light\nMore spectral than November eve could mix\nWith sunset, to blaze on her pale crucifix.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThis message for you lest we both go down\nScattered with no character to death,\nFor death’s untutored so that when we drown\nSevered, must be told we breathed one breath;\nLet it be said that sharp confusion stood,\nA vulture, at the heart of all our kin\nUntil we heard the echo of our blood\n(Lost in the pulse of man) stricken with sin;\nFor evil done these last two centuries\nWe fulminate in exile from our earth\nAged exclusions of blood memories\nThose superstitions of explosive birth,\nUntil there’ll be of us not anything\nBut gentle death, who is confusion’s king.\n\n\n# IX.\n\nNot power nor the storied hand of God\nShall keep us whole in this dissevering air,\nWhich is a stink upon this pleasant sod\nSo foul, the hovering buzzard sees it fair.\nI ask you therefore will it end tonight\nAnd the moth tease again his windy flame,\nOr spiders eating their loves hide in the night\nAt last, drowsy with self-devouring shame?\nThis is the house of Atreus where we live--\nWhich one of us the Greek, perplexed with crime,\nQuestions the future that with his lucid sieve\nStrains off the appointed particles of time;\nIt is not spoken now, for time is slow,\nWhich brother, you or I, shall swiftly go.\n\n\n# X.\n\nCaptains of industry, your aimless power\nAwakens harsh velleities of time,\nLet you, brother, a captain in your hour\nBe zealous that your numbers are all prime\nLest false division with sly mathematic\nPlunder the inner mansion of our blood--\nThe Thracian swollen with pride besiege the Attic\nFierce lumber-jack felling the sacred wood:\nYet the prime secret whose simplicity\nYour towering engine hammers to reduce,\nThough driven holds that bulwark of the sea\nWhich breached will turn unspeaking fury loose\nTo drown out him who swears to rectify\nInfinity--that has nor ear nor eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "stranger": { - "title": "“Stranger”", - "body": "This is the village where the funeral\nStilted its dusty march over deep ruts\nUp the hillside covered with queen’s lace\nTo the patch of weeds known finally to all.\n\nOf her virtues large tongues were loud\nAs I, a stranger, trudged the streets\nGay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few\nSly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud.\n\nFor this was death.\nI should never see these men again\nAnd yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil--\nAn issue for conscience, say--\nThe cold heart of death was beating in my brain:\nA new figuration of an old phenomenon.\n\nThis is the village where women walk the streets\nSelling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide;\nOf their virtues the symbol can be washtubs\nBut when they die it is a time of singing,\n\nAnd then the symbol changes with change of place.\nLet the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill.\nLet a new slab look off into the sunset:\nThe night drops down with sullen grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-subway": { - "title": "“The Subway”", - "body": "Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell\nOf arch on arch, where ogives burst a red\nReverberance of hail upon the dead\nThunder like an exploding crucible!\nHarshly articulate, musical steel shell\nOf angry worship, hurled religiously\nUpon your business of humility\nInto the iron forestries of hell:\n\nTill broken in the shift of quieter\nDense altitudes tangential of your steel,\nI am become geometries, and glut\nExpansions like a blind astronomer\nDazed, while the worldless heavens bulge and reel\nIn the cold revery of an idiot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-swimmers": { - "title": "“The Swimmers”", - "body": "_Scene: Montgomery County, Kentucky, July 1911_\n\nKentucky water, clear springs: a boy fleeing\nTo water under the dry Kentucky sun,\nHis four little friends in tandem with him, seeing\n\nLong shadows of grapevine wriggle and run\nOver the green swirl; mullein under the ear\nSoft as Nausicaa’s palm; sullen fun\n\nSavage as childhood’s thin\nO fountain, bosom source undying-dead\nReplenish me the spring of love and fear\n\nAnd give me back the eye that looked and fled\nWhen a thrush idling in the tulip tree\nUnwound the cold dream of the copperhead.\n\n--Along the creek the road was winding; we\nFelt the quicksilver sky. I see again\nThe shrill companions of that odyssey:\n\nBill Eaton, Charlie Watson, ‘Nigger’ Layne\nThe doctor’s son, Harry Duesler who played\nThe flute; and Tate, with water on the brain.\n\nDog days: the dusty leaves where rain delayed\nHung low on poison-oak and scuppernong,\nAnd we were following the active shade.\n\nOf water, that bells and bickers all night long.\n“No more’n a mile,” Layne said. All five stood still.\nListening, I heard what seemed at first a song;\n\nPeering, I heard the hooves come down the hill.\nThe posse passed, twelve horse; the leader’s face\nWas worn as limestone on an ancient sill.\n\nThen, as sleepwalkers shift from a hard place\nIn bed, and rising to keep a formal pledge\nDescend a ladder into empty space,\n\nWe scuttled down the bank below a ledge\nAnd marched stiff-legged in our common fright\nAlong a hog-track by the riffle’s edge:\n\nInto a world where sound shaded the sight\nDropped the dull hooves again; the horsemen came\nAgain, all but the leader. It was night\n\nMomently and I feared: eleven same\nJesus-Christers unmembered and unmade,\nWhose Corpse had died again in dirty shame.\n\nThe bank then leveling in a speckled glade,\nWe stopped to breathe above the swimming-hole;\nI gazed at its reticulated shade\n\nRecoiling in blue fear, and felt it roll\nOver my ears and eyes and lift my hair\nLike seaweed tossing on a sunk atoll.\n\nI rose again. Borne on the copper air\nA distant voice green as a funeral wreath\nAgainst a grave: “That dead nigger there.”\n\nThe melancholy sheriff slouched beneath\nA giant sycamore; shaking his head\nHe plucked a sassafras twig and picked his teeth:\n\n“We come too late.” He spoke to the tired dead\nWhose ragged shirt soaked up the viscous flow\nOf blood in which It lay discomfited.\n\nA butting horse-fly gave one ear a blow\nAnd glanced off, as the sheriff kicked the rope\nLoose from the neck and hooked it with his toe\n\nAway from the blood--I looked back down the slope:\nThe friends were gone that I had hoped to greet--\nA single horseman came at a slow lope\n\nAnd pulled up at the hanged man’s horny feet;\nThe sheriff noosed the feet, the other end\nThe stranger tied to his pommel in a neat\n\nSlip-knot. I saw the Negro’s body bend\nAnd straighten, as a fish-line cast transverse\nYields to the current that it must subtend.\n\nThe sheriff’s Goddamn was a murmured curse\nNot for the dead but for the blinding dust\nThat boxed the cortege in a cloudy hearse\n\nAnd dragged it towards our town.\nI knew I must Not stay till twilight in that silent road;\nSliding my bare feet into the warm crust,\n\nI hopped the stonecrop like a panting toad\nMouth open, following the heaving cloud\nThat floated to the court-house square its load\n\nOf limber corpse that took the sun for shroud.\nThese were three figures in the dying sun\nWhose light were company where three was crowd.\n\nMy breath crackled the dead air like a shotgun\nAs, sheriff and the stranger disappearing,\nThe faceless head lay still. I could not run\n\nOr walk, but stood. Alone in the public clearing\nThis private thing was owned by all the town.\nThough never claimed by us within my hearing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "winter-mask": { - "title": "“Winter Mask”", - "body": "# I.\n\nTowards nightfall when the wind\nTries the eaves and casements\n(A winter wind of the mind\nLong gathering its will)\nI lay the mind’s contents\nBare, as upon a table,\nAnd ask, in a time of war,\nWhether there is still\nTo a mind frivolously dull\nAnything worth living for.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIf I am meek and dull\nAnd a poor sacrifice\nOf perverse will to cull\nThe act from the attempt,\nJust look into damned eyes\nAnd give the returning glare;\nFor the damned like it, the more\nDamnation is exempt\nFrom what would save its heir\nWith a thing worth living for.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe poisoned rat in the wall\nCuts through the wall like a knife,\nThen blind, drying, and small\nAnd driven to cold water,\nDies of the water of life:\nBoth damned in eternal ice,\nThe traitor become the boor\nWho had led his friend to slaughter,\nNow bites his head not nice,\nThe food that he lives for.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nI supposed two scenes of hell,\nTwo human bestiaries,\nMight uncommonly well\nConvey the doom I thought;\nBut lest the horror freeze\nThe gentler estimation\nI go to the sylvan door\nWhere nature has been bought\nIn rational proration\nAs a thing worth living for.\n\n\n# V.\n\nShould the buyer have been beware?\nIt is an uneven trade\nFor man has wet his hair\nUnder the winter weather\nWith only fog for shade:\nHis mouth a bracketed hole\nPicked by the crows that bore\nNature to their hanged brother,\nWho rattles against the bole\nThe thing that he lived for.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nI asked the master Yeats\nWhose great style could not tell\nWhy it is man hates\nHis own salvati6n,\nPrefers the way to hell,\nAnd finds his last safety\nIn the self-made curse that bore\nHim towards damnation:\nThe drowned undrowned by the sea\nThe sea worth living for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-wolves": { - "title": "“The Wolves”", - "body": "There are wolves in the next room waiting\nWith heads bent low, thrust out, breathing\nAt nothing in the dark: between them and me\nA white door patched with light from the hall\nWhere it seems never (so still is the house)\nA man has walked from the front door to the stair.\nIt has all been forever; a beast claws the floor.\nI have brooded on angels and archfiends\nBut no man has ever sat where the next room’s\nCrowded with wolves, and for the honor of man\nI affirm that never have I before. Now while\nI have looked for the evening star at a cold window\nAnd whistled when Arcturus spilt his light,\nI’ve heard the wolves scuffle, and said: So this\nIs man; so--and what better conclusion is there--\nThe day will not follow night, and the heart\nOf man has a little dignity, but less patience\nThan a wolf’s, and a duller sense that cannot\nSmell its own mortality. (This and other\nMeditations will be suited to other times\nAfter dog silence howls my epitaph.)\nNow remember courage, go to the door,\nOpen it and see whether coiled on the bed\nOr cringing by the wall a savage beast,\nMaybe with golden hair, with deep eyes\nLike a bearded spider on a sunlit floor,\nWill snarl--and man can never be alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-tate": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Tate", - "birth": { - "year": 1943 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tate_(writer)", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 144 - }, - "poems": { - "anatomy": { - "title": "“Anatomy”", - "body": "The beautiful one studies anatomy from dawn to dusk and then just sits there crying. No one speaks to her in a friendly manner. They know she is dying inside, they can see in her beautiful face. They exchange glances that say “It won’t be long now. Soon we’ll have this city back to ourselves and our ugliness will become the standard.” But the beautiful one must walk the streets to escape her mirrors, and she must read her anatomy book in the park under the maple tree to understand the looks the others give her. She needs love, she tries to approach them with kindness, with a smile and a kind word, but they shuffle past her growling, their faces stuffed down into their overcoats. She is shunned in the little vegetable store, she is shunned in the museum, and in the church. The beautiful one is dying, all alone, no merciful words, no soft touch, no flowers. Perhaps the city will be a better place to visit, I don’t know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "at-the-clothesline": { - "title": "“At the Clothesline”", - "body": "Millie was in the backyard hanging the laundry. I was watching her from the kitchen window. Why does this give me so much pleasure? Because I love her in a million ways, and because I love the idea of clean laundry flapping in the wind. It’s timeless, a new beginning, a promise of tomorrow. Clothespins! God, I love clothespins. We should stock up on them. Some day they may stop making them, and then what? If I were a painter, I would paint Millie hanging the laundry. That would be a painting that would make you happy, and break your heart. You would never know what was in her mind, big thoughts, little thoughts, no thoughts. Did she see the hawk circling overheard? Did she hate hanging laundry? Was she going to run away with a sailor? The sheets billowing like sails on an ancient skiff, the socks waving goodbye. Millie, O Millie, do you remember me? The man who traveled with cloth napkins and loved you in the great storm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "the-aviary": { - "title": "“The Aviary”", - "body": "I flew low over the neighborhood. Then a blackbird flew into my mouth and I swallowed it. It was still alive. I could hear it squawking and feel it kicking. I did several somersaults in the air and finally straightened out. I could see the Stewards watching television. They were eating popcorn. The Goodwins were just having dinner. A roast chicken, lovely! Then I hit a power line and started to fall, then gained my balance and flew on. This time of night is most beautiful, the stars just coming out, the moon a pale shadow up there, several stray dogs wandering the streets. That’s my house down there. My wife is starting to set the table, music is playing on the radio. I land in the driveway, dust myself off. I pick a couple of feathers out of my teeth. I walk up to the door and let myself in. “Hi, honey, sorry if I’m late,” I said. “You’re just in time for dinner,” she said. I pulled out my chair and sat myself down. The blackbird squawked. “What was that?” she said. “I didn’t hear anything,” I said. She served us a delicious beef stew. “How was work?” she said. “Oh, work was fine. You know, a little of this and a little of that. It ends up evening about,” I said. “That doesn’t make much sense,” she said. The blackbird was in my throat now. I tried to swallow some stew, but it flew out. “My god, what the hell is that?” she screamed. “I guess that’s a blackbird,” I said. “But it came out of your mouth!” she said. “I’ll catch it and put it back in,” I said, “No, a thing like that doesn’t belong there,” she said. “Well, where else are we going to put it?” I said. “In the aviary,” she said. “We don’t have an aviary,” I said. “Well, we do now,” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "the-bag-of-feed": { - "title": "“The Bag of Feed”", - "body": "I was on my way home from the farm where I worked when a bull attacked me. I hid behind a tree, but he came around and charged at me again. I realized I had a red shirt on and this must have enraged the bull, so I tore it off as fast as I could and threw it on the ground. This seemed to have worked because the bull walked up to the shirt and snorted at it, then walked away. I picked up my shirt and rolled it into a ball and walked on my way, naked from the waist up. When I got home I told my wife about the bull and she laughed and told me I should remember to never wear red to work. The next day I was milking a cow in its stall when it turned around and started kicking my face. I laughed so hard I kicked over the bucket of milk. And the next day I was feeding the chickens when one of them suddenly flew up and bit my ear. It bled so hard I had to go to the farmer’s house and get his wife to bandage it. The next day I was feeding the pigs when one of them bit me on the ankle. It hurt terribly and I had to quit for the day. My wife told me I was allergic to the farm and that I had to quit my job there. It didn’t make any sense to me. I had been working there for twenty years. Nonetheless, I did quit. It made me sad to do so. When I told Mr. Johnson, he said he understood. He said one of his workers had been eaten alive by the chickens many years ago. He said it’s called The Bag of Feed Syndrome. The animals think they know you so well they begin to think of you as a bag of feed. I thanked him for all he had done for us and said my goodbye. On the way home I secretly cried. My wife said everything would be alright. On the first morning home I woke with my left hand missing. I looked everywhere for it. I hid the stump from my wife, and she didn’t seem to notice. The next morning my right leg was gone. And so on until there was just my head lying on the pillow. My wife asked if I wanted breakfast and I said, “I don’t think so.” The thought of it made me sick. Well, it gave me a headache.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "banking-rules": { - "title": "“Banking Rules”", - "body": "I was standing in line at the bank and the fellow in front of me was humming. The line was long and slow, and after a while the humming began to irritate me. I said to the fellow, “Excuse me, would you mind not humming.” And he said, “Was I humming? I’m sorry I didn’t realize it.” And he went right on humming. I said, “Sir, you’re humming again.” “Me, humming?” he said. “I don’t think so.” And then he went on humming. I was about to blow my lid. Instead, I went to find the manager. I said, “See that man over there in the blue suit?” “Yes,” he said, “what about him?” “He won’t stop humming,” I said, “I’ve asked him politely several times, but he won’t stop.” “There’s no crime in humming,” he said. I went back and took my place in line. I listened, but there was nothing coming out of him. I said, “Are you okay, pal?” He looked mildly peeved, and gave me no reply. I felt myself shrinking. The manager of the bank walked briskly up to me and said, “Sir, are you aware of the fact that you’re shrinking?” I said I was. And he said, “I’m afraid we don’t allow that kind of behavior in this bank. I have to ask you to leave.” The air was whistling out of me, I was almost gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2004 - } - } - }, - "the-banner": { - "title": "“The Banner”", - "body": "I tugged at her sleeve: doorbell? She hugged the arm: magpie. Intervals went by spotlessly, but somehow foetid, too. She stitched, I read the Apocrypha, abruptly slammed shut the covers, suspicious of fumes rippling through the room. I was poking around under cushions, bracing myself for the worst, dead fruit, something under the rug, a gelatinous potato. Would you stop? she pleaded. Vm cooking. Oh, I said, that explains everything. I stared at her for a very long time, I felt horns growing, meagre horns denting my baldspot. That book was a fake, a neon sneer across the ages, a prolonged rasp corrupting the squeamish, among whom I loomed as a negligible connoisseur. I felt discouraged now as I watched her leathery fingers unfold her munificent banner: Endurance, it read, as though the Bridegroom had endowed her, and she were the Bride? I tugged at her sleeve: telephone? She rocked in her trance: coyotes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "barroom-confession": { - "title": "“Barroom Confession”", - "body": "When I was a young boy, whenever trouble visited me, I would head for the forest in back of our house, and follow the Crystal Springs with its twists and turns, its hills and bluffs and valleys. I couldn’t walk ten feet without something catching my eye, a wood lily, a patch of purple trillium, milkweed bursting open and floating everywhere, some cattails, and enormous bullfrog staring me in the eye. I felt entirely at home in those woods. In my mind, they went on forever. I never saw another human being in here, though, occasionally, I would find a really old soda or medicine bottle half-buried in the mud, and, this, of course, gave me thoughts of what the previous life of the forest might have been, a few campers from the past century, nothing more. Some days I would be gone all day. Just as long as I got home for supper I wouldn’t be missed. No one would even ask me where I had been, and I never volunteered anything. There wasn’t much conversation around the table, but I didn’t mind. I was always hungry, and loved mother’s cooking. One day I had started out early, right after breakfast, and wanted to see how far I could get. Three deer had crossed my path right in front of me, and I felt lucky. Later, I spotted a porcupine clinging to a branch above my head. When I got hungry, I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a log beside the stream with butterflies flitting about. That was my home, that was where I really lived. I walked on and on, until nothing was familiar any longer. I was very excited to be entering unknown territory. I remember thinking, perhaps I was the first person to have ever stepped on these grounds. The bluffs were steeper, and there was no trace of a path anywhere. My arms and legs were pricked by thorny bushes, and clouds of insects occasionally pestered me and got into my eyes so that I was blinded for moments at a time. I wasn’t sure if I could find my way back, as I had lost all sense of direction. Sometimes I thought I heard something following me. The woods were so thick it was practically dark. I had no idea what time it was, but I definitely did not want to spend the night in there. As much as I had wanted to know what lay beyond, I now longed for the safety of the familiar. I turned and started to fight my way back through the thick brush. Once, I stopped for breath, but and a copperhead slithered over my shoe. I started to run, but soon fell and started to slide down a slope. I caught hold of a sapling and pulled myself up, sweating. My hands were bleeding. I stood still and tried to get my bearings. I heard a girl’s voice singing, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. “I’m over here,” I yelled, and the voice stopped. It was ten years before I ever got out of that forest. By then, my parents had moved, or died. I never found them. I don’t even have any pictures of them. “Eat you green beans,” my mother would say. “I never ate my green beans, and look at me,” my father said. These are my memories of a happy childhood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "bewitched": { - "title": "“Bewitched”", - "body": "I was standing in the lobby, some irritant in my eye, thinking back on a soloist I once heard in Venezuela, and then, for some reason, on a crate of oranges recently arrived from a friend in Florida, and then this colleague came up to me and asked me what time it was, and I don’t know what came over me but I was certain that I was standing there naked and I was certain she could see my thoughts, so I tried to hide them quickly, I was embarrassed that there was no apparent connection to them, will-o’-the-wisps, and I needed an alibi, so I told her I had seen a snapshot of a murder victim recently that greatly resembled her, and that she should take precaution, my intonation getting me into deeper trouble and I circled the little space I had cut out as if looking for all the sidereal years she had inquired into moments before, and the dazzling lunar poverty of some thoughts had me pinned like a moth and my dubious tactic to hide my malady had prompted this surreptitious link to the whirling Sufi dancers, once so popular in these halls. “It’s five minutes past four,” I said, knowing I had perjured myself for all time. I veered into the men’s room, astonished to have prevailed, my necktie, a malediction stapled in place, my zipper synchronized with the feminine motive. In Zagreb, just now, a hunter is poaching some cherries.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "the-blue-booby": { - "title": "“The Blue Booby”", - "body": "The blue booby lives on the bare rocks of Galápagos and fears nothing. It is a simple life: they live on fish, and there are few predators. Also, the males do not make fools of themselves chasing after the young ladies. Rather, they gather the blue objects of the world and construct from them a nest--an occasional Gaulois package, a string of beads, a piece of cloth from a sailor’s suit. This replaces the need fo dazzling plumage; in fact, in the past fifty million years the male has grown considerably duller, nor can he sing well. The female, though, asks little of him--the blue satisfies her completely, has a magical effect on her. When she returns from her day of gossip and shopping, she sees he has found her a new shred of blue foil: for this she rewards him with her dark body, the stars turn slowly in the blue foil beside them like the eyes of a mild savior.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "bounden-duty": { - "title": "“Bounden Duty”", - "body": "I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why, sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured” bit. He thanked me several times and hung up. I was dying to tell someone that the President himself called me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to act normal was killing me. And what was going on anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on. I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty suspicious. I opened the door and looked around. What was going on? There was a car parked in front of my car that I had never seen before, a car that was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled. If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise people will think something’s going on. I got into my car and sped down the road. I could feel those little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush, but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile. I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee. You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise you. Everything is normal. The President shook hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I know,” I said, feeling better.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2004 - } - } - }, - "breathing": { - "title": "“Breathing”", - "body": "I hear something coming,\nsomething like a motorcycle,\nsomething horrible with pistons awry,\nwith camshafts about to fill the air\nwith redhot razor-y shrapnel.\nAt the window, I see nothing.\nCorrection: I see two girls\n\nplaying tennis, they have no\nvoices, only the muted thump\nof the ball kissing the racket,\nthe sound of a snowball\nhitting a snowman, the sound\n\nof a snowman’s head rolling\ninto a river, a snowman with\nan alarmclock for a heart\ndeep inside him. Listen:\nsomeone is breathing.\n\nSomeone has a problem\nbreathing. Someone is blowing\nsmoke through a straw.\nSomeone has stopped breathing.\nAmazing. Someone broke\nhis wrist this morning,\nbroke it into powder.\nHe did it intentionally.\nHe had an accident\n\nwhile breathing.\nHe was exhaling\nwhen his wrist broke.\nActually\n\nit’s a woman breathing.\nShe’s not even thinking\nabout it. She’s thinking\nabout something else.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1970 - } - } - }, - "brittle-family-photographs": { - "title": "“Brittle Family Photographs”", - "body": "It’s hard work and the pay is low, but at least you get to hang out with a bunch of nasty, bitter people. So I took the job. The first week I thought I’d die. I couldn’t stop my hands from bleeding, and my legs could barely hold me up. The second week my eyes were blurred and I couldn’t keep my food down. By the fourth week I was beginning to like it. I felt strong. After a year I felt nothing. I didn’t know my name, I didn’t know where I was. Whatever it was I was supposed to do got done, but I don’t know how. Then I met Deidre in the cafeteria and she said, “Mr. President, you’re doing a great job.” “What did you call me?” I said. “Mr. President,” she said. “How time pisses away,” I said. “I can hear the birdies singing.” My eye was on the jello.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2005 - } - } - }, - "burn-down-the-town-no-survivors": { - "title": "“Burn Down The Town, No Survivors”", - "body": "Those were my orders, issued with a sense of Tightness I’d rarely known. I was tired of how June was treating John, how Mary was victimizing herself with nearly everyone, Mark was a loose cannon, and Carlotta would never find any peace; It seemed to me that there could be no acceptable resolution for anyone, except those who didn’t deserve one. And when, for a moment, I held the power, I surveyed the landscape?it was just a typical mid-sized town in the middle of nowhere?and the citizens showed no signs of remorse, as if what they were doing to one another (and to me) was what we were here for (and I recognize the mistake in that kind of thinking, but still?) a bold and decisive action seemed so appealing, even healing. I was with a friend’s wife, her wild mane would make such ideal kindling? I could have loved her but it would have been just more of the same, more petty crimes and slow death, more passion leading to betrayal, more ecstasy guaranteeing tears. I saw how dangerous and fragile I had become. I could have loved a fig right then with my gasoline in one hand, and the other fluttering between her breast and a packet of matches. My contagious laughter frightening us both, “No survivors,” I repeated, and we looked through one another, the work already completed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "the-cages": { - "title": "“The Cages”", - "body": "The insular firebird\n(meaning the sun) gives up\nthe day, and is tucked into\n\na corner. Order, like\na giant janitor, shuttles\nabout naming and replacing\n\nthe various humanities.\nI look at you, you look\nat me--we wave again\n\n(the same), our hands like\nswollen flags falling, words\nmarooned in the brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967 - } - } - }, - "camp-of-no-return": { - "title": "“Camp of No Return”", - "body": "I sat in the old tree swing without swinging. My loafer had fallen off and I left it on the ground. My sister came running out of the house to tell me something. She said, “I’m going to camp tomorrow.” I said, “I don’t believe you.” She said, “I am. It’s a fact. Mother told me.” We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. I was mad at her for getting to do something I didn’t. At dinner I asked mother what kind of camp it was. She said, “Oh, just a camp like any other.” I didn’t really know what that meant. The next day they got her ready to go, and then they drove off, leaving me with the neighbors. When they got back everything was normal, except I missed Maisie. And I missed her more each following day. I didn’t know how much she had meant to me before. I asked my parents over and over how much longer it would be. All they said was soon. I told some kids at school how long my sister had been gone. One of them said, “She’ll never be back. That’s the death camp.” When I got home I told my parents what that boy had said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” my father said. But after a couple of more weeks of her absence I began to wonder. That’s when they began to clean out Maisie’s room. I said, “What are you doing? You said Maise will be back soon.” My mother said, “Maisie’s not coming back. She likes it there better than she does here.” “That’s not true. I don’t believe you,” I said. My father gave me a look that let me know I might be next if I didn’t mend my ways. I never said a word about Maisie again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "certain-nuances-certain-gestures": { - "title": "“Certain Nuances, Certain Gestures”", - "body": "The way a lady entertaining an illicit desire touches her earlobe in a crowded room, and the way that room seems to single her out and undress her with murmuring torchlight? if the right spectator is present, even though the band is playing loudly and the myriad celebrants are toasting their near-tragic rise to glory, and the Vice President of an important bank is considering an assassination, and even the mice in the boiler room are planning a raid on an old bag of cookies in the attic? Even so, this spectator senses the moisture on her palms, can feel her thoughts wander in and out of the cavernous room; knows, too, their approximate destination. Beyond this, he refuses to follow. She stands alone there on the quay, waiting. The river of life is flowing. The spectator returns to his room, a few hours closer to his own death or ecstacy. He makes a few hasty entries into his diary before turning off the light. And, yes, he dreams, but of a gazelle frozen in the path of a runaway truck.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "the-chaste-stranger": { - "title": "“The Chaste Stranger”", - "body": "All the sexually active people in Westport look so clean and certain, I wonder if they’re dead. Their lives are tennis without end, the avocado-green Mercedes waiting calm as you please. Perhaps it is my brain that is unplugged, and these shadow-people don’t know how to drink martinis anymore. They are suddenly and mysteriously not in the least interested in fornicating with strangers. Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions here, and certainly no dinner invitations where a fella could probe Buffy’s inner-mush, a really complicated adventure, in a 1930ish train station, outlandish bouquets, a poisonous insect found burrowing its way through the walls of the special restaurant and into one of her perfect nostrils--she was reading _Meetings with Remarkable Men_, needing succor, dreaming of a village near Bosnia, when a clattering of carts broke her thoughts--“Those billy goats and piglets, they are all so ephemeral …” But now, in Westport Connecticut, a boy, a young man really, looking as if he had just come through a carwash, and dressed for the kind of success that made her girlfriends froth and lather, can be overheard speaking to no one in particular: “That _Paris Review_ crowd, I couldn’t tell if they were bright or just overbred.” Whereupon Buffy swings into action, pinning him to the floor: “I will unglue your very being from this planet, if ever …” He could appreciate her sincerity, not to mention her spiffy togs. Didymus the Blind has put three dollars on Total Departure, and I am tired of pumping my own gas. I’m Lewis your aluminum man, and we are whirling in a spangled frenzy toward a riddle and a doom--here’s looking up your old address.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "city-at-night": { - "title": "“City at Night”", - "body": "The blue-black plumes of the fountain\nparched my yearning, and a tuft of cellophane\nclings fondly to my foot like a diadem.\nDown that street an uproar is dwindling,\na small word had been magnified and was\nonce again shrinking back to its reasonable size,\nand Joe Blow drifts down to the riverbank\nsearching for relics, a man of sorrows.\nThen a new turmoil infects another flock,\nit’s a good corner on which to sell balm.\nA seer bobs along, oblivious or beguiled.\nI look for my reflection in a window:\nGoodnight Joe, Goodnight Joe, Goodnight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "coda": { - "title": "“Coda”", - "body": "Love is not worth so much;\nI regret everything.\nNow on our backs\nin Fayetteville, Arkansas,\nthe stars are falling\n\ninto our cracked eyes.\nWith my good arm\nI reach for the sky,\nand let the air out of the moon,\nIt goes whizzing off\nto shrivel and sink\nin the ocean.\n\nYou cannot weep;\nI cannot do anything\nthat once held an ounce\nof meaning for us.\nI cover you\nwith pine needles.\n\nWhen morning comes,\nI will build a cathedral\naround our bodies.\nAnd the crickets,\nwho sing with their knees,\nwill come there\nin the night to be sad,\nwhen they can sing no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967 - } - } - }, - "the-cognac": { - "title": "“The Cognac”", - "body": "I smoked a cigar just before taking my bath. My rubber ducky floated around me. When I had finished I dried myself off and dressed. Then I went to the living room and poured myself a shot of vodka. Cindy was coming over in a half an hour. I wanted to be in good shape. When she arrived I offered her a cocktail and she accepted. She told me about her job as an accountant and I told her about mine as an insurance agent. We both agreed that our bosses were idiots. We joked and laughed and had a second drink. I felt I had known her a long time, when in fact this was our first date. I grilled us some steaks for dinner. I poured us some wine. We toasted each other. We laughed and ate. We talked about what we liked to do in our spare time. We both liked to read. She liked novels and I liked nonfiction. When we finished I cleared the table and got us some cognac and dessert. She had beautiful eyes. I was attracted to her, but knew I should wait. We talked about our childhoods, growing up in the city, brothers and sisters. I asked her if her family was religious. She said, “Not really. We went to church on Easter and Christmas, you could hardly call that religious.” I said, “Same here.” And we laughed. We talked politics and so on. The next thing I knew I woke up in bed in the morning. I looked around for Cindy, but she wasn’t there. I got up, holding my sore head. I went to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. There was blood all over the floor. I panicked. I tried to remember the end of the evening. I couldn’t. Maybe we fought, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I stabbed her, but that seemed unlikely. I wasn’t a violent man, I never had been before. But somebody got hurt and it wasn’t me. Finally the phone rang. It was Cindy. “Are you all right? There’s blood all over the floor,” I said. “Yes, I’m okay, but I stabbed something. I don’t know what it was,” she said. “What do you mean,” I said. “It had fangs and sharp claws and pointy ears and was the size of a small dog, that’s all I know,” she said. “Was it a raccoon?” I said. “No, I know what a raccoon looks like. I said I don’t know.” “Okay, well it must be in the house, anyway. You stabbed it, I mean, it must be dead,” I said. “I think it went back in one of those cognac bottles,” she said. “Oh my God, I’m going to throw them all out immediately,” I said. “Please don’t, I kind of liked it,” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "collect-call-from-nepal": { - "title": "“Collect Call from Nepal”", - "body": "I popped myself a beer, and went to sit on the porch with the newspaper. It was six o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday, middle of July, beautiful day. But, then, the phone was ringing. It was a collect call from Katmandu, Nepal, from Darcy Symonds. I hadn’t seen Darcy in years. “Yes, I’ll take it,” I said. “Judson, this is Darcy. Listen, I’m in a lot of trouble here. There’s a revolution going on, and I need to get out of here. The airports are closed. There’s fighting in the streets. I’m suspected of being a spy and an informer for the government, but I’m not, Judson, I swear it. You’ve got to get me out of here,” she said. “Okay, Darcy, calm down. We’ll think of something. How can I get a hold of you? I need to know where you are,” I said. “That’s the trouble, you can’t. I’m running for my life. The whole town is on fire,” she said. “Call me again when you know where you are. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Judson, there isn’t much time,” she said. She hung up. I took a long pull on my beer and picked up the paper. There was a front page story about a two-year-old boy whose dog had saved him from drowning in the town reservoir. And another about a man who had found a six-foot boa constrictor in his bed. Police suspected that its owner will be found. Why would Darcy call me after all these years? And what was I supposed to do? I tried calling the State Department in D.C., but they put me on hold and then switched me over to somebody else, who put me on hold and so on, until I finally screamed at an actual human being “My wife is trapped in Katmandu. They’re going to kill her if you don’t help me get her out of there!” “Calm down, sir. What is your wife’s name?” he said. “Darcy Symonds,” I said. “And who is going to kill her?” he said. “The revolutionaries. They think she’s a spy and an informer,” I said. He asked for my phone number and said he would get back to me as soon as he knows something. I drained my beer and got another one. I looked at the weather forecast for tomorrow: another perfect day, I tried to read the article about the mayoral election, but lost interest. Mr. Giddings trimmed his hedges until the last light was gone. I ate some cheese and crackers and a handful of grapes. I waited up most of the night waiting for Darcy to call back, and also for the man from the State Department. The phone never rang. I got out my atlas and looked up Nepal. I read about it in my encyclopedia. But, still, my imagination failed to picture anything, just screaming and gunfire and fires, and Darcy’s frightened face I could see, one among the many, running for cover. It was just another bad movie, and, yet, she was my wife, or so I now believed, and it had to end happily, safe but for a few scratches, reunited. I sat there staring at the stars and listening to the crickets, feeling emptier than I had ever known. “Who’s in charge here?” I said, “A few good men is all we’ll need. We’ll need some technical support. You, Jones, take out the Himalayas. Martinez, nullify the Buddha.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july", - "month_epoch": "middle", - "weekday": "saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-condemned-man": { - "title": "“The Condemned Man”", - "body": "The condemned man clutches his lucky penny. He paces the park, famished, recounting incurable injuries, condemning the scoundrel in him, banishing the swindler, pleading with his jury to show no mercy. The grocer watches from his doorway, recoiling from the dreary display?he has goatcheese and radishes to consider, turnips under intense surveillance. A limousine squeezes through the traffic, smothering the thoughts of little people. An errand boy percolates down the sidewalk, cracking codes in his mind, lumping forecasts and rituals into sure treasure by tomorrow. A plump and dusky woman with something on a leash pauses to inspect some loaves’ and peppers, licking her lips and speaking a private language to her nervous pet, who’s ready to croak. “Fiber, Mrs. Zumstein, fiber’s the only thing!” the grocer quips, swatting flies from the lumpy morsels. And, across the street, a net is dropped from the trees. Men in blue costumes fan-out and sweep through the park. Dogs pick up a scent in the breeze and dash yapping over the ridge where, in their teeming zest, they up-end a baby carriage and frighten a young mother nearly to death. The condemned man briskly apologizes to his condemned god and withdraws from the park quietly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "consolations-after-an-affair": { - "title": "“Consolations After An Affair”", - "body": "My plants are whispering to one another: they are planning a little party later on in the week about watering time. I have quilts on beds and walls that think it is still the 19th century. They know nothing of automobiles and jet planes. For them a wheat field in January is their mother and enough. I’ve discovered that I don’t need a retirement plan, a plan to succeed. A snow leopard sleeps beside me like a slow, warm breeze. And I can hear the inner birds singing alone in this house I love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1989 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "conspiracy": { - "title": "“Conspiracy”", - "body": "I said, “Well, I certainly don’t know anything about any of this.” Mr. Black said, “Well, you’ve certainly landed in the middle of it.” I said, “I don’t even know what it is.” “It’s a conspiracy of like-minded sous to undermine the government,” he said. “Why would I care to be a part of something like that?” I said. “You would like to bring down our government,” he said. “I don’t think about our government one way or another,” I said. “Of course you do. Everybody thinks about our government one way or another,” he said. “But I don’t. I am completely oblivious to our government,” he said. “That’s not possible. You pay your taxes, don’t you? You follow certain laws. The government is always telling you what to do,” he said. “Yes, but I try to ignore it. I just do things my own way,” I said. “And your way happens to coincide with what the government is telling you?” he said. “I’ve never really thought about it, I guess so,” I said. “I don’t believe you. You are out to tear the whole thing down. I know your type,” he said. “I am not, I assure you. I don’t care one bit about the government,” I said. “See, that’s what I mean. Only somebody like yourself could have made these plans,” he said. “I’m not like anybody you have met before. I don’t care what you say. You’re not going to twist me into this thing,” I said. “You are already there. Everything you say points towards your guilt,” he said. “Then I’ll not say anything more,” I said. We sat there in our chairs for a long time until he finally fell asleep. Crickets were chirruping outside. I thought about the keys on his belt, then fell into my own deep sleep, where antelope jumped the fence each night and were caught captive by the farmer in the morning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "constant-defender": { - "title": "“Constant Defender”", - "body": "My little finger’s stuck in a Coca-Cola bottle and I’ve got three red checkers lodged in my watchpocket. In a rush to meet my angel, now I don’t even know who my angel was. I can see seven crimson jeeps lined up outside Pigboy’s Barbecue Shack--must be a napkin salesmen’s convention. I don’t care what cargo as long as their hats are back on by eleven. The thing I’m trying to avoid is talking to my mule about glue futures. What’s a fellow going to do? I must have a ceiling fan, I can’t postpone twirling blades. And my one stuffed chair was owned by a hunchback for a hundred years before I came along. I need some new knickknacks to suggest an air of cleanliness to this sluggish pit of extinct sweet potatoes. Ah, trickery, you sassy lark, withered black pearl, unfetter me from these latches, make me the Director at every meatball’s burial, lacerate this too, too static air I’ve been eating my way through. I lunch on eels and larks in lemonade, Lord, I’m so happy I woke up in my right mind today. And those kleptomaniacs, Smitty and Bob, stole peanuts from a hunchback, snuff from an angel. My knees click, I won’t budge, like a wind-up toy unwound, my guitar held tightly between my thighs. Last night a clam fell from the stars: a festive, if slippery occasion, a vibrating blob entered our midst--I say “ours” out of some need--I was alone when it hit me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1982 - } - } - }, - "the-cowboy": { - "title": "“The Cowboy”", - "body": "Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the worst sort, and up till now I had not been one of his victims, so I kind of knew my time had come. People parked in front of my house for hours and took pictures. I had to draw all my blinds and only went out when I had to. Then there was a barrage of questions. “What does he look like?” “What do you feed him?” “How did you capture him?” And I simply denied the presence of an extraterrestrial in my house. And, of course, this excited them all the more. The press showed up and started creeping around my yard. It got to be very irritating. More and more came and parked up and down the street. Roger was really working overtime on this one. I had to do something. Finally, I made an announcement. I said, “The little fellow died peacefully in his sleep at 11:02 last night.” “Let us see the body,” they clamored. “He went up in smoke instantly,” I said. “I don’t believe you,” one of them said. “There is no body in the house or I would have buried it myself,” I said. About half of them got in their cars and drove off. The rest of them kept their vigil, but more solemnly now. I went out and bought some groceries. When I came back about an hour later another half of them had gone. When I went into the kitchen I nearly dropped the groceries. There was a nearly transparent fellow with large pink eyes standing about three feet tall. “Why did you tell them I was dead? That was a lie,” he said. “You speak English,” I said. “I listen to the radio. It wasn’t very hard to learn. Also we have television. We get all your channels. I like cowboys, especially John Ford movies. They’re the best,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?” I said. “Take me to meet a real cowboy. That would make me happy,” he said. “I don’t know any real cowboys, but maybe we could find one. But people will go crazy if they see you. We’d have press following us everywhere. It would be the story of the century,” I said. “I can be invisible. It’s not hard for me to do,” he said. “I’ll think about it. Wyoming or Montana would be our best bet, but they’re a long way from here,” I said. “Please, I won’t cause you any trouble,” he said. “It would take some planning,” I said. I put the groceries down and started putting them away. I tried not to think of the cosmic meaning of all this. Instead, I treated him like a smart little kid. “Do you have any sarsaparilla?” he said. “No, but I have some orange juice. It’s good for you,” I said. He drank it and made a face. “I’m going to get the maps out,” I said. “We’ll see how we could get there.” When I came back he was dancing on the kitchen table, a sort of ballet, but very sad. “I have the maps,” I said. “We won’t need them. I just received word. I’m going to die tonight. It’s really a joyous occasion, and I hope you’ll help me celebrate by watching The Magnificent Seven,” he said. I stood there with the maps in my hand. I felt an unbearable sadness come over me. “Why must you die?” I said. “Father decides these things. It is probably my reward for coming here safely and meeting you,” he said. “But I was going to take you to meet a real cowboy,” I said. “Let’s pretend you are my cowboy,” he said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cryptozoa": { - "title": "“Cryptozoa”", - "body": "I wish the stone lady would come to me.\nParakeet or no parakeet\nthe night is a vial of lighterfluid.\nAnd I have been good, composing the perishable song\nof my childhood: one dollar, one frond\nmeekly but loyally exploding the oath of circles.\nI have been the best wound a diamond ever knew.\n\nBut what can I do for you? Write an encyclopedia\nto which the least gnat could gain entrance?\nI love you and I do not love you, perambulating utensils,\nstreet names. An old man is giving mirrors\nto a young girl. The meek have inherited the Aypaper.\nThe past is more present than this moment.\nI am drinking at a spring, my skin\nis red and white. A little burning sensation,\na little joy I leave forever.\n\nOh well, I keep singing: I sing the song\nof utensils, and there is one of street names,\nand one of the names of dead pets.\nThe next day I am giving mirrors to a young girl.\nI give free shoes for life to a stone lady.\nShe walks on air, she walks near the earth\nin a region called the cryptosphere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "damaged-stopper-with-marigold": { - "title": "“Damaged Stopper with Marigold”", - "body": "The Woman I love is a forest of enormous whispers and her tongue smooths the petals after rain. Her finger dreams of a garden and it is Spring. A fast car lathers the mist like milk beneath a breast. The puppy sleeps on top of a pink dress drooling and a man said Think about cooking honey delicious sausage beautiful luscious eggs please, essential shadows drunk as diamonds in a sweet storm. I take my cry and sing delicate girl what about this thing. Can I leave the gift with you, swim through peach and fiddle, chant and shine?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1996 - } - } - }, - "days-of-pie-and-coffee": { - "title": "“Days of Pie and Coffee”", - "body": "A motorist once said to me, and this was in the country, on a county lane, a motorist slowed his vehicle as I was walking my dear old collie, Sithney, by the side of the road, and the motorist came to a halt mildly alarming both Sithney and myself, not yet accustomed to automobiles, and this particular motorist sent a little spasm of fright up our spines, which in turn panicked the driver a bit and it seemed as if we were off to a bad start, and that’s when Sithney began to bark and the man could not be heard, that is, if he was speaking or trying to speak because I was commanding Sithnewy to be silent, though, indeed I was sympathetic to his emotional excitement. It was, as I recall, a day of prodigious beauty. April 21, 1932--clouds like the inside of your head explained. Bluebirds, too numerous to mention. The clover calling you by name. And fields oozing green. And this motorist from nowhere moving his lips like the wings of a butterfly and nothing coming out, and Sithney silent now. He was no longer looking at us, but straight ahead where his election was in doubt. “That’s a fine dog,” he said. “Collies are made in heaven.” Well, if I were a voting man I’d vote for you, I said. “A bedoozling day to be lost in the country, I say. Leastways, I am a misplaced individual.” We introduced ourselves and swapped a few stories. He was a veteran and a salesmen who didn’t believe in his product--I’ve forgotten what it was--hair restorer, parrot feed--and he enjoyed nothing more then a a day spent meandering the back roads in his jalopy. I gave him directions to the Denton farm, but I doubt that he followed them, he didn’t seem to be listening, and it was getting late and Sithney had an idea of his own and I don’t know why I am remembering this now, just that he summed himself up by saying “I’ve missed too many boats” and all these years later I keep thinking that was a man who loved to miss boats, but he didn’t miss them that much.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 21 - } - } - }, - "the-definition-of-gardening": { - "title": "“The Definition of Gardening”", - "body": "Jim just loves to garden, yes he does. He likes nothing better than to put on his little overalls and his straw hat. He says, “Let’s go get those tools, Jim.” But then doubt begins to set in. He says, “What is a garden, anyway?” And thoughts about a “modernistic” garden begin to trouble him, eat away at his resolve. He stands in the driveway a long time. “Horticulture is a groping in the dark into the obscure and unfamiliar, kneeling before a disinterested secret, slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle, birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and destroy, pull out and apply salt, hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots, where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous, the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love, into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating, through the nose, the earsplitting necrology of it, the withering, shriveling, the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris, wireworms are worse than their parents, there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently at me, the me who so loves to garden because it prevents the heaving of the ground and the untimely death of porch furniture, and dark, murky days in a large city and the dream home under a permanent storm is also a factor to keep in mind.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "demigoddess": { - "title": "“Demigoddess”", - "body": "Aunt Myrtle was very old now and lived alone. We hadn’t visited her in years. The elegant mansion on a hill that I remembered from my childhood was now in such shocking disrepair it looked as if it might collapse into a heap of rubble any minute. We opened the gate and it fell right off its hinges. The shudders on the windows were mostly gone, as were more than half the shingles on the roof. Aunt Myrtle herself was a mess, her long stringy hair was filthy, and she walked around in an ancient bathrobe looking like a ghost. “This house needs some work, Aunt Myrtle,” I said. “It’s the raccoons,” she explained. “They’re out to get me, taking the house apart board by board every night.” “But why would they do that?” I asked. told you they want me, they worship me, I’m their goddess, and they won’t stop until I come and live with them. There are hundreds of them “Hundreds? My god …” Naturally I couldn’t sleep that night. I tiptoed around the creaky old house peering out of the windows Then around 2 a.m. I thought I heard something. From the kitchen window I saw Aunt Myrtle crouched in the backyard holding a plate of food in one hand and stroking the back of a standing raccoon with the other. They looked like very good friends, indeed. And one is enough in this world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-disappearing-wife": { - "title": "“The Disappearing Wife”", - "body": "“For the love of God, why don’t you leave me?” I said. “I have no place else to go,” Patty said. “You could go to your mother’s,” I said. “I hate her,” she said. “How about your sister?” “I don’t trust her,” she said. “Your uncle?” “He’s a pervert,” she said. “You don’t like anybody,” I said. “Not anybody in my family,” she said. “How about your friend, Suzanne?” I said. “She’s a snake,” she said. “And Paolo?” I said. “Not over my dead body,” she said. “You’re right, you have no place to go,” I said. “No place,” she said. “Then why don’t you just stay here and be happy,” I said. “I can’t stay here, I hate you,” she said. “No, you don’t, you just think you do,” I said. “I’d rather be dead,” she said. “I’ll help you,” I said. “I told you, I don’t want your help,” she said. “No, I meant I’ll help you be dead,” I said. “A fine husband you are,” she said. “I’m just trying to help,” I said. “You’re trying to kill me,” she said. “I am not. I want to help you find what you want,” I said. “Well, I’m leaving,” she said. “Alright, go ahead and go,” I said. “But I have no place to go,” she said. “It will build your character,” I said. “What will?” she said. “Finding a place when you have no place to go,” I said. “Oh, fuck you, I’m leaving,” she said. I watched her pack and stomp out the door. The house was suddenly quiet. I stared at the door as if she would be back, but she wasn’t. Where would she go? She had no place. I paced the floor. I stared out the window. I felt sick to my stomach. I went to bed. When I woke I was in a forest somewhere. I had never seen anything like it. Vines were hanging from the trees. A fox was staring at me. But when I tried to stand up he ran away. I thought I saw Patty standing in the shadows. I called out to her, but she disappeared.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "double-trouble": { - "title": "“Double Trouble”", - "body": "I sat by myself at a cafe downtown. I had a hamburger and a malt. I had to get back to work in a while, but I had enough time to chat up the waitress. Her name was Irene and she was from the same nearby town as I was. In fact, we had gone to the same high school and had the same English teacher. I liked Irene. She said to me, “Do you ever get home much?” “Oh yeah, about once a month,” I said. “How about you?” “I still live there. I commute, I guess you could say,” she said. “Do you ever see Bobby?” I said. “Oh yeah, I dated him for a while,” she said. “No kidding. Bobby used to be my best friend,” I said. “Is that a fact? We had a vicious falling out, but I really liked him,” she said. “What did you fight over, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said. “Oh, he was seeing another girl. Marianne was her name,” she said. “I used to date Marianne myself,” I said. “It’s a small world,” she said. “Yes, it certainly is,” I said. Then I hurried off to work. I didn’t go back into the cafe for a week, but when I did Irene had some big news for me. My divorced mother was dating her widowed father. We could hardly believe it. It practically made us brother and sister, but not quite. We could date each other if we chose. We looked each other in the eye and then looked away. I couldn’t go back into the cafe for a while after that. It was just too much. I was dating a local girl anyway. But we eventually broke up, over nothing really, I never did understand it. She said she wanted more freedom, so I let her go. When I went back to the cafe Irene wasn’t there. She had quit the previous week and no one knew why. I asked about her around town, but no one knew anything. Finally I called my mother and asked her to ask her father if he could help me locate her. She called me back the next day and said he didn’t know where she was, but if I heard anything to please call him. I became obsessed with her and her whereabouts. I quit my job and looked for her full-time. I had some savings which allowed me to do so. I had a tip that she might be on St Thomas. So I bought a ticket and went there. After searching the island thoroughly I gave up and flew back. That’s when I discovered her living in my attic. She said she was sorry, but she just wanted to be closer to me and didn’t know how to tell me. I asked her to come down and live with me in my space. She said she couldn’t now that our parents were married. It would be too much like incest. “I didn’t know our parents were married,” I said. “They didn’t want anybody to know,” she said. “Why?” I said. “In case we got married,” she said. “Why?” I said. “It would be too much like incest,” she said. “Oh,” I said, not knowing what she meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dream-on": { - "title": "“Dream On”", - "body": "Some people go their whole lives without ever writing a single poem. Extraordinary people who don’t hesitate to cut somebody’s heart or skull open. They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease. and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing. These same people stroll into a church as if that were a natural part of life. Investing money is second nature to them. They contribute to political campaigns that have absolutely no poetry in them and promise none for the future. They sit around the dinner table at night and pretend as though nothing is missing. Their children get caught shoplifting at the mall and no one admits that it is poetry they are missing. The family dog howls all night, lonely and starving for more poetry in his life. Why is it so difficult for them to see that, without poetry, their lives are effluvial. Sure, they have their banquets, their celebrations, croquet, fox hunts, their sea shores and sunsets, their cocktails on the balcony, dog races, and all that kissing and hugging, and don’t forget the good deeds, the charity work, nursing the baby squirrels all through the night, filling the birdfeeders all winter, helping the stranger change her tire. Still, there’s that disagreeable exhalation from decaying matter, subtle but everpresent. They walk around erect like champions. They are smooth-spoken and witty. When alone, rare occasion, they stare into the mirror for hours, bewildered. There was something they meant to say, but didn’t: “And if we put the statue of the rhinoceros next to the tweezers, and walk around the room three times, learn to yodel, shave our heads, call our ancestors back from the dead--” poetrywise it’s still a bust, bankrupt. You haven’t scribbled a syllable of it. You’re a nowhere man misfiring the very essence of your life, flustering nothing from nothing and back again. The hereafter may not last all that long. Radiant childhood sweetheart, secret code of everlasting joy and sorrow, fanciful pen strokes beneath the eyelids: all day, all night meditation, knot of hope, kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life seeking, through poetry, a benediction or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal, explore, to imbue meaning on the day’s extravagant labor. And yet it’s cruel to expect too much. It’s a rare species of bird that refuses to be categorized. Its song is barely audible. It is like a dragonfly in a dream--here, then there, then here again, low-flying amber-wing darting upward then out of sight. And the dream has a pain in its heart the wonders of which are manifold, or so the story is told.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "editor": { - "title": "“Editor”", - "body": "It was a foggy day anyway, and my cockatoo was scorched, and my bikini was moping in the ruins, so I started reading a journal some poky guy had written and dropped on my doorstep disguised in a baboon uniform. The rhythms were all crooked, and he seemed to live at the margins, outcast even by himself, snatching limps from the vast gaps and presuming to slip through checkpoints with official documents stuffed in his bloodshot eyeballs, when, in fact, the hatcheck girl’s own torpor beheld the preposterous sloth with pinched nostrils. He claims he was born with thirteen digits. Years later he pirated a schooner and sailed it over a waterfall. He was in London during the blitz. He lived on crayfish alone in a swamp for seven years. Then he procured white women for a famous eastern emperor. He was implicated in an assassination plot and has been working at a school crossing since. He feels the time has come to tell his story. I feel some old shrapnel crawling around in my head. I want fresh bandages. I want to shoot out his stoplight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-escapade": { - "title": "“The Escapade”", - "body": "When Patsy came home from work, I told her the bad news. “I resigned from my job today,” I said. “What?” she said. “Grant Jennings told me the report I had been working on for the past five weeks, day and night, as you’ll recall, was absolutely useless. He said all the figures appear to have been made up out of thin air. He called me all kinds of foul names, and I had no choice but to tender my resignation.” Patsy took off her coat and walked around the room scratching her head. “Can you sue the bastard?” she said. “Well some of the figures might have been off a little,” I said. “How could that be? You know that business inside and out,” she said. “I’ve put quite a bit of money aside, you know. We could go someplace,” I said. “But I’ve got my job. We have the house and our friends,” she said. “I’ve got over thirty million dollars,” I said. “Thirty million. You must be crazy,” she said. She went into the kitchen, and started nervously making herself a cup of tea. Maybe telling her was a mistake. I thought she would be happy for us. But Patsy’s such a straight-arrow. “We could go someplace really nice,” I said, “and never work again. Come on, we’ve both worked hard all of our lives. We deserve a break.” “They’ll catch us wherever we go. And then what? We’ll spend the rest of our lives in prison. Is that what you want?” she said. “It’s just loose change. I was in charge of the books. They’ll never figure it out,” I said. Patsy was thinking. She looked very distraught. “If you turned yourself and with all of the money, you could plea bargain,” she said. “It might not be too bad,” she said. “No way in hell am I going to do anything like that. I feel the company owes it to me, and I’m going to enjoy it,” I said. Patsy look like she was going to cry. “I really liked our lives as they were, both of us working, and our weekends together,” she said. “It had to end. It was too good,” I said. We sat there in silence, mourning the end of an era. Finally, I said, “It’s all a lie, Patsy. I was just testing you, to see which way you to go if it came to that. And, now, I can see that you’d leave me, maybe even turn me in. And all along I thought you loved me, that you’d stick with me through anything. Well, I still have my job, and I certainly don’t have thirty million. But I have to wonder about your loyalty,” I said. Her eyes were popping out of her skull. “Frank, you’re crazy. You’re sick. How could you put me through this?” she said. Then she started laughing really wildly. I was frightened and didn’t know what to say. “My god, you’re a funny man. And that’s why I’d go with you anywhere,” she said, still shaking her head like a crazy person. I didn’t even have a plan. I looked around the room for anything to hold on to.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fathers-day": { - "title": "“Father’s Day”", - "body": "My daughter has lived overseas for a number of years now. She married into royalty, and they won’t let her communicate with any of her family or friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband, the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming. Fierce guard dogs won’t let her out of their sight. I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters to the State Department. They have written back saying that they are aware of the situation. I never saw her dance. I was always at some convention. I never saw her sing. I was always working late. I called her My Princess, to make up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me. Birdseed was her middle name.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2007 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "fathers_day" - } - } - }, - "fuck-the-astronauts": { - "title": "“Fuck the Astronauts”", - "body": "# I.\n\nEventually we must combine nightmares\nan angel smoking a cigarette on the steps\nof the last national bank, said to me.\nI put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that\ncheap talk I’ve got my own problems.\nIt was sad, exciting, and horrible.\nIt was exciting, horrible, and sad.\nIt was horrible, sad, and exciting.\nIt was inviting, mad, and deplorable.\nIt was adorable, glad, and enticing.\nEventually we must smoke a thumb\ncheap talk I’ve got my own angel\non the steps of the problems the bank\nsaid to me I don’t need that.\nI will take this one window\nwith its sooty maps and scratches\nso that my dreams will remember\none another and so that my eyes will not\nbecome blinded by the new world.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe flames don’t dance or slither.\nThey have painted the room green.\nBeautiful and naked, the wives\nare sleeping before the fire.\nNow it is out. The men have\nreturned to the shacks,\nslaved creatures from the forest\nfloor across their white\nstationwagons. That just about\ndoes it, says the other,\ndumping her bucket\nover her head. Well, I guess\nwe got everything, says one,\nfeeling around in the mud,\nas if for a child.\nNow they remember they want\nthat mud, who can’t remember\nwhat they got up for.\nThey parcel it out: when\nthey are drunk enough\nthey go into town with\na bucket of mud, saying\nwe can slice it up into\nwindmills like a bloated cow.\nLater, they paint the insides\nof the shack black,\nand sit sucking eggs all night,\nthey want something real, useful,\nbut there isn’t anything.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI will engineer the sunrise\nthey have disassembled our shadows\nour echoes are erased from the walls\nyour nipples are the skeletons of olives\nyour nipples are an oriental delight\nyour nipples blow away like cigarette papers\nyour nipples are the mouths of mutes\nso I am not here any longer\nskein of lightning\nmemory’s dark ink in your last smile\nwhere the stars have swallowed their train schedule\nwhere the stars have drowned in their dark petticoats\nlike a sock of hamburger\nreceiving the lightning\ninto his clitoris\nred on red the prisoner\nconfesses his waltz\nthrough the corkscrew lightning\nnevermind the lightning\nin your teeth let’s waltz\nI am the hashish pinball machine\nthat rapes a piano.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "a-good-date": { - "title": "“A Good Date”", - "body": "I dreamed I was on a faraway planet, and when I woke up I was in my neighbor’s bed. I said, “Excuse me, I don’t really know how I got here, I was dreaming and when I woke up I was here.” She said, “I don’t understand it. I was alone when I went to bed. All the doors were locked, I’m sure of it.” “I’m sorry. I’ll leave now. It won’t happen again, I promise you.” “Well, as long as you’re here, let me make you some breakfast,” she said. “Oh, I don’t want to cause you any trouble,” I said. “It’s no trouble, I promise you,” she said, and went into the bathroom to get dressed. She came out in a long black gown covered with silver stars. She wore a tiara on her head that sparkled with what looked like diamonds. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “It won’t take long.” We chatted a bit while she busied herself in the kitchen. Then she pulled out a pan from the oven and said, “This should be good.” It was a moose shank covered in green noodles, for breakfast, no less. We sat there gnawing on the shanks like wild beasts in the forest. My stomach nearly turned over. But she, Matilda, couldn’t get enough of it. She gnawed and gnawed until her dress was covered with its juices. “Aren’t you hungry?” she said to me. “Not really,” I said, and put my shank down on the plate. “Would you care to arm wrestle?” she said. “Not today,” I said. “How about some ping pong?” she said. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Well, what would you like to do?” she said. “I think I had better go home,” I said. “I feel hurt, rejected. You don’t like me, do you?” she said. “Oh no, it’s not that. I just have things to do at home,” I said. “What could you possibly have to do that’s more important than having fun with me?” she said. “Well, I have to mow the lawn and fix the roof, those are two things,” I said. “Can’t they wait until tomorrow?” she said. “I have to go to work tomorrow,” I said. “What if I put handcuffs on you?” she said. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?” I said. “I would.” I moved toward the door. She pulled a lasso from under the table and tossed it over my head. She pulled it tight and I fell over. Then she pulled handcuffs from under her dress and put them around my wrists. “You’ll stay, won’t you?” she said. “My God, you’re quick with those things,” I said. “A good date’s hard to find these days,” she said. Then she smothered me with kisses all over.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "goodtime-jesus": { - "title": "“Goodtime Jesus”", - "body": "Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-government-lake": { - "title": "“The Government Lake”", - "body": "The way to the toy store was blocked by a fallen tree in the road. There was a policeman directing traffic down a side street. I asked him, “What happened?” He said, “Lightning in the night.” I took the turn and drove down the street looking for a way to turn back. Other streets were blocked by fallen trees, and I couldn’t find a way back to the toy store. I kept driving and soon I was on the outskirts of town. I got on a highway and drove, soon forgetting the toy store and what I was supposed to get there. I drove on as if I was hypnotized, not noticing the signs for turnoffs. I must have driven a couple of hours before I woke up, then I took the next exit and had no idea where I was. I drove down a straight tree-lined lane with farm houses on either side. There was a lake at the end of the lane. I pulled over and parked. I got out and started walking. There were several docks along the shore. I walked out on one and watched the ducks swimming and diving. There was something bobbing in the middle of the lake. I stared at it for a long time before I realized it was a man’s head. Then, a moment later, it was a coconut. No, it was an old tire floating right side up. I gave up and started following the ducks. They would suddenly fly up and circle the lake and come down and splash land again. It was quite entertaining. A man walked up behind me and said, “This government lake is off-limits to the public. You’ll have to leave.” I said, “I didn’t know it was a government lake. Why should it be off-limits?” He said, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to leave.” “I don’t even know where I am,” I said. “You’ll still have to leave,” he said. “What about that man out there?” I said, pointing to the tire. “He’s dead,” he said. “No, he’s not. I just saw him move his arm,” I said. He removed his pistol from his holster and fired a shot. “Now he’s dead,” he said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "half-eaten": { - "title": "“Half-Eaten”", - "body": "The fortune-teller told me I was going to come into a large sum of money soon. She told me my love life would continue to be happy and satisfying. She said my health would be vigorous. But then she looked worried. She said there was some kind of large cat in my near future--a cougar. And that cat would surprise me when I least expected it. And that, of course, cancelled out all the previous good news. I paid her and left her dirty, little storefront. I looked up and down the street, checked out the rooftops. Once home, I kissed Jo, and headed for my study where I looked up Cougar. Six to eight feet in length, 160 lbs., can drag five times their weight, can leap twenty feet in one bound, jump from sixty feet above the ground. I debated telling Jo. I knew she would ridicule me. Then I went back in the kitchen and told her. She stared at me in disgust, incapable of even finding words at first. Then she said, “You went to a fortune-teller? And you believe this outrageous crap about a cougar? And all these years I thought I was married to a sensible man. What happened to you, Ralph? Are you on drugs? Have you been drinking?” “Weirder things have happened,” I said. “Last week a man exploded in Chicago, spontaneous combustion, walking down the street. There were witnesses. It was in the paper. There used to be cougars in these parts, only they called them catamounts or mountain lions. There could be one left, has a thing for me.” “You’re not serious, are you, because, if you are, I’m moving out until your bloody destiny has reached its climax, she said. It’s strange how alone I felt just then. I thought, it’s just me and the cat, now.” I said, “Gee whiz, Jo, can’t you take a little joke. You know I would never go to a fortune-teller.” “Still,” she said, “I can fell it, you’re a marked man.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2002 - } - } - }, - "happy-as-the-day-is-long": { - "title": "“Happy as the Day is Long”", - "body": "I take the long walk up the staircase to my secret room. Today’s big news: they found Amelia Earhart’s shoe, size 9. 1992: Charlie Christian is bebopping at Minton’s in 1941. Today, the Presidential primaries have failed us once again. We’ll look for our excitement elsewhere, in the last snow that is falling, in tomorrow’s Gospel Concert in Springfield. It’s a good day to be a cat and just sleep. Or to read the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Jesus called the sons of Zebedee the Sons of Thunder. In my secret room, plans are hatched: we’ll explore the Smoky Mountains. Then we’ll walk along a beach: Hallelujah! (A letter was just delivered by Overnight Express--it contained nothing of importance, I slept through it.) (I guess I’m trying to be “above the fray.”) The Russians, I know, have developed a language called “Lincos” designed for communicating with the inhabitants of other worlds. That’s been a waste of time, not even a postcard. But then again, there are tree-climbing fish, called anabases. They climb the trees out of stupidity, or so it is said. Who am I to judge? I want to break out of here. A bee is not strong in geometry: it cannot tell a square from a triangle or a circle. The locker room of my skull is full of panting egrets. I’m saying that strictly for effect. In time I will heal, I know this, or I believe this. The contents and furnishings of my secret room will be labeled and organized so thoroughly it will be a little frightening. What I thought was infinite will turn out to be just a couple of odds and ends, a tiny miscellany, miniature stuff, fragments of novelties, of no great moment. But it will also be enough, maybe even more than enough, to suggest an immense ritual and tradition. And this makes me very happy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "haunted-aquarium": { - "title": "“Haunted Aquarium”", - "body": "A white pigeon is digging for something in the snow.\nAs it digs further, it is disappearing.\nA young girl finds it in the Spring,\na handkerchief of thin bones,\nor a powder-puff she carries in her purse\nfor the rest of her days. Toward the end,\nshe gives it to her granddaughter,\nwho immediately recognizes it as the death\nof the grandmother herself,\nand flings it out the window.\nIt takes flight, utterly thankful\nto feel like its old self again.\nFor a few precious moments it flies\nin circles, then back in the window.\nThe grandmother pitches forward, dead.\nThe granddaughter lugs her toward the window:\n_Adieu! Godspeed!_\n\nShe and the pigeon talk long into the night.\n\nAt breakfast, the grandmother says nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "head-of-a-white-woman-winking": { - "title": "“Head of a White Woman Winking”", - "body": "She has one good bumblebee which she leads about town on a leash of clover. It’s as big as a Saint Bernard but also extremely fragile. People want to pet its long, shaggy coat. These would be mostly whirling dervishes out shopping for accessories. When Lily winks they understand everything, right down to the particle of a butterfly’s wing lodged in her last good eye, so the situation is avoided, the potential for a cataclysm is narrowly averted, and the bumblebee lugs its little bundle of shaved nerves forward, on a mission from some sick, young godhead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "heaven": { - "title": "“Heaven”", - "body": "I was playing with Peapod, when I suddenly grabbed my head and fell to the floor. The cat came over and sniffed me, but soon got bored and walked away. I squirmed and tossed and finally lay still. I reached up to my head and felt something clinging to my skull. I pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t come off. Finally, I was able to pinch it off. It was a beetle of some sort, huge and ugly. I got up and threw it in the trash, but only after I was certain it was dead. I felt dizzy and couldn’t walk straight for a minute. I sat down at the kitchen table and soon felt better. I reached for my insect book and looked it up. It was a Yellow Bellied Sawbuck from Brazil. It said it can kill you if attached to the skin for 24 hours. I had no idea how long this one had been attached. I certainly hoped it had been less than 24 hours, but how would I know. I had been to a concert of Brazilian music a few days ago, and I supposed I had picked it up there. I poured myself a glass of milk. Peapod came over and I scratched his head. He rubbed himself against my leg. I tried to stand, but felt wobbly. Then I took a couple of steps and felt better. I made it to the bathroom and relieved myself. On the way back I felt faint and propped myself against the wall. I sat down on the floor and held my head. My head was spinning. I thought I was going to faint. I sat like that for twenty minutes or more. Then I tried standing and I was okay. Peapod wanted to play and I tossed the ball for him. I sat down at the kitchen table again. I reached for the phone and fell over dead, or at least I thought I was dead. I must have lay like that for an hour or so. Then Peapod came over and jumped on the table and bit me on the nose. I wriggled around and opened my eyes. So this is heaven, I thought. It’s just my home, though I think I like it better.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "honey-can-you-hear-me": { - "title": "“Honey, Can You Hear Me”", - "body": "Alison stared into the mirror and combed her hair. How beautiful she was! “I look awful,” she said. I bent down and tied my shoe and hit my head on the coffee table on the way up. “Ouch,” I said. “What did you say, honey?” she said. “I said we ought to buy a new couch,” I said. “I thought we just bought one,” she said. “We could buy another one so we’d have a backup in case anything happens to this one,” I said. She didn’t answer me, but continued to brush her hair. I stared down at my shoes and said, “Something is so wrong there.” “What did you say, honey?” she said. I said, “It will be wonderful to be there tonight.” “Where’s that, honey?” she said. “Wherever it is that we’re going,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “I meant here. It will be wonderful to be here tonight,” I said. “A little romantic night at home,” she said. What did she mean by ‘nomadic’? A little nomadic night at home. There were times when I worried about Alison. She hovered right on the borderline, about to cross over into her own private realm, where nothing she sees or hears corresponds to anything in the known world. I live with this fear daily. My shoes are on the wrong feet, or so it seems to me now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2008 - } - } - }, - "how-was-your-day": { - "title": "“How Was Your Day?”", - "body": "After a morning of miniature golf, everything everything seemed smaller. The cardplayers at the club?tiny. And what I wanted most was grandeur! So I checked into the Grand Hotel. Things were beginning to turn around. On an outing, I clambered up the tomb of some monstrous dictator?feeling really excellent now. I had tea with several obese bluestockings, a beer with an encyclopedist who himself resembled a mosque. Some days nothing arrives in its proper package, and I hate that. There are the flattened bodies, the diaphanous tabloids, the speckled sauces. All I can do is clutch the phone in my Thinkery, popping seedless grapes? poor seeds? and in an almost devotional or neutral voice I ask room service for an eagle sandwich? I am suddenly suffocating?cancel that? make that a knuckle sandwich, chopped lips? oh, hell?please connect me with the horticulture consultant standing this minute beneath the pyramids. I’m checking out, I’m going home to my little bungalow? actually, it’s the perfect size. I’m going to kneel down on the veranda and toss kisses at the setting sun. On the horizon, a pregnant woman blots out the sun. It’s okay, I tell myself, since she herself is crimson. Chopped hps, nodding off in a life of perpetual learning. Tranquility weaves its dim web around my imperfect rags.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "how-the-people-live": { - "title": "“How the People Live”", - "body": "Every five minutes or so, a police car drove by telling us not to go out through its bullhorn. I said to Amelia, “I’m dying to know what’s out there.” She said, “That’s why they’re doing this, don’t you think?” “It looks like it’s a beautiful day outside. I don’t see any evil lurking out there. Everything’s in bloom, blue skies, lovely, white clouds,” I said. “That’s when they attack,” she said. “Who?” I said. “How the hell should I know?” she said. “Some kind of phantoms, known only to the police, seen only by the police.” “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why should I believe them? Now, if they’d tell us that there was a mountain lion loose in the neighborhood, that would be something I could understand and respect,” I said. “I’m going to walk to town.” Amelia didn’t try to stop me. “I’ll expect you home by dinner” was all she said. Every time I heard a police car coming, I hid behind a tree or a bush. No one else was out driving or walking or working in their yards. It made me sad to think I lived in a town with a bunch of cowards. The birds were singing, though, and this got me to whistling a happy tune. The ducking and hiding got to be a game I didn’t mind. I assumed I would be punished if caught, but the police weren’t monsters. They weren’t going to cut off my little finger or anything like that. They weren’t going to blind me. They were just afraid of things I couldn’t see. I was crossing the bridge over the little creek when I heard another squad car coming. There was no place to hide, so I instinctively jumped over the rail into the water. The water’s not very deep, and I twisted my ankle on some rocks. I crouched in the cold water until the car had passed. My ankle hurt like hell. I curled up on the bank of the creek under the bridge and felt like crying. I could hear another squad car coming, blaring its fearful message. I was afraid of what I might do next. I tried to wash the mud from my face. I dragged myself from under the bridge and looked up and down the road. I pulled myself up the embankment, trying not to think about the shooting pain. Suddenly the street looked like a place where anything might happen, and I had the power to make it happen. I started to panic, but I didn’t know which way to run. I felt like an escaped prisoner with no memory of home and only a murderous instinct to survive. They were closing in on me. I could hear the dogs. I dove under a spirea bush in somebody’s front lawn. “It’s all clear now. You can come out,” the car said. A few moments later, the owner of the house opened his front door to let his dog out. The dog came straight over to me and started sniffing. The owner walked over and looked at me. “What the hell are you doing there?” he said. “The phantom bit me on the ankle,” I said. “It’s nothing. I’ll be all right.” “What’d it look like?” he said. “That’s the thing about a phantom; you can’t see it. It doesn’t look like anything. You’re walking along. It’s a beautiful day, then, bam! it’s got you,” I said. “You didn’t listen to the police, did you?” he said. “How do you know it hasn’t already got them?” I said. He stared at me. “You’re on my property, you know?” he said. “I’ll be leaving,” I said. “Beautiful day,” he said. “You couldn’t ask for a better one,” I said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "the-humming": { - "title": "“The Humming”", - "body": "I had rented a little cabin on the lake. It was peaceful and beautiful there, but there was very little to do, which suited me fine. Moose came in the early morning to bathe and drink and at night skunks rooted around for garbage. Mostly I sat on the porch and read, though occasionally I would take out a canoe and paddle around the lake. One day when I was doing this I thought I spotted a dead man on the bottom of the lake. When I got back to the cabin I called the sheriff. He came over immediately and paddled out with me. He looked over the sides and said it was just my reflection in the water. I said, “Are you sure?” He looked again and said he was. I was terribly embarrassed. We rowed back to the shore and I offered him some hot chocolate. He thanked me but said he had better get back to the station. I sat on the porch and read the rest of the afternoon. That evening I built a fire in the fireplace and, just as I was about to fall asleep, I heard someone yelling outside. I jumped up and ran to the door. The yelling seemed to be coming from the middle of the lake. I ran outside. Now it was more like a deep humming, and I didn’t know where it was coming from. Actually, it was rather pleasant. I stood there for a few moments just listening to it. It made me want to dance. Maybe it was the fish that were humming. That’s quite a thought. I left the cabin and started walking around the lake, but the sound wasn’t coming from there. It was coming from the forest. I started to walk in there, but it was night, I couldn’t go far. I took a few tentative steps at first, then my eyes started to adjust, and I took a few more. I heard every sort of sound: barks, wheezes, snorts, growls. But beneath it all there was still the humming. I wanted to find its source, so I kept walking. I was deep in the forest when I realized I had forgotten to mark my way. I’d find my way back somehow. I spotted a toad. I thought the humming was coming from him. I picked him up and put him next to my ear. His tongue darted out. I felt it deep within my ear. The humming stopped. He’d caught a fly. I dropped the toad and turned around. Faced with complete blackness, I dropped to the ground and fell asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-a-finn": { - "title": "“I Am a Finn”", - "body": "I am standing in the post office, about to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family. I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop). Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language. He knew Luther and translated the New Testament. When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger no one suspects that I am a Finn. I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid to show their quivery emotions, secure in the knowledge that my grandparents really did emigrate from Finland in 1910--why is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia? Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s one hundredth birthday, though he is not Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten and fox. There are about 35,000 elk. But I should be studying for my exam. I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight, assuming I pass. Finnish Literature really came alive in the 1860s. Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no one cares that I am a Finn. They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää, winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a Finn, this infuriates me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1990 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april", - "day": 16 - } - } - }, - "i-dont-know-about-the-cold": { - "title": "“I don’t know about the cold …”", - "body": "I don’t know about the cold. I am sad without hands. I can’t speak for the wind which chips away at me. When pulling a potato, I see only the blue haze. When riding an escalator, I expect something orthopedic to happen Sinking in quicksand, I’m a wild Appaloosa. I fly into a rage at the sight of a double-decker bus, I want to eat my way through the Congo, I’m a double-agent who tortures himself and still will not speak. I don’t know about the cold, But I know what I like. I like a tropical madness, I like to shake the coconuts and fingerprint the pythons fevers which make the children dance. I am sad without hands, I’m very sad without sleeves or pockets. Winter is coming to this city, I can’t speak for the wind which chips away at me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "i-sat-at-my-desk": { - "title": "“I sat at my desk …”", - "body": "I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island. No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm wrestling champion in Portland, Maine. False. I caught the largest boa constrictor in Southern Brazil. In my dreams. I built the largest house out of matchsticks in all the United States. Wow! I caught a wolf by its tail. Yumee. I married the Princess of Monaco. Can you believe it? I fell off of Mount Everest. Ouch! I walked back up again. It was tiring. Snore. I set a record for sitting in my chair and snoring longer than anybody. Awake! I set a record for swimming from one end of my bath to the other in No Count, Nebraska. Blurb. I read a book written by a dove. Great! I slept in my chair all day and all night for thirty days. Whew! I ate a cheeseburger every day for a year. I never want to do that again. A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. That’s how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the street and said he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like me and had the same name. What are the chances?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ice-cream-man": { - "title": "“The Ice Cream Man”", - "body": "I answered the ad in the paper. I had been unemployed for nine months and was desperate. At the interview, the man said, “Do you have much experience climbing tall mountains?” “Absolutely. I climb them all the time. If I see a tall mountain, I have to climb it immediately,” I said. “What about swimming long distances in rough ocean waters, perhaps in a storm?” he said. “I’m like a fish, you can’t stop me. I just keep going in all kinds of weather,” I said. “Could you fly a glider at night and land in a wheat field, possibly under enemy fire?” he said. “Nothing could come more naturally to me,” I said. “How are you with explosives? Would a large building, say, twenty stories high present you with much difficulty?” he said. “Certainly not. I pride myself on a certain expertise,” I said. “And I take it you are fully acquainted with the latest in rocket launchers and landmines?” he said. “I even own a few myself for personal use. They’re definitely no problem for me,” I said. “Now, Mr. Strafford, or may I call you Stephen, what you’ll be doing is driving one of our ice cream trucks, selling ice cream to all the little kids in the neighborhood, but sometimes things get tricky and we like all our drivers to be well-trained and well-equipped to face any eventuality, you know, some fathers can get quite irate if you are out of their kid’s favorite flavor or if the kid drops the cone,” he said. “I understand, I won’t hesitate to take appropriate action,” I said. “And there are certain neighborhoods where you’re under advisement to expect the worst, sneak attacks, gang tactics, bodies dropping from trees or rising out of manholes, blockades, machine gun fire, launched explosives, flamethrowers and that kind of thing. You can still do a little business there if you are on your toes. Do you see what I’m saying?” he said. “No problem. I know those kinds of neighborhoods, but, as you say, kids still want their ice cream and I won’t let them down,” I said. “Good, Stephen, I think you’re going to like this job. It’s exciting and challenging. We’ve, of course, lost a few drivers over the years, but mostly it was because they weren’t paying attention. It’s what I call the Santa Claus complex. They thought they were there just to make the kids happy. But there’s a lot more to it than that. One of our best drivers had to level half the city once. Of course, that was an extreme case, but he did what needed to be done. We’ll count on you to be able to make that kind of decision. You’ll have to have all your weapons loaded and ready to go in a moment’s notice. You’ll have your escape plans with you at all times,” he said. “Yes, sir, I’ll be ready at all times,” I said. “And, as you know, some of the ice cream is lethal, so that will require a quick judgment call on your part as well. Mistakes will inevitably be made, but try to keep them at a minimum, otherwise the front office becomes flooded with paperwork,” he said. “I can assure you I will use it only when I deem it absolutely necessary,” I said. “Well, Stephen, I look forward to your joining our team. They’re mostly crack professionals, ex--Green Berets and Navy Seals and that kind of thing. At the end of the day you’ve made all those kids happy, but you’ve also thinned out the bad seeds and made our city a safer place to be,” he said. He sat there smiling with immense pride. “How will I know which flavor is lethal?” I said. “Experiment,” he said. I looked stunned, then we both started laughing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-new-york": { - "title": "“In New York”", - "body": "The cosmopolis leans up against the light\nand tries to start a conversation\nwhere one is terribly serious\nand the other is a gigantic raging oscilloscope\nhearing nothing and swimming on\nlike you smartiepants.\nI’m parched, my notebooks are parched & so\nwith my eggs, everything is coming up pencils\nand I come home to a chaotic celebration\n\nreally shocked me out of my whirlpool to find\nthe mightly surging tribulet budding with ants\ncounting their blessings after the pillage\nof every living cell on the banks\nnow all is bald, O get on your evil horse, ride down\nloose spheres of blacklight across the border\nI give into my seashells\nthey’re still something to bounce off\nwho are sure they exist\nvery humble and self-assured.\n\nAn old man in the cosmopolis\nmust divorce himself, his home in the far TV\nthe false hope at the end\nit would be proritious to die though\nthe standards O gulp into the gulfing\nthe big Mexico burst upon the solitary stone\nand be glad\nand know what that old person feels like:\nbroken aquariums\nbugging everyone.\n\nAlways aware that we are dying\nat a meaningful pace for a real experience\nthat stab was meant for everyone\nthe fat sages\ndown the ages\ntheir elliptical hearts are an excuse for holidays\nmating stupor and drinking song\nby reason of the effort and its tradition\nof the utterly hopeless\ncelebrating “remote exquisite Beauties.”\n\nYou can purchase something to keep you sane\nsuch as a bigger and bigger slab of the madness\nnavigating uptown like a crumpled fish\nthrough Buddha’s nightgown\nyou sometimes know the secret, if anything,\nnot asking for anyone to take you home\nyou are, for one second,\nthe only one that’s not alone and\nlike Jesus you can’t lift your arm\nto stop a taxi, you tear yourself up\nbecause it feels so damned good.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - } - } - }, - "in-the-rough": { - "title": "“In The Rough”", - "body": "Hovering over me all night was some kind of spirit. I didn’t know who or what it was, but it made me uncomfortable. When I got up in the morning, I felt drained and beaten. I looked around, but there was nothing there. I needed something, but I didn’t know what, a rock, something to bang my head against. I drank a glass of water, then another glass, then another. Then I felt a fly buzzing inside me. I needed to kill it. I stood on my head and managed to spit him out. Then I walked into a wall and fell down. I lay there for a while dreaming I was in a bumper car, banging this way and that. Then I stood up, shaking my head. I walked to the couch and sat down. Everything was clear and bright. I was OK now. I looked out the window. A dark cloud came over. I sat there twiddling my thumbs. I knew I was supposed to do something, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Oh, yes, I was supposed to buy my mother a birthday present today. I tried to think of something. I could buy her a parrot, or a monkey, or a snake. None of them seemed right, because my mother had been dead for ten years, or was it twenty? Oh well, forget about the present. I was supposed to do something else, but what was it? I was supposed to go to work, that’s it! But what was my job? I didn’t know. A carpenter? A plumber? I didn’t think so. I went back to twiddling my thumbs. I was pretty good at it, but nobody was going to pay me. I decided not to worry about it. Maybe I was senile. I knew my name and address. I didn’t think so. I knew my mother’s birthday. I was an out-of-work genius! There was a knock on the door. “Hello Jack.” “Hi Bob.” “Have you got your golf clubs?” “Oh yes, I’ll get them.” And so we played golf and everything was back to normal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "indivisible": { - "title": "“Indivisible”", - "body": "Some genetic prodding in the termite’s nest, accomplished by servants with arrows, led to some dodgy sandwiches in the petshop. I was yelping with a pitchfork at some gummy weathervane. Predatory delicacies were sifting through the cradle. I assigned myself the task of pasting up itineraries for the victims. Once in a motel I put some electrodes on a chimp, I’m sorry about that. I turned newts into astronauts, that was a mistake. Maybe my cousin is a dolphin, I don’t know. There are networks of cells that form sponges on which this galaxy exists. Their urgent criteria woven into the buffeting, if feeble, sensory geometry of woebegone trains, immolating distinct convenience. It’s the maintenance of hierarchies that breaks our backs. I find peace in lava, in plums, in kernels with exact instructions. I am hushed when it comes to an arsenal of viscera, I am piqued when the soggy grasp at me in tubs. I provide, casually; incidentally, I partake. I have sampled some devotions, I have envisioned being perpetually hitched. I have set myself on fire with kerosene. And now I walk among my town’s folk, immune, beseeching.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "interruptions": { - "title": "“Interruptions”", - "body": "I long for some, even\none would be a beginning,\nnot this long flat stretch\nof just me and my improvising\nof waste, of a kind of heroic\nnegligence that life does not\nappreciate. My loved one\nis wobbling--O creme de menthe!\nSee, I am making my own\ninterference, jerked stratagem--\nher overcoat, my cottage.\nWhy are we so bad? I hear them\nfaintly knocking, neutral ducks,\nand I am reprimanded.\nI am thinking “scalloped potatoes”\nare of absolutely no use.\nI’m thumping my canteen\nand pointing at my nose.\nYes, I lied about “her,”\nthere wasn’t one, but for\nthat moment a gourd drifted\ndown the chimney on the pretext\nof weeding a peninsula\nand nourishing the articulation\nof a single bud. Am I forgiven?\nForgotten? This is the constellation\nof my own bewilderment. Please,\nsomeone interrupt me.\nHence, whatever, reverts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "it-happens-like-this": { - "title": "“It Happens Like This”", - "body": "I was outside St. Cecelia’s Rectory smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me. It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish brown here and there. When I started to walk away, it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered what the laws were on this kind of thing. There’s a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People smiled at me and admired the goat. “It’s not my goat,” I explained. “It’s the town’s goat. I’m just taking my turn caring for it.” “I didn’t know we had a goat,” one of them said. “I wonder when my turn is.” “Soon,” I said. “Be patient. Your time is coming.” The goat stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew everything essential about me. We walked on. A policeman on his beat looked us over. “That’s a mighty fine goat you got there,” he said, stopping to admire. “It’s the town’s goat,” I said. “His family goes back three-hundred years with us,” I said, “from the beginning.” The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped and looked up at me. “Mind if I pat him?” he asked. “Touching this goat will change your life,” I said. “It’s your decision.” He thought real hard for a minute, and then stood up and said, “What’s his name?” “He’s called the Prince of Peace,” I said. “God! This town is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there’s mystery and wonder. And I’m just a child playing cops and robbers forever. Please forgive me if I cry.” “We forgive you, Officer,” I said. “And we understand why you, more than anybody, should never touch the Prince.” The goat and I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning to wonder where we would spend the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2002 - } - } - }, - "it-wasnt-me": { - "title": "“It Wasn’t Me”", - "body": "I recall a miser’s\nwhite goose\nsold for naught.\nI, too, have my jewels,\nmy contingency plan\nwinding down\nto the goose-flesh of this world.\nI have my hunter’s reflex,\nmy critical versions.\nGruff parcel, that Turko.\nSoundless macabre, calculating.\nJeannetje smacks Octave across the lips.\n\nI have my digitalis and black mittens,\nmy pasty-faced actresses.\n\nOnce, in a sailor suit, I ate an éclair.\n\nBackstage at the ballet\nI consulted a yellow skull,\na grapefruit really.\nI disfigured somebody’s sandwich.\n\nThe waxworks don’t open until nine.\n\nA stranger’s visiting card\nblows off the bridge.\n\nAt first light I have my stepchild,\nmy white china basin,\ntherapeutic jostling of the toddler.\n\nSuspicions are almost confirmed.\nDenials are swiftly circulating.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1981 - } - } - }, - "jims-all-night-diner": { - "title": "“Jim’s All-Night Diner”", - "body": "Solemnity around the samovar\nwarms the old interlopers:\n\ngrief is momentarily rinsed\naway. They wait as if for\na certain invitation.\n\nThe voices outside are\na panoply of scorn.\n\nThese yellow thumbs haul up\nthe hot liquid, but when\nthe cup’s drunk it is more\n\nlike an orphanage.\nThe dead letter department,\nthe salvation army,\n\nthe animal rescue league--\nthese are the only destinations.\nOne desires to touch\n\ntheir lowly shoulders\nwith a plastic spoon\n\nand change them into green rabbits\non a white Alpine mountain,\ntheir gauzy faces exhilarated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "the-kiss": { - "title": "“The Kiss”", - "body": "Barbara didn’t remember who I was, so I told her and said, “Maybe we can get together sometime.” And she said, “Why? I still don’t know you.” And I said, “But I told you. We went out together in high school once. I kissed you. You don’t remember that?” “No, I don’t. I have no memory of that at all,” she said. “It was quite a beautiful kiss as I remember it, but it’s gone, or at least one half of it is gone,” I said. “Good-bye, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said. She picked up her purse and left. I sat there thinking things over. I didn’t really know her any longer. She was a different person. I got up to leave. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and it was Barbara. “I remember you, you were short and had braces,” she said. “I grew quite a bit,” I said. “Yes, you did. And you’re really quite handsome,” she said. “Well, thank you. It’s not something I tried to be,” I said. “How I remembered you I’ll never know. You were just a squirt of a guy,” she said. “Well, it was still me. I was just in a different package,” I said. “That’s one way of putting it. It was quite a different package all right,” she said. “But it was me, I promise you,” I said. “That kiss was the silliest I ever had in my life,” she said. “It was sacred to me,” I said. “We should try again,” she said. “No, that was the only kiss I had for you in this lifetime,” I said. And I walked away swinging my old knapsack on my back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "a-knock-on-the-door": { - "title": "“A Knock on the Door”", - "body": "They ask me if I’ve ever thought about the end of the world, and I say, “Come in, come in, let me give you some lunch, for God’s sake.” After a few bites it’s the afterlife they want to talk about. “Ouch,” I say, “did you see that grape leaf skeletonizer?” Then they’re talking about redemption and the chosen few sitting right by His side. “Doing what?” I ask. “Just sitting?” I am surrounded by burned up zombies. “Let’s have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday at the 3 Dog Bakery.” But they want to talk about my soul. I’m getting drowsy and see butterflies everywhere. “Would you gentlemen like to take a nap, I know I would.” They stand and back away from me, out the door, walking toward my neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and they see nothing without end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - } - } - }, - "a-last-hayride": { - "title": "“A Last Hayride”", - "body": "I was driving home late on a winter’s night and when I pulled up to a stop light I saw coming out of a thick fog a large farm wagon being pulled by two horses. In the wagon were about twenty-five elderly persons. Some were slumped forward half- asleep, and others appeared to be singing. I had my window up so I wasn’t sure if anything was actually coming out of their mouths. The horses were straining to pull such a heavy load. They moved slowly as if seriously considering each step. It was quite cold out. No one was behind me so I sat through the next green light and watched the wagon disappear into the fog. The next day I read the local paper from cover to cover. No hayride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2008 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "leaving-mother-waiting-for-father": { - "title": "“Leaving Mother Waiting for Father”", - "body": "The evening went on;\nI got very old.\nShe kept telling me it didn’t matter.\nThe real man would come back\nsoon. We waited. We had alarms\nfixed, vases of white and purple\nflowers ready to thrust\non him should he.\n\nWe had to sell the place\nin a hurry; walked downtown\nholding hands.\nShe had a yard of blue material in her pocket:\nI remember that so well!\nShe fell asleep and a smile\nbegan to blister her old mouth.\nI propped her against an old hotel\nand left without any noise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1968 - } - } - }, - "like-a-saint": { - "title": "“Like a Saint”", - "body": "Should I leap from the balcony and back up again like a great big Saint! If I pulled all these daggers out of my firehead I could breathe like a jet in an exemplory way like a sergeant, like a bean. O Heroes, I’ll always need you from this time on: I’m an old bag with a potato-brain. How will this effect the children, an arm to span the ages with a sperm-bank inbetween. I will unplug the freezer when the suffering is over--grip flung loose of the popsicle--it was not a real party. No, Lord, I masturbated on the desk then crossed the Great Sandy. This is my iron, that your fuzzy. It must come as a big surprise I am appealing to Zanzibar. I will never move to Beacon Hill, dust the cameo with a crowbar. Some kind of rare fungus is taking a bite of our diamond. Does it have any extra-marital rhinoes? Only a few satin diving-units which never refer to the sky, whose lips appear willfully removed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - } - } - }, - "like-a-scarf": { - "title": "“Like a Scarf”", - "body": "The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing, more likely they were the random associations and confused ramblings of a lunatic. We arrived three hours late for lunch and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves, quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due. The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they should receive all the credit that is their due. When I asked one of the doctors for a corkscrew he produced one without a moment’s hesitation. And it was a corkscrew of the finest craftsmanship, very shiny and bright not unlike the doctor himself. “We’ll be conducting our picnic under the great oak beginning in just a few minutes, and if you’d care to join us we’d be most honored. However, I understand you have your obligations and responsibilities, and if you would prefer to simply visit with us from time to time, between patients, our invitation is nothing if not flexible. And, we shan’t be the least slighted or offended in any way if, due to your heavy load, we are altogether deprived of the pleasure of exchanging a few anecdotes, regarding the mentally ill, depraved, diseased, the purely knavish, you in your bughouse, if you’ll pardon my vernacular, O yes, and we in our crackbrain daily rounds, there are so many gone potty everywhere we roam, not to mention in one’s own home, dead moonstruck. Well, well, indeed we would have many notes to compare if you could find the time to join us after your injections.” My invitation was spoken in the evenest tones, but midway though it I began to suspect I was addressing an imposter. I returned the corkscrew in a nonthreatening manner. What, for instance, I asked myself, would a doctor, a doctor of the mind, be doing with a corkscrew in his pocket? This was a very sick man, one might even say dangerous. I began moving away cautiously, never taking my eyes off of him. His right eyelid was twitching guiltily, or at least anxiously, and his smock flapping slightly in the wind. Several members of our party were mingling with the nurses down by the duck pond, and my grip on the situation was loosening, the planks in my picnic platform were rotting. I was thinking about the potato salad in an unstable environment. A weeping spell was about to overtake me. I was very close to howling and gnashing the gladiola. I noticed the great calm of the clouds overhead. And below, several nurses appeared to me in need of nursing. The psychopaths were stirring from their naps, I should say, their postprandial slumbers. They were lumbering through the pines like inordinately sad moose. Who could eat liverwurst at a time like this? But, then again, what’s a picnic without pathos? Lacking a way home, I adjusted the flap in my head and duck-walked down to the pond and into the pond and began gliding around in circles, quacking, quacking like a scarf. Inside the belly of that image I began recycling like a sorry whim, sincerest regrets are always best.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-list-of-famous-hats": { - "title": "“The List of Famous Hats”", - "body": "Napoleon’s hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that’s not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn’t much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn’t even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn’t really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1985 - } - } - }, - "a-little-skull": { - "title": "“A Little Skull”", - "body": "I found a skull on the beach, it was just a little skull, maybe that of a canary. White sand trickled through the sockets. It seemed to smile at me and I tried feeding it some crumbs. Oh well, cookies are for frogs, and maybe this isn’t a skull at all, but an egg or a bulb of some sort. Maybe I will glue some sequins on it and donate it to the local monastery. It would be happy there, supervising the luncheon menu, pounding its forehead through the lilac sermons, patrolling the starched brainwaves in the library. But what if it’s my own long lost ancestor? Shouldn’t I guzzle a toast about now? Raise a kite, or faint in a spiral upward? The whole episode is lamentable, I’m simply rehearsing for another kind of scrutiny, an expedition into the heart of heresy where dowdy, abusive hobgoblins lounge yanking at one another’s hair and snapping newcomers with hot towels. I expect to be incarcerated there for some time. All nectar will taste like insecticide. Privileges, such as holding this bird’s skull in the palm of my hand, will surely be rare. And so, better to forfeit it now, savor forever its twirling arc back into the sea, and circulate among the clustered natives, sniffing for honey, whisking flies from laughing faces.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "the-loon": { - "title": "“The Loon”", - "body": "A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up in another world. I had no idea what was expected of me. I waited for instructions. Someone called and asked me if I wanted a free trip to Florida. I said, “Sure. Can I go today?” A man in a uniform picked me up in a limousine, and the next thing I know I’m being chased by an alligator across a parking lot. A crowd gathers and cheers me on. Of course, none of this really happened. I’m still sleeping. I don’t want to go to work. I want to know what the loon is saying. It sounds like ecstasy tinged with unfathomable terror. One thing is certain: at least they are not speaking of tax shelters. The phone rings. It’s my boss. She says, “Where are you?” I say, “I don’t know. I don’t recognize my surroundings. I think I’ve been kidnapped. If they make demands of you, don’t give in. That’s my professional advice.” Just then, the loon let out a tremendous looping, soaring, swirling, quadruple whoop. “My god, are you alright?” my boss said. “In case we do not meet again, I want you to know that I’ve always loved you, Agnes,” I said. “What?” she said. “What are you saying?” “Good-bye, my darling. Try to remember me as your ever loyal servant,” I said. “Did you say you loved me?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and hung up. I tried to go back to sleep, but the idea of being kidnapped had me quite worked up. I looked in the mirror for signs of torture. Every time the loon cried, I screamed and contorted my face in agony. They were going to cut off my head and place it on a stake. I overheard them talking. They seemed like very reasonable men, even, one might say, likeable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lost-pilot": { - "title": "“The Lost Pilot”", - "body": "Your face did not rot like the others--the co-pilot, for example, I saw him yesterday. His face is cornmush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stareas if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot like the others--it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in theirdistinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsiveorbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now, with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterestedscholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would notturn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god, I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you. My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1966 - } - } - }, - "lost-river": { - "title": "“Lost River”", - "body": "Jill and I had been driving for hours on these little back country roads and we hadn’t seen another car or a store of any kind in all that time. We were trying to get to a village called Lost River and were running out of gas. There was a man there that owns a pterodactyl wing and we heard that he might want to sell it. He was tired of it, we were told. Finally, I see an old pick-up truck coming up behind us and I pull over and get out of the car and wave. The man starts to pass by, but changes his mind and stops. I ask him if he knows how to get to Lost River and he says he’s never heard of it, but can give us directions to the closest town called Last Grocery Store. I thank him and we eventually find Last Grocery Store, which consists of three trailers and a little bitsy grocery store. The owner is old and nearly blind, but he’s glad to meet us and we’re glad to meet him. I ask him if he knows how to get to Lost River from here. He ponders for awhile, and then says, “I don’t see how you could get there, unless you’re walking. There’s no road in them parts. Why would anybody be wanting to go to Lost River, there’s nothing there.” “There’s a man there that’s got a pterodactyl wing he might be willing to sell,” I say. “Hell, I’ll sell you mine. I can’t see it anymore, so I might as well sell it,” he says. Jill and I look at eachother, incredulous. “Well, we’d sure like to see it,” I say. “No problem,” he says, “I keep it right here in back of the store.” He brings it out and it’s beautiful, delicate and it’s real, I’m certain of it. The foot even has its claws on it. We’re speechless and rather terrified of holding it, though he hands it to us trustingly. My whole body feels like it’s vibrating, like I’m a harp of time. I’m sort of embarassed, but finally I ask him how much he wants for it. “Oh, just take it. It always brought me luck, but I’ve had all the luck I need,” he says. Jill gives him a kiss on the cheek and I shake his hand and thank him. Tomorrow: Lost River.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2005 - } - } - }, - "loyalty": { - "title": "“Loyalty”", - "body": "This is the hardest part: when I came back to life I was a good family dog and not too friendly to strangers. I got a thirty-five dollar raise in salary, and through the pea-soup fogs I drove the General, and introduced him at rallies. I had a totalitarian approach and was a massive boost to his popularity. I did my best to reduce the number of people. The local bourgeoisie did not exist. One of them was a mystic and walked right over me as if I were a bed of hot coals. This is par for the course--I will be employing sundry golf metaphors henceforth, because a dog, best friend and chief advisor to the General, should. While dining with the General I said, “Let’s play the back nine in a sacred rage. Let’s tee-off over the foredoomed community and putt ourselves thunderously, touching bottom.” He drank it all in, rugged and dusky. I think I know what he was thinking. He held his automatic to my little head and recited a poem about my many weaknesses, for which I loved him so.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lucinda": { - "title": "“Lucinda”", - "body": "Lucinda said she was going to take a shower. I said, “Do you mind if I watch?” She looked at me as if I were crazy, or some kind of pervert. “We’ve lived together for ten years and I’ve never seen you take a shower,” I added. She scratched her head and looked at her feet. “A shower is kind of a private thing, don’t you think?” she said. “So is making love, but we do it,” I said. She thought that over for a minute. “Well, you’ll be disappointed, a shower is just a shower,” she said. She made me wait outside while she undressed. After the curtain was pulled and the water was running, I was permitted to enter. There were hundreds of native boys chanting in a tongue I couldn’t comprehend, dancing in a circle around her. She soaped her breasts and ignored them. They worshipped her. She continued soaping her breasts. They whooped and cried for joy. More soap for the breasts. I was afraid for my life. Then the soap travelled south.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "lust-for-life": { - "title": "“Lust for Life”", - "body": "Veronica has the best apartment in town. It’s on the third story and has big plate glass windows that look straight down on the town common. She has a bird’s eye view of all the protestors, the fairs, the lovers, people eating lunch on park benches; in general, the life-blood of the town. The more Veronica watched all these little dramas, the less desire she had to actually go out and be one herself. I called her from time to time, but her conversation consisted of her descriptions of what was going on in the common. “Now he’s kissing her and saying good-bye. He’s getting on the bus. The bus is pulling out. Wait a minute, she’s just joined hands with another guy. I can’t believe it! These people are behaving like trash. There’s a real tiny old lady with a walker trying to go into the bookstore, but she keeps stopping and looking over her shoulder. She thinks she’s being followed.” “Veronica,” I say, “I’m dying.” “Two of the richest and nastiest lawyers in town are arguing over by the drinking fountain. They’re actually shouting, I can almost hear them. Oh my god, one of them has shoved the other. It’s incredible, Artie. You should be here,” she says. “War has been declared with England, Veronica. Have you heard that?” I say. “That’s great, Artie,” she says. “Remember the girl who kissed the guy getting on the bus and then immediately took up with the other guy? Well, now she’s flirting with the parking officer and he’s loving it and flirting back with her. He just tore up a ticket he had written for her. I’m really beginning to like this girl after all.” “That’s great Veronica,” I say. “Why don’t you check and see if your little panties are on fire yet,” and I hang up, and I don’t think she even notices. I wonder if I’m supposed to be worried about her. But in the end I don’t. Veronica has the best apartment in town.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2001 - } - } - }, - "making-the-best-of-the-holidays": { - "title": "“Making the Best of the Holidays”", - "body": "Justine called on Christmas day to say she was thinking of killing herself. I said, “We’re in the middle of opening presents, Justine. Could you possibly call back later, that is, if you’re still alive.” She was furious with me and called me all sorts of names which I refuse to dignify by repeating them. I hung up on her and returned to the joyful task of opening presents. Everyone seemed delighted with what they got, and that definitely includes me. I placed a few more logs on the fire, and then the phone rang again. This time it was Hugh and he had just taken all of his pills and washed them down with a quart of gin. “Sleep it off, Hugh,” I said, “I can barely understand you, you’re slurring so badly. Call me tomorrow, Hugh, and Merry Christmas.” The roast in the oven smelled delicious. The kids were playing with their new toys. Loni was giving me a big Christmas kiss when the phone rang again. It was Debbie. “I hate you,” she said. “You’re the most disgusting human being on the planet.” “You’re absolutely right,” I said, “and I’ve always been aware of this. Nonetheless, Merry Christmas, Debbie.” Halfway through dinner the phone rang again, but this time Loni answered it. When she came back to the table she looked pale. “Who was it?” I asked. “It was my mother,” she said. “And what did she say?” I asked. “She said she wasn’t my mother,” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2008 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "man-with-wooden-leg-escapes-prison": { - "title": "“Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison”", - "body": "Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "marcella-in-the-forest": { - "title": "“Marcella in the Forest”", - "body": "Marcella stood naked on the forest floor. I said, “What are you doing naked out here?” She said, “I thought you might like it.” “Well, of course I’ll like it, but somebody might catch us out here,” I said. “You know there’s never anybody out here,” she said. “I know, but there might be,” I said. “You’re just afraid of nature, aren’t you?” she said. “If I am, I didn’t know it,” I said. “Then why don’t you get naked too,” she said. “I could never get naked out here. It just doesn’t feel right,” I said. “Then I’m putting my clothes back on. It doesn’t make any sense for me to be standing naked all by myself,” she said. A hunter walked onto the scene just then. “What’s going on here?” he said. “She’s my wife,” I said. “I just wanted to feel close to nature,” Marcella said. “I almost shot you. I thought you were a deer,” he said. “I don’t look like a deer,” she said. “In the brush and all you do,” he said. “Honey, put your clothes on,” I said. “I forgot where I put them,” she said. “They’re somewhere around here,” I said. The hunter said, “Here they are, right at my feet.” She walked toward the hunter, glancing back at me. The hunter said, “Panties first, then the bra.” She followed his orders. Finally she was completely dressed. She thanked him for his help. He waved his around and said, “Go on, get out of here, before I decide to shoot you.” We started running. Marcella leapt over a lake that I fell in. Then I heard a shot, and another shot.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "the-march": { - "title": "“The March”", - "body": "There were two or three stragglers who couldn’t keep up with the rest. I said to the captain, “What should we do about the stragglers?” He said, “Shoot them. Stragglers are often captured by the enemy and tortured until they reveal our whereabouts. It is best to not leave them behind.” I went back to the stragglers and told them that my orders were to shoot them. They started running to catch up with the rest. Then a sniper was shot out of a tree. “Good work,” said the captain. Then we climbed a mountain. Once we were on top, the captain said, “I’ll give a hundred dollars to anyone who can spot the enemy.” Nobody could. “We’ll spend the night here,” the captain said. I was appointed first lookout. I smoked a cigarette and looked into the forest below through my night-vision glasses. Something moved, but it was hard to tell what it was. There was a lot of movement, but it didn’t seem like men, more like animals. I soon fell asleep. When Juarez tapped me on the shoulder to tell me he would take over, he said, “You were asleep, weren’t you?” I stared at him with pleading eyes. “The captain would have you shot, you know?” I didn’t say anything. The next morning Juarez was missing. “Captain, do you want me to send out a search party?” I said. “No, I always suspected he was with the enemy,” he said. “Today, we will descend the mountain.” “Yes, sir, captain,” I said. The men tumbled and rolled, bounced up against trees and boulders. Some of them broke their arms and noses. I was standing next to the captain at the bottom of the mountain. “Shoot them all!” he ordered. “But, captain, they’re our men,” I said. “No they’re not. My men were well-trained and disciplined. Look at this mess here. They are not my men. Shoot them!” he again ordered. I raised my rifle, then turned and smacked him in the head with the butt of it. Then I knelt and handcuffed him. The soldiers gathered about me and we headed for home. Of course, none of us knew where that was, but we had our dreams and our memories. Or I think we did.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2008 - } - } - }, - "mimi": { - "title": "“Mimi”", - "body": "After the train wreck I found her hat in the top branches of a catalpa tree. It was all feathers, green and pink and blue, and it shivered in my hands like a starveling from Fiji too happy or frightened to remember its way home. Oh, it’s true, she drank too much champagne on all the wrong occasions. She hired a limousine when she could have crawled. Her laughter made me freeze, and when she exposed her breast I was a Naval Cadet about to leave for a losing war. “Something to die for,” she said. And I did, every night, every day. I told her not to take this train, puzzle of hot steel beside the river we never swam. But there was something out there that she needed more than me. So she donned her hat of tragic feathers and vanished from this life. And I am left in the present with a history that could never matter. I know what day it is, what hour, and I see many strangers whose Christmases did not work out, who broke under the pressure. And the frozen hare over there, isn’t he some kind of freedom fighter? Tribulations over rations. A hat that wants to fly to the moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "more-later-less-the-same": { - "title": "“More Later, Less the Same”", - "body": "The common is unusually calm--they captured the storm last night, it’s sleeping in the stockade, relieved of its duty, pacified, tamed, a pussycat. But not before it tied the flagpole in knots, and not before it alarmed the firemen out of their pants. Now it’s really calm, almost too calm, as though anything could happen, and it would be a first. It could be the worst thing that ever happened. All the little rodents are sitting up and counting their nuts. What if nothing ever happened again? Would there be enough to “eke out an existence,” as they say? I wish “they” were here now, kicking up a little dust, mussing my hair, taunting me with weird syllogisms. Instead, these are the windless, halcyon days. The lull dispassion is upon us. Serenity has triumphed in its mindless, atrophied way. A school of Stoics walks by, eager, in its phlegmatic way, to observe human degradation, lust and debauchery at close quarters. They are disappointed, but it barely shows on their faces. They are late Stoa, very late. They missed the bus. They should have been here last night. The joint was jumping. But people change, they grow up, they fly around. It’s the same old story, but I don’t remember it. It’s a tale of gore and glory, but we had to leave. It could have turned out differently, and it did. I feel much the same way about the city of Pompeii. A police officer with a poodle cut squirts his gun at me for saying that, and it’s still just barely possible that I didn’t, and the clock is running out on his sort of behavior. I’m napping in a wigwam as I write this, near Amity Street, which is buried under fifteen feet of ashes and cinders and rocks. Moss and a certain herblike creature are beginning to whisper nearby. I am beside myself, peering down, senselessly, since, for us, in space, there is neither above nor below; and thus the expression “He is being nibbled to death by ducks” shines with such style, such poise, and reserve, a beautiful, puissant form and a lucid thought. To which I reply “It is time we had our teeth examined by a dentist.” So said James the Lesser to James the More.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1992 - } - } - }, - "the-motorcyclists": { - "title": "“The Motorcyclists”", - "body": "My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way, did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other. I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now. Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July, but fireworks any time? There are people like that, you know. They’re like people who like orchestra music, listen to it any time of day. Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them. Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats, shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene, the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first one at the scene of a bad accident. Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas? I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me, did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep. Do you know that I have never understood what they meant by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They should have called it something like “the grudging notch.” But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say? “It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.” You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story, but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much. Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon? I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "my-felisberto": { - "title": "“My Felisberto”", - "body": "My felisberto is handsomer than your mergotroid, although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two. Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails, my felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies. For a night of wit and danger and temptation my felisberto would be the obvious choice. However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired your mergotroid cannot be ignored. Merely to sit near it in the garden and watch the fabrications of the world swirl by, the deep-sea’s bathymetry wash your eyes, not to mention the little fawns of the forest and their flip-floppy gymnastics, ah, for this and so much more your mergotroid is infinitely preferable. But there is a place for darkness and obscurity without which life can sometimes seem too much, too frivolous and too profound simultaneously, and that is when my felisberto is needed, is longed for and loved, and then the sun can rise again. The bee and the hummingbird drink of the world, and your mergotroid elaborates the silent concert that is always and always about to begin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-great-great-etc-uncle-patrick-henry": { - "title": "“My Great Great Etc. Uncle Patrick Henry”", - "body": "There’s a fortune to be made in just about everything in this country, somebody’s father had to invent everything--baby food, tractors, rat poisoning. My family’s obviously done nothing since the beginning of time. They invented poverty and bad taste and getting by and taking it from the boss. O my mother goes around chewing her nails and spitting them in a jar: You shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself she says, think of your family. My family I say what have they ever done but paint by numbers the most absurd and disgusting scenes of plastic squalor and human degradation. Well then think of your great great etc. Uncle Patrick Henry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1971 - } - } - }, - "never-again-the-same": { - "title": "“Never Again the Same”", - "body": "Speaking of sunsets, last night’s was shocking. I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they? Well, this one was terrifying. Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful. It wasn’t natural. One climax followed another and then another until your knees went weak and you couldn’t breathe. The colors were definitely not of this world, peaches dripping opium, pandemonium of tangerines, inferno of irises, Plutonian emeralds, all swirling and churning, swabbing, like it was playing with us, like we were nothing, as if our whole lives were a preparation for this, this for which nothing could have prepared us and for which we could not have been less prepared. The mockery of it all stung us bitterly. And when it was finally over we whimpered and cried and howled. And then the streetlights came on as always and we looked into one another’s eyes--ancient caves with still pools and those little transparent fish who have never seen even one ray of light. And the calm that returned to us was not even our own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1996 - } - } - }, - "the-new-chinese-fiction": { - "title": "“The New Chinese Fiction”", - "body": "Although the depiction of living forms was not explicitly forbidden, the only good news about famines was that the station was empty. It was about 2 A.M. The truck drove away. A tropical insect that lives in enormous cities stroked my hair awkwardly, organizing everyone’s schedule. She drove me back to my hotel in a misty and allusive style, while the old schools continued the process of devolution. Part of the roof was loose and flapped noisily in the wind, who needed work like that? Poor brethren, do you have any good prose yet? The New Chinese fiction is getting better, I suspect, people walking and thinking and fussing, with a nest to fly out of, with a less intimate footing. Are we responsible for their playtimes? Keep up your music, my dears; there were a lot of people like that, with strange eyes, green fields and orchards. The little house they sat in produced simple people, cars full of blood, all they needed was a hat, extramusical sounds, purging the emotions. Expect no mercy, I said, from the sickbay. And try to imagine Howard Hughes piloting the plane that flew Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton off toward their marriage in 1950. Well, don’t bother. The New Chinese fiction shouldn’t concern itself with anything other than a stolen turnip and a coldness in the heart, and a lit window, a young man on a horse appearing and then disappearing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1994 - } - } - }, - "the-new-ergonomics": { - "title": "“The New Ergonomics”", - "body": "The new ergonomics were delivered just before lunchtime so we ignored them. Without revealing the particulars let me just say that lunch was most satisfying. Jack and Roberta went with the corned beef for a change. Jack believes in alien abduction and Roberta does not, although she has had several lost weekends lately and one or two unexplained scars on her buttocks. I thought I recognized someone from my childhood at a table across the room, the same teeth, the same hair, but when he stood-up, I wasn’t sure, Squid with a red tie? Impossible. I finished my quiche lorraine and returned my thoughts to Jack’s new jag: “Well, I guess anything’s possible. People disappear all the time, and most of them have no explanation when and if they return. Look at Tony’s daughter and she’s never been the same.” Jack was looking as if he’d bet on the right horse now. “And these new ergonomics, who really designed them? Does anybody know? Do they tell us anything? A name, an address? Hell no.” Squid was paying his bill in a standard-issue blue blazer. He looked across the room at me several times. He looked tired, like he wanted to sleep for a long time in a barn somewhere, in Kansas. I wanted to sleep there, too.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-horses": { - "title": "“The New Horses”", - "body": "When the horses arrived I was so happy. I put them out in the field and they seemed to like it, except for the flies. Then, later, I made sure they got fed. The pinto bucked up and kicked the fence, which shocked me, but then everything was alright again. Later, when they settled down for the night, there was a sound like a snake hissing in one of the stalls, but I couldn’t find anything. In the morning, when I left them out, the bay was limping. I tried to examine her, but she kicked me in the head and I was out for a good fifteen minutes before I woke. She was alright by then. The sorrel had jumped the fence while I was out and I went and got the truck. I found her about three miles down the road. Someone in a truck or car had grazed her and she was lying down by the side of the road. I managed to pull her up and she made it up the plank into the back of the truck. When I let her back in the pen, I realized her leg was broken and she would have to be shot. The chestnut let out a loud whinny. The roan walked over and stomped on my foot very deliberately. My foot hurt, but, more importantly, my feelings were hurt. I really wanted to make those horses happy. The pinto took off running and crashed into the fence. The chestnut started chasing the sorrel until the sorrel collapsed. My head was buzzing, my stomach churning. The bay jumped over the tractor and was headed right for me. I ran out of the pen and shut the fence. The sorrel was suffering. I had to put her out of her misery. I got my rifle from the house. I loved these horses, I really did, but something wasn’t right with them. The chestnut wouldn’t let me in the gate. The pinto started chanting in Latin. The roan look like it had grown a horn in its forehead. I started firing every which way, blind as a bat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2007 - } - } - }, - "no-spitting-up": { - "title": "“No Spitting Up”", - "body": "“People in glass elevators shouldn’t carry snow shovels,” I said to Sheila, because we were in one with a lady who was. I faced the closed doors, rejected the view of the city without the slightest curiosity, because I already knew. What if this woman with the shovel suddenly went crazy, started flapping her wings like a chicken, like a fiend? I wonder what Sheila is thinking just now, I wonder if she has her eye on the snow shovel, how it can’t rest in this glass elevator, how it is dancing inside of itself and making me dance. No one’s paying the least attention to the tension between me and that shovel, that shovel and that window, that window and me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "non-stop": { - "title": "“Non-Stop”", - "body": "It seemed as if the enormous journey was finally approaching its conclusion. From the window of the train the last trees were dissipating, a child-like sailor waved once, a seal-like dog barked and died. The conductor entered the lavatory and was not seen again, although his harmonica-playing was appreciated. He was not without talent, some said. A botanist with whom I had become acquainted actually suggested we form a group or something. I was looking for a familiar signpost in his face, or a landmark that would indicate the true colors of his tribe. But, alas, there was not a glass of water anywhere or even the remains of a trail. I got a bewildered expression of my own and slinked to the back of the car where a nun started to tickle me. She confided to me that it was her cowboy pride that got her through … Through what? I thought, but drew my hand close to my imaginary vest. “That’s a beautiful vest,” she said, as I began crawling down the aisle. At last, I pressed my face against the window: A little fog was licking its chop, as was the stationmaster licking something. We didn’t stop. We didn’t appear to be arriving, and yet we were almost out of landscape. No creeks or rivers. Nothing even remotely reminding one of a mound. O mound! Thou ain’t around no more. A heap of abstract geometrical symbols, that’s what it’s coming to, I thought. A nothing you could sink your teeth into. “Relief’s on the way,” a little know-nothing boy said to me. “Imagine my surprise,” I said and reached out to muss his hair. But he had no hair and it felt unlucky touching his skull like that. “Forget what I said,” he said. “What did you say?” I asked in automatic compliance. And then it got very dark and quiet. I closed my eyes and dreamed of an emu I once loved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nuisance": { - "title": "“Nuisance”", - "body": "It was more of a nuisance than an actual apparition. It wanted my microfilm, it was spraying me with an atomizer such as one I had never seen. I even carried an umbrella around inside the house for a while. I sat in my armchair with a saucer of warm milk and took my temperature several times. I calculated some errors I had made in recent days, all the while this tingling at my temples, as though I were being spied on by satellites, as though some inscrutably virulent sanitation problem were attacking my very foundation, and hecklers were arriving by the busloads. I tried yawning--it was broken. I could tidy up a bit, pad from room to room, polish the corroding molecular remnants. After all, it’s just so much propaganda, really, it’s nothing more than a massive injection of disembodied transparencies on a simple excursion, a vacation, brief, in all likelihood, millimeter by millimeter subtracting my formulas, maiming a few of my components. But, then again, I saw nothing. I could hardly be called a witness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1987 - } - } - }, - "on-the-subject-of-doctors": { - "title": "“On the Subject of Doctors”", - "body": "I like to see doctors cough. What kind of human being would grab all your money just when you’re down? I’m not saying they enjoy this: “Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that’s it, no hope! You might as well hand over your wallet.” Hell no, they’d rather be playing golf and swapping jokes about our feet. Some of them smoke marijuana and are alcoholics, and their moral turpitude is famous: who gets to see most sex organs in the world? Not poets. With the hours they keep they need drugs more than anyone. Germ city, there’s no hope looking down those fire-engine throats. They’re bound to get sick themselves sometime; and I happen to be there myself in a high fever taking my plastic medicine seriously with the doctors, who are dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "our-roles-in-life": { - "title": "“Our Roles in Life”", - "body": "“Is there nothing you can do for me? I’m stuck in this hole,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re stuck in that hole,” I said. “But can’t you find a shovel or something and dig me out?” he said. “I don’t think there’s a shovel around here, but I could look,” I said. I went and looked for a shovel, but all I found was a spoon. “Here’s a spoon,” I said. “But that will take forever,” he said. “I don’t want a spoon. That will take forever,” he said. “Then I’m afraid you must stay buried,” I said. “This is not something I want to hear,” he said. “Who buried you like this, anyway?” I said. “I did not catch his name. He was a tall man, quick with his hands,” he said. “Well, that is no help,” I said. “I was half-asleep at the time. I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “And you ended up buried in that hole?” I said. “Yes, when I awoke I was buried in this hole,” he said. “Let me remove just one spoon of dirt and see if that feels better,” I said. “One spoon couldn’t possibly make me feel better,” he said. “Okay, then I’m going,” I said. “Oh, please don’t go. I need you,” he said. “I can’t do anything for you so I might as well leave,” I said. “You could put a spoon of dirt on my head. If I’m going to be buried I might as well be buried all the way,” he said. “No, you need a breathing hole,” I said. “I don’t want a breathing hole if I’m going to be buried like this,” he said. “Someone will come along and dig you out eventually,” I said. “I can’t go on like this,” he said. “You’re doing fine,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m next to death here,” he said. “I’ve never seen a finer head than yours,” I said. “Please put me out of my misery,” he said. “I suppose I could start digging with my hands,” I said. “We could be here forever,” he said. “Such is cast our roles in life,” I said. “Such is cast our roles in life,” he said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "the-painter-of-the-night": { - "title": "“The Painter of the Night”", - "body": "Someone called in a report that she had seen a man painting in the dark over by the pond. A police car was dispatched to go investigate. The two officers with their big flashlights walked all around the pond, but found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the younger of the two, and he said to Johnson, “What do you think he was painting?” Johnson looked bemused and said, “The dark, stupid. What else could he have been painting?” Hatcher, a little hurt, said, “Frogs in the Dark, Lily-pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as many things exist in the dark as they do in the light.” Johnson paused, exasperated. Then Hatcher added, “I’d like to see them. Hell, I might even buy one. Maybe there’s more out there than we know. We are the police, after all. We need to know.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2000 - } - } - }, - "pastoral": { - "title": "“Pastoral”", - "body": "With lukewarm tongs I hold this swaying cow. She’s dripping cubes into the cove below. And little Hank fills his glass and blows the bubbles in my face and I laugh: ho ho … O blissful, plump swimmer in Life’s disfigured crossword, don’t frown. I’ll set you down unchurned-up. Now you’re happy and dumb and Hank can dip his donut in the wind … A hooded figure slithers by, an oblong reptile with dahlias for eyes. I pause, curse, and bend, pick up a squeezed-out tube of something blue. The hooded figure sneezes. “Kazoontite,” I say. “Well, I guess I’ll be moseying back to the barn. If I don’t get back soon I’ll miss the Farm Report.” “Is that you in there, Ma,” little Hank detected. “You sure scared Pa, fooled him good this time.” This farm-funning is going to give me a nervous breakdown. And I suppose this squeezed-out tube of blue means something, too, like bald-faced vexation. The hooded one shakes her beak: yes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-phone-call": { - "title": "“The Phone Call”", - "body": "I sat on the steps for a very long time. No one passed, no cars went by. It was as if the world had stopped. Then the mailman walked by. I was so happy to see him I nearly jumped out of my pants. “Hi!” I shouted to him. “Hello,” he answered back. “How are you today?” I said. “I’m just fine. How are you?” he said. “Well, I was a bit lonely until I saw you,” I said. “There’s no reason to be lonely. There’s all the world to keep you company,” he said. “I guess you’re right,” I said, as he disappeared down the block. Then school got out and the streets were flooded with youngsters. They were sweet and friendly. A while later work ended and the grown-ups came home. They were exhausted and not so friendly, but, still, they reminded me that there was a world out there. I sat on the steps all that time, thinking about what a funny place we live in. Then I got up and went in the house. I had lost my job at the oil refinery and was waiting to hear from several other companies. I had some savings and wasn’t too worried. Jack called and asked if I wanted to go hunting tomorrow. I said I’d like to but I had other plans. Then Betsy called and asked if I wanted to go drinking tonight. I said that sounded great, but I just couldn’t. I waited for the phone to ring after that, but there was nothing. I played some crossword puzzles, then watched television and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up in the morning feeling achy and lost. I wasn’t sure where I was. It took me a few minutes to figure it out. I was home, as always. I shaved and ate breakfast. My mother called and I said I was just fine. It was a lie, of course, but the truth would hurt her more. I wanted to go for a walk, but I was afraid of missing a phone call. Finally the phone rang. The voice said, “Hello my name is Mark Smith and I’d like to offer you a job as president of Prudential Banks, the largest bank in America. Are you interested?” “Well, yes, but why me?” I said. “We want someone with no experience and no ideas about banking, and you seemed ideal,” he said. “Why would you want someone like that?” I said. “We want to kill him,” he said. “I don’t think I’m interested,” I said. “It’s a great salary, nice vacations,” he said. “No thanks,” I said, feeling relieved and very lucky to be just where I am.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "pity-ascending-with-the-fog": { - "title": "“Pity Ascending with the Fog”", - "body": "He had no past and he certainly had no future. All the important events were ending shortly before they began. He says he told mama earth what he would not accept: and I keep thinking it had something to do with her world. Nights expanding into enormous parachutes of fire, his eyes were little more than mercury. Or sky-diving in the rain when there was obviously no land beneath, half-dead fish surfacing all over his body. He knew all this too well. And she who might at anytime be saying the word that would embrace all he had let go, he let go of course. I think the pain for him will end in May or January, though the weather is far too clear for me to think of anything but august comedy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967 - } - } - }, - "precious-little-we-can-do": { - "title": "“Precious Little We Can Do”", - "body": "The clubhouse was bedecked with blue ribbons perhaps symbolizing the simpler days of water splashing everywhere. We were just out for a drive when we saw it and thought it must mean something or the boys were having a party tonight because one of them just turned seventy and was feeling kind of blue. The older they get the friskier they get, that’s the rule around here anyway. We drove down to the pond just to see some water and then the ducks came over and we talked to them for an hour or so, mostly about things they couldn’t understand. I think that’s why they stayed and talked back so vociferously. It was cloudy and then it was sunny and then a big car drove up and some newlyweds got out and started singing. The ducks were frightened and frankly so were we, and our fear brought us closer. We waddled towards the water prestissimo and paddled for the cattails and waterlilies on the far side, our panic given way to serenity. The couple left at the end of the song. A great blue heron circled overhead. We climbed ashore and shook off what water we could, and feathers. We wrapped ourselves in some blanket from the trunk. On the way home, my wife, who can be very cruel when she wants to be, says to me, “I prefer the company of loons, their insane, crazy laughter is a comfort for which there is no substitute.” Later that night, I joined the boys at a clubhouse. They sighed in unison and repeated, “There is precious little we can do, precious little we can do.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2000 - } - } - }, - "prides-crossing": { - "title": "“Pride’s Crossing”", - "body": "Where the railroad meets the sea,\nI recognize her hand.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nher hair is as intricate as a thumbprint.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nher name is the threshold of sleep.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nit takes all night to get there.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nyou have stepped over the barrier.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nyou will understand afterwards.\nWhere the railroad meets the sea,\nwhere the railroad meets the sea--\nI know only that our paths lie together,\nand you cannot endure if you remain alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "quabbin-reservoir": { - "title": "“Quabbin Reservoir”", - "body": "All morning, skipping stones on the creamy lake, I thought I heard a lute being played, high up, in the birch trees, or a faun speaking French with a Brooklyn accent. A snowy owl watched me with half-closed eyes. “What have you done for me philately,” I wanted to ask it, licking the air. There was a village at the bottom of the lake, and I could just make out the old pos toff ice, and, occasionally, when the light struck it just right, I glimpsed several mailmen swimming in or out of it, letters and packages escaping randomly, 1938, 1937, it didn’t matter to them any longer. Void. No such address. Soft blazes squirmed across the surface and I could see their church, now home to druid squatters, rock in the intoxicating current, as if to an ancient hymn. And a thousand elbowing reeds conducted the drowsy band pavilion: awake, awake, you germs of habit! Alas, I fling my final stone, my callingcard, my gift of porphyry to the citizens of the deep, and disappear into a copse, raving like a butterfly to a rosebud: I love you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "red-bricks-and-camphor-trees": { - "title": "“Red Bricks and Camphor Trees”", - "body": "A mandolin from the madhouse was calling the lunatics to prayer. Mr. Beasely’s Portuguese was improving by the hour. Little pissing brats just freed from school threw rotten eggs and wild chrysanthemums, and the gondolier was getting edgy. Mrs. Beasely promptly ruled that the trip to the Great Cloud Hermitage must begin, and the boatman blazed on past the little tombs with their fuddy-duddies. Oratorios by Handel and Haydn bounced out of buildings with a random elegance that subtly flustered their direction. A pyromaniac lit the lamps that shown the way past pillars which ignited like the soul of the architect who built them, past villas with delicate shadows. Mr. Beasely remembered his mother’s music-room, touchy as wet paint. The current lady of his life slapped him awake, “I swear, Mr. Beasely, your past is a perilous irrelevance today. Biscuits and dried peaches, if you ask me. And soggy to boot! This decisive and dynamic driver of our vehicle shows more stamina, just look at his fangs!” He felt the early riddles of a language stir inside--a mandolin calling the lunatics to prayer. They carried sacred fires to hermaphroditic dieties at the end of Canal Street. Mr. Beasely closed his eyes and thought to himself: _I close my eyes to this civilized vista. And what she says is news, is news: ‘Even the darkest night is really dark blue.’_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1981 - } - } - }, - "restless-leg-syndrome": { - "title": "“Restless Leg Syndrome”", - "body": "After the burial we returned to our units and assumed our poses. Our posture was the new posture and not the old sick posture. When we left our stations it was just to prove we could, not a serious departure or a search for yet another beginning. We were done with all that. We were settled in, as they say, though it might have been otherwise. What a story! After the burial we returned to our units and here is where I am experiencing that lag kicking syndrome thing. My leg, for no apparent reason, flies around the room kicking stuff, well, whatever is in its way, like a screen or a watering can. Those are just two examples and indeed I could give many more. I could construct a catalogue of the things it kicks, perhaps I will do that later. We’ll just have to see if it’s really wanted. Or I could do a little now and then return to listing later. It kicked the scrimshaw collection, yes it did. It kicked the ocelot, which was rude and uncalled for, and yes hurtful. It kicked the guacamole right out of its bowl, which made for a grubby and potentially dangerous workplace. I was out testing the new speed bump when it kicked the Viscountess, which she probably deserved, and I was happy, needless to say, to not be a witness. The kicking subsided for a while, nobody was keeping track of time at that time so it is impossible to fill out the forms accurately. Suffice it to say we remained at our units on constant alert. And then it kicked over the little cow town we had set up for punching and that sort of thing, a covered wagon filled with cover girls. But now it was kicked over and we had a moment of silence, but it was clear to me that many of our minions were getting tetchy and some of them were getting tetchier. And then it kicked a particularly treasured snuff box which, legend has it, once belonged to somebody named Bob Mackey, so we were understandably saddened and returned to our units rather weary. No one seemed to think I was in the least bit culpable. It was my leg, of course, that was doing the actual kicking, of that I am almost certain. At any rate, we decided to bury it. After the burial we returned to our units and assumed our poses. A little bit of time passed, not much, and then John’s leg started acting suspicious. It looked like it wanted to kick the replica of the White House we keep on hand just for situations such as this. And then, sure enough, it did.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - } - } - }, - "right-conduct": { - "title": "“Right Conduct”", - "body": "A boy and a girl were playing together when they spotted a woodchuck and started chasing it. The woodchuck’s burrow was at the edge of the forest and it safely disappeared into it, but the children did not see this and kept running into the forest. In no time at all they realized that they were lost and they sat down and began to cry. After a while, a man appeared and this frightened them all the more. They had been warned a thousand times never to talk to strangers. He assured them that he would not hurt them and that, in fact, he would lead them back to their home. They agreed to walk with him, but when he tried to make conversation they would not reply. “You act like you’re prisoners of war,” he said. “Not much fun for me, but I guess that’s good. When I was a kid my mother also told me never to talk to strangers. But I did anyway, because that’s how you learn stuff. I always thought the stuff my ma and pa tried to teach me was boring. But from strangers you could learn the secret stuff, like how to break into a locked door or how to tame a wild stallion, stuff you could use in life.” It made sense what he was saying, but the kids were sworn to silence, a brainwashed silence in a shrunken world from which they could already faintly hear their mother scolding them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2000 - } - } - }, - "rising-absenteeism": { - "title": "“Rising Absenteeism”", - "body": "I keep stalling in the middle\nof these sprawling decades.\nThe first few minutes are all that matter.\n\nThen a big fizzle,\nI’m out of wind for centuries\nlike a dead husky,\na dejected opera house,\n\nreally just pizzling down\nthe slopes\ninto a tub of pink wine.\nDoes anybody remember _Yoko?_\n\nperson dont live here anymore\n\n“You don’t do me justice!”\n\nThat where you want to get slain?\nPort of Scorn, you want to escape\nnot from, not into, your center is off\nand you move sideways,\n\nyou allow yourself to move\nalways with fear and deep defeat.\nYou will make it--\nfor you the sea will not open.\n\nYou have this love written on you:\nstern failure to negotiate\nor giving-in to the flood.\n\n“Yes, poor Snake gave her life for you,\npushed you away from that speeding car …”\n\nA certain head-on collision didn’t happen\nat a fortuitous time, is that what\nyou’re braying? That we’re inviolable?\nI hope you had more enthusiasm as a child\nthan to say after the rollercoaster\n\n“It was uneven,\nThe Hall of Mirrors was uneven;\nand surely my days are uneven\nas the world is uneven.”\n\nNo two days are alike.\nI guess they are glued.\nI am still digesting\nmy miles per gallon.\n\nIt’s not meant to look like anybody else.\n\nThis is definitely an aberration.\nI could get to like yours.\n\nThis is my political punching bag, my cell.\nMake me happy and I’ll be your slave\n_boogie boogie dumb dumb …_\n\nIt moves from despair to despair\nto despair to slapstick to despair\nto slapstick despair despair and so on.\n\nMy self had died,\nsits up and yawns:\nit must be melancholy for someone.\n\nIn a world so rich no wonder\nthe insane own most of it.\nIt exists; refutes all attempts\nto destroy it,\ntwitters in the night.\n\nI have no vision, only a lasting gaze, _bam!_\nOff with your head.\n\nThere are moments--most of them\nhave committed murder--and many\nhave everlasting monuments.\nWho are the people, you may ask.\nGazing over the torn flesh you spot yourself.\n\nIt’s that kind of day,\nI guess I feel like killing you.\n\nI said spit over your shoulder,\nthis place is getting creepy.\n\nI have always disapproved of higher education.\n\nReally? Isn’t that fascinating.\nHe ought to get his head capped,\nget one of those starheads.\nAdios sixteen Japanese ricebirds\nthat couldn’t accommodate\nmore up-to-date habits.\n\nI have been given ideas\nfor which I am not always grateful.\nEarn a fortune overnight,\nblow your brains out for the enchantment\nof science and a wealth for all.\nI look like a pile of people,\nI can’t say too much about it.\nI have this raging distraction:\nthe case of rising absenteeism.\nI am alive beside you in hot type.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - } - } - }, - "saint-john-of-the-cross-in-prison": { - "title": "“Saint John of the Cross in Prison”", - "body": "Browsing among the zero-hours, and where I went from there. diabolical? No. I went out of myself into … I did not go out of myself into the afternoon of parrots; I did not go out of myself into the dew; I did not go out of myself into the bat-terrors. I did not say silence, I said nothing about the love I did not go out of myself into. I said nothing fire, I said nothing water, I said nothing air. I went out of myself into no, into nowhere. I was not alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1970 - } - } - }, - "the-salute": { - "title": "“The Salute”", - "body": "I dreamed a black widow dream all night.\nHer legs were as long\nand velvet as a debutante’s.\n\nShe was my only friend,\nand the little language she spoke\nI completely misunderstood.\n\nSo full of poison she was,\nmy heart poured out to her.\nShe kissed me!\n\nI was thrilled, my stiff body swooned\nlike a dead orchid,\nand also like a rose I blushed.\n\nShe slapped her knobby knees\nand ran away. I salute\nthis lady with obedient white fingers\n\nfor she is a widow by choice\nand I her mate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967 - } - } - }, - "saturdays-are-for-bathing-betsy": { - "title": "“Saturdays Are For Bathing Betsy”", - "body": "I am thinking about Betsy almost all the time now. I am also thinking about the relationship between a man and his watch. I am amazed at how each sort of animal and plant manages to keep its kind alive. Shocking poultry. Maybe there’s a movie playing downtown about a dotty fat woman with a long knife who dismembers innocent ducks and chickens. But it is the reconstruction of the villa of the mysteries that is killing me. How each sort of animal and plant prevents itself from returning to dust just a little while longer while I transfer some assets to a region where there are no thinking creatures, just worshipping ones. They oscillate along like magicians, deranged seaweed fellows and their gals, a Nile landscape littered with Pygmies. I’m lolling on the banks. I am not just a bunch of white stuff inside my skull. No, there is this villa, and in the villa there is a bathing pool, and on Saturdays Betsy always visits. I am not the first rational man, but my tongue does resemble a transmitter. And, when wet, she is a triangle. And when she’s wet, time has a fluffiness about it, and that has me trotting about, loathing any locomotion not yoked to her own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "the-search-for-lost-lives": { - "title": "“The Search for Lost Lives”", - "body": "I was chasing this blue butterfly down the road when a car came by and clipped me. It was nothing serious, but it angered me and I turned around and cursed the driver who didn’t even slow down to see if I was hurt. Then I returned my attention to the butterfly which was nowhere to be seen. One of the Doubleday girls came running up the street with her toy poodle toward me. I stopped her and asked, “Have you seen a blue butterfly around here?” “It’s down near that birch tree near Grandpa’s,” she said. “Thanks,” I said, and walked briskly toward the tree. It was fluttering from flower to flower in Mr. Doubleday’s extensive garden, a celestial blueness to soothe the weary heart. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I certainly didn’t want to capture it. It was like something I had known in another life, even if it was only in a dream, I wanted to confirm it. I was a blind beggar on the streets of Cordoba when I first saw it, and now, again it was here.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2004 - } - } - }, - "the-shadowman": { - "title": "“The Shadowman”", - "body": "In the backyard, I saw the shadow of a man, but I didn’t see the man. I walked toward it and the shadow backed away. The shadowman was taller than I was. It mocked me. When I waved my arms, he waved his. I ran and it followed. When I stopped, it stopped. And all the while it was silent. It couldn’t sing, but I could. I sang at the top of my lungs. The birds flew away in a cloud. The neighbors pounded on their windows. Finally, the shadowman turned and slithered into his hole.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "a-shipwrecked-person": { - "title": "“A Shipwrecked Person”", - "body": "When I woke from my afternoon nap, I wanted to hold onto my dream, but in a matter of seconds it had drifted away like a fine mist. Nothing remained; oh, perhaps a green corner of cloth pinched between my fingers, signifying what? Everything about the house seemed alien to me. The scissors yawned. The plants glowed. The mirror was full of pain and stories that made no sense to me. I moved like a ghost through the rooms. Stacks of books with secret formulas and ancient hieroglyphic predictions. And lamps, like stern remonstrances. The silverware is surely more guilty than I. The doorknobs don’t even believe in tomorrow. The green cloth is burning-up. I toss it into the freezer with a sigh of relief.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2002 - } - } - }, - "shroud-of-the-gnome": { - "title": "“Shroud of the Gnome”", - "body": "And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him it is time he got his booster shots, but then I realize I have no power over him whatsoever. He becomes increasingly light-footed until I lose sight of him downtown between the federal building and the post office. A registered nurse is taking her coffee break. I myself needed a break, so I sat down next to her at the counter. “Don’t mind me,” I said, “I’m just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich.” (This old line of mine had met with great success on any number of previous occasions.) I thought, a deaf, dumb, and blind nurse, sounds ideal! But then I remembered that some of the earliest Paleolithic office workers also feigned blindness when approached by nonoffice workers, so I paid my bill and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself. Amidst the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely, the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare, windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither, battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too. And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward, hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss, and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - } - } - }, - "shut-up-and-eat-your-toad": { - "title": "“Shut up and Eat Your Toad”", - "body": "The disorganization to which I currently belong has skipped several meetings in a row which is a pattern I find almost fatally attractive. Down at headquarters there’s a secretary and a janitor who I shall call Suzie and boy can she ever shoot straight. She’ll shoot you straight in the eye if you ask her to. I mow the grass every other Saturday and that’s the day she polishes the trivets whether they need it or not, I don’t know if there is a name for this kind of behavior, hers or mine, but somebody once said something or another. That’s why I joined up in the first place, so somebody could teach me a few useful phrases, such as, “Good afternoon, my dear anal-retentive Doctor,” and “My, that is a lovely dictionary you have on, Mrs. Smith.” Still, I hardly feel like functioning even on a brute or loutish level. My plants think I’m one of them, and they don’t look so good themselves, or so I tell them. I like to give them at least several reasons to be annoyed with me, it’s how they exercise their skinny spectrum of emotions. Because. That and cribbage. Often when I return from the club late at night, weary-laden, weary-winged, washed out, I can actually hear the nematodes working, sucking the juices from the living cells of my narcissus. I have mentioned this to Suzie on several occasions. Each time she has backed away from me, panic-stricken when really I was just making a stab at conversation. It is not my intention to alarm anyone, but dear Lord if I find a dead man in the road and his eyes are crawling with maggots, I refuse to say have a nice day Suzie just because she’s desperate and her life is a runaway carriage rushing toward a cliff now can I? Would you let her get away with that kind of crap? Who are you anyway? And what kind of disorganization is this? Baron of the Holy Grail? Well it’s about time you got here. I was worried, I was starting to fret.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sky": { - "title": "“The Sky”", - "body": "What is the sky?\nA week later\nI reply: I don’t know\n\nwhy don’t you ask\nyour only friend.\nAnother week passes.\nHe doesn’t call.\n\nHe must be up to something,\nhe must know\nwhat the hell it is.\n\nI look at my bankbook,\nit’s forty-seven below.\nCan you give me a clue?\n\nI blurt at him.\nThose few shining masterpieces\nare lost, electric piercing\n\nbouquets\nlost in a fantastic fire.\nWhat is the sky?\n\nWhat is the sky.\nThe sky is a door,\na very small door\n\nthat opens for an inchworm\nan inch above his rock,\nand keeps his heart from flying off.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - } - } - }, - "somali-shopping-for-organic-figs": { - "title": "“Somali Shopping for Organic Figs”", - "body": "I was walking out of the health food store and into the parking lot when something powerful and strange stopped me dead in my tracks. A woman dressed from head to toe in a black veil, a bui-bui, I believe it’s called in Arabic, stood stock-still, alone, tall, only her eyes showing, but oh what eyes, like bits of onyx set in virgin snow. A panther would have been less shocking than this woman. Everyone who saw her just stopped and stared. Normal manners didn’t seem to apply to this situation. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and yet, I saw nothing but those eyes. Perhaps she was stricken in terror. Children walked right up to her and stood staring in awe. It felt like some tremendous mistake. But maybe she was only dreaming, and we were dreaming along with her. It was a cruel dream, the kind that changes you forever, and waking from it was strictly forbidden. Her bui-bui was made in Heaven, the blackest corner of it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2002 - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-nightingales": { - "title": "“Song of the Nightingales”", - "body": "Hilda Kupferman saw fit to invite me to her annual party for interesting people. It sounded awful but to her credit, at least, her definition of interesting did not measure wealth or power, but simply people who had caught her fancy during the past year. Of course, some people were invited back year after year on the basis of something they had done, or something that had happened to them, years ago. I, myself, had been bitten by a wolf on a camping trip a while back, and she never tired of asking me questions about the incident. There was really only so much I had to say, so I had begun to embellish it. “Under the wan moonlight, he tore at my arm’s flesh with the savagery of a god, but my free had found a stone and I pounded his skull with all my might. In no time the wolf lay whimpering at my feet, my blood dripping from its fangs,” I said. Hilda’s eyes were popping out of her head with delight. “Oh, Mr. Rowley, you are certainly a brave man. I am honored that you have agreed to grace us with your presence tonight,” she said. The others gathered around her gave me an approving round of applause. Of course, the story I had told was far from the truth. Some wild furry animal, with a tongue like a dog’s, had licked my face as I slept on a mountain years ago. That’s all I really know. But I liked being invited to the party. I was introduced to an elderly, aristocratic lady by the name of Gertrude Falk. Mrs. Falk had been captured by a tribe of headhunters in Borneo while researching a certain rare orchid. She wasn’t violated in any way. On the contrary, it soon became apparent that they believed her to be their queen, sent to them from the stars. She stayed there ten years, until she had converted them into the most peace-loving, gentlest people on earth. She finished her story with tears in her eyes, and Hilda said, grabbing Mrs. Falk’s shoulders, “She’s a saint.” I spotted the bar and a long table of canapés. As I was filling up my plate, a man standing next to me was saying to himself, “Yes, sir. No, sir. They are all dead, Captain, every last one.” He was nibbling little crab cakes nervously, glancing this way and that. He didn’t even see me standing right in front of him. He didn’t look like he was ready to tell his story, so I walked away, uncertain of what to do with myself. A pretty woman stood along by the door, staring down into her drink. I walked up to her, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t seem to mind my being there, so I just stayed. A man crawled by on his hands and knees, saying, “Water, water, all my riches for a cup of water.” Hilda Kupferman was shrieking in laughter or horror somewhere on the far side of the room. The girl beside me finally lifter her head and said, “Do you believe in miracles?” “I suppose I do,” I said, “I mean, almost everything is a miracle when you think about it.” “That’s what I figured you’d say,” she said. The man from the bar walked by saying, “The reinforcements are not on their way, Captain. They were all slaughtered on the beach. I’m afraid it’s juts you and me, and the enemy surrounds us as far as the eye can see.” “What about truth? Do you think there is such a thing, and can we ever know it?” she said. “You’re kind of fresh,” I said. “I don’t even know your name.” “That’s what I mean,” she said, “you can’t know it. There’s no way you’ll ever know it. It’s like a perfume, it’s here, and then it’s gone.” “Oh well, it’s nice to meet you, or not meet you,” I said. “My name’s Dan, and, once, on a mountain as I was sleeping under the moonlight, something licked my face, and it was a wolf or a mouse or a lamb, or maybe it was your perfume carrying your name on its nameless journey through time.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "spaceship": { - "title": "“Spaceship”", - "body": "I saw something in the sky, then realized it was only something in my eye. I rubbed it and then it felt better. But then there was a spaceship and I rubbed my eye again. It was still there. It was moving across the sky at an alarming speed. I didn’t know what to do. Then it was out of sight. I ran into the house and called the police. I told them what I had seen. I said, “What are you going to do about it?” They said they had already dispatched several squad cars to search the area. When they heard nothing back from those two cars they sent two more. They heard nothing from those two cars and an hour later they sent the last four cars they had. They waited nervously at the station. Hours passed. Finally they called for help from neighboring towns. Altogether they had sixteen cars from nearby towns. They sent out eight at first. Silence followed. This was really an emergency. They decided not to send out any more. Too dangerous. They called in the National Guard. They surrounded the area where they thought the spaceship had landed. It was a wooded area about ten miles from town. They moved in slowly, their heaviest weapons drawn. They heard squealing far off. As they approached, one of the guardsmen was thrown in the air, another sank into a hole. Then five were shot backward at great speed about a hundred yards. Now the remaining guardsmen looked at each other and decided to run for their vehicles. They jumped in and sped off. Then they stopped, not of their own accord, and a huge, monstrous hand came out of the forest and picked them up and hurled them back to where they came from, crashing them against a tree. They were all knocked out cold. Back at the police station they had not heard a word from anyone. They were terrified the end of the world had come. I called them several more times, but they were not answering the phone. The policemen from the first two squad cars showed up at work the next week. The officers on duty were dumbfounded. They said, “Thank God you’re alive. We can’t believe it. We thought sure you were dead.” “Oh no, we had the best time in our lives. We’ve never seen anything like that before,” one of them said. And so it went all week. The men in the second squad car came back and said the same thing. Then the men from the other towns, then the National Guard. All said it was the time of their lives. The officers at the station couldn’t figure it out, nobody could. They never knew their men liked being beaten up, hurled through space, crushed and eaten alive so much until now. Perhaps now they will get along better.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spiderwebs": { - "title": "“Spiderwebs”", - "body": "The man sitting next to me on the airplane pulled out the tray in front of him and set up his laptop computer as the stewardess gave permission to use electronic devices. He played the keyboard like a piano virtuoso, but nothing but annoying clicks came out of it. I read the airline magazine as if it were a suspense novel, although I glanced at his screen hoping to decipher something. He was too fast for the likes of me. Columns of figures appeared, mutated and disappeared. I was lonely and longed for some good old-fashioned human contact, but he wasn’t having any of that raggedy-assed stuff. I couldn’t even tell what he was trafficking in. When our snack came, he ignored it. Admittedly, it wasn’t much, but still, I devoured it and stared at his hungrily. He gave me a brief glance of irritation, stuck it in his pocket, then went back to work. “Fascinating,” I said. “What?” he said. “I find your work fascinating. Of course, you’ve made several mistakes that will come back to haunt you,” I said. He stared at me as if noticing me for the first time. “What are you talking about?” he said. “Nothing. It’s none of my business,” I said, staring into my magazine. “Who are you? Are you a spy?” he said. “My name is Jeremy Bendix, and I’m a human being,” I said. “A human being?” he said. “Well, goody for you. I played golf on Maui yesterday. What does that make me, a piece of space debris? Now, I have work to do, no doubt riddled with grave mistakes, but still I’m going to do it, if you’ll excuse me.” And, with that, he turned his attention to the screen and worked more furiously than ever. I nodded off for a while, and when I awoke I looked at him and said, “Oops.” He said, “What?” And I repeated, “Oops.” He said, “What are you talking about now?” “Nothing, nothing. It’s just that you’ve failed to take into account the effect of the recession in the Southeast Asian market, and the ripple it’s had throughout Europe, not to mention elsewhere. Of course, I’m completely out of my league here, and I ought to shut up,” I said, and closed my eyes again. “I work hard, but it’s not like I’m building a wall with stones that you can see and feel. I’m in the dark, crawling around on my hands and knees. All I can feel are the spiderwebs across my face and the dust beneath my hands. I hear nothing but the chatter of mice and rats. Can’t you understand that?” he said. “What?” I said. “Are you talking to me?” “No,” he said, and closed up his laptop as we waited for the plane to land. “Listen, I was just kidding when I said that,” I said. “Said what?” he said. “About being a human being,” I said. “Oh yes, that, of course. I took it in the spirit of jest,” he said. I followed him through the terminal and we stood in line for taxis. “Where are you going?” he asked after a while. “I’m going to see a very poor blind man, who rarely eats or drinks, and who talks in riddles, well, not riddles really, but a very special kind of nonsense. He probably knows more than you and me together about the Asian market,” I said. “Sounds like my boss on a good day,” he said. “It is,” I said. “Good, we can share a taxi.” he said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2005 - } - } - }, - "the-square-at-dawn": { - "title": "“The Square at Dawn”", - "body": "Unconsumable material is everywhere;\nred machinery washes out the gutter.\nAnd the grim musicians\n\nare seen stalking themselves with rare\ncacti in their saxophones.\nMosquitoes linger in the air\n\nlike snowy egrets.\nWhat has happened to the rush of night?\nIt is as white as an arctic wolf.\n\nA little buoyant coffin drifts\nacross the square; larvae configure\non the last gasp of a lamp,\n\nfrying like the ink\nof an old elaborate alphabet.\nSuch original works as feathers\n\nannounce the angel of death\nis selling kisses in the alley.\nAn early yellow bus of women\n\ntakes photographs of the man\nwho devours nails, as the heirloom\nquilt unravels behind the green\n\nunlatched door of our town idiot.\nThe rent is up and the cat\nis dead: we ought to go home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1969 - } - } - }, - "storm": { - "title": "“Storm”", - "body": "The snow visits us, taking little bits of us with it, to become part of the earth, an early death and an early return--like the filing of tax forms. And all you can say after adding up column after column: “I’m not myself.” And all you can say after the long night of searching for one certain scrap of paper: “It never existed.” And when all the lamps are lit and the smell of the stew has followed you upstairs and slipped under the door of your study: “The lute is telling the story of the life I might have lived, had I not--” In my study, which is without heat, in mid-January, in the hills of a northern province--only the thin white-haired volumes of poetry speak, quietly, like unfed birds on a night visit to a cat farm. And an airplane is lost in a storm of fitting pins. The snow falls, far into the interior.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "context": { - "month": "january", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "success-comes-to-cow-creek": { - "title": "“Success Comes to Cow Creek”", - "body": "I sit on the tracks, a hundred feet from earth, fifty from the water. Gerald is inching toward me as grim, slow, and determined as a season, because he has no trade and wants none. It’s been nine months since I last listened to his fate, but I know what he will say: he’s the fire hydrant of the underdog.\nWhen he reaches my point above the creek, he sits down without salutation, and spits profoundly out past the edge, and peeks for meaning in the ripple it brings. He scowls. He speaks: when you walk down any street you see nothing but coagulations of shit and vomit, and I’m sick of it. I suggest suicide; he prefers murder, and spits again for the sake of all the great devout losers.\nA conductor’s horn concerto breaks the air, and we, two doomed pennies on the track, shove off and somersault like anesthetized fleas, ruffling the ideal locomotive poised on the water with our light, dry bodies. Gerald shouts terrifically ashe sails downstream like a young man with a destination. I swim toward shore as fast as my boots will allow; as always, neglecting to drown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1966 - } - } - }, - "teaching-the-ape-to-write-poems": { - "title": "“Teaching the Ape to Write Poems”", - "body": "They didn’t have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into the chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: “You look like a god sitting there. Why don’t you try writing something?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1990 - } - } - }, - "the-thief": { - "title": "“The Thief”", - "body": "My wife and I were spending a quiet night at home. She was reading a magazine on the couch and I was reading my novel in my chair. I said, “Darling, can I fix you a cup of hot chocolate?” She said, “That would be great.” So I got up and went into the kitchen and started to boil the milk. A few minutes later I handed her the cup. “Hmmm, smells great. Thank you, darling,” she said. I sat down and resumed my reading. She said, “Did you know a tiger has the same number of bones in it as a monkey?” “I don’t believe it,” I said. “And a whale has the same number as a mouse.” “Get out of here,” I said. “These are some little known facts discovered by a man named John D. Baxter,” she said. “He must be crazy,” I said. Then we were quiet for a while. I looked over and she was asleep. I went on reading my novel. Then I put my novel down and got up and started to tiptoe around the house. I went into our bedroom and over to the dresser. I opened up Mitzy’s jewelry box and let the jewels run through my fingers. There were some fantastic pieces in there, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. I thought about stealing some, but felt creepy about it. I put them back in the box and tiptoed back into the living room. I tripped on the coffee table and went crashing down. Mitzy woke with a start. “Go back to sleep,” I said. “What was that?” she said. “I tripped, that’s all,” I said. She started to get up. “Where are you going?” I said. “I want to look in my jewelry box,” she said. “Why?” I said. “I dreamed somebody was trying to steal something in there,” she said. She went into the bedroom and looked in the box, then came out. “It’s okay,” she said. “Well, I’m glad,” I said. She got back on the couch and picked up her magazine. “Did you know jellyfish have bigger brains than humans?” she said. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Well, they do. It says right here,” she said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-fuzzy": { - "title": "“To Fuzzy”", - "body": "I was standing outside this cocktail bar, see, on the Nile, when along came this chick with whom I had passed the morning in the poolhall: We found we shared a deep interest in thaumaturgy as she stroked the 8-ball into the side pocket. Fuzzy Wuzzy, for that was her name. Probability was her strong suit. She was a gold mine on the skids, and I yearned to wangle a weekend with her. I bluffed, “The farther you get away from me the suddener you’ll be back.” Rotten and lazy, I carried a gun. I began shrugging toward her, closer, until she turned to ice. “Since when did you escape from mud,” she said, and I considered my predicament, I took time for reflection. “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” I said, “you learned the dark arts through a prolonged sojourn among myriads of bats nesting in abandoned mines, I know that. Still, as Nietzsche says, ‘Man has regarded his natural propensities with an _evil eye_ for too long.’ It is not that I wish you to visit depravities upon me, I would perish first! One of the big Pharaohs once told me in a dream that one day I would be very thin and sit in a soft armchair. I would be reading a letter, written in Chinese calligraphy, in pencil, scribbled hastily, and its central motif would be the mat the author was sitting on and the writing pencil with which his hand and arm, torso and brain and a lifetime of witnessing, were struggling. I know there are contradictions in all that I say. Fuzzy, whence is the unseen vindicated? Esteemed cocktail bar, the Pharaohs have edged your needs into retreat.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1981 - } - } - }, - "the-truth": { - "title": "“The Truth”", - "body": "Mitzy fell asleep as soon as we got home, but I didn’t. The evening had upset me. Why did Jack keep asking me if I’d been married before? And why did my answer not satisfy him? It was probably just a bad joke. Jack’s humor is off sometimes. But he’s not a bad guy. Well, then I went to bed. When we woke up in the morning Mitzy said, “Jack was right about you, wasn’t he?” “What do you mean?” I said. “Jack said you were kicked out of the Army,” she said. “I was never in the Army, how could I be kicked out?” I said. “I don’t think he likes me.” “Oh, I think Jack likes you a lot. He just wishes you were more interesting,” she said. “And by making me secretly divorced and secretly kicked out of the Army I’m instantly more interesting, is that it?” I said. “According to Jack you are,” she said. “I think we had better have breakfast,” I said. “Good idea,” she said. During breakfast I said, “Don’t you think I’m interesting?” “Of course I do, honey,” she said. “Let’s forget it. I mean, Jack is an old friend. Maybe he was just drunk,” I said. “That’s probably it,” she said. “What are you going to do today?” I asked. “I’m thinking of buying a new dress for the wedding,” she said. “What wedding?” I said. “You know, Carol and Bob’s wedding, next Saturday,” she said. “Oh God, I forgot all about it,” I said. “How could you forget? Bob’s your best friend,” she said. “I know, I just had my mind on other things, but now I’ll focus on their wedding, I promise,” I said. Shortly after that Mitzy left the house. I cleaned up the breakfast dishes, then sat down on the couch. Why had Jack told the two secrets I had told him years ago. I had sworn him to silence, and now everybody knew. I had told him I would kill him if he ever told anybody. I wasn’t going to kill him, but I did think about disappearing, just vanishing altogether. Where would I go? What would I do? And I do love Mitzy. I could tell her the truth. I’ve had eighteen years to do that, and not a squeak so far.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "trying-to-help": { - "title": "“Trying to Help”", - "body": "On another planet, a silvery starlet is brooding on her salary. Some gangly ranchers are blindfolding her for her own good, or so they say. It’s all part of some lawful research, or maybe they said “awful research,” I wasn’t listening. I was roving down a chestnut lane, thinking about origins in a contrite sort of way, amid the nearly inaudible society of aphids and such, modulating my little hireling feet none too carefully, an average stroller praying for keepsakes, or at least one, when I heard this eerie squeak from afar. For reasons which I refuse to explain I knew instantly what was going on, and I tried to negotiate in my rudimentary way. I offered up some rose petals, I think they were tempted but liked playing tough because it was in their contract or something. So I offered to play the fiddle on their patio for a whole night. No deal-I don’t think they knew what a fiddle was, which was actually lucky for me since I have but one tiny tune. I sat down on my chestnut lane, tempted to sneer at my own timidity. Those squeaks from afar, all that damned distant research, provide the only keepsake for this day, my momentum crushed. Hours pass, crows pass, a pheasant crashes into an oak tree. In a dream she says to me, “Thanks for caring, mister, but it’s all part of the plot, and I’m getting paid awfully well.” And now I can hardly walk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1989 - } - } - }, - "unlikely-friends": { - "title": "“Unlikely Friends”", - "body": "There was a rib joint where I could go and get take-out. It made me extremely happy to be eating those ribs at home, they were so tender and tasty. When I’d clean up I’d feel completely happy. Then I’d go and watch a movie on television and fall asleep on my recliner. One night while I was sleeping I thought I heard some scratching on my door. I woke up and went and opened it. There was a bear standing there. I said, “What do you want?” The bear pushed me to the floor and stepped over me. I stood up and grabbed a kitchen knife. “You shouldn’t be in my house,” I said. The bear walked into my living room. He seemed careful not to break any lamps. I followed him in there. He sat down in my chair and fell asleep. I couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, so I sat down in the chair next to him and fell asleep myself. When I woke up an hour later he was sniffing me all over. I pulled my knife and aimed it at him. “Stand back,” I said. He made whining sounds and stood back. “I don’t think you should be in this house,” I said. I stood and pointed the knife at him. He roared and looked angry. He reached out and shoved me back in my chair. I waved the knife at him. He raised a paw and knocked it from my hand. I didn’t like my odds in this kind of game. The bear walked into the dining room. I picked up my knife and followed him. He sat down at the table and demanded that I bring him some food. So I went and filled a bowl with raspberries and brought it to him. He gobbled them up in a surprisingly short time. He wanted more, so I took his bowl and filled it with blueberries, which he quickly ate. I filled his bowl with strawberries, which he lingered over, eating them one at a time. By the time he was finished he wanted no more. He stood up and yawned. He lumbered toward the door and asked to be let out. I opened the door and we said good-bye. After that night he came often. Some nights we’d watch TV and fall asleep. Other nights he just wanted his berries. I no longer carried a knife. I no longer had to.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2012 - } - } - }, - "a-vagabond": { - "title": "“A Vagabond”", - "body": "A vagabond is a newcomer in a heap of trouble. He’s an eyeball at a peephole that should be electrocuted. He’s a leper in a textile mill and likely to be beheaded, I mean, given a liverwurst sandwich on the break by the brook where the loaves are sliced. But he oughtn’t meddle with the powder puffs on the golf links--they have their own goats to tame, dirigibles to situate. He can act like an imbecile if the climate is propitious, a magnate of kidnap paradising around the oily depot, or a speck from a distant nebula wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper … Well, if it’s permitted, then let’s regulate him, let’s testify against his thimble, and moderate his gloves before they sew an apron. The local minister is thinking of moving to Holland, exchanging his old ballads for some lingerie. “Zatso!” says the vagabond. Homeless, like wheat that tattletales on the sermon, like wages swigged. “Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond. The minister reels under the weight of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have jutted into his kernel, disturbed his terminal core. Slowly, and with trifling dignity, the minister removes from his lapel his last campaign button: _Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "very-late-but-not-too-late": { - "title": "“Very Late, but Not too Late”", - "body": "I was the last one to leave the party. I said goodnight to Stephanie and Jared. They were already in bed. In fact, they were making love, but they stopped and thanked me for coming. Walking down Kellog Street, with the full moon lighting my way, I wondered who those people really were, and why they had invited me. I had felt like a spy all evening, absorbing useless bits of information. It’s amazing what people will tell a complete stranger. At the end of Kellog I turn right on Windsor. A woman was standing under the streetlight. She looked frightened. “Do you need help?” I said She was hesitant to speak, but finally said, “I’m lost.” “Where are you trying to go?” I asked. “Richards Street,” she said, “my aunt lives there.” “That’s not far from here,” I said. “I’ll walk you there.” And so we walked. I could tell she was still a little apprehensive. Her bus had gotten in late, and she had expected her aunt to meet her, and no one answered the phone when she tried to call her. When we got to her aunt’s house there were no lights on. I waited while she knocked on the door. She knocked harder and harder, but the aunt didn’t answer, “Listen,” I said, “I live close by. Let’s go over to my place and we can call the police. They’ll figure this thing out.” She hadn’t much choice but to agree. We walked in silence, a smooth, rich flow of it. And when she reached out and held my hand, I felt as though my life had begun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2003 - } - } - }, - "the-walk-home": { - "title": "“The Walk Home”", - "body": "I told the doctor I wouldn’t be seeing him again. “No, I guess you won’t,” he said. I walked out the door feeling really good. Of course I knew I was going to die, but still the day looked bright to me. I walked down to the water. Ducks were circling around and about. A sailboat sailed by. I walked along the shore. The sun beat down on me. I felt as though I might live forever. I sat down on a bench and watched the joggers pass. A pretty blonde walked by and I said, “Hello.” She looked at me and said hello. A man with a greyhound on a leash walked by. I got up and started to walk. A woodpecker was pounding on a tree. An airplane flew over, leaving a thick trail of smoke. I left the lake and walked on up the road. I crossed at the streetlights and crossed the bridge. A car swerved to miss me. I thought, that could have been it, the end right there, but I walked on, bravely dodging the cars. When I got to the residential district, I felt relieved. There were large elms and maples overhanging the street, and people pushing baby carriages. Dogs ran loose everywhere. A man stopped me and asked if I knew where 347 Walnut Street was. I said I didn’t. He said, “Oh well, it didn’t matter anyway.” I said, “Why?” He said it was a funeral notice. I walked on, bumping into a fat lady with a load of groceries. I said I was sorry. She kept going, dropping a load of grapefruit. Then, further on, there was a giant explosion across the street. Police and firemen were there right away. It appears it was a gas main beneath the shop. No one was there, luckily, but the firetrucks had their hands full. I left before it was out. The shop was pretty much destroyed. When I got home I was tired. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down on the couch. I thought about calling my mother, but she was in heaven. I called her anyway. “Mom, how are you doing?” I said. “I’m bored. Don’t come here. There’s nothing to do,” she said. “Aren’t there angels?” I said. “Yes, but they’re boring,” she said. “But I was going to come see you,” I said. “Go to hell, it’s more exciting,” she said. I had fallen asleep with my teacup in my hand. When I awoke I realized I had thought it was a phone. My mother would never be so sarcastic about heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-wedding": { - "title": "“A Wedding”", - "body": "She was in terrible pain the whole day, as she had been for months: a slipped disc, and there is nothing more painful. She herself was a nurse’s aide, also a poet just beginning to make a name for her nom de plume. As with most things in life, it happened when she was changing channels on her television. The lucky man, on the other hand, was smiling for the first time in his life, and it was fake. He was an aspiring philosopher of dubious potential, very serious, but somehow lacking in essential depth. He could have been an adequate undertaker. It was not the first time for either of them. It was a civil service, with no music, few flowers. Still, there was a slow and erratic tide of champagne--corks shot clear into the trees. And flashcubes, instant photos, some blurred and some too revealing, cake slices that aren’t what they were meant to be. The bride slept through much of it, and never did we figure out who was on whose team. I think the groom meant it in the end when he said, “We never thought anyone would come.” We were not the first to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows, it may all turn out for the best. And who really cares about such special days, they are not what we live for.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - } - } - }, - "what-had-to-be-done": { - "title": "“What Had To Be Done”", - "body": "Dale told me he was communicating with his dead mother. He seemed very agitated. “What did she say?” I asked. “Well, she wants me to kill my father,” he said. “Your father is a nice old man,” I said. “He doesn’t hurt anybody.” “That’s not what she says. She says he killed her,” he said. “That’s crazy,” I said. “I know your father, and he wouldn’t kill anyone, especially her. He loved her. Anyone could see that. You must have the wrong number, I mean, you must be talking to somebody else. Did you ever consider that?” “No, it’s her all right. I couldn’t mistake her voice,” he said. “Well, what are you going to do about it? You can’t just go and kill your father,” I said. “I wish she would just go away. At first I was glad to hear from her. I missed her, you know. But then she started telling me these horrible things. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy,” he said. I told him to go have a nice dinner with his father. He’d see it was all a big mistake. He agreed, but he said he was afraid of what he might do to him, because he was under orders from his mother. I didn’t hear from Dale for a while after that. I called Carla and asked her if she had heard anything. “No, I haven’t heard from Dale, but, you know, I think the old man might have done it. He was in the war, you know, and who knows what might have gone on there. Maybe he was tortured, or he could have been the torturer. He’s very quiet, and those are the ones you have to watch. And, I must say, she was pretty irritating,” she said. “I, personally, couldn’t stand her,” I said. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to me, and I tried to put it out of my mind. Morgan came by and wanted to take me for a drive in his new car, which looked like a gangster car from the thirties. He was showing off and showing me what it could do when a police car pulled us off to the side of the road. “Is there a fire somewhere?” he said. They need a new scriptwriter, I thought to myself. “No, officer, I was just showing off my new car,” Morgan said. “I’ve heard that one before,” the officer said. “Still, I’m going to let you off with a warning this time just because it’s such a good looking car,” he said. Morgan thanked him and drove on very sheepishly. We talked in whispers as though we were being monitored. “Have you heard about Dale’s problems?” I said, assuming he had. “No, what problems?” he said. “His dead mother’s talking to him,” I said. “Oh, just stock tips and that kind of thing. Advice,” I said. “Stock tips from the dead, sounds like it could be kind of risky,” he said. “It’s just kind of troubling. I doubt that he’ll do anything about it,” I said. Just then a stag walked out of the forest and stood right in our lane staring at us. Morgan hit the brakes as hard as he could and skidded to a stop just feet away from the animal. The stag in its majesty showed no fear and refused to move. We were both trembling and trying to catch our breath. “Jesus,” Morgan said, “that was a close one. What are we supposed to do now?” “I’ll get out of the car and have a word with it,” I said. “He has a very impressive rack,” he said, “and I don’t think it’s there for picking berries.” “Good point,” I said. The stag sniffed the car and examined it, but soon lost interest and ambled across the highway. Morgan drove on, even more slowly than before. Dale called me later that week and said it was done. I said, “What’s done?” He said, “I’ve killed my mother. She was always a liar and wanted to hurt both me and my father.” I said, “But, Dale, she was already dead.” He said, “Not dead enough.” I said, “Then that’s good.” “My father doesn’t know anything. He thought she was a saint,” he said. “Mum’s the word,” I said.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2004 - } - } - }, - "what-the-city-was-like": { - "title": "“What the City Was Like”", - "body": "The city was full of blue devils, and, once, during an eclipse, the river began to glow, and a small body walked out of it carrying a wooden ship full of vegetables, which we mistook for pearls. We made necklaces of them, and tiaras and bracelets, and the small body laughed until its head fell ott, and soon enouh we realized our mistake, and grew weak with our knowledge. Across town, a man lived his entire life without ever going out on the street. He destroyed his part of the city many times without getting off his sofa. But that neighborhood has always blossomed afresh. Pixies germinated in the still pools under streetlights. Cattle grazed in back of the bakery and helped deliver baked goods to the needy. A mouse issued commands in a benevolent, judicious and cheerful manner. A small, headless body lay in the road, and passersby clicked their heels. Across the street the Military Academy had many historic spots on its windows, thanks, in part, to the rivers and canals which carried large quantities of freight into the treasure-house of maps and music scores necessary for each war. The spots were all given names by the janitors--River of Unwavering Desire, River of Untruth, Spring of Spies, Rill of Good Enough Hotelkeepers, and then, of course, there was the Spot of Spots. Nobody paid any attention to the wars, though there must have been a few or more. The citizens of the city were wanderers who did not live in any one place but roamed the boulevards and alleyways picking up gumwrappers and setting them down again. We were relieved when Modern ice skating was finally invented: the nuns glided in circles for days on end, and this was the greatest blessing. Behind City Hall salt was mined under a powerful magnifying glass, and each grain was tasted by someone named Mildred until she became a stenographer and moved away, and no one could read her diacritical remarks, except the little devils. For years Mildred sent cards at Christmas, and then nothing, and no one said a thing. The city was covered with mountains which ran straight down the center, and on the southern tip there were several volcanoes which could erupt on demand. Or so it was said, though no one demanded proof. It was a sketchy little volcano of normal girth where Dolly Madison hosted her parties more often than I care to remember. She served ice cream when she was coming. She came early and stayed late, as they say, until all the lights were off and the guests had lost all hope of regaining their senses. It is not certain if she possessed a cupcake at that time. She might have had one in her cellar as no one was allowed to penetrate her there. And then the prairie dogs arrived and caused incorrect pips to appear on the radar screen, for which they became famous, and which precipitated the rapid decline of the Know Nothings-not a minute too soon. In the days that followed children were always screaming. You could set their hair on fire and, sure enough, they’d start screaming.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wheelchair-butterfly": { - "title": "“The Wheelchair Butterfly”", - "body": "O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs\nwhere a mouse can commit suicide if he can\n\nconcentrate long enough\non the history book of rodents\nin this underground town\n\nof electrical wheelchairs!\nThe girl who is always pregnant and bruised\nlike a pear\n\nrides her many-stickered bicycle\nbackward up the staircase\nof the abandoned trolleybarn.\n\nYesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze\nin midair; and was plucked like a grape\nby a child who swore he could take care\n\nof it. O confident city where\nthe seeds of poppies pass for carfare,\n\nwhere the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart\nmay slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge\n\nin an orange garage of daydreams,\nwe wait in our loose attics for a new season\n\nas if for an ice-cream truck.\nAn Indian pony crosses the plains\n\nwhispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.\nHoneysuckle says: I thought I could swim.\n\nThe Mayor is urinating on the wrong side\nof the street! A dandelion sends off sparks:\nbeware your hair is locked!\n\nBeware the trumpet wants a glass of water!\nBeware a velvet tabernacle!\n\nBeware the Warden of Light has married\nan old piece of string!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1991 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "where-babies-come-from": { - "title": "“Where Babies Come From”", - "body": "Many are from the Maldives,\nsouthwest of India, and must begin\ncollecting shells almost immediately.\nThe larger ones may prefer coconuts.\nSurvivors move from island to island\nhopping over one another and never\nlooking back. After the typhoons\nhave had their pick, and the birds of prey\nhave finished with theirs, the remaining few\nmust build boats, and in this, of course,\nthey can have no experience, they build\ntheir boats of palm leaves and vines.\nOnce the work is completed, they lie down,\nthoroughly exhausted and confused,\nand a huge wave washes them out to sea.\nAnd that is the last they see of one another.\nIn their dreams Mama and Papa\nare standing on the shore\nfor what seems like an eternity,\nand it is almost always the wrong shore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-white-thing": { - "title": "“The White Thing”", - "body": "I went to my boss’s office and told him I had better go home because I felt sick. He said, “You don’t look sick.” Then I threw up in his wastebasket. He said, “I’m sorry I said that. You had better go home.” I said, “Thank you. I think I will.” I grabbed my hat from the hat rack and headed for the door. I took the elevator down to the first floor and headed for the parking lot. I found my car and got in and started driving home. There was something strange going on. There were palm trees all along the avenues, and I live in the north. There were parrots flying all over the place and birds I’d never seen before. I felt hot and it was winter. People were walking in shorts. I liked it here, better than I’d ever liked it before. Convertibles drove by. I waved at them, but I also felt lost. I wasn’t getting any closer to my home, I felt sure of that. All the usual landmarks were gone, nothing seemed familiar. But I was enjoying my ride, of that I was sure. Women in bathing suits, many of them bikinis. There must be a beach nearby. Yes, there it was. A beautiful white-sand beach. I drove alongside it for miles. Then I turned off onto a side street. It got darker and darker the further I drove. It was a shanty town with poor dilapidated houses and people dressed in winter coats. I found my house among these, needing a roof and broken-down fence. I parked my car and went inside. The furniture was pathetic. I was afraid to sit in the chairs. The food in the refrigerator looked ancient and wild. Just minutes ago I had been on a beautiful beach and now this. I didn’t understand it. How could life turn you upside down so quickly? I went and found the bed and lay down in it. Rats scurried out of it and down to the floor. I closed my eyes and tried to dream of the beach, but sharks kept nipping at my fingers and toes. I swam faster and I started to sink. I was caught in a fisherman’s net. I woke up thrashing and screaming. It was my old home, with lovely furniture and rugs. I went to the fridge and it was full of delicious food, like baked chicken and fresh fruit. I looked out the window. Beautiful houses and lawns surrounded me. I felt so happy. Then I remembered I was sick. I threw up in the wastebasket and collapsed on the floor. I tried to reach for the phone, but I couldn’t make it. I crawled toward it, but then I passed out. When I woke up I was in the hospital, but I didn’t know who I was or what that white thing was leaning over me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-whole-worlds-sadly-talking-to-itself": { - "title": "“The Whole World’s Sadly Talking to Itself”", - "body": "Hands full of sand, I say:\ntake this, this is what I have saved;\nI earned this with my genius,\nand because I love you …\n\ntake this, hurry.\nI am dropping everything.\nAnd then I listened:\nI was not saying anything;\nout of all that had gone into\nthe composition of the language\nand what I knew of it\nI had chiselled these words--\ntake this, hurry--\nand you could not hear me.\nI had said nothing.\nAnd then I am leaving,\n\nmaking ready to go to another street,\nwhen you, mingled between sleep\nand delirium, turned\n\nand handed me an empty sack:\ntake this, friend;\nI am not coming back. The ghost\nof a flower poised on your lip.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1967 - } - } - }, - "why-you-wanna-know-what-time-it-is-you-got-an-appointment-with-your-analyst": { - "title": "“Why You Wanna Know What Time It Is You Got an Appointment with Your Analyst”", - "body": "When I think no thing is _like_ any other thing\nI become speechless, cold, my body turns silver\nand water runs off me, as if repulsed. There I am\nten feet from myself, possessor of nothing,\nuncomprehending of even the simplest particle of dust.\nBut when I say, You are _like_\na swamp-animal during an eclipse,\nI am happy, full of wisdom, loved by children\nand old men alike. I am sorry if this confuses you.\nDuring an eclipse the swamp-animal\nacts as though day were night,\ndrinking when he should be sleeping, etc.\nThis is why men stay up all night\nwriting to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1970 - } - } - }, - "wild-beasts": { - "title": "“Wild Beasts”", - "body": "In the front all the weapons were loaded. We sat there in the dark with not so much as a whisper. We could hear sounds outside--skirrs, rasps, the occasional yap, ting. We were alert, perhaps, too alert. Ready to shoot a fly for just being a fly. When you don’t sleep you start to hallucinate and that’s not good. One night this crazy notion started to possess me: I said, “Who are our enemies anyhow? We don’t have any enemies. What are we doing here? We should be with our families doing what families do. I’m laying down this gun and I’m leaving right now.” I knew there was a chance that one of them might shoot me. Instead they all laid down their guns and we walked right out into the moonlit night, frightened, now, only of ourselves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2000 - } - } - }, - "witches": { - "title": "“Witches”", - "body": "There are all kinds of druids and witches living in the hills around here. They don’t hurt anybody as far as we know. But you can always spot them at the grocery store. First off, they drive these really broken down old pick-up trucks, often with hand-made wooden shelters over beds like they could live in there. And they’re covered in layers of shawls and scarves and bedecked with long gaudy earrings and necklaces and bracelets. And always the long, long hair. They buy huge amounts of supplies, twenty pounds of cheese, giant bags of granola, etc. They move quickly as if afraid of being burned at a stake. We all know who they are and like having them amongst us on their secret missions to decorate their inner Christmas trees with bedevilled human chickenbones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2000 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "with-a-child-all-day": { - "title": "“With a Child All Day”", - "body": "Little ragamuffin, brat, a craving for sen-sen\nas we walked along the _Academie_;\nit is all that interests you.\nI remain quiet and my manner annoys you;\nI’m present and unaccounted for.\nThe tunnels are not crowded in this part of the city.\n\nFinally I say I like dogs, possible dogs, worn thin.\n\nWe’re in the wrong place, our favorite season.\nIll luck has surfaced again and you do as you please.\nI hang on to you around the corner.\nThere is something lacking even now.\nCome, whitewash my fasting worth.\n\nSomething living touched me; a plant?\nYou pretend to recognize old friends.\nWhy this embarrassed despair, this recoiling?\nCity of Love--I can’t breathe.\n\nOur own God gave us, gave us the bird.\n\nGoodbye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1978 - } - } - }, - "the-workforce": { - "title": "“The Workforce”", - "body": "Do you have adequate oxen for the job?\nNo, my oxen are inadequate.\nWell, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job?\nI would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately.\nI’ll see if I can get them for you.\nI’d be obliged if you could do that for me.\nCertainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men?\nWe have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient.\nI’ll have them delivered on the morrow.\nDo you need maps of the mountains and the underworld?\nWe have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld.\nOf course you lack maps of the underworld,\nthere are no maps of the underworld.\nAnd, besides, you don’t want to go there, it’s stuffy.\nI had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter.\nIt’s just that you asked me if I needed maps …\nYes, yes, it’s my fault, I got carried away.\nWhat do you need, then, you tell me?\nWe need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens,\npigs, cows, buckets and women.\nWomen?\nWe have no women.\nYou’re a sorry lot, then.\nWe are a sorry lot, sir.\nWell, I can’t get you women.\nI assumed as much, sir.\nWhat are you going to do without women, then?\nWe will suffer, sir. And then we’ll die out one by one.\nCan any of you sing?\nYes, sir, we have many fine singers among us.\nOrder them to begin singing immediately.\nEither women will find you this way or you will die\ncomforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves\nwith the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves.\nSir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 2001 - } - } - }, - "the-wrong-way-home": { - "title": "“The Wrong Way Home”", - "body": "All night a door floated down the river. It tried to remember little incidents of pleasure from its former life, like the time the lovers leaned against it kissing for hours and whispering those famous words. Later, there were harsh words and a shoe was thrown and the door was slammed. Comings and goings by the thousands, the early mornings and late nights, years, years. O they’ve got big plans, they’ll make a bundle. The door was an island that swayed in its sleep. The moon turned the doorknob just slightly, burned its fingers and ran, and still the door said nothing and slept. At least that’s what they like to say, the little fishes and so on. Far away, a bell rang, and then a shot was fired.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1994 - } - } - }, - "you-are-my-destination-and-desire-fading": { - "title": "“You Are My Destination And Desire, Fading”", - "body": "Dawn animal, why don’t you come out now and have a nice cuppa? I am reading the obituaries, strenuously, which is what one does to get ready. I am counting the fissures in my egg. We could go to the islands, the netherworld full of coral, and have our portraits painted in feathers and mud?I know this betokens a kinship too rickety, or even sizzling, for you. Mammoths walked there a decade ago, lonely, tottering along the channels. They looked at their thumbs and shrugged. They took out their brains and hurled them into the reefs. Fm holding a crust of bread in my palm, I see our initials rising from the lithosphere, a couple of pinpoints of utility needed elsewhere, and I remember how to cry, and I remember you, my last kin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "season": "Summer", - "year": 1988 - } - } - }, - "zebras-anything": { - "title": "“Zebras Anything”", - "body": "I wish somebody would give me a couple of live panda bears. After all these years I deserve them. Yesterday I nearly went insane searching for a toucan: “No toucans!” everywhere I went. One son-of-a-bitch even went so far as to say: “Toucans are filthy, disgusting birds, terrible pets; and on the endangered list besides.” And I said, then I’ll take the last one, I’ll be responsible; my pets don’t have to bow and scrape to me. We are equals, this I believe, so give me the pandas.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1975 - } - } - } - } - }, - "edward-taylor": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edward Taylor", - "birth": { - "year": 1642, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1729 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Taylor", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "gods-determinations-touching-his-elect": { - "title": "“God’s Determinations Touching His Elect”", - "body": "Infinity, when all things it beheld\nIn Nothing, and of Nothing all did build,\nUpon what base was fixed the lath wherein\nHe turned this globe and rigalled it so trim?\nWho blew the bellows of His furnace vast?\nOr held the mold wherein the world was cast?\nWho laid its cornerstone? Or whose command?\nWhere stand the pillars upon which it stands?\nWho laced and filleted the earth so fine,\nWith rivers like green ribbons smaragdine?\nWho made the seas its selvedge and it locks\nLike a quilt ball within a silver box?\nWho spread its canopy? Or curtains spun?\nWho in this bowling alley bowled the sun?\nWho made it always when it rises set,\nTo go at once both down, and up to get?\nWho the curtain rods made for this tapestry?\nWho hung the twinkling lanterns in the sky?\nWho? Who did this? Or who is He? Why, know\nIt’s only Might Almighty this did do.\nHis hand hath made this noble work which stands,\nHis glorious handiwork not made by hands.\nWho spake all things from nothing; and with ease.\nCan speak all things to nothing, if He please.\nWhose little finger at His pleasure can\nOut mete ten thousand worlds with half a span:\nWhose Might Almighty can by half a looks\nRoot up the rocks and rock the hills by the roots.\nCan take this mighty world up in His hand,\nAnd shake it like a squitchen or a wand.\nWhose single frown will make the heavens shake\nLike as an aspen-leaf the wind makes quake.\nOh, what a might is this Whose single frown\nDoth shake the world as it would shake it down?\nWhich All on Nothing fet, from Nothing, All:\nHath All on Nothing set, lts Nothing fall.\nGave All to nothing-man indeed, whereby\nThrough nothing-man all might him glorify.\nIn Nothing then embossed the brightest gem\nMore precious than all preciousness in them.\nBut nothing-man did throw down all by sin:\nAnd darkened that lightsome gem in him.\nThat now his brightest diamond is grown\nDarker by far than any coal-pit stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-the-living-bread": { - "title": "“I Am the Living Bread”", - "body": "I kening through Astronomy Divine\nThe Worlds bright Battlement, wherein I spy\nA Golden Path my Pensill cannot line,\nFrom that bright Throne unto my Threshold ly.\nAnd while my puzzled thoughts about it pore\nI finde the Bread of Life in’t at my doore.\n\nWhen that this Bird of Paradise put in\nThis Wicker Cage (my Corps) to tweedle praise\nHad peckt the Fruite forbad: and so did fling\nAway its Food; and lost its golden dayes;\nIt fell into Celestiall Famine sore:\nAnd never could attain a morsell more.\n\nAlas! alas! Poore Bird, what wilt thou doe?\nThe Creatures field no food for Souls e’re gave.\nAnd if thou knock at Angells dores they show\nAn Empty Barrell: they no soul bread have.\nAlas! Poore Bird, the Worlds White Loafe is done\nAnd cannot yield thee here the smallest Crumb.\n\nIn this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run\nOut streams of Grace: And he to end all strife\nThe Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son\nGrinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.\nWhich Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands\nDisht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.\n\nDid God mould up this Bread in Heaven, and bake,\nWhich from his Table came, and to thine goeth?\nDoth he bespeake thee thus, This Soule Bread take.\nCome Eate thy fill of this thy Gods White Loafe?\nIts Food too fine for Angells, yet come, take\nAnd Eate thy fill. Its Heavens Sugar Cake.\n\nWhat Grace is this knead in this Loafe? This thing\nSouls are but petty things it to admire.\nYee Angells, help: This fill would to the brim\nHeav’ns whelm’d-down Chrystall meele Bowle, yea and higher.\nThis Bread of Life dropt in thy mouth, doth Cry.\nEate, Eate me, Soul, and thou shalt never dy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "corpus_christi" - } - } - } - } - }, - "sara-teasdale": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sara Teasdale", - "birth": { - "year": 1884 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Teasdale", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-a-girl": { - "title": "“Advice to a Girl”", - "body": "No one worth possessing\nCan be quite possessed;\nLay that on your heart,\nMy young angry dear;\nThis truth, this hard and precious stone,\nLay it on your hot cheek,\nLet it hide your tear.\nHold it like a crystal\nWhen you are alone\nAnd gaze in the depths of the icy stone.\nLong, look long and you will be blessed:\nNo one worth possessing\nCan be quite possessed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-ballad-of-the-two-knights": { - "title": "“A Ballad of the Two Knights”", - "body": "Two knights rode forth at early dawn\nA-seeking maids to wed,\nSaid one, “My lady must be fair,\nWith gold hair on her head.”\n\nThen spake the other knight-at-arms:\n“I care not for her face,\nBut she I love must be a dove\nFor purity and grace.”\n\nAnd each knight blew upon his horn\nAnd went his separate way,\nAnd each knight found a lady-love\nBefore the fall of day.\n\nBut she was brown who should have had\nThe shining yellow hair--\nI ween the knights forgot their words\nOr else they ceased to care.\n\nFor he who wanted purity\nBrought home a wanton wild,\nAnd when each saw the other knight\nI ween that each knight smiled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "child-child": { - "title": "“Child, Child”", - "body": "Child, child, love while you can\nThe voice and the eyes and the soul of a man;\nNever fear though it break your heart--\nOut of the wound new joy will start;\nOnly love proudly and gladly and well,\nThough love be heaven or love be hell.\n\nChild, child, love while you may,\nFor life is short as a happy day;\nNever fear the thing you feel--\nOnly by love is life made real;\nLove, for the deadly sins are seven,\nOnly through love will you enter heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hidden-love": { - "title": "“Hidden Love”", - "body": "I hid the love within my heart,\nAnd lit the laughter in my eyes,\nThat when we meet he may not know\nMy love that never dies.\n\nBut sometimes when he dreams at night\nOf fragrant forests green and dim,\nIt may be that my love crept out\nAnd brought the dream to him.\n\nAnd sometimes when his heart is sick\nAnd suddenly grows well again,\nIt may be that my love was there\nTo free his life of pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-shall-not-care": { - "title": "“I Shall Not Care”", - "body": "When I am dead and over me bright April\nShakes out her rain-drenched hair,\nTho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted,\nI shall not care.\n\nI shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful\nWhen rain bends down the bough,\nAnd I shall be more silent and cold-hearted\nThan you are now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "in-spring-santa-barbara": { - "title": "“In Spring, Santa Barbara”", - "body": "I have been happy two weeks together,\nMy love is coming home to me,\nGold and silver is the weather\nAnd smooth as lapis is the sea.\nThe earth has turned its brown to green\nAfter three nights of humming rain,\nAnd in the valleys peck and preen\nLinnets with a scarlet stain.\nHigh in the mountains all alone\nThe wild swans whistle on the lakes,\nBut I have been as still as stone,\nMy heart sings only when it breaks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-long-hill": { - "title": "“The Long Hill”", - "body": "I must have passed the crest a while ago\nAnd now I am going down--\nStrange to have crossed the crest and not to know,\nBut the brambles were always grabbing at the hem of my gown.\n\nAll the morning I thought how proud I should be\nTo stand there straight as a queen,\nWrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me--\nBut the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.\n\nIt was nearly level along the beaten track\nAnd the brambles caught in my gown--\nBut it’s no use now to think of turning back,\nThe rest of the way will be only going down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer": { - "title": "“A Prayer”", - "body": "When I am dying, let me know\nThat I loved the blowing snow\nAlthough it stung like whips;\nThat I loved all lovely things\nAnd I tried to take their stings\nWith gay unembittered lips;\nThat I loved with all my strength,\nTo my soul’s full depth and length,\nCareless if my heart must break,\nThat I sang as children sing\nFitting tunes to everything,\nLoving life for its own sake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "spring-in-wartime": { - "title": "“Spring in Wartime”", - "body": "I feel the spring far off, far off,\nThe faint, far scent of bud and leaf--\nOh, how can spring take heart to come\nTo a world in grief,\nDeep grief?\n\nThe sun turns north, the days grow long,\nLater the evening star grows bright--\nHow can the daylight linger on\nFor men to fight,\nStill fight?\n\nThe grass is waking in the ground,\nSoon it will rise and blow in waves--\nHow can it have the heart to sway\nOver the graves,\nNew graves?\n\nUnder the boughs where lovers walked\nThe apple-blooms will shed their breath--\nBut what of all the lovers now\nParted by Death,\nGrey Death?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "there-will-come-soft-rains": { - "title": "“There Will Come Soft Rains”", - "body": "There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,\nAnd swallows circling with their shimmering sound;\n\nAnd frogs in the pools singing at night,\nAnd wild plum trees in tremulous white;\n\nRobins will wear their feathery fire,\nWhistling their whims on a low fence-wire;\n\nAnd not one will know of the war, not one\nWill care at last when it is done.\n\nNot one would mind, neither bird nor tree,\nIf mankind perished utterly;\n\nAnd Spring herself, when she woke at dawn\nWould scarcely know that we were gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "those-who-love": { - "title": "“Those Who Love”", - "body": "Those who love the most\nDo not talk of their love;\nFrancesca, Guenevere,\nDierdre, Iseult, Heloise\nIn the fragrant gardens of heaven\nAre silent, or speak, if at all,\nOf fragile, inconsequent things.\n\nAnd a woman I used to know\nWho loved one man from her youth,\nAgainst the strength of the fates\nFighting in lonely pride,\nNever spoke of this thing,\nBut hearing his name by chance,\nA light would pass over her face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wisdom": { - "title": "“Wisdom”", - "body": "It was a night of early spring,\nThe winter-sleep was scarcely broken;\nAround us shadows and the wind\nListened for what was never spoken.\n\nThough half a score of years are gone,\nSpring comes as sharply now as then--\nBut if we had it all to do\nIt would be done the same again.\n\nIt was a spring that never came;\nBut we have lived enough to know\nThat what we never have, remains;\nIt is the things we have that go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - } - } - }, - "alfred-tennyson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alfred, Lord Tennyson", - "birth": { - "year": 1809 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 40 - }, - "poems": { - "as-thro-the-land-at-eve-we-went": { - "title": "“As thro’ the land at eve we went”", - "body": "As thro’ the land at eve we went,\n And pluck’d the ripen’d ears,\nWe fell out, my wife and I,\nO we fell out I know not why,\n And kiss’d again with tears.\nAnd blessings on the falling out\n That all the more endears,\nWhen we fall out with those we love\n And kiss again with tears!\nFor when we came where lies the child\n We lost in other years,\nThere above the little grave,\nO there above the little grave,\n We kiss’d again with tears.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Princess", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "ask-me-no-more": { - "title": "“Ask Me No More”", - "body": "Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;\n The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,\n With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;\nBut O too fond, when have I answer’d thee?\n Ask me no more.\n\nAsk me no more: what answer should I give?\n I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:\n Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!\nAsk me no more, lest I should bid thee live;\n Ask me no more.\n\nAsk me no more: thy fate and mine are seal’d:\n I strove against the stream and all in vain:\n Let the great river take me to the main:\nNo more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;\n Ask me no more.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Princess", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-oriana": { - "title": "“The Ballad of Oriana”", - "body": "My heart is wasted with my woe,\n Oriana.\nThere is no rest for me below,\n Oriana.\nWhen the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,\nAnd loud the Norland whirlwinds blow,\n Oriana,\nAlone I wander to and fro,\n Oriana.\n\nEre the light on dark was growing,\n Oriana,\nAt midnight the cock was crowing,\n Oriana:\nWinds were blowing, waters flowing,\nWe heard the steeds to battle going,\n Oriana,\nAloud the hollow bugle blowing,\n Oriana.\n\nIn the yew-wood black as night,\n Oriana,\nEre I rode into the fight.\n Oriana,\nWhile blissful tears blinded my sight\nBy star-shine and by moonlight,\n Oriana,\nI to thee my troth did plight,\n Oriana.\n\nShe stood upon the castle wall,\n Oriana:\nShe watch’d my crest among them all,\n Oriana:\nShe saw me fight, she heard me call,\nWhen forth there stept a foeman tall,\n Oriana,\nAtween me and the castle wall,\n Oriana.\n\nThe bitter arrow went aside,\n Oriana:\nThe false, false arrow went aside,\n Oriana;\nThe damned arrow glanced aside,\nAnd pierced thy heart, my love, my bride,\n Oriana!\nThy heart, my life, my love, my bride,\n Oriana!\n\nOh! narrow, narrow was the space,\n Oriana.\nLoud, loud rung out the bugle’s brays,\n Oriana.\nOh! deathful stabs were dealt apace,\nThe battle deepen’d in its place,\n Oriana;\nBut I was down upon my face,\n Oriana.\n\nThey should have stabb’d me where I lay,\n Oriana!\nHow could I rise and come away,\n Oriana?\nHow could I look upon the day?\nThey should have stabb’d me where I lay,\n Oriana--\nThey should have trod me into clay,\n Oriana.\n\nOh! breaking heart that will not break,\n Oriana;\nOh! pale, pale face so sweet and meek,\n Oriana.\nThou smilest, but thou dost not speak,\nAnd then the tears run down my cheek,\n Oriana:\nWhat wantest thou? whom dost thou seek,\n Oriana?\n\nI cry aloud: none hear my cries,\n Oriana.\nThou comest atween me and the skies,\n Oriana.\nI feel the tears of blood arise\nUp from my heart unto my eyes,\n Oriana.\nWithin thy heart my arrow lies,\n Oriana.\n\nOh cursed hand! Oh cursed blow!\n Oriana!\nOh happy thou that liest low,\n Oriana!\nAll night the silence seems to flow\nBeside me in my utter woe,\n Oriana.\nA weary, weary way I go,\n Oriana!\n\nWhen Norland winds pipe down the sea,\n Oriana,\nI walk, I dare not think of thee,\n Oriana.\nThou liest beneath the greenwood tree,\nI dare not die and come to thee,\n Oriana.\nI hear the roaring of the sea,\n Oriana.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "break-break-break": { - "title": "“Break, Break, Break”", - "body": "Break, break, break,\n On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!\nAnd I would that my tongue could utter\n The thoughts that arise in me.\n\nO, well for the fisherman’s boy,\n That he shouts with his sister at play!\nO, well for the sailor lad,\n That he sings in his boat on the bay!\n\nAnd the stately ships go on\n To their haven under the hill;\nBut O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,\n And the sound of a voice that is still!\n\nBreak, break, break\n At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!\nBut the tender grace of a day that is dead\n Will never come back to me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1842 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-charge-of-the-light-brigade": { - "title": "“The Charge of the Light Brigade”", - "body": "Half a league, half a league,\nHalf a league onward,\nAll in the valley of Death\n Rode the six hundred.\n“Forward, the Light Brigade!\nCharge for the guns!” he said.\nInto the valley of Death\n Rode the six hundred.\n\n“Forward, the Light Brigade!”\nWas there a man dismayed?\nNot though the soldier knew\n Someone had blundered.\n Theirs not to make reply,\n Theirs not to reason why,\n Theirs but to do and die.\n Into the valley of Death\n Rode the six hundred.\n\nCannon to right of them,\nCannon to left of them,\nCannon in front of them\n Volleyed and thundered;\nStormed at with shot and shell,\nBoldly they rode and well,\nInto the jaws of Death,\nInto the mouth of hell\n Rode the six hundred.\n\nFlashed all their sabres bare,\nFlashed as they turned in air\nSabring the gunners there,\nCharging an army, while\n All the world wondered.\nPlunged in the battery-smoke\nRight through the line they broke;\nCossack and Russian\nReeled from the sabre stroke\n Shattered and sundered.\nThen they rode back, but not\n Not the six hundred.\n\nCannon to right of them,\nCannon to left of them,\nCannon behind them\n Volleyed and thundered;\nStormed at with shot and shell,\nWhile horse and hero fell.\nThey that had fought so well\nCame through the jaws of Death,\nBack from the mouth of hell,\nAll that was left of them,\n Left of six hundred.\n\nWhen can their glory fade?\nO the wild charge they made!\n All the world wondered.\nHonour the charge they made!\nHonour the Light Brigade,\n Noble six hundred!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1854 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "circumstance": { - "title": "“Circumstance”", - "body": "Two children in two neighbour villages\nPlaying mad pranks along the heathy leas;\nTwo strangers meeting at a festival;\nTwo lovers whispering by an orchard wall;\nTwo lives bound fast in one with golden ease;\nTwo graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower,\nWash’d with still rains and daisy-blossomed;\nTwo children in one hamlet born and bred;\nSo runs the round of life from hour to hour.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "claribel": { - "title": "“Claribel”", - "body": "Where Claribel low-lieth\nThe breezes pause and die,\nLetting the rose-leaves fall:\nBut the solemn oak-tree sigheth,\nThick-leaved, ambrosial,\nWith an ancient melody\nOf an inward agony,\nWhere Claribel low-lieth.\n\nAt eve the beetle boometh\nAthwart the thicket lone:\nAt noon the wild bee hummeth\nAbout the moss’d headstone:\nAt midnight the moon cometh,\nAnd looketh down alone.\nHer song the lintwhite swelleth,\nThe clear-voiced mavis dwelleth,\nThe callow throstle lispeth,\nThe slumbrous wave outwelleth,\nThe babbling runnel crispeth,\nThe hollow grot replieth\nWhere Claribel low-lieth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "come-down-o-maid-from-yonder-mountain-height": { - "title": "“Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height …”", - "body": "Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:\nWhat pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)\nIn height and cold, the splendour of the hills?\nBut cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease\nTo glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,\nTo sit a star upon the sparkling spire;\nAnd come, for Love is of the valley, come,\nFor Love is of the valley, come thou down\nAnd find him; by the happy threshold, he,\nOr hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,\nOr red with spirted purple of the vats,\nOr foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk\nWith Death and Morning on the silver horns,\nNor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,\nNor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,\nThat huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls\nTo roll the torrent out of dusky doors:\nBut follow; let the torrent dance thee down\nTo find him in the valley; let the wild\nLean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave\nThe monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill\nTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,\nThat like a broken purpose waste in air:\nSo waste not thou; but come; for all the vales\nAwait thee; azure pillars of the hearth\nArise to thee; the children call, and I\nThy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound,\nSweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;\nMyriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn,\nThe moan of doves in immemorial elms,\nAnd murmuring of innumerable bees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "crossing-the-bar": { - "title": "“Crossing the Bar”", - "body": "Sunset and evening star,\n And one clear call for me!\nAnd may there be no moaning of the bar,\n When I put out to sea,\n\nBut such a tide as moving seems asleep,\n Too full for sound and foam,\nWhen that which drew from out the boundless deep\n Turns again home.\n\nTwilight and evening bell,\n And after that the dark!\nAnd may there be no sadness of farewell,\n When I embark;\n\nFor tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place\n The flood may bear me far,\nI hope to see my Pilot face to face\n When I have crost the bar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1889 - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-old-year": { - "title": "“The Death of the Old Year”", - "body": "Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,\nAnd the winter winds are wearily sighing:\nToll ye the church bell sad and slow,\nAnd tread softly and speak low,\nFor the old year lies a-dying.\n Old year you must not die;\n You came to us so readily,\n You lived with us so steadily,\n Old year, you shall not die.\n\nHe lieth still: he doth not move:\nHe will not see the dawn of day.\nHe hath no other life above.\nHe gave me a friend and a true truelove\nAnd the New-year will take ’em away.\n Old year you must not go;\n So long you have been with us,\n Such joy as you have seen with us,\n Old year, you shall not go.\n\nHe froth’d his bumpers to the brim;\nA jollier year we shall not see.\nBut tho’ his eyes are waxing dim,\nAnd tho’ his foes speak ill of him,\nHe was a friend to me.\n Old year, you shall not die;\n We did so laugh and cry with you,\n I’ve half a mind to die with you,\n Old year, if you must die.\n\nHe was full of joke and jest,\nBut all his merry quips are o’er.\nTo see him die across the waste\nHis son and heir doth ride post-haste,\nBut he’ll be dead before.\n Every one for his own.\n The night is starry and cold, my friend,\n And the New-year blithe and bold, my friend,\n Comes up to take his own.\n\nHow hard he breathes! over the snow\nI heard just now the crowing cock.\nThe shadows flicker to and fro:\nThe cricket chirps: the light burns low:\n’Tis nearly twelve o’clock.\n Shake hands, before you die.\n Old year, we’ll dearly rue for you:\n What is it we can do for you?\n Speak out before you die.\n\nHis face is growing sharp and thin.\nAlack! our friend is gone,\nClose up his eyes: tie up his chin:\nStep from the corpse, and let him in\nThat standeth there alone,\n And waiteth at the door.\n There’s a new foot on the floor, my friend,\n And a new face at the door, my friend,\n A new face at the door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1833 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-eagle": { - "title": "“The Eagle”", - "body": "He clasps the crag with crooked hands;\nClose to the sun in lonely lands,\nRing’d with the azure world, he stands.\n\nThe wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;\nHe watches from his mountain walls,\nAnd like a thunderbolt he falls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1851 - } - } - }, - "home-they-brought-her-warrior-dead": { - "title": "“Home they brought her warrior dead …”", - "body": "Home they brought her warrior dead:\n She nor swoon’d nor utter’d cry:\nAll her maidens, watching, said,\n “She must weep or she will die.”\n\nThen they praised him, soft and low,\n Call’d him worthy to be loved,\nTruest friend and noblest foe;\n Yet she neither spoke nor moved.\n\nStole a maiden from her place,\n Lightly to the warrior stepped,\nTook the face-cloth from the face;\n Yet she neither moved nor wept.\n\nRose a nurse of ninety years,\n Set his child upon her knee--\nLike summer tempest came her tears--\n “Sweet my child, I live for thee.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "i-have-led-her-home": { - "title": "“I Have Led Her Home”", - "body": "I have led her home, my love, my only friend,\nThere is none like her, none.\nAnd never yet so warmly ran my blood\nAnd sweetly, on and on\nCalming itself to the long-wished-for end,\nFull to the banks, close on the promised good.\n\nNone like her, none.\nJust now the dry-tongued laurels’ pattering talk\nSeem’d her light foot along the garden walk,\nAnd shook my heart to think she comes once more;\nBut even then I heard her close the door,\nThe gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone.\n\nThere is none like her, none.\nNor will be when our summers have deceased.\nO, art thou sighing for Lebanon\nIn the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East,\nSighing for Lebanon,\nDark cedar, tho’ thy limbs have here increased,\nUpon a pastoral slope as fair,\n\nAnd looking to the South, and fed\nWith honeyed rain and delicate air,\nAnd haunted by the starry head\nOf her whose gentle will has changed my fate,\nAnd made my life a perfumed altar-frame;\nAnd over whom thy darkness must have spread\nWith such delight as theirs of old, thy great\nForefathers of the thornless garden, there\nShadowing the snow-limbed Eve from whom she came.\n\nHere will I lie, while these long branches sway,\nAnd you fair stars that crown a happy day\nGo in and out as if at merry play,\nWho am no more so all forlorn,\nAs when it seemed far better to be born\nTo labour and the mattock-hardened hand\nThan nursed at ease and brought to understand\nA sad astrology, the boundless plan\nThat makes you tyrants in your iron skies,\nInnumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes,\nCold fires, yet with power to burn and brand\nHis nothingness into man.\n\nBut now shine on, and what care I,\nWho in this stormy gulf have found a pearl\nThe countercharm of space and hollow sky,\nAnd do accept my madness, and would die\nTo save from some slight shame one simple girl.\n\nWould die; for sullen-seeming Death may give\nMore life to Love than is or ever was\nIn our low world, where yet ’tis sweet to live.\nLet no one ask me how it came to pass;\nIt seems that I am happy, that to me\nA livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,\nA purer sapphire melts into the sea.\n\nNot die; but live a life of truest breath,\nAnd teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs.\nOh, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs,\nSpice his fair banquet with the dust of death?\n\nMake answer, Maud my bliss,\nMaud made my Maud by that long loving kiss,\nLife of my life, wilt thou not answer this?\n“The dusky strand of Death inwoven here\nWith dear Love’s tie, makes love himself more dear.”\nIs that enchanted moan only the swell\nOf the long waves that roll in yonder bay?\nAnd hark the clock within, the silver knell\nOf twelve sweet hours that past in bridal white,\nAnd die to live, long as my pulses play;\nBut now by this my love has closed her sight\nAnd given false death her hand, and stol’n away\nTo dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell\n\nAmong the fragments of the golden day.\nMay nothing there her maiden grace affright!\nDear heart, I feel with thee the drowsy spell.\nMy bride to be, my evermore delight,\nMy own heart’s heart, my ownest own, farewell;\nIt is but for a little space I go:\nAnd ye meanwhile far over moor and fell\nBeat to the noiseless music of the night!\nHas our whole earth gone nearer to the glow\nOf your soft splendour that you look so bright?\nI have climbed nearer out of lonely Hell.\nBeat, happy stars, timing with things below,\nBeat with my heart more blest than heart can tell.\nBlest, but for some dark undercurrent woe\nThat seems to draw--but it shall not be so:\nLet all be well, be well.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Maud", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "isabel": { - "title": "“Isabel”", - "body": "Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed\nWith the clear-pointed flame of chastity,\nClear, without heat, undying, tended by\nPure vestal thoughts in the translucent fane\nOf her still spirit; locks not wide-dispread,\nMadonna-wise on either side her head;\nSweet lips whereon perpetually did reign\nThe summer calm of golden charity,\nWere fixed shadows of thy fixed mood,\nRevered Isabel, the crown and head,\nThe stately flower of female fortitude,\nOf perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead.\n\nThe intuitive decision of a bright\nAnd thorough-edged intellect to part\nError from crime; a prudence to withhold;\nThe laws of marriage character’d in gold\nUpon the blanched tablets of her heart;\nA love still burning upward, giving light\nTo read those laws; an accent very low\nIn blandishment, but a most silver flow\nOf subtle-paced counsel in distress,\nRight to the heart and brain, tho’ undescried,\nWinning its way with extreme gentleness\nThro’ all the outworks of suspicious pride;\nA courage to endure and to obey;\nA hate of gossip parlance, and of sway,\nCrown’d Isabel, thro’ all her placid life,\nThe queen of marriage, a most perfect wife.\n\nThe mellow’d reflex of a winter moon;\nA clear stream flowing with a muddy one,\nTill in its onward current it absorbs\nWith swifter movement and in purer light\nThe vexed eddies of its wayward brother:\nA leaning and upbearing parasite,\nClothing the stem, which else had fallen quite,\nWith cluster’d flower-bells and ambrosial orbs\nOf rich fruit-bunches leaning on each other--\nShadow forth thee:--the world hath not another\n(Though all her fairest forms are types of thee,\nAnd thou of God in thy great charity)\nOf such a finish’d chasten’d purity,\nAnd through thine eyes, e’en in thy soul, I see\nA lamp of vestal fire burning eternally.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-kraken": { - "title": "“The Kraken”", - "body": "Below the thunders of the upper deep,\nFar, far beneath in the abysmal sea,\nHis ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep\nThe Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee\nAbout his shadowy sides; above him swell\nHuge sponges of millennial growth and height;\nAnd far away into the sickly light,\nFrom many a wondrous grot and secret cell\nUnnumbered and enormous polypi\nWinnow with giant arms the slumbering green.\nThere hath he lain for ages, and will lie\nBattening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,\nUntil the latter fire shall heat the deep;\nThen once by man and angels to be seen,\nIn roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1830 - } - } - }, - "late-late-so-late": { - "title": "“Late, Late, so Late”", - "body": "Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!\nLate, late, so late! but we can enter still.\nToo late, too late! ye cannot enter now.\n\nNo light had we: for that we do repent;\nAnd learning this, the bridegroom will relent.\nToo late, too late! ye cannot enter now.\n\nNo light: so late! and dark and chill the night!\nO, let us in, that we may find the light!\nToo late, too late: ye cannot enter now.\n\nHave we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet?\nO, let us in, tho’ late, to kiss his feet!\nNo, no, too late! ye cannot enter now.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Idylls of the Kings", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1859 - } - } - }, - "locksley-hall": { - "title": "“Locksley Hall”", - "body": "Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’t is early morn:\nLeave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.\n\n’T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,\nDreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;\n\nLocksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,\nAnd the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.\n\nMany a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,\nDid I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.\n\nMany a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,\nGlitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.\n\nHere about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime\nWith the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;\n\nWhen the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;\nWhen I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:\n\nWhen I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;\nSaw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.--\n\nIn the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;\nIn the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;\n\nIn the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;\nIn the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.\n\nThen her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,\nAnd her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.\n\nAnd I said, “My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,\nTrust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.”\n\nOn her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,\nAs I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.\n\nAnd she turn’d--her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs--\nAll the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes--\n\nSaying, “I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong”;\nSaying, “Dost thou love me, cousin?” weeping, “I have loved thee long.”\n\nLove took up the glass of Time, and turn’d it in his glowing hands;\nEvery moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.\n\nLove took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;\nSmote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.\n\nMany a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,\nAnd her whisper throng’d my pulses with the fulness of the Spring.\n\nMany an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,\nAnd our spirits rush’d together at the touching of the lips.\n\nO my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!\nO the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!\n\nFalser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,\nPuppet to a father’s threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!\n\nIs it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline\nOn a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!\n\nYet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,\nWhat is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.\n\nAs the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,\nAnd the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.\n\nHe will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,\nSomething better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.\n\nWhat is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine.\nGo to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine.\n\nIt may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:\nSoothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.\n\nHe will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand--\nBetter thou wert dead before me, tho’ I slew thee with my hand!\n\nBetter thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart’s disgrace,\nRoll’d in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.\n\nCursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!\nCursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!\n\nCursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature’s rule!\nCursed be the gold that gilds the straiten’d forehead of the fool!\n\nWell--’t is well that I should bluster!--Hadst thou less unworthy proved--\nWould to God--for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.\n\nAm I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?\nI will pluck it from my bosom, tho’ my heart be at the root.\n\nNever, tho’ my mortal summers to such length of years should come\nAs the many-winter’d crow that leads the clanging rookery home.\n\nWhere is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?\nCan I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?\n\nI remember one that perish’d; sweetly did she speak and move;\nSuch a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.\n\nCan I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?\nNo--she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore.\n\nComfort? comfort scorn’d of devils! this is truth the poet sings,\nThat a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.\n\nDrug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,\nIn the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.\n\nLike a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,\nWhere the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.\n\nThen a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,\nTo thy widow’d marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.\n\nThou shalt hear the “Never, never,” whisper’d by the phantom years,\nAnd a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;\n\nAnd an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.\nTurn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.\n\nNay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.\n’T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.\n\nBaby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest.\nBaby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother’s breast.\n\nO, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.\nHalf is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.\n\nO, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,\nWith a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter’s heart.\n\n“They were dangerous guides the feelings--she herself was not exempt--\nTruly, she herself had suffer’d”--Perish in thy self-contempt!\n\nOverlive it--lower yet--be happy! wherefore should I care?\nI myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.\n\nWhat is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?\nEvery door is barr’d with gold, and opens but to golden keys.\n\nEvery gate is throng’d with suitors, all the markets overflow.\nI have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?\n\nI had been content to perish, falling on the foeman’s ground,\nWhen the ranks are roll’d in vapour, and the winds are laid with sound.\n\nBut the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels,\nAnd the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other’s heels.\n\nCan I but relive in sadness? I will turn that earlier page.\nHide me from my deep emotion, O thou wondrous Mother-Age!\n\nMake me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife,\nWhen I heard my days before me, and the tumult of my life;\n\nYearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield,\nEager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father’s field,\n\nAnd at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn,\nSees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn;\n\nAnd his spirit leaps within him to be gone before him then,\nUnderneath the light he looks at, in among the throngs of men:\n\nMen, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:\nThat which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:\n\nFor I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,\nSaw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;\n\nSaw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,\nPilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;\n\nHeard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew\nFrom the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;\n\nFar along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,\nWith the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;\n\nTill the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d\nIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.\n\nThere the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,\nAnd the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.\n\nSo I triumph’d ere my passion sweeping thro’ me left me dry,\nLeft me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;\n\nEye, to which all order festers, all things here are out of joint:\nScience moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point:\n\nSlowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,\nGlares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.\n\nYet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,\nAnd the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.\n\nWhat is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,\nTho’ the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy’s?\n\nKnowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,\nAnd the individual withers, and the world is more and more.\n\nKnowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,\nFull of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.\n\nHark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,\nThey to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:\n\nShall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder’d string?\nI am shamed thro’ all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.\n\nWeakness to be wroth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain--\nNature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:\n\nWoman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine,\nAre as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine--\n\nHere at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat\nDeep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;\n\nWhere in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr’d,--\nI was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle’s ward.\n\nOr to burst all links of habit--there to wander far away,\nOn from island unto island at the gateways of the day.\n\nLarger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,\nBreadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.\n\nNever comes the trader, never floats an European flag,\nSlides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;\n\nDroops the heavy-blossom’d bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree--\nSummer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.\n\nThere methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,\nIn the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.\n\nThere the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing space;\nI will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.\n\nIron-jointed, supple-sinew’d, they shall dive, and they shall run,\nCatch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;\n\nWhistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,\nNot with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books--\n\nFool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,\nBut I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.\n\nI, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,\nLike a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!\n\nMated with a squalid savage--what to me were sun or clime?\nI the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time--\n\nI that rather held it better men should perish one by one,\nThan that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua’s moon in Ajalon!\n\nNot in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,\nLet the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.\n\nThro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;\nBetter fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.\n\nMother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as when life begun:\nRift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh the Sun.\n\nO, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.\nAncient founts of inspiration well thro’ all my fancy yet.\n\nHowsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!\nNow for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.\n\nComes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,\nCramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.\n\nLet it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;\nFor the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1842 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-lotos-eaters": { - "title": "“The Lotos-Eaters”", - "body": "“Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,\n“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”\nIn the afternoon they came unto a land\nIn which it seemed always afternoon.\nAll round the coast the languid air did swoon,\nBreathing like one that hath a weary dream.\nFull-faced above the valley stood the moon;\nAnd like a downward smoke, the slender stream\nAlong the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.\n\nA land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,\nSlow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;\nAnd some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,\nRolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.\nThey saw the gleaming river seaward flow\nFrom the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,\nThree silent pinnacles of aged snow,\nStood sunset-flush’d: and, dew’d with showery drops,\nUp-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse.\n\nThe charmed sunset linger’d low adown\nIn the red West: thro’ mountain clefts the dale\nWas seen far inland, and the yellow down\nBorder’d with palm, and many a winding vale\nAnd meadow, set with slender galingale;\nA land where all things always seem’d the same!\nAnd round about the keel with faces pale,\nDark faces pale against that rosy flame,\nThe mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.\n\nBranches they bore of that enchanted stem,\nLaden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave\nTo each, but whoso did receive of them,\nAnd taste, to him the gushing of the wave\nFar far away did seem to mourn and rave\nOn alien shores; and if his fellow spake,\nHis voice was thin, as voices from the grave;\nAnd deep-asleep he seem’d, yet all awake,\nAnd music in his ears his beating heart did make.\n\nThey sat them down upon the yellow sand,\nBetween the sun and moon upon the shore;\nAnd sweet it was to dream of Fatherland,\nOf child, and wife, and slave; but evermore\nMost weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,\nWeary the wandering fields of barren foam.\nThen some one said, “We will return no more”;\nAnd all at once they sang, “Our island home\nIs far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”\n\n\n_Choric Song_\n\n# I.\n\nThere is sweet music here that softer falls\nThan petals from blown roses on the grass,\nOr night-dews on still waters between walls\nOf shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;\nMusic that gentlier on the spirit lies,\nThan tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;\nMusic that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.\nHere are cool mosses deep,\nAnd thro’ the moss the ivies creep,\nAnd in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,\nAnd from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhy are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,\nAnd utterly consumed with sharp distress,\nWhile all things else have rest from weariness?\nAll things have rest: why should we toil alone,\nWe only toil, who are the first of things,\nAnd make perpetual moan,\nStill from one sorrow to another thrown:\nNor ever fold our wings,\nAnd cease from wanderings,\nNor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;\nNor harken what the inner spirit sings,\n“There is no joy but calm!”\nWhy should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?\n\n\n# III.\n\nLo! in the middle of the wood,\nThe folded leaf is woo’d from out the bud\nWith winds upon the branch, and there\nGrows green and broad, and takes no care,\nSun-steep’d at noon, and in the moon\nNightly dew-fed; and turning yellow\nFalls, and floats adown the air.\nLo! sweeten’d with the summer light,\nThe full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,\nDrops in a silent autumn night.\nAll its allotted length of days\nThe flower ripens in its place,\nRipens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,\nFast-rooted in the fruitful soil.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHateful is the dark-blue sky,\nVaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.\nDeath is the end of life; ah, why\nShould life all labour be?\nLet us alone. Time driveth onward fast,\nAnd in a little while our lips are dumb.\nLet us alone. What is it that will last?\nAll things are taken from us, and become\nPortions and parcels of the dreadful past.\nLet us alone. What pleasure can we have\nTo war with evil? Is there any peace\nIn ever climbing up the climbing wave?\nAll things have rest, and ripen toward the grave\nIn silence; ripen, fall and cease:\nGive us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHow sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,\nWith half-shut eyes ever to seem\nFalling asleep in a half-dream!\nTo dream and dream, like yonder amber light,\nWhich will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;\nTo hear each other’s whisper’d speech;\nEating the Lotos day by day,\nTo watch the crisping ripples on the beach,\nAnd tender curving lines of creamy spray;\nTo lend our hearts and spirits wholly\nTo the influence of mild-minded melancholy;\nTo muse and brood and live again in memory,\nWith those old faces of our infancy\nHeap’d over with a mound of grass,\nTwo handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!\n\n\n# VI.\n\nDear is the memory of our wedded lives,\nAnd dear the last embraces of our wives\nAnd their warm tears: but all hath suffer’d change:\nFor surely now our household hearths are cold,\nOur sons inherit us: our looks are strange:\nAnd we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.\nOr else the island princes over-bold\nHave eat our substance, and the minstrel sings\nBefore them of the ten years’ war in Troy,\nAnd our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.\nIs there confusion in the little isle?\nLet what is broken so remain.\nThe Gods are hard to reconcile:\n’Tis hard to settle order once again.\nThere is confusion worse than death,\nTrouble on trouble, pain on pain,\nLong labour unto aged breath,\nSore task to hearts worn out by many wars\nAnd eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nBut, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,\nHow sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)\nWith half-dropt eyelid still,\nBeneath a heaven dark and holy,\nTo watch the long bright river drawing slowly\nHis waters from the purple hill--\nTo hear the dewy echoes calling\nFrom cave to cave thro’ the thick-twined vine--\nTo watch the emerald-colour’d water falling\nThro’ many a wov’n acanthus-wreath divine!\nOnly to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,\nOnly to hear were sweet, stretch’d out beneath the pine.\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nThe Lotos blooms below the barren peak:\nThe Lotos blows by every winding creek:\nAll day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:\nThro’ every hollow cave and alley lone\nRound and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.\nWe have had enough of action, and of motion we,\nRoll’d to starboard, roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,\nWhere the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.\nLet us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,\nIn the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined\nOn the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.\nFor they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d\nFar below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d\nRound their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:\nWhere they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,\nBlight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,\nClanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.\nBut they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song\nSteaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,\nLike a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong;\nChanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,\nSow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,\nStoring yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;\nTill they perish and they suffer--some, ’tis whisper’d--down in hell\nSuffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,\nResting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.\nSurely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore\nThan labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;\nO, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1832 - } - } - }, - "love-and-death": { - "title": "“Love and Death”", - "body": "What time the mighty moon was gathering light\nLove paced the thymy plots of Paradise,\nAnd all about him roll’d his lustrous eyes;\nWhen, turning round a cassia, full in view\nDeath, walking all alone beneath a yew,\nAnd talking to himself, first met his sight:\n“You must begone,” said Death, “these walks are mine.”\nLove wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight;\nYet ere he parted said, “This hour is thine:\nThou art the shadow of life, and as the tree\nStands in the sun and shadows all beneath,\nSo in the light of great eternity\nLife eminent creates the shade of death;\nThe shadow passeth when the tree shall fall,\nBut I shall reign for ever over all.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "mariana-in-the-south": { - "title": "“Mariana in the South”", - "body": "With one black shadow at its feet,\nThe house thro’ all the level shines,\nClose-latticed to the brooding heat,\nAnd silent in its dusty vines:\nA faint-blue ridge upon the right,\nAn empty river-bed before,\nAnd shallows on a distant shore,\nIn glaring sand and inlets bright.\nBut “Aye Mary,” made she moan,\nAnd “Aye Mary,” night and morn,\nAnd “Ah,” she sang, “to be all alone,\nTo live forgotten, and love forlorn.”\n\nShe, as her carol sadder grew,\nFrom brow and bosom slowly down\nThro’ rosy taper fingers drew\nHer streaming curls of deepest brown\nTo left and right, and made appear,\nStill-lighted in a secret shrine,\nHer melancholy eyes divine,\nThe home of woe without a tear.\nAnd “Aye Mary,” was her moan,\n“Madonna, sad is night and morn;”\nAnd “Ah,” she sang, “to be all alone,\nTo live forgotten, and love forlorn.”\n\nTill all the crimson changed, and past\nInto deep orange o’er the sea,\nLow on her knees herself she cast,\nBefore Our Lady murmur’d she:\nComplaining, “Mother, give me grace\nTo help me of my weary load.”\nAnd on the liquid mirror glow’d\nThe clear perfection of her face.\n“Is this the form,” she made her moan,\n“That won his praises night and morn?”\nAnd “Ah,” she said, “but I wake alone,\nI sleep forgotten, I wake forlorn.”\n\nNor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat,\nNor any cloud would cross the vault,\nBut day increased from heat to heat,\nOn stony drought and steaming salt;\nTill now at noon she slept again,\nAnd seem’d knee-deep in mountain grass,\nAnd heard her native breezes pass,\nAnd runlets babbling down the glen.\nShe breathed in sleep a lower moan,\nAnd murmuring, as at night and morn\nShe thought, “My spirit is here alone,\nWalks forgotten, and is forlorn.”\n\nDreaming, she knew it was a dream:\nShe felt he was and was not there.\nShe woke: the babble of the stream\nFell, and, without, the steady glare\nShrank one sick willow sere and small.\nThe river-bed was dusty-white;\nAnd all the furnace of the light\nStruck up against the blinding wall.\nShe whisper’d, with a stifled moan\nMore inward than at night or morn,\n“Sweet Mother, let me not here alone\nLive forgotten and die forlorn.”\n\nAnd, rising, from her bosom drew\nOld letters, breathing of her worth,\nFor “Love,” they said, “must needs be true,\nTo what is loveliest upon earth.”\nAn image seem’d to pass the door,\nTo look at her with slight, and say,\n“But now thy beauty flows away,\nSo be alone for evermore.”\n“O cruel heart,” she changed her tone,\n“And cruel love, whose end is scorn,\nIs this the end to be left alone,\nTo live forgotten, and die forlorn?”\n\nBut sometimes in the falling day\nAn image seem’d to pass the door,\nTo look into her eyes and say,\n“But thou shalt be alone no more.”\nAnd flaming downward over all\nFrom heat to heat the day decreased,\nAnd slowly rounded to the east\nThe one black shadow from the wall.\n“The day to night,” she made her moan,\n“The day to night, the night to morn,\nAnd day and night I am left alone\nTo live forgotten, and love forlorn.”\n\nAt eve a dry cicala sung,\nThere came a sound as of the sea;\nBackward the lattice-blind she flung,\nAnd lean’d upon the balcony.\nThere all in spaces rosy-bright\nLarge Hesper glitter’d on her tears,\nAnd deepening thro’ the silent spheres\nHeaven over Heaven rose the night.\nAnd weeping then she made her moan,\n“The night comes on that knows not morn,\nWhen I shall cease to be all alone,\nTo live forgotten, and love forlorn.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "mariana": { - "title": "“Mariana”", - "body": "With blackest moss the flower-plots\nWere thickly crusted, one and all:\nThe rusted nails fell from the knots\nThat held the pear to the gable-wall.\nThe broken sheds look’d sad and strange:\nUnlifted was the clinking latch;\nWeeded and worn the ancient thatch\nUpon the lonely moated grange.\nShe only said, “My life is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said, “I am aweary, aweary,\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nHer tears fell with the dews at even;\nHer tears fell ere the dews were dried;\nShe could not look on the sweet heaven,\nEither at morn or eventide.\nAfter the flitting of the bats,\nWhen thickest dark did trance the sky,\nShe drew her casement-curtain by,\nAnd glanced athwart the glooming flats.\nShe only said, “The night is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said, “I am aweary, aweary,\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nUpon the middle of the night,\nWaking she heard the night-fowl crow:\nThe cock sung out an hour ere light:\nFrom the dark fen the oxen’s low\nCame to her: without hope of change,\nIn sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,\nTill cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn\nAbout the lonely moated grange.\nShe only said, “The day is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said, “I am aweary, aweary,\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nAbout a stone-cast from the wall\nA sluice with blacken’d waters slept,\nAnd o’er it many, round and small,\nThe cluster’d marish-mosses crept.\nHard by a poplar shook alway,\nAll silver-green with gnarled bark:\nFor leagues no other tree did mark\nThe level waste, the rounding gray.\nShe only said, “My life is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said “I am aweary, aweary\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nAnd ever when the moon was low,\nAnd the shrill winds were up and away,\nIn the white curtain, to and fro,\nShe saw the gusty shadow sway.\nBut when the moon was very low\nAnd wild winds bound within their cell,\nThe shadow of the poplar fell\nUpon her bed, across her brow.\nShe only said, “The night is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said “I am aweary, aweary,\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nAll day within the dreamy house,\nThe doors upon their hinges creak’d;\nThe blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse\nBehind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,\nOr from the crevice peer’d about.\nOld faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors\nOld footsteps trod the upper floors,\nOld voices called her from without.\nShe only said, “My life is dreary,\nHe cometh not,” she said;\nShe said, “I am aweary, aweary,\nI would that I were dead!”\n\nThe sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,\nThe slow clock ticking, and the sound\nWhich to the wooing wind aloof\nThe poplar made, did all confound\nHer sense; but most she loathed the hour\nWhen the thick-moted sunbeam lay\nAthwart the chambers, and the day\nWas sloping toward his western bower.\nThen said she, “I am very dreary,\nHe will not come,” she said;\nShe wept, “I am aweary, aweary,\nOh God, that I were dead!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "marriage-morning": { - "title": "“Marriage Morning”", - "body": "Light, so low upon earth,\n You send a flash to the sun.\nHere is the golden close of love,\n All my wooing is done.\nOh, all the woods and the meadows,\n Woods, where we hid from the wet,\nStiles where we stayed to be kind,\n Meadows in which we met!\nLight, so low in the vale\n You flash and lighten afar,\nFor this is the golden morning of love,\n And you are his morning star.\nFlash, I am coming, I come,\n By meadow and stile and wood,\nOh, lighten into my eyes and my heart,\n Into my heart and my blood!\nHeart, are you great enough\n For a love that never tires?\nO heart, are you great enough for love?\n I have heard of thorns and briers.\nOver the thorns and briers,\n Over the meadows and stiles,\nOver the world to the end of it\n Flash of a million miles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1833 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-millers-daughter": { - "title": "“The Miller’s Daughter”", - "body": "It is the miller’s daughter,\n And she is grown so dear, so dear,\nThat I would be the jewel\n That trembles in her ear:\nFor hid in ringlets day and night,\nI’d touch her neck so warm and white.\n\nAnd I would be the girdle\n About her dainty dainty waist,\nAnd her heart would beat against me,\n In sorrow and in rest:\nAnd I should know if it beat right,\nI’d clasp it round so close and tight.\n\nAnd I would be the necklace,\n And all day long to fall and rise\nUpon her balmy bosom,\n With her laughter or her sighs,\nAnd I would lie so light, so light,\nI scarce should be unclasp’d at night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "a-monodrama": { - "title": "“A Monodrama”", - "body": "Come into the garden, Maud,\n For the black bat, night, has flown,\nCome into the garden, Maud,\n I am here at the gate alone;\nAnd the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,\n And the musk of the rose is blown.\n\nFor a breeze of morning moves,\n And the planet of Love is on high,\nBeginning to faint in the light that she loves\n In a bed of daffodil sky,\nTo faint in the light of the sun she loves,\n To faint in his light, and to die.\n\nAll night have the roses heard\n The flute, violin, bassoon;\nAll night has the casement jessamine stirr’d\n To the dancers dancing in tune;\nTill a silence fell with the waking bird,\n And a hush with the setting moon.\n\nI said to the lily, “There is but one\n With whom she has heart to be gay.\nWhen will the dancers leave her alone?\n She is weary of dance and play.”\nNow half to the setting moon are gone,\n And half to the rising day;\nLow on the sand and loud on the stone\n The last wheel echoes away.\n\nI said to the rose, “The brief night goes\n In babble and revel and wine.\nO young lord-lover, what sighs are those,\n For one that will never be thine?\nBut mine, but mine,” so I sware to the rose,\n “For ever and ever, mine.”\n\nAnd the soul of the rose went into my blood,\n As the music clash’d in the hall;\nAnd long by the garden lake I stood,\n For I heard your rivulet fall\nFrom the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,\n Our wood, that is dearer than all;\n\nFrom the meadow your walks have left so sweet\n That whenever a March-wind sighs\nHe sets the jewel-print of your feet\n In violets blue as your eyes,\nTo the woody hollows in which we meet\n And the valleys of Paradise.\n\nThe slender acacia would not shake\n One long milk-bloom on the tree;\nThe white lake-blossom fell into the lake\n As the pimpernel dozed on the lea;\nBut the rose was awake all night for your sake,\n Knowing your promise to me;\nThe lilies and roses were all awake,\n They sigh’d for the dawn and thee.\n\nQueen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,\n Come hither, the dances are done,\nIn gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,\n Queen lily and rose in one;\nShine out, little head, sunning over with curls,\n To the flowers, and be their sun.\n\nThere has fallen a splendid tear\n From the passion-flower at the gate.\nShe is coming, my dove, my dear;\n She is coming, my life, my fate;\nThe red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”\n And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”\nThe larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”\n And the lily whispers, “I wait.”\n\nShe is coming, my own, my sweet;\n Were it ever so airy a tread,\nMy heart would hear her and beat,\n Were it earth in an earthy bed;\nMy dust would hear her and beat,\n Had I lain for a century dead,\nWould start and tremble under her feet,\n And blossom in purple and red.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Maud", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "new-years-eve": { - "title": "“New Year’s Eve”", - "body": "You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;\nTo-morrow ’ll be the happiest time of all the glad new-year,--\nOf all the glad new-year, mother, the maddest, merriest day;\n_For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May._\n\nI sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,\nIf you do not call me loud when the day begins to break;\nBut I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay;\n_For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May._\n\nLittle Effie shall go with me to-morrow to the green,\nAnd you’ll be there, too, mother, to see me made the Queen;\nFor the shepherd lads on every side ’ll come from far away;\n_And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May._\n\nThe night-winds come and go, mother, upon the meadow-grass,\nAnd the happy stars above them seem to brighten as they pass;\nThere will not be a drop of rain the whole of the livelong day;\n_And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May._\n\nAll the valley, mother, ’ll be fresh and green and still,\nAnd the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill,\nAnd the rivulet in the flowery dale ’ll merrily glance and play,\n_For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May. _", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "now-sleeps-the-crimson-petal-now-the-white": { - "title": "“Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white …”", - "body": "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;\nNor waves the cypress in the palace walk;\nNor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.\nThe firefly wakens; waken thou with me.\n\nNow droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,\nAnd like a ghost she glimmers on to me.\n\nNow lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,\nAnd all thy heart lies open unto me.\n\nNow slides the silent meteor on, and leaves\nA shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.\n\nNow folds the lily all her sweetness up,\nAnd slips into the bosom of the lake.\nSo fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip\nInto my bosom and be lost in me.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Princess", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - } - } - }, - "o-that-twere-possible": { - "title": "“O that ’twere possible …”", - "body": "O that ’twere possible\nAfter long grief and pain\nTo find the arms of my true love\nRound me once again!\n\nWhen I was wont to meet her\nIn the silent woody places\nBy the home that gave me birth,\nWe stood tranced in long embraces\nMixt with kisses sweeter sweeter\nThan anything on earth.\n\nA shadow flits before me,\nNot thou, but like to thee:\nAh Christ, that it were possible\nFor one short hour to see\nThe souls we loved, that they might tell us\nWhat and where they be.\n\nIt leads me forth at evening,\nIt lightly winds and steals\nIn a cold white robe before me,\nWhen all my spirit reels\nAt the shouts, the leagues of lights,\nAnd the roaring of the wheels.\n\nHalf the night I waste in sighs,\nHalf in dreams I sorrow after\nThe delight of early skies;\nIn a wakeful doze I sorrow\nFor the hand, the lips, the eyes,\nFor the meeting of the morrow,\nThe delight of happy laughter,\nThe delight of low replies.\n\n’Tis a morning pure and sweet,\nAnd a dewy splendour falls\nOn the little flower that clings\nTo the turrets and the walls;\n’Tis a morning pure and sweet,\nAnd the light and shadow fleet;\nShe is walking in the meadow,\nAnd the woodland echo rings;\nIn a moment we shall meet;\nShe is singing in the meadow,\nAnd the rivulet at her feet\nRipples on in light and shadow\nTo the ballad that she sings.\n\nSo I hear her sing as of old,\nMy bird with the shining head,\nMy own dove with the tender eye?\nBut there rings on a sudden a passionate cry,\nThere is some one dying or dead,\nAnd a sullen thunder is roll’d;\nFor a tumult shakes the city,\nAnd I wake, my dream is fled;\nIn the shuddering dawn, behold,\nWithout knowledge, without pity,\nBy the curtains of my bed\nThat abiding phantom cold.\n\nGet thee hence, nor come again,\nMix not memory with doubt,\nPass, thou deathlike type of pain,\nPass and cease to move about!\n’Tis the blot upon the brain\nThat will show itself without.\n\nThen I rise, the eave-drops fall,\nAnd the yellow vapours choke\nThe great city sounding wide;\nThe day comes, a dull red ball\nWrapt in drifts of lurid smoke\nOn the misty river-tide.\n\nThro’ the hubbub of the market\nI steal, a wasted frame;\nIt crosses here, it crosses there,\nThro’ all that crowd confused and loud,\nThe shadow still the same;\nAnd on my heavy eyelids\nMy anguish hangs like shame.\n\nAlas for her that met me,\nThat heard me softly call,\nCame glimmering thro’ the laurels\nAt the quiet evenfall,\nIn the garden by the turrets\nOf the old manorial hall.\n\nWould the happy spirit descend\nFrom the realms of light and song,\nIn the chamber or the street,\nAs she looks among the blest,\nShould I fear to greet my friend\nOr to say “Forgive the wrong,”\nOr to ask her, “Take me, sweet,\nTo the regions of thy rest”?\n\nBut the broad light glares and beats,\nAnd the shadow flits and fleets\nAnd will not let me be;\nAnd I loathe the squares and streets,\nAnd the faces that one meets,\nHearts with no love for me:\nAlways I long to creep\nInto some still cavern deep,\nThere to weep, and weep, and weep\nMy whole soul out to thee.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Maud", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1855 - } - } - }, - "oenone": { - "title": "“Oenone”", - "body": "There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier\nThan all the valleys of Ionian hills.\nThe swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,\nPuts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,\nAnd loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand\nThe lawns and meadow-ledges midway down\nHang rich in flowers, and far below them roars\nThe long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine\nIn cataract after cataract to the sea.\nBehind the valley topmost Gargarus\nStands up and takes the morning: but in front\nThe gorges, opening wide apart, reveal\nTroas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,\nThe crown of Troas.\n\n Hither came at noon\nMournful Oenone, wandering forlorn\nOf Paris, once her playmate on the hills.\nHer cheek had lost the rose, and round her neck\nFloated her hair or seem’d to float in rest.\nShe, leaning on a fragment twined with vine,\nSang to the stillness, till the mountain-shade\nSloped downward to her seat from the upper cliff.\n\n“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,\nDear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nFor now the noonday quiet holds the hill:\nThe grasshopper is silent in the grass:\nThe lizard, with his shadow on the stone,\nRests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.\nThe purple flower droops: the golden bee\nIs lily-cradled: I alone awake.\nMy eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,\nMy heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,\nAnd I am all aweary of my life.”\n\n“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,\nDear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nHear me, O Earth, hear me, O Hills, O Caves\nThat house the cold crown’d snake! O mountain brooks,\nI am the daughter of a River-God,\nHear me, for I will speak, and build up all\nMy sorrow with my song, as yonder walls\nRose slowly to a music slowly breathed,\nA cloud that gather’d shape: for it may be\nThat, while I speak of it, a little while\nMy heart may wander from its deeper woe.”\n\n“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,\nDear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nI waited underneath the dawning hills,\nAloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark,\nAnd dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine:\nBeautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,\nLeading a jet-black goat white-horn’d, white-hooved,\nCame up from reedy Simois all alone.”\n\n“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nFar-off the torrent call’d me from the cleft:\nFar up the solitary morning smote\nThe streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes\nI sat alone: white-breasted like a star\nFronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin\nDroop’d from his shoulder, but his sunny hair\nCluster’d about his temples like a God’s:\nAnd his cheek brighten’d as the foam-bow brightens\nWhen the wind blows the foam, and all my heart\nWent forth to embrace him coming ere he came.”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nHe smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm\nDisclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold,\nThat smelt ambrosially, and while I look’d\nAnd listen’d, the full-flowing river of speech\nCame down upon my heart.”\n\n “My own Oenone,\nBeautiful-brow’d Oenone, my own soul,\nBehold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav’n\n‘For the most fair,’ would seem to award it thine,\nAs lovelier than whatever Oread haunt\nThe knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace\nOf movement, and the charm of married brows.”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nHe prest the blossom of his lips to mine,\nAnd added ‘This was cast upon the board,\nWhen all the full-faced presence of the Gods\nRanged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon\nRose feud, with question unto whom ’twere due:\nBut light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve,\nDelivering that to me, by common voice\nElected umpire, Herè comes to-day,\nPallas and Aphroditè, claiming each\nThis meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave\nBehind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine,\nMayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard\nHear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods.’”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nIt was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud\nHad lost his way between the piney sides\nOf this long glen. Then to the bower they came,\nNaked they came to that smooth-swarded bower,\nAnd at their feet the crocus brake like fire,\nViolet, amaracus, and asphodel,\nLotos and lilies: and a wind arose,\nAnd overhead the wandering ivy and vine,\nThis way and that, in many a wild festoon\nRan riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs\nWith bunch and berry and flower thro’ and thro’.”\n\n“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nOn the tree-tops a crested peacock lit,\nAnd o’er him flow’d a golden cloud, and lean’d\nUpon him, slowly dropping fragrant dew.\nThen first I heard the voice of her, to whom\nComing thro’ Heaven, like a light that grows\nLarger and clearer, with one mind the Gods\nRise up for reverence. She to Paris made\nProffer of royal power, ample rule\nUnquestion’d, overflowing revenue\nWherewith to embellish state, ‘from many a vale\nAnd river-sunder’d champaign clothed with corn,\nOr labour’d mine undrainable of ore.\nHonour,’ she said, ‘and homage, tax and toll,\nFrom many an inland town and haven large,\nMast-throng’d beneath her shadowing citadel\nIn glassy bays among her tallest towers.’”\n\n“O mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nStill she spake on and still she spake of power,\n‘Which in all action is the end of all;\nPower fitted to the season; wisdom-bred\nAnd throned of wisdom--from all neighbour crowns\nAlliance and allegiance, till thy hand\nFail from the sceptre-staff. Such boon from me,\nFrom me, Heaven’s Queen, Paris, to thee king-born,\nA shepherd all thy life but yet king-born,\nShould come most welcome, seeing men, in power\nOnly, are likest Gods, who have attain’d\nRest in a happy place and quiet seats\nAbove the thunder, with undying bliss\nIn knowledge of their own supremacy.’”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nShe ceased, and Paris held the costly fruit\nOut at arm’s-length, so much the thought of power\nFlatter’d his spirit; but Pallas where she stood\nSomewhat apart, her clear and bared limbs\nO’erthwarted with the brazen-headed spear\nUpon her pearly shoulder leaning cold,\nThe while, above, her full and earnest eye\nOver her snow-cold breast and angry cheek\nKept watch, waiting decision, made reply.”\n\n“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,\nThese three alone lead life to sovereign power.\nYet not for power (power of herself\nWould come uncall’d for) but to live by law,\nActing the law we live by without fear;\nAnd, because right is right, to follow right\nWere wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nAgain she said: ‘I woo thee not with gifts.\nSequel of guerdon could not alter me\nTo fairer. Judge thou me by what I am,\nSo shalt thou find me fairest.’”\n\n “‘Yet, indeed,\nIf gazing on divinity disrobed\nThy mortal eyes are frail to judge of fair,\nUnbias’d by self-profit, oh! rest thee sure\nThat I shall love thee well and cleave to thee,\nSo that my vigour, wedded to thy blood,\nShall strike within thy pulses, like a God’s,\nTo push thee forward thro’ a life of shocks,\nDangers, and deeds, until endurance grow\nSinew’d with action, and the full-grown will,\nCircled thro’ all experiences, pure law,\nCommeasure perfect freedom.’”\n\n “Here she ceas’d\nAnd Paris ponder’d, and I cried, ‘O Paris,\nGive it to Pallas!’ but he heard me not,\nOr hearing would not hear me, woe is me!”\n\n“O mother Ida, many-fountain’d Ida,\nDear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nIdalian Aphroditè beautiful,\nFresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells,\nWith rosy slender fingers backward drew\nFrom her warm brows and bosom her deep hair\nAmbrosial, golden round her lucid throat\nAnd shoulder: from the violets her light foot\nShone rosy-white, and o’er her rounded form\nBetween the shadows of the vine-bunches\nFloated the glowing sunlights, as she moved.”\n\n“Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nShe with a subtle smile in her mild eyes,\nThe herald of her triumph, drawing nigh\nHalf-whisper’d in his ear, ‘I promise thee\nThe fairest and most loving wife in Greece.’\nShe spoke and laugh’d: I shut my sight for fear:\nBut when I look’d, Paris had raised his arm,\nAnd I beheld great Herè’s angry eyes,\nAs she withdrew into the golden cloud,\nAnd I was left alone within the bower;\nAnd from that time to this I am alone,\nAnd I shall be alone until I die.”\n\n“Yet, mother Ida, harken ere I die.\nFairest--why fairest wife? am I not fair?\nMy love hath told me so a thousand times.\nMethinks I must be fair, for yesterday,\nWhen I past by, a wild and wanton pard,\nEyed like the evening star, with playful tail\nCrouch’d fawning in the weed. Most loving is she?\nAh me, my mountain shepherd, that my arms\nWere wound about thee, and my hot lips prest\nClose, close to thine in that quick-falling dew\nOf fruitful kisses, thick as Autumn rains\nFlash in the pools of whirling Simois!”\n\n“O mother, hear me yet before I die.\nThey came, they cut away my tallest pines,\nMy tall dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge\nHigh over the blue gorge, and all between\nThe snowy peak and snow-white cataract\nFoster’d the callow eaglet--from beneath\nWhose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn\nThe panther’s roar came muffled, while I sat\nLow in the valley. Never, never more\nShall lone OEnone see the morning mist\nSweep thro’ them; never see them overlaid\nWith narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud,\nBetween the loud stream and the trembling stars.”\n\n“O mother, hear me yet before I die.\nI wish that somewhere in the ruin’d folds,\nAmong the fragments tumbled from the glens,\nOr the dry thickets, I could meet with her\nThe Abominable, that uninvited came\nInto the fair Peleïan banquet-hall,\nAnd cast the golden fruit upon the board,\nAnd bred this change; that I might speak my mind,\nAnd tell her to her face how much I hate\nHer presence, hated both of Gods and men.”\n\n“O mother, hear me yet before I die.\nHath he not sworn his love a thousand times,\nIn this green valley, under this green hill,\nEv’n on this hand, and sitting on this stone?\nSeal’d it with kisses? water’d it with tears?\nO happy tears, and how unlike to these!\nO happy Heaven, how canst thou see my face?\nO happy earth, how canst thou bear my weight?\nO death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud,\nThere are enough unhappy on this earth,\nPass by the happy souls, that love to live:\nI pray thee, pass before my light of life,\nAnd shadow all my soul, that I may die.\nThou weighest heavy on the heart within,\nWeigh heavy on my eyelids: let me die.”\n\n“O mother, hear me yet before I die.\nI will not die alone, for fiery thoughts\nDo shape themselves within me, more and more,\nWhereof I catch the issue, as I hear\nDead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,\nLike footsteps upon wool. I dimly see\nMy far-off doubtful purpose, as a mother\nConjectures of the features of her child\nEre it is born: her child!--a shudder comes\nAcross me: never child be born of me,\nUnblest, to vex me with his father’s eyes!”\n\n“O mother, hear me yet before I die.\nHear me, O earth. I will not die alone,\nLest their shrill happy laughter come to me\nWalking the cold and starless road of death\nUncomforted, leaving my ancient love\nWith the Greek woman. I will rise and go\nDown into Troy, and ere the stars come forth\nTalk with the wild Cassandra, for she says\nA fire dances before her, and a sound\nRings ever in her ears of armed men.\nWhat this may be I know not, but I know\nThat, wheresoe’er I am by night and day,\nAll earth and air seem only burning fire.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "of-old-sat-freedom-on-the-heights": { - "title": "“Of old sat Freedom on the heights …”", - "body": "Of old sat Freedom on the heights,\nThe thunders breaking at her feet:\nAbove her shook the starry lights:\nShe heard the torrents meet.\n\nThere in her place she did rejoice,\nSelf-gather’d in her prophet-mind,\nBut fragments of her mighty voice\nCame rolling on the wind.\n\nThen stept she down thro’ town and field\nTo mingle with the human race,\nAnd part by part to men reveal’d\nThe fulness of her face--\n\nGrave mother of majestic works,\nFrom her isle-altar gazing down,\nWho, God-like, grasps the triple forks,\nAnd, King-like, wears the crown:\n\nHer open eyes desire the truth.\nThe wisdom of a thousand years\nIs in them. May perpetual youth\nKeep dry their light from tears;\n\nThat her fair form may stand and shine,\nMake bright our days and light our dreams,\nTurning to scorn with lips divine\nThe falsehood of extremes!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - }, - "our-enemies-have-falln": { - "title": "“Our enemies have fall’n …”", - "body": "Our enemies have fall’n, have fall’n: the seed,\nThe little seed they laugh’d at in the dark,\nHas risen and cleft the soil, and grown a bulk\nOf spanless girth, that lays on every side\nA thousand arms and rushes to the Sun.\n\nOur enemies have fall’n, have fall’n: they came;\nThe leaves were wet with women’s tears: they heard\nA noise of songs they would not understand:\nThey mark’d it with the red cross to the fall,\nAnd would have strown it, and are fall’n themselves.\n\nOur enemies have fall’n, have fall’n: they came,\nThe woodmen with their axes: lo the tree!\nBut we will make it faggots for the hearth,\nAnd shape it plank and beam for roof and floor,\nAnd boats and bridges for the use of men.\n\nOur enemies have fall’n, have fall’n: they struck;\nWith their own blows they hurt themselves, nor knew\nThere dwelt an iron nature in the grain:\nThe glittering axe was broken in their arms,\nTheir arms were shatter’d to the shoulder blade.\n\nOur enemies have fall’n, but this shall grow\nA night of Summer from the heat, a breadth\nOf Autumn, dropping fruits of power; and roll’d\nWith music in the growing breeze of Time,\nThe tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs\nShall move the stony bases of the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1869 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-passing-of-arthur": { - "title": "“The Passing of Arthur”", - "body": "That story which the bold Sir Bedivere,\nFirst made and latest left of all the knights,\nTold, when the man was no more than a voice\nIn the white winter of his age, to those\nWith whom he dwelt, new faces, other minds.\n\nFor on their march to westward, Bedivere,\nWho slowly paced among the slumbering host,\nHeard in his tent the moanings of the King:\n\n“I found Him in the shining of the stars,\nI mark’d Him in the flowering of His fields,\nBut in His ways with men I find Him not.\nI waged His wars, and now I pass and die.\nO me! for why is all around us here\nAs if some lesser god had made the world,\nBut had not force to shape it as he would,\nTill the High God behold it from beyond,\nAnd enter it, and make it beautiful?\nOr else as if the world were wholly fair,\nBut that these eyes of men are dense and dim,\nAnd have not power to see it as it is:\nPerchance, because we see not to the close;--\nFor I, being simple, thought to work His will,\nAnd have but stricken with the sword in vain;\nAnd all whereon I lean’d in wife and friend\nIs traitor to my peace, and all my realm\nReels back into the beast, and is no more.\nMy God, thou hast forgotten me in my death:\nNay--God my Christ--I pass but shall not die.”\n\nThen, ere that last weird battle in the west,\nThere came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill’d\nIn Lancelot’s war, the ghost of Gawain blown\nAlong a wandering wind, and past his ear\nWent shrilling, “Hollow, hollow all delight!\nHail, King! to-morrow thou shalt pass away.\nFarewell! there is an isle of rest for thee.\nAnd I am blown along a wandering wind,\nAnd hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.”\nAnd fainter onward, like wild birds that change\nTheir season in the night and wail their way\nFrom cloud to cloud, down the long wind the dream\nShrill’d; but in going mingled with dim cries\nFar in the moonlit haze among the hills,\nAs of some lonely city sack’d by night,\nWhen all is lost, and wife and child with wail\nPass to new lords; and Arthur woke and call’d,\n“Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,\nThine, Gawain, was the voice--are these dim cries\nThine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild\nMourn, knowing it will go along with me?”\n\nThis heard the bold Sir Bedivere and spake:\n“O me, my King, let pass whatever will,\nElves, and the harmless glamour of the field;\nBut in their stead thy name and glory cling\nTo all high places like a golden cloud\nFor ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass.\nLight was Gawain in life, and light in death\nIs Gawain, for the ghost is as the man;\nAnd care not thou for dreams from him, but rise--\nI hear the steps of Modred in the west,\nAnd with him many of thy people, and knights\nOnce thine, whom thou hast loved, but grosser grown\nThan heathen, spitting at their vows and thee.\nRight well in heart they know thee for the King.\nArise, go forth and conquer as of old.”\n\nThen spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:\n“Far other is this battle in the west\nWhereto we move, than when we strove in youth,\nAnd brake the petty kings, and fought with Rome,\nOr thrust the heathen from the Roman wall,\nAnd shook him thro’ the north. Ill doom is mine\nTo war against my people and my knights.\nThe king who fights his people fights himself.\nAnd they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke\nThat strikes them dead is as my death to me.\nYet let us hence, and find or feel a way\nThro’ this blind haze, which ever since I saw\nOne lying in the dust at Almesbury,\nHath folded in the passes of the world.”\n\nThen rose the King and moved his host by night,\nAnd ever push’d Sir Modred, league by league,\nBack to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse--\nA land of old upheaven from the abyss\nBy fire, to sink into the abyss again;\nWhere fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,\nAnd the long mountains ended in a coast\nOf ever-shifting sand, and far away\nThe phantom circle of a moaning sea.\nThere the pursuer could pursue no more,\nAnd he that fled no further fly the King;\nAnd there, that day when the great light of heaven\nBurn’d at his lowest in the rolling year,\nOn the waste sand by the waste sea they closed.\nNor ever yet had Arthur fought a fight\nLike this last, dim, weird battle of the west.\nA deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:\nWhereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew\nDown with his blood, till all his heart was cold\nWith formless fear; and ev’n on Arthur fell\nConfusion, since he saw not whom he fought.\n\nFor friend and foe were shadows in the mist,\nAnd friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;\nAnd some had visions out of golden youth,\nAnd some beheld the faces of old ghosts\nLook in upon the battle; and in the mist\nWas many a noble deed, many a base,\nAnd chance and craft and strength in single fights,\nAnd ever and anon with host to host\nShocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,\nShield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash\nOf battleaxes on shatter’d helms, and shrieks\nAfter the Christ, of those who falling down\nLook’d up for heaven, and only saw the mist;\nAnd shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,\nOaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,\nSweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs\nIn that close mist, and cryings for the light,\nMoans of the dying, and voices of the dead.\n\nLast, as by some one deathbed after wail\nOf suffering, silence follows, or thro’ death\nOr deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,\nSave for some whisper of the seething seas,\nA dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day\nGrew drearier toward twilight falling, came\nA bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew\nThe mist aside, and with that wind the tide\nRose, and the pale King glanced across the field\nOf battle: but no man was moving there;\nNor any cry of Christian heard thereon,\nNor yet of heathen; only the wan wave\nBrake in among dead faces, to and fro\nSwaying the helpless hands, and up and down\nTumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,\nAnd shiver’d brands that once had fought with Rome,\nAnd rolling far along the gloomy shores\nThe voice of days of old and days to be.\n\nThen spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere,\nAnd whiter than the mist that all day long\nHad held the field of battle was the King:\n\n“Hearest thou this great voice that shakes the world,\nAnd wastes the narrow realm whereon we move,\nAnd beats upon the faces of the dead,\nMy dead, as tho’ they had not died for me?--\nO Bedivere, for on my heart hath fall’n\nConfusion, till I know not what I am,\nNor whence I am, nor whether I be King.\nBehold, I seem but King among the dead.”\n\nThen spake the bold Sir Bedivere: “My King,\nKing everywhere! and so the dead have kings,\nThere also will I worship thee as King.\nYet still thy life is whole, and still I live\nWho love thee; but who hates thee, he that brought\nThe heathen back among us, yonder stands,\nModred, unharm’d, the traitor of thine house.”\n\nThen spake the King: “My house hath been my doom.\nBut call not thou this traitor of my house\nWho hath but dwelt beneath one roof with me.\nMy house are rather they who sware my vows,\nYea, even while they brake them, own’d me King.\nAnd well for thee, saying in my dark hour,\nWhen all the purport of my throne hath fail’d,\nThat quick or dead thou hottest me for King.\nKing am I, whatsoever be their cry;\nAnd one last act of kinghood shalt thou see\nYet, ere I pass.” And uttering this the King\nMade at the man: then Modred smote his liege\nHard on that helm which many a heathen sword\nHad beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow,\nStriking the last stroke with Excalibur,\nSlew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.\n\nSo all day long the noise of battle roll’d\nAmong the mountains by the winter sea;\nUntil King Arthur’s Table, man by man,\nHad fall’n in Lyonnesse about their lord,\nKing Arthur. Then, because his wound was deep,\nThe bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,\nAnd bore him to a chapel nigh the field,\nA broken chancel with a broken cross,\nThat stood on a dark strait of barren land:\nOn one side lay the Ocean, and on one\nLay a great water, and the moon was full.\n\nThen spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:\n“The sequel of to-day unsolders all\nThe goodliest fellowship of famous knights\nWhereof this world holds record. Such a sleep\nThey sleep--the men I loved. I think that we\nShall never more, at any future time,\nDelight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,\nWalking about the gardens and the halls\nOf Camelot, as in the days that were.\nI perish by this people which I made,--\nTho’ Merlin sware that I should come again\nTo rule once more; but, let what will be, be,\nI am so deeply smitten thro’ the helm\nThat without help I cannot last till morn.\nThou therefore take my brand Excalibur,\nWhich was my pride: for thou rememberest how\nIn those old days, one summer noon, an arm\nRose up from out the bosom of the lake,\nClothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,\nHolding the sword--and how I row’d across\nAnd took it, and have worn it, like a king;\nAnd, wheresoever I am sung or told\nIn aftertime, this also shall be known:\nBut now delay not: take Excalibur,\nAnd fling him far into the middle mere:\nWatch what thou seëst, and lightly bring me word.”\n\nTo him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:\n“It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,\nAidless, alone, and smitten thro’ the helm--\nA little thing may harm a wounded man;\nYet I thy hest will all perform at full,\nWatch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.”\n\nSo saying, from the ruin’d shrine he stept,\nAnd in the moon athwart the place of tombs,\nWhere lay the mighty bones of ancient men,\nOld knights, and over them the sea-wind sang\nShrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down\nBy zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,\nCame on the shining levels of the lake.\n\nThere drew he forth the brand Excalibur,\nAnd o’er him, drawing it, the winter moon,\nBrightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth\nAnd sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:\nFor all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,\nMyriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work\nOf subtlest jewellery. He gazed so long\nThat both his eyes were dazzled as he stood,\nThis way and that dividing the swift mind,\nIn act to throw: but at the last it seem’d\nBetter to leave Excalibur conceal’d\nThere in the many-knotted waterflags,\nThat whistled stiff and dry about the marge.\nSo strode he back slow to the wounded King.\n\nThen spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere:\n“Hast thou perform’d my mission which I gave?\nWhat is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?”\n\nAnd answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:\n“I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,\nAnd the wild water lapping on the crag.”\n\nTo whom replied King Arthur, faint and pale:\n“Thou hast betray’d thy nature and thy name,\nNot rendering true answer, as beseem’d\nThy fealty, nor like a noble knight:\nFor surer sign had follow’d, either hand\nOr voice, or else a motion of the mere.\nThis is a shameful thing for men to lie.\nYet now, I charge thee, quickly go again,\nAs thou art lief and dear, and do the thing\nI bade thee, watch, and lightly bring me word.”\n\nThen went Sir Bedivere the second time\nAcross the ridge, and paced beside the mere,\nCounting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought;\nBut when he saw the wonder of the hilt,\nHow curiously and strangely chased, he smote\nHis palms together, and he cried aloud:\n\n“And if indeed I cast the brand away,\nSurely a precious thing, one worthy note,\nShould thus be lost for ever from the earth,\nWhich might have pleased the eyes of many men.\nWhat good should follow this, if this were done?\nWhat harm, undone? Deep harm to disobey,\nSeeing obedience is the bond of rule.\nWere it well to obey then, if a king demand\nAn act unprofitable, against himself?\nThe King is sick, and knows not what he does.\nWhat record, or what relic of my lord\nShould be to aftertime, but empty breath\nAnd rumours of a doubt? But were this kept,\nStored in some treasure-house of mighty kings,\nSome one might show it at a joust of arms,\nSaying, ‘King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur,\nWrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.\nNine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps\nUpon the hidden bases of the hills.’\nSo might some old man speak in the aftertime\nTo all the people, winning reverence.\nBut now much honour and much fame were lost.”\n\nSo spake he, clouded with his own conceit,\nAnd hid Excalibur the second time,\nAnd so strode back slow to the wounded King.\n\nThen spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily:\n“What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?”\n\nAnd answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:\n“I heard the water lapping on the crag,\nAnd the long ripple washing in the reeds.”\n\nTo whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath:\n“Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue,\nUnknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me!\nAuthority forgets a dying king,\nLaid widow’d of the power in his eye\nThat bow’d the will. I see thee what thou art,\nFor thou, the latest-left of all my knights,\nIn whom should meet the offices of all,\nThou wouldst betray me for the precious hilt;\nEither from lust of gold, or like a girl\nValuing the giddy pleasure of the eyes.\nYet, for a man may fail in duty twice,\nAnd the third time may prosper, get thee hence:\nBut, if thou spare to fling Excalibur,\nI will arise and slay thee with my hands.”\n\nThen quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,\nAnd, leaping down the ridges, lightly, plunged\nAmong the bulrush beds, and clutch’d the sword,\nAnd strongly wheel’d and threw it. The great brand\nMade lightnings in the splendour of the moon,\nAnd flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,\nShot like a streamer of the northern morn,\nSeen where the moving isles of winter shock\nBy night, with noises of the Northern Sea.\nSo flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:\nBut ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm\nClothed in white samite, mystic wonderful,\nAnd caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him\nThree times, and drew him under in the mere.\nAnd lightly went the other to the King.\n\nThen spoke King Arthur, drawing thicker breath:\n“Now see I by thine eyes that this is done.\nSpeak out: what is it thou hast heard, or seen?”\n\nAnd answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:\n“Sir King, I closed mine eyelids, lest the gems\nShould blind my purpose, for I never saw,\nNor shall see, here or elsewhere, till I die,\nNot tho’ I live three lives of mortal men,\nSo great a miracle as yonder hilt.\nThen with both hands I flung him, wheeling him;\nBut when I look’d again, behold an arm,\nClothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,\nThat caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him\nThree times, and drew him under in the mere.”\n\nAnd answer made King Arthur, breathing hard:\n“My end draws nigh; ’tis time that I were gone.\nMake broad thy shoulders to receive my weight,\nAnd bear me to the margin; yet I fear\nMy wound hath taken cold, and I shall die.”\n\nSo saying, from the pavement he half rose,\nSlowly, with pain, reclining on his arm,\nAnd looking wistfully with wide blue eyes\nAs in a picture. Him Sir Bedivere\nRemorsefully regarded thro’ his tears,\nAnd would have spoken, but he found not words;\nThen took with care, and kneeling on one knee,\nO’er both his shoulders drew the languid hands,\nAnd rising bore him thro’ the place of tombs.\n\nBut, as he walk’d, King Arthur panted hard,\nLike one that feels a nightmare on his bed\nWhen all the house is mute. So sigh’d the King,\nMuttering and murmuring at his ear, “Quick, quick!\nI fear it is too late, and I shall die.”\nBut the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,\nClothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk’d,\nLarger than human on the frozen hills.\nHe heard the deep behind him, and a cry\nBefore. His own thought drove him like a goad.\nDry clash’d his harness in the icy caves\nAnd barren chasms, and all to left and right\nThe bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based\nHis feet on juts of slippery crag that rang\nSharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels--\nAnd on a sudden, lo! the level lake,\nAnd the long glories of the winter moon.\n\nThen saw they how there hove a dusky barge,\nDark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern,\nBeneath them; and descending they were ware\nThat all the decks were dense with stately forms,\nBlack-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these\nThree Queens with crowns of gold: and from them rose\nA cry that shiver’d to the tingling stars,\nAnd, as it were one voice, an agony\nOf lamentation, like a wind that shrills\nAll night in a waste land, where no one comes,\nOr hath come, since the making of the world.\n\nThen murmur’d Arthur, “Place me in the barge.”\nSo to the barge they came. There those three Queens\nPut forth their hands, and took the King, and wept.\nBut she, that rose the tallest of them all\nAnd fairest, laid his head upon her lap,\nAnd loosed the shatter’d casque, and chafed his hands,\nAnd call’d him by his name, complaining loud,\nAnd dropping bitter tears against a brow\nStriped with dark blood: for all his face was white\nAnd colourless, and like the wither’d moon\nSmote by the fresh beam of the springing east;\nAnd all his greaves and cuisses dash’d with drops\nOf onset; and the light and lustrous curls--\nThat made his forehead like a rising sun\nHigh from the daïs-throne--were parch’d with dust\nOr, clotted into points and hanging loose,\nMix’d with the knightly growth that fringed his lips.\nSo like a shatter’d column lay the King;\nNot like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,\nFrom spur to plume a star of tournament,\nShot thro’ the lists at Camelot, and charged\nBefore the eyes of ladies and of kings.\n\nThen loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:\n“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?\nWhere shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?\nFor now I see the true old times are dead,\nWhen every morning brought a noble chance,\nAnd every chance brought out a noble knight.\nSuch times have been not since the light that led\nThe holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.\nBut now the whole Round Table is dissolved\nWhich was an image of the mighty world,\nAnd I, the last, go forth companionless,\nAnd the days darken round me, and the years,\nAmong new men, strange faces, other minds.”\n\nAnd slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:\n“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,\nAnd God fulfils himself in many ways,\nLest one good custom should corrupt the world.\nComfort thyself: what comfort is in me?\nI have lived my life, and that which I have done\nMay He within himself make pure! but thou,\nIf thou shouldst never see my face again,\nPray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer\nThan this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice\nRise like a fountain for me night and day.\nFor what are men better than sheep or goats\nThat nourish a blind life within the brain,\nIf, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer\nBoth for themselves and those who call them friend?\nFor so the whole round earth is every way\nBound by gold chains about the feet of God.\nBut now farewell. I am going a long way\nWith these thou seëst--if indeed I go\n(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)--\nTo the island-valley of Avilion;\nWhere falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,\nNor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies\nDeep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns\nAnd bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,\nWhere I will heal me of my grievous wound.”\n\nSo said he, and the barge with oar and sail\nMoved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan\nThat, fluting a wild carol ere her death,\nRuffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood\nWith swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere\nRevolving many memories, till the hull\nLook’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,\nAnd on the mere the wailing died away.\n\nBut when that moan had past for evermore,\nThe stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn\nAmazed him, and he groan’d, The King is gone.\nAnd therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,\n“From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”\n\nWhereat he slowly turn’d and slowly clomb\nThe last hard footstep of that iron crag;\nThence mark’d the black hull moving yet, and cried,\n“He passes to be King among the dead,\nAnd after healing of his grievous wound\nHe comes again; but--if he come no more--\nO me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,\nWho shriek’d and wail’d, the three whereat we gazed\nOn that high day, when, clothed with living light,\nThey stood before his throne in silence, friends\nOf Arthur, who should help him at his need?”\n\nThen from the dawn it seem’d there came, but faint\nAs from beyond the limit of the world,\nLike the last echo born of a great cry,\nSounds, as if some fair city were one voice\nAround a king returning from his wars.\n\nThereat once more he moved about, and clomb\nEv’n to the highest he could climb, and saw,\nStraining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,\nOr thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,\nDown that long water opening on the deep\nSomewhere far off, pass on and on, and go\nFrom less to less and vanish into light.\nAnd the new sun rose bringing the new year.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1884 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "ring-out-wild-bells": { - "title": "“Ring Out, Wild Bells”", - "body": "Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,\nThe flying cloud, the frosty light:\nThe year is dying in the night;\nRing out, wild bells, and let him die …\n\nRing out false pride in place and blood,\nThe civic slander and the spite;\nRing in the love of truth and right,\nRing in the common love of good.\n\nRing out old shapes of foul disease;\nRing out the narrowing lust of gold;\nRing out the thousand wars of old,\nRing in the thousand years of peace.\n\nRing in the valiant man and free,\nThe larger heart, the kindlier hand;\nRing out the darkness of the land,\nRing in the Christ that is to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1850 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "song": { - "title": "“Song”", - "body": "Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud;\nTurn thy wild wheel thro’ sunshine, storm, and cloud;\nThy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.\n\nTurn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown;\nWith that wild wheel we go not up or down;\nOur hoard is little, but our hearts are great.\n\nSmile and we smile, the lords of many lands;\nFrown and we smile, the lords of our own hands;\nFor man is man and master of his fate.\n\nTurn, turn thy wheel above the staring crowd;\nThy wheel and thou are shadows in the cloud;\nThy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.", - "metadata": { - "source": "The Marriage of Geraint", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1859 - } - } - }, - "the-splendor-falls": { - "title": "“The Splendor Falls”", - "body": "The splendor falls on castle walls\n And snowy summits old in story;\nThe long light shakes across the lakes,\n And the wild cataract leaps in glory.\nBlow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,\nBlow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.\n\nO, hark, O, hear! how thin and clear,\n And thinner, clearer, farther going!\nO, sweet and far from cliff and scar\n The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!\nBlow, let us hear the purple glens replying,\nBlow, bugles; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.\n\nO love, they die in yon rich sky,\n They faint on hill or field or river;\nOur echoes roll from soul to soul,\n And grow forever and forever.\nBlow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,\nAnd answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1850 - } - } - }, - "st-agnes-eve": { - "title": "“St. Agnes’ Eve”", - "body": "Deep on the convent-roof the snows\nAre sparkling to the moon:\nMy breath to heaven like vapour goes;\nMay my soul follow soon!\nThe shadows of the convent-towers\nSlant down the snowy sward,\nStill creeping with the creeping hours\nThat lead me to my Lord:\nMake Thou my spirit pure and clear\nAs are the frosty skies,\nOr this first snowdrop of the year\nThat in my bosom lies.\n\nAs these white robes are soil’d and dark,\nTo yonder shining ground;\nAs this pale taper’s earthly spark,\nTo yonder argent round;\nSo shows my soul before the Lamb,\nMy spirit before Thee;\nSo in mine earthly house I am,\nTo that I hope to be.\nBreak up the heavens, O Lord! and far,\nThro’ all yon starlight keen,\nDraw me, thy bride, a glittering star,\nIn raiment white and clean.\n\nHe lifts me to the golden doors;\nThe flashes come and go;\nAll heaven bursts her starry floors,\nAnd strows her lights below,\nAnd deepens on and up! the gates\nRoll back, and far within\nFor me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,\nTo make me pure of sin.\nThe sabbaths of Eternity,\nOne sabbath deep and wide--\nA light upon the shining sea--\nThe Bridegroom with his bride!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1857 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_agnes_eve" - } - } - }, - "tears-idle-tears": { - "title": "“Tears, Idle Tears”", - "body": "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,\nTears from the depth of some divine despair\nRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,\nIn looking on the happy Autumn-fields,\nAnd thinking of the days that are no more.\n\nFresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,\nThat brings our friends up from the underworld,\nSad as the last which reddens over one\nThat sinks with all we love below the verge;\nSo sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.\n\nAh, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns\nThe earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds\nTo dying ears, when unto dying eyes\nThe casement slowly grows a glimmering square;\nSo sad, so strange, the days that are no more.\n\nDear as remember’d kisses after death,\nAnd sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d\nOn lips that are for others; deep as love,\nDeep as first love, and wild with all regret;\nO Death in Life, the days that are no more!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "tithonius": { - "title": "“Tithonius”", - "body": "The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,\nThe vapours weep their burthen to the ground,\nMan comes and tills the field and lies beneath,\nAnd after many a summer dies the swan.\nMe only cruel immortality\nConsumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,\nHere at the quiet limit of the world,\nA white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream\nThe ever-silent spaces of the East,\nFar-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.\n\nAlas! for this gray shadow, once a man--\nSo glorious in his beauty and thy choice,\nWho madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d\nTo his great heart none other than a God!\nI ask’d thee, “Give me immortality.”\nThen didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,\nLike wealthy men, who care not how they give.\nBut thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,\nAnd beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,\nAnd tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d\nTo dwell in presence of immortal youth,\nImmortal age beside immortal youth,\nAnd all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,\nThy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now,\nClose over us, the silver star, thy guide,\nShines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears\nTo hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:\nWhy should a man desire in any way\nTo vary from the kindly race of men\nOr pass beyond the goal of ordinance\nWhere all should pause, as is most meet for all?\n\nA soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes\nA glimpse of that dark world where I was born.\nOnce more the old mysterious glimmer steals\nFrom thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,\nAnd bosom beating with a heart renew’d.\nThy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom,\nThy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,\nEre yet they blind the stars, and the wild team\nWhich love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,\nAnd shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes,\nAnd beat the twilight into flakes of fire.\n\nLo! ever thus thou growest beautiful\nIn silence, then before thine answer given\nDepartest, and thy tears are on my cheek.\n\nWhy wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,\nAnd make me tremble lest a saying learnt,\nIn days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?\n“The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”\n\nAy me! ay me! with what another heart\nIn days far-off, and with what other eyes\nI used to watch--if I be he that watch’d--\nThe lucid outline forming round thee; saw\nThe dim curls kindle into sunny rings;\nChanged with thy mystic change, and felt my blood\nGlow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all\nThy presence and thy portals, while I lay,\nMouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm\nWith kisses balmier than half-opening buds\nOf April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d\nWhispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,\nLike that strange song I heard Apollo sing,\nWhile Ilion like a mist rose into towers.\n\nYet hold me not for ever in thine East:\nHow can my nature longer mix with thine?\nColdly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold\nAre all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet\nUpon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam\nFloats up from those dim fields about the homes\nOf happy men that have the power to die,\nAnd grassy barrows of the happier dead.\nRelease me, and restore me to the ground;\nThou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:\nThou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;\nI earth in earth forget these empty courts,\nAnd thee returning on thy silver wheels.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1860 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "ulysses": { - "title": "“Ulysses”", - "body": "It little profits that an idle king,\nBy this still hearth, among these barren crags,\nMatch’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole\nUnequal laws unto a savage race,\nThat hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.\nI cannot rest from travel: I will drink\nLife to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d\nGreatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those\nThat loved me, and alone, on shore, and when\nThro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades\nVext the dim sea: I am become a name;\nFor always roaming with a hungry heart\nMuch have I seen and known; cities of men\nAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,\nMyself not least, but honour’d of them all;\nAnd drunk delight of battle with my peers,\nFar on the ringing plains of windy Troy.\nI am a part of all that I have met;\nYet all experience is an arch wherethro’\nGleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades\nFor ever and forever when I move.\nHow dull it is to pause, to make an end,\nTo rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!\nAs tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life\nWere all too little, and of one to me\nLittle remains: but every hour is saved\nFrom that eternal silence, something more,\nA bringer of new things; and vile it were\nFor some three suns to store and hoard myself,\nAnd this gray spirit yearning in desire\nTo follow knowledge like a sinking star,\nBeyond the utmost bound of human thought.\n\n This is my son, mine own Telemachus,\nTo whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--\nWell-loved of me, discerning to fulfil\nThis labour, by slow prudence to make mild\nA rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees\nSubdue them to the useful and the good.\nMost blameless is he, centred in the sphere\nOf common duties, decent not to fail\nIn offices of tenderness, and pay\nMeet adoration to my household gods,\nWhen I am gone. He works his work, I mine.\n\n There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:\nThere gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,\nSouls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me--\nThat ever with a frolic welcome took\nThe thunder and the sunshine, and opposed\nFree hearts, free foreheads--you and I are old;\nOld age hath yet his honour and his toil;\nDeath closes all: but something ere the end,\nSome work of noble note, may yet be done,\nNot unbecoming men that strove with Gods.\nThe lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:\nThe long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep\nMoans round with many voices. Come, my friends,\n’T is not too late to seek a newer world.\nPush off, and sitting well in order smite\nThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holds\nTo sail beyond the sunset, and the baths\nOf all the western stars, until I die.\nIt may be that the gulfs will wash us down:\nIt may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,\nAnd see the great Achilles, whom we knew.\nTho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’\nWe are not now that strength which in old days\nMoved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;\nOne equal temper of heroic hearts,\nMade weak by time and fate, but strong in will\nTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1842 - } - } - }, - "viviens-song": { - "title": "“Vivien’s Song”", - "body": "In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,\nFaith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:\nUnfaith in aught is want of faith in all.\n\nIt is the little rift within the lute,\nThat by and by will make the music mute,\nAnd ever widening slowly silence all.\n\nThe little rift within the lover’s lute,\nOr little pitted speck in garner’d fruit,\nThat rotting inward slowly moulders all.\n\nIt is not worth the keeping: let it go:\nBut shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.\nAnd trust me not at all or all in all.", - "metadata": { - "source": "Merlin and Vivien", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1859 - } - } - }, - "you-ask-me-why-tho-ill-at-ease": { - "title": "“You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease …”", - "body": "You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,\nWithin this region I subsist,\nWhose spirits falter in the mist,\nAnd languish for the purple seas.\n\nIt is the land that freemen till,\nThat sober-suited Freedom chose,\nThe land, where girt with friends or foes\nA man may speak the thing he will;\n\nA land of settled government,\nA land of just and old renown,\nWhere Freedom slowly broadens down\nFrom precedent to precedent:\n\nWhere faction seldom gathers head,\nBut by degrees to fullness wrought,\nThe strength of some diffusive thought\nHath time and space to work and spread.\n\nShould banded unions persecute\nOpinion, and induce a time\nWhen single thought is civil crime,\nAnd individual freedom mute;\n\nTho’ Power should make from land to land\nThe name of Britain trebly great--\nTho’ every channel of the State\nShould fill and choke with golden sand--\n\nYet waft me from the harbour-mouth,\nWild wind! I seek a warmer sky,\nAnd I will see before I die\nThe palms and temples of the South.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1843 - } - } - } - } - }, - "teresa-of-avila": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Teresa of Ávila", - "birth": { - "year": 1515 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1582 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_Ávila", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "saint", - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "laughter-came-from-every-brick": { - "title": "“Laughter Came from Every Brick”", - "body": "Just these two words He spoke\nchanged my life,\n“Enjoy Me.”\nWhat a burden I thought I was to carry--\na crucifix, as did He.\nLove once said to me, “I know a song,\nwould you like to hear it?”\nAnd laughter came from every brick in the street\nand from every pore\nin the sky.\nAfter a night of prayer, He\nchanged my life when\nHe sang,\n“Enjoy Me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_teresa_of_avila" - } - } - }, - "let-nothing-disturb-you": { - "title": "“Let Nothing Disturb You”", - "body": "Let nothing disturb you,\nLet nothing frighten you,\nAll things pass away:\nGod never changes.\nPatience obtains all things.\nHe who has God\nFinds he lacks nothing;\nGod alone suffices.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_teresa_of_avila" - } - } - } - } - }, - "therese-of-lisieux": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint Thérèse of Lisieux", - "birth": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1897 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thérèse_of_Lisieux", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "french", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 9 - }, - "poems": { - "canticle-to-the-holy-face": { - "title": "“Canticle To The Holy Face”", - "body": "Dear Jesus! ’tis Thy Holy Face\nIs here the start that guides my way;\nThey countenance, so full of grace,\nIs heaven on earth, for me, today.\nAnd love finds holy charms for me\nIn Thy sweet eyes with tear-drops wet;\nThrough mine own tears I smile at Thee,\nAnd in Thy griefs my pains forget.\nHow gladly would I live unknown,\nThus to console Thy aching heart.\nThy veiled beauty, it is shown\nTo those who live from earth apart.\nI long to fly to Thee alone!\n\nThy Face is now my fatherland,\nThe radiant sunshine of my days,\nMy realm of love, my sunlit land,\nWhere, all life long, I sing Thy praise;\nIt is the lily of the vale,\nWhose mystic perfume, freely given,\nBrings comfort, when I faint and fail,\nAnd makes me taste the peace of heaven.\nThy face, in its unearthly grace,\nIs like the divinest myrrh to me,\nThat on my heart I gladly place;\nIt is my lyre of melody;\nMy rest--my comfort--is Thy Face.\n\nMy only wealth, Lord! is thy Face;\nI ask naught else than this from Thee;\nHid in the secret of that Face,\nThe more I shall resemble Thee!\nOh, leave on me some impress faint\nOf Thy sweet, humble, patient Face,\nAnd soon I shall become a saint,\nAnd draw men to Thy saving grace.\nSo, in the secret of Thy Face,\nOh! hide me, hide me, Jesus blest!\nThere let me find its hidden grace,\nIts holy fires, and, in heaven’s rest,\nIts rapturous kiss, in Thy embrace!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "do-you-realize": { - "title": "“Do you realize …”", - "body": "Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you--for you alone? He burns with the desire to come into your heart …don’t listen to the demon, laugh at him, and go without fear to receive the Jesus of peace and love …\n\nReceive Communion often, very often …there you have the sole remedy, if you want to be cured. Jesus has not put this attraction in your heart for nothing …\n\nThe guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us--that is all He asks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "the-eternal-canticle": { - "title": "“The Eternal Canticle”", - "body": "Exiled afar from heaven, I still, dear Lord, can sing,--\nI, Thy betrothed, can sing the eternal hymn of love;\nFor, spite of exile comes to me, on dove-like wing,\nThy Holy Spirit’s fire of rapture from above.\n\nBeauty supreme! my Love Thou art;\nThyself Thou givest all to me.\nOh, take my heart, my yearning heart,--\nMake of my life one act of love to Thee!\n\nCanst Thou my worthlessness efface?\nIn heart like mine canst make Thy home?\nYes, love wins love, -O wondrous grace!\nI love Thee, love Thee! Jesu, come I\n\nLove that enkindleth me,\nPierce and inflame me;\nCome, for I cry to Thee!\nCome and be mine!\n\nThy love it urgeth me;\nFain would I ever be\nSunken and lost in Thee,\nFurnace divine!\n\nAll pain borne for Thee\nChanges to joy for me,\nWhen my love flies to Thee,\nWinged like the dove.\n\nHeavenly Completeness,\nInfinite Sweetness,\nMy soul possesseth Thee\nHere, as above.\n\nHeavenly Completeness,\nInfinite sweetness,\nNaught else art Thou but Love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "jesus-only": { - "title": "“Jesus Only”", - "body": "Oh, how my heart would spend itself, to bless;\nIt hath such need to prove its tenderness!\nAnd yet what heart can my heart comprehend?\nWhat heart shall always love me without end?\nAll--all in vain for such return seek I;\nJesus alone my soul can satisfy.\nNaught else contents or charms me here below;\nCreated things no lasting joy bestow\n\nMy peace, my joy, my love, O Christ!\n’Tis Thou alone! Thou hast sufficed.\n\nThou didst know how to make a mother’s heart;\nTenderest of fathers, Lord! to me Thou art.\nMy only Love, Jesus, Divinest Word!\nMore than maternal is Thy heart, dear Lord!\nEach moment Thou my way dost guard and guide;\nI call--at once I find Thee at my side--\nAnd if, sometimes Thou hid’st Thy face from me,\nThou com’st Thyself to help me seek for Thee.\n\nThee, Thee, alone I choose: I am Thy bride.\nUnto Thy arms I hasten, there to hide.\nThee would I love, as little children love;\nFor Thee, like warrior bold, my love I’d prove.\nNow, like to children, full of joy and glee,\nSo come I, Lord! to show my love to Thee;\nYet, like a warrior bold with high elation,\nRush I to combats in my blest vocation.\n\nThy Heart is Guardian of our innocence;\nNot once shall it deceive my confidence.\nWholly my hopes are placed in Thee, dear Lord!\nAfter long exile, I Thy Face adored\nIn heaven shall see. When clouds the skies o’erspread.\nTo Thee, my Jesus! I lift up my head;\nFor, in Thy tender glance, these words I see:\n‘O child! I made My radiant heaven for thee.\n\nI know it well--my burning tears and sighs\nAre full of charm for Thy benignant eyes.\nStrong seraphs form in heaven Thy court divine,\nYet Thou dost seek this poor weak heart of mine.\nAh! take my heart! Jesus, ’tis Thine alone;\nAll my desires I yield to Thee, my Own!\nAnd all my friends, that are so loved by me,\nNo longer will I love them, save in Thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "jesus-my-beloved-remember-thou": { - "title": "“Jesus, My Beloved Remember Thou”", - "body": "Recall, O Christ! the Father’s glories bright,\nRecall the splendors of Thy heavenly home,\nWhich Thou didst leave, to come to earth’s dark night,\nAnd save poor sinners who in exile roam!\nDear Jesus! bending down at Mary’s humble word,\nIn her Thou didst conceal Thy majesty adored.\n\nNow that maternal breast,\nThy second heaven, Thy rest,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember, now, the day of Thy blest birth,\nHow angels, quitting heaven, sang joyously:\n“To God be power, glory, lasting worth;\nAnd peace to men of good-will ever be!”\nFor nineteen hundred years Thy promise Thou hast kept;\nThy children in that peace have waked, and worked, and slept.\n\nTo taste forever here\nThy peace, divinely dear,\nI seek Thee now.\n\nRemember O Thou Babe in swaddling bands!\nBeside Thy crib I would forever stay.\nThere, with Thine angels, Lord of all the lands!\nI would remind thee of that happy day.\nO Jesus! call to mind the shepherds and wise men,\nWho offered Thee their hearts, as I mine own again;\n\nThe Babes of Bethlehem see,\nWho gave their blood for Thee.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember Thou that Mary’s holy arms\nThou didst prefer to any royal throne.\nDear little One! she shielded Thee from harm,\nShe fed Thee with her virginal milk alone.\nOh, at that feast of love Thy mother gave to Thee,\nMy little Brother, grant that I a guest may be,\n\nThy little sister I.\nOh, hear my ardent cry:\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember that Thy childish voice, dear Lord!\nCalled Joseph father, who, at heaven’s decree,\nPrevailed to snatch Thee from the tyrant’s sword,\nAnd sought old Egypt’s far-off coast with Thee.\nO Word of God! recall what mysteries round Thee woke;\nThou didst keep silent, Lord! the while an angel spoke.\n\nThy distant, long exile\nOn banks of ancient Nile,\nRemember now.\n\nRemember Thou that on my native shore,\nThe stars of gold, the moon of silver bright,\nWhich I contemplate, wondering more and more,\nCharmed in the East Thine infant eyes at night.\nThat tiny hand of Thine, that stroked Thy Mother’s face,\nSustained the world, held all things in their place.\n\nAnd Thou didst think of me!\nAh! how I think of Thee,\nRemember now.\n\nRemember Thou, in solitude most blest,\nThou laboredst with Thy hands for daily bread.\nTo live forgotten,--this Thy earnest quest,\nAll human wisdom trampled ‘neath Thy tread,\nOne single word of Thine could charm a listening world;\nYet Thou Thy wisdom kept in closest silence furled.\n\nThou, Who didst all things know,\nNo sign of power wouldst show.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember how,--Stranger and Pilgrim here,--\nThou hadst no’home, O Thou Eternal Word!\nNot e’en a pillow for Thy head most dear;\nNot e’en a shelter, like the flitting bird.\nO Jesu, come to me! Rest Thou upon my breast.\nCome, Come! My spirit longs to have Thee for its Guest.\n\nThou well-beloved, adored!\nRest in my heart, dear Lord,\nEver as now!\n\nRemember Thou, the loving tenderness\nThat Thou didst show to children seeking Thee.\nLike them I would receive Thy kind caress;\nLike them, Thy blessings, Lord, be granted me.\nThat I in heaven may gain Thy welcome and Thy rest,\nHere will I practise well all childhood’s virtues best.\n\n“The childlike soul wins heaven.”\nThis promise Thou hast given,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember Thou that on the fountain’s brink,\nA traveller, weary with the journey’s length,\nThou of the sinful tenderly didst think,\nAnd for contrition gave her lasting strength.\nI know Thee well Who asked, of her, the draught, that day.\n\nThou art “the Gift of God,” the Life, the Truth the Way.\nThou wilt not pass me by.\nI hear Thy tender cry:\n\n“Come to Me now!”\n“Come unto Me, poor souls with sorrow tost!\nYour heavy load My hands shall take away;\nYour griefs and pains shall be forever lost,\nWithin the depths of love I feel for aye.”\nI thirst, I thirst, 0 Christ! Nought else I seek, save Thee.\nBorne down beneath my cross, I cry: “O comfort me!”\n\nBe Thy dear love my home!\nI come! Yes, Lord, I come!\nReceive me now!\n\nRemember Thou that, though a child of light,\nToo oft, alas! I have neglected Thee.\nTake pity on me in life’s dreary night;\nOh, pardon all my sin and misery!\nMake my sad heart rejoice Thy holy will to do;\nMy soul to those delights, hid in Thy gospels, woo!\n\nThat I that book of gold\nEver most dear did hold,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember Thou Thy holy Mother’s power\nThat she possesses o’er Thy Heart divine.\nRemember, at her prayer, one joyful hour,\nThou didst change water to delicious wine.\nDeign also to transform my works, though poor they be;\nOh, make them glorious works, when Mary pleads with Thee.\n\nThat I am Mary’s child,\nDear Jesus, meek and mild,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember that the summits of the hills\nThou often didst ascend at set of sun.\nAh! how Thy prayer the long, long night-hours fills,\nThy chants of praise when weary day is done.\nThy prayer I offer now, with ever new delight,\nJoined to my own poor prayers, my office, day and night.\n\nThat I, too, near Thy heart,\nTake in Thy prayer my part,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember that Thine eyes beheld the fields\nWhite to the harvest,--harvest of the blest!\nThy Heart o’er them Its mystic influence wields;\nWithin that Heart is room for all, and rest.\nThat soon may come for Thee Thy glorious harvest day,\nI immolate myself, I offer prayers alway.\n\nI give my joys, my tears,\nFor thy good harvesters.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRecall that feast of angels in delight,\nThat harmony of heaven’s kingly host,\nThe joy of all those choirs of spirits bright,\nWhen one is saved, once counted ‘mongst the lost.\nOh, how I would augment that joy and glory there!\nFor sinners I will pray with ceaseless, ardent prayer.\n\nTo win dear souls to heaven,\nMy life and prayers are given.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember that most holy flame of love\nThou wouldst enkindle in all hearts alway.\nTo me it came from Thy fair heaven above;\nWould I could spread its fires by night and day!\nOne feeble spark, dear Lord!--0 glorious mystery!--\nA fire immense can light, if fanned to flame by Thee.\n\nI long, Divinest Star!\nTo bear Thy flames afar.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember how the festal board was graced,\nTo feast the penitent returning son!\nRemember, too, the innocent soul is placed\nEver near Thee, O Thou Beloved One!\nUnto the prodigal no welcome is denied;\nBut, ah! the elder son is always at Thy side.\n\nFather, and Love Divine,\nAll that Thou hast is mine.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember how Thou didst disdain earth’s pride,\nWhen working miracles with God’s own ease.\n“Ye who seek human praise! can ye decide\nTo give your faith to mysteries like these?\nThe great works that I do, (so Thou hast said, dear Lord!)\nMy friends shall yet surpass, according to My word.”\n\nHow humble Thou wast then,\nAmong the sons of men.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember in what rapture of delight\nThe loved apostle rested on Thy Heart.\nIn that deep peace he knew Thy love and might;\nThy mysteries thence he drew,--how strong Thou art!\nOf Thy beloved John I feel no jealousy.\nI am Thy choice; I, too, behold the mystery.\n\nI, too, upon Thy breast\nMay have ecstatic rest.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRecall Thine awful hour of agony\nWhen blood and tears bore witness to Thy woe.\nO pearls of love! O rubies fair to see!\nThence virginal blooms of beauty ever grow.\nAn angel, showing Thee what harvest Thou shouldst reap,\nGave gladness to Thee, then, even while Thou didst weep.\n\nThen truly didst Thou see,\nAmongst those lilies, me!\nRemember now!\n\nThy blood, Thy tears,--a fruitful living source,\nThose mystic flowers, makes virginal evermore;\nAnd to them grants a wondrous, holy force,\nFor winning souls to serve Thee and adore.\nA virginal heart is mine; yet, Christ, what mystery!\nMother of souls am I, through my chaste bond with Thee.\n\nThese virginal flowers that bloom\nTo bring poor sinners home,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember Thou, that, steeped in direst woe,\nCondemned by men, to heaven Thine eyes were raised;\nAnd Thou didst cry: “Soon ye My power shall know.\nSoon shall ye hear My name by angels praised!”\nYet who believed Thee, then, the Son of God to be,\nThy glory veiled and hid in our humanity?\n\nFairest of sons of men!\nMy God! I knew Thee then!\nRemember now!\n\nRemember that Thy dear, divinest Face,\nEven among Thy friends, was oft unknown.\nBut Thou hast drawn me by its matchless grace;\nThou knowest well I claimed it for mine own.\nI have divined its charms, tho’ wet with human tears.\nFace of Eternal God! I love Thee all these years.\n\nPart of my name Thou art!\nThou dost console mv heart.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember Thou that amorous complaint,\nEscaping from Thy lips on Calvary’s tree:\n“I thirst!” Oh, how my heart like Thine doth faint.\nYes, yes! I share Thy burning thirst with Thee.\nThe more my heart burns bright with Thy great Heart’s chaste fires,\nThe more I thirst for souls, to quench Thy Heart’s desires.\n\nThat with such love always\nI burn, by night, by day,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember, O my Jesu! Word of life!\nThat Thou hast loved me, dying e’en for me.\nOh, let me be with holy folly rife!\nSo would I, also, live and die for Thee!\nThou knowest, Lord! my wish, my loving heart’s desire,--\nTo make Thee loved, and then, in martyrdom expire.\n\nI long of love to die.\nO hear my ardent cry.\nRemember Thou!\n\nRecall that glorious, that victorious hour,\nWhen Thou didst say: “Happy indeed is he,\nWho has not seen My triumph and My power,\nBut, seeing not, has still believed in Me.”\nIn faith’s dim, shadowy night, I love Thee, I adore.\nJesu, I wait in peace, till faith’s long night is o’er.\n\nThat not one wish had I\nTo see Thee ‘neath this sky,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember that ascending unto God,\nThou wouldst not leave us orphans sad and lone,\nBut didst, a Prisoner still, where we abode,\nVeil on our altars all Thy pomp, my Own!\nThe shadow of Thy veil is, oh! how pure and bright,\nThou Living Bread of faith, heaven’s Food, my heart’s Delight.\n\nO mystery of love!\nMy Bread from heaven above,\nJesus, ’tis Thou!\n\nRemember Thou, in spite of insults hurled\nAgainst this sacrament of love divine,\nThou dost remain in this dull, weary world,\nAnd fix Thy dwelling in a heart like mine.\nO Bread of exiled souls! holy and heavenly Host!\nNo more I live--not I! in Thee my life is lost.\n\nThy chosen ciborium\nAm I. Come, Jesu, come!\nMy Love art Thou.\n\nThy sanctuary here, dear Lord, am I,\nThat evil men shall never dare molest.\nRest in my, heart! Oh, do not pass me by!\nThy garden I, each flower an offering blest.\nBut if from me Thou turn, white Lily of the vale!\nI know too well those flowers would wither and would fail.\n\nEver, Thou Lily rare!\nBloom in my garden fair.\nMy life art Thou!\n\nRemember that I longed upon this earth,\nTo comfort Thee for sinners’ scorn of Thee.\nGive me a thousand hearts to praise Thy worth.\nMy Well-Beloved! abide, abide with me!\nA thousand hearts too few would be for my desire;\nGive me Thy Heart to set my longing heart on fire.\n\nMy ardent love for Thee,\nWhile swift the moments flee,\nRemember Thou!\n\nRemember, Lord! that Thy dear will alone\nIs my sole wish, my only happiness.\nI give mvself to Thee, to rest, mine Own!\nWith Thee in peace, and know Thy power to bless.\nAnd if Thou seems’t to sleep while raging waves beat high,\nIn peace I still remain, without one anguished cry.\n\nIn peace, on Thee, I wait;\nBut, for th’ Awakening great,\nPrepare me Thou!\n\nRemember how I often long and sigh\nFor that last day when angels shall proclaim:\n“Time is no more! The judgment draweth nigh.\nRise thou, to face thy judge! He calls thy name.”\nThen swiftly shall I fly, past bounds of earth in space,\nTo live at last within the Vision of Thy Face.\n\nThat it alone can be\nMy joy eternally,\nRemember Thou!\n\nThe life immortal must\nBe this life of ours.\nLimitless progress, Joy\nMust feed our hours.\nThe selfless Will that knows\nNo feeble fears\nIs our only guide and Eye\nTo end our tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "my-hope": { - "title": "“My Hope”", - "body": "Though in a foreign land I dwell afar,\nI taste in dreams the endless joys of heaven.\nFain would I fly beyond the farthest star,\nAnd see the wonders to the ransomed given!\nNo more the sense of exile weighs on me,\nWhen once I dream of that immortal day.\nTo my true fatherland, dear God! I see,\nFor the first time I soon shall fly away.\n\nAh! give me, Jesus! wings as white as snow,\nThat unto Thee I soon may take my flight.\nI long to be where flowers unfading blow;\nI long to see Thee, O my heart’s Delight!\nI long to fly to Mary’s mother-arms,--\nTo rest upon that spotless throne of bliss;\nAnd, sheltered there from troubles and alarms,\nFor the first time to feel her gentle kiss.\n\nThy first sweet smile of welcoming delight\nSoon show, O Jesus! to Thy lowly bride;\nO’ercome with rapture at that wondrous sight,\nWithin Thy Sacred Heart, ah! let me hide.\nO happy moment! and O heavenly grace!\nWhen I shall hear Thee, Jesus, speak to me;\nAnd the full vision of Thy glorious Face\nFor the first time my longing eyes shall see.\n\nThou knowest well, my only martyrdom\nIs love, O Heart of Jesus Christ! for Thee;\nAnd if my soul craves for its heavenly home,\n’Tis but to love Thee more, eternally.\nAbove, when Thy sweet Face unveiled I view,\nMeasure nor bounds shall to my love be given;\nForever my delight shall seem as new\nAs the first time my spirit entered heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "my-song-of-today": { - "title": "“My Song Of Today”", - "body": "Oh! how I love Thee, Jesus! my soul aspires to Thee--\nAnd yet for one day only my simple prayer I pray!\nCome reign within my heart, smile tenderly on me,\nTo-day, dear Lord, to-day.\n\nBut if I dare take thought of what the morrow brings--\nThat fills my fickle heart with dreary, dull dismay;\nI crave, indeed, my God, trials and sufferings,\nBut only for to-day!\n\nO sweetest Star of heaven! O Virgin, spotless, blest,\nShining with Jesus’ light, guiding to Him my way!\nO Mother! ‘neath thy veil let my tired spirit rest,\nFor this brief passing day!\n\nSoon shall I fly afar among the holy choirs,\nThen shall be mine the joy that never knows decay;\nAnd then my lips shall sing, to heaven’s angelic lyres,\nThe eternal, glad To-day!", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "date": { - "year": 1894, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_therese_of_lisieux" - } - } - }, - "to-live-of-love": { - "title": "“To Live Of Love”", - "body": "1.\n\nThe eve His life of love drew near its end,\nThus Jesus spoke: “Whoever loveth Me,\nAnd keeps My word as Mine own faithful friend,\nMy Father, then and I his guests will be;\nWithin his heart will make Our dwelling above.\nOur palace home, true type of heaven above.\nThere, filled with peace, We will that he shall rest,\nWith us, in love.”\n\n\n2.\n\nIncarnate Word! Thou Word of God alone!\nTo live of love, ’tis to abide with Thee.\nThou knowest I love Thee, Jesus Christ, my Own!\nThy Spirit’s fire of love enkindleth me.\nBy loving Thee, I draw the Father here\nDown to my heart, to stay with me always.\nBlest Trinity! Thou art my prisoner dear,\nOf love, to-day.\n\n\n3.\n\nTo live of love, ’tis by Thy life to live,\nO glorious King, my chosen, sole Delight!\nHid in the Host, how often Thou dost give\nThyself to those who seek Thy radiant light.\nThen hid shall be my life, unmarked, unknown,\nThat I may have Thee heart to heart with me;\nFor loving souls desire to be alone,\nWith love, and Thee!\n\n\n4.\n\nTo live of love, ’tis not to fix one’s tent\nOn Tabor’s height and there with Thee remain.\n’Tis to climb Calvary with strength nigh spent,\nAnd count Thy heavy cross our truest gain.\nIn heaven, my life a life of joy shall be,\nThe heavy cross shall then be gone for aye.\nHere upon earth, in suffering with Thee,\nLove! let me stay.\n\n\n5.\n\nTo live of love, ’tis without stint to give,\nAn never count the cost, nor ask reward;\nSo, counting not the cost, I long to live\nAnd show my dauntless love for Thee, dear Lord!\nO Heart Divine, o’erflowing with tenderness,\nHow swift I run, who all to Thee has given!\nNaught but Thy love I need, my life to bless.\nThat love is heaven!\n\n\n6.\n\nTo live of love, it is to know no fear;\nNo memory of past faults can I recall;\nNo imprint of my sins remaineth here;\nThe fire of Love divine effaces all.\nO sacred flames! O furnace of delight!\nI sing my safe sweet happiness to prove.\nIn these mild fires I dwell by day, by night.\nI live of love!\n\n\n7.\n\nTo live of love, ’tis in my heart to guard\nA mighty treasure in a fragile vase.\nWeak, weak, am I, O well?beloved Lord!\nNor have I yet an angel’s perfect grace.\nBut, if I fall each hour that hurries by,\nThou com’st to me from Thy bright home above,\nAnd, raising me, dost give me strength to cry:\nI live of love!\n\n\n8.\n\nTo live of love it is to sail afar\nAnd bring both peace and joy where’er I be.\n0 Pilot blest! love is my guiding star;\nIn every soul I meet, Thyself I see.\nSafe sail I on, through wind or rain or ice;\nLove urges me, love conquers every gale.\nHigh on my mast behold is my device:\n“By love I sail!”\n\n\n9.\n\nTo live of love, it is when Jesus sleeps\nTo sleep near Him, though stormy waves beat nigh.\nDeem not I shall awake Him! On these deeps\nPeace reigns, like that the Blessed know.on high.\nTo Hope, the vovage seems one little day;\nFaith’s hand shall soon the veil between remove;\n’Tis Charity that swells my sail alway.\nI live of love!\n\n\n10.\n\nTo live of love, 0 Master dearest, best!\nIt is to beg Thee light Thy holiest fires\nWithin the soul of each anointed priest,\nTill he shall feel the Seraphim’s desires;\nIt is to beg Thee guard Thy Church, 0 Christ!\nFor this I plead with Thee by night, by day;\nAnd give myself, in sacrifice unpriced,\nWith love alway!\n\n\n11.\n\nTo live of love, it is to dry Thy tears,\nTo seek for pardon for each sinful soul,\nTo strive to save all men from doubts and fears,\nAnd bring them home to Thy benign control.\nComes to my ear sin’s wild and blasphemous roar;\nSo, to efface each day, that burning shame,\nI cry: “O Jesus Christ! I Thee adore.\nI love Thy Name!”\n\n\n12.\n\nTo live of love, ’tis Mary’s part to share,\nTo bathe with tears and odorous perfume\nThy holy feet, to wipe them with my hair,\nTo kiss them; then still loftier lot assume,?\nTo rise, and by Thy side to take my place,\nAnd pour my ointments on Thy holy head.\nBut with no balsams I embalm Thy Face!\n’Tis love, instead!\n\n\n13.\n\n“To live of love, what foolishness she sings!”\nSo cries the world. “Renounce such idle jov!\nWaste not thy perfumes on such trivial things.\nIn useful arts thy talents now employ!”\nTo love Thee, Jesus! Ah, this loss is gain;\nFor all my perfumes no reward seek I.\nQuitting the world, I sing in death’s sweet pain:\nOf love I die!\n\n\n14.\n\nTo die of love, O martyrdom most blest!\nFor this I long, this is my heart’s desire;\nMy exile ends; I soon will be at rest.\nYe Cherubim, lend, lend to me your lyre!\nO dart of Seraphim, O flame of love,\nConsume me wholly; hear my ardent cry!\nJesu, make reall my dream! Come Holy Dove!\nOf love I die!\n\n\n15.\n\nTo die of love, behold my life’s long hope!\nGod is my one exceeding great reward.\nHe of my wishes forms the end and scope;\nHim only do I seek; my dearest Lord.\nWith passionate love for Him my heart is riven.\nO may He quickly come! He draweth nigh!\nBehold my destiny, behold my heaven,--\nOf love to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "date": { - "year": 1895, - "month": "february", - "day": 25 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_thursday" - } - } - }, - "to-the-sacred-heart": { - "title": "“To The Sacred Heart”", - "body": "Beside the tomb wept Magdalen at dawn,--\nShe sought to find the dead and buried Christ;\nNothing could fill the void now He was gone,\nNo one to soothe her burning grief sufficed.\n\nNot even you, Archangels heaven-assigned!\nTo her could bring content that dreary day.\nYour buried King, alone, she longed to find,\nAnd bear His lifeless body far away.\n\nBeside His tomb she there the last remained,\nAnd there again was she before the sun;\nThere, too, to come to her the Saviour deigned,--\nHe would not be, by her, in love outdone.\n\nGently He showed her then His blessed Face,\nAnd one word sprang from His deep Heart’s recess:\nMary! His voice she knew, she knew its grace;\nIt came with perfect peace her heart to bless.\n\nOne day, my God! I, too, like Magdalen,\nDesired to find Thee, to draw near to Thee;\nSo, over earth’s immense, wide-stretching plain,\nI sought its Master and its King to see.\n\nThen cried I, though I saw the flowers bloom\nIn beauty ‘neath green trees and azure skies:\nO brilliant Naturel thou art one vast tomb,\nUnless God’s Face shall greet my longing eyes.\n\nA heart I need, to soothe me and to bless,--\nA strong support that can not pass away,--\nTo love me wholly, e’en my feebleness,\nAnd never leave me through the night or day.\n\nThere is not one created thing below,\nCan love me truly, and can never die.\nGod become man--none else’ my needs can know;\nHe, He alone, can understand my cry.\n\nThou comprehendest all I need, dear Lord!\nTo win my heart, from heaven Thou didst come;\nFor me Thy blood didst shed, O King adored!\nAnd on our altars makest Thy home.\n\nSo, if I may not here behold Thy Face,\nOr catch the heaenly music of Thy Voice,\nI still can live, each moment, by Thy grace,\nAnd in Thy Sacred Heart I can rejoice.\n\nO Heart of Jesus, wealth of tenderness!\nMy joy Thou art, in Thee I safely hide.\nThou, Who my earliest youth didst charm and bless,\nTill my last evening, oh! with me abide,\n\nAll that I had, to Thee I wholly gave,\nTo Thee each deep desire of mine is known.\nWhoso his life shall lose, that life shall save;--\nLet mine be ever lost in Thine alone!\n\nI know it well, no righteousness of mine\nHath any value in Thy searching eyes;\nIts every breath my heart must draw from Thine,\nTo make of worth my life’s long sacrifice.\n\nThou hast not found Thine angels without taint;\nThy Law amid the thunderbolts was given;\nAnd yet, my Jesus! I nor fear nor faint.\nFor me, on Calvary, Thy Heart was riven.\n\nTo see Thee in Thy glory face to face,--\nI know it well,--the soul must pass through fires.\nChoose I on earth my purgatorial place,--\nThe flaming love of Thy great Heart’s desires!\n\nSo shall my exiled soul, to death’s command,\nMake answer with one cry of perfect love;\nThen flying straight to heaven its Fatherland,\nShall reach with no delay that home above.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "S. L. Emery", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - } - } - }, - "dylan-thomas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Dylan Thomas", - "birth": { - "year": 1915 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 64 - }, - "poems": { - "all-all-and-all-the-dry-worlds-lever": { - "title": "“All All and All the Dry Worlds Lever”", - "body": "# I.\n\nAll all and all the dry world’s lever,\nStage of the ice, the solid ocean,\nAll from the oil, the pound of lava.\nCity of spring, the governed flower,\nTurns in the earth that turns the ashen\nTowns around on a wheel of fire.\n\nHow now my flesh, my naked fellow,\nDug of the sea, the glanded morrow,\nWorm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.\nAll all and all, the corpse’s lover,\nSkinny as sin, the foaming marrow,\nAll of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.\n\n\n# II.\n\nFear not the waking world, my mortal,\nFear not the flat, synthetic blood,\nNor the heart in the ribbing metal.\nFear not the tread, the seeded milling,\nThe trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,\nNor the flint in the lover’s mauling.\n\nMan of my flesh, the jawbone riven,\nKnow now the flesh’s lock and vice,\nAnd the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.\nKnow, O my bone, the jointed lever,\nFear not the screws that turn the voice,\nAnd the face to the driven lover.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAll all and all the dry worlds couple,\nGhost with her ghost, contagious man\nWith the womb of his shapeless people.\nAll that shapes from the caul and suckle,\nStroke of mechanical flesh on mine,\nSquare in these worlds the mortal circle.\n\nFlower, flower the people’s fusion,\nO light in zenith, the coupled bud,\nAnd the flame in the flesh’s vision.\nOut of the sea, the drive of oil,\nSocket and grave, the brassy blood,\nFlower, flower, all all and all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "all-that-i-owe-the-fellows-of-the-grave": { - "title": "“All that I Owe the Fellows of the Grave”", - "body": "All that I owe the fellows of the grave\nAnd all the dead bequeathed from pale estates\nLies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,\nLike senna stirs along the ravaged roots.\nO all I owe is all the flesh inherits,\nMy fathers’ loves that pull upon my nerves,\nMy sisters tears that sing upon my head\nMy brothers’ blood that salts my open wounds\n\n\nHeir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop,\nMy fallen filled, that had the hint of death,\nHeir to the telling senses that alone\nAcquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,\nI round this heritage as rounds the sun\nHis windy sky, and, as the candles moon,\nCast light upon my weather. I am heir\nTo women who have twisted their last smile,\nTo children who were suckled on a plague,\nTo young adorers dying on a kiss.\nAll such disease I doctor in my blood,\nAnd all such love’s a shrub sown in the breath.\n\n\nThen look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortune\nAnd browse upon the postures of the dead;\nAll night and day I eye the ragged globe\nThrough periscopes rightsighted from the grave;\nAll night and day I wander in these same\nWax clothes that wax upon the aging ribs;\nAll night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.\nThen look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,\nAnd look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;\nAll night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "among-those-killed-in-the-dawn-raid-was-a-man-aged-a-hundred": { - "title": "“Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred”", - "body": "When the morning was waking over the war\nHe put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,\nThe locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,\nHe dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone\nAnd the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.\nTell his street on its back he stopped a sun\nAnd the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire\nWhen all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.\nDig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.\nThe heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound\nAssembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.\nO keep his bones away from the common cart,\nThe morning is flying on the wings of his age\nAnd a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "and-death-shall-have-no-dominion": { - "title": "“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”", - "body": "And death shall have no dominion.\nDead mean naked they shall be one\nWith the man in the wind and the west moon;\nWhen their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,\nThey shall have stars at elbow and foot;\nThough they go mad they shall be sane,\nThough they sink through the sea they shall rise again;\nThough lovers be lost love shall not;\nAnd death shall have no dominion.\n\nAnd death shall have no dominion.\nUnder the windings of the sea\nThey lying long shall not die windily;\nTwisting on racks when sinews give way,\nStrapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;\nFaith in their hands shall snap in two,\nAnd the unicorn evils run them through;\nSplit all ends up they shan’t crack;\nAnd death shall have no dominion.\n\nAnd death shall have no dominion.\nNo more may gulls cry at their ears\nOr waves break loud on the seashores;\nWhere blew a flower may a flower no more\nLift its head to the blows of the rain;\nThrough they be mad and dead as nails,\nHeads of the characters hammer through daisies;\nBreak in the sun till the sun breaks down,\nAnd death shall have no dominion.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "authors-prologue": { - "title": "“Author’s Prologue”", - "body": "This day winding down now\nAt God speeded summer’s end\nIn the torrent salmon sun,\nIn my seashaken house\nOn a breakneck of rocks\nTangled with chirrup and fruit,\nFroth, flute, fin, and quill\nAt a wood’s dancing hoof,\nBy scummed, starfish sands\nWith their fishwife cross\nGulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,\nOut there, crow black, men\nTackled with clouds, who kneel\nTo the sunset nets,\nGeese nearly in heaven, boys\nStabbing, and herons, and shells\nThat speak seven seas,\nEternal waters away\nFrom the cities of nine\nDays’ night whose towers will catch\nIn the religious wind\nLike stalks of tall, dry straw,\nAt poor peace I sing\nTo you strangers (though song\nIs a burning and crested act,\nThe fire of birds in\nThe world’s turning wood,\nFor my swan, splay sounds),\nOut of these seathumbed leaves\nThat will fly and fall\nLike leaves of trees and as soon\nCrumble and undie\nInto the dogdayed night.\nSeaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,\nAnd the dumb swans drub blue\nMy dabbed bay’s dusk, as I hack\nThis rumpus of shapes\nFor you to know\nHow I, a spining man,\nGlory also this star, bird\nRoared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.\nHark: I trumpet the place,\nFrom fish to jumping hill! Look:\nI build my bellowing ark\nTo the best of my love\nAs the flood begins,\nOut of the fountainhead\nOf fear, rage read, manalive,\nMolten and mountainous to stream\nOver the wound asleep\nSheep white hollow farms\nTo Wales in my arms.\nHoo, there, in castle keep,\nYou king singsong owls, who moonbeam\nThe flickering runs and dive\nThe dingle furred deer dead!\nHuloo, on plumbed bryns,\nO my ruffled ring dove\nin the hooting, nearly dark\nWith Welsh and reverent rook,\nCoo rooning the woods’ praise,\nwho moons her blue notes from her nest\nDown to the curlew herd!\nHo, hullaballoing clan\nAgape, with woe\nIn your beaks, on the gabbing capes!\nHeigh, on horseback hill, jack\nWhisking hare! who\nHears, there, this fox light, my flood ship’s\nClangour as I hew and smite\n(A clash of anvils for my\nHubbub and fiddle, this tune\nOn atounged puffball)\nBut animals thick as theives\nOn God’s rough tumbling grounds\n(Hail to His beasthood!).\nBeasts who sleep good and thin,\nHist, in hogback woods! The haystacked\nHollow farms ina throng\nOf waters cluck and cling,\nAnd barnroofs cockcrow war!\nO kingdom of neighbors finned\nFelled and quilled, flash to my patch\nWork ark and the moonshine\nDrinking Noah of the bay,\nWith pelt, and scale, and fleece:\nOnly the drowned deep bells\nOf sheep and churches noise\nPoor peace as the sun sets\nAnd dark shoals every holy field.\nWe will ride out alone then,\nUnder the stars of Wales,\nCry, Multiudes of arks! Across\nThe water lidded lands,\nManned with their loves they’ll move\nLike wooden islands, hill to hill.\nHuloo, my prowed dove with a flute!\nAhoy, old, sea-legged fox,\nTom tit and Dai mouse!\nMy ark sings in the sun\nAt God speeded summer’s end\nAnd the flood flowers now.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "ballad-of-the-long-legged-bait": { - "title": "“Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait”", - "body": "The bows glided down, and the coast\nBlackened with birds took a last look\nAt his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;\nThe trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.\n\nThen good-bye to the fishermanned\nBoat with its anchor free and fast\nAs a bird hooking over the sea,\nHigh and dry by the top of the mast,\n\nWhispered the affectionate sand\nAnd the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.\nFor my sake sail, and never look back,\nSaid the looking land.\n\nSails drank the wind, and white as milk\nHe sped into the drinking dark;\nThe sun shipwrecked west on a pearl\nAnd the moon swam out of its hulk.\n\nFunnels and masts went by in a whirl.\nGood-bye to the man on the sea-legged deck\nTo the gold gut that sings on his reel\nTo the bait that stalked out of the sack,\n\nFor we saw him throw to the swift flood\nA girl alive with his hooks through her lips;\nAll the fishes were rayed in blood,\nSaid the dwindling ships.\n\nGood-bye to chimneys and funnels,\nOld wives that spin in the smoke,\nHe was blind to the eyes of candles\nIn the praying windows of waves\n\nBut heard his bait buck in the wake\nAnd tussle in a shoal of loves.\nNow cast down your rod, for the whole\nOf the sea is hilly with whales,\n\nShe longs among horses and angels,\nThe rainbow-fish bend in her joys,\nFloated the lost cathedral\nChimes of the rocked buoys.\n\nWhere the anchor rode like a gull\nMiles over the moonstruck boat\nA squall of birds bellowed and fell,\nA cloud blew the rain from its throat;\n\nHe saw the storm smoke out to kill\nWith fuming bows and ram of ice,\nFire on starlight, rake Jesu’s stream;\nAnd nothing shone on the water’s face\n\nBut the oil and bubble of the moon,\nPlunging and piercing in his course\nThe lured fish under the foam\nWitnessed with a kiss.\n\nWhales in the wake like capes and Alps\nQuaked the sick sea and snouted deep,\nDeep the great bushed bait with raining lips\nSlipped the fins of those humpbacked tons\n\nAnd fled their love in a weaving dip.\nOh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!\nShe nipped and dived in the nick of love,\nSpun on a spout like a long-legged ball\n\nTill every beast blared down in a swerve\nTill every turtle crushed from his shell\nTill every bone in the rushing grave\nRose and crowed and fell!\n\nGood luck to the hand on the rod,\nThere is thunder under its thumbs;\nGold gut is a lightning thread,\nHis fiery reel sings off its flames,\n\nThe whirled boat in the burn of his blood\nIs crying from nets to knives,\nOh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood\nOh the bulls of Biscay and their calves\n\nAre making under the green, laid veil\nThe long-legged beautiful bait their wives.\nBreak the black news and paint on a sail\nHuge weddings in the waves,\n\nOver the wakeward-flashing spray\nOver the gardens of the floor\nClash out the mounting dolphin’s day,\nMy mast is a bell-spire,\n\nStrike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,\nSing through the water-spoken prow\nThe octopus walking into her limbs\nThe polar eagle with his tread of snow.\n\nFrom salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern\nSing how the seal has kissed her dead!\nThe long, laid minute’s bride drifts on\nOld in her cruel bed.\n\nOver the graveyard in the water\nMountains and galleries beneath\nNightingale and hyena\nRejoicing for that drifting death\n\nSing and howl through sand and anemone\nValley and sahara in a shell,\nOh all the wanting flesh his enemy\nThrown to the sea in the shell of a girl\n\n\nIs old as water and plain as an eel;\nAlways good-bye to the long-legged bread\nScattered in the paths of his heels\nFor the salty birds fluttered and fed\n\nAnd the tall grains foamed in their bills;\nAlways good-bye to the fires of the face,\nFor the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose\nAnd scuttled over her eyes,\n\nThe blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.\nThe tempter under the eyelid\nWho shows to the selves asleep\nMast-high moon-white women naked\n\nWalking in wishes and lovely for shame\nIs dumb and gone with his flame of brides.\nSusannah’s drowned in the bearded stream\nAnd no-one stirs at Sheba’s side\n\nBut the hungry kings of the tides;\nSin who had a woman’s shape\nSleeps till Silence blows on a cloud\nAnd all the lifted waters walk and leap.\n\nLucifer that bird’s dropping\nOut of the sides of the north\nHas melted away and is lost\nIs always lost in her vaulted breath,\n\nVenus lies star-struck in her wound\nAnd the sensual ruins make\nSeasons over the liquid world,\nWhite springs in the dark.\n\nAlways good-bye, cried the voices through the shell,\nGood-bye always, for the flesh is cast\nAnd the fisherman winds his reel\nWith no more desire than a ghost.\n\nAlways good luck, praised the finned in the feather\nBird after dark and the laughing fish\nAs the sails drank up the hail of thunder\nAnd the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.\n\nThe boat swims into the six-year weather,\nA wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.\nSee what the gold gut drags from under\nMountains and galleries to the crest!\n\nSee what clings to hair and skull\nAs the boat skims on with drinking wings!\nThe statues of great rain stand still,\nAnd the flakes fall like hills.\n\nSing and strike his heavy haul\nToppling up the boatside in a snow of light!\nHis decks are drenched with miracles.\nOh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!\n\nOut of the urn a size of a man\nOut of the room the weight of his trouble\nOut of the house that holds a town\nIn the continent of a fossil\n\nOne by one in dust and shawl,\nDry as echoes and insect-faced,\nHis fathers cling to the hand of the girl\nAnd the dead hand leads the past,\n\nLeads them as children and as air\nOn to the blindly tossing tops;\nThe centuries throw back their hair\nAnd the old men sing from newborn lips:\n\nTime is bearing another son.\nKill Time! She turns in her pain!\nThe oak is felled in the acorn\nAnd the hawk in the egg kills the wren.\n\nHe who blew the great fire in\nAnd died on a hiss of flames\nOr walked the earth in the evening\nCounting the denials of the grains\n\nClings to her drifting hair, and climbs;\nAnd he who taught their lips to sing\nWeeps like the risen sun among\nThe liquid choirs of his tribes.\n\nThe rod bends low, divining land,\nAnd through the sundered water crawls\nA garden holding to her hand\nWith birds and animals\n\nWith men and women and waterfalls\nTrees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships\nAnd stunned and still on the green, laid veil\nSand with legends in its virgin laps\n\nAnd prophets loud on the burned dunes;\nInsects and valleys hold her thighs hard,\nTimes and places grip her breast bone,\nShe is breaking with seasons and clouds;\n\nRound her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,\nwith moving fish and rounded stones\nUp and down the greater waves\nA separate river breathes and runs;\n\nStrike and sing his catch of fields\nFor the surge is sown with barley,\nThe cattle graze on the covered foam,\nThe hills have footed the waves away,\n\nWith wild sea fillies and soaking bridles\nWith salty colts and gales in their limbs\nAll the horses of his haul of miracles\nGallop through the arched, green farms,\n\nTrot and gallop with gulls upon them\nAnd thunderbolts in their manes.\nO Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London\nThe country tide is cobbled with towns\n\nAnd steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder\nAnd the streets that the fisherman combed\nWhen his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire\nAnd his loin was a hunting flame\n\nCoil from the thoroughfares of her hair\nAnd terribly lead him home alive\nLead her prodigal home to his terror,\nThe furious ox-killing house of love.\n\nDown, down, down, under the ground,\nUnder the floating villages,\nTurns the moon-chained and water-wound\nMetropolis of fishes,\n\nThere is nothing left of the sea but its sound,\nUnder the earth the loud sea walks,\nIn deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down\nAnd the bait is drowned among hayricks,\n\nLand, land, land, nothing remains\nOf the pacing, famous sea but its speech,\nAnd into its talkative seven tombs\nThe anchor dives through the floors of a church.\n\nGood-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,\nTo the fisherman lost on the land.\nHe stands alone in the door of his home,\nWith his long-legged heart in his hand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-childs-christmas-in-wales": { - "title": "“A Child’s Christmas in Wales”", - "body": "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.\nAll the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.\nIt was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.\nWe were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows--eternal, ever since Wednesday--that we never heard Mrs. Prothero’s first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor’s polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder. “Fire!” cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.\nAnd we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.\nSomething was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, “A fine Christmas!” and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.\n“Call the fire brigade,” cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong. “There won’t be there,” said Mr. Prothero, “it’s Christmas.” There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting. “Do something,” he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke--I think we missed Mr. Prothero--and ran out of the house to the telephone box. “Let’s call the police as well,” Jim said. “And the ambulance.” “And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.”\nBut we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, “Would you like anything to read?”\nYears and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”\n“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”\n“Were there postmen then, too?” “With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells.” “You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?” “I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them.” “I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells.” “There were church bells, too.” “Inside them?” “No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence.”\n“Get back to the postmen” “They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles …” “Ours has got a black knocker …” “And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out.” “And then the presents?” “And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger’s slabs. He wagged his bag like a frozen camel’s hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone.”\n“Get back to the Presents.” “There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o’-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o’-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’ pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”\n“Go on the Useless Presents.” “Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons.”\n“Were there Uncles like in our house?” “There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms’ length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.”\nNot many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.\nI hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o’-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.\nOr I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements. “I bet people will think there’s been hippos.” “What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?” “I’d go like this, bang! I’d throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I’d tickle him under the ear and he’d wag his tail.” “What would you do if you saw two hippos?”\nIron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel’s house. “Let’s post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box.” “Let’s write things in the snow.” “Let’s write, ‘Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel’ all over his lawn.” Or we walked on the white shore. “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?”\nThe silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying “Excelsior.” We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheelrutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.\nBring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. “What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?”\n“No,” Jack said, “Good King Wencelas. I’ll count three.” One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen … And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town. “Perhaps it was a ghost,” Jim said. “Perhaps it was trolls,” Dan said, who was always reading. “Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,” Jack said. And we did that.\nAlways on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_eve" - } - } - }, - "clown-in-the-moon": { - "title": "“Clown in the Moon”", - "body": "My tears are like the quiet drift\nOf petals from some magic rose;\nAnd all my grief flows from the rift\nOf unremembered skies and snows.\n\nI think, that if I touched the earth,\nIt would crumble;\nIt is so sad and beautiful,\nSo tremulously like a dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-conversation-of-prayer": { - "title": "“The Conversation of Prayer”", - "body": "The conversation of prayers about to be said\nBy the child going to bed and the man on the stairs\nWho climbs to his dying love in her high room,\nThe one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move\nAnd the other full of tears that she will be dead,\n\nTurns in the dark on the sound they know will arise\nInto the answering skies from the green ground,\nFrom the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.\nThe sound about to be said in the two prayers\nFor the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies\n\nWill be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?\nShall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?\nThe conversation of prayers about to be said\nTurns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stair\nTo-night shall find no dying but alive and warm\n\nIn the fire of his care his love in the high room.\nAnd the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer\nShall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,\nAnd mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,\nDragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "deaths-and-entrances": { - "title": "“Deaths and Entrances”", - "body": "On almost the incendiary eve\n Of several near deaths,\nWhen one at the great least of your best loved\n And always known must leave\nLions and fires of his flying breath,\n Of your immortal friends\nWho’d raise the organs of the counted dust\n To shoot and sing your praise,\nOne who called deepest down shall hold his peace\n That cannot sink or cease\n Endlessly to his wound\nIn many married London’s estranging grief.\n\nOn almost the incendiary eve\n When at your lips and keys,\nLocking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,\n One who is most unknown,\nYour polestar neighbour, sun of another street,\n Will dive up to his tears.\nHe’ll bathe his raining blood in the male sea\n Who strode for your own dead\nAnd wind his globe out of your water thread\n And load the throats of shells\n with every cry since light\nFlashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.\n\nOn almost the incendiary eve\n Of deaths and entrances,\nWhen near and strange wounded on London’s waves\n Have sought your single grave,\nOne enemy, of many, who knows well\n Your heart is luminous\nIn the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,\n Will pull the thunderbolts\nTo shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys\n And sear just riders back,\n Until that one loved least\nLooms the last Samson of your zodiac.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night": { - "title": "“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”", - "body": "Do not go gentle into that good night,\nOld age should burn and rave at close of day;\nRage, rage against the dying of the light.\n\nThough wise men at their end know dark is right,\nBecause their words had forked no lightning they\nDo not go gentle into that good night.\n\nGood men, the last wave by, crying how bright\nTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,\nRage, rage against the dying of the light.\n\nWild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,\nAnd learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,\nDo not go gentle into that good night.\n\nGrave men, near death, who see with blinding sight\nBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,\nRage, rage against the dying of the light.\n\nAnd you, my father, there on the sad height,\nCurse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.\nDo not go gentle into that good night.\nRage, rage against the dying of the light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ears-in-the-turrets-hear": { - "title": "“Ears in the Turrets Hear”", - "body": "Ears in the turrets hear\nHands grumble on the door,\nEyes in the gables see\nThe fingers at the locks.\nShall I unbolt or stay\nAlone till the day I die\nUnseen by stranger-eyes\nIn this white house?\nHands, hold you poison or grapes?\n\nBeyond this island bound\nBy a thin sea of flesh\nAnd a bone coast,\nThe land lies out of sound\nAnd the hills out of mind.\nNo birds or flying fish\nDisturbs this island’s rest.\n\nEars in this island hear\nThe wind pass like a fire,\nEyes in this island see\nShips anchor off the bay.\nShall I run to the ships\nWith the wind in my hair,\nOr stay till the day I die\nAnd welcome no sailor?\nShips, hold you poison or grapes?\n\nHands grumble on the door,\nShips anchor off the bay,\nRain beats the sand and slates.\nShall I let in the stranger,\nShall I welcome the sailor,\nOr stay till the day I die?\n\nHands of the stranger and holds of the ships,\nHold you poison or grapes?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "Too proud to die; broken and blind he died\nThe darkest way, and did not turn away,\nA cold kind man brave in his narrow pride\n\nOn that darkest day. Oh, forever may\nHe lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed\nHill, under the grass, in love, and there grow\n\nYoung among the long flocks, and never lie lost\nOr still all the numberless days of his death, though\nAbove all he longed for his mother’s breast\n\nWhich was rest and dust, and in the kind ground\nThe darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.\nLet him find no rest but be fathered and found,\n\nI prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,\nIn the muted house, one minute before\nNoon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead\n\nVeined his poor hand I held, and I saw\nThrough his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.\nAn old tormented man three-quarters blind,\n\nI am not too proud to cry that He and he\nWill never never go out of my mind.\nAll his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,\n\nBeing innocent, he dreaded that he died\nHating his God, but what he was was plain:\nAn old kind man brave in his burning pride.\n\nThe sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.\nEven as a baby he had never cried;\nNor did he now, save to his secret wound.\n\nOut of his eyes I saw the last light glide.\nHere among the light of the lording sky\nAn old blind man is with me where I go\n\nWalking in the meadows of his son’s eye\nOn whom a world of ills came down like snow.\nHe cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’\n\nLast sound, the world going out without a breath:\nToo proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,\nAnd caught between two nights, blindness and death.\n\nO deepest wound of all that he should die\nOn that darkest day. Oh, he could hide\nThe tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "especially-when-the-october-wind": { - "title": "“Especially when the October Wind”", - "body": "Especially when the October wind\nWith frosty fingers punishes my hair,\nCaught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire\nAnd cast a shadow crab upon the land,\nBy the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,\nHearing the raven cough in winter sticks,\nMy busy heart who shudders as she talks\nSheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.\n\nShut, too, in a tower of words, I mark\nOn the horizon walking like the trees\nThe wordy shapes of women, and the rows\nOf the star-gestured children in the park.\nSome let me make you of the vowelled beeches,\nSome of the oaken voices, from the roots\nOf many a thorny shire tell you notes,\nSome let me make you of the water’s speeches.\n\nBehind a pot of ferns the wagging clock\nTells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning\nFlies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning\nAnd tells the windy weather in the cock.\nSome let me make you of the meadow’s signs;\nThe signal grass that tells me all I know\nBreaks with the wormy winter through the eye.\nSome let me tell you of the raven’s sins.\n\nEspecially when the October wind\n(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,\nThe spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)\nWith fists of turnips punishes the land,\nSome let me make you of the heartless words.\nThe heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry\nOf chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.\nBy the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "fern-hill": { - "title": "“Fern Hill”", - "body": "Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs\nAbout the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,\nThe night above the dingle starry,\nTime let me hail and climb\nGolden in the heydays of his eyes,\nAnd honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns\nAnd once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves\nTrail with daisies and barley\nDown the rivers of the windfall light.\n\nAnd as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns\nAbout the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,\nIn the sun that is young once only,\nTime let me play and be\nGolden in the mercy of his means,\nAnd green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves\nSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,\nAnd the sabbath rang slowly\nIn the pebbles of the holy streams.\n\nAll the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay\nFields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air\nAnd playing, lovely and watery\nAnd fire green as grass.\nAnd nightly under the simple stars\nAs I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,\nAll the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars\nFlying with the ricks, and the horses\nFlashing into the dark.\n\nAnd then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white\nWith the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all\nShining, it was Adam and maiden,\nThe sky gathered again\nAnd the sun grew round that very day.\nSo it must have been after the birth of the simple light\nIn the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm\nOut of the whinnying green stable\nOn to the fields of praise.\n\nAnd honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house\nUnder the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,\nIn the sun born over and over,\nI ran my heedless ways,\nMy wishes raced through the house high hay\nAnd nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows\nIn all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs\nBefore the children green and golden\nFollow him out of grace,\n\nNothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me\nUp to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,\nIn the moon that is always rising,\nNor that riding to sleep\nI should hear him fly with the high fields\nAnd wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.\nOh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,\nTime held me green and dying\nThough I sang in my chains like the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-force-that-through-the-green-fuse-drives-the-flower": { - "title": "“The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”", - "body": "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower\nDrives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees\nIs my destroyer.\nAnd I am dumb to tell the crooked rose\nMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.\n\nThe force that drives the water through the rocks\nDrives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams\nTurns mine to wax.\nAnd I am dumb to mouth unto my veins\nHow at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.\n\nThe hand that whirls the water in the pool\nStirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind\nHauls my shroud sail.\nAnd I am dumb to tell the hanging man\nHow of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.\n\nThe lips of time leech to the fountain head;\nLove drips and gathers, but the fallen blood\nShall calm her sores.\nAnd I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind\nHow time has ticked a heaven round the stars.\n\nAnd I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb\nHow at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "foster-the-light": { - "title": "“Foster the Light”", - "body": "Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,\nNor weather winds that blow not down the bone,\nBut strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;\nMaster the night nor serve the snowman’s brain\nThat shapes each bushy item of the air\nInto a polestar pointed on an icicle.\n\nMurmur of spring nor crush the cockerel’s eggs,\nNor hammer back a season in the figs,\nBut graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;\nFarmer in time of frost the burning leagues,\nBy red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,\nIn your young years the vegetable century.\n\nAnd father all nor fail the fly-lord’s acre,\nNor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,\nBut rail with your wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet;\nOf mortal voices to the ninnies’ choir,\nHigh lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,\nAnd pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.\n\nRoll unmanly over this turning tuft,\nO ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift\nFrom all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;\nNor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift\nNaked among the bow-and-arrow birds\nShall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.\n\nWho gave these seas their colour in a shape,\nShaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark\nIn time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;\nO who is glory in the shapeless maps,\nNow make the world of me as I have made\nA merry manshape of your walking circle.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-loves-first-fever-to-her-plague": { - "title": "“From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague”", - "body": "From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second\nAnd to the hollow minute of the womb,\nFrom the unfolding to the scissored caul,\nThe time for breast and the green apron age\nWhen no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,\nAll world was one, one windy nothing,\nMy world was christened in a stream of milk.\nAnd earth and sky were as one airy hill.\nThe sun and mood shed one white light.\n\nFrom the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting\nHand, the breaking of the hair,\nFrom the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,\nAnd to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,\nThe sun was red, the moon was grey,\nThe earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.\n\nThe body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,\nThe growing bones, the rumour of the manseed\nWithin the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,\nAnd the four winds, that had long blown as one,\nShone in my ears the light of sound,\nCalled in my eyes the sound of light.\nAnd yellow was the multiplying sand,\nEach golden grain spat life into its fellow,\nGreen was the singing house.\n\nThe plum my mother picked matured slowly,\nThe boy she dropped from darkness at her side\nInto the sided lap of light grew strong,\nWas muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,\nAnd to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,\nItched in the noise of wind and sun.\n\nAnd from the first declension of the flesh\nI learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts\nInto the stony idiom of the brain,\nTo shade and knit anew the patch of words\nLeft by the dead who, in their moonless acre,\nNeed no word’s warmth.\nThe root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,\nThat but a name, where maggots have their X.\n\nI learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;\nThe code of night tapped on my tongue;\nWhat had been one was many sounding minded.\n\nOne wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,\nOne breast gave suck the fever’s issue;\nFrom the divorcing sky I learnt the double,\nThe two-framed globe that spun into a score;\nA million minds gave suck to such a bud\nAs forks my eye;\nYouth did condense; the tears of spring\nDissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;\nOne sun, one manna, warmed and fed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-hand-that-signed-the-paper": { - "title": "“The Hand that Signed the Paper”", - "body": "The hand that signed the paper felled a city;\nFive sovereign fingers taxed the breath,\nDoubled the globe of dead and halved a country;\nThese five kings did a king to death.\n\nThe mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,\nThe finger joints are cramped with chalk;\nA goose’s quill has put an end to murder\nThat put an end to talk.\n\nThe hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,\nAnd famine grew, and locusts came;\nGreat is the hand the holds dominion over\nMan by a scribbled name.\n\nThe five kings count the dead but do not soften\nThe crusted wound nor pat the brow;\nA hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;\nHands have no tears to flow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hold-hard-these-ancient-minutes-in-the-cuckoos-month": { - "title": "“Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes in the Cuckoo’s Month”", - "body": "Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month,\nUnder the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill,\nAs the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;\nTime, in a folly’s rider, like a county man\nOver the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,\nDrives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.\n\nCountry, your sport is summer, and December’s pools\nBy crane and water-tower by the seedy trees\nLie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;\nHoly hard, my country children in the world if tales,\nThe greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,\nThe first and steepled season, to the summer’s game.\n\nAnd now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,\nSummon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,\nOver the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;\nHurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,\nCrack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,\nSpill the lank folly’s hunter and the hard-held hope.\n\nDown fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,\nStalking my children’s faces with a tail of blood,\nTime, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;\nHold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,\nGolden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.\nYour sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "holy-spring": { - "title": "“Holy Spring”", - "body": "O\nOut of a bed of love\nWhen that immortal hospital made one more moove to soothe\nThe curless counted body,\nAnd ruin and his causes\nOver the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army\nAnd swept into our wounds and houses,\nI climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only\nThat one dark I owe my light,\nCall for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none\nTo glow after the god stoning night\nAnd I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun.\n\nNo\nPraise that the spring time is all\nGabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful\nOut of the woebegone pyre\nAnd the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,\nMy arising prodgidal\nSun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,\nBut blessed be hail and upheaval\nThat uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing\nAlone in the husk of man’s home\nAnd the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,\nIf only for a last time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "how-shall-my-animal": { - "title": "“How Shall My Animal”", - "body": "How shall my animal\nWhose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,\nVessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,\nEndure burial under the spelling wall,\nThe invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,\nWho should be furious,\nDrunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,\nRoaring, crawling, quarrel\nWith the outside weathers,\nThe natural circle of the discovered skies\nDraw down to its weird eyes?\n\nHow shall it magnetize,\nTowards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze\nThat melts the lionhead’s heel and horseshoe of the heart\nA brute land in the cool top of the country days\nTo trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,\nLove and labour and kill\nIn quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout\nThe black, burst sea rejoice,\nThe bowels turn turtle,\nClaw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle\nThe parched and raging voice?\n\nFishermen of mermen\nCreep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin\nWith bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,\nTongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound\nCurl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,\nTrace out a tentacle,\nNailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed\nTo clasp my fury on ground\nAnd clap its great blood down;\nNever shall beast be born to atlas the few seas\nOr poise the day on a horn.\n\nSigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,\nCast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost\nClack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops\nWith carved bird, saint, and suns the wrackspiked maiden mouth\nLops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,\nClips short the gesture of breath.\nDie in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut,\nAnd roll with the knocked earth:\nLie dry, rest robbed, my beast.\nYou have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,\nAnd dug your grave in my breast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-dreamed-my-genesis": { - "title": "“I Dreamed My Genesis”", - "body": "I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking\nThrough the rotating shell, strong\nAs motor muscle on the drill, driving\nThrough vision and the girdered nerve.\n\nFrom limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled\nOff from the creasing flesh, filed\nThrough all the irons in the grass, metal\nOf suns in the man-melting night.\n\nHeir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly\nA creature in my bones I\nRounded my globe of heritage, journey\nIn bottom gear through night-geared man.\n\nI dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel\nRammed in the marching heart, hole\nIn the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled\nDeath on the mouth that ate the gas.\n\nSharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest\nOf hemlock and the blades, rust\nMy blood upon the tempered dead, forcing\nMy second struggling from the grass.\n\nAnd power was contagious in my birth, second\nRise of the skeleton and\nRerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood\nSpat up from the resuffered pain.\n\nI dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen\nTwice in the feeding sea, grown\nStale of Adam’s brine until, vision\nOf new man strength, I seek the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-fellowed-sleep": { - "title": "“I Fellowed Sleep”", - "body": "I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,\nLet fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,\nShifting to light, turned on me like a moon.\nSo, planning-heeled, I flew along my man\nAnd dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.\n\nI fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,\nReaching a second ground far from the stars;\nAnd there we wept I and a ghostly other,\nMy mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;\nI fled that ground as lightly as a feather.\n\n“My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.”\n“This that we tread was, too, your father’s land.”\n“But this we tread bears the angelic gangs\nSweet are their fathered faces in their wings.”\n“These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.”\n\nFaded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,\nAs, blowing on the angels, I was lost\nOn that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;\nI blew the dreaming fellows to their bed\nWhere still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.\n\nThen all the matter of the living air\nRaised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,\nI spelt my vision with a hand and hair,\nHow light the sleeping on this soily star,\nHow deep the waking in the worlded clouds.\n\nThere grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,\nEach rung a love or losing to the last,\nThe inches monkeyed by the blood of man.\nAnd old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,\nMy fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-have-longed-to-move-away": { - "title": "“I Have Longed to Move Away”", - "body": "I have longed to move away\nFrom the hissing of the spent lie\nAnd the old terrors’ continual cry\nGrowing more terrible as the day\nGoes over the hill into the deep sea;\nI have longed to move away\nFrom the repetition of salutes,\nFor there are ghosts in the air\nAnd ghostly echoes on paper,\nAnd the thunder of calls and notes.\n\nI have longed to move away but am afraid;\nSome life, yet unspent, might explode\nOut of the old lie burning on the ground,\nAnd, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.\nNeither by night’s ancient fear,\nThe parting of hat from hair,\nPursed lips at the receiver,\nShall I fall to death’s feather.\nBy these I would not care to die,\nHalf convention and half lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-see-the-boys-of-summer": { - "title": "“I See the Boys of Summer”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI see the boys of summer in their ruin\nLay the gold tithings barren,\nSetting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;\nThere in their heat the winter floods\nOf frozen loves they fetch their girls,\nAnd drown the cargoed apples in their tides.\n\nThese boys of light are curdlers in their folly,\nSour the boiling honey;\nThe jacks of frost they finger in the hives;\nThere in the sun the frigid threads\nOf doubt and dark they feed their nerves;\nThe signal moon is zero in their voids.\n\nI see the summer children in their mothers\nSplit up the brawned womb’s weathers,\nDivide the night and day with fairy thumbs;\nThere in the deep with quartered shades\nOf sun and moon they paint their dams\nAs sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.\n\nI see that from these boys shall men of nothing\nStature by seedy shifting,\nOr lame the air with leaping from its heats;\nThere from their hearts the dogdayed pulse\nOf love and light bursts in their throats.\nO see the pulse of summer in the ice.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut seasons must be challenged or they totter\nInto a chiming quarter\nWhere, punctual as death, we ring the stars;\nThere, in his night, the black-tongued bells\nThe sleepy man of winter pulls,\nNor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.\n\nWe are the dark derniers let us summon\nDeath from a summer woman,\nA muscling life from lovers in their cramp\nFrom the fair dead who flush the sea\nThe bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp\nAnd from the planted womb the man of straw.\n\nWe summer boys in this four-winded spinning,\nGreen of the seaweeds’ iron,\nHold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,\nPick the world’s ball of wave and froth\nTo choke the deserts with her tides,\nAnd comb the county gardens for a wreath.\n\nIn spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,\nHeigh ho the blood and berry,\nAnd nail the merry squires to the trees;\nHere love’s damp muscle dries and dies\nHere break a kiss in no love’s quarry,\nO see the poles of promise in the boys.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI see you boys of summer in your ruin.\nMan in his maggot’s barren.\nAnd boys are full and foreign to the pouch.\nI am the man your father was.\nWe are the sons of flint and pitch.\nO see the poles are kissing as they cross.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "i-in-my-intricate-image": { - "title": "“I, in My Intricate Image”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,\nForged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator\nLaying my ghost in metal,\nThe scales of this twin world tread on the double,\nMy half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor,\nTo my man-iron sidle.\n\nBeginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,\nBright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season\nWorked on a world of petals;\nShe threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble\nCasts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain\nOut of the naked entrail.\n\nBeginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,\nImage of images, my metal phantom\nForcing forth through the harebell,\nMy man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,\nI, in my fusion of rose and male motion,\nCreate this twin miracle.\n\nThis is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,\nA steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,\nNo death more natural;\nThus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,\nIn seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance.\nThe natural parallel.\n\nMy images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel,\nNo tread more perilous, the green steps and spire\nMount on man’s footfall,\nI with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,\nIn the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,\nHearing the weather fall.\n\nIntricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,\nVoyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,\nFinding the water final,\nOn the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells,\nSail on the level, the departing adventure,\nTo the sea-blown arrival.\n\n# II.\n\nThey climb the country pinnacle,\nTwelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,\nCorner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;\nThey see the squirrel stumble,\nThe haring snail go giddily round the flower,\nA quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.\n\nAs they dive, the dust settles,\nThe cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,\nThe highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel\nTurn the long sea arterial\nTurning a petrol face blind to the enemy\nTurning the riderless dead by the channel wall.\n\n(Death instrumental,\nSplitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,\nYour corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,\nThe neck of the nostril,\nUnder the mask and the ether, they making bloody\nThe tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;\n\nBring out the black patrol,\nYour monstrous officers and the decaying army,\nThe sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,\nA cock-on-a-dunghill\nCrowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,\nDust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)\n\nAs they drown, the chime travels,\nSweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift\nRings out the Dead Sea scale;\nAnd, clapped in water till the triton dangles,\nStrung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft,\nHear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.\n\n(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,\nThe grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning\nDazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,\nLet the wax disk babble\nShames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.\nThese are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)\n\n# III.\n\nThey suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,\nCome unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,\nThe flight of the carnal skull\nAnd the cell-stepped thimble;\nSuffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel\nSprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.\n\nBe by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,\nBrass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly\nStar-set at Jacob’s angle,\nSmoke hill and hophead’s valley,\nAnd the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral\nThrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.\n\nSuffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,\nBe by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored\nThe stoved bones’ voyage downward\nIn the shipwreck of muscle;\nGive over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,\nLove like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.\n\nAnd in the pincers of the boiling circle,\nThe sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,\nMy great blood’s iron single\nIn the pouring town,\nI, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle,\nNo man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.\n\nMan was the scales, the death birds on enamel,\nTail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,\nTime in the hourless houses\nShaking the sea-hatched skull,\nAnd, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,\nAll-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.\n\nMan was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle,\nWindily master of man was the rotten fathom,\nMy ghost in his metal neptune\nForged in man’s mineral.\nThis was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,\nAnd my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "if-i-were-tickled-by-the-rub-of-love": { - "title": "“If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love”", - "body": "If I were tickled by the rub of love,\nA rooking girl who stole me for her side,\nBroke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,\nIf the red tickle as the cattle calve\nStill set to scratch a laughter from my lung,\nI would not fear the apple nor the flood\nNor the bad blood of spring.\n\nShall it be male or female? say the cells,\nAnd drop the plum like fire from the flesh.\nIf I were tickled by the hatching hair,\nThe winging bone that sprouted in the heels,\nThe itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,\nI would not fear the gallows nor the axe\nNor the crossed sticks of war.\n\nShall it be male or female? say the fingers\nThat chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.\nI would not fear the muscling-in of love\nIf I were tickled by the urchin hungers\nRehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.\nI would not fear the devil in the loin\nNor the outspoken grave.\n\nIf I were tickled by the lovers’ rub\nThat wipes away not crow’s-foot nor the lock\nOf sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,\nTime and the crabs and the sweethearting crib\nWould leave me cold as butter for the flies\nThe sea of scums could drown me as it broke\nDead on the sweethearts’ toes.\n\nThis world is half the devil’s and my own,\nDaft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl\nAnd curling round the bud that forks her eye.\nAn old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,\nAnd all the herrings smelling in the sea,\nI sit and watch the worm beneath my nail\nWearing the quick away.\n\nAnd that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.\nThe knobbly ape that swings along his sex\nFrom damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist\nCan never raise the midnight of a chuckle,\nNor when he finds a beauty in the breast\nOf lover, mother, lovers, or his six\nFeet in the rubbing dust.\n\nAnd what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?\nYour mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?\nMy Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?\nThe words of death are dryer than his stiff,\nMy wordy wounds are printed with your hair.\nI would be tickled by the rub that is:\nMan be my metaphor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-my-craft-or-sullen-art": { - "title": "“In My Craft or Sullen Art”", - "body": "In my craft or sullen art\nExercised in the still night\nWhen only the moon rages\nAnd the lovers lie abed\nWith all their griefs in their arms\nI labour by singing light\nNot for ambition or bread\nOr the strut and trade of charms\nOn the ivory stages\nBut for the common wages\nOf their most secret heart.\n\nNot for the proud man apart\nFrom the raging moon I write\nOn these spindrift pages\nNor for the towering dead\nWith their nightingales and psalms\nBut for the lovers, their arms\nRound the griefs of the ages,\nWho pay no praise or wages\nNor heed my craft or art.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-beginning": { - "title": "“In the Beginning”", - "body": "In the beginning was the three-pointed star,\nOne smile of light across the empty face,\nOne bough of bone across the rooting air,\nThe substance forked that marrowed the first sun,\nAnd, burning ciphers on the round of space,\nHeaven and hell mixed as they spun.\n\nIn the beginning was the pale signature,\nThree-syllabled and starry as the smile,\nAnd after came the imprints on the water,\nStamp of the minted face upon the moon;\nThe blood that touched the crosstree and the grail\nTouched the first cloud and left a sign.\n\nIn the beginning was the mounting fire\nThat set alight the weathers from a spark,\nA three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,\nLife rose and spouted from the rolling seas,\nBurst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock\nThe secret oils that drive the grass.\n\nIn the beginning was the word, the word\nThat from the solid bases of the light\nAbstracted all the letters of the void;\nAnd from the cloudy bases of the breath\nThe word flowed up, translating to the heart\nFirst characters of birth and death.\n\nIn the beginning was the secret brain.\nThe brain was celled and soldered in the thought\nBefore the pitch was forking to a sun;\nBefore the veins were shaking in their sieve,\nBlood shot and scattered to the winds of light\nThe ribbed original of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "incarnate-devil": { - "title": "“Incarnate Devil”", - "body": "Incarnate devil in a talking snake,\nThe central plains of Asia in his garden,\nIn shaping-time the circle stung awake,\nIn shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,\nAnd God walked there who was a fiddling warden\nAnd played down pardon from the heavens’ hill.\n\nWhen we were strangers to the guided seas,\nA handmade moon half holy in a cloud,\nThe wisemen tell me that the garden gods\nTwined good and evil on an eastern tree;\nAnd when the moon rose windily it was\nBlack as the beast and paler than the cross.\n\nWe in our Eden knew the secret guardian\nIn sacred waters that no frost could harden,\nAnd in the mighty mornings of the earth;\nHell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,\nAll heaven in the midnight of the sun,\nA serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "january-1939": { - "title": "“January 1939”", - "body": "Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,\nShall the blind horse sing sweeter?\nConvenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer\nThe supper and knives of a mood.\nIn the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year\nThat clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,\nAn enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,\nCamped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,\nSavours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair\nIn a wind that plucked a goose,\nNor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,\nRounds to look at the red, wagged root.\nBecause there stands, one story out of the bum city,\nThat frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea\nSecretly in statuary,\nShall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,\nNot spin to stare at an old year\nToppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries\nLike the mauled pictures of boys?\nThe salt person and blasted place\nI furnish with the meat of a fable.\nIf the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble\nAn upright man in the antipodes\nOr spray-based and rock-chested sea:\nOver the past table I repeat this present grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lament": { - "title": "“Lament”", - "body": "When I was a windy boy and a bit\nAnd the black spit of the chapel fold,\n(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),\nI tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,\nThe rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,\nI skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled\nNine-pin down on donkey’s common,\nAnd on seesaw sunday nights I wooed\nWhoever I would with my wicked eyes,\nThe whole of the moon I could love and leave\nAll the green leaved little weddings’ wives\nIn the coal black bush and let them grieve.\n\nWhen I was a gusty man and a half\nAnd the black beast of the beetles’ pews\n(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),\nNot a boy and a bit in the wick-\nDipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,\nI whistled all night in the twisted flues,\nMidwives grew in the midnight ditches,\nAnd the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!--\nWhenever I dove in a breast high shoal,\nWherever I ramped in the clover quilts,\nWhatsoever I did in the coal-\nBlack night, I left my quivering prints.\n\nWhen I was a man you could call a man\nAnd the black cross of the holy house,\n(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),\nBrandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,\nNo springtailed tom in the red hot town\nWith every simmering woman his mouse\nBut a hillocky bull in the swelter\nOf summer come in his great good time\nTo the sultry, biding herds, I said,\nOh, time enough when the blood runs cold,\nAnd I lie down but to sleep in bed,\nFor my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!\n\nWhen I was half the man I was\nAnd serve me right as the preachers warn,\n(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),\nNo flailing calf or cat in a flame\nOr hickory bull in milky grass\nBut a black sheep with a crumpled horn,\nAt last the soul from its foul mousehole\nSlunk pouting out when the limp time came;\nAnd I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,\nGristle and rind, and a roarers’ life,\nAnd I shoved it into the coal black sky\nTo find a woman’s soul for a wife.\n\nNow I am a man no more no more\nAnd a black reward for a roaring life,\n(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),\nTidy and cursed in my dove cooed room\nI lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--\nFor, oh, my soul found a sunday wife\nIn the coal black sky and she bore angels!\nHarpies around me out of her womb!\nChastity prays for me, piety sings,\nInnocence sweetens my last black breath,\nModesty hides my thighs in her wings,\nAnd all the deadly virtues plague my death!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lie-still-sleep-becalmed": { - "title": "“Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed”", - "body": "Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound\nIn the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat\nOn the silent sea we have heard the sound\nThat came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.\n\nUnder the mile off moon we trembled listening\nTo the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound\nAnd when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing\nThe voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.\n\nOpen a pathway through the slow sad sail,\nThrow wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat\nFor my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,\nWe heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.\nLie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,\nOr we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light-breaks-where-no-sun-shines": { - "title": "“Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines”", - "body": "Light breaks where no sun shines;\nWhere no sea runs, the waters of the heart\nPush in their tides;\nAnd, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,\nThe things of light\nFile through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.\n\nA candle in the thighs\nWarms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;\nWhere no seed stirs,\nThe fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,\nBright as a fig;\nWhere no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.\n\nDawn breaks behind the eyes;\nFrom poles of skull and toe the windy blood\nSlides like a sea;\nNor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky\nSpout to the rod\nDivining in a smile the oil of tears.\n\nNight in the sockets rounds,\nLike some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;\nDay lights the bone;\nWhere no cold is, the skinning gales unpin\nThe winter’s robes;\nThe film of spring is hanging from the lids.\n\nLight breaks on secret lots,\nOn tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;\nWhen logics die,\nThe secret of the soil grows through the eye,\nAnd blood jumps in the sun;\nAbove the waste allotments the dawn halts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-in-the-asylum": { - "title": "“Love in the Asylum”", - "body": "A stranger has come\nTo share my room in the house not right in the head,\nA girl mad as birds\n\nBolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.\nStrait in the mazed bed\nShe deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds\n\nYet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,\nAt large as the dead,\nOr rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.\n\nShe has come possessed\nWho admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,\nPossessed by the skies\n\nShe sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust\nYet raves at her will\nOn the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.\n\nAnd taken by light in her arms at long and dear last\nI may without fail\nSuffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-hero-bares-his-nerves": { - "title": "“My Hero Bares His Nerves”", - "body": "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist\nThat rules from wrist to shoulder,\nUnpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,\nLeans on my mortal ruler,\nThe proud spine spurning turn and twist.\n\nAnd these poor nerves so wired to the skull\nAche on the lovelorn paper\nI hug to love with my unruly scrawl\nThat utters all love hunger\nAnd tells the page the empty ill.\n\nMy hero bares my side and sees his heart\nTread, like a naked Venus,\nThe beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;\nStripping my loin of promise,\nHe promises a secret heat.\n\nHe holds the wire from the box of nerves\nPraising the mortal error\nOf birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,\nAnd the hunger’s emperor;\nHe pulls the chain, the cistern moves.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-world-is-pyramid": { - "title": "“My World is Pyramid”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHalf of the fellow father as he doubles\nHis sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,\nHalf of the fellow mother as she dabbles\nTo-morrow’s diver in her horny milk,\nBisected shadows on the thunder’s bone\nBolt for the salt unborn.\n\nThe fellow half was frozen as it bubbled\nCorrosive spring out of the iceberg’s crop,\nThe fellow seed and shadow as it babbled\nThe swing of milk was tufted in the pap,\nFor half of love was planted in the lost,\nAnd the unplanted ghost.\n\nThe broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,\nThe crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,\nLimp in the street of sea, among the rabble\nOf tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,\nAnd stake the sleepers in the savage grave\nThat the vampire laugh.\n\nThe patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded\nThe wild pigs’ wood, and slime upon the trees,\nSucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,\nAnd loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,\nRotating halves are horning as they drill\nThe arterial angel.\n\nWhat colour is glory? death’s feather? tremble\nThe halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air,\nAnd prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.\nThe ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,\nThe ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew\nBlinds their cloud-tracking eye.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMy world is pyramid. The padded mummer\nWeeps on the desert ochre and the salt\nIncising summer.\nMy Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet,\nI scrape through resin to a starry bone\nAnd a blood parhelion.\n\nMy world is cypress, and an English valley.\nI piece my flesh that rattled on the yards\nRed in an Austrian volley.\nI hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,\nScrewing their bowels from a hill of bones,\nCry Eloi to the guns.\n\nMy grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.\nThe Arctic scut, and basin of the South,\nDrip on my dead house garden.\nWho seek me landward, marking in my mouth\nThe straws of Asia, lose me as I turn\nThrough the Atlantic corn.\n\nThe fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel\nOn casting tides, are tangled in the shells,\nBearding the unborn devil,\nBleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.\nThe tongue’s of heaven gossip as I glide\nBinding my angel’s hood.\n\nWho blows death’s feather? What glory is colour?\nI blow the stammel feather in the vein.\nThe loin is glory in a working pallor.\nMy clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,\nThe secret child, I sift about the sea\nDry in the half-tracked thigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "not-from-this-anger": { - "title": "“Not from This Anger”", - "body": "Not from this anger, anticlimax after\nRefusal struck her loin and the lame flower\nBent like a beast to lap the singular floods\nIn a land strapped by hunger\nShall she receive a bellyful of weeds\nAnd bear those tendril hands I touch across\nThe agonized, two seas.\nBehind my head a square of sky sags over\nThe circular smile tossed from lover to lover\nAnd the golden ball spins out of the skies;\nNot from this anger after\nRefusal struck like a bell under water\nShall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,\nThat burns along my eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "now": { - "title": "“Now”", - "body": "Now\nSay nay,\nMan dry man,\nDry lover mine\nThe deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,\nShould he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,\nForsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.\n\nNow\nSay nay,\nSir no say,\nDeath to the yes,\nthe yes to death, the yesman and the answer,\nShould he who split his children with a cure\nHave brotherless his sister on the handsaw.\n\nNow\nSay nay,\nNo say sir\nYea the dead stir,\nAnd this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,\nHe lying low with ruin in his ear,\nThe cockrel’s tide upcasting from the fire.\n\nNow\nSay nay,\nSo star fall,\nSo the ball fail,\nSo solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,\nThe sun that leaps on petals through a nought,\nthe come-a-cropper rider of the flower.\n\nNow\nSay nay\nA fig for\nThe seal of fire,\nDeath hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,\nWe make me mystic as the arm of air,\nThe two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-make-me-a-mask": { - "title": "“O Make Me a Mask”", - "body": "O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies\nOf the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws\nRape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,\nGag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies\nThe bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,\nThe present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,\nShaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce\nTo shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,\nAnd a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes\nTo veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive\nOthers betray the lamenting lies of their losses\nBy the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-no-work-of-words": { - "title": "“On No Work of Words”", - "body": "On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody\nBelly of the rich year and the big purse of my body\nI bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:\n\nTo take to give is all, return what is hungrily given\nPuffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,\nThe lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.\n\nTo lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death\nThat will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath\nAnd count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.\n\nTo surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.\nAncient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas\nIf I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-a-wedding-anniversary": { - "title": "“On a Wedding Anniversary”", - "body": "The sky is torn across\nThis ragged anniversary of two\nWho moved for three years in tune\nDown the long walks of their vows.\n\nNow their love lies a loss\nAnd Love and his patients roar on a chain;\nFrom every tune or crater\nCarrying cloud, Death strikes their house.\n\nToo late in the wrong rain\nThey come together whom their love parted:\nThe windows pour into their heart\nAnd the doors burn in their brain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "once-it-was-the-colour-of-saying": { - "title": "“Once It Was the Colour of Saying”", - "body": "Once it was the colour of saying\nSoaked my table the uglier side of a hill\nWith a capsized field where a school sat still\nAnd a black and white patch of girls grew playing;\nThe gentle seaslides of saying I must undo\nThat all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.\nWhen I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park\nWhere at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo\nLovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,\nThe shade of their trees was a word of many shades\nAnd a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;\nNow my saying shall be my undoing,\nAnd every stone I wind off like a reel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "our-eunuch-dreams": { - "title": "“Our Eunuch Dreams”", - "body": "# I.\n\nOur eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,\nOf light and love the tempers of the heart,\nWhack their boys’ limbs,\nAnd, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,\nGroom the dark brides, the widows of the night\nFold in their arms.\n\nThe shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,\nWhen sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,\nThe bones of men, the broken in their beds,\nBy midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn this our age the gunman and his moll\nTwo one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,\nStrange to our solid eye,\nAnd speak their midnight nothings as they swell;\nWhen cameras shut they hurry to their hole\ndown in the yard of day.\n\nThey dance between their arclamps and our skull,\nImpose their shots, showing the nights away;\nWe watch the show of shadows kiss or kill\nFlavoured of celluloid give love the lie.\n\n\n# III.\n\nWhich is the world? Of our two sleepings, which\nShall fall awake when cures and their itch\nRaise up this red-eyed earth?\nPack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,\nThe sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,\nOr drive the night-geared forth.\n\nThe photograph is married to the eye,\nGrafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;\nThe dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith\nThat shrouded men might marrow as they fly.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThis is the world; the lying likeness of\nOur strips of stuff that tatter as we move\nLoving and being loth;\nThe dream that kicks the buried from their sack\nAnd lets their trash be honoured as the quick.\nThis is the world. Have faith.\n\nFor we shall be a shouter like the cock,\nBlowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack\nThe image from the plates;\nAnd we shall be fit fellows for a life,\nAnd who remains shall flower as they love,\nPraise to our faring hearts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poem-in-october": { - "title": "“Poem in October”", - "body": "It was my thirtieth year to heaven\nWoke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood\nAnd the mussel pooled and the heron\nPriested shore\nThe morning beckon\nWith water praying and call of seagull and rook\nAnd the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall\nMyself to set foot\nThat second\nIn the still sleeping town and set forth.\n\nMy birthday began with the water-\nBirds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name\nAbove the farms and the white horses\nAnd I rose\nIn rainy autumn\nAnd walked abroad in a shower of all my days.\nHigh tide and the heron dived when I took the road\nOver the border\nAnd the gates\nOf the town closed as the town awoke.\n\nA springful of larks in a rolling\nCloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling\nBlackbirds and the sun of October\nSummery\nOn the hill’s shoulder,\nHere were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly\nCome in the morning where I wandered and listened\nTo the rain wringing\nWind blow cold\nIn the wood faraway under me.\n\nPale rain over the dwindling harbour\nAnd over the sea wet church the size of a snail\nWith its horns through mist and the castle\nBrown as owls\nBut all the gardens\nOf spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales\nBeyond the border and under the lark full cloud.\nThere could I marvel\nMy birthday\nAway but the weather turned around.\n\nIt turned away from the blithe country\nAnd down the other air and the blue altered sky\nStreamed again a wonder of summer\nWith apples\nPears and red currants\nAnd I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s\nForgotten mornings when he walked with his mother\nThrough the parables\nOf sun light\nAnd the legends of the green chapels\n\nAnd the twice told fields of infancy\nThat his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.\nThese were the woods the river and sea\nWhere a boy\nIn the listening\nSummertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy\nTo the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.\nAnd the mystery\nSang alive\nStill in the water and singingbirds.\n\nAnd there could I marvel my birthday\nAway but the weather turned around. And the true\nJoy of the long dead child sang burning\nIn the sun.\nIt was my thirtieth\nYear to heaven stood there then in the summer noon\nThough the town below lay leaved with October blood.\nO may my heart’s truth\nStill be sung\nOn this high hill in a year’s turning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "poem-on-his-birthday": { - "title": "“Poem on His Birthday”", - "body": "In the mustardseed sun,\nBy full tilt river and switchback sea\nWhere the cormorants scud,\nIn his house on stilts high among beaks\nAnd palavers of birds\nThis sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave\nHe celebrates and spurns\nHis driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;\nHerons spire and spear.\n\nUnder and round him go\nFlounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,\nDoing what they are told,\nCurlews aloud in the congered waves\nWork at their ways to death,\nAnd the rhymer in the long tongued room,\nWho tolls his birthday bell,\nToils towards the ambush of his wounds;\nHerons, steeple stemmed, bless.\n\nIn the thistledown fall,\nHe sings towards anguish; finches fly\nIn the claw tracks of hawks\nOn a seizing sky; small fishes glide\nThrough wynds and shells of drowned\nShip towns to pastures of otters. He\nIn his slant, racking house\nAnd the hewn coils of his trade perceives\nHerons walk in their shroud,\n\nThe livelong river’s robe\nOf minnows wreathing around their prayer;\nAnd far at sea he knows,\nWho slaves to his crouched, eternal end\nUnder a serpent cloud,\nDolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,\nThe rippled seals streak down\nTo kill and their own tide daubing blood\nSlides good in the sleek mouth.\n\nIn a cavernous, swung\nWave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.\nThirty-five bells sing struck\nOn skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,\nSteered by the falling stars.\nAnd to-morrow weeps in a blind cage\nTerror will rage apart\nBefore chains break to a hammer flame\nAnd love unbolts the dark\n\nAnd freely he goes lost\nIn the unknown, famous light of great\nAnd fabulous, dear God.\nDark is a way and light is a place,\nHeaven that never was\nNor will be ever is always true,\nAnd, in that brambled void,\nPlenty as blackberries in the woods\nThe dead grow for His joy.\n\nThere he might wander bare\nWith the spirits of the horseshoe bay\nOr the stars’ seashore dead,\nMarrow of eagles, the roots of whales\nAnd wishbones of wild geese,\nWith blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,\nAnd every soul His priest,\nGulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold\nBe at cloud quaking peace,\n\nBut dark is a long way.\nHe, on the earth of the night, alone\nWith all the living, prays,\nWho knows the rocketing wind will blow\nThe bones out of the hills,\nAnd the scythed boulders bleed, and the last\nRage shattered waters kick\nMasts and fishes to the still quick starts,\nFaithlessly unto Him\n\nWho is the light of old\nAnd air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild\nAs horses in the foam:\nOh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined\nAnd druid herons’ vows\nThe voyage to ruin I must run,\nDawn ships clouted aground,\nYet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,\nCount my blessings aloud:\n\nFour elements and five\nSenses, and man a spirit in love\nTangling through this spun slime\nTo his nimbus bell cool kingdom come\nAnd the lost, moonshine domes,\nAnd the sea that hides his secret selves\nDeep in its black, base bones,\nLulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,\nAnd this last blessing most,\n\nThat the closer I move\nTo death, one man through his sundered hulks,\nThe louder the sun blooms\nAnd the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;\nAnd every wave of the way\nAnd gale I tackle, the whole world then,\nWith more triumphant faith\nThat ever was since the world was said,\nSpins its morning of praise,\n\nI hear the bouncing hills\nGrow larked and greener at berry brown\nFall and the dew larks sing\nTaller this thunderclap spring, and how\nMore spanned with angles ride\nThe mansouled fiery islands! Oh,\nHolier then their eyes,\nAnd my shining men no more alone\nAs I sail out to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "day": 27 - } - } - }, - "a-process-in-the-weather-of-the-heart": { - "title": "“A Process in the Weather of the Heart”", - "body": "A process in the weather of the heart\nTurns damp to dry; the golden shot\nStorms in the freezing tomb.\nA weather in the quarter of the veins\nTurns night to day; blood in their suns\nLights up the living worm.\n\nA process in the eye forwarns\nThe bones of blindness; and the womb\nDrives in a death as life leaks out.\n\nA darkness in the weather of the eye\nIs half its light; the fathomed sea\nBreaks on unangled land.\nThe seed that makes a forest of the loin\nForks half its fruit; and half drops down,\nSlow in a sleeping wind.\n\nA weather in the flesh and bone\nIs damp and dry; the quick and dead\nMove like two ghosts before the eye.\n\nA process in the weather of the world\nTurns ghost to ghost; each mothered child\nSits in their double shade.\nA process blows the moon into the sun,\nPulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;\nAnd the heart gives up its dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-refusal-to-mourn-the-death-by-fire-of-a-child-in-london": { - "title": "“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”", - "body": "Never until the mankind making\nBird beast and flower\nFathering and all humbling darkness\nTells with silence the last light breaking\nAnd the still hour\nIs come of the sea tumbling in harness\n\nAnd I must enter again the round\nZion of the water bead\nAnd the synagogue of the ear of corn\nShall I let pray the shadow of a sound\nOr sow my salt seed\nIn the least valley of sackcloth to mourn\n\nThe majesty and burning of the child’s death.\nI shall not murder\nThe mankind of her going with a grave truth\nNor blaspheme down the stations of the breath\nWith any further\nElegy of innocence and youth.\n\nDeep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,\nRobed in the long friends,\nThe grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,\nSecret by the unmourning water\nOf the riding Thames.\nAfter the first death, there is no other.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-seed-at-zero": { - "title": "“The Seed-At-Zero”", - "body": "The seed-at-zero shall not storm\nThat town of ghosts, the trodden womb,\nWith her rampart to his tapping,\nNo god-in-hero tumble down\nLike a tower on the town\nDumbly and divinely stumbling\nOver the manwaging line.\n\nThe seed-at-zero shall not storm\nThat town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb\nWith her rampart to his tapping,\nNo god-in-hero tumble down\nLike a tower on the town\nDumbly and divinely leaping\nOver the warbearing line.\n\nThrough the rampart of the sky\nShall the star-flanked seed be riddled,\nManna for the rumbling ground,\nQuickening for the riddled sea;\nSettled on a virgin stronghold\nHe shall grapple with the guard\nAnd the keeper of the key.\n\nMay a humble village labour\nAnd a continent deny?\nA hemisphere may scold him\nAnd a green inch be his bearer;\nLet the hero seed find harbour,\nSeaports by a drunken shore\nHave their thirsty sailors hide him.\n\nMay be a humble planet labour\nAnd a continent deny?\nA village green may scold him\nAnd a high sphere be his bearer;\nLet the hero seed find harbour,\nSeaports by a thirsty shore\nHave their drunken sailors hide him.\n\nMan-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,\nFrom the foreign fields of space,\nShall not thunder on the town\nWith a star-flanked garrison,\nNor the cannons of his kingdom\nShall the hero-in-tomorrow\nRange on the sky-scraping place.\n\nMan-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,\nFrom the star-flanked fields of space,\nThunders on the foreign town\nWith a sand-bagged garrison,\nNor the cannons of his kingdom\nShall the hero-in-to-morrow\nRange from the grave-groping place.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "should-lanterns-shine": { - "title": "“Should Lanterns Shine”", - "body": "Should lanterns shine, the holy face,\nCaught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,\nWould wither up, an any boy of love\nLook twice before he fell from grace.\nThe features in their private dark\nAre formed of flesh, but let the false day come\nAnd from her lips the faded pigments fall,\nThe mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.\n\nI have been told to reason by the heart,\nBut heart, like head, leads helplessly;\nI have been told to reason by the pulse,\nAnd, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace\nTill field and roof lie level and the same\nSo fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman\nWhose beard wags in Egyptian wind.\n\nI have heard may years of telling,\nAnd many years should see some change.\n\nThe ball I threw while playing in the park\nHas not yet reached the ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sometimes-the-skys-too-bright": { - "title": "“Sometimes the Sky’s too Bright”", - "body": "Sometimes the sky’s too bright,\nOr has too many clouds or birds,\nAnd far away’s too sharp a sun\nTo nourish thinking of him.\nWhy is my hand too blunt\nTo cut in front of me\nMy horrid images for me,\nOf over-fruitful smiles,\nThe weightless touching of the lip\nI wish to know\nI cannot lift, but can,\nThe creature with the angel’s face\nWho tells me hurt,\nAnd sees my body go\nDown into misery?\nNo stopping. Put the smile\nWhere tears have come to dry.\nThe angel’s hurt is left;\nHis telling burns.\n\nSometimes a woman’s heart has salt,\nOr too much blood;\nI tear her breast,\nAnd see the blood is mine,\nFlowing from her, but mine,\nAnd then I think\nPerhaps the sky’s too bright;\nAnd watch my hand,\nBut do not follow it,\nAnd feel the pain it gives,\nBut do not ache.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-mischievous-dog": { - "title": "“The Song of the Mischievous Dog”", - "body": "There are many who say that a dog has its day,\nAnd a cat has a number of lives;\nThere are others who think that a lobster is pink,\nAnd that bees never work in their hives.\nThere are fewer, of course, who insist that a horse\nHas a horn and two humps on its head,\nAnd a fellow who jests that a mare can build nests\nIs as rare as a donkey that’s red.\nYet in spite of all this, I have moments of bliss,\nFor I cherish a passion for bones,\nAnd though doubtful of biscuit, I’m willing to risk it,\nAnd I love to chase rabbits and stones.\nBut my greatest delight is to take a good bite\nAt a calf that is plump and delicious;\nAnd if I indulge in a bite at a bulge,\nLet’s hope you won’t think me too vicious.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "then-was-my-neophyte": { - "title": "“Then Was My Neophyte”", - "body": "Then was my neophyte,\nChild in white blood bent on its knees\nUnder the bell of rocks,\nDucked in the twelve, disciple seas\nThe winder of the water-clocks\nCalls a green day and night.\nMy sea hermaphrodite,\nSnail of man in His ship of fires\nThat burn the bitten decks,\nKnew all His horrible desires\nThe climber of the water sex\nCalls the green rock of light.\n\nWho in these labyrinths,\nThis tidethread and the lane of scales,\nTwine in a moon-blown shell,\nEscapes to the flat cities’ sails\nFurled on the fishes’ house and hell,\nNor falls to His green myths?\nStretch the salt photographs,\nThe landscape grief, love in His oils\nMirror from man to whale\nThat the green child see like a grail\nThrough veil and fin and fire and coil\nTime on the canvas paths.\n\nHe films my vanity.\nShot in the wind, by tilted arcs,\nOver the water come\nChildren from homes and children’s parks\nWho speak on a finger and thumb,\nAnd the masked, headless boy.\nHis reels and mystery\nThe winder of the clockwise scene\nWound like a ball of lakes\nThen threw on that tide-hoisted screen\nLove’s image till my heartbone breaks\nBy a dramatic sea.\n\nWho kills my history?\nThe year-hedged row is lame with flint,\nBlunt scythe and water blade.\n“Who could snap off the shapeless print\nFrom your to-morrow-treading shade\nWith oracle for eye?”\nTime kills me terribly.\n“Time shall not murder you,” He said,\n“Nor the green nought be hurt;\nWho could hack out your unsucked heart,\nO green and unborn and undead?”\nI saw time murder me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "there-was-a-saviour": { - "title": "“There Was a Saviour”", - "body": " There was a saviour\n Rarer than radium,\n Commoner than water, crueller than truth;\n Children kept from the sun\n Assembled at his tongue\n To hear the golden note turn in a groove,\nPrisoners of wishes locked their eyes\nIn the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.\n\n The voice of children says\n From a lost wilderness\n There was calm to be done in his safe unrest,\n When hindering man hurt\n Man, animal, or bird\n We hid our fears in that murdering breath,\nSilence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,\nIn lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.\n\n There was glory to hear\n In the churches of his tears,\n Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,\n O you who could not cry\n On to the ground when a man died\n Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood\nAnd laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:\nNow in the dark there is only yourself and myself.\n\n Two proud, blacked brothers cry,\n Winter-locked side by side,\n To this inhospitable hollow year,\n O we who could not stir\n One lean sigh when we heard\n Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour\n But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall\nNow break a giant tear for the little known fall,\n\n For the drooping of homes\n That did not nurse our bones,\n Brave deaths of only ones but never found,\n Now see, alone in us,\n Our own true strangers’ dust\n Ride through the doors of our unentered house.\nExiled in us we arouse the soft,\nUnclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "this-side-of-the-truth": { - "title": "“This Side of the Truth”", - "body": "(for Llewelyn)\n\nThis side of the truth,\nYou may not see, my son,\nKing of your blue eyes\nIn the blinding country of youth,\nThat all is undone,\nUnder the unminding skies,\nOf innocence and guilt\nBefore you move to make\nOne gesture of the heart or head,\nIs gathered and spilt\nInto the winding dark\nLike the dust of the dead.\n\nGood and bad, two ways\nOf moving about your death\nBy the grinding sea,\nKing of your heart in the blind days,\nBlow away like breath,\nGo crying through you and me\nAnd the souls of all men\nInto the innocent\nDark, and the guilty dark, and good\nDeath, and bad death, and then\nIn the last element\nFly like the stars’ blood\n\nLike the sun’s tears,\nLike the moon’s seed, rubbish\nAnd fire, the flying rant\nOf the sky, king of your six years.\nAnd the wicked wish,\nDown the beginning of plants\nAnd animals and birds,\nWater and Light, the earth and sky,\nIs cast before you move,\nAnd all your deeds and words,\nEach truth, each lie,\nDie in unjudging love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-day-this-insect": { - "title": "“To-Day, This Insect”", - "body": "To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,\nNow that my symbols have outelbowed space,\nTime at the city spectacles, and half\nThe dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,\nIn trust and tale I have divided sense,\nSlapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double\nOf head and tail made witnesses to this\nMurder of Eden and green genesis.\n\nThe insect certain is the plague of fables.\n\nThis story’s monster has a serpent caul,\nBlind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,\nMeasures his own length on the garden wall\nAnd breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;\nA crocodile before the chrysalis,\nBefore the fall from love the flying heartbone,\nWinged like a sabbath ass this children’s piece\nUncredited blows Jericho on Eden.\n\nThe insect fable is the certain promise.\n\nDeath: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,\nAn air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,\nJohn’s beast, Job’s patience, and the fibs of vision,\nGreek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:\n“Adam I love, my madmen’s love is endless,\nNo tell-tale lover has an end more certain,\nAll legends’ sweethearts on a tree of stories,\nMy cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "twenty-four-years": { - "title": "“Twenty-Four Years”", - "body": "Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.\n(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)\nIn the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor\nSewing a shroud for a journey\nBy the light of the meat-eating sun.\nDressed to die, the sensual strut begun,\nWith my red veins full of money,\nIn the final direction of the elementary town\nI advance as long as forever is.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "was-there-a-time": { - "title": "“Was There a Time”", - "body": "Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles\nIn children’s circuses could stay their troubles?\nThere was a time they could cry over books,\nBut time has set its maggot on their track.\nUnder the arc of the sky they are unsafe.\nWhat’s never known is safest in this life.\nUnder the skysigns they who have no arms\nHave cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost\nAlone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-all-my-five-and-country-senses-see": { - "title": "“When All My Five and Country Senses See”", - "body": "When all my five and country senses see,\nThe fingers will forget green thumbs and mark\nHow, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,\nHusk of young stars and handfull zodiac,\nLove in the frost is pared and wintered by,\nThe whispering ears will watch love drummed away\nDown breeze and shell to a discordant beach,\nAnd, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry\nThat her fond wounds are mended bitterly.\nMy nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.\n\nMy one and noble heart has witnesses\nIn all love’s countries, that will grope awake;\nAnd when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,\nThe heart is sensual, though five eyes break.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-once-the-twilight-locks-no-longer": { - "title": "“When once the Twilight Locks No Longer”", - "body": "When once the twilight locks no longer\nLocked in the long worm of my finger\nNor damned the sea that sped about my fist,\nThe mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,\nThe milky acid on each hinge,\nAnd swallowed dry the waters of the breast.\n\nWhen the galactic sea was sucked\nAnd all the dry seabed unlocked,\nI sent my creature scouting on the globe,\nThat globe itself of hair and bone\nThat, sewn to me by nerve and brain,\nHad stringed my flask of matter to his rib.\n\nMy fuses are timed to charge his heart,\nHe blew like powder to the light\nAnd held a little sabbath with the sun,\nBut when the stars, assuming shape,\nDrew in his eyes the straws of sleep\nHe drowned his father’s magics in a dream.\n\nAll issue armoured, of the grave,\nThe redhaired cancer still alive,\nThe cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;\nSome dead undid their bushy jaws,\nAnd bags of blood let out their flies;\nHe had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.\n\nSleep navigates the tides of time;\nThe dry Sargasso of the tomb\nGives up its dead to such a working sea;\nAnd sleep rolls mute above the beds\nWhere fishes’ food is fed the shades\nWho periscope through flowers to the sky.\n\nWhen once the twilight screws were turned,\nAnd mother milk was stiff as sand,\nI sent my own ambassador to light;\nBy trick or chance he fell asleep\nAnd conjured up a carcass shape\nTo rob me of my fluids in his heart.\n\nAwake, my sleeper, to the sun,\nA worker in the morning town,\nAnd leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;\nThe fences of the light are down,\nAll but the briskest riders thrown\nAnd worlds hang on the trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-like-a-running-grave": { - "title": "“When, Like a Running Grave”", - "body": "When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,\nYour calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,\nLove in her gear is slowly through the house,\nUp naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,\nHauled to the dome,\n\nComes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,\nDeliver me who timid in my tribe,\nOf love am barer than Cadaver’s trap\nRobbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape\nOf the bone inch\n\nDeliver me, my masters, head and heart,\nHeart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,\nWhen blood, spade-handed, and the logic time\nDrive children up like bruises to the thumb,\nFrom maid and head,\n\nFor, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,\nChaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,\nI, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice\nMay fail to fasten with a virgin o\nIn the straight grave,\n\nStride through Cadaver’s country in my force,\nMy pickbrain masters morsing on the stone\nDespair of blood faith in the maiden’s slime,\nHalt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain\nOn fork and face.\n\nTime is a foolish fancy, time and fool.\nNo, no, you lover skull, descending hammer\nDescends, my masters, on the entered honour.\nYou hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar\nTells the stick, “fail.”\n\nJoy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,\nThe cancer’s fashion, or the summer feather\nLit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,\nNot city tar and subway bored to foster\nMan through macadam.\n\nI dump the waxlights in your tower dome.\nJoy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot\nOf bud of Adam through his boxy shift,\nLove’s twilit nation and the skull of state,\nSir, is your doom.\n\nEverything ends, the tower ending and,\n(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,\nBall of the foot depending from the sun,\n(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,\nThe actions’ end.\n\nAll, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind\nWith whistler’s cough contages, time on track\nShapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,\nHappy Cadaver’s hunger as you take\nThe kissproof world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "where-once-the-waters-of-your-face": { - "title": "“Where once the Waters of Your Face”", - "body": "Where once the waters of your face\nSpun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,\nThe dead turns up its eye;\nWhere once the mermen through your ice\nPushed up their hair, the dry wind steers\nThrough salt and root and roe.\n\nWhere once your green knots sank their splice\nInto the tided cord, there goes\nThe green unraveller,\nHis scissors oiled, his knife hung loose\nTo cut the channels at their source\nAnd lay the wet fruits low.\n\nInvisible, your clocking tides\nBreak on the lovebeds of the weeds;\nThe weed of love’s left dry;\nThere round about your stones the shades\nOf children go who, from their voids,\nCry to the dolphined sea.\n\nDry as a tomb, your coloured lids\nShall not be latched while magic glides\nSage on the earth and sky;\nThere shall be corals in your beds\nThere shall be serpents in your tides,\nTill all our sea-faiths die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "your-breath-was-shed": { - "title": "“Your Breath Was Shed”", - "body": "Your breath was shed\nInvisible to make\nAbout the soiled undead\nNight for my sake,\n\nA raining trail\nIntangible to them\nWith biter’s tooth and tail\nAnd cobweb drum,\n\nA dark as deep\nMy love as a round wave\nTo hide the wolves of sleep\nAnd mask the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "edward-thomas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Edward Thomas", - "birth": { - "year": 1878 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1917 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "digging": { - "title": "“Digging”", - "body": "To-day I think\nOnly with scents,--scents dead leaves yield,\nAnd bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,\nAnd the square mustard field;\n\nOdours that rise\nWhen the spade wounds the root of tree,\nRose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,\nRhubarb or celery;\n\nThe smoke’s smell, too,\nFlowing from where a bonfire burns\nThe dead, the waste, the dangerous,\nAnd all to sweetness turns.\n\nIt is enough\nTo smell, to crumble the dark earth,\nWhile the robin sings over again\nSad songs of Autumn mirth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "early-one-morning": { - "title": "“Early One Morning”", - "body": "Early one morning in May I set out,\nAnd nobody I knew was about.\nI’m bound away for ever,\nAway somewhere, away for ever.\n\nThere was no wind to trouble the weathercocks.\nI had burnt my letters and darned my socks.\n\nNo one knew I was going away,\nI thought myself I should come back some day.\n\nI heard the brook through the town gardens run.\nO sweet was the mud turned to dust by the sun.\n\nA gate banged in a fence and banged in my head.\n“A fine morning, sir,” a shepherd said.\n\nI could not return from my liberty,\nTo my youth and my love and my misery.\n\nThe past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,\nThe only sweet thing that is not also fleet.\nI’m bound away for ever,\nAway somehwere, away for ever.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "memoriam": { - "title": "“Memoriam”", - "body": "The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood\nThis Eastertide call into mind the men,\nNow far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should\nHave gathered them and will do never again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - } - } - }, - "r-s-thomas": { - "metadata": { - "name": "R. S. Thomas", - "birth": { - "year": 1913 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2000 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._S._Thomas", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 22 - }, - "poems": { - "album": { - "title": "“Album”", - "body": "My father is dead.\nI who am look at him\nwho is not, as once he\nwent looking for me\nin the woman who was.\n\nThere are pictures\nof the two of them, no\nneed of a third, hand\nin hand, hearts willing\nto be one but not three.\n\nWhat does it mean\nlife? I am here I am\nthere. Look! Suddenly\nthe young tool in their hands\nfor hurting one another.\n\nAnd the camera says:\nSmile; there is no wound\ntime gives that is not bandaged\nby time. And so they do the\nthree of them at me who weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-blackbird-singing": { - "title": "“A Blackbird Singing”", - "body": "It seems wrong that out of this bird,\nBlack, bold, a suggestion of dark\nPlaces about it, there yet should come\nSuch rich music, as though the notes’\nOre were changed to a rare metal\nAt one touch of that bright bill.\n\nYou have heard it often, alone at your desk\nIn a green April, your mind drawn\nAway from its work by sweet disturbance\nOf the mild evening outside your room.\n\nA slow singer, but loading each phrase\nWith history’s overtones, love, joy\nAnd grief learned by his dark tribe\nIn other orchards and passed on\nInstinctively as they are now,\nBut fresh always with new tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "chapel-deacon": { - "title": "“Chapel Deacon”", - "body": "Who put that crease in your soul,\nDavies, ready this fine morning\nFor the staid chapel, where the Book’s frown\nSobers the sunlight? Who taught you to pray\nAnd scheme at once, your eyes turning\nSkyward, while your swift mind weighs\nYour heifer’s chances in the next town’s\nFair on Thursday? Are your heart’s coals\nKindled for God, or is the burning\nOf your lean cheeks because you sit\nToo near that girl’s smouldering gaze?\nTell me, Davies, for the faint breeze\nFrom heaven freshens and I roll in it,\nWho taught you your deft poise?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "childrens-song": { - "title": "“Children’s Song”", - "body": "We live in our own world,\nA world that is too small\nFor you to stoop and enter\nEven on hands and knees,\nThe adult subterfuge.\nAnd though you probe and pry\nWith analytic eye,\nAnd eavesdrop all our talk\nWith an amused look,\nYou cannot find the centre\nWhere we dance, where we play,\nWhere life is still asleep\nUnder the closed flower,\nUnder the smooth shell\nOf eggs in the cupped nest\nThat mock the faded blue\nOf your remoter heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dance": { - "title": "“The Dance”", - "body": "She is young. Have I the right\nEven to name her? Child,\nIt is not love I offer\nYour quick limbs, your eyes;\nOnly the barren homage\nOf an old man whom time\nCrucifies. Take my hand\nA moment in the dance,\nIgnoring its sly pressure,\nThe dry rut of age,\nAnd lead me under the boughs\nOf innocence. Let me smell\nMy youth again in your hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death-of-a-poet": { - "title": "“Death of a Poet”", - "body": "Laid now on his smooth bed\nFor the last time, watching dully\nThrough heavy eyelids the day’s colour\nWidow the sky, what can he say\nWorthy of record, the books all open,\nPens ready, the faces, sad,\nWaiting gravely for the tired lips\nTo move once--what can he say?\n\nHis tongue wrestles to force one word\nPast the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases\nFor the day’s news, just the one word ‘sorry’;\nSorry for the lies, for the long failure\nIn the poet’s war; that he preferred\nThe easier rhythms of the heart\nTo the mind’s scansion; that now he dies\nIntestate, having nothing to leave\nBut a few songs, cold as stones\nIn the thin hands that asked for bread.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "evans": { - "title": "“Evans”", - "body": "Evans? Yes, many a time\nI came down his bare flight\nOf stairs into the gaunt kitchen\nWith its wood fire, where crickets sang\nAccompaniment to the black kettle’s\nWhine, and so into the cold\nDark to smother in the thick tide\nOf night that drifted about the walls\nOf his stark farm on the hill ridge.\n\nIt was not the dark filling my eyes\nAnd mouth appalled me; not even the drip\nOf rain like blood from the one tree\nWeather-tortured. It was the dark\nSilting the veins of that sick man\nI left stranded upon the vast\nAnd lonely shore of his bleak bed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "good": { - "title": "“Good”", - "body": "The old man comes out on the hill\nand looks down to recall earlier days\nin the valley. He sees the stream shine,\nthe church stand, hears the litter of\nchildren’s voices. A chill in the flesh\ntells him that death is not far off\nnow: it is the shadow under the great boughs\nof life. His garden has herbs growing.\nThe kestrel goes by with fresh prey\nin its claws. The wind scatters the scent\nof wild beans. The tractor operates\non the earth’s body. His grandson is there\nploughing; his young wife fetches him\ncakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-interrogation": { - "title": "“The Interrogation”", - "body": "But the financiers will ask\nIn that day: IS it not better\nTo leave broken bank balances\nBehind than broken heads?\n\nAnd Christ recognizing the\nNew warriors will feel breaching\nHis healed side their terrible\nPencil and the haemorrhage of its figures.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kneeling": { - "title": "“Kneeling”", - "body": "Moments of great calm,\nKneeling before an altar\nOf wood in a stone church\nIn summer, waiting for the God\nTo speak; the air a staircase\nFor silence; the sun’s light\nRinging me, as though I acted\nA great rôle. And the audiences\nStill; all that close throng\nOf spirits waiting, as I,\nFor the message. Prompt me, God;\nBut not yet. When I speak,\nThough it be you who speak\nThrough me, something is lost.\nThe meaning is in the waiting.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-marriage": { - "title": "“A Marriage”", - "body": "We met\nunder a shower\nof bird-notes.\nFifty years passed,\nlove’s moment\nin a world in\nservitude to time.\nShe was young;\nI kissed with my eyes\nclosed and opened\nthem on her wrinkles.\n“Come,” said death,\nchoosing her as his\npartner for\nthe last dance, And she,\nwho in life\nhad done everything\nwith a bird’s grace,\nopened her bill now\nfor the shedding\nof one sigh no\nheavier than a feather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ninetieth-birthday": { - "title": "“Ninetieth Birthday”", - "body": "You go up the long track\nThat will take a car, but is best walked\nOn slow foot, noting the lichen\nThat writes history on the page\nOf the grey rock. Trees are about you\nAt first, but yield to the green bracken,\nThe nightjars house: you can hear it spin\nOn warm evenings; it is still now\nIn the noonday heat, only the lesser\nVoices sound, blue-fly and gnat\nAnd the stream’s whisper. As the road climbs,\nYou will pause for breath and the far sea’s\nSignal will flash, till you turn again\nTo the steep track, buttressed with cloud.\n\nAnd there at the top that old woman,\nBorn almost a century back\nIn that stone farm, awaits your coming;\nWaits for the news of the lost village\nShe thinks she knows, a place that exists\nIn her memory only. You bring her greeting\nAnd praise for having lasted so long\nWith time’s knife shaving the bone.\nYet no bridge joins her own\nWorld with yours, all you can do\nIs lean kindly across the abyss\nTo hear words that were once wise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "an-old-man": { - "title": "“An Old Man”", - "body": "Looking upon this tree with its quaint pretension\nOf holding the earth, a leveret, in its claws,\nOr marking the texture of its living bark,\nA grey sea wrinkled by the winds of years,\nI understand whence this man’s body comes,\nIn veins and fibres, the bare boughs of bone,\nThe trellised thicket, where the heart, that robin,\nGreets with a song the seasons of the blood.\n\nBut where in meadow or mountain shall I match\nThe individual accent of the speech\nThat is the ear’s familiar? To what sun attribute\nThe honeyed warmness of his smile?\nTo which of the deciduous brood is german\nThe angel peeping from the latticed eye?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-farm": { - "title": "“On the Farm”", - "body": "There was Dai Puw. He was no good.\nThey put him in the fields to dock swedes,\nAnd took the knife from him, when he came home\nAt late evening with a grin\nLike the slash of a knife on his face.\n\nThere was Llew Puw, and he was no good.\nEvery evening after the ploughing\nWith the big tractor he would sit in his chair,\nAnd stare into the tangled fire garden,\nOpening his slow lips like a snail.\n\nThere was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?\nI have heard him whistling in the hedges\nOn and on, as though winter\nWould never again leave those fields,\nAnd all the trees were deformed.\n\nAnd lastly there was the girl:\nBeauty under some spell of the beast.\nHer pale face was the lantern\nBy which they read in life’s dark book\nThe shrill sentence: God is love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-peasant": { - "title": "“A Peasant”", - "body": "Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,\nJust an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,\nWho pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.\nDocking mangels, chipping the green skin\nFrom the yellow bones with a half-witted grin\nOf satisfaction, or churning the crude earth\nTo a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind--\nSo are his days spent, his spittled mirth\nRarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks\nOf the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.\nAnd then at night see him fixed in his chair\nMotionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.\nThere is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.\nHis clothes, sour with years of sweat\nAnd animal contact, shock the refined,\nBut affected, sense with their stark naturalness.\nYet this is your prototype, who, season by season\nAgainst siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,\nPreserves his stock, an impregnable fortress\nNot to be stormed, even in death’s confusion.\nRemember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,\nEnduring like a tree under the curious stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "poetry-for-supper": { - "title": "“Poetry for Supper”", - "body": "“Listen, now, verse should be as natural\nAs the small tuber that feeds on muck\nAnd grows slowly from obtuse soil\nTo the white flower of immortal beauty.”\n\n“Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer\nSaid once about the long toil\nThat goes like blood to the poem’s making?\nLeave it to nature and the verse sprawls,\nLimp as bindweed, if it break at all\nLife’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat\nAnd rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build\nYour verse a ladder.”\n\n“You speak as though\nNo sunlight ever surprised the mind\nGroping on its cloudy path.”\n\n“Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window\nBefore it enter a dark room.\nWindows don’t happen.”\n\nSo two old poets,\nHunched at their beer in the low haze\nOf an inn parlour, while the talk ran\nNoisily by them, glib with prose.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sorry": { - "title": "“Sorry”", - "body": "Dear parents,\nI forgive you my life,\nBegotten in a drab town,\nThe intention was good;\nPassing the street now,\nI see still the remains of sunlight.\n\nIt was not the bone buckled;\nYou gave me enough food\nTo renew myself.\nIt was the mind’s weight\nKept me bent, as I grew tall.\n\nIt was not your fault.\nWhat should have gone on,\nArrow aimed from a tried bow\nAt a tried target, has turned back,\nWounding itself\nWith questions you had not asked.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-village": { - "title": "“The Village”", - "body": "Scarcely a street, too few houses\nTo merit the title; just a way between\nThe one tavern and the one shop\nThat leads nowhere and fails at the top\nOf the short hill, eaten away\nBy long erosion of the green tide\nOf grass creeping perpetually nearer\nThis last outpost of time past.\n\nSo little happens; the black dog\nCracking his fleas in the hot sun\nIs history. Yet the girl who crosses\nFrom door to door moves to a scale\nBeyond the bland day’s two dimensions.\n\nStay, then, village, for round you spins\nOn a slow axis a world as vast\nAnd meaningful as any posed\nBy great Plato’s solitary mind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "walter-llywarch": { - "title": "“Walter Llywarch”", - "body": "I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,\nBorn in Wales of approved parents,\nWell goitred, round in the bum,\nSure prey of the slow virus\nBred in quarries of grey rain.\n\nBorn in autumn at the right time\nFor hearing stories from the cracked lips\nOf old folk dreaming of summer,\nI piled them on to the bare hearth\nOf my own fancy to make a blaze\nTo warm myself, but achieved only\nThe smoke’s acid that brings the smart\nOf false tears into the eyes.\n\nMonths of fog, months of drizzle;\nThought wrapped in the grey cocoon\nOf race, of place, awaiting the sun’s\nComing, but when the sun came,\nTouching the hills with a hot hand,\nWings were spread only to fly\nRound and round in a cramped cage\nOr beat in vain at the sky’s window.\n\nSchool in the week, on Sunday chapel:\nTales of a land fairer than this\nWere not so tall, for others had proved it\nWithout the grave’s passport, they sent\nThe fruit home for ourselves to taste.\n\nWalter Llywarch--the words were a name\nOn a lost letter that never came\nFor one who waited in the long queue\nOf life that wound through a Welsh valley.\nI took instead, as others had done\nBefore, a wife from the back pews\nIn chapel, rather to share the rain\nOf winter evenings, than to intrude\nOn her pale body; and yet we lay\nFor warmth together and laughed to hear\nEach new child’s cry of despair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "welsh-landscape": { - "title": "“Welsh Landscape”", - "body": "To live in Wales is to be conscious\nAt dusk of the spilled blood\nThat went into the making of the wild sky,\nDyeing the immaculate rivers\nIn all their courses.\nIt is to be aware,\nAbove the noisy tractor\nAnd hum of the machine\nOf strife in the strung woods,\nVibrant with sped arrows.\nYou cannot live in the present,\nAt least not in Wales.\nThere is the language for instance,\nThe soft consonants\nStrange to the ear.\nThere are cries in the dark at night\nAs owls answer the moon,\nAnd thick ambush of shadows,\nHushed at the fields’ corners.\nThere is no present in Wales,\nAnd no future;\nThere is only the past,\nBrittle with relics,\nWind-bitten towers and castles\nWith sham ghosts;\nMouldering quarries and mines;\nAnd an impotent people,\nSick with inbreeding,\nWorrying the carcase of an old song. To live in Wales is to be conscious\nAt dusk of the spilled blood\nThat went into the making of the wild sky,\nDyeing the immaculate rivers\nIn all their courses.\nIt is to be aware,\nAbove the noisy tractor\nAnd hum of the machine\nOf strife in the strung woods,\nVibrant with sped arrows.\nYou cannot live in the present,\nAt least not in Wales.\nThere is the language for instance,\nThe soft consonants\nStrange to the ear.\nThere are cries in the dark at night\nAs owls answer the moon,\nAnd thick ambush of shadows,\nHushed at the fields’ corners.\nThere is no present in Wales,\nAnd no future;\nThere is only the past,\nBrittle with relics,\nWind-bitten towers and castles\nWith sham ghosts;\nMouldering quarries and mines;\nAnd an impotent people,\nSick with inbreeding,\nWorrying the carcase of an old song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-welsh-testament": { - "title": "“A Welsh Testament”", - "body": "All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?\nI spoke a tongue that was passed on\nTo me in the place I happened to be,\nA place huddled between grey walls\nOf cloud for at least half the year.\nMy word for heaven was not yours.\nThe word for hell had a sharp edge\nPut on it by the hand of the wind\nHoning, honing with a shrill sound\nDay and night. Nothing that Glyn Dwr\nKnew was armour against the rain’s\nMissiles. What was descent from him?\n\nEven God had a Welsh name:\nHe spoke to him in the old language;\nHe was to have a peculiar care\nFor the Welsh people. History showed us\nHe was too big to be nailed to the wall\nOf a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him\nBetween the boards of a black book.\n\nYet men sought us despite this.\nMy high cheek-bones, my length of skull\nDrew them as to a rare portrait\nBy a dead master. I saw them stare\nFrom their long cars, as I passed knee-deep\nIn ewes and wethers. I saw them stand\nBy the thorn hedges, watching me string\nThe far flocks on a shrill whistle.\nAnd always there was their eyes; strong\nPressure on me: You are Welsh, they said;\nSpeak to us so; keep your fields free\nOf the smell of petrol, the loud roar\nOf hot tractors; we must have peace\nAnd quietness.\n\nIs a museum\nPeace? I asked. Am I the keeper\nOf the heart’s relics, blowing the dust\nIn my own eyes? I am a man;\nI never wanted the drab role\nLife assigned me, an actor playing\nTo the past’s audience upon a stage\nOf earth and stone; the absurd label\nOf birth, of race hanging askew\nAbout my shoulders. I was in prison\nUntil you came; your voice was a key\nTurning in the enormous lock\nOf hopelessness. Did the door open\nTo let me out or yourselves in?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-woman": { - "title": "“The Woman”", - "body": "So beautiful--God himself quailed\nat her approach: the long body curved\nlike the horizon. Why had he made\nher so? How would it be, she said,\nleaning towards him, if instead of\nquarreling over it, we divided it\nbetween us? You can have all the credit\nfor its invention, if you will leave the ordering\nof it to me. He looked into her\neyes and saw far down the bones\nof the generations that would navigate\nby those great stars, but the pull of it\nwas too much. Yes, he thought, give me their minds’\ntribute, and what they do with their bodies\nis not my concern. He put his hand in his side\nand drew out the thorn for the letting\nof the ordained blood and touched her with\nit. Go, he said. They shall come to you for ever\nwith their desire, and you shall bleed for them in return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "francis-thompson": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Francis Thompson", - "birth": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1907 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Thompson", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 20 - }, - "poems": { - "an-arab-love-song": { - "title": "“An Arab Love Song”", - "body": "The hunchèd camels of the night\nTrouble the bright\nAnd silver waters of the moon.\nThe Maiden of the Morn will soon\nThrough Heaven stray and sing,\nStar gathering.\n\nNow while the dark about our loves is strewn,\nLight of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!\nAnd night will catch her breath up, and be dumb.\n\nLeave thy father, leave thy mother\nAnd thy brother;\nLeave the black tents of thy tribe apart!\nAm I not thy father and thy brother,\nAnd thy mother?\nAnd thou--what needest with thy tribe’s black tents\nWho hast the red pavilion of my heart?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "assumpta-maria": { - "title": "“Assumpta Maria”", - "body": "Mortals, that behold a Woman,\nRising ’twixt the Moon and Sun;\nWho am I the heavens assume? an\nAll am I, and I am one.\n\nMultitudinous ascend I,\nDreadful as a battle arrayed,\nFor I bear you whither tend I;\nYe are I: be undismayed!\nI, the Ark that for the graven\nTables of the Law was made;\nMan’s own heart was one, one Heaven,\nBoth within my womb were laid.\nFor there Anteros with Eros\nHeaven with man conjoinéd was,--\nTwin-stone of the Law, Ischyros,\nAgios Athanatos.\n\nI, the flesh-girt Paradises\nGardenered by the Adam new,\nDaintied o’er with sweet devices\nWhich He loveth, for He grew.\nI, the boundless strict savannah\nWhich God’s leaping feet go through;\nI, the heaven whence the Manna,\nWeary Israel, slid on you!\nHe the Anteros and Eros,\nI the body, He the Cross;\nHe upbeareth me, Ischyros,\nAgios Athanatos!\n\nI am Daniel’s mystic Mountain,\nWhence the mighty stone was rolled;\nI am the four Rivers’ fountain,\nWatering Paradise of old;\nCloud down-raining the Just One am,\nDanae of the Shower of Gold;\nI the Hostel of the Sun am;\nHe the Lamb, and I the Fold.\nHe the Anteros and Eros,\nI the body, He the Cross;\nHe is fast to me, Ischyros,\nAgios Athanatos!\n\nI, the presence-hall where Angels\nDo enwheel their placéd King--\nEven my thoughts which, without change else,\nCyclic burn and cyclic sing.\nTo the hollow of Heaven transplanted,\nI a breathing Eden spring,\nWhere with venom all outpanted\nLies the slimed Curse shrivelling.\nFor the brazen Serpent clear on\nThat old fangéd knowledge shone;\nI to Wisdom rise, Ischyron,\nAgion Athanaton!\n\nSee in highest heaven pavilioned\nNow the maiden Heaven rest,\nThe many-breasted sky out-millioned\nBy the splendours of her vest.\nLo, the Ark this holy tide is\nThe un-handmade Temple’s guest,\nAnd the dark Egyptian bride is\nWhitely to the Spouse-Heart prest!\nHe the Anteros and Eros,\nNail me to Thee, sweetest Cross!\nHe is fast to me, Ischyros,\nAgios Athanatos!\n\n“Tell me, tell me, O Belovéd,\nWhere Thou dost in mid-day feed!\nFor my wanderings are reprovéd,\nAnd my heart is salt with need.”\n“Thine own self not spellest God in,\nNor the lisping papyrus reed?\nFollow where the flocks have trodden,\nFollow where the shepherds lead.”\nHe, the Anteros and Eros,\nMounts me in Aegyptic car,\nTwin-yoked; leading me, Ischyros,\nTrembling to the untempted Far.\n\n“Make me chainlets, silvern, golden,\nI that sow shall surely reap;\nWhile as yet my Spouse is holden\nLike a Lion in mountained sleep.”\n“Make her chainlets, silvern, golden,\nShe hath sown and she shall reap;\nLook up to the mountains olden,\nWhence help comes with lioned leap.”\nBy what gushed the bitter Spear on,\nPain, which sundered, maketh one;\nCrucified to Him, Ischyron,\nAgion Athanaton!\n\nThen commanded and spake to me\nHe who framed all things that be;\nAnd my Maker entered through me,\nIn my tent His rest took He.\nLo! He standeth, Spouse and Brother;\nI to Him, and He to me,\nWho upraised me where my mother\nFell, beneath the apple-tree.\nRisen ’twixt Anteros and Eros,\nBlood and Water, Moon and Sun,\nHe upbears me, He Ischyros,\nI bear Him, the Athanaton!\n\nWhere is laid the Lord arisen?\nIn the light we walk in gloom;\nThough the sun has burst his prison,\nWe know not his biding-room.\nTell us where the Lord sojourneth,\nFor we find an empty tomb.\n“Whence He sprung, there He returneth,\nMystic Sun,--the Virgin’s Womb.”\nHidden Sun, His beams so near us,\nCloud enpillared as He was\nFrom of old, there He, Ischyros,\nWaits our search, Athanatos.\n\nWho will give Him me for brother,\nCounted of my family,\nSucking the sweet breasts of my Mother?--\nI His flesh, and mine is He;\nTo my Bread myself the bread is,\nAnd my Wine doth drink me: see,\nHis left hand beneath my head is,\nHis right hand embraceth me!\nSweetest Anteros and Eros,\nLo, her arms He leans across;\nDead that we die not, stooped to rear us,\nThanatos Athanatos.\n\nWho is She, in candid vesture,\nRushing up from out the brine?\nTreading with resilient gesture\nAir, and with that Cup divine?\nShe in us and we in her are,\nBeating Godward: all that pine,\nLo, a wonder and a terror!\nThe Sun hath blushed the Sea to Wine!\nHe the Anteros and Eros,\nShe the Bride and Spirit; for\nNow the days of promise near us,\nAnd the Sea shall be no more.\n\nOpen wide thy gates, O Virgin,\nThat the King may enter thee!\nAt all gates the clangours gurge in,\nGod’s paludament lightens, see!\nCamp of Angels! Well we even\nOf this thing may doubtful be,--\nIf thou art assumed to Heaven,\nOr is Heaven assumed to thee!\nConsummatum. Christ the promised,\nThy maiden realm is won, O Strong!\nSince to such sweet Kingdom comest,\nRemember me, poor Thief of Song!\n\nCadent fails the stars along:--\nMortals, that behold a woman\nRising ’twixt the Moon and Sun;\nWho am I the heavens assume? an\nAll am I, and I am one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "before-her-portrait-in-you": { - "title": "“Before Her Portrait in You”", - "body": "As lovers, banished from their lady’s face\nAnd hopeless of her grace,\nFashion a ghostly sweetness in its place,\nFondly adore\nSome stealth-won cast attire she wore,\nA kerchief or a glove:\nAnd at the lover’s beck\nInto the glove there fleets the hand,\nOr at impetuous command\nUp from the kerchief floats the virgin neck:\nSo I, in very lowlihead of love,--\nToo shyly reverencing\nTo let one thought’s light footfall smooth\nTread near the living, consecrated thing,--\nTreasure me thy cast youth.\nThis outworn vesture, tenantless of thee,\nHath yet my knee,\nFor that, with show and semblance fair\nOf the past Her\nWho once the beautiful, discarded raiment bare,\nIt cheateth me.\nAs gale to gale drifts breath\nOf blossoms’ death,\nSo dropping down the years from hour to hour\nThis dead youth’s scent is wafted me to-day:\nI sit, and from the fragrance dream the flower.\nSo, then, she looked (I say);\nAnd so her front sunk down\nHeavy beneath the poet’s iron crown:\nOn her mouth museful sweet--\n(Even as the twin lips meet)\nDid thought and sadness greet:\nSighs\nIn those mournful eyes\nSo put on visibilities;\nAs viewless ether turns, in deep on deep, to dyes.\nThus, long ago,\nShe kept her meditative paces slow\nThrough maiden meads, with waved shadow and gleam\nOf locks half-lifted on the winds of dream,\nTill love up-caught her to his chariot’s glow.\nYet, voluntary, happier Proserpine!\nThis drooping flower of youth thou lettest fall\nI, faring in the cockshut-light, astray,\nFind on my ’lated way,\nAnd stoop, and gather for memorial,\nAnd lay it on my bosom, and make it mine.\nTo this, the all of love the stars allow me,\nI dedicate and vow me.\nI reach back through the days\nA trothed hand to the dead the last trump shall not raise.\nThe water-wraith that cries\nFrom those eternal sorrows of thy pictured eyes\nEntwines and draws me down their soundless intricacies!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-corymbus-for-autumn": { - "title": "“A Corymbus for Autumn”", - "body": "Hearken my chant, ’tis\nAs a Bacchante’s,\nA grape-spurt, a vine-splash, a tossed tress, flown vaunt ’tis!\nSuffer my singing,\nGipsy of Seasons, ere thou go winging;\nEre Winter throws\nHis slaking snows\nIn thy feasting-flagon’s impurpurate glows!\nThe sopped sun--toper as ever drank hard--\nStares foolish, hazed,\nRubicund, dazed,\nTotty with thine October tankard.\nTanned maiden! with cheeks like apples russet,\nAnd breast a brown agaric faint-flushing at tip,\nAnd a mouth too red for the moon to buss it,\nBut her cheek unvow its vestalship;\nThy mists enclip\nHer steel-clear circuit illuminous,\nUntil it crust\nRubiginous\nWith the glorious gules of a glowing rust.\nFar other saw we, other indeed,\nThe crescent moon, in the May-days dead,\nFly up with its slender white wings spread\nOut of its nest in the sea’s waved mead!\nHow are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden?\nUmbered juices,\nAnd pulpèd oozes\nPappy out of the cherry-bruises,\nFroth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden!\nWith hair that musters\nIn globèd clusters,\nIn tumbling clusters, like swarthy grapes,\nRound thy brow and thine ears o’ershaden;\nWith the burning darkness of eyes like pansies,\nLike velvet pansies\nWherethrough escapes\nThe splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies;\nWith robe gold-tawny not hiding the shapes\nOf the feet whereunto it falleth down,\nThy naked feet unsandallèd;\nWith robe gold-tawny that does not veil\nFeet where the red\nIs meshed in the brown,\nLike a rubied sun in a Venice-sail.\n\nThe wassailous heart of the Year is thine!\nHis Bacchic fingers disentwine\nHis coronal\nAt thy festival;\nHis revelling fingers disentwine\nLeaf, flower, and all,\nAnd let them fall\nBlossom and all in thy wavering wine.\nThe Summer looks out from her brazen tower,\nThrough the flashing bars of July,\nWaiting thy ripened golden shower;\nWhereof there cometh, with sandals fleet,\nThe North-west flying viewlessly,\nWith a sword to sheer, and untameable feet,\nAnd the gorgon-head of the Winter shown\nTo stiffen the gazing earth as stone.\n\nIn crystal Heaven’s magic sphere\nPoised in the palm of thy fervid hand,\nThou seest the enchanted shows appear\nThat stain Favonian firmament;\nRicher than ever the Occident\nGave up to bygone Summer’s wand.\nDay’s dying dragon lies drooping his crest,\nPanting red pants into the West.\nOr the butterfly sunset claps its wings\nWith flitter alit on the swinging blossom,\nThe gusty blossom, that tosses and swings,\nOf the sea with its blown and ruffled bosom;\nIts ruffled bosom wherethrough the wind sings\nTill the crispèd petals are loosened and strown\nOverblown, on the sand;\nShed, curling as dead\nRose-leaves curl, on the fleckèd strand.\nOr higher, holier, saintlier when, as now,\nAll nature sacerdotal seems, and thou.\nThe calm hour strikes on yon golden gong,\nIn tones of floating and mellow light\nA spreading summons to even-song:\nSee how there\nThe cowlèd night\nKneels on the Eastern sanctuary-stair.\nWhat is this feel of incense everywhere?\nClings it round folds of the blanch-amiced clouds,\nUpwafted by the solemn thurifer,\nThe mighty spirit unknown,\nThat swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne?\nOr is’t the Season under all these shrouds\nOf light, and sense, and silence, makes her known\nA presence everywhere,\nAn inarticulate prayer,\nA hand on the soothed tresses of the air?\nBut there is one hour scant\nOf this Titanian, primal liturgy;\nAs there is but one hour for me and thee,\nAutumn, for thee and thine hierophant,\nOf this grave ending chant.\nRound the earth still and stark\nHeaven’s death-lights kindle, yellow spark by spark,\nBeneath the dreadful catafalque of the dark.\n\nAnd I had ended there:\nBut a great wind blew all the stars to flare,\nAnd cried, “I sweep the path before the moon!\nTarry ye now the coming of the moon,\nFor she is coming soon;”\nThen died before the coming of the moon.\nAnd she came forth upon the trepidant air,\nIn vesture unimagined-fair,\nWoven as woof of flag-lilies;\nAnd curdled as of flag-lilies\nThe vapour at the feet of her,\nAnd a haze about her tinged in fainter wise.\nAs if she had trodden the stars in press,\nTill the gold wine spurted over her dress,\nTill the gold wine gushed out round her feet;\nSpouted over her stainèd wear,\nAnd bubbled in golden froth at her feet,\nAnd hung like a whirlpool’s mist round her.\nStill, mighty Season, do I see’t,\nThy sway is still majestical!\nThou hold’st of God, by title sure,\nThine indefeasible investiture,\nAnd that right round thy locks are native to;\nThe heavens upon thy brow imperial,\nThis huge terrene thy ball,\nAnd o’er thy shoulders thrown wide air’s depending pall.\nWhat if thine earth be blear and bleak of hue?\nStill, still the skies are sweet!\nStill, Season, still thou hast thy triumphs there!\nHow have I, unaware,\nForgetful of my strain inaugural,\nCleft the great rondure of thy reign complete,\nYielding thee half, who hast indeed the all?\nI will not think thy sovereignty begun\nBut with the shepherd sun\nThat washes in the sea the stars’ gold fleeces\nOr that with day it ceases,\nWho sets his burning lips to the salt brine,\nAnd purples it to wine;\nWhile I behold how ermined Artemis\nOrdainèd weed must wear,\nAnd toil thy business;\nWho witness am of her,\nHer too in autumn turned a vintager;\nAnd, laden with its lampèd clusters bright,\nThe fiery-fruited vineyard of this night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "daisy": { - "title": "“Daisy”", - "body": "Where the thistle lifts a purple crown\nSix foot out of the turf,\nAnd the harebell shakes on the windy hill--\nO the breath of the distant surf!--\n\nThe hills look over on the South,\nAnd southward dreams the sea;\nAnd, with the sea-breeze hand in hand,\nCame innocence and she.\n\nWhere ’mid the gorse the raspberry\nRed for the gatherer springs,\nTwo children did we stray and talk\nWise, idle, childish things.\n\nShe listened with big-lipped surprise,\nBreast-deep mid flower and spine:\nHer skin was like a grape, whose veins\nRun snow instead of wine.\n\nShe knew not those sweet words she spake,\nNor knew her own sweet way;\nBut there’s never a bird, so sweet a song\nThronged in whose throat that day!\n\nOh, there were flowers in Storrington\nOn the turf and on the spray;\nBut the sweetest flower on Sussex hills\nWas the Daisy-flower that day!\n\nHer beauty smoothed earth’s furrowed face!\nShe gave me tokens three:--\nA look, a word of her winsome mouth,\nAnd a wild raspberry.\n\nA berry red, a guileless look,\nA still word,--strings of sand!\nAnd yet they made my wild, wild heart\nFly down to her little hand.\n\nFor standing artless as the air,\nAnd candid as the skies,\nShe took the berries with her hand,\nAnd the love with her sweet eyes.\n\nThe fairest things have fleetest end:\nTheir scent survives their close,\nBut the rose’s scent is bitterness\nTo him that loved the rose!\n\nShe looked a little wistfully,\nThen went her sunshine way:--\nThe sea’s eye had a mist on it,\nAnd the leaves fell from the day.\n\nShe went her unremembering way,\nShe went and left in me\nThe pang of all the partings gone,\nAnd partings yet to be.\n\nShe left me marvelling why my soul\nWas sad that she was glad;\nAt all the sadness in the sweet,\nThe sweetness in the sad.\n\nStill, still I seemed to see her, still\nLook up with soft replies,\nAnd take the berries with her hand,\nAnd the love with her lovely eyes.\n\nNothing begins, and nothing ends,\nThat is not paid with moan;\nFor we are born in other’s pain,\nAnd perish in our own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-dead-astronomer": { - "title": "“A Dead Astronomer”", - "body": "Starry amorist, starward gone,\nThou art--what thou didst gaze upon!\nPassed through thy golden garden’s bars,\nThou seest the Gardener of the Stars.\n\nShe, about whose moonéd brows\nSeven stars make seven glows,\nSeven lights for seven woes;\nShe, like thine own Galaxy,\nAll lustres in one purity:--\nWhat said’st thou, Astronomer,\nWhen thou did’st discover HER?\nWhen thy hand its tube let fall,\nThou found’st the fairest Star of all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dream-tryst": { - "title": "“Dream Tryst”", - "body": "The breaths of kissing night and day\nWere mingled in the eastern Heaven,\nThrobbing with unheard melody,\nShook Lyra all its star-cloud seven.\nWhen dusk shrank cold, and light trod shy,\nAnd dawn’s grey eyes were troubled grey;\nAnd souls went palely up to the sky,\nAnd mine to Lucidè,\nThere was no change in her sweet eyes\nSince last I saw those sweet eyes shine;\nThere was no change in her deep heart\nSince last that deep heart knocked at mine.\nHer eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope’s,\nWherein did ever come and go;\nThe sparkle of the fountain drops\nFrom her sweet soul below.\nThe chambers in the house of dream\nAre fed with so divine an air,\nThat Time’s hoar wings grow young therein,\nAnd they who walk there are most fair.\nI joyed for me, I joyed for her,\nWho with the Past meet girt about:\nWhere her last kiss still warms the air,\nNor can her eyes go out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ended-is-our-brief-sweet-play": { - "title": "“Ended is Our Brief Sweet Play”", - "body": "Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play;\nGo, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow:\nAnd some are sung, and that was yesterday,\nAnd some are unsung, and that may be tomorrow.\n\nGo forth; and if it be o’er stony way,\nOld joy can lend what newer grief must borrow:\nAnd it was sweet, and that was yesterday,\nAnd sweet is sweet, though purchased with sorrow.\n\nGo, songs, and come not back from your far way:\nAnd if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow,\nTell them ye grieve, for your hearts know Today,\nTell them ye smile, for your eyes know Tomorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "epilogue": { - "title": "“Epilogue”", - "body": "Virtue may unlock hell, or even\nA sin turn in the wards of Heaven,\n(As ethics of the text-book go),\nSo little men their own deeds know,\nOr through the intricate _mêlée_\nGuess whitherward draws the battle-sway;\nSo little, if they know the deed,\nDiscern what therefrom shall succeed.\nTo wisest moralists ’tis but given\nTo work rough border-law of Heaven,\nWithin this narrow life of ours,\nThese marches ’twixt delimitless Powers.\nIs it, if Heaven the future showed,\nIs it the all-severest mode\nTo see ourselves with the eyes of God?\nGod rather grant, at His assize,\nHe see us not with our own eyes!\n\nHeaven, which man’s generations draws\nNor deviates into replicas,\nMust of as deep diversity\nIn judgment as creation be.\nThere is no expeditious road\nTo pack and label men for God,\nAnd save them by the barrel-load.\nSome may perchance, with strange surprise,\nHave blundered into Paradise.\nIn vasty dusk of life abroad,\nThey fondly thought to err from God,\nNor knew the circle that they trod;\nAnd wandering all the night about,\nFound them at morn where they set out.\nDeath dawned; Heaven lay in prospect wide:--\nLo! they were standing by His side!\n\nThe rhymer a life uncomplex,\nWith just such cares as mortals vex,\nSo simply felt as all men feel,\nLived purely out to his soul’s weal.\nA double life the Poet lived,\nAnd with a double burthen grieved;\nThe life of flesh and life of song,\nThe pangs to both lives that belong;\nImmortal knew and mortal pain,\nWho in two worlds could lose and gain.\nAnd found immortal fruits must be\nMortal through his mortality.\nThe life of flesh and life of song!\nIf one life worked the other wrong,\nWhat expiating agony\nMay for him damned to poesy\nShut in that little sentence be--\nWhat deep austerities of strife--\n“He lived his life.” He lived _his_ life!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-fallen-yew": { - "title": "“A Fallen Yew”", - "body": "It seemed corrival of the world’s great prime,\nMade to unédge the scythe of Time,\nAnd last with stateliest rhyme.\n\nNo tender Dryad ever did indue\nThat rigid chiton of rough yew,\nTo fret her white flesh through:\n\nBut some god like to those grim Asgard lords,\nWho walk the fables of the hordes\nFrom Scandinavian fjords,\n\nUpheaved its stubborn girth, and raised unriven,\nAgainst the whirl-blast and the levin,\nDefiant arms to Heaven.\n\nWhen doom puffed out the stars, we might have said,\nIt would decline its heavy head,\nAnd see the world to bed.\n\nFor this firm yew did from the vassal leas,\nAnd rain and air, its tributaries,\nIts revenues increase,\n\nAnd levy impost on the golden sun,\nTake the blind years as they might run,\nAnd no fate seek or shun.\n\nBut now our yew is strook, is fallen--yea\nHacked like dull wood of every day\nTo this and that, men say.\n\nNever!--To Hades’ shadowy shipyards gone,\nDim barge of Dis, down Acheron\nIt drops, or Lethe wan.\n\nStirred by its fall--poor destined bark of Dis!--\nAlong my soul a bruit there is\nOf echoing images,\n\nReverberations of mortality:\nSpelt backward from its death, to me\nIts life reads saddenedly.\n\nIts breast was hollowed as the tooth of eld;\nAnd boys, their creeping unbeheld,\nA laughing moment dwelled.\n\nYet they, within its very heart so crept,\nReached not the heart that courage kept\nWith winds and years beswept.\n\nAnd in its boughs did close and kindly nest\nThe birds, as they within its breast,\nBy all its leaves caressed.\n\nBut bird nor child might touch by any art\nEach other’s or the tree’s hid heart,\nA whole God’s breadth apart;\n\nThe breadth of God, he breadth of death and life!\nEven so, even so, in undreamed strife\nWith pulseless Law, the wife,--\n\nThe sweetest wife on sweetest marriage-day,--\nTheir souls at grapple in mid-way,\nSweet to her sweet may say:\n\n“I take you to my inmost heart, my true!”\nAh, fool! but there is one heart you\nShall never take him to!\n\nThe hold that falls not when the town is got,\nThe heart’s heart, whose immurèd plot\nHath keys yourself keep not!\n\nIts ports you cannot burst--you are withstood--\nFor him that to your listening blood\nSends precepts as he would.\n\nIts gates are deaf to Love, high summoner;\nYea, Love’s great warrant runs not there:\nYou are your prisoner.\n\nYourself are with yourself the sole consortress\nIn that unleaguerable fortress;\nIt knows you not for portress\n\nIts keys are at the cincture hung of God;\nIts gates are trepidant to His nod;\nBy Him its floors are trod.\n\nAnd if His feet shall rock those floors in wrath,\nOr blest aspersion sleek His path,\nIs only choice it hath.\n\nYea, in that ultimate heart’s occult abode\nTo lie as in an oubliette of God,\nOr as a bower untrod,\n\nBuilt by a secret Lover for His Spouse;--\nSole choice is this your life allows,\nSad tree, whose perishing boughs\nSo few birds house!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-holocaust": { - "title": "“A Holocaust”", - "body": "_“No man ever attained supreme knowledge, unless his heart had been torn up by the roots.”_\n\nWhen I presage the time shall come--yea, now\nPerchance is come, when you shall fail from me,\nBecause the mighty spirit, to whom you vow\nFaith of kin genius unrebukably,\nScourges my sloth, and from your side dismissed\nHenceforth this sad and most, most lonely soul\nMust, marching fatally through pain and mist,\nThe God-bid levy of its powers enrol;\nWhen I presage that none shall hear the voice\nFrom the great Mount that clangs my ordained advance,\nThat sullen envy bade the churlish choice\nYourself shall say, and turn your altered glance;\nO God! Thou knowest if this heart of flesh\nQuivers like broken entrails, when the wheel\nRolleth some dog in middle street, or fresh\nFruit when ye tear it bleeding from the peel;\nIf my soul cries the uncomprehended cry\nWhen the red agony oozed on Olivet!\nYet not for this, a caitiff, falter I,\nBeloved whom I must lose, nor thence regret\nThe doubly-vouched and twin allegiance owed\nTo you in Heaven, and Heaven in you, Lady.\nHow could you hope, loose dealer with my God,\nThat I should keep for you my fealty?\nFor still ’tis thus:--because I am so true,\nMy Fair, to Heaven, I am so true to you!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hound-of-heaven": { - "title": "“The Hound of Heaven”", - "body": "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;\nI fled Him, down the arches of the years;\nI fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways\nOf my own mind; and in the mist of tears\nI hid from Him, and under running laughter.\nUp vistaed hopes, I sped;\nAnd shot, precipitated\nAdown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,\nFrom those strong Feet that followed, followed after.\nBut with unhurrying chase,\nAnd unperturbéd pace,\nDeliberate speed, majestic instancy,\nThey beat--and a Voice beat\nMore instant than the Feet--\n“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”\n\nI pleaded, outlaw-wise,\nBy many a hearted casement, curtained red,\nTrellised with intertwining charities;\n(For, though I knew His love Who followéd,\nYet was I sore adread\nLest, having Him, I must have naught beside)\nBut, if one little casement parted wide,\nThe gust of His approach would clash it to\nFear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.\nAcross the margent of the world I fled,\nAnd troubled the gold gateways of the stars,\nSmiting for shelter on their changèd bars;\nFretted to dulcet jars\nAnd silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.\nI said to dawn: Be sudden--to eve: Be soon;\nWith thy young skiey blossoms heap me over\nFrom this tremendous Lover!\nFloat thy vague veil about me, lest He see!\nI tempted all His servitors, but to find\nMy own betrayal in their constancy,\nIn faith to Him their fickleness to me,\nTheir traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.\nTo all swift things for swiftness did I sue;\nClung to the whistling mane of every wind.\nBut whether they swept, smoothly fleet,\nThe long savannahs of the blue;\nOr whether, Thunder-driven,\nThey clanged his chariot ’thwart a heaven,\nPlashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet:--\nFear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.\nStill with unhurrying chase,\nAnd unperturbèd pace,\nDeliberate speed, majestic instancy,\nCame on the following Feet,\nAnd a Voice above their beat--\n“Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”\n\nI sought no more that, after which I strayed,\nIn face of man or maid;\nBut still within the little children’s eyes\nSeems something, something that replies,\n_They_ at least are for me, surely for me!\nI turned me to them very wistfully;\nBut just as their young eyes grew sudden fair\nWith dawning answers there,\nTheir angel plucked them from me by the hair.\n“Come then, ye other children, Nature’s--share\nWith me” (said I) “your delicate fellowship;\nLet me greet you lip to lip,\nLet me twine with you caresses,\nWantoning\nWith our Lady-Mother’s vagrant tresses,\nBanqueting\nWith her in her wind-walled palace,\nUnderneath her azured daïs,\nQuaffing, as your taintless way is,\nFrom a chalice\nLucent-weeping out of the dayspring.”\nSo it was done:\n_I_ in their delicate fellowship was one--\nDrew the bolt of Nature’s secrecies.\n_I_ knew all the swift importings\nOn the wilful face of skies;\nI knew how the clouds arise\nSpumèd of the wild sea-snortings;\nAll that’s born or dies\nRose and drooped with--made them shapers\nOf mine own moods, or wailful or divine--\nWith them joyed and was bereaven.\nI was heavy with the even,\nWhen she lit her glimmering tapers\nRound the day’s dead sanctities.\nI laughed in the morning’s eyes.\nI triumphed and I saddened with all weather,\nHeaven and I wept together,\nAnd its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;\nAgainst the red throb of its sunset-heart\nI laid my own to beat,\nAnd share commingling heat;\nBut not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.\nIn vain my tears were wet on Heaven’s grey cheek.\nFor ah! we know not what each other says,\nThese things and I; in sound _I_ speak--\n_Their_ sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.\nNature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;\nLet her, if she would owe me,\nDrop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me\nThe breasts o’ her tenderness:\nNever did any milk of hers once bless\nMy thirsting mouth.\nNigh and nigh draws the chase,\nWith unperturbèd pace,\nDeliberate speed majestic instancy\nAnd past those noisèd Feet\nA voice comes yet more fleet--\n“Lo! naught contents thee, who content’st not Me.”\n\nNaked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!\nMy harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,\nAnd smitten me to my knee;\nI am defenceless utterly,\nI slept, methinks, and woke,\nAnd, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.\nIn the rash lustihead of my young powers,\nI shook the pillaring hours\nAnd pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,\nI stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years--\nMy mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.\nMy days have crackled and gone up in smoke,\nHave puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.\nYea, faileth now even dream\nThe dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;\nEven the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist\nI swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,\nAre yielding; cords of all too weak account\nFor earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.\nAh! is Thy love indeed\nA weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,\nSuffering no flowers except its own to mount?\nAh! must--\nDesigner infinite!--\nAh! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?\nMy freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;\nAnd now my heart is as a broken fount,\nWherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever\nFrom the dank thoughts that shiver\nUpon the sighful branches of my mind.\nSuch is; what is to be?\nThe pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?\nI dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;\nYet ever and anon a trumpet sounds\nFrom the hid battlements of Eternity,\nThose shaken mists a space unsettle, then\nRound the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again;\nBut not ere him who summoneth\nI first have seen, enwound\nWith grooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;\nHis name I know, and what his trumpet saith.\nWhether man’s heart or life it be which yields\nThee harvest, must Thy harvest fields\nBe dunged with rotten death?\nNow of that long pursuit\nComes on at hand the bruit;\nThat Voice is round me like a bursting sea:\n“And is thy earth so marred,\nShattered in shard on shard?\nLo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!”\n\n“Strange, piteous, futile thing!\nWherefore should any set thee love apart?\nSeeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said),\n“And human love needs human meriting:\nHow hast thou merited--\nOf all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?\nAlack, thou knowest not\nHow little worthy of any love thou art!\nWhom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,\nSave Me, save only Me?\nAll which I took from thee I did but take,\nNot for thy harms,\nBut just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.\nAll which thy child’s mistake\nFancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:\nRise, clasp My hand, and come.”\n\nHalts by me that footfall:\nIs my gloom, after all,\nShade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?\n“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,\nI am He Whom thou seekest!\nThou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1890 - } - } - }, - "in-no-strange-land": { - "title": "“In No Strange Land”", - "body": "_The kingdom of God is within you_\n\nO world invisible, we view thee,\nO world intangible, we touch thee,\nO world unknowable, we know thee,\nInapprehensible, we clutch thee!\n\nDoes the fish soar to find the ocean,\nThe eagle plunge to find the air--\nThat we ask of the stars in motion\nIf they have rumor of thee there?\n\nNot where the wheeling systems darken,\nAnd our benumbed conceiving soars!--\nThe drift of pinions, would we hearken,\nBeats at our own clay-shuttered doors.\n\nThe angels keep their ancient places--\nTurn but a stone and start a wing!\n’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,\nThat miss the many-splendored thing.\n\nBut (when so sad thou canst not sadder)\nCry--and upon thy so sore loss\nShall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder\nPitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.\n\nYea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,\nCry--clinging to Heaven by the hems;\nAnd lo, Christ walking on the water,\nNot of Genesareth, but Thames!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-may-burden": { - "title": "“A May Burden”", - "body": "Though meadow-ways as I did tread,\nThe corn grew in great lustihead,\nAnd hey! the beeches burgeoned.\nBy Goddes fay, by Goddes fay!\nIt is the month, the jolly month,\nIt is the jolly month of May.\n\nGod ripe the wines and corn, I say,\nAnd wenches for the marriage-day,\nAnd boys to teach love’s comely play.\nBy Goddes fay, by Goddes fay!\nIt is the month, the jolly month,\nIt is the jolly month of May.\n\nAs I went down by lane and lea,\nThe daisies reddened so, pardie!\n“Blushets!” I said, “I well do see,\nBy Goddes fay, by Goddes fay!\nThe thing ye think of in this month,\nHeigho! this jolly month of May.”\n\nAs down I went by rye and oats,\nThe blossoms smelt of kisses; throats\nOf birds turned kisses into notes;\nBy Goddes fay, by Goddes fay!\nThe kiss it is a growing flower,\nI trow, this jolly month of May.\n\nGod send a mouth to every kiss,\nSeeing the blossom of this bliss\nBy gathering doth grow, certes!\nBy Goddes fay, by Goddes fay!\nThy brow-garland pushed all aslant\nTells--but I tell not, wanton May!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "new-years-chimes": { - "title": "“New Year’s Chimes”", - "body": "What is the song the stars sing?\n(And a million songs are as song of one)\nThis is the song the stars sing:\n(Sweeter song’s none)\nOne to set, and many to sing,\n(And a million songs are as song of one)\nOne to stand, and many to cling,\nThe many things, and the one Thing,\nThe one that runs not, the many that run.\nThe ever new weaveth the ever old,\n(And a million songs are as song of one)\nEver telling the never told;\nThe silver saith, and the said is gold,\nAnd done ever the never done.\nThe chase that’s chased is the Lord o’ the chase,\n(And a million songs are as song of one)\nAnd the pursued cries on the race;\nAnd the hounds in leash are the hounds that run.\nHidden stars by the shown stars’ sheen:\n(And a million suns are but as one)\nColours unseen by the colours seen,\nAnd sounds unheard heard sounds between,\nAnd a night is in the light of the sun.\nAn ambuscade of lights in night,\n(And a million secrets are but as one)\nAnd anight is dark in the sun’s light,\nAnd a world in the world man looks upon.\nHidden stars by the shown stars’ wings,\n(And a million cycles are but as one)\nAnd a world with unapparent strings\nKnits the stimulant world of things;\nBehold, and vision thereof is none.\nThe world above in the world below,\n(And a million worlds are but as one)\nAnd the One in all; as the sun’s strength so\nStrives in all strength, glows in all glow\nOf the earth that wits not, and man thereon.\nBraced in its own fourfold embrace\n(And a million strengths are as strength of one)\nAnd round it all God’s arms of grace,\nThe world, so as the Vision says,\nDoth with great lightning-tramples run.\nAnd thunder bruiteth into thunder,\n(And a million sounds are as sound of one)\nFrom stellate peak to peak is tossed a voice of wonder,\nAnd the height stoops down to the depths thereunder,\nAnd sun leans forth to his brother-sun.\nAnd the more ample years unfold\n(With a million songs as song of one)\nA little new of the ever old,\nA little told of the never told,\nAdded act of the never done.\nLoud the descant, and low the theme,\n(A million songs are as song of one)\nAnd the dream of the world is dream in dream,\nBut the one Is is, or nought could seem;\nAnd the song runs round to the song begun.\nThis is the song the stars sing,\n(Tonèd all in time)\nTintinnabulous, tuned to ring\nA multitudinous-single thing\n(Rung all in rhyme).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "the-poppy": { - "title": "“The Poppy”", - "body": "Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare.\nAnd left the flushed print in a poppy there:\nLike a yawn of fire from the grass it came,\nAnd the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.\n\nWith burnt mouth red like a lion’s it drank\nThe blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,\nAnd dipped its cup in the purpurate shine\nWhen the eastern conduits ran with wine.\n\nTill it grew lethargied with fierce bliss,\nAnd hot as a swinked gipsy is,\nAnd drowsed in sleepy savageries,\nWith mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss.\n\nA child and man paced side by side,\nTreading the skirts of eventide;\nBut between the clasp of his hand and hers\nLay, felt not, twenty withered years.\n\nShe turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair,\nAnd saw the sleeping gipsy there;\nAnd snatched and snapped it in swift child’s whim,\nWith--“Keep it, long as you live!”--to him.\n\nAnd his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres,\nTrembled up from a bath of tears;\nAnd joy, like a mew sea-rocked apart,\nTossed on the wave of his troubled heart.\n\nFor _he_ saw what she did not see,\nThat--as kindled by its own fervency--\nThe verge shrivelled inward smoulderingly:\n\nAnd suddenly ’twixt his hand and hers\nHe knew the twenty withered years--\nNo flower, but twenty shrivelled years.\n\n“Was never such thing until this hour,”\nLow to his heart he said; “the flower\nOf sleep brings wakening to me,\nAnd of oblivion memory.”\n\n“Was never this thing to me,” he said,\n“Though with bruisèd poppies my feet are red!”\nAnd again to his own heart very low:\n“O child! I love, for I love and know;”\n\n“But you, who love nor know at all\nThe diverse chambers in Love’s guest-hall,\nWhere some rise early, few sit long:\nIn how differing accents hear the throng\nHis great Pentecostal tongue;”\n\n“Who know not love from amity,\nNor my reported self from me;\nA fair fit gift is this, meseems,\nYou give--this withering flower of dreams.”\n\n“O frankly fickle, and fickly true,\nDo you know what the days will do to you?\nTo your Love and you what the days will do,\nO frankly fickle, and fickly true?”\n\n“You have loved me, Fair, three lives--or days:\n’Twill pass with the passing of my face.\nBut where _I_ go, your face goes too,\nTo watch lest I play false to you.”\n\n“I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover,\nKnowing well when certain years are over\nYou vanish from me to another;\nYet I know, and love, like the foster-mother.”\n\n“So, frankly fickle, and fickly true!\nFor my brief life--while I take from you\nThis token, fair and fit, meseems,\nFor me--this withering flower of dreams.”\n\nThe sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,\nHeavy with dreams, as that with bread:\nThe goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper\nThe reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.\n\nI hang ’mid men my needless head,\nAnd my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:\nThe goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper\nTime shall reap, but after the reaper\nThe world shall glean of me, me the sleeper!\n\nLove! love! your flower of withered dream\nIn leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem,\nSheltered and shut in a nook of rhyme,\nFrom the reaper man, and his reaper Time.\n\nLove! _I_ fall into the claws of Time:\nBut lasts within a leavèd rhyme\nAll that the world of me esteems--\nMy withered dreams, my withered dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "to-daisies": { - "title": "“To Daisies”", - "body": "Ah, drops of gold in whitening flame\nBurning, we know your lovely name--\nDaisies, that little children pull!\nLike all weak things, over the strong\nYe do not know your power for wrong,\nAnd much abuse your feebleness.\nDaisies, that little children pull,\nAs ye are weak, be merciful!\nO hide your eyes! they are to me\nBeautiful insupportably.\nOr be but conscious ye are fair,\nAnd I your loveliness could bear,\nBut, being fair so without art,\nYe vex the silted memories of my heart!\n\nAs a pale ghost yearning strays\nWith sundered gaze,\n’Mid corporal presences that are\nTo it impalpable--such a bar\nSets you more distant than the morning-star.\nSuch wonder is on you, and amaze,\nI look and marvel if I be\nIndeed the phantom, or are ye?\nThe light is on your innocence\nWhich fell from me.\nThe fields ye still inhabit whence\nMy world-acquainted treading strays,\nThe country where I did commence;\nAnd though ye shine to me so near,\nSo close to gross and visible sense,--\nBetween us lies impassable year on year.\n\nTo other time and far-off place\nBelongs your beauty: silent thus,\nThough to other naught you tell,\nTo me your ranks are rumorous\nOf an ancient miracle.\nVain does my touch your petals graze,\nI touch you not; and though ye blossom here,\nYour roots are fast in alienated days.\nYe there are anchored, while Time’s stream\nHas swept me past them: your white ways\nAnd infantile delights do seem\nTo look in on me like a face,\nDead and sweet, come back through dream,\nWith tears, because for old embrace\nIt has no arms.\n\nThese hands did toy,\nChildren, with you, when I was child,\nAnd in each other’s eyes we smiled:\nNot yours, not yours the grievous-fair\nApparelling\nWith which you wet mine eyes; you wear,\nAh me, the garment of the grace\nI wove you when I was a boy;\nO mine, and not the year’s your stolen Spring!\nAnd since ye wear it,\nHide your sweet selves! I cannot bear it.\nFor when ye break the cloven earth\nWith your young laughter and endearment,\nNo blossomy carillon ’tis of mirth\nTo me; I see my slaughtered joy\nBursting its cerement.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "to-monica-thought-dying": { - "title": "“To Monica Thought Dying”", - "body": "You, O the piteous you!\nWho all the long night through\nAnticipatedly\nDisclose yourself to me\nAlready in the ways\nBeyond our human comfortable days;\nHow can you deem what Death\nImpitiably saith\nTo me, who listening wake\nFor your poor sake?\nWhen a grown woman dies\nYou know we think unceasingly\nWhat things she said, how sweet, how wise;\nAnd these do make our misery.\nBut you were (you to me\nThe dead anticipatedly!)\nYou--eleven years, was’t not, or so?--\nWere just a child, you know;\nAnd so you never said\nThings sweet immeditatably and wise\nTo interdict from closure my wet eyes:\nBut foolish things, my dead, my dead!\nLittle and laughable,\nYour age that fitted well.\nAnd was it such things all unmemorable,\nWas it such things could make\nMe sob all night for your implacable sake?\n\nYet, as you said to me,\nIn pretty make-believe of revelry,\nSo the night long said Death\nWith his magniloquent breath;\n(And that remembered laughter\nWhich in our daily uses followed after,\nWas all untuned to pity and to awe):\n_“A cup of chocolate,\nOne farthing is the rate,\nYou drink it through a straw.”_\n\nHow could I know, how know\nThose laughing words when drenched with sobbing so?\nAnother voice than yours, than yours, he hath!\nMy dear, was’t worth his breath,\nHis mighty utterance?--yet he saith, and saith!\nThis dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness\nDoth dreadful wrong,\nThis dreadful childish babble on his tongue!\nThat iron tongue made to speak sentences,\nAnd wisdom insupportably complete,\nWhy should it only say the long night through,\nIn mimicry of you,--\n_“A cup of chocolate,\nOne farthing is the rate,\nYou drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw!”_\nOh, of all sentences,\nPiercingly incomplete!\nWhy did you teach that fatal mouth to draw,\nChild, impermissible awe,\nFrom your old trivialness?\nWhy have you done me this\nMost unsustainable wrong,\nAnd into Death’s control\nBetrayed the secret places of my soul?\nTeaching him that his lips,\nUttering their native earthquake and eclipse,\nCould never so avail\nTo rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil\nOf this most desolate\nSpirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate,--\nNay, never so have wrung\nFrom eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet;\nAs when his terrible dotage to repeat\nIts little lesson learneth at your feet;\nAs when he sits among\nHis sepulchres, to play\nWith broken toys your hand has cast away,\nWith derelict trinkets of the darling young.\nWhy have you taught--that he might so complete\nHis awful panoply\nFrom your cast playthings--why,\nThis dreadful childish babble to his tongue,\nDreadful and sweet?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_monica" - } - } - }, - "to-a-snowflake": { - "title": "“To a Snowflake”", - "body": "What heart could have thought you?--\nPast our devisal\n(O filigree petal!)\nFashioned so purely,\nFragilely, surely,\nFrom what Paradisal\nImagineless metal,\nToo costly for cost?\nWho hammered you, wrought you,\nFrom argentine vapor?--\n“God was my shaper.\nPassing surmisal,\nHe hammered, He wrought me,\nFrom curled silver vapor,\nTo lust of His mind--\nThou could’st not have thought me!\nSo purely, so palely,\nTinily, surely,\nMightily, frailly,\nInsculped and embossed,\nWith His hammer of wind,\nAnd His graver of frost.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "what-shall-i-your-true-love-tell": { - "title": "“What Shall I Your True Love Tell?”", - "body": "What shall I your true love tell,\nEarth forsaking maid?\nWhat shall I your true love tell\nWhen life’s spectre’s laid?\n“Tell him that, our side the grave,\nMaid may not believe\nLife should be so sad to have,\nThat’s so sad to leave!”\nWhat shall I your true love tell\nWhen I come to him?\nWhat shall I your true love tell\nEyes growing dim?\n“Tell him this, when you shall part\nFrom a maiden pined;\nThat I see him with my heart,\nNow my eyes are blind.”\nWhat shall I your true love tell\nSpeaking while is scant?\nWhat shall I your true love tell\nDeath’s white postulant?\n“Tell him love, with speech at strife,\nFor last utterance saith:\n‘I who loved with all my life,\nLoved with all my death.’”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "henry-david-thoreau": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry David Thoreau", - "birth": { - "year": 1817 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1862 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "conscience": { - "title": "“Conscience”", - "body": "Conscience is instinct bred in the house,\nFeeling and Thinking propagate the sin\nBy an unnatural breeding in and in.\nI say, Turn it out doors,\nInto the moors.\nI love a life whose plot is simple,\nAnd does not thicken with every pimple,\nA soul so sound no sickly conscience binds it,\nThat makes the universe no worse than ‘t finds it.\nI love an earnest soul,\nWhose mighty joy and sorrow\nAre not drowned in a bowl,\nAnd brought to life to-morrow;\nThat lives one tragedy,\nAnd not seventy;\nA conscience worth keeping;\nLaughing not weeping;\nA conscience wise and steady,\nAnd forever ready;\nNot changing with events,\nDealing in compliments;\nA conscience exercised about\nLarge things, where one may doubt.\nI love a soul not all of wood,\nPredestinated to be good,\nBut true to the backbone\nUnto itself alone,\nAnd false to none;\nBorn to its own affairs,\nIts own joys and own cares;\nBy whom the work which God begun\nIs finished, and not undone;\nTaken up where he left off,\nWhether to worship or to scoff;\nIf not good, why then evil,\nIf not good god, good devil.\nGoodness! you hypocrite, come out of that,\nLive your life, do your work, then take your hat.\nI have no patience towards\nSuch conscientious cowards.\nGive me simple laboring folk,\nWho love their work,\nWhose virtue is song\nTo cheer God along.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-am-the-autumnal-sun": { - "title": "“I Am the Autumnal Sun”", - "body": "Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature\n--not his Father but his Mother stirs\nwithin him, and he becomes immortal with her\nimmortality. From time to time she claims\nkindredship with us, and some globule\nfrom her veins steals up into our own.\n\nI am the autumnal sun,\nWith autumn gales my race is run;\nWhen will the hazel put forth its flowers,\nOr the grape ripen under my bowers?\nWhen will the harvest or the hunter’s moon\nTurn my midnight into mid-noon?\nI am all sere and yellow,\nAnd to my core mellow.\nThe mast is dropping within my woods,\nThe winter is lurking within my moods,\nAnd the rustling of the withered leaf\nIs the constant music of my grief …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "an-inward-morning": { - "title": "“An Inward Morning”", - "body": "Packed in my mind lie all the clothes\nWhich outward nature wears,\nAnd in its fasion’s hourly change\nIt all things else repairs\n\nIn vain I look for change abroad,\nAnd can no difference find,\nTill som new ray of peace uncalled\nIllumes my inmost mind.\n\nWhat is it gilds the trees and clouds\nAnd paints the heavens so gay,\nBut yonder fast-abiding light\nWith its unchanging ray?\n\nLo, when the sun streams through the wood,\nUpon a winter’s morn,\nWhere’er his silent beams intrude\nThe murky night is gone.\n\nHow could the patient pine have known\nThe morning breeze would come,\nOr humble flowers anticipate\nThe insect’s noonday hum,--\n\nTill the new light with morning cheer\nFrom far streamed through the aisles,\nAnd nimbly told the forest trees\nFor many stretching miles?\n\nI’ve heard within my inmost soul\nSuch cheerful news,\nIn the horizon of my mind\nHave seen such orient hues,\n\nAs in the twilight of the dawn,\nWhen the first awake,\nAre heard within some silent wood,\nWhere they the small twigs break,\n\nOr in the eastern skies are seen,\nBefore the sun appears,\nThe harbingers of summer heats\nWhich from afar he bears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "low-anchored-cloud": { - "title": "“Low-Anchored Cloud”", - "body": "Low-anchored cloud,\nNewfoundland air,\nFountain-head and source of rivers,\nDew-cloth, dream-drapery,\nAnd napkin spread by fays;\nDrifting meadow of the air,\nWhere bloom the daisied banks and violets,\nAnd in whose fenny labyrinth\nThe bittern booms and heron wades;\nSpirit of lakes and seas and rivers,\nBear only perfumes and the scent\nOf healing herbs to just men’s fields!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "winter-memories": { - "title": "“Winter Memories”", - "body": "Within the circuit of this plodding life\nThere enter moments of an azure hue,\nUntarnished fair as is the violet\nOr anemone, when the spring stew them\nBy some meandering rivulet, which make\nThe best philosophy untrue that aims\nBut to console man for his grievances.\nI have remembered when the winter came,\nHigh in my chamber in the frosty nights,\nWhen in the still light of the cheerful moon,\nOn the every twig and rail and jutting spout,\nThe icy spears were adding to their length\nAgainst the arrows of the coming sun,\nHow in the shimmering noon of winter past\nSome unrecorded beam slanted across\nThe upland pastures where the Johnwort grew;\nOr heard, amid the verdure of my mind,\nThe bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag\nLoitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,\nWhich now through all its course stands still and dumb\nIts own memorial,--purling at its play\nAlong the slopes, and through the meadows next,\nUntil its youthful sound was hushed at last\nIn the staid current of the lowland stream;\nOr seen the furrows shine but late upturned,\nAnd where the fieldfare followed in the rear,\nWhen all the fields around lay bound and hoar\nBeneath a thick integument of snow.\nSo by God’s cheap economy made rich\nTo go upon my winter’s task again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "chidiock-tichborne": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Chidiock Tichborne", - "birth": { - "year": 1558, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1586 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chidiock_Tichborne", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "elegy": { - "title": "“Elegy”", - "body": "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,\nMy feast of joy is but a dish of pain,\nMy crop of corn is but a field of tares,\nAnd all my good is but vain hope of gain.\nThe day is gone and yet I saw no sun,\nAnd now I live, and now my life is done.\n\nThe spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,\nThe fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,\nMy youth is gone, and yet I am but young,\nI saw the world, and yet I was not seen,\nMy thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,\nAnd now I live, and now my life is done.\n\nI sought my death and found it in my womb,\nI lookt for life and saw it was a shade,\nI trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,\nAnd now I die, and now I am but made.\nThe glass is full, and now the glass is run,\nAnd now I live, and now my life is done.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "nikolai-tikhonov": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolai Tikhonov", - "birth": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1979 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Tikhonov_(writer)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "as-the-fire-loves-the-birch-tree-she-loved-me": { - "title": "“As the fire loves the birch-tree she loved me …”", - "body": "As the fire loves the birch-tree she loved me\nAnd as gay flared the flames of our love.\nAs the dawn on the nomad camp breaking\nHer young shoulders were shining and smooth.\n\nNeither poetry, nor quarrels, nor concord\nCould keep us together for long.\nShe ran off with a sullen-faced nomad\nTo the sharp sleigh-runners’ song.\n\nAt night, as we shared our rough supper,\nA Yakut, in exchange for my knife,\nTold me how you drink with your lover\nAnd what gifts you have taken from him.\n\n“That must mean, I suppose, mine were less good?”\n“I should think so,” the Yakut agreed,\nAnd stretched out a hand purple with cold\nWith a wad of tobacco for me.\n\nWith my rifle the cold ground I struck,\nTook the wad, and said, “I don’t blame\nHer now, brother. Though burnt to the ground,\nThe birch-tree should still thank the flame.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Avril Pyman", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "flame-rope-the-bullet-and-the-axe": { - "title": "“Flame, rope, the bullet and the axe …”", - "body": "Flame, rope, the bullet and the axe\nLike servants bowed to us and followed in our wake;\nIn every drop a torrent slept;\nGreat mountains thrust their peaks through every pebble;\nIn every twig snapped by a careless boot\nHuge, black-armed forests rustled.\n\nInjustice ate and drank with us,\nThe bells of churches pealed from force of habit,\nCoins lost their weight and ringing sound,\nThe sight of corpses woke no fear in children.\nThen was it that we learned new words,\nWords bitter, beautiful and cruel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Irina Zheleznova", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "long-was-the-road": { - "title": "“Long was the road …”", - "body": "Long was the road. Much blood we drank\nand ardently our love we scattered\nwhere gallows swung with clink and clank\nand walls were breached and brickwork shattered.\n\nOur children must not hear this tale.\nWhen grown, they’ll guess and brood awhile\nand ask … but the closed lips will fail,\nthe eyes will send no answering smile.\n\nLet others speak for us and spread\nthe earth before them rich and good.\n“Children of Peace, taste unafraid.\nThe price was fully paid in blood.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Jack Lindsay", - "date": { - "year": 1921 - } - } - }, - "we-have-unlearned-how-to-give-alms": { - "title": "“We have unlearned how to give alms …”", - "body": "We have unlearned how to give alms, forgotten\nHow to breathe the salt air above the sea,\nAnd how to meet the dawn, and in the market\nBuy golden lemons for two coins or three.\nShips call on us only by chance, and freight trains\nBring cargoes out of habit, that is all;\nJust count the men belonging to my country--\nHow many dead will answer to the call!\nBut we have no occasion to be solemn--\nA broken knife’s no good to work with, but\nWith the same knife that is all black and broken\nKnow that immortal pages have been cut.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Babette Deutsch", - "date": { - "year": 1921, - "month": "november" - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - } - } - }, - "j-r-r-tolkien": { - "metadata": { - "name": "J. R. R. Tolkien", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1973 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "all-woods-must-fail": { - "title": "“All Woods Must Fail”", - "body": "O! Wanderers in the shadowed land\nDespair not! For though dark they stand,\nAll woods there be must end at last,\nAnd see the open sun go past:\nThe setting sun, the rising sun,\nThe day’s end, or the day begun.\nFor east or west all woods must fail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "all-ye-joyful": { - "title": "“All Ye Joyful”", - "body": "Sing all ye joyful, now sing all together!\nThe wind’s in the tree-top, the wind’s in the heather;\nThe stars are in blossom, the moon is in flower,\nAnd bright are the windows of night in her tower.\nDance all ye joyful, now dance all together!\nSoft is the grass, and let foot be like feather!\nThe river is silver, the shadows are fleeting;\nMerry is May-time, and merry our meeting.\nSigh no more pine, till the wind of the morn!\nFall Moon! Dark be the land!\nHush! Hush! Oak, ash and thorn!\nHushed by all water, till dawn is at hand!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "bath-song": { - "title": "“Bath-Song”", - "body": "Sing hey! For the bath at close of day\nthat washes the weary mud away\nA loon is he that will not sing\nO! Water Hot is a noble thing!\n\nO! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,\nand the brook that leaps from hill to plain;\nbut better than rain or rippling streams\nis Water Hot that smokes and steams.\n\nO! Water cold we may pour at need\ndown a thirsty throat and be glad indeed\nbut better is beer if drink we lack,\nand Water Hot poured down the back.\n\nO! Water is fair that leaps on high\nin a fountain white beneath the sky;\nbut never did fountain sound so sweet\nas splashing Hot Water with my feet!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-sit-and-think": { - "title": "“I Sit and Think”", - "body": "I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,\nof meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;\nOf yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,\nwith morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.\nI sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be\nwhen winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.\nFor still there are so many things that I have never seen:\nin every wood in every spring there is a different green.\nI sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,\nand people who will see a world that I shall never know.\nBut all the while I sit and think of times there were before,\nI listen for returning feet and voices at the door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "journeys-end": { - "title": "“Journey’s End”", - "body": "In western lands beneath the Sun\nThe flowers may rise in Spring,\nThe trees may bud, the waters run,\nThe merry finches sing.\nOr there maybe ’tis cloudless night,\nAnd swaying branches bear\nThe Elven-stars as jewels white\nAmid their branching hair.\n\nThough here at journey’s end I lie\nIn darkness buried deep,\nBeyond all towers strong and high,\nBeyond all mountains steep,\nAbove all shadows rides the Sun\nAnd Stars for ever dwell:\nI will not say the Day is done,\nNor bid the Stars farewell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-road-goes-ever-on": { - "title": "“The Road Goes Ever On”", - "body": "The roads goes ever on,\nOver rock and under tree,\nBy caves where never sun has shone,\nBy streams that never find the sea;\nOver snow by winter sown,\nAnd through the merry flowers of June,\nOver grass and over stone,\nAnd under mountains in the moon.\n\nThe road goes ever on\nUnder cloud and under star,\nYet feet that wandering have gone\nTurn at last to home afar.\nEyes that fire and sword have seen\nAnd horror in the halls of stone\nLook at last on meadows green\nAnd trees and hills they long have known.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "georg-trakl": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Georg Trakl", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1914 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "austrian", - "language": "german", - "flag": "🇦🇹", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Trakl", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "austrian" - ], - "n_poems": 41 - }, - "poems": { - "accord": { - "title": "“Accord”", - "body": "Very bright tones in the thin winds,\nThey sing the distant mourning of this day,\nThat makes us dream after never-felt showers\nCompletely filled with unimaginable smells.\nLike mementos to lost companions\nAnd quiet echo of delights sunken in night,\nThe foliage falls in the long ago abandoned gardens,\nWhich sun themselves in the silence of paradise.\nIn the bright mirror of the clarified floods\nWe see the dead time strangely animate itself\nAnd our passions in the bleeding\nLift our souls to more distant heavens.\nWe go through deaths newly transformed\nTo deeper tortures and deeper delights,\nWhere the unknown deity governs--\nAnd we are completed by eternally new suns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "along-walls": { - "title": "“Along Walls”", - "body": "An old path goes along\nNear wild gardens and lonesome walls.\nThousand-year-old yews shudder\nIn the rising falling chant of the wind.\nThe moths dance as if they would die soon,\nMy glance drinks weeping the shadows and lights.\nFar away women’s faces float\nGhostly painted in the blue.\n\nA smile trembles in the sunshine,\nMeanwhile I slowly stride on;\nUnending love gives escort.\nQuietly the hard rock greens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "always-darker": { - "title": "“Always Darker”", - "body": "The wind, which moves purple treetops,\nIs God’s breath that comes and goes.\nThe black village rises before the forest;\nThree shadows are laid over the field.\nMeagerly the valley dusks\nBelow and silent for the humble.\nA seriousness greets in garden and hall,\nThat wants to finish the day,\nPiously and darkly an organ-sound.\nMary is enthroned there in blue vestment\nAnd cradles her babe in hand.\nThe night is starlit and long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "amen": { - "title": "“Amen”", - "body": "Decayed things gliding through the moldering room;\nShadows on yellow hangings; in dark mirrors\nArches the ivory sorrow of our hands.\n\nBrown pearls run through perished fingers.\nIn the stillness\nAn angel opens his blue poppied eyes.\n\nBlue, too, is the evening;\nThe hour of our death, Azrael’s shadow,\nThat darkens a small brown garden.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "birth": { - "title": "“Birth”", - "body": "These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow.\nThe red hunter climbs down from the forest;\nOh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.\n\nThe peace of the mother: under black firs\nThe sleeping hands open by themselves\nWhen the cold moon seems ready to fall.\n\nThe birth of man. Each night\nBlue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;\nThe fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,\n\nSomething pale wakes up in a suffocating room.\nThe eyes\nOf the stony old woman shine, two moons.\n\nThe cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles\nThe boy’s sleep with black wings,\nWith snow, which falls with ease out of the purple clouds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "blood-guilt": { - "title": "“Blood Guilt”", - "body": "Night threatens at the bed of our kisses.\nSomewhere a whisper: who absolves your guilt?\nStill trembling from the sweetness of nefarious lust\nWe pray: forgive us, Mary, in your mercy.\n\nOut of flower vases greedy scents climb,\nWheedling our foreheads pale with guilt.\nExhausting under the waft of sultry air\nWe dream: forgive us, Mary, in your mercy.\n\nBut the well of the sirens rushes louder,\nAnd the sphinx rises darker before our guilt,\nSo that our hearts sound again more sinfully,\nWe sob: forgive us, Mary, in your mercy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "by-a-window": { - "title": "“By a Window”", - "body": "Above the roofs the sky-blue,\nAnd clouds passing by,\nBefore the window a tree in spring dew,\nAnd a bird shoots up skyward drunk\n\nA lost scent of blossoms--\nA heart feels: This is the world!\nThe stillness increases and the midday glows!\nMy God, how rich is the world!\n\nI dream and dream and life flees,\nLife there outdoors--somewhere\nFar-off to me because of a sea of loneliness!\nA heart feels it and doesn’t become glad!", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "closing-chord": { - "title": "“Closing Chord”", - "body": "The last, pale light went from the day,\nThe early passions have rustled down,\nThe holy wine of my joys spilled\nNow my heart weeps in the night and listens\n\nAfter the echo of its young celebrations,\nWhich trails off so placidly in the dark,\nSo shadowy, like wilted leaves falling\nOn an abandoned grave in autumn night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "daydreaming-in-the-evening": { - "title": "“Daydreaming In The Evening”", - "body": "Where one goes in the evening is not the angel’s shadow\nAnd beauty! grief and gentler forgetting alternate;\nThe stranger’s hands grope coolness and cypresses\nAnd his soul is taken by an astonished languishing.\n\nThe market is emptied of red fruits and garlands.\nHarmoniously the church’s blackish pageantry attunes\nIn a garden the tones of soft play sound,\nWhere tired ones find each other after the meal.\n\nA carriage rushes, a spring very far away through green puddles.\nThere a childhood appears dreamlike and elapsed,\nAngela’s stars, enclosed devoutly to a mystical constellation,\nAnd calmly the evening coolness rounds.\n\nWhite poppy loosens the limbs of the lonely ponderer,\nSo that he views righteousness and God’s deep joy.\nFrom the garden his shadow strays here in white silk\nAnd bends down over mournful waters.\n\nBranches knocked whispering into the abandoned room\nAnd a loving and small evening flowers’ tremor.\nCorn and golden vines gird the site of man,\nA lunar shimmer, however, ponders after the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "de-profundis": { - "title": "“De Profundis”", - "body": "There is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.\nThere is a tree which, brown, stands lonely here.\nThere is a hissing wind which haunts deserted huts--\nHow sad this evening.\n\nPast the village pond\nThe gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of corn.\nGolden and round her eyes are gazing in the dusk\nAnd her lap awaits the heavenly bridegroom.\n\nReturning home\nShepherds found the sweet body\nDecayed in the bramble bush.\n\nA shade I am remote from sombre hamlets.\nThe silence of God\nI drank from the woodland well.\n\nOn my forehead cold metal forms.\nSpiders look for my heart.\nThere is a light that fails in my mouth.\n\nAt night I found myself upon a heath,\nThick with garbage and the dust of stars.\nIn the hazel copse\nCrystal angels have sounded once more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "delirium": { - "title": "“Delirium”", - "body": "The black snow runs down from the rooftops;\nA red finger dips into your brow;\nBlue snow flakes sink into the empty room,\nThey are a lovers’ dying mirrors.\n\nHeavy and torn to pieces the mind muses,\nFollows the shadow in the mirror of blue snow flakes,\nThe cold smile of a deceased harlot.\nThe evening’s wind weeps in the scent of carnations.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "descent-and-defeat": { - "title": "“Descent and Defeat”", - "body": "Over the white fishpond\nThe wild birds have blown away.\nAn icy wind drifts from our stars at evening.\n\nOver our graves\nThe broken forehead of the night is bending.\nUnder the oaks we veer in a silver skiff.\n\nThe white walls of the city are always giving off sound.\nUnder arching thorns\nO my brother blind minute-hands we are climbing toward midnight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "downfall": { - "title": "“Downfall”", - "body": "Over the white fishpond\nThe wild birds have been driven away.\nIn the evening an icy wind blows from the stars.\n\nOver our graves\nThe broken brows of the night bend across us.\nUnder oaks we swing on a silver boat.\n\nWe always hear the noise from the white walls of the town.\nUnder the bow of thorns\nO my brother we climb with blind hands towards midnight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Eric Plattner & Joseph Suglia", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "dusk": { - "title": "“Dusk”", - "body": "You are rumpled, distorted by every pain\nAnd shake with the discord of all melodies,\nYou burst harp--a poor heart,\nFrom which gloom’s sick flowers bloom.\n\nWho has ordered the enemy, the murderer for you,\nThat stole the last spark of your soul,\nHow he makes this scanty world godless\nTo a whore, ugly, ill, pale with putrefaction!\n\nFrom shadows a wild dance still swings\nTo frizzily ruptured, soulless sound,\nA round dance around beauty’s thorn wreath,\n\nWhich witheringly crowns the lost winner,\n--A bad trophy for that fought desperation,\nAnd that does not reconcile the bright divinity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "elis": { - "title": "“Elis”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nThe absolute stillness of this golden day.\nUnder ancient oak trees\nyou appear, Elis, a dormant seed with round eyes.\n\nTheir blueness reflects the slumber of lovers,\nwhose rosy sighs\ndie on your lips.\n\nAt evening the fishermen drew in their heavy nets.\nA good shepherd\nleads his herd to the edge of the woods.\nO, Elis, how just are your days!\n\nWordlessly, by barren walls,\nthe blue secrecy of olive trees descends.\nAn old man’s dark song dies away.\n\nOne golden boat\nrocks back and forth, Elis--your heart to the deserted sky.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nA sweet chiming ripples in Elis’s breast\nat evening\nwhen his head sinks into the black pillow.\n\nThe shadow of the hunted\nbleeds in peace in the barbed thicket.\n\nA brown tree stands cloistered there,\nits blue fruit falling away.\n\nSigns and stars\ngo under, breathless, in the night-pond.\n\nBehind the hill winter has come.\n\nBy night\nblue doves drink the glacial sweat\nfrom Elis’s crystal brow.\n\nForever whines by the blackened walls\nGod’s forsaken wind.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Eric Plattner", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "en-route": { - "title": "“En Route”", - "body": "A scent of myrrh which roams in the twilight.\nPlazas red and desolate sink in fume.\nBazaars circle and a golden ray flows\nIn old shops queerly and confused.\nIn the dishwater decay glows; and the wind\nEvokes dully the agony of burnt gardens.\nThe possessed pursue golden dreams.\nBy windows dryads rest slender and dulcet.\nThe dream-addicted wander pined over by a wish.\nWorkers surge shimmering through a gate.\nSteel towers glow upward at the edge of the sky.\nO fairy tale barred gray in factories!\nIn the sinisterness an old man trips dollish\nAnd a jingling sound of money laughs lasciviously.\nA halo falls on that little girl\nWho waits before the coffee house, soft and white.\nO golden brilliance which she wakes in panes!\nSun-filled noise roars distantly and ecstatically.\nA crooked writer smiles as if crazy\nTo the horizon which is frightened green by an uproar.\nState coaches of crystal move on bridges,\nFruit barrows, hearse black and sallow,\nThe canal swarms with bright steamboats,\nConcerts sound. Green domes drizzle.\nPublic baths flicker in magic of light,\nExecrated streets which one tears down.\nA center of epidemics chaotically circles in ether,\nA light from forests breaks through ruby dust.\nEnchanted an opera house shines in the gray.\nFrom alleys masks flood unforeseen,\nAnd somewhere a fire still blazes furiously.\nA small moth dances in the wind-roar.\nLodgings threaten full of squalor and stench.\nViola colors and chords move\nAlong cellar holes before the hungry.\nA sweet child sits dead on a bank.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "encounter": { - "title": "“Encounter”", - "body": "The stranger on the way--we look at each other\nAnd our tired eyes ask:\nWhat have you done with your life?\nBe silent! Be silent! Leave all laments!\n\nAlready it becomes cooler around us,\nThe clouds dissolve in the vastnesses.\nI think we shall ask more no longer\nAnd nobody will escort us to the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "evening-song": { - "title": "“Evening Song”", - "body": "At evening, when we walk on dark trails,\nour bleached selves appear before us.\n\nThirsty\nwe drink from the pond’s white water,\nthe sweetness of our mournful childhood.\n\nWeary, we rest beneath the elderberry\nto behold the dawning gulls.\n\nSpring clouds rise above the town’s dark thoughts--\nmute, the monks’ nobler days.\n\nAs I took your tiny hands\nyour round eyes gently broke upon me.\nThis was long ago.\n\nAnd yet, when darker songs descend upon the soul,\nyou appear--a whiteness--in your friend’s autumn landscape.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Eric Plattner", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "exhausting": { - "title": "“Exhausting”", - "body": "Putrefaction of dream-created paradises\nBlows around this mourning-filled, tired heart,\nThat drank only disgust out of all sweetness,\nAnd bleeds to death in vulgar pain.\n\nNow it beats after the rhythm of faded dances\nTo the cloudy melodies of despair,\nMeanwhile the star-crowns of old hope\nWither on the long ago godless altar.\n\nFrom the drunkenness of fragrances and wines\nAn extreme awake feeling of shame remained with you--\nYesterday in distorted reflection--\nAnd everyday’s gray grief crushes you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "grodek": { - "title": "“Grodek”", - "body": "At evening the autumn woodlands ring\nWith deadly weapons. Over the golden plains\nAnd lakes of blue, the sun\nMore darkly rolls. The night surrounds\nWarriors dying and the wild lament\nOf their fragmented mouths.\nYet silently there gather in the willow combe\nRed clouds inhabited by an angry god,\nShed blood, and the chill of the moon.\nAll roads lead to black decay.\nUnder golden branching of the night and stars\nA sister’s shadow sways through the still grove\nTo greet the heroes’ spirits, the bloodied heads.\nAnd softly in the reeds Autumn’s dark flutes resound.\nO prouder mourning!--You brazen altars,\nThe spirit’s hot flame is fed now by a tremendous pain:\nThe grandsons, unborn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "gypsy": { - "title": "“Gypsy”", - "body": "The longing flames in their nightly glance\nToward that homeland they never find.\nSo they drift in an unfortunate fate,\nThat only melancholy may fathom completely.\n\nThe clouds lead their ways,\nA migration of birds may sometimes escort them,\nUntil it loses their track in the evening,\nAnd the wind sometimes carries an Ave of bells\n\nIn their camp’s star-loneliness,\nSo that their songs swell more longing\nAnd sob from inherited curse and suffering,\nThat no stars of hope softly illuminate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "the-heart": { - "title": "“The Heart”", - "body": "The wild heart grew white in the forest;\nDark anxiety\nOf death, as when the gold\nDied in the grey cloud.\nAn evening in November.\nA crowd of needy women stood at the bare gate\nOf the slaughterhouse;\nRotten meat and guts fell\nInto every basket;\nHorrible food.\n\nThe blue dove of the evening\nBrought no forgiveness.\nThe dark cry of trumpets\nTravelled in the golden branches\nOf the soaked elms,\nA frayed flag\nSmoking with blood,\nTo which a man listens\nIn wild despair.\nAll your days of nobility, buried\nIn that red evening!\n\nOut of the dark entrance hall\nThe golden shape\nOf the young girl steps\nSurrounded by the pale moon,\nThe prince’s court of autumn,\nBlack fir trees broken\nIn the night’s storm,\nThe steep fortress.\nO heart\nGlittering above in the snowy cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "helian": { - "title": "“Helian”", - "body": "In the spirit’s solitary hours\nIt is lovely to walk in the sun\nAlong the yellow walls of summer.\nQuietly whisper the steps in the grass; yet always sleeps\nThe son of Pan in the grey marble.\n\nAt eventide on the terrace we got drunk on brown wine\nThe red peach glows under the foliage.\nTender sonata, joyous laughter.\n\nLovely is this silence of the night.\nOn the dark plains\nWe gather with shepherds and the white stars.\n\nWhen autumn rises\nThe grove is a sight of sober clarity.\nAlong the red walls we loiter at ease\nAnd the round eyes follow the flight of birds.\nIn the evening pale water gathers in the dregs of burial urns.\n\nHeaven celebrates, sitting in bare branches.\nIn hallowed hands the yeoman carries bread and wine\nAnd fruit ripens in the peace of a sunny chamber.\n\nOh how stern is the face of the beloved who have taken their passage.\nYet the soul is comforted in righteous meditation.\n\nOverwhelming is the desolated garden‘s secrecy,\nAs the young novice has wreathed his brow with brown leaves,\nHis breath inhales icy gold.\n\nThe hands touch the antiquity of blueish water\nOr in a cold night the sisters’ white cheeks.\n\nIn quiet and harmony we walk along a suite of hospitable rooms\nInto solitude and the rustling of maple trees,\nWhere, perhaps, the thrush still sings.\n\nBeautiful is man and emerging from the dark\nHe marvels as he moves his arms and legs,\nAnd his eyes quietly roll in purple cavities.\n\nAt suppertime a stranger loses himself in November’s black destitution;\nUnder brittle branches he follows a wall covered under leprosy.\nOnce the holy brother went here,\nEngrossed in the tender music of his madness.\n\nOh how lonely settles the evening-wind.\nDying away a man‘s head droops in the dark of the olive tree.\n\nHow shattering is the decline of a family.\nThis is the hour when the seer’s eyes are filled\nWith gold as he beholds the stars.\n\nThe evening’s descend has muffled the belfry‘s knell in silence;\nAmong black walls in the public place,\nA dead soldier calls for a prayer.\n\nLike a pale angel\nThe son enters his ancestor’s empty house.\n\nThe sisters have traveled far to the pale ancients.\nAt night, returned from their mournful pilgrimage,\nHe found them asleep under the columns of the hallway.\n\nOh hair stained with dung and worms\nAs his silver feet stepped on it\nAnd on those who died in echoing rooms.\n\nOh you palms under midnight’s burning rain,\nWhen the servants flogged those tender eyes with nettles,\nThe hollyhock’s early fruit\nBeheld your empty grave in wonder.\n\nFading moons sail quietly\nOver the sheets of the feverish lad,\nInto the silence of winter.\n\nAt the bank of Kidron a great mind is lost in musing,\nUnder a tree, the tender cedar,\nStretched out under the father’s blue eyebrows,\nWhere a shepherd drives his flock to pastures at night.\n\nOr there are screams which escape the sleep;\nWhen an iron angel approaches man in the grove,\nThe holy man’s flesh melts over burning coals.\n\nPurple wine climbs about the mud-cottage,\nSheaves of faded corn sing;\nThe buzz of bees; the crane’s flight.\nIn the evening the souls of the resurrected gather on rocky paths.\n\nLepers behold their image in dark water;\nOr they lift the hemp of their dung soiled attire,\nAnd weep to the soothing wind, as it drifts down from the rosy hill.\n\nSlender maidens grope their way through the narrow lanes of night;\nThey hope for the gracious shepherd.\nTenderly, songs ring out from the huts on weekend.\n\nLet the song pay homage to the boy,\nTo his madness to his white eyebrows and to his passage,\nTo the decaying corpse, who opened his blue eyes.\nOh how sad is this reunion.\n\nThe stairs of madness in black apartments--\nThe matriarch’s shadow emerged under the open door\nWhen Helian’s soul beheld his image in a rosy mirror;\nAnd from his brow bled snow and leprosy.\n\nThe walls extinguished the stars\nAnd the white effigies of light.\n\nFrom the carpet rise skeletons, escaping their graves,\nFallen crosses sit silent on the hill,\nThe night’s purple wind is sweet with frankincense.\n\nOh ye broken eyes over black gaping jaws,\nWhen the grandson in the solitude\nOf his tender madness muses over a darker ending,\nThe blue eyelids of the silent god sink upon him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "hohenburg": { - "title": "“Hohenburg”", - "body": "Nobody in the house. Autumn in the rooms:\nMoonlight sonata\nAnd the awakening of the margins of the dusky woods.\n\nYou always think that the white faces of men\nAre farther away from the tumult of time:\nBending down over a slope in dreams of such happy green branches\n\nCross and evening:\nEncircled by sounds with the purple branches of stars,\nClimbing up the uninhabited windows.\n\nTherefore strangers tremble in the dark,\nThere the soft eyelids of people lift themselves up,\nThere in the distance the silver voice of the winds in the hallway.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "in-the-evening-the-sky-was-overcast": { - "title": "“In the evening the sky was overcast …”", - "body": "In the evening the sky was overcast.\nAnd through the grove full of silence and grief\nA dark-golden shower went.\nDistant evening bells faded away.\nThe earth has drunk icy water,\nAt the forest’s edge a fire lay glowing,\nThe wind quietly sang with angel’s voices\nAnd shivering I have gone to the knee,\nIn the heather, in bitter cresses.\nFar outside clouds swam in silver puddles,\nDesolate guards of love.\nThe heath was lonesome and unmeasured.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "mood-of-depression": { - "title": "“Mood of Depression”", - "body": "You dark mouth inside me,\nYou are strong, shape\nComposed of autumn cloud,\nAnd golden evening stillness;\nIn the shadows thrown\nBy the broken pine trees\nA mountain stream turns dark in the green light;\nA little town\nThat piously dies away into brown pictures.\n\nNow the black horses rear\nIn the foggy pasture.\nI think of soldiers!\nDown the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,\nThe laughing blood plunges,\nSpeechless\nUnder the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression\nOf an army; a blazing steel helmet\nFell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.\n\nThe autumn night comes down so coolly.\nWith her white habit glittering like the stars\nOver the broken human bodies\nThe convent nurse is silent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "my-heart-at-evening": { - "title": "“My Heart at Evening”", - "body": "Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats.\nTwo black horses bound in the pasture,\nThe red maple rustles,\nThe walker along the road sees ahead the small tavern.\nNuts and young wine taste delicious,\nDelicious: to stagger drunk into the darkening woods.\nVillage bells, painful to hear, echo through the black fir branches,\nDew forms on the face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "on-the-moor": { - "title": "“On the Moor”", - "body": "Wanderer in the blackened wind. Dry reeds whisper\nin the stillness of the moor. A column of savage birds\nensues in the dawning sky.\nOver murky waters they cross.\n\nUproar. From the crumbling shack\nthe black wings of rot flutter up.\nCrippled birches sigh in the wind.\n\nEvening in the forsaken tavern. The way home is shrouded\nby the tender sadness of the grazing herd.\nNight becomes manifest: toads emerge from the silver water.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Eric Plattner & Joseph Suglia", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-rats": { - "title": "“The Rats”", - "body": "In the farmyard the white moon of autumn shines.\nFantastic shadows fall from the eaves of the roof.\nA silence is living in the empty windows;\nNow from it the rats emerge softly\n\nAnd skitter here and there, squeaking,\nAnd a grey malodorous mist from the latrine\nFollows behind them, sniffling:\nThrough the mist the ghostly moonlight quivers.\n\nAnd the rats squeak eagerly as if insane\nAnd go out to fill houses and barns\nWhich are filled full of fruit and grain.\nIcy winds quarrel in the darkness", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "sleep": { - "title": "“Sleep”", - "body": "Not your dark poisons again,\nWhite sleep!\nThis fantastically strange garden\nOf trees in deepening twilight\nFills up with serpents, nightmoths,\nSpiders, bats.\nApproaching stranger!\nYour abandoned shadow\nIn the red of evening\nIs a dark pirate ship\nOf the salty oceans of confusion.\nWhite birds from the outskirts of the night\nFlutter out over the shuddering cities\nOf steel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly" - } - }, - "song-of-the-western-countries": { - "title": "“Song of the Western Countries”", - "body": "Oh the nighttime beating of the soul’s wings:\nHerders of sheep once, we walked along the forests that were growing dark,\nAnd the red deer, the green flower and the speaking river followed us\nIn humility. Oh the old old note of the cricket,\nBlood blooming on the altarstone,\nAnd the cry of the lonely bird over the green silence of the pool.\n\nAnd you Crusades, and glowing punishment\nOf the flesh, purple fruits that fell to earth\nIn the garden at dusk, where young and holy men walked,\nEnlisted men of war now, waking up out of wounds and dreams about stars.\nOh the soft cornflowers of the night.\n\nAnd you long ages of tranquillity and golden harvests,\nWhen as peaceful monks we pressed out the purple grapes;\nAnd around us the hill and forest shone strangely.\nThe hunts for wild beasts, the castles, and at night, the rest,\nWhen man in his room sat thinking justice,\nAnd in noiseless prayer fought for the living head of God.\n\nAnd this bitter hour of defeat,\nWhen we behold a stony face in the black waters.\nBut radiating light, the lovers lift their silver eyelids:\nThey are one body. Incense streams from rose-colored pillows\nAnd the sweet song of those risen from the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "summer": { - "title": "“Summer”", - "body": "At evening the complaint of the cuckoo\nGrows still in the wood.\nThe grain bends its head deeper,\nThe red poppy.\nDarkening thunder drives\nOver the hill.\nThe old song of the cricket\nDies in the field.\nThe leaves of the chestnut tree\nStir no more.\nYour clothes rustle\nOn the winding stair.\nThe candle gleams silently\nIn the dark room;\nA silver hand\nPuts the light out;\nWindless, starless night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-sun": { - "title": "“The Sun”", - "body": "Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.\nThe woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,\nAlso man; hunter or farmer.\n\nThe fish rises with a red body in the green pond.\nUnder the arch of heaven\nThe fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.\n\nThe grain, the cluster of grapes, ripens slowly.\nWhen the still day comes to an end,\nBoth evil and good have been prepared.\n\nWhen the; night has come,\nEasily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;\nThe sun breaks from gloomy ravines.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-the-boy-elis": { - "title": "“To the Boy, Elis”", - "body": "Elis, when the blackbird calls in the dark forest,\nthis is your downfall.\nYour lips drink the cool of the blue\nrock spring.\n\nInvoke, when your brow lightly bleeds,\nancient legends\nand dark interpretations of bird flight.\n\nYou, though, go with soft paces in the night\nthat hangs full of purple grapes\nand you wave arms more beautifully in blue.\n\nA thornbush chimes\nwhere your mooning eyes are.\nO, how long Elis, are you dead?\n\nYour body is a hyacinth\na monk dips his wax finger into.\nA black cave is our silence.\n\nSometimes a soft beast treads out of it\nand slowly sinks its heavy lids.\nBlack dew beads on your temples.\n\nThe last gold of fallen stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Christopher Newton" - } - }, - "trumpets": { - "title": "“Trumpets”", - "body": "Under the trimmed willows, where brown children are playing\nAnd leaves tumbling, the trumpets blow. A quaking of cemeteries.\nBanners of scarlet rattle through a sadness of maple trees,\nRiders along rye-fields, empty mills.\n\nOr shepherds sing during the night, and stags step delicately\nInto the circle of their fire, the grove’s sorrow immensely old,\nDancing, they loom up from one black wall;\nBanners of scarlet, laughter, insanity, trumpets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "winter-evening": { - "title": "“Winter Evening”", - "body": "When snow falls against the window,\nLong sounds the evening bell …\nFor so many has the table\nBeen prepared, the house set in order.\n\nFrom their wandering, many\nCome on dark paths to this gateway.\nThe tree of grace is flowering in gold\nOut of the cool sap of the earth.\n\nIn stillness, wanderer, step in:\nGrief has worn the threshold into stone.\nBut see: in pure light, glowing\nThere on the table: bread and wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "a-winter-night": { - "title": "“A Winter Night”", - "body": "It has been snowing. Past midnight, drunk on purple wine, you leave the gloomy shelters of men, and the red fire of their fireplaces. Oh the darkness of night.\nBlack frost. The ground is hard, the air has a bitter taste. Your stars make unlucky figures.\nWith a stiff walk, you tramp along the railroad embankment with huge eyes, like a soldier charging a dark machinegun nest. Onward!\nBitter snow and moon.\nA red wolf, that an angel is strangling. Your trouser legs rustle, as you walk, like blue ice, and a smile full of suffering and pride petrifies your face, and your forehead is white before the ripe desire of the frost;\nor else it bends down silently over the doze of the night watchman, slumped down in his wooden shack.\nFrost and smoke. A white shirt of stars burns on your clothed shoulders, and the hawk of God strips flesh out of your hard heart.\nOh the stony hill. The cool body, forgotten and silent, is melting away in the silver snow.\nSleep is black. For a long time the ear follows the motion of the stars deep down in the ice.\nWhen you woke, the churchbells were ringing in the town. Out of the door in the east the rose-colored day walked with silver light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "James Wright & Robert Bly", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-blueness-dies-out-in-my-eyes-tonight": { - "title": "“The blueness dies out in my eyes tonight …”", - "body": "The blueness dies out in my eyes tonight,\nthe red gold of my heart. O how still the light burns!\nYour cloak of sadness encircles the long descent.\nYour red lips seal your friend’s unhinging.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german", - "translator": "Eric Plattner" - } - }, - "a-fool-wrote-three-signs-in-the-sand": { - "title": "“A fool wrote three signs in the sand …”", - "body": "A fool wrote three signs in the sand,\nA pale maiden stood there before him.\nLoudly the sea sang, o it sang.\n\nShe held a cup in the hand,\nWhich gleamed up to the edge\nLike blood so red and heavy.\n\nNo word was spoken--the sun faded away,\nThen the fool took the cup\nOut of her hand and drank it empty.\n\nThen its light extinguished in her hand,\nThe wind blew away the three signs in the sand--\nLoudly the sea sang, o it sang.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "a-heart-laments": { - "title": "“A heart laments …”", - "body": "A heart laments: you do not find her,\nHer native country is probably far from here,\nAnd her face is strange!\n\nThe night weeps by a door!\nIn the marble hall light upon light burns,\nO stuffy, o stuffy! Somebody dies here!\n\nA whisper somewhere: o do you not come?\nThe night weeps by a door!\nA sobbing still: o that he would see the light!\n\nThen it became dark there and here--\nA sobbing: brother, o do you not pray?\nThe night weeps by a door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - }, - "a-sultry-garden-stood-the-night": { - "title": "“A sultry garden stood the night …”", - "body": "A sultry garden stood the night.\nWe kept silent ourselves about what grips us horribly.\nFrom this our hearts awoke\nAnd succumbed under the burden of silence.\n\nNo star blossomed in that night\nAnd nobody asked for us.\nOnly a demon has laughed in the darkness.\nBe cursed everyone! Then the deed came into being.", - "metadata": { - "language": "german" - } - } - } - }, - "tomas-transtromer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Tomas Tranströmer", - "birth": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "swedish", - "language": "swedish", - "flag": "🇸🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomas_Tranströmer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "swedish" - ], - "n_poems": 7 - }, - "poems": { - "breathing-space-july": { - "title": "“Breathing Space, July”", - "body": "The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees\nis also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,\nswaying to and fro,\nsitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.\n\nThe one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.\nThe docks age faster than people.\nThey have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.\nThe glaring light pounds all the way in.\n\nThe one who’s traveling all day in an open boat\nover the glittering bays\nwill fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp\nwhile the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Patty Crane", - "date": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "the-indoors-is-endless": { - "title": "“The Indoors is Endless”", - "body": "It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven\nhoists his death-mask and sails off.\n\nThe grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.\nThe wild geese are flying northwards.\n\nHere is the north, here is Stockholm\nswimming palaces and hovels.\n\nThe logs in the royal fireplace\ncollapse from Attention to At Ease.\n\nPeace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,\nbut the city wells breathe heavily.\n\nPrivy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas\nare carried by night over the North Bridge.\n\nThe cobblestones make them stagger\nmamselles loafers gentlemen.\n\nImplacably still, the sign-board\nwith the smoking blackamoor.\n\nSo many islands, so much rowing\nwith invisible oars against the current!\n\nThe channels open up, April May\nand sweet honey dribbling June.\n\nThe heat reaches islands far out.\nThe village doors are open, except one.\n\nThe snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.\nThe rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.\n\nIt happened like this, or almost.\nIt is an obscure family tale\n\nabout Erik, done down by a curse\ndisabled by a bullet through the soul.\n\nHe went to town, met an enemy\nand sailed home sick and grey.\n\nKeeps to his bed all that summer.\nThe tools on the wall are in mourning.\n\nHe lies awake, hears the woolly flutter\nof night moths, his moonlight comrades.\n\nHis strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain\nagainst the iron-bound tomorrow.\n\nAnd the God of the depths cries out of the depths\n“Deliver me! Deliver yourself!”\n\nAll the surface action turns inwards.\nHe’s taken apart, put together.\n\nThe wind rises and the wild rose bushes\ncatch on the fleeing light.\n\nThe future opens, he looks into\nthe self-rotating kaleidoscope\n\nsees indistinct fluttering faces\nfamily faces not yet born.\n\nBy mistake his gaze strikes me\nas I walk around here in Washington\n\namong grandiose houses where only\nevery second column bears weight.\n\nWhite buildings in crematorium style\nwhere the dream of the poor turns to ash.\n\nThe gentle downward slope gets steeper\nand imperceptibly becomes an abyss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Robin Fulton", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "midday-thaw": { - "title": "“Midday Thaw”", - "body": "The morning air delivered its letters with stamps that glowed.\nThe snow glistened and all burdens were lifted--a kilo weighed 700 grams, no more.\n\nHigh over the ice the sun was flying in place, both warm and cold.\nThe wind advanced gently, as if pushing a baby stroller.\n\nFamilies went outside, seeing open sky for the first time in a long while.\nWe found ourselves in the first chapter of a captivating story.\n\nThe sunshine stuck to all the fur hats like pollen to the bees\nand the sunshine stuck to the name winter and stayed there until winter’s end.\n\nA still life of harvested logs on the snow made me thoughtful. I asked them:\n“Are You coming along to my childhood?” They answered, “Yes.”\n\nDeep in the thicket, there was a mumbling of words in a new language:\nthe vowels were blue sky, the consonants black twigs, and spoken so softly over the snow.\n\nBut the jet curtsying in its thundering skirts\nintensified the strength of silence on Earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Patty Crane", - "date": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "november-in-the-former-ddr": { - "title": "“November in the Former DDR”", - "body": "The almighty cyclop’s-eye clouded over\nand the grass shook itself in the coal dust.\n\nBeaten black and blue by the night’s dreams\nwe board the train\nthat stops at every station\nand lays eggs.\n\nAlmost silent.\nThe clang of the church bells’ buckets\nfetching water.\nAnd someone’s inexorable cough\nscolding everything and everyone.\n\nA stone idol moves its lips:\nit’s the city.\nRuled by iron-hard misunderstandings\namong kiosk attendants butchers\nmetal-workers naval officers\niron-hard misunderstandings, academics!\n\nHow sore my eyes are!\nThey’ve been reading by the faint glimmer of the glow-worm lamps.\n\nNovember offers caramels of granite.\nUnpredictable!\nLike world history\nlaughing at the wrong place.\n\nBut we hear the clang\nof the church bells’ buckets fetching water\nevery Wednesday\n--is it Wednesday?--\nso much for our Sundays!", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Robin Fulton", - "date": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november", - "weekday": "wednesday" - } - } - }, - "the-open-window": { - "title": "“The Open Window”", - "body": "I stood shaving one morning\nin front of the open window\non the second floor.\nSwitched on the razor.\nIt started to purr.\nIt whirred louder and louder.\nGrew into a roar.\nGrew into a helicopter\nand a voice--the pilot’s--pierced\nthrough the noise, shouting:\n“Keep your eyes open!\nYou’re seeing this for the last time.”\nWe lifted off.\nFlew low over the summer.\nSo much that I loved, does it have any weight?\nSo many dialects of green.\nAnd above all, the red walls of the wooden houses.\nThe beetles glistened in the dung, in the sun.\nCellars being pulled up by the roots\nwafted through the air.\nActivity.\nThe printing presses crawled along.\nAt that instant, the people\nwere the only ones who kept still.\nThey held a minute of silence.\nAnd above all, the dead in the country graveyard\nwere still\nlike those who posed for a photo in the camera’s youth.\nFly low!\nI didn’t know which way\nto turn my head--\nwith my visual field divided\nlike a horse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Patty Crane", - "date": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "open-and-closed-spaces": { - "title": "“Open and Closed Spaces”", - "body": "A man feels the world with his work like a glove.\nHe rests for a while at midday and has laid his gloves on the shelf.\nWhere they suddenly grow, spreading out\nand darkening the whole house from within.\n\nThe darkened house is in the midst of the spring winds.\n“Amnesty,” goes whispering through the grass: “amnesty.”\nA boy runs with an invisible line angling up into the sky\nwhere his wild dreams about the future fly like a kite bigger than the suburbs.\n\nFrom a peak farther north, you can see the infinite blue carpet of the pine forest\nwhere the cloud-shadows\nare standing still.\nNo, flying along.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "translator": "Patty Crane", - "date": { - "year": 2011 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "task-to-be-who-i-am": { - "title": "“Task to Be Who I Am”", - "body": "I’m ordered out to a big hump of stone as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the iron age.\nThe rest are still back in the tent sleeping\nstretched out like spokes in a wheel.\nIn the tent the stove is boss,\nThe big snake that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.\nIt is silent out here in the spring night amongst the stones waiting for the dawn.\nIn the cold I start to fly like a shaman to her body, some places pale from her swimming suit\nthe sun shone right on us, the moss was hot\nI brush along the side of warm moments\nBut I can’t stay here long\nI am whistled back through space;\nI crawl among the stones\nBack to here and now.\nTask: to be where I am.\nEven when I am in this solemn and absurd role\nI am still the place where creation does a little work on itself.\nDawn comes, the sparse tree trunks take on color now\nThe frost-bitten forest flowers form a silent search party after something that\nhas disappeared in the dark\nBut to be where I am and to wait.\nI am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused\nThings not yet happened are here and now\nI feel that--they’re just out there--\nA murmuring mass outside the barrier\nThey can only slip in one by one.\nThey want to slip in.\nWhy?\nThey do one by one.\nI am the turnstile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "swedish", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - } - } - }, - "marina-tsvetaeva": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Marina Tsvetaeva", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Tsvetaeva", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 14 - }, - "poems": { - "from-an-attempt-at-jealousy": { - "title": "From “An Attempt at Jealousy”", - "body": "How is your life with that other one?\nSimpler, is it? A stroke of the oars\nand a long coastline--\nand the memory of me\n\nis soon a drifting island\n(not in the ocean--in the sky!)\nSouls--you will be sisters--\nsisters, not lovers.\n\nHow is your life with an ordinary\nwoman? without the god inside her?\nThe queen supplanted--\n\nHow do you breathe now?\nFlinch, waking up?\nWhat do you do, poor man?\n\n“Hysterics and interruptions--\nenough! I’ll rent my own house!”\nHow is your life with that other,\nyou, my own.\n\nIs the breakfast delicious?\n(If you get sick, don’t blame me!)\nHow is it, living with a postcard?\nYou who stood on Sinai.\n\nHow’s your life with a tourist\non Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)\nis it to your liking?\n\nHow’s life? Do you cough?\nDo you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?\n\nHow do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?\nHow’s kissing plaster-dust?\n\nAre you bored with her new body?\nHow’s it going, with an earthly woman,\nwith no sixth sense?\n\nAre you happy?\nNo? In a shallow pit--how is your life,\nmy beloved? Hard as mine\nwith another man?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "from-the-desk": { - "title": "From “The Desk”", - "body": "Fair enough: you people have eaten me,\nI--wrote you down.\nThey’ll lay you out on a dinner table,\nme--on this desk.\n\nI’ve been happy with little.\nThere are dishes I’ve never tried.\nBut you, you people eat slowly, and often;\nYou eat and eat.\n\nEverything was decided for us\nback in the ocean:\nOur places of action,\nour places of gratitude.\n\nYou--with belches, I--with books,\nwith truffles, you. With pencil, I,\nyou and your olives, me and my rhyme,\nwith pickles, you. I, with poems.\n\nAt your head--funeral candles\nlike thick-legged asparagus:\nyour road out of this world\na dessert table’s striped cloth.\n\nThey will smoke Havana cigars\non your left side and your right;\nyour body will be dressed\nin the best Dutch linen.\n\nAnd--not to waste such expensive cloth,\nthey will shake you out,\nalong with the crumbs and bits of food,\ninto the hole, the grave.\n\nYou--stuffed capon, I--pigeon.\nGunpowder, your soul, at the autopsy.\nAnd I will be laid out bare\nwith only two wings to cover me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "dialogue-of-hamlet-with-his-conscience": { - "title": "“Dialogue of Hamlet with His Conscience”", - "body": "--She is at the bottom,\nwhere mud and weed …\nShe went to sleep there,--\nBut even there she can’t find sleep!\n--But I loved her,\nas forty thousand brothers cannot love!\n --Hamlet!\n\nShe is at the bottom, where mud: mud! …\nAnd the last wreath\nhas washed up upon the riverside decking …\n--But I loved her,\nas forty thousand …\n --Still less\nthan one lover.\n\nShe is at the bottom, where mud.\n--But I\n loved her …?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Sergey Rybin" - } - }, - "i-bless-a-night-i-sleep": { - "title": "“I Bless a Night I Sleep”", - "body": "I bless a night I sleep in my abode,\nI bless a day when to my work I go,\nJudgment and mercy of omniscient God,\nThe good law--and the stony law,\n\nMy dusty purple, patched in every piece …\nMy dusty staff, in the eternal glow!\nAnd else, O God, I bless forever--peace\nAnd bread in stove of another home.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "i-know-the-only-truth": { - "title": "“I Know the only Truth”", - "body": "I know the only truth! The others--cast aside!\nThere’s no need for the men of Earth to fight with others!\nLook, there’s the evening soon and soon it’ll be the night.\nWhat you about, colonels, poets, lovers?\n\nNow wind is near the soil and dew lay on the grass,\nThe starry blizzard soon will freeze into the heaven,\nAnd soon under the earth will sleep each one of us--\nBy whom a sleep on it to others hadn’t been given.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-like-that-you-are-crazy-not-with-me": { - "title": "“I Like that You Are Crazy Not with Me”", - "body": "I like that you are crazy not with me,\nI like that I’m not with you crazy, either,\nThat ne’er the heavy planet’s globe will be\nDrifting away under our feet, quite easy.\nI like that one might funny be and brave,\nAnd free-behaved--and not to play words, rather,\nAnd not to blush with choking a wave,\nAt easy touching just a sleeve another’s.\n\nI thank you with my hand and all my heart\nFor loving me (that you don’t even know!),\nFor the sweet peace, I own in the night,\nFor the scarce meeting in the eve’s fast flow,\nFor our not-walking under the moonlight,\nFor our not-standing under the sun’s glow--\nThat not with me--alas--you lose your mind,\nThat not with you--alas--I lose my own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "if-you-soul-was-born-with-wings": { - "title": "“If You Soul Was Born with Wings”", - "body": "If your soul was born with wings\nWhat does a hut mean or a palace of kings!\nWhat--Genghis Khan, and what--a horde!\nI have two foes in the whole world,\nThey are two twins in one image united:\nHunger of hungry and glut of glutted.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "oh-tears-that-in-eyes-freeze": { - "title": "“Oh Tears that in Eyes Freeze”", - "body": "O, tears that in eyes freeze!\nThe cry of love and pain!\nMy Chekhia’s in tears!\nIn blood is all my Spain!\n\nO, mountain of black,\nYou shaded all the world!\nIt’s time to return back\nMy ticket to the God.\n\nYes, I refuse to be\nIn Bedlam of non-men.\nYes, I refuse to see\nHow wolves of squares do slain.\n\nYes, I refuse to wail\nWith field sharks of all ranks.\nYes, I refuse to sail\nDown the stream of backs.\n\nMy ears I need more not,\nMy eyes I needn’t to use,\nTo all your crazy world\nOne answer--“I refuse.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "our-sweet-companions": { - "title": "“Our Sweet Companions”", - "body": "Our sweet companions--sharing your bunk and your bed\nThe versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread\nThe wheels’ endless round\nThe rivers, streaming to ground\nThe road …\n\nOh the heavenly the Gypsy the early dawn light\nRemember the breeze in the morning, the steppe silver-bright\nWisps of blue smoke from the rise\nAnd the song of the wise\nGypsy czar …\n\nIn the dark midnight, under the ancient trees’ shroud\nWe gave you sons as perfect as night, sons\nAs poor as the night\nAnd the nightingale chirred\nYour might …\n\nWe never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours\nPoverty’s passions, the impoverished meals we shared\nThe fierce bonfire’s glow\nAnd there, on the carpet below,\nFell stars …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "from-poems-to-czechoslovakia": { - "title": "From “Poems to Czechoslovakia”", - "body": "Black mountain\n\nblack mountain\nblocks the earth’s light.\nTime--time--time\nto give back to God his ticket.\n\nI refuse to--be. In\nthe madhouse of the inhumans\nI refuse to--live. To swim\n\non the current of human spines.\nI don’t need holes in my ears,\nno need for seeing eyes.\nI refuse to swim on the current of human spines.\n\nTo your mad world--one answer: I refuse.\n\nThey took--suddenly--and took--openly--\ntook mountains--and took their entrails,\nthey took coal, and steel they took,\nthey took lead, and crystal.\n\nAnd sugar they took, and took the clover,\nthey took the West, and they took the North,\nthey took the beehive, and took the haystack,\nthey took the South from us, and the East.\n\nVari--they took, and the Tatras--they took,\nthey took our fingers--took our friends--\n\nBut we stand up--\nas long as there’s spit in our mouths!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "the-seafarer": { - "title": "“The Seafarer”", - "body": "Rock me down, o starry skiff!\nMy head tired from waves, so stiff!\n\nVery long I look for abode,--\nMy head tired from passions, hot:\n\nLaurels--hymns--hydras--heroes, brazed,--\nMy head tired from senseless plays!\n\nLay me down mid leaves and grass,--\nMy head tired from ceaseless wars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "there-is-some-hour": { - "title": "“There is Some Hour”", - "body": "There is some hour--like a cast off load--\nWhen our proud had been fully tamed.\nThe learning hour--on each life-long road--\nIs predestined and great.\n\nThe time, in which--our arms just had been thrown\nDown to the feet of shown by His hand--\nThe solder’s purple to the gray-fur gown\nWe’re changing on the seashore sand.\n\nO, this great hour--like some loud trumpet,\nRising us up from free-will of a date!\nO, this great hour, when like some ear, ripened,\nWe’re low-bending to our weight.\n\nThe ear has risen, and the hour--been crowned,\nAnd now the ear is thirsty for the mill.\nO, Law! O, Law! Yet in a womb of ground\nMy yoke by my own will.\n\nThe learning hour! But we see and know\nAnother light,--another bright sunrise.\nBe ever blessed, now rising him below,\nHigh time when lone will be each of us!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "two-suns-are-cooling": { - "title": "“Two Suns Are Cooling”", - "body": "Two suns are cooling--O save me, God!\nThe first--in heavens, the second--in heart.\nWill I have an excuse for that?--\nBoth suns made me fully mad!\nNo pain from the beams--they’re lost!\nHotter sun will be frozen first.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - }, - "where-does-such-tenderness-come-from": { - "title": "“Where Does Such Tenderness Come From?”", - "body": "Where does such tenderness come from?\nThese aren’t the first curls\nI’ve wound around my finger--\nI’ve kissed lips darker than yours.\n\nThe sky is washed and dark\n(Where does such tenderness come from?)\nOther eyes have known\nand shifted away from my eyes.\n\nBut I’ve never heard words like this\nin the night\n(Where does such tenderness come from?)\nwith my head on your chest, rest.\n\nWhere does this tenderness come from?\nAnd what will I do with it? Young\nstranger, poet, wandering through town,\nyou and your eyelashes--longer than anyone’s.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Yevgeny Bonver" - } - } - } - }, - "tu-fu": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Tu Fu", - "birth": { - "year": 712 - }, - "death": { - "year": 770 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chinese", - "language": "chinese", - "flag": "🇨🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chinese" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "brimming-water": { - "title": "“Brimming Water”", - "body": "Under my feet the moon\nGlides along the river.\nNear midnight, a gusty lantern\nShines in the heart of night.\nAlong the sandbars flocks\nOf white egrets roost,\nEach one clenched like a fist.\nIn the wake of my barge\nThe fish leap, cut the water,\nAnd dive and splash.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Kenneth Rexroth" - } - }, - "the-excursion": { - "title": "“The Excursion”", - "body": "_A number of young gentlemen of rank, accompanied by singing-girls, go out to enjoy the cool of evening. They encounter a shower of rain._\n\n# I.\n\nHow delightful, at sunset, to loosen the boat!\nA light wind is slow to raise waves.\nDeep in the bamboo grove, the guests linger;\nThe lotus-flowers are pure and bright in the cool evening air.\nThe young nobles stir the ice-water;\nThe Beautiful Ones wash the lotus-roots, whose fibres are like silk threads.\nA layer of clouds above our heads is black.\nIt will certainly rain, which impels me to write this poem.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe rain comes, soaking the mats upon which we are sitting.\nA hurrying wind strikes the bow of the boat.\nThe rose-red rouge of the ladies from Yüeh is wet;\nThe Yen beauties are anxious about their kingfisher-eyebrows.\nWe throw out a rope and draw in to the sloping bank. We tie the boat to the willow-trees.\nWe roll up the curtains and watch the floating wave-flowers.\nOur return is different from our setting out. The wind whistles and blows in great gusts.\nBy the time we reach the shore, it seems as though the Fifth Month were Autumn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Florence Ayscough", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "pounding-the-clothes": { - "title": "“Pounding the Clothes”", - "body": "You won’t return from the front.\nI clean the laundry stone in autumn.\nThe bitter cold months are near;\nMy heart aches with long separation.\nCan I shirk the toil of pounding your clothes?\nNo, they must go to the Great Wall.\nLet me use all my woman’s strength.\nMay you, my lord, hear the sound o’er the vast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Chao Tze-Chiang", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-river-village": { - "title": "“The River Village”", - "body": "The river makes a bend and encircles the village with its current.\nAll the long Summer, the affairs and occupations of the river village are quiet and simple.\nThe swallows who nest in the beams go and come as they please.\nThe gulls in the middle of the river enjoy one another, they crowd together and touch one another.\nMy old wife paints a chess-board on paper.\nMy little sons hammer needles to make fish-hooks.\nI have many illnesses, therefore my only necessities are medicines.\nBesides these, what more can so humble a man as I ask?", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-toast": { - "title": "“A Toast”", - "body": "Illimitable happiness,\nBut grief for our white heads.\nWe love the long watches of the night, the red candle.\nIt would be difficult to have too much of meeting,\nLet us not be in hurry to talk of separation.\nBut because the Heaven River will sink,\nWe had better empty the wine-cups.\nTo-morrow, at bright dawn, the world’s business will entangle us.\nWe brush away our tears,\nWe go--East and West.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Florence Ayscough" - } - } - } - }, - "ivan-turgenev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ivan Turgenev", - "birth": { - "year": 1818 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Turgenev", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 18 - }, - "poems": { - "alms": { - "title": "“Alms”", - "body": "Near a large town, along the broad highroad walked an old sick man.\nHe tottered as he went; his old wasted legs, halting, dragging, stumbling, moved painfully and feebly, as though they did not belong to him; his clothes hung in rags about him; his uncovered head drooped on his breast … He was utterly worn-out.\nHe sat down on a stone by the wayside, bent forward, leant his elbows on his knees, hid his face in his hands; and through the knotted fingers the tears dropped down on to the grey, dry dust.\nHe remembered …\nRemembered how he too had been strong and rich, and how he had wasted his health, and had lavished his riches upon others, friends and enemies … And here, he had not now a crust of bread; and all had forsaken him, friends even before foes … Must he sink to begging alms? There was bitterness in his heart, and shame.\nThe tears still dropped and dropped, spotting the grey dust.\nSuddenly he heard some one call him by his name; he lifted his weary head, and saw standing before him a stranger.\nA face calm and grave, but not stern; eyes not beaming, but clear; a look penetrating, but not unkind.\n“Thou hast given away all thy riches,” said a tranquil voice … “But thou dost not regret having done good, surely?”\n“I regret it not,” answered the old man with a sigh; “but here I am dying now.”\n“And had there been no beggars who held out their hands to thee,” the stranger went on, “thou wouldst have had none on whom to prove thy goodness; thou couldst not have done thy good works.”\nThe old man answered nothing, and pondered.\n“So be thou also now not proud, poor man,” the stranger began again. “Go thou, hold out thy hand; do thou too give to other good men a chance to prove in deeds that they are good.”\nThe old man started, raised his eyes … but already the stranger had vanished, and in the distance a man came into sight walking along the road.\nThe old man went up to him, and held out his hand. This man turned away with a surly face, and gave him nothing.\nBut after him another passed, and he gave the old man some trifling alms.\nAnd the old man bought himself bread with the coppers given him, and sweet to him seemed the morsel gained by begging, and there was no shame in his heart, but the contrary: peace and joy came as a blessing upon him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "at-dawn": { - "title": "“At Dawn”", - "body": "Sleep has not touched my eyes\nWhen the first gleam of daylight\nSteals through the window-pane …\n\nFighting with dismal night-time thoughts\nMy troubled mind tosses and turns,\nMy heart is tormented.\n\nMy heart is tormented …\n\nPeace be with you,\nMy heart, full of anguish!\nPeace be with you,\n\nMy heart, full of anguish!\nPeace be with you,\nMy heart, full of anguish!\n\nDo you hear … do you hear the call?\nThe call from heaven above …\n\nThe bells ring out the Resurrection,\nThe bells, the bells,\nThe bells ringing the Resurrection!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Anthony Phillips", - "date": { - "year": 1868 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "autumn": { - "title": "“Autumn”", - "body": "As a sad look I fancy autumn.\nOn a serene and misty day\nTo woods I often choose my way\nAnd gratified there stay\nAlone in pleasant mood begotten.\nBeneath a pine in a land of needles,\nWhile tasting lazily a berry,\nI muse on matters sad and merry\nAnd listen to woodpeckers’ whistles.\nThe grass is withered, a cool brightness\nOver the leaves is calmly spread,\nAnd in a forest pleasant quietness\nI watch the pine tops overhead.\nWhat memories will I recover?\nWhat dreams will be inspired with?\nThe giant pines are bending over\nTo tell their tales in thoughtfulness.\nBut gusts of wind as hordes of birds\nThe trees will suddenly arouse\nAnd with increasing gale will burst\nImpatiently high flied up crowns.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1842 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "cabbage-soup": { - "title": "“Cabbage Soup”", - "body": "A peasant woman, a widow, had an only son, a young man of twenty, the best workman in the village, and he died.\nThe lady who was the owner of the village, hearing of the woman’s trouble, went to visit her on the very day of the burial.\nShe found her at home.\nStanding in the middle of her hut, before the table, she was, without haste, with a regular movement of the right arm (the left hung listless at her side), scooping up weak cabbage soup from the bottom of a blackened pot, and swallowing it spoonful by spoonful.\nThe woman’s face was sunken and dark; her eyes were red and swollen … but she held herself as rigid and upright as in church.\n“Heavens!” thought the lady, “she can eat at such a moment … what coarse feelings they have really, all of them!”\nAnd at that point the lady recollected that when, a few years before, she had lost her little daughter, nine months old, she had refused, in her grief, a lovely country villa near Petersburg, and had spent the whole summer in town! Meanwhile the woman went on swallowing cabbage soup.\nThe lady could not contain herself, at last. “Tatiana!” she said … “Really! I’m surprised! Is it possible you didn’t care for your son? How is it you’ve not lost your appetite? How can you eat that soup!”\n“My Vasia’s dead,” said the woman quietly, and tears of anguish ran once more down her hollow cheeks. “It’s the end of me too, of course; it’s tearing the heart out of me alive. But the soup’s not to be wasted; there’s salt in it.”\nThe lady only shrugged her shoulders and went away. Salt did not cost her much.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "a-dream": { - "title": "“A Dream”", - "body": "I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house.\nThe room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed.\nI am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.\nNot one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency … all in turn approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something from without.\nThen again they fall to wandering up and down. Among us is a small-sized boy; from time to time he whimpers in the same thin voice, “Father, I’m frightened!” My heart turns sick at his whimper, and I too begin to be afraid … of what? I don’t know myself. Only I feel, there is coming nearer and nearer a great, great calamity.\nThe boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How stifling! How weary! how heavy … But escape is impossible.\nThat sky is like a shroud. And no wind … Is the air dead or what?\nAll at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous voice, “Look! look! the earth has fallen away!”\n“How? fallen away?” Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out, black precipice.\nWe all crowded to the window … Horror froze our hearts. “Here it is … here it is!” whispers one next me.\nAnd behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.\n“It is the sea!” the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. “It will swallow us all up directly … Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?”\nAnd yet, it grows, grows enormously … Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance … One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.\nIt is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered-and there, in this flying mass-was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats …\nAh! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror … The end of it! the end of all!\nThe child whimpered once more … I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness … darkness everlasting!\nScarcely breathing, I awoke.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-egoist": { - "title": "“The Egoist”", - "body": "He had every qualification for becoming the scourge of his family.\nHe was born healthy, was born wealthy, and throughout the whole of his long life, continuing to be wealthy and healthy, he never committed a single sin, never fell into a single error, never once made a slip or a blunder.\nHe was irreproachably conscientious! … And complacent in the sense of his own conscientiousness, he crushed every one with it, his family, his friends and his acquaintances.\nHis conscientiousness was his capital … and he exacted an exorbitant interest for it.\nHis conscientiousness gave him the right to be merciless, and to do no good deeds beyond what it dictated to him; and he was merciless, and did no good … for good that is dictated is no good at all.\nHe took no interest in any one except his own exemplary self, and was genuinely indignant if others did not take as studious an interest in it!\nAt the same time he did not consider himself an egoist, and was particularly severe in censuring, and keen in detecting egoists and egoism. To be sure he was. The egoism of another was a check on his own.\nNot recognising the smallest weakness in himself he did not understand, did not tolerate any weakness in any one. He did not, in fact, understand any one or any thing, since he was all, on all sides, above and below, before and behind, encircled by himself.\nHe did not even understand the meaning of forgiveness. He had never had to forgive himself … What inducement could he have to forgive others?\nBefore the tribunal of his own conscience, before the face of his own God, he, this marvel, this monster of virtue, raised his eyes heavenwards, and with clear unfaltering voice declared, “Yes, I am an exemplary, a truly moral man!”\nHe will repeat these words on his deathbed, and there will be no throb even then in his heart of stone--in that heart without stain or blemish!\nOh, hideousness of self-complacent, unbending, cheaply bought virtue; thou art almost more revolting than the frank hideousness of vice!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-face-of-christ": { - "title": "“The Face of Christ”", - "body": "I saw myself, in dream, a youth, almost a boy, in a low-pitched wooden church. The slim wax candles gleamed, spots of red, before the old pictures of the saints.\nA ring of coloured light encircled each tiny flame. Dark and dim it was in the church … But there stood before me many people. All fair-haired, peasant heads. From time to time they began swaying, falling, rising again, like the ripe ears of wheat, when the wind of summer passes in slow undulation over them.\nAll at once some man came up from behind and stood beside me.\nI did not turn towards him; but at once I felt that this man was Christ.\nEmotion, curiosity, awe overmastered me suddenly. I made an effort … and looked at my neighbour.\nA face like every one’s, a face like all men’s faces. The eyes looked a little upwards, quietly and intently. The lips closed, but not compressed; the upper lip, as it were, resting on the lower; a small beard parted in two. The hands folded and still. And the clothes on him like every one’s.\n“What sort of Christ is this?” I thought. “Such an ordinary, ordinary man! It can’t be!”\nI turned away. But I had hardly turned my eyes away from this ordinary man when I felt again that it really was none other than Christ standing beside me.\nAgain I made an effort over myself … And again the same face, like all men’s faces, the same everyday though unknown features.\nAnd suddenly my heart sank, and I came to myself. Only then I realised that just such a face--a face like all men’s faces--is the face of Christ.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-first-snow": { - "title": "“The First Snow”", - "body": "I’m glad to see you, light stars of the fluffy first snow!\nOn the dark ground you instantly melt one by one.\nOther snowflakes quick and easy instead of you fly up:\nBees in the motionless air are whirling this way.\nWinter will be before long; pressed ice will be screaming\nUnder a sonorous iron of earnest fast sleighs,\nHard will be frost, beauties’ cheeks will be profusely blushing,\nTheir long lashes with rime will be tenderly touched.\nWell then! Steppe village, the time’s come to leave you however,\nI will not look at your cabins all covered with snow,\nI will not see smokes floated in skies blue and clear,\nWhite fields and hills,--and the looming mysterious wood.\nLet you fall down, fine snow! Yet a far away city\nCalls me again for a meeting with foes and friends.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "fog-filled-the-morning-sky": { - "title": "“Fog Filled the Morning Sky”", - "body": "Fog filled the morning sky, gray-haired this morning,\nSnowy the saddened fields, many times trodden.\nThough you resent, feel your past, unreturning:\nFaces you shall recall, long since forgotten.\n\nYou shall recall the talks, long, full of passion,\nGlances, so eager, so shy and so subtile.\nFirst date and last date, and lovely confessions,\nSounds of a quiet voice, sweetheart’s, for some time.\n\nYou shall recall breaking up, smiling oddly,\nYou shall recall lots of things, dear and distant,\nThoughtfully stare at the sky that hangs broadly,\nHearing the buzz of wheels, soft, yet persistent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitriy Belyanin", - "date": { - "year": 1843, - "month": "november" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "how-fair-how-fresh-were-the-roses": { - "title": "“How Fair, How Fresh Were the Roses”", - "body": "Somewhere, sometime, long, long ago, I read a poem. It was soon forgotten … but the first line has stuck in my memory--\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_\n\nNow is winter; the frost has iced over the window-panes; in the dark room burns a solitary candle. I sit huddled up in a corner; and in my head the line keeps echoing and echoing--\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_\n\nAnd I see myself before the low window of a Russian country house. The summer evening is slowly melting into night, the warm air is fragrant of mignonette and lime-blossom; and at the window, leaning on her arm, her head bent on her shoulder, sits a young girl, and silently, intently gazes into the sky, as though looking for new stars to come out. What candour, what inspiration in the dreamy eyes, what moving innocence in the parted questioning lips, how calmly breathes that still-growing, still-untroubled bosom, how pure and tender the profile of the young face! I dare not speak to her; but how dear she is to me, how my heart beats!\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_\n\nBut here in the room it gets darker and darker … The candle burns dim and gutters, dancing shadows quiver on the low ceiling, the cruel crunch of the frost is heard outside, and within the dreary murmur of old age …\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_\n\nThere rise up before me other images. I hear the merry hubbub of home life in the country. Two flaxen heads, bending close together, look saucily at me with their bright eyes, rosy cheeks shake with suppressed laughter, hands are clasped in warm affection, young kind voices ring one above the other; while a little farther, at the end of the snug room, other hands, young too, fly with unskilled fingers over the keys of the old piano, and the Lanner waltz cannot drown the hissing of the patriarchal samovar …\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_\n\nThe candle flickers and goes out … Whose is that hoarse and hollow cough? Curled up, my old dog lies, shuddering at my feet, my only companion … I’m cold … I’m frozen … and all of them are dead … dead …\n\n_How fair, how fresh were the roses …_", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-like-to-drive-up-to-a-village-in-the-eve": { - "title": "“I Like To Drive up to a Village in the Eve …”", - "body": "I like to drive up to a village in the eve,\nTo look at crows above the church and to believe--\n At height they are somehow playing.\nAmong the endless fields and flowery precious meads,\nOn quiet banks, amid the gardens went to weeds\n I like to listen to the baying\n\nOf watchful dogs, to mooing of the weighty herds;\nI like deserted parks all overgrown with herbs,\n And lime-trees’ shadows unshakable.\nYou stand stock-still when glassy air is as if\nWith you it listened to the sounds of the eve--\n Of feeling bliss you grow capable;\n\nYou have a thoughtful look at eyes of local men--\nYou understand them, their hard poor life,--and then\n You crave for artless and simple living;\nAn aged woman comes for water from the well,\nThe tall pole’s screaming, neighing horses at the pale:\n To them the water she’ll be giving.\n\nA driving passer-by strikes up a mournful song\nBut utters daring cries,--his sadness is not long,--\n Away the horse hurtles at a canter;\nA girl comes out on the low porch of the hut,\nShe watches sunset, her blue eyes feign funny shut,\n She’s reddened by the sun-a-painter.\n\nEnormous carts are rocking slowly awhile\nDescending from the hill in a single file\n With a strong-smelling corn-fields’ bounty;\nBeyond the patches of compacted verdant hemp\nFlows the open, dressed in a haze, both vast and ample\n Impressive steppe--eye-catching country.\n\nThis steppe is boundless indeed, it does not end,\nA lively breeze streams over it a ceaseless strand,\n The earth is breathing, skies are blazing;\nThe forest’s brims are being touched with purple gold,\nIt’s telling something in the wind to rural world;\n Ample is the evening of amazing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1847 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-rose": { - "title": "“The Rose”", - "body": "The last days of August … Autumn was already at hand.\nThe sun was setting. A sudden downpour of rain, without thunder or lightning, had just passed rapidly over our wide plain.\nThe garden in front of the house glowed and steamed, all filled with the fire of the sunset and the deluge of rain.\nShe was sitting at a table in the drawing-room, and, with persistent dreaminess, gazing through the half-open door into the garden.\nI knew what was passing at that moment in her soul; I knew that, after a brief but agonising struggle, she was at that instant giving herself up to a feeling she could no longer master.\nAll at once she got up, went quickly out into the garden, and disappeared.\nAn hour passed … a second; she had not returned.\nThen I got up, and, getting out of the house, I turned along the walk by which-of that I had no doubt-she had gone.\nAll was darkness about me; the night had already fallen. But on the damp sand of the path a roundish object could be discerned-bright red even through the mist.\nI stooped down. It was a fresh, new-blown rose. Two hours before I had seen this very rose on her bosom.\nI carefully picked up the flower that had fallen in the mud, and, going back to the drawing-room, laid it on the table before her chair.\nAnd now at last she came back, and with light footsteps, crossing the whole room, sat down at the table.\nHer face was both paler and more vivid; her downcast eyes, that looked somehow smaller, strayed rapidly in happy confusion from side to side.\nShe saw the rose, snatched it up, glanced at its crushed, muddy petals, glanced at me, and her eyes, brought suddenly to a standstill, were bright with tears.\n“What are you crying for?” I asked.\n“Why, see this rose. Look what has happened to it.”\nThen I thought fit to utter a profound remark.\n“Your tears will wash away the mud,” I pronounced with a significant expression.\n“Tears do not wash, they burn,” she answered. And turning to the hearth she flung the rose into the dying flame.\n“Fire burns even better than tears,” she cried with spirit; and her lovely eyes, still bright with tears, laughed boldly and happily.\nI saw that she too had been in the fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-solution": { - "title": "“The Solution”", - "body": "How all the blood in my breast\nFlooded into my heart,\nWhen the gaze from your eyes\nFastened itself upon me!\n\nFor long I could not understand\nIts silent language …\nI sought its meaning\nWith fear and anguish …\n\nSuddenly all doubts vanished\nAnd my fear forever stilled …\nMy angel, I understood all\nIn one moment of bliss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "date": { - "year": 1867 - } - } - }, - "the-sparrow": { - "title": "“The Sparrow”", - "body": "I was returning from hunting, and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me.\nSuddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game.\nI looked along the avenue, and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch-trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly flapping its half-grown wings.\nMy dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated sparrow fell like a stone right before his nose, and all ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps, it flung itself twice towards the open jaws of shining teeth.\nIt sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling … but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear, it offered itself up!\nWhat a huge monster must the dog have seemed to it! And yet it could not stay on its high branch out of danger … A force stronger than its will flung it down.\nMy Trésor stood still, drew back … Clearly he too recognised this force.\nI hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of reverence.\nYes; do not laugh. I felt reverence for that tiny heroic bird, for its impulse of love.\nLove, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-***": { - "title": "“To ***”", - "body": "To shadowy hills a heavy shower\nHas rolled through meadows--at once\nThe sky has cleared up, all over\nThere is fine brilliance on grass.\nThe storm has gone. The air now\nEnhances sounds, is a balm;\nHow every leaf on every bough\nIs turning soothed being calm!\nAn evening toll of bells in earnest\nIs calling us to have a stroll--\nOh, let us roam in the forest,\nCome on, a sister of my soul!\nLet’s have a walk in silent meadows,\nMy love, my one and only friend,\nLet’s take an ease in forest shadows,\nA lovely grove let us attend.\nAnd where crops lie golden-colored\nAcross a field in widening rings\nWhen evening glow light all around\nWith placid and contented beams--\nAllow me to sit in silence\nBeside your dearly loved feet,\nTo thy shy hand in the reticence\nAllow my timid lips to meet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chistyakov", - "date": { - "year": 1844 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "to-morrow": { - "title": "“To-Morrow”", - "body": "How empty, dull, and useless is almost every day when it is spent! How few the traces it leaves behind it! How meaningless, how foolish those hours as they coursed by one after another!\nAnd yet it is man’s wish to exist; he prizes life, he rests hopes on it, on himself, on the future … Oh, what blessings he looks for from the future!\nBut why does he imagine that other coming days will not be like this day he has just lived through?\nNay, he does not even imagine it. He likes not to think at all, and he does well.\n“Ah, to-morrow, to-morrow!” he comforts himself, till ‘to-morrow’ pitches him into the grave.\nWell, and once in the grave, thou hast no choice, thou doest no more thinking.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-two-brothers": { - "title": "“The Two Brothers”", - "body": "It was a vision …\nTwo angels appeared to me … two genii.\nI say angels, genii, because both had no clothes on their naked bodies, and behind their shoulders rose long powerful wings.\nBoth were youths. One was rather plump, with soft smooth skin and dark curls. His eyes were brown and full, with thick eyelashes; his look was sly, merry, and eager. His face was charming, bewitching, a little insolent, a little wicked. His full soft crimson lips were faintly quivering. The youth smiled as one possessing power-self-confidently and languidly; a magnificent wreath of flowers rested lightly on his shining tresses, almost touching his velvety eyebrows. A spotted leopard’s skin, pinned up with a golden arrow, hung lightly from his curved shoulder to his rounded thigh. The feathers of his wings were tinged with rose colour; the ends of them were bright red, as though dipped in fresh-spilt scarlet blood. From time to time they quivered rapidly with a sweet silvery sound, the sound of rain in spring.\nThe other was thin, and his skin yellowish. At every breath his ribs could be seen faintly heaving. His hair was fair, thin, and straight; his eyes big, round, pale grey … his glance uneasy and strangely bright. All his features were sharp; the little half-open mouth, with pointed fish-like teeth; the pinched eagle nose, the projecting chin, covered with whitish down. The parched lips never once smiled.\nIt was a well-cut face, but terrible and pitiless! (Though the face of the first, the beautiful youth, sweet and lovely as it was, showed no trace of pity either.) About the head of the second youth were twisted a few broken and empty ears of corn, entwined with faded grass-stalks. A coarse grey cloth girt his loins; the wings behind, a dull dark grey colour, moved slowly and menacingly.\nThe two youths seemed inseparable companions. Each of them leaned upon the other’s shoulder. The soft hand of the first lay like a cluster of grapes upon the bony neck of the second; the slender wrist of the second, with its long delicate fingers, coiled like a snake about the girlish bosom of the first.\nAnd I heard a voice. This is what it said: “Love and Hunger stand before thee--twin brothers, the two foundation-stones of all things living.\nAll that lives moves to get food, and feeds to bring forth young.\nLove and Hunger--their aim is one; that life should cease not, the life of the individual and the life of others--the same universal life.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "two-rich-men": { - "title": "“Two Rich Men”", - "body": "When I hear the praises of the rich man Rothschild, who out of his immense revenues devotes whole thousands to the education of children, the care of the sick, the support of the aged, I admire and am touched.\nBut even while I admire it and am touched by it, I cannot help recalling a poor peasant family who took an orphan niece into their little tumble-down hut.\n“If we take Katka,” said the woman, “our last farthing will go on her, there won’t be enough to get us salt to salt us a bit of bread.”\n“Well, … we’ll do without salt,” answered the peasant, her husband.\nRothschild is a long way behind that peasant!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - } - } - }, - "mark-twain": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mark Twain", - "birth": { - "year": 1835 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "genius": { - "title": "“Genius”", - "body": "Genius, like gold and precious stones,\nis chiefly prized because of its rarity.\n\nGeniuses are people who dash of weird, wild,\nincomprehensible poems with astonishing facility,\nand get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter.\n\nGenius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres\nfar above the vulgar world and fills his soul\nwith regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth.\n\nIt is probably on account of this\nthat people who have genius\ndo not pay their board, as a general thing.\n\nGeniuses are very singular.\n\nIf you see a young man who has frowsy hair\nand distraught look, and affects eccentricity in dress,\nyou may set him down for a genius.\n\nIf he sings about the degeneracy of a world\nwhich courts vulgar opulence\nand neglects brains,\nhe is undoubtedly a genius.\n\nIf he is too proud to accept assistance,\nand spurns it with a lordly air\nat the very same time\nthat he knows he can’t make a living to save his life,\nhe is most certainly a genius.\n\nIf he hangs on and sticks to poetry,\nnotwithstanding sawing wood comes handier to him,\nhe is a true genius.\n\nIf he throws away every opportunity in life\nand crushes the affection and the patience of his friends\nand then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot,\nand finally persists,\nin spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense\nbut not any genius,\npersists in going up some infamous back alley\ndying in rags and dirt,\nhe is beyond all question a genius.\n\nBut above all things,\nto deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse\nand then rush off and get booming drunk,\nis the surest of all the different signs\nof genius.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "katharine-tynan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Katharine Tynan", - "birth": { - "year": 1859 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Tynan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 13 - }, - "poems": { - "the-birds-bargain": { - "title": "“The Birds’ Bargain”", - "body": "“O spare my cherries in the net,”\nBrother Benignus prayed; “and I\nSummer and winter, shine and wet,\nWill pile the blackbirds’ table high.”\n\n“O spare my youngling peas,” he prayed,\n“That for the Abbot’s table be;\nAnd every blackbird shall be fed;\nYea, they shall have their fill,” said he.\n\nHis prayer, his vow, the blackbirds heard,\nAnd spared his shining garden-plot.\nIn abstinence went every bird,\nAll the old thieving ways forgot.\n\nHe kept his promise to his friends,\nAnd daily set them finest fare\nOf corn and meal and manchet-ends,\nWith marrowy bones for winter bare.\n\nBrother Benignus died in grace:\nThe brethren keep his trust, and feed\nThe blackbirds in this pleasant place,\nPurged, as dear heaven, from strife and greed.\n\nThe blackbirds sing the whole year long,\nHere where they keep their promise given,\nAnd do the mellowing fruit no wrong.\nBrother Benignus smiles in heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-children-of-lir": { - "title": "“The Children of Lir”", - "body": "Out upon the sand-dunes thrive the coarse long grasses;\nHerons standing knee-deep in the brackish pool;\nOverhead the sunset fire and flame amasses\nAnd the moon to eastward rises pale and cool.\nRose and green around her, silver-gray and pearly,\nChequered with the black rooks flying home to bed;\nFor, to wake at daybreak, birds must couch them early:\nAnd the day’s a long one since the dawn was red.\n\nOn the chilly lakelet, in that pleasant gloaming,\nSee the sad swans sailing: they shall have no rest:\nNever a voice to greet them save the bittern’s booming\nWhere the ghostly sallows sway against the West.\n“Sister,” saith the gray swan, “Sister, I am weary,”\nTurning to the white swan wet, despairing eyes;\n“O” she saith, “my young one! O” she saith, “my dearie!”\nCasts her wings about him with a storm of cries.\n\nWoe for Lir’s sweet children whom their vile stepmother\nGlamoured with her witch-spells for a thousand years;\nDied their father raving, on his throne another,\nBlind before the end came from the burning tears.\nLong the swans have wandered over lake and river;\nGone is all the glory of the race of Lir:\nGone and long forgotten like a dream of fever:\nBut the swans remember the sweet days that were.\n\nHugh, the black and white swan with the beauteous feathers,\nFiachra, the black swan with the emerald breast,\nConn, the youngest, dearest, sheltered in all weathers,\nHim his snow-white sister loves the tenderest.\nThese her mother gave her as she lay a-dying;\nTo her faithful keeping; faithful hath she been,\nWith her wings spread o’er them when the tempest’s crying,\nAnd her songs so hopeful when the sky’s serene.\n\nOther swans have nests made ’mid the reeds and rushes,\nLined with downy feathers where the cygnets sleep\nDreaming, if a bird dreams, till the daylight blushes,\nThen they sail out swiftly on the current deep.\nWith the proud swan-father, tall, and strong, and stately,\nAnd the mild swan-mother, grave with household cares,\nAll well-born and comely, all rejoicing greatly:\nFull of honest pleasure is a life like theirs.\n\nBut alas! for my swans with the human nature,\nSick with human longings, starved for human ties,\nWith their hearts all human cramped to a bird’s stature.\nAnd the human weeping in the bird’s soft eyes.\nNever shall my swans build nests in some green river,\nNever fly to Southward in the autumn gray,\nRear no tender children, love no mates for ever;\nRobbed alike of bird’s joys and of man’s are they.\n\nBabbles Conn the youngest, “Sister, I remember\nAt my father’s palace how I went in silk,\nAte the juicy deer-flesh roasted from the ember,\nDrank from golden goblets my child’s draught of milk.\nOnce I rode a-hunting, laughed to see the hurry,\nShouted at the ball-play, on the lake did row;\nYou had for your beauty gauds that shone so rarely.”\n“Peace” saith Fionnuala, “that was long ago.”\n\n“Sister,” saith Fiachra, “well do I remember\nHow the flaming torches lit the banquet-hall,\nAnd the fire leapt skyward in the mid-December,\nAnd among the rushes slept our staghounds tall.\nBy our father’s right hand you sat shyly gazing,\nSmiling half and sighing, with your eyes a-glow,\nAs the bards sang loudly all your beauty praising.”\n“Peace,” saith Fionnuala, “that was long ago.”\n\n“Sister,” then saith Hugh “most do I remember\nOne I called my brother, one, earth’s goodliest man,\nStrong as forest oaks are where the wild vines clamber,\nFirst at feast or hunting, in the battle’s van.\nAngus, you were handsome, wise, and true, and tender,\nLoved by every comrade, feared by every foe:\nLow, low, lies your beauty, all forgot your splendour.”\n“Peace,” saith Fionnuala, “that was long ago.”\n\nDews are in the clear air and the roselight paling;\nOver sands and sedges shines the evening star;\nAnd the moon’s disc lonely high in heaven is sailing;\nSilvered all the spear-heads of the rushes are.\nHoused warm are all things as the night grows colder,\nWater-fowl and sky-fowl dreamless in the nest;\nBut the swans go drifting, drooping wing and shoulder\nCleaving the still water where the fishes rest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "easter": { - "title": "“Easter”", - "body": "Bring flowers to strew His way,\nYea, sing, make holiday;\nBid young lambs leap,\nAnd earth laugh after sleep.\n\nFor now He cometh forth\nWinter flies to the north,\nFolds wings and cries\nAmid the bergs and ice.\n\nYea, Death, great Death is dead,\nAnd Life reigns in his stead;\nCometh the Athlete\nNew from dead Death’s defeat.\n\nCometh the Wrestler,\nBut Death he makes no stir,\nUtterly spent and done,\nAnd all his kingdom gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-gardener-sage": { - "title": "“A Gardener-Sage”", - "body": "Here in the garden-bed,\nHoeing the celery,\nWonders the Lord has made\nPass ever before me.\nI see the young birds build,\nAnd swallows come and go,\nAnd summer grow and gild,\nAnd winter die in snow.\n\nMany a thing I note,\nAnd store it in my mind,\nFor all my ragged coat\nThat scarce will stop the wind.\nI light my pipe and draw,\nAnd, leaning on my spade,\nI marvel with much awe\nO’er all the Lord hath made.\n\nNow, here’s a curious thing:\nUpon the first of March\nThe crow goes house-building\nIn the elm and in the larch.\nAnd be it shine or snow,\nThough many winds carouse,\nThat day the artful crow\nBegins to build his house.\n\nBut then--the wonder’s big!\nIf Sunday fell that day,\nNor straw, nor screw, nor twig,\nTill Monday would he lay.\nHis black wings to his side,\nHe’d drone upon his perch,\nSubdued and holy-eyed\nAs though he were in church.\n\nThe crow’s a gentleman\nNot greatly to my mind,\nHe’ll steal what seeds he can,\nAnd all you hide he’ll find.\nYet though he’s bully and sneak,\nTo small birds, bird of prey,\nHe counts the days of the week,\nAnd keeps the Sabbath Day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "day": 1, - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "immortality": { - "title": "“Immortality”", - "body": "So I have sunk my roots in earth\nSince that my pretty boys had birth;\nAnd fear no more the grave and gloom,\nI, with the centuries to come.\n\nAs the tree blossoms so bloom I,\nFlinging wild branches to the sky;\nRenew each year my leafy suit,\nStrike with the years a deeper root.\n\nShelter a thousand birds to be,\nA thousand herds give praise to me;\nAnd in my kind and grateful shade\nHow many a weary head be laid.\n\nI clothe myself without a stain.\nIn me a child is born again,\nA child that looks with innocent eyes\nOn a new world with glad surprise.\n\nThe old mistakes are all undone,\nAll the old sins are purged and gone.\nOld wounds and scars have left no trace,\nThere are no lines in this young face.\n\nTo hear the cuckoo the first time,\nAnd ’mid new roses in the prime\nTo read the poets newly. This,\nYear after year, shall be my bliss.\n\nOf me shall love be born anew;\nI shall be loved and lover too;\nYears after this poor body has died\nShall be the bridegroom and the bride.\n\nOf me shall mothers spring to know\nThe mother’s bliss, the mother’s woe;\nAnd children’s children yet to be\nShall learn their prayers about my knee.\n\nAnd many million lights of home\nShall light for me the time to come.\nUnto me much shall be forgiven,\nI that make many souls for heaven.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-legend-of-st-austin-and-the-child": { - "title": "“The Legend of St. Austin and the Child”", - "body": "St. Austin, going in thought\nAlong the sea-sands gray,\nInto another world was caught,\nAnd Carthage far away.\n\nHe saw the City of God\nHang in the saffron sky;\nAnd this was holy ground he trod,\nWhere mortals come not nigh.\n\nHe saw pale spires aglow,\nHouses of heavenly sheen;\nAll in a world of rose and snow,\nA sea of gold and green.\n\nThere amid Paradise\nThe saint was rapt away\nFrom unillumined sands and skies\nAnd floor of muddy clay.\n\nHis soul took wings and flew,\nForgetting mortal stain,\nUpon the track of that bright crew\nThat homed to heaven again.\n\nForgetting mortal dearth\nIt seized on heavenly things,\nTill it was cast again to earth,\nBecause it had not wings.\n\nBecause the Three in One\nHe could not understand,\nBaffled and beaten and undone,\nHe gazed o’er sea and land.\n\nThen by a little pool\nA lovely child he saw;\nA harmless thing and beautiful,\nAnd yet so full of awe,\n\nThat with a curved sea-shell,\nHeld in his rosy hand,\nHad scooped himself a little well\nWithin the yielding sand.\n\nAnd to and fro went he,\nBetween it and the wave,\nBearing his shell filled with the sea\nTo find a sandy grave.\n\n“What is it that you do,\nYou lovely boy and bold?”\n“I empty out the ocean blue,\nYou man so wise and old!”\n\n“See you how in this cup\nI bind the great sea’s girth!”\n“Ah no, the gray sands suck it up\nYour cup is little worth.”\n\n“Now put your play aside,\nAnd let the ocean be.\nTell me your name, O violet-eyed,\nThat empty out the sea!”\n\n“What lineage high and fine\nIs yours, O kingly boy,\nThat sure art sprung of royal line,\nA people’s hope and joy.”\n\n“Austin, as you have said,\nA crown my Sire doth wear,\nMy mother was a royal maid\nAnd yet went cold and bare.”\n\nHe shook his golden curls,\nA scornful laugh laughed he:\n“The night that I was born, the churls,\nThey would not shelter me.”\n\n“Only the ox and ass,\nThe night that I was born,\nMade me a cradle of the grass\nAnd watched by me till morn.”\n\n“The night that I was born\nThe ass and ox alone,\nBetwixt the midnight and the morn,\nKnelt down upon the stone.”\n\n“The bitter night I came,\nEach star sang in its sphere.\nNow riddle, riddle me my name,\nMy Austin, tried and dear.”\n\nAustin is on his face,\nBefore that vision bright.\n“My Lord, what dost Thou in this place\nWith such a sinful wight?”\n\n“I come not here in wrath,\nBut I come here in love,\nMy Austin, skilled in life and death,\nThy vanity to prove.”\n\n“Mortal, yet over-bold\nTo fly where th’ eagle flies,\nAs soon this cup the sea will hold\nAs thou My Mysteries.”\n\n“Patience a little yet,\nAnd thou shalt be with Me,\nAnd in thy soul’s small cup unmeet\nMyself will pour the sea.”\n\nWhen Austin raised his head\nNo child was there beside,\nBut in the cup the Child had made\nThere swelled the rising tide.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_augustine" - } - } - }, - "of-saint-francis-and-the-ass": { - "title": "“Of Saint Francis and the Ass”", - "body": "Our father, ere he went\nOut with his brother, Death,\nSmiling and well-content\nAs a bridegroom goeth,\nSweetly forgiveness prayed\nFrom man or beast whom he\nHad ever injured\nOr burdened needlessly.\n\n“Verily,” then said he,\n“I crave before I pass\nForgiveness full and free\nOf my little brother, the ass.\nMany a time and oft,\nWhen winds and ways were hot,\nHe hath borne me cool and soft\nAnd service grudged me not.”\n\n“And once did it betide\nThere was, unseen of me,\nA gall upon his side\nThat suffered grievously.\nAnd once his manger was\nEmpty and bare, and brown.\n(Praise God for sweet, dry grass\nThat Bethlehem folk shook down!)”\n\n“Consider, brethern,” said he,\n“Our little brother; how mild,\nHow patient, he will be,\nThough men are fierce and wild.\nHis coat is gray and fine,\nHis eyes are kind with love;\nThis little brother of mine\nIs gentle as the dove.”\n\n“Consider how such an one\nBeheld our Saviour born,\nAnd carried him, full-grown,\nThrough Eastern streets one morn.\nFor this the Cross is laid\nUpon him for a sign.\nGreatly is honourèd\nThis little brother of mine.”\n\nAnd even while he spake,\nDown in his stable stall\nHis little ass ’gan shake\nAnd turned its face to the wall.\nDown fell the heavy tear;\nIts gaze so mournful was,\nFra Leo, standing near,\nPitied the little ass.\n\nThat night our father died,\nAll night the kine did low:\nThe ass went heavy-eyed,\nWith patient tears and slow.\nThe very birds on wings\nMade mournful cries in the air.\nAmen! all living things\nOur father’s brethern were.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "the-old-soldier": { - "title": "“The Old Soldier”", - "body": "Lest the young soldiers be strange in heaven,\nGod bids the old soldier they all adored\nCome to Him and wait for them, clean, new-shriven,\nA happy doorkeeper in the House of the Lord.\n\nLest it abash them, the strange new splendour,\nLest it affright them, the new robes clean;\nHere’s an old face, now, long-tried, and tender,\nA word and a hand-clasp as they troop in.\n\n“My boys,” he greets them: and heaven is homely,\nHe their great captain in days gone o’er;\nDear is the friend’s face, honest and comely,\nWaiting to welcome them by the strange door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "old-song-re-sung": { - "title": "“Old Song Re-Sung”", - "body": "I saw three ships a-sailing,\nA-sailing on the sea,\nThe first her masts were silver,\nHer hull was ivory.\nThe snows came drifting softly,\nAnd lined her white as wool;\nOh, Jesus, Son of Mary,\nThy Cradle beautiful!\n\nI saw three ships a-sailing,\nThe next was red as blood,\nHer decks shone like a ruby,\nEncrimsoned all her wood.\nHer main-mast stood up lonely,\nA lonely Cross and stark.\nOh, Jesus, Son of Mary,\nBring all men to that ark!\n\nI saw three ships a-sailing.\nThe third for cargo bore\nThe souls of men redeemed,\nThat shall be slaves no more.\nThe lost beloved faces,\nI saw them glad and free.\nOh, Jesus, Son of Mary,\nWhen wilt thou come for me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "saint-francis-to-the-birds": { - "title": "“Saint Francis to the Birds”", - "body": "Little sisters, the birds:\nWe must praise God, you and I--\nYou, with songs that fill the sky,\nI, with halting words.\n\nAll things tell His praise,\nWoods and waters thereof sing,\nSummer, Winter, Autumn, Spring,\nAnd the night and days.\n\nYea, and cold and heat,\nAnd the sun and stars and moon,\nSea with her monotonous tune,\nRain and hail and sleet,\n\nAnd the winds of heaven,\nAnd the solemn hills of blue,\nAnd the brown earth and the dew,\nAnd the thunder even,\n\nAnd the flowers’ sweet breath.\nAll things make one glorious voice;\nLife with fleeting pains and joys,\nAnd our brother, Death.\n\nLittle flowers of air,\nWith your feathers soft and sleek,\nAnd your bright brown eyes and meek,\nHe hath made you fair.\n\nHe hath taught to you\nSkill to weave in tree and thatch\nNests where happy mothers hatch\nSpeckled eggs of blue.\n\nAnd hath children given:\nWhen the soft heads overbrim\nThe brown nests, then thank ye Him\nIn the clouds of heaven.\n\nAlso in your lives\nLive His laws Who loveth you.\nHusbands, be ye kind and true;\nBe home-keeping, wives:\n\nLove not gossiping;\nStay at home and keep the nest;\nFly not here and there in quest\nOf the newest thing.\n\nLive as brethren live:\nLove be in each heart and mouth;\nBe not envious, be not wroth,\nBe not slow to give.\n\nWhen ye build the nest,\nQuarrel not o’er straw or wool;\nHe who hath be bountiful\nTo the neediest.\n\nBe not puffed nor vain\nOf your beauty or your worth,\nOf your children or your birth,\nOr the praise ye gain.\n\nEat not greedily:\nSometimes for sweet mercy’s sake,\nWorm or insect spare to take;\nLet it crawl or fly.\n\nSee ye sing not near\nTo our church on holy day,\nLest the human-folk should stray\nFrom their prayers to hear.\n\nNow depart in peace:\nIn God’s name I bless each one;\nMay your days be long i’ the sun\nAnd your joys increase.\n\nAnd remember me,\nYour poor brother Francis, who\nLoves you and gives thanks to you\nFor this courtesy.\n\nSometimes when ye sing,\nName my name, that He may take\nPity for the dear song’s sake\nOn my shortcoming.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "sheep-and-lambs": { - "title": "“Sheep and Lambs”", - "body": "All in the April evening,\nApril airs were abroad;\nThe sheep with their little lambs\nPassed me by on the road.\n\nThe sheep with their little lambs\nPassed me by on the road;\nAll in the April evening\nI thought on the Lamb of God.\n\nThe lambs were weary and crying\nWith a weak, human cry.\nI thought on the Lamb of God\nGoing meekly to die.\n\nUp in the blue, blue mountains\nDewy pastures are sweet;\nRest for the little bodies,\nRest for the little feet.\n\nBut for the Lamb of God,\nUp on the hill-top green,\nOnly a Cross of shame\nTwo stark crosses between.\n\nAll in the April evening,\nApril airs were abroad;\nI saw the sheep with their lambs,\nAnd thought on the Lamb of God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "slow-spring": { - "title": "“Slow Spring”", - "body": "O year, grow slowly. Exquisite, holy,\nThe days go on\nWith almonds showing the pink stars blowing\nAnd birds in the dawn.\n\nGrow slowly, year, like a child that is dear,\nOr a lamb that is mild,\nBy little steps, and by little skips,\nLike a lamb or a child.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-weeping-babe": { - "title": "“The Weeping Babe”", - "body": "She kneels by the cradle\nWhere Jesus doth lie;\nSinging, Lullaby, my Baby!\nBut why dost Thou cry?\n\nThe babes of the village\nSmile sweetly in sleep;\nAnd lullaby, my Baby,\nThat ever dost weep!\n\nI’ve wrapped Thee in linen,\nThe gift of the Kings;\nAnd wool, soft and fleecy,\nThe kind Shepherd brings.\n\nNow smile, little Jesus,\nWhom naught can defile;\nAll gifts will I give Thee\nAn thou wilt but smile.\n\nBut it’s lullaby, my Baby!\nAnd mournful am I,\nThou cherished little Jesus,\nThat still Thou wilt cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - } - } - }, - "fyodor-tyutchev": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Fyodor Tyutchev", - "birth": { - "year": 1803 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1873 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Tyutchev", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 10 - }, - "poems": { - "hes-taken-all-from-me-executioner-god": { - "title": "“He’s taken all from me, executioner God …”", - "body": "He’s taken all from me, executioner God.\nHealth, strength of will, the air, and sleep.\nOnly one thing did he leave me, and that\nIs you, that I may continue to praise him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale", - "date": { - "year": 1873 - } - } - }, - "i-knew-two-eyes": { - "title": "“I knew two eyes …”", - "body": "I knew two eyes--those eyes, oh\nhow I loved them--God knows.\nI couldn’t tear my soul\nfrom their intense, bewitching darkness.\n\nSuch sorrow, such passion showed\nin that deep gaze\nthat laid life bare,\nsuch depth, such sorrow!\n\nSad and self-absorbed it trembled,\nin the deep shadow of her lashes,\nwearied like sensual pleasure,\nand deadly like pain.\n\nAnd in those magic moments\nthere was never a time\nI met it without emotion,\nor admired it without tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "A. S. Kline", - "date": { - "year": 1851 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "lord-send-your-comfort": { - "title": "“Lord, send your comfort …”", - "body": "Lord, send your comfort\nto him who, during summer’s scorching heat,\nlike some poor beggar past a garden,\nalong a hot road drags his weary feet,\n\nwho gazes in passing across a fence\nat the shades of trees, at valleys’ golden grain\nand at the inaccessible coolness\nof softly bright, luxuriant plains.\n\nNot for him have forests woven\na welcome with their boughts and fronds;\nnot for him have fountains scattered\na misty haze above their ponds.\n\nA being made of mist, an azure grotto\ntries vain enticement at his gaze;\nhis head cannot be cooled and freshened\nby the fountain’s dewy haze.\n\nLord, send your blessing\nto him who, trailing through life’s heat,\nlike some poor beggar past a garden,\nalong a dry road drags his blistered feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1850, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "nature-is-a-sphinx": { - "title": "“Nature is a sphinx …”", - "body": "Nature is a sphinx.\nThe truer she kills you\nwith her eternal riddle,\nit’s more than likely,\nfor centuries,\nthe truer she has fooled you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1869, - "month": "august" - }, - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "our-age": { - "title": "“Our Age”", - "body": "Today it’s not the flesh--the spirit is laid bare.\nMan longs in desperation.\nHe strives to leave the darkness for the light,\nprotesting and rebelling once he’s there.\n\nThrough non-belief he’s dry and burned,\nhe tolerates what man should never bear,\naware at every step that he is ruined, not trying\nto attain that faith for which he’s always yearned.\n\nThe door stays closed though he may grieve.\nHe’ll never offer prayers nor tears.\nHe’ll never call, “My God, admit me, for I do have faith!\nCome to my aid, for I cannot believe!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1851 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "sad-night-creeps": { - "title": "“Sad night creeps …”", - "body": "Sad night creeps\nacross an earth beset\nneither by thought nor threat\nbut by joyless, sluggish sleep.\nLightning brightens the scowls,\nwinking intermittently\nlike deaf-mute ghouls\ndebating heatedly.\n\nA sign has been agreed:\nthe sky’s alight. A sudden surge\nsnaps from the murk with sudden speed\nand fields and distant woods emerge.\nThen again they’re under shrouds.\nYou sense it all go darkly still up there,\nand if in camera some high affair\nthey’d ratified above the clouds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1865, - "month": "august", - "day": 18 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 18 - } - } - }, - "separation-has-this-lofty-meaning": { - "title": "“Separation has this lofty meaning …”", - "body": "Separation has this lofty meaning:\nif love lasts years,\nif but a day it takes,\nloveТs just a dream\nand weТre a moment dreaming,\nand whether early, whether late the waking,\nthe time must finally arrive when we awake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1851, - "month": "august", - "day": 6 - }, - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 6 - } - } - }, - "the-twins": { - "title": "“The Twins”", - "body": "There are twins. For the earthborn\nthey are gods, Death and Sleep,\nlike brother and sister wondrously akin,\nDeath’s the gloomier, Sleep is gentler.\n\nBut there are two more twins:\nthere are no finer twins in the world,\nand there’s no fascination more fearsome\nthan he who’s surrendered his heart to them.\n\nThey’re no in-laws. Their union is one of blood,\nand only on days ordained by fate,\nwith their unsolvable mystery\ndo they charm us, enchant, fascinate,\n\nand who, in an excess of sensation,\nwhen blood boils and freezes in his veins,\ncan claim he’s never tasted your temptations,\nSuicide and Love?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1851 - } - } - }, - "we-meet-again": { - "title": "“We meet again …”", - "body": "We meet again, and all the bygone\nIs brightening up my aging soul;\nI summon up the golden time, and\nMy heart is ever so consoled…\n\nLike by the end of autumn, sometimes,\nThere happen days, there is an hour\nWhen, with a sudden breath of springtime,\nA feeling gets the spirit roused,--\n\nSo, fanned all over by the whiff of\nSpiritual fullness of those years,\nDo I look at the dear features,\nAroused by long forgotten bliss…\n\nAnd after age-long separation,\nI look at you, like in a dream,\nAnd ever present intonations\nAre getting more and more distinct…\n\nThis is not only reminiscence,\nIt’s lifeblood, speaking like of old,--\nThere’s former charm in your appearance,\nThere’s former passion in my soul! …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vyacheslav Chetin", - "date": { - "year": 1870, - "month": "july", - "day": 26 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "when-natures-final-hour-strikes": { - "title": "“When nature’s final hour strikes …”", - "body": "When nature’s final hour strikes\nand earthly matter has disintegrated,\nthe visible universe will be flooded.\nIn the waters God’s face will be reflected.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Frank Jude", - "date": { - "year": 1829 - } - } - } - } - }, - "miguel-de-unamuno": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Miguel de Unamuno", - "birth": { - "year": 1864 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Unamuno", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "throw-yourself-like-seed": { - "title": "“Throw Yourself Like Seed”", - "body": "Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;\nSluggish you will never see the wheel of fate\nThat brushes your heel as it turns going by,\nThe man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.\n\nNow you are only giving food to that final pain\nWhich is slowly winding you in the nets of death,\nBut to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts\nIs the work; start there, turn to the work.\n\nThrow yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,\nDon’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,\nAnd do not let the past weigh down your motion.\n\nLeave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,\nFor life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;\nFrom your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - } - } - }, - "louis-untermeyer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louis Untermeyer", - "birth": { - "year": 1885 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1977 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Untermeyer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "the-flaming-circle": { - "title": "“The Flaming Circle”", - "body": "Though for fifteen years you have chaffed me across the table,\nSlept in my arms and fingered my plunging heart,\nI scarcely know you; we have not known each other.\nFor all the fierce and casual contacts, something keeps us apart.\n\nAre you struggling, perhaps, in a world that I see only dimly,\nExcept as it sweeps toward the star on which I stand alone?\nAre we swung like two planets, compelled in our separate orbits,\nYet held in a flaming circle far greater than our own?\n\nLast night we were single, a radiant core of completion,\nSurrounded by flames that embraced us but left no burns,\nTo-day we are only ourselves; we have plans and pretensions;\nWe move in dividing streets with our small and different concerns.\n\nMerging and rending, we wait for the miracle. Meanwhile\nThe fire runs deeper, consuming these selves in its growth.\nCan this be the mystical marriage--this clash and communion;\nThis pain of possession that frees and encircles us both?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-updike": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Updike", - "birth": { - "year": 1932 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2009 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 32 - }, - "poems": { - "61-and-23": { - "title": "“61 and 2/3”", - "body": "How many more, I must ask myself,\nsuch perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?--\nthe schoolgirls giggling in their months-old tans,\n\ntittering of school soon to come as they hang on the curbs\nas brown as maple seeds, the strip of curbside grass\nsunparched in the tired shade beneath the maple\n\nthat in its globular cloud of green cumulus\nholds now an arc, a bulge of rouge,\nheld up to the bored blue sky like a cheek to kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "back-from-vacation": { - "title": "“Back from Vacation”", - "body": "“Back from vacation,” the barber announces,\nor the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.\nThey are amazed to find the workaday world\nstill in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,\ntheir customers having hardly missed them, and\nthere being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,\nthe pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,\nthe nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved\nin foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,\nthe hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.\nBut at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.\nGray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,\nwarm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,\nthe evidence says, though their hearts cry, “Not so!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bridge": { - "title": "“Bridge”", - "body": "In my dreams I am always trying to get to the dummy\nits ledge of superior attack, its long chest of treasure,\nthe diamonds like stubby daggers, the clubs and the spades\nblunt and black maces poised to crush a trick,\nand the hearts, those bifurcated, lethal rubies.\nYet something holds me back, some truth about numbers\ninflexible and invisible, while losers pour\nout from my hand, one after another,\nto meet the derision of our enemies’ trump\nand their face cards--the supercilious queen\nwith her slim arched eyebrow, and the simpleton king,\nhis armless hand like a baby’s on his sword.\nDears, there are gears in the logic of combat,\nand they grind away while we age and chat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "burning-trash": { - "title": "“Burning Trash”", - "body": "At night--the light turned off, the filament\nUnburdened of its atom-eating charge,\nHis wife asleep, her breathing dipping low\nTo touch a swampy source--he thought of death.\nHer father’s hilltop home allowed him time\nTo sense the nothing standing like a sheet\nOf speckless glass behind his human future.\nHe had two comforts he could see, just two.\n\nOne was the cheerful fullness of most things:\nPlump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil\nOffering up pressure to his knees and hands.\nThe other was burning the trash each day.\nHe liked the heat, the imitation danger,\nAnd the way, as he tossed in used-up news,\nString, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,\nHypnotic tongues of order intervened.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "chambered-nautilus": { - "title": "“Chambered Nautilus”", - "body": "How many rooms one occupies to lead\na life!--the child’s small cell, within earshot\nof his parents’ smothered moans; the college room\nassigned by number, a poster-clad outpost\nof freedom; the married man’s bedchamber,\ncramped scene of glad possession and sneaking sorrow;\nthe holiday rental, redolent of salt\nand sun and other people’s cast-off days;\nthe capstone mansion with its curtained pomp;\nthe businessman’s hotel, a one-night stand\nwhose trim twin beds and TV sketch a dream\nof habitation soon forgot; the chill\nguest room; the pricey white hospital space,\nwhere now the moaning has become one’s own.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "claremont-hotel": { - "title": "“Claremont Hotel”", - "body": "_Claremont Hotel, Southwest Harbor, Maine_\n\n_Click. Clack._ Struck-wicket thud. Human ex-\nclamations, mannerly. Such are the sounds\nof croquet, carried by an idle breeze.\nSaltwater, just beyond, is steely blue,\nbedecked by mooring-balls and colored buoys,\nbeneath a sky where tufts of cirrus hang\nlike combings from a pampered, moon-white dog.\nVacationland, all bays and sails and trees.\n\nThe lumbermen who rafted logs downstream,\nthe fishermen whose slickers gleamed through storms,\nas did the struggling silver in their nets,\nimpart, though dead, a hardness to this coast\nwhere, mornings, wickets on their vacant courts\nmake, with their shadows, rhomboidal pairs of wings.\n\nMaine mountains, vestiges of Ap-\npalachians once mightier than Rockies,\nhave balding tops, like men, and crumbling sides\nthat seek to fill the sea with scree and piles\nof giant building blocks for reassembly\nnext aeon. Rocking on the Claremont porch\nin my fortuity and gazing past\nthe croquet court and sail-filled, too-blue bay\n\nand shoreline summer homes to pine-dark slopes\nthat hide their hiking trails, I see a spot,\nbelow the crest, a broad gray bare spot where I\nwould like to be, like very much, so much\na lightning crackle floods my chest with pain:\nthe viewer, like the view, is wearing out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "colonoscopy": { - "title": "“Colonoscopy”", - "body": "Talk about intimacy! I’d almost rather not.\nThe day before, a tussle with nausea\n(DRINK ME: a liter of sickly-sweet liquid)\nand diarrhea, so as to present oneself\npristine as a bride to the groom with his tools,\nhis probe and tiny TV camera\nand honeyed words. He has a tan,\njust back from a deserved vacation\nfrom his accustomed nether regions.\n\nBegowned, recumbent on one’s side,\none views through uprolled eyes the screen whereon\none’s big intestine snakes sedately by,\nits segments marked by tidy annular\nconstruction-seams as in a prefab tunnel\nslapped up by the mayor’s son-in-law.\nA sudden wash of sparkling liquid shines\nin the inserted light, and hairpin turns\nloom far ahead and soon are vaulted past\nimpalpably; we float, we fall, we veer\nin these soft, pliant passages spelunked\nby everything one eats.\n\n Then all goes dark,\nas God intended it whenever He\nsealed shut in Adam’s abdomen\nlife’s slimy, twisting, smelly miracle.\nThe bridegroom’s voice, below the edge of sight\nlike buried treasure, announces,\n“Perfect. Not a polyp. See you in\nfive years.” Five years? The funhouse may have folded.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dogs-death": { - "title": "“Dog’s Death”", - "body": "She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.\nToo young to know much, she was beginning to learn\nTo use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor\nAnd to win, wetting there, the words, ‘Good dog! Good dog!’\n\nWe thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.\nThe autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.\nAs we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin\nAnd her heart was learning to lie down forever.\n\nMonday morning, as the children were noisily fed\nAnd sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.\nWe found her twisted and limp but still alive.\nIn the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried\n\nTo bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur\nAnd my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.\nThough surrounded by love that would have upheld her,\nNevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.\n\nBack home, we found that in the night her frame,\nDrawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame\nOf diarrhea and had dragged across the floor\nTo a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "monday" - } - } - }, - "down-time": { - "title": "“Down Time”", - "body": "Waiting for Tom, the boy who can fix my computer if anybody can,\nI observe how the minutes, emptied of content,\nooze past like transparent microörganisms\nin magnification’s slow motion. I have the time\nat last to consider my life, this its stubby stale end--\nwhither, and wherefore, and who says?\nBut I fail to. I look out the window again.\nA wisp from the woods announces that my neighbor is burning brush.\nWind tugs the rising plume this way and that,\na signifier that doesn’t know its mind.\nMy desktop is cluttered, but what\ncan be discarded utterly with certainty\nof its not coming back to haunt us from the kingdom of the lost?\nMy wife no longer acts like a mistress,\nbut surely I am too frail to seek a mistress;\n_passé_ the pink salmon’s slick effortful flipping\nup the icy, carbonated cataracts.\nIs there anything to write about but human sadness?\nEven if there were, I couldn’t write it today.\nMy neighbor’s smoke has stopped rising; his fire, too, is down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ex-basketball-player": { - "title": "“Ex-Basketball Player”", - "body": "Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,\nBends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off\nBefore it has a chance to go two blocks,\nAt Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage\nIs on the corner facing west, and there,\nMost days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.\n\nFlick stands tall among the idiot pumps--\nFive on a side, the old bubble-head style,\nTheir rubber elbows hanging loose and low.\nOne’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes\nAn E and O. And one is squat, without\nA head at all--more of a football type.\n\nOnce Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.\nHe was good: in fact, the best. In ’46\nHe bucketed three hundred ninety points,\nA county record still. The ball loved Flick.\nI saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty\nIn one home game. His hands were like wild birds.\n\nHe never learned a trade, he just sells gas,\nChecks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,\nAs a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,\nBut most of us remember anyway.\nHis hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.\nIt makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.\n\nOff work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.\nGrease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,\nSmokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.\nFlick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods\nBeyond her face toward bright applauding tiers\nOf Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flight-to-limbo": { - "title": "“Flight to Limbo”", - "body": "The line didn’t move, though there were not\nmany people in it. In a half-hearted light\nthe lone agent dealt patiently, noiselessly, endlessly\nwith a large dazed family ranging\nfrom twin toddlers in strollers to an old lady\nin a bent wheelchair. Their baggage\nwas all in cardboard boxes. The plane was delayed,\nthe rumor went through the line. We shrugged,\nin our hopeless overcoats. Aviation\nhad never seemed a very natural idea.\n\nBored children floated with faces drained of blood.\nThe girls in the tax-free shops stood frozen\namid promises of a beautiful life abroad.\nLouis Armstrong sang in some upper corner,\na trickle of ignored joy.\nOutside, in an unintelligible darkness\nthat stretched to include the rubies of strip malls,\nwinged behemoths prowled looking for the gates\nwhere they could bury their koala-bear noses\nand suck our dimming dynamos dry.\n\nBoys in floppy sweatshirts and backward hats\nslapped their feet ostentatiously\nwhile security attendants giggled\nand the voice of a misplaced angel melodiously\nparroted FAA regulations. Women in saris\nand kimonos dragged, as their penance, behind them\ntoddlers clutching Occidental teddy bears,\nand chair legs screeched in the food court\nwhile ill-paid wraiths mopped circles of night\ninto the motionless floor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hoeing": { - "title": "“Hoeing”", - "body": "I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived\nof the pleasures of hoeing;\nthere is no knowing\nhow many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.\n\nThe dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing\nmoist-dark loam--\nthe pea-root’s home,\na fertile wound perpetually healing.\n\nHow neatly the green weeds go under!\nThe blade chops the earth new.\nIgnorant the wise boy who\nhas never rendered thus the world fecunder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-extremis": { - "title": "“In Extremis”", - "body": "I saw my toes the other day.\nI hadn’t looked at them for months.\nIndeed, they might have passed away.\nAnd yet they were my best friends once.\nWhen I was small, I knew them well.\nI counted on them up to ten\nAnd put them in my mouth to tell\nThe larger from the lesser. Then\nI loved them better than my ears,\nMy elbows, adenoids, and heart.\nBut with the swelling of the years\nWe drifted, toes and I, apart.\nNow, gnarled and pale, each said, j’accuse!--\nI hid them quickly in my shoes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "january": { - "title": "“January”", - "body": "The days are short,\nThe sun a spark,\nHung thin between\nThe dark and dark.\n\nFat snowy footsteps\nTrack the floor.\nMilk bottles burst\nOutside the door.\n\nThe river is\nA frozen place\nHeld still beneath\nThe trees of lace.\n\nThe sky is low.\nThe wind is gray.\nThe radiator\nPurrs all day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "not-cancelled-yet": { - "title": "“Not Cancelled Yet”", - "body": "Some honorary day\nif I play my remaining cards right\nI might be a postage stamp\nbut I won’t be there to lick me\nand licking was what I liked,\nin tasty anticipation of\nthe long dark slither from the mailbox,\nfrom box to pouch to hand\nto bag to box to slot to hand:\nthat box is best\nwhose lid slams open as well as shut,\nadmitting a parcel of daylight,\nthe green top of a tree,\nand a flickering of fingers, letting go.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-road": { - "title": "“On the Road”", - "body": "Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors\nwhile gnawing at a Dunkin’ Donuts cruller,\nthose hotel rooms where the TV remote\nwaits by the bed like a suicide pistol,\nthose hours in the air amid white shirts\nwhose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,\nthose breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts--\nsuch venues of transit grow dearer than home.\n\nThe tricycle in the hall, the wife’s hasty kiss,\nthe dripping faucet and uncut lawn--this is life?\nNo, _vita_ thrives via the road, in the laptop\nwhose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen’s mirror,\nin the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,\nand in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide\ndown through the cloud cover to a single runway\nat whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "one-tough-keratosis": { - "title": "“One Tough Keratosis”", - "body": "My hands have had their fun, and now must suffer.\nA wealth of sun, especially on the right,\nungolf-gloved hand, pays dividends of damage:\nwhite horny spots, pre-cancerous, that grow\nuntil the squinting dermatologist\nhits back by spraying liquid nitrogen,\nwhich stings like a persistent, icy bee.\n\nOne spot especially fascinated me--\na trapezoidal chip of cells gone wrong\nbetween my wrist and thumb, in vexing view\nwhenever I wrote or gestured. Blasted, it\nsat up on a red blister, then a scab.\nHow hideous! Obsessing helplessly,\nI couldn’t stop my wishing it away,\n\nand yet it clung, a staring strange bull’s-eye\nboth part of me and not, like consciousness\nor an immortal, ugly soul. I touched\nit morning, noon, and night, a talisman\nof human imperfection and self-hate.\nThe dermatologist had botched his job,\nI feared. Only death would unmar me. Then\n\nit fell off in a New York taxicab.\nI brushed it lightly, settling back, and felt\na kind of tiny birth-pang near my thumb.\nRelease! Pinched fingers held a piece of flesh\nno longer me--so small and dry and meek\nI wondered how the thing had held, so long\nand fiercely, my attention. Fighting down\n\nan urge to slip it in my jacket pocket\nto save among my other souvenirs,\nor else to pop it in my mouth, to give\nthose cells another chance, I dropped it to\nthe dirty taxi floor, to join Manhattan’s\nunfathomable trafficking of dust.\nA tidy rosy trace has still to heal.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "penumbrae": { - "title": "“Penumbrae”", - "body": "The shadows have their seasons, too.\nThe feathery web the budding maples\ncast down upon the sullen lawn\n\nbears but a faint relation to\nhigh summer’s umbrageous weight\nand tunnellike continuum--\n\nblack leached from green, deep pools\nwherein a globe of gnats revolves\nas airy as an astrolabe.\n\nThe thinning shade of autumn is\nan inherited Oriental,\nred worn to pink, nap worn to thread.\n\nShadows on snow look blue. The skier,\nexultant at the summit, sees his poles\nelongate toward the valley: thus\n\neach blade of grass projects another\nopposite the sun, and in marshes\nthe mesh is infinite,\n\nas the winged eclipse an eagle in flight\ndrags across the desert floor\nis infinitesimal.\n\nAnd shadows on water!--\nthe beech bough bent to the speckled lake\nwhere silt motes flicker gold,\n\nor the steel dock underslung\nwith a submarine that trembles,\nits ladder stiffened by air.\n\nAnd loveliest, because least looked-for,\ngray on gray, the stripes\nthe pearl-white winter sun\n\nhung low beneath the leafless wood\ndraws out from trunk to trunk across the road\nlike a stairway that does not rise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "perfection-wasted": { - "title": "“Perfection Wasted”", - "body": "And another regrettable thing about death\nis the ceasing of your own brand of magic,\nwhich took a whole life to develop and market--\nthe quips, the witticisms, the slant\nadjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest\nthe lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched\nin the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,\ntheir tears confused with their diamond earrings,\ntheir warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,\ntheir response and your performance twinned.\nThe jokes over the phone. The memories packed\nin the rapid-access file. The whole act.\nWho will do it again? That’s it: no one;\nimitators and descendants aren’t the same.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "planting-trees": { - "title": "“Planting Trees”", - "body": "Our last connection with the mythic.\nMy mother remembers the day as a girl\nshe jumped across a little spruce\nthat now overtops the sandstone house\nwhere still she lives; her face delights\nat the thought of her years translated\ninto wood so tall, into so mighty\na peer of the birds and the wind.\n\nToo, the old farmer still stout of step\ntreads through the orchard he has outlasted\nbut for some hollow-trunked much-lopped\napples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood\nplanted to mark my birth flowers each April,\na soundless explosion. We tell its story\ntime after time: the drizzling day,\nthe fragile sapling that had to be staked.\n\nAt the back of our acre here, my wife and I,\nfreshly moved in, freshly together,\ntransplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door\ngloomily, green gnomes a meter high.\nOne died, gray as sagebrush next spring.\nThe other lives on and some day will dominate\nthis view no longer mine, its great\nlazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,\nits tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.\nThen may I return, an old man, a trespasser,\nand remember and marvel to see\nour small deed, that hurried day,\nso amplified, like a story through layers of air\ntold over and over, spreading.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "pura-vida": { - "title": "“Pura Vida”", - "body": "Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.\nSmall, recurrent events become the daily news--\nthe white-nosed coati treading the cecropia’s\nbending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,\nthe scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark\nin the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves\nperforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,\nthe black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.\n\nWhat does the world’s wide brimming mean, with hunger\nthe unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?\n_Con mucho gusto_--the muchness extends to the stars,\nas wet and numerous as larvae underground\nwhere the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,\nand the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs\nin the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,\nfrom England’s chill classrooms and Tuscany’s paved hills.\n\nFor thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,\nknit of the moment’s headlines and temperate-zone quips,\nviable in the debris of our rotting educations,\nthat thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes\necosystematically. Great God Himself\nwilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,\na new language in its grimacing opacity.\nThe brain’s dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "relatives": { - "title": "“Relatives”", - "body": "Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:\nthose turkey dinners, those holidays with\nthe air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,\nand Aunt Lil’s tablecloth stained by her girlhood’s gravy.\nA doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from\nyour uncles’ collected eyes; their very jokes\ncreak with genetic sorrow, a strain\nof common heritage that hurts the gut.\n\nSheer boredom and fascination! A spidering\nof chromosomes webs even the infants in\nand holds us fast around the spread\nof rotting food, of too-sweet pie.\nThe cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;\nto love one’s self is to love them all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "a-rescue": { - "title": "“A Rescue”", - "body": "I wrote some words today that will see print.\nMaybe they will last “forever”--\nthat is, more than ten years, in that\nsomeone will read them, their ink making\na light scratch on his mind, or hers.\nI think back with greater satisfaction\nupon a yellow bird--a goldfinch?--\nthat had flown into our potting shed\nand could not get out,\nbattering its wings unintelligently\nupon the dusty panes of the never-opened windows.\nWithout much reflection, for once, I stepped\nto where its panicked heart\nwas making commotion, the flared wings drumming,\nand with clumsy soft hands\npinned it against a pane,\nheld cupped this agitated essence of the air,\nand through the open door released it,\nlike a self-flung ball,\nto all that lovely perishing outdoors.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "returning-native": { - "title": "“Returning Native”", - "body": "What can you say about Pennsylvania\nin regard to New England except that\nit is slightly less cold, and less rocky,\nor rather that the rocks are different?\nRedder, and gritty, and piled up here and there,\nwhether as glacial moraine or collapsed springhouse\nis not easy to tell, so quickly\nare human efforts bundled back into nature.\n\nIn fall, the trees turn yellower--\nhard maple, hickory, and oak\ngive way to tulip poplar, black walnut,\nand locust. The woods are overgrown\nwith wild-grape vines, and with greenbrier\nspreading its low net of anxious small claws.\nIn warm November, the mulching forest floor\nsmells like a rotting animal.\n\nA genial pulpiness, in short: the sky\nis soft with haze and paper-gray\neven as the sun shines, and the rain\nfalls soft on the shoulders of farmers\nwhile the children keep on playing,\ntheir heads of hair beaded like spider webs.\nA deep-dyed blur softens the bleak cities\nwhose people palaver in prolonged vowels.\n\nThere is a secret here, some death-defying joke\nthe eyes, the knuckles, the bellies imply--\na suet of consolation fetched straight\nfrom the slaughterhouse and hung out\nfor chickadees to peck in the lee of the spruce,\nwhere the husks of sunflower seeds\nand the peace-signs of bird feet crowd\nthe snow that barely masks the still-green grass.\n\nI knew that secret once, and have forgotten.\nThe death-defying secret--it rises\ntoward me like a dog’s gaze, loving\nbut bewildered. When winter sits cold and black\non Boston’s granite hills, in Philly,\nslumped between its two polluted rivers,\nwarmth’s shadow leans close to the wall\nand gets the cement to deliver a kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "saying-goodbye-to-very-young-children": { - "title": "“Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children”", - "body": "They will not be the same next time. The sayings\nso cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.\nTheir eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in\nthe more securely to the worldly buzz\nof television, alphabet, and street talk,\nculture polluting their gazes’ dawn blue.\nIt makes you see at last the value of\nthose boring aunts and neighbors (their smells\nof summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces\nlike shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)\nwho knew you from the start, when you were zero,\ncooing their nothings before you could be bored\nor knew a name, not even you own, or how\nthis world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "seven-stanzas-at-easter": { - "title": "“Seven Stanzas at Easter”", - "body": "Make no mistake: if He rose at all\nit was as His body;\nif the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules\nreknit, the amino acids rekindle,\nthe Church will fall.\n\nIt was not as the flowers,\neach soft Spring recurrent;\nit was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled\neyes of the eleven apostles;\nit was as His flesh: ours.\n\nThe same hinged thumbs and toes,\nthe same valved heart\nthat-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then\nregathered out of enduring Might\nnew strength to enclose.\n\nLet us not mock God with metaphor,\nanalogy, sidestepping, transcendence;\nmaking of the event a parable, a sign painted in the\nfaded credulity of earlier ages:\nlet us walk through the door.\n\nThe stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,\nnot a stone in a story,\nbut the vast rock of materiality that in the slow\ngrinding of time will eclipse for each of us\nthe wide light of day.\n\nAnd if we will have an angel at the tomb,\nmake it a real angel,\nweighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,\nopaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen\nspun on a definite loom.\n\nLet us not seek to make it less monstrous,\nfor our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,\nlest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are\nembarrassed by the miracle,\nand crushed by remonstrance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "subtropical-night": { - "title": "“Subtropical Night”", - "body": "Orion is upstanding overhead\nand Venus does a dance of slow recession\nwith a thin new moon balanced on its back--\nArtemis’s bow, aimed straight down.\nThe palms don’t deign to rustle in the dark,\nthat dark which falls with an intemperate speed\nand seems a shade of silver-green wherein\nthe oleander blooms burn black, like coals\n\nSo flat, this Florida has sidewalks that\nseem made for wheelchairs and for shuffling steps\ntoo old and slow to wear away concrete.\nThe starlight walks upon the dimpled Gulf,\nthe banyans widen sideways while we watch\na Cadillac prowls by, in search of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "to-two-of-my-characters": { - "title": "“To Two of My Characters”", - "body": "Emily, as I entered a real greenhouse,\nI feared I failed to do you justice, to see\nwith Teddy’s eyes, to smell as he would have\nthe cyclamens, the mums, the pithy tilth\nand near-obscene sweet richness of it all,\nwhich he ascribed to you, despite\nyour gimpy leg and spiky manner--\nyou were his hothouse houri, dizzying.\n\nAnd Essie, did I make it clear enough\njust how your face combined the Wilmot cool\nprecision, the clean Presbyterian cut,\nhellbent on election, with the something\nsoft your mother brought to the blend, the petals\nof her willing to unfold at a touch?\nI wanted you to be beautiful, the both of you,\nand, here among real flowers, fear I failed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tools": { - "title": "“Tools”", - "body": "Tell me, how do the manufacturers of tools\nturn a profit? I have used the same clawed hammer\nfor forty years. The screwdriver misted with rust\nonce slipped into my young hand, a new householder’s.\nTools wait obliviously to be used: the pliers,\nnotched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench\nwith its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough\nto take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit\nstill fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought;\nthe tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk;\nthe carpenter’s angle, still absolutely right though I\nhave strayed; the wooden bubble level from my father’s\nmeagre horde. Their stubborn shapes pervade the cellar,\nenduring with a thrift that shames our wastrel lives.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tossing-and-turning": { - "title": "“Tossing and Turning”", - "body": "The spirit has infinite facets, but the body\nconfiningly few sides.\n\nThere is the left,\nthe right, the back, the belly, and tempting\nin-betweens, northeasts and northwests,\nthat tip the heart and soon pinch circulation\nin one or another arm.\n\nYet we turn each time\nwith fresh hope, believing that sleep\nwill visit us here, descending like an angel\ndown the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,\ntilted toward that unreachable star\nhung in the night between our eyebrows, whence\ndreams and good luck flow.\n\nUncross\nyour ankles. Unclench your philosophy.\nThis bed was invented by others; know we go\nto sleep less to rest than to participate\nin the twists of another world.\nThis churning is our journey.\n\nIt ends,\ncan only end, around a corner\nwe do not know\nwe are turning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "venetian-candy": { - "title": "“Venetian Candy”", - "body": "How long will our bewildered heirs\nmarooned in possessions not theirs\npuzzle at disposing of these three\ncunning feignings of hard candy in glass--\nthe striped little pillowlike mock-sweets,\nthe flared end-twists as of transparent paper?\n\nNo clue will be attached, no trace\nof the sunny day of their purchase,\nat a glittering shop a few doors\nup from Harry’s Bar, a disappointing place\nfor all its testaments from Hemingway.\nThe Grand Canal was also aglitter\nwhile the lesser canals lay in the shade\nlike snakes, flicking wet tongues\nand gliding to green rendezvous.\n\nThe immaculate salesgirl, in her aloof\nItalian succulence, sized us up,\na middle-aged American couple,\nas unserious shoppers who,\nstill half jet-lagged, would cling to their lire\nin the face of any enchanted vase\nor ethereal wineglass that might shatter\nin the luggage going home.\n\nYet we wanted something, something small …\nThis? No … How much is ten thousand? Dizzy,\nat last we decided. She wrapped\nthe three glass candies, the cheapest\nitems in the shop, with a showy care\nworthy of crown jewels--tissue,\ntape, and tissue again sprang up\nbeneath her blood-red fingernails,\nplus a jack-in-the-box-shaped paper bag\nadorned with harlequin lozenges, sad\nthough she surely was, on her feet waiting\nall day for a wild rich Arab, a compulsive Japanese.\n_Grazie, signor … grazie, signora … ciao._\n\nNor will our thing-weary heirs decipher\nthe little repair, the reattached triangle\nof glass from the paper-imitating end-twist,\nits mending a labor of love in the cellar,\nby winter light, by the man of the house,\nmixing transparent epoxy and rigging\na clever small clamp as if to keep\nintact the time that we, alive,\nhad spent in the feathery bed\nat the Europa e Regina.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vero-beach-birthday": { - "title": "“Vero Beach Birthday”", - "body": "Three score three years ago, a thousand miles\nnorth of this strand, a bundle of innards\nand outward signifiers was conjured from\nthe reluctant loins of a Pennsylvania lass\nwith literary aspirations. It took\nforceps to get me out, but once out, I\nresolved to have what fun there was--candy,\nthe comic strips, the opposite sex, and golf.\n\nNow here among retired CEOs\ndeposited in walled communities\nwhose seven-figure pastel domiciles\nbespeak funereal discipline--a wealth\nof wasps preserved in money’s sparkling amber.\nthe forceps tug me one notch further out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "cesar-vallejo": { - "metadata": { - "name": "César Vallejo", - "birth": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "peruvian", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇵🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/César_Vallejo", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "peruvian" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "and-if-after-so-many-words": { - "title": "“And if after so many words …”", - "body": "And if after so many words,\nthe word doesn’t survive!\nIf after the wings of birds,\nthe standing bird doesn’t survive!\nIt would be better, honestly,\nto consume everything and be done with it!\n\nTo have been born in order to live off our death!\nTo lift ourselves up by our own disasters\nfrom the sky to the earth,\nwatching for the right moment to blot out\nour darkness with our shadow!\nIt would be better, frankly,\nto consume everything and to hell with it!\n\nAnd if after so much history, we succumb\nnot to eternity\nbut to these simple things,\nlike sitting at home or settling in to think!\nAnd if we then discovered\nall of a sudden that we’re living--to judge\nby the height of the stars--off a comb\nand the stains on a handkerchief!\nIt would be better, honestly,\nto consume everything, of course!\n\nThey’ll say that we have\nin one eye a lot of grief\nand in the other eye, too, a lot of grief\nand in both, wherever they look, a lot of grief …\nSo … _It’s clear!_ So … _Not a word!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Dave Bonta" - } - }, - "the-big-people": { - "title": "“The Big People”", - "body": "What time are the big people\ngoing to come back?\nBlind Santiago is striking six\nand already it’s very dark.\n\nMother said that she wouldn’t be delayed\n\nAguedita, Nativa, Miguel,\nbe careful of going over there, where\ndoubled-up griefs whimpering their memories\nhave just gone\ntoward the quiet poultry-yard, where\nthe hens are still getting settled,\nwho have been startled so much.\n\nWe’d better just stay here.\nMother said that she wouldn’t be delayed.\n\nAnd we shouldn’t be sad. Let’s go see\nthe boats--mine is prettier than anybody’s!--\nwe were playing with them the whole blessed day,\nwithout fighting among ourselves, as it should be:\nthey stayed behind in the puddle, all ready,\nloaded with pleasant things for tomorrow.\n\nLet’s wait like this, obedient\nand helpless, for the homecoming, the apologies\nof the big people, who are always the first\nto abandon the rest of us in the house--\nas if we couldn’t get away too!\n\nAguedita, Nativa, Miguel?\nI am calling, I am feeling around for you in the darkness.\nDon’t leave me behind by myself,\nto be locked in all alone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-black-cup": { - "title": "“The Black Cup”", - "body": "The night is a cup of evil. A sharp whistle\nOf the watchman cuts through it, as a vibrant blade.\nListen, you little woman, if you’ve gone,\nWhy is the wave still black and still sets me afire?\n\nThe Earth has edges of a coffin in the darkness.\nListen, you little woman, don’t come back.\n\nMy flesh swims, swims\nIn the cup of darkness that still hurts me;\nMy flesh swims in it,\nAs in the marshy heart of a woman.\n\nStarry coal … I have felt\nDry rocks of clay\nFall over my diaphanous lotus.\nAh, woman! Through you the flesh\nMade of instinct exists. Ah, woman!\n\nFor this oh, black cup! even when you’ve gone\nI choke in the dust;\nAnd my thirst paws in my flesh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays" - } - }, - "the-black-messengers": { - "title": "“The Black Messengers”", - "body": "In life there are blows so heavy. “I don’t know.”\nBlows like God’s hatred; as if before them\nThe undertow of all that is suffered\nShould be dammed up in the soul. “I don’t know.”\n\nThere are few; but they exist. Dark chasms\nOpen in the boldest face and in the strongest back.\nPerhaps they shall be the steeds of barbaric Attilas\nOr the black messengers that death sends us.\n\nThey are the profound backslidings of Christs of the soul\nFrom an adored faith, blasphemed by destiny.\nThese bloody blows are the cracklings\nOf some bread that we have burned in the door of the oven.\n\nAnd man. Wretch! Wretch! He turns his eyes,\nAs if behind our backs a clap of hands summons us;\nHe turns mad eyes and all that has been lived\nIs dammed up like a puddle of blame in his look.\n\nIn life there are blows so heavy. “I don’t know.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays" - } - }, - "black-stone-on-top-of-a-white-stone": { - "title": "“Black Stone on Top of a White Stone”", - "body": "I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,\nOn a day I already remember.\nI shall die in Paris--it does not bother me--\nDoubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.\n\nIt shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday\nAs I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders\nTo the evil. Never like today have I turned,\nAnd headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.\n\nCésar Vallejo is dead. They struck him,\nAll of them, though he did nothing to them,\nThey hit him hard with a stick and hard also\nWith the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,\nThe shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain, and the roads …", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "weekday": "thursday", - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "it-was-sunday-in-the-clear-ears-of-my-ass": { - "title": "“It was Sunday in the clear ears of my ass …”", - "body": "It was Sunday in the clear ears of my ass,\nOf my Peruvian ass in Peru (pardon the sadness)\nMore than ever today is it eleven in my personal experience\nExperience of a single eye, nailed in the middle of the breast.\nOf a single asininity, nailed in the middle of my breast,\nOf a single hecatomb nailed in the middle of my breast.\n\nSo I see the portraits of the summits of my country\n(Rich in asses, sons of asses, a bowing acquaintance with their parents),\nWhile they turned now already painted with belief.\nHorizontal summits of my griefs.\n\nIn his statue, like a sword,\nVoltaire folds his cape and looks at the pediment,\nBut the sun enters me and frightens a growing number\nOf inorganic bodies from my incisors.\n\nAnd then I dream seventeen\nIn a greenish stone.\nCraggy numeral I have forgotten,\nSound of years in the needle noise of my arm,\nRain and sun in Europe and the way I cough! 1 live!\nHow my hair hurts me perceiving the weekly centuries!\nAnd how my microbe cycle,\nI mean my tremulous, patriotic haircomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "masses": { - "title": "“Masses”", - "body": "When the battle was over,\nAnd the fighter was dead, a man came toward him\nAnd said to him: “Do not die; I love you so!”\nBut the corpse, how sad! went on dying.\n\nAnd two came near, and repeated it.\n“Do not leave us! Courage! Return to life!”\nBut the corpse, how sad! went on dying.\n\nTwenty arrived, a hundred, a thousand, five hundred thousand,\nShouting: “So much love, and it can do nothing against death!”\nBut the corpse, how sad! went on dying.\n\nMillions of persons stood around him,\nAll with the same request: “Stay here, brother!”\nBut the corpse, how sad! went on dying.\n\nThen all the men on the earth\nStood around him; the corpse looked at them sadly, deeply moved;\nHe sat up slowly,\nPut his arms around the furst man; started to walk …", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "miguel": { - "title": "“Miguel”", - "body": "I’m sitting here on the old patio\nbeside your absence. It is a black well.\nWe’d be playing, now … I can hear Mama yell\n“Boys! Calm down!” We’d laugh, and off I’d go\nto hide where you’d never look … under the stairs,\nin the hall, the attic … Then you’d do the same.\nMiguel, we were too good at that game.\nEverything would always end in tears.\n\nNo one was laughing on that August night\nyou went to hide away again, so late\nit was almost dawn. But now your brother’s through\nwith this hunting and hunting and never finding you.\nThe shadows crowd him. Miguel, will you hurry\nand show yourself? Mama will only worry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "our-daily-bread": { - "title": "“Our Daily Bread”", - "body": "_(for Alejandro Gamboa)_\n\nBreakfast is drunk … Moist earth\nOf the cemetery smells of the beloved blood.\nWinter city … The biting crossing\nOf a cart that appears to drag down\nAn emotion of fasting in chains!\n\nI want to knock on all doors.\nAnd ask for I don’t know whom; and then\nTo see the poor, and, weeping silences,\nTo give fragments of fresh bread to everyone.\nTo sack the vineyards of the rich\nWith two sacred hands\nThat a blaze of light\nSet flying loose from the nails of the Cross!\n\nMorning eyelids, don’t open!\nGive us our daily bread,\nLord …!\n\nAll my bones are strangers;\nPerhaps I stole them!\nI come to give myself what was perhaps\nAssigned to someone else;\nAnd I think that, if I had not been born,\nSome other poor fellow would be drinking this coffee!\nI am an evil thief … Where shall I go?\n\nIn this cold time in which the earth\nTranscends human dust and is so sad,\nI want to knock on every door.\nAnd beg pardon of I don’t know whom.\nAnd make them slices of fresh bread\nHere, in the oven of my heart …!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "paris": { - "title": "“Paris”", - "body": "From all of this I am the only one who leaves.\nFrom this bench I go away, from my pants,\nfrom my great situation, from my actions,\nfrom my number split side to side,\nfrom all of this I am the only one who leaves.\n\nFrom the Champs Elysées or as the strange\nalley of the Moon makes a turn,\nmy death goes away, my cradle leaves,\nand, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,\nmy human resemblance turns around\nand dispatches its shadows one by one.\n\nAnd I move away from everything, since everything\nremains to create my alibi:\nmy shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud\nand even the bend in the elbow\nof my own buttoned shirt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "poem-to-be-read-and-sung": { - "title": "“Poem To Be Read And Sung”", - "body": "I know there is a person\nWho looks for me day and night inside her hand,\nand coming upon me, every minute, in her shoes.\nDoesn’t she know that the night is buried\nwith spurs behind the kitchen?\n\nI know there is someone composed of my pieces,\nwhom I complete when my waist goes\ngalloping in her precise little stone.\nDoesn’t she know that money once out for her likeness\nnever returns to her trunk?\n\nI know the day,\nbut the sun has escaped from me;\nI know the universal act she performed in her bed\nwith some other woman’s bravery and warm water,\nwhose shallow recurrence is a mine.\nIs it possible this being is so small\neven her own feet walk on her that way?\n\nA cat is the border between us two,\nright there beside her bowl of water.\nI see her on the corners, her dress--once\nan inquiring palm tree--opens and closes …\nWhat can she do but change her style weeping?\n\nBut she does look and look for me. This is a real story!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "Robert Bly" - } - }, - "today-i-like-life-much-less": { - "title": "“Today I like life much less …”", - "body": "Today I like life much less,\nBut I always enjoy living: I used to say so.\nI almost touched the part of my everything and restrained myself\nWith a pull at my tongue behind every word.\n\nToday I feel my chin as I hold it in\nAnd in these momentary trousers I say to myself:\nSo much life and never!\nSo many years and always my weeks!\nMy ancestors buried with their stone\nAnd their sad last breath that still isn’t over;\nBrothers upright in body, my brothers,\nAnd, finally, my stationary being and in a waistcoat.\n\nI enjoy life enormously\nBut immediately\nWith my beloved death and my coffee\nAnd seeing the leafy chestnuts of Paris\nAnd saying:\nThat is an eye, this is a forehead … and repeating\nSo much life and the tune never fails me!\nSo many years and always, always, always!\n\nI said waistcoat, I said\nEverything, part, anxiety, I said almost to keep from weeping.\nFor it is true that I suffered in the hospital over there\nAnd it is good and bad to have looked\nMy organism up and down.\n\nI always used to enjoy living, even though it were of the belly\nBecause as I have been saying and I repeat it,\nSo much life and never! And so many years,\nAnd always, much always, always, always!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays" - } - }, - "from-trilce": { - "title": "From “Trilce”", - "body": "# XVIII.\n\nOh, the four walls of the cell!\nAh, the four whitening walls\nWhich never fail to add up to the same number!\n\nSeedbeds of nerves, evil aperture.\nHow it snatches from its four corners\nAt the daily chained extremities!\n\nKind turnkey of innumerable keys,\nIf you were here, if you could see\nTill what hour these walls remain four,\nWe should both be against them, we two,\nMore two than ever. And neither should you weep.\nSpeak, O liberator!\n\nAh, the walls of the cell!\nMeanwhile I am hurt all the more\nBy the two long ones which, this night, possess\nSomething of mothers already dead,\nEach leading a child by the hand\nDown bromine steps.\n\nAnd I am left alone,\nThe right hand upraised, which serves for both,\nSeeking the third arm\nWhich, between my where and my when.\nMust look for man’s powerless superiority.\n\n\nLVI.\n\nEvery day I blindly get up at dawn\nTo work for my living; and I eat breakfast\nWithout tasting a morsel of it every morning.\nWithout knowing if I have achieved, or never,\nSomething that leaps out of the flavour,\nOr is simply the heart, which having turned back, shall lament\nUntil the time when this is least of all.\n\nA child would grow up surfeited with happiness\nOh dawns,\nFaced with his parents’ regret at not being able to leave us,\nTo uproot themselves from their dreams of love for this world;\nFaced with those who, like God, from so much love,\nUnderstand each other even until they become creators\nAnd love us even to doing us harm.\n\nFringes on an invisible pattern,\nTeeth which ferret out from neuter emotion, pillars\nWithout base or capital,\nIn the great mouth which has lost the power of speech.\n\nMatch after match in the darkness,\nTear after tear in a cloud of dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - } - } - }, - "under-the-poplars": { - "title": "“Under the Poplars”", - "body": "Like priestly imprisoned poets,\nthe poplars of blood have fallen asleep.\nOn the hills, the flocks of Bethlehem\nchew arias of grass at sunset.\n\nThe ancient shepherd, who shivers\nat the last martyrdoms of light,\nin his Easter eyes has caught\na purebred flock of stars.\n\nFormed in orphanhood, he goes down\nwith rumors of burial to the praying field,\nand the sheep bells are seasoned with shadow.\n\nIt survives, the blue warped\nin iron, and on it, pupils shrouded,\na dog etches its pastoral howl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish" - } - }, - "the-wheel-of-the-hungry": { - "title": "“The Wheel of the Hungry”", - "body": "I emerge from between my teeth, sniffing,\nCrying out, pushing,\nDropping my trousers …\nMy stomach empty, my guts empty,\nPoverty pulls me out from between my own teeth,\nCaught on a sliver by the cuff of my shirt.\n\nA stone to sit on,\nCan’t I even have that now?\nEven that stone, the woman who gives birth stumbles on,\nMother of the lamb, the cause, the root,\nCan’t I even have that now?\nAt least the other one\nThat passed through my soul stooping.\nAt least\nThe limestone, the bad one (humble ocean)\nOr the one not even useful to throw at a man,\nLet me have that one now!\n\nAt least the one you find by chance and only in an insult,\nLet me have that one now!\nAt least the twisted and crowned one in which\nBut once, the tread of clear conscience resounds.\nOr at least that other which is hurled in a suitable curve\nWill fall by itself\nIn declaration of inmost truth.\nLet me have that one now!\n\nA crumb of bread, can’t I even have that now?\nNo more do I have to be what I always have to be.\nBut give me\nA stone on which to sit,\nBut give me\nPlease, a crust of bread on which to sit,\nBut give me,\nIn Spanish,\nSomething, at least to drink, to eat, to live, to rest me,\nAnd afterwards I will go on …\nI discover a strange shape, my shirt is very ragged\nAnd dirty\nAnd still I have nothing,\nThis is horrible.", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays" - } - }, - "the-miners-went-forth-from-the-mine": { - "title": "“The miners went forth from the mine …”", - "body": "The miners went forth from the mine,\nMounting its future ruins.\nAttacking its health with gunshots.\nAnd fashioning its function of the mind,\nWith their voices they closed\nThe cavern shaped like a profound symptom.\n\nTheir corrosive powder was something to see!\nTheir oxides of height were something to hear!\nWedges of mouths, anvils of mouths, instruments of mouths.\n(It is tremendous!)\n\nThe order of their tombs.\nTheir plastic persuasions, their choral responses,\nBeat at the foot of igneous misfortunes\nAnd the sad and saddened knew an airy yellowness\nInfused\nWith finished metal, with metalloid small and pale.\n\nSkulled with labour,\nAnd shod with rodent leather,\nShod with infinite paths\nAnd eyes of physical weeping,\nCreators of profundity,\nThey know, in the intermittent sky of the mine lift,\nHow to descend looking upward.\nHow to rise looking downward.\n\nPraise the ancient play of their nature,\nTheir sleepless organs, their rustic saliva!\nLet grass grow, the lichen and the frog, in their adverbs!\nIron plush in their nuptial blankets!\nWomen, through and through, their women!\nMuch joy is theirs!\nThey are something portentous, the miners,\nMounting its future ruins,\nFashioning its function of the mind\nAnd with their voices opening\nThe cavern shaped like a profound symptom!\nPraise their yellow nature,\nTheir magic lantern,\nIts cubes and its rhomboids, its plastic misfortunes.\nAnd their large eyes with six optic nerves\nAnd their children who play in the church\nAnd their silent, childlike fathers!\nSalud, O creators of profundity!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "translator": "H. R. Hays" - } - } - } - }, - "mark-van-doren": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Mark Van Doren", - "birth": { - "year": 1894 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1972 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Van_Doren", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "after-long-drought": { - "title": "“After Long Drought”", - "body": "After long drought, commotion in the sky;\nAfter dead silence, thunder. Then it comes,\nThe rain. It slashes leaves, and doubly drums\nOn tin and shingle; beats and bends awry\nThe flower heads; puddles dust, and with a sigh\nLike love sinks into grasses, where it hums\nAs bees did once, among chrysanthemums\nAnd asters when the summer thought to die.\n\nThe whole world dreamed of this, and has it now.\nNor was the waking easy. The dull root\nIs jealous of its death; the sleepy brow\nSmiles in its slumber; and a heart can fear\nThe very flood it longed for, roaring near.\nThe spirit best remembers being mute.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "farewell-and-thanksgiving": { - "title": "“Farewell and Thanksgiving”", - "body": "Whatever I have left unsaid\nWhen I am dead\nO’muse forgive me.\nYou were always there,\nlike light, like air.\nThose great good things\nof which the least bird sings,\nSo why not I?\nYet thank you even then,\nSweet muse, Amen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "he-loves-me": { - "title": "“He Loves Me”", - "body": "That God should love me is more wonderful\nThan that I so imperfectly love him.\nMy reason is mortality, and dim\nSenses; his--oh, insupportable--\nIs that he sees me. Even when I pull\nDark thoughts about my head, each vein and limb\nDelights him, though remembrance in him, grim\nWith my worst crimes, should prove me horrible.\n\nAnd he has terrors that he can release.\nBut when he looks he loves me; which is why\nI wonder; and my wonder must increase\nTill more of it shall slay me. Yet I live,\nI live; and he has never ceased to give\nThis glance at me that sweetens the whole sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "morning-worship": { - "title": "“Morning Worship”", - "body": "I wake and hearing it raining.\nWere I dead, what would I give\nLazily to lie here,\nLike this, and live?\n\nOr better yet: birdsong,\nBrightening and spreading--\nHow far would I come then\nTo be at the world’s wedding?\n\nNow that I lie, though,\nListening, living,\n(Oh, but not forever,\nOh, end arriving)\n\nHow shall I praise them:\nAll the sweet beings\nEternally that outlive\nMe and my dying?\n\nMountains, I mean; wind, water, air;\nGrass, and huge trees; clouds, flowers,\nAnd thunder, and night.\n\nTurtles, I mean, and toads; hawks, herons, owls;\nGraveyards, and towns, and trout; roads, gardens,\nRed berries, and deer.\n\nLightning, I mean, and eagles; fences; snow;\nSunrise, and ferns; waterfalls, serpents,\nGreen islands, and sleep.\n\nHorses, I mean; butterflies, whales;\nMosses, and stars and gravelly\nRivers, and fruit.\n\nOceans, I mean; black valleys; corn;\nBrambles, and cliffs; rock, dirt, dust, ice;\nAnd warnings of flood.\n\nHow shall I name them?\nAnd in what order?\nEach would be first.\nOmission is murder.\n\nMaidens, I mean, and apples; needles; leaves;\nWorms, and planers, and clover; whirlwinds; dew;\nBulls; geese--\n\nStop. Lie still.\nYou will never be done.\nLeave them all there.\nOld lover. Live on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spring-thunder": { - "title": "“Spring Thunder”", - "body": "Listen, The wind is still,\nAnd far away in the night--\nSee! The uplands fill\nWith a running light.\n\nOpen the doors. It is warm;\nAnd where the sky was clear--\nLook! The head of a storm\nThat marches here!\n\nCome under the trembling hedge--\nFast, although you fumble …\nThere! Did you hear the edge\nof winter crumble", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - }, - "henry-vaughan": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Henry Vaughan", - "birth": { - "year": 1621 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1695 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "welsh", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Vaughan", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "welsh" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "christs-nativity": { - "title": "“Christ’s Nativity”", - "body": "Awake, glad heart! get up and sing!\nIt is the birth-day of thy King.\nAwake! awake!\nThe Sun doth shake\nLight from his locks, and all the way\nBreathing perfumes, doth spice the day.\nAwake, awake! hark how th’ wood rings;\nWinds whisper, and the busy springs\nA concert make;\nAwake! awake!\nMan is their high-priest, and should rise\nTo offer up the sacrifice.\nI would I were some bird, or star,\nFlutt’ring in woods, or lifted far\nAbove this inn\nAnd road of sin!\nThen either star or bird should be\nShining or singing still to thee.\nI would I had in my best part\nFit rooms for thee! or that my heart\nWere so clean as\nThy manger was!\nBut I am all filth, and obscene;\nYet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean.\nSweet Jesu! will then. Let no more\nThis leper haunt and soil thy door!\nCure him, ease him,\nO release him!\nAnd let once more, by mystic birth,\nThe Lord of life be born in earth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "eternity": { - "title": "“Eternity”", - "body": "I saw Eternity the other night,\nLike a great ring of pure and endless light,\nAll calm, as it was bright;\nAnd round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,\nDriv’n by the spheres\nLike a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world\nAnd all her train were hurl’d.\nThe doting lover in his quaintest strain\nDid there complain;\nNear him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,\nWit’s sour delights,\nWith gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,\nYet his dear treasure\nAll scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour\nUpon a flow’r.\nThe darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,\nLike a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,\nHe did not stay, nor go;\nCondemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl\nUpon his soul,\nAnd clouds of crying witnesses without\nPursued him with one shout.\nYet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,\nWork’d under ground,\nWhere he did clutch his prey; but one did see\nThat policy;\nChurches and altars fed him; perjuries\nWere gnats and flies;\nIt rain’d about him blood and tears, but he\nDrank them as free.\nThe fearful miser on a heap of rust\nSate pining all his life there, did scarce trust\nHis own hands with the dust,\nYet would not place one piece above, but lives\nIn fear of thieves;\nThousands there were as frantic as himself,\nAnd hugg’d each one his pelf;\nThe downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,\nAnd scorn’d pretence,\nWhile others, slipp’d into a wide excess,\nSaid little less;\nThe weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,\nWho think them brave;\nAnd poor despised Truth sate counting by\nTheir victory.\nYet some, who all this while did weep and sing,\nAnd sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;\nBut most would use no wing.\nO fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night\nBefore true light,\nTo live in grots and caves, and hate the day\nBecause it shews the way,\nThe way, which from this dead and dark abode\nLeads up to God,\nA way where you might tread the sun, and be\nMore bright than he.\nBut as I did their madness so discuss\nOne whisper’d thus,\n“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,\nBut for his bride.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "etesia-absent": { - "title": "“Etesia Absent”", - "body": "Love, the world’s life! What a sad death\nThy absence is to lose our breath\nAt once and die, is but to live\nEnlarged, without the scant reprieve\nOf pulse and air: whose dull returns\nAnd narrow circles the soul mourns.\nBut to be dead alive, and still\nTo wish, but never have our will:\nTo be possessed, and yet to miss;\nTo wed a true but absent bliss:\nAre lingering tortures, and their smart\nDissects and racks and grinds the heart!\nAs soul and body in that state\nWhich unto us seems separate,\nCannot be said to live, until\nReunion; which days fulfil\nAnd slow-paced seasons: so in vain\nThrough hours and minutes (Time’s long train,)\nI look for thee, and from thy sight,\nAs from my soul, for life and light.\nFor till thine eyes shine so on me,\nMine are fast-closed and will not see.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-evening-watch": { - "title": "“The Evening Watch”", - "body": "_Body_:\n\nFarewell! I go to sleep; but when\nThe day-star springs, I’ll wake again.\n\n\n_Soul_:\n\nGo, sleep in peace; and when thou liest\nUnnumber’d in thy dust, when all this frame\nIs but one dram, and what thou now descriest\nIn sev’ral parts shall want a name,\nThen may his peace be with thee, and each dust\nWrit in his book, who ne’er betray’d man’s trust!\n\n\n_Body_:\n\nAmen! but hark, ere we two stray\nHow many hours dost think ’till day?\n\n\n_Soul_:\n\nAh go; th’art weak, and sleepy. Heav’n\nIs a plain watch, and without figures winds\nAll ages up; who drew this circle, even\nHe fills it; days and hours are blinds.\nYet this take with thee. The last gasp of time\nIs thy first breath, and man’s eternal prime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "friends-departed": { - "title": "“Friends Departed”", - "body": "They are all gone into the world of light!\nAnd I alone sit ling’ring here;\nTheir very memory is fair and bright,\nAnd my sad thoughts doth clear.\n\nIt glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,\nLike stars upon some gloomy grove,\nOr those faint beams in which this hill is drest\nAfter the sun’s remove.\n\nI see them walking in an air of glory,\nWhose light doth trample on my days:\nMy days, which are at best but dull and hoary,\nMere glimmering and decays.\n\nO holy Hope! and high Humility,\nHigh as the heavens above!\nThese are your walks, and you have show’d them me,\nTo kindle my cold love.\n\nDear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the Just,\nShining nowhere, but in the dark;\nWhat mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,\nCould man outlook that mark!\n\nHe that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest may know,\nAt first sight, if the bird be flown;\nBut what fair well or grove he sings in now,\nThat is to him unknown.\n\nAnd yet as Angels in some brighter dreams\nCall to the soul, when man doth sleep:\nSo some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,\nAnd into glory peep.\n\nIf a star were confin’d into a tomb,\nHer captive flames must needs burn there;\nBut when the hand that lock’d her up gives room,\nShe’ll shine through all the sphere.\n\nO Father of eternal life, and all\nCreated glories under Thee!\nResume Thy spirit from this world of thrall\nInto true liberty.\n\nEither disperse these mists, which blot and fill\nMy perspective still as they pass:\nOr else remove me hence unto that hill,\nWhere I shall need no glass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "i-walkd-the-other-day": { - "title": "“I Walk’d the Other Day”", - "body": "I walk’d the other day, to spend my hour,\nInto a field,\nWhere I sometimes had seen the soil to yield\nA gallant flow’r;\nBut winter now had ruffled all the bow’r\nAnd curious store\nI knew there heretofore.\n\nYet I, whose search lov’d not to peep and peer\nI’ th’ face of things,\nThought with my self, there might be other springs\nBesides this here,\nWhich, like cold friends, sees us but once a year;\nAnd so the flow’r\nMight have some other bow’r.\n\nThen taking up what I could nearest spy,\nI digg’d about\nThat place where I had seen him to grow out;\nAnd by and by\nI saw the warm recluse alone to lie,\nWhere fresh and green\nHe liv’d of us unseen.\n\nMany a question intricate and rare\nDid I there strow;\nBut all I could extort was, that he now\nDid there repair\nSuch losses as befell him in this air,\nAnd would ere long\nCome forth most fair and young.\n\nThis past, I threw the clothes quite o’er his head;\nAnd stung with fear\nOf my own frailty dropp’d down many a tear\nUpon his bed;\nThen sighing whisper’d, “happy are the dead!\nWhat peace doth now\nRock him asleep below!”\n\nAnd yet, how few believe such doctrine springs\nFrom a poor root,\nWhich all the winter sleeps here under foot,\nAnd hath no wings\nTo raise it to the truth and light of things;\nBut is still trod\nBy ev’ry wand’ring clod.\n\nO Thou! whose spirit did at first inflame\nAnd warm the dead,\nAnd by a sacred incubation fed\nWith life this frame,\nWhich once had neither being, form, nor name;\nGrant I may so\nThy steps track here below,\n\nThat in these masques and shadows I may see\nThy sacred way;\nAnd by those hid ascents climb to that day,\nWhich breaks from Thee,\nWho art in all things, though invisibly!\nShew me thy peace,\nThy mercy, love, and ease,\n\nAnd from this care, where dreams and sorrows reign,\nLead me above,\nWhere light, joy, leisure, and true comforts move\nWithout all pain;\nThere, hid in thee, shew me his life again,\nAt whose dumb urn\nThus all the year I mourn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "mount-of-olives": { - "title": "“Mount of Olives”", - "body": "Sweet, sacred hill! on whose fair brow\nMy Saviour sate, shall I allow\nLanguage to love,\nAnd idolize some shade, or grove,\nNeglecting thee? such ill-plac’d wit,\nConceit, or call it what you please,\nIs the brain’s fit,\nAnd mere disease.\n\nCotswold and Cooper’s both have met\nWith learnèd swains, and echo yet\nTheir pipes and wit;\nBut thou sleep’st in a deep neglect,\nUntouch’d by any; and what need\nThe sheep bleat thee a silly lay,\nThat heard’st both reed\nAnd sheepward play?\n\nYet if poets mind thee well,\nThey shall find thou art their hill,\nAnd fountain too.\nTheir Lord with thee had most to do;\nHe wept once, walk’d whole nights on thee:\nAnd from thence--His suff’rings ended--\nUnto glory\nWas attended.\n\nBeing there, this spacious ball\nIs but His narrow footstool all;\nAnd what we think\nUnsearchable, now with one wink\nHe doth comprise; but in this air\nWhen He did stay to bear our ill\nAnd sin, this hill\nWas then His Chair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ascension" - } - } - }, - "the-nativity": { - "title": "“The Nativity”", - "body": "Peace? and to all the world? sure, One\nAnd He the Prince of Peace, hath none.\nHe travels to be born, and then\nIs born to travel more again.\nPoor Galilee! thou canst not be\nThe place for His nativity.\nHis restless mother’s called away,\nAnd not delivered till she pay.\nA tax? ’tis so still! we can see\nThe church thrive in her misery;\nAnd like her Head at Bethlem, rise\nWhen she, oppressed with troubles, lies.\nRise? should all fall, we cannot be\nIn more extremities than He.\nGreat Type of passions! come what will,\nThy grief exceeds all copies still.\nThou cam’st from heaven to earth, that we\nMight go from earth to heaven with Thee.\nAnd though Thou foundest no welcome here,\nThou didst provide us mansions there.\nA stable was Thy court, and when\nMen turned to beasts, beasts would be men.\nThey were Thy courtiers, others none;\nAnd their poor manger was Thy throne.\nNo swaddling silks Thy limbs did fold,\nThough Thou couldst turn Thy rays to gold.\nNo rockers waited on Thy birth,\nNo cradles stirred, nor songs of mirth;\nBut her chaste lap and sacred breast\nWhich lodged Thee first did give Thee rest.\nBut stay: what light is that doth stream,\nAnd drop here in a gilded beam?\nIt is Thy star runs page, and brings\nThy tributary Eastern kings.\nLord! grant some light to us, that we\nMay with them find the way to Thee.\nBehold what mists eclipse the day:\nHow dark it is! shed down one ray\nTo guide us out of this sad night,\nAnd say once more, “Let there be light.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "peace": { - "title": "“Peace”", - "body": "My Soul, there is a country\nAfar beyond the stars,\nWhere stands a winged sentry\nAll skillful in the wars;\nThere, above noise and danger\nSweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles,\nAnd One born in a manger\nCommands the beauteous files.\nHe is thy gracious friend\nAnd (O my Soul awake!)\nDid in pure love descend,\nTo die here for thy sake.\nIf thou canst get but thither,\nThere grows the flow’r of peace,\nThe rose that cannot wither,\nThy fortress, and thy ease.\nLeave then thy foolish ranges,\nFor none can thee secure,\nBut One, who never changes,\nThy God, thy life, thy cure.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "regeneration": { - "title": "“Regeneration”", - "body": "Award, and still in bonds, one day\nI stole abroad,\nIt was high-spring, and all the way\nPrimros’d, and hung with shade;\nYet, was it frost within,\nAnd surly winds\nBlasted my infant buds, and sin\nLike clouds eclips’d my mind.\n\nStorm’d thus; I straight perceiv’d my spring\nMere stage, and show,\nMy walk a monstrous, mountain’s thing\nRough-cast with rocks, and snow;\nAnd as a pilgrim’s eye\nFar from relief,\nMeasures the melancholy sky\nThen drops, and rains for grief,\n\nSo sigh’d I upwards still, at last\n’Twixt steps, and falls\nI reach’d the pinnacle, where plac’d\nI found a pair of scales,\nI took them up and laid\nIn th’one late pains,\nThe other smoke, and pleasures weigh’d\nBut prov’d the heavier grains;\n\nWith that, some cried, Away; straight I\nObey’d, and led\nFull east, a fair, fresh field could spy\nSome call’d it Jacob’s Bed;\nA virgin-soil, which no\nRude feet ere trod,\nWhere (since he slept there,) only go\nProphets, and friends of God.\n\nHere, I repos’d; but scarce well set,\nA grove descried\nOf stately height, whose branches met\nAnd mixed on every side;\nI entered, and once in\n(Amaz’d to see’t,)\nFound all was chang’d, and a new spring\nDid all my senses greet;\n\nThe unthrift sun shot vital gold\nA thousand pieces,\nAnd heaven its azure did unfold\nChecker’d with snowy fleeces,\nThe air was all in spice\nAnd every bush\nA garland wore; thus fed my eyes\nBut all the ear lay hush.\n\nOnly a little fountain lent\nSome use for ears,\nAnd on the dumb shades language spent\nThe music of her tears;\nI drew her near, and found\nThe cistern full\nOf diverse stones, some bright, and round\nOthers ill’shap’d, and dull.\n\nThe first (pray mark,) as quick as light\nDanc’d through the flood,\nBut, th’last more heavy than the night\nNail’d to the center stood;\nI wonder’d much, but tir’d\nAt last with thought,\nMy restless eye that still desir’d\nAs strange an object brought;\n\nIt was a bank of flowers, where I descried\n(Though ’twas mid’day,)\nSome fast asleep, others broad-eyed\nAnd taking in the ray,\nHere musing long, I heard\nA rushing wind\nWhich still increas’d, but whence it stirr’d\nNo where I could not find;\n\nI turn’d me round, and to each shade\nDispatch’d an eye,\nTo see, if any leaf had made\nLeast motion, or reply,\nBut while I listening sought\nMy mind to ease\nBy knowing, where ’twas, or where not,\nIt whispered: Where I please.\nLord, then said I, On me one breath,\nAnd let me die before my death!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-relapse": { - "title": "“The Relapse”", - "body": "My God, how gracious art thou! I had slipt\n Almost to hell,\nAnd on the verge of that dark, dreadful pit\n Did hear them yell,\nBut O thy love! thy rich, almighty love\n That sav’d my soul,\nAnd checkt their fury, when I saw them move,\n And heard them howl;\nO my sole comfort, take no more these ways,\n This hideous path,\nAnd I will mend my own without delays,\n Cease thou thy wrath!\nI have deserv’d a thick, Egyptian damp,\n Dark as my deeds,\nShould mist within me, and put out that lamp\n Thy spirit feeds;\nA darting conscience full of stabs and fears;\n No shade but Yew,\nSullen, and sad eclipses, cloudy spheres,\n These are my due.\nBut he that with his blood, (a price too dear,)\n My scores did pay,\nBid me, by virtue from him, challenge here\n The brightest day;\nSweet, downy thoughts; soft lily-shades; calm streams;\n Joys full and true;\nFresh, spicy mornings; and eternal beams\n These are his due.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "sacred_heart_of_jesus" - } - } - }, - "retirement": { - "title": "“Retirement”", - "body": "Fresh fields and woods! the Earth’s fair face,\nGod’s foot-stool, and man’s dwelling-place.\nI ask not why the first Believer\nDid love to be a country liver?\nWho to secure pious content\nDid pitch by groves and wells his tent;\nWhere he might view the boundless sky,\nAnd all those glorious lights on high;\nWith flying meteors, mists and show’rs,\nSubjected hills, trees, meads and flow’rs;\nAnd ev’ry minute bless the King\nAnd wise Creator of each thing.\nI ask not why he did remove\nTo happy Mamre’s holy grove,\nLeaving the cities of the plain\nTo Lot and his successless train?\nAll various lusts in cities still\nAre found; they are the thrones of ill;\nThe dismal sinks, where blood is spill’d,\nCages with much uncleanness fill’d.\nBut rural shades are the sweet fense\nOf piety and innocence.\nThey are the Meek’s calm region, where\nAngels descend and rule the sphere,\nWhere heaven lies leiger, and the dove\nDuly as dew, comes from above.\nIf Eden be on Earth at all,\n’Tis that, which we the country call.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-retreat": { - "title": "“The Retreat”", - "body": "Happy those early days, when I\nShin’d in my angel-infancy!\nBefore I understood this place\nAppointed for my second race,\nOr taught my soul to fancy ought\nBut a white, celestial thought;\nWhen yet I had not walk’d above\nA mile or two from my first love,\nAnd looking back (at that short space)\nCould see a glimpse of his bright face;\nWhen on some gilded cloud or flow’r\nMy gazing soul would dwell an hour,\nAnd in those weaker glories spy\nSome shadows of eternity;\nBefore I taught my tongue to wound\nMy conscience with a sinful sound,\nOr had the black art to dispense,\nA sev’ral sin to ev’ry sense,\nBut felt through all this fleshly dress\nBright shoots of everlastingnes.\n\nO how I long to travel back,\nAnd tread again that ancient track!\nThat I might once more reach that plain,\nWhere first I left my glorious train,\nFrom whence th’ enlighten’d spirit sees\nThat shady city of palm trees.\nBut ah! my soul with too much stay\nIs drunk, and staggers in the way.\nSome men a forward motion love,\nBut I by backward steps would move;\nAnd when this dust falls to the urn,\nIn that state I came, return.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-revival": { - "title": "“The Revival”", - "body": "Unfold! unfold! Take in His light,\nWho makes thy cares more short than night.\nThe joys which with His day-star rise,\nHe deals to all but drowsy eyes;\nAnd (what the men of this world miss)\nSome drops and dews of future bliss.\n\nHark! how his winds have chang’d their note,\nAnd with warm whispers call thee out.\nThe frosts are past, the storms are gone,\nAnd backward life at last comes on.\nThe lofty groves in express joys\nReply unto the turtle’s voice;\nAnd here in dust and dirt, O here\nThe lilies of His love appear!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "the-shepherds": { - "title": "“The Shepherds”", - "body": "Sweet, harmless lives! (on whose holy leisure\nWaits innocence and pleasure),\nWhose leaders to those pastures, and clear springs,\nWere patriarchs, saints, and kings,\nHow happened it that in the dead of night\nYou only saw true light,\nWhile Palestine was fast asleep, and lay\nWithout one thought of day?\nWas it because those first and blessed swains\nWere pilgrims on those plains\nWhen they received the promise, for which now\n’Twas there first shown to you?\n’Tis true, He loves that dust whereon they go\nThat serve Him here below,\nAnd therefore might for memory of those\nHis love there first disclose;\nBut wretched Salem, once His love, must now\nNo voice, nor vision know,\nHer stately piles with all their height and pride\nNow languished and died,\nAnd Bethlem’s humble cotes above them stepped\nWhile all her seers slept;\nHer cedar, fir, hewed stones and gold were all\nPolluted through their fall,\nAnd those once sacred mansions were now\nMere emptiness and show;\nThis made the angel call at reeds and thatch,\nYet where the shepherds watch,\nAnd God’s own lodging (though He could not lack)\nTo be a common rack;\nNo costly pride, no soft-clothed luxury\nIn those thin cells could lie,\nEach stirring wind and storm blew through their cots\nWhich never harbored plots,\nOnly content, and love, and humble joys\nLived there without all noise,\nPerhaps some harmless cares for the next day\nDid in their bosoms play,\nAs where to lead their sheep, what silent nook,\nWhat springs or shades to look,\nBut that was all; and now with gladsome care\nThey for the town prepare,\nThey leave their flock, and in a busy talk\nAll towards Bethlem walk\nTo see their souls’ Great Shepherd, Who was come\nTo bring all stragglers home,\nWhere now they find Him out, and taught before\nThat Lamb of God adore,\nThat Lamb whose days great kings and prophets wished\nAnd longed to see, but missed.\nThe first light they beheld was bright and gay\nAnd turned their night to day,\nBut to this later light they saw in Him,\nTheir day was dark, and dim.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "silence-and-stealth-of-days": { - "title": "“Silence and Stealth of Days”", - "body": "Silence, and stealth of days! ’tis now\nSince thou art gone,\nTwelve hundred hours, and not a brow\nBut clouds hang on.\nAs he that in some cave’s thick damp\nLockt from the light,\nFixeth a solitary lamp,\nTo brave the night,\nAnd walking from his sun, when past\nThat glim’ring ray\nCuts through the heavy mists in haste\nBack to his day,\nSo o’r fled minutes I retreat\nUnto that hour\nWhich show’d thee last, but did defeat\nThy light, and power,\nI search, and rack my soul to see\nThose beams again,\nBut nothing but the snuff to me\nAppeareth plain;\nThat dark and dead sleeps in its known\nAnd common urn,\nBut those fled to their Maker’s throne\nThere shine and burn;\nO could I track them! but souls must\nTrack one the other,\nAnd now the spirit, not the dust,\nMust be thy brother.\nYet I have one Pearl by whose light\nAll things I see,\nAnd in the heart of earth and night\nFind heaven and thee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "son-days": { - "title": "“Son-Days”", - "body": "Bright shadows of true Rest! some shoots of bliss,\nHeaven once a week;\nThe next world’s gladness prepossest in this;\nA day to seek;\nEternity in time; the steps by which\nWe Climb above all ages; Lamps that light\nMan through his heap of dark days; and the rich,\nAnd full redemption of the whole week’s flight.\n\nThe Pulleys unto headlong man; time’s bower;\nThe narrow way;\nTransplanted Paradise; God’s walking hour;\nThe Cool o’th’ day;\nThe Creatures’ _Jubilee_; God’s parle with dust;\nHeaven here; Man on the hills of Myrrh, and flowers;\nAngels descending; the Returns of Trust;\nA Gleam of glory, after six-days’-showers.\n\nThe Church’s love-feasts; Time’s Prerogative,\nAnd Interest\nDeducted from the whole; The Combs, and hive,\nAnd home of rest.\nThe milky way chalked out with suns; a clue\nThat guides through erring hours; and in full story\nA taste of Heav’n on earth; the pledge, and cue\nOf a full feast: And the Out Courts of glory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-star": { - "title": "“The Star”", - "body": "Whatever ’tis, whose beauty here below\nAttracts thee thus and makes thee stream and flow,\nAnd wind and curl, and wink and smile,\nShifting thy gate and guile;\n\nThough thy close commerce nought at all imbars\nMy present search, for eagles eye not stars,\nAnd still the lesser by the best\nAnd highest good is blest;\n\nYet, seeing all things that subsist and be,\nHave their commissions from divinity,\nAnd teach us duty, I will see\nWhat man may learn from thee.\n\nFirst, I am sure, the subject so respected\nIs well dispos’d, for bodies once infected,\nDeprav’d, or dead, can have with thee\nNo hold, nor sympathy.\n\nNext, there’s in it a restless, pure desire\nAnd longing for thy bright and vital fire,\nDesire that never will be quench’d,\nNor can be writh’d, nor wrench’d.\n\nThese are the magnets which so strongly move\nAnd work all night upon thy light and love,\nAs beauteous shapes, we know not why,\nCommand and guide the eye.\n\nFor where desire, celestial, pure desire\nHath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire,\nThere God a commerce states, and sheds\nHis secret on their heads.\n\nThis is the heart he craves, and who so will\nBut give it him, and grudge not, he shall feel\nThat God is true, as herbs unseen\nPut on their youth and green.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-timber": { - "title": "“The Timber”", - "body": "Sure thou didst flourish once! and many springs,\nMany bright mornings, much dew, many showers,\nPass’d o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,\nWhich now are dead, lodg’d in thy living bowers.\n\nAnd still a new succession sings and flies;\nFresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot\nTowards the old and still enduring skies,\nWhile the low violet thrives at their root.\n\nBut thou beneath the sad and heavy line\nOf death, doth waste all senseless, cold, and dark;\nWhere not so much as dreams of light may shine,\nNor any thought of greenness, leaf, or bark.\n\nAnd yet--as if some deep hate and dissent,\nBred in thy growth betwixt high winds and thee,\nWere still alive--thou dost great storms resent\nBefore they come, and know’st how near they be.\n\nElse all at rest thou liest, and the fierce breath\nOf tempests can no more disturb thy ease;\nBut this thy strange resentment after death\nMeans only those who broke--in life--thy peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-true-christians": { - "title": "“The True Christians”", - "body": "So stick up ivy and the bays,\nAnd then restore the heathen ways.\nGreen will remind you of the spring,\nThough this great day denies the thing.\nAnd mortifies the earth and all\nBut your wild revels, and loose hall.\nCould you wear flowers, and roses strow\nBlushing upon your breasts’ warm snow,\nThat very dress your lightness will\nRebuke, and wither at the ill.\nThe brightness of this day we owe\nNot unto music, masque, nor show:\nNor gallant furniture, nor plate;\nBut to the manger’s mean estate.\nHis life while here, as well as birth,\nWas but a check to pomp and mirth;\nAnd all man’s greatness you may see\nCondemned by His humility.\nThen leave your open house and noise,\nTo welcome Him with holy joys,\nAnd the poor shepherd’s watchfulness:\nWhom light and hymns from heaven did bless.\nWhat you abound with, cast abroad\nTo those that want, and ease your load.\nWho empties thus, will bring more in;\nBut riot is both loss and sin.\nDress finely what comes not in sight,\nAnd then you keep your Christmas right.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "unprofitableness": { - "title": "“Unprofitableness”", - "body": "How rich, O Lord! how fresh thy visits are!\n’Twas but just now my bleak leaves hopeless hung\nSullied with dust and mud;\nEach snarling blast shot through me, and did share\nTheir youth, and beauty, cold showers nipt, and wrung\nTheir spiciness and blood;\nBut since thou didst in one sweet glance survey\nTheir sad decays, I flourish, and once more\nBreath all perfumes, and spice;\nI smell a dew like myrrh, and all the day\nWear in my bosom a full sun; such store\nHath one beam from thy eyes.\nBut, ah, my God! what fruit hast thou of this?\nWhat one poor leaf did ever I yet fall\nTo wait upon thy wreath?\nThus thou all day a thankless weed dost dress,\nAnd when th’hast done, a stench or fog is all\nThe odor I bequeath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "upon-the-priory-grove-his-usual-retirement": { - "title": "“Upon the Priory Grove, His Usual Retirement”", - "body": "Hail sacred shades! cool, leavy House!\nChaste treasurer of all my vows,\nAnd wealth! on whose soft bosom laid\nMy love’s fair steps I first betrayed:\nHenceforth no melancholy flight,\nNo sad wing, or hoarse bird of night,\nDisturb this air, no fatal throat\nOf raven, or owl, awake the note\nOf our laid echo, no voice dwell\nWithin these leaves, but Philomel.\nThe poisonous ivy here no more\nHis false twists on the oak shall score,\nOnly the woodbine here may twine\nAs th’emblem of her love and mine;\nTh’amorous sun shall here convey\nHis best beams, in thy shades to play;\nThe active air, the gentlest showers\nShall from his wings rain on thy flowers;\nAnd the moon from her dewy locks\nShall deck thee with her brightest drops:\nWhat ever can a fancy move,\nOr feed the eye; be on this Grove;\nAnd when at last the winds and tears\nOf Heaven, with the consuming years,\nShall these green curls bring to decay,\nAnd clothe thee in an aged gray:\n(If ought a lover can foresee;\nOr if we poets, prophets be)\nFrom hence transplant’d, thou shalt stand\nA fresh Grove in th’Elysian land;\nWhere (most blest pair!) as here on earth\nThou first didst eye our growth and birth;\nSo there again, thou’lt see us move\nIn our first innocence, and love:\nAnd in thy shades, as now, so then,\nWe’ll kiss, and smile, and walk again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-waterfall": { - "title": "“The Waterfall”", - "body": "With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth\nDoth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth\nHere flowing fall,\nAnd chide, and call,\nAs if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d\nLing’ring, and were of this steep place afraid;\nThe common pass\nWhere, clear as glass,\nAll must descend\nNot to an end,\nBut quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave,\nRise to a longer course more bright and brave.\nDear stream! dear bank, where often I\nHave sate and pleas’d my pensive eye,\nWhy, since each drop of thy quick store\nRuns thither whence it flow’d before,\nShould poor souls fear a shade or night,\nWho came, sure, from a sea of light?\nOr since those drops are all sent back\nSo sure to thee, that none doth lack,\nWhy should frail flesh doubt any more\nThat what God takes, he’ll not restore?\nO useful element and clear!\nMy sacred wash and cleanser here,\nMy first consigner unto those\nFountains of life where the Lamb goes!\nWhat sublime truths and wholesome themes\nLodge in thy mystical deep streams!\nSuch as dull man can never find\nUnless that Spirit lead his mind\nWhich first upon thy face did move,\nAnd hatch’d all with his quick’ning love.\nAs this loud brook’s incessant fall\nIn streaming rings restagnates all,\nWhich reach by course the bank, and then\nAre no more seen, just so pass men.\nO my invisible estate,\nMy glorious liberty, still late!\nThou art the channel my soul seeks,\nNot this with cataracts and creeks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "lope-de-vega": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Lope de Vega", - "birth": { - "year": 1562 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1635 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "spanish", - "language": "spanish", - "flag": "🇪🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lope_de_Vega", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "spanish" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "country-life": { - "title": "“Country Life”", - "body": "Let the vain courtier waste his days,\nLured by the charms that wealth displays,\nThe couch of down, the hoard of costly fare;\nBe his to kiss the ungrateful hand\nThat waves the sceptre of command,\nAnd rear full many a palace in the air:\nWhilst Ï enjoy, all unconfined,\nThe glowing sun, the genial wind,\nAnd tranquil hours, to rustic toil assigned;\nAnd prize far more, in peace and health,\nContented indigence, than joyless wealth.\nNot mine in Fortune’s face to bend,\nAt Grandeur’s altar to attend,\nReflect his smile, and tremble at his frown;\nNor mine a fond aspiring thought,\nA wish, a sigh, a vision, fraught\nWith Fame’s bright phantom, Glory’s deathless crown!\nNectareous draughts and viands pure\nLuxuriant nature will insure;\nThese the clear fount and fertile field\nStill to the wearied shepherd yield;\nAnd when repose and visions reign,\nThen we are equals all, the monarch and the swain", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-good-shepherd": { - "title": "“The Good Shepherd”", - "body": "Shepherd! who with thine amorous, sylvan song\nHast broken the slumber that encompassed me,\nWho mad’st Thy crook from the accursed tree\nOn which Thy powerful arms were stretched so long!\nLead me to mercy’s ever-flowing fountains;\nFor Thou my shepherd, guard, and guide shalt be;\nI will obey Thy voice, and wait to see\nThy feet all beautiful upon the mountains.\n\nHear, Shepherd Thou who for Thy flock art dying,\nOh, wash away these scarlet sins, for Thou\nRejoicest at the contrite sinner’s vow.\nOh, wait! to Thee my weary soul is crying,\nWait for me: Yet why ask it, when I see,\nWith feet nailed to the cross, Thou’rt waiting still for me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "o-navis": { - "title": "“O Navis”", - "body": "Poor bark of Life, upon the billows hoarse\nAssailed by storms of envy and deceit,\nAcross what cruel seas in passage fleet\nMy and sword alone direct thy course!\nMy pen is dull; my sword of little force;\nThy side lies open to the wild waves’ beat\nAs out from Favor’s harbors we retreat,\nPursued by hopes deceived and vain remorse.\n\nLet heaven by star to guide thee! here below\nHow vain the joys that foolish hearts desire!\nHere friendship dies and enmity keeps true;\nHere happy days have left thee long ago!\nBut seek not port, brave thou the tempest’s ire;\nUntil the end thy fated course pursue!", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "tomorrow": { - "title": "“Tomorrow”", - "body": "Lord, what am I, that, with unceasing care,\nThou didst seek after me,--that thou didst wait,\nWet with unhealthy dews, before my gate,\nAnd pass the gloomy nights of winter there?\nO, strange delusion, that I did not greet\nThy blest approach! and, O, to heaven how lost,\nIf my ingratitude’s unkindly frost\nHas chilled the bleeding wounds upon thy feet!\nHow oft my guardian angel gently cried,\n“Soul, from thy casement look, and thou shalt see\nHow he persists to knock and wait for thee!”\nAnd, O, how often to that voice of sorrow,\n“To-morrow we will open,” I replied!\nAnd when the morrow came, I answered still,\n“To-morrow.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "spanish", - "context": { - "holiday": "guardian_angels" - } - } - } - } - }, - "emile-verhaeren": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Émile Verhaeren", - "birth": { - "year": 1855 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "belgian", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇧🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Verhaeren", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "belgian" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "the-cathedral-of-rheims": { - "title": "“The Cathedral of Rheims”", - "body": "He who walks through the meadows of Champagne\nAt noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,\nSees it draw near\nLike some great mountain set upon the plain,\nFrom radiant dawn until the close of day,\nNearer it grows\nTo him who goes\nAcross the country. When tall towers lay\nTheir shadowy pall\nUpon his way,\nHe enters, where\nThe solid stone is hollowed deep by all\nIts centuries of beauty and of prayer.\n\nAncient French temple! thou whose hundred kings\nWatch over thee, emblazoned on thy walls,\nTell me, within thy memory-hallowed halls\nWhat chant of triumph, or what war-song rings?\nThou hast known Clovis and his Frankish train,\nWhose mighty hand Saint Remy’s hand did keep\nAnd in thy spacious vault perhaps may sleep\nAn echo of the voice of Charlemagne.\nFor God thou has known fear, when from His side\nMen wandered, seeking alien shrines and new,\nBut still the sky was bountiful and blue\nAnd thou wast crowned with France’s love and pride.\nSacred thou art, from pinnacle to base;\nAnd in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass\nThe setting sun sees thousandfold his face;\nSorrow and joy, in stately silence pass\nAcross thy walls, the shadow and the light;\nAround thy lofty pillars, tapers white\nIlluminate, with delicate sharp flames,\nThe brows of saints with venerable names,\nAnd in the night erect a fiery wall.\nA great but silent fervour burns in all\nThose simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb,\nAnd know that down below, beside the Rhine--\nCannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line--\nWith blare of trumpets, mighty armies come.\n\nSuddenly, each knows fear;\nSwift rumours pass, that every one must hear,\nThe hostile banners blaze against the sky\nAnd by the embassies mobs rage and cry.\nNow war has come, and peace is at an end.\nOn Paris town the German troops descend.\nThey are turned back, and driven to Champagne.\nAnd now, as to so many weary men,\nThe glorious temple gives them welcome, when\nIt meets them at the bottom of the plain.\n\nAt once, they set their cannon in its way.\nThere is no gable now, nor wall\nThat does not suffer, night and day,\nAs shot and shell in crushing torrents fall.\nThe stricken tocsin quivers through the tower;\nThe triple nave, the apse, the lonely choir\nAre circled, hour by hour,\nWith thundering bands of fire\nAnd Death is scattered broadcast among men.\n\nAnd then\nThat which was splendid with baptismal grace;\nThe stately arches soaring into space,\nThe transepts, columns, windows gray and gold,\nThe organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled,\nThe crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places,\nThe Virgin’s gentle hands, the Saints’ pure faces,\nAll, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord\nWere struck and broken by the wanton sword\nOf sacrilegious lust.\n\nO beauty slain, O glory in the dust!\nStrong walls of faith, most basely overthrown!\nThe crawling flames, like adders glistening\nAte the white fabric of this lovely thing.\nNow from its soul arose a piteous moan,\nThe soul that always loved the just and fair.\nGranite and marble loud their woe confessed,\nThe silver monstrances that Popes had blessed,\nThe chalices and lamps and crosiers rare\nWere seared and twisted by a flaming breath;\nThe horror everywhere did range and swell,\nThe guardian Saints into this furnace fell,\nTheir bitter tears and screams were stilled in death.\n\nAround the flames armed hosts are skirmishing,\nThe burning sun reflects the lurid scene;\nThe German army, fighting for its life,\nRallies its torn and terrified left wing;\nAnd, as they near this place\nThe imperial eagles see\nBefore them in their flight,\nHere, in the solemn night,\nThe old cathedral, to the years to be\nShowing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "infinitely": { - "title": "“Infinitely”", - "body": "The hounds of despair, the hounds of the autumnal wind,\nGnaw with their howling the black echoes of evenings.\nThe darkness, immensely, gropes in the emptiness\nFor the moon, seen by the light of water.\n\nFrom point to point, over there, the distant lights,\nAnd in the sky, above, dreadful voices\nComing and going from the infinity of the marshes and planes\nTo the infinity of the valleys and the woods.\n\nAnd roadways that stretch out like sails\nAnd pass each other, coming unfolded in the distance, soundlessly,\nWhile lengthening beneath the stars,\nThrough the shadows and the terror of the night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "tenebrae": { - "title": "“Tenebrae”", - "body": "A moon, with vacant, chilling eye, stares\nAt the winter, enthroned vast and white upon the hard ground;\nThe night is an entire and translucent azure;\nThe wind, a blade of sudden presence, stabs.\n\nFar away, on the skylines, the long pathways of frost,\nSeen, in the distance, to pierce the expanses,\nAnd stars of gold, suspended to the zenith,\nAlways higher, amid the ether, to rend the blue of the sky.\n\nThe villages crouched in the plains of Flanders,\nNear the rivers, the heather, and the great forests,\nBetween two pale infinities, shiver with cold,\nHuddled near old hearthsides, where they stir the ashes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - } - } - }, - "paul-verlaine": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Paul Verlaine", - "birth": { - "year": 1844 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1896 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Verlaine", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "innocents-we": { - "title": "“Innocents We”", - "body": "Their long skirts and high heels battled away:\nDepending on the ground’s and breezes’ whim,\nAt times some stocking shone, low on the limb--\nToo soon concealed!--tickling our naïveté.\n\nAt times, as well, an envious bug would bite\nOur lovelies’ necks beneath the boughs, and we\nWould glimpse a flash--white flash, ah! ecstasy!--\nAnd glut our mad young eyes on sheer delight.\n\nEvening would fall, the autumn day would draw\nTo its uncertain close: our belles would cling\nDreamingly to us, cooing, whispering\nLies that still set our souls trembling with awe.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "mon-reve-familier": { - "title": "“Mon Rêve Familier”", - "body": "Oft do I dream this strange and penetrating dream:\nAn unknown woman, whom I love, who loves me well,\nWho does not every time quite change, nor yet quite dwell\nThe same,--and loves me well, and knows me as I am.\n\nFor she knows me! My heart, clear as a crystal beam\nTo her alone, ceases to be inscrutable\nTo her alone, and she alone knows to dispel\nMy grief, cooling my brow with her tears’ gentle stream.\n\nIs she of favor dark or fair?--I do not know.\nHer name? All I remember is that it doth flow\nSoftly, as do the names of them we loved and lost.\n\nHer eyes are like the statues’,--mild and grave and wide;\nAnd for her voice she has as if it were the ghost\nOf other voices,--well-loved voices that have died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-sky-blue-smiles-above-the-roof": { - "title": "“The Sky-Blue Smiles above the Roof”", - "body": "The sky-blue smiles above the roof\n Its tenderest;\nA green tree rears above the roof\n Its waving crest.\n\nThe church-bell in the windless sky\n Peaceably rings,\nA skylark soaring in the sky\n Endlessly sings.\n\nMy God, my God, all life is there,\n Simple and sweet;\nThe soothing bee-hive murmur there\n Comes from the street!\n\nWhat have you done, O you that weep\n In the glad sun,--\nSay, with your youth, you man that weep,\n What have you done?", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "peter-viereck": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Peter Viereck", - "birth": { - "year": 1916 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2006 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Viereck", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 16 - }, - "poems": { - "again-again": { - "title": "“Again, Again!”", - "body": "Who here’s afraid to gawk at lilacs?\nWho won’t stand up and praise the moon?\nWho doubts that skies still ache for skylarks\nAnd waves are lace upon the dune?\nBut flowering grave-dust, flowerlike snow-dust,\nBut tinkling dew, but fun of hay,\nBut soothing buzz and scent of sawdust\nHave all been seen, been said--we say.\n\nBANALITY, our saint, our silly:\nThe sun’s your adverb, named ‘Again’;\nYou wake us with it willy-nilly\nAnd westward wait to tuck us in.\nWe, nurse, are flouted when we flout you.\nEven to shock you is cliché.\nO inescapable and dowdy!\nO gold uniqueness every day!\n\nWho’s new enough, most now, most youngest\nEnough to eye you most again?\nWho’ll love the rose that love wore longest,\nYet say it fresher than brief rain?\nI’ll see. I’ll say. I’ll find the word.\nAll earth must lilt, then, willy-nilly\nAnd vibrate one rich triple-chord\nOf August, wine, and waterlily.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "benediction": { - "title": "“Benediction”", - "body": "When the first vague years, the years of questions and toys,\nResolved into years of the boy with his nose in old fable,\n It was good to hear a father’s voice\n Across the lull of the breakfast table.\nWhen the second fate, the years of answer and choice,\nDiffused into years of the youth on the parapet,\n Where maps went rainbowing round such tallness\n In outspread valley of my whim,\nThen earth was good in multicolored allness,\nAnd I loved all of it. But loved not him.\n\nThe third fate ambushed. Then the three roads met;\nI faced the enemy the Sphinx foretold.\nAgain, again the ancient rites unfold.\nMust all men play out fables to the end?\n Are men themselves not fates?--to bend\nTheir chains to rungs? I will out bless that curse,\nI praise alike the young years and the old:\nThe enemy the Sphinx foretold, I slew;\nThat, too, was good--forgive my doubt, my smallness--\n\nIt all is good, it all is good, him I loved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "better-come-quietly": { - "title": "“Better Come Quietly”", - "body": "> _Baby John:_\nO kinsfolk and gentlefolk, PLEASE be forgiving,\nBut nothing can lure me to living, to living.\nI’m snug where I am; I don’t WISH to burst through.\n\n> _Chorus of Nurses, Furies, & Muses:_\nThat’s what YOU think.\nIf only you KNEW!\n\n> _Baby John:_\nWell then YES, I’ll be BORN, but my EARTH will be heaven;\nMy dice will throw nothing but seven-eleven;\nLife is tall lilacs, all giddy with dew.\n\n> _Chorus of Nurses, Furies, & Muses:_\nThat’s what YOU think\nIf only you KNEW!\n\n> _Baby John:_\nWell then YES, there’ll be sorrows, be sorrows that best me;\nBut these are mere teasings to test me, to test me.\nWe’ll ZOOM from our graves when God orders us to.\n\n> _Chorus of Nurses, Furies, & Muses:_\nThat’s what YOU think.\nIf only you KNEW!\n\n> _Baby John:_\nWell then YES, I’ll belie my belief in survival\nBut IF there’s no God, then at least there’s no devil:\nIf at LAST I must die--well, at LEAST when I do.\nIt’s clear I won’t sizzle.\n\n> _Chorus of Nurses, Furies, & Muses:_\nIf only you KNEW!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "blindmans-buff": { - "title": "“Blindman’s Buff”", - "body": "Night-watchmen think of dawn and things auroral.\nClerks wistful for Bermudas think of coral.\nThe poet in New York still thinks of laurel.\n(But lovers think of death and touch each other\nAs if to prove that love is still alive.)\n\nThe Martian space-crew, in an Earthward dive,\nThink of their sweet unearthly earth Up There,\nWhere darling monsters romp in airless air.\n(Two lovers think of death and touch each other,\nFearing that day when only one’s alive.)\n\nWe think of cash, but cash does not arrive.\nWe think of fun, but fate will not connive.\nWe never mention death. Do we survive?\n(The lovers think of death and touch each other\nTo live their love while love is yet alive.)\n\nPrize-winners are so avid when they strive;\nThey race so far; they pile their toys so high.\nOnly a cad would trip them. Yet they die.\n(The lovers think of death and touch each other;\nOf all who live, these are the most alive.)\n\nWhen all the lemming-realists contrive\nTo swim--where to?--in life’s enticing tide,\nOnly a fool would stop and wait outside.\n(The lovers stop and wait and touch each other.\nWho twinly think of death are twice alive.)\n\nPlump creatures smack their lips and think they thrive;\nThe hibernating bear, but half alive,\nDreams of free honey in a stingless hive.\nHe thinks of life at every lifeless breath\n(The lovers think of death.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegy-to-all-sainthood-everywhere": { - "title": "“Elegy to All Sainthood Everywhere”", - "body": "Now hope, your sipped liqueur and our gulped wine,\nPromising us unearned your blessing-power\nWhen you are beautiful in your high blessing-hour,\nStill tricks the loneliness and love\nOf hearts which need you, tricks us to your tower.\n\nThat little contract which you had with death,\nHis casual subclause with its fine-print “dust,”\nHope hid this from us like amnesia. Now\nWe stand here so terribly shattered,\nSo shattered by death which made your tower a mound.\n\nHope-swilling on pneumatic cushions, you-ward\nBus loads of priests and lovers come,\nTown-pent and pale as toward a picnic ground,\nBegging your blessing like good picnic weather,\nLiving your sainthood like a week-end.\n\nThey hoped to lounge on kindness as on lawns;\nBut finding only death’s “No Trespass” sign,\nAll stand here shy, ungainly now,\nWanting so terribly hard to help you help them,\nWanting to help but never knowing how.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - }, - "game-called-on-account-of-darkness": { - "title": "“Game Called on Account of Darkness”", - "body": "Once there was a friend.\nHe watched me from the sky.\nMaybe he never lived at all.\nMaybe too much friendship made him die.\n\nWhen the gang played cops and robbers in the alley,\nIt was my friend who told me which were which.\nNow he doesn’t tell me any more.\n(Which team am I playing for?)\n\nMy science teacher built a telescope\nTo show me every answer in the end.\nI stared and stared at every star for hours.\nI couldn’t find my friend.\n\nEvery time I stood upon a crossroads,\nIt made me mad to feel him watch me choose.\nI’m glad there’s no more spying while I play.\nStill, I’m sad he went away.\n\nHe was like a kind of central-heating\nIn the big cold house, and that was good.\nOne by one I have to chop my toys now,\nAs firewood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "girl-child-pastoral": { - "title": "“Girl-Child Pastoral”", - "body": "Less like an eggshell than a tourniquet.\nOutside it: all that made the winds so knowing.\nInside it (being just a house): just she.\nShe remembered rain; and summers; and centuries.\n\nThat door in those days meant so much to her\nIt frightened her the time its slamming breeze\nFluttered her blouse as if it knew of breasts.\nThen she drew subtler pressures to her, softer\n\nBruises by lolling cool on flames of grass.\nKicking her shoes off, careless where they landed,\nShe spread her toes as wide apart as ducks do\nTo let the wind-webs through that never came.\n\nWhen pairs of vermin-wildness serenaded\nWith wooden grunts, her porch stayed free and airy;\nStayed paceable as cake-like castle-walls\nTo which all hoof-beats soar that never come.\n\nUntil one day they came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "hide-and-seek": { - "title": "“Hide and Seek”", - "body": "(An Easter Ballad)\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nThe frisking children chorused.\nWhen playtime ends,\nAll hidden friends\nAre bound to come out of the forest.\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nThe tidy children chorused,\nIn the short proud street\nWhere our lives are neat\nOn the nearer side of the forest.\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nThe puzzled children chorused.\nWhen fun is over,\nWhy doesn’t the rover\nCome whooping out of the forest?\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nThe lonely children chorused;\nFor the greater the dark\nThe less the lark\nWhen you wait till dusk near a forest.\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nThe shivering children chorused.\n(With some wonderful toy\nCan’t we hold back the boy\nWho is westering into the forest?)\n\n“Come OUT, come OUT, wherEVer you are,”\nWe aging children chorused\nWhile beyond our shout\nA boy comes out\nOn the farther side of the forest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "love-song-of-judas-smith": { - "title": "“Love Song of Judas Smith”", - "body": "Children, be happy while we others wait.\nPlant for yourselves; see mirrors lovingly.\nBe sweet; be progress; burst with fat.\nThe worms will thank you. Not he.\n\nNot you will recognize\nHim when again he comes.\nOnly our loveless eyes\nWill love without surprise\nHim when he comes.\n\nWe plant for him alone.\nOur wait is wild and calm.\nFor him, for his great hour, we’ve sown\nVine, hemp, palm.\n\nNew palm-leaves for his way\nThe second time he comes.\nAnd wine for the Supper at close of day.\nAnd hemp for the one of us who’ll betray\nHim when he comes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "nostalgia": { - "title": "“Nostalgia”", - "body": "(for a while, it was good to have been Man)\n\n# 1.\n\nAfter eight thousand years among the stars,\nA sudden wistfulness for August\nTugged me--like guilt--through half a cosmos\nBack to a planet sweet as canebrake,\nWhere winds have plumes and plumes have throats,\nWhere pictures\nLike “blue” and “south” can break your heart with sweet suggestiveness.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAfter a mere eight flickers, nothing changed there\nAmong the birds, still just as blazing,\nAmong the rain of leaves on rivers,\nThe heartbreak of the south and blue,\nThe canebrake-sweet of August night;\nBut only\nThe people changed, my people, oh my people, my\nforgetters.\n\n\n# 3.\n\n“After eight cycles, how is this you greet me?\nWhere is my horse? Where is my harp?\nWhy are the drums of goat-skin silent?\nSpin my abyss of resin-wine;\nDrape me my cloak of prophecy;\nMy name is …”\nAnd then I said the true and lost and terrifying word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "sonnet-for-servants-of-the-word": { - "title": "“Sonnet for Servants of the Word”", - "body": "Only the self-jailed jailbirds--monastery\nOr poet’s attic--know that knack of winning\nPeace out of pangs of lonely disciplining\nWhen form and content (soul, flesh) shotgun-marry.\n\nWrestling with Satan lest he tempt the unwary\nTo lusting after _clichés_ or to sinning,\nThey seek that Word which was in the beginning,\nWith Bible or with rhyming dictionary.\n\nBut what when doubt’s loud nightly wolf-pack rages?\nThen, staring thought down like a dog, monks win\nTheir peace back in the colored prints of bliss\nWhich beam from walls. But reeling from his pages\nThe poet’s eye meets but the hungry grin\nOf the--what shall we call it?--the Abyss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "a-sort-of-redemption": { - "title": "“A Sort of Redemption”", - "body": "The tenderness, the dignity of souls\nSweetens our cheated gusto and consoles.\nIt shades love’s lidless eyes like parasols\nAnd tames the earthquake licking at our soles.\nRetunes the tensions of the flesh we wear.\nForgives the dissonance our triumphs blare.\nAnd maps the burrows of heart’s buried lair\nWhere furtive furry Wishes hide like moles.\nO hear the kind voice, hear it everywhere\n(It sings, it sings, it conjures and cajoles)\nPrompting us shyly in our half-learnt roles.\nIt sprouts the great chromatic vine that lolls\nIn small black petals on our music scrolls\n(It flares, it flowers--it quickens yet controls)\nIt teaches dance-steps to this uncouth bear\nWho hops and stumbles in our skin and howls.\n\nThe weight that tortures diamonds out of coals\nIs lighter than the skimming hooves of foals\nCompared to one old heaviness our souls\nHoist daily, each alone, and cannot share:\nTo-be-awake, to sense, to-be-aware.\nThen even the dusty dreams that clog our skulls,\nThe rant and thunder of the storm we are,\nThe sunny silences our prophets hear,\nThe rainbow of the oil upon the shoals,\nThe crimes and Christmases of creature-lives,\nAnd all pride’s barefoot tarantelle on knives\nAre but man’s search for dignity of souls.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "a-walk-on-moss": { - "title": "“A Walk on Moss”", - "body": "# I.\n\nTwo lovers walking in a lovers’ garden,\nDreaming old books with heavy-lidded pages\nAbout two lovers walking in a garden.\nThey walk as dawdlingly as bark uncurls,\nMore inwardly than deep green lavishes;\nThey walk as timelessly as moss spells out\nTo every step the Braille of “dream forever,”\nWhere “forever” means an hour’s walk on moss.\nHis eyes that drowse too open, dream illusions:\nThat worlds--what kind?--exist outside the garden.\nThen just in time both dim their eyes--to wake;\nAnd then she sees no grief on earth beyond\nThe hint of pebbles in a sandal or\nA starling lost in rhododendron bushes.\n\n\n# II.\n\nTwo lovers, speaking in a garden, spangling\nConfetti of tropes. In fun articulating\nExtravagant picnics of sound. Let her say: “I am\nA mere coiffure of baubles who thank the sun,\n‘It is your noon that loans us stellar ways.’”\n\n“If head-dress,” let him answer,\n“then Milky Way.\nA pompadour of trellised fireflies.\nAn intricacy of comets at toss of the head,”\n\nA disciplined waterfall of well-tuned skies.\n“Then you, disheveler of cosmic primness,\nIt is who orchestrates that luminary\nLustre as startlingly as combs in winter.”\n\nAnd he: “Swim, tortoise-shell, on such sweet tides!”\nSo let them speak--like Byzantines of love--\nA minute in fun, their courtship having been\nIn truth least courtierlike of pastorals,\nNeeding each other as simply as fetching water\nFrom stillness of wells. Two lovers, two true loves:\nAs inarticulate as bread is shared.\n\n\n# III.\n\nA garden of togethers, waifs of groves,\nTwo twigs slender as rain, leaning\nAs tenderly as eyelids almost-meet.\nOr else an “ah” and “oh,” a pair of breaths\nSo in, so through, so hoveringly past\nCorporeal gates as if two sighs were drifting\nThrough sultry, gnat-stirred southlands, fluttered at\nBy dusks of moth-eyed, mild astonishments.\nYet lovers both: branded to the bone with knowledge,\nStifled to the lungs with incense of fulfilment,\nStained with each other’s scents like painter’s palettes.\nPalettes whose perfect white is white and isn’t,\nBeing blended from all colors ever found.\nDark and pure their thicket of entangling;\nDark and heavy its cloying; darkly white\nThe gentleness--heavy, heavy--of the gorged lovers.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFrom time to time they watch a goldfish circling.\nBeside white groves. The shade of saplings covers\nThe pond as chastely as a shadow longs.\nWhite shadow, ceremoniously emblemed\nWith slow wet rings that fade as sad as gold does.\nWhat have they to do--touching, as they walk,\nOnly each other’s knowing fingertips--\nWhat have they to do, satiated and kind,\nTwo lovers in a garden-walk, what else\nBut watch a rainbow of fins paddle like petals\nAcross a mirrored indolence of birches?\nMore real than they themselves are, for an hour\nIs not the only solid stuff in dreamland\nThe slow wet gold reflected from the circlings\nOf fish on the reflected white of bark?\nHere limbs are air, and contours cannot press.\nAnd only surfaces are deep.\nAnd nothing true except reflectedness.\n\n\n# V.\n\nHere and now, nothing is willed, and nothing touches;\nNot even the slowed up air--westering breezelessly--\nRipples the gauze of her shoulders. For an hour,\nLuxuriance has grown past wantonness; has grown\nBack down into a bud, as darkly pure\nAs satin, as unfolded as cocoons …\nAnd so two lovers walking in a garden\nBecame one moon. Pure white, drained beyond fire,\nOne moon in empty skies,\nRich beyond clouds and to itself enough.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "we-ran-all-the-way-home": { - "title": "“We Ran All the Way Home”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nCallously innocent in our disinfected games,\nWe plastic-swaddled children of fifty years\nWith unlined faces, hacking down some gnarls,\nUnpeeled a dryad once, stript, trapt, and spitting;--\nThat older race, filth of unswaddled pulse-beat,\nA god and shieldless,\nuninnocently tender.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nPlodding back home, yanking a god we cornered:\nA lassoed cataract amid canals.\nThen hours of swapping new toys for old spells,\nTill sobered by the hygiene-spraying aunts:\n“What makes our young ones fuss round just some stump?\nGo clutter honest lumber up with spooks,\nRead dryads in, go hunt for haunters; yet\nWhen all is said and done of ‘myth’ and ‘magic’,\nOne flashlight shrivels any hunk of dusk.\nBut watch for tricks: with lyric buzz re-enter\nFlies, incense, backwardness, those Old Expelled.\nHer spells?--her frauds! Aim lights--look, nothing there.”\n\n\n# 3.\n\nFrauds of the dryad:\n speech, growth, weapon mocked us.\nHer weapon: raids by quicksilver evadings.\nHer growth: tree rhythm, an unfolding. Her speech:\nA riffraff of breezes, truant from asphalt and logic,\nLeaving behind a litter of petals and doubts.\nOf anti-metal something shimmered then\n(A winging of sap against a steeling of will)\nThat would have rusted something of machine in us,\nHad something in us of weight not tamed that wine.\nWe tamed by gifts. Gave metal’s just-as-good:\n“Instead! Instead! You need; we give; you change.”\nAnd so a god gets nursed into a pet;\n\n\n# 4.\n\nBut threshes about.\n Exchanged her splintry wood--\nImagine being cooped in living coarseness--\nFor kind soft straw we dumped upon the pavement\nOf a prefab garage we lavished on her,\nA half-mile from our street. Ingratitude\nOf gods we house! Not one gift worked\nTo stop that twisting on that first-class straw.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nA far-off tremor shook our sleep that evening;\nA twirl of arms and boughs; recurrent dream:\n_No start,\n Around around,\n She is a god she is a plant\n Undertow of flesh and ocean\n Ocean and flesh of undertow\n A plant is she a god is she\n Around around,\nNo end._\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThat obscene vibrance jarred our own snug beds\nAnd blighted every crib from birth with pulse:\n“Dear aunts, we have bad dreams, seal unrest out.”\nSo much of other nuisance, junk, and murk\nWe’ve killed for its own good, to scrape earth pure;\nBut when some bitch-dog wags immortal hide,\nOur “put her out of her misery” won’t put.\nA rotten gyp when gift and gun both fail;\nNo other vermin lasts; it’s them, it’s she, it’s\nImmortals always spoil our cleaning up.\n… And so a pet gets cursed into a god.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nNext dream, half farce: she sowed--amid tame starches--\nSong’s fleeing laurel, wriggly still with nymph,\nAnd love’s wild myrtle,--till a crop of sighs\nDrowned out the crackle of our breakfast cornflakes.\n “Deft aunts, help quick; growth shrinks us; school in panic.\n Whatever sprouts, throbs to the dryad’s tossing.”\n“Growth just won’t shape like plastics, you poor boys;\nTo wither myrtle, plant it in a pot;\nTo wither laurel, spray it with a footnote.\nBut darker than her wars, her lures. Those fancy\nGod-molls got gossiped of in Arcady.\nNeighbors saw them bend near bulls, and as for swans--\nThen stomp more moral than a quadruped;\nBe well-scrubbed knights; in short, go lynch that foreigner.”\nCreation gets reversed to kill a god.\n\n\n# 8.\n\nWhat cannot kill unkillable, can torture;\nShe, writhing stubborn, droned unwelcome myth:\n_“Two signs, when first your campfire banned us, wrangled:\nCircle and line. Our cycle, your ascent.\n‘Revere each season’s own true bend,’ we sang then;\n‘Drain, build, stamp logic on,’ clanged will, male, steel.\nClang-knit geometries of girders garland\nYour plumb-lines now\n and grid our zigzag ways.”_\n“Bulldozer world: grove’s awe and rubble razed for\nA smile of blueprints on a surge of chins.”\n\n_“Your lavishness with clicks and slot machines--”_\n\n“--(here tin gives birth, true stainless birth, not life’s kind)--”\n\n_“--is but man’s fear of liking being owned again\nBy cornucopian lap.”_\n “All nest and trap and\nPrayer lips and infinite pillowing mercy … and quicksand\nHail man-the-improver, for his is the world without end.”\n\nFrom deicide, man deified. But she:\n\n\n# 9.\n\n_“Girl was the older race’s core, unshrined by\nWho shrines machine, the heavy public man\nToo willed to play or pray. And girlhood once\nUprooted roots out child, man, landmark too,\nUntending--to be priestess means to tend--\nThe linking ivy of a heritage.\nApart, apart the mute shared sap-flow dries,\nInto a crackle of unclutching. Hail\nThe chattery scorch-torch-ping of progress popping.”_\n\n“Back to your lute-strings; our rustproof nerves twang prose.”\n\n_“What have you prosed us to?--once tide, ode, bud.\nGood for your files and glands, the thing your time-clock\nAnd cot call ‘woman’ means but gelded male.\nYet girl-lap templed--inner Delphi--teaches\n Doer what grower knows of spell and rite,\n Willing what being knows of soul and gut.”_\n\n“A belly swelled into an oracle?”\n\n_“Don’t think apart the mixed-up dark of things.\nAs we need your half, starving you’ll need ours;\nNo crop from conquering plow without our furrow;\nSpray all your fruit-trees clean, they still won’t dangle\nTill fouled into life by dryad-rut within.”_\n\n\n# 10.\n\nWas heard to pray when thought herself unheard:\n _“You high ones, old ones, watching two by two\n Wherever shrineless gods are exiled to,\n Send down your lightning. But your olive too.\n Cool whisper of the ages, not the age,\n Expand the shallows of men’s anchorage,\n Apprentice them to more than they can hear.\n You earth-deep resonance they dare not hear,\n Be everywhere, like fragrance of the orange,\n Yet single and sonorous as its root,\n Till lives are sweet and inward as an orange,\n And every death a quilt of leaves on root.”_\n\n\n# 11.\n\nNerve-drugs for war words; for daft wings, a cage.\nWe hiked to her garage dorm, spruced it up with\nBars into really not too glum a cell:\n“To help you help yourself to be mature.”\nChain stopped much nonsense; only her locks now threshing,--\nFever of clouds across her forehead’s moon.\nThat orbitless sick moon our purging kindness\nDrained glow-worm dim; yet sneaky silver embered\nOutrageously between the bars of norm--\nWhenever, chained or bribed, she still said “no”\nThe one vile puking way still left to say it:\n\n_“At hefty orbit sleazily genteeled\n (Shuttling from chintzy homes to brassy markets,\n From taciful tantrums of your filtered hearts\n To drive-in heavens of a public grin),\nMy unchromed gullet vomits, vomits, vomits.”_\n\n\n# 12.\n\nOh aunts, the vileness of last gasp of gods!\nYet that foul no, the same that threshed our sleep through,\nSomehow exulted more than all our yes.\nExultant oceanic resonances--\nDolphins of air--tinkled her chains like gauds;\nFar off, where bulging breakers shriek their spray\nOf birthday round a trouble-making island,\nHer pulse found girl-communion.\n Drawing up from\nThe caterwauling deeps at Kythera\nThat pain-surviving bitch-tenacity\nThat just can’t help enduring through and through,\nShe prayed her second prayer. But this time peer to peer,\nTree-skirt to foam-skirt sister, tide to tide:--\n_“Undertow,\nYou other blue,\nTow these to you.\nCame sky; in upside-down of sky, there always\nWas undertow.\nCame Greek year; shrines held only what a port can\nOf undertow.\nCame eons, Lilith, Venusburg; there always\nWas undertow.\nQueened, demoned, pseudo-tamed, renamed, there always\nWas undertow.\nLines of the straighteners, net of nerves and subways,\nCame; always indestructible below\nIs undertow.\nNow undertow’s\nFierce coarseness, sinew us who are so birch-bark\nGentle we pale with gladness at glint of dew.\nThem, goddess, too,\nSwerve\n not too late\n from where they hurtle to;\nSway up unearned for these who earn the lightning,\nThe olive too.”_\n\n\n# 13.\n\nSilence below. Prayer scorned. “You are alone.”\n_“Silence? No balm for these but their own ghat?\nThey tried to force the wooed consent of things.\nThen, under-goddess, must they all the way\n(From whiz to slag) plumb their own plumb-line’s end?\nOnce there were promises intense as noons.\nHail man-the-improver,\nFor his is the end of the world. In technicolor.”_\n To us: _“Lively is not alive; a pyre\n Seems snugger than a hearth a little while.”_\nThen royal-slim within imagined pine:\n_“Nears its end the chummy phase of will, male, steel,--\nBang triply stoked; a few toys more, then feeds\nYour ash my wilds,\n re-greened;\n wild sap, strict dance;\nThe second bloomtide of the hacked first gods.”_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-cant-i-live-forever": { - "title": "“Why Can’t I Live Forever?”", - "body": "_“Here comes a candle to light you to bed,\nAnd here comes a chopper to chop off your head”_\n (Nursery rhyme)\n\nDeath is a blind flamingo, hunting fishes.\nHe does not mean to gobble you or me--\nAnd when his beak swings wildly, never wishes\nTo scare us so. If only he could see!\n\nAt night he wades through surf to seek a mate.\nThat’s why he stinks of salt and oyster shells.\nIt is his blindness keeps him celibate:\nThis bungler thinks he kisses when he kills.\n\nI wish he wouldn’t make us die. I wish\nHe’d spread his wings one night and fly away\nTo higher planets for his girls and fish.\nBut he’s got used to Earth and plans to stay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vale-from-carthage": { - "title": "“‘Vale’ from Carthage”", - "body": "I, now at Carthage. He, shot dead at Rome.\nShipmates last May. “And what if one of us,”\nI asked last May, in fun, in gentleness,\n“Wears doom, like dungarees, and doesn’t know?”\nHe laughed, _“Not see Times Square again?”_ The foam,\nFeathering across that deck a year ago,\nSwept those five words--like seeds--beyond the seas\n Into his future. There they grew like trees,\n And as he passed them there next spring, they spread\n Across his road of fire their sudden shade.\nThough he had always scraped his mess-kit pure\nAnd polished piously his barracks floor,\nThough all his buttons glowed like cloudless moons\nTo plead for him in G. I. orisons,\nNo furlough fluttered from the sky. He will\nNot see Times Square--he will not see--he will\nNot see Times change; at Carthage (while my friend,\nLiving those words at Rome, screamed in the end)\nI saw an ancient Roman’s tomb and read\n_“Vale”_ in stone. Here two wars mix their dead:\n Roman, my shipmate’s dream walks hand in hand\n With yours tonight (“New York again” and “Rome”),\n Like widowed sisters bearing water home\n On tired heads through hot Tunisian sand\nIn good cool urns, and says, “I understand.”\nRoman, you’ll see your Forum Square no more;\nWhat’s left but this to say of any war?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "jose-garcia-villa": { - "metadata": { - "name": "José García Villa", - "birth": { - "year": 1908 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1997 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "filipino", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇵🇭", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_García_Villa", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "filipino" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "in-my-desire-to-be-nude": { - "title": "“In my desire to be Nude …”", - "body": "In my desire to be Nude\nI clothed myself in fire:--\nBurned down my walls, my roof,\nBurned all these down.\n\nEmerged myself supremely lean\nUnsheathed like a holy knife.\nWith only His Hand to find\nTo hold me beyond annul.\n\nAnd found Him found Him found Him\nFound the Hand to hold me up!\nHe held me like a burning poem\nAnd waved me all over the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "francois-villon": { - "metadata": { - "name": "François Villon", - "birth": { - "year": 1431, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1463 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "french", - "language": "french", - "flag": "🇫🇷", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François_Villon", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "french" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "ballade-of-the-ladies-of-time-past": { - "title": "“Ballade of the Ladies of Time Past”", - "body": "Oh tell me where, in lands or seas,\nFlora, that Roman belle, has strayed,\nThais, or Archipiades,\nWho put each other in the shade,\nOr Echo, who by bank and glade\nGave back the crying of the hound,\nAnd whose sheer beauty could not fade.\n_But where shall last year’s snow be found?_\n\nWhere too is learned Heloise,\nFor whom shorn Abelard was made\nA tonsured monk upon his knees?\nSuch tribute his devotion paid.\nAnd where’s that queen who, having played\nWith Buridan, had him bagged and bound\nTo swim the Seine thus ill-arrayed?\n_But where shall last year’s snow be found?_\n\nQueen Blanche the fair, whose voice could please\nAs does the siren’s serenade, Big Bertha, Beatrice, Alice--these,\nAnd Arembourg whom Maine obeyed,\nAnd Joan whom Burgundy betrayed,\nAnd England burned, and Heaven crowned:\nWhere are they, Mary, Sovereign Maid?\n_But where shall last year’s snow be found?_\n\nNot next week, Prince, nor next decade,\nAsk me these questions I propound.\nI shall but say again, dismayed,\n_Ah, where shall last year’s snow be found?_", - "metadata": { - "language": "french", - "translator": "Richard Wilbur", - "date": { - "year": 1461 - } - } - } - } - }, - "andrei-voznesensky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Andrei Voznesensky", - "birth": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2010 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Voznesensky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "autumn-in-sigulda": { - "title": "“Autumn in Sigulda”", - "body": "Hanging out of the train, I\nBid you all good-bye.\n\nGood-bye, Summer:\nMy time is up.\nAxes knock at the dacha\nAs they board it up:\nGood-bye.\n\nThe woods have shed their leaves,\nEmpty and sad today\nAs an accordion case that grieves\nWhen its music is taken away.\n\nPeople (meaning us)\nAre also empty,\nAs we leave behind\n(We have no choice)\nWalls, mothers, womankind:\nSo it has always been and will be.\n\nGood-bye, Mother,\nStanding at the window\nTransparent as a cocoon: soon\nYou will know how tired you are.\nLet us sit here a bit.\nFriends and foes, adieu,\nGood-bye.\nThe whistle has blown: it is time\nFor you to run out of me and I\nOut of you.\n\nMotherland, good-bye now.\nI shall not whimper nor make a scene,\nBut be a star, a willow:\nThank you, Life, for having been.\n\nIn the shooting gallery,\nWhere the top score is ten,\nI tried to reach a century:\nThank you for letting me make the mistake,\nBut a triple thank-you that into\n\nMy transparent shoulders\nGenius drove\nLike a red male fist that enters\nA rubber glove.\n\nVoznesensky may one day be graven\nIn cold stone but, meanwhile, may\nI find haven\nOn your warm cheek as Andrei.\n\nIn the woods the leaves were already falling\nWhen you ran into me, asked me something.\nYour dog was with you: you tugged at his leash and called him,\nHe tugged the other way:\nThank you for that day.\nI came alive: thank you for that September,\nFor explaining me to myself. The housekeeper, I remember,\nWoke us at eight, and on weekends her phonograph sang\nSome old underworld song\nIn a hoarse bass:\nI give thanks for the time, the place.\n\nBut you are leaving, going,\nAs the train is going, leaving,\nGoing in another direction: we are ceasing to belong\nto each other or this house. What is wrong?\n\nNear to me, I say:\nYet Siberias away!\n\nI know we shall live again as\nFriends or girlfriends or blades of grass,\nInstead of us this one or that one will come:\nNature abhors a vacuum.\n\nThe leaves are swept away without trace\nBut millions more will grow in their place:\nThank you, Nature, for the laws you gave me.\n\nBut a woman runs down the track\nlike a red autumn leaf at the train’s back.\n\nSave me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "W. H. Auden", - "date": { - "year": 1961 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "blue-snow-will-soon-be-turning-grey": { - "title": "“Blue snow will soon be turning grey …”", - "body": "Blue snow will soon be turning grey\nOn roadways out beyond the town\nThe low-lying patches churned away\nBy waking waters seeping down.\n\nIn clear, clean sand and seeming quiet\nThe waiting waters still lie low;\nThen, one wild night, in steaming riot\nThey’ll rise, the streams will overflow.\n\nAnd as the earth, still all a-mush\nA-thaw and sleepy, is drying out\nSprinkling the leaf mould, with a rush\nThe new green grass will start to sprout.\n\nThen alder pollen, drifting green,\nWill blow by on the breeze,\nBlown up from childhood’s distant scene,\nShadow-soft to the cheeks.\n\nAnd again the heart shall respond enthralled\nTo the season’s freshness, as before.\nNot gone, as it seemed, beyond recall.\nBut with us now-and evermore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Avril Pyman", - "date": { - "year": 1965 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "dead-still": { - "title": "“Dead still”", - "body": "Now, with your palms on the blades of my shoulders,\nLet us embrace:\nLet there be only your lips’ breath on my face,\nOnly, behind our backs, the plunge of the rollers.\n\nOur backs, which like two shells in moonlight shine,\nAre shut behind us now;\nWe lie here huddled, listening brow to brow,\nLike life’s twin formula or double sign.\n\nIn folly’s world-wide wind\nOur shoulders shield from the weather\nThe calm we now beget together,\nLike a flame held between hand and hand.\n\nDoes each cell have a soul within it?\nIf so, fling open all your little doors,\nAnd all your souls shall flutter like the linnet\nIn the cages of my pores.\n\nNothing is hidden that shall not be known.\nYet by no storm of scorn shall we\nBe pried from this embrace, and left alone\nLike muted shells forgetful of the sea.\n\nMeanwhile, O load of stress and bother,\nLie on the shells of our backs in a great heap:\nIt will but press us closer, one to the other.\n\nWe are asleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Richard Wilbur", - "date": { - "year": 1965 - } - } - }, - "first-frost": { - "title": "“First Frost”", - "body": "A girl is freezing in a telephone booth,\nhuddled in her flimsy coat,\nher face stained by tears\nand smeared with lipstick.\n\nShe breathes on her thin little fingers.\nFingers like ice. Glass beads in her ears.\n\nShe has to beat her way back alone\ndown the icy street.\n\nFirst frost. A beginning of losses.\nThe first frost of telephone phrases.\n\nIt is the start of winter glittering on her cheek,\nthe first frost of having been hurt.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Stanley Kunitz", - "date": { - "year": 1959 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "million-roses": { - "title": "“Million roses”", - "body": "There was painter once,\nOwned a small home and his art.\nBut there’s an actress he loved,\nFlowers were dear to her heart.\n\nSo he sold his house on a whim--\nHis art and his roof, undeterred--\nAnd spent all the money to buy\nA whole sea of flowers for her.\n\nA million, million, million red roses here,\nFrom you room, from your room, from your room, you can view.\nOne in love, one in love, one in love--that’s sincere!--\nWill transform life into flowers for you.\n\nOutside the window, you gaze--\nMaybe your mind’s in a daze?\nYour dream is continuing there,\nFlowers have covered the square.\n\nYour soul turns cold, overwhelmed--\nWhat affluent man went offbeat?\nBut there, not a penny in hand,\nThe painter stands in the street.\n\nTheir meeting was fleeting, of course.\nShe left on the train in the night.\nBut in her life there once was\nThe mad song of roses outside.\n\nThe painter lived all alone.\nThrough much misfortune and gloom.\nBut in his life there once was\nA square full of roses in bloom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1981 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_mary_magdalene" - } - } - }, - "the-nose": { - "title": "“The Nose”", - "body": "_The nose grows during the whole of one’s life_\n --from scientific sources\n\nYesterday my doctor told me:\n“Clever you may be, however\nYour snout is frozen.”\nSo don’t go out in the cold,\nNose!\n\nOn me, on you, on Capuchin monks,\nAccording to well-known medical laws\nRelentless as clocks, without pause\nNose-trunks triumphantly grow.\n\nDuring the night they grow\nOn every citizen, high or low,\non janitors, ministers, rich and poor,\nHooting endlessly like owls,\nChilly and out of kilter,\nBrutally bashed by a boxer\nOr foully crushed by a door,\nAnd those of our feminine neighbors\nAre foxily screwed like drills\nInto many a keyhole.\n\nGogol, that mystical uneasy soul,\nIntuitively sensed their role.\n\nMy good friend Buggins got drunk: in his dream\nIt seemed that, like a church spire\nBreaking through washbowls and chandeliers,\nPiercing and waking startled ceilings,\nImpaling each floor like,\nReceipts on a spike,\n\nHigher and higher\nrose\nhis nose.\n\n“What could that mean?” he wondered next morning.\n“A warning,” I said, “of doomsday: it looks\nAs if they were going to check your books.”\nOn the 30th poor Buggins was haled off to jail.\n\nWhy, O Prime Mover of Noses, why\nDo our noses grow longer, our lives shorter,\nwhy during the night should these fleshly lumps,\nlike vampires or suction pumps,\nDrain us dry?\n\nThey report that Eskimos,\nKiss with their nose.\n\nAmong us this has not caught on.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "W. H. Auden", - "date": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "roman-holiday": { - "title": "“Roman Holiday”", - "body": "_In Rome at the New Year it is the custom to throw old things into the street._\n\nRome rattles and shakes\nlike a runaway breakdown truck.\nAll over Rome and round about\nthe New Year’s coming in!\n\nLike Mills bombs, bottles\ndropped from windowsills.\ncrash all over the place,\nand what price that tough\nshoving a bathtub onto a balcony?\n\nUp on the Piazza di Spagna,\nspinning like a flying saucer,\na husband is flung from his nuptial bed:\nhe’s obsolete and all but dead!\n\nThey’ve cornered a naked man in a bar,\n‘Damn you squares!’, he bawls,\n‘I need a change of suit:\nlast year’s is out of date’.\n\nDear town, we shall flounder and drown\nIn your cast-offs and metamorphoses;\nyour ancient asphalted roadways\ngleam like the sloughed skins of pythons.\nAll the times you have shuffled them off,\nbut the speedometers show they’re still too slow\nfor Roman girls on Vespas!\nSo what next do you have in store for us?\n\nThe human race with roars and guffaws\nis ridding itself of its rubbish,\ndo we all need overhauls?\nLike Time itself we approach our hour\n\nand stand, forgetting petty chores,\nfully absorbed now by the future.\nDo we regret what we’re discarding?\nA reindeer’s dam, just after fawning,\nlooks loving and a little overcome.\n\nMaybe the New Year will be rough,\nwith a few good days for flying in it?\nDon’t worry: it won’t be the end of the world\n--and the more fun we’ll have saying goodbye to it.\n\nWe fly through the air like apples off branches.\nThis fuss is already rather a bore,\nthough later, at least, I have something to live for:\n--towards the middle of the windy day,\nin her lopsided winter villa she’ll say\n(once she’s gallopped through that thriller)\nthat she’s cold when I’m not with her,\nshe’s cold without me is what she’ll say …\n\nAnd past other worlds\ninto darkness, deadpan as a croupier,\nour pale planet whirls--\ncooped in its shell like an embryo bird.\nIt’s hatching out now, look!\nWhat to become? A warbler?\nOr a black thing, a baby rook\nblasted off the wing by atomic warheads?\n\nI only hope the weather keeps fine\nfor all these darling creatures …\nOver Rome--and all the world what’s more--\nthe New Year’s coming in …\n… with tangerines and amorous passes,\nand right till dawn the women’s bodies\n--like electric bulbs in lampshades--\nglowing through their dresses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Max Hayward", - "date": { - "year": 1996 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-monologue-of-the-beatnik": { - "title": "“The monologue of the beatnik”", - "body": "_Rebellion of machines_\n\nEscape--to yourself, to republic of Haiti, to churches, to toilets,\n to Egypt--\nEscape!\n\nThe heaps of machines roar and mew, smoke and fume, they are angry:\n“We are hungry”\n\nDark machines, like Batus, have enslaved us:\n“Mercedes!”\n\nTheir arrogant myrmidons,\nDrinking from glass gasoline,\nFigure out: whoever in England\nHas started rebellion against the machine?\nLet’s flee! I’ll join in!…\n\nAt night, overcoming its fear,\nRobot says to inventor:\n“My dear,\n\nGive me your wife, if you can,\nYou know, I am fond of brunettes\nI love her for all I am worth\nSo you had better give in!”\n\nOh, things most predacious of all!\nThe veto is put on the soul.\nWe flee to the hills and speak in our beards,\n\nWe jump into the water, naked,\nBut rivers get shallow, or\nFish die in the sea ever more.\n\nOur women give birth to Rolls-Royces\nRadiation rejoices!\n\n… My souls is a little wild animal\nWalking around back streets\nLike a puppy with a piece of rope\nYou whine, run around and hop.\n\nThe time is now whistles nicely\nOver fiery Tennessee\nSophisticated like Sirin\nWith the light-alloy chassis.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alec Vagapov", - "date": { - "year": 1973 - } - } - } - } - }, - "alexander-vvedensky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Alexander Vvedensky", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1941 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vvedensky_(poet)", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "i-regret-that-im-not-a-beast": { - "title": "“I regret that I’m not a beast …”", - "body": "I regret that I’m not a beast,\nrunning along a blue path,\ntelling myself to believe,\nand my other self to wait a little,\nI’ll go out with myself to the forest\nto examine the insignificant leaves.\nI regret that I’m not a star,\nrunning along the vaults of the sky,\nin search of the perfect nest\nit finds itself and earth’s empty water,\nno one has ever heard of a star giving out a squeak,\nits purpose is to encourage the fish with its silence.\nAnd then there’s this grudge that I bear,\nthat I’m not a rug, nor a hydrangea.\nI regret I’m not a roof,\nfalling apart little by little,\nwhich the rain soaks and softens,\nwhose death is not sudden.\nI don’t like the fact that I’m mortal,\nI regret that I am not perfect.\nMuch much better, believe me,\nis a particle of day a unit of night.\nI regret that I’m not an eagle,\nflying over peak after peak,\nto whom comes to mind\na man observing the acres.\nI regret I am not an eagle,\nflying over lengthy peaks,\nto whom comes to mind\na man observing the acres.\nYou and I, wind, will sit down together\non this pebble of death.\nIt’s a pity I’m not a grail,\nI don’t like that I am not pity.\nI regret not being a grove,\nwhich arms itself with leaves.\nI find it hard to be with minutes,\nthey have completely confused me.\nIt really upsets me terribly\nthat I can be seen in reality.\nAnd then there’s this grudge that I bear,\nthat I’m not a rug, nor a hydrangea.\nWhat scares me is that I move\nnot the way that do bugs that are beetles,\nor butterflies and baby strollers\nand not the way that do bugs that are spiders.\nWhat scares me is that I move\nvery unlike a worm,\na worm burrows holes in the earth\nmaking small talk with her.\nEarth, where are things with you,\nsays the cold worm to the earth,\nand the earth, governing those that have passed,\nperhaps keeps silent in reply,\nit knows that it’s all wrong.\nI find it hard to be with minutes,\nthey have completely confused me.\nI’m frightened that I’m not the grass\nthat is grass, I’m frightened that I’m not a candle.\nI’m frightened that I’m not the candle that is grass,\nto this I have answered,\nand the trees sway back and forth in an instant.\nI’m frightened by the fact that when my glance\nfalls upon two of the same thing\nI don’t notice that they are different,\nthat each lives only once.\nI’m frightened by the fact that when my glance\nfalls upon two of the same thing\nI don’t see how hard they are trying\nto resemble each other.\nI see the world askew\nand hear the whispers of muffled lyres,\nand having by their tips the letters grasped\nI lift up the word wardrobe,\nand now I put it in its place,\nit is the thick dough of substance.\nI don’t like the fact that I’m mortal,\nI regret that I am not perfect,\nmuch much better, believe me,\nis a particle of day a unit of night.\nAnd then there’s this grudge that I bear\nthat I’m not a rug, nor a hydrangea.\nI’ll go out with myself to the woods\nfor the examination of insignificant leaves,\nI regret that upon these leaves\nI will not see the imperceptible words,\nwhich are called accident, which are called immortality,\nwhich are called a kind of roots.\nI regret that I’m not an eagle\nflying over peak after peak,\nto whom came to mind\na man observing the acres.\nI’m frightened by the fact that everything becomes dilapidated,\nand in comparison I’m not a rarity.\nYou and I, wind, will sit down together\non this pebble of death.\nLike a candle the grass grows up all around,\nand the trees sway back and forth in an instant.\nI regret that I am not a seed,\nI am frightened I’m not fertility.\nThe worm crawls along behind us all,\nhe carries monotony with him.\nI’m scared to be an uncertainty,\nI regret that I am not fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Matvei Yankelevich", - "date": { - "year": 1934 - } - } - }, - "the-joyful-man-franz": { - "title": "“The Joyful Man Franz”", - "body": "the joyful man Franz\nmaintained protuberance\nfrom start to finish\nhe never came down the porch\nmeasured stars named flowers\nbelieved I am you\naffixing number to time\nhumming in rhyme\nhe died and was deceased\nlike the shotgun and the cyst\nfrightened, he would see a skirt\nas he fantasized asleep\nand would sail at the helm\nto a melancholy elm\nwhere squads of beetles\nperformed about-faces\nshowed their mustaches to gods\npronounced themselves to be clocks\ngods howled out of tune\nand tumbled down from the moon\nthere in luxurious grass\nan ant was being stamped\nand the glowworm, unkind king\nlit up a large lamp\nsilently the lightnings flashed\nlanguid animals snorted\nunhurriedly growled\nthe waves that lay on the sand\nwhere? where did all this happen\nwhere did this location roam\nI forgot, the sun will say\nsinking into the unknown\nall we see is the exit\nfrom the schoolbag of Franz\nof the contemporary of man\nthe psychologist of the divine\nthis wizard announces\nthe party begins\nidle stars crowd in\nboring people smoke\nlonely thoughts run around\neverything is sad and pointless\nGod what kind of party is this\nit’s the christmas of death or something\nhens step around gulfs\nthe hall hops with cupids\nand the iron steam-engine\nmeditates on cow-patties\nFranz awoke from his nightmare\nwhy are all these things here?\nthe valet stood here like a palm\nbefore the meadows of eternity\nshort as a reed\nthe collar sleeps upon a chair\na branch of kerosene\noverlooks the twilight\nanswer me wizard\nis this a dream? I’m a fool\nbut where is that wizard\nwhere is the psychologist of the divine\nhe counts songs in his sleep\ngrowing bald as a tree\nhe can’t come here\nwhere the real world stands\nhe calmly multiplies the shades\nhe does not shimmer in the sky\nTurks give me my carriage\nthe joyful Franz called\ngive me the rocket of Ober\ngive me horsepower\nI will ride around the world\nin this fascinating cab\nI will orchestrate a race\nof the star with the prisoner earth\ntouch the ceiling with my head\nI’m a bluebird\nmeanwhile out of the acute night\nout of the abyss of the bad dream\nappears a crown\nand the ramified scythe\nyou’re an irate serpent\nmy childless death\nhello Franz will sadly say\neach of your hairs holds\nmore thoughts than a pot\nmore sleep than a powder\ntake out your saber\nand open my shirt\nand then open my skin\nglue me to the bed\nall the same shall learning triumph\nI’ll announce as I gurgle\nand create a grandson\nmy substitute in the form of a lamp\nhe will stand and glow\nwrite essays for school\ndeath said you are a flower\nand fled to the east\nFranz remained alone\nto contemplate protuberance\nmeasure stars name flowers\ncompose I and you\nlying in absolute silence\nin the empty heights", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Eugene Ostashevsky", - "date": { - "year": 1930 - } - } - }, - "the-meaning-of-the-sea": { - "title": "“The Meaning of the Sea”", - "body": "to understand it once and for all\none must live life as in reverse\nand to take walks in the forest\nwhile tearing out your hair whole\n\nand when you get to know the fire\nof the light bulb or of the oven\nsay to it why are you shining\nyou the fire are candle’s master\n\nwhat’s your meaning is it nothing\nwhere’s the kettle where the cabinet\nthe demons whirl around like flies\ncircling above a piece of pie\n\nand these spirits flash their eyes\nhands and legs and horns and smiles\n\naround the trees juicy beasts howl\nthe light bulbs twisting in their sleep\nthe silent children blow their horns\nold women cry atop the evergreens\n\nand the universal deity\nstands in the celestial cemetery\nand the ideal horse saunters\nuntil finally the forest enters\n\nand so we stare terrified by it\nthinking that it is a mist only\nthe forest roars its hands raised\nworries mostly about boredom\n\nit whispers weakly i’m a phantom\nperhaps I’ll exist later sometime\n\nall around stand peaks and meadows\nbearing phobias on a platter\npeople animals mountain women\ndance and celebrate the feast day\n\nthe music is ringing out brightly\nand the tribal folk are playing\nshepherds and shepherdesses barking\non the tables the shuttles spinning\n\nand in the shuttles now and then\nvisible are the wreaths of minutes\n\nhere there is a general mirth\nthis I told you from the start\nit is the precipice’s birth\nor the marriage of these cliffs\n\nit is we who have seen the feast\nwe will sit down on the piping bench\nby the pathway spinning like the earth\nhands thundering with tambourines\n\nthere will be sky and will be battle\nor we will become ourselves\n\nthe cups are tramping on mustaches\nflowers are sprouting on the clocks\nand our thoughts are taking flight\namong the plants grown entwined\n\nour thoughts and our rowboats\nour sacred gods and our aunties\nour souls and our solid earth\nour cups and in the cups death\n\nyet however we still insisted\nthere is no meaning in such rain\nsalt of the earth we ask for a sign\nthe sign plays upon the waters\n\nthe wise old hills are tossing\nall those feasting into rivers\nin the rivers shot glasses blooming\nin rivers is the birthplace of night\n\nour thoughts like those of corpses\nwe have shown the sky the grain\nsea and time and dream are one\nso we say dropping to the bottom\n\nhaving grabbed with us the instruments\nour souls our feet and healing powders\nand having set up the monuments\nshedding light on the chamber pots\n\nwe’re on the floor of the deep sea\nwe are the town hall of the drowned\narguing with the number fifteen\nwe will race and we will burn up\n\nbut however the years were passing\npassing were the fog and nonsense\nwho had fallen to the sea’s bottom\nlike a board from the ship’s timbers\nbecame sad and full of longing\nknocking together wisdom teeth\nsit on top of the colorless seaweed\nhang to dry out laundered muscles\n\nwe are blinking like the moonlight\nwhen the waves tremble aglimmer\nwho was it that said the sea’s bottom\nand my foot are one and the same\n\ngenerally all here are dissatisfied\nin silence they walk out of the waters\nwhile behind them hum the waves\nputting their shoulders to the wheel\n\nthe ships were galloping up and down\nthe horses racing in the fields\nthere was firing and there was keening\nsleep and death are in the clouds\n\nall the drowned have left the water\nand are trudging toward the sunset\nsaddling up the yolk and harness\nwho was poor and who was wealthy\n\nas I said I saw this right off\nanyway the end is nearing\nthey are bringing us a large vase\na flower and a little sleigh bell\n\nit’s a vase and it is graceful\nit’s the candle and it’s the snow\nit is salt and it’s the mousetrap\nfor rejoicing and for basking\n\ngreetings to god the universal\nhere I stand a little sleazy\nfree-will memory and oar\ncarried off glory be to the sky", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Alex Cigale" - } - }, - "snow-lies": { - "title": "“Snow Lies”", - "body": "snow lies\nearth flies\nlights flip\nin pigments night has come\non a rug of stars it lies\nis it night or a demon?\nlike an inane lever\nsleeps the insane river\nit is now aware\nof the moon everywhere\nanimals gnash their canines\nin black gold cages\nanimals bang their heads\nanimals are the ospreys of saints\nthe world flies around the universe\nin the vicinity of stars\ndashes deathless like a swallow\nseeks a home a nest\nthere’s no nest a hole\nthe universe is alone\nmaybe rarely in flight\ntime will pass as poor as night\nor a daughter in a bed\nwill grow sleeping and then dead\nthen a crowd of relations\nwill rush in and cry alas\nin steel houses\nwill howl loudly\nshe’s gone and buried\nhopped to paradise big-bellied\nGod God have pity\ngood God on the precipice\nbut God said Go play\nand she entered paradise\nthere spun any which way\nnumbers houses and seas\nthe inessential exists\nin vain, they perceived\nthere God languished behind bars\nwith no eyes no legs no arms\nso that maiden in tears\nsees all this in the heavens\nsees various eagles\nappear out of night\nand fly inane\nand flash insane\nthis is so depressing\nthe dead maiden will say\nserenely surprised\nGod will say\nwhat’s depressing what’s\ndepressing, God, life\nwhat are you talking about\nwhat O noon do you know\nyou press pleasure and Paris\nto your breast like two pears\nyou swell like music\nyou’re swell like a statue\nthen the wood howled\nin final despair\nit spies through the tares\na meandering ribbon\nlittle ribbon a crate\ncurvy Lena of fate\nMercury was in the air\nspinning like a top\nand the bear\nsunned his coat\npeople also walked around\nbearing fish on a platter\nbearing on their hands\nten fingers on a ladder\nwhile all this went on\nthat maiden rested\nrose from the dead and forgot\nyawned and said\nyou guys, I had a dream\nwhat can it mean\ndreams are worse than macaroni\nthey make crows double over\nI was not at all dying\nI was gaping and lying\nundulating and crying\nI was so terrifying\na fit of lethargy\nwas had by me among the effigies\nlet’s enjoy ourselves really\nlet’s gallop to the cinema\nand sped off like an ass\nto satisfy her innermost\nlights glint in the heaven\nis it night or a demon", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Eugene Ostashevsky", - "date": { - "year": 1930, - "month": "january" - }, - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "where-when": { - "title": "“Where. When.”", - "body": "> _Where_\n\nWhere he was standing leaning against a statue. With a face charged with thoughts. He himself was turning into a statue. He had no blood. Lo this is what he said:\n\nfarewell dark trees\nfarewell black forests\nrevolution of heavenly stars\nand voices of carefree birds.\n\nHe probably had the idea of somewhere, sometime going away.\n\nfarewell field-cliffs\nhours on end have I looked at you\nfarewell, lively butterflies\nI have hungered with you\nfarewell stones farewell clouds\nI have loved you and tormented you.\n\nWith yearning and belated repentance he began to scrutinize the tips of the grassblades.\n\nfarewell splendid tips\nfarewell flowers. Farewell water.\nthe postal couriers rush on\nfate rushes past, misfortune rushes past.\nI walked a prisoner in the meadow\nI embraced the forest path\nI woke the fishes in the mornings\nscared the crowd of oaks\nsaw the sepulchral house of oaks\nhorses and singing led laboriously around.\n\nHe depicts how he habitually or unhabitually used to arrive at the river.\n\nRiver I used to come to you.\nRiver farewell. Trembles my hand.\nYou used to sparkle, used to flow,\nI used to stand in front of you\nclad in a caftan made of glass\nand listen to your fluvial waves.\nhow sweet it was for me to enter\nyou, and once again emerge.\nhow sweet it was for me to enter\nmyself and once again emerge\nwhere like finches oaktrees rustled.\nthe oaks were crazily able\nthe oaks to rustle scarely audibly.\n\nBut hereupon he calculated in his mind what would happen if he also saw the sea.\n\nSea farewell farewell sand\no mountain land how you are high\nmay the waves beat. May the spray scatter,\nupon a rock I sit, still with my pipes.\nand the sea plashes gradually\nand everything from the sea is far.\nand everything from the sea is for\ncare like a tedious duck runs off\nparting with the sea is hard.\nsea farewell. farewell paradise\no mountain land how you are high.\n\nAbout the last thing that there is in nature he also remembered. He remembered about the wilderness.\n\nfarewell to you too\nwildernesses and lions.\n\nAnd thus having bidden farewell to all he neatly laid down his weapons and extracting from his pocket a temple shot himself in the head. And hereupon took place the second part--the farewell of all with one.\n\nThe trees as if they had wings waved their arms. They thought that they could, and answered:\n\nYou used to visit us. Behold,\nhe died, and you all will die.\nfor instants he accepted us--\nshabby, crumpled, bent.\nwandering mindlessly\nlike an icebound winter.\n\nWhat then is he communicating now to the trees. Nothing he is growing numb.\n\nThe cliffs or stones had not moved from their place. Through silence and voicelessness and the absence of sound they were encouraging us and you and him.\n\nsleep. farewell. the end has come\nthe courier has come for you.\nit has come--the ultimate hour.\nLord have mercy upon us.\nLord have mercy upon us.\nLord have mercy upon us.\n\nWhat then does he retort to the stones.--Nothing he is becoming frozen. Fishes and oaks gave him a bunch of grapes and a small quantity of final joy.\n\nThe oaks said: we grow.\nThe fishes said: we swim.\nThe oaks said: what is the time.\nThe fishes said: have mercy upon us.\n\nWhat then will he say to fishes and oaks: He will not be able to say thank you. The river powerfully racing over the earth. The river powerfully flowing. The river powerfully carrying its waves. River as tsar. It said farewell in such a way, that. that’s how. And he lay like a notebook on its very bank.\n\nFarewell notebook\nUnpleasant and easy to die.\nFarewell world. Farewell paradise\nyou are very remote, land of humans.\n\nWhat had he done to the river?--Nothing--he is turning into stone. And the sea weakening from its lengthy storms with sympathy looked upon death. Did the sea faintly possess the aspect of an eagle. No it did not possess it.\n\nWill he glance at the seat--No he cannot. In the night there was a sudden trumpeting somewhere not quite savages, not quite not. He looked upon people.\n\n\n> _When_\n\nWhen he parted his swollen eyelids, he half-opened his eyes. He recalled by heart into his memory all that is. I have forgotten to say farewell to much else. Then he recalled, he remembered the whole instant of his death. All these sixes and fives. All that--fuss. All the rhyme. Which was a loyal friend to him, as before him Pushkin had said. Oh Pushkin, Pushkin, that very Pushkin who had lived before him. Thereupon the shadow of universal disgust lay upon everything. Thereupon the shadow of the universal lay upon everything. Thereupon the shadow lay upon everything. He understood nothing, but he restrained himself. And savages, and maybe not savages with lamentation like the rustle of oaks, the buzzing of bees, the plash of waves, the silence of stones, and the aspect of the wilderness, carrying dishes over their heads, emerged and unhurriedly descended from the heights onto the far-from-numerous earth. Oh Pushkin. Pushkin.\n\nAll.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Robin Milner-Gulland", - "date": { - "year": 1941 - } - } - } - } - }, - "derek-walcott": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Derek Walcott", - "birth": { - "year": 1930 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2017 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "saint_lucian", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇱🇨", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Walcott", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "saint_lucian" - ], - "n_poems": 17 - }, - "poems": { - "after-the-storm": { - "title": "“After the Storm”", - "body": "There are so many islands!\nAs many islands as the stars at night\non that branched tree from which meteors are shaken\nlike falling fruit around the schooner Flight.\nBut things must fall, and so it always was,\non one hand Venus, on the other Mars;\nfall, and are one, just as this earth is one\nisland in archipelagoes of stars.\nMy first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.\nI stop talking now. I work, then I read,\ncotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.\nI try to forget what happiness was,\nand when that don’t work, I study the stars.\nSometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam\nas the deck turn white and the moon open\na cloud like a door, and the light over me\nis a road in white moonlight taking me home.\nShabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bleecker-street-summer": { - "title": "“Bleecker Street, Summer”", - "body": "Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,\nfor the eternal idleness of the imagined return,\nfor rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom\nof tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!\n\nWhen I press summer dusks together, it is\na month of street accordions and sprinklers\nlaying the dust, small shadows running from me.\n\nIt is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,\nciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children\ntearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;\nit is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water\ndown littered streets that lead you to no water,\nand gathering islands and lemons in the mind.\n\nThere is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.\nI would undress you in the summer heat,\nand laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-citys-death-by-fire": { - "title": "“A City’s Death by Fire”", - "body": "After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,\nI wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire;\nUnder a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I\nWanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.\nAll day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,\nShocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;\nLoud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales\nTorn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.\nBy the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why\nShould a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?\nIn town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;\nTo a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath\nRebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,\nBlessing the death and the baptism by fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dark-august": { - "title": "“Dark August”", - "body": "So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky\nof this black August. My sister, the sun,\nbroods in her yellow room and won’t come out.\n\nEverything goes to hell; the mountains fume\nlike a kettle, rivers overrun; still,\nshe will not rise and turn off the rain.\n\nShe is in her room, fondling old things,\nmy poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls\nlike a crash of plates from the sky,\n\nshe does not come out.\nDon’t you know I love you but am hopeless\nat fixing the rain? But I am learning slowly\n\nto love the dark days, the steaming hills,\nthe air with gossiping mosquitoes,\nand to sip the medicine of bitterness,\n\nso that when you emerge, my sister,\nparting the beads of the rain,\nwith your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,\n\nall with not be as it was, but it will be true\n(you see they will not let me love\nas I want), because, my sister, then\n\nI would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,\nThe black rain, the white hills, when once\nI loved only my happiness and you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-day-with-all-its-pain-ahead-is-yours": { - "title": "“The Day, with All Its Pain Ahead, is Yours”", - "body": "The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.\nThe ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,\nthe fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,\nthe rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze,\nthe rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,\nthe coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,\nthe echo of benediction on a house\nits rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse\nwhen joy lanced through its open-hearted doors\nlike a hummingbird out to the garden and the pool\nin which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,\nand pain has made them brighter as absence does\nafter a death, as the light heals the grass.\nAnd the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch\nlike fingers on the struts of a guitar.\nI hear the detonations of agave\nthe stuttering outbursts of bougainvillea,\nI see the acacia’s bonfire, the begonia’s bayonets,\nand the tamarind’s thorns and the broadsides of clouds\nfrom the calabash\nand the cedars fluttering their white flags of surrender\nand the flame trees’ siege of the fort.\nI saw black bulls, horns lowered, galloping, goring the mist\nthat rose, unshrouding the hillocks of Santa Cruz\nand the olives of Esperanza\nAndalusian idyll, and answer\nand the moon’s blank tambourine\nand the drizzle’s guitars\nand the sunlit wires of the rain\nthe shawls and the used stars\nand the ruined fountains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dialect-of-the-scrub-in-the-dry-season": { - "title": "“The Dialect of the Scrub in the Dry Season”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe dialect of the scrub in the dry season\nwithers the flow of English. Things burn for days\nwithout translation, with the heat\nof the scorched pastures and their skeletal cows.\nEvery noun is a stump with its roots showing,\nand the creole language rushes like weeds\nuntil the entire island is overrun,\nthen the rain begins to come in paragraphs\nand hazes this page, hazes the grey of islets,\nthe grey of eyes, the rainstorm’s wild-haired beauty.\n\nThe first daybreak of rain, the crusted drought\nbroken in half like bread, the quiet trumpet mouth\nof a rainbow and the wiry drizzle fighting\ndecease, half the year blowing out to sea\nin hale, refreshing gusts, the withered lilies\ndrink with grateful mouths, and the first blackbird\nof the new season announces itself on a bough\nthe hummingbird is reglistened drilling\nthe pierced hedges, my small shaft to your heart,\nmy emerald arrow: A crowd crosses a bridge\nfrom Canaries to the Ponte Vecchio, from\nPiaille to Pescara, and a volley of blackbirds\n\nfans over Venice or the broken pier of Choiseul,\nand love is as wide as the span of my open palm\nfor frontiers that read like one country,\none map of affection that closes around my pen.\nI had forgotten the benediction of rain\nedged with sunlight, the prayers of dripping leaves\nand the cat testing the edge of the season\nwith careful paw. And I have nothing more\nto write about than gratitude. For la mer,\nsoleil-là, the bow of the arc-en-ciel\nand the archery of blackbirds from its\nradiant bow. The rest of the year is rain.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThere was a beautiful rain this morning.\n“I was asleep.”\n He stroked her forehead.\nShe smiled at him, then laughed as she kept yawning.\n“It was lovely rain.” But I thought of the dead\nI know. The sun shone through the rain\nand it was lovely.\n “I’m sure,” she said.\nThere were so many names the rain recited:\nAlan, Joseph and Claude and Charles and Roddy.\nThe sunlight came through the rain and the drizzle shone\nas it had done before for everybody.\nFor John and Inge, Devindra and Hamilton.\n“Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon,”\nwrote Edward Thomas. Her eyes closed in my arms,\nbut it was sleep. She was asleep again,\nwhile the bright rain moved from Massade to Monchy.\n\nSometimes I stretch out, or you stretch out your hand,\nand we lock palms; our criss-crossed histories join\nand two maps fit. Bays, boundaries, rivers, roads,\none country, one warm island. Is that noise rain\non the hot roof, is it sweeping out to sea\nby the stones and shells of the almond cemetery?\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe road is wet, the leaves wet, but the sun inching,\nand always the astonishment: in March?\nThis blustery, this grey? The waves chopping\nand circling and ramming into one another\nlike sheep in a maddened pen from a whiff of wolf,\nor white mares, bug-eyed from the lightning’s whip,\nand, if they could, whinnying. But the light will win.\nThe sun fought with the rain in the leaves and won;\nthen the rain came back and it was finer out to sea.\nA drizzle blurred the promontories evenly\nand now the manchineels and acacias sparkled\nwith the new rain and the cows’ hides darkened\nas the horses dipped their heads and shook their manes,\nand over the horizon the faint arc\nof an almost imperceptible bow appeared\nthen dimmed across the channel towards Martinique.\nThis miracle was usual for the season.\n“The sun came out just for you,” he said.\n\nAnd it was true. The light entered her forehead\nand blazoned her difference there.\nThe pastures were beaded, roofs shone on the hills,\na sloop was working its way against huge clouds\nas patches of sunlight widened with a new zeal\ntowards detachment, towards simplicity.\nWho said that they were lying side by side,\nthe cupped spoon of her torso in his own\nin the striped shadows of mid-afternoon?\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThe doors are open, the house breathes and I feel\na balm so heavy and a benediction\nso weightless that the past is just blue air\nand cobalt motion lanced with emerald\nand sail-flecks and the dove’s continuous complaint\nabout repletion, its swollen note of gratitude--\nall incantation is the monody of thanks\nto the sky’s motionless or moving altars,\neven to the faint drone of that silver insect\nthat is the morning plane over Martinique,\nwhile, take this for what you will, the frangipani\nthat, for dry months, contorted, crucified\nin impotence or barrenness, endured, has come\nwith pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves,\nparable of my loin-longing, my silver age.\n\nFrom the salt brightness of my balcony\nI look across to the abandoned fort;\nno History left, just natural history,\nas a cloud’s shadow subtilizes thought.\nOn a sloped meadow lifted by the light,\nthe Hessians spun like blossoms from the immortelle,\nthe tattered pennons of the sea-almond fluttered\nto the spray-white detonations of the lilac\nagainst blue the hue of a grenadier, dried pods\nof the flamboyant rattle their sabres\nand a mare’s whinny across the parched pastures\nlaunches white scuds of sails across the channel,\nthe race of a schooner launched in a canal.\nA grey sky trawls its silver wires of rain;\nthese are the subtleties of the noon sea:\nlime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-fist": { - "title": "“The Fist”", - "body": "The fist clenched round my heart\nloosens a little, and I gasp\nbrightness; but it tightens\nagain. When have I ever not loved\nthe pain of love? But this has moved\n\npast love to mania. This has the strong\nclench of the madman, this is\ngripping the ledge of unreason, before\nplunging howling into the abyss.\n\nHold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-a-blue-keg-the-barrels-thumb-tuned-goatskin": { - "title": "“From a Blue Keg, the Barrel’s Thumb-Tuned Goatskin”", - "body": "# I.\n\nFrom a blue keg, the barrel’s thumb-tuned goatskin,\nthe choirs of ancestral ululation\nare psalms and pivot for the prodigal\nin a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation,\nold incantation and fresh sacrifice\nwhere a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns,\nwool locks and beard of the scapegoat,\nin the Old Testament, or black blood gushing in a trench\nin Attic ceremony and rite. Death softens the eyes\nof the still, unbleating sheep, a common ewe,\nas for you this is common. There is no awe\nin repetition, no claim, no tribal ecstasy,\nno pardon in the bent smoke from Guinea,\nthe sprinkled white rum, or the meal crumbled\non the small stone altar, in the broken memory\nof the slaver’s coast and the braided villages\nof thatch and coalpot from the salted passage\nto this paralysis where your pale feet cannot keep time\nfeel no communion with its celebrants,\nthey keep another time, the time you keep\ncomes with a different metre, your skin\nwhat sheath and prison that it has become\nas a dried chrysalis with no ressurection\nand one unwished for. Star-embers fade.\n\n# II.\n\nI could give facts and dates, but to what use?\nIn the lush chasms and fissures of Choiseul\nan ogre bred my grandam, whelped my father,\nerected my tall aunts; slopes with potato vines,\nand the narrow, clean dark water of River Doree,\nthe fragrant hogplums and chapel of La Fargue;\ngo in search of his own shire, unlatch a gate\nthat opens into Albion, its faery flowers,\nits source of intellectual bastardy,\nwithout embarrassment or degradation,\nwithout belligerence or accusation,\nand mostly selfishly, without self-contempt,\na curious and self-nourishing integer\noutside their given numbers and their dates,\nas nameless as the bush, beyond heredity\nor prophecy, or the quiet panic of clocks,\nthe shallow penitence of mirrors. Mongrel.\nAnd out of this chord, this discord will come\nthe Atlantic’s drone, the Caribbean hum\nof chaos in an ochre afternoon\nthe enclosing harmony that we call home\nwhen the sea mints its quicksilver, when\nthe cedars sag and the light ends up with nothing.\nThe facts! The Facts! The history. The cause.\nYou need a history to make your case.\n\n# III.\n\n1492. 1833. 1930.\nDates. The one thing about which there is no discourse.\nDates multiplied by events, by consequences,\nare what add up to History. We have a few coins\nstruck for a mere handful of events,\nas amateur numismatists, regal profiles,\nnone worthy in the traditional way of memory\nslavery being an infinity of endeavour\nwithout pause or payment, without commemoration,\nonly the long division of day into dark,\nof drought into rainburst, equinoxes glide\nover their own shadows, and all our dates,\nour calendars, hymns and anniversaries,\nwere bequeathed to us. Left to itself\nthe brain would be mantled like coral in the cool\nshade of a reefs outcrop and turret, swayed\nlike reeds in meditation, dateless.\nThe petals of the sun curl, wilting on its stalk--\nhere comes the quiet lily crescent of the moon.\n\n# IV.\n\nFrom this thick tree issues miraculous bread.\nThe breadfruit makes itself from copious shade,\nwhose dial is the ground’s dry, palmate leaves,\na voluble, invaluable dome, a library,\nwhere all the town’s talk is stored,\nand in whose core is coiled--a tempest,\na rising sea in wind, the spinning pages\nof remorseful texts, Bligh’s log and cannonballs\nand bowling thunder, shelter from the rain\nand so magnanimous in circumference\nthat it has no time without shade, and shade\nis suffering. The sun makes their suffering mute.\nThis bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot,\nthis little field of leaves, brittle and fallen,\nof all the cities of the world, this is your centre.\nO to be luminous and exact! As this tree is\nin ripening sunshine, that your own leaves could shine\nwith nourishment, and give such shade and peace,\nthe mirror of each canvas that you sign.\nDespite acclamation, despite contempt,\nI was never part of that catalogue\nin spite of friends in the same business\nneither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other--\nthe clogged, elegiac thickness of memory;\nfarther away from all that, forever,\nknee-high in the foam of the page\nwading by sounding caves.\nGradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame.\n\n# V.\n\nAnd Sancta Trinidad. It is that sacred to me.\nHowever fragmentary, through a sunlit hedge,\nby the running of clear water over the sun-wiry stones\nand a cool hoarding of bamboos without a bridge\nphrases of Spain in summer, in the vale of Santa Cruz,\nperhaps because of the name, but the bamboo’s fountains\narch, sounding sweet, surreptitious, twittering leaves\nand shadows moving over indigo mountains.\nIn a green street of hedges and vermilion roofs,\nand gates that creak open into banana yards\nand doors that groan on the evocation of ginger\nbehind which are the hill with five cresting palms\nwhose long fingers are stirring tropical almanacs\ndarkened with rain over the grey savannahs\nof zebu and bison and the small chalk temples\nof an almost erased Asia, and the ovations of cane\nthrough which turbaned horsemen carry feathering lances.\nThe cloud-white egret, the heron whose hue\nis wet slate, move through a somnolence\nas sweet as malaria to a child whose parched lips\nare soothed by a servant or his own mother,\nto the sudden great sound of rain on the roofs,\ncloudburst of benediction, dry seas in his ears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-ground-dove-stuttered-for-a-few-steps": { - "title": "“The Ground Dove Stuttered for a Few Steps”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe ground dove stuttered for a few steps then flew\nup from his path to settle in the sun-browned\nbranches that were now barely twigs; in drought it coos\nwith its relentless valve, a tiring sound,\nnot like the sweet exchanges of turtles in the Song\nof Solomon, or the flutes of Venus in frescoes\nthough all the mounds in the dove-calling drought\nthe hills and gulches all briary and ochre\nand the small dervishes that swivelled in the dust\nwere like an umber study for a fresco\nof The Prodigal Son, this scorched, barren acre.\nHe had the smell of cities in his clothes,\nthe steam and soot of trains of Fascist stations\nand their resounding vaults, he had the memory of rain\ncarried in his head, the rain on Pescara’s beach\nwith the pastel hotels, and instead of the doves\nthe air-show with the jets soaring and swooping\nover the Fair, the smell off that beach\ncame back on the rock-road where the turtle lifted\nits mating music into the dry acacias,\nand mixed with the smell off the galloping sea-flock,\neach odour distinct, of sheep trampling their pens\nas if their fear had caught the wolf-scent.\n\nThe rock-brown dove had fluttered from that fear\nthat what he loved and knew once as a boy\nwould panic and forget him from the change\nof character that the grunting swine could smell.\nA sow and her litter. Acknowledged prodigal.\n\nGrey sunrise through a sky of frosted glass,\nthe great trees sodden, the paths below them pooled,\nthe headlands veiled and muslin-thin, no birds,\nand pale green combers cresting through the drizzle;\na change of climate, the clouding of the self\nin a sudden culture but one more confident\nin its glazed equestrian statues in wet parks,\nits railway stations echoing like the combers\nin the ground-shaken caves under the cliff;\ngathering, cresting then dissolving shallows\nas light steps quietly into the house.\nLight that inaudibly fits in the house\nas a book on a bookshelf with its spines of tombs\nand names, mouths slightly parted, eager to speak\nwherever their station now. Every library\nis a cemetery in sunlight. Sometimes, a shaft …\n\nAcross the dry hillock, leaves chasing dead leaves\nin resurrecting gusts, or in the ochre quiet\nleaves too many to rake on the road’s margins,\ntoo loaded to lift themselves, they lapsed singly\nor in a yellow chute from the cedar, burnt branches;\nlyres of desiccation choked the dry gutters\neverywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,\nby the caked track to Saltibus, over D’ennery.\nDrought. Song of the wireless harp of the frangipani\nthat still makes a tangled music out of silence.\n\n\n# II.\n\nNow to cherish the depredations of April\neven on the threshold of March, its sunlit eve--\nthe _gommier maudit_ unshouldering its leaves,\nbarrow after loaded barrow, the leaves fading, yellow,\nburnt grass and the tigerish shadows on the hillside,\nand the azure a trowelled blue, and blue hill-smoke,\nparched shortcuts and rust, cattle anchored in shadows\nand groaning like winches, the didactic drought\nagainst the hot sea that teaches what? Thirst\nfor the grace that springs in grooves of oblivious dust.\n\nA fine haze screens the headland, the drizzle drifts.\nIs every noun: breakwater, headland, haze,\nseen through a gauze of English, a bright scrim,\na mesh in which light now defines the wires\nand not its natural language? Were your life and work\nsimply a good translation? Would headland,\nhaze and the spray-wracked breakwater\npronounce their own names differently?\nAnd have I looked at life, in other words,\nthrough some inoperable cataract?\n“What language do you speak in your own country?”\nEvery noun has its echo, a noun is a noise,\nas every stone in the expanding sunlight\nfinds an exact translation in its shadow,\nand it may be that you were halved by language\nas definitively as the meridian\nof Greenwich or by Pope Alexander’s line,\nbut what makes this, if this is all it is,\nmore than just bearable, in fact, exultation\nis the stone that is looked at, and the manchineels,\nbitter, poisonous yellow berries, treacherous apples\nthat look like Eden’s on the tree of knowledge\nwhen the first noun was picked and named and eaten\nand the shadow of knowledge defined every edge\noriginating language and then difference,\nand subtlety, the snake and contradiction\nand the sudden Babel of the manchineel.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe blank page grows a visionary wood.\nA parallel section, no, in fact a whole province\nof far, of foreign, of self-translating leaves\nstands on the place where it has always stood\nthe right-hand margin of the page\nloud, soft but voluble in their original language,\nan orchestrating lexicon, veined manuscripts\ngoing far back in time and deep in roots\nand echoing in the tunnel of the right ear\nwith echoes: oak-echo, beech-echo, linden-echo,\nand beech and birds a half-ancestral forest\nwhose metre was an ocean’s and whose break,\nparting declared the white-lined conjugation\nof combers’ centuries. This ocean, English and this forest weald,\nthis clattering natterer “burn,” this distance, mist,\nkept its high columns marching as my pen moves\ntowards that gap of light that comes upon\nthe bright salt arc of a bare unprinted beach\nor where the piper leaves a print, its claws,\ndim, imperceptible as an ancient rune--\nthat is the landscape, that, the stand of forest\nmade up of all these leaves and lines that\nstill rasp with delight with rhyme and incantation\npages of shade turning into translation.\nAnd my left hand another vegetation\nbut not their opposite or their enemy,\npalms and wild fern and praising them, the sea,\nsea-almond, grape and vine and agave\nthat the wind’s finger folded carefully\ndrawing its thumb to mark the dog-eared wave\nacross the dry hill, leaves chasing leaves\nin a shiny, scurrying wind, and, in the brown quiet,\nleaves, unraked, tiling the road’s margins,\nso loaded they don’t lift, they lapse singly, yellow,\nor chute from the cedars. Lyres of desiccation\nin March’s autumn, filling the dry gutters,\neverywhere in the country, La Feuillée, Monchy,\nexcept for the wireless harp of the frangipani\nthat still makes its music out of extreme stillness.\nIn my own botanic origins, _frangere panem_\nto break bread, flower-flour in its white lilies,\nexcept that in rare blossom I now remember\nthe flower is pink. It doesn’t matter.\nSince whatever hue it is, its wafer it serves that need,\npetal on the sky’s open palate at early mass\nevery morning but here most on this Sunday\nwith its Lenten drought, the heart-coloured flowers then\nthe caterpillars determinedly devour,\non a Sunday when a sadness still eats at the parallel\npetals of my beaten heart, and the white pews of the sea,\nthe waves coming in aisles, my longing\nfor the communion of breakfast, the leafless,\nflower-less but crusted bark of the frangipani,\nfrangere panem, the pain that I break and eat\nflower and flour, pain and pain,\nbright Easter coming, like the seas white communion.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nIn the country of the ochre afternoon\nit is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring\ninfrequently sometimes with the rattling pods\nof what they call ‘women’s tongues’, in\nthe afternoon country the far hills are very quiet\nand heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle\nof the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat\nof the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect,\nso unaltered, and I see how she walked\nwith her sunburnt hands against the still sea-almonds,\nto a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock--\nthat was when I thought we were immortal\nand that love would be folded doves and folded oars\nand water lapping against eroding stone\nin the ochre country of the afternoon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "a-lesson-for-this-sunday": { - "title": "“A Lesson for This Sunday”", - "body": "The growing idleness of summer grass\nWith its frail kites of furious butterflies\nRequests the lemonade of simple praise\nIn scansion gentler than my hammock swings\nAnd rituals no more upsetting than a\nBlack maid shaking linen as she sings\nThe plain notes of some Protestant hosanna--\nSince I lie idling from the thought in things--\n\nOr so they should, until I hear the cries\nOf two small children hunting yellow wings,\nWho break my Sabbath with the thought of sin.\nBrother and sister, with a common pin,\nFrowning like serious lepidopterists.\nThe little surgeon pierces the thin eyes.\nCrouched on plump haunches, as a mantis prays\nShe shrieks to eviscerate its abdomen.\nThe lesson is the same. The maid removes\nBoth prodigies from their interest in science.\nThe girl, in lemon frock, begins to scream\nAs the maimed, teetering thing attempts its flight.\nShe is herself a thing of summery light,\nFrail as a flower in this blue August air,\nNot marked for some late grief that cannot speak.\n\nThe mind swings inward on itself in fear\nSwayed towards nausea from each normal sign.\nHeredity of cruelty everywhere,\nAnd everywhere the frocks of summer torn,\nThe long look back to see where choice is born,\nAs summer grass sways to the scythe’s design.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "map-of-the-new-world": { - "title": "“Map of the New World”", - "body": "At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.\nAt the rain’s edge, a sail.\n\nSlowly the sail will lose sight of islands;\ninto a mist will go the belief in harbours\nof an entire race.\n\nThe ten-years war is finished.\nHelen’s hair, a grey cloud.\nTroy, a white ashpit\nby the drizzling sea.\n\nThe drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.\nA man with clouded eyes picks up the rain\nand plucks the first line of the Odyssey.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "midsummer-tobago": { - "title": "“Midsummer, Tobago”", - "body": "Broad sun-stoned beaches.\n\nWhite heat.\nA green river.\n\nA bridge,\nscorched yellow palms\n\nfrom the summer-sleeping house\ndrowsing through August.\n\nDays I have held,\ndays I have lost,\n\ndays that outgrow, like daughters,\nmy harbouring arms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "pentecost": { - "title": "“Pentecost”", - "body": "Better a jungle in the head\nthan rootless concrete.\nBetter to stand bewildered\nby the fireflies’ crooked street;\n\nwinter lamps do not show\nwhere the sidewalk is lost,\nnor can these tongues of snow\nspeak for the Holy Ghost;\n\nthe self-increasing silence\nof words dropped from a roof\npoints along iron railings,\ndirection, in not proof.\n\nBut best is this night surf\nwith slow scriptures of sand,\nthat sends, not quite a seraph,\nbut a late cormorant,\n\nwhose fading cry propels\nthrough phosphorescent shoal\nwhat, in my childhood gospels,\nused to be called the Soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "prodigal-what-were-your-wanderings-about": { - "title": "“Prodigal, What Were Your Wanderings About?”", - "body": "# I.\n\nProdigal, what were your wanderings about?\nThe smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.\nThe earth grew music and the tubers sprouted\nto Sesenne’s singing, rain-water, fresh patois\nin a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns,\nand pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine.\nOver the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,\nas the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash,\nclouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage;\nany man without a history stands in nettles\nand no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags,\ndoes he, still a child, long for battles and castles\nfrom the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language\nhe will never inherit, but one in which he writes\n“Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,”\nhis whole life a language awaiting translation?\n\nSince I am what I am, how was I made?\nTo ascribe complexion to the intellect\nis not an insult, since it takes its plaid\nlike the invaluable lizard from its background,\nand if our work is piebald mimicry\nthen virtue lies in its variety\nto be adept. On the warm stones of Florence\nI subtly alter to a Florentine\ntill the sun passes, in London\nI am pieced by fog, and shaken from reflection\nin Venice, a printed page in the sun\non which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark.\nTo break through veils like spiders’ webs,\ncrack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve\na clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle\nlike a brown afternoon stream in River Doree\nis what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist\nfor the drifting benediction of a drizzle\ndrying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes\nlike a changing cloud, to a hawk’s slow pivot.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills.\nThe white flowers have the fury of battle,\nthey lay siege to the mountains, for war\nthere is the tumult of the white ravines,\nand the cascade’s assault; they bow their plumes,\nQueen Anne’s lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander,\nand they are as white as arrested avalanches,\nangry and Alpine, their petals blur into\na white gust from the Matterhom or the streets of Zermatt.\nBoth worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight.\nSanta Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts.\nI have come back for the white egrets\nfeeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills\nin that finical stride, gawkily elegant,\nthen suddenly but leisurely sailing\nto settle, but not too far off, like angels.\n\n\n# III.\n\nI wake at sunrise to angelic screams.\nAnd time is measuring my grandchildren’s cries\nand time outpaces the sepia water\nof the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning\nin the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones\nin the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails\nwith the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills\nand the clouds that fray and change\nand time waits very quiet between the mountains\nand the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range,\na cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval\nwhere, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races\nor tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail\nfor me at least, or where a range’s blues\nand indigo over which wide hawks sail\ntheir shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz,\ndark benedictions on the brook’s muttering shale,\nand the horses are slowly plunging their manes\nas they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond,\nso much mythology in their unharnessed necks!\nThese little things take root as I add my praise\nto the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field,\na bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah\nfor cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs\nbolting after pedalling boys, the crescent ghost\nof the new moon showing and on the thick slopes\nthis forest like green billowing smoke\npierced by the flame petals of the immortelle.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nPetals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls\nand the arches across the park with its tacit fountain,\nthe old idlers on the benches, this is the prose\nthat spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan\nin front of the library, the bulk that darkens\nthe violin of twilight when traffic has vanished\nand nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves\ncradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to\nthe echo of vespers in the alien cathedral.\nIn the hot green silence a dragonfly’s drone\ncrossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars\nand spiced laurels, the _lauriers canelles_,\nthe word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves,\nfrom the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells.\nHow simple to write this after you have gone,\nthat your death that afternoon had the same ease\nas stopping at the side of the road under the trees\nto buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts\nsweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron,\non the road between Soufrière and Canaries.\nThe heat collects in the depths between the ridges\nand the high hawks circle in the gathering haze;\nlike consonants round a vowel, insistent midges\nhum round noun’s hexagon, and the hornet’s house.\nDelve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière,\nthe black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade\nand here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil\nof the churning vegetation. The small church\nhidden in leaves. In mid-afternoon, the halt--\nthen dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-sea-is-history": { - "title": "“The Sea is History”", - "body": "Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?\nWhere is your tribal memory? Sirs,\nin that gray vault. The sea. The sea\nhas locked them up. The sea is History.\n\nFirst, there was the heaving oil,\nheavy as chaos;\nthen, likea light at the end of a tunnel,\n\nthe lantern of a caravel,\nand that was Genesis.\nThen there were the packed cries,\nthe shit, the moaning:\n\nExodus.\nBone soldered by coral to bone,\nmosaics\nmantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,\n\nthat was the Ark of the Covenant.\nThen came from the plucked wires\nof sunlight on the sea floor\n\nthe plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,\nas the white cowries clustered like manacles\non the drowned women,\n\nand those were the ivory bracelets\nof the Song of Solomon,\nbut the ocean kept turning blank pages\n\nlooking for History.\nThen came the men with eyes heavy as anchors\nwho sank without tombs,\n\nbrigands who barbecued cattle,\nleaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,\nthen the foaming, rabid maw\n\nof the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,\nand that was Jonah,\nbut where is your Renaissance?\n\nSir, it is locked in them sea sands\nout there past the reef’s moiling shelf,\nwhere the men-o’-war floated down;\n\nstrop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.\nIt’s all subtle and submarine,\nthrough colonnades of coral,\n\npast the gothic windows of sea fans\nto where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,\nblinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;\n\nand these groined caves with barnacles\npitted like stone\nare our cathedrals,\n\nand the furnace before the hurricanes:\nGomorrah. Bones ground by windmills\ninto marl and cornmeal,\n\nand that was Lamentations--\nthat was just Lamentations,\nit was not History;\n\nthen came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,\nthe brown reeds of villages\nmantling and congealing into towns,\n\nand at evening, the midges’ choirs,\nand above them, the spires\nlancing the side of God\n\nas His son set, and that was the New Testament.\n\nThen came the white sisters clapping\nto the waves’ progress,\nand that was Emancipation--\n\njubilation, O jubilation--\nvanishing swiftly\nas the sea’s lace dries in the sun,\n\nbut that was not History,\nthat was only faith,\nand then each rock broke into its own nation;\n\nthen came the synod of flies,\nthen came the secretarial heron,\nthen came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,\n\nfireflies with bright ideas\nand bats like jetting ambassadors\nand the mantis, like khaki police,\n\nand the furred caterpillars of judges\nexamining each case closely,\nand then in the dark ears of ferns\n\nand in the salt chuckle of rocks\nwith their sea pools, there was the sound\nlike a rumour without any echo\n\nof History, really beginning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-season-of-phantasmal-peace": { - "title": "“The Season of Phantasmal Peace”", - "body": "Then all the nations of birds lifted together\nthe huge net of the shadows of this earth\nin multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,\nstitching and crossing it. They lifted up\nthe shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,\nthe shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,\nthe shadow of a frail plant on a city sill--\nthe net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until\nthere was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,\nonly this passage of phantasmal light\nthat not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.\n\nAnd men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,\nwhat the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes\nthat flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear\nbattalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,\nbearing the net higher, covering this world\nlike the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing\nthe trembling gauze over the trembling eyes\nof a child fluttering to sleep;\n\nit was the light\nthat you will see at evening on the side of a hill\nin yellow October, and no one hearing knew\nwhat change had brought into the raven’s cawing,\nthe killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough\nsuch an immense, soundless, and high concern\nfor the fields and cities where the birds belong,\nexcept it was their seasonal passing, Love,\nmade seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,\nsomething brighter than pity for the wingless ones\nbelow them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,\nand higher they lifted the net with soundless voices\nabove all change, betrayals of falling suns,\nand this season lasted one moment, like the pause\nbetween dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,\nbut, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-star-apple-kingdom": { - "title": "“The Star-Apple Kingdom”", - "body": "There were still shards of an ancient pastoral\nin those shires of the island where the cattle drank\ntheir pools of shadow from an older sky,\nsurviving from when the landscape copied such subjects as\n“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.”\nThe mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel\nsprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,\nand all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules\non the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat\nin tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues\nof Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering\ntheir source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St. David, Parish\nSt. Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures,\nthe lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle\nwith a docile longing, an epochal content.\nAnd there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,\namong the boas and parasols and the tea-coloured\ndaguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness\nas ordered and infinite to the child\nas the great house road to the Great House\ndown a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes\nin time to the horses, an orderly life\nreduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun,\nthe other the moon, reduced into a pier glass:\nnannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways\nno larger than those of an album in which\nthe flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as\nthe piled cakes of teatime on that latticed\nbougainvillea verandah that looked down toward\na prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky\nlurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words:\n“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.”\n\nStrange, that the rancour of hatred hid in that dream\nof slow dreams and lily-like parasols, in snaps\nof fine old colonial families, curled at the edge\nnot from age or from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,\nbut because, off at its edges, innocently excluded\nstood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,\nthe tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,\ntheir mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream.\nA scream which would open the doors to swing wildly\nall night, that was bringing in heavier clouds,\nmore black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle\nin whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished;\na scorching wind of a scream\nthat began to extinguish the fireflies,\nthat dried the water mill creaking to a stop\nas it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny\nall over, in the ancient pastoral voice,\na wind that blew all without bending anything,\nneither the leaves of all the album nor the lime groves;\nblew Nanny floating back in white from a feather\nto a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank\nthe drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows\non a mantel piece, Trelawny trembling with dusk,\nthe scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew\nfor the decent servants and the lifelong cook,\nand shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral\nof dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun\nin Jamaica, making both epochs one.\n\nHe looked out from the Great House windows on\nclouds that still held the fragrances of fire,\nhe saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown\nin a formal dusk, where governors had strolled\nand black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears\nat the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns,\nthe flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks,\nthe flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift,\nthe porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia’s jet\ndimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies\nand left a lonely bulb on the verandah,\nand, had his mandate extended to that ceiling\nof star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered\nthe sky to sleep, saying, I’m tired,\nsave the starlight for victories, we can’t afford it,\nleave the moon on for one more hour, and that’s it.\nBut though his power, the given mandate, extended\nfrom tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks,\nhis hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust\nthat carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music,\ndown the gullies of Yallahs and August Town,\nto lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags\ncrucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons;\nfrom the black Warieka Hills the sky glowered fierce as\nthe dials of a million radios,\na throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid\nwhere the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston.\nHe saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music\nof the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes\nput aside. He had to heal\nthis malarial island in its bath of bay leaves,\nits forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle\ngroaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking\nits head to remember its name. No vowels left\nin the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone.\n\nThe mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars\nas he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep,\ndrawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world\nbetween a star and a star, by that black power\nthat has the assassin dreaming of snow,\nthat poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child.\nThe house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls\nhis mind is a mill wheel in moonlight,\nand he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned\nbell of Port Royal’s cathedral, sees the copper pennies\nof bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets\nof green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating\nfrom the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea-horses\ndrawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade\nacross the moss-green meadows of the sea;\nhe heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes,\na hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted\nby water, a crab climbing the steeple,\nand he climbed from that submarine kingdom\nas the evening lights came on in the institute,\nthe scholars lamplit in their own aquarium,\nhe saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed\nupward from that baptism, their history lessons,\nthe bubbles like ideas which he could not break:\nJamaica was captured by Penn and Venables,\nPort Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake.\n\nBefore the coruscating façades of cathedrals\nfrom Santiago to Caracas, where the penitential archbishops\nwashed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment\nthat made the Caribbean a baptismal font,\nturned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves\nthe buzzards circling municipal garbage),\nthe Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin\nin the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved\nof a history which they did not commit;\nthe slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed\nsaid the rosary of islands for three hundred years,\na hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea\ninside a sea-cave, as their knees turned to stone,\nwhile the bodies of patriots were melting down walls\nstill crusted with mute outcries of La Revolución!\n“San Salvador, pray for us, St. Thomas, San Domingo,\nora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia\nof no eyes,” and when the circular chaplet\nreached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad\nthey began again, their knees drilled into stone,\nwhere Colón had begun, with San Salvador’s bead,\nbeads of black colonies round the necks of Indians.\nAnd while they prayed for an economic miracle,\nulcers formed on the municipal portraits,\nthe hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels,\nand the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas,\nuntil a black woman, shawled like a buzzard,\nclimbed up the stairs and knocked at the door\nof his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole:\n“Let me in, I’m finished with praying, I’m the Revolution.\nI am the darker, the older America.”\nShe was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,\nher voice had the gutturals of machine guns\nacross khaki deserts where the cactus flower\ndetonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat\nof an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.\nShe was a black umbrella blown inside out\nby the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,\na black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,\nraped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin\ntransfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,\na stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue\nto the tortures done in the name of the Father,\nwould curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,\nthe fountain of generals, poets, and cripples\nwho danced without moving over their graves\nwith each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched\nby the teeth of machine guns, and every sunset\nshe carried the Caribbean’s elliptical basin\nas she had once carried the penitential napkins\nto be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado,\nand those whose faces had yellowed like posters,\non municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair\nuntil it turned white, but she would not understand\nthat he wanted no other power but peace\nthat he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed,\nhe wanted a history without any memory,\nstreets without statues,\nand a geography without myth. He wanted no armies\nbut those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane,\nand he sobbed, “I am powerless, except for love.”\nShe faded from him, because he could not kill;\nshe shrank to a bat that hung day and night\nin the back of his brain. He rose in his dream.\n\nThe soul, which was his body made as thin\nas its reflection and invulnerable\nwithout its clock, was losing track of time;\nit walked the mountain tracks of the Maroons,\nit swung with Gordon from the creaking gibbet,\nit bought a pack of peppermints and cashews\nfrom one of the bandanna’d mammies outside the ward,\nit heard breath pitched to the decibels\nof the peanut vendors’ carts, it entered a municipal wall\nStirring the slogans that shrieked his name: saviour!\nand others: lackey! he melted like a spoon\nthrough the alphabet soup of CIA, PNP, OPEC,\nthat resettled once he passed through with this thought:\nI should have foreseen those seraphs with barbed-wire hair,\nbeards like burst mattresses, and wild eyes of garnet,\nwho nestled the Coptic Bible to their ribs, would\ncall me Joshua, expecting him to bring down Babylon\nby Wednesday, after the fall of Jericho; yes, yes,\nI should have seen the cunning bitterness of the rich\nwho left me no money but these mandates:\n\nHis aerial mandate, which\ncontained the crows whose circuit\nwas this wedding band that married him to his island.\nHis marine mandate, which\nwas the fishing limits\nwhich the shark scissored like silk with its teeth\nbetween Key West and Havana;\nhis terrestrial:\nthe bled hills rusted with bauxite;\nparadisal:\nthe chimneys like angels sheathed in aluminium.\n\nIn shape like a cloud\nhe saw the face of his father,\nthe hair like white cirrus blown back\nin a photographic wind,\nthe mouth of mahogany winced shut,\nthe eyes lidded, resigned\nto the first compromise,\nthe last ultimatum,\nthe first and last referendum.\nOne morning the Caribbean was cut up\nby seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts--\none thousand miles of aquamarine with lace trimmings;\none million yards of lime-coloured silk,\none mile of violet, leagues of cerulean satin--\nwho sold it at a markup to the conglomerates,\nthe same conglomerates who had rented the water spouts\nfor ninety-nine years in exchange for fifty ships,\nwho retailed it in turn to the ministers\nwith only one bank account, who then resold it\nin ads for the Caribbean Economic Community,\ntill everyone owned a little piece of the sea,\nfrom which some made saris, some made bandannas;\nthe rest was offered on trays to white cruise ships\ntaller than the post office; then the dogfights\nbegan in the cabinets as to who had first sold\nthe archipelago for this chain store of islands.\n\nNow a tree of grenades was his star-apple kingdom,\nover fallow pastures his crows patrolled,\nhe felt his fist involuntarily tighten\ninto a talon that was strangling five doves,\nthe mountains loomed leaden under martial law,\nthe suburban gardens flowered with white paranoia\nnext to the bougainvilleas of astonishing April;\nthe rumours were a rain that would not fall:\nthat enemy intelligence had alerted the roaches’\nquivering antennae, that bats flew like couriers,\ntransmitting secrets between the embassies;\nover dials in the war rooms, the agents waited\nfor a rifle crack from Havana; down shuttered avenues\nroared a phalanx of Yamahas. They left\na hole in the sky that closed on silence.\n\nHe didn’t hear the roar of the motorcycles\ndiminish in circles like those of the water mill\nin a far childhood; he was drowned in sleep;\nhe slept, without dreaming, the sleep after love\nin the mineral oblivion of night\nwhose flesh smells of cocoa, whose teeth are white\nas coconut meat, whose breath smells of ginger,\nwhose braids are scented like sweet-potato vines\nin furrows still pungent with the sun.\nHe slept the sleep that wipes out history,\nhe slept like the islands on the breast of the sea,\nlike a child again in her star-apple kingdom.\n\nTomorrow the sea would gleam like nails\nunder a zinc sky where the barren frangipani\nwas hammered, a horizon without liners;\ntomorrow the heavy caravels of clouds would wreck\nand dissolve in their own foam on the reefs\nof the mountains, tomorrow a donkey’s yawn\nwould saw the sky in half, and at dawn\nwould come the noise of a government groaning uphill.\nBut now she held him, as she holds us all,\nher history-orphaned islands, she to whom\nwe came late as our muse, our mother,\nwho suckled the islands, who, when she grows old\nwith her breasts wrinkled like eggplants,\nis the head-tie mother, the bleached-sheets-on-the-river-rocks mother,\nthe gospel mother, the t’ank-you-parson mother\nwho turns into mahogany, the lignum-vitae mother,\nher sons like thorns,\nher daughters dry gullies that give birth to stones,\nwho was, in our childhood, the housemaid and the cook,\nthe young grand’ who polished the plaster figure\nof Clio, Muse of history, in her seashell grotto\nin the Great House parlour, Anadyomene washed\nin the deep Atlantic heave of her housemaid’s hymn.\n\nIn the indigo dawn the palms unclenched their fists,\nhis eyes opened the flowers, and he lay as still\nas the waterless mill wheel. The sun’s fuse caught;\nit hissed on the edge of the skyline, and day exploded\nits remorseless avalanche of dray carts and curses,\nthe roaring oven of Kingston, its sky as fierce\nas the tin box of a patties cart. Down the docks\nbetween the Levantine smells of the warehouses\nnosed the sea-wind with its odour of a dog’s damp fur.\nHe lathered in anger and refreshed his love.\nHe was lathered like a horse, but the instant\nthe shower crowned him and he closed his eyes,\nhe was a bride under lace, remarrying his country,\na child drawn by the roars of the mill wheel’s electorate,\nthose vows reaffirmed; he dressed, went down to breakfast,\nand sitting again at the mahogany surface\nof the breakfast table, its dark hide as polished\nas the sheen of mares, saw his father’s face\nand his own face blent there, and looked out\nto the drying garden and its seeping pond.\n\nWhat was the Caribbean? A green pond mantling\nbehind the Great House columns of Whitehall,\nbehind the Greek façades of Washington,\nwith bloated frogs squatting on lily pads\nlike islands, islands that coupled as sadly as turtles\nengendering islets, as the turtle of Cuba\nmounting Jamaica engendered the Caymans, as, behind\nthe hammerhead turtle of Haiti-San Domingo\ntrailed the little turtles from Tortuga to Tobago;\nhe followed the bobbing trek of the turtles\nleaving America for the open Atlantic,\nfelt his own flesh loaded like the pregnant beaches\nwith their moon-guarded eggs--they yearned for Africa,\nthey were lemmings drawn by magnetic memory\nto an older death, to broader beaches\nwhere the coughing of lions was dumbed by breakers.\nYes, he could understand their natural direction\nbut they would drown, sea-eagles circling them,\nand the languor of frigates that do not beat wings,\nand he closed his eyes, and felt his jaw drop\nagain with the weight of that silent scream.\nHe cried out at the turtles as one screams at children\nwith the anger of love, it was the same scream\nwhich, in his childhood, had reversed an epoch\nthat had bent back the leaves of his star-apple kingdom,\nmade streams race uphill, pulled the water wheel backward\nlike the wheels in a film, and at that outcry,\nfrom the raw ropes and tendons of his throat,\nthe sea-buzzards receded and receded into specks,\nand the osprey vanished.\n\nOn the knee-hollowed steps\nof the crusted cathedral, there was a woman in black,\nthe black of moonless nights, within whose eyes\nshone seas in starlight like the glint of knives\n(the one who had whispered to the keyhole of his ear),\nwashing the steps, and she heard it first.\nShe was one of a flowing black river of women\nwho bore elliptical basins to the feet of pauper\non the Day of Thorns, who bore milk pails to cows\nin a pastoral sunrise, who bore baskets on their heads\ndown the haemophilic red hills of Haiti,\nnow with the squeezed rag dripping from her hard hands\nthe way that vinegar once dropped from a sponge,\nbut she heard as a dog hears, as all the underdogs\nof the world hear, the pitched shriek of silence.\nStar-apples rained to the ground in that silence,\nthe silence was the green of cities undersea,\nand the silence lasted for half an hour\nin that single second, a seashell silence, resounding\nwith silence, and the men with barbed-wire beards saw\nin that creak of light that was made between\nthe noises of the world that was equally divided\nbetween rich and poor, between North and South,\nbetween white and black, between two Americas,\nhe fields of silent Zion in Parish Trelawny,\nin Parish St. David, in Parish St. Andrew,\nleaves dancing like children without any sound,\nin the valley of Tryall, and the white, silent roar\nof the old water wheel in the star-apple kingdom;\nand the woman’s face, had a smile been decipherable\nin that map of parchment so rivered with wrinkles,\nwould have worn the same smile with which he now\ncracked the day open and began his egg.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-walsh": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Walsh", - "birth": { - "year": 1875 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Walsh_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 1 - }, - "poems": { - "to-christ-crucified": { - "title": "“To Christ Crucified”", - "body": "I am not moved to love Thee, O my Lord,\nBy any longing for Thy Promised Land;\nNor by the fear of hell am I unmanned\nTo cease from my transgressing deed or word.\n’Tis Thou Thyself dost move me,--Thy blood poured\nUpon the cross from nailed foot and hand;\nAnd all the wounds that did Thy body brand;\nAnd all Thy shame and bitter death’s award.\n\nYea, to Thy heart am I so deeply stirred\nThat I would love Thee were no heaven on high,--\nThat I would fear, were hell a tale absurd!\nSuch my desire, all questioning grows vain;\nThough hope deny me hope I still should sigh,\nAnd as my love is now, it should remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - } - } - }, - "wang-wei": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wang Wei", - "birth": { - "year": 699 - }, - "death": { - "year": 759 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chinese", - "language": "chinese", - "flag": "🇨🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Wei_(Tang_dynasty)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chinese" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "an-autumn-evening-in-the-mountains": { - "title": "“An Autumn Evening in the Mountains”", - "body": "After rain the empty mountain\nStands autumnal in the evening,\nMoonlight in its groves of pine,\nStones of crystal in its brooks.\nBamboos whisper of washer-girls bound home,\nLotus-leaves yield before a fisher-boat--\nAnd what does it matter that springtime has gone,\nWhile you are here, O Prince of Friends?", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Witter Bynner", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "fields-and-gardens-by-the-river-qi": { - "title": "“Fields and Gardens by the River Qi”", - "body": "I dwell apart by the River Qi,\nWhere the Eastern wilds stretch far without hills.\n\nThe sun darkens beyond the mulberry trees;\nThe river glistens through the villages.\n\nShepherd boys depart, gazing back to their hamlets;\nHunting dogs return following their men.\n\nWhen a man’s at peace, what business does he have?\nI shut fast my rustic door throughout the day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Paul Rouzer" - } - }, - "a-song-of-peach-blossom-river": { - "title": "“A Song of Peach-Blossom River”", - "body": "A fisherman is drifting, enjoying the spring mountains,\nAnd the peach-trees on both banks lead him to an ancient source.\nWatching the fresh-coloured trees, he never thinks of distance\nTill he comes to the end of the blue stream and suddenly--strange men!\nIt’s a cave-with a mouth so narrow that he has to crawl through;\nBut then it opens wide again on a broad and level path--\nAnd far beyond he faces clouds crowning a reach of trees,\nAnd thousands of houses shadowed round with flowers and bamboos …\nWoodsmen tell him their names in the ancient speech of Han;\nAnd clothes of the Qin Dynasty are worn by all these people\nLiving on the uplands, above the Wuling River,\nOn farms and in gardens that are like a world apart,\nTheir dwellings at peace under pines in the clear moon,\nUntil sunrise fills the low sky with crowing and barking.\n… At news of a stranger the people all assemble,\nAnd each of them invites him home and asks him where he was born.\nAlleys and paths are cleared for him of petals in the morning,\nAnd fishermen and farmers bring him their loads at dusk …\nThey had left the world long ago, they had come here seeking refuge;\nThey have lived like angels ever since, blessedly far away,\nNo one in the cave knowing anything outside,\nOutsiders viewing only empty mountains and thick clouds.\n… The fisherman, unaware of his great good fortune,\nBegins to think of country, of home, of worldly ties,\nFinds his way out of the cave again, past mountains and past rivers,\nIntending some time to return, when he has told his kin.\nHe studies every step he takes, fixes it well in mind,\nAnd forgets that cliffs and peaks may vary their appearance.\n… It is certain that to enter through the deepness of the mountain,\nA green river leads you, into a misty wood.\nBut now, with spring-floods everywhere and floating peachpetals--\nWhich is the way to go, to find that hidden source?", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Witter Bynner", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-a-girl-from-loyang": { - "title": "“A Song of a Girl from Loyang”", - "body": "There’s a girl from Loyang in the door across the street,\nShe looks fifteen, she may be a little older.\n… While her master rides his rapid horse with jade bit an bridle,\nHer handmaid brings her cod-fish in a golden plate.\nOn her painted pavilions, facing red towers,\nCornices are pink and green with peach-bloom and with willow,\nCanopies of silk awn her seven-scented chair,\nAnd rare fans shade her, home to her nine-flowered curtains.\nHer lord, with rank and wealth and in the bud of life,\nExceeds in munificence the richest men of old.\nHe favours this girl of lowly birth, he has her taught to dance;\nAnd he gives away his coral-trees to almost anyone.\nThe wind of dawn just stirs when his nine soft lights go out,\nThose nine soft lights like petals in a flying chain of flowers.\nBetween dances she has barely time for singing over the songs;\nNo sooner is she dressed again than incense burns before her.\nThose she knows in town are only the rich and the lavish,\nAnd day and night she is visiting the hosts of the gayest mansions.\n… Who notices the girl from Yue with a face of white jade,\nHumble, poor, alone, by the river, washing silk?", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Witter Bynner", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-song-of-an-autumn-night": { - "title": "“A Song of an Autumn Night”", - "body": "Under the crescent moon a light autumn dew\nHas chilled the robe she will not change--\nAnd she touches a silver lute all night,\nAfraid to go back to her empty room.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "translator": "Witter Bynner", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - } - } - }, - "robert-penn-warren": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Robert Penn Warren", - "birth": { - "year": 1905 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1989 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Penn_Warren", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 17 - }, - "poems": { - "aspen-leaf-in-windless-world": { - "title": "“Aspen Leaf in Windless World”", - "body": "Watch how the aspen leaf, pale and windless, waggles,\nWhile one white cloud loiters motionless over Wyoming,\nAnd think how delicately the heart may flutter\nIn the windless joy of unworded revelation.\n\nLook how the sea-foam, white, makes its Arabic scrawl\nOn the unruffled sand of the beach’s faint-tilted plane.\nIs there a message there for you to decipher?\nOr only the joy of its sunlit intricacy?\n\nIs there a sign Truth gives that we recognize?\nCan we fix our eyes on the flight of birds for answer?\nCan the bloody-armed augurs declare expediency?\nWhat does dew on stretched woolfleece, the grass dry, mean?\n\nHave you stood on the night-lawn, in blackness of oaks, and heard\nFrom bough-crotch to bough-crotch, the moon-eyed tree toad utter,\nAgain and again, that quavery croak, and asked\nIf it means there’ll be rain? Toward dawn? Or early tomorrow?\n\nWe were not by when Aaron laid down his rod\nThat suddenly twisted, went scaley, and heaved the fanged head,\nAnd when Egypt’s high magi probed their own lore for the trick.\nWell, the sacred serpent devoured that brood. What, then,\n\nWould you’ve made of that? Yes, we wander our world\nOf miracles, whispers, high-jinks, and metaphor.\nYes, why is the wind in the cedar the sub-sob of grief?\nAnd the puppy--why is his tongue on your palm so sweet?\n\nWhat image--behind blind eyes when the nurse steps back--\nWill loom at the end of your own life’s long sorites?\nWould a sun rise red on an eastern horizon of waters?\nWould you see a face? What face? Would it smile? Can you say?\n\nOr would it be some great, sky-thrusting gray menhir\nOr what, in your long-lost childhood, one morning you saw--\nTinfoil wrappers of chocolate, tramped popcorn, nut shells, and poorly\nCleared up, the last elephant turd on the lot where the circus had been?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "bearded-oaks": { - "title": "“Bearded Oaks”", - "body": "The oaks, how subtle and marine!\nBearded, and all the layered light\nAbove them swims; and thus the scene,\nRecessed, awaits the positive night.\n\nSo, waiting, we in the grass now lie\nBeneath the langorous tread of light;\nThe grasses, kelp-like, satisfy\nThe nameless motions of the air.\n\nUpon the floor of light, and time,\nUnmurmuring, of polyp made,\nWe rest; we are, as light withdraws,\nTwin atolls on a shelf of shade.\n\nAges to our construction went,\nDim architecture, hour by hour;\nAnd violence, forgot now, lent\nThe present stillness all its power.\n\nThe storm of noon above us rolled,\nOf light the fury, furious gold,\nThe long drag troubling us, the depth\nUnrocked is dark, unrippling, still.\n\nPassion and slaughter, ruth, decay\nDescended, whispered grain by grain,\nSilted down swaying streams, to lay\nFoundation for our voicelessness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cardinal": { - "title": "“The Cardinal”", - "body": "Cardinal, lover of shade,\nRock and gold is the land in the pulsing noon.\nLover of cedar, lover of shade …\nBlue the shadow of cedar on grey limestone\nWhere the lizard, devout as an ikon,\nIs carved on the stone, throat pulsing on lichen.\n\nAt the hour of noon I have seen\nThe burst of your wings displayed,\nVision of scarlet devised in the slumberous green …\nLover of cedar and shade.\n\nWhat if the lizard, my cardinal,\nDepart like a breath its altar, summer westward fall?\nFor here is a bough where you can perch, and preen\nYour scarlet that from its landscape shall not fade,\nLapped in the cool of the mind’s undated shade,\nIn a whispering tree, like cedar, evergreen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-garden": { - "title": "“The Garden”", - "body": "How kind, how secretly, the sun\nHas blessed this garden frost has won,\nAnd touched again, as once it used,\nThe furlèd boughs by frost bemused.\nThough summered brilliance had but room\nFor blossom, now the leaves will bloom\nTheir time, and take from a milder sun\nThe unreviving benison.\n\nNo marbles whitely gleam among\nThese paths where gilt the late pear hung;\nBut branches interlace to frame\nAn avenue of stately flame\nWhere yonder, far more chill and pure\nThan marble, gleams the sycamore,\nOf argent torse and cunning shaft\nPropped nobler than the sculptor’s craft.\n\nThe hand that crooked upon the spade\nHere plucked the peach, and thirst allayed;\nHere lovers paused upon the kiss,\nInstructed of what ripeness is.\nWhere all who came might stand to try\nThe grace of this green empery,\nNow jay and cardinal debate,\nLike twin usurpers, the ruined state.\n\nThen he who sought, not love but peace,\nIn such rank plot could take no ease:\nNow poised between the two alarms\nOf summer’s lusts and winter’s harms,\nFor him alone these precincts wait\nWith sacrament that could translate\nAll things that fed luxurious sense\nFrom appetite to innocence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "the-limited": { - "title": "“The Limited”", - "body": "Since there’s no help, come, let them kiss and part--\nThe Pullman step’s as good as any place.\nIt’s certain love can scarcely learn the art\nTo read the mind’s construction in the face.\nAnd so he tips the grim white-coated groom,\nConsigns her bags to that black hand of doom;\nThen slick as death the velvet pistons start,\nLike fat blood in a drowning swimmer’s heart.\n\nWhite Proserpine whirled in the cloudy car\nWhile brightness drops from star and star:\nProven--ah, sad sorites of the year--\nFor him who turns like that mute Orpheus\nAgain to thrust by all the vulgar dead.\nBut in his heart the summer’s wrath shall roam\nWith burning eyes, as in the vacant house\nThe cold and dry-foot cat whose tread\nWheels from last week’s newspaper to the broom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "man-coming-of-age": { - "title": "“Man Coming of Age”", - "body": "What rime, what tinsel pure and chill,\nBy dawn adorns the new-spied hill?\n\nThis brilliance in the night was wrought:\nFrom cold and dark a dead world caught\nSuch light that glitters past our thought.\n\nSo settles on a dying face,\nAfter the retch and spasm, grace.\n\n(A grace like that did not belong\nIn the room of no-love, fret, and wrong:\nThe watchers sat heavy, night was long.)\n\nNow standing on his own doorsill,\nHe views the woods that crest the hill.\n\nAnd asks: “Was it I who roamed to prove\nMy heart beneath the unwhispering grove\nIn season greener and of more love?”\n\nAnd was it he? Now let him stride\nWith crampèd knee the slant hillside,\n\nPondering what paths he used to know,\nSeeking under the snowy bough\nThat frail deceitful alter ego.\n\nWanderer in woods that bear no leaf,\nClimber of rocks, assume your grief,\n\nAnd go! lest he, before you tread\nThat ground once sweetly tenanted,\nLike mist down the glassy glooms be fled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-moonlights-dream": { - "title": "“The Moonlight’s Dream”", - "body": "Why did I wake at night, all the house at rest?\nI could not hear, but knew, what each breath meant\nIn each room. My father’s long drag to the depth of chest.\nMy mother’s as silky as rustle of lilies that leant\nBy the garden pool when night-breeze is merely a whisper.\nBut loudest of all that of my old grandfather,\nWho with years struggled, grumbling, croupy, and slow\nBut once dreamed forth a yell for blood, at Fort Pillow or Shiloh.\n\nTonight the house was mouse-still except for some beam\nThat, whisper or creak, complained of the years it had borne\nThe weight of reality and the human dream\nAs the real became more real, and the real more forlorn.\nOutside, I wondered why I had come here and where\nI would go, and back-looking now, saw the tracks of my bare\nDark footprints set in the moonlit dew like snow,\nAnd thought: _I must go where they go, for they must know where to go._\n\nIt was as though they knew their way in a dream\nThe moonlight was having of all the world that night,\nAnd I took the path it dreamed, which led to the stream\nWhere cattle snorted in shadow, and eyes without sight\nStared through the dream that I was, while a whip-o-will\nAsserted to moonlight its name, while nameless and still,\nI wondered if ever my heart would beat again,\nAs I wandered the moonlight’s dream, past pleasure or past pain,\n\nAcross the sweet-clover whiteness, then up the hill\nTo the darkness that hung from old maples, and lay down to wonder\nIf I, being part of the moonlight’s dream, could be real,\nFor whatever realness I was, it must lie asleep yonder\nIn the far white house that was part of the moonlight’s dream, too.\nThen blankness. At day-streak, in terror, I rose, ran through\nThe tangle of clover, the corn balks, the creek--home to bed:\nBut no breath could I hear, and all seemed still, as still as the dead.\n\nNot dead! Though long years now are, and the creek bull-dozed dry,\nAnd their sorrow and joy, their passion and pain and endeavor,\nHave with them gone in whatever reality\nThey were, or are, by sunlight or moonlight--whatever.\nThe highway has slicked the spot the white farmhouse once stood.\nAt sixty per I am whirled past the spot, my blood\nUnwitting of that as of the defunct stream,\nOr of the ignorant night I strayed as part of the moonlight’s dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mortal-limit": { - "title": "“Mortal Limit”", - "body": "I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.\nIt rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags\nOf mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming\nOf dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags.\n\nThere--west--were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be\nIn dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height\nHangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see\nNew ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?\n\nOr, having tasted that atmosphere’s thinness, does it\nHang motionless in dying vision before\nIt knows it will accept the mortal limit,\nAnd swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore\n\nThe breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such\nItems, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-owl": { - "title": "“The Owl”", - "body": "Here was the sound of water falling only,\nWhich is not sound but silence musical\nTumbling forever down the gorge’s wall.\nLike late milkweed that blooms beside the lonely\nAnd sunlit stone, peace bloomed all afternoon.\nWhere time is not is peace; and here the shadow,\nThat crept to him across the western meadow\nAnd climbed the hill to mark the dropping sun,\nSeemed held a space, washed downward by the water\nWhose music flowed against the flow of time.\nIt could not be. Dark fell along the stream,\nAnd like a child grown suddenly afraid,\nWith shaking knees, hands bloody on the stone,\nToward the upland gleaming fields he fled.\n\nLight burned against their rim, was quickly gone.\nLater he would remember this, and start.\nAnd once or twice again his tough old heart\nKnew sickness that the rabbit’s heart must know,\nWhen star by star the great wings float,\nAnd down the moonlit track below\nTheir mortal silken shadow sweeps the snow.\nO scaled bent claw, infatuate deep throat!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "question-an-answer": { - "title": "“Question an Answer”", - "body": "_What has availed\nOr failed?_\nThe firm decision,\nThe voices\nLost,\nAnd the choices\nLost,\nElision\nOf choice and choice\nIn the long stammer of chance?\nWhat has availed\nOr failed?\n_Or will avail?_\nHawk’s poise,\nThe boxer’s stance,\nThe sail\n(O true upon the swollen tack! )\nThe sprinter’s pace,\nMoonlit the bomber’s bludgeoning grace--\nOr looking back,\nThe stainèd face?\n\nPace forth in dawns\nOf buds unhinged, and dew;\nAt dusk pace downs\nTo see the sea and view,\nImmense, the casual land:\nFor the heart can be held in the hand\nAnd the hour held in the hand\nAnd the question held in the hand:\nBut never demand\nOf the wave-lipped, sea-tongued sand\nAnswer.\nNor of the gull demand\nAnswer,\nNor of the noble sky\nWhere the gull in its integrity\nWill move;\nNor answer\nOf your true love.\n\nFor all--\nEach frescoed figure leaning from the world’s wall\nWith tongue too dry and small,\nBlunt eye and ignorant hand--\nDemand\nIn truth the true\nAnswer of you;\nAnd each,\nLocked lonely in its valveless speech,\nSpeaks,\nAnd without resting, seeks\nAnswer, and seeks to speak:\nTheir converse is not loud.\nHow painful, intimate, and meek\nBefore your face are crag and cloud!\n\nFor all\nRehearse their own simplicity:\nFor all--\nThe wind-heaved gull,\nThe ocean with its blundering garrulity,\nStony pasture, starving goat,\nMullein, anemone,\nGroaning gallows and the gallows-meat--\nFor all repeat\nIn mirrored-mirrored-mirror-wise\nUnto our eyes\nBut question, not replies:\nAll flower from the stalk, and bend,\nLike you, with what beseeching hand.\n\nThen let the heart be stone,\nAnd think\nOn stone,\nAnd think\nHow once the tribes in dread\nfrom easy-bellied Egypt fled,\nAnd when the conniving sea was past,\nStumbling the waste\nWere led,\nNot to the desert well\nOr green-lipped pool\nWhere the moving water sang\nAnd algae swayed beneath,\nBut thirsting and accurst--\nTongue black between the teeth\nWhence no sweet spittle sprang--\nUnder the noon’s flame\nTo the rock came:\nAnd think how the Israelite\nStruck\nAnd the riven rock\nLike a pealing bell rang\nAnd in the general sight\nGave forth to tongue and gut the living stream’s delight.\n\nBut if not that, then know\nAt least the heart a bow\nBent,\nAnd the wood’s tough nerve unspent,\nCord-kissing notch set now\nUpon the cord\nAs on the tongue the word\nThe lover at love has heard:\nAnd once the wide arc is sprung,\nLive in the cord’s long clang,\nWho let the arrow fy\nAt God’s black, orbèd, target eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-return-an-elegy": { - "title": "“The Return: An Elegy”", - "body": "The east wind finds the gap bringing rain--\nRain in the pine wind shaking the stiff pine.\nBeneath the wind the hollow gorges whine,\nThe pines decline.\nSlow film of rain creeps down the loam again\nWhere the blind and nameless bones recline.\n\n_they burn like faggots in … of damp and dark … the monstrous bulging flame.\ncalcium-phosphate lust speculation faith treachery:\nit walked upright with habitation and a name\ntell me its name_\n\nThe pines, black, like combers plunge with spray,\nLick the wind’s unceasing keel\nIt is not long till day.\nPines lurch beneath the thunder’s livid heel;\nThe long sough, the rent bough’s squeal.\nThe pines, black, snore. What does the wind say?\n\n_tell me its name_\n\nI have a name, I am not blind.\nEyes not blind press to the Pullman pane\nSurvey the driving dark and silver taunt of rain.\nWhat will I find--\nWhat will I find beyond the snoring pine?\nOh, eyes locked blind in death’s immaculate design\nShall fix their last distrust in mine.\n\n_give me the nickels off your eyes\nfrom your hands the violets\nlet me bless your obsequies …\nif you possessed conveniently enough three eyes\nthen I could buy a pack of cigarettes_\n\nIn gorges where the dead fox lies, the fern\nWill rankest loop the battened frond and fall\nAbove the bare and tushed jaws that turn\nTheir insolence unto the gracious catafalque and pall.\nIt would be the season when milkweed blossoms burn.\n\n_the old for is dead\nwhat have I said!\nI have only said what the wind said\nwind shakes a bell the hollow head_\n\nBy dawn the wind, the blown rain,\nWill cease their antique concitation.\nIt is the hour when old ladies cough and wake,\nThe chair the table take their form again\nAnd earth begins the matinal exhalation.\n\n_does my mother wake_\n\nPines drip without motion,\nThe hairy boughs no longer shake.\nMist crook-backed and shagged ascends;\nRound hairy boughs the mist with shaggy fingers bends.\nNo wind no rain:\nWhy do the steady pines complain?--\nComplain--\n\n_the old for is dead\nwhat have I said!_\n\nLocked in the roaring cubicle\nOver the mountains through darkness hurled\nI race the daylight’s westward cycle\nAcross the groaning roof-tree of the world.\nThe mist is furled.\n\n_a hundred years men took this road\nthe lank hunters then men hardeyed with hope:\nor--breath whitened the chill air the goad\nfell: here on the western slope\nthe hungry beoble the lost ones took their abode\nhere they took their stand:\nalders bloomed on the road to the new land._\n\n_here is the barn the broken door the shed\nthe old for is dead_\n\nThe wheels hum--\nThe wheels. I come.\nWhirl out of space through time, O wheels!\nPursue down backward time the ghostly parallels,\nPursue past culvert, cut, embankment, semaphore--\nPursue down time.\nThe pines, black, snore--\n\n_turn backward turn backward O time in your flight\nand make me a child again just for tonight\ngood lord he’s wet the bed come bring a light_\n\nWhat grief hath the mind distilled?\nThe heart is unfulfilled,\nThe hoarse pine stilled.\nI cannot pluck\nOut of this land of pine and rock,\nOf the fallen pine-cone,\nOf redbud (its season not yet gone).\nIn drouth the lizard will blink on the hot limestone.\nIf I could pluck--\n\n_the old for is dead\nwhat is said is said\nheaven rest the whorey head\nwhat have I said!\nonly said what the wind said\nhonor thy father and mother in the days of thy youth\nlook homeward angel let thy heart melt with ruth_\n\nIf I could pluck\nOut of the dark that whirls\nOver the hoarse pine, over the rock,\nOut of the mist that furls\nCould I stretch forth like God the hand and gather\nFor you my mother--\nIf I could pluck\nAgainst the dry essential of tomorrow\nTo lay upon the breast that gave me suck\nOut of the dark\nThe dark and swollen orchid of this sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "revelation": { - "title": "“Revelation”", - "body": "Because he had spoken harshly to his mother,\nThe day became astonishingly bright,\nThe enormity of distance crept to him like a dog now,\nAnd earth’s own luminescence seemed to repel the night.\n\nRoof was rent like the loud paper tearing to admit\nSun-sulphurous splendor where had been before\nBut the submarine glimmer by kindly countenances lit,\nAs slow, phosphorescent dignities light the ocean floor.\n\nBy walls, by walks, chrysanthemum and aster,\nAll hairy, fat-petaled species, lean, confer,\nAnd his ears, and heart, should burn at that insidious whisper\nWhich concerns him so, he knows; but he cannot make out the words.\n\nThe peacock screamed, and his feathered fury made\nLegend shake, all day, while the sky ran pale as milk;\nThat night, all night, the buck rabbit stamped in the moonlit glade,\nAnd the owl’s brain glowed like a coal in the grove’s combustible dark.\n\nWhen Sulla smote and Rome was rent, Augustine\nRecalled how Nature, shuddering, tore her gown,\nAnd kind changed kind, and the blunt herbivorous tooth dripped blood;\nAt Duncan’s death, at Dunsinane, chimneys blew down.\n\nBut, oh! his mother was kinder than ever Rome,\nDearer than Duncan--no wonder, then, Nature’s frame\nThrilled in voluptuous hemispheres far off from his home;\nBut not in terror: only as the bride, as the bride.\n\nIn separateness only does love learn definition,\nThough Brahma smiles beneath the dappled shade,\nThough tears, that night, wet the pillow where the boy’s head was laid\nDreamless of splendid antipodal agitation;\n\nAnd though across what tide and tooth Time is,\nHe was to lean back toward that merciless face,\nHe would think, than Sulla more fortunate, how once he had learned\nSomething important about love, and about love’s grace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "so-frost-astounds": { - "title": "“So Frost Astounds”", - "body": "_I have thouaht: this will be so--\nnothing less_\n\nYou sat by the window in a dull blue dress;\nit was the season when blackbirds go.\n\n_Shut to light--too much of light--the classic lids_\n\nYou were sustained in the green translucence that resides\nall afternoon beneath the maple trees.\nI observed your hands which lay, on the lap, supine.\n\n_So frost astounds the garden caluxes_\n\nThey were composed by will which locked the frail\narticulation beneath the pensive skin:\nas though composed by the will of an artist on the dull blue cloth\nforever beyond the accident of fesh and bone,\nor principle of thief and rat and moth,\nor beyond the stately perturbation of the mind.\n\n_I have thought: this I will find._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "tell-me-a-story": { - "title": "“Tell Me a Story”", - "body": "Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood\nBy a dirt road, in first dark, and heard\nThe great geese hoot northward.\n\nI could not see them, there being no moon\nAnd the stars sparse. I heard them.\n\nI did not know what was happening in my heart.\n\nIt was the season before the elderberry blooms,\nTherefore they were going north.\n\nThe sound was passing northward.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "true-love": { - "title": "“True Love”", - "body": "In silence the heart raves. It utters words\nMeaningless, that never had\nA meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,\n\nFreckled. In a big black Buick,\nDriven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat\nIn front of the drugstore, sipping something\n\nThrough a straw. There is nothing like\nBeauty. It stops your heart. It\nThickens your blood. It stops your breath. It\n\nMakes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.\nI leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.\nI thought I would die if she saw me.\n\nHow could I exist in the same world with that brightness?\nTwo years later she smiled at me. She\nNamed my name. I thought I would wake up dead.\n\nHer grown brothers walked with the bent-knee\nSwagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced.\nTold jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.\n\nTheir father was what is called a drunkard.\nWhatever he was he stayed on the third floor\nOf the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years.\n\nHe never came down. They brought everything up to him.\nI did not know what a mortgage was.\nHis wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.\n\nWhen the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing\nAn old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing.\nThe sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were\n\nEngraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought\nI would cry. I lay in bed that night\nAnd wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.\n\nThe mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.\nShe never came back. The family\nSort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.\n\nBut I know she is beautiful forever, and lives\nIn a beautiful house, far away.\nShe called my name once. I didn’t even know she knew it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "watershed": { - "title": "“Watershed”", - "body": "From this high place all things flow:\nLand of divided streams, of water spilled\nEastward, westward without memento;\nLand where the morning mist is curled\nLike smoke about the ridgepole of the world.\nThe mist is furled.\n\nThe sunset hawk now rides\nThe tall light up the climbing deep of air.\nBeneath him swings the rooftree that divides\nThe east and west. His gold eyes scan\nThe crumpled shade on gorge and crest,\nAnd streams that creep and disappear, appear,\nPast fingered ridges and their shrivelling span.\nUnder the broken eaves men take their rest.\n\nForever, should they stir, their thought would keep\nThis place. Not love, happiness past, constrains,\nBut certitude. Enough, and it remains;\nThough they who thread the flood and neap\nOf earth itself have felt the earth creep,\nIn pastures hung against the rustling gorge\nHave felt the shudder and the sweat of stone,\nKnowing thereby no constant moon\nSustains the hill’s lost granite surge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-way-to-love-god": { - "title": "“A Way to Love God”", - "body": "Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.\nAnd the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific\nFirst leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know\nAbout submarine geography, and your father’s death rattle\nProvides all biographical data required for the Who’s Who of the dead.\n\nI cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least\nI can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and\nHeard mountains moan in their sleep. By daylight,\nThey remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions\nOf not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. At night\nThey remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.\nSo moan. Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that\nOf forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.\n\nI do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you\nTo think on the slug’s white belly, how sick-slick and soft,\nOn the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence\nBlows like wind by, and on the sea’s virgin bosom unveiled\nTo give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,\nIn the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square,\nBoot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.\n\nEverything seems an echo of something else.\n\nAnd when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head\nOf Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,\nBut without sound. The lips,\nThey were trying to say something very important.\n\nBut I had forgotten to mention an upland\nOf wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when\nNo wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,\nI watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes\nStared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes\nWere stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,\nOr of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.\n\nTheir jaws did not move. Shreds\nOf dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung\nFrom the side of a jaw, unmoving.\n\nYou would think that nothing would ever again happen.\n\nThat may be a way to love God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "charles-wesley": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Wesley", - "birth": { - "year": 1707 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1788 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wesley", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "come-on-my-partners-in-distress": { - "title": "“Come On, My Partners in Distress”", - "body": "Come on, my partners in distress,\nMy comrades through the wilderness,\n Who still your bodies feel;\nAwhile forget your griefs and fears,\nAnd look beyond this vale of tears\n To that celestial hill.\n\nBeyond the bounds of time and space\nLook forward to that heavenly place,\n The saints’ secure abode;\nOn faith’s strong eagle pinions rise,\nAnd force your passage to the skies,\n And scale the mount of God.\n\nWho suffer with our Master here,\nWe shall before his face appear,\n And by his side sit down;\nTo patient faith the prize is sure,\nAnd all that to the end endure\n The cross, shall wear the crown.\n\nThrice blessed bliss-inspiring hope!\nIt lifts the fainting spirits up,\n It brings to life the dead;\nOur conflicts here shall soon be past,\nAnd you and I ascend at last\n Triumphant with our head.\n\nThe great mysterious Deity\nWe soon with open face shall see;\n The beatific sight\nShall fill heaven’s sounding courts with praise,\nAnd wide diffuse the golden blaze\n Of everlasting light.\n\nThe Father shining on his throne,\nThe glorious, co-eternal Son,\n The Spirit, one and seven,\nConspire our rapture to complete,\nAnd lo! we fall before his feet,\n And silence heightens heaven.\n\nIn hope of that ecstatic pause,\nJesu, we now sustain the cross,\n And at thy footstool fall,\nTill thou our hidden life reveal,\nTill thou our ravished spirits fill,\n And God is all in all.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-christmas-day": { - "title": "“For Christmas Day”", - "body": "Hark, how all the welkin rings,\n“Glory to the King of kings;\nPeace on earth, and mercy mild,\nGod and sinners reconcil’d!”\n\nJoyful, all ye nations, rise,\nJoin the triumph of the skies;\nUniversal nature say,\n“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”\n\nChrist, by highest Heaven ador’d,\nChrist, the everlasting Lord:\nLate in time behold him come,\nOffspring of a virgin’s womb!\n\nVeil’d in flesh, the Godhead see,\nHail th’ incarnate Deity!\nPleas’d as man with men to appear,\nJesus, our Immanuel here!\n\nHail, the heavenly Prince of Peace,\nHail, the Sun of Righteousness!\nLight and life to all he brings,\nRisen with healing in his wings.\n\nMild he lays his glory by,\nBorn that man no more may die;\nBorn to raise the sons of earth;\nBorn to give them second birth.\n\nCome, desire of nations, come,\nFix in us thy humble home;\nRise, the woman’s conquering seed,\nBruise in us the serpent’s head.\n\nNow display thy saving power,\nRuin’d nature now restore;\nNow in mystic union join\nThine to ours, and ours to thine.\n\nAdam’s likeness, Lord, efface,\nStamp thy image in its place.\nSecond Adam from above,\nReinstate us in thy love.\n\nLet us thee, though lost, regain,\nThee, the life, the inner man:\nO, to all thyself impart,\nForm’d in each believing heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "hark-the-herald-angels-sing": { - "title": "“Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”", - "body": "Hark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King,\nPeace on earth and mercy mild,\nGod and sinner reconcil’d.\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.\n\nJoyful all ye nations rise,\nJoin the triumph of the skies,\nWith the angelic host proclaim,\nChrist is born in Bethlehem.\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.\n\nChrist by highest Heaven ador’d,\nChrist the everlasting Lord!\nLate in time behold him come,\nOffspring of a virgin’s womb.\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.\n\nVeiled in flesh the Godhead see,\nHail, the incarnate Deity,\nPleased as Man with man to dwell,\nJesus our Immanuel!\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.\n\nHail the Heaven-born Prince of Peace!\nHail the Sun of Righteousness!\nLight and life to all he brings,\nRisen with healing in his wings.\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.\n\nMild he lays his glory by,\nBorn that man no more may die,\nBorn to raise the sons of earth,\nBorn to give them second birth.\nHark! the herald Angels sing,\nGlory to the new-born King.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "morning-hymn": { - "title": "“Morning Hymn”", - "body": "Christ, whose glory fills the skies,\nChrist, the true, the only light,\nSun of Righteousness, arise,\nTriumph o’er the shades of night:\nDay-spring from on high, be near:\nDay-star, in my heart appear.\n\nDark and cheerless is the morn\nUnaccompanied by thee,\nJoyless is the day’s return,\nTill thy mercy’s beams I see;\nTill thy inward light impart,\nGlad my eyes, and warm my heart.\n\nVisit then this soul of mine,\nPierce the gloom of sin, and grief,\nFill me, Radiancy Divine,\nScatter all my unbelief,\nMore and more thyself display,\nShining to the perfect day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "my-god-i-know-i-feel-thee-mine": { - "title": "“My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine”", - "body": "My God! I know, I feel thee mine,\n And will not quit my claim\nTill all I have is lost in thine,\n And all renewed I am.\n\nI hold thee with a trembling hand,\n But will not let thee go\nTill steadfastly by faith I stand,\n And all thy goodness know.\n\nWhen shall I see the welcome hour\n That plants my God in me!\nSpirit of health, and life, and power,\n And perfect liberty!\n\nJesu, thine all-victorious love\n Shed in my heart abroad!\nThen shall my feet no longer rove,\n Rooted and fixed in God.\n\nLove only can the conquest win,\n The strength of sin subdue\n(Mine own unconquerable sin),\n And form my soul anew.\n\nLove can bow down the stubborn neck,\n The stone to flesh convert;\nSoften, and melt, and pierce, and break\n An adamantine heart.\n\nOh, that in me the sacred fire\n Might now begin to glow,\nBurn up the dross of base desire,\n And make the mountains flow!\n\nOh, that it now from heaven might fall,\n And all my sins consume!\nCome, Holy Ghost, for thee I call,\n Spirit of burning, come!\n\nRefining fire, go through my heart,\n Illuminate my soul;\nScatter thy life through every part,\n And sanctify the whole.\n\nSorrow and sin shall then expire,\n While, entered into rest,\nI only live my God t’admire--\n My God forever blest.\n\nNo longer then my heart shall mourn,\n While purified by grace\nI only for his glory burn,\n And always see his face.\n\nMy steadfast soul, from falling free,\n Shall then no longer move;\nBut Christ be all the world to me,\n And all my heart be love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "walt-whitman": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Walt Whitman", - "birth": { - "year": 1819 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 34 - }, - "poems": { - "are-you-the-new-person-drawn-to-me": { - "title": "“Are You the New Person Drawn to Me?”", - "body": "Are you the new person drawn toward me?\nTo begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;\nDo you suppose you will find in me your ideal?\nDo you think it so easy to have me become your lover?\nDo you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?\nDo you think I am trusty and faithful?\nDo you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?\nDo you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?\nHave you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "as-i-ebbd-with-the-ocean-of-life": { - "title": "“As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nAs I ebb’d with the ocean of life,\nAs I wended the shores I know,\nAs I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,\nWhere they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,\nWhere the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,\nI musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,\nHeld by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,\nWas seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,\nThe rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe.\n\nFascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows,\nChaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,\nScum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide,\nMiles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me,\nPaumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses,\nThese you presented to me you fish-shaped island,\nAs I wended the shores I know,\nAs I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nAs I wend to the shores I know not,\nAs I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,\nAs I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,\nAs the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,\nI too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,\nA few sands and dead leaves to gather,\nGather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.\n\nO baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,\nOppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,\nAware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,\nBut that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,\nWithdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,\nWith peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,\nPointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.\n\nI perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can,\nNature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me,\nBecause I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nYou oceans both, I close with you,\nWe murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why,\nThese little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all.\n\nYou friable shore with trails of debris,\nYou fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,\nWhat is yours is mine my father.\n\nI too Paumanok,\nI too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores,\nI too am but a trail of drift and debris,\nI too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island.\n\nI throw myself upon your breast my father,\nI cling to you so that you cannot unloose me,\nI hold you so firm till you answer me something.\n\nKiss me my father,\nTouch me with your lips as I touch those I love,\nBreathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nEbb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,)\nCease not your moaning you fierce old mother,\nEndlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,\nRustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you.\n\nI mean tenderly by you and all,\nI gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine.\n\nMe and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,\nFroth, snowy white, and bubbles,\n(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,\nSee, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)\nTufts of straw, sands, fragments,\nBuoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,\nFrom the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,\nMusing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,\nUp just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,\nA limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,\nJust as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,\nJust as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,\nWe, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,\nYou up there walking or sitting,\nWhoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "as-i-lay-with-my-head-in-your-lap-camerado": { - "title": "“As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado”", - "body": "As I lay with my head in your lap camerado\nThe confession I made I resume what I said to you and the open air I resume\nI know I am restless and make others so\nI know my words are weapons full of danger full of death\nFor I confront peace security and all the settled laws to unsettle them\nI am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have been had all accepted me\nI heed not and have never heeded either experience cautions majorities nor ridicule\nAnd the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me\nAnd the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;\nDear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me and still urge you without the least idea what is our destination\nOr whether we shall be victorious or utterly quell’d and defeated.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "beat-beat-drums": { - "title": "“Beat! Beat! Drums!”", - "body": "Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!\nThrough the windows--through doors--burst like a ruthless force,\nInto the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,\nInto the school where the scholar is studying,\nLeave not the bridegroom quiet--no happiness must he have now with his bride,\nNor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,\nSo fierce you whirr and pound you drums--so shrill you bugles blow.\n\nBeat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!\nOver the traffic of cities--over the rumble of wheels in the streets;\nAre beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,\nNo bargainers’ bargains by day--no brokers or speculators--would they continue?\nWould the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?\nWould the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?\nThen rattle quicker, heavier drums--you bugles wilder blow.\n\nBeat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!\nMake no parley--stop for no expostulation,\nMind not the timid--mind not the weeper or prayer,\nMind not the old man beseeching the young man,\nLet not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,\nMake even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,\nSo strong you thump O terrible drums--so loud you bugles blow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "come-up-from-the-fields-father": { - "title": "“Come up from the Fields Father”", - "body": "Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,\nAnd come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.\n\nLo, ’tis autumn,\nLo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,\nCool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,\nWhere apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,\n(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?\nSmell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)\n\nAbove all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,\nBelow too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.\n\nDown in the fields all prospers well,\nBut now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,\nAnd come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.\n\nFast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,\nShe does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.\n\nOpen the envelope quickly,\nO this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,\nO a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!\nAll swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,\nSentences broken, _gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,\nAt present low, but will soon be better._\n\nAh now the single figure to me,\nAmid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,\nSickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,\nBy the jamb of a door leans.\n\n_Grieve not so, dear mother,_ (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,\nThe little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)\n_See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better._\nAlas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)\nWhile they stand at home at the door he is dead already,\nThe only son is dead.\n\nBut the mother needs to be better,\nShe with thin form presently drest in black,\nBy day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,\nIn the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,\nO that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,\nTo follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "crossing-brooklyn-ferry": { - "title": "“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face!\nClouds of the west--sun there half an hour high--I see you also face to face.\n\nCrowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!\nOn the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,\nAnd you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,\nThe simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,\nThe similitudes of the past and those of the future,\nThe glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,\nThe current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,\nThe others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,\nThe certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.\n\nOthers will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,\nOthers will watch the run of the flood-tide,\nOthers will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,\nOthers will see the islands large and small;\nFifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,\nA hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,\nWill enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nIt avails not, time nor place--distance avails not,\nI am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,\nJust as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,\nJust as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,\nJust as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,\nJust as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,\nJust as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.\n\nI too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,\nWatched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,\nSaw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,\nSaw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,\nSaw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,\nHad my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,\nLook’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,\nLook’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,\nLook’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,\nLook’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,\nSaw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,\nSaw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,\nThe sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,\nThe round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,\nThe large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,\nThe white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,\nThe flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,\nThe scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,\nThe stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,\nOn the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-boat, the belated lighter,\nOn the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,\nCasting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThese and all else were to me the same as they are to you,\nI loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,\nThe men and women I saw were all near to me,\nOthers the same--others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,\n(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)\n\n\n# 5.\n\nWhat is it then between us?\nWhat is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?\n\nWhatever it is, it avails not--distance avails not, and place avails not,\nI too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,\nI too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,\nI too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,\nIn the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,\nIn my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,\nI too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,\nI too had receiv’d identity by my body,\nThat I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nIt is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,\nThe dark threw its patches down upon me also,\nThe best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,\nMy great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?\nNor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,\nI am he who knew what it was to be evil,\nI too knitted the old knot of contrariety,\nBlabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,\nHad guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,\nWas wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,\nThe wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,\nThe cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,\nRefusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,\nWas one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,\nWas call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,\nFelt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,\nSaw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,\nLived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,\n\nPlay’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,\nThe same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,\nOr as small as we like, or both great and small.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nCloser yet I approach you,\nWhat thought you have of me now, I had as much of you--I laid in my stores in advance,\nI consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.\n\nWho was to know what should come home to me?\nWho knows but I am enjoying this?\nWho knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?\n\n\n# 8.\n\nAh, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?\nRiver and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?\nThe sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?\n\nWhat gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?\nWhat is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?\nWhich fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?\n\nWe understand then do we not?\nWhat I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?\nWhat the study could not teach--what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?\n\n\n# 9.\n\nFlow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!\nFrolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!\nGorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!\nCross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!\nStand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!\nThrob, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!\nSuspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!\nGaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!\n\nSound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!\nLive, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!\nPlay the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!\nConsider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;\nBe firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;\nFly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;\nReceive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you!\nDiverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!\nCome on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!\nFlaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!\nBurn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses!\n\nAppearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,\nYou necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,\nAbout my body for me, and your body for you, be hung out divinest aromas,\nThrive, cities--bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,\nExpand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,\nKeep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.\n\nYou have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,\nWe receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,\nNot you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,\nWe use you, and do not cast you aside--we plant you permanently within us,\nWe fathom you not--we love you--there is perfection in you also,\nYou furnish your parts toward eternity,\nGreat or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dirge-for-two-veterans": { - "title": "“Dirge for Two Veterans”", - "body": "The last sunbeam\nLightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,\nOn the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,\nDown a new-made double grave.\n\nLo, the moon ascending,\nUp from the east the silvery round moon,\nBeautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,\nImmense and silent moon.\n\nI see a sad procession,\nAnd I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,\nAll the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,\nAs with voices and with tears.\n\nI hear the great drums pounding,\nAnd the small drums steady whirring,\nAnd every blow of the great convulsive drums,\nStrikes me through and through.\n\nFor the son is brought with the father,\n(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,\nTwo veterans son and father dropt together,\nAnd the double grave awaits them.)\n\nNow nearer blow the bugles,\nAnd the drums strike more convulsive,\nAnd the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,\nAnd the strong dead-march enwraps me.\n\nIn the eastern sky up-buoying,\nThe sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,\n(’Tis some mother’s large transparent face,\nIn heaven brighter growing.)\n\nO strong dead--march you please me!\nO moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!\nO my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!\nWhat I have I also give you.\n\nThe moon gives you light,\nAnd the bugles and the drums give you music,\nAnd my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,\nMy heart gives you love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "for-you-o-democracy": { - "title": "“For You O Democracy”", - "body": "Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,\nI will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,\nI will make divine magnetic lands,\n With the love of comrades,\n With the life-long love of comrades.\n\nI will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,\nI will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,\n By the love of comrades,\n By the manly love of comrades.\n\nFor you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!\nFor you, for you I am trilling these songs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "gliding-oer-all-through-all": { - "title": "“Gliding o’er all, through all …”", - "body": "Gliding o’er all, through all,\nThrough Nature, Time, and Space,\nAs a ship on the waters advancing,\nThe voyage of the soul--not life alone,\nDeath, many deaths I’ll sing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-glimpse": { - "title": "“A Glimpse”", - "body": "A glimpse through an interstice caught,\nOf a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,\nOf a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,\nA long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,\nThere we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-hear-america-singing": { - "title": "“I Hear America Singing”", - "body": "I hear America singing the varied carols I hear\nThose of mechanics each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong\nThe carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam\nThe mason singing his as he makes ready for work or leaves off work\nThe boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck\nThe shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench the hatter singing as he stands\nThe wood-cutter’s song the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning or at noon intermission or at sundown\nThe delicious singing of the mother or of the young wife at work or of the girl sewing or washing\nEach singing what belongs to him or her and to none else\nThe day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows robust friendly\nSinging with open mouths their strong melodious songs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "i-saw-in-louisiana-a-live-oak-growing": { - "title": "“I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing”", - "body": "I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,\nAll alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,\nWithout any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,\nAnd its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,\nBut I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,\nAnd I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,\nAnd brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,\nIt is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,\n(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)\nYet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;\nFor all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space,\nUttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,\nI know very well I could not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-sing-the-body-electric": { - "title": "“I Sing the Body Electric”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nI sing the body electric,\nThe armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,\nThey will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,\nAnd discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.\n\nWas it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?\nAnd if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?\nAnd if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?\nAnd if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,\nThat of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.\n\nThe expression of the face balks account,\nBut the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,\nIt is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,\nIt is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,\nThe strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,\nTo see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,\nYou linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.\n\nThe sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards,\nThe swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water,\nThe bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle,\nGirls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,\nThe group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting,\nThe female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,\nThe young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd,\nThe wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work,\nThe coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance,\nThe upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;\nThe march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps,\nThe slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,\nThe natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting;\nSuch-like I love--I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child,\nSwim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nI knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,\nAnd in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.\n\nThis man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,\nThe shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners,\nThese I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,\nHe was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,\nThey and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,\nThey did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love,\nHe drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face,\nHe was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,\nWhen he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang,\nYou would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nI have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,\nTo stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,\nTo be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,\nTo pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?\nI do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.\n\nThere is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,\nAll things please the soul, but these please the soul well.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThis is the female form,\nA divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,\nIt attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,\nI am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,\nBooks, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed,\nMad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,\nHair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,\nEbb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,\nLimitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,\nBridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,\nUndulating into the willing and yielding day,\nLost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.\n\nThis the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,\nThis the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.\n\nBe not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,\nYou are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.\n\nThe female contains all qualities and tempers them,\nShe is in her place and moves with perfect balance,\nShe is all things duly veil’d, she is both passive and active,\nShe is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.\n\nAs I see my soul reflected in Nature,\nAs I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,\nSee the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nThe male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,\nHe too is all qualities, he is action and power,\nThe flush of the known universe is in him,\nScorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,\nThe wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him,\nThe full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,\nKnowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test of himself,\nWhatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here,\n(Where else does he strike soundings except here?)\n\nThe man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,\nNo matter who it is, it is sacred--is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang?\nIs it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?\nEach belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,\nEach has his or her place in the procession.\n\n(All is a procession,\nThe universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)\n\nDo you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?\nDo you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?\nDo you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,\nFor you only, and not for him and her?\n\n\n# 7.\n\nA man’s body at auction,\n(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)\nI help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.\n\nGentlemen look on this wonder,\nWhatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,\nFor it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,\nFor it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.\n\nIn this head the all-baffling brain,\nIn it and below it the makings of heroes.\n\nExamine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,\nThey shall be stript that you may see them.\n\nExquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,\nFlakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs,\nAnd wonders within there yet.\n\nWithin there runs blood,\nThe same old blood! the same red-running blood!\nThere swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,\n(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)\n\nThis is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,\nIn him the start of populous states and rich republics,\nOf him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.\n\nHow do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?\n(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?)\n\n\n# 8.\n\nA woman’s body at auction,\nShe too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,\nShe is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.\n\nHave you ever loved the body of a woman?\nHave you ever loved the body of a man?\nDo you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?\n\nIf any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,\nAnd the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,\nAnd in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.\n\nHave you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?\nFor they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nO my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,\nI believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)\nI believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,\nMan’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,\nHead, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,\nEyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,\nMouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,\nNose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,\nCheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,\nStrong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,\nUpper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,\nWrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,\nBroad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,\nRibs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,\nHips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,\nStrong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,\nLeg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,\nAnkles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;\nAll attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,\nThe lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,\nThe brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,\nSympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,\nWomanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,\nThe womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,\nThe voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,\nFood, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,\nPoise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,\nThe continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,\nThe skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,\nThe curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,\nThe circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,\nThe beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,\nThe thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,\nThe exquisite realization of health;\nO I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,\nO I say now these are the soul!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "long-too-long-america": { - "title": "“Long, too Long America”", - "body": "Long, too long America,\nTraveling roads all even and peaceful you learn’d from joys and prosperity only,\nBut now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,\nAnd now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,\n(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-march-in-the-ranks-hard-prest": { - "title": "“A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest”", - "body": "A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,\nA route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,\nOur army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,\nTill after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,\nWe come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,\n’Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital\nEntering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,\nShadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,\nAnd by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and clouds of smoke,\nBy these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some in the pews laid down,\nAt my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)\nI stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white as a lily,)\nThen before I depart I sweep my eyes o’er the scene fain to absorb it all,\nFaces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,\nSurgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood,\nThe crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill’d,\nSome on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the death-spasm sweating,\nAn occasional scream or cry, the doctor’s shouted orders or calls,\nThe glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of the torches,\nThese I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,\nThen hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;\nBut first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,\nThen the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,\nResuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,\nThe unknown road still marching.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-captain-my-captain": { - "title": "“O Captain! My Captain!”", - "body": "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,\nThe ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,\nThe port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,\nWhile follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;\nBut O heart! heart! heart!\nO the bleeding drops of red,\nWhere on the deck my Captain lies,\nFallen cold and dead.\n\nO Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;\nRise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,\nFor you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,\nFor you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;\nHere Captain! dear father!\nThis arm beneath your head!\nIt is some dream that on the deck,\nYou’ve fallen cold and dead.\n\nMy Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,\nMy father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,\nThe ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,\nFrom fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;\nExult O shores, and ring O bells!\nBut I with mournful tread,\nWalk the deck my Captain lies,\nFallen cold and dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "oh-me-oh-life": { - "title": "“Oh Me! Oh Life!”", - "body": "Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,\nOf the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,\nOf myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)\nOf eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,\nOf the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,\nOf the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,\nThe question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?\n\nAnswer.\nThat you are here--that life exists and identity,\nThat the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-beach-at-night-alone": { - "title": "“On the Beach at Night Alone”", - "body": "On the beach at night alone,\nAs the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,\nAs I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.\n\nA vast similitude interlocks all,\nAll spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,\nAll distances of place however wide,\nAll distances of time, all inanimate forms,\nAll souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,\nAll gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,\nAll nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,\nAll identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,\nAll lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,\nThis vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,\nAnd shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-beach-at-night": { - "title": "“On the Beach at Night”", - "body": "On the beach at night,\nStands a child with her father,\nWatching the east, the autumn sky.\n\nUp through the darkness,\nWhile ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,\nLower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,\nAmid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,\nAscends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,\nAnd nigh at hand, only a very little above,\nSwim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.\n\nFrom the beach the child holding the hand of her father,\nThose burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,\nWatching, silently weeps.\n\nWeep not, child,\nWeep not, my darling,\nWith these kisses let me remove your tears,\nThe ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,\nThey shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,\nJupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,\nThey are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,\nThe great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,\nThe vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.\n\nThen dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?\nConsiderest thou alone the burial of the stars?\n\nSomething there is,\n(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,\nI give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)\nSomething there is more immortal even than the stars,\n(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)\nSomething that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter\nLonger than sun or any revolving satellite,\nOr the radiant sisters the Pleiades.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "out-of-the-cradle-endlessly-rocking": { - "title": "“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”", - "body": "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,\nOut of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,\nOut of the Ninth-month midnight,\nOver the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,\nDown from the shower’d halo,\nUp from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,\nOut from the patches of briers and blackberries,\nFrom the memories of the bird that chanted to me,\nFrom your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,\nFrom under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,\nFrom those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,\nFrom the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,\nFrom the myriad thence-arous’d words,\nFrom the word stronger and more delicious than any,\nFrom such as now they start the scene revisiting,\nAs a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,\nBorne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,\nA man, yet by these tears a little boy again,\nThrowing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,\nI, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,\nTaking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,\nA reminiscence sing.\n\nOnce Paumanok,\nWhen the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass was growing,\nUp this seashore in some briers,\nTwo feather’d guests from Alabama, two together,\nAnd their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,\nAnd every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,\nAnd every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes,\nAnd every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,\nCautiously peering, absorbing, translating.\n\n_Shine! shine! shine!\nPour down your warmth, great sun!\nWhile we bask, we two together._\n\n_Two together!\nWinds blow south, or winds blow north,\nDay come white, or night come black,\nHome, or rivers and mountains from home,\nSinging all time, minding no time,\nWhile we two keep together._\n\nTill of a sudden,\nMay-be kill’d, unknown to her mate,\nOne forenoon the she-bird crouch’d not on the nest,\nNor return’d that afternoon, nor the next,\nNor ever appear’d again.\n\nAnd thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,\nAnd at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,\nOver the hoarse surging of the sea,\nOr flitting from brier to brier by day,\nI saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,\nThe solitary guest from Alabama.\n\n_Blow! blow! blow!\nBlow up sea-winds along Paumanok’s shore;\nI wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me._\n\nYes, when the stars glisten’d,\nAll night long on the prong of a moss-scallop’d stake,\nDown almost amid the slapping waves,\nSat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.\n\nHe call’d on his mate,\nHe pour’d forth the meanings which I of all men know.\n\nYes my brother I know,\nThe rest might not, but I have treasur’d every note,\nFor more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,\nSilent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows,\nRecalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,\nThe white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,\nI, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,\nListen’d long and long.\n\nListen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,\nFollowing you my brother.\n\n_Soothe! soothe! soothe!\nClose on its wave soothes the wave behind,\nAnd again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,\nBut my love soothes not me, not me._\n\n_Low hangs the moon, it rose late,\nIt is lagging--O I think it is heavy with love, with love._\n\n_O madly the sea pushes upon the land,\nWith love, with love._\n\n_O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?\nWhat is that little black thing I see there in the white?_\n\n_Loud! loud! loud!\nLoud I call to you, my love!_\n\n_High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,\nSurely you must know who is here, is here,\nYou must know who I am, my love._\n\n_Low-hanging moon!\nWhat is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?\nO it is the shape, the shape of my mate!\nO moon do not keep her from me any longer._\n\n_Land! land! O land!\nWhichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would,\nFor I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look._\n\n_O rising stars!\nPerhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you._\n\n_O throat! O trembling throat!\nSound clearer through the atmosphere!\nPierce the woods, the earth,\nSomewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want._\n\n_Shake out carols!\nSolitary here, the night’s carols!\nCarols of lonesome love! death’s carols!\nCarols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!\nO under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!\nO reckless despairing carols._\n\n_But soft! sink low!\nSoft! let me just murmur,\nAnd do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea,\nFor somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,\nSo faint, I must be still, be still to listen,\nBut not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me._\n\n_Hither my love!\nHere I am! here!\nWith this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you,\nThis gentle call is for you my love, for you._\n\n_Do not be decoy’d elsewhere,\nThat is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,\nThat is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,\nThose are the shadows of leaves._\n\n_O darkness! O in vain!\nO I am very sick and sorrowful._\n\n_O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!\nO troubled reflection in the sea!\nO throat! O throbbing heart!\nAnd I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night._\n\n_O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!\nIn the air, in the woods, over fields,\nLoved! loved! loved! loved! loved!\nBut my mate no more, no more with me!\nWe two together no more._\n\nThe aria sinking,\nAll else continuing, the stars shining,\nThe winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,\nWith angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,\nOn the sands of Paumanok’s shore gray and rustling,\nThe yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,\nThe boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying,\nThe love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting,\nThe aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,\nThe strange tears down the cheeks coursing,\nThe colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,\nThe undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,\nTo the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown’d secret hissing,\nTo the outsetting bard.\n\nDemon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)\nIs it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?\nFor I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,\nNow in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,\nAnd already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,\nA thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.\n\nO you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,\nO solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,\nNever more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,\nNever more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,\nNever again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,\nBy the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,\nThe messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,\nThe unknown want, the destiny of me.\n\nO give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)\nO if I am to have so much, let me have more!\n\nA word then, (for I will conquer it,)\nThe word final, superior to all,\nSubtle, sent up--what is it?--I listen;\nAre you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves?\nIs that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?\n\nWhereto answering, the sea,\nDelaying not, hurrying not,\nWhisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break,\n\nLisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,\nAnd again death, death, death, death,\nHissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart,\nBut edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,\nCreeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,\nDeath, death, death, death, death.\n\nWhich I do not forget,\nBut fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,\nThat he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach,\nWith the thousand responsive songs at random,\nMy own songs awaked from that hour,\nAnd with them the key, the word up from the waves,\nThe word of the sweetest song and all songs,\nThat strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,\n(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,)\nThe sea whisper’d me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "out-of-the-rolling-ocean-the-crowd": { - "title": "“Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd”", - "body": "Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,\nWhispering, _I love you, before long I die,\nI have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,\nFor I could not die till I once look’d on you,\nFor I fear’d I might afterward lose you._\n\nNow we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,\nReturn in peace to the ocean my love,\nI too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,\nBehold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!\nBut as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,\nAs for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;\nBe not impatient--a little space--know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,\nEvery day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-passage-to-india": { - "title": "“A Passage to India”", - "body": "Passage O soul to India!\nEclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables.\n\nNot you alone, proud truths of the world,\nNor you alone, ye facts of modern science,\nBut myths and fables of eld, Asia’s, Africa’s fables,\nThe far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos’d dreams,\nThe deep diving bibles and legends,\nThe daring plots of the poets, the elder religions;\nO you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun!\nO you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven!\nYou lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold!\nTowers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams!\nYou too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest!\nYou too with joy I sing.\n\nPassage to India!\nLo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?\nThe earth to be spann’d, connected by network,\nThe races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,\nThe oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,\nThe lands to be welded together.\n\nA worship new I sing,\nYou captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,\nYou engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,\nYou, not for trade or transportation only,\nBut in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "patroling-barnegat": { - "title": "“Patroling Barnegat”", - "body": "Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running,\nSteady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering,\nShouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing,\nWaves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing,\nOut in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,\nOn beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting,\nWhere through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting,\nThrough cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing,\n(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?)\n\nSlush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,\nSteadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting,\nAlong the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering,\nA group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting,\nThat savage trinity warily watching.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-the-sleepers": { - "title": "From “The Sleepers”", - "body": "I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,\nHis brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,\nI see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,\nI hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks.\n\nWhat are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?\nWill you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime of his middle-age?\n\nSteady and long he struggles,\nHe is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength holds out,\nThe slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away, they roll him, swing him, turn him,\nHis beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is continually bruis’d on rocks,\nSwiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sometimes-with-one-i-love": { - "title": "“Sometimes with One I Love”", - "body": "Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,\nBut now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another\n(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,\nYet out of that I have written these songs).", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-of-the-open-road": { - "title": "“Song of the Open Road”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nAfoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,\nHealthy, free, the world before me,\nThe long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.\n\nHenceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,\nHenceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,\nDone with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,\nStrong and content I travel the open road.\n\nThe earth, that is sufficient,\nI do not want the constellations any nearer,\nI know they are very well where they are,\nI know they suffice for those who belong to them.\n\n(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,\nI carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,\nI swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,\nI am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)\n\n\n# 2.\n\nYou road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,\nI believe that much unseen is also here.\n\nHere the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,\nThe black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied;\nThe birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,\nThe escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,\n\nThe early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,\nThey pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,\nNone but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nYou air that serves me with breath to speak!\nYou objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!\nYou light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!\nYou paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!\nI believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.\n\nYou flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!\nYou ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!\n\nYou rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!\nYou porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!\nYou windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!\nYou doors and ascending steps! you arches!\nYou gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!\nFrom all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,\nFrom the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThe earth expanding right hand and left hand,\nThe picture alive, every part in its best light,\nThe music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,\nThe cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.\n\nO highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?\nDo you say Venture not--if you leave me you are lost?\nDo you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?\n\nO public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,\nYou express me better than I can express myself,\nYou shall be more to me than my poem.\n\nI think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also,\nI think I could stop here myself and do miracles,\nI think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,\nI think whoever I see must be happy.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nFrom this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,\nGoing where I list, my own master total and absolute,\nListening to others, considering well what they say,\nPausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,\nGently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.\nI inhale great draughts of space,\nThe east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.\n\nI am larger, better than I thought,\nI did not know I held so much goodness.\n\nAll seems beautiful to me,\nI can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,\nI will recruit for myself and you as I go,\nI will scatter myself among men and women as I go,\nI will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,\nWhoever denies me it shall not trouble me,\nWhoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nNow if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,\nNow if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not astonish me.\n\nNow I see the secret of the making of the best persons,\nIt is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.\n\nHere a great personal deed has room,\n(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,\nIts effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)\n\nHere is the test of wisdom,\nWisdom is not finally tested in schools,\nWisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,\nWisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,\nApplies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,\nIs the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;\nSomething there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.\n\nNow I re-examine philosophies and religions,\nThey may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.\n\nHere is realization,\nHere is a man tallied--he realizes here what he has in him,\nThe past, the future, majesty, love--if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.\n\nOnly the kernel of every object nourishes;\nWhere is he who tears off the husks for you and me?\nWhere is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?\n\nHere is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos;\nDo you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?\nDo you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?\n\n\n# 7.\n\nHere is the efflux of the soul,\nThe efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions,\nThese yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?\nWhy are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?\nWhy when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?\nWhy are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?\n(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)\nWhat is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?\nWhat with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?\nWhat with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause?\nWhat gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine?\n\n\n# 8.\n\nThe efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,\nI think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,\nNow it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.\n\nHere rises the fluid and attaching character,\nThe fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,\n(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)\n\nToward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,\nFrom it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,\nToward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nAllons! whoever you are come travel with me!\nTraveling with me you find what never tires.\n\nThe earth never tires,\nThe earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,\nBe not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,\nI swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.\n\nAllons! we must not stop here,\nHowever sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,\nHowever shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,\nHowever welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nAllons! the inducements shall be greater,\nWe will sail pathless and wild seas,\nWe will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.\n\nAllons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,\nHealth, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;\nAllons! from all formules!\nFrom your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.\n\nThe stale cadaver blocks up the passage--the burial waits no longer.\n\nAllons! yet take warning!\nHe traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,\nNone may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,\nCome not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,\nOnly those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies,\nNo diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.\n\n(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,\nWe convince by our presence.)\n\n\n# 11.\n\nListen! I will be honest with you,\nI do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,\nThese are the days that must happen to you:\nYou shall not heap up what is call’d riches,\nYou shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,\nYou but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,\nYou shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,\nWhat beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,\nYou shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nAllons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!\nThey too are on the road--they are the swift and majestic men--they are the greatest women,\nEnjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,\nSailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,\nHabituès of many distant countries, habituès of far-distant dwellings,\nTrusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,\nPausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,\nDancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children,\nSoldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins,\nJourneyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which preceded it,\nJourneyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,\nForth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,\nJourneyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,\nJourneyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content,\nJourneyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood,\nOld age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,\nOld age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.\n\n\n# 13.\n\nAllons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,\nTo undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,\nTo merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,\nAgain to merge them in the start of superior journeys,\nTo see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,\nTo conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,\nTo look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however long but it stretches and waits for you,\nTo see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither,\nTo see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it,\nTo take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,\nTo take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,\nTo carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,\nTo gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their hearts,\nTo take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you,\nTo know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.\n\nAll parts away for the progress of souls,\nAll religion, all solid things, arts, governments--all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.\n\nOf the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.\n\nForever alive, forever forward,\nStately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,\nDesperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,\nThey go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go,\nBut I know that they go toward the best--toward something great.\n\nWhoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!\nYou must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.\n\nOut of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!\nIt is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.\n\nBehold through you as bad as the rest,\nThrough the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,\nInside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces,\nBehold a secret silent loathing and despair.\n\nNo husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,\nAnother self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,\nFormless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors,\nIn the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,\nHome to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere,\nSmartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,\nUnder the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,\nKeeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,\nSpeaking of any thing else but never of itself.\n\n\n# 14.\n\nAllons! through struggles and wars!\nThe goal that was named cannot be countermanded.\n\nHave the past struggles succeeded?\nWhat has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?\nNow understand me well--it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.\n\nMy call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,\nHe going with me must go well arm’d,\nHe going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.\n\n\n# 15.\n\nAllons! the road is before us!\nIt is safe--I have tried it--my own feet have tried it well--be not detain’d!\n\nLet the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!\nLet the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!\nLet the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!\nLet the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.\n\nCamerado, I give you my hand!\nI give you my love more precious than money,\nI give you myself before preaching or law;\nWill you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?\nShall we stick by each other as long as we live?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "time-to-come": { - "title": "“Time to Come”", - "body": "O, Death! a black and pierceless pall\nHangs round thee, and the future state;\nNo eye may see, no mind may grasp\nThat mystery of fate.\n\nThis brain, which now alternate throbs\nWith swelling hope and gloomy fear;\nThis heart, with all the changing hues,\nThat mortal passions bear--\n\nThis curious frame of human mould,\nWhere unrequited cravings play,\nThis brain, and heart, and wondrous form\nMust all alike decay.\n\nThe leaping blood will stop its flow;\nThe hoarse death-struggle pass; the cheek\nLay bloomless, and the liquid tongue\nWill then forget to speak.\n\nThe grave will take me; earth will close\nO’er cold dull limbs and ashy face;\nBut where, O, Nature, where shall be\nThe soul’s abiding place?\n\nWill it e’en live? For though its light\nMust shine till from the body torn;\nThen, when the oil of life is spent,\nStill shall the taper burn?\n\nO, powerless is this struggling brain\nTo rend the mighty mystery;\nIn dark, uncertain awe it waits\nThe common doom, to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-states": { - "title": "“To the States”", - "body": "Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?\nWhat deepening twilight--scum floating atop of the waters,\nWho are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?\nWhat a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)\nAre those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?\nThen I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons;\n(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake,\nSouth, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night": { - "title": "“Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”", - "body": "Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;\nWhen you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,\nOne look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,\nOne touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,\nThen onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,\nTill late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,\nFound you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)\nBared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,\nLong there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,\nVigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,\nBut not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,\nThen on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,\nPassing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade--not a tear, not a word,\nVigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,\nAs onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,\nVigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,\nI faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)\nTill at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,\nMy comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,\nFolded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,\nAnd there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,\nEnding my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,\nVigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)\nVigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,\nI rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,\nAnd buried him where he fell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer": { - "title": "“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”", - "body": "When I heard the learn’d astronomer,\nWhen the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,\nWhen I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,\nWhen I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,\nHow soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,\nTill rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,\nIn the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,\nLook’d up in perfect silence at the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-lilacs-last-in-the-dooryard-bloomd": { - "title": "“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nWhen lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,\nAnd the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,\nI mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.\n\nEver-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,\nLilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,\nAnd thought of him I love.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nO powerful western fallen star!\nO shades of night--O moody, tearful night!\nO great star disappear’d--O the black murk that hides the star!\nO cruel hands that hold me powerless--O helpless soul of me!\nO harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nIn the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,\nStands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,\nWith many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,\nWith every leaf a miracle--and from this bush in the dooryard,\nWith delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,\nA sprig with its flower I break.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nIn the swamp in secluded recesses,\nA shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.\n\nSolitary the thrush,\nThe hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,\nSings by himself a song.\n\nSong of the bleeding throat,\nDeath’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,\nIf thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)\n\n\n# 5.\n\nOver the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,\nAmid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,\nAmid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,\nPassing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,\nPassing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,\nCarrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,\nNight and day journeys a coffin.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nCoffin that passes through lanes and streets,\nThrough day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,\nWith the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,\nWith the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,\nWith processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,\nWith the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,\nWith the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,\nWith dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,\nWith all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,\nThe dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs--where amid these you journey,\nWith the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,\nHere, coffin that slowly passes,\nI give you my sprig of lilac.\n\n\n# 7.\n\n(Nor for you, for one alone,\nBlossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,\nFor fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.\n\nAll over bouquets of roses,\nO death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,\nBut mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,\nCopious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,\nWith loaded arms I come, pouring for you,\nFor you and the coffins all of you O death.)\n\n\n# 8.\n\nO western orb sailing the heaven,\nNow I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,\nAs I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,\nAs I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,\nAs you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)\nAs we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)\nAs the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,\nAs I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night,\nAs I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,\nAs my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,\nConcluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.\n\n\n# 9.\n\nSing on there in the swamp,\nO singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call,\nI hear, I come presently, I understand you,\nBut a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me,\nThe star my departing comrade holds and detains me.\n\n\n# 10.\n\nO how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?\nAnd how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?\nAnd what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?\n\nSea-winds blown from east and west,\nBlown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,\nThese and with these and the breath of my chant,\nI’ll perfume the grave of him I love.\n\n\n# 11.\n\nO what shall I hang on the chamber walls?\nAnd what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,\nTo adorn the burial-house of him I love?\n\nPictures of growing spring and farms and homes,\nWith the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,\nWith floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,\nWith the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,\nIn the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,\nWith ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows,\nAnd the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,\nAnd all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.\n\n\n# 12.\n\nLo, body and soul--this land,\nMy own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,\nThe varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,\nAnd ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.\n\nLo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,\nThe violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,\nThe gentle soft-born measureless light,\nThe miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,\nThe coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,\nOver my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.\n\n\n# 13.\n\nSing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,\nSing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,\nLimitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.\n\nSing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,\nLoud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.\n\nO liquid and free and tender!\nO wild and loose to my soul--O wondrous singer!\nYou only I hear--yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)\nYet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.\n\n\n# 14.\n\nNow while I sat in the day and look’d forth,\nIn the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,\nIn the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests,\nIn the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the storms,)\nUnder the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,\nThe many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,\nAnd the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,\nAnd the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,\nAnd the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent--lo, then and there,\nFalling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,\nAppear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,\nAnd I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.\n\nThen with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,\nAnd the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,\nAnd I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,\nI fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,\nDown to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,\nTo the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.\n\nAnd the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,\nThe gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,\nAnd he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.\n\nFrom deep secluded recesses,\nFrom the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,\nCame the carol of the bird.\n\nAnd the charm of the carol rapt me,\nAs I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,\nAnd the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.\n\n_Come lovely and soothing death,\nUndulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,\nIn the day, in the night, to all, to each,\nSooner or later delicate death._\n\n_Prais’d be the fathomless universe,\nFor life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,\nAnd for love, sweet love--but praise! praise! praise!\nFor the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death._\n\n_Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,\nHave none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?\nThen I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,\nI bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly._\n\n_Approach strong deliveress,\nWhen it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,\nLost in the loving floating ocean of thee,\nLaved in the flood of thy bliss O death._\n\n_From me to thee glad serenades,\nDances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,\nAnd the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,\nAnd life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night._\n\n_The night in silence under many a star,\nThe ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,\nAnd the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,\nAnd the body gratefully nestling close to thee._\n\n_Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,\nOver the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,\nOver the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,\nI float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death._\n\n\n# 15.\n\nTo the tally of my soul,\nLoud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,\nWith pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.\n\nLoud in the pines and cedars dim,\nClear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,\nAnd I with my comrades there in the night.\n\nWhile my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,\nAs to long panoramas of visions.\n\nAnd I saw askant the armies,\nI saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,\nBorne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,\nAnd carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,\nAnd at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)\nAnd the staffs all splinter’d and broken.\n\nI saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,\nAnd the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,\nI saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,\nBut I saw they were not as was thought,\nThey themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,\nThe living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,\nAnd the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,\nAnd the armies that remain’d suffer’d.\n\n\n# 16.\n\nPassing the visions, passing the night,\nPassing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,\nPassing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,\nVictorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,\nAs low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,\nSadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,\nCovering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,\nAs that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,\nPassing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,\nI leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.\n\nI cease from my song for thee,\nFrom my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,\nO comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.\n\nYet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,\nThe song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,\nAnd the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,\nWith the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,\nWith the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,\nComrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,\nFor the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands--and this for his dear sake,\nLilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,\nThere in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "whoever-you-are-holding-me-now-in-hand": { - "title": "“Whoever You Are Holding Me now in Hand”", - "body": "Whoever you are holding me now in hand,\nWithout one thing all will be useless,\nI give you fair warning before you attempt me further,\nI am not what you supposed, but far different.\n\nWho is he that would become my follower?\nWho would sign himself a candidate for my affections?\n\nThe way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,\nYou would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,\nYour novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,\nThe whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d,\nTherefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,\nPut me down and depart on your way.\n\nOr else by stealth in some wood for trial,\nOr back of a rock in the open air,\n(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,\nAnd in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)\nBut just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,\nOr possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,\nHere to put your lips upon mine I permit you,\nWith the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,\nFor I am the new husband and I am the comrade.\n\nOr if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,\nWhere I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,\nCarry me when you go forth over land or sea;\nFor thus merely touching you is enough, is best,\nAnd thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.\n\nBut these leaves conning you con at peril,\nFor these leaves and me you will not understand,\nThey will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you,\nEven while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!\nAlready you see I have escaped from you.\n\nFor it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,\nNor is it by reading it you will acquire it,\nNor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,\nNor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,\nNor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,\nFor all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;\nTherefore release me and depart on your way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-world-below-the-brine": { - "title": "“The World below the Brine”", - "body": "The world below the brine,\nForests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,\nSea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,\nDifferent colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,\nDumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,\nSluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,\nThe sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,\nThe leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,\nPassions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,\nThe change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,\nThe change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wound-dresser": { - "title": "“The Wound-Dresser”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nAn old man bending I come among new faces,\nYears looking backward resuming in answer to children,\nCome tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me,\n(Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,\nBut soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,\nTo sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)\nYears hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,\nOf unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)\nNow be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth,\nOf those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?\nWhat stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,\nOf hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?\n\n\n# 2.\n\nO maidens and young men I love and that love me,\nWhat you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls,\nSoldier alert I arrive after a long march cover’d with sweat and dust,\nIn the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the rush of successful charge,\nEnter the captur’d works--yet lo, like a swift running river they fade,\nPass and are gone they fade--I dwell not on soldiers’ perils or soldiers’ joys,\n(Both I remember well--many of the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)\n\nBut in silence, in dreams’ projections,\nWhile the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,\nSo soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,\nWith hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,\nWhoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)\n\nBearing the bandages, water and sponge,\nStraight and swift to my wounded I go,\nWhere they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,\nWhere their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,\nOr to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,\nTo the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,\nTo each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,\nAn attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,\nSoon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.\n\nI onward go, I stop,\nWith hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,\nI am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,\nOne turns to me his appealing eyes--poor boy! I never knew you,\nYet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nOn, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)\nThe crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)\nThe neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,\nHard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard,\n(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!\nIn mercy come quickly.)\n\nFrom the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,\nI undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,\nBack on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head,\nHis eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,\nAnd has not yet look’d on it.\n\nI dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,\nBut a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,\nAnd the yellow-blue countenance see.\n\nI dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,\nCleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,\nWhile the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.\n\nI am faithful, I do not give out,\nThe fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,\nThese and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)\n\n\n# 4.\n\nThus in silence in dreams’ projections,\nReturning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,\nThe hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,\nI sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,\nSome suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,\n(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,\nMany a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "reed-whittemore": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Reed Whittemore", - "birth": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2012 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Whittemore", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 19 - }, - "poems": { - "an-american-takes-a-walk": { - "title": "“An American Takes a Walk”", - "body": "In the middle of this life’s journey\nHe came, like Dante, on a wood\nThe notes said stood for error\nBut in his case stood for good,\nWhere his art and prowess left him\nAnd let him become a child\nTo whom the wild seemed milder\nThan his old neighborhood.\n\nHad he, with those abandoned\nSons of fatal decrees,\nThen been found by a shepherd\nAnd bred up to shepherdese,\nOr retrieved, like Dante, by Virgil\nAnd led through circles and seas\nTo some brighter country beyond\nHis annotated trees,\n\nHe could not have been more cared for.\nNature was awfully kind.\nHell in that motherly habit\nPut hell quite out of mind.\n\nHow in that Arden could human\nFrailty be but glossed?\nHow in that Eden could Adam\nReally be lost?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-teacher": { - "title": "“Another Teacher”", - "body": "He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them\nWhat was important and vital and by God if\nThey thought they’d never have use for it he was\nSorry as hell for them, that’s all, with their genteel\nMercantile Main Street Babbitt\nBourgeois-barbaric faces, they were beyond\nSaving, clearly, quite out of reach, and so he\nG-rrr\nGot up every morning and g-rrr ate his breakfast\nAnd g-rrr lumbered off to his eight o’clock\nGladly to teach.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "big-brother": { - "title": "“Big Brother”", - "body": "I spent last night with my Big (Board) (American) Brother\nand all his Perception Managers\nas they told me (right on the tube) what I should eat\nbuy drink wear and invest in\n\ntoward the end of the evening they noticed that I was unconscious\nand took this to mean that the lobes of my infantile brain\nwere grieving for lack of sufficient data on all the amazing\nbreakthroughs in life and tummy remedies\nimproving each human human at each waking moment\n\nso then they\nfixed up my lobes until my perceptions grew glum and started\nto bug me\nat which time I woke and smiled to them saying dear Sirs\nI wish you to know Sirs that when Sirs you sit Sirs and smile Sirs\nand say Sirs NOTHING AT ALL it is then that my lobes Sirs\nadvise me that all my major organic systems Sirs\n(by which to be brief I mean Sirs my lymphatic system\nmy circulatory system\nmy respiratory system\nmy digestive system\nand my reproductive system)\nlove you as all such small-brother systems (Sirs) SHOULD\n\nand yet Sirs\nI wish you also to know at this time Sirs that when Sirs\nyou talk to me from the depths of your own noisy lobes Sirs\nand keep telling me telling me telling me that which you tell me\nit is THEN Sirs that something unbrotherly sweeps through my systems\nwith the muggy messy manic moronic consequence\nthat I itch and twitch and cannot seem to stop twitching\nSirs\nbut must sweat shudder and come to DESPISE Sirs\nYOU Sirs\nat at that time I yearn yearn and even yearn MORE Sirs\nfor you to SHUT\nUP\nok?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-destruction-of-washington": { - "title": "“The Destruction of Washington”", - "body": "When Washington has been destroyed,\nAnd the pollutants have been silting up for an age,\nThen the old town will attract the world’s Schliemanns.\nWhat, they will say, a dig! as they uncover\nThe L’Enfant plan in the saxifrage.\n\nSo many plaques, so many figures in marble\nWith large shoulders and lawman lips\nWill have to be pieced together and moved to the new\nSmithsonian\nThat the mere logistics will delight vips.\n\nFor how can one pass by a muchness? There will be fund drives\nWith uplifting glosses,\nTeams of researchers will mass with massive machinery\nAt the Rayburn ruin\nTo outscoop Athens and Knossos.\n\nDusty Scholars will stumble in, looking nearsightedly\nAt gray facades\nOf pillar and portal,\nAnd at curious acres of asphalt,\nFor clues to the mystery of that culture’s gods.\n\nMoney of course they will miss,\nSince money is spoke not at all on the plaques there,\nNor will they shovel up evidence\nThat the occupants of the chambers and cloakrooms\nWere strangers in town, protecting their deities elsewhere,\n\nBut sanctums they surely will guess at,\nWhere the real and true pieties were once expressed.\nIf the Greeks had their Elusinians,\nSurely this tribe on the Potomac had mysteries too?\n--Having to do, perhaps, with the “Wild West”?\n\nLike most of us sitting here now beside the Potomac,\nThey will find the Potomac primitives hard to assess.\nOh, may their ignorance be, than ours,\nAt least less!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-english-teacher": { - "title": "“An English Teacher”", - "body": "After a summer of beaches Mr. Meeching,\nDressed as always in flannel and bristling tweed,\nApplied his tanned physique again to teaching\nShelley and Meeching and how to (romantically) bleed.\n\nStanding before his first class with the erotic\nAir of the Cape still curling his hair,\nHe thought of the sand and the breakers, and of an exotic\nQuohaug chowder with camembert.\n\nAbstracted, class roll in hand, he let his gaze wander\nLazily out over thirty-three heads to a dim\nWindow where trees became masts and grass water\nAnd lobsters crawled on the steps of the briny gym.\n\nSadly recalled to the roll, the text and the faces,\nHe saw stretched before him a continent of drab\nAnd merely poetic commonplaces\nWith nary a long-necked clam or soft-shelled crab.\n\nPoor Meeching.\nWould he ever again get through to the ocean side?\nHe doubted it,\nHaving no thoughts to comfort his soul in his dark night of teaching\nExcept that lucky old Shelley (by drowning) died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "gods-acres": { - "title": "“God’s Acres”", - "body": "He who can tell a grosbeak from a grackle,\nRed oak from maple, marigold from heather\nMay get on. But will that other,\nInward drawn,\nWho never on his T-shirt smugly\nSewed at camp a badge or feather\nFor mastery of wood or shore or meadow?\n\nNot likely.\n\nHis is not a placid, plotted\nNature trail of brae and coot,\nDingle, willet, plash and pintail,\nBotany and fruit,\n\nBut thorns, thorns, thorns his flesh to scratch\nAs he slogs nameless in his briar patch", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ladders": { - "title": "“Ladders”", - "body": "_“He flew up the ladder, tapped at the shutter …”_\n --Stendhal, _The Red and the Black_\n\nI am frightened by ladders, Freud, by ladders,\nLadders that rock and shudder and sink in the ground.\nAs I rise to dangerous roofs and windows and branches,\nMy soul, Freud, my soul sinks in the ground.\n\nWhat does this tell of my love, Freud, my love?\nIs every swaying balcony or boudoir\nOut of reach of my love because of my nerve’s\nFaltering, Freud, after three rungs, Freud, or four?\n\nHelp me, Freud, oh help me master the gap\nBetween the ground and all such high and precarious places.\nHold the ladder firm, and when I fly up,\nTell me, Freud, of successful similar cases.\n\nWithout you, Freud, my love will tumble, and then\nNever, Freud, will I fly up ladders again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-palms": { - "title": "“The Palms”", - "body": "The de luxe tourist resort auto court\nOf the senses\nHas deck chairs and bright umbrellas, and over these\nPalms, always palms preside. But not from the palms\nThemselves, or their fruit,\nBut their silhouettes and rustlings proceeds the dazzle\nThat blinds and deceives,\nAs a shell at a child’s ear strums forth the sea,\nAs a spangled bauble burbles of old bazaars,\nAnd as sirens sweet in the storm-torn straits--but enough!\n--Oh, essence of palm,\nIf all those bearded explorers with frozen fingers\nHad planted a tropic grove in polar snows,\nWhat poet would not have been warmed, and what motel\nWould not have been aired and graced with vast verandahs\nWhere sunstruck nations\nGathered unto your fronds, while hired beauties\nSquirmed to and fro in bikinis, and herons and pelicans\nLanguidly glided over the arctic sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-primitives": { - "title": "“The Primitives”", - "body": "To visit the vision in broken\nEnglish of peoples who live on corn,\nNuts and a broad-leaved prairie grass\nIn houses of brick and mud with their beasts of burden and children\nIs to be, as always, tricked.\nThere are no primitive peoples.\n\nWhen the guide to the old part of town\nPoints to the son of the son\nOf the father of fathers, Jarvis\n(Discoverer of the wheel),\nHe has no choice but to choose as always, always\nA native of Springfield.\n\nNone of the gnarled old crones\nIn flaxen bags in Gaza\nBut has danced the jellyroll blues\nIn Springfield.\n\nNone of the brittle bones\nIn the catacombs\nBut are my cousin Jonathan\nOf Springfield.\n\nThere are no primitive peoples. All old crockery\nStems from the common culture where converge,\nAt Springfield,\nThe Nile, The Tigris and The Ganges.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "psalm": { - "title": "“Psalm”", - "body": "The Lord feeds some of His prisoners better than others.\nIt could be said of Him that He is not a just god but an indifferent god.\nThat He is not to be trusted to reward the righteous and punish the unscrupulous.\nThat He maketh the poor poorer but is otherwise undependable.\n\nIt could be said of Him that it is His school of the germane that produced the\nCongressional Record.\nThat it is His vision of justice that gave us cost accounting.\n\nIt could be said of Him that thought we walk with Him all the days of our lives we\nwill never fathom Him\nBecause He is empty.\n\nThese are dark images of our Lord\nThat make it seem needful for us to pray not unto Him\nBut ourselves.\nBut when we do that we find that indeed we are truly lost\nAnd we rush back into the safer fold, impressed by His care for us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-siege": { - "title": "“The Siege”", - "body": "We raise our own, our king’s, our Khufu’s walls\nAnd hide behind with yams against our yielding\nBecause we have been paid or whipped to build\nAgainst unbuilding.\n\nBut no old colonial pillbox with its beams\nFitted and spiked to rib\nMany a cluster of lungs and hearts from cold;\nNo buttressed granite keep, or church, or shed\nPillared against the slug, or mouse, or mold;\nNot even the snuggest web\nWoven of words and prayers for iron tomes\nWill serve to hold off Ugly, The Plugger, the dread\nBorer in the bastions of our ruin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-storing-of-the-soul": { - "title": "“The Storing of the Soul”", - "body": "The American soul has been stored under the stairs\nIn a box with the mittens and scarves\nFor the longest time. We couldn’t think where we had put it.\nWe looked in the attic and cellar, and in the garage,\nAnd then found it at last, as I say, under the stairs.\n\nWhy would anyone store a poor spiritual soul there,\nWe wondered.\nIt was ever so slightly creased and decreased bit it was\nPerfectly safe, we were sure.\nWe put it back in the box there.\n\nI have been checking it Fridays, just to make sure\nIt isn’t departing,\nAnd see no change in it at all, except in its color,\nWhich is less.\nOf its continuing immortality I have made sure\n\nBy adding more mothballs.\nBut do you think that there is a chance that we will have need of it?\nI ask because if we will I think I should air it.\nA soul is not at its best when it is\nHeavy with mothballs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-tale-of-a-poem-and-a-squash": { - "title": "“A Tale of a Poem and a Squash”", - "body": "Let me take this acorn squash, grown in my garden,\nAnd place beside it a poem grown in a hothouse.\nYou will note the difference at once; the former is jolly\nAnd fat, self-contained, the latter anaemic,\nColorless, tasteless, the clearest evidence\nThat a poem does not make a squash. But now take the squash,\nAnd shoving its roundness into a lyric book,\nLook!\nHow those covers squinch, being quashed, to elucidate\nSomething or other\n\nwhere was I?\n\nOf late\nI have been reading too much on this subject.\nArt is not life, I am told, and thus in my garden\n(Which as a matter of fact has no squashes,\nJust toads), I fund myself gathering\nWool mostly, a few old tomatoes of rhymes,\nAnd a mythical rosebud or two in the hope that these items\nWill store well against winter, my chosen season,\nWhen nothing from nature is blooming except my\nDog, a few plants on a windowsill, and of course people,\nMost of whom,\nLike myself,\nAre not of the soil, the good earth, and in winter look\nMore like a poem than a--\n\nbut, as I say,\nThis subject unnerves me.\nWhere,\nWhere does one go--into war? poverty?--\nTo keep those squashes and poems from preening and posing\nFor any nitwitted author who has mouths\nTo feed and a ballpoint pen\nAnd some paper\nAnd thinks that if he could settle, once and for all,\nLife and art, art and life, and how they are\nKnit, he (that nit)\nCould stake himself some sort of claim on our cultural garden,\nAnd be forever in squ …\n\nbut, as I say,\nI have been thinking of going away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "thinking-of-tents": { - "title": "“Thinking of Tents”", - "body": "I am thinking of tents and tentage, tents through the ages.\nI had half a tent in the army and rolled it religiously,\nBut Supply stole it back at war’s end, leaving me tentless.\nAnd tentless I thankfully still am, a house man at heart,\nThinking of tents as one who has passed quite beyond tents,\nPassed the stakes and the flaps, mosquitoes and mildew,\nAnd come to the ultimate tent, archetypal, platonic,\nWith one cot in it, and one man curled on the cot\nDrinking, cooling small angers, smelling death in the distance\nWar’s end\nWorld’s end\nSullen Achilles.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "thoughts-of-the-california-desert": { - "title": "“Thoughts of the California Desert”", - "body": "Under palm trees, oranges, olives and pears\nThe indolent desert slouches, half an eye closed\nAnd half an eye out for men of affairs whose cares\nKeep them from keeping their gaudy gardens hosed.\n\nSlouches and yawns, that clown. Leaves in disdain\nGaseous dragons their nauseous knights to nettle.\nFlips his tail coyly, rolls over, says he would fain\nDie a dry death. Haw! browning a petal.\n\nHas it too good, too good. Is vastly diverted\nWatching his merchants and bankers stumble out doors.\nParries their blows, says he loves, loves to be squirted\nAs at him they fiercely empty their reservoirs.\n\nSleeps a great deal, drinks deep, drinks deep and makes hay,\nThinking he’ll swallow the bankers and all one day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-poems-to-jackson": { - "title": "“Three Poems to Jackson”", - "body": "# I.\n\nDarkness comes early, stays late\nIn my winter country; the frost\nGoes four feet down; trees are like sticks;\nA light snow lingers\nFor a month or two, getting dirty. I write every day\nBut throw much away.\n\nMy third book will appear in the spring, a small book,\nA slight book,\nContaining no plays or long narrative poems,\nBorrowing hardly at all from the middle ages,\nMaking few affirmations, avoiding inversions,\nUsing iambics distrustfully, favoring lines\nOf odd lengths and irony.\n\nI am forty.\nI seem to know the dimensions of what I can do\nAnd the season to do it in.\nGive me a few more winters like this one, and spring--\nOr the thought of spring--\nWill cease to be a disturbance, and I’ll be\nSolid,\nJackson.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSteam on a winter stream. Cold air\nMeeting warm water\nCondenses? I suppose so.\nBut why should the water not freeze\nLike me? I don’t know.\nI am mufflered, mittened, booted and earflapped\nLike a child. I am taking the air.\nThe air is bitter.\nThe water is dark, incredibly dark; I look down\nAnd see nothing and see that Narcissus\nWas a summer child, a child who knew green\nScum and tadpoles, not\nBlack water.\n\nNature would rather we rest our psyches in winter.\nShe gives us no looking glass; she withdraws\nFrom our poems, leaving us\nOnly our own thoughts, words and inflections\nTo fund solace in. When we look out\nWe see nothing like us; we live\nIn a land of the dead with our mittens on; if we\nWalk all day in the rutted road by the stream,\nWe find not even a stranger to befriend us.\n\nBut I am forty.\nI look down from the stone bridge to the water,\nAnd I see, yes, my face. It sends me,\nJackson.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd the lawyers said, and the wisemen said,\n“It is better to come to terms.”\nWith what?\nWith all that ice, stickery, black water?\nOf course not. Given a choice we choose\nTo walk in the meadows, pick clover, commune with\nWhat there is to commune with. It is moral.\nHow, then, come to terms?\n\nWhat the lawyers meant, and the wisemen, was that we\nTrundle out to the stone bridge and play at terms.\nThen the snow sparkles,\nThe stream converts to a prize-winning shot from a kodak,\nAnd we think of spring.\n\nI have a book of lyrics coming out\nIn the spring.\nI am twenty.\nThe spirit is strong within me; I have not\nCome to terms with winter but bludgeoned winter\nTo my terms.\nIs the air warm?\nI take off my coat.\nIs the grass soft?\nOff, shoes.\nAnd so on.\nOne does these things as a poet. I am a poet,\nJackson.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "three-sonnets-to-time": { - "title": "“Three Sonnets to Time”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhen a man dies and is lowered into the ground\nAnd thus leaves behind all his failings at bed and board,\nHe achieves something: fleshbound\nWas he a lout; bonebound is lord.\n\nThe ceremonies are instructive: our double standard\nPermits us to dignify process--the sun’s burning,\nThe moon’s dead whirling, the mountain’s crumbling sand ward--\nAnd meanwhile mock the living, the yet barnstorming.\n\nYet man without the respect of man when he lives\nComes to but feeble flourishings, war or sonnet.\nIf the hat comes off after the visitor leaves,\nAll the world’s grandest mouthings are but ironic.\n\nWhat he looks for, feels for, fears for, is, does\nMust be honored, surely, before his bones, his was.\n\n\n# II.\n\nIn books, and in sealed containers at world’s fairs,\nTime is reduced to something tasteless and soluble.\nWhy? When not in capsules it turns hairs,\nAnd bleaches golden words in the mouths of the voluble.\n\nWe put up statues and plaques, and deposit regret\nAt the tombs and shrines of time’s late enthusiasts.\nWhy? We trust that with gifts we help time forget\nOur rickety present for all those marble pasts.\n\nBut time does not live for capsules, stones, bones, books.\nIt breathes even as we, and would be friends.\nWhen we tote pills, do shrines, muster backward looks,\nWill it not be offended, question our ends?\n\n--Thus, to dear time I pray, whom I swear to love\nFar beyond all that is timeless, below or above.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAgain and again we deceive time. We sleep, we meander\nAs if it were nothing to us when we’d come, or be, through,\nOr where, in the limitless world, our ship would founder,\nOr do whatever ships in metaphor do.\n\nWe wear all the bright fashions, read soft books\nAnd lie in the sun in Nassau with our hides.\nWe build our castles and line our secretest nooks\nWith the addresses where passion or drink resides.\n\nAnd though time is never deceived--it is we, with our slippers on,\nWho are caught by surprise when our light verse yawns its last\n yawn--\nTo the last hour we must strive to keep not looking drawn\nFrom lamenting in secret, mumbling dirges at dawn.\n\nIt is a game, but a very solemn one, this that we play\nWith art, drama and rhetoric as we decay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-walk-home": { - "title": "“The Walk Home”", - "body": "As one grows older and Caesar, Hitler,\nLear and the salesman are bundled off one by one,\nIt is hard to sustain discomposure. The files thicken.\n“Leaves,” says the poet,\n“grass, and birds of the field,”\nConjuring up a glass and a good book\nOn some green hill\nWhere nobody bears or cares more than old care will.\n\nWho’s in, who’s out--such words harden\nIn bronze or plastic; pipes and slippers\nMove to their destined places, swords to theirs;\nAnd one walking home at dusk with the evening paper\nThinks with erosive irreverence that perhaps\nHe should let his subscription to that sheet lapse.\n\nWhat, then, would the world do? As swords clashed\nUnder the sun, and Prince Hal and Sir Winston\nTriumphed on all continents, would then the word\nSweep the ranks that one watching watched no longer?\nAs he closed his eves to all but his own thin theme,\nWould the world then oblige, age and dream his dream?\n\nDream. Dream. And still dream. And leave not a wrack.\nAs one grows older\nPlato’s, Bottom’s and all such country rouses\nThicken the files with the rest;\nAnd walking home at dusk with the sages, age\nThinks no more than age must always think:--\nThe world doesn’t oblige, and old pipes stink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-world-around-us": { - "title": "“The World around Us”", - "body": "Serpents,\nTake, let us, a simple Christian,\nNot child wholly, nor saint,\nBut one sharing their ego as he trots\nAbout on his earth with his eyes on his scuffed\nShoes, frayed cuffs, and such marks\nOf his species--take him,\nAnd tell him that as he is frail and is dust and not even\nA mote on somebody’s optic, he could please\nUs all most excessively if he’d just\nQuick on his belly for God and the Right\nmerely\n\nCrawl, that’s all--will he do it? Lord, he’ll\nUp on his two hind feet to prance and whinny\nLike Black Beauty. So I ask you,\nSerpents,\nWho are the world’s true Christians?\n\nFish,\nAs you know he is up there,\nFishing.\nHe lets his lines down with his hooks and sinkers;\nHe drags with his nets our provinces;\nAnd not yet sated he even swims down to us,\nBrandishing\nSharp things at us as if he were God knows\nWhat, maybe something Greek? But for all this,\n\nFish,\nThink of him not as he would be but as he is,\nPoor forked beast,\nWho envies us vitamins, oxygen, salts and lebensraum,\nAnd gasping for breath in his thin air watches,\nhelpless,\nAs our climbing waters stalk him,\n\nDogs,\nAre you with me?\nFight, shall we, fire with fire? Be wise\nIn the world’s ways? Listen.\nIf you be not for the fashion of these times,\nFeel too deep the species’ difference, penalty of Rover,\nAnd languish for old custom in your exile,\nThen gather round and I’ll unfold, dear friends,\nFor your ears only,\nShhh …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "john-greenleaf-whittier": { - "metadata": { - "name": "John Greenleaf Whittier", - "birth": { - "year": 1807 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1892 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Greenleaf_Whittier", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 41 - }, - "poems": { - "barbara-frietchie": { - "title": "“Barbara Frietchie”", - "body": "Up from the meadows rich with corn,\nClear in the cool September morn,\n\nThe clustered spires of Frederick stand\nGreen-walled by the hills of Maryland.\n\nRound about them orchards sweep,\nApple and peach tree fruited deep,\n\nFair as the garden of the Lord\nTo the eyes of the famished rebel horde,\n\nOn that pleasant morn of the early fall\nWhen Lee marched over the mountain-wall;\n\nOver the mountains winding down,\nHorse and foot, into Frederick town.\n\nForty flags with their silver stars,\nForty flags with their crimson bars,\n\nFlapped in the morning wind: the sun\nOf noon looked down, and saw not one.\n\nUp rose old Barbara Frietchie then,\nBowed with her fourscore years and ten;\n\nBravest of all in Frederick town,\nShe took up the flag the men hauled down;\n\nIn her attic window the staff she set,\nTo show that one heart was loyal yet,\n\nUp the street came the rebel tread,\nStonewall Jackson riding ahead.\n\nUnder his slouched hat left and right\nHe glanced; the old flag met his sight.\n\n‘Halt!’--the dust-brown ranks stood fast.\n‘Fire!’--out blazed the rifle-blast.\n\nIt shivered the window, pane and sash;\nIt rent the banner with seam and gash.\n\nQuick, as it fell, from the broken staff\nDame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.\n\nShe leaned far out on the window-sill,\nAnd shook it forth with a royal will.\n\n‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,\nBut spare your country’s flag,’ she said.\n\nA shade of sadness, a blush of shame,\nOver the face of the leader came;\n\nThe nobler nature within him stirred\nTo life at that woman’s deed and word;\n\n‘Who touches a hair of yon gray head\nDies like a dog! March on! he said.\n\nAll day long through Frederick street\nSounded the tread of marching feet:\n\nAll day long that free flag tost\nOver the heads of the rebel host.\n\nEver its torn folds rose and fell\nOn the loyal winds that loved it well;\n\nAnd through the hill-gaps sunset light\nShone over it with a warm good-night.\n\nBarbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,\nAnd the Rebel rides on his raids nor more.\n\nHonor to her! and let a tear\nFall, for her sake, on Stonewalls’ bier.\n\nOver Barbara Frietchie’s grave,\nFlag of Freedom and Union, wave!\n\nPeace and order and beauty draw\nRound they symbol of light and law;\n\nAnd ever the stars above look down\nOn thy stars below in Frederick town!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "barclay-of-ury": { - "title": "“Barclay of Ury”", - "body": "Up the streets of Aberdeen,\nBy the kirk and college green,\nRode the Laird of Ury;\nClose behind him, close beside,\nFoul of mouth and evil-eyed,\nPressed the mob in fury.\n\nFlouted him the drunken churl,\nJeered at him the serving-girl,\nPrompt to please her master;\nAnd the begging carlin, late\nFed and clothed at Ury’s gate,\nCursed him as he passed her.\n\nYet, with calm and stately mien,\nUp the streets of Aberdeen\nCame he slowly riding;\nAnd, to all he saw and heard,\nAnswering not with bitter word,\nTurning not for chiding.\n\nCame a troop with broad swords swinging,\nBits and bridles sharply ringing,\nLoose and free and forward;\nQuoth the foremost, ‘Ride him down!\nPush him! prick him! through the town\nDrive the Quaker coward!’\n\nBut from out the thickening crowd\nCried a sudden voice and loud:\n‘Barclay! Ho! a Barclay!\nAnd the old man at his side\nSaw a comrade, battle tried,\nScarred and sunburned darkly,\n\nWho with ready weapon bare,\nFronting to the troopers there,\nCried aloud: ‘God save us,\nCall ye coward him who stood\nAnkle deep in Lutzen’s blood,\nWith the brave Gustavus?’\n\n‘Nay, I do not need thy sword,\nComrade mine,’ said Ury’s lord.\n‘Put it up, I pray thee:\nPassive to His holy will,\nTrust I in my Master still,\nEven though He slay me.\n\n‘Pledges of thy love and faith,\nProved on many a field of death,\nNot by me are needed.’\nMarvelled much that henchman bold,\nThat his laird, so stout of old,\nNow so meekly pleaded.\n\n‘Woe’s the day!’ he sadly said,\nWith a slowly shaking head,\nAnd a look of pity;\n‘Ury’s honest lord reviled,\nMock of knave and sport of child,\nIn his own good city!\n\n‘Speak the word, and, master mine,\nAs we charged on Tilly’s line,\nAnd his Walloon lancers,\nSmiting through their midst we’ll teach\nCivil look and decent speech\nTo these boyish prancers!’\n\n‘Marvel not, mine ancient friend,\nLike beginning, like the end,’\nQuoth the Laird of Ury;\n‘Is the sinful servant more\nThan his gracious Lord who bore\nBonds and stripes in Jewry?\n\n‘Give me joy that in his name\nI can bear, with patient frame,\nAll these vain ones offer;\nWhile for them He suffereth long,\nShall I answer wrong with wrong,\nScoffing with the scoffer?\n\n‘Happier I, with loss of all,\nHunted, outlawed, held in thrall,\nWith few friends to greet me,\nThan when reeve and squire were seen,\nRiding our from Aberdeen,\nWith bared heads to meet me.\n\n‘When each goodwife, o’er and o’er,\nBlessed me as I passed her door;\nAnd the snooded daughter,\nThrough her casement glancing down,\nSmiled on him who bore renown\nFrom red fields of slaughter.\n\n‘Hard to feel the stranger’s scoff,\nHard the old friend’s falling off,\nHard to learn forgiving;\nBut the Lord His own rewards,\nAnd His love with theirs accords,\nWarm and fresh and living.\n\n‘Through this dark and stormy night\nFaith beholds a feeble light\nUp the blackness streaking;\nKnowing God’s own time is best,\nIn a patient hope I rest\nFor the full day-breaking!’\n\nSo the Laird of Ury said,\nTurning slow his horse’s head\nTowards the Tolbooth prison,\nWhere, through iron gates, he heard\nPoor disciples of thee Word\nPreach of Christ arisen!\n\nNot in vain, Confessor old,\nUnto us the tale is told\nOf thy day of trial;\nEvery age on him who strays\nFrom its broad and beaten ways\nPours its seven-fold vial.\n\nHappy he whose inward ear\nAngel comfortings can hear,\nO’er the rabble’s laughter;\nAnd while Hatred’s fagots burn,\nGlimpses through the smoke discern\nOf the good hereafter.\n\nKnowing this, that never yet\nShare of Truth was vainly set\nIn the world’s wide fallow;\nAfter hands shall sow the seed,\nAfter hands from hill and mead\nReap the harvests yellow.\n\nThus, with somewhat of the Seer,\nMust the moral pioneer\nFrom the Future borrow;\nClothe the waste with dreams of grain,\nAnd, on midnight’s sky of rain,\nPaint the golden morrow!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-barefoot-boy": { - "title": "“The Barefoot Boy”", - "body": "Blessings on thee, little man,\nBarefoot boy, with cheek of tan!\nWith thy turned-up pantaloons,\nAnd thy merry whistled tunes;\nWith thy red lip, redder still\nKissed by strawberries on the hill;\nWith the sunshine on thy face,\nThrough thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;\nFrom my heart I give thee joy,--\nI was once a barefoot boy!\nPrince thou art,--the grown-up man\nOnly is republican.\nLet the million-dollared ride!\nBarefoot, trudging at his side,\nThou hast more than he can buy\nIn the reach of ear and eye,--\nOutward sunshine, inward joy:\nBlessings on thee, barefoot boy!\n\nOh for boyhood’s painless play,\nSleep that wakes in laughing day,\nHealth that mocks the doctor’s rules,\nKnowledge never learned of schools,\nOf the wild bee’s morning chase,\nOf the wild-flower’s time and place,\nFlight of fowl and habitude\nOf the tenants of the wood;\nHow the tortoise bears his shell,\nHow the woodchuck digs his cell,\nAnd the ground-mole sinks his well;\nHow the robin feeds her young,\nHow the oriole’s nest is hung;\nWhere the whitest lilies blow,\nWhere the freshest berries grow,\nWhere the ground-nut trails its vine,\nWhere the wood-grape’s clusters shine;\nOf the black wasp’s cunning way,\nMason of his walls of clay,\nAnd the architectural plans\nOf gray hornet artisans!\nFor, eschewing books and tasks,\nNature answers all he asks;\nHand in hand with her he walks,\nFace to face with her he talks,\nPart and parcel of her joy,--\nBlessings on the barefoot boy!\n\nOh for boyhood’s time of June,\nCrowding years in one brief moon,\nWhen all things I heard or saw,\nMe, their master, waited for.\nI was rich in flowers and trees,\nHumming-birds and honey-bees;\nFor my sport the squirrel played,\nPlied the snouted mole his spade;\nFor my taste the blackberry cone\nPurpled over hedge and stone;\nLaughed the brook for my delight\nThrough the day and through the night,\nWhispering at the garden wall,\nTalked with me from fall to fall;\nMine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,\nMine the walnut slopes beyond,\nMine, on bending orchard trees,\nApples of Hesperides!\nStill as my horizon grew,\nLarger grew my riches too;\nAll the world I saw or knew\nSeemed a complex Chinese toy,\nFashioned for a barefoot boy!\n\nOh for festal dainties spread,\nLike my bowl of milk and bread;\nPewter spoon and bowl of wood,\nOn the door-stone, gray and rude!\nO’er me, like a regal tent,\nCloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,\nPurple-curtained, fringed with gold,\nLooped in many a wind-swung fold;\nWhile for music came the play\nOf the pied frogs’ orchestra;\nAnd, to light the noisy choir,\nLit the fly his lamp of fire.\nI was monarch: pomp and joy\nWaited on the barefoot boy!\n\nCheerily, then, my little man,\nLive and laugh, as boyhood can!\nThough the flinty slopes be hard,\nStubble-speared the new-mown sward,\nEvery morn shall lead thee through\nFresh baptisms of the dew;\nEvery evening from thy feet\nShall the cool wind kiss the heat:\nAll too soon these feet must hide\nIn the prison cells of pride,\nLose the freedom of the sod,\nLike a colt’s for work be shod,\nMade to tread the mills of toil,\nUp and down in ceaseless moil:\nHappy if their track be found\nNever on forbidden ground;\nHappy if they sink not in\nQuick and treacherous sands of sin.\nAh! that thou couldst know thy joy,\nEre it passes, barefoot boy!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "burning-drift-wood": { - "title": "“Burning Drift-Wood”", - "body": "Before my drift-wood fire I sit,\nAnd see, with every waif I burn,\nOld dreams and fancies coloring it,\nAnd folly’s unlaid ghosts return.\n\nO ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft\nThe enchanted sea on which they sailed,\nAre these poor fragments only left\nOf vain desires and hopes that failed?\n\nDid I not watch from them the light\nOf sunset on my towers in Spain,\nAnd see, far off, uploom in sight\nThe Fortunate Isles I might not gain?\n\nDid sudden lift of fog reveal\nArcadia’s vales of song and spring,\nAnd did I pass, with grazing keel,\nThe rocks whereon the sirens sing?\n\nHave I not drifted hard upon\nThe unmapped regions lost to man,\nThe cloud-pitched tents of Prester John,\nThe palace domes of Kubla Khan?\n\nDid land winds blow from jasmine flowers,\nWhere Youth the ageless Fountain fills?\nDid Love make sign from rose blown bowers,\nAnd gold from Eldorado’s hills?\n\nAlas! the gallant ships, that sailed\nOn blind Adventure’s errand sent,\nHowe’er they laid their courses, failed\nTo reach the haven of Content.\n\nAnd of my ventures, those alone\nWhich Love had freighted, safely sped,\nSeeking a good beyond my own,\nBy clear-eyed Duty piloted.\n\nO mariners, hoping still to meet\nThe luck Arabian voyagers met,\nAnd find in Bagdad’s moonlit street,\nHaroun al Raschid walking yet,\n\nTake with you, on your Sea of Dreams,\nThe fair, fond fancies dear to youth.\nI turn from all that only seems,\nAnd seek the sober grounds of truth.\n\nWhat matter that it is not May,\nThat birds have flown, and trees are bare,\nThat darker grows the shortening day,\nAnd colder blows the wintry air!\n\nThe wrecks of passion and desire,\nThe castles I no more rebuild,\nMay fitly feed my drift-wood fire,\nAnd warm the hands that age has chilled.\n\nWhatever perished with my ships,\nI only know the best remains;\nA song of praise is on my lips\nFor losses which are now my gains.\n\nHeap high my hearth! No worth is lost;\nNo wisdom with the folly dies.\nBurn on, poor shreds, your holocaust\nShall be my evening sacrifice!\n\nFar more than all I dared to dream,\nUnsought before my door I see;\nOn wings of fire and steeds of steam\nThe world’s great wonders come to me,\n\nAnd holier signs, unmarked before,\nOf Love to seek and Power to save,--\nThe righting of the wronged and poor,\nThe man evolving from the slave;\n\nAnd life, no longer chance or fate,\nSafe in the gracious Fatherhood.\nI fold o’er-wearied hands and wait,\nIn full assurance of the good.\n\nAnd well the waiting time must be,\nThough brief or long its granted days,\nIf Faith and Hope and Charity\nSit by my evening hearth-fire’s blaze.\n\nAnd with them, friends whom Heaven has spared,\nWhose love my heart has comforted,\nAnd, sharing all my joys, has shared\nMy tender memories of the dead,--\n\nDear souls who left us lonely here,\nBound on their last, long voyage, to whom\nWe, day by day, are drawing near,\nWhere every bark has sailing room.\n\nI know the solemn monotone\nOf waters calling unto me;\nI know from whence the airs have blown\nThat whisper of the Eternal Sea.\n\nAs low my fires of drift-wood burn,\nI hear that sea’s deep sounds increase,\nAnd, fair in sunset light, discern\nIts mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-call-of-the-christian": { - "title": "“The Call of the Christian”", - "body": "Not always as the whirlwind’s rush\nOn Horeb’s mount of fear,\nNot always as the burning bush\nTo Midian’s shepherd seer,\nNor as the awful voice which came\nTo Israel’s prophet bards,\nNor as the tongues of cloven flame,\nNor gift of fearful words,--\n\nNot always thus, with outward sign\nOf fire or voice from Heaven,\nThe message of a truth divine,\nThe call of God is given!\nAwaking in the human heart\nLove for the true and right,--\nZeal for the Christian’s better part,\nStrength for the Christian’s fight.\n\nNor unto manhood’s heart alone\nThe holy influence steals\nWarm with a rapture not its own,\nThe heart of woman feels!\nAs she who by Samaria’s wall\nThe Saviour’s errand sought,--\nAs those who with the fervent Paul\nAnd meek Aquila wrought:\n\nOr those meek ones whose martyrdom\nRome’s gathered grandeur saw\nOr those who in their Alpine home\nBraved the Crusader’s war,\nWhen the green Vaudois, trembling, heard,\nThrough all its vales of death,\nThe martyr’s song of triumph poured\nFrom woman’s failing breath.\n\nAnd gently, by a thousand things\nWhich o’er our spirits pass,\nLike breezes o’er the harp’s fine strings,\nOr vapors o’er a glass,\nLeaving their token strange and new\nOf music or of shade,\nThe summons to the right and true\nAnd merciful is made.\n\nOh, then, if gleams of truth and light\nFlash o’er thy waiting mind,\nUnfolding to thy mental sight\nThe wants of human-kind;\nIf, brooding over human grief,\nThe earnest wish is known\nTo soothe and gladden with relief\nAn anguish not thine own;\n\nThough heralded with naught of fear,\nOr outward sign or show;\nThough only to the inward ear\nIt whispers soft and low;\nThough dropping, as the manna fell,\nUnseen, yet from above,\nNoiseless as dew-fall, heed it well,--\nThy Father’s call of love!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-changeling": { - "title": "“The Changeling”", - "body": "For the fairest maid in Hampton\nThey needed not to search,\nWho saw young Anna favor\nCome walking into church,--\n\nOr bringing from the meadows,\nAt set of harvest-day,\nThe frolic of the blackbirds,\nThe sweetness of the hay.\n\nNow the weariest of all mothers,\nThe saddest two years’ bride,\nShe scowls in the face of her husband,\nAnd spurns her child aside.\n\n“Rake out the red coals, goodman,--\nFor there the child shall lie,\nTill the black witch comes to fetch her\nAnd both up chimney fly.”\n\n“It’s never my own little daughter,\nIt’s never my own,” she said;\n“The witches have stolen my Anna,\nAnd left me an imp instead.”\n\n“Oh, fair and sweet was my baby,\nBlue eyes, and hair of gold;\nBut this is ugly and wrinkled,\nCross, and cunning, and old.”\n\n“I hate the touch of her fingers,\nI hate the feel of her skin;\nIt’s not the milk from my bosom,\nBut my blood, that she sucks in.”\n\n“My face grows sharp with the torment;\nLook! my arms are skin and bone!\nRake open the red coals, goodman,\nAnd the witch shall have her own.”\n\n“She’ll come when she hears it crying,\nIn the shape of an owl or bat,\nAnd she’ll bring us our darling Anna\nIn place of her screeching brat.”\n\nThen the goodman, Ezra Dalton,\nLaid his hand upon her head:\n“Thy sorrow is great, O woman!\nI sorrow with thee,” he said.\n\n“The paths to trouble are many\nAnd never but one sure way\nLeads out to the light beyond it:\nMy poor wife, let us pray.”\n\nThen he said to the great All-Father,\n“Thy daughter is weak and blind;\nLet her sight come back, and clothe her\nOnce more in her right mind.”\n\n“Lead her out of this evil shadow,\nOut of these fancies wild;\nLet the holy love of the mother\nTurn again to her child.”\n\n“Make her lips like the lips of Mary\nKissing her blessed Son;\nLet her hands, like the hands of Jesus,\nRest on her little one.”\n\n“Comfort the soul of thy handmaid,\nOpen her prison-door,\nAnd thine shall be all the glory\nAnd praise forevermore.”\n\nThen into the face of its mother\nThe baby looked up and smiled;\nAnd the cloud of her soul was lifted,\nAnd she knew her little child.\n\nA beam of the slant west sunshine\nMade the wan face almost fair,\nLit the blue eyes’ patient wonder\nAnd the rings of pale gold hair.\n\nShe kissed it on lip and forehead,\nShe kissed it on cheek and chink\nAnd she bared her snow-white bosom\nTo the lips so pale and thin.\n\nOh, fair on her bridal morning\nWas the maid who blushed and smiled,\nBut fairer to Ezra Dalton\nLooked the mother of his child.\n\nWith more than a lover’s fondness\nHe stooped to her worn young face,\nAnd the nursing child and the mother\nHe folded in one embrace.\n\n“Blessed be God!” he murmured.\n“Blessed be God!” she said;\n“For I see, who once was blinded,--\nI live, who once was dead.”\n\n“Now mount and ride, my goodman,\nAs thou lovest thy own soul!\nWoe’s me, if my wicked fancies\nBe the death of Goody Cole!”\n\nHis horse he saddled and bridled,\nAnd into the night rode he,\nNow through the great black woodland,\nNow by the white-beached sea.\n\nHe rode through the silent clearings,\nHe came to the ferry wide,\nAnd thrice he called to the boatman\nAsleep on the other side.\n\nHe set his horse to the river,\nHe swam to Newbury town,\nAnd he called up Justice Sewall\nIn his nightcap and his gown.\n\nAnd the grave and worshipful justice\n(Upon whose soul be peace!)\nSet his name to the jailer’s warrant\nFor Goodwife Cole’s release.\n\nThen through the night the hoof-beats\nWent sounding like a flail;\nAnd Goody Cole at cockcrow\nCame forth from Ipswich jail.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-common-question": { - "title": "“The Common Question”", - "body": "Behind us at our evening meal\nThe gray bird ate his fill,\nSwung downward by a single claw,\nAnd wiped his hooked bill.\n\nHe shook his wings and crimson tail,\nAnd set his head aslant,\nAnd, in his sharp, impatient way,\nAsked, “What does Charlie want?”\n\n“Fie, silly bird!” I answered, “tuck\nYour head beneath your wing,\nAnd go to sleep;”--but o’er and o’er\nHe asked the self-same thing.\n\nThen, smiling, to myself I said\nHow like are men and birds!\nWe all are saying what he says,\nIn action or in words.\n\nThe boy with whip and top and drum,\nThe girl with hoop and doll,\nAnd men with lands and houses, ask\nThe question of Poor Poll.\n\nHowever full, with something more\nWe fain the bag would cram;\nWe sigh above our crowded nets\nFor fish that never swam.\n\nNo bounty of indulgent Heaven\nThe vague desire can stay;\nSelf-love is still a Tartar mill\nFor grinding prayers alway.\n\nThe dear God hears and pities all;\nHe knoweth all our wants;\nAnd what we blindly ask of Him\nHis love withholds or grants.\n\nAnd so I sometimes think our prayers\nMight well be merged in one;\nAnd nest and perch and hearth and church\nRepeat, “Thy will be done.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "disarmament": { - "title": "“Disarmament”", - "body": "“Put up the sword!” The voice of Christ once more\nSpeaks, in the pauses of the cannon’s roar,\nO’er fields of corn by fiery sickles reaped\nAnd left dry ashes; over trenches heaped\nWith nameless dead; o’er cities starving slow\nUnder a rain of fire; through wards of woe\nDown which a groaning diapason runs\nFrom tortured brothers, husbands, lovers, sons\nOf desolate women in their far-off homes\nWaiting to hear the step that never comes!\nO men and brothers! let that voice be heard.\nWar fails, try peace; put up the useless sword!\n\nFear not the end. There is a story told\nIn Eastern tents, when autumn nights grow cold,\nAnd round the fire the Mongol shepherds sit\nWith grave responses listening unto it:\nOnce, on the errands of his mercy bent,\nBuddha, the holy and benevolent,\nMet a fell monster, huge and fierce of look,\nWhose awful voice the hills and forests shook,\n“O son of peace!” the giant cried, “thy fate\nIs sealed at last, and love shall yield to hate.”\nThe unarmed Buddha looking, with no trace\nOf fear and anger, in the monster’s face,\nIn pity said, “Poor fiend, even thee I love.”\nLo! as he spake the sky-tall terror sank\nTo hand-breadth size; the huge abhorrence shrank\nInto the form and fashion of a dove\nAnd where the thunder of its rage was heard,\nCircling above him sweetly sang the bird:\n“Hate hath no harm for love,” so ran the song,\n“And peace unweaponed conquers every wrong!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "divine-compassion": { - "title": "“Divine Compassion”", - "body": "Long since, a dream of heaven I had,\nAnd still the vision haunts me oft;\nI see the saints in white robes clad,\nThe martyrs with their palms aloft;\nBut hearing still, in middle song,\nThe ceaseless dissonance of wrong;\nAnd shrinking, with hid faces, from the strain\nOf sad, beseeching eyes, full of remorse and pain.\n\nThe glad song falters to a wail,\nThe harping sinks to low lament;\nBefore the still unlifted veil\nI see the crowned foreheads bent,\nMaking more sweet the heavenly air,\nWith breathings of unselfish prayer;\nAnd a Voice saith: “O Pity which is pain,\nO Love that weeps, fill up my sufferings which remain!”\n\n“Shall souls redeemed by me refuse\nTo share my sorrow in their turn?\nOr, sin-forgiven, my gift abuse\nOf peace with selfish unconcern?\nHas saintly ease no pitying care?\nHas faith no work, and love no prayer?\nWhile sin remains, and souls in darkness dwell,\nCan heaven itself be heaven, and look unmoved on hell?”\n\nThen through the Gates of Pain, I dream,\nA wind of heaven blows coolly in;\nFainter the awful discords seem,\nThe smoke of torment grows more thin,\nTears quench the burning soil, and thence\nSpring sweet, pale flowers of penitence\nAnd through the dreary realm of man’s despair,\nStar-crowned an angel walks, and to! God’s hope is there!\n\nIs it a dream? Is heaven so high\nThat pity cannot breathe its air?\nIts happy eyes forever dry,\nIts holy lips without a prayer!\nMy God! my God! if thither led\nBy Thy free grace unmerited,\nNo crown nor palm be mine, but let me keep\nA heart that still can feel, and eyes that still can weep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "a-dream-of-summer": { - "title": "“A Dream of Summer”", - "body": "Bland as the morning breath of June\nThe southwest breezes play;\nAnd, through its haze, the winter noon\nSeems warm as summer’s day.\nThe snow-plumed Angel of the North\nHas dropped his icy spear;\nAgain the mossy earth looks forth,\nAgain the streams gush clear.\n\nThe fox his hillside cell forsakes,\nThe muskrat leaves his nook,\nThe bluebird in the meadow brakes\nIs singing with the brook.\n“Bear up, O Mother Nature!” cry\nBird, breeze, and streamlet free;\n“Our winter voices prophesy\nOf summer days to thee!”\n\nSo, in those winters of the soul,\nBy bitter blasts and drear\nO’erswept from Memory’s frozen pole,\nWill sunny days appear.\nReviving Hope and Faith, they show\nThe soul its living powers,\nAnd how beneath the winter’s snow\nLie germs of summer flowers!\n\nThe Night is mother of the Day,\nThe Winter of the Spring,\nAnd ever upon old Decay\nThe greenest mosses cling.\nBehind the cloud the starlight lurks,\nThrough showers the sunbeams fall;\nFor God, who loveth all His works,\nHas left His hope with all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "an-easter-flower-gift": { - "title": "“An Easter Flower Gift”", - "body": "O dearest bloom the seasons know,\nFlowers of the Resurrection blow,\nOur hope and faith restore;\nAnd through the bitterness of death\nAnd loss and sorrow, breathe a breath\nOf life forevermore!\n\nThe thought of Love Immortal blends\nWith fond remembrances of friends;\nIn you, O sacred flowers,\nBy human love made doubly sweet,\nThe heavenly and the earthly meet,\nThe heart of Christ and ours!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-eternal-goodness": { - "title": "“The Eternal Goodness”", - "body": "O Friends! with whom my feet have trod\nThe quiet aisles of prayer,\nGlad witness to your zeal for God\nAnd love of man I bear.\n\nI trace your lines of argument;\nYour logic linked and strong\nI weigh as one who dreads dissent,\nAnd fears a doubt as wrong.\n\nBut still my human hands are weak\nTo hold your iron creeds:\nAgainst the words ye bid me speak\nMy heart within me pleads.\n\nWho fathoms the Eternal Thought?\nWho talks of scheme and plan?\nThe Lord is God! He needeth not\nThe poor device of man.\n\nI walk with bare, hushed feet the ground\nYe tread with boldness shod;\nI dare not fix with mete and bound\nThe love and power of God.\n\nYe praise His justice; even such\nHis pitying love I deem:\nYe seek a king; I fain would touch\nThe robe that hath no seam.\n\nYe see the curse which overbroods\nA world of pain and loss;\nI hear our Lord’s beatitudes\nAnd prayer upon the cross.\n\nMore than your schoolmen teach, within\nMyself, alas! I know:\nToo dark ye cannot paint the sin,\nToo small the merit show.\n\nI bow my forehead to the dust,\nI veil mine eyes for shame,\nAnd urge, in trembling self-distrust,\nA prayer without a claim.\n\nI see the wrong that round me lies,\nI feel the guilt within;\nI hear, with groan and travail-cries,\nThe world confess its sin.\nYet, in the maddening maze of things,\nAnd tossed by storm and flood,\nTo one fixed trust my spirit clings;\nI know that God is good!\n\nNot mine to look where cherubim\nAnd seraphs may not see,\nBut nothing can be good in Him\nWhich evil is in me.\n\nThe wrong that pains my soul below\nI dare not throne above,\nI know not of His hate,--I know\nHis goodness and His love.\n\nI dimly guess from blessings known\nOf greater out of sight,\nAnd, with the chastened Psalmist, own\nHis judgments too are right.\n\nI long for household voices gone.\nFor vanished smiles I long,\nBut God hath led my dear ones on,\nAnd He can do no wrong.\n\nI know not what the future hath\nOf marvel or surprise,\nAssured alone that life and death\nHis mercy underlies.\n\nAnd if my heart and flesh are weak\nTo bear an untried pain,\nThe bruised reed He will not break,\nBut strengthen and sustain.\n\nNo offering of my own I have,\nNor works my faith to prove;\nI can but give the gifts He gave,\nAnd plead His love for love.\n\nAnd so beside the Silent Sea\nI wait the muffled oar;\nNo harm from Him can come to me\nOn ocean or on shore.\n\nI know not where His islands lift\nTheir fronded palms in air;\nI only know I cannot drift\nBeyond His love and care.\n\nO brothers! if my faith is vain,\nIf hopes like these betray,\nPray for me that my feet may gain\nThe sure and safer way.\n\nAnd Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen\nThy creatures as they be,\nForgive me if too close I lean\nMy human heart on Thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-farewell": { - "title": "“The Farewell”", - "body": "Gone, gone,--sold and gone\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone.\nWhere the slave-whip ceaseless swings\nWhere the noisome insect stings\nWhere the fever demon strews\nPoison with the falling dews\nWhere the sickly sunbeams glare\nThrough the hot and misty air;\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters;\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!\n\nGone, gone,--sold and gone\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone\nThere no mother’s eye is near them,\nThere no mother’s ear can hear them;\nNever, when the torturing lash\nSeams their back with many a gash\nShall a mother’s kindness bless them\nOr a mother’s arms caress them.\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters;\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!\n\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nOh, when weary, sad, and slow,\nFrom the fields at night they go\nFaint with toil, and racked with pain\nTo their cheerless homes again,\nThere no brother’s voice shall greet them\nThere no father’s welcome meet them.\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters;\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!\n\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone\nFrom the tree whose shadow lay\nOn their childhood’s place of play;\nFrom the cool sprmg where they drank;\nRock, and hill, and rivulet bank;\nFrom the solemn house of prayer,\nAnd the holy counsels there;\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters;\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!\n\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone;\nToiling through the weary day,\nAnd at night the spoiler’s prey.\nOh, that they had earlier died,\nSleeping calmly, side by side,\nWhere the tyrant’s power is o’er\nAnd the fetter galls no more!\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone;\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!\n\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone;\nBy the holy love He beareth;\nBy the bruised reed He spareth;\nOh, may He, to whom alone\nAll their cruel wrongs are known,\nStill their hope and refuge prove,\nWith a more than mother’s love.\nGone, gone,--sold and gone,\nTo the rice-swamp dank and lone,\nFrom Virginia’s hills and waters;\nWoe is me, my stolen daughters!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "flowers-in-winter": { - "title": "“Flowers in Winter”", - "body": "How strange to greet, this frosty morn,\nIn graceful counterfeit of flower,\nThese children of the meadows, born\nOf sunshine and of showers!\n\nHow well the conscious wood retains\nThe pictures of its flower-sown home,\nThe lights and shades, the purple stains,\nAnd golden hues of bloom!\n\nIt was a happy thought to bring\nTo the dark season’s frost and rime\nThis painted memory of spring,\nThis dream of summertime.\n\nOur hearts are lighter for its sake,\nOur fancy’s age renews its youth,\nAnd dim-remembered fictions take\nThe guise of present truth.\n\nA wizard of the Merrimac,--\nSo old ancestral legends say,--\nCould call green leaf and blossom back\nTo frosted stem and spray.\n\nThe dry logs of the cottage wall,\nBeneath his touch, put out their leaves;\nThe clay-bound swallow, at his call,\nPlayed round the icy eaves.\n\nThe settler saw his oaken flail\nTake bud, and bloom before his eyes;\nFrom frozen pools he saw the pale\nSweet summer lilies rise.\n\nTo their old homes, by man profaned\nCame the sad dryads, exiled long,\nAnd through their leafy tongues complained\nOf household use and wrong.\n\nThe beechen platter sprouted wild,\nThe pipkin wore its old-time green,\nThe cradle o’er the sleeping child\nBecame a leafy screen.\n\nHaply our gentle friend hath met,\nWhile wandering in her sylvan quest,\nHaunting his native woodlands yet,\nThat Druid of the West;\n\nAnd while the dew on leaf and flower\nGlistened in the moonlight clear and still,\nLearned the dusk wizard’s spell of power,\nAnd caught his trick of skill.\n\nBut welcome, be it new or old,\nThe gift which makes the day more bright,\nAnd paints, upon the ground of cold\nAnd darkness, warmth and light!\n\nWithout is neither gold nor green;\nWithin, for birds, the birch-logs sing;\nYet, summer-like, we sit between\nThe autumn and the spring.\n\nThe one, with bridal blush of rose,\nAnd sweetest breath of woodland balm,\nAnd one whose matron lips unclose\nIn smiles of saintly calm.\n\nFill soft and deep, O winter snow!\nThe sweet azalea’s oaken dells,\nAnd hide the banks where roses blow\nAnd swing the azure bells!\n\nO’erlay the amber violet’s leaves,\nThe purple aster’s brookside home,\nGuard all the flowers her pencil gives\nA live beyond their bloom.\n\nAnd she, when spring comes round again,\nBy greening slope and singing flood\nShall wander, seeking, not in vain\nHer darlings of the wood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "forgiveness": { - "title": "“Forgiveness”", - "body": "My heart was heavy, for its trust had been\nAbused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;\nSo, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,\nOne summer Sabbath day I strolled among\nThe green mounds of the village burial-place;\nWhere, pondering how all human love and hate\nFind one sad level; and how, soon or late,\nWronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face,\nAnd cold hands folded over a still heart,\nPass the green threshold of our common grave,\nWhither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,\nAwed for myself, and pitying my race,\nOur common sorrow, like a nighty wave,\nSwept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "the-frost-spirit": { - "title": "“The Frost Spirit”", - "body": "He comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nYou may trace his footsteps now\nOn the naked woods and the blasted fields\nAnd the brown hill’s withered brow.\nHe has smitten the leaves of the gray old trees\nWhere their pleasant green came forth,\nAnd the winds, which follow wherever he goes,\nHave shaken them down to earth.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nFrom the frozen Labrador,\nFrom the icy bridge of the northern seas,\nWhich the white bear wanders o’er,\nWhere the fisherman’s sail is stiff with ice,\nAnd the luckless forms below\nIn the sunless cold of the lingering night\nInto marble statues grow!\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nOn the rushing Northern blast,\nAnd the dark Norwegian pines have bowed\nAs his fearful breath went past.\nWith an unscorched wing he has hurried on,\nWhere the fires of Hecla glow\nOn the darkly beautiful sky above\nAnd the ancient ice below.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nAnd the quiet lake shall feel\nThe torpid touch of his glazing breath,\nAnd ring to the skater’s heel;\nAnd the streams which danced on the broken rocks,\nOr sang to the leaning grass,\nShall bow again to their winter chain,\nAnd in mournful silence pass.\n\nHe comes,--he comes,--the Frost Spirit comes!\nLet us meet him as we may,\nAnd turn with the light of the parlor-fire\nHis evil power away;\nAnd gather closer the circle ’round,\nWhen the firelight dances high,\nAnd laugh at the shriek of the baffled Fiend\nAs his sounding wing goes by!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "godspeed": { - "title": "“Godspeed”", - "body": "Outbound, your bark awaits you. Were I one\nWhose prayer availeth much, my wish should be\nYour favoring trad-wind and consenting sea.\nBy sail or steed was never love outrun,\nAnd, here or there, love follows her in whom\nAll graces and sweet charities unite,\nThe old Greek beauty set in holier light;\nAnd her for whom New England’s byways bloom,\nWho walks among us welcome as the Spring,\nCalling up blossoms where her light feet stray.\nGod keep you both, make beautiful your way,\nComfort, console, and bless; and safely bring,\nEre yet I make upon a vaster sea\nThe unreturning voyage, my friends to me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "hampton-beach": { - "title": "“Hampton Beach”", - "body": "The sunlight glitters keen and bright,\nWhere, miles away,\nLies stretching to my dazzled sight\nA luminous belt, a misty light,\nBeyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes of sandy gray.\n\nThe tremulous shadow of the Sea!\nAgainst its ground\nOf silvery light, rock, hill, and tree,\nStill as a picture, clear and free,\nWith varying outline mark the coast for miles around.\n\nOn--on--we tread with loose-flung rein\nOur seaward way,\nThrough dark-green fields and blossoming grain,\nWhere the wild brier-rose skirts the lane,\nAnd bends above our heads the flowering locust spray.\n\nHa! like a kind hand on my brow\nComes this fresh breeze,\nCooling its dull and feverish glow,\nWhile through my being seems to flow\nThe breath of a new life, the healing of the seas!\n\nNow rest we, where this grassy mound\nHis feet hath set\nIn the great waters, which have bound\nHis granite ankles greenly round\nWith long and tangled moss, and weeds with cool spray wet.\n\nGood-by to Pain and Care! I take\nMine ease to-day\nHere where these sunny waters break,\nAnd ripples this keen breeze, I shake\nAll burdens from the heart, all weary thoughts away.\n\nI draw a freer breath, I seem\nLike all I see--\nWaves in the sun, the white-winged gleam\nOf sea-birds in the slanting beam,\nAnd far-off sails which flit before the south-wind free.\n\nSo when Time’s veil shall fall asunder,\nThe soul may know\nNo fearful change, nor sudden wonder,\nNor sink the weight of mystery under,\nBut with the upward rise, and with the vastness grow.\n\nAnd all we shrink from now may seem\nNo new revealing;\nFamiliar as our childhood’s stream,\nOr pleasant memory of a dream\nThe loved and cherished Past upon the new life stealing.\n\nSerene and mild the untried light\nMay have its dawning;\nAnd, as in summer’s northern night\nThe evening and the dawn unite,\nThe sunset hues of Time blend with the soul’s new morning.\n\nI sit alone; in foam and spray\nWave after wave\nBreaks on the rocks which, stern and gray,\nShoulder the broken tide away,\nOr murmurs hoarse and strong through mossy cleft and cave.\n\nWhat heed I of the dusty land\nAnd noisy town?\nI see the mighty deep expand\nFrom its white line of glimmering sand\nTo where the blue of heaven on bluer waves shuts down!\n\nIn listless quietude of mind,\nI yield to all\nThe change of cloud and wave and wind\nAnd passive on the flood reclined,\nI wander with the waves, and with them rise and fall.\n\nBut look, thou dreamer! wave and shore\nIn shadow lie;\nThe night-wind warns me back once more\nTo where, my native hill-tops o’er,\nBends like an arch of fire the glowing sunset sky.\n\nSo then, beach, bluff, and wave, farewell!\nI bear with me\nNo token stone nor glittering shell,\nBut long and oft shall Memory tell\nOf this brief thoughtful hour of musing by the Sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ichabod": { - "title": "“Ichabod”", - "body": "So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn\nWhich once he wore!\nThe glory from his gray hairs gone\nForevermore!\n\nRevile him not, the Tempter hath\nA snare for all;\nAnd pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,\nBefit his fall!\n\nOh, dumb be passion’s stormy rage,\nWhen he who might\nHave lighted up and led his age,\nFalls back in night.\n\nScorn! would the angels laugh, to mark\nA bright soul driven,\nFiend-goaded, down the endless dark,\nFrom hope and heaven!\n\nLet not the land once proud of him\nInsult him now,\nNor brand with deeper shame his dim,\nDishonored brow.\n\nBut let its humbled sons, instead,\nFrom sea to lake,\nA long lament, as for the dead,\nIn sadness make.\n\nOf all we loved and honored, naught\nSave power remains;\nA fallen angel’s pride of thought,\nStill strong in chains.\n\nAll else is gone; from those great eyes\nThe soul has fled:\nWhen faith is lost, when honor dies,\nThe man is dead!\n\nThen, pay the reverence of old days\nTo his dead fame;\nWalk backward, with averted gaze,\nAnd hide the shame!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "halloween" - } - } - }, - "immortal-love-forever-full": { - "title": "“Immortal Love, Forever Full”", - "body": "Immortal love, forever full,\nForever flowing free,\nForever shared, forever whole,\nA never ebbing sea!\n\nOur outward lips confess the name\nAll other names above;\nLove only knoweth whence it came,\nAnd comprehendeth love.\n\nBlow, winds of God, awake and blow\nThe mists of earth away:\nShine out, O Light divine, and show\nHow wide and far we stray.\n\nWe may not climb the heavenly steeps\nTo bring the Lord Christ down;\nIn vain we search the lowest deeps,\nFor Him no depths can drown.\n\nBut warm, sweet, tender, even yet,\nA present help is He;\nAnd faith still has its Olivet,\nAnd love its Galilee.\n\nThe healing of His seamless dress\nIs by our beds of pain;\nWe touch Him in life’s throng and press,\nAnd we are whole again.\n\nThrough Him the first fond prayers are said\nOur lips of childhood frame,\nThe last low whispers of our dead\nAre burdened with His Name.\n\nO Lord and Master of us all,\nWhate’er our name or sign,\nWe own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,\nWe test our lives by Thine.\n\nThe letter fails, the systems fall,\nAnd every symbol wanes;\nThe Spirit over brooding all,\nEternal Love remains.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "kallundborg-church": { - "title": "“Kallundborg Church”", - "body": "_“Tie stille, barn min!\nImorgen kommer Fin,\nFa’er din,\nOg gi’er dich Esbern Snares öine og hjerte at lege med!”_\n--Zealand Rhyme.\n\n“Build at Kallundborg by the sea\nA church as stately as church may be,\nAnd there shalt thou wed my daughter fair,”\nSaid the Lord of Nesvek to Esbern Snare.\n\nAnd the Baron laughed. But Esbern said,\n“Though I lose my soul, I will Helva wed!”\nAnd off he strode, in his pride of will,\nTo the Troll who dwelt in Ulshoi hill.\n\n“Build, O Troll, a church for me\nAt Kallundborg by the mighty sea;\nBuild it stately, and build it fair,\nBuild it quickly,” said Esbern Snare.\n\nBut the sly Dwarf said, “No work is wrought\nBy Trolls of the Hills, O man, for naught.\nWhat wilt thou give for thy church so fair?”\n“Set thy own price,” quoth Esbern Snare.\n\n“When Kallundborg church is builded well,\nThou must the name of its builder tell,\nOr thy heart and thy eyes must be my boon.”\n“Build,” said Esbern, “and build it soon.”\n\nBy night and by day the Troll wrought on;\nHe hewed the timbers, he piled the stone;\nBut day by day, as the walls rose fair,\nDarker and sadder grew Esbern Snare.\n\nHe listened by night, he watched by day,\nHe sought and thought, but he dared not pray;\nIn vain he called on the Elle-maids shy,\nAnd the Neck and the Nis gave no reply.\n\nOf his evil bargain far and wide\nA rumor ran through the country-side;\nAnd Helva of Nesvek, young and fair,\nPrayed for the soul of Esbern Snare.\n\nAnd now the church was wellnigh done;\nOne pillar it lacked, and one alone;\nAnd the grim Troll muttered, “Fool thou art!\nTo-morrow gives me thy eyes and heart!”\n\nBy Kallundborg in black despair,\nThrough wood and meadow, walked Esbern Snare,\nTill, worn and weary, the strong man sank\nUnder the birches on Ulshoi bank.\n\nAt his last day’s work he heard the Troll\nHammer and delve in the quarry’s hole;\nBefore him the church stood large and fair:\n“I have builded my tomb,” said Esbern Snare.\n\nAnd he closed his eyes the sight to hide,\nWhen he heard a light step at his side:\n“O Esbern Snare!” a sweet voice said,\n“Would I might die now in thy stead!”\n\nWith a grasp by love and by fear made strong,\nHe held her fast, and he held her long;\nWith the beating heart of a bird afeard,\nShe hid her face in his flame-red beard.\n\n“O love!” he cried, “let me look to-day\nIn thine eyes ere mine are plucked away;\nLet me hold thee close, let me feel thy heart\nEre mine by the Troll is torn apart!”\n\n“I sinned, O Helva, for love of thee!\nPray that the Lord Christ pardon me!”\nBut fast as she prayed, and faster still,\nHammered the Troll in Ulshoi hill.\n\nHe knew, as he wrought, that a loving heart\nWas somehow baffling his evil art;\nFor more than spell of Elf or Troll\nIs a maiden’s prayer for her lover’s soul.\n\nAnd Esbern listened, and caught the sound\nOf a Troll-wife singing underground:\n“To-morrow comes Fine, father thine:\nLie still and hush thee, baby mine!”\n\n“Lie still, my darling! next sunrise\nThou’lt play with Esbern Snare’s heart and eyes!”\n“Ho! ho!” quoth Esbern, “is that your game?\nThanks to the Troll-wife, I know his name!”\n\nThe Troll he heard him, and hurried on\nTo Kallundborg church with the lacking stone.\n“Too late, Gaffer Fine!” cried Esbern Snare;\nAnd Troll and pillar vanished in air!\n\nThat night the harvesters heard the sound\nOf a woman sobbing underground,\nAnd the voice of the Hill-Troll loud with blame\nOf the careless singer who told his name.\n\nOf the Troll of the Church they sing the rune\nBy the Northern Sea in the harvest moon;\nAnd the fishers of Zealand hear him still\nScolding his wife in Ulshoi hill.\n\nAnd seaward over its groves of birch\nStill looks the tower of Kallundborg church\nWhere, first at its altar, a wedded pair,\nStood Helva of Nesvek and Esbern Snare!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "laus-deo": { - "title": "“Laus Deo”", - "body": "It is done!\nClang of bell and roar of gun\nSend the tidings up and down.\nHow the belfries rock and reel!\nHow the great guns, peal on peal,\nFling the joy from town to town!\n\nRing, O bells!\nEvery stroke exulting tells\nOf the burial hour of crime.\nLoud and long, that all may hear,\nRing for every listening ear\nOf Eternity and Time!\n\nLet us kneel:\nGod’s own voice is in that peal,\nAnd this spot is holy ground.\nLord, forgive us! What are we\nThat our eyes this glory see,\nThat our ears have heard this sound!\n\nFor the Lord\nOn the whirlwind is abroad;\nIn the earthquake He has spoken;\nHe has smitten with His thunder\nThe iron walls asunder,\nAnd the gates of brass are broken!\n\nLoud and long\nLift the old exulting song;\nSing with Miriam by the sea,\nHe has cast the mighty down;\nHorse and rider sink and drown;\n‘He hath triumphed gloriously!’\n\nDid we dare,\nIn our agony of prayer,\nAsk for more than He has done?\nWhen was ever His right hand\nOver any time or land\nStretched as now beneath the sun?\n\nHow they pale,\nAncient myth and song and tale,\nIn this wonder of our days\nWhen the cruel rod of war\nBlossoms white with righteous law,\nAnd the wrath of man is praise!\n\nBlotted out!\nAll within and all about\nShall a fresher life begin;\nFreer breathe the universe\nAs it rolls its heavy curse\nOn the dead and buried sin!\n\nIt is done!\nIn the circuit of the sun\nShall the sound thereof go forth.\nIt shall bid the sad rejoice,\nIt shall give the dumb a voice,\nIt shall belt with joy the earth!\n\nRing and swing,\nBells of joy! On morning’s wing\nSound the song of praise abroad!\nWith a sound of broken chains\nTell the nations that He reigns,\nWho alone is Lord and God!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "massachusetts-to-virginia": { - "title": "“Massachusetts to Virginia”", - "body": "The blast from Freedom’s Northern hills, upon its Southern way,\nBears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay:\nNo word of haughty challenging, nor battle bugle’s peal,\nNor steady tread of marching files, nor clang of horsemen’s steel,\n\nNo trains of deep-mouthed cannon along our highways go;\nAround our silent arsenals untrodden lies the snow;\nAnd to the land-breeze of our ports, upon their errands far,\nA thousand sails of commerce swell, but none are spread for war.\n\nWe hear thy threats, Virginia! thy stormy words and high\nSwell harshly on the Southern winds which melt along our sky;\nYet not one brown, hard hand foregoes its honest labor here,\nNo hewer of our mountain oaks suspends his axe in fear.\n\nWild are the waves which lash the reefs along St. George’s bank;\nCold on the shores of Labrador the fog lies white and dank;\nThrough storm, and wave, and blinding mist, stout are the hearts which man\nThe fishing-smacks of Marblehead, the sea-boats of Cape Ann.\n\nThe cold north light and wintry sun glare on their icy forms,\nBent grimly o’er their straining lines or wrestling with the storms;\nFree as the winds they drive before, rough as the waves they roam,\nThey laugh to scorn the slaver’s threat against their rocky home.\n\nWhat means the Old Dominion? Hath she forgot the day\nWhen o’er her conquered valleys swept the Briton’s steel array?\nHow, side by side with sons of hers, the Massachusetts men\nEncountered Tarleton’s charge of fire, and stout Cornwallis, then?\n\nForgets she how the Bay State, in answer to the call\nOf her old House of Burgesses, spoke out from Faneuil Hall?\nWhen, echoing back her Henry’s cry, came pulsing on each breath\nOf Northern winds the thrilling sounds of ‘Liberty or Death!’\n\nWhat asks the Old Dominion? If now her sons have proved\nFalse to their fathers’ memory, false to the faith they loved;\nIf she can scoff at Freedom, and its great charter spurn,\nMust we of Massachusetts from truth and duty turn?\n\nWe hunt your bondmen, flying from Slavery’s hateful hell;\nOur voices, at your bidding, take up the bloodhound’s yell;\nWe gather, at your summons, above our fathers’ graves,\nFrom Freedom’s holy altar-horns to tear your wretched slaves!\n\nThank God! not yet so vilely can Massachusetts bow;\nThe spirit of her early time is with her even now;\nDream not because her Pilgrim blood moves slow and calm and cool,\nShe thus can stoop her chainless neck, a sister’s slave and tool!\n\nAll that a sister State should do, all that a free State may,\nHeart, hand, and purse we proffer, as in our early day;\nBut that one dark loathsome burden ye must stagger with alone,\nAnd reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown!\n\nHold, while ye may, your struggling slaves, and burden God’s free air\nWith woman’s shriek beneath the lash, and manhood’s wild despair;\nCling closer to the ‘cleaving curse’ that writes upon your plains\nThe blasting of Almighty wrath against a land of chains.\n\nStill shame your gallant ancestry, the cavaliers of old,\nBy watching round the shambles where human flesh is sold;\nGloat o’er the new-born child, and count his market value, when\nThe maddened mother’s cry of woe shall pierce the slaver’s den!\n\nLower than plummet soundeth, sink the Virginia name;\nPlant, if ye will, your fathers’ graves with rankest weeds of shame;\nBe, if ye will, the scandal of God’s fair universe;\nWe wash our hands forever of your sin and shame and curse.\n\nA voice from lips whereon the coal from Freedom’s shrine hath been,\nThrilled, as but yesterday, the hearts of Berkshire’s mountain men:\nThe echoes of that solemn voice are sadly lingering still\nIn all our sunny valleys, on every wind-swept hill.\n\nAnd when the prowling man-thief came hunting for his prey\nBeneath the very shadow of Bunker’s shaft of gray,\nHow, through the free lips of the son, the father’s warning spoke;\nHow, from its bonds of trade and sect, the Pilgrim city broke!\n\nA hundred thousand right arms were lifted up on high,\nA hundred thousand voices sent back their loud reply;\nThrough the thronged towns of Essex the startling summons rang,\nAnd up from bench and loom and wheel her young mechanics sprang!\n\nThe voice of free, broad Middlesex, of thousands as of one,\nThe shaft of Bunker calling to that Lexington;\nFrom Norfolk’s ancient villages, from Plymouth’s rocky bound\nTo where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close to her round;\n\nFrom rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm repose\nOf cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua flows,\nTo where Wachuset’s wintry blasts the mountain larches stir,\nSwelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of ‘God save Latimer!’\n\nAnd sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;\nAnd Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay!\nAlong the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,\nAnd the cheer of Hampshire’s woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.\n\nThe voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,\nDeep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!\nAgainst the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?\nNo fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!\n\nLook to it well, Virginians! In calmness we have borne,\nIn answer to our faith and trust, your insult and your scorn;\nYou’ve spurned our kindest counsels; you’ve hunted for our lives;\nAnd shaken round our hearths and homes your manacles and gyves!\n\nWe wage no war, we lift no arm, we fling no torch within\nThe fire-damps of the quaking mine beneath your soil of sin;\nWe leave ye with your bondmen, to wrestle, while ye can,\nWith the strong upward tendencies and God-like soul of man!\n\nBut for us and for our children, the vow which we have given\nFor freedom and humanity is registered in heaven;\nNo slave-hunt in our borders,--no pirate on our strand!\nNo fetters in the Bay State,--no slave upon our land!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "maud-muller": { - "title": "“Maud Muller”", - "body": "Maud Muller on a summer’s day\nRaked the meadow sweet with hay.\n\nBeneath her torn hat glowed the wealth\nOf simple beauty and rustic health.\n\nSinging, she wrought, and her merry gleee\nThe mock-bird echoed from his tree.\n\nBut when she glanced to the far-off town\nWhite from its hill-slope looking down,\n\nThe sweet song died, and a vague unrest\nAnd a nameless longing filled her breast,--\n\nA wish that she hardly dared to own,\nFor something better than she had known.\n\nThe Judge rode slowly down the lane,\nSmoothing his horse’s chestnut mane.\n\nHe drew his bridle in the shade\nOf the apple-trees, to greet the maid,\n\nAnd asked a draught from the spring that flowed\nThrough the meadow across the road.\n\nShe stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,\nAnd filled for him her small tin cup,\n\nAnd blushed as she gave it, looking down\nOn her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.\n\n“Thanks!” said the Judge; “a sweeter draught\nFrom a fairer hand was never quaffed.”\n\nHe spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,\nOf the singing birds and the humming bees;\n\nThen talked of the haying, and wondered whether\nThe cloud in the west would bring foul weather.\n\nAnd Maud forgot her brier-torn gown\nAnd her graceful ankles bare and brown;\n\nAnd listened, while a pleased surprise\nLooked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.\n\nAt last, like one who for delay\nSeeks a vain excuse, he rode away.\n\nMaud Muller looked and sighed: “Ah me!\nThat I the Judge’s bride might be!”\n\n“He would dress me up in silks so fine,\nAnd praise and toast me at his wine.”\n\n“My father should wear a broadcloth coat;\nMy brother should sail a pointed boat.”\n\n“I’d dress my mother so grand and gay,\nAnd the baby should have a new toy each day.”\n\n“And I’d feed the hungry and clothe the poor,\nAnd all should bless me who left our door.”\n\nThe Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,\nAnd saw Maud Muller standing still.\n\n“A form more fair, a face more sweet,\nNe’er hath it been my lot to meet.”\n\n“And her modest answer and graceful air\nShow her wise and good as she is fair.”\n\n“Would she were mine, and I to-day,\nLike her, a harvester of hay.”\n\n“No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,\nNor weary lawyers with endless tongues,”\n\n“But low of cattle and song of birds,\nAnd health and quiet and loving words.”\n\nBut he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,\nAnd his mother, vain of her rank and gold.\n\nSo, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,\nAnd Maud was left in the field alone.\n\nBut the lawyers smiled that afternoon,\nWhen he hummed in court an old love-tune;\n\nAnd the young girl mused beside the well\nTill the rain on the unraked clover fell.\n\nHe wedded a wife of richest dower,\nWho lived for fashion, as he for power.\n\nYet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,\nHe watched a picture come and go;\n\nAnd sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes\nLooked out in their innocent surprise.\n\nOft, when the wine in his glass was red,\nHe longed for the wayside well instead;\n\nAnd closed his eyes on his garnished rooms\nTo dream of meadows and clover-blooms.\n\nAnd the proud man sighed, and with a secret pain,\n“Ah, that I were free again!”\n\n“Free as when I rode that day,\nWhere the barefoot maiden raked her hay.”\n\nShe wedded a man unlearned and poor,\nAnd many children played round her door.\n\nBut care and sorrow, and childbirth pain,\nLeft their traces on heart and brain.\n\nAnd oft, when the summer sun shone hot\nOn the new-mown hay in the meadow lot,\n\nAnd she heard the little spring brook fall\nOver the roadside, through a wall,\n\nIn the shade of the apple-tree again\nShe saw a rider draw his rein;\n\nAnd, gazing down with timid grace,\nShe felt his pleased eyes read her face.\n\nSometimes her narrow kitchen walls\nStretched away into stately halls;\n\nThe weary wheel to a spinet turned,\nThe tallow candle an astral burned,\n\nAnd for him who sat by the chimney lug,\nDozing and grumbling o’er pipe and mug,\n\nA manly form at her side she saw,\nAnd joy was duty and love was law.\n\nThen she took up her burden of life again,\nSaying only, “It might have been.”\n\nAlas for the maiden, alas for the Judge,\nFor rich repiner and househole drudge!\n\nGod pity them both and pity us all,\nWho vainly the dreams of youth recall.\n\nFor of all sad words of tongue or pen,\nThe saddest are these: “It might have been!”\n\nAh, well! for us all some sweet hope lies\nDeeply buried from human eyes;\n\nAnd, in the hereafter, angels may\nRoll the stone from its grave away!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-memory": { - "title": "“A Memory”", - "body": "Here, while the loom of Winter weaves\nThe shroud of flowers and fountains,\nI think of thee and summer eves\nAmong the Northern mountains.\n\nWhen thunder tolled the twilight’s close,\nAnd winds the lake were rude on,\nAnd thou wert singing, _Ca’ the Yowes_,\nThe bonny yowes of Cluden!\n\nWhen, close and closer, hushing breath,\nOur circle narrowed round thee,\nAnd smiles and tears made up the wreath\nWherewith our silence crowned thee;\n\nAnd, strangers all, we felt the ties\nOf sisters and of brothers;\nAh! whose of all those kindly eyes\nNow smile upon another’s?\n\nThe sport of Time, who still apart\nThe waifs of life is flinging;\nOh, nevermore shall heart to heart\nDraw nearer for that singing!\n\nYet when the panes are frosty-starred,\nAnd twilight’s fire is gleaming,\nI hear the songs of Scotland’s bard\nSound softly through my dreaming!\n\nA song that lends to winter snows\nThe glow of summer weather,--\nAgain I hear thee ca’ the yowes\nTo Cluden’s hills of heather.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "my-triumph": { - "title": "“My Triumph”", - "body": "The autumn-time has come;\nOn woods that dream of bloom,\nAnd over purpling vines,\nThe low sun fainter shines.\n\nThe aster-flower is failing,\nThe hazel’s gold is paling;\nYet overhead more near\nThe eternal stars appear!\n\nAnd present gratitude\nInsures the future’s good,\nAnd for the things I see\nI trust the things to be;\n\nThat in the paths untrod,\nAnd the long days of God,\nMy feet shall still be led,\nMy heart be comforted.\n\nO living friends who love me!\nO dear ones gone above me!\nCareless of other fame,\nI leave to you my name.\n\nHide it from idle praises,\nSave it from evil phrases:\nWhy, when dear lips that spake it\nAre dumb, should strangers wake it?\n\nLet the thick curtain fall;\nI better know than all\nHow little I have gained,\nHow vast the unattained.\n\nNot by the page word-painted\nLet life be banned or sainted:\nDeeper than written scroll\nThe colors of the soul.\n\nSweeter than any sung\nMy songs that found no tongue;\nNobler than any fact\nMy wish that failed of act.\n\nOthers shall sing the song,\nOthers shall right the wrong,--\nFinish what I begin,\nAnd all I fail of win.\n\nWhat matter, I or they?\nMine or another’s day,\nSo the right word be said\nAnd life the sweeter made?\n\nHail to the coming singers!\nHail to the brave light-bringers!\nForward I reach and share\nAll that they sing and dare.\n\nThe airs of heaven blow o’er me;\nA glory shines before me\nOf what mankind shall be,--\nPure, generous, brave, and free.\n\nA dream of man and woman\nDiviner but still human,\nSolving the riddle old,\nShaping the Age of Gold!\n\nThe love of God and neighbor;\nAn equal-handed labor;\nThe richer life, where beauty\nWalks hand in hand with duty.\n\nRing, bells in unreared steeples,\nThe joy of unborn peoples!\nSound, trumpets far off blown,\nYour triumph is my own!\n\nParcel and part of all,\nI keep the festival,\nFore-reach the good to be,\nAnd share the victory.\n\nI feel the earth move sunward,\nI join the great march onward,\nAnd take, by faith, while living,\nMy freehold of thanksgiving.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-mystics-christmas": { - "title": "“The Mystic’s Christmas”", - "body": "“All hail!” the bells of Christmas rang,\n“All hail!” the monks at Christmas sang,\nThe merry monks who kept with cheer\nThe gladdest day of all their year.\n\nBut still apart, unmoved thereat,\nA pious elder brother sat\nSilent, in his accustomed place,\nWith God’s sweet peace upon his face.\n\n“Why sitt’st thou thus?” his brethren cried.\n“It is the blessed Christmas-tide;\nThe Christmas lights are all aglow,\nThe sacred lilies bud and blow.”\n\n“Above our heads the joy-bells ring,\nWithout the happy children sing,\nAnd all God’s creatures hail the morn\nOn which the holy Christ was born!”\n\n“Rejoice with us; no more rebuke\nOur gladness with thy quiet look.”\nThe gray monk answered: “Keep, I pray,\nEven as ye list, the Lord’s birthday.”\n\n“Let heathen Yule fires flicker red\nWhere thronged refectory feasts are spread;\nWith mystery-play and masque and mime\nAnd wait-songs speed the holy time!”\n\n“The blindest faith may haply save;\nThe Lord accepts the things we have;\nAnd reverence, howsoe’er it strays,\nMay find at last the shining ways.”\n\n“They needs must grope who cannot see,\nThe blade before the ear must be;\nAs ye are feeling I have felt,\nAnd where ye dwell I too have dwelt.”\n\n“But now, beyond the things of sense,\nBeyond occasions and events,\nI know, through God’s exceeding grace,\nRelease from form and time and place.”\n\n“I listen, from no mortal tongue,\nTo hear the song the angels sung;\nAnd wait within myself to know\nThe Christmas lilies bud and blow.”\n\n“The outward symbols disappear\nFrom him whose inward sight is clear;\nAnd small must be the choice of clays\nTo him who fills them all with praise!”\n\n“Keep while you need it, brothers mine,\nWith honest zeal your Christmas sign,\nBut judge not him who every morn\nFeels in his heart the Lord Christ born!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "christmastide" - } - } - }, - "the-norsemen": { - "title": "“The Norsemen”", - "body": "Gift from the cold and silent Past!\nA relic to the present cast,\nLeft on the ever-changing strand\nOf shifting and unstable sand,\nWhich wastes beneath the steady chime\nAnd beating of the waves of Time!\nWho from its bed of primal rock\nFirst wrenched thy dark, unshapely block?\nWhose hand, of curious skill untaught,\nThy rude and savage outline wrought?\nThe waters of my native stream\nAre glancing in the sun’s warm beam;\nFrom sail-urged keel and flashing oar\nThe circles widen to its shore;\nAnd cultured field and peopled town\nSlope to its willowed margin down.\nYet, while this morning breeze is bringing\nThe home-life sound of school-bells ringing,\nAnd rolling wheel, and rapid jar\nOf the fire-winged and steedless car,\nAnd voices from the wayside near\nCome quick and blended on my ear,--\nA spell is in this old gray stone,\nMy thoughts are with the Past alone!\n\nA change!--The steepled town no more\nStretches along the sail-thronged shore;\nLike palace-domes in sunset’s cloud,\nFade sun-gilt spire and mansion proud:\nSpectrally rising where they stood,\nI see the old, primeval wood;\nDark, shadow-like, on either hand\nI see its solemn waste expand;\nIt climbs the green and cultured hill,\nIt arches o’er the valley’s rill,\nAnd leans from cliff and crag to throw\nIts wild arms o’er the stream below.\nUnchanged, alone, the same bright river\nFlows on, as it will flow forever!\nI listen, and I hear the low\nSoft ripple where its water go;\nI hear behind the panther’s cry,\nThe wild-bird’s scream goes thrilling by,\nAnd shyly on the river’s brink\nThe deer is stooping down to drink.\n\nBut hard!--from wood and rock flung back,\nWhat sound come up the Merrimac?\nWhat sea-worn barks are those which throw\nThe light spray from each rushing prow?\nHave they not in the North Sea’s blast\nBowed to the waves the straining mast?\nTheir frozen sails the low, pale sun\nOf Thulë’s night has shone upon;\nFlapped by the sea-wind’s gusty sweep\nRound icy drift, and headland steep.\nWild Jutland’s wives and Lochlin’s daughters\nHave watched them fading o’er the waters,\nLessening through driving mist and spray,\nLike white-winged sea-birds on their way!\n\nOnward they glide,--and now I view\nTheir iron-armed and stalwart crew;\nJoy glistens in each wild blue eye,\nTurned to green earth and summer sky.\nEach broad, seamed breast has cast aside\nIts cumbering vest of shaggy hide;\nBared to the sun and soft warm air,\nStreams back the Northmen’s yellow hair.\nI see the gleam of axe and spear,\nA sound of smitten shields I hear,\nKeeping a harsh and fitting time\nTo Saga’s chant, and Runic rhyme;\nSuch lays as Zetland’s Scald has sung,\nHis gray and naked isles among;\nOr mutter low at midnight hour\nRound Odin’s mossy stone of power.\nThe wolf beneath the Arctic moon\nHas answered to that startling rune;\nThe Gael has heard its stormy swell,\nThe light Frank knows its summons well;\nIona’s sable-stoled Culdee\nHas heard it sounding o’er the sea,\nAnd swept, with hoary beard and hair,\nHis altar’s foot in trembling prayer!\n\n’T is past,--the ’wildering vision dies\nIn darkness on my dreaming eyes!\nThe forest vanishes in air,\nHill-slope and vale lie starkly bare;\nI hear the common tread of men,\nAnd hum of work-day life again;\nThe mystic relic seems alone\nA broken mass of common stone;\nAnd if it be the chiselled limb\nOf Berserker or idol grim,\nA fragment of Valhalla’s Thor,\nThe stormy Viking’s god of War,\nOr Praga of the Runic lay,\nOr love-awakening Siona,\nI know not,--for no graven line,\nNor Druid mark, nor Runic sign,\nIs left me here, by which to trace\nIts name, or origin, or place.\nYet, for this vision of the Past,\nThis glance upon its darkness cast,\nMy spirit bows in gratitude\nBefore the Giver of all good,\nWho fashioned so the human mind,\nThat, from the waste of Time behind,\nA simple stone, or mound of earth,\nCan summon the departed forth;\nQuicken the Past to life again,\nThe Present lose in what hath been,\nAnd in their primal freshness show\nThe buried forms of long ago.\nAs if a portion of that Thought\nBy which the Eternal will is wrought,\nWhose impulse fills anew with breath\nThe frozen solitude of Death,\nTo mortal mind were sometimes lent,\nTo mortal musing sometimes sent,\nTo whisper--even when it seems\nBut Memory’s fantasy of dreams--\nThrough the mind’s waste of woe and sin,\nOf an immortal origin!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pipes-at-lucknow": { - "title": "“The Pipes at Lucknow”", - "body": "Pipes of the misty moorlands,\nVoice of the glens and hills;\nThe droning of the torrents,\nThe treble of the rills!\nNot the braes of bloom and heather,\nNor the mountains dark with rain,\nNor maiden bower, nor border tower,\nHave heard your sweetest strain!\n\nDear to the Lowland reaper,\nAnd plaided mountaineer,--\nTo the cottage and the castle\nThe Scottish pipes are dear;--\nSweet sounds the ancient pibroch\nO’er mountain, loch, and glade;\nBut the sweetest of all music\nThe pipes at Lucknow played.\n\nDay by day the Indian tiger\nLouder yelled, and nearer crept;\nRound and round the jungle-serpent\nNear and nearer circles swept.\n‘Pray for rescue, wives and mothers,--\nPray to-day!’ the soldier said;\n‘To-morrow, death’s between us\nAnd the wrong and shame we dread.’\n\nOh, they listened, looked, and waited,\nTill their hope became despair;\nAnd the sobs of low bewailing\nFilled the pauses of their prayer.\nThen up spake a Scottish maiden.\nWith her ear unto the ground:\n‘Dinna ye hear it?--dinna ye hear it?\nThe pipes o’ Havelock sound!’\n\nHushed the wounded man his groaning;\nHushed the wife her little ones;\nAlone they heard the drum-roll\nAnd the roar of Sepoy guns.\nBut to sounds of home and childhood\nThe Highland ear was true;--\nAs her mother’s cradle-crooning\nThe mountain pipes she knew.\n\nLike the march of soundless music\nThrough the vision of the seer,\nMore of feeling than of hearing,\nOf the heart than of the ear,\nShe knew the droning pibroch,\nShe knew the Campbell’s call:\n‘Hark! hear ye no MacGregor’s,\nThe grandest o’ them all!’\n\nOh, they listened, dumb and breathless,\nAnd they caught the sound at last;\nFaint and far beyond the Goomtee\nRose and fell the piper’s blast!\nThen a burst of wild thanksgiving\nMingled woman’s voice and man’s;\n‘God be praised!--the march of Havelock!\nThe piping of the clans!’\n\nLouder, nearer, fierce as vengeance,\nSharp and shrill as swords at strife,\nCame the wild MacGregor’s clan-call,\nStinging all the air to life.\nBut when the far-off dust-cloud\nTo plaided legions grew,\nFull tenderly and blithesomely\nThe pipes of rescue blew!\n\nRound the silver domes of Lucknow.\nMoslem mosque and Pagan shrine,\nBreathed the air to Britons dearest,\nThe air of Auld Lang Syne.\nO’er the cruel roll of war-drums\nRose that sweet and homelike strain;\nAnd the tartan clove the turban,\nAs the Goomtee cleaves the plain.\n\nDear to the corn-land reaper\nAnd plaided mountaineer,--\nTo the cottage and the castle\nThe piper’s song is dear.\nSweet sounds the Gaelic pibroch\nO’er mountain, glen, and glade;\nBut the sweetest of all music\nThe pipes at Lucknow played!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-prayer-seeker": { - "title": "“The Prayer-Seeker”", - "body": "Along the aisle where prayer was made,\nA woman, all in black arrayed,\nClose-veiled, between the kneeling host,\nWith gliding motion of a ghost,\nPassed to the desk, and laid thereon\nA scroll which bore these words alone,\n_Pray for me_!\n\nBack from the place of worshipping\nShe glided like a guilty thing\nThe rustle of her draperies, stirred\nBy hurrying feet, alone was heard;\nWhile, full of awe, the preacher read,\nAs out into the dark she sped:\n“_Pray for me_!”\n\nBack to the night from whence she came,\nTo unimagined grief or shame!\nAcross the threshold of that door\nNone knew the burden that she bore;\nAlone she left the written scroll,\nThe legend of a troubled soul,--\n_Pray for me_!\n\nGlide on, poor ghost of woe or sin!\nThou leav’st a common need within;\nEach bears, like thee, some nameless weight,\nSome misery inarticulate,\nSome secret sin, some shrouded dread,\nSome household sorrow all unsaid.\n_Pray for us_!\n\nPass on! The type of all thou art,\nSad witness to the common heart!\nWith face in veil and seal on lip,\nIn mute and strange companionship,\nLike thee we wander to and fro,\nDumbly imploring as we go\n_Pray for us_!\n\nAh, who shall pray, since he who pleads\nOur want perchance hath greater needs?\nYet they who make their loss the gain\nOf others shall not ask in vain,\nAnd Heaven bends low to hear the prayer\nOf love from lips of self-despair\n_Pray for us_!\n\nIn vain remorse and fear and hate\nBeat with bruised bands against a fate\nWhose walls of iron only move\nAnd open to the touch of love.\nHe only feels his burdens fall\nWho, taught by suffering, pities all.\n_Pray for us_!\n\nHe prayeth best who leaves unguessed\nThe mystery of another’s breast.\nWhy cheeks grow pale, why eyes o’erflow,\nOr heads are white, thou need’st not know.\nEnough to note by many a sign\nThat every heart hath needs like thine.\n_Pray for us_!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pumpkin": { - "title": "“The Pumpkin”", - "body": "Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,\nThe vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,\nAnd the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,\nWith broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,\nLike that which o’er Nineveh’s prophet once grew,\nWhile he waited to know that his warning was true,\nAnd longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain\nFor the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain.\n\nOn the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden\nComes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden;\nAnd the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold\nThrough orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold;\nYet with dearer delight from his home in the North,\nOn the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth,\nWhere crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines,\nAnd the sun of September melts down on his vines.\n\nAh! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,\nFrom North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest;\nWhen the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board\nThe old broken links of affection restored;\nWhen the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,\nAnd the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before;\nWhat moistens the lip and what brightens the eye,\nWhat calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?\n\nOh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,\nWhen wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!\nWhen wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,\nGlaring out through the dark with a candle within!\nWhen we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,\nOur chair a broad pumpkin,--our lantern the moon,\nTelling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam\nIn a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!\n\nThen thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better\nE’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!\nFairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,\nBrighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!\nAnd the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,\nSwells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,\nThat the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,\nAnd the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,\nAnd thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky\nGolden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - }, - "the-reward": { - "title": "“The Reward”", - "body": "Who, looking backward from his manhood’s prime,\nSees not the spectre of his misspent time?\nAnd, through the shade\nOf funeral cypress planted thick behind,\nHears no reproachful whisper on the wind\nFrom his loved dead?\n\nWho bears no trace of passion’s evil force?\nWho shuns thy sting, O terrible Remorse?\nWho does not cast\nOn the thronged pages of his memory’s book,\nAt times, a sad and half-reluctant look,\nRegretful of the past?\n\nAlas! the evil which we fain would shun\nWe do, and leave the wished-for good undone\nOur strength to-day\nIs but to-morrow’s weakness, prone to fall;\nPoor, blind, unprofitable servants all\nAre we alway.\n\nYet who, thus looking backward o’er his years,\nFeels not his eyelids wet with grateful tears,\nIf he hath been\nPermitted, weak and sinful as he was,\nTo cheer and aid, in some ennobling cause,\nHis fellow-men?\n\nIf he hath hidden the outcast, or let in\nA ray of sunshine to the cell of sin;\nIf he hath lent\nStrength to the weak, and, in an hour of need,\nOver the suffering, mindless of his creed\nOr home, hath bent;\n\nHe has not lived in vain, and while he gives\nThe praise to Him, in whom he moves and lives,\nWith thankful heart;\nHe gazes backward, and with hope before,\nKnowing that from his works he nevermore\nCan henceforth part.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "snowbound": { - "title": "“Snowbound”", - "body": "The sun that brief December day\nRose cheerless over hills of gray,\nAnd, darkly circled, gave at noon\nA sadder light than waning moon.\nSlow tracing down the thickening sky\nIts mute and ominous prophecy,\nA portent seeming less than threat,\nIt sank from sight before it set.\nA chill no coat, however stout,\nOf homespun stuff could quite shut out,\nA hard, dull bitterness of cold,\nThat checked, mid-vein, the circling race\nOf life-blood in the sharpened face,\nThe coming of the snow-storm told.\nThe wind blew east: we heard the roar\nOf Ocean on his wintry shore,\nAnd felt the strong pulse throbbing there\nBeat with low rhythm our inland air.\nMeanwhile we did your nightly chores,--\nBrought in the wood from out of doors,\nLittered the stalls, and from the mows\nRaked down the herd’s-grass for the cows;\nHeard the horse whinnying for his corn;\nAnd, sharply clashing horn on horn,\nImpatient down the stanchion rows\nThe cattle shake their walnut bows;\nWhile, peering from his early perch\nUpon the scaffold’s pole of birch,\nThe cock his crested helmet bent\nAnd down his querulous challenge sent.\n\nUnwarmed by any sunset light\nThe gray day darkened into night,\nA night made hoary with the swarm\nAnd whirl-dance of the blinding storm,\nAs zigzag, wavering to and fro\nCrossed and recrossed the wingèd snow:\nAnd ere the early bed-time came\nThe white drift piled the window-frame,\nAnd through the glass the clothes-line posts\nLooked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.\n\nAs night drew on, and, from the crest\nOf wooded knolls that ridged the west,\nThe sun, a snow-blown traveller, sank\nFrom sight beneath the smothering bank,\nWe piled, with care, our nightly stack\nOf wood against the chimney-back,--\nThe oaken log, green, huge, and thick,\nAnd on its top the stout back-stick;\nThe knotty forestick laid apart,\nAnd filled between with curious art\nThe ragged brush; then, hovering near,\nWe watched the first red blaze appear,\nHeard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam\nOn whitewashed wall and sagging beam,\nUntil the old, rude-furnished room\nBurst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;\nWhile radiant with a mimic flame\nOutside the sparkling drift became,\nAnd through the bare-boughed lilac-tree\nOur own warm hearth seemed blazing free.\nThe crane and pendent trammels showed,\nThe Turks’ heads on the andirons glowed;\nWhile childish fancy, prompt to tell\nThe meaning of the miracle,\nWhispered the old rhyme: “Under the tree,\nWhen fire outdoors burns merrily,\nThere the witches are making tea.”\nThe moon above the eastern wood\nShone at its full; the hill-range stood\nTransfigured in the silver flood,\nIts blown snows flashing cold and keen,\nDead white, save where some sharp ravine\nTook shadow, or the somber green\nOf hemlocks turned to pitchy black\nAgainst the whiteness at their back.\nFor such a world and such a night\nMost fitting that unwarming light,\nWhich only seemed where’er it fell\nTo make the coldness visible.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "winter_solstice" - } - } - }, - "stanzas-for-the-times": { - "title": "“Stanzas for the Times”", - "body": "Is this the land our fathers loved,\nThe freedom which they toiled to win?\nIs this the soil whereon they moved?\nAre these the graves they slumber in?\nAre we the sons by whom are borne\nThe mantles which the dead have worn?\n\nAnd shall we crouch above these graves,\nWith craven soul and fettered lip?\nYoke in with marked and branded slaves,\nAnd tremble at the driver’s whip?\nBend to the earth our pliant knees,\nAnd speak but as our masters please?\n\nShall outraged Nature cease to feel?\nShall Mercy’s tears no longer flow?\nShall ruffian threats of cord and steel,\nThe dungeon’s gloom, the assassin’s blow,\nTurn back the spirit roused to save\nThe Truth, our Country, and the slave?\n\nOf human skulls that shrine was made,\nRound which the priests of Mexico\nBefore their loathsome idol prayed;\nIs Freedom’s altar fashioned so?\nAnd must we yield to Freedom’s God,\nAs offering meet, the negro’s blood?\n\nShall tongue be mute, when deeds are wrought\nWhich well might shame extremest hell?\nShall freemem lock the indignant thought?\nShall Pity’s bosom cease to swell?\nShall Honor bleed?--shall Truth succumb?\nShall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?\n\nNo; by each spot of haunted ground,\nWhere Freedom weeps her children’s fall;\nBy Plymouth’s rock, and Bunker’s mound;\nBy Griswold’s stained and shattered wall;\nBy Warren’s ghost, by Langdon’s shade;\nBy all the memories of our dead!\n\nBy their enlarging souls, which burst\nThe bands and fetters round them set;\nBy the free Pilgrim spirit nursed\nWithin our inmost bosoms, yet,\nBy all above, around, below,\nBe ours the indignant answer,--No!\n\nNo; guided by our country’s laws,\nFor truth, and right, and suffering man,\nBe ours to strive in Freedom’s cause,\nAs Christians may, as freemen can!\nStill pouring on unwilling ears\nThat truth oppression only fears.\n\nWhat! shall we guard our neighbor still,\nWhile woman shrieks beneath his rod,\nAnd while he trampels down at will\nThe image of a common God?\nShall watch and ward be round him set,\nOf Northern nerve and bayonet?\n\nAnd shall we know and share with him\nThe danger and the growing shame?\nAnd see our Freedom’s light grow dim,\nWhich should have filled the world with flame?\nAnd, writhing, feel, where’er we turn,\nA world’s reproach around us burn?\n\nIs’t not enough that this is borne?\nAnd asks our haughty neighbor more?\nMust fetters which his slaves have worn\nClank round the Yankee farmer’s door?\nMust he be told, beside his plough,\nWhat he must speak, and when, and how?\n\nMust he be told his freedom stands\nOn Slavery’s dark foundations strong;\nOn breaking hearts and fettered hands,\nOn robbery, and crime, and wrong?\nThat all his fathers taught is vain,--\nThat Freedom’s emblem is the chain?\n\nIts life, its soul, from slavery drawn!\nFalse, foul, profane! Go, teach as well\nOf holy Truth from Falsehood born!\nOf Heaven refreshed by airs from Hell!\nOf Virtue in the arms of Vice!\nOf Demons planting Paradise!\n\nRail on, then, brethren of the South,\nYe shall not hear the truth the less;\nNo seal is on the Yankee’s mouth,\nNo fetter on the Yankee’s press!\nFrom our Green Mountains to the sea,\nOne voice shall thunder, We are free!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-star-of-bethlehem": { - "title": "“The Star of Bethlehem”", - "body": "Where Time the measure of his hours\nBy changeful bud and blossom keeps,\nAnd, like a young bride crowned with flowers,\nFair Shiraz in her garden sleeps;\n\nWhere, to her poet’s turban stone,\nThe Spring her gift of flowers imparts,\nLess sweet than those his thoughts have sown\nIn the warm soil of Persian hearts:\n\nThere sat the stranger, where the shade\nOf scattered date-trees thinly lay,\nWhile in the hot clear heaven delayed\nThe long and still and weary day.\n\nStrange trees and fruits above him hung,\nStrange odors filled the sultry air,\nStrange birds upon the branches swung,\nStrange insect voices murmured there.\n\nAnd strange bright blossoms shone around,\nTurned sunward from the shadowy bowers,\nAs if the Gheber’s soul had found\nA fitting home in Iran’s flowers.\n\nWhate’er he saw, whate’er he heard,\nAwakened feelings new and sad,--\nNo Christian garb, nor Christian word,\nNor church with Sabbath-bell chimes glad,\n\nBut Moslem graves, with turban stones,\nAnd mosque-spires gleaming white, in view,\nAnd graybeard Mollahs in low tones\nChanting their Koran service through.\n\nThe flowers which smiled on either hand,\nLike tempting fiends, were such as they\nWhich once, o’er all that Eastern land,\nAs gifts on demon altars lay.\n\nAs if the burning eye of Baal\nThe servant of his Conqueror knew,\nFrom skies which knew no cloudy veil,\nThe Sun’s hot glances smote him through.\n\n“Ah me!” the lonely stranger said,\n“The hope which led my footsteps on,\nAnd light from heaven around them shed,\nO’er weary wave and waste, is gone!”\n\n“Where are the harvest fields all white,\nFor Truth to thrust her sickle in?\nWhere flock the souls, like doves in flight,\nFrom the dark hiding-place of sin?”\n\n“A silent-horror broods o’er all,--\nThe burden of a hateful spell,--\nThe very flowers around recall\nThe hoary magi’s rites of hell!”\n\n“And what am I, o’er such a land\nThe banner of the Cross to bear?\nDear Lord, uphold me with Thy hand,\nThy strength with human weakness share!”\n\nHe ceased; for at his very feet\nIn mild rebuke a floweret smiled;\nHow thrilled his sinking heart to greet\nThe Star-flower of the Virgin’s child!\n\nSown by some wandering Frank, it drew\nIts life from alien air and earth,\nAnd told to Paynim sun and dew\nThe story of the Saviour’s birth.\n\nFrom scorching beams, in kindly mood,\nThe Persian plants its beauty screened,\nAnd on its pagan sisterhood,\nIn love, the Christian floweret leaned.\n\nWith tears of joy the wanderer felt\nThe darkness of his long despair\nBefore that hallowed symbol melt,\nWhich God’s dear love had nurtured there.\n\nFrom Nature’s face, that simple flower\nThe lines of sin and sadness swept;\nAnd Magian pile and Paynim bower\nIn peace like that of Eden slept.\n\nEach Moslem tomb, and cypress old,\nLooked holy through the sunset air;\nAnd, angel-like, the Muezzin told\nFrom tower and mosque the hour of prayer.\n\nWith cheerful steps, the morrow’s dawn\nFrom Shiraz saw the stranger part;\nThe Star-flower of the Virgin-Born\nStill blooming in his hopeful heart!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-sycamores": { - "title": "“The Sycamores”", - "body": "In the outskirts of the village\nOn the river’s winding shores\nStand the Occidental plane-trees,\nStand the ancient sycamores.\n\nOne long century hath been numbered,\nAnd another half-way told\nSince the rustic Irish gleeman\nBroke for them the virgin mould.\n\nDeftly set to Celtic music\nAt his violin’s sound they grew,\nThrough the moonlit eves of summer,\nMaking Amphion’s fable true.\n\nRise again, thou poor Hugh Tallant!\nPass in erkin green along\nWith thy eyes brim full of laughter,\nAnd thy mouth as full of song.\n\nPioneer of Erin’s outcasts\nWith his fiddle and his pack--\nLittle dreamed the village Saxons\nOf the myriads at his back.\n\nHow he wrought with spade and fiddle,\nDelved by day and sang by night,\nWith a hand that never wearied\nAnd a heart forever light,--\n\nStill the gay tradition mingles\nWith a record grave and drear\nLike the rollic air of Cluny\nWith the solemn march of Mear.\n\nWhen the box-tree, white with blossoms,\nMade the sweet May woodlands glad,\nAnd the Aronia by the river\nLighted up the swarming shad,\n\nAnd the bulging nets swept shoreward\nWith their silver-sided haul,\nMidst the shouts of dripping fishers,\nHe was merriest of them all.\n\nWhen, among the jovial huskers\nLove stole in at Labor’s side\nWith the lusty airs of England\nSoft his Celtic measures vied.\n\nSongs of love and wailing lyke-wake\nAnd the merry fair’s carouse;\nOf the wild Red Fox of Erin\nAnd the Woman of Three Cows,\n\nBy the blazing hearths of winter\nPleasant seemed his simple tales,\nMidst the grimmer Yorkshire legends\nAnd the mountain myths of Wales.\n\nHow the souls in Purgatory\nScrambled up from fate forlorn\nOn St. Keven’s sackcloth ladder\nSlyly hitched to Satan’s horn.\n\nOf the fiddler who at Tara\nPlayed all night to ghosts of kings;\nOf the brown dwarfs, and the fairies\nDancing in their moorland rings!\n\nJolliest of our birds of singing\nBest he loved the Bob-o-link.\n“Hush!” he’d say, “the tipsy fairies!\nHear the little folks in drink!”\n\nMerry-faced, with spade and fiddle,\nSinging through the ancient town,\nOnly this, of poor Hugh Tallant\nHath Tradtion handed down.\n\nNot a stone his grave discloses;\nBut if yet his spirit walks\nTis beneath the trees he planted\nAnd when Bob-o-Lincoln talks.\n\nGreen memorials of the gleeman!\nLinking still the river-shores,\nWith their shadows cast by sunset\nStand Hugh Tallant’s sycamores!\n\nWhen the Father of his Country\nThrough the north-land riding came\nAnd the roofs were starred with banners,\nAnd the steeples rang acclaim,--\n\nWhen each war-scarred Continental\nLeaving smithy, mill,.and farm,\nWaved his rusted sword in welcome,\nAnd shot off his old king’s-arm,--\n\nSlowly passed that august Presence\nDown the thronged and shouting street;\nVillage girls as white as angels\nScattering flowers around his feet.\n\nMidway, where the plane-tree’s shadow\nDeepest fell, his rein he drew:\nOn his stately head, uncovered,\nCool and soft the west-wind blew.\n\nAnd he stood up in his stirrups,\nLooking up and looking down\nOn the hills of Gold and Silver\nRimming round the little town,--\n\nOn the river, full of sunshine,\nTo the lap of greenest vales\nWinding down from wooded headlands,\nWillow-skirted, white with sails.\n\nAnd he said, the landscape sweeping\nSlowly with his ungloved hand\n“I have seen no prospect fairer\nIn this goodly Eastern land.”\n\nThen the bugles of his escort\nStirred to life the cavalcade:\nAnd that head, so bare and stately\nVanished down the depths of shade.\n\nEver since, in town and farm-house,\nLife has had its ebb and flow;\nThrice hath passed the human harvest\nTo its garner green and low.\n\nBut the trees the gleeman planted,\nThrough the changes, changeless stand;\nAs the marble calm of Tadmor\nMocks the deserts shifting sand.\n\nStill the level moon at rising\nSilvers o’er each stately shaft;\nStill beneath them, half in shadow,\nSinging, glides the pleasure craft;\n\nStill beneath them, arm-enfolded,\nLove and Youth together stray;\nWhile, as heart to heart beats faster,\nMore and more their feet delay.\n\nWhere the ancient cobbler, Keezar,\nOn the open hillside justice wrought,\nSinging, as he drew his stitches,\nSongs his German masters taught.\n\nSinging, with his gray hair floating\nRound a rosy ample face,--\nNow a thousand Saxon craftsmen\nStitch and hammer in his place.\n\nAll the pastoral lanes so grassy\nNow are Traffic’s dusty streets;\nFrom the village, grown a city,\nFast the rural grace retreats.\n\nBut, still green and tall and stately,\nOn the river’s winding shores,\nStand the occidental plane-trees,\nStand Hugh Tallant’s sycamores.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "telling-the-bees": { - "title": "“Telling the Bees”", - "body": "Here is the place; right over the hill\nRuns the path I took;\nYou can see the gap in the old wall still,\nAnd the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.\n\nThere is the house, with the gate red-barred,\nAnd the poplars tall;\nAnd the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,\nAnd the white horns tossing above the wall.\n\nThere are the beehives ranged in the sun;\nAnd down by the brink\nOf the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,\nPansy and daffodil, rose and pink.\n\nA year has gone, as the tortoise goes,\nHeavy and slow;\nAnd the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,\nAnd the same brook sings of a year ago.\n\nThere’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;\nAnd the June sun warm\nTangles his wings of fire in the trees,\nSetting, as then, over Fernside farm.\n\nI mind me how with a lover’s care\nFrom my Sunday coat\nI brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,\nAnd cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.\n\nSince we parted, a month had passed,--\nTo love, a year;\nDown through the beeches I looked at last\nOn the little red gate and the well-sweep near.\n\nI can see it all now,--the slantwise rain\nOf light through the leaves,\nThe sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,\nThe bloom of her roses under the eaves.\n\nJust the same as a month before,--\nThe house and the trees,\nThe barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,--\nNothing changed but the hives of bees.\n\nBefore them, under the garden wall,\nForward and back,\nWent drearily singing the chore-girl small,\nDraping each hive with a shred of black.\n\nTrembling, I listened: the summer sun\nHad the chill of snow;\nFor I knew she was telling the bees of one\nGone on the journey we all must go!\n\nThen I said to myself, “My Mary weeps\nFor the dead to-day:\nHaply her blind old grandsire sleeps\nThe fret and the pain of his age away.”\n\nBut her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,\nWith his cane to his chin,\nThe old man sat; and the chore-girl still\nSung to the bees stealing out and in.\n\nAnd the song she was singing ever since\nIn my ear sounds on:--\n“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!\nMistress Mary is dead and gone!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "vesta": { - "title": "“Vesta”", - "body": "O CHRIST of God! whose life and death\nOur own have reconciled,\nMost quietly, most tenderly\nTake home thy star-named child!\n\nThy grace is in her patient eyes,\nThy words are on her tongue;\nThe very silence round her seems\nAs if the angels sung.\n\nHer smile is as a listening child’s\nWho hears its mother’s call;\nThe lilies of Thy perfect peace\nAbout her pillow fall.\n\nShe leans from out our clinging arms\nTo rest herself in Thine;\nAlone to Thee, dear Lord, can we\nOur well-beloved resign.\n\nO, less for her than for ourselves\nWe bow our heads and pray;\nHer setting star, like Bethlehem’s,\nTo Thee shall point the way!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "what-the-birds-said": { - "title": "“What the Birds Said”", - "body": "The birds against the April wind\nFlew northward, singing as they flew;\nThey sang, “The land we leave behind\nHas swords for corn-blades, blood for dew.”\n\n“O wild-birds, flying from the South,\nWhat saw and heard ye, gazing down?”\n“We saw the mortar’s upturned mouth,\nThe sickened camp, the blazing town!”\n\n“Beneath the bivouac’s starry lamps,\nWe saw your march-worn children die;\nIn shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps,\nWe saw your dead uncoffined lie.”\n\n“We heard the starving prisoner’s sighs\nAnd saw, from line and trench, your sons\nFollow our flight with home-sick eyes\nBeyond the battery’s smoking guns.”\n\n“And heard and saw ye only wrong\nAnd pain,” I cried, “O wing-worn flocks?”\n“We heard,” they sang, “the freedman’s song,\nThe crash of Slavery’s broken locks!”\n\n“We saw from new, uprising States\nThe treason-nursing mischief spurned,\nAs, crowding Freedom’s ample gates,\nThe long-estranged and lost returned.”\n\n“O’er dusky faces, seamed and old,\nAnd hands horn-hard with unpaid toil,\nWith hope in every rustling fold,\nWe saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.”\n\n“And struggling up through sounds accursed,\nA grateful murmur clomb the air;\nA whisper scarcely heard at first,\nIt filled the listening heavens with prayer.”\n\n“And sweet and far, as from a star,\nReplied a voice which shall not cease,\nTill, drowning all the noise of war,\nIt sings the blessed song of peace!”\n\nSo to me, in a doubtful day\nOf chill and slowly greening spring,\nLow stooping from the cloudy gray,\nThe wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.\n\nThey vanished in the misty air,\nThe song went with them in their flight;\nBut lo! they left the sunset fair,\nAnd in the evening there was light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "a-word-for-the-hour": { - "title": "“A Word for the Hour”", - "body": "The firmament breaks up. In black eclipse\nLight after light goes out. One evil star,\nLuridly glaring through the smoke of war,\nAs in the dream of the Apocalypse,\nDrags others down. Let us not weakly weep\nNor rashly threaten. Give us grace to keep\nOur faith and patience; wherefore should we leap\nOn one hand into fratricidal fight,\nOr, on the other, yield eternal right,\nFrame lies of laws, and good and ill confound?\nWhat fear we? Safe on freedom’s vantage ground\nOur feet are planted; let us there remain\nIn unrevengeful calm, no means untried\nWhich truth can sanction, no just claim denied,\nThe sad spectators of a suicide!\nThey break the lines of Union: shall we light\nThe fires of hell to weld anew the chain\nOn that red anvil where each blow is pain?\nDraw we not even now a freer breath,\nAs from our shoulders falls a load of death\nLoathsome as that the Tuscan’s victim bore\nWhen keen with life to a dead horror bound?\nWhy take we up the accursed thing again?\nPity, forgive, but urge them back no more\nWho, drunk with passion, flaunt disunion’s rag\nWith its vile reptile blazon. Let us press\nThe golden cluster on our brave old flag\nIn closer union, and, if numbering less,\nBrighter shall shine the stars which still remain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-worship-of-nature": { - "title": "“The Worship of Nature”", - "body": "The harp at Nature’s advent strung\nHas never ceased to play;\nThe song the stars of morning sung\nHas never died away.\n\nAnd prayer is made, and praise is given,\nBy all things near and far;\nThe ocean looketh up to heaven,\nAnd mirrors every star.\n\nIts waves are kneeling on the strand,\nAs kneels the human knee,\nTheir white locks bowing to the sand,\nThe priesthood of the sea!\n\nThey pour their glittering treasures forth,\nTheir gifts of pearl they bring,\nAnd all the listening hills of earth\nTake up the song they sing.\n\nThe green earth sends its incense up\nFrom many a mountain shrine;\nFrom folded leaf and dewy cup\nShe pours her sacred wine.\n\nThe mists above the morning rills\nRise white as wings of prayer;\nThe altar-curtains of the hills\nAre sunset’s purple air.\n\nThe winds with hymns of praise are loud,\nOr low with sobs of pain,--\nThe thunder-organ of the cloud,\nThe dropping tears of rain.\n\nWith drooping head and branches crossed\nThe twilight forest grieves,\nOr speaks with tongues of Pentecost\nFrom all its sunlit leaves.\n\nThe blue sky is the temple’s arch,\nIts transept earth and air,\nThe music of its starry march\nThe chorus of a prayer.\n\nSo Nature keeps the reverent frame\nWith which her years began,\nAnd all her signs and voices shame\nThe prayerless heart of man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "margaret-widdemer": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Margaret Widdemer", - "birth": { - "year": 1884 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1978 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Widdemer", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "goodbye-my-lover": { - "title": "“Goodbye My Lover”", - "body": "All the flags stream abroad, and the crowds wave and cry--\nAnd I watch for your face in the long lines marching by;\nFor my lips bade you go, but my heart would bid you stay--\nOh, lad, and will the war be long, and you so far away?\nAnd your step as you marched, would it lag or fall more true\nIf you know that my heart’s gone to war to follow you?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-did-not-know": { - "title": "“I Did Not Know”", - "body": "I did not know that I should miss you,\nSo silver-soft your loving came--\nThere were no trumpets down the dawning,\nThere were no leaping tides of flame:\n\nOnly a peace like still rain falling\nOn a tired land with drought foredone,\nOnly a warmth like light soft lying\nOn a shut place that had not sun.\n\nI did not know that I should miss you …\nI only miss you, day and night,\nStilly, as earth would miss the rainfall;\nAlways, as earth would miss the light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "irish-love-song": { - "title": "“Irish Love Song”", - "body": "Well, if the thing is over, better it is for me,\nThe lad was ever a rover, loving and laughing free,\nFar too clever a lover not to be having still\nA lass in the town and a lass by the road and a lass by the farther hill--\nLove on the field and love on the path and love in the woody glen--\n(Lad, will I never see you, never your face again?)\n\nAy, if the thing is ending, now I’ll be getting rest,\nSaying my prayers and bending down to be stilled and blest,\nNever the days are sending hope till my heart is sore\nFor a laugh on the path and a voice by the gate and a step\non the shieling floor--\nGrief on my ways and grief on my work and grief till the evening’s dim--\n(Lord, will I never hear it, never a sound of him?)\n\nSure if it’s done forever, better for me that’s wise,\nNever the hurt, and never tears in my aching eyes,\nNo more the trouble ever to hide from my asking folk\nBeat of my heart at click o’ the latch, and throb if his name is spoke;\nNever the need to hide the sighs and the flushing thoughts and the fret,\nAnd after awhile my heart will hush and my hungering hands forget …\nPeace on my ways, and peace in my step, and maybe my heart grown light--\n(Mary, helper of heartbreak, send him to me to-night!)", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-jester": { - "title": "“The Jester”", - "body": "I have known great gold Sorrows:\nMajestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully\nThrough the slow-pacing morrows:\nI have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing\nDim endless voices cried of suffering\nVibrant and far in broken litany:\nWhere white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly\nPulsed their regretful sweets along the air--\nAll things most tragical, most fair,\nHave still encompassed me …\n\nI dance where in the screaming market-place\nThe dusty world that watches buys and sells,\nWith painted merriment upon my face,\nWhirling my bells,\nThrusting my sad soul to its mockery.\n\nI have known great gold Sorrows …\nShall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones,\nIf it shall make them merry, and forget\nThat grief shall rise and set\nWith the unchanging, unforgetting suns\nOf their relentless morrows?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-singer-at-the-gate": { - "title": "“The Singer at the Gate”", - "body": "Must I always sing at the gate to hearten the men who fight\nFor causes changeful as wind and as brief as the summer night?\n\nMust I always herald the wisdom of Man who is blind, blind-led,\nOf kings who rule for an hour and die when the hour is dead;\n\nOf right that is wrong tomorrow, of truths that were last year’s lies,\nOf little strifes and upbuildings that die when a nation dies?\n\nFor all Assyria’s captains are dead with the dead they made,\nDust of the gyve and anklet with dust of the casque and blade;\n\nBut wonderful dreams blow still in the swirl of a smoke new-gone,\nAs they blew from a fire at dusk for my brother in Ascalon.\n\nAnd Rome is withered, and Hellas; but leaves in the wind bow still,\nAs they bowed for my brother’s dreaming who sang by some dead god’s hill:\n\nFor all of the mighty walls men have built to sweep down again\nAre shadows of visions spun by some poet far from men.\n\nI am tired of praising the deeds that are brief as a wind may be,\nThat change with the mocking turn of a year or a century:\n\nI go to spin dreams in dark, that shall last until men are hurled\nOut into the space of the Timeless with ash of a burning world!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - }, - "the-spring-will-come-when-the-year-turns": { - "title": "“The Spring will come when the year turns …”", - "body": "The Spring will come when the year turns,\nAs if no Winter had been,\nBut what shall I do with a locked heart\nThat lets no new year in?\n\nThe birds will go when the Fall goes,\nThe leaves will fade in the field,\nBut what shall I do with an old love\nWill neither die nor yield?\n\nOh! youth will turn as the world turns,\nAnd dim grow laughter and pain,\nBut how shall I hide from an old dream\nI never may dream again?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - } - } - }, - "richard-wilbur": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Richard Wilbur", - "birth": { - "year": 1921 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2017 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 30 - }, - "poems": { - "advice-to-a-prophet": { - "title": "“Advice to a Prophet”", - "body": "When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,\nMad-eyed from stating the obvious,\nNot proclaiming our fall but begging us\nIn God’s name to have self-pity,\n\nSpare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,\nThe long numbers that rocket the mind;\nOur slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,\nUnable to fear what is too strange.\n\nNor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.\nHow should we dream of this place without us?--\nThe sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,\nA stone look on the stone’s face?\n\nSpeak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive\nOf an undreamt thing, we know to our cost\nHow the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,\nHow the view alters. We could believe,\n\nIf you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip\nInto perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,\nThe lark avoid the reaches of our eye,\nThe jack-pine lose its knuckled grip\n\nOn the cold ledge, and every torrent burn\nAs Xanthus once, its gliding trout\nStunned in a twinkling. What should we be without\nThe dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,\n\nThese things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?\nAsk us, prophet, how we shall call\nOur natures forth when that live tongue is all\nDispelled, that glass obscured or broken\n\nIn which we have said the rose of our love and the clean\nHorse of our courage, in which beheld\nThe singing locust of the soul unshelled,\nAnd all we mean or wish to mean.\n\nAsk us, ask us whether with the worldless rose\nOur hearts shall fail us; come demanding\nWhether there shall be lofty or long standing\nWhen the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "after-the-last-bulletins": { - "title": "“After the Last Bulletins”", - "body": "After the last bulletins the windows darken\nAnd the whole city founders readily and deep,\nSliding on all its pillows\nTo the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep,\n\nAnd the wind rises. The wind rises and bowls\nThe day’s litter of news in the alleys. Trash\nTears itself on the railings,\nSoars and falls with a soft crash,\n\nTumbles and soars again. Unruly flights\nScamper the park, and taking a statue for dead\nStrike at the positive eyes,\nBatter and flap the stolid head\n\nAnd scratch the noble name. In empty lots\nOur journals spiral in a fierce noyade\nOf all we thought to think,\nOr caught in corners cramp and wad\n\nAnd twist our words. And some from gutters flail\nTheir tatters at the tired patrolman’s feet,\nLike all that fisted snow\nThat cried beside his long retreat\n\nDamn you! damn you! to the emperor’s horse’s heels.\nOh none too soon through the air white and dry\nWill the clear announcer’s voice\nBeat like a dove, and you and I\n\nFrom the heart’s anarch and responsible town\nReturn by subway-mouth to life again,\nBearing the morning papers,\nAnd cross the park where saintlike men,\n\nWhite and absorbed, with stick and bag remove\nThe litter of the night, and footsteps rouse\nWith confident morning sound\nThe songbirds in the public boughs.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-barred-owl": { - "title": "“A Barred Owl”", - "body": "The warping night air having brought the boom\nOf an owl’s voice into her darkened room,\nWe tell the wakened child that all she heard\nWas an odd question from a forest bird,\nAsking of us, if rightly listened to,\n“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”\n\nWords, which can make our terrors bravely clear,\nCan also thus domesticate a fear,\nAnd send a small child back to sleep at night\nNot listening for the sound of stealthy flight\nOr dreaming of some small thing in a claw\nBorne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-beautiful-changes": { - "title": "“The Beautiful Changes”", - "body": "One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides\nThe Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies\nOn water; it glides\nSo from the walker, it turns\nDry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you\nValleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.\n\nThe beautiful changes as a forest is changed\nBy a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;\nAs a mantis, arranged\nOn a green leaf, grows\nInto it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves\nAny greenness is deeper than anyone knows.\n\nYour hands hold roses always in a way that says\nThey are not only yours; the beautiful changes\nIn such kind ways,\nWishing ever to sunder\nThings and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose\nFor a moment all that it touches back to wonder.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "ceremony": { - "title": "“Ceremony”", - "body": "A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille\nIs, you may say, a patroness of boughs\nToo queenly kind toward nature to be kin.\nBut ceremony never did conceal,\nSave to the silly eye, which all allows,\nHow much we are the woods we wander in.\n\nLet her be some Sabrina fresh from stream,\nLucent as shallows slowed by wading sun,\nBedded on fern, the flowers’ cynosure:\nThen nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream\nThat she is airy earth, the trees, undone,\nMust ape her languor natural and pure.\n\nHo-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness,\nAnd love this feigning lady by Bazille.\nWhat’s lightly hid is deepest understood,\nAnd when with social smile and formal dress\nShe teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille,\nI think there are most tigers in the wood.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-christmas-hymn": { - "title": "“A Christmas Hymn”", - "body": "A stable-lamp is lighted\nWhose glow shall wake the sky;\nThe stars shall bend their voices,\nAnd every stone shall cry.\nAnd every stone shall cry,\nAnd straw like gold shall shine;\nA barn shall harbor heaven,\nA stall become a shrine.\n\nThis child through David’s city\nShall ride in triumph by;\nThe palm shall strew its branches,\nAnd every stone shall cry.\nAnd every stone shall cry,\nThough heavy, dull, and dumb,\nAnd lie within the roadway\nTo pave his kingdom come.\n\nYet he shall be forsaken,\nAnd yielded up to die;\nThe sky shall groan and darken,\nAnd every stone shall cry.\nAnd every stone shall cry\nFor stony hearts of men:\nGod’s blood upon the spearhead,\nGod’s love refused again.\n\nBut now, as at the ending,\nThe low is lifted high;\nThe stars shall bend their voices,\nAnd every stone shall cry.\nAnd every stone shall cry,\nIn praises of the child,\nBy whose descent among us,\nThe worlds are reconciled.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "christmas_day" - } - } - }, - "a-chronic-condition": { - "title": "“A Chronic Condition”", - "body": "Berkeley did not foresee such misty weather,\nNor centuries of light\nIntend so dim a day. Swaddled together\nIn separateness, the trees\nPersist or not beyond the gray-white\nPalings of the air. Gone\nAre whatever wings bothered the lighted leaves\nWhen leaves there were. Are all\nThe sparrows fallen? I can hardly hear\nMy memory of those bees\nWho only lately mesmerized the lawn.\nNow, something, blaze! A fear\nSwaddles me now that Hylas’ tree will fall\nWhere no eye lights and grieves,\nWill fall to nothing and without a sound.\nI sway and lean above the vanished ground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "conjuration": { - "title": "“Conjuration”", - "body": "Backtrack of sea, the baywater goes; flats\nBubble in sunlight, running with herringbone streams;\nSea-lettuce lies in oily mats\nOn sand mislaid; stranded\nAre slug, stone and shell, as dreams\nDrain into morning shine, and the cheat is ended.\n\nOh, it was blue, the too amenable sea.\nWe heard of pearls in the dark and wished to dive.\nBut here in this snailshell, see, see,\nThe crab-legs waggle; where,\nIf altered now, and yet alive,\nDid softness get these bitter claws to wear?\n\nAs curtains from a fatal window blown,\nThe sea’s receding fingers terribly tell\nOf strangest things together grown;\nAll join, and in the furl\nOf waters, blind in muck and shell,\nPursue their slow paludal games. O pearl,\n\nRise, rise and brighten, wear clear air, and in\nYour natal cloudiness receive the sun;\nHang among single stars, and twin\nOur double deep; O tides,\nReturn a truer blue, make one\nThe sky’s blue speech, and what the sea confides.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december" - } - } - }, - "the-death-of-a-toad": { - "title": "“The Death of a Toad”", - "body": "A toad the power mower caught,\nChewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got\nTo the garden verge, and sanctuaried him\nUnder the cineraria leaves, in the shade\nOf the ashen heartshaped leaves, in a dim,\nLow, and a final glade.\n\nThe rare original heartsblood goes,\nSpends on the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows\nIn the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies\nAs still as if he would return to stone,\nAnd soundlessly attending, dies\nToward some deep monotone,\n\nToward misted and ebullient seas\nAnd cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.\nDay dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone\nIn the wide and antique eyes, which still appear\nTo watch, across the castrate lawn,\nThe haggard daylight steer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "ejaculation-reply-and-song": { - "title": "“Ejaculation, Reply, and Song”", - "body": "> _The Poet_\n\nHow oft, retiring from the dusty road\nTo rest a moment in the forest’s shade,\nThe footsore traveler has set down his load\nAnd, couched upon some bank of mosses, heard,\nThrilling the silence of a far, dim glade,\nThe music of the ocka-ocka bird!\n\n\n> _The Scientist_\n\nHow “oft,” you ask, has such a thing occurred?\nThe answer to your question, Sir, is _never._\nArt follows nature or it is absurd.\nNo reputable ornithologist\nMentions that name in any text whatever.\nThe ocka-ocka bird does not exist!\n\n\n> _The Mockingbird_\n\nChip-chip. Tu-wit-a-wee. Ocka-ocka.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "five-women-bathing-in-moonlight": { - "title": "“Five Women Bathing in Moonlight”", - "body": "When night believes itself alone\nIt is most natural, conceals\nNo artifice. The open moon\nWith webs in sky and water wields\n\nThe slightest wave. This vision yields\nTo one sole theme of semblance, land\nLeasing each wave the palest peals\nOf bright apparent notes of sand.\n\nThe bathers whitely come and stand.\nWater diffuses them, their hair\nLike seaweed slurs the shoulders, and\nTheir voices in the moonstrung air\n\nGo plucked of words. Now wading where\nThe moon’s misprisions salve them in.\nTo silver, they are unaware\nHow lost they are when they begin\n\nTo mix with water, making then\nGestures of blithe obedience,\nAs five Danilovas within\nThe soft compulsions of their dance.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-c": { - "title": "“For C.”", - "body": "After the clash of elevator gates\nAnd the long sinking, she emerges where,\nA slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,\nShe looks up toward the window where he waits,\nThen in a fleeting taxi joins the rest\nOf the huge traffic bound forever west.\n\nOn such grand scale do lovers say good-bye--\nEven this other pair whose high romance\nHad only the duration of a dance,\nAnd who, now taking leave with stricken eye,\nSee each in each a whole new life forgone.\nFor them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,\n\nBright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these\nWho part now on the dock, weighed down by grief\nAnd baggage, yet with something like relief,\nIt takes three thousand miles of knitting seas\nTo cancel out their crossing, and unmake\nThe amorous rough and tumble of their wake.\n\nWe are denied, my love, their fine tristesse\nAnd bittersweet regrets, and cannot share\nThe frequent vistas of their large despair,\nWhere love and all are swept to nothingness;\nStill, there’s a certain scope in that long love\nWhich constant spirits are the keepers of,\n\nAnd which, though taken to be tame and staid,\nIs a wild sostenuto of the heart,\nA passion joined to courtesy and art\nWhich has the quality of something made,\nLike a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,\nLike a rose window or the firmament.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "junk": { - "title": "“Junk”", - "body": "_Huru Welandes\nworc ne geswiceσ?\nmonna aenigum\nσara σe Mimming can\nheardne gehealdan._\n\n--Waldere\n\nAn axe angles\nfrom my neighbor’s ashcan;\nIt is hell’s handiwork,\nthe wood not hickory,\nThe flow of the grain\nnot faithfully followed.\nThe shivered shaft\nrises from a shellheap\nOf plastic playthings,\npaper plates,\nAnd the sheer shards\nof shattered tumblers\nThat were not annealed\nfor the time needful.\nAt the same curbside,\na cast-off cabinet\nOf wavily warped\nunseasoned wood\nWaits to be trundled\nin the trash-man’s truck.\nHaul them off! Hide them!\nThe heart winces\nFor junk and gimcrack,\nfor jerrybuilt things\nAnd the men who make them\nfor a little money,\nBartering pride\nlike the bought boxer\nWho pulls his punches,\nor the paid-off jockey\nWho in the home stretch\nholds in his horse.\nYet the things themselves\nin thoughtless honor\nHave kept composure,\nlike captives who would not\nTalk under torture.\nTossed from a tailgate\nWhere the dump displays\nits random dolmens,\nIts black barrows\nand blazing valleys,\nThey shall waste in the weather\ntoward what they were.\nThe sun shall glory\nin the glitter of glass-chips,\nForeseeing the salvage\nof the prisoned sand,\nAnd the blistering paint\npeel off in patches,\nThat the good grain\nbe discovered again.\nThen burnt, bulldozed,\nthey shall all be buried\nTo the depth of diamonds,\nin the making dark\nWhere halt Hephaestus\nkeeps his hammer\nAnd Wayland’s work\nis worn away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "looking-into-history": { - "title": "“Looking into History”", - "body": "# I.\n\nFive soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye\nStand in a land subdued beyond belief.\nBelief might lend them life again. I try\nLike orphaned Hamlet working up his grief\n\nTo see my spellbound fathers in these men\nWho, breathless in their amber atmosphere,\nShow but the postures men affected then\nAnd the hermit faces of a finished year.\n\nThe guns and gear and all are strange until\nBeyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees\nVerging a road that struggles up a hill.\nThey’re sycamores.\n The long-abated breeze\n\nFlares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound\nOf guns and a great forest in distress.\nFathers, I know my cause, and we are bound\nBeyond that hill to fight at Wilderness.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think\nHow fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees\nRode on the back of Simois to sink\nIn the wide waters. Reflect how history’s\n\nChanges are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls\nIts salvage of the world in shifty waves,\nShrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls\nAnd yielding views of its confounded graves\n\nTo the new moon, the sun, or any eye\nThat in its shallow shoreward version sees\nThe pebbles charging with a deathless cry\nAnd carageen memorials of trees.\n\n\n# III.\n\nNow, old man of the sea,\nI start to understand:\nThe will will find no stillness\nBack in a stilled land.\n\nThe dead give no command\nAnd shall not find their voice\nTill they be mustered by\nSome present fatal choice.\n\nLet me now rejoice\nIn all impostures, take\nThe shape of lion or leopard,\nBoar, or watery snake,\n\nOr like the comber break,\nYet in the end stand fast\nAnd by some fervent fraud\nFather the waiting past,\n\nResembling at the last\nThe self-established tree\nThat draws all waters toward\nIts live formality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "love-calls-us-to-the-things-of-this-world": { - "title": "“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”", - "body": "The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,\nAnd spirited from sleep, the astounded soul\nHangs for a moment bodiless and simple\nAs false dawn.\n Outside the open window\nThe morning air is all awash with angels.\n\n Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,\nSome are in smocks: but truly there they are.\nNow they are rising together in calm swells\nOf halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear\nWith the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;\n\n Now they are flying in place, conveying\nThe terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving\nAnd staying like white water; and now of a sudden\nThey swoon down into so rapt a quiet\nThat nobody seems to be there.\n The soul shrinks\n\n From all that it is about to remember,\nFrom the punctual rape of every blessèd day,\nAnd cries,\n “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,\nNothing but rosy hands in the rising steam\nAnd clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”\n\n Yet, as the sun acknowledges\nWith a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,\nThe soul descends once more in bitter love\nTo accept the waking body, saying now\nIn a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,\n “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;\nLet there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;\nLet lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,\nAnd the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating\nOf dark habits,\n keeping their difficult balance.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lying": { - "title": "“Lying”", - "body": "To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,\nWhen in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.\nYour reputation for saying things of interest\nWill not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,\nNor will the delicate web of human trust\nBe ruptured by that airy fabrication.\nLater, however, talking with toxic zest\nOf golf, or taxes, or the rest of it\nWhere the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,\nYou may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing\nAbove your head the shrug of unreal wings.\nNot that the world is tiresome in itself:\nWe know what boredom is: it is a dull\nImpatience or a fierce velleity,\nA champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,\nTo make or do. In the strict sense, of course,\nWe invent nothing, merely bearing witness\nTo what each morning brings again to light:\nGold crosses, cornices, astonishment\nOf panes, the turbine-vent which natural law\nSpins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,\nThen grass and grackles or, at the end of town\nIn sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck\nClothed with its usual thunder, and the stones\nBeginning now to tug their shadows in\nAnd track the air with glitter. All these things\nAre there before us; there before we look\nOr fail to look; there to be seen or not\nBy us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,\nAccording to our means and purposes.\nSo too with strangeness not to be ignored,\nTotal eclipse or snow upon the rose,\nAnd so with that most rare conception, nothing.\nWhat is it, after all, but something missed?\nIt is the water of a dried-up well\nGone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.\nThere is what galled the arch-negator, sprung\nFrom Hell to probe with intellectual sight\nThe cells and heavens of a given world\nWhich he could take but as another prison:\nSmall wonder that, pretending not to be,\nHe drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden\nIn a _black mist low creeping_, dragging down\nAnd darkening with moody self-absorption\nWhat, when he left it, lifted and, if seen\nFrom the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.\nCloser to making than the deftest fraud\nIs seeing how the catbird’s tail was made\nTo counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,\nIts light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,\nHow the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed\nTo one side on a backlit chopping-board\nAnd rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints\nIts bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.\nOdd that a thing is most itself when likened:\nThe eye mists over, basil hints of clove,\nThe river glazes toward the dam and spills\nTo the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,\nAnd in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile\nSome great thing is tormented. Either it is\nA tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind\nNow puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast\nWhich tries again, and once again, to rise.\nWhat, though for pain there is no other word,\nFinds pleasure in the cruellest simile?\nIt is something in us like the catbird’s song\nFrom neighbor bushes in the grey of morning\nThat, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,\nProclaims its many kin. It is a chant\nOf the first springs, and it is tributary\nTo the great lies told with the eyes half-shut\nThat have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron\nWho, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof\nInstructed brute Achilles in the lyre,\nOr of the garden where we first mislaid\nSimplicity of wish and will, forgetting\nOut of what cognate splendor all things came\nTo take their scattering names; and nonetheless\nThat matter of a baggage-train surprised\nBy a few Gascons in the Pyrenees\nWhich, having worked three centuries and more\nIn the dark caves of France, poured out at last\nThe blood of Roland, who to Charles his king\nAnd to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world\nWas faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "marginalia": { - "title": "“Marginalia”", - "body": "Things concentrate at the edges; the pond-surface\nIs bourne to fish and man and it is spread\nIn textile scum and damask light, on which\nThe lily-pads are set; and there are also\n Inlaid ruddy twigs, becalmed pine-leaves,\n Air-baubles, and the chain mail of froth.\n\nDescending into sleep (as when the night-lift\nFalls past a brilliant floor) we glimpse a sublime\nDécor and hear, perhaps, a complete music,\nBut this evades us, as in the night meadows\n The crickets’ million roundsong dies away\n From all advances, rising in every distance.\n\nOur riches are centrifugal; men compose\nDaily, unwittingly, their final dreams,\nAnd those are our own voices whose remote\nConsummate chorus rides on the whirlpool’s rim,\n Past which we flog our sails, toward which we drift,\n Plying our trades, in hopes of a good drowning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "orchard-trees-january": { - "title": "“Orchard Trees, January”", - "body": "It’s not the case, though some might wish it so\nWho from a window watch the blizzard blow\n\nWhite riot through their branches vague and stark,\nThat they keep snug beneath their pelted bark.\n\nThey take affliction in until it jells\nTo crystal ice between their frozen cells,\n\nAnd each of them is inwardly a vault\nOf jewels rigorous and free of fault,\n\nUnglimpsed until in May it gently bears\nA sudden crop of green-pronged solitaires.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january" - } - } - }, - "parable": { - "title": "“Parable”", - "body": "I read how Quixote in his random ride\nCame to a crossing once, and lest he lose\nThe purity of chance, would not decide\n\nWhither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.\nFor glory lay wherever turned the fable.\nHis head was light with pride, his horse’s shoes\n\nWere heavy, and he headed for the stable.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-plain-song-for-comadre": { - "title": "“A Plain Song for Comadre”", - "body": "Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails\nAnd doubter and downcast saint\nJoin in the same complaint,\nWhat holy things were ever frightened off\nBy a fly’s buzz, or itches, or a cough?\nHarder than nails\n\nThey are, more warmly constant than the sun,\nAt whose continual sign\nThe dimly prompted vine\nUpbraids itself to a green excellence.\nWhat evening, when the slow and forced expense\nOf sweat is done,\n\nDoes not the dark come flooding the straight furrow\nOr filling the well-made bowl?\nWhat night will not the whole\nSky with its clear studs and steady spheres\nTurn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years\nCome tomorrow\n\nThat Bruna Sandoval has kept the church\nOf San Ysidro, sweeping\nAnd scrubbing the aisles, keeping\nThe candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,\nAnd seen no vision but the thing done right\nFrom the clay porch\n\nTo the white altar. For love and in all weathers\nThis is what she has done.\nSometimes the early sun\nShines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash\nOf grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash\nLike angel-feathers.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-riddle": { - "title": "“The Riddle”", - "body": "Shall I love God for causing me to be?\nI was mere utterance; shall these words love me?\n\nYet when I caused His work to jar and stammer,\nAnd one free subject loosened all His grammar,\n\nI love Him that He did not in a rage\nOnce and forever rule me off the page,\n\nBut, thinking I might come to please Him yet,\nCrossed out ‘delete’ and wrote His patient ‘stet’.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shame": { - "title": "“Shame”", - "body": "It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy,\nSave to be thought inoffensive. The grammar of the language\nHas never been fathomed, owing to the national habit\nOf allowing each sentence to trail off in confusion.\nThose who have visited Scusi, the capital city,\nReport that the railway-route from Schuldig passes\nThrough country best described as unrelieved.\nSheep are the national product. The faint inscription\nOver the city gates may perhaps be rendered,\n“I’m afraid you won’t find much of interest here.”\nCensus-reports which give the population\nAs zero are, of course, not to be trusted,\nSave as reflecting the natives’ flustered insistence\nThat they do not count, as well as their modest horror\nOf letting one’s sex be known in so many words.\nThe uniform grey of the nondescript buildings, the absence\nOf churches or comfort-stations, have given observers\nAn odd impression of ostentatious meanness,\nAnd it must be said of the citizens (muttering by\nIn their ratty sheepskins, shying at cracks in the sidewalk)\nThat they lack the peace of mind of the truly humble.\nThe tenor of life is careful, even in the stiff\nUnsmiling carelessness of the border-guards\nAnd douaniers, who admit, whenever they can,\nNot merely the usual carloads of deodorant\nBut gypsies, g-strings, hasheesh, and contraband pigments.\nTheir complete negligence is reserved, however,\nFor the hoped-for invasion, at which time the happy people\n(Sniggering, ruddily naked, and shamelessly drunk)\nWill stun the foe by their overwhelming submission,\nCorrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff,\nUsurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods,\nAnd bring about the collapse of the whole empire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-simile-for-her-smile": { - "title": "“A Simile for Her Smile”", - "body": "Your smiling, or the hope, the thought of it,\nMakes in my mind such pause and abrupt ease\nAs when the highway bridgegates fall,\nBalking the hasty traffic, which must sit\nOn each side massed and staring, while\nDeliberately the drawbridge starts to rise:\n\nThen horns are hushed, the oilsmoke rarefies,\nAbove the idling motors one can tell\nThe packet’s smooth approach, the slip,\nSlip of the silken river past the sides,\nThe ringing of clear bells, the dip\nAnd slow cascading of the paddle wheel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-an-american-poet-just-dead": { - "title": "“To an American Poet Just Dead”", - "body": "In the _Boston Sunday Herald_ just three lines\nOf no-point type for you who used to sing\nThe praises of imaginary wines,\nAnd died, or so I’m told, of the real thing.\n\nAlso gone, but a lot less forgotten\nAre an eminent cut-rate druggist, a lover of Giving,\nA lender, and various brokers: gone from this rotten\nTaxable world to a higher standard of living.\n\nIt is out in the comfy suburbs I read you are dead,\nAnd the soupy summer is settling, full of the yawns\nOf Sunday fathers loitering late in bed,\nAnd the shhh of sprays on all the little lawns.\n\nWill the sprays weep wide for you their chaplet tears?\nFor you will the deep-freeze units melt and mourn?\nFor you will Studebakers shred their gears\nAnd sound from each garage a muted horn?\n\nThey won’t. In summer sunk and stupefied\nThe suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.\nAnd though they sleep the sounder since you died\nIt’s just as well that now you save your breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "under-a-tree": { - "title": "“Under a Tree”", - "body": "We know those tales of gods in hot pursuit\nWho frightened wood nymphs into taking root\nAnd changing then into a branchy shape,\nFair, but perplexing to the thought of rape:\nBut this, we say, is more how love is made\nPly and reply of limbs in fireshot shade,\nWhere overhead we hear tossed leaves consent\nTo take the wind in free dishevelment\nAnd, answering with supple blade and stem,\nCaress the gusts that are caressing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "weather-bird": { - "title": "“Weather Bird”", - "body": "It’s hard to decide whether the weather-swallow\nSeems on his standard over a tile hill\nTo be flying stock-still,\nOr hurdling, rather, a tall composite billow,\nFar too fast for the sea’s\nSlack to be seen, and the vast redundancies.\n\nAnd it’s hard to say whether the swallow’s standard\nLooks like a leash he ever strains to break,\nHolding him lest he take\nThe sky too far; or whether the house, half-foundered,\nCast him a line, in the hope\nHe’d raise it toward horizons with that rope.\n\nBoth would be best.\nContention magnifies,\nAnd this discarnate swallow is the crown\nOf all that pulls him down,\nSince as a schoolboy’s kite he tries to rise,\nAnd must be held-to tight\nFor fear the house will lose its touch with height.\n\nA house should hug the earth, but turn with it,\nBe buoy to circling storms, and the moon’s manger,\nAware of the slight danger\nIts halcyon bird may hurl to a helix, set\nThe roof toward anywhere,\nAnd tug the dwellers into empty air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wellfleet-the-house": { - "title": "“Wellfleet: The House”", - "body": "Roof overwoven by a soft tussle of leaves,\nThe walls awave with sumac shadow, lilac\nLofts and falls in the yard, and the house believes\nIt’s guarded, garlanded in a former while.\n\nHere one cannot intrude, the stillness being\nLichenlike grown, a coating of quietudes;\nThe portraits dream themselves, they are done with seeing;\nRocker and teacart balance in iron moods.\n\nYet for the transient here is no offense,\nBecause at certain hours a wallowed light\nFloods at the seaside windows, vague, intense,\nAnd lays on all within a mending blight,\n\nMaking the kitchen silver blindly gleam,\nThe yellow floorboards swim, the dazzled clock\nBoom with a buoy sound, the chambers seem\nAlluvial as that champed and glittering rock.\n\nThe sea strokes up to fashion dune and beach\nIn strew by strew, and year by hundred years.\nOne is at home here. Nowhere in ocean’s reach\nCan time have any foreignness or fears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "we": { - "title": "“We”", - "body": "“We ought to drop the bomb at once before\nThose Russians do. I’m sure you all agree?”\nOf course we do; and hearing of a war\nThe Continentals rise in clouds of tea,\nAttired in looks of conscious ancestry,\nDecorous rags, and decorative gore.\n\n“I fear we’re growing soft,” says Mr. Fee,\nA hardened gentleman of several score.\n“Lemon?,” inquires Miss Blood. “It seems to me\nWe mustn’t shilly shally any more.”\nThe Continentals quick-step out the door\nAnd pivot off around the shrubbery.\n\nHow good to have the Russians to abhor:\nIt lets us dance the nation on our knee\nWho haven’t been quite certain since the war\nPrecisely what we meant by saying _we_.\nThe alien elements have come to be\nEntirely too enormous to ignore.\n\nThe servant girl has spoken back to me.\nMy dividends are yearly getting lower.\nThe nights are full of fires and burglary.\nThe Jews have bought my cottage by the shore.\nI feel at times like locking up the door\nAnd never even going out to tea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "worlds": { - "title": "“Worlds”", - "body": "For Alexander there was no Far East,\nBecause he thought the Asian continent\nIndia ended. Free Cathay at least\nDid not contribute to his discontent.\n\nBut Newton, who had grasped all space, was more\nSerene. To him it seemed that he’d but played\nWith several shells and pebbles on the shore\nOf that profundity he had not made.\n\nSwiss Einstein with his relativity--\nMost secure of all. God does not play dice\nWith the cosmos and its activity.\nReligionless equations won’t suffice.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "years-end": { - "title": "“Year’s End”", - "body": "Now winter downs the dying of the year,\nAnd night is all a settlement of snow;\nFrom the soft street the rooms of houses show\nA gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,\nLike frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin\nAnd still allows some stirring down within.\n\nI’ve known the wind by water banks to shake\nThe late leaves down, which frozen where they fell\nAnd held in ice as dancers in a spell\nFluttered all winter long into a lake;\nGraved on the dark in gestures of descent,\nThey seemed their own most perfect monument.\n\nThere was perfection in the death of ferns\nWhich laid their fragile cheeks against the stone\nA million years. Great mammoths overthrown\nComposedly have made their long sojourns,\nLike palaces of patience, in the gray\nAnd changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii\n\nThe little dog lay curled and did not rise\nBut slept the deeper as the ashes rose\nAnd found the people incomplete, and froze\nThe random hands, the loose unready eyes\nOf men expecting yet another sun\nTo do the shapely thing they had not done.\n\nThese sudden ends of time must give us pause.\nWe fray into the future, rarely wrought\nSave in the tapestries of afterthought.\nMore time, more time. Barrages of applause\nCome muffled from a buried radio.\nThe New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_eve" - } - } - } - } - }, - "ella-wheeler-wilcox": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Ella Wheeler Wilcox", - "birth": { - "year": 1850 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1919 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Wheeler_Wilcox", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "ad-finem": { - "title": "“Ad Finem”", - "body": "On the white throat of useless passion\nThat scorched my soul with its burning breath\nI clutched my hands in murderous fashion,\nAnd held them close in a grip of death;\nFor why should I fan, or feed with fuel,\nA love that showed me but blank despair?\nSo my hold was firm, and my grasp was cruel--\nI meant to strangle it then and there!\n\nI thought it was dead. But with no warning,\nIt rose from its grave last night, and came\nAnd stood by my bed til the early morning\nAnd over and over it spoke your name.\nIts throat was red where my hands had held it;\nIt burned my brow with its scorching breath;\nAnd I knew the moment my eyes beheld it,\n“A love like this can know no death.”\n\nFor just one kiss that your lips have given\nIn the lost and beautiful past to me,\nI would gladly barter my hopes of Heaven\nAnd all the bliss of Eternity.\nFor never a joy are the angels keeping,\nTo lay at my feet in Paradise,\nLike that into your strong arms creeping,\nAnd looking into your love-lit eyes.\n\nI know, in the way that sins are reckoned,\nThis thought is a sin of the deepest dye;\nBut I know too if an angel beckoned,\nStanding close by the Throne on High,\nAnd you, adown by the gates infernal,\nShould open your loving arms and smile,\nI would turn my back on things supernal,\nTo lay on your breast a little while.\n\nTo know for an hour you were mine completely--\nMine in body and soul, my own--\nI would bear unending tortures sweetly,\nWith not a murmur and not a moan.\nA lighter sin or lesser error\nMight change through hope or fear divine;\nBut there is no fear, and hell has no terror,\nTo change or alter a love like mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "growing-old": { - "title": "“Growing Old”", - "body": "Little by little the year grows old,\nThe red leaves drop from the maple boughs;\nThe sun grows dim, and the winds blow cold,\nDown from the distant arctic seas.\n\nOut of the skies the soft light dies,\nAnd the shadows of autumn come creeping over,\nAnd the bee and the bird are no longer heard\nIn grove or meadow, or field of clover.\n\nLittle by little our lives grow old,\nOur faces no longer are fair to see;\nFor gray creeps into the curls of gold,\nAnd the red fades out of the cheeks, ah me!\n\nAnd the birds that sang till our heart strings rang\nWith strains of hope, and joy, and pleasure,\nHave flown away; and our hearts today\nHear only the weird wind’s solemn measure.\n\nYouth and summer, and beauty and bloom,\nDroop and die in the autumn weather,\nBut up from the gloom of the winter’s tomb,\nThey shall rise, in God’s good time, together.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "solitude": { - "title": "“Solitude”", - "body": "Laugh, and the world laughs with you;\nWeep, and you weep alone.\nFor the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,\nBut has trouble enough of its own.\nSing, and the hills will answer;\nSigh, it is lost on the air.\nThe echoes bound to a joyful sound,\nBut shrink from voicing care.\n\nRejoice, and men will seek you;\nGrieve, and they turn and go.\nThey want full measure of all your pleasure,\nBut they do not need your woe.\nBe glad, and your friends are many;\nBe sad, and you lose them all.\nThere are none to decline your nectared wine,\nBut alone you must drink life’s gall.\n\nFeast, and your halls are crowded;\nFast, and the world goes by.\nSucceed and give, and it helps you live,\nBut no man can help you die.\nThere is room in the halls of pleasure\nFor a long and lordly train,\nBut one by one we must all file on\nThrough the narrow aisles of pain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "when-love-is-lost": { - "title": "“When Love is Lost”", - "body": "When love is lost, the day sets towards the night,\nAlbeit the morning sun may still be bright,\nAnd not one cloud-ship sails across the sky.\nYet from the places where it used to lie\nGone is the lustrous glory of the light.\n\nNo splendour rests in any mountain height,\nNo scene spreads fair and beauteous to the sight;\nAll, all seems dull and dreary to the eye\nWhen love is lost.\n\nLove lends to life its grandeur and its might;\nLove goes, and leaves behind it gloom and blight;\nLike ghosts of time the pallid hours drag by,\nAnd grief’s one happy thought is that we die.\nAh, what can recompense us for its flight\nWhen love is lost?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "oscar-wilde": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Oscar Wilde", - "birth": { - "year": 1854 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 47 - }, - "poems": { - "amor-intellectualis": { - "title": "“Amor Intellectualis”", - "body": "Oft have we trod the vales of Castaly\n And heard sweet notes of sylvan music blown\n From antique reeds to common folk unknown:\nAnd often launched our bark upon that sea\nWhich the nine Muses hold in empery,\n And ploughed free furrows through the wave and foam,\n Nor spread reluctant sail for more safe home\nTill we had freighted well our argosy.\nOf which despoilèd treasures these remain,\n Sordello’s passion, and the honeyed line\nOf young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine\n Driving his pampered jades, and more than these,\nThe seven-fold vision of the Florentine,\n And grave-browed Milton’s solemn harmonies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "apologia": { - "title": "“Apologia”", - "body": "Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,\nBarter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,\nAnd at thy pleasure weave that web of pain\nWhose brightest threads are each a wasted day?\n\nIs it thy will--Love that I love so well--\nThat my Soul’s House should be a tortured spot\nWherein, like evil paramours, must dwell\nThe quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?\n\nNay, if it be thy will I shall endure,\nAnd sell ambition at the common mart,\nAnd let dull failure be my vestiture,\nAnd sorrow dig its grave within my heart.\n\nPerchance it may be better so--at least\nI have not made my heart a heart of stone,\nNor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,\nNor walked where Beauty is a thing unknown.\n\nMany a man hath done so; sought to fence\nIn straitened bonds the soul that should be free,\nTrodden the dusty road of common sense,\nWhile all the forest sang of liberty,\n\nNot marking how the spotted hawk in flight\nPassed on wide pinion through the lofty air,\nTo where some steep untrodden mountain height\nCaught the last tresses of the Sun God’s hair.\n\nOr how the little flower he trod upon,\nThe daisy, that white-feathered shield of gold,\nFollowed with wistful eyes the wandering sun\nContent if once its leaves were aureoled.\n\nBut surely it is something to have been\nThe best belovèd for a little while,\nTo have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen\nHis purple wings flit once across thy smile.\n\nAy! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed\nOn my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,\nStood face to face with Beauty, known indeed\nThe Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "at-verona": { - "title": "“At Verona”", - "body": "How steep the stairs within Kings’ houses are\n For exile-wearied feet as mine to tread,\n And O how salt and bitter is the bread\nWhich falls from this Hound’s table,--better far\nThat I had died in the red ways of war,\n Or that the gate of Florence bare my head,\n Than to live thus, by all things comraded\nWhich seek the essence of my soul to mar.\n\n“Curse God and die: what better hope than this?\n He hath forgotten thee in all the bliss\n Of his gold city, and eternal day”--\nNay peace: behind my prison’s blinded bars\n I do possess what none can take away\n My love, and all the glory of the stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "athanasia": { - "title": "“Athanasia”", - "body": "To that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught\n Of all the great things men have saved from Time,\nThe withered body of a girl was brought\n Dead ere the world’s glad youth had touched its prime,\nAnd seen by lonely Arabs lying hid\nIn the dim womb of some black pyramid.\n\nBut when they had unloosed the linen band\n Which swathed the Egyptian’s body,--lo! was found\nClosed in the wasted hollow of her hand\n A little seed, which sown in English ground\nDid wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear\nAnd spread rich odours through our spring-tide air.\n\nWith such strange arts this flower did allure\n That all forgotten was the asphodel,\nAnd the brown bee, the lily’s paramour,\n Forsook the cup where he was wont to dwell,\nFor not a thing of earth it seemed to be,\nBut stolen from some heavenly Arcady.\n\nIn vain the sad narcissus, wan and white\n At its own beauty, hung across the stream,\nThe purple dragon-fly had no delight\n With its gold dust to make his wings a-gleam,\nAh! no delight the jasmine-bloom to kiss,\nOr brush the rain-pearls from the eucharis.\n\nFor love of it the passionate nightingale\n Forgot the hills of Thrace, the cruel king,\nAnd the pale dove no longer cared to sail\n Through the wet woods at time of blossoming,\nBut round this flower of Egypt sought to float,\nWith silvered wing and amethystine throat.\n\nWhile the hot sun blazed in his tower of blue\n A cooling wind crept from the land of snows,\nAnd the warm south with tender tears of dew\n Drenched its white leaves when Hesperos up-rose\nAmid those sea-green meadows of the sky\nOn which the scarlet bars of sunset lie.\n\nBut when o’er wastes of lily-haunted field\n The tired birds had stayed their amorous tune,\nAnd broad and glittering like an argent shield\n High in the sapphire heavens hung the moon,\nDid no strange dream or evil memory make\nEach tremulous petal of its blossoms shake?\n\nAh no! to this bright flower a thousand years\n Seemed but the lingering of a summer’s day,\nIt never knew the tide of cankering fears\n Which turn a boy’s gold hair to withered grey,\nThe dread desire of death it never knew,\nOr how all folk that they were born must rue.\n\nFor we to death with pipe and dancing go,\n Nor would we pass the ivory gate again,\nAs some sad river wearied of its flow\n Through the dull plains, the haunts of common men,\nLeaps lover-like into the terrible sea!\nAnd counts it gain to die so gloriously.\n\nWe mar our lordly strength in barren strife\n With the world’s legions led by clamorous care,\nIt never feels decay but gathers life\n From the pure sunlight and the supreme air,\nWe live beneath Time’s wasting sovereignty,\nIt is the child of all eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ave-maria-gratia-plena": { - "title": "“Ave Maria Gratia Plena”", - "body": "Was this His coming! I had hoped to see\nA scene of wondrous glory, as was told\nOf some great God who in a rain of gold\nBroke open bars and fell on Danae:\nOr a dread vision as when Semele\nSickening for love and unappeased desire\nPrayed to see God’s clear body, and the fire\nCaught her brown limbs and slew her utterly:\nWith such glad dreams I sought this holy place,\nAnd now with wondering eyes and heart I stand\nBefore this supreme mystery of Love:\nSome kneeling girl with passionless pale face,\nAn angel with a lily in his hand,\nAnd over both the white wings of a Dove.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "annunciation" - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-reading-gaol": { - "title": "“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe did not wear his scarlet coat,\n For blood and wine are red,\nAnd blood and wine were on his hands\n When they found him with the dead,\nThe poor dead woman whom he loved,\n And murdered in her bed.\n\nHe walked amongst the Trial Men\n In a suit of shabby grey;\nA cricket cap was on his head,\n And his step seemed light and gay;\nBut I never saw a man who looked\n So wistfully at the day.\n\nI never saw a man who looked\n With such a wistful eye\nUpon that little tent of blue\n Which prisoners call the sky,\nAnd at every drifting cloud that went\n With sails of silver by.\n\nI walked, with other souls in pain,\n Within another ring,\nAnd was wondering if the man had done\n A great or little thing,\nWhen a voice behind me whispered low,\n “_That fellow’s got to swing_.”\n\nDear Christ! the very prison walls\n Suddenly seemed to reel,\nAnd the sky above my head became\n Like a casque of scorching steel;\nAnd, though I was a soul in pain,\n My pain I could not feel.\n\nI only knew what hunted thought\n Quickened his step, and why\nHe looked upon the garish day\n With such a wistful eye;\nThe man had killed the thing he loved,\n And so he had to die.\n\nYet each man kills the thing he loves,\n By each let this be heard,\nSome do it with a bitter look,\n Some with a flattering word,\nThe coward does it with a kiss,\n The brave man with a sword!\n\nSome kill their love when they are young,\n And some when they are old;\nSome strangle with the hands of Lust,\n Some with the hands of Gold:\nThe kindest use a knife, because\n The dead so soon grow cold.\n\nSome love too little, some too long,\n Some sell, and others buy;\nSome do the deed with many tears,\n And some without a sigh:\nFor each man kills the thing he loves,\n Yet each man does not die.\n\nHe does not die a death of shame\n On a day of dark disgrace,\nNor have a noose about his neck,\n Nor a cloth upon his face,\nNor drop feet foremost through the floor\n Into an empty space.\n\nHe does not sit with silent men\n Who watch him night and day;\nWho watch him when he tries to weep,\n And when he tries to pray;\nWho watch him lest himself should rob\n The prison of its prey.\n\nHe does not wake at dawn to see\n Dread figures throng his room,\nThe shivering Chaplain robed in white,\n The Sheriff stern with gloom,\nAnd the Governor all in shiny black,\n With the yellow face of Doom.\n\nHe does not rise in piteous haste\n To put on convict-clothes,\nWhile some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes\n Each new and nerve-twitched pose,\nFingering a watch whose little ticks\n Are like horrible hammer-blows.\n\nHe does not know that sickening thirst\n That sands one’s throat, before\nThe hangman with his gardener’s gloves\n Slips through the padded door,\nAnd binds one with three leathern thongs,\n That the throat may thirst no more.\n\nHe does not bend his head to hear\n The Burial Office read,\nNor, while the terror of his soul\n Tells him he is not dead,\nCross his own coffin, as he moves\n Into the hideous shed.\n\nHe does not stare upon the air\n Through a little roof of glass:\nHe does not pray with lips of clay\n For his agony to pass;\nNor feel upon his shuddering cheek\n The kiss of Caiaphas.\n\n\n# II.\n\nSix weeks our guardsman walked the yard,\n In the suit of shabby grey:\nHis cricket cap was on his head,\n And his step seemed light and gay,\nBut I never saw a man who looked\n So wistfully at the day.\n\nI never saw a man who looked\n With such a wistful eye\nUpon that little tent of blue\n Which prisoners call the sky,\nAnd at every wandering cloud that trailed\n Its ravelled fleeces by.\n\nHe did not wring his hands, as do\n Those witless men who dare\nTo try to rear the changeling Hope\n In the cave of black Despair:\nHe only looked upon the sun,\n And drank the morning air.\n\nHe did not wring his hands nor weep,\n Nor did he peek or pine,\nBut he drank the air as though it held\n Some healthful anodyne;\nWith open mouth he drank the sun\n As though it had been wine!\n\nAnd I and all the souls in pain,\n Who tramped the other ring,\nForgot if we ourselves had done\n A great or little thing,\nAnd watched with gaze of dull amaze\n The man who had to swing.\n\nAnd strange it was to see him pass\n With a step so light and gay,\nAnd strange it was to see him look\n So wistfully at the day,\nAnd strange it was to think that he\n Had such a debt to pay.\n\nFor oak and elm have pleasant leaves\n That in the springtime shoot:\nBut grim to see is the gallows-tree,\n With its adder-bitten root,\nAnd, green or dry, a man must die\n Before it bears its fruit!\n\nThe loftiest place is that seat of grace\n For which all worldlings try:\nBut who would stand in hempen band\n Upon a scaffold high,\nAnd through a murderer’s collar take\n His last look at the sky?\n\nIt is sweet to dance to violins\n When Love and Life are fair:\nTo dance to flutes, to dance to lutes\n Is delicate and rare:\nBut it is not sweet with nimble feet\n To dance upon the air!\n\nSo with curious eyes and sick surmise\n We watched him day by day,\nAnd wondered if each one of us\n Would end the self-same way,\nFor none can tell to what red Hell\n His sightless soul may stray.\n\nAt last the dead man walked no more\n Amongst the Trial Men,\nAnd I knew that he was standing up\n In the black dock’s dreadful pen,\nAnd that never would I see his face\n In God’s sweet world again.\n\nLike two doomed ships that pass in storm\n We had crossed each other’s way:\nBut we made no sign, we said no word,\n We had no word to say;\nFor we did not meet in the holy night,\n But in the shameful day.\n\nA prison wall was round us both,\n Two outcast men we were:\nThe world had thrust us from its heart,\n And God from out His care:\nAnd the iron gin that waits for Sin\n Had caught us in its snare.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn Debtors’ Yard the stones are hard,\n And the dripping wall is high,\nSo it was there he took the air\n Beneath the leaden sky,\nAnd by each side a Warder walked,\n For fear the man might die.\n\nOr else he sat with those who watched\n His anguish night and day;\nWho watched him when he rose to weep,\n And when he crouched to pray;\nWho watched him lest himself should rob\n Their scaffold of its prey.\n\nThe Governor was strong upon\n The Regulations Act:\nThe Doctor said that Death was but\n A scientific fact:\nAnd twice a day the Chaplain called,\n And left a little tract.\n\nAnd twice a day he smoked his pipe,\n And drank his quart of beer:\nHis soul was resolute, and held\n No hiding-place for fear;\nHe often said that he was glad\n The hangman’s hands were near.\n\nBut why he said so strange a thing\n No Warder dared to ask:\nFor he to whom a watcher’s doom\n Is given as his task,\nMust set a lock upon his lips,\n And make his face a mask.\n\nOr else he might be moved, and try\n To comfort or console:\nAnd what should Human Pity do\n Pent up in Murderers’ Hole?\nWhat word of grace in such a place\n Could help a brother’s soul?\n\nWith slouch and swing around the ring\n We trod the Fools’ Parade!\nWe did not care: we knew we were\n The Devil’s Own Brigade:\nAnd shaven head and feet of lead\n Make a merry masquerade.\n\nWe tore the tarry rope to shreds\n With blunt and bleeding nails;\nWe rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,\n And cleaned the shining rails:\nAnd, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,\n And clattered with the pails.\n\nWe sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,\n We turned the dusty drill:\nWe banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,\n And sweated on the mill:\nBut in the heart of every man\n Terror was lying still.\n\nSo still it lay that every day\n Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:\nAnd we forgot the bitter lot\n That waits for fool and knave,\nTill once, as we tramped in from work,\n We passed an open grave.\n\nWith yawning mouth the yellow hole\n Gaped for a living thing;\nThe very mud cried out for blood\n To the thirsty asphalte ring:\nAnd we knew that ere one dawn grew fair\n Some prisoner had to swing.\n\nRight in we went, with soul intent\n On Death and Dread and Doom:\nThe hangman, with his little bag,\n Went shuffling through the gloom:\nAnd each man trembled as he crept\n Into his numbered tomb.\n\nThat night the empty corridors\n Were full of forms of Fear,\nAnd up and down the iron town\n Stole feet we could not hear,\nAnd through the bars that hide the stars\n White faces seemed to peer.\n\nHe lay as one who lies and dreams\n In a pleasant meadow-land,\nThe watchers watched him as he slept,\n And could not understand\nHow one could sleep so sweet a sleep\n With a hangman close at hand.\n\nBut there is no sleep when men must weep\n Who never yet have wept:\nSo we--the fool, the fraud, the knave--\n That endless vigil kept,\nAnd through each brain on hands of pain\n Another’s terror crept.\n\nAlas! it is a fearful thing\n To feel another’s guilt!\nFor, right within, the sword of Sin\n Pierced to its poisoned hilt,\nAnd as molten lead were the tears we shed\n For the blood we had not spilt.\n\nThe Warders with their shoes of felt\n Crept by each padlocked door,\nAnd peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,\n Grey figures on the floor,\nAnd wondered why men knelt to pray\n Who never prayed before.\n\nAll through the night we knelt and prayed,\n Mad mourners of a corse!\nThe troubled plumes of midnight were\n The plumes upon a hearse:\nAnd bitter wine upon a sponge\n Was the savour of Remorse.\n\nThe grey cock crew, the red cock crew,\n But never came the day:\nAnd crooked shapes of Terror crouched,\n In the corners where we lay:\nAnd each evil sprite that walks by night\n Before us seemed to play.\n\nThey glided past, they glided fast,\n Like travellers through a mist:\nThey mocked the moon in a rigadoon\n Of delicate turn and twist,\nAnd with formal pace and loathsome grace\n The phantoms kept their tryst.\n\nWith mop and mow, we saw them go,\n Slim shadows hand in hand:\nAbout, about, in ghostly rout\n They trod a saraband:\nAnd the damned grotesques made arabesques,\n Like the wind upon the sand!\n\nWith the pirouettes of marionettes,\n They tripped on pointed tread:\nBut with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,\n As their grisly masque they led,\nAnd loud they sang, and long they sang,\n For they sang to wake the dead.\n\n_“Oho!”_ they cried, _“The world is wide,\n But fettered limbs go lame!\nAnd once, or twice, to throw the dice\n Is a gentlemanly game,\nBut he does not win who plays with Sin\n In the secret House of Shame.”_\n\nNo things of air these antics were,\n That frolicked with such glee:\nTo men whose lives were held in gyves,\n And whose feet might not go free,\nAh! wounds of Christ! they were living things,\n Most terrible to see.\n\nAround, around, they waltzed and wound;\n Some wheeled in smirking pairs;\nWith the mincing step of a demirep\n Some sidled up the stairs:\nAnd with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,\n Each helped us at our prayers.\n\nThe morning wind began to moan,\n But still the night went on:\nThrough its giant loom the web of gloom\n Crept till each thread was spun:\nAnd, as we prayed, we grew afraid\n Of the Justice of the Sun.\n\nThe moaning wind went wandering round\n The weeping prison-wall:\nTill like a wheel of turning steel\n We felt the minutes crawl:\nO moaning wind! what had we done\n To have such a seneschal?\n\nAt last I saw the shadowed bars,\n Like a lattice wrought in lead,\nMove right across the whitewashed wall\n That faced my three-plank bed,\nAnd I knew that somewhere in the world\n God’s dreadful dawn was red.\n\nAt six o’clock we cleaned our cells,\n At seven all was still,\nBut the sough and swing of a mighty wing\n The prison seemed to fill,\nFor the Lord of Death with icy breath\n Had entered in to kill.\n\nHe did not pass in purple pomp,\n Nor ride a moon-white steed.\nThree yards of cord and a sliding board\n Are all the gallows’ need:\nSo with rope of shame the Herald came\n To do the secret deed.\n\nWe were as men who through a fen\n Of filthy darkness grope:\nWe did not dare to breathe a prayer,\n Or to give our anguish scope:\nSomething was dead in each of us,\n And what was dead was Hope.\n\nFor Man’s grim Justice goes its way,\n And will not swerve aside:\nIt slays the weak, it slays the strong,\n It has a deadly stride:\nWith iron heel it slays the strong,\n The monstrous parricide!\n\nWe waited for the stroke of eight:\n Each tongue was thick with thirst:\nFor the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate\n That makes a man accursed,\nAnd Fate will use a running noose\n For the best man and the worst.\n\nWe had no other thing to do,\n Save to wait for the sign to come:\nSo, like things of stone in a valley lone,\n Quiet we sat and dumb:\nBut each man’s heart beat thick and quick,\n Like a madman on a drum!\n\nWith sudden shock the prison-clock\n Smote on the shivering air,\nAnd from all the gaol rose up a wail\n Of impotent despair,\nLike the sound that frightened marshes hear\n From some leper in his lair.\n\nAnd as one sees most fearful things\n In the crystal of a dream,\nWe saw the greasy hempen rope\n Hooked to the blackened beam,\nAnd heard the prayer the hangman’s snare\n Strangled into a scream.\n\nAnd all the woe that moved him so\n That he gave that bitter cry,\nAnd the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,\n None knew so well as I:\nFor he who lives more lives than one\n More deaths than one must die.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nThere is no chapel on the day\n On which they hang a man:\nThe Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,\n Or his face is far too wan,\nOr there is that written in his eyes\n Which none should look upon.\n\nSo they kept us close till nigh on noon,\n And then they rang the bell,\nAnd the Warders with their jingling keys\n Opened each listening cell,\nAnd down the iron stair we tramped,\n Each from his separate Hell.\n\nOut into God’s sweet air we went,\n But not in wonted way,\nFor this man’s face was white with fear,\n And that man’s face was grey,\nAnd I never saw sad men who looked\n So wistfully at the day.\n\nI never saw sad men who looked\n With such a wistful eye\nUpon that little tent of blue\n We prisoners called the sky,\nAnd at every careless cloud that passed\n In happy freedom by.\n\nBut there were those amongst us all\n Who walked with downcast head,\nAnd knew that, had each got his due,\n They should have died instead:\nHe had but killed a thing that lived,\n Whilst they had killed the dead.\n\nFor he who sins a second time\n Wakes a dead soul to pain,\nAnd draws it from its spotted shroud,\n And makes it bleed again,\nAnd makes it bleed great gouts of blood,\n And makes it bleed in vain!\n\nLike ape or clown, in monstrous garb\n With crooked arrows starred,\nSilently we went round and round\n The slippery asphalte yard;\nSilently we went round and round,\n And no man spoke a word.\n\nSilently we went round and round,\n And through each hollow mind\nThe Memory of dreadful things\n Rushed like a dreadful wind,\nAnd Horror stalked before each man,\n And Terror crept behind.\n\nThe Warders strutted up and down,\n And kept their herd of brutes,\nTheir uniforms were spick and span,\n And they wore their Sunday suits,\nBut we knew the work they had been at,\n By the quicklime on their boots.\n\nFor where a grave had opened wide,\n There was no grave at all:\nOnly a stretch of mud and sand\n By the hideous prison-wall,\nAnd a little heap of burning lime,\n That the man should have his pall.\n\nFor he has a pall, this wretched man,\n Such as few men can claim:\nDeep down below a prison-yard,\n Naked for greater shame,\nHe lies, with fetters on each foot,\n Wrapt in a sheet of flame!\n\nAnd all the while the burning lime\n Eats flesh and bone away,\nIt eats the brittle bone by night,\n And the soft flesh by day,\nIt eats the flesh and bone by turns,\n But it eats the heart alway.\n\nFor three long years they will not sow\n Or root or seedling there:\nFor three long years the unblessed spot\n Will sterile be and bare,\nAnd look upon the wondering sky\n With unreproachful stare.\n\nThey think a murderer’s heart would taint\n Each simple seed they sow.\nIt is not true! God’s kindly earth\n Is kindlier than men know,\nAnd the red rose would but blow more red,\n The white rose whiter blow.\n\nOut of his mouth a red, red rose!\n Out of his heart a white!\nFor who can say by what strange way,\n Christ brings His will to light,\nSince the barren staff the pilgrim bore\n Bloomed in the great Pope’s sight?\n\nBut neither milk-white rose nor red\n May bloom in prison-air;\nThe shard, the pebble, and the flint,\n Are what they give us there:\nFor flowers have been known to heal\n A common man’s despair.\n\nSo never will wine-red rose or white,\n Petal by petal, fall\nOn that stretch of mud and sand that lies\n By the hideous prison-wall,\nTo tell the men who tramp the yard\n That God’s Son died for all.\n\nYet though the hideous prison-wall\n Still hems him round and round,\nAnd a spirit may not walk by night\n That is with fetters bound,\nAnd a spirit may but weep that lies\n In such unholy ground,\n\nHe is at peace--this wretched man--\n At peace, or will be soon:\nThere is no thing to make him mad,\n Nor does Terror walk at noon,\nFor the lampless Earth in which he lies\n Has neither Sun nor Moon.\n\nThey hanged him as a beast is hanged:\n They did not even toll\nA requiem that might have brought\n Rest to his startled soul,\nBut hurriedly they took him out,\n And hid him in a hole.\n\nThey stripped him of his canvas clothes,\n And gave him to the flies:\nThey mocked the swollen purple throat,\n And the stark and staring eyes:\nAnd with laughter loud they heaped the shroud\n In which their convict lies.\n\nThe Chaplain would not kneel to pray\n By his dishonoured grave:\nNor mark it with that blessed Cross\n That Christ for sinners gave,\nBecause the man was one of those\n Whom Christ came down to save.\n\nYet all is well; he has but passed\n To Life’s appointed bourne:\nAnd alien tears will fill for him\n Pity’s long-broken urn,\nFor his mourners will be outcast men,\n And outcasts always mourn\n\n\n# V.\n\nI know not whether Laws be right,\n Or whether Laws be wrong;\nAll that we know who lie in gaol\n Is that the wall is strong;\nAnd that each day is like a year,\n A year whose days are long.\n\nBut this I know, that every Law\n That men have made for Man,\nSince first Man took his brother’s life,\n And the sad world began,\nBut straws the wheat and saves the chaff\n With a most evil fan.\n\nThis too I know--and wise it were\n If each could know the same--\nThat every prison that men build\n Is built with bricks of shame,\nAnd bound with bars lest Christ should see\n How men their brothers maim.\n\nWith bars they blur the gracious moon,\n And blind the goodly sun:\nAnd they do well to hide their Hell,\n For in it things are done\nThat Son of God nor son of Man\n Ever should look upon!\n\nThe vilest deeds like poison weeds,\n Bloom well in prison-air;\nIt is only what is good in Man\n That wastes and withers there:\nPale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,\n And the Warder is Despair.\n\nFor they starve the little frightened child\n Till it weeps both night and day:\nAnd they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,\n And gibe the old and grey,\nAnd some grow mad, and all grow bad,\n And none a word may say.\n\nEach narrow cell in which we dwell\n Is a foul and dark latrine,\nAnd the fetid breath of living Death\n Chokes up each grated screen,\nAnd all, but Lust, is turned to dust\n In Humanity’s machine.\n\nThe brackish water that we drink\n Creeps with a loathsome slime,\nAnd the bitter bread they weigh in scales\n Is full of chalk and lime,\nAnd Sleep will not lie down, but walks\n Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.\n\nBut though lean Hunger and green Thirst\n Like asp with adder fight,\nWe have little care of prison fare,\n For what chills and kills outright\nIs that every stone one lifts by day\n Becomes one’s heart by night.\n\nWith midnight always in one’s heart,\n And twilight in one’s cell,\nWe turn the crank, or tear the rope,\n Each in his separate Hell,\nAnd the silence is more awful far\n Than the sound of a brazen bell.\n\nAnd never a human voice comes near\n To speak a gentle word:\nAnd the eye that watches through the door\n Is pitiless and hard:\nAnd by all forgot, we rot and rot,\n With soul and body marred.\n\nAnd thus we rust Life’s iron chain\n Degraded and alone:\nAnd some men curse, and some men weep,\n And some men make no moan:\nBut God’s eternal Laws are kind\n And break the heart of stone.\n\nAnd every human heart that breaks,\n In prison-cell or yard,\nIs as that broken box that gave\n Its treasure to the Lord,\nAnd filled the unclean leper’s house\n With the scent of costliest nard.\n\nAh! happy they whose hearts can break\n And peace of pardon win!\nHow else may man make straight his plan\n And cleanse his soul from Sin?\nHow else but through a broken heart\n May Lord Christ enter in?\n\nAnd he of the swollen purple throat,\n And the stark and staring eyes,\nWaits for the holy hands that took\n The Thief to Paradise;\nAnd a broken and a contrite heart\n The Lord will not despise.\n\nThe man in red who reads the Law\n Gave him three weeks of life,\nThree little weeks in which to heal\n His soul of his soul’s strife,\nAnd cleanse from every blot of blood\n The hand that held the knife.\n\nAnd with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,\n The hand that held the steel:\nFor only blood can wipe out blood,\n And only tears can heal:\nAnd the crimson stain that was of Cain\n Became Christ’s snow-white seal.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nIn Reading gaol by Reading town\n There is a pit of shame,\nAnd in it lies a wretched man\n Eaten by teeth of flame,\nIn a burning winding-sheet he lies,\n And his grave has got no name.\n\nAnd there, till Christ call forth the dead,\n In silence let him lie:\nNo need to waste the foolish tear,\n Or heave the windy sigh:\nThe man had killed the thing he loved,\n And so he had to die.\n\nAnd all men kill the thing they love,\n By all let this be heard,\nSome do it with a bitter look,\n Some with a flattering word,\nThe coward does it with a kiss,\n The brave man with a sword!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "ballade-de-marguerite": { - "title": "“Ballade de marguerite”", - "body": "I am weary of lying within the chase\nWhen the knights are meeting in market-place.\n\nNay, go not thou to the red-roofed town\nLest the hoofs of the war-horse tread thee down.\n\nBut I would not go where the Squires ride,\nI would only walk by my Lady’s side.\n\nAlack! and alack! thou art overbold,\nA Forester’s son may not eat off gold.\n\nWill she love me the less that my Father is seen\nEach Martinmas day in a doublet green?\n\nPerchance she is sewing at tapestrie,\nSpindle and loom are not meet for thee.\n\nAh, if she is working the arras bright\nI might ravel the threads by the fire-light.\n\nPerchance she is hunting of the deer,\nHow could you follow o’er hill and mere?\n\nAh, if she is riding with the court,\nI might run beside her and wind the morte.\n\nPerchance she is kneeling in St. Denys,\n(On her soul may our Lady have gramercy!)\n\nAh, if she is praying in lone chapelle,\nI might swing the censer and ring the bell.\n\nCome in, my son, for you look sae pale,\nThe father shall fill thee a stoup of ale.\n\nBut who are these knights in bright array?\nIs it a pageant the rich folks play?\n\n’T is the King of England from over sea,\nWho has come unto visit our fair countrie.\n\nBut why does the curfew toll sae low?\nAnd why do the mourners walk a-row?\n\nO ’t is Hugh of Amiens my sister’s son\nWho is lying stark, for his day is done.\n\nNay, nay, for I see white lilies clear,\nIt is no strong man who lies on the bier.\n\nO ’t is old Dame Jeannette that kept the hall,\nI knew she would die at the autumn fall.\n\nDame Jeannette had not that gold-brown hair,\nOld Jeannette was not a maiden fair.\n\nO ’t is none of our kith and none of our kin,\n(Her soul may our Lady assoil from sin!)\n\nBut I hear the boy’s voice chaunting sweet,\n“Elle est morte, la Marguerite.”\n\nCome in, my son, and lie on the bed,\nAnd let the dead folk bury their dead.\n\nO mother, you know I loved her true:\nO mother, hath one grave room for two?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-burden-of-itys": { - "title": "“The Burden of Itys”", - "body": "The English Thames is holier far than Rome,\n Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea\nBreaking across the woodland, with the foam\n Of meadow-sweet and white anemone\nTo fleck their blue waves,--God is likelier there\nThan hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear!\n\nThose violet-gleaming butterflies that take\n Yon creamy lily for their pavilion\nAre monsignores, and where the rushes shake\n A lazy pike lies basking in the sun,\nHis eyes half shut,--he is some mitred old\nBishop in _partibus_! look at those gaudy scales all green and gold.\n\nThe wind the restless prisoner of the trees\n Does well for Palaestrina, one would say\nThe mighty master’s hands were on the keys\n Of the Maria organ, which they play\nWhen early on some sapphire Easter morn\nIn a high litter red as blood or sin the Pope is borne\n\nFrom his dark House out to the Balcony\n Above the bronze gates and the crowded square,\nWhose very fountains seem for ecstasy\n To toss their silver lances in the air,\nAnd stretching out weak hands to East and West\nIn vain sends peace to peaceless lands, to restless nations rest.\n\nIs not yon lingering orange after-glow\n That stays to vex the moon more fair than all\nRome’s lordliest pageants! strange, a year ago\n I knelt before some crimson Cardinal\nWho bare the Host across the Esquiline,\nAnd now--those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine.\n\nThe blue-green beanfields yonder, tremulous\n With the last shower, sweeter perfume bring\nThrough this cool evening than the odorous\n Flame-jewelled censers the young deacons swing,\nWhen the grey priest unlocks the curtained shrine,\nAnd makes God’s body from the common fruit of corn and vine.\n\nPoor Fra Giovanni bawling at the mass\n Were out of tune now, for a small brown bird\nSings overhead, and through the long cool grass\n I see that throbbing throat which once I heard\nOn starlit hills of flower-starred Arcady,\nOnce where the white and crescent sand of Salamis meets sea.\n\nSweet is the swallow twittering on the eaves\n At daybreak, when the mower whets his scythe,\nAnd stock-doves murmur, and the milkmaid leaves\n Her little lonely bed, and carols blithe\nTo see the heavy-lowing cattle wait\nStretching their huge and dripping mouths across the farmyard gate.\n\nAnd sweet the hops upon the Kentish leas,\n And sweet the wind that lifts the new-mown hay,\nAnd sweet the fretful swarms of grumbling bees\n That round and round the linden blossoms play;\nAnd sweet the heifer breathing in the stall,\nAnd the green bursting figs that hang upon the red-brick wall,\n\nAnd sweet to hear the cuckoo mock the spring\n While the last violet loiters by the well,\nAnd sweet to hear the shepherd Daphnis sing\n The song of Linus through a sunny dell\nOf warm Arcadia where the corn is gold\nAnd the slight lithe-limbed reapers dance about the wattled fold.\n\nAnd sweet with young Lycoris to recline\n In some Illyrian valley far away,\nWhere canopied on herbs amaracine\n We too might waste the summer-trancèd day\nMatching our reeds in sportive rivalry,\nWhile far beneath us frets the troubled purple of the sea.\n\nBut sweeter far if silver-sandalled foot\n Of some long-hidden God should ever tread\nThe Nuneham meadows, if with reeded flute\n Pressed to his lips some Faun might raise his head\nBy the green water-flags, ah! sweet indeed\nTo see the heavenly herdsman call his white-fleeced flock to feed.\n\nThen sing to me thou tuneful chorister,\n Though what thou sing’st be thine own requiem!\nTell me thy tale thou hapless chronicler\n Of thine own tragedies! do not contemn\nThese unfamiliar haunts, this English field,\nFor many a lovely coronal our northern isle can yield\n\nWhich Grecian meadows know not, many a rose\n Which all day long in vales Aeolian\nA lad might seek in vain for over-grows\n Our hedges like a wanton courtesan\nUnthrifty of its beauty; lilies too\nIlissos never mirrored star our streams, and cockles blue\n\nDot the green wheat which, though they are the signs\n For swallows going south, would never spread\nTheir azure tents between the Attic vines;\n Even that little weed of ragged red,\nWhich bids the robin pipe, in Arcady\nWould be a trespasser, and many an unsung elegy\n\nSleeps in the reeds that fringe our winding Thames\n Which to awake were sweeter ravishment\nThan ever Syrinx wept for; diadems\n Of brown bee-studded orchids which were meant\nFor Cytheraea’s brows are hidden here\nUnknown to Cytheraea, and by yonder pasturing steer\n\nThere is a tiny yellow daffodil,\n The butterfly can see it from afar,\nAlthough one summer evening’s dew could fill\n Its little cup twice over ere the star\nHad called the lazy shepherd to his fold\nAnd be no prodigal; each leaf is flecked with spotted gold\n\nAs if Jove’s gorgeous leman Danae\n Hot from his gilded arms had stooped to kiss\nThe trembling petals, or young Mercury\n Low-flying to the dusky ford of Dis\nHad with one feather of his pinions\nJust brushed them! the slight stem which bears the burden of its suns\n\nIs hardly thicker than the gossamer,\n Or poor Arachne’s silver tapestry,--\nMen say it bloomed upon the sepulchre\n Of One I sometime worshipped, but to me\nIt seems to bring diviner memories\nOf faun-loved Heliconian glades and blue nymph-haunted seas,\n\nOf an untrodden vale at Tempe where\n On the clear river’s marge Narcissus lies,\nThe tangle of the forest in his hair,\n The silence of the woodland in his eyes,\nWooing that drifting imagery which is\nNo sooner kissed than broken; memories of Salmacis\n\nWho is not boy nor girl and yet is both,\n Fed by two fires and unsatisfied\nThrough their excess, each passion being loth\n For love’s own sake to leave the other’s side\nYet killing love by staying; memories\nOf Oreads peeping through the leaves of silent moonlit trees,\n\nOf lonely Ariadne on the wharf\n At Naxos, when she saw the treacherous crew\nFar out at sea, and waved her crimson scarf\n And called false Theseus back again nor knew\nThat Dionysos on an amber pard\nWas close behind her; memories of what Maeonia’s bard\n\nWith sightless eyes beheld, the wall of Troy,\n Queen Helen lying in the ivory room,\nAnd at her side an amorous red-lipped boy\n Trimming with dainty hand his helmet’s plume,\nAnd far away the moil, the shout, the groan,\nAs Hector shielded off the spear and Ajax hurled the stone;\n\nOf wingèd Perseus with his flawless sword\n Cleaving the snaky tresses of the witch,\nAnd all those tales imperishably stored\n In little Grecian urns, freightage more rich\nThan any gaudy galleon of Spain\nBare from the Indies ever! these at least bring back again,\n\nFor well I know they are not dead at all,\n The ancient Gods of Grecian poesy:\nThey are asleep, and when they hear thee call\n Will wake and think ’t is very Thessaly,\nThis Thames the Daulian waters, this cool glade\nThe yellow-irised mead where once young Itys laughed and played.\n\nIf it was thou dear jasmine-cradled bird\n Who from the leafy stillness of thy throne\nSang to the wondrous boy, until he heard\n The horn of Atalanta faintly blown\nAcross the Cumnor hills, and wandering\nThrough Bagley wood at evening found the Attic poets’ spring,--\n\nAh! tiny sober-suited advocate\n That pleadest for the moon against the day!\nIf thou didst make the shepherd seek his mate\n On that sweet questing, when Proserpina\nForgot it was not Sicily and leant\nAcross the mossy Sandford stile in ravished wonderment,--\n\nLight-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood!\n If ever thou didst soothe with melody\nOne of that little clan, that brotherhood\n Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany\nMore than the perfect sun of Raphael\nAnd is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well.\n\nSing on! sing on! let the dull world grow young,\n Let elemental things take form again,\nAnd the old shapes of Beauty walk among\n The simple garths and open crofts, as when\nThe son of Leto bare the willow rod,\nAnd the soft sheep and shaggy goats followed the boyish God.\n\nSing on! sing on! and Bacchus will be here\n Astride upon his gorgeous Indian throne,\nAnd over whimpering tigers shake the spear\n With yellow ivy crowned and gummy cone,\nWhile at his side the wanton Bassarid\nWill throw the lion by the mane and catch the mountain kid!\n\nSing on! and I will wear the leopard skin,\n And steal the moonèd wings of Ashtaroth,\nUpon whose icy chariot we could win\n Cithaeron in an hour ere the froth\nHas over-brimmed the wine-vat or the Faun\nCeased from the treading! ay, before the flickering lamp of dawn\n\nHas scared the hooting owlet to its nest,\n And warned the bat to close its filmy vans,\nSome Maenad girl with vine-leaves on her breast\n Will filch their beech-nuts from the sleeping Pans\nSo softly that the little nested thrush\nWill never wake, and then with shrilly laugh and leap will rush\n\nDown the green valley where the fallen dew\n Lies thick beneath the elm and count her store,\nTill the brown Satyrs in a jolly crew\n Trample the loosestrife down along the shore,\nAnd where their hornèd master sits in state\nBring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate!\n\nSing on! and soon with passion-wearied face\n Through the cool leaves Apollo’s lad will come,\nThe Tyrian prince his bristled boar will chase\n Adown the chestnut-copses all a-bloom,\nAnd ivory-limbed, grey-eyed, with look of pride,\nAfter yon velvet-coated deer the virgin maid will ride.\n\nSing on! and I the dying boy will see\n Stain with his purple blood the waxen bell\nThat overweighs the jacinth, and to me\n The wretched Cyprian her woe will tell,\nAnd I will kiss her mouth and streaming eyes,\nAnd lead her to the myrtle-hidden grove where Adon lies!\n\nCry out aloud on Itys! memory\n That foster-brother of remorse and pain\nDrops poison in mine ear,--O to be free,\n To burn one’s old ships! and to launch again\nInto the white-plumed battle of the waves\nAnd fight old Proteus for the spoil of coral-flowered caves!\n\nO for Medea with her poppied spell!\n O for the secret of the Colchian shrine!\nO for one leaf of that pale asphodel\n Which binds the tired brows of Proserpine,\nAnd sheds such wondrous dews at eve that she\nDreams of the fields of Enna, by the far Sicilian sea,\n\nWhere oft the golden-girdled bee she chased\n From lily to lily on the level mead,\nEre yet her sombre Lord had bid her taste\n The deadly fruit of that pomegranate seed,\nEre the black steeds had harried her away\nDown to the faint and flowerless land, the sick and sunless day.\n\nO for one midnight and as paramour\n The Venus of the little Melian farm!\nO that some antique statue for one hour\n Might wake to passion, and that I could charm\nThe Dawn at Florence from its dumb despair,\nMix with those mighty limbs and make that giant breast my lair!\n\nSing on! sing on! I would be drunk with life,\n Drunk with the trampled vintage of my youth,\nI would forget the wearying wasted strife,\n The riven veil, the Gorgon eyes of Truth,\nThe prayerless vigil and the cry for prayer,\nThe barren gifts, the lifted arms, the dull insensate air!\n\nSing on! sing on! O feathered Niobe,\n Thou canst make sorrow beautiful, and steal\nFrom joy its sweetest music, not as we\n Who by dead voiceless silence strive to heal\nOur too untented wounds, and do but keep\nPain barricadoed in our hearts, and murder pillowed sleep.\n\nSing louder yet, why must I still behold\n The wan white face of that deserted Christ,\nWhose bleeding hands my hands did once enfold,\n Whose smitten lips my lips so oft have kissed,\nAnd now in mute and marble misery\nSits in his lone dishonoured House and weeps, perchance for me?\n\nO Memory cast down thy wreathèd shell!\n Break thy hoarse lute O sad Melpomene!\nO Sorrow, Sorrow keep thy cloistered cell\n Nor dim with tears this limpid Castaly!\nCease, Philomel, thou dost the forest wrong\nTo vex its sylvan quiet with such wild impassioned song!\n\nCease, cease, or if ’t is anguish to be dumb\n Take from the pastoral thrush her simpler air,\nWhose jocund carelessness doth more become\n This English woodland than thy keen despair,\nAh! cease and let the north wind bear thy lay\nBack to the rocky hills of Thrace, the stormy Daulian bay.\n\nA moment more, the startled leaves had stirred,\n Endymion would have passed across the mead\nMoonstruck with love, and this still Thames had heard\n Pan plash and paddle groping for some reed\nTo lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid\nWho for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid.\n\nA moment more, the waking dove had cooed,\n The silver daughter of the silver sea\nWith the fond gyves of clinging hands had wooed\n Her wanton from the chase, and Dryope\nHad thrust aside the branches of her oak\nTo see the lusty gold-haired lad rein in his snorting yoke.\n\nA moment more, the trees had stooped to kiss\n Pale Daphne just awakening from the swoon\nOf tremulous laurels, lonely Salmacis\n Had bared his barren beauty to the moon,\nAnd through the vale with sad voluptuous smile\nAntinous had wandered, the red lotus of the Nile\n\nDown leaning from his black and clustering hair,\n To shade those slumberous eyelids’ caverned bliss,\nOr else on yonder grassy slope with bare\n High-tuniced limbs unravished Artemis\nHad bade her hounds give tongue, and roused the deer\nFrom his green ambuscade with shrill halloo and pricking spear.\n\nLie still, lie still, O passionate heart, lie still!\n O Melancholy, fold thy raven wing!\nO sobbing Dryad, from thy hollow hill\n Come not with such despondent answering!\nNo more thou wingèd Marsyas complain,\nApollo loveth not to hear such troubled songs of pain!\n\nIt was a dream, the glade is tenantless,\n No soft Ionian laughter moves the air,\nThe Thames creeps on in sluggish leadenness,\n And from the copse left desolate and bare\nFled is young Bacchus with his revelry,\nYet still from Nuneham wood there comes that thrilling melody\n\nSo sad, that one might think a human heart\n Brake in each separate note, a quality\nWhich music sometimes has, being the Art\n Which is most nigh to tears and memory;\nPoor mourning Philomel, what dost thou fear?\nThy sister doth not haunt these fields, Pandion is not here,\n\nHere is no cruel Lord with murderous blade,\n No woven web of bloody heraldries,\nBut mossy dells for roving comrades made,\n Warm valleys where the tired student lies\nWith half-shut book, and many a winding walk\nWhere rustic lovers stray at eve in happy simple talk.\n\nThe harmless rabbit gambols with its young\n Across the trampled towing-path, where late\nA troop of laughing boys in jostling throng\n Cheered with their noisy cries the racing eight;\nThe gossamer, with ravelled silver threads,\nWorks at its little loom, and from the dusky red-eaved sheds\n\nOf the lone Farm a flickering light shines out\n Where the swinked shepherd drives his bleating flock\nBack to their wattled sheep-cotes, a faint shout\n Comes from some Oxford boat at Sandford lock,\nAnd starts the moor-hen from the sedgy rill,\nAnd the dim lengthening shadows flit like swallows up the hill.\n\nThe heron passes homeward to the mere,\n The blue mist creeps among the shivering trees,\nGold world by world the silent stars appear,\n And like a blossom blown before the breeze\nA white moon drifts across the shimmering sky,\nMute arbitress of all thy sad, thy rapturous threnody.\n\nShe does not heed thee, wherefore should she heed,\n She knows Endymion is not far away;\n’Tis I, ’tis I, whose soul is as the reed\n Which has no message of its own to play,\nSo pipes another’s bidding, it is I,\nDrifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.\n\nAh! the brown bird has ceased: one exquisite trill\n About the sombre woodland seems to cling\nDying in music, else the air is still,\n So still that one might hear the bat’s small wing\nWander and wheel above the pines, or tell\nEach tiny dew-drop dripping from the bluebell’s brimming cell.\n\nAnd far away across the lengthening wold,\n Across the willowy flats and thickets brown,\nMagdalen’s tall tower tipped with tremulous gold\n Marks the long High Street of the little town,\nAnd warns me to return; I must not wait,\nHark! ’t is the curfew booming from the bell at Christ Church gate.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "canzonet": { - "title": "“Canzonet”", - "body": " I have no store\nOf gryphon-guarded gold;\n Now, as before,\nBare is the shepherd’s fold.\n Rubies nor pearls\nHave I to gem thy throat;\n Yet woodland girls\nHave loved the shepherd’s note.\n\n Then pluck a reed\nAnd bid me sing to thee,\n For I would feed\nThine ears with melody,\n Who art more fair\nThan fairest fleur-de-lys,\n More sweet and rare\nThan sweetest ambergris.\n\n What dost thou fear?\nYoung Hyacinth is slain,\n Pan is not here,\nAnd will not come again.\n No hornèd Faun\nTreads down the yellow leas,\n No God at dawn\nSteals through the olive trees.\n\n Hylas is dead,\nNor will he e’er divine\n Those little red\nRose-petalled lips of thine.\n On the high hill\nNo ivory dryads play,\n Silver and still\nSinks the sad autumn day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "charmides": { - "title": "“Charmides”", - "body": "# I.\n\nHe was a Grecian lad, who coming home\n With pulpy figs and wine from Sicily\nStood at his galley’s prow, and let the foam\n Blow through his crisp brown curls unconsciously,\nAnd holding wave and wind in boy’s despite\nPeered from his dripping seat across the wet and stormy night.\n\nTill with the dawn he saw a burnished spear\n Like a thin thread of gold against the sky,\nAnd hoisted sail, and strained the creaking gear,\n And bade the pilot head her lustily\nAgainst the nor’west gale, and all day long\nHeld on his way, and marked the rowers’ time with measured song.\n\nAnd when the faint Corinthian hills were red\n Dropped anchor in a little sandy bay,\nAnd with fresh boughs of olive crowned his head,\n And brushed from cheek and throat the hoary spray,\nAnd washed his limbs with oil, and from the hold\nBrought out his linen tunic and his sandals brazen-soled,\n\nAnd a rich robe stained with the fishers’ juice\n Which of some swarthy trader he had bought\nUpon the sunny quay at Syracuse,\n And was with Tyrian broideries inwrought,\nAnd by the questioning merchants made his way\nUp through the soft and silver woods, and when the labouring day\n\nHad spun its tangled web of crimson cloud,\n Clomb the high hill, and with swift silent feet\nCrept to the fane unnoticed by the crowd\n Of busy priests, and from some dark retreat\nWatched the young swains his frolic playmates bring\nThe firstling of their little flock, and the shy shepherd fling\n\nThe crackling salt upon the flame, or hang\n His studded crook against the temple wall\nTo Her who keeps away the ravenous fang\n Of the base wolf from homestead and from stall;\nAnd then the clear-voiced maidens ’gan to sing,\nAnd to the altar each man brought some goodly offering,\n\nA beechen cup brimming with milky foam,\n A fair cloth wrought with cunning imagery\nOf hounds in chase, a waxen honey-comb\n Dripping with oozy gold which scarce the bee\nHad ceased from building, a black skin of oil\nMeet for the wrestlers, a great boar the fierce and white-tusked spoil\n\nStolen from Artemis that jealous maid\n To please Athena, and the dappled hide\nOf a tall stag who in some mountain glade\n Had met the shaft; and then the herald cried,\nAnd from the pillared precinct one by one\nWent the glad Greeks well pleased that they their simple vows had done.\n\nAnd the old priest put out the waning fires\n Save that one lamp whose restless ruby glowed\nFor ever in the cell, and the shrill lyres\n Came fainter on the wind, as down the road\nIn joyous dance these country folk did pass,\nAnd with stout hands the warder closed the gates of polished brass.\n\nLong time he lay and hardly dared to breathe,\n And heard the cadenced drip of spilt-out wine,\nAnd the rose-petals falling from the wreath\n As the night breezes wandered through the shrine,\nAnd seemed to be in some entrancèd swoon\nTill through the open roof above the full and brimming moon\n\nFlooded with sheeny waves the marble floor,\n When from his nook up leapt the venturous lad,\nAnd flinging wide the cedar-carven door\n Beheld an awful image saffron-clad\nAnd armed for battle! the gaunt Griffin glared\nFrom the huge helm, and the long lance of wreck and ruin flared\n\nLike a red rod of flame, stony and steeled\n The Gorgon’s head its leaden eyeballs rolled,\nAnd writhed its snaky horrors through the shield,\n And gaped aghast with bloodless lips and cold\nIn passion impotent, while with blind gaze\nThe blinking owl between the feet hooted in shrill amaze.\n\nThe lonely fisher as he trimmed his lamp\n Far out at sea off Sunium, or cast\nThe net for tunnies, heard a brazen tramp\n Of horses smite the waves, and a wild blast\nDivide the folded curtains of the night,\nAnd knelt upon the little poop, and prayed in holy fright.\n\nAnd guilty lovers in their venery\n Forgat a little while their stolen sweets,\nDeeming they heard dread Dian’s bitter cry;\n And the grim watchmen on their lofty seats\nRan to their shields in haste precipitate,\nOr strained black-bearded throats across the dusky parapet.\n\nFor round the temple rolled the clang of arms,\n And the twelve Gods leapt up in marble fear,\nAnd the air quaked with dissonant alarums\n Till huge Poseidon shook his mighty spear,\nAnd on the frieze the prancing horses neighed,\nAnd the low tread of hurrying feet rang from the cavalcade.\n\nReady for death with parted lips he stood,\n And well content at such a price to see\nThat calm wide brow, that terrible maidenhood,\n The marvel of that pitiless chastity,\nAh! well content indeed, for never wight\nSince Troy’s young shepherd prince had seen so wonderful a sight.\n\nReady for death he stood, but lo! the air\n Grew silent, and the horses ceased to neigh,\nAnd off his brow he tossed the clustering hair,\n And from his limbs he throw the cloak away;\nFor whom would not such love make desperate?\nAnd nigher came, and touched her throat, and with hands violate\n\nUndid the cuirass, and the crocus gown,\n And bared the breasts of polished ivory,\nTill from the waist the peplos falling down\n Left visible the secret mystery\nWhich to no lover will Athena show,\nThe grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of snow.\n\nThose who have never known a lover’s sin\n Let them not read my ditty, it will be\nTo their dull ears so musicless and thin\n That they will have no joy of it, but ye\nTo whose wan cheeks now creeps the lingering smile,\nYe who have learned who Eros is,--O listen yet awhile.\n\nA little space he let his greedy eyes\n Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight\nHalf swooned for surfeit of such luxuries,\n And then his lips in hungering delight\nFed on her lips, and round the towered neck\nHe flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion’s will to check.\n\nNever I ween did lover hold such tryst,\n For all night long he murmured honeyed word,\nAnd saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed\n Her pale and argent body undisturbed,\nAnd paddled with the polished throat, and pressed\nHis hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast.\n\nIt was as if Numidian javelins\n Pierced through and through his wild and whirling brain,\nAnd his nerves thrilled like throbbing violins\n In exquisite pulsation, and the pain\nWas such sweet anguish that he never drew\nHis lips from hers till overhead the lark of warning flew.\n\nThey who have never seen the daylight peer\n Into a darkened room, and drawn the curtain,\nAnd with dull eyes and wearied from some dear\n And worshipped body risen, they for certain\nWill never know of what I try to sing,\nHow long the last kiss was, how fond and late his lingering.\n\nThe moon was girdled with a crystal rim,\n The sign which shipmen say is ominous\nOf wrath in heaven, the wan stars were dim,\n And the low lightening east was tremulous\nWith the faint fluttering wings of flying dawn,\nEre from the silent sombre shrine his lover had withdrawn.\n\nDown the steep rock with hurried feet and fast\n Clomb the brave lad, and reached the cave of Pan,\nAnd heard the goat-foot snoring as he passed,\n And leapt upon a grassy knoll and ran\nLike a young fawn unto an olive wood\nWhich in a shady valley by the well-built city stood;\n\nAnd sought a little stream, which well he knew,\n For oftentimes with boyish careless shout\nThe green and crested grebe he would pursue,\n Or snare in woven net the silver trout,\nAnd down amid the startled reeds he lay\nPanting in breathless sweet affright, and waited for the day.\n\nOn the green bank he lay, and let one hand\n Dip in the cool dark eddies listlessly,\nAnd soon the breath of morning came and fanned\n His hot flushed cheeks, or lifted wantonly\nThe tangled curls from off his forehead, while\nHe on the running water gazed with strange and secret smile.\n\nAnd soon the shepherd in rough woollen cloak\n With his long crook undid the wattled cotes,\nAnd from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke\n Curled through the air across the ripening oats,\nAnd on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed\nAs through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy cattle strayed.\n\nAnd when the light-foot mower went afield\n Across the meadows laced with threaded dew,\nAnd the sheep bleated on the misty weald,\n And from its nest the waking corncrake flew,\nSome woodmen saw him lying by the stream\nAnd marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem,\n\nNor deemed him born of mortals, and one said,\n “It is young Hylas, that false runaway\nWho with a Naiad now would make his bed\n Forgetting Herakles,” but others, “Nay,\nIt is Narcissus, his own paramour,\nThose are the fond and crimson lips no woman can allure.”\n\nAnd when they nearer came a third one cried,\n “It is young Dionysos who has hid\nHis spear and fawnskin by the river side\n Weary of hunting with the Bassarid,\nAnd wise indeed were we away to fly:\nThey live not long who on the gods immortal come to spy.”\n\nSo turned they back, and feared to look behind,\n And told the timid swain how they had seen\nAmid the reeds some woodland god reclined,\n And no man dared to cross the open green,\nAnd on that day no olive-tree was slain,\nNor rushes cut, but all deserted was the fair domain,\n\nSave when the neat-herd’s lad, his empty pail\n Well slung upon his back, with leap and bound\nRaced on the other side, and stopped to hail,\n Hoping that he some comrade new had found,\nAnd gat no answer, and then half afraid\nPassed on his simple way, or down the still and silent glade\n\nA little girl ran laughing from the farm,\n Not thinking of love’s secret mysteries,\nAnd when she saw the white and gleaming arm\n And all his manlihood, with longing eyes\nWhose passion mocked her sweet virginity\nWatched him awhile, and then stole back sadly and wearily.\n\nFar off he heard the city’s hum and noise,\n And now and then the shriller laughter where\nThe passionate purity of brown-limbed boys\n Wrestled or raced in the clear healthful air,\nAnd now and then a little tinkling bell\nAs the shorn wether led the sheep down to the mossy well.\n\nThrough the grey willows danced the fretful gnat,\n The grasshopper chirped idly from the tree,\nIn sleek and oily coat the water-rat\n Breasting the little ripples manfully\nMade for the wild-duck’s nest, from bough to bough\nHopped the shy finch, and the huge tortoise crept across the slough.\n\nOn the faint wind floated the silky seeds\n As the bright scythe swept through the waving grass,\nThe ouzel-cock splashed circles in the reeds\n And flecked with silver whorls the forest’s glass,\nWhich scarce had caught again its imagery\nEre from its bed the dusky tench leapt at the dragon-fly.\n\nBut little care had he for any thing\n Though up and down the beech the squirrel played,\nAnd from the copse the linnet ’gan to sing\n To its brown mate its sweetest serenade;\nAh! little care indeed, for he had seen\nThe breasts of Pallas and the naked wonder of the Queen.\n\nBut when the herdsman called his straggling goats\n With whistling pipe across the rocky road,\nAnd the shard-beetle with its trumpet-notes\n Boomed through the darkening woods, and seemed to bode\nOf coming storm, and the belated crane\nPassed homeward like a shadow, and the dull big drops of rain\n\nFell on the pattering fig-leaves, up he rose,\n And from the gloomy forest went his way\nPast sombre homestead and wet orchard-close,\n And came at last unto a little quay,\nAnd called his mates aboard, and took his seat\nOn the high poop, and pushed from land, and loosed the dripping sheet,\n\nAnd steered across the bay, and when nine suns\n Passed down the long and laddered way of gold,\nAnd nine pale moons had breathed their orisons\n To the chaste stars their confessors, or told\nTheir dearest secret to the downy moth\nThat will not fly at noonday, through the foam and surging froth\n\nCame a great owl with yellow sulphurous eyes\n And lit upon the ship, whose timbers creaked\nAs though the lading of three argosies\n Were in the hold, and flapped its wings and shrieked,\nAnd darkness straightway stole across the deep,\nSheathed was Orion’s sword, dread Mars himself fled down the steep,\n\nAnd the moon hid behind a tawny mask\n Of drifting cloud, and from the ocean’s marge\nRose the red plume, the huge and hornèd casque,\n The seven-cubit spear, the brazen targe!\nAnd clad in bright and burnished panoply\nAthena strode across the stretch of sick and shivering sea!\n\nTo the dull sailors’ sight her loosened looks\n Seemed like the jagged storm-rack, and her feet\nOnly the spume that floats on hidden rocks,\n And, marking how the rising waters beat\nAgainst the rolling ship, the pilot cried\nTo the young helmsman at the stern to luff to windward side\n\nBut he, the overbold adulterer,\n A dear profaner of great mysteries,\nAn ardent amorous idolater,\n When he beheld those grand relentless eyes\nLaughed loud for joy, and crying out “I come”\nLeapt from the lofty poop into the chill and churning foam.\n\nThen fell from the high heaven one bright star,\n One dancer left the circling galaxy,\nAnd back to Athens on her clattering car\n In all the pride of venged divinity\nPale Pallas swept with shrill and steely clank,\nAnd a few gurgling bubbles rose where her boy lover sank.\n\nAnd the mast shuddered as the gaunt owl flew\n With mocking hoots after the wrathful Queen,\nAnd the old pilot bade the trembling crew\n Hoist the big sail, and told how he had seen\nClose to the stern a dim and giant form,\nAnd like a dipping swallow the stout ship dashed through the storm.\n\nAnd no man dared to speak of Charmides\n Deeming that he some evil thing had wrought,\nAnd when they reached the strait Symplegades\n They beached their galley on the shore, and sought\nThe toll-gate of the city hastily,\nAnd in the market showed their brown and pictured pottery.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBut some good Triton-god had ruth, and bare\n The boy’s drowned body back to Grecian land,\nAnd mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair\n And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clenching hand;\nSome brought sweet spices from far Araby,\nAnd others bade the halcyon sing her softest lullaby.\n\nAnd when he neared his old Athenian home,\n A mighty billow rose up suddenly\nUpon whose oily back the clotted foam\n Lay diapered in some strange fantasy,\nAnd clasping him unto its glassy breast\nSwept landward, like a white-maned steed upon a venturous quest!\n\nNow where Colonos leans unto the sea\n There lies a long and level stretch of lawn;\nThe rabbit knows it, and the mountain bee\n For it deserts Hymettus, and the Faun\nIs not afraid, for never through the day\nComes a cry ruder than the shout of shepherd lads at play.\n\nBut often from the thorny labyrinth\n And tangled branches of the circling wood\nThe stealthy hunter sees young Hyacinth\n Hurling the polished disk, and draws his hood\nOver his guilty gaze, and creeps away,\nNor dares to wind his horn, or--else at the first break of day\n\nThe Dryads come and throw the leathern ball\n Along the reedy shore, and circumvent\nSome goat-eared Pan to be their seneschal\n For fear of bold Poseidon’s ravishment,\nAnd loose their girdles, with shy timorous eyes,\nLest from the surf his azure arms and purple beard should rise.\n\nOn this side and on that a rocky cave,\n Hung with the yellow-belled laburnum, stands\nSmooth is the beach, save where some ebbing wave\n Leaves its faint outline etched upon the sands,\nAs though it feared to be too soon forgot\nBy the green rush, its playfellow,--and yet, it is a spot\n\nSo small, that the inconstant butterfly\n Could steal the hoarded money from each flower\nEre it was noon, and still not satisfy\n Its over-greedy love,--within an hour\nA sailor boy, were he but rude enow\nTo land and pluck a garland for his galley’s painted prow,\n\nWould almost leave the little meadow bare,\n For it knows nothing of great pageantry,\nOnly a few narcissi here and there\n Stand separate in sweet austerity,\nDotting the unmown grass with silver stars,\nAnd here and there a daffodil waves tiny scimitars.\n\nHither the billow brought him, and was glad\n Of such dear servitude, and where the land\nWas virgin of all waters laid the lad\n Upon the golden margent of the strand,\nAnd like a lingering lover oft returned\nTo kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned,\n\nEre the wet seas had quenched that holocaust,\n That self-fed flame, that passionate lustihead,\nEre grisly death with chill and nipping frost\n Had withered up those lilies white and red\nWhich, while the boy would through the forest range,\nAnswered each other in a sweet antiphonal counter-change.\n\nAnd when at dawn the wood-nymphs, hand-in-hand,\n Threaded the bosky dell, their satyr spied\nThe boy’s pale body stretched upon the sand,\n And feared Poseidon’s treachery, and cried,\nAnd like bright sunbeams flitting through a glade\nEach startled Dryad sought some safe and leafy ambuscade.\n\nSave one white girl, who deemed it would not be\n So dread a thing to feel a sea-god’s arms\nCrushing her breasts in amorous tyranny,\n And longed to listen to those subtle charms\nInsidious lovers weave when they would win\nSome fencèd fortress, and stole back again, nor thought it sin\n\nTo yield her treasure unto one so fair,\n And lay beside him, thirsty with love’s drouth,\nCalled him soft names, played with his tangled hair,\n And with hot lips made havoc of his mouth\nAfraid he might not wake, and then afraid\nLest he might wake too soon, fled back, and then, fond renegade,\n\nReturned to fresh assault, and all day long\n Sat at his side, and laughed at her new toy,\nAnd held his hand, and sang her sweetest song,\n Then frowned to see how froward was the boy\nWho would not with her maidenhood entwine,\nNor knew that three days since his eyes had looked on Proserpine;\n\nNor knew what sacrilege his lips had done,\n But said, “He will awake, I know him well,\nHe will awake at evening when the sun\n Hangs his red shield on Corinth’s citadel;\nThis sleep is but a cruel treachery\nTo make me love him more, and in some cavern of the sea\n\nDeeper than ever falls the fisher’s line\n Already a huge Triton blows his horn,\nAnd weaves a garland from the crystalline\n And drifting ocean-tendrils to adorn\nThe emerald pillars of our bridal bed,\nFor sphered in foaming silver, and with coral crownèd head,\n\nWe two will sit upon a throne of pearl,\n And a blue wave will be our canopy,\nAnd at our feet the water-snakes will curl\n In all their amethystine panoply\nOf diamonded mail, and we will mark\nThe mullets swimming by the mast of some storm-foundered bark,\n\nVermilion-finned with eyes of bossy gold\n Like flakes of crimson light, and the great deep\nHis glassy-portaled chamber will unfold,\n And we will see the painted dolphins sleep\nCradled by murmuring halcyons on the rocks\nWhere Proteus in quaint suit of green pastures his monstrous flocks.\n\nAnd tremulous opal-hued anemones\n Will wave their purple fringes where we tread\nUpon the mirrored floor, and argosies\n Of fishes flecked with tawny scales will thread\nThe drifting cordage of the shattered wreck,\nAnd honey-coloured amber beads our twining limbs will deck.”\n\nBut when that baffled Lord of War the Sun\n With gaudy pennon flying passed away\nInto his brazen House, and one by one\n The little yellow stars began to stray\nAcross the field of heaven, ah! then indeed\nShe feared his lips upon her lips would never care to feed,\n\nAnd cried, “Awake, already the pale moon\n Washes the trees with silver, and the wave\nCreeps grey and chilly up this sandy dune,\n The croaking frogs are out, and from the cave\nThe nightjar shrieks, the fluttering bats repass,\nAnd the brown stoat with hollow flanks creeps through the dusky grass.\n\nNay, though thou art a god, be not so coy,\n For in yon stream there is a little reed\nThat often whispers how a lovely boy\n Lay with her once upon a grassy mead,\nWho when his cruel pleasure he had done\nSpread wings of rustling gold and soared aloft into the sun.\n\nBe not so coy, the laurel trembles still\n With great Apollo’s kisses, and the fir\nWhose clustering sisters fringe the seaward hill\n Hath many a tale of that bold ravisher\nWhom men call Boreas, and I have seen\nThe mocking eyes of Hermes through the poplar’s silvery sheen.\n\nEven the jealous Naiads call me fair,\n And every morn a young and ruddy swain\nWoos me with apples and with locks of hair,\n And seeks to soothe my virginal disdain\nBy all the gifts the gentle wood-nymphs love;\nBut yesterday he brought to me an iris-plumaged dove\n\nWith little crimson feet, which with its store\n Of seven spotted eggs the cruel lad\nHad stolen from the lofty sycamore\n At daybreak, when her amorous comrade had\nFlown off in search of berried juniper\nWhich most they love; the fretful wasp, that earliest vintager\n\nOf the blue grapes, hath not persistency\n So constant as this simple shepherd-boy\nFor my poor lips, his joyous purity\n And laughing sunny eyes might well decoy\nA Dryad from her oath to Artemis;\nFor very beautiful is he, his mouth was made to kiss;\n\nHis argent forehead, like a rising moon\n Over the dusky hills of meeting brows,\nIs crescent shaped, the hot and Tyrian noon\n Leads from the myrtle-grove no goodlier spouse\nFor Cytheraea, the first silky down\nFringes his blushing cheeks, and his young limbs are strong and brown;\n\nAnd he is rich, and fat and fleecy herds\n Of bleating sheep upon his meadows lie,\nAnd many an earthen bowl of yellow curds\n Is in his homestead for the thievish fly\nTo swim and drown in, the pink clover mead\nKeeps its sweet store for him, and he can pipe on oaten reed.\n\nAnd yet I love him not; it was for thee\n I kept my love; I knew that thou would’st come\nTo rid me of this pallid chastity,\n Thou fairest flower of the flowerless foam\nOf all the wide Aegean, brightest star\nOf ocean’s azure heavens where the mirrored planets are!\n\nI knew that thou would’st come, for when at first\n The dry wood burgeoned, and the sap of spring\nSwelled in my green and tender bark or burst\n To myriad multitudinous blossoming\nWhich mocked the midnight with its mimic moons\nThat did not dread the dawn, and first the thrushes’ rapturous tunes\n\nStartled the squirrel from its granary,\n And cuckoo flowers fringed the narrow lane,\nThrough my young leaves a sensuous ecstasy\n Crept like new wine, and every mossy vein\nThrobbed with the fitful pulse of amorous blood,\nAnd the wild winds of passion shook my slim stem’s maidenhood.\n\nThe trooping fawns at evening came and laid\n Their cool black noses on my lowest boughs,\nAnd on my topmost branch the blackbird made\n A little nest of grasses for his spouse,\nAnd now and then a twittering wren would light\nOn a thin twig which hardly bare the weight of such delight.\n\nI was the Attic shepherd’s trysting place,\n Beneath my shadow Amaryllis lay,\nAnd round my trunk would laughing Daphnis chase\n The timorous girl, till tired out with play\nShe felt his hot breath stir her tangled hair,\nAnd turned, and looked, and fled no more from such delightful snare.\n\nThen come away unto my ambuscade\n Where clustering woodbine weaves a canopy\nFor amorous pleasaunce, and the rustling shade\n Of Paphian myrtles seems to sanctify\nThe dearest rites of love; there in the cool\nAnd green recesses of its farthest depth there is pool,\n\nThe ouzel’s haunt, the wild bee’s pasturage,\n For round its rim great creamy lilies float\nThrough their flat leaves in verdant anchorage,\n Each cup a white-sailed golden-laden boat\nSteered by a dragon-fly,--be not afraid\nTo leave this wan and wave-kissed shore, surely the place was made\n\nFor lovers such as we; the Cyprian Queen,\n One arm around her boyish paramour,\nStrays often there at eve, and I have seen\n The moon strip off her misty vestiture\nFor young Endymion’s eyes; be not afraid,\nThe panther feet of Dian never tread that secret glade.\n\nNay if thou will’st, back to the beating brine,\n Back to the boisterous billow let us go,\nAnd walk all day beneath the hyaline\n Huge vault of Neptune’s watery portico,\nAnd watch the purple monsters of the deep\nSport in ungainly play, and from his lair keen Xiphias leap.\n\nFor if my mistress find me lying here\n She will not ruth or gentle pity show,\nBut lay her boar-spear down, and with austere\n Relentless fingers string the cornel bow,\nAnd draw the feathered notch against her breast,\nAnd loose the archèd cord; aye, even now upon the quest\n\nI hear her hurrying feet,--awake, awake,\n Thou laggard in love’s battle! once at least\nLet me drink deep of passion’s wine, and slake\n My parchèd being with the nectarous feast\nWhich even gods affect! O come, Love, come,\nStill we have time to reach the cavern of thine azure home.”\n\nScarce had she spoken when the shuddering trees\n Shook, and the leaves divided, and the air\nGrew conscious of a god, and the grey seas\n Crawled backward, and a long and dismal blare\nBlew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed,\nAnd like a flame a barbèd reed flew whizzing down the glade.\n\nAnd where the little flowers of her breast\n Just brake into their milky blossoming,\nThis murderous paramour, this unbidden guest,\n Pierced and struck deep in horrid chambering,\nAnd ploughed a bloody furrow with its dart,\nAnd dug a long red road, and cleft with wingèd death her heart.\n\nSobbing her life out with a bitter cry\n On the boy’s body fell the Dryad maid,\nSobbing for incomplete virginity,\n And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead,\nAnd all the pain of things unsatisfied,\nAnd the bright drops of crimson youth crept down her throbbing side.\n\nAh! pitiful it was to hear her moan,\n And very pitiful to see her die\nEre she had yielded up her sweets, or known\n The joy of passion, that dread mystery\nWhich not to know is not to live at all,\nAnd yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall.\n\nBut as it hapt the Queen of Cythere,\n Who with Adonis all night long had lain\nWithin some shepherd’s hut in Arcady,\n On team of silver doves and gilded wain\nWas journeying Paphos-ward, high up afar\nFrom mortal ken between the mountains and the morning star,\n\nAnd when low down she spied the hapless pair,\n And heard the Oread’s faint despairing cry,\nWhose cadence seemed to play upon the air\n As though it were a viol, hastily\nShe bade her pigeons fold each straining plume,\nAnd dropt to earth, and reached the strand, and saw their dolorous\ndoom.\n\nFor as a gardener turning back his head\n To catch the last notes of the linnet, mows\nWith careless scythe too near some flower bed,\n And cuts the thorny pillar of the rose,\nAnd with the flower’s loosened loneliness\nStrews the brown mould; or as some shepherd lad in wantonness\n\nDriving his little flock along the mead\n Treads down two daffodils, which side by aide\nHave lured the lady-bird with yellow brede\n And made the gaudy moth forget its pride,\nTreads down their brimming golden chalices\nUnder light feet which were not made for such rude ravages;\n\nOr as a schoolboy tired of his book\n Flings himself down upon the reedy grass\nAnd plucks two water-lilies from the brook,\n And for a time forgets the hour glass,\nThen wearies of their sweets, and goes his way,\nAnd lets the hot sun kill them, even go these lovers lay.\n\nAnd Venus cried, “It is dread Artemis\n Whose bitter hand hath wrought this cruelty,\nOr else that mightier maid whose care it is\n To guard her strong and stainless majesty\nUpon the hill Athenian,--alas!\nThat they who loved so well unloved into Death’s house should pass.”\n\nSo with soft hands she laid the boy and girl\n In the great golden waggon tenderly\n(Her white throat whiter than a moony pearl\n Just threaded with a blue vein’s tapestry\nHad not yet ceased to throb, and still her breast\nSwayed like a wind-stirred lily in ambiguous unrest)\n\nAnd then each pigeon spread its milky van,\n The bright car soared into the dawning sky,\nAnd like a cloud the aerial caravan\n Passed over the Aegean silently,\nTill the faint air was troubled with the song\nFrom the wan mouths that call on bleeding Thammuz all night long.\n\nBut when the doves had reached their wonted goal\n Where the wide stair of orbèd marble dips\nIts snows into the sea, her fluttering soul\n Just shook the trembling petals of her lips\nAnd passed into the void, and Venus knew\nThat one fair maid the less would walk amid her retinue,\n\nAnd bade her servants carve a cedar chest\n With all the wonder of this history,\nWithin whose scented womb their limbs should rest\n Where olive-trees make tender the blue sky\nOn the low hills of Paphos, and the Faun\nPipes in the noonday, and the nightingale sings on till dawn.\n\nNor failed they to obey her hest, and ere\n The morning bee had stung the daffodil\nWith tiny fretful spear, or from its lair\n The waking stag had leapt across the rill\nAnd roused the ouzel, or the lizard crept\nAthwart the sunny rock, beneath the grass their bodies slept.\n\nAnd when day brake, within that silver shrine\n Fed by the flames of cressets tremulous,\nQueen Venus knelt and prayed to Proserpine\n That she whose beauty made Death amorous\nShould beg a guerdon from her pallid Lord,\nAnd let Desire pass across dread Charon’s icy ford.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIn melancholy moonless Acheron,\n Farm for the goodly earth and joyous day\nWhere no spring ever buds, nor ripening sun\n Weighs down the apple trees, nor flowery May\nChequers with chestnut blooms the grassy floor,\nWhere thrushes never sing, and piping linnets mate no more,\n\nThere by a dim and dark Lethaean well\n Young Charmides was lying; wearily\nHe plucked the blossoms from the asphodel,\n And with its little rifled treasury\nStrewed the dull waters of the dusky stream,\nAnd watched the white stars founder, and the land was like a dream,\n\nWhen as he gazed into the watery glass\n And through his brown hair’s curly tangles scanned\nHis own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass\n Across the mirror, and a little hand\nStole into his, and warm lips timidly\nBrushed his pale cheeks, and breathed their secret forth into a sigh.\n\nThen turned he round his weary eyes and saw,\n And ever nigher still their faces came,\nAnd nigher ever did their young mouths draw\n Until they seemed one perfect rose of flame,\nAnd longing arms around her neck he cast,\nAnd felt her throbbing bosom, and his breath came hot and fast,\n\nAnd all his hoarded sweets were hers to kiss,\n And all her maidenhood was his to slay,\nAnd limb to limb in long and rapturous bliss\n Their passion waxed and waned,--O why essay\nTo pipe again of love, too venturous reed!\nEnough, enough that Eros laughed upon that flowerless mead.\n\nToo venturous poesy, O why essay\n To pipe again of passion! fold thy wings\nO’er daring Icarus and bid thy lay\n Sleep hidden in the lyre’s silent strings\nTill thou hast found the old Castalian rill,\nOr from the Lesbian waters plucked drowned Sappho’s golden quid!\n\nEnough, enough that he whose life had been\n A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame,\nCould in the loveless land of Hades glean\n One scorching harvest from those fields of flame\nWhere passion walks with naked unshod feet\nAnd is not wounded,--ah! enough that once their lips could meet\n\nIn that wild throb when all existences\n Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy\nWhich dies through its own sweetness and the stress\n Of too much pleasure, ere Persephone\nHad bade them serve her by the ebon throne\nOf the pale God who in the fields of Enna loosed her zone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dole-of-the-kings-daughter": { - "title": "“The Dole of the King’s Daughter”", - "body": "Seven stars in the still water,\n And seven in the sky;\nSeven sins on the King’s daughter,\n Deep in her soul to lie.\n\nRed roses are at her feet,\n (Roses are red in her red-gold hair)\nAnd O where her bosom and girdle meet\n Red roses are hidden there.\n\nFair is the knight who lieth slain\n Amid the rush and reed,\nSee the lean fishes that are fain\n Upon dead men to feed.\n\nSweet is the page that lieth there,\n (Cloth of gold is goodly prey,)\nSee the black ravens in the air,\n Black, O black as the night are they.\n\nWhat do they there so stark and dead?\n (There is blood upon her hand)\nWhy are the lilies flecked with red?\n (There is blood on the river sand.)\n\nThere are two that ride from the south and east,\n And two from the north and west,\nFor the black raven a goodly feast,\n For the King’s daughter rest.\n\nThere is one man who loves her true,\n (Red, O red, is the stain of gore!)\nHe hath duggen a grave by the darksome yew,\n (One grave will do for four.)\n\nNo moon in the still heaven,\n In the black water none,\nThe sins on her soul are seven,\n The sin upon his is one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "desespoir": { - "title": "Désespoir", - "body": "The seasons send their ruin as they go,\nFor in the spring the narciss shows its head\nNor withers till the rose has flamed to red,\nAnd in the autumn purple violets blow,\nAnd the slim crocus stirs the winter snow;\nWherefore yon leafless trees will bloom again\nAnd this grey land grow green with summer rain\nAnd send up cowslips for some boy to mow.\n\nBut what of life whose bitter hungry sea\nFlows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night\nCovers the days which never more return?\nAmbition, love and all the thoughts that burn\nWe lose too soon, and only find delight\nIn withered husks of some dead memory.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "e-tenebris": { - "title": "“E Tenebris”", - "body": "Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach Thy hand,\n For I am drowning in a stormier sea\n Than Simon on Thy lake of Galilee:\nThe wine of life is spilt upon the sand,\nMy heart is as some famine-murdered land\n Whence all good things have perished utterly,\n And well I know my soul in Hell must lie\nIf I this night before God’s throne should stand.\n“He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,\n Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name\n From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.”\nNay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,\n The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,\n The wounded hands, the weary human face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "easter-day": { - "title": "“Easter Day”", - "body": "The silver trumpets rang across the Dome:\n The people knelt upon the ground with awe:\n And borne upon the necks of men I saw,\nLike some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.\nPriest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,\n And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,\n Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:\nIn splendour and in light the Pope passed home.\nMy heart stole back across wide wastes of years\n To One who wandered by a lonely sea,\n And sought in vain for any place of rest:\n“Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest.\n I, only I, must wander wearily,\n And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "easter_sunday" - } - } - }, - "endymion": { - "title": "“Endymion”", - "body": "The apple trees are hung with gold,\n And birds are loud in Arcady,\nThe sheep lie bleating in the fold,\nThe wild goat runs across the wold,\nBut yesterday his love he told,\n I know he will come back to me.\nO rising moon! O Lady moon!\n Be you my lover’s sentinel,\n You cannot choose but know him well,\nFor he is shod with purple shoon,\nYou cannot choose but know my love,\n For he a shepherd’s crook doth bear,\nAnd he is soft as any dove,\n And brown and curly is his hair.\n\nThe turtle now has ceased to call\n Upon her crimson-footed groom,\nThe grey wolf prowls about the stall,\nThe lily’s singing seneschal\nSleeps in the lily-bell, and all\n The violet hills are lost in gloom.\nO risen moon! O holy moon!\n Stand on the top of Helice,\n And if my own true love you see,\nAh! if you see the purple shoon,\nThe hazel crook, the lad’s brown hair,\n The goat-skin wrapped about his arm,\nTell him that I am waiting where\n The rushlight glimmers in the Farm.\n\nThe falling dew is cold and chill,\n And no bird sings in Arcady,\nThe little fauns have left the hill,\nEven the tired daffodil\nHas closed its gilded doors, and still\n My lover comes not back to me.\nFalse moon! False moon! O waning moon!\n Where is my own true lover gone,\n Where are the lips vermilion,\nThe shepherd’s crook, the purple shoon?\nWhy spread that silver pavilion,\n Why wear that veil of drifting mist?\nAh! thou hast young Endymion,\n Thou hast the lips that should be kissed!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "fantaisies-decoratives": { - "title": "“Fantaisies Décoratives”", - "body": "# I. _Le Panneau_\n\nUnder the rose-tree’s dancing shade\n There stands a little ivory girl,\n Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl\nWith pale green nails of polished jade.\n\nThe red leaves fall upon the mould,\n The white leaves flutter, one by one,\n Down to a blue bowl where the sun,\nLike a great dragon, writhes in gold.\n\nThe white leaves float upon the air,\n The red leaves flutter idly down,\n Some fall upon her yellow gown,\nAnd some upon her raven hair.\n\nShe takes an amber lute and sings,\n And as she sings a silver crane\n Begins his scarlet neck to strain,\nAnd flap his burnished metal wings.\n\nShe takes a lute of amber bright,\n And from the thicket where he lies\n Her lover, with his almond eyes,\nWatches her movements in delight.\n\nAnd now she gives a cry of fear,\n And tiny tears begin to start:\n A thorn has wounded with its dart\nThe pink-veined sea-shell of her ear.\n\nAnd now she laughs a merry note:\n There has fallen a petal of the rose\n Just where the yellow satin shows\nThe blue-veined flower of her throat.\n\nWith pale green nails of polished jade,\n Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl,\n There stands a little ivory girl\nUnder the rose-tree’s dancing shade.\n\n\n# II. _Les Ballons_\n\nAgainst these turbid turquoise skies\n The light and luminous balloons\n Dip and drift like satin moons,\nDrift like silken butterflies;\n\nReel with every windy gust,\n Rise and reel like dancing girls,\n Float like strange transparent pearls,\nFall and float like silver dust.\n\nNow to the low leaves they cling,\n Each with coy fantastic pose,\n Each a petal of a rose\nStraining at a gossamer string.\n\nThen to the tall trees they climb,\n Like thin globes of amethyst,\n Wandering opals keeping tryst\nWith the rubies of the lime.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "from-spring-days-to-winter": { - "title": "“From Spring Days to Winter”", - "body": "In the glad springtime when leaves were green,\n O merrily the throstle sings!\nI sought, amid the tangled sheen,\nLove whom mine eyes had never seen,\n O the glad dove has golden wings!\n\nBetween the blossoms red and white,\n O merrily the throstle sings!\nMy love first came into my sight,\nO perfect vision of delight,\n O the glad dove has golden wings!\n\nThe yellow apples glowed like fire,\n O merrily the throstle sings!\nO Love too great for lip or lyre,\nBlown rose of love and of desire,\n O the glad dove has golden wings!\n\nBut now with snow the tree is grey,\n Ah, sadly now the throstle sings!\nMy love is dead: ah! well-a-day,\nSee at her silent feet I lay\n A dove with broken wings!\n Ah, Love! ah, Love! that thou wert slain--\nFond Dove, fond Dove return again!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "the-garden-of-eros": { - "title": "“The Garden of Eros”", - "body": "It is full summer now, the heart of June;\n Not yet the sunburnt reapers are astir\nUpon the upland meadow where too soon\n Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer,\nWill lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,\nAnd see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze.\n\nToo soon indeed! yet here the daffodil,\n That love-child of the Spring, has lingered on\nTo vex the rose with jealousy, and still\n The harebell spreads her azure pavilion,\nAnd like a strayed and wandering reveller\nAbandoned of its brothers, whom long since June’s messenger\n\nThe missel-thrush has frighted from the glade,\n One pale narcissus loiters fearfully\nClose to a shadowy nook, where half afraid\n Of their own loveliness some violets lie\nThat will not look the gold sun in the face\nFor fear of too much splendour,--ah! methinks it is a place\n\nWhich should be trodden by Persephone\n When wearied of the flowerless fields of Dis!\nOr danced on by the lads of Arcady!\n The hidden secret of eternal bliss\nKnown to the Grecian here a man might find,\nAh! you and I may find it now if Love and Sleep be kind.\n\nThere are the flowers which mourning Herakles\n Strewed on the tomb of Hylas, columbine,\nIts white doves all a-flutter where the breeze\n Kissed them too harshly, the small celandine,\nThat yellow-kirtled chorister of eve,\nAnd lilac lady’s-smock,--but let them bloom alone, and leave\n\nYon spirèd hollyhock red-crocketed\n To sway its silent chimes, else must the bee,\nIts little bellringer, go seek instead\n Some other pleasaunce; the anemone\nThat weeps at daybreak, like a silly girl\nBefore her love, and hardly lets the butterflies unfurl\n\nTheir painted wings beside it,--bid it pine\n In pale virginity; the winter snow\nWill suit it better than those lips of thine\n Whose fires would but scorch it, rather go\nAnd pluck that amorous flower which blooms alone,\nFed by the pander wind with dust of kisses not its own.\n\nThe trumpet-mouths of red convolvulus\n So dear to maidens, creamy meadow-sweet\nWhiter than Juno’s throat and odorous\n As all Arabia, hyacinths the feet\nOf Huntress Dian would be loth to mar\nFor any dappled fawn,--pluck these, and those fond flowers which are\n\nFairer than what Queen Venus trod upon\n Beneath the pines of Ida, eucharis,\nThat morning star which does not dread the sun,\n And budding marjoram which but to kiss\nWould sweeten Cytheraea’s lips and make\nAdonis jealous,--these for thy head,--and for thy girdle take\n\nYon curving spray of purple clematis\n Whose gorgeous dye outflames the Tyrian King,\nAnd foxgloves with their nodding chalices,\n But that one narciss which the startled Spring\nLet from her kirtle fall when first she heard\nIn her own woods the wild tempestuous song of summer’s bird,\n\nAh! leave it for a subtle memory\n Of those sweet tremulous days of rain and sun,\nWhen April laughed between her tears to see\n The early primrose with shy footsteps run\nFrom the gnarled oak-tree roots till all the wold,\nSpite of its brown and trampled leaves, grew bright with shimmering gold.\n\nNay, pluck it too, it is not half so sweet\n As thou thyself, my soul’s idolatry!\nAnd when thou art a-wearied at thy feet\n Shall oxlips weave their brightest tapestry,\nFor thee the woodbine shall forget its pride\nAnd veil its tangled whorls, and thou shalt walk on daisies pied.\n\nAnd I will cut a reed by yonder spring\n And make the wood-gods jealous, and old Pan\nWonder what young intruder dares to sing\n In these still haunts, where never foot of man\nShould tread at evening, lest he chance to spy\nThe marble limbs of Artemis and all her company.\n\nAnd I will tell thee why the jacinth wears\n Such dread embroidery of dolorous moan,\nAnd why the hapless nightingale forbears\n To sing her song at noon, but weeps alone\nWhen the fleet swallow sleeps, and rich men feast,\nAnd why the laurel trembles when she sees the lightening east.\n\nAnd I will sing how sad Proserpina\n Unto a grave and gloomy Lord was wed,\nAnd lure the silver-breasted Helena\n Back from the lotus meadows of the dead,\nSo shalt thou see that awful loveliness\nFor which two mighty Hosts met fearfully in war’s abyss!\n\nAnd then I’ll pipe to thee that Grecian tale\n How Cynthia loves the lad Endymion,\nAnd hidden in a grey and misty veil\n Hies to the cliffs of Latmos once the Sun\nLeaps from his ocean bed in fruitless chase\nOf those pale flying feet which fade away in his embrace.\n\nAnd if my flute can breathe sweet melody,\n We may behold Her face who long ago\nDwelt among men by the Aegean sea,\n And whose sad house with pillaged portico\nAnd friezeless wall and columns toppled down\nLooms o’er the ruins of that fair and violet cinctured town.\n\nSpirit of Beauty! tarry still awhile,\n They are not dead, thine ancient votaries;\nSome few there are to whom thy radiant smile\n Is better than a thousand victories,\nThough all the nobly slain of Waterloo\nRise up in wrath against them! tarry still, there are a few\n\nWho for thy sake would give their manlihood\n And consecrate their being; I at least\nHave done so, made thy lips my daily food,\n And in thy temples found a goodlier feast\nThan this starved age can give me, spite of all\nIts new-found creeds so sceptical and so dogmatical.\n\nHere not Cephissos, not Ilissos flows,\n The woods of white Colonos are not here,\nOn our bleak hills the olive never blows,\n No simple priest conducts his lowing steer\nUp the steep marble way, nor through the town\nDo laughing maidens bear to thee the crocus-flowered gown.\n\nYet tarry! for the boy who loved thee best,\n Whose very name should be a memory\nTo make thee linger, sleeps in silent rest\n Beneath the Roman walls, and melody\nStill mourns her sweetest lyre; none can play\nThe lute of Adonais: with his lips Song passed away.\n\nNay, when Keats died the Muses still had left\n One silver voice to sing his threnody,\nBut ah! too soon of it we were bereft\n When on that riven night and stormy sea\nPanthea claimed her singer as her own,\nAnd slew the mouth that praised her; since which time we walk alone,\n\nSave for that fiery heart, that morning star\n Of re-arisen England, whose clear eye\nSaw from our tottering throne and waste of war\n The grand Greek limbs of young Democracy\nRise mightily like Hesperus and bring\nThe great Republic! him at least thy love hath taught to sing,\n\nAnd he hath been with thee at Thessaly,\n And seen white Atalanta fleet of foot\nIn passionless and fierce virginity\n Hunting the tuskèd boar, his honied lute\nHath pierced the cavern of the hollow hill,\nAnd Venus laughs to know one knee will bow before her still.\n\nAnd he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine,\n And sung the Galilaean’s requiem,\nThat wounded forehead dashed with blood and wine\n He hath discrowned, the Ancient Gods in him\nHave found their last, most ardent worshipper,\nAnd the new Sign grows grey and dim before its conqueror.\n\nSpirit of Beauty! tarry with us still,\n It is not quenched the torch of poesy,\nThe star that shook above the Eastern hill\n Holds unassailed its argent armoury\nFrom all the gathering gloom and fretful fight--\nO tarry with us still! for through the long and common night,\n\nMorris, our sweet and simple Chaucer’s child,\n Dear heritor of Spenser’s tuneful reed,\nWith soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled\n The weary soul of man in troublous need,\nAnd from the far and flowerless fields of ice\nHas brought fair flowers to make an earthly paradise.\n\nWe know them all, Gudrun the strong men’s bride,\n Aslaug and Olafson we know them all,\nHow giant Grettir fought and Sigurd died,\n And what enchantment held the king in thrall\nWhen lonely Brynhild wrestled with the powers\nThat war against all passion, ah! how oft through summer hours,\n\nLong listless summer hours when the noon\n Being enamoured of a damask rose\nForgets to journey westward, till the moon\n The pale usurper of its tribute grows\nFrom a thin sickle to a silver shield\nAnd chides its loitering car--how oft, in some cool grassy field\n\nFar from the cricket-ground and noisy eight,\n At Bagley, where the rustling bluebells come\nAlmost before the blackbird finds a mate\n And overstay the swallow, and the hum\nOf many murmuring bees flits through the leaves,\nHave I lain poring on the dreamy tales his fancy weaves,\n\nAnd through their unreal woes and mimic pain\n Wept for myself, and so was purified,\nAnd in their simple mirth grew glad again;\n For as I sailed upon that pictured tide\nThe strength and splendour of the storm was mine\nWithout the storm’s red ruin, for the singer is divine;\n\nThe little laugh of water falling down\n Is not so musical, the clammy gold\nClose hoarded in the tiny waxen town\n Has less of sweetness in it, and the old\nHalf-withered reeds that waved in Arcady\nTouched by his lips break forth again to fresher harmony.\n\nSpirit of Beauty, tarry yet awhile!\n Although the cheating merchants of the mart\nWith iron roads profane our lovely isle,\n And break on whirling wheels the limbs of Art,\nAy! though the crowded factories beget\nThe blindworm Ignorance that slays the soul, O tarry yet!\n\nFor One at least there is,--He bears his name\n From Dante and the seraph Gabriel,--\nWhose double laurels burn with deathless flame\n To light thine altar; He too loves thee well,\nWho saw old Merlin lured in Vivien’s snare,\nAnd the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair,\n\nLoves thee so well, that all the World for him\n A gorgeous-coloured vestiture must wear,\nAnd Sorrow take a purple diadem,\n Or else be no more Sorrow, and Despair\nGild its own thorns, and Pain, like Adon, be\nEven in anguish beautiful;--such is the empery\n\nWhich Painters hold, and such the heritage\n This gentle solemn Spirit doth possess,\nBeing a better mirror of his age\n In all his pity, love, and weariness,\nThan those who can but copy common things,\nAnd leave the Soul unpainted with its mighty questionings.\n\nBut they are few, and all romance has flown,\n And men can prophesy about the sun,\nAnd lecture on his arrows--how, alone,\n Through a waste void the soulless atoms run,\nHow from each tree its weeping nymph has fled,\nAnd that no more ’mid English reeds a Naiad shows her head.\n\nMethinks these new Actaeons boast too soon\n That they have spied on beauty; what if we\nHave analysed the rainbow, robbed the moon\n Of her most ancient, chastest mystery,\nShall I, the last Endymion, lose all hope\nBecause rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope!\n\nWhat profit if this scientific age\n Burst through our gates with all its retinue\nOf modern miracles! Can it assuage\n One lover’s breaking heart? what can it do\nTo make one life more beautiful, one day\nMore godlike in its period? but now the Age of Clay\n\nReturns in horrid cycle, and the earth\n Hath borne again a noisy progeny\nOf ignorant Titans, whose ungodly birth\n Hurls them against the august hierarchy\nWhich sat upon Olympus; to the Dust\nThey have appealed, and to that barren arbiter they must\n\nRepair for judgment; let them, if they can,\n From Natural Warfare and insensate Chance,\nCreate the new Ideal rule for man!\n Methinks that was not my inheritance;\nFor I was nurtured otherwise, my soul\nPasses from higher heights of life to a more supreme goal.\n\nLo! while we spake the earth did turn away\n Her visage from the God, and Hecate’s boat\nRose silver-laden, till the jealous day\n Blew all its torches out: I did not note\nThe waning hours, to young Endymions\nTime’s palsied fingers count in vain his rosary of suns!\n\nMark how the yellow iris wearily\n Leans back its throat, as though it would be kissed\nBy its false chamberer, the dragon-fly,\n Who, like a blue vein on a girl’s white wrist,\nSleeps on that snowy primrose of the night,\nWhich ’gins to flush with crimson shame, and die beneath the light.\n\nCome let us go, against the pallid shield\n Of the wan sky the almond blossoms gleam,\nThe corncrake nested in the unmown field\n Answers its mate, across the misty stream\nOn fitful wing the startled curlews fly,\nAnd in his sedgy bed the lark, for joy that Day is nigh,\n\nScatters the pearlèd dew from off the grass,\n In tremulous ecstasy to greet the sun,\nWho soon in gilded panoply will pass\n Forth from yon orange-curtained pavilion\nHung in the burning east: see, the red rim\nO’ertops the expectant hills! it is the God! for love of him\n\nAlready the shrill lark is out of sight,\n Flooding with waves of song this silent dell,--\nAh! there is something more in that bird’s flight\n Than could be tested in a crucible!--\nBut the air freshens, let us go, why soon\nThe woodmen will be here; how we have lived this night of June!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june", - "month_epoch": "middle" - } - } - }, - "the-harlots-house": { - "title": "“The Harlot’s House”", - "body": "We caught the tread of dancing feet,\nWe loitered down the moonlit street,\nAnd stopped beneath the harlot’s house.\n\nInside, above the din and fray,\nWe heard the loud musicians play\nThe “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.\n\nLike strange mechanical grotesques,\nMaking fantastic arabesques,\nThe shadows raced across the blind.\n\nWe watched the ghostly dancers spin\nTo sound of horn and violin,\nLike black leaves wheeling in the wind.\n\nLike wire-pulled automatons,\nSlim silhouetted skeletons\nWent sidling through the slow quadrille,\n\nThen took each other by the hand,\nAnd danced a stately saraband;\nTheir laughter echoed thin and shrill.\n\nSometimes a clockwork puppet pressed\nA phantom lover to her breast,\nSometimes they seemed to try to sing.\n\nSometimes a horrible marionette\nCame out, and smoked its cigarette\nUpon the steps like a live thing.\n\nThen, turning to my love, I said,\n“The dead are dancing with the dead,\nThe dust is whirling with the dust.”\n\nBut she--she heard the violin,\nAnd left my side, and entered in:\nLove passed into the house of lust.\n\nThen suddenly the tune went false,\nThe dancers wearied of the waltz,\nThe shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.\n\nAnd down the long and silent street,\nThe dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,\nCrept like a frightened girl.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-voice": { - "title": "“Her Voice”", - "body": "The wild bee reels from bough to bough\n With his furry coat and his gauzy wing,\nNow in a lily-cup, and now\n Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,\n In his wandering;\nSit closer love: it was here I trow\n I made that vow,\n\nSwore that two lives should be like one\n As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,\nAs long as the sunflower sought the sun,--\n It shall be, I said, for eternity\n ’Twixt you and me!\nDear friend, those times are over and done;\n Love’s web is spun.\n\nLook upward where the poplar trees\n Sway and sway in the summer air,\nHere in the valley never a breeze\n Scatters the thistledown, but there\n Great winds blow fair\nFrom the mighty murmuring mystical seas,\n And the wave-lashed leas.\n\nLook upward where the white gull screams,\n What does it see that we do not see?\nIs that a star? or the lamp that gleams\n On some outward voyaging argosy,--\n Ah! can it be\nWe have lived our lives in a land of dreams!\n How sad it seems.\n\nSweet, there is nothing left to say\n But this, that love is never lost,\nKeen winter stabs the breasts of May\n Whose crimson roses burst his frost,\n Ships tempest-tossed\nWill find a harbour in some bay,\n And so we may.\n\nAnd there is nothing left to do\n But to kiss once again, and part,\nNay, there is nothing we should rue,\n I have my beauty,--you your Art,\n Nay, do not start,\nOne world was not enough for two\n Like me and you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "humanitad": { - "title": "“Humanitad”", - "body": "It is full winter now: the trees are bare,\n Save where the cattle huddle from the cold\nBeneath the pine, for it doth never wear\n The autumn’s gaudy livery whose gold\nHer jealous brother pilfers, but is true\nTo the green doublet; bitter is the wind, as though it blew\n\nFrom Saturn’s cave; a few thin wisps of hay\n Lie on the sharp black hedges, where the wain\nDragged the sweet pillage of a summer’s day\n From the low meadows up the narrow lane;\nUpon the half-thawed snow the bleating sheep\nPress close against the hurdles, and the shivering house-dogs creep\n\nFrom the shut stable to the frozen stream\n And back again disconsolate, and miss\nThe bawling shepherds and the noisy team;\n And overhead in circling listlessness\nThe cawing rooks whirl round the frosted stack,\nOr crowd the dripping boughs; and in the fen the ice-pools crack\n\nWhere the gaunt bittern stalks among the reeds\n And flaps his wings, and stretches back his neck,\nAnd hoots to see the moon; across the meads\n Limps the poor frightened hare, a little speck;\nAnd a stray seamew with its fretful cry\nFlits like a sudden drift of snow against the dull grey sky.\n\nFull winter: and the lusty goodman brings\n His load of faggots from the chilly byre,\nAnd stamps his feet upon the hearth, and flings\n The sappy billets on the waning fire,\nAnd laughs to see the sudden lightening scare\nHis children at their play, and yet,--the spring is in the air;\n\nAlready the slim crocus stirs the snow,\n And soon yon blanchèd fields will bloom again\nWith nodding cowslips for some lad to mow,\n For with the first warm kisses of the rain\nThe winter’s icy sorrow breaks to tears,\nAnd the brown thrushes mate, and with bright eyes the rabbit peers\n\nFrom the dark warren where the fir-cones lie,\n And treads one snowdrop under foot, and runs\nOver the mossy knoll, and blackbirds fly\n Across our path at evening, and the suns\nStay longer with us; ah! how good to see\nGrass-girdled spring in all her joy of laughing greenery\n\nDance through the hedges till the early rose,\n (That sweet repentance of the thorny briar!)\nBurst from its sheathèd emerald and disclose\n The little quivering disk of golden fire\nWhich the bees know so well, for with it come\nPale boy’s-love, sops-in-wine, and daffadillies all in bloom.\n\nThen up and down the field the sower goes,\n While close behind the laughing younker scares\nWith shrilly whoop the black and thievish crows,\n And then the chestnut-tree its glory wears,\nAnd on the grass the creamy blossom falls\nIn odorous excess, and faint half-whispered madrigals\n\nSteal from the bluebells’ nodding carillons\n Each breezy morn, and then white jessamine,\nThat star of its own heaven, snap-dragons\n With lolling crimson tongues, and eglantine\nIn dusty velvets clad usurp the bed\nAnd woodland empery, and when the lingering rose hath shed\n\nRed leaf by leaf its folded panoply,\n And pansies closed their purple-lidded eyes,\nChrysanthemums from gilded argosy\n Unload their gaudy scentless merchandise,\nAnd violets getting overbold withdraw\nFrom their shy nooks, and scarlet berries dot the leafless haw.\n\nO happy field! and O thrice happy tree!\n Soon will your queen in daisy-flowered smock\nAnd crown of flower-de-luce trip down the lea,\n Soon will the lazy shepherds drive their flock\nBack to the pasture by the pool, and soon\nThrough the green leaves will float the hum of murmuring bees at noon.\n\nSoon will the glade be bright with bellamour,\n The flower which wantons love, and those sweet nuns\nVale-lilies in their snowy vestiture\n Will tell their beaded pearls, and carnations\nWith mitred dusky leaves will scent the wind,\nAnd straggling traveller’s-joy each hedge with yellow stars will bind.\n\nDear bride of Nature and most bounteous spring,\n That canst give increase to the sweet-breath’d kine,\nAnd to the kid its little horns, and bring\n The soft and silky blossoms to the vine,\nWhere is that old nepenthe which of yore\nMan got from poppy root and glossy-berried mandragore!\n\nThere was a time when any common bird\n Could make me sing in unison, a time\nWhen all the strings of boyish life were stirred\n To quick response or more melodious rhyme\nBy every forest idyll;--do I change?\nOr rather doth some evil thing through thy fair pleasaunce range?\n\nNay, nay, thou art the same: ’tis I who seek\n To vex with sighs thy simple solitude,\nAnd because fruitless tears bedew my cheek\n Would have thee weep with me in brotherhood;\nFool! shall each wronged and restless spirit dare\nTo taint such wine with the salt poison of own despair!\n\nThou art the same: ’tis I whose wretched soul\n Takes discontent to be its paramour,\nAnd gives its kingdom to the rude control\n Of what should be its servitor,--for sure\nWisdom is somewhere, though the stormy sea\nContain it not, and the huge deep answer “’Tis not in me.”\n\nTo burn with one clear flame, to stand erect\n In natural honour, not to bend the knee\nIn profitless prostrations whose effect\n Is by itself condemned, what alchemy\nCan teach me this? what herb Medea brewed\nWill bring the unexultant peace of essence not subdued?\n\nThe minor chord which ends the harmony,\n And for its answering brother waits in vain\nSobbing for incompleted melody,\n Dies a swan’s death; but I the heir of pain,\nA silent Memnon with blank lidless eyes,\nWait for the light and music of those suns which never rise.\n\nThe quenched-out torch, the lonely cypress-gloom,\n The little dust stored in the narrow urn,\nThe gentle ΧΑΙΡΕ of the Attic tomb,--\n Were not these better far than to return\nTo my old fitful restless malady,\nOr spend my days within the voiceless cave of misery?\n\nNay! for perchance that poppy-crownèd god\n Is like the watcher by a sick man’s bed\nWho talks of sleep but gives it not; his rod\n Hath lost its virtue, and, when all is said,\nDeath is too rude, too obvious a key\nTo solve one single secret in a life’s philosophy.\n\nAnd Love! that noble madness, whose august\n And inextinguishable might can slay\nThe soul with honeyed drugs,--alas! I must\n From such sweet ruin play the runaway,\nAlthough too constant memory never can\nForget the archèd splendour of those brows Olympian\n\nWhich for a little season made my youth\n So soft a swoon of exquisite indolence\nThat all the chiding of more prudent Truth\n Seemed the thin voice of jealousy,--O hence\nThou huntress deadlier than Artemis!\nGo seek some other quarry! for of thy too perilous bliss.\n\nMy lips have drunk enough,--no more, no more,--\n Though Love himself should turn his gilded prow\nBack to the troubled waters of this shore\n Where I am wrecked and stranded, even now\nThe chariot wheels of passion sweep too near,\nHence! Hence! I pass unto a life more barren, more austere.\n\nMore barren--ay, those arms will never lean\n Down through the trellised vines and draw my soul\nIn sweet reluctance through the tangled green;\n Some other head must wear that aureole,\nFor I am hers who loves not any man\nWhose white and stainless bosom bears the sign Gorgonian.\n\nLet Venus go and chuck her dainty page,\n And kiss his mouth, and toss his curly hair,\nWith net and spear and hunting equipage\n Let young Adonis to his tryst repair,\nBut me her fond and subtle-fashioned spell\nDelights no more, though I could win her dearest citadel.\n\nAy, though I were that laughing shepherd boy\n Who from Mount Ida saw the little cloud\nPass over Tenedos and lofty Troy\n And knew the coming of the Queen, and bowed\nIn wonder at her feet, not for the sake\nOf a new Helen would I bid her hand the apple take.\n\nThen rise supreme Athena argent-limbed!\n And, if my lips be musicless, inspire\nAt least my life: was not thy glory hymned\n By One who gave to thee his sword and lyre\nLike Aeschylos at well-fought Marathon,\nAnd died to show that Milton’s England still could bear a son!\n\nAnd yet I cannot tread the Portico\n And live without desire, fear and pain,\nOr nurture that wise calm which long ago\n The grave Athenian master taught to men,\nSelf-poised, self-centred, and self-comforted,\nTo watch the world’s vain phantasies go by with unbowed head.\n\nAlas! that serene brow, those eloquent lips,\n Those eyes that mirrored all eternity,\nRest in their own Colonos, an eclipse\n Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne\nIs childless; in the night which she had made\nFor lofty secure flight Athena’s owl itself hath strayed.\n\nNor much with Science do I care to climb,\n Although by strange and subtle witchery\nShe drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time\n Unrolls her gorgeous-coloured tapestry\nTo no less eager eyes; often indeed\nIn the great epic of Polymnia’s scroll I love to read\n\nHow Asia sent her myriad hosts to war\n Against a little town, and panoplied\nIn gilded mail with jewelled scimitar,\n White-shielded, purple-crested, rode the Mede\nBetween the waving poplars and the sea\nWhich men call Artemisium, till he saw Thermopylae\n\nIts steep ravine spanned by a narrow wall,\n And on the nearer side a little brood\nOf careless lions holding festival!\n And stood amazèd at such hardihood,\nAnd pitched his tent upon the reedy shore,\nAnd stayed two days to wonder, and then crept at midnight o’er\n\nSome unfrequented height, and coming down\n The autumn forests treacherously slew\nWhat Sparta held most dear and was the crown\n Of far Eurotas, and passed on, nor knew\nHow God had staked an evil net for him\nIn the small bay at Salamis,--and yet, the page grows dim,\n\nIts cadenced Greek delights me not, I feel\n With such a goodly time too out of tune\nTo love it much: for like the Dial’s wheel\n That from its blinded darkness strikes the noon\nYet never sees the sun, so do my eyes\nRestlessly follow that which from my cheated vision flies.\n\nO for one grand unselfish simple life\n To teach us what is Wisdom! speak ye hills\nOf lone Helvellyn, for this note of strife\n Shunned your untroubled crags and crystal rills,\nWhere is that Spirit which living blamelessly\nYet dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century!\n\nSpeak ye Rydalian laurels! where is he\n Whose gentle head ye sheltered, that pure soul\nWhose gracious days of uncrowned majesty\n Through lowliest conduct touched the lofty goal\nWhere love and duty mingle! Him at least\nThe most high Laws were glad of, he had sat at Wisdom’s feast;\n\nBut we are Learning’s changelings, know by rote\n The clarion watchword of each Grecian school\nAnd follow none, the flawless sword which smote\n The pagan Hydra is an effete tool\nWhich we ourselves have blunted, what man now\nShall scale the august ancient heights and to old Reverence bow?\n\nOne such indeed I saw, but, Ichabod!\n Gone is that last dear son of Italy,\nWho being man died for the sake of God,\n And whose unrisen bones sleep peacefully,\nO guard him, guard him well, my Giotto’s tower,\nThou marble lily of the lily town! let not the lour\n\nOf the rude tempest vex his slumber, or\n The Arno with its tawny troubled gold\nO’er-leap its marge, no mightier conqueror\n Clomb the high Capitol in the days of old\nWhen Rome was indeed Rome, for Liberty\nWalked like a bride beside him, at which sight pale Mystery\n\nFled shrieking to her farthest sombrest cell\n With an old man who grabbled rusty keys,\nFled shuddering, for that immemorial knell\n With which oblivion buries dynasties\nSwept like a wounded eagle on the blast,\nAs to the holy heart of Rome the great triumvir passed.\n\nHe knew the holiest heart and heights of Rome,\n He drave the base wolf from the lion’s lair,\nAnd now lies dead by that empyreal dome\n Which overtops Valdarno hung in air\nBy Brunelleschi--O Melpomene\nBreathe through thy melancholy pipe thy sweetest threnody!\n\nBreathe through the tragic stops such melodies\n That Joy’s self may grow jealous, and the Nine\nForget awhile their discreet emperies,\n Mourning for him who on Rome’s lordliest shrine\nLit for men’s lives the light of Marathon,\nAnd bare to sun-forgotten fields the fire of the sun!\n\nO guard him, guard him well, my Giotto’s tower!\n Let some young Florentine each eventide\nBring coronals of that enchanted flower\n Which the dim woods of Vallombrosa hide,\nAnd deck the marble tomb wherein he lies\nWhose soul is as some mighty orb unseen of mortal eyes;\n\nSome mighty orb whose cycled wanderings,\n Being tempest-driven to the farthest rim\nWhere Chaos meets Creation and the wings\n Of the eternal chanting Cherubim\nAre pavilioned on Nothing, passed away\nInto a moonless void,--and yet, though he is dust and clay,\n\nHe is not dead, the immemorial Fates\n Forbid it, and the closing shears refrain.\nLift up your heads ye everlasting gates!\n Ye argent clarions, sound a loftier strain\nFor the vile thing he hated lurks within\nIts sombre house, alone with God and memories of sin.\n\nStill what avails it that she sought her cave\n That murderous mother of red harlotries?\nAt Munich on the marble architrave\n The Grecian boys die smiling, but the seas\nWhich wash Aegina fret in loneliness\nNot mirroring their beauty; so our lives grow colourless\n\nFor lack of our ideals, if one star\n Flame torch-like in the heavens the unjust\nSwift daylight kills it, and no trump of war\n Can wake to passionate voice the silent dust\nWhich was Mazzini once! rich Niobe\nFor all her stony sorrows hath her sons; but Italy,\n\nWhat Easter Day shall make her children rise,\n Who were not Gods yet suffered? what sure feet\nShall find their grave-clothes folded? what clear eyes\n Shall see them bodily? O it were meet\nTo roll the stone from off the sepulchre\nAnd kiss the bleeding roses of their wounds, in love of her,\n\nOur Italy! our mother visible!\n Most blessed among nations and most sad,\nFor whose dear sake the young Calabrian fell\n That day at Aspromonte and was glad\nThat in an age when God was bought and sold\nOne man could die for Liberty! but we, burnt out and cold,\n\nSee Honour smitten on the cheek and gyves\n Bind the sweet feet of Mercy: Poverty\nCreeps through our sunless lanes and with sharp knives\n Cuts the warm throats of children stealthily,\nAnd no word said:--O we are wretched men\nUnworthy of our great inheritance! where is the pen\n\nOf austere Milton? where the mighty sword\n Which slew its master righteously? the years\nHave lost their ancient leader, and no word\n Breaks from the voiceless tripod on our ears:\nWhile as a ruined mother in some spasm\nBears a base child and loathes it, so our best enthusiasm\n\nGenders unlawful children, Anarchy\n Freedom’s own Judas, the vile prodigal\nLicence who steals the gold of Liberty\n And yet has nothing, Ignorance the real\nOne Fraticide since Cain, Envy the asp\nThat stings itself to anguish, Avarice whose palsied grasp\n\nIs in its extent stiffened, moneyed Greed\n For whose dull appetite men waste away\nAmid the whirr of wheels and are the seed\n Of things which slay their sower, these each day\nSees rife in England, and the gentle feet\nOf Beauty tread no more the stones of each unlovely street.\n\nWhat even Cromwell spared is desecrated\n By weed and worm, left to the stormy play\nOf wind and beating snow, or renovated\n By more destructful hands: Time’s worst decay\nWill wreathe its ruins with some loveliness,\nBut these new Vandals can but make a rain-proof barrenness.\n\nWhere is that Art which bade the Angels sing\n Through Lincoln’s lofty choir, till the air\nSeems from such marble harmonies to ring\n With sweeter song than common lips can dare\nTo draw from actual reed? ah! where is now\nThe cunning hand which made the flowering hawthorn branches bow\n\nFor Southwell’s arch, and carved the House of One\n Who loved the lilies of the field with all\nOur dearest English flowers? the same sun\n Rises for us: the seasons natural\nWeave the same tapestry of green and grey:\nThe unchanged hills are with us: but that Spirit hath passed away.\n\nAnd yet perchance it may be better so,\n For Tyranny is an incestuous Queen,\nMurder her brother is her bedfellow,\n And the Plague chambers with her: in obscene\nAnd bloody paths her treacherous feet are set;\nBetter the empty desert and a soul inviolate!\n\nFor gentle brotherhood, the harmony\n Of living in the healthful air, the swift\nClean beauty of strong limbs when men are free\n And women chaste, these are the things which lift\nOur souls up more than even Agnolo’s\nGaunt blinded Sibyl poring o’er the scroll of human woes,\n\nOr Titian’s little maiden on the stair\n White as her own sweet lily and as tall,\nOr Mona Lisa smiling through her hair,--\n Ah! somehow life is bigger after all\nThan any painted angel, could we see\nThe God that is within us! The old Greek serenity\n\nWhich curbs the passion of that level line\n Of marble youths, who with untroubled eyes\nAnd chastened limbs ride round Athena’s shrine\n And mirror her divine economies,\nAnd balanced symmetry of what in man\nWould else wage ceaseless warfare,--this at least within the span\n\nBetween our mother’s kisses and the grave\n Might so inform our lives, that we could win\nSuch mighty empires that from her cave\n Temptation would grow hoarse, and pallid Sin\nWould walk ashamed of his adulteries,\nAnd Passion creep from out the House of Lust with startled eyes.\n\nTo make the body and the spirit one\n With all right things, till no thing live in vain\nFrom morn to noon, but in sweet unison\n With every pulse of flesh and throb of brain\nThe soul in flawless essence high enthroned,\nAgainst all outer vain attack invincibly bastioned,\n\nMark with serene impartiality\n The strife of things, and yet be comforted,\nKnowing that by the chain causality\n All separate existences are wed\nInto one supreme whole, whose utterance\nIs joy, or holier praise! ah! surely this were governance\n\nOf Life in most august omnipresence,\n Through which the rational intellect would find\nIn passion its expression, and mere sense,\n Ignoble else, lend fire to the mind,\nAnd being joined with it in harmony\nMore mystical than that which binds the stars planetary,\n\nStrike from their several tones one octave chord\n Whose cadence being measureless would fly\nThrough all the circling spheres, then to its Lord\n Return refreshed with its new empery\nAnd more exultant power,--this indeed\nCould we but reach it were to find the last, the perfect creed.\n\nAh! it was easy when the world was young\n To keep one’s life free and inviolate,\nFrom our sad lips another song is rung,\n By our own hands our heads are desecrate,\nWanderers in drear exile, and dispossessed\nOf what should be our own, we can but feed on wild unrest.\n\nSomehow the grace, the bloom of things has flown,\n And of all men we are most wretched who\nMust live each other’s lives and not our own\n For very pity’s sake and then undo\nAll that we lived for--it was otherwise\nWhen soul and body seemed to blend in mystic symphonies.\n\nBut we have left those gentle haunts to pass\n With weary feet to the new Calvary,\nWhere we behold, as one who in a glass\n Sees his own face, self-slain Humanity,\nAnd in the dumb reproach of that sad gaze\nLearn what an awful phantom the red hand of man can raise.\n\nO smitten mouth! O forehead crowned with thorn!\n O chalice of all common miseries!\nThou for our sakes that loved thee not hast borne\n An agony of endless centuries,\nAnd we were vain and ignorant nor knew\nThat when we stabbed thy heart it was our own real hearts we slew.\n\nBeing ourselves the sowers and the seeds,\n The night that covers and the lights that fade,\nThe spear that pierces and the side that bleeds,\n The lips betraying and the life betrayed;\nThe deep hath calm: the moon hath rest: but we\nLords of the natural world are yet our own dread enemy.\n\nIs this the end of all that primal force\n Which, in its changes being still the same,\nFrom eyeless Chaos cleft its upward course,\n Through ravenous seas and whirling rocks and flame,\nTill the suns met in heaven and began\nTheir cycles, and the morning stars sang, and the Word was Man!\n\nNay, nay, we are but crucified, and though\n The bloody sweat falls from our brows like rain\nLoosen the nails--we shall come down I know,\n Staunch the red wounds--we shall be whole again,\nNo need have we of hyssop-laden rod,\nThat which is purely human, that is godlike, that is God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "ash_wednesday" - } - } - }, - "helas": { - "title": "“Hélas!”", - "body": "To drift with every passion till my soul\nIs a stringed lute on which can winds can play\nIs it for this that I have given away\nMine ancient wisdom and austere control?\nMethinks my life is a twice-written scroll\nScrawled over on some boyish holiday\nWith idle songs for pipe and virelay\nWhich do but mar the secret of the whole.\nSurely there was a time I might have trod\nThe sunlit heights and from life’s dissonance\nStruck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:\nIs that time dead? lo! with a little rod\nI did but touch the honey of romance--\nAnd must I lose a soul’s inheritance?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "impressions": { - "title": "“Impressions”", - "body": "# I. _Le Jardin_\n\nThe lily’s withered chalice falls\n Around its rod of dusty gold,\n And from the beech-trees on the wold\nThe last wood-pigeon coos and calls.\n\nThe gaudy leonine sunflower\n Hangs black and barren on its stalk,\n And down the windy garden walk\nThe dead leaves scatter,--hour by hour.\n\nPale privet-petals white as milk\n Are blown into a snowy mass:\n The roses lie upon the grass\nLike little shreds of crimson silk.\n\n\n# II. _La Mer_\n\nA white mist drifts across the shrouds,\n A wild moon in this wintry sky\n Gleams like an angry lion’s eye\nOut of a mane of tawny clouds.\n\nThe muffled steersman at the wheel\n Is but a shadow in the gloom;--\n And in the throbbing engine-room\nLeap the long rods of polished steel.\n\nThe shattered storm has left its trace\n Upon this huge and heaving dome,\n For the thin threads of yellow foam\nFloat on the waves like ravelled lace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "in-the-gold-room": { - "title": "“In the gold room”", - "body": "Her ivory hands on the ivory keys\n Strayed in a fitful fantasy,\nLike the silver gleam when the poplar trees\n Rustle their pale-leaves listlessly,\nOr the drifting foam of a restless sea\nWhen the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze.\n\nHer gold hair fell on the wall of gold\n Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun\nOn the burnished disk of the marigold,\n Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun\n When the gloom of the dark blue night is done,\nAnd the spear of the lily is aureoled.\n\nAnd her sweet red lips on these lips of mine\n Burned like the ruby fire set\nIn the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,\n Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,\n Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet\nWith the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "la-bella-donna-della-mia-mente": { - "title": "“La Bella Donna della Mia Mente”", - "body": "My limbs are wasted with a flame,\n My feet are sore with travelling,\nFor, calling on my Lady’s name,\n My lips have now forgot to sing.\n\nO Linnet in the wild-rose brake\n Strain for my Love thy melody,\nO Lark sing louder for love’s sake,\n My gentle Lady passeth by.\n\nShe is too fair for any man\n To see or hold his heart’s delight,\nFairer than Queen or courtesan\n Or moonlit water in the night.\n\nHer hair is bound with myrtle leaves,\n (Green leaves upon her golden hair!)\nGreen grasses through the yellow sheaves\n Of autumn corn are not more fair.\n\nHer little lips, more made to kiss\n Than to cry bitterly for pain,\nAre tremulous as brook-water is,\n Or roses after evening rain.\n\nHer neck is like white melilote\n Flushing for pleasure of the sun,\nThe throbbing of the linnet’s throat\n Is not so sweet to look upon.\n\nAs a pomegranate, cut in twain,\n White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,\nHer cheeks are as the fading stain\n Where the peach reddens to the south.\n\nO twining hands! O delicate\n White body made for love and pain!\nO House of love! O desolate\n Pale flower beaten by the rain!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "le-jardin-des-tuileries": { - "title": "“Le Jardin Des Tuileries”", - "body": "This winter air is keen and cold,\n And keen and cold this winter sun,\n But round my chair the children run\nLike little things of dancing gold.\n\nSometimes about the painted kiosk\n The mimic soldiers strut and stride,\n Sometimes the blue-eyed brigands hide\nIn the bleak tangles of the bosk.\n\nAnd sometimes, while the old nurse cons\n Her book, they steal across the square,\n And launch their paper navies where\nHuge Triton writhes in greenish bronze.\n\nAnd now in mimic flight they flee,\n And now they rush, a boisterous band--\n And, tiny hand on tiny hand,\nClimb up the black and leafless tree.\n\nAh! cruel tree! if I were you,\n And children climbed me, for their sake\n Though it be winter I would break\nInto spring blossoms white and blue!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "madonna-mia": { - "title": "“Madonna mia”", - "body": "A lily-girl, not made for this world’s pain,\n With brown, soft hair close braided by her ears,\n And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears\nLike bluest water seen through mists of rain:\nPale cheeks whereon no love hath left its stain,\n Red underlip drawn in for fear of love,\n And white throat, whiter than the silvered dove,\nThrough whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.\nYet, though my lips shall praise her without cease,\n Even to kiss her feet I am not bold,\n Being o’ershadowed by the wings of awe,\nLike Dante, when he stood with Beatrice\n Beneath the flaming Lion’s breast, and saw\n The seventh Crystal, and the Stair of Gold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "magdalen-walks": { - "title": "“Magdalen Walks”", - "body": "The little white clouds are racing over the sky,\n And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,\n The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch\nSways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.\n\nA delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze,\n The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,\n The birds are singing for joy of the Spring’s glad birth,\nHopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.\n\nAnd all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,\n And the rose-bud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,\n And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire\nGirdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.\n\nAnd the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love\n Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,\n And the gloom of the wych-elm’s hollow is lit with the iris sheen\nOf the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.\n\nSee! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there,\n Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew,\n And flashing adown the river, a flame of blue!\nThe kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-helen": { - "title": "“The New Helen”", - "body": "Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy\n The sons of God fought in that great emprise?\n Why dost thou walk our common earth again?\nHast thou forgotten that impassioned boy,\n His purple galley and his Tyrian men\n And treacherous Aphrodite’s mocking eyes?\nFor surely it was thou, who, like a star\n Hung in the silver silence of the night,\n Didst lure the Old World’s chivalry and might\nInto the clamorous crimson waves of war!\n\nOr didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?\n In amorous Sidon was thy temple built\n Over the light and laughter of the sea\n Where, behind lattice scarlet-wrought and gilt,\n Some brown-limbed girl did weave thee tapestry,\nAll through the waste and wearied hours of noon;\nTill her wan cheek with flame of passion burned,\n And she rose up the sea-washed lips to kiss\nOf some glad Cyprian sailor, safe returned\n From Calpé and the cliffs of Herakles!\n\nNo! thou art Helen, and none other one!\n It was for thee that young Sarpedôn died,\n And Memnôn’s manhood was untimely spent;\n It was for thee gold-crested Hector tried\nWith Thetis’ child that evil race to run,\n In the last year of thy beleaguerment;\nAy! even now the glory of thy fame\n Burns in those fields of trampled asphodel,\n Where the high lords whom Ilion knew so well\nClash ghostly shields, and call upon thy name.\n\nWhere hast thou been? in that enchanted land\n Whose slumbering vales forlorn Calypso knew,\n Where never mower rose at break of day\n But all unswathed the trammelling grasses grew,\nAnd the sad shepherd saw the tall corn stand\n Till summer’s red had changed to withered grey?\nDidst thou lie there by some Lethaean stream\n Deep brooding on thine ancient memory,\n The crash of broken spears, the fiery gleam\nFrom shivered helm, the Grecian battle-cry?\n\nNay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill\n With one who is forgotten utterly,\n That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine;\n Hidden away that never mightst thou see\nThe face of Her, before whose mouldering shrine\n To-day at Rome the silent nations kneel;\nWho gat from Love no joyous gladdening,\n But only Love’s intolerable pain,\n Only a sword to pierce her heart in twain,\nOnly the bitterness of child-bearing.\n\nThe lotus-leaves which heal the wounds of Death\n Lie in thy hand; O, be thou kind to me,\n While yet I know the summer of my days;\n For hardly can my tremulous lips draw breath\nTo fill the silver trumpet with thy praise,\n So bowed am I before thy mystery;\nSo bowed and broken on Love’s terrible wheel,\n That I have lost all hope and heart to sing,\n Yet care I not what ruin time may bring\nIf in thy temple thou wilt let me kneel.\n\nAlas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here,\n But, like that bird, the servant of the sun,\n Who flies before the north wind and the night,\n So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear,\nBack to the tower of thine old delight,\n And the red lips of young Euphorion;\nNor shall I ever see thy face again,\n But in this poisonous garden-close must stay,\n Crowning my brows with the thorn-crown of pain,\nTill all my loveless life shall pass away.\n\nO Helen! Helen! Helen! yet a while,\n Yet for a little while, O, tarry here,\n Till the dawn cometh and the shadows flee!\n For in the gladsome sunlight of thy smile\nOf heaven or hell I have no thought or fear,\n Seeing I know no other god but thee:\nNo other god save him, before whose feet\n In nets of gold the tired planets move,\n The incarnate spirit of spiritual love\nWho in thy body holds his joyous seat.\n\nThou wert not born as common women are!\n But, girt with silver splendour of the foam,\n Didst from the depths of sapphire seas arise!\n And at thy coming some immortal star,\nBearded with flame, blazed in the Eastern skies,\n And waked the shepherds on thine island-home.\nThou shalt not die: no asps of Egypt creep\n Close at thy heels to taint the delicate air;\n No sullen-blooming poppies stain thy hair,\nThose scarlet heralds of eternal sleep.\n\nLily of love, pure and inviolate!\n Tower of ivory! red rose of fire!\n Thou hast come down our darkness to illume:\nFor we, close-caught in the wide nets of Fate,\n Wearied with waiting for the World’s Desire,\n Aimlessly wandered in the House of gloom,\nAimlessly sought some slumberous anodyne\n For wasted lives, for lingering wretchedness,\nTill we beheld thy re-arisen shrine,\n And the white glory of thy loveliness.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-remorse": { - "title": "“The New Remorse”", - "body": "The sin was mine; I did not understand.\n So now is music prisoned in her cave,\n Save where some ebbing desultory wave\nFrets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.\nAnd in the withered hollow of this land\n Hath Summer dug herself so deep a grave,\n That hardly can the leaden willow crave\nOne silver blossom from keen Winter’s hand.\n\nBut who is this who cometh by the shore?\n(Nay, love, look up and wonder!) Who is this\n Who cometh in dyed garments from the South?\nIt is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss\n The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,\nAnd I shall weep and worship, as before.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "panthea": { - "title": "“Panthea”", - "body": "Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,\n From passionate pain to deadlier delight,--\nI am too young to live without desire,\n Too young art thou to waste this summer night\nAsking those idle questions which of old\nMan sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.\n\nFor, sweet, to feel is better than to know,\n And wisdom is a childless heritage,\nOne pulse of passion--youth’s first fiery glow,--\n Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:\nVex not thy soul with dead philosophy,\nHave we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love and eyes to see!\n\nDost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,\n Like water bubbling from a silver jar,\nSo soft she sings the envious moon is pale,\n That high in heaven she is hung so far\nShe cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,--\nMark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late and labouring moon.\n\nWhite lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,\n The fallen snow of petals where the breeze\nScatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam\n Of boyish limbs in water,--are not these\nEnough for thee, dost thou desire more?\nAlas! the Gods will give nought else from their eternal store.\n\nFor our high Gods have sick and wearied grown\n Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour\nFor wasted days of youth to make atone\n By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,\nHearken they now to either good or ill,\nBut send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.\n\nThey sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,\n Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,\nThey sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees\n Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,\nMourning the old glad days before they knew\nWhat evil things the heart of man could dream, and dreaming do.\n\nAnd far beneath the brazen floor they see\n Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,\nThe bustle of small lives, then wearily\n Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again\nKissing each others’ mouths, and mix more deep\nThe poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-lidded sleep.\n\nThere all day long the golden-vestured sun,\n Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch ablaze,\nAnd, when the gaudy web of noon is spun\n By its twelve maidens, through the crimson haze\nFresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon,\nAnd the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.\n\nThere walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,\n Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust\nOf wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede\n Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,\nHis curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare\nThe frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.\n\nThere in the green heart of some garden close\n Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,\nHer warm soft body like the briar rose\n Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,\nLaughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis\nPeers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of lonely bliss.\n\nThere never does that dreary north-wind blow\n Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,\nNor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,\n Nor ever doth the red-toothed lightning dare\nTo wake them in the silver-fretted night\nWhen we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead delight.\n\nAlas! they know the far Lethaean spring,\n The violet-hidden waters well they know,\nWhere one whose feet with tired wandering\n Are faint and broken may take heart and go,\nAnd from those dark depths cool and crystalline\nDrink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls, and anodyne.\n\nBut we oppress our natures, God or Fate\n Is our enemy, we starve and feed\nOn vain repentance--O we are born too late!\n What balm for us in bruisèd poppy seed\nWho crowd into one finite pulse of time\nThe joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of infinite crime.\n\nO we are wearied of this sense of guilt,\n Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,\nWearied of every temple we have built,\n Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,\nFor man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:\nOne fiery-coloured moment: one great love; and lo! we die.\n\nAh! but no ferry-man with labouring pole\n Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,\nNo little coin of bronze can bring the soul\n Over Death’s river to the sunless land,\nVictim and wine and vow are all in vain,\nThe tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead rise not again.\n\nWe are resolved into the supreme air,\n We are made one with what we touch and see,\nWith our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,\n With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree\nFlames into green, the wildest beasts that range\nThe moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.\n\nWith beat of systole and of diastole\n One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,\nAnd mighty waves of single Being roll\n From nerveless germ to man, for we are part\nOf every rock and bird and beast and hill,\nOne with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.\n\nFrom lower cells of waking life we pass\n To full perfection; thus the world grows old:\nWe who are godlike now were once a mass\n Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,\nUnsentient or of joy or misery,\nAnd tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and wind-swept sea.\n\nThis hot hard flame with which our bodies burn\n Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,\nAy! and those argent breasts of thine will turn\n To water-lilies; the brown fields men till\nWill be more fruitful for our love to-night,\nNothing is lost in nature, all things live in Death’s despite.\n\nThe boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,\n The man’s last passion, and the last red spear\nThat from the lily leaps, the asphodel\n Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear\nOf too much beauty, and the timid shame\nOf the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes,--these with the same\n\nOne sacrament are consecrate, the earth\n Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,\nThe yellow buttercups that shake for mirth\n At daybreak know a pleasure not less real\nThan we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood,\nWe draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good.\n\nSo when men bury us beneath the yew\n Thy crimson-stainèd mouth a rose will be,\nAnd thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,\n And when the white narcissus wantonly\nKisses the wind its playmate some faint joy\nWill thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.\n\nAnd thus without life’s conscious torturing pain\n In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,\nAnd from the linnet’s throat will sing again,\n And as two gorgeous-mailèd snakes will run\nOver our graves, or as two tigers creep\nThrough the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge lions sleep\n\nAnd give them battle! How my heart leaps up\n To think of that grand living after death\nIn beast and bird and flower, when this cup,\n Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,\nAnd with the pale leaves of some autumn day\nThe soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s last great prey.\n\nO think of it! We shall inform ourselves\n Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,\nThe Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves\n That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn\nUpon the meadows, shall not be more near\nThan you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear\n\nThe thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,\n And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun\nOn sunless days in winter, we shall know\n By whom the silver gossamer is spun,\nWho paints the diapered fritillaries,\nOn what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.\n\nAy! had we never loved at all, who knows\n If yonder daffodil had lured the bee\nInto its gilded womb, or any rose\n Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!\nMethinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,\nBut for the lovers’ lips that kiss, the poets’ lips that sing.\n\nIs the light vanished from our golden sun,\n Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,\nThat we are nature’s heritors, and one\n With every pulse of life that beats the air?\nRather new suns across the sky shall pass,\nNew splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.\n\nAnd we two lovers shall not sit afar,\n Critics of nature, but the joyous sea\nShall be our raiment, and the bearded star\n Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be\nPart of the mighty universal whole,\nAnd through all aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!\n\nWe shall be notes in that great Symphony\n Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,\nAnd all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be\n One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years\nHave lost their terrors now, we shall not die,\nThe Universe itself shall be our Immortality.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "pan": { - "title": "“Pan”", - "body": "# I.\n\nO goat-foot God of Arcady!\nThis modern world is grey and old,\nAnd what remains to us of thee?\n\nNo more the shepherd lads in glee\nThrow apples at thy wattled fold,\nO goat-foot God of Arcady!\n\nNor through the laurels can one see\nThy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold,\nAnd what remains to us of thee?\n\nAnd dull and dead our Thames would be,\nFor here the winds are chill and cold,\nO goat-foot God of Arcady!\n\nThen keep the tomb of Helice,\nThine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold,\nAnd what remains to us of thee?\n\nThough many an unsung elegy\nSleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,\nO goat-foot God of Arcady!\nAh, what remains to us of thee?\n\n\n# II.\n\nAh, leave the hills of Arcady,\nThy satyrs and their wanton play,\nThis modern world hath need of thee.\n\nNo nymph or Faun indeed have we,\nFor Faun and nymph are old and grey,\nAh, leave the hills of Arcady!\n\nThis is the land where liberty\nLit grave-browed Milton on his way,\nThis modern world hath need of thee!\n\nA land of ancient chivalry\nWhere gentle Sidney saw the day,\nAh, leave the hills of Arcady!\n\nThis fierce sea-lion of the sea,\nThis England lacks some stronger lay,\nThis modern world hath need of thee!\n\nThen blow some trumpet loud and free,\nAnd give thine oaten pipe away,\nAh, leave the hills of Arcady!\nThis modern world hath need of thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "requiescat": { - "title": "“Requiescat”", - "body": "Tread lightly, she is near\n Under the snow,\nSpeak gently, she can hear\n The daisies grow.\n\nAll her bright golden hair\n Tarnished with rust,\nShe that was young and fair\n Fallen to dust.\n\nLily-like, white as snow,\n She hardly knew\nShe was a woman, so\n Sweetly she grew.\n\nCoffin-board, heavy stone,\n Lie on her breast,\nI vex my heart alone,\n She is at rest.\n\nPeace, Peace, she cannot hear\n Lyre or sonnet,\nAll my life’s buried here,\n Heap earth upon it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "rome-unvisited": { - "title": "“Rome Unvisited”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe corn has turned from grey to red,\n Since first my spirit wandered forth\n From the drear cities of the north,\nAnd to Italia’s mountains fled.\n\nAnd here I set my face towards home,\n For all my pilgrimage is done,\n Although, methinks, yon blood-red sun\nMarshals the way to Holy Rome.\n\nO Blessed Lady, who dost hold\n Upon the seven hills thy reign!\n O Mother without blot or stain,\nCrowned with bright crowns of triple gold!\n\nO Roma, Roma, at thy feet\n I lay this barren gift of song!\n For, ah! the way is steep and long\nThat leads unto thy sacred street.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAnd yet what joy it were for me\n To turn my feet unto the south,\n And journeying towards the Tiber mouth\nTo kneel again at Fiesole!\n\nAnd wandering through the tangled pines\n That break the gold of Arno’s stream,\n To see the purple mist and gleam\nOf morning on the Apennines\n\nBy many a vineyard-hidden home,\n Orchard and olive-garden grey,\n Till from the drear Campagna’s way\nThe seven hills bear up the dome!\n\n\n# III.\n\nA pilgrim from the northern seas--\n What joy for me to seek alone\n The wondrous temple and the throne\nOf him who holds the awful keys!\n\nWhen, bright with purple and with gold\n Come priest and holy cardinal,\n And borne above the heads of all\nThe gentle Shepherd of the Fold.\n\nO joy to see before I die\n The only God-anointed king,\n And hear the silver trumpets ring\nA triumph as he passes by!\n\nOr at the brazen-pillared shrine\n Holds high the mystic sacrifice,\n And shows his God to human eyes\nBeneath the veil of bread and wine.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nFor lo, what changes time can bring!\n The cycles of revolving years\n May free my heart from all its fears,\nAnd teach my lips a song to sing.\n\nBefore yon field of trembling gold\n Is garnered into dusty sheaves,\n Or ere the autumn’s scarlet leaves\nFlutter as birds adown the wold,\n\nI may have run the glorious race,\n And caught the torch while yet aflame,\n And called upon the holy name\nOf Him who now doth hide His face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "roses-and-rue": { - "title": "“Roses and Rue”", - "body": "Could we dig up this long-buried treasure,\n Were it worth the pleasure,\nWe never could learn love’s song,\n We are parted too long.\n\nCould the passionate past that is fled\n Call back its dead,\nCould we live it all over again,\n Were it worth the pain!\n\nI remember we used to meet\n By an ivied seat,\nAnd you warbled each pretty word\n With the air of a bird;\n\nAnd your voice had a quaver in it,\n Just like a linnet,\nAnd shook, as the blackbird’s throat\n With its last big note;\n\nAnd your eyes, they were green and grey\n Like an April day,\nBut lit into amethyst\n When I stooped and kissed;\n\nAnd your mouth, it would never smile\n For a long, long while,\nThen it rippled all over with laughter\n Five minutes after.\n\nYou were always afraid of a shower,\n Just like a flower:\nI remember you started and ran\n When the rain began.\n\nI remember I never could catch you,\n For no one could match you,\nYou had wonderful, luminous, fleet,\n Little wings to your feet.\n\nI remember your hair--did I tie it?\n For it always ran riot--\nLike a tangled sunbeam of gold:\n These things are old.\n\nI remember so well the room,\n And the lilac bloom\nThat beat at the dripping pane\n In the warm June rain;\n\nAnd the colour of your gown,\n It was amber-brown,\nAnd two yellow satin bows\n From your shoulders rose.\n\nAnd the handkerchief of French lace\n Which you held to your face--\nHad a small tear left a stain?\n Or was it the rain?\n\nOn your hand as it waved adieu\n There were veins of blue;\nIn your voice as it said good-bye\n Was a petulant cry,\n\n“You have only wasted your life.”\n (Ah, that was the knife!)\nWhen I rushed through the garden gate\n It was all too late.\n\nCould we live it over again,\n Were it worth the pain,\nCould the passionate past that is fled\n Call back its dead!\n\nWell, if my heart must break,\n Dear love, for your sake,\nIt will break in music, I know,\n Poets’ hearts break so.\n\nBut strange that I was not told\n That the brain can hold\nIn a tiny ivory cell\n God’s heaven and hell.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "san-miniato": { - "title": "“San Miniato”", - "body": "See, I have climbed the mountain side\nUp to this holy house of God,\nWhere once that Angel-Painter trod\nWho saw the heavens opened wide,\n\nAnd throned upon the crescent moon\nThe Virginal white Queen of Grace,--\nMary! could I but see thy face\nDeath could not come at all too soon.\n\nO crowned by God with thorns and pain!\nMother of Christ! O mystic wife!\nMy heart is weary of this life\nAnd over-sad to sing again.\n\nO crowned by God with love and flame!\nO crowned by Christ the Holy One!\nO listen ere the searching sun\nShow to the world my sin and shame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "assumption" - } - } - }, - "santa-decca": { - "title": "“Santa Decca”", - "body": "The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring\n To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves!\n Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves,\nAnd in the noon the careless shepherds sing,\nFor Pan is dead, and all the wantoning\n By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er:\n Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more;\nGreat Pan is dead, and Mary’s son is King.\n\nAnd yet--perchance in this sea-trancèd isle,\n Chewing the bitter fruit of memory,\n Some God lies hidden in the asphodel.\nAh Love! if such there be, then it were well\n For us to fly his anger: nay, but see,\n The leaves are stirring: let us watch awhile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "serenade": { - "title": "“Serenade”", - "body": "The western wind is blowing fair\n Across the dark Aegean sea,\nAnd at the secret marble stair\n My Tyrian galley waits for thee.\nCome down! the purple sail is spread,\n The watchman sleeps within the town,\nO leave thy lily-flowered bed,\n O Lady mine come down, come down!\n\nShe will not come, I know her well,\n Of lover’s vows she hath no care,\nAnd little good a man can tell\n Of one so cruel and so fair.\nTrue love is but a woman’s toy,\n They never know the lover’s pain,\nAnd I who loved as loves a boy\n Must love in vain, must love in vain.\n\nO noble pilot, tell me true,\n Is that the sheen of golden hair?\nOr is it but the tangled dew\n That binds the passion-flowers there?\nGood sailor come and tell me now\n Is that my Lady’s lily hand?\nOr is it but the gleaming prow,\n Or is it but the silver sand?\n\nNo! no! ’tis not the tangled dew,\n ’Tis not the silver-fretted sand,\nIt is my own dear Lady true\n With golden hair and lily hand!\nO noble pilot, steer for Troy,\n Good sailor, ply the labouring oar,\nThis is the Queen of life and joy\n Whom we must bear from Grecian shore!\n\nThe waning sky grows faint and blue,\n It wants an hour still of day,\nAboard! aboard! my gallant crew,\n O Lady mine, away! away!\nO noble pilot, steer for Troy,\n Good sailor, ply the labouring oar,\nO loved as only loves a boy!\n O loved for ever evermore!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "silentium-amoris": { - "title": "“Silentium amoris”", - "body": "As often-times the too resplendent sun\n Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon\nBack to her sombre cave, ere she hath won\n A single ballad from the nightingale,\n So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,\nAnd all my sweetest singing out of tune.\n\nAnd as at dawn across the level mead\n On wings impetuous some wind will come,\nAnd with its too harsh kisses break the reed\n Which was its only instrument of song,\n So my too stormy passions work me wrong,\nAnd for excess of Love my Love is dumb.\n\nBut surely unto Thee mine eyes did show\n Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;\nElse it were better we should part, and go,\n Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,\n And I to nurse the barren memory\nOf unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet": { - "title": "“Sonnet”", - "body": "Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,\nSad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,\n Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love\nThan terrors of red flame and thundering.\nThe hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:\n A bird at evening flying to its nest\n Tells me of One who had no place of rest:\nI think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.\nCome rather on some autumn afternoon,\n When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,\n And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,\nCome when the splendid fulness of the moon\n Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,\n And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "taedium-vitae": { - "title": "“Taedium vitae”", - "body": "To stab my youth with desperate knives, to wear\nThis paltry age’s gaudy livery,\nTo let each base hand filch my treasury,\nTo mesh my soul within a woman’s hair,\nAnd be mere Fortune’s lackeyed groom,--I swear\nI love it not! these things are less to me\nThan the thin foam that frets upon the sea,\nLess than the thistledown of summer air\nWhich hath no seed: better to stand aloof\nFar from these slanderous fools who mock my life\nKnowing me not, better the lowliest roof\nFit for the meanest hind to sojourn in,\nThan to go back to that hoarse cave of strife\nWhere my white soul first kissed the mouth of sin.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "theoretikos": { - "title": "“Theoretikos”", - "body": "This mighty empire hath but feet of clay:\n Of all its ancient chivalry and might\n Our little island is forsaken quite:\nSome enemy hath stolen its crown of bay,\nAnd from its hills that voice hath passed away\n Which spake of Freedom: O come out of it,\n Come out of it, my Soul, thou art not fit\nFor this vile traffic-house, where day by day\n Wisdom and reverence are sold at mart,\n And the rude people rage with ignorant cries\nAgainst an heritage of centuries.\n It mars my calm: wherefore in dreams of Art\n And loftiest culture I would stand apart,\nNeither for God, nor for his enemies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tristitae": { - "title": "“Tristitae”", - "body": "_Αἴλινον_, _αἴλινον εἰπέ_, _τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω_\n\nO well for him who lives at ease\n With garnered gold in wide domain,\n Nor heeds the splashing of the rain,\nThe crashing down of forest trees.\n\nO well for him who ne’er hath known\n The travail of the hungry years,\n A father grey with grief and tears,\nA mother weeping all alone.\n\nBut well for him whose foot hath trod\n The weary road of toil and strife,\n Yet from the sorrows of his life.\nBuilds ladders to be nearer God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-true-knowledge": { - "title": "“The True Knowledge”", - "body": "… _ἀναyκαίως δ’ ἔχει_\n_Βίον θερίζειν ὥστε κάρπιμον στάχυν_,\n_καὶ τὸν yὲν εἶναι τὸν δὲ yή_.\n\nThou knowest all; I seek in vain\n What lands to till or sow with seed--\n The land is black with briar and weed,\nNor cares for falling tears or rain.\n\nThou knowest all; I sit and wait\n With blinded eyes and hands that fail,\n Till the last lifting of the veil\nAnd the first opening of the gate.\n\nThou knowest all; I cannot see.\n I trust I shall not live in vain,\n I know that we shall meet again\nIn some divine eternity.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "under-the-balcony": { - "title": "“Under the balcony”", - "body": "O beautiful star with the crimson mouth!\n O moon with the brows of gold!\nRise up, rise up, from the odorous south!\n And light for my love her way,\n Lest her little feet should stray\n On the windy hill and the wold!\nO beautiful star with the crimson mouth!\n O moon with the brows of gold!\n\nO ship that shakes on the desolate sea!\n O ship with the wet, white sail!\nPut in, put in, to the port to me!\n For my love and I would go\n To the land where the daffodils blow\n In the heart of a violet dale!\nO ship that shakes on the desolate sea!\n O ship with the wet, white sail!\n\nO rapturous bird with the low, sweet note!\n O bird that sits on the spray!\nSing on, sing on, from your soft brown throat!\n And my love in her little bed\n Will listen, and lift her head\n From the pillow, and come my way!\nO rapturous bird with the low, sweet note!\n O bird that sits on the spray!\n\nO blossom that hangs in the tremulous air!\n O blossom with lips of snow!\nCome down, come down, for my love to wear!\n You will die on her head in a crown,\n You will die in a fold of her gown,\n To her little light heart you will go!\nO blossom that hangs in the tremulous air!\n O blossom with lips of snow!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-vision": { - "title": "“A Vision”", - "body": "Two crownèd Kings, and One that stood alone\n With no green weight of laurels round his head,\n But with sad eyes as one uncomforted,\nAnd wearied with man’s never-ceasing moan\nFor sins no bleating victim can atone,\n And sweet long lips with tears and kisses fed.\n Girt was he in a garment black and red,\nAnd at his feet I marked a broken stone\n Which sent up lilies, dove-like, to his knees.\nNow at their sight, my heart being lit with flame,\nI cried to Beatricé, “Who are these?”\nAnd she made answer, knowing well each name,\n “Aeschylos first, the second Sophokles,\n And last (wide stream of tears!) Euripides.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "vita-nuova": { - "title": "“Vita Nuova”", - "body": "I stood by the unvintageable sea\n Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray;\n The long red fires of the dying day\nBurned in the west; the wind piped drearily;\nAnd to the land the clamorous gulls did flee:\n “Alas!” I cried, “my life is full of pain,\n And who can garner fruit or golden grain\nFrom these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!”\nMy nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,\n Nathless I threw them as my final cast\n Into the sea, and waited for the end.\nWhen lo! a sudden glory! and I saw\n From the black waters of my tortured past\n The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "c-k-williams": { - "metadata": { - "name": "C. K. Williams", - "birth": { - "year": 1936 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Williams", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 32 - }, - "poems": { - "apes": { - "title": "“Apes”", - "body": "One branch, I read, of a species of chimpanzees has something like territorial wars,\nand when the … army, I suppose you’d call it, of one tribe prevails and captures an enemy,\n“Several males hold a hand or foot of the rival so the victim can be damaged at will.”\n\nThis is so disquieting: if beings with whom we share so many genes can be this cruel,\nwhat hope for us? Still, “rival,” “victim,” “will”--don’t such anthropomorphic terms\nmake those simians’ social-political conflicts sound more brutal than they are?\n\nThe chimps Catherine and I saw on their island sanctuary in Uganda we loathed.\nUnlike the pacific gorillas in the forest of Bwindi, they fought, dementedly shrieked,\nthe dominant male lorded it over the rest; they were, in all, too much like us.\n\nAnother island from my recent reading, where Columbus, on his last voyage,\nencountering some “Indians” who’d greeted him with curiosity and warmth, wrote,\nbefore he chained and enslaved them, “They don’t even know how to kill each other.”\n\nIt’s occurred to me I’ve read enough--at my age all it does is confirm my sadness.\nSurely the papers: war, terror, torture, corruption--they’re like broken glass in the mind.\nBack when I knew I knew nothing, I read all the time, poems, novels, philosophy, myth,\n\nbut I hardly glanced at the news, there was a distance between what could happen\nand the part of myself I felt with: now everything’s so tight against me I hardly can move.\nThe Analects say people in the golden age weren’t aware they were governed; they just lived.\n\nCould I have passed through my own golden age and not even known I was there?\nSome gold: nuclear rockets aimed at your head, racism, sexism, contempt for the poor.\nAnd there I was, reading. What did I learn? Everything, nothing, too little, too much …\nJust enough to get me here: a long-faced, white-haired ape with a book, still turning the page.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blades": { - "title": "“Blades”", - "body": "When I was about eight, I once stabbed somebody, another kid, a little girl.\nI’d been hanging around in front of the supermarket near our house\nand when she walked by, I let her have it, right in the gap between her shirt and her shorts\nwith a piece of broken-off car antenna I used to carry around in my pocket.\nIt happened so fast I still don’t know how I did it: I was as shocked as she was\nexcept she squealed and started yelling as though I’d plunged a knife in her\nand everybody in the neighborhood gathered around us, then they called the cops,\nthen the girl’s mother came running out of the store saying “What happened? What happened?”\nand the girl screamed, “He stabbed me!” and I screamed back, “I did not!” and she said did too\nand me I didn’t and we were both crying hysterically by that time.\nSomebody pulled her shirt up and it was just a scratch but we went on and on\nand the mother, standing between us, seemed to be absolutely terrified.\nI still remember how she watched first one of us and then the other with a look of complete horror--\nYou did too! I did not!--as though we were both strangers, as though it was some natural disaster\nshe was beholding that was beyond any mode of comprehension so all she could do\nwas stare speechlessly at us, and then another expression came over her face,\none that I’d never seen before, that made me think she was going to cry herself\nand sweep both of us, the girl and me, into her arms and hold us against her.\nThe police came just then, though, quieted everyone down, put the girl and the mother\ninto a squad-car to take to the hospital and me in another to take to jail\nexcept they really only took me around the corner and let me go because the mother and daughter were black\nand in those days you had to do something pretty terrible to get into trouble that way.\n\nI don’t understand how we twist these things or how we get them straight again\nbut I relived that day I don’t know how many times before I realized I had it all wrong.\nThe boy wasn’t me at all, he was another kid: I was just there.\nAnd it wasn’t the girl who was black, but him. The mother was real, though.\nI really had thought she was going to embrace them both\nand I had dreams about her for years afterwards: that I’d be being born again\nand she’d be lifting me with that same wounded sorrow or she would suddenly appear out of nowhere,\nblotting out everything but a single, blazing wing of holiness.\nWho knows the rest? I can still remember how it felt the old way.\nHow I make my little thrust, how she crushes us against her, how I turn and snarl\nat the cold circle of faces around us because something’s torn in me,\nsome ancient cloak of terror we keep on ourselves because we’ll do anything,\nanything, not to know how silently we knell in the mouth of death\nand not to obliterate the forgiveness and the lies we offer one another and call innocence.\nThis is innocence. I touch her, we kiss.\nAnd this. I’m here or not here. I can’t tell. I stab her. I stab her again. I still can’t.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "butchers": { - "title": "“Butchers”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nThank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,\nfrom our mountains, our tundra--that way we had all the meat we might need.\n\nThus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,\nand never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,\n\nwhere flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation\nas cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.\n\nRembrandt knew of all this--isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?\nIt’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.\n\nVanished those species--begone!--those tribes, those peoples, those nations--\nMyrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.\n\n\n# 2.\n\nBut back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely\nthat hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal\n\nwithin us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,\naglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.\n\nFling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec\nyour heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!\n\nOur own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,\nwe’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher,\n\nwho inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure\nwhere dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "claws": { - "title": "“Claws”", - "body": "_from the Sanskrit of Mayura_\n\nThe claws of the mighty nation dabble the gore-pools\nand wallow the muddy flesh of the horrible enemy.\n\nHuman mouthfuls plucked like reeds. Hearts, plucked.\n\nThe claws dancing in the torn chest like herons.\n\nMay the mighty nation protect you!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "clay-out-of-silence": { - "title": "“Clay out of Silence”", - "body": "chances are we will sink quietly back\ninto oblivion without a ripple\nwe will go back into the face\ndown through the mortars as though it hadn’t happened\n\nearth: I’ll remember you\nyou were the mother you made pain\nI’ll grind my thorax against you for the last time\nand put my hand on you again to comfort you\n\nsky: could we forget?\nwe were the same as you were\nwe couldn’t wait to get back sleeping\nwe’d have done anything to be sleeping\n\nand trees angels for being thrust up here\nand stones for cracking in my bare hands\nbecause you foreknew\nthere was no vengeance for being here\n\nwhen we were flesh we were eaten\nwhen we were metal we were burned back\nthere was no death anywhere but now\nwhen we were men when we became it", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "droplets": { - "title": "“Droplets”", - "body": "Even when the rain falls relatively hard,\nonly one leaf at a time of the little tree\nyou planted on the balcony last year,\nthen another leaf at its time, and one more,\nis set trembling by the constant droplets,\n\nbut the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,\nyou at the piano inside, your hesitant music\nmingling with the din of the downpour,\nthe gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,\nthe iron railings and flowing gutters,\n\nall of it fuses in me with such intensity\nthat I can’t help wondering why my longing\nto live forever has so abated that it hardly\ncomes to me anymore, and never as it did,\nas regret for what I might not live to live,\n\nbut rather as a layering of instants like this,\ntransient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,\nyet emphatic as any note of the nocturne\nyou practice, and, the storm faltering, fading\ninto its own radiant passing, you practice again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "dust": { - "title": "“Dust”", - "body": "Face powder, gun powder, talcum of anthrax,\nshavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips\nof crumbling poetry paper--all these in my lock-box,\nand dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.\n\nSaw-, silk-, chalk-dust and chaff,\nthe dust the drool of a bull swinging its head\nas it dreams its death\nslobs out on; dust even from that scoured,\n\nscraped littoral of the Aegean,\ntroops streaming screaming across it\nat those who that day, that age or forever\nwould be foe, worthy of being dust for.\n\nLast, hovering dust of the harvest, brief\nas the half-instant hitch in the flight\nof the hawk, as the poplets of light\nthrough the leaves of the bronzing maples.\n\nAnimal dust, mineral, mental, all hoarded\nnot in the jar of sexy Pandora, not\nin the ark where the dust of the holy aspiring\nto congeal as glorious mud-thing still writhes--\n\nJust this leathery, crackled, obsolete box,\nheart-sized or brain, rusted lock shattered,\nhinge howling with glee to be lifted again …\nFace powder, gun powder, dust, darling dust.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fire": { - "title": "“Fire”", - "body": "An ax-shattered\nbedroom window\nthe wall above\nstill smutted with\nsoot the wall\nbeneath still\nsoiled with\nsoak and down\n\non the black\nof the pavement\na mattress its ticking\nhalf eaten away\nthe end where\nthe head would\nhave been with\na nauseous bite\n\nburnt away\nand beside it\nan all at once\nmeaningless heap\nof soiled sodden\nclothing one\nshoe a jacket\nonce white\n\nthe vain matters\na life gathers\nabout it symbols\nof having once\ncried out to itself\nwho art thou?\nthen again who\nwouldst thou be?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "from-my-window": { - "title": "“From My Window”", - "body": "Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives\nfrom somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.\nThe scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded--I hadn’t noticed--\nand the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken the gritty soil.\nUp the street, some surveyors with tripods are waving each other left and right the way they do.\nA girl in a gym suit jogged by a while ago, some kids passed, playing hooky, I imagine,\nand now the paraplegic Vietnam vet who lives in a half-converted warehouse down the block\nand the friend who stays with him and seems to help him out come weaving towards me,\ntheir battered wheelchair lurching uncertainly from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.\nI know where they’re going--to the “Legion”: once, when I was putting something out, they stopped,\nboth drunk that time, too, both reeking--it wasn’t ten o’clock--and we chatted for a bit.\nI don’t know how they stay alive--on benefits most likely. I wonder if they’re lovers?\nThey don’t look it. Right now, in fact, they look a wreck, careening haphazardly along,\ncontriving, as they reach beneath me, to dip a wheel from the curb so that the chair skewers, teeters,\ntips, and they both tumble, the one slowly, almost gracefully sliding in stages from his seat,\nhis expression hardly marking it, the other staggering over him, spinning heavily down,\nto lie on the asphalt, his mouth working, his feet shoving weakly and fruitlessly against the curb.\nIn the storefront office on the corner, Reed and Son, Real Estate, have come to see the show.\nGazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least, thank god, laughing.\nNow the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.\nNow he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.\nHe hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot\ncatches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down,\nset the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.\nNo drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber,\nthe poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,\nthen his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be,\nand the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he’d known,\nall along, that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,\nI watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.\nIt was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,\nand he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then realized made a figure eight,\nwhat must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,\nand lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.\nOver and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he’d blazed,\nbut the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them\nnow and I looked away, up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,\nwith all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically\nagainst the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.\nIn the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white,\nits surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-gaffe": { - "title": "“The Gaffe”", - "body": "# 1.\n\nIf that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,\nas he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?\n\nIf he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,\nshouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?\n\nI’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me:\nis there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he,\n\ncould already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse,\nand orchestrate ever undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself?\n\n\n# 2.\n\nThe son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call,\ntake me along, and I’m sent out with the dead boy’s brother and some others to play.\n\nWe’re joking around, and some words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said.\n_How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies?_\n\nis what’s said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares,\nand I want to know now why that someone in me who’s me yet not me let me say it.\n\nShouldn’t he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me,\nit didn’t matter that I’d really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when?\n\n\n# 3.\n\nI could hear the boy’s mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping.\nWas the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end?\n\nWas her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me,\nfor guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes?\n\nShe didn’t laugh, though, or I never heard her. _How do you know when you can laugh?_\nWhy couldn’t someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain?\n\nThe kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn’t hear anything more from inside.\nThe way now sometimes what’s in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-gas-station": { - "title": "“The Gas Station”", - "body": "This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even before Whitman and Yeats.\nI don’t think there were three words in my head yet. I knew perhaps, that I should suffer,\nI can remember I almost cried for this or for that, nothing special, nothing to speak of.\nProbably I was mad with grief for the loss of my childhood, but I wouldn’t have known that.\nIt’s dawn. A gas station. Route twenty-two. I remember exactly: route twenty-two curved,\nthere was a squat, striped concrete divider they’d put in after a plague of collisions.\nThe gas station? Texaco, Esso--I don’t know. They were just words anyway then, just what their signs said.\nI wouldn’t have understood the first thing about monopoly or imperialist or oppression.\nIt’s dawn. It’s so late. Even then, when I was never tired, I’m just holding on.\nSlumped on my friend’s shoulder, I watch the relentless, wordless misery of the route twenty-two sky\nthat seems to be filming my face with a grainy oil I keep trying to rub off or in.\nWhy are we here? Because one of my friends, in the men’s room over there, has blue balls.\nHe has to jerk off. I don’t know what that means, “blue balls,” or why he has to do that--\nIt must be important to have to stop here after this long night, but I don’t ask.\nI’m just trying, I think, to keep my head as empty as I can for as long as I can.\nOne of my other friends is asleep. He’s so ugly, his mouth hanging, slack and wet.\nAnother--I’ll never see this one again--stares from the window as though he were frightened.\nHere’s what we’ve done. We were in Times Square, a pimp found us, corralled us, led us somewhere,\ndown a dark street, another dark street, up dark stairs, dark hall, dark apartment,\nwhere his whore, his girl, or his wife or his mother for all I know dragged herself from her sleep,\npropped herself on an elbow, gazed into the dark hall, and agreed, for two dollars each, to take care of us.\nTake care of us. Some of the words that come through me now seem to stay, to hook in.\nMy friend in the bathroom is taking so long. The filthy sky must be starting to lighten.\nIt took me a long time, too, with the woman, I mean. Did I mention that she, the woman, the whore or the mother,\nwas having her time and all she would deign to do was to blow us? Did I say that? Deign? Blow?\nWhat a joy, though, the idea was in those days. Blown! What a thing to tell the next day.\nShe only deigned, though, no more. She was like a machine. When I lift her back to me now,\nthere’s nothing there but that dark, curly head, working, a machine, up and down, and now,\nFreud, Marx, Fathers, tell me, what am I, doing this, telling this, on her, on myself,\nhammering it down, cementing it, sealing it in, but a machine, too? Why am I doing this?\nI still haven’t read Augustine. I don’t understand Chomsky that well. Should I?\nMy friend at last comes back. Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.\nHow pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hog-heaven": { - "title": "“Hog Heaven”", - "body": "It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.\nIt stinks in the mansions and it stinks in the shacks and the carpeted offices,\nin the beds and the classrooms and out in the fields where there’s no one.\nIt just stinks. Sniff and feel it come up: it’s like death coming up.\nTake one foot, ignore it long enough, leave it on the ground long enough\nbecause you’re afraid to stop, even to love, even to be loved,\nit’ll stink worse than you can imagine, as though the whole air was meat pressing your eyelids,\nas though you’d been caught, hung up from the earth\nand all the stinks of the fear drain down and your toes are the valves dripping\nthe giant stinks of the pain and the death and the radiance.\nOld people stink, with their teeth and their hot rooms, and the kiss,\nthe age-kiss, the death-kiss, it comes like a wave and you want to fall down and be over.\nAnd money stinks: the little threads that go through it like veins through an eye,\neach stinks--if you hold it onto your lip it goes bad, it stinks like a vein going bad.\nAnd Christ stank: he knew how the slaves would be stacked into the holds and he took it--\nthe stink of the vomit and shit and of somebody just rolling over and plunging in with his miserable seed.\nAnd the seed stinks. And the fish carrying it upstream and the bird eating the fish\nand you the bird’s egg, the dribbles of yolk, the cycle: the whole thing stinks.\nThe intellect stinks and the moral faculty, like things burning, like the cave under justice,\nand the good quiet men, like oceans of tears squeezed into one handful, they stink,\nand the whole consciousness, like something plugged up, stinks, like something cut off.\nLife stinks and death stinks and god and your hand touching your face\nand every breath, daring to turn, daring to come back from the stop: the turn stinks\nand the last breath, the real one, the one where everyone troops into your bed\nand piles on--oh, that one stinks best! It stays on your mouth\nand who you kiss now knows life and knows death, knows how it would be to fume in a nostril\nand the thousand desires that stink like the stars and the voice heard through the stars\nand each time--milk sour, egg sour, sperm sour--each time--dirt, friend, father--\neach time--mother, tree, breath,--each time, breath and breath and breath--\neach time the same stink, the amazement, the wonder to do this and it flares,\nthis, and it stinks, this: it stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-hate": { - "title": "“I Hate”", - "body": "I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,\nnot sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,\nkeeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise\nas nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;\n\nnot as remembrance, grief for so many gone,\nnor either that other tangle of recall, regret\nfor unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,\npetrified roots too deep to ever excise;\n\na mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh\nof delight in astonishing being, of being in being,\nwith a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,\nnot non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;\n\nnot even war, fuck war, sighing for war,\nsobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;\nmore than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,\nsown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,\n\necho of love we had, have, for world, for our world,\non which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,\nmere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,\ncacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,\n\ndin from which every emotion henceforth emerges,\nand into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:\nsigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,\nof, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ice": { - "title": "“Ice”", - "body": "That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a block of ice:\nthe way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures, facets;\ndazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly complicate the cosmos of its innards.\nRadiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a treasure horde of light,\nwhen you stab it with the awl again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both faces sadly grainy, gnawed at, dull.\n\nWhat was called an ice-house was a dark, low place, of raw, unpainted wood,\nalways black with melted ice or ice as yet ungelled;\nthere was saw-dust, and saw-dust’s tantalizing, half-sweet odor, which, so cold, seemed to pierce directly to the brain.\nYou’d step onto a low-roofed porch, someone would materialize,\ntake up great tongs and with precise, placating movements like a lion-tamer’s slide an ice block from its row.\n\nTake the awl again yourself now, thrust, and when the block splits do it yet again, again;\nwatch it disassemble into smaller fragments, crystal after fissured crystal.\nOr if not the puncturing blade, try to make a metaphor, like Kaka’s frozen sea within:\ntake into your arms the cake of actual ice, make a figure of its ponderous inertness,\nof the way its quickly wetting chill against your breast would frighten you and make you let it drop.\n\nImagine then how even if it shattered and began to liquefy,\nthe hope would still remain that if you acted quickly, gathering up the slithery, perversely skittish ovals,\nthey might be refrozen and the mass reconstituted, with precious little of its brilliance lost,\njust this lucent shimmer on the rough, raised grain of water-rotten floor,\njust this drop as sweet and warm as blood evaporating on your tongue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "innings": { - "title": "“Innings”", - "body": "somebody keeps track of how many times\nI make love don’t you god don’t you?\nand how good it is telling me\nit’s marked down where I can’t see\nright underneath me so the next time\nsomething unreal happens in the papers\nI don’t understand it it doesn’t touch\nme I start thinking\neveryone’s heart might be pure\nafter all because what the hell\nthey don’t kill me just each other\nthey don’t actually try making me sad\njust do things make things happen\nsuffer things I erupt\ninto the feminine like a lion don’t\nI god? among doves? so even being with me\nis like beauty? I move under this god\nlike a whore I gurgle I roll\nlike a toy boat what’s the score\nnow god? am I winning?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "last-things": { - "title": "“Last Things”", - "body": "In a tray of dried fixative in a photographer friend’s darkroom,\nI found a curled-up photo of his son the instant after his death,\nhis glasses still on, a drop of blood caught at his mouth.\n\nRecently, my friend put a book together to commemorate his son;\nnear the end, there’s a picture taken the day before the son died;\nthe caption says: “This is the last photo of Alex.”\n\nI’m sure my friend doesn’t know I’ve seen the other picture.\nIs telling about it a violation of confidence?\nBefore I show this to anyone else, I’ll have to ask his permission.\n\nIf you’re reading it, you’ll know my friend pardoned me,\nthat he found whatever small truth his story might embody\nwas worth the anguish of remembering that reflexive moment\n\nwhen after fifty years of bringing reality into himself through a lens,\nhis camera doubtlessly came to his eye as though by itself,\nand his finger, surely also of its own accord, convulsed the shutter.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "light": { - "title": "“Light”", - "body": "Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,\nunaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples--\n\nI think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,\n“a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls …”\n\nthen of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp\nof the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,\n\na chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,\ntheir cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings\n\nchurning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one,\nperfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others,\n\nwas looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up\nfrom beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings\n\nas though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me,\nto situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now,\n\nthe trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again,\nthis time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of …”\n\nnot the soul, or person, the _life_, and once more the bat, and I,\nour lives in that moment together, our lives, our _lives_,\n\nhis with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem,\nmine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark,\n\nhis without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist,\nmine having to know for us both that everything ends,\n\nworld, after-world, even their memory, steamed away\nlike the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-nail": { - "title": "“The Nail”", - "body": "Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime, the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail: that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls. Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath, mind imagines--how not be annihilated by it?--the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand, feels the way you do with _your_ nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed; the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more …\n\nNo, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here; it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen, something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast; as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale, a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail, drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-the-metro": { - "title": "“On the Metro”", - "body": "On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;\nshe’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.\nI sit, take out my own book--Cioran, The Temptation to Exist--and notice her glancing up from hers\nto take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,\nbecomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself\nto come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark\nher strong figure and very tan skin--(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)\nShe leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;\nshe seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,\nachingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.\n\nI understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,\nbut it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:\na memory--a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,\nour feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,\nmy having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.\nThe young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,\nand crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,\n(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,\n(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again\nas senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "on-the-roof": { - "title": "“On the Roof”", - "body": "The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not\nI suffer from it. My heart always seems to be prowling\na mile ahead of me, and, by the time I get there to surround it,\nit’s chewing fences in the next county, clawing\nthe bank-vault wall down or smashing in the window\nI’d just started etching my name on with my diamond.\n\nAnd that’s how come I end up on the roof. Because even if I talk\ninto my fist everyone still hears my voice like the ocean\nin theirs, and so they solace me and I have to keep\nbreaking toes with my gun-boots and coming up here\nto live--by myself, like an aerial, with a hand on the ledge,\none eye glued to the tin door and one to the skylight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rampage": { - "title": "“The Rampage”", - "body": "a baby got here once who before\nhe was all the way out and could already feel the hindu\npain inside him and the hebrew and the iliad\ndecided he was never going to stop crying no matter what\nuntil they did something he wasn’t going\nto turn the horror\noff in their fat sentences\nand in the light bulb how much murder to get light\nand in the walls agony agony for the bricks for the glaze\nhe was going to keep screaming\nuntil they made death little like he was\nand loved him too and sent\nhim back to undo all this\nand it happened\nhe kept screaming he scared them he saw them\nfilling with womb-light again like stadiums\nhe saw the tears sucked back into the story the smiles\nopening like sandwiches\nso he stopped\nand looked up and said all right\nit’s better now\nI’m hungry now I want just to sleep\nand they let him", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "risk": { - "title": "“Risk”", - "body": "Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious\nabout crisis, calamity, disaster, or unknowingly crave them.\nThese horrific conditionals, these expected unexpecteds,\nwe dwell on them, flinch, feint, steel ourselves:\nbut mightn’t our forebodings actually precede anxiety?\nIsn’t so much sheer heedfulness emblematic of _desire_?\n\nHow do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention\nis the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?\nConsciousness tremble: might what makes it so\nnot be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,\nbut the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?\nAs though life were more convincing resonating like a blade.\n\nOf course, we’re rarely swept into events, other than domestic tumult,\nfrom which awful consequences will ensue. Fortunately rarely.\nAnd yet we sweat as fervently\nfor the most insipid issues of honor and unrealized ambition.\nLost brothership. Lost lust. We engorge our little sorrows,\nbeat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.\n\nAlways, “These gigantic inconceivables.”\nAlways, “What will have been done to me?”\nAnd so we don our mental armor,\nflex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.\nA violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,\nthough still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sanctity": { - "title": "“The Sanctity”", - "body": "The men working on the building going up here have got these great,\nlittle motorized wheelbarrows that’re supposed to be for lugging bricks and mortar\nbut that they seem to spend most of their time barrel-assing up the street in,\nracing each other or trying to con the local secretaries into taking rides in the bucket.\nI used to work on jobs like that and now when I pass by the skeleton of the girders\nand the tangled heaps of translucent brick wrappings, I remember the guys I was with then\nand how hard they were to know. Some of them would be so good to be with at work,\nslamming things around, playing practical jokes, laughing all the time, but they could be miserable,\ntouchy and sullen, always ready to imagine an insult or get into a fight anywhere else.\nIf something went wrong, if a compressor blew or a truck backed over somebody,\nthey’d be the first ones to risk their lives dragging you out\nbut later you’d see them and they’d be drunk, looking for trouble, almost murderous,\nand it would be frightening trying to figure out which person they really were.\nOnce I went home to dinner with a carpenter who’d taken me under his wing\nand was keeping everyone off my back while he helped me. He was beautiful but at his house, he sulked.\nAfter dinner, he and the kids and I were watching television while his wife washed the dishes\nand his mother, who lived with them, sat at the table holding a big cantaloupe in her lap,\nfondling it and staring at it with the kind of intensity people usually only look into fires with.\nThe wife kept trying to take it away from her but the old lady squawked\nand my friend said, “Leave her alone, will you?” “But she’s doing it on purpose,” the wife said.\nI was watching. The mother put both her hands on it then, with her thumbs spread\nas though the melon were a head and her thumbs were covering the eyes and she was aiming it like a gun or a camera.\nSuddenly the wife muttered, “You bitch!” ran over to the bookshelf, took a book down--\nA History of Revolutions--rattled through the pages and triumphantly handed it to her husband.\nA photograph: someone who’s been garroted and the executioner, standing behind him in a business hat,\nhas his thumbs just like that over the person’s eyes, straightening the head,\nso that you thought the thumbs were going to move away because they were only pointing\nthe person at something they wanted him to see and the one with the hands was going to say, “Look! Right there!”\n“I told you,” the wife said. “I swear to god she’s trying to drive me crazy.”\nI didn’t know what it all meant but my friend went wild, started breaking things, I went home\nand when I saw him the next morning at breakfast he acted as though nothing had happened.\nWe used to eat at the Westfield truck stop, but I remember Fritz’s, The Victory, The Eagle,\nand I think I’ve never had as much contentment as I did then, before work, the light just up,\neveryone sipping their coffee out of the heavy white cups and teasing the middle-aged waitresses\nwho always acted vaguely in love with whoever was on jobs around there right then\nbesides the regular farmers on their way back from the markets and the long-haul truckers.\nListen: sometimes when you go to speak about life it’s as though your mouth’s full of nails\nbut other times it’s so easy that it’s ridiculous to even bother.\nThe eggs and the toast could fly out of the plates and it wouldn’t matter\nand the bubbles in the level could blow sky high and it still wouldn’t.\nListen to the back-hoes gearing up and the shouts and somebody cracking his sledge into the mortar pan.\nListen again. He’ll do it all day if you want him to. Listen again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shame": { - "title": "“Shame”", - "body": "A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me--\n\nI can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things--she’d decided that I was after all all right … twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected, but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted, what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shock": { - "title": "“Shock”", - "body": "Furiously a crane\nin the scrapyard out of whose grasp\na car it meant to pick up slipped,\nlifts and lets fall, lifts and lets fall\nthe steel ton of its clenched pincers\nonto the shuddering carcass\nwhich spurts fragments of anguished glass\nuntil it’s sufficiently crushed\nto be hauled up and flung onto\nthe heap from which one imagines\nit’ll move on to the shredding\nor melting down that awaits it.\n\nAlso somewhere a crow\nwith less evident emotion\npunches its beak through the dead\nbreast of a dove or albino\nsparrow until it arrives at\na coil of gut it can extract,\nthen undo with a dexterous twist\nan oily stretch just the right length\nto be devoured, the only\nsuggestion of violation\nthe carrion jerked to one side\nin involuntary dismay.\n\nSplayed on the soiled pavement\nthe dove or sparrow; dismembered\nin the tangled remnants of itself\nthe wreck, the crane slamming once more\nfor good measure into the all\nbut dematerialized hulk,\nthen luxuriously swaying\naway, as, gorged, glutted, the crow\nwith savage care unfurls the full,\nluminous glitter of its wings,\nso we can preen, too, for so much\nso well accomplished, so well seen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-singing": { - "title": "“The Singing”", - "body": "I was walking home down a hill near our house\non a balmy afternoon\nunder the blossoms\nOf the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here\nevery spring with\ntheir burgeoning forth\n\nWhen a young man turned in from a corner singing\nno it was more of\na cadenced shouting\nMost of which I couldn’t catch I thought because\nthe young man was\nblack speaking black\n\nIt didn’t matter I could tell he was making his\nsong up which pleased\nme he was nice-looking\nHusky dressed in some style of big pants obviously\nfull of himself\nhence his lyrical flowing over\n\nWe went along in the same direction then he noticed\nme there almost\nbeside him and “Big”\nHe shouted-sang “Big” and I thought how droll\nto have my height\nincorporated in his song\n\nSo I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing\nhe looked\nin fact pointedly away\nAnd his song changed “I’m not a nice person”\nhe chanted “I’m not\nI’m not a nice person”\n\nNo menace was meant I gathered no particular threat\nbut he did want\nto be certain I knew\nThat if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord\nbetween us I should forget it\n\nThat’s all nothing else happened his song became\nindecipherable to\nme again he arrived\nWhere he was going a house where a girl in braids\nwaited for him on\nthe porch that was all\n\nNo one saw no one heard all the unasked and\nunanswered questions\nwere left where they were\nIt occurred to me to sing back “I’m not a nice\nperson either” but I\ncouldn’t come up with a tune\n\nBesides I wouldn’t have meant it nor he have believed\nit both of us\nknew just where we were\nIn the duet we composed the equation we made\nthe conventions to\nwhich we were condemned\n\nSometimes it feels even when no one is there that\nsomeone something\nis watching and listening\nSomeone to rectify redo remake this time again though\nno one saw nor\nheard no one was there", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "sleeping-over": { - "title": "“Sleeping Over”", - "body": "There hasn’t been any rain\nsince I arrived. The lawns\nare bleached and tonight goldenrod\nand burnt grass reflect\nacross my walls like ponds.\nAfter all these days\nthe textures and scents of my room\nare still strange and comforting.\nThe pines outside, immobile\nas chessmen, fume turps\nthat blend with the soap taste\nof the sheets and with the rot\nof camphor and old newspapers\nin the bare bureau drawers.\nJarred by a headlight’s glare\nfrom the county road, the crumbling\nplaster swarms with shadows.\nThe bulb in the barn, dull\nand eternal, sways and flickers\nas though its long drool\nof cobwebs had been touched,\nand the house loosens, unmoors,\nand, distending and shuddering, rocks\nme until I fall asleep.\n\nLast December the mare\nI learned to ride on died.\nOn the frozen paddock hill,\ndown, she moaned all night\nbefore the mink farmers\ncame in their pick-up\ntruck, sat on her dark\nhead and cut her throat.\nI dream winter. Shutters\nslamming apart. Bags\ncrammed with beer bottles\ntipping against clapboard\nwalls. Owls in chimneys.\nDrafts; thieves; snow.\nOver the crusty fields\nscraps of blue loveletters\nmill wildly like children,\nand a fat woman, her rough\nstockings tattered away\nat a knee, sprints in high,\nlumbering bounds among\nthe skating papers. Out\nto the road-red hydrant,\nbus bench, asphalt--\na wasp twirling at her feet,\nshe is running back.\n\nMy first kiss was here.\nI can remember the spot--\nnext to a path, next\nto a cabin, to a garden patch--\nbut not how it happened\nor what I felt, except\namazement that a kiss\ncould be soundless. Now,\npropped up on an elbow,\nI smoke through the dawn, smudging\nthe gritty sheets with ashes,\nwondering what if that night\nsomeone nearby had snorted\naloud, had groaned or even\nhad only rustled a branch.\nMaybe someone did.\n\nDay finally. The trees\nand fences clarify, unsnarl.\nFlagstones, coins, splash\nacross the driveway crowns\nand the stark underbrush\nanimals go away.\nA rickety screendoor bangs,\nslaps its own echo\ntwice. There were no footsteps\nbut someone is out sifting\nashes in the garbage pit.\nSuddenly dishes jangle\nthe bright middle distances\nand the heat begins again:\nby now the ground must be\nhard and untillable as ice.\nFar off from the house,\nthe lake, jellied with umbre\nweed scum, tilts toward\nthe light like a tin tray.\nDead rowboats clog\nthe parched timber dam\nand along the low banks\nthe mounds of water rubble\nI gathered yesterday\nhave dried and shrunk down\nto a weak path wobbling\nback and forth from the edge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "spit": { - "title": "“Spit”", - "body": "After this much time, it’s still impossible. The SS man with his stiff hair and his uniform;\nthe Rabbi, probably in a torn overcoat, probably with a stained beard the other would be clutching;\nthe Torah, God’s word, on the altar, the letters blurring under the blended phlegm;\nthe Rabbi’s parched mouth, the SS man perfectly absorbed, obsessed with perfect humiliation.\nSo many years and what is there to say still about the soldiers waiting impatiently in the snow,\nabout the one stamping his feet, thinking, “Kill him! Get it over with!”\nwhile back there the lips of the Rabbi and the other would have brushed\nand if time had stopped you would have thought they were lovers,\nso lightly kissing, the sharp, luger hand under the dear chin,\nthe eyes furled slightly and then when it started again the eyelashes of both of them\nshyly fluttering as wonderfully as the pulse of a baby.\nMaybe we don’t have to speak of it at all, it’s still the same.\nWar, that happens and stops happening but is always somehow right there, twisting and hardening us;\nthen what we make of God--words, spit, degradation, murder, shame; every conceivable torment.\nAll these ways to live that have something to do with how we live\nand that we’re almost ashamed to use as metaphors for what goes on in us\nbut that we do anyway, so that love is battle and we watch ourselves in love\nbecome maddened with pride and incompletion, and God is what it is when we’re alone\nwrestling with solitude and everything speaking in our souls turns against us like His fury\nand just facing another person, there is so much terror and hatred that yes,\nspitting in someone’s mouth, trying to make him defile his own meaning,\nwould signify the struggle to survive each other and what we’ll enact to accomplish it.\n\nThere’s another legend.\nIt’s about Moses, that when they first brought him as a child before Pharaoh,\nthe king tested him by putting a diamond and a live coal in front of him\nand Moses picked up the red ember and popped it into his mouth\nso for the rest of his life he was tongue-tied and Aaron had to speak for him.\nWhat must his scarred tongue have felt like in his mouth?\nIt must have been like always carrying something there that weighed too much,\nsomething leathery and dead whose greatest gravity was to loll out like an ox’s,\nand when it moved, it must have been like a thick embryo slowly coming alive,\nbutting itself against the inner sides of his teeth and cheeks.\nAnd when God burned in the bush, how could he not cleave to him?\nHow could he not know that all of us were on fire and that every word we said would burn forever,\nin pain, unquenchably, and that God knew it, too, and would say nothing Himself ever again beyond this,\never, but would only live in the flesh that we use like firewood,\nin all the caves of the body, the gut cave, the speech cave:\nHe would slobber and howl like something just barely a man that beats itself again and again onto the dark,\nmoist walls away from the light, away from whatever would be light for this last eternity.\n“Now therefore go,” He said, “and I will be with thy mouth.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "tantrum": { - "title": "“Tantrum”", - "body": "A child’s cry out in the street, not of pain or fear,\nrather one of those vividly inarticulate\nyet perfectly expressive trumpet thumps of indignation:\nsomething wished for has been denied,\nsomething wanted now delayed.\n\nSo useful it would be to carry that preemptive howl\nalways with you; all the functions it performs,\nits equivalents in words are so unwieldy,\ntake up so much emotive time,\nentail such muffling, qualifying, attenuation.\n\nAnd in our cries out to the cosmos, our exasperation\nwith imperfection, our theodicies, betrayed ideals:\nto keep that rocky core of rage within one’s rage\nwith which to blame, confront, accuse, bewail\nall that needs retaliation for our absurdly thwarted wants.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tar": { - "title": "“Tar”", - "body": "The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.\nAll morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,\nand all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them\nas they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.\nAfter half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind\nif and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven\nwhen the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,\nwe still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,\nthe slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.\nSurely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,\nsetting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.\n\nI never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.\nThe ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.\nWhen the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.\nEven the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,\na dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,\nbefore the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.\nIn its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,\nit sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,\nthe men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.\nWhen they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,\nwork gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,\nthe enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.\n\nSometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.\nHowever much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:\nwe were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.\nSomeday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,\nwould rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.\nI think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,\nthe terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.\nI remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.\nI remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.\nBut, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.\nEven the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.\nBy nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wait": { - "title": "“Wait”", - "body": "Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax--\nnot even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,\ntime, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,\none part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,\nanother still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was\nfor whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.\n\nIt was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,\nrelished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.\nNow you’re polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,\nyou suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,\nmy heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,\ntrying to heave itself back to its other way with you.\n\nBut was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran\nas though for my life, wasn’t I fleeing from you, or for you?\nWasn’t I frightened you’d fray, leave me nothing but shreds?\nAren’t I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it,\na pebble, a planet, isn’t it wearing away in my hand as though I,\nnot you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve?\n\nWait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am,\nhow I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all.\nPlease know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over\nthe languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn,\nto do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is “Wait!”?\nWe whose anguished wish is that our last word not be “Wait.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "zebra": { - "title": "“Zebra”", - "body": "Kids once carried tin soldiers in their pockets as charms\nagainst being afraid, but how trust soldiers these days\nnot to load up, aim, blast the pants off your legs?\n\nI have a key-chain zebra I bought at the Thanksgiving fair.\nHow do I know she won’t kick, or bite at my crotch?\nBecause she’s been murdered, machine-gunned: she’s dead.\n\nAlso, she’s a she: even so crudely carved, you can tell\nby the sway of her belly a foal’s inside her.\nEven murdered mothers don’t hurt people, do they?\n\nAnd how know she’s murdered? Isn’t everything murdered?\nSome dictator’s thugs, some rebels, some poachers;\nsome drought, world-drought, world-rot, pollution, extinction.\n\nEverything’s murdered, but still, not good, a dead thing\nin with your ID and change. I fling her away, but the death\nof her clings, the death of her death, her murder, her slaughter.\n\nThe best part of Thanksgiving Day, though--the parade!\nMickey Mouse, Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, enormous as clouds!\nAnd the marching bands, majorettes, anthems and drums!\n\nWhen the great bass stomped its galloping boom out\nto the crowd, my heart swelled with valor and pride.\nI remembered when we saluted, when we took off our hat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "thanksgiving" - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-williams": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Williams", - "birth": { - "year": 1886 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "british", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇬🇧", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Williams_(British_writer)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "british" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "the-adventures-of-the-holy-week": { - "title": "“The Adventures Of The Holy Week”", - "body": "When our Lord came riding,\nThrough the midst of them,\nThe children ran and shouted\nIn Jerusalem,\nThrowing down their palm-leaves,\nThrowing up their caps;\nAll the babies crowed to him\nFrom their mother’s laps.\n\nWhen the Lord came swiftly\nThrough the place of shades,\nAll the children thronged to Him,\nFresh from Herod’s blades:\nThe sad dusk was full of them\nWhom He did retrieve,\nAnd first the smallest of them all\nFrom the lap of Eve.\n\nSocrates and Caesar\nThough He met them there,\nThough He went a thousand miles\nTo the bottom of hell-stair,\nYet He came again to them\nWhen, turning from their play,\nAll those little Jewish souls\nObserved the Sabbath day.\n\nBut within the garden\nHe slept in double ward;\nArmed and still and silent\nWatched the Roman guard;\nWatched the high prince Michael,\nAstonished and aware\nOf a new thing moving\nAs dawn filled the air.\n\nAnd within the chamber\nHe slept in single ward;\nAll the rock was conscious\nOf the heavenly guard.\nFrom the air within the air\nA soft wind came,\nAnd above the silent head\nBurned the tongues of flame.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "palm_sunday" - } - } - }, - "bethlehem": { - "title": "“Bethlehem”", - "body": "“Let us go a journey,”\nQuoth my soul to my mind,\n“Past the plains of darkness\nIs a house to find\nWhere for my thirsting\nI shall have my fill,\nAnd from my torment\nI shall be still.”\n\n“Let us go a journey,”\nQuoth my mind to my heart,\n“Past the hills of questing,\nBy our ghostly art,\nWe shall see the high worlds,\nHoly and clear,\nMoving in their order\nWithout hate or fear.”\n\n“Let us go a journey,”\nQuoth my heart to my soul,\n“I shall thrive never\nOn the world’s dole.\nPast the streams of cleansing\nShall a house be found\nWhere the peace and healing\nFor my aching wound.”\n\nBy the streams of cleansing,\nBy the hill of quest,\nBy the plains of darkness,\nThey came to their rest.\nAs the kings of Asia,\nThey went to a far land;\nAs the early shepherds,\nThey found it close at hand.\n\nWhen they saw Saint Joseph\nBy their ghostly art,\n“Forget not thy clients,\nBrother,” quoth my heart,\nWhen they saw Our Lady\nIn her place assigned,\n“Forget not thy clients,\nMother,” quoth my mind.\n\nBut my soul hurrying\nCould not speak for tears,\nWhen she saw her own Child,\nLost so many years.\nDown she knelt, up she ran\nTo the Babe restored:\n“O my Joy,” she sighed to it,\nShe wept, “O my Lord!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "friday": { - "title": "“Friday”", - "body": "To-day at morn I set the dish aside,\nSaying: “Since to fast so many mortals choose\nShall not I too the ceremony use?”\nSmall place had love therein, or aught but pride.\n\nToo swift, too sure, the sudden grace replied!\nFor though my heart, thinking of nothing less,\nThat we the outer world all cease to press,\nAnd lightly there Love sets its dish aside.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent", - "weekday": "friday" - } - } - }, - "hymn-for-septuagesima-sunday": { - "title": "“Hymn For Septuagesima Sunday”", - "body": "Out of the deep they arose,\nMeasure in measure they came,\nOn the mighty wind that blows\nCreation in paths of flame;\nSun with each farther sun\nTrod the dance of the sky,\nAnd in the thin air was begun\nThe journey of God Most High.\n\nOut of Himself He came\nIn the vibrating light;\nThe fire of Himself the flame\nShone in Himself the night,\nFar in Himself for rest\nAll things were born to be,\nWho move in a royal quest\nOf the end that is only He.\n\nNote upon rising note\nThrough the times and the spaces heard,\nArchangel, planet and mote\nSang but the single Word:\nThe Word He uttered of old\nIN the haunts of eternity\nAll things to all things told,\nThe Word that is only He.\n\nVoice of the Lord, arise\nThrough man, in darkness and flame,\nTill through his inner skies\nSounds the Unnameable Name;\nFashion the heavenly way\nTill, last of His creatures, we,\nIn His union of night and day,\nKnow ourselves naught but He.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "septuagesima" - } - } - }, - "vision": { - "title": "“Vision”", - "body": "I saw the happy spirits all in bliss\nbeholding and beheld with heavenly sight,\ncontemplative of that now and of this,\nand still rejoiced with subtle new delight;\n\nfeeling the universal lordship run,\nillumining infinities of joy,\ntill contemplation, mounting in each one,\nbecame infinity and had no cloy;\n\nno cloy of all desire, now cloy of dread,\nbecause desire and dread are but one name,\nbut studious evermore in lowlihead\nto see the shape he wore, the road he came,\n\nto each of all that multitude; in each\ntender and terrible epiphany\nbeholding more than even himself could teach\nand still expanding in felicity.\n\nAll ways they saw his motion and were seen,\nand were adorable and were adored,\neach by all those its peers; and still between\nheir knowledge was his newer coming toward.\n\nAnd all their past was with them, and they sang,\nand therein only sweetly were disposed,\neach to some other, and love’s memories range\nwithin the Eternal that about them closed.\n\nAnd up at once a myriad ways he passed,\nand out of all these myriad spirits shone,\nand was made perfect in them all at last,\nand did them wholly as himself put on;\n\nand they were gathered and became the Child,\nand he, more fast than any thought could know,\nbeyond all names wherewith he should be styled,\nwas with his own devised joy aglow;\n\nCrimson and fiery-thunderous he stood;\nin his one hand a bow, in one a shaft.\nso young, and yet so apt in hardihood,\nthat out of very tenderness he laughed;\n\nthen, all delight, he, lifting up his bow,\naiming at my immortal heart, let fly\nhis arrow, and was gone, and all the glow\npassed, and the moon rode in a sober sky.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_saints" - } - } - } - } - }, - "william-carlos-williams": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Carlos Williams", - "birth": { - "year": 1883 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1963 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 39 - }, - "poems": { - "4th-of-july": { - "title": "“4th of July”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe ship moves\nbut its smoke\nmoves with the wind\nfaster than the ship\n\n--thick coils of it\nthrough leafy trees\npressing\nupon the river\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe heat makes this place of the woods\na room in which two robins pain crying\ndistractedly over the plight of\ntheir unhappy young\n\n\n# III.\n\nDuring the explosions\nat dawn, the celebrations\nI could hear\na native cuckoo\n\nin the distance\nas at dusk, before\nI’d heard\na night hawk calling", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "independence_day" - } - } - }, - "approach-of-winter": { - "title": "“Approach of Winter”", - "body": "The half-stripped trees\nstruck by a wind together,\nbending all,\nthe leaves flutter drily\nand refuse to let go\nor driven like hail\nstream bitterly out to one side\nand fall\nwhere the salvias, hard carmine--\nlike no leaf that ever was--\nedge the bare garden.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "arrival": { - "title": "“Arrival”", - "body": "And yet one arrives somehow,\nfinds himself loosening the hooks of\nher dress\nin a strange bedroom--\nfeels the autumn\ndropping its silk and linen leaves\nabout her ankles.\nThe tawdry veined body emerges\ntwisted upon itself\nlike a winter wind …!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "blizzard": { - "title": "“Blizzard”", - "body": "Snow:\nyears of anger following\nhours that float idly down--\nthe blizzard\ndrifts its weight\ndeeper and deeper for three days\nor sixty years, eh? Then\nthe sun! a clutter of\nyellow and blue flakes--\nHairy looking trees stand out\nin long alleys\nover a wild solitude.\nThe man turns and there--\nhis solitary track stretched out\nupon the world.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "burning-the-christmas-greens": { - "title": "“Burning the Christmas Greens”", - "body": "Their time past, pulled down\ncracked and flung to the fire\n--go up in a roar\n\nAll recognition lost, burnt clean\nclean in the flame, the green\ndiesel, living blood wakes\non the ash--\n\nand ebbs to a steady burning\nthe rekindled bed become\na landscape of flame\n\nAt winter’s midnight\nwe went to the trees, the coarse\nholly, the balsam and\nthe hemlock for their green\n\nAt the thick of the dark\nthe moment of the cold’s\ndeepest plunge we bought branches\ncut from the green trees\n\nto fill our need, and over\ndoorways, about paper Christmas\nbells covered with tinfoil\nand fastened by red ribbons\n\nwe stuck the green prongs\nin the windows hung\nwoven wreaths and above pictures\nthe living green. On the\n\nmantle we built a green forest\nand among those hemlock\nsprays put a herd of small\nwhite deer as if they\n\nwere walking there. All this!\nand it seemed gentle and good\nto us. Their time past,\nrelief! The room bare. We\n\nstuffed the dead grate\nwith them upon the half-burnt-out\nlog’s smoldering eye, opening\nred and closing under them\n\nand we stood there looking down.\nGreen is a solace\na promise of peace, a fort\nagainst the cold (though we\n\ndid not say so) a challenge\nabove the snow’s\nhard shell. Green (we might\nhave said) that, where\n\nsmall birds hide and dodge\nand lift their plaintive\nrallying cries, blocks for them\nand knocks down\n\nthe unseeing bullets of\nthe storm. Green spruce boughs\npulled down by a weight of\nsnow--Transformed!\n\nViolence leaped and appeared\nRecreant! roared to life\nas the flames rose through and\nour eyes recoiled from it.\n\nIn the jagged flames green\nto red, instant and alive. Green!\nthose sure abutments … Gone!\nlost to mind!\n\nand quick in the contracting\ntunnel of the grate\nappeared a world! Black\nmountains. black and red--as\n\nyet uncolored--and ash white,\nan infant landscape of shimmering\nash and flame and we, in\nthat instant, lost,\n\nbreathless to be witnesses,\nas if we stood\nourselves refreshed among\nthe shining fauna of the fire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "a-celebration": { - "title": "“A Celebration”", - "body": "A middle-northern March, now as always--\ngusts from the South broken against cold winds--\nbut from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide,\nit moves--not into April--into a second March,\n\nthe old skin of wind-clear scales dropping\nupon the mold: this is the shadow projects the tree\nupward causing the sun to shine in his sphere.\n\nSo we will put on our pink felt hat--new last year!\n--newer this by virtue of brown eyes turning back\nthe seasons--and let us walk to the orchid-house,\nsee the flowers will take the prize tomorrow\nat the Palace.\nStop here, these are our oleanders.\nWhen they are in bloom--\nYou would waste words\nIt is clearer to me than if the pink\nwere on the branch. It would be a searching in\na colored cloud to reveal that which now, huskless,\nshows the very reason for their being.\n\nAnd these the orange-trees, in blossom--no need\nto tell with this weight of perfume in the air.\nIf it were not so dark in this shed one could better\nsee the white.\nIt is that very perfume\nhas drawn the darkness down among the leaves.\nDo I speak clearly enough?\nIt is this darkness reveals that which darkness alone\nloosens and sets spinning on waxen wings--\nnot the touch of a finger-tip, not the motion\nof a sigh. A too heavy sweetness proves\nits own caretaker.\nAnd here are the orchids!\nNever having seen\nsuch gaiety I will read these flowers for you:\nThis is an odd January, died--in Villon’s time.\nSnow, this is and this the stain of a violet\ngrew in that place the spring that foresaw its own doom.\n\nAnd this, a certain July from Iceland:\na young woman of that place\nbreathed it toward the South. It took root there.\nThe color ran true but the plant is small.\n\nThis falling spray of snow-flakes is\na handful of dead Februaries\nprayed into flower by Rafael Arevalo Martinez\nof Guatemala.\nHere’s that old friend who\nwent by my side so many years: this full, fragile\nhead of veined lavender. Oh that April\nthat we first went with our stiff lusts\nleaving the city behind, out to the green hill--\nMay, they said she was. A hand for all of us:\nthis branch of blue butterflies tied to this stem.\n\nJune is a yellow cup I’ll not name; August\nthe over-heavy one. And here are--\nrusset and shiny, all but March. And March?\nAh, March--\nFlowers are a tiresome pastime.\nOne has a wish to shake them from their pots\nroot and stem, for the sun to gnaw.\n\nWalk out again into the cold and saunter home\nto the fire. This day has blossomed long enough.\nI have wiped out the red night and lit a blaze\ninstead which will at least warm our hands\nand stir up the talk.\nI think we have kept fair time.\nTime is a green orchard.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march", - "month_epoch": "late" - } - } - }, - "the-centenarian": { - "title": "“The Centenarian”", - "body": "I don’t think we shall\nany of us live as long as\nhas she, we haven’t the\nsteady mind and strong heart--\n\n_Wush a deen a daddy o\nThere’s whisky in the jar!_\n\nI wish you could have seen\nher yesterday\nwith her red cheeks and\nsnow-white hair\nso cheerful and contented--\nshe was a picture--\n\nWe sang hymns for her.\n\nShe couldn’t join us but\nwhen we had done she raised\nher hands and clapped them\nsoftly together.\n\nThen when I brought her\nher whisky and water I said\nto her as we always do\n\n_Wush a deen a daddy o\nThere’s whisky in the jar!_\n\nShe couldn’t say the first\npart but she managed to\nrepeat at the end--\n\n_There’s whisky in the jar!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "complete-desctruction": { - "title": "“Complete Desctruction”", - "body": "It was an icy day.\nWe buried the cat,\nthen took her box\nand set fire to it\nin the back yard.\nThose fleas that escaped\nearth and fire\ndied by the cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "defiance-to-cupid": { - "title": "“Defiance to Cupid”", - "body": "Not in this grave\nwill I lie\nmore than a summer\nholiday!\n\nDig it deep, no\nmatter, I\nwill break that sleep\nand run away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "epitaph": { - "title": "“Epitaph”", - "body": "An old willow with hollow branches\nSlowly swayed his few high bright tendrils\nAnd sang:\n\n_Love is a young green willow\nShimmering at the bare wood’s edge._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "fertile": { - "title": "“Fertile”", - "body": "You are a typical American woman\nyou think men grow on trees--\n\nYou want love, only love! rarest\nof male fruit! Break it open and\n\nin the white of the crisp flesh\nfind the symmetrical brown seeds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-fond-farewell": { - "title": "“A Fond Farewell”", - "body": "You? Why you’re\njust sucking\nmy life blood out.\n\nWhat do I care\nif the baker\nand the garbage man\n\nmust be served.\nTake what\nyou might give\n\nand be damned\nto you. I’m\ngoing elsewhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "a-footnote": { - "title": "“A Footnote”", - "body": "Walk on the delicate parts\nof necessary mechanisms\nand you will pretty soon have\neither mod, clothing, nor\neven Communism itself,\nComrades. Read good poetry!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-eleanor-and-bill-monohan": { - "title": "“For Eleanor and Bill Monohan”", - "body": "MOTHER OF GOD! Our Lady!\nthe heart\nis an unruly Master:\nForgive us our sins\nas we\nforgive those who have sinned against\nus.\nWe submit ourselves\nto Your rule\nas the flowers in May\nsubmit themselves to\nyour Holy rule--against\nthat impossible spring-time\nwhen men\nshall be the flowers\nspread at your feet.\n\nAS FAR AS spring is\nfrom winter\nso are we\nfrom you now. We have not come\neasily\nto your environs\nbut painfully\nacross sands\nthat have scored our\nfeet. That which we have suffered\nwas for us\nto suffer. Now,\nin the winter of the year,\nthe birds who know how\nto escape suffering\nby flight\nare gone. Man alone\nis that creature who\ncannot escape suffering\nby flight\n\nI DO NOT come to you\nsave that I confess\nto being\nhalf man and half\nwoman. I have seen the ivy\ncling\nto a piece of crumbled\nwall so that\nyou cannot tell\nby which either\nstands: this is to say\nif she to whom I cling\nis loosened both\nof us go down.\n\nMOTHER OF GOD\nI have seen you stoop\nto a merest flower\n\nand raise it\nand press it to your cheek.\nI could have called out\njoyfully\nbut you were too far off\nYou are a woman and\nit was\na woman’s gesture\nI declare it boldly\nwith my heart\nin my teeth\nand my knees knocking\ntogether. Yet I declare\nit, and by God’s word\nit is no lie. Make us\nhumble and obedient to His rule.\n\nTHERE ARE MEN\nwho as they live\nfling caution to the\nwind and women praise them\nand love them for it.\nCruel as the claws of\na cat …\n\nYOU HAVE NO lover now\nin the bare skies\nto whisper\nto bring you flowers,\nto you under a hedge\nhowbeit\nyou are young\nand fit to be loved\n\nTHE MOON WHICH\nthey have vulgarized recently\nis still\nyour planet\nas it was Venus’ before\nyou. What\ndo they think they will attain\nby their ships\nthat death has not\nalready given\nthem? Their ships\nshould be directed\ninward upon …\nBut I\nam an old man. I\nhave had enough.\n\nTHE FEMALE PRINCIPLE of the world\nis my appeal\nin the extremity\nto which I have come.\n_O clemens! O pial O dolcis!_\n_Maria!_", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "new_years_day" - } - } - }, - "from-a-window": { - "title": "“From a Window”", - "body": "Here’s a question for us. Help me\nto find the answer. The tops\nof the row of poplar trees are level\nwith the fourth floor of the hospital\n\nAnd, Yes, says Sister Francis,\nthe lady in the next bed had her\nbaby circumcised this morning. I’ve\nnoticed that in the wards you have\n\nto use your psychology. If the\nfirst one doesn’t eat her apple pie\nespecially if she is a leader the whole\nward will go without its dessert--\n\nHeart-shaped leaves tear at their stems\noutside the window of the scrub-room\nwhile the trees rock and sway\nin the broken light and a seething\n\nsound sets off their changing colors.\nWhat is the answer to this rivalry?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-goodnight": { - "title": "“A Goodnight”", - "body": "Go to sleep--though of course you will not--\nto tideless waves thundering slantwise against\nstrong embankments, rattle and swish of spray\ndashed thirty feet high, caught by the lake wind,\nscattered and strewn broadcast in over the steady\ncar rails! Sleep, sleep! Gulls’ cries in a wind-gust\nbroken by the wind; calculating wings set above\nthe field of waves breaking.\n Go to sleep to the lunge between foam-crests,\nrefuse churned in the recoil. Food! Food!\nOffal! Offal! that holds them in the air, wave-white\nfor the one purpose, feather upon feather, the wild\nchill in their eyes, the hoarseness in their voices--\nsleep, sleep …\n\nGentlefooted crowds are treading out your lullaby.\nTheir arms nudge, they brush shoulders,\nhitch this way then that, mass and surge at the crossings--\nlullaby, lullaby! The wild-fowl police whistles,\nthe enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks:\nit is all to put you to sleep,\nto soften your limbs in relaxed postures,\nand that your head slip sidewise, and your hair loosen\nand fall over your eyes and over your mouth,\nbrushing your lips wistfully that you may dream,\nsleep and dream--\n\nA black fungus springs out about lonely church doors--\nsleep, sleep. The Night, coming down upon\nthe wet boulevard, would start you awake with his\nmessage, to have in at your window. Pay no\nheed to him. He storms at your sill with\ncooings, with gesticulations, curses!\nYou will not let him in. He would keep you from sleeping.\nHe would have you sit under your desk lamp\nbrooding, pondering; he would have you\nslide out the drawer, take up the ornamented dagger\nand handle it. It is late, it is nineteen-nineteen--\ngo to sleep, his cries are a lullaby;\nhis jabbering is a sleep-well-my-baby; he is\na crackbrained messenger.\n\nThe maid waking you in the morning\nwhen you are up and dressing,\nthe rustle of your clothes as you raise them--\nit is the same tune.\nAt table the cold, greenish, split grapefruit, its juice\non the tongue, the clink of the spoon in\nyour coffee, the toast odors say it over and over.\n\nThe open street-door lets in the breath of\nthe morning wind from over the lake.\nThe bus coming to a halt grinds from its sullen brakes--\nlullaby, lullaby. The crackle of a newspaper,\nthe movement of the troubled coat beside you--\nsleep, sleep, sleep, sleep …\nIt is the sting of snow, the burning liquor of\nthe moonlight, the rush of rain in the gutters packed\nwith dead leaves: go to sleep, go to sleep.\nAnd the night passes-and never passes--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "histology": { - "title": "“Histology”", - "body": "There is\nthe\nmicroscopic\nanatomy\nof\nthe whale\nthis is\nreassuring", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "history": { - "title": "“History”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThis sarcophagus contained the body Of Uresh-Nai, priestess to the goddess Mut,\nMother of All-- …\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe priestess has passed into her tomb.\nThe stone has taken up her spirit!\nGranite over flesh: who will deny\nIts advantages?\n\nYour death?-water\nSpilled upon the ground--\nThough water will mount again into rose-leaves--\nBut you?--would hold life still,\nEven as a memory, when it is over.\nBenevolence is rare.\n\nClimb about this sarcophagus, read\nWhat is writ for you in these figures,\nHard as the granite that has held them\nWith so soft a hand the while\nYour own flesh has been fifty times\nThrough the guts of oxen--read!\n\n“The rose-tree will have its donor\nEven though he give stingily.\nThe gift of some endures\nTen years, the gift of some twenty,\nAnd the gift of some for the time a\nGreat house rots and is torn down.\nSome give for a thousand years to men of\nOne country, some for a thousand\nTo all men, and some few to all men\nWhile granite holds an edge against\nThe weather.”\n“Judge then of love!”\n\n\n# III.\n\n“My flesh is turned to stone. I\nHave endured my summer. The flurry\nOf falling petals is ended. I was\nWell desired and fully caressed\nBy many lovers, but my flesh\nWithered swiftly and my heart was\nNever satisfied. Lay your hands\nUpon the granite as a lover lays his\nHand upon the thigh and upon the\nRound breasts of her who is\nBeside him; for now I will not wither,\nNow I have thrown off secrecy, now\nI have walked naked into the street,\nNow I have scattered my heavy beauty\nIn the open market.”\n\n“Here I am with head high and a\nBurning heart eagerly awaiting\nYour caresses, whoever it may be,\nFor granite is not harder than\nMy love is open, runs loose among you!”\n\n“I arrogant against death! I\nWho have endured! I worn against\nThe years!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1917, - "month": "july" - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "lear": { - "title": "“Lear”", - "body": "When the world takes over for us\nand the storm in the trees\nreplaces our brittle consciences\n(like ships, female to all seas)\nwhen the few last yellow leaves\nstand out like flags on tossed ships\nat anchor--our minds are rested\n\nYesterday we sweated and dreamed\nor sweated in our dreams walking\nat a loss through the bulk of figures\nthat appeared solid, men or women,\nbut as we approached down the paved\ncorridor melted-Was it I?--like\nsmoke from bonfires blowing away\n\nToday the storm, inescapable, has\ntaken the scene and we return\nour hearts to it, however made, made\nwives by it and though we secure\nourselves for a dry skin from the drench\nof its passionate approaches we\nyield and are made quiet by its fury\n\nPitiful Lear, not even you could\nout-shout the storm--to make a fool\ncry! Wife to its power might you not\nbetter have yielded earlier? as on ships\nfacing the seas were carried once\nthe figures of women at repose to\nsignify the strength of the waves’ lash.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1948, - "month": "may" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-locust-tree-in-flower": { - "title": "“The Locust Tree in Flower”", - "body": "Among\nthe leaves\nbright\n\ngreen\nof wrist-thick\ntree\n\nand old\nstiff broken\nbranch\n\nferncool swaying\nloosely strung--\n\ncome May\nagain\nwhite blossom\n\nclusters\nhide\nto spill\n\ntheir sweets\nalmost\nunnoticed\n\ndown\nand quickly\nfall", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "love-song": { - "title": "“Love Song”", - "body": "What have I to say to you\nWhen we shall meet?\nYet--\nI lie here thinking of you.\n\nThe stain of love\nIs upon the world.\nYellow, yellow, yellow,\nIt eats into the leaves,\nSmears with saffron\nThe horned branches that lean\nHeavily\nAgainst a smooth purple sky.\n\nThere is no light--\nOnly a honey-thick stain\nThat drips from leaf to leaf\nAnd limb to limb,\nSpoiling the colors\nOf the whole world.\n\nI am alone. The weight of love\nHas buoyed me up\nTill my head\nKnocks against the sky.\n\nSee me!\nMy hair is dripping with nectar--\nStarlings carry it\nOn their black wings.\nSee, at last My arms and my hands\nAre lying idle.\n\nHow can I tell\nIf I shall ever love you again\nAs I do now?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_valentine" - } - } - }, - "marriage": { - "title": "“Marriage”", - "body": "So different, this man\nAnd this woman:\nA stream flowing\nIn a field.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "memory-of-april": { - "title": "“Memory of April”", - "body": "You say love is this, love is that:\nPoplar tassels, willow tendrils\nThe wind and the rain comb\nTinkle and drip, tinkle and drip--\nBranches drifting apart. Hagh!\nLove has not even visited this country.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "naked": { - "title": "“Naked”", - "body": "What fool would feel\nHis cheeks burn\nBecause of the snow?\nWould he call it\nBy a name, give it\nBreasts, features,\nBare limbs?\nWould he call it\nA woman?\n(Surely then he would be\nA fool.)\n\nAnd see her,\nWarmed with the cold,\nGo upon the heads\nOf creatures\nWhose faces lean\nTo the ground?\n\nWould he watch\nThe compassion of\nHer eyes,\nThat look, now up\nNow down,\nTo the turn of\nThe wind and\nThe turn of\nThe shivering minds\nShe touches--\nMotionless--troubled?\n\nI ask you--\nI ask you, my townspeople,\nWhat fool is this?\n\nWould he forget\nThe sight of\nHis mother and\nHis wife\nBecause of her?--\nHave his heart\nTurned to ice\nThat will not soften?\n\nWhat!\nWould he see a thing\nLovelier than\nA high-school girl,\nWith the skill\nOf Venus To stand naked--\nNaked on the air?\nFalling snow and\n_you up there--waiting._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-death": { - "title": "“Of death …”", - "body": "Of death\nthe barber\nthe barber\ntalked to me\n\ncutting my\nlife with\nsleep to trim\nmy hair--\n\nIt’s just\na moment\nhe said, we die\nevery night--\n\nAnd of\nthe newest\nways to grow\nhair on\n\nbald death--\nI told him\nof the quartz\nlamp\n\nand of old men\nwith third\nsets of teeth\nto the cue\n\nof an old man\nwho said\nat the door--\nSunshine today!\n\nfor which\ndeath shaves\nhim twice\na week", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "from-paterson-book-ii": { - "title": "From “Paterson: Book II”", - "body": "America the golden!\nwith trick and money\ndamned\nlike Altgeld sick\nand molden\nwe love thee bitter\nland\n\nLike Altgeld on the\ncorner\nseeing the mourners\npass\nwe bow our heads\nbefore thee\nand take our hats in\nhand", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "play": { - "title": "“Play”", - "body": "Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am,\nBy what devious means do you contrive\nTo remain idle? Teach me, O Master.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "postlude": { - "title": "“Postlude”", - "body": "Now that I have cooled to you\nLet there be gold of tarnished masonry,\nTemples soothed by the sun to ruin\nThat sleep utterly.\nGive me hand for the dances,\nRipples at Philae, in and out,\nAnd lips, my Lesbian,\nWall flowers that once were flame.\n\nYour hair is my Carthage\nAnd my arms the bow,\nAnd our words arrows\nTo shoot the stars\nWho from that misty sea\nSwarm to destroy us.\n\nBut you there beside me--\nOh, how shall I defy you,\nWho wound me in the night\nWith breasts shining\nLike Venus and like Mars?\nThe night that is shouting Jason\nWhen the loud eaves rattle\nAs with waves above me\nBlue at the prow of my desire.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-red-wheelbarrow": { - "title": "“The Red Wheelbarrow”", - "body": "so much depends\nupon\n\na red wheel\nbarrow\n\nglazed with rain\nwater\n\nbeside the white\nchickens.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sicilian-emigrants-song": { - "title": "“Sicilian Emigrant’s Song”", - "body": "_In New York Harbor_\n\nO--eh--lee! La--la!\n Donna! Donna!\nBlue is the sky of Palermo;\nBlue is the little bay; And dost thou remember the orange and fig,\nThe lively sun and the sea breeze at evening?\n Hey--la!\nDonna! Donna! Maria!\n\nO--eh--li! La--la!\n Donna! Donna!\nGrey is the sky of this land.\nGrey and green is the water.\nI see no trees, dost thou? The wind\nIs cold for the big woman there with the candle.\n Hey-la!\nDonna! Donna! Maria!\n\nO--eh--li! O--la!\n Donna! Donna!\nI sang thee by the blue waters;\nI sing thee here in the grey dawning.\nKiss, for I put down my guitar;\nI’ll sing thee more songs after the landing.\n O Jesu, I love thee!\nDonna! Donna! Maria!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1913, - "month": "june" - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "somebody-dies-every-four-minutes": { - "title": "“Somebody dies every four minutes …”", - "body": "Somebody dies every four minutes\nin New York State--\n\nTo hell with you and your poetry--\nYou will rot and be blown\nthrough the next solar system\nwith the rest of the gases--\n\nWhat the hell do you know about it?\n\nAXIOMS\n\nDo not get killed\n\nCareful Crossing Campaign\nCross Crossings Cautiously\n\nTHE HORSES black\n &\nPRANCED white\n\nWhat’s the use of sweating over\nthis sort of thing, Carl; here\nit is all set up--\n\nOutings in New York City\n\nHo for the open country\n\nDont’t stay shut up in hot rooms\nGo to one of the Great Parks\nPelham Bay for example\n\nIt’s on Long Island sound\nwith bathing, boating\ntennis, baseball, golf, etc.\n\nAcres and acres of green grass\nwonderful shade trees, rippling brooks\n\n Take the Pelham Bay Park Branch\n of the Lexington Ave. (East Side)\n Line and you are there in a few\n minutes\n\nInterborough Rapid Transit Co.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "stroller": { - "title": "“Stroller”", - "body": "I have seen the hills blue,\nI have seen them purple;\nAnd it is as hard to know\nThe words of a woman\nAs to straighten the crumpled branch\nOf an old willow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-song": { - "title": "“Summer Song”", - "body": "Wanderer moon,\nSmiling\nA faintly ironical smile\nAt this brilliant,\nDew-moistened\nSummer morning--\nA detached,\nSleepily indifferent\nSmile,\nA wanderer’s smile--\nIf I should\nBuy a shirt\nYour color, and\nPut on a necktie\nSky-blue,\nWhere would they carry me?\nOver the hills and\nFar away?\nWhere would they carry me?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "thus-weary-of-life": { - "title": "“Thus, weary of life …”", - "body": "Thus, weary of life, in view of the great consummation which awaits us--tomorrow, we rush among our friends congratulating ourselves upon the joy soon to be. Thoughtless of evil we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars as we go happily from place to place. It seems that there is not time enough in which to speak the full of our exaltation. Only a day is left, one miserable day, before the world comes into its own. Let us hurry! Why bother for this man or that? In the offices of the great newspapers a mad joy reigns as they prepare the final extras. Rushing about, men bump each other into the whirring presses. How funny it seems. All thought of misery has left us. Why should we care? Children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem.\n\nOh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings? Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown, orange, black, grey? In the imagination, flying above the wreck of ten thousand million souls, I see you departing sadly for the land of plants and insects, already far out to sea. (Thank you, I know well what I am plagiarising) Your great wings flap as you disappear in the distance over the pre-Columbian acres of floating weed.\n\nThe new cathedral overlooking the park, looked down from its towers today, with great eyes, and saw by the decorative lake a group of people staring curiously at the corpse of a suicide: Peaceful, dead young man, the money they have put into the stones has been spent to teach men of life’s austerity. You died and teach us the same lesson. You seem a cathedral, celebrant of the spring which shivers for me among the long black trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1923 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "to-elsie": { - "title": "“To Elsie”", - "body": "The pure products of America\ngo crazy--\nmountain folk from Kentucky\n\nor the ribbed north end of\nJersey\nwith its isolate lakes and\n\nvalleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves\nold names\nand promiscuity between\n\ndevil-may-care men who have taken\nto railroading\nout of sheer lust of adventure--\n\nand young slatterns, bathed\nin filth\nfrom Monday to Saturday\n\nto be tricked out that night\nwith gauds\nfrom imaginations which have no\n\npeasant traditions to give them\ncharacter\nbut flutter and flaunt\n\nsheer rags--succumbing without\nemotion\nsave numbed terror\n\nunder some hedge of choke-cherry\nor viburnum--\nwhich they cannot express--\n\nUnless it be that marriage\nperhaps\nwith a dash of Indian blood\n\nwill throw up a girl so desolate\nso hemmed round\nwith disease or murder\n\nthat she’ll be rescued by an\nagent--\nreared by the state and\n\nsent out at fifteen to work in\nsome hard-pressed\nhouse in the suburbs--\n\nsome doctor’s family, some Elsie--\nvoluptuous water\nexpressing with broken\n\nbrain the truth about us--\nher great\nungainly hips and flopping breasts\n\naddressed to cheap\njewelry\nand rich young men with fine eyes\n\nas if the earth under our feet\nwere\nan excrement of some sky\n\nand we degraded prisoners\ndestined\nto hunger until we eat filth\n\nwhile the imagination strains\nafter deer\ngoing by fields of goldenrod in\n\nthe stifling heat of September\nSomehow\nit seems to destroy us\n\nIt is only in isolate flecks that\nsomething\nis given off\n\nNo one\nto witness\nand adjust, no one to drive the car", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "tree-and-sky": { - "title": "“Tree and Sky”", - "body": "--again\nthe bare brush of\nthe half-broken\nand already written of\ntree stands alone\nupon its battered\nhummock--\n\nAbove\namong the shufflings\nof the distant\ncloud-rifts\nvaporously\nopens the unmoving\nblue", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-widows-lament-in-springtime": { - "title": "“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”", - "body": "Sorrow is my own yard\nwhere the new grass\nflames as it has flamed\noften before but not\nwith the cold fire\nthat closes round me this year.\nThirtyfive years\nI lived with my husband.\nThe plumtree is white today\nwith masses of flowers.\nMasses of flowers\nload the cherry branches\nand color some bushes\nyellow and some red\nbut the grief in my heart\nis stronger than they\nfor though they were my joy\nformerly, today I notice them\nand turn away forgetting.\nToday my son told me\nthat in the meadows,\nat the edge of the heavy woods\nin the distance, he saw\ntrees of white flowers.\nI feel that I would like\nto go there\nand fall into those flowers\nand sink into the marsh near them.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "winter-trees": { - "title": "“Winter Trees”", - "body": "All the complicated details\nof the attiring and\nthe disattiring are completed!\nA liquid moon\nmoves gently among\nthe long branches.\nThus having prepared their buds\nagainst a sure winter\nthe wise trees\nstand sleeping in the cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "young-sycamore": { - "title": "“Young Sycamore”", - "body": "I must tell you\nthis young tree\nwhose round and firm trunk\nbetween the wet\n\npavement and the gutter\n(where water\nis trickling) rises\nbodily\n\ninto the air with\none undulant\nthrust half its height--\nand then\n\ndividing and waning\nsending out\nyoung branches on\nall sides--\n\nhung with cocoons\nit thins\ntill nothing is left of it\nbut two\n\neccentric knotted\ntwigs\nbending forward\nhornlike at the top", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "yvor-winters": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Yvor Winters", - "birth": { - "year": 1900 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1968 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_García_Villa", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "the-magpies-shadow": { - "title": "“The Magpie’s Shadow”", - "body": "# I. _In Winter_\n\n_Myself_\nPale mornings, and\n I rise.\n\n_Still Morning_\nSnow air--my fingers curl.\n\n_Awakening_\nNew snow, O pine of dawn!\n\n_Winter Echo_\nThin air! My mind is gone.\n\n_The Hunter_\nRun! In the magpie’s shadow.\n\n_No Being_\nI, bent. Thin nights receding.\n\n\n# II. _In Spring_\n\n_Spring_\nI walk out the world’s door.\n\n_May_\nOh, evening in my hair!\n\n_Spring Rain_\nMy doorframe smells of leaves.\n\n_Song_\nWhy should I stop\n for spring?\n\n\nIII. _In Summer and Autumn_\n\n_Sunrise_\nPale bees! O whither now?\n\n_Fields_\nI did not pick\n a flower.\n\n_At Evening_\nLike leaves my feet passed by.\n\n_Cool Nights_\nAt night bare feet on flowers!\n\n_Sleep_\nLike winds my eyelids close.\n\n_The Aspen’s Song_\nThe summer holds me here.\n\n_The Walker_\nIn dream my feet are still.\n\n_Blue Mountains_\nA deer walks that mountain.\n\n_God of Roads_\nI, peregrine of noon.\n\n_September_\nFaint gold! O think not here.\n\n_A Lady_\nShe’s sun on autumn leaves.\n\n_Alone_\nI saw day’s shadow strike.\n\n_A Deer_\nThe trees rose in the dawn.\n\n_Man in Desert_\nHis feet run as eyes blink.\n\n_Desert_\nThe tented autumn, gone!\n\n_The End_\nDawn rose, and desert shrunk.\n\n_High Valleys_\nIn sleep I filled these lands.\n\n_Awaiting Snow_\nThe well of autumn--dry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1922 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "moonlight": { - "title": "“Moonlight”", - "body": "I waited on\nIn the late autumn moonlight,\nA train droning out of thought--\n\nThe mind on moonlight\nAnd on trains.\n\nBlind as a thread of water\nStirring through a cold like dust,\nLonely beyond all silence\n\nAnd humming this to children,\nThe nostalgic listeners in sleep,\n\nBecause no guardian\nStrides through distance upon distance,\nHis eyes a web of sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1924 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - } - } - }, - "p-g-wodehouse": { - "metadata": { - "name": "P. G. Wodehouse", - "birth": { - "year": 1881 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1975 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "caliban-at-sunset": { - "title": "“Caliban at Sunset”", - "body": "I stood with a man\nWatching the sun go down.\nThe air was full of murmurous summer scents\nAnd a brave breeze sang like a bugle\nFrom a sky that smouldered in the west,\nA sky of crimson, amethyst, gold and sepia\nAnd blue as blue were the eyes of Helen\nWhen she sat\nGazing from some high tower in Ilium\nUpon the Grecian tents darkling below.\n\nAnd he,\nThis man who stood beside me,\nGaped like some dull, half-witted animal\nAnd said,\n“I say,\nDoesn’t that sunset remind you\nOf a slice\nOf underdone roast beef?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "morning-carol": { - "title": "“Morning Carol”", - "body": "Oh! The present is gay,\nAnd the future is bright.\nAs I lie on my bed\nWith a heart that is light.\nFor I think with a smile\n(And I know I am right)\nThat my face is a fairly\nPresentable sight,\nAnd I need not get up\nFor ten minutes quite.\nFor--Oh! Rapture ecstatic,\nI shaved overnight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "karol-wojtyla": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Saint John Paul II", - "birth": { - "year": 1920 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2005 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish", - "saint" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "john-beseeches-her": { - "title": "“John Beseeches Her”", - "body": "Don’t lower the wave of my heart,\nit swells to your eyes, mother;\ndon’t alter love, but bring the wave to me\nin your translucent hands.\nHe asked for this.\nI am John the fisherman. There isn’t much\nin me to love.\nI feel I am still on that lake shore,\ngravel crunching under my feet--\nand, suddenly--Him.\nYou will embrace his mystery in me no more,\nyet quietly I spread round your thoughts like myrtle.\nAnd calling you Mother--His wish--\nI beseech you: may this word\nnever grow less for you.\nTrue, it’s not easy to measure the meaning\nof the words he breathed into us both\nso that all earlier love in those words\nshould be concealed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "holiday": "good_friday" - } - } - }, - "material": { - "title": "“Material”", - "body": "# I.\n\nListen: the even knocking of hammers,\nso much their own,\nI project on to the people\nto test the strength of each blow.\nListen now: electric current\ncuts through a river of rock.\nAnd a thought grows in me day after day:\nthe greatness of work is inside man.\nHard and cracked\nhis hand is differently charged\nby the hammer\nand thought differently unravels in stone\nas human energy splits from the strength of stone\ncutting the bloodstream, an artery\nin the right place.\nLook, how love feeds\non this well-grounded anger\nwhich flows in to people’s breath\nas a river bent by the wind,\nand which is never spoken, but just breaks high vocal cords.\nPassers-by scuttle off into doorways,\nsomeone whispers: “Yet here is a great force.”\nFear not. Man’s daily deeds have a wide span,\na strait riverbed can’t imprison them long.\nFear not. For centuries they all stand in Him,\nand you look at Him now\nthrough the even knocking of hammers.\n\n\n# II.\n\nBound are the blocks of stone, the low-voltage wire\ncuts deep in their flesh, an invisible whip--\nstones know this violence.\nWhen an elusive blast rips their ripe compactness\nand tears them from their eternal simplicity,\nthe stones know this violence.\nYet can the current unbind their full strength?\nIt is he who carries that strength in his hands:\nthe worker.\n\n\n# III.\n\nHands are the heart’s landscape. They split sometimes\nlike ravines into which an undefined force rolls.\nThe very same hands which man only opens\nwhen his palms have had their fill of toil.\nNow he sees: because of him alone others can walk in peace.\nHands are a landscape. When they split, the pain of their sores\nsurges free as a stream.\nBut no thought of pain--\nno grandeur in pain alone.\nFor his own grandeur he does not know how to name.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nNo, not just hands drooping with the hammer’s weight,\nnot the taut torso, muscles shaping their own style,\nbut thought informing his work,\ndeep, knotted in wrinkles on his brow,\nand over his head, joined in a sharp arc, shoulders and veins vaulted.\nSo for a moment he is a Gothic building\ncut by a vertical thought born in the eyes.\nNo, not a profile alone,\nnot a mere figure between God and the stone,\nsentenced to grandeur and error.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_paul_ii" - } - } - }, - "the-quarry": { - "title": "“The Quarry”", - "body": "He wasn’t alone.\nHis muscles grew into the flesh of the crowd, energy their pulse,\nAs long as they held a hammer, as long as his feet felt the ground.\nAnd a stone smashed his temples and cut through his heart’s chamber.\nThey took his body and walked in a silent line\nToil still lingered about him, a sense of wrong.\nThey wore gray blouses, boots ankle-deep in mud.\nIn this, they showed the end.\nHow violently his time halted:\nthe pointers on the low voltage dials jerked,\nthen dropped to zero again.\nWhite stone now within him, eating into his being,\ntaking over enough of him to turn him into stone.\nWho will lift up that stone,\nunfurl his thoughts again under the cracked temples?\nSo plaster cracks on the wall.\nThey laid him down, his back on a sheet of gravel.\nHis wife came, worn out with worry; his son returned from school\nShould his anger now flow into the anger of others?\nIt was maturing in him through his own truth and love\nShould he be used by those who came after,\ndeprived of substance, unique and deeply his own?\nThe stones on the move again; a wagon bruising the flowers.\nAgain the electric current cuts deep into the walls.\nBut the man has taken with him the world’s inner structure,\nwhere the greater the anger, the higher the explosion of love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_john_paul_ii" - } - } - } - } - }, - "madeleva-wolff": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Madeleva Wolff", - "birth": { - "year": 1887 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1964 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleva_Wolff", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "i-seek-a-teacher-and-a-rule": { - "title": "“I Seek a Teacher and a Rule”", - "body": "I seek a teacher and a rule,\nDear Brother Francis, and a school\nWhere I can learn to be a fool.\n\nThe world is erudite today;\nThe folk of Gubbio and thy gray\nBrother Wolf are dead, they say.\nSweet friend of Christ, thyself shalt be\nMy book of gentle courtesy.\n\nA single purse, a single cloak\nDo scarce suffice for modern folk;\nSuch foolishness as once thou spoke\nAbout thy Lady Poverty,\nThat, poverello, tell to me.\n\nBird songs in Umbria were sweet,\nOr else, mayhap, thy quaint conceit\nFound meanings now quite obsolete.\nGod’s little one, wilt share with me\nThy sister birds’ sweet psaltery?\n\nStars nebular and wise, indeed,\nAbove Averno shared thy creed\nOf pierced Heart and Wounds that bleed.\n Enamored Knight of Calvary,\n Teach me love’s madmost ecstasy.\n\nBehold my teacher and my rule;\nThyself, Saint Francis, art my school;\nGod give me grace to be a fool!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_francis_of_assisi" - } - } - }, - "song-silence": { - "title": "“Song Silence”", - "body": "Yes, I shall take this quiet house and keep it\nWith kindled hearth and candle-lighted board,\nIn singing silence garnish it and sweep it\n For Christ, my Lord.\n\nMy heart is filled with little songs to sing Him--\nI dream them into words with careful art--\nBut this I think a better gift to bring Him,\n Nearer his heart.\n\nThe foxes have their holes, the wise, the clever;\nThe birds have each a safe and secret nest;\nBut He, my lover, walks the world with never\n A place to rest.\n\nI found Him once upon a straw bed lying;\n(Once on His mother’s heart He laid His head)\nHe had a bramble pillow for His dying,\n A stone when dead.\n\nI think to leave off singing for this reason,\nTaking instead my Lord God’s house to keep,\nWhere He may find a home in every season\n To wake, to sleep.\n\nDo you not think that in this holy sweetness\nOf silence shared with God a whole life long\nBoth he and I shall find divine completeness\n Of perfect song?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "ultimates": { - "title": "“Ultimates”", - "body": "Although you know, you cannot end my quest,\nNor ever, ever compass my desire;\nThat were to burn me with divinest fire;\nThat were to fill me with divinest rest,\nTo lift me, living, to God’s living breast.\nI should not dare this thing, nor you aspire\nTo it, who no less passionately require\nLove ultimate, possessor and possessed.\nYou who are everything and are not this,\nBe but its dream, its utter, sweet surmise\nWhich waking makes the more intensely true\nWith every exquisite, wistful part of you;\nMy own, the depths of your untroubled eyes,\nYour quiet hands, and your most quiet kiss.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "wind-wraith": { - "title": "“Wind Wraith”", - "body": "A shy ghost of a wind was out\nTiptoeing through the air\nAt dawn, and though I could not see\nNor hear her anywhere,\nI felt her lips just brush my cheek,\nHer fingers touch my hair.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "william-wordsworth": { - "metadata": { - "name": "William Wordsworth", - "birth": { - "year": 1770 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1850 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 47 - }, - "poems": { - "character-of-the-happy-warrior": { - "title": "“Character of the Happy Warrior”", - "body": "Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he\nThat every man in arms should wish to be?\n--It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought\nAmong the tasks of real life, hath wrought\nUpon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:\nWhose high endeavours are an inward light\nThat makes the path before him always bright;\nWho, with a natural instinct to discern\nWhat knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;\nAbides by this resolve, and stops not there,\nBut makes his moral being his prime care;\nWho, doomed to go in company with Pain,\nAnd Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!\nTurns his necessity to glorious gain;\nIn face of these doth exercise a power\nWhich is our human nature’s highest dower:\nControls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves\nOf their bad influence, and their good receives:\nBy objects, which might force the soul to abate\nHer feeling, rendered more compassionate;\nIs placable--because occasions rise\nSo often that demand such sacrifice;\nMore skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure,\nAs tempted more; more able to endure,\nAs more exposed to suffering and distress;\nThence, also, more alive to tenderness.\n--’Tis he whose law is reason; who depends\nUpon that law as on the best of friends;\nWhence, in a state where men are tempted still\nTo evil for a guard against worse ill,\nAnd what in quality or act is best\nDoth seldom on a right foundation rest,\nHe labours good on good to fix, and owes\nTo virtue every triumph that he knows:\n--Who, if he rise to station of command,\nRises by open means; and there will stand\nOn honourable terms, or else retire,\nAnd in himself possess his own desire;\nWho comprehends his trust, and to the same\nKeeps faithful with a singleness of aim;\nAnd therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait\nFor wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;\nWhom they must follow; on whose head must fall,\nLike showers of manna, if they come at all:\nWhose powers shed round him in the common strife,\nOr mild concerns of ordinary life,\nA constant influence, a peculiar grace;\nBut who, if he be called upon to face\nSome awful moment to which Heaven has joined\nGreat issues, good or bad for human kind,\nIs happy as a Lover; and attired\nWith sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;\nAnd, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law\nIn calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;\nOr if an unexpected call succeed,\nCome when it will, is equal to the need:\n--He who, though thus endued as with a sense\nAnd faculty for storm and turbulence,\nIs yet a Soul whose master-bias leans\nTo homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;\nSweet images! which, wheresoe’er he be,\nAre at his heart; and such fidelity\nIt is his darling passion to approve;\nMore brave for this, that he hath much to love:--\n’Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high,\nConspicuous object in a Nation’s eye,\nOr left unthought-of in obscurity,--\nWho, with a toward or untoward lot,\nProsperous or adverse, to his wish or not--\nPlays, in the many games of life, that one\nWhere what he most doth value must be won:\nWhom neither shape or danger can dismay,\nNor thought of tender happiness betray;\nWho, not content that former worth stand fast,\nLooks forward, persevering to the last,\nFrom well to better, daily self-surpast:\nWho, whether praise of him must walk the earth\nFor ever, and to noble deeds give birth,\nOr he must fall, to sleep without his fame,\nAnd leave a dead unprofitable name--\nFinds comfort in himself and in his cause;\nAnd, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws\nHis breath in confidence of Heaven’s applause:\nThis is the happy Warrior; this is he\nThat every man in arms should wish to be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "a-complaint": { - "title": "“A Complaint”", - "body": "There is a change--and I am poor;\nYour love hath been, nor long ago,\nA fountain at my fond heart’s door,\nWhose only business was to flow;\nAnd flow it did; not taking heed\nOf its own bounty, or my need.\n\nWhat happy moments did I count!\nBlest was I then all bliss above!\nNow, for that consecrated fount\nOf murmuring, sparkling, living love,\nWhat have I? shall I dare to tell?\nA comfortless and hidden well.\n\nA well of love--it may be deep--\nI trust it is,--and never dry:\nWhat matter? if the waters sleep\nIn silence and obscurity.\n--Such change, and at the very door\nOf my fond heart, hath made me poor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "elegiac-stanzas": { - "title": "“Elegiac Stanzas”", - "body": "_Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont_\n\nI was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!\nFour summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:\nI saw thee every day; and all the while\nThy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.\n\nSo pure the sky, so quiet was the air!\nSo like, so very like, was day to day!\nWhene’er I looked, thy Image still was there;\nIt trembled, but it never passed away.\n\nHow perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;\nNo mood, which season takes away, or brings:\nI could have fancied that the mighty Deep\nWas even the gentlest of all gentle things.\n\nAh! _then_, if mine had been the Painter’s hand,\nTo express what then I saw; and add the gleam,\nThe light that never was, on sea or land,\nThe consecration, and the Poet’s dream;\n\nI would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile\nAmid a world how different from this!\nBeside a sea that could not cease to smile;\nOn tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.\n\nThou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine\nOf peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;--\nOf all the sunbeams that did ever shine\nThe very sweetest had to thee been given.\n\nA Picture had it been of lasting ease,\nElysian quiet, without toil or strife;\nNo motion but the moving tide, a breeze,\nOr merely silent Nature’s breathing life.\n\nSuch, in the fond illusion of my heart,\nSuch Picture would I at that time have made:\nAnd seen the soul of truth in every part,\nA steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.\n\nSo once it would have been,--’tis so no more;\nI have submitted to a new control:\nA power is gone, which nothing can restore;\nA deep distress hath humanised my Soul.\n\nNot for a moment could I now behold\nA smiling sea, and be what I have been:\nThe feeling of my loss will ne’er be old;\nThis, which I know, I speak with mind serene.\n\nThen, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,\nIf he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,\nThis work of thine I blame not, but commend;\nThis sea in anger, and that dismal shore.\n\nO ’tis a passionate Work!--yet wise and well,\nWell chosen is the spirit that is here;\nThat Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,\nThis rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!\n\nAnd this huge Castle, standing here sublime,\nI love to see the look with which it braves,\nCased in the unfeeling armour of old time,\nThe lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.\n\nFarewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,\nHoused in a dream, at distance from the Kind!\nSuch happiness, wherever it be known,\nIs to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.\n\nBut welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,\nAnd frequent sights of what is to be borne!\nSuch sights, or worse, as are before me here.--\nNot without hope we suffer and we mourn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "extempore-effusion": { - "title": "“Extempore Effusion”", - "body": "_Upon the death of James Hogg_\n\nWhen first, descending from the moorlands,\nI saw the Stream of Yarrow glide\nAlong a bare and open valley,\nThe Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.\n\nWhen last along its banks I wandered,\nThrough groves that had begun to shed\nTheir golden leaves upon the pathways,\nMy steps the Border-minstrel led.\n\nThe mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,\n’Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;\nAnd death upon the braes of Yarrow,\nHas closed the Shepherd-poet’s eyes:\n\nNor has the rolling year twice measured,\nFrom sign to sign, its stedfast course,\nSince every mortal power of Coleridge\nWas frozen at its marvellous source;\n\nThe rapt One, of the godlike forehead,\nThe heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:\nAnd Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,\nHas vanished from his lonely hearth.\n\nLike clouds that rake the mountain-summits,\nOr waves that own no curbing hand,\nHow fast has brother followed brother,\nFrom sunshine to the sunless land!\n\nYet I, whose lids from infant slumber\nWere earlier raised, remain to hear\nA timid voice, that asks in whispers,\n“Who next will drop and disappear?”\n\nOur haughty life is crowned with darkness,\nLike London with its own black wreath,\nOn which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking,\nI gazed from Hampstead’s breezy heath.\n\nAs if but yesterday departed,\nThou too art gone before; but why,\nO’er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered,\nShould frail survivors heave a sigh?\n\nMourn rather for that holy Spirit,\nSweet as the spring, as ocean deep;\nFor Her who, ere her summer faded,\nHas sunk into a breathless sleep.\n\nNo more of old romantic sorrows,\nFor slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid!\nWith sharper grief is Yarrow smitten,\nAnd Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-green-linnet": { - "title": "“The Green Linnet”", - "body": "Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed\nTheir snow-white blossoms on my head,\nWith brightest sunshine round me spread\nOf spring’s unclouded weather,\nIn this sequestered nook how sweet\nTo sit upon my orchard-seat!\nAnd birds and flowers once more to greet,\nMy last year’s friends together.\n\nOne have I marked, the happiest guest\nIn all this covert of the blest:\nHail to Thee, far above the rest\nIn joy of voice and pinion!\nThou, Linnet! in thy green array,\nPresiding Spirit here to-day,\nDost lead the revels of the May;\nAnd this is thy dominion.\n\nWhile birds, and butterflies, and flowers,\nMake all one band of paramours,\nThou, ranging up and down the bowers,\nArt sole in thy employment:\nA Life, a Presence like the Air,\nScattering thy gladness without care,\nToo blest with any one to pair;\nThyself thy own enjoyment.\n\nAmid yon tuft of hazel trees,\nThat twinkle to the gusty breeze,\nBehold him perched in ecstasies,\nYet seeming still to hover;\nThere! where the flutter of his wings\nUpon his back and body flings\nShadows and sunny glimmerings,\nThat cover him all over.\n\nMy dazzled sight he oft deceives,\nA brother of the dancing leaves;\nThen flits, and from the cottage-eaves\nPours forth his song in gushes;\nAs if by that exulting strain\nHe mocked and treated with disdain\nThe voiceless Form he chose to feign,\nWhile fluttering in the bushes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "i-travelled-among-unknown-men": { - "title": "“I Travelled among Unknown Men”", - "body": "I travelled among unknown men,\nIn lands beyond the sea;\nNor, England! did I know till then\nWhat love I bore to thee.\n\n’Tis past, that melancholy dream!\nNor will I quit thy shore\nA second time; for still I seem\nTo love thee more and more.\n\nAmong thy mountains did I feel\nThe joy of my desire;\nAnd she I cherished turned her wheel\nBeside an English fire.\n\nThy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,\nThe bowers where Lucy played;\nAnd thine too is the last green field\nThat Lucy’s eyes surveyed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud": { - "title": "“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”", - "body": "I wandered lonely as a cloud\nThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,\nWhen all at once I saw a crowd,\nA host, of golden daffodils;\nBeside the lake, beneath the trees,\nFluttering and dancing in the breeze.\n\nContinuous as the stars that shine\nAnd twinkle on the milky way,\nThey stretched in never-ending line\nAlong the margin of a bay:\nTen thousand saw I at a glance,\nTossing their heads in sprightly dance.\n\nThe waves beside them danced; but they\nOut-did the sparkling waves in glee:\nA poet could not but be gay,\nIn such a jocund company:\nI gazed--and gazed--but little thought\nWhat wealth the show to me had brought:\n\nFor oft, when on my couch I lie\nIn vacant or in pensive mood,\nThey flash upon that inward eye\nWhich is the bliss of solitude;\nAnd then my heart with pleasure fills,\nAnd dances with the daffodils.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "influence-of-natural-objects": { - "title": "“Influence of Natural Objects”", - "body": "_In Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth_\n\nWisdom and Spirit of the universe!\nThou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!\nAnd giv’st to forms and images a breath\nAnd everlasting motion! not in vain,\nBy day or star-light, thus from my first dawn\nOf childhood didst thou intertwine for me\nThe passions that build up our human soul;\nNot with the mean and vulgar works of Man;\nBut with high objects, with enduring things,\nWith life and nature; purifying thus\nThe elements of feeling and of thought,\nAnd sanctifying by such discipline\nBoth pain and fear,--until we recognise\nA grandeur in the beatings of the heart.\n\nNor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me\nWith stinted kindness. In November days,\nWhen vapours rolling down the valleys made\nA lonely scene more lonesome; among woods\nAt noon; and ’mid the calm of summer nights,\nWhen, by the margin of the trembling lake,\nBeneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went\nIn solitude, such intercourse was mine:\nMine was it in the fields both day and night,\nAnd by the waters, all the summer long.\nAnd in the frosty season, when the sun\nWas set, and, visible for many a mile,\nThe cottage-windows through the twilight blazed,\nI heeded not the summons: happy time\nIt was indeed for all of us; for me\nIt was a time of rapture! Clear and loud\nThe village-clock tolled six--I wheeled about,\nProud and exulting like an untired horse\nThat cares not for his home.--All shod with steel\nWe hissed along the polished ice, in games\nConfederate, imitative of the chase\nAnd woodland pleasures,--the resounding horn,\nThe pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.\nSo through the darkness and the cold we flew,\nAnd not a voice was idle; with the din\nSmitten, the precipices rang aloud;\nThe leafless trees and every icy crag\nTinkled like iron; while far-distant hills\nInto the tumult sent an alien sound\nOf melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars,\nEastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west\nThe orange sky of evening died away.\n\nNot seldom from the uproar I retired\nInto a silent bay, or sportively\nGlanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,\nTo cut across the reflex of a star;\nImage, that, flying still before me, gleamed\nUpon the glassy plain: and oftentimes,\nWhen we had given our bodies to the wind,\nAnd all the shadowy banks on either side\nCame sweeping through the darkness, spinning still\nThe rapid line of motion, then at once\nHave I, reclining back upon my heels,\nStopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs\nWheeled by me--even as if the earth had rolled\nWith visible motion her diurnal round!\nBehind me did they stretch in solemn train,\nFeebler and feebler, and I stood and watched\nTill all was tranquil as a summer sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "it-is-a-beauteous-evening-calm-and-free": { - "title": "“It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”", - "body": "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,\nThe holy time is quiet as a Nun\nBreathless with adoration; the broad sun\nIs sinking down in its tranquility;\nThe gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea;\nListen! the mighty Being is awake,\nAnd doth with his eternal motion make\nA sound like thunder--everlastingly.\nDear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,\nIf thou appear untouched by solemn thought,\nThy nature is not therefore less divine:\nThou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;\nAnd worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,\nGod being with thee when we know it not.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "laodamia": { - "title": "“Laodamia”", - "body": "“With sacrifice before the rising morn\nVows have I made by fruitless hope inspired;\nAnd from the infernal Gods, ’mid shades forlorn\nOf night, my slaughtered Lord have I required:\nCelestial pity I again implore;--\nRestore him to my sight--great Jove, restore!”\n\nSo speaking, and by fervent love endowed\nWith faith, the Suppliant heavenward lifts her hands;\nWhile, like the sun emerging from a cloud,\nHer countenance brightens--and her eye expands;\nHer bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows;\nAs she expects the issue in repose.\n\nO terror! what hath she perceived?--O joy!\nWhat doth she look on?--whom doth she behold?\nHer Hero slain upon the beach of Troy?\nHis vital presence? his corporeal mould?\nIt is--if sense deceive her not--’tis He!\nAnd a God leads him, wingèd Mercury!\n\nMild Hermes spake--and touched her with his wand\nThat calms all fear; “Such grace hath crowned thy prayer,\nLaodamía! that at Jove’s command\nThy husband walks the paths of upper air:\nHe comes to tarry with thee three hours’ space;\nAccept the gift, behold him face to face!”\n\nForth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp;\nAgain that consummation she essayed;\nBut unsubstantial Form eludes her grasp\nAs often as that eager grasp was made.\nThe Phantom parts--but parts to re-unite,\nAnd re-assume his place before her sight.\n\n“Protesiláus, lo! thy guide is gone!\nConfirm, I pray, the vision with thy voice:\nThis is our palace,--yonder is thy throne;\nSpeak, and the floor thou tread’st on will rejoice.\nNot to appal me have the gods bestowed\nThis precious boon; and blest a sad abode.”\n\n“Great Jove, Laodamía! doth not leave\nHis gifts imperfect:--Spectre though I be,\nI am not sent to scare thee or deceive;\nBut in reward of thy fidelity.\nAnd something also did my worth obtain;\nFor fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain.”\n\n“Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold\nThat the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand\nShould die; but me the threat could not withhold:\nA generous cause a victim did demand;\nAnd forth I leapt upon the sandy plain;\nA self-devoted chief--by Hector slain.”\n\n“Supreme of Heroes--bravest, noblest, best!\nThy matchless courage I bewail no more,\nWhich then, when tens of thousands were deprest\nBy doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore;\nThou found’st--and I forgive thee--here thou art--\nA nobler counsellor than my poor heart.”\n\n“But thou, though capable of sternest deed,\nWert kind as resolute, and good as brave;\nAnd he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed\nThou should’st elude the malice of the grave:\nRedundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair\nAs when their breath enriched Thessalian air.”\n\n“No spectre greets me,--no vain Shadow this;\nCome, blooming Hero, place thee by my side!\nGive, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss\nTo me, this day a second time thy bride!”\nJove frowned in heaven: the conscious Parcae threw\nUpon those roseate lips a Stygian hue.\n\n“This visage tells thee that my doom is past:\nNor should the change be mourned, even if the joys\nOf sense were able to return as fast\nAnd surely as they vanish. Earth destroys\nThose raptures duly--Erebus disdains:\nCalm pleasures there abide--majestic pains.”\n\n“Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control\nRebellious passion: for the Gods approve\nThe depth, and not the tumult, of the soul;\nA fervent, not ungovernable love.\nThy transports moderate; and meekly mourn\nWhen I depart, for brief is my sojourn--”\n\n“Ah wherefore?--Did not Hercules by force\nWrest from the guardian monster of the tomb\nAlcestis, a reanimated corse,\nGiven back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom?\nMedea’s spells dispersed the weight of years,\nAnd Aeson stood a youth ’mid youthful peers.”\n\n“The Gods to us are merciful--and they\nYet further may relent: for mightier far\nThan strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway\nOf magic potent over sun and star,\nIs love, though oft to agony distrest,\nAnd though his favourite seat be feeble woman’s breast.”\n\n“But if thou goest, I follow--” “Peace!” he said,--\nShe looked upon him and was calmed and cheered;\nThe ghastly colour from his lips had fled;\nIn his deportment, shape, and mien, appeared\nElysian beauty, melancholy grace,\nBrought from a pensive though a happy place.\n\nHe spake of love, such love as Spirits feel\nIn worlds whose course is equable and pure;\nNo fears to beat away--no strife to heal--\nThe past unsighed for, and the future sure;\nSpake of heroic arts in graver mood\nRevived, with finer harmony pursued;\n\nOf all that is most beauteous--imaged there\nIn happier beauty; more pellucid streams,\nAn ampler ether, a diviner air,\nAnd fields invested with purpureal gleams;\nClimes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day\nEarth knows, is all unworthy to survey.\n\nYet there the Soul shall enter which hath earned\nThat privilege by virtue.--“Ill,” said he,\n“The end of man’s existence I discerned,\nWho from ignoble games and revelry\nCould draw, when we had parted, vain delight,\nWhile tears were thy best pastime, day and night;”\n\n“And while my youthful peers before my eyes\n(Each hero following his peculiar bent)\nPrepared themselves for glorious enterprise\nBy martial sports,--or, seated in the tent,\nChieftains and kings in council were detained;\nWhat time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained.”\n\n“The wished-for wind was given:--I then revolved\nThe oracle, upon the silent sea;\nAnd, if no worthier led the way, resolved\nThat, of a thousand vessels, mine should be\nThe foremost prow in pressing to the strand,--\nMine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand.”\n\n“Yet bitter, oft-times bitter, was the pang\nWhen of thy loss I thought, belovèd Wife!\nOn thee too fondly did my memory hang,\nAnd on the joys we shared in mortal life,--\nThe paths which we had trod--these fountains, flowers:\nMy new-planned cities, and unfinished towers.”\n\n“But should suspense permit the Foe to cry,\n‘Behold they tremble!--haughty their array,\nYet of their numbers no one dares to die?’\nIn soul I swept the indignity away:\nOld frailties then recurred:--but lofty thought,\nIn act embodied, my deliverance wrought.”\n\n“And Thou, though strong in love, art all too weak\nIn reason, in self-government too slow;\nI counsel thee by fortitude to seek\nOur blest re-union in the shades below.\nThe invisible world with thee hath sympathised;\nBe thy affections raised and solemnised.”\n\n“Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend--\nSeeking a higher object. Love was given,\nEncouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end;\nFor this the passion to excess was driven--\nThat self might be annulled: her bondage prove\nThe fetters of a dream opposed to love.--”\n\n“Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes re-appears!\nRound the dear Shade she would have clung--’tis vain:\nThe hours are past--too brief had they been years;\nAnd him no mortal effort can detain:\nSwift, toward the realms that know not earthly day,\nHe through the portal takes his silent way,\nAnd on the palace-floor a lifeless corse She lay.”\n\n“Thus, all in vain exhorted and reproved,\nShe perished; and, as for a wilful crime,\nBy the just Gods whom no weak pity moved,\nWas doomed to wear out her appointed time,\nApart from happy Ghosts, that gather flowers\nOf blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers.”\n\n“--Yet tears to human suffering are due;\nAnd mortal hopes defeated and o’erthrown\nAre mourned by man, and not by man alone,\nAs fondly he believes.--Upon the side\nOf Hellespont (such faith was entertained)\nA knot of spiry trees for ages grew\nFrom out the tomb of him for whom she died;\nAnd ever, when such stature they had gained\nThat Ilium’s walls were subject to their view,\nThe trees’ tall summits withered at the sight;\nA constant interchange of growth and blight!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey": { - "title": "“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”", - "body": "Five years have past; five summers, with the length\nOf five long winters! and again I hear\nThese waters, rolling from their mountain-springs\nWith a soft inland murmur.--Once again\nDo I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,\nThat on a wild secluded scene impress\nThoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect\nThe landscape with the quiet of the sky.\nThe day is come when I again repose\nHere, under this dark sycamore, and view\nThese plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,\nWhich at this season, with their unripe fruits,\nAre clad in one green hue, and lose themselves\n’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see\nThese hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines\nOf sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,\nGreen to the very door; and wreaths of smoke\nSent up, in silence, from among the trees!\nWith some uncertain notice, as might seem\nOf vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,\nOr of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire\nThe Hermit sits alone.\n\nThese beauteous forms,\nThrough a long absence, have not been to me\nAs is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:\nBut oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din\nOf towns and cities, I have owed to them,\nIn hours of weariness, sensations sweet,\nFelt in the blood, and felt along the heart;\nAnd passing even into my purer mind\nWith tranquil restoration:--feelings too\nOf unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,\nAs have no slight or trivial influence\nOn that best portion of a good man’s life,\nHis little, nameless, unremembered, acts\nOf kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,\nTo them I may have owed another gift,\nOf aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,\nIn which the burthen of the mystery,\nIn which the heavy and the weary weight\nOf all this unintelligible world,\nIs lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,\nIn which the affections gently lead us on,--\nUntil, the breath of this corporeal frame\nAnd even the motion of our human blood\nAlmost suspended, we are laid asleep\nIn body, and become a living soul:\nWhile with an eye made quiet by the power\nOf harmony, and the deep power of joy,\nWe see into the life of things.\n\nIf this\nBe but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft--\nIn darkness and amid the many shapes\nOf joyless daylight; when the fretful stir\nUnprofitable, and the fever of the world,\nHave hung upon the beatings of my heart--\nHow oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,\nO sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,\nHow often has my spirit turned to thee!\n\nAnd now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,\nWith many recognitions dim and faint,\nAnd somewhat of a sad perplexity,\nThe picture of the mind revives again:\nWhile here I stand, not only with the sense\nOf present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts\nThat in this moment there is life and food\nFor future years. And so I dare to hope,\nThough changed, no doubt, from what I was when first\nI came among these hills; when like a roe\nI bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides\nOf the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,\nWherever nature led: more like a man\nFlying from something that he dreads, than one\nWho sought the thing he loved. For nature then\n(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days\nAnd their glad animal movements all gone by)\nTo me was all in all.--I cannot paint\nWhat then I was. The sounding cataract\nHaunted me like a passion: the tall rock,\nThe mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,\nTheir colours and their forms, were then to me\nAn appetite; a feeling and a love,\nThat had no need of a remoter charm,\nBy thought supplied, nor any interest\nUnborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,\nAnd all its aching joys are now no more,\nAnd all its dizzy raptures. Not for this\nFaint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts\nHave followed; for such loss, I would believe,\nAbundant recompense. For I have learned\nTo look on nature, not as in the hour\nOf thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes\nThe still sad music of humanity,\nNor harsh nor grating, though of ample power\nTo chasten and subdue.--And I have felt\nA presence that disturbs me with the joy\nOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublime\nOf something far more deeply interfused,\nWhose dwelling is the light of setting suns,\nAnd the round ocean and the living air,\nAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man:\nA motion and a spirit, that impels\nAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,\nAnd rolls through all things. Therefore am I still\nA lover of the meadows and the woods\nAnd mountains; and of all that we behold\nFrom this green earth; of all the mighty world\nOf eye, and ear,--both what they half create,\nAnd what perceive; well pleased to recognise\nIn nature and the language of the sense\nThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,\nThe guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul\nOf all my moral being.\n\nNor perchance,\nIf I were not thus taught, should I the more\nSuffer my genial spirits to decay:\nFor thou art with me here upon the banks\nOf this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,\nMy dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch\nThe language of my former heart, and read\nMy former pleasures in the shooting lights\nOf thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while\nMay I behold in thee what I was once,\nMy dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,\nKnowing that Nature never did betray\nThe heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,\nThrough all the years of this our life, to lead\nFrom joy to joy: for she can so inform\nThe mind that is within us, so impress\nWith quietness and beauty, and so feed\nWith lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,\nRash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,\nNor greetings where no kindness is, nor all\nThe dreary intercourse of daily life,\nShall e’er prevail against us, or disturb\nOur cheerful faith, that all which we behold\nIs full of blessings. Therefore let the moon\nShine on thee in thy solitary walk;\nAnd let the misty mountain-winds be free\nTo blow against thee: and, in after years,\nWhen these wild ecstasies shall be matured\nInto a sober pleasure; when thy mind\nShall be a mansion for all lovely forms,\nThy memory be as a dwelling-place\nFor all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,\nIf solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,\nShould be thy portion, with what healing thoughts\nOf tender joy wilt thou remember me,\nAnd these my exhortations! Nor, perchance--\nIf I should be where I no more can hear\nThy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams\nOf past existence--wilt thou then forget\nThat on the banks of this delightful stream\nWe stood together; and that I, so long\nA worshipper of Nature, hither came\nUnwearied in that service: rather say\nWith warmer love--oh! with far deeper zeal\nOf holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,\nThat after many wanderings, many years\nOf absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,\nAnd this green pastoral landscape, were to me\nMore dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1798, - "month": "july", - "day": 13 - }, - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "lines-written-in-early-spring": { - "title": "“Lines Written in Early Spring”", - "body": "I heard a thousand blended notes,\nWhile in a grove I sate reclined,\nIn that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts\nBring sad thoughts to the mind.\n\nTo her fair works did Nature link\nThe human soul that through me ran;\nAnd much it grieved my heart to think\nWhat man has made of man.\n\nThrough primrose tufts, in that green bower,\nThe periwinkle trailed its wreaths;\nAnd ’tis my faith that every flower\nEnjoys the air it breathes.\n\nThe birds around me hopped and played,\nTheir thoughts I cannot measure:--\nBut the least motion which they made\nIt seemed a thrill of pleasure.\n\nThe budding twigs spread out their fan,\nTo catch the breezy air;\nAnd I must think, do all I can,\nThat there was pleasure there.\n\nIf this belief from heaven be sent,\nIf such be Nature’s holy plan,\nHave I not reason to lament\nWhat man has made of man?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "most-sweet-it-is": { - "title": "“Most Sweet It Is”", - "body": "Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes\nTo pace the ground, if path be there or none,\nWhile a fair region round the traveller lies\nWhich he forbears again to look upon;\nPleased rather with some soft ideal scene,\nThe work of Fancy, or some happy tone\nOf meditation, slipping in between\nThe beauty coming and the beauty gone.\nIf Thought and Love desert us, from that day\nLet us break off all commerce with the Muse:\nWith Thought and Love companions of our way,\nWhate’er the senses take or may refuse,\nThe Mind’s internal heaven shall shed her dews\nOf inspiration on the humblest lay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "mutability": { - "title": "“Mutability”", - "body": "From low to high doth dissolution climb,\nAnd sink from high to low, along a scale\nOf awful notes, whose concord shall not fail;\nA musical but melancholy chime,\nWhich they can hear who meddle not with crime,\nNor avarice, nor over-anxious care.\nTruth fails not; but her outward forms that bear\nThe longest date do melt like frosty rime,\nThat in the morning whitened hill and plain\nAnd is no more; drop like the tower sublime\nOf yesterday, which royally did wear\nHis crown of weeds, but could not even sustain\nSome casual shout that broke the silent air,\nOr the unimaginable touch of Time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "november": { - "title": "“November”", - "body": "Another year!--another deadly blow!\nAnother mighty Empire overthrown!\nAnd We are left, or shall be left, alone;\nThe last that dare to struggle with the Foe.\n’Tis well! from this day forward we shall know\nThat in ourselves our safety must be sought;\nThat by our own right hands it must be wrought;\nThat we must stand unpropped, or be laid low.\nO dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer!\nWe shall exult, if they who rule the land\nBe men who hold its many blessings dear,\nWise, upright, valiant; not a servile band,\nWho are to judge of danger which they fear,\nAnd honour which they do not understand.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "nuns-fret-not": { - "title": "“Nuns Fret Not”", - "body": "Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;\nAnd hermits are contented with their cells;\nAnd students with their pensive citadels;\nMaids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,\nSit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,\nHigh as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,\nWill murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:\nIn truth the prison, into which we doom\nOurselves, no prison is: and hence for me,\nIn sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound\nWithin the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;\nPleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)\nWho have felt the weight of too much liberty,\nShould find brief solace there, as I have found.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nutting": { - "title": "“Nutting”", - "body": "--It seems a day\n(I speak of one from many singled out)\nOne of those heavenly days that cannot die;\nWhen, in the eagerness of boyish hope,\nI left our cottage-threshold, sallying forth\nWith a huge wallet o’er my shoulders slung,\nA nutting-crook in hand; and turned my steps\nTow’rd some far-distant wood, a Figure quaint,\nTricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds\nWhich for that service had been husbanded,\nBy exhortation of my frugal Dame--\nMotley accoutrement, of power to smile\nAt thorns, and brakes, and brambles,--and, in truth,\nMore ragged than need was! O’er pathless rocks,\nThrough beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,\nForcing my way, I came to one dear nook\nUnvisited, where not a broken bough\nDrooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign\nOf devastation; but the hazels rose\nTall and erect, with tempting clusters hung,\nA virgin scene!--A little while I stood,\nBreathing with such suppression of the heart\nAs joy delights in; and, with wise restraint\nVoluptuous, fearless of a rival, eyed\nThe banquet;--or beneath the trees I sate\nAmong the flowers, and with the flowers I played;\nA temper known to those, who, after long\nAnd weary expectation, have been blest\nWith sudden happiness beyond all hope.\nPerhaps it was a bower beneath whose leaves\nThe violets of five seasons re-appear\nAnd fade, unseen by any human eye;\nWhere fairy water-breaks do murmur on\nFor ever; and I saw the sparkling foam,\nAnd--with my cheek on one of those green stones\nThat, fleeced with moss, under the shady trees,\nLay round me, scattered like a flock of sheep--\nI heard the murmur, and the murmuring sound,\nIn that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay\nTribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,\nThe heart luxuriates with indifferent things,\nWasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,\nAnd on the vacant air. Then up I rose,\nAnd dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash\nAnd merciless ravage: and the shady nook\nOf hazels, and the green and mossy bower,\nDeformed and sullied, patiently gave up\nTheir quiet being: and, unless I now\nConfound my present feelings with the past;\nEre from the mutilated bower I turned\nExulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings,\nI felt a sense of pain when I beheld\nThe silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.--\nThen, dearest Maiden, move along these shades\nIn gentleness of heart; with gentle hand\nTouch--for there is a spirit in the woods.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "october": { - "title": "“October”", - "body": "These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:\nEven rich men, brave by nature, taint the air\nWith words of apprehension and despair:\nWhile tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,\nMen unto whom sufficient for the day\nAnd minds not stinted or untilled are given,\nSound, healthy, children of the God of heaven,\nAre cheerful as the rising sun in May.\nWhat do we gather hence but firmer faith\nThat every gift of noble origin\nIs breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath;\nThat virtue and the faculties within\nAre vital,--and that riches are akin\nTo fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "ode-to-duty": { - "title": "“Ode to Duty”", - "body": "_“Jam non consilio bonus, sed more eo perductus, ut non tantum recte facere possim, sed nisi recte facere non possim”_\n_“I am no longer good through deliberate intent, but by long habit have reached a point where I am not only able to do right, but am unable to do anything but what is right.”_\n --_Seneca, Letters 120.10_\n\nStern Daughter of the Voice of God!\nO Duty! if that name thou love\nWho art a light to guide, a rod\nTo check the erring, and reprove;\nThou, who art victory and law\nWhen empty terrors overawe;\nFrom vain temptations dost set free;\nAnd calm’st the weary strife of frail humanity!\n\nThere are who ask not if thine eye\nBe on them; who, in love and truth,\nWhere no misgiving is, rely\nUpon the genial sense of youth:\nGlad Hearts! without reproach or blot;\nWho do thy work, and know it not:\nOh! if through confidence misplaced\nThey fail, thy saving arms, dread Power! around them cast.\n\nSerene will be our days and bright,\nAnd happy will our nature be,\nWhen love is an unerring light,\nAnd joy its own security.\nAnd they a blissful course may hold\nEven now, who, not unwisely bold,\nLive in the spirit of this creed;\nYet seek thy firm support, according to their need.\n\nI, loving freedom, and untried;\nNo sport of every random gust,\nYet being to myself a guide,\nToo blindly have reposed my trust:\nAnd oft, when in my heart was heard\nThy timely mandate, I deferred\nThe task, in smoother walks to stray;\nBut thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may.\n\nThrough no disturbance of my soul,\nOr strong compunction in me wrought,\nI supplicate for thy control;\nBut in the quietness of thought:\nMe this unchartered freedom tires;\nI feel the weight of chance-desires:\nMy hopes no more must change their name,\nI long for a repose that ever is the same.\n\nStern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear\nThe Godhead’s most benignant grace;\nNor know we anything so fair\nAs is the smile upon thy face:\nFlowers laugh before thee on their beds\nAnd fragrance in thy footing treads;\nThou dost preserve the stars from wrong;\nAnd the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.\n\nTo humbler functions, awful Power!\nI call thee: I myself commend\nUnto thy guidance from this hour;\nOh, let my weakness have an end!\nGive unto me, made lowly wise,\nThe spirit of self-sacrifice;\nThe confidence of reason give;\nAnd in the light of truth thy Bondman let me live!", - "metadata": { - "source": "Poems", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1815 - } - } - }, - "ode": { - "title": "“Ode”", - "body": "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,\nThe earth, and every common sight,\nTo me did seem\nApparelled in celestial light,\nThe glory and the freshness of a dream.\nIt is not now as it hath been of yore;--\nTurn wheresoe’er I may,\nBy night or day.\nThe things which I have seen I now can see no more.\n\nThe Rainbow comes and goes,\nAnd lovely is the Rose,\nThe Moon doth with delight\nLook round her when the heavens are bare,\nWaters on a starry night\nAre beautiful and fair;\nThe sunshine is a glorious birth;\nBut yet I know, where’er I go,\nThat there hath past away a glory from the earth.\n\nNow, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,\nAnd while the young lambs bound\nAs to the tabor’s sound,\nTo me alone there came a thought of grief:\nA timely utterance gave that thought relief,\nAnd I again am strong:\nThe cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;\nNo more shall grief of mine the season wrong;\nI hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,\nThe Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,\nAnd all the earth is gay;\nLand and sea\nGive themselves up to jollity,\nAnd with the heart of May\nDoth every Beast keep holiday;--\nThou Child of Joy,\nShout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.\n\nYe blessèd creatures, I have heard the call\nYe to each other make; I see\nThe heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;\nMy heart is at your festival,\nMy head hath its coronal,\nThe fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.\nOh evil day! if I were sullen\nWhile Earth herself is adorning,\nThis sweet May-morning,\nAnd the Children are culling\nOn every side,\nIn a thousand valleys far and wide,\nFresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,\nAnd the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:--\nI hear, I hear, with joy I hear!\n--But there’s a Tree, of many, one,\nA single field which I have looked upon,\nBoth of them speak of something that is gone;\nThe Pansy at my feet\nDoth the same tale repeat:\nWhither is fled the visionary gleam?\nWhere is it now, the glory and the dream?\n\nOur birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:\nThe Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,\nHath had elsewhere its setting,\nAnd cometh from afar:\nNot in entire forgetfulness,\nAnd not in utter nakedness,\nBut trailing clouds of glory do we come\nFrom God, who is our home:\nHeaven lies about us in our infancy!\nShades of the prison-house begin to close\nUpon the growing Boy,\nBut he beholds the light, and whence it flows,\nHe sees it in his joy;\nThe Youth, who daily farther from the east\nMust travel, still is Nature’s Priest,\nAnd by the vision splendid\nIs on his way attended;\nAt length the Man perceives it die away,\nAnd fade into the light of common day.\n\nEarth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;\nYearnings she hath in her own natural kind,\nAnd, even with something of a Mother’s mind,\nAnd no unworthy aim,\nThe homely Nurse doth all she can\nTo make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,\nForget the glories he hath known,\nAnd that imperial palace whence he came.\n\nBehold the Child among his new-born blisses,\nA six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!\nSee, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,\nFretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,\nWith light upon him from his father’s eyes!\nSee, at his feet, some little plan or chart,\nSome fragment from his dream of human life,\nShaped by himself with newly-learnéd art\nA wedding or a festival,\nA mourning or a funeral;\nAnd this hath now his heart,\nAnd unto this he frames his song:\nThen will he fit his tongue\nTo dialogues of business, love, or strife;\nBut it will not be long\nEre this be thrown aside,\nAnd with new joy and pride\nThe little Actor cons another part;\nFilling from time to time his “humorous stage”\nWith all the Persons, down to palsied Age,\nThat Life brings with her in her equipage;\nAs if his whole vocation\nWere endless imitation.\n\nThou, whose exterior semblance doth belie\nThy Soul’s immensity;\nThou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep\nThy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,\nThat, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,\nHaunted for ever by the eternal mind,--\nMighty Prophet! Seer blest!\nOn whom those truths do rest,\nWhich we are toiling all our lives to find,\nIn darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;\nThou, over whom thy Immortality\nBroods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,\nA Presence which is not to be put by;\nThou little Child, yet glorious in the might\nOf heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,\nWhy with such earnest pains dost thou provoke\nThe years to bring the inevitable yoke,\nThus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?\nFull soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,\nAnd custom lie upon thee with a weight,\nHeavy as frost, and deep almost as life!\n\nO joy! that in our embers\nIs something that doth live,\nThat Nature yet remembers\nWhat was so fugitive!\nThe thought of our past years in me doth breed\nPerpetual benediction: not indeed\nFor that which is most worthy to be blest;\nDelight and liberty, the simple creed\nOf Childhood, whether busy or at rest,\nWith new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--\nNot for these I raise\nThe song of thanks and praise\nBut for those obstinate questionings\nOf sense and outward things,\nFallings from us, vanishings;\nBlank misgivings of a Creature\nMoving about in worlds not realised,\nHigh instincts before which our mortal Nature\nDid tremble like a guilty thing surprised:\nBut for those first affections,\nThose shadowy recollections,\nWhich, be they what they may\nAre yet the fountain-light of all our day,\nAre yet a master-light of all our seeing;\nUphold us, cherish, and have power to make\nOur noisy years seem moments in the being\nOf the eternal Silence: truths that wake,\nTo perish never;\nWhich neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,\nNor Man nor Boy,\nNor all that is at enmity with joy,\nCan utterly abolish or destroy!\nHence in a season of calm weather\nThough inland far we be,\nOur Souls have sight of that immortal sea\nWhich brought us hither,\nCan in a moment travel thither,\nAnd see the Children sport upon the shore,\nAnd hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.\n\nThen sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!\nAnd let the young Lambs bound\nAs to the tabor’s sound!\nWe in thought will join your throng,\nYe that pipe and ye that play,\nYe that through your hearts to-day\nFeel the gladness of the May!\nWhat though the radiance which was once so bright\nBe now for ever taken from my sight,\nThough nothing can bring back the hour\nOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;\nWe will grieve not, rather find\nStrength in what remains behind;\nIn the primal sympathy\nWhich having been must ever be;\nIn the soothing thoughts that spring\nOut of human suffering;\nIn the faith that looks through death,\nIn years that bring the philosophic mind.\nAnd O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,\nForebode not any severing of our loves!\nYet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;\nI only have relinquished one delight\nTo live beneath your more habitual sway.\nI love the Brooks which down their channels fret,\nEven more than when I tripped lightly as they;\nThe innocent brightness of a new-born Day\nIs lovely yet;\nThe Clouds that gather round the setting sun\nDo take a sober colouring from an eye\nThat hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;\nAnother race hath been, and other palms are won.\nThanks to the human heart by which we live,\nThanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,\nTo me the meanest flower that blows can give\nThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "resolution-and-independence": { - "title": "“Resolution and Independence”", - "body": "There was a roaring in the wind all night;\nThe rain came heavily and fell in floods;\nBut now the sun is rising calm and bright;\nThe birds are singing in the distant woods;\nOver his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;\nThe Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;\nAnd all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.\n\nAll things that love the sun are out of doors;\nThe sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;\nThe grass is bright with rain-drops;--on the moors\nThe hare is running races in her mirth;\nAnd with her feet she from the plashy earth\nRaises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,\nRuns with her all the way, wherever she doth run.\n\nI was a Traveller then upon the moor;\nI saw the hare that raced about with joy;\nI heard the woods and distant waters roar;\nOr heard them not, as happy as a boy:\nThe pleasant season did my heart employ:\nMy old remembrances went from me wholly;\nAnd all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.\n\nBut, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might\nOf joys in minds that can no further go,\nAs high as we have mounted in delight\nIn our dejection do we sink as low;\nTo me that morning did it happen so;\nAnd fears and fancies thick upon me came;\nDim sadness--and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name.\n\nI heard the sky-lark warbling in the sky;\nAnd I bethought me of the playful hare:\nEven such a happy Child of earth am I;\nEven as these blissful creatures do I fare;\nFar from the world I walk, and from all care;\nBut there may come another day to me--\nSolitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty.\n\nMy whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,\nAs if life’s business were a summer mood;\nAs if all needful things would come unsought\nTo genial faith, still rich in genial good;\nBut how can He expect that others should\nBuild for him, sow for him, and at his call\nLove him, who for himself will take no heed at all?\n\nI thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,\nThe sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;\nOf Him who walked in glory and in joy\nFollowing his plough, along the mountain-side:\nBy our own spirits are we deified:\nWe Poets in our youth begin in gladness;\nBut thereof come in the end despondency and madness.\n\nNow, whether it were by peculiar grace,\nA leading from above, a something given,\nYet it befell that, in this lonely place,\nWhen I with these untoward thoughts had striven,\nBeside a pool bare to the eye of heaven\nI saw a Man before me unawares:\nThe oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.\n\nAs a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie\nCouched on the bald top of an eminence;\nWonder to all who do the same espy,\nBy what means it could thither come, and whence;\nSo that it seems a thing endued with sense:\nLike a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf\nOf rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;\n\nSuch seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead,\nNor all asleep--in his extreme old age:\nHis body was bent double, feet and head\nComing together in life’s pilgrimage;\nAs if some dire constraint of pain, or rage\nOf sickness felt by him in times long past,\nA more than human weight upon his frame had cast.\n\nHimself he propped, limbs, body, and pale face,\nUpon a long grey staff of shaven wood:\nAnd, still as I drew near with gentle pace,\nUpon the margin of that moorish flood\nMotionless as a cloud the old Man stood,\nThat heareth not the loud winds when they call,\nAnd moveth all together, if it move at all.\n\nAt length, himself unsettling, he the pond\nStirred with his staff, and fixedly did look\nUpon the muddy water, which he conned,\nAs if he had been reading in a book:\nAnd now a stranger’s privilege I took;\nAnd, drawing to his side, to him did say,\n“This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.”\n\nA gentle answer did the old Man make,\nIn courteous speech which forth he slowly drew:\nAnd him with further words I thus bespake,\n“What occupation do you there pursue?\nThis is a lonesome place for one like you.”\nEre he replied, a flash of mild surprise\nBroke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes.\n\nHis words came feebly, from a feeble chest,\nBut each in solemn order followed each,\nWith something of a lofty utterance drest--\nChoice word and measured phrase, above the reach\nOf ordinary men; a stately speech;\nSuch as grave Livers do in Scotland use,\nReligious men, who give to God and man their dues.\n\nHe told, that to these waters he had come\nTo gather leeches, being old and poor:\nEmployment hazardous and wearisome!\nAnd he had many hardships to endure:\nFrom pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor;\nHousing, with God’s good help, by choice or chance;\nAnd in this way he gained an honest maintenance.\n\nThe old Man still stood talking by my side;\nBut now his voice to me was like a stream\nScarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;\nAnd the whole body of the Man did seem\nLike one whom I had met with in a dream;\nOr like a man from some far region sent,\nTo give me human strength, by apt admonishment.\n\nMy former thoughts returned: the fear that kills;\nAnd hope that is unwilling to be fed;\nCold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;\nAnd mighty Poets in their misery dead.\n--Perplexed, and longing to be comforted,\nMy question eagerly did I renew,\n“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”\n\nHe with a smile did then his words repeat;\nAnd said that, gathering leeches, far and wide\nHe travelled; stirring thus about his feet\nThe waters of the pools where they abide.\n“Once I could meet with them on every side;\nBut they have dwindled long by slow decay;\nYet still I persevere, and find them where I may.”\n\nWhile he was talking thus, the lonely place,\nThe old Man’s shape, and speech--all troubled me:\nIn my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace\nAbout the weary moors continually,\nWandering about alone and silently.\nWhile I these thoughts within myself pursued,\nHe, having made a pause, the same discourse renewed.\n\nAnd soon with this he other matter blended,\nCheerfully uttered, with demeanour kind,\nBut stately in the main; and, when he ended,\nI could have laughed myself to scorn to find\nIn that decrepit Man so firm a mind.\n“God,” said I, “be my help and stay secure;\nI’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-reverie-of-poor-susan": { - "title": "“The Reverie of Poor Susan”", - "body": "At the corner of Wood-Street, when day-light appears,\nThere’s a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.\nPoor Susan has pass’d by the spot and has heard\nIn the silence of morning the song of the bird.\n\n’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees\nA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;\nBright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,\nAnd a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.\n\nGreen pastures she views in the midst of the dale,\nDown which she so often has tripp’d with her pail,\nAnd a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,\nThe only one dwelling on earth that she loves.\n\nShe looks, and her heart is in Heaven, but they fade,\nThe mist and the river, the hill and the shade;\nThe stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,\nAnd the colours have all pass’d away from her eyes.\n\nPoor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more\nThe house of thy Father will open its door,\nAnd thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,\nMayst hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. ", - "metadata": { - "source": "Lyrical Ballads", - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1797 - }, - "location": "Alfoxden" - } - }, - "september": { - "title": "“September”", - "body": "Departing summer hath assumed\nAn aspect tenderly illumed,\nThe gentlest look of spring;\nThat calls from yonder leafy shade\nUnfaded, yet prepared to fade,\nA timely carolling.\n\nNo faint and hesitating trill,\nSuch tribute as to winter chill\nThe lonely redbreast pays!\nClear, loud, and lively is the din,\nFrom social warblers gathering in\nTheir harvest of sweet lays.\n\nNor doth the example fail to cheer\nMe, conscious that my leaf is sere,\nAnd yellow on the bough:--\nFall, rosy garlands, from my head!\nYe myrtle wreaths, your fragrance shed\nAround a younger brow!\n\nYet will I temperately rejoice;\nWide is the range, and free the choice\nOf undiscordant themes;\nWhich, haply, kindred souls may prize\nNot less than vernal ecstasies,\nAnd passion’s feverish dreams.\n\nFor deathless powers to verse belong,\nAnd they like Demi-gods are strong\nOn whom the Muses smile;\nBut some their function have disclaimed,\nBest pleased with what is aptliest framed\nTo enervate and defile.\n\nNot such the initiatory strains\nCommitted to the silent plains\nIn Britain’s earliest dawn:\nTrembled the groves, the stars grew pale,\nWhile all-too-daringly the veil\nOf nature was withdrawn!\n\nNor such the spirit-stirring note\nWhen the live chords Alcaeus smote,\nInflamed by sense of wrong;\nWoe! woe to Tyrants! from the lyre\nBroke threateningly, in sparkles dire\nOf fierce vindictive song.\n\nAnd not unhallowed was the page\nBy wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage\nThe pangs of vain pursuit;\nLove listening while the Lesbian Maid\nWith finest touch of passion swayed\nHer own Aeolian lute.\n\nO ye, who patiently explore\nThe wreck of Herculanean lore,\nWhat rapture! could ye seize\nSome Theban fragment, or unroll\nOne precious, tender-hearted scroll\nOf pure Simonides.\n\nThat were, indeed, a genuine birth\nOf poesy; a bursting forth\nOf genius from the dust:\nWhat Horace gloried to behold,\nWhat Maro loved, shall we enfold?\nCan haughty Time be just!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "she-dwelt-among-the-untrodden-ways": { - "title": "“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”", - "body": "She dwelt among the untrodden ways\nBeside the springs of Dove,\nA Maid whom there were none to praise\nAnd very few to love:\n\nA violet by a mossy stone\nHalf hidden from the eye!\n--Fair as a star, when only one\nIs shining in the sky.\n\nShe lived unknown, and few could know\nWhen Lucy ceased to be;\nBut she is in her grave, and, oh,\nThe difference to me!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "she-was-a-phantom-of-delight": { - "title": "“She Was a Phantom of Delight”", - "body": "She was a Phantom of delight\nWhen first she gleamed upon my sight;\nA lovely Apparition, sent\nTo be a moment’s ornament;\nHer eyes as stars of Twilight fair;\nLike Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;\nBut all things else about her drawn\nFrom May-time and the cheerful Dawn;\nA dancing Shape, an Image gay,\nTo haunt, to startle, and way-lay.\nI saw her upon nearer view,\nA Spirit, yet a Woman too!\nHer household motions light and free,\nAnd steps of virgin-liberty;\nA countenance in which did meet\nSweet records, promises as sweet;\nA Creature not too bright or good\nFor human nature’s daily food;\nFor transient sorrows, simple wiles,\nPraise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.\nAnd now I see with eye serene\nThe very pulse of the machine;\nA Being breathing thoughtful breath,\nA Traveller between life and death;\nThe reason firm, the temperate will,\nEndurance, foresight, strength, and skill;\nA perfect Woman, nobly planned,\nTo warn, to comfort, and command;\nAnd yet a Spirit still, and bright\nWith something of angelic light.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "simon-lee-the-old-huntsman": { - "title": "“Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman”", - "body": "In the sweet shire of Cardigan,\nNot far from pleasant Ivor-hall,\nAn old Man dwells, a little man,--\n’Tis said he once was tall.\nFor five-and-thirty years he lived\nA running huntsman merry;\nAnd still the centre of his cheek\nIs red as a ripe cherry.\n\nNo man like him the horn could sound,\nAnd hill and valley rang with glee\nWhen Echo bandied, round and round\nThe halloo of Simon Lee.\nIn those proud days, he little cared\nFor husbandry or tillage;\nTo blither tasks did Simon rouse\nThe sleepers of the village.\n\nHe all the country could outrun,\nCould leave both man and horse behind;\nAnd often, ere the chase was done,\nHe reeled, and was stone-blind.\nAnd still there’s something in the world\nAt which his heart rejoices;\nFor when the chiming hounds are out,\nHe dearly loves their voices!\n\nBut, oh the heavy change!--bereft\nOf health, strength, friends, and kindred, see!\nOld Simon to the world is left\nIn liveried poverty.\nHis Master’s dead--and no one now\nDwells in the Hall of Ivor;\nMen, dogs, and horses, all are dead;\nHe is the sole survivor.\n\nAnd he is lean and he is sick;\nHis body, dwindled and awry,\nRests upon ankles swoln and thick;\nHis legs are thin and dry.\nOne prop he has, and only one,\nHis wife, an aged woman,\nLives with him, near the waterfall,\nUpon the village Common.\n\nBeside their moss-grown hut of clay,\nNot twenty paces from the door,\nA scrap of land they have, but they\nAre poorest of the poor.\nThis scrap of land he from the heath\nEnclosed when he was stronger;\nBut what to them avails the land\nWhich he can till no longer?\n\nOft, working by her Husband’s side,\nRuth does what Simon cannot do;\nFor she, with scanty cause for pride,\nIs stouter of the two.\nAnd, though you with your utmost skill\nFrom labour could not wean them,\n’Tis little, very little--all\nThat they can do between them.\n\nFew months of life has he in store\nAs he to you will tell,\nFor still, the more he works, the more\nDo his weak ankles swell.\nMy gentle Reader, I perceive,\nHow patiently you’ve waited,\nAnd now I fear that you expect\nSome tale will be related.\n\nO Reader! had you in your mind\nSuch stores as silent thought can bring,\nO gentle Reader! you would find\nA tale in every thing.\nWhat more I have to say is short,\nAnd you must kindly take it:\nIt is no tale; but, should you think,\nPerhaps a tale you’ll make it.\n\nOne summer-day I chanced to see\nThis old Man doing all he could\nTo unearth the root of an old tree,\nA stump of rotten wood.\nThe mattock tottered in his hand;\nSo vain was his endeavour,\nThat at the root of the old tree\nHe might have worked for ever.\n\n“You’re overtasked, good Simon Lee,\nGive me your tool,” to him I said;\nAnd at the word right gladly he\nReceived my proffered aid.\nI struck, and with a single blow\nThe tangled root I severed,\nAt which the poor old Man so long\nAnd vainly had endeavoured.\n\nThe tears into his eyes were brought,\nAnd thanks and praises seemed to run\nSo fast out of his heart, I thought\nThey never would have done.\n--I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds\nWith coldness still returning;\nAlas! the gratitude of men\nHath oftener left me mourning.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-simplon-pass": { - "title": "“The Simplon Pass”", - "body": " --Brook and road\nWere fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,\nAnd with them did we journey several hours\nAt a slow step. The immeasurable height\nOf woods decaying, never to be decayed,\nThe stationary blasts of waterfalls,\nAnd in the narrow rent, at every turn,\nWinds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,\nThe torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,\nThe rocks that muttered close upon our ears,\nBlack drizzling crags that spake by the wayside\nAs if a voice were in them, the sick sight\nAnd giddy prospect of the raving stream,\nThe unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,\nTumult and peace, the darkness and the light--\nWere all like workings of one mind, the features\nOf the same face, blossoms upon one tree,\nCharacters of the great Apocalypse,\nThe types and symbols of Eternity,\nOf first and last, and midst, and without end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-slumber-did-my-spirit-seal": { - "title": "“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”", - "body": "A slumber did my spirit seal;\nI had no human fears:\nShe seemed a thing that could not feel\nThe touch of earthly years.\n\nNo motion has she now, no force;\nShe neither hears nor sees;\nRolled round in earth’s diurnal course,\nWith rocks, and stones, and trees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-solitary-reaper": { - "title": "“The Solitary Reaper”", - "body": "Behold her, single in the field,\nYon solitary Highland Lass!\nReaping and singing by herself;\nStop here, or gently pass!\nAlone she cuts and binds the grain,\nAnd sings a melancholy strain;\nO listen! for the Vale profound\nIs overflowing with the sound.\n\nNo Nightingale did ever chaunt\nMore welcome notes to weary bands\nOf travellers in some shady haunt,\nAmong Arabian sands:\nA voice so thrilling ne’er was heard\nIn spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,\nBreaking the silence of the seas\nAmong the farthest Hebrides.\n\nWill no one tell me what she sings?--\nPerhaps the plaintive numbers flow\nFor old, unhappy, far-off things,\nAnd battles long ago:\nOr is it some more humble lay,\nFamiliar matter of to-day?\nSome natural sorrow, loss, or pain,\nThat has been, and may be again?\n\nWhate’er the theme, the Maiden sang\nAs if her song could have no ending;\nI saw her singing at her work,\nAnd o’er the sickle bending;--\nI listened, motionless and still;\nAnd, as I mounted up the hill,\nThe music in my heart I bore,\nLong after it was heard no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "song-of-the-feast-of-brougham-castle": { - "title": "“Song of the Feast of Brougham Castle”", - "body": "High in the breathless Hall the Minstrel sate,\nAnd Emont’s murmur mingled with the Song.--\nThe words of ancient time I thus translate,\nA festal strain that hath been silent long:--\n\n“From town to town, from tower to tower,\nThe red rose is a gladsome flower.\nHer thirty years of winter past,\nThe red rose is revived at last;\nShe lifts her head for endless spring,\nFor everlasting blossoming:\nBoth roses flourish, red and white:\nIn love and sisterly delight\nThe two that were at strife are blended,\nAnd all old troubles now are ended.--\nJoy! joy to both! but most to her\nWho is the flower of Lancaster!\nBehold her how She smiles to-day\nOn this great throng, this bright array!\nFair greeting doth she send to all\nFrom every corner of the hall;\nBut chiefly from above the board\nWhere sits in state our rightful Lord,\nA Clifford to his own restored!”\n\n“They came with banner, spear, and shield;\nAnd it was proved in Bosworth-field.\nNot long the Avenger was withstood--\nEarth helped him with the cry of blood:\nSt. George was for us, and the might\nOf blessed Angels crowned the right.\nLoud voice the Land has uttered forth,\nWe loudest in the faithful north:\nOur fields rejoice, our mountains ring,\nOur streams proclaim a welcoming;\nOur strong-abodes and castles see\nThe glory of their loyalty.”\n\n“How glad is Skipton at this hour--\nThough lonely, a deserted Tower;\nKnight, squire, and yeoman, page and groom,\nWe have them at the feast of Brough’m.\nHow glad Pendragon--though the sleep\nOf years be on her!--She shall reap\nA taste of this great pleasure, viewing\nAs in a dream her own renewing.\nRejoiced is Brough, right glad, I deem,\nBeside her little humble stream;\nAnd she that keepeth watch and ward\nHer statelier Eden’s course to guard;\nThey both are happy at this hour,\nThough each is but a lonely Tower:--\nBut here is perfect joy and pride\nFor one fair House by Emont’s side,\nThis day, distinguished without peer,\nTo see her Master and to cheer--\nHim, and his Lady-mother dear!”\n\n“Oh! it was a time forlorn\nWhen the fatherless was born--\nGive her wings that she may fly,\nOr she sees her infant die!\nSwords that are with slaughter wild\nHunt the Mother and the Child.\nWho will take them from the light?\n--Yonder is a man in sight--\nYonder is a house--but where?\nNo, they must not enter there.\nTo the caves, and to the brooks,\nTo the clouds of heaven she looks;\nShe is speechless, but her eyes\nPray in ghostly agonies.\nBlissful Mary, Mother mild,\nMaid and Mother undefiled,\nSave a Mother and her Child!”\n\n“Now who is he that bounds with joy\nOn Carrock’s side, a Shepherd-boy?\nNo thoughts hath he but thoughts that pass\nLight as the wind along the grass.\nCan this be He who hither came\nIn secret, like a smothered flame?\nO’er whom such thankful tears were shed\nFor shelter, and a poor man’s bread!\nGod loves the Child; and God hath willed\nThat those dear words should be fulfilled,\nThe Lady’s words, when forced away\nThe last she to her Babe did say:\n‘My own, my own, thy fellow-guest\nI may not be; but rest thee, rest,\nFor lowly shepherd’s life is best!’”\n\n“Alas! when evil men are strong\nNo life is good, no pleasure long.\nThe Boy must part from Mosedale’s groves,\nAnd leave Blencathara’s rugged coves,\nAnd quit the flowers that summer brings\nTo Glenderamakin’s lofty springs;\nMust vanish, and his careless cheer\nBe turned to heaviness and fear.\n--Give Sir Lancelot Threlkeld praise!\nHear it, good man, old in days!\nThou tree of covert and of rest\nFor this young Bird that is distrest;\nAmong thy branches safe he lay,\nAnd he was free to sport and play,\nWhen falcons were abroad for prey.”\n\n“A recreant harp, that sings of fear\nAnd heaviness in Clifford’s ear!\nI said, when evil men are strong,\nNo life is good, no pleasure long,\nA weak and cowardly untruth!\nOur Clifford was a happy Youth,\nAnd thankful through a weary time,\nThat brought him up to manhood’s prime.\n--Again he wanders forth at will,\nAnd tends a flock from hill to hill:\nHis garb is humble; ne’er was seen\nSuch garb with such a noble mien;\nAmong the shepherd-grooms no mate\nHath he, a Child of strength and state!\nYet lacks not friends for simple glee,\nNor yet for higher sympathy.\n\nTo his side the fallow-deer\nCame and rested without fear;\nThe eagle, lord of land and sea,\nStooped down to pay him fealty;\nAnd both the undying fish that swim\nThrough Bowscale-tarn did wait on him;\nThe pair were servants of his eye\nIn their immortality;\nAnd glancing, gleaming, dark or bright,\nMoved to and fro, for his delight.\nHe knew the rocks which Angels haunt\nUpon the mountains visitant;\nHe hath kenned them taking wing:\nAnd into caves where Faeries sing\nHe hath entered; and been told\nBy Voices how men lived of old.\nAmong the heavens his eye can see\nThe face of thing that is to be;\nAnd, if that men report him right,\nHis tongue could whisper words of might.\n--Now another day is come,\nFitter hope, and nobler doom;\nHe hath thrown aside his crook,\nAnd hath buried deep his book;\nArmour rusting in his halls\nOn the blood of Clifford calls,--\n‘Quell the Scot,’ exclaims the Lance--\nBear me to the heart of France,\nIs the longing of the Shield--\nTell thy name, thou trembling field;\nField of death, where’er thou be,\nGroan thou with our victory!\nHappy day, and mighty hour,\nWhen our Shepherd, in his power,\nMailed and horsed, with lance and sword,\nTo his ancestors restored\nLike a re-appearing Star,\nLike a glory from afar\nFirst shall head the flock of war!”\n\nAlas! the impassioned minstrel did not know\nHow, by Heaven’s grace, this Clifford’s heart was framed:\nHow he, long forced in humble walks to go,\nWas softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.\n\nLove had he found in huts where poor men lie;\nHis daily teachers had been woods and rills,\nThe silence that is in the starry sky,\nThe sleep that is among the lonely hills.\n\nIn him the savage virtue of the Race,\nRevenge and all ferocious thoughts were dead:\nNor did he change; but kept in lofty place\nThe wisdom which adversity had bred.\n\nGlad were the vales, and every cottage-hearth;\nThe Shepherd-lord was honoured more and more;\nAnd, ages after he was laid in earth,\n“The good Lord Clifford” was the name he bore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sonnet-from-the-river-duddon": { - "title": "“Sonnet from the River Duddon”", - "body": "I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,\nAs being past away.--Vain sympathies!\nFor, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,\nI see what was, and is, and will abide;\nStill glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;\nThe Form remains, the Function never dies;\nWhile we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,\nWe Men, who in our morn of youth defied\nThe elements, must vanish;--be it so!\nEnough, if something from our hands have power\nTo live, and act, and serve the future hour;\nAnd if, as toward the silent tomb we go,\nThrough love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower,\nWe feel that we are greater than we know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "surprised-by-joy": { - "title": "“Surprised by Joy”", - "body": "Surprised by joy--impatient as the Wind\nI turned to share the transport--Oh! with whom\nBut Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,\nThat spot which no vicissitude can find?\nLove, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--\nBut how could I forget thee?--Through what power,\nEven for the least division of an hour,\nHave I been so beguiled as to be blind\nTo my most grievous loss!--That thought’s return\nWas the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,\nSave one, one only, when I stood forlorn,\nKnowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;\nThat neither present time, nor years unborn\nCould to my sight that heavenly face restore.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "eastertide" - } - } - }, - "the-tables-turned": { - "title": "“The Tables Turned”", - "body": "Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;\nOr surely you’ll grow double:\nUp! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;\nWhy all this toil and trouble?\n\nThe sun above the mountain’s head,\nA freshening lustre mellow\nThrough all the long green fields has spread,\nHis first sweet evening yellow.\n\nBooks! ’tis a dull and endless strife:\nCome, hear the woodland linnet,\nHow sweet his music! on my life,\nThere’s more of wisdom in it.\n\nAnd hark! how blithe the throstle sings!\nHe, too, is no mean preacher:\nCome forth into the light of things,\nLet Nature be your teacher.\n\nShe has a world of ready wealth,\nOur minds and hearts to bless--\nSpontaneous wisdom breathed by health,\nTruth breathed by cheerfulness.\n\nOne impulse from a vernal wood\nMay teach you more of man,\nOf moral evil and of good,\nThan all the sages can.\n\nSweet is the lore which Nature brings;\nOur meddling intellect\nMis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--\nWe murder to dissect.\n\nEnough of Science and of Art;\nClose up those barren leaves;\nCome forth, and bring with you a heart\nThat watches and receives.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "there-was-a-boy": { - "title": "“There Was a Boy”", - "body": "There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs\nAnd islands of Winander! many a time,\nAt evening, when the earliest stars began\nTo move along the edges of the hills,\nRising or setting, would he stand alone,\nBeneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;\nAnd there, with fingers interwoven, both hands\nPressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth\nUplifted, he, as through an instrument,\nBlew mimic hootings to the silent owls\nThat they might answer him.--And they would shout\nAcross the watery vale, and shout again,\nResponsive to his call,--with quivering peals,\nAnd long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud\nRedoubled and redoubled; concourse wild\nOf jocund din! And, when there came a pause\nOf silence such as baffled his best skill:\nThen, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung\nListening, a gentle shock of mild surprise\nHas carried far into his heart the voice\nOf mountain-torrents; or the visible scene\nWould enter unawares into his mind\nWith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,\nIts woods, and that uncertain heaven received\nInto the bosom of the steady lake.\n\nThis boy was taken from his mates, and died\nIn childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.\nPre-eminent in beauty is the vale\nWhere he was born and bred: the churchyard hangs\nUpon a slope above the village-school;\nAnd through that churchyard when my way has led\nOn summer-evenings, I believe that there\nA long half-hour together I have stood\nMute--looking at the grave in which he lies!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-thorn": { - "title": "“The Thorn”", - "body": "# I.\n\n“There is a Thorn--it looks so old,\nIn truth, you’d find it hard to say\nHow it could ever have been young,\nIt looks so old and grey.\nNot higher than a two years’ child\nIt stands erect, this aged Thorn;\nNo leaves it has, no prickly points;\nIt is a mass of knotted joints,\nA wretched thing forlorn.\nIt stands erect, and like a stone\nWith lichens is it overgrown.”\n\n\n# II.\n\n“Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown,\nWith lichens to the very top,\nAnd hung with heavy tufts of moss,\nA melancholy crop:\nUp from the earth these mosses creep,\nAnd this poor Thorn they clasp it round\nSo close, you’d say that they are bent\nWith plain and manifest intent\nTo drag it to the ground;\nAnd all have joined in one endeavour\nTo bury this poor Thorn for ever.”\n\n\n# III.\n\n“High on a mountain’s highest ridge,\nWhere oft the stormy winter gale\nCuts like a scythe, while through the clouds\nIt sweeps from vale to vale;\nNot five yards from the mountain path,\nThis Thorn you on your left espy;\nAnd to the left, three yards beyond,\nYou see a little muddy pond\nOf water--never dry,\nThough but of compass small, and bare\nTo thirsty suns and parching air.”\n\n\n# IV.\n\n“And, close beside this aged Thorn,\nThere is a fresh and lovely sight,\nA beauteous heap, a hill of moss,\nJust half a foot in height.\nAll lovely colours there you see,\nAll colours that were ever seen;\nAnd mossy network too is there,\nAs if by hand of lady fair\nThe work had woven been;\nAnd cups, the darlings of the eye,\nSo deep is their vermilion dye.”\n\n\n# V.\n\n“Ah me! what lovely tints are there\nOf olive green and scarlet bright,\nIn spikes, in branches, and in stars,\nGreen, red, and pearly white!\nThis heap of earth o’ergrown with moss,\nWhich close beside the Thorn you see,\nSo fresh in all its beauteous dyes,\nIs like an infant’s grave in size,\nAs like as like can be:\nBut never, never any where,\nAn infant’s grave was half so fair.”\n\n\n# VI.\n\n“Now would you see this aged Thorn,\nThis pond, and beauteous hill of moss,\nYou must take care and choose your time\nThe mountain when to cross.\nFor oft there sits between the heap,\nSo like an infant’s grave in size,\nAnd that same pond of which I spoke,\nA Woman in a scarlet cloak,\nAnd to herself she cries,\n‘Oh misery! oh misery!\nOh woe is me! oh misery!’”\n\n\n# VII.\n\n“At all times of the day and night\nThis wretched Woman thither goes;\nAnd she is known to every star,\nAnd every wind that blows;\nAnd there, beside the Thorn, she sits\nWhen the blue daylight’s in the skies,\nAnd when the whirlwind’s on the hill,\nOr frosty air is keen and still,\nAnd to herself she cries,\n‘Oh misery! oh misery!\nOh woe is me! oh misery!’”\n\n\n# VIII.\n\n“Now wherefore, thus, by day and night,\nIn rain, in tempest, and in snow,\nThus to the dreary mountain-top\nDoes this poor Woman go?\nAnd why sits she beside the Thorn\nWhen the blue daylight’s in the sky\nOr when the whirlwind’s on the hill,\nOr frosty air is keen and still,\nAnd wherefore does she cry?--\nO wherefore? wherefore? tell me why\nDoes she repeat that doleful cry?”\n\n\n# IX.\n\n“I cannot tell; I wish I could;\nFor the true reason no one knows:\nBut would you gladly view the spot,\nThe spot to which she goes;\nThe hillock like an infant’s grave,\nThe pond--and Thorn, so old and grey;\nPass by her door--’tis seldom shut--\nAnd if you see her in her hut--\nThen to the spot away!\nI never heard of such as dare\nApproach the spot when she is there.”\n\n\n# X.\n\n“But wherefore to the mountain-top\nCan this unhappy Woman go,\nWhatever star is in the skies,\nWhatever wind may blow?”\n“Full twenty years are past and gone\nSince she (her name is Martha Ray)\nGave with a maiden’s true good-will\nHer company to Stephen Hill;\nAnd she was blithe and gay,\nWhile friends and kindred all approved\nOf him whom tenderly she loved.”\n\n\n# XI.\n\n“And they had fixed the wedding day,\nThe morning that must wed them both;\nBut Stephen to another Maid\nHad sworn another oath;\nAnd, with this other Maid, to church\nUnthinking Stephen went--\nPoor Martha! on that woeful day\nA pang of pitiless dismay\nInto her soul was sent;\nA fire was kindled in her breast,\nWhich might not burn itself to rest.”\n\n\n# XII.\n\n“They say, full six months after this,\nWhile yet the summer leaves were green,\nShe to the mountain-top would go,\nAnd there was often seen.\nWhat could she seek?--or wish to hide?\nHer state to any eye was plain;\nShe was with child, and she was mad;\nYet often was she sober sad\nFrom her exceeding pain.\nO guilty Father--would that death\nHad saved him from that breach of faith!”\n\n# XIII.\n\n“Sad case for such a brain to hold\nCommunion with a stirring child!\nSad case, as you may think, for one\nWho had a brain so wild!\nLast Christmas-eve we talked of this,\nAnd grey-haired Wilfred of the glen\nHeld that the unborn infant wrought\nAbout its mother’s heart, and brought\nHer senses back again:\nAnd, when at last her time drew near,\nHer looks were calm, her senses clear.”\n\n\n# XIV.\n\n“More know I not, I wish I did,\nAnd it should all be told to you;\nFor what became of this poor child\nNo mortal ever knew;\nNay--if a child to her was born\nNo earthly tongue could ever tell;\nAnd if ’twas born alive or dead,\nFar less could this with proof be said;\nBut some remember well,\nThat Martha Ray about this time\nWould up the mountain often climb.”\n\n\n# XV.\n\n“And all that winter, when at night\nThe wind blew from the mountain-peak,\n’Twas worth your while, though in the dark,\nThe churchyard path to seek:\nFor many a time and oft were heard\nCries coming from the mountain head:\nSome plainly living voices were;\nAnd others, I’ve heard many swear,\nWere voices of the dead:\nI cannot think, whate’er they say,\nThey had to do with Martha Ray.”\n\n\n# XVI.\n\n“But that she goes to this old Thorn,\nThe Thorn which I described to you,\nAnd there sits in a scarlet cloak,\nI will be sworn is true.\nFor one day with my telescope,\nTo view the ocean wide and bright,\nWhen to this country first I came,\nEre I had heard of Martha’s name,\nI climbed the mountain’s height:--\nA storm came on, and I could see\nNo object higher than my knee.”\n\n\n# XVII.\n\n“’Twas mist and rain, and storm and rain:\nNo screen, no fence could I discover;\nAnd then the wind! in sooth, it was\nA wind full ten times over.\nI looked around, I thought I saw\nA jutting crag,--and off I ran,\nHead-foremost, through the driving rain,\nThe shelter of the crag to gain;\nAnd, as I am a man,\nInstead of jutting crag, I found\nA Woman seated on the ground.”\n\n\n# XVIII.\n\n“I did not speak--I saw her face;\nHer face!--it was enough for me;\nI turned about and heard her cry,\n‘Oh misery! oh misery!’\nAnd there she sits, until the moon\nThrough half the clear blue sky will go;\nAnd when the little breezes make\nThe waters of the pond to shake,\nAs all the country know,\nShe shudders, and you hear her cry,\n‘Oh misery! oh misery!’”\n\n\n# XIX.\n\n“But what’s the Thorn? and what the pond?\nAnd what the hill of moss to her?\nAnd what the creeping breeze that comes\nThe little pond to stir?”\n“I cannot tell; but some will say\nShe hanged her baby on the tree;\nSome say she drowned it in the pond,\nWhich is a little step beyond:\nBut all and each agree,\nThe little Babe was buried there,\nBeneath that hill of moss so fair.”\n\n\n# XX.\n\n“I’ve heard, the moss is spotted red\nWith drops of that poor infant’s blood;\nBut kill a new-born infant thus,\nI do not think she could!\nSome say, if to the pond you go,\nAnd fix on it a steady view,\nThe shadow of a babe you trace,\nA baby and a baby’s face,\nAnd that it looks at you;\nWhene’er you look on it, ’tis plain\nThe baby looks at you again.”\n\n\n# XXI.\n\n“And some had sworn an oath that she\nShould be to public justice brought;\nAnd for the little infant’s bones\nWith spades they would have sought.\nBut instantly the hill of moss\nBefore their eyes began to stir!\nAnd, for full fifty yards around,\nThe grass--it shook upon the ground!\nYet all do still aver\nThe little Babe lies buried there,\nBeneath that hill of moss so fair.”\n\n\n# XXII.\n\n“I cannot tell how this may be,\nBut plain it is the Thorn is bound\nWith heavy tufts of moss that strive\nTo drag it to the ground;\nAnd this I know, full many a time,\nWhen she was on the mountain high,\nBy day, and in the silent night,\nWhen all the stars shone clear and bright,\nThat I have heard her cry,\n‘Oh misery! oh misery!\nOh woe is me! oh misery!’”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-years-she-grew": { - "title": "“Three Years She Grew”", - "body": "Three years she grew in sun and shower,\nThen Nature said, “A lovelier flower\nOn earth was never sown;\nThis Child I to myself will take;\nShe shall be mine, and I will make\nA Lady of my own.”\n\n“Myself will to my darling be\nBoth law and impulse: and with me\nThe Girl, in rock and plain,\nIn earth and heaven, in glade and bower,\nShall feel an overseeing power\nTo kindle or restrain.”\n\n“She shall be sportive as the fawn\nThat wild with glee across the lawn\nOr up the mountain springs;\nAnd hers shall be the breathing balm,\nAnd hers the silence and the calm\nOf mute insensate things.”\n\n“The floating clouds their state shall lend\nTo her; for her the willow bend;\nNor shall she fail to see\nEven in the motions of the Storm\nGrace that shall mould the Maiden’s form\nBy silent sympathy.”\n\n“The stars of midnight shall be dear\nTo her; and she shall lean her ear\nIn many a secret place\nWhere rivulets dance their wayward round,\nAnd beauty born of murmuring sound\nShall pass into her face.”\n\n“And vital feelings of delight\nShall rear her form to stately height,\nHer virgin bosom swell;\nSuch thoughts to Lucy I will give\nWhile she and I together live\nHere in this happy dell.”\n\nThus Nature spake--The work was done--\nHow soon my Lucy’s race was run!\nShe died, and left to me\nThis heath, this calm and quiet scene;\nThe memory of what has been,\nAnd never more will be.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-highland-girl": { - "title": "“To a Highland Girl”", - "body": "Sweet Highland Girl, a very shower\nOf beauty is thy earthly dower!\nTwice seven consenting years have shed\nTheir utmost bounty on thy head:\nAnd these grey rocks; that household lawn;\nThose trees, a veil just half withdrawn;\nThis fall of water that doth make\nA murmur near the silent lake;\nThis little bay; a quiet road\nThat holds in shelter thy Abode--\nIn truth together do ye seem\nLike something fashioned in a dream;\nSuch Forms as from their covert peep\nWhen earthly cares are laid asleep!\nBut, O fair Creature! in the light\nOf common day, so heavenly bright,\nI bless Thee, Vision as thou art,\nI bless thee with a human heart;\nGod shield thee to thy latest years!\nThee, neither know I, nor thy peers;\nAnd yet my eyes are filled with tears.\n\nWith earnest feeling I shall pray\nFor thee when I am far away:\nFor never saw I mien, or face,\nIn which more plainly I could trace\nBenignity and home-bred sense\nRipening in perfect innocence.\nHere scattered, like a random seed,\nRemote from men, Thou dost not need\nThe embarrassed look of shy distress,\nAnd maidenly shamefacedness:\nThou wear’st upon thy forehead clear\nThe freedom of a Mountaineer:\nA face with gladness overspread!\nSoft smiles, by human kindness bred!\nAnd seemliness complete, that sways\nThy courtesies, about thee plays;\nWith no restraint, but such as springs\nFrom quick and eager visitings\nOf thoughts that lie beyond the reach\nOf thy few words of English speech:\nA bondage sweetly brooked, a strife\nThat gives thy gestures grace and life!\nSo have I, not unmoved in mind,\nSeen birds of tempest-loving kind--\nThus beating up against the wind.\n\nWhat hand but would a garland cull\nFor thee who art so beautiful?\nO happy pleasure! here to dwell\nBeside thee in some heathy dell;\nAdopt your homely ways, and dress,\nA Shepherd, thou a Shepherdess!\nBut I could frame a wish for thee\nMore like a grave reality:\nThou art to me but as a wave\nOf the wild sea; and I would have\nSome claim upon thee, if I could,\nThough but of common neighbourhood.\nWhat joy to hear thee, and to see!\nThy elder Brother I would be,\nThy Father--anything to thee!\n\nNow thanks to Heaven! that of its grace\nHath led me to this lonely place.\nJoy have I had; and going hence\nI bear away my recompense.\nIn spots like these it is we prize\nOur Memory, feel that she hath eyes:\nThen, why should I be loth to stir?\nI feel this place was made for her;\nTo give new pleasure like the past,\nContinued long as life shall last.\nNor am I loth, though pleased at heart,\nSweet Highland Girl! from thee to part;\nFor I, methinks, till I grow old,\nAs fair before me shall behold,\nAs I do now, the cabin small,\nThe lake, the bay, the waterfall;\nAnd thee, the spirit of them all!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1820 - }, - "location": "At Inversneyde, upon Loch Lomond" - } - }, - "to-the-cuckoo": { - "title": "“To the Cuckoo”", - "body": "O blithe New-comer! I have heard,\nI hear thee and rejoice.\nO Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,\nOr but a wandering Voice?\n\nWhile I am lying on the grass\nThy twofold shout I hear;\nFrom hill to hill it seems to pass,\nAt once far off, and near.\n\nThough babbling only to the Vale\nOf sunshine and of flowers,\nThou bringest unto me a tale\nOf visionary hours.\n\nThrice welcome, darling of the Spring!\nEven yet thou art to me\nNo bird, but an invisible thing,\nA voice, a mystery;\n\nThe same whom in my school-boy days\nI listened to; that Cry\nWhich made me look a thousand ways\nIn bush, and tree, and sky.\n\nTo seek thee did I often rove\nThrough woods and on the green;\nAnd thou wert still a hope, a love;\nStill longed for, never seen.\n\nAnd I can listen to thee yet;\nCan lie upon the plain\nAnd listen, till I do beget\nThat golden time again.\n\nO blessèd Bird! the earth we pace\nAgain appears to be\nAn unsubstantial, faery place;\nThat is fit home for Thee!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "to-the-skylark": { - "title": "“To the Skylark”", - "body": "Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!\nDost thou despise the earth where cares abound?\nOr, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye\nBoth with thy nest upon the dewy ground?\nThy nest which thou canst drop into at will,\nThose quivering wings composed, that music still!\n\nLeave to the nightingale her shady wood;\nA privacy of glorious light is thine;\nWhence thou dost pour upon the world a flood\nOf harmony, with instinct more divine;\nType of the wise who soar, but never roam;\nTrue to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1825 - } - } - }, - "the-virgin": { - "title": "“The Virgin”", - "body": "Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost\nWith the least shade of thought to sin allied.\nWoman! above all women glorified,\nOur tainted nature’s solitary boast;\nPurer than foam on central ocean tost;\nBrighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn\nWith fancied roses, than the unblemished moon\nBefore her wane begins on heaven’s blue coast;\nThy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,\nNot unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,\nAs to a visible Power, in which did blend\nAll that was mixed and reconciled in thee\nOf mother’s love with maiden purity,\nOf high with low, celestial with terrene!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "immaculate_conception" - } - } - }, - "we-are-seven": { - "title": "“We Are Seven”", - "body": "--A simple Child,\nThat lightly draws its breath,\nAnd feels its life in every limb,\nWhat should it know of death?\n\nI met a little cottage Girl:\nShe was eight years old, she said;\nHer hair was thick with many a curl\nThat clustered round her head.\n\nShe had a rustic, woodland air,\nAnd she was wildly clad:\nHer eyes were fair, and very fair;\n--Her beauty made me glad.\n\n“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,\nHow many may you be?”\n“How many? Seven in all,” she said,\nAnd wondering looked at me.\n\n“And where are they? I pray you tell.”\nShe answered, “Seven are we;\nAnd two of us at Conway dwell,\nAnd two are gone to sea.”\n\n“Two of us in the church-yard lie,\nMy sister and my brother;\nAnd, in the church-yard cottage, I\nDwell near them with my mother.”\n\n“You say that two at Conway dwell,\nAnd two are gone to sea,\nYet ye are seven! I pray you tell,\nSweet Maid, how this may be.”\n\nThen did the little Maid reply,\n“Seven boys and girls are we;\nTwo of us in the church-yard lie,\nBeneath the church-yard tree.”\n\n“You run about, my little Maid,\nYour limbs they are alive;\nIf two are in the church-yard laid,\nThen ye are only five.”\n\n“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”\nThe little Maid replied,\n“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,\nAnd they are side by side.”\n\n“My stockings there I often knit,\nMy kerchief there I hem;\nAnd there upon the ground I sit,\nAnd sing a song to them.”\n\n“And often after sun-set, Sir,\nWhen it is light and fair,\nI take my little porringer,\nAnd eat my supper there.”\n\n“The first that died was sister Jane;\nIn bed she moaning lay,\nTill God released her of her pain;\nAnd then she went away.”\n\n“So in the church-yard she was laid;\nAnd, when the grass was dry,\nTogether round her grave we played,\nMy brother John and I.”\n\n“And when the ground was white with snow,\nAnd I could run and slide,\nMy brother John was forced to go,\nAnd he lies by her side.”\n\n“How many are you, then,” said I,\n“If they two are in heaven?”\nQuick was the little Maid’s reply,\n“O Master! we are seven.”\n\n“But they are dead; those two are dead!\nTheir spirits are in heaven!”\n’Twas throwing words away; for still\nThe little Maid would have her will,\nAnd said, “Nay, we are seven!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-are-thou-silent": { - "title": "“Why Are Thou Silent”", - "body": "Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant\nOf such weak fibre that the treacherous air\nOf absence withers what was once so fair?\nIs there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?\nYet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant--\nBound to thy service with unceasing care,\nThe mind’s least generous wish a mendicant\nFor nought but what thy happiness could spare.\nSpeak--though this soft warm heart, once free to hold\nA thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,\nBe left more desolate, more dreary cold\nThan a forsaken bird’s-nest filled with snow\n’Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine--\nSpeak, that my torturing doubts their end may know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-world-is-too-much-with-us": { - "title": "“The World is too Much with Us”", - "body": "The world is too much with us; late and soon,\nGetting and spending, we lay waste our powers;--\nLittle we see in Nature that is ours;\nWe have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!\nThis Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;\nThe winds that will be howling at all hours,\nAnd are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;\nFor this, for everything, we are out of tune;\nIt moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be\nA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;\nSo might I, standing on this pleasant lea,\nHave glimpses that would make me less forlorn;\nHave sight of Proteus rising from the sea;\nOr hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "written-in-london": { - "title": "“Written in London”", - "body": "O Friend! I know not which way I must look\nFor comfort, being, as I am, opprest,\nTo think that now our life is only drest\nFor show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,\nOr groom!--We must run glittering like a brook\nIn the open sunshine, or we are unblest:\nThe wealthiest man among us is the best:\nNo grandeur now in nature or in book\nDelights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,\nThis is idolatry; and these we adore:\nPlain living and high thinking are no more:\nThe homely beauty of the good old cause\nIs gone; our peace, our fearful innocence,\nAnd pure religion breathing household laws.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "yarrow-revisited": { - "title": "“Yarrow Revisited”", - "body": "The gallant Youth, who may have gained,\nOr seeks, a “winsome Marrow,”\nWas but an Infant in the lap\nWhen first I looked on Yarrow;\nOnce more, by Newark’s Castle-gate\nLong left without a warder,\nI stood, looked, listened, and with Thee,\nGreat Minstrel of the Border!\n\nGrave thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day,\nTheir dignity installing\nIn gentle bosoms, while sere leaves\nWere on the bough, or falling;\nBut breezes played, and sunshine gleamed-\nThe forest to embolden;\nReddened the fiery hues, and shot\nTransparence through the golden.\n\nFor busy thoughts the Stream flowed on\nIn foamy agitation;\nAnd slept in many a crystal pool\nFor quiet contemplation:\nNo public and no private care\nThe freeborn mind enthralling,\nWe made a day of happy hours,\nOur happy days recalling.\n\nBrisk Youth appeared, the Morn of youth,\nWith freaks of graceful folly,-\nLife’s temperate Noon, her sober Eve,\nHer Night not melancholy;\nPast, present, future, all appeared\nIn harmony united,\nLike guests that meet, and some from far,\nBy cordial love invited.\n\nAnd if, as Yarrow, through the woods\nAnd down the meadow ranging,\nDid meet us with unaltered face,\nThough we were changed and changing;\nIf, then, some natural shadows spread\nOur inward prospect over,\nThe soul’s deep valley was not slow\nIts brightness to recover.\n\nEternal blessings on the Muse,\nAnd her divine employment!\nThe blameless Muse, who trains her Sons\nFor hope and calm enjoyment;\nAlbeit sickness, lingering yet,\nHas o’er their pillow brooded;\nAnd Care waylays their steps-a Sprite\nNot easily eluded.\n\nFor thee, O Scott! compelled to change\nGreen Eildon-hill and Cheviot\nFor warm Vesuvio’s vine-clad slopes;\nAnd leave thy Tweed and Tiviot\nFor mild Sorrento’s breezy waves;\nMay classic Fancy, linking\nWith native Fancy her fresh aid,\nPreserve thy heart from sinking!\n\nOh! while they minister to thee,\nEach vying with the other,\nMay Health return to mellow Age\nWith Strength, her venturous brother;\nAnd Tiber, and each brook and rill\nRenowned in song and story,\nWith unimagined beauty shine,\nNor lose one ray of glory!\n\nFor Thou, upon a hundred streams,\nBy tales of love and sorrow,\nOf faithful love, undaunted truth\nHast shed the power of Yarrow;\nAnd streams unknown, hills yet unseen,\nWherever they invite Thee,\nAt parent Nature’s grateful call,\nWith gladness must requite Thee.\n\nA gracious welcome shall be thine,\nSuch looks of love and honour\nAs thy own Yarrow gave to me\nWhen first I gazed upon her;\nBeheld what I had feared to see,\nUnwilling to surrender\nDreams treasured up from early days,\nThe holy and the tender.\n\nAnd what, for this frail world, were all\nThat mortals do or suffer,\nDid no responsive harp, no pen,\nMemorial tribute offer?\nYea, what were mighty Nature’s self?\nHer features, could they win us,\nUnhelped by the poetic voice\nThat hourly speaks within us?\n\nNor deem that localized Romance\nPlays false with our affections;\nUnsanctifies our tears-made sport\nFor fanciful dejections:\nAh, no! the visions of the past\nSustain the heart in feeling\nLife as she is-our changeful Life,\nWith friends and kindred dealing.\n\nBear witness, Ye, whose thoughts that day\nIn Yarrow’s groves were centred;\nWho through the silent portal arch\nOf mouldering Newark entered;\nAnd clomb the winding stair that once\nToo timidly was mounted\nBy the “last Minstrel,”(not the last!)\nEre he his Tale recounted.\n\nFlow on for ever, Yarrow Stream!\nFulfil thy pensive duty,\nWell pleased that future Bards should chant\nFor simple hearts thy beauty;\nTo dream-light dear while yet unseen,\nDear to the common sunshine,\nAnd dearer still, as now I feel,\nTo memory’s shadowy moonshine!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "yarrow-unvisited": { - "title": "“Yarrow Unvisited”", - "body": "From Stirling castle we had seen\nThe mazy Forth unravelled;\nHad trod the banks of Clyde, and Tay,\nAnd with the Tweed had travelled;\nAnd when we came to Clovenford,\nThen said my “_winsome Marrow_,”\n“Whate’er betide, we’ll turn aside,\nAnd see the Braes of Yarrow.”\n\n“Let Yarrow folk, _frae_ Selkirk town,\nWho have been buying, selling,\nGo back to Yarrow, ’tis their own;\nEach maiden to her dwelling!\nOn Yarrow’s banks let her herons feed,\nHares couch, and rabbits burrow!\nBut we will downward with the Tweed\nNor turn aside to Yarrow.”\n\n“There’s Galla Water, Leader Haughs,\nBoth lying right before us;\nAnd Dryborough, where with chiming Tweed\nThe lintwhites sing in chorus;\nThere’s pleasant Tiviot-dale, a land\nMade blithe with plough and harrow:\nWhy throw away a needful day\nTo go in search of Yarrow?”\n\n“What’s Yarrow but a river bare,\nThat glides the dark hills under?\nThere are a thousand such elsewhere\nAs worthy of your wonder.”\n--Strange words they seemed of slight and scorn;\nMy True-love sighed for sorrow;\nAnd looked me in the face, to think\nI thus could speak of Yarrow!\n\n“Oh! green,” said I, “are Yarrow’s holms,\nAnd sweet is Yarrow flowing!\nFair hangs the apple frae the rock,\nBut we will leave it growing.\nO’er hilly path, and open Strath,\nWe’ll wander Scotland thorough;\nBut, though so near, we will not turn\nInto the dale of Yarrow.”\n\n“Let beeves and home-bred kine partake\nThe sweets of Burn-mill meadow,\nThe swan on still St. Mary’s Lake\nFloat double, swan and shadow!\nWe will not see them; will not go,\nTo-day, nor yet to-morrow;\nEnough if in our hearts we know\nThere’s such a place as Yarrow.”\n\n“Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!\nIt must, or we shall rue it:\nWe have a vision of our own;\nAh! why should we undo it?\nThe treasured dreams of times long past,\nWe’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!\nFor when we’er there, although ’tis fair,\n’Twill be another Yarrow!”\n\n“If Care with freezing years should come,\nAnd wandering seem but folly,--\nShould we be loth to stir from home,\nAnd yet be melancholy;\nShould life be dull, and spirits low,\n’Twill soothe us in our sorrow,\nThat earth has something yet to show,\nThe bonny holms of Yarrow!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "yarrow-visited": { - "title": "“Yarrow Visited”", - "body": "And is this--Yarrow?--This the stream\nOf which my fancy cherished,\nSo faithfully, a waking dream?\nAn image that hath perished!\nO that some Minstrel’s harp were near,\nTo utter notes of gladness,\nAnd chase this silence from the air,\nThat fills my heart with sadness!\n\nYet why?--a silvery current flows\nWith uncontrolled meanderings;\nNor have these eyes by greener hills\nBeen soothed, in all my wanderings.\nAnd, through her depths, Saint Mary’s Lake\nIs visibly delighted;\nFor not a feature of those hills\nIs in the mirror slighted.\n\nA blue sky bends o’er Yarrow vale,\nSave where that pearly whiteness\nIs round the rising sun diffused,\nA tender hazy brightness;\nMild dawn of promise! that excludes\nAll profitless dejection;\nThough not unwilling here to admit\nA pensive recollection.\n\nWhere was it that the famous Flower\nOf Yarrow Vale lay bleeding?\nHis bed perchance was yon smooth mound\nOn which the herd is feeding:\nAnd haply from this crystal pool,\nNow peaceful as the morning,\nThe Water-wraith ascended thrice--\nAnd gave his doleful warning.\n\nDelicious is the Lay that sings\nThe haunts of happy Lovers,\nThe path that leads them to the grove,\nThe leafy grove that covers:\nAnd Pity sanctifies the Verse\nThat paints, by strength of sorrow,\nThe unconquerable strength of love;\nBear witness, rueful Yarrow!\n\nBut thou, that didst appear so fair\nTo fond imagination,\nDost rival in the light of day\nHer delicate creation:\nMeek loveliness is round thee spread,\nA softness still and holy;\nThe grace of forest charms decayed,\nAnd pastoral melancholy.\n\nThat region left, the vale unfolds\nRich groves of lofty stature,\nWith Yarrow winding through the pomp\nOf cultivated nature;\nAnd, rising from those lofty groves,\nBehold a Ruin hoary!\nThe shattered front of Newark’s Towers,\nRenowned in Border story.\n\nFair scenes for childhood’s opening bloom,\nFor sportive youth to stray in;\nFor manhood to enjoy his strength;\nAnd age to wear away in!\nYon cottage seems a bower of bliss,\nA covert for protection\nOf tender thoughts, that nestle there--\nThe brood of chaste affection.\n\nHow sweet, on this autumnal day,\nThe wild-wood fruits to gather,\nAnd on my True-love’s forehead plant\nA crest of blooming heather!\nAnd what if I enwreathed my own!\n’Twere no offence to reason;\nThe sober Hills thus deck their brows\nTo meet the wintry season.\n\nI see--but not by sight alone,\nLoved Yarrow, have I won thee;\nA ray of fancy still survives--\nHer sunshine plays upon thee!\nThy ever-youthful waters keep\nA course of lively pleasure;\nAnd gladsome notes my lips can breathe,\nAccordant to the measure.\n\nThe vapours linger round the Heights,\nThey melt, and soon must vanish;\nOne hour is theirs, nor more is mine--\nSad thought, which I would banish,\nBut that I know, where’er I go,\nThy genuine image, Yarrow!\nWill dwell with me--to heighten joy,\nAnd cheer my mind in sorrow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - } - } - }, - "charles-wright": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Charles Wright", - "birth": { - "year": 1935 - }, - "death": null, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wright_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 18 - }, - "poems": { - "the-appalachian-book-of-the-dead": { - "title": "“The Appalachian Book of the Dead”", - "body": "Sunday, September Sunday … Outdoors,\nLike an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,\nSunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,\nDoves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,\nA crow calls, deep in its own darkness,\nSomething like water ticks on\nJust there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock …\n\nGo in fear of abstractions …\n Well, possibly. Meanwhile,\nThey are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins\nOur skins rub off on.\nFor instance, whatever enlightenment there might be\nHousels compassion and affection, those two tributaries\nThat river above our lives,\nWhose waters we sense the sense of late at night, and later still.\n\nUneasy, suburbanized,\nI drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard\nTesting the grass and border garden.\nA stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise,\nBell jars the afternoon.\n Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine\nUnder the endlessness of heaven.\nSuch skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary.\n\nIt always amazes me\nHow landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead,\nHow what we see jacks up\n the odd quotient of what we don’t see,\nHow God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down.\nFirst glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift,\nFlicks in and flicks out, a virtual reality.\nTime to begin the long division.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "bedtime-story": { - "title": "“Bedtime Story”", - "body": "The generator hums like a distant _ding an sich_.\nIt’s early evening, and time, like the dog it is,\nis hungry for food,\nAnd will be fed, don’t doubt it, will be fed, my small one.\nThe forest begins to gather its silences in.\nThe meadow regroups and hunkers down\nfor its cleft feet.\n\nSomething is wringing the rag of sunlight\ninexorably out and hanging.\nSomething is making the reeds bend and cover their heads.\nSomething is licking the shadows up,\nAnd stringing the blank spaces along, filling them in.\nSomething is inching its way into our hearts,\nscratching its blue nails against the wall there.\n\nShould we let it in?\nShould we greet it as it deserves,\nHands on our ears, mouths open?\nOr should we bring it a chair to sit on, and offer it meat?\nShould we turn on the radio,\nshould we clap our hands and dance\nThe Something Dance, the welcoming Something Dance?\nI think we should, love, I think we should.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "black-zodiac": { - "title": "“Black Zodiac”", - "body": "Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix\nAnd mismatch,\nand settle about our lawn furniture, like air\nWithout a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.\nWhat can we say to either of them?\nHow can they be so dark and so clear at the same time?\nThey ruffle our hair,\nthey ruffle the leaves of the August trees.\nThen stop, abruptly as wind.\nThe flies come back, and the heat--\nwhat can we say to them?\nNothing is endless but the sky.\nThe flies come back, and the afternoon\nTeeters a bit on its green edges,\nthen settles like dead weight\nNext to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns.\n\nThose who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him.\nPerhaps. And perhaps not--\ndust and ashes though we are,\nSome will go wordlessly, some\nWill listen their way in with their mouths\nWhere pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor.\nAnd some will revile him out of love\nand deep disdain.\nThe gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides.\nRows of gravestones stay our steps,\nAugust humidity\nBright as auras around our bodies.\nAnd some will utter the words,\nspeaking in fear and tongues,\nHating their garments splotched by the flesh.\nThese are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased.\n\nDante and John Chrysostom\nMight find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap,\nA pilgrim’s way …\nYou might too\nUnder the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon,\nClouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes,\nWhat hasn’t happened to happen yet\nStill lurking behind the stars,\n31 August 1995 …\nThe afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes\nIn the landscape,\nsuch things, such avenues, lead to dust\nAnd handle our hurt with ease.\nSky blue, blue of infinity, blue\nwaters above the earth:\nWhy do the great stories always exist in the past?\n\nThe unexamined life’s no different from\nthe examined life--\nUnanswerable questions, small talk,\nUnprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments--\nYou’ve got to write it all down.\nLandscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar\nOf evening,\nyou’ve got to write it down.\nMemory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile,\nGod’s sleep,\nyou’ve still got to write it down,\nMoon half-empty, moon half-full,\nNight starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black,\nSpider at work between the hedges,\nLast bird call,\ntoad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry …\n\nWe go to our graves with secondary affections,\nSecond-hand satisfaction, half-souled,\nstar charts demagnetized.\nWe go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass.\nSure we’re cold and untouchable,\nbut we harbor no ill will.\nNo tooth tuned to resentment’s fork,\nwe’re out of here, and sweet meat.\nCalligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards,\nWhat letters will we illuminate?\nAbove us, the atmosphere,\nThe nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call.\nAbove us, the great constellations sidle and wince,\nThe letters undarken and come forth,\nYour X and my X.\nThe letters undarken and they come forth.\n\nEluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse,\nSpirit of slides and silences,\nInvisible Hand,\nWitness and walk on.\nLords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures,\nSuccor my shift and save me …\nAll afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind,\nAnd in the gardens and dwarf orchard.\nAll afternoon\nThe lexicon of late summer has turned its pages\nUnder the rain,\nabstracting the necessary word.\nAutumn’s upon us.\nThe rain fills our narrow beds.\nDescription’s an element, like air or water.\nThat’s the word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august", - "day": 31 - } - } - }, - "blackwater-mountain": { - "title": "“Blackwater Mountain”", - "body": "That time of evening, weightless and disparate,\nWhen the loon cries, when the small bass\nTostle the lake’s reflections, when\nThe green of the oak begins\nTo open its robes to the dark, the green\nOf water to offer itself to the flames,\nWhen lily and lily pad\nHusband the last light\nWhich flares like a white disease, then disappears:\nThis is what I remember. And this:\n\nThe slap of the jacklight on the cove;\nThe freeze-frame of ducks\nBelow us; your shots; the wounded flop\nAnd skid of one bird to the thick brush;\nThe moon of your face in the fire’s glow;\nThe cold; the darkness. Young,\nWanting approval, what else could I do?\nAnd did, for two hours, waist-deep in the lake,\nThe thicket as black as death,\nWithout success or reprieve, try.\n\nThe stars over Blackwater Mountain\nStill dangle and flash like hooks, and ducks\nCoast on the evening water;\nThe foliage is like applause.\nI stand where we stood before and aim\nMy flashlight down to the lake. A black duck\nExplodes to my right, hangs, and is gone.\nHe shows me the way to you;\nHe shows me the way to a different fire\nWhere you, black moon, warm your hands.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "chickamauga": { - "title": "“Chickamauga”", - "body": "Dove-twirl in the tall grass.\nEnd-of-summer glaze next door\nOn the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree.\nWork sounds: truck back-up beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn.\n\nHistory handles our past like spoiled fruit.\nMid-morning, late-century light\ncalicoed under the peach trees.\nFingers us here. Fingers us here and here.\n\nThe poem is a code with no message:\nThe point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath,\nAbsolute, incommunicado,\nunhoused and peregrine.\n\nThe gill net of history will pluck us soon enough\nFrom the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in\nOne by one\ninto its suffocating light and air.\n\nStructure becomes an element of belief, syntax\nAnd grammar a catechist,\nTheir words what the beads say,\nwords thumbed to our discontent.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "clear-night": { - "title": "“Clear Night”", - "body": "Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.\nMoon-fingers lay down their same routine\nOn the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.\nBird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.\n\nI want to be bruised by God.\nI want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.\nI want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.\nI want to be entered and picked clean.\n\nAnd the wind says “What?” to me.\nAnd the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.\nAnd the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.\nAnd the gears notch and the engines wheel.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "dio-ed-io": { - "title": "“Dio Ed Io”", - "body": "There is a heaviness between us,\nNameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours.\nWhat ash has it come to purify?\nWhat disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds?\n\nGod of my fathers, but not of mine,\nYou are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one.\nThere is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt.\nWhat figure of earth and clay would it have me become?\n\nSunday again, January thaw back big time.\nThe knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls\nSit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy\nSmoking their dun-filtered cigarettes.\n\nNothing is bothering them--and their nicotine dreams--\nThis afternoon. Everything’s weightless,\nAs insubstantial as smoke.\nNothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all.\n\nThere is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window\nAbove a cobblestone Paris street.\nA man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance.\nOne of them’s you, the other is me.\n\nCut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net\nRight under the swan-diving body.\nCut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net.\nHmm … And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man.\n\nOne loses one’s center in the air, trying to stay afloat,\nDoesn’t one? Snowfalling metaphors.\nUnbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed.\nAnd unshedable.\n\nSuch heaviness. The world has come and lies between us.\nSuch distance. Ungraspable.\nAsh and its disappearance--\nUnbearable absence of being,\nTonto, then taken back.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "january", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "entries": { - "title": "“Entries”", - "body": "--The seepage from what you have killed in one part of your life will rise, eventually, through your rooms no matter what doors you might try to close.\n\n--Always it is the same dark you touch, wherever you touch, its odors, its watery flesh closing about you, spreading across your hands like new skin.\n\n--What does one say to the mad? They hang from their trees like swollen fruit, unwilling to fall, untouched by the weather. What meetings can hold them there? What candor?\n\n--The shed skin, the broken rind, your life but a catch now in your own throat …\n\n--So one has to dive, sinking more rapidly than what sinks in advance of you: once down, once under it all, the quieter it becomes, the less fearful it becomes, the quieter it becomes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "future-tense": { - "title": "“Future Tense”", - "body": "All things in the end are bittersweet--\nAn empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.\n\nIf you can’t delight in the everyday,\n you have no future here.\n\nAnd if you can, no future either.\n\nAnd time, black dog, will sniff you out,\n and lick your lean cheeks,\nAnd lie down beside you--warm, real close--and will not move.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-grave-of-the-right-hand": { - "title": "“The Grave of the Right Hand”", - "body": "It lies in the American West\nAll but forgotten. No stone\nCommemorates the spot,\nNor is one necessary. What hopes there\nHave calcified, what expectations,\nThe traveller would not recognize;\nOr--recognizing--care.\n\nSuch landmarks as showed the way\n(The curious rocks, the morning clouds\nWhich were skulls) are scattered now,\nOr have eroded. And paths\n\nWhich suffered our crossing, the roads which once\nExisted, it seemed, merely\nTo take us there, have faded and overgrown.\nNothing is easily found …\n\nShould you persist, however, and should\nYou approach, tonight, that broken landscape you\nWould find, at land’s end, these words\n\n‘This is the grave of the right hand:\nThe threshold, the woebegone.’", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-valley-of-the-magra": { - "title": "“In the Valley of the Magra”", - "body": "In June, above Pontrèmoli, high in the Lunigiana,\nThe pollen-colored chestnut blooms sweep like a long cloth\nSnapped open over the bunched tree tops\nAnd up the mountain as far as the almost-alpine meadows.\nAt dusk, in the half-light, they appear\nLike stars come through the roots of the great trees from another sky.\nOr tears, with my glasses off.\nSometimes they seem like that\nJust as the light fades and the darkness darkens for good.\n\nOr that’s the way I remember it when the afternoon thunderstorms\nTumble out of the Blue Ridge,\nAnd distant bombardments muscle in across the line\n\nLike God’s solitude or God’s shadow,\nThe loose consistency of mortar and river stone\nUnder my fingers where I leaned out\nOver it all, isolate farm lights\nStarting to take the color on, the way I remember it …", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "night-piece": { - "title": "“Night Piece”", - "body": "After the cormorant, after the rain, after the long snow in the shark’s belly, after the grass, after the last chord in the frog’s throat, the dark moon will enter behind the eyelids; when the blood takes it in, billowing into light--another fire that will not heal, another tinsel, black rose, old petal-face, for you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "northhanger-ridge": { - "title": "“Northhanger Ridge”", - "body": "Half-bridge over nothingness,\nWhite sky of the palette knife; blot orange,\nVertical blacks; blue, bird-like,\nDrifting up from the next life,\nThe heat-waves, like consolation, wince--\nOne cloud, like a trunk, stays shut\nAbove the horizon; off to the left, dream-wires,\nHill-snout like a crocodile’s.\n\nOr so I remember it,\nTheir clenched teeth in their clenched mouths,\nTheir voices like shards of light,\nBrittle, unnecessary.\nRuined shoes, roots, the cabinet of lost things:\nThis is the same story,\nIts lips in flame, its throat a dark water,\nThe page stripped of its meaning.\n\nSunday, and Father Dog is turned loose:\nUp the long road the children’s feet\nSnick in the dust like raindrops; the wind\nExcuses itself and backs off; inside, heat\nLies like a hand on each head;\nSlither and cough. Now Father Dog\nAddles our misconceptions, points, preens,\nHis finger a white flag, run up, run down.\n\nBow-wow and arf, the Great Light;\nO, and the Great Yes, and the Great No;\nRedemption, the cold kiss of release,\nEtc.; sentences, sentences.\n(Meanwhile, docile as shadows, they stare\nFrom their four corners, looks set:\nNo glitter escapes\nThis evangelical masonry.)\n\nCandleflame; vigil and waterflow:\nLike dust in the night the prayers rise:\nFrom 6 to 6, under the sick Christ,\nThe children talk to the nothingness,\nCrossrack and wound; the dark room\nBurns like a coal, goes\nAsh to the touch, ash to the tongue’s tip;\nBlood turns in the wheel:\n\nSomething drops from the leaves; the drugged moon\nTwists and turns in its sheets; sweet breath\nIn a dry corner, the black widow reknits her dream:\nSalvation again declines,\nAnd sleeps like a skull in the hard ground,\nNothing for ears, nothing for eyes;\nIt sleeps as its always slept, without\nShadow, waiting for nothing.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer", - "weekday": "sunday" - } - } - }, - "peccatology": { - "title": "“Peccatology”", - "body": "As Kafka has told us, sin always comes openly:\nIt walks on its roots and doesn’t have to be torn out.\n\nHow easily it absolves itself in the senses,\nHowever, in Indian Summer, the hedge ivy’s star-feet\nTreading the dead spruce and hemlock spurs,\nThe last leaves like live coals banked in the far corners of the yard,\nThe locust pods in Arabic letters, right to left.\n\nHow small a thing it becomes, nerve-sprung\nAnd half-electric, deracinated, full of joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "road-warriors": { - "title": "“Road Warriors”", - "body": "My traveling clothes light up the noon.\nI’ve been on my way for a long time\nback to the past,\nThat irreconcilable city.\nEveryone wants to join me, it seems, and I let them.\nRoadside flowers drive me to distraction,\ndragonflies\nHover like lapus lazuli, there, just out of reach.\n\nNarrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,\nUnsettled, seven yards short of immortality\nAnd a yard short of not long to live.\nBetter to sit down in the tall grass\nand watch the clouds,\nTo lift our faces up to the sky,\nConsidering--for most of us--our lives have been a constant mistake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "salt": { - "title": "“Salt”", - "body": "Skeptical, often deserving; a purgative; a seasoner; gives liveliness, pungency; a preservative; creates a false impression; is stored away … O, definitions, holding--for nothing--our black hands … tassels, tassels … the words come, and the words come, trailing like dew upon the world’s wet wounds, O salt!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sitting-outside-at-the-end-of-autumn": { - "title": "“Sitting outside at the End of Autumn”", - "body": "Three years ago, in the afternoons,\nI used to sit back here and try\nTo answer the simple arithmetic of my life,\nBut never could figure it--\nThis object and that object\nNever contained the landscape\nnor all of its implications,\nThis tree and that shrub\nNever completely satisfied the sum or quotient\nI took from or carried to,\nnor do they do so now,\nThough I’m back here again, looking to calculate,\nLooking to see what adds up.\n\nEverything comes from something,\nonly something comes from nothing,\nLao Tzu says, more or less.\nEminently sensible, I say,\nRubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers.\nDelicate as an earring, it carries its emptiness like a child\nIt would be rid of.\nI rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything\nResplendent in its vocabulary or disguise--\nBut one and one make nothing, he adds,\nendless and everywhere,\nThe shadow that everything casts.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "december", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "stone-canyon-nocturne": { - "title": "“Stone Canyon Nocturne”", - "body": "Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back.\nNo one believes in his own life anymore.\n\nThe moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread\nAt the earth’s edge,\nUnfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs.\n\nIn the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings.\nThey sing songs, and their fingers blear.\n\nAnd here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot\nAnd belladonna insist on our comforting,\nWhere the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more,\n\nLike a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind,\nPart eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "franz-wright": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Franz Wright", - "birth": { - "year": 1953 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2015 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Wright", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 4 - }, - "poems": { - "alcohol": { - "title": "“Alcohol”", - "body": "You do look a little ill.\n\nBut we can do something about that, now.\n\nCan’t we.\n\nThe fact is you’re a shocking wreck.\n\nDo you hear me.\n\nYou aren’t all alone.\n\nAnd you could use some help today, packing in the\ndark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and\ngrinning with terror flowing over your legs through\nyour fingers and hair …\n\nI was always waiting, always here.\n\nKnow anyone else who can say that.\n\nMy advice to you is think of her for what she is:\none more name cut in the scar of your tongue.\n\nWhat was it you said, “To rather be harmed than\nharm, is not abject.”\n\nPlease.\n\nCan we be leaving now.\n\nWe like bus trips, remember. Together\n\nwe could watch these winter fields slip past, and\nnever care again,\n\nthink of it.\n\nI don’t have to be anywhere.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "boardinghouse-with-no-visible-address": { - "title": "“Boardinghouse with No Visible Address”", - "body": "So, I thought,\nas the door was unlocked\nand the landlord disappeared (no,\nhe actually disappeared)\nand I got to examine the room\nunobserved. There\nit stood\nin its gray corner:\nthe narrow bed, sheets\nthe color of old aspirin.\nMaybe all this had occurred\nsomewhere inside me\nalready, or\nwas just about to.\nIs there a choice?\nIs there\neven a difference? Familiar,\nfamiliar but not\nyet remembered …\nThe small narrow bed.\nI had often wondered\nwhere I would find it, and\nwhat it would look like.\nDon’t you?\nIt was so awful\nI couldn’t speak. Then\nmaybe you ought to lie down for a minute, I heard myself\nthinking. I mean\nif you are having that much trouble\nfunctioning. And when\nwas the last time\nwith genuine sorrow\nand longing to change\nyou got on your knees?\nI could get some work done\nhere, I shrugged;\nI had done it before.\nI would work without cease.\nOh, I would stay awake\nif only from horror\nat the thought of waking\nup here. _Ma,_\na voice spoke from the darkness\nin the back seat where\na long thin man lay,\narms crossed\non his chest,\nwhile they cruised slowly up and down\nstraining to make out the numbers\nover unlighted doors,\nthe midnight doctor’s;\nin his hurt mind\nhe was already merging\nwith a black Mississippi\nof mercy, the sweat pouring off him\nas though he’d been doused\nwith a bucket of ice water\nas he lay sleeping. “I saw the light,”\nthey kept screaming. “Do\nI saw the light!”\n_Ma--there ain’t no light\nI don’t see no light._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "dedication": { - "title": "“Dedication”", - "body": "It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.\nGladly lower myself down alone with you into the enormous mouth\nthat waits, beyond youth, beyond every instant of ecstasy, remember:\nbefore battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s hair out\nsaying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid--\nthe mouth waiting, patiently waiting. And I will meet you there again\nbeyond bleeding thorns, the endless dilation, the fire that alters nothing;\nI am there already past snowy clouds, balding moss, dim\nswarm of stars even we can step over, it is easier this time, I promise--\nI am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand,\nI will help you across. I would gladly die with you still,\nalthough I never write\nfrom this gray institution. See\nthey are so busy trying to cure me,\nI’m condemned--sorry, I have been given the job\nof vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours a day.\nAnd it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria;\na large one in any event. With its miniature plastic knives,\nits tuna salad and Saran-Wrapped genitalia will somebody please\nget me out of here, sorry. I am happy to say that\nevery method, massive pharmaceuticals, art therapy\nand edifying films as well as others I would prefer\nnot to mention--I mean, every single technique\nknown to the mouth--_sorry!_--to our most kindly\ncompassionate science is being employed\nto restore me to normal well-being\nand cheerful stability. I go on vacuuming\ntoward a small diamond light burning\noff in the distance. Remember\nme. Do you\nremember me?\nIn the night’s windowless darkness\nwhen I am lying cold and numb\nand no one’s fiddling with the lock, or\nshining flashlights in my eyes,\nalthough I never write, secretly\nI long to die with you,\ndoes that count?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to": { - "title": "“To”", - "body": "Before you were I loved you\nand when you were born\nand when you took your first step\nAlthough I did not know\ngood luck I want to say\n\nlone penguin keep sturdily waddling\nin the direction of those frozen mountains sister\nof desolate sanctity\nI want to scream\nAlthough I did not know you\n\nI loved you later on\nas just a weedy thing\na little skeleton I loved\nBoth long pre-you a child myself\nand as a man in retrospect\n\nI loved and I was there\nwhile they were raping you\nI loved although\nlike God\nthat’s all that I could do--", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "james-wright": { - "metadata": { - "name": "James Wright", - "birth": { - "year": 1927 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1980 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wright_(poet)", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 23 - }, - "poems": { - "the-alarm": { - "title": "“The Alarm”", - "body": "When I came back from my last dream, when I\nWhirled with the morning snowfall up the lawn,\nI looked behind me where my wings were gone\nRusting above the snow, for lack of care,\nA pile of rakes and shovels rotted away.\nTools of the world were crumbling into air,\nAnd I, neither the living nor the dead,\nPaused in the dusk of dawn to wonder why\nAny man clambers upward out of shade\nTo rake and shovel all his dust away.\n\nI found my body sprawled against the bed.\nOne hand flopped back as though to ward away\nShovels of light. The body wakes to burial;\nBut my face rebelled; the lids and lips were gray,\nAnd sridorelimbed that crabs, bor stultend.\nA foot reclined over the wrenching thigh,\nAnd suddenly, before I joined my face,\nThe eyelids opened, and it stared across\nThe window pane, into the hollow sky.\n\nNeither the living nor the dead I stood,\nLonging to leave my poor flesh huddled there\nHeaped up for burning under the last laments.\nI moved, to leap on spider webs and climb.\nBut where do spiders fling those filaments,\nThose pure formalities of blood and air,\nBoth perfect and alive? I did no good.\nThe hands of daylight hammered down my ghost,\nAnd I was home now, bowing into my dust,\nTo quicken into stupor one more time,\nOne of the living buried like the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "at-the-executed-murderers-grave": { - "title": "“At the Executed Murderer’s Grave”", - "body": "_“Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done?”_\n --Freud\n\n\n# 1.\n\nMy name is James A. Wright, and I was born\nTwenty-five miles from this infected grave,\nIn Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave\nTo Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.\nHe tried to teach me kindness. I return\nOnly in memory now, aloof, unhurried,\nTo dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,\nHad I not run away before my time.\nOhio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,\nHis skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best\nOf all the arts men learn in a dead place.\nI walked here once. I made my loud display,\nLeaning for language on a dead man’s voice.\nNow sick of lies, I turn to face the past.\nI add my easy grievance to the rest:\n\n\n# 2.\n\nDoty, if I confess I do not love you,\nWill you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.\nThe nights electrocute my fugitive,\nMy mind. I run like the bewildered mad\nAt St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,\nArch and cunning, under the maple trees,\nPleased to be playing guilty after dark.\nStaring to bed, they croon self-lullabies.\nDoty, you make me sick. I am not dead.\nI croon my tears at fifty cents per line.\n\n\n# 3.\n\nIdiot, he demanded love from girls,\nAnd murdered one. Also, he was a thief.\nHe left two women, and a ghost with child.\nThe hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head,\nMade such revolting Ohio animals\nFitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief.\nI waste no pity on the dead that stink,\nAnd no love’s lost between me and the crying\nDrunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police\nKick at their kidneys till they die of drink.\nChrist may restore them whole, for all of me.\nAlive and dead, those giggling muckers who\nSaddled my nightmares thirty years ago\nCan do without my widely printed sighing\nOver their pains with paid sincerity.\nI do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.\n\n\n# 4.\n\nI pity myself, because a man is dead.\nIf Belmont County killed him, what of me?\nHis victims never loved him. Why should we?\nAnd yet, nobody had to kill him either.\nIt does no good to woo the grass, to veil\nThe quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.\nNature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.\nI kick the clods away, and speak my name.\n\n\n# 5.\n\nThis grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,\nWhen all are caught with what they had to do\nIn fear of love, when every man stands still\nBy the last sea,\nAnd the princes of the sea come down\nTo lay away their robes, to judge the earth\nAnd its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,\nAnd my bodies--father and child and unskilled criminal--\nRidiculously kneel to bare my scars,\nMy sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.\n\n\n# 6.\n\nStaring politely, they will not mark my face\nFrom any murderer’s, buried in this place.\nWhy should they? We are nothing but a man.\n\n\n# 7.\n\nDoty, the rapist and the murderer,\nSleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;\nAnd where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace,\nMen’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I.\nAngels and pebbles mock me under trees.\nEarth is a door I cannot even face.\nOrder be damned, I do not want to die,\nEven to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.\nThe hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.\n(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)\nI hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,\nHeaving a tide of gray disastrousness.\nWrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face\nOf Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:\nDirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "aubade-at-the-zama-replacement-depot": { - "title": "“Aubade at the Zama Replacement Depot”", - "body": "At five o’clock I saw the sergeant slouch\nOut of the guardroom, fumble for the shack\nWhere trusties laid a new latrine, and crouch\nClose to the window, shuddering his back.\n\nThe weapons carrier slept on mushy tires.\nSomebody screamed awake, lashed in a whirl\nOf dreams, and nuzzled back to his desires:\nSipping his ideal whiskey with a girl;\n\nOut on a beach somewhere he ran, the palms\nDulling the light, the breakers muffing sound;\nOld women in kimonos rubbed his arms,\nA bareback lady carried him around.\n\nWhen the dawn stung me more alert, I saw\nAnother soldier heaving round his bed,\nTwisting, high up in clutches of the raw\nAnd empty ecstasy that shakes the dead\n\nAnd the alone. So everybody slept,\nEven the sergeant padding in the door.\nBut under the white streak of dawn I kept\nMy wakefulness. Barefoot across the floor\n\nI shivered to the window in the light,\nForcing my eyelids open with my hands,\nLeaping in terror from the blind delight\nOf soldiers dreaming. Up the rutted sands\n\nOutside, an old man flayed alive with cold\nPlucked in the fog for cigarettes. Yet I\nRemember him awake, though sick and old,\nWaving his arms beneath the falling sky,\n\nSick of the dawn but kicking it awake,\nOld on the earth but living on it now,\nSlapping his skinny shoulder for the sake\nOf life, the shadow in the fog somehow\n\nShaken into flesh. Quick in the light, I tore\nOver the bundled soldiers, broke the latch\nAnd, wrapping on a jacket at the door,\nRan to the man and offered him a match.\n\nFor all he knew, the soldiers in the gray\nBarracks were dead. And so I knew they were,\nAs I rose up, moulting the dark away,\nLaughing good-morning to the live man there.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "autumn-begins-in-martins-ferry-ohio": { - "title": "“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”", - "body": "In the Shreve High football stadium,\nI think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,\nAnd gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,\nAnd the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,\nDreaming of heroes.\n\nAll the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,\nTheir women cluck like starved pullets,\nDying for love.\n\nTherefore,\nTheir sons grow suicidally beautiful\nAt the beginning of October,\nAnd gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "directions-out-of-a-dream": { - "title": "“Directions out of a Dream”", - "body": "The bush of thorn be left. The apple trees\nBe blown till petals fall and glide so slow\nYou see bare sparrows shivering to the knees\n(The limbs of birds bend in the autumn.) Go\nAmong the gulleys and the withering hedge,\nThe plane-trees dying golden to their edge,\nAnd gather to your palm the coin you find.\nThen lift it to the polish of the wind.\n\nThere, though the glitter blind you, fear no light.\nAn hour may pass before you lean and hear\nShadows of feet beginning from the height\nAbove your shoulder. Let your open ear\nCherish out of the air whatever sound\nSearches the bushes and the frozen ground;\nWhen she cries downward from the granite cliff,\nLook for no comfort from that lonely wife.\n\nCover your eyes against the daylight. Wait.\nDo anything but look--whether you move\nYour fingers toward her, whistle to the late\nCrickets or toads, or speak aloud your love\nFor something earthly, something on the path\nGive her bone of a swallow or the moth\nOr the dark feather of tanager or crow,\nBut close your eyes. She knows the thing to do.\n\nShe has to dance three times around the leaves,\nLimping and humming, shaking off the dust\nOf rock and root, she needs the cleansing waves\nOf air above the earth, she lay so long\nDeeper than loud men ever delved in song,\nFarther in darkness than the wind believes\nWho probed so far to find another ghost:\nDeeper and colder than the floors of graves.\n\nOnce you behold her eyes, you will be gone\nAfter her, calling, singing nowhere else.\nShe hears the large veins in the heart of stone\nBeating your name, she knows your human face.\nAsk her for nothing when she rises then\nWiping the dust away and the year’s rain;\nStand up, perform, under the open sky,\nWhatever she demands, before you die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-farmer": { - "title": "“The Farmer”", - "body": "I know the time has come to make\nMy signal where he sowed before.\nAlert for change, I bend to break\nA stinging bit of parsley stalk.\nI wave it at the crows, and walk\nBack in the house and close the door.\n\nHanson is dead. His hands are lost,\nMore memorable than voice or face.\nHis arms are blown like pollen-dust\nWith brawn and loving kindnesses.\nI cannot mourn his buried trees.\nHe is not planted any place.\n\nThe hill will shoulder him with oak,\nThe oak will hand him down to shade,\nThe shade will face him into rock.\nBackward and forward he will go\nSo many days, I cannot know\nHow long it takes him to be dead.\n\nNevertheless, the time has come\nFor me to make my sign, to leave\nThe earth alone, and wander home.\nEarth has enough to mourn about.\nMan’s weeping it can do without,\nWhether by garden or by grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-flower-passage": { - "title": "“A Flower Passage”", - "body": "Even if you were above the ground this year,\nYou would not know my face.\nOne of the small boys, one of the briefly green,\nI prowled with the others along the Ohio,\nRaised hell in the B & O boxcars after dark,\nAnd sometimes in the evening\nChawed the knots out of my trousers\nOn the river bank, while the other\nChildren of blast furnace and mine\nFought and sang in the channel-current,\nDaring the Ohio.\n\nShepherd of the dead, one of the tall men,\nI did not know your face.\nOne summer dog-day after another,\nYou rose and gathered your gear\nAnd slogged down hill of the river ditch to dive\nInto the blind channel. You dragged your hooks\nAll over the rubble sludge and lifted\nThe twelve-year bones.\n\nNow you are dead and turned over\nTo the appropriate authorities, Christ\nHave mercy on me, I would come to the funeral home\nIf I were home\nIn Martins Ferry, Ohio.\nI would bring to your still face a dozen\nModest and gaudy carnations.\n\nBut I am not home in my place\nWhere I was born and my friends drowned.\nSo I dream of you, mourning.\nI walk down the B & O track\nNear the sewer main.\n\nAnd there I gather, and here I gather\nThe flowers I only know best.\nThe spring leaves of the sumac\nStink only a little less worse\nThan the sewer main, and up above that gouged hill\nWhere somebody half-crazy tossed a cigarette\nStraight down into a pile of sawdust\nIn the heart of the LaBelle Lumber Company,\nThere, on the blank mill field, it is the blind and tough\nFireweeds I gather and bring home.\nTo you, for my drowned friends, I offer\nThe true sumac, and the foul trillium\nWhose varicose bloom swells the soil with its bruise;\nAnd a little later, I bring\nThe still totally unbelievable spring beauty\nThat for some hidden reason nobody raped\nTo death in Ohio.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "july" - } - } - }, - "a-gesture-by-a-lady-with-an-assumed-name": { - "title": "“A Gesture by a Lady with an Assumed Name”", - "body": "Letters she left to clutter up the desk\nBurned in the general gutter when the maid\nCame in to do the room and take the risk\nOf slipping off the necklace round her head.\n\nLaundry she left to clutter up the floor\nHung to rachitic skeletons of girls\nWho worked the bars, or labored up the stair\nTo crown her blowsy ribbons on their curls.\n\nLovers she left to clutter up the town\nMourned in the chilly morgue and went away,\nAll but the husbands sneaking up and down\nThe stairs of that apartment house all day.\n\nWhat were they looking for? the cold pretense\nOf lamentation offered in a stew?\nA note? a gift? a shred of evidence\nTo love when there was nothing else to do?\n\nOr did they rise to weep for that unheard--\nOf love, whose misery cries, and does not care\nWhether or not the madam hears a word\nOr skinny children watch the trodden stair?\n\nWhether or not, how could she love so many,\nThen turn away to die as though for none?\nI saw the last offer a child a penny\nTo creep outside and see the cops were gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-response-to-the-rumor-that-the-oldest-whorehouse-in-wheeling-west-virginia-has-been-condemned": { - "title": "“In Response to the Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned”", - "body": "I will grieve alone,\nAs I strolled alone, years ago, down along\nThe Ohio shore.\nI hid in the hobo jungle weeds\nUpstream from the sewer main,\nPondering, gazing.\n\nI saw, down river,\nAt Twenty-third and Water Streets\nBy the vinegar works,\nThe doors open in early evening.\nSwinging their purses, the women\nPoured down the long street to the river\nAnd into the river.\n\nI do not know how it was\nThey could drown every evening.\nWhat time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,\nDrying their wings?\n\nFor the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,\nHas only two shores:\nThe one in hell, the other\nIn Bridgeport, Ohio.\n\nAnd nobody would commit suicide, only\nTo find beyond death\nBridgeport, Ohio.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "just-before-a-thunder-shower": { - "title": "“Just before a Thunder Shower”", - "body": "Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together\nBefore the north clouds.\nThe wind tiptoes between poplars, carrying its shoes.\nThe silver-maple leaves squint\nToward the ground.\nAn old farmer, his scarlet face\nApologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door\nAnd calls twenty black-and-white Holsteins\nFrom the clover field.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "a-lazy-poem-on-saturday-evening": { - "title": "“A Lazy Poem on Saturday Evening”", - "body": "Right now, I am going on a journey\nTo the kind voice.\nIn cold pools, below gray sands,\nI want to drink.\nA lazy girl laughs at me.\nThe moon lets itself fall into the dark pines.\nI think of that strange star\nAt the center of a pine twig.\nAnimals are very quiet\nAs they follow solitary people down paths.\nI lie back in the grass, shameless,\nAnd surrender to that voice.\nMy bare forearms are wet\nWith dew.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "weekday": "saturday", - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-life": { - "title": "“The Life”", - "body": "Murdered, I went, risen,\nWhere the murderers are,\nThat black ditch\nOf river.\n\nAnd if I come back to my only country\nWith a white rose on my shoulder,\nWhat is that to you?\nIt is the grave\nIn blossom.\n\nIt is the trillium of darkness,\nIt is hell, it is the beginning of winter,\nIt is a ghost town of Etruscans who have no names\nAny more.\n\nIt is the old loneliness.\nIt is.\nAnd it is\nThe last time.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lights-in-the-hallway": { - "title": "“The Lights in the Hallway”", - "body": "The lights in the hallway\nHave been out a long time.\nI clasp her,\nTerrified by the roundness of the earth\nAnd its apples and the voluptuous rings\nOf poplar trees, the secret Africas,\nThe children they give us.\nShe is slim enough.\nHer knee feels like the face\nOf a surprised lioness\nNursing the lost children\nOf a gazelle by pure accident.\nIn that body I long for,\nThe Gabon poets gaze for hours\nBetween boughs toward heaven, their noble faces\nToo secret to weep.\nHow do I know what color her hair is? I float among\nLonely animals, longing\nFor the red spider who is God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-little-girl-on-her-way-to-school": { - "title": "“A Little Girl on Her Way to School”", - "body": "When the dark dawn humped off to die\nThe air sang, clearly the county bells\nRang in the light from trees to wells\nAnd silkened every catbird cry.\n\nWebbed in a gown of yellow white,\nGauzed as a robin where the tree\nBlows down over the eyelids, she\nLimped on beyond me in the light.\n\nOne bell before I woke, the stones\nUnder the balls of her soft feet\nCried out to her, the leaves in the wet\nAll tumbled toward her name at once.\n\nAnd while my waking hung in poise\nBetween the air and the damp earth,\nI saw her startle to the breath\nOf birds beginning in her voice.\n\n_Be careful of holes,_ the catbird said,\nHis nest hanging below her hair,\nNudging the robins windward there,\nWhorling the air of glint and shade.\n\n_Fall in the hole,_ the pigeon swore,\nHis feathers beckoning her to ground.\nBurling the sparrows out of sound,\nWhorling the glints of shade and air.\n\n_Cling to the edge, cling to the edge,\nHere, step lightly, touch my beak._\nShe listened, but she would not speak,\nFollowing the white swan through the hedge.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "lying-in-a-hammock-at-william-duffys-farm-in-pine-island-minnesota": { - "title": "“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”", - "body": "Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,\nAsleep on the black trunk,\nBlowing like a leaf in green shadow.\nDown the ravine behind the empty house,\nThe cowbells follow one another\nInto the distances of the afternoon.\nTo my right,\nIn a field of sunlight between two pines,\nThe droppings of last year’s horses\nBlaze up into golden stones.\nI lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.\nA chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.\nI have wasted my life.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "may-morning": { - "title": "“May Morning”", - "body": "Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his hopelessness, he stays alive in every shady place, starving along the Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree below Grottaghlie welcomes the winter into noontime shade, and talks as softly as Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can hear him say, cradling in his arms the wounded head, letting the sunlight touch the savage face.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may", - "month_epoch": "early" - } - } - }, - "near-mansfield-ohio": { - "title": "“Near Mansfield, Ohio”", - "body": "The enormous muscle-bound dobbins of autumn\nAre gone now, to dark barns,\nWhere they can be lazy,\nWhere they can munch little apples, lazy,\nIn their sleep.\n\nAnd many highways are bare.\n\nYou, too, are abandoned\nBeside a street, now,\nNear Mansfield, Ohio.\nOnce in that town, that looks\nLike a sixty-year-old whore selling poppies\nOn Armistice Day, you died\nAlone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "veterans_day" - } - } - }, - "a-note-left-in-jimmy-leonards-shack": { - "title": "“A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack”", - "body": "Near the dry river’s water-mark we found\n Your brother Minnegan,\nFlopped like a fish against the muddy ground.\nBeany, the kid whose yellow hair turns green,\nTold me to find you, even in the rain,\n And tell you he was drowned.\n\nI hid behind the chassis on the bank,\n The wreck of someone’s Ford:\nI was afraid to come and wake you drunk:\nYou told me once the waking up was hard,\nThe daylight beating at you like a board.\n Blood in my stomach sank.\n\nBeside, you told him never to go out\n Along the river-side\nDrinking and singing, clattering about.\nYou might have thrown a rock at me and cried\nI was to blame, I let him fall in the road\n And pitch down on his side.\n\nWell, I’ll get hell enough when I get home\n For coming up this far,\nLeaving the note, and running as I came.\nI’ll go and tell my father where you are.\nYou’d better go find Minnegan before\n Policemen hear and come.\n\nBeany went home, and I got sick and ran,\n You old son of a bitch.\nYou better hurry down to Minnegan;\nHe’s drunk or dying now, I don’t know which,\nRolled in the roots and garbage like a fish,\n The poor old man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-age-compensation": { - "title": "“Old Age Compensation”", - "body": "There are no roads but the frost,\nAnd the pumpkins look haggard.\nThe ants have gone down to the grave, crying\nGod spare them one green blade.\nFailing the grass, they have abandoned the grass.\nAll creatures who have died today of old age\nHave gone more than ten miles already.\nAll day I have slogged behind\nAnd dreamed of them praying for one candle,\nOnly one.\nFair enough. Only, from where I stand,\nI can see one last night-nurse shining in one last window\nIn the Home for Senior Citizens.\nThe white uniform flickers, the town is gone.\nWhat do I do now? I have one candle,\nBut what’s the use?\nIf only they can catch up with twilight,\nThey’ll be safe enough.\nTheir boats are moored there, among the cat-tails\nAnd the night-herons nests.\nAll they have to do now\nIs to get one of those lazy birds awake long enough\nTo guide them across the river.\nHerons fly low, too.\nAll it will take is one old man trawling one oar.\nAnybody can follow a blue wing.\nThey don’t need my candle.\nBut I do.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "the-resurrected": { - "title": "“The Resurrected”", - "body": "Praying down the gulley,\nSlowed by the rainy mire,\nI will discern, across the void,\nTwo flies winding a fire,\nAnd a long thick leaf\nHanging on another,\nAnd a leg of root and a leg\nOf bough twining together.\n\nThat will be she forever:\nLightning bugs for eyes,\nThat see no farther in the dark\nThan my own blind eyes;\nA limp leaf for a cheek,\nCracking before it slips;\nTendril and twig for ankle bones,\nAnd nothing at all for lips\n\nBut the unbodied mark\nMy mouth makes on the dark.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "sheep-in-the-rain": { - "title": "“Sheep in the Rain”", - "body": "In Burgundy, beyond Auxerre\nAnd all the way down the river to Avallon,\nThe grass lies thick with sheep\nShorn only a couple of days ago.\nThey shine all over their plump bodies\nIn the June mist.\n\nSheep eat everything\nAll the way down to the roots.\nAnd maybe that is why\nThese explorers of the rain\nSeem so relaxed in their browsing.\nSomeone has freed them only a little while\nInto the fields, and they have a good life of it\nWhile it lasts.\n\nBurgundian farmers will return\nSome morning soon,\nAnd flock the fat sheep down a wall\nInto glittering rocks.\nThen a boy will go alone back into the grass\nAnd care for the grass.\nThe farmers are kind to the grass.\nThey have to.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "to-the-muse": { - "title": "“To the Muse”", - "body": "It is all right. All they do\nIs go in by dividing\nOne rib from another. I wouldn’t\nLie to you. It hurts\nLike nothing I know. All they do\nIs burn their way in with a wire.\nIt forks in and out a little like the tongue\nOf that frightened garter snake we caught\nAt Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny\nSo long ago.\n\nI would lie to you\nIf I could.\nBut the only way I can get you to come up\nOut of the suckhole, the south face\nOf the Powhatan pit, is to tell you\nWhat you know:\n\nYou come up after dark, you poise alone\nWith me on the shore.\nI lead you back to this world.\n\nThree lady doctors in Wheeling open\nTheir offices at night.\nI don’t have to call them, they are always there.\nBut they only have to put the knife once\nUnder your breast.\nThen they hang their contraption.\nAnd you bear it.\n\nIt’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you\nWalk about on tiptoe if you don’t\nJiggle the needle.\nIt might stab your heart, you see.\nThe blade hangs in your lung and the tube\nKeeps it draining.\nThat way they only have to stab you\nOnce. Oh Jenny.\n\nI wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy\nAnd disastrous place. I\nDidn’t, I can’t bear it\nEither, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there\nFace down in the unbelievable silk of spring,\nMuse of black sand,\nAlone.\n\nI don’t blame you, I know\nThe place where you lie.\nI admit everything. But look at me.\nHow can I live without you?\nCome up to me, love,\nOut of the river, or I will\nCome down to you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "youth": { - "title": "“Youth”", - "body": "Strange bird,\nHis song remains secret.\nHe worked too hard to read books.\nHe never heard how Sherwood Anderson\nGot out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself\nFrom his hatred of factories.\nMy father toiled fifty years\nAt Hazel-Atlas Glass,\nCaught among girders that smash the kneecaps\nOf dumb honyaks.\nDid he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?\nMaybe. But my brother and I do know\nHe came home as quiet as the evening.\n\nHe will be getting dark, soon,\nAnd loom through new snow.\nI know his ghost will drift home\nTo the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,\nWhittling a root.\nHe will say nothing.\nThe waters flow past, older, younger\nThan he is, or I am.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "wu-li": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Wu Li", - "birth": { - "year": 1632, - "circa": true - }, - "death": { - "year": 1718 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "chinese", - "language": "chinese", - "flag": "🇨🇳", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Li", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "chinese" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "boat-trip-on-the-river-underneath-a-buddist-temple": { - "title": "“Boat Trip on the River Underneath a Buddist Temple”", - "body": "Before the firmament was ever formed\n or any foundation laid,\nhigh there hovered the Judge of the World,\n prepared for the last days!\n\nThis single man from His five wounds\n poured every drop of blood;\nA myriad nations gave their hearts\n to the wonder of the Cross!\n\nThe heavenly gates now have a ladder\n leading to their peace:\ndemonic spirits lack any art\n to insinuate deception.\n\nTake up the burden, joyfully\n fall in behind Jesus,\nlook up with reverence towards the top of that mountain\n follow His every step.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese" - } - }, - "pine-wind-from-myriad-villages": { - "title": "“Pine Wind from Myriad Villages”", - "body": "Within the twelvefold walled enclosure,\n at the highest spot\nis the palace of the Lord\n with springs and autumns of its own.\n\nThe misty fragrance is breath of flowers\n where roses bloom;\nthe glittering brilliance is glow of pearls\n where gemmed crowns reverently bow.\n\nThere in Heaven should we seek\n true blessings and true joy;\nin the human realm we must cut off\n false strivings and false plans.\n\nLook there where girls, so many of them,\n their hair in tufts,\nday after day follow behind\n the Holy Mother in their play.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese" - } - }, - "singing-of-the-source-and-course-of-holy-church": { - "title": "“Singing of the Source and Course of Holy Church”", - "body": "“The Supreme Ultimate contains three--”\nmuddled words indeed!\n\nIn fact, they start with primal energy\nto speak of original chaos.\n\nFrom books of the past, we learned of old\nof sincerity, wisdom and goodness;\n\nthe Mysterious meaning now we understand\nof Father, Son and Holy Spirit.\n\nThe Persons distinct: close at hand, consider\nthe flame within the mirror;\n\nthe Essence is whole: far off, please note\nthe wheel that graces the sky.\n\nThe Holy Name has been revealed,\nHis authority conferred;\n\nthroughout the world in this human realm\nthe sound of the teaching supreme!", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "context": { - "holiday": "trinity_sunday" - } - } - }, - "song-of-the-fisherman": { - "title": "“Song of the Fisherman”", - "body": "From patching rips in tattered nets\n his eyes have gotten blurred;\nhe scours the river, does not disdain\n the tiniest fish and shrimp.\n\nSelecting the freshest, he has supplied\n the feasts of sovereigns;\nAll four limbs exhausted now,\n dare he refuse the work?\n\nSpreading nets he gets confused\n by water just like the sky;\nsong lingering, still drunk, approaches\n dragons as they sleep.\n\nNow hair and whiskers are all white,\n his face has aged with time;\nhe’s startled by the wind and waves\n and fears an early autumn.\n\nSome friends of his have changed their jobs:\n they are now fishers of men;\nhe hears compared to fishing fish,\n this task is tougher still.\n\nOf late he finds the Heavenly Learning\n has come into the city.\nTo customers now happily add families that fast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "spring-comes-to-the-lake": { - "title": "“Spring Comes to the Lake”", - "body": "By nature I have always felt quite close to the Way;\nWhen done with chanting my new poems, I always concentrate my spirit.\nPrior to death, who believes in the joy of the land of Heaven?\nAfter the end, then comes amazement at the truth of the fires of hell!\n\nThe achievements and fame of this ephemeral world; footprints of geese on snow;\nThis body, this shell of a lifetime of toil: dust beneath horses’ hoofs.\nAnd what is more, the flowing of time presses man so fast:\nLet us plan carefully about the ford that leads to the true source.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "the-gate-of-eternal-blessings": { - "title": "“The gate of eternal blessings …”", - "body": "The gate of eternal blessings\n this day has opened for you;\nthe light of grace and felicitation\n have come to you from Heaven.\n\nExtirpated are your former taints,\n repulsed the Devil’s troops;\nnow you will enjoy the real bread;\n formed in the Holy Womb.\n\nHow dignified! Your name has entered\n the register of the righteous.\nHow glorious! Your heart\n becomes an altar for the Lord.\n\nI know you will prove worthy\n to console the people’s yearning;\nthe great hall now is in need of pillars\n raised on rock.", - "metadata": { - "language": "chinese" - } - } - } - }, - "thomas-wyatt": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Thomas Wyatt", - "birth": { - "year": 1503 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1542 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "english", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_(poet)", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "english" - ], - "n_poems": 5 - }, - "poems": { - "and-wilt-thou-leave-me-thus": { - "title": "“And Wilt Thou Leave Me Thus?”", - "body": "And wilt thou leave me thus?\nSay nay, say nay, for shame,\nTo save thee from the blame\nOf all my grief and grame;\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus?\nSay nay, say nay!\n\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus,\nThat hath loved thee so long\nIn wealth and woe among?\nAnd is thy heart so strong\nAs for to leave me thus?\nSay nay, say nay!\n\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus,\nThat hath given thee my heart\nNever for to depart,\nNother for pain nor smart;\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus?\nSay nay, say nay!\n\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus\nAnd have no more pity\nOf him that loveth thee?\nHélas, thy cruelty!\nAnd wilt thou leave me thus?\nSay nay, say nay!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1537, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "forget-not-yet": { - "title": "“Forget Not Yet”", - "body": "Forget not yet the tried intent\nOf such a truth as I have meant;\nMy great travail so gladly spent,\n Forget not yet.\n\nForget not yet when first began\nThe weary life ye know, since whan\nThe suit, the service, none tell can;\n Forget not yet.\n\nForget not yet the great assays,\nThe cruel wrong, the scornful ways;\nThe painful patience in denays,\n Forget not yet.\n\nForget not yet, forget not this,\nHow long ago hath been and is\nThe mind that never meant amiss;\n Forget not yet.\n\nForget not then thine own approved,\nThe which so long hath thee so loved,\nWhose steadfast faith yet never moved;\n Forget not this.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1537, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "i-find-no-peace": { - "title": "“I Find No Peace”", - "body": "I find no peace, and all my war is done.\nI fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.\nI fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;\nAnd nought I have, and all the world I seize on.\nThat loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison\nAnd holdeth me not--yet can I scape no wise--\nNor letteth me live nor die at my device,\nAnd yet of death it giveth me occasion.\nWithout eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.\nI desire to perish, and yet I ask health.\nI love another, and thus I hate myself.\nI feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;\nLikewise displeaseth me both life and death,\nAnd my delight is causer of this strife.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1537, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "the-long-love": { - "title": "“The Long Love”", - "body": "The longë love that in my thought doth harbour\nAnd in mine hert doth keep his residence,\nInto my face presseth with bold pretence\nAnd therein campeth, spreading his banner.\nShe that me learneth to love and suffer\nAnd will that my trust and lustës negligence\nBe rayned by reason, shame, and reverence,\nWith his hardiness taketh displeasure.\nWherewithall unto the hert’s forest he fleeth,\nLeaving his enterprise with pain and cry,\nAnd there him hideth and not appeareth.\nWhat may I do when my master feareth\nBut in the field with him to live and die?\nFor good is the life ending faithfully.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1537, - "circa": true - } - } - }, - "they-flee-from-me": { - "title": "“They Flee from Me”", - "body": "They flee from me that sometime did me seek\nWith naked foot, stalking in my chamber.\nI have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,\nThat now are wild and do not remember\nThat sometime they put themself in danger\nTo take bread at my hand; and now they range,\nBusily seeking with a continual change.\n\nThanked be fortune it hath been otherwise\nTwenty times better; but once in special,\nIn thin array after a pleasant guise,\nWhen her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,\nAnd she me caught in her arms long and small;\nTherewithall sweetly did me kiss\nAnd softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’\n\nIt was no dream: I lay broad waking.\nBut all is turned thorough my gentleness\nInto a strange fashion of forsaking;\nAnd I have leave to go of her goodness,\nAnd she also, to use newfangleness.\nBut since that I so kindly am served\nI would fain know what she hath deserved.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1537, - "circa": true - } - } - } - } - }, - "w-b-yeats": { - "metadata": { - "name": "W. B. Yeats", - "birth": { - "year": 1865 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "irish", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇮🇪", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats", - "favorite": true, - "tags": [ - "irish" - ], - "n_poems": 216 - }, - "poems": { - "adams-curse": { - "title": "“Adam’s Curse”", - "body": "We sat together at one summer’s end,\nThat beautiful mild woman, your close friend,\nAnd you and I, and talked of poetry.\nI said, “A line will take us hours maybe;\nYet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,\nOur stitching and unstitching has been naught.\nBetter go down upon your marrow-bones\nAnd scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones\nLike an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;\nFor to articulate sweet sounds together\nIs to work harder than all these, and yet\nBe thought an idler by the noisy set\nOf bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen\nThe martyrs call the world.”\n\n And thereupon\nThat beautiful mild woman for whose sake\nThere’s many a one shall find out all heartache\nOn finding that her voice is sweet and low\nReplied, “To be born woman is to know--\nAlthough they do not talk of it at school--\nThat we must labour to be beautiful.”\nI said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing\nSince Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.\nThere have been lovers who thought love should be\nSo much compounded of high courtesy\nThat they would sigh and quote with learned looks\nPrecedents out of beautiful old books;\nYet now it seems an idle trade enough.”\n\nWe sat grown quiet at the name of love;\nWe saw the last embers of daylight die,\nAnd in the trembling blue-green of the sky\nA moon, worn as if it had been a shell\nWashed by time’s waters as they rose and fell\nAbout the stars and broke in days and years.\n\nI had a thought for no one’s but your ears:\nThat you were beautiful, and that I strove\nTo love you in the old high way of love;\nThat it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown\nAs weary-hearted as that hollow moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "against-unworthy-praise": { - "title": "“Against Unworthy Praise”", - "body": "O heart, be at peace, because\nNor knave nor dolt can break\nWhat’s not for their applause,\nBeing for a woman’s sake.\nEnough if the work has seemed,\nSo did she your strength renew,\nA dream that a lion had dreamed\nTill the wilderness cried aloud,\nA secret between you two,\nBetween the proud and the proud.\n\nWhat, still you would have their praise!\nBut here’s a haughtier text,\nThe labyrinth of her days\nThat her own strangeness perplexed;\nAnd how what her dreaming gave\nEarned slander, ingratitude,\nFrom self-same dolt and knave;\nAye, and worse wrong than these.\nYet she, singing upon her road,\nHalf lion, half child, is at peace.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "all-souls-night": { - "title": "“All Souls’ Night”", - "body": "Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell\nAnd may a lesser bell sound through the room;\nAnd it is All Souls’ Night,\nAnd two long glasses brimmed with muscatel\nBubble upon the table. A ghost may come;\nFor it is a ghost’s right,\nHis element is so fine\nBeing sharpened by his death,\nTo drink from the wine-breath\nWhile our gross palates drink from the whole wine.\n\nI need some mind that, if the cannon sound\nFrom every quarter of the world, can stay\nWound in mind’s pondering\nAs mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;\nBecause I have a marvellous thing to say,\nA certain marvellous thing\nNone but the living mock,\nThough not for sober ear;\nIt may be all that hear\nShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.\n\nHorton’s the first I call. He loved strange thought\nAnd knew that sweet extremity of pride\nThat’s called platonic love,\nAnd that to such a pitch of passion wrought\nNothing could bring him, when his lady died,\nAnodyne for his love.\nWords were but wasted breath;\nOne dear hope had he:\nThe inclemency\nOf that or the next winter would be death.\n\nTwo thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell\nWhether of her or God he thought the most,\nBut think that his mind’s eye,\nWhen upward turned, on one sole image fell;\nAnd that a slight companionable ghost,\nWild with divinity,\nHad so lit up the whole\nImmense miraculous house\nThe Bible promised us,\nIt seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.\n\nOn Florence Emery I call the next,\nWho finding the first wrinkles on a face\nAdmired and beautiful,\nAnd knowing that the future would be vexed\nWith ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,\npreferred to teach a school\nAway from neighbour or friend,\nAmong dark skins, and there\npermit foul years to wear\nHidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.\n\nBefore that end much had she ravelled out\nFrom a discourse in figurative speech\nBy some learned Indian\nOn the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,\nWherever the orbit of the moon can reach,\nUntil it plunge into the sun;\nAnd there, free and yet fast,\nBeing both Chance and Choice,\nForget its broken toys\nAnd sink into its own delight at last.\n\nAnd I call up MacGregor from the grave,\nFor in my first hard springtime we were friends.\nAlthough of late estranged.\nI thought him half a lunatic, half knave,\nAnd told him so, but friendship never ends;\nAnd what if mind seem changed,\nAnd it seem changed with the mind,\nWhen thoughts rise up unbid\nOn generous things that he did\nAnd I grow half contented to be blind!\n\nHe had much industry at setting out,\nMuch boisterous courage, before loneliness\nHad driven him crazed;\nFor meditations upon unknown thought\nMake human intercourse grow less and less;\nThey are neither paid nor praised.\nbut he d object to the host,\nThe glass because my glass;\nA ghost-lover he was\nAnd may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.\n\nBut names are nothing. What matter who it be,\nSo that his elements have grown so fine\nThe fume of muscatel\nCan give his sharpened palate ecstasy\nNo living man can drink from the whole wine.\nI have mummy truths to tell\nWhereat the living mock,\nThough not for sober ear,\nFor maybe all that hear\nShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.\n\nSuch thought--such thought have I that hold it tight\nTill meditation master all its parts,\nNothing can stay my glance\nUntil that glance run in the world’s despite\nTo where the damned have howled away their hearts,\nAnd where the blessed dance;\nSuch thought, that in it bound\nI need no other thing,\nWound in mind’s wandering\nAs mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "all_souls" - } - } - }, - "all-things-can-tempt-me": { - "title": "“All Things Can Tempt Me”", - "body": "All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:\nOne time it was a woman’s face, or worse--\nThe seeming needs of my fool-driven land;\nNow nothing but comes readier to the hand\nThan this accustomed toil. When I was young,\nI had not given a penny for a song\nDid not the poet Sing it with such airs\nThat one believed he had a sword upstairs;\nYet would be now, could I but have my wish,\nColder and dumber and deafer than a fish.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "among-school-children": { - "title": "“Among School Children”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI walk through the long schoolroom questioning;\nA kind old nun in a white hood replies;\nThe children learn to cipher and to sing,\nTo study reading-books and histories,\nTo cut and sew, be neat in everything\nIn the best modern way--the children’s eyes\nIn momentary wonder stare upon\nA sixty-year-old smiling public man.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI dream of a Ledaean body, bent\nAbove a sinking fire. a tale that she\nTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial event\nThat changed some childish day to tragedy--\nTold, and it seemed that our two natures blent\nInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,\nOr else, to alter Plato’s parable,\nInto the yolk and white of the one shell.\n\n\n# III.\n\nAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rage\nI look upon one child or t’other there\nAnd wonder if she stood so at that age--\nFor even daughters of the swan can share\nSomething of every paddler’s heritage--\nAnd had that colour upon cheek or hair,\nAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:\nShe stands before me as a living child.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nHer present image floats into the mind--\nDid Quattrocento finger fashion it\nHollow of cheek as though it drank the wind\nAnd took a mess of shadows for its meat?\nAnd I though never of Ledaean kind\nHad pretty plumage once--enough of that,\nBetter to smile on all that smile, and show\nThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.\n\n\n# V.\n\nWhat youthful mother, a shape upon her lap\nHoney of generation had betrayed,\nAnd that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape\nAs recollection or the drug decide,\nWould think her Son, did she but see that shape\nWith sixty or more winters on its head,\nA compensation for the pang of his birth,\nOr the uncertainty of his setting forth?\n\n\n# VI.\n\nPlato thought nature but a spume that plays\nUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;\nSolider Aristotle played the taws\nUpon the bottom of a king of kings;\nWorld-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras\nFingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings\nWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:\nOld clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nBoth nuns and mothers worship images,\nBut thos the candles light are not as those\nThat animate a mother’s reveries,\nBut keep a marble or a bronze repose.\nAnd yet they too break hearts--O presences\nThat passion, piety or affection knows,\nAnd that all heavenly glory symbolise--\nO self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nLabour is blossoming or dancing where\nThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.\nNor beauty born out of its own despair,\nNor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.\nO chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,\nAre you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?\nO body swayed to music, O brightening glance,\nHow can we know the dancer from the dance?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "another-song-of-a-fool": { - "title": "“Another Song of a Fool”", - "body": "This great purple butterfly,\nIn the prison of my hands,\nHas a learning in his eye\nNot a poor fool understands.\n\nOnce he lived a schoolmaster\nWith a stark, denying look;\nA string of scholars went in fear\nOf his great birch and his great book.\n\nLike the clangour of a bell,\nSweet and harsh, harsh and sweet.\nThat is how he learnt so well\nTo take the roses for his meat.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-apparitions": { - "title": "“The Apparitions”", - "body": "Because there is safety in derision\nI talked about an apparition,\nI took no trouble to convince,\nOr seem plausible to a man of sense.\nDistrustful of thar popular eye\nWhether it be bold or sly.\nFifteen apparitions have I seen;\nThe worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.\n\nI have found nothing half so good\nAs my long-planned half solitude,\nWhere I can sit up half the night\nWith some friend that has the wit\nNot to allow his looks to tell\nWhen I am unintelligible.\nFifteen apparitions have I seen;\nThe worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.\n\nWhen a man grows old his joy\nGrows more deep day after day,\nHis empty heart is full at length,\nBut he has need of all that strength\nBecause of the increasing Night\nThat opens her mystery and fright.\nFifteen apparitions have I seen;\nThe worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "at-algeciras": { - "title": "“At Algeciras”", - "body": "The heron-billed pale cattle-birds\nThat feed on some foul parasite\nOf the Moroccan flocks and herds\nCross the narrow Straits to light\nIn the rich midnight of the garden trees\nTill the dawn break upon those mingled seas.\n\nOften at evening when a boy\nWould I carry to a friend--\nHoping more substantial joy\nDid an older mind commend--\nNot such as are in Newton’s metaphor,\nBut actual shells of Rosses’ level shore.\n\nGreater glory in the Sun,\nAn evening chill upon the air,\nBid imagination run\nMuch on the Great Questioner;\nWhat He can question, what if questioned I\nCan with a fitting confidence reply.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "baile-and-aillinn": { - "title": "“Baile and Aillinn”", - "body": "> _Argument:_\nBaile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to he happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other’s death, so that their hearts were broken and they died.\n\nI hardly hear the curlew cry,\nNor thegrey rush when the wind is high,\nBefore my thoughts begin to run\nOn the heir of Uladh, Buan’s son,\nBaile, who had the honey mouth;\nAnd that mild woman of the south,\nAillinn, who was King Lugaidh’s heir.\nTheir love was never drowned in care\nOf this or that thing, nor grew cold\nBecause their hodies had grown old.\nBeing forbid to marry on earth,\nThey blossomed to immortal mirth.\n\nAbout the time when Christ was born,\nWhen the long wars for the White Horn\nAnd the Brown Bull had not yet come,\nYoung Baile Honey Mouth, whom some\nCalled rather Baile Little-Land,\nRode out of Emain with a band\nOf harpers and young men; and they\nImagined, as they struck the way\nTo many-pastured Muirthemne,\nThat all things fell out happily,\nAnd there, for all that fools had said,\nBaile and Aillinn would be wed.\n\nThey found an old man running there:\nHe had ragged long grass-coloured hair;\nHe had knees that stuck out of his hose;\nHe had puddle-water in his shoes;\nHe had half a cloak to keep him dry,\nAlthough he had a squirrel’s eye.\n\nO wandering hirds and rushy beds,\nYou put such folly in our heads\nWith all this crying in the wind,\nNo common love is to our mind,\nAnd our poor kate or Nan is less\nThan any whose unhappiness\nAwoke the harp-strings long ago.\nYet they that know all things hut know\nThat all this life can give us is\nA child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss.\nWho was it put so great a scorn\nIn thegrey reeds that night and morn\nAre trodden and broken hy the herds,\nAnd in the light bodies of birds\nThe north wind tumbles to and fro\nAnd pinches among hail and snow?\n\nThat runner said: “I am from the south;\nI run to Baile Honey-Mouth,\nTo tell him how the girl Aillinn\nRode from the country of her kin,\nAnd old and young men rode with her:\nFor all that country had been astir\nIf anybody half as fair\nHad chosen a husband anywhere\nBut where it could see her every day.\nWhen they had ridden a little way\nAn old man caught the horse’s head\nWith: ‘You must home again, and wed\nWith somebody in your own land.’\nA young man cried and kissed her hand,\n‘O lady, wed with one of us”;\nAnd when no face grew piteous\nFor any gentle thing she spake,\nShe fell and died of the heart-break.’\nBecause a lover’s heart s worn out,\nBeing tumbled and blown about\nBy its own blind imagining,\nAnd will believe that anything\nThat is bad enough to be true, is true,\nBaile’s heart was broken in two;\nAnd he, being laid upon green boughs,\nWas carried to the goodly house\nWhere the Hound of Uladh sat before\nThe brazen pillars of his door,\nHis face bowed low to weep the end\nOf the harper’s daughter and her friend\nFor athough years had passed away\nHe always wept them on that day,\nFor on that day they had been betrayed;\nAnd now that Honey-Mouth is laid\nUnder a cairn of sleepy stone\nBefore his eyes, he has tears for none,\nAlthough he is carrying stone, but two\nFor whom the cairn’s but heaped anew.\n\nWe hold, because our memory is\nSofull of that thing and of this,\nThat out of sight is out of mind.\nBut the grey rush under the wind\nAnd the grey bird with crooked bill\nrave such long memories that they still\nRemember Deirdre and her man;\nAnd when we walk with Kate or Nan\nAbout the windy water-side,\nOur hearts can Fear the voices chide.\nHow could we be so soon content,\nWho know the way that Naoise went?\nAnd they have news of Deirdre’s eyes,\nWho being lovely was so wise--\nAh! wise, my heart knows well how wise.\n\nNow had that old gaunt crafty one,\nGathering his cloak about him, mn\nWhere Aillinn rode with waiting-maids,\nWho amid leafy lights and shades\nDreamed of the hands that would unlace\nTheir bodices in some dim place\nWhen they had come to the matriage-bed,\nAnd harpers, pacing with high head\nAs though their music were enough\nTo make the savage heart of love\nGrow gentle without sorrowing,\nImagining and pondering\nHeaven knows what calamity;\n\n“Another’s hurried off,” cried he,\n“From heat and cold and wind and wave;\nThey have heaped the stones above his grave\nIn Muirthemne, and over it\nIn changeless Ogham letters writ--\nBaile, that was of Rury’s seed.\nBut the gods long ago decreed\nNo waiting-maid should ever spread\nBaile and Aillinn’s marriage-bed,\nFor they should clip and clip again\nWhere wild bees hive on the Great Plain.\nTherefore it is but little news\nThat put this hurry in my shoes.”\n\nThen seeing that he scarce had spoke\nBefore her love-worn heart had broke.\nHe ran and laughed until he came\nTo that high hill the herdsmen name\nThe Hill Seat of Laighen, because\nSome god or king had made the laws\nThat held the land together there,\nIn old times among the clouds of the air.\n\nThat old man climbed; the day grew dim;\nTwo swans came flying up to him,\nLinked by a gold chain each to each,\nAnd with low murmuring laughing speech\nAlighted on the windy grass.\nThey knew him: his changed body was\nTall, proud and ruddy, and light wings\nWere hovering over the harp-strings\nThat Edain, Midhir’s wife, had wove\nIn the hid place, being crazed by love.\n\nWhat shall I call them? fish that swim,\nScale rubbing scale where light is dim\nBy a broad water-lily leaf;\nOr mice in the one wheaten sheaf\nForgotten at the threshing-place;\nOr birds lost in the one clear space\nOf morning light in a dim sky;\nOr, it may be, the eyelids of one eye,\nOr the door-pillars of one house,\nOr two sweet blossoming apple-boughs\nThat have one shadow on the ground;\nOr the two strings that made one sound\nWhere that wise harper’s finger ran.\nFor this young girl and this young man\nHave happiness without an end,\nBecause they have made so good a friend.\n\nThey know all wonders, for they pass\nThe towery gates of Gorias,\nAnd Findrias and Falias,\nAnd long-forgotten Murias,\nAmong the giant kings whose hoard,\nCauldron and spear and stone and sword,\nWas robbed before earth gave the wheat;\nWandering from broken street to street\nThey come where some huge watcher is,\nAnd tremble with their love and kiss.\n\nThey know undying things, for they\nWander where earth withers away,\nThough nothing troubles the great streams\nBut light from the pale stars, and gleams\nFrom the holy orchards, where there is none\nBut fruit that is of precious stone,\nOr apples of the sun and moon.\n\nWhat were our praise to them? They eat\nQuiet’s wild heart, like daily meat;\nWho when night thickens are afloat\nOn dappled skins in a glass boat,\nFar out under a windless sky;\nWhile over them birds of Aengus fly,\nAnd over the tiller and the prow,\nAnd waving white wings to and fro\nAwaken wanderings of light air\nTo stir their coverlet and their hair.\n\nAnd poets found, old writers say,\nA yew tree where his body lay;\nBut a wild apple hid the grass\nWith its sweet blossom where hers was,\nAnd being in good heart, because\nA better time had come again\nAfter the deaths of many men,\nAnd that long fighting at the ford,\nThey wrote on tablets of thin board,\nMade of the apple and the yew,\nAll the love stories that they knew.\n\nLet rush and hird cry out their fill\nOf the harper’s daughter if they will,\nBeloved, I am not afraid of her.\nShe is not wiser nor lovelier,\nAnd you are more high of heart than she,\nFor all her wanderings over-sea;\nBut I’d have bird and rush forget\nThose other two; for never yet\nHas lover lived, but longed to wive\nLike them that are no more alive.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-father-gilligan": { - "title": "“The Ballad of Father Gilligan”", - "body": "The old priest Peter Gilligan\nWas weary night and day;\nFor half his flock were in their beds,\nOr under green sods lay.\n\nOnce, while he nodded on a chair,\nAt the moth-hour of eve,\nAnother poor man sent for him,\nAnd he began to grieve.\n\n“I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,\nFor people die and die”;\nAnd after cried he, “God forgive!\nMy body spake, not I!”\n\nHe knelt, and leaning on the chair\nHe prayed and fell asleep;\nAnd the moth-hour went from the fields,\nAnd stars began to peep.\n\nThey slowly into millions grew,\nAnd leaves shook in the wind;\nAnd God covered the world with shade,\nAnd whispered to mankind.\n\nUpon the time of sparrow-chirp\nWhen the moths came once more.\nThe old priest Peter Gilligan\nStood upright on the floor.\n\n“Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died\nWhile I slept on the chair”;\nHe roused his horse out of its sleep,\nAnd rode with little care.\n\nHe rode now as he never rode,\nBy rocky lane and fen;\nThe sick man’s wife opened the door:\n“Father! you come again!”\n\n“And is the poor man dead?” he cried.\n“He died an hour ago.”\nThe old priest Peter Gilligan\nIn grief swayed to and fro.\n\n“When you were gone, he turned and died\nAs merry as a bird.”\nThe old priest Peter Gilligan\nHe knelt him at that word.\n\n“He Who hath made the night of stars\nFor souls who tire and bleed,\nSent one of His great angels down\nTo help me in my need.”\n\n“He Who is wrapped in purple robes,\nWith planets in His care,\nHad pity on the least of things\nAsleep upon a chair.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-father-ohart": { - "title": "“The Ballad of Father O’Hart”", - "body": "Good Father John O’Hart\nIn penal days rode out\nTo a shoneen who had free lands\nAnd his own snipe and trout.\n\nIn trust took he John’s lands;\nSleiveens were all his race;\nAnd he gave them as dowers to his daughters\nAnd they married beyond their place.\n\nBut Father John went up\nAnd Father John went down;\nAnd he wore small holes in his shoes\nAnd he wore large holes in his gown.\n\nAll loved him only the shoneen\nWhom the devils have by the hair\nFrom the wives and the cats and the children\nTo the birds in the white of the air.\n\nThe birds for he opened their cages\nAs he went up and down;\nAnd he said with a smile “Have peace now”;\nAnd he went his way with a frown.\n\nBut if when any one died\nCame keeners hoarser than rooks\nHe bade them give over their keening;\nFor he was a man of books.\n\nAnd these were the works of John\nWhen weeping score by score\nPeople came into Coloony;\nFor he’d died at ninety-four.\n\nThere was no human keening;\nThe birds from Knocknarea\nAnd the world round Knocknashee\nCame keening in that day.\n\nThe young birds and old birds\nCame flying heavy and sad;\nKeening in from Tiraragh\nKeening from Ballinafad;\n\nKeening from Inishmurray\nNor stayed for bite or sup;\nThis way were all reproved\nWho dig old customs up.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-moll-magee": { - "title": "“The Ballad of Moll Magee”", - "body": "Come round me, little childer;\nThere, don’t fling stones at me\nBecause I mutter as I go;\nBut pity Moll Magee.\n\nMy man was a poor fisher\nWith shore lines in the say;\nMy work was saltin’ herrings\nThe whole of the long day.\n\nAnd sometimes from the Saltin’ shed\nI scarce could drag my feet,\nUnder the blessed moonlight,\nAlong thc pebbly street.\n\nI’d always been but weakly,\nAnd my baby was just born;\nA neighbour minded her by day,\nI minded her till morn.\n\nI lay upon my baby;\nYe little childer dear,\nI looked on my cold baby\nWhen the morn grew frosty and clear.\n\nA weary woman sleeps so hard!\nMy man grew red and pale,\nAnd gave me money, and bade me go\nTo my own place, Kinsale.\n\nHe drove me out and shut the door.\nAnd gave his curse to me;\nI went away in silence,\nNo neighbour could I see.\n\nThe windows and the doors were shut,\nOne star shone faint and green,\nThe little straws were turnin round\nAcross the bare boreen.\n\nI went away in silence:\nBeyond old Martin’s byre\nI saw a kindly neighbour\nBlowin’ her mornin’ fire.\n\nShe drew from me my story--\nMy money’s all used up,\nAnd still, with pityin’, scornin’ eye,\nShe gives me bite and sup.\n\nShe says my man will surely come\nAnd fetch me home agin;\nBut always, as I’m movin’ round,\nWithout doors or within,\n\nPilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf,\nOr goin’ to the well,\nI’m thinkin’ of my baby\nAnd keenin’ to mysel’.\n\nAnd Sometimes I am sure she knows\nWhen, openin’ wide His door,\nGod lights the stats, His candles,\nAnd looks upon the poor.\n\nSo now, ye little childer,\nYe won’t fling stones at me;\nBut gather with your shinin’ looks\nAnd pity Moll Magee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-ballad-of-the-foxhunter": { - "title": "“The Ballad of the Foxhunter”", - "body": "“Lay me in a cushioned chair;\nCarry me, ye four,\nWith cushions here and cushions there,\nTo see the world once more.\n\nTo stable and to kennel go;\nBring what is there to bring;\nLead my Lollard to and fro,\nOr gently in a ring.\n\nPut the chair upon the grass:\nBring Rody and his hounds,\nThat I may contented pass\nFrom these earthly bounds.”\n\nHis eyelids droop, his head falls low,\nHis old eyes cloud with dreams;\nThe sun upon all things that grow\nFalls in sleepy streams.\n\nBrown Lollard treads upon the lawn,\nAnd to the armchair goes,\nAnd now the old man’s dreams are gone,\nHe smooths the long brown nose.\n\nAnd now moves many a pleasant tongue\nUpon his wasted hands,\nFor leading aged hounds and young\nThe huntsman near him stands.\n\n“Huntsmam Rody, blow the horn,\nMake the hills reply.”\nThe huntsman loosens on the morn\nA gay wandering cry.\n\nFire is in the old man’s eyes,\nHis fingers move and sway,\nAnd when the wandering music dies\nThey hear him feebly say,\n\n“Huntsman Rody, blow the horn,\nMake the hills reply.”\n“I cannot blow upon my horn,\nI can but weep and sigh.”\n\nServants round his cushioned place\nAre with new sorrow wrung;\nHounds are gazing on his face,\nAged hounds and young.\n\nOne blind hound only lies apart\nOn the sun-smitten grass;\nHe holds deep commune with his heart:\nThe moments pass and pass:\n\nThe blind hound with a mournful din\nLifts slow his wintry head;\nThe servants bear the body in;\nThe hounds wail for the dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "beggar-to-beggar-cried": { - "title": "“Beggar to Beggar Cried”", - "body": "“Time to put off the world and go somewhere\nAnd find my health again in the sea air,”\nBeggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,\n“And make my soul before my pate is bare.--”\n\n“And get a comfortable wife and house\nTo rid me of the devil in my shoes,”\nBeggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,\n“And the worse devil that is between my thighs.”\n\n“And though I’d marry with a comely lass,\nShe need not be too comely--let it pass,”\nBeggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,\n“But there’s a devil in a looking-glass.”\n\n“Nor should she be too rich, because the rich\nAre driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,”\nBeggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,\n“And cannot have a humorous happy speech.”\n\n“And there I’ll grow respected at my ease,\nAnd hear amid the garden’s nightly peace.”\nBeggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,\n“The wind-blown clamour of the barnacle-geese.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-black-tower": { - "title": "“The Black Tower”", - "body": "Say that the men of the old black tower,\nThough they but feed as the goatherd feeds,\nTheir money spent, their wine gone sour,\nLack nothing that a soldier needs,\nThat all are oath-bound men:\nThose banners come not in.\n\nThere in the tomb stand the dead upright,\nBut winds come up from the shore:\nThey shake when the winds roar,\nOld bones upon the mountain shake.\n\nThose banners come to bribe or threaten,\nOr whisper that a man’s a fool\nWho, when his own right king’s forgotten,\nCares what king sets up his rule.\nIf he died long ago\nWhy do you dread us so?\n\nThere in the tomb drops the faint moonlight,\nBut wind comes up from the shore:\nThey shake when the winds roar,\nOld bones upon the mountain shake.\n\nThe tower’s old cook that must climb and clamber\nCatching small birds in the dew of the morn\nWhen we hale men lie stretched in slumber\nSwears that he hears the king’s great horn.\nBut he’s a lying hound:\nStand we on guard oath-bound!\n\nThere in the tomb the dark grows blacker,\nBut wind comes up from the shore:\nThey shake when the winds roar,\nOld bones upon the mountain shake.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-blessed": { - "title": "“The Blessed”", - "body": "Cumhal called out, bending his head,\nTill Dathi came and stood,\nWith a blink in his eyes, at the cave-mouth,\nBetween the wind and the wood.\n\nAnd Cumhal said, bending his knees,\n“I have come by the windy way\nTo gather the half of your blessedness\nAnd learn to pray when you pray.\n\nI can bring you salmon out of the streams\nAnd heron out of the skies.”\nBut Dathi folded his hands and smiled\nWith the secrets of God in his eyes.\n\nAnd Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke\nAll manner of blessed souls,\nWomen and children, young men with books,\nAnd old men with croziers and stoles.\n\n“Praise God and God’s Mother,” Dathi said,\n“For God and God’s Mother have sent\nThe blessedest souls that walk in the world\nTo fill your heart with content.”\n\n“And which is the blessedest,” Cumhal said,\n“Where all are comely and good?\nIs it these that with golden thuribles\nAre singing about the wood?”\n\n“My eyes are blinking,” Dathi said,\n“With the secrets of God half blind,\nBut I can see where the wind goes\nAnd follow the way of the wind;\n\nAnd blessedness goes where the wind goes,\nAnd when it is gone we are dead;\nI see the blessedest soul in the world\nAnd he nods a drunken head.\n\nO blessedness comes in the night and the day\nAnd whither the wise heart knows;\nAnd one has seen in the redness of wine\nThe Incorruptible Rose,\n\nThat drowsily drops faint leaves on him\nAnd the sweetness of desire,\nWhile time and the world are ebbing away\nIn twilights of dew and of fire.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "blood-and-the-moon": { - "title": "“Blood and the Moon”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBlessed be this place,\nMore blessed still this tower;\nA bloody, arrogant power\nRose out of the race\nUttering, mastering it,\nRose like these walls from these\nStorm-beaten cottages--\nIn mockery I have set\nA powerful emblem up,\nAnd sing it rhyme upon rhyme\nIn mockery of a time\nHalf dead at the top.\n\n\n# II.\n\nAlexandria’s was a beacon tower, and Babylon’s\nAn image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun’s journey and the moon’s;\nAnd Shelley had his towers, thought’s crowned powers he called them once.\n\nI declare this tower is my symbol; I declare\nThis winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;\nThat Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.\n\nSwift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind\nBecause the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind,\nGoldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,\n\nAnd haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,\nThat this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century,\nCast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;\n\nAnd God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,\nThat this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,\nMust vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;\n\nSaeva Indignatio and the labourer’s hire,\nThe strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity of its own desire;\nEverything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe purity of the unclouded moon\nHas flung its atrowy shaft upon the floor.\nSeven centuries have passed and it is pure,\nThe blood of innocence has left no stain.\nThere, on blood-saturated ground, have stood\nSoldier, assassin, executioner.\nWhether for daily pittance or in blind fear\nOr out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,\nBut could not cast a single jet thereon.\nOdour of blood on the ancestral stair!\nAnd we that have shed none must gather there\nAnd clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nUpon the dusty, glittering windows cling,\nAnd seem to cling upon the moonlit skies,\nTortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,\nA couple of night-moths are on the wing.\nIs every modern nation like the tower,\nHalf dead at the top? No matter what I said,\nFor wisdom is the property of the dead,\nA something incompatible with life; and power,\nLike everything that has the stain of blood,\nA property of the living; but no stain\nCan come upon the visage of the moon\nWhen it has looked in glory from a cloud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "broken-dreams": { - "title": "“Broken Dreams”", - "body": "There is grey in your hair.\nYoung men no longer suddenly catch their breath\nWhen you are passing;\nBut maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing\nBecause it was your prayer\nRecovered him upon the bed of death.\nFor your sole sake--that all heart’s ache have known,\nAnd given to others all heart’s ache,\nFrom meagre girlhood’s putting on\nBurdensome beauty--for your sole sake\nHeaven has put away the stroke of her doom,\nSo great her portion in that peace you make\nBy merely walking in a room.\n\nYour beauty can but leave among us\nVague memories, nothing but memories.\nA young man when the old men are done talking\nWill say to an old man, “Tell me of that lady\nThe poet stubborn with his passion sang us\nWhen age might well have chilled his blood.”\n\nVague memories, nothing but memories,\nBut in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.\nThe certainty that I shall see that lady\nLeaning or standing or walking\nIn the first loveliness of womanhood,\nAnd with the fervour of my youthful eyes,\nHas set me muttering like a fool.\n\nYou are more beautiful than any one,\nAnd yet your body had a flaw:\nYour small hands were not beautiful,\nAnd I am afraid that you will run\nAnd paddle to the wrist\nIn that mysterious, always brimming lake\nWhere those What have obeyed the holy law\npaddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged\nThe hands that I have kissed,\nFor old sake’s sake.\n\nThe last stroke of midnight dies.\nAll day in the one chair\nFrom dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged\nIn rambling talk with an image of air:\nVague memories, nothing but memories.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-bronze-head": { - "title": "“A Bronze Head”", - "body": "Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,\nHuman, superhuman, a bird’s round eye,\nEverything else withered and mummy-dead.\nWhat great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky\n(Something may linger there though all else die;)\nAnd finds there nothing to make its tetror less\nHysterica passio of its own emptiness?\n\nNo dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full\nAs though with magnanimity of light,\nYet a most gentle woman; who can tell\nWhich of her forms has shown her substance right?\nOr maybe substance can be composite,\nprofound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath\nA mouthful held the extreme of life and death.\n\nBut even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,\nI saw the wildness in her and I thought\nA vision of terror that it must live through\nHad shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought\nImagiation to that pitch where it casts out\nAll that is not itself: I had grown wild\nAnd wandered murmuring everywhere, “My child, my child.”\n\nOr else I thought her supernatural;\nAs though a sterner eye looked through her eye\nOn this foul world in its decline and fall;\nOn gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,\nAncestral pearls all pitched into a sty,\nHeroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,\nAnd wondered what was left for massacre to save.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "byzantium": { - "title": "“Byzantium”", - "body": "The unpurged images of day recede;\nThe Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;\nNight resonance recedes, night walkers’ song\nAfter great cathedral gong;\nA starlit or a moonlit dome disdains\nAll that man is,\nAll mere complexities,\nThe fury and the mire of human veins.\n\nBefore me floats an image, man or shade,\nShade more than man, more image than a shade;\nFor Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth\nMay unwind the winding path;\nA mouth that has no moisture and no breath\nBreathless mouths may summon;\nI hail the superhuman;\nI call it death-in-life and life-in-death.\n\nMiracle, bird or golden handiwork,\nMore miraclc than bird or handiwork,\nPlanted on the star-lit golden bough,\nCan like the cocks of Hades crow,\nOr, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud\nIn glory of changeless metal\nCommon bird or petal\nAnd all complexities of mire or blood.\n\nAt midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit\nFlames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,\nNor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,\nWhere blood-begotten spirits come\nAnd all complexities of fury leave,\nDying into a dance,\nAn agony of trance,\nAn agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.\n\nAstraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,\nSpirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.\nThe golden smithies of the Emperor!\nMarbles of the dancing floor\nBreak bitter furies of complexity,\nThose images that yet\nFresh images beget,\nThat dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cap-and-bells": { - "title": "“The Cap and Bells”", - "body": "The jester walked in the garden:\nThe garden had fallen still;\nHe bade his soul rise upward\nAnd stand on her window-sill.\n\nIt rose in a straight blue garment,\nWhen owls began to call:\nIt had grown wise-tongued by thinking\nOf a quiet and light footfall;\n\nBut the young queen would not listen;\nShe rose in her pale night-gown;\nShe drew in the heavy casement\nAnd pushed the latches down.\n\nHe bade his heart go to her,\nWhen the owls called out no more;\nIn a red and quivering garment\nIt sang to her through the door.\n\nIt had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming\nOf a flutter of flower-like hair;\nBut she took up her fan from the table\nAnd waved it off on the air.\n\n“I have cap and bells,” he pondered,\n“I will send them to her and die”;\nAnd when the morning whitened\nHe left them where she went by.\n\nShe laid them upon her bosom,\nUnder a cloud of her hair,\nAnd her red lips sang them a love-song\nTill stars grew out of the air.\n\nShe opened her door and her window,\nAnd the heart and the soul came through,\nTo her right hand came the red one,\nTo her left hand came the blue.\n\nThey set up a noise like crickets,\nA chattering wise and sweet,\nAnd her hair was a folded flower\nAnd the quiet of love in her feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-cat-and-the-moon": { - "title": "“The Cat and the Moon”", - "body": "The cat went here and there\nAnd the moon spun round like a top,\nAnd the nearest kin of the moon,\nThe creeping cat, looked up.\nBlack Minnaloushe stared at the moon,\nFor, wander and wail as he would,\nThe pure cold light in the sky\nTroubled his animal blood.\nMinnaloushe runs in the grass\nLifting his delicate feet.\nDo you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?\nWhen two close kindred meet.\nWhat better than call a dance?\nMaybe the moon may learn,\nTired of that courtly fashion,\nA new dance turn.\nMinnaloushe creeps through the grass\nFrom moonlit place to place,\nThe sacred moon overhead\nHas taken a new phase.\nDoes Minnaloushe know that his pupils\nWill pass from change to change,\nAnd that from round to crescent,\nFrom crescent to round they range?\nMinnaloushe creeps through the grass\nAlone, important and wise,\nAnd lifts to the changing moon\nHis changing eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-choice": { - "title": "“The Choice”", - "body": "The intellect of man is forced to choose\nperfection of the life, or of the work,\nAnd if it take the second must refuse\nA heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.\nWhen all that story’s finished, what’s the news?\nIn luck or out the toil has left its mark:\nThat old perplexity an empty purse,\nOr the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-circus-animals-desertion": { - "title": "“The Circus Animal’s Desertion”", - "body": "# I.\n\nI sought a theme and sought for it in vain,\nI sought it daily for six weeks or so.\nMaybe at last being but a broken man\nI must be satisfied with my heart, although\nWinter and summer till old age began\nMy circus animals were all on show,\nThose stilted boys, that burnished chariot,\nLion and woman and the Lord knows what.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhat can I but enumerate old themes,\nFirst that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose\nThrough three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,\nVain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,\nThemes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,\nThat might adorn old songs or courtly shows;\nBut what cared I that set him on to ride,\nI, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.\n\nAnd then a counter-truth filled out its play,\n‘The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it,\nShe, pity-crazed, had given her soul away\nBut masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.\nI thought my dear must her own soul destroy\nSo did fanaticism and hate enslave it,\nAnd this brought forth a dream and soon enough\nThis dream itself had all my thought and love.\n\nAnd when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread\nCuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;\nHeart mysteries there, and yet when all is said\nIt was the dream itself enchanted me:\nCharacter isolated by a deed\nTo engross the present and dominate memory.\nPlayers and painted stage took all my love\nAnd not those things that they were emblems of.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThose masterful images because complete\nGrew in pure mind but out of what began?\nA mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,\nOld kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,\nOld iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut\nWho keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone\nI must lie down where all the ladders start\nIn the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-cloak-the-boat-and-the-shoes": { - "title": "“The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes”", - "body": "“What do you make so fair and bright?”\n\n“I make the cloak of Sorrow:\nO lovely to see in all men’s sight\nShall be the cloak of Sorrow,\nIn all men’s sight.”\n\n“What do you build with sails for flight?”\n\n“I build a boat for Sorrow:\nO swift on the seas all day and night\nSaileth the rover Sorrow,\nAll day and night.”\n\n“What do you weave with wool so white?”\n\n“I weave the shoes of Sorrow:\nSoundless shall be the footfall light\nIn all men’s ears of Sorrow,\nSudden and light.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "closing": { - "title": "“Closing”", - "body": "While I, that reed-throated whisperer\nWho comes at need, although not now as once\nA clear articulation in the air,\nBut inwardly, surmise companions\nBeyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof\n--Ben Johnson’s phrase--and find when June is come\nAt Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof\nA sterner conscience and a friendlier home,\nI can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,\nThose undreamt accidents that have made me\n--Seeing that Fame has perished that long while,\nBeing but a part of ancient ceremony--\nNotorious, till all my priceless things\nAre but a post the passing dogs defile.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "cold-heaven": { - "title": "“Cold Heaven”", - "body": "Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven\nThat seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,\nAnd thereupon imagination and heart were driven\nSo wild that every casual thought of that and this\nVanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season\nWith the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;\nAnd I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,\nUntil I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,\nRiddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,\nConfusion of the death-bed over, is it sent\nOut naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken\nBy the injustice of the skies for punishment?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-crazed-girl": { - "title": "“A Crazed Girl”", - "body": "That crazed girl improvising her music.\nHer poetry, dancing upon the shore,\nHer soul in division from itself\nClimbing, falling She knew not where,\nHiding amid the cargo of a steamship,\nHer knee-cap broken, that girl I declare\nA beautiful lofty thing, or a thing\nHeroically lost, heroically found.\n\nNo matter what disaster occurred\nShe stood in desperate music wound,\nWound, wound, and she made in her triumph\nWhere the bales and the baskets lay\nNo common intelligible sound\nBut sang, “O sea-starved, hungry sea.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-crazed-moon": { - "title": "“The Crazed Moon”", - "body": "Crazed through much child-bearing\nThe moon is staggering in the sky;\nMoon-struck by the despairing\nGlances of her wandering eye\nWe grope, and grope in vain,\nFor children born of her pain.\n\nChildren dazed or dead!\nWhen she in all her virginal pride\nFirst trod on the mountain’s head\nWhat stir ran through the countryside\nWhere every foot obeyed her glance!\nWhat manhood led the dance!\n\nFly-catchers of the moon,\nOur hands are blenched, our fingers seem\nBut slender needles of bone;\nBlenched by that malicious dream\nThey are spread wide that each\nMay rend what comes in reach.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crazy-jane-reproved": { - "title": "“Crazy Jane Reproved”", - "body": "I care not what the sailors say:\nAll those dreadful thunder-stones,\nAll that storm that blots the day\nCan but show that Heaven yawns;\nGreat Europa played the fool\nThat changed a lover for a bull.\nFol de rol, fol de rol.\n\nTo round that shell’s elaborate whorl,\nAdorning every secret track\nWith the delicate mother-of-pearl,\nMade the joints of Heaven crack:\nSo never hang your heart upon\nA roaring, ranting journeyman.\nFol de rol, fol de rol.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crazy-jane-and-the-bishop": { - "title": "“Crazy Jane and the Bishop”", - "body": "Bring me to the blasted oak\nThat I, midnight upon the stroke,\n(All find safety in the tomb.)\nMay call down curses on his head\nBecause of my dear Jack that’s dead.\nCoxcomb was the least he said:\nThe solid man and the coxcomb.\n\nNor was he Bishop when his ban\nBanished Jack the Journeyman,\n(All find safety in the tomb.)\nNor so much as parish priest,\nYet he, an old book in his fist,\nCried that we lived like beast and beast:\nThe solid man and the coxcomb.\n\nThe Bishop has a skin, God knows,\nWrinkled like the foot of a goose,\n(All find safety in the tomb.)\nNor can he hide in holy black\nThe heron’s hunch upon his back,\nBut a birch-tree stood my Jack:\nThe solid man and the coxcomb.\n\nJack had my virginity,\nAnd bids me to the oak, for he\n(all find safety in the tomb.)\nWanders out into the night\nAnd there is shelter under it,\nBut should that other come, I spit:\nThe solid man and the coxcomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crazy-jane-on-god": { - "title": "“Crazy Jane on God”", - "body": "That lover of a night\nCame when he would,\nWent in the dawning light\nWhether I would or no;\nMen come, men go;\nAll things remain in God.\n\nBanners choke the sky;\nMen-at-arms tread;\nArmoured horses neigh\nIn the narrow pass:\nAll things remain in God.\n\nBefore their eyes a house\nThat from childhood stood\nUninhabited, ruinous,\nSuddenly lit up\nFrom door to top:\nAll things remain in God.\n\nI had wild Jack for a lover;\nThough like a road\nThat men pass over\nMy body makes no moan\nBut sings on:\nAll things remain in God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crazy-jane-on-the-day-of-judgment": { - "title": "“Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment”", - "body": "“Love is all\nUnsatisfied\nThat cannot take the whole\nBody and soul”;\nAnd that is what Jane said.\n\n“Take the sour\nIf you take me\nI can scoff and lour\nAnd scold for an hour.”\n“That’s certainly the case,” said he.\n\n“Naked I lay,\nThe grass my bed;\nNaked and hidden away,\nThat black day”;\nAnd that is what Jane said.\n\n“What can be shown?\nWhat true love be?\nAll could be known or shown\nIf Time were but gone.”\n“That’s certainly the case,” said he.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "crazy-jane-on-the-mountain": { - "title": "“Crazy Jane on the Mountain”", - "body": "I am tired of cursing the Bishop,\n(Said Crazy Jane)\nNine books or nine hats\nWould not make him a man.\nI have found something worse\nTo meditate on.\nA King had some beautiful cousins.\nBut where are they gone?\nBattered to death in a cellar,\nAnd he stuck to his throne.\nLast night I lay on the mountain.\n(Said Crazy Jane)\nThere in a two-horsed carriage\nThat on two wheels ran\nGreat-bladdered Emer sat.\nHer violent man\nCuchulain sat at her side;\nThereupon\nPropped upon my two knees,\nI kissed a stone\nI lay stretched out in the dirt\nAnd I cried tears down.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "cuchulain-comforted": { - "title": "“Cuchulain Comforted”", - "body": "A man that had six mortal wounds, a man\nViolent and famous, strode among the dead;\nEyes stared out of the branches and were gone.\n\nThen certain Shrouds that muttered head to head\nCame and were gone. He leant upon a tree\nAs though to meditate on wounds and blood.\n\nA Shroud that seemed to have authority\nAmong those bird-like things came, and let fall\nA bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and thrce\n\nCame creeping up because the man was still.\nAnd thereupon that linen-carrier said:\n“Your life can grow much sweeter if you will\n\nObey our ancient rule and make a shroud;\nMainly because of what we only know\nThe rattle of those arms makes us afraid.\n\nWe thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do\nAll must together do.” That done, the man\nTook up the nearest and began to sew.\n\n“Now must we sing and sing the best we can,\nBut first you must be told our character:\nConvicted cowards all, by kindred slain\n\nOr driven from home and left to dic in fear.”\nThey sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,\nThough all was done in common as before;\n\nThey had changed their thtoats and had the throats of birds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dawn": { - "title": "“The Dawn”", - "body": "I would be as ignorant as the dawn,\nThat has looked down\nOn that old queen measuring a town\nWith the pin of a brooch,\nOr on the withered men that saw\nFrom their pedantic Babylon\nThe careless planets in their courses,\nThe stars fade out where the moon comes,\nAnd took their tablets and made sums--\nYet did but look, rocking the glittering coach\nAbove the cloudy shoulders of the horses.\nI would be--for no knowledge is worth a straw--\nIgnorant and wanton as the dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-death-of-cuchulain": { - "title": "“The Death of Cuchulain”", - "body": "A man came slowly from the setting sun\nTo Forgail’s daughter Emer in her dun\nAnd found her dyeing cloth with subtle care\nAnd said casting aside his draggled hair:\n“I am Aleel the swineherd whom you bid\nGo dwell upon the sea cliffs vapour hid;\nBut now my years of watching are no more.”\n\nThen Emer cast the web upon the floor\nAnd stretching out her arms red with the dye\nParted her lips with a loud sudden cry.\n\nLooking on her Aleel the swineherd said:\n“Not any god alive nor mortal dead\nHas slain so mighty armies so great kings\nNor won the gold that now Cuchulain brings.”\n\n“Why do you tremble thus from feet to crown?”\n\nAleel the swineherd wept and cast him down\nUpon the web-heaped floor and thus his word:\n“With him is one sweet-throated like a bird.”\n\n“Who bade you tell these things?” and then she cried\nTo those about “Beat him with thongs of hide\nAnd drive him from the door.”\n\nAnd thus it was:\nAnd where her son Finmole on the smooth grass\nWas driving cattle came she with swift feet\nAnd called out to him “Son it is not meet\nThat you stay idling here with flocks and herds.”\n\n“I have long waited mother for those words:\nBut wherefore now?”\n\n“There is a man to die;\nYou have the heaviest arm under the sky.”\n\n“My father dwells among the sea-worn bands\nAnd breaks the ridge of battle with his hands.”\n\n“Nay you are taller than Cuchulain son.”\n\n“He is the mightiest man in ship or dun.”\n\n“Nay he is old and sad with many wars\nAnd weary of the crash of battle cars.”\n\n“I only ask what way my journey lies\nFor God who made you bitter made you wise.”\n\n“The Red Branch kings a tireless banquet keep\nWhere the sun falls into the Western deep.\nGo there and dwell on the green forest rim;\nBut tell alone your name and house to him\nWhose blade compels and bid them send you one\nWho has a like vow from their triple dun.”\n\nBetween the lavish shelter of a wood\nAnd the gray tide the Red Branch multitude\nFeasted and with them old Cuchulain dwelt\nAnd his young dear one close beside him knelt\nAnd gazed upon the wisdom of his eyes\nMore mournful than the depth of starry skies\nAnd pondered on the wonder of his days;\nAnd all around the harp-string told his praise\nAnd Concobar the Red Branch king of kings\nWith his own fingers touched the brazen strings.\nAt last Cuchulain spake “A young man strays\nDriving the deer along the woody ways.\nI often hear him singing to and fro\nI often hear the sweet sound of his bow\nSeek out what man he is.”\n\nOne went and came.\n“He bade me let all know he gives his name\nAt the sword point and bade me bring him one\nWho had a like vow from our triple dun.”\n\n“I only of the Red Branch hosted now,”\nCuchulain cried, “have made and keep that vow.”\n\nAfter short fighting in the leafy shade\nHe spake to the young man “Is there no maid\nWho loves you no white arms to wrap you round\nOr do you long for the dim sleepy ground\nThat you come here to meet this ancient sword?”\n\n“The dooms of men are in God’s hidden hoard.”\n\n“Your head a while seemed like a woman’s head\nThat I loved once.”\n\nAgain the fighting sped\nBut now the war rage in Cuchulain woke\nAnd through the other’s shield his long blade broke\nAnd pierced him.\n\n“Speak before your breath is done.\nI am Finmole, mighty Cuchulain’s son.”\n\n“I put you from your pain. I can no more.”\n\nWhile day its burden on to evening bore\nWith head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed;\nThen Concobar sent that sweet-throated maid\nAnd she to win him his gray hair caressed;\nIn vain her arms in vain her soft white breast.\nThen Concobar the subtlest of all men\nRanking his Druids round him ten by ten\nSpake thus “Cuchulain will dwell there and brood\nFor three days more in dreadful quietude\nAnd then arise and raving slay us all.\nGo cast on him delusions magical\nThat he might fight the waves of the loud sea.”\nAnd ten by ten under a quicken tree\nThe Druids chaunted swaying in their hands\nTall wands of alder and white quicken wands.\n\nIn three days’ time Cuchulain with a moan\nStood up and came to the long sands alone:\nFor four days warred he with the bitter tide;\nAnd the waves flowed above him and he died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-death-of-the-hare": { - "title": "“The Death of the Hare”", - "body": "I have pointed out the yelling pack,\nThe hare leap to the wood,\nAnd when I pass a compliment\nRejoice as lover should\nAt the drooping of an eye,\nAt the mantling of the blood.\n\nThen suddenly my heart is wrung\nBy her distracted air\nAnd I remember wildness lost\nAnd after, swept from there,\nAm set down standing in the wood\nAt the death of the hare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "death": { - "title": "“Death”", - "body": "Nor dread nor hope attend\nA dying animal;\nA man awaits his end\nDreading and hoping all;\nMany times he died,\nMany times rose again.\nA great man in his pride\nConfronting murderous men\nCasts derision upon\nSupersession of breath;\nHe knows death to the bone--\nMan has created death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-dialogue-of-self-and-soul": { - "title": "“A Dialogue of Self and Soul”", - "body": "# I.\n\n> _My Soul:_\n\nI summon to the winding ancient stair;\nSet all your mind upon the steep ascent,\nUpon the broken, crumbling battlement,\nUpon the breathless starlit air,\nUpon the star that marks the hidden pole;\nFix every wandering thought upon\nThat quarter where all thought is done:\nWho can distinguish darkness from the soul?\n\n\n> _My Self:_\n\nThe consecrated blade upon my knees\nIs Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,\nStill razor-keen, still like a looking-glass\nUnspotted by the centuries;\nThat flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn\nFrom some court-lady’s dress and round\nThe wooden scabbard bound and wound,\nCan, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.\n\n\n> _My Soul:_\n\nWhy should the imagination of a man\nLong past his prime remember things that are\nEmblematical of love and war?\nThink of ancestral night that can,\nIf but imagination scorn the earth\nAnd intellect its wandering\nTo this and that and t’other thing,\nDeliver from the crime of death and birth.\n\n\n> _My Self:_\n\nMontashigi, third of his family, fashioned it\nFive hundred years ago, about it lie\nFlowers from I know not what embroidery--\nHeart’s purple--and all these I set\nFor emblems of the day against the tower\nEmblematical of the night,\nAnd claim as by a soldier’s right\nA charter to commit the crime once more.\n\n\n> _My Soul:_\n\nSuch fullness in that quarter overflows\nAnd falls into the basin of the mind\nThat man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,\nFor intellect no longer knows\nIs from the Ought, or Knower from the Known--\nThat is to say, ascends to Heaven;\nOnly the dead can be forgiven;\nBut when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.\n\n\n# II.\n\n> _My Self:_\n\nA living man is blind and drinks his drop.\nWhat matter if the ditches are impure?\nWhat matter if I live it all once more?\nEndure that toil of growing up;\nThe ignominy of boyhood; the distress\nOf boyhood changing into man;\nThe unfinished man and his pain\nBrought face to face with his own clumsiness;\n\nThe finished man among his enemies?--\nHow in the name of Heaven can he escape\nThat defiling and disfigured shape\nThe mirror of malicious eyes\nCasts upon his eyes until at last\nHe thinks that shape must be his shape?\nAnd what’s the good of an escape\nIf honour find him in the wintry blast?\n\nI am content to live it all again\nAnd yet again, if it be life to pitch\nInto the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,\nA blind man battering blind men;\nOr into that most fecund ditch of all,\nThe folly that man does\nOr must suffer, if he woos\nA proud woman not kindred of his soul.\n\nI am content to follow to its source\nEvery event in action or in thought;\nMeasure the lot; forgive myself the lot!\nWhen such as I cast out remorse\nSo great a sweetness flows into the breast\nWe must laugh and we must sing,\nWe are blest by everything,\nEverything we look upon is blest.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-dolls": { - "title": "“The Dolls”", - "body": "A doll in the doll-maker’s house\nLooks at the cradle and bawls:\n“That is an insult to us.”\nBut the oldest of all the dolls,\nWho had seen, being kept for show,\nGenerations of his sort,\nOut-screams the whole shelf: “Although\nThere’s not a man can report\nEvil of this place,\nThe man and the woman bring\nHither, to our disgrace,\nA noisy and filthy thing.”\nHearing him groan and stretch\nThe doll-maker’s wife is aware\nHer husband has heard the wretch,\nAnd crouched by the arm of his chair,\nShe murmurs into his ear,\nHead upon shoulder leant:\n“My dear, my dear, O dear,\nIt was an accident.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "down-by-the-salley-gardens": { - "title": "“Down by the Salley Gardens”", - "body": "Down by the salley gardens\nmy love and I did meet;\nShe passed the salley gardens\nwith little snow-white feet.\nShe bid me take love easy,\nas the leaves grow on the tree;\nBut I, being young and foolish,\nwith her would not agree.\n\nIn a field by the river\nmy love and I did stand,\nAnd on my leaning shoulder\nshe laid her snow-white hand.\nShe bid me take life easy,\nas the grass grows on the weirs;\nBut I was young and foolish,\nand now am full of tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "a-dream-of-death": { - "title": "“A Dream of Death”", - "body": "I dreamed that one had died in a strange place\nNear no accustomed hand;\nAnd they had nailed the boards above her face\nThe peasants of that land\nWondering to lay her in that solitude\nAnd raised above her mound\nA cross they had made out of two bits of wood\nAnd planted cypress round;\nAnd left her to the indifferent stars above\nUntil I carved these words:\n_She was more beautiful than thy first love\nBut now lies under boards_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-drinking-song": { - "title": "“A Drinking Song”", - "body": "Wine comes in at the mouth\nAnd love comes in at the eye;\nThat’s all we shall know for truth\nBefore we grow old and die.\nI lift the glass to my mouth,\nI look at you, and I sigh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-drunken-mans-praise-of-sobriety": { - "title": "“A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety”", - "body": "Come swish around, my pretty punk,\nAnd keep me dancing still\nThat I may stay a sober man\nAlthough I drink my fill.\nSobriety is a jewel\nThat I do much adore;\nAnd therefore keep me dancing\nThough drunkards lie and snore.\nO mind your feet, O mind your feet,\nKeep dancing like a wave,\nAnd under every dancer\nA dead man in his grave.\nNo ups and downs, my pretty,\nA mermaid, not a punk;\nA drunkard is a dead man,\nAnd all dead men are drunk.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ego-dominus-tuus": { - "title": "“Ego Dominus Tuus”", - "body": "> _Hic_\n\nOn the grey sand beside the shallow stream,\nUnder your old wind-beaten tower, where still\nA lamp burns on beside the open book\nThat Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon;\nAnd though you have passed the best of life still trace,\nEnthralled by the unconquerable delusion,\nMagical shapes.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nBy the help of an image\nI call to my own opposite, summon all\nThat I have handled least, least looked upon.\n\n\n> _Hic_\n\nAnd I would find myself and not an image.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nThat is our modern hope, and by its light\nWe have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind\nAnd lost the old nonchalance of the hand.\nWhether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush\nWe are but critics, or but half create,\nTimid, entangled, empty and abashed,\nLacking the countenance of our friends.\n\n\n> _Hic_\n\nAnd yet\nThe chief imagination of christendom\nDante Alighieri so utterly found himself\nThat he has made that hollow face of his\nMore plain to the mind’s eye than any face\nBut that of Christ.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nAnd did he find himself,\nOr was the hunger that had made it hollow\nA hunger for the apple on the bough\nMost out of reach? and is that spectral image\nThe man that Lapo and that Guido knew?\nI think he fashioned from his opposite\nAn image that might have been a stony face,\nStaring upon a bedouin’s horse-hair roof\nFrom doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned\nAmong the coarse grass and the camel dung.\nHe set his chisel to the hardest stone.\nBeing mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,\nDerided and deriding, driven out\nTo climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,\nHe found the unpersuadable justice, he found\nThe most exalted lady loved by a man.\n\n\n> _Hic_\n\nYet surely there are men who have made their art\nOut of no tragic war--lovers of life,\nImpulsive men that look for happiness\nAnd sing when they have found it.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nNo, not sing;\nFor those that love the world serve it in action,\nGrow rich, popular and full of influence,\nAnd should they paint or write still it is action:\nThe struggle of the fly in marmalade.\nThe rhetorician would deceive his neighbors,\nThe sentimentalist himself; while art\nIs but a vision of reality.\nWhat portion in the world can the artist have\nWho has awakened from the common dream,\nBut dissipation and despair?\n\n\n> _Hic_\n\nAnd yet\nNo one denies to Keats love of the world.\nRemember his deliberate happiness.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nHis art is happy, but who knows his mind?\nI see a school-boy when I think of him\nWith face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.\nFor certainly he sank into his grave\nHis senses and his heart unsatisfied,\nAnd made--being poor, ailing and ignorant,\nShut out from all the luxury of the world,\nThe ill-bred son of a livery-stable keeper--\nLuxuriant song.\n\n\n> _Hic_\n\nWhy should you leave the lamp\nBurning alone beside an open book,\nAnd trace these characters upon the sands?\nA style is found by sedentary toil\nAnd by the imitation of great masters.\n\n\n> _Ille_\n\nBecause I seek an image not a book,\nThose men that in their writings are most wise\nOwn nothing but their blind, stupified hearts.\nI call to the mysterious one who yet\nShall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream\nAnd look most like me, being indeed my double,\nAnd prove if all imaginable things\nThe most unlike, being my anti-self,\nAnd standing by these characters disclose\nAll that I seek: and whisper it as though\nHe were afraid the birds, who cry aloud\nTheir momentary cries before it is dawn,\nWould carry it away to blasphemous men.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-empty-cup": { - "title": "“The Empty Cup”", - "body": "A crazy man that found a cup,\nWhen all but dead of thirst,\nHardly dared to wet his mouth\nImagining, moon-accursed,\nThat another mouthful\nAnd his beating heart would burst.\nOctober last I found it too\nBut found it dry as bone,\nAnd for that reason am I crazed\nAnd my sleep is gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "ephemera": { - "title": "“Ephemera”", - "body": "“Your eyes that once were never weary of mine\nAre bowed in sotrow under pendulous lids,\nBecause our love is waning.” And then She:\n“Although our love is waning, let us stand\nBy the lone border of the lake once more,\nTogether in that hour of gentleness\nWhen the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.\nHow far away the stars seem, and how far\nIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”\n\nPensive they paced along the faded leaves,\nWhile slowly he whose hand held hers replied:\n“Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.”\n\nThe woods were round them, and the yellow leaves\nFell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once\nA rabbit old and lame limped down the path;\nAutumn was over him: and now they stood\nOn the lone border of the lake once more:\nTurning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves\nGathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,\nIn bosom and hair. “Ah, do not mourn,” he said,\n“That we are tired, for other loves await us;\nHate on and love through unrepining hours.\nBefore us lies eternity; our souls\nAre love, and a continual farewell.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-fallen-majesty": { - "title": "“The Fallen Majesty”", - "body": "Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face\nAnd even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,\nLike some last courtier at a gipsy camping place\nBabbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.\nThe lineaments, the heart that laughter has made sweet,\nThese, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd\nWill gather and not know that through its very street\nOnce walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning cloud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fallen-majesty": { - "title": "“Fallen Majesty”", - "body": "Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,\nAnd even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone,\nLike some last courtier at a gypsy camping-place\nBabbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone.\n\nThese lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet,\nThese, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd\nWill gather, and not know it walks the very street\nWhereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-falling-of-the-leaves": { - "title": "“The Falling of the Leaves”", - "body": "Autumn is over the long leaves that love us\nAnd over the mice in the barley sheaves;\nYellow the leaves of the rowan above us\nAnd yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.\n\nThe hour of the waning of love has beset us\nAnd weary and worn are our sad souls now;\nLet us part ere the season of passion forget us\nWith a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "father-and-child": { - "title": "“Father and Child”", - "body": "She hears me strike the board and say\nThat she is under ban\nOf all good men and women,\nBeing mentioned with a man\nThat has the worst of all bad names;\nAnd thereupon replies\nThat his hair is beautiful,\nCold as the March wind his eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "march" - } - } - }, - "fergus-and-the-druid": { - "title": "“Fergus and the Druid”", - "body": "> _Fergus:_\nThis whole day have I followed in the rocks,\nAnd you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,\nFirst as a raven on whose ancient wings\nScarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed\nA weasel moving on from stone to stone,\nAnd now at last you wear a human shape,\nA thin grey man half lost in gathering night.\n\n> _Druid:_\nWhat would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?\n\n> _Fergus:_\nThis would I say, most wise of living souls:\nYoung subtle Conchubar sat close by me\nWhen I gave judgment, and his words were wise,\nAnd what to me was burden without end,\nTo him seemed easy, so I laid the crown\nUpon his head to cast away my sorrow.\n\n> _Druid:_\nWhat would you, king of the proud Red Branch kings?\n\n> _Fergus:_\nA king and proud! and that is my despair.\nI feast amid my people on the hill,\nAnd pace the woods, and drive my chariot-wheels\nIn the white border of the murmuring sea;\nAnd still I feel the crown upon my head\n\n> _Druid:_\nWhat would you, Fergus?\n\n> _Fergus:_\nBe no more a king\nBut learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.\n\n> _Druid:_\nLook on my thin grey hair and hollow cheeks\nAnd on these hands that may not lift the sword,\nThis body trembling like a wind-blown reed.\nNo woman’s loved me, no man sought my help.\n\n> _Fergus:_\nA king is but a foolish labourer\nWho wastes his blood to be another’s dream.\n\n> _Druid:_\nTake, if you must, this little bag of dreams;\nUnloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.\n\n> _Fergus:_\nI see my life go drifting like a river\nFrom change to change; I have been many things--\nA green drop in the surge, a gleam of light\nUpon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,\nAn old slave grinding at a heavy quern,\nA king sitting upon a chair of gold--\nAnd all these things were wonderful and great;\nBut now I have grown nothing, knowing all.\nAh! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow\nLay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-first-confession": { - "title": "“A First Confession”", - "body": "I admit the briar\nEntangled in my hair\nDid not injure me;\nMy blenching and trembling,\nNothing but dissembling,\nNothing but coquetry.\n\nI long for truth, and yet\nI cannot stay from that\nMy better self disowns,\nFor a man’s attention\nBrings such satisfaction\nTo the craving in my bones.\n\nBrightness that I pull back\nFrom the Zodiac,\nWhy those questioning eyes\nThat are fixed upon me?\nWhat can they do but shun me\nIf empty night replies?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "first-love": { - "title": "“First Love”", - "body": "Though nurtured like the sailing moon\nIn beauty’s murderous brood,\nShe walked awhile and blushed awhile\nAnd on my pathway stood\nUntil I thought her body bore\nA heart of flesh and blood.\n\nBut since I laid a hand thereon\nAnd found a heart of stone\nI have attempted many things\nAnd not a thing is done,\nFor every hand is lunatic\nThat travels on the moon.\n\nShe smiled and that transfigured me\nAnd left me but a lout,\nMaundering here, and maundering there,\nEmptier of thought\nThan the heavenly circuit of its stars\nWhen the moon sails out.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fisherman": { - "title": "“The Fisherman”", - "body": "Although I can see him still--\nThe freckled man who goes\nTo a gray place on a hill\nIn gray Connemara clothes\nAt dawn to cast his flies--\nIt’s long since I began\nTo call up to the eyes\nThis wise and simple man.\nAll day I’d looked in the face\nWhat I had hoped it would be\nTo write for my own race\nAnd the reality:\nThe living men that I hate,\nThe dead man that I loved,\nThe craven man in his seat,\nThe insolent unreproved--\nAnd no knave brought to book\nWho has won a drunken cheer--\nThe witty man and his joke\nAimed at the commonest ear,\nThe clever man who cries\nThe catch cries of the clown,\nThe beating down of the wise\nAnd great Art beaten down.\n\nMaybe a twelve-month since\nSuddenly I began,\nIn scorn of this audience,\nImagining a man,\nAnd his sun-freckled face\nAnd gray Connemara cloth,\nClimbing up to a place\nWhere stone is dark with froth,\nAnd the down turn of his wrist\nWhen the flies drop in the stream--\nA man who does not exist,\nA man who is but a dream;\nAnd cried, “Before I am old\nI shall have written him one\nPoem maybe as cold\nAnd passionate as the dawn.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-fish": { - "title": "“The Fish”", - "body": "Although you hide in the ebb and flow\nOf the pale tide when the moon has set,\nThe people of coming days will know\nAbout the casting out of my net,\nAnd how you have leaped times out of mind\nOver the little silver cords,\nAnd think that you were hard and unkind,\nAnd blame you with many bitter words.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "fled-foam-underneath-us": { - "title": "“Fled Foam underneath Us”", - "body": "Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke,\nHigh as the Saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;\nAnd those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke;\nThe immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.\n\nI mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,\nAnd never a song sang Niamh, and over my finger-tips\nCame now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,\nAnd now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.\n\nWere we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly peace,\nAn isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?\nAnd we stood on a sea’s edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece\nFled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.\n\nAnd we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge; the sea’s edge barren and grey,\nGrey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,\nDripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,\nLike an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.\n\nBut the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;\nDropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;\nFor no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:\nLong sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.\n\nAnd the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,\nFor, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,\nCeased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,\nAnd the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.\n\nTill the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak,\nA valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,\nUnder the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,\nTheir naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.\n\nAnd by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;\nAnd dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old\nCould sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,\nAnd more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.\n\nAnd each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;\nThe tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds,\nAnd, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,\nThe breathing came from those bodies, long warless, grown whiter than curds.\n\nThe wood was so Spacious above them, that He who has stars for His flocks\nCould fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-cumbered skies;\nSo long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks,\nFilling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.\n\nAnd over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,\nNow in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow-place wide;\nAnd the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-flame,\nLay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.\n\nGolden the nails of his bird-clawS, flung loosely along the dim ground;\nIn one was a branch soft-shining with bells more many than sighs\nIn midst of an old man’s bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around\nSidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.\n\nAnd my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no, not since the world began,\nIn realms where the handsome were many, nor in glamours by demons flung,\nHave faces alive with such beauty been known to the salt eye of man,\nYet weary with passions that faded when the sevenfold seas were young.\n\nAnd I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep’s forebear, far sung by the Sennachies.\nI saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep,\nOf wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas,\nLaid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.\n\nSnatching the horn of Niamh, I blew a long lingering note.\nCame sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like the stirring of flies.\nHe, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,\nWatched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.\n\nI cried, “Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!\nAnd tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,\nThat we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;\nYour questioner, Oisin, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands.”\n\nHalf open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams;\nHis lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;\nThen he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in faint streams\nSofter than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.\n\nWrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,\nThe moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone\nWere the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the whole of my mirth,\nAnd a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.\n\nIn the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;\nAnd the pearl-pale Niamh lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;\nAnd the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years ’gan flow;\nSquare leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.\n\nAnd, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot\nHow the fetlocks drip blocd in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie rolled;\nHow the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot,\nAnd the name of the demon whose hammer made Conchubar’s sword-blade of old.\n\nAnd, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot\nThat the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and hide;\nHow the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead’s burning spot;\nHow the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.\n\nBut in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust with their throngs,\nMoved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;\nCame by me the kings of the Red Branch, with roaring of laughter and songs,\nOr moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with sails.\n\nCame Blanid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,\nCook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry,\nDark Balor, as old as a forest, car-borne, his mighty head sunk\nHelpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death making eye.\n\nAnd by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,\nAnd Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone.\nSo lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams,\nIn a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.\n\nAt times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;\nWhen brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love going by;\nWhen a glow-worm was green on a grass-leaf, lured from his lair in the mould;\nHalf wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh.\n\nSo watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,\nWeak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,\nA starling like them that forgathered ’neath a moon waking white as a shell\nWhen the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sceolan, Lomair.\n\nI awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,\nThrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep\nThat once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,\nAnd that I would leave the Immortals, their dimness, their dews dropping sleep.\n\nO, had you seen beautiful Niamh grow white as the waters are white,\nLord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:\nBut, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight\nOf twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.\n\nI died, “O Niamh! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,\nI must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young\nIn the Fenians’ dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,\nAh, sweet to me now were even bald Conan’s slanderous tongue!”\n\n“Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle,\nRemembering its long-oared companions, sails turning to threadbare rags;\nNo more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,\nBut to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.”\n\nTheir motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought,\nWatched her those seamless faces from the valley’s glimmering girth;\nAs she murmured, “O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is naught,\nFor there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.”\n\n“Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,\nAnd softly come to your Niamh over the tops of the tide;\nBut weep for your Niamh, O Oisin, weep; for if only your shoe\nBrush lightly as haymouse earth’s pebbles, you will come no more to my side.”\n\n“O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?”\nI saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan:\n“I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto breast\nWe shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone\n\nIn the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.\nWere the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her nest,\nNor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea’s vague drum?\nO flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?”\n\nThe wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,\nWhere ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;\nFor no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark:\nIn a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling’ ground.\n\nAnd I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and grey,\nGrey sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,\nDripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,\nLike an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.\n\nAnd the winds made the sands on the sea’s edge turning and turning go,\nAs my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak,\nI rode away on the surges, where, high aS the saddle-bow,\nFled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.\n\nLong fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,\nSnatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart,\nWhen they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,\nFor Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.\n\nTill, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay\nCame, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;\nLater a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,\nFrom the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.\n\nIf I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand and the shells,\nComing out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,\nNot coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,\nI would leave no saint’s head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of ships.\n\nMaking way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path\nMuch wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,\nYour bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the mth,\nAnd a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade,\n\nOr weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet;\nWhile in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious, their chieftains stood,\nAwaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in your net:\nWent the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring of wind in a wood.\n\nAnd before I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright,\nCame after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head:\nAnd I rode and I rode, and I cried out, “The Fenians hunt wolves in the night,\nSo sleep thee by daytime.” A voice cried, “The Fenians a long time are dead.”\n\nA whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh of his face as dried grass,\nAnd in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad as a child without milk--\nAnd the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how men sorrow and pass,\nAnd their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes that glimmer like silk.\n\nAnd wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, “In old age they ceased”;\nAnd my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured, “Where white clouds lie spread\nOn Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast\nOn the floors of the gods.” He cried, “No, the gods a long time are dead.”\n\nAnd lonely and longing for Niamh, I shivered and turned me about,\nThe heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;\nI turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea’s old shout\nTill I saw where Maeve lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part.\n\nAnd there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand,\nThey bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell with their burden at length.\nLeaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it five yards with my hand,\nWith a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenians’ old strength.\n\nThe rest you have heard of, O croziered man; how, when divided the girth,\nI fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly;\nAnd my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose, and walked on the earth,\nA creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his beard never dry.\n\nHow the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air;\nSorry place, where for swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier gleams;\nWhat place have Caoilte and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair?\nSpeak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded with dreams.\n\n> _Saint Patrick:_\nWhere the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones is their place;\nWhere the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide Hell,\nWatching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God’s face,\nBetween them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell.\n\n> _Oisin:_\nPut the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt\nThe war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds with their Breath,\nInnumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant,\nAnd demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death.\n\nAnd demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings,\nAfraid, their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep;\nHearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings,\nHearing Hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.\n\nWe will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass\nAnd enter, and none sayeth ‘No’ when there enters the strongly armed guest;\nMake clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young grass;\nThen feast, making converse of wars, and of old wounds, and turn to our rest.\n\n> _Saint Patrick:_\nOn the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Fenians are tost;\nNone war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world in their rage;\nBut kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost\nThrough the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age.\n\n> _Oisin:_\nAh me! to be Shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain,\nWithout laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear;\nAll emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain,\nAs a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir.\n\nIt were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there;\nI throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,\nI will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,\nAnd dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-folly-of-being-comforted": { - "title": "“The Folly of Being Comforted”", - "body": "One that is ever kind said yesterday:\n“Your well-beloved’s hair has threads of grey,\nAnd little shadows come about her eyes;\nTime can but make it easier to be wise\nThough now it seems impossible, and so\nAll that you need is patience.” Heart cries, “No,\nI have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.\nTime can but make her beauty over again:\nBecause of that great nobleness of hers\nThe fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,\nBurns but more clearly. O she had not these ways\nWhen all the wild Summer was in her gaze.”\n\nHeart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head,\nYou’d know the folly of being comforted.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-fool-by-the-roadside": { - "title": "“The Fool by the Roadside”", - "body": "When all works that have\nFrom cradle run to grave\nFrom grave to cradle run instead;\nWhen thoughts that a fool\nHas wound upon a spool\nAre but loose thread, are but loose thread;\n\nWhen cradle and spool are past\nAnd I mere shade at last\nCoagulate of stuff\nTransparent like the wind,\nI think that I may find\nA faithful love, a faithful love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-anne-gregory": { - "title": "“For Anne Gregory”", - "body": "“Never shall a young man,\nThrown into despair\nBy those great honey-coloured\nRamparts at your ear,\nLove you for yourself alone\nAnd not your yellow hair.”\n\n“But I can get a hair-dye\nAnd set such colour there,\nBrown, or black, or carrot,\nThat young men in despair\nMay love me for myself alone\nAnd not my yellow hair.”\n\n“I heard an old religious man\nBut yesternight declare\nThat he had found a text to prove\nThat only God, my dear,\nCould love you for yourself alone\nAnd not your yellow hair.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-four-ages-of-man": { - "title": "“The Four Ages of Man”", - "body": "He with body waged a fight,\nBut body won; it walks upright.\n\nThen he struggled with the heart,\nInnocence and peace depart.\n\nThen he struggled with the mind;\nHis proud heart he left behind.\n\nNow his wars on God begin,\nAt stroke of midnight God shall win.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "fragments": { - "title": "“Fragments”", - "body": "# I.\n\nLocke sank into a swoon;\nThe Garden died;\nGod took the spinning-jenny\nOut of his side.\n\n\n# II.\n\nWhere got I that truth?\nOut of a medium’s mouth.\nOut of nothing it came,\nOut of the forest loam,\nOut of dark night where lay\nThe crowns of Nineveh.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-friends-of-his-youth": { - "title": "“The Friends of His Youth”", - "body": "Laughter not time destroyed my voice\nAnd put that crack in it,\nAnd when the moon’s pot-bellied\nI get a laughing fit,\nFor that old Madge comes down the lane,\nA stone upon her breast,\nAnd a cloak wrapped about the stone,\nAnd she can get no rest\nWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;\nShe that has been wild\nAnd barren as a breaking wave\nThinks that the stone’s a child.\n\nAnd Peter that had great affairs\nAnd was a pushing man\nShrieks, “I am King of the Peacocks,”\nAnd perches on a stone;\nAnd then I laugh till tears run down\nAnd the heart thumps at my side,\nRemembering that her shriek was love\nAnd that he shrieks from pride.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-grey-rock": { - "title": "“The Grey Rock”", - "body": "_Here’s an old story I’ve remade,\nImagining ’twould better please\nYour ears than stories now in fashion.\nThough you may think I waste my breath\nPretending that there can be passion\nThat has more life in it than death,\nThough at the bottling of your wine\nThe bow-legged Goban had no say;\nThe moral’s yours because it’s mine._\n\nWhen cups went round at close of day\nIs not that how good stories run?\nSomewhere within some hollow hill,\nIf books speak truth, in Slievenamon\nBut let that be--the gods were still\nAnd sleepy having had their meal:\nAnd smoky torches made a glare\nOn painted pillars, on a deal\nOf old stringed instruments, hung there\nBy the ancient holy hands that brought them\nFrom murmuring Murias; on cups\nOld Goban hammered them and wrought them,\nAnd put his pattern round their tops\nTo hold the wine they buy of him.\nBut from the juice that made them wise\nAll those had lifted up the dim\nImaginations of their eyes;\nFor one that was like woman made\nBefore their sleepy eyelids ran,\nAnd trembling with her passion said:\n“Come out and dig for a dead man,\nWho’s burrowing somewhere in the ground;\nAnd mock him to his face, and then\nHollo him on with horse and hound,\nFor he is the worst of all dead men.”\n\n_We should be dared and terror struck\nIf we but saw in dreams that room\nAnd those fierce eyes, and curse our luck\nThat emptied all our days to come.\nI knew a woman none could please\nBecause she dreamed when but a child\nOf men and women made like these;\nAnd after, when her blood ran wild,\nHad ravelled her own story out,\nAnd said, “In two or in three years\nI need must marry some poor lout,”\nAnd having said it burst in tears.\nSince, tavern comrades, you have died\nMaybe your images have stood,\nMere bone and muscle thrown aside,\nBefore that roomful or as good.\n“’Twas wine or women or some curse\nBut never made a boorer song\nThat you might have a heavier purse;\nNor gave loud service to a cause\nThat you might have a troop of friends.\nYou kept the Muses’ sterner laws\nAnd unrepenting faced your ends;\nAnd therefore earned the right\nand yet\nDowson and Tohnson most I praise\nTo troop with those the world’s forgot,\nAnd copy their proud steady gaze._”\n\n“The Danish troop was driven put\nBetween the dawn and dusk,” she said;\n“Although the event was long in doubt,\nAlthough the King of Ireland’s dead\nAnd half his kings, before sundown\nAll was accomplished.”\n\nWhen this day\nMurrough the King of Ireland’s son\nFoot after foot was giving way,\nHe and his best troops back to back\nHad perished there, but the Danes ran\nStricken with panic from the attack,\nThe shouting of an unseen man;\nAnd, being thankful, Murrough found,\nLed by a foot-sole dipped in blood\nThat had made prints upon the ground,\nWhere by old thorn trees that man stood;\nAnd though when he gazed here and there\nHe had but gazed on thorn trees, spoke:\n“Who is the friend that seems but air\nAnd yet could give so fine a stroke?”\nThereon a young man met his eye\nWho said, “Because she held me in\nHer love and would not have me die,\nRock-nurtured Aoife took a pin\nAnd pushing it into my shirt\nPromised that for a pin’s sake\nNo man should see to do me hurt;\nBut there it’s gone; I will not take\nThe fortune that had been my shame,\nSeeing, King’s son, what wounds you have.\n’Twas roundly spoke, but when night came\nHe had betrayed me to his grave,\nFor he and the King’s son were dead.\nI’d promised him two hundred years,\nAnd when, for all I’d done or said\nAnd these immortal eyes shed tears\nHe claimed his country’s need was most.\nI’d saved his life, yet for the sake\nOf a new friend he has turned a ghost.\nWhat does he care if my heart break?\nI call for spade and horse and hound\nThat we may harry him.” Thereon\nShe cast herself upon the ground\nAnd rent her clothes and made her moan:\n“Why are they faithless when their might\nIs from the holy shades that rove\nThe grey rock and the windy light?\nWhy should the faithfulest heart most love\nThe bitter sweetness of false faces?\nWhy must the lasting love what passes?\nWhy are the gods by men betrayed!”\nBut thereon every god stood up\nWith a slow smile and without sound,\nAnd, stretching forth his arm and cup\nTo where she moaned upon the ground,\nSuddenly drenched her to the skin;\nAnd she with Goban’s wine adrip,\nNo more remembering what had been,\nStared at the gods with laughing lip.\n\n_I have kept my faith, though faith was tried,\nTo that rock-born, rock-wandering foot;\nAnd the world’s altered since you died,\nAnd I am in no good repute\nWith the loud host before the sea,\nThat think sword strokes were better meant\nThan lover’s music:--let that be,\nSo that the wandering foot’s content._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-gyres": { - "title": "“The Gyres”", - "body": "The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;\nThings thought too long can be no longer thought,\nFor beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,\nAnd ancient lineaments are blotted out.\nIrrational streams of blood are staining earth;\nEmpedocles has thrown all things about;\nHector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;\nWe that look on but laugh in tragic joy.\n\nWhat matter though numb nightmare ride on top,\nAnd blood and mire the sensitive body stain?\nWhat matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,\nA-greater, a more gracious time has gone;\nFor painted forms or boxes of make-up\nIn ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;\nWhat matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,\nAnd all it knows is that one word “Rejoice!”\n\nConduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,\nWhat matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,\nLovers of horses and of women, shall,\nFrom marble of a broken sepulchre,\nOr dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,\nOr any rich, dark nothing disinter\nThe workman, noble and saint, and all things run\nOn that unfashionable gyre again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-happy-townland": { - "title": "“The Happy Townland”", - "body": "There’s many a strong farmer\nWhose heart would break in two,\nIf he could see the townland\nThat we are riding to;\nBoughs have their fruit and blossom\nAt all times of the year;\nRivers are running over\nWith red beer and brown beer.\nAn old man plays the bagpipes\nIn a golden and silver wood;\nQueens, their eyes blue like the ice,\nAre dancing in a crowd.\n\nThe little fox he murmured,\n“O what of the world’s bane?”\nThe sun was laughing sweetly,\nThe moon plucked at my rein;\nBut the little red fox murmured,\n“O do not pluck at his rein,\nHe is riding to the townland\nThat is the world’s bane.”\n\nWhen their hearts are so high\nThat they would come to blows,\nThey unhook rheir heavy swords\nFrom golden and silver boughs;\nBut all that are killed in battle\nAwaken to life again.\nIt is lucky that their story\nIs not known among men,\nFor O, the strong farmers\nThat would let the spade lie,\nTheir hearts would be like a cup\nThat somebody had drunk dry.\n\nThe little fox he murmured,\n“O what of the world’s bane?”\nThe sun was laughing sweetly,\nThe moon plucked at my rcin;\nBut the little red fox murmured,\n“O do not pluck at his rein,\nHe is riding to the townland\nThat is the world’s bane.”\n\nMichael will unhook his trumpet\nFrom a bough overhead,\nAnd blow a little noise\nWhen the supper has been spread.\nGabriel will come from the water\nWith a fish-tail, and talk\nOf wonders that have happened\nOn wet roads where men walk.\nAnd lift up an old horn\nOf hammered silver, and drink\nTill he has fallen asleep\nUpon the starry brink.\n\nThe little fox he murmured,\n“O what of the world’s bane?”\nThe sun was laughing sweetly,\nThe moon plucked at my rein;\nBut the little red fox murmured.\n“O do not pluck at his rein,\nHe is riding to the townland\nThat is the world’s bane.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-remembers-forgotten-beauty": { - "title": "“He Remembers Forgotten Beauty”", - "body": "When my arms wrap you round I press\nMy heart upon the loveliness\nThat has long faded from the world;\nThe jewelled crowns that kings have hurled\nIn shadowy pools, when armies fled;\nThe love-tales wrought with silken thread\nBy dreaming ladies upon cloth\nThat has made fat the murderous moth;\nThe roses that of old time were\nWoven by ladies in their hair,\nThe dew-cold lilies ladies bore\nThrough many a sacred corridor\nWhere such grey clouds of incense rose\nThat only God’s eyes did not close:\nFor that pale breast and lingering hand\nCome from a more dream-heavy land,\nA more dream-heavy hour than this;\nAnd when you sigh from kiss to kiss\nI hear white Beauty sighing, too,\nFor hours when all must fade like dew.\nBut flame on flame, and deep on deep,\nThrone over throne where in half sleep,\nTheir swords upon their iron knees,\nBrood her high lonely mysteries.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-tells-of-a-valley-full-of-lovers": { - "title": "“He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers”", - "body": "I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,\nFor happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;\nAnd I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood\nWith her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:\nI cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay\nTheir heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your fair,\nOr remembering hers they will find no other face fair\nTill all the valleys of the world have been withered away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-tells-of-the-perfect-beauty": { - "title": "“He Tells of the Perfect Beauty”", - "body": "O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,\nThe poets labouring all their days\nTo build a perfect beauty in rhyme\nAre overthrown by a woman’s gaze\nAnd by the unlabouring brood of the skies:\nAnd therefore my heart will bow, when dew\nIs dropping sleep, until God burn time,\nBefore the unlabouring stars and you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-wishes-his-beloved-were-dead": { - "title": "“He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead”", - "body": "Were you but lying cold and dead,\nAnd lights were paling out of the West,\nYou would come hither, and bend your head,\nAnd I would lay my head on your breast;\nAnd you would murmur tender words,\nForgiving me, because you were dead:\nNor would you rise and hasten away,\nThough you have the will of wild birds,\nBut know your hair was bound and wound\nAbout the stars and moon and sun:\nO would, beloved, that you lay\nUnder the dock-leaves in the ground,\nWhile lights were paling one by one.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "he-and-she": { - "title": "“He and She”", - "body": "As the moon sidles up\nMust she sidle up,\nAs trips the scared moon\nAway must she trip,\n“His light had struck me blind\nDared I stop.”\nShe sings as the moon sings\n“I am I, am I;\nThe greater grows my light\nThe further that I Aly.”\nAll creation shivers\nWith that sweet cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-heart-of-the-woman": { - "title": "“The Heart of the Woman”", - "body": "O what to me the little room\nThat was brimmed up with prayer and rest;\nHe bade me out into the gloom,\nAnd my breast lies upon his breast.\n\nO what to me my mother’s care,\nThe house where I was safe and warm;\nThe shadowy blossom of my hair\nWill hide us from the bitter storm.\n\nO hiding hair and dewy eyes,\nI am no more with life and death,\nMy heart upon his warm heart lies,\nMy breath is mixed into his breath.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-anxiety": { - "title": "“Her Anxiety”", - "body": "Earth in beauty dressed\nAwaits returning spring.\nAll true love must die,\nAlter at the best\nInto some lesser thing.\nProve that I lie.\n\nSuch body lovers have,\nSuch exacting breath,\nThat they touch or sigh.\nEvery touch they give,\nLove is nearer death.\nProve that I lie.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "her-praise": { - "title": "“Her Praise”", - "body": "She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.\nI have gone about the house, gone up and down\nAs a man does who has published a new book,\nOr a young girl dressed out in her new gown,\nAnd though I have turned the talk by hook or crook\nUntil her praise should be the uppermost theme,\nA woman spoke of some new tale she had read,\nA man confusedly in a half dream\nAs though some other name ran in his head.\nShe is foremost of those that I would hear praised.\nI will talk no more of books or the long war\nBut walk by the dry thorn until I have found\nSome beggar sheltering from the wind, and there\nManage the talk until her name come round.\nIf there be rags enough he will know her name\nAnd be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,\nThough she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,\nAmong the poor both old and young gave her praise.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "her-triumph": { - "title": "“Her Triumph”", - "body": "I did the dragon’s will until you came\nBecause I had fancied love a casual\nImprovisation, or a settled game\nThat followed if I let the kerchief fall:\nThose deeds were best that gave the minute wings\nAnd heavenly music if they gave it wit;\nAnd then you stood among the dragon-rings.\nI mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it\nAnd broke the chain and set my ankles free,\nSaint George or else a pagan Perseus;\nAnd now we stare astonished at the sea,\nAnd a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "saint_george" - } - } - }, - "her-vision-in-the-wood": { - "title": "“Her Vision in the Wood”", - "body": "Dry timber under that rich foliage,\nAt wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,\nToo old for a man’s love I stood in rage\nImagining men. Imagining that I could\nA greater with a lesser pang assuage\nOr but to find if withered vein ran blood,\nI tore my body that its wine might cover\nWhatever could rccall the lip of lover.\n\nAnd after that I held my fingers up,\nStared at the wine-dark nail, or dark that ran\nDown every withered finger from the top;\nBut the dark changed to red, and torches shone,\nAnd deafening music shook the leaves; a troop\nShouldered a litter with a wounded man,\nOr smote upon the string and to the sound\nSang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.\n\nAll stately women moving to a song\nWith loosened hair or foreheads grief-distraught,\nIt seemed a Quattrocento painter’s throng,\nA thoughtless image of Mantegna’s thought--\nWhy should they think that are for ever young?\nTill suddenly in grief’s contagion caught,\nI stared upon his blood-bedabbled breast\nAnd sang my malediction with the rest.\n\nThat thing all blood and mire, that beast-torn wreck,\nHalf turned and fixed a glazing eye on mine,\nAnd, though love’s bitter-sweet had all come back,\nThose bodies from a picture or a coin\nNor saw my body fall nor heard it shriek,\nNor knew, drunken with singing as with wine,\nThat they had brought no fabulous symbol there\nBut my heart’s victim and its torturer.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "high-talk": { - "title": "“High Talk”", - "body": "Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.\nWhat if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,\nAnd mine were but fifteen foot, no modern Stalks upon higher,\nSome rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.\n\nBecause piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows,\nBecause children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes,\nBecause women in the upper storeys demand a face at the pane,\nThat patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane.\n\nMalachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,\nFrom collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.\n\nAll metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose\nFar up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;\nI, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;\nThose great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "his-confidence": { - "title": "“His Confidence”", - "body": "Undying love to buy\nI wrote upon\nThe corners of this eye\nAll wrongs done.\nWhat payment were enough\nFor undying love?\n\nI broke my heart in two\nSo hard I struck.\nWhat matter? for I know\nThat out of rock,\nOut of a desolate source,\nLove leaps upon its course.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "his-dream": { - "title": "“His Dream”", - "body": "I swayed upon the gaudy stem\nThe butt-end of a steering-oar,\nAnd saw wherever I could turn\nA crowd upon a shore.\n\nAnd though I would have hushed the crowd,\nThere was no mother’s son but said,\n“What is the figure in a shroud\nUpon a gaudy bed?”\n\nAnd after running at the brim\nCried out upon that thing beneath\n--It had such dignity of limb--\nBy the sweet name of Death.\n\nThough I’d my finger on my lip,\nWhat could I but take up the song?\nAnd running crowd and gaudy ship\nCried out the whole night long,\n\nCrying amid the glittering sea,\nNaming it with ecstatic breath,\nBecause it had such dignity,\nBy the sweet name of Death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "his-memories": { - "title": "“His Memories”", - "body": "We should be hidden from their eyes,\nBeing but holy shows\nAnd bodies broken like a thorn\nWhereon the bleak north blows,\nTo think of buried Hector\nAnd that none living knows.\n\nThe women take so little stock\nIn what I do or say\nThey’d sooner leave their cosseting\nTo hear a jackass bray;\nMy arms are like the twisted thorn\nAnd yet there beauty lay;\n\nThe first of all the tribe lay there\nAnd did such pleasure take--\nShe who had brought great Hector down\nAnd put all Troy to wreck--\nThat she cried into this ear,\n“Strike me if I shriek.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "his-phoenix": { - "title": "“His Phoenix”", - "body": "There is a queen in China, or maybe it’s in Spain,\nAnd birthdays and holidays such praises can be heard\nOf her unblemished lineaments, a whiteness with no stain,\nThat she might be that sprightly girl trodden by a bird;\nAnd there’s a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,\nOr who have found a painter to make them so for pay\nAnd smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:\nI knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.\n\nThe young men every night applaud their Gaby’s laughing eye,\nAnd Ruth St. Denis had more charm although she had poor luck;\nFrom nineteen hundred nine or ten, Pavlova’s had the cry\nAnd there’s a player in the States who gathers up her cloak\nAnd flings herself out of the room when Juliet would be bride\nWith all a woman’s passion, a child’s imperious way,\nAnd there are--but no matter if there are scores beside:\nI knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.\n\nThere’s Margaret and Marjorie and Dorothy and Nan,\nA Daphne and a Mary who live in privacy;\nOne’s had her fill of lovers, another’s had but one,\nAnother boasts, “I pick and choose and have but two or three.”\nIf head and limb have beauty and the instep’s high and light\nThey can spread out what sail they please for all I have to say,\nBe but the breakers of men’s hearts or engines of delight:\nI knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.\n\nThere’ll be that crowd, that barbarous crowd, through all the centuries,\nAnd who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild\nWho is my beauty’s equal, though that my heart denies,\nBut not the exact likeness, the simplicity of a child,\nAnd that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun,\nAnd all the shapely body no tittle gone astray.\nI mourn for that most lonely thing; and yet God’s will be done:\nI knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-host-of-the-air": { - "title": "“The Host of the Air”", - "body": "O’Driscoll drove with a song\nThe wild duck and the drake\nFrom the tall and the tufted reeds\nOf the drear Hart Lake.\n\nAnd he saw how the reeds grew dark\nAt the coming of night-tide,\nAnd dreamed of the long dim hair\nOf Bridget his bride.\n\nHe heard while he sang and dreamed\nA piper piping away,\nAnd never was piping so sad,\nAnd never was piping so gay.\n\nAnd he saw young men and young girls\nWho danced on a level place,\nAnd Bridget his bride among them,\nWith a sad and a gay face.\n\nThe dancers crowded about him\nAnd many a sweet thing said,\nAnd a young man brought him red wine\nAnd a young girl white bread.\n\nBut Bridget drew him by the sleeve\nAway from the merry bands,\nTo old men playing at cards\nWith a twinkling of ancient hands.\n\nThe bread and the wine had a doom,\nFor these were the host of the air;\nHe sat and played in a dream\nOf her long dim hair.\n\nHe played with the merry old men\nAnd thought not of evil chance,\nUntil one bore Bridget his bride\nAway from the merry dance.\n\nHe bore her away in his atms,\nThe handsomest young man there,\nAnd his neck and his breast and his arms\nWere drowned in her long dim hair.\n\nO’Driscoll scattered the cards\nAnd out of his dream awoke:\nOld men and young men and young girls\nWere gone like a drifting smoke;\n\nBut he heard high up in the air\nA piper piping away,\nAnd never was piping so sad,\nAnd never was piping so gay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "hound-voice": { - "title": "“Hound Voice”", - "body": "Because we love bare hills and stunted trees\nAnd were the last to choose the settled ground,\nIts boredom of the desk or of the spade, because\nSo many years companioned by a hound,\nOur voices carry; and though slumber-bound,\nSome few half wake and half renew their choice,\nGive tongue, proclaim their hidden name--‘hound voice.’\n\nThe women that I picked spoke sweet and low\nAnd yet gave tongue. ‘Hound voices’ were they all.\nWe picked each other from afar and knew\nWhat hour of terror comes to test the soul,\nAnd in that terror’s name obeyed the call,\nAnd understood, what none have understood,\nThose images that waken in the blood.\n\nSome day we shall get up before the dawn\nAnd find our ancient hounds before the door,\nAnd wide awake know that the hunt is on;\nStumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,\nThen stumbling to the kill beside the shore;\nThen cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,\nAnd chants of victory amid the encircling hounds.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-hour-before-dawn": { - "title": "“The Hour before Dawn”", - "body": "A cursing rogue with a merry face,\nA bundle of rags upon a crutch,\nStumbled upon that windy place\nCalled Cruachan, and it was as much\nAs the one sturdy leg could do\nTo keep him upright while he cursed.\nHe had counted, where long years ago\nQueen Maeve’s nine Maines had been nursed,\nA pair of lapwings, one old sheep,\nAnd not a house to the plain’s edge,\nWhen close to his right hand a heap\nOf grey stones and a rocky ledge\nReminded him that he could make.\nIf he but shifted a few stones,\nA shelter till the daylight broke.\n\nBut while he fumbled with the stones\nThey toppled over; “Were it not\nI have a lucky wooden shin\nI had been hurt’; and toppling brought\nBefore his eyes, where stones had been,\nA dark deep hollow in the rock.\nHe gave a gasp and thought to have fled,\nBeing certain it was no right rock\nBecause an ancient history said\nHell Mouth lay open near that place,\nAnd yet stood still, because inside\nA great lad with a beery face\nHad tucked himself away beside\nA ladle and a tub of beer,\nAnd snored, no phantom by his look.\nSo with a laugh at his own fear\nHe crawled into that pleasant nook.”\n\n“Night grows uneasy near the dawn\nTill even I sleep light; but who\nHas tired of his own company?\nWhat one of Maeve’s nine brawling sons\nSick of his grave has wakened me?\nBut let him keep his grave for once\nThat I may find the sleep I have lost.”\n\n“What care I if you sleep or wake?\nBut I’Il have no man call me ghost.”\n\n“Say what you please, but from daybreak\nI’ll sleep another century.”\n\n“And I will talk before I sleep\nAnd drink before I talk.”\n And he\nHad dipped the wooden ladle deep\nInto the sleeper’s tub of beer\nHad not the sleeper started up.\n\n“Before you have dipped it in the beer\nI dragged from Goban’s mountain-top\nI’ll have assurance that you are able\nTo value beer; no half-legged fool\nShall dip his nose into my ladle\nMerely for stumbling on this hole\nIn the bad hour before the dawn.”\n\n“Why beer is only beer.” “But say\nI’ll sleep until the winter’s gone,\nOr maybe to Midsummer Day,\nAnd drink and you will sleep that length.”\n\n“I’d like to sleep till winter’s gone\nOr till the sun is in his srrength.\nThis blast has chilled me to the bone.”\n\n“I had no better plan at first.\nI thought to wait for that or this;\nMaybe the weather was accursed\nOr I had no woman there to kiss;\nSo slept for half a year or so;\nBut year by year I found that less\nGave me such pleasure I’d forgo\nEven a half-hour’s nothingness,\nAnd when at one year’s end I found\nI had not waked a single minute,\nI chosc this burrow under ground.\nI’ll sleep away all time within it:\nMy sleep were now nine centuries\nBut for those mornings when I find\nThe lapwing at their foolish dies\nAnd the sheep bleating at the wind\nAs when I also played the fool.”\n\nThe beggar in a rage began\nUpon his hunkers in the hole,\n“It’s plain that you are no right man\nTo mock at everything I love\nAs if it were not worth, the doing.\nI’d have a merry life enough\nIf a good Easter wind were blowing,\nAnd though the winter wind is bad\nI should not be too down in the mouth\nFor anything you did or said\nIf but this wind were in the south.”\n\n“You cry aloud, O would ’twere spring\nOr that the wind would shift a point,\nAnd do not know that you would bring,\nIf time were suppler in the joint,\nNeither the spring nor the south wind\nBut the hour when you shall pass away\nAnd leave no smoking wick behind,\nFor all life longs for the Last Day\nAnd there’s no man but cocks his ear\nTo know when Michael’s trumpet cries\nThat flesh and bone may disappear,\nAnd souls as if they were but sighs,\nAnd there be nothing but God left;\nBut, I aone being blessed keep\nLike some old rabbit to my cleft\nAnd wait Him in a drunken sleep.”\nHe dipped his ladle in the tub\nAnd drank and yawned and stretched him out,\nThe other shouted, “You would rob\nMy life of every pleasant thought\nAnd every comfortable thing,\nAnd so take that and that.” Thereon\nHe gave him a great pummelling,\nBut might have pummelled at a stone\nFor all the sleeper knew or cared;\nAnd after heaped up stone on stone,\nAnd then, grown weary, prayed and cursed\nAnd heaped up stone on stone again,\nAnd prayed and cursed and cursed and bed\nFrom Maeve and all that juggling plain,\nNor gave God thanks till overhead\nThe clouds were brightening with the dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "i-am-of-ireland": { - "title": "“I Am of Ireland”", - "body": "“I am of Ireland,\nAnd the Holy Land of Ireland,\nAnd time runs on,” cried she.\n“Come out of charity,\nCome dance with me in Ireland.”\n\n“One man, one man alone\nIn that outlandish gear,\nOne solitary man\nOf all that rambled there\nHad turned his stately head.\nThat is a long way off,\nAnd time runs on,” he said,\n“And the night grows rough.”\n\n“I am of Ireland,\nAnd the Holy Land of Ireland,\nAnd time runs on,” cried she.\n“Come out of charity\nAnd dance with me in Ireland.”\n\n“The fiddlers are all thumbs,\nOr the fiddle-string accursed,\nThe drums and the kettledrums\nAnd the trumpets all are burst,\nAnd the trombone,” cried he,\n“The trumpet and trombone,”\nAnd cocked a malicious eye,\n“But time runs on, runs on.”\n\n“I am of Ireland,\nAnd the Holy Land of Ireland,\nAnd time runs on,” cried she.\n“Come out of charity\nAnd dance with me in Ireland.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "i-thought-no-more-was-needed": { - "title": "“I thought no more was needed …”", - "body": "I thought no more was needed\nYouth to prolong\nThan dumb-bell and foil\nTo keep the body young.\nO who could have foretold\nThat the heart grows old?\n\nThough I have many words,\nWhat woman’s satisfied,\nI am no longer faint\nBecause at her side?\nO who could have foretold\nThat the heart grows old?\n\nI have not lost desire\nBut the heart that I had;\nI thought ’twould burn my body\nLaid on the death-bed,\nFor who could have foretold\nThat the heart grows old?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-image-from-a-past-life": { - "title": "“An Image from a past Life”", - "body": "> _He:_\nNever until this night have I been stirred.\nThe elaborate starlight throws a reflection\nOn the dark stream,\nTill all the eddies gleam;\nAnd thereupon there comes that scream\nFrom terrified, invisible beast or bird:\nImage of poignant recollection.\n\n> _She:_\nAn image of my heart that is smitten through\nOut of all likelihood, or reason,\nAnd when at last,\nYouth’s bitterness being past,\nI had thought that all my days were cast\nAmid most lovely places; smitten as though\nIt had not learned its lesson.\n\n> _He:_\nWhy have you laid your hands upon my eyes?\nWhat can have suddenly alarmed you\nWhereon ’twere best\nMy eyes should never rest?\nWhat is there but the slowly fading west,\nThe river imaging the flashing skies,\nAll that to this moment charmed you?\n\n> _She:_\nA Sweetheart from another life floats there\nAs though she had been forced to linger\nFrom vague distress\nOr arrogant loveliness,\nMerely to loosen out a tress\nAmong the starry eddies of her hair\nUpon the paleness of a finger.\n\n> _He:_\nBut why should you grow suddenly afraid\nAnd start--I at your shoulder--\nImagining\nThat any night could bring\nAn image up, or anything\nEven to eyes that beauty had driven mad,\nBut images to make me fonder?\n\n> _She:_\nNow She has thrown her arms above her head;\nWhether she threw them up to flout me,\nOr but to find,\nNow that no fingers bind,\nThat her hair streams upon the wind,\nI do not know, that know I am afraid\nOf the hovering thing night brought me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "imitated-from-the-japanese": { - "title": "“Imitated from the Japanese”", - "body": "A most astonishing thing--\nSeventy years have I lived;\n\n(Hurrah for the flowers of Spring,\nFor Spring is here again.)\n\nSeventy years have I lived\nNo ragged beggar-man,\nSeventy years have I lived,\nSeventy years man and boy,\nAnd never have I danced for joy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "in-memory": { - "title": "“In Memory”", - "body": "The light of evening, Lissadell,\nGreat windows open to the south,\nTwo girls in silk kimonos, both\nBeautiful, one a gazelle.\nBut a raving autumn shears\nBlossom from the summer’s wreath;\nThe older is condemned to death,\nPardoned, drags out lonely years\nConspiring among the ignorant.\nI know not what the younger dreams--\nSome vague Utopia--and she seems,\nWhen withered old and skeleton-gaunt,\nAn image of such politics.\nMany a time I think to seek\nOne or the other out and speak\nOf that old Georgian mansion, mix\nPictures of the mind, recall\nThat table and the talk of youth,\nTwo girls in silk kimonos, both\nBeautiful, one a gazelle.\n\nDear shadows, now you know it all,\nAll the folly of a fight\nWith a common wrong or right.\nThe innocent and the beautiful\nHave no enemy but time;\nArise and bid me strike a match\nAnd strike another till time catch;\nShould the conflagration climb,\nRun till all the sages know.\nWe the great gazebo built,\nThey convicted us of guilt;\nBid me strike a match and blow.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "in-taras-halls": { - "title": "“In Tara’s Halls”", - "body": "A man I praise that once in Tara’s Halls\nSaid to the woman on his knees, “Lie still.\nMy hundredth year is at an end. I think\nThat something is about to happen, I think\nThat the adventure of old age begins.\nTo many women I have said, ‘Lie still,’\nAnd given everything a woman needs,\nA roof, good clothes, passion, love perhaps,\nBut never asked for love; should I ask that,\nI shall be old indeed.”\n\n Thereon the man\nWent to the Sacred House and stood between\nThe golden plough and harrow and spoke aloud\nThat all attendants and the casual crowd might hear.\n“God I have loved, but should I ask return\nOf God or woman, the time were come to die.”\nHe bade, his hundred and first year at end,\nDiggers and carpenters make grave and coffin;\nSaw that the grave was deep, the coffin sound,\nSummoned the generations of his house,\nLay in the coffin, stopped his breath and died.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "in-the-seven-woods": { - "title": "“In the Seven Woods”", - "body": "I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods\nMake their faint thunder, and the garden bees\nHum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away\nThe unavailing outcries and the old bitterness\nThat empty the heart. I have forgot awhile\nTara uprooted, and new commonness\nUpon the throne and crying about the streets\nAnd hanging its paper flowers from post to post,\nBecause it is alone of all things happy.\nI am contented, for I know that Quiet\nWanders laughing and eating her wild heart\nAmong pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,\nWho but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs\nA cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "august" - } - } - }, - "the-indian-to-his-love": { - "title": "“The Indian to His Love”", - "body": "The island dreams under the dawn\nAnd great boughs drop tranquillity;\nThe peahens dance on a smooth lawn,\nA parrot sways upon a tree,\nRaging at his own image in the enamelled sea.\n\nHere we will moor our lonely ship\nAnd wander ever with woven hands,\nMurmuring softly lip to lip,\nAlong the grass, along the sands,\nMurmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:\n\nHow we alone of mortals are\nHid under quiet boughs apart,\nWhile our love grows an Indian star,\nA meteor of the burning heart,\nOne with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart,\n\nThe heavy boughs, the burnished dove\nThat moans and sighs a hundred days:\nHow when we die our shades will rove,\nWhen eve has hushed the feathered ways,\nWith vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-indian-upon-god": { - "title": "“The Indian upon God”", - "body": "I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees\nMy spirit rocked in evening light the rushes round my knees\nMy spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace\nAll dripping on a grassy slope and saw them cease to chase\nEach other round in circles and heard the eldest speak:\n_Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak\nIs an undying moorfowl and He lives beyond the sky.\nThe rains are from His dripping wing the moonbeams from His eye._\nI passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:\n_Who made the world and ruleth it He hangeth on a stalk_\n_For I am in His image made and all this tinkling tide\nIs but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide._\nA little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes\nBrimful of starlight and he said: _The Stamper of the Skies\nHe is a gentle roebuck; for how else I pray could He\nConceive a thing so sad and soft a gentle thing like me?_\nI passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:\n_Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay\nHe is a monstrous peacock and He waveth all the night\nHis languid tail above us lit with myriad spots of light._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "into-the-twilight": { - "title": "“Into the Twilight”", - "body": "Out-Worn heart, in a time out-worn,\nCome clear of the nets of wrong and right;\nLaugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,\nSigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.\n\nYour mother Eire is aways young,\nDew ever shining and twilight grey;\nThough hope fall from you and love decay,\nBurning in fires of a slanderous tongue.\n\nCome, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:\nFor there the mystical brotherhood\nOf sun and moon and hollow and wood\nAnd river and stream work out their will;\n\nAnd God stands winding His lonely horn,\nAnd time and the world are ever in flight;\nAnd love is less kind than the grey twilight,\nAnd hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death": { - "title": "“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”", - "body": "I know that I shall meet my fate\nSomewhere among the clouds above;\nThose that I fight I do not hate,\nThose that I guard I do not love;\nMy country is Kiltartan Cross,\nMy countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,\nNo likely end could bring them loss\nOr leave them happier than before.\nNor law, nor duty bade me fight,\nNor public men, nor cheering crowds,\nA lonely impulse of delight\nDrove to this tumult in the clouds;\nI balanced all, brought all to mind,\nThe years to come seemed waste of breath,\nA waste of breath the years behind\nIn balance with this life, this death.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "king-and-no-king": { - "title": "“King and No King”", - "body": "“Would it were anything but merely voice!”\nThe No King cried who after that was King,\nBecause he had not heard of anything\nThat balanced with a word is more than noise;\nYet Old Romance being kind, let him prevail\nSomewhere or somehow that I have forgot,\nThough he’d but cannon--Whereas we that had thought\nTo have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale\nHave been defeated by that pledge you gave\nIn momentary anger long ago;\nAnd I that have not your faith, how shall I know\nThat in the blinding light beyond the grave\nWe’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?\nThe hourly kindness, the day’s common speech.\nThe habitual content of each with each\nMen neither soul nor body has been crossed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-ladys-first-song": { - "title": "“The Lady’s First Song”", - "body": "I turn round\nLike a dumb beast in a show.\nNeither know what I am\nNor where I go,\nMy language beaten\nInto one name;\nI am in love\nAnd that is my shame.\nWhat hurts the soul\nMy soul adores,\nNo better than a beast\nUpon all fours.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lake-isle-of-innisfree": { - "title": "“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”", - "body": "I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree\nAnd a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made:\nNine bean rows will I have there a hive for the honey bee\nAnd live alone in the bee-loud glade.\n\nAnd I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow\nDropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;\nThere midnight’s all a glimmer and noon a purple glow\nAnd evening full of the linnet’s wings.\n\nI will arise and go now for always night and day\nI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;\nWhile I stand on the roadway or on the pavements gray\nI hear it in the deep heart’s core.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-lamentation-of-the-old-pensioner": { - "title": "“The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner”", - "body": "Although I shelter from the rain\nUnder a broken tree,\nMy chair was nearest to the fire\nIn every company\nThat talked of love or politics,\nEre Time transfigured me.\n\nThough lads are making pikes again\nFor some conspiracy,\nAnd crazy rascals rage their fill\nAt human tyranny,\nMy contemplations are of Time\nThat has transfigured me.\n\nThere’s not a woman turns her face\nUpon a broken tree,\nAnd yet the beauties that I loved\nAre in my memory;\nI spit into the face of Time\nThat has transfigured me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lapis-lazuli": { - "title": "“Lapis Lazuli”", - "body": "I have heard that hysterical women say\nThey are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,\nOf poets that are always gay,\nFor everybody knows or else should know\nThat if nothing drastic is done\nAeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,\nPitch like King Billy bomb-balls in\nUntil the town lie beaten flat.\n\nAll perform their tragic play,\nThere struts Hamlet, there is Lear,\nThat’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;\nYet they, should the last scene be there,\nThe great stage curtain about to drop,\nIf worthy their prominent part in the play,\nDo not break up their lines to weep.\nThey know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;\nGaiety transfiguring all that dread.\nAll men have aimed at, found and lost;\nBlack out; Heaven blazing into the head:\nTragedy wrought to its uttermost.\nThough Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,\nAnd all the drop scenes drop at once\nUpon a hundred thousand stages,\nIt cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.\n\nOn their own feet they came, or on shipboard,\nCamel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,\nOld civilisations put to the sword.\nThen they and their wisdom went to rack:\nNo handiwork of Callimachus\nWho handled marble as if it were bronze,\nMade draperies that seemed to rise\nWhen sea-wind swept the corner, stands;\nHis long lamp chimney shaped like the stem\nOf a slender palm, stood but a day;\nAll things fall and are built again\nAnd those that build them again are gay.\n\nTwo Chinamen, behind them a third,\nAre carved in Lapis Lazuli,\nOver them flies a long-legged bird\nA symbol of longevity;\nThe third, doubtless a serving-man,\nCarries a musical instrument.\n\nEvery discolouration of the stone,\nEvery accidental crack or dent\nSeems a water-course or an avalanche,\nOr lofty slope where it still snows\nThough doubtless plum or cherry-branch\nSweetens the little half-way house\nThose Chinamen climb towards, and I\nDelight to imagine them seated there;\nThere, on the mountain and the sky,\nOn all the tragic scene they stare.\nOne asks for mournful melodies;\nAccomplished fingers begin to play.\nTheir eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,\nTheir ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-last-confession": { - "title": "“A Last Confession”", - "body": "What lively lad most pleasured me\nOf all that with me lay?\nI answer that I gave my soul\nAnd loved in misery,\nBut had great pleasure with a lad\nThat I loved bodily.\n\nFlinging from his arms I laughed\nTo think his passion such\nHe fancied that I gave a soul\nDid but our bodies touch,\nAnd laughed upon his breast to think\nBeast gave beast as much.\n\nI gave what other women gave\nThat stepped out of their clothes.\nBut when this soul, its body off,\nNaked to naked goes,\nHe it has found shall find therein\nWhat none other knows,\n\nAnd give his own and take his own\nAnd rule in his own right;\nAnd though it loved in misery\nClose and cling so tight,\nThere’s not a bird of day that dare\nExtinguish that delight.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-leaders-of-the-crowd": { - "title": "“The Leaders of the Crowd”", - "body": "They must to keep their certainty accuse\nAll that are different of a base intent;\nPull down established honour; hawk for news\nWhatever their loose fantasy invent\nAnd murmur it with bated breath, as though\nThe abounding gutter had been Helicon\nOr calumny a song. How can they know\nTruth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,\nAnd there alone, that have no Solitude?\nSo the crowd come they care not what may come.\nThey have loud music, hope every day renewed\nAnd heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "leda-and-the-swan": { - "title": "“Leda and the Swan”", - "body": "A sudden blow: the great wings beating still\nAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressed\nBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,\nHe holds her helpless breast upon his breast.\n\nHow can those terrified vague fingers push\nThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?\nAnd how can body, laid in that white rush,\nBut feel the strange heart beating where it lies?\n\nA shudder in the loins engenders there\nThe broken wall, the burning roof and tower\nAnd Agamemnon dead.\n Being so caught up,\nSo mastered by the brute blood of the air,\nDid she put on his knowledge with his power\nBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "lines-written-in-dejection": { - "title": "“Lines Written in Dejection”", - "body": "When have I last looked on\nThe round green eyes and the long wavering bodies\nOf the dark leopards of the moon?\nAll the wild witches, those most noble ladies,\nFor all their broom-sticks and their tears,\nTheir angry tears, are gone.\n\nThe holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;\nI have nothing but the embittered sun;\nBanished heroic mother moon and vanished,\nAnd now that I have come to fifty years\nI must endure the timid sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-living-beauty": { - "title": "“The Living Beauty”", - "body": "I bade, because the wick and oil are spent\nAnd frozen are the channels of the blood,\nMy discontented heart to draw content\nFrom beauty that is cast out of a mould\nIn bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,\nAppears, but when wc have gone is gone again,\nBeing more indifferent to our solitude\nThan ’twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;\nThe living beauty is for younger men:\nWe cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "long-legged-fly": { - "title": "“Long-Legged Fly”", - "body": "That civilisation may not sink,\nIts great battle lost,\nQuiet the dog, tether the pony\nTo a distant post;\nOur master Caesar is in the tent\nWhere the maps ate spread,\nHis eyes fixed upon nothing,\nA hand under his head.\n\nLike a long-legged fly upon the stream\nHis mind moves upon silence.\n\nThat the topless towers be burnt\nAnd men recall that face,\nMove most gently if move you must\nIn this lonely place.\nShe thinks, part woman, three parts a child,\nThat nobody looks; her feet\nPractise a tinker shuffle\nPicked up on a street.\n\nLike a long-legged fly upon the stream\nHer mind moves upon silence.\n\nThat girls at puberty may find\nThe first Adam in their thought,\nShut the door of the Pope’s chapel,\nKeep those children out.\nThere on that scaffolding reclines\nMichael Angelo.\nWith no more sound than the mice make\nHis hand moves to and fro.\n\nLike a long-leggedfly upon the stream\nHis mind moves upon silence.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lover-asks-forgiveness-because-of-his-many-moods": { - "title": "“The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods”", - "body": "If this importunate heart trouble your peace\nWith words lighter than air,\nOr hopes that in mere hoping flicker and cease;\nCrumple the rose in your hair;\nAnd cover your lips with odorous twilight and say,\n“O Hearts of wind-blown flame!\nO Winds, older than changing of night and day,\nThat murmuring and longing came\nFrom marble cities loud with tabors of old\nIn dove-grey faery lands;\nFrom battle-banners, fold upon purple fold,\nQueens wrought with glimmering hands;\nThat saw young Niamh hover with love-lorn face\nAbove the wandering tide;\nAnd lingered in the hidden desolate place\nWhere the last Phoenix died,\nAnd wrapped the flames above his holy head;\nAnd still murmur and long:\nO piteous Hearts, changing till change be dead\nIn a tumultuous song’:\nAnd cover the pale blossoms of your breast\nWith your dim heavy hair,\nAnd trouble with a sigh for all things longing for rest\nThe odorous twilight there.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-lover-tells-of-the-rose-in-his-heart": { - "title": "“The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart”", - "body": "All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,\nThe cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,\nThe heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,\nAre wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.\n\nThe wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;\nI hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,\nWith the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold\nFor my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "lullaby": { - "title": "“Lullaby”", - "body": "Beloved, may your sleep be sound\nThat have found it where you fed.\nWhat were all the world’s alarms\nTo mighty paris when he found\nSleep upon a golden bed\nThat first dawn in Helen’s arms?\n\nSleep, beloved, such a sleep\nAs did that wild Tristram know\nWhen, the potion’s work being done,\nRoe could run or doe could leap\nUnder oak and beechen bough,\nRoe could leap or doe could run;\n\nSuch a sleep and sound as fell\nUpon Eurotas’ grassy bank\nWhen the holy bird, that there\nAccomplished his predestined will,\nFrom the limbs of Leda sank\nBut not from her protecting care.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-madness-of-king-goll": { - "title": "“The Madness of King Goll”", - "body": "I sat on cushioned otter skin:\nMy word was law from Ith to Emen\nAnd shook at Invar Amargin\nThe hearts of the world-troubling seamen.\nAnd drove tumult and war away\nFrom girl and boy and man and beast;\nThe fields grew fatter day by day\nThe wild fowl of the air increased;\nAnd every ancient Ollave said\nWhile he bent down his fading head\n“He drives away the Northern cold.”\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._\n\nI sat and mused and drank sweet wine;\nA herdsman came from inland valleys\nCrying the pirates drove his swine\nTo fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.\nI called my battle-breaking men\nAnd my loud brazen battle-cars\nFrom rolling vale and rivery glen\nAnd under the blinking of the stars\nFell on the pirates by the deep\nAnd hurled them in the gulph of sleep:\nThese hands won many a torque of gold.\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._\n\nBut slowly as I shouting slew\nAnd trampled in the bubbling mire\nIn my most secret spirit grew\nA whirling and a wandering fire:\nI stood: keen stars above me shone\nAround me shone keen eyes of men:\nI laughed aloud and hurried on\nBy rocky shore and rushy fen;\nI laughed because birds fluttered by\nAnd starlight gleamed and clouds flew high\nAnd rushes waved and waters rolled.\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._\n\nAnd now I wander in the woods\nWhen summer gluts the golden bees\nOr in autumnal solitudes\nArise the leopard-coloured trees;\nOr when along the wintry strands\nThe cormorants shiver on their rocks;\nI wander on and wave my hands\nAnd sing and shake my heavy locks.\nThe gray wolf knows me; by one ear\nI lead along the woodland deer;\nThe hares run by me growing bold.\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._\n\nI came upon a little town\nThat slumbered in the harvest moon\nAnd passed a-tiptoe up and down\nMurmuring to a fitful tune\nHow I have followed night and day\nA tramping of tremendous feet\nAnd saw where this old tympan lay\nDeserted on a doorway seat\nAnd bore it to the woods with me;\nOf some unhuman misery\nOur married voiced wildly trolled.\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._\n\nI sang how when day’s toil is done\nOrchil shakes out her long dark hair\nThat hides away the dying sun\nAnd sheds faint odours through the air:\nWhen my hand passed from wire to wire\nIt quenched with sound like falling dew\nThe whirling and the wandering fire;\nBut lift a mournful ulalu\nFor the kind wires are torn and still\nAnd I must wander wood and hill\nThrough summer’s heat and winter’s cold.\n_They will not hush the leaves a-flutter round me\nthe beech leaves old._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-magi": { - "title": "“The Magi”", - "body": "Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,\nIn their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones\nAppear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky\nWith all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,\nAnd all their helms of silver hovering side by side,\nAnd all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,\nBeing by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,\nThe uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "epiphany" - } - } - }, - "the-man-who-dreamed-of-faeryland": { - "title": "“The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”", - "body": "He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;\nHis heart hung all upon a silken dress,\nAnd he had known at last some tenderness,\nBefore earth took him to her stony care;\nBut when a man poured fish into a pile,\nIt Seemed they raised their little silver heads,\nAnd sang what gold morning or evening sheds\nUpon a woven world-forgotten isle\nWhere people love beside the ravelled seas;\nThat Time can never mar a lover’s vows\nUnder that woven changeless roof of boughs:\nThe singing shook him out of his new ease.\n\nHe wandered by the sands of Lissadell;\nHis mind ran all on money cares and fears,\nAnd he had known at last some prudent years\nBefore they heaped his grave under the hill;\nBut while he passed before a plashy place,\nA lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth\nSang that somewhere to north or west or south\nThere dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race\nUnder the golden or the silver skies;\nThat if a dancer stayed his hungry foot\nIt seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:\nAnd at that singing he was no more wise.\n\nHe mused beside the well of Scanavin,\nHe mused upon his mockers: without fail\nHis sudden vengeance were a country tale,\nWhen earthy night had drunk his body in;\nBut one small knot-grass growing by the pool\nSang where--unnecessary cruel voice--\nOld silence bids its chosen race rejoice,\nWhatever ravelled waters rise and fall\nOr stormy silver fret the gold of day,\nAnd midnight there enfold them like a fleece\nAnd lover there by lover be at peace.\nThe tale drove his fine angry mood away.\n\nHe slept under the hill of Lugnagall;\nAnd might have known at last unhaunted sleep\nUnder that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,\nNow that the earth had taken man and all:\nDid not the worms that spired about his bones\nproclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry\nThat God has laid His fingers on the sky,\nThat from those fingers glittering summer runs\nUpon the dancer by the dreamless wave.\nWhy should those lovers that no lovers miss\nDream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?\nThe man has found no comfort in the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "man-and-the-echo": { - "title": "“Man and the Echo”", - "body": "> _Man:_\nIn a cleft that’s christened Alt\nUnder broken stone I halt\nAt the bottom of a pit\nThat broad noon has never lit,\nAnd shout a secret to the stone.\nAll that I have said and done,\nNow that I am old and ill,\nTurns into a question till\nI lie awake night after night\nAnd never get the answers right.\nDid that play of mine send out\nCertain men the English shot?\nDid words of mine put too great strain\nOn that woman’s reeling brain?\nCould my spoken words have checked\nThat whereby a house lay wrecked?\nAnd all seems evil until I\nSleepless would lie down and die.\n\n> _Echo:_\nLie down and die.\n\n> _Man:_\nThat were to shirk\nThe spiritual intellect’s great work,\nAnd shirk it in vain. There is no release\nIn a bodkin or disease,\nNor can there be work so great\nAs that which cleans man’s dirty slate.\nWhile man can still his body keep\nWine or love drug him to sleep,\nWaking he thanks the Lord that he\nHas body and its stupidity,\nBut body gone he sleeps no more,\nAnd till his intellect grows sure\nThat all’s arranged in one clear view,\npursues the thoughts that I pursue,\nThen stands in judgment on his soul,\nAnd, all work done, dismisses all\nOut of intellect and sight\nAnd sinks at last into the night.\n\n> _Echo:_\nInto the night.\n\n> _Man:_\nO Rocky Voice,\nShall we in that great night rejoice?\nWhat do we know but that we face\nOne another in this place?\nBut hush, for I have lost the theme,\nIts joy or night-seem but a dream;\nUp there some hawk or owl has struck,\nDropping out of sky or rock,\nA stricken rabbit is crying out,\nAnd its cry distracts my thought.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mask": { - "title": "“The Mask”", - "body": "“Put off that mask of burning gold\nWith emerald eyes.”\n“O no, my dear, you make so bold\nTo find if hearts be wild and wise,\nAnd yet not cold.”\n\n“I would but find what’s there to find,\nLove or deceit.”\n“It was the mask engaged your mind,\nAnd after set your heart to beat,\nNot what’s behind.”\n\n“But lest you are my enemy,\nI must enquire.”\n“O no, my dear, let all that be;\nWhat matter, so there is but fire\nIn you, in me?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-meditation-of-the-old-fisherman": { - "title": "“The Meditation of the Old Fisherman”", - "body": "You waves though you dance by my feet like children at play\nThough you glow and you glance though you purr and you dart;\nIn the Junes that were warmer than these are the waves were more gay\n_When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart_.\n\nThe herring are not in the tides as they were of old;\nMy sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cart\nThat carried the take to Sligo town to be sold\n_When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart_.\n\nAnd ah you proud maiden you are not so fair when his oar\nIs heard on the water as they were the proud and apart\nWho paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore\n_When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart_.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "june" - } - } - }, - "meditations-in-time-of-civil-war": { - "title": "“Meditations in Time of Civil War”", - "body": "# I. _Ancestral Houses_\n\nSurely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,\nAmid the rustle of his planted hills,\nLife overflows without ambitious pains;\nAnd rains down life until the basin spills,\nAnd mounts more dizzy high the more it rains\nAs though to choose whatever shape it wills\nAnd never stoop to a mechanical\nOr servile shape, at others’ beck and call.\n\nMere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not Sung\nHad he not found it certain beyond dreams\nThat out of life’s own self-delight had sprung\nThe abounding glittering jet; though now it seems\nAs if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung\nOut of the obscure dark of the rich streams,\nAnd not a fountain, were the symbol which\nShadows the inherited glory of the rich.\n\nSome violent bitter man, some powerful man\nCalled architect and artist in, that they,\nBitter and violent men, might rear in stone\nThe sweetness that all longed for night and day,\nThe gentleness none there had ever known;\nBut when the master’s buried mice can play.\nAnd maybe the great-grandson of that house,\nFor all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.\n\nO what if gardens where the peacock strays\nWith delicate feet upon old terraces,\nOr else all Juno from an urn displays\nBefore the indifferent garden deities;\nO what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways\nWhere slippered Contemplation finds his ease\nAnd Childhood a delight for every sense,\nBut take our greatness with our violence?\n\nWhat if the glory of escutcheoned doors,\nAnd buildings that a haughtier age designed,\nThe pacing to and fro on polished floors\nAmid great chambers and long galleries, lined\nWith famous portraits of our ancestors;\nWhat if those things the greatest of mankind\nConsider most to magnify, or to bless,\nBut take our greatness with our bitterness?\n\n\n# II. _My House_\n\nAn ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,\nA farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,\nAn acre of stony ground,\nWhere the symbolic rose can break in flower,\nOld ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,\nThe sound of the rain or sound\nOf every wind that blows;\nThe stilted water-hen\nCrossing Stream again\nScared by the splashing of a dozen cows;\n\nA winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,\nA grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,\nA candle and written page.\nIl Penseroso’s Platonist toiled on\nIn some like chamber, shadowing forth\nHow the daemonic rage\nImagined everything.\nBenighted travellers\nFrom markets and from fairs\nHave seen his midnight candle glimmering.\n\nTwo men have founded here. A man-at-arms\nGathered a score of horse and spent his days\nIn this tumultuous spot,\nWhere through long wars and sudden night alarms\nHis dwinding score and he seemed castaways\nForgetting and forgot;\nAnd I, that after me\nMy bodily heirs may find,\nTo exalt a lonely mind,\nBefitting emblems of adversity.\n\n\n# III. _My Table_\n\nTwo heavy trestles, and a board\nWhere Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,\nBy pen and paper lies,\nThat it may moralise\nMy days out of their aimlessness.\nA bit of an embroidered dress\nCovers its wooden sheath.\nChaucer had not drawn breath\nWhen it was forged. In Sato’s house,\nCurved like new moon, moon-luminous\nIt lay five hundred years.\nYet if no change appears\nNo moon; only an aching heart\nConceives a changeless work of art.\nOur learned men have urged\nThat when and where ’twas forged\nA marvellous accomplishment,\nIn painting or in pottery, went\nFrom father unto son\nAnd through the centuries ran\nAnd seemed unchanging like the sword.\nSoul’s beauty being most adored,\nMen and their business took\nMe soul’s unchanging look;\nFor the most rich inheritor,\nKnowing that none could pass Heaven’s door,\nThat loved inferior art,\nHad such an aching heart\nThat he, although a country’s talk\nFor silken clothes and stately walk.\nHad waking wits; it seemed\nJuno’s peacock screamed.\n\n\n# IV. _My Descendants_\n\nHaving inherited a vigorous mind\nFrom my old fathers, I must nourish dreams\nAnd leave a woman and a man behind\nAs vigorous of mind, and yet it seems\nLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,\nScarce spread a glory to the morning beams,\nBut the torn petals strew the garden plot;\nAnd there’s but common greenness after that.\n\nAnd what if my descendants lose the flower\nThrough natural declension of the soul,\nThrough too much business with the passing hour,\nThrough too much play, or marriage with a fool?\nMay this laborious stair and this stark tower\nBecome a roofless min that the owl\nMay build in the cracked masonry and cry\nHer desolation to the desolate sky.\n\nThe primum Mobile that fashioned us\nHas made the very owls in circles move;\nAnd I, that count myself most prosperous,\nSeeing that love and friendship are enough,\nFor an old neighbour’s friendship chose the house\nAnd decked and altered it for a girl’s love,\nAnd know whatever flourish and decline\nThese stones remain their monument and mine.\n\n\n# V. _The Road at My Door_\n\nAn affable Irregular,\nA heavily-built Falstaffian man,\nComes cracking jokes of civil war\nAs though to die by gunshot were\nThe finest play under the sun.\n\nA brown Lieutenant and his men,\nHalf dressed in national uniform,\nStand at my door, and I complain\nOf the foul weather, hail and rain,\nA pear-tree broken by the storm.\n\nI count those feathered balls of soot\nThe moor-hen guides upon the stream.\nTo silence the envy in my thought;\nAnd turn towards my chamber, caught\nIn the cold snows of a dream.\n\n\n# VI. _The Stare’s Nest by My Window_\n\nThe bees build in the crevices\nOf loosening masonry, and there\nThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.\nMy wall is loosening; honey-bees,\nCome build in the empty house of the state.\n\nWe are closed in, and the key is turned\nOn our uncertainty; somewhere\nA man is killed, or a house burned,\nYet no clear fact to be discerned:\nCome build in he empty house of the stare.\n\nA barricade of stone or of wood;\nSome fourteen days of civil war;\nLast night they trundled down the road\nThat dead young soldier in his blood:\nCome build in the empty house of the stare.\n\nWe had fed the heart on fantasies,\nThe heart’s grown brutal from the fare;\nMore Substance in our enmities\nThan in our love; O honey-bees,\nCome build in the empty house of the stare.\n\n\n# VII. _I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness_\n\nI climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,\nA mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,\nValley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon\nThat seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,\nA glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind\nAnd those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.\nFrenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;\nMonstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.\n\n“Vengeance upon the murderers,” the cry goes up,\n“Vengeance for Jacques Molay.” In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,\nThe rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,\nTrooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,\nPlunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide\nFor the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray\nBecause of all that senseless tumult, all but cried\nFor vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.\n\nTheir legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,\nMagical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.\nThe ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,\nRemembered out of Babylonian almanacs,\nHave closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool\nWhere even longing drowns under its own excess;\nNothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full\nOf their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.\n\nThe cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,\nThe quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,\nOr eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,\nGive place to an indifferent multitude, give place\nTo brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,\nNor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,\nNothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,\nThe innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.\n\nI turn away and shut the door, and on the stair\nWonder how many times I could have proved my worth\nIn something that all others understand or share;\nBut O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth\nA company of friends, a conscience set at ease,\nIt had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,\nThe half-read wisdom of daemonic images,\nSuffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meeting": { - "title": "“Meeting”", - "body": "Hidden by old age awhile\nIn masker’s cloak and hood,\nEach hating what the other loved,\nFace to face we stood:\n“That I have met with such,” said he,\n“Bodes me little good.”\n\n“Let others boast their fill,” said I,\n“But never dare to boast\nThat such as I had such a man\nFor lover in the past;\nSay that of living men I hate\nSuch a man the most.”\n\n“A loony’d boast of such a love,”\nHe in his rage declared:\nBut such as he for such as me--\nCould we both discard\nThis beggarly habiliment--\nHad found a sweeter word.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-memory-of-youth": { - "title": "“A Memory of Youth”", - "body": "The moments passed as at a play;\nI had the wisdom love brings forth;\nI had my share of mother-wit,\nAnd yet for all that I could say,\nAnd though I had her praise for it,\nA cloud blown from the cut-throat North\nSuddenly hid Love’s moon away.\n\nBelieving every word I said,\nI praised her body and her mind\nTill pride had made her eyes grow bright,\nAnd pleasure made her cheeks grow red,\nAnd vanity her footfall light,\nYet we, for all that praise, could find\nNothing but darkness overhead.\n\nWe sat as silent as a stone,\nWe knew, though she’d not said a word,\nThat even the best of love must die,\nAnd had been savagely undone\nWere it not that Love upon the cry\nOf a most ridiculous little bird\nTore from the clouds his marvellous moon.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "memory": { - "title": "“Memory”", - "body": "One had a lovely face,\nAnd two or three had charm,\nBut charm and face were in vain\nBecause the mountain grass\nCannot but keep the form\nWhere the mountain hare has lain.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-mermaid": { - "title": "“The Mermaid”", - "body": "A mermaid found a swimming lad,\nPicked him for her own,\nPressed her body to his body,\nLaughed; and plunging down\nForgot in cruel happiness\nThat even lovers drown.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "meru": { - "title": "“Meru”", - "body": "Civilization is hooped together, brought\nUnder a rule, under the semblance of peace\nBy manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought\nAnd he, despite his terror, cannot cease\nRavening through century after century,\nRavening, raging and uprooting that he may come\nInto the desolation of reality:\nEgypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome.\n\nHermits upon Mount Meru or Everest\nCaverned in night under the drifted snow,\nOr where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast\nBeat down upon their naked bodies, know\nThat day brings round the night, that before dawn\nHis glory and his monuments are gone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-mountain-tomb": { - "title": "“The Mountain Tomb”", - "body": "Pour wine and dance if manhood still have pride,\nBring roses if the rose be yet in bloom;\nThe cataract smokes upon the mountain side,\nOur Father Rosicross is in his tomb.\n\nPull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet\nThat there be no foot silent in the room\nNor mouth from kissing, nor from wine unwet;\nOur Father Rosicross is in his tomb.\n\nIn vain, in pain; the cataract still cries;\nThe everlasting taper lights the gloom;\nAll wisdom shut into his onyx eyes,\nOur Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "never-give-all-the-heart": { - "title": "“Never Give All the Heart”", - "body": "Never give all the heart, for love\nWill hardly seem worth thinking of\nTo passionate women if it seem\nCertain, and they never dream\nThat it fades out from kiss to kiss;\nFor everything that’s lovely is\nBut a brief, dreamy, kind delight.\nO never give the heart outright,\nFor they, for all smooth lips can say,\nHave given their hearts up to the play.\nAnd who could play it well enough\nIf deaf and dumb and blind with love?\nHe that made this knows all the cost,\nFor he gave all his heart and lost.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-new-faces": { - "title": "“The New Faces”", - "body": "If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,\nNeither catalpa tree nor scented lime\nShould hear my living feet, nor would I tread\nWhere we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time.\nLet the new faces play what tricks they will\nIn the old rooms; night can outbalance day,\nOur shadows rove the garden gravel still,\nThe living seem more shadowy than they.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "news-for-the-delphic-oracle": { - "title": "“News for the Delphic Oracle”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThere all the golden codgers lay,\nThere the silver dew,\nAnd the great water sighed for love,\nAnd the wind sighed too.\nMan-picker Niamh leant and sighed\nBy Oisin on the grass;\nThere sighed amid his choir of love\nTall pythagoras.\nplotinus came and looked about,\nThe salt-flakes on his breast,\nAnd having stretched and yawned awhile\nLay sighing like the rest.\n\n\n# II.\n\nStraddling each a dolphin’s back\nAnd steadied by a fin,\nThose Innocents re-live their death,\nTheir wounds open again.\nThe ecstatic waters laugh because\nTheir cries are sweet and strange,\nThrough their ancestral patterns dance,\nAnd the brute dolphins plunge\nUntil, in some cliff-sheltered bay\nWhere wades the choir of love\nProffering its sacred laurel crowns,\nThey pitch their burdens off.\n\n\n# III.\n\nSlim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,\nPeleus on Thetis stares.\nHer limbs are delicate as an eyelid,\nLove has blinded him with tears;\nBut Thetis’ belly listens.\nDown the mountain walls\nFrom where pan’s cavern is\nIntolerable music falls.\nFoul goat-head, brutal arm appear,\nBelly, shoulder, bum,\nFlash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs\nCopulate in the foam.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "nineteen-hundred-and-nineteen": { - "title": "“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”", - "body": "# I.\n\nMany ingenious lovely things are gone\nThat seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,\nprotected from the circle of the moon\nThat pitches common things about. There stood\nAmid the ornamental bronze and stone\nAn ancient image made of olive wood--\nAnd gone are phidias’ famous ivories\nAnd all the golden grasshoppers and bees.\n\nWe too had many pretty toys when young:\nA law indifferent to blame or praise,\nTo bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong\nMelt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;\nPublic opinion ripening for so long\nWe thought it would outlive all future days.\nO what fine thought we had because we thought\nThat the worst rogues and rascals had died out.\n\nAll teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,\nAnd a great army but a showy thing;\nWhat matter that no cannon had been turned\nInto a ploughshare? Parliament and king\nThought that unless a little powder burned\nThe trumpeters might burst with trumpeting\nAnd yet it lack all glory; and perchance\nThe guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.\n\nNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare\nRides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery\nCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,\nTo crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;\nThe night can sweat with terror as before\nWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,\nAnd planned to bring the world under a rule,\nWho are but weasels fighting in a hole.\n\nHe who can read the signs nor sink unmanned\nInto the half-deceit of some intoxicant\nFrom shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,\nWhether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent\nOn master-work of intellect or hand,\nNo honour leave its mighty monument,\nHas but one comfort left: all triumph would\nBut break upon his ghostly solitude.\nBut is there any comfort to be found?\n\nMan is in love and loves what vanishes,\nWhat more is there to say? That country round\nNone dared admit, if Such a thought were his,\nIncendiary or bigot could be found\nTo burn that stump on the Acropolis,\nOr break in bits the famous ivories\nOr traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "no-second-troy": { - "title": "“No Second Troy”", - "body": "Why should I blame her that she filled my days\nWith misery, or that she would of late\nHave taught to ignorant men most violent ways,\nOr hurled the little streets upon the great,\nHad they but courage equal to desire?\nWhat could have made her peaceful with a mind\nThat nobleness made simple as a fire,\nWith beauty like a tightened bow, a kind\nThat is not natural in an age like this,\nBeing high and solitary and most stern?\nWhy, what could she have done, being what she is?\nWas there another Troy for her to burn?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "o-do-not-love-too-long": { - "title": "“O Do Not Love too Long”", - "body": "Sweetheart, do not love too long:\nI loved long and long,\nAnd grew to be out of fashion\nLike an old song.\n\nAll through the years of our youth\nNeither could have known\nTheir own thought from the other’s,\nWe were so much at one.\n\nBut O, in a minute she changed--\nO do not love too long,\nOr you will grow out of fashion\nLike an old song.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-age-of-queen-maeve": { - "title": "“The Old Age of Queen Maeve”", - "body": "A certain poet in outlandish clothes\nGathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane,\nTalked of his country and its people, sang\nTo some stringed instrument none there had seen,\nA wall behind his back, over his head\nA latticed window. His glance went up at time\nAs though one listened there, and his voice sank\nOr let its meaning mix into the strings.\n\nMaeve the great queen was pacing to and fro,\nBetween the walls covered with beaten bronze,\nIn her high house at Cruachan; the long hearth,\nFlickering with ash and hazel, but half showed\nWhere the tired horse-boys lay upon the rushes,\nOr on the benches underneath the walls,\nIn comfortable sleep; all living slept\nBut that great queen, who more than half the night\nHad paced from door to fire and fire to door.\nThough now in her old age, in her young age\nShe had been beautiful in that old way\nThat’s all but gone; for the proud heart is gone,\nAnd the fool heart of the counting-house fears all\nBut Soft beauty and indolent desire.\nShe could have called over the rim of the world\nWhatever woman’s lover had hit her fancy,\nAnd yet had been great-bodied and great-limbed,\nFashioned to be the mother of strong children;\nAnd she’d had lucky eyes and high heart,\nAnd wisdom that caught fire like the dried flax,\nAt need, and made her beautiful and fierce,\nSudden and laughing.\n O unquiet heart,\nWhy do you praise another, praising her,\nAs if there were no tale but your own tale\nWorth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?\nHave I not bid you tell of that great queen\nWho has been buried some two thousand years?\n\nWhen night was at its deepest, a wild goose\nCried from the porter’s lodge, and with long clamour’\nShook the ale-horns and shields upon their hooks;\nBut the horse-boys slept on, as though some power\nHad filled the house with Druid heaviness;\nAnd wondering who of the many-changing Sidhe\nHad come as in the old times to counsel her,\nMaeve walked, yet with slow footfall, being old,\nTo that small chamber by the outer gate.\nThe porter slept, although he sat upright\nWith still and stony limbs and open eyes.\nMaeve waited, and when that ear-piercing noise\nBroke from his parted lips and broke again,\nShe laid a hand on either of his shoulders,\nAnd shook him wide awake, and bid him say\nWho of the wandering many-changing ones\nHad troubled his sleep. But all he had to say\nWas that, the air being heavy and the dogs\nMore still than they had been for a good month,\nHe had fallen asleep, and, though he had dreamed nothing,\nHe could remember when he had had fine dreams.\nIt was before the time of the great war\nOver the White-Horned Bull and the Brown Bull.\n\nShe turned away; he turned again to sleep\nThat no god troubled now, and, wondering\nWhat matters were afoot among the Sidhe,\nMaeve walked through that great hall, and with a sigh\nLifted the curtain of her sleeping-room,\nRemembering that she too had seemed divine\nTo many thousand eyes, and to her own\nOne that the generations had long waited\nThat work too difficult for mortal hands\nMight be accomplished, Bunching the curtain up\nShe saw her husband Ailell sleeping there,\nAnd thought of days when he’d had a straight body,\nAnd of that famous Fergus, Nessa’s husband,\nWho had been the lover of her middle life.\n\nSuddenly Ailell spoke out of his sleep,\nAnd not with his own voice or a man’s voice,\nBut with the burning, live, unshaken voice\nOf those that, it may be, can never age.\nHe said, “High Queen of Cruachan and Magh Ai,\nA king of the Great Plain would speak with you.”\nAnd with glad voice Maeve answered him, “What king\nOf the far-wandering shadows has come to me,\nAs in the old days when they would come and go\nAbout my threshold to counsel and to help?”\nThe parted lips replied, “I seek your help,\nFor I am Aengus, and I am crossed in love.”\n“How may a mortal whose life gutters out\nHelp them that wander with hand clasping hand,\nTheir haughty images that cannot wither,\nFor all their beauty’s like a hollow dream,\nMirrored in streams that neither hail nor rain\nNor the cold North has troubled?”\n He replied,\n“I am from those rivers and I bid you call\nThe children of the Maines out of sleep,\nAnd set them digging under Bual’s hill.\nWe shadows, while they uproot his earthy housc,\nWill overthrow his shadows and carry off\nCaer, his blue-eyed daughter that I love.\nI helped your fathers when they built these walls,\nAnd I would have your help in my great need,\nQueen of high Cruachan.”\n “I obey your will\nWith speedy feet and a most thankful heart:\nFor you have been, O Aengus of the birds,\nOur giver of good counsel and good luck.”\nAnd with a groan, as if the mortal breath\nCould but awaken sadly upon lips\nThat happier breath had moved, her husband turned\nFace downward, tossing in a troubled sleep;\nBut Maeve, and not with a slow feeble foot,\nCame to the threshold of the painted house\nWhere her grandchildren slept, and cried aloud,\nUntil the pillared dark began to stir\nWith shouting and the clang of unhooked arms.\nShe told them of the many-changing ones;\nAnd all that night, and all through the next day\nTo middle night, they dug into the hill.\nAt middle night great cats with silver claws,\nBodies of shadow and blind eyes like pearls,\nCame up out of the hole, and red-eared hounds\nWith long white bodies came out of the air\nSuddenly, and ran at them and harried them.\n\nThe Maines’ children dropped their spades, and stood\nWith quaking joints and terror-stricken faces,\nTill Maeve called out, “These are but common men.\nThe Maines’ children have not dropped their spades\nBecause Earth, crazy for its broken power,\nCasts up a Show and the winds answer it\nWith holy shadows.” Her high heart was glad,\nAnd when the uproar ran along the grass\nShe followed with light footfall in the midst,\nTill it died out where an old thorn-tree stood.\n\nFriend of these many years, you too had stood\nWith equal courage in that whirling rout;\nFor you, although you’ve not her wandering heart,\nHave all that greatness, and not hers alone,\nFor there is no high story about queens\nIn any ancient book but tells of you;\nAnd when I’ve heard how they grew old and died,\nOr fell into unhappiness, I’ve said,\n“She will grow old and die, and she has wept!”\nAnd when I’d write it out anew, the words,\nHalf crazy with the thought, She too has wept!\nOutrun the measure.\n I’d tell of that great queen\nWho stood amid a silence by the thorn\nUntil two lovers came out of the air\nWith bodies made out of soft fire. The one,\nAbout whose face birds wagged their fiery wings,\nSaid, “Aengus and his sweetheart give their thanks\nTo Maeve and to Maeve’s household, owing all\nIn owing them the bride-bed that gives peace.”\nThen Maeve: “O Aengus, Master of all lovers,\nA thousand years ago you held high ralk\nWith the first kings of many-pillared Cruachan.\nO when will you grow weary?”\n They had vanished,\nBut our of the dark air over her head there came\nA murmur of soft words and meeting lips.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "old-memory": { - "title": "“Old Memory”", - "body": "O thought, fly to her when the end of day\nAwakens an old memory, and say,\n“Your strength, that is so lofty and fierce and kind,\nIt might call up a new age, calling to mind\nThe queens that were imagined long ago,\nIs but half yours: he kneaded in the dough\nThrough the long years of youth, and who would have thought\nIt all, and more than it all, would come to naught,\nAnd that dear words meant nothing?” But enough,\nFor when we have blamed the wind we can blame love;\nOr, if there needs be more, be nothing said\nThat would be harsh for children that have strayed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-men-admiring-themselves-in-the-water": { - "title": "“The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water”", - "body": "I heard the old, old men say,\n“Everything alters,\nAnd one by one we drop away.”\nThey had hands like claws, and their knees\nWere twisted like the old thorn-trees\nBy the waters.\nI heard the old, old men say,\n“All that’s beautiful drifts away\nLike the waters.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-old-stone-cross": { - "title": "“The Old Stone Cross”", - "body": "A statesman is an easy man,\nHe tells his lies by rote;\nA journalist makes up his lies\nAnd takes you by the throat;\nSo stay at home’ and drink your beer\nAnd let the neighbours’ vote,\n Said the man in the golden breastplate\n Under the old stone Cross.\n\nBecause this age and the next age\nEngender in the ditch,\nNo man can know a happy man\nFrom any passing wretch;\nIf Folly link with Elegance\nNo man knows which is which,\n Said the man in the golden breastplate\n Under the old stone Cross.\n\nBut actors lacking music\nDo most excite my spleen,\nThey say it is more human\nTo shuffle, grunt and groan,\nNot knowing what unearthly stuff\nRounds a mighty scene,\n Said the man in the golden breastplate\n Under the old stone Cross.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "on-a-political-prisoner": { - "title": "“On a Political Prisoner”", - "body": "She that but little patience knew,\nFrom childhood on, had now so much\nA grey gull lost its fear and flew\nDown to her cell and there alit,\nAnd there endured her fingers’ touch\nAnd from her fingers ate its bit.\n\nDid she in touching that lone wing\nRecall the years before her mind\nBecame a bitter, an abstract thing,\nHer thought some popular enmity:\nBlind and leader of the blind\nDrinking the foul ditch where they lie?\n\nWhen long ago I saw her ride\nUnder Ben Bulben to the meet,\nThe beauty of her country-side\nWith all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,\nShe seemed to have grown clean and sweet\nLike any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:\n\nSea-borne, or balanced on the air\nWhen first it sprang out of the nest\nUpon some lofty rock to stare\nUpon the cloudy canopy,\nWhile under its storm-beaten breast\nCried out the hollows of the sea.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "owen-aherne-and-his-dancers": { - "title": "“Owen Aherne and His Dancers”", - "body": "# I.\n\nA strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought\nUpon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,\nShould find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.\nIt could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.\n\nThe south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,\nThe west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.\nIt feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempestthere;\nIt feared the hurt that shc could give and therefore it went mad.\n\nI can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,\nI have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,\nBut O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;\nI ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe Heart behind its rib laughed out. “You have called me mad,” it said,\n“Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;\nHow could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?\nLet the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.”\n\n“You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,” I replied.\n“And all those lies have but one end, poor wretches to betray;\nI did not find in any cage the woman at my side.\nO but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.”\n\n“Speak all your mind,” my Heart sang out, “speak all your mind; who cares,\nNow that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake\nHer childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years?\nO let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "peace": { - "title": "“Peace”", - "body": "Ah, that Time could touch a form\nThat could show what Homer’s age\nBred to be a hero’s wage.\n“Were not all her life but storm\nWould not painters paint a form\nOf such noble lines,” I said,\n“Such a delicate high head,\nAll that sternness amid charm,\nAll that sweetness amid strength?”\nAh, but peace that comes at length,\nCame when Time had touched her form.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-phases-of-the-moon": { - "title": "“The Phases of the Moon”", - "body": "_An old man cocked his car upon a bridge;\nHe and his friend, their faces to the South,\nHad trod the uneven road. Their hoots were soiled,\nTheir Connemara cloth worn out of shape;\nThey had kept a steady pace as though their beds,\nDespite a dwindling and late-risen moon,\nWere distant still. An old man cocked his ear._\n\n> _Aherne:_\nWhat made that Sound?\n\n> _Robartes:_\nA rat or water-hen\nSplashed, or an otter slid into the stream.\nWe are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower,\nAnd the light proves that he is reading still.\nHe has found, after the manner of his kind,\nMere images; chosen this place to live in\nBecause, it may be, of the candle-light\nFrom the far tower where Milton’s Platonist\nSat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:\nThe lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,\nAn image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;\nAnd now he seeks in book or manuscript\nWhat he shall never find.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nWhy should not you\nWho know it all ring at his door, and speak\nJust truth enough to show that his whole life\nWill scarcely find for him a broken crust\nOf all those truths that are your daily bread;\nAnd when you have spoken take the roads again?\n\n> _Robartes:_\nHe wrote of me in that extravagant style\nHe had learnt from pater, and to round his tale\nSaid I was dead; and dead I choose to be.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nSing me the changes of the moon once more;\nTrue song, though speech: “mine author sung it me.”\n\n> _Robartes:_\nTwenty-and-eight the phases of the moon,\nThe full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents,\nTwenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty\nThe cradles that a man must needs be rocked in:\nFor there’s no human life at the full or the dark.\nFrom the first crescent to the half, the dream\nBut summons to adventure and the man\nIs always happy like a bird or a beast;\nBut while the moon is rounding towards the full\nHe follows whatever whim’s most difficult\nAmong whims not impossible, and though scarred.\nAs with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind,\nHis body moulded from within his body\nGrows comelier. Eleven pass, and then\nAthene takes Achilles by the hair,\nHector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,\nBecause the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.\nAnd yet, twice born, twice buried, grow he must,\nBefore the full moon, helpless as a worm.\nThe thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war\nIn its own being, and when that war’s begun\nThere is no muscle in the arm; and after,\nUnder the frenzy of the fourteenth moon,\nThe soul begins to tremble into stillness,\nTo die into the labyrinth of itself!\n\n> _Aherne:_\nSing out the song; sing to the end, and sing\nThe strange reward of all that discipline.\n\n> _Robartes:_\nAll thought becomes an image and the soul\nBecomes a body: that body and that soul\nToo perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,\nToo lonely for the traffic of the world:\nBody and soul cast out and cast away\nBeyond the visible world.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nAll dreams of the soul\nEnd in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.\nRobartes, Have you not always known it?\n\n> _Aherne:_\nThe song will have it\nThat those that we have loved got their long fingers\nFrom death, and wounds, or on Sinai’s top,\nOr from some bloody whip in their own hands.\nThey ran from cradle to cradle till at last\nTheir beauty dropped out of the loneliness\nOf body and soul.\n\n> _Robartes:_\nThe lover’s heart knows that.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nIt must be that the terror in their eyes\nIs memory or foreknowledge of the hour\nWhen all is fed with light and heaven is bare.\n\n> _Robartes:_\nWhen the moon’s full those creatures of the full\nAre met on the waste hills by countrymen\nWho shudder and hurry by: body and soul\nEstranged amid the strangeness of themselves,\nCaught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye\nFixed upon images that once were thought;\nFor separate, perfect, and immovable\nImages can break the solitude\nOf lovely, satisfied, indifferent eyes.\n\n_And thereupon with aged, high-pitched voice\nAherne laughed, thinking of the man within,\nHis sleepless candle and lahorious pen._\n\n> _Robartes:_\nAnd after that the crumbling of the moon.\nThe soul remembering its loneliness\nShudders in many cradles; all is changed,\nIt would be the world’s servant, and as it serves,\nChoosing whatever task’s most difficult\nAmong tasks not impossible, it takes\nUpon the body and upon the soul\nThe coarseness of the drudge.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nBefore the full\nIt sought itself and afterwards the world.\n\n> _Robartes:_\nBecause you are forgotten, half out of life,\nAnd never wrote a book, your thought is clear.\nReformer, merchant, statesman, learned man,\nDutiful husband, honest wife by turn,\nCradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all\nDeformed because there is no deformity\nBut saves us from a dream.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nAnd what of those\nThat the last servile crescent has set free?\n\n> _Robartes:_\nBecause all dark, like those that are all light,\nThey are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud,\nCrying to one another like the bats;\nAnd having no desire they cannot tell\nWhat’s good or bad, or what it is to triumph\nAt the perfection of one’s own obedience;\nAnd yet they speak what’s blown into the mind;\nDeformed beyond deformity, unformed,\nInsipid as the dough before it is baked,\nThey change their bodies at a word.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nAnd then?\n\nRohartes. When all the dough has been so kneaded up\nThat it can take what form cook Nature fancies,\nThe first thin crescent is wheeled round once more.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nBut the escape; the song’s not finished yet.\n\n> _Robartes:_\nHunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.\nThe burning bow that once could shoot an arrow\nOut of the up and down, the wagon-wheel\nOf beauty’s cruelty and wisdom’s chatter--\nOut of that raving tide--is drawn betwixt\nDeformity of body and of mind.\n\n> _Aherne:_\nWere not our beds far off I’d ring the bell,\nStand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall\nBeside the castle door, where all is stark\nAusterity, a place set out for wisdom\nThat he will never find; I’d play a part;\nHe would never know me after all these years\nBut take me for some drunken countryman:\nI’d stand and mutter there until he caught\n“Hunchback and Sant and Fool,” and that they came\nUnder the three last crescents of the moon.\nAnd then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits\nDay after day, yet never find the meaning.\n\n_And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard\nShould be so simple--a bat rose from the hazels\nAnd circled round him with its squeaky cry,\nThe light in the tower window was put out._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-phoenix": { - "title": "“The Phoenix”", - "body": "“What have I earned for all that work,” I said,\n“For all that I have done at my own charge?\nThe daily spite of this unmannerly town\nWhere who has served the most is most defamed,\nThe reputation of his lifetime lost\nBetween the night and morning. I might have lived--\nAnd you know well how great the longing has been--\nWhere every day my footfall should have lit\nIn the green shadow on Ferrara wall;\nOr climbed among the images of the past,\nThe unperturbed and courtly images,\nEvening and morn, the steep street of Urbino\nTo where the duchess and her people talked\nThe stately midnight through until they stood\nIn their great window looking at the dawn.\nI might have had no friend that could not mix\nCourtesy and passion into one, like those\nThat saw the wicks grow yellow in the dawn.\nI might have used the one substantial right\nMy trade allows--chosen my company,\nAnd chosen what scenery had pleased me best.”\n\nTheron my phoenix answered in reproof:\n“The drunkards, pilferers of public funds--\nAll the dishonest crowd I had driven away.\nWhen my luck changed and they dared to meet my face,\nCrawled from obscurity and set upon me\nThose I had served and some that I had fed;\nYet never have I, now nor any time,\nComplained of the people.”\n\nAll I could reply\nWas: “You that have not lived in thought but deed\nCan have the purity of a natural force;\nBut I, whose virtues are the definitions\nOf the analytic mind, can neither close\nThe eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.”\n\nAnd yet, because my heart leaped at her words,\nI was abashed, and now they come to mind\nAfter nine years, I sink my head abashed.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-pilgrim": { - "title": "“The Pilgrim”", - "body": "I fasted for some forty days on bread and buttermilk,\nFor passing round the bottle with girls in rags or silk,\nIn country shawl or Paris cloak, had put my wits astray,\nAnd what’s the good of women, for all that they can say\nIs fol de rol de rolly O.\n\nRound Lough Derg’s holy island I went upon the stones,\nI prayed at all the Stations upon my matrow-bones,\nAnd there I found an old man, and though, I prayed all day\nAnd that old man beside me, nothing would he say\nBut fol de rol de rolly O.\n\nAll know that all the dead in the world about that place are stuck,\nAnd that should mother seek her son she’d have but little luck\nBecause the fires of purgatory have ate their shapes away;\nI swear to God I questioned them, and all they had to say\nWas fol de rol de rolly O.\n\nA great black ragged bird appeared when I was in the boat;\nSome twenty feet from tip to tip had it stretched rightly out,\nWith flopping and with flapping it made a great display,\nBut I never stopped to question, what could the boatman say\nBut fol de rol de rolly O.\n\nNow I am in the public-house and lean upon the wall,\nSo come in rags or come in silk, in cloak or country shawl,\nAnd come with learned lovers or with what men you may,\nFor I can put the whole lot down, and all I have to say\nIs fol de rol de rolly O.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-pity-of-love": { - "title": "“The Pity of Love”", - "body": "A pity beyond all telling\nIs hid in the heart of love:\nThe folk who are buying and selling,\nThe clouds on their journey above,\nThe cold wet winds ever blowing,\nAnd the shadowy hazel grove\nWhere mouse-grey waters are flowing,\nThreaten the head that I love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer-for-my-daughter": { - "title": "“A Prayer for My Daughter”", - "body": "Once more the storm is howling, and half hid\nUnder this cradle-hood and coverlid\nMy child sleeps on. There is no obstacle\nBut Gregory’s wood and one bare hill\nWhereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind.\nBred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;\nAnd for an hour I have walked and prayed\nBecause of the great gloom that is in my mind.\n\nI have walked and prayed for this young child an hour\nAnd heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,\nAnd-under the arches of the bridge, and scream\nIn the elms above the flooded stream;\nImagining in excited reverie\nThat the future years had come,\nDancing to a frenzied drum,\nOut of the murderous innocence of the sea.\n\nMay she be granted beauty and yet not\nBeauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,\nOr hers before a looking-glass, for such,\nBeing made beautiful overmuch,\nConsider beauty a sufficient end,\nLose natural kindness and maybe\nThe heart-revealing intimacy\nThat chooses right, and never find a friend.\n\nHelen being chosen found life flat and dull\nAnd later had much trouble from a fool,\nWhile that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,\nBeing fatherless could have her way\nYet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.\nIt’s certain that fine women eat\nA crazy salad with their meat\nWhereby the Horn of plenty is undone.\n\nIn courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;\nHearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned\nBy those that are not entirely beautiful;\nYet many, that have played the fool\nFor beauty’s very self, has charm made wisc.\nAnd many a poor man that has roved,\nLoved and thought himself beloved,\nFrom a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.\n\nMay she become a flourishing hidden tree\nThat all her thoughts may like the linnet be,\nAnd have no business but dispensing round\nTheir magnanimities of sound,\nNor but in merriment begin a chase,\nNor but in merriment a quarrel.\nO may she live like some green laurel\nRooted in one dear perpetual place.\n\nMy mind, because the minds that I have loved,\nThe sort of beauty that I have approved,\nProsper but little, has dried up of late,\nYet knows that to be choked with hate\nMay well be of all evil chances chief.\nIf there’s no hatred in a mind\nAssault and battery of the wind\nCan never tear the linnet from the leaf.\n\nAn intellectual hatred is the worst,\nSo let her think opinions are accursed.\nHave I not seen the loveliest woman born\nOut of the mouth of plenty’s horn,\nBecause of her opinionated mind\nBarter that horn and every good\nBy quiet natures understood\nFor an old bellows full of angry wind?\n\nConsidering that, all hatred driven hence,\nThe soul recovers radical innocence\nAnd learns at last that it is self-delighting,\nSelf-appeasing, self-affrighting,\nAnd that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;\nShe can, though every face should scowl\nAnd every windy quarter howl\nOr every bellows burst, be happy Still.\n\nAnd may her bridegroom bring her to a house\nWhere all’s accustomed, ceremonious;\nFor arrogance and hatred are the wares\nPeddled in the thoroughfares.\nHow but in custom and in ceremony\nAre innocence and beauty born?\nCeremony’s a name for the rich horn,\nAnd custom for the spreading laurel tree.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer-for-my-son": { - "title": "“A Prayer for My Son”", - "body": "Bid a strong ghost stand at the head\nThat my Michael may sleep sound,\nNor cry, nor turn in the bed\nTill his morning meal come round;\nAnd may departing twilight keep\nAll dread afar till morning’s back.\nThat his mother may not lack\nHer fill of sleep.\n\nBid the ghost have sword in fist:\nSome there are, for I avow\nSuch devilish things exist,\nWho have planned his murder, for they know\nOf some most haughty deed or thought\nThat waits upon his future days,\nAnd would through hatred of the bays\nBring that to nought.\n\nThough You can fashion everything\nFrom nothing every day, and teach\nThe morning stars to sing,\nYou have lacked articulate speech\nTo tell Your simplest want, and known,\nWailing upon a woman’s knee,\nAll of that worst ignominy\nOf flesh and bone;\n\nAnd when through all the town there ran\nThe servants of Your enemy,\nA woman and a man,\nUnless the Holy Writings lie,\nHurried through the smooth and rough\nAnd through the fertile and waste,\nprotecting, till the danger past,\nWith human love.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-prayer-for-old-age": { - "title": "“A Prayer for Old Age”", - "body": "God guard me from those thoughts men think\nIn the mind alone;\nHe that sings a lasting song\nThinks in a marrow-bone;\n\nFrom all that makes a wise old man\nThat can be praised of all;\nO what am I that I should not seem\nFor the song’s sake a fool?\n\nI pray--for word is out\nAnd prayer comes round again--\nThat I may seem, though I die old,\nA foolish, passionate man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "presences": { - "title": "“Presences”", - "body": "This night has been so strange that it seemed\nAs if the hair stood up on my head.\nFrom going-down of the sun I have dreamed\nThat women laughing, or timid or wild,\nIn rustle of lace or silken stuff,\nClimbed up my creaking stair. They had read\nAll I had rhymed of that monstrous thing\nReturned and yet unrequited love.\nThey stood in the door and stood between\nMy great wood lectern and the fire\nTill I could hear their hearts beating:\nOne is a harlot, and one a child\nThat never looked upon man with desire.\nAnd one, it may be, a queen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "quarrel-in-old-age": { - "title": "“Quarrel in Old Age”", - "body": "I met the Bishop on the road\nAnd much said he and I.\n“Those breasts are flat and fallen now,\nThose veins must soon be dry;\nLive in a heavenly mansion,\nNot in some foul sty.”\n\n“Fair and foul are near of kin,\nAnd fair needs foul,” I cried.\n“My friends are gone, but that’s a truth\nNor grave nor bed denied,\nLearned in bodily lowliness\nAnd in the heart’s pride.”\n\n“A woman can be proud and stiff\nWhen on love intent;\nBut Love has pitched his mansion in\nThe place of excrement;\nFor nothing can be sole or whole\nThat has not been rent.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "reconciliation": { - "title": "“Reconciliation”", - "body": "Some may have blamed you that you took away\nThe verses that could move them on the day\nWhen, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind\nWith lightning, you went from me, and I could find\nNothing to make a song about but kings,\nHelmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things\nThat were like memories of you--but now\nWe’ll out, for the world lives as long ago;\nAnd while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,\nHurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.\nBut, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,\nMy barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "responsibilities": { - "title": "“Responsibilities”", - "body": "Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain\nSomewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end,\nOld Dublin merchant “free of the ten and four”\nOr trading out of Galway into Spain;\nOld country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend,\nA hundred-year-old memory to the poor;\nMerchant and scholar who have left me blood\nThat has not passed through any huckster’s loin,\nSoldiers that gave, whatever die was cast:\nA Butler or an Armstrong that withstood\nBeside the brackish waters of the Boyne\nJames and his Irish when the Dutchman crossed;\nOld merchant skipper that leaped overboard\nAfter a ragged hat in Biscay Bay;\nYou most of all, silent and fierce old man,\nBecause the daily spectacle that stirred\nMy fancy, and set my boyish lips to say,\n“Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun”;\nPardon that for a barren passion’s sake,\nAlthough I have come close on forty-nine,\nI have no child, I have nothing but a book,\nNothing but that to prove your blood and mine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ribh-considers-christian-love-insufficient": { - "title": "“Ribh Considers Christian Love Insufficient”", - "body": "Why should I seek for love or study it?\nIt is of God and passes human wit.\nI study hatred with great diligence,\nFor that’s a passion in my own control,\nA sort of besom that can clear the soul\nOf everything that is not mind or sense.\n\nWhy do I hate man, woman or event?\nThat is a light my jealous soul has sent.\nFrom terror and deception freed it can\nDiscover impurities, can show at last\nHow soul may walk when all such things are past,\nHow soul could walk before such things began.\n\nThen my delivered soul herself shall learn\nA darker knowledge and in hatred turn\nFrom every thought of God mankind has had.\nThought is a garment and the soul’s a bride\nThat cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:\nHatred of God may bring the soul to God.\n\nAt stroke of midnight soul cannot endure\nA bodily or mental furniture.\nWhat can she take until her Master give!\nWhere can she look until He make the show!\nWhat can she know until He bid her know!\nHow can she live till in her blood He live!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ribh-denounces-patrick": { - "title": "“Ribh Denounces Patrick”", - "body": "An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man--\nRecall that masculine Trinity. Man, woman, child (daughter or son),\nThat’s how all natural or supernatural stories run.\n\nNatural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed.\nAs man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,\nFor things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.\n\nYet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;\nWhen the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped by the body or the mind,\nThat juggling nature mounts, her coil in their embraces twined.\n\nThe mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,\nBut all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air, share God that is but three,\nAnd could beget or bear themselves could they but love as He.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ribh-at-the-tomb-of-baile-and-aillinn": { - "title": "“Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn”", - "body": "Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night\nWith open book you ask me what I do.\nMark and digest my tale, carry it afar\nTo those that never saw this tonsured head\nNor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.\nOf Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,\nAll know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,\nWhat juncture of the apple and the yew,\nSurmount their bones; but speak what none have heard.\n\nThe miracle that gave them such a death\nTransfigured to pure substance what had once\nBeen bone and sinew; when such bodies join\nThere is no touching here, nor touching there,\nNor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;\nFor the intercourse of angels is a light\nWhere for its moment both seem lost, consumed.\n\nHere in the pitch-dark atmosphere above\nThe trembling of the apple and the yew,\nHere on the anniversary of their death,\nThe anniversary of their first embrace,\nThose lovers, purified by tragedy,\nHurry into each other’s arms; these eyes,\nBy water, herb and solitary prayer\nMade aquiline, are open to that light.\nThough somewhat broken by the leaves, that light\nLies in a circle on the grass; therein\nI turn the pages of my holy book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "ribh-in-ecstasy": { - "title": "“Ribh in Ecstasy”", - "body": "What matter that you understood no word!\nDoubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard\nIn broken sentences. My soul had found\nAll happiness in its own cause or ground.\nGodhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot\nGodhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot\nThose amorous cries that out of quiet come\nAnd must the common round of day resume.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rose-tree": { - "title": "“The Rose Tree”", - "body": "“O words are lightly spoken,”\nSaid Pearse to Connolly,\n“Maybe a breath of politic words\nHas withered our Rose Tree;\nOr maybe but a wind that blows\nAcross the bitter sea.”\n\n“It needs to be but watered,”\nJames Connolly replied,\n“To make the green come out again\nAnd spread on every side,\nAnd shake the blossom from the bud\nTo be the garden’s pride.”\n\n“But where can we draw water,”\nSaid Pearse to Connolly,\n“When all the wells are parched away?\nO plain as plain can be\nThere’s nothing but our own red blood\nCan make a right Rose Tree.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "the-rose-of-battle": { - "title": "“The Rose of Battle”", - "body": "Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!\nThe tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled\nAbove the tide of hours, trouble the air,\nAnd God’s bell buoyed to be the water’s care;\nWhile hushed from fear, or loud with hope, a band\nWith blown, spray-dabbled hair gather at hand,\nTurn if you may from battles never done,\nI call, as they go by me one by one,\nDanger no refuge holds, and war no peace,\nFor him who hears love sing and never cease,\nBeside her clean-swept hearth, her quiet shade:\nBut gather all for whom no love hath made\nA woven silence, or but came to cast\nA song into the air, and singing passed\nTo smile on the pale dawn; and gather you\nWho have sougft more than is in rain or dew,\nOr in the sun and moon, or on the earth,\nOr sighs amid the wandering, starry mirth,\nOr comes in laughter from the sea’s sad lips,\nAnd wage God’s battles in the long grey ships.\nThe sad, the lonely, the insatiable,\nTo these Old Night shall all her mystery tell;\nGod’s bell has claimed them by the little cry\nOf their sad hearts, that may not live nor die.\n\nRose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!\nYou, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled\nUpon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring\nThe bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.\nBeauty grown sad with its eternity\nMade you of us, and of the dim grey sea.\nOur long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,\nFor God has bid them share an equal fate;\nAnd when at last, defeated in His wars,\nThey have gone down under the same white stars,\nWe shall no longer hear the little cry\nOf our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-rose-of-the-world": { - "title": "“The Rose of the World”", - "body": "Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?\nFor these red lips with all their mournful pride\nMournful that no new wonder may betide\nTroy passed away in one high funeral gleam\nAnd Usna’s children died.\n\nWe and the labouring world are passing by:\nAmid men’s souls that waver and give place\nLike the pale waters in their wintry race\nUnder the passing stars foam of the sky\nLives on this lonely face.\n\nBow down archangels in your dim abode:\nBefore you were or any hearts to beat\nWeary and kind one lingered by His seat;\nHe made the world to be a grassy road\nBefore her wandering feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "running-to-paradise": { - "title": "“Running to Paradise”", - "body": "As I came over Windy Gap\nThey threw a halfpenny into my cap,\nFor I am running to Paradise.\nAnd all that I need do is to wish,\nAnd somebody puts his hand in the dish\nTo throw me a bit of salted fish,\nAnd there the king is but as the beggar.\n\nMy brother Mourteen is worn out\nWith skelping his big brawling lout,\nWhile I am running to Paradise.\nA poor life, do what he can,\nAnd though he keep a dog and a gun,\nA serving maid and a serving man,\nAnd there the king is but as the beggar.\n\nPoor men have grown to be rich men,\nAnd rich men grown to be poor again,\nWhile I am running to Paradise.\nAnd many a darling wit’s grown dull\nThat tossed a bare heel when at school;\nNow it has filled an old sock full,\nAnd there the king is but as the beggar.\n\nThe wind is old and still at play\nWhile I must hurry upon my way\nFor I am running to Paradise.\nYet never have I lit on a friend\nTo take my fancy like the wind\nThat nobody can buy or bind--\nAnd there the king is but as the beggar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sad-shepherd": { - "title": "“The Sad Shepherd”", - "body": "There was a man whom Sorrow named his Friend,\nAnd he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,\nWent walking with slow steps along the gleaming\nAnd humming Sands, where windy surges wend:\nAnd he called loudly to the stars to bend\nFrom their pale thrones and comfort him, but they\nAmong themselves laugh on and sing alway:\nAnd then the man whom Sorrow named his friend\nCried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story.!\nThe sea Swept on and cried her old cry still,\nRolling along in dreams from hill to hill.\nHe fled the persecution of her glory\nAnd, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping,\nCried all his story to the dewdrops glistening.\nBut naught they heard, for they are always listening,\nThe dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.\nAnd then the man whom Sorrow named his friend\nSought once again the shore, and found a shell,\nAnd thought, I will my heavy story tell\nTill my own words, re-echoing, shall send\nTheir sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;\nAnd my own talc again for me shall sing,\nAnd my own whispering words be comforting,\nAnd lo! my ancient burden may depart.\nThen he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;\nBut the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone\nChanged all he sang to inarticulate moan\nAmong her wildering whirls, forgetting him.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "sailing-to-byzantium": { - "title": "“Sailing to Byzantium”", - "body": "That is no country for old men. The young\nIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees,\n--Those dying generations--at their song,\nThe salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,\nFish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long\nWhatever is begotten, born, and dies.\nCaught in that sensual music all neglect\nMonuments of unageing intellect.\n\nAn aged man is but a paltry thing,\nA tattered coat upon a stick, unless\nSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing\nFor every tatter in its mortal dress,\nNor is there singing school but studying\nMonuments of its own magnificence;\nAnd therefore I have sailed the seas and come\nTo the holy city of Byzantium.\n\nO sages standing in God’s holy fire\nAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,\nCome from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,\nAnd be the singing-masters of my soul.\nConsume my heart away; sick with desire\nAnd fastened to a dying animal\nIt knows not what it is; and gather me\nInto the artifice of eternity.\n\nOnce out of nature I shall never take\nMy bodily form from any natural thing,\nBut such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make\nOf hammered gold and gold enamelling\nTo keep a drowsy Emperor awake;\nOr set upon a golden bough to sing\nTo lords and ladies of Byzantium\nOf what is past, or passing, or to come.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-scholars": { - "title": "“The Scholars”", - "body": "Would I could cast a sad on the water\nWhere many a king has gone\nAnd many a king’s daughter,\nAnd alight at the comely trees and the lawn,\nThe playing upon pipes and the dancing,\nAnd learn that the best thing is\nTo change my loves while dancing\nAnd pay but a kiss for a kiss.\nI would find by the edge of that water\nThe collar-bone of a hare\nWorn thin by the lapping of water,\nAnd pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare\nAt the old bitter world where they marry in churches,\nAnd laugh over the untroubled water\nAt all who marry in churches,\nThrough the white thin bone of a hare.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-second-coming": { - "title": "“The Second Coming”", - "body": "Turning and turning in the widening gyre\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst\nAre full of passionate intensity.\n\nSurely some revelation is at hand;\nSurely the Second Coming is at hand.\nThe Second Coming! Hardly are those words out\nWhen a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi\nTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert\nA shape with lion body and the head of a man,\nA gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,\nIs moving its slow thighs, while all about it\nReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.\nThe darkness drops again; but now I know\nThat twenty centuries of stony sleep\nWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,\nAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,\nSlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "september": { - "title": "“September”", - "body": "What need you, being come to sense,\nBut fumble in a greasy till\nAnd add the halfpence to the pence\nAnd prayer to shivering prayer, until\nYou have dried the marrow from the bone;\nFor men were born to pray and save:\nRomantic Ireland’s dead and gone,\nIt’s with O’Leary in the grave.\n\nYet they were of a different kind,\nThe names that stilled your childish play,\nThey have gone about the world like wind,\nBut little time had they to pray\nFor whom the hangman’s rope was spun,\nAnd what, God help us, could they save?\nRomantic Ireland’s dead and gone,\nIt’s with O’Leary in the grave.\n\nWas it for this the wild geese spread\nThe grey wing upon every tide;\nFor this that all that blood was shed,\nFor this Edward Fitzgerald died,\nAnd Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,\nAll that delirium of the brave?\nRomantic Ireland’s dead and gone,\nIt’s with O’Leary in the grave.\n\nYet could we turn the years again,\nAnd call those exiles as they were\nIn all their loneliness and pain,\nYou’d cry, “Some woman’s yellow hair\nHas maddened every mother’s son”:\nThey weighed so lightly what they gave.\nBut let them be, they’re dead and gone,\nThey’re with O’Leary in the grave.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "september" - } - } - }, - "the-shadowy-waters": { - "title": "“The Shadowy Waters”", - "body": "I walked among the seven woods of Coole:\nShan-walla, where a willow-hordered pond\nGathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;\nShady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,\nWhere many hundred squirrels are as happy\nAs though they had been hidden hy green houghs\nWhere old age cannot find them; Paire-na-lee,\nWhere hazel and ash and privet hlind the paths:\nDim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling\nTheir sudden fragrances on the green air;\nDim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes\nHave seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk;\nDim Inchy wood, that hides badger and fox\nAnd marten-cat, and borders that old wood\nWise Buddy Early called the wicked wood:\nSeven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods.\nI had not eyes like those enchanted eyes,\nYet dreamed that beings happier than men\nMoved round me in the shadows, and at night\nMy dreams were clown hy voices and by fires;\nAnd the images I have woven in this story\nOf Forgael and Dectora and the empty waters\nMoved round me in the voices and the fires,\nAnd more I may not write of, for they that cleave\nThe waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue\nHeavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence.\nHow shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?\nI only know that all we know comes from you,\nAnd that you come from Eden on flying feet.\nIs Eden far away, or do you hide\nFrom human thought, as hares and mice and coneys\nThat run before the reaping-hook and lie\nIn the last ridge of the barley? Do our woods\nAnd winds and ponds cover more quiet woods,\nMore shining winds, more star-glimmering ponds?\nIs Eden out of time and out of space?\nAnd do you gather about us when pale light\nShining on water and fallen among leaves,\nAnd winds blowing from flowers, and whirr of feathers\nAnd the green quiet, have uplifted the heart?\nI have made this poem for you, that men may read it\nBefore they read of Forgael and Dectora,\nAs men in the old times, before the harps began,\nPoured out wine for the high invisible ones.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "shepherd-and-goatherd": { - "title": "“Shepherd and Goatherd”", - "body": "> _Shepherd:_\nThat cry’s from the first cuckoo of the year.\nI wished before it ceased.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nNor bird nor beast\nCould make me wish for anything this day,\nBeing old, but that the old alone might die,\nAnd that would be against God’s providence.\nLet the young wish. But what has brought you here?\nNever until this moment have we met\nWhere my goats browse on the scarce grass or leap\nFrom stone to Stone.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nI am looking for strayed sheep;\nSomething has troubled me and in my rrouble\nI let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone,\nFor rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble\nAnd make the daylight sweet once more; but when\nI had driven every rhyme into its Place\nThe sheep had gone from theirs.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nI know right well\nWhat turned so good a shepherd from his charge.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nHe that was best in every country sport\nAnd every country craft, and of us all\nMost courteous to slow age and hasty youth,\nIs dead.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nThe boy that brings my griddle-cake\nBrought the bare news.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nHe had thrown the crook away\nAnd died in the great war beyond the sea.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nHe had often played his pipes among my hills,\nAnd when he played it was their loneliness,\nThe exultation of their stone, that died\nUnder his fingers.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nI had it from his mother,\nAnd his own flock was browsing at the door.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nHow does she bear her grief? There is not a shepherd\nBut grows more gentle when he speaks her name,\nRemembering kindness done, and how can I,\nThat found when I had neither goat nor grazing\nNew welcome and old wisdom at her fire\nTill winter blasts were gone, but speak of her\nEven before his children and his wife?\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nShe goes about her house erect and calm\nBetween the pantry and the linen-chest,\nOr else at meadow or at grazing overlooks\nHer labouring men, as though her darling lived,\nBut for her grandson now; there is no change\nBut such as I have Seen upon her face\nWatching our shepherd sports at harvest-time\nWhen her son’s turn was over.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nSing your song.\nI too have rhymed my reveries, but youth\nIs hot to show whatever it has found,\nAnd till that’s done can neither work nor wait.\nOld goatherds and old goats, if in all else\nYouth can excel them in accomplishment,\nAre learned in waiting.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nYou cannot but have seen\nThat he alone had gathered up no gear,\nSet carpenters to work on no wide table,\nOn no long bench nor lofty milking-shed\nAs others will, when first they take possession,\nBut left the house as in his father’s time\nAs though he knew himself, as it were, a cuckoo,\nNo settled man. And now that he is gone\nThere’s nothing of him left but half a score\nOf sorrowful, austere, sweet, lofty pipe tunes.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nYou have put the thought in rhyme.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nI worked all day,\nAnd when ’twas done so little had I done\nThat maybe “I am sorry” in plain prose\nHad Sounded better to your mountain fancy.\n\n[He sings.]\n\n“Like the speckled bird that steers\nThousands of leagues oversea,\nAnd runs or a while half-flies\nOn his yellow legs through our meadows.\nHe stayed for a while; and we\nHad scarcely accustomed our ears\nTo his speech at the break of day,\nHad scarcely accustomed our eyes\nTo his shape at the rinsing-pool\nAmong the evening shadows,\nWhen he vanished from ears and eyes.\nI might have wished on the day\nHe came, but man is a fool.”\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nYou sing as always of the natural life,\nAnd I that made like music in my youth\nHearing it now have sighed for that young man\nAnd certain lost companions of my own.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nThey say that on your barren mountain ridge\nYou have measured out the road that the soul treads\nWhen it has vanished from our natural eyes;\nThat you have talked with apparitions.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nIndeed\nMy daily thoughts since the first stupor of youth\nHave found the path my goats’ feet cannot find.\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nSing, for it may be that your thoughts have plucked\nSome medicable herb to make our grief\nLess bitter.\n\n> _Goatherd:_\nThey have brought me from that ridge\nSeed-pods and flowers that are not all wild poppy.\n\n[Sings.]\n\n“He grows younger every second\nThat were all his birthdays reckoned\nMuch too solemn seemed;\nBecause of what he had dreamed,\nOr the ambitions that he served,\nMuch too solemn and reserved.\nJaunting, journeying\nTo his own dayspring,\nHe unpacks the loaded pern\nOf all ’twas pain or joy to learn,\nOf all that he had made.\nThe outrageous war shall fade;\nAt some old winding whitethorn root\nHe’ll practise on the shepherd’s flute,\nOr on the close-cropped grass\nCourt his shepherd lass,\nOr put his heart into some game\nTill daytime, playtime seem the same;\nKnowledge he shall unwind\nThrough victories of the mind,\nTill, clambering at the cradle-side,\nHe dreams himself hsi mother’s pride,\nAll knowledge lost in trance\nOf sweeter ignorance.”\n\n> _Shepherd:_\nWhen I have shut these ewes and this old ram\nInto the fold, we’ll to the woods and there\nCut out our rhymes on strips of new-torn bark\nBut put no name and leave them at her door.\nTo know the mountain and the valley have grieved\nMay be a quiet thought to wife and mother,\nAnd children when they spring up shoulder-high.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "sixteen-dead-men": { - "title": "“Sixteen Dead Men”", - "body": "O but we talked at large before\nThe sixteen men were shot,\nBut who can talk of give and take,\nWhat should be and what not\nWhile those dead men are loitering there\nTo stir the boiling pot?\n\nYou say that we should still the land\nTill Germany’s overcome;\nBut who is there to argue that\nNow Pearse is deaf and dumb?\nAnd is their logic to outweigh\nMacDonagh’s bony thumb?\n\nHow could you dream they’d listen\nThat have an ear alone\nFor those new comrades they have found,\nLord Edward and Wolfe Tone,\nOr meddle with our give and take\nThat converse bone to bone?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "solomon-and-the-witch": { - "title": "“Solomon and the Witch”", - "body": "And thus declared that Arab lady:\n“Last night, where under the wild moon\nOn grassy mattress I had laid me,\nWithin my arms great Solomon,\nI suddenly cried out in a strange tongue\nNot his, not mine.”\n\nWho understood\nWhatever has been said, sighed, sung,\nHowled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,\nThereon replied: “A cockerel\nCrew from a blossoming apple bough\nThree hundred years before the Fall,\nAnd never crew again till now,\nAnd would not now but that he thought,\nChance being at one with Choice at last,\nAll that the brigand apple brought\nAnd this foul world were dead at last.\nHe that crowed out eternity\nThought to have crowed it in again.\nFor though love has a spider’s eye\nTo find out some appropriate pain--\nAye, though all passion’s in the glance--\nFor every nerve, and tests a lover\nWith cruelties of Choice and Chance;\nAnd when at last that murder’s over\nMaybe the bride-bed brings despair,\nFor each an imagined image brings\nAnd finds a real image there;\nYet the world ends when these two things,\nThough several, are a single light,\nWhen oil and wick are burned in one;\nTherefore a blessed moon last night\nGave Sheba to her Solomon.”\n“Yet the world stays.”\n\n“If that be so,\nYour cockerel found us in the wrong\nAlthough he thought it worth a crow.\nMaybe an image is too strong\nOr maybe is not strong enough.”\n\n“The night has fallen; not a sound\nIn the forbidden sacred grove\nUnless a petal hit the ground,\nNor any human sight within it\nBut the crushed grass where we have lain!\nAnd the moon is wilder every minute.\nO! Solomon! let us try again.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "solomon-to-sheba": { - "title": "“Solomon to Sheba”", - "body": "Sang Solomon to Sheba,\nAnd kissed her dusky face,\n“All day long from mid-day\nWe have talked in the one place,\nAll day long from shadowless noon\nWe have gone round and round\nIn the narrow theme of love\nLike a old horse in a pound.”\n\nTo Solomon sang Sheba,\nPlated on his knees,\n“If you had broached a matter\nThat might the learned please,\nYou had before the sun had thrown\nOur shadows on the ground\nDiscovered that my thoughts, not it,\nAre but a narrow pound.”\n\nSaid Solomon to Sheba,\nAnd kissed her Arab eyes,\n“There’s not a man or woman\nBorn under the skies\nDare match in learning with us two,\nAnd all day long we have found\nThere’s not a thing but love can make\nThe world a narrow pound.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "a-song-from-the-player-queen": { - "title": "“A Song from the Player Queen”", - "body": "My mother dandled me and sang,\n“How young it is, how young!”\nAnd made a golden cradle\nThat on a willow swung.\n\n“He went away,” my mother sang,\n“When I was brought to bed,”\nAnd all the while her needle pulled\nThe gold and silver thread.\n\nShe pulled the thread and bit the thread\nAnd made a golden gown,\nAnd wept because she had dreamt that I\nWas born to wear a crown.\n\n“When she was got,” my mother sang,\n“I heard a sea-mew cry,\nAnd saw a flake of the yellow foam\nThat dropped upon my thigh.”\n\nHow therefore could she help but braid\nThe gold into my hair,\nAnd dream that I should carry\nThe golden top of care?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-song-of-wandering-aengus": { - "title": "“The Song of Wandering Aengus”", - "body": "I went out to the hazel wood,\nBecause a fire was in my head,\nAnd cut and peeled a hazel wand,\nAnd hooked a berry to a thread;\nAnd when white moths were on the wing,\nAnd moth-like stars were flickering out,\nI dropped the berry in a stream\nAnd caught a little silver trout.\n\nWhen I had laid it on the floor\nI went to blow the fire a-flame,\nBut something rustled on the floor,\nAnd someone called me by my name:\nIt had become a glimmering girl\nWith apple blossom in her hair\nWho called me by my name and ran\nAnd faded through the brightening air.\n\nThough I am old with wandering\nThrough hollow lands and hilly lands,\nI will find out where she has gone,\nAnd kiss her lips and take her hands;\nAnd walk among long dappled grass,\nAnd pluck till time and times are done,\nThe silver apples of the moon,\nThe golden apples of the sun.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-happy-shepherd": { - "title": "“The Song of the Happy Shepherd”", - "body": "The woods of Arcady are dead,\nAnd over is their antique joy;\nOf old the world on dreaming fed;\nGrey Truth is now her painted toy;\nYet still she turns her restless head:\nBut O, sick children of the world,\nOf all the many changing things\nIn dreary dancing past us whirled,\nTo the cracked tune that Chronos sings,\nWords alone are certain good.\nWhere are now the warring kings,\nWord be-mockers?--By the Rood,\nWhere are now the watring kings?\nAn idle word is now their glory,\nBy the stammering schoolboy said,\nReading some entangled story:\nThe kings of the old time are dead;\nThe wandering earth herself may be\nOnly a sudden flaming word,\nIn clanging space a moment heard,\nTroubling the endless reverie.\nThen nowise worship dusty deeds,\nNor seek, for this is also sooth,\nTo hunger fiercely after truth,\nLest all thy toiling only breeds\nNew dreams, new dreams; there is no truth\nSaving in thine own heart. Seek, then,\nNo learning from the starry men,\nWho follow with the optic glass\nThe whirling ways of stars that pass--\nSeek, then, for this is also sooth,\nNo word of theirs--the cold star-bane\nHas cloven and rent their hearts in twain,\nAnd dead is all their human truth.\nGo gather by the humming sea\nSome twisted, echo-harbouring shell.\nAnd to its lips thy story tell,\nAnd they thy comforters will be.\nRewording in melodious guile\nThy fretful words a little while,\nTill they shall singing fade in ruth\nAnd die a pearly brotherhood;\nFor words alone are certain good:\nSing, then, for this is also sooth.\nI must be gone: there is a grave\nWhere daffodil and lily wave,\nAnd I would please the hapless faun,\nBuried under the sleepy ground,\nWith mirthful songs before the dawn.\nHis shouting days with mirth were crowned;\nAnd still I dream he treads the lawn,\nWalking ghostly in the dew,\nPierced by my glad singing through,\nMy songs of old earth’s dreamy youth:\nBut ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!\nFor fair are poppies on the brow:\nDream, dream, for this is also sooth.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-song-of-the-old-mother": { - "title": "“The Song of the Old Mother”", - "body": "I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow\nTill the seed of the fire flicker and glow;\nAnd then I must scrub and bake and sweep\nTill stars are beginning to blink and peep;\nAnd the young lie long and dream in their bed\nOf the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,\nAnd their day goes over in idleness,\nAnd they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:\nWhile I must work because I am old,\nAnd the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-sorrow-of-love": { - "title": "“The Sorrow of Love”", - "body": "The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,\nThe brilliant moon and all the milky sky,\nAnd all that famous harmony of leaves,\nHad blotted out man’s image and his cry.\n\nA girl arose that had red mournful lips\nAnd seemed the greatness of the world in tears,\nDoomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships\nAnd proud as Priam murdered with his peers;\n\nArose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,\nA climbing moon upon an empty sky,\nAnd all that lamentation of the leaves,\nCould but compose man’s image and his cry.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-stolen-child": { - "title": "“The Stolen Child”", - "body": "Where dips the rocky highland\nOf Sleuth Wood in the lake\nThere lies a leafy island\nWhere flapping herons wake\nThe drowsy water rats;\nThere we’ve hid our faery vats\nFull of berries\nAnd of reddest stolen cherries.\n_Come away O human child!\nTo the waters and the wild\nWith a faery hand in hand\nFor the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._\n\nWhere the wave of moonlight glosses\nThe dim gray sands with light\nFar off by furthest Rosses\nWe foot it all the night\nWeaving olden dances\nMingling hands and mingling glances\nTill the moon has taken flight;\nTo and fro we leap\nAnd chase the frothy bubbles\nWhile the world is full of troubles\nAnd is anxious in its sleep.\n_Come away O human child!\nTo the waters and the wild\nWith a faery hand in hand\nFor the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._\n\nWhere the wandering water gushes\nFrom the hills above Glen-Car\nIn pools among the rushes\nThat scarce could bathe a star\nWe seek for slumbering trout\nAnd whispering in their ears\nGive them unquiet dreams;\nLeaning softly out\nFrom ferns that drop their tears\nOver the young streams\n_Come away O human child!\nTo the waters and the wild\nWith a faery hand in hand\nFor the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand._\n\nAway with us he’s going\nThe solemn-eyed:\nHe’ll hear no more the lowing\nOf the calves on the warm hillside\nOr the kettle on the hob\nSing peace into his breast\nOr see the brown mice bob\nRound and round the oatmeal-chest.\n_For he comes the human child\nTo the waters and the wild\nWith a faery hand in hand\nFrom a world more full of weeping than he can understand._", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "summer-and-spring": { - "title": "“Summer and Spring”", - "body": "We sat under an old thorn-tree\nAnd talked away the night,\nTold all that had been said or done\nSince first we saw the light,\nAnd when we talked of growing up\nKnew that we’d halved a soul\nAnd fell the one in t’other’s arms\nThat we might make it whole;\nThen peter had a murdering look,\nFor it seemed that he and she\nHad spoken of their childish days\nUnder that very tree.\nO what a bursting out there was,\nAnd what a blossoming,\nWhen we had all the summer-time\nAnd she had all the spring!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "these-are-the-clouds": { - "title": "“These Are the Clouds”", - "body": "These are the clouds about the fallen sun,\nThe majesty that shuts his burning eye:\nThe weak lay hand on what the strong has done,\nTill that be tumbled that was lifted high\nAnd discord follow upon unison,\nAnd all things at one common level lie.\nAnd therefore, friend, if your great race were run\nAnd these things came, So much the more thereby\nHave you made greatness your companion,\nAlthough it be for children that you sigh:\nThese are the clouds about the fallen sun,\nThe majesty that shuts his burning eye.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "those-dancing-days-are-gone": { - "title": "“Those Dancing Days Are Gone”", - "body": "Come, let me sing into your ear;\nThose dancing days are gone,\nAll that silk and satin gear;\nCrouch upon a stone,\nWrapping that foul body up\nIn as foul a rag:\nI carry the sun in a golden cup.\nThe moon in a silver bag.\n\nCurse as you may I sing it through;\nWhat matter if the knave\nThat the most could pleasure you,\nThe children that he gave,\nAre somewhere sleeping like a top\nUnder a marble flag?\nI carry the sun in a golden cup.\nThe moon in a silver bag.\n\nI thought it out this very day.\nNoon upon the clock,\nA man may put pretence away\nWho leans upon a stick,\nMay sing, and sing until he drop,\nWhether to maid or hag:\nI carry the sun in a golden cup,\nThe moon in a silver bag.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-three-beggars": { - "title": "“The Three Beggars”", - "body": "“Though to my feathers in the wet,\nI have stood here from break of day.\nI have not found a thing to eat,\nFor only rubbish comes my way.\nAm I to live on lebeen-lone?”\nMuttered the old crane of Gort.\n“For all my pains on lebeen-lone?”\n\nKing Guaire walked amid his court\nThe palace-yard and river-side\nAnd there to three old beggars said,\n“You that have wandered far and wide\nCan ravel out what’s in my head.\nDo men who least desire get most,\nOr get the most who most desire?”\nA beggar said, “They get the most\nWhom man or devil cannot tire,\nAnd what could make their muscles taut\nUnless desire had made them so?”\nBut Guaire laughed with secret thought,\n“If that be true as it seems true,\nOne of you three is a rich man,\nFor he shall have a thousand pounds\nWho is first asleep, if but he can\nSleep before the third noon sounds.”\nAnd thereon, merry as a bird\nWith his old thoughts, King Guaire went\nFrom river-side and palace-yard\nAnd left them to their argument.\n“And if I win,” one beggar said,\n“Though I am old I shall persuade\nA pretty girl to share my bed”;\nThe second: “I shall learn a trade”;\nThe third: “I’ll hurry to the course\nAmong the other gentlemen,\nAnd lay it all upon a horse”;\nThe second: “I have thought again:\nA farmer has more dignity.”\nOne to another sighed and cried:\nThe exorbitant dreams of beggary.\nThat idleness had borne to pride,\nSang through their teeth from noon to noon;\nAnd when the sccond twilight brought\nThe frenzy of the beggars’ moon\nNone closed his blood-shot eyes but sought\nTo keep his fellows from their sleep;\nAll shouted till their anger grew\nAnd they were whirling in a heap.\n\nThey mauled and bit the whole night through;\nThey mauled and bit till the day shone;\nThey mauled and bit through all that day\nAnd till another night had gone,\nOr if they made a moment’s stay\nThey sat upon their heels to rail,,\nAnd when old Guaire came and stood\nBefore the three to end this tale,\nThey were commingling lice and blood\n“Time’s up,” he cried, and all the three\nWith blood-shot eyes upon him stared.\n“Time’s up,” he eried, and all the three\nFell down upon the dust and snored.\n\n“Maybe I shall be lucky yet,\nNow they are silent,” said the crane.\n“Though to my feathers in the wet\nI’ve stood as I were made of stone\nAnd seen the rubbish run about,\nIt’s certain there are trout somewhere\nAnd maybe I shall take a trout\nbut I do not seem to care.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-three-hermits": { - "title": "“The Three Hermits”", - "body": "Three old hermits took the air\nBy a cold and desolate sea,\nFirst was muttering a prayer,\nSecond rummaged for a flea;\nOn a windy stone, the third,\nGiddy with his hundredth year,\nSang unnoticed like a bird:\n“Though the Door of Death is near\nAnd what waits behind the door,\nThree times in a single day\nI, though upright on the shore,\nFall asleep when I should pray.”\nSo the first, but now the second:\n“We’re but given what we have eamed\nWhen all thoughts and deeds are reckoned,\nSo it’s plain to be discerned\nThat the shades of holy men\nWho have failed, being weak of will,\nPass the Door of Birth again,\nAnd are plagued by crowds, until\nThey’ve the passion to escape.”\nMoaned the other, “They are thrown\nInto some most fearful shape.”\nBut the second mocked his moan:\n“They are not changed to anything,\nHaving loved God once, but maybe\nTo a poet or a king\nOr a witty lovely lady.”\nWhile he’d rummaged rags and hair,\nCaught and cracked his flea, the third,\nGiddy with his hundredth year,\nSang unnoticed like a bird.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "three-marching-songs": { - "title": "“Three Marching Songs”", - "body": "# I.\n\nRemember all those renowned generations,\nThey left their bodies to fatten the wolves,\nThey left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,\nFled to far countries, or sheltered themselves\nIn cavern, crevice, or hole,\nDefending Ireland’s soul.\n\nBe still, be still, what can be said?\nMy father sang that song,\nBut time amends old wrong,\nAll that is finished, let it fade.\n\nRemember all those renowned generations,\nRemember all that have sunk in their blood,\nRemember all that have died on the scaffold,\nRemember all that have fled, that have stood,\nStood, took death like a tune\nOn an old, tambourine.\n\nBe still, be still, what can be said?\nMy father sang that song,\nBut time amends old wrong,\nAnd all that’s finished, let it fade.\n\nFail, and that history turns into rubbish,\nAll that great past to a trouble of fools;\nThose that come after shall mock at O’Donnell,\nMock at the memory of both O’Neills,\nMock Emmet, mock Parnell,\nAll the renown that fell.\n\nBe still, be still, what can be said?\nMy father sang that song,\nbut time amends old wrong,\nAnd all that’s finished, let it fade.\n\n\n# II.\n\nThe soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,\nThe devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,\nSome back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,,\nTroy backed its Helen; Troy died and adored;\nGreat nations blossom above;\nA slave bows down to a slave.\n\nWhat marches through the mountain pass?\nNo, no, my son, not yet;\nThat is an airy spot,\nAnd no man knows what treads the grass.\n\nWe know what rascal might has defiled,\nThe lofty innocence that it has slain,\nWere we not born in the peasant’s cot\nWhere men forgive if the belly gain?\nMore dread the life that we live,\nHow can the mind forgive?\n\nWhat marches down the mountain pass?\nNo, no, my son, not yet;\nThat is an airy spot,\nAnd no man knows what treads the grass.\n\nWhat if there’s nothing up there at the top?\nWhere are the captains that govern mankind?\nWhat tears down a tree that has nothing within it?\nA blast of the wind, O a marching wind,\nMarch wind, and any old tune.\nMarch, march, and how does it run?\n\nWhat marches down the mountain pass?\nNo, no, my son, not yet;\nThat is an airy spot,\nAnd no man knows what treads the grass.\n\n\n# III.\n\nGrandfather sang it under the gallows:\n“Hear, gentlemen, ladies, and all mankind:\nMoney is good and a girl might be better,\nBut good strong blows are delights to the mind.”\nThere, standing on the cart,\nHe sang it from his heart.\n\nRobbers had taken his old tambourine,\nBut he took down the moon\nAnd rattled out a tunc;\nRobbers had taken his old tambourinc.\n\n“A girl I had, but she followed another,\nMoney I had, and it went in the night,\nStrong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,\nBut a good strong cause and blows are delight.”\nAll there caught up the tune:\n“Oh, on, my darling man.”\n\nRobbers had taken his old tambourine,\nBut he took down the moon\nAnd rattled out a tune;\nRobbers had taken his old tambourine.\n\n“Money is good and a girl might be better,\nNo matter what happens and who takes the fall,\nBut a good strong cause”--the rope gave a jerk there,\nNo more sang he, for his throat was too small;\nBut he kicked before he died,\nHe did it out of pride.\n\nRobbers had taken his old tambourine,\nBut he took down the moon\nAnd rattled out a tune;\nRobbers had taken his old tambourine.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "memorial_day" - } - } - }, - "three-songs-to-the-one-burden": { - "title": "“Three Songs to the One Burden”", - "body": "# I.\n\nThe Roaring Tinker if you like,\nBut Mannion is my name,\nAnd I beat up the common sort\nAnd think it is no shame.\nThe common breeds the common,\nA lout begets a lout,\nSo when I take on half a score\nI knock their heads about.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nAll Mannions come from Manannan,\nThough rich on every shore\nHe never lay behind four walls\nHe had such character,\nNor ever made an iron red\nNor soldered pot or pan;\nHis roaring and his ranting\nBest please a wandering man.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nCould Crazy Jane put off old age\nAnd ranting time renew,\nCould that old god rise up again\nWe’d drink a can or two,\nAnd out and lay our leadership\nOn country and on town,\nThrow likely couples into bed\nAnd knock the others down.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMy name is Henry Middleton,\nI have a small demesne,\nA small forgotten house that’s set\nOn a storm-bitten green.\nI scrub its floors and make my bed,\nI cook and change my plate,\nThe post and garden-boy alone\nHave keys to my old gate.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nThough I have locked my gate on them,\nI pity all the young,\nI know what devil’s trade they learn\nFrom those they live among,\nTheir drink, their pitch-and-toss by day,\nTheir robbery by night;\nThe wisdom of the people’s gone,\nHow can the young go straight?\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nWhen every Sunday afternoon\nOn the Green Lands I walk\nAnd wear a coat in fashion.\nMemories of the talk\nOf henwives and of queer old men\nBrace me and make me strong;\nThere’s not a pilot on the perch\nKnows I have lived so long.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\n\n# III.\n\nCome gather round me, players all:\nCome praise Nineteen-Sixteen,\nThose from the pit and gallery\nOr from the painted scene\nThat fought in the Post Office\nOr round the City Hall,\npraise every man that came again,\nPraise every man that fell.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nWho was the first man shot that day?\nThe player Connolly,\nClose to the City Hall he died;\nCatriage and voice had he;\nHe lacked those years that go with skill,\nBut later might have been\nA famous, a brilliant figure\nBefore the painted scene.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.\n\nSome had no thought of victory\nBut had gone out to die\nThat Ireland’s mind be greater,\nHer heart mount up on high;\nAnd yet who knows what’s yet to come?\nFor patrick pearse had said\nThat in every generation\nMust Ireland’s blood be shed.\n\nFrom mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-songs-to-the-same-tune": { - "title": "“Three Songs to the Same Tune”", - "body": "# I.\n\nGrandfather sang it under the gallows\n“Hear gentlemen, ladies and all mankind\nMoney is good and a girl might be better\nBut good strong blows are delights to the mind.”\nThere, standing on the cart,\nHe sang it from his heart.\n\nThose fanatics all that we do would undo:\nDown the fanatic, down the clown;\nDown, down, hammer them down,\nDown to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.\n\n“A girl I had, but she followed another,\nMoney I had and it went in the night,\nStrong drink I had, and it brought me to sorrow,\nBut a good strong cause and blows are delight.”\nAll there caught up the tune:\n“On, on my darling man.”\n\nThose fanatics all that we do would undo;\nDown the fanatic, down the clown;\nDown, down, hammer them down,\nDown to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.\n\n“Money is good and a girl might be better\nNo matter what happens and who takes the fall,\nBut a good strong cause”--the rope gave a jerk there\nNo more sang he for his throat was too small;\nBut he kicked before he died;\nHe did it out of pride.\n\nThose fanatics all that we do would undo:\nDown the fanatic, down the clown;\nDown, down, hammer them down,\nDown to the tune of O’Donnell Abu.\n\n\n# II.\n\nJustify all those renowned generations;\nThey left their bodies to fatten the wolves,\nThey left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,\nFled to far countries, or sheltered themselves\nIn cavern, crevice, hole,\nDefending Ireland’s soul.\n\n“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman,\n“They killed my goose and a cat.\nDrown, drown in the water butt,\nDrown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman.\n\nJustify all those renowned generations,\nJustify all that have sunk in their blood,\nJustify all that have died on the scaffold,\nJustify all that have fled or have stood\nOr have marched the night long\nSinging, singing a song.\n\n“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman,\n“They killed my goose and a cat.\nDrown, drown in the water butt,\nDrown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman.\n\nFail, and that history turns into rubbish,\nAll that great past to a trouble of fools;\nThose that come after shall mock at O’Donnell,\nMock at the memory of both O’Neills,\nMock Emmet, mock Parnell:\nAll the renown that fell.\n\n“Drown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman,\n“They killed my goose and a cat.\nDrown, drown in the water butt,\nDrown all the dogs,” said the fierce young woman.\n\n\n# III.\n\nThe soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,\nThe devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,\nSome back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,\nTroy looked on Helen, it died and adored;\nGreat nations, blossom above;\nA slave bows down to a slave.\n\n“Who’d care to dig ’em,” said the old, old man,\n“Those six feet marked in chalk;\nMuch I talk, more I walk;\nTime I were buried,” said the old, old man.\n\nWhen nations are empty up there at the top,\nWhen order has weakened or faction is strong,\nTime for us all to pick out a good tune,\nTake to the roads and go marching along.\nMarch, march--How does it run--\nO any old words to a tune.\n\n“Who’d care to dig ’em,” said the old, old man,\n“Those six feet marked in chalk;\nMuch I talk, more I walk,\nTime I were buried,” said the old, old man.\n\nSoldiers take pride in saluting their captain,\nWhere are the captains that govern mankind?\nWhat happens a tree that has nothing within it?\nO marching wind, O a blast of the wind,\nMarching, marching along,\nMarch, march, lift up the song:\n\n“Who’d care to dig ’em,” said the old, old man,\n“Those six feet marked in chalk;\nMuch I talk, more I walk;\nTime I were buried,” said the old, old man.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "three-things": { - "title": "“Three Things”", - "body": "“O cruel Death, give three things back,”\nSang a bone upon the shore;\n“A child found all a child can lack,\nWhether of pleasure or of rest,\nUpon the abundance of my breast:\nA bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.”\n\n“Three dear things that women know,”\nSang a bhone upon the shore;\n“A man if I but held him so\nWhen my body was alive\nFound all the pleasure that life gave’:\nA bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.”\n\n“The third thing that I think of yet,”\nSang a bone upon the shore,\n“Is that morning when I met\nFace to face my rightful man\nAnd did after stretch and yawn:\nA bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-dorothy-wellesley": { - "title": "“To Dorothy Wellesley”", - "body": "Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees,\nAs though that hand could reach to where they stand,\nAnd they but famous old upholsteries\nDelightful to the touch; tighten that hand\nAs though to draw them closer yet.\n Rammed full\nOf that most sensuous silence of the night\n(For since the horizon’s bought strange dogs are still)\nClimb to your chamber full of books and wait,\nNo books upon the knee, and no one there\nBut a Great Dane that cannot bay the moon\nAnd now lies sunk in sleep.\n What climbs the stair?\nNothing that common women ponder on\nIf you are worth my hope! Neither Content\nNor satisfied Conscience, but that great family\nSome ancient famous authors mistepresent,\nThe proud Furies each with her torch on high.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-his-heart-bidding-it-have-no-fear": { - "title": "“To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear”", - "body": "Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;\nRemember the wisdom out of the old days:\nHim who trembles before the flame and the flood,\nAnd the winds that blow through the starry ways,\nLet the starry winds and the flame and the flood\nCover over and hide, for he has no part\nWith the lonely, majestical multitude.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-some-i-have-talked-with-by-the-fire": { - "title": "“To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire”", - "body": "While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,\nMy heart would brim with dreams about the times\nWhen we bent down above the fading coals\nAnd talked of the dark folk who live in souls\nOf passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;\nAnd of the wayward twilight companies\nWho sigh with mingled sorrow and content,\nBecause their blossoming dreams have never bent\nUnder the fruit of evil and of good:\nAnd of the embattled flaming multitude\nWho rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,\nAnd, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,\nAnd with the clashing of their sword-blades make\nA rapturous music, till the morning break\nAnd the white hush end all but the loud beat\nOf their long wings, the flash of their white feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-friend-whose-work-has-come-to-nothing": { - "title": "“To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”", - "body": "Now all the truth is out,\nBe secret and take defeat\nFrom any brazen throat,\nFor how can you compete,\nBeing honour bred, with one\nWho, were it proved he lies,\nWere neither shamed in his own\nNor in his neighbours’ eyes?\nBred to a harder thing\nThan Triumph, turn away\nAnd like a laughing string\nWhereon mad fingers play\nAmid a place of stone,\nBe secret and exult,\nBecause of all things known\nThat is most difficult.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-a-young-girl": { - "title": "“To a Young Girl”", - "body": "My dear, my dear, I know\nMore than another\nWhat makes your heart beat so;\nNot even your own mother\nCan know it as I know,\nWho broke my heart for her\nWhen the wild thought,\nThat she denies\nAnd has forgot,\nSet all her blood astir\nAnd glittered in her eyes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-an-isle-in-the-water": { - "title": "“To an Isle in the Water”", - "body": "Shy one, shy one,\nShy one of my heart,\nShe moves in the firelight\nPensively apart.\n\nShe carries in the dishes,\nAnd lays them in a row.\nTo an isle in the water\nWith her would I go.\n\nShe carries in the candles,\nAnd lights the curtained room,\nShy in the doorway\nAnd shy in the gloom;\n\nAnd shy as a rabbit,\nHelpful and shy.\nTo an isle in the water\nWith her would I fly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "to-the-rose-upon-the-rood-of-time": { - "title": "“To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”", - "body": "Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!\nCome near me, while I sing the ancient ways:\nCuchulain battling with the bitter tide;\nThe Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,\nWho cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;\nAnd thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old\nIn dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,\nSing in their high and lonely melody.\nCome near, that no more blinded hy man’s fate,\nI find under the boughs of love and hate,\nIn all poor foolish things that live a day,\nEternal beauty wandering on her way.\n\nCome near, come near, come near--Ah, leave me still\nA little space for the rose-breath to fill!\nLest I no more bear common things that crave;\nThe weak worm hiding down in its small cave,\nThe field-mouse running by me in the grass,\nAnd heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;\nBut seek alone to hear the strange things said\nBy God to the bright hearts of those long dead,\nAnd learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.\nCome near; I would, before my time to go,\nSing of old Eire and the ancient ways:\nRed Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "tom-the-lunatic": { - "title": "“Tom the Lunatic”", - "body": "Sang old Tom the lunatic\nThat sleeps under the canopy:\n“What change has put my thoughts astray\nAnd eyes that had so keen a sight?\nWhat has turned to smoking wick\nNature’s pure unchanging light?”\n\n“Huddon and Duddon and Daniel O’Leary.\nHoly Joe, the beggar-man,\nWenching, drinking, still remain\nOr sing a penance on the road;\nSomething made these eyeballs weary\nThat blinked and saw them in a shroud.”\n\n“Whatever stands in field or flood,\nBird, beast, fish or man,\nMare or stallion, cock or hen,\nStands in God’s unchanging eye\nIn all the vigour of its blood;\nIn that faith I live or die.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "towards-break-of-day": { - "title": "“Towards Break of Day”", - "body": "Was it the double of my dream\nThe woman that by me lay\nDreamed, or did we halve a dream\nUnder the first cold gleam of day?\n\nI thought: “There is a waterfall\nUpon Ben Bulben side\nThat all my childhood counted dear;\nWere I to travel far and wide\nI could not find a thing so dear.”\nMy memories had magnified\nSo many times childish delight.\n\nI would have touched it like a child\nBut knew my finger could but have touched\nCold stone and water. I grew wild.\nEven accusing Heaven because\nIt had set down among its laws:\nNothing that we love over-much\nIs ponderable to our touch.\n\nI dreamed towards break of day,\nThe cold blown spray in my nostril.\nBut she that beside me lay\nHad watched in bitterer sleep\nThe marvellous stag of Arthur,\nThat lofty white stag, leap\nFrom mountain steep to steep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-tower": { - "title": "“The Tower”", - "body": "# I.\n\nWhat shall I do with this absurdity--\nO heart, O troubled heart--this caricature,\nDecrepit age that has been tied to me\nAs to a dog’s tail?\n Never had I more\nExcited, passionate, fantastical\nImagination, nor an ear and eye\nThat more expected the impossible--\nNo, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,\nOr the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back\nAnd had the livelong summer day to spend.\nIt seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,\nChoose Plato and Plotinus for a friend\nUntil imagination, ear and eye,\nCan be content with argument and deal\nIn abstract things; or be derided by\nA sort of battered kettle at the heel.\n\n\n# II.\n\nI pace upon the battlements and stare\nOn the foundations of a house, or where\nTree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;\nAnd send imagination forth\nUnder the day’s declining beam, and call\nImages and memories\nFrom ruin or from ancient trees,\nFor I would ask a question of them all.\n\nBeyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once\nWhen every silver candlestick or sconce\nLit up the dark mahogany and the wine.\nA serving-man, that could divine\nThat most respected lady’s every wish,\nRan and with the garden shears\nClipped an insolent farmer’s ears\nAnd brought them in a little covered dish.\n\nSome few remembered still when I was young\nA peasant girl commended by a Song,\nWho’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,\nAnd praised the colour of her face,\nAnd had the greater joy in praising her,\nRemembering that, if walked she there,\nFarmers jostled at the fair\nSo great a glory did the song confer.\n\nAnd certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,\nOr else by toasting her a score of times,\nRose from the table and declared it right\nTo test their fancy by their sight;\nBut they mistook the brightness of the moon\nFor the prosaic light of day--\nMusic had driven their wits astray--\nAnd one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.\n\nStrange, but the man who made the song was blind;\nYet, now I have considered it, I find\nThat nothing strange; the tragedy began\nWith Homer that was a blind man,\nAnd Helen has all living hearts betrayed.\nO may the moon and sunlight seem\nOne inextricable beam,\nFor if I triumph I must make men mad.\n\nAnd I myself created Hanrahan\nAnd drove him drunk or sober through the dawn\nFrom somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.\nCaught by an old man’s juggleries\nHe stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro\nAnd had but broken knees for hire\nAnd horrible splendour of desire;\nI thought it all out twenty years ago:\n\nGood fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;\nAnd when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on\nHe so bewitched the cards under his thumb\nThat all but the one card became\nA pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,\nAnd that he changed into a hare.\nHanrahan rose in frenzy there\nAnd followed up those baying creatures towards--\n\nO towards I have forgotten what--enough!\nI must recall a man that neither love\nNor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear\nCould, he was so harried, cheer;\nA figure that has grown so fabulous\nThere’s not a neighbour left to say\nWhen he finished his dog’s day:\nAn ancient bankrupt master of this house.\n\nBefore that ruin came, for centuries,\nRough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees\nOr shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,\nAnd certain men-at-arms there were\nWhose images, in the Great Memory stored,\nCome with loud cry and panting breast\nTo break upon a sleeper’s rest\nWhile their great wooden dice beat on the board.\n\nAs I would question all, come all who can;\nCome old, necessitous, half-mounted man;\nAnd bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;\nThe red man the juggler sent\nThrough God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,\nGifted with so fine an ear;\nThe man drowned in a bog’s mire,\nWhen mocking Muses chose the country wench.\n\nDid all old men and women, rich and poor,\nWho trod upon these rocks or passed this door,\nWhether in public or in secret rage\nAs I do now against old age?\nBut I have found an answer in those eyes\nThat are impatient to be gone;\nGo therefore; but leave Hanrahan,\nFor I need all his mighty memories.\n\nOld lecher with a love on every wind,\nBring up out of that deep considering mind\nAll that you have discovered in the grave,\nFor it is certain that you have\nReckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing\nplunge, lured by a softening eye,\nOr by a touch or a sigh,\nInto the labyrinth of another’s being;\n\nDoes the imagination dwell the most\nUpon a woman won or woman lost?\nIf on the lost, admit you turned aside\nFrom a great labyrinth out of pride,\nCowardice, some silly over-subtle thought\nOr anything called conscience once;\nAnd that if memory recur, the sun’s\nUnder eclipse and the day blotted out.\n\n\n# III.\n\nIt is time that I wrote my will;\nI choose upstanding men\nThat climb the streams until\nThe fountain leap, and at dawn\nDrop their cast at the side\nOf dripping stone; I declare\nThey shall inherit my pride,\nThe pride of people that were\nBound neither to Cause nor to State.\nNeither to slaves that were spat on,\nNor to the tyrants that spat,\nThe people of Burke and of Grattan\nThat gave, though free to refuse--\npride, like that of the morn,\nWhen the headlong light is loose,\nOr that of the fabulous horn,\nOr that of the sudden shower\nWhen all streams are dry,\nOr that of the hour\nWhen the swan must fix his eye\nUpon a fading gleam,\nFloat out upon a long\nLast reach of glittering stream\nAnd there sing his last song.\nAnd I declare my faith:\nI mock plotinus’ thought\nAnd cry in plato’s teeth,\nDeath and life were not\nTill man made up the whole,\nMade lock, stock and barrel\nOut of his bitter soul,\nAye, sun and moon and star, all,\nAnd further add to that\nThat, being dead, we rise,\nDream and so create\nTranslunar paradise.\nI have prepared my peace\nWith learned Italian things\nAnd the proud stones of Greece,\nPoet’s imaginings\nAnd memories of love,\nMemories of the words of women,\nAll those things whereof\nMan makes a superhuman,\nMirror-resembling dream.\n\nAs at the loophole there\nThe daws chatter and scream,\nAnd drop twigs layer upon layer.\nWhen they have mounted up,\nThe mother bird will rest\nOn their hollow top,\nAnd so warm her wild nest.\n\nI leave both faith and pride\nTo young upstanding men\nClimbing the mountain-side,\nThat under bursting dawn\nThey may drop a fly;\nBeing of that metal made\nTill it was broken by\nThis sedentary trade.\n\nNow shall I make my soul,\nCompelling it to study\nIn a learned school\nTill the wreck of body,\nSlow decay of blood,\nTesty delirium\nOr dull decrepitude,\nOr what worse evil come--\nThe death of friends, or death\nOf every brilliant eye\nThat made a catch in the breath--\nSeem but the clouds of the sky\nWhen the horizon fades;\nOr a bird’s sleepy cry\nAmong the deepening shades.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-travail-of-passion": { - "title": "“The Travail of Passion”", - "body": "When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;\nWhen an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;\nOur hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way\nCrowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,\nThe vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;\nWe will bend down and loosen our hair over you,\nThat it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,\nLilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-two-kings": { - "title": "“The Two Kings”", - "body": "King Eochaid came at sundown to a wood\nWestward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen\nHe had outridden his war-wasted men\nThat with empounded cattle trod the mire,\nAnd where beech-trees had mixed a pale green light\nWith the ground-ivy’s blue, he saw a stag\nWhiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea.\nBecause it stood upon his path and seemed\nMore hands in height than any stag in the world\nHe sat with tightened rein and loosened mouth\nUpon his trembling horse, then drove the spur;\nBut the stag stooped and ran at him, and passed,\nRending the horse’s flank. King Eochaid reeled,\nThen drew his sword to hold its levelled point\nAgainst the stag. When horn and steel were met\nThe horn resounded as though it had been silver,\nA sweet, miraculous, terrifying sound.\nHorn locked in sword, they tugged and struggled there\nAs though a stag and unicorn were met\nAmong the African Mountains of the Moon,\nUntil at last the double horns, drawn backward,\nButted below the single and so pierced\nThe entrails of the horse. Dropping his sword\nKing Eochaid seized the horns in his strong hands\nAnd stared into the sea-green eye, and so\nHither and thither to and fro they trod\nTill all the place was beaten into mire.\nThe strong thigh and the agile thigh were met,\nThe hands that gathered up the might of the world,\nAnd hoof and horn that had sucked in their speed\nAmid the elaborate wilderness of the air.\nThrough bush they plunged and over ivied root,\nAnd where the stone struck fire, while in the leaves\nA squirrel whinnied and a bird screamed out;\nBut when at last he forced those sinewy flanks\nAgainst a beech-bole, he threw down the beast\nAnd knelt above it with drawn knife. On the instant\nIt vanished like a shadow, and a cry\nSo mournful that it seemed the cry of one\nWho had lost some unimaginable treasure\nWandered between the blue and the green leaf\nAnd climbed into the air, crumbling away,\nTill all had seemed a shadow or a vision\nBut for the trodden mire, the pool of blood,\nThe disembowelled horse.\n King Eochaid ran\nToward peopled Tara, nor stood to draw his breath\nUntil he came before the painted wall,\nThe posts of polished yew, circled with bronze,\nOf the great door; but though the hanging lamps\nShowed their faint light through the unshuttered windows,\nNor door, nor mouth, nor slipper made a noise,\nNor on the ancient beaten paths, that wound\nFrom well-side or from plough-land, was there noisc;\nNor had there been the noise of living thing\nBefore him or behind, but that far off\nOn the horizon edge bellowed the herds.\nKnowing that silence brings no good to kings,\nAnd mocks returning victory, he passed\nBetween the pillars with a beating heart\nAnd saw where in the midst of the great hall\npale-faced, alone upon a bench, Edain\nSat upright with a sword before her feet.\nHer hands on either side had gripped the bench.\nHer eyes were cold and steady, her lips tight.\nSome passion had made her stone. Hearing a foot\nShe started and then knew whose foot it was;\nBut when he thought to take her in his arms\nShe motioned him afar, and rose and spoke:\n“I have sent among the fields or to the woods\nThe fighting-men and servants of this house,\nFor I would have your judgment upon one\nWho is self-accused. If she be innocent\nShe would not look in any known man’s face\nTill judgment has been given, and if guilty,\nWould never look again on known man’s face.”\nAnd at these words hc paled, as she had paled,\nKnowing that he should find upon her lips\nThe meaning of that monstrous day.\n Then she:\n“You brought me where your brother Ardan sat\nAlways in his one seat, and bid me care him\nThrough that strange illness that had fixed him there.\nAnd should he die to heap his burial-mound\nAnd catve his name in Ogham.” Eochaid said,\n“He lives?” “He lives and is a healthy man.”\n“While I have him and you it matters little\nWhat man you have lost, what evil you have found.”\n“I bid them make his bed under this roof\nAnd carried him his food with my own hands,\nAnd so the weeks passed by.” But when I said,\n“What is this trouble?” he would answer nothing,\nThough always at my words his trouble grew;\nAnd I but asked the more, till he cried out,\nWeary of many questions: “There are things\nThat make the heart akin to the dumb stone.”\nThen I replied, “Although you hide a secret,\nHopeless and dear, or terrible to think on,\nSpeak it, that I may send through the wide world\nFor Medicine.” Thereon he cried aloud\n“Day after day you question me, and I,\nBecause there is such a storm amid my thoughts\nI shall be carried in the gust, command,\nForbid, beseech and waste my breath.” Then I:\n“Although the thing that you have hid were evil,\nThe speaking of it could be no great wrong,\nAnd evil must it be, if done ’twere worse\nThan mound and stone that keep all virtue in,\nAnd loosen on us dreams that waste our life,\nShadows and shows that can but turn the brain.”\nbut finding him still silent I stooped down\nAnd whispering that none but he should hear,\nSaid, “If a woman has put this on you,\nMy men, whether it please her or displease,\nAnd though they have to cross the Loughlan waters\nAnd take her in the middle of armed men,\nShall make her look upon her handiwork,\nThat she may quench the rick she has fired; and though\nShe may have worn silk clothes, or worn a crown,\nShe’ll not be proud, knowing within her heart\nThat our sufficient portion of the world\nIs that we give, although it be brief giving,\nHappiness to children and to men.”\nThen he, driven by his thought beyond his thought,\nAnd speaking what he would not though he would,\nSighed, “You, even you yourself, could work the cure!”\nAnd at those words I rose and I went out\nAnd for nine days he had food from other hands,\nAnd for nine days my mind went whirling round\nThe one disastrous zodiac, muttering\nThat the immedicable mound’s beyond\nOur questioning, beyond our pity even.\nBut when nine days had gone I stood again\nBefore his chair and bending down my head\nI bade him go when all his household slept\nTo an old empty woodman’s house that’s hidden\nWestward of Tara, among the hazel-trees--\nFor hope would give his limbs the power--and await\nA friend that could, he had told her, work his cure\nAnd would be no harsh friend.\n When night had deepened,\nI groped my way from beech to hazel wood,\nFound that old house, a sputtering torch within,\nAnd stretched out sleeping on a pile of skins\nArdan, and though I called to him and tried\nTo Shake him out of sleep, I could not rouse him.\nI waited till the night was on the turn,\nThen fearing that some labourer, on his way\nTo plough or pasture-land, might see me there,\nWent out.\n Among the ivy-covered rocks,\nAs on the blue light of a sword, a man\nWho had unnatural majesty, and eyes\nLike the eyes of some great kite scouring the woods,\nStood on my path. Trembling from head to foot\nI gazed at him like grouse upon a kite;\nBut with a voice that had unnatural music,\n“A weary wooing and a long,” he said,\n“Speaking of love through other lips and looking\nUnder the eyelids of another, for it was my craft\nThat put a passion in the sleeper there,\nAnd when I had got my will and drawn you here,\nWhere I may speak to you alone, my craft\nSucked up the passion out of him again\nAnd left mere sleep. He’ll wake when the sun wakes,\npush out his vigorous limbs and rub his eyes,\nAnd wonder what has ailed him these twelve months.”\nI cowered back upon the wall in terror,\nBut that sweet-sounding voice ran on: “Woman,\nI was your husband when you rode the air,\nDanced in the whirling foam and in the dust,\nIn days you have not kept in memory,\nBeing betrayed into a cradle, and I come\nThat I may claim you as my wife again.”\nI was no longer terrified--his voice\nHad half awakened some old memory--\nYet answered him, “I am King Eochaid’s wife\nAnd with him have found every happiness\nWomen can find.” With a most masterful voice,\nThat made the body seem as it were a string\nUnder a bow, he cried, “What happiness\nCan lovers have that know their happiness\nMust end at the dumb stone? But where we build\nOur sudden palaces in the still air\npleasure itself can bring no weariness.\nNor can time waste the cheek, nor is there foot\nThat has grown weary of the wandering dance,\nNor an unlaughing mouth, but mine that mourns,\nAmong those mouths that sing their sweethearts’ praise,\nYour empty bed.” “How should I love,” I answered,\n“Were it not that when the dawn has lit my bed\nAnd shown my husband sleeping there,” I have sighed,\n“Your strength and nobleness will pass away?’\nOr how should love be worth its pains were it not\nThat when he has fallen asleep within my atms,\nBeing wearied out, I love in man the child?\nWhat can they know of love that do not know\nShe builds her nest upon a narrow ledge\nAbove a windy precipice?” Then he:\n“Seeing that when you come to the deathbed\nYou must return, whether you would or no,\nThis human life blotted from memory,\nWhy must I live some thirty, forty years,\nAlone with all this useless happiness?”\nThereon he seized me in his arms, but I\nThrust him away with both my hands and cried,\n“Never will I believe there is any change\nCan blot out of my memory this life\nSweetened by death, but if I could believe,\nThat were a double hunger in my lips\nFor what is doubly brief.”\n “And now the shape\nMy hands were pressed to vanished suddenly.\nI staggered, but a beech-tree stayed my fall,\nAnd clinging to it I could hear the cocks\nCrow upon Tara.”\n King Eochaid bowed his head\nAnd thanked her for her kindness to his brother,\nFor that she promised, and for that refused.\nThereon the bellowing of the empounded herds\nRose round the walls, and through the bronze-ringed door\nJostled and shouted those war-wasted men,\nAnd in the midst King Eochaid’s brother stood,\nAnd bade all welcome, being ignorant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "two-songs-of-a-fool": { - "title": "“Two Songs of a Fool”", - "body": "# I.\n\nA speckled cat and a tame hare\nEat at my hearthstone\nAnd sleep there;\nAnd both look up to me alone\nFor learning and defence\nAs I look up to Providence.\n\nI start out of my sleep to think\nSome day I may forget\nTheir food and drink;\nOr, the house door left unshut,\nThe hare may run till it’s found\nThe horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.\n\nI bear a burden that might well try\nMen that do all by rule,\nAnd what can I\nThat am a wandering-witted fool\nBut pray to God that He ease\nMy great responsibilities?\n\n\n# II.\n\nI slept on my three-legged stool by thc fire.\nThe speckled cat slept on my knee;\nWe never thought to enquire\nWhere the brown hare might be,\nAnd whether the door were shut.\nWho knows how she drank the wind\nStretched up on two legs from the mat,\nBefore she had settled her mind\nTo drum with her heel and to leap?\nHad I but awakened from sleep\nAnd called her name, she had heard.\nIt may be, and had not stirred,\nThat now, it may be, has found\nThe horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-two-trees": { - "title": "“The Two Trees”", - "body": "Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,\nThe holy tree is growing there;\nFrom joy the holy branches start,\nAnd all the trembling flowers they bear.\nThe changing colours of its fruit\nHave dowered the stars with metry light;\nThe surety of its hidden root\nHas planted quiet in the night;\nThe shaking of its leafy head\nHas given the waves their melody,\nAnd made my lips and music wed,\nMurmuring a wizard song for thee.\nThere the Joves a circle go,\nThe flaming circle of our days,\nGyring, spiring to and fro\nIn those great ignorant leafy ways;\nRemembering all that shaken hair\nAnd how the winged sandals dart,\nThine eyes grow full of tender care:\n\nBeloved, gaze in thine own heart.\nGaze no more in the bitter glass\nThe demons, with their subtle guile.\nLift up before us when they pass,\nOr only gaze a little while;\nFor there a fatal image grows\nThat the stormy night receives,\nRoots half hidden under snows,\nBroken boughs and blackened leaves.\nFor ill things turn to barrenness\nIn the dim glass the demons hold,\nThe glass of outer weariness,\nMade when God slept in times of old.\nThere, through the broken branches, go\nThe ravens of unresting thought;\nFlying, crying, to and fro,\nCruel claw and hungry throat,\nOr else they stand and sniff the wind,\nAnd shake their ragged wings; alas!\nThy tender eyes grow all unkind:\nGaze no more in the bitter glass.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "may" - } - } - }, - "two-years-later": { - "title": "“Two Years Later”", - "body": "Has no one said those daring\nKind eyes should be more learn’d?\nOr warned you how despairing\nThe moths are when they are burned?\nI could have warned you; but you are young,\nSo we speak a different tongue.\nO you will take whatever’s offered\nAnd dream that all the world’s a friend,\nSuffer as your mother suffered,\nBe as broken in the end.\nBut I am old and you are young,\nAnd I speak a barbarous tongue.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-unappeasable-host": { - "title": "“The Unappeasable Host”", - "body": "The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,\nAnd clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,\nFor they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,\nWith heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:\nI kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,\nAnd hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.\nDesolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;\nDesolate winds that hover in the flaming West;\nDesolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat\nThe doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;\nO heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host\nIs comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "under-ben-bulben": { - "title": "“Under Ben Bulben”", - "body": "# I.\n\nSwear by what the sages spoke\nRound the Mareotic Lake\nThat the Witch of Atlas knew,\nSpoke and set the cocks a-crow.\n\nSwear by those horsemen, by those women\nComplexion and form prove superhuman,\nThat pale, long-visaged company\nThat air in immortality\nCompleteness of their passions won;\nNow they ride the wintry dawn\nWhere Ben Bulben sets the scene.\n\nHere’s the gist of what they mean.\n\n\n# II.\n\nMany times man lives and dies\nBetween his two eternities,\nThat of race and that of soul,\nAnd ancient Ireland knew it all.\nWhether man die in his bed\nOr the rifle knocks him dead,\nA brief parting from those dear\nIs the worst man has to fear.\nThough grave-diggers’ toil is long,\nSharp their spades, their muscles strong.\nThey but thrust their buried men\nBack in the human mind again.\n\n\n# III.\n\nYou that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,\n“Send war in our time, O Lord!”\nKnow that when all words are said\nAnd a man is fighting mad,\nSomething drops from eyes long blind,\nHe completes his partial mind,\nFor an instant stands at ease,\nLaughs aloud, his heart at peace.\nEven the wisest man grows tense\nWith some sort of violence\nBefore he can accomplish fate,\nKnow his work or choose his mate.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nPoet and sculptor, do the work,\nNor let the modish painter shirk\nWhat his great forefathers did.\nBring the soul of man to God,\nMake him fill the cradles right.\n\nMeasurement began our might:\nForms a stark Egyptian thought,\nForms that gentler phidias wrought.\nMichael Angelo left a proof\nOn the Sistine Chapel roof,\nWhere but half-awakened Adam\nCan disturb globe-trotting Madam\nTill her bowels are in heat,\nproof that there’s a purpose set\nBefore the secret working mind:\nProfane perfection of mankind.\n\nQuattrocento put in paint\nOn backgrounds for a God or Saint\nGardens where a soul’s at ease;\nWhere everything that meets the eye,\nFlowers and grass and cloudless sky,\nResemble forms that are or seem\nWhen sleepers wake and yet still dream.\nAnd when it’s vanished still declare,\nWith only bed and bedstead there,\nThat heavens had opened.\nGyres run on;\nWhen that greater dream had gone\nCalvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,\nPrepared a rest for the people of God,\nPalmer’s phrase, but after that\nConfusion fell upon our thought.\n\n\n# V.\n\nIrish poets, earn your trade,\nSing whatever is well made,\nScorn the sort now growing up\nAll out of shape from toe to top,\nTheir unremembering hearts and heads\nBase-born products of base beds.\nSing the peasantry, and then\nHard-riding country gentlemen,\nThe holiness of monks, and after\nPorter-drinkers’ randy laughter;\nSing the lords and ladies gay\nThat were beaten into the clay\nThrough seven heroic centuries;\nCast your mind on other days\nThat we in coming days may be\nStill the indomitable Irishry.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nUnder bare Ben Bulben’s head\nIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.\nAn ancestor was rector there\nLong years ago, a church stands near,\nBy the road an ancient cross.\n\nNo marble, no conventional phrase;\nOn limestone quarried near the spot\nBy his command these words are cut:\n\nCast a cold eye\nOn life, on death.\nHorseman, pass by!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "under-the-moon": { - "title": "“Under the Moon”", - "body": "I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde,\nNor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle,\nWhere one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for a while;\nNor Uladh, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind;\nNor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart:\nLand-under-Wave, where out of the moon’s light and the sun’s\nSeven old sisters wind the threads of the long-lived ones,\nLand-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart,\nAnd Wood-of-Wonders, where one kills an ox at dawn,\nTo find it when night falls laid on a golden bier.\nTherein are many queens like Branwen and Guinevere;\nAnd Niamh and Laban and Fand, who could change to an otter or fawn,\nAnd the wood-woman, whose lover was changed to a blue-eyed hawk;\nAnd whether I go in my dreams by woodland, or dun, or shore,\nOr on the unpeopled waves with kings to pull at the oar,\nI hear the harp-string praise them, or hear their mournful talk.\n\nBecause of something told under the famished horn\nOf the hunter’s moon, that hung between the night and the day,\nTo dream of women whose beauty was folded in dis may,\nEven in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "under-the-round-tower": { - "title": "“Under the round Tower”", - "body": "“Although I’d lie lapped up in linen\nA deal I’d sweat and little earn\nIf I should live as live the neighbours,”\nCried the beggar, Billy Byrne;\n“Stretch bones till the daylight come\nOn great-grandfather’s battered tomb.”\n\nUpon a grey old battered tombstone\nIn Glendalough beside the stream\nWhere the O’Byrnes and Byrnes are buried,\nHe stretched his bones and fell in a dream\nOf sun and moon that a good hour\nBellowed and pranced in the round tower;\n\nOf golden king and Silver lady,\nBellowing up and bellowing round,\nTill toes mastered a sweet measure,\nMouth mastered a sweet sound,\nPrancing round and prancing up\nUntil they pranced upon the top.\n\nThat golden king and that wild lady\nSang till stars began to fade,\nHands gripped in hands, toes close together,\nHair spread on the wind they made;\nThat lady and that golden king\nCould like a brace of blackbirds sing.\n\n“It’s certain that my luck is broken,”\nThat rambling jailbird Billy said;\n“Before nightfall I’ll pick a pocket\nAnd snug it in a feather bed.\nI cannot find the peace of home\nOn great-grandfather’s battered tomb.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "upon-a-dying-lady": { - "title": "“Upon a Dying Lady”", - "body": "# I.\n\n_Her Courtesy_\n\nWith the old kindness, the old distinguished grace,\nShe lies, her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair\npropped upon pillows, rouge on the pallor of her face.\nShe would not have us sad because she is lying there,\nAnd when she meets our gaze her eyes are laughter-lit,\nHer speech a wicked tale that we may vie with her,\nMatching our broken-hearted wit against her wit,\nThinking of saints and of petronius Arbiter.\n\n\n# II.\n\n_Curtain Artist bring her Dolls and Drawings_\n\nBring where our Beauty lies\nA new modelled doll, or drawing,\nWith a friend’s or an enemy’s\nFeatures, or maybe showing\nHer features when a tress\nOf dull red hair was flowing\nOver some silken dress\nCut in the Turkish fashion,\nOr, it may be, like a boy’s.\nWe have given the world our passion,\nWe have naught for death but toys.\n\n\n# III.\n\n_She turns the Dolls’ Faces to the Wall_\n\nBecause to-day is some religious festival\nThey had a priest say Mass, and even the Japanese,\nHeel up and weight on toe, must face the wall\n--Pedant in passion, learned in old courtesies,\nVehement and witty she had seemed--; the Venetian lady\nWho had seemed to glide to some intrigue in her red shoes,\nHer domino, her panniered skirt copied from Longhi;\nThe meditative critic; all are on their toes,\nEven our Beauty with her Turkish trousers on.\nBecause the priest must have like every dog his day\nOr keep us all awake with baying at the moon,\nWe and our dolls being but the world were best away.\n\n\n# IV.\n\n_The End of Day_\n\nShe is playing like a child\nAnd penance is the play,\nFantastical and wild\nBecause the end of day\nShows her that some one soon\nWill come from the house, and say--\nThough play is but half done--\n“Come in and leave the play.”\n\n\n# V.\n\n_Her Race_\n\nShe has not grown uncivil\nAs narrow natures would\nAnd called the pleasures evil\nHappier days thought good;\nShe knows herself a woman,\nNo red and white of a face,\nOr rank, raised from a common\nVnreckonable race;\nAnd how should her heart fail her\nOr sickness break her will\nWith her dead brother’s valour\nFor an example still?\n\n\n# VI.\n\n_Her Courage_\n\nWhen her soul flies to the predestined dancing-place\n(I have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made\nAmid the dreams of youth) let her come face to face,\nAmid that first astonishment, with Grania’s shade,\nAll but the terrors of the woodland flight forgot\nThat made her Diatmuid dear, and some old cardinal\nPacing with half-closed eyelids in a sunny spot\nWho had murmured of Giorgione at his latest breath--\nAye, and Achilles, Timor, Babar, Barhaim, all\nWho have lived in joy and laughed into the face of Death.\n\n\n# VII.\n\n_Her Friends bring her a Christmas Tree_\n\nPardon, great enemy,\nWithout an angry thought\nWe’ve carried in our tree,\nAnd here and there have bought\nTill all the boughs are gay,\nAnd she may look from the bed\nOn pretty things that may\nplease a fantastic head.\nGive her a little grace,\nWhat if a laughing eye\nHave looked into your face?\nIt is about to die.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "vacillation": { - "title": "“Vacillation”", - "body": "# I.\n\nBetween extremities\nMan runs his course;\nA brand, or flaming breath.\nComes to destroy\nAll those antinomies\nOf day and night;\nThe body calls it death,\nThe heart remorse.\nBut if these be right\nWhat is joy?\n\n\n# II.\n\nA tree there is that from its topmost bough\nIs half all glittering flame and half all green\nAbounding foliage moistened with the dew;\nAnd half is half and yet is all the scene;\nAnd half and half consume what they renew,\nAnd he that Attis’ image hangs between\nThat staring fury and the blind lush leaf\nMay know not what he knows, but knows not grief\n\n\n# III.\n\nGet all the gold and silver that you can,\nSatisfy ambition, animate\nThe trivial days and ram them with the sun,\nAnd yet upon these maxims meditate:\nAll women dote upon an idle man\nAlthough their children need a rich estate;\nNo man has ever lived that had enough\nOf children’s gratitude or woman’s love.\n\nNo longer in Lethean foliage caught\nBegin the preparation for your death\nAnd from the fortieth winter by that thought\nTest every work of intellect or faith,\nAnd everything that your own hands have wrought\nAnd call those works extravagance of breath\nThat are not suited for such men as come\nproud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.\n\n\n# IV.\n\nMy fiftieth year had come and gone,\nI sat, a solitary man,\nIn a crowded London shop,\nAn open book and empty cup\nOn the marble table-top.\nWhile on the shop and street I gazed\nMy body of a sudden blazed;\nAnd twenty minutes more or less\nIt seemed, so great my happiness,\nThat I was blessed and could bless.\n\n\n# V.\n\nAlthough the summer Sunlight gild\nCloudy leafage of the sky,\nOr wintry moonlight sink the field\nIn storm-scattered intricacy,\nI cannot look thereon,\nResponsibility so weighs me down.\n\nThings said or done long years ago,\nOr things I did not do or say\nBut thought that I might say or do,\nWeigh me down, and not a day\nBut something is recalled,\nMy conscience or my vanity appalled.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nA rivery field spread out below,\nAn odour of the new-mown hay\nIn his nostrils, the great lord of Chou\nCried, casting off the mountain snow,\n“Let all things pass away.”\n\nWheels by milk-white asses drawn\nWhere Babylon or Nineveh\nRose; some conquer drew rein\nAnd cried to battle-weary men,\n“Let all things pass away.”\n\nFrom man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung\nThose branches of the night and day\nWhere the gaudy moon is hung.\nWhat’s the meaning of all song?\n“Let all things pass away.”\n\n\n# VII.\n\n> _The Soul:_\nSeek out reality, leave things that seem.\n\n> _The Heart:_\nWhat, be a singer born and lack a theme?\n\n> _The Soul:_\nIsaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?\n\n> _The Heart:_\nStruck dumb in the simplicity of fire!\n\n> _The Soul:_\nLook on that fire, salvation walks within.\n\n> _The Heart:_\nWhat theme had Homer but original sin?\n\n\n# VIII.\n\nMust we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we\nAccept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?\nThe body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,\nBathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,\nHealing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance\nEternalised the body of a modern saint that once\nHad scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I--though heart might find relief\nDid I become a Christian man and choose for my belief\nWhat seems most welcome in the tomb--play a pre-destined part.\nHomer is my example and his unchristened heart.\nThe lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?\nSo get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-valley-of-the-black-pig": { - "title": "“The Valley of the Black Pig”", - "body": "The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears\nSuddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,\nAnd then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries\nOf unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.\nWe who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,\nThe grey caim on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,\nBeing weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you.\nMaster of the still stars and of the flaming door.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wanderings-of-oisin": { - "title": "“The Wanderings of Oisin”", - "body": "> _Saint Patrick:_\nYou who are bent, and bald, and blind,\nWith a heavy heart and a wandering mind,\nHave known three centuries, poets sing,\nOf dalliance with a demon thing.\n\n> _Oisin:_\nSad to remember, sick with years,\nThe swift innumerable spears,\nThe horsemen with their floating hair,\nAnd bowls of barley, honey, and wine,\nThose merry couples dancing in tune,\nAnd the white body that lay by mine;\nBut the tale, though words be lighter than air.\nMust live to be old like the wandering moon.\n\nCaoilte, and Conan, and Finn were there,\nWhen we followed a deer with our baying hounds.\nWith Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,\nAnd passing the Firbolgs’ burial-motmds,\nCame to the cairn-heaped grassy hill\nWhere passionate Maeve is stony-still;\nAnd found On the dove-grey edge of the sea\nA pearl-pale, high-born lady, who rode\nOn a horse with bridle of findrinny;\nAnd like a sunset were her lips,\nA stormy sunset on doomed ships;\nA citron colour gloomed in her hair,\n\nBut down to her feet white vesture flowed,\nAnd with the glimmering crimson glowed\nOf many a figured embroidery;\nAnd it was bound with a pearl-pale shell\nThat wavered like the summer streams,\nAs her soft bosom rose and fell.\n\n> _Saint Patrick:_\nYou are still wrecked among heathen dreams.\n\n> _Oisin:_\n“Why do you wind no horn?” she said\n“And every hero droop his head?\nThe hornless deer is not more sad\nThat many a peaceful moment had,\nMore sleek than any granary mouse,\nIn his own leafy forest house\nAmong the waving fields of fern:\nThe hunting of heroes should be glad.”\n\n“O pleasant woman,” answered Finn,\n“We think on Oscar’s pencilled urn,\nAnd on the heroes lying slain\nOn Gabhra’s raven-covered plain;\nBut where are your noble kith and kin,\nAnd from what country do you ride?”\n\n“My father and my mother are\nAengus and Edain, my own name\nNiamh, and my country far\nBeyond the tumbling of this tide.”\n\n“What dream came with you that you came\nThrough bitter tide on foam-wet feet?\nDid your companion wander away\nFrom where the birds of Aengus wing?”\nThereon did she look haughty and sweet:\n“I have not yet, war-weary king,\nBeen spoken of with any man;\nYet now I choose, for these four feet\nRan through the foam and ran to this\nThat I might have your son to kiss.”\n\n“Were there no better than my son\nThat you through all that foam should run?”\n\n“I loved no man, though kings besought,\nUntil the Danaan poets brought\nRhyme that rhymed upon Oisin’s name,\nAnd now I am dizzy with the thought\nOf all that wisdom and the fame\nOf battles broken by his hands,\nOf stories builded by his words\nThat are like coloured Asian birds\nAt evening in their rainless lands.”\n\nO Patrick, by your brazen bell,\nThere was no limb of mine but fell\nInto a desperate gulph of love!\n“You only will I wed,” I cried,\n“And I will make a thousand songs,\nAnd set your name all names above,\nAnd captives bound with leathern thongs\nShall kneel and praise you, one by one,\nAt evening in my western dun.”\n\n“O Oisin, mount by me and ride\nTo shores by the wash of the tremulous tide,\nWhere men have heaped no burial-mounds,\nAnd the days pass by like a wayward tune,\nWhere broken faith has never been known\nAnd the blushes of first love never have flown;\nAnd there I will give you a hundred hounds;\nNo mightier creatures bay at the moon;\nAnd a hundred robes of murmuring silk,\nAnd a hundred calves and a hundred sheep\nWhose long wool whiter than sea-froth flows,\nAnd a hundred spears and a hundred bows,\nAnd oil and wine and honey and milk,\nAnd always never-anxious sleep;\nWhile a hundred youths, mighty of limb,\nBut knowing nor tumult nor hate nor strife,\nAnd a hundred ladies, merry as birds,\nWho when they dance to a fitful measure\nHave a speed like the speed of the salmon herds,\nShall follow your horn and obey your whim,\nAnd you shall know the Danaan leisure;\nAnd Niamh be with you for a wife.”\nThen she sighed gently, “It grows late.\nMusic and love and sleep await,\nWhere I would be when the white moon climbs,\nThe red sun falls and the world grows dim.”\n\nAnd then I mounted and she bound me\nWith her triumphing arms around me,\nAnd whispering to herself enwound me;\nHe shook himself and neighed three times:\nCaoilte, Conan, and Finn came near,\nAnd wept, and raised their lamenting hands,\nAnd bid me stay, with many a tear;\nBut we rode out from the human lands.\nIn what far kingdom do you go’\nAh Fenians, with the shield and bow?\nOr are you phantoms white as snow,\nWhose lips had life’s most prosperous glow?\nO you, with whom in sloping vallcys,\nOr down the dewy forest alleys,\nI chased at morn the flying deer,\nWith whom I hurled the hurrying spear,\nAnd heard the foemen’s bucklers rattle,\nAnd broke the heaving ranks of battle!\nAnd Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,\nWhere are you with your long rough hair?\nYou go not where the red deer feeds,\nNor tear the foemen from their steeds.\n\n> _Saint Patrick:_\nBoast not, nor mourn with drooping head\nCompanions long accurst and dead,\nAnd hounds for centuries dust and air.\n\n> _Oisin:_\nWe galloped over the glossy sea:\nI know not if days passed or hours,\nAnd Niamh sang continually\nDanaan songs, and their dewy showers\nOf pensive laughter, unhuman sound,\nLulled weariness, and softly round\nMy human sorrow her white arms wound.\nWe galloped; now a hornless deer\nPassed by us, chased by a phantom hound\nAll pearly white, save one red ear;\nAnd now a lady rode like the wind\nWith an apple of gold in her tossing hand;\nAnd a beautiful young man followed behind\nWith quenchless gaze and fluttering hair.\n“Were these two born in the Danaan land,\nOr have they breathed the mortal air?”\n\n“Vex them no longer,” Niamh said,\nAnd sighing bowed her gentle head,\nAnd sighing laid the pearly tip\nOf one long finger on my lip.\n\nBut now the moon like a white rose shone\nIn the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank,\nAnd clouds atrayed their rank on rank\nAbout his fading crimson ball:\nThe floor of Almhuin’s hosting hall\nWas not more level than the sea,\nAs, full of loving fantasy,\nAnd with low murmurs, we rode on,\nWhere many a trumpet-twisted shell\nThat in immortal silence sleeps\nDreaming of her own melting hues,\nHer golds, her ambers, and her blues,\nPierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.\nBut now a wandering land breeze came\nAnd a far sound of feathery quires;\nIt seemed to blow from the dying flame,\nThey seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.\nThe horse towards the music raced,\nNeighing along the lifeless waste;\nLike sooty fingers, many a tree\nRose ever out of the warm sea;\nAnd they were trembling ceaselessly,\nAs though they all were beating time,\nUpon the centre of the sun,\nTo that low laughing woodland rhyme.\nAnd, now our wandering hours were done,\nWe cantered to the shore, and knew\nThe reason of the trembling trees:\nRound every branch the song-birds flew,\nOr clung thereon like swarming bees;\nWhile round the shore a million stood\nLike drops of frozen rainbow light,\nAnd pondered in a soft vain mood\nUpon their shadows in the tide,\nAnd told the purple deeps their pride,\nAnd murmured snatches of delight;\nAnd on the shores were many boats\nWith bending sterns and bending bows,\nAnd carven figures on their prows\nOf bitterns, and fish-eating stoats,\nAnd swans with their exultant throats:\nAnd where the wood and waters meet\nWe tied the horse in a leafy clump,\nAnd Niamh blew three merry notes\nOut of a little silver trump;\nAnd then an answering whispering flew\nOver the bare and woody land,\nA whisper of impetuous feet,\nAnd ever nearer, nearer grew;\nAnd from the woods rushed out a band\nOf men and ladies, hand in hand,\nAnd singing, singing all together;\nTheir brows were white as fragrant milk,\nTheir cloaks made out of yellow silk,\nAnd trimmed with many a crimson feather;\nAnd when they saw the cloak I wore\nWas dim with mire of a mortal shore,\nThey fingered it and gazed on me\nAnd laughed like murmurs of the sea;\nBut Niamh with a swift distress\nBid them away and hold their peace;\nAnd when they heard her voice they ran\nAnd knelt there, every girl and man,\nAnd kissed, as they would never cease,\nHer pearl-pale hand and the hem of her dress.\nShe bade them bring us to the hall\nWhere Aengus dreams, from sun to sun,\nA Druid dream of the end of days\nWhen the stars are to wane and the world be done.\n\nThey led us by long and shadowy ways\nWhere drops of dew in myriads fall,\nAnd tangled creepers every hour\nBlossom in some new crimson flower,\nAnd once a sudden laughter sprang\nFrom all their lips, and once they sang\nTogether, while the dark woods rang,\nAnd made in all their distant parts,\nWith boom of bees in honey-marts,\nA rumour of delighted hearts.\nAnd once a lady by my side\nGave me a harp, and bid me sing,\nAnd touch the laughing silver string;\nBut when I sang of human joy\nA sorrow wrapped each merry face,\nAnd, patrick! by your beard, they wept,\nUntil one came, a tearful boy;\n“A sadder creature never stept\nThan this strange human bard,” he cried;\nAnd caught the silver harp away,\nAnd, weeping over the white strings, hurled\nIt down in a leaf-hid, hollow place\nThat kept dim waters from the sky;\nAnd each one said, with a long, long sigh,\n“O saddest harp in all the world,\nSleep there till the moon and the stars die!”\n\nAnd now, still sad, we came to where\nA beautiful young man dreamed within\nA house of wattles, clay, and skin;\nOne hand upheld his beardless chin,\nAnd one a sceptre flashing out\nWild flames of red and gold and blue,\nLike to a merry wandering rout\nOf dancers leaping in the air;\nAnd men and ladies knelt them there\nAnd showed their eyes with teardrops dim,\nAnd with low murmurs prayed to him,\nAnd kissed the sceptre with red lips,\nAnd touched it with their finger-tips.\nHe held that flashing sceptre up.\n“Joy drowns the twilight in the dew,\nAnd fills with stars night’s purple cup,\nAnd wakes the sluggard seeds of corn,\nAnd stirs the young kid’s budding horn,\nAnd makes the infant ferns unwrap,\nAnd for the peewit paints his cap,\nAnd rolls along the unwieldy sun,\nAnd makes the little planets run:\nAnd if joy were not on the earth,\nThere were an end of change and birth,\nAnd Earth and Heaven and Hell would die,\nAnd in some gloomy barrow lie\nFolded like a frozen fly;\nThen mock at Death and Time with glances\nAnd wavering arms and wandering dances.”\n\n“Men’s hearts of old were drops of flame\nThat from the saffron morning came,\nOr drops of silver joy that fell\nOut of the moon’s pale twisted shell;\nBut now hearts cry that hearts are slaves,\nAnd toss and turn in narrow caves;\nBut here there is nor law nor rule,\nNor have hands held a weary tool;\nAnd here there is nor Change nor Death,\nBut only kind and merry breath,\nFor joy is God and God is joy.”\nWith one long glance for girl and boy\nAnd the pale blossom of the moon,\nHe fell into a Druid swoon.\n\nAnd in a wild and sudden dance\nWe mocked at Time and Fate and Chance\nAnd swept out of the wattled hall\nAnd came to where the dewdrops fall\nAmong the foamdrops of the sea,\nAnd there we hushed the revelry;\nAnd, gathering on our brows a frown,\nBent all our swaying bodies down,\nAnd to the waves that glimmer by\nThat sloping green De Danaan sod\nSang, “God is joy and joy is God,\nAnd things that have grown sad are wicked,\nAnd things that fear the dawn of the morrow\nOr the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.”\n\nWe danced to where in the winding thicket\nThe damask roses, bloom on bloom,\nLike crimson meteors hang in the gloom.\nAnd bending over them softly said,\nBending over them in the dance,\nWith a swift and friendly glance\nFrom dewy eyes: “Upon the dead\nFall the leaves of other roses,\nOn the dead dim earth encloses:\nBut never, never on our graves,\nHeaped beside the glimmering waves,\nShall fall the leaves of damask roses.\nFor neither Death nor Change comes near us,\nAnd all listless hours fear us,\nAnd we fear no dawning morrow,\nNor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.”\n\nThe dance wound through the windless woods;\nThe ever-summered solitudes;\nUntil the tossing arms grew still\nUpon the woody central hill;\nAnd, gathered in a panting band,\nWe flung on high each waving hand,\nAnd sang unto the starry broods.\nIn our raised eyes there flashed a glow\nOf milky brightness to and fro\nAs thus our song arose: “You stars,\nAcross your wandering ruby cars\nShake the loose reins: you slaves of God.\nHe rules you with an iron rod,\nHe holds you with an iron bond,\nEach one woven to the other,\nEach one woven to his brother\nLike bubbles in a frozen pond;\nBut we in a lonely land abide\nUnchainable as the dim tide,\nWith hearts that know nor law nor rule,\nAnd hands that hold no wearisome tool,\nFolded in love that fears no morrow,\nNor the grey wandering osprey Sorrow.”\n\nO Patrick! for a hundred years\nI chased upon that woody shore\nThe deer, the badger, and the boar.\nO patrick! for a hundred years\nAt evening on the glimmering sands,\nBeside the piled-up hunting spears,\nThese now outworn and withered hands\nWrestled among the island bands.\nO patrick! for a hundred years\nWe went a-fishing in long boats\nWith bending sterns and bending bows,\nAnd carven figures on their prows\nOf bitterns and fish-eating stoats.\nO patrick! for a hundred years\nThe gentle Niamh was my wife;\nBut now two things devour my life;\nThe things that most of all I hate:\nFasting and prayers.\n\n> _Saint Patrick:_\nTell on.\n\n> _Oisin:_\nYes, yes,\nFor these were ancient Oisin’s fate\nLoosed long ago from Heaven’s gate,\nFor his last days to lie in wait.\nWhen one day by the tide I stood,\nI found in that forgetfulness\nOf dreamy foam a staff of wood\nFrom some dead warrior’s broken lance:\nI tutned it in my hands; the stains\nOf war were on it, and I wept,\nRemembering how the Fenians stept\nAlong the blood-bedabbled plains,\nEqual to good or grievous chance:\nThereon young Niamh softly came\nAnd caught my hands, but spake no word\nSave only many times my name,\nIn murmurs, like a frighted bird.\nWe passed by woods, and lawns of clover,\nAnd found the horse and bridled him,\nFor we knew well the old was over.\nI heard one say, “His eyes grow dim\nWith all the ancient sorrow of men’;\nAnd wrapped in dreams rode out again\nWith hoofs of the pale findrinny\nOver the glimmering purple sea.\nUnder the golden evening light,\nThe Immortals moved among thc fountains\nBy rivers and the woods’ old night;\nSome danced like shadows on the mountains\nSome wandered ever hand in hand;\nOr sat in dreams on the pale strand,\nEach forehead like an obscure star\nBent down above each hooked knee,\nAnd sang, and with a dreamy gaze\nWatched where the sun in a saffron blaze\nWas slumbering half in the sea-ways;\nAnd, as they sang, the painted birds\nKept time with their bright wings and feet;\nLike drops of honey came their words,\nBut fainter than a young lamb’s bleat.”\n\n“An old man stirs the fire to a blaze,\nIn the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother.\nHe has over-lingered his welcome; the days,\nGrown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other;\nHe hears the storm in the chimney above,\nAnd bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,\nWhile his heart still dreams of battle and love,\nAnd the cry of the hounds on the hills of old.\n\nBut We are apart in the grassy places,\nWhere care cannot trouble the least of our days,\nOr the softness of youth be gone from our faces,\nOr love’s first tenderness die in our gaze.\nThe hare grows old as she plays in the sun\nAnd gazes around her with eyes of brightness;\nBefore the swift things that she dreamed of were done\nShe limps along in an aged whiteness;\nA storm of birds in the Asian trees\nLike tulips in the air a-winging,\nAnd the gentle waves of the summer seas,\nThat raise their heads and wander singing,\nMust murmur at last, ‘Unjust, unjust’;\nAnd ‘My speed is a weariness,’ falters the mouse,\nAnd the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust,\nAnd the roof falls in of his tunnelled house.\nBut the love-dew dims our eyes till the day\nWhen God shall come from the Sea with a sigh\nAnd bid the stars drop down from the sky,\nAnd the moon like a pale rose wither away.”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-then": { - "title": "“What Then?”", - "body": "His chosen comrades thought at school\nHe must grow a famous man;\nHe thought the same and lived by rule,\nAll his twenties crammed with toil;\n“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”\n\nEverything he wrote was read,\nAfter certain years he won\nSufficient money for his need,\nFriends that have been friends indeed;\n“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”\n\nAll his happier dreams came true--\nA small old house, wife, daughter, son,\nGrounds where plum and cabbage grew,\npoets and Wits about him drew;\n“What then.?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”\n\n“The work is done,” grown old he thought,\n“According to my boyish plan;\nLet the fools rage, I swerved in naught,\nSomething to perfection brought”;\nBut louder sang that ghost, “What then?”", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "what-was-lost": { - "title": "“What Was Lost”", - "body": "I sing what was lost and dread what was won,\nI walk in a battle fought over again,\nMy king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;\nFeet to the Rising and Setting may run,\nThey always beat on the same small stone.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wheel": { - "title": "“The Wheel”", - "body": "Through winter-time we call on spring,\nAnd through the spring on summer call,\nAnd when abounding hedges ring\nDeclare that winter’s best of all;\nAnd after that there s nothing good\nBecause the spring-time has not come--\nNor know that what disturbs our blood\nIs but its longing for the tomb.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "when-you-are-old": { - "title": "“When You Are Old”", - "body": "When you are old and grey and full of sleep,\nAnd nodding by the fire, take down this book,\nAnd slowly read, and dream of the soft look\nYour eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;\n\nHow many loved your moments of glad grace,\nAnd loved your beauty with love false or true,\nBut one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,\nAnd loved the sorrows of your changing face;\n\nAnd bending down beside the glowing bars,\nMurmur, a little sadly, how Love fled\nAnd paced upon the mountains overhead\nAnd hid his face amid a crowd of stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-white-birds": { - "title": "“The White Birds”", - "body": "I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!\nWe tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;\nAnd the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,\nHas awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.\nA weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;\nAh, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,\nOr the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:\nFor I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!\nI am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,\nWhere Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;\nSoon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,\nWere we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "who-goes-with-fergus": { - "title": "“Who Goes with Fergus?”", - "body": "Who will go drive with Fergus now,\nAnd pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,\nAnd dance upon the level shore?\nYoung man, lift up your russet brow,\nAnd lift your tender eyelids, maid,\nAnd brood on hopes and fear no more.\n\nAnd no more turn aside and brood\nUpon love’s bitter mystery;\nFor Fergus rules the brazen cars,\nAnd rules the shadows of the wood,\nAnd the white breast of the dim sea\nAnd all dishevelled wandering stars.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "why-should-not-old-men-be-mad": { - "title": "“Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”", - "body": "Why should not old men be mad?\nSome have known a likely lad\nThat had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist\nTurn to a drunken journalist;\nA girl that knew all Dante once\nLive to bear children to a dunce;\nA Helen of social welfare dream,\nClimb on a wagonette to scream.\nSome think it a matter of course that chance\nShould starve good men and bad advance,\nThat if their neighbours figured plain,\nAs though upon a lighted screen,\nNo single story would they find\nOf an unbroken happy mind,\nA finish worthy of the start.\nYoung men know nothing of this sort,\nObservant old men know it well;\nAnd when they know what old books tell\nAnd that no better can be had,\nKnow why an old man should be mad.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wild-old-wicked-man": { - "title": "“The Wild Old Wicked Man”", - "body": "“Because I am mad about women\nI am mad about the hills,”\nSaid that wild old wicked man\nWho travels where God wills.\n“Not to die on the straw at home.\nThose hands to close these eyes,\nThat is all I ask, my dear,\nFrom the old man in the skies.\nDaybreak and a candle-end.”\n\n“Kind are all your words, my dear,\nDo not the rest withhold.\nWho can know the year, my dear,\nwhen an old man’s blood grows cold? ’\nI have what no young man can have\nBecause he loves too much.\nWords I have that can pierce the heart,\nBut what can he do but touch?”\nDaybreak and a candle-end.\n\nThen Said she to that wild old man,\nHis stout stick under his hand,\n“Love to give or to withhold\nIs not at my command.\nI gave it all to an older man:\nThat old man in the skies.\nHands that are busy with His beads\nCan never close those eyes.”\nDaybreak and a candle-end.\n\n“Go your ways, O go your ways,\nI choose another mark,\nGirls down on the seashore\nWho understand the dark;\nBawdy talk for the fishermen;\nA dance for the fisher-lads;\nWhen dark hangs upon the water\nThey turn down their beds.\nDaybreak and a candle-end.”\n\n“A young man in the dark am I,\nBut a wild old man in the light,\nThat can make a cat laugh, or\nCan touch by mother wit\nThings hid in their marrow-bones\nFrom time long passed away,\nHid from all those warty lads\nThat by their bodies lay.\nDayhreak and a candle-end”\n\n“All men live in suffering,\nI know as few can know,\nWhether they take the upper road\nOr stay content on the low,\nRower bent in his row-boat\nOr weaver bent at his loom,\nHorseman erect upon horseback\nOr child hid in the womb.\nDaybreak and a candle-end.”\n\n“That some stream of lightning\nFrom the old man in the skies\nCan burn out that suffering\nNo right-taught man denies.\nBut a coarse old man am I,\nI choose the second-best,\nI forget it all awhile\nUpon a woman’s breast.”\nDaybreak and a candle-end.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-wild-swans-at-coole": { - "title": "“The Wild Swans at Coole”", - "body": "The trees are in their autumn beauty,\nThe woodland paths are dry,\nUnder the October twilight the water\nMirrors a still sky;\nUpon the brimming water among the stones\nAre nine-and-fifty swans.\n\nThe nineteenth autumn has come upon me\nSince I first made my count;\nI saw, before I had well finished,\nAll suddenly mount\nAnd scatter wheeling in great broken rings\nUpon their clamorous wings.\n\nI have looked upon those brilliant creatures,\nAnd now my heart is sore.\nAll’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,\nThe first time on this shore,\nThe bell-beat of their wings above my head,\nTrod with a lighter tread.\n\nUnwearied still, lover by lover,\nThey paddle in the cold\nCompanionable streams or climb the air;\nTheir hearts have not grown old;\nPassion or conquest, wander where they will,\nAttend upon them still.\n\nBut now they drift on the still water,\nMysterious, beautiful;\nAmong what rushes will they build,\nBy what lake’s edge or pool\nDelight men’s eyes when I awake some day\nTo find they have flown away?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "october" - } - } - }, - "the-witch": { - "title": "“The Witch”", - "body": "Toil and grow rich,\nWhat’s that but to lie\nWith a foul witch\nAnd after, drained dry,\nTo be brought\nTo the chamber where\nLies one long sought\nWith despair?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-withering-of-the-boughs": { - "title": "“The Withering of the Boughs”", - "body": "I cried when the moon was mutmuring to the birds:\n“Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,\nI long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,\nFor the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.”\nThe honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,\nAnd I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge of streams.\nNo boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;\nThe boughs have withered because I have told them my, dreams.\n\nI know of the leafy paths that the witches take\nWho come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,\nAnd their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;\nI know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind\nWind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool\nOn the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.\nNo boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;\nThe boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.\n\nI know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round\nCoupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.\nA king and a queen are wandering there, and the sound\nHas made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind\nWith wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;\nI know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.\nNo boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;\nThe boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "words": { - "title": "“Words”", - "body": "I had this thought a while ago,\n“My darling cannot understand\nWhat I have done, or what would do\nIn this blind bitter land.”\n\nAnd I grew weary of the sun\nUntil my thoughts cleared up again,\nRemembering that the best I have done\nWas done to make it plain;\n\nThat every year I have cried, “At length\nMy darling understands it all,\nBecause I have come into my strength,\nAnd words obey my call”;\n\nThat had she done so who can say\nWhat would have shaken from the sieve?\nI might have thrown poor words away\nAnd been content to live.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "young-mans-song": { - "title": "“Young Man’s Song”", - "body": "“She will change,” I cried.\n“Into a withered crone.”\nThe heart in my side,\nThat so still had lain,\nIn noble rage replied\nAnd beat upon the bone:\n\n“Uplift those eyes and throw\nThose glances unafraid:\nShe would as bravely show\nDid all the fabric fade;\nNo withered crone I saw\nBefore the world was made.”\n\nAbashed by that report,\nFor the heart cannot lie,\nI knelt in the dirt.\nAnd all shall bend the knee\nTo my offended heart\nUntil it pardon me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "sergei-yesenin": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Sergei Yesenin", - "birth": { - "year": 1895 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1925 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Yesenin", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 6 - }, - "poems": { - "far-away-happy-song": { - "title": "“Far Away Happy Song”", - "body": "Somebody sings a happy song\nSomewhere far, far away; I‘d go\nThere, or I’d happily sing along\nAlas, my broken heart says no.\n\nMy soul strives to reach this song\nAnd seeks like notes in my heart\nAlas, I wasted my strength long\nAgo, before this song did start.\n\nQuite early, I began to seek, to follow\nA fleeting dream of an earth’s ideal\nI would grumble that it was hollow\nAnd that happiness seemed unreal,\n\nEarlier my soul searched at length,\nFor my happy self, lost on a dark day;\nUntil I will regain my lost strength\nI cannot join in the song, or the play.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "K. M. W. Klara", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - } - } - }, - "farewell": { - "title": "“Farewell”", - "body": "Farewell, my good friend, farewell.\nIn my heart, forever, you’ll stay.\nMay the fated parting foretell\nThat again we’ll meet up someday.\n\nLet no words, no handshakes ensue,\nNo saddened brows in remorse,--\nTo die, in this life, is not new,\nAnd living’s no newer, of course.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller" - } - }, - "no-more-searching-footsteps-in-the-groves": { - "title": "“No more searching footsteps in the groves …”", - "body": "No more searching footsteps in the groves,\nNo more strolling in the leaves …\nWith your flaxen hair like a sheaf of oats\nYou have disappeared from my dreams.\n\nSkin in crimson berry juices splashes;\nYou were sweet, and beautiful, and kind!\nLike the dusk, last sunrays in your lashes,\nAnd like snow, radiant and bright.\n\nAs a subtle tune, your name has faded;\nAnd your eyes, like berries, withered and grew cold.\nYet the scent of honey from your chaste hands\nStill remains inside your rumpled shawl.\n\nOn the roof, when a quiet sleepy morning\nLike a kitten cleanses lips by hand,\nHoneycombs about you are chanting,\nAnd their chants are echoed by the wind.\n\nLet the blue eve whisper to me, sometimes,\nHow you were a fantasy, a dream,\nYet the dreamer of your slender waist and shoulders,\nHas affixed his lips to the secret realm …\n\nNo more searching footsteps in the groves,\nNo more strolling in the leaves …\nWith your flaxen hair like a sheaf of oats\nYou have disappeared from my dreams.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "suns-golden-arc": { - "title": "“Sun’s golden arc …”", - "body": "Sun’s golden arc\nHot like a red coal,\nSent down its spark\nAnd it warmed my soul;\n\nAlthough, I am not sure\nNow, I hope that I could\nExpect from my future\nTo bring something good;\n\nThe warmth brought me back\nTo life, the light illuminated me\nI forgot the past, all that I lack\nAnd all that is lacking in me.\n\nWarmed by the Light\nMy blood caught fire,\nMy soul shined, alight\nMy spirit was inspired.\n\nI feel restored by the ray,\nMy heart still beats stronger,\nThese good feelings are here to stay\nEven when the sun shines no longer;\n\nOn the trip I am forced to make\nLove goes with me from the start.\nIt banishes anguish, fear and ache\nAnd it gives freedom to my heart.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "K. M. W. Klara", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "pentecost" - } - } - }, - "the-winter-sings": { - "title": "“The Winter Sings”", - "body": "The winter sings--aloud it yells,\nThe pine tree with its hundred bells\nlulls shaggy forest and\naround it all the rain-drenched clouds\nAre sadly mounting in their crowds\nTo float to distant land.\n\nAnd in the yard a blizzard spreads\nIts lovely silken carpet’s threads,\nBut brings its painful cold.\nThe energetic sparrows flit\nLike little orphans there and sit\nclose up to window’s hold.\n\nFor frozen stiff they huddle tight\nTo warming house with all their might\nAnd hunger makes them tired.\nBut, madly roaring, storm’s gusts knock\nThe flapping shutters as they rock--\nIts anger now is fired.\n\nAnd gently there the birds now sleep\nSurrounded by the icy heap\nAgainst the frozen pane.\nAnd there they dream of lovely thing--\nHow beauteous spring to all will bring\nBright sunny smiles again.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Rupert Moreton", - "date": { - "year": 1910 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "the-crimson-light-of-dawn-is-woven-in-the-lake": { - "title": "“The crimson light of dawn is woven in the lake …”", - "body": "The crimson light of dawn is woven in the lake.\nIn the woods, the grouses are crying out, awake.\n\nAn oriole weeps loud, hidden in the tree.\nOnly, I’m not crying--filled with ecstasy.\n\nYou will surely meet me, later on today,\nWe will sit together on fresh stacks of hay.\n\nLike a bloom, I’ll rumple you, kiss you all night long,\nFor a man so fuddled, there’s no right or wrong.\n\nYou’ll throw off your veil, drunk in my embrace,\nHidden in the bushes till the morning rays.\n\nLet the grouses cry, in the woods, alone,\nThere is joyful sadness in the crimson dawn.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Andrey Kneller", - "date": { - "year": 1911 - } - } - } - } - }, - "yevgeny-yevtushenko": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Yevgeny Yevtushenko", - "birth": { - "year": 1933 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2017 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Yevtushenko", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 12 - }, - "poems": { - "dont-disappear": { - "title": "“Don’t disappear …”", - "body": "Don’t disappear … for if you go away,\ntransfigured, you will leave your own essence.\nOnce and for all your own self you will betray\nand that will be dishonest, downright treacherous.\n\nDon’t go … You can depart quite easily, of course.\nBut you and I will not revive. We wouldn’t.\nDeath has a an extraordinary drawing force,\nand dying, even for a moment, is imprudent.\n\nDon’t go … Forget the shade in our way.\nLove is for two. A third one doesn’t count.\nWe shall be flawless on the Judgement Day\nwhen trumpeters call us for account.\n\nWe have atoned for our sin … Don’t say good-bye.\nNo one can censure us or make an accusation,\nand we deserve to be forgiven by\nall those whom we have hurt, with no intention.\n\nDon’t vanish … You can do it in no time.\nHow can we subsequently see each other?\nAnd can there be the double, yours and mine?\nExclusively in our kids, I gather.\n\nGive me your hand … Don’t disappear, please.\nYou’ve got me on your palm engraved distinctly.\nThe frightening truth about final, last love is\nthat it’s the fear of loss, not love, to put it strictly.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "human-life-in-this-century-has-a": { - "title": "“Human life in this century has a …”", - "body": "Human life in this century has a\nvery small value, as it were …\nBeneath the wings of the dove of Picasso\nthere’s a war going on everywhere.\n\nWe give a hug to our kids in a hurry,\nand we hastily kiss our wives,\nand we leave them to fight in the war of\nhuman passions, emotions and vibes.\n\nWe fight with the earth and the heaven,\nwith sands, heavy snowfalls and hails,\nwe fight with dishonest behaviour,\nwith our creditors, fools and ourselves.\n\nWhen we die you should not be ingenuous\nin believing it’s a natural death,\nheart attack or some serious illness,\nno, we die in this big war of nerves.\n\nEvery day, standing close by the windows,\nour sweethearts, like soldiers’ wives,\nwatch their husbands, guilty though guiltless,\ngo to join in these rigorous fights.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "im-burying-my-friend-i-suppose": { - "title": "“I’m burying my friend, I suppose, …”", - "body": "I’m burying my friend, I suppose,\nIt’s a secret I never disclose.\nOthers think that he’s still alive,\nOthers know that he has a wife,\nthat we still have got friendly ties,\nfor we dine out together sometimes.\n\nAnd I don’t want to tell anyone\nthat my friend is a living dead man.\nIt’s not cleanness I’m talking with,\nI’m talking to a void and filth\nIt’s not friendship that’s raised a glass\nnot openness,--emptiness has.\n\nI do not condemn what you do,\nI’m silent, I’m just burying you.\nWell, what’s that? Do I get it right? …\nAfter all, no one has died,\nand I haven’t lived long as yet\nBut so many friends are dead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "im-out-of-love-with-you": { - "title": "“I’m out of love with you …”", - "body": "I’m out of love with you … It’s such a trivial story,\nas trivial as life, as trivial as death.\nI’ll break off the romance without feeling sorry,\nand smashed be my guitar! Why make pretence at length?\n\nOur shaggy ugly dog does not appear to catch us,\nhe doesn’t understand what we have got in mind\nfor when I let him in at your front door he scratches,\nand when you let him in he’ll come to scratch at mine.\n\nThe way he runs about, he can go quite mental …\nYou sentimental dog, you’re too young, my friend.\nMe, I shall not let myself be sentimental,\nI’d just prolong the torture by putting off the end.\n\nSentimentality’s a crime and not just human weakness.\nWhen you give in again, you promise once again\nand try to stage a show, albeit without willingness,\nchoosing a silly name, something like “Love Regained”.\n\nTrue love should be protected, kept safe from the beginning\nagainst the ardent “never!” and childish “once for all!”.\nDon’t promise!--the train whistle’s in our ears ringing,\nDon’t promise!--comes the mumbling from the wire call.\n\nThe heavy smoky clouds as well as damaged foliage\nhave many times admonished and warned us ignor’nt snobs:\nexcessive optimism is caused by lack of knowledge,\nand we should draw the line at cherishing big hopes.\n\nThe vergers had good sense, they checked the chains for heaviness\nbefore putting them on, they were wise enough\nto give the earth instead of promising the heavens,\ngive instant love instead of eternal love above.\n\nWhen we’re in love it’s not humane to say “I love you”.\nIt’s hard to hear, escaping the same lips, afterward\nabusive empty sounds, lies, rudeness, sneering, laughing,\nthe world’s deceitful fullness will be an empty world.\n\nWe shouldn’t make a promise for love is not compliance.\nWhy do we clothe our lies into a wedding dress ?\nA vision is all right until it melts like ice.\nIt’s better not to love if love eventually ends.\n\nOur poor little dog whines, getting puzzled, maddened,\ndashing from door to door, you should have seen him prance! …\nFor having ceased to love you I do not ask your pardon,\nI ask to pardon me for having loved you once.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "my-dog": { - "title": "“My Dog”", - "body": "Clinging to the window pane\nhe’s waiting for someone, in vain.\n\nI dip my hand into his hair,\nI’m also waiting, as it were.\n\nYou do remember, doggie, dear,\na woman used to live in here.\n\nBut who on earth was she to me?\nMy sister, or my wife, maybe?\n\nSometimes I think that it could be\nmy daughter who needs help from me.\n\nShe’s away. You’re quiet, my dear.\nThere won’t be other women here.\n\nMy dear dog, you’re nice, I think,\nbut it’s a pity you don’t drink.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-prayer": { - "title": "“The Prayer”", - "body": "They intimidate and slash us,\nThey reduce our souls to ashes,\nPut out in us the light of God.\n\nShould we our pride abandon,\nLike grey mire we’ll be found then\nUnder coach wheels on the road.\n\nOur body we can cage in\nSo that it cannot engage in\nFlying off above the sky.\n\nBut our soul will break away,\nSomehow it will find a way\nTo God Almighty it will fly.\n\nLife from death I don’t distinguish,\nSomeone dares death diminish.\nDeath is often more fragile.\n\nTeach me, oh, my Lord Almighty,\nShould death come before me quietly,\nHow to give a placid smile.\n\nHelp me, pray, my Lord,\nTo bravely face the world,\nHide not stars from visions.\n\nThou canst grant, I bet,\nA little piece of bread,\nCrumbs to feed the pigeons.\n\nOur body may get cold, or\nBe unhealthy, burn and moulder\nAnd then perish in the shades,\n\nWhile our soul does not surrender,\nAfter death there is remainder:\nSomething more than just ourselves.\n\nWe remain as bits and pieces:\nSome as books or sighing whispers,\nSome as children, or a song.\n\nEven in those bits, however,\nSomewhere we live for ever,\nThough we die, we get along.\n\nWhat will you, my soul, tell God,\nWhat will bring you to His threshold?\nWill you be from Hell released?\n\nWe all have a sinful moment,\nBut mostly he fears atonement\nWhose transgression is the least.\n\nHelp me, pray, my Lord,\nTo bravely face the world,\nHide not stars from visions.\n\nThou canst grant, I bet,\nA little piece of bread,\nCrumbs to feed the pigeons.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "should-the-clover-rustle-in-the-meadow": { - "title": "“Should the clover rustle in the meadow …”", - "body": "Should the clover rustle in the meadow\nor a pine-tree in the wind should sway\nI will stop and listen and remember\nthat I, too, will pass away some day.\n\nWhen I see a boy, a pigeon-fancier,\nstanding on the roof, right on the brink,\nI believe that death is not the answer,\ndying is a ruthless thing, I think.\n\nDeath is what we ought to be aware of.\nWe shall perish but our world survives;\nthose who will replace the dead, however,\ncannot substitute for their lives.\n\nIt was not in vain that I was trodden,\nI have learnt my lesson, as I find.\nWhat I bore mind I have forgotten,\nwhat I did forget I bear in mind.\n\nNow I know that snow is very special,\nand the hills are greener, when you’re young,\nand I know that life implies affection,\nfor we live because we love someone.\n\nNow I know that secretly I happened\nto be bound to so many lives,\nand I know that man is so unhappy\njust because for happiness he strives.\n\nHappiness, at times, is rather silly,\ntakes of things a vacant, flippant view,\nwhereas trouble stares, frowning grimly,\nhence, its power of seeing trough and through.\n\nHappiness is distant and unreal.\nTrouble sees the earth in its true light.\nHappiness has somewhat of betrayal,\ntrouble will be always by man’s side.\n\nIt was thoughtless of me to be happy,\nbut, thank God, it failed me anyway.\nI desired the impossible to happen,\nand I’m glad it didn’t come my way.\n\nPeople, humankind, I love you dearly,\nfor a happy life as ever you may strive.\nAs for me, now I ’m happy, really,\nbecause happiness I do not seek in life.\n\nWhat I want now is the taste sweetness\nof the clover on my lips to stay,\nand I want to have my little weakness:\nmy unwillingness to perish right away.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "snow-flakes-are-falling": { - "title": "“Snow flakes are falling …”", - "body": "Snow flakes are falling\nsliding round and round …\nI would keep living … always …\nbut I probably can’t.\n\nHuman souls fade dissolving\nand leaving no trace,\nlike snowflakes they’re going\nfrom earth into space.\n\nSnow flakes are falling …\nSome day I shall go …\nAbout death I’m not worrying\nI’m mortal, I know.\n\nI do not believe in\nany miracles, no,\nand I’ll never be living,\nunlike snow, anymore.\n\nA sinner, I’m thinking\nwho on earth I have been,\nwhat is most I’ve been keen on,\nin this world I live in.\n\nIt’s Russia that I love so\nwith my backbone, my blood,\nits rivers when iced, or\nwhen lively they flood.\n\nits spirit of houses,\nits spirit of pines,\nits Pushkin and Razin,\nits old men, so kind.\n\nAnd in my hours of worry\nI didn’t take it too bad.\nI may’ve lived in a flurry,\nI’ve lived for my land.\n\nDeep in heart, feeling anxious,\nI hope against hope\nthat I did help my Russia\nto the extent I could cope.\n\nIt may once and for ever\nforget me, with ease,\nbut I wish it would never\never cease to exist.\n\nSnowflakes are falling,\nas they do at all times,\ntimes of Pushkin and Razin\nand the time that yet comes.\n\nSliding like crystal beads,\nlight and bright as can be,\nflakes wipe out the footprints\nleft by others and me.\n\nI do not believe in\nimmortality … well …\nIf Russia keeps living\nI’ll keep living as well.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "were-stiff-and-numb-when-seized-with-feeling": { - "title": "“We’re stiff and numb when seized with feeling, …”", - "body": "We’re stiff and numb when seized with feeling,\nwe just restrain it, more or less;\nwe are incapable of living,\nincapable of facing death.\n\nWishing to save this world of ours\nmake friends with rascals we must not,\nit’s just like ent’ring a hostile house\nwhere we have to fire a shot.\n\nWhat shall we do--just hit the target\nor let them bring us tea on a tray,\nleave the revolver undischarged,\nsay our good-byes and go away?\n\nAnd, breathing freely, think it over\nand find an instance, as ‘n excuse,\nand, turning round, throw the revolver\ninto the water, still unused.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "you-are-big-and-courageous-at-loving": { - "title": "“You are big and courageous at loving …”", - "body": "You are big\nand courageous at loving.\nAs for me, at each step I get shy.\nI shall not do you harm, oh, my darling,\nand I can’t do you good, though I try.\n\n\nI imagine,\nyou’re leading me down\nthrough a wood with no path and no way.\nIn waist-high wildflowers we are drowned,\nI’m wondering:\n“What flowers are they?”\n\nAll my skills are quite useless and shaky.\nI don’t know what to do\nand how.\nYou are tired.\nYou want me to take you\nin your arms. There! I’ve taken you now.\n\n\n“There are birds in the wood,\ncan’t you hear?\nCan’t you see,\nthe sky is so blue?\nNow, come on,\ncarry me somewhere, dear!”\nYes,\nbut where shall I carry you? …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "you-havent-given-all-my-letters-yet": { - "title": "“You haven’t given all my letters yet …”", - "body": "You haven’t given\nall my letters yet\nand haven’t thrown out the trash,\nbut you’re receding\nlike a floe\nthat breaks in two and crashes, in a flash.\nA sinless woman, you’re asleep,\nand seem to be so close,\nwithin my reach,\nthe grinding sound\nof the deadly white starched bed-sheet fills the breach.\nYou are receding,\nand I am frightened that you’re doing it\nas slowly as you can.\nAnd like my soul\nyou’re separating\nfrom my body,\nfrom a living man.\nYou’re taking all away:\nso many common years\nand both of our sons.\nAnd like the living skin\nyou’re getting stripped,\nripped off my living bones.\nThe pain of separation\ncuts to pieces,\nrages,\nbreaks my heart and all,\nwith blood\nalong the crack of souls\nwhich almost have been turned into a single whole.\nThis almost insurmountable “almost”\n--may it be cursed and plagued!\nHow can\nwhat has\nor almost has been crucified\nbe saved?\nLike a piranha,\nleaving the skeleton behind,\nwith ease and skill,\nhave trivialities devoured\none more love, against our will.\nDevouring\nis contagious,\nit is like plague, unsafe,\nand love that was betrayed\ncommits a treachery\nitself.\nSome kind of howling thing,\nputs out a claw\nto catch at kids.\nLove\nis a monster\nthat hungrily its own children eats.\n\nFor banqueting\nand eating up the best of years of yours\nI bring apologies\nand beg you, please,\ndon’t eat me in response.\nThere is a trivial saying\nthat a woman has a present but no past.\nI am your past,\nso I do not exist\nI am my own dust.\nI’m filled with horror\ncarrying, my remains to the unfriendly bed.\nIt isn’t easy for a non-existent man in our world\nnot to be dead.\nMy love,\nI am your child,\nrevive me, if you please.\nDo mold me,\nfrom yourself,\nfrom all remains\nand\nfrom nonentities.\nYou are\nmy future\nmy instantaneous and eternal star,\nperchance, a loving one,\nhaving forgotten how to love …\nfor good, by far?", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - }, - "the-house-swayed-and-creaked": { - "title": "“The house swayed and creaked …”", - "body": "The house swayed and creaked a choral hymn composing;\nit was a burial service chorale for you and me.\nThe creaking house felt that we were not just dozing\nwe were dying slowly, unobtrusively.\n\n“Wait, do not die!”--a neigh resounded in the meadow\nand echoed in the howl of dogs and fairy wood;\nyet we were dying to each other and for ever\nwhich was the same as dying to the whole wide world.\n\nWe didn’t want to die! A bird pecked in the pine wood,\na hedgehog ran around in the grass beneath,\nand like a shaggy dog, the black, wet night flowed onward\nholding a water-lily, a star, between its teeth.\n\nThe darkness breathed the smell of raspberries through shutters;\nbehind my back I saw--without turning round--\nmy worn-out sweetheart sleep quietly with Plato’s\nspiritual girl-friend, a sister she had found.\n\nI thought about marriages being made in heaven,\nabout how mean we all liars and traitors were:\nI used to love you, dear, like thousands of brethren,\nand like as many foes I drove you to despair.\n\nYes, you have changed a lot. Your angry look is arduous;\nyou sneer bitterly, as you put out a claw.\nIsn’t it we ourselves who turn our beloved ones\nto kinds of hateful creatures we can’t love anymore ?\n\nThe fount of eloquence is obviously worthless\nwhen wasted on a row, a stupid petty scene,\nI wanted to bring happiness to all the earthlings\nbut couldn’t make it with a single human being.\n\nYes, we were dying but I couldn’t just believe in\nthe end of you and me, the end of both of us.\nOur love had not yet died, it was alive and breathing\nthe trace of it imprinted upon her looking glass.\n\nThe house swayed and creaked amidst the nettle, stinging,\nas if it were offering restraint and will of life.\nWe were dying there but we were still living.\nWe loved each other still which meant we were alive.\n\nSome day ( oh, God forbid, I still hope for salvation )\nwhen I fall out of love and when I really die\nmy flesh will make a point, with hidden exultation,\nof whispering at nights: “so you are alive!”\n\nBelated man of wisdom in our world of passions,\nI’ll come to realize: my flesh does tell a lie;\nI’ll tell myself: “I’m dead. My love is turned to ashes.\nI used to be in love. I used to be alive.”\n\n\n\nTHE CATKIN FROM AN ALDER-TREE\n\nTo D.Batler\n\nThe instant a catkin\nfalls down on my palm from an alder\nor when a cuckoo\ngives a call, through the thunder of train,\nattempting to give explanation to living\nI ponder\nand find it impossible\nto understand and explain.\n\n\nReducing oneself\nto a speck of a star-dust is trivial,\nbut certainly wiser\nthan being affectedly great,\nand knowing one’s smallness\nis neither disgrace nor an evil,\nit only implies our knowledge\nof greatness of fate.\n\n\nThe alder-tree catkin is light\nand so airy and fluffy;\nyou blow it away,--\nand the world will go wrong overnight.\nOur life doesn’t seem\nto be petty and trifling\nfor nothing in it is a trifle\nand nothing is slight.\n\n\nThe alder-tree catkin\nis greater than any prediction,\nand he who has quietly broken it\nwon’t be the same.\nWe cannot change everything now\nby our volition,\nthe world tends to change anyway\nwith the change of ourselves.\n\n\nAnd so we transform\nto assume quite a different essence\nand go on a voyage\nto a desolate land, far from home,\nwe don’t even notice\nand don’t realize our presence\non board an entirely different ship,\nin a storm.\n\n\nAnd when you are seized\nwith a feeling of hopeless remoteness,\naway from the shores\nwhere the sunrise amazed you at dawn,\nmy dear good friend, don’t despair\nand please don’t be hopeless,--\nbelieve in the black frightening harbors,\nso strange and unknown.\n\n\nA place, when remote, may be frightening\nbut not when it’s near.\nThere’s everything there:\neyes, voices, the lights and the sun …\nAs you get accustomed\nthe creak of the shadowy pier\nwill tell you that there’re can be more\npiers and harbors than one.\n\n\nYour soul clears up,\nwith no malice against the conversion.\nForgive all your friends\nthat betrayed you, or misunderstood.\nForgive your beloved one\nif you don’t enjoy her affection,\nallow her to fly off your palm\nlike a catkin, for good.\n\n\nAnd don’t put your trust in a harbor\nthat gets too officious.\nAn endless and harbourless vast\nis what you must have on the brain.\nIf something should keep you pinned down\njust get off the hinges\nAnd go\non a lasting disconsolate voyage once again.\n\n“Whenever will he come to reason?”--\nsome people may grumble.\nYou don’t have to worry,\nyou know that one cannot please all.\nThe saying that “all things must pass”\nis a treacherous babble\nif all things must pass,\nthen it isn’t worth living at all.\n\nWhat can’t be explained\nisn’t really absolute nonsense.\nSo don’t be embarrassed\nby revaluation of things,--\nThere won’t be a fall nor a rise\nin the prices of our life since\nthe price of a thing of no value\nremains as it is\n\n… Now why do I say it?\nBecause a cuckoo, silly liar,\npredicts\nthat I’m going to live a long life\nNow why do I say it?\nWell, there is an alder-tree flower,\na catkin, which, quivering,\nrests on my palm as if live …", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian" - } - } - } - }, - "nikolay-zabolotsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Nikolay Zabolotsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1903 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "russian", - "language": "russian", - "flag": "🇷🇺", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Zabolotsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "russian" - ], - "n_poems": 21 - }, - "poems": { - "all-that-my-soul-possessed": { - "title": "“All that my soul possessed …”", - "body": "All that my soul possessed, it seemed that again I had lost it all,\nAs I lay emptily in the grass, wretchedly sad and bored.\nAnd a flower rose up over me, a body, living, beautiful,\nWith a grasshopper standing in front, a sort of miniature guard.\n\nAnd then I opened my book, which was thick and heavily bound,\nOn the first page was an illustration of a plant.\nAnd dark and dead, stretching from the flower to the book\nWas either the flower’s truth or else the lie shielded within.\n\nAnd the flower seemed amazed at the sight of its reflexion,\nAs if it tried to comprehend a quite outlandish wisdom;\nIts leaves were trembling, stirred by thought to an unaccustomed motion,\nTrembling with that effort of will, which cannot be expressed.\n\nThe grasshopper raised his horn and nature suddenly awoke,\nAnd the sorrowing creature started to sing a praise of thought.\nAnd then the image of the flower engraved in my old book\nBegan to move, and to compel my heart to move toward it.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Bob Perelman & Kathy Lewis", - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "the-autumn-maple": { - "title": "“The Autumn Maple”", - "body": "The autumn world is sensibly ordered\nAnd inhabited.\nEnter, be quiet in the heart of things,\nLike this maple.\n\nAnd if dust covers you momentarily,\nDon’t be alarmed.\nLet the dew from dawn fields\nWash your leaves.\n\nWhen thunder breaks out over the world\nAnd a windstorm rages,\nYour slender trunk is forced to bend\nTowards the ground.\n\nAnd even falling into a fatal weariness\nFrom such torments,\nBe silent, my friend, like this\nAutumn tree.\n\nDon’t forget, it will straighten again,\nIt isn’t bowed,\nFor the autumn maple is made wiser\nBy the earth’s wisdom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "season": "autumn" - } - } - }, - "the-blind-man": { - "title": "“The Blind Man”", - "body": "With face upturned to the sky,\nHead uncovered,\nHe lingers by the gates,\nThis God-accursed old guy.\nAll day he sings,\nAnd his sad, angry refrain,\nStriking at the heart,\nStartles pedestrians again.\n\nAround the old man\nYounger generations stir.\nBlossoming in the gardens,\nA mad siren’s moan is heard.\nIn a white grotto of bird-cherries\nAlong silvery leaves of plants,\nA dazzling day\nRises skyward …\n\nWhy do you weep, blind man?\nWhy torment yourself in spring for naught?\nThe past long ago ceased to leave\nTraces of hopeful thought.\nYour black abyss you cannot hide\nWith spring leaves,\nYour half-dead eyes,\nAlas, will never open wide.\n\nIndeed, your whole life is\nLike a large familiar wound,\nYou’re no favorite of the sun,\nNo kin of nature’s womb.\nYou learned to live\nIn the depths of eternal mist,\nYou learned to look\nInto the eternal face of darkness …\n\nAnd I am afraid to ponder,\nThat somewhere on nature’s fringe\nI’m that same blind man,\nWith face turned skyward in a cringe.\nI watch the spring floods,\nOnly in my soul’s depths dark,\nConversing with them\nOnly in my sorrowful heart.\n\nO, how difficult\nTo observe earth’s elements\nWrapped in the mist of habit,\nCareless, vain, and evil!\nThese songs of mine lament--\nHow many times are they sung in the world!\nWhere can I find the words,\nSo my lofty songs of life can be heard?\n\nWhere are you leading my hand,\nO dark, dreadful Muse,\nAlong the great roadways\nOf my unbounded land?\nNever, at any hour\nDid I seek union with you,\nNever, did I wish\nSubmission to your power.\n\nYou chose me yourself,\nAnd pierced my soul at birth,\nYou showed me\nThe great wonder of the earth …\nSing out, old blind man!\nNight approaches. And the stars,\nEchoing your song,\nShine indifferently from afar.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1946 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "death-of-a-medic": { - "title": "“Death of a Medic”", - "body": "In a land far remote,\nNear the end of the earth,\nForeman lay by a road,\nFor he couldn’t move forth.\nHis heart must have been strained\nOr forgotten, his flask,\nBut no strength there remained\nTo deliver the task.\nWhat the peasants there deemed,\nDrove them into dismay,\nFor their medic, it seemed,\nShort of consciousness lay.\nStill a rider was quick\nTo fly settlement-bound,\nAnd in languor the sick\nTook a slight look around.\nAnd from under the sweat,\nThrough a twilight of mind,\nAn intelligent thread\nWith a shiver replied.\nAnd, uncertain, he rose,\nAnd in darkness he rode,\nGave the rescuing doze\nTo the man by the road.\nIn the crowd, in the light,\nIn the steppe at dawn,\nAn old hero in white,\nHe collapsed and was gone.\nTo the power of one\nThere can not be an end.\nTo his deathbed he’d gone,\nAnd still did what he meant.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitry Yampolsky", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - } - } - }, - "farewell-to-friends": { - "title": "“Farewell to friends”", - "body": "In broad-brimmed hats, wearing long coats,\nWith notebooks full of your poems,\nYou have scattered long since into dust\nLike branches of dry lilac.\n\nYou are in the country without ready-made shapes,\nWhere all is disjointed, mixed up, broken,\nWhere instead of the sky there is only a grave-mound,\nAnd the moon does not orbit.\n\nThere, in a different, inaudible language\nSings the council of soundless insects.\nThere, with a small lantern in hand,\nThe beetle-man greets his acquaintance.\n\nIs it peaceful, my comrades?\nIs it easy for you? Have you forgotten?\nThe ants and the roots, the herbs and the sighs\nAnd little columns of dust are brothers to you now.\n\nSisters to you now are wild carnations,\nNipples of lilac, slivers, chicks …\nYou are powerless to remember\nThe tongue of your brother you left above.\n\nFor him there is not yet a place in those regions\nWhere you disappeared weightless as the shadows,\nIn broad-brimmed hats, wearing long coats,\nWith notebooks full of your poems.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Vera Sandomirsky", - "date": { - "year": 1952 - } - } - }, - "fireflies": { - "title": "“Fireflies”", - "body": "Words are like lamplit fireflies.\nWhile scattered and unseen in the dark,\nTheir pure flame is dim and insignificant,\nAnd their living dust invisible.\n\nBut look at them in a Black Sea spring,\nWhere oleanders sleep in solemn bloom,\nWhere a sea of fireflies glows in the nocturnal abyss,\nAnd waves beat the shore, longing for summer.\n\nThe whole world merges in a single breath,\nThere, the earth spins beneath your feet,\nAnd their flames no longer confirm creation,\nJust a flickering fire of distant storms.\n\nThere, an unknown fanfare of sounds\nDrones slowly and hovers up above,\nWhat are pitiable words? Like insects!\nAnd yet these creatures obey me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1949 - }, - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "flight-to-egypt": { - "title": "“Flight to Egypt”", - "body": "Guardian angel was watching,\nIn my room where fire glowed.\nHe kept eye over the lodging,\nWhere, in ailment, I abode.\n\nDriven frail by the sickness,\nFrom my fellows far away,\nI would dream, and in sequence\nBefore me the visions lay.\n\nI could see myself headed\nFrom my birthplace as a tot,\nIn a cradle, thinly padded,\nTo a distant country brought.\n\nBeing settlers of Judea,\nTrembling before Herod’s horde,\nIn a little house here\nWe found shelter and accord.\n\nDonkey grazed by the olea.\nI found frolic in the sand.\nHappy Joseph and Maria\nCared about what’s at hand.\n\nOften I would doze idly\nIn the shadow of the sphinx,\nAnd the Nile’s lens, brightly,\nMirrored the celestial blinks.\n\nAnd inside I could hear it,\nIn the rainbow ablaze,\nPlaying panpipes to me were spirit--\nAngel-children in the haze.\n\nBut when came the idea\nTo return from our retreat,\nAnd before us lay Judea\nSpreading sights under our feet--\n\nIts intolerance and hatred,\nPoverty and slaves’ fright,\nWhere, above the slums, waited\nShadow of the crucified--\n\nSuddenly I woke up, screaming …\nBy the bed light I could see,\nYour angelic gaze was beaming,\nFlowing gently towards me.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitry Yampolsky", - "context": { - "holiday": "guardian_angels" - } - } - }, - "last-love": { - "title": "“Last love”", - "body": "The car shuddered and stopped,\nThey stepped into the evening spaces,\nAnd work-worn the driver sank\nExhausted over his wheel.\nFar off, through the windows,\nTrembled fiery constellations.\nThe old man, with his lady friend,\nStopped by the flowerbed.\nAnd heavy-eyed, the driver\nWas startled by their two faces\nLost forever in each other,\nOblivious of themselves.\nA faint glow emanated\nFrom each of them, and the summer’s\nDeparting beauty wrapped them\nIn its multifold embrace.\nLike glasses of blood-red wine,\nThere were flame-headed cannae there,\nAnd plumes of gray columbine\nAnd gold-disked ox-eye daisies.\nThis brief spell of happiness\nEnfolded the lovers like a sea,\nThough grief could be felt in the offing\nAnd autumnal days were near.\nAnd drawing closer to each other,\nThese homeless children of night\nSilently walked in a floral circle,\nIn the electric glare of the lights.\nAnd the car stood there in the dark,\nIts motor shuddering,\nAnd the driver smiled wearily,\nWinding down his window.\nFor he knew that summer was ending,\nThat rainy days were to follow,\nThat their song was long ago over,\nWhich, mercifully, they did not know.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - }, - "context": { - "holiday": "autumn_equinox" - } - } - }, - "memory": { - "title": "“Memory”", - "body": "Months of languor have settled in\nCan it be that life is over,\nOr, its work done, has come\nLike a late guest to the table …\n\nIt wants to drink, but won’t touch wine,\nAnd wants to eat, but has no appetite.\nIt listens to the whisper of an ash\nAnd to a goldfinch singing outside.\n\nIt sings of that distant land,\nWhere just visible through a storm,\nThe mound of a lonely grave\nLies beneath white crystal snow.\n\nThere, a birch tree whispers no reply,\nIts frozen veins rooted in ice,\nAnd high above in a ring of frost\nThe blood-stained moon drifts by.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1952 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "metamorphoses": { - "title": "“Metamorphoses”", - "body": "How the world changes! And how I change as well!\nI am known by one name only, yet\nThat which is named by me\nIs not I alone. We are many. I am a living being.\nSo that the blood should not freeze in my veins,\nI died many times. Oh, how many dead bodies\nHave I raised from my own body!\nAnd if my reason should begin to see,\nTo penetrate the earth’s crust, it would find\nMe there, deep, lying\nAmong the graves. It would show me\nMyself rocked on the waves of the sea,\nMyself riding the wind to unseen regions,\nMy once so cherished, pitiful remains.\n\nBut I am still alive! More openly, more fully\nDoes the spirit embrace the wonderful tribe of creatures.\nNature is alive. Alive among the rocks\nIs the living grain and my dead herbarium.\nLink into link, form into form. The world\nIn all its living architecture is\nA singing organ, a sea of trumpets, a piano\nThat does not fade, in joy or when it storms.\n\nHow everything changes! What was a bird before\nNow lies, a sheet of paper scribbled over;\nA thought was once a simple flower;\nA poem moved in the shape of a plodding bull;\nAnd that which was I, perhaps may\nGrow again and multiply the world of plants.\n\nSo, labouring to unravel\nThis tangled ball of wool,\nSuddenly you perceive what we must call\nImmortality. Oh, our superstitions!", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1937 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "nightingale": { - "title": "“Nightingale”", - "body": "The forest choir had just fallen silent,\nA finch was about to release its voice.\nIn a crown of leaves a nightingale’s silhouette\nAlone, unceasing above, began to rejoice.\n\nO insidious passion, the more I pursue you,\nThe less am I able to ridicule.\nHave you the power, insignificant bird,\nTo be silent in this radiant cathedral?\n\nSlant rays of light, glancing the surface\nOf cool leaves, vanish in the distance.\nThe more fidelity from you I suffer,\nThe less trust I put in your allegiance.\n\nBut you, nightingale, fastened to art,\nLike Antony in love with Cleopatra’s fire,\nFrenzied, how can you keep emotion apart,\nAnd be captivated by love’s desire?\n\nForsaking these evening groves, why\nAre you breaking my heart?\nI’m smitten by you, yet, how easy to try\nTo separate, to let misfortune depart.\n\nAlas, it’s obvious, this world’s a creation\nFor beasts, parents of the desert’s first symphony,\nWho, hearing in a cave your exclamation,\nBellow and howl: “Antony! Antony!”", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1939 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "an-old-tale": { - "title": "“An Old Tale”", - "body": "In this world where our\nRole is obscure and frail,\nYou and I will both grow old\nLike the king in a fairy tale.\n\nOur life, shining patiently,\nBurns out in a forbidden land,\nAnd silently we meet there\nFate’s inevitable hand.\n\nAnd when those silver streaks\nBegin to glitter in your hair,\nI’ll tear up my notebooks\nAnd leave my last poems there.\n\nLet the soul splash like a lake\nAt the sill of underground gates,\nAnd the crimson leafage clearing\nThe water’s surface shakes.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1952 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "advent" - } - } - }, - "peasant-spokesmen": { - "title": "“Peasant Spokesmen”", - "body": "In sheepskin coats of homely peasant cut\nFrom villages far south of the Oka\nThey came, three strangers. Each had left his hut\nTo put his case about the way things are.\n\nAll Russia tossed, distraught by war and famine\nWith everything confused, disturbed, displaced.\nShe roared and argued, trains and stations cramming\nWith human misery, unhidden, open-faced.\n\nOnly those three strangers waited mildly\nIn a crowd that craved for bread and news,\nNeither shouting frenziedly and wildly,\nNor upsetting order in the queues.\n\nOn the havoc born of need and hunger\nLooked three pairs of travel-tired old eyes;\nSorrowful they stood there, lost in wonder,\nSaying almost nothing, peasantwise.\n\nThere’s a trait I treasure in my people:\nThey never reason with the mind alone,\nBut their hearts, too, are involved so deeply\nThat thought and feeling mingle into one.\n\nThat is why our folktales are so splendid,\nSo sincere and sensitive our songs\nIn that all-expressive language rendered\nThat to heart and mind alike belongs.\n\nThough little spoke the three, their hearts were burning.\nWhat are words? Real truth is past their power.\nAll that they had felt upon their journey\nWas hidden in their breasts until its hour.\n\nMaybe that was why an anxious flicker\nCame into the eyes on faces white\nWhen they stopped, their heartbeats getting quicker,\nAt the gates of Smolny late at night.\n\nBut when their host, a man of over fifty\nIn a well-worn suit of darkish grey,\nTired to death himself with work and worry,\nAddressed them in his simple, kindly way,\n\nTalked about their famine-ridden village\nAnd about the none-too-distant time\nWhen an iron horse would do the tillage\nAnd of how the yields would start to climb.\n\nHow life would flourish, filled with man-made wonders\nAnd the people, happy in their hearts,\nWould reap the golden harvest of abundance,\nGladness lighting up their native parts--\n\nOnly then the heavy, anxious feeling\nVanished from the bosoms of the three\nAnd suddenly they too began discerning\nMuch that he alone till then could see.\n\nAnd their knapsacks got undone as if by magic\nPowdering the floor around with dust\nAnd out of them too tasty to imagine--\nCome home-baked krendels, little else but crust.\n\nAnd they treated Lenin with those dainties\nOffered with a humble, open hand.\nEverybody ate. ’Twas sweet and bitter,\nThe meagre fruit of the tormented land.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dorian Rottenberg", - "date": { - "year": 1954 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "peoples-house": { - "title": "“People’s house”", - "body": "Funfair, henhouse of pleasure,\nBarn of beguiling life,\nHoliday trough of passion,\nFiery furnace of existence!\nHere, spiked Red Army helmets\nDrift by in a pensive stream,\nWith them ladies of the world,\nUntroubled by the city’s din!\nHere pleasure crooks its finger,\nOffering a good time to all,\nHere every lad has fun:\nOne feeds his girlfriend nuts,\nAnother passes out over his beer.\nHere are the roller-coaster mountain peaks,\nAnd girls, ravishing goddesses,\nHide themselves in the speeding cars,\nThe cars roll on. These lovely, tender\ncreatures collapse, in floods of tears,\nUpon their boyfriends’ shoulders …\nAnd there is much else besides.\n\nA sauntering girl is trailing\nHer immaculate doggy on a lasso.\nShe herself is bathed in sweat\nAnd her breasts are riding high.\nAnd as for that most upright doggy,\nFilled with the sap of spring,\nHe rustles awkwardly along\nThe path on mushroom legs.\n\nA splendid muzhik orange vendor\nApproaches this distinguished wench.\nHe holds a many-colored vessel,\nIn which neat oranges are laid,\nLike circles, compass-drawn,\nRubbery and corrugated;\nLike little suns, they roll\nFreely about the tin container\nAnd burble “Grab me, grab me!” to the fingers.\nAnd the wench, munching fruit,\nBestows a ruble on the man,\nAddresses him familiarly, but\nIt’s another that she wants, a handsome fellow\nThat her eyes seek here and there,\nThen a swing whistles in front of her.\n\nOn it a sweet little girl is sitting--\nHer dainty legs are whispering.\nShe is flying through the air,\nTwirling a warm little foot and\nBeckoning with a warm little hand.\n\nAnother, seeing his face reflected\nIn a distorting mirror,\nStands there mortified,\nTries unsuccessfully to laugh it off.\nWanting to find out how the thing deforms,\nHe turns himself into an infant,\nBacking away on all fours,\nA close-on-forty quadruped.\n\nBut this holiday excitement seems\nToo much for others.\nThey get no satisfaction from\nThe barn of pleasure! They’ve seen it all before.\nAnd now, tete-a-tete with a bottle,\nBidding impassioned youth farewell,\nThey gnaw at the glass,\nSuck it dry with their lips,\nTell their friends all about\nThe wild times they have had.\nThe bottle is like a mother to them,\nHoney-tongued gossip of the soul,\nWith kisses sweeter than any wench’s\nAnd more refreshing than the Nevka.\n\nThey look through the window:\nThe morning is rising in it.\nA lamp, bloodless as a worm,\nDangles like an arrow in the bushes.\nParadise sways along in the tramcars--\nHere every lad wears a smile,\nWhile his girl, contrarywise,\nOpens her mouth and shuts her eyes\nAnd lets a warm arm flop\nOver her belly, slightly raised.\n\nSwaying the tram creeps on its way.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1928 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "poem-about-rain": { - "title": "“Poem about rain”", - "body": "> _Wolf:_\n\nHonorable woodland snake,\nWhy do you creep, when you know not\nWhere to go--why do you make haste?\nCan one live life in such a hurry?\n\n\n> _Snake:_\n\nMost wise wolf, a world that does not move\nIs not comprehensible to us.\nAnd so we run, that’s all,\nLike smoke escaping from a peasant’s house.\n\n\n> _Wolf:_\n\nYour answer is not hard to grasp.\nHow feeble is the snake’s intellect!\nMy light, you are running from yourself,\nUnderstanding truth to lie in movement.\n\n\n> _Snake:_\n\nYou are an idealist, I see.\n\n\n> _Wolf:_\n\nLook: a leaf falls from a tree.\nThe cuckoo, shaping his song\nFrom two notes (the naive fellow!),\nSings in the noble grove.\nThe sun shines, bright rain descends,\nThe water falls for a minute or two,\nPeasants scatter barefoot,\nThen it is bright again,\nThe rain has stopped,\nTell me the meaning of this scene.\n\n\n> _Snake:_\n\nGo discuss it with the wolves.\nThey will explain\nWhy water flows from heaven.\n\n\n> _Wolf:_\n\nYes, I shall go to the wolves.\nThe water pours over their flanks.\nThe water sings like a mother\nWhen it falls gently upon us.\nNature, in a smart sarafan,\nLeaning her head upon the sun,\nPlays all day on an organ.\nWe call this--life.\nWe call this--rain.\nThe splashing of little ones through puddles.\nThe rustle and dance of trees,\nThe laughter of forget-me-nots.\nOr, when the organ’s note is sullen,\nThe sky trembling to the sound of drums,\nAnd an army of ponderous clouds\nCovering all from edge to edge,\nWhen a great gush of water\nKnocks the woodland beast off its legs,\nNot believing our own eyes,\nWe call this--God.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1931 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - }, - "signs-of-winter": { - "title": "“Signs of Winter”", - "body": "As the first signs of winter\nHover above the Neva’s expanse,\nWe compare the scattered leaves\nAlong its banks to summer’s radiance.\n\nBut I admire these old poplars\nWhose branches refuse to shed\nTheir dry and rusty armor\nTill winter’s first storms ahead.\n\nHow to describe our similarity?\nLike the poplar I’m growing old,\nAnd I too should meet, in my armor,\nWinter’s coming, its mortal cold.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1955 - }, - "context": { - "month": "november" - } - } - }, - "snakes": { - "title": "“Snakes”", - "body": "The cool, damp forest shakes,\nHere are the varying blossoms\nAnd the shining bodies of snakes\nEntwined among the stones.\nThe warm, simplistic sun\nPours down on them its rays.\nArranged among the stones,\nThe snakes are sheer as glass.\nAlthough a bird makes noise\nOr a beetle bravely wails\nThe snakes sleep, hiding their faces\nWithin their bodies’ warm folds.\nAnd mysterious and poor\nThey sleep, their mouths unclosed,\nWhile time floats in the air\nAbove them, scarcely noticed.\nA year goes by, two years,\nThree years. And finally\nA man comes on the bodies--\nSevere models of sleep.\nWhat are they for? From where?\nCan they be justified?\nA pile of lovely creatures\nSleeps, in disarray.\nThe wise man leaves to ponder,\nAnd lives as a hermit, alone,\nAnd instantly bored nature\nStands over him like a prison.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Denis Johnson & Kathy Lewis", - "date": { - "year": 1929 - }, - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - }, - "somewhere-in-a-field-near-magadan": { - "title": "“Somewhere in a field near Magadan …”", - "body": "Somewhere in a field near Magadan,\nDespairing and fearing for their life,\nThrough the swirling, freezing mists\nThey trudge behind the sledges.\nFrom the soldiers’ iron roar,\nFrom the preying gang of thieves,\nOnly the first aid post can save them here,\nOr being sent for flour into town.\nTwo sad old Russian men, they walked\nHuddling in their pea jackets,\nRemembering their village huts\nFar away, and longing for them.\nThey’d no heart left,\nFar from friends and family,\nAnd weariness that had bent their backs,\nTonight bit deep into their souls.\nLife unwound above them,\nClothed in the forms of nature.\nBut the stars, those symbols of freedom,\nNo longer gazed on men.\nThe wonderful mystery of the universe\nFilled the theater of the northern stars,\nBut its penetrating flame was powerless\nAny more to reach into men’s hearts.\nThe blizzard howled, burying\nThe frozen stumps of trees\nAnd, seated on them, the two old men,\nNot looking at each other, froze.\nThe horses stood, the work was over,\nThey were done with mortal affairs.\nA sweet drowsiness lulled them\nAnd led them sobbing, into distant parts.\nThey were beyond the call of guards,\nThe convoy would never reach them now.\nOnly the stars of Magadan\nSparkled, rising overhead.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1956 - }, - "context": { - "season": "winter" - } - } - }, - "swallow": { - "title": "“Swallow”", - "body": "Swallow tweets fair and confiding,\nCuts the air with wings agile,\nEvery current she is fighting\nSaving strengths all the while.\nSoars the pits and soars the heaven,\nIn perusal of the pest,\nAt the cornice of the cabin\nUntil daybreak taking rest.\n\nOvercome by her behaviors,\nI set course towards the height,\nAnd my soul far lands endeavors\nLike an avian in flight.\nLike a bird it’s crying, flapping\nIn the magical terrain,\nWith its frail beak tapping\nAt your poor soul in vain.\n\nFor your soul became faded,\nA lock is hanging on the door.\nOil has burned in the lampade,\nAnd the wick sheds light no more.\nSwallow weeps, distressed and dreary,\nDesperate to set it right,\nAnd departs the cemetery\nFor the magic-ridden night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Dmitry Yampolsky", - "date": { - "year": 1958 - }, - "context": { - "liturgy": "lent" - } - } - }, - "who-answered-me-in-the-forest-grove": { - "title": "“Who answered me in the forest grove?”", - "body": "Who answered me in the forest grove?\nDid an old oak whisper to a pine,\nOr a mountain ash creak far away,\nOr the okarina of a goldfinch sing,\nOr a robin, my little pet,\nCall suddenly at sunset?\n\nWho answered me in the forest grove?\nDid you remember\nOne spring, our past,\nOur cares and troubles,\nOur wanderings apart,\nYou, who singed my heart?\n\nWho answered me in the forest grove?\nMorning and evening, in cold and heat,\nI still hear the faint echo,\nThe sigh of an unbounded love,\nAnd my trembling poems\nStraining towards you from my palms.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Christopher R. Fortune", - "date": { - "year": 1957 - } - } - }, - "a-woodland-lake": { - "title": "“A woodland lake”", - "body": "Again the crystal dreamstruck vessel\nFlashed in the darkness of the wood.\n\nPast battling trees and quarrelling wolves,\nWhere insects drink the sap of plants,\nWhere stems writhe and flowers moan,\nWhere predatory nature disposes,\nI pressed on towards you, halting upon\nYour threshold--and parted the dry shrubbery.\n\nThere, wreathed in lilies, dressed in sedge,\nWith a brittle necklace of vegetable flutes,\nLay the chaste patch of limpid water,\nA sanctuary for fish, a refuge for ducks.\nBut how strangely solemn and quiet it was!\nSuch nobility--where did it come from?\nWhy are birds not clamouring as usual?--\nInstead they sleep, lulled by sweet dreams.\nOne solitary sandpiper complains of its lot,\nPlays foolishly on a vegetable flute.\n\nAnd the lake, in the tranquil glow of evening,\nLies in its depth, fixedly shining;\nAnd pine trees, like candles, stand in their height,\nClosing their ranks from edge to edge.\nThe fathomless vessel of limpid water\nShone, and thought its separate thought,\nAs, at the first glimmer of the evening star,\nIn infinite sadness, the sick man’s eye,\nNo longer concerning itself with the ailing\nBody, burns, gazing into the night sky.\nAnd hordes of animals and wild beasts,\nThrusting their antlered heads between\nThe firs, lean over this source of truth, their font,\nTo drink of its life-giving waters.", - "metadata": { - "language": "russian", - "translator": "Daniel Weissbort", - "date": { - "year": 1938 - }, - "context": { - "season": "summer" - } - } - } - } - }, - "adam-zagajewski": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Adam Zagajewski", - "birth": { - "year": 1945 - }, - "death": { - "year": 2021 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "polish", - "language": "polish", - "flag": "🇵🇱", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Zagajewski", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "polish" - ], - "n_poems": 2 - }, - "poems": { - "cello": { - "title": "“Cello”", - "body": "Those who don’t like it say it’s\njust a mutant violin\nthat’s been kicked out of the chorus.\nNot so.\nThe cello has many secrets,\nbut it never sobs,\njust sings in its low voice.\nNot everything turns into song\nthough. Sometimes you catch\na murmur or a whisper:\nI’m lonely,\nI can’t sleep.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh" - } - }, - "transformation": { - "title": "“Transformation”", - "body": "I haven’t written a single poem\nin months.\nI’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,\npondering the riddle of power\nand the reasons for obedience.\nI’ve watched sunsets\n(crimson, anxious),\nI’ve heard the birds grow quiet\nand night’s muteness.\nI’ve seen sunflowers dangling\ntheir heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman\nhad gone strolling through the gardens.\nSeptember’s sweet dust gathered\non the windowsill and lizards\nhid in the bends of walls.\nI’ve taken long walks,\ncraving one thing only:\nlightning,\ntransformation,\nyou.", - "metadata": { - "language": "polish", - "translator": "Clare Cavanagh" - } - } - } - }, - "marya-zaturenska": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Marya Zaturenska", - "birth": { - "year": 1902 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1982 - }, - "gender": "female", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "ukrainian+american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇦 🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marya_Zaturenska", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american", - "ukrainian" - ], - "n_poems": 8 - }, - "poems": { - "the-castaways": { - "title": "“The Castaways”", - "body": "No matter where they lived the same dream came\nOf the invisible landlady whose voice\nQuickened the air with a dark flame\nThe words they have always known, will always know\n“You are unwanted! Go!”\n\nAnd when they built a mansion and furnished it with art,\nWith love, with music, with the native flowers\nIt always happened, it was always the same,\nThe salon narrowed to a tomb,\nSometimes a servant’s voice, or a voice from the chandelier,\n“You have no business here.”\n\nAnd when they left for the remote island and became the idol\nOf the indigenous tribe,\nAnd were caressed, admired, and sheltered--then\nWhose was the voice of blame?\nThat came when they assumed the garlands, the voice they knew\nSaying “This is not for you, this is all untrue.”\n\nAnd in the parks on Sundays with nursemaids, lovers, flowers,\nAnd the bands playing and the fountains rising\nIn silver liquid hours,\nWhose was th enemy? who was to blame?\nIf suddenly the observant shadows start\nAnd cry “Depart! Depart!”\n\nNow they have chosen exile, they have found a secluded house\nIn the smallest city, in the stillest shelter,\nAnd they speak only to the wounded, the hunted, the lame,\nThe long evenings, the longer mornings, the longest noons,\nAnd they wait for the bell to ring, for the landlady to appear.\nAnd are they wanted here?", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1944 - } - } - }, - "epitaph-for-a-careless-beauty": { - "title": "“Epitaph for a Careless Beauty”", - "body": "How carelessly you wore your beauty!\nLightly as if ’twere cloth of air,\nToo heavy for your soul to wear,\nAs if to deny your gifts a duty,\nAlas, for now you sigh\nTo see your graces fly.\n\nThat white hand, that rosy tinge,\nUpon the cheek’s deep pallor caught--\nMounting and rising with your thought,\nThe dark hair’s soft fringe\nThat on the high wide forehead lay--\nAnd the eyes burning brown\nThat no heart could disown.\n\nAs after a dull gala-day\nA rich indifferent girl\nThrows down each moon-clear pearl\nThat on small ear tips lay,\nPrecious and gay,\nOr an exquisite gown,\nThrown idly down.\n\nSo careless of your gifts you walked--\nLost in a vision’s gleam\nOr pale abstraction, ghostly dream,\nWhile close behind Love’s shadow stalked\nUntil with his last sigh,\nYou turned and saw him die.\n\nIn mid-way of your path you heard that cry--\nAnd from his quiver of gold,\nThe last arrow, stinging hot and cold,\nUnsealed your blood no longer frozen dry\nKindling the fires unsated,\nPassionate, unabated.\n\nThe fires that chill your life, torment the mind,\nEven the enrapt vision gone,\nThe Platonic fury it has fed upon\nHears love’s sigh on every wind,\nLooks in an endless urn that now discloses\nEmbers of joy, ashes of roses.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "for-the-seasons": { - "title": "“For the Seasons”", - "body": "Burning with heat and cold\nIn April’s tender weather\nI let my tense hands hold\nAll they could gather of love.\n\nDesire shaking the branch\nOf every quivering tree,\nLove, like an avalanche,\nDestroying me.\n\nNow brightly in the air,\nLove’s vivid signature\nIs more than I can bear,\nI bind my flowing hair.\n\nLet other lovers lie\nUnder that great tree\nOf rich incredible fruit\nAnd make their suit:\n\nO turn their burning look\nUpon that vast and deep\nStarry-lettered book\nWhose lovely meanings leap\nIn generative lore\nA moment and no more.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "month": "april" - } - } - }, - "invocation": { - "title": "“Invocation”", - "body": "Make of my voice a blue-edged Sword, Oh, Lord!\nStrengthen my soul to deliver your war-cry,\nMake of my voice a blue-edged sword, Oh, Lord!\n\nOut of my frailness fashion a piercing reed,\nOut of my pity a great battle ax,\nOut of my frailness fashion a piercing reed!\n\nI have had a vision and I cannot sleep,\nA vision consumes me and tears me apart,\nI have had a vision and I cannot sleep.\n\nOh body of mine, make of yourself a stronghold,\nGird yourself in the steel of your vision,\nOh body of mine, make of yourself a stronghold!\n\nMake of my breath an infinite prophecy, Oh, Lord!\nMake of my song a summons to prayer,\nMake of my breath an infinite prophecy, Oh, Lord!\n\nA vision consumes me and I am its slave and its lover,\nMake of my spirit a song so that I may announce it!\nA vision consumes me and I am its slave and its lover.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "date": { - "year": 1920 - } - } - }, - "places": { - "title": "“Places”", - "body": "How red the roses were\nIn that narrow lane\nWhere we used to meet,\nMet and met again.\n\nI see you sitting there\nOn a stone stair.\nOn your golden hair\nFell the enamoured air.\n\nThe roses were too red\nAt our cottage door;\nWarm light covered the floor,\nFlowed and spread.\n\nThe ivy was too black,\nThe roses were too red.\nThey withered on the stem--\nHow I remember them.\n\nDo you remember too?\nThe sky was far too blue.\nYour eyes were far bluer.\n(They alone were true.)\n\nWe wandered by the sea\nLed by a lucky star\nKnown to antiquity.\nHow good to breathe the air.\n\nI tired of the cottage wall,\nThe oak tree, and the yew,\nTired of the falling snow,\nThere was no place to go.\n\nTired of the blue and green,\nThe cold rain and the dew,\nThe winding, vanishing scene--\nTired of all things but you.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "souls-haven": { - "title": "“Soul’s Haven”", - "body": "Because the sterile arms no longer beat\nAcross the predatory air\nBut form a cross of grandeur and despair\nBecause that glorious hair\nThat grew and flowed like laurel round you head\nLies shorn beneath your feet\nYet I rejoice in my despair, and know\nYour agelong summer burning through the snow.\n\nBecause your throat no longer holds the word\nThat shaped the world\nNor your adorable hands the apple of all grace\nYet in all kindness I behold your face\nAnd bless that face and know it mine forever\n\nSafe in your arms across the world’s last brink\nI stand and hear the coming of the gloom\nI learn the slow approach of time and doom.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "holiday": "holy_saturday" - } - } - }, - "the-uninvited-guest": { - "title": "“The Uninvited Guest”", - "body": "Through what doors will you enter, through what walls\nWill your white sould resume its solitudes?\nI count the clockbeats in my mind, the warning trumpet\nReechoing in my heart and hear no answer,\nNo answer and no cry\nAnd no reply.\n\nOn a known hour at an appointed rendezvous\n(So destiny has spoken)\nYour eloquent feet will sing in the dry grass;\nI know their rhythm cruel and sweet\nAnd their presaging beat\nOn that unknown street.\n\nSurprise will come like a stern robber,\nFear like a jealous pain, and a joy\nCome carrying gifts disastrous and rich\nYet I shall miss\nThat steep abyss.\n\nWhere shall I wait, where shall impatience lie,\nOn what low bed of thorns shall my head rest\nUntil I meet the uninvited guest,\nWill the door open at a secret word\nUnknown, unheard?\n\nShall I run down the world whose strict restraint\nHeld me too long, whose iron hand has left\nIts sharp stigmata on my brows and heart\nSee I have waited long, the golden lamp I light\nThrough the expectant night.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "the-white-dress": { - "title": "“The White Dress”", - "body": "Imperceptively the world became haunted by her white dress.\nWalking in forest or garden, he would start to see,\nHer flying form; sudden, swift, brief as a caress\nThe flash of her white dress against a darkening tree.\n\nAnd with forced unconcern, withheld desire, and pain\nHe beheld her at night; and when sleepless in his bed,\nHer light footfalls seemed loud as cymbals; deep as his disdain,\nHer whiteness entered his heart, flowed through from feet to head.\n\nOr it was her face at a window, her swift knock at the door,\nThen she appeared in her white dress, her face white as her gown;\nLike snow in midsummer she came and left the rich day poor;\nAnd the sun chilled and grew higher, remote, and the moon slipped down.\n\nSo the years passed; more fierce in pursuit her image grew;\nShe became the dream abjured, the ill uncured, the deed undone,\nThe life one never lived, the answer one never knew,\nTill the white shadow swayed the moon, stayed the expiring sun.\n\nUntil at his life’s end, the shadow of the white face, the white dress\nBecame his inmost thought, his private wound, the word unspoken,\nAll that he cherished in failure, all that had failed his success;\nShe became the crystal orb, half-seen, untouched, unbroken.\n\nThere on his death bed, kneeling at the bed’s foot, he trembling saw,\nThe image of the Mother-Goddess, enormous, archaic, cruel,\nOverpowering the universe, creating her own inexorable law,\nMolded of stone, but her fire and ice flooded the room like a pool.\n\nAnd she was the shadow in the white dress, no longer slight and flying,\nBut solid as death. Her cold, firm, downward look,\nBrought close to the dissolving mind the marvellous act of dying,\nAnd on her lap, the clasped, closed, iron book.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - } - } - }, - "louis-zukofsky": { - "metadata": { - "name": "Louis Zukofsky", - "birth": { - "year": 1904 - }, - "death": { - "year": 1978 - }, - "gender": "male", - "religion": "", - "nationality": "american", - "language": "english", - "flag": "🇺🇸", - "link": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Zukofsky", - "favorite": false, - "tags": [ - "american" - ], - "n_poems": 3 - }, - "poems": { - "atque-in-perpetuum": { - "title": "“Atque in Perpetuum”", - "body": "Alias to a wand the height lowered\nsleep well who woke every half hour\non the hour with last breath joked\ntwo legs were mine walk ‘Glad to\nhear your voice’ ‘Glad to hear my\nown voice.’ One shot and sat on\nin the universe fast but unsure. Itself\nsedum has come up thru rock water\nslate black twilight the sky’s blue reins\nwhite sweats in mist rains storms summer\nclears stars and moon rounds. We have\nnot walked out of this place what\nhave we to collect. Each privet’s ablossom\nI am a son of the soil.\nA coast guard cutter with four orange\nlights and a search--scurrying only a\nboat’s government and the world’s raids. Wire\nfence of high terrace meshes day and\nnight air altered sometimes by gulls swallows\nhelicopters and turbojets. It used to shower\nAprils but never blew winds that way.\nThe scholarly string player has a theory\nof his tone the old hour listens\n‘I don’t understand a thing you’re saying\nbut it’s terribly’--sleepily--‘out of tune.’\nCounting sevens an ornament unto my wound.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "of-dying-beauty": { - "title": "“Of Dying Beauty”", - "body": "“Spare us of dying beauty,” cries out Youth,\n“Of marble gods that moulder into dust--\nWide-eyed and pensive with an ancient truth\nThat even gods will go as old things must.”\nWhere fading splendor grays to powdered earth,\nAnd time’s slow movement darkens quiet skies,\nYouth weeps the old, yet gives new beauty birth\nAnd molds again, though the old beauty dies.\nTime plays an ancient dirge amid old places\nWhere ruins are a sign of passing strength,\nAs is the weariness of aged faces\nA token of a beauty gone at length.\nYet youth will always come self-willed and gay--\nA sun-god in a temple of decay.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english" - } - }, - "siren-and-signal": { - "title": "“Siren and Signal”", - "body": "# I. _“He came also still”_\n\nSmall I come also still, that in the spring\nMay flower such blossoms of the earth, pall--\nFlorets I planted crying on your fall,\nAnd meek buds you make worth remembering.\nFor you only is every growing thing,\nCreepers across the earth and climbers tall,\nAnd branches that bend over the carved wall\nOf stone that commemorates time’s reckoning.\n\nAnd also small your earth is sealed; tomorrow\nEarth lies no nearer to me for all sorrow;\nNo more removed, my loved one, than you dead\nWhose form sunned in your last hours with me here\nSlept, and your head. I placed you on your bier\nAnd feared, straightening you, to hurt your head\n\n\n# II.\n\nAll the stars have filled the heavens,\nAnd a few I recognize\nTremble over the ocean--\n\nCome, we might as well be walking\nWith the shadows on the land--\nNothing--you heard nothing\nBut your feet upon the sand.\n\n\n# III.\n\nPlay lost, banjos! Across the areas of ocean’s flowing\nThe red phosphor fades! Autumn! Your tunes\nStrummed far, must lose--Oh, the noise of the ocean, the evening flooding,\nDrowns them out with the dunes!\n\nBanjos on the beach! Autumn! Strum, for I follow you\nEven to those sea-heavens you seem to drive\nLike the voice the naked human voice before the waste dark ocean,\nSinging to remain alive.\n\n\n# IV. _North River Ferry_\n\nGleams a green lamp\nIn the fog:\nMurmur in almost\nA dialogue.\n\nSiren and signal,\nSiren to signal.\n\nParts the shore from the fog,\nRise there, tower on tower,\nSigns of stray light\nAnd of power.\n\nSiren to signal\nSiren and signal.\n\nHour-gongs and the green\nOf the lamp.\nPlash. Night. Plash. Sky.\n\n\n# V.\n\nCars once steel and green, now old,\nFind their grave at Cedar Manor.\nThey rust in a wind\nThe sky alone can hold.\n\nFor the wind, too great for any thought,\nFlows heavily through the mind like cold,\nDrums in the ears\nTill one knows its being, which soon is not.\n\n\n# VI.\n\nComes a day when the round tracts of sky\nEmit such light\nFrom their own sun and blue\nAs seems not meant for ordinary sight.\n\nFor he whose sight by chance might wander high\nWalks heedlessly,\nAs never in his life he has,\nOr may not ever in all life to be.\n\nAnd he might feel like sun itself, could sun\nBut feel its might\nWhen, passing through the pristine sky,\nThe immersed gold of its passing lasts longer than delight.\n\n\n# VII.\n\nDuring lunch hour I shall stretch opposite\nThe few great smoke-stacks of Bayonne, belong\nTo day-blue, to channel, to Staten Island.\nI shall not eat, but stretch myself--the wit\nOf gulls’ sunned bellies blow my mind to song:\n(And while I alone recall you dead), “Fly land\nAnd water, no, nor stop at blue, among\nOur skies, white birds, your flight be holy writ.”\n\nFutility of motion, and the love\nOf sun will then be close to me.\nAnd whether I shall grieve or not, sight then\nWill be beyond all near felicity--\nBeing with blue sky-bubble over sea,\nWith gulls that near me are a thought thereof.", - "metadata": { - "language": "english", - "context": { - "season": "spring" - } - } - } - } - } -} \ No newline at end of file